The Uncounted

The notice arrived at 0547 Institute time, which she would eventually decide was a coincidence, because the alternative was that the universe had learned her schedule, and the universe did not need the advantage.

Yara Osei had been home for thirty-nine days. Home was a records office on the second ring of the Cassini Institute’s archive habitat, a room she had held for eleven years and occupied for perhaps four of them, and she had spent the thirty-nine days doing what the discipline did with a finished case, which was to survive it administratively: the debrief, nine sessions; the board’s review of field expenditures, which had queried the cost of a freighter berth to Veld and accepted, without comment, her one-line justification — a witness was dying — because even auditors have seams; the handover of the far-side channel monitoring to the successor protocol, Pei’s work, immaculate; and the last, the annexation of her field notebooks into the case’s permanent housing, all but one page, which she razored out with the archive’s own blade, in the archive, on camera, and logged as withheld to the archive of the investigator, per personal-record provision, and took home. The civil file number on the left of the seam. The corridor on the right. Some accounts you kept where only you would have to read them.