LOST Chapter 21: The Triangle Network

Read chapter 21 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Hana said: we'll walk. It's better on foot. She said this the way she said things that had been decided before she said them, without room for discussion, not because she was closing off discussion but because discussion would require explanation and the explanation was the walk itself. I had learned, in the ten days since arriving at the guesthouse, that Hana's economy with words was not a withholding but a preference for demonstration over description, for the thing itself over the account of the thing. We left through the blue door into the alley and turned toward the harbor. She said: the triangle marks a place where someone crossed, or where someone knows crossing happens, or where someone has been in contact with the network. The markings are not uniform. They're personal. Everyone who leaves one leaves it slightly differently, which means if you know how to read them you can tell roughly how many different people have been to a given location and whether any of them came back more than once. I said: how many people leave them. She said: not all Threshers. Some people cross and never mark anything, either because they don't know about the network or because they don't want to be findable. The ones who mark are the ones who have decided they want to be part of something, even if they don't know what the something is yet. We came out of the alley onto the harbor road and she turned north, away from the fishing district, toward the older part of town where the streets were narrower and the buildings were three and four centuries old and the stone of the road changed to something darker and less even. She said: twelve that I've confirmed. Probably more that I haven't found yet. They're not all in contact with each other. Some of them know about the guesthouse. Some of them have been coming and going from this world for years without knowing there's anyone else. I said: do they know about the machine. She said: no. One word, the same flatness she brought to information that had weight. No discussion, no elaboration. They didn't know and she had decided not to tell them and I understood, from the economy of the no, that this was not an oversight. The first mark was on the corner of a building I had walked past three times without seeing it. A small triangle scratched into the mortar between two stones at approximately shoulder height, on the north-facing wall, where the shadow fell for most of the day and where you would not see it unless you were looking specifically and at the right angle. I stopped and looked at it and Hana stopped beside me. She said: Kenji. He crossed four years ago and came back within a week. He's a fisherman now, or was before, he switched to working at the fish market last year. He comes by the guesthouse occasionally. He knows about the network, knows that others have crossed. He has never asked me about the cause of the crossing, which is either because he doesn't want to know or because he has decided that knowing would change something he's not ready to have changed. I said: he's happy here. She said: he found a life here. Whether it's happiness is his business. We kept walking. The second mark was inside a shop that sold fishing equipment and rope and the particular hardware of coastal working life, scratched into the inside of the doorframe at the height of a child, which meant either it had been done by someone short or someone who had crouched to put it where it would be less visible. A woman in her sixties ran the shop, moving through the narrow space between the shelves with the efficient intimacy of someone who had been doing this for many years and for whom every item in the inventory had a location she knew without looking. Hana bought a coil of thin rope. She bought it without appearing to look at the woman specifically, but I noticed, because I had been watching Hana navigate spaces for ten days and I had learned that her attention was rarely where it appeared to be, that she tracked th