LOST Chapter 17: She Was Here First

Read chapter 17 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The kitchen light went off at nine forty-two. I had been across the street since eight, which was when the boy had arrived through the alley door, and I had watched the kitchen window the whole time, not constantly, not with the fixed attention of someone conducting surveillance, but with the peripheral attention of someone who has learned that peripheral is often more accurate than direct, that the thing you are watching behaves differently when it knows it's being watched. Through the window, at the angle I had, I could see the table and the three of them around it. Not clearly. The glass was old and the street lamp did something to the light that made the figures imprecise, impressionistic, people-shaped more than people-specific. But I knew which one was Hana because of how she sat, the particular economy of her stillness. I knew which one was Sai because of how he moved his hands when he was explaining something, a habit I had noticed during the afternoon visit, the hands following the logic, tracing shapes in the air above the table that were almost diagrams. The third one I did not know. Young. Seventeen, possibly, the build of someone who had not quite finished arriving at the size they were going to be. School bag on the floor beside the chair. Hands around the tea cup the way all of them eventually held the tea cups, as though the cups were the point rather than the tea. He had arrived through the alley door. He had left through the alley door. In between he had sat at Hana's kitchen table for the better part of two hours and listened to things that required listening to carefully, and whatever he was he was not alarmed, which told me something about him, that the information had found somewhere in him to land that was already prepared for it. After the light went off I stayed across the street for a few minutes longer. This is a habit I have that I cannot entirely explain except as caution, the waiting after the thing is finished to be sure the thing is finished, the same reflex that makes me check a rupture site after using it rather than assuming it has closed. Most things close. Most things finish. The waiting is for the ones that don't. The light stayed off. The building was quiet. The page was in my inner pocket, the dry one, where I had put it four days ago when I arrived wet from the harbor. I had touched it probably a hundred times in four days, not reading it, not taking it out, just the small reassurance of knowing it was there, the way you touch something important in a pocket to confirm it has not become lost in transit. The paper was slightly soft now from the contact. The fold was set. His name was on it. I had held this page in ten different worlds over eleven months before I found the right version of it in the right version of the shrine. The wrong versions had wrong names, or the right name in the wrong context, or the right context in the wrong handwriting. The physicist who had written this had been precise, which was consistent with everything else I had learned about him, the precision of someone who understood that what he was doing would only work once, that the message had to be unambiguous, that the person who found it had to be unmistakable. His name. The date. A notation in the physicist's own script that I had learned to read, across eleven months and six worlds, well enough to understand: he will need the rest of what I left. Show him the door. I had found the page. I had not yet found everything the physicist had left. I knew it was here, in this version of Misakiura, in the machine room under the shrine, in places I had been twice and had not yet fully explored because the right time had not yet presented itself and the right time was a thing I had learned, painfully, not to force. The right time was coming. That was what the kitchen window had told me, the three of them at the table, Hana's economy and Sai's diagramming hands and the unknown boy who had sat for two hours and come out