LOST Chapter 8: Mori

Read chapter 8 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The meeting was called for nine. I was there at eight forty-five, which is when I always arrive, because arriving early to a meeting with Mori is not the same as arriving early to other meetings. To other meetings it signals enthusiasm, or anxiety, or the particular social hunger of someone who needs to be seen as prepared. To a meeting with Mori it signals nothing, because Mori is also there at eight forty-five, and has been there since before I arrived, and will give no indication of having noticed either way. We have had this same exchange of early arrivals many times and it has never been remarked upon and I have come to think of it as a kind of compact, two people who understand that the meeting begins before the meeting begins, sitting with their coffee in the glass room while the floor fills up around them. He poured me coffee from the carafe without asking. This is the only hospitality Mori performs and he performs it consistently, which I have decided means something without being able to say what. The floor was coming in through the main entrance, the morning shuffle of coats and bags and the low sounds of people transitioning from outside to inside, the particular energy of people who have been out in the cold and are now warm and settling. Ikeda. Nishimura. Patel. Three of the junior Watchers whose names I have and whose faces I am still mapping to names after two months of working alongside them. The monitoring team, four of them, who handle the rupture data and whose work I understand well enough to supervise and not well enough to do myself. I watched them through the glass and drank my coffee. "How are you sleeping," Mori said. "Fine." He looked at me with the level attention that is his default expression, which communicates neither belief nor disbelief, simply the fact that he has heard what you said and is holding it somewhere. I have spent six years learning to return this look without flinching and I am still not certain I manage it. "You should sleep," he said. "You'll be less useful if you don't." This is the closest Mori comes to expressing concern. I have learned to receive it as such. He opened the folder on the table between us. The monitoring protocol, three pages, clean formatting, the work of someone on the administrative side who had put it together overnight after Mori's request, which meant Mori had requested it immediately after I left the previous evening, which meant he had not slept either or had slept briefly and worked before I arrived, which was consistent with everything I knew about him. "We track the rupture events in the likely landing zone," he said. "W-02, possibly W-03 if the crossing had significant lateral drift. We flag any anomalous contact patterns, any new network activity around the harbor sites. If he's made contact with local Threshers we'll see it in the communication traces within a week." I looked at the protocol. It was thorough. It would work, as a method of tracking someone who didn't know they were being tracked, which Sai currently didn't, and it would work right up until the moment Sai figured out enough to start being careful, which based on my knowledge of Sai was not a long runway. "That seems right," I said. "Any concerns about the approach." "No." This was true in the way that many things I said to Mori were true, which is to say precisely and not completely. I had no concerns about the approach as a method of locating Sai. My concerns were about what happened after locating him, which was not what Mori was asking about, and which I was not going to raise. He turned to the second page. "The rupture rate." "Yes." "It's accelerating faster than the models projected. Twelve documented events in the harbor zone this month. The previous monthly record was seven." He said this without inflection, the way he states most things, as a property of the situation rather than a judgment about it. "This creates some urgency around the timeline." I thought about urgency an