LOST Chapter 3: Return to Sender

Read chapter 3 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I took the long way back. This was not a decision I made consciously. I was walking and then I noticed I was on the coastal road instead of the main street, which is twenty minutes longer and involves a hill, and I had been walking for some time already without particularly registering the walking. This happens to me more than it used to. I'll find myself somewhere and have to reconstruct how I arrived. The sea was grey. The fog was coming in. I stood at the top of the hill for a moment with the harbor below me and the shrine on the headland and the town spread out between them, and I thought: he landed. The crossing felt clean. He landed and he's in the apartment and he's doing what Sai does, which is catalog everything, which is write it all down, which is turn it into something he can think about instead of something he has to feel. He'll be all right. He'll be frightened and he'll be furious and he'll be more all right than he knows, because he has been theorizing toward this his entire adult life and the mind does something useful with confirmation even when the confirmation is terrifying. I told myself this. Then I walked down the hill and through the north gate of the Kankyō building and took the elevator to the fourth floor and went to tell Mori that Sai was gone. The fourth floor is where the Architects work. It looks like any other office floor, which is the point. Open plan, standing desks, a glass-walled meeting room at the far end that Mori uses for individual conversations because it means everyone on the floor can see that a conversation is happening without being able to hear it. I have been in that room many times. I know the particular quality of attention you receive from your colleagues when you're called in there, the way they find reasons to look somewhere else, which is its own form of watching. Mori was at his desk. He looked up when I came in, which meant he had heard me coming, which meant he had been waiting. "Where is Sai," he said. Not a question. Mori rarely asks questions. He makes statements with the intonation of questions removed, which has the effect of making you feel that he already knows the answer and is offering you the opportunity to confirm it. In six years I have not figured out how much of this is deliberate and how much is just how he speaks. "He's not available," I said. Mori looked at me for a moment. His desk is very clean. A monitor, a notebook, a pen placed parallel to the notebook's spine. No personal items. I have thought about that absence of personal items for a long time and I have not resolved what it means, whether it is professional caution or genuine absence of sentiment or something else entirely. "Sit down, Ken." I sat. The thing about lying to Mori is that you have to commit to it before you're in the room. If you decide while he's looking at you, he'll see the deciding. I had made this decision on the coastal road, somewhere between the top of the hill and the north gate, without fully acknowledging that I was making it. I had thought about Sai cataloging his seventeen wrong things and I had thought about what Mori would do with precise information about Sai's location, and somewhere in that thinking the decision had made itself. "He crossed," I said. "I don't know where he landed." This was true in the narrowest sense. I knew which world. I did not know which apartment, which corner of the floor, whether he'd hit his head or bitten his tongue or landed clean. I held the technical accuracy of this in my mind like something to stand on. Mori nodded slowly. "How did it happen." "He was researching near the harbor rupture site. A spontaneous event." I had prepared this on the road too. Not a complicated story. Spontaneous crossings happen, they have been happening more frequently, the rupture rate has been accelerating for months and the org knows it, it is one of the things the Tier 2 meetings have been circling without quite landing on. A spontaneous crossing involv