LOST Chapter 14: Nao

Read chapter 14 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

The rupture opened where I expected it to, which was the first good sign. Not all of them open where you expect. Most of them, in my experience, open somewhere in the general vicinity of where you expect, and the gap between general vicinity and exact location is the gap where things go wrong, where you come through at the wrong angle and hit a wall or land in water or, once, memorably, arrive inside a building that in this world contains a staircase where in your departure world it did not. My left ankle still registers that staircase in cold weather. This one opened cleanly, at the harbor mouth, three meters above the water, which was close enough to the shoreline that I cleared it with the cross-current and landed on wet stone with the particular impact that has become, across more crossings than I keep an accurate count of anymore, entirely familiar. Knees soft. Weight forward. Let the impact distribute. I have broken the same two ribs four times in four different worlds and I know exactly how to avoid it now. I stood up. I assessed. This is the first thing you do after a crossing, or the first thing I do, which amounts to the same methodology after you have done it enough times for it to become a methodology: you establish where you are, and then you establish when you are, and then you establish whether those two things are consistent with where and when you intended to be. The harbor was the harbor. Correct configuration of the bay, correct headland, correct shrine on the headland catching the early morning light at the angle I expected for the time of year. The boats were in, which was correct for this hour. The smell was the Misakiura smell, kelp and cold water and the faint trace of something that might be the machine if you knew what you were smelling for, which not many people did. The time: morning, early autumn, consistent with what I had calculated from the rupture window timing on the departure side. The world: that was the harder assessment, and the one that required more than a glance at the harbor. I had been to this world twice before. I knew its specific flavor the way you know the specific flavor of a place after enough visits, not from any single identifiable thing but from the aggregate, the texture of it, the way the light hit the water at this particular angle, the specific shade of the shrine's torii gate which was half a degree redder in this world than in W-01 and which I had noticed the first time and confirmed on the second. Half a degree. I notice things like that now. You either develop this or you don't, and the people who don't are the ones who end up confused about where they've arrived, which is a confusion with consequences. The torii was the right shade. I was where I meant to be. I had fifteen minutes before I needed to be off the harbor wall, because the early morning is when the fishing crews come back and I was wet and had arrived from nowhere in a way that would require explaining, and explaining is the thing I most consistently try to avoid. I wrung out my jacket as best I could and walked quickly up the stone steps to the shrine approach road and from there into the town. The shrine opens at six. I had arrived at five forty-seven. I waited thirteen minutes in the narrow street that runs along the shrine's eastern wall, watching the light change, watching a cat that had found a warm patch of stone near the base of the wall and was conducting the feline assessment of whether to acknowledge my presence. It decided not to. I respected this. At six the outer gate was unlocked by a man in the grey working clothes of the shrine staff, moving with the purposeful morning efficiency of someone with a list of tasks and a specific order for them. He did not look at the narrow street. I have found that people who have tasks and orders for them rarely look at things that are not on the list. I went in through the outer gate. The shrine records are kept in the administrative building at the north