Chapter 3: The Complaint Log, Entry 44

The heat that week had weight. It sat on the town like wet cloth and did not lift even at midnight, and Natsuko woke each morning already damp, the sheet twisted around her ankles, her notebook on the pillow beside her where she had been writing the night before.

She had developed a habit, sometime in the previous year, of keeping the complaint log within arm's reach during sleep. It had started practically — an observation at 3 a.m. is only useful if you can record it before the rational brain reasserts itself and decides it doesn't qualify — and had since become something she didn't examine too closely. The notebook was there. She reached for it. That was enough.

Entry 44 began on Tuesday, the sixth of August.