Chapter 20: Reconstructing the Index

The notepad was already full when I reached the fourth floor.

Not the freshest page — that one still held the name in its box, waiting with the patience of something that had already done its damage and could afford to be still. The full pages were the ones behind it, thirty-one of them covered front and back in the compressed shorthand I'd developed in the Jakarta field tents when the power was out and the wounded needed cataloguing faster than any system could manage. Abbreviations that meant nothing to anyone who hadn't been there. Which was the point. Which had always been the point.

I laid the notepad on the narrow table, set the data chip beside it, and looked at what I had.