Chapter 9: Sera Starts Noticing the Wrong Things

The coffee at Naktok Bay was made in a thirty-cup percolator that had been donated, according to the hand-lettered tape on its base, by the 2014 cohort, and it tasted exactly like what it was: institutional, reliable, and improved only by not thinking about it too much. Sera had been drinking two cups every morning for three weeks, standing at the communal table while the station came awake around her, and she had found this to be an adequate arrangement.

What she had also found, over the same three weeks, was a list.

She had not meant to start it. That was the thing she kept having to explain to herself — not to anyone else, because she had not explained it to anyone else — when she noticed how much space it was beginning to occupy. She had not sat down and thought, I will now catalog the anomalies. She had simply noticed things, the way she noticed things, and the noticing had accumulated the way data always did when you let it: neutrally, patiently, until the pattern became impossible to attribute to noise.