Chapter 25: A New Creature Chooses

The new log began with a date.

Not the archaic notation he had used since Budapest — the cipher Nadia had taught him on a train between cities he no longer inhabited, the system of oblique marks and inverted numerals that had made his private records illegible to anyone who was not him, which had been, he understood now, precisely the point. Not that system. A date, written in plain figures, in the month and day and year format of the country where he currently kept his laboratory and his meager set of possessions and, provisionally, himself.

He wrote it in the margin first, then in the header line. Then he sat back and looked at it for a moment.