Chapter 9: Three Thousand Years of Pedagogical Triage

The rain started just before dawn, the kind of thin, persistent coastal rain that doesn't commit to anything — not to being a storm, not to stopping. Edmund had been in the archive anteroom for two hours by the time it reached the windows, and he was aware of it only peripherally, the way he was aware of his own hunger: as data, filed and not acted upon.

The anteroom was a converted storage space off the main Big House library, lit by two standing lamps with warm incandescent bulbs that someone had clearly chosen for the comfort of mortal eyes. The camp's architectural accommodations for mortality were, Edmund had noticed, more extensive than its residents seemed to realize — or perhaps they simply stopped noticing them the way you stopped noticing a ramp when you'd used it long enough. The anteroom held four wooden filing cabinets, a map table scarred by what appeared to be decades of compasses and straightedges, and a smell of cedar and something older underneath the cedar, some mineral patience that reminded him, inconveniently, of the specific way Aldous's study in the manor had smelled in winter.

He had seven reports spread on the map table, weighted at the corners with smooth stones the camp seemed to produce in every size for exactly this purpose. Eastern meadow sightings, six weeks' worth, organized chronologically. He had read through them twice. He was now reading through them the second time, more slowly, paying attention to what was not in them.