Chapter 12: Terry Ives's Lab Report, Page Forty-Seven

The cross-referencing had taken four hours.

Holmes sat on the floor of the rented room with his back against the iron radiator and the documents spread in a three-meter radius, organized by date along one axis and by document type along a second, with a tertiary arrangement by the frequency of specific redacted terms that he had begun cataloguing as shapes rather than words — the long flat bar of a four-letter deletion, the broad smear of something eight or nine characters long that appeared always in the same positional relationship to the phrase *sensory threshold protocol*. El had fallen asleep on the cot with her face turned toward the wall and the blanket pulled to her chin, and Holmes had kept the lamp angled away from her without consciously deciding to do so.

By half past two he had built the first complete chronology.