Chapter 23: The Night Elias Stops Trusting His Own Accounting

The lamp he finally lit was the small one, the one whose light did not reach the door.

He had the cipher open. He had a second sheet of paper, clean, which he had taken from the bottom of his revision stack two weeks earlier and flattened under a surveying text until the fold lines disappeared. He set them side by side — the cipher on the left, the clean sheet on the right — and uncapped his pen, and began.

On the left he had everything he had already written. On the right he wrote nothing yet. He sat for a while looking at the disproportion.