Theame lures them with a simplicity that surprises even her.
She lets the Register slip.
Twenty-three contracts, twenty-three encoded sensations. An emanation. A trace of the stolen information, dense enough to be detected by those who know what to sniff for.
The entities who hired the four sense immediately the direction the Register moves. They warn. The four set out on the trail.
Theame settles into the manor three days before their arrival.
She sleeps on the floor of the main salon, wrapped in her change of clothes, the geography book open to page 114 beside her. Familiar objects anchor the mind to the body, and Theame needs every stable point available.
The blue thimble remains permanently on her ring finger.
She explores the manor systematically.
The room with the hexagonal wallpaper seems to shrink a little each day. Not much — a few centimeters — but enough for her to notice.
She marks the wall with the nail scissors' blade and measures the distance to the door on the first and third day: twenty-eight centimeters difference.
The stairs leading to the second floor have uneven steps: some twenty centimeters, one nearly half a meter, another inexplicably deep, as if descending instead of ascending.
Theame marks it so she won't miss it in the dark.
On the second floor, she discovers a room entirely wallpapered with a single material: tin can labels.
Hundreds of labels layered from floor to ceiling, in layers reaching a centimeter thick in places.
Faded colors, barely legible text, images of tomatoes, beans, stewed plums, sardines in oil, minced meat, pickled beets.
Someone lived here a long time, eating exclusively from cans, pasting each label on the wall day after day, like a calendar.
Theame counts the layers in one section.
Seventy-one labels stacked.
Seventy-one days.
Seven hundred.
She continues counting.
At one can per day, it means nearly two and a half years.
She stands in the middle of the room and thinks of the person who ate sardines and beans for two and a half years, alone, in a haunted manor, pasting each proof of survival on the walls like an archive of persistent madness.
The room at the end of the hall is locked with a new padlock, anachronistic compared to the rest of the building.
Theame does not force it.
She notes mentally that there is something inside that desperately wants out.
A possibility she rejects on principle.
On the third day, at dawn, she senses the Recoverers approaching.
She washes her face with water from a basin filled at the well in the yard and crouches in a corner of the main salon, back to the wall, facing the entrance.
She runs her finger through the blue thimble.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
The movement is involuntary, a repetitive gesture that her psyche accepts as a form of balance.