Meera drank her tea. She wrote in her notebook. She counted nothing — there was nothing here to count, the flat was the right size and the corridor was seven steps and all the numbers were what they should be.
For now. That was always the correct addendum. For now. The present was what it was and was worth attending to, because the present was where you were and where you could act, and acting was what separated inquiry from mere observation, and she intended to remain, for as long as she could manage it, a person who did more than observe.
Her phone lit up again. Rajan: i think i understand the transition entries now. i need to tell you something. can you talk?
She called him.
He picked up on the first ring. His voice was his voice — the tired and the alert simultaneously, the voice of a man who had been awake in buildings for six years and had found, this specific morning, the thing he had been awake in buildings to find. She could hear in his breathing that he was in the night-version of the building, the version with the longer corridors, the version in which something above the top floor was cataloguing his awareness stage and finding it, as always, at the maximum, which meant it was keeping him, and he was using the being-kept to continue looking, and tonight he had found something, and he was calling her at four in the morning to tell her what it was.
She listened. She made notes. The Bangalore night did what it did. The chai went cold and she didn't notice. Some problems were unsolved and some were unsolvable and some were in a third category that didn't have a name yet, where the solving was happening but hadn't finished, where you were in the middle of something large that would take longer than you had so far and might take longer than you had in total and you continued anyway because the alternative was to have been in a building with something that found you worth noticing and to have learned nothing from it, which was a waste, and waste was the thing she had the least patience for.
