Three scraps lay where Finley’s long strip should have been. 🍂
THE BOOK OF TAD
PAGE 125
NOTHING TO FETCH 🍂
Glint woke to find Finley comparing the same three scraps.
“Did you lose all of it?”
“The field sequence.”
“Because of me.”
Finley set the scraps down.
“Because Krail trapped you while I was holding it.”
Glint looked at the supported flipper.
“You worked on it for days.”
“Yes.”
From the doorway came Nibble’s voice asking for a shorter measuring reed. Marno answered. Ordinary work sounded oddly far away.
“I’m sorry,” Glint said.
Finley watched a loose fibre turn above the stone.
“I’m angry it’s gone. I can be angry about that and glad you’re here.”
“You don’t have to tell me it didn’t matter.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
Glint asked what the lost record had shown. Finley described the quiet intervals that were not all alike, and the return that arrived after they thought the water had settled. He began drawing two sequences with his flipper on the stone.
At the third interval he stopped.
Glint waited without supplying an answer.
They left the space empty.
Later, when Finley rose to fetch food, Glint called him back.
“I was going to forget my bowl. When we got home. So you’d have to go back for it.”
Finley turned.
“Choose something heavier. A bowl’s hardly inconvenient.”
Glint considered this with proper seriousness.