No Essentials List

Hana found intern Pell in Cabinet 12 with a terminal and a guilty back.

“You’re ranking the hearings.”

“I’m making them findable.”

“That’s the same knife.”

She sat on the F-sharp stool.

Pell showed her a draft: a gateway collection called OLD CIRCUIT ESSENTIALS, twelve documents, the pancake war not among them, the inhabited under-annex definitely not among them.

“Essentials is a pretty word for deletion,” Hana said.

He deleted the draft.

They sat.

The annex smelled like glue and rain that had not been allowed in.

“I wanted to help the stall woman,” he said.

“You did. You scanned Cabinet 4. You wrote where, not whether. That’s help. A list of twelve is a throne.”

Pell put the terminal face down.

Hana date-stamped a blank card and wrote: NO ESSENTIALS LIST. THE SHELF IS THE LIST.

She clipped it to Cabinet 12.

Pell, after a while, copied the card into his notebook and did not put it online.

Oren Beck, fetching a sandwich of the mind, saw the card and did not photograph it.

Downstairs, Mara heard nothing, which was the point of boredom as a lock.

Hana locked the cabinets.

Pell oiled the hinge of the discontinued door, once, like a caretaker.

“That’s not your job.”

“It’s a neighbor job.”

They went out into Old Circuit’s evening dough-stall weather.

The gateway, unfed, did not receive an essentials list that night.

Page seventy-nine remained seventy-nine.

The stall license remained in a kitchen drawer.

The school remained a stack of jobs.

Pell said, “I’ll still want to search.”

“Search. Then walk to where it sits. If you can’t walk there, you don’t have it. You have a rumor of it.”

He nodded, sixteen-no, twenty-two, and learning feet.

Hana bought dough.

They ate standing, which Ivo would have understood, and did not rate the stall.

Rating was how pancakes had started a war.

Old Circuit, un-essential, kept its cabinets.

That was the expansion the sign had forbidden.

They did it anyway, by existing.