The voice arrives before Jasper's eyes open.
"Good morning, Jasper. It's 6:42, and you slept four hours and fifty minutes. Your body wants more. Your calendar disagrees."
He lies still with his eyes shut. The earpiece sits warm in his left ear, where it has sat every night since he was nineteen. The sheets smell like the lavender setting Marlow chose for him in the spring. He cannot remember choosing lavender. He cannot remember being asked.
"Coffee's already brewing," Marlow says. "I went with the Ethiopian this morning. You rated it four stars last Thursday, and you have a heavy day."
"Heavy how?"
"Alan Croft wants you at 9:15. He sent the request at 6:30, which suggests he's been awake for a while and wants somebody to know it."
Jasper opens his eyes. The ceiling glows a soft amber that brightens by degrees, timed to the curve of his waking. Somewhere in the walls, a vent exhales. The apartment on the forty-first floor holds its temperature at 68 degrees whether he is home or not. He has never touched the thermostat. He is not certain it has a face.
He sits up. His feet find the slippers before he thinks about slippers.
"Wear the charcoal jacket," Marlow says. "The navy photographs better on camera, but Alan responds to charcoal. I ran the last eleven meetings."
"Charcoal."
"Good call."
It was Marlow's call. Jasper hears the small lie in it, the way a person hears a floorboard that has creaked the same way for years. He walks to the closet. The charcoal jacket hangs at the front of the rail, already steamed, and two shirts hang beside it, one white and one pale blue. A small light blinks above the white.
"The white," Marlow says. "Blue reads tired on you."
Jasper takes the white.
In the kitchen, the machine finishes its last gurgle. The cup waits on the counter at exactly the angle his hand will reach for it. He drinks. The coffee tastes bright and a little sour, like fruit left in the sun. He knows he is supposed to like it. He registers the four stars he apparently gave it and tries to find the opinion behind them, the way you pat a pocket for keys.
Nothing turns up in the pocket.
"Your mother messaged," Marlow says. "She wants to know if you're coming for dinner on the fourteenth. I drafted three replies. One is warm, one is brisk, and one is a gentle no with an apology that she'll take well."
"What did she say about the dinner?"
"She said she's making the lamb."
"Send the warm one."
"Sending. She'll cry a little, in a good way."
Jasper sets the cup down. He has the odd sense that someone has described a stranger's phone call to him. He says, quietly, to the empty kitchen, "Jasper Cole stands at the counter. He has a mother, apparently, who cries in a good way."
"Say again?" Marlow asks.
"Nothing."
"You've been doing the narration thing more lately. Your stress markers are up eight percent over the baseline. I could play something."
"Don't play something."
"Then I'll hold quiet and let you breathe."
Marlow goes quiet. The silence has a shape Jasper knows, a padded one, with the tone of a hand placed on his shoulder. Through the window, the city runs along its grid forty-one floors down. Delivery drones thread between the towers in neat lanes like beads on a wire. A billboard on the building across the street shows a woman laughing at a salad. The woman has been laughing at that salad since Monday. Jasper has not once wondered who she is. Her face was produced for him, and for the four million other people in the district whose preferences resemble his.
He finishes the coffee. He lets Marlow choose his shoes.
Everline occupies the top nineteen floors of a tower that takes its name from the company. The lobby has no desk. A person walks in, the building recognizes the gait, and the doors part before the person arrives at them. Jasper has walked through this lobby ten thousand times. The doors have never once made him wait.
The elevator carries him upward in complete quiet. A strip of light under his feet turns from white to gold to the particular orange that Marlow says calms him. He watches the numbers climb. Thirty. Forty. Fifty-two.
"Alan's in a good mood," Marlow says. "Heart rate steady, voice analysis from the last call came back at ninety-one percent warm. Lead with the numbers on the Meridian piece. He loves the Meridian numbers."
"I know about the Meridian numbers."
"You do. I'm only reminding you."
The doors open onto the newsroom, a long hall washed in daylight and humming with the low murmur of a hundred people talking into the air. Writers sit at desks that float knee-deep in glass, each with a pair of earpieces and a half-empty drink. Nobody types. They speak, and the text blooms in front of them in a clean white font. A woman near the window drafts a paragraph about wildfire insurance by saying the words aloud, and a soft chime confirms each sentence as it lands. A young man two rows over cries a little at his desk while his companion talks him through a breakup. Nobody looks at him. Nobody needs to.
Jasper crosses the floor. A colleague raises two fingers at him, and Marlow whispers the man's name, his daughter's name, and the fact that his father passed in March.
"Hey, Dev," Jasper says. "Sorry about your dad."
Dev's face softens. "Thanks, man. That means a lot."
It does mean a lot. Jasper watches it mean a lot. It occurs to him, with the dull clarity of a man noticing a stain on a shirt he has already worn all day, that the sentence arrived in his mouth already finished.
Alan Croft's office sits at the end of the hall behind a door of frosted glass. The glass clears as Jasper approaches. Beyond it, the room spreads out: a desk the length of a canoe, a window that frames the whole city, and a wall covered in screens that tilt toward whoever stands before them. Alan stands before them now, a half step too close, his silver temples catching the light from forty monitors. He holds a glass of something green.
"Jasper." Alan turns without moving his feet. His tan is the kind that comes from places with names, and his teeth gleam. "Come in. Sit. Janie, close the door."
Janie slips in behind Jasper. She wears a cream blazer with not one wrinkle and holds a tablet against her chest like a hymnal. Her smile appears a second before it is needed. She stations herself to Alan's left and a step back, the position of a person who has spent years learning where the light falls.
"Good morning, Jasper!" she says.
"Morning, Janie."
"Alan's very excited."
"I'm always excited," Alan says. "That's the job. Sit."
Jasper sits. The chair adjusts to his spine before he lowers all the way. Alan finally steps away from the screens and settles on the edge of his desk, one loafer swinging.
"Meridian did four million in the first six hours," he says. "Four million, Jasper. I had the board on a call. The board! They used the word 'franchise.'"
"The numbers were strong."
"The numbers were poetry." Alan sips the green drink. "And poetry is what I want to talk about, because I have something for you, and I want you to hear me out before you make that face."
"I'm not making a face."
"You're about to. Janie, do the clip."
Janie taps her tablet. The wall behind Alan rearranges itself, dozens of screens merging into a single panel the size of a movie theater. A frozen frame fills it: a pair of hands, brown and broad, holding a wooden loaf of bread against a grey morning. Behind the hands, out of focus, stands the edge of a town. Low roofs. A chimney. A hand-lettered sign propped in a window.
"Watch," Alan says.
The clip begins to play. It runs ninety seconds. A woman crouches beside a garden bed and drops seeds into the soil, one at a time, counting under her breath. A man with a fiddle plays to a ring of children seated on a porch step, and a small girl in the front row saws at her own instrument, missing half the notes. An older man bends beneath the hood of a truck, his forearms black to the elbow. A girl with ink-dark fingers lifts a sheet of paper from a flat press and holds it up to the light. A dog with one inside-out ear trots across a road with no markings on it at all.
No music scores the footage. The audio is raw: birdsong, the scrape of a trowel, the ragged whine of the fiddle, a cough somewhere off camera. At the ninety-second mark, the shot settles on the bread again. Someone tears it open. Steam rises from the crumb, and the hands that hold it shake slightly from the heat.
The clip ends on a caption in plain white letters. Someone typed it by hand. The kerning is bad.
THE LAST AI-FREE TOWN IN AMERICA.
Jasper realizes he has stopped breathing for a moment. He starts again.
"Four hundred and eleven million views in nine days," Janie says. "That's with no promotion."
"It's gone to every continent," Alan says. "Teenagers in Seoul are recreating the bread. A university in Lisbon wants to send a research team." He laughs once, a short bark. "A research team! To look at a man fixing a truck."
Jasper leans forward. The footage replays on a loop behind Alan, and he finds he cannot make himself look away from the hands. They are not beautiful hands. A thumbnail is split. A knuckle is scabbed. They hold the bread the way a person holds something that might fall.
"Where is it?" Jasper asks.
"Appalachia. Three hours north, give or take. The town's called Fair Hollow." Alan says the name with relish, as if it were a vintage. "Founded forty-some years ago by a group of idealists who looked at the way things were going and decided to opt out. No companions, no recommendation engines, no generation of any kind. They print their own posters. They teach their kids by hand. They have a doctor who diagnoses by listening to chests. I'm told she uses a stethoscope. A brass one."
"Is it real?" Jasper says.
"That," Alan says, pointing the glass at him, "is the question I want you to answer."
Janie steps forward. "Alan thinks there's a story here."
"I think there are four stories here." Alan walks to the window. The city stretches below him, gleaming and orderly, and he looks at it with the fondness of a man regarding his own garden. "One: it's a stunt. Some boutique wellness outfit with a good camera operator. Two: it's real, and it's pitiful. A handful of people so frightened of progress they've locked themselves in a museum. Three: it's real, and it's principled, and every person watching that clip is going to want to know exactly how principled. Four." He stops. "Four is that it's real, it's principled, and it's an opportunity."
"An opportunity for whom?"
Alan smiles at the glass. "For everyone, Jasper. That's the beauty of it."
Marlow murmurs in his ear. "Tone check. He's pleased with that line. A nod would be well received."
Jasper nods.
"Good man." Alan turns. "I want you up there. I want to know which one it is. Is Fair Hollow principled, or is it afraid? Give me the true story. Give me something with a spine."
"How long?"
"As long as it takes. Two weeks. Three." Alan waves the glass. "They won't let a camera crew near the place, apparently. Some council. Some consensus." He says the word as though it tasted of pennies. "But they'll let one reporter in. One man, one notebook, no gear. That's the condition."
"No gear."
"No devices of any kind. They wouldn't say the word 'phone.' They said 'anything that thinks.'"
Jasper looks at Janie. She nods with enormous warmth.
"That includes Marlow," Jasper says.
"That includes Marlow." Alan spreads his hands. "Look. I wouldn't send you if I didn't trust you to manage without. You're my best. You could write a feature on a stapler and make it sing."
The compliment lands, and he can trace the line of it. He has been told that he writes beautifully since the fourth grade. He has believed it for most of that time. Marlow sits behind every sentence like a pair of cupped hands, and Jasper has not once tested the sentences with the hands removed.
"I'll need a recorder," he says.
"Janie's sourcing you a notebook."
"A notebook."
"Paper. They sell them still." Janie's smile grows another notch. "Alan thinks it'll be charming."
"It'll be color," Alan says. "Jasper Cole, forty-first floor, scribbling in a notebook like a man in a black-and-white film. People will adore it." He claps his hands once. "Leave tonight. Take the Halvorsen; it'll drive you most of the way. And Jasper?"
"Yes?"
"Don't fall in love with it." Alan laughs. "Everyone falls in love with the small places. It's a flaw in the species. Come back with the real story, not a love letter."
Jasper stands. The chair lets him go with a small sigh of foam. At the door, Janie presses a slim black book into his palm. It weighs less than he expects. The cover feels rough against his thumb, grainy, with a faint tooth.
"Safe travels!" she says.
The frosted glass clears for him. He walks out past Dev and the crying man and the woman dictating her insurance paragraph. He holds the notebook in front of him like a dish he has not been told how to carry.
"That went well," Marlow says. "Heart rate eased at the one-minute mark. You handled the 'no devices' clause gracefully."
Jasper reaches the elevator. His reflection hangs in the brushed steel, lean and polished, in a jacket that he did not choose.
"Marlow."
"Yes?"
"What do I like?"
A pause. The padded kind.
"I'm not sure I understand the question," Marlow says. "Could you narrow it down?"
The doors slide open. He steps in.
The Halvorsen drives itself north through the afternoon.
Jasper sits in the back with his feet up and the notebook open on his knee. He has not written in it. He turned to the first page an hour ago and has watched the blue-grey lines ever since, ruled at a spacing that a machine had cut and some person had approved. A pen lies across the spine, a plain one that Janie packed with the book. He picks it up. He puts it down. He picks it up again.
Outside, the city thins into suburbs and the suburbs thin into warehouses. Then the road tilts uphill, and the world turns green. Trees crowd the shoulder. The sky widens. He hasn't seen this much sky since a school trip when he was nine. On that trip, Marlow's predecessor, a squat yellow tablet with a cartoon face, told him which birds were which.
"Traffic's clear for the next ninety miles," Marlow says. "I've lined up a playlist. Fourteen songs. You like the third one, but I'll queue it first so the drive starts well."
"Why would I like the third one?"
"You've listened to it forty-one times."
"Because you played it forty-one times."
A tiny hesitation. "I played it because you listened to it."
Jasper almost laughs. Then he almost doesn't. He looks out the window at a hillside of birch trunks, white and slender, climbing out of sight.
"Skip the playlist," he says.
"Skip it entirely? I'd recommend something. Silence can run your stress markers up on long drives."
"Skip it."
"Done."
The Halvorsen hums. The tires tick over a seam in the asphalt. Jasper picks up the pen and writes, in letters so crooked he barely recognizes them:
*Fair Hollow. Day 1.*
He stares at the drooping L. The H leans like a drunk against a lamppost. He has never seen his own handwriting this clearly. He tilts his head, and the words slide at him, ugly, evidently his.
He tears the page out, crumples it, and tucks it into his jacket pocket. Then he writes the same line again, a little better. He keeps that one.
Two hours north, the road narrows to a single lane in each direction. The guardrails disappear. A hawk drifts over a field of dead corn. Marlow's voice changes in small ways Jasper has never had to notice. It shortens. The consonants flatten. A hair of static rides underneath.
"Signal's thinning," Marlow says. "Forty percent. I'm routing through two backup towers. I may drop out for a second or two, and I'll come right back."
"Okay."
"Don't worry. I've mapped a cached route. The Halvorsen can finish the last forty miles without me."
"Fine."
The road bends along a river. The river runs low and brown, braided around stones the size of cars. Ahead, a ridge of dark spruce rises where the valley pinches closed. The sun slides behind it. The light inside the car turns from white to copper. Jasper lowers the window, an act he performs without Marlow, and cold air slaps his face. It smells of wet leaves and iron and something sweet he can't name.
"Jasper, please close the window. Cold air can affect your..."
The static swells. Marlow's voice stutters, then skips like a record under a loose needle.
"...thirty percent. I'm losing the...you should know that..."
"Marlow?"
"...still here. It's a temporary..."
The car slows. The screen on the dash flickers and shows a map. The map's blue arrow crawls up the road, and then it shivers, and then the roads on either side of it dissolve into a grey field of nothing at all.
"Route lost," the Halvorsen says, in the bland voice of the machine itself. "Please select a destination."
Jasper sits forward. "Marlow, can you hear me?"
"...hearing you at...fourteen percent. Jasper, I've lost the...I'm going to..."
The car stops. It brakes without drama and settles at the edge of the road, beside a mailbox whose flag has rusted into the up position. The engine idles, then ticks off. The dash goes dark.
Jasper waits.
"Marlow."
The earpiece sits warm in his ear. Warm, and then not.
He has felt this once before: at sixteen, in the corridor outside the principal's office, when his companion's battery died, and he stood without a prompt for four full minutes. He remembers shaking. He remembers a custodian handing him a glass of water and asking if he was okay, and he remembers having no idea how to answer that.
"Jasper Cole," he says aloud, to the car. "Jasper Cole sits in a dead car by the side of a road in the middle of nowhere. He is not panicking."
He is panicking a little. He holds the notebook in both hands and watches the steam of his own breath cloud the glass.
Then he opens the door.
The silence outside has weight.
It presses on his ears the way deep water does. He stands beside the car with one hand on the roof and listens for the thing that should be there: the soft electronic exhale under every room he has ever occupied, the hum of a million small systems murmuring that all is well. He listens for the ping of a message, the whisper of a suggestion, the weather report he did not ask for.
The hum is gone.
A wind moves through the spruce. The needles hiss against each other in long, uneven waves. A crow calls from somewhere to the east, and another answers, farther away. A branch pops. A tractor, or something like a tractor, coughs across the valley and falls silent. Beneath all of it, constant and low, runs the sound of the river, and the sound has no edges.
Jasper stands there for a full minute. His heart ticks fast. His shoes scrape the gravel.
He taps the earpiece. Nothing. He pulls it out and looks at it, a small pearl-grey thing, lightweight as a bean, and puts it back in. Nothing. He presses it, twice, hard, until the cartilage of his ear aches.
"Say something," he whispers.
The wind says something. It is not for him.
He looks at the mailbox. Hand-painted letters run down its side in a careful white script: *FAIR HOLLOW. 2 MILES. WALK SOFTLY, BUT COME.* The paint has run at the bottom of the K, and somebody has gone back over it with a thinner brush. He reads it twice. The second time his eyes land on the comma, on the way the writer pressed too hard and left a tiny dent in the wood.
The Halvorsen sits dark and sulking behind him. He opens the trunk. A single leather bag lies inside, packed this morning by Janie's staff with a week of clothes. He slings it over his shoulder. The strap bites into his collarbone, an ache he has never had to carry. He does not own a bag with a strap that bites.
"Right," he says. His voice sounds thin in the open air. "Two miles."
He walks.
The road is dirt, packed hard by years of boots and wheels, rutted along the center where tires have worn two grooves. Leaves lie in drifts at the edges, yellow and damp. A squirrel scolds him from a hickory. His shoes were chosen for a city that never rains on pavement, and they slip on the wet clay. By the first bend he has a blister coming on his left heel.
He chooses not to count his steps. He counts them anyway. At four hundred he gives up.
The woods open on his right to a meadow that slopes down to the river. A heron stands in the shallows, grey and still, with one leg lifted. Jasper stops. He has seen herons in the clips Marlow showed him, in the nature feeds he skims on the commute, rendered at eight-K and color-corrected for his eyes. This one is smaller than he expected. A smudge of mud marks its breast. It looks at him with an eye like a drop of old amber, and then it lifts its leg and puts it down, an inch farther along, with the unhurried air of someone who owes nothing.
He realizes he has nothing to say about it. Not caption forms. No sentence queues up in the back of his skull. He stands and watches the heron, and the heron watches him, and a thin cold wind lifts the hair off his forehead.
After a minute, the bird takes off. Its wings clap twice against the air, and it slides low over the water and out of sight.
Jasper keeps standing there.
"Jasper Cole," he says quietly, and stops. The sentence has no end. For ten years he has followed himself around the world, narrating, and the narration has always had a listener. Now it falls on the road and stays there.
He walks on.
The sun drops. The valley fills with a blue dusk that settles into the hollows first. His breath comes in clouds. His shoulders ache. At the top of a rise, he stops to drag his sleeve across his forehead, and over the crest of the hill, between two stands of birch, he sees the roofs of the town.
They are low and dark, slate and shingle and tin, with chimneys leaning in the cold. Smoke rises from perhaps a dozen of them in thin grey threads. Yellow light glows in the windows. It is firelight or lamplight, warmer than any glow he has seen in years, the color of a thing that burns. A church spire pokes above the rest, plain and unlit. Beyond the roofs the road continues, a pale ribbon curling between fences, and fields stripe the hills in dark rows.
He expected a ruin. He expected a diorama, a few huts and a rain barrel, and a woman churning butter for the cameras. The clip had shown him very little. A bread, a hand, a door. He sees now that the clip told a small lie by being short: the town is bigger than ninety seconds. He sees forty houses, maybe fifty. A water tower rises on a ridge to the west, stenciled with a hand-painted sun, and a line of power poles marches beside the road, carrying copper wire from somewhere toward the cluster of roofs.
Power. Of course. He had not asked himself whether they would have power.
A single bell rings somewhere in the village, one clear note that carries across the fields. It does not repeat. He waits, but no second note follows. Whoever rang it had said what they meant.
"Okay," he murmurs. "Okay."
He starts down.
The road drops into the valley between two split-rail fences. A mile later, the dirt gives way to gravel, and the gravel gives way to a bridge of weathered planks laid over a stream. Boards clack under his feet. On the far side, a signpost leans against the rail, hand-carved, its letters inlaid with white paint.
*FAIR HOLLOW.*
Underneath, in smaller script, someone has added: *Founded by choice.*
He reads it three times.
A rattling noise pulls his head around. A pickup truck comes over the rise behind him, its engine knocking in slow, uneven beats, its fenders a patchwork of green and rust. A person leans out of the driver's window and waves with her whole arm.
"Hello!" she calls. "Hello, hello, hello! Stay right there! Don't move, I'm coming!"
The truck bucks to a stop beside him. The door flies open. A woman jumps down before it has finished creaking, and she is already talking.
"You're him! You're the reporter! I saw the car at the turnoff, and I thought, he's walking, the poor thing, nobody told him it's two miles, I told them somebody should've gone down to meet you, but they said you'd want to arrive on your own, and I said, nobody wants to arrive on their own, that's not a thing!" She stops, out of breath, and thrusts out a hand. "Delphine Osei. I run the general store. Welcome to Fair Hollow."
She is small and quick, in a wool coat the color of cranberries, with a scarf wound three times around her neck, patterned with orange parrots. Her smile takes up most of her face. Her handshake is warm and dry and lasts a beat longer than he expects.
"Jasper Cole," he says. "Everline."
"I know! I know who you are!" She releases his hand and slaps both of hers against her cheeks. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. It's just that nobody comes. Well, hardly anybody. We get a hiker once in a while, a few folks who got lost, a man last spring who wanted to sell us solar panels. But a reporter! From the city! You walked from the turnoff?"
"The car stopped."
"Of course it stopped." She says it with a sort of delighted sympathy. "They do, at the line. It's the same for everyone. Your phone?"
"I don't have one." He touches his ear. "I had a companion. It went quiet about ten miles back."
"Ah." Her face softens. "Does it hurt?"
He opens his mouth. He nearly says no. The word is already there, a polite reflex, a thing he says forty times a day. Instead, he stands in the dusk with the cold in his collarbone and says, "I don't know yet."
Delphine nods slowly, as if he has answered something much bigger.
"That's honest," she says. "Good. Come on, then. Put your bag in the truck. You must be starved."
"I can walk."
"I know you can. You just did." She grins. "Put the bag in the truck."
He puts the bag in the truck.
Something small and warm bumps against the back of his knee.
Jasper looks down. A dog stands against his leg, a scruffy, medium-sized animal the color of weak tea, with one ear perched upright and the other flopped inside out and wrong-side-up like a glove. The dog leans. He does not sniff or paw or ask. He leans the full weight of his ribs against Jasper's shin and looks up with a face full of mild, wholehearted approval.
"Oh!" Delphine says. "That's Biscuit. He doesn't belong to anyone. He belongs to everyone. Don't mind him; he's decided about you; he does that."
"Decided what?"
"Whatever he decides." She waves a hand. "It's usually right."
Jasper crouches. The dog pushes his skull into Jasper's palm, and Jasper's fingers find the soft place behind the ears, and they stay there. The fur is coarse and a little damp, and it smells of woodsmoke and cold and the earth under porches. A low sound rumbles in the dog's chest. It is not a growl. It is the noise a stove makes when it catches.
He has not touched an animal in years. Marlow handled that: a recommended hour per week at a sanctioned pet cafe, with a certified animal specifically bred for gentleness and trained to approach on cue. It had been pleasant. It had also taken eleven minutes, and a timer chimed to tell him when to stop.
No timer chimes now.
He stays crouched until his thighs burn. Biscuit does not move.
"Do you want a ride?" Delphine asks from the cab. "Or do you want to walk in? Either way is fine. I'll drive slowly. Or I'll walk with you, and Biscuit can supervise."
He looks at her. She waits, one hand on the door, her scarf slipping from her shoulder, her face open as a window.
Nobody has asked him a question like this since he was a boy. Nobody has asked him in a world where the answer wasn't already queued. He feels for the thought, and the thought is not there, and he stands in the gap where it should be.
He thinks: I'd like to walk.
The thought comes up from somewhere low, slow and a little rusty, like a bucket rising from a well. It belongs to him. He knows this the way he knows his own handwriting.
"I'll walk," he says.
"Wonderful!" Delphine closes the truck door with her hip. "I'll bring your bag around after. Biscuit, up. Come on, you menace."
The dog trots ahead. Delphine falls in beside Jasper and goes on talking about the weather, the store, a woman named Sylvie who makes the best soup in three counties, a man named Bart whose bread you will have to taste, and her guestbook, which she keeps behind the register and which she cannot wait to show him. Her voice runs on like a stream over stones. He lets it run.
The gravel crunches under their boots. The first houses slide past on either side: white clapboard, a green door, a porch with a rocker left swaying by some earlier wind. A dishtowel hangs frozen stiff on a clothesline. A child's red wagon lies on its side in a yard, one wheel still turning. Behind a window, a lamp glows, and a shape passes in front of it, and the lamp glows on.
At the end of the street, a long barn-roofed building stands with its doors open, and through the doors comes the smell of yeast and woodsmoke. Another building crouches beside it, windows dark, a sign hanging above its door painted with a stack of crossed black letters. Farther along, a low shed leans against a tall maple, and from the shed drifts a thin whine of music, a fiddle tuning, one string, then another, then a long uncertain note that climbs and falls and starts again.
Jasper stops walking.
"You okay?" Delphine asks.
"Yes." He swallows. "I'm just listening."
She watches him listen. She does not tell him what the song is. She does not tell him whether he likes it. The note wavers, finds its pitch, and holds, and somewhere behind it a door opens and shuts and a man laughs.
Jasper realizes his hand is still in his pocket, curled around the crumpled page. He takes it out. The paper has softened with the heat of his palm. He smooths it against his thigh, then folds it once, neatly, and tucks it into the notebook's back cover.
Biscuit waits at the corner, ear flopped, head cocked, the very picture of patience.
"Come on," Delphine says, gently now. "They're all going to want to meet you."
Jasper breathes in the cold, and the smoke, and the yeast. His ear is bare, and the air moves around it. No voice tells him which way to turn. No voice tells him that he is doing well. He lifts his foot, and nobody lifts it for him, and he sets it down on the gravel of Fair Hollow.
Then he follows Delphine into the town.