Eli came back to the station in early August, hauling a load of feed-line spares, and looked in on the empty tank while he was at it. The tank still sat on the rack outside the water room, its water still changed, the sunken log pressed on the bottom untouched, all three notches there. He changed the water, sat down, smoked a cigarette, and only then carried the wooden box out of the cab.
The box was smaller than she remembered. Lao Wu had died in January 2024, halfway through a molt; Eli had taken the shell on the spot, treated it, aired it half a year, boxed it. On the lid was a label, written in ballpoint, traced over twice: Lao Wu. Raised at the station. The shell is proof that it grew. The shell lay in the cotton, back arched, the carapace split down the middle, the edges of the split curled outward, stopped there. Molted halfway, strength run out. Fourteen years; the cotton had yellowed; the shell hadn't warped.
Crayfish give warning before a molt: they stop eating, hide in corners, the shell darkens. Lao Wu had stopped eating three times, hidden twice; the shell never darkened. The station had logged tank temperature for it twenty years, not one entry missed; it had become the most thoroughly recorded life the station ever kept. Three years after it died, someone still dropped crayfish food into the empty tank—twice—was seen, said they'd forgotten. After that the tank got plain water, nothing else.
Eli said the station was driving piles again; machinery had gone into the gobi. He'd passed the month before and seen the pile drivers standing on the flat, more than at the site survey those years back. The room in his house had to be cleared—his boy was moving to the city for school in the fall, and he was moving along. With the shell sitting at home he always felt he was storing it for the station; hauling it around, he was afraid of a knock. The box had followed him through three homes, from the station family compound to the county town and back, always on the top shelf, held on his knees in the bus. He said: What was raised at the station should come back to the station. The gobi keeps things. Steadier than anyone's house.
She said all right. Eli said he knew the pile field—which ground got no piles, no cable runs, no trenching, he knew. He'd thought about the depth too: half a meter. The gobi's surface layer gets turned by wind once a year; below half a meter, nothing moves. She said fine, you pick the day. Eli closed the lid, thought, opened it again, and peeled the label off—slowly, the corners fuzzing a little. He said: I'll keep the label. The shell is its. The words are mine. He'd written the label the day the shell went into the box, thought the strokes too faint, traced them once; the next year, once more. Twice in fourteen years, and the ballpoint ink had raised an oily edge, more and more like something printed.
Zhou Yao arrived in early October, her first time at the station. Two days of buses; the first thing she did at the gate was look at the poplar, and when she'd looked: Taller than on the livestream. The guesthouse stood at the east end of the compound, windows facing the gobi. The first night she didn't draw the curtains; the next day she told her mother there'd been a sound in the small hours, coming in waves. Zhou Yan typed: Wind. Zhou Yao said: I heard someone counting.
She stayed ten days, on annual leave. Days she wandered the station on her own, ate in the canteen; someone recognized her, pointed her out to the next person, and she stood, bowed, sat back down and went on eating. The third day she came to the office to find her mother and called out at the door. Zhou Yan was checking the table and didn't look up. She called again, louder; the young man at the desk across rose to tap Zhou Yan's shoulder, and she waved him off. She walked to the desk, curled her knuckles, and knocked twice on the tabletop.
Zhou Yan looked up.
From that day she stopped calling and knocked. Twice, heavy. Sometimes Zhou Yan sat with her back to the door; the knock came, and Zhou Yan didn't turn, just reached sideways for the pencil, and Zhou Yao wrote what she had to say in the notebook her mother pushed over. One week used up half the book. Zhou Yao leafed through it and said: Does everyone here talk like this? Zhou Yan typed: Just us two.
Some pages ran long. One page was about the year her mother first missed the Saturday call: seven messages sent in a row, and the answer that came back: no need. She wrote: That year I saved up a whole year of things to say, keeping them for the call. You said no need, so I saved them all. Zhou Yan took the notebook and wrote one line: It wasn't that there was no need. That day I couldn't have held them. Zhou Yao read it and turned the page, turned it fast.
She looked a long time at the office. The open-eyed portrait hung on the level beside the S-table printouts; she stood opposite the picture, followed its gaze across, and found the bone-conduction headset on the desk. She looked a while and said: The destination moved right. Zhou Yan didn't take that up; she pointed at a stack of printouts in the corner and said the bottom three lines were from the year you were three. Zhou Yao said: Then it's older than my memory. She leaned in to look; the top page carried three columns of numbers, and she asked which column mattered. Zhou Yan pointed to the middle. Zhou Yao ran a finger down the numbers, half a page of them: They're all the same. Zhou Yan wrote: That's the point—that they're all the same.
Two days before she left, Zhou Yao pulled a sheet from the print tube, rolled, edges furred. She spread it on the desk, pinned one corner with her hand, and said: Carved at nineteen. I never dared mail it then. Zhou Yan put down her pen. Black and white, a small print, the back of a young woman, seated on a stool, head tilted, as if listening to someone beside her. No one was beside her in the picture. Zhou Yan looked a long time and did not ask who it was. Zhou Yao didn't say. Zhou Yan rolled the print back up and said: For the dormitory. Zhou Yao said: As long as it hangs.
The next day Zhou Yan gave her a pair of cotton gloves, the Shanghai archive kind—white cotton, spare stock, brand new. Zhou Yao pinched the fingertips and asked what they were for. Zhou Yan typed: For reading paper. The ink that bleeds through to the back—you can feel it through these, cell by cell, a slight bulge. Zhou Yao put them in her bag and said: Next time I finish a block, I'll run my hands over it before I print. She paused, then added: Where the knife went too far, the hands know before the eyes. Zhou Yao asked where the gloves were bought. Zhou Yan wrote: Not bought. Issued. Zhou Yao folded them neatly back into her bag: Then they're the station's. Borrowed, not returned.
The fifth package arrived on Julian date 2465663, October 9, 2038, a Sunday.
That night Zhou Yao stood in the outer room of the machine room, one pane of glass between. The checksums done, the difference plots spread, Zhou Yan stood at her old place. Groove length, two hundred ten meters, unchanged. Width 6.2, holding steady. The sediment-berm column read below 0.2; the note said: measurement method changed; from the next package, reckoned as surface residual.
The depth column: 1.6 meters.
Engineer Ma worked the rate by hand: three months, shallower by 0.2, that's 0.048 a month. He laid out the four numbers: 0.036, 0.039, 0.044, 0.048. Set the pen down. The newcomer on duty laid them out too; the numbers matched. This year he didn't need the crib sheet. The rise held, gentler now; it fell on the extension of Ursula's line and inside Brouwer's analytic band, hugging the lower edge. Brouwer updated the appendix that night, one line: rise unbroken, rate of increase slowing, shallow-regime gradient behavior awaits the sixth package. Kramer did not forward it. Before the redesign, someone had built their own mirror of the old page—depth only, no headline. The day of one meter forty-five, that page's traffic passed a hundred thousand for the first time.
Afterward Zhou Yan went back to the office, opened the "scale" file, and filled the fifth-step blank with 160. She set the headset against her left mastoid and played from 340: 290, 220, 180, 160—five tones, three times through. The five numbers walked down through bone, step by step, like a staircase going lower and lower, and at the bottom, the foot still landed on something solid. The desk calendar lay open at the corner of the desk, the October page; the pencil circle drawn in July was still there. She made a small check inside the circle, small enough that the circle wasn't retraced. When the third pass ended, she held one extra second. That second went into no file. The debt owed to the man in Shanghai, she thought; when the sixth package comes, pay it together.
Outside the glass, Zhou Yao had watched the whole thing, hands in her coat pockets, standing like a gallery-goer. When the depth column came up, she leaned in half a step. On the way back she asked: That last tone, very low—what is it? Zhou Yan typed: Depth times a hundred. Zhou Yao said: The groove got shallower again. Zhou Yan typed: Shallower by 0.2. Zhou Yao looked at the two numbers a while and said: You people now call a groove eleven light-years away shallow.
They buried the shell the next morning. Eli drove; the pile flat lay twenty-some kilometers northwest, forty minutes by road. The pile drivers had multiplied, seven in a row, only one still under tarp. That one was a spare, standing two years; the tarp had come off twice for inspection and gone back on. Eli parked beside it and said this stretch was reserved land, hatched in diagonal lines on the map, no work for ten years. The hatch lines were his own doing. The day the maps came down he had copied one and gone over the ground around the station parcel by parcel—which would be worked, which wouldn't—marking it on his own sheet. He said: The pile crews don't look at this. I do. He scuffed a patch of gravel clear with his boot, sank the shovel, half a meter; the pit wall showed layers, the top one loose, the one below firm. He'd brought a section of leveling rod, set it to the pit floor and measured: fifty-one centimeters. He jumped down, shaved off a finger's depth, measured again: fifty. Filling back in, he stopped halfway and picked a few pebbles out of the soil before going on.
The box opened; the label was gone, the cotton still there. Eli pulled the gloves on, lifted the shell out, head north, laid level, the split facing up. He said: Split up. It can be seen. Zhou Yao crouched at the pit edge, watched, and reached in to press down one corner of the cotton beside the shell. Filling in, she took two handfuls of gravel and scattered them on top.
Eli fixed the point by GPS and read it off; Zhou Yan entered it in her phone: 39°21′04.31″ north, 75°59′17.60″ east. Eli said he'd keep a copy too—the back of the label was blank; he'd copy it there. Back at the car he said: If they really do start work here in ten years, no fear—we dig it out. The shell is proof that it grew. We bury it back. From the back seat Zhou Yao said: Then bury it deeper. Eli said: No. Deep, and the insects can't get through. Nobody asked what insects. The car drove a long way, and that patch of gravel was still in the mirror.
For the next two and a half years, the numbers everywhere kept walking.
At year's end she went to Shanghai again; the side-light slot came up, four cells in five days, and the ink-bleed count dropped from twelve to eight: five awaiting side light, three doubtful. One of the four resolved to a 2, from 1974, stuck seven years. Lu Weiming was seventy-three, came every day, and still had his two volumes done by machine. The cabinet key was the same one. Leaving, he asked when the sixth package came. She said next month. He said: That debt is still on my books.
The sixth package came in January, one meter forty-five. That night she played the five tones through and held two extra seconds: one to pay the debt, one entered in the file. The "scale" appendix gained a line it kept from then on: from 160 on, one second per step; the Shanghai account is settled.
The S table never missed a line. Line 6,097 was the day of the fifth package; line 7,030 was a night in April 2041. The left ear's checkup fell in April 2040: the low frequencies still there; the audiogram laid over the one from two years before, down by less than a notch. Dr. Shen had retired; the doctor who took over read the record and said at this rate the low frequencies would hold another two or three years. She wrote the sixth line of the listening-method file: low frequencies—use them sparingly.
The telemetry came every ninety days as always, and the depth column walked on down: one forty-five, one ten, zero point eight, zero point five. By spring 2041, zero point three. Engineer Ma extended the extrapolation column to the bottom of the table and boxed the last line: April 2042, zero. He pressed the sheet under the glass plate and didn't send it to the group. Anyone could compute it; no one said it first. Engineer Ma photographed the sheet. The photo went nowhere—into the folder of his own, where everything he'd computed on his own already lived.
The second batch, seven, ignited in 2039; the third batch, nine, in 2040. The piles reached the thirty-first. Hu Yisu's name stayed in the duty line; the telemetry daily's co-signature became a rotation, seven names for seven days, his on Wednesdays. Ursula's avatar never lit. Nothing at all from Amina's side. The 3t directory she opened once a year; the "Shoulder" draft was there, two thousand forty-one bytes, timestamp never moved.
Zhou Yao delivered the last three closed-eye commissions at the end of 2038. After that she took no more closed-eye work; the workshop's order book sat empty three months, and she began laying in blocks of her own. What she was carving, she didn't say. The Saturday calls went on; in the caption window her words grew more, her mother's fewer—some weeks ten minutes of her typing a thousand characters and more, and her mother replying three words: I know now. One week she typed nothing at all; she held a spoiled block up to the camera, pointed to where the knife had broken, and made a gesture: next one.
On a night at the end of April 2041 she finished the day's S table—line 7,030, 0.37—and signed. The page was still open; the four words of its title hadn't changed in three years: How Many Years Left. That night the third column jumped once, from two-something to a single digit; a few days more, to one.
Copying the line into the day's log, she took the unused calendar from the desk corner—next year's. She turned to April and folded the corner.
The number on the screen was 1.