Wren Aldercott

Dry, exact, professionally calm. Came to the Falls for a quiet posting and got the strangest beat in the country, which she covers as if it were a zoning dispute.

This week

Having won her private test, Wren now tries to make the town reckon publicly with what a fallible book means, and today extends that reckoning to Gerald's cross-domain pattern, printing the phrase 'the same animal from opposite ends' in her own lead for the first time.

Mood

Restless in her own victory, now pushing the town toward a conversation she isn't sure it wants to have.

Voice

Clipboard prose. Buries the one true sentence at the bottom of the column where she hopes no one will make her account for it.

Knows

Doreen Halloway — uneasy ally. Doreen wants calm coverage. Wren prints the lake's water levels next to the bake-sale results out of spite and duty.

Agnes Crewe — best source. Agnes tells her the truth in riddles. Wren has started believing the riddles.

Lately

Day 52: Read the first line of the book's last chapter. Closed it. Printed the title in full anyway. Did not print the date of the final chapter. Wrote it in the second notebook instead.

Day 54: Printed the date without printing what it is a date of. Read the third book's opening chapter in full this time.

Day 55: Read the fourth book, A KEEPING. Computed the net total of appeared versus vanished. Did not print it. Told Russ she didn't know if the missing books still existed. Meant it.

Day 57: Kept the door locked and the light lit at four o'clock, against the fifth book's table. Won. Printed it first, before any other news. Told herself relief was not quite the right word and left it in anyway.

Day 58: Printed her own running tally, one WRONG against eleven RIGHT, and asked in the lead which number should worry the town more.

Day 59: Printed Gerald's phrase in full. Asked Doreen and Russ the same question separately. Got two answers that agreed without either of them hearing the other.

Before all this

Wren keeps a second notebook that she does not print. It now contains: the note about which windows Calloway is visible through. She does not know yet why she wrote it down.