Letter Without a Sender

The letter was in the slot at 06:00, which was when letters arrived if they were going to pretend to be ordinary. No ship in the scope. No dust on the seal. The date on the paper was tomorrow.

Iria held it to the lamp. The handwriting was hers. The message was not one she remembered writing: Do not answer this until the beam has gone backward once. If you answer early, you will meet yourself on the stair and neither of you will know who keeps the light.

She logged it. Keeper’s habit. Then she set the letter under a weight and went up to check the lamp, counting steps. Forty. The count mattered. On this moon, a miscount was a kind of time.

Halfway up, she heard someone coming down. She stopped. The footsteps stopped. When she continued, they did too, perfectly, as if the stair were folding a single pair of boots into two directions. At the lamp room the beam was steady, white, and pointed at a future she had not scheduled.