第 004 Ch.| Between the Third Point and the Fourth

October 23, 06:42.

She hadn't set an alarm. She woke at this exact time on her own. The third time now.

Outside, the sky was still dark. On a late-October morning there was only the orange-yellow of the streetlamps, falling in at a slant through the edge of the curtain onto one corner of her desk. She lay there for maybe thirty seconds, confirming she was really awake, that she wasn't still trailing off the end of some dream.

She got out of bed, went to the desk, and looked down at the sheet of A4 paper.

The broken ring she had drawn—its position now, compared with where it had been at 16:33 last night—had come back exactly to its starting place.

It hadn't stopped somewhere in the middle. It had gone all the way around, returned to the spot where she'd first drawn it, and then stopped moving. 24/24.

She reached for the watermark at the foot of the letter—the letter was tucked inside the notebook, the notebook in the inner pocket of her backpack. The watermark had returned to its original position too. It had turned a full circle and stopped.

The two sheets weren't strictly synchronized; they had simply arrived at the same sense of completion: no longer moving, stopped.

Ren Yi sat down and looked at the two sheets for about three minutes.

---

She took out a second, brand-new sheet of A4 paper, smoothed it flat twice with her left hand, made sure there were no creases, no dust. She uncapped the fountain pen, pointed the nib down, and pressed it lightly against the pad of her finger to test the flow—the ink was still the dark blue she'd added last Thursday, smooth, no clogging.

With the same fountain pen—the one she'd used to write don't look into it, seven days, the one I drew myself turns too—she drew a broken ring in the dead center of the new sheet. The break at the upper right, between the third point and the fourth. The same size, the same line weight.

When she finished, she checked the clock: 06:58. She made a mark with a thin pencil one centimeter outside the break, picked up her mug, and went to make coffee.

When she came back it was 07:14.

She looked at the position of the mark relative to the break. It had already moved. About 1/24 of the circumference.

Sixteen minutes, 1/24 of the circumference traveled—last night it had taken 35 minutes to cover the same distance, and now it covered it in 16. The speed was twice what it had been the night before.

She realized something: the speed was increasing.

---

She needed to run more tests.

From the bottom of a drawer she took a third sheet of A4 paper, drew the same broken ring with the same fountain pen, made the reference mark, and put it inside an office document envelope.

She carried the envelope to the entryway, opened the drawer beneath the shoe cabinet where she usually kept her winter rain boots, laid the envelope flat inside, shut the drawer, and locked it. After the envelope went in she made a special note of the time: 07:30.

Back at the desk, before 09:00, she drew five more. Each one changed a single variable:

• Sheet four: the fountain pen her mother had given her four years ago—the ink black, not dark blue.
• Sheet five: a ballpoint pen from the convenience store.
• Sheet six: the pencil a senior had given her when she graduated from high school.
• Sheet seven: back to her own fountain pen, but writing the figure 8 instead (which has a round shape of its own).
• Sheet eight: her own fountain pen, but drawing an ordinary circle with no break.

None of them moved.

She sat at the desk and stared for a long time, then tried one more.

Sheet nine: her own fountain pen, a broken ring, but with the break at the 12 o'clock position (straight up, not between the third point and the fourth). She marked it at 11:30. She checked it at 12:15—it didn't turn.

---

Ren Yi leaned back in her chair.

Every condition had to be met for it to turn: that fountain pen, the break between the third point and the fourth, a figure rather than text, the figure itself having a break. Swap out any one of them, and the paper was just an ordinary sheet of paper.

The broken ring was not a shape she could simply draw at will. It was a specific something—with an orientation, a line weight, a particular medium, a particular writing instrument.

She thought of what Professor Sekhet had said—a curse-mark.

The ring she drew was the pictured version of a curse-mark. What she drew was the likeness of some thing, not the thing itself. The thing itself existed on its own, and turned on its own.

---

She needed to run one last test.

She went to the entryway, opened the shoe-cabinet drawer, and took out the document envelope with the third sheet.

On that third sheet, the broken ring she had drawn at 07:30—was turning. The position of the mark relative to the break lagged the second sheet on her desk by about 2/24 of the circumference—exactly the distance that worked out to the 32-minute gap between when the two had been drawn.

The one not beside her was turning too. Same direction, same speed. Only the starting point was different.

She'd been wrong about one thing—earlier she had assumed that "the things beside her wouldn't be acted upon, and the things not beside her would be" (the broken-ring glyph in the inventory booklet vanishing, versus the don't look into it in the notebook still there). That rule held for things other people had moved.

But for the rings she drew herself, the rule was different. The ones she drew herself turned on their own, wherever she put them.

Not acted upon. Acting.

---

13:00.

She laid the nine sheets out in a row across the desk. Two of them turned (sheets two and three); the other seven lay quietly. Plus the watermark at the foot of the letter, plus the original first sheet, plus the three lines of writing in the notebook. The three lines of writing didn't turn (they were text, not figures). The watermark turned (someone else had written it, but it met the condition of "a specific broken-ring figure"). Her own rings all turned (as long as the four conditions were satisfied).

She consolidated all of this in her notebook, in the tightest format she could, finishing it in half a page.

Then she looked up at the fountain pen on the desk, the one that produced every ring that turned.

---

She wanted to seal it away.

She took a transparent document sleeve from the drawer, meaning to put the pen inside.

She picked up the pen, fingers pinched at the middle of the barrel. The dark-green surface of the barrel had extremely fine wear marks—the spot she'd held over the past few years, worn smooth, lining up exactly with the second knuckle of her middle finger.

She suddenly realized something.

She couldn't remember where she'd bought this pen.

She remembered using it. She remembered writing with it. She remembered drawing ink, refilling it, changing the cartridge. She remembered it accompanying her through these past few years of study and her museum internship. She remembered its weight, its nib, all the words it had written that she remembered. But she couldn't remember how it had first come into her hands.

---

She went through it in her mind, item by item. Birthdays—she remembered what she'd gotten each year, and none of those years was a pen. The first pen she'd bought herself—she remembered it was that one year in high school, going to the stationery section of the old street, and it was a basic model, not this one. Her parents—her mother had given her a different one four years ago, the very one she'd used for sheet four, not this one.

This one—she remembered already having it, but couldn't remember where she had gotten it.

She didn't put it in the sleeve.

She crouched and pulled out a tin box from under the desk, the one holding every photo she'd cared to keep since middle school. She went through them. She'd seen every photo, remembered what she'd been doing when each was taken.

She came to last year's joint training for museum interns, one of the field trips—to a heritage museum in Nangang. In the photos from those few days, she was holding a notebook, and right beside the notebook was this fountain pen. So by then, she already had it.

She went back further: high school, middle school, elementary school. Not a single photo had a moment with this fountain pen in it. Not one was the moment she "got this pen."

She put the lid back on the tin box and pushed it back under the desk.

---

15:00.

She didn't go to work. Today she was supposed to take the middle shift, 13:00–21:00, but she'd taken a day of personal leave, telling her supervisor she "wasn't feeling well." The supervisor didn't ask.

She left the nine sheets on the desk, pinned in order between the pen holder and the Moleskine. She wanted the first thing she saw when she woke tomorrow to be every one of them, in a sweep—not put away in a drawer.

The small brass key she normally kept on the keyring on her backpack—the one to her drawer in the museum office—she took off today and put into the unused hidden compartment on the left side of the desk, the compartment that didn't lock. She wanted this key to be away from her body for a while, to see whether it too would vanish tomorrow.

She put the fountain pen back in the holder, in its place, exactly where she put it every day. She didn't seal it—in the end she decided not to—she didn't want Professor Sekhet, if she ever came again, to find she'd made any obvious defensive move.

She opened the notebook to the page after the one I drew myself turns too, and wrote:

October 23, 2065.
Conditions for the ring to turn on its own: a certain fountain pen + the break between the third point and the fourth + a figure rather than text + a break present.
I don't remember where this fountain pen came from.
I remember using it, but I don't remember the moment I got it.

She closed the notebook and looked at the fountain pen.

It looked no different from an ordinary fountain pen—dark-green barrel, brass nib, dark-blue ink added last Thursday. But the broken rings it drew turned on their own. And she couldn't remember where it had come from.

A question she didn't want to think about came to her:

If she couldn't even remember where this fountain pen had come from, then what else was there that she had already forgotten.

She flipped back to the very front of the notebook and checked every event she'd recorded—the sarcophagus, the whispering, that woman, the letter, Sekhet—she remembered them all clearly, time and place and action complete, not a single moment she had lived through left out.

But she had thought she remembered the origin of this pen too.

Remembering using it didn't mean she remembered acquiring it.

【Ch. 004 End · Ren Yi's apartment】