Tereza Sousa

Appearance

Forty-six, wind-cut, weathered the way the bay floor weathers people who work it on schedule. She moves low and unhurried, a silhouette by profession even at street level. The rangefinder is older than she is — brass housing, salt-worn, smelling of lamp oil — and its digital readout windows have been taped over since the afternoon of Day 13, when the Data Purge taught the bay floor what instruments' numbers were worth. She replaces the tape when it frays. She has never removed it. The tide-table folder under her arm holds pencil-annotated charts, a war ledger she has never let anyone photograph, and two letters, unopened, in order.

Field Observations

She speaks in windows: duration first, route second, everything else if there is time. Entering any room, she announces its exit window aloud — "tide in forty; east stair" — a habit thirteen years past its need, delivered to full crews, to strangers, to empty rooms. New crews call it superstition. Old crews set their watches by it. She pauses a half-second at whatever she looks at — machines, cargo, people — a beat the crews call the weigh, and in forty-six years she has never once said a person's number aloud.

What she doesn't say: why. Not about the doors, not about Day 6, not about what the weigh concludes. Asked about the war she answers with dates and tides, completely and accurately, and the completeness is the wall: her account has no gaps anywhere except the one place everyone is looking.

Sample Dialogue

"Window's the tide. Forty minutes. We walk out the east stair, or we stay and learn what she does at flood."

"Machines stop mattering when they stop moving. People take longer. The arithmetic doesn't know the difference. That is what arithmetic is for."

"There's no line on the card for doors."

History

Born 2138 on the bay floor, Sousa of the four carriage families; tide-lane courier at twelve, scout for the family carts by twenty, because the bay floor prices its freight before lifting it and somebody has to look first. The war arrived on the neighborhood on March 14, 2171, and made her profession strategic without consulting her. Day 6 is the struck line in her ledger. Day 10 she called the Pinole galleries at four minutes a window — the custodial systems were still cycling — and was right eleven times; the sixty-one came out on schedule. Day 12 she wrote recovery card no. 3,101, the one the bay floor still quotes entire: "She was facing the water." Day 13 she taped the readouts. Days 19 through 21 she logged nothing, like the rest of the firm, for the Memorial. She has never said where she was during the crossings the ledger marks "no charge — civic," which is consistent with her, and with the ledger, and with the question staying exactly where it is.

After the treaty she declined three corporate observation contracts at multiples of her worth — the offers assumed the war had taught her to watch for a side — and went back to pricing the tide. The Bessemer Reef work is hers now as much as anyone's: marsh crews buy her windows the way both armies once did, and in thirteen years of glassing that wreck she has never once put the lens on the crew module's arc. The etiquette out there is unposted. Her compliance is total, and unexplained, like the doors.

Connections

• The Last Mile — The family trade; the windows; the column
• The Three-Week War — All 21 days on the glass
• The Bessemer Reef — Tide windows for the marsh crews; the arc she won't glass
• The Doorwrights — Two letters, unanswered, kept

▲ Unverified Intelligence

• The Day 6 page carries one struck-through line, legible under the strike as a service-door entry — no amount, no sector code. Three theories hold currency: a door she priced and should not have (and the question of who buys a door mid-war, and to keep whom on which side of it, is why this theory is whispered); a door she opened; a door she did not open in time — the Sector 8 assumption, transposed five days early, which is precisely what is wrong with it. The strike itself is single, ruled, unhurried: the hand of someone correcting an inventory, not someone grieving. That observation either eliminates the third theory or is the most complete thing anyone has learned about her in thirteen years.
• The Doorwrights' Sector 9 chapter — the guild that checks doors, inviting the scout who will not touch them — has not asked a third time. Guilds that check things for a living know a sealed thing when they see one.
• She has priced every person she has met since 2171 and never said a number. One exception is rumored: a Nexus archivist who came in 2183 to buy the Day 15 page for a tenth-anniversary exhibit and left without it, pale. Whether the number she finally said was the page's price or the archivist's is not recorded.