2157. New Geneva. Three weeks after the return from Paris.

Sera Calloway stands outside the archive room for eleven minutes before going in.

She knows about the letters because Moss told her — not in the formal debrief, but in the space between the formal debrief and the hallway, the corridor of unofficial truth that every institution maintains alongside its official one. Twelve letters. 1926 to 1934. Held pending her clearance.

She has the clearance.

She stands outside the archive room for eleven minutes. She is counting.

What she thinks, during those eleven minutes: if she reads the letters, she will have more of him. More of his voice, his precision, the handwriting she has not seen but can imagine because she knew his hands — the way they moved across piano keys and across the particular air of 1925 Paris and across her face in the dark of the apartment on the Passage d'Enfer.

She will have more. And the more will make the less more acute. The less being: his death in 1968, documented in the archive, a heart condition at sixty-five, the music preserved, the man gone.

She is twenty-eight years old. She will not die until a date she does not know because the Bureau prohibits operatives from accessing their own future records, which she considers the single most ethical policy in the field charter. She has, actuarially, a great deal of time ahead of her. The time is not presently useful to her.

The letters are behind a door she has been standing outside for eleven minutes.

She turns around.

She goes back to her desk.

She reads the Vienna file instead.