Page 15 of Pocket Wife

“Could a goat become mayor? Anything can be written down if the writer is shameless enough.”

I turn away before my laugh escapes too loudly.

The second witness, Pell’s older sister Amadine, has a cedar chest full of winter letters. The handwriting wavers across old paper, but the dates are clear. One letter describes the disputed southern fields as planted and taxed eighteen years before Helix’s chain claimed them as dormant reserve land. Another mentions a “valley promise” made at the first settlement hall, though the line ends before explaining more.

Rethan reads that sentence three times.

“What does valley promise mean?” I ask.

Amadine rubs her thumb over the edge of the page. “My mother used to say the founders made terms before they broke ground. Land for living. Water for sharing. No one owning what everyone needed.”

“Was it written?” Rethan asks.

“Everything important was written somewhere,” the old woman says. “The trouble is people only look for paper after thieves arrive.”

By late afternoon, word has outrun us.

At every stop, more people wait. A widower with irrigation stones wrapped in cloth. Two sisters carrying their grandmother’s boundary songs copied into a school primer. A former mill worker who remembers surveyors being chased away forty years ago because they had mapped burial hills as “unoccupied rise.”

I listen until my head aches. I write until my fingers cramp. Rethan asks questions with careful precision, never wasting a witness’s strength, never mocking what sounds strange to outside ears. When someone drifts into grief, he waits. When someone offers anger instead of facts, he separates the useful detail without shaming them.

It’s infuriating, how decent he can be when he’s not busy sounding like a statute carved into ice.

On the road between farms, he walks beside me rather than ahead. The twin suns have lowered, warming the dust and catching the faint Pi’rell light along the edges of his skin.

“You are staring,” he says.

I look forward. “I am checking whether you glow in late light.”

“I do not glow.”

“You absolutely glow.”

“Pi’rell dermal patterns reflect certain wavelengths.”

“So, glow.”

His mouth doesn’t smile, but something close to amusement touches his voice. “If imprecision comforts you.”

“Careful, Specialist. Around here we call that teasing.”

“I will consult a local index.”

I laugh, and for one breath the day feels almost ordinary.

Then I notice the drone.

It hovers above the far fence line, black against the amber sky, small enough to pass for a survey unit if someone wants to insult my intelligence. Its lens tracks the cart road. When I stop, it shifts with us.

Rethan sees it too.

“Helix?” I ask.

“Likely.”

The warmth goes out of the evening.

I think of Nara’s cottage, Amadine’s letters, the widower’s shaking hands as he unwrapped stones from a field his son still works. Helix is not only watching records now. They’re watching people.