Nobody spoke.
The sentence sat in the open ledger and the room sat around it, and the silence was different from the silences that had preceded it in the lower archive—not the silence of people absorbing a shock, not the silence of people waiting for someone else to speak first, but the silence of people who had stopped doubting and started wondering, which is a quieter and more serious thing.
*If you are reading this, then you have finally begun looking for the Garden.*
Nobody questioned whether the words were real. That particular argument had become unavailable somewhere in the past several days—closed off by the accumulating weight of things that should not have been possible and were, things that should not have survived and had, things that arrived without explanation and proved themselves through what they did rather than through anything they said about themselves.
What nobody understood was the when of it.
