@ChristmasStars made tea while Gosie spread the copied manifests across the farmhouse table for the third time that day.
The black cat moved carefully, stars glinting softly across her fur whenever the sunlight caught them. Outside, beyond the kitchen windows, the flat fen landscape stretched away beneath enormous pale skies.
“You’re looking at routes,” ChristmasStars said eventually.
“I am looking at routes.”
“No,” said ChristmasStars. “You’re looking at movement. That’s different.”
Gosie stopped writing.
That sentence landed somewhere important.
ChristmasStars reached across the table and tapped one claw lightly against the silver star symbol.
“This mark doesn’t identify where something ends up,” she said. “It identifies trusted transfers. People. Places. Systems that won’t ask questions.”
“That’s what I thought.”
ChristmasStars nodded.
Then she added:
“The western routes use birds.”
Gosie looked up sharply.
“Birds?”
“Not metaphorically,” said ChristmasStars. “Actual birds.”
Pause.
Then Gosie’s ears lifted slightly.
“Oh.”
ChristmasStars waited.
“Oh no.”
“Yes,” said ChristmasStars quietly.
“Puffins.”
Now the cat smiled properly.
Gosie stared at her.
“Fuzzy.”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence while several increasingly strange conversations from the past few weeks abruptly rearranged themselves into something much worse.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
“Afraid not.”
ChristmasStars crossed to the dresser and returned with an old folded postcard showing steep cliffs crowded with seabirds above a grey Atlantic sea.
On the back, in neat handwriting, were only four words:
WEST LIGHT STILL ACTIVE
No signature.
But beneath the writing sat the same tiny silver star.
Gosie looked at it for a long moment.
Then:
“Lundy.”
ChristmasStars inclined her head once.
“The western observation chains run along the coast,” she said. “Harbour watchers. Lighthouse keepers. Fishing crews. Migratory timings. Weather reports. Things people ignore because they think nobody important is watching.”
“And the puffins?”
“The puffins,” said ChristmasStars carefully, “see absolutely everything.”
That was not, on balance, reassuring.
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