Back on the cord, I tossed aside familiar reflections that the machine pulled up. For Mr Bugs, it always started with his childhood. Walks near a pond with his mother, crawling into tangles of root and down along the bank, looking for new animals to inspect. Perhaps his mother was a teacher or a scientist. It was obvious that she had imparted her wonder and curiosity onto him as a child. After that, there wasn’t much more about his personal life I could gather. Every reflection was stacked with glimmers of his own work – obsessive research, no surprise, focused mainly on the intricacies of bug junk.91 Not sure that’s what mom was going for.

There was even less about Mr Watches the person. Nearly all of his imprints were of things. He must have found them incredibly interesting for them to take precedence over actual life events. I wondered, sadly, if he’d even had life events. He seemed a solitary person with the one hobby and that was it. Not a single reflection, hardly a glimmer of any other people. No spouse, no kids, no family. Not even a cat. Imprints were largely of time spent alone, reading about antiques and rarities, pulling old timepieces down from a cabinet, inspecting them, then going to bed. No life beyond his obsession.92

These were very different people, except for one distinct similarity. They shared an imprint with each other – and with me. They knew about the Chime and the Note of Jecca. Both were plenty obsessed with them, and both put in hours upon hours in libraries trying to understand the things haunting their minds. They never got anywhere, of course. Having come years before me, neither had the internet – which explained why I was the one picked up by a bounty hunter.

A blank reflection appeared. A long span with heavy ends and crenellations down the middle length. Neon blue, with a glowing amber cap-piece. I caught it and flipped it around as I had with similar polygons a thousand times before, then pulled it through the lid on the third axis to check the glimmers. These were supposed to be imprints from a life lived. If I’d learned anything at all from Bugs and Watches, it was that only the most important things made an impression enough to imprint the cord. You can’t form an imprint of nothing, and yet these were empty. A malfunction in the dredge? A malfunction in the third prior?