Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

I should be on.” Dr. Corwin held his breath as she stared straight ahead, waiting for her to continue, wanting it to be true but knowing she wasn’t fully convinced herself. “I believe, in theory, that our cause is just,” she said finally, “and, in theory, that a just and important cause should be pursued . . .”

“But not at all costs,” Dr. Corwin finished. “Because there is no cause worthy of an absolute.”

“The Ascendants disagree, and have extremely convincing arguments in support of their position. But I . . . I suppose I’m weak.”

“You’re not weak, Ana. You’re human. Something they’ve forgotten how to be.”

She turned toward him, held his gaze for a moment, then leaned in and kissed him passionately.

“I’m still not sure I can trust you,” he managed to say when their lips parted. He thought it was their first kiss without pretense, and it left him breathless.

“I wouldn’t be sure either,” she said, tracing a nail across his chest.

They watched the city for a while, nestled in each other’s arms, and he didn’t want to break the spell. When he moved to light a cigarette, he mused, “How do you find a man—a genius—who doesn’t want to be found?”

Ana took a drag off his cigarette, then laughed as she patted his knee. “Genius or not, men are creatures of habit. If it was a woman you were searching for, I would say the cause is lost.”

Creatures of habit, he repeated to himself, her words sparking an insight as he continued to smoke and think.

Yes, perhaps my gender is guilty as charged, but habits of what sort?

And then it came to him.

“Ana, you’re a genius! A maestro of perspicacity! A virtuoso of logic and deduction!”

She curled into him. “What did I do?”

Dr. Corwin disentangled from her embrace, slipped on his trousers, and paced the room while he smoked. Ana watched him curiously but didn’t interrupt.

Habits.

As intelligent as Ettore was, he was equally frail and bookish. Not the sort of man who could disappear into the wild and live off the land. No, he would need access to a city or town of some size, even if just a small village to pick up groceries. Knowing this already, Dr. Corwin had concentrated his search on real estate leases and medical records. So far, these had failed to bear fruit, likely because Ettore had gone to great pains never to leave a trace.

Yet who was a creature of habit more than a scientist and a mathematician? Especially one like Ettore, who had never cared for fame and fortune, and lived only to discover the next theorem or physical law of the universe. If Ettore was still alive, there was no way he would be able to resist the latest textbooks and journals in circulation. He would have to keep up with modern research—especially if isolated from the world.

Dr. Corwin was sure of it.

And that was how he was going to find him.

Years passed before Dr. Corwin made a breakthrough. Part of it was the sheer enormity of the task. Ettore would have the good sense to avoid libraries, but searching the world’s bookstores was an impractical task, so Dr. Corwin had narrowed it down in a number of ways.

First, geography. Most people were loath to permanently leave their homes, and Ettore was a misanthrope. Dr. Corwin believed the Italian physicist had returned to Europe—if he had ever truly left at all.

Second, he knew Ettore would crave access to textbooks and journals, and that meant university bookstores or specialty stores. Yes, textbooks and journals could be ordered by mail, but that would leave a money trail. After the bookstores in Italy and continental Europe failed to produce a lead, Dr. Corwin expanded the geographic parameters.

During this time period, his twin duties as a professor and a member of the Leap Year Society took him all over the world. The war with the Ascendants was not going well. Society safe houses were under attack. The Ascendants had abandoned time-honored laws and principles to pursue their goals by any means.

In contrast, the Society had decided that, instead of fighting back with the same total war tactics the Ascendants employed, they would take the high ground and retreat farther into the shadows. Protect their superior knowledge and ride out the storm.

Dr. Corwin sympathized. How does one commit the violence necessary to combat an aggressive enemy without staining one’s own soul? It was an awful reality of the world.

Yet one could not simply turn one’s back on evil and hope it went away. You had to step into the muck, fight like hell while preserving your principles as best you could.

His outspoken thoughts did him no favors within the Society. Still, he was a valued member and rising through the ranks—or so he was told. He did not know nearly as much about the Society as he would have liked. Oh, he knew the rituals and the names of many members, the locations of safe houses and libraries under Society jurisdiction. He also knew the Society had a number of arcane items, like the chronovisor, either built by its own members or diligently collected from dig sites, private collectors, and other sources.

But the true extent of their knowledge eluded him. His superiors believed in doling out information in dribs and drabs as one gained in wisdom and proved oneself to the cause.

In theory, he supported this approach.

But he was an impatient man.

The Fold also remained an enigma. Dr. Corwin had seen for himself the fascinating and well-documented accounts of its existence in the Society’s possession, the veins of which stretched across history and threaded through all cultures. A shadowy world that mirrors our own. A playground of the mind of infinite possibility and undetermined origin.

As Ana had intimated, it was said that high-level Society members had more knowledge of this place. That some had even seen it. But Dr. Corwin did not want to wait decades or years for answers that might resolve