The assignment description was unusual in that it contained what clients were not supposed to include: secondhand testimony.
Mira read through the file on the plane. The company had been trying to acquire a parcel of land in the hills north of the town for eighteen months. The local records showed nothing at the specified location. Aerial surveys showed forest. Ground surveys by two previous contractors had shown forest. But the locals, the file included three separate interviews, described a place in those hills with a specificity that was inconsistent with nonexistence. They described a clearing with a particular quality of light and a quality of arrival.
The file used the phrase quality of arrival, which had not been explained.
She had located seventy-three sites in nine years. She had found archaeological remains under shopping centers and water sources under five meters of farmland and boundary discrepancies that had been in dispute for decades. She had not failed to locate a thing that existed.
She was prepared to find that the place did not exist in any actionable sense. She was also prepared to find that the local testimony was describing a real feature with the wrong vocabulary, which was common.
She arrived on a Tuesday. She spent the first two days walking the grid in standard pattern, marking coordinates, photographing anything that broke the continuity of the forest. She found nothing that matched the descriptions.
On the third day, her GPS unit's battery died an hour into the walk and she walked without it, intending to return to the car and recharge. She was thinking about a problem with her brother she had not resolved, a conversation she needed to have, the specific and intractable difficulty of saying a true thing to someone you loved who was not ready to hear it.
She found the clearing at 11:23 by her watch.
She stood in it for a moment before she understood what it was. Then she understood. Then she looked for her phone, which she had in her pocket but had put on airplane mode that morning to preserve battery.
She turned it off airplane mode. She checked the coordinates. She wrote them down.
She walked back to the car and ate lunch and drove to a charging point and charged both the phone and the GPS unit and returned to the coordinates she had written.
She found forest.
She stood in the forest for a while. Then she opened her notebook and wrote: approach without instruments. approach while thinking about something else. She looked at this. Then she wrote: this is not a methodology I can document in a report.
She went back to the hotel. She started the report. She wrote: the parcel as described does not appear to correspond to any feature identifiable by standard survey methods. She stopped.
She started again.