"Why are you scrounging for clues?" Constance asked, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around her shins. "The tower seems like it's chompin' at the bit to tell us all about itself."
"Well, that's what I'm trying to find out," Abner Wade explained, turning the strange object over in his thick fingers. It resembled a slab of plastic or glass, about 10 inches to a side and a quarter of an inch thick, with rounded corners. Dozens of thin, straight filaments ran parallel through it, only visible from certain angles, and tiny bubbles or beads clung to these filaments. There was no apparent self-illumination to the object, but the ambient pastel light of the garden seemed to be caught up and refracted by the object so that the bubbles stood out clearly whether in light or shadow. As Abner slid a fingertip along the edge of the artifact, the pattern of bubbles changed in a way that seemed definitely not random.
"At first, I thought it might be similar to an abacus," Abner continued. "With the beads moving to form numbers or equations. But the patterns they make don't seem to follow any mathematical logic I can recognize. So then I wondered if it might be representing language instead. Some kind of writing system, you know? I've been recording the sequence of beads, or bubbles, or whatever they are, and analyzing the frequency of certain arrangements, looking for repeating patterns that might correlate to letters or words. Just think, Connie—if I can crack this code, who knows what secrets it might reveal about this place! Or at any rate, about some of the folks who came to visit it. I found it in one of the vehicles, you know."
He looked up at Constance, suddenly blushing, his lips clamping shut. Something about her expression must have told him that he had been babbling. Perhaps to display a modicum of interest, she took the object from his hands and held it up, peering closely at the patterns before looking through them at the mottled pastel hues of Abner's blunt features. "Looks like braille," she observed, handing it back to him.
"Braille," Abner mumbled, his fingertips brushing along the side of her hand as he took the slab. His brows furrowed. "Braille. I hadn't thought of that."
He pulled a small notebook from the pocket of his coveralls, pulled a pencil from its spine, and scrawled a quick note.
"Why are you scrounging for clues?" Constance asked, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around her shins. It seemed to her that her hands went farther past her elbows than they had in the past. "The tower seems like it's chompin' at the bit to tell us all about itself."
Abner tucked the diary into his pocket again and looked up at her. He was a head taller than her, but she was sitting atop a rock-like outcropping and he was crouched at its base. "Do you mean the statue?" He asked.
Constance nodded.
"Have you gone back there again? Since the expedition?"
She nodded again. "Once or twice."
Abner's usually mild expression darkened, his jaw tightening. "Confound it, Connie. I wish you wouldn't."