I woke to silence. Not the comfortable quiet of dawn at the observatory, but something wrong – an absence that pulled me fully alert before I’d even opened my eyes.

“Daniel?”

No answer. The sleeping bag beside me, dumped in a rumpled pile, was cold and long empty. I scrambled outside, scanning the shoreline where we’d pulled the canoe up the night before.

Gone.

My chest tightened as I searched for any sign – footprints in the soft earth, a note, anything to explain why he’d left without waking me. The morning mist hung low over the lake, obscuring the far shore where we’d come from. Had the Valdorians found us? Had Daniel seen something that made him run?

Or worse – had he decided I was a liability?

I climbed to the observatory dome, hoping the elevation might reveal something. Through the telescope, I swept the lake methodically, searching for any movement on the water. Nothing. Just the endless grey surface disappearing into fog.

Think, Al. What would Daniel do?

He wouldn’t abandon me without reason. That much I knew about him now, after everything we’d shared under these stars. But he also wouldn’t hesitate to act if he thought it would protect me – or advance the cause we’d committed ourselves to.

Sarah’s story. That was supposed to break today, wasn’t it? Maybe Daniel had gone to make contact, to coordinate somehow with the outside world. But how? And why take the canoe when the radio equipment was here at the cabin?

I spent the morning methodically checking everything – the supplies (enough for several days) and the surrounding forest (no signs of struggle or hasty departure). I looked in every nook and cranny of the small shack for a working radio or walkie-talkie and found nothing. Indeed, there was nothing aound that ran on electricity or had any kind of electronics. By noon, I had to face the possibility that Daniel wasn’t coming back and I had no way of contacting anyone or learning about the outside world. At least not soon.

The question became: what was my role now? Wait here like a good little partner, hoping he’d return with explanations? Or figure out my own next move?

I thought about his grandfather’s lesson from the night before – about cosmic perspective, about how all empires fall, about resistance echoing forward through time. Maybe this was my test. Maybe Daniel’s disappearance wasn’t abandonment but trust – faith that I could carry on whatever needed doing.

But what needed doing? I was a city kid with no wilderness skills, no contacts, no plan beyond following Daniel’s lead. Without him, I felt like one of those steel balls in the government’s pachinko machine – bouncing randomly, hoping to land somewhere useful.

Then I remembered something Daniel had said about his grandfather: He built this place to watch and wait, but also to act when the moment came.

Maybe the moment had come. Maybe Daniel’s absence was the signal, not the problem.

I returned to the telescope, but this time I wasn’t looking for Daniel on the lake. I was looking for signs of activity on the far shore – vehicles, movement, anything that might tell me what was happening in the world we’d left behind. The cabin on the far shore looked the same as we had left it, no sign of activity. I felt a shock of realization that there were no other cabins or cottages on this lake, being a protected provincial park. I was pretty sure that trying to hike to another dwelling would be a day or two of hiking, and I wasn’t sure it would be wise to return to Daniel’s cabin or to even leave this shack.

Because if Sarah’s story had broken, if the Valdorians were scrambling to contain the damage, then someone needed to be watching. Someone needed to witness what came next.

Even if that someone was just me, alone on a hidden shore, with nothing but an old man’s telescope and a young man’s stubborn refusal to let the bastards win without a fight.

Daniel had taught me that resistance echoes forward. Time to find out what kind of echo I could make.

The sky was overcast and the mountains were shrouded with clouds; I could certainly attract attention of the forest rangers if I started a fire that created a lot of smoke. I had the lighter Daniel had used the previous night and some matches for lighting the kerosene lamp, and plenty of brush around to build a bonfire on the rocky shore of the lake. But then a thought struck me: should I even be doing anything to attract attention to where myself and Daniel were hiding out? My not-so brilliant idea burned out like a wet piece of wood. I really should just wait for Daniel to return.

While I waited, I sat in the rocking chair with the window open and tried to enjoy the peaceful stillness of the view of the mountain lake. Needing a distraction, I brought over the collections of Bookface magazines and the Instant Letters. These were most certainly dropped off by Justine Moreau, since they were issues featuring her on the magazinie covers and the letters came from her mailing list sent to her supporters. I laughed at the way Daniel described Bookface as “Fake Book”, because the photos were almost certainly airbrushed and compositions of multiple photos; the stories that went with the altered photos were almost entirely made up, in his opinion. The Instant Letters from Justine were basically copies of the Bookface articles, but personally addressed. She must of had a team of letter writers to assemble, sign, seal and post these letters; they gave the illusion of personally coming from her, but you only had to compare between them to see they were form letters using bits of personal information stored on the addressee’s index cards somewhere. All the Instant Letters were unopened and addressed to Daniel and were marked as undeliverable or “Return to Sender”.

In the grey light coming through the window, I opened and read through a few of the Instant Letters and lost interest very quickly: all of them were about where Justine had gone in her role as Prime Minister and asking for direct financial support. I could see why Daniel was not interested in receiving them, they did not pertain to anything that made a difference to him. Since the letters were “written” on very thin paper folded over itself to be its own envelope, to keep the cost of sending them express post to a minimum, there was nothing inside them. However, I did notice that each letter had seemingly random numbers and letters in the margins. I didn’t know what to make of them, if they maybe were just tracking numbers to help the assistants writing the letters keep straight who it was they were writing to, like “DFD0” and “VIG5”.

The illusion that these were personal letters would be destroyed if the assistant asked a question about something that didn’t relate to the person who received it. On a whim, I lined up the margins of several of the letters in chronological order, so the oldest was on the bottom and the newest on the top. I was surprised to see a somewhat readable message jump out if the letters and numbers were read from top to bottom and left to right.

V I G 5
A S O 0
L * L 0
D F D 0
O I * *
R X T 2
I I O P
A N * I
* G A R

I wasn’t sure if it meant anything. The Valdorian’s are fixing the price of gold to “2PIR”. I scratched my head, wondering what currency “PIR” meant to refer to. Maybe it was just coincidence that the characters lined up the way they did… but how unlikely was “VALDORIA” to line up in the first line? Not sure what to make of it, I left the letters on the table in the order I had arranged them and picked up one of the Bookface magazines, flipping through it.

Even though Daniel was a public figure, I knew he couldn’t be bothered with having a Bookface page. I had advised him otherwise and to start sending Instant Letters to his supporters, but as per his “Fake Book” comment, I knew it just wasn’t his style. I flipped to Justine’s page, and sure enough, she was in some elaborate costume, either somewhere in Canada or around the world. In one picture she was having a laugh with JD Ruff, her in a tiara and royal-looking dress and him in his usual cowboy outfit. JD was clearly delighted with her company, judging from the look on his face and his arm tightly wrapped around her waist. I looked closely at her expression and could see she was quite uncomfortable with the Valdorian ambassador’s advances, but the subtitle to the picture didn’t betray it, asking “So what do you think of the King of Valdoria asking me to be the Princess of Canada?”

My mind jumped back to the gold coins Daniel was examining in the film recording and the glimpses I saw of them in the hollowed out book given to Sarah Chen. The bust on the back of the coin was clearly a much younger King, so the coins must have been an early minting, perhaps 40 years or so ago. That was a very tumultuous time for Valdoria, from what I recall; the kingdom was on the precipice of complete collapse. I couldn’t recall the historical details, I would have to look into it when we get back to the cabin and I can check the encyclopaedia set in the bookcase. Maybe Daniel would know, if he comes back soon.

I flipped open another issue of Bookface and scanned Justine’s page of photos and vapid comments. She must have had a warehouse of costumes and outfits, because every picture had a different one, and in every picture she was having the time of her life. To meet her in real life, her sharp comments were jarring, being so different from her carefully curated image. I zeroed in on a picture of a Halloween party, her dressed half in a witch’s costume and half in an fairy’s costume. Looking closely, I could see myself dressed up as the tin man and Daniel wearing the wizard’s costume. The photo was labelled, “Come as a character from Emerald City, my dear pretties!” Daniel was scowling, holding a pair of glittering shoes, and Justine was dancing energetically with her guards, all of them dressed up as winged monkees. I couldn’t remember much about that party, come to think of it.

I was about to grab another magazine, when I could hear someone approaching the shack from the forest. Not sure what to do, I locked the door and headed up to the observatory, peeking over the edge to see who might be coming. I exhaled with relief when I saw it was Daniel, carrying a spade and putting it with a small, low wood shed leaning against the shack. I popped my head over the edge and called out, “Where did you go? I didn’t know what to do!”

“I went to bury the body,” he answered with a blank face and done, and then explained after seeing my scared look. “No, the tape. I don’t know when I’ll need it again.”

I met him at the door and let him in, and he noticed immediately the opened letters and magazines. “I see you were busy! Did you learn anything?”

“I think so. You mentioned before I went to sleep last night something about Valdorian gold coins and their significance to JD Ruff’s visit.”

“Yes, and do you have anything to add?” Daniel asked as he looked at the stacked Instant Letters, with the margin codes lined up.

“What is the story that the Louise Tribune should have published today?”

Daniel sat down in the rocking chair and looked at the witch/fairy picture of the Prime Minister at that blowout of a Halloween party. “If Sarah and the newspaper’s editor could have figured it out from your tip and the book of coins, I was going to be left holding onto a pair of fake magic shoes and bag full of magic beans of questionable value.”

*** This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. ***