WL--the word--knowing

Amy found her sister Anna's love letters after the fact. They had been stored on the family Mac, in a file called "Abandoned software" in the system folder.

Amy wouldn't have found it, except that she had accidently trashed the last copy of her paper for her English Lit that was due the next day. So she was rooting around with Norton Utilities, trying to unlock every secret file, hoping to find a more or less intact version of her paper.

When she stumbled across the letters instead, she decided that the paper could wait. The letters were far more important, far more valuable than a missed grade. There were only three of them, all from an unnamed lover. Short, a few paragraphs only. The headers had not been saved, only the bodies.

For a moment, she debated against showing them to anyone, let alone the police. Let the dead bury their own dead, she thought. Then she looked over at her grandmother. Sophie was still kneeling at the window, where she vowed to stay until Anna was found. Until Anna came home. Sophie had made the vow almost a week before, when they first realized Anna had disappeared not only from her dorm room at Berkeley, but from everywhere else. By now, Sophie had made a sort of bed from the couch's headrest and had put a pillow on the windowsill for her head.

Sophie moved to fix food for Yuki, to convince Kit to eat when she came home. But during the night, Sophie never budged from the window.

Amy printed out the love letters, writing at the top the name of the file and directory she had found them in. She stared at the paper for a moment, feeling its soft, cold possibilities. Carefully, she folded the paper in a square and taped it to the back of her English notebook.

She put a yellow post-it on the side of the Mac, above the restart switch. Do not turn off, she wrote. Do not touch. This could be important.

knowing / lost words / drown / in sounds that cannot / merge into meaning / the danger in / words of / melted water

the word is / the sound / of water / dripping from/ ancient symbols / tiny particles / of merging / realities