Griffin

Griffin held the sleeve up under the lamp, turning it until the light came through the brown ring where somebody’s cup had sat. The press thumped behind them, steady as a heartbeat, and warm air full of the roasting smell drifted down through the boards from the loft above.

The Rotation stops this week where the, and then a smear, a soft brown cloud, before it rolls on Wednesday.

“Did this come off your press?” Griffin asked.

Ferris Loam didn’t look up. Ink went to their elbows like long gloves, and they fed the next sheet in without missing a beat. “No date on it. Everything off my press has a date.” They nodded at a stack of damp sleeves drying on the table, this week’s date in neat blue on every one. “Somebody wrote that by hand. Not me. And I’m not stopping a run to squint at it.”

The press came down again. Griffin looked toward the loudest part of the room, which was most of it, and then found the quiet bit at the edge. A Squirrel was stacking printed sleeves into towers at the end of the table, alone, with Beasts laughing on every side. Now and then they ticked a little card. Griffin went over and picked up a stack without asking.

“I’m Dash,” the Squirrel said. “You don’t have to help.”

“I like helping.” Griffin squared the stack. “Do you know where the Rotation is?”

Dash went very still. Their eyes slid to the sleeve, then away. They knew. Griffin could see them knowing, the way you can see a friend holding in a sneeze.

“I might have a guess,” Dash said. “But you say yours first. I’m always first at everything. I’d like to be second. Just once.”

“I haven’t got one. That’s the trouble.”

Out the front window, the awning bellied out in the wind, three colours this year on purpose, and Griffin wanted very badly to just go. Pick a street and walk until something turned up. They’d always found things that way, by leaving. Under the floor the Hum ran tight, the way it had for months, and the morning was slipping past, and somewhere out there a shop was getting ready to wheel off to a corner nobody had shown them yet.

Dash wouldn’t follow. Griffin could tell that too. Dash would stay at the end of the table and stack, and watch them go, and be second at nothing again.

A smudged sleeve slid off the pile. Dash caught it. “That’s last week,” they said, and dropped it in the bin.

“That’s last week,” Griffin said, and dropped one in after it.

Then Griffin laid the inked sleeve face up on the table between them and picked up the next stack.

“We’ll both think,” they said. “Whoever gets it, we walk there together, and you go through the door second.”

Dash stared at them. Then, slowly, Dash started stacking again, a little closer.

The press thumped. The morning kept running, and Wednesday came on with it. Griffin kept glancing at the clue as they worked. Those looping letters were nothing like Ferris’s blocky print, and nothing like the small scratchy ticks on Dash’s card.

So whose hand had held the pen?