Morning came to Neshiyah the way it always did, with the fog pressed against the windows like a damp gray cloth. The hall was busy before the light was full. Ezra Ben-Ami had died in the night at eighty-five, and Idit Ronen at a hundred and seven, and Oren Erez at a hundred and fifteen, and Shai Ofer at ninety-seven. People said they had been asleep in their last days, and the deaths were quiet, as deaths in town often were. The cots were laid out in a row in the hall, and the neighbors moved through with soft steps, laying hands on shoulders, speaking low.

In the same hour, four newborns were brought into the hall for the morning weighing. Malachi Eshel, Maayan Kfir, Nava Sharon, and Reuben Nir. The mothers held them against their chests, and the fathers stood near the door, shifting their weight. No one spoke of the dreams the babies had been having, the repeated words that came out of sleep, because no one wanted to be the first to say it out loud in the light of day. But Zipporah Gefen, who had come to the hall to watch the weighing, stood near the cots and listened. She heard the small voices in the quiet, the way they rose and fell, and she counted the seconds between the words without moving her lips.

By mid-morning, the south edge of town had its own gathering. Gilead Meron had gone to the old well with a long pole, lowered it until it touched the water, marked the depth, and raised it wet. He measured the wet length with a tape and wrote the number in his notebook. Then he dropped a stone and timed the splash with his own stopwatch. The splash came back late again, a full second on the timer. He stood there a moment, the stopwatch in his hand, and looked at the water's dark surface as if it might explain itself. It did not. He wrote the number down and walked back to the hall without telling anyone what he had found.

Zipporah had tried the same test earlier, at the well, with her own mechanical stopwatch and a stone. She dropped the stone from arm height three times, timing each splash, and counted the seconds between the splash and any second sound she might hear. But a guard had turned her back at the fog line before she could finish, reminding her that the Council preferred people to stay at their work. She had not argued. She had simply walked back to the river, where she lived quietly, and sat on the bank with the stopwatch in her lap, watching the water move past.

At the mill, Jael Kfir and Hillel Kfir came to blows over nothing much. The fight started over a sack of flour that had been moved to the wrong shelf, and then it was about something older, something neither of them would name. Dalia Shalev and Uzziah Peretz sat at the mill for a long while after, comparing what they had seen. They talked about the instruments, whether the rangefinders could be wrong, whether the stopwatches could be slow. They did not agree. Dalia kept her voice low, her hands folded on the table, and Uzziah kept his notebook open, his pencil moving, but the numbers did not match, and the conversation ended in silence.

In the fields, Liesl Kfir had run the drop-and-stop test with Garrin Zohar, dropping a stone onto a flat board behind a cloth screen, pressing the button when she heard the impact. The results had been normal, same as Garrin's. She had not been late. But the well was different, and she knew it, and Garrin knew it too. He proposed one more test, a blind cloth-screen test at the well, with the stone and her voice on the same track, so that if her cue lagged, it would be the well itself, not her ears. She had agreed, still determined to prove the echo was real. They had not run the test yet. They had only agreed to it, and the afternoon had passed in planning.

Noa Hadar had gone to the town hall to play back the fresh well recording for Liesl, with headphones, asking her to speak along or just listen, and to mark on the transcript where she heard the second splash. Nothing unusual. Everything measured the way it should. Fernando had come in afterward, asking to compare the click test results with the well recording, and Noa had agreed to run a fresh click test with her voice on the same track. They had set the files side by side, the click test clean, the well recording with the lag, and Fernando had said, If her cue lines up on the clicks but lags on the splash, it's the well, not her ears. Noa had nodded. They had not yet run the new test.

In the late afternoon, the east edge of town produced a seed. Naomi Nir and Jesse Nir, the children, had been handed it by a bird that carried it out of the fog. The seed did not match any plant in the town's reference list. The children brought it to the hall, where it sat on a table in a small glass jar, and people came by to look at it without touching it. Meir Golan had found another seed at the east edge, not in the reference list, and had gone to find Fernando to ask if it might be a known cross or something new. Fernando had not yet answered. The seeds sat in their jars, and the fog pressed against the glass, and no one knew what they were.

By evening, the hall had grown quiet. The four newborns had been fed and swaddled and placed in their cots. The four dead had been washed and laid out, their faces calm, their hands folded. The lamps were lit, and the shadows stretched long across the floor. Liesl had not gone home. She had stayed in the hall, waiting for the recording to be played back, waiting for the second sound to appear on the track, waiting for someone to say the words she had been hearing in her head all day. Noa had the recorder in her bag. Garrin had his notebook. Fernando had his stopwatch. They were all waiting for the same thing, though none of them said it.

And then, from one of the cots, a small voice rose out of sleep. It was Malachi Eshel, or Maayan Kfir, or Nava Sharon, or Reuben Nir—no one could tell in the dark. The voice said, The fog is just fog. And then, a second later, softer, as if answering from somewhere else in the room, the voice came again. The fog is just fog.

The hall went still. Liesl turned her head. Noa stopped breathing. Fernando stopped his stopwatch. Garrin set down his pencil. The voice did not come a third time. But the second one had been there, clear as the first, and no one could say where it had come from.