Haxley doesn't advance. The smile stays on his face, but his fingers go still over the flap of his coat, where he had stowed the crystal folder. The three runic plates around his wrist lose their rhythm.
"Wait," he says. "Echo Fragment. You asked whether an Echo Fragment dropped along with the page."
He mumbles, retracing his steps, a hand cupping his chin.
"I mentioned a physical page, taken from an archivist monster. A record fragment, material, damaged. I never said Echo Fragment..." And then he tilts his head toward me. "So why was that your first association?"
There it is.
For a clever man, that took longer than I expected.
My question had been honest curiosity. It just wasn't a mistake.
