No Provenance: The Answering Dark, Book Three: 3

Longbarrow is where things go when they have stopped moving. Four hundred yards of shelves, both sides, floor to ceiling. Nothing on them is labelled with what it is. The label says where the thing came from, the day it was lodged, and the weight. Kael's job is to say where it came from. If she can say it, the thing stays on the shelf. If she cannot, it goes on the list - and on the ninth of March the list is run, and the corridor plays each one back, once, as it goes. They are all in the middle of something. Not one of them is at the end of anything. There are three bays nobody has worked in years. The chains behind them do not break. They stop, in a clean hand, at the first entry. Somebody in this building decided how this is done, a long time ago, and is still here. On the seventh a man arrives from head office to read every sheet on the floor. NO PROVENANCE is the third book of The Answering Dark - a standalone novella about records, competence, and what it costs to be the person who decides whether a thing is allowed to have been real. "I thought held meant safe." ```