Oldest First: The Answering Dark, Book Two: 2

She comes back off a year alone on a moon, and they give her a desk. Bellhouse is the relay. Everything anybody says to anybody out here passes through it, and the buffer has to be under a line by four in the morning. >Somebody decides what does not go on. There is an order to it, and a form, and a rule Kael is taught on her first night: oldest first, always oldest. Do it any other way and you're picking, >She turns out to be very good at it. The man at the next desk has kept a small book for six years. A woman from stores comes in to ask whether one letter ever arrived. And on a moon eighteen minutes away, the keeper who replaced Kael starts sending readings >None of it is anybody's fault. That is the difficult part. OLDEST FIRST is the second book of The Answering Dark - a standalone novella about competence, procedure, and the small daily arithmetic of deciding what >It takes two seconds and a little over.