Meridian Crossings

Chapter 1: The Glass Sky

The vault at the Royal Greenwich Observatory was not a place where one expected to find a ghost. It was a place of order, of iron shelving and acid-free boxes, of temperature and humidity logged twice daily in a binder that no one had touched in months. Dr. Elias Vane had been cataloging its contents for three years now, and in that time he had developed a kind of kinship with its silences. The plates were the closest thing to a congregation he had ever known—thousands of thin glass rectangles, each one a frozen slice of sky, each one waiting to be measured, labeled, and returned to its dark envelope like a letter never sent.

He was on the third shelving unit, fourth row from the top, which meant he was working from a step-ladder with a headlamp strapped to his brow because the overhead fluorescents had a tendency to flicker and fail at precisely the hour when the light outside was too dim to help. The archives were underground, below the main observatory, and the only window was a narrow strip of reinforced glass near the ceiling that showed a swath of grass and, beyond it, the park. On good days he could see the masts of the Cutty Sark from the top of the ladder, a reminder that the world above, with its tourists and its tea shops and its anniversaries, still existed. Today the window showed only the grey exhaustion of late