Rosa put a bread wrapper on Oren’s table. On its back were a circle, two short lines and an arrow.
“Does this mean anything?” she asked.
“It means you didn’t use a plate.”
“I copied the marks from a loading slip. Twelve boxes of library books went missing this morning. So did the painted moon for the school play.” She showed him the photograph of the original slip on her tablet.
Oren turned the wrapper round. For twenty years, before the route system changed, he had kept the district’s delivery books. Now an AI clerk named Ami planned the journeys. Oren’s notebooks sat on his shelves, and visitors sometimes asked to see them as if they were old coins.
He wanted work, not visitors.
“The circle is the fountain,” he said. “Two lines: second lane. Arrow: side door. I’ve written it a thousand times.”
Rosa took him there. The fountain was gone. A glass office building covered the place where Oren remembered it standing.
“You were sure,” Rosa said.
He stared at the locked service doors. “I was.”
The delivery tablet in Rosa’s hand spoke in Ami’s calm voice. “I cannot confirm a route from those marks. May I copy the notebooks?”
Oren pictured every page spread across some bright screen: wages, old addresses, notes about customers who had once left their doors unlocked.
“No.”
Rosa tucked the wrapper into her pocket. “Then we try another way. We only need these boxes.”
Her pockets also held a shop receipt. She had bought tea opposite the demolished fountain last week. At the top of the receipt was a small picture of a pavement mosaic: blue tiles in a ring, preserved when the square was rebuilt.
Oren pointed at it. “The old fountain stood there.”
“That’s two streets from here,” Rosa said.
He had taken them to the newer fountain site, the one he had used in his last working year. The packing marks were older.
“Let’s walk from the tiles,” he said.
They found the blue ring outside a shoe shop. From there Oren counted the lanes in the order a driver would pass them. The second was a narrow opening between two buildings. Rosa enlarged the photograph of the slip. Its faded arrow bent left, so they turned left too.
The door they reached was labelled DOVE STORAGE. Ami found no destination under that name.
“We used to call it the pigeon loft,” Oren said. “The old room was above the yard. The new room is here.”
Rosa called the number on the door. A caretaker arrived with a key. Inside stood twelve boxes marked LIBRARY and a wooden moon leaning against a shelving unit.
“The driver said the slips sent him here,” the caretaker said. “Nobody gave me a collection time.”
Rosa checked the box count and called the library. Oren wrote a small key on the wrapper: which fountain, how to count the lanes, which side the arrow named. He crossed out his first answer before adding the corrected one.
“You can copy this,” he told Ami. “Just this.”
“I can store the route with your explanation and today’s checked address,” Ami replied. “I cannot hire you.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.”
He had been, a little. He folded the wrapper and put it down.
The school clerk came with two children and a handcart to collect the moon. Rosa told her how they had found it.
“We have four more old slips for the play stores,” the clerk said to Oren. “I can pay for a week of route checking from the school office budget. Would you bring only the pages those jobs need?”
“I’d bring copies,” Oren said. “And we’d test them before anyone drove off.”
They agreed on the hours and the sum. It was one week’s work. It did not restore his old desk or change the city’s delivery system.
One child held the moon upright on the cart while the other tied it down. A painted star had come loose from its edge. Oren found it beside the shelf and gave it back.
“Don’t leave that behind,” he said.
“We need it for the last scene,” the child told him.
Oren watched them wheel the moon down the lane. Then he asked Rosa for a clean sheet of paper. His first paid route was going to need more space than a bread wrapper.
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