The problem was the category.
Maren had been filing documents at the Mechanist Academy library for twenty-three years. In that time, she had processed 9,814 items — monographs, technical specifications, reference catalogues, experimental summaries, survey reports, and one recipe for foundry-grade lubricant that had been submitted by a junior researcher who'd confused the intake forms and whose embarrassment had been, by institutional consensus, never mentioned again.
She had categories for all of these. The filing system was not complicated — it was, in fact, elegantly simple, the product of her predecessor's predecessor's conviction that a library was a machine that ran on alphabetical order and thematic groupings, and that the purpose of a librarian was to keep the machine oiled. Natural Philosophy. Engineering. Theological Reference. Applied Metallurgy. Agricultural Science. Survey and Cartography.
None of these categories contained the document she was holding.
