The road curves south toward the Strait.

Trucks move toward Algeciras. Port signs begin to appear. The sea is bright as a blade, and Morocco rises from the haze like another thought waiting to become real.

Behind them: a village lunch, a mounted boar, an old contract named aloud and refused.

Ahead of them: ferries, another continent, an old man oiling a shotgun for Sunday.

“Next audience,” she says. “Men, gods, and ghosts.”

The person beside her does not laugh.

“Good thing,” he says, “you’re fluent in all three.”

Quantum Gravity moves through borders of every kind: between families and institutions, between women’s labour and men’s authority, between the living and the inherited, between one shore and another.

A Contract Signed Under His Shoulders

“I speak in facts,” I say. “They listen to testosterone.”

The road south slips past trucks heading for Algeciras. Wolfgang drives barefoot, his tattoos visible beneath rolled sleeves, one hand on the wheel. The Strait waits ahead: a thin silver line between landmasses, Morocco a muted shadow beyond.

At lunch, the village men heard him before they heard me.

They saw tall, young, inked, broad-shouldered—every old man’s worst-case scenario made flesh—and recalibrated.

He calls it fieldwork.

I call it the problem.

“A contract signed under your shoulders is void the moment you leave the room. And on Monday you won’t be in the room. She will.”

Then he takes my cold fingers in his and kisses them until the feeling returns.

“They’ll call it his hunt on Sunday. Fine. He can carry the shotgun and pose for the old men. She knows the terraces, the wind, the birds, and exactly where the coveys break. By the time they understand who led them, she’ll already have brought them home.”

Behind us, an old man is preparing for Sunday’s hunt. Ahead, ferries point toward another continent. I smile.

Start the series here → https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-european-records

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange. All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.