As

Previously

…She looked at the jar again. The brine was still clear, the cucumbers still floating. But now she saw, at the very bottom, a small object—dark, unidentifiable, like a seed or a stone. She did not reach for it. Not yet. Tomorrow was Sunday. She had nowhere to go. She would call the archive in Vilnius, the one her grandmother had mentioned in a letter. She would ask about a man named Kenedis Džonas, about chaos theory, about the mountain. And she would find out why the pickles tasted like a warning.