Chapter X · Who Holds the Door

On the third day he slept through the daylight in an abandoned yard, on a wooden bench under a vine gone wild. The Hunters came only at night. Or only at night could he feel them.

When he woke, the sun was low, and he had put his jacket under his head the way he had never put it before: with the sleeves tied, so no one could take it from him without waking him.

He did not remember doing it. His hands had done it.

The marks on his right wrist had darkened while he slept. He worked his fingers before touching the knot.

He looked at the knot for a long time. A good knot, tight, with a free end he could undo with one tug. No one had taught him. Or someone had, long ago, in a winter camp near some ruins.

He undid the knot. He tied it again, by himself, with his eyes open, so he would know it was his now. His hands learned it a second time, more slowly. The third time it was his alone.

That evening he wrote: here.

Krista replied: Maxim called from the road. Lucky isn’t eating. Mina’s eating for both of them. Maxim says you’re not allowed to die, because he doesn’t know what to do with two dogs.

Soles read it three times and, for the first time in three days, laughed. It hurt his ribs. He didn’t care.

At the far end of the yard, the old stone wall facing the street grew heavier.

Then another, the wall on the right.

And a third, the one at the back, the one the bench was leaning against.

Soles stood up slowly. Three. Until then there had been one, that followed him, lost him and found him again. Now there were three, and they were no longer trying anything. They were waiting.

Surrounded.

The word came with a weariness Soles recognized from the winter camp. It named what he could already feel. It did not find him a way out.

The only side without a wall was the one facing the riverbed: a slope of earth, a fallen wire fence, the reeds. And beyond the reeds, down below, far off, the water still coming out murky from the garden’s broken bank.

Soles understood that they were no longer following him. They were herding him.

He slid down the slope on his backside, the backpack clutched to his chest, through the soft earth and the wire of the fallen fence. The reeds received him with a long rustle, and behind him the three walls stayed heavy, full, motionless. They did not follow him. They knew where he was going.

The riverbed was almost empty at that hour. On the bank, the garden’s temporary fence, the investigator’s tape tied between two stakes, a forgotten wheelbarrow with its wheel in the air. Water was still coming out of the two uncovered arches, more slowly now, gray, smelling of old earth. The blocks stood where Kale had left them, stone backs lined up end to end along the bank. Above them, on the terrace, the post at the end, the one Piter had measured from.

Soles looked at it and felt it fill.

It was not a wall. It was a stone post, as thick as a man, and the weight in it settled exactly as it had settled in the pillar under the bridge: from the inside, leaning, facing him. Then the second weight, in the terrace wall. The third stayed behind, somewhere in the slope he had come down, in the earth itself. Soles had not known they could be in the earth too.

Forward.

Soles looked toward the blocks. Whatever Leonatus meant, he would have to find a way through them himself.

Soles walked past the first two without a glance. Those had been measured; they were on the map. He stopped at the third and moved two paces to the left, to the angle Piter had found between the reeds. He crouched beside the block and laid a hand on the cold stone.

The stripe was there. Dark, low, as long as an arm, between the edge of the block and the bank. Maybe the shadow of a crack, he had thought then. He had told the investigator only that he couldn’t tell him yet.

Now he could. Not with his eyes. With something else.

The block was resting on something. Not on the bank, the way the other two rested, with all their weight let down onto the earth, but on a curve. Soles felt it through the stone. The block did not press on the curve. It sat on it carefully, its weight spread, like a hand laid on a shoulder to steady it, not to break it. Someone had lowered it there with care. Someone had seen, or had been told, where to stop it.

Soles did not take the thought further. There was no time.

The weight inside the terrace post shifted. Soles felt it come down, slowly, along the post, toward the base. Toward the earth. And from the earth it could go anywhere.

He dropped onto his stomach in the mud and slid under the edge of the block.

The space was tighter than it had looked from the terrace. His injured rib struck the stone and the light went white in his eyes. He pushed the backpack ahead, then pulled himself after it, his knees in the water and his cheek pressed against the underside of the block, which smelled of silt and iron.

The dark stripe widened. It was not a crack. It was the mouth of an arch, half blocked with sand and gravel brought by the flood, through which a thin thread of water flowed.

Beyond it, warm air.

He felt it on his face, with a smell he had smelled once before, under the garden, on the night of the footbridge. Old stone and something sweetish, like an apple forgotten in a drawer. Soles pushed through the mouth of the arch on his elbows, water running under his clothes, and dropped into a drain in which he could kneel.

He switched on Kale’s flashlight.

The drain ran forward on a gentle slope, toward the heart of the hill. The walls were old brick, then, after a few meters, dressed stone: large blocks fitted without mortar, so tightly that a pocketknife blade would not have gone between them. Soles knew them. He had touched them once before, under another arch.

Behind him, at the mouth of the arch, the earth grew heavy.

He went forward on his knees, then stooping, then, when the ceiling rose, upright. The drain climbed now, leaving the water behind. Under his soles the stone was dry and warm, like a hearth where the fire was put out an hour ago. Soles held the trembling flashlight with both hands.

The tunnel ended in a chamber.

The chamber was smaller than the first, round, its vaulted roof built without a keystone. Soles could feel the load spread across the fitted stones. There was no single support to break. Whoever built it had allowed for someone like him.

The walls were carved.

In two rows, one above the other, all the way around. The lower row began to the right of the entrance he had come through. A sapling, a single young tree, with three leaves. Then a grove, a few trees crowded together, their roots tangled. A dense forest, the trunks so close together they left no room to pass.

Then, at the end, a northern forest, with straight black firs under snow, so vast that the stone could no longer hold its edges and it vanished into the vault above.

The upper row was faces.

The first had its eyes closed and its mouth closed. It was not sleeping. It was listening. The second had its mouth open, as if about to say something. The third held a mask in front of its face, with both hands, and the mask resembled it, but was not it. The fourth no longer had a face. In its place it had another face, pressed over its own, motionless, eyes open.

Soles looked at the fourth for a long time. Then he could not.

In the wall opposite, right in the middle, was a slab.

He knew it. Not this one, but its sister, the one he had held open with his palm while Krista crossed to the other side and the water rose to his knees. This one was smaller, simpler, without a single sign on it. From under it came the warm air, in slow pulses, like breathing.

Soles took a step toward it and the chamber opened.

Not the slab. The chamber. Or maybe him. He never knew afterward how to say which of them. He knew only that, in one instant, he could feel the vault, the walls and the stone under his feet, and in the next he could feel everything.

The hill. The whole weight of the hill, set on the chamber and on the drains and on the arches under the blocks. The garden above, with its greenhouses, its paths, its terrace and its post. The street. The houses on the street, each with its foundation, its walls, its beams that held, that gave, that rested on others. The pipes under the asphalt.

Far off, the railway pillars were empty. The men had left them to come here. The load of the city poured into him, beyond any house he could see, like water into a vessel too small.

He fell to his knees. The flashlight rolled across the stone and lit the ceiling, then a wall, then that face with another face over it.

Blood burst from his nose and ran down his chin, warm, painless. The pain came after, behind his eyes, in his temples, in the bones of his face. It was not the pain of a wound. It was the pain of something that widens and no longer fits.

He could feel his own body too. That was the worst of it. Not the way he had always felt it, from the inside, as something taken for granted, but the way he now felt the beams of a house: the bones that carried the weight of the muscles, the ribs that held the lungs, the cracked rib on the right that no longer carried what it should. The knees on the stone, two points of support, too few. The head, heavy, on a spine that was bending.

He was no longer a man who felt things. He was one more thing among them.

Breathe.

Leonatus’s word reached him through the pressure. Soles drew air slowly. The blood on his chin was still his; nothing in the borrowed steadiness could make that harmless.

Soles breathed. Once. Twice. The soldier’s voice was no longer alone.

There were others too. He felt them at the edge, the way he had felt the Hunters in the walls, but differently. They did not press. They waited. Three presences, besides the one that spoke. One straight and cold, with a patience that was not that of a man used to waiting, but of a man used to being waited for.

One quick and tired, that counted, that counted all the time, even now, beams, distances, weights, with the haste of a man who knows he has little time left. And one about which he could say nothing, because it stood farthest away and most calmly, with something in its hand, something sharp, held carelessly, the way you hold a thing you have known all your life.

For a moment the chamber gave way to his garden. The central trunk rose through a canopy of light; far below the flower beds, trees pressed together more densely than before. The figures waited beside their plants. None had grown a new face for him to trust.

He caught himself sagging toward the stone and opened his eyes. They were waiting for more than a visit.

Soles stayed on his knees, blood dripping onto the warm stone, and understood, without knowing how, that he could do it. It would have been easy. It would have been like opening a door you have held shut with your shoulder for so long that you no longer know why.

He did not open it.

He picked up the flashlight. His hand was shaking, and the light shook on the walls, on the trees and on the faces, on the black forest under the snow. He got up, leaning against the wall, and stayed on his feet. The city was still there, poured into him. It was no longer draining out. It was getting used to him, maybe. Or he was getting used to it.

And there was something else, beneath the trembling. In his bones, in the heels of his hands, in his good shoulder, a weight sat coiled that did not tremble at all. It was not his. It belonged to the dense forest on the wall, its trunks packed too close to pass between, and it sat in him the way powder sits in a shell no one has lit yet.

Soles felt it in his hands and feared it more than the footsteps in the tunnel. A man with a cracked rib should not have had in his palms something that could blow a wall apart. A man with a cracked rib, some part of him observed, calm enough to worry him, should not even have been standing.

From the drain he had come through came the sound of water.

Not flowing water. Water being pushed aside. Footsteps in water, slow, heavy, along the bottom of the tunnel, where he had gone on his knees.

Soles turned the flashlight toward the mouth of the tunnel and waited to feel the weight in the walls. He felt nothing. The walls of the chamber stayed walls, full only of themselves, as they had been since someone had set them there.

The footsteps came closer.

The first Hunter came out of the tunnel on his feet, the way Soles had. He did not come through the wall. He came the way Soles had come, through the water and the mouth of the arch, stooped under the low ceiling, and straightened his back only in the chamber. He was tall, in black clothes without any insignia, wet and clinging to his body.

The flashlight beam fell straight on his face, and Soles could not have said, then or later, what he looked like. There was nothing to remember in that face. No expression. The stillness of a river stone after a thousand years of water.

Behind him, in the tunnel, more footsteps could be heard.

The Hunter looked neither at the carvings, nor at the slab, nor at Soles, and yet Soles felt clearly where his attention had gone: under his jacket, to the place under his arm, where the oiled leather lay pressed against his ribs.

The Hunter took a step.

He was in no hurry. He had no reason to be. Behind him, the second came out of the tunnel, straightened up and stopped an arm’s length behind the first. The third stayed in the mouth of the tunnel, shoulders hunched under the low ceiling, closing off the way Soles had come.

Hold.

Leonatus’s word was close to his ear. Soles kept his feet beneath him. The soldier could lend him steadiness; the hand, the rib and the men closing the tunnel were still there.

Soles knew. He felt in his bones how much they would still carry him: his knees were trembling, the cracked rib carried a third of what it should, his head could barely stay on his neck under all the weight of the city poured into him. He was not a man who could fight. He was a man who could barely stand.

And at the edge, the three were waiting.

They were not pushing him. That was the strangest part, and Soles understood it only then, with the flashlight trembling and the blood drying on his chin. This time they would not come in without being let in. Until now they had come on their own, as echo, as reflex, as a knot tied in sleep, when they wanted.

He had seen them apart in the garden: a soldier who did not think him trained, a king who expected obedience, a tired man intent on his work. None had lived this moment for him. He would be asking them to move through a body they did not have to mend afterward.

He wanted Maxim’s voice behind him. Something stupid about the flashlight, something he could answer without thinking. The tunnel gave him only the scrape of a third man’s boot.

He had brought them away from the house. That had been the plan. Here he was, away from the house, and the plan had nothing left in it.

If I let them in, who holds the blade?

His right wrist still ached where the man under the bridge had caught it. He tightened his fingers around the flashlight until the shaking became worse, then stopped. He could feel the power waiting in his bones. He could not make his hand obey him with a light in it.

The first Hunter watched that hand. Soles knew what he had shown him.

He took a breath through his mouth. There was blood drying on his teeth. Whatever he chose next, he would have to live with it, if there was enough of him left.

They waited for his decision.

The Hunter took another step. Then another. There were about five steps left between them.

Soles left the door open.

He could not say how. Only that, in one instant, he was holding on to the edge of himself with both hands, and in the next he was no longer holding on. And they came in.

The soldier first. Soles’s body sank low, on spread feet, the weight on the heels and the good shoulder forward, in the stance of a man who has stood in a shield wall and knows that the first thing you do is not fall. The rib screamed. The soldier did not let him listen.

Then the straight, cold one. He did not move his body. He moved his gaze. Soles looked at the three Hunters and no longer saw three. He saw an order. The one in front decided. The second waited to see what the first decided. The one in the tunnel guarded, and nothing more. They were not three hunters.

They were one hunter with two extra hands, and those hands did not know how to move on their own. The cold one had seen this in men dressed in silk, in high-ceilinged halls, and had not been surprised then either.

Then the hurried one, who counted. Two steps back to the slab. Four forward to the Hunter in front. The Hunter’s reach was an arm and a half of Soles’s. The hands were in black gloves, but the arm bent at the elbow like any man’s. That meant it could be locked at the elbow. The hurried one had seen men who hunted like this before.

Somewhere else, under another light, and he had not escaped. He was counting now with a cold fury, so it would not happen again.

Last came Phenom, with the sharp thing held quietly in his hand.

Soles’s hand went under his jacket, undid the knot of the oiled leather strap and drew the blade.

He had never held it like this. He had lifted it from the chest, wrapped it, carried it pressed against his ribs for days, but he had never drawn it against anyone. Now it sat in his palm as if it had sat there a whole lifetime: an underhand grip, tight, the blade turned back along the wrist, the thumb on the guard. It was not the grip of a man cutting bread. It was the grip of someone who knew this thing had not been made for bread.

The Hunter in front stopped.

The second stopped too, a moment later.

Soles looked at them through four pairs of eyes at once and felt the face he was wearing. It was not his. Nor any of theirs. It was a face made of all of them, held in front of his own with both hands, the way the third face on the wall held its mask. Underneath it was still him. Only, for the moment, he was no longer the one looking out.

And to make room for them, something had to leave.

He felt it like a brick taken out of a wall to let a beam through. It did not hurt. It was worse than pain: it was coming loose. Somewhere deep, in the place where the things from home were kept, something small wobbled and began to slide. A sink. Mary’s hands, wet, taking out of the pocket of a pair of overalls something small, with plastic covers, its pages stuck together by the water.

Her voice, annoyed, not loud, tired: you left it in your pocket again. And Kale, laughing in the doorway, his hands black with oil.

Soles tried to hold on to it. He gripped with everything he had left. That small thing, with plastic covers, that he had been looking for. Why had he been looking for it? He had looked for it in the box, on the floor, on the tiles, among the gloves. He had looked for it because…

The Hunter in front lunged at Soles.

The soldier drove Soles’s body low and to the side, under the outstretched arm. The flashlight fell from his free hand. The one who counted already knew where the elbow would be. Soles’s bandaged hand struck there, with the heel of the palm, and the weight in his bones went out with it. Not all of it.

The one who counted caught it on the way, the way you catch a dropped tool before it hits the floor, and let only part of it through. That part was enough: the elbow bent the wrong way with a sound like wet wood, and in the wall beside the slab, where no one had touched it, a crack opened from top to bottom. The shock ran back up Soles’s arm into the cracked rib.

The Hunter made no sound. His face did not change either. But his other hand closed on Soles’s wrist, the one with the blade, and squeezed.

It squeezed like a vise. Soles’s fingers opened on their own. The blade slipped in his grip, a finger’s width, then two. The gloved hand climbed up the wrist, toward the palm, toward the hilt, toward the thing they had come for.

Keep it.

Phenom’s words were clipped and close. Soles remembered the wrist he had touched in the garden. The man who had watched his footing now wanted his fingers closed. Wanting it did not make the grip painless.

Soles closed his fingers over the hilt and pulled. The Hunter let him spend the effort, then turned the trapped wrist outward. Pain ran up the arm already bruised beneath the bridge. The blade tipped away from Soles’s chest.

He clamped his left hand around his own right fingers to keep them closed. The dressing tightened; something gave beneath it. Blood warmed the web of his thumb. He felt each stitch pulling as the Hunter twisted again.

He’s opening my hand. Pulling helps him.

Soles stopped pulling. He drove the hilt toward his own hip instead, elbow tight against his side, until the Hunter had to lean over his broken arm to keep hold. The pressure eased enough for Soles to breathe.

He tried to turn past the man. The third Hunter had left the tunnel. He stepped into that space, forcing Soles back toward the slab. Soles dragged the first between them; the third checked a punch beside his companion’s head and reached around him instead.

The three of them crowded into the flashlight beam on the floor. Soles could see the blood running over his knuckles. The broken elbow had bought him space for one movement. He had spent it keeping the blade.

The struggle had pushed Soles back until his heel brushed the base of the slab. Then the second Hunter came.

Soles did not see him. The cold one saw him for him, a fraction of an instant too late, because even the cold one had been looking at the blade. The second Hunter came from the left, palm out and flat, its edge toward Soles’s throat, striking from the shoulder, with the whole weight of a body that did not know what tiredness was. The hurried one worked out the distance, the time and the angle and arrived at a single figure.

He should have died.

He did not die.

He did not know then what had happened. Neither he nor the four. He knew only that the blow meant to break his neck passed him by the width of a finger. He had not dodged it. It was as if the world had dodged. The stone under his left heel, which had held for a thousand years without shifting, sank by a hair, exactly enough to tip his body backward.

The blow passed under his chin, brushed the skin of his throat like a cold breath and slammed into the wall beside the slab, where Soles no longer was.

He fell backward. The Hunter in front, his elbow broken and his hand still on Soles’s wrist, fell with him, twisted and let go, so as not to fall on the blade he wanted. Soles’s shoulders struck the base of the slab; his head snapped back against it. His outstretched left palm slapped the stone beside his hip, close to the floor.

His palm landed on the slab.

The slab opened.

Not with a sound. It did not move. Only, under his palm, the stone stopped being wall, and Soles fell through it, on his back, into darkness and warm air, the blade clutched to his chest. His hand slid off the edge of the slab.

The slab closed.

From the other side came a blow. A single one, dull, like a fist driven into a thick wall. Then nothing.

Soles lay on his back, on a warm stone, in total darkness. The stone held his body, but beneath it he felt nothing holding it. For the first time, nothing rested on anything. The flashlight had stayed on the other side. Blood seeped through the bandage on his left hand. He folded it against his jacket. He was breathing. He did not know if he could do anything else. He thought, clearly, that this was where he would stay.

The four were still there. The mask was still there. He felt it on his cheek like a stranger’s face pressed over his own, warm, well fitted. He could have stayed like that. It would have been easy. Nothing hurt when he looked out through it.

— Soles, he said aloud, into the dark.

It was not his voice. It was lower, with an accent no one in this city had.

— Soles, he said again.

It still was not his, but it had come closer.

The third time it was nearly his.

The four withdrew. Not all at once. First Phenom, unhurried, like a man leaving a room he never wanted to enter.

The hurried one, still counting, more and more slowly, until he went out.

The cold one, who left without a backward glance. The soldier stayed last. He stayed beside him for a while, in the dark, the way someone stays beside a wounded comrade until the stretcher comes.

Good.

The word was grudging. Leonatus had stayed long enough to see Soles trying to find his own voice again. His hand steadied Soles’s shoulder for a moment, then its weight went too.

Then he left too.

Soles was alone. Truly alone, for the first time since he had left home.

No weight in the walls, no voice at his ear. Only the warm dark, the stone beneath him, the blade pressed to his chest and the city, still poured into him, which he now felt like an old ache he would have to live with.

And that empty place.

He found it only after he had calmed down. Somewhere, among the things from home, there was an empty place. He did not know what had been there. He knew only that something had. A gap the size of a small thing, with smooth edges, like the mark a picture leaves on a wall.

He tried to remember. The house, Mary’s voice, Kale’s jacket on the hook. They were all there, whole. Only, between them, something was missing, and he did not know what.

He had been looking for it these last few days. That much he knew. He had been looking for something from his father’s story, in the box, on the floor, among the gloves. He no longer knew what.

He took out his phone. The bruised screen lit his face. The signal was a single bar, flickering on and off.

He typed here and pressed send. Beside the word appeared a small circle that spun, and spun, and would not stop.

He remembered that Krista had promised to come looking for him if she got nothing.

He thought, too, of that gap with smooth edges and felt around it in his mind, the way the tongue feels for the place of a pulled tooth.

He knew that he did not know.

It was all he had left of what he had been looking for.

Tesa had seen a stone door held open once before.

Serren made her wait.

On Monday evening, after the meeting in Soles’s yard, she called the number on the pavilion’s brass plate. No one answered. She had said the word “list” aloud under the shed roof, and since then she had known whose door came first. Her brother had guarded the north-bank site. The committee had run it. The only man on the committee who had ever opened a door to any of them was Serren.

On Tuesday he answered through a young man in a vest, at the pavilion gate, who told her that Mr. Serren was out of town. Tesa looked at the card reader fitted in place of the old lock, then at her hand in its cast, and told him she could wait.

She waited two hours on the bench across the street, her hood up, until the streetlamps came on. Serren did not come out. Nor did anyone go in who looked like him.

Before she left, she wrote him a note on the back of a gas station receipt and slipped it under the gate. Six words: The watchman who saw too much. Below it, her number.

Serren called her that same evening.

— Tomorrow, he said. At eleven. Come alone.

— How else?

Serren did not answer that. He hung up.

She did not sleep. She had not slept, for years, more than three or four hours a night anyway, and that night not even that. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hand in its cast on her knee and the other opening and closing, opening and closing, until her fingers began to ache. On the coat rack in the hall, by the door, hung her brother’s winter jacket.

It had hung there for six years. Tesa dusted it off in spring and autumn, like a coat someone was going to come and collect.

Toward morning she went to the gym. She couldn’t hit anything, but she could move. She put her left foot in front of her right, shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet and danced around the bag for half an hour without touching it, her hand in the cast held up at her chin, the way she would have held it if it had been whole. The gym was empty. The man with the mop had not come in yet.

At some point, she could not tell when, she felt she was not alone.

No one stood in the gym. The attention belonged to the man she had met beside the bright plant in her garden. There he could look her in the eye; here there were no footsteps, no shadow by the bag. Once, after the bell, her punch had come from him. Since then she had learned to recognize the approach.

He did not speak like a trainer, but like someone who had been hit himself. He did not tell her what to do. He watched.

Shoulders.

Tesa noticed how high she held them. She lowered them and tried the step again. Easier. That correction she could use; the urge to keep moving until the arm stopped hurting was another matter.

By day the pavilion looked less like a club and more like a home for rich old people. The young man in the vest took her upstairs without checking any list and left her in the room with the armchairs Soles had told her about, its window facing the canal that flowed slowly beneath the pavilion.

Serren sat facing the light. Tesa noticed that first. Soles had told her that last time he had sat with his back to the window, his face in shadow. He was older than she had imagined. Or maybe he simply was not hiding anymore.

On his knees he held a gray cardboard folder, tied with a string.

— Have a seat, he said.

— I’m fine standing.

— As you wish.

He did not insist. He looked at her hand in the cast, then at her face, and Tesa saw that he recognized her. From before. From a face that resembled hers and that she had never seen there.

— You look like him, Serren said. Around the eyes.

Tesa felt something tighten under her ribs, where no punch had ever reached in her life.

— So you knew him.

— I saw him once. He came here, upstairs, to this room. It was autumn. He stood where you’re standing now. He didn’t want to sit down either.

Serren undid the string of the folder, slowly, with fingers that did not shake.

— He had a notebook with him. The night-shift log from the site on the north bank. The company had given it to him to write down who came in and who went out. He wrote everything down. Times, truck numbers, how low they sat on their axles coming in and how low going out.

That was him. That was exactly him. The man who could never remember whether they had been full coming in or going out and who, for exactly that reason, had started writing.

— He came to the committee, Serren said, because he didn’t know who else to go to. Not the police. He didn’t trust them. He told me he’d been afraid to keep it at home. He left me the copies. The pages he considered important. He said he’d come back for them after he talked to someone.

— To whom?

— He didn’t tell me.

Serren took from the folder a thin stack of sheets, copies made on an old photocopier, gray at the edges, the lines handwritten, crooked, the pen pressed hard. Tesa recognized the handwriting before she saw what it said. His big, sprawling letters, with the “a” closed like an “o,” which his third-grade teacher had tried in vain to straighten out.

— He never came back, Serren said.

Tesa took the sheets. She did not read them. She held them in her good hand and felt it shake, she who never shook, not in the ring or out of it.

— And you kept them here. Six years.

— Yes.

— In this folder. With a string.

— Yes.

— And you did nothing.

Serren did not defend himself. He looked at her with that old face, with nothing to hide, and that enraged her more than any lie.

— I was afraid, he said. Not for myself. Or not only. I saw what happened to him. I saw who handled the things that weren’t in the contracts. And I thought that, if these pages didn’t leave this room, at least no one else would disappear over them.

— He disappeared.

— Yes.

Tesa took a step toward him. Her hand in the cast rose by itself to her chin, on guard, and under the cast her fingers tried to close into a fist and could not. Serren did not draw back. He sat in the armchair, old, the empty folder on his knees, and would have let himself be hit.

And Tesa saw it, with a clarity like ring light. How it would be if he were the man. If Serren had given the order, if Serren had sent Kerr, if everything stopped here, in this room with armchairs, with an old man she could touch. For six years she had been looking for someone to pay, and he sat in front of her and did not defend himself.

No, said the one in her corner.

That was all. He only said no, the way a trainer does when he sees his fighter about to hit below the belt.

Tesa lowered her hand.

— You weren’t the one who sent Kerr, she said.

She was not asking.

— No.

— But you know who.

Serren was silent for a long time.

— I know who was paying the company, he said at last. That’s not the same thing. Castell. He’s sat on the committee for twenty years and signs what nobody else wants to sign.

Tesa waited to feel something. For six years she had been looking for a name, and now she had it. She felt nothing. Only a cold distrust, like a boxer’s when an opponent drops his guard too early.

— And I’m supposed to believe you.

— No, Serren said. You’re not. Not without proof. You’re holding the proof now. Read it.

Tesa clutched the sheets to her chest.

At the door she stopped. She turned, her hand on the handle.

— Why now? After six years.

Serren turned his eyes to the window.

— Because I read the paper, he said. And because a girl wrote to me about her brother on a gas station receipt. No one had done that in six years.

That night she fell asleep over the pages at the kitchen table, her head on her arm in the cast and the lamp on. She had read halfway through, up to the month when the truck numbers began repeating and the depths on the axles no longer made any sense, and his sprawling letters grew smaller and more cramped, like those of a man writing with someone looking over his shoulder.

Beneath her tree, Reil stood beside the bright plant with his gloves hanging from one hand. She touched its leaves. Then the lamp grew yellower, heavier, smoky.

— Round I —

The lamps hung low over the ring and buzzed. One had been flickering since the start of the evening, and he had learned to use it: when it went out, his opponent blinked.

The hall smelled of machine oil, sweat and the cheap tobacco of the officers on the front benches, who bet on them with ration coupons instead of money. The war was outside, toward the port. In here there was only the ring.

In his corner, his trainer held the towel over his shoulder. The old man never said anything between rounds. He watched. And after he had watched enough, he said a single word, and that word was always the right one.

— Six, he said now.

Reil knew what it meant. The sixth round. That was where he had to go down. That was what they had agreed with the man in the leather coat who had come to him at the depot, with an envelope and the voice of a man who does not ask. Go down in the sixth, take the envelope, and his sister would eat white bread for a whole month. Refuse, and he would never work in this city again.

He sized up the other one. A boy from the artillery regiment, thick-necked and small-eyed, who hit honestly and hard and thought he was good. He wasn’t. Reil could put him down in the third. He could put him down now.

He did not put him down. He let him hit. He let him believe. That was the part no one had told him when he took the envelope: that you have to let the other one believe.

The fourth.

The fifth. His lip split. The officers in the front row rose to their feet and shouted the boy’s name.

The trainer wiped the blood away in the corner and looked at him. Reil knew, by the way he looked, that the old man had seen everything. The envelope, the man in the leather coat, the white bread.

— Six, the trainer said again.

But this time it was not a count. It was a question.

The bell. Reil stood up.

The boy came first. A wide left hook, which Reil let through his guard to catch him on the temple, as agreed. The hall roared. A right to the ribs pinned him to the ropes, and Reil felt his chest empty. He took one more, on the chin, and his knees went soft.

It would have been the easiest thing in the world, to let them fold all the way.

He didn’t. He came off the ropes with his shoulder and tied the boy up in a clinch, forehead to forehead. The referee split them.

The artillery boy came at him head down, his right drawn back wide, like a man throwing a stone. It was the punch he was supposed to go down to. The whole hall was waiting. The man in the leather coat, leaning against a post at the back, knew it.

Reil watched that punch coming and, at the last instant, without ever having decided, ducked inside it and drove a short punch up under the boy’s chin. Where the boy did not keep his guard, because no one had ever told him he had to.

The boy went down.

The hall fell silent. The lamp flickered, went out, came back on. The man in the leather coat pushed himself off the post and left, unhurried.

Reil helped the boy up. He touched the boy’s glove with his own, once, lightly. That’s how it’s done. After.

❦

Tesa woke with her cheek on the pages and the taste of smoke in her mouth.

She lay still, eyes open, the lamp buzzing above her like those lamps over a ring she had never seen and knew by heart. Her good hand lay on the table, clenched into a fist.

Tesa looked at her fist and remembered, though she did not want to, how she touched her glove to the other fighter’s, in the ring, after every match. That’s how we do it. After. She had said it hundreds of times. She had never asked herself where she got it.

Now she asked.

The phone vibrated on the table, beside the pages. It was almost one in the morning. Krista.

He said he’d write one word every evening. Tonight he hasn’t written anything.

And, a moment later:

Tesa. You’re not asleep. I know you’re not asleep.

— I’m not asleep, Tesa said, when Krista answered on the first ring. What do you want me to do?

— I don’t know, Krista said.

She was breathing fast, as if after a flight of stairs.

— I’ve called him nine times. It doesn’t even go to voicemail. It sounds as if the number doesn’t exist.

— Or as if there’s no signal.

— Where is there no signal in this city?

Tesa looked at the pages on the table, her brother’s sprawling letters, the figures that did not add up. She thought of a man who leaves at night with a backpack and something under his jacket that others want. Who goes to no one he knows. Who wants to draw them after him.

Where do you go when you want to be followed? Where you know the way better than they do.

— Underground, she said.

Krista was silent.

— The block, she said then, quietly. The third one. There was a stripe under it. I measured it with Piter. The investigator asked for it to be left untouched.

— Who else knows about the stripe? Tesa asked.

— Us. Piter. The investigator.

— And Soles, Tesa said.

Krista was silent for a moment.

— And Soles.

Tesa stood up. She gathered the pages, folded them once and put them in the inside pocket of her jacket, next to her heart, where no one could take them without hitting her first.

— Call Maxim, she said. He’s on the road, but call him. Tell him to bring that lamp he wears on his forehead. And not to bring the dogs.

Maxim had brought the dogs.

He had turned the yellow truck around at a weigh station two hours out of town and driven straight to the riverbed, without stopping at the house. He did not let the dogs out. He left them on the front seat, Lucky with his nose against the window and Mina curled up on the driver’s seat, and got out with the headlamp on his forehead and the crowbar in his hand, as on the morning of the footbridge.

— They’ve been with me since yesterday morning, he said, before Tesa could say anything. Where was I supposed to leave them, at the weigh station? And the big one won’t eat. Maybe he’ll eat if we find him.

— And if we don’t find him?

Maxim looked at her in the light of the streetlamp on the road.

— Then I won’t eat either, he said. And that’ll be weird, because I eat everything.

They went down the slope past the temporary fence, under the investigator’s tape. The riverbed was black, and the water still coming out of the two arches could be heard more than seen. Krista went first. She knew the place by heart, with the map in her head and every one of Piter’s measurements. She stopped at the third block without hesitating and crouched to its left, two paces over, where she had stood with her phone raised.

Maxim lowered the headlamp.

The stripe was no longer a stripe. It was a black hole under the edge of the block, big enough for a man to pass through on his stomach. The earth in front of it was churned up, with a long, deep trail in the mud, as if from a body dragged. Over that trail were other tracks. Big. Wide. Smooth as the sole of a rubber boot, without any tread, without a heel. Three lines of tracks, going into the hole and not coming out.

No one said anything for a while.

— I won’t fit in there, Maxim said at last. I’m not saying I’m scared. I’m saying I won’t fit.

— I know, Tesa said.

— I’ll stay here. Facing the hole.

— I know.

Tesa lay down on her stomach in the mud. She held her hand in the cast out in front of her, like a lance, and pulled herself along with the other. The mud got under her jacket, cold, and pressed her brother’s pages to her chest. She didn’t care. Behind her she heard the rustle of Krista getting down too, without questions.

Under the block it was tighter than she had thought. The cast struck the stone, once, then again, and the pain climbed up into her shoulder, white and clean, like a good punch. Tesa gritted her teeth and laughed softly, so as not to swear.

— What’s funny? Krista whispered from behind.

— Nothing. I hit a wall. Again.

Beyond the mouth of the arch the air was warm.

Tesa stopped. It smelled of old stone and something sweetish, like an apple forgotten in a drawer. She had smelled that once before, on the night she broke her hand on a wall a faceless man walked through.

Here, said the one in her corner.

— I know, Tesa said aloud, and Krista did not ask who she was talking to.

The drain climbed. After a few meters they could rise onto their knees, then walk stooped, then upright. Tesa switched on her phone’s flashlight. The brick walls turned to dressed stone, blocks fitted without mortar. The smooth tracks went on along the dry floor of the tunnel, three lines, dark against the stone.

The chamber was empty.

It was round, smaller than the other one, its vault intact. In the middle, on the floor, lay an old flashlight, heavy, metal, switched off. Tesa picked it up. It was cold. On the handle, someone had scratched a K with the point of a nail. Beside it, on the stone, were dark spots, dried, in a line, like drops falling from a nose.

— It’s Kale’s, Krista said, looking at the flashlight in Tesa’s hand. He took it from home.

Tesa was looking at the wall.

Beside the slab, at the height of a man’s throat, the stone was cracked. Not broken. Cracked in a star, like a windshield hit by a pebble, with a small dent in the middle. Tesa went closer and laid the backs of her fingers on the crack. She knew what force it took to crack a stone like that with a hand. She knew because she had tried.

She had the cast to prove it. Farther along the same wall, a straight crack ran from top to bottom, as if drawn with a chisel.

That blow had not been meant for the wall. It had been meant for someone who had stood in front of it and who, at the last instant, was no longer there.

— Tesa.

Krista stood in front of the far wall, her light raised. The walls were covered in carvings: small trees, then forests, then faces hidden behind other faces. Tesa was careful not to look at them straight. Krista was not looking at them. She was looking at the slab in the middle of the wall, small, without a single sign on it.

On the edge of the slab, a flat hand’s height from the floor, there was a mark. A human palm, outlined in the dust on the stone, fingers spread, the way a hand leaves its print when someone catches himself on it as he falls. Blood marked the edge of the thumb.

From under the slab came warm air, slow, in pulses, like breathing.

— He’s in there, Krista said.

Tesa looked at her and saw, for the first time since she had known her, that Krista’s face was no longer polite, or formal, or orderly. It was only frightened.

Tesa put her good hand on the slab.

The stone was warm. Warmer than a stone should be. Under her palm, the stone changed without moving and without creaking. Tesa felt it pull at her. Not at her hand. From somewhere deeper, under her ribs, deeper than the corner where the one with the towel over his shoulder stood. It pulled at her and held her, and she had to pull back with her whole body, as on a rope stretched in a current.

And she remembered.

She did not want to remember. But she remembered. Varren, his palm on another slab, under another arch, on another night, saying Go. I’ve got it in his calm voice, the way he said everything.

Varren standing afterward with his back to the stone, hands in his pockets, as if he had held nothing. And his palms, which she had seen in the lamplight. Dry.

She could feel her own now, wet, pressed to the stone, and her arm was shaking up to the elbow.

Tesa gritted her teeth and did not follow the thought any further. She couldn’t let herself. She knew where thoughts like that led her. They had already led her once, less than a day ago, in a room with armchairs, toward an old man who did not defend himself.

— Go in, she told Krista. I’ve got it.

Krista went through the stone, light first, and disappeared.

Tesa counted. Maybe because that is how the referee counts, while you kneel and listen to your time running out. One. Two. Three. At six her hand began to burn. At nine, her knees. At eleven she heard, on the other side, muffled, Krista’s voice saying a name, then again, louder.

At fourteen, Soles came out through the stone.

He came out half carried, his arm over Krista’s shoulders, white-faced, with dried blood from his nose to his chin. He was clutching to his chest something wrapped in oiled leather. The bandage on his left hand was red through. His eyes moved slowly, like those of someone who has woken in a different room from the one he fell asleep in.

Krista had brought most of his weight through on one shoulder, her jaw set and her eyes on the floor. Tesa, who knew what every kilo cost, said nothing.

He looked at Tesa, and Tesa, her hand still on the slab, found herself on guard.

Soles was standing differently.

She did not know how differently. She knew only that she would have spotted it in the ring from ten meters: feet apart, weight on the heels, the injured side drawn back and the good one forward. The stance of a man who had learned not to fall. And not from her.

— You came, he said.

His voice was hoarse, and it seemed to Tesa that there was an accent in it, something that was not theirs, like a word spoken by a stranger. Then the accent could no longer be heard.

— Krista came, Tesa said. I’m holding the door.

She took her hand off the slab. The stone became stone again. Tesa pressed her palm to her chest and felt it shaking, wet, up to the elbow.

— There was something else, Soles said.

He looked at them, one after the other, frowning, like a man searching for a word on the tip of his tongue.

— I was looking for something. Before. I don’t know what anymore.

Krista held him around the waist. Tesa saw that she did not understand, saw that Soles did not understand either, and did not like it at all.

— You’ll remember later, Tesa said.

— No, Soles said. I don’t think so.

It was not a complaint. He had said it calmly, like a measurement.

They went out the way they had come in, Soles between them and Kale’s flashlight in Tesa’s hand, cold, dead, heavy.

In the tunnel, Soles stopped twice to lean against the wall, and each time Tesa saw him lay his palm on the stone as on the back of an animal he knew, listening to something she could not hear.

Under the block, Maxim pulled them out one by one, by the collar, swearing softly, his headlamp blinding them. He held Soles by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and looked him over from head to toe, like a truck brought in on a flatbed.

— You’re lucky, he said at last.

After a pause that was too long, Soles smiled. The smile came hard, like a stuck door.

— I’ve… I’ve got good hands, he said.

Maxim squeezed his shoulders once, briefly, and let him go.

In Krista’s pocket, the phone vibrated.

Krista took it out by reflex and stood with it in her hand, in the light of Maxim’s headlamp.

Tesa leaned over her shoulder. On the screen was a message from Soles, sent three hours earlier and only arriving now:

here

Krista looked at the word, then at Soles, who stood beside her, wet, blood on his chin, leaning against a stone block set there by his father’s crane.

— I know, she told him quietly, her voice breaking. I know you’re here.

Tesa turned her back to them, toward the water, so her face could not be seen. Her palm was still shaking. She clenched it into a fist as hard as she could, until it stopped.