Chapter XVI · He Must Not Be Alone

Krista drove. Maxim sat in the back with his leg stretched along the seat and his face turned toward the window, Tesa beside him with the cracked cast held to her chest. Soles sat in front and could not remember when he had decided that. He kept one hand on his rib and watched Krista’s hands on the wheel.

The notebook rested in her lap. When she changed gears, she took her hand off it, then put it back right away, gently.

Before leaving Varren’s street, they had stopped beside Maxim’s truck. Soles had fetched the crowbar for him to lean on; it now lay against the rear seat. No one spoke until the first traffic light.

— You’ve got blood on your shirt, Tesa said.

— It’s mine.

— I know it’s yours. I’m telling you so you won’t be surprised when the investigator looks at you.

Maxim made a sound that might have been a laugh if his leg had not hurt.

— He’s going to be surprised anyway, he said. I would be.

The investigator was waiting for them at the top of the stairs, his coat on his shoulders as it had been that morning, except now he no longer looked as though he was preparing to leave. He looked at them one by one: Tesa’s cast, cracked along the edge; Maxim, climbing the steps with one hand on the railing and the crowbar from the truck used as a cane; the dried blood on Soles’s lip. He looked at Krista last, because she was holding something with both hands.

— Second time today, he said. Get inside before someone upstairs sees you.

The office was just as cold. Kerr’s pages still lay on the desk beneath a glass paperweight, their edges aligned. Krista placed the notebook beside them, open to the page Soles had marked, then stepped back and did not touch it again.

The investigator did not sit. He leaned over the notebook with his hands behind his back, without touching it.

The writing was small and heavily pressed, in pencil. Shifts, times, weights. At the bottom of the page, on a line written harder than the rest, the same hand had noted, without accusation: Varren, S.’s client, came looking for me at the port. Asked about shifts. I told him.

The investigator read the line twice. Then he lifted the paperweight from the pages, pulled Kerr’s first sheet beside the notebook, and looked at them for a while side by side, comparing the two.

— He must not be alone when he finds them, he read quietly from Kerr’s page.

No one said anything. Soles stared at the empty desk by the window. He knew the sentence by heart. He did not want to hear it a second time, and he had heard it.

— First thing tomorrow I’m asking for a warrant, the investigator said. For the house and for him. Until then, stay home. All four of you, in the same house if possible. And do not go anywhere on foot after anyone.

— You told us that once before, Tesa said.

— And did you listen?

— No.

— Then I’m saying it again.

He looked at Soles. His gaze dropped, without hurry, to the place beneath his coat where the blade sat, then returned to his face. He asked nothing. Soles was grateful and did not know how to show it.

Maxim refused emergency care twice. The third time, Krista told him she would take him, it would take an hour, and if he did not go, she would take him anyway, back seat and all. The doctor on duty wrapped his ankle in an elastic bandage, told him it was a bad sprain, not a fracture, and that he was not to put weight on it for a week. Maxim said he understood. He walked out of the room on it.

That evening they gathered at Soles’s because the dogs were there.

Lucky was limping too, with his spoon splint, and when he saw Maxim’s bandage he came over, sniffed his leg for a long time, and lay down against him on the couch, pressed close. Mina settled in front of the front door with her muzzle toward the threshold and did not move again.

Krista made soup from whatever she found in the cupboards. Tesa sat in the chair with its back to the wall, facing the door, the way she always did. No one turned on the television. No one said Varren’s name. The name was in the kitchen anyway, between them, like a fifth mug no one had put on the table.

Around nine, Soles got up to wash the dishes. This time Krista let him.

He turned on the water and kept his hands beneath it longer than necessary. In the window above the sink he could see the kitchen behind him, lit up: Maxim with his eyes closed, Tesa with hers open, Krista wiping the same plate for the third time. The last two months were all there in the glass, and Varren had been in every one of them. Bread torn by hand. Mugs found at once in someone else’s cupboard. The crust given to him without asking. All true.

That was the part he could not put anywhere. Not the lies. The truths.

The phone vibrated on the sill.

The name on the screen was first in the call list, as it had been for months. Soles shut off the faucet. Behind him, Tesa had already stood, without making a sound.

He answered.

— You left the gate open, Varren said.

It was his voice. Warm, unhurried, with that smile you could hear even over the phone. Soles gripped the edge of the sink with his free hand and said nothing.

— And the bench raised. You made it lift easily, with one finger. I remembered that. I never thought you’d be the one to lift it.

— Where are you?

— Where it’s quiet. You know the place.

Soles knew it. The warm water at the far end of the old garden, beside the riverbed, where it came out of the ground without asking anyone.

— Bring it, Varren said. Not for me. For what comes after it. You saw today that they don’t stop. They won’t stop at your house, or Maxim’s, or hers. You know that better than I do.

Soles looked at the window. In the kitchen reflected in the glass, Krista had set the plate down.

— The investigator has the notebook, Soles said.

The silence at the other end lasted one moment. No longer than it needed to. Then Varren drew a deep breath through his nose. He sounded relieved.

— Then we have one night, he said. No more. Come. And bring them with you.

— Why?

— Because I don’t want you to be alone.

The line went dead.

Soles remained with the phone to his ear. The sentence had entered him along the same path as it had the first time, in the office, from Kerr’s page, and settled in the same place beneath his ribs. Varren had said it gently. He had said it the way he said everything, as though it were obvious, like the crust at the end of the loaf.

He turned around. Tesa stood in the kitchen doorway. She had heard everything. Krista was beside the table, hands wet. Maxim had opened his eyes and was trying to get up from the couch without waking Lucky.

— Stay here, Soles said.

— No, Tesa said.

— Tesa.

— I told you once to call me at three in the morning. You didn’t. I also told you I’d ask where you were before I came.

She jerked her chin toward the phone in his hand.

— Now I know where you are. There’s nothing left to ask.

Maxim was on his feet. He looked for the crowbar, found it leaning against the wall, and tucked it under his arm like a crutch, with a dignity that did not suit the bandage around his ankle at all.

— I’m not allowed to walk for a week anyway, he said. So it doesn’t matter where I walk.

— You have a sprain.

— You’ve cracked the same rib three times and had your palm stitched twice. Don’t teach me medicine.

Krista dried her hands on the towel. She did not hurry. She dried them finger by finger, the way Soles dried his hands after washing them, and only when she finished did she look at him.

— He called you there with us, she said. That means he wants us there. So we go to show him we came, not because he called us.

— And the investigator?

Krista took out her phone. She typed something short and held her finger over the screen without sending it.

— I’ll send it when we get there, she said. If he comes before then, Varren leaves. If he never comes, no one knows where we are.

Soles looked at all three of them in his kitchen, beneath the bulb Kale had promised for years to replace. He wanted to tell them no. He had the word in his mouth the way he had had Stay in the archive basement. He did not say it.

— The dogs stay, was all he said.

Mina got up from beside the door, looked at them, then lay down again with her muzzle on the threshold. Lucky did not move.

They drove Krista’s car as far as the temporary fence on the canal side. From there, they went on foot. The service gate was locked. So was the small gate. Krista took Key Fourteen from her pocket, the one Varren had placed in her palm, turned it, and opened the little gate only halfway, just as he had advised her. It did not squeak. Krista looked at it for a long time before going through.

The garden was black and wet. The collapsed paths smelled of turned earth, and the greenhouses stood empty in the darkness. Tesa went first. She did not turn on a flashlight. She listened. Now and then she raised her good hand and they all stopped, and she listened farther, head tilted slightly, until she lowered it again.

Toward the far end of the garden, the air changed.

It grew warmer. Not much. Just enough to feel against your cheek that somewhere ahead the ground was breathing. Then they saw the steam, white and low over a sheet of water that never froze, at the edge of the old riverbed between the old stones of the bank.

A folding chair stood open beside the water.

Varren sat in it with his back to them and his face toward the water, hands clasped between his knees. On the stone beside one chair leg stood a mug. Steam rose around him and drifted into the dark, slowly, without touching him.

He did not turn.

— You all came, he said. Good.

Soles stopped three steps from the chair. Tesa stayed to his left, slightly behind, where she could hear everything. Maxim leaned on the crowbar to Soles’s right, at the edge of the stones. Krista stopped last, phone in hand, and sent the message without looking at the screen.

Varren did not turn even then. He picked up the mug beside the chair, took a drink, and set it back exactly on the damp ring it had left on the stone.

— Here I can’t hear anything anymore, he said. I don’t know whether I ever told you what it’s like. I told you it was quiet. Quiet is a bad word. At home, in my head, there are people standing around a tree. They don’t all talk at once. They speak one at a time, and every one of them is right. Here they all go quiet and step back. I sit in this chair and I’m the only one left under the tree.

At last he turned. His face was tired and clear, and his eyes were the ones Soles had trusted since the empty pool. That was the hardest part. He had expected a different face. The man sitting in the folding chair was the same man who brought him warm bread, who had sat beside his hospital bed while he cried, who had emptied a locker at the port so Soles would not have to empty it himself.

How does this man want me to see him?

The question came on its own, the way it did with strangers. Soles had never asked it about Varren. Now he did, and no answer came. Varren did not want to be seen in any particular way. He sat in front of him with his hands open on his knees and let everything show.

— Why? Soles asked.

He did not ask what. He did not ask how. Kerr’s pages told him how, and Kale’s notebook told him when. One word was all that was missing.

Varren looked at the water before answering.

— You didn’t need anyone, he said. Do you know that? You had a father who fixed everything, a mother who knew what you’d eaten for lunch by the way you came through the door, and a house where nothing stayed broken for more than a day. I came to your workshop with a folded plan and a few photographs of an empty pool. You looked at them and told me where the water would bear and where it wouldn’t hold. You didn’t ask me anything. You didn’t need to ask me anything. I was your best client, and that was all.

He opened his hands and looked at them.

— I was always the person people called after something had already happened. At the home, in the unit, everywhere. When nothing happens, no one calls me. I wanted somewhere to stay. Beside you. I wanted you to need me once, just once, badly enough that you could never stop needing me.

— So you killed them.

— I paid a man to kill them. I know that isn’t a difference. I’m telling you so you don’t think I’m hiding behind it.

Krista made a small sound without words. Maxim did not move. Neither did Tesa.

— You were supposed to arrive afterward, Varren said. To come into the yard and find them. And I was supposed to be there. So you wouldn’t be alone when you found them. That was the whole plan. Only Kerr was late. You came through the gate while he was still in the yard, and he panicked and fired at you, even though he’d been told a hundred times not to touch you. I wasn’t there. Maxim called me from the workshop. For three days I sat outside that ward and didn’t know whether I’d done all of it for nothing. And still it happened the way I wanted. When they told you about your parents, I was the one beside you.

Soles could feel the water behind Varren. Not with his eyes. He felt how it rested against the stones of the bank, heavy and warm, how it pushed up into them without stopping. He felt the stones holding. Lower down, he felt the place where stone rested on something other than stone.

The anger came slowly. Not like at the archive, all at once, like a room becoming a yard. It came up from his bones and settled in his palms. Soles felt it gathering there, the way he had gripped the roof tile in Maxim’s yard until it turned to powder, and he knew exactly how much he could let out. He could feel the whole bank beneath them, stones stacked one over another by people long dead, and the place beneath them where one push would bring all of it down, with Varren, his chair, and the four of them along with it. The way he had brought down the temple.

End.

Phenom’s voice, quieter and colder than his own. Soles pictured the man by the low plant, no longer looking past him. That attention had helped him follow a trail; now it rested on the vulnerable place beneath Varren. The answer it wanted was the same.

— Why now? Soles asked. Why did you call me here? You could have left. You can go through walls, can’t you? Or they can. You could be in another country by morning.

Varren smiled. His old smile, warm and slightly crooked, the one he used when telling Soles a weld had come out well.

— Because you have something of mine, he said.

He looked at Soles’s coat beneath the arm, where the blade rested.

— Not mine, he corrected himself. His. But it’s the only thing in this world that can help me. Give it to me, Soles. And they stop coming. Not for you, not for them. They stop tearing through everything, stop coming out of walls at one in the morning. You stop sleeping with it on the nightstand. Give it to me and it ends.

He held out his hand. Palm up.

Soles looked at that palm and recognized it before he knew from where.

The Hunter in his hall, holding Krista by the throat, stretching out his free hand and waiting. Like a customs officer at a barrier. The one in the round room, who had not struck but opened Soles’s fingers from the hilt one by one, with a craftsman’s patience. The one from earlier that day beside the pool, who had let go of his coat to seize his wrist. And earlier still, the night he slept with it pressed to his ribs, the house searched, Kale’s box opened, while he himself lay whole and untouched in his bed, the blade beneath his arm.

They could have taken it at any time. They never had.

Not because they could not reach him. Because they could not take it.

He understood it all at once, whole, the way he understood where an arch carried its weight. The blade could not be taken. It could only be given. Or dropped. That was why they had driven him toward fights, why they had squeezed wrists, why they held out a palm and waited. And Varren, with all his voices, with everything passing through walls after this blade, now sat in a folding chair and asked. Like an ordinary man.

Soles held the one thing Varren could not take from him.

— No, he said.

Varren lowered his hand. He did not look surprised. If anything, he looked relieved. He had asked only to make sure of an answer he already knew.

— I knew, he said. Then do it yourself.

He stood from the folding chair. Not quickly. He stood the way he rose from the dinner table, one hand on his knee. Now he was two steps from Soles, the steam rising from the water behind him, and he opened his arms slightly, palms toward Soles.

— It’s the only way, he said. For me. I’ve tried everything. For years. This water gives me an hour, two. Then I go home and they crowd around the tree again. One day I won’t be standing with them. It’ll be only them, and I’ll be somewhere underneath, like a man who falls under ice and can see the light but can’t find the hole anymore. You know what it’s like. You saw it in the temple. You felt it.

He took one step.

— I don’t want to die just any way. I want someone who knows me to stop me. Really knows me. Not a policeman, not a stranger, not a disease. Someone who knows what I did and why and stops me anyway. You’re the only person in this world who knows me like that. I made you that person.

Soles listened and felt something strange, colder than anger.

He recognized the request. He knew it from somewhere deep, from before himself. People standing in front of death and refusing it. Refusing it with everything they had, for years, for whole lives, each with a reason: an until, something unfinished, someone to protect. Soles himself had told death, so many times without knowing he was telling it: not until I know.

Varren stood in front of him with the same refusal turned inside out. He did not want to live until he finished something. He wanted to die before he himself was finished.

And he was asking Soles to give him that.

The anger in Soles’s palms wavered. It did not go out. It simply had nowhere to go. If he let it out, he did exactly what Varren was asking. If he killed this man, on this bank, with this blade, Varren won. He got what he had wanted from the beginning: Soles beside him at the end, the only person who had come.

Phenom’s attention tightened on the blade.

Kill.

One word. Soles could supply the movement himself, and every reason he had carried here.

Soles knew exactly where. That frightened him more than anything else that night.

— No, he said again.

His voice came out softer than the first time, but steadier.

— I’m not killing you, Varren. Not because I forgive you. I don’t. Maybe I never will. But I’m not giving you what you want. You made sure I wouldn’t be alone when I found out. Fine. I’m not alone now either.

He did not turn toward the others. He did not need to. He could feel them: Maxim’s weight resting on the crowbar, on the stone, to his right; Tesa’s breathing, slow the way she breathed between rounds; Krista’s hand, no longer holding the phone but a stone from the bank the size of her fist.

Varren looked past Soles at them one by one. Something passed over his face that Soles had never seen there. It was not anger. It was a kind of quiet sadness. What he had made had not turned out the way he planned.

— Then I’ll make you want to, he said quietly.

And the steam above the water stopped rising.

It hung over the surface like stretched cloth, motionless, and in that silence Soles heard for the first time how loudly each of them was breathing.

Varren did not come toward him.

He went toward Maxim.

He did not run. He took two steps, and the third could no longer be seen. Soles felt him moving through the stones of the bank, a weight passing from one place to another without crossing the air between, the way pressure moves through a beam when you step on one end. Then Varren was beside Maxim, and the crowbar was already rising to meet him.

Maxim had felt him coming. That was what he told Soles later, wearing the face of a man who did not understand how: he had felt Varren the way he felt ships from an hour away, except the hour had lasted half a second. He raised the crowbar with both hands, crosswise, like the barrier on the bridge.

Varren caught it in one hand. He bent it.

The iron, thick as a wrist, warped in his palm with a long squeal like an old door until the ends nearly touched. Varren did not even strain his face, and he stopped there, as if bending it any further would have been showing off. He took the crowbar from Maxim as if taking a toy from a child and threw it into the water.

— I’m sorry, he told him. I know you were fond of it.

Then he pushed Maxim in the chest with the back of his hand. Not hard. Just enough to put his weight onto the injured ankle. Maxim fell onto the stones with a short sound and did not cry out.

— Look at me, Soles, Varren said without turning. Look at what I’m doing. I’m not going to stop.

Tesa closed her eyes.

Soles saw her close them and understood. Varren made no sound. No footsteps, no rustle of clothes, nothing. But the water did. Water moved out of his way in the puddles on the bank, and the frozen steam shifted when he passed through it. Tesa was listening to the water.

She struck her good wrist against the cracked cast once. Pain shot through her arm into her teeth, white and clean. And the one who had kept apart from her since the quays came.

Varren turned toward her, and she struck before he finished turning. Her good fist caught him beneath the ribs, short and rising from below, with all the weight from her knees and all the weight of the one behind her. Soles heard the blow the way he had heard ten iron cabinets start moving on their rails in the archive.

Varren folded. Then straightened.

— Beautiful, he said. Truly beautiful.

He caught the wrist inside the cast with two fingers. He did not squeeze. He only pressed once, in a single point, with the certainty of a man who knew exactly where bones break the second time. Tesa made a sound through her teeth and dropped to one knee. She did not open her eyes. She did not rise, but neither did she sink any farther.

Soles was already moving. He did not remember deciding to.

It was not the soldier, who had held him upright in the shield line. Not the king or Elias. Phenom had come beside him, close as the wrist Soles had once touched in the garden. The refusal had not driven him away. He waited for Soles to choose where the blade would go. Soles’s body went low and long. The hilt entered his palm on its own, held tight from underneath, the blade turned back toward his wrist, and his feet found a path across the wet stones that he had never walked and somehow knew.

Varren saw him coming.

And for a moment, his face changed. Not with fear. With recognition, like a man hearing a voice from home in the street.

He slipped away from the blade with a movement Soles knew. Not from any fight. From his own body. Elbow tucked, shoulder turned, weight on the back heel. It was the movement Soles himself would make. The movement he had just made, a heartbeat earlier, to get there.

— You taught us yourself, Varren said softly, astonished.

— From your left! Krista shouted.

Soles threw himself to the right. He got his head clear. Varren’s palm caught the forearm he had raised beside it.

The arm struck his chest. Both feet left the stone.

He landed on his hip and slid, the blade tight against his right wrist. The impact emptied his lungs. He tried to get up and found himself on one knee, his left arm hanging too heavily to help.

Varren had stopped with his striking elbow still bent. He could have followed. He stayed where he was and watched Soles try to breathe.

He stopped the blow. That was him stopping.

Soles wanted the point of the blade under that arm. The knowledge came cleanly, with the promise of an end to the pain and the watching. He shut his fingers harder around the hilt and kept the point down.

Krista was still calling. He heard her on his right. He put a foot beneath himself and stood before the others had to come for him. His forearm throbbed with his heartbeat. Varren’s hand was open again.

Krista stood at the water’s edge with the stone tight in her hand, and she was not watching Varren’s face. She was watching his hands. She had seen them hundreds of times and never read them, because they were Varren’s. Now she read them. Before every blow, the thumb of the striking hand passed once over the knuckles of the other, brief, as if over a cord tied around the wrist.

Everyone hides something with their hands.

— His right arm, she said, quieter now, certain. Get low.

Tesa rose from her knee, eyes still closed, and moved under Varren’s right arm just as it came down. She did not hit him. She tied him up in a clinch, cast and good arm around him, forehead against his chest. Varren could have thrown her off at any time. For one moment, he stayed caught.

Maxim had risen onto one elbow and was looking at Varren’s sleeve, pulled up by Tesa’s grip. At the left wrist was a cord. Old, dark. Two knots.

— He has their cord, Maxim said hoarsely, like a man seeing at last the seal he had never asked for. Like the one at the pool.

Varren threw Tesa off him.

And the Hunters came out.

They came out of the old stones of the bank, three of them, the way a man steps from shallow water. The first had his arm bound where Soles’s blade had gone in by the pool. The second limped on the knee Krista had struck. The third was whole. They looked at no one. They looked at Soles’s hand.

Anger showed on Varren’s face for the first time that night.

— No, he told them. Not you.

He caught the first by the throat and slammed him into the bank. The stone cracked beneath the man in a star.

Soles felt the blow land under his own feet, lower than the stone. Beneath the bank, beneath the water, in a place he had never felt before and on which everything rested. Something down there gave by the width of a hair.

The second Hunter passed Varren and came toward Soles with open hands and a craftsman’s patience. He wanted the wrist.

Soles stepped back, and his heel slid on the wet stone. The Hunter closed the distance in the half step it cost him and took his right wrist in both hands, thumbs pressing between the bones, peeling.

Don’t cut him. Don’t give him a reason to make you.

Soles turned the blade flat against his own right forearm and pulled. He tried to brace the trapped wrist with his left hand, but the arm Varren had struck gave under the pressure. The Hunter pulled back. Their weight went into the bank through four feet, and deep down Soles felt a second hair’s width.

The water rose.

Not in waves. It rose behind the Hunter’s shoulder in thin, straight columns like threads pulled upward, and stayed there, trembling. The steam turned gold. Afternoon light, warm as honey, came from nowhere in the middle of the night and lay across the bank. It smelled of wax and old paper. Then salt and tar. Then pine smoke. Then snow.

At the edge of his sight, the others caught hold of things that were not there: Tesa a distant bell over a sea, Maxim something large and burning across the water, Krista a fresh ink stain between her fingers.

And all the voices woke.

He felt his four draw close: Leonatus, Decimus, Elias, Phenom. For a moment the garden’s light lay across the water. Beyond it came strangers who were not his: blackened hands, a man beneath a tall window, the sound of a sea he had never crossed. He had not entered anyone else’s garden. Something was pressing through the warmth, toward all of them, and he could no longer keep the impressions apart.

This is how a person is lost, Soles understood, with a terror that had no bottom. He does not die. He becomes a crowd.

For a moment he was not sure whose hand was holding the blade.

The Hunter felt it. One thumb slid under Soles’s first finger and lifted it off the hilt.

Soles let his knees go. He dropped onto the stones, and the man, holding his wrist with both hands, came down with him, bent over. Soles turned his wrist a quarter inside the grip, edge toward the Hunter’s own fingers. To keep holding on, the man would have to close his hands over it.

He let go and stepped back, limping, and looked at Soles with something like respect.

Every one of those movements had struck down there too. Each blow, each weight shifted through stone, went down into that place like drops on the same stone, over and over. And the stone, which had held for a thousand years, was beginning to give.

Varren stood in the middle of it and laughed.

Softly, face lifted into the afternoon light, eyes closed. The third Hunter came up behind him and struck him in the back with both fists, and Varren did not even turn. He had come here to be killed, not to kill, Soles understood, and he was keeping the rest of himself folded shut.

— Do you hear it? he said to no one. Nothing. You opened it for me, Soles.

— Soles!

Krista had gone along the waterline to where the golden light fell thickest. She stood beside an old slab leaning out of the bank into the water, a tilted stone no one had noticed beneath the silt. A tree was carved into its face, the same as on the slab in the temple. Roots, trunk, branches. One branch stopped before the end, before any fruit. Cut, straight and clean, the way a gardener cuts a branch so the tree will grow true. Beneath it were the temple signs.

Krista looked at the stone, then at the blade in Soles’s hand. Soles saw her do what she did with photographs: look for what was missing. And find it.

— The branch cut before fruit, she read slowly, in the voice she used for a difficult line. It isn’t a weapon, Soles. It isn’t for him. It’s a gardener’s knife.

She pointed with the stone toward the light rising from the water.

— Don’t cut him. Cut that.

Soles looked, with the sight he had used all his life to see where something carried its weight. The breach was not a hole. It was an arch of light and voices raised over the water, and all of it leaned on one point, just past the lip of Krista’s slab, where the threads were thickest. He knew it the way he had known the keystone of the temple vault the night he pressed it and brought everything down.

Now he did not want to bring anything down. He wanted to cut.

Six steps. Three across the stones to the foot of the slab, three up its tilted face to the edge. Between him and the first stood the limping Hunter, flexing his fingers. The third had left Varren’s back and was turning toward Krista. And at the foot of the slab, letting the first Hunter slide down the bank behind him, arms already beginning to open, stood Varren.

Maxim stood. He had no crowbar. He could not put weight on his ankle. He stood anyway, on one leg, and put himself in the path of the limping Hunter with his arms spread, the way he had placed his truck crosswise on the bridge.

— No one passes here, he said.

The Hunter hit him. Maxim took the blow in the chest and did not move. He caught the man by the coat and stayed. He did not leave first.

Krista threw the stone past the uninjured Hunter, into the water, where one of the thin columns was rising.

— The blade! she shouted. Soles, throw it! To me!

The lie came out perfect, without an edge. The uninjured Hunter turned toward her for half a second, as the man at the pool had. Half a second was enough for Tesa. She went in the way she went in when a guard dropped in the ring: from the side, shoulder and cast, carrying both of them into the warm water.

Only Varren remained.

He stood between Soles and that place, arms open, his face wet with light.

— Me, Soles, he said. I’m here. You know exactly where.

He did know exactly where. Phenom knew too and was pushing him, without words, with the whole weight of a life in which killing had always been the cleanest solution. One step. One rising movement from below the ribs, the one he had made a hundred times in another life. And everything would end. Varren would get what he wanted. Soles would have his revenge. And both of them would remain forever on this bank, the only man who had come and the man he had come for.

Soles walked past him.

He did not go around him. He passed so close their shoulders touched, and Varren remained with his arms open, looking after him with a face Soles never saw.

He put his boot on the foot of the slab and pushed upward.

Water ran down the tilted face. His sole slipped across a carved root, and his knee struck stone. He caught himself with his left palm. The torn skin burned; the forearm Varren had struck shook beneath his weight.

Below him, Maxim grunted under another blow. Soles tried to hurry. His boot slid again.

The grooves. Put the edge in, not the sole.

He lowered his weight and set the side of his boot into the carved roots. It held. He tested it before lifting his knee, keeping the blade away from the stone in his right hand. Behind him the water splashed; Tesa was still in it with the other Hunter. He could hear her struggling for breath.

He wanted to look. He kept his eyes on the next foothold.

Three steps up the face. The roots, then the trunk. At the cut branch, the voices pressed so close that he almost put his foot where the stone ended. He felt for the edge with his toe and stopped short.

At the lip there was only water below, steaming gold, and the threads standing up out of it close enough to touch. He stayed low until his breathing settled enough to trust his hand.

He crouched on the edge and reached out with his left hand.

He could feel it beneath his palm, in the air just beyond the lip, a hand’s height above the water: the place where everything bore its weight. It was not warm and it was not cold. It was heavy, like a door held shut with your shoulder for so long you no longer know why.

He raised the blade.

In the garden, Phenom stopped pushing. He looked at what Soles meant to do, head tilted slightly. He had never used the blade this way. Then his attention let go of the hilt and left Soles’s hand there alone.

Soles cut.

There was no sound. That was what he would remember all his life. There was no sound, and then everything sounded at once, differently.

The columns of water fell, all together, with a long splash like a brief summer rain. The golden light went out. The smell of wax and salt and snow disappeared. Tesa’s bell stopped in the middle of a toll.

In the garden, the figures began to withdraw.

Not all of them. Decimus went first, upright, looking once toward the place he had left for Soles beside him. Elias’s attention followed the falling water until Soles could no longer reach it. Leonatus stayed last.

The soldier put his hand on Soles’s shoulder, as he had in the dark beneath the slab.

Still standing.

His grip was firm. Soles had known the man shaking behind a cart, the boy carrying a friend toward warmth, the soldier dying with home in his mouth. He tried to keep hold of that hand.

Then he was gone.

Phenom remained beside the low plant, his hands empty. Soles still held the blade. The man had let him make a use of it that was not a killing; he was watching where it led. Soles did not know whether he approved.

The world grew heavy. Not the stones, not the water. The whole world, all at once, like a wet overcoat. Soles felt what he had until then sensed far away draw tight around him—the city, the hill, the bridge—and leave only the bank, the garden, the street beyond the fence. There was still a great deal. But it was no longer everything.

He dropped to his knees on the stone and breathed. Krista reached him first and knelt.

— Here, Soles said.

Krista did not answer. She took his cut hand in hers and held it.

Maxim lay on his back beside the limping Hunter, hands open on the stones, and Soles heard him say softly, astonished: “Nothing else is coming.” Tesa came out of the water soaked to the waist, the shattered cast held to her chest, and stopped to listen, with a child’s confusion on her face. Krista let go of Soles’s hand and looked at her right forefinger.

The ink stain was gone.

The uninjured Hunter came out of the water and tried to pass through the bank. His shoulder struck stone like stone. He stared at his hands with a fear Soles had never seen in any of them, hauled the limping man up from beside Maxim, and the two ran for the fence like ordinary men, their clothes catching on the wire.

The first one did not run.

He had tried to withdraw into the bank where Varren had slammed him, and had made it halfway at the moment of the cut. His shoulder and right arm protruded from the stone cracked in a star, the gloved hand open. The rest of him was inside. He did not move.

No one went near him.

Varren stood beside the folding chair, his arms still slightly open. Then he let them fall. He took one step toward Soles and his knees failed. He no longer had a mountain inside him. He caught the chair back, sat down slowly, and raised his face.

He was crying. Or laughing. Soles could not tell. Perhaps Varren could not either.

— They’re gone, he said. Two of them. Diplomat and Doctor. They’re not in my garden anymore.

He looked at Soles and smiled through the wetness on his face.

— And nothing hurts anymore. I asked you for one death, Soles. You gave me silence. You don’t even know what you gave me.

Soles stood. His rib hurt, and his palm, where the stitches had torn again. He looked at the man in the folding chair, at his tired, clear eyes, and understood him. That was the worst part. He understood all of him.

He did not forgive him.

Sirens sounded from the canal. Krista took out her phone, looked at the screen, and put it away without saying anything.

Soles bent and dipped his hand into the water at the edge of the bank where the light had risen. He kept his palm beneath the surface for a moment.

The water was still warm.