Capitolul VII · What Is Missing

— You didn’t try, Maxim said to her.

— No.

— Why not?

Tesa shrugged.

— I don’t step on what I can’t see, she said. And I don’t put my hand on it.

She turned toward the way out. Passing Varren, she stopped for a moment without looking at him.

— Neither did you, she said.

Varren took one hand out of his pocket and ran his thumb over the wrist of the other, back and forth, once.

— I brought the coffee, he said. I did my part.

Tesa left the chamber without a word. The beam of her flashlight went along the walls of the tunnel and was lost beyond the bend.

Soles looked at the slab once more. At the cut branch. At the little heap of white dust under the drill hole, which he had stepped in without meaning to and which now had a sole print in the middle. His.

Whoever had left those fresh marks would come again. And would see that someone had been there.

Daylight filled the arch ahead of Tesa. Beyond it, a man crouched beside the open grate, feeding a chain through its bars and an iron ring in the stone.

— Back inside.

He pulled. The grate caught Tesa’s shoulder and drove her against Maxim. Soles stopped behind his cousin; Krista’s light struck the chain over his shoulder. Varren was behind her. The low tunnel gave them nowhere to straighten.

Maxim caught the grate with his shoulder before it closed. Tesa shoved beside him, but her boots slipped on the wet stone. The man took up the chain again. Another few inches and he could fasten its ends outside their reach.

— The bar, Soles said.

Maxim passed it back. Soles tried to reach around him, and his rib stopped him halfway through a breath. The grate scraped closer. He pictured them calling through it, the closed shutters above, nobody answering.

Lower. Wedge it against the stone.

He slid the crowbar beside Maxim’s boot and pushed its end beneath the grate. His cousin stamped it down. Iron struck stone; the closing gap held.

The man reached through to pull the bar out. Tesa caught the loose chain and hauled it inward, pinning his other hand against the bars. Maxim shoved from his shoulder. This time the grate moved.

The man let go and scrambled toward the sheds. Tesa released the chain. It clattered onto the gravel outside.

They crawled out, keeping clear of the swinging iron. Soles knelt until the pressure in his side eased. The man had vanished behind the sheds. Maxim recovered the crowbar; the chain lay beyond the broken latch.

Tesa was already outside. She was standing on the first block, hands in her jacket pockets, looking up toward the road.

— Don’t stand up, she said over her shoulder. Just look.

On the road above the riverbed, about a hundred meters from Ivo’s shed, a car was parked. Gray, clean, the kind you don’t remember even when you look at it. It stood with its nose toward them, and behind the windshield there was no one.

Maxim slowly crouched beside Soles, the crowbar across his knees.

— New rule, he said quietly. If the man in the gray car gets out, we leave. Both of us. No negotiating.

— He’s not in the car.

— Exactly. He got out.

Soles let his eyes run along the riverbed. The gray reeds, the blocks, the footbridge, the stone steps on the other bank. No one. Ivo’s shutters were drawn. Only Varren’s paper cups stood on the edge of the footbridge, one inside another, where he had left them.

— The grate, Krista said. We can’t close it again. The latch is broken.

— And you stepped in his dust, Tesa said, still over her shoulder. If he comes today, he knows today. If he comes tomorrow, he knows tomorrow. He knows either way.

— Then we leave and think about it, Maxim said.

— No.

Tesa got down from the block. Her face had mostly healed since their fight. Soles recognized the set of her jaw, though: she had decided what she wanted before hearing the objections.

— If we leave now, she said, tomorrow the padlock is new, the grate is welded, and there’s nothing left behind that stone. The way there was nothing in their depot. The way there was nothing anywhere. My brother guarded this bank. They carried things past him. And afterward he left the city without his winter jacket.

No one said anything.

— I want to see what’s on the other side, she said. Today.

— Soles said no, Maxim said.

— I know what Soles said.

She looked at him. Soles was holding his right hand pressed to his chest without realizing it. His palm still tingled, and in his chest that place that had widened still pulled at him, like a coat sewn too loose.

— He doesn’t have to touch it again, Tesa said.

— We don’t go beyond another door, Soles said. And if you can’t hold it, we leave.

Tesa nodded. Krista checked her phone battery before putting it away.

Varren had got up from the edge of the footbridge. He looked toward the car on the road, then at them.

— I’ll go up, he said. I’ll stand by the shed. From there I can see both the road and the slope. If anyone comes, I’ll call you.

— There’s no signal down there, Krista said.

— Then I’ll shout.

— You can’t hear shouting down there either.

Varren smiled, warmly, patiently.

— Then I’ll run, he said. My legs are in better shape than his ribs.

He did not wait for an answer. He climbed the slope past the sheds with an even step, hands in his pockets, and stopped at the corner of Ivo’s shed, facing the road. From below he looked like a man waiting for a bus.

Maxim got up and sat down in front of the stone arch, his back to the broken grate and the crowbar resting against his ankle.

— I’m staying here, he said. After you lot, anyone coming in has to get past me.

He tried the grate with his foot, then shifted the crowbar within reach. Soles watched him settle against the stone. It was the same stubbornness that had put him between Soles and Kerr. This time Soles was leaving him outside deliberately.

Tesa bent down and went into the tunnel first. Krista looked at Soles for a moment.

— You don’t have to come.

— Do you?

Krista did not answer. She went in after Tesa.

They went quickly past the boot prints and the upturned crate lid. Soles counted each bent step through the pain in his ribs. The warmth clung to their clothes again.

In the chamber, the slab stood unmoved, with its tree and its cut branch. In the little heap of white dust under the drill hole, his sole print could be seen.

Tesa stopped in front of the stone. She took her hands out of her pockets and held them in front of her, open, looking at them in the flashlight’s beam the way you look at tools you did not buy yourself.

— Do you know why I don’t touch things? she said, without turning.

— You don’t step on what you can’t see.

— That’s what I say.

She clenched her fists and opened them again.

— For a while now, my fists have been heavier than I am, she said quietly. Not heavier in strength. Heavier like… as if someone else were hitting along with me. At the gym I’ve split two bags. The coach said it’s technique. It isn’t.

She looked at her palms.

— And there’s a place I keep seeing when I sleep. A tree. A bright plant among gray ones. A man beside it who knows how to stand when I don’t.

Soles forgot the stone for a moment.

— A garden?

Her eyes came up to his.

— Don’t make me regret saying it.

Soles thought of the night in the mud. Of the blows that had struck him like a beam dropped from a frame. Of the moment he had pushed her off the smooth gravel and her fist had suddenly weighed nothing.

— I felt it, he said.

— I know you felt it. You were the first one who felt it and stayed on his feet.

She knocked her wrists together twice, with the dry sound of tape, though she had no tape on her hands. She rolled her shoulders. She lowered her chin. Then she put both palms on the carved roots.

— Open, she said under her breath, and leaned into the stone.

The stone moved.

Faster than under Soles’s hand, more decidedly, as if it had recognized her. The dust rose from the floor and hung in the air around their legs. The drops on the ceiling stopped at the ends of the stone. The slab drew back without a sound, a hand, two, a step, until between it and the wall there opened a gap a man could pass through.

Tesa groaned. Not loudly, through her teeth. Soles saw her begin to rock, slowly, from one foot to the other, her palms pressed to the stone, as in the ring between rounds, when you have no air left and don’t want to show it. A thread of blood ran from her nose onto her upper lip. She did not wipe it. Her breathing shortened as the gap widened.

Soles remembered the weight in his own hand, heavy and not his. Tesa’s fingers tightened against the stone. She could have let go then. She did not. She took the weight the way you take a blow you could have slipped, and held it.

— Go, she said. I’ve got one round. Three minutes. Maybe less.

— Tesa…

— Don’t talk to me. Count.

Soles checked the time on his phone before pocketing it. He would have to get Krista back through that gap while Tesa could still hold it.

Krista went through the gap first, her phone raised. Soles squeezed through after her, his arm pressed to his ribs, and the air inside hit him in the face, warm and heavy with that smell of earth turned over after rain.

The room beyond was round. The ceiling rose into a vault so high that the light of the phone did not reach the top. The walls were covered in signs, from the floor to as high as anything could be seen, row upon row, cut deep into the stone. They were not letters. They were not drawings either. They were something in between: lines that branched, closed circles, open circles, shapes that repeated with small changes, like a word written in several ways.

Krista stopped in the middle of the room and did not move. The light of the phone trembled in her hand.

— I don’t know this writing, she said. Some of these shapes repeat, but I can’t read them.

— Krista. Three minutes.

— I know.

She began at the entrance and worked around the wall, taking overlapping pictures. Between shots her eyes moved ahead, fixing the next group of signs. She might keep what she saw; the others would need the images.

Watching her, Soles remembered a balance under a laboratory lamp, the man beside it forgetting that night had fallen.

— Stay where you can hear her, he said.

— I can hear her. Go.

Soles looked too, because he could not help it.

On the wall in front of him, among the signs, was a man. Lying on his back, arms at his sides, carved from above, as if whoever had cut him had stood over him and looked down. From the man’s chest grew a tree. Its roots went into his chest, and its branches climbed the wall, among the signs, until they were lost in the dark.

Soles looked at him longer than he should have.

He knew what the world looked like seen from above. He did not know how he knew.

— Soles, Krista said, and her voice was different. Over there.

She pointed with the light to the left, where the wall opened into a small, low gap, the size of a pantry door. Soles bent down and went in.

The room beyond was small and square, with smooth walls and no signs. No trees, no men seen from above. Only bare stone and dust. And in the middle, on the floor, a chest. Krista shone her phone past his shoulder and photographed it from the doorway before turning back to the signs in the larger room.

It was not stone. It was wood, dark, almost black, its corners bound in iron. It was much newer than the room, and that showed at once, the way a plastic chair shows in an old church. On the lid, someone had made notches. Rows of short, deep notches, packed close together, so many that they had thickened into a single knotted band, like a root wrapped around a stone.

Soles felt his left wrist.

It did not hurt. He only felt it, the way you feel a place from which something has just been taken. He rubbed the skin once with his thumb, out of reflex, and stopped when he realized what he was doing.

In the large room, Krista was taking photographs. Beyond the gap, Tesa’s breathing could be heard, long and rough, let out through her mouth at even intervals.

The chest had no lock. Soles lifted the lid.

Inside was a piece of oiled leather, wrapped several times around something long and thin. He rested the bundle on the open lid and unfolded the stiff leather with his good hand.

Beneath it was a blade.

It was not long. A palm and a half, slightly curved, with the edge on the inside, like a grafting knife, like the tools Mary used to cut the roses in autumn at the edge of the greenhouse. Only it was not iron. It was stone. A dark stone, smooth as water, polished to a shine, without a single scratch. The same kind of stone as the slab the tree had been cut into.

Soles lifted it.

Nothing happened.

The dust did not rise. The drops did not stop. His hand did not grow warm. It was a blade, cold and exactly as heavy as it should be, and nothing more.

Just a knife.

He turned it in the light. The edge was perfect. Not a single nick. As if it had never cut anything, or as if it had cut so many times that the stone had learned not to break.

— Soles!

Tesa’s voice. Broken, too high.

— Soles, the round’s ending!

And beneath her voice, far off, from the tunnel, from the white light of day, came a sound they all knew.

The long creak of an iron grate pulled on its hinges.

Maxim had not shouted. Varren had not come running.

Someone was coming in.

Soles folded the leather over the blade with his right hand, bracing the bundle against the lid. He tucked it inside his jacket and closed the chest. If he left it open, anyone coming in would know at once. He had no time to decide what taking it meant.

He came out of the little room on his knees. Krista was still standing in the middle of the round room, her phone raised toward the man lying on his back and the tree growing from his chest.

— Krista.

— One more.

— Krista. Now!

She lowered the phone. She checked the unlit section beyond her last photograph, then pocketed the phone and ran for the gap. There were things she had not seen. Memory could not supply them.

Tesa was still rocking, her palms pressed to the stone. The blood from her nose had run over her lip and was dripping from her chin onto her jacket in slow, heavy drops. Her eyes were open, but she was not looking at anything.

— One, she was saying quietly. Two. One. Two.

Krista went through the gap. Soles squeezed through after her, his arm tight over the hidden blade, and felt the edge of the slab brush his shoulder, warm, trembling faintly, like a large animal holding its breath.

— Done, he said. Tesa. Done. We’re out.

Tesa did not take her hands off the stone.

— Tesa.

Soles put his hand on her shoulder. The shoulder was hard as wood, tensed to the bone. Tesa started, as if woken, and tore her palms from the slab all at once, the way you snatch your hand from a hot stove.

The dust fell. The drops burst on the floor. The slab settled back without a sound, and the tree with the cut branch stood before them as if nothing had ever opened.

Tesa swayed. Soles caught her by the arm, and his ribs flared across his chest, but he did not let go. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and looked at the blood and at her palms. They were dry. Completely dry, in a tunnel where water ran down the walls.

— Thanks, she said, her voice hoarse. For the bell.

— Shut up and breathe.

From the tunnel, nothing more could be heard.

The creak of the grate had died away. No footsteps had followed. No light on the walls beyond the bend. No voice. Only the water, dripping from the ceiling, one drop, then another, after a long time.

— Maxim? Krista called.

Her voice went down the tunnel and came back, thinner.

No one answered.

Soles felt something change in him. The fear did not disappear. It only took a step back, like a man making room for someone else at a table, and in its place came someone cold and patient, who did not ask who or why.

The tunnel was their only known way out. The slab had closed behind them; opening it again would put Tesa back against the stone while someone approached. Soles moved her nearer Krista and faced the tunnel mouth. He could hear better with his right ear turned toward it.

It did not come from the front.

The wall to their left, the smooth one, without a single sign, blurred.

The stone did not move. The air in front of it moved, the way air moves above a hot road in summer. The dust on the floor rose again in front of it, motionless, caught in the beam of Soles’s flashlight. And out of the stone, where there was no door and no crack, a man stepped.

He came out the way you come out of water. First a shoulder, then a leg, then all of him, unhurried. Behind him the air blurred a little longer, then settled.

He looked like nothing. That was the first thing Soles saw, and the thing that frightened him most. He was not tall. He was not broad-shouldered. He had a face you would not remember even if you looked at it, short-cropped hair, and a black coat without any insignia, tight at the sleeves. The left sleeve was rolled up to the elbow.

On his wrist he wore a black cord. With knots.

He had seen that cord before, on the man sitting on the canal parapet the day they went to Krista.

Soles felt his own left wrist like an empty place.

The man was not looking at them. He was looking at the slab. He studied it at length, from bottom to top, from the roots to the cut branch, then bent toward the little heap of white dust under the drill hole, toward the sole print in the middle of it. He did not seem surprised.

Only then did he turn to them.

Soles’s bandaged left hand had slipped under his jacket. He hooked his fingers around the folded leather without closing his palm. Through it he could feel the blade’s curve. He had reached for it before deciding to move. The cold, patient one in him had already measured the distance: three steps. Two, if he threw himself. The man had nothing in his hands. The man was not on guard. The man was three steps from Krista.

The urge to strike came with the smell of hot iron and wet earth. The soldier’s field crowded over the chamber: a movement meant an enemy, a shadow meant someone coming to kill him. Waiting meant giving that man the first blow.

Under the urge lay the immense weight the slab had left in him. He could reach for it now. He had no idea what it would do in a room with Tesa barely standing and Krista within arm’s reach of the stranger.

The man’s hands were empty. Soles looked at them instead of the distance. Krista’s sleeve brushed his arm. She was close enough to be caught by any movement he could not stop.

Soles did not move.

He did not know where he found the strength not to move. It was not courage. It was something smaller and more stubborn, his own, which looked at the man in front of him and saw that those hands wanted nothing. Yet.

He unhooked his fingers from the leather. His left hand stayed under the jacket, within reach of the blade, but he had given up the first strike. In his right arm, the weight from the slab remained. For the first time it did not seem to demand an outlet. He could leave it unused while the man stood there. That was all he knew how to do with it.

The man looked at Soles’s hand hidden under the jacket, at his face, at Tesa.

At Tesa’s hands.

Tesa was holding them in front of her, half closed, the blood drying on her wrists. The man looked at them the way someone looks at a track in the snow, reading it. Her palms were dry. Then he moved on to Soles’s right hand, the one he had leaned on the slab with. The palm was still red and dry.

He did not smile. He did nothing with his face. He only nodded, once, like a man who has checked a calculation and found it correct.

— Two, he said.

He had an ordinary voice. Low, calm, without any accent, the voice of a clerk telling you that you’ve come to the wrong window.

Krista stepped forward, between him and Tesa. Her phone was in her hand, held tight against her chest.

— Who are you?

The man did not answer. He held out his hand, palm up, toward her phone.

Krista did not move.

— No.

The man kept his hand out. He did not bring it closer. He did not draw it back. He stood there, among them, with his palm open and the black cord at his wrist, and waited with the patience of a man who has waited like this many times and has always got what he wanted.

— Krista, Tesa said quietly. Give it to him.

— The photographs are in there. The signs. The chest. Everything we could show someone.

— I know. Give it to him.

Krista turned to Tesa. Tesa was looking at the cord on the man’s wrist. On her face there was neither anger nor mockery anymore. There was something Soles had never seen on her before: a very old fear, without a name, like a child who has heard a story she should not have heard.

Krista put the phone in the man’s palm.

The man put the phone in his pocket without a glance. He took in the slab once more, the tree, the cut branch, then the three of them, one by one, slowly, so as to remember their faces. His gaze stopped again on Soles’s hand hidden under his jacket. It stayed there a moment longer than it should have.

Then he turned toward the wall and walked into it.

The stone blurred, the dust rose, and the man passed through it, shoulder first, the way you pass through a curtain, and vanished. The air blurred a moment longer. Then the wall was a wall again.

No one moved for a long time.

Tesa was the first to sink down, her back against the slab, and bury her face in her dry palms. She was not crying. She was breathing. Long, through her mouth, her shoulders rising and falling.

— Hunters, she said into her palms. I didn’t believe it. My brother used to say. I didn’t believe it.

Soles drew his left hand from his jacket. His fingers shook as he straightened them, and the cuts stung beneath the bandage. The borrowed certainty had drawn back. The trembling remained. His hands shook, his knees, his jaw. He leaned against the wall and quickly took his hand away, as if the stone might blur under him too.

— Maxim, Krista said.

They left. They went through the tunnel as fast as Soles’s ribs and Tesa’s legs would carry them. Past the crate lid, past the lines in the dust, past the boot prints, which they looked at differently now. Daylight appeared beyond the bend, white and narrow, and in it, on his knees, a broad silhouette with a crowbar.

Maxim was exactly where they had left him, facing the road with his back to the grate. When he heard them, he turned so abruptly that the crowbar struck the stone.

— What? he said. What happened? What’s wrong with you?

— Someone came in, Krista said.

Maxim looked at her, at Tesa, at the blood on her face, then at the grate, which hung open on its hinges the way he had left it.

— No one came in, he said. I was here. I didn’t move from here. No one got past me.

— The grate creaked.

— I moved the grate. With my foot. My ankle went numb and I…

He stopped. He saw their faces, and what was on them made him fall silent.

— No one got past me, he said again, more quietly, and this time it no longer sounded like a statement.

Soles came out into the light first. He stood up beside his father’s blocks and raised his eyes to the slope, to Ivo’s shed.

Varren was there. Exactly where he had said he would be, at the corner of the shed, facing the road. Only he was no longer looking at the road. He was looking down, at them. He stood very straight, hands in his pockets, and did not move at all. Not a step. Not a sign.

Up on the road, the place where the gray car had been parked was empty.

Soles climbed the slope slowly. Varren followed him with his eyes until he reached him, and only then seemed to wake. He took his hands out of his pockets. He smiled, almost as usual.

— You’re out, he said. Good. I was starting to…

— Did you see anyone?

Varren looked at him. One second. Maybe less. But Soles saw it, that second, the way you see a part that goes in a quarter turn too hard.

— The car left, Varren said. A few minutes ago. I didn’t see anyone get out. I thought it was just someone who’d stopped to make a phone call.

Soles looked past him at the road. Varren had stayed outside; the man had come through stone. Soles could not make those facts tell him whether Varren had seen anything.

The explanation was calm and in the right order.

Soles believed him.

Almost.

That night, the garden was still above the forest. The tree had grown; the luminous plants had not multiplied.

Phenom looked up when Soles approached. His eyes followed Soles’s hand. Soles reached past the low leaves and touched his bare wrist.

Skin met skin. He snatched his fingers back.

Stand.

One word, rough and impatient. Soles had crouched without noticing. When he rose, Phenom watched his feet.

Leonatus stood beyond the narrow leaves, looking through him as before. Soles wanted to ask about the carved branch and the warm stone. The soldier did not turn.

Soles touched the narrow leaves. The next thing he knew was cold. He had not chosen a memory.

— I —

Winter caught them on the bank of a river with no name.

Maybe it had a name. Leo had not learned it. The sergeant with the sunburned face, whose face was now frostburned, had told them only that they would stay there until the ice melted, then move on south, where the war was that had not yet reached them. Until then, the war was the cold.

The camp spread over a slope beneath a bare hill, among ruins. No one knew whose they were. They were stones too large and too smooth for any hands in the region, set down without any sense: a wall that enclosed nothing, a step that climbed nowhere, a pillar lying on its side, one face polished like water. The men tied their horses to them and dried their foot wraps on them. No one looked at them longer than you look at a boulder.

Except for one.

It stood at the edge of the camp, sunk halfway into the side of the hill, like a door someone had buried and forgotten to dig out again. It was two men high and smooth as frozen water, and on it someone had carved a tree. The roots went down into the ground and were lost beneath the snow. The branches rose and spread at the top, out to the edges. Only one, on the left, stopped halfway, cut clean.

The stone was warm.

Leo had found that out in the second week, when snow settled everywhere except in a half circle in front of the tree. There the ground stayed black and soft. The veterans slept by it. Not all of them.

Seven or eight, the ones who had already been through other winters and other camps. They spread their blankets on the black ground, their backs against the stone, and slept like babies, while the rest of the camp shivered until daybreak and counted their toes in the morning.

— Whoever sleeps up against it, one of them had told him, a man with half an ear, one evening when Leo had stared too long, dreams of strangers’ deaths. You’re too young for strangers’ deaths. You’ve still got your own to make.

The men around the fire had laughed. Leo had laughed too, so as not to be the only one who didn’t.

The miller’s son had not laughed. He was coughing.

They had left together from the hill by the village, on the same morning, under the same flag. He was a year younger than Leo, though he had sworn at the recruitment table that he was older. The officer had seen his hands, white with flour, and signed without asking anything more. He was allowed to sign for anyone who could hold a spear.

His cough had started at the end of autumn. Now it did not stop. It came at night, from deep in his chest, with a wet sound, like a bellows with a hole in it. During the day he hid it.

At roll call he stood straight, his face white, his lips blue, and answered loudly to his name. At night he curled up next to Leo, under their two blankets laid one on top of the other, and shook so hard that Leo shook with him.

One night, after the frost had hardened the tent ropes, the miller’s son stopped shaking.

Leo woke because of the silence. He did not know what had woken him. Then he realized he could no longer hear the cough. He touched the boy’s cheek. The cheek was cold. Not cold like a man in the cold. Cold like a thing.

The boy opened his eyes when Leo shook him. He looked at him as if from the bottom of a well.

— I’m warm, he said.

Leo knew what that meant. He knew it from his grandfather, who had once found a shepherd in the snow and carried him to the village on his shoulders, and who had told the story at every table afterward: He said he was warm. When they say they’re warm, you have until morning. If you haven’t warmed them by then, you have nothing.

He got up. He lifted him too, blankets and all, and dragged him through the snow, between the tents, past the dead fires, to the edge of the camp, to the black half circle in front of the stone tree.

The veterans were asleep. Seven, in a row, their backs to the stone, under thick blankets. Between them there was not a hand’s width of room.

Leo stopped at the edge of the black ground. He could feel the warmth from there, on his face, like the mouth of an oven. The miller’s son hung from his arm, heavy, his head fallen on his chest.

— Make room, Leo said.

No one moved.

— Make room! he said louder. He’s sick.

The man with half an ear opened one eye. He weighed them both up. He closed the eye again.

— We’re all sick, he said. Go and sleep. Roll call in the morning.

— He’ll be dead by morning.

— Then he won’t need the room.

It was not a joke. The man had said something he knew and had said before, perhaps, to other boys, in other winters. He turned onto his side, facing the stone, and pulled the blanket over his good ear.

Leo stood there in the snow, with the boy hanging from his arm.

He knew what he should do. Go back to the tent. Rub the boy’s hands and feet until daybreak and pray, though he was not sure to whom. There were seven veterans. He was one, with a half-dead boy in his arms. The man with half an ear had hands like shovels and a knife at his belt, and Leo had seen what he had done with it to a mule driver who had once stolen his ration.

He was afraid.

He had not been afraid on the hill by the village, under the flag, with the smoke of their house rising straight from the chimney. He had not been afraid at camp, on the march, at the first roll call where the sergeant had called his name and no one laughed. Now he was. It was a cold fear that climbed up from the soles of his feet, and he did not know what to do with it.

He laid the boy down carefully at the edge of the black ground, his feet in the snow and his back toward the warmth. Then he stepped over the first veteran.

He grabbed the man with half an ear by his blanket and pulled.

The blanket came. The man did not. He rose onto one elbow and looked at him. The others woke and sat up around Leo, blocking his way back to the boy.

— Get out of here, boy, the man said, almost gently.

— Make room for him.

The first punch caught him in the mouth. He did not see it coming. He found himself on his knees in the warm earth, the taste of blood on his tongue. A kick caught him in the ribs and drove all the air out of him.

He curled up. A few more came, in his back, his shoulder, the back of his neck, with the laziness of men woken from sleep who want to get back to it.

Then they stopped.

Leo stayed curled up, his cheek pressed against the stone. It was warm. Not like an oven. Like a hand laid on your forehead.

— Enough, someone said. Leave him. He’s a child.

The veterans settled back down one by one. Leo lifted his face from the stone. He had ended up lying exactly between two of them, on a strip where no one was.

No one had driven him off.

He crawled back, took the miller’s son under the arms, pulled him onto the black earth and laid him down beside him, his back to the stone.

The veteran on the right shifted a few fingers’ width to the side without opening his eyes. Maybe in his sleep. Maybe not.

Toward daybreak the boy began to shake again. Leo almost cried for joy. Whoever shakes is still there.

Above him, the carved tree climbed toward a sky that was beginning to pale. From down there he could see that the cut branch had not been cut by time. It had been cut by a hand. Straight. Decisive. The way his father cut an apple branch so the tree would grow straight.

He put his fingers in the cut. The stone was warmer there than anywhere else. Nothing happened.

He sat with blood in his mouth until morning and understood that the war was not something waiting in the south after the ice melted. It was already here, with half an ear and a knife at its belt. And you did not win it. You paid for it.

At roll call, the sergeant saw his mouth and asked nothing.

— Leonatus, he called.

— Here.

No one laughed anymore.

❦

Krista drew until the pencil wore down to the wood.

Her phone was in a stranger’s pocket. What she had seen in the round room was not. She set the signs down in a spiral notebook, group by group, as they had stood on the walls, without knowing what any of them meant. Exact was the only thing she could still prove to herself.

Around three, her head went down on her arm.

She stood beneath a tree she had never seen and knew it was hers the way she knew her own handwriting. Gray outlines of plants stood around its roots. One had pale leaves, lit from inside along their veins, and it smelled faintly of wax.

A flat stone lay at its base. A name was cut into it.

Anselm.

No one stood beside the plant. Krista bent and touched a leaf.

— Leaf I —

For thirty-one years, Anselm had written what he was told. Every autumn, as the carts came in at the lower gate, he entered in the ledger what the stewards dictated.

That spring brought hunger. Brădet ate elm bark until May, and at the start of summer the miller climbed to the manor with the village tally. Forty notches. The lord asked for the autumn ledger. It said twenty-five, in Anselm’s hand.

The administrator stood beside the lord’s chair, his hands behind his back.

— His handwriting, he said. Anyone who knows it can tell.

Inside the belly of the first letter, where the loop closed, there was a stroke as thin as a hair. Anselm could see it from three paces away. No one else did. Pointing to it would only prove that he had known and written it anyway.

— It’s my handwriting, Anselm said.

They hanged him at the lower gate on a sunny morning. The last thing he thought of was the tiny line. That it would remain in the belly of the letter after him. That perhaps one day someone would look.

❦

Krista woke at four with her cheek on the notebook. The smell of wax was still in the room. There were no candles in her apartment.

Soles woke with the taste of iron in his mouth. His lip was whole. The taste remained, as after a dream in which you have bitten something.

Mina was asleep on his feet. Lucky lay in the bedroom doorway, watching him. When Soles sat up, his ribs reminded him of the day before. The tunnel. The warm stone. Tesa’s dry hands. The man who had stepped out of the wall the way you step out of water and said a single word.

Two.

He opened the nightstand drawer. The blade lay wrapped in its stiff leather, beside his phone charger and an old box of Mary’s buttons. He put his hand on it through the leather. It was cold. Only cold. And yet he thought of an apple branch cut straight, so the tree would grow the way it should.

He closed the drawer.

The phone vibrated. Maxim, sent just after five, from the room down the hall.

No one got past me. I know no one got past me. And yet someone did.

The spare room was empty. Soles followed the sound of a wrench into the yard. The hood was up. Maxim lay underneath on cardboard, only his legs showing.

— Came to see if I’ve hanged myself? came from under the truck.

— Came to see if you slept.

— I lay there. It’s almost the same.

Soles lowered himself onto a crate by the front wheel. His ribs let him sit only on the second try.

After a while Maxim came out on his back, pulling himself along with his heels. There was grease on his forehead and his eyes were red.

— I was there, he said. With the crowbar. With my back to the hole. I saw the road, the slope, the shed. I saw Varren’s cups on the footbridge and a sparrow that landed on them. And someone got past me.

— You didn’t see him because he couldn’t be seen.

— That’s worse, not better.

He rubbed his face with his palm and smeared the grease from his forehead down onto his cheek.

— After Kerr, I kept thinking I should have stayed closer. So this time I was there from the start. I watched the damn entrance. And it was still for nothing. If I’m no help even when I’m there, he said quietly, then what good am I?

Soles looked at the truck. The raised hood. The exposed engine, with one hose taken off and laid on the fender.

— What’s wrong with it?

— It’s losing fluid somewhere. I can’t find where.

Soles got up from the crate, his hand on the wheel, and bent over the engine as far as his ribs allowed. Not at the hose that had been taken off. At the one beside it, which ran down under the block to a place nothing could be seen without a mirror. A dried green streak marked the block beneath it.

— You have a mirror?

— In your shed. Top shelf, beside the clamps…

Maxim stopped.

— Why?

— There’s dried coolant under the hose behind it. Let’s look before we take anything else off.

Maxim went into the shed and came back with the mirror. He pushed it under the block, the flashlight in his other hand, and looked for a long time.

— The clamp, he said. It’s cracked underneath. From the front it looks perfect.

— From the front it always looks perfect.

Maxim turned the mirror over in his hand.

— Last time it was the pump. And you said you had a good drill bit.

— Now I have a good mirror.

Maxim snorted. It was not quite a laugh, but it was closer than anything all morning. He sat back down on the cardboard by the wheel, and this time his shoulders were not held so high.

By noon he was asleep there, sitting up against the tire, the mirror still in his hand. Lucky lay across his boots. Soles brought a blanket from the house and did not wake him.

The tire at Maxim’s back was warm. Then it was rough. Bark.

He sat beneath a tree he had never seen, in a garden without color. Gray outlines of plants stood around its roots. One shone, low and dark, its leaves stiff as needles. It smelled of pitch.

At its base lay a flat stone with a name cut into it.

Tertius.

No one stood beside it. Maxim reached out and closed his hand on the needles.

— Fire I —

Tertius had kept the fire on the harbor tower for twenty-two years. He could feel the grain ships an hour before anyone saw them, the way old bones feel weather. It was a gift of the tower. He had never left the tower at night to learn otherwise.

His son fished beyond the rocks with a lamp in the bow. That night the wind turned after midnight.

Tertius piled wood onto the fire, enough to last until daylight, and went to the railing. His son’s lamp was out there beyond the white line of breakers, very small. It bobbed. Then it was gone.

The ships were still far to the south. An hour, perhaps more.

One hour, he told himself. I go down, get the boy out, come back up.

He rowed toward the rocks with his face to the tower. Down on the water, he felt nothing. Not the rocks, not the waves, not the ships. Away from the tower he was an old man in a small boat in the dark, like every other man on the sea.

He found the boy clinging to the overturned hull and hauled him in. He did not feel the wave coming.

The last thing he saw, from the water, with his son’s hand gripping his tunic, was the tower. The fire had burned down to embers. Beyond it, a ship’s lantern was coming straight toward the breakwater.

Tertius tried to shout. His mouth was full of sea.

❦

Maxim woke with the blanket over his knees and the smell of pitch in his nose. Nothing in the yard was burning.

That evening they gathered at Soles’s house.

Krista came first, with a new, cheap phone still in its box and a spiral notebook under her arm. Maxim came in from the yard with washed hands and a bag of pretzels. Tesa arrived last, with a fresh bruise below her eye.

— Gym, she said when Soles looked. You can stop feeling responsible for that one.

Varren’s folding chair stood open by the corner of the table. Varren had not come. At noon he had written: Can’t make it today. A problem that won’t solve itself. I’ll come tomorrow with bread. Look after those ribs.

Tesa looked at the empty chair and sat nearest the door without taking off her jacket.

— I checked my account this morning, Krista said. The last photograph uploaded at ten past eleven, up on the footbridge. Varren’s cups. Everything from the tunnel stayed on the phone.

— And the phone’s with the man from the wall, Maxim said.

She opened the notebook to rows of signs, grouped as they had been on the walls.

— These repeat. The small marks beside them change. I don’t know what they mean.

— You remember all that? Maxim asked.

— What I looked at. I can’t prove these came from a wall.

The man had taken the photographs. He had not taken everything.

He had inspected the slab and the fresh drill dust, then their hands. He had not asked their names.

Two.

— I think he came to check the door, Soles said. He looked at our dry palms and counted two.

— And the phone? Tesa asked.

— It leaves us without photographs. Whatever else he wanted, he’s made that harder to prove.

— And easier to deny, Krista said. Keep the drawings. Don’t treat them as a translation.

A lamp seemed to come on inside Soles. The questions arranged themselves more neatly than they had all day. Elias’s patience, or something of it, had reached him. It was easy to trust the feeling. He still had to check the facts.

He drew Krista’s notebook toward him, turned to a blank page and took the pencil from her hand. She let him take it, surprised.

— Kerr, he said.

He wrote the name. Under it, a line.

— The guard says the cell stayed locked. No visitor overnight. They told us his heart, pending the examination. He wrote two pages. Now they can’t find them.

His handwriting came out smaller than his own. More cramped. He did not notice. He drew a box around the lines, the corners joined.

— A locked room. Missing pages. Yesterday we saw a man enter without using a door.

The silence settled over the table like a blanket.

— The man from the wall, Maxim said.

— Or someone like him.

The possibility fitted so neatly that Soles wanted it to be the answer. He drew another line under the missing pages.

— Soles.

Tesa was not looking at the notebook. She was looking at him.

— Say the other part too. If someone took the pages, who was meant to read them?

— The police. His lawyer. I don’t know.

— He asked for you.

She leaned across the table.

— You’re making it a problem about getting into a cell. Kerr wanted to tell you something after he’d confessed. If someone silenced him, maybe it was to stop you hearing it.

Soles put the pencil down on the notebook.

The lamp in him went out. Not all at once. It grew small, then disappeared, and in its place remained his kitchen, with Maxim’s pretzels, the empty folding chair, and Tesa, who was still leaning across the table, the bruise dark under her eye.

He asked for me. Soles had known that for days. He had turned it into a question about locks.

What did you want to tell me?

Maxim was no longer at the table. He stood at the window, his back to them, looking out at the truck with its hood still raised.

Krista drew her notebook back across the table and read the box he had drawn. She did not look at the lines first. She looked at the handwriting, small and cramped, then at his hand.

— One correction, she said, and took the pencil. The guard didn’t see that the cell stayed locked. He says it did. That’s his statement, not a fact.

She wrote according to the guard beside the line and underlined it once.

— And the pages, she went on. Someone told the investigator they existed. That person saw them. That’s a name we don’t have.

She drew a second box under his, with a question mark inside. It made his look careless, and more useful.

Maxim turned from the window.

— So what do we do?

They all looked at Soles.

He got up. He went to his room, opened the drawer of the nightstand, took the leather bundle and came back with it. He set it between the pretzels and Krista’s notebook and unwrapped it, layer by layer, with his good hand.

The blade lay on the leather, curved, smooth, dark. The ceiling lamp slid over it without catching on anything.

No one spoke.

— From the chest, Soles said. In the small room, behind the round one.

— You took it while I was holding the door, Tesa said.

— Yes.

— And you didn’t say.

— I didn’t know what it was. I still don’t.

Maxim came back to the table. He did not sit.

— You walked past me with that under your jacket.

— I walked past you with a cracked rib. You didn’t notice that either.

Maxim opened his mouth and shut it again.

Krista bent over the blade without touching it. She studied the edge on the inside of the curve, the sheen of the stone, the small hole near the base where something had once been fixed.

— It’s the same stone as the slab, she said.

— And the ruins, Soles said, before he could stop himself.

Krista looked up.

— What ruins?

He had never seen ruins. He had never slept in a camp under a bare hill, his mouth full of blood. Yet he knew those stones, too large and too smooth for anyone’s hands.

— From a dream, he said. It doesn’t matter.

Krista let it pass. She did not need to write it down.

— Does the man from the wall know it’s gone? Maxim asked.

— He didn’t go into the small room while we were there. I closed the lid. That’s all I know.

— Then he finds out the first time he looks, Tesa said.

She clenched her fist on the table, then opened it. Her eyes went once to the folding chair by the corner.

— You don’t tell anyone else about this.

— Who would I tell?

Tesa did not answer.

Soles wrapped the blade again.

— We’re going back. Tonight.

— Why tonight? Krista asked. She wanted the reason, not an argument.

— Because he counted two. Someone who counts comes back to check the count. If we go tomorrow, we go when he wants.

— And the signs, Krista said. Before someone cleans the walls.

— And my brother, Tesa said.

Maxim tied the bag of pretzels shut and put it in his jacket pocket, like a ration.

— This time I’m not standing with my back to the hole, he said. I’m coming in, and I’m watching the walls.

They left after eleven. Mina lay down on the mat when she was told. Lucky stayed upright behind the glass, ears forward, watching them to the gate.

The blade was under Soles’s jacket, against his ribs, where it hurt anyway.

Under the streetlight by the gate, someone was standing.

He was leaning on the fence, hands in his coat pockets, a paper bag at his feet. He straightened when he saw them.

— I said I’d come tomorrow with bread, Varren said. I changed my mind.

He smiled. The same warm smile, without surprise. When he took his hands from his pockets to pick up the bag, Soles saw the thumb of his left hand moving slowly over the wrist of the other. Back and forth.

It did not stop.

No one told him to go home.

Soles thought about it three times on the way. Each time Varren was beside him, asking Maxim about the clamp, laughing softly when Maxim told him Soles had found the crack with a mirror, like a dentist.

It was Varren. The man who had stayed beside a hospital bed when there was no one else in the room. Soles could not make those weeks fit a man who should be sent home.

Tesa walked last, ten paces behind, and spoke to no one.

At the boat ramp there was no car. Ivo’s shed was dark.

They went down the slope by the light of a single lamp, the one on Maxim’s forehead. The reeds rustled, though there was no wind. On the footbridge, Varren’s paper cups were gone.

Maxim stopped first. His lamp dipped toward the stone blocks.

The grate was open.

Not hanging crooked on its broken latch, as they had left it. It was propped wide against the stone, and the earth around the arch had been swept smooth, like a shop entrance on opening day.

— He’s left the door open for us, Maxim said quietly.

— He’s expecting us, Krista said.

— He was expecting us yesterday too, Tesa said from behind. We just didn’t know.

At the table Soles had said they would go when they chose. The man had counted two and swept the doorstep.

— We can leave, Varren said.

He stood at the edge of the footbridge, facing the hole. Maxim’s lamp lit one side of his face and left the other in the dark.

— There’s no shame in it. We go home. Tomorrow we think. The grate isn’t going anywhere.

— The signs might, Krista said.

Varren looked at Soles. Only at him.

— What do you want?

He asked it the way he asked everything simple. This time it felt like a hand held out, the kind that can pull you up or keep you where you are.

— I want to know what Kerr was going to tell me, Soles said.

Varren nodded. He was the first to step down from the footbridge. He stopped by the arch, hands in his pockets, and waited for them.

All five of them went in.