Chapter XI · The Part I Chose

The blade was below the Hunter’s chest when Soles saw it. There was time to recognize the point, and then there was more time than there should have been.

Rain hung bright against the window. The knife kept coming.

Soles turned toward the stone partition. The point missed his chest and opened his shirt along the right ribs. Heat followed it. His left palm met the Hunter’s wrist before the man could draw back.

The stretched moment ended.

He knew this turn. The woman in the training jacket had made him fail it until his feet stopped trying to stay behind.

Except he was on a bed.

He drove his heel into the mattress, brought his shoulder beneath the reaching arm and turned with it. Phenom found the opening. The forester’s quiet kept his eyes on the hand, not the face. The movement itself had to be his own. His bandaged forearm pulled hard enough to make his grip falter.

The Hunter stumbled against the bed. Soles followed before the wrist could escape, using his weight to take the man over its edge. They struck the floor together, Soles above him, the knife arm forced wide beside the chair.

His side hurt. The Hunter was stronger on the floor than he had been in the turn. Soles put a knee across the upper arm and reached for his own knife with his right hand.

The other man drew up one leg.

Soles saw the left hand go to the ankle. A short, dark shape came free beneath the pant cuff.

He moved before he knew its name.

His left forearm struck the rising hand as he turned his head away from it.

The shot filled the space beside his head.

Something struck the wall beyond his right ear. White grit hit his cheek. The room rolled as he tried to follow the pistol; his knee slipped off the arm, and the hand he had been holding tore free.

He could see the Hunter moving. He could not make the movement and its sound belong to the same place.

His own blade came up between them. The man jerked away from its point. The pistol struck the bed frame and dropped; Soles heard none of it. He caught the mattress with his left hand and tried to rise.

The window burst outward.

Then there was only rain beyond it.

He remained on one knee. Someone shook the door. A mouth was calling from the other side, but his right ear held one long, impossible note, and the words from the left seemed to arrive through a wall.

He tried to say wait.

His mouth had worked. He could feel that much.

The woman from the desk came in with a lamp. She stopped at the window, looked at the hole in the plaster and put the lamp down so carefully that Soles wanted to tell her she could drop it if she needed to.

He got onto the bed before she tried to help him.

For several minutes, every thought returned at once. Bull on the floor. The gun. The man at the loop in the woods. Krista asleep somewhere he could no longer picture without the window breaking above her. The knife that had almost entered his chest.

He kept reaching for the instant in which he had been faster. It would not come back. Nothing in him answered in a way he could use.

So he looked at the lamp.

One flame. A chair beneath his phone. Water crossing the sill and darkening the boards.

Cold air reached his face through the broken window. He drew it in slowly enough to feel where his side resisted, let it out and watched the flame lean. On the next breath he could hear the rain in his left ear.

He stayed with that.

The woman was asking whether she should send for somebody. This time he understood her.

— A cloth first, he said. Please.

He had to repeat it more quietly.

She brought one. He pressed it beneath his torn shirt and waited until he could stand without the room tilting. Phenom had offered the turn. Haya’s quiet had come when he needed to see. Neither had counted these breaths for him.

The pistol lay against the bed leg. The Hunter’s knife was gone. Soles did not pick the pistol up yet. He looked at it the way he would look at a tool someone else had left running.

Soles crouched beside the chair. No wet footprints led from the door. There was damp on the stone partition at the head of the bed, a hand-shaped smear already losing its edges. He had felt for someone outside the room. He had lain down beside the wall.

He put his phone in his pocket. The screen was dark. He did not wake it; there was nobody he could call at this hour who would not hear it in his voice.

Through the window he could see the yard and the low roof beneath it. Glass shone on the tiles. He climbed down to the roof, keeping his right side away from the sill, then dropped into the yard.

The gutter emptied beside his boots. Every patch of earth was taking new marks and losing them. At the gate, the lane divided toward the road and the forest. He found blood on a shard of glass and nothing he could follow beyond it.

He listened. The rain filled the places a footstep would have occupied. Somewhere toward the forest a dog started barking and stopped, the way dogs do when someone they know walks past, or someone they do not know walks past carefully.

He could go into the woods and give the man another hour of darkness to work in. Soles stood at the gate until he could admit that was what going after him would mean.

He went back inside.

The stairs took longer than they should have. On every step the right side of the world stayed silent, and twice he turned his head toward a sound that was already behind him.

The woman had covered the broken window with a blanket and gone without asking him anything else. It lifted and settled with the wind. He wrapped the pistol and put it with the agency file, then sat where he could see both the door and the wall.

Twice before dawn the house settled around him, a beam ticking in the cold, a door somewhere below, and both times his hand was on the knife before he had decided anything. Both times he made himself take it off again, finger by finger, and look at what was actually there: the blanket breathing in the window, the lamp, the wall. The wall was only a wall. He watched it anyway.

He tried to remember the face from the lightning.

A pale surface. Eyes that had been looking at his throat. Every time he fixed one feature, another slipped away. It was like trying to remember a man through somebody else’s mask.

By dawn, he had stopped trying to make that into a description.

He spread the map on the chair instead. His hands were steady. He noticed that, and did not trust it.

In the morning, Soles marked the places from which a man could watch the charcoal road without showing himself on it.

At the first mark his hand stopped. A hollow open on three sides. He could not explain why it troubled him until he imagined waiting there after dark, with somebody able to come through the trees behind him.

He crossed it out.

At the mouth of one cave the ground rose steeply behind the rock. At another, the path could be seen from inside. Two old forest cabins stood where the ravine narrowed, each with an approach a man could watch from a window.

He circled those.

The forester’s preferences reached him as small refusals: too exposed; nowhere to hear the approach; water that would cover every other sound. Soles checked each against the contours. One of the useful-looking ridges had no path to it. He left it for later.

He had slept less than an hour. The cloth against his ribs had been replaced by a dressing; turning still pulled it. His right ear had begun admitting sound again, thinly, beneath the ringing. At the stairs he had missed someone calling from that side.

He turned the map so the charcoal road ran away from him.

I can’t hear properly. I don’t get to forget that because I’m angry.

He left by the front door and watched the upstairs window until the road took it from view.

The first cave held water, old droppings and a rusted pail. He stayed outside its mouth. A man could have watched him kneel there from the trees above, and Phenom’s attention kept returning to those trees.

At the next turn he found a cord crossing the path. He saw where it entered the leaves and backed away without touching it. Going round took him into mud below the bank; he tested it with a branch before trusting his weight to it.

Nobody was making him hurry. That was another thing anger kept trying to hide.

By midday he had checked the lower cabin. Cold ash, a door swinging in the wind, no mark beneath the spring’s muddy edge. The upper cabin lay beyond the ravine. Its path came to a footbridge of two thick beams and old boards, narrow enough to cross in single file.

Soles stopped before the trees ended.

Across the gap, the path entered firs again. Below the near end of the bridge, a shelf of rock disappeared beneath an overhang. He could see neither its back nor what stood inside it.

A pale breath rose from under the rock.

Wind broke it apart. Nothing rose from the wet bridge or the dark water below.

He waited.

Another small plume, in the same place.

He settled behind the tree rather than take the next step.

The bridge gave a man one place to cross. The shelf beneath it would put a knife beside a traveler’s ankles. Soles looked at the boards, then at the narrow lip farther down the near wall. He could reach that lower ledge by backing up to where the bank sloped into the ravine. It passed below the overhang.

He would have to come back underneath the man who was waiting for him.

His side tightened as he pictured the climb.

Above the bridge, a small bird was turning leaves beside the path. It flicked one away, hopped after something beneath it and came back. Soles watched long enough to see what it did to a loose pebble.

He took the dried berries from his food packet.

He placed them out of sight of the shelf, beside a curl of bark that barely held a few small stones. A touch would spill them onto the rock above the bridge. Then he withdrew into the trees and threw one pebble farther up the path.

The plume stopped coming from the middle of the overhang. A faint scrape reached his good ear from its nearer edge.

He left the trees by the way he had come.

At the slope he went down on his heels and one hand, keeping his bad side uphill. The lower ledge was wide enough for his boots. He followed it back toward the bridge until the overhang hid the sky.

Above him, a boot ground once against stone.

He stopped beneath it. The knife was free in his right hand, its chain gathered short. He could not see the bird now. It might never come back.

He waited with his forehead against the cold rock, breathing through the part of his chest that did not pull at the dressing.

❦

Under the overhang, the Hunter listened to the path above the bridge.

The boy had heard something. That first pause had been too long. Then a stone had moved farther up the path, and the footsteps had withdrawn.

He had gone round to inspect the crossing from another angle. Sensible. He would still have to use it if he wanted the upper cabin.

The Hunter shifted to the near edge of the shelf. From here, he could reach the back of a boot as its owner stepped onto the bridge. Cut the tendon, let the leg fail. The rest would be work on the ground, where that black knife could not be allowed room.

His left wrist still hurt from the bedroom. He flexed it once and closed his hand again.

There was a dry click above him.

Then another, followed by the brief scrape of stones falling together. Close to the bridge. A foot finding its place.

If he waited for the boards to take the man’s weight, the first step would already have carried that ankle past him. He rose on the scrape, knife low, turning toward the leg that should have been there.

There was no ankle.

A bird burst from the path. Loose berries rolled after the stones.

He tried to turn back toward the overhang.

Weight struck him from below and behind. He saw the dark point beside his coat and twisted away from it. The turn saved the center of his body; the blade entered his side instead.

Cold went through him before pain.

Something that had always answered when he reached for it was gone. He reached again, blindly, and found no presence, no life at the far end of it. There was nowhere for it to have withdrawn to. The absence went all the way down.

He heard himself make a sound.

The boy was close enough for another thrust.

The Hunter drove an elbow backward, struck the boy’s wounded side and tore himself away. The blade came free. He stumbled across the bridge into the firs on the far bank, one hand pressed hard beneath his coat.

He did not look back. Blood was falling through his fingers onto the path.

Soles reached the far side of the bridge with one hand against his ribs. The Hunter had vanished among the firs. Blood marked the first pale stone beyond them.

He stopped there.

The blow had opened something beneath his dressing. His breath came easier than it had on the ledge, though, and that ease was worse than the pain. He had felt what the knife took. Somewhere in the man ahead, a whole life had ceased to exist, and Soles was using what had come back along the blade to stand straighter.

He made himself look away from the knife and at the stone.

The next drop lay beneath a fern.

He followed it without running. At the first fork, the brighter marks ended on the left. He almost committed to them, then saw where the man had pressed a bloody hand to a trunk before crossing the path. A smear shone on the underside of a branch to the right.

Soles went right.

The ground rose. In the soft earth between roots, the square heel he had seen at the spring printed cleanly; its owner was shortening one step.

He knew how badly he wanted an unbroken trail. He had followed a deer for twenty minutes because of the same wanting. Haya’s patience returned in the pause, in the need to see where the weight had actually gone.

He found the next print downhill.

An hour passed in small pieces of evidence: blood on a root, a branch moving after the wind had stopped, a scuff he caught only with his good ear turned to the slope. The man ahead had ceased trying to hide every step; he was choosing the ground that would let him keep taking them.

At a stream, the trail ended.

Soles stayed on the bank. The water ran fast and shallow over round stones, loud in his left ear; on the right there was only the ringing. Phenom’s instinct wanted him looking beyond the water, toward the stones a man could hide behind. He did that first.

No movement. He checked upstream, then started across. A handprint darkened the wet face of a low rock midstream. On the far bank, crushed moss held a few red beads of water.

He stopped beside the handprint. It was too neat: a whole palm laid flat, fingers spread, where anyone crossing would have to look at it.

Bait. My eyes on the rock, and water to cover the rest.

He looked right, toward the side he could not hear.

The Hunter was already out from under the cut bank downstream, coming up the stream bed in long, silent strides, one hand pressed to his side, the knife in the other.

Soles let the chain run and threw. The chain caught on the low rock, on the handprint he had been made to look at, and the blade splashed down short. Then the Hunter was inside its length.

The first cut came for his throat. Soles got the wrapped forearm up; the edge skipped off the dressing and opened his collar. The second came low, for his ribs. He twisted, and his boot went out from under him.

He went down on his back in the stream. The Hunter came down with a knee on his chest, and the knife came after.

Soles caught the wrist with both hands.

His mouth was dry, inside all that water. A drop of blood formed on the man’s cuff and fell onto his cheek. The point hung a hand’s width above his throat. The Hunter was not strong now; he did not need to be. His whole weight was going down onto it, and Soles’s left wrist, the one from the bedroom, had begun to give.

A finger closer. Another.

Inside his coat, against his chest, the folded release order was going soft in the water. He thought, absurdly, that the signature would run.

His side. What he did to me on the bridge.

He let go with his left hand, and because he turned toward the knife to free it, the point went into the top of his shoulder instead of his throat and stopped against bone, and his left fist was already driving up under the man’s coat into the wound the black knife had made.

The Hunter cried out, and his weight went sideways into the water.

Soles came up coughing on his knees. The Hunter knelt a pace away, folded around his side. For a moment neither could move. Then the man got up and went downstream, half falling.

Soles hauled in the chain. His arm would not lift the knife for another throw. He crossed the last stones on his knees and sat on the bank until he could breathe. The shoulder bled in a thin, steady line inside his shirt.

In water a hand deep. With one hand on his own wound.

When he could stand, he followed the blood again. Now it went straight, without forks or handprints. The man was no longer choosing his ground.

By the time he saw the cabin, his wet shirt had stuck to the dressing and to the new cut at his shoulder. He could smell damp cloth and the sharp iron smell from his own hand. Near the cabin’s step, the same smell came fresh from blood spread over the wood.

There was one door. A shutter stood open beside it; beyond the cabin, the ground rose into bare stone.

He kept the trees between himself and the window. Through it he saw a bench, the edge of an unlit stove and a boot resting sideways on the floor.

— Stay outside, the Hunter said.

Soles stopped beneath the window.

— You’ve left enough blood for both of us to know I found you.

— Come through that door and I’ll try again.

He sounded as though the warning cost him more breath than he had meant to spend.

Soles moved until he could see the man’s hands. One held a folded blanket against his side. The knife lay beneath the other. Blood had reached the floor and followed a gap between its boards.

He looked at the stone behind the bench.

— You could have kept going through that.

— And come out where? In this state?

The Hunter’s gaze went to the black knife. His hand tightened on the blanket.

— What did you do to me?

Soles remembered Bull’s frightened question during their fight. He could have said he did not know enough to answer. It would have been true and far too convenient.

— You won’t get it back, he said.

The man stared at him. For a moment his face held still in Soles’s memory: the effort of a mouth trying to make a question it could survive hearing answered.

— No, the Hunter said at last. I didn’t think so.

He moved his free hand from the knife.

Soles came in, staying beside the door. He had followed a man here to kill him. He had not decided what he would do if the man stopped trying to kill him first.

The Hunter noticed the dressing beneath his torn shirt.

— You were quick in that room.

— Not quick enough.

— Quick enough to be here.

He shifted the blanket. His breath caught, and he waited until he could continue.

— What did they offer?

Soles said nothing.

— Money doesn’t make a man look at the road behind him like that.

— Home.

The Hunter shut his eyes. It might have been pain. Soles thought it was recognition.

— Of course.

— Why did you run?

The man reached inside his coat. Soles raised the dark point.

— Slowly.

A folded page came out, wet at one corner. The Hunter put it on the bench between them.

— Read the bottom.

Three names. A transfer number. A statement that no one had survived to be transferred. Beneath it, a space for a signature.

The space was empty.

— They were alive when I put them in the van, the man said. I came back and found that waiting. They wanted my name under it.

— You asked where they’d gone.

— First. Then I asked to see them. After that I stopped being the man they wanted in the office.

He pressed harder against his side.

— They took my keys. One waited by the door. The other brought the same report back with a different date. I left through the washroom wall while they discussed what to tell me.

Soles looked at the page, then at the man.

He had seen men trying to buy mercy with a confession. This one kept looking at the empty space beneath the names, as if the worst thing that could happen now would be somebody deciding to fill it for him.

Soles believed him about the van.

Outside, water began dripping from the eaves again.

— I know how this sounds, the Hunter said. A man cornered by his own people, telling you they’re bad people. You’ve heard it before.

— Not from somebody who came to cut my throat.

— You came for mine.

Soles looked at the blanket against the wound. He had.

The Hunter waited for him to argue, then seemed relieved when he did not.

— I worked for them long enough to know which rooms the useful people went into. Which doors stayed locked. I kept bringing people in and letting somebody else decide what happened after the handover.

Soles remembered a wrench in a basement and a daughter’s number disappearing beneath a recovery label.

— Until those three?

— Until they needed my name on a thing I knew was a lie. I should have asked before that. That doesn’t make the answer different now.

He nodded toward the paper.

— Ask for the transfer log. Same number. See which building they send you to, and whether they let you leave it with a copy.

Soles took out his own phone and photographed the page. The Hunter watched the screen go dark.

— Keep that one. They give you another?

Soles touched the agency phone through his coat.

— Thought so.

The man’s breathing had changed. He left longer spaces between the words, gathering himself before each sentence.

— They won’t be your friends, he said. They’ll use what works. When you stop working the way they need, they’ll write something down and send the next man. If the people you love are the easiest way to move you, they’ll use those too.

Soles did not have to imagine the right photograph on the wrong desk. He had already sat in front of it.

— The people who walk through walls, he said. Are you all theirs?

— No.

The answer was immediate.

— They train us. Employ us. Some of them think that’s the same as making us.

— Then what makes you?

The Hunter looked at the stone behind his shoulder. His free hand rested against it, fingers spread, as though he might remember something by touch.

— Walking through it. Who gets that?

— Only those whose Fate was cut.

Soles waited for the rest.

The man looked back at him.

— Cut how?

— You want a better answer than I’ve got left.

He did not smile. The hand came away from the wall and returned to the blanket.

Soles could not tell whether he had been given a saying, an explanation worn down by being repeated, or the edge of a thing the man had once understood. He remembered it anyway.

— How many? he asked. People like you.

— More than they send to your door.

— And people like me?

The Hunter’s eyes went to the blade.

— I don’t know what you are.

He meant it. The knowledge made Soles feel less safe than a number would have.

For a while they listened to the water outside. Soles could hear it clearly on his left. On the right, the ringing rose and fell beneath every other sound.

The man was no longer holding the wound firmly enough. Soles saw his hand loosen and tighten again.

There was a road out of these woods. A signed page against Soles’s chest said he could take it home after the assignment was confirmed. Nothing on it required him to ask these questions. Nothing in this room would make the signature disappear if he stopped asking them now.

He hated how simple that had become.

The Hunter looked toward the door when Soles moved away from the bench.

— Take the paper, he said.

Soles folded it and put it apart from the release order.

The man’s knife stayed on the bench. His free hand lay open beside it.

Soles let the gathered chain slip from his right fingers. He had room for the throw, and no rock for the chain to catch on; the man was still, and the familiar balance offered him the same certainty it had offered against a marked board.

He knew whose hand he was using.

The dark point struck between the Hunter’s eyes. His head fell back against the wall and stayed there. Soles waited, then went close enough to check him before retrieving the knife by hand.

Strength returned to Soles’s arm before he had moved. He had felt the same return on the bridge. He could not name what the knife had taken this time. He knew it had been a life.

He used the agency phone for the photograph. Then he wiped the blade, gathered the chain and left the cabin.

On the return path, he tried to measure Varren against the man he had been three months earlier. He had taken the Hunter down in the room and still nearly died beneath him. At the stream he had nearly died again, under a man with one hand on his own wound. In the ravine he had needed a bird, a ledge and a man looking in the wrong direction. Training had kept his feet beneath him. It had not made the forest safe.

You saw what I used against you. Not what I had.

Varren had said it in the doorway, with Soles’s hand still on the door. At the bank, all of them had stood against him. Soles had counted that as the measure of the man because it was the part he had survived.

He had no measure of the rest.

The Hunter had not known how many people could do what he did. Hundreds? Thousands? Soles thought of streets he had walked through without looking at the walls, of customers who had put their hands on his workbench and waited to be served. He had been living among possibilities he had only just learned to recognize.

He stopped at the stream, beside the low rock with the handprint, and washed the blood from his fingers. His shoulder stung when he bent. Water carried it between the stones. He watched until he could look at his own hand without immediately seeing the bench.

Then he took out the agency phone and attached the photograph.

Assignment completed.

The reply arrived before he reached the charcoal road.

Completion received. Well done. Return to station for release.

He read the middle two words once more, put the phone away and kept walking.

By the following afternoon, Soles was back in the station office, with his bag between his boots and the signed release order on the desk.

He wanted the return journey settled before they found another reason to keep him. The man in gray had asked for his account first.

— At a forester’s cabin, Soles said. Alone.

— Resistance?

— At the inn. Then at the bridge, and at a stream. By the cabin he couldn’t keep going.

The man in uniform looked at the dressing beneath Soles’s shirt.

— And then?

The Hunter’s knife had stayed on the bench. Soles could still see where the man’s hand had left it.

— He put it down.

The man in uniform paused over the form, then wrote something below the time of death. Beside his elbow lay the photograph Soles had sent from the road. Neither man asked why the knife had been out of the Hunter’s hand.

The man in gray turned the release order around and checked the signature he had put on it.

— Completion confirmed. You’ll receive the travel details this afternoon.

Soles kept his hand beside the page.

— And Bull?

The uniformed man opened another folder. Fatal training incident. The words stood beneath the date; below them were the accounts of the assault that had begun it.

— The finding has been submitted, the man in gray said.

They had kept that part of the bargain too. Soles took his copy of the release. The transfer form from the Hunter’s pocket remained folded inside his coat; he had kept the photograph on his own phone.

— Reporting arrangements will be sent to you, the man in uniform said.

— At home.

— Yes. Your service continues.

Soles put the copy away and stood. His left forearm pulled beneath its dressing as he lifted the bag; changing hands pulled the cut at his ribs and the one at his shoulder instead. He settled for holding it close and went back across the yard to collect his clothes. At the gate, someone called from his right. He had to turn before he understood.

In his room, the return ticket was waiting on the agency phone. Soles checked the destination twice, then put it down and called Maxim.

— You alive?

— Yes.

— Good. Tell your employers. They seem to think answering a phone is classified.

Soles leaned against the edge of the bed. He had planned to begin with the train time.

— Are you busy?

— For you? No. For the dog chewing my slipper, very.

A muffled complaint came through the phone, followed by the scrape of a chair.

— There. What is it?

Soles looked at his hand. The report was finished. The people who had wanted it were satisfied, and there was nothing left on the desk to correct.

— I haven’t been all right.

Maxim said nothing for long enough that Soles checked the screen.

— I’m here, he said.

— I kept thinking I’d ring when I had something better to tell you.

— You can ring with something worse.

Soles let his head rest against the wall. He had kept working so nobody would have to ask how he was. Haya had hidden what hurt him in the same way, with another job finished and nothing said. Calling Maxim had been harder than telling the office what they wanted.

— I don’t know what I can explain on the phone.

— Then don’t do it on the phone. Tell me the train.

He read the time aloud. Maxim repeated it and asked which station. They went over the journey, including a change Soles had missed on the ticket. When they finished, Maxim stayed on the line.

He closed his eyes against the wall. Haya stood beside the new light in his garden. Soles had watched him die and kept reaching for the useful hands. Now those hands offered a place to sit.

Soles touched the forester’s sleeve. Rough cloth caught his fingers. Haya looked straight at him.

Rest.

Soles opened his eyes. He stayed on the bed until his breathing eased.

He had done his own killing. The memory offered him no way to put it somewhere else.

— Thank you, he said.

— You’re welcome. Now stay there a minute. I need someone to explain to this animal that I own two slippers.

After the call, Soles found the woman in the training jacket putting equipment away. She looked toward the bag over his shoulder.

— Thought you were leaving.

— I am. Could you watch me try something? I keep missing what happens around me.

At the far end of the room, rolled mats stood in a rack beside the cupboards. The bench she had been clearing faced them at an angle. Soles set his bag by the door and explained what had happened beside the boiler. He told her how little of the rest of the room he had noticed.

She moved a weight off the bench. Soles told her about his ear, and she came around to his left before answering.

— Show me.

— If you watch me the whole way, it doesn’t work.

— Useful thing to know.

She returned to sorting the equipment. Soles went behind the rack, where the mats broke the line between them. In the narrow space there, he held a fold of his sleeve between his fingers, as Haya had held the torn seam while he worked.

For weeks he had tried to summon the man who knew how to wait. Now he remembered how Haya had sat with the driver until the other man’s breathing eased. The waiting had belonged to someone.

He let out a breath and asked for a little of that quiet.

It came while he was still awake.

He could feel the response settle through his shoulders into his feet. The edge of the mat was close to his cheek; beyond it, the woman counted something into a box. He moved along the rack, keeping the rolled canvas between them, and reached its end before she looked up.

Her glance crossed the cupboards and stopped.

— There you are.

He had moved too far past the last mat. She was looking straight at him now, and he could feel how useless it would be to keep trying to become part of the room.

He released the fold of his sleeve.

A weight struck the bench. He flinched at the sound; he had missed her lifting it.

— Again? she asked.

He told her what he had missed.

— Same place, she said. I’ll give you something else to listen for.

The second time, the quiet came with the breath. He kept close to the rack, but when she called his name he answered, and her eyes found him at once.

She made him stop there.

He sat on the bench while she finished with the weights. His shoulders ached with an effort no one watching would have seen, and the room seemed louder than it had before.

This time, when she asked if he needed a minute, he took it.

On Saturday morning, Soles reached his own gate with his bag against his leg and both dogs waiting on the other side.

Lucky barked before he had touched the latch. Mina stood beside him, her white muzzle pushed between the bars. Then she began making a small, impatient sound Soles had not heard for months.

He set the bag down.

— Hello, my two kids.

Lucky came through as soon as the gate opened. His paws struck Soles’s coat, and pain caught under the dressing at his ribs. Soles bent carefully, one arm going around Lucky before Mina could push between them. He gathered her in too and held both heads against him.

Lucky licked his jaw. Mina kept forcing her nose beneath his palm, insisting on a hand of her own.

— I know. I know.

He put his face into their fur and stayed there until Lucky settled enough to lean his weight into him, until Mina’s little complaints stopped.

Last spring he had come home hungry, still arguing with a client in his head. Lucky had tried to knock him down behind the house, and Mina had arrived to claim him. He had laughed and told them he hadn’t come back from a war.

His hand stopped on Lucky’s neck.

The dog pushed against it, and Soles began stroking him again.

He went around to the garden with both dogs so close that he had to shorten his steps. The table still stood beneath the pergola; beyond it was the greenhouse, the path worn through the grass to its door. He could remember the smell of stew from the kitchen, his mother among the tomato plants, his father turning a tomato in his hand before putting it in the crate. Kale had caught him reaching for the green ones and told him he would finish school before they ripened.

Mary had known he had something to tell her. She had kept working until he found the words.

For a moment he wanted to call into the greenhouse.

Mina sat against his shin. He rested his hand on her head and looked at the empty doorway.

— I’m home, he said quietly.

He stood there a little longer. Then he went to the loose board, recovered the spare key and let himself into the house.

Maxim had washed the dogs’ bowls. Their food was in the cupboard by the stove; Mina’s blanket had been shaken out and folded at one corner. Soles found the collars and leads where they belonged.

Lucky began turning in a circle. Mina watched his hands, her tail moving against the blanket.

— Slowly, he told the dogs. I’m not much competition this morning.

It was Saturday. Krista would be at breakfast, letting her tea go cold while she moved one task ahead of another. He stopped at a florist on the way and, with two leads in one hand, asked for seven roses, red and white.

At her door he moved the flowers behind his back and knocked.

She opened it in the clothes she wore when she meant to stay in, her hair still loose. Beyond her he could see the cup beside an open notebook.

— I’m back, he said. I missed you.

He brought out the flowers.

Her eyes went to them, then to his face. She drew a breath and kept it.

She slapped him hard across the cheek.

His head turned. Before he could look back, she had caught his coat in both hands and pulled herself against him.

— Don’t go away again. Please.

Her forehead pressed into his chest. He held the flowers out to one side.

— I thought about you all the time. Don’t leave me like that again. I missed you so much. You inconsiderate idiot.

The last words broke against his coat. For a moment he could only stand there and let her hold him.

Then he put his arm around her. The cut at his ribs pulled; she felt him flinch and shifted her hands, but kept her face against his chest.

He had spent so long making himself finish the next task. In the woods, in the cabin, at the desk afterward, he had kept his voice steady and found the words that would let him leave. He had rehearsed what he would say when someone at home looked at him properly. He could remember none of it now.

Krista was crying into his coat. The cold he had carried back began to give under her hands, and with it the effort of holding himself apart from everything that might hurt.

He wanted her closer. He wanted to tell her that he had been afraid. His eyes burned, and he lowered his face into her hair.

She lifted her face to his.

— You’re an idiot, you know that? But I love you just as you are.

It was the first time she had said it. There was a little of her old teasing in the words, but her eyes were wet and she was still holding his coat. He wanted her to hear his answer clearly.

— I love you too.

He held her a moment longer before letting her go.

Lucky nosed between them. Krista wiped her cheek with the heel of her hand.

— You brought everyone.

She finally took the flowers. A red petal had caught in the fold of his sleeve. She freed it, then touched the cheek she had struck.

— Come in. Have you eaten?

— Not properly.

— Sit down.

He sat where he used to. Krista put the roses in water and made his coffee without asking how he wanted it. He watched her hands and remembered mornings when there had been nothing remarkable about knowing he would see them again.

She pulled her chair close to his and took his hand. With the other, he wrote to Maxim and Tesa.

I’m home. At Krista’s, with Mina and Lucky. Come when you can. I’ve missed you both.

He sent it before he could decide they might be busy.

Beneath the table, Mina settled against his shoe. Lucky lay across the way out of the kitchen.

The coffee was exactly how she had always made it. He had missed this house too: the chair, the cup, the morning that belonged to her. He had missed being expected somewhere without having to finish anything first.

Outside, someone passed the window. This time he stayed turned toward Krista.

By the second cup the kitchen had gone quiet in the good way. Mina was asleep on his shoe. Lucky had given up on the door and slept across it. His cheek still remembered her hand. The rest of him had stopped being careful for an hour, and he let it.

Krista’s notebook still lay open beside her plate. When he looked at it, she closed it with one finger, without hurry, the way you turn over a card you have finished with.

— Work? he asked.

— The catalogue.

She said it easily. She smiled a little as she said it, the right amount, and reached for the pot to pour him more coffee he had not asked for.

It was a perfect answer. That caught him. Krista answered most questions the way she filed papers, a little crooked, with the corners sticking out. This one had no corners at all.

Soles watched her hands. The left lay flat on the cover of the notebook. The thumb was moving along the edge of the pages, slowly, back and forth, the way he had seen Varren’s friend move his thumb along a deck before he dealt.

She looked down at it too. The thumb stopped, then pressed the page lightly, the way a finger presses a leaf.

— Leaf I —

The man in the good coat had been at The Switch for three nights, and on the third he found the boy.

Casimir had watched him find him. The boy was a railway fireman, nineteen at most, with coal still in the creases of his knuckles and his month’s wages in an envelope he kept touching through his jacket. He had come in for one drink. He had stayed for the game because the man in the good coat had asked him to make up a fourth, kindly, as a favor.

By midnight the envelope was on the table. By one, so was a silver watch with a dent in the lid.

— My father’s, the boy said, to nobody.

Casimir sat at the next table with a glass he had not touched and read the man in the good coat the way he read everyone: not the face, which was a good face, but the hands. He had liked doing it since he was a boy on Platform Three. People told the truth with their fingers all day long and never noticed.

The left hand cut the deck with the little finger curled. Every time. A card rode in the curl of that finger, flat against the palm, and came back to the deck when the man wanted it. Clean work. Casimir had not seen better in years.

He could have said so. The man’s friend stood by the door with a knife under his coat and the patience of someone who had used it before. Saying so would end with the boy in the gutter and Casimir beside him.

So he did what he did best. He lied.

— Room for a fifth? he asked, and sat down with his money already out, slightly too much of it, like a man who had been drinking since supper.

He lost the first hand with disappointment so exact that the man in the good coat almost smiled. He lost the second because he wanted to. On the third he let the man see him curl his own little finger around the deck when he cut.

Just once. Just enough.

The man in the good coat looked at the finger. Then he looked at Casimir’s face, which was the face of a fool, and back at the finger, which was not.

Now you don’t know what I’ve got. Now you don’t know what I’ve seen.

The man in the good coat stopped bringing his card back. He played the next four hands honestly, because he could no longer be sure he was the only one at the table who wasn’t, and an honest man playing against Casimir Lenz was only a man playing cards.

Casimir won the envelope with two pairs. He won the watch with nothing at all, a bluff so calm the man in the good coat folded three queens and did not know why until he was in the street.

The friend by the door followed him out. Nobody came back in.

Casimir put the watch on the table between himself and the boy.

— Last hand, he said. Winner takes it. I’m tired.

He dealt honestly. The boy had a pair of sevens. Casimir had a king high and a face full of regret, and he turned his cards over slowly so the boy could enjoy it.

The boy took the watch and the envelope and went out into the night as if he had won them.

The tavern keeper, wiping the counter, did not look up.

— That was a lot of lying, he said, for something you can’t keep.

Casimir drank the drink he had not touched. It was the first true thing he had done all evening, and it tasted of nothing.

❦

Krista took her hand off the notebook.

She sat for a moment looking at the coffee pot, as if she had forgotten why she had picked it up. Then she put it down.

— It’s not the catalogue, she said.

Soles waited.

— I’m good at that, she said. Saying the easy thing, so nicely nobody looks under it. I’ve been doing it to you for months. To Tesa, too, until she caught me.

She slid the notebook into her bag, bent cover first, and closed the clasp on it.

— Not now. When the others are here. I want to tell it once, properly, to all of you, and I don’t want to do it by accident over breakfast because you looked at my thumb.

— Fair.

— It isn’t, she said. But it’s what I’ve got.

Soles thought of the man in gray, of the office with the window that did not open, of all the easy things he had said there so nobody would look under them. He did not say that he understood. She would have known it was true, and it would have been the wrong moment for it.

Mina shifted on his shoe. Outside, the street went on being Saturday. Krista reached across the table and turned his cup the right way around on its saucer, a small, honest thing to do with her hands.

Maxim came through Krista’s door with a paper bag held above Lucky’s nose.

— Lunch, he announced. Before anyone starts thanking me, there’s a chicken in here and I’m tired.

Soles got up. Maxim put the bag down and caught him in a hug. The pressure pulled at Soles’s ribs; he shifted, and Maxim loosened his arms.

— You could have mentioned the holes.

— I was waiting to see what you’d brought.

Maxim held him a moment longer, then let go.

Tesa came in behind him. She stopped in front of Soles, taking in his face and the dressing showing at his cuff, then put her hand against his shoulder, clear of the cuts.

— You look like hell.

— I’ve missed you too. Every day of it.

She pulled him close, briefly, keeping her arm high across his back. When she stepped away, she wiped a streak of dust from his sleeve. Across her left knuckles ran a row of small white scars he did not know. He looked at them, then at Krista, and decided that was one of the things he had missed.

Krista had opened the bag.

— You bought half a chicken.

— Enough for four sensible people, Maxim said.

Tesa took off her coat.

— So you’re eating on the way home?

Soles laughed, properly, for the first time in months. His ribs caught halfway through, and he put a hand against his side.

— Damn it. Give me a chance.

— She’s had months to prepare, Maxim told him. I’ve been taking these alone.

Krista made room on the counter. Soles reached for plates, but Tesa was already at the cupboard.

— Sit. Tell me where they are.

— You’re holding them.

— See? Useful already.

He sat beside Krista. Maxim lowered the chicken onto a dish while Lucky followed every movement. Mina had stayed beneath Soles’s chair; when he moved his foot, she leaned harder against it.

For a few minutes he could keep up. Maxim complained about the price, Krista checked the receipt and found the pastries he had bought for himself, and Soles helped him argue that a man carrying lunch deserved payment in advance.

Tesa ate one of the pastries while they were arguing.

Then Maxim asked about the journey. Soles told him about the change of trains and the coffee he had paid for and abandoned after one mouthful.

— Next time call before you get on, Tesa said.

He reached for his cup.

— I did call.

— This time.

— He wrote to me, Krista said quietly. Before he left. I read it on Sunday, under the bridge.

Maxim stopped pulling the paper away from the bread. Tesa kept her attention on Soles.

— You decided you were going. We got to find out afterward. Then we were meant to carry on until you decided to answer.

He remembered the room before he left, the reasons that had seemed to fit together so neatly.

— I thought it would keep you out of it.

— We were already in it.

The cup was warm between his hands. He could explain the bargain, what the agency had held over them, how little room he had felt he had. Tesa knew enough of that already.

— I know. I should have spoken to you.

— You should have let us answer.

He set the cup down.

— Yes.

She held his gaze a moment, then reached across for the bread.

Soles stayed still until Krista moved the plate closer to him. He took a piece. Tesa was cutting the chicken, giving him time to do something ordinary.

— How’s work? he asked Maxim.

— Which part? The driving, the lifting, or lying awake doing both?

— The bit you charge for.

— Oh. Could be worse.

Maxim tore bread from the loaf. Soles waited.

— I’ve had help with the runs, Maxim added. Turns out other people can find addresses. Some can even reverse.

— Terrible news for the business.

— I drove over to check one delivery. Got there after he’d unloaded. He asked if I’d come to carry the empty straps.

Tesa passed him the dish.

— Had you?

— I was supervising.

— From another vehicle, Soles said. Expensive way to stand around.

Maxim pointed the bread at him.

— He’s been back ten minutes.

Soles smiled, then asked him what he wanted to do about it. Maxim took longer over that answer.

— Keep the work. Let somebody else get on with some of it. I’m trying.

His phone sounded in his coat. He checked the screen, typed a reply and put it back. When he reached for it again, Krista offered him the chicken.

He took the dish instead.

Tesa had brought Soles the smaller pieces. He thanked her and asked about her brother.

Her knife stopped against the plate.

— Later. Not over chicken.

— Can I help?

— You can listen. After.

He nodded.

— I mean it, she said. It’s a long one. I want to tell it properly.

She resumed cutting. Soles kept his questions to himself this time and ate what she had put on his plate.

Across the table, Maxim was letting Lucky smell his empty hand.

— You had breakfast, he told the dog. I watched you have it. Mina watched you have it. There were witnesses.

Lucky put his chin on Maxim’s knee.

— That’s the face he uses when I open his bill, Soles said.

Krista laughed into her cup. Tesa pushed the pastry paper farther from Lucky’s reach.

Soles wanted another afternoon of this. He wanted to hear about a late customer and an ordinary bad day at the exhibition. He turned to Krista.

— And you? How much have I missed?

She rubbed a spot of grease from the table with her thumb.

— Quite a lot.

— Still the catalogue?

— That too.

Tesa put her knife down. Beside her, Maxim drew his chair closer to the table.

Krista got her bag and brought out a second notebook. Its cover was bent; dust remained in the join beside the spine. She laid it in the space between their plates.

— Some of the days I said I was working, I was somewhere else.

Soles recognized the care in the small drawings on the first page. He drew his plate back to give her room.

Tesa reached over and turned to a page farther in.

— Start here, she said. He’ll need this bit first.

Soles settled back beside Krista and listened.

Krista’s drawing showed the round floor, the broken stairs and the slab beyond the gap. Soles followed the edge with his finger until he reached the opening opposite the entrance.

— I don’t remember that opening.

— The mechanism opened it, Krista said. I thought it might give us another way out.

She described the pale passage beyond it. Tesa leaned forward.

— Low ceiling. Rough stone.

— That’s yours. Mine was straight.

Soles lifted his finger.

— You went through the same opening?

— Separately, Krista said. We could hear each other. I could see the room behind me while I was inside, but she couldn’t see me.

— I tried bringing her through mine, Tesa added.

Krista touched the place above her eyebrow.

— We established that she couldn’t.

— I did bring the hand back.

Soles smiled, then studied the two drawings. He had remembered the place as rooms they had all stood in together. Beyond that opening, the same patch of floor had become a different passage for each woman.

Krista showed him the four doorways. Three had been blank stone; the fourth held fragments of the card player’s life. Tesa had found the boxer in hers. Two signs had been lit on each occupied doorway.

— We copied the marks, Krista said. I’m comparing them with the inscriptions. Some strokes match. That doesn’t give me a translation yet.

— And down here?

He indicated the dark line beyond the doors.

She explained how the walls had divided beyond it, until she could no longer follow their shape.

— I came back.

Tesa tapped the edge of her own drawing.

— So did I.

Maxim moved his cup away from the notebook.

— Meanwhile, outside, it was Sunday.

Soles turned to him.

— The Sunday after I left?

— That’s when I found them.

The message Maxim had left came back to him. He had seen the name on his phone and put the call off.

Maxim told him about the search, the notebook outside the slab and the missing steps. Soles listened to how he had brought the ladder from the truck and used the rope to secure the crossing. He knew what a folded ladder could take, and how awkward it would have been to extend it while keeping a hand against the stone.

— You held the opening yourself?

— Until Krista got across. Then she took it.

Soles turned toward her. She was following the route on the page.

— We went in Friday night, she said. For us it was a few hours. Our phones said Sunday when we got out.

He remembered going into the temple after eleven and finding dawn outside.

— We lost hours the first time.

— This time it was longer, Maxim said. Enough to start wondering where both of them had gone.

Soles drew his hand back from the diagram.

— How many times had you been there?

Krista closed the cover halfway, keeping her finger between the pages.

— I’d been to the archives. Then the cave, as far as the slab. Tesa came with me the night the stairs broke.

— You said you were working.

— Sometimes I was.

He waited.

— Sometimes I used it as an excuse. I wanted to go back, and I didn’t want to argue about it.

He had been about to ask why she hadn’t told him. Tesa’s plate was still beside his; he remembered what she had asked of him over lunch.

— What were you looking for?

Krista opened the notebook again.

— Something I could establish for myself. After everything Varren told us, I wanted to know which parts we’d actually seen.

She spread the pages flat.

— I should have told you I was going.

— I’d have tried to stop you.

— I know.

Soles kept his hand beside the drawing.

— I should have listened first.

He could have left it there. She had told him before anyone made her. With the river, he had waited to be made.

— I knew, he said. The night before I left. There was mortar in the hem of your coat, the sand from under the bridge. I’d knelt in it.

Krista’s finger stopped on the page.

— You didn’t say anything.

— I wanted you to account for it. The way you made me account for the river.

— Why didn’t you?

— I’d have been doing it again. Looking, then using what I saw.

She held his eyes. Across the table, Maxim had stopped chewing.

— So we both kept something, she said.

— Yes.

— Then we’re square. Let’s not keep score after this.

Krista moved the notebook toward him. He took out his own phone.

— I’ve got something I need help checking.

He opened the photograph of the folded page. Krista enlarged it. Tesa shifted closer to read beside her.

Three names, a transfer number, the statement that no one had survived to be transferred. The space for a signature was empty.

— Who gave you this? Krista asked.

— A Hunter. He said those three were alive when he put them in the van. This was waiting when he got back. They wanted him to sign.

— Is that why he left the agency?

— That’s what he told me.

Maxim read the bottom of the page.

— So where did the people go?

— I don’t know. He told me to ask for the transfer log with that number. See where they sent me, and whether they’d let me leave with a copy.

Krista brought the number back into view.

— This gives us somewhere to start. It doesn’t tell us what happened to them.

Soles nodded.

He told them the rest of the warning: the agency trained and employed the Hunters, but hadn’t made them; the people he loved could be used to move him. Asked who could walk through walls, the man had said only those whose Fate was cut.

Tesa repeated the last words.

— Cut how?

— I asked. He couldn’t give me a better answer.

— That’s convenient.

— He was hurt. I couldn’t tell how much he understood, or how much he wanted me to believe.

Maxim put his cup down.

— If you ask the agency, they’ll know you’ve got this.

Soles had carried the page all the way home. He understood what he was putting on Krista’s table.

— I’m not asking you to walk into one of their offices.

— Good, she said. I wasn’t offering. There are three people here. We can start by finding out whether anyone has heard from them.

She drew her own phone closer.

— Send me the picture. I’ll keep my notes with it.

He sent it.

Maxim picked up his cup.

— Next time somebody goes missing, I want to know where I’m bringing the ladder.

— We’ll tell you before we go, Krista said.

Soles agreed. He left his phone on the table while she copied the transfer number and the three names. There was room for all of them on the page. She left space beneath each one.

Krista set the pen beside the notebook. Soles kept his hands on the table.

— I killed two men while I was away.

Maxim lowered his cup.

— The first was at the barracks, Soles said. They called him Bull.

He told them about the weeks of harassment, the men who helped it along, the officers who watched. When he reached the training hall, he described Bull’s knife and the cut across his own arm.

Tesa shifted forward.

— At the end. Did he still have it?

— No. It was on the floor. He was backing away from me.

She waited.

— I could have gone out through the office. There was room. I stepped in front of him instead.

Soles could see the doorway again. He had spent so much of that day explaining why he had needed to fight. Here he had to say what came after.

— I beat him. Then I cut his throat.

Krista’s hand remained beside his. He could feel the warmth of her fingers against the side of his own.

— For a moment I felt better, he said. He couldn’t get up. I wouldn’t have to hear him coming into the room again. I was glad.

He swallowed.

— That’s the part I keep coming back to.

Tesa pressed her thumb against the handle of her fork.

— I’d have wanted him hurt too.

— He was hurt already.

— I heard you.

She put the fork down. Soles had been ready to argue against an excuse she hadn’t offered.

Maxim spoke from across the table.

— What happened after?

— They wrote it up as a training incident. I had to do another assignment before I could come home.

He told them about the signed order and the Hunter he had been sent to kill. The pursuit took only a few sentences; the dressing on his arm and the pain beneath his shirt supplied enough of what it had cost.

— The man who gave you the page? Krista asked.

— Yes.

Her fingers moved away from his. She brought the photograph back onto her screen and studied it.

— He’d tried to kill me. More than once. By the time we talked, he was sitting on a bench, holding a blanket against the wound. His knife was beside him.

Soles paused.

— He gave me that. I listened to him. Then I killed him.

Maxim sat back.

— Had he gone for the knife?

— No.

Soles kept his attention on him.

— I wanted to finish. Get the photograph they needed. Come home.

He had managed to say it. Krista’s breakfast cup was still on the counter; beyond it, the seven roses stood in water.

— Did you have another way? Maxim asked.

— I could have tried to keep him alive. Asked them what to do with him. I didn’t try.

His voice sounded rougher now. He reached for his coffee, found it cold and put it down again.

— I used what Phenom taught me. I knew it was my hand. I knew what I was doing.

Tesa drew the notebook away from a wet mark beneath her glass.

— So what happens now? With the people who sent you?

— I’m still in their service. They’ll send the reporting arrangements. That was the agreement.

— Then tell us when they do, Maxim said. Before you go off somewhere to sort it out.

Soles nodded.

— I will.

Maxim kept his eyes on him until Soles said it again.

— I’ll tell you.

Krista turned her phone face down and moved her chair closer.

— What are you frightened of now?

He had thought he might be able to leave this part unsaid once they knew the rest.

— That I’ll keep finding reasons. He was dangerous. They wouldn’t let me leave. I had to get home. Every time, I knew what I wanted at the end.

— And us? she asked.

He rubbed a finger along the edge of the table.

— I get angry with you. All of you. I’ve already decided things for you because I thought I knew better. What if there’s a day when being angry feels that clear?

Krista took his hand. He could feel how firmly she held it.

— Then tell me you’re angry. Let me answer. I might be angry too.

— And when I’m not angry? he said. I look at people. For what will move them. There was a driver who needed a box ticked, and I gave him the words before I’d decided to. It was easy.

Krista’s thumb stopped on his knuckles.

— Saying the easy thing.

— Yes.

— I know that one.

— I’ll stop looking at people to find something I can use. With you. With all of you.

— Then I’ll tell you when you do.

He tried to say more, but his throat had tightened.

— I’m going to take care of you, she said. I want you here. Even when you’ve got something awful to tell me.

— You can’t watch me all the time.

— I can’t. You have to help.

He lowered his head. She rested her cheek against his shoulder, above the cut at his ribs, and stayed there.

Across the table, Maxim picked up an empty plate.

— I meant what I said on the phone. You can call with something worse.

Soles breathed out slowly. Tesa took the plates from Maxim and carried them to the counter. She left the notebook open where Krista had put it.

When Krista lifted her head, Soles turned his hand beneath hers and held on.

— I don’t know what to do with all of it.

— Start with staying, she said. We’ll have the rest of the afternoon.

He sat with her until the tightness in his throat eased. Maxim had begun washing up. Tesa was putting the leftover bread into the paper bag; she brushed crumbs from the table into her palm and took them to the bin before Lucky could get up.

Soles rose carefully and went to the counter. Krista gave him a dry towel while Maxim rinsed a cup.

He took it in his right hand and dried it, working the cloth around the handle. Maxim waited until he had finished before passing him another.

By the time they had put the cups away, the light had moved across the kitchen floor. Mina followed it from beneath the table and settled beside Soles’s feet. He stayed against the counter, listening while the others decided what to do for supper.

Supper was soup from Krista’s freezer and what was left of Maxim’s bread. When Soles put his spoon down, the other three were already looking at one another.

— You’ve had mine, he said. What happened while I was away?

— The short version, Tesa said. Or we’ll be here till Tuesday.

— Mine is short, Maxim said. Six weeks after you left, I’m unloading irrigation fittings at the Botanical Garden and a crate nearly takes my fingers off. Too heavy for fittings. Fittings on top. Pistols underneath.

— You called about a name, Krista said. Then you opened the crate.

— Then I called again.

— That call was shorter, Tesa said.

Soles had asked about the van on one of those calls. Maxim had said it was running.

Maxim laid the yard out with the bread and the salt. Truck here, office there, police outside the main gate. They had spent a night matching his deliveries to the Garden’s records; he could remember every face and every conversation, and Krista had still caught him putting one on the wrong Thursday. By Friday Lazar had a collection arranged around them.

— The boss came early, with two men. One reached inside his coat. I put him into the truck door, and the other into the same door after he’d had a go at my ear.

Soles could see the yellow beside it.

— Then the boss started shooting. I got behind the truck with a pistol somebody had dropped and fired twice. Hit the office doorframe.

— Both times? Tesa said.

— It was a substantial doorframe. The police did the useful shooting. When he ducked back to reload, I went for him. Nearly missed the gun hand. He pulled, and the pistol bent in my grip.

He looked at his own hand on the table as if it were a tool he had borrowed and not returned.

— The police were coming into the yard behind me. So I threw him to them.

— You threw him at the police? Soles said.

— Delivered him. Nobody signed. Very upsetting.

— I gave them every note. I still have to answer for what my truck carried.

Tesa put her brother’s notebook beside Soles’s bowl.

— Mine isn’t short. I’ll make it short.

Her mother had kept a hospital receipt. On the night her brother’s old workmate swore he had put him on a train, her brother had been having his hand set. Krista checked the dates; Maxim knew the face and found the address.

— He gave me the date before I’d asked, Tesa said. Six years of practice. Then I put down the receipt. We took it to Lazar. Two days later the man was gone. Lazar told me about an unidentified body from the gravel pits, and old X-rays to compare. Someone independent was doing it. All I could do was wait.

— You came around most nights, Krista said.

— I know.

That Friday Tesa had been at the Garden’s side gate, waiting to bring Krista out, when three men came from the gatehouse. A pipe, a knife, and the man from the address.

— I told them to show their hands. The pipe came at my head instead.

She told it in the boxer’s order, plainly. The turn of the shoulder inside the pipe. The knife-man’s chest rising, his feet crossing, the gatehouse wall. Hands around her throat from behind, a heel, an elbow, the gate against her back. She showed Soles the small cut inside her lip.

— Teeth. At the end he went for the pipe again. I told him to leave it. He didn’t. After that he couldn’t get up, and the boxer had the next opening ready.

She turned her fork over.

— I left it there.

The man from the address had talked at the station. Her brother had refused to open the works entrance for them, and had started keeping names. Krista’s records put their van at the gravel pits on the date he gave. Then the medical comparison came back.

Tesa opened the notebook. Under the last entry was one word in her hand.

Found.

— They’ve got the men. They’re still working out who did what. I’m not giving them the wrong name because I want an answer quicker.

Soles waited until she closed it.

Krista moved her photographs into the space the bowls had left. A page from the Garden’s night ledger. Halfway down it, her signature.

— Copied, she said. I was underground with Tesa that night.

She had gone back for the books with a notice she had made herself. Her name on it. False.

— The clerk had his thumb over the space where somebody should have authorized it. I lied to him, and the card player’s attention went straight to his hands. Then I heard two men through the window talking about guns under the fittings, and I narrowed everything to their voices. Every word.

Tesa tapped the table once.

— Like that, Krista said. I looked up and the ledger was halfway into his coat. I’d missed him moving. At the bus station I’d done the same to the man who named his brother in the photograph. Heard everything. Missed his hands shaking.

— I asked for the earlier volume, Tesa said. He needed both hands.

Lazar had matched her photographs to Maxim’s deliveries; that was how Friday had been arranged. Afterward she had given him the false notice with the rest.

— I’ll answer for it. The bookkeeper upstairs was going to take all of it because she was frightened and handy. She wasn’t going to.

She opened the catalogue proof. A hundred and twelve names verified. Under the other photographs, the same words, again and again.

Not yet known.

— The committee wanted probable names. I sent them back twice. People can tell us who they recognize, and we check.

— My brother’s is in there, Tesa said.

— You checked it twice.

— Yes.

— I gave it to my deputy on Monday, Krista said. She can argue with the committee.

Soles looked at his place between the notebook and the delivery notes.

— You could have told me.

— We did, Maxim said. You kept saying you’d ring when you weren’t busy.

Soles put his phone on the table beside theirs.

They went to the cemetery the next morning. Maxim drove. The unknown graves lay at the back, small stones with numbers on them. Soles stood where Tesa asked him to. Krista kept her notebook closed.

Tesa crouched by one stone for a long time. Then she took out a pencil and wrote her brother’s name under the number, where the rain would wash it away.

— Until they cut it properly, she said.

She stood and put the pencil in Krista’s hand. Maxim opened the gate before she reached it.

Soles stayed a moment longer, looking along the row. Numbers, and nothing under them.