Chapter XIII · Where It Drinks

Three months before Soles came to Vatra, Varren stood in the doorway of the seamen’s hostel while the retired tram driver packed his shirts.

The bed had been made. Beside it stood the lantern the man had carried on their walks along the river, its handle still wrapped in a rag against his hot palms.

— Your wife came?

— Yesterday. While you were out.

— You could have told me.

— I’m telling you now.

The man pressed a shirt into his bag. His hands were still too warm. At home he would have to sleep with the window open, and his wife would complain, and they would settle it between them.

— Is she all right with it? Varren asked.

— She brought my slippers. Said if I wasn’t coming home, she wanted my half of the wardrobe.

He smiled, waiting. Varren found a smile for him.

For weeks the man had offered his hand every morning. He had needed someone to hold it without flinching. Now he pulled his gloves on himself and fastened the bag. Varren searched for the hesitation that would tell him where to help. The man only wanted to get home before his wife left for the market.

— We were going to try the lower landing today, Varren said.

The driver looked at the lantern.

— I can come tomorrow.

Varren almost accepted. With someone above to hold the light, he could examine the bank without leaving his way back in darkness. Tomorrow would give him another evening here, another breakfast, time to ask whether home was really ready for him.

— No. Go home.

— You’re sure?

— Take the lantern. That street of yours is badly lit.

The man hesitated, then took it. At the door he caught Varren’s hand between both of his. The warmth was familiar. Varren held on until the man began to turn, then let him.

The others were at the bakery. Varren stayed beside the empty bed, listening to the front door close.

He could ask Zora to check on the man’s wife. A careful question about sleeping arrangements would be enough. The wife might worry again; the man might come back. Varren knew how to make the question sound kind.

He sat down instead.

He remembered a woman sitting among empty beds, trying to find someone who needed her. He had felt the cold of that room before. Now he understood why she had remained in the chair. Without a need to answer, she had no reason to get up.

The urge to follow the driver pressed against his chest. He waited until it eased, then closed his eyes.

In the garden, the old woman sat beside her plant. She watched the empty place near Varren, as though someone should still be standing there. He sat down without bringing her anyone.

After a while she moved her hand toward him. He took it.

Go on.

She kept looking toward the empty place. He could bear that without filling it.

When he left, he took his own flashlight.

Along the river, the steps down to the lower landing were wet with spray. Across the water the hostel windows caught the afternoon light. Varren could still go back for company.

He had spent days checking where the men from the dark van went. One doorway had led to a fish store. Another had belonged to a woman who charged him for the crate he knocked over. Yesterday a man in a good coat had descended here and stayed below the bank long after the last boat left.

Varren went down to look.

The landing ended against a stone wall beneath the embankment. The river washed over its outer edge. Near the wall, damp footprints crossed the silt and stopped at a slab taller than he was.

He held the flashlight close. The slab’s seam was clean, although mud had collected against the rest of the wall. Someone had been through recently.

The patient presence in him stirred. He had felt it on reaching Vatra, when he first heard the river running through the frost. Here it drew his attention to the stone before he touched it.

He put his palm against the slab and wanted it open.

It withdrew from his hand. Warm air came through the gap, smelling of wet stone. Steps led down beyond it, wide enough for two people to walk together. He shone the flashlight down to their foot, then looked back across the river.

Nobody stood at the hostel window.

He went in.

The stair went down toward the river and ended in a long chamber. Varren stopped on the bottom step. Water sounded overhead, a low, continuous weight of noise. Behind him the open doorway remained a pale rectangle at the top of the stairs.

His light reached pillars sunk into the walls and roots carved across the ceiling. Some had been worn almost smooth. Beneath them stood a broad stone table, low enough to kneel beside. Something pale lay in a hollow on its surface.

He moved closer, keeping the stairs behind him.

A blade. Narrow, with a curved cutting edge and a hole near the base. He had seen another like it in Soles’s hand, dark where this one caught the light.

Recognition struck through him so sharply that he stopped breathing.

For an instant his hand expected a weight it had never held. Then came the need to step back, urgent and sickening. He caught the edge of the table. The stone was warm beneath his fingers.

Away.

Varren straightened. He had followed this presence through streets and along the river, trusted the patience that had brought him here. Now it wanted him away from the thing he had found.

— You know it.

His voice carried to the far wall.

Away.

He waited for more. The feeling only worsened, an old distress with no explanation he could reach. He wanted a name, a place, anything that would tell him what had happened. The presence recoiled from the blade again.

Varren took out his handkerchief and spread it beside the hollow. He could bring someone back to look at the carvings. He could ask questions. If he left the blade here, the men who knew the entrance might take it before he returned.

He lifted it by the base.

His fingers shook while he folded the cloth around the cutting edge. He waited, holding it clear of his body. Nothing in the chamber moved.

The distress stayed with him all the way up the stairs. At the doorway he stopped and looked back. He had wanted the old voice to recognize something.

Now it had, and he was carrying it home.

The following afternoon, Varren took Zora, Halloran and Noct down to the lower landing in Vatra.

Zora carried her thermometer and the notebook nobody at the regional office seemed willing to read. Halloran had brought a spare flashlight from the bakery. Noct, a little younger than Varren and unshaven, stopped on the last step and looked at the water washing across the landing.

— How far under does it go?

— One flight down, Varren said. Then a chamber.

— That’s a description of every cellar I’ve regretted entering.

Zora went past him to examine the clean seam around the slab. Each of them had come for something. Zora wanted more than figures to put in a report. Halloran, who had told enough people that Zora could read a thermometer, wanted to see the place that kept making her instruments look faulty. Noct had asked whether the room might have something to do with the man in his head, and Varren had said it might.

— What happened when you went in? Zora asked.

— I found the blade.

— To you.

He could still feel the old voice recoiling from the stone table.

— I was frightened, he said. I came out all right.

She watched him for a moment, then tucked the notebook under her arm.

Varren opened the slab and stayed beside it while they passed. They followed the stair down to the chamber. Halloran stopped at its foot, shining his flashlight along the carved roots. Noct stayed near him. Zora went to the stone table, where Varren put down the wrapped blade.

— Don’t handle that yet, he said.

She nodded and put her notebook beside it.

The river sounded overhead. Varren remembered the room as smaller. With people in it, he could judge the height of the ceiling and the distance between the pillars. Zora looked very slight beside the table.

She took readings along the wall, waited, and repeated them. Halloran held the light wherever she asked.

— Here, she said at last.

The base of a pillar was warmer than the stone around it. Varren crouched beside her. Just above the floor, the edge of his flashlight beam seemed to bend around something too thin to see directly.

He shifted the flashlight. The distortion stayed where it was.

Zora put down the thermometer.

— Do you know what that is?

— I think I can show you.

She picked up her pencil. Varren put his palm against the pillar and braced himself. He knew what power had done to weakened places before. Here the resistance felt close enough to reach.

He let the strength come through his legs and shoulder into the stone.

A thin line appeared in the air beside his wrist. Warmth pressed across his face. Behind him, Halloran drew breath, and Zora’s pencil stopped moving.

Varren eased off. The line narrowed.

He could stop there. They had all seen it. But it was barely wide enough for Zora to describe, and he could already imagine a clerk asking whether her flashlight had been faulty too.

— Stand back a little, he said.

He pushed again, harder. The line opened downward, past his hand, and a deep sound filled the chamber. The pillar stayed whole beneath his palm.

Away.

The warning came with the same sickening force as yesterday. Varren held on long enough to see the opening keep its shape.

Then Halloran dropped the flashlight.

It struck the floor and lit the baker’s face from below. His mouth was open. He was rubbing his fingers together, staring at them as though he had found something on the skin.

— Stop, Zora said.

Varren took his hand away. The opening remained. Heat came through it in slow, uneven waves.

Noct had backed against the stairs. He pressed the heel of his hand to his ear, then pulled it away angrily.

— He’s right here.

— Who? Halloran asked.

— Same one. Come away from there.

The baker turned toward the wall instead. Varren caught his shoulder and guided him to the stair. Halloran went with him, stumbling on the first step.

Zora had backed to the table with one hand closed. Her thermometer lay beside the pillar, where she had put it down.

— Zora.

She looked up. For a moment she seemed to be looking beyond him.

— There’s rope, she said. Through my hand.

He looked at her palm. The skin was unbroken, not even reddened.

She opened her fingers and stared at them. Then she picked up the notebook with her other hand. Varren wanted her to describe what she had felt. If he knew how it had started, he might be able to stop it. She looked past him at the baker on the stairs.

— Get them out.

Varren put the wrapped blade into his bag and collected the fallen flashlight and her thermometer. Noct helped Halloran up the stairs. Zora followed; Varren came last, listening to the sound behind them. He had stopped using his strength. The thing he had opened kept making its own noise.

Outside, Halloran sat on the steps. Noct stood below him, keeping a hand close to the baker’s elbow without touching it. Zora pressed her palm against the cold railing and kept it there.

— Still there? Varren asked.

She nodded. He offered to carry the notebook. She held on to it with both hands.

Halloran looked up at them.

— There was a room. A desk. I knew which drawer to open.

— Down there? Noct asked.

— No. Somewhere else.

Varren sat beside him. He wanted to say it would settle, that they would sleep and wake with the voices further away. He had given people comfort before without knowing what morning would bring.

Zora stood in front of him.

— Did you know it could do that?

— Not that.

— What did you know?

He looked at her closed hand.

— That using my strength could open it. That places like this can change people.

Halloran stopped rubbing his fingers.

— You should have said, Zora told Varren.

— Yes.

She stayed beside the railing. He waited without reaching for her.

When Halloran was ready, she helped him stand. They went back toward the bakery together. Varren walked a little behind until she slowed and let him come alongside.

Her fingers were still moving against her coat, trying to let go of something he could not see.

Three months after he found the blade, on a Thursday afternoon, Varren waited above the pontoon in Vatra with Zora’s gloves in his pocket while she measured the river again.

She had taken the thermometer into the hut, checked it, and brought it back. Now she stood by the railing with the cord running through her bare fingers. Beyond her, houses that had been hidden behind steam that morning showed clearly on the opposite bank.

— Your hands are blue, Varren said.

— I’m being thorough.

She glanced up at him. He smiled before she turned back to the water. There had been a time when she checked whether he was still waiting. Now she left things in his pockets.

She drew up the thermometer and held it against the pale sky.

— Lower again.

— Since this morning?

— Since I went inside.

He looked across the river. The measuring board stood at the same depth; the water moved as it had before. He had no explanation for the change. Zora climbed the steps and held out her hands for the gloves. He kept one between his palms until she curled her fingers against his.

— Is it hurting you? he asked.

— No. But I want to check the old readings. Come with me?

They crossed the bridge to Halloran’s bakery. She had left her earlier notebooks there when they spread the months of figures across his table the night before.

In the back room, Noct sat beside the outer door with his coat on, his damp cuffs tucked into his sleeves. The chair let him leave without asking anyone to move. He had chosen it himself.

Varren had stopped checking his breath when they met. Noct came for bread now, stayed to complain about the price, sometimes carried a sack for Halloran before being asked. The bottle still traveled with him; he had begun forgetting to use it. Yesterday he had put a loaf aside for Varren, claiming it was too misshapen for a paying customer. Varren had found nothing wrong with it.

Halloran stood at the worktable with a tray against his hip. He looked toward the ovens, then at them.

— Did you call me?

Zora shook her head. He set down the tray and looked toward the ovens again.

Noct watched him. His right hand had disappeared inside his coat.

— Don’t ask me. I’ve got enough people lying to me already.

Varren stopped beside the table.

— Since when?

Noct took out a small bottle. The cork squeaked against the neck; his hand was shaking too much to pull it free.

— Started before you came in, Halloran said. I thought he was cold.

— I am cold, Noct said. Glad that’s all it is.

The cork came out. He raised the bottle, stopped, and turned sharply toward the door.

Nobody stood there.

Zora put her notebooks on the table. Varren knew the attention spreading through him, the old woman’s patient search for what a person lacked. Noct needed something steady to answer. He moved into the young man’s line of sight.

— Noct. Who are you hearing?

— Same one.

— What’s changed?

Noct looked at his mouth.

— Say that again.

Halloran came around the table.

— Give me the bottle a moment.

He reached for it. Noct recoiled against the chair, his arm coming up between them with the bottle clenched in his fist. Varren put his palm against the forearm before it reached Halloran’s face.

The arm stopped. The force pressed back through Varren’s shoulder; he set his feet and held the contact. Noct’s free hand caught the edge of the table. The chair scraped behind him.

Then Noct was out of it.

He came up inside Varren’s reach, and the forearm under Varren’s palm turned, not away but around, so that for an instant it was Varren’s wrist that was caught. Noct’s free hand came short and flat into the hollow under his ribs. It was not a drunk’s blow. It was the one from the pontoon steps, economical, almost bored, and it emptied Varren’s lungs.

I could close my hand. The bones would go like bread sticks.

He did not close it. He took the second blow on the forearm and the third on the shoulder, and gave ground only where Noct’s weight sent him, and Noct read every step before Varren took it, the way a man reads a road he has walked for years.

Then Noct’s heel struck the wall.

Varren saw it reach his face: whitewashed brick at his back, flour sacks against his legs, nowhere behind him to go. The eyes went wide and blank, and the bottle came up again, not at Halloran now, at anything.

Away from the wall. I told him.

Varren let go of the wrist, took Noct by both lapels and turned them, half a circle across the floor with the table edge biting his hip and the bottle glancing off his ear, until it was his own back that met the oven door, and the iron, still hot from the morning bake, came through his shirt like a hand pressed flat, and Noct stood in front of him with the whole room open behind him and the outer door at his shoulder.

Varren did not move off the iron. He put his palm back on the forearm.

Noct found the chair behind him and sat, as if someone had cut the strings.

— Leave him room, Zora told Halloran.

The baker stepped back. She held out her hand where Noct could see it.

— I’ll put it beside you. You can have it back.

His fingers loosened. She took the bottle and set it on the table.

— Let go, Noct said.

— Sit back first.

— I’m in a chair.

Varren kept his hand there. The bottle was gone; Halloran had moved away. But Noct was still trembling, and Varren wanted to be sure before he released him.

Noct tried to turn his forearm. His eyes came up to Varren’s face.

— You can let go now. Or we can get engaged. Your call.

He put his free hand against Varren’s chest, pushing himself and the chair sideways. Varren shifted to keep the contact.

Zora touched his sleeve.

— He asked you to let go.

Varren lifted his hand. Noct drew the arm against himself and rubbed it. For a moment the only sound was the draft pulling through the oven.

— I thought you were going to hit him, Varren said.

— I nearly did. Then I gave her the bottle.

Zora moved the bottle within Noct’s reach and brought him water as well. He chose the water. Halloran went to the ovens, checked through the open mouth, and came back with nothing in his hands.

— It keeps sounding as if someone’s calling from there, he said.

Varren looked at Zora. She was standing beside Noct, still wearing only one glove.

— Did yours change too?

— By the river. I kept losing the reading.

— You should have told me.

— I’m telling you now.

He wanted them all here, where he could reach them. The urge was so immediate that he had already looked toward the door before he saw Zora watching him.

Noct put down the glass.

— Open that, would you?

Varren stepped aside. Zora opened the outer door. Cold air moved across the flour on the table, and Noct turned his face toward it.

The river had cooled. Halloran was hearing calls from an empty oven; Zora had lost her place in work she did every day. Varren could put them together. He could not yet say what joined them.

He drew another chair beside Noct’s, leaving the doorway clear, and sat forward, his back stinging where the oven had touched it.

— Look at me.

Noct did. His breathing eased. Varren asked him to describe what he heard, and waited through the pauses without filling them. For a little while, the answers came more easily.

Then Noct leaned forward.

— Keep talking.

— About what?

— Anything. I’m having trouble telling which one’s you.

Varren began again. Halfway through the next sentence, Noct asked him to start over.

On Thursday evening, Zora’s kitchen had four chairs and five people.

Halloran had brought the last of the day’s bread in a sack. Noct sat beside the window, which stood open a hand’s width onto the frost; he had asked for that before taking off his coat. The man who had come up through the mill race the week before stayed in the doorway with his cap in both hands.

He had worked for the survey office, he told them on his first night. After that he had stopped telling them anything. He ate what Zora put in front of him and looked toward the river whenever the talk died.

— There isn’t— he began.

Varren had already pulled the stool from under the sink. He set it at the corner of the table, between Noct and the stove, where nobody would have to squeeze behind it.

— Sit. I made room.

The man sat. Halloran cut the bread. For a while there was only the knife, and the draft lifting the edge of the curtain.

Varren watched them eat. Noct finished first and pushed his plate an inch away, the way he did when he wanted someone to offer him more. Halloran’s eyes went to the stove door twice. The surveyor kept both hands around his cup, as though it might leave without him.

All of it had started that morning. The river, the calls from the oven, the voices Noct could no longer tell apart. Something had changed at the root, and Varren could not see what.

He said so.

Zora put the teapot down. Her hand stayed on the handle.

— There’s something I haven’t told you.

Halloran looked at his plate, as if he already knew what was coming.

— The day the new team arrived, she said, Halloran heard the detachment men talking at the morning delivery. Someone was coming up on the evening train, the man who had killed somebody called Bull. They said his name.

She said it.

The stove ticked. Noct turned his head from the window.

— I went back with Halloran in the afternoon, when he took bread to the house they’d readied, Zora said. While he stacked the loaves, I put two bowls by the radiator and a sack of food. I wrote her name on one.

— Whose name?

— Mina. You said she always wants something of her own.

He had said it. In this kitchen, on a night when she asked him what he missed, he had talked about Soles’s dogs, and the younger one by name. It had not occurred to him that the story could leave the room.

— You didn’t know the dogs were coming.

— No. I hoped.

— You’ve told him we’re here.

It came out flat. He watched it reach her.

He could see Soles in a strange kitchen, looking down at a dog’s name in somebody else’s handwriting. Soles would not have called it a kindness. He would have asked who had a key, and he would have kept asking.

— I told a dog she was welcome, Zora said. You talk about him as if he were family. I thought—

She stopped. Varren was on his feet. He had not decided to stand.

Soles was in Vatra. Soles, who carried the dark blade. For weeks the detachment had gone down to the river and changed nothing. Then he arrived, and this morning the water cooled.

Varren could not prove it. He did not need to. He looked at Noct’s fingers working against the sill, at the baker watching the stove door, at the surveyor, who had put his cup down and turned his face toward the river.

— He’s closing it.

— Closing what? Halloran asked.

Varren went into the hall. His bag hung beside Zora’s coat. Through the canvas he felt the shape of the wrapped blade before he lifted it down.

Zora followed him.

— Where are you going?

— To look.

— Then I’ll come.

— Stay with them. Noct shouldn’t be alone tonight.

— Noct has three people in that kitchen.

He buttoned his coat. She stood between him and the door without touching him.

— At the landing, I told you that you should have said, she said. So I said it.

— You did.

— And now you’re going.

He put his hand on the latch. Behind her, someone had moved a chair; he heard Noct ask for the window to stay open.

— Keep it open for him, Varren said, and went out.

The steps down to the lower landing were glazed with ice. Varren kept one hand on the wall and left his flashlight off until the last street lamp was behind him.

The slab opened to his palm. Warm air rose from the stair, thinner than he remembered.

In the chamber he went straight to the pillar.

The opening was still there. Three months ago it had hung beside his wrist and pushed heat across his face. Now he had to crouch to feel it. It was narrower. The deep sound had gone faint, as if he were hearing it through a wall, and the edge would not keep still. It trembled like a rope with someone pulling on the far end.

If it closed, what would it take with it? Noct losing his place in a sentence. Halloran answering an empty oven. Zora dropping a reading she had taken a hundred times. None of them had asked to be closed. Nobody had asked them at all.

He laid his hand flat against the stone. The strength was there if he wanted it. He remembered Halloran’s flashlight rolling across the floor, Zora’s closed fist, and kept it where it was.

He set the bag on the stone table and unwrapped the blade.

It lay pale in the flashlight: the narrow body, the curved edge, the hole near the base where something had once been fixed. The old voice drew back from it as it had the first time.

Away.

He did not.

He carried it to the pillar and held it close to the trembling edge. Nothing happened. He had no idea what ought to happen. For three months he had kept it wrapped, because a frightened voice told him to and because the men who knew the entrance might have come back for it.

Somewhere in the town, Soles had a bowl by the radiator and the other blade within reach.

Varren knelt beside the opening with the pale one in his hand. He did not know what it could do.

He knew who carried the other.

On Saturday the doctor came back to the house at eight, as he had promised, and this time he did not unwind the bandage slowly.

Tesa held out her hand before he asked.

— Make a fist.

She made most of one. The last two fingers stopped short of her palm and stayed there, trembling, until she let them open.

— Tomorrow, she said. Ask me tomorrow.

The doctor did not smile. He pressed along the knuckles one by one, the way he had the day before, and Soles watched his lips move as he counted. Then he wrapped the hand again, though there was less of it to wrap.

He packed his bag. On the back of his own hand a knuckle had split in the cold, raw at the edges, exactly as it had been yesterday. Soles saw it. So did Krista; her pen stopped on the page.

When the door had shut behind him, she went to her bag and came back with an older notebook, the cover gone soft with handling. She opened it on the table beside yesterday’s.

Soles knew the pages before she turned them toward him. The prison. Four mornings of times and small notes in her narrow hand. T. both hands on the bag. S. elbow, full extension.

She laid the new page beside the old one. The times were closer together.

— Same thing, she said. Faster.

— What thing? Maxim asked.

— Whatever was in the air near that wing. We all felt better and nobody knew why. I wrote it down because it was strange.

She tapped the back of her own hand, where the doctor’s knuckle had split.

— His didn’t get better. Ours do.

— Only us, Tesa said.

— Only people like us.

Soles went up to fetch his coat. Halfway up the stairs he realized he had not put a hand to his ribs. Since Thursday every step had caught him under the left arm. Now there was nothing. He opened and shut his hands. The palms that had stuck to their wrappings every morning since the rope moved without pulling.

On the landing he turned his head, as he did a dozen times a day, to put the street on his right side. The right ear gave him nothing. It never would. Whatever was in the air mended what was already mending. It did not give back what was gone.

Mina was asleep against the radiator, beside the bowl with her name on it. He still did not know who had written it.

When he came down, Tesa was standing at the window. She had slept with it open, though the room was cold. At the end of the street the river lay under its steam.

— I want to go back down, she said.

— You can’t hold a rope.

— Not to do anything. Just to see the shelf again. Sit there a while.

She said it lightly, the way she said most things, and she was smiling at the steam.

Soles remembered the truck. The Hunter’s warning, which he had repeated to them himself. It won’t feel like pulling.

— Tesa.

— I know, she said, without turning around. I’m telling you so you’ll stop me.

Down the street, a man began to shout a name.

Not loudly. Over and over, the same two syllables, the way someone calls a child in from a yard.

Maxim was at the door first. Krista took her notebook. Soles buckled the blade on as he went down the steps. Tesa came last, her bandaged hand held against her coat. The shouting came from below, toward the river, and they went down the street after it.

The street ran down to the river between two rows of narrow houses. The frost lay white on the cobbles, on the sills, on the lids of the bins.

Halfway down, the frost stopped.

It stopped in a line, as clean as if someone had drawn it. White stones, then black ones, wet, with a thin steam lifting off them. Soles felt the warmth on his face from three paces away, the way you feel a kitchen when somebody opens the door.

The man who had been shouting stood at the line in his slippers.

— My wife. She went for bread. She’s just there. She won’t come.

She was just there. Sitting on a front step twenty meters in, her shopping bag on her knees, her face turned up into the steam.

She was not alone. A coalman sat on the shafts of his handcart with his cap in his lap. A boy sat on the curb with his school bag between his boots. None of them moved, except to breathe, and they breathed slowly.

At the far end, where the street met the embankment, the air above the drain grate had a seam in it.

Pale. Narrower than a door. The steam that drifted across it stretched into bright threads and broke.

— That’s not under the river, Maxim said.

— No.

It had come up. Out of the water, out of the rock they had pulled on, into a street where people went for bread.

Soles had gone down for one cut.

— Same air, Krista said. She had the notebook open and was not writing in it.

Tesa stepped over the line.

He saw her do it. One step, easy, the way you step into a warm bath. Her shoulders came down. Her bandaged hand opened at her side.

— Oh, she said softly. Oh, that’s nice.

Soles had her belt before he knew he had moved. The same grip as on the slope. He pulled. She came back one step, then another, and when her heel crossed onto the frost she turned on him with her good fist half raised.

Then she saw his face, and lowered it.

— Sorry, she said. I told you to stop me.

— You did.

The dark blade leaned on his hip, toward the seam, the way it had leaned in the steam. He kept his hands where they were. Anything he gave this place, it would drink.

— Look at their mouths, Maxim said quietly.

The boy’s lips were gray. So were the coalman’s.

Twenty meters. Three people. No rope. And every step in there would be the step Tesa had just taken.

Boots on the cobbles behind them. Four men from the detachment, one with a roll of yellow tape. The cleaners from the back row.

The one with the tape walked past Soles without looking at him. He ran it across the street along the frost line, from a lamppost to a drainpipe, waist high, and the husband was left standing on the cold side of it.

— Step back, sir.

— My wife’s in there.

— Nobody goes in.

He did not look at the step, or the boy.

— Chief’s orders.

He tied off the tape. Then he stood with his hand resting on it, his face turned toward the warm air, and Soles watched his eyes half close.

On the step, the woman set her shopping bag down beside her. She stood up, unhurried, and began to walk toward the seam, the way people walk home.

Soles lifted the tape.

The tape was cold in his hand, and then it was behind him.

Three steps in, the frost under his boots turned to wet stone. The warmth closed over him like bathwater. His shoulders came down on their own. Under his ribs, a knot he had carried since Thursday let go, and he understood why nobody in this street was running.

It’ll feel like being allowed to stop.

He kept going.

The woman was ten meters from the seam. Eight. She walked with her coat open and her hands empty. The steam in front of her stretched into bright threads and broke against her face, and she smiled at it.

He was not going to reach her.

Then there was more time than there should have been.

The steam stopped moving. A drop of water hung under the gutter of the nearest house, fat and silver. The woman’s foot was lifted in a step that did not come down. Soles ran through all of it.

He caught her by the collar and the crook of her arm, a meter from the seam, and turned her round.

The stretched moment ended.

The seam flared. Not at him. Outward, along the ground, the way a pan spits when water hits it. Behind him somebody shouted. Under his boots the stone grew warmer.

The dark blade leaned on his hip. He felt it to the elbow.

Finish it.

The seam was right there, a hand’s breadth from his knee. One cut. He could feel exactly where it would go.

He had finished it once. It had come up into the street.

He dragged the woman back instead.

For two steps she came, heavy and agreeable, like a sleepwalker. Then she looked over her shoulder at the light, and woke.

She tore at his hand with her nails. She twisted out of one sleeve of her coat and threw herself back toward the seam with her whole weight, and when he caught her other arm she bit the back of his wrist. She was not strong. She did not have to be. Every time he pulled, she answered with everything she had, and the seam waited behind her, close.

Don’t grip. You’ll break the arm.

He thought of Tesa on the stairs, the marks of his fingers going from white to red, and opened his hand to take a better hold, and she was out of it.

His knees bent.

Not from her weight. The warmth had found the place in his legs where the slope and the rope and every step since Thursday were stored, and it was offering to take them. It did not come as a voice. It came as his own body, being reasonable. Sit down. A moment. Then go on.

His knee touched the wet stone.

The woman took one step toward the light, then another, her coat hanging from one shoulder.

Not the arm. The belt. Like Tesa.

He came up off the knee with his teeth together and caught her by the belt from behind, the grip that had brought Tesa back over the line, and lifted until only her toes touched the stone, so that every lunge she made went into his forearm and nowhere else. She kicked his shins. She clawed backward at his face. He walked backward with her through all of it and did not let his legs listen.

He hauled her past her shopping bag, past the coalman, past the boy, and then his boots were sliding on frost.

Except the frost was not where he had left it.

The line had moved. Five meters up the street, clean as before. The tape lay in the wet. The cleaner who had tied it was sitting on the curb beside the lamppost, hands loose on his knees, face turned toward the river.

Two more doorways stood on the warm side now. In one of them an old man in a cardigan had come out to see what the shouting was. He was sitting down on his step.

Soles put the woman into her husband’s arms. Her lips were gray. Her nails had left four lines across the back of his hand. The husband said her name, the same two syllables, and somewhere around the fifth time she coughed and said it was cold.

One out. And the street had paid for her with two more.

— That was you, Maxim said.

— Yes.

Krista was writing now. Fast. She did not look up.

— It moves when something feeds it, she said. Every time, further.

Maxim was already gone. He came back from the yard between two houses with a washing line coiled around his forearm, a peg still clipped to it. He knotted one end around his own waist, sat down on the frost with his back against the lamppost and his heels against the curb, and held out the other end.

— I’m the post, he said. You go in on the line, you grab, I pull. Nobody runs. Nobody does anything clever.

He was looking at Soles when he said the last part.

— Nobody does anything clever, Soles said, and tied the line around his waist.

The warmth took his shoulders again at the first step. He let it. He walked, he did not run, and he felt nothing in the blade but its weight.

The boy did not look up when Soles knelt beside him.

— In a minute, the boy said, the way children say it from a bath.

Soles got his arms under the boy’s and lifted. Behind him the line came taut. Maxim leaned back against the lamppost and pulled hand over hand, and Soles let himself be pulled, the boy’s school bag banging against both their knees.

On the frost, the boy began to shiver. Krista wrapped her coat around him.

The coalman was too heavy to lift. Soles got him by the belt and the collar and Maxim pulled, swearing, and Krista put her hands on the line behind Maxim’s, and the coalman came out on his back, his cap still in his lap.

Soles stood bent over on the cold side with his hands on his knees.

Twice in. Twice the warmth had asked him to sit down. The first time his knee had answered for him. The second time he had nearly let the rest of him follow.

Tesa took the line off his waist.

— You can’t hold a rope.

— I’m not going to hold it, she said. You are.

She knotted it around her own belt and put his hand on the knot. The same grip as on the slope. Then she stepped over.

He watched her shoulders come down. He watched her stop.

— Tesa.

She did not answer. She was looking at her bandaged hand. Slowly, as if she were testing ice, she closed it.

All the way. The last two fingers met her palm and stayed there.

— Oh, she said.

He pulled the knot an inch toward him.

She went, without turning around, to the cleaner on the curb. She took him by the collar with that hand and hauled him upright, and the rope went tight in Soles’s fist, and between them they dragged him back over the line.

Then she bent over the old man’s step and did it again.

When she came back onto the frost, she stood there with her fist held up in front of her face. Not a tremor in it.

— It finished, she said. In there.

She was not smiling. She looked at the fist the way you look at something you have been given in a shop and not paid for. Then she looked past it, down the street, at the steam.

Soles kept his hand on her belt.

The cleaner was on his knees, coughing. His color came back in patches. When he could breathe, he took the radio off his chest and pressed the button.

— Breach has moved, he said. Five meters. Pilot team crossed the tape.

Krista looked up from the notebook.

— You were sitting in it. We pulled you out.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the tape lying in the wet, and the boy in Krista’s coat, and the line still knotted around Tesa’s waist.

The radio said something short.

— Yes, sir, the cleaner said. Them. On their own.

The order came to the detachment at four, on two sheets of fax paper that were still curling when the chief read them out.

He read them standing, under the map, to the whole room. Behind him his office door stood half open. He had not lit the lamp in there. The cohort at the desk he had given them. The cleaners on the back row. Corvin at the end with the case on his knees. The man who had tied the tape that morning sat with a blanket around his shoulders and looked at the floor between his boots.

— Residential sector east of the embankment, from the bridge to the mill, the chief read. All occupants to be evacuated within ten days of this notice. On the eleventh day the detachment will proceed to sterilization of the site.

He turned the page.

— Occupants who decline to leave will be treated as part of the site.

Nobody on the back row moved. They had not needed to hear it. They had known before the fax machine started.

— Sterilization, Maxim said. Of a street. People go for bread in it.

— For ten more days.

Soles turned his head so the chief was on his left side.

— Whatever you use on it, he said, it’ll drink. You’ll make it bigger.

The chief looked at him for the first time since the fax.

— Is that in your report?

— Since yesterday, Krista said. With the requisition.

— Then it’s being read.

He folded the sheets in half, then in half again, and put them in his breast pocket. His thumb went to the cap of his pen. A quarter turn. Back.

— The pilot mandate stands, he said. Pending review.

He went into his office and shut the door.

On the back row someone laughed, short, through his nose. Corvin did not. He opened the case on his knees, looked at whatever was inside, and closed it again.

As Soles passed the bench, the man in the blanket spoke without lifting his head.

— I said what he told me to say.

His hands were still pale at the knuckles. He turned them over and looked at the palms, as if the warm street might still be on them somewhere.

— I was sitting down, he said. I know I was sitting down.

Nobody on the bench looked at him. Soles did not know what to answer, so he nodded, and the man nodded back at the floor.

Krista was already in the corridor with her phone.

She dialed from the card she kept in the back of her notebook, the one with no name on it, only a number. Soles stood at the window beside her. Below, in the yard, two men were loading a truck with rolls of tape and boxes he did not recognize.

Down the corridor, behind the chief’s door, a telephone began to ring.

Krista looked up from the card. It rang again. On the third ring it stopped, and the voice came into her ear, unhurried.

— Miss Krista.

She tilted the phone so Soles could hear. He knew the voice before it said anything else.

Krista gave the reference from the top of the mandate, slowly, the way she would read a number to someone writing it down.

— Your report was received Friday, eighteen ten, the man in gray said. Status: under analysis.

— Whose analysis?

— Mine.

— Has anything else come in from this location?

— The detachment’s report. Nine forty this morning. Pilot team widened breach unassisted. There’s a recommendation attached.

— May I hear it?

— Not yet.

Krista’s eyes went still on the yard below.

— The man on the tape radioed at twenty past nine.

— I know. I was here at twenty past.

Paper moved behind the door. Soles heard it twice, once in the phone and once down the corridor.

— And the requisition? Krista said. The rope.

— Very good work. Also under analysis.

— Thank you, she said. That’s very helpful.

She put the phone in her pocket. The chief’s door stayed shut.

— Twenty minutes, she said. He had it typed before we were out of the street. And he let it go up.

Maxim had come up behind them. He did not say anything clever. He put one hand on the back of Krista’s neck, briefly, the way he did with Lucky when there was thunder, and took it away.

— And ours is being analyzed, he said.

They walked home along the embankment at dusk.

The cleaners had started at the bridge. Two of them, one with a bucket, one with a stick of white chalk as thick as a thumb. At every door the one with the chalk drew a cross on the wood at head height and wrote a number under it.

10.

A woman in an apron opened her door while he was still writing. She read it. She looked up the street toward the steam, then down at the chalk on her own door, and closed it again without a word.

Nobody shouted. That was what Soles noticed. Nobody came out to argue. People stood in their doorways in their slippers and read the number and went back in, and behind them the lamps went on, one kitchen after another, as if it were any other evening.

Their own door had a cross on it.

Krista stopped and looked at it for a long moment. Then she took out her pen and wrote the time in the notebook, under the number.

Inside, Mina was asleep against the radiator. Lucky got up to meet them and leaned against Maxim’s legs until he knelt.

Tesa was at the window. She had not come to the detachment. She stood with the curtain pulled back, and when she heard them she held up her right hand without turning around and closed it. All the way. Opened it.

— Still fine, she said. Doesn’t hurt anywhere.

She was not looking at the hand. She was looking down the street, at the steam over the river, and her voice had the same easy lightness it had had at breakfast.

Soles went and stood beside her. He did not touch her belt. He stood close enough that he could.

Ten days. He went through it the way he would go through a lock. The blade fed it. The slowing fed it. Whatever the truck in the yard was carrying would feed it too, and the men who had loaded it did not know. That left rope, and feet, and whatever Krista could read off a wall.

— Ten days, Krista said behind them. Then whatever they bring.

She took her notebook to the other window and began to count the lit ones down the street. Her lips moved. Soles counted with her, because it was something to do.

Forty-one. Forty-two. The last house before the tape.

On the far side of the tape, the street was dark. The cleaners had cleared it by noon. Every door down there had a cross on it, and nobody behind any of them.

Krista was writing the number when a window came on below the tape.

Then, two doors down, another.

They came back at first light and crossed out the ten.

Soles heard the chalk before he saw it, a dry squeak on wood below the window. When he looked down, the cleaner with the stick was already two doors on. On their own door the 10 had a line through it. Under it, a 9.

Krista had been up before him. She sat at the kitchen table and at the top of a clean page she had written two words and underlined them twice.

Stage one.

Under them, three lines.

Nobody else sits down.

Three ropes. Ours. Tested.

A way down that isn’t theirs.

— That’s not a plan, Maxim said. That’s a shopping list.

— Stage one is shopping.

He read it again, nodded, and went to find his boots.

Tesa was at the stove. She lifted the full kettle with her right hand and poured four cups without spilling, and Soles watched the spout the whole way. It did not shake.

— I can hold a rope, she said, to nobody in particular.

Nobody argued.

The knock came while Maxim was still lacing up. Three knocks, spaced, the way a man knocks when he has stood on the step for some time deciding to.

It was Bram, from the hardware shop. His coat was buttoned wrong, as if he had put it on walking. He did not come in.

— They put a nine on my father’s door, he said.

— On ours too, said Maxim.

— You’re not from here.

He looked past Maxim and found Soles at the table.

— The coalman brings my coal. He told me what you did on Saturday. A washing line. He says it was the best he’s felt in thirty years, in there. He says it like he’d go back.

Maxim opened his mouth. Bram did not let him.

— Sterilization. My father had a dictionary. Nothing living.

Nobody answered that.

— Last week I asked you what happens to people who go down there. You said both.

— I did.

— I’m asking again. And this time I’ve got a nine on my door.

Soles did not answer at once. He turned his head, not toward the street this time. Toward the table.

Krista had put her pen down. Tesa had turned from the stove with a cup in each hand. Maxim stood with one boot laced and the other in his fist.

You should have let us answer.

He waited.

— Tell him, Krista said. I’ll write down that you did.

Tesa set the cups on the table. Maxim pulled on the other boot.

Soles stood up so that he would not be saying it sitting down.

— There’s something under the bank. We don’t know what it is. It’s warm. Near it, people feel better than they have in years, and they sit down, and they don’t want to get up. If nobody pulls them out, they don’t.

Bram did not move.

— On Saturday it came up into the street. It came up because we went down and cut at it. That part’s ours.

— And the eleventh day?

— Whatever they use on it, it’ll drink. It’ll get bigger. They don’t believe that yet.

— Do you?

— I’ve watched it twice.

Bram looked at the chalk on the door frame for a long while.

— And the part that’s still both?

— What it is. Where it ends. Who else knows.

Krista was writing every word. Soles did not ask her to stop.

Bram put his hand in his coat pocket and held something out across the step. A shackle, dull gray, the pin bright with oil.

Maxim took it. He worked the pin with his thumb and held it up to the window.

— That’s a hard one.

— It’s the one I kept.

Bram turned his collar up.

— I’ll show you where the race starts. Not the chief. You four.

They went along the embankment in a line, Bram in front.

The tape had been tied again, five meters higher. The frost line ran under it, white stones, then black. Beyond it the street was empty. On the woman’s step, her shopping bag sat where she had left it. The two windows lit below the tape last night were dark now. Krista looked at them as they passed and wrote something down.

Every door on that side had a nine.

The mill stood at the end of the sector, the wheel locked white in the ice, the iron stair to the platform running up its flank where they had hung the rope on Thursday. A cleaner sat on an upturned crate beside the wheelhouse door, a radio on his chest.

He stood up when he saw them.

It was the man from the tape. The color had come back into his face, all of it. His hand went to the radio and stayed there.

Soles stopped. So did the others.

One press of a thumb. Twenty minutes, and it would be typed.

Bram walked straight past Soles and up to the crate.

— My father’s mill, he said. I’ve come for his things before you burn them.

The cleaner looked at Bram. Then at Soles. Then down at his own hands, the way he had looked at them on the bench.

He took his hand off the radio.

— Ten minutes, he said. I was around the back.

He carried the crate around the corner of the wheelhouse and set it down facing the river.

Inside, the wheelhouse was dark and smelled of old flour and cold iron. Bram went to the far corner without looking for it, kicked aside a stack of rotten sacks, and crouched.

A flagstone. An iron ring set into it, flat in its groove.

— Nobody’s lifted that since my father, he said.

Maxim took one side of the ring and Soles the other. They braced and pulled.

The stone came up too easily. It came up like a lid somebody had lifted the week before.

Warm air rose past their faces.

Not much. A breath. It smelled of wet stone and steam, and Soles knew the smell. He had last smelled it on Saturday, with a washing line around his waist.

Tesa took a step back from the hole without seeming to decide to. Soles put his hand on her belt, and she let him.

Below, stone steps went down into the dark.

Krista struck a match and held it out over the opening.

The flame leaned. Not up, with the warm air. Down. Toward the dark, the way the blade on his hip leaned toward the seam.

— It’s breathing in, Tesa said quietly.

Krista knelt and held the match low over the first step.

The steps were thick with flour dust, pale and soft as the frost on the street. Bram looked at them and went very still.

— Those aren’t mine.

Boot prints. One man’s, the heel worn down on the outer edge. Krista lowered the match to the second step, then the third, as far as her arm would reach.

Every one of them was coming up.

Corvin came round the corner of the wheelhouse while Krista’s match was still burning.

He had the case under his arm. He stopped in the doorway and looked at the stone, the hole, the steps going down. Then, for a long moment, at the flour on them.

Krista shook the match out.

— I check the mill on Sundays, Corvin said. Nobody told you that.

— Nobody tells us anything, Maxim said.

Corvin set the case down on the flagstones.

— That’s my line out there on the shelf. Nobody goes down under this bank without me.

— You came up without us last time, Tesa said.

Her right hand was at her side. Corvin looked at it, at the whole of it, knuckles and all, and something moved in his face and was put away.

— Outside, he said to Soles. You and me. Then we’ll see who goes down where.

— He gave us ten minutes, Maxim said. The man on the crate.

— It won’t take ten.

Outside, the snow between the wheelhouse and the bank had been stamped flat by the cleaners’ boots and frozen again. Twelve paces of it. Behind it the wheel, locked white to the hub. In front, the edge of the bank, and three meters below, the shelf with the bolts and the ladder. Round the corner, the man on the crate sat with his back to all of them.

Bram stood in the doorway with a canvas bag against his chest. He had found his father’s things after all.

Corvin opened the case on the snow and took out two knives, short and plain-handled, the ones Soles had watched him clean along the flat and then the edge. He laid one halfway between them, handle toward Soles.

— He fought you with one of these.

— I know.

— Then pick it up.

Soles left it where it was.

— Then the other one, Corvin said. The black one. I want to see it.

He wants to see what it did to Bull.

Soles kept his hands open and the chain gathered short against the cuff.

— No.

Tesa had come out behind him. He felt her stop at his right shoulder, on the side where he heard nothing, and knew she had chosen it.

— Stay out of it, he said. This one’s mine.

— Then don’t lose it.

Krista had her notebook out. She was not writing.

— If you cut him, she said to Corvin, I’m writing down where.

Corvin almost smiled.

He came in low and patient, the knife laid along his forearm, and the first thing he did was walk to Soles’s right.

Soles turned with him. Corvin kept turning. Two steps, three, always to the right, and Soles understood a moment late what he was doing. On that side the snow made no sound. He could see the feet. He could not hear them.

The knife came from there.

He got his left arm across. The blade went over the old scar Bull had given him and opened a new one beside it, short and hot. Soles stepped back and felt the blood start inside his sleeve.

He tried to keep Corvin on his left. He stepped, and Corvin stepped wider, and the snow on the deaf side swallowed him again. Something struck the right side of his head, not the blade, the butt of it, short, from nowhere, and the world became one long note. He went down on a knee. The ringing that had lived on that side since the inn rose until it filled his skull, and through it he saw Corvin’s boots stop a pace away and wait.

Waiting. Not finishing. Corvin wanted him up.

He got up.

Three months on a bench, watching me. He knows the ear. He knows the left comes first.

So Soles stopped turning.

He let Corvin go round to the right and stayed where he was, facing the wheel, with the low sun at his back, and looked at the ice instead. Anything behind him on the deaf side threw its shadow forward across the bright ice. Corvin’s shadow came into the edge of his eye a heartbeat before Corvin could.

Corvin saw him see it. He stepped once to the left, where Soles could hear the snow take his weight, and feinted with the shoulder. Soles’s head turned to the sound, the way three months of turning had taught it to. In the same heartbeat, the shadow on the ice went right again.

He let the sound go and kept the shadow.

The shadow lifted its arm.

Soles turned into him, under the arm, outside the knife, and hit the arm across Corvin’s body. The knife did not fall. Corvin had held knives too long for that. But his weight went over his front foot, the ribs on that side came open, and Soles put a short left into them with everything his back could give.

The breath went out of Corvin in one white cloud.

He cut back across, blind and fast. Soles was already inside it. Right hand to the jaw. Left to the ribs again. It was the combination the trainer had made him lose a hundred times by stepping sideways. Corvin stepped sideways, and his heel found the ice where the cleaners had stamped it smooth, and went.

He came down on one knee with his back against the frozen wheel. The knife skidded out of his hand and stopped at the edge of the bank, above the shelf.

Soles was on him before the knee had settled.

His left hand closed on the back of Corvin’s neck.

It was the same grip. His fingers knew it before the rest of him did: the bones under the collar, the weight leaning forward into his palm, the head held where a blade would go. The chain slid loose against the cuff on his right wrist. All he had to do was let it. It would be quick. Nobody on this bank would walk to his right again.

Corvin did not fight the hand. He looked up at him from under it.

— Go on, he said. That’s how you did him.

Behind Soles nobody moved. Through the ringing he could hear Krista breathing. He could hear the river.

In a training hall far from here he had chosen every part of a few seconds, and he had carried each of them here. He could choose these too.

Soles opened his hand.

— Get up.

Corvin did not get up. He knelt against the wheel with an arm across his ribs, breathing short and white.

Soles picked up the other knife from the snow, put it back in the case, and closed the lid.

Krista pushed his sleeve up on the step of the wheelhouse and bound the forearm with her scarf. It was the same scarf she had used on Tesa’s hand. She had washed it.

Maxim held the case shut with both hands, as if it might open on its own. Corvin sat down in the snow with his back to the wheel and spoke to the river.

— There was an order.

Krista’s hands stopped on the knot. Then they went on.

— Make it go wrong. Nobody dies. Four people from the coast close what we couldn’t with a rope and a dog, and then what are we for? Bull would have said it out loud. Bull’s dead.

He breathed in carefully, around the ribs.

— It came down through the chief. My part was small. Come up first. Say you were right behind me.

— Who tied the splice? Tesa said.

— I don’t know whose hands. I didn’t ask.

He looked at her right hand. She closed it for him, all the way, and opened it.

— Nobody dies, he said again. That was the order.

He got up, went to the edge of the bank and picked up his knife. He wiped it on his sleeve, along the flat and then the edge, and put it away without looking at Soles.

Inside, the stairs under the stone were still breathing in.

Krista tied off the scarf, opened her notebook at the page headed Stage one., and under the third line she wrote a fourth.

Nothing through the chief.

Corvin took the case back from Maxim and put it under his arm. At the corner of the wheelhouse he stopped, his back to them.

— I check the mill on Sundays, he said. Today I checked it. There was nothing under the sacks.

He went round the corner. They heard him say something to the man on the crate, and the man laugh once through his nose, and then one pair of boots going away along the bank.

Maxim let his breath out.

— Does that mean what I think it means?

— It means he owes you, Krista said to Soles. And he’s paying before he changes his mind.

Inside, she knelt by the hole again with a fresh match and drew the heel in her notebook. Then she drew it a second time, beside the first.

— Two of them on the same step, she said. One over the other. The top one’s sharper. He’s been up more than once.

— And down? Maxim said.

— Not here.

Soles looked at the steps going into the dark and thought about a man who did not need a rope.

Krista closed the notebook on her pen and turned to Bram.

— When it rains, where does the street go?

Bram looked at her as if it were a child’s question. Then, slowly, as if it were not.

— Here. Every drain from the bridge down runs into the race. That’s why they cut it so deep. My father cursed every thaw.

— Put the stone back, Krista said.

They lowered it into its groove. Bram kicked the rotten sacks over it, his father’s bag held against his chest.

The man on the crate did not turn round as they passed.

On the embankment Krista stopped at the first drain grate past the mill, crouched, and struck a match. She held it low over the iron.

The flame leaned down.

She shook it out and walked on. Ten meters, another grate, its bars furred with frozen leaves. Another match. Down.

The third leaned so hard it went out.

Nobody said anything. Maxim had started counting under his breath, the way Krista counted windows. At the bottom of their own street they could not reach the grate where the seam was. They did not need to. Even from the embankment Soles could see the air above it, faintly bent, like the air over a stove.

Krista took the alley up behind the tape and came out into the street above it.

The grates ran up the gutter on the left side, one outside every second house. She went from one to the next, and at every one she struck a match, and at every one the flame went down into the iron as if it were being poured. Every door they passed had a nine.

Outside a house where a lamp was already on, Tesa crouched beside her and held her right hand open over the grate.

— Warm, she said.

— The iron’s frozen, Maxim said.

— My hand says warm.

She closed it. Opened it. Something in her face went quiet and pleased, the way the woman’s face had gone before she stood up from her step. Soles put his hand on her shoulder. Tesa took hers away from the grate and put it in her pocket.

— I know, she said. I know.

Above them the curtain moved in the lit window and fell still.

The last grate before their own door leaned like the rest.

Krista went on past it, all the way to the top of the street, where it met the road. A newer grate here, square, the iron still black with paint. She struck the match.

The flame stood straight up.

— That one goes to the river on its own, Bram said. New pipe. They laid it with the road.

Krista held the match until it burned her fingers. Then she looked back down the street. The last chalked door was two houses below her.

— They drew the line right, she said. They just don’t know why.

In the kitchen she cleared the table and spread the tracing from the archive, and beside it a clean page. She drew the river first, then the bank, the mill, the race running under it out to the water. Then the street, and a small cross for every grate, and from every cross a line down to the race.

She turned the page round so they could see it.

It was not a hole. Soles had been thinking of it as a hole since the rope: a place under the bank you went down to and cut. On the page it was a thick line under the river and the race, and thinner lines going up from it, one under every gutter, branching toward the doors.

Bram leaned over it, his bag still in his arms.

— Willow, he said. When I was a boy the willow on the bank got into the drains. My father had the roots out every spring. They go where the water goes.

Nobody answered him. Krista wrote one word beside the drawing and did not underline it.

Root.

Soles looked at the lines under the gutters.

It came up the street because I cut it. But it was already under the street. It was waiting at the grates.

— It doesn’t come up through the ground, Krista said. It comes up the water’s road. And the water’s road goes under every house with a nine on it.

— Including this one, Maxim said.

— Including this one.

She turned to the page headed Stage one. and put the pen on the third line.

— A way down that isn’t theirs. We have one.

— Tomorrow, Soles said. After dark. Our ropes.

— I sell rope, Bram said.

Maxim took the shackle out of his pocket and set it on the table between them.

— Then three coils. I test every meter in the yard first. Nobody else’s splice.

— We go to the step and the grating, Soles said. We find where the race meets it. We look. We don’t cut.

Tesa looked at him across the table.

— Last time you cut, it came up the street.

— That’s why.

Krista wrote it down as he said it. Then she looked up at Bram.

— Somebody has to hold the other end. Up top, where we can’t see you.

— My father did that for me. Belt round the waist.

— You know what might be down there.

Bram shifted the bag in his arms and looked at the drawing for a long time.

— Both, he said. You told me.

Krista wrote under the fourth line.

Monday night. The race. Bram holds the end.

Maxim got up to fill the kettle. The water ran into it, loud in the quiet, and the overflow ran away into the sink and gurgled down the pipe.

Krista watched it go.

She took the matches out of her pocket, struck one, and held it over the drain.

In their own kitchen, the flame leaned down.