Capitolul XIV · Bring Him In

Soles was reading the pilot terms beside Krista’s drawing when his phone lit up. It was Sunday evening. Tomorrow they would take their own ropes to the mill, and he wanted to know whether the detachment could stop them.

The message came from the number he had called before accepting Vatra.

Come to the detachment. Ask for me.

Krista read it over his shoulder. She pulled the terms free of the drawing and held out the copy.

— Take these.

— He wrote them.

— Then he won’t need long.

Soles folded the sheets. Across the table, Tesa was watching him.

— I’ll bring back what he says, he told them.

He went down the embankment to the old customs building. Through the windows he could see the cleaners eating at the long desk. The chief stood when Soles entered, then stepped aside from his office door.

— In there.

The man in gray sat at the chief’s desk with an open folder. He looked up, indicated the chair and waited for the chief to shut the door from outside.

Soles sat with his good ear toward the desk. The folded terms rested on his knee.

— We need access to inspect the breach, he said. Your chief’s put tape across it. He’s also sent you a report saying we made it worse.

— You did make it worse.

— Using power to get a woman out. Our report explains what happened.

— I have it.

The man turned a sheet in the folder. Soles recognized their own report by its file number.

— Yesterday you called it under analysis.

— It still is.

— The other one seems to have finished being analyzed.

The man slid a page across the desk.

Pilot team widened breach unassisted.

Below it were lines about the tape, the warning and the order Soles had ignored. He read far enough to find the recommendation: suspend the pilot pending inquiry. The chief’s name was at the bottom.

Soles laid the page back down.

— The man who wrote this was on the cold side. His cleaner was sitting in the street, waiting to die.

— And you brought him out.

— Yes.

— Good.

The word left Soles angrier than the accusation had. He pressed his thumb against the folded sheets until the paper edge hurt.

— Then read ours.

— I have read yours. It doesn’t make this disappear.

The man put one finger on the chief’s recommendation.

Soles could describe the rope, the false request, the signature that didn’t belong on it. Each fact would go into the folder. He had seen what happened after that.

He unfolded the terms instead.

— We close it, or we give your researchers an explanation they can verify. Every finding in the report. That was what we agreed.

— You haven’t closed it.

— We’re still working. Nine days left on our door.

— The evacuation period belongs to the town. It isn’t a guarantee of nine more days for your unit.

Soles looked down at the copy. The terms had given them a way to fail without becoming the failure themselves: show what made closure impossible, let somebody check it. He had made the others hear that part before they agreed to come.

— You can send researchers to check what we’ve found, he said.

— I can. There’s something you can do for me first.

The man drew the recommendation back toward himself.

— We have information that Varren is coming to the river.

For a moment Soles could hear the men eating outside. A spoon struck the rim of a bowl. He had been looking at the report, and now the room contained someone else entirely: Varren standing in a doorway, asking him for something he could not bear to give.

— Here?

— That’s the information.

— When?

— You’ll have to find him.

Soles sat back. The movement pulled at the cut under his left sleeve.

The channel ran beneath the houses. They had a way in, ropes to test, a man willing to hold the end. He had come to argue for that work. Across the desk, the man in gray waited for him to abandon it.

— Bring him in alive, he said.

— You sent us to close a breach.

— And I’m telling you what keeps your pilot open.

He lifted the recommendation by its corner.

— Without the pilot, this proceeds. Your team will face charges for what happened here. Not just you. The others were part of the intervention.

There it is. All their names, and my answer.

The old bargain rose easily: agree now, take the danger himself, make it safe before they heard about it. For a few seconds he could almost believe he would manage it better this time.

He flattened the terms against his knee.

— Put the new condition in writing.

— So Miss Krista can put it on a wall?

— So she can read what you’re asking her to pay for.

The man watched him. Then he pulled a clean sheet from beside the folder and began to write. Soles waited through the scrape of the pen.

— My chief can supply men, the man said. Equipment. Transport.

— The same men who supplied the rope?

— You’ll want help if you find him.

Soles kept his hands on the old terms. He wanted to take the offer far enough to learn what they knew. He also knew how easily a question could become agreement in somebody else’s report.

— I haven’t said yes.

The pen stopped.

— You haven’t said no.

— You asked for an answer from a unit. You’ll get one.

The man finished the line and pushed the sheet toward him. The written order named Varren and called for his capture. Soles looked for the threat about the inquiry. It wasn’t there. He folded the order separately from the terms they had accepted.

Outside the office, the chief was eating with the cleaners. He moved his bowl to let Soles pass.

On the walk home Soles kept to the upper side of the street, away from the warm grates. A nine stood under the cross on their door. Through the kitchen window he could see Krista’s drawing still spread across the table, held flat by Maxim’s hands.

He reached inside his coat.

The old terms and the new condition had fitted in the same pocket. Before he went in, he took them out and separated them.

Krista moved her drawing aside when Soles came into the kitchen. He put the old terms on the cleared wood and the new order beside them.

She reached for the new sheet. Maxim brought his chair round to Soles’s left, where he could hear him. Tesa stayed by the window, her arms folded.

— What did he say? Krista asked.

Soles told them about the recommendation to suspend the pilot, then about Varren. He kept the words as close as he could remember them. When he reached the threat of charges, Maxim stopped turning the shackle in his hands.

— All of us?

— He said the team.

— Is that on the paper?

Krista ran her finger down the order and turned it over.

— It isn’t, she said. This asks for Varren. Alive. Nothing about what happens if we refuse.

— That part he told me.

She fetched her notebook. Soles watched her write the time and his name above a clean space.

— Again, please. What he said about us.

He gave her the sentence. Speaking it here was harder. At the desk he had been angry enough to answer; here he had to watch them hear it.

Krista finished, read it back to him and waited for his nod. Then she set the pen down.

— What did you agree to?

— Nothing. I said he’d get an answer from the unit.

Tesa came away from the window.

— Do you want to catch him?

He had expected a question about the man in gray. He looked at the empty chair beside her.

— I want to find him.

— I asked if you want to catch him.

— If that would get you out of this, yes.

Maxim laid the shackle on top of the order.

— That’s the part I don’t like.

— Which part?

— We’re sitting here and you’re already working out what you’d have to do for us.

Soles took off his coat. The cuff caught on the bandage, and he eased it free before hanging the coat over his chair.

— I came back before I answered.

— I know, Maxim said. Keep doing it.

Tesa sat opposite Soles.

— And when we find him? Say he comes quietly. You hand him over and he becomes somebody else’s problem?

— He is a problem.

— You know what I mean.

Soles did. A man in a cabin had once become the thing between him and home. He had listened, believed enough of what the man said, and killed him anyway. The others knew that. He wished, briefly and uselessly, that they didn’t.

— I’m not promising to deliver him because they’ve put your names behind mine, he said.

Krista pulled her chair in.

— Good. Because I haven’t given you permission to buy me out of anything.

Her voice was level. He wanted to tell her that wasn’t what he had meant. It was close enough that he kept quiet.

Maxim pushed his chair back.

— We could leave. Pack tonight, take the dogs. I can drive.

— And the inquiry? Krista asked.

— I said leave. I didn’t say disappear.

Lucky lifted his head at the sound of Maxim standing. Mina slept through it, her muzzle tucked against the radiator.

Soles could picture the van loaded, the road out before morning. Then the kitchen they would leave behind, the water running into its pipe. Whoever came after them would use the same taps.

— I want to finish what we came for, he said. But I don’t know whether we can. I’m asking you to stay without being able to promise that.

Maxim looked at the drawing. His chair remained pushed out.

— I don’t want to spend tomorrow pretending I’m testing rope for a fishing trip, he said. If we’re staying, tell me what the rope’s for now.

Soles spread his hand beside the line Krista had drawn under the mill.

— The same thing. We look at the channel tomorrow night. Before that, we find out whether Varren’s here.

— And catch him? Tesa asked.

— Find him. See what he’s doing. Then decide what we can do.

She pressed a finger against the mill.

— If something goes wrong down there, I don’t want him between us and the way out.

— Neither do I.

— So we look for him together.

Krista nodded.

— No cleaners. No help arranged through the chief.

— And if he’s hurting people? Maxim asked.

Soles thought of the strength Varren had held back against him. If the others had to stand in front of that, he wanted something better to offer than an order from the state.

— We stop what we can. I can’t tell you how before we find him.

Maxim sat down again. He took the shackle off the order and set it beside the drawing.

— Fine. Tomorrow I test the rope. After that, I’m coming.

Tesa reached for the kettle, then stopped with her hand over the handle.

— One more thing.

She looked at Soles.

— At the grate today, I knew I should move. It still took you touching me.

His eyes went to her right hand. She closed it and rested it on the table.

— If I say I’m fine tomorrow, look anyway.

— I will.

Krista turned the drawing toward herself.

— We start with Bram. People are still living below the road. Somebody buys their food, brings it in. If Varren comes to the river, somebody may see him. And we still haven’t found the man who came up those steps.

Soles looked at the worn heel she had drawn. He had wanted a place to begin; they had one already.

His phone lay beside the new order. He picked it up and opened the message that had called him to the detachment.

— We should acknowledge this, Krista said. Only that we received it.

He typed, then put the phone between them.

Order received. The team has not agreed to the change in terms.

Maxim leaned over to read it. Tesa read it after him, then Krista.

— That’ll annoy him, Maxim said.

— Yes, Krista said.

Soles kept his finger clear of the screen until she had finished reading. Then he sent it.

For a moment he waited for the phone to ring. Tesa took the kettle to the cold tap. Maxim got up to make room for her, and Krista pulled the drawing back under the lamp.

Soles left the phone where they could all reach it.

By Monday afternoon Maxim had tested the last length of rope. He wound it into a coil in the yard. An eight had replaced the nine on their door.

They took the coils inside, left the dogs with water and went to Bram’s shop together.

Bram listened from behind his counter.

— Food? The baker brings it. He’s still delivering down by the mill.

— Where do we find him? Krista asked.

— Across the bridge. Follow the people carrying empty bags.

They found a short line outside the bakery. Beside the front door an open gate led into a delivery yard, with another gate at the far end. A handcart stood between them. The baker was lifting loaves into its basket, a broad man with flour in the folds of his sleeves.

Soles watched him cut a blackened strip from the side of a loaf. He put that one beneath the others.

— Excuse me, Krista said.

The man beside the cart turned.

For an instant Soles knew him only as someone who had stood in his own kitchen. Then he saw Varren’s hand on the basket, the thumb rubbing across the knuckles, and remembered all the things that had come after.

Varren’s face changed too. His hand stayed on the basket.

— Soles.

Soles stepped past Krista.

— I need to talk to you.

The baker looked between them. Varren took his hand off the basket and backed into the yard.

Soles followed. Behind him Tesa said his name, sharply enough that he heard it over his left shoulder.

He raised an empty hand without turning.

Varren went toward the far gate. Soles lengthened his stride. He wanted to get between him and the exit before the talk became another promise from a distance.

Maxim was already moving along the street toward the far end of the yard. Varren heard him and stopped with his hand on the gate.

Soles reached him.

His right hand closed around Varren’s wrist. He stepped close, trying to turn the arm back against the gatepost before Varren could pull free.

For a moment he had the weight where he wanted it.

Varren put his other hand on Soles’s elbow.

— Not here.

The pressure folded Soles’s arm toward his chest. He tried to keep his feet under him, but his heel slid across the packed snow. Varren turned his wrist through the gap beside Soles’s thumb and was free.

The gate swung between them. Soles caught its edge before it struck his face.

Beyond it, a narrow lane ran back to the street. Maxim came round the corner as Varren went the other way, into the people carrying sacks from the marked houses.

Soles went after him.

The street was full of the evacuation: sacks, bedding, a boy pulling a sled with a sewing machine roped to it, an old woman in two coats with a birdcage under a cloth. Varren was not running. He did not need to. Every person between them was another reason for Soles not to.

He caught Varren’s collar beside a doorway.

Varren turned into the grip instead of out of it, close enough that his shoulder pressed Soles’s chest, and set a flat hand on Soles’s breastbone. He did not push. He let Soles feel how easily he could.

He could put me through that door. He won’t. Not with them watching.

Soles’s right hand was already a fist. He brought it short toward the ribs, and the boy with the sled came between them at knee height, and Soles pulled the blow so hard that his elbow cracked with it. Pain went up into his shoulder.

He remembered a cup coming apart in his hand.

Not here. Anything I hit here, I break.

He hooked Varren’s ankle instead, quiet, no weight, the way the trainer had taught him. Varren stepped over the hook as if it were a curb, and Soles’s own heel went on the packed snow. A hand caught his coat and held him up. Varren’s hand.

For a moment they stood like that in the crowd, Varren holding him upright, his face close and unreadable.

— Look where you are, Varren said.

He let go.

A woman stumbled against the handcart she was pulling. Varren caught its handle, steadied it and moved past.

Soles ran to the corner. There were carts, shoulders, a man lifting a mattress across the sidewalk.

He stopped before the mattress hit him. By the time it passed, he could see both ways along the street.

Varren was gone.

Tesa reached him. He was still holding his right arm across his chest.

— Can you move it?

He straightened it, then bent it again. His elbow hurt. He could use the hand.

Maxim came back from the other end of the lane and shook his head.

— Find him. See what he’s doing, Tesa said quietly. You said that last night.

— I know.

Soles wanted to run down to the embankment. Varren might have gone there. He might have gone into any of the houses they had just passed.

— He knew we’d come here, he said.

— We don’t know that, Krista said.

She had stayed by the bakery gate. The baker was still there, gripping the handcart.

Soles went back to him.

— How long have you known him?

— Long enough to know he helps people.

— He does that.

The baker’s expression hardened.

Soles could tell him about his parents. He could bring out the order and let the man read what happened to people who sheltered Varren. He felt how readily the two things went together in his mind.

He kept the paper in his pocket.

— We’re looking for somebody else as well, Krista said. A surveyor. He came out through the mill channel. The detachment says he didn’t come back.

The baker lifted the basket onto the cart.

— Then ask the detachment.

He wheeled it out through the front gate, between them. Near the bridge, he stopped at a door and handed over a loaf. At the next house somebody had left a plate beneath an upturned bowl. He replaced the bowl over the bread.

They watched him turn into a lane above the embankment.

Soles remembered the loaf at the bottom of the basket.

— Come on.

They followed at walking pace. He could hear the wheels ahead of them. At the first corner the baker stopped and waited.

— I’m delivering bread.

— We can see that, Krista said.

— Then let me.

She moved aside. Soles moved with her.

The man took the cart to a house with an open upstairs window and knocked. He lifted out the loaf with the blackened strip cut away.

Soles stopped a few paces back. Through the open door he could see a man in a chair holding a cup in both hands. One boot rested on the threshold. The heel had worn down along its outer edge.

Krista’s fingers closed briefly on Soles’s sleeve.

The baker spoke quietly to the man. Soles could not hear the words. Then the man leaned far enough forward to see them.

— From the detachment? he asked.

Soles came closer, keeping his hands clear.

— We worked with them. We’re the ones who went down on Thursday.

The man set his cup on the floor.

— They’re still going down?

— We’re trying to find a way.

He looked past Soles, toward the river.

Krista opened her notebook at the drawing of the boot print.

— Did you come up these steps?

He stared at it, then put his foot flat on the threshold.

— I came out that way. More than once.

He looked past Soles, toward the river again.

— I meant to keep going. Go home. But I kept coming back.

The baker stood beside the door with the loaf still in his hands.

— Do you want them to leave? he asked the man.

Soles waited.

After a while, the man shook his head.

Krista asked his name. He gave it, and she checked it against the name on her copies of the survey sheets.

She closed the notebook.

The baker handed over the loaf. The man took it in both hands and held it against his chest.

— Can we come in? Soles asked.

The man drew his foot off the threshold and made room.

The surveyor kept his cup between his knees while Krista laid the copied sheets on the kitchen table.

Soles took the chair beside the door. Maxim remained standing behind him; Tesa sat beside the table, facing the door. The baker put the bread down.

Krista covered the dates with her fingers.

— Are these your signatures?

The surveyor pointed to the first.

— That one.

She uncovered the dates. He read them, then pushed the second sheet away.

— I was down there. I couldn’t have signed that.

— Did you ask the detachment for new rope?

He shook his head before she finished showing him the request.

Krista marked the copies. Soles had expected another careful answer. Instead they had a living man denying the papers that had helped hide him.

— Why didn’t you report when you came out? he asked.

The surveyor rubbed a thumb over the cup’s rim.

— I got as far as the bridge. Then I heard the water. I thought I’d forgotten something below. I went back to look.

He tried to smile.

— I still don’t know what.

Soles waited while Krista asked about the way out. The man described steps joining the mill channel; her pencil followed his finger across the sketch. He had climbed them more than once. Between those climbs he had found himself back below, unable to say clearly why he had gone.

The baker rested a hand on his shoulder and left it there.

— That’s enough for now.

Soles wanted the rest. The man’s thumb was bleeding where he had worried the skin beside the nail.

— Can we come back? Soles asked.

The surveyor nodded.

A woman came in carrying a notebook under her arm. She stopped when she saw the papers, then set her bag beside the stove.

— Halloran?

The baker turned.

— They asked him. He said yes.

So the baker had a name. The woman seemed to accept the answer, though she stayed beside the surveyor.

She introduced herself as Zora. Krista recognized the name before Soles could place it.

— The river readings. We read your notebook.

— Then you’ve had more use for it than the detachment.

Soles remembered the house, the bowls by the radiator.

— Did you go into the place they gave us?

Zora’s hand tightened on her bag.

— With Halloran. He was taking bread.

— Mina’s bowl?

She nodded.

His mind went back to the platform, Mina heavy in his arms, and the kitchen prepared for her before they arrived.

— How did you know?

— I didn’t. Varren told me about your dogs. About her being old. I hoped you’d bring them.

He had searched that room for another way someone might have entered. She had bought a bowl on a guess.

— You could have left a note.

— Yes, she said. I should have.

The latch lifted behind him.

Soles stood before the door opened fully. Varren stopped outside, one hand still on it, as if unsure he would be let in.

— I saw you follow Halloran, he said. Let me come in.

Maxim moved beside Soles.

— You’ve just had a go at his arm. Ask from out there.

Varren released the latch. His eyes went past them to the surveyor, then to the papers.

— Is he all right?

— Ask him, Tesa said.

The surveyor nodded. Varren waited for the answer, though his hand remained close to the door.

Soles stepped outside. Maxim followed him onto the narrow sidewalk; Krista and Tesa stayed at the open doorway. Varren backed away far enough to give them room.

— You ran, Soles said.

— You grabbed me.

— I wanted to talk.

— Then talk.

Soles could still feel Varren folding his arm with almost no effort. He wanted to try again, properly this time, with the others ready. Behind Krista, the surveyor was watching through the doorway.

He let his right hand hang open.

— The detachment has written him off. They’ve put a date on every door down there. You’re keeping people beside something that’s spreading.

— They were here before the dates.

— They won’t be afterward.

Varren glanced toward the river.

— You tried to close it on Thursday.

— Yes.

— That afternoon they started getting worse. Noct couldn’t keep his place in a sentence. Halloran heard things inside the oven.

Soles remembered the retreat, Tesa’s crushed hand, the rope straining through his own hands.

— You think I did that?

— I saw what was left of the opening after you pulled at it. Smaller. Shaking.

He spoke as if the rest followed from that. Soles could believe the change without accepting what Varren wanted it to mean.

Krista came out onto the sidewalk.

— Show us.

Varren studied her.

— I can take you below.

— We choose what we touch, she said. And you tell us what you’ve done before we get there.

For a moment his attention settled on Soles alone, familiar and expectant. Soles shifted so Krista stood beside him.

— All of us, he said.

— All of you.

Tesa joined them.

— I’m coming too. Don’t offer to leave me upstairs.

— I know you are, Varren said.

Maxim looked toward the bridge.

— Bram’s expecting us at the mill tonight. Our ropes are ready.

— Keep that way open, Krista said.

Varren agreed to meet them there after dark. He would go down with them and show them the chamber beneath the river. The others would stay above.

Soles watched him accept each condition. A place, a time, witnesses. He could tell the detachment where to wait.

Varren seemed to reach the same thought.

— And when we come back up?

— You leave with us, Soles said.

— In whose custody?

— Neither side takes a prisoner on this trip, Krista said. Is that what you’re asking?

— Yes.

Soles felt the folded order inside his coat. He thought of the names the man in gray had kept off the page, and of Krista making him say the threat again at their table.

— Then you leave free, he said. Until we’re out and clear of the mill.

— After that?

— After that, we haven’t agreed to anything.

Varren held out his hand.

Soles left it there.

— You heard me.

— I did.

From inside, Halloran asked whether the surveyor wanted the window shut. The man said to leave it open.

Varren lowered his hand.

— After dark.

He walked toward the bridge. This time Soles stayed beside the doorway and let him go.

Varren came into the mill after dark, alone, with a bag over one shoulder. Bram had already tied their rope around his own waist. Soles stood beside the open hatch, watching the doorway.

Bram inspected him without offering a hand.

— You know the way?

— From below.

— Then you can tell them what to expect before they find it.

Maxim lowered the first coil, and they went down, leaving Bram at the hatch. At the bottom, Soles waited for Tesa. She caught the back of his coat and kept hold until Krista’s flashlight found the narrow ledge beside the channel.

Before they went on, Varren told them he had found the blade months ago, then brought Zora, Halloran and Noct back to see the chamber. He had pushed against a weak place beside a pillar. The opening had remained when he stopped.

— You opened it? Soles asked.

— Yes.

Soles wanted to see exactly where Varren had put his hand.

They followed the channel beneath the embankment.

Halfway along, the channel dropped. The water went over a stone step as high as a man and fell into a pool they could hear and not see, and the ledge went down beside it in three wet treads, slick with spray. The noise filled Soles’s left ear and left nothing for the right.

Varren went first, the rope at his waist.

— The second one moves, he said over his shoulder.

Soles put his boot on the second tread, carefully, at the wall end. It tilted anyway.

He went sideways toward the fall. His hand slapped the wall and found only wet stone. The flashlight beam swung across the spray, and below it was black water, loud and close.

His stomach dropped before his body did.

A hand closed on his right wrist, over the cuff.

He hung by it, one boot scraping the tread, the other in the spray. Above him Varren lay half on the bottom tread with his free arm braced against the wall and the rope taut behind him.

This afternoon I wouldn’t take this hand. If he opens it, nobody will ever know it wasn’t the step.

Soles got his boot onto the loose tread and pushed. The stone slid out from under him and went into the pool, and for a heartbeat all his weight was on that one hand.

It did not open.

He brought his left hand up and closed it on Varren’s wrist in turn, the way you take a hand you have decided to shake, and Varren leaned back into the rope and drew him up the step as if he weighed nothing, until Soles’s knees found the tread and Tesa’s fist closed on the back of his coat from above.

They let go at the same moment.

Neither of them said anything. Varren stood, wiped his palm on his coat and went on along the ledge. Soles followed with water running out of his sleeve.

The mill brickwork ended at a stone opening, where Varren stopped to let Krista light the chamber beyond.

The ceiling rose above their beams. Roots had been cut across it, thick near the pillars, branching into finer grooves toward the walls. A low stone table occupied the middle of the floor. Beyond it, beside a pillar, a slit hung just above the ground. Its uneven light washed the stone below. Steps rose beside the table toward a shut slab in the far wall.

Soles stopped in the doorway.

— How far from where we went down? he asked.

— Further under the river, Varren said.

Soles could hear the water overhead.

Varren pointed toward the steps.

— That way comes out on the landing.

Maxim looped their line around the foot of a pillar near the entrance. Krista put her flashlight on the table. Its beam reached the slit; she turned it slightly to keep it out of their eyes.

— This is where I found it, Varren said.

He set his bag on the table and unwrapped a length of cloth.

Soles knew the shape before the curved edge appeared.

The pale blade had the same narrow body as his own. Light caught along one side. Near the base was a round hole, worn smooth at its rim.

His fingers went to the dark blade beneath his coat.

Varren noticed.

— Yours has the other part.

Soles drew it, keeping the edge toward the floor. The chain rested across his wrist. The rivet stood out from one side, as useless-looking as when he first tried to understand it.

He had searched for a missing handle. Here was a hole where that rivet could sit.

— Turn it sideways, he said.

Varren lifted the pale blade. Soles held his own beside it, each keeping his hand on the metal that belonged to him.

The rivet lined up with the hole.

A low note ran through Soles’s fingers.

He stopped. Across the table, Varren’s grip tightened. The blades remained apart, their edges turned away from each other.

Tesa came closer.

— What was that?

— You heard it too? Soles asked.

She nodded. Maxim had taken his hand off the rope.

Krista crouched beside the table, shining her phone along its base. Signs ran beneath the carved roots on the wall behind it. She found a group she recognized and opened her notebook at the copies from the temple near Vineward.

— The same writing, she said. This group repeats here.

She compared the strokes, then passed her light to Tesa so she could copy the next line. Soles wanted to ask what it meant. Her pencil was already correcting the shape of one mark.

Varren lowered the pale blade toward the cloth.

The note faded. Behind him, something moved inside the slit.

Soles took the flashlight from the table.

— Wait.

A line showed within the opening. It was thicker than the one he had tried to catch on Thursday, dark at its center, with light pulled tightly along its sides. It ran down past the stone, out of sight.

Varren turned to look. The pale blade moved farther from Soles’s hand.

The line disappeared.

Soles kept his own blade still.

— Bring yours back.

Varren held it beside the dark one. The low note returned.

So did the line.

Krista stood, leaving the notebook open.

Fine strands spread from the thicker one, crossing the slit and continuing beyond its edges. Some rose straight into the ceiling. Others slanted through the wall toward the mill. As Soles watched, another became visible behind them, and then more, until he could no longer separate the ones nearest the center.

He remembered the pull through his wrist. The many small weights that had held on when he pulled harder.

They were here.

— Can you all see them? he asked.

Maxim pointed toward the wall.

— Those go back the way we came.

Tesa stepped aside to follow a strand with her eyes. Varren stared past the pale blade in his hand, his lips parted. Soles had seen that expression before, when a repair had turned out to be something worse than the fault he had come to fix.

— You didn’t know, Soles said.

— No.

It came without the pause Varren gave a difficult answer.

Krista brought her phone close to one of the fine strands. The beam passed across it without changing its shape. The strand continued into solid stone.

— The ones under the street, she said. We followed the drains. They keep going.

Soles looked from the carved roots above her to the living shape exposed inside the slit. On Thursday he had tried to draw the opening shut. The smaller lines had tightened against him. Varren said his people had got worse that afternoon.

Soles couldn’t see where the strands ended. But the pull he had felt toward the town now had a shape. He still could not tell what closing it would take from them.

The pale blade shook slightly in Varren’s hand.

— Hold it there, Soles said.

Varren steadied his wrist against the table. He watched the strands that passed above the stairs, toward the houses.

Soles turned his own blade until he could see its edge against the thick line. There was the thing they had come to close. Around it, the finer strands crossed and twisted, too close to separate with his hand.

Tesa moved beside him.

— We’re only looking, she said.

He lowered the edge.

The bright strands lay across every path he could see to the root.

The strands faded as Varren drew the pale blade back against his chest.

— That’s what you were pulling, he said.

Soles kept his eyes on the slit. Without the strands it looked almost small enough to close.

— Then help me stop it spreading.

— By cutting through them?

— By finding a way that doesn’t.

Varren wrapped the blade. His fingers missed the fold of the cloth, then caught it.

— Halloran had a business before this. Noct had work. You think they came here because I offered them a warm room?

— The surveyor wanted to go home, Soles said.

— And I gave him somewhere to sit when he couldn’t.

He set the wrapped blade beside his bag. The slit pulsed against the pillar behind him.

Krista closed her notebook.

— What happens when the count on the doors runs out?

Varren’s hand stopped on the cloth.

— They’ll have to move.

— Will they?

— I’ll get them out.

— Where to? Maxim asked.

Varren turned toward him.

— We can find somewhere.

— We’ve got a town full of people trying to do that. You heard the surveyor. What happens when he walks back here?

Soles could hear water moving above the ceiling. In the dark behind the pillar, the opening gave off another breath of heat.

Tesa rubbed the heel of her hand against her coat.

— I’d sit down here if you left me alone long enough, she said. It feels like that would fix something.

— They’re still people, Varren said. They know what they want.

— So do I. I’m telling you what this place does to wanting it.

Varren looked at the slit.

— When you pulled at it, they got worse. You saw those lines. You don’t get to decide they can do without them.

Soles remembered his hand dragging against the resistance, the voice urging him on. Tesa’s fist had closed on his collar. Even then he had pulled again.

— I should have stopped sooner, he said.

Varren waited.

— That was mine. It doesn’t make leaving this open safe.

Krista came beside the table.

— We could ask them what help they’d need somewhere else. Before anybody cuts anything. Halloran, Zora, the man we spoke to.

— Zora has work here.

— She can tell us that herself.

Varren tucked in a loose corner of the cloth.

— And if one of them gets worse on the road? Who goes back for them?

— We do, Soles said.

— You have a job to finish.

Soles knew that trap from the inside. Soles had an order inside his coat and people standing beside him whose safety had been made conditional on it.

— You could help them leave, Soles said.

— I’ve told you I will.

— If they decide to go before you’re ready.

Varren drew the bag closer.

— Noct needs someone with him at night. Halloran keeps hearing a man who isn’t there. I’m not sending them off because a date’s been written on a door.

— Then ask them what they want, Krista said.

— I know them.

— That isn’t asking.

His hand closed over the bag’s opening.

Soles watched him tuck the blade inside. Everything was being put away, the proof and the possibility of doing something about it, while they stood there talking.

— You’re not keeping it open for them, he said. You’re keeping it open so they’ll stay.

Varren went still.

For a moment Soles wanted to take the words back. Then Varren looked toward the stairs that led up to the landing, and Soles remembered waiting at the surveyor’s door for the man to let them in.

— Give me the pale one, he said.

Varren’s attention came back to him.

— So you can close it.

— So I can see what I’m doing. We’ve seen what happens when I can’t.

— Can you promise they’ll come through it?

Soles looked at the pillar. He could remember the thick line clearly. Around it the finer strands had crossed too closely to separate.

— No.

— Then no.

Varren fastened the bag.

The answer left Soles standing with his own blade in his hand. He could argue until the flashlight failed. Varren had heard the question he would refuse, and Soles had no better promise to put beside it.

He gathered the chain and sheathed the dark blade.

— We go back.

They followed their rope along the channel, past the step where the water fell, keeping to the wall end of every tread. Nobody spoke until Krista called up to Bram. He answered from the hatch, and Maxim went ahead to help him take in the line.

At the last step Varren turned and reached down for Soles.

It was the second time that night. This time it was such an ordinary offer that Soles took his hand before he thought about it. Varren pulled him up, then braced against the edge while Soles got his feet beneath him. His sleeve was still wet from the race.

Soles had his wrist.

The pale blade was in the bag on the floor. Maxim stood behind Varren with the rope in his hands, and Tesa was beside the door. Varren’s arm lay across the hatch edge, his attention on Soles’s footing.

Soles could turn that arm against the wood before Varren got it back. There would be help this time. His fingers tightened, and Varren raised his eyes.

For a moment neither moved. Soles felt the pulse beneath his thumb. The order in his coat had a name, and here was the man.

He opened his hand.

Varren drew his arm back slowly. Soles stepped clear of the hatch. Bram looked between them, then bent to unfasten the rope from his waist.

Varren picked up his bag. They walked out of the mill together. Beyond the yard, Varren moved clear of the group and opened his bag, keeping one hand inside. The river was dark except where the street lamps reached it.

— We’re clear, Soles said.

Varren adjusted the strap on his shoulder. He seemed about to speak, then turned toward the bridge.

Soles stayed with the others until the bag disappeared behind the wall.

Krista had taken out her notebook.

— What do we tell them? she asked.

Her pencil waited over a clean page. They could send everything they had learned about the breach and leave out the walk back.

— That we found him, Soles said. And let him go.