Chapter XV · Two Orders

The truck blocked half the detachment gate when Soles and Krista reached it that night. Men were unloading shields beside the steps. He waited for one to pass, then sent the report they had finished at home.

Krista checked her copy. The meeting, the opening Varren had made, the strands revealed by the blades. The refusal. Their return without a prisoner.

Received.

Soles put the phone away. His sleeve was still damp from the race. Telling the truth had taken less time than walking here. Now he wanted to know what they had left themselves to work with.

Inside, the long desk had been cleared of bowls. A map of the riverside sector lay beneath a lamp, with the mill at one end and the bridge at the other. The chief stood beside it. A cleaner was drawing lines across the streets.

The chief checked his phone as they entered, and did not put it down.

— You had him.

— We agreed to go down together and leave free, Soles said. He kept his part.

— I asked you to bring him in.

— You asked us to close the breach. We’ve found the root.

The cleaner stopped drawing.

Soles described the thick line and the smaller strands passing into the stone. He kept to what they had seen. He couldn’t say where they ended or what cutting them would do to the people above. That was why they had come back without trying.

The chief pulled the lamp closer to the map.

— Where?

Krista set down the sketch they had made after returning. Her finger followed the mill channel to the chamber.

— Beneath this part. The strands continue beyond what we could see.

— Through the foundations?

— Through stone. We couldn’t follow them farther.

The chief compared the drawing with the map, then moved a pencil mark from one street to the next. Soles leaned forward to read the writing beside it.

ENTRY TEAM.

— What’s that for?

— Getting the remaining occupants out.

The cleaner laid down his pencil.

— Before the operation. If they’ll come.

Beside his elbow, Soles recognized the case Corvin had brought to the detachment. Its lid stood open. The knives were fitted neatly into the black lining.

— And if they won’t? Soles asked.

— You’ve read the order, the chief said.

A man from the truck came in with a board of forms. The chief checked the delivery against the shields outside, initialed a line and turned the page. His pen stopped.

He pushed the board back.

— Not that one.

— They want the clearance with the delivery receipt.

— Then they’ll have to want it for longer.

Krista leaned close enough to read. Soles moved beside her.

SECTOR CLEAR OF OCCUPANTS.

The box beside it had already been checked. Below, the space for the chief’s signature was empty.

— There are people cooking supper down there, the chief said. Bring it back when it’s true.

The delivery man held the board for another moment, then took it outside.

Soles had watched this man recommend their suspension. His report had gone straight through while theirs waited. The pen was still in his hand, above a map of houses he was preparing to destroy.

There was still something he wouldn’t put his name to.

— Help us get them out, Soles said.

— My men have been trying since Saturday.

— The man we found keeps going back. He knows how to leave. He still goes back.

The chief’s attention settled on him.

— What are you saying?

— That marching him across the bridge won’t finish the job.

Krista turned their sketch so both men could see it.

— We need somewhere to take them, she said. People who will stay with them. And time to find out what happens when they’re away from the river.

— You’ve had time.

— We’ve used it. This is what we’ve learned.

The cleaner closed the knife case.

— They’ll be put on transport. That’s what happens when they’re away from the river.

Soles remembered the surveyor rubbing his thumb raw against the cup. A seat on a truck would get him off the street. Someone would have to notice when he got up again.

— Where does the transport take them?

The chief named a reception center outside the sector. Krista wrote it down and asked who was responsible there. This time he gave her a number.

It was something they could use. Soles held on to that while the cleaner reopened the map.

— We still prepare, the chief said. Your report goes up tonight. The order stands until somebody changes it.

— There are eight days on our door.

— Then use them.

Soles put a finger beside the mark for the entry team.

— If your people use power down there, it’ll spread. We pulled once and people got worse. You have that in writing now.

— I have your account.

— And the clearance you wouldn’t sign. Remember that when they ask for the next signature.

The chief put his pen down.

Krista asked him to mark their copy of the sketch as received. Soles waited while he wrote the time beside the chamber. If the warning disappeared into another folder, they would have a record of where it had started.

The cleaner moved to the door. Soles stayed beside Krista while she folded their drawing; the man gave them room to pass.

Outside, the truck was nearly empty. Soles stepped around a shield propped against the wall. From here, the mill roof showed beyond the houses. He could trace the short walk back to the hatch, then the route they had taken underneath it. A squad could follow the same rope.

Krista put the number into her phone.

— I’ll call the center when we get home.

— Ask whether they’ve taken anyone from that street yet. Whether they’ve tried to go back.

She nodded. At the gate, Soles turned toward the river instead of their house, then stopped. He wanted to go straight to the bakery and start asking who would leave. He wanted somebody out of reach of those knives tonight.

Maxim and Tesa needed to hear what had happened first.

He turned back to Krista.

— We tell the others. Then we ask them to help us get people out.

— Even if Varren won’t help?

Soles watched the last shield go through the door.

— We ask the people.

By Tuesday morning, Krista had arranged beds at the reception center. Soles stood at their kitchen window, with Maxim and Tesa waiting at the table, while she finished the call. Across the street, a cleaner was putting a seven beneath yesterday’s eight.

The woman at the center had answered again after breakfast. She could take people from the riverside houses; someone could stay with anyone who was confused or frightened. She had asked for warning before they brought them.

Krista put down the phone.

— We can visit before anybody agrees to stay there.

— Good, Soles said. They need to see what we’re offering.

Maxim had brought the van round. His keys lay beside the drawing of the chamber, on the spot where Varren had stood holding the pale blade.

Soles moved them. He needed the others to see the whole problem before they went out.

— Getting people across the bridge won’t stop this. We need to close it before those men go in.

He put his dark blade beside the drawing. The chain settled across the paper.

— With this alone, I’d be cutting blind again. With his beside it, we could see the strands.

— See them, Krista said. We still don’t know what cutting them does.

— I know.

Tesa pulled a chair round and sat facing him.

— So what’s the part you haven’t said?

Soles rested his hand beside the blade. Last night he had tried to think of a way to make Varren understand. Every version ended with the same question, and he already knew the answer.

— If he won’t help, I mean to take it.

Maxim stopped turning his cup.

— You’ve tried taking his arm. I was there. And his collar.

— Then we don’t build the plan around me being stronger than him.

— Or all of us being stronger, Tesa said. You haven’t seen him try.

Soles remembered how easily Varren had folded his elbow at the bakery gate, and held his whole weight one-handed over the fall in the race, without seeming to try. Down in the chamber, the slit had been behind him. A fight there could put any of them into it.

— We give him room to leave, Soles said. We ask for the blade. If he keeps it, we need him away from the opening before anybody goes near him.

— He can leave through a wall, Krista said.

— Yes.

Saying it made the plan look as thin as it was. He had a weapon he couldn’t use carelessly, against a man he couldn’t hold, beside people he was trying to spare.

Tesa reached across and moved the chain off the drawing.

— We need a way to get somebody hurt out of there. Before we need a way to win.

Maxim touched the line leading back to the mill.

— Bram stays at the top again. If he’ll do it. And this time we tell him what we’re going back for.

Krista turned to a clean page. They worked through who would hold the way out and what would make them abandon an attempt. Soles could offer no safe way to take the blade yet. They left that space empty.

For today they could offer a ride, beds, and somebody who would listen. That much was ready.

Soles put the blade away and handed Maxim his keys.

❦

They went to the bakery together later that morning. Halloran was carrying bread from the oven; the surveyor sat at the kitchen table behind him. Soles waited until the tray was down before asking whether they could talk.

Halloran listened while Krista described the center. The surveyor’s eyes stayed on the keys in Maxim’s hand.

— I could come back? he asked.

Soles wanted to say that was what they were trying to prevent.

— We aren’t locking you in, he said. You can look at the place first.

— Varren says moving won’t help.

— We don’t know how much it’ll help. We can have someone stay with you while we find out.

The man rubbed his hands together. Soles waited for an answer. Halloran put a loaf beside him, and he bent over it, breaking a piece from the end.

— There’s a woman two doors down, Halloran said. She’s been asking about transport since Sunday. Her husband can’t manage the steps. The truck people told her to have him outside.

Maxim turned toward the door.

— Well, that sounds like our level of medical expertise.

— You drive, Tesa said. I’ll ask about the steps.

The woman recognized Soles before he could introduce himself. She was the one who had read the ten on her door and shut it again. Now a bag stood beside her boots, packed so tightly that a sleeve hung out beneath the straps.

They explained where they could take her husband. She fetched his coat.

The stairs were narrow but straight. Maxim and Tesa carried the chair from the bedroom to the landing, then lowered it one step at a time while Soles held the door clear. At the bottom the man caught Maxim’s sleeve.

— Mind the footrest.

Maxim stopped. The footrest had caught against the frame. He eased it free, and they carried him out without touching the warm grate beside the step.

No power. Soles heard the man’s breath in the cold air and the woman telling them which bag held his medicine. They could still do this much.

Krista called the center before they left. Tesa rode with the couple; Maxim would bring her back after they had helped them settle.

Soles watched the van reach the bridge. One household. Along the street, the sevens went on beyond the next bend.

Halloran came out carrying the woman’s second bag.

Soles took it from him.

— We’ll bring it on the next trip.

— I’ll tell the others, Halloran said. About the beds. They can ask me where you are.

Soles gave him the center’s number too.

His own phone lit up before Halloran went inside. A message from the man in gray asked when they would resume the search for Varren.

Krista read it beside him.

— What do you want to tell him?

The chamber’s location was already in their report. The blade, too. Their way of reaching it would have to stay between the people who were going down.

Soles put the phone away.

— Let’s speak to Bram.

Bram kept his hand on the counter while Soles explained why they wanted to return to the mill. Krista stood beside Soles with the drawing open. Outside the shop, traffic was moving again after the evacuation van had crossed the bridge.

— Last time you were looking, Bram said.

— This time we mean to close it. We still don’t know whether we can do that safely.

Soles told him about the strands, and about needing Varren’s blade to see them. He said Varren had refused to hand it over. If they fought over it, the people holding the way out could be caught in that too.

Bram took his hand off the counter and wiped it on his apron.

— You want me on the other end of the rope.

— If you’re willing. You can leave if it stops being safe.

— Will you tell me when that is?

Soles thought of the stone ticking above them, just before Tesa’s hand had been crushed, and of the rope running through his palms below it.

— I’ll tell you what I notice. I can’t promise I’ll notice in time.

Bram read the drawing for a long time. His finger followed the line through the mill floor.

— I’ll hold it from the hatch. That’s what I’m agreeing to.

— That’s what I’m asking.

— And if I tell somebody afterward?

The terms on their kitchen wall had an answer for that. Soles could remember agreeing to them.

— You decide what you tell them.

— You can’t promise that for the men across the road.

— No. I can tell them you helped after I told you what could happen. If they want an account, they can have mine as well.

Bram considered that. Soles had wanted to give him something better. The papers across the road already described one version of what had happened at the mill. Adding his name to another would mean staying to answer for it.

— Put your own rope through first, Bram said. I’ll check it before anybody follows.

Krista closed the drawing. Bram came round the counter to help them choose another lamp.

❦

By the following Monday evening, there was a one on their door.

Soles came home from the center carrying the woman’s empty medicine bag. Her husband had stayed. Other people had accepted a ride, looked at the beds and asked to be taken back. The surveyor had reached the van twice and returned to Halloran’s table both times.

They had spent the days carrying what people could not carry, checking who had arrived, going back for those who hadn’t. Meanwhile the warm street had spread toward the bridge. Every morning the man in gray had asked about Varren.

Tomorrow the evacuation period ended. The chief had confirmed the operation; the warning in their report had changed none of its terms. They would go to the mill before the entry teams.

Maxim and Tesa were checking the ropes in the kitchen. Krista waited for Soles upstairs. She had put his clean shirt on the bed beside hers, with the sleeves turned the right way out.

He set the bag by the door.

— He asked whether we could bring his chair tomorrow.

— We can take it with the next load.

The woman had offered to keep the dogs beside their beds while the cohort was at the mill. Maxim would take them over first thing, with the chair. Soles had written Mina’s feeding instructions on the back of the center’s address, then crossed them out and started again.

— She’ll know what to do, Krista said. You’ve told her twice.

— Mina hides the tablets.

— So do you.

He almost smiled. Krista took the bag from beside the door and put the instructions inside it.

Soles sat on the bed. For days he had been moving toward this evening. Now he wanted another load, another trip across the bridge. A fault he knew how to put right.

Krista sat beside him.

— Have you found a way to take it?

He shook his head.

— If he brings it near mine, we can see. That’s the part I can ask him for without lying.

— And if he takes it away again?

— Then I have to decide whether to try.

She pulled the clean shirt closer and smoothed a crease out of it.

— If it becomes a fight, I need you to remember we’re down there too.

— I will.

She looked at him until he stopped treating it as a promise he could make easily.

He remembered the order for a man in a cabin, and how much simpler the world had become when he had decided to finish it. He had done the thing between him and home. Tomorrow he could call it something better and still do the same thing.

— I might see him in the way, Soles said. Instead of seeing you.

Krista’s hand stopped on the shirt.

— Yes. That’s what I’m asking you to watch for.

He wanted her to say she could stop him. She had stopped him before, and knowing she would be there had become another thing he counted on. He could hear what was wrong with that before he asked.

— You shouldn’t have to keep pulling me out, he said.

— Sometimes I will. Sometimes you’ll pull me. I need you to help when I do.

— How?

— Let go when I ask. Before you need another reason.

Soles thought of her notebook waiting while he decided what to tell the detachment. She had left the page open for the answer. She was doing it again now, giving him time to choose instead of choosing for him.

He nodded, and she took his hand.

He reached for her. She came close enough for him to rest his forehead against hers, and stayed there while the first hurried breaths passed.

Downstairs, Tesa asked Maxim whether he intended to put the whole shop on his belt. Something metal landed on the table.

Krista laughed once against Soles’s cheek.

He kissed her, then held her with both arms. She fitted herself against him and pulled his shirt free where it had twisted beneath her hand.

For a while they stayed on the bed with their boots on. When Mina scratched at the door, Soles got up to let her in.

Krista moved the clean clothes before the dog could claim them.

On Monday night the bakery door had a one on it, chalked by someone from the detachment in a hand Varren did not know.

He stood in front of it longer than he needed to, then went in through the shop.

The kitchen behind it still held the afternoon’s heat. Zora sat at the table with her notebook shut under her hand. Noct had the chair by the back door, which stood open a hand’s width onto the yard, and a glass he had not touched yet. The surveyor sat on the flour sacks with his coat buttoned to the throat. That morning he had walked to the evacuation van for the second time and come back for the second time, and nobody had asked him why.

Halloran came in last, carrying the empty trays from the old customs building.

He set them on the counter. He did not take off his coat.

— They’re going in when the doors run out, he said. Tomorrow night.

— Who is?

— The entry teams. They were loading cases into the trucks. One of the men called it sterilizing. He said it twice, like he enjoyed the word.

Noct turned the glass a quarter turn on the table.

— And your friend? he asked.

Halloran answered before Varren could.

— His people go down first. Before the teams. The cook said the chief wanted it that way.

Varren laid both hands flat on the table.

— What else?

— He gave them a drawing of the room. The one under the river. It’s pinned up in the hall, by the coats. The cook asked me if I’d ever been down there. I said I bake bread.

— What else, Halloran.

Halloran looked at the trays.

— There’s a man in gray who asks every morning whether they’ve brought you in. They have a paper with your name on it. And Soles told them he found you. He told them he let you go.

Zora looked up.

— He let you go?

Varren had not told them about the hatch. He told them now, plainly, in order. The rope. The edge of the boards. His own arm across the frame and Soles’s hand on his wrist, closed, the cousin standing behind him with the line, the man who held the rope at the top watching them both.

— And he opened his hand, Zora said.

— With a witness at the hatch.

He heard how quiet the kitchen had become, and went on into it.

— The same night, he walked into their building and told them where I had been. Now he has a paper with my name on it, and a drawing of the room, and he goes down first, before anyone else can see what he does there.

Nobody answered. The surveyor’s hands moved in his lap.

— He killed a man called Bull, Varren said. You heard that before I did. He pulled at the root once, and you all got worse. You know that better than I do.

He looked at the sacks.

— And twice this week his people walked you to their van.

— I walked, the surveyor said.

— Twice.

Zora opened the notebook, looked at a page and closed it again. Varren knew that gesture. She made it at the river when a reading came out the same as the day before and she did not trust it.

— Every one of those things happened, she said.

— Yes.

— You’re telling them so there’s only one way to hear them.

— I’m telling you what he did.

She held his eyes a moment longer. Then she turned in her chair, away from him.

— Halloran. What do you want?

Halloran blinked at her as if she had asked him to spell his name.

— I want the oven to be empty when it’s empty.

— Noct?

— A drink that works. Failing that, a quiet one.

She looked at the sacks.

— And you?

The surveyor rubbed his thumb along the seam of his coat.

— I want it to stop calling me.

He swallowed.

— I want to go home. Then I get to the van and I want to come back here.

Zora nodded slowly.

— None of you said keep it open, she said.

— None of them said cut it either, Varren said.

The stove ticked. Somewhere above the yard a gutter let go of its snow all at once.

Varren pushed back his chair and went around the table to Noct.

— Give me your arm.

Noct looked at the offered hand, then at Varren.

— We’ve been through this. I said I’d think about it.

— Your forearm. Pull whenever you like. Tell me when to let go.

Noct put the glass down untouched and laid his arm on the table, palm up, like a man offering it for a blood test.

Varren set his fingers above the wrist and his thumb across the inside of the forearm. No grip. Contact, and the place in himself that answered contact. Then he leaned into that place.

Noct pulled. The arm stayed where it was.

Noct pulled harder, then came up off the chair and shoved Varren’s shoulder with his free hand. Varren let the shove turn him, stepped with it, kept his fingers where they were. The effort ran up through his own forearm and settled in his back. Sweat broke at his hairline.

— Now, Noct said.

Varren let go on the word.

They did it again. And again. The third time Noct said it in the middle of a pull, a liar’s timing, and Varren opened his hand exactly there. Noct went back two steps, caught himself without the wall and stood looking at his arm.

For an instant, under Varren’s thumb, the angle of that wrist had been familiar. The old voice said nothing at all. It seemed to be listening.

— You’re getting better at that, Noct said. The letting go.

Zora had not moved.

— That isn’t letting go, she said. That’s deciding when.

Varren dried his palms on a cloth from the oven rail. Nobody had asked him what he was practicing for. Zora was the only one who did not need to.

Halloran started stacking the trays. The surveyor watched the open door. Outside, someone from the detachment walked past the shop window with a lamp, slowing at each door to read the chalk.

Noct sat down again and rubbed the inside of his forearm.

— So what is he? he asked. Your brother, or the thing down there?

Varren lifted his bag from the back of the chair and settled the strap on his shoulder. Through the canvas he could feel the wrapped length of the pale blade lying against his hip.

— He’s the one with the knife.

On Tuesday evening the detachment men came down the street with chalk and crossed out the ones.

Soles watched from the window. A man in a cleaner’s jacket drew a line through the number on the door opposite, then crossed the road and drew one through theirs. It took him less time than knocking would have.

Maxim had come back from the center an hour before, with dog hair on both knees and no dogs. He had not said much about it. He had checked the ropes again instead, coil by coil, on the kitchen floor.

They were lacing their boots when somebody knocked.

Halloran stood on the step in his apron, flour to the elbows, breathing as if he had run most of the way.

— He’s gone, he said. The surveyor. Since noon.

— Gone where? Krista asked.

— He took the candle end from the drawer in the shop. His coat’s still on the sacks.

He looked past her at Soles.

— He went down. I know he went down.

— And Varren?

— Didn’t come back last night. Zora’s sitting with Noct. She sent me to you.

Tesa pulled her second lace tight.

— Then he’s been down there six hours.

Soles took the coil Maxim held out to him. Six hours of heat in a man’s face, telling him to sit.

— Walk with us to the mill, he said to Halloran.

Bram’s shop at the head of the bridge was dark except for the back room. He came out with a lamp before they reached the door, his coat already buttoned, as if he had been waiting in it.

Across the road the detachment yard was lit. Two trucks stood in it with their engines off. A cleaner sat on the step of the old customs building with a cigarette and watched them pass. He did not get up. He flicked ash onto the snow and turned his head to keep them in view all the way across the bridge.

On the far bank the mill stood black against the snow. Bram unlocked the side door. Inside, the floor still smelled faintly of grain, and the hatch lay where they had left it, under a sack.

Krista told Bram about the surveyor while Maxim fed the rope through the anchor. She told it plainly, without softening the hours. Bram listened with the lamp in his hand.

— He came up through the race once, he said.

— So he knows the way, Soles said.

— He knows the way down when it’s calling him. That isn’t the same thing.

He set the lamp on the floor and began to unbuckle his belt.

Soles understood before he said anything.

— You agreed to the hatch.

— I agreed to the hatch with nobody down there but people who chose to be.

Bram drew the belt free and looked at it.

— You told me what it does. You told me you might end up fighting. I heard you.

— You can still stay up here.

— I know.

He wound the belt twice around his fist.

— After the second arch you go on your knees. You’ll be slow there. He won’t.

He held the end of the rope out to Halloran.

— You hold this. If it goes slack for long, you pull. If it pulls hard, you hold. If anybody but us comes through that door, you close the hatch and sit on it.

Halloran took the rope in both floury hands. He looked down at it the way the surveyor used to look at his cup.

— Varren’s down there, he said.

— Then he’ll want it held as much as we do.

Outside, an engine started.

Then another.

Maxim reached the door first. Soles came up behind him. Across the river the yard lights were moving. The trucks rolled out through the gate, swung onto the bridge road, and their headlights slid across the snow toward the mill.

— That isn’t midnight, Maxim said.

— They watched us pass, Krista said.

The first beam found the mill wall and stayed there. Doors banged. Men’s voices. Something heavy set down on frozen ground, then something else. Someone was shouting about the anchors on the platform.

— Down, Soles said. Now.

Bram went first, the lamp hooked to his coat. Then Tesa. Then Krista. Then Maxim, who stopped with the rope in his hands and looked up at Soles as if he meant to argue about the order, and didn’t.

Soles went last. Above him the hatch came down. The light from the mill floor narrowed to a line, then to nothing, and he felt the rope move once in Halloran’s hands.

The ledge. Black water sliding beside it. At the step the fall filled his left ear and left nothing for the right. The second tread was gone; Bram had them cross the gap at the wall end, one at a time, with his fist in the back of each collar until their boots were down.

Then the arches. Low, then lower. After the second one they went on their knees, the stone cold through Soles’s pants and the lamp swinging ahead of them. His elbow, the one he had wrenched in the crowd, complained at every push. Bram moved fast there, the way he had said he would. A man who had done this at twelve, with his father’s belt around his waist.

Krista stopped.

She shut her eyes. Soles watched her face go still, the way it did when she read a line twice, and knew she was pulling one sound out of the water.

— Someone’s counting, she said. Ahead of us. Out loud.

— Counting what?

— Down. From ten. He gets to one, and starts again.

Nobody said anything. Tesa’s hand found the back of Soles’s coat and held on.

They came to the grating. Warm air pushed through it into their faces. Beyond it, the chamber was already lit.

Varren’s flashlight lay on the stone table, aimed at the pillar.

The surveyor knelt at the slit with one palm flat in the heat. His lips were moving. Four. Three.

Varren stood over him. The pale blade was out of its cloth.

He looked at Bram first, and at the rope tied to Bram’s waist, and then at the rest of them. He did not look surprised.

Through the rock on their left came a sound Soles knew from the night of the splice. Metal ringing against stone. Men calling out knots.

The teams were coming down the other way.

Varren’s eyes came back to Soles.

— You brought them.

— They followed us, Soles said.

It was true. He heard how little it helped.

Varren did not answer. He looked at the rope around Bram’s waist, at the coil on Maxim’s shoulder, at Tesa, who had already moved half a step toward the man on his knees.

— Don’t, Varren said to her. He came down on his own.

— He’s counting, Tesa said.

— He came down at one o’clock. I didn’t send him back.

The surveyor’s palm lay flat beside the slit, in the heat, as if he were keeping something warm. Above him a shelf of rock jutted from the wall over the pillar, its edge rough with old chisel marks. His lips moved. Ten. Nine.

Through the rock on their left the knot-calls went on, closer now. Soles knew the voice calling them. Corvin. The last time they had gone down together, Corvin had come up the rope alone and told the men at the top that the others were right behind him.

Krista went to the foot of the stair, where the wall was thinnest to the sound, and laid her ear against the stone.

— How many? Soles asked.

— Six. Seven. They’re carrying something between two of them.

Behind them, in the channel, water splashed. A light swung across the grating.

Maxim turned with the rope already up in both fists. Halloran came through first, soaked to the knees, his apron gone. Zora came after him. Noct came last and passed through the grating without touching its sides.

— Zora brought him to the mill, Halloran said. He was breathing hard. Then the trucks came back. Six of them, going through the mill with lamps. I couldn’t sit on the hatch against six.

— The rope? Bram asked.

— Tied off. It’ll hold. I don’t know who’ll be holding the other end.

Zora had stopped just inside the grating. She looked past all of them to Varren, then down at the pale blade in his hand.

— Varren, she said. Put it away.

He did not.

— You told me to decide when, he said.

Soles took a step toward the table, slowly, his hands where Varren could see them.

— There are men behind that wall, he said. Whatever you came here to do, do it with us.

— With you. Varren tilted his head at the rock. And with them. They have a paper with my name on it, Soles. Yours is on it too. Under mine. The man who found me and let me go.

Noct looked around the chamber, at the pillar, at the slit, at the faces. He stood in the middle of the floor, well away from every wall.

— Fight an ancient horror for a couple of pints, he said to nobody. Should have asked for more pints.

Through the rock, the knot-calls stopped.

In the quiet, Soles heard Krista breathe in.

A man’s voice came through the wall, flat and clear, used to being obeyed.

— Charge is set. Clear the face.

Krista pushed off the stone.

— They’re going to—

— Down! Soles shouted.

The floor came up through his knees and threw him sideways. The slit opened like an eye. Heat came out of it in one long breath, and light behind the heat, white and moving, and every flashlight in the chamber went dim against it.

Above the pillar, the shelf cracked along its length.

The surveyor did not look up.

— One, he said.

The shelf came down.

It struck the floor beside the pillar with a sound Soles felt in his teeth, and the surveyor’s voice stopped as if someone had closed a door on it. Dust rolled out from the fall in a gray wall. Soles lost the pillar, lost the table, lost his own hand in front of his face.

Somewhere a flashlight hit stone and went out. Smoke came after the dust, bitter, from the far side of the rock, where the charge had gone off.

The air was moving. It went past him toward the slit, steady and warm, pulling the dust with it in long threads. He could feel it in his clothes. Wanting him to sit.

He did not sit. He got one boot under him, then the other, and counted his people the only way he could.

— Tesa!

— Here!

Her voice came from beyond the fallen stone, close and furious.

— He’s under it. He’s alive. I’ve got his hand.

Another voice beside hers, deep and shaken. Halloran.

— It’s on his legs. If it rolls, it rolls onto his chest. Don’t you touch that rock—

— Maxim!

— Grating. Maxim was coughing. I’ve got Bram. Bram’s got the rope. Zora’s—

A woman’s voice, farther along the channel, calling Noct’s name. No answer came. Noct had been standing in the middle of the floor. Soles could not remember which side of the fall the middle had been.

— Krista!

Nothing.

Soles took a breath of dust and heat and called again. The slit pulled at the sound and took half of it.

— Krista!

He turned his good ear toward the dark and waited. When her voice came, it came from higher than he expected, and thin.

— Stairs. I’m on the stairs. I can’t see the bottom.

He let out the breath. Two steps from him the dust was thinning, drawn toward the light in long gray ribbons. The fallen shelf lay across the floor between him and the others like a wall somebody had built in a hurry. On this side there was only the pillar, the slit and the heat.

The slit was wider. Not much. A hand’s width. He could see it was wider, and he knew whose force had done it, and none of the men behind the rock would believe him when he told them. The air no longer only pulled. Every few breaths it pushed back, warm, as if something on the other side had noticed the door was open.

Across it, Varren got to his feet.

There was dust in his hair and a cut over one eyebrow, bleeding into the corner of his eye. He did not wipe it. The pale blade was still in his hand. In the light from the slit it looked almost white.

Behind the fallen shelf Tesa was swearing steadily at somebody. Maxim was calling Zora’s name now, and Zora was still calling Noct’s. Above them all, on the stairs, Krista said something Soles could not make out.

Varren listened to all of it. He looked at the wall of stone, at the dust, at the dark where every one of those voices was coming from.

Then he looked at Soles.

— Now nobody’s watching, he said.

He began to walk around the pillar. Not toward Soles. To his right, along the edge of the light, to the side where Soles would not hear him coming.

Tesa had the surveyor’s hand in hers and the edge of the shelf a foot from her face.

The stone lay across his legs from the knee down. His other hand was still reaching past her for the slit. Dust settled on his eyelashes and he did not blink it away.

She shifted her weight to get her right fist under the low edge.

A hand closed on her wrist. Not hard. Exactly hard enough. Her arm went up behind her and her cheek met the shelf, and Halloran’s voice came down beside her ear, very calm, the voice of a man who had done this to people before and had not liked them.

— I said don’t touch it.

— Let go.

— You want it to be something you can hit, he said. That’s all. You’ve wanted that since you came down.

It was not the voice that had held the rope at the hatch. Tesa stopped pulling. Reil never fought the hold. Reil waited for the man holding it to breathe.

Wait. Watch his feet.

Halloran’s weight was on his front foot, his hip against her back. His eyes were on the stone, not on her. He breathed out.

She turned into him and hit him once, short, from below, under the ribs. Enough to open a hand. No more.

The grip went. Halloran folded over his own arm and sat down in the dust, mouth open, getting no air.

Tesa put her fist against his, knuckles to knuckles, the way it was done. After.

— It’s on its left edge, he said when he could. Hit the right. It tips away from him.

He was right. She could see it now that he had said it.

She set her feet, set her hand, and hit the right edge of the shelf with everything she had decided to spend. The stone rose a palm’s width. She got her shoulder under it before it came down.

Her healed hand split open across the knuckles. She heard herself make a sound.

— Now, she said.

Halloran took the surveyor under the arms and pulled.

The man screamed when his legs came out. The stone ground on her shoulder and she held it, and held it, counting the way Reil had counted in the third round, until Halloran said he was clear and she let the shelf down onto nothing.

❦

Soles kept Varren on his left.

It cost him the pillar. It cost him the light. Every step Varren took to the right, Soles turned to meet it, and every turn put the slit behind him, breathing on his neck.

The chain was longer than Varren’s arm. That was the one thing Soles had that Varren did not, and he meant to keep it between them.

Then the slit breathed out, long and loud, and filled his good ear, and for one breath he heard nothing else at all.

Varren was already moving. Soles saw the shape come out of the noise and brought the dark blade up, too late. Two fingers touched the inside of his forearm.

The arm stopped.

It was still his. He could feel the chain on his wrist, the grip in his palm. It would not move. It hung in front of him like something nailed to the air, and Varren stood close enough to take the blade out of it, and did not.

— Go, Varren said.

The arm came back. Soles stumbled with it.

Varren stepped away and began to circle right again.

He could have had it, Soles thought. He didn’t want it. He wanted me to know he could.

❦

Maxim saw Halloran first, coming out of the dust on his knees, dragging the surveyor by the armpits.

— Take him, Halloran said. Get him up.

Maxim took him. The man weighed nothing. His legs were bleeding through his pants and he did not seem to know it. He twisted in Maxim’s arms toward the light.

— It’s nearly— Let me—

Maxim got him over his shoulder, the way you carry a sack of feed, and turned for the grating. Bram had the rope already in his hands.

Zora stood in the opening.

She was soaked to the waist and shaking, and she put both hands flat on Maxim’s chest.

— Put him down, she said. Ask him.

— He’ll say stay.

— Then he says stay.

Maxim pushed.

It was like pushing a door that had decided not to open. She took his weight and leaned into it and gave none of it back, and then she turned, just a little, and his own push carried him sideways into the wall. The surveyor slid half off his shoulder.

Something hot came up through Maxim’s arms. He knew it. It came when he was angry and it never asked what for. He could lift her out of the way. He could lift her into the water.

His hand was fisted in her coat. The surveyor’s fingers were clawing over his shoulder toward the slit.

Both of them pulling the same man.

Maxim put the surveyor down on the ledge and crouched in front of him so he had to look at someone.

— What do you want? he said.

The surveyor’s eyes went to the light. Came back.

— I want it to stop calling me.

— Then come up where it can’t shout.

A long time. Water running past their boots.

— Up, the surveyor said.

Zora let her hands fall. She put one of them on the surveyor’s back, briefly, and stepped aside. Then she turned back into the dark, calling Noct’s name.

Bram led. The ledge, the arches, the gap in the step. The surveyor went up the rope with Maxim under him. At the top Maxim got a knee over the edge of the hatch. The mill floor was empty. The trucks stood outside with their doors open and nobody in them, and the side door stood open, and the cold came in through it with a sound Maxim did not understand until he was outside.

People.

Twenty, thirty of them, along the bank in the snow. Coats over nightclothes. Shoes without socks. He knew some of them. People he had helped onto trucks with their suitcases this week, who had looked at the beds in the center and asked to be taken back.

None of them spoke. All of them were facing the mill.

The surveyor stopped beside them and turned to face it too.

Maxim stood in the snow with his hand still in the man’s coat and looked along the line of faces. He understood that he was going to have to ask every one of them.

Krista was six steps up the stair when the dust thinned enough to show her the floor of the chamber.

Two shapes in the light from the slit. One turning, one circling right. She knew the turn. Soles kept men on his left now, on the side he could still hear.

She started down.

Noct was on the stair below her. He stood in the middle of the tread, exactly in the middle, his hands loose at his sides. Of course he was here. The stair was the only way out of the chamber that wasn’t water.

— Don’t, he said. His voice was clear. Nothing lazy in it at all. He wants this with nobody in it.

— I’m not nobody.

— Down there you are.

She went for the gap on his left. His hand was on her forearm before she had moved, as if he had seen it in her shoulders. She tried the right. The same hand, the same forearm, and her heel on the step she had left.

Fast. Faster than he should be. He watches what I’m about to do, not what I’m doing.

She stopped trying. She let the noise of the chamber fall away, the slit, the water, Tesa swearing somewhere below, until there was only one sound left to her. His breathing.

It was even. Then the slit breathed out, and his shoulder drifted an inch toward the wall, and his breath caught short.

Once more. Same inch. Same catch.

On the grating he had not touched the sides. In the chamber he had stood in the middle of the floor. Here, in the middle of the tread.

Not a habit. He’s afraid of it.

To read his hands she would have to lie to him. That was how it had always worked.

She looked past his shoulder, at the stone beside his head, and let her face go still.

— Noct, she said quietly. The wall.

His whole body went away from it. Hands up, weight thrown to the open side of the stair, eyes wide on the stone. Krista went past him on the wall side, so close her sleeve brushed the rock, and she saw his face as she passed.

Behind her he did not follow. She could hear his breath still going short and fast, still in the exact middle of the tread, as if the stair had become very narrow.

She had used that. She would have to think about it later.

❦

— Give me the pale one, Soles said.

Varren kept circling.

— With both of them I can see which threads are yours, Soles said. Without it I cut blind. I asked you the first night. I’m asking again.

— I heard you the first night.

— Then give it to me.

— No.

He came in on the word.

The first time Soles swung the chain out, it caught Varren’s coat and held. Varren let the coat go. He shrugged out of it the way you drop something you were only carrying for someone else, and the coat slid off the blade into the dark, and Varren was already inside its reach.

Soles stepped back to make room for the chain and swung again, quicker, and Varren was not where the chain went. He had stepped inside the arc, low, the way a man goes through a door he has been paid to go through. A palm touched Soles’s knee.

The leg locked. Soles went down on his back with the slit roaring beside his head, and Varren came down after him with one knee on his chest and the pale blade in his right hand.

The world slowed.

Soles knew this. It had come before, when something was about to kill him. The dust hung in the light. Varren’s blade was coming down the way a leaf comes down in still air. And Varren’s right forearm was bare, the sleeve pushed back, a hand’s width from the dark blade in Soles’s fist.

One cut. Not to the heart. To the arm.

He knew what the dark blade did to a man who carried other lives. It took them. It did not ask which. Whatever lives Varren carried, the ones that kept him upright, the dark blade would find one and take it, or take all of them, and Soles would not know which until he saw what was left.

Blind. Like the cut I was trying not to make.

He opened his hand.

Time came back all at once. Varren’s thumb landed on his wrist, and the wrist went dead, the dark blade lying useless in his open palm.

The pale blade came down. Soles caught Varren’s hands on the handle with his left hand, both of them, because the blade itself would throw him off, and held.

It was not enough. He had known it would not be. Varren had both hands and his whole weight behind them. Soles had one hand and a knee on his chest.

Varren leaned his weight onto the handle. His face was very close. There was dust in the cut over his eyebrow.

— Here, Varren said. You can have it.

The point went in under Soles’s collarbone.

It did not hurt yet. It was cold, and then it was very cold, and it went deep. Soles watched Varren’s eyes and saw the moment Varren believed he had found the heart.

Then the handle pushed Varren’s hands off it.

Not Soles. The blade. As if it had turned over in its sleep. Varren’s hands came away from it and stayed in the air, open, and he looked at them.

Soles’s left hand closed on the handle. It did not push him away.

— Then they’re mine to answer for, he said.

Something woke.

Not Phenom. Not Haya. Something with no name and no face, sitting up inside him in the dark as if it had always been there and had just been told to start work. Soles felt it the way you feel a stranger come into a room behind you.

Varren saw it too. Soles could tell from his face. Whatever Varren saw, it was not what he had come down here to see.

The slit breathed in.

The floor tilted under Soles, or he slid on it, toward the light, toward the heat, with a knife in his chest and one dead hand and nothing to hold. Varren reached and missed.

Somebody caught his wrist.

— One, Krista said. Two. Soles. Three.

Krista did not let go. She lay flat on the stone with both hands around his wrist and her boots braced against the leg of the table, and the slit pulled at him, and she counted.

At eight the pull eased. At ten it stopped.

Soles lay where it had left him, an arm’s length from the light. The heat was on his face. The pale blade stood out of him under the collarbone, his own hand still around the handle.

— Don’t take it out, Krista said. Soles. Don’t.

— I have to.

— You don’t know what’s under it.

— Nothing that matters, he said, and was not sure why he was sure.

He drew it out.

It came easier than it had gone in. The blood came after it, warm, quick, and then slower. He pressed his dead hand over the hole without being able to feel his own fingers.

Something sat in the dark behind his ribs and waited. It did not speak. It had no face that he could find. It felt like a man who had been put to work in a room he had never seen, and had already started.

Later.

Tesa came around the end of the fallen shelf, holding her right hand against her coat. Blood ran from her knuckles to her wrist. She looked at the hole in his shirt, then at Varren, and took one step toward Varren.

— Tesa, Soles said.

She stopped.

— You’re bleeding, she said.

— So are you.

She looked down at her knuckles as if they belonged to somebody else, and did not answer.

Varren had not moved since his hands came off the handle. He stood by the pillar with his coat gone and the cut over his eye still bleeding, and he looked at Soles the way a man looks at a door he has walked through all his life and finds locked.

Soles lifted the pale blade, so that Varren could see it.

— I told you I’d cut blind without it, he said. I’m not blind now.

Varren’s eyes went to the blade, and then to Soles’s face, looking for whatever he had seen wake there a minute ago. Soles let him look. He did not know what it was either.

He looked.

It was not like the first night. Then the two halves had shown the root and the strands to everyone in the room. This was only his. With the pale blade in his hand and his mind on it, the people around him were no longer only people.

Threads came out of their chests.

One from Tesa, pulled tight. One from Krista, pulled just as tight. From Varren more than Soles could count at a glance, pulled in every direction, as if he were tied to a dozen walls at once. On the stairs, a single one from Noct, trembling. Beside him Zora, kneeling, one thread, and a hand on Noct’s back. Noct was still in the middle of the tread. Zora had come down to him rather than ask him to come to her.

Behind the rock, where the teams were, nothing. Not one. Men with no threads at all.

Then Soles turned the pale blade toward the slit.

The root was there, the way it had been the first night, dark at its center and lit along its sides. The fine strands ran out of it into the ceiling and the walls, toward the mill and the street above it. There were more of them than before, many more, as if the town had come closer to the root tonight. One went out through the grating, to wherever Halloran was. One went to Noct. One to Zora. The rest went up through the stone in a bundle as thick as rope, toward houses Soles could not see.

That’s what he meant. Cut blind.

— I can see which ones are yours, Soles said. I can cut around them.

Varren said nothing.

— I need two hands. He lifted the dark blade a little on its chain. It hung from his wrist like something tied to a dead man. Let it go.

For a long moment Varren did not move.

Then he crossed the floor, stepping over Tesa’s blood, and crouched, and laid two fingers on Soles’s wrist, exactly where his thumb had been.

— Go, he said.

The wrist came back. It hurt, all at once, the whole forearm, as if the blood had been waiting outside. Soles closed his fingers on the dark blade and felt them close.

Varren stayed crouched beside him a moment longer.

— If one of them goes, he said, I’ll know.

Krista got under his good shoulder and Tesa under the other, and between them they stood him up at the edge of the slit.

— Lean, Tesa said. I’ve got the heavy side.

Heat came up around his legs. He had the dark blade in his right hand and the pale one in his left, and he brought them toward each other.

The low note came. Not quiet this time. It came up through the floor and through his boots into his teeth, and the threads in the slit went bright.

Too bright. They would not hold still. They shook, every one of them, the way a wire shakes when a truck goes over a bridge. The three he had marked as Varren’s people crossed the bundle going up to the town. He lost one and found it and lost it again.

And something was going out of him.

Not blood. He knew what blood felt like. This went out of the middle of him, out of the place where the forester’s quiet lived and the slowed time came from, as if both blades were drinking from it at once. His knees went soft. Krista took more of his weight without a word.

Not much. Not much left of whatever that is. Do it now or don’t do it.

He found the root again. Dark at the center. Three fine strands on its near side, to the stairs and the grating. The thick bundle on its far side, going up toward the town. Between them, a gap a finger wide where nothing crossed.

He put the dark blade into the gap.

For one heartbeat the gap held.

Then every thread in the slit moved at once.

The gap closed on the dark blade like a hand.

Every thread in the slit came toward it. Not the three he had chosen to spare. Those held, pulled tight away from the cut, to the stairs and the grating. Everything else. The bundle that went up toward the town bent down into the root as if the blade were a drain, and the fine strands went into it one after another, and some went through and kept going, and some did not.

He heard them go. A small sound each time, like a wire parting. Somewhere above them, under the snow, people were losing something, and he could not see who. He counted without meaning to and lost count at five.

Stop. Pull it out. Stop.

His hand would not open. Both blades were in it now, the note in his teeth, and something going out of the middle of him faster than before.

On his other side Tesa’s thread jerked once, hard, toward the slit, and sprang back. She swore through her teeth and did not let go of him.

Beside him Krista went rigid.

He saw it with the pale blade, because he was still looking with it. Her thread, the one that had been tight all night, was bending toward the slit. Toward the dark blade. The way a plant turns.

She felt it. He saw her face change.

— Krista.

She did not answer him. Her lips moved, and he knew what she was doing, because he had watched her do it at desks and doors for months: she was reaching for the man in her, the one who read hands. Calling him to hold on.

Then she stopped.

She let go of his shoulder and took his right wrist in both hands, the dark blade’s wrist, and pulled it back out of the slit.

He opened his hand. He did not decide to. The dark blade fell and swung on its chain against his leg.

Her thread went slack. Then it was not there at all.

The note dropped away. The light from the pale blade did not. It ran down his arm and into Krista’s hands, still closed on his wrist, and something grew out of her chest where the old thread had been. Thin. New. Pulled tight at once.

Soles’s knees went. Tesa took him, and Krista did not let go, and between them they lowered him to the stone a long step back from the light. The middle of him felt hollow, like a room after the furniture has been carried out. He could hear the slit breathing, and it sounded farther away than it was.

On the stairs Noct’s thread hung where it had hung all night, Zora’s beside it. Through the grating, Halloran’s. Three. He had kept those three. He did not know how many he had lost.

Krista looked at her own hands on his wrist as if she did not know whose they were.

— I’m holding you, she said. Only she said it slowly, and differently, like a woman checking a measurement.

Across the chamber Varren had turned his face up toward the stone, toward the place where the bundle went into the ceiling. He stood very still, listening the way a man listens to doors closing in a house he thought was empty.

His lips moved.

— Six, Varren said, to nobody. Seven.

He had said he would know. He was counting them.

❦

Maxim had the names of nineteen people written on the back of a delivery slip when the surveyor’s coat jerked in his hand.

Bram had gone back to the hatch to bring up the rope. Maxim had stayed with the people. He had been going down the line in the snow, one by one. Asking. Writing the name, the street, whether they would walk to the bridge if somebody walked with them. Most said yes and did not move. He wrote it anyway.

— Third house from the pump, the woman beside the surveyor had told him. I’ll go when he goes.

— He’s going.

— Then I’ll go.

She had not moved either. Her eyes had gone back to the mill as soon as he looked down at the slip. Ordric had kept a gate for thirty years. You wrote the face down and the crossing after it.

He knew every face on the bank. He had known them since the trucks.

The surveyor said something with no air in it and went down on one knee in the snow.

All along the bank people moved. Not together. One woman put her hand to her chest. A man three places down sat down where he stood. The old man at the end of the line laughed once, surprised, and then began to cry.

Maxim felt it go through the surveyor and into his own hand.

It was very small. A door shutting somewhere at the back of a long building. He did not know what it was until he looked up.

He looked along the line, and he did not know them.

He had their names on the slip. He had their streets. He had stood in front of every one of them in the last ten minutes and asked. The faces were there, red with cold, wet-eyed, and they were faces. Just faces. Nothing came up behind them. No truck, no suitcase, no doorstep with a one on it.

Ordric.

Nobody answered.

Something else did. Not in words. In his legs, which had already turned him toward the bridge. In his free hand, which had already taken the elbow of the woman from the third house, and was steering her, gently, the way you steer someone onto a plank laid across water.

He did not know he could do that. He did not know where it came from. His hands had always been good with weight. This was not weight. This was knowing where the other side was, and how far, and who should go first.

The surveyor was looking up at him. His face had changed. The pull had gone out of it, the way it goes out of a cut rope.

— It stopped, the surveyor said. It’s stopped calling me.

He started to laugh, kneeling in the snow, and Maxim held on to his coat and looked at nineteen strangers whose names he had written down himself.

The slit was wider.

Soles lay on the stone with Krista’s hands around his wrist and watched it breathe. A hand’s width after the charge. Two now. The heat came out of it in long pushes and went back in, and every time it went back in, it took a little more of the room with it. Dust. Light. The sound of the water overhead.

Nothing he had done had closed anything. He had only shaken the root, and the root had fed.

Krista lifted her head.

She was listening past him, through the rock, with the same stillness she had used on the stair. Whatever had changed in her, that had not.

— They’re setting another one, she said. Two men. Same place. They’re arguing about how much.

Tesa said a word Soles had never heard her use.

He sat up. The hole under his collarbone opened and closed with the movement, and he felt it as something far away, happening to a man he knew.

Another charge. Into a root that drinks force. Twice as wide. Then four times.

He did not need anybody to tell him what came after four times.

He looked down at his hands. The pale blade in the left. The dark one hanging from his right wrist on its chain.

Both together, and the threads would jump again. More people on the bank would lose something they had not offered. Maybe Noct. Maybe Zora. Maybe Krista, again.

The dark blade alone, and he would see nothing at all. He would put it into the root the way he had put it into the root under Vineward, and it would close, and he would not know what it took until afterward.

He thought of Vineward. Everyone who had stood in that temple had gone down a step that night. And afterward, warm water in a river in another town.

It doesn’t close. It goes somewhere else.

There was no way to make the two of them one tool. Not tonight. There was no time to learn to hold two.

He slid the pale blade inside his coat, where it had no business being. It lay there, cold, and did not push him away.

Krista was still listening through the rock.

— They’ve got the wire out, she said.

Halloran came through the grating on his knees, saw the three of them, saw the slit, and stopped where he was.

— Help me up, Soles said.

They did. Tesa on the side of the wound, Krista on the other, and this time Krista did not take his wrist. She held his belt. He noticed that and did not know what to make of it.

At the edge of the slit he took the dark blade into his hand and stood there a moment, getting his breath.

Across the floor Varren watched him. He had stopped counting.

— If you close it, Varren said, what happens to them?

— I don’t know.

— You said you could see.

— Not with this one.

Varren looked at the dark blade, and then at Soles’s face, and whatever he was looking for, he did not seem to find it.

— Then don’t miss, he said.

Soles drew in.

He did it the way he had done it on the washroom tiles: everything he had, from his feet and his hands and the back of his skull, pulled into one place under his ribs. Only there was less of it. Much less. He gathered and kept gathering and came up short, like a man reaching into a pocket he knows was full this morning.

He reached for the slowed time, and it came, and it was thin.

The dust slowed in the air. Not enough. The slit’s next breath went on at nearly its own speed, and he had to put the blade in before it came, while it was still drawing back.

His heel went down. His hip came around.

He drove the dark blade into the root.

It went in like a knife into wet rope, and then into nothing.

The light went out the way a filament goes out. White, then red, then a line of nothing hanging in the air where the slit had been. The heat dropped off his face so fast that his skin hurt. The breath of the root stopped in the middle, and did not finish.

Soles went down on his knees.

The floor was cold. He put his hand on it to be sure, and it was cold, all the way through, the way stone is supposed to be.

He felt the pull go.

It did not stop. It left. He felt it go out of the chamber through the rock in every direction at once, like water finding the drains of a whole street when one is blocked, thinning as it went, until it was too far away to feel. Toward other towns. Other rivers. People who had no idea yet.

Because of me.

He knew it the way he knew his own hands. And under it, worse, the thing he had known since the first night down here and had not let himself say. Somewhere there was a way to do this cleanly. Two halves, one tool. A man who knew how to hold it would have closed this root and nothing would have run.

He did not know how to hold it.

Krista knelt beside him and took his wrist again, two fingers on the inside of it, and he felt her count under her breath.

— Fast, she said. But there.

Tesa stood over both of them, blood on her hand, looking at the place where the slit had been as if it might change its mind.

Varren had sat down on the edge of the stone table. His hands hung between his knees, the hands the blade had pushed away, and he was looking at them.

On the stairs Noct had sat down at last, in the middle of the tread. Zora sat beside him.

— Well, Noct said. Warmest I’ve been all winter. Gone.

Nobody laughed. Zora put her shoulder to his, and he let her.

Through the rock, the men had stopped arguing. Somebody put a hand on the stone on the far side. Soles heard it, a small flat sound, and then a voice he knew.

— It’s gone cold, Corvin said. Tell them it worked.