Chapter XVI · What We Kept

It took Soles three tries to stand.

The first time his legs did not believe him. The second time Tesa caught him by the belt before he reached the floor. The third time Krista said, very calmly, that she would count to three and he would stand on three, and he did, mostly because she had said so.

He stood in the cold chamber with the hole under his collarbone and the pale blade inside his coat and looked at what was left. A crack in the stone where the slit had been, a finger long. The fallen shelf. Tesa’s blood on the floor. The table, with Varren’s flashlight still lying on it, pointed at nothing.

Varren had watched him get up.

He was standing now, by the table, and his face had the look of a man going over a sum he had checked three times and could not make come out. He looked at Soles’s chest. At his own hands. At Soles’s face again, at whatever he had seen wake there.

Then he turned to the stairs.

— Zora, he said. Noct.

They came. Noct got up off the tread and went first, keeping to the middle. Zora followed him, and stopped once at the top, by the shut slab, to look back at Soles. Halloran came last, from the grating. He passed Soles without a word. Passing Tesa, he held out his fist, and after a moment she touched it with her good one.

The stairs came out on the surveyor’s landing. Soles had stood on that landing. He knew how close it was to the street.

He could have shouted. Through the rock, the teams were still there, close enough to hear him. One word, and the man in gray would have Varren before he reached the door.

Bring him in, or the pilot closes.

Soles watched the slab grind open at the top of the stairs, and the four of them go up through it into the dark, and he said nothing at all.

Krista was watching his face.

— I know, he said.

She did not say anything. She took his arm.

❦

The way back was the way they had come, only longer. The arches on his knees, with Tesa’s hand in the back of his coat. The gap in the step, where Krista went first and turned and waited with both arms out. The ledge, the black water, the rope.

It was past three when Bram and Maxim pulled him out of the hatch.

The mill floor was lit from outside by the headlights of the trucks. Through the open door the snow on the bank was white and hard in the light. The trucks were still there, and around them men in coveralls stood smoking with their hands cupped around the flame, the way men do after a long job that went the way they said it would.

Corvin was among them. He saw Soles come out of the mill on Maxim’s shoulder, and his cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth.

The people were still on the bank, but they were no longer a line. They sat in the snow in twos and threes. Some had blankets from the trucks. A woman was rocking a little, back and forth, with her arms around her knees, and talking to somebody who was not there, and getting no answer. A man three places down kept putting his hand flat on his chest as if he had lost his wallet.

Those are mine, Soles thought. Not his. Mine.

Tesa came up the rope after him and sat down in the snow by the door, holding her hand against her chest. Krista came last. She sat on the step with her notebook open on her knee and wrote the time first, before anything else, and then kept writing.

Maxim set him down on an upturned crate by the mill door and stood beside him, not quite looking at the bank.

— I wrote them all down, Maxim said. Nineteen. He held out the slip. I can’t tell you which one is which.

Soles looked at him.

— I mean it, Maxim said. I look at them and they’re just people. I knew every one of them yesterday.

He folded the slip and put it in his pocket and kept his hand on it.

Soles’s own hands would not stop shaking. He put them between his knees. The cold had got into the middle of him, into the place that had gone hollow at the slit, and it sat there and did not warm.

Bram came out with the rope coiled over his shoulder. He did not sit. He stood in front of Soles with the rope and the snow on his boots and looked at the hole in Soles’s shirt for a long moment.

— I’ll tell them what I saw, Bram said. That’s what I agreed to. All of it.

— All of it might not help you.

— It isn’t supposed to help me.

Soles nodded. There was nothing to say to that which would not make it smaller.

Across the yard, a car door opened. The chief got out. Then, from the other side, the man in gray, buttoning his coat against the cold, looking first at the trucks and the men around them, and then at the mill, and then at Soles on his crate.

Corvin stepped out from the trucks to meet the chief halfway. Soles could not hear what he said. He did not need to. The chief nodded twice and looked pleased, and the man in gray did not look pleased at all. He was counting the people in the snow. Every morning for ten days he had asked Soles one question. Soles could see him getting ready to ask it again.

Then he started across the yard toward the mill.

The surveyor got up before he reached them. He had been sitting a little apart, with a blanket around his shoulders and his ruined pants frozen stiff at the knee. He limped out into the middle of the yard and stood there, in the man in gray’s way, swaying a little.

— You’ll want to know what happened, the surveyor said. I was under it when they set their charge off. Right beside it. With my hand on it.

The man in gray stopped.

— It didn’t go cold, the surveyor said. It got louder. Ask me.

The slab let Varren out onto the surveyor’s landing a little after two in the morning, into the smell of a cold stove and a coat that had been left on its hook.

He had left his own on the floor of the chamber. He noticed it on the stairs going down to the street, when the cold reached his shirt, and did not go back.

Noct went ahead of him into the snow, down the middle of the street, as far from the house fronts as the street allowed. Zora walked at Varren’s side without touching him. Halloran came last and pulled the street door shut behind them, gently, the way you close a door on somebody asleep.

The street was empty. Every door had its one, crossed out. Across the river the trucks had their headlights on the mill, and in the light there were people sitting on the bank. He could not see faces from here. He did not need to. He had counted seven, down there, with his face turned up to the stone, one wire after another going quiet. Seven, and then he had stopped, because the next one would have been somebody he could name.

They walked toward the bridge.

Here. You can have it.

He had said that. He went back over it the way he went back over a wall he had climbed, checking each hold.

Soles on his back. The knee on his chest. Both of his own hands on the handle and Soles’s hand over them, holding, not strong enough. He had chosen the place. Under the collarbone, then down and in. He had done that before, in other lives, in other cold rooms. He knew what it felt like when it was right.

It had felt right.

He had watched Soles’s eyes and seen the moment the blade reached the heart.

And then Soles had stood up.

Varren stopped at the foot of the bridge with his hand on the rail. The iron was so cold it burned.

Your hand turned.

That was it. At the last, when the weight went in, his hand had turned a finger’s width, the way a hand turns from a dog it has raised. He had not felt it turn. That was how it went, with people you had let yourself get close to. You did not feel your hand turn. You found out afterward.

The rope on the step, the elbow in the crowd, the way Soles opened his hand when he had won. He had sat in the bakery and built a case against him out of true things, and his hand had not believed the case.

That was why.

It was a better reason than the other one. The other one had no reason at all.

The old voice had not spoken since the handle pushed his hands away. He looked for it on the bridge and found it a long way back, very still, the way it went still near the pale blade. He thought it was ashamed. He did not know of whom.

— Varren, Zora said. Are you hurt?

— No. I’m coming.

They crossed. Below them the river ran black and loud between the ice. For a moment, in the headlights from the far bank, he thought it was steaming. Then the wind took whatever it was, and it was only water.

Halfway over, he let himself look at the other thing.

After the blade went in, something had woken in Soles. Varren had seen it come up behind his eyes like a man coming into a lit room from a dark one. Not anything Soles had brought down with him. A stranger. New. Put there.

By the blade.

He did not know how. He did not know what it was or whose. He knew the pale blade had been in his bag for months and he had never once held it out over a man and found out what it did.

Zora had one life in her, at Echo, barely awake. Noct had one, and it frightened him. Halloran had one. Seven people on the bank had one fewer than they had at midnight.

If the blade could put one in—

He took the thought and set it down very carefully, the way you set down something that might go off, and walked on.

And the rest.

He had watched Soles stand at the slit with both halves and try. Really try, bleeding, Krista and Tesa holding him up. He had watched the threads jump. He had felt seven of his own go.

If it had been his hands on both blades, he would have cut those threads himself. Not by accident. He would have chosen which ones. He would have chosen fast, and well, and called it mercy, and gone to see the families afterward.

Soles had done it blind, trying not to.

Varren did not know which of them he would rather be. That frightened him more than the blade had.

The bakery door had its one, crossed out like the others. Halloran unlocked it and went straight through to the kitchen and put his hand on the oven, and it was cold, and he stood there with his palm on the iron for a long moment.

Then he opened the firebox and began to lay a fire.

Noct took the chair by the back door. He did not open the door. Zora sat at the table and put her hands flat on it.

Nobody asked. They were waiting for him to say it.

— I had him, Varren said. On his back. The blade in.

Noct looked up.

— And I couldn’t, Varren said. At the end. My hand wouldn’t.

— Happens, Noct said. Mine won’t hold a glass most mornings.

Halloran’s back stayed turned. The kindling caught.

Zora looked at him for a long time. She was the one who told him the truth when it was hard, quietly, so nobody else heard. He waited for her to do it now.

— All right, Zora said.

That was all.

Varren sat down across from her. The fire began to tick in the oven. Outside, toward the river, someone was shouting names into the dark, the way you do when you are counting people and want them to answer.

Later, alone at the window over the sink, he said it once more, to the cold glass.

— I couldn’t.

By morning he believed it.

At nine in the morning the doctor finished with the hole under Soles’s collarbone and sat back on his stool and looked at it.

— I’ve seen knives go in there before, he said. It went past everything. The artery, the lung. Past all of it, by the width of a hair. He wiped his hands. You should be dead, and you’re not even very interesting.

He taped the dressing down and went to see to Tesa’s hand. Through the curtain Soles heard him tell her that the knuckles would mend, again, and that if she hit anything with them in the next month she could find another doctor.

Soles buttoned his shirt over the bandage. The pale blade was in the inside pocket of his coat, hanging on the back of the chair. Nobody had asked about it. Nobody had seen it come out of him except the people who had been in the chamber, and four of them were across the river behind a bakery door.

At ten the chief read his report aloud in the briefing room.

He read it standing, under the map and the standing orders and Krista’s seven pages, to the cleaners on the back row and the men from the entry teams and the man in gray, who had taken a chair by the door and kept his coat on. The cohort sat at the desk they had been given on the first day. Bram sat beside them, because nobody had told him where else to sit.

The report was short. At twenty-three forty the entry teams had gone down by the platform route. At one twelve the sterilization charge had been placed and fired. At one fifty-one the anomaly had been observed to cool. Operation successful. Residual effects among the remaining residents were being assessed.

The pilot team, the report said, had entered the site ahead of the operation without authorization, using a civilian guide. Its earlier action at the site, the breaking of a stone slab during the first descent, was assessed as the probable cause of the anomaly’s growth. The fugitive Varren had been present. He had escaped in the confusion.

The chief put the paper down.

— Statements from the guide and from one resident have been noted, he said, and attached.

Bram’s jaw moved. He said nothing.

Corvin sat at the end of the back row, the case on his knees. He did not look at Soles. He looked at the floor by his boots.

Then the man in gray stood up.

— Soles, he said. Where is Varren?

It was the question he had asked every morning for ten days. Soles had answered it every morning with what he knew.

— He went up the stairs to the surveyor’s landing a little after two, Soles said. With three of his people. I was on the floor. The teams were close enough to hear me through the rock. I could have called them.

The room had gone very quiet.

— I didn’t, Soles said.

He felt Krista beside him not move. Tesa let out a breath through her nose, which might have been a laugh. Maxim put his hand flat on the desk, beside Soles’s hand, not touching it.

The man in gray looked at him for a while.

— Thank you, he said. That’s the first complete answer anybody has given me this morning.

He turned back to the chief.

— The pilot is closed, he said. As of now. These four are released from the service of the detachment pending review. Their report goes to me. Not through you.

The chief opened his mouth, and the man in gray looked at him, and the chief closed it again.

— Mine isn’t finished, Krista said. It will be complete.

— I’m counting on that, the man in gray said.

Bram stood up. He still had snow drying on his boots.

— I’ll sign my statement again, he said. In front of you. All of it.

The man in gray nodded to him as if they were the only two people there.

❦

He caught them in the corridor, by the stairs to the store.

— Walk with me, he said to Soles. Only you.

Krista’s hand found Soles’s sleeve and let go. Tesa watched them go with her bandaged hand against her chest. He followed the man in gray down into the cellar, past the storekeeper’s empty table, to the shelf where the ropes were kept.

The man in gray took a coil down and turned it in his hands until he found the place. A splice, old work, very neat.

— Your rope, he said. Ten knots, then three meters between them instead of two. I have the ledger. I have the order that came through the chief, and the words it used. I have Corvin’s statement, which he gave me at six this morning without being asked, and which he will deny if anybody else asks him. And I have a surveyor who says the charge made it worse.

He put the rope back on the shelf.

— Why are you showing me all this?

— Because you answered the question.

— The chief’s report goes to the capital today, he went on. It says force cools these things. In a month they will be sending charges to every warm river in the country.

Soles felt the cold of the cellar go into the hole under his collarbone. He thought of the pull going out through the rock last night, toward other towns, other rivers. Toward men who would come with charges and call it cooling.

— You know it isn’t true, Soles said.

— I know a great many things that aren’t in reports, the man in gray said. The question is what I do with them, and when. A failed pilot can’t tell the capital anything. A man the capital has to listen to can.

He buttoned his coat to the collar.

— Go home. Rest. Your four are not the state’s any more. Keep the house until the end of the month. When I need you, I’ll come to the door myself.

— And when you come, what will you want?

The man in gray looked at him, and his eyes went to Soles’s coat, to the inside pocket, as if he could see the shape of it.

— I’ll know when I see it, he said.

Maxim brought the dogs home at four, in the van from the center.

Lucky came through the door first and went straight to Soles and stopped, a step away, and smelled the air around his chest for a long time with his ears flat. Then he lay down across Soles’s feet and did not move again. Mina did a full circuit of the kitchen, ate something off the floor that Tesa had dropped on purpose, and climbed into Soles’s lap as if she had been gone a year.

He could not lift her. He found that out when he tried. She weighed what she had always weighed, and his arms did not care.

Thin, he thought. That’s the word. Like a coat worn through at the elbows.

He had a washer in his coat pocket. He had pocketed one at the factory and never put it back, and carried it since the way some men carry a coin. He took it out now, while the others were busy, and held it at eye height over his open palm, and let go.

In the factory the washer had turned in the air slowly enough for him to see its edge and correct his hand. He reached for that now. The extra moment came.

It came late, and short. The washer was already halfway down when the room slowed, and the room did not slow much. He closed his hand and the washer hit the heel of it and bounced onto the floor and rolled under the stove.

Nobody had seen. Mina had. She went after it.

He sat with his empty hand open on his knee and understood that this was going to be how it was now. Not gone. Thinner. The doctor had said weeks for the hole. Nobody had said anything about the other thing, because nobody knew it was there.

Krista sat down beside him and took his wrist.

She had done it every hour since the chamber. Two fingers on the inside, eyes on the clock over the stove, lips moving. He let her. She finished counting, and wrote the number on the back of her hand with a pen, beside the others.

Then she did not let go.

She sat holding his wrist and looking at him, not at his face, at all of him, the way she looked at a page she meant to copy. A long time. Long enough that Tesa, at the sink, turned round.

— Krista, Tesa said.

Krista let go so fast her chair scraped.

— I wasn’t finished, she said. She looked at her own hand. I don’t know what I was waiting for. I had the number.

She got up and went to the window and stood there with her back to them.

At the sink Tesa washed the same cup for the third time. She had not said a word all afternoon about the thing nobody had taken from her.

At the back door Maxim was fighting the step. It had iced over again in the afternoon, the one by the yard, where Mina always slipped. He went out with a board from the shed and laid it across the ice from the sill to the dry flagstone, and kicked one end level, and stood back.

— There, he said. Now she can cross.

Then he stopped, with his hands still out, and looked at the board as if somebody else had put it there.

— I didn’t think about that, he said. I just knew where it went.

Nobody said anything. Tesa turned the tap off.

Maxim came in and sat down and took the delivery slip out of his pocket and smoothed it on the table. Nineteen names. Nineteen streets.

— I’m going round them tomorrow, he said. By the street. Knocking. He folded it again. If I can’t know them by their faces, I’ll know them by their doors.

Soles waited until it was dark and the others were upstairs. Then he took the pale blade out of his coat and sat at the kitchen table with it in his left hand and the dark one hanging from his right wrist, and called them down.

He did not explain. He asked them to sit. They sat, Krista and Maxim across the table from him, and Tesa leaning in the doorway with her bandaged hand against her chest.

He looked at them with the pale blade.

Threads. Tesa’s, the one she had always had, pulled taut. Krista’s, where the old one had gone slack and vanished at the slit: a new one, thin, very tight. Maxim’s, the same. New. Thin. Working already.

He had put those there. He could see it, the way you can see your own handwriting on somebody else’s letter.

And with the dark blade on his wrist, he could feel something else. Not a pull. A possibility. The thread was right there. He could reach it without touching either of them, without a wound. He could cut it the way you cut a string on a parcel, and whatever he had put into them would go back where it came from.

He did not know if that was mercy. He did not know if it was the same thing he had done at the slit, only slower.

He put the pale blade down on the table.

— There’s something new in each of you, he said. In you two. Not in Tesa. I put it there, last night. I didn’t choose it. I don’t know whose it is.

— Can you take it out? Maxim said.

— I think so.

— And if you did. Would I get him back? Ordric.

— No. That one’s gone.

Maxim nodded slowly, as if he had known and needed to hear it said.

Krista looked at the blades on the table for a long time.

— Don’t, she said. Not tonight. Not because you’re afraid of it.

Soles nodded.

When they had gone up he took the pale blade and put it in the drawer with the spoons, at the far end of the kitchen from the stove, and stood with his hand on the drawer.

Never both again. Not unless the other way is worse than anything I can see.

Then he lay down on the floor by the stove, where the dogs were, and slept.

The next morning the sound started a little after eight, from the shed in the yard. A dull thud, then another, evenly spaced, like somebody splitting wood who never missed.

Maxim had gone at seven with the delivery slip in his inside pocket and his collar up. Krista was at the kitchen table with her report for the man in gray, nine pages now, writing with her arm curled around the paper as if somebody might copy it. She did not look up when the thudding started.

— Since seven, she said. Both hands.

Soles put his coat on over the bandage. It took him longer than it should have.

The shed was cold and smelled of coal. Tesa had hung a sack of it from the beam on a length of rope, and she was working it in the gray light from the door: left, left, right, the right wrapped in a dish towel over the doctor’s tape. Every time the right one landed, the towel showed a little more red.

— He said a month, Soles said.

— He said if I hit anything.

She hit it again.

— This is coal.

He came round the sack and stood behind it, where it swung. He could not have held it still; he knew that from Mina. He held it anyway, his good hand flat on the sacking, and felt the next punch come through it into his palm.

Tesa stopped.

— Move.

— No.

She looked at him the way she looked at a man across a ring: his feet, his shoulders, the side he was keeping back. She had seen all of it already. She had been watching him since the chamber.

— You can’t even hold that, she said.

— I know.

She hit the sack once more, low and short, on the far side from his hand, so the jolt never reached him. Then she let her arms hang.

— Mine came back, she said.

He waited.

— In there. At the end. It went for the light. I felt it go, like somebody grabbing your shirt from behind. And I pulled. I didn’t decide anything. I just didn’t let go of you, and I didn’t let go of him.

She put the wrapped hand against the sacking, gently, as if it were the sack that needed it.

— Krista let hers go. For your wrist. Maxim wasn’t even in the room, and he lost his anyway. And I’m the one walking around with mine.

— It wasn’t one or the other, Soles said. If you’d let go, you’d have lost him too. They’d still have lost theirs.

— I know that.

— Then—

— I know it, Tesa said. It doesn’t help.

A crow walked along the top of the yard wall, looked in at them, and walked away.

— Reil never went down, she said. That’s what he is. They paid him to go down in the sixth and he couldn’t. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Even when going down would have kept him safe. She looked at her hands. I used to think that was the best thing about him.

— And now?

— Now I think it’s just what he is. And I’m it too.

She unwrapped the towel. The tape underneath had come loose at the knuckles, and the skin there had opened along the old lines. She looked at it without much interest.

— You can take things out now, she said. You said so. With the light one.

— What I put in. Not what was already there.

— But you could.

He thought about the drawer with the spoons and what lay at the back of it, and the sentence he had said to himself over it last night. He thought about putting that blade to Tesa, who had stood him up at the edge of the slit and told him she had the heavy side.

Not for this. Not to make anybody even.

— No, he said.

— Because you can’t?

— Because I won’t. I’m not cutting anything else out of anybody. Not this week. Maybe not ever. And not out of you, so you can feel you’ve paid for something you didn’t buy.

For a moment she looked as if she might hit him after all. Then she laughed, one short bark, the way she did when somebody landed a clean one on her in the ring.

— That was a good one.

— I’ve been saving it.

He held out his good fist. She looked at it, then touched it with her left, knuckles to knuckles. After.

❦

Maxim came back at four with eleven doors crossed off the slip. Two of them had known him by his voice, he said, and one by his van, and the rest had let him say who he was and believed him. He ate standing up and did not want to talk about it, and then talked about it for half an hour.

It was full dark when somebody knocked at the back gate.

Lucky got there first, stiff-legged and silent. Soles went out behind him with the lamp. Halloran stood in the lane with his cap pulled down and snow on his shoulders and a loaf under his arm, wrapped in brown paper the way they sold them across the river.

He did not come in. He looked past Soles to the kitchen door, where Tesa stood with her hand held against her chest, and held the loaf out to her over the gate.

— Zora sent it, he said. White. They had the oven going at five.

Tesa came down the step and took it. She held it in both hands, against her coat, and for a moment did not seem to know what to do with it.

— He had one of these, she said. Under his arm, for his sister. The night he won. They were waiting for him outside, and they took it off him with everything else.

Halloran did not know who she meant, and did not ask. Soles knew.

Tesa’s brother had not come home at all, with bread or without.

— Tell her thank you, Tesa said.

— Tell her yourself. Halloran glanced back down the lane toward the river. Not tonight. She won’t leave him.

— Leave who? Soles said.

— He’s been on the pontoon since this morning. By the measuring board. He won’t come in and he won’t eat. His chair’s up at the top of the steps where it always is, and he hasn’t sat in it.

Halloran turned his collar up and stepped back from the gate.

— He says the water’s wrong.

On the second evening after the chamber, Zora came down the pontoon steps at six with the lamp from the hut, humming, and stopped humming at the bottom, the way she did when she reached the board.

Varren had been there since seven in the morning. He had not meant to stay. He had come down to carry the lamp for the first reading, because she had asked him to, and the number had been wrong, and he had stood at the railing waiting for the next one to be less wrong while the day went past him like traffic.

At seven the river had stood at one degree, the way it had for three weeks, with a lip of ice along both banks thick enough to hold a duck. At noon it was three. At four, five and a half. By then the ice on the near bank had gone gray and soft, and plates of it were breaking off and turning slowly in the current, going downstream to wherever ice went.

Zora let the thermometer down on its cord. She counted under her breath while it hung. Then she drew it up, and held it to the lamp, and looked at it longer than she needed to.

— Eight, she said.

— Since four?

— Since four.

She wrote it down. Her hand was steady. Her hands were always steady when the work was bad; it was afterward they shook.

— Rivers don’t do this, she said. Not in two hours. Not in winter. Not with nothing coming down from the mountains. She tapped the pen against the page. I keep wanting to take it inside and check it. I checked it at noon. It’s fine. It’s the river that isn’t.

Across the water the houses on the far bank were going soft at the edges. The steam had started a little after four, thin, the way it had been the morning he came to the town, and it was thickening now with the dark. The bakery’s window was still there, yellow, at the foot of the bridge. Halloran had gone out an hour ago with a loaf under his arm and had not said where.

Zora sat down on the bottom step with the notebook on her knee. She did not open it. She set the thermometer on the boards beside her with the cord coiled, and looked at the water and not at him.

— I was on the stairs, she said.

He knew which stairs.

— I saw where it went in. I had the lamp. I saw your hands, both of them, on the handle. She said it quietly, the way she told him things she knew he would not want, so that nobody else heard. There was nobody else. She said it quietly anyway. They didn’t turn.

The river talked under the pontoon. A plate of ice knocked against the board and went on.

— You were a long way up, Varren said. In the dark.

— Eleven steps. I counted them going down. She turned the pencil over. I’m not good at a lot of things. I’m good at seeing what a thing does when it says it’s doing something else.

He heard it the way other people heard her readings, the ones who decided the instrument was at fault. He felt it arrive, and felt it not go in.

— I know what I felt, he said.

— I know what I saw.

She looked at him at last.

— I’m not telling you so you’ll change your mind. I said all right in the bakery because you needed to sleep, and you did. I’m telling you so it’s been said. Once. Then I’ll leave it where you put it.

He looked at her hands on the notebook. Blue at the knuckles again. She had taken her gloves off for the cord and forgotten them on the rail.

— All right, he said.

She heard what it was. She let it be.

He went and got the gloves from the rail and held them out, and when she reached for them he kept one, the way he did, between his palms, until she curled her fingers against his. Her hand was cold right through. One life in her, at Echo, barely awake.

The thought he had set down on the bridge came back up by itself.

— If there were a way, he said, to give you another one.

— Another glove?

— Another life. A second one. So that if anything ever—

She took her hand back, not quickly.

— Whose? she said.

He had no answer, and she watched him not have it.

— That’s the only place they come from, isn’t it, she said. Somebody. She pulled the glove on finger by finger. I’ve got one. I’m using it. Don’t you dare go and fetch me somebody else’s. She thought about it. I’d only leave it on the rail with my gloves.

She laughed at that, short, through her nose, and pressed her wrist to her mouth. He did not laugh. After a moment, neither did she.

At nine it was fourteen.

The ice was gone from the near bank by then, all of it, and the far bank had gone behind the steam except for the bakery window, which was there and then was not and then was there again, like somebody blinking. The ducks began to come back a little before ten. He heard them first, out in the dark, a long rustling line of them coming low over the water, and then they were settling on the open river around the pontoon in their dozens, talking about it, as many as the morning he had come, more than one river should have been asked to hold.

Zora stood at the railing and watched them land.

— They know something, she said.

— They know it’s warm.

— That’s what I mean.

She went up to the hut at eleven to call the reading in to the office in the capital, and came back down with the lamp and said that nobody had answered, and that she had left it on the machine anyway, every number since seven, so that in the morning somebody would have to listen to her voice saying them.

At midnight she let the thermometer down again.

He watched her count. He watched her draw it up, and hold it to the lamp, and go very still.

— Thirty-one, she said.

Then she laughed, because it was not possible, and stopped, because nobody had made a joke.

The red line went to the top of the glass at one in the morning and stayed there.

Zora held the thermometer to the lamp and turned it, as if the number might be hiding on the other side. Fifty was as high as it went. Nobody had ever needed more on this river.

— There’s a long one in the hut, she said. For the summer gauges. It goes to a hundred.

— Then you won’t need it, Varren said.

She looked at him. She went up the steps to get it anyway.

He stayed at the railing. The steam came off the water in a solid wall now, gray in the lamp and black beyond it, and the far bank was gone, and the bridge was gone after the first arch. The river had a smell he did not know, flat and mineral, like a kettle boiled dry. Under the pontoon the current had changed its voice. It had been talking all day. Now it was muttering.

The ducks went at a quarter past one.

They went all at once, without a signal he could hear, hundreds of them off the water together, and the noise of their wings was so loud and so close that he put his arm over his head. Then they were gone upriver, into the dark, and the open water around the pontoon was empty and steaming and very fast.

Zora came back down with the long thermometer and the lamp, and stopped on the last step, and looked at where the ducks had been.

— They know something, Varren said.

She did not smile.

He took the lamp from her and held it while she let the long thermometer down. Her bare hands on the cord. He watched the steam close around them and thought how much he would give for her to be the kind of woman who left a job half done.

— Sixty-two, she said.

He took her by the arm.

— Up.

— One more. At two. I need the curve, Varren, I need to know if it’s—

— Up, he said. You can read it from the top. You can read it from the bridge. You can read it from the moon. Not from here.

She let him take her up. Halfway she turned and looked back at the measuring board, white with its black marks, standing in the water at the foot of its pillar the way it had stood every morning since before either of them came, and he saw that she was frightened for it. Not for herself. For the board.

At the top of the steps his chair was still standing where he had put it in the morning. Zora sat down in it without being asked, with the notebook in her lap, and wrote sixty-two, and the time.

Lights were coming on along both banks.

He heard windows first. Then a door, and a man’s voice asking what that smell was, and a woman’s voice telling him to come away from there. Somewhere on the far side a dog barked and kept barking. On the bridge, in the steam, a flashlight came out over the water and swept along it and came back and stopped, pointing at the pontoon. He knew how it was held. Halloran held a flashlight the way he held a tray, level, from the elbow.

The old voice had not come back since the chamber. He wished it would. He would have liked, for once, somebody who knew.

He did not know what was under the river, not really. He had been down there more times than he could count, to the room with the pillar and the stone table, and the first time he had come up with a pale blade in a cloth. Two nights ago he had watched the thing in that room closed by a man who was trying not to close it. He had felt it pull out through the rock like a tide going out. Afterward the room had gone cold. He had felt it on the stairs going up, the warmth gone out of the stone like out of a stove left overnight.

Cold down there. And up here, this.

At two Zora stood up from the chair and went to the top step with the long thermometer, and he went with her and held her coat in his fist from behind, the way you hold a child at a railing.

The cord went down into the steam. She counted. She drew it up.

— Eighty-one.

She said it in her reading voice. Then she sat down on the top step, quite suddenly, as if her knees had been told before she had.

He crouched beside her. The steam rolled up the steps toward them and he put himself on the river side of her without thinking about it.

— It’s going to boil, Zora said.

— I know.

— It can’t. A whole river. It can’t, there isn’t— She stopped. You’d need— I don’t even know what you’d need.

He did not know either. He put his arm round her.

She was shaking now, all of her, the way she did afterward. The work was done. There was nothing left to read that she did not already know. He held her the way he had held her gloves, one hand between his palms, until her fingers curled against his, and he felt the one life in her, small and asleep, under his hand, and thought, very clearly, Not this one. Whatever it costs. Not this one.

He had thought it about other people, in other lives. He had always meant it.

Below them, at the foot of the measuring board, the water began to move strangely. Small bubbles first, a string of them, rising along the pillar where the board was bolted on. Then more, coming up all over the black surface in the lamplight, each one a little pop, like rain falling upward.

A wave of heat came up the steps. It hit his back and his neck and the hand he had put up between it and her face, and he felt the skin on the back of that hand go tight, and kept it there.

Zora was looking past his arm at the water. Her face was wet with steam and nothing had touched it.

— Varren, she said. Look.

He looked.

The bubbles were not at the board any more. They were everywhere, from the pontoon out into the dark and under the bridge where Halloran’s light had stopped moving, and a sound was coming up off the water over the windows and the dog and the shouting on the far bank, a sound he had heard all his life on every stove in every kitchen and never once from anything this size.

Then the river began to boil.