Chapter III · Those Who Know

The policeman at the gate had let Soles through yesterday. This morning he stood in front of it with both hands on his belt and waited while Soles explained why he had come.

— I remember you, he said. That doesn’t change anything.

Beyond him, a man in a gray coat stood beside the dark sedan. Soles recognized the briefcase before the face. A second man, younger, was speaking to someone inside the gatehouse. Neither wore a police uniform.

Maxim had parked the truck on the road. He came up slowly, with Tesa keeping his pace and pretending not to. Krista stood beside Soles. She had brought no camera.

— The investigator knows me, Soles said.

— Then call him.

The policeman looked past Soles. The man by the sedan had put down his briefcase.

— I’ll take it from here, the older man said.

The policeman stepped aside. The gate stayed shut.

— You’re early, the man said.

— You were expecting me?

— I was expecting someone.

The younger man left the gatehouse and stood on the older man’s right. Between them was room for a person to pass. Neither had needed to block it; the closed gate did that for them.

— We’d like to see the east wing, Soles said.

— The building is unsafe.

— Then we’ll look from outside.

— The restriction includes the grounds.

— Who put it there?

The younger man opened a leather wallet. The card inside had a photograph, a seal and several lines too small to read at that distance. He held it still when Krista leaned closer.

— We’re here on state business, he said. Under a defense order. Access is by authorization only.

— Police? Soles asked.

— No.

Krista read the card and looked at the policeman. He nodded once. Soles had seen enough. The authority was real. Yesterday’s explanation was something else.

— All this for a gas leak, Soles said. Must be very important gas.

The younger man shut the wallet.

— It becomes important when people keep trying to get into an unsafe building.

The older man had not smiled. He stood comfortably, without the stiffness of someone expecting trouble. His briefcase was beside his shoe. He did not reach for it until Soles looked down.

— You’ve studied the case, Soles said.

— Yes.

— More than the investigator has.

— His responsibilities are different.

— And ours?

The man opened the briefcase on the sedan’s hood. He took out a folder, turned a few pages and laid it flat. Soles saw his own name above a photograph of the workshop. A list of dates followed. The younger man rested a hand on the next page before Soles could read it.

— We know about the stone by the water, the older man said. The carved tree. The structure you entered beneath the garden. And your relationship with the escaped prisoner.

Tesa moved beside Maxim. Soles heard the sole of her boot scrape the road.

— What’s his name? Krista asked.

— You know his name.

— Then use it.

The man closed the folder.

— Varren. If he contacts any of you, we need to be informed immediately.

Soles asked why, and got the four missing prisoners he had heard about yesterday. He asked what they had found inside and was told it was part of an ongoing investigation. He asked about the garden and got the same answer, word for word, as if the man kept it on a card.

— You show us a file and then tell us nothing.

— I showed you that this conversation is worth taking seriously.

The folder had shown him only names he already knew. The man had not turned the page.

— You’ve got my name in there, Soles said. I haven’t got yours.

— Tarn, the man said, as though it cost him nothing. It probably didn’t.

— Do you have a name for these investigations?

— Cases involving reported paranormal phenomena, the younger man said.

— Reported?

— Until we’ve established what happened.

Soles needed something they wanted, and he had exactly one thing. He meant to find out what it was worth to them before he gave any of it away.

— Does your file mention a blade?

The younger man’s hand stopped on the fastening of his wallet. Tarn put the folder back without looking at him.

— Several items were recovered during the investigation.

— This one wasn’t.

The blade lay against Soles’s ribs, inside his jacket. Krista turned her head a little. He kept his hands where both men could see them.

— Dark blade, he said. Almost no reflection. Heavy for its size. I found it in the temple.

— Where is it now?

— I left it there.

The answer came easily. He disliked how easily.

— You left an object like that behind? Tarn asked.

— I wasn’t collecting souvenirs.

— Can you identify its location?

— Yes.

Tarn waited. Behind him, the younger one slipped the wallet into his coat and left the fastening open.

— I want to see what’s in the prison, Soles said. And I want something I don’t already know. Then I’ll tell you where to look.

— You’re proposing an exchange of information.

— You can call it that in the report.

— We can contact you after we’ve considered it.

Tarn picked up the briefcase. His fingers settled around the handle, but he did not lift it. Soles turned toward the road.

— Let’s go, he said to the others.

— We have your address.

Soles looked back.

— Good. Saves me writing it down. I’m offering now. You can have the meeting afterward.

For a moment nobody spoke. The policeman watched the road. Tesa’s eyes went from Soles to the briefcase and back, measuring which of them would move first.

— You may observe the site, the man said. With an escort. You’ll answer our questions afterward.

— If you answer mine.

— Questions about this site. I can’t offer you access to an investigation because you’ve described a weapon.

— But you can offer me access to a building that’s unsafe.

— From a designated position.

Soles nodded. The man lifted the briefcase at last.

They entered through the gate. The younger man stayed behind them, close enough that Soles heard every step. The grass beyond the broken yard wall was still green. Overnight frost had stopped in a sharp line short of it.

Krista walked beside Soles.

— Left it there, she said quietly.

— Keep walking.

She did, but moved a little farther from him.

The east wing smelled of wet plaster. Sheets of canvas covered two openings where windows had been. Farther down, daylight fell through a break in the roof. The corridor ended at a boarded door; before it, Tarn turned into a room with no door left in its frame.

— Was the opening here before the wall fell? Soles asked.

— We don’t know when it opened. The earliest recorded complaint about the heat predates the collapse by three weeks.

— And you called it gas.

— There was no mention of gas in that complaint.

Soles let that sit between them. The man kept walking.

Soles knew which door it was before he counted. The last cell on the corridor. Someone had nailed planks across it at chest height, as if whatever had lived there might still want to come back out. The wall beside it was dry. Everything else on the corridor sweated.

The room had been a washroom. Broken basins lay under the pipes on one wall. A length of hose hung from a faucet, ending above a drain. Part of the ceiling remained, with a crack running from the light fitting to the missing outer corner. Tarn stopped behind a square pillar just inside the doorway.

— Stay on this side of the pillar.

— Why?

— Beyond it, the pressure becomes difficult to tolerate. Two men have been sick. One lost consciousness.

Soles felt it already. Yesterday it had pressed on his face across an open field. Here it pushed against his chest and made swallowing uncomfortable. He breathed through his nose, slowly. In the garden, Phenom’s attention turned toward the room.

A crack ran across the floor between the basins and the drain. Above it hung a pale thread, no longer than his forearm. Nothing held either end. Its lower tip stopped just clear of the tiles.

At the water, the opening had filled his sight. This one was thin enough to lose when he turned his head. He looked straight at it again, and the pressure gathered behind his eyes.

Maxim rested a hand against the doorframe. Tesa took his elbow and drew him back a step. Krista stayed by the pillar, looking from the thread to the cracked ceiling.

— How long have you been standing here? she asked Tarn.

— We limit the time inside.

— How much time?

— We haven’t established a safe duration.

Tesa breathed in through her nose and frowned.

— Apples, she said under her breath. Old ones.

— In a drawer, Krista said.

They had both been down there. Neither of them had forgotten the smell. Maxim, who had stayed outside that night, looked from one to the other and kept his mouth shut.

Soles stepped past the pillar.

Tarn caught at his sleeve. Soles stopped before the grip became a pull.

— You agreed to observe.

— I can’t see the bottom from there.

— We have photographs.

— Then show me.

The man released his sleeve, opened the briefcase and took out an envelope. The first photograph showed the room from the doorway. In the next, the thread was barely visible. A white rule lay on the floor beside the crack.

— Yesterday morning, the man said.

He handed Soles another. The same rule, the same angle. The crack had passed the next black mark.

— This morning.

Soles held the photographs side by side. The man had given him an answer at last. The wall was down, the prisoners were gone, and the opening was still growing.

— Did anyone try to cover it?

— With a sheet of steel. They couldn’t bring it close enough to set it down.

— And the sheet?

— Outside.

— Damaged?

— No.

Soles gave back the photographs. The pressure felt like trying to bring two magnets together with the wrong ends facing. He could lean into it. The men with the measuring rule had reached the floor. He needed to know where the resistance began, before he brought the blade anywhere near it.

He took another step.

— Soles, Krista said.

He held up his empty right hand.

— I’m only going to feel it.

— You can feel it from here, Tesa said.

He could. He could also stand against it where Tarn had not followed. The weight in his body was available, steady and familiar. He used enough to keep his feet moving.

The thread brightened.

Soles stopped. A drop fell from the hose into the drain. Then another. He let the extra force go. The pressure did not lessen.

— Come back, Tarn said.

His hand was a few inches from the thread. If he withdrew, he would still know nothing about what happened at the edge. He bent his knees and put his left foot behind him, as he would to loosen a bolt that resisted the first turn.

He pushed with more than muscle.

The pale line drew tight. Under his boot, a tile clicked against the one beside it. Soles reached with his fingertips. He felt resistance before contact, firm and smooth, although there was nothing between his hand and the light.

He pressed harder. His fingertips touched.

The thread widened into a narrow strip.

The pressure struck his palm and chest together. His planted foot tore off the tiles, and he went up hard enough to drive his shoulder through the cracked ceiling.

Plaster broke around his head. He fell among it, struck a broken basin with his hip and landed with no breath left to cry out. He raised a forearm over his face as the smaller pieces came down.

Tesa caught his collar with her good hand and dragged him clear before a slab struck the place where his head had been. She kept pulling toward the pillar. Krista caught his jacket below the shoulder and helped, while Maxim ordered someone out of the doorway.

His breath came back in a thin, painful gulp. Dust stuck to the blood in his mouth. He put his right hand down to help them and his elbow gave way.

— Leave it, Tesa said. Let us.

He let them pull him. A smaller piece of plaster fell onto the tiles behind his heels. The younger man backed into the corridor, coughing, and cleared the doorway.

Soles reached the pillar on his knees. He held his damaged arm against his stomach and looked past Tesa at the floor.

The thread was thicker than it had been before he touched it.

The thread no longer disappeared when Soles turned his head. From beside the pillar, he could see it, pale and thick, with the broken floor beneath it. The hose still dripped into the drain. None of the water reached the crack.

He put his left hand against the pillar and stood. His right elbow hurt when he let the arm hang, so he held it against his stomach. Tesa kept a hand on his jacket until he had both feet under him.

The younger agent was watching the thread. He took a step toward the room, stopped and pressed his lips together.

— Nobody goes back in, Tarn said.

— We weren’t planning to, Maxim said. We’ve seen the ceiling.

They backed into the corridor. The younger man pulled the canvas across the empty doorway, though it did not quite reach the floor. Soles could still see the light underneath it.

Outside, the cold air made him cough. He spat into the snow. Plaster and blood; he had bitten the inside of his cheek.

— We’ll have someone look at that arm, Tarn said.

— I can move it.

— That’s not what I said.

Soles straightened it a little. The pain was there, but the elbow moved. He bent it again before anyone could ask him to do more.

— We’ll get it looked at, Krista said. First we’re taking him home.

The man studied her, then Soles. He had dust on one sleeve of his gray coat. He brushed at it twice and stopped.

— I’ll contact you about the blade.

Soles felt its weight inside his jacket. He had not lost it. For a moment that was all he could think about.

— We haven’t finished the exchange, the man said.

— The arches in the riverbank below the footbridge, Krista said. Beside the garden. There’s a stone block in front of the third one. That’s where we went in.

Soles turned to her. That had been his debt to pay, and she was paying it in a currency he had not chosen.

— There’s a slab inside, she went on. It’s damaged now. Whatever made it open doesn’t work anymore.

She gave the location carefully, using the path and the edge of the water as points of reference. Tarn took a notebook from his pocket. At the part about the slab, he looked up.

— You’ve checked?

— We were there.

It was an answer to a different question. Soles heard it. So, perhaps, did the man. He wrote another line and put the notebook away.

— Nobody returns there without informing us.

— Then you’ll have time to study the drawings, Krista said.

The man did not answer. He turned toward the younger agent, who was still looking back at the canvas in the doorway.

Tesa helped Soles into the truck. He had to sit sideways before he could bring his legs inside. Krista climbed in last.

They drove away without speaking. Every rut in the road found the bruise on Soles’s hip. He kept his right hand flat on his thigh and watched the white fields pass.

— Why did you say that? he asked Krista at last.

— About the slab?

— There’s nothing wrong with it.

— They don’t know that.

She kept her face toward the windshield. Dust lay in her hair above one ear, as ordinary as the lie had sounded.

— I didn’t want them following us there, she said.

— They’ll check.

— Let them. Maybe they’ll spend some time studying how to move it. At least they won’t need to come to the house for directions.

— You made it sound very certain.

She rubbed the dust from her hair with two fingers and looked at them.

— Yes, she said.

Soles waited. She did not add anything.

Lucky met them at the door and stopped when he smelled Soles’s jacket. He sniffed it again, sneezed and backed away. Mina did not back away. She sniffed the jacket from collar to hem, sneezed twice and sat down squarely in front of it, as if someone had to keep an eye on the thing and she had decided it would be her. Lucky watched her from the hall and did not come closer.

— Look at that, Maxim said. Even the dog knows to get out of his way.

Tesa pointed to a kitchen chair. Soles sat. Krista put a basin of warm water on the table. When he tried to pull off the jacket, his elbow caught halfway, and Tesa worked the sleeve down his arm without bending it further. The blade dragged the other side of the jacket down. Krista caught it before it slipped off the chair and laid it on the other chair, pocket upward.

His shirt had torn at the shoulder. The water in the basin went gray, with a little pink along one edge. There was a scrape down the forearm and swelling around the elbow, but no strange angle. He could open and close his hand. Turning the palm up hurt.

— Don’t keep doing it, Krista said. We saw.

Maxim picked a piece of plaster from the torn shirt.

— Next time, just take a photograph.

— I wanted a closer look.

— Very thorough. Brought samples, too.

— Keep it, Soles said.

— Oh, I will. Next time you tell me you know what you’re doing, I’m showing you this. And next time you want Krista to undress you, just ask.

— Next time you can wait in the truck.

— Oh, now he wants privacy.

Tesa turned her face away. Soles heard a short breath through her nose.

— If you’re going to laugh, he said, do it before she puts that stuff on me.

Krista tilted the bottle from the cupboard over the clean end of the cloth and looked at him the way she looked at a photograph she was about to crop.

— Now, Maxim said helpfully.

The cloth touched his forearm. Soles made a sound he would deny later, and the kitchen laughed at him three different ways: Maxim out loud, Tesa through her nose, Krista without stopping work. He laughed too, and regretted it when his cheek pulled against his teeth.

Only Lucky had not come in. He lay across the kitchen doorway with his back to them and his nose toward the hall, the way he lay when he heard someone on the path before anyone else did.

There was nobody on the path.

— You could have helped with the shirt, Tesa told Maxim.

— I drove him home.

— Your truck carried him home.

— Fine. Thank the truck. Never complains.

— I’ve heard it start, Soles said. It complains.

Tesa was still smiling when she reached for the cloth with her recovering hand and changed hands before she picked it up.

— First morning supervising us, Maxim said, and he’s already through the ceiling.

— I told him to stay where he was, Tesa said.

— That’s what you tell people at the gym, Soles said. Right before you hit them.

— Then you should’ve stayed put. I’d have hit you for less damage.

Krista laughed, briefly and without covering her mouth, and Maxim turned on her.

— And I suppose you’re writing the report.

— Done. I put you down as helpful. And the slab as broken.

— You’re enjoying this.

— A little.

They gave him a clean shirt. Tesa rolled up the torn one instead of shaking it out in the kitchen. Maxim found the broom. Lucky watched from the doorway until the small white pile had been taken outside, and did not come in after it.

Then they sat down. Nobody had suggested leaving.

— It got bigger, Soles said. Not after I touched it. Before. The first time I used the weight to keep walking, it brightened. When I pushed harder, it gave back harder.

— And when we walked in to pull you out? Tesa asked.

— Nothing, Krista said. It didn’t throw us.

Soles set his mug down carefully.

— Then it isn’t the closeness. It’s the pushing. I was feeding it.

Don’t force a seized bolt. I’d have told any apprentice that, and then I went and put my shoulder into one.

Krista took a pencil from the shelf and drew a short line on the back of an envelope, a square beside it for the pillar, then the places where they had stood. She rubbed one mark out with her thumb and moved it closer to the doorway.

— At the water we could stand beside it, she said. Here, their men couldn’t even put a sheet over the crack.

— This one’s smaller, Maxim said.

— It looks smaller, Krista said.

— A small crack in a dam is worse than a big hole in a fence, Maxim said after a moment. The water’s got somewhere to push, and it pushes all day.

Maxim’s answer was a small nod toward Soles’s swollen elbow.

Krista circled the line. She did not write an explanation beside it.

— We don’t know what happens when we cut this one, she said.

Every eye in the kitchen went to the jacket on the other chair. Maxim’s was the first to come back to the table.

— Then we find out what we can before he tries another ceiling.

— Without feeding it, Tesa said.

Soles nodded. His right hand had begun to shake. He laid it flat on the table. Krista put her own hand down beside it, not on it, close enough that he could see the two side by side and feel stupid about which one was shaking. She left it there until it stopped.

Krista looked at the envelope, then pushed it away.

— I don’t know why I said it like that.

For a moment Soles thought she meant the crack. Then she looked at the jacket.

— The slab, she said. I hadn’t decided to lie. I just knew what to say. Even when he asked if we’d checked. The answer was there.

— You wanted them off our backs, Maxim said.

— I did. But I usually have to think.

She turned the pencil over between her fingers.

Soles thought of the words she had used at the gate. All the useful parts were true. The lie was where the man would put his next question.

Better than I lied at the gate, Soles thought, and did not like that he was grading it.

— You think it was him? Tesa asked.

Krista did not answer at once.

— I don’t know, she said. I was the one who said it.

She put the pencil down.

— And they may be back sooner than I wanted.

Soles leaned back and found the one position his hip allowed. He was tired enough to close his eyes, but when he did, he saw the thread widen in front of his hand.

He opened them again. Krista was watching him.

— Leave the cup, she said. I’ll make fresh.

He let her. There was still dust on the jacket, lodged along the seam above the pocket. He hung it on the back of his own chair, close to the wall, where he could get to it with his left hand.

He had just settled back against it when a man said:

— Leave it there.

The voice came from beside his chair. Soles turned. A dark sleeve was coming out of the wall above the baseboard; the rest of the man was already in the kitchen. His heel cleared the plaster without a sound.

Soles stood too quickly. His hip struck the table, and his right arm pulled against his stomach. The mug tipped. Tesa caught it with her good hand.

The man looked at the jacket.

Nobody had knocked. Lucky was still in the doorway, facing the street. He turned when Maxim moved, then began to growl.

Maxim put himself between the man and the door. He leaned on the table to spare his ankle. Krista stayed on the other side of Soles, one hand beside the pencil.

— Don’t move toward him, Tesa said.

She was speaking to Soles. Her eyes stayed on the visitor.

He wore a dark coat, buttoned high. There was nothing on it Soles could read: no badge, no stitched name, no mark of an office. He had taken off one glove. The bare hand hung open beside his leg.

Soles tried to hold his face in mind. He could see it plainly enough. When he looked down at the hand, he could no longer have said much about the face.

At the temple, he had felt the Hunters inside the stone. Later, he had felt them in walls and pillars before they came out. There had been a change in how the weight rested, something pressing where nothing should have been.

This Hunter had been close enough to touch his chair.

— Get out, Soles said.

— I came for the blade.

— Then you can leave without it.

The man measured the space between Soles and the chair, and his feet stayed where they were.

— You have it here.

Soles kept his left hand down, well away from the chair. The effort of keeping it there made him aware of how close the pocket was.

— You’re in my house.

— Yes.

— That wasn’t permission.

This morning the state kept me out with a gate. At least it used one.

The man looked at him again. Soles wanted to turn the chair so that the jacket lay between his knees, but that would tell him more. He had already looked at it once.

Krista asked whether the men at the prison had sent him. The visitor kept his attention on the jacket.

— Nobody here has offered me anything. That’s what I came for.

— We haven’t invited you in, either, Maxim said.

Lucky’s growl became a bark. Maxim held out a hand behind him, and the dog came far enough to touch it with his nose. He did not stop watching the man.

Tesa set the mug down. She moved it well away from the edge, as though they still had time to care about cups.

— What’s your name?

— You don’t need it.

— We need to know who we’re refusing, Krista said.

— You can refuse without knowing.

He spoke at the volume of a man ordering coffee. Ordinary visitors looked at things: the stove, the wet cloths, the dog. This one kept Soles and the chair in view the whole time, even when he answered someone else.

— You know Varren, Soles said.

The bare hand closed once, then opened.

— I trained him.

Maxim stopped stroking Lucky.

— In what? Tesa asked.

— The army. Later, the special unit.

Soles looked at the man’s wrist. A short black cord showed beneath the cuff. There were knots in it. He could not see how many.

He remembered the cord at Varren’s wrist beside the warm water, old and dark, with two knots. Maxim had seen it first. The Hunters had come out of the bank right after.

— He’s out of the prison, Soles said.

— And you went back.

— Did you teach him to come through walls?

The man waited. Soles had the feeling he was deciding how much the question deserved.

— I taught him things he still uses.

— Including what he did to my parents?

Krista’s hand left the pencil. Tesa’s weight moved onto her front foot.

— I wasn’t there, he said.

— That’s not what I asked.

— No.

It could have meant either. Soles wanted to make him say which. More than that, he wanted the man away from his jacket.

His left fingers curled.

The visitor’s gaze stopped on them, then moved to his face. For the first time, he seemed uncertain about something.

— Is that all you? he asked.

Soles said nothing.

The stillness he knew had begun to settle in him. The man’s throat was bare above the coat. His hands were empty. Soles noticed both things before he noticed the pain in his elbow again.

He opened his fingers.

The man watched the movement. Whatever he had been checking, the answer did not satisfy him.

— What do you mean? Krista asked.

— Perhaps nothing.

He turned his bare hand palm upward.

— Give it to me.

Soles looked at the hand. It was not reaching for him. It stayed where it was, low enough that he would have to take the blade out and place it there himself.

— You know you can’t take it.

— I know it has to be given.

— Then you have your answer.

— Or left in a temple for someone else to find.

Krista drew a slow breath. Soles heard it beside him.

— Leaving it in a drawer doesn’t count, the man said.

He glanced at the jacket again. Soles did not remember looking toward it this time. Perhaps he had moved his shoulder. Perhaps the man had never needed another sign.

Then the bare hand moved toward it.

Not fast. The way a man reaches across a table for the salt. Soles could not make himself move. Moving would put his own hand on the jacket first, and that was what the man was waiting for.

Maxim moved instead.

He came off the table on the bad ankle, low, arms out to take the man around the waist, the way he took a pallet sliding off a truck. He had his whole weight in it.

The visitor did not turn his head. His other hand met Maxim’s wrist on the way in, turned it, and kept turning, and Maxim’s weight went where the hand sent it. He came down on his back between the table and the stove, and the air left him in one sound.

That was all. No blow. The man let go at once, as though he had only been steadying him.

Lucky was barking from the doorway, high and furious. Tesa had taken one step and stopped, her good hand open.

He didn’t hurt him. He chose not to.

The bare hand finished what it had started. It came to rest on the jacket, flat over the pocket, the way a man feels for a heartbeat. Then it lifted away, empty.

— I can’t take it, the visitor said. I wanted to know it was there.

— Who told you? Tesa asked.

— The men who tried to take it didn’t seem to know, Maxim said from the floor.

The visitor lowered his hand.

— They didn’t get it.

— One of them didn’t get out, Soles said.

For a moment nobody spoke. The man turned toward the wall he had come through. Above the baseboard the old paint was whole, without a crack.

— You think the damage ended at the water, the man said.

— We were just at the prison, Krista said. We know it didn’t.

— The prison is close enough for you to visit. That doesn’t make it the end.

Soles leaned his left hand on the table. He disliked needing the support while the man watched him.

— What’s happening elsewhere?

— Water running where it should be frozen. People who no longer know what happened to them and what happened to someone else.

— Where?

The man did not name a place.

— You’ve brought a calamity into the world.

— By stopping the thing that was killing us? Tesa asked.

— By entering places you didn’t understand. By putting your hands on what was there.

Soles looked at the dust caught in the seam of his jacket.

— Forgotten places, the man said. Forgotten by the world itself. You found a door and treated it as though it had been waiting for you.

— It opened for him, Maxim said. He was on his feet again, leaning on the table.

— That isn’t the same thing.

Krista came a little closer to the table. She did not move toward the visitor.

— You know what those places are?

— Enough to know what you’ve done.

— Then tell us enough to stop doing it.

— Keeping the blade won’t undo anything, the man said.

— Neither will handing it to you without knowing what you want to do, Soles said.

Soles listened for something in the wall. He could hear Lucky breathing and the stove ticking. Nothing in either told him how the man had arrived.

— There’s a hole under that prison, Tesa said. People have already been hurt. Why come here?

— What would you do with the blade? Krista asked.

The visitor turned toward Krista, then back to Soles, leaving both questions unanswered. Soles could use that. A man who needed permission could be made to explain what he wanted it for.

— If you want it given, Soles said, you need the person holding it to agree.

The man looked at him for a long moment. Then he took the glove from his pocket and drew it over the bare hand.

— Keep it close, he said.

— I intend to.

— You’ll die one day.

Maxim straightened. The movement made him wince, but he did not sit.

— Get away from him.

The man was still looking at Soles.

— When you die, I’ll be there to take it. The rite will continue.

Soles had no idea what rite he meant. The certainty in the man’s voice made him want to ask. He kept his hand on the table instead.

— Not today, he said.

The visitor turned toward the wall.

— What rite? Krista asked.

He was already stepping into it. His coat disappeared first, then the side of his face. There was no scrape of cloth. Soles stared at the place where his shoulder should have struck. The last boot went through above the baseboard.

Tesa moved before anyone else. She stopped short of the wall with her good hand raised. Then she touched it with her fingertips.

— Still here, she said.

Soles knew she meant the plaster. For a moment he had thought she meant the man.

Maxim reached for the door bolt and stopped with his fingers on it.

Lucky sniffed the floor where the visitor had stood. He sneezed, moved back toward Maxim and stayed beside his leg.

— Did any of you feel him? Soles asked.

Tesa shook her head. Krista was looking at the wall. Maxim let go of the bolt.

— I heard him speak, he said.

Soles sat. His hip hurt badly enough that he could not make the movement look deliberate. He brought the jacket onto his lap with his left hand.

The man had been in the room without any of them knowing. He had stood beside Lucky, beside the wet cloths they had used on Soles’s arm, beside the chair where they had left the one thing he wanted.

Soles tried once more to feel where the wall’s weight rested. Nothing in it had changed.

Nobody reached for a cup.

Soles put the jacket on the table. He wanted both hands free, though his right one was not much use to him.

The chair scraped when he stood. Tesa caught its back before it fell.

— What are you doing?

— Looking.

He went to the wall. The pain in his hip made him shorten the last step. Up close he could see the paint lifting at the baseboard, a thin edge he had meant to scrape off months ago. He put his left palm above it.

The wall held the roof. It had held it before the man came through, and it held it now. Soles could find no place where the load had changed.

— You won’t find him by staring harder, Tesa said.

— I found the others.

— And you didn’t find this one.

He took his hand away.

What bothered him was how little the man had needed to do. Soles had told him to leave. He had stayed. Soles had refused the blade, and the man had accepted the refusal because taking it was not an option. When he left, it was at a time of his own choosing.

The rest of them had watched.

In our own kitchen, and he chose when to leave.

— If he’d wanted one of you instead, Soles said.

He did not finish. Maxim pulled out a chair and sat, slowly.

— We’d have done what we could.

— You were leaning on the table.

— So were you.

The swelling in his arm had not gone down.

— We need to get stronger.

— You need to get that looked at first, Tesa said.

— After that.

— After that too.

Krista gathered the wet cloths into the basin. She rinsed one, wrung it out and stopped with it in her hand.

— At the prison, we didn’t know what touching it would do, Krista said. Here we didn’t even know someone was in the room. I don’t want to watch you get thrown into something else because pushing harder is all you’ve practiced.

— Being stronger would’ve helped.

— I know. I’m saying I’d like you to see him before he’s standing beside us.

Soles sat on the edge of the chair. He had pushed at the thread because pushing had seemed possible. He had wanted to take the blade out here because it was the one thing the visitor could not take from him. Neither had left him with much room to choose.

— Then quicker too, he said. Quicker to notice. Quicker to do something useful.

Tesa rubbed the base of her recovering hand with her thumb.

— That’s work, she said.

— I know.

— You want to get stronger. That’s not the same as doing this every day.

— Will you teach me? Soles asked.

She let go of her wrist.

— Yes. Once you stop needing the furniture.

— I can stand.

— I know. Staying there is what we’ll work on.

Maxim gave a short laugh. Soles could not quite manage one.

— I mean properly, he said. Where to put my feet. How to get away. What to do when there’s nowhere to get away to.

Tesa considered him the way she considered a new student at the door of the gym, then nodded.

— And when to stop.

Soles did not answer quickly enough.

— Especially that, she said.

Krista’s phone buzzed on the shelf. She looked at the number, then put it on the table between them and turned on the speaker.

— The men at the prison measured it again at noon, the investigator said. It’s past the next mark.

Nobody looked at Soles’s elbow. He felt them not looking.

— Can we go back in? Krista asked.

— Not with their permission. I’m working on it.

— And the guard?

— Which one?

Krista glanced at Soles.

— Either.

— The one you met is at home, on leave. The older one walked out of the hospital last night. They found him at the prison gate this morning, in uniform, with his keys. He told them someone has to watch the exit.

The line went quiet. Soles thought of an old man on an ambulance step, counting car doors, starting again each time the number came out wrong.

You’ll start to like it.

He had been warned too. He had pushed anyway.

Krista put the cloth over the edge of the basin.

— We can’t all do the same thing.

— I wasn’t going to ask you to fight her, Soles said.

— Good. I’ve seen what happens to her friends.

Tesa raised her good hand a little.

— Only the slow ones.

Krista took the envelope with the drawing of the prison room. She turned it over. The empty side was damp where it had lain beside the basin.

— I want to know what I’m seeing, she said. What I can keep watching, and what I miss while I’m watching it. Today I was looking at his hand. I couldn’t tell you what Maxim was doing.

— Leaning, Maxim said. I’d have told you. You only had to ask.

— Tomorrow it might matter, Krista said.

The smile left him.

— I know.

Krista laid the envelope on the shelf to dry.

— I can start with that. With you moving around me. Looking away and checking what changed. Without pretending that guessing right once means I know how to do it.

— I’ll move around you, Tesa said. Once he can stand on his own. I’m not carrying him around you.

Maxim eased his injured foot farther under the chair.

— Most of what I know starts with picking something up.

— Start before you pick it up, Tesa said.

— You charge by the word?

— You couldn’t afford a longer answer.

— I could pay in labor, Maxim said. I’m very good with my hands.

— Good. Put one over your mouth.

He rubbed his hands together, considering it.

— I can work out where to stand before I pick it up, he said. Where everyone else needs to be. Half the trouble at a loading bay starts before anyone touches the load.

— And you can ask someone else to carry it, Krista said.

Maxim opened his mouth to argue, then shut it.

— I’ll try that before I put my back out proving I don’t need to.

Soles nodded. They had all been there, the man between them, each waiting for something that would make the next movement possible. Soles wanted another chance with a body that did not hurt. He also knew that the man could have arrived yesterday, before the elbow, and he might still have missed him.

— We try what we can, Tesa said. Find the mistake. Then try again without it.

— Somewhere that won’t get worse for trying, Krista said.

Soles nodded at the drawing on the shelf.

— Not beside that crack.

They still had to go back. The cloth across the doorway would not stop the thread growing, and an old man was standing at the gate in his uniform, waiting for a count that would never come out right. Training until they felt ready was not a reason to leave him there.

Maxim picked up the truck keys.

— Right, Maxim said. Give me the arm that doesn’t hurt. We’re going.

By late afternoon Soles had been examined, had bent and straightened his elbow under someone else’s instructions, and had been told to leave it alone when it hurt. He came home with the arm supported and no sudden improvement he could mistake for permission to use it.

Tesa was still there when Maxim brought him back. She had moved the chairs against the table, leaving a strip of floor clear.

— I thought I wasn’t allowed, Soles said.

— You’re not. Watch.

She stood with her feet together. Then she moved one back and bent her knees a little. She made a small turn, bringing her back foot around without crossing the other.

— Watch which foot moves first, she said. You turn your whole body toward whatever you’re looking at. Then you’ve got to move it all again to get away. Make the turn smaller.

She showed him a smaller turn. Her hands stayed loose, the recovering one close to her side.

Soles watched her feet. He had seen people do it before. He had done something like it himself, with someone else’s certainty in him. Asked to say which foot moved first, he hesitated.

— That’s where we start, Tesa said.

He tried to show her from the chair. She moved his left foot with the side of hers and told him to leave the right where it was.

— Sit, she said when he began to rise. Watching means watching. I know that’s difficult for you.

He sat back. It irritated him more than it should have. Tesa saw it and went through the turn again without making it easier to admire or harder to understand.

Krista left for work before dark. There were records she had not finished while they were at the prison, and she said she would call when she knew how late she would be. Soles nearly asked her to stay. She was already checking the time. He let her go.

At the door she looked at the clear strip of floor, then at him.

— Don’t practice without Tesa.

— I’m only going to watch.

— I know what your watching looks like, she said.

Mina followed her as far as the hall and came back with one of Krista’s gloves, which she laid beside Soles’s foot like lost property returned. Then she lay down on it.

Maxim stayed until they had eaten. Tesa left with him. At the door she pointed at the clear strip of floor.

— It will still be there tomorrow.

— So will I.

— That’s the idea.

Maxim told him to call if anyone came. Soles held the door while he went down the step, then watched Tesa wait beside the truck until he reached it.

Later, he moved the chair back to the table and sat with both feet on the floor. He tried to remember Tesa’s turn without copying it. The direction was easy. The order was not.

Once, the stillness came. He knew where an approaching man’s throat would be, how little distance his left hand would need. The certainty lasted until he tried to work backward from the hand to the feet.

He could not make the two parts fit.

One of us knows how to kill a man. The other one can’t turn around in his own kitchen.

He got up and drew the bolt on the front door. The bolt would not stop the Hunter. It still stopped a door opening.

Later that evening, Krista cleared a space on the archive table by moving the unnamed gardeners to the left, two uneven stacks of photographs beside the lamp.

She had come down to put a date to the woman holding the watering can. The employment books offered three possible names. One had been crossed out so hard that the paper had torn, and Krista had spent an hour matching the surviving letters against signatures elsewhere in the book before admitting that the hand belonged to a clerk, not to the woman. Another name ended before the date penciled on the back of the print. She moved it to the bottom of the sheet without crossing it out. Dates on prints could be wrong too. She had promised herself, on the night the exhibition reopened, that nobody in those boxes would be labeled “Staff” again if she could help it. Some of them she would never name. She could live with a question mark. She could not live with a guess dressed up as a name.

The book lay open where she had left it. Across the other half of the table, held flat by her phone and a box of paper clips, was the garden’s original plan.

Cabinet three. Alden had told them where to find it before they went under the bridge. She had looked at it then for a way down. Tonight she was trying to see what else she had stopped looking at once she had found one.

The draughtsman’s ink had faded to brown. Beds, paths, greenhouses; a garden arranged for people who would arrive by the front gate and keep their feet dry. Along the riverbank, the five arches were little more than strokes beneath the footbridge. Beside them, the architect had given the stonework a single word.

Existing.

She laid the old photograph beside it. Five low arches, the water halfway into them, the bank behind. All of it smaller than she remembered, because the photograph had been taken from above, by someone who had been interested in the bridge.

The plan included the width of the flowerbeds. It gave the spacing of the trees along the main avenue. Below the bridge, the lines stopped at the edge of what the surveyor could see.

Krista had treated the blank paper beyond them as empty space.

She followed the ink back toward the bridge. The measurements belonged to the garden above; she had been borrowing their certainty for the stone below. On the back of the plan there was no second drawing. Only old stains, and the ring of a glass.

She pulled a sheet of tracing paper from the drawer and copied the bank, then the bridge. She marked the way they had gone down. After that she put the photograph away and tried to draw the turn in the passage from memory.

At the end of the turn she drew the slab.

She stopped with the pencil against the paper.

It was easy to put things where a drawing wanted them. A straight passage, a square room, a door in the middle. She had made the chamber wider to fit the tree. She rubbed out the wall and drew it again, leaving the width unmarked.

You were there. That isn’t the same as having measured it.

She wrote a question mark beside the turn.

She tried a scale using the bridge’s width from the plan. That made the passage on her tracing absurdly narrow. In the photograph, she had copied a sloping edge as though it were square to the camera. She drew a line through the scale and left it there. A tape would have to come with her. For now she could mark the places to check without pretending she knew the distance between them.

The photograph was useful again. On the bank, just beside the third arch, a pale line divided two patches of stonework. She had taken it for a crack when she first looked. Now she moved the lamp closer and turned the print beneath it. The line followed the edges of the stones for a short distance, then disappeared under the bridge’s shadow.

A repair, perhaps. A joint. The light could have made it look deeper than it was.

She searched for it on the plan. There was a stroke in roughly the same place, too faint to tell whether it belonged to the drawing or to a fold in the old paper. She traced it lightly, stopped where it stopped, and wrote another question mark.

The clock above the filing cabinet clicked. She looked up. Nearly midnight.

Her phone had been holding down the other end of the plan. She lifted it, and the paper curled immediately toward her hand.

She opened Soles’s messages. For a moment she tried to compose the thing she would have to say: she had been looking at the passage again; there was something she wanted to check; she did not know what it was yet.

He would ask where. Then he would want to come.

She could picture him putting the jacket on badly, trying to make the injured arm cooperate, getting angry with the sleeve instead of with her. The picture made her smile. She missed him enough to want to put the books away. She had not slept at her own place since the prison wall came down, and she had not yet decided what to call that either. She did not intend to decide it tonight.

Instead she typed Still at work. I’ll call when I’m done.

She read it twice, then sent it.

On the table, the woman with the watering can waited under her three possible names. Krista slipped the employment book into a paper wrapper, marked the page and placed it beside the photographs. She would finish that search tomorrow. She wanted to finish it.

The tracing paper was thin enough to fold into her bag. She folded it along the riverbank, keeping the two question marks inside. Three things to check: the distance from the bridge, the turn, the join in the stone. She did not write them down. She never lost that kind of thing.

She had put the three in order before she admitted what they were for.

She would check them at the bank. Then she turned off the lamp.

His phone lit. Maxim was home and going to bed. A little later Tesa sent a message saying the same thing, followed by an instruction to stop doing whatever he was doing.

Soles looked at the chair and wrote back that he was sitting down.

At half past two Krista was still at work. He told her he was awake and asked her to call before she came over. Then he put the phone where he could see it.

Lucky slept beside the stove. Soles dozed in the chair and woke when his arm slipped. For a moment he expected the man to be standing beside him again.

The kitchen was empty.

He checked his phone. No new message. A few minutes past four. He got up for water, carrying the jacket over his left arm.

The knock came while he was putting the glass down.

Lucky raised his head. Soles stood still and waited. Two more knocks, quiet enough not to carry far into the street.

He looked at the phone again.

It was 04:05.

Krista had said she would call. Maxim and Tesa had gone to bed hours ago.

Soles left the kitchen light on. He took the blade from the pocket with his left hand and went into the hall, keeping it low beside his leg. Through the narrow glass beside the door he could see a coat and part of a shoulder. The face was out of sight.

— Who is it?

— It’s me.

Soles knew the voice.

He moved closer to the glass. The man shifted until the light above the door fell on his face. Varren stood on the step. His thumb was moving over the knuckles of his other hand.

— I need to speak to you, he said. Before I go.

Soles left the bolt where it was.

A door between them was the one argument Varren could not talk around, and with one working arm, Soles meant to keep it.

— Speak.

Varren looked at the narrow pane of glass, then at the handle, the way a man looks at a lock he has been asked not to pick.

— Through that?

— You got a message out of a prison. You can manage a door.

The thumb stopped on his knuckles. Soles kept the blade low against his leg, edge turned away from himself, and waited for the request. There was always a request. Varren had never once come to this door without bringing something and leaving with something else.

— I’m leaving, Varren said.

— You’ve said that.

— I don’t know when I’ll be back.

— Then don’t come back here.

Varren nodded once, accepting it the way he accepted everything, and stayed exactly where he was.

— What you did at the water took more than the others from me. I have to learn what I can still use. Then build it up again.

— And you came to ask for it back.

— You couldn’t give it back if you wanted to.

That was true, and it was also not an answer, which meant the real reason for the visit was still standing on the step. Soles had his refusal ready, worn smooth from use. Without the request to refuse, he no longer knew where the man’s hands were going.

— I can do the work, Varren said. I know some of what stopped me the first time. I won’t spend years making the same mistakes.

— Some of them.

— Some of them.

He didn’t walk across town before dawn to say goodbye to the man who cut away half of what he was.

Soles reached for the bolt with his right hand out of habit, and the elbow caught him halfway. So it would be the left. He moved the blade into the jacket pocket, drew the bolt and opened the door as far as his own shoulder, which was as far as it would go.

The cold came in at once. Varren had stepped back off the step to make room he had not been offered. Lucky arrived behind Soles’s heel, sniffed at the gap and stayed there, a warm weight against his ankle, neither growling nor wagging. Undecided. Soles knew the feeling.

— You shouldn’t be moving that arm, Varren said.

— Don’t.

Varren let his eyes leave the sling.

— I was stronger than what you saw at the bank.

— I was there.

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

Soles remembered the pressure under Varren’s palm, his own strength meeting it and finding nowhere to go. They had all stood against one man, and the man had still chosen the moment he stood up.

— Then why didn’t you use the rest?

Varren’s gaze went to the pocket where the blade was and stayed there a moment too long. Soles’s fingers tightened on the door.

— You weren’t trying to win.

— No.

He said it plainly, without lowering his eyes, and it was worse than a lie would have been, because a lie he could have argued with. Soles wanted to shut the door on that answer. He also wanted to know exactly how much worse the night by the water could have gone, and he hated that the second want was louder.

— How much?

— Enough that trying harder wouldn’t have closed the gap. Neither would a better place to stand.

— And I’m meant to take your word for that.

— No. You felt part of it. Remember that part the next time someone tells you practice is all you need.

Soles put his shoulder against the frame. The cold had found its way under his shirt, and his hip had opinions about standing. He was not going to fetch a chair. Varren would wait for him, patiently, and that patience would cost more than the hip.

— You want me to think I need you.

— I want you to know what you’re standing in front of.

Varren’s thumb began to move again, slowly, over the knuckles.

— You’re thinking about getting stronger, he said.

— Everyone who comes to this house is stronger than me.

— Who else came?

Soles had not meant to give him that. He had given it anyway.

— A man who says he trained you. The army. Then the special unit.

The thumb stopped.

— Did he ask for the blade?

— He came out of my kitchen wall to ask.

— And?

— If I’d given it to him, you’d be talking to him instead.

— Was he stronger than you?

— Did he use his strength? Varren asked back.

— We didn’t hear him come in. We didn’t feel him. He could have stood there a full minute before he spoke.

— Then you know he can get close to you. That’s all you know. Getting close and hitting hard are different skills.

Wonderful. One of them walks through walls, and the other one grades my questions.

— What am I supposed to do with that?

— Learn to notice him. Leave yourself somewhere to move if you don’t. And don’t mistake either of those for being able to stop him.

— We’re working on it.

If Tesa heard that, she would call it optimistic. Two of them could barely lift their arms.

— Good.

It came out warm and easy, the way Varren had once said good about a cup of tea Soles had made badly. Soles pushed the door an inch closer to the frame.

— You don’t get to approve it.

— No.

Varren lifted one hand, palm open, well away from the door, the way people show a dog they mean no harm.

— It can grow, he said. Yours. You can hit harder. Keep at it longer. Take a blow and still have your feet under you.

He listed it the way a man lists what an engine will do after he has rebuilt it himself: each part fitted to something Soles had felt, the promises still untested and the price nowhere in it. Soles waited for the price.

— And?

— And see a movement in time to answer it. Your body stops giving out where it used to. Not all at once, and not all of it equally. Being able to take a blow won’t teach you how to avoid one.

There it was. Soles looked down at his arm in its sling, at the proof that being able to take a blow and choosing to were two separate kinds of stupidity.

— Does it come back when you remember how?

— I remember things I can’t do anymore. Remembering doesn’t make them possible.

Varren lowered his hand.

— First I find out what’s left. Then I work it without wrecking myself. When it gets easier, I ask more of it. That’s all there is.

He made it sound like a gearbox: find the fault, replace the part, test it under load. For a moment Soles could see him at the workshop bench, telling him to try the joint again before trusting it with the full weight, and the picture was so ordinary that it frightened him.

— You could have told me this before.

— Yes.

— Before the bank. Before I went into that place. When you sat at my table.

Varren said nothing.

— Why now?

His mouth moved and then stopped. Soles watched him set one answer aside and pick up another, so whatever came next would be true and not the reason.

— Because you’re still here.

— Meaning that next time you come, I might not be.

Varren’s eyes went to the pocket again. That was answer enough.

— Leave it, Soles said. You’re not getting that from me either.

He had begun to close the door when Varren spoke again.

— Don’t go looking for more strength in the place that’s already hurting you.

Soles stopped with the edge of the door against his shoulder.

— Which place?

— You didn’t do that to your arm at the workshop.

Soles said nothing, which was a mistake, because silence told him.

— Somewhere you thought you could push a little further, Varren said quietly. I know what that feels like. Right up until it doesn’t.

— People are getting hurt there. We have to go back.

— Then go back for them. Just don’t tell yourself it’s for them when what you really want is to find out how much you can take.

The question about his parents was right there, sharp and ready: what kind of help Varren had meant to give them. Varren was waiting, as if he had already decided how he would answer it.

Soles gave him something else.

— I’m learning with Tesa.

— She knows how to teach.

— She’s going to teach me. You aren’t.

He shut the door before Varren could make anything warm out of that, and held it shut while he drove the bolt home with his left hand.

Footsteps went down the path. The gate clicked. After that, nothing. Soles watched the street from the side window until it had been empty long enough to believe, then a little longer, because believing came cheap tonight.

He sent the same message three times, to Krista, to Maxim and to Tesa: Varren came. I didn’t let him in. I’ll tell you properly in the morning. It was not enough, and they would tell him so. He sent it anyway. Waiting until they woke felt too much like keeping a secret, and he had seen where secrets led.

In the living room, Mina lifted her head from her blanket. She watched him check the window with the grave attention she gave a closed door before a walk. Then she got up, unhurried, and pressed her nose against his knee.

He sat on the sofa because it was kinder to his hip than the kitchen chair. Mina waited for his nod, jumped up beside him, turned once and settled with her chin across his thigh. Lucky came in from the hall, considered the arrangement and took the other side.

He had my parents killed. And I stood in the cold and asked him for lessons.

He had told Varren to go. He had kept him on the step. He had also opened the door, asked how strong he could become and stood in the cold waiting for the answer like a customer who already knew he was going to buy. Shutting the door afterward did not take the questions back.

The one hour when I’d have nobody else to ask. He didn’t pick it by accident.

What a filthy way to make yourself needed. And how well it had worked.

Varren had been the man beside his hospital bed, catching the phone before it slid from his hand while he cried. The man who came around to the workshop with bread. Who sat at his table while Soles asked him things. For a long time, a knock from Varren had been one of the good sounds the house made.

Soles found that the hand on Mina’s back had closed into a fist. He opened it one finger at a time and laid it flat.

He could follow the whole chain now, the way he could follow a fault through an engine: wanting a place at someone’s table, paying Kerr, a stranger in the yard, two people who went to work that morning and bought bread and never knew what had already been decided about their evening. He could follow every link. Being able to follow it made him feel sick.

He got up before he could put them in the yard again.

In the kitchen he drew the room on a clean sheet, left-handed and badly. The table. The wall. A square for the chair where the jacket had hung. A mark for the Hunter, closer than he had been drawing him in his head, close enough to have reached the pocket first if the blade had allowed it. Tesa by the mug. Maxim at the table. Krista beside him, one hand near the pencil he was holding now.

He searched the paper for the place from which he would have known the man was coming. There was none.

Fine. Then I learn to be somewhere else when he comes.

He wrote Tesa’s name in the corner. She had been there. She could tell him what he was remembering wrong, and so could the others.

Back on the sofa, Mina shifted to make room for his leg without opening her eyes. He put the phone where he would hear it and let his own eyes close.

He had questions for the people who would come in the morning. Varren would not be the one answering them.