Chapter IV · Where We Stood

The knocking woke Lucky before it woke Soles. By the time he opened his eyes, the dog was at the living-room door, waiting for someone to do something about it.

Getting out from under Mina without disturbing her took longer than answering the second knock would have. His elbow had set overnight into the shape of the sling, and his hip had opinions about the sofa.

— Coming.

— Take your time, Maxim called through the door. Lovely morning to be standing on a step.

Tesa was beside him with a paper bag. Krista stood behind them with her scarf pulled up to her nose and snow along the seams of her boots. She had finished work at some hour she was not going to mention.

— You look awful, Maxim said.

— Morning to you too.

— I was going to build up to it. Then you opened the door.

Tesa went straight past them both and put the bread on the kitchen table.

— Have you eaten?

— No.

— Start there.

Krista stayed in the doorway until he looked at her. Her eyes went to the sling first.

— Worse?

— Stiff.

She touched the back of his left hand, briefly, the way she checked a label before trusting it, and took off her coat.

The drawing was still on the table. Maxim pulled it toward him and turned it a quarter of the way around.

— Ah. I hoped you’d finally measured the kitchen.

— It’s us. Yesterday. When he came in.

— I’m by the table. That narrows it down. I’m usually by a table.

Maxim pulled the drawing closer.

— You’ve given me three legs.

— One of those is the chair, Soles said.

— Ah. I was about to frame it.

Tesa leaned over the paper and put her finger on her own mark, which Soles had drawn closer to the door than she had been.

— Here. Until I spoke. Before that I was nearer you.

They went through it while the kettle heated. Maxim had stepped toward the door and stopped at the table, because the table was where his ankle had told him to stop. Krista had stayed at Soles’s other side the whole time. Tesa had put down her mug before she asked the man’s name, which Soles remembered clearly, and he could not remember noticing her feet at all. Each of them moved a mark, and every correction put the Hunter closer to the chair. Soles rubbed the pencil line out a third time, until the paper went soft under his thumb.

— I keep putting him farther away.

— He wasn’t, Krista said.

— I know. That’s why I keep doing it.

The kettle clicked off. Nobody got up for it.

— About Varren, Soles said.

Maxim put the bread down.

— I saw the message.

— There was more than I could put in it.

He told them. He told it straight, because there was no version of it that sounded better: the door, the hour, the questions he had asked through the gap, the list of things his body could learn to do, the warning about the prison. He watched Tesa’s face when he got to the part about being taught, and saw it close a little.

— You could’ve called, Maxim said.

— You were asleep.

— Then I’d have been awake.

— I should have, Soles said. I know.

Maxim took a piece of bread and did not eat it, which for Maxim was the loudest way to be angry.

Varren had not asked for the knife, Soles told them, not in words. He had only kept looking at the pocket, the way a man keeps looking at a door he has decided to come back to.

— And you let him tell you how to get stronger, Tesa said.

— I asked him.

It was worse said that way. It was also the true way to say it.

— Then don’t make me compete with what he told you, Tesa said. If something doesn’t make sense, ask me. Don’t save it up and try it on your own first.

— He doesn’t get to teach me. I told him that.

— Good. Now tell yourself.

Krista poured the tea and turned his mug so the handle faced his left hand.

— He can know something useful, she said. You still decide whether he gets through the door.

— I opened it.

— I know.

She did not tell him it was all right. He was glad of that, though he could not have said why.

— Next time, call, Maxim said at last. I won’t be cheerful about it.

— When are you cheerful?

— When nobody’s testing whether a wall stops a murderer. It’s a very specific mood. You should try it.

They ate. Krista called the investigator and got the same answer as yesterday: no permission yet, he was trying. Tesa took the chair beside Soles and turned it to face him.

— Ten minutes, she said, and when he started to rise she put two fingers on his knee. While we wait. I said ten minutes. I said nothing about getting up.

She moved one foot back and showed him the turn from the chair, small and slow. He copied it, and his knee went first and pulled at the bruised hip, so he stopped. She set her shoe beside his to give him something to measure against, and that helped, because now he could see when he dragged his heel instead of lifting it. On the third try she took the shoe away, and he put his foot exactly where hers had been, which was wrong. His legs were longer than hers; copying her shape had left his knee cramped against the chair.

He moved it forward. For an instant the cold stillness came. There was a hand approaching him, though hers had not moved, and his left shoulder knew where to meet it before he could have said why. Then the hip spoke, and the hand was gone, and the floor under his foot was only a floor.

— What were you trying to do? Tesa asked.

— Something else. I know bits of it, when he’s there. When I try to start before the bit I know, there’s nothing to start from.

She considered that the way she considered a fighter’s guard.

— Then we start with the part you can do. The foot. Small.

He did it again without looking at her shoe. It felt too small to matter. That was probably the point.

Small. And under the prison it’s already past the next mark.

He was setting the foot down for the fourth time when Krista’s phone began to buzz its way across the table toward the edge. She caught it and looked at the screen, and her face went careful.

Tesa took her shoe away. The kitchen went quiet.

— Not the investigator, she said, and held it out.

Soles took it with his left hand.

— You wanted to observe the east wing, Tarn said.

— Yesterday you wanted us out of it.

— Yesterday there was somewhere you could stand. The pressure has reached the corridor. Nobody is going back into that room.

— Then get your people out.

— We have.

— How far?

The pause was short and very careful.

— Come to the gate. We’ll discuss what you can tell us.

The call ended. Soles looked at the drawing, at the mark that kept moving closer to the chair, and stood up.

— Now? Maxim asked.

— Now.

He said his people were out. He didn’t say how far.

On the drive, Soles turned the call over the way he would turn a part that had come back from a customer with no note. The agency had not called because it missed them. Yesterday the man had wanted a location; this morning he wanted an account, and he wanted it at a table outside the gate rather than in a room inside it. Something in that corridor had frightened them enough to ask. That gave the cohort a little weight on their side of the scale, and Soles meant to spend it carefully. Maxim, in the back, had worked out the same sum and was already spending it in his head on something unwise.

The road ran straight past the prison gate. Since yesterday someone had laid a line of cones across it twenty paces short of the gatehouse and moved the dark sedan behind them. On the near side stood a canvas shelter with a table in it; on the far side, the gate, and through it the strip of yard that led to the front offices. Anyone leaving the building had to walk that strip, through the gate and past the table. It was a good place to count people, Soles thought, if you wanted to know who was missing.

People were walking it now. A woman came through with a cardboard box against her chest, and the policeman took it from her and carried it to the shelter as if it were evidence.

Two more came behind her: a guard holding a ring of keys tight in his fist so they would not jingle, and a clerk in a cardigan with nothing in her hands at all. None of them looked back at the building. Soles had seen people leave a workshop like that once, after a boiler made a sound nobody could name. They walked at an ordinary pace and talked about ordinary things, and not one of them turned around.

Tarn came out to meet them, coat buttoned to the throat. The younger one followed with the briefcase. Neither of them had slept; it showed in the careful way they walked, as if the ground might have changed while they were inside.

— You said your people were out, Soles said.

— Out of the east wing.

— That wasn’t what I asked.

— It was what I could confirm. The front offices are being cleared.

Maxim looked at the table, then at the folding chairs, then at the man.

— Lovely. You’ve evacuated the furniture. Where are the people?

— You can remain by your vehicle, the younger agent said.

— I was asking about yours.

Soles touched Maxim’s sleeve, and they went to the table together. Tesa put a chair behind Maxim without asking him, which was the only way he ever accepted one. He sat down in it as if it had been his own idea all along.

The photographs came out of the briefcase in a fan. The washroom from the doorway, the ceiling down across the floor. Soles found the basin his hip had struck and looked away from it. In the next picture the pillar was far beyond the door, and a strip of tape crossed the corridor in the foreground.

— That’s where we stopped the last inspection, Tarn said.

There was a small pale piece in his ear. Soles had taken it yesterday for part of a wire going down into his collar. Now the man’s jaw moved once while nobody was speaking.

Someone else is at this table.

Which meant everything said here would be heard twice, once by the man in front of him and once by someone who did not have to watch his own face while he listened. Soles kept his left hand on the photograph and his right arm where it was.

— We need to understand what led to this, Tarn said. What happened beneath the garden.

So that was the price of the photographs. Soles had expected it, and he had decided on the drive what he would pay with: the things they had all seen, and nothing that had moved inside him.

He told them about the warm water. The people at the bank, the fighting, the opening that grew while they used their strength on each other. When he reached the cut, the younger agent asked him to repeat where the blade had gone.

— Into what was holding it open.

— You saw that?

— I felt where it was carrying the weight. Krista saw the carving.

Krista took a blank sheet from the folder and drew the tree from memory, the clean cut on the branch that stayed on the trunk. Tesa corrected where they had been standing. Maxim described the climb down from the bank with an ankle that had disagreed with every step.

— But you continued, the younger agent said.

— The alternative was staying there. Nobody was offering tea.

The younger agent wrote that down too. He wrote everything in the same small, upright hand and never looked back at what he had written; whoever read it later would have the words and none of the faces. Krista watched the pen move the way she watched a door she meant to remember. Later she would be able to say which words he had underlined.

Tarn let them finish. Then he drew one more photograph from the bottom of the folder and laid it on the table, face up, beside Krista’s drawing.

Mud. The third block on the bank, and beneath its edge the hole they had crawled through, dug wider with shovels. A drain climbing into the dark. Flashlight on a slab of stone with a carving in it, and a man in orange overalls crouched beside it with a crowbar across his knees, looking at the slab as if it had insulted him.

The carving in the photograph was the carving in Krista’s drawing. Every line of it was whole.

— We went down at six this morning, Tarn said. It didn’t open for us. It isn’t damaged either.

Krista’s pencil had stopped in the middle of a branch.

Soles had forgotten the slab entirely. That was the trouble with a lie told on your behalf: you never carried it, so you never felt it getting heavier. Six this morning. They had already inspected the garden before this meeting. Which meant Tarn had checked her story before he called, had called anyway, and had let them give the whole account of the water first, every true thing they were willing to part with, before he put this on the table. He had not been asking for an account. He had been measuring how much of it would match.

Tarn kept his voice level; he had no need to raise it. He turned the photograph a little, so that it faced her squarely, and the jaw under the earpiece moved once more.

— You lied to a state investigation.

Krista put the pencil down beside the drawing, very precisely, as if it might go off.

— I gave you the location, she said. Every part of it was accurate.

— Except the part about the slab.

— Except that part.

Her voice had gone polite, which was how Soles knew she was frightened. When Krista was angry she asked questions. When she was frightened she started organizing the room, and her voice went smooth and correct, like a letter to someone who could ruin her.

Tarn waited. He was good at it. He had the photograph, the earpiece and all morning.

Soles ran through it the way he ran through a fault with three possible causes. He could deny it, but the photograph was on the table, and denying a photograph only told the man what kind of people he was dealing with. He could let Krista carry it, and then her name would sit in that folder for good with a word next to it, and Krista had built her whole life around not being the kind of person other people could write things next to. Or he could give the man a true thing heavy enough to make the lie look like what it had really been.

The third would cost more than the photographs were worth. He knew that before he opened his mouth.

— It didn’t open for your man, Soles said, because it doesn’t open for anyone ordinary.

Tarn’s eyes came off Krista.

— It opened for us. For people like us. Like Varren.

For a moment nobody at the table moved. The jaw under the earpiece moved twice.

— Like you, Tarn said.

— Like us.

— And she told us it was damaged because?

— Because I didn’t want your men in there with a crowbar, Krista said. That part was true as well.

And now you can’t go in without us. That’s what she wanted yesterday. I’ve just bought it for her with the truth.

It should have felt like a win. It felt like handing over a key and watching the other man put it on his own ring.

Tarn wrote something in his notebook, one line, and underlined it. Pleasure did not come into it. He had the face of a man who had just been told the price of something he had already decided to buy.

— Show us, he said.

— Not today. Not with a crowbar.

— Then when?

— When you’ve told us something we didn’t know.

Soles leaned back, as far as the hip allowed.

— You’ve had the water from us. Now the slab. Two true things. Give us one.

Tarn considered him. Behind him the younger man had stopped writing.

— Ask, Tarn said.

— The man who came through my kitchen wall yesterday.

That landed differently. The younger agent’s hand went to his collar, where a flat black lens was clipped facing the table, and then away again.

— Didn’t knock, Soles said. Knew Varren. Said he’d trained him. The army, then something special.

— What did he want?

— The blade.

— And?

— No.

— Through the wall, Maxim added. I bolted the door afterward. Don’t ask me why.

— He said he’d be there when I died, Soles said. To take it.

Tarn’s eyes went to Soles’s jacket and stayed there. Soles kept his hand on the table.

— Can you describe him?

— His clothes, Tesa said. His face is harder. You look at it and then you can’t.

Tarn lowered his eyes and paused. When he raised them, Soles suspected that the answer had arrived through the small pale piece in his ear.

— These men belonged to a parallel branch, he said.

— Parallel to yours?

— Same military command. Different assignments. We study sites like this one. They handle field operations. Intervention. Clearing sites.

Clearing sites. Soles put the words away somewhere he would be able to find them again.

— Clearing people out, Tesa asked, or clearing people away?

— That depends on the operation.

She waited. He gave her nothing else.

— Are they working for you now? Krista asked.

— The men you describe are listed as missing in action. Or gone rogue.

— Which is that one?

— We haven’t identified him.

— You didn’t ask what he looked like until after you’d asked about the blade, Soles said.

— Both matter.

— To different people?

Tarn took his hand off the folder. There was almost a smile in it.

— If you want the full account, he said, you may have to work for the state.

Maxim turned to Soles.

— Do you get paid before or after they tell you what the job is?

— After you find out you can’t leave, Soles said.

— Ah. Benefits.

— Nobody has offered you a position, the younger agent said.

— That’s a relief, Maxim said. I’d hate to fail the interview sitting down.

The almost-smile went away. The younger agent opened his notebook to a fresh page, drew a line under what they had said about the Hunter, and below it, in a careful hand, wrote their names.

Soles watched the pen move. Yesterday they had wanted a location. This morning they had wanted an account. Now they wanted them, and he had just told them why they should.

One true thing. That’s all it took to turn us from witnesses into equipment.

He pulled the photographs back toward him because it was something to do with his hand.

— The pictures from before, he said. Before I went in. With the times.

The younger agent fetched another envelope. Krista laid the pictures out in order, using the edge of the basin as her fixed point, because everything else in the room had either moved or been moved by Soles. The thread was there in all of them, faint against the white wall, and in the ones with the measuring rule it had crossed another black mark between one morning and the next. They had known it was growing. Seeing the marks in a row made it worse, the way a gauge is worse than a feeling.

Beyond the pillar in the corridor photograph, tape crossed the floor well short of the washroom door.

— That’s where someone stopped, Soles said.

— A man couldn’t continue. We brought him out.

— I want to talk to him.

— He’s being examined.

— So was I. You still asked me questions.

Tarn held his eyes a moment longer. Then he touched the earpiece, listened to whatever it told him, and stood.

— Five minutes. The medic decides when they’re up. And whatever he tells you, I hear first.

— Or what? Maxim asked.

— Or I write that down too.

On his way past, he tapped the younger man’s notebook, on the page with their names.

The man was on the side step of a van beyond the cones, a blanket around his shoulders and pale dust worked into the knees of his pants. A medic was packing a cuff into her bag. He recognized Soles before anyone introduced him; his eyes went straight to the sling.

— I heard about you.

— You should’ve seen the coat, Maxim said. Nearly brought the whole room home with him.

The man almost smiled. Soles let Maxim have that one. He tried to crouch beside the step, but his hip refused halfway, so Tesa fetched a folding chair and he sat in it like an old man at a parade.

The younger agent held out the corridor photograph. The man put his finger short of the tape.

— There. Like walking into a strong wind. Except my coat wasn’t moving.

He had turned sideways when it got bad. Then he had put a hand on the wall and pushed off, because he thought the resistance was something a man could get through if he managed one more step. His finger moved a little farther along the picture.

— Another step. Maybe two. Then I couldn’t breathe properly.

Same decision. It hurts, but I can bear it, so I’ll lean harder. Soles had made it himself, a few meters farther on, with more than muscle behind it.

— Did it throw you back? Tesa asked.

— No. I went down on one knee, and they pulled me out by the coat.

His eyes went back to the sling.

— Nothing like what happened to you.

— I kept going too, Soles said.

— They told me to stop. I thought they meant if I couldn’t get through. I was still moving.

The medic asked him to stand slowly. He stood fast instead, and for an instant he was upright, and then his knees went. Soles came out of the chair before he had decided to, reaching with the wrong arm, and pain caught him at the elbow and stopped his hand in the air. The medic already had the man by the arm. Tesa caught the chair before it tipped into her way.

— Let her do it, Tesa told Soles quietly.

He lowered his hand and let her. It was the second time that day someone had told him to let another person do it. He was starting to hear a pattern.

Tarn walked him a few paces back toward the shelter, out of the man’s hearing.

— You got farther than our men, he said. We need to know where it becomes too much.

— It was already too much. I kept going.

— If we found somewhere you could stand, without going that far —

— Not today, Tesa said. She had come up on his other side without a sound.

The corridor photograph was still in the younger agent’s hand. Saying yes would get them a number, a place on the floor where it became too much, and would get him another ceiling. Saying no meant standing outside while the line in their pictures crept past another mark. Neither choice closed anything. Only one of them put him back in that room with an arm he couldn’t lift.

— Get the times first, he said. And find me the people who worked in that wing before it fell. Not the ones who tried to get closer. The ones who were just doing their jobs.

— What are you looking for?

— I don’t know yet. That’s why I’d like to ask them.

Tarn took out his phone and walked toward the gate to make the call. For the first time that morning, he had not asked for anything in return.

Krista was standing by the truck with the envelope against her chest. Soles went over, because she had not come to him.

— You didn’t have to do that, she said.

— You did it for us yesterday.

— I did it badly.

— You did it so they’d stay out of the garden. They’ll stay out now. They can’t open it without us.

She looked at him in a way he did not want to read, so he didn’t.

— Thank you, she said, in the smooth, correct voice.

— Don’t thank me in that voice. It’s the one you use for sponsors.

That got her. It was only the corner of her mouth, but it was real, and the voice that came after it was her own.

— Then I’ll thank you properly later, she said. When nobody’s writing our names down.

Across the road, Tarn lowered his phone and turned toward the gate, where people were still coming out of the front offices with their coats over their arms. Most of them had gone into that building yesterday morning to work.

Soles stayed by the shelter while the front offices emptied. The policeman at the gate waved each employee toward the road.

The first to come was a woman carrying a coat over one arm. A temporary badge hung crookedly from her pocket. She stopped beside the shelter and waited while Tarn put his phone away.

— I work in the front office, she said. Records. They said you wanted to ask about before.

— Before the roof came down, Soles said.

— I wasn’t here that night.

— What about the days before it?

She folded the coat against her chest.

— The heating was wrong. People complained. I told the man who came to look at it.

— Wrong how? Krista asked.

— Hot along one wall. Not the others. Then there were the people.

Tarn’s pen stopped.

— Which people?

— You asked me about the building yesterday.

— I’m asking now.

She pulled a chair out, then left it standing where it was.

— A colleague kept saying he had to get home for his little girl. I thought he meant his granddaughter. He said no. His daughter. He wanted someone to finish his work so he could leave.

— When was that? Krista asked.

— The morning before the roof fell. He’d been restless the day before too, but I didn’t ask him why.

— Does he have a daughter?

— She’s in her thirties. She came to collect him after an operation a few years ago. I met her.

Soles glanced toward the van. The man from the corridor was still beside it, speaking to the medic.

— Is that him? Soles asked, with a nod toward the van.

— No. Mine works at a desk. He didn’t go into that corridor.

A raised voice came from the gate. The woman turned before Soles did.

A man in a dark pullover had come out of the front offices behind a colleague with a tray of papers, and stopped just short of the policeman. He was looking past him at the building.

— There, the woman said.

The man turned back. The policeman stepped into his way.

— You need to stay outside.

— My phone’s on my desk.

— Someone will bring it when they can.

— I need it now.

The woman put her coat on the empty chair and went. Soles followed as far as the road, which was as far as his hip agreed to. Tesa stayed at his side, close enough that her sleeve touched his supported arm.

— She’ll be waiting, the man said. She doesn’t know where I’ve gone.

— Who will? the policeman asked.

— My daughter.

— I have her number, the woman said. She called me yesterday when she couldn’t reach you. We can use my phone.

The policeman checked with the younger agent, who nodded. He stepped back, but stayed between the man and the entrance. The man reached toward the woman’s phone, stopped, and put both hands in his pockets.

— She shouldn’t have to wait.

The first call rang out.

— Again, he said. Put it where she can reach it.

The woman looked at Soles, as if the decision were his. He knew what it was to have someone else’s worry arrive in his head and refuse to leave. Arguing with it had never once sent it away.

— Try once more.

Someone answered the second time. The woman said where they were and that his phone was still inside, then steadied hers against his ear.

— Are you home?

He listened.

— Lock the door. Don’t go out until I get there.

His free hand came out of his pocket and pressed flat against his pants.

— No. Don’t come here.

His mouth eased, then tightened again.

— Where’s your mother?

The woman lowered her eyes. Krista came a little nearer, still leaving him room.

— Can I tell her we’re outside?

He looked at her as if she had interrupted something private. Then he held out the phone.

— Your father’s out of the building, Krista said. He’s with people who can look after him. Are you somewhere safe?

She listened, glanced at the medic, and held the phone where he could hear it.

— Dad? his daughter said.

He turned toward the voice.

Soles looked away from the man’s face. A voice on a phone saying Dad. He had not expected that to find him here, on a road outside a prison, out of a stranger’s phone. Nobody would say his name in that voice again. He kept his eyes on the cones until it passed. It did not entirely pass.

— I’m at home, she said. I’m all right.

— You shouldn’t be there by yourself.

— I’m not. My husband’s here.

The man frowned.

— Your husband?

He took one step toward the gate, then stopped.

— She’s too young.

The woman from records had heard it too. So had Soles: a husband. The man was still trying to get home to a little girl.

The man reached for Soles’s arm. Soles turned his right side away, and Tesa offered her good hand instead.

— This way.

He followed her back to the shelter. Maxim got up from his chair slowly and left it for him. It was the last free chair, and he did not mention it.

The medic crouched in front of him while Krista held the phone by his shoulder.

— Dad. Listen to me. I’m thirty-four.

He bent toward the phone.

— I know how old you are.

— Then stay with them. Please. I’ll come to you.

His knees shifted as though he meant to stand. The medic took his wrist, and Krista lowered the phone into his other hand. He held it away from his ear so he could watch the screen. The woman from records put her coat around his shoulders without fastening it.

— He’s been asking about her for days, she told the medic. I thought he was worried about something at home.

— Tell me when it began.

— Three or four days before the roof, the woman said. He pinned a drawing above his desk, a child’s drawing of a house. I thought his granddaughter had made it. He said his daughter did it that morning, before school.

Tarn had his notebook open. Soles caught his eye.

— Let her tell the medic first.

Tarn shut the notebook halfway and listened.

Maxim was leaning on the shelter’s table. Soles joined him, his left hand on the edge until his hip settled.

— You can have the next chair, Maxim said.

— There isn’t a next chair.

— I didn’t promise delivery today.

Then, lower, without the joke:

— If it gets into people’s heads like that. The ones from the paper, out there somewhere.

— I know.

— I’d know their faces, Maxim said. I’m not sure I’d know mine, after.

Soles had no answer to that. He pushed Maxim’s shoulder with his own, the good side, and Maxim pushed back. Neither of them said anything else about faces. Across the road, the medic had sat down on the step of the van, close enough to catch the man if he stood too fast.

Behind them, the daughter was asking her father to describe what he could see.

— A road, he said. They’re keeping us on the road.

The woman from records came back to the shelter rubbing her hands, and stopped when she noticed she no longer had a coat.

— Did that help?

— He sat down, Soles said.

— He knew her when she spoke. For a moment he looked like himself.

Krista came back for the envelope of photographs.

— His daughter’s coming. The medic has her number.

By the chair, the man lifted the phone to his ear again.

— I can’t get back yet, he said. You’ll have to be good until I come.

The woman’s hands went still.

— Yesterday, Soles said, you told them about the wall getting hot. Did anyone ask you about him?

— No.

Tarn stood at the edge of the shelter. This time he opened the notebook without asking Soles anything.

— Who else? he asked her.

She looked through the gate at the people still coming out.

— I don’t know. You’ll have to ask them.

The younger agent came back from the gatehouse with a policeman. Behind them, a guard blocked the path from the front offices. Three employees waited on the steps. One held a stack of folders against his stomach.

— That’s the last office, the agent told his colleague. We need them through.

The guard raised a hand when the policeman approached. He wore no coat. A ring of keys hung from his belt, and he had a short black baton in his other hand.

— Passes first, he said.

The woman from records turned away from the shelter.

— They’ve already checked us.

— Then you can show them again.

Tarn went to the gate. Soles followed, stopping outside it. Tesa stayed beside him. Krista and Maxim remained at the shelter. The guard was several steps inside the yard, between the office steps and the gatehouse.

The policeman spoke quietly to him. The man shook his head. Behind him, the employee with the folders lowered them to show the pass hanging from his neck.

— Not around your neck. In your hand.

The employee obeyed. A sheet slipped from between the folders. He left it on the ground.

— Does he normally check them here? Soles asked.

— At the office door, the woman said. Nobody stops us at this gate when we leave.

Tarn called the guard over. He did not move.

— I can’t abandon the exit.

— You’re being relieved. Come outside.

— Who by?

The policeman showed his identification. The guard glanced at it, then looked past him into the yard.

— You don’t know who’s come through.

The younger agent stepped aside so the employees could see the gate. He beckoned to the man with the folders. The guard put the baton across his path.

— One at a time.

The employee stopped. The guard studied his pass, turning it over while the folders shook in the man’s hands.

Soles could see the open office door beyond them. A woman stood just inside it, holding her own pass ready. Nobody was trying to force a way out. The guard kept looking behind each person as though somebody else might come with them.

— Let him finish checking, Soles said quietly.

Tarn weighed that for a second, then told the others to wait.

The guard handed back the pass. The employee took a step toward the gate. Before he had taken another, the baton came across him again.

— Wait. How many?

— Three, the younger agent said. Those three.

— There were four.

— One came out before I went in.

— Then bring that one back.

The man with the folders pressed his lips together. Each time someone spoke, the guard’s empty hand went to the keys on his belt. Soles had seen men touch a pocket like that when they were afraid of losing what was in it. The guard’s lips were moving too. Three, four, three, under his breath, the way a man checks a sum that will not come out. He was not guarding the gate. He was guarding the count.

— They need you outside, Soles said. You can hand over the keys there.

The guard looked at him for the first time.

— Who said anything about my keys?

His hand closed around the ring.

Well done, Soles thought. Now he’s guarding the keys too.

The man had been afraid of leaving his post; now he was watching the gate as though they had arranged to take something from him.

— Keep them, Tarn said. Just let these people out.

The younger man approached from the guard’s left. He kept his hands visible.

— You can walk with me. Nobody’s asking you to leave alone.

The guard moved to block him. The man with the folders edged past on the other side. Tesa pointed him toward the gap beside the gatehouse, and he came through it with his papers still held against his chest.

The guard turned after him. The younger agent touched his elbow.

— Let him go.

The baton came up.

It was going to come down on the younger agent’s head, and the agent was still looking at the guard’s face. Soles had one idea and no time to like it: get between them, shove the guard back through the gate, take the blow on anything but a skull.

He went past Tesa and through the gate, aiming for the arm above the baton. His hip punished the first step. By the time his left palm met the guard’s forearm, the blow was already carrying both their hands toward the agent’s head.

He could not stop it. Beside the guard, though, there was space to turn with it. For an instant he knew the movement from another body: both arms free, weight already on the other foot. He tried it with the feet he had.

He drew on the strength he had used in the washroom and turned with the arm instead of trying to hold it still. The arm did not turn like an arm. It came on like a gate in a high wind, heavier than the man it belonged to, as if something under the yard were leaning into it with him. Against Soles’s ear the guard was still counting. Part of the blow went past the agent: the baton brushed his cheek and struck the iron gate.

Soles’s left foot had scraped around on the paving. His right had stayed planted behind him. The guard kept turning, and Soles tried to drag the foot after him too late. Something in the front of his left shoulder gave, a small, wrong slide, and came back. Pain ran down to his elbow; his grip opened, and the guard’s arm knocked him aside. His injured right elbow struck his ribs as he stumbled.

For a heartbeat the guard’s side was open to him, ribs and kidney, the whole length of it.

Not him. He thinks he’s keeping them.

Soles let it go.

A crack sounded from the offices.

The woman in the doorway cried out. Dust dropped from the top corner of the door. Soles saw the crack above it widen; the door scraped the paving as it swung farther open.

— Move! Tarn shouted.

The two remaining employees ran for the gate. The guard reached after them, then swung back at the younger agent. Soles’s left arm would not rise high enough to try again.

Tesa caught the agent’s coat with her sound hand and pulled him toward the gap beside the gatehouse. The baton hit the gate a second time. The policeman pushed the iron leaf between them and the guard.

— Back, Tesa told Soles.

He stepped against the gatepost instead. His heel caught its base. She pointed down, and he looked before moving this time. The agent got through. Soles followed him, keeping his left arm close to his side.

— Keep coming, Maxim called.

He stood beside the shelter’s table, one hand on it. He pointed the employees past the chairs, toward the road. Krista moved the empty chair out of their way and went with them. The man talking to his daughter tried to stand.

— Stay with me, the medic told him. We’re moving together.

Tarn called for help. Another policeman came from the gatehouse. Through the bars, Soles could see the guard trying to pull the gate open while the first policeman held it.

— You can’t just let them walk off, the guard said.

The guard let go of the gate and looked back toward the office steps. Tarn called to him.

— They’ve all shown their passes. You saw them.

— Where’s the fourth?

— Outside. Come and check.

The policeman eased the gate open. He stayed between the guard and the road. The second policeman waited on the other side. Soles wanted to warn them, but Tarn was already pointing toward the people beyond the shelter.

The guard came through, still holding the baton.

— Put that down first, the policeman said.

He did not. He tried to pass between them. The first policeman caught the guard’s wrist; the second took his other arm. The baton fell against the gatepost. The guard struggled, shouting that someone had to watch the exit.

Soles took another step back. Tesa stayed with him. It took both policemen to bring the guard away from the gate, and they had to stop once when he tried to turn back.

Tarn picked up the baton. He carried it with the handle down.

By the sedan, Krista counted the employees who had come with her. Then she looked back toward the shelter, waiting until the medic and the man on the phone had come clear of it too.

Maxim reached the truck last. He unlocked it and lowered himself into the driver’s seat. Soles sat in the open rear doorway. His left shoulder hurt even when he let the arm hang.

Tesa crouched in front of him.

— Where?

He touched the front of his shoulder with two fingers. She looked at his hand, then at the right arm still pressed against his body.

— Don’t try it again.

— I can’t.

She stood and called the medic. Soles watched the guard being taken toward the van. He was no longer struggling. His mouth kept moving, but they were too far away to hear him.

The younger agent came to the truck. There was a red mark below his eye. He touched it, then looked at his fingers.

— Did he get you? Soles asked.

— Not properly.

The agent glanced at Soles’s arm.

— You turned him.

— Part of the way.

— Enough.

The second swing would have reached the man if Tesa had not pulled him clear. Soles had stopped one blow; she had stopped the one that mattered.

— She got you out.

The agent turned to her.

— Thank you.

Tesa nodded. She was watching the offices. A thin stream of dust still fell beside the doorway. The policeman at the gate waved everyone farther down the road.

— It moved when I did it, Soles said.

Krista had seen it too. She held the envelope against her chest.

— I couldn’t see the wall behind you. I saw the doorway move.

— I felt the force change. That wasn’t just me stepping aside.

Tarn joined them. He looked from Soles to the doorway, then touched his earpiece and asked for the cordon to be moved back.

— You stopped the first blow, he said afterward.

— And then I couldn’t stop the next one.

Tarn’s attention moved to Tesa. She did not offer to demonstrate what she had done.

The medic came to the truck. Soles made room for her, then stopped when moving sent pain through his shoulder again.

Behind her, the younger agent was telling the policeman what had happened. He pointed at the guard, at Soles, then at Tesa. This time he did not leave her out.

Soles let the medic take his hand. At the gate, someone bent to pick up the sheet that had fallen from the folders. The policeman called him back before he reached it.

The paper stayed where it was.

The doctor after the medic said what the medic had said, in more words: the left shoulder was new, the right elbow was old, and neither of them was going to like being used for a while. Soles came out needing help with his coat. He let Krista give it, which he decided to count as progress.

At home, Mina waited on the sofa until he sat down, then came to inspect the place where his arm usually rested.

— Not there, he told her.

Krista put a folded blanket beside him. Mina stepped onto it and settled as though the blanket had been her idea.

— I’ll bring the plates in here, Tesa said from the kitchen.

— We can sit at the table.

— Or you can stay there and let somebody bring you a plate. Try it. For the novelty.

Maxim lowered himself into the chair by the window with the care of a man defusing something.

— I’m with her. I’ve just sat down. Don’t waste it.

They ate with the plates on their knees. Maxim told the story of the agent’s cheek twice, and the second time the baton was longer. Tesa corrected him both times. Krista let him finish, then said that the sheet from the folders was still lying in the yard, and nobody laughed at that. Afterward, Soles was left with Lucky asleep by his foot and the turn still unfinished in his head.

At the gate he had felt it as clearly as a gear catching. The pressure had changed direction under his palm, the room had opened beside the guard, and for one instant his body had known exactly how to step into it, because it had done it before, in another body, with both arms free and no hip to argue with. Then his right foot had stayed behind.

He stood up. Lucky moved out of the way without being asked, which Soles found more insulting than encouraging.

Left foot where it had been. Right foot behind. He began to turn, slowly, and it felt like nothing at all until the pull reached his hip and stopped him like a hand on his chest. The turn he remembered had carried him twice as far.

The turn belongs to someone else. The hip is all mine.

He sat down before Tesa came back. She looked at Lucky, now on the far side of the room, then at Soles.

— What did you try?

— The turn.

— Did it hurt?

— I stopped.

— That wasn’t what I asked.

— My hip. I didn’t get far enough to find out about the shoulder.

She called Krista back from the kitchen and asked her to hold out one arm.

— Nobody’s swinging anything, Tesa said. I’m showing him his feet.

She laid her good hand on Krista’s forearm and turned, one foot first and her body after it, until she stood beside the arm instead of reaching across it. Then she did it again with her rear foot left where Soles had left his. The turn died halfway.

— That’s you, she said. You carried on after this.

— The force was still coming.

— I know. And your back foot was still in the last century.

— You can explain that bit, Maxim said from the window, once you can do it without wrecking another arm.

— I haven’t got another one.

— Then stop treating them like spares.

Soles almost laughed. His shoulder advised against it.

— The back foot, he said to Tesa. Show me that. Only that.

— Not the turn?

— I’ve had the turn before. In someone else. The foot is the part that’s mine, and it’s the part that stayed behind.

She considered that for longer than he liked.

— Then we start with standing. When you can stand. Until then, you watch.

The next afternoon, Krista went down to the bank with the tracing paper folded in her bag, her notebook for the measurements, a measuring tape in her coat pocket and, added at the last moment, a clean cloth.

At the service gate, the day guard looked up from his newspaper, then at the tape sticking out of her pocket.

— Measuring again?

— Checking.

— It was all checked before. Then it was all wrong.

He said it without bitterness. Since the exhibition he had started telling her things he had kept to himself most of his life, a sentence at a time, like a man paying back a loan. Krista said she would be an hour. He wrote the time in the gate book, in the daytime column, and turned the book so she could see it.

A wheelbarrow rattled across the footbridge above her. She waited for it to pass before crouching by the third block. From the path the stone looked as if it had always sat against the bank. From below, the hole beneath its edge was easy to find. Someone had widened it with shovels since the night she and Tesa had crawled through on their stomachs.

She switched on her phone’s light and went in on her knees. The ground was wet for the first few steps. Farther along, a pale patch of daylight lay across the floor where the passage turned.

Her drawing had given the turn a neat corner. The wall curved, and the curve began sooner than she remembered. She measured what she could reach and crossed out the straight line. The new one ran over one of her question marks.

Good start. You’ve moved the wall.

The joke was less comfortable here. When she turned the light toward the slab, the end of the passage came back to her with a familiarity that made her want to walk the rest of the way without looking at her feet.

She looked at them. Then she went forward.

Here Tesa had laughed in the dark so she would not swear, the cast knocking against the stone. Here the smell had come, old apples in a drawer. Farther in, an old flashlight with a K scratched into its handle had lain beside a line of dried drops. Krista remembered all of it exactly, the way she remembered everything she had seen. Remembering exactly had never once told her what she had not seen.

Before she passed the turn, she photographed it facing back toward the steps. From that side the wall hid more of the opening than she had expected. She drew a small arrow on her sketch. A plan that worked only when she was looking at the slab was not much use for getting out.

The slab was closed.

Krista put the notebook on a dry ledge and took out the photograph. The pale line she had traced at the archive ran along the repaired stonework near the entrance. Here, beyond the turn, she found another join at roughly the same height.

She wanted it to be the same line.

A match in height proved nothing, not when she had measured it from two different patches of uneven ground. When she put the tape against the wall, the floor rose under one boot and dipped under the other, and the figure changed when she changed feet. She wrote both readings rather than choosing the one that fitted.

In the notebook she wrote Possibly continuous. Underneath, she added Check height from the same level.

The second line annoyed her. It was also the one she would have asked anyone else to write.

Near the slab, mortar covered a narrow strip of the join. She wiped away the loose dirt with the cloth. One edge emerged, straight and smooth; beside it, a smaller stone had been cut into an awkward wedge to fill the space.

She moved the light to the other side.

Two more wedges. Different widths, fitted against the same smooth edge.

Krista crouched. The repairs followed the edge of the slab instead of carrying straight past it. Whoever had laid those smaller stones had worked around something already there.

She traced the arrangement on a clean page. The pencil moved quickly until the join disappeared behind the closed stone. At one angle of the light a shallow groove seemed to continue into the covered part. At another it vanished. She drew it faintly and put a question mark beside it.

A scrape sounded behind her.

She turned so sharply that the light struck the ceiling. A photograph had slid off the ledge and lay face down by her boot.

She let out the breath she had been holding and picked it up. While she had followed the groove, she had stopped listening to the passage behind her. She checked the ground between her and the entrance anyway.

On the old plan, all of this had been reduced to Existing. She had read it as a finished answer: old stonework, already accounted for. Now she wrote the word at the top of the page and drew a box around it.

Existing when?

The phone lit up with Soles’s name.

She watched it ring. If she answered, he would hear the water, ask about the passage, ask if she had gone through the door.

She had not. She could tell him that much.

The call ended while she was deciding how to begin.

If she told him, he would come down here with one arm that would not lift and one that would not straighten, and he would be polite about it, and he would put his palm on the slab because it was there. She knew him well enough to see it. She did not yet know him well enough to stop him.

At the slab she stopped again, close enough to touch it. She kept both hands on the notebook. The part she could reach had already changed her drawing. She would not use the blank space beyond the door to make the rest of the lines fit.

Outside, the daylight had thinned. In the clearest photograph, the smaller stones crowded against the smooth edge like fingers against a closed book.

She sent Soles a message.

I’ll be home soon.

Then she put the phone away and went back through the garden, carrying a measured drawing and another thing she had chosen not to tell him.

By morning he had found a way of sitting that left both shoulders alone. It worked until Mina decided she wanted the blanket under his elbow, and he surrendered it an inch at a time, with her watching from the far end of the sofa like a bailiff.

Krista came through with her coat on; the exhibition wanted its captions by Friday. She kissed him carefully enough that he resented how much care was needed.

— Call me when someone calls you. If you want me to come, say so before you’re on your way. Not after.

Maxim had taken the chair by the window again and was glaring at his phone. A customer wanted a delivery with loading, and Maxim could drive but not lift.

— Ask Dorin, Soles said.

— I’d have to pay him.

— I assumed you’d mention that part.

— He’d charge me for the conversation too.

Maxim scrolled, sighed and typed with one thumb.

— Fine. Dorin. But if he brings Piter, Piter talks the whole way there and back, and I’m not paying for that either.

Tesa had just put bread on the table when the knock came. Three, evenly spaced, the knock of a man used to doors being opened for him. Lucky went to the hall without barking, which meant the dog had decided it was nobody to worry about. Soles had stopped trusting that decision two days ago.

The investigator stood on the step in his good overcoat, with snow on his shoulders and a paper bag of bread of his own. His eyes went to the sling, then to the other shoulder.

— I heard about the gate.

In the hall, on his way to the kitchen, he paused. His lips moved. Kitchen door, living-room door, bathroom, bedroom, the cupboard under the stairs. At the end of the hall he frowned slightly, as if the number had come out wrong, and went on.

Five. There are five. He counted five, and it still came out wrong.

He did not sit. He stood by the table with his hands in his pockets and delivered it in the same flat order he drove in.

— One of the four was seen. Two nights running, in a laundromat on the north side. Clean, fed, warm. Not a man who’d been sleeping in a bus shelter in February. When the patrol came, he’d gone.

— Varren? Tesa asked.

— No. One of the others. The woman who runs it asked where he was staying. He said somebody had given him a place to sit.

Soles thought of a folding chair under a man’s arm, carried across a yard full of steam.

A place to sit. He’s already started.

Somewhere in this town a man with warm hands was sitting very still and calling it rest.

— She said he kept looking at the dryers, the investigator added. As if he wanted to put his hands in them. Because they were warm.

Nobody said anything to that.

— The other thing is why I came myself.

He took his right hand out of his pocket. It had been closed. He opened it with what looked like effort.

— Yesterday I carried a message I wasn’t asked to bring here. The east wing has been handed to the other branch. A team goes in to clear the site a week on Saturday.

Clearing sites. The words came back up exactly where Soles had put them.

— How? Tesa asked.

— Nobody told me how. Nobody told me not to tell you, either.

— Which is how you know they expected you to, Maxim said.

Soles did the arithmetic because someone had to. Twelve days. A team from the same branch as the man who walked out of walls, going into a building where the opening fed on exactly that kind of strength. He had pushed at it for perhaps ten seconds, and the ceiling had come down on him. He could still feel exactly where it had landed.

— They’ll make it bigger, he said.

— You don’t know that.

— I know what it did when I pushed. If they push the way that man walks, they’ll open it over everyone still standing near it.

— Then it’s closed before they go in, Tesa said, the way she said things in the gym, as a description of what would happen.

Soles looked at his hands. One arm would not lift past his chest. The other would not straighten. To touch the thread he had to cross that room without doing the one thing that made it worse.

So. Go further than the man in the corridor without being what I was in there. In twelve days. With these arms. Wonderful.

— Whatever I do in there, he said, it can’t be pushing.

— Then you learn to walk into a wind, Tesa said. You don’t push a wind. You lean at the right angle and keep your feet under you. That’s footwork. That’s the turn.

— That’s not boxing, Maxim said.

— Everything’s boxing if you do it properly.

— Then I’ve been boxing my accountant for years.

— And losing.

The investigator looked from one of them to the other, like a man who had come to deliver bad news and was no longer sure what he had delivered instead. He left his bread beside Tesa’s and went. In the hall his lips moved again. Soles did not count with him.

The front door closed. Through the window Soles watched him stop at the gate and look back at the house for a moment, the way a man checks a figure he has already written down, before he turned up his collar and walked to his car. Mina watched him go from the arm of the sofa and did not settle again until the engine had started.

Then Soles picked up the envelope of photographs and wrote on the back, under the date of the last inspection, the word Saturday. With his left hand the letters came out crooked.

— When can I use the gym?

Tesa looked at his left shoulder, then his right elbow.

— When you can lift your arm above your head without making that face.

— What face?

— That one.

He stopped making it.

— Four days. Maybe. If you sit still until then.

Twelve days had become eight before he had even started. He found he was glad to know the number at last.

Tesa did not wait for him to say anything else. She stacked the chairs by the stove, pushed the rug back with her foot and dragged the table to the window, where Maxim moved his phone out of its way without looking up. When she was done there was a strip of bare floor from the sofa to the hall, as long as a ring and half as wide. Mina got off the sofa to inspect it, found nothing in it worth having, and got back on.

Tesa stood in the clear space with one foot behind the other.

— Which one can I move first?

— The back one.

She lifted the front one. It left the floor without disturbing anything above it.

— You were looking at my face, she said.

— It was talking.

— It’ll be talking for four days. Look lower.

He sat still. This time he watched her feet.

Lucky came in from the hall and lay down across the clear strip, exactly where she was standing, and had to be moved twice.