Capitolul V · Nothing Extra

Four days later, Soles carried his own bag into the gym, lifted his left arm above his head in the doorway without making the face, and waited for someone to notice.

Nobody did. The old man who mopped the floor, and who according to Tesa owned the place, went on mopping. Tesa was taping her hands on the edge of the ring. The heavy bags hung in their row from the beam, and at the far end the oldest one, patched at the bottom, hung alone on a chain from a steel bar bolted under the ceiling.

Day seven. Eight left. Let’s see what the sofa bought.

Not much, for the first ten minutes.

Tesa came at him slowly, gloves up, and touched his forehead with her left. He went backward. She did it again, and the bottom rope pressed into his calf, and he had nowhere left to go.

— That’s where you keep going, she said.

— I’d noticed.

— Then stop going there.

He moved his right foot first, the way he had watched her do it from the sofa, and brought the left after it without letting them meet. Her glove went past his face. Not far past. Far enough.

It was only a step. But it was the first time in a week that his body had done what he asked without sending him a bill, and he wanted, absurdly, to tell somebody.

Her other glove tapped his ribs.

— You left me that.

He brought his elbow down. Next time she found nothing there and tapped his forehead instead, and he was grinning like an idiot behind his gloves.

— What?

— That one was better.

— That one was worse. You just liked it more.

She did not explain much. She did the wrong thing slowly so he could see it, then the right thing at speed so he could feel the difference when it hit him.

Somewhere in the second half hour, the floor started talking to him.

The ring was old boards under canvas, and boards carry weight like any structure; he had spent a week of nights on the sofa learning how his own house carried it. When Tesa settled over her back leg, the plank under his front foot eased by a hair, the way a load comes off a jack. He felt it before he saw her hip move, and moved before her glove had left her cheek.

She stopped and watched him finish the step.

— What did you see?

— I didn’t. I felt the floor.

Tesa inspected the canvas, then him. Soles could not tell whether she was impressed or annoyed; the reply sounded like both.

— Fine. Feel this.

Her shoulder moved. Her feet and her weight stayed exactly where they were, and he stepped anyway, because the shoulder had told him a story and his body believed it. Her glove met his forehead in the place he had stepped into.

— Sometimes I want you to think that.

He should have been annoyed. He was delighted. A mistake you understand is half a lesson.

The step and the punch together, short, his glove meeting her raised hand with a flat sound that came back off the windows. He missed twice. On the third, step and punch arrived together, and his shoulder worked through the whole movement, and he realized he had not thought about the shoulder at all. On the ninth, Tesa lowered her hand.

— Stop grinning. You look like a man who’s found money in an old coat.

— I have.

— It’s my money. I’m lending it to you.

Between drills she skipped rope by the bags. Her feet went in threes. One, two, three, a little hitch. Her lips moved with it.

— Who are you counting for?

— Him.

He did not have to ask who. She had told him once, on a bad night, that her fists had grown heavier than she was, as if someone else were hitting along with her. A boxer from a war she could not place.

— Reil, she said, still skipping. His name was Reil. He liked threes. I’m trying to work out if I do.

— And?

— I like threes. I hate his jab.

She showed him: a long, lazy left that would have been beautiful on a tall man. On her it reached for a face a head higher than his and left her stretched and open. She shook her head at it the way he would at a part made for the wrong model.

— He had arms like a crane. I’ll keep his rhythm. I’ll keep my own arms.

She went to change at nine and left him the gym.

He faced the mirror and did the step alone. Nothing came after him. That was the trouble with mirrors.

So he thought of Phenom.

He pictured Phenom close enough to reach him and tried the remembered exchange against the empty space in front of the mirror.

He knew how Phenom’s feet had moved, light and sideways on snow. His own hip would not follow. In the movement he was recalling, that delay left his guard open to the second hand. His breath caught and he folded before he could finish the step.

In the mirror, nobody had touched him.

Beaten by a man who isn’t in the room. Tell no one.

He lost again, in three moves this time instead of two, and then he understood. He was borrowing Phenom’s legs, and Phenom’s legs had never had a ceiling fall on them. What was worth having was in his eyes: the way he looked at a man and saw where he kept his weight, what he protected, which way he wanted to run before he knew it himself.

So Soles kept his own feet and let Phenom look.

Through those eyes the man in the mirror was easy to read. He dropped his left hand when he thought. He leaned back when he was afraid, as if an inch of air would save him. Soles fixed the hand and the lean. Phenom came again, and Soles went past the first hand on his own short step, felt the second meet his forearm and stay there, and answered with his left.

It landed in the place where Phenom’s jaw was going to be.

Nothing met it but air. But he had seen the opening before it opened, and gone through it on his own feet, and he laughed out loud in the empty gym. At the far end, the old man looked up from his bucket. Soles did not explain.

He set his feet to go again, and something else came with the next breath.

Not a thought. The next move, already decided: the man is hurt, so you follow him down, and you keep going until there is nothing left that can get up and come after you. It was so calm that for a moment it felt like his own idea.

He lowered his hands.

No. We’re practicing footwork. Nobody’s following anybody anywhere.

Phenom did not argue. In the garden, beside his plant, he only waited, patient as a noose.

The next morning Soles came in before the gym opened, because Tesa had said the side door would be open by seven and he wanted to see what the place was like without anybody in it.

Day eight. His arm went over his head now without the face. Phenom had been quiet since the mirror, the kind of quiet that meant waiting, not leaving. When Soles lifted the arm too high, a clipped Lower. came with the pull in his shoulder. He lowered it. That much help he could use without accepting everything else the man wanted.

The gym was not empty. Tesa was sitting on the edge of the ring, taping her good hand.

Three lamps hung over the canvas on long chains. Two burned steady. The third, the far one, buzzed and flickered and went dark for a heartbeat, then came back as if nothing had happened.

She had stopped taping. The roll hung from her wrist. She was looking up at the lamp, and her lips were moving, very slightly, the way Krista’s did when she counted.

— Tesa?

She did not hear him. Her taped fingers closed slowly, as if around a stem. The lamp went out. She did not blink.

— Round I —

The depot lamps buzzed louder than the crowd, and the far one flickered.

Reil was twenty-two and had been hit more times in two rounds than in the whole of the year before. The purse tonight was rent for the room he shared with his sister, and a pair of school shoes she had stopped mentioning so that he would stop feeling bad about them. The docker across the ring was a head taller, with arms that reached into the next week. Every time Reil stepped in, the long left was already in his face. Every time he slipped it, the right was waiting.

The men on the crates did not care. They had money on the docker, and the docker was doing what money wanted. It was the end of a shift. The depot smelled of coal smoke and wet wool, and somebody had hung a tarpaulin across the loading door to keep the rain off the ring and the police out of it.

In the corner, Oskar held the towel and said nothing. He never said anything between rounds. He watched. Reil had learned to sit still and let him watch, because when the old man finally opened his mouth, there would be one word in it, and it would be the right one.

Water. Blood in the bucket. His ear sang.

Over the ring the far lamp went out. Across the canvas, the docker blinked at the dark and turned his head a fraction, looking for where the light had gone.

It came back. Nobody else had seen it. The docker had already forgotten it.

Oskar leaned down to the ear that still worked.

— Count.

Then he took the towel and stepped back.

Reil counted.

He counted through the whole third round while the left hand found him and the right hand waited. He did not try to get in. His nose went, somewhere in the middle of it, and the taste ran down the back of his throat, and he kept counting through that too. He covered, and took it on the arms, and listened to the lamp. It buzzed, and it buzzed, and on the eleventh buzz it went out. Not always the eleventh. Sometimes the tenth. Never fewer, never more than twelve.

Eleven. Ten. Twelve. Not a clock. A man coughing.

The men on the crates were bored with him. A docker shouted that the depot boy had come to dance.

Fourth round. Reil let himself be walked back. He went back where he wanted to go, under the far lamp, and the docker followed him there because that was where the easy work was.

Eight. Nine.

The left came in. He took it on the forearm and felt the bone hum.

Ten.

Nothing. The lamp held.

Eleven.

Dark.

The docker blinked.

Reil was already inside. There was no room to wind up and he did not try; he turned, and the hand was only the end of the turn, short, rising under the long arms where nobody so tall ever thought to guard.

When the light came back, the docker was sitting on the canvas with the look of a man who has missed a step on a familiar stair.

He did not get up in time. The crates went quiet, then loud, then angry, then quiet again while money changed hands it had not expected to.

Reil walked over to him. The docker held up a glove without looking, embarrassed, and Reil touched it with his own.

In the corner, Oskar was coiling the towel.

— After, the old man said. That’s when you touch them. Not before.

It was two words more than he had said all night. Reil remembered every one of them.

He took the purse home in his sock. His sister made him sit under the kitchen lamp while she cleaned his face, and complained that he had bled on the good towel, and did not ask how much he had won until he put the shoes money on the table.

❦

The lamp came back.

Tesa blinked, and looked down at her hand as if surprised to find the tape still hanging from it. She wound the rest on, quick and neat, and tore it with her teeth.

— How long have you been standing there?

— Long enough to see you count.

She did not deny it. She flexed the hand, made a fist, opened it.

— Nobody’s fixed that lamp in years, she said. I asked them not to.

— Why?

— Because it’s honest. It always tells you when it’s going to go. Most things don’t.

— Who taught you that?

She thought about it longer than the question needed.

— Somebody who counted it before me.

Soles thought of the hunter in his own head, who had also done everything before him, and did not ask her anything else. Some answers you only got by waiting for them.

She swung down off the ring and walked past him to the bags, and he stood under the far lamp a moment longer, listening to it buzz.

He lost count at seven. The light went out on eleven.

Of course it did.

Behind him, Tesa hit the old bag once, the ordinary way, and the chain rang against the bar.

— Gloves, she said. Today you’re going to learn why you never fight under that thing.

Two mornings later, Tesa took him to the old bag at the end of the room.

— When you’re this close, you’ve got nothing to wind up with, she said. So you don’t. You turn, and the hand is just the end of the turn.

She set her shoulder almost against the canvas, back foot turning on the ball, hip coming around, and hit it with her good hand at speed.

The bag jumped as if something had kicked it from inside. It lifted on its chain and came down hard, and the chain rang against the bar under the ceiling, and the sound went around the empty gym long after the bag had swung back.

Tesa looked at her glove. Then at the door. Soles had looked there first.

— That’s not how hard I hit it.

She tried twice the ordinary way, drawing the hand back first, and the bag swung like any bag. Then she let her shoulders drop and hit it without thinking, and it jumped, and she pulled her arm in against her side and stood bent over it.

— Wrist? he asked.

— Wrist. And up here.

He had been watching her feet for a week, because she kept telling him to.

— The ones that did that, you didn’t pull back first. And on the one that hurt, your back heel came up before the hand got there.

She put the heel down, checked it before she checked the bag, and turned. The bag jumped, not as high. Her heel stayed flat.

— It still came back up the arm, she said.

— Less?

— Less.

Then it was his turn. He leaned his shoulder into the bag like a man at a bus stop.

— Close, Tesa said. Not romantic.

He turned. The glove went a short way into the canvas, and the bag moved a small honest distance and came back to him.

— That’s a punch.

— It’s very small.

— It’s what it should be.

She sat on the edge of the ring and pulled the glove off with her teeth. Above them, one of the bolts that held the steel bar sat a little crooked in its plate. Soles didn’t think it had been like that before.

— Tonight, Tesa said. Here, after closing. Four rounds. You and me.

He looked at her.

— A bag doesn’t hit back, she said. In five days you walk into something that does. I want to see if you remember your feet when it hurts.

He knew how it would sound, and said it anyway.

— Round two.

Her mouth moved at the corner.

— That’s my line.

— You said it first. I’m only answering.

— Bring Krista. Somebody should count when you’re on the floor.

— And Maxim?

— Maxim’s in my corner. He likes to back a winner.

She went to change. The bag hung straight now. Only the dust beneath it said otherwise, a pale curve swept across the boards much farther out than any punch of his had ever sent it.

Tonight she would be throwing them at him.

The gym closed at eight. At ten past, the old man handed Tesa the keys, looked at them for a long moment, said he lived upstairs and slept lightly, and left them the ring.

Only the three lamps over it were on. They hung low on chains and buzzed, and the one over the far corner flickered now and then as if thinking about something else. Beyond them the gym went dark: the row of bags, the old patched one alone on its chain, the mirror giving back their reflections and a lot of shadow.

Soles had the corner by the mirror. Krista stood on the apron outside it with her phone in one hand and the adjustable wrench from his bag in the other, because the bell was a brass thing screwed to that corner post, older than any of them, and nobody could find what it was supposed to be rung with.

Maxim had the corner by the bags, a stool from the office, a crate for his ankle and a towel over one shoulder, like a man who had paid for good seats.

— For the record, he said, I’m in her corner because she asked first.

— She didn’t ask, Soles said.

— And because I’ve seen you fight.

— Water’s here, Sol, Krista said.

He looked around at her.

— Sol?

— An old word for the sun. I like it.

Maxim looked across from Tesa’s corner.

— The sun? I’ve spent a month helping it put its coat on.

— You can stop worshipping whenever you like, Soles said.

— Tomorrow, then. Find your own damn sleeves, Sol.

Tesa climbed through the ropes. She had taped both hands, and the tape on the one that had spent the winter in a cast went halfway to her elbow.

— Gloves, she said. No headguards, they make people brave. No elbows, no heads. Two minutes, one to breathe. And nothing after the bell.

She looked at Soles when she said the last part.

— I remember, he said.

— I’d hope so. You redecorated my nose.

— You started it before the bell.

— That’s why it’s called the first punch.

— Are you two going to fight, Krista asked, or keep flirting in that terrible way?

— That’s not flirting, Maxim said. That’s how she says hello.

Soles held out his gloves. Tesa did not touch them.

— After, she said. That’s how we do it.

He had known that since the first morning in this gym, with the mud still on his bandage. It had been worth asking.

Krista hit the bell.

Tesa stopped in the middle of the ring and knocked her wrists together, once, twice, and something changed in the way she stood. Her chin went down. Her weight went lower and further forward than it usually lived, and when she moved, she moved in threes: one, two, three, a little hitch, one, two, three. It was not her rhythm. It was a dead man’s, and it fitted her like a coat she had grown into.

Reil. She’s brought him.

She came in on the hitch.

He felt it through the boards, the plank under his front foot easing as her weight came forward, and he moved. Her left went past his ear. Her right went into his ribs, short, from below, from a place he had not been watching, and the breath went out of him in one piece.

He covered his head. Tesa stayed close and drove two short punches under his elbows. He brought them down against his ribs, and her next glove struck above them, sending sweat from his brow into the lamplight.

He tried to escape along the ropes. She cut across his path in two steps and made him turn back into the ring. He could still feel her weight through the boards, but he was moving on the first beat; her punch arrived on the hitch after it.

The far lamp flickered. He blinked.

When he opened his eyes she was inside, and the uppercut came up through his guard so short he barely saw her shoulder move. Reil’s punch. Soles did not know how he knew that, only that it had been thrown a thousand times before it was ever thrown by her.

The canvas hit him in the back.

He lay looking up at three lamps, two steady and one flickering, and listened to Krista counting in her most polite voice.

Ah. So that’s what it’s like from down here. I’d forgotten.

He got up at five. His jaw was still attached. His hip had an opinion. He lasted the rest of the round and even hit her once, a straight left that landed because he stopped reading the floor and simply put his glove where her face was going to be. It was the first time he had ever hit her in a ring. She did not seem to notice.

Krista hit the bell.

— You’re watching the lamp, she said, climbing up behind him with the water.

— She’s using the lamp.

— Then don’t look at it. She’s looking at you.

Across the ring, Maxim held the towel for Tesa with the solemnity of a waiter.

— That was lovely, he told her. Do that three more times and we can all catch the last bus.

Tesa was flexing the taped hand slowly, checking it was still the right one.

— Her rhythm isn’t hers, Soles said quietly. When I read her feet, I’m reading the wrong person.

— Then read the right person.

— I can’t. He’s been dead a long time.

Krista wiped his eyebrow and waited. She would wait until you said the true thing, and then make you say it again more clearly.

Fine. She’s brought hers. I’ve got mine.

All week he had kept Phenom on a short lead, the eyes and nothing else. But Phenom had not been a boxer. He had been a hunter, and a hunter does not trade punches with a man in threes. He waits for the hitch, and he puts something in it.

— What are you going to do? Krista asked.

— Lie.

— To Tesa?

— To her hands.

He let Phenom in.

It was not like a voice. It was like the moment before a door opens, when the air in a room changes. The buzzing of the lamps went far away. His breathing slowed without being told. The ring resolved into corners, exits, and an opponent who kept coming.

Krista hit the bell.

Tesa came out in threes. Soles gave her ground, a step at a time, on purpose, along the ropes toward his own corner, where they sagged. He could feel exactly how much they would give, the way he knew a loaded spring before he touched it.

She went to the body and he let one through. It went into the same ribs, and something there made a small sound he would think about later. He let his elbow drop. His back went into the ropes and stayed there.

Tesa stepped in as his guard dropped. The bait had worked. Soles knew the short punch from below, on the hitch; he had already taken it from her once. He felt the floor tell him it was coming.

One, two, three.

His legs went. He let them. He sagged on the ropes, gloves sliding, chin coming up, and he heard Maxim say "Oh" in the far corner, as if something had been dropped.

Tesa stepped in on the hitch.

Tesa was close enough now. Soles let the ropes drive him forward out of the sag, planted his front foot and turned through the short punch before she could finish stepping in. Phenom’s impulse came with it: everything, enough to make sure there would be no next attack.

His right glove struck the side of her jaw.

Pain shot through his right elbow as the force left him. Not his force; the bigger one, the one that had thrown him through a ceiling and had sat quiet under his ribs all week. It went through the glove as if the glove were not there. The sweat came off her face in a sheet, and she went.

She flew backward across the ring. The far ropes caught her weight, pulled tight and threw her down onto her side; the corner post groaned, and the impact traveled through the boards into Soles’s feet.

Maxim’s stool went over. He was standing, which he was not supposed to do.

— One, Krista said.

Soles was walking.

He had not decided to. His feet took him across the ring, quiet and unhurried, the way you cross a yard in the snow toward a man who has stepped into your wire. The lamps had gone. The gym had gone. There was only the floor, and on it someone who had been hit hard and was already moving.

She was getting up. Of course she was. One knee. A glove flat on the canvas. Her head hanging, her guard nowhere.

— Two, Krista said, far away. Three.

Up— It rose through his legs, so calm that it sounded like him. Don’t let her.

He was standing over her. He did not remember the last two steps.

Phenom knew this part. He had done it in a stable yard, under an apple tree, in snow so new it squeaked. You did not leave anything behind that could come after you. You finished it while it was easy.

His right hand was already drawn back.

Tesa lifted her head and looked at him from under her hair, her eyes not quite focused.

— Four, Krista said, and her voice had changed.

The bell had not rung. Her guard was down. And the hand drawn back above her head was not entirely his.

The punch came down.

Everything in him that was Phenom had already sent it. All Soles had left was where it landed. In the last inch he turned his wrist, the way you turn a wrench off a nut about to round, and drove the glove into the canvas a hand’s width from her ear.

The canvas split, and the board under it cracked like a branch in frost.

Tesa did not flinch. She looked at the glove beside her head, then up at him.

— Five, Krista said.

He walked backward to his corner. He did not want to turn his back on whatever had just stood over her, and that was absurd, because it had been him.

Tesa got up at seven. Krista hit the bell.

— There are six seconds left, she said. I’m taking them.

He sat down. His hands were shaking. He put them on his knees so he could watch them do it.

Krista came up behind him. She spoke in the polite voice, the one she kept for officials and for people who had frightened her.

— Would you like to tell me what that was?

— Phenom. He doesn’t stop at one. He doesn’t stop.

— Then he doesn’t come back into this ring.

— No.

— I’m not asking.

— I know.

Across the ring, Maxim was talking to Tesa in a voice meant to stay low. An empty gym is a bad place to keep anything low.

— You want to stop?

— No.

— Because he’d have—

— I know what he’d have. He didn’t.

Tesa came to the middle of the ring and looked at Soles over the hole in the canvas.

— That was yours. Fair.

— It wasn’t fair at the end.

— The end didn’t happen. And Soles. If you hold back on me now, I’ll know.

On the way back to her corner she shook out both wrists, hard, the way you shake water off your hands. When she sat down, her shoulders had come back to where they usually lived.

— He was taller anyway, she told Maxim, and Maxim, who could not possibly know what she meant, nodded as though he did.

One each. Both of us cheated. Both of us got caught.

Krista hit the bell.

Now, it turned out, he was afraid of his hands. Every time he threw something, part of him grabbed it by the collar halfway there. His punches arrived politely, like letters.

Tesa had come out without the threes, in the rhythm he had been learning all week. It helped him for about twenty seconds.

Then she began to lie to the floor.

She settled over her back leg and let him feel the plank ease beneath his foot. When he moved to meet the attack, she stayed where she was. His step carried him past her guard, and she touched his bruised ribs as he tried to turn back.

She knows I read the boards. She’s known since the first morning. She’s been saving it.

Then, in the center of the ring, she sagged. Her knees went soft and her chin came up, the way a body folds when a punch from two minutes ago finally reaches the legs. He knew that fold. He had done it himself, on the ropes, with a dead man’s patience in his head.

He did not want to follow anybody down, ever again. He hesitated.

She came up out of it with the hand he had not been watching, and he saw her face as she came. It was not the face of someone springing a trap. It was the face from the mud by the blocks, before either of them had known the other’s name.

She saw me hesitate. She thinks I’m sparing her.

All week that hand had been carried and taped and saved, and he had stopped seeing it, the way you stop seeing a part that never moves. It hit him in the eye with everything the tape had been keeping from her. White light, then water. Through it he saw her good hand already coming. It went into his ribs, and the ropes caught him and held him up when his legs would not.

She did not step back. She stood over him a beat longer than the round needed, breathing through her teeth.

— You taught me that one, she said. About three minutes ago. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me.

Krista hit the bell. Two to one. Tesa turned away before he could answer, and he saw the taped hand shake once before she pressed it to her ribs.

— She drops it afterward, Krista said behind him. The bad hand. She uses it once and puts it back against her ribs. Every time.

He looked across. The taped hand lay in Tesa’s lap like something borrowed.

— And you’re hitting like you’re apologizing, Krista said.

— I nearly—

— You didn’t. I was there. I was counting. Now hit her, Soles. She’d hit you.

— I can hear you, Tesa said from across the ring.

— Good, said Krista.

Maxim held the bottle for Tesa without looking at her.

— For what it’s worth, he said, he’s stopped being scared of you. He’s scared of himself. Personally I’d find that more worrying.

Tesa stood.

— Last one. Nothing held back.

Soles knew what he would do, and it was simple. No pushing. Nobody else’s arms. Close, the way she had taught him at the bag, and turn, and let the hand be the end of the turn. If the strength came, it would go where he sent it and nowhere else.

Krista hit the bell.

They met in the middle. Her feet were true now; when the plank eased, she was really coming. He slipped her left and stayed where he ended up, beside her, close enough to see blood on her lip and the tape fraying at her wrist. His feet wanted to leave. He told them no.

He turned. Back foot on the ball, hip complaining, shoulder, and the glove last, a very short way into her raised guard. The strength came with it. Not all of it, and not someone else’s. Only as much as the turn could carry.

It moved her a full yard. She hit the ropes on the window side, and the top rope tore out of its turnbuckle with a crack like a shot and came whipping across the canvas. On that side, the ring was open to the dark.

Tesa came off the ropes before they had finished falling. Soles backed toward his corner by the mirror, keeping the open side of the ring to his left. She followed and set her feet in front of him.

He looked for the heel, through an eye that was already closing. It was flat. She had fixed the one thing he could read.

So he read the floor. The board eased under her front foot as she turned her whole weight into the punch. He had watched that movement make the bag jump on its chain.

He moved his head just far enough. Her tape grazed his ear, and the glove struck the post behind him, the one with the bell. The post tore away at its base, taking the edge of the old platform with it. Canvas and boards dropped toward the broken corner; the brass bell hit the floor with a long, dented clang.

Krista jumped clear of the apron as it went.

— That wasn’t the bell! she shouted.

— Tell the bell, Maxim said.

Tesa made no sound. She stood on the slope with her good arm hanging dead from the shoulder, and Soles saw it in her face first: the force had come back up her arm, the way it had come up his at the prison gate.

She brought up the other hand. The taped one.

— Thirty seconds, said Krista’s phone.

She came at him one-handed on the slope. The dead arm stayed clamped to her ribs, and on that side there was no guard at all.

There. That’s the door. She’d go through it.

He went in close. Back foot, hip, shoulder, and his own short punch into the place under the dead arm where nothing could stop it. He had decided on the way in how much would go with it.

It was enough. Tesa folded and went down on the slope and slid a little toward the fallen corner.

— One, Krista said. Two.

At eight she was up, swaying, the bad hand in front of her face, her eyes fixed on him.

— Ten seconds.

She came anyway. And he saw it: the guard gone on the dead side, chin up, weight going forward with nowhere to put it. The same opening as the night in the mud, when she had hit before the bell and he had hit after it, with his whole weight, square on her nose.

His hand was already back. He did not throw it.

Krista’s phone played a cheerful little tune nobody had chosen and nobody knew how to change. Under the circumstances, it was the bell.

Soles let his hand drop.

Tesa stopped in front of him with her guard down, and he understood that she was waiting for what had come last time.

It did not come.

— After the bell, he said.

She laughed. It broke off halfway, the way it had that first morning in the gym, and she touched her nose with the back of her glove. Then she held the taped hand out between them.

— This is how we do it.

— After.

He touched his glove to hers. Once, lightly.

— Two knockdowns to one, said Krista, back on what was left of the apron, holding the wrench like evidence. Soles.

— Let the record show, Maxim said, that I was in the losing corner and still had the best seat.

The light came on at the back of the gym. The old man stood there in a cardigan and slippers and looked at the ring for a long time: the rope lying loose, the split canvas, the corner post snapped off with the bell beside it, still faintly humming.

— Who’s paying?

— He is, Tesa said. He won.

— I fix things, Soles said.

— You’d better.

He went back upstairs. Krista was already kneeling by Tesa, asking her to move her fingers one at a time.

Soles looked at his glove. The last punch had not been a push. It had been a turn, and the strength had gone where he sent it and no farther. For the first time since the washroom, he thought he knew what he was taking into that room.

He also knew what else was coming with him. Phenom had not said a word since the second round. Soles did not think that meant he had gone.

The bag came at him at chest height, sixty kilos of old canvas on a rope, and Soles went backward.

He did not decide to. His feet decided, the way they had been deciding for two days, and took him two neat steps out of the way while the bag swung through the space he had left and came back toward Maxim.

— Stop leaving, Tesa said.

— I’m not leaving. I’m relocating.

— Relocate forward.

Maxim caught the bag on the return, braced it against his good leg and looked at Soles over the top of it with the patience of a man who was going to remember all of this.

— I can do this all day, he said. Correction: I can do this until my ankle files a complaint. So, about an hour.

Soles looked at the grin above the bag.

— You’re enjoying this.

— You built a machine to kick your own ass. I’m admiring the craftsmanship.

The rig had been Soles’s idea, which meant that every time it worked he was pleased with himself and every time it didn’t he had nobody else to blame.

He had lain awake after the investigator left, turning the problem over the way he would turn over a gearbox that only failed under load. In the washroom the pressure had not hit him like a punch. It had leaned on him, steadily, everywhere at once, and every time he leaned back harder it had leaned back harder still. Nobody could train for that by being hit. You trained for that by being pushed.

So: the old heavy bag from the corner of the gym, hung from the second beam, because neither of them was going to hang anything from the bar with the crooked bolt. A rope through a pulley Maxim had brought from the truck, a sandbag on the other end as a counterweight, so that when Maxim let it go the bag did not swing so much as arrive, slow and heavy and patient, like a wall deciding to come closer.

The rule was Soles’s as well. He could step into it. He could turn against it. He could let it slide off his shoulder and go past. He could not push it away.

Because pushing is what fed it. Because the man in the corridor pushed with muscle and went down on one knee, and I pushed with more and went through the ceiling. Whatever gets me to that thread, it can’t be more.

— Again, he said.

Maxim let the bag go. It came. Soles watched Tesa’s foot instead of the bag, the way she had shown him in practice, and moved his own right foot first, small, at an angle into the swing instead of away from it. The canvas met his shoulder. It was heavy and it kept coming, and every part of him that had been in the washroom wanted to plant his feet and shove.

The weight was there. He could feel it waiting under his ribs, steady and familiar, the strength that had moved a slab and knocked a ceiling down. It would have been easy. It would have felt wonderful for about two seconds.

He did not use it.

He let the bag push his shoulder around instead, let it turn him the way water turns a boat that has stopped fighting the current, and brought his left foot after the right without letting them cross. The bag slid off his back. It went past him. He was standing a full step deeper into the space it had come from than he had been when it started.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

— That’s the one, Tesa said.

She did not say well done. Tesa said well done the way other people paid for rounds, rarely and only when everyone was watching. That’s the one was worth more.

— Do it again before your feet remember they don’t like you, she said.

He did it again. His feet remembered. He went backward, hit the ropes of the ring behind him, the ones he had spent the morning re-stringing to a new corner post, and stood there with the bottom rope pressing into his calf, while Maxim caught the bag and looked at the ceiling.

— All that footwork, Maxim said, and he’s found the one direction we didn’t teach him.

Krista had been sitting on the bench with the envelope of photographs open on her knees. She had laid the pictures out along the bench in order of the times the younger agent had finally given them, and for the last half hour she had been looking at them the way she looked at a document she suspected of lying.

— It breathes, she said.

All three of them turned.

— The thread. In these.

She held up two photographs taken from the same spot by the pillar, twenty minutes apart. In one, the thread was faint against the white wall, barely more than a scratch. In the other it was bright enough that the camera had caught a halo around it.

— Same angle. Same light from the window, I checked the shadow of the basin. Nobody went in between, they told us that. And it isn’t getting brighter in a line, the way it’s getting longer. It goes bright and then faint, and then bright again. I’ve got six of them. It’s slower than breathing. But it’s regular.

Something that pushes harder and then less. Like the bag. Like a tide. Soles thought of the washroom, of the moment the pressure had seemed to give and he had leaned into the give and then it had come back twice as hard and thrown him upward.

— I went in on the wrong beat, he said.

— Maybe, Krista said. I can tell you it changes. I can’t tell you that’s why.

That was Krista. She would hand you the whole truth and refuse to let you add a single word to it.

— If it changes, Tesa said slowly, then there’s a moment when it’s leaning less.

— And somebody has to count it, Maxim said, looking at Krista. Somebody who notices things.

Krista put the photographs down.

— I can try to count your bag.

So they tried that. Maxim swung, Krista counted aloud the moment the bag reached the bottom of its arc, and Soles stepped on her count rather than his own eyes. At first it was better. Then Tesa, without warning, dropped a glove on the floor beside the bench, and Krista turned her head toward the sound, lost the count and called it late, and the bag arrived on Soles’s chest a quarter-second before he expected it and sat him down on the mat.

It did not stop there. It came on over him, and up on the beam the rope jumped out of the pulley’s groove with a dry snap. The bag dropped. Sixty kilos, straight down, onto the place where he was sitting.

Everything in him that had been in the washroom wanted to put both hands up and throw it at the ceiling. He could feel how easy it would be.

No. Not that.

He threw himself sideways instead, onto the bad hip, and the bag hit the mat where his head had been with a sound he felt through the floor. At the other end of the rope the sandbag came off its hook and burst on the boards. Maxim was on his knees by the bench. He had caught the running rope with both hands and held it for maybe half a second, long enough to slow it, not long enough to stop it, and now he was looking at his palms.

For a while nobody moved. Then Tesa crossed the mat, set her foot against the bag and pushed it once, as if making sure it was dead.

— Sorry, Krista said, already standing.

— Don’t be, Tesa said. Not for the count. That’s the exercise. You’ll be listening for one thing in there, and the building will be making a hundred other noises. When something else happens, you check it, and then you come back. You don’t stay on the glove, and you don’t stay on him.

Krista looked at the glove on the floor for a long moment, as though it had personally taken something from her.

— Again, she said.

Soles put the rope back in its groove and drove a nail across the pulley so it could not jump again. They went on until Maxim’s ankle filed its complaint, his palms wrapped in tape from Tesa’s bag. By then Soles had passed through the swing eleven times out of twenty. Krista had lost the count twice when Tesa interrupted her and found it again both times. Tesa could close the hand that had gone numb against the post again, but she had not punched anything, which seemed to cost her more than punching would have, and the bolt on the bar under the ceiling was still exactly as crooked as it had been two days ago, which Soles checked twice without telling anyone.

His left shoulder hurt. His hip hurt. The eye Tesa had closed was open again, but it watered when he turned his head fast. He had used nothing he could not have used before the temple, and he was further into the swing than he had any right to be.

Eleven out of twenty. In a gym, with a bag. In there, the bag doesn’t stop when Maxim’s ankle does.

That evening, they met Tarn by the cones.

He came out alone, without the younger man and without the briefcase, and stood beside the truck with his hands in his coat pockets. The canvas shelter was still there, but the table was gone. The front offices were dark.

— The investigator came to see you, Tarn said. I assume he told you about Saturday.

— He told us someone else is coming to clear the site.

— Then you know why I’m standing in the cold.

Soles had prepared this on the drive the way he prepared a quote for a job he did not want to lose: the price first, then the work, then the risk, and never in a voice that sounded like asking.

— Let us in on Friday night, he said. All of us. Nobody else in the wing.

— And then?

— Then on Saturday your people arrive at a site that doesn’t need clearing.

— And if you fail?

— Then on Saturday they arrive at a bigger one. Which is what they’ll get anyway, if they push at it the way that man walks through walls.

Tarn was quiet for a while. A car went past on the road beyond the cones and its lights ran over all of them and away.

— You’ll show me the slab, he said. Afterward. You’ll open it for me.

— Afterward.

— With my people present.

— With you present, Soles said. Not your people.

Tarn’s jaw moved. It took Soles a moment to understand why that was strange, and then he saw: there was no pale piece in the man’s ear tonight. The wire that went down into his collar was gone. He had come out to the cones without anyone listening.

So this isn’t the agency talking. This is him.

— Midnight, Tarn said. I’ll be at the gate. If anyone asks me afterward, the gate was locked and I was at home.

He turned to go, then stopped.

— If it goes wrong, he said, I never let you in.

— I know.

— No. You think you know. I mean that if it goes wrong, I’ll stand at that table on Saturday and tell them I’ve never seen any of you in my life, and I’ll say it well.

He studied them in turn, as though he were memorizing them for exactly that purpose. Then he looked at Krista, last and longest.

— You lie well, he said. You’ll understand.

Krista said nothing. Her hand closed on the envelope.

He was a few steps away when he spoke again, over his shoulder, as if it had only just occurred to him.

— The guard from the gate. The one with the keys. They released him this afternoon. He said he had to get back to his post.

Then he went back past the cones toward the dark front offices, and none of them said anything until the truck doors were shut.

Since the night the man came out of the kitchen wall, Soles had been listening to his house.

Not with his ears. With the other thing, the sense that had found men inside stone at the temple: where the weight of a wall rested, where a beam carried the roof, the way a load sat in a structure the way he could feel it sit in an engine on a stand. Every night he lay on the sofa with Mina against his leg and went around the house in his head, room by room, wall by wall, until he knew what each of them felt like empty.

It was a stupid exercise. He did it anyway. Varren had told him to learn to notice the man, and Tesa had told him not to save things up and try them on his own, and this was the one thing he could practice without either of them watching.

It had not gone well at first. On the second night he had been certain, absolutely certain, that something was resting in the bathroom wall, and he had stood outside the bathroom door with the blade in his hand before he understood that the something was the boiler, which had been resting in that wall for eleven years. On the third night it was the fridge. The next night it was Lucky, who had wedged himself against the hall radiator and changed the way the floor carried his weight, and who had looked up at Soles standing over him in the dark with an expression of deep, sleepy disappointment.

So he had learned the house. The boiler, the fridge, the radiator and the dog. The way the roof settled when the frost came down after midnight, and the way the stairs creaked when nobody was on them. By the ninth night he could go around every wall and know which weights belonged there. That was the point, he told himself. You could not notice something wrong in an engine until you knew what right sounded like.

On Wednesday night, a little after three, the kitchen wall changed.

It was very small. Something in the wall above the baseboard was resting where nothing should rest, the way a car sits a fraction lower on one corner when someone has climbed into the back without telling you. Soles lay still. Lucky slept on. Mina breathed slowly against his thigh.

There. Not imagining it. It wasn’t like that an hour ago.

His heart had started going faster than he liked. He made himself wait for three breaths, to be sure, and the weight stayed where it was. It was not moving. It was waiting.

He got up slowly, because his hip insisted, and because a man getting up slowly looks less like a man who knows. He put his hand in the jacket pocket and closed it on the hilt. Then he went to the kitchen doorway and stood in it, with the dark kitchen in front of him and the dark wall above the baseboard.

— You can come out, he said. I heard you.

For a moment, nothing at all.

Then a dark sleeve came out of the plaster, and stopped.

It stopped halfway. That was the thing Soles would remember afterward: the man had come out of the wall in his kitchen twice, and the first time he had stepped into the room as if the room had been arranged for him. This time his shoulder was out and his head was still in the wall, and he stayed like that for a long second, considering.

Then he stepped the rest of the way through, and the wall closed behind his heel without a mark.

— When? the man asked.

— Before you decided to speak.

The man’s face was still the kind that slid off your memory while you were looking at it. Soles fixed on the bare hand instead, the left one, the glove in the other. The bare hand was open.

— At home, the man said. At night. Lying still. With nobody else awake in the house.

He was not arguing. He was taking measurements.

— It’s a start, Soles said.

— It’s a start, the man agreed. It isn’t enough.

He looked around the kitchen as if checking that it was the same kitchen. His eyes passed over the chair where the jacket had hung the first time, and found it empty.

— You’re going in on Friday, he said.

Soles’s hand tightened on the hilt in his pocket before he could stop it.

He knows about Friday. Nobody knows about Friday except us and one man by the cones without a wire in his ear.

— Your agent should check his walls, the man said, quite gently, as if he were advising Soles about damp.

The fridge hummed. Somewhere in the house a pipe ticked as it cooled. Soles made himself breathe out slowly, the way Tesa did between rounds.

— What do you want?

— What I wanted before.

The bare hand turned palm upward.

— Give it to me now, and I’ll go in on Friday instead of you. I’ll close it. You won’t need to walk into anything.

He wanted to believe the offer. That was the worst part. He had watched the man come through two walls without a sound; he had not watched him close anything. If the man could do what he promised, Soles could stay home with the dogs instead of leaning into the pressure with a bad shoulder and a hip that complained about stairs. On Saturday the clearing team might find nothing to clear. Or they might find what the man had made of it.

And the blade would be in the hand of a man who had come into his house to wait for him to die.

He said the rite would continue. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what he’d close and what he’d open. I know he wants it more than he wants the prison shut.

— No, Soles said.

— You haven’t asked what it would cost you.

— I don’t need to. I’ve seen what you’re willing to wait for.

The man lowered his hand. He did not seem disappointed. He seemed like someone who had expected that answer and had come anyway, to find out how it would be said.

— Then hear this, he said. For nothing.

He glanced at the wall he had come through, as though the prison were on the other side of it.

— Places like that keep what comes near them. Warmth. People. Whatever falls in. The ones who stay near too long start to like it. The old stories called it drinking.

The place drinks. It was the kind of thing old men said about ground where nothing would grow. It did not sound like the kind of thing this man would bother to repeat unless he believed it.

— You’ll feel it pull, the man said. It won’t feel like pulling. It’ll feel like being allowed to stop. Don’t let it keep you.

— Why do you care?

— Because if it keeps you, it keeps the blade.

That, at least, was honest.

In the garden, Phenom had not moved since the man came through the wall. He stood beside his plant the way a hunter stands when another hunter walks across his ground, and he did not look away.

He pulled the glove onto the bare hand, finger by finger.

— Next time I’ll come quieter, he said.

— Then I’ll listen harder.

The man looked at him. For the first time, Soles had the impression that the look had a temperature, that somewhere behind the face nobody could remember, something had been interested.

Then he turned and walked into the wall. His coat went first, then his shoulder, and the plaster took him without a sound, and the weight above the baseboard stayed there for a breath, two, and then was gone.

Soles crossed the kitchen and put his palm flat on the plaster where the man had gone in. It was cool and dry and perfectly ordinary. He moved his hand a little to the left, then to the right, the way he would feel along a boiler casing for the warm seam where a weld had failed. Nothing. Whatever the man used to come and go, it closed behind him like water.

He went back to the doorway and stood there until his hip made him sit down.

— Soles.

Krista was in the hall in his old shirt, her arms wrapped around herself, her hair flattened on one side from the pillow. He had not felt her get up. He had been listening to the wall.

So that’s the price. When I listen to one thing, I don’t hear the next. Same as her with the glove.

— How long were you there? he asked.

— Since he told you to check the walls.

She came and sat beside him on the kitchen floor, which was cold, and neither of them suggested getting up.

For a while they only listened. The fridge. The pipe. A car going past at the end of the street, its lights crossing the ceiling and sliding down the wall where the man had been, and both of them watching the light until it was gone.

— You heard him first, she said.

— In my own kitchen. At three in the morning. With nobody talking.

— You heard him first.

He leaned his head back against the cupboard. She was right, and he was right, and both of those things would still be true on Friday, in a building full of noise.

— He offered to go in for you, Krista said. I heard that part too.

— He offered to go in with it.

— You thought about it.

— For a second.

— Good. Then you know what you said no to.

— He knows about Tarn, he said.

— Then Tarn needs to know he knows.

— And Tarn needs to not panic and lock the gate.

Krista paused before answering. Soles knew the pause from her work: a caption had to be true and short at once.

— I’ll write to him, she said. Something that says check your walls, and doesn’t say why. He’ll understand. He told me I lie well.

She typed it with her thumbs, there on the floor, and turned the screen toward him. Your walls are thinner than you think. Check them before Friday.

— That says why, Soles said.

— It says where. He’ll find the why himself. He’s good at that.

It was almost funny. Soles almost laughed. Lucky had come in from the living room to see why everyone was on the floor, and he sniffed the place above the baseboard for a long time, and sneezed, and lay down across Soles’s feet as if to make sure they stayed where they were. Mina arrived last, considered the three of them on the floor and lay down across Krista’s feet instead, which settled the matter.

Friday was two days away. Somebody who walked through walls knew it, and had offered to do it for him, and had been told no.

Soles found, sitting on his own kitchen floor at a quarter past three, that he did not regret the no. He only wished he knew exactly what he had refused.

On Thursday night, Soles laid the prison photographs beside his bed and turned them face down.

Tomorrow, Maxim would hold the rope. Krista would count. Tesa would stand between them and whatever came out of the wing. He had gone over their positions until he could place all three in the dark, yet whenever he reached the door in his head, someone offered to open it for him.

He put out the lamp.

Lucky settled against the bed. For a while Soles listened to him breathing.

In sleep he found Phenom beside the low plant. The man’s attention rested on Soles, then shifted toward something Soles could not yet see. He had come looking for the man who knew how to kill. He touched the low leaves. The smell of cabbage reached him before he could ask anything.

Then the bed was a bench, and someone across a table was trying to stop his hands from shaking.

— Sol I —

The old man had brought a purse with a broken clasp. He kept one hand over it while he spoke.

Phenom let him finish. Beyond their booth, the kitchen woman was scraping a pot. The room smelled of cabbage and wet wool, and the old man’s coat had begun to steam.

— Both of them? Phenom asked.

The old man nodded.

His granddaughters had gone into the councilman’s household together. One worked in the kitchens, the other upstairs. When the younger one stopped coming home, her sister had stayed to find out why. A week later, the councilman’s steward returned their belongings.

— He said they had stolen from the house.

— Who told you what happened?

The old man named a laundress. Phenom knew her. Two nights earlier, she had come to him herself.

The old man began pulling things from his purse: folded money, a small ring, a paper recording what he owed for a cart he no longer owned. He smoothed the paper as though the debt might count toward the price.

Phenom pushed it back.

— Keep that.

— I can sell the house.

— Where will you go?

— There’s a room at my brother’s.

— Does he know?

The old man looked down.

Phenom waited until he looked up again.

— I don’t work for nothing.

— I know.

— Have you got a coin?

The old man opened his palm. Two small coins lay in it, dark with sweat. Phenom pointed to the smaller one.

— That one.

For a moment the hand stayed open between them.

— You’ll need to eat on the road, Phenom said.

The coin struck the table before he had finished.

Phenom covered it with his hand and drew it toward him. The old man began gathering the rest, hurried now, as if a delay could reopen the price.

— Will he know why?

— Yes.

The old man caught his sleeve.

— They used to fight over who sat by the window.

Phenom stayed where he was until the hand loosened. Then he helped fasten the purse. The clasp would hold if the torn leather was folded under it.

— Your brother, he said. Tonight.

The councilman’s house stood above the canal. A stone passage joined it to the watch barracks; below the dining-room window, the water ran between sheer walls. There was one landing, two houses downstream.

Phenom went there the next morning to learn the man before choosing how to kill him. He needed to get close enough to finish the work without dragging a household into a fight. Getting out would have to be part of the same choice.

For the first two days, he learned how little the street could tell him. The councilman’s carriage stood outside while its owner remained indoors. Servants opened shutters in empty rooms. Once, Phenom followed a man in the councilman’s coat as far as the square before the man turned and showed him a stranger’s face.

He went back to the canal. By evening, the lamps had been lit upstairs. Someone carried a tray away from the dining-room window, and the councilman stayed behind it, eating something from a small plate.

The laundress told him it would be an apple. The man complained about his stomach after every supper and ate another apple while giving the complaint. He wanted the peel left on; he liked taking it off himself.

On the third evening, Phenom saw the knife in his hand.

He stayed until the shutters closed. Then he returned the next day and watched the servants instead. He learned which faces belonged to the house, which came from the barracks, and which carried work between them. A kitchen woman sent a delivery back because the linen smelled of the cart. A guard made the porter wait while he finished his food.

The guard had been eating when Phenom passed the day before. Phenom waited another evening before trusting that the bowl belonged to a habit rather than a coincidence.

He had begun to know the man’s supper better than his own. At a stall near the bridge, he bought the last pie and discovered why it had survived the dinner trade. He ate it anyway, watching the upper windows through the steam rising from the canal.

By the fifth day, he had ruled out the street. There were servants and petitioners around the carriage whenever the councilman appeared. Inside the house, the man dismissed people once he had eaten. Phenom wanted those few minutes. He had promised the old man an answer the councilman would hear.

The way out still troubled him. He walked down to the landing while there was light and looked back up at the windows. Eight guards lived in the house; more slept across the passage in the barracks. The canal gave him somewhere to jump, with too little room beneath it to recover from a mistake.

He wanted another week.

On the sixth morning, the laundress found him at the bridge. Trunks had been brought down. The councilman was leaving at dawn with a new household.

Phenom asked whether she meant tomorrow. She did.

He paid what he owed for his washing and asked her to leave the bundle at the bridge stall. Then he spent the afternoon beside the canal, weighing the unfinished way out against the people who would be taken into that carriage.

Before the supper dishes went upstairs, he crossed the bridge.

Phenom went in carrying a basket of clean linen.

The kitchen woman pointed him toward the stairs without looking up. He followed the passage to its bend, where a guard sat beside the servants’ door with a bowl on his knee.

— Late, the guard said.

— Complain to the woman who washes his drawers.

The guard grunted and reached for the basket.

Phenom drove him against the wall with the linen between them. His knife went beneath the jaw. He held the body upright until the bowl stopped ringing on the floor, then lowered it behind the open door.

Footsteps crossed the dining room.

He left the basket where a servant would have to move it and went through.

The councilman was alone, peeling an apple. He looked up at the unfamiliar coat.

— Who let you in?

Phenom gave him the two names.

The knife stopped against the apple. In the passage, someone called to the guard.

— If this is about money—

Phenom took him by the hair and brought his head down against the table. The chair tipped behind him. He kept his grip and drew the knife across the exposed throat, deep enough that the next breath came through the wound.

The councilman clawed at the tablecloth. Phenom held him until his hands fell away.

Then a servant screamed behind him.

The basket had bought less time than he needed.

Phenom dragged the heavy chair beneath the door handle as boots struck the passage floor. The first blow shifted it. He crossed to the window, opened both shutters and climbed onto the sill.

Water moved blackly below. The landing was downstream, beyond the next house.

A second blow drove the chair across the boards. He lowered himself outside, hanging by his hands while he found the narrow ledge below the sill. His left foot settled. Before he could bring the other down, the door broke inward.

A guard reached the window with a spear. As Phenom pushed away, its point tore through his shoulder. He hit the canal on his side, swallowed water and went under. The weight of the coat pulled him down until he got an arm free and kicked toward the paler strip above him.

When he surfaced, men were shouting from the window.

He let the current carry him beneath the next house’s overhanging privy. There he caught an iron brace and stayed, cheek against the stone, while blood warmed the sleeve of his coat. At the landing ahead, a lantern began to descend.

The man carrying it would reach the lowest step before Phenom could swim there.

He eased the knife out again.

❦

Soles woke with his good hand closed in the sheet.

Morning light lay across the photographs. Lucky lifted his head when Soles sat up, then put it down again.

Soles remembered the old man fastening his purse. He remembered holding the councilman still.

Tonight, Maxim would hold the rope.

He turned the photographs over and checked where his friend would stand.

At ten to midnight on Friday, the prison gate stood open by the width of one person, and Tarn was standing in the gap with his hands in his pockets.

— I checked my walls, he said, when they reached him. Every one in the house. I found a great deal of damp and nothing else.

— Did it help? Krista asked.

— It took until two in the morning. My wife thinks I’ve been offered a job in construction.

He looked at the coil of rope over Maxim’s shoulder.

— Do I want to know?

— It’s from a gym, Maxim said. It’s been very well behaved all week.

Tarn stepped aside. The relief at the gatehouse came at two, he said, and after two there would be someone in it who had not been told anything. Then he went back into the little lit window and sat where anyone passing on the road would see a man on a dull night shift.

Two hours. Soles had worked to tighter deadlines. Never with his hands shaking slightly in his pockets.

At the gate he did what he had done every night for a week on the sofa and let his attention go out into the walls. It came back full. The gatehouse, the yard wall, the long low weight of the wings, every one of them carrying something. His house had a boiler, a fridge, a radiator and a dog. The prison had a hundred years.

So that’s what I can do. At home, lying down. Not here.

He did not say it. Krista, beside him, looked at his face and did not ask. She put two fingers on the back of his hand instead, briefly, the way she checked a label before trusting it, and took them away again.

The yard was worse than he remembered. The steam over the fallen stretch of the east wall stood in the cold like breath, and inside the green circle a few stupid weeds had come up in January as if somebody had told them it was May. Across the yard, the iron grille of the wing gate was folded back against the wall. Beyond it the corridor ran straight to a boarded door, with the washroom doorway on the right three quarters of the way down, and halfway along, a strip of yellow tape where the agency’s men had stopped being able to go on.

— Two ways out, Maxim said, looking from the grille to the black gap in the yard wall. That one, and the one nobody fixed.

— Three, Tesa said. Through the ceiling. He’s tried it.

— Thank you, Soles said.

They went in.

The heat met them three steps past the grille, wet stone and something sweet under it, and it did not come at them like air. It leaned. Past the tape it was on Soles’s shoulders as well as his face, as if he had walked into deep water and the water had opinions.

At the canvas across the washroom entrance he stopped them.

— Nothing extra tonight. Nothing we didn’t have before the temple.

Maxim stayed on the corridor side of the doorway and tied the rope through Soles’s belt with his knot for fridges. Krista took her watch to the square pillar inside, keeping clear of the rope’s line. Tesa stood just inside the room, where she could watch both the corridor and Soles.

Beyond the pillar, the thread hung above the crack in the floor, longer than his forearm now. It brightened, slowly, and slowly faded.

— Bright for four, Krista said. Faint for six. I’ll tell you when it’s going faint.

Soles stepped past the pillar.

The pressure came onto him like the bag. Not a blow. Something that arrived and kept arriving. Every muscle he owned remembered this room and wanted to plant his back foot and shove. The strength was there, under his ribs, steady and very willing.

Don’t. You push, it pushes back, and you go through the ceiling with your friends watching. Again.

He turned his shoulder into it instead and let it slide.

— Now, Krista said.

Right foot first, small, at an angle into the pressure. Left foot after it, never crossing. One step deeper.

— Wait.

He waited, sideways, letting the bright roll over him like wind.

— Now.

Another step. Another. The rope paid out behind him. Maxim said nothing at all, which in Maxim was a form of shouting.

He was halfway to the thread when it changed.

— Now, Krista said, and he stepped, and the faint was not there. The bright came early and stayed. It caught him with one foot in the air and nothing to turn on, and the room picked him up.

He went backward across the washroom like a sack off a tailgate. The rope snapped taut at his belt and stopped him a hand’s width from the pillar, and he hung on it for a moment, bent double, his hip shouting, before his feet found the floor.

— Still attached? Maxim said from the doorway. He had both hands on the rope, the tape on his palms gone gray, and one boot braced against the frame.

— Still attached.

— Good. I’d hate to explain to the man at the gate that I lost you through a wall.

It learns. Of course it learns. It’s had all week to watch me practice.

— It’s changed, Krista said. Her voice was steady; her face was not. Five bright. Five faint. It’s not the same as the photographs anymore.

— Is it the same as five seconds ago?

She watched it through two beats.

— Yes.

— Then that’s the one I want.

He went again. It took him longer this time, because he did not trust a single faint until he had felt it begin under his own feet, and twice he stopped with his weight already moving and let the bright roll over him instead. Tesa said nothing. He could feel her watching his heels.

He came back to where he had been thrown from, and past it.

Up close the thread was not quite a line. It had a texture, like a strand of something wet seen against light, and the sweetness in the air was strong enough to taste. His left shoulder would not lift above his ear. The rope had perhaps three meters left in it. He was standing, in his own body, with nothing in him but his own strength and Tesa’s footwork, closer than any of the men with the measuring rule had come.

One more step and it’s arm’s length. Fine.

— Faint in two, Krista said. One —

Metal clicked in the corridor behind him. Keys, striking one another with each hurried step.

— Soles, Maxim said. Somebody’s coming.

The rope held steady at his belt. Soles stayed sideways to the thread, with his weight over both feet; if he turned now, he would give it the same opening it had used to throw him. Tesa’s boots scraped toward the washroom doorway.

— Stay there, she said to the newcomer.

During the next faint Soles glanced back. Tesa stood in the doorway with her good hand up, between the corridor and Krista at the pillar. Beside her, Maxim still had both hands on the rope and a boot against the frame. A guard waited beyond them, in uniform and without a coat, the keys hanging from his hand.

The guard smiled into the room.

— Four, he said.

Soles faced the thread again before the bright returned. They had been counted. He disliked the relief in that man’s voice more than the keys.

— Hey! Maxim said. Stay where you are.

The footsteps went away instead, quickly, toward the grille. Tesa took a step after them; her sole scraped again as she stopped.

— He’s going to the gate, Maxim said.

The rope stayed taut. Soles needed Maxim where he was, and Krista needed to keep the count. Tesa was the one person who could move, and if she followed the guard, there would be nobody between the corridor and the two of them who could not look away.

— Krista, Tesa said, not loudly. Look around. Now look back.

Krista’s count broke for one breath. Then she called the next faint, her voice level again.

At the far end of the corridor, iron scraped across stone. The grille hit its post. A key turned in the lock and turned again.

— Someone has to watch the exit, the guard called, perfectly calm.

Soles could see the pillar beside Krista and the strip of corridor beyond Maxim. The yard lay past the grille. So did the gap in the outer wall Maxim had counted as their second way out.

— Locked, Maxim said. Both ways are behind it.

Four, the guard had said. He had waited for all four of them.

In the washroom, the thread brightened.

Tesa stayed in the washroom doorway while Maxim held the rope. To reach the locked grille, one of them would have to leave the other with it.

— Hold this, Maxim told her.

The rope shifted at Soles’s belt. Tesa had it now. He felt the difference at once. Maxim held a rope the way he held a wardrobe on a staircase, as if it were about to try something. Tesa held it with the taped hand over the good one, ready to give and take back. Maxim’s uneven steps went up the corridor and stopped at the grille.

— He’s sitting against the bars, Maxim called. Facing out. Keys in his open hand, and I can’t reach them.

The guard’s answer carried down the wet corridor.

— It’s warm here. It’s very quiet. I can watch from here.

— Pass me the keys, Maxim told him, in the voice he used on customers whose fridges would not fit through their own doors. I’ll find you a blanket.

— I’m not cold. The guard sounded pleased about it. That’s the nice part.

Soles remembered the Hunter’s warning, the one he had repeated to them in the truck. It won’t feel like pulling. It’ll feel like being allowed to stop.

— His lips are gray, Maxim called. Breathing’s too slow.

Soles had seen a man go gray like that once, in the army, after a night exercise in the snow: a recruit who sat down against a wall to rest for one minute and had to be carried in. He had looked comfortable too. That was the worst of it.

Soles wanted to step back. The thread brightened as he shifted his weight, and he settled sideways again. He could return to the pillar and still be on the wrong side of the gate, with the guard dying beyond it.

— I can open that gate, Tesa said.

He had watched her make the heavy bag jump. Here, the force would feed the thread before the lock had finished falling.

— If you do, it grows, he said. Hit it. I’ll take what it gives back.

Maxim came back at a limping run and took the rope from Tesa. He tied its loose end twice around the base of the pillar, pulled the knot tight, then followed her up the corridor. For the length of that corridor there was only Krista at the pillar, the count in her voice, and him at the end of a rope tied to stone.

— Still here, she said between two numbers, as if he had asked, and her voice did not slip on either of them.

Soles kept his knees loose. Being ready would not make the cost smaller.

He could hear them at the grille: Maxim’s voice gone soft and practical, the guard answering in the slow, contented way of a man talking in his sleep, Tesa saying nothing at all. Then her boots shifting on the stone, finding their place. He knew that sound from the gym, the half step back before the bag, and his stomach knew it too. Krista called a faint. He let it pass. She called a bright, and the thread swelled toward him like something leaning in to listen.

The blow rang down the corridor. Metal struck stone, and Tesa cried out through her teeth.

— I’ve got him, Maxim called.

The thread flared. It went thick as a finger, and the pressure struck Soles in the chest. He slid back a full step before the rope caught him. Under the thread, with a sound like ice breaking on a pond, the crack ran another hand’s width toward the basins.

In the washroom doorway Tesa bent over her good arm, clamping it against her ribs. Maxim hauled the guard past her by the jacket. The gate was open. The cost had arrived.

That’s the price. There. Now pay it.

— It’s faster, Krista said. Three bright. Three faint. Two. It’s not —

He tried to enter on the faint. The pressure caught him before his foot settled and threw him back against the rope. He regained his footing and tried again; the second throw drove his left shoulder into the pillar. His arm went numb to the fingers. He flexed the hand. Nothing answered but a distant prickle, like a limb that had been slept on.

— I can’t count it, Krista said. Soles. It’s not regular anymore. It’s watching you.

She was right. Every time he leaned, it leaned. Every time he turned, it was already there. Footwork was a conversation, and the thing in front of him had learned to finish his sentences.

He stood at the end of the rope with his arm dead and his hip shaking and thought about the guard sitting down against the bars, happy, with the keys in his hand. The place did not throw the guard. It kept him. It did not fight the people it was keeping.

Don’t let it keep you, the man in the wall had said.

Right. Then let it think it has.

He stopped leaning.

He let his shoulders drop and his knees soften and his weight go loose, the way you let go of a rope you have been pulling, and on the next bright he did not resist at all. He breathed with it. Bright, in. Faint, out. He went light, light as a feather on a draft, and the draft took him, a step, and another, and it did not throw him. It drew him in.

It was warm.

It was the warmth of a kitchen with the radio on low and somebody else doing the washing up. Nobody needed anything from him in here. Nobody was counting. There was a chair. There had always been a chair, pulled out a little from the table, and he had been standing for such a long time.

Sit down, the warmth said, very kindly. You’ve done enough.

He had. He had done a great deal. His arm hurt and his hip hurt and his friends were tired, and it would be so easy to sit, just for a moment, and let somebody else watch the exit.

— Soles, Krista said. Five. Soles.

Her voice reached him from a long way off. He could hear that she wanted something, and he would answer as soon as he had sat down. The rope had gone slack behind him. Light covered his shoulders and his arms to the elbows; the blade hung loosely from his right fingers.

— Soles, she said again, in the polite voice. Answer me.

A rope scraped against stone. Maxim spoke from somewhere near the doorway.

— Ready to pull.

Soles knew what those words meant. He should have told him to pull. But the chair was right there, and for once nobody needed him to stand.

He was at the chair.

He had his hand on the back of it. It was warm and smooth and someone had been sitting in it a moment ago, and it would hold him, and he only had to turn and sit.

He did not turn.

He drew in. Everything he was, gathered from his feet and his hands and the back of his skull, pulled into one place under his ribs the way a fist closes, the way Tesa’s body came around on its turn before the hand went anywhere. The warmth felt him go hard inside it, and for the first time it hesitated.

That was the beat.

His back heel went down flat. His hip came around, then his shoulder. Pain caught in the damaged right elbow; he kept the hand close and drove the turn through it instead of reaching farther. Everything he had left, every scrap of strength and stubbornness and fear, went down that arm, and he heard himself shout, a sound with no word in it, the way a man shouts when he means to break something that cannot be broken.

He drove the blade into the heart of the thread.

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

The light went out the way a filament goes out when the power fails: white, then red, then a line of nothing hanging in the air where the line had been. The pressure stopped. Soles fell forward onto his knees on the wet floor, and the blade rang on the tiles.

In the silence, the hose dripped. It sounded like a hose.

Soles tried to draw breath, and somebody caught his wrist.

— One. Two. Soles. Three.

Krista was kneeling beside him on the washroom tiles. His left hand had closed on his pant leg; he could feel her fingers working beneath his to loosen them.

— You’re here, she said. Say something that isn’t me.

He looked down at the cloth under his hand, then at the drain.

— The hose, he managed.

Maxim crouched on his other side. The rope lay slack between them, its loose end still in his hand.

— Stay with us.

Then the warmth came back. Not the warmth of the place. The breeze that had leaned on them for weeks gathered itself up from the floor and the walls as the opening died, and passed through the room.

Soles lifted his left arm above his head. His right followed it. He bent the elbow, opened the hand, bent it again. The pain had gone. His hip held when he stood.

Beside him, Maxim rose without favoring either foot. Tesa stripped the wrapping from her wrist and closed both hands. She touched her jaw, then looked at Krista, who was still holding Soles’s sleeve. None of them spoke for a moment.

Under his ribs, where the strength had always waited, there was more of it than he had felt, more than the temple had forced into him, so much he did not dare close his hand on anything.

A drop fell from the end of the hose and hit the drain. Another followed. Krista picked up the blade from the tiles before they left the washroom.

They brought the guard out into the yard and laid him on the fallen stones, which were no longer warm. He was breathing. He checked their faces in turn.

— Four, he said, relieved, and closed his eyes.

— He counted us twice, Maxim said. Once going in, once coming out. I’d like that to be the last time anybody does.

The steam over the stones had stopped. Tarn looked at the place where it had been for a long time.

— I saw that, he said. I don’t know what I’ll say I saw.

By seven the sky was gray, and three white vans came up the road, and men in coveralls walked across the yard toward a building that had nothing in it to clear. Soles sat in the back of the truck with Krista’s coat over his knees and his left hand resting open on the cloth. Each time he closed his eyes, he felt his hand settle on the back of the chair.

He opened them and watched the others until the warmth belonged to the coat again.

Tarn came over with his phone in his hand.

— They’ve been calling since six. Not about here.

Soles read the message twice.

A river in a town in the north, three hundred kilometers away, had stopped freezing in the night.