Chapter IX · What He Gave Away

By ten the gym was closed, the shutters were down and the only light was the lamp over the office desk.

Not at the house, the message had said. So they had come here, to the one place none of them slept, and spent the evening pretending to do ordinary things in it. Tesa had swept a floor that did not need sweeping. Krista had read the same page twice. Soles had checked the back corridor once, found the fire door shut, and stopped thinking about it.

Tesa had locked the front doors herself and put the key in her pocket. Krista sat on the edge of the ring with her notebook closed on her knees. Soles stood where he could see both doors and the stairs, which meant he stood in the middle of the floor, which meant he felt like a man waiting for a bus in a field.

Maxim had taken the front window.

He had lifted one slat of the shutter with two fingers and stood with his eye to the gap and his other hand resting on the iron bar that ran across the frame. He had not moved for half an hour.

— Man with the dog, he said. Second time. Same side. He’s not watching. He’s just got a dog that wants to go around twice.

A minute later:

— Taxi. Empty. Driver’s eating.

— You remember all of them? Krista asked.

— Faces. Wheels. Walks, he said, without turning around. It’s not a gift. It’s a filing cabinet that won’t close.

The street went quiet. A tram somewhere. Maxim’s hand tightened on the bar, the way a man takes hold of a rail on a bridge when the wind gets up, and stayed there.

Soles saw him go still. Maxim’s free hand closed on the empty air beside him, the way a hand closes on a stem.

— Fire I —

The river had been rising for three days, and on the fourth it came over the low fields on the far bank, and the village there began to cross.

They came up the causeway with what they could carry: bedding, a crate of hens, a clock, a child asleep on a sack of flour. The water came behind them, brown and patient, taking the fences one at a time.

Ordric had kept the bridge gate for fifteen years. He knew every one of them. The miller’s widow with the two goats. The cooper and his apprentice, both carrying a barrel because neither would leave it. The family from the end of the lane, five children and a grandmother on a door laid across a handcart.

He knew what each of them had in their purse, too, because he had watched them pay for fifteen years. Most of them had nothing in it today.

The steward rode up at noon, wet to the knees and furious about it.

— The lord’s toll, he said. Every head. Every animal. The bridge is the lord’s, the flood is God’s, and God doesn’t pay for repairs.

Behind him, two of the lord’s men sat their horses with their hands on their belts.

Ordric looked at the line. It went back down the ramp and out along the causeway into water that was already up to the cart axles.

He had never let anyone cross without paying. Not the priest. Not the blacksmith, who was his wife’s brother. Not the steward himself, who cursed and paid.

He went into the hut and came back with his own purse, the one he kept for winter, and stood beside the iron-banded box.

The miller’s widow came first. She opened her mouth to explain. Ordric took a coin from his purse and dropped it in the box.

— Paid, he said, and raised the gate.

He cut a notch in the tally stick. He looked at her face, as he always did, so that he would know it.

The cooper. Coin. Notch. The apprentice. Coin. Notch. The barrel, which he decided was an animal. Coin.

The steward watched for six heads before he understood.

— That’s your money.

— It’s paid.

— The lord didn’t send you here to be generous.

— The lord sent me to see nobody crossed without paying. Nobody has.

— With what will you eat this winter?

— With what I always eat. Less of it.

The steward turned in his saddle and spoke to his men. They came down off their horses and walked to the gate and took hold of the beam, one on each side, to bring it down across the road.

Ordric put his shoulder under it.

He was not a big man. He did not have to be. The beam rested on its post, and his shoulder was between the beam and the post, and the only way down was through him. The two men leaned on it. Then they leaned harder. Ordric set his feet in the wet planks and held, and looked at each of them in turn, the way he looked at faces he meant to remember.

— I know your mother, he said to the younger one. She crosses on market day. She pays.

The young man let go first. The other one looked at the steward, and then at the line of people in the water, and let go too.

The handcart came up the ramp. Five children and a grandmother on a door.

Seven coins. Seven notches.

By dusk his purse was empty and the stick was so cut that he had to start another. Nobody crossed without paying. Nobody ever paid him back, and he never asked, and all that winter, whenever one of them came to the gate, he knew their faces, and they knew he did.

❦

Maxim let the slat drop.

The shutter clacked against the frame. He stood with his hand on the bar for a moment longer, then took it away and looked at the palm as if he expected something to be written on it.

— All right? Soles asked.

— Fine, he said, shaking the hand out. The man in my garden. Bridges. Don’t ask.

— The one who watches people pass?

— He opened the gate for them. Paid for them himself.

Maxim looked back at the shutter. Soles let the answer stand.

Krista was watching him. She didn’t ask either.

Maxim lifted the slat again.

— Nobody’s come the front way, he said. Ten thirty. If he’s coming, he’s late or he’s careful.

Behind them, at the far end of the gym, beyond the bags and the dark mouth of the corridor, something metal shifted, very softly, as if a door that ought to have been shut had been resting against its latch all evening, waiting for somebody to lean on it.

Tarn found them at Tesa’s gym at half past ten, after closing, by coming in through the fire door at the back that Tesa had left on the latch without telling anyone she had.

He looked ten years older than he had on the courtyard stones. He had not shaved. He was wearing a coat that was not his and carrying nothing, and when he saw the ring, with its new corner post and the ropes Soles had re-strung, he stopped and looked at it for a moment as if he could not remember what rings were for.

— They suspended me this morning, he said. Pending review. My house has a car outside it with nobody in it. That means there’s somebody in it.

He looked at Tesa as he said it. The split in his lip from the stairs had scabbed over.

— Sit down, Tesa said. From her, it was nearly an apology.

He sat on the edge of the ring. Krista gave him her flask without a word, and he drank from it and coughed and drank again.

Soles had told them everything that morning, all of it, in order, and then he had told them again in the afternoon at Krista’s request, slower, while she drew the river and the dam for the others. It had felt like having a tooth pulled. It had felt, when it was done, like the first clean thing he had done in a week.

— You went on the ice with him, Tarn said to Soles. They know. They had someone on the far bank. They watched you pull him out of the river.

— And?

— And nobody in that building has ever seen anyone do that. Pull him out, I mean. Most people who meet him don’t get the chance to decide.

He turned the flask in his hands.

— The building on the north ring road is called the Annex. It isn’t called anything, officially. Your guard is on the third floor. He’s being looked after, which is a phrase I’ve learned to dislike. And there’s a review of him too, on Friday.

— What happens at the review? Maxim said.

— They decide whether he’s useful.

Nobody asked what happened if he wasn’t. The guard’s sister was at home with Lucky and Mina and the door locked, and everyone in the gym was glad of it.

— Why are you telling us? Tesa said. You’ve just been suspended for knowing us.

Tarn looked at the flask.

— Because I stood in a courtyard and watched them take a man off a balcony, and I wrote it down afterward as a successful operation. I’ve written a lot of things down. I’d like to stop.

He screwed the cap back on the flask and handed it to Krista.

— I said don’t go near it, he said, and I meant it. But you’re going to look at it anyway. So look at it properly, and don’t stop.

Maxim’s delivery to the cement works was booked for nine.

It had been booked for a week, a real job, eight pallets of bagged sand for a yard that did not trust anyone else to bring it on time, and the road to the cement works ran along the north ring road for its last kilometer. Maxim had looked at the map on his phone at the kitchen table that morning and gone very quiet, and then very pleased with himself.

— I’m not saying it’s fate, he said. I’m saying it’s a booking.

So at nine the next morning the truck went up the ring road with Maxim at the wheel, Soles beside him and Krista in the middle, because she had said so before they left, not after, and nobody had argued.

Krista sat with her shoulder against his. On every bend it pressed a little harder, and she did not move it away, and she did not look at him. He did not know whether that meant she had forgiven him or only that the cab was small. He decided not to read it. It was hers to say.

Tesa had stayed. Someone had to be with the sister, and someone had to not be seen with them, and Tesa was the best of all of them at being where nobody expected her.

The road went past the last tram stop, past a row of dead warehouses with their windows boarded, past the long gray wall of the cement works with its silos standing up behind it like organ pipes.

And then, on the left, set back behind a fence and a strip of frozen lawn that someone mowed in summer for no one, the building.

Brown brick. Rows of windows, and every one of them shut. A gate with no name on it, and a hut by the gate with no name on it either, and in the hut a man reading something who did not look up as the truck went past. There were cameras on the corners of the roof, small and patient, turning very slowly. There was a parking lot around the side with six cars in it, all clean.

And at the end of the row of clean cars, a gray sedan.

— Don’t slow down, Soles said.

— I’m a delivery driver, Maxim said. I never slow down. It’s a matter of professional pride.

Soles kept his attention on the building as they passed.

Two days ago he had learned the town by laying his hand on its walls. Here there was a moving truck, a fence and forty meters of lawn between him and the brick. He could not test it from the cab. What he had was the Hunter’s account of a place that kept people like him inside.

If they can hold him in there, they’ve found something he can’t go through.

He said it out loud, quietly. Krista did not look at him. She was looking at the building, and her lips were moving very slightly.

— Two at the gate, she said. One in the hut, one in the car by the hut that I don’t think is empty. Cameras on the corners, turning in opposite directions. Don’t count on a blind side. Third floor, the windows are a different glass. Darker. And somebody has put a plant in one of the windows on the left.

— A plant.

— A little one. On the inside of the sill. Someone in there wanted something alive to look at.

Soles thought of the guard on his sister’s sofa, telling her which plants needed water.

Could be him. That window. If it’s his plant, he’s still making a place to sit.

He kept the gatehouse in view until the truck passed it. The man in the hut still had not looked up. Maxim had a real delivery to make, and a booking that explained why they were on this road. Neither explained why his passengers were studying the windows. Soles let the building go behind them.

The cement works gate came up on the right. Maxim swung the truck in and down the ramp to the yard, and the men in hard hats waved him toward the loading bay, and for twenty minutes it was only work: pallets, a forklift, a foreman who wanted a signature and a joke and got both.

— Your mechanic’s quiet today, the foreman said to Maxim.

— He charges for opinions. I’m trying not to encourage him.

The foreman looked at Soles, then at the loading sheet, and decided, visibly, not to ask if the bill had already started.

Soles stood by the cab with his hands in his pockets and turned the building over in his head like a bad engine.

If the Hunter was right, the walls were no use to him. The windows were shut. One man in the hut, another in the car beside it. Cameras turning back toward the road. A review on Friday.

There’s no way in without being seen.

He tried it from every side and it came out the same each time. That was the trouble with a well-made thing. You could see exactly how it was put together, and that was how you knew it would not come apart.

— Mr. Soles.

The voice came from behind the truck. Pleasant. Quiet. A voice that had never needed to be raised.

Soles turned.

The man in the gray coat was standing in the cement yard with his hands in his pockets and frost on his good shoes, as if he had walked over from the building next door for some fresh air, which he had. He looked at the truck, and at Maxim on the forklift, and at Krista in the cab, who had gone very still, and then back at Soles.

— You’ve come to look at my building, he said. That’s understandable. It’s an unusual building.

He smiled the smile that stopped at his mouth.

— Would you like to see the inside?

Soles went back to the cab before he answered.

The man in gray let him. He stood in the frozen yard with his hands in his pockets and watched the forklift with polite interest, as if he had all morning, and probably he had.

Krista had the window down. She had heard. Maxim had heard too; he had switched the forklift off and was sitting on it with his hands on the wheel, very still, the way men sit when they have decided not to get off and do something stupid.

— He wants to show me inside, Soles said. I’m telling you before I go.

— And if I say no?

He thought about it. He made himself think about it honestly, in the time it took her to ask, because she deserved that.

— Then I’ll still go. But you’ll have said it, and I’ll have heard it.

She looked at him for a long moment through the cab window. Then she looked past him at the man in the gray coat, and her face did the thing it did in archives when a document turned out to be exactly as bad as she had suspected.

— One hour, she said. After that we come in. Walls or no walls.

— I’ll keep the engine running, Maxim said from the forklift. It’s what I do.

The man in gray held the gate for him himself.

Soles had watched him on the way across the yard, the way he watched every new engine: what it wanted, what it was built to do, what did not fit. The man wanted something. That was ordinary. What did not fit was that he had come out to get it himself, on foot, in good shoes, across a cement yard. Men like him sent people. He had not.

Inside, the building was warm and quiet and smelled of floor polish. There was a reception desk with nobody at it and a rubber plant in a pot beside the elevator, and a bulletin board with a schedule on it and a leaflet about the importance of hand-washing. It was so ordinary that it took Soles a moment to notice what was wrong with it.

The walls did not settle. Every building he had ever stood in breathed a little, shifted as people moved through it. These walls took his footsteps the way a cliff takes rain. He laid his hand on the wall beside the elevator, as if steadying himself, and felt nothing come back at all.

— Nobody walks through these, the man said, pressing the button. You’ll have noticed. It was expensive.

The elevator went up to three.

The corridor was long and pale green and lined with doors, each with a small square of glass at head height. The man walked down it slowly, as if giving a tour of a school, and Soles looked through the glass because he was meant to.

A woman sat on a bed with her hands in her lap, humming three notes over and over, the same three notes. A young man stood at his window with both palms flat on the glass, and the glass in front of his palms was running with condensation, as if it were summer on his side of it. An old man was counting the tiles on his floor, out loud, starting again every time he reached a hundred.

Fissured. All of them. And useful.

A door farther along had a plant on the inside of the sill.

The guard was sitting on his bed in the clothes he had worn on the balcony. Someone had taken his shoelaces. His shoes sat side by side under the bed, the left heel worn down further than the right, the way it had been at the prison gate. Years of a bad knee. Nobody here would have noticed. He looked up when the shadow crossed the glass, and saw Soles, and his lips moved.

— One, he said.

He looked past Soles, into the corridor, for the others. There were no others. His face fell, very slightly, the face of a man whose count has come out short.

Soles put his hand flat on the glass. He did not know why. The guard looked at it for a moment, then got up and came and put his own hand on the other side, and they stood like that, like visitors in a movie, until the man in gray cleared his throat.

The office was at the end of the corridor. A desk, two chairs, a window that did not open. The man did not sit behind the desk. He sat in one of the chairs in front of it and gestured Soles into the other, as if they were two people waiting to see someone more important.

— You’ve seen what we do, he said. Not all of it. Enough.

— You keep people.

— We keep people safe from what they’ve become, and other people safe from them. It’s a cleaning job. Most of my colleagues are very good at it. What none of us is good at is the other thing.

He looked at Soles’s coat. At the left side of it, where the inside pocket was.

— They’re opening, Mr. Soles. Places like your prison. One in a mill town last week. One under a parking lot in the capital. We go in and we push, because pushing is what we know, and they get bigger, and we lose people. You went into one and closed it. We had a man at the gate who saw.

Tarn. Who had stood in the cold with a clipboard and written it down.

— So here it is. Your guard goes home tomorrow, with his sister, with a pension and a letter saying he was never here. Your house comes off our list. Your friends go back to their lives, and nobody in this building ever thinks about them again.

— And me.

— You work for us. Three months, to start. Wherever we send you. Alone; we’re not hiring a team. You close what we point you at. And you don’t tell anyone what you’ve seen or where you’ve been. Not your friends. Not her.

He did not say Krista’s name. He did not need to.

In the garden, the king stood beside his plant: a man who had once sent his son south and called it necessary. Soles had never stood in that hall. He had only inherited the ear for it: the way a man sounds just before he calls something necessary.

— And the people downstairs? Soles said.

The man in gray looked at him with real interest.

— What makes you think there’s a downstairs?

— I was told you keep the useful ones on the third floor.

— Ah. He told you that.

He did not explain. He let it lie on the desk between them, like a file nobody wanted to open.

Soles sat with it. On one side, a man with a plant on his windowsill going home on Friday instead of downstairs. A house nobody watched. Krista back at her photographs, Tesa at her bags, Maxim at his customers, all of them out of this. On the other side, three months of doing what this man pointed at, alone, and not being able to say where he had been to the one person who would ask.

It was not a hard sum. That was what frightened him. It came out the same every time he did it.

— I’d like a night, Soles said.

— You can have until seven tomorrow morning. The review is at nine. After nine, I’m afraid, it stops being my decision.

He took a card from his pocket. It was blank on both sides except for a phone number written in pen. He held it out, and Soles took it, because not taking it would have been a kind of answer too.

Soles put it in his inside pocket, next to the blade. They sat there together against his ribs, the card and the knife, and he could not have said which of them weighed more.

The man walked him back to the elevator himself.

The guard was still at his window. He had taken his hand off the glass. He was counting the doors along the corridor, under his breath, the way he must have counted them every night since the balcony, and when Soles went past he did not look up.

At the elevator, the man in gray pressed the button and then, as the doors opened, turned as if he had just remembered something.

— One more thing. The man you pulled out of the river.

Soles waited.

— He walked in through the front gate at six this morning, the man said. Soaking wet, in a sweater that wasn’t his. He asked to be put on Friday’s review as well.

He smiled the smile that stopped at his mouth.

— I thought you’d want to know you’d made an impression.

He told them everything, at the kitchen table, before.

The corridor. The woman humming three notes. The young man with summer on his side of the glass. The guard with his hand flat on the window and his shoelaces gone. The office with two chairs on the wrong side of the desk. The offer, word for word, as near as he could remember it, and the condition at the end of it: alone, and not a word to anyone about where he went or what he did.

He even told them about the downstairs that nobody would explain.

He put the card on the table at the end of it, the blank card with a number in pen, and they all looked at it as if it might go off.

— No, Tesa said.

— You haven’t heard me say yes.

— I’ve heard your face.

— We go in, she said to the others. Friday. Before nine. Maxim drives, I take the gate, Krista counts the cameras.

— The walls are dead, Soles said. You can’t break what you can’t feel. There is one man in the hut and another in the car by the gate, and six cars around the side, and the man who walks through walls is sitting in one of those rooms by choice. If we go in, we don’t come out. Not all of us.

Maxim had been doing his own arithmetic. Soles could see it on his face, the same sum, coming out the same way.

— There’s no other way in, Maxim said quietly. Is there.

— Not before nine on Friday.

Krista had not said anything. She was sitting with her hands around a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago, looking at the card.

— Three months, she said at last.

— To start.

— And you can’t tell us where.

— Or what.

— And if you say no, the guard goes downstairs.

— Yes.

She turned the cup around once on the table.

— Then we’ll think of something else, she said. Tonight. All of us. We’ve got until seven.

They thought until two in the morning. It was the worst night Soles had spent in that kitchen, worse than the night after the gate, because every idea anyone had he had already had on the walk home and taken apart, and he had to take them apart again in front of them, one by one, while they watched him do it. Tesa’s plan. Maxim’s plan. Krista’s plan, which was to go to a journalist, and which would have put their faces on the front of a newspaper and the guard in a basement by lunch.

— I could crash the truck into the gate, Maxim offered, at about one. I’m insured. Partly. For some of the truck.

— And then?

— And then I’d be a man who’d crashed his truck into a government gate. I hadn’t got past that part. I was hoping someone else would.

At two, Krista said they should sleep and start again at five.

They went up. She fell asleep against his side, the way she had begun to, as if it were simply where she went now.

At five he woke, with her still asleep against him. He did not wake her. For half an hour he listened to the house, waiting for someone else to move. Nobody did. At half past five he eased out from under her and went downstairs.

He stood at the kitchen window with the card in his hand and did the sum one last time. A man with a plant on his windowsill, and a review at nine, and a basement nobody would describe. Against that: three months, and a promise he had made to her about before and after.

He knew what she would say. She would say they should start again at five. They would start again at five, and at seven they would still be starting, and at nine a man who counted doors would be taken downstairs while they sat in a kitchen being careful.

The thought that had settled in him on the ice was simple: Do it now, while it’s easy.

He called the number on the card, one digit at a time.

The man in gray answered on the first ring. He did not sound as if he had been asleep.

— I’ll do it, Soles said.

— Good. Seven o’clock, the gate. Bring nothing you’d mind leaving behind.

He put the phone down on the kitchen table, next to the cold cup of tea, and sat there until he heard her on the stairs.

Before that, Lucky came and put his crooked paw on Soles’s knee, and Soles rubbed the dog’s ears until the house began to creak with people waking. He did not know what he would say to her. He had had all night to decide, and he had spent it on the other thing.

She knew from the doorway. She did not have to read him; she had never needed to. She looked at the phone on the table, and at his face, and at the clock, which said ten to six, and he watched her understand the whole night in about a second, the way she had understood the empty doorway in the washroom.

— We said five, she said.

— I know.

— We said we’d start again at five. All of us.

— There wasn’t anything to start, Krista. I took every plan apart last night. You watched me. There’s no way in. There’s only the front door, and he’s holding it open.

— So you walked through it.

— Somebody had to.

— You keep saying that. As if it’s a law. Somebody has to. And somehow it’s always you, and somehow you always find out before the rest of us that there’s nothing to discuss.

She came into the kitchen and did not sit down.

— You told us before. I’ll give you that. You told us every single thing, very clearly, before. And then you waited until we were asleep and decided for us anyway. That isn’t before. That’s just a longer after.

He should have said nothing. He knew it as he opened his mouth. Every part of him that had ever stood beside a broken engine and kept quiet while the owner shouted knew it. But he had not slept, and somewhere in the night something cold had settled into him that had not been there before the ice, and it was tired of being told what it was.

So he looked at her.

He had promised himself he would not. He had promised it long ago, without ever saying it out loud, about the people he loved: that he would not do to them what he did to strangers, would not take them apart to see how they worked. He looked anyway. And it was easy. It was the easiest thing in the world. She was standing right there, open, furious, and he could see exactly what was underneath.

— You’re not angry that I decided, he said. You’re angry that you’d have decided the same, and you’d have wanted to be the one who did it. You’d have stood in that office with your notebook and made him write it down properly. And you can’t stand that for once it isn’t your name on the paper.

There was truth in it. He had used it to dismiss everything she had actually said. He watched her fingers tighten on the cup. She had watched him do it to strangers. Now he had done it to her.

The kitchen was very quiet. Upstairs, Maxim’s door opened, and then stayed open, and nobody came down.

Krista put down the cup she had picked up without noticing.

— Thank you, she said. In the polite voice. The one for officials. You’re very good at that. I’ve watched you do it to other people, and I always thought, he’ll never do that to me.

She went to the hall and took her coat off the hook.

— Krista.

— Go, she said, at the door, without turning around. You’ve decided. Go and do it properly. Don’t do it halfway because of me.

The door closed behind her very quietly. That was worse than if she had slammed it.

Her cup stood where she had put it down. He moved it away from the edge, slowly, with both hands. Since the stairs he did not trust one hand with anything he cared about.

Soles sat at the table with the cold tea and the phone and the blank card, and the clock moved on toward seven, and his first relief was that there would be no more argument. He let that relief stay.

Maxim came down the stairs a few minutes later. He stood in the kitchen doorway in his socks and looked at Soles, and at the card, and at the hook where Krista’s coat had been.

He did not ask. He went to the stove and put the kettle on, and stood with his back to Soles while it boiled, and when it clicked off he said, to the wall:

— Fine.

It was a whole sentence, the way Maxim said it. It meant that he had heard, and would not argue, and was not fine at all.

Soles did not question the relief. That was the first thing he would be ashamed of, later. Not what he had said to her. That he had let himself feel relieved.

By the end of his first week in Vatra, Varren had filled seven of the twelve beds in the old seamen’s hostel, on the east bank below the bridge.

He had not meant to. That was nearly true. The clerk at the customs house, the one whose chair no longer let him down, had mentioned that the hostel had been empty for two winters and that its key hung behind his desk. Varren had not asked for the key. The clerk had given it to him, the way people gave him things.

Then the people had come.

Not many. A retired tram driver whose hands had been warm since the river stopped freezing, so warm that his wife would no longer hold them. A woman from behind the bakery who heard faint singing in her kitchen. A boy of seventeen who counted the ice floes from the bridge every morning and could not stop. They had heard there was a man by the river who did not laugh at things like that.

Varren knew what each was missing before they told him.

The tram driver was missing someone to shake his hand. Varren shook it every morning, a moment longer than a handshake needed. The woman was missing someone to sit in her kitchen and say yes, I hear something too, which was not even a lie. The boy was missing a reason to count. Varren put him in charge of the stove: coal, minutes, the thermometer by the door, all in a notebook. He had not missed a morning since.

They were better. They slept. They ate the bread Halloran sent across and refused to be paid for. The voices in Varren’s garden were quiet in the hostel, almost as quiet as on the pontoon, and he moved among the beds in the evening with the feeling he had looked for all his life: of being exactly where he was needed.

Zora came on the sixth evening with soup she said Halloran had made, though it had too much pepper to be Halloran’s.

She watched from the doorway for a long time. She watched him put a cup down beside the singing woman without asking, tea without milk, exactly how she took it.

— She didn’t tell you that, Zora said later, at the stove, quietly. How she takes her tea.

— No.

— You just knew.

— I notice things.

— You notice what people haven’t got, she said. And then you’re the one who’s got it.

She said it the way she read a figure off the measuring board, carefully, aloud, so that she would remember it. Then she ladled the soup and told the boy a joke about ducks that made him drop the coal scuttle.

Varren laughed too. But the thing she had said stayed in the room with them, like a draft under a door.

There was another draft he did not mention to her. The dark van from the hotel had driven past the hostel twice that week, slowly, the way a man drives past a house he is thinking of buying. Both times a man in a good coat had looked up at the windows, and Varren had not stepped back.

He found the eighth one on the pontoon steps at one in the morning.

He had gone down because he could not sleep, and the river was the only place where the voices left him alone. A young man was already there, halfway down the concrete steps, back very straight, a bottle between his boots, not leaning on anything. He did not turn around.

— If you’re the man with the chair, he said, I’m not interested. I’ve got my own step.

— I’m not here for you.

— Everybody’s here for somebody. That’s the whole problem with people.

Varren came down three steps and sat, not too close.

— There’s a rail, he said. It’s warmer than it looks.

— I don’t lean on things, the young man said. Walls especially. You never know who’s on the other side.

He said it like a joke, and did not laugh. He had a face that had been handsome before he started drinking and might be again if he stopped.

— You were here the night it stopped freezing, Varren said.

It was not much of a guess. Everyone in Vatra knew the witness had been drunk, and had told the whole bakery he had heard the river sigh, and that nobody had believed him.

— I was here every night, the young man said. That night the river did something interesting for once. Then I made the mistake of mentioning it.

— Zora believed you.

— Zora believes thermometers. It’s not the same as believing people. It’s better, actually.

He drank, without hurry.

— And since then, Varren said, you’ve been hearing something.

The young man went still. Not the stillness of surprise. The stillness of a man who has been hit in a place he thought was covered.

— There’s a man in my head, he said at last, very evenly, who’s trying to remember a name. He’s been trying for weeks. He’s very polite about it. He never gets there. I drink until he stops trying. It’s the only arrangement we’ve managed.

Varren knew what this one was missing: a night when the man in his head did not try. He could give him that. A warm room, a boy who counted coal, a hand on his shoulder in the evening, and in a month this young man would not be able to imagine sleeping anywhere else.

He opened his mouth to offer it.

— Don’t, the young man said.

Varren closed his mouth.

— I can see you doing it, the young man said. You’ve got a look. Like a man measuring a door for a curtain. I don’t need you. I’ve got a bottle. It’s cheaper and it doesn’t watch me sleep.

Then he looked at the black water for a long moment, and something in his face gave a little.

— I’ll take the bed, he said. If there is one. Not the help. Just the bed.

— There’s a bed. By the window. Away from the wall.

The young man looked at him properly for the first time, a short, suspicious look, as if Varren had guessed something he had not been told.

— Fine, he said. But I’m not singing around the stove. I’ve heard about the stove.

He stood, and the bottle tipped over, and neither of them reached for it.

At the top of the steps, a man was waiting.

Varren had not heard him come. Good wool, the coat the men in the van wore, and a way of standing: his weight back on his rear heel, as if the ground in front of him had not been decided yet.

— You’re the one from the bakery, the man said to Noct’s back. The river. Someone would like to hear about it properly.

— Someone can read the papers.

— Tonight. It won’t take long.

He came down two steps and took the young man’s arm.

Noct turned into the grip instead of away from it. His free hand came up under the man’s elbow, short and flat, and the man went sideways into the rail with a grunt. It was not a drunk’s movement. It was not a young man’s either. It was economical, almost bored, the movement of someone who had done it in snow and in mud, and Noct looked down at his own hands afterward as though they had told a joke without him.

The man recovered faster than he should have. He came off the rail low, took Noct around the body and drove him back, one step, two, until Noct’s shoulders hit the wall beside the stair.

Noct made a sound Varren would remember. Not pain. Terror. The wall at his back, the whole cold weight of it, and his hands flat against it as if it might open.

Varren went down between them.

He did not take the man’s wrist, though he could have closed it to splinters. He did not lift him, though he could have put him in the river. He put himself where the next blow was going and let it land.

It took him in the mouth. He tasted blood. He did not step back, and he did not step forward. He stood on the stair with his hands open at his sides and watched the man’s weight settle onto that back heel again.

He came to collect a drunk. Not to fight two men on a stair under a bridge.

Up on the bridge a car went over, and its lights swept the steps.

The man looked at the blood on Varren’s lip, at Noct against the wall, and decided. He straightened his good coat.

— Daylight, he said to Noct, and went up without hurrying.

Noct came off the wall slowly, one hand still behind him on the concrete, as if checking it would hold.

— Away from the wall, Varren said. I told you.

— Noct, the young man said, holding out his hand without looking. Since you’re going to ask.

Varren took it.

And the patient one, the voice that had stood beside its plant in his garden since he could remember, that had stood forward in a yard with no windows and in the back of a bakery and on a frozen river, went entirely still. Not quiet. Still, the way a man goes still when he hears footsteps on a stair he has not climbed in years.

Noct laughed at something, short and dry, at nothing Varren had said, at the river perhaps, or at himself.

Varren had never seen him before in his life, and he would have known that laugh anywhere.

At nine o’clock on Friday, the gate with no name on it opened, and the guard walked out.

He walked out in his own coat, buttoned to the neck, with his shoelaces back in his shoes and a brown envelope held against his chest in both hands, the way a man carries something he has been told is important and does not yet believe. He stopped on the sidewalk outside the gate. He looked left, toward the cement works, and right, toward the last tram stop. He looked as if he had been let out of a building into a country he did not know.

Soles had been inside since seven.

He had signed the papers in the office with two chairs on the wrong side of the desk. He had read every one of them, slowly, the way he read a contract for a job he did not want to lose, and the man in gray had let him, with every appearance of patience. Three months, renewable. Wherever directed. Alone. No disclosure. A phone that would ring when it rang. In exchange: one man released, with a pension and a letter stating that he had never been there, and one house removed from a list.

He had asked what happened to the man who had walked in at six the day before, soaking wet, in a sweater that was not his.

— He’ll be useful again, the man in gray had said. He’s always been very useful.

That was all. Soles had signed.

Now he stood just inside the gate with his hand in his pocket and watched the guard on the sidewalk, and did not go out. It was not his moment. It belonged to someone else.

The sister came across the road at a run.

She did not look for traffic. A car braked and sounded its horn and she did not hear it. She reached the guard and stopped a meter from him, as if she were afraid he would break, and then she did not stop, and she had her arms around his neck and the brown envelope crushed between them, and the guard stood with his arms at his sides for a long moment, and then lifted them, slowly, and held on.

Behind her, Maxim’s truck was parked half on the sidewalk with its engine running. Tesa was standing beside it with her hands at her sides. Maxim was in the driver’s seat, both hands on the wheel, looking straight ahead through the windshield at nothing at all, the way he looked when he did not trust his own face.

The guard let go of his sister and looked past her, at the truck, and his lips moved.

— One, he said, looking at Tesa.

He found Maxim behind the windshield.

— Two.

He turned and found Soles, inside the gate.

— Three.

Then he looked for the fourth. Soles watched him do it. He watched the guard’s eyes go along the sidewalk, and across the road, and back to the truck, and into the cab, looking for a woman with a notebook who had stood at the washroom pillar with her watch and helped them bring him out. She was not there. The guard’s face did what it had done in the corridor, when the shadow at the glass had been only one: it fell, very slightly, the face of a man whose count has come out short.

— Where’s the fourth? he said.

Nobody answered him. Tesa looked at Soles. Maxim did not take his eyes off the windshield.

Soles walked out through the gate.

At the edge of it he looked back, once, because something made him. On the third floor, the window where he had seen the guard’s little plant now had a bare sill. In the window beside it, a man stood with his hands at his sides in a dark sweater that was too big for him. He did not wave. He only looked down at the gate and the street and the man walking out of it, the way he looked at everything, taking measurements. Then he stepped back from the glass, and the window was only a window.

— She’s at work, he said. She sends her love.

It was the first lie he had told since he signed. It was much easier than the last one. That frightened him more than anything that had happened inside.

— Get in, Maxim said through the window, to all of them, in the short voice. Before somebody in there changes their mind.

They took the guard home in the truck, all of them squeezed into the cab, the sister on Tesa’s knee, the guard by the window with his envelope in his lap, counting the tram stops under his breath. The upstairs apartment had a new lock on the door, and a balcony door that had been fixed, and on the kitchen table a clean vase with nothing in it.

The sister made tea, because it was what you did. She put out a cup for each of them, then set one more beside the vase. She looked at the extra cup for a moment and left it empty. The guard sat at the kitchen table with his envelope unopened in front of him and his hands around the cup, and looked at each of them in turn, and kept arriving at three.

Tesa found Soles on the landing, where he had gone to stand because the kitchen was too small for what was in it.

She did not lean on the wall. Her sleeves were pushed up, and the marks on her forearm had gone yellow at the edges. She stood square in front of him with both hands loose at her sides, the way she stood before a bell.

— When? she said.

— Tomorrow. The last train north. That’s when he wants me out of the city.

— For three months.

— To start.

— And you can’t say where.

— I don’t know where. He said the phone will ring.

Tesa looked at him for a long time. He let her. She was one of the people he had promised himself he would not read, and he kept the promise, and it cost him something to keep it, standing there, knowing exactly how easy it would be.

— I watched you on the ice, she said. In my head. From what you told us. You made the turn work. Not every time. But you found it when you needed it. And then you went back for him. I was proud of you, and I’m still angry that I had to be proud of you from my kitchen.

— I know.

— And then you came home and did the one thing I never taught you.

She did not say what it was. She did not need to. He had heard Krista’s door close at ten to six.

— Listen to me, Tesa said. You’re going somewhere to do something I can’t see, for people I don’t trust, and you’re going to come back. When you come back, you come back the same man. The one who pulled him out of the river. Not the other one.

— Which other one?

— The one who sat in your kitchen at six this morning and decided it was simpler.

She stepped back.

— Come back as him, she said, and you’re not welcome in my gym.

It was the hardest thing anyone had ever said to him, and she said it gently.

He heard footsteps on the stairs below.

Slow ones. Someone climbing all the way to the landing, not hurrying, a step at a time. Tesa heard them too, and turned her head, and something in her face changed.

Krista came around the last turn of the stairs with her coat buttoned all the way up and a paper bag from the bakery on the corner of her own street in one hand, and stopped on the landing below them.

She did not look at Soles. She looked past him, at the open door of the apartment, at the kitchen table, at the guard.

The guard looked up from his cup and saw her in the doorway, and his lips moved, and his whole face cleared, like a sky after rain.

— Four, he said.

Krista smiled at him. It was a real smile, and none of it was for Soles. She went past him into the kitchen without touching him, and put the buns on the table, and sat down beside the guard, and asked him how he was, and listened to the answer.

Soles stood on the landing with Tesa and listened to the count come out right, and to the woman who had made it come out right, and understood that she had come for the guard, and not for him.

It was exactly what he would have wanted her to do. It was the worst thing that had happened all day.

The kitchen clock had passed nine when Krista came back on Friday. She had answered After work. when Soles asked to see her. Maxim was out sorting his deliveries. Soles had eaten standing at the counter and left her a plate beneath another plate, which was how his mother had kept things warm when she expected him to be late.

He wanted to get through an apology without asking her for anything afterward. He had rehearsed it while washing up. Each version had acquired a reason before he reached the end.

Krista stopped in the doorway with her work bag against her hip. Lucky brought her his bowl.

— He’s eaten, Soles said.

— He says otherwise.

— He watched me eat as well. He may be reporting that.

She took the bowl from Lucky and put it beside the stove. For a moment her mouth softened. Soles pulled out the chair nearest the kettle.

— There’s food.

— I ate at work.

— Tea, then?

She set her bag beside the chair. He filled the kettle with his left hand, setting it down carefully for her to switch on.

— Sit down. You’re holding your breath again.

He sat. She stayed by the counter, watching the kettle’s little glass window.

— What I said this morning, he began. I wanted it to hurt. I knew where to put it, and I put it there.

Krista turned from the kettle.

— You knew because you looked.

— Yes.

— Say that bit too.

He pressed his hand flat against his thigh.

— I looked at you to find something I could use. I’m sorry.

She drew the other chair away from the table and sat with her coat still on. He could hear the clock and the kettle and Lucky licking the empty bowl behind her.

— When you do it, she asked, can you stop?

— I could have stopped this morning.

— Before you said it?

— Before I looked.

She pushed her sleeves back. There was pencil dust along the side of one finger.

— I kept trying to remember whether you’d done it before. Things you’ve said to me. Things I thought you’d noticed because you knew me.

He wanted to tell her which things had been his. The little ones came first: how she held a cup when it was too hot, the corner of a photograph she always straightened. He could have made a list. He had made enough lists for one day.

— I don’t know how to prove it to you, he said.

— You can’t tonight.

The kettle clicked off. She got up for the cups. He almost stood to help her, then stayed where he was.

She put his cup within reach of his left hand.

— Milk?

— Just a little.

She knew. He let her pour it anyway.

They drank for a while. Her work bag had slumped against the chair leg, and a corner of folded paper showed beneath its flap. He could ask her to stay. Tomorrow he would have to pack, and Maxim would come, and there would be a train. Tonight there was still room for her coat on the hook.

— Did you get the captions finished?

— This afternoon.

— All of them?

— Enough for them to stop asking me.

She rubbed at the pencil mark with her thumb. It spread across the knuckle.

— You said you’d come after work, Soles said.

Her thumb stopped.

— I did come.

— I meant, was there something else to do?

— I went for a walk.

He glanced at the clock before he could stop himself. She put her cup down.

— Don’t.

— I’m asking where you’ve been.

— Yes. I heard you.

The bottom of her coat was wet, and there was pale grit worked into the hem, the fine sandy mortar that came off the brickwork under the bridge. He had seen it when she came in. He knew exactly where it came from. He had knelt in it.

She went down there. On her own. Then she came here and called it a walk.

He knew that sentence. He had said it himself a few days ago, with Dorin’s name in it.

— You’ve been late before, he said. You say work, and sometimes you call, and sometimes you don’t.

— This morning wasn’t about a telephone.

— I know that.

— Then why are we talking about mine?

He could have told her. I know where you were. It’s on your coat. It would have been true, and it would have been the thing he had done to her that morning: looking, and then using what he saw.

The chair caught against a table leg as he pushed it back. Krista reached to steady it, but he had already pulled it clear, leaving her hand suspended between them.

— I don’t know what you do when you’re not here, he said.

— You never used to need an account of it.

— I never used to be going away for three months.

She lowered her hand.

— You could have said you wanted me here, she said.

— I do.

— Instead you want to know where I was.

He could still ask her properly. Or he could say what he had seen, and make her account for the passage the way she had made him account for the river. He did neither. He did not like either of the men he could be in the next minute.

— Was it work?

She took hold of the bag’s strap.

— I told you. I went for a walk.

— And I have to leave it there.

— Yes.

He looked down at his tea. There was room for his hand around the cup. He kept it flat on the table.

— I can’t make you tell me.

She waited until he looked up.

— Then leave it there because I’ve asked you to.

For a moment he wanted to say he had. That he was sitting down, that he hadn’t looked, that the door was clear. She picked up her bag before he could turn any of those things into a defense.

— Krista. You don’t have to go.

— I can’t stay here tonight.

He followed her as far as the hall. She was having trouble with a button, the strap caught across it. He knew how to lift it free. She moved the bag herself and opened the door.

Lucky went after her. Soles caught his collar before he reached the step.

— Come on. Inside.

The dog came reluctantly. By the time Soles had shut the door, he had found the question he should have asked: whether she had somewhere to go, whether she wanted him to walk with her.

He typed it. Have you got somewhere to go? Then he read it the way she would, and saw the other question folded inside it, the one about where she had been.

He deleted it.

Her cup was still on the table, still warm when he touched the handle. He left it where it was.

Upstairs, he put the phone beside the lamp and lay down with the light off. Tomorrow there would be clothes to pack, the dogs to leave with Maxim, a train. He tried putting the jobs in order. Halfway through the list Krista was standing by the kitchen table again, asking him to leave it there.

He had known what she wanted. That was the part he could not get past.

On the landing outside the guard’s apartment, he had wanted her to look at him, and she had gone in to sit beside the guard instead. Four. He could still hear the relief in the old man’s voice, and his own small shame at having resented the thing he had helped to make.

Three months, renewable. He had read every clause before he signed and asked what each one meant. At home he had asked only where she had been.

She asked you to leave it there. Do that much.

He turned the phone face down. It was the only thing in the room he could still put where it belonged.

Sleep came late. When it did, his hand was open on the blanket, as if something might still be put into it.

Krista had reached the turn above the footbridge when Tesa called her name.

She kept walking for three steps before stopping. Behind her, shoes struck the path at an uneven pace. Tesa was coming down from the road with her gym bag over her shoulder.

— Soles at home?

— Yes.

Tesa shifted the bag. Krista could still go home. She could turn at the bridge, take the street past the bakery and spend the rest of the night finding things to put away. Instead she went down the first step toward the bank.

— Where are you going?

— I need a little time.

— Down there?

Krista stopped with her hand on the railing.

— You don’t have to come.

— I know.

Tesa shifted the strap higher on her shoulder and followed.

At the opening beneath the bridge, Krista switched on her phone’s light. Tesa crouched beside her. The loose end of the tape wrapped around her bag strap caught on a projecting corner of brick.

— Wait, Krista said.

Tesa pulled back before Krista could free the tape. A strip tore away and stayed on the brick; Tesa pressed the remainder flat against the strap.

— That’s going to come off.

— Then I’ll know where I left it.

Krista ducked into the passage and checked the bend against the sketch in her head. Beyond the turn, she moved left until her light found the chamber entrance past the edge of the wall. She had checked that approach in daylight. Tonight it was a piece of darkness cut out of another piece.

Tesa came through behind her.

— You’ve been back.

Krista lowered the light.

— Yes.

— On your own?

— Yes.

Tesa waited. Krista had spent the walk preparing an answer for someone who would tell her to stop. The silence was harder to meet.

— I was measuring the passage. Looking at the repairs.

— Anything else I should avoid standing on?

Krista wanted to take it as a joke, but lowered the light to check their footing.

— Stay behind me until we reach the chamber.

The carved tree was still on the slab. The cut branch ended beneath her light, blunt and empty. Along the edge, the old chisel marks showed white against the smooth stone.

Krista put the notebook on the crate lid and took off one glove.

— You opened it before, she said.

— And bled all over myself. I remember.

— You were trying to keep it open.

— There were people in it.

Krista set her palm beside the roots. Warmth entered her fingers. She waited for a movement, listening so hard that the scrape of Tesa’s shoe made her start.

Nothing happened.

She had come to look at stone, she told herself. She could do that from here. There was enough she had not measured outside it.

Her hand remained against the carving.

She wanted to go in.

The pressure caught beneath her ribs. She drew a breath and found that she had stopped halfway through it. The slab moved back, taking its edge away from the wall. Warm air reached her sleeve.

— Krista.

— I know.

She held her palm in place until the gap was wide enough. Tesa moved beside it and put her hand on the stone.

— Go. Then come straight back.

Krista passed through sideways onto a short landing, with three broad steps leading down to the round room’s floor. Her light found the carved man and the tree rising from his chest, then the signs above the steps.

She turned before going down them. There were shallow branches on the inner face of the stone too, worn so smooth that her sleeve passed over them before she felt the grooves.

She put her palm against them.

— Take your hand off, she said.

Tesa stayed where she was.

— You’re on the wrong side.

— I want to try from here.

Tesa let go. The gap narrowed. Krista kept her hand flat and wanted it open again.

For a moment she thought it would crush her fingers. She almost pulled away. Then the pressure returned through her wrist and the seam widened.

Her knees shook. She set her shoulder against the wall beside the landing until it passed.

— It opens from here, she said.

— Good. Use it.

Krista stepped back through to Tesa. For a little while they stood together in the outer chamber, breathing the cooler air. Somewhere above them a tram crossed the bridge, and the brick hummed with it. Tesa was looking at the hand Krista held against her coat.

— How long have you known that?

— Since just now.

She flexed her fingers. The joints ached when she straightened them. Tesa took the hand without asking and pressed her thumb into the palm, the way she worked a cramp out of a boxer between rounds, until the ache let go.

— We can go home, Tesa said.

Krista looked past her at the closed stone. From here she could see only the tree. All the signs beyond it, the other face of the carving, the repairs she had never reached, were still where she had left them.

— One look.

Tesa rubbed the edge of the tape on her bag strap.

— I’m coming this time.

Krista opened the slab again, letting Tesa through before following her onto the inner landing. She noticed that the stone remained open for a breath after she took her hand away, then settled shut.

She touched the inner face once more and opened a narrow seam. The effort came quicker now and left her less steady. She closed it deliberately, palm flat, concentrating on bringing the edge back to the place it had occupied.

— Enough, Tesa said.

Krista took her hand off. She wanted to write down the difference while she could still feel it in her wrist. Her notebook was still outside, on the crate lid.

— Damn it.

— We’ll get it on the way out.

Tesa went down the three steps. Krista followed, lighting the edge of each one. On the last, the surface beneath her boot gave with a short, hard click.

She stopped.

The front edge of the tread had sunk, exposing a narrow gap beneath the step above. Through it she could see two dark edges pressed across each other and, between them, a pale chip of stone. One edge moved against the chip, stopped, then tried again.

— Don’t move, she said.

Tesa turned from the round floor.

Something struck inside the wall. Krista felt the blow through the sole of her boot. She shifted her weight to the higher step.

The chip held. The dark edge behind it twisted farther. Dust fell from the joint where the stair met the landing.

Tesa came toward her.

— Back. On the flat floor, Krista said.

A crack ran across the higher tread.

She stepped off toward Tesa. The stone tipped beneath her trailing foot, and then there was nothing under either foot at all.

She did not fall far. Her coat jerked tight under her arms and stopped her, and she hung with her boots over the dark and the collar cutting into her throat. Above her, Tesa lay flat on the round floor with one arm over the edge and her right fist knotted in the front of the coat. Krista’s phone struck the floor beside Tesa and skidded away, still lit.

Below, the steps went on folding into the dark, stone striking stone, farther and farther down.

— Don’t kick, Tesa said through her teeth. Don’t grab me. Grab the edge.

Krista grabbed the edge. It came away in her hand.

Same stone as the steps. It won’t hold. She’s holding all of it.

She could feel the coat going, a seam at the shoulder starting to give, a small, steady tearing she could count. One stitch. Another. She stopped counting.

Tesa’s left hand swept the floor beside her, flat, searching. Smooth stone, worn round, nothing to hold. In the light from the phone her face had no fear in it at all, only the look she wore before a bell.

She lifted the hand a few centimeters off the floor and brought it down, short, almost no swing.

The stone cracked under it like ice. A split ran out from her knuckles, a finger wide. Tesa made a small, furious sound, and the hand curled against her chest for one breath. Then she drove her fingers into the crack and hooked them there.

— Now, she said. Up. Use me.

Krista climbed her. Tesa’s arm, Tesa’s shoulder, the hooked hand in the crack holding both of them, and then a knee was on the floor and Tesa was rolling backward, dragging her by the coat away from the lip.

The fall took the air out of her. They lay in a heap on the round floor. She heard a last, heavier crash far below. Dust drifted through the beam of the fallen phone.

For several breaths neither woman moved.

— You all right? Krista asked.

— Get off my knee and I’ll let you know.

Krista rolled aside and retrieved her phone, aiming the light at the stairs. Tesa sat up beside her.

The three steps were gone. Their short landing remained against the closed slab, above the broken edges of the round floor. Between it and the floor where they knelt, darkness ran from wall to wall.

A last piece fell from the lip near Krista’s knee. She pulled her weight back.

Beyond the gap, something small and pale bounced against the landing and dropped out of sight.

The blow inside the wall came again. This time it continued into a long scraping movement, circling behind the signs. On the opposite side of the room, a line opened in what had looked like solid stone.

Tesa turned toward it.

— Tell me that goes outside.

Krista got to her feet. Her legs were still answering a moment later than she expected. She put the light back on the broken edge first.

— Sit there. Away from it.

Tesa stayed standing.

Krista crouched and shone the light across the gap. The landing sat higher than their floor and was too narrow to land on at a run. Tesa tested the lip on their side with her boot, heard it ring hollow, and drew back. Below, the light found no bottom.

Tesa followed the light.

— If I could get a hand on the edge—

— And then? There’s nowhere to put your feet.

Tesa looked at the crumbling lip on their side, then across at the narrow landing.

— Something across it, then.

They searched the room. Nothing in it was long enough to bridge the gap.

Krista tried her phone. No signal.

Behind them the scraping stopped.

The opening opposite the entrance stood clear. In it was a smooth, dark surface reflecting the light. A thin line of brightness ran up its middle, like the edge of a door left ajar.

— Was that here before? Tesa asked.

Krista moved closer. Through the bright seam she could see a narrow passage, pale walls and a dark opening on the left.

— Looks low, Tesa said.

Krista could see clear space above her head.

— Where is it low?

Tesa stepped through. Krista caught at her sleeve and closed her fingers on air.

— Tesa?

— Here.

The voice was close, but the pale passage stood empty.

— Come back.

— I’m right here. Give me your hand.

A hand appeared in front of Krista’s chest. It ended at the wrist; beyond that there was only the dark surface. The fingers opened impatiently.

Krista took them.

— There’s nothing to it, Tesa said.

She pulled. Krista’s forehead hit the surface with a flat crack.

— Ow! Damn it!

— Bend your knees.

— My knees aren’t what’s stopping me, you idiot!

The hand loosened. From beyond it came a short, startled laugh.

— Did you hit the wall?

— Come out here and I’ll show you.

Tesa stepped back into view, mouth open to say something. She saw Krista’s face and closed it.

Krista pressed her fingertips above one eyebrow. No blood. It hurt enough without any.

— We could try— Tesa began.

— We have tried. I was there for it.

Tesa described a broad passage under a low, curved ceiling, its walls rough stone. Krista’s was straight and narrow, its pale joints as neat as the lines on her notebook. Neither could see what the other described.

Krista touched the surface, trying to reach her own passage this time. Her fingers passed through.

— Stay here, she said. I’ll come back before you go in again.

She put the phone in her coat pocket and stepped through alone.

The pale hall extended straight ahead. Four doorways faced across it, two on the left and two on the right; beyond the second pair, a darker strip crossed the floor. Krista turned before approaching any of them. Through the entrance she could still see Tesa and the round room behind her.

— I’m going to look at the first door, Krista told her. Then I’ll come back.

Tesa raised a hand to show she had heard. Krista walked along the left wall.

A man’s hands moved across a table inside the doorway, gathering cards. The scene changed to a hand holding paper. She remembered what that paper had meant to him: the south, a road he could finally take. Her fingers tightened against her coat. In her garden the man could look back at her. These hands kept moving without noticing her. She stayed a step away, recognizing a life she knew in pieces. What came next vanished before she could see it.

Four signs were cut into the frame. Light filled two all the way to their edges; the other two remained dark. She kept her hands away.

The other three doors were plain stone, their four signs unlit. Her phone’s beam showed shallow cuts and the grain beneath them.

At the second pair she stopped. Beyond the darker join in the floor, the walls divided into smaller angles that divided again. Following one toward the end made her stomach turn. There was room to walk, but she could not keep its shape in her head. Behind her, the entrance remained where she had left it. She went back to it.

Tesa was waiting on the round floor.

— Anything leading out?

— Four doors. One has the card player in it. The others are stone.

Tesa glanced toward the broken stairs.

— So he isn’t going to lend us a ladder.

— I didn’t ask.

— Good. You’d lose your coat before you got to the price.

Then it was Tesa’s turn. She stepped through into her own passage, and Krista waited at the threshold with her hand out.

Tesa came back a few minutes later and took the hand as she crossed.

— Four in mine too, she said. Two each side. The boxer is in the first on the right. Just a piece of him, then something else. I didn’t go through.

— And the others?

— Stone. There’s something wrong farther down. I came back.

She had seen two lit signs on her door as well, though she had been watching the twisted passage beyond it more than their shapes.

With her notebook outside the slab, Krista drew the four signs in a blank note on her phone so Tesa could compare them. She remembered their arrangement. She did not know what made the light in them complete.

One resembled a mark beside the carved tree. Keeping clear of the broken edge, she went to compare them. The strokes joined other shapes in the longer inscription. She had somewhere to start, though she could not yet read a word.

— You could have told me you were coming back here, Tesa said.

Krista lowered the phone. Tesa was looking at her now, rather than at what she had found.

— I thought you’d tell me not to.

— I would have.

Krista looked at Tesa’s left hand, the knuckles split and gray with dust where she had struck the floor.

— Next time I’ll tell you anyway.

Tesa set her bag down well away from the gap.

— Start with telling me before you go into that thing again.

Krista nodded and turned her light back toward the landing. The carved slab was within sight and beyond reach. She knew how to open it now.

— Mine, she said, looking once more at the other entrance. And yours.

Tesa followed her glance, then looked back at the broken stairs.

— All right. We find another way to get to it.

By seven on Saturday evening, Soles had packed enough for a week and put everything else back in the drawer.

The train left at nine. He had allowed half an hour for the walk and another half for finding the right platform. Packing for three months meant washing the same clothes more often. He could manage that.

The bag lay open on his bed. Shirts, socks, a sweater folded around his wash things. He packed the good gloves last. His fingers still ached from the river when he bent them. Downstairs, a spoon struck the side of a bowl. Maxim was feeding the dogs.

Soles tried the zip. It caught halfway around the corner.

He eased it back, felt along the teeth and tried again. Same place. A small fault, with a cause he could find and a remedy that would work whether anyone agreed with him or not.

I could stay here and fix this all night.

Maxim appeared in the doorway carrying an older canvas bag.

— Take this one.

— Mine’s fine.

— Yours has been fine since you showed it to me last summer. It still doesn’t close.

He put the canvas bag on the bed and stood back while Soles transferred the clothes. The buckle worked. Soles checked it twice.

— Don’t put anything valuable in the side pocket, Maxim said. There’s a hole.

— What do you use it for?

— Invoices. It’s excellent.

Soles had an answer ready about the accountant. He kept it. Maxim rubbed a thumb along the seam of his pants, then went downstairs, leaving his bag open on the bed.

Soles put on his coat. The blade settled against his left ribs; beside it, the agency phone made a hard rectangular weight. The blank card was still in the pocket too. He took it out and left it on the chest of drawers. They had other ways of reaching him now.

The ticket had arrived on the agency phone that afternoon, with a coach and seat number. Even the place he would sit had been arranged.

In the kitchen, Maxim had laid a folded sheet beside Soles’s keys.

— Deliveries, he said. I’ll come before the first one. Tesa can do the evenings. Food’s in the cupboard by the stove, yes?

— Yes. Mina sometimes leaves hers. Give her time.

— I know.

— Tesa hasn’t called back about the evenings, Maxim said. I left her two messages.

— She’ll call. She always does, in the end.

— She always does, Maxim agreed, and looked at his phone anyway, as if it might have changed its mind.

Soles thought of the grit worked into the hem of Krista’s coat, the mortar under the bridge. He could ask where she had gone after she left. He had asked her last night where she had been, and it had cost him her chair at his table.

She asked you to leave it there.

He left it there. It sat in him like a stone in a shoe.

— If you don’t hear from them, Soles said, keep calling.

— I’ll call until they answer just to make me stop.

Soles studied the delivery times. Maxim had fitted the visits into the gaps, leaving himself twenty minutes here, half an hour there. Beside the earliest one he had written Mina’s name. Soles reached for a pen to move that visit later, then put it down. Maxim had customers waiting after it.

He separated the house key from the ring. The split metal resisted his left thumbnail; his right he did not trust with anything that small. Maxim held it open for him. Their hands met over the table, briefly, doing a job.

— There’s a spare under—

— The loose board. I know that too.

— Right.

Mina slept on her blanket by the stove, one paw over her nose. Lucky had planted himself beside the bag. Every time Soles moved it, Lucky moved too, and sat down against it again. He knew the shape of a departure, and so far nobody had done anything to persuade him it was an ordinary one.

— I’ll drive you, Maxim said.

Soles had expected it. In the truck Maxim would complain about the traffic until they reached the station. It would be an ordinary ride until the moment he had to get out. He pictured Maxim waiting while he took his bag, giving him time to say something worth having come for.

— I’ll walk.

— It’s cold. And you’ll have to carry that.

— Slowly, then. I’ve got time.

Maxim folded the paper along its existing crease and put it by the key. Soles wanted a stretch of road on which nobody needed anything from him, including the friend who had come to feed his dogs. He picked up the bag before he had to hear himself say it.

— Thanks for this.

— Bring it back.

— I will.

Maxim pressed the house key flat beside the paper. Soles gripped the buckle until its edge hurt his palm, waiting for another instruction he could agree to.

Maxim went to the sink. Soles stood with the key ring in his hand until Lucky nudged his knee, then put the remaining keys in his pocket and opened the back door.

The path was slick where snow had melted and frozen again. Lucky walked ahead to the gate, stopped at the latch and turned, waiting for the part where Soles let him through.

Soles set the bag down and crouched by the gate. Lucky pushed his nose under his hand. His fur was warm at the neck, thick enough to keep the cold out. Soles scratched the place behind his ear until the dog’s weight leaned into his fingers.

— Stay here.

Lucky leaned harder.

The back door opened. Maxim stood in the light.

— Lucky. Come on.

The dog stayed while Soles rose and opened the gate. When it closed between them, Lucky pressed his nose through the bars. Soles touched it with two fingers, then took the bag and turned toward the road.

At the corner of the yard he stopped and took out his own phone. He wrote The train is at nine. and looked at it. Then he added I’m telling you before. and sent it before he could make it better.

He heard Maxim call again. This time, behind him, claws clicked back along the path.

At the corner he looked back once. Maxim was moving inside the kitchen window, clearing the bowls. Soles kept walking. By the time he reached the tram road, the house was hidden by the buildings along it.

By the bakery, a girl was turning the sign in the door while her mother wiped the counter. Men outside the bar moved aside for his bag and went back to arguing about somebody’s wages. The canvas bag pulled at his shoulder. Maxim had been right about carrying it. He shifted it to the other hand, carefully; the handle was old.

The agency phone stayed quiet. His own was in the outer pocket of his coat. He could feel both as he walked: one waiting to tell him what to do, the other full of people he could still call.

At the station the last northbound service was already on the board, its platform and time matching the ticket on the agency phone. The train stood under the white lamps with its doors open. He bought a tea from the cart before boarding. The woman filled the paper cup too high, saw it spill over the rim and took it back to pour some out.

— There. You can carry that.

He drank it beside the coach with the bag against his shin, until the heat reached his chest.

He watched the platform entrance while he drank. People came through it in twos and threes, with bags and children and boxes tied with string. None of them was a woman in a buttoned coat, walking slowly, as if she had not decided yet. He had told her before. That did not mean she owed him the platform.

The guard’s home.

He tried to keep his thoughts there, at the gate opening and the sister running across the road. In the apartment afterward, the guard had kept looking for Krista until she came. Soles could have called her before they left the gate. Instead he had told the guard she was at work and sent her love for her.

Even then, he had preferred an answer nobody could argue with. Tonight he had sent her the truth, plainly, before. He did not know whether it counted for anything when it came this late. Perhaps it only counted for him. That would have to be enough for now.

Get on the train. That’s the job tonight.

He dropped the cup into a bin and boarded. Warm air smelled of upholstery and somebody’s supper. A narrow corridor ran along the coach to his compartment, past a soldier asleep with his boots on the seat and a woman peeling an orange for a child who did not want it. Through the glass door of his own compartment he saw the man in gray, sitting at the corridor end of one bench with a file on his knees. His coat lay folded on the opposite bench, leaving the window seat beside it free.

Soles stopped with his hand on the door handle.

The man raised his head and indicated the empty place.

— Your bag will fit underneath.

Soles had pictured the journey by the window, alone, with no one asking what he intended to do. The man had already taken off his coat and made himself comfortable.

He slid the door aside and went past the folded coat to the window. The seat was too warm from the heating and smelled of other people’s journeys. He pushed the bag beneath the seat and settled with his back against the wall, his own phone on his knee. No new message. The man waited while he checked.

Soles put his hands on his knees. Since the stairs, in small rooms, he kept them where he could see them. The man noticed, and said nothing.

Then he opened the file and drew out a photograph of a low brick pumping station beside a drainage channel. Steam or smoke showed above its roof; the picture gave no way to tell which.

— Tonight? Soles asked.

— You’ll be met when we arrive. There’s a room for you. Read this in the morning, if you’d rather sleep.

He laid the file on the seat between them, the photograph on top.

The whistle sounded outside. A door slammed farther down the coach, and the train began to move. The woman with the cart was still pushing toward the building, leaning her weight into the handle.

Soles could call Maxim. He could ask whether Mina had eaten and hear the kitchen behind him. But Maxim would answer, and Soles would have to find something to say after the dogs.

He thought of the grit in Krista’s hem, and of Tesa, who had not called Maxim back about the evenings. He told himself that was what leaving looked like from the inside: everyone at home going quiet at once, each for a reason of their own. He minded less than he should have, and noticed that too. They had each other. That was what he had signed for.

The photograph had a service door at one end, a drainpipe at the other and a dark line beneath the roof. He looked at it the way he looked at a machine in a customer’s yard before anyone told him what was wrong with it: what it was for, what it was built to stand, where it would fail first. He could start with those. Ask where the photographer had stood. Find out what the line looked like from inside.

He put his phone away and reached across for the file. The man let him take it.

— How much time have we got?

The man settled back.

— First one’s tomorrow.

— And the others?

— There’s a list. You’ll get it a page at a time. It’s kinder.

For a while Soles followed the lines beneath the photograph. Beyond the glass, the last station lights gave way to darkness, and his own face grew clearer in the window. For a moment, in that light, it looked like his father’s. Then it looked like a stranger who had signed something. The wheels settled into a rhythm. He found he had read the same sentence twice without keeping it. He held the folder beneath his palm, rested his head against the wall and let his eyes close.

The wheels were still turning when Soles reached the tree in sleep. The forest lay below the beds, and Phenom watched from beside his low plant.

Another light had begun among the gray stems. Soles followed it to a small plant with coarse leaves. A name was cut into the stone at its base.

Haya.

No one stood beside it.

Soles touched the coarse leaves.

Cold settled against his wrist.

— Sol II —

By the second winter, the others let Haya choose where they rested. He could find shelter in woods they thought empty, bring a patrol around a roadblock and wait through cold that made younger men careless. They sent for him when someone had to be watched from a distance.

He learned to eat before going out. To keep his hands warm afterward. To answer questions about the ground instead of the men who had fallen on it. The loose strap beneath the birch returned when he cleaned his rifle; he could finish the cleaning while it was there.

When the war ended, he went back to the forest station. Someone had repaired the stove. The roof over the woodpile still leaked at the corner he had promised to mend before leaving.

He bought boards, climbed up and repaired it.

The following autumn, he found the first bear snare above the old charcoal road. A week later there were bootprints beside another, and the remains of a fire beneath an overhang. He took away the wire and began walking the road after dark.

One night, a shot brought him down toward the ravine.

The moon lit the road and the pale cut where it passed between the bank and the stream. Two lanterns stood beside a handcart. One man held a rifle. The other was pulling a rope out from beneath the cart’s wheel. Beyond them, broken willow branches hung over the stream.

He stopped above the road, with a spruce between himself and the man with the rifle.

— Forest service! Put it down.

The man turned. The muzzle rose a little, then stopped.

— We’re fetching our things.

— Put the rifle on the road.

The other man straightened with the rope in his hands. The forester could see blood on its lower length. The willows shook once beside the water.

— Both of you, he said. Away from the stream.

The man by the cart looked toward the bushes. The forester followed his eyes and saw the rope stretching through them. A low sound came from beneath the branches.

They had snared the bear and followed it down here. It had dragged their line into the stream. He could see a patch of dark fur now, moving behind the willow stems, and blood where its body had rubbed the pale bark.

— Come up the road. Leave the cart.

He moved out from behind the spruce to show them the way past him. The armed man took a step backward. His heel struck the lantern. It rolled beneath the cart, spilling light across the underside of the boards.

The bear pulled free of the willows.

For one instant the forester saw the whole animal: wet fur, the rope dragging beneath it, its mouth open. The rifle went off beside the cart. The bear struck the man before the sound had finished coming back from the bank.

The forester raised his own rifle. The cart tipped toward the stream. Man and animal went down behind it, hidden by the boards and one wheel still turning above the road.

The second man ran toward him, away from the overturned cart.

— Up here! Keep coming!

Haya caught his sleeve and pulled him toward the gap beside the spruce. The cloth tore before the man cleared the road. He stumbled into Haya and fell at his feet, leaving both of them in the bear’s path.

The animal came around the cart. Haya fired; it lurched but kept coming. He tried to get behind the spruce, and the bear struck before he reached it, driving his side into the bank and trapping the rifle between them. His face hit earth. He curled his arms over his head as its weight dragged at his coat, lifted him and dropped him against the slope.

He heard the second man screaming below him on the road, then felt the animal’s weight leave him.

After that he could hear water, loud and close, and nothing else.

He lay curled against the bank. The bear was below him on the road, moving beside the second man. The screaming stopped. The animal stood over the still body, breathing in short, harsh bursts. Then it turned toward the stream and dragged the rope back into the willows.

He waited until the branches stopped moving, and then a while longer, to be sure.

His right leg lay at an angle he could not understand. He reached for it and found the torn seam of his pants. Warmth ran between his fingers. He pressed his hand there and tried to sit up.

The road tilted. He lowered himself again.

By the cart, the first man’s face was turned toward the moon. The second lay a few feet from the forester, one arm folded beneath his chest. Neither moved when he called. He waited, watching for a breath. Neither chest rose.

He knew both paths back to the station. The shorter climbed the bank behind him. He tried pushing with his good heel, managed a hand’s breadth and had to stop. His breath came too quickly to call again.

The rope lay across the second man’s boot and disappeared beneath the willows. He wanted to pull it clear of the water. The animal would catch it on something else.

He let go of his pants to reach it.

The warmth spread beneath his leg, and he pressed his hand back. There was earth in his mouth. He worked it out with his tongue, taking small breaths, trying to keep the pressure where it belonged.

The lantern beneath the cart burned lower. He watched its light withdraw from the wheel. When it went out, he could still see the road in the moonlight, but the trees above it had begun to run together.

He tried to draw enough air to call once more. His chest rose a little and settled.

❦

On Sunday morning, Maxim fed Mina before checking his phone again.

She had left half her food the night before. Soles had warned him about that, so he had sat at the kitchen table until she came back to the bowl. Lucky had waited beside him with an expression suggesting that this was a poor use of available food.

There was still no answer from Tesa.

He called her, listened to it ring, then tried Krista. The two names sat one above the other in the list. Since Friday evening, neither woman had answered.

Yesterday he had worked. There had been deliveries to finish, then Soles’s bag and the dogs. He had expected Tesa to call about the evening visits. When she hadn’t, he had stayed. There were reasons for two people to want a day without him asking where they were. This morning, with both phones silent, he began going through the places he could check.

He left water for the dogs and locked the back door.

At Tesa’s building, the woman downstairs said she hadn’t heard her come in. Krista’s curtains were drawn. He rang twice, waited and called again beneath her window. At the gym, the man opening up remembered Tesa leaving on Friday with her bag over one shoulder.

— She’s not answered you either? the man asked.

Maxim went back to the truck.

He sat behind the wheel until the engine warmed. They knew the same people, had used the same streets all week. He had checked the places where somebody could have seen them. There was one place left where a phone would be no use at all.

He drove toward the garden.

The path above the river was slick. He took it slowly where the ground fell away beneath his boot. At the little bridge he stopped and looked down toward the old opening.

Mud had been pressed flat beneath it. More than one person had gone through. That would have meant nothing a week ago.

He crouched. A pale strip hung from a broken corner of brick, caught where someone entering would have put a shoulder. He touched it and felt the familiar roughness of sports tape.

Tesa had been picking at the loose end around her bag strap on Friday morning. He had told her to leave it alone.

He went down on his knees and switched on his flashlight.

The passage took him under the garden. Past the first bend, daylight disappeared behind his shoulder. He moved with one hand against the wall, carrying the flashlight in the other, until the floor opened into the outer chamber.

The carved slab was shut.

On a crate lid beside it lay Krista’s notebook. He knew the little squared labels on the cover. He had once waited while she straightened one that had gone on crooked.

He put the flashlight beside it and called both names, loud enough to hurt.

There was no answer.

He set his palm against the carved tree. The stone was warm. He remembered standing here with the others, trying to understand how much the place could take from a person before it gave anything back.

— Come on, he said.

He wanted it open. He wanted to see them standing on the other side, annoyed that he had made such a fuss.

Pressure gathered beneath his ribs. He set his feet farther apart and kept his hand flat. The edge of the slab moved back from the wall.

Warm air reached his face.

— Krista?

— Here!

Her voice came from below the level of the opening. He brought the flashlight through first, then stepped onto the narrow landing behind the stone.

The steps were gone.

He kept one palm on the slab and braced the flashlight hand against the wall. The beam showed the landing’s broken edge just beyond his boots; below it lay stone fragments and darkness. Across the gap, on the round room’s floor, Krista and Tesa were getting to their feet.

Tesa still had her bag. Her left hand was wound in tape from its strap, the knuckles dark through it. Krista held her phone as if she had been trying it when he called.

— Stay there, Maxim said.

Tesa looked at the empty space between them.

— We’d got that far.

He turned the beam along the broken floor. The near landing was sound where it met the slab. On the other side, loose pieces lay around the lip; the girls had stayed back from it. Anything laid across would have to reach past those pieces onto the round floor.

He swept the light over their faces.

— Can you both walk?

— Yes, Krista said.

— Anything new broken?

— My opinion of this place, Tesa said.

He took a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. His hand was beginning to ache against the stone.

— I have a ladder in the truck. It folds down. Rope, too. I’m going to get them.

Krista moved forward, then stopped at the sound of grit falling.

— Will it open again?

— I opened it once.

— You need to want it. Keep your hand there.

He looked at his palm.

— Yes. I’ve noticed that part.

The pressure had reached his jaw. He backed into the outer chamber before taking his hand away. The opening narrowed, with the girls still visible beyond it. Krista raised her phone to light the edge until it closed.

Beside the crate lid, he stood breathing through his mouth and wiped the wetness from beneath his nose onto his sleeve. Then he turned the flashlight toward the passage.

The truck had never seemed so far from the bridge. He ran the last of the path, the flashlight beam jumping across the wet brick.

He carried the folded loading ladder down first, stopping at the bend to work its ends around the wall. Then he returned for the rope and two short straps.

He secured the rope to the sound stone pier beside the slab with a short strap, then set the folded ladder within reach of his free hand. Only then did he open the stone again.

The girls were waiting in the same place.

— How long have you been down here? he asked.

Krista looked at Tesa.

— Three hours. Perhaps a little more.

Maxim kept his palm on the stone.

— It’s Sunday.

Krista stared at Maxim from the far side of the broken steps.

— Sunday morning?

He nodded. The ladder rested against his knee, folded between the outer chamber and the little landing behind the slab. His left palm remained on the stone.

— We can work that out upstairs. I need you to catch the end of this.

She put her phone down, light pointing across the gap, and crouched well back from the broken lip. Tesa stood beside her, watching the far landing.

Maxim eased the ladder onto the landing. The near end stayed against his boot while he pushed the folded sections toward the girls. When he had gone as far as he could, Krista reached out and caught the end.

— Don’t pull. Hold it while I open the next section.

He worked the catch with his right hand. The extended section slid toward her. She guided it onto the round floor. Tesa put her hand beside Krista’s and helped them move it farther back, beyond the loose stone.

The ladder lay across the hole, rising from their floor to his landing.

Maxim lowered his knee onto the near end. Something shifted below him, and all three stopped.

He moved the flashlight with his foot. A small fragment had fallen from beneath the landing’s edge. The ladder’s feet were still on sound stone, close to the slab. He brought them back another inch and settled his weight again.

This time nothing moved.

— The rope’s tied outside, he said. I’m sending a loop over. Put it around you before you get on.

He fed the loose end through the air between them. It fell short. Krista drew it toward her with the toe of her boot, keeping her weight on the flat floor.

His left hand was going numb. He pressed it harder against the stone, then forced himself to ease it. Wanting the opening wider had brought it wider. Holding it there was already enough work.

Krista fastened the loop and checked it with both hands.

— Tesa first?

— You first. I need you here to hold the door. Then I can use both hands.

Tesa took the ladder’s far end, bracing it with a knee and her right hand, the taped one held clear. Krista lowered herself onto the first rungs. She kept her body close to the metal, looking at the place where she would put her next hand.

The ladder bowed slightly beneath her.

— Keep coming, Maxim said.

He kept his boot against the ladder foot and watched her cross the middle. The rope moved through the opening beside him, running back to the pier in the outer chamber.

When she reached the landing, he caught her sleeve and helped her bring one knee onto the stone. She stayed there until she had room to stand without touching the broken edge.

— Hand on the slab, he said.

She set her palm beside his.

He took his away slowly. The opening held. Krista leaned her shoulder against the wall while the effort settled into her arm.

With Krista holding the slab, Maxim freed the rope from her waist and sent the loop back across the ladder. Tesa caught it, fastened it around herself and knelt at the first rung.

Maxim flexed his fingers and gripped the ladder in both hands.

— I’ve got the near end, Maxim told her. Stay low.

She started across on her hands and knees. At the middle the ladder flexed beneath her weight, and she stopped until it settled.

— Give me a moment.

He held the ladder still. Behind him, Krista’s breathing had become audible. Dust ticked onto the fallen steps beneath them.

Tesa moved one hand to the next rung and edged forward on her knees. Maxim waited until her shoulder was within reach before taking her coat; pulling sooner would have lifted her from the rung.

She came onto the landing with a hard breath and sat against the wall.

For a little while none of them tried to speak.

Maxim backed into the outer chamber and helped Tesa through the opening. She caught the pier with her good hand. Krista followed last, keeping her palm on the stone until she was beside them.

When she let go, the slab settled shut, hiding the broken route and the round room beyond it. Krista reached for the notebook on the crate lid, then sank onto the lid beside it instead.

— I left that there a few hours ago.

Maxim looked at the rope around Tesa’s waist. His hands were not ready for the buckle. He sat beside the ladder and let her work it loose herself.

— Lucky’s been asking for overtime, he told her.

— Doing what?

— Nothing. Same job, higher rates.

Tesa rubbed her face with the back of her good hand. A small laugh escaped her, followed by a breath that took much longer to finish.

Maxim nodded at the tape on her knuckles.

— What did that?

— A floor, she said. It was in the way.

At the first bend of the passage, Krista stopped to look back. Maxim waited until she turned away from the darkness herself. Then they went up, slowly, with the folded ladder scraping the wall behind them.

Daylight reached them beneath the bridge. Tesa stood in it with her eyes shut, her taped hand held against her chest like something borrowed. Krista’s phone found a signal and began vibrating in her hand.

She looked at the date. Maxim watched her read it twice.

Among the missed calls there was one message from Soles, sent on Saturday evening. She read that twice as well, and did not say what it said.

— Friday, she said. It was Friday when we came.

— I know.

She sat on the low wall above the opening. He put the ladder down and made room beside her for Tesa. The river moved below them at its ordinary speed, as if nothing had been missing.

Maxim took out his phone. He had promised himself he would call Soles as soon as he found them. He pressed the name and waited, looking at the women on the wall.

It rang without an answer. He left a message asking Soles to call him, then put the phone away and stayed with them until they were ready to stand.