Episodul 123 · A Man at the Table

Varren looked at the water before answering.

— You didn’t need anyone, he said. Do you know that? You had a father who fixed everything, a mother who knew what you’d eaten for lunch by the way you came through the door, and a house where nothing stayed broken for more than a day. I came to your workshop with a folded plan and a few photographs of an empty pool. You looked at them and told me where the water would bear and where it wouldn’t hold. You didn’t ask me anything. You didn’t need to ask me anything. I was your best client, and that was all.

He opened his hands and looked at them.

— I was always the person people called after something had already happened. At the home, in the unit, everywhere. When nothing happens, no one calls me. I wanted somewhere to stay. Beside you. I wanted you to need me once, just once, badly enough that you could never stop needing me.

— So you killed them.

— I paid a man to kill them. I know that isn’t a difference. I’m telling you so you don’t think I’m hiding behind it.

Krista made a small sound without words. Maxim did not move. Neither did Tesa.

— You were supposed to arrive afterward, Varren said. To come into the yard and find them. And I was supposed to be there. So you wouldn’t be alone when you found them. That was the whole plan. Only Kerr was late. You came through the gate while he was still in the yard, and he panicked and fired at you, even though he’d been told a hundred times not to touch you. I wasn’t there. Maxim called me from the workshop. For three days I sat outside that ward and didn’t know whether I’d done all of it for nothing. And still it happened the way I wanted. When they told you about your parents, I was the one beside you.

Soles could feel the water behind Varren. Not with his eyes. He felt how it rested against the stones of the bank, heavy and warm, how it pushed up into them without stopping. He felt the stones holding. Lower down, he felt the place where stone rested on something other than stone.

The anger came slowly. Not like at the archive, all at once, like a room becoming a yard. It came up from his bones and settled in his palms. Soles felt it gathering there, the way he had gripped the roof tile in Maxim’s yard until it turned to powder, and he knew exactly how much he could let out. He could feel the whole bank beneath them, stones stacked one over another by people long dead, and the place beneath them where one push would bring all of it down, with Varren, his chair, and the four of them along with it. The way he had brought down the temple.

End.

Phenom’s voice, quieter and colder than his own. Soles pictured the man by the low plant, no longer looking past him. That attention had helped him follow a trail; now it rested on the vulnerable place beneath Varren. The answer it wanted was the same.

— Why now? Soles asked. Why did you call me here? You could have left. You can go through walls, can’t you? Or they can. You could be in another country by morning.

Varren smiled. His old smile, warm and slightly crooked, the one he used when telling Soles a weld had come out well.

— Because you have something of mine, he said.

He looked at Soles’s coat beneath the arm, where the blade rested.

— Not mine, he corrected himself. His. But it’s the only thing in this world that can help me. Give it to me, Soles. And they stop coming. Not for you, not for them. They stop tearing through everything, stop coming out of walls at one in the morning. You stop sleeping with it on the nightstand. Give it to me and it ends.

He held out his hand. Palm up.

Soles looked at that palm and recognized it before he knew from where.

The Hunter in his hall, holding Krista by the throat, stretching out his free hand and waiting. Like a customs officer at a barrier. The one in the round room, who had not struck but opened Soles’s fingers from the hilt one by one, with a craftsman’s patience. The one from earlier that day beside the pool, who had let go of his coat to seize his wrist. And earlier still, the night he slept with it pressed to his ribs, the house searched, Kale’s box opened, while he himself lay whole and untouched in his bed, the blade beneath his arm.

They could have taken it at any time. They never had.

Not because they could not reach him. Because they could not take it.

He understood it all at once, whole, the way he understood where an arch carried its weight. The blade could not be taken. It could only be given. Or dropped. That was why they had driven him toward fights, why they had squeezed wrists, why they held out a palm and waited. And Varren, with all his voices, with everything passing through walls after this blade, now sat in a folding chair and asked. Like an ordinary man.

Soles held the one thing Varren could not take from him.

— No, he said.

Varren lowered his hand. He did not look surprised. If anything, he looked relieved. He had asked only to make sure of an answer he already knew.

— I knew, he said. Then do it yourself.

He stood from the folding chair. Not quickly. He stood the way he rose from the dinner table, one hand on his knee. Now he was two steps from Soles, the steam rising from the water behind him, and he opened his arms slightly, palms toward Soles.

— It’s the only way, he said. For me. I’ve tried everything. For years. This water gives me an hour, two. Then I go home and they crowd around the tree again. One day I won’t be standing with them. It’ll be only them, and I’ll be somewhere underneath, like a man who falls under ice and can see the light but can’t find the hole anymore. You know what it’s like. You saw it in the temple. You felt it.

He took one step.

— I don’t want to die just any way. I want someone who knows me to stop me. Really knows me. Not a policeman, not a stranger, not a disease. Someone who knows what I did and why and stops me anyway. You’re the only person in this world who knows me like that. I made you that person.

Soles listened and felt something strange, colder than anger.