Episodul 142 · Until the Report Is Done

The man looked at him for a long moment.

— Why?

— He asked.

— He asked.

— He pulled me out from under the ceiling. Then he asked for his chair. And I gave it to him.

The man said nothing for a while. Then he picked up his pen, drew a single neat line through One folding chair, wood, used, and wrote something beside it in his small, backward-leaning hand. The guard read it upside down. Item not found. Presumed destroyed.

— There, the man said. That’s simpler for everyone. Including you.

He turned his block around and pushed it across the desk. What the guard had taken for notes was a report, written in the first person, in the guard’s name. The time the shift started. The count at midnight. The scream. The blackout. The smell of gas that the guard, on reflection, believed he might have noticed. The doors warped by the blast. The keys taken from an injured colleague. The riot. The wall. Twenty-three.

There was nothing in it about the warm stones. Nothing about the steam rising along the wall to the window of the last cell. Nothing about the man drawing ships, or the man singing in a language nobody knew, or the young guard smiling at the gate. Nothing about the chair. Nothing about the message.

— Read it, the man said. If you agree, sign at the bottom.

The guard read it. It was a good report. It was clear and simple, and it explained everything, and every sentence in it led naturally to the next one. If he had found it in a file, written by someone else about some other night, he would have believed it.

He signed.

The man took the block back, tore off the page, folded it once and put it in the folder.

— Thank you. Paid leave starts today. Two weeks, perhaps longer. Get some rest. See a doctor if you need to. And no newspapers. No talking about this until the investigation is closed. You haven’t done anything wrong. But people will ask questions, and after the night you’ve had, you could say something you’ll regret.

He held out his hand. The guard shook it. The man’s hand was cold and dry and firm.

— And your colleague? the guard asked. The older one.

— He’s been taken to the hospital for observation. Shock. He’ll be fine.

— He was counting.

— People do strange things in shock.

— And the young one? From the day shift. At the gate.

— He resigned this morning, the man said. For health reasons.

He closed the briefcase.

— One more thing. The young man who came with the investigator. The mechanic. What did you tell him?

The guard looked at the folder with his signed report in it.

— Nothing, he said. He just looked at the wall.

They came that evening without being called.

Maxim first, at seven, with a bag of pretzels and the newspaper folded under his arm. He still walked with a little hitch when he thought nobody was looking, and he stopped it the moment he saw Soles in the doorway. Tesa twenty minutes later, straight from the gym, her hair wet, her hand bare for the first time in months. The skin where the cast had been was pale and thin, and she kept flexing her fingers as if she did not quite trust them yet. Krista was already there. She had been there all day, though she had not said so, and Soles had not asked. Her coat hung on the hook by the door as if it had always hung there. Mina had claimed the scarf that had slipped beneath it and was lying on it with her chin on her paws.

Lucky went from one to the other on his crooked paw, sniffing their boots, and then lay down under the kitchen table, against Soles’s feet, the way he did when he knew something was wrong and had decided to stay close to it.

Soles told them.

He told it in order, the way he had learned to tell things to the investigator. The phone call. The road. The wall that was gone and the stones that steamed. The heaviness in the air. The guard and his knee. The older guard on the ambulance step, counting car doors. The man in the gray coat. He did not tell them how he had known about the guard’s knee. They did not ask. They had seen him do it before.

Then he told them the message.

Nobody said anything for a while. Maxim unfolded the newspaper and laid it on the table, and they all looked at it. A photograph of the prison from the road, with the gap in the wall too small to see properly. Gas leak. Partial collapse. Disturbance among inmates. Most already returned. The public is asked to stay calm.

— Four, Maxim said. On the radio it was several. In the paper, most are back. Would it kill them to give us a number?

— The investigator called at noon. He said four, Soles said.

— Then the investigator’s the only one counting.

Maxim tapped the newspaper with one finger.

— They’ll print their faces. Tomorrow, the day after. They always do, when someone runs. Show me the faces, and I’ll know them if they walk past my truck. I’ll know them in a crowd at the market. I’ll know them in ten years.

It was not a boast. A face, once seen, did not leave him. He had stopped wishing it would.

— And when you see one? Tesa asked. There he is, in the market. What do you actually do?

— Then I call Soles. And Soles calls you. And you hit him.

— With what? She held up the hand, pale and thin. With this?

— With the other one. I’m the transport. You’re the specialist.

Tesa almost smiled. Then she didn’t.

— I used to be able to hear them, she said. Before. I’d have heard him from the gate. Where he went. How he breathed. I’d have followed him across that field in the dark and he’d never have known I was there.

She flexed her fingers again.

— Now I’m just a woman who hits hard.

— That’s still more than most people, Maxim said.

— It’s not enough for him.

She did not say his name. Nobody had said it since Soles came in.