Episode 146 · Only Dust

The thread no longer disappeared when Soles turned his head. From beside the pillar, he could see it, pale and thick, with the broken floor beneath it. The hose still dripped into the drain. None of the water reached the crack.

He put his left hand against the pillar and stood. His right elbow hurt when he let the arm hang, so he held it against his stomach. Tesa kept a hand on his jacket until he had both feet under him.

The younger agent was watching the thread. He took a step toward the room, stopped and pressed his lips together.

— Nobody goes back in, Tarn said.

— We weren’t planning to, Maxim said. We’ve seen the ceiling.

They backed into the corridor. The younger man pulled the canvas across the empty doorway, though it did not quite reach the floor. Soles could still see the light underneath it.

Outside, the cold air made him cough. He spat into the snow. Plaster and blood; he had bitten the inside of his cheek.

— We’ll have someone look at that arm, Tarn said.

— I can move it.

— That’s not what I said.

Soles straightened it a little. The pain was there, but the elbow moved. He bent it again before anyone could ask him to do more.

— We’ll get it looked at, Krista said. First we’re taking him home.

The man studied her, then Soles. He had dust on one sleeve of his gray coat. He brushed at it twice and stopped.

— I’ll contact you about the blade.

Soles felt its weight inside his jacket. He had not lost it. For a moment that was all he could think about.

— We haven’t finished the exchange, the man said.

— The arches in the riverbank below the footbridge, Krista said. Beside the garden. There’s a stone block in front of the third one. That’s where we went in.

Soles turned to her. That had been his debt to pay, and she was paying it in a currency he had not chosen.

— There’s a slab inside, she went on. It’s damaged now. Whatever made it open doesn’t work anymore.

She gave the location carefully, using the path and the edge of the water as points of reference. Tarn took a notebook from his pocket. At the part about the slab, he looked up.

— You’ve checked?

— We were there.

It was an answer to a different question. Soles heard it. So, perhaps, did the man. He wrote another line and put the notebook away.

— Nobody returns there without informing us.

— Then you’ll have time to study the drawings, Krista said.

The man did not answer. He turned toward the younger agent, who was still looking back at the canvas in the doorway.

Tesa helped Soles into the truck. He had to sit sideways before he could bring his legs inside. Krista climbed in last.

They drove away without speaking. Every rut in the road found the bruise on Soles’s hip. He kept his right hand flat on his thigh and watched the white fields pass.

— Why did you say that? he asked Krista at last.

— About the slab?

— There’s nothing wrong with it.

— They don’t know that.

She kept her face toward the windshield. Dust lay in her hair above one ear, as ordinary as the lie had sounded.

— I didn’t want them following us there, she said.

— They’ll check.

— Let them. Maybe they’ll spend some time studying how to move it. At least they won’t need to come to the house for directions.

— You made it sound very certain.

She rubbed the dust from her hair with two fingers and looked at them.

— Yes, she said.

Soles waited. She did not add anything.

Lucky met them at the door and stopped when he smelled Soles’s jacket. He sniffed it again, sneezed and backed away. Mina did not back away. She sniffed the jacket from collar to hem, sneezed twice and sat down squarely in front of it, as if someone had to keep an eye on the thing and she had decided it would be her. Lucky watched her from the hall and did not come closer.

— Look at that, Maxim said. Even the dog knows to get out of his way.

Tesa pointed to a kitchen chair. Soles sat. Krista put a basin of warm water on the table. When he tried to pull off the jacket, his elbow caught halfway, and Tesa worked the sleeve down his arm without bending it further. The blade dragged the other side of the jacket down. Krista caught it before it slipped off the chair and laid it on the other chair, pocket upward.

His shirt had torn at the shoulder. The water in the basin went gray, with a little pink along one edge. There was a scrape down the forearm and swelling around the elbow, but no strange angle. He could open and close his hand. Turning the palm up hurt.

— Don’t keep doing it, Krista said. We saw.

Maxim picked a piece of plaster from the torn shirt.

— Next time, just take a photograph.

— I wanted a closer look.

— Very thorough. Brought samples, too.

— Keep it, Soles said.

— Oh, I will. Next time you tell me you know what you’re doing, I’m showing you this. And next time you want Krista to undress you, just ask.

— Next time you can wait in the truck.

— Oh, now he wants privacy.

Tesa turned her face away. Soles heard a short breath through her nose.

— If you’re going to laugh, he said, do it before she puts that stuff on me.

Krista tilted the bottle from the cupboard over the clean end of the cloth and looked at him the way she looked at a photograph she was about to crop.

— Now, Maxim said helpfully.

The cloth touched his forearm. Soles made a sound he would deny later, and the kitchen laughed at him three different ways: Maxim out loud, Tesa through her nose, Krista without stopping work. He laughed too, and regretted it when his cheek pulled against his teeth.

Only Lucky had not come in. He lay across the kitchen doorway with his back to them and his nose toward the hall, the way he lay when he heard someone on the path before anyone else did.

There was nobody on the path.