Episode 148 · Without Knocking

— Get out, Soles said.

— I came for the blade.

— Then you can leave without it.

The man measured the space between Soles and the chair, and his feet stayed where they were.

— You have it here.

Soles kept his left hand down, well away from the chair. The effort of keeping it there made him aware of how close the pocket was.

— You’re in my house.

— Yes.

— That wasn’t permission.

This morning the state kept me out with a gate. At least it used one.

The man looked at him again. Soles wanted to turn the chair so that the jacket lay between his knees, but that would tell him more. He had already looked at it once.

Krista asked whether the men at the prison had sent him. The visitor kept his attention on the jacket.

— Nobody here has offered me anything. That’s what I came for.

— We haven’t invited you in, either, Maxim said.

Lucky’s growl became a bark. Maxim held out a hand behind him, and the dog came far enough to touch it with his nose. He did not stop watching the man.

Tesa set the mug down. She moved it well away from the edge, as though they still had time to care about cups.

— What’s your name?

— You don’t need it.

— We need to know who we’re refusing, Krista said.

— You can refuse without knowing.

He spoke at the volume of a man ordering coffee. Ordinary visitors looked at things: the stove, the wet cloths, the dog. This one kept Soles and the chair in view the whole time, even when he answered someone else.

— You know Varren, Soles said.

The bare hand closed once, then opened.

— I trained him.

Maxim stopped stroking Lucky.

— In what? Tesa asked.

— The army. Later, the special unit.

Soles looked at the man’s wrist. A short black cord showed beneath the cuff. There were knots in it. He could not see how many.

He remembered the cord at Varren’s wrist beside the warm water, old and dark, with two knots. Maxim had seen it first. The Hunters had come out of the bank right after.

— He’s out of the prison, Soles said.

— And you went back.

— Did you teach him to come through walls?

The man waited. Soles had the feeling he was deciding how much the question deserved.

— I taught him things he still uses.

— Including what he did to my parents?

Krista’s hand left the pencil. Tesa’s weight moved onto her front foot.

— I wasn’t there, he said.

— That’s not what I asked.

— No.

It could have meant either. Soles wanted to make him say which. More than that, he wanted the man away from his jacket.

His left fingers curled.

The visitor’s gaze stopped on them, then moved to his face. For the first time, he seemed uncertain about something.

— Is that all you? he asked.

Soles said nothing.

The stillness he knew had begun to settle in him. The man’s throat was bare above the coat. His hands were empty. Soles noticed both things before he noticed the pain in his elbow again.

He opened his fingers.

The man watched the movement. Whatever he had been checking, the answer did not satisfy him.

— What do you mean? Krista asked.

— Perhaps nothing.

He turned his bare hand palm upward.

— Give it to me.

Soles looked at the hand. It was not reaching for him. It stayed where it was, low enough that he would have to take the blade out and place it there himself.

— You know you can’t take it.

— I know it has to be given.

— Then you have your answer.

— Or left in a temple for someone else to find.

Krista drew a slow breath. Soles heard it beside him.

— Leaving it in a drawer doesn’t count, the man said.

He glanced at the jacket again. Soles did not remember looking toward it this time. Perhaps he had moved his shoulder. Perhaps the man had never needed another sign.

Then the bare hand moved toward it.

Not fast. The way a man reaches across a table for the salt. Soles could not make himself move. Moving would put his own hand on the jacket first, and that was what the man was waiting for.

Maxim moved instead.

He came off the table on the bad ankle, low, arms out to take the man around the waist, the way he took a pallet sliding off a truck. He had his whole weight in it.

The visitor did not turn his head. His other hand met Maxim’s wrist on the way in, turned it, and kept turning, and Maxim’s weight went where the hand sent it. He came down on his back between the table and the stove, and the air left him in one sound.

That was all. No blow. The man let go at once, as though he had only been steadying him.

Lucky was barking from the doorway, high and furious. Tesa had taken one step and stopped, her good hand open.

He didn’t hurt him. He chose not to.

The bare hand finished what it had started. It came to rest on the jacket, flat over the pocket, the way a man feels for a heartbeat. Then it lifted away, empty.

— I can’t take it, the visitor said. I wanted to know it was there.

— Who told you? Tesa asked.

— The men who tried to take it didn’t seem to know, Maxim said from the floor.

The visitor lowered his hand.

— They didn’t get it.

— One of them didn’t get out, Soles said.

For a moment nobody spoke. The man turned toward the wall he had come through. Above the baseboard the old paint was whole, without a crack.

— You think the damage ended at the water, the man said.

— We were just at the prison, Krista said. We know it didn’t.

— The prison is close enough for you to visit. That doesn’t make it the end.

Soles leaned his left hand on the table. He disliked needing the support while the man watched him.

— What’s happening elsewhere?

— Water running where it should be frozen. People who no longer know what happened to them and what happened to someone else.

— Where?

The man did not name a place.

— You’ve brought a calamity into the world.

— By stopping the thing that was killing us? Tesa asked.

— By entering places you didn’t understand. By putting your hands on what was there.

Soles looked at the dust caught in the seam of his jacket.

— Forgotten places, the man said. Forgotten by the world itself. You found a door and treated it as though it had been waiting for you.

— It opened for him, Maxim said. He was on his feet again, leaning on the table.

— That isn’t the same thing.

Krista came a little closer to the table. She did not move toward the visitor.

— You know what those places are?

— Enough to know what you’ve done.

— Then tell us enough to stop doing it.

— Keeping the blade won’t undo anything, the man said.

— Neither will handing it to you without knowing what you want to do, Soles said.

Soles listened for something in the wall. He could hear Lucky breathing and the stove ticking. Nothing in either told him how the man had arrived.

— There’s a hole under that prison, Tesa said. People have already been hurt. Why come here?

— What would you do with the blade? Krista asked.

The visitor turned toward Krista, then back to Soles, leaving both questions unanswered. Soles could use that. A man who needed permission could be made to explain what he wanted it for.

— If you want it given, Soles said, you need the person holding it to agree.