Episode 152 · At Five Past Four

His phone lit. Maxim was home and going to bed. A little later Tesa sent a message saying the same thing, followed by an instruction to stop doing whatever he was doing.

Soles looked at the chair and wrote back that he was sitting down.

At half past two Krista was still at work. He told her he was awake and asked her to call before she came over. Then he put the phone where he could see it.

Lucky slept beside the stove. Soles dozed in the chair and woke when his arm slipped. For a moment he expected the man to be standing beside him again.

The kitchen was empty.

He checked his phone. No new message. A few minutes past four. He got up for water, carrying the jacket over his left arm.

The knock came while he was putting the glass down.

Lucky raised his head. Soles stood still and waited. Two more knocks, quiet enough not to carry far into the street.

He looked at the phone again.

It was 04:05.

Krista had said she would call. Maxim and Tesa had gone to bed hours ago.

Soles left the kitchen light on. He took the blade from the pocket with his left hand and went into the hall, keeping it low beside his leg. Through the narrow glass beside the door he could see a coat and part of a shoulder. The face was out of sight.

— Who is it?

— It’s me.

Soles knew the voice.

He moved closer to the glass. The man shifted until the light above the door fell on his face. Varren stood on the step. His thumb was moving over the knuckles of his other hand.

— I need to speak to you, he said. Before I go.

Soles left the bolt where it was.

A door between them was the one argument Varren could not talk around, and with one working arm, Soles meant to keep it.

— Speak.

Varren looked at the narrow pane of glass, then at the handle, the way a man looks at a lock he has been asked not to pick.

— Through that?

— You got a message out of a prison. You can manage a door.

The thumb stopped on his knuckles. Soles kept the blade low against his leg, edge turned away from himself, and waited for the request. There was always a request. Varren had never once come to this door without bringing something and leaving with something else.

— I’m leaving, Varren said.

— You’ve said that.

— I don’t know when I’ll be back.

— Then don’t come back here.

Varren nodded once, accepting it the way he accepted everything, and stayed exactly where he was.

— What you did at the water took more than the others from me. I have to learn what I can still use. Then build it up again.

— And you came to ask for it back.

— You couldn’t give it back if you wanted to.

That was true, and it was also not an answer, which meant the real reason for the visit was still standing on the step. Soles had his refusal ready, worn smooth from use. Without the request to refuse, he no longer knew where the man’s hands were going.

— I can do the work, Varren said. I know some of what stopped me the first time. I won’t spend years making the same mistakes.

— Some of them.

— Some of them.

He didn’t walk across town before dawn to say goodbye to the man who cut away half of what he was.

Soles reached for the bolt with his right hand out of habit, and the elbow caught him halfway. So it would be the left. He moved the blade into the jacket pocket, drew the bolt and opened the door as far as his own shoulder, which was as far as it would go.

The cold came in at once. Varren had stepped back off the step to make room he had not been offered. Lucky arrived behind Soles’s heel, sniffed at the gap and stayed there, a warm weight against his ankle, neither growling nor wagging. Undecided. Soles knew the feeling.

— You shouldn’t be moving that arm, Varren said.

— Don’t.

Varren let his eyes leave the sling.

— I was stronger than what you saw at the bank.

— I was there.

— You saw what I used against you. Not what I had.

Soles remembered the pressure under Varren’s palm, his own strength meeting it and finding nowhere to go. They had all stood against one man, and the man had still chosen the moment he stood up.

— Then why didn’t you use the rest?

Varren’s gaze went to the pocket where the blade was and stayed there a moment too long. Soles’s fingers tightened on the door.

— You weren’t trying to win.

— No.

He said it plainly, without lowering his eyes, and it was worse than a lie would have been, because a lie he could have argued with. Soles wanted to shut the door on that answer. He also wanted to know exactly how much worse the night by the water could have gone, and he hated that the second want was louder.

— How much?

— Enough that trying harder wouldn’t have closed the gap. Neither would a better place to stand.

— And I’m meant to take your word for that.

— No. You felt part of it. Remember that part the next time someone tells you practice is all you need.

Soles put his shoulder against the frame. The cold had found its way under his shirt, and his hip had opinions about standing. He was not going to fetch a chair. Varren would wait for him, patiently, and that patience would cost more than the hip.

— You want me to think I need you.

— I want you to know what you’re standing in front of.

Varren’s thumb began to move again, slowly, over the knuckles.

— You’re thinking about getting stronger, he said.

— Everyone who comes to this house is stronger than me.

— Who else came?

Soles had not meant to give him that. He had given it anyway.

— A man who says he trained you. The army. Then the special unit.

The thumb stopped.

— Did he ask for the blade?

— He came out of my kitchen wall to ask.

— And?

— If I’d given it to him, you’d be talking to him instead.

— Was he stronger than you?

— Did he use his strength? Varren asked back.

— We didn’t hear him come in. We didn’t feel him. He could have stood there a full minute before he spoke.

— Then you know he can get close to you. That’s all you know. Getting close and hitting hard are different skills.

Wonderful. One of them walks through walls, and the other one grades my questions.

— What am I supposed to do with that?

— Learn to notice him. Leave yourself somewhere to move if you don’t. And don’t mistake either of those for being able to stop him.

— We’re working on it.

If Tesa heard that, she would call it optimistic. Two of them could barely lift their arms.

— Good.

It came out warm and easy, the way Varren had once said good about a cup of tea Soles had made badly. Soles pushed the door an inch closer to the frame.

— You don’t get to approve it.

— No.