Episode 154 · Before We Go

The knocking woke Lucky before it woke Soles. By the time he opened his eyes, the dog was at the living-room door, waiting for someone to do something about it.

Getting out from under Mina without disturbing her took longer than answering the second knock would have. His elbow had set overnight into the shape of the sling, and his hip had opinions about the sofa.

— Coming.

— Take your time, Maxim called through the door. Lovely morning to be standing on a step.

Tesa was beside him with a paper bag. Krista stood behind them with her scarf pulled up to her nose and snow along the seams of her boots. She had finished work at some hour she was not going to mention.

— You look awful, Maxim said.

— Morning to you too.

— I was going to build up to it. Then you opened the door.

Tesa went straight past them both and put the bread on the kitchen table.

— Have you eaten?

— No.

— Start there.

Krista stayed in the doorway until he looked at her. Her eyes went to the sling first.

— Worse?

— Stiff.

She touched the back of his left hand, briefly, the way she checked a label before trusting it, and took off her coat.

The drawing was still on the table. Maxim pulled it toward him and turned it a quarter of the way around.

— Ah. I hoped you’d finally measured the kitchen.

— It’s us. Yesterday. When he came in.

— I’m by the table. That narrows it down. I’m usually by a table.

Maxim pulled the drawing closer.

— You’ve given me three legs.

— One of those is the chair, Soles said.

— Ah. I was about to frame it.

Tesa leaned over the paper and put her finger on her own mark, which Soles had drawn closer to the door than she had been.

— Here. Until I spoke. Before that I was nearer you.

They went through it while the kettle heated. Maxim had stepped toward the door and stopped at the table, because the table was where his ankle had told him to stop. Krista had stayed at Soles’s other side the whole time. Tesa had put down her mug before she asked the man’s name, which Soles remembered clearly, and he could not remember noticing her feet at all. Each of them moved a mark, and every correction put the Hunter closer to the chair. Soles rubbed the pencil line out a third time, until the paper went soft under his thumb.

— I keep putting him farther away.

— He wasn’t, Krista said.

— I know. That’s why I keep doing it.

The kettle clicked off. Nobody got up for it.

— About Varren, Soles said.

Maxim put the bread down.

— I saw the message.

— There was more than I could put in it.

He told them. He told it straight, because there was no version of it that sounded better: the door, the hour, the questions he had asked through the gap, the list of things his body could learn to do, the warning about the prison. He watched Tesa’s face when he got to the part about being taught, and saw it close a little.

— You could’ve called, Maxim said.

— You were asleep.

— Then I’d have been awake.

— I should have, Soles said. I know.

Maxim took a piece of bread and did not eat it, which for Maxim was the loudest way to be angry.

Varren had not asked for the knife, Soles told them, not in words. He had only kept looking at the pocket, the way a man keeps looking at a door he has decided to come back to.

— And you let him tell you how to get stronger, Tesa said.

— I asked him.

It was worse said that way. It was also the true way to say it.

— Then don’t make me compete with what he told you, Tesa said. If something doesn’t make sense, ask me. Don’t save it up and try it on your own first.

— He doesn’t get to teach me. I told him that.

— Good. Now tell yourself.

Krista poured the tea and turned his mug so the handle faced his left hand.

— He can know something useful, she said. You still decide whether he gets through the door.

— I opened it.

— I know.

She did not tell him it was all right. He was glad of that, though he could not have said why.

— Next time, call, Maxim said at last. I won’t be cheerful about it.

— When are you cheerful?

— When nobody’s testing whether a wall stops a murderer. It’s a very specific mood. You should try it.

They ate. Krista called the investigator and got the same answer as yesterday: no permission yet, he was trying. Tesa took the chair beside Soles and turned it to face him.

— Ten minutes, she said, and when he started to rise she put two fingers on his knee. While we wait. I said ten minutes. I said nothing about getting up.

She moved one foot back and showed him the turn from the chair, small and slow. He copied it, and his knee went first and pulled at the bruised hip, so he stopped. She set her shoe beside his to give him something to measure against, and that helped, because now he could see when he dragged his heel instead of lifting it. On the third try she took the shoe away, and he put his foot exactly where hers had been, which was wrong. His legs were longer than hers; copying her shape had left his knee cramped against the chair.

He moved it forward. For an instant the cold stillness came. There was a hand approaching him, though hers had not moved, and his left shoulder knew where to meet it before he could have said why. Then the hip spoke, and the hand was gone, and the floor under his foot was only a floor.

— What were you trying to do? Tesa asked.

— Something else. I know bits of it, when he’s there. When I try to start before the bit I know, there’s nothing to start from.

She considered that the way she considered a fighter’s guard.

— Then we start with the part you can do. The foot. Small.

He did it again without looking at her shoe. It felt too small to matter. That was probably the point.

Small. And under the prison it’s already past the next mark.

He was setting the foot down for the fourth time when Krista’s phone began to buzz its way across the table toward the edge. She caught it and looked at the screen, and her face went careful.