Episodul 170 · Heard You

He looked around the kitchen as if checking that it was the same kitchen. His eyes passed over the chair where the jacket had hung the first time, and found it empty.

— You’re going in on Friday, he said.

Soles’s hand tightened on the hilt in his pocket before he could stop it.

He knows about Friday. Nobody knows about Friday except us and one man by the cones without a wire in his ear.

— Your agent should check his walls, the man said, quite gently, as if he were advising Soles about damp.

The fridge hummed. Somewhere in the house a pipe ticked as it cooled. Soles made himself breathe out slowly, the way Tesa did between rounds.

— What do you want?

— What I wanted before.

The bare hand turned palm upward.

— Give it to me now, and I’ll go in on Friday instead of you. I’ll close it. You won’t need to walk into anything.

He wanted to believe the offer. That was the worst part. He had watched the man come through two walls without a sound; he had not watched him close anything. If the man could do what he promised, Soles could stay home with the dogs instead of leaning into the pressure with a bad shoulder and a hip that complained about stairs. On Saturday the clearing team might find nothing to clear. Or they might find what the man had made of it.

And the blade would be in the hand of a man who had come into his house to wait for him to die.

He said the rite would continue. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what he’d close and what he’d open. I know he wants it more than he wants the prison shut.

— No, Soles said.

— You haven’t asked what it would cost you.

— I don’t need to. I’ve seen what you’re willing to wait for.

The man lowered his hand. He did not seem disappointed. He seemed like someone who had expected that answer and had come anyway, to find out how it would be said.

— Then hear this, he said. For nothing.

He glanced at the wall he had come through, as though the prison were on the other side of it.

— Places like that keep what comes near them. Warmth. People. Whatever falls in. The ones who stay near too long start to like it. The old stories called it drinking.

The place drinks. It was the kind of thing old men said about ground where nothing would grow. It did not sound like the kind of thing this man would bother to repeat unless he believed it.

— You’ll feel it pull, the man said. It won’t feel like pulling. It’ll feel like being allowed to stop. Don’t let it keep you.

— Why do you care?

— Because if it keeps you, it keeps the blade.

That, at least, was honest.

In the garden, Phenom had not moved since the man came through the wall. He stood beside his plant the way a hunter stands when another hunter walks across his ground, and he did not look away.

He pulled the glove onto the bare hand, finger by finger.

— Next time I’ll come quieter, he said.

— Then I’ll listen harder.

The man looked at him. For the first time, Soles had the impression that the look had a temperature, that somewhere behind the face nobody could remember, something had been interested.

Then he turned and walked into the wall. His coat went first, then his shoulder, and the plaster took him without a sound, and the weight above the baseboard stayed there for a breath, two, and then was gone.

Soles crossed the kitchen and put his palm flat on the plaster where the man had gone in. It was cool and dry and perfectly ordinary. He moved his hand a little to the left, then to the right, the way he would feel along a boiler casing for the warm seam where a weld had failed. Nothing. Whatever the man used to come and go, it closed behind him like water.

He went back to the doorway and stood there until his hip made him sit down.

— Soles.

Krista was in the hall in his old shirt, her arms wrapped around herself, her hair flattened on one side from the pillow. He had not felt her get up. He had been listening to the wall.

So that’s the price. When I listen to one thing, I don’t hear the next. Same as her with the glove.

— How long were you there? he asked.

— Since he told you to check the walls.

She came and sat beside him on the kitchen floor, which was cold, and neither of them suggested getting up.

For a while they only listened. The fridge. The pipe. A car going past at the end of the street, its lights crossing the ceiling and sliding down the wall where the man had been, and both of them watching the light until it was gone.

— You heard him first, she said.

— In my own kitchen. At three in the morning. With nobody talking.

— You heard him first.

He leaned his head back against the cupboard. She was right, and he was right, and both of those things would still be true on Friday, in a building full of noise.

— He offered to go in for you, Krista said. I heard that part too.

— He offered to go in with it.

— You thought about it.

— For a second.

— Good. Then you know what you said no to.

— He knows about Tarn, he said.

— Then Tarn needs to know he knows.

— And Tarn needs to not panic and lock the gate.

Krista paused before answering. Soles knew the pause from her work: a caption had to be true and short at once.

— I’ll write to him, she said. Something that says check your walls, and doesn’t say why. He’ll understand. He told me I lie well.

She typed it with her thumbs, there on the floor, and turned the screen toward him. Your walls are thinner than you think. Check them before Friday.

— That says why, Soles said.

— It says where. He’ll find the why himself. He’s good at that.

It was almost funny. Soles almost laughed. Lucky had come in from the living room to see why everyone was on the floor, and he sniffed the place above the baseboard for a long time, and sneezed, and lay down across Soles’s feet as if to make sure they stayed where they were. Mina arrived last, considered the three of them on the floor and lay down across Krista’s feet instead, which settled the matter.

Friday was two days away. Somebody who walked through walls knew it, and had offered to do it for him, and had been told no.

Soles found, sitting on his own kitchen floor at a quarter past three, that he did not regret the no. He only wished he knew exactly what he had refused.