Episode 172 · Watch the Exit

At ten to midnight on Friday, the prison gate stood open by the width of one person, and Tarn was standing in the gap with his hands in his pockets.

— I checked my walls, he said, when they reached him. Every one in the house. I found a great deal of damp and nothing else.

— Did it help? Krista asked.

— It took until two in the morning. My wife thinks I’ve been offered a job in construction.

He looked at the coil of rope over Maxim’s shoulder.

— Do I want to know?

— It’s from a gym, Maxim said. It’s been very well behaved all week.

Tarn stepped aside. The relief at the gatehouse came at two, he said, and after two there would be someone in it who had not been told anything. Then he went back into the little lit window and sat where anyone passing on the road would see a man on a dull night shift.

Two hours. Soles had worked to tighter deadlines. Never with his hands shaking slightly in his pockets.

At the gate he did what he had done every night for a week on the sofa and let his attention go out into the walls. It came back full. The gatehouse, the yard wall, the long low weight of the wings, every one of them carrying something. His house had a boiler, a fridge, a radiator and a dog. The prison had a hundred years.

So that’s what I can do. At home, lying down. Not here.

He did not say it. Krista, beside him, looked at his face and did not ask. She put two fingers on the back of his hand instead, briefly, the way she checked a label before trusting it, and took them away again.

The yard was worse than he remembered. The steam over the fallen stretch of the east wall stood in the cold like breath, and inside the green circle a few stupid weeds had come up in January as if somebody had told them it was May. Across the yard, the iron grille of the wing gate was folded back against the wall. Beyond it the corridor ran straight to a boarded door, with the washroom doorway on the right three quarters of the way down, and halfway along, a strip of yellow tape where the agency’s men had stopped being able to go on.

— Two ways out, Maxim said, looking from the grille to the black gap in the yard wall. That one, and the one nobody fixed.

— Three, Tesa said. Through the ceiling. He’s tried it.

— Thank you, Soles said.

They went in.

The heat met them three steps past the grille, wet stone and something sweet under it, and it did not come at them like air. It leaned. Past the tape it was on Soles’s shoulders as well as his face, as if he had walked into deep water and the water had opinions.

At the canvas across the washroom entrance he stopped them.

— Nothing extra tonight. Nothing we didn’t have before the temple.

Maxim stayed on the corridor side of the doorway and tied the rope through Soles’s belt with his knot for fridges. Krista took her watch to the square pillar inside, keeping clear of the rope’s line. Tesa stood just inside the room, where she could watch both the corridor and Soles.

Beyond the pillar, the thread hung above the crack in the floor, longer than his forearm now. It brightened, slowly, and slowly faded.

— Bright for four, Krista said. Faint for six. I’ll tell you when it’s going faint.

Soles stepped past the pillar.

The pressure came onto him like the bag. Not a blow. Something that arrived and kept arriving. Every muscle he owned remembered this room and wanted to plant his back foot and shove. The strength was there, under his ribs, steady and very willing.

Don’t. You push, it pushes back, and you go through the ceiling with your friends watching. Again.

He turned his shoulder into it instead and let it slide.

— Now, Krista said.

Right foot first, small, at an angle into the pressure. Left foot after it, never crossing. One step deeper.

— Wait.

He waited, sideways, letting the bright roll over him like wind.

— Now.

Another step. Another. The rope paid out behind him. Maxim said nothing at all, which in Maxim was a form of shouting.

He was halfway to the thread when it changed.

— Now, Krista said, and he stepped, and the faint was not there. The bright came early and stayed. It caught him with one foot in the air and nothing to turn on, and the room picked him up.

He went backward across the washroom like a sack off a tailgate. The rope snapped taut at his belt and stopped him a hand’s width from the pillar, and he hung on it for a moment, bent double, his hip shouting, before his feet found the floor.

— Still attached? Maxim said from the doorway. He had both hands on the rope, the tape on his palms gone gray, and one boot braced against the frame.

— Still attached.

— Good. I’d hate to explain to the man at the gate that I lost you through a wall.

It learns. Of course it learns. It’s had all week to watch me practice.

— It’s changed, Krista said. Her voice was steady; her face was not. Five bright. Five faint. It’s not the same as the photographs anymore.

— Is it the same as five seconds ago?

She watched it through two beats.

— Yes.

— Then that’s the one I want.

He went again. It took him longer this time, because he did not trust a single faint until he had felt it begin under his own feet, and twice he stopped with his weight already moving and let the bright roll over him instead. Tesa said nothing. He could feel her watching his heels.

He came back to where he had been thrown from, and past it.

Up close the thread was not quite a line. It had a texture, like a strand of something wet seen against light, and the sweetness in the air was strong enough to taste. His left shoulder would not lift above his ear. The rope had perhaps three meters left in it. He was standing, in his own body, with nothing in him but his own strength and Tesa’s footwork, closer than any of the men with the measuring rule had come.

One more step and it’s arm’s length. Fine.