Episodul 174 · Half of What Was Left

He stopped leaning.

He let his shoulders drop and his knees soften and his weight go loose, the way you let go of a rope you have been pulling, and on the next bright he did not resist at all. He breathed with it. Bright, in. Faint, out. He went light, light as a feather on a draft, and the draft took him, a step, and another, and it did not throw him. It drew him in.

It was warm.

It was the warmth of a kitchen with the radio on low and somebody else doing the washing up. Nobody needed anything from him in here. Nobody was counting. There was a chair. There had always been a chair, pulled out a little from the table, and he had been standing for such a long time.

Sit down, the warmth said, very kindly. You’ve done enough.

He had. He had done a great deal. His arm hurt and his hip hurt and his friends were tired, and it would be so easy to sit, just for a moment, and let somebody else watch the exit.

— Soles, Krista said. Five. Soles.

Her voice reached him from a long way off. He could hear that she wanted something, and he would answer as soon as he had sat down. The rope had gone slack behind him. Light covered his shoulders and his arms to the elbows; the blade hung loosely from his right fingers.

— Soles, she said again, in the polite voice. Answer me.

A rope scraped against stone. Maxim spoke from somewhere near the doorway.

— Ready to pull.

Soles knew what those words meant. He should have told him to pull. But the chair was right there, and for once nobody needed him to stand.

He was at the chair.

He had his hand on the back of it. It was warm and smooth and someone had been sitting in it a moment ago, and it would hold him, and he only had to turn and sit.

He did not turn.

He drew in. Everything he was, gathered from his feet and his hands and the back of his skull, pulled into one place under his ribs the way a fist closes, the way Tesa’s body came around on its turn before the hand went anywhere. The warmth felt him go hard inside it, and for the first time it hesitated.

That was the beat.

His back heel went down flat. His hip came around, then his shoulder. Pain caught in the damaged right elbow; he kept the hand close and drove the turn through it instead of reaching farther. Everything he had left, every scrap of strength and stubbornness and fear, went down that arm, and he heard himself shout, a sound with no word in it, the way a man shouts when he means to break something that cannot be broken.

He drove the blade into the heart of the thread.

It went in like a knife into wet rope, and then into nothing.

The light went out the way a filament goes out when the power fails: white, then red, then a line of nothing hanging in the air where the line had been. The pressure stopped. Soles fell forward onto his knees on the wet floor, and the blade rang on the tiles.

In the silence, the hose dripped. It sounded like a hose.

Soles tried to draw breath, and somebody caught his wrist.

— One. Two. Soles. Three.

Krista was kneeling beside him on the washroom tiles. His left hand had closed on his pant leg; he could feel her fingers working beneath his to loosen them.

— You’re here, she said. Say something that isn’t me.

He looked down at the cloth under his hand, then at the drain.

— The hose, he managed.

Maxim crouched on his other side. The rope lay slack between them, its loose end still in his hand.

— Stay with us.

Then the warmth came back. Not the warmth of the place. The breeze that had leaned on them for weeks gathered itself up from the floor and the walls as the opening died, and passed through the room.

Soles lifted his left arm above his head. His right followed it. He bent the elbow, opened the hand, bent it again. The pain had gone. His hip held when he stood.

Beside him, Maxim rose without favoring either foot. Tesa stripped the wrapping from her wrist and closed both hands. She touched her jaw, then looked at Krista, who was still holding Soles’s sleeve. None of them spoke for a moment.

Under his ribs, where the strength had always waited, there was more of it than he had felt, more than the temple had forced into him, so much he did not dare close his hand on anything.

A drop fell from the end of the hose and hit the drain. Another followed. Krista picked up the blade from the tiles before they left the washroom.

They brought the guard out into the yard and laid him on the fallen stones, which were no longer warm. He was breathing. He checked their faces in turn.

— Four, he said, relieved, and closed his eyes.

— He counted us twice, Maxim said. Once going in, once coming out. I’d like that to be the last time anybody does.

The steam over the stones had stopped. Tarn looked at the place where it had been for a long time.

— I saw that, he said. I don’t know what I’ll say I saw.

By seven the sky was gray, and three white vans came up the road, and men in coveralls walked across the yard toward a building that had nothing in it to clear. Soles sat in the back of the truck with Krista’s coat over his knees and his left hand resting open on the cloth. Each time he closed his eyes, he felt his hand settle on the back of the chair.

He opened them and watched the others until the warmth belonged to the coat again.

Tarn came over with his phone in his hand.

— They’ve been calling since six. Not about here.

Soles read the message twice.

A river in a town in the north, three hundred kilometers away, had stopped freezing in the night.