Episodul 192 · His Ground

Soles went home by the streets, the long way, with Lucky trotting ahead and very pleased with himself.

— He looks like he’s been to the seaside, Maxim said, when the dog collapsed on the kitchen floor and did not move again.

— He had a long one.

— Did you?

— Long enough.

Krista was at the table with the photographs from the prison spread in front of her, the ones she had not been able to stop looking at. She looked up when he came in, at his face, at his left hand, which had gray dust on the palm from two hours of laying it on walls. She did not ask. She took his hand and turned it over and brushed the dust off it with her thumb, slowly, and then she went back to the photographs.

That was worse than a question.

Tesa left before dark, to walk the guard’s sister to the pharmacy and back. At the door she pulled on her coat, and the sleeve rode up, and he saw her forearm. The marks had gone from red to the color of plums, a row of them like a hand pressed into wax.

— Tesa.

— I’ve been hit harder by people who meant it, she said.

— I didn’t mean it.

— I know. She pulled the sleeve down over it. That’s the part I don’t like.

She went out. The guard’s sister went with her, holding on to her other arm, and neither of them looked back at the house.

He lay awake that night with Krista asleep against his side. He kept his hands off her. He lay with them flat on the blanket, the way you lay down tools you don’t trust, and listened to the house, the way he had every night since the sleeve. Boiler. Fridge. Radiator. Dog. The roof settling under the frost.

The kitchen wall.

He knew its weight now the way he knew the weight of his own arm, and the weight was different. A new seam ran through it, beside the old one. Not cold. Not settled. It was so fresh he could almost feel it closing.

He got up without waking her and went down the stairs in his socks.

The kitchen was dark and empty and exactly as they had left it, the cups in the sink, the chairs pushed in, the drawer of broken things. Nothing was missing.

Something had been added.

On the table, beside the guard’s cup that nobody had been able to bring themselves to wash, lay a ring of keys. Soles recognized the ring from the man’s visit to this kitchen. It had hung from his belt and knocked against the chair when he sat down, reaching for the hot cup Krista put in front of him. Now it lay beside the cup, with no guard to collect it.

The guard’s keys.

Someone had walked through the wall of his kitchen while they slept upstairs, and put them there for him to find.

He picked up the ring the way he would pick up an egg, and it was still too hard. One of the keys bent a little against his thumb. He put the ring down and left his hand beside it instead, flat on the wood, where it could do no harm.

Soles did not wake anyone. He sat at the kitchen table until it got light, with the guard’s keys in front of him and his left hand flat on the wood, and did the thing he did with every job before he touched it: he wrote down what he had.

Not on paper. Paper could be found.

The strength. More than I’ve ever had. I can’t use it. I broke a mug yesterday by picking it up. I held Tesa on the stairs and couldn’t let go.

Reorientation. Contact only. Needs my feet under me and something coming at me to turn.

The blade. Left hand. Keep it close.

Him.

That was the column he could not fill. A man who stepped out of plaster as easily as out of a doorway. He had trained Varren in the army and the special unit; Soles knew that much, and still hadn’t seen him fight. He had entered the kitchen in daylight, returned while the others slept, and come a third time to leave the keys. He had laid a straight line across the town for anyone clever enough to read walls, and ended it in a river.

He looked at the keys.

They were not a threat. A threat would have been something broken, or nothing at all and a door left open. The keys were a sentence. I know where he is. I can come in whenever I like. Come and find me. And the place to come and find him was the end of the line, the stone embankment where the seam went into the rock and did not come out. A wall a hundred meters long and nine meters deep, with water at its foot.

His ground. Of course it’s his ground. He’s made of walls.

Something stirred in the garden, beside one of the plants. Not a voice. An instinct, older than him and very patient, the instinct of a man who had once spent three nights watching a latrine path from the branches of an apple tree.

Never meet a man on the ground he picked. Make him come to yours.

Soles thought about the river. The gray shelf of ice along the bank, a few meters wide and thickening every night the frost held. The black water beyond it. Out there, there was nothing to step into, nothing to stand behind, nothing to come out of at a man’s back. Out there the Hunter would have to walk, like anyone else, on something that could be heard.

And ice was a structure. It carried weight. It carried it the way the boards of a ring had carried Tesa’s, the way his own walls carried the boiler and the dog. He had felt a woman shift her weight through a canvas floor. He thought he might feel a man walking on ice before he saw him.

He did not know it. He thought it. He wrote that down too, in the same place, under the column he could not fill.

Maybe.