Episode 193 · Somewhere Without Walls

Krista came down at seven in his old sweater, with her hair on one side and her eyes still half asleep, and stopped in the doorway when she saw him.

— You’ve been up all night.

— Couldn’t sleep.

He had put the keys in his pocket when he heard her on the stairs. He felt them there now, heavy and small, against his thigh.

She came and stood behind his chair and put her arms around his neck, and rested her chin on top of his head. It was the first time she had done that. He sat very still, as if a bird had landed on him.

— Is it Tarn? she said into his hair.

— Partly.

— What’s the other part?

He could have told her. It would have taken one sentence. He came into the kitchen last night and left the guard’s keys on the table. He could feel the sentence sitting in his mouth, whole, ready.

He thought of her face if she heard it. He thought of her saying, quite reasonably, then we go together, and of them walking down to a stone wall nine meters deep while a man inside it watched them come.

— Dorin called, he said. They’re short at the workshop. A job tonight, a big one. I said I’d go in and point at things.

She lifted her chin off his head.

— While everyone else does the work.

— I’m very good at pointing.

She came around the chair and looked at him. Not at his face. At his hand, which had been flat on the table all night and still had the grain of the wood pressed into the palm. She looked at it the way she had looked at the dust on it yesterday.

— Say so before, she said. Not after. You remember.

— I remember.

He had said so. Before. It just wasn’t true.

Well done. Very clean. Phenom would be proud.

He did not like the thought, and he did not like that it was not entirely wrong.

The day went the way days went in that house now. Maxim on the phone to customers who did not believe his truck could only be in one place.

— It’s only one truck, he told one of them. I can send you a photograph. It won’t turn into two.

Tesa was in the yard with the guard’s sister, teaching her to breathe out when she was frightened instead of in, because the woman had not stopped holding her breath since the balcony. Tesa’s sleeve stayed down the whole time, even when she showed the woman where the breath should go, low, under the ribs. Tarn’s phone was still off. Krista sat at the table with the photographs, not looking at Soles in a way that was very much looking at him.

As the light started to go, he walked down to the river alone.

The embankment was empty. A man with a dog on the far side. The ducks. The long gray wall of the flood defense going down in stone blocks to the water, and on the bottom block, where the line had ended, the faint wrong weld he had felt with his palm the day before.

He put his hand on it again.

It was warmer than the stone around it. Not much. Enough. Someone had been in there recently, or was in there now, inside nine meters of rock, close enough to hear a man breathing against it.

You came out of my wall to ask for the blade. I heard you then. Let’s see if you hear me.

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He spoke to the stone the way he had spoken to the dark in his kitchen at three in the morning, two nights before the prison, when a sleeve had come out of the plaster and stopped.

— Not here, he said. Not in your walls. Tonight. On the ice, by the old ferry steps. I’ll have it with me.

Nothing answered. Not a sound, not a change in the stone. The water slid past the bottom step, black and quick, and somewhere upstream a piece of ice broke off the shelf with a sound like a cup set down too hard.

He took his hand away. Under his palm the seam had gone cold.

At eleven he put on his coat and his boots and took the blade out of the drawer of broken things, where it had been lying among the snapped handles and the chipped saucers, and put it in his left inside pocket. He went out through the kitchen door without turning on the light. Nobody heard him. That was the point.

The old ferry steps were a kilometer downstream, where the town stopped and the reeds began. He had chosen them in the afternoon, walking the bank with his hand out of his pocket like a man feeling for rain: no houses within two hundred meters, no wall, no shed, nothing but reeds and a rotten jetty post leaning into the water. Nothing a man could step into. And if it came to holding someone, nobody near enough to be held by mistake.

There the shelf of ice had grown out from the bank almost a third of the way across. The shelf from the opposite bank reached much farther. Upstream the two joined; here the current had kept a narrow strip of black water open between them. He went down the steps and onto it. It held. He walked out ten meters and stood still, with the black open water ahead of him and the bank behind, and let his attention go down through his boots into the ice.

It was singing. Very faintly. The current pulling at its underside, the cold pushing at its top, the whole shelf carrying its own weight and his on top of it, all of it humming like a cable under load.

He waited.

At twenty past midnight, the ice changed.

Far off. On the far side, where the shelf from the opposite bank reached out toward his. A weight had come onto it, steady and unhurried, the way a man steps onto a floor he has stood on many times.

Then another step.

Someone was walking toward him across the river.