Episodul 227 · The Night Window

The blade was below the Hunter’s chest when Soles saw it. There was time to recognize the point, and then there was more time than there should have been.

Rain hung bright against the window. The knife kept coming.

Soles turned toward the stone partition. The point missed his chest and opened his shirt along the right ribs. Heat followed it. His left palm met the Hunter’s wrist before the man could draw back.

The stretched moment ended.

He knew this turn. The woman in the training jacket had made him fail it until his feet stopped trying to stay behind.

Except he was on a bed.

He drove his heel into the mattress, brought his shoulder beneath the reaching arm and turned with it. Phenom found the opening. The forester’s quiet kept his eyes on the hand, not the face. The movement itself had to be his own. His bandaged forearm pulled hard enough to make his grip falter.

The Hunter stumbled against the bed. Soles followed before the wrist could escape, using his weight to take the man over its edge. They struck the floor together, Soles above him, the knife arm forced wide beside the chair.

His side hurt. The Hunter was stronger on the floor than he had been in the turn. Soles put a knee across the upper arm and reached for his own knife with his right hand.

The other man drew up one leg.

Soles saw the left hand go to the ankle. A short, dark shape came free beneath the pant cuff.

He moved before he knew its name.

His left forearm struck the rising hand as he turned his head away from it.

The shot filled the space beside his head.

Something struck the wall beyond his right ear. White grit hit his cheek. The room rolled as he tried to follow the pistol; his knee slipped off the arm, and the hand he had been holding tore free.

He could see the Hunter moving. He could not make the movement and its sound belong to the same place.

His own blade came up between them. The man jerked away from its point. The pistol struck the bed frame and dropped; Soles heard none of it. He caught the mattress with his left hand and tried to rise.

The window burst outward.

Then there was only rain beyond it.

He remained on one knee. Someone shook the door. A mouth was calling from the other side, but his right ear held one long, impossible note, and the words from the left seemed to arrive through a wall.

He tried to say wait.

His mouth had worked. He could feel that much.

The woman from the desk came in with a lamp. She stopped at the window, looked at the hole in the plaster and put the lamp down so carefully that Soles wanted to tell her she could drop it if she needed to.

He got onto the bed before she tried to help him.

For several minutes, every thought returned at once. Bull on the floor. The gun. The man at the loop in the woods. Krista asleep somewhere he could no longer picture without the window breaking above her. The knife that had almost entered his chest.

He kept reaching for the instant in which he had been faster. It would not come back. Nothing in him answered in a way he could use.

So he looked at the lamp.

One flame. A chair beneath his phone. Water crossing the sill and darkening the boards.

Cold air reached his face through the broken window. He drew it in slowly enough to feel where his side resisted, let it out and watched the flame lean. On the next breath he could hear the rain in his left ear.

He stayed with that.

The woman was asking whether she should send for somebody. This time he understood her.

— A cloth first, he said. Please.

He had to repeat it more quietly.

She brought one. He pressed it beneath his torn shirt and waited until he could stand without the room tilting. Phenom had offered the turn. Haya’s quiet had come when he needed to see. Neither had counted these breaths for him.

The pistol lay against the bed leg. The Hunter’s knife was gone. Soles did not pick the pistol up yet. He looked at it the way he would look at a tool someone else had left running.

Soles crouched beside the chair. No wet footprints led from the door. There was damp on the stone partition at the head of the bed, a hand-shaped smear already losing its edges. He had felt for someone outside the room. He had lain down beside the wall.

He put his phone in his pocket. The screen was dark. He did not wake it; there was nobody he could call at this hour who would not hear it in his voice.

Through the window he could see the yard and the low roof beneath it. Glass shone on the tiles. He climbed down to the roof, keeping his right side away from the sill, then dropped into the yard.

The gutter emptied beside his boots. Every patch of earth was taking new marks and losing them. At the gate, the lane divided toward the road and the forest. He found blood on a shard of glass and nothing he could follow beyond it.

He listened. The rain filled the places a footstep would have occupied. Somewhere toward the forest a dog started barking and stopped, the way dogs do when someone they know walks past, or someone they do not know walks past carefully.

He could go into the woods and give the man another hour of darkness to work in. Soles stood at the gate until he could admit that was what going after him would mean.

He went back inside.

The stairs took longer than they should have. On every step the right side of the world stayed silent, and twice he turned his head toward a sound that was already behind him.

The woman had covered the broken window with a blanket and gone without asking him anything else. It lifted and settled with the wind. He wrapped the pistol and put it with the agency file, then sat where he could see both the door and the wall.

Twice before dawn the house settled around him, a beam ticking in the cold, a door somewhere below, and both times his hand was on the knife before he had decided anything. Both times he made himself take it off again, finger by finger, and look at what was actually there: the blanket breathing in the window, the lamp, the wall. The wall was only a wall. He watched it anyway.

He tried to remember the face from the lightning.

A pale surface. Eyes that had been looking at his throat. Every time he fixed one feature, another slipped away. It was like trying to remember a man through somebody else’s mask.

By dawn, he had stopped trying to make that into a description.

He spread the map on the chair instead. His hands were steady. He noticed that, and did not trust it.