Episode 230 · Severed Fate

— I know how this sounds, the Hunter said. A man cornered by his own people, telling you they’re bad people. You’ve heard it before.

— Not from somebody who came to cut my throat.

— You came for mine.

Soles looked at the blanket against the wound. He had.

The Hunter waited for him to argue, then seemed relieved when he did not.

— I worked for them long enough to know which rooms the useful people went into. Which doors stayed locked. I kept bringing people in and letting somebody else decide what happened after the handover.

Soles remembered a wrench in a basement and a daughter’s number disappearing beneath a recovery label.

— Until those three?

— Until they needed my name on a thing I knew was a lie. I should have asked before that. That doesn’t make the answer different now.

He nodded toward the paper.

— Ask for the transfer log. Same number. See which building they send you to, and whether they let you leave it with a copy.

Soles took out his own phone and photographed the page. The Hunter watched the screen go dark.

— Keep that one. They give you another?

Soles touched the agency phone through his coat.

— Thought so.

The man’s breathing had changed. He left longer spaces between the words, gathering himself before each sentence.

— They won’t be your friends, he said. They’ll use what works. When you stop working the way they need, they’ll write something down and send the next man. If the people you love are the easiest way to move you, they’ll use those too.

Soles did not have to imagine the right photograph on the wrong desk. He had already sat in front of it.

— The people who walk through walls, he said. Are you all theirs?

— No.

The answer was immediate.

— They train us. Employ us. Some of them think that’s the same as making us.

— Then what makes you?

The Hunter looked at the stone behind his shoulder. His free hand rested against it, fingers spread, as though he might remember something by touch.

— Walking through it. Who gets that?

— Only those whose Fate was cut.

Soles waited for the rest.

The man looked back at him.

— Cut how?

— You want a better answer than I’ve got left.

He did not smile. The hand came away from the wall and returned to the blanket.

Soles could not tell whether he had been given a saying, an explanation worn down by being repeated, or the edge of a thing the man had once understood. He remembered it anyway.

— How many? he asked. People like you.

— More than they send to your door.

— And people like me?

The Hunter’s eyes went to the blade.

— I don’t know what you are.

He meant it. The knowledge made Soles feel less safe than a number would have.

For a while they listened to the water outside. Soles could hear it clearly on his left. On the right, the ringing rose and fell beneath every other sound.

The man was no longer holding the wound firmly enough. Soles saw his hand loosen and tighten again.

There was a road out of these woods. A signed page against Soles’s chest said he could take it home after the assignment was confirmed. Nothing on it required him to ask these questions. Nothing in this room would make the signature disappear if he stopped asking them now.

He hated how simple that had become.

The Hunter looked toward the door when Soles moved away from the bench.

— Take the paper, he said.

Soles folded it and put it apart from the release order.

The man’s knife stayed on the bench. His free hand lay open beside it.

Soles let the gathered chain slip from his right fingers. He had room for the throw, and no rock for the chain to catch on; the man was still, and the familiar balance offered him the same certainty it had offered against a marked board.

He knew whose hand he was using.

The dark point struck between the Hunter’s eyes. His head fell back against the wall and stayed there. Soles waited, then went close enough to check him before retrieving the knife by hand.

Strength returned to Soles’s arm before he had moved. He had felt the same return on the bridge. He could not name what the knife had taken this time. He knew it had been a life.

He used the agency phone for the photograph. Then he wiped the blade, gathered the chain and left the cabin.

On the return path, he tried to measure Varren against the man he had been three months earlier. He had taken the Hunter down in the room and still nearly died beneath him. At the stream he had nearly died again, under a man with one hand on his own wound. In the ravine he had needed a bird, a ledge and a man looking in the wrong direction. Training had kept his feet beneath him. It had not made the forest safe.

You saw what I used against you. Not what I had.

Varren had said it in the doorway, with Soles’s hand still on the door. At the bank, all of them had stood against him. Soles had counted that as the measure of the man because it was the part he had survived.

He had no measure of the rest.

The Hunter had not known how many people could do what he did. Hundreds? Thousands? Soles thought of streets he had walked through without looking at the walls, of customers who had put their hands on his workbench and waited to be served. He had been living among possibilities he had only just learned to recognize.

He stopped at the stream, beside the low rock with the handprint, and washed the blood from his fingers. His shoulder stung when he bent. Water carried it between the stones. He watched until he could look at his own hand without immediately seeing the bench.

Then he took out the agency phone and attached the photograph.

Assignment completed.

The reply arrived before he reached the charcoal road.

Completion received. Well done. Return to station for release.

He read the middle two words once more, put the phone away and kept walking.