Episodul 245 · Tesa Down

Krista took Corvin’s lamp from the floor of the chamber. Nobody said his name.

— Up, Soles said. Krista first. Then Tesa. I’m last.

— Because you’ll argue otherwise, Tesa said.

— Because I’m slowest on a rope.

— That too.

The slope rose out of the chamber into the steam, the old gray line running up it in the lamplight. Twenty meters to the shelf. Ten knots of the old rope, two meters apart. That part, at least, they could trust.

Krista hung the lamp from her belt and took the line in both hands.

— Nine, she said, and started up.

Soles put his palm flat on the wall before he followed. The rock was warmer than it had been on the way down. Under his hand, very faintly, it ticked, the way a stove ticks when someone has just fed it.

He took the rope.

— Talk to me, Maxim said from Krista’s pocket. Anything. Shopping lists.

— Eight, Krista said.

— That’s a short list.

They climbed backward up wet stone, feet braced, the line burning through their gloves. Through what was left of Soles’s, it burned on raw palms. The steam was thicker now. It came up behind them in slow breaths, each one hotter than the last, and Soles could feel the dark blade on his hip lean back toward it every time, the way it had leaned toward the seam.

Not closed. Narrower. Awake.

He had gone in for one cut and pulled on something that pulled back. Whatever held the other ends had not let go when he did. It had only stopped being patient.

— Seven.

The ticking became a crack.

It came from above them, not below. A sound like a branch breaking in frost. Soles looked up past Tesa’s boots.

A slab of the roof had opened along a seam of its own. As wide as a door. It hung by one edge over the slope, over the rope, over Krista.

Then it leaned.

— Krista! Tesa said. Down!

Krista dropped flat against the slope. The slab came away.

Tesa did not climb out of its path. She climbed into it.

She jammed her left boot against the rope where it crossed a ridge of stone, locked her knee, and drove her right fist up into the falling rock from a hand’s width away.

There was no swing in it. There was no room. Only the short, ugly push he had watched her practice on a padded post, the one that hit harder than it had any right to.

The slab broke.

Half of it went past Krista’s head into the dark. The other half came down on Tesa’s shoulder and slid off her back, and then there was only dust and the sound of stone going on falling below them for a long time.

Tesa made no noise at all.

Soles was beside her before he decided to be. She was still on her feet, still braced against the rope, her right arm held out from her body as if it belonged to somebody else.

Her hand was wrong. The knuckles had gone flat. The wrist bent in a place where wrists didn’t.

— Tesa.

— Don’t, she said through her teeth. I’m counting.

— Counting what?

— How many things I can still feel. It’s a short list too.

She looked at the hand once, the way she looked at an opponent’s guard, and then away from it.

— After, she said. That’s how we do it.

He had heard her say it before, touching a glove that wasn’t there. It had belonged to the boxer once. Down here it belonged to her.

Above them Krista had lifted her head. Her face was gray with dust.

— Is she…

— Climb, Tesa said. Six. Go.

Krista went.

Below them, at the bottom of the slope, the chamber had begun to glow. Not lamplight. The color of the seam.

— Maxim, Soles said. We need a doctor on the bank.

— Already called one. You’ve got two minutes and a very bad road.

Soles took Tesa’s belt in one hand and the rope in the other. She climbed with her left hand and her legs, the right arm folded against her chest, and every time her boot slipped he felt it through the belt before she said anything. She never said anything.

Behind them, the heat came on. Not a breath now. A slow, steady pressure, like standing with his back to an open oven. The ticking had spread into the walls on both sides. When he put his knuckles to the rock for balance it was hot enough to sting.

It was not following them. It was getting bigger, and they happened to be in the way.

— Four, Krista called from above. Three. I can see the ring.

Then Maxim’s voice, not from the phone. From above. Real, and very close.

— Give me your hand, Tesa. The left one. I’m not an idiot.

The rope went taut from the top. Maxim was hauling. Soles felt Tesa’s weight lift off his arm, and then the slope was a ladder, and the ladder was cold iron under his gloves, and he came up into gray daylight with steam pouring off his coat.

Tesa sat on the shelf with her back to the rock and her arm in her lap, and did not look at it. Krista knelt beside her, already unwinding the scarf from her own neck. Maxim stood over all of them with the rope still looped around his forearm and his face the color of the snow.

Krista bound the hand against the hard cover of her notebook, wrapping the scarf around both, quick and tight, the way she tied up bundles of photographs. Tesa watched her do it.

— Next time, she said, the roof goes first.

Out on the river, the steam lay lower on the water than it had that morning. Soles noticed it and could not think what it meant.

Nobody spoke for the space of three breaths.

Then Maxim looked at the hole under the bank, and at the rope, and at Soles.

— Corvin came up twenty minutes ago, he said. He said you were right behind him.

Soles looked down at the line in his hands, at the torn gloves gone dark around it.

Twenty minutes ago they had been kneeling at the seam.