Episode 252 · What It Cost

The tape was cold in his hand, and then it was behind him.

Three steps in, the frost under his boots turned to wet stone. The warmth closed over him like bathwater. His shoulders came down on their own. Under his ribs, a knot he had carried since Thursday let go, and he understood why nobody in this street was running.

It’ll feel like being allowed to stop.

He kept going.

The woman was ten meters from the seam. Eight. She walked with her coat open and her hands empty. The steam in front of her stretched into bright threads and broke against her face, and she smiled at it.

He was not going to reach her.

Then there was more time than there should have been.

The steam stopped moving. A drop of water hung under the gutter of the nearest house, fat and silver. The woman’s foot was lifted in a step that did not come down. Soles ran through all of it.

He caught her by the collar and the crook of her arm, a meter from the seam, and turned her round.

The stretched moment ended.

The seam flared. Not at him. Outward, along the ground, the way a pan spits when water hits it. Behind him somebody shouted. Under his boots the stone grew warmer.

The dark blade leaned on his hip. He felt it to the elbow.

Finish it.

The seam was right there, a hand’s breadth from his knee. One cut. He could feel exactly where it would go.

He had finished it once. It had come up into the street.

He dragged the woman back instead.

For two steps she came, heavy and agreeable, like a sleepwalker. Then she looked over her shoulder at the light, and woke.

She tore at his hand with her nails. She twisted out of one sleeve of her coat and threw herself back toward the seam with her whole weight, and when he caught her other arm she bit the back of his wrist. She was not strong. She did not have to be. Every time he pulled, she answered with everything she had, and the seam waited behind her, close.

Don’t grip. You’ll break the arm.

He thought of Tesa on the stairs, the marks of his fingers going from white to red, and opened his hand to take a better hold, and she was out of it.

His knees bent.

Not from her weight. The warmth had found the place in his legs where the slope and the rope and every step since Thursday were stored, and it was offering to take them. It did not come as a voice. It came as his own body, being reasonable. Sit down. A moment. Then go on.

His knee touched the wet stone.

The woman took one step toward the light, then another, her coat hanging from one shoulder.

Not the arm. The belt. Like Tesa.

He came up off the knee with his teeth together and caught her by the belt from behind, the grip that had brought Tesa back over the line, and lifted until only her toes touched the stone, so that every lunge she made went into his forearm and nowhere else. She kicked his shins. She clawed backward at his face. He walked backward with her through all of it and did not let his legs listen.

He hauled her past her shopping bag, past the coalman, past the boy, and then his boots were sliding on frost.

Except the frost was not where he had left it.

The line had moved. Five meters up the street, clean as before. The tape lay in the wet. The cleaner who had tied it was sitting on the curb beside the lamppost, hands loose on his knees, face turned toward the river.

Two more doorways stood on the warm side now. In one of them an old man in a cardigan had come out to see what the shouting was. He was sitting down on his step.

Soles put the woman into her husband’s arms. Her lips were gray. Her nails had left four lines across the back of his hand. The husband said her name, the same two syllables, and somewhere around the fifth time she coughed and said it was cold.

One out. And the street had paid for her with two more.

— That was you, Maxim said.

— Yes.

Krista was writing now. Fast. She did not look up.

— It moves when something feeds it, she said. Every time, further.

Maxim was already gone. He came back from the yard between two houses with a washing line coiled around his forearm, a peg still clipped to it. He knotted one end around his own waist, sat down on the frost with his back against the lamppost and his heels against the curb, and held out the other end.

— I’m the post, he said. You go in on the line, you grab, I pull. Nobody runs. Nobody does anything clever.

He was looking at Soles when he said the last part.

— Nobody does anything clever, Soles said, and tied the line around his waist.

The warmth took his shoulders again at the first step. He let it. He walked, he did not run, and he felt nothing in the blade but its weight.

The boy did not look up when Soles knelt beside him.

— In a minute, the boy said, the way children say it from a bath.

Soles got his arms under the boy’s and lifted. Behind him the line came taut. Maxim leaned back against the lamppost and pulled hand over hand, and Soles let himself be pulled, the boy’s school bag banging against both their knees.

On the frost, the boy began to shiver. Krista wrapped her coat around him.

The coalman was too heavy to lift. Soles got him by the belt and the collar and Maxim pulled, swearing, and Krista put her hands on the line behind Maxim’s, and the coalman came out on his back, his cap still in his lap.

Soles stood bent over on the cold side with his hands on his knees.

Twice in. Twice the warmth had asked him to sit down. The first time his knee had answered for him. The second time he had nearly let the rest of him follow.

Tesa took the line off his waist.

— You can’t hold a rope.

— I’m not going to hold it, she said. You are.

She knotted it around her own belt and put his hand on the knot. The same grip as on the slope. Then she stepped over.

He watched her shoulders come down. He watched her stop.

— Tesa.

She did not answer. She was looking at her bandaged hand. Slowly, as if she were testing ice, she closed it.

All the way. The last two fingers met her palm and stayed there.

— Oh, she said.

He pulled the knot an inch toward him.

She went, without turning around, to the cleaner on the curb. She took him by the collar with that hand and hauled him upright, and the rope went tight in Soles’s fist, and between them they dragged him back over the line.

Then she bent over the old man’s step and did it again.

When she came back onto the frost, she stood there with her fist held up in front of her face. Not a tremor in it.

— It finished, she said. In there.

She was not smiling. She looked at the fist the way you look at something you have been given in a shop and not paid for. Then she looked past it, down the street, at the steam.

Soles kept his hand on her belt.

The cleaner was on his knees, coughing. His color came back in patches. When he could breathe, he took the radio off his chest and pressed the button.

— Breach has moved, he said. Five meters. Pilot team crossed the tape.

Krista looked up from the notebook.

— You were sitting in it. We pulled you out.

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the tape lying in the wet, and the boy in Krista’s coat, and the line still knotted around Tesa’s waist.

The radio said something short.

— Yes, sir, the cleaner said. Them. On their own.