Episodul 253 · The Deadline

The order came to the detachment at four, on two sheets of fax paper that were still curling when the chief read them out.

He read them standing, under the map, to the whole room. Behind him his office door stood half open. He had not lit the lamp in there. The cohort at the desk he had given them. The cleaners on the back row. Corvin at the end with the case on his knees. The man who had tied the tape that morning sat with a blanket around his shoulders and looked at the floor between his boots.

— Residential sector east of the embankment, from the bridge to the mill, the chief read. All occupants to be evacuated within ten days of this notice. On the eleventh day the detachment will proceed to sterilization of the site.

He turned the page.

— Occupants who decline to leave will be treated as part of the site.

Nobody on the back row moved. They had not needed to hear it. They had known before the fax machine started.

— Sterilization, Maxim said. Of a street. People go for bread in it.

— For ten more days.

Soles turned his head so the chief was on his left side.

— Whatever you use on it, he said, it’ll drink. You’ll make it bigger.

The chief looked at him for the first time since the fax.

— Is that in your report?

— Since yesterday, Krista said. With the requisition.

— Then it’s being read.

He folded the sheets in half, then in half again, and put them in his breast pocket. His thumb went to the cap of his pen. A quarter turn. Back.

— The pilot mandate stands, he said. Pending review.

He went into his office and shut the door.

On the back row someone laughed, short, through his nose. Corvin did not. He opened the case on his knees, looked at whatever was inside, and closed it again.

As Soles passed the bench, the man in the blanket spoke without lifting his head.

— I said what he told me to say.

His hands were still pale at the knuckles. He turned them over and looked at the palms, as if the warm street might still be on them somewhere.

— I was sitting down, he said. I know I was sitting down.

Nobody on the bench looked at him. Soles did not know what to answer, so he nodded, and the man nodded back at the floor.

Krista was already in the corridor with her phone.

She dialed from the card she kept in the back of her notebook, the one with no name on it, only a number. Soles stood at the window beside her. Below, in the yard, two men were loading a truck with rolls of tape and boxes he did not recognize.

Down the corridor, behind the chief’s door, a telephone began to ring.

Krista looked up from the card. It rang again. On the third ring it stopped, and the voice came into her ear, unhurried.

— Miss Krista.

She tilted the phone so Soles could hear. He knew the voice before it said anything else.

Krista gave the reference from the top of the mandate, slowly, the way she would read a number to someone writing it down.

— Your report was received Friday, eighteen ten, the man in gray said. Status: under analysis.

— Whose analysis?

— Mine.

— Has anything else come in from this location?

— The detachment’s report. Nine forty this morning. Pilot team widened breach unassisted. There’s a recommendation attached.

— May I hear it?

— Not yet.

Krista’s eyes went still on the yard below.

— The man on the tape radioed at twenty past nine.

— I know. I was here at twenty past.

Paper moved behind the door. Soles heard it twice, once in the phone and once down the corridor.

— And the requisition? Krista said. The rope.

— Very good work. Also under analysis.

— Thank you, she said. That’s very helpful.

She put the phone in her pocket. The chief’s door stayed shut.

— Twenty minutes, she said. He had it typed before we were out of the street. And he let it go up.

Maxim had come up behind them. He did not say anything clever. He put one hand on the back of Krista’s neck, briefly, the way he did with Lucky when there was thunder, and took it away.

— And ours is being analyzed, he said.

They walked home along the embankment at dusk.

The cleaners had started at the bridge. Two of them, one with a bucket, one with a stick of white chalk as thick as a thumb. At every door the one with the chalk drew a cross on the wood at head height and wrote a number under it.

10.

A woman in an apron opened her door while he was still writing. She read it. She looked up the street toward the steam, then down at the chalk on her own door, and closed it again without a word.

Nobody shouted. That was what Soles noticed. Nobody came out to argue. People stood in their doorways in their slippers and read the number and went back in, and behind them the lamps went on, one kitchen after another, as if it were any other evening.

Their own door had a cross on it.

Krista stopped and looked at it for a long moment. Then she took out her pen and wrote the time in the notebook, under the number.

Inside, Mina was asleep against the radiator. Lucky got up to meet them and leaned against Maxim’s legs until he knelt.

Tesa was at the window. She had not come to the detachment. She stood with the curtain pulled back, and when she heard them she held up her right hand without turning around and closed it. All the way. Opened it.

— Still fine, she said. Doesn’t hurt anywhere.

She was not looking at the hand. She was looking down the street, at the steam over the river, and her voice had the same easy lightness it had had at breakfast.

Soles went and stood beside her. He did not touch her belt. He stood close enough that he could.

Ten days. He went through it the way he would go through a lock. The blade fed it. The slowing fed it. Whatever the truck in the yard was carrying would feed it too, and the men who had loaded it did not know. That left rope, and feet, and whatever Krista could read off a wall.

— Ten days, Krista said behind them. Then whatever they bring.

She took her notebook to the other window and began to count the lit ones down the street. Her lips moved. Soles counted with her, because it was something to do.

Forty-one. Forty-two. The last house before the tape.

On the far side of the tape, the street was dark. The cleaners had cleared it by noon. Every door down there had a cross on it, and nobody behind any of them.

Krista was writing the number when a window came on below the tape.

Then, two doors down, another.