Episode 269 · Crossfire

Tesa had the surveyor’s hand in hers and the edge of the shelf a foot from her face.

The stone lay across his legs from the knee down. His other hand was still reaching past her for the slit. Dust settled on his eyelashes and he did not blink it away.

She shifted her weight to get her right fist under the low edge.

A hand closed on her wrist. Not hard. Exactly hard enough. Her arm went up behind her and her cheek met the shelf, and Halloran’s voice came down beside her ear, very calm, the voice of a man who had done this to people before and had not liked them.

— I said don’t touch it.

— Let go.

— You want it to be something you can hit, he said. That’s all. You’ve wanted that since you came down.

It was not the voice that had held the rope at the hatch. Tesa stopped pulling. Reil never fought the hold. Reil waited for the man holding it to breathe.

Wait. Watch his feet.

Halloran’s weight was on his front foot, his hip against her back. His eyes were on the stone, not on her. He breathed out.

She turned into him and hit him once, short, from below, under the ribs. Enough to open a hand. No more.

The grip went. Halloran folded over his own arm and sat down in the dust, mouth open, getting no air.

Tesa put her fist against his, knuckles to knuckles, the way it was done. After.

— It’s on its left edge, he said when he could. Hit the right. It tips away from him.

He was right. She could see it now that he had said it.

She set her feet, set her hand, and hit the right edge of the shelf with everything she had decided to spend. The stone rose a palm’s width. She got her shoulder under it before it came down.

Her healed hand split open across the knuckles. She heard herself make a sound.

— Now, she said.

Halloran took the surveyor under the arms and pulled.

The man screamed when his legs came out. The stone ground on her shoulder and she held it, and held it, counting the way Reil had counted in the third round, until Halloran said he was clear and she let the shelf down onto nothing.

❦

Soles kept Varren on his left.

It cost him the pillar. It cost him the light. Every step Varren took to the right, Soles turned to meet it, and every turn put the slit behind him, breathing on his neck.

The chain was longer than Varren’s arm. That was the one thing Soles had that Varren did not, and he meant to keep it between them.

Then the slit breathed out, long and loud, and filled his good ear, and for one breath he heard nothing else at all.

Varren was already moving. Soles saw the shape come out of the noise and brought the dark blade up, too late. Two fingers touched the inside of his forearm.

The arm stopped.

It was still his. He could feel the chain on his wrist, the grip in his palm. It would not move. It hung in front of him like something nailed to the air, and Varren stood close enough to take the blade out of it, and did not.

— Go, Varren said.

The arm came back. Soles stumbled with it.

Varren stepped away and began to circle right again.

He could have had it, Soles thought. He didn’t want it. He wanted me to know he could.

❦

Maxim saw Halloran first, coming out of the dust on his knees, dragging the surveyor by the armpits.

— Take him, Halloran said. Get him up.

Maxim took him. The man weighed nothing. His legs were bleeding through his pants and he did not seem to know it. He twisted in Maxim’s arms toward the light.

— It’s nearly— Let me—

Maxim got him over his shoulder, the way you carry a sack of feed, and turned for the grating. Bram had the rope already in his hands.

Zora stood in the opening.

She was soaked to the waist and shaking, and she put both hands flat on Maxim’s chest.

— Put him down, she said. Ask him.

— He’ll say stay.

— Then he says stay.

Maxim pushed.

It was like pushing a door that had decided not to open. She took his weight and leaned into it and gave none of it back, and then she turned, just a little, and his own push carried him sideways into the wall. The surveyor slid half off his shoulder.

Something hot came up through Maxim’s arms. He knew it. It came when he was angry and it never asked what for. He could lift her out of the way. He could lift her into the water.

His hand was fisted in her coat. The surveyor’s fingers were clawing over his shoulder toward the slit.

Both of them pulling the same man.

Maxim put the surveyor down on the ledge and crouched in front of him so he had to look at someone.

— What do you want? he said.

The surveyor’s eyes went to the light. Came back.

— I want it to stop calling me.

— Then come up where it can’t shout.

A long time. Water running past their boots.

— Up, the surveyor said.

Zora let her hands fall. She put one of them on the surveyor’s back, briefly, and stepped aside. Then she turned back into the dark, calling Noct’s name.

Bram led. The ledge, the arches, the gap in the step. The surveyor went up the rope with Maxim under him. At the top Maxim got a knee over the edge of the hatch. The mill floor was empty. The trucks stood outside with their doors open and nobody in them, and the side door stood open, and the cold came in through it with a sound Maxim did not understand until he was outside.

People.

Twenty, thirty of them, along the bank in the snow. Coats over nightclothes. Shoes without socks. He knew some of them. People he had helped onto trucks with their suitcases this week, who had looked at the beds in the center and asked to be taken back.

None of them spoke. All of them were facing the mill.

The surveyor stopped beside them and turned to face it too.

Maxim stood in the snow with his hand still in the man’s coat and looked along the line of faces. He understood that he was going to have to ask every one of them.