Episodul 272 · What Slipped

The gap closed on the dark blade like a hand.

Every thread in the slit came toward it. Not the three he had chosen to spare. Those held, pulled tight away from the cut, to the stairs and the grating. Everything else. The bundle that went up toward the town bent down into the root as if the blade were a drain, and the fine strands went into it one after another, and some went through and kept going, and some did not.

He heard them go. A small sound each time, like a wire parting. Somewhere above them, under the snow, people were losing something, and he could not see who. He counted without meaning to and lost count at five.

Stop. Pull it out. Stop.

His hand would not open. Both blades were in it now, the note in his teeth, and something going out of the middle of him faster than before.

On his other side Tesa’s thread jerked once, hard, toward the slit, and sprang back. She swore through her teeth and did not let go of him.

Beside him Krista went rigid.

He saw it with the pale blade, because he was still looking with it. Her thread, the one that had been tight all night, was bending toward the slit. Toward the dark blade. The way a plant turns.

She felt it. He saw her face change.

— Krista.

She did not answer him. Her lips moved, and he knew what she was doing, because he had watched her do it at desks and doors for months: she was reaching for the man in her, the one who read hands. Calling him to hold on.

Then she stopped.

She let go of his shoulder and took his right wrist in both hands, the dark blade’s wrist, and pulled it back out of the slit.

He opened his hand. He did not decide to. The dark blade fell and swung on its chain against his leg.

Her thread went slack. Then it was not there at all.

The note dropped away. The light from the pale blade did not. It ran down his arm and into Krista’s hands, still closed on his wrist, and something grew out of her chest where the old thread had been. Thin. New. Pulled tight at once.

Soles’s knees went. Tesa took him, and Krista did not let go, and between them they lowered him to the stone a long step back from the light. The middle of him felt hollow, like a room after the furniture has been carried out. He could hear the slit breathing, and it sounded farther away than it was.

On the stairs Noct’s thread hung where it had hung all night, Zora’s beside it. Through the grating, Halloran’s. Three. He had kept those three. He did not know how many he had lost.

Krista looked at her own hands on his wrist as if she did not know whose they were.

— I’m holding you, she said. Only she said it slowly, and differently, like a woman checking a measurement.

Across the chamber Varren had turned his face up toward the stone, toward the place where the bundle went into the ceiling. He stood very still, listening the way a man listens to doors closing in a house he thought was empty.

His lips moved.

— Six, Varren said, to nobody. Seven.

He had said he would know. He was counting them.

❦

Maxim had the names of nineteen people written on the back of a delivery slip when the surveyor’s coat jerked in his hand.

Bram had gone back to the hatch to bring up the rope. Maxim had stayed with the people. He had been going down the line in the snow, one by one. Asking. Writing the name, the street, whether they would walk to the bridge if somebody walked with them. Most said yes and did not move. He wrote it anyway.

— Third house from the pump, the woman beside the surveyor had told him. I’ll go when he goes.

— He’s going.

— Then I’ll go.

She had not moved either. Her eyes had gone back to the mill as soon as he looked down at the slip. Ordric had kept a gate for thirty years. You wrote the face down and the crossing after it.

He knew every face on the bank. He had known them since the trucks.

The surveyor said something with no air in it and went down on one knee in the snow.

All along the bank people moved. Not together. One woman put her hand to her chest. A man three places down sat down where he stood. The old man at the end of the line laughed once, surprised, and then began to cry.

Maxim felt it go through the surveyor and into his own hand.

It was very small. A door shutting somewhere at the back of a long building. He did not know what it was until he looked up.

He looked along the line, and he did not know them.

He had their names on the slip. He had their streets. He had stood in front of every one of them in the last ten minutes and asked. The faces were there, red with cold, wet-eyed, and they were faces. Just faces. Nothing came up behind them. No truck, no suitcase, no doorstep with a one on it.

Ordric.

Nobody answered.

Something else did. Not in words. In his legs, which had already turned him toward the bridge. In his free hand, which had already taken the elbow of the woman from the third house, and was steering her, gently, the way you steer someone onto a plank laid across water.

He did not know he could do that. He did not know where it came from. His hands had always been good with weight. This was not weight. This was knowing where the other side was, and how far, and who should go first.

The surveyor was looking up at him. His face had changed. The pull had gone out of it, the way it goes out of a cut rope.

— It stopped, the surveyor said. It’s stopped calling me.

He started to laugh, kneeling in the snow, and Maxim held on to his coat and looked at nineteen strangers whose names he had written down himself.