Episodul 274 · Witnesses

It took Soles three tries to stand.

The first time his legs did not believe him. The second time Tesa caught him by the belt before he reached the floor. The third time Krista said, very calmly, that she would count to three and he would stand on three, and he did, mostly because she had said so.

He stood in the cold chamber with the hole under his collarbone and the pale blade inside his coat and looked at what was left. A crack in the stone where the slit had been, a finger long. The fallen shelf. Tesa’s blood on the floor. The table, with Varren’s flashlight still lying on it, pointed at nothing.

Varren had watched him get up.

He was standing now, by the table, and his face had the look of a man going over a sum he had checked three times and could not make come out. He looked at Soles’s chest. At his own hands. At Soles’s face again, at whatever he had seen wake there.

Then he turned to the stairs.

— Zora, he said. Noct.

They came. Noct got up off the tread and went first, keeping to the middle. Zora followed him, and stopped once at the top, by the shut slab, to look back at Soles. Halloran came last, from the grating. He passed Soles without a word. Passing Tesa, he held out his fist, and after a moment she touched it with her good one.

The stairs came out on the surveyor’s landing. Soles had stood on that landing. He knew how close it was to the street.

He could have shouted. Through the rock, the teams were still there, close enough to hear him. One word, and the man in gray would have Varren before he reached the door.

Bring him in, or the pilot closes.

Soles watched the slab grind open at the top of the stairs, and the four of them go up through it into the dark, and he said nothing at all.

Krista was watching his face.

— I know, he said.

She did not say anything. She took his arm.

❦

The way back was the way they had come, only longer. The arches on his knees, with Tesa’s hand in the back of his coat. The gap in the step, where Krista went first and turned and waited with both arms out. The ledge, the black water, the rope.

It was past three when Bram and Maxim pulled him out of the hatch.

The mill floor was lit from outside by the headlights of the trucks. Through the open door the snow on the bank was white and hard in the light. The trucks were still there, and around them men in coveralls stood smoking with their hands cupped around the flame, the way men do after a long job that went the way they said it would.

Corvin was among them. He saw Soles come out of the mill on Maxim’s shoulder, and his cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth.

The people were still on the bank, but they were no longer a line. They sat in the snow in twos and threes. Some had blankets from the trucks. A woman was rocking a little, back and forth, with her arms around her knees, and talking to somebody who was not there, and getting no answer. A man three places down kept putting his hand flat on his chest as if he had lost his wallet.

Those are mine, Soles thought. Not his. Mine.

Tesa came up the rope after him and sat down in the snow by the door, holding her hand against her chest. Krista came last. She sat on the step with her notebook open on her knee and wrote the time first, before anything else, and then kept writing.

Maxim set him down on an upturned crate by the mill door and stood beside him, not quite looking at the bank.

— I wrote them all down, Maxim said. Nineteen. He held out the slip. I can’t tell you which one is which.

Soles looked at him.

— I mean it, Maxim said. I look at them and they’re just people. I knew every one of them yesterday.

He folded the slip and put it in his pocket and kept his hand on it.

Soles’s own hands would not stop shaking. He put them between his knees. The cold had got into the middle of him, into the place that had gone hollow at the slit, and it sat there and did not warm.

Bram came out with the rope coiled over his shoulder. He did not sit. He stood in front of Soles with the rope and the snow on his boots and looked at the hole in Soles’s shirt for a long moment.

— I’ll tell them what I saw, Bram said. That’s what I agreed to. All of it.

— All of it might not help you.

— It isn’t supposed to help me.

Soles nodded. There was nothing to say to that which would not make it smaller.

Across the yard, a car door opened. The chief got out. Then, from the other side, the man in gray, buttoning his coat against the cold, looking first at the trucks and the men around them, and then at the mill, and then at Soles on his crate.

Corvin stepped out from the trucks to meet the chief halfway. Soles could not hear what he said. He did not need to. The chief nodded twice and looked pleased, and the man in gray did not look pleased at all. He was counting the people in the snow. Every morning for ten days he had asked Soles one question. Soles could see him getting ready to ask it again.

Then he started across the yard toward the mill.

The surveyor got up before he reached them. He had been sitting a little apart, with a blanket around his shoulders and his ruined pants frozen stiff at the knee. He limped out into the middle of the yard and stood there, in the man in gray’s way, swaying a little.

— You’ll want to know what happened, the surveyor said. I was under it when they set their charge off. Right beside it. With my hand on it.

The man in gray stopped.

— It didn’t go cold, the surveyor said. It got louder. Ask me.