Episode 275 · His Eyes

The slab let Varren out onto the surveyor’s landing a little after two in the morning, into the smell of a cold stove and a coat that had been left on its hook.

He had left his own on the floor of the chamber. He noticed it on the stairs going down to the street, when the cold reached his shirt, and did not go back.

Noct went ahead of him into the snow, down the middle of the street, as far from the house fronts as the street allowed. Zora walked at Varren’s side without touching him. Halloran came last and pulled the street door shut behind them, gently, the way you close a door on somebody asleep.

The street was empty. Every door had its one, crossed out. Across the river the trucks had their headlights on the mill, and in the light there were people sitting on the bank. He could not see faces from here. He did not need to. He had counted seven, down there, with his face turned up to the stone, one wire after another going quiet. Seven, and then he had stopped, because the next one would have been somebody he could name.

They walked toward the bridge.

Here. You can have it.

He had said that. He went back over it the way he went back over a wall he had climbed, checking each hold.

Soles on his back. The knee on his chest. Both of his own hands on the handle and Soles’s hand over them, holding, not strong enough. He had chosen the place. Under the collarbone, then down and in. He had done that before, in other lives, in other cold rooms. He knew what it felt like when it was right.

It had felt right.

He had watched Soles’s eyes and seen the moment the blade reached the heart.

And then Soles had stood up.

Varren stopped at the foot of the bridge with his hand on the rail. The iron was so cold it burned.

Your hand turned.

That was it. At the last, when the weight went in, his hand had turned a finger’s width, the way a hand turns from a dog it has raised. He had not felt it turn. That was how it went, with people you had let yourself get close to. You did not feel your hand turn. You found out afterward.

The rope on the step, the elbow in the crowd, the way Soles opened his hand when he had won. He had sat in the bakery and built a case against him out of true things, and his hand had not believed the case.

That was why.

It was a better reason than the other one. The other one had no reason at all.

The old voice had not spoken since the handle pushed his hands away. He looked for it on the bridge and found it a long way back, very still, the way it went still near the pale blade. He thought it was ashamed. He did not know of whom.

— Varren, Zora said. Are you hurt?

— No. I’m coming.

They crossed. Below them the river ran black and loud between the ice. For a moment, in the headlights from the far bank, he thought it was steaming. Then the wind took whatever it was, and it was only water.

Halfway over, he let himself look at the other thing.

After the blade went in, something had woken in Soles. Varren had seen it come up behind his eyes like a man coming into a lit room from a dark one. Not anything Soles had brought down with him. A stranger. New. Put there.

By the blade.

He did not know how. He did not know what it was or whose. He knew the pale blade had been in his bag for months and he had never once held it out over a man and found out what it did.

Zora had one life in her, at Echo, barely awake. Noct had one, and it frightened him. Halloran had one. Seven people on the bank had one fewer than they had at midnight.

If the blade could put one in—

He took the thought and set it down very carefully, the way you set down something that might go off, and walked on.

And the rest.

He had watched Soles stand at the slit with both halves and try. Really try, bleeding, Krista and Tesa holding him up. He had watched the threads jump. He had felt seven of his own go.

If it had been his hands on both blades, he would have cut those threads himself. Not by accident. He would have chosen which ones. He would have chosen fast, and well, and called it mercy, and gone to see the families afterward.

Soles had done it blind, trying not to.

Varren did not know which of them he would rather be. That frightened him more than the blade had.

The bakery door had its one, crossed out like the others. Halloran unlocked it and went straight through to the kitchen and put his hand on the oven, and it was cold, and he stood there with his palm on the iron for a long moment.

Then he opened the firebox and began to lay a fire.

Noct took the chair by the back door. He did not open the door. Zora sat at the table and put her hands flat on it.

Nobody asked. They were waiting for him to say it.

— I had him, Varren said. On his back. The blade in.

Noct looked up.

— And I couldn’t, Varren said. At the end. My hand wouldn’t.

— Happens, Noct said. Mine won’t hold a glass most mornings.

Halloran’s back stayed turned. The kindling caught.

Zora looked at him for a long time. She was the one who told him the truth when it was hard, quietly, so nobody else heard. He waited for her to do it now.

— All right, Zora said.

That was all.

Varren sat down across from her. The fire began to tick in the oven. Outside, toward the river, someone was shouting names into the dark, the way you do when you are counting people and want them to answer.

Later, alone at the window over the sink, he said it once more, to the cold glass.

— I couldn’t.

By morning he believed it.