Episodul 276 · The Morning After

At nine in the morning the doctor finished with the hole under Soles’s collarbone and sat back on his stool and looked at it.

— I’ve seen knives go in there before, he said. It went past everything. The artery, the lung. Past all of it, by the width of a hair. He wiped his hands. You should be dead, and you’re not even very interesting.

He taped the dressing down and went to see to Tesa’s hand. Through the curtain Soles heard him tell her that the knuckles would mend, again, and that if she hit anything with them in the next month she could find another doctor.

Soles buttoned his shirt over the bandage. The pale blade was in the inside pocket of his coat, hanging on the back of the chair. Nobody had asked about it. Nobody had seen it come out of him except the people who had been in the chamber, and four of them were across the river behind a bakery door.

At ten the chief read his report aloud in the briefing room.

He read it standing, under the map and the standing orders and Krista’s seven pages, to the cleaners on the back row and the men from the entry teams and the man in gray, who had taken a chair by the door and kept his coat on. The cohort sat at the desk they had been given on the first day. Bram sat beside them, because nobody had told him where else to sit.

The report was short. At twenty-three forty the entry teams had gone down by the platform route. At one twelve the sterilization charge had been placed and fired. At one fifty-one the anomaly had been observed to cool. Operation successful. Residual effects among the remaining residents were being assessed.

The pilot team, the report said, had entered the site ahead of the operation without authorization, using a civilian guide. Its earlier action at the site, the breaking of a stone slab during the first descent, was assessed as the probable cause of the anomaly’s growth. The fugitive Varren had been present. He had escaped in the confusion.

The chief put the paper down.

— Statements from the guide and from one resident have been noted, he said, and attached.

Bram’s jaw moved. He said nothing.

Corvin sat at the end of the back row, the case on his knees. He did not look at Soles. He looked at the floor by his boots.

Then the man in gray stood up.

— Soles, he said. Where is Varren?

It was the question he had asked every morning for ten days. Soles had answered it every morning with what he knew.

— He went up the stairs to the surveyor’s landing a little after two, Soles said. With three of his people. I was on the floor. The teams were close enough to hear me through the rock. I could have called them.

The room had gone very quiet.

— I didn’t, Soles said.

He felt Krista beside him not move. Tesa let out a breath through her nose, which might have been a laugh. Maxim put his hand flat on the desk, beside Soles’s hand, not touching it.

The man in gray looked at him for a while.

— Thank you, he said. That’s the first complete answer anybody has given me this morning.

He turned back to the chief.

— The pilot is closed, he said. As of now. These four are released from the service of the detachment pending review. Their report goes to me. Not through you.

The chief opened his mouth, and the man in gray looked at him, and the chief closed it again.

— Mine isn’t finished, Krista said. It will be complete.

— I’m counting on that, the man in gray said.

Bram stood up. He still had snow drying on his boots.

— I’ll sign my statement again, he said. In front of you. All of it.

The man in gray nodded to him as if they were the only two people there.

❦

He caught them in the corridor, by the stairs to the store.

— Walk with me, he said to Soles. Only you.

Krista’s hand found Soles’s sleeve and let go. Tesa watched them go with her bandaged hand against her chest. He followed the man in gray down into the cellar, past the storekeeper’s empty table, to the shelf where the ropes were kept.

The man in gray took a coil down and turned it in his hands until he found the place. A splice, old work, very neat.

— Your rope, he said. Ten knots, then three meters between them instead of two. I have the ledger. I have the order that came through the chief, and the words it used. I have Corvin’s statement, which he gave me at six this morning without being asked, and which he will deny if anybody else asks him. And I have a surveyor who says the charge made it worse.

He put the rope back on the shelf.

— Why are you showing me all this?

— Because you answered the question.

— The chief’s report goes to the capital today, he went on. It says force cools these things. In a month they will be sending charges to every warm river in the country.

Soles felt the cold of the cellar go into the hole under his collarbone. He thought of the pull going out through the rock last night, toward other towns, other rivers. Toward men who would come with charges and call it cooling.

— You know it isn’t true, Soles said.

— I know a great many things that aren’t in reports, the man in gray said. The question is what I do with them, and when. A failed pilot can’t tell the capital anything. A man the capital has to listen to can.

He buttoned his coat to the collar.

— Go home. Rest. Your four are not the state’s any more. Keep the house until the end of the month. When I need you, I’ll come to the door myself.

— And when you come, what will you want?

The man in gray looked at him, and his eyes went to Soles’s coat, to the inside pocket, as if he could see the shape of it.

— I’ll know when I see it, he said.