Episode 42 · Every Knot

— III —

In the mountain laboratory, long before the alarm, Elias watched the colonel spread photographs across his table like a hand of cards.

There were twelve. Elias counted them before looking at them, out of habit, then examined each one from left to right without touching.

A command post, its exterior walls intact and windows unbroken. Inside, overturned tables and men lying in the positions in which death had found them: one still in his chair with his head on the maps, another beside a door still locked from the inside. A hotel room, bolt drawn, a general in his shirt on the carpet. A barracks. A bridge. Another room, with a barred window and locked door.

— All in the last six weeks, the colonel said. All within two hundred kilometers of the capital.

Elias looked again at the door locked from the inside.

— Who found it like that?

— His orderly. Broke it down in the morning.

— Was the key in the lock?

The colonel blinked. He searched through the papers in his folder and found the report.

— Yes. On the inside.

— And the window?

— Closed. Barred.

Elias nodded. He leaned over the photograph to see the dust on the sill more clearly—no mark in it—and the hinges of the door, which had not been touched. Against his will, he felt an explanation beginning to assemble. A duplicate key. Someone already inside. The orderly. It was simple and elegant and closed every gap, which was precisely why he disliked it.

— People say they walk through walls, the colonel said.

— People say many things.

— They also say they use whatever they brought out of the ruins in the northern mountains. Something no one knows how to make anymore.

— And what do you believe?

The colonel looked at him. He was a tired man in a uniform tailored for a fuller body, eyes red from sleep he had not had in a long time.

— I believe that however they get in, Doctor, they can get in. And I want to know how much time you have left before it no longer matters whether they do.

Elias did not answer at once. He looked at the clock on the wall. At the neighboring table, his colleague had stopped writing.

— How many months? the colonel pressed.

— I don’t work in months. I work in verifications.

— Then how many verifications?

Elias told him. The colonel made a quick calculation, one Elias saw on his face before he said it aloud.

— That’s too long.

— It’s exactly as long as it needs to be.

— The front isn’t waiting for you to finish your verifications.

— Matter isn’t waiting for the front to finish either.

His colleague set her pencil down slowly, the way she did when she wanted to tell him he had gone too far. Elias did not look at her.

The colonel gathered the photographs into a stack. At the last one he stopped. He held it for a moment, then placed it back on the table apart from the others.

— We don’t show this one often, he said.

It was a dead man.

He lay on his back on the gravel of a courtyard, black armor without insignia opened across the chest by someone who had tried either to save him or to see what lay beneath it. Young. Younger than Elias had expected. His face was calm, almost bored, and there was a small hole above his left eyebrow.

— A sentry, the colonel said. Luck. One bullet fired into the dark at random. He’s the only one we’ve ever found. They usually take their dead with them. They didn’t have time for this one.

Elias looked at the dead man’s left hand.

A cord was tied around the wrist over the black glove. Or it had once been cord. It no longer looked like cord.

The knots had tightened against one another, so many that they formed a single thick, gnarled piece, like a root wrapped twice around a stone.

— What is that?

— His count, the colonel said. Every knot is a person. They all wear it, from what we’ve learned. Here, on the left. Some have two, one on each hand, when they run out of room. They say it’s a custom from before they were Hunters. From when they were savages in the forests, bounty hunters, in our grandparents’ time. This one had forty-one.

Elias leaned closer. He counted. He did not want to count and counted anyway, the way he counted everything, left to right, the tip of his pen held above the paper without touching it.

— Forty-three, he said.

— What?

— There aren’t forty-one. There are forty-three. Two are tied over each other here, beside the wrist. You can tell from the shadow.

The colonel took the photograph and held it close to his eyes. He fell silent.

— What difference does it make? he said at last.

Elias did not know. He stared at the two knots drawn tight over one another, as if someone had tied them on the same day. Or in the same hour. He wondered who the two had been. He thought about how, on the colonel’s paper, they had remained uncounted.

— None, he said.

The colonel put the photographs back in the folder. At the door he stopped and turned.

— I’ll ask you again in a month, Doctor. Perhaps by then you’ll be working in months.

He left. His footsteps sounded down the corridor to the elevator, then the heavy elevator door, then nothing.

His colleague rose from her table and came beside him.

— You didn’t have to count his knots.

— The count was wrong.

— He was a dead man, Elias.

— Exactly. Someone ought to count him correctly.

She did not answer. She looked at him for a long moment with the expression she sometimes wore, somewhere between irritation and something gentler, then returned to her table.

Elias was left alone with the calculations. He took the sheet he had been working on that morning and placed it before him. He did not read the first line.

He was thinking about that cord. About a man keeping count of the people he had killed on his own body, knot by knot, until there was no room left.

He thought that the device beneath the mountain, if it was ever used, would leave no one time to tie knots. Nor anyone to tie them for.

On the military papers, cities were counted differently. In hundreds of thousands. Rounded.

He pushed his glasses up his nose and began to write.

He still had verifications to make.

He made every one of them, one by one, skipping none, until late, when his colleague turned off her lamp and left without saying good night.

Only at the end, when he closed the notebook, did he realize that for the past several hours he had been holding his right hand tightly around his left wrist.

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