Episode 53 · Not by Force

Someone had tried a chisel, then a drill. The slab had yielded to neither. Soles studied the joint, wanting to see how it opened. The impatience was familiar: an assembly would not fit, and someone had reached for a bigger hammer.

Not by force. That’s not how it opens.

He did not know where the thought had come from. It was his own, simple and sure, like seeing that a screw won’t go in because it doesn’t belong to that part.

Krista had put her palm on the slab, beside the roots, and was moving it slowly, looking for an unevenness, a crack, a place that would give.

— Nothing, she said. It’s warm. That’s all. It’s warmer than the walls.

Maxim put his hand on it too, higher up, on the trunk. He pushed, gently at first, then with all his weight, his shoulder into it.

— Zero, he said. This isn’t a door. This is a mountain pretending.

Tesa kept her hands in her pockets. Her eyes went from the slab to Varren.

Varren remained at the tunnel mouth, watching the cut branch. He had touched nothing since they entered.

Soles kept his bandaged left hand against his side and bent toward the drill hole. A pain caught across his chest. He folded farther than he meant to, and his right palm went out to the slab to keep him from falling.

The stone moved.

Not much. A breath’s worth. But it moved all of a piece, the whole slab at once, like a living thing that feels a hand on its shoulder and turns to see whose it is.

Soles froze. His palm was stuck to the stone. Not from cold, but from warmth: a warmth rising through his hand, his wrist, his elbow, like hot water drawn up through a pipe. It did not hurt. It was too much to hurt.

Around him, the dust on the floor rose.

No wind had lifted it. There was no wind. It had risen by itself, grain by grain, and now hung in the air at knee height, motionless, caught in the beam of Maxim’s lamp as in a long-exposure photograph. The drops of water on the ceiling no longer fell. They hung at the ends of the stone, heavy, round, and trembled without coming loose.

The slab drew back, slowly, without any sound of stone on stone. Between its edge and the wall a strip of darkness opened, a finger wide, then a hand. Out of that strip came the same warm air as at the entrance, only warmer, older, with a smell that was neither stone nor water. It smelled of earth turned over after rain. Of a garden.

— Soles, Krista said. Very quietly.

He could not turn. Everything in him was in his palm, where the skin touched the stone, listening. It was not a voice. It was not the voices that came sometimes, from far off, with the weight of other people. It was something simpler, without words, like a door that, once opened, can never be hung back on its hinges exactly as it was.

Somewhere in him, something widened.

The chamber vanished.

He stood beneath the tree in his garden. Light climbed its trunk in thickening strands. Branches stretched overhead, dividing, reaching farther than he could follow. The luminous plants remained around its roots. Beyond them stood the soldier, the king, the man from the laboratory and Phenom. Soles could not tell what the light had done to them; he was still trying to understand what it had done to the tree. No new plant had appeared.

Beyond the beds, the gray emptiness was filling with trunks. A forest spread below him, tree behind tree, while his garden stood high enough to overlook it. He turned toward the edge. He had never had an edge to look down from before.

His fingers tightened on bark. He could hold it. That told him nothing about how to stop it growing.

— Soles. Can you hear me?

Krista. The bark was gone. His palm lay against stone, and his shoulder had begun to sag. He had lost sight of everyone while they stood within reach.

A huge, blind weight filled his hand. Like a boiler under pressure with no one at the controls, it wanted an outlet. He did not know how to give it one without hurting someone.

The pain in his ribs came back all at once, all of it, with interest. Soles gasped and tore his hand from the stone.

Dust fell through the lamplight. The ceiling drops struck the floor. The slab settled back, closing the dark strip to nothing.

The stone was smooth again. The cut branch was where it had been.

Soles looked at his hand. The palm was red, as after holding a mug that was too hot. In the middle of it, the skin was perfectly dry, though the whole tunnel was wet.

They all stayed where they were.

Maxim was the first to move. He went up to the slab, put his hand on it again, exactly where Soles had had his, and pushed. Once more, harder, with his shoulder.

Nothing.

He drew back and looked at Soles’s palm, then at his face.

— Your hand’s warmer than mine, he said. That’s all.

He was not entirely joking.

Krista put her hand on it too, took it off and put it back in another place, on the roots, on the cut branch, on the edge with the drill hole. The stone stayed stone.

— Put it back, she said to Soles. Just for a moment. I want to see.

— No.

His arm tingled to the elbow. The weight remained after contact ended. His ribs hurt, his left hand was still cut, and the others were waiting for him to do it again. Whatever had changed had not made him ready.

— Not today, he said, more quietly.

Krista lowered her phone. She looked from his hand to the narrow joint, then stepped aside instead of asking again.

— Can you stand?

— Yes. Just give me room.

Maxim reached toward his elbow and waited. Soles nodded before taking the support. His cousin’s grip was familiar; the weight waiting inside his own arm was not. He kept that arm loose at his side. Nobody needed him to demonstrate what it might do.

Tesa had not put her hand on the stone. She had not taken a single step toward it. She was still standing two steps away, hands in her pockets, and her face, in the lamplight, was white and very calm.