Episode 54 · Before He Comes Back

— You didn’t try, Maxim said to her.

— No.

— Why not?

Tesa shrugged.

— I don’t step on what I can’t see, she said. And I don’t put my hand on it.

She turned toward the way out. Passing Varren, she stopped for a moment without looking at him.

— Neither did you, she said.

Varren took one hand out of his pocket and ran his thumb over the wrist of the other, back and forth, once.

— I brought the coffee, he said. I did my part.

Tesa left the chamber without a word. The beam of her flashlight went along the walls of the tunnel and was lost beyond the bend.

Soles looked at the slab once more. At the cut branch. At the little heap of white dust under the drill hole, which he had stepped in without meaning to and which now had a sole print in the middle. His.

Whoever had left those fresh marks would come again. And would see that someone had been there.

Daylight filled the arch ahead of Tesa. Beyond it, a man crouched beside the open grate, feeding a chain through its bars and an iron ring in the stone.

— Back inside.

He pulled. The grate caught Tesa’s shoulder and drove her against Maxim. Soles stopped behind his cousin; Krista’s light struck the chain over his shoulder. Varren was behind her. The low tunnel gave them nowhere to straighten.

Maxim caught the grate with his shoulder before it closed. Tesa shoved beside him, but her boots slipped on the wet stone. The man took up the chain again. Another few inches and he could fasten its ends outside their reach.

— The bar, Soles said.

Maxim passed it back. Soles tried to reach around him, and his rib stopped him halfway through a breath. The grate scraped closer. He pictured them calling through it, the closed shutters above, nobody answering.

Lower. Wedge it against the stone.

He slid the crowbar beside Maxim’s boot and pushed its end beneath the grate. His cousin stamped it down. Iron struck stone; the closing gap held.

The man reached through to pull the bar out. Tesa caught the loose chain and hauled it inward, pinning his other hand against the bars. Maxim shoved from his shoulder. This time the grate moved.

The man let go and scrambled toward the sheds. Tesa released the chain. It clattered onto the gravel outside.

They crawled out, keeping clear of the swinging iron. Soles knelt until the pressure in his side eased. The man had vanished behind the sheds. Maxim recovered the crowbar; the chain lay beyond the broken latch.

Tesa was already outside. She was standing on the first block, hands in her jacket pockets, looking up toward the road.

— Don’t stand up, she said over her shoulder. Just look.

On the road above the riverbed, about a hundred meters from Ivo’s shed, a car was parked. Gray, clean, the kind you don’t remember even when you look at it. It stood with its nose toward them, and behind the windshield there was no one.

Maxim slowly crouched beside Soles, the crowbar across his knees.

— New rule, he said quietly. If the man in the gray car gets out, we leave. Both of us. No negotiating.

— He’s not in the car.

— Exactly. He got out.

Soles let his eyes run along the riverbed. The gray reeds, the blocks, the footbridge, the stone steps on the other bank. No one. Ivo’s shutters were drawn. Only Varren’s paper cups stood on the edge of the footbridge, one inside another, where he had left them.

— The grate, Krista said. We can’t close it again. The latch is broken.

— And you stepped in his dust, Tesa said, still over her shoulder. If he comes today, he knows today. If he comes tomorrow, he knows tomorrow. He knows either way.

— Then we leave and think about it, Maxim said.

— No.

Tesa got down from the block. Her face had mostly healed since their fight. Soles recognized the set of her jaw, though: she had decided what she wanted before hearing the objections.

— If we leave now, she said, tomorrow the padlock is new, the grate is welded, and there’s nothing left behind that stone. The way there was nothing in their depot. The way there was nothing anywhere. My brother guarded this bank. They carried things past him. And afterward he left the city without his winter jacket.

No one said anything.

— I want to see what’s on the other side, she said. Today.

— Soles said no, Maxim said.

— I know what Soles said.

She looked at him. Soles was holding his right hand pressed to his chest without realizing it. His palm still tingled, and in his chest that place that had widened still pulled at him, like a coat sewn too loose.

— He doesn’t have to touch it again, Tesa said.

— We don’t go beyond another door, Soles said. And if you can’t hold it, we leave.

Tesa nodded. Krista checked her phone battery before putting it away.

Varren had got up from the edge of the footbridge. He looked toward the car on the road, then at them.

— I’ll go up, he said. I’ll stand by the shed. From there I can see both the road and the slope. If anyone comes, I’ll call you.

— There’s no signal down there, Krista said.

— Then I’ll shout.

— You can’t hear shouting down there either.

Varren smiled, warmly, patiently.

— Then I’ll run, he said. My legs are in better shape than his ribs.

He did not wait for an answer. He climbed the slope past the sheds with an even step, hands in his pockets, and stopped at the corner of Ivo’s shed, facing the road. From below he looked like a man waiting for a bus.

Maxim got up and sat down in front of the stone arch, his back to the broken grate and the crowbar resting against his ankle.

— I’m staying here, he said. After you lot, anyone coming in has to get past me.

He tried the grate with his foot, then shifted the crowbar within reach. Soles watched him settle against the stone. It was the same stubbornness that had put him between Soles and Kerr. This time Soles was leaving him outside deliberately.

Tesa bent down and went into the tunnel first. Krista looked at Soles for a moment.

— You don’t have to come.

— Do you?

Krista did not answer. She went in after Tesa.

They went quickly past the boot prints and the upturned crate lid. Soles counted each bent step through the pain in his ribs. The warmth clung to their clothes again.

In the chamber, the slab stood unmoved, with its tree and its cut branch. In the little heap of white dust under the drill hole, his sole print could be seen.

Tesa stopped in front of the stone. She took her hands out of her pockets and held them in front of her, open, looking at them in the flashlight’s beam the way you look at tools you did not buy yourself.

— Do you know why I don’t touch things? she said, without turning.

— You don’t step on what you can’t see.

— That’s what I say.

She clenched her fists and opened them again.

— For a while now, my fists have been heavier than I am, she said quietly. Not heavier in strength. Heavier like… as if someone else were hitting along with me. At the gym I’ve split two bags. The coach said it’s technique. It isn’t.

She looked at her palms.

— And there’s a place I keep seeing when I sleep. A tree. A bright plant among gray ones. A man beside it who knows how to stand when I don’t.

Soles forgot the stone for a moment.

— A garden?

Her eyes came up to his.

— Don’t make me regret saying it.