Episode 56 · The Black Cord

— Soles!

Tesa’s voice. Broken, too high.

— Soles, the round’s ending!

And beneath her voice, far off, from the tunnel, from the white light of day, came a sound they all knew.

The long creak of an iron grate pulled on its hinges.

Maxim had not shouted. Varren had not come running.

Someone was coming in.

Soles folded the leather over the blade with his right hand, bracing the bundle against the lid. He tucked it inside his jacket and closed the chest. If he left it open, anyone coming in would know at once. He had no time to decide what taking it meant.

He came out of the little room on his knees. Krista was still standing in the middle of the round room, her phone raised toward the man lying on his back and the tree growing from his chest.

— Krista.

— One more.

— Krista. Now!

She lowered the phone. She checked the unlit section beyond her last photograph, then pocketed the phone and ran for the gap. There were things she had not seen. Memory could not supply them.

Tesa was still rocking, her palms pressed to the stone. The blood from her nose had run over her lip and was dripping from her chin onto her jacket in slow, heavy drops. Her eyes were open, but she was not looking at anything.

— One, she was saying quietly. Two. One. Two.

Krista went through the gap. Soles squeezed through after her, his arm tight over the hidden blade, and felt the edge of the slab brush his shoulder, warm, trembling faintly, like a large animal holding its breath.

— Done, he said. Tesa. Done. We’re out.

Tesa did not take her hands off the stone.

— Tesa.

Soles put his hand on her shoulder. The shoulder was hard as wood, tensed to the bone. Tesa started, as if woken, and tore her palms from the slab all at once, the way you snatch your hand from a hot stove.

The dust fell. The drops burst on the floor. The slab settled back without a sound, and the tree with the cut branch stood before them as if nothing had ever opened.

Tesa swayed. Soles caught her by the arm, and his ribs flared across his chest, but he did not let go. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and looked at the blood and at her palms. They were dry. Completely dry, in a tunnel where water ran down the walls.

— Thanks, she said, her voice hoarse. For the bell.

— Shut up and breathe.

From the tunnel, nothing more could be heard.

The creak of the grate had died away. No footsteps had followed. No light on the walls beyond the bend. No voice. Only the water, dripping from the ceiling, one drop, then another, after a long time.

— Maxim? Krista called.

Her voice went down the tunnel and came back, thinner.

No one answered.

Soles felt something change in him. The fear did not disappear. It only took a step back, like a man making room for someone else at a table, and in its place came someone cold and patient, who did not ask who or why.

The tunnel was their only known way out. The slab had closed behind them; opening it again would put Tesa back against the stone while someone approached. Soles moved her nearer Krista and faced the tunnel mouth. He could hear better with his right ear turned toward it.

It did not come from the front.

The wall to their left, the smooth one, without a single sign, blurred.

The stone did not move. The air in front of it moved, the way air moves above a hot road in summer. The dust on the floor rose again in front of it, motionless, caught in the beam of Soles’s flashlight. And out of the stone, where there was no door and no crack, a man stepped.

He came out the way you come out of water. First a shoulder, then a leg, then all of him, unhurried. Behind him the air blurred a little longer, then settled.

He looked like nothing. That was the first thing Soles saw, and the thing that frightened him most. He was not tall. He was not broad-shouldered. He had a face you would not remember even if you looked at it, short-cropped hair, and a black coat without any insignia, tight at the sleeves. The left sleeve was rolled up to the elbow.

On his wrist he wore a black cord. With knots.

He had seen that cord before, on the man sitting on the canal parapet the day they went to Krista.

Soles felt his own left wrist like an empty place.

The man was not looking at them. He was looking at the slab. He studied it at length, from bottom to top, from the roots to the cut branch, then bent toward the little heap of white dust under the drill hole, toward the sole print in the middle of it. He did not seem surprised.

Only then did he turn to them.

Soles’s bandaged left hand had slipped under his jacket. He hooked his fingers around the folded leather without closing his palm. Through it he could feel the blade’s curve. He had reached for it before deciding to move. The cold, patient one in him had already measured the distance: three steps. Two, if he threw himself. The man had nothing in his hands. The man was not on guard. The man was three steps from Krista.

The urge to strike came with the smell of hot iron and wet earth. The soldier’s field crowded over the chamber: a movement meant an enemy, a shadow meant someone coming to kill him. Waiting meant giving that man the first blow.

Under the urge lay the immense weight the slab had left in him. He could reach for it now. He had no idea what it would do in a room with Tesa barely standing and Krista within arm’s reach of the stranger.

The man’s hands were empty. Soles looked at them instead of the distance. Krista’s sleeve brushed his arm. She was close enough to be caught by any movement he could not stop.

Soles did not move.