Episode 62 · A Room Prepared

The tunnel was as warm as before. The boot prints in the dust had multiplied, fresher now, all pointing the same way. The crate lid was gone. The drag marks had been trodden over, as if someone had come and gone several times that day.

Maxim walked in front, the crowbar in one hand, his lamp turning from the left wall to the right one, then back. At every step.

— Stop looking at the walls, Krista said. You’re making me look too.

— That’s the idea.

The low chamber before the slab was already lit.

Not by their lamp. Field lanterns stood along the edges of the floor at equal distances, giving a steady yellow light, like a hall laid out for a ceremony. At the far end stood the slab with the tree. In that light the carved roots seemed to move.

In the middle of the chamber, on a metal folding chair, sat a man.

He held a thin folder on his crossed knee. When they came in, he closed it, set it on the floor beside the chair and rose without hurry, the way a host rises for guests he has been expecting.

Maxim stopped by the left wall, Tesa by the right. Krista and Soles were between them, facing the slab. Varren stayed by the entrance.

Soles knew him before the man smiled. The navy suit. The smooth, narrow face. The hair combed close to the scalp. The side door of police headquarters, the gray car, the little wave across the parking lot.

— Mr. Soles, Kerr’s lawyer said. I’m glad you came. And with your friends. That makes things simpler.

His voice was low and pleasant, without edges. He looked at them one by one, unhurried, as at people in a waiting room. Krista. Maxim and the crowbar. Tesa and the bruise under her eye.

Then Varren.

His gaze stopped there a moment longer than on the others. Long enough to match a face to a description.

— And you came too, he said quietly.

Varren did not answer. Nothing moved in his face. Soles knew that face, and the nothing was what was new.

— Who are you? Maxim asked.

— A man doing his job. This time my job is to open a door. And this door, I’ve recently learned, doesn’t open for me.

He looked at the slab with mild reproach, as at a clerk refusing to stamp a form.

— My people go through any wall in this city. Not through this one.

He made a short gesture over his shoulder.

The walls blurred.

All around them at once, like a pond when someone throws in a handful of gravel. Dust rose and hung in the air. People came out of the stone.

Four. Maybe five. Soles could not count them. They came out the way the first had, shoulder first, in dark clothes without insignia. One came out behind Maxim.

— Wall! Maxim shouted, and turned with the crowbar.

He had time to shout. He had time to turn. The crowbar caught the shoulder of the man still stepping out, with a dry crack of bone. The man staggered.

A second one took Maxim from the side and wrenched his arm behind his back. The crowbar rang on the stone. The man forced Maxim to his knees and bent him forward until his forehead struck the floor.

But he had shouted first. This time he had.

Tesa was already moving. She rocked once on her toes, then her fist went for the nearest of them, with all that weight that was not hers. The man did not dodge. He stepped half back into the wall, as into a doorway.

Tesa’s fist hit the stone.

Something cracked.

She did not cry out. She drew her hand to her chest, white to the lips, and the man came out of the wall beside her and took her by the back of the neck.

Krista had not moved. She stood in the middle of the chamber, her notebook pressed to her chest. The faceless man from Thursday stood behind her. He was not holding her. He did not need to. His hand rested on her shoulder, light, almost friendly, the black knotted cord hanging at his wrist.

Soles felt the cold, patient attention rise in him. He smelled hot iron. He saw everything with a clarity that did not feel like his: one way out, five of them, a cracked rib, a bandaged left hand, a blade under his jacket he did not know how to use. The weight from the slab was still in his right arm, blind, asking for somewhere to go.

One of the men from the wall was watching the place under Soles’s jacket. Not the slab.

— No, the lawyer said gently. Don’t, Mr. Soles. There’s no need. No one has to come to any harm.

He moved his eyes to the hand on Krista’s shoulder, then back.

— I only ask you to put your hand on the stone. Once. Like Thursday.

— And then?

— Then I go in, have a look, and come out. And you all go home. All of you.

— The way Kerr went home?

The lawyer smiled, almost sadly.

— Kerr wrote too much, he said. You don’t have to write anything. You only have to touch a stone.

Kerr wrote. The word went into Soles like a splinter. The man knew there had been pages. Maybe he knew what was on them. Maybe he had them in that thin folder on the floor beside the chair.

Krista was looking at him with wide, very calm eyes, and shaking her head. Barely. No.

Tesa was bent over her broken hand, a stranger’s fist at the back of her neck. Maxim’s breath scraped against the floor.

If Soles touched the stone, the lawyer would go through the round room and into the small one. He would lift a lid Soles had closed with care. If Soles refused, the hand on Krista’s shoulder would stop being friendly.

Soles looked at Varren.

Varren had not moved. He stood by the entrance, the only one no one was holding. None of the men from the wall had gone near him. Two of them were watching him with an attention Soles did not understand.

Varren was looking at the cord on the wrist of the man who held Krista.

His face had gone white.