Episodul 80 · Behind the Slab

The Hunter in front lunged at Soles.

The soldier drove Soles’s body low and to the side, under the outstretched arm. The flashlight fell from his free hand. The one who counted already knew where the elbow would be. Soles’s bandaged hand struck there, with the heel of the palm, and the weight in his bones went out with it. Not all of it.

The one who counted caught it on the way, the way you catch a dropped tool before it hits the floor, and let only part of it through. That part was enough: the elbow bent the wrong way with a sound like wet wood, and in the wall beside the slab, where no one had touched it, a crack opened from top to bottom. The shock ran back up Soles’s arm into the cracked rib.

The Hunter made no sound. His face did not change either. But his other hand closed on Soles’s wrist, the one with the blade, and squeezed.

It squeezed like a vise. Soles’s fingers opened on their own. The blade slipped in his grip, a finger’s width, then two. The gloved hand climbed up the wrist, toward the palm, toward the hilt, toward the thing they had come for.

Keep it.

Phenom’s words were clipped and close. Soles remembered the wrist he had touched in the garden. The man who had watched his footing now wanted his fingers closed. Wanting it did not make the grip painless.

Soles closed his fingers over the hilt and pulled. The Hunter let him spend the effort, then turned the trapped wrist outward. Pain ran up the arm already bruised beneath the bridge. The blade tipped away from Soles’s chest.

He clamped his left hand around his own right fingers to keep them closed. The dressing tightened; something gave beneath it. Blood warmed the web of his thumb. He felt each stitch pulling as the Hunter twisted again.

He’s opening my hand. Pulling helps him.

Soles stopped pulling. He drove the hilt toward his own hip instead, elbow tight against his side, until the Hunter had to lean over his broken arm to keep hold. The pressure eased enough for Soles to breathe.

He tried to turn past the man. The third Hunter had left the tunnel. He stepped into that space, forcing Soles back toward the slab. Soles dragged the first between them; the third checked a punch beside his companion’s head and reached around him instead.

The three of them crowded into the flashlight beam on the floor. Soles could see the blood running over his knuckles. The broken elbow had bought him space for one movement. He had spent it keeping the blade.

The struggle had pushed Soles back until his heel brushed the base of the slab. Then the second Hunter came.

Soles did not see him. The cold one saw him for him, a fraction of an instant too late, because even the cold one had been looking at the blade. The second Hunter came from the left, palm out and flat, its edge toward Soles’s throat, striking from the shoulder, with the whole weight of a body that did not know what tiredness was. The hurried one worked out the distance, the time and the angle and arrived at a single figure.

He should have died.

He did not die.

He did not know then what had happened. Neither he nor the four. He knew only that the blow meant to break his neck passed him by the width of a finger. He had not dodged it. It was as if the world had dodged. The stone under his left heel, which had held for a thousand years without shifting, sank by a hair, exactly enough to tip his body backward.

The blow passed under his chin, brushed the skin of his throat like a cold breath and slammed into the wall beside the slab, where Soles no longer was.

He fell backward. The Hunter in front, his elbow broken and his hand still on Soles’s wrist, fell with him, twisted and let go, so as not to fall on the blade he wanted. Soles’s shoulders struck the base of the slab; his head snapped back against it. His outstretched left palm slapped the stone beside his hip, close to the floor.

His palm landed on the slab.

The slab opened.

Not with a sound. It did not move. Only, under his palm, the stone stopped being wall, and Soles fell through it, on his back, into darkness and warm air, the blade clutched to his chest. His hand slid off the edge of the slab.

The slab closed.

From the other side came a blow. A single one, dull, like a fist driven into a thick wall. Then nothing.

Soles lay on his back, on a warm stone, in total darkness. The stone held his body, but beneath it he felt nothing holding it. For the first time, nothing rested on anything. The flashlight had stayed on the other side. Blood seeped through the bandage on his left hand. He folded it against his jacket. He was breathing. He did not know if he could do anything else. He thought, clearly, that this was where he would stay.

The four were still there. The mask was still there. He felt it on his cheek like a stranger’s face pressed over his own, warm, well fitted. He could have stayed like that. It would have been easy. Nothing hurt when he looked out through it.

— Soles, he said aloud, into the dark.

It was not his voice. It was lower, with an accent no one in this city had.

— Soles, he said again.

It still was not his, but it had come closer.

The third time it was nearly his.

The four withdrew. Not all at once. First Phenom, unhurried, like a man leaving a room he never wanted to enter.

The hurried one, still counting, more and more slowly, until he went out.

The cold one, who left without a backward glance. The soldier stayed last. He stayed beside him for a while, in the dark, the way someone stays beside a wounded comrade until the stretcher comes.

Good.

The word was grudging. Leonatus had stayed long enough to see Soles trying to find his own voice again. His hand steadied Soles’s shoulder for a moment, then its weight went too.

Then he left too.

Soles was alone. Truly alone, for the first time since he had left home.

No weight in the walls, no voice at his ear. Only the warm dark, the stone beneath him, the blade pressed to his chest and the city, still poured into him, which he now felt like an old ache he would have to live with.

And that empty place.

He found it only after he had calmed down. Somewhere, among the things from home, there was an empty place. He did not know what had been there. He knew only that something had. A gap the size of a small thing, with smooth edges, like the mark a picture leaves on a wall.

He tried to remember. The house, Mary’s voice, Kale’s jacket on the hook. They were all there, whole. Only, between them, something was missing, and he did not know what.

He had been looking for it these last few days. That much he knew. He had been looking for something from his father’s story, in the box, on the floor, among the gloves. He no longer knew what.

He took out his phone. The bruised screen lit his face. The signal was a single bar, flickering on and off.

He typed here and pressed send. Beside the word appeared a small circle that spun, and spun, and would not stop.

He remembered that Krista had promised to come looking for him if she got nothing.

He thought, too, of that gap with smooth edges and felt around it in his mind, the way the tongue feels for the place of a pulled tooth.

He knew that he did not know.

It was all he had left of what he had been looking for.