Episodul 84 · Who Holds the Door

— It’s Kale’s, Krista said, looking at the flashlight in Tesa’s hand. He took it from home.

Tesa was looking at the wall.

Beside the slab, at the height of a man’s throat, the stone was cracked. Not broken. Cracked in a star, like a windshield hit by a pebble, with a small dent in the middle. Tesa went closer and laid the backs of her fingers on the crack. She knew what force it took to crack a stone like that with a hand. She knew because she had tried.

She had the cast to prove it. Farther along the same wall, a straight crack ran from top to bottom, as if drawn with a chisel.

That blow had not been meant for the wall. It had been meant for someone who had stood in front of it and who, at the last instant, was no longer there.

— Tesa.

Krista stood in front of the far wall, her light raised. The walls were covered in carvings: small trees, then forests, then faces hidden behind other faces. Tesa was careful not to look at them straight. Krista was not looking at them. She was looking at the slab in the middle of the wall, small, without a single sign on it.

On the edge of the slab, a flat hand’s height from the floor, there was a mark. A human palm, outlined in the dust on the stone, fingers spread, the way a hand leaves its print when someone catches himself on it as he falls. Blood marked the edge of the thumb.

From under the slab came warm air, slow, in pulses, like breathing.

— He’s in there, Krista said.

Tesa looked at her and saw, for the first time since she had known her, that Krista’s face was no longer polite, or formal, or orderly. It was only frightened.

Tesa put her good hand on the slab.

The stone was warm. Warmer than a stone should be. Under her palm, the stone changed without moving and without creaking. Tesa felt it pull at her. Not at her hand. From somewhere deeper, under her ribs, deeper than the corner where the one with the towel over his shoulder stood. It pulled at her and held her, and she had to pull back with her whole body, as on a rope stretched in a current.

And she remembered.

She did not want to remember. But she remembered. Varren, his palm on another slab, under another arch, on another night, saying Go. I’ve got it in his calm voice, the way he said everything.

Varren standing afterward with his back to the stone, hands in his pockets, as if he had held nothing. And his palms, which she had seen in the lamplight. Dry.

She could feel her own now, wet, pressed to the stone, and her arm was shaking up to the elbow.

Tesa gritted her teeth and did not follow the thought any further. She couldn’t let herself. She knew where thoughts like that led her. They had already led her once, less than a day ago, in a room with armchairs, toward an old man who did not defend himself.

— Go in, she told Krista. I’ve got it.

Krista went through the stone, light first, and disappeared.

Tesa counted. Maybe because that is how the referee counts, while you kneel and listen to your time running out. One. Two. Three. At six her hand began to burn. At nine, her knees. At eleven she heard, on the other side, muffled, Krista’s voice saying a name, then again, louder.

At fourteen, Soles came out through the stone.

He came out half carried, his arm over Krista’s shoulders, white-faced, with dried blood from his nose to his chin. He was clutching to his chest something wrapped in oiled leather. The bandage on his left hand was red through. His eyes moved slowly, like those of someone who has woken in a different room from the one he fell asleep in.

Krista had brought most of his weight through on one shoulder, her jaw set and her eyes on the floor. Tesa, who knew what every kilo cost, said nothing.

He looked at Tesa, and Tesa, her hand still on the slab, found herself on guard.

Soles was standing differently.

She did not know how differently. She knew only that she would have spotted it in the ring from ten meters: feet apart, weight on the heels, the injured side drawn back and the good one forward. The stance of a man who had learned not to fall. And not from her.

— You came, he said.

His voice was hoarse, and it seemed to Tesa that there was an accent in it, something that was not theirs, like a word spoken by a stranger. Then the accent could no longer be heard.

— Krista came, Tesa said. I’m holding the door.

She took her hand off the slab. The stone became stone again. Tesa pressed her palm to her chest and felt it shaking, wet, up to the elbow.

— There was something else, Soles said.

He looked at them, one after the other, frowning, like a man searching for a word on the tip of his tongue.

— I was looking for something. Before. I don’t know what anymore.

Krista held him around the waist. Tesa saw that she did not understand, saw that Soles did not understand either, and did not like it at all.

— You’ll remember later, Tesa said.

— No, Soles said. I don’t think so.

It was not a complaint. He had said it calmly, like a measurement.

They went out the way they had come in, Soles between them and Kale’s flashlight in Tesa’s hand, cold, dead, heavy.

In the tunnel, Soles stopped twice to lean against the wall, and each time Tesa saw him lay his palm on the stone as on the back of an animal he knew, listening to something she could not hear.

Under the block, Maxim pulled them out one by one, by the collar, swearing softly, his headlamp blinding them. He held Soles by the shoulders, at arm’s length, and looked him over from head to toe, like a truck brought in on a flatbed.

— You’re lucky, he said at last.

After a pause that was too long, Soles smiled. The smile came hard, like a stuck door.

— I’ve… I’ve got good hands, he said.

Maxim squeezed his shoulders once, briefly, and let him go.

In Krista’s pocket, the phone vibrated.

Krista took it out by reflex and stood with it in her hand, in the light of Maxim’s headlamp.

Tesa leaned over her shoulder. On the screen was a message from Soles, sent three hours earlier and only arriving now:

here

Krista looked at the word, then at Soles, who stood beside her, wet, blood on his chin, leaning against a stone block set there by his father’s crane.

— I know, she told him quietly, her voice breaking. I know you’re here.

Tesa turned her back to them, toward the water, so her face could not be seen. Her palm was still shaking. She clenched it into a fist as hard as she could, until it stopped.