The Grip

By November the water had been gone five months and the city had mostly stopped talking about it, which was the part Val found remarkable and did not say so.

A town had been there in May. Not a camp and not a row of huts — a town, with a theater and a post office and schools, out on the floodplain between the river and the slough, eighteen thousand people in it on a Sunday afternoon.

And then the fill had let go at four in the afternoon and the water had come across in under an hour, and by the Tuesday there was no town, and by November there was a flat place with willows coming up in it and a few slabs where things had stood.

Val had seen towns go. She had seen a great many of them go, in four hundred years, by fire and by plague and by people simply walking away from them over a generation.

She had never seen one go in an hour, and she had never seen one go while she was standing in it.

The relief office was in a hall on the east side with a counter down one end and a stove at the other and about sixty people in it most of the day.

Kyra had been going three afternoons a week since June, which had started as carrying boxes and had turned into whatever the woman running it needed, which by November was mostly talking to people in a line.

She was extremely good at that. She had been good at it for four hundred years and on two worlds, and the thing she was good at was not comfort. It was that she asked people questions they could answer.

Val came on the Thursdays and did the books, because somebody had to and because the alternative was sitting in a house.

The man came in at about two.

He was perhaps fifty-five and he had a hat in his hands and he had been in that line before, twice, and he was trying to prove that he had lived in a place that no longer existed.

This was not an unusual difficulty that autumn. People had gone out of their apartments in the clothes they had on. Rent books, letters, discharge papers, insurance, the photograph of a wife with a date on the back — all of it had been in a drawer in a building on the floodplain and the drawer had gone to the Columbia in an hour.

And the office could do a great deal for a man, and most of what it could do began with knowing who he was.

"I had it all," he said. "I had every bit of it."

"I know you did," said Kyra.

"I'm not asking anybody to take my word."

"You can ask. People do."

"I had a book," said the man. "I had a rent book with my name wrote in it every month for six years, and I had the letter from the yard, and now I'm stood here telling a woman at a desk that I'm who I am, and she's got nothing to write it on."

Val, forty feet away with a run of figures she had been in the middle of for some while, had stopped.

Kyra got him sorted in the end, after a fashion, which took most of an hour and involved a foreman at the yard and a man who had lived on the same stair and a form that went somewhere else.

She was good at it. She sat down with him and asked him who else had been on his floor, and then who had been on the floor below, and then where he had got his hair cut, and by the end of it there were four living people in that city who would sign a piece of paper saying that the man was the man.

Four people. That was what it took.

Val finished her figures and ruled off the page and sat looking at the ruled line for a while.

They walked home because the streetcar was not worth it and because it had stopped raining for an hour, and the cold had put the color up in the whole of Kyra’s face the way it did and never had in Val’s.

"You went quiet," Kyra said, about a block in.

"I was working."

"Val."

"I was working, and then I stopped working at about ten past two, and you know precisely when because you were facing the door." Val had her hands in her coat. "Ask me."

"I'm asking."

"Four people," said Val. "That is what it took to put him back. Four people in this city who could put a hand up and say they knew him before the thirtieth of May."

"He's lucky. Some of them have got nobody."

"I am aware that some of them have got nobody," Val said. "I have been aware of it since about ten past two and I have not been able to think about anything else since, and I am going to say the thing now and I would like you to let me get it out in one piece."

"Go on."

"If that had been us," said Val, "there would not have been four. There would not have been one."

They went another block without saying anything.

"Jo," said Kyra, eventually.

"Jo is eleven years dead and she is the last one, and I have gone through it four times on that walk and I cannot produce a second name." Val's voice was entirely level, which was how Kyra knew. "There is nobody alive on this planet who knew either of us before the war. Not a neighbor, not a landlady, not a man at a counter. The woman at the bank has had us two years. The people on that street have had us six."

"We've got the paper."

"We have got a great deal of paper and it is very good paper, and it is the only thing we have got, and it is in a drawer in a wooden house four blocks from a river." Val looked up the street. "That is the thought and I have had it now and I am not going to be able to un-have it."

Kyra took her arm, which on that street at that hour was two women walking home in the cold and was nothing whatsoever, and which they had been doing in public since 1917.

"Then we put it somewhere else," said Kyra.

"Yes."

"That's a Saturday's work and it's a box and a bank and it's done. Don't carry it home."

"I was not going to."

"You were going to carry it home, set it on the table, and have it in pieces by Tuesday." Kyra's grip on her arm did not change. "Saturday. Box. Bank. And then it's a thing we did instead of a thing you're doing."

"That is a considerably better plan than mine," said Val, "and mine had eleven steps in it."

They did it on the Saturday, and it took an hour and ten minutes, and it cost four dollars a year.

What went into the box was fourteen documents, two certificates, a copied deed with an alias on it that was older than anybody in that bank, a notebook that had been recopied four times in the same hand, and eleven sheets of something that was not paper and had not been made on this planet.

What did not go into the box was the one thing Val wanted in it, which was a person.

She did not say that on the Saturday. She said it in January, in the dark, in the middle of a conversation about something else, in about nine words — which is how everything got said in that house that winter, because they had both come out of the autumn with less surface than they had gone into it with.

"A box only proves a thing to somebody who will read it."

"Mm," said Kyra, mostly asleep.

"A person proves it to anybody. That is the whole difference and it took me until the ninth of January to get it out properly."

"Then get another person."

"That is not how—"

"Val, that's exactly how." Kyra turned over. "We've had fourteen of them. Frederick, Marjeta, Zofka, Jo. You don't go and get one. You stay somewhere long enough and one happens to you, and then they die, and that's the arrangement and it has never once been a good one and we've done it fourteen times."

Val lay in the dark and did the arithmetic she had been avoiding for a fortnight.

A human being takes about forty years to become a person who can put a hand up for you. Jo Selby had taken forty and had been worth all of them. And a human being who has known you for forty years is a human being who has watched you for forty years, and the only reason Jo Selby had ever worked was that she had gone into the ground at forty with the whole of it unexamined.

So the thing she wanted was a person who would know them for forty years and never once look.

And the thing she had was a box in a bank and a woman beside her and a street full of people who had had six years of them and would get perhaps fifteen more before somebody started doing arithmetic at a mailbox.

She went to sleep without solving it, which she had learned to do about a hundred years ago and still disliked.

It stayed where she left it for nine years.

In October 1957 a firm on the east side would announce a retirement plan and hand everybody a form with four questions on it, and the fourth question would be a date of birth, and Val Sorin would understand inside eleven seconds that the thought she had put down on a Portland street in November 1948 had not been about a flood at all.

But that was nine years off, and in the meantime there was a winter.

The hall on the east side closed in March when the money ran out, and the woman who had run it went to work for the county and sent Kyra a card at Christmas for nine years. The flat place out on the floodplain stayed flat. Somebody put up a sign about a future industrial park and somebody else shot it.

And on an ordinary evening at the end of that February, with the rain going and nothing at all happening anywhere, Kyra came in from the kitchen and stood in the doorway with a cloth in her hand and looked at Val for slightly longer than the errand required.

"What," said Val.

"Nothing."

"You are standing in a doorway."

"I'm allowed to stand in a doorway," said Kyra. "It's my doorway. I pay for half of it."

And she went back into the kitchen, and the rain went on, and that was the whole of the evening, and in a year and a half Val would do a sum about the two minutes and the thing would come apart in her hands.

— end of chapter one —

Val had decided about it at four in the afternoon, over a seed catalogue she was not reading, and had then spent five hours being entirely normal.

She was good at that. She had been good at it for a very long time. She washed the two plates and put the pan out on the step and said something about the Kesslers' fence that she had no opinion about whatsoever, and at no point did her face do anything at all.

Kyra knew by about half past six.

She knew because Val went still in a particular way — not stiff, not tense, simply still, the way a needle goes still — and because she had been reading that woman across a room since before anybody had put a road through this part of the country. She did not say anything. She never said anything. She got up and went and put the kettle on for no reason and stood there smiling into the dark of the window like an idiot.

Upstairs, later, nobody went near the switch by the door, because nobody ever did.

What light there was came in off the street through the gap where the blind had never fit, and lay in a long stripe across the floor and up the side of the bed, and in four years neither of them had thought about it enough to move the bed.

They took their time. They always took their time. There was no reason on this planet to hurry and had not been for four hundred years, and Kyra's mouth was at the side of Val's throat where the light came up first, and Val had both hands in Kyra's hair and was not doing anything with them.

And then they arrived, as they always did, at the part where they waited.

Kyra's body had always been quick about it. It had been quick on a mountain and it was quick now — she was ready almost before she had decided to be, and she wore herself trimmed close and always had, and there was nothing in her way.

Val was not quick.

She had never once put a blade to her own hair in four hundred years and never would, and it was thick and dark and it did not part for anything, and what came easily to Kyra had to work its way through all of that and take whatever time it took. It had always been so. It had been so on a mountain and in Maribor and in a room over a saddler's in November, and Kyra had waited every single time, without a word, for four centuries.

And tonight, lying in the dark with Kyra's arms around her and her face in Kyra's neck and nothing at all wrong anywhere in the world, Val Sorin began to cry.

She did not make any noise about it. She would not have known how.

Kyra felt it before she heard it — the breath going short and wrong against her collarbone, and then the wet — and she did not say what is it and she did not sit up and she did not let go. She got one hand round the back of Val's head and the other arm the whole way across her and held on and let it come.

"All right," said Kyra, into her hair. "All right. I've got you. You're all right."

It went on for some time.

"I've got you," Kyra said. "Nothing's happening. Nobody's anywhere. Take as long as you like."

It stopped eventually, the way it does, in stages, with a great deal of breathing in between.

Val did not move her face. Kyra did not make her.

"I burned the notes," Val said, into her neck.

"You did."

"I burned every page and I meant it and I have not started another one, and I want that established before I say the rest of this, because the rest of it is going to sound as though I have."

Kyra's hand did not stop moving on the back of her head.

"Say the rest."

"There is a count," said Val, "that survived the fire."

"Of what?"

"You have been waiting for me for four hundred years. Every time. You are ready and I am not and you lie there and wait for me and you have never once said a word about it, not one, in four centuries." Her voice was wrecked and completely precise, which was the worst combination she had. "And I know the number."

Kyra's hand stopped.

"You know the number."

"I know the number," Val said.

She got herself up onto an elbow then, which took some doing, and her face was a ruin and she did not appear to care, which in that woman was itself a kind of undressing.

"Not on purpose. That is the part I want you to understand and I do not think I am going to manage it. I did not sit down and decide to keep it. It is simply what happens in me. I notice a thing and the thing goes in, and by the time I am aware of it there is a figure."

"Val."

"You told me on Hawthorne that nobody was ahead. You said it to me on the morning I burned the notes and I agreed with you and I have kept to it in every particular I could see." Val had her eyes shut. "And this one went past me for forty years, because everything I burned was a record of you and this is not. This is a record of me. It is every time I have kept you waiting, and I have been filing it under my own name, and it never once occurred to me that it is still a count and that it is still about you."

"What's at the top of it?"

"It does not have a heading. It has never been written down anywhere and that is exactly how it got past me." Val's mouth went. "If it had one it would be she waited again."

Kyra sat up properly.

"And every entry in it," said Val, "is a small kindness you did not mention. I have put four hundred years of them on a page that is not about you at all. That is what I understood about nine minutes ago, lying there, and it is why I am in this state. The page is a bill. It is a bill and it is made out to me."

The room did what rooms do. A truck went down the far end of the street in second gear and somebody shouted at a dog.

"Say the rest," Kyra said.

"There isn't any rest."

"There is a whole great deal of rest and you have been carrying it up the stairs for four centuries. Say it."

Val was quiet for a moment.

"I am a timing person," said Val. "That is the whole of my character and it is not a flattering thing to say about oneself. I have spent my life inside sixty seconds and five-second intervals and eleven-year peaks, and I was good at it, Kyra. I have never in my life been late for anything. And then here — here, in the one place in the universe that matters more to me than any other — I am the one who keeps somebody waiting. Every time. Without exception. And you never say anything, and that is worse, and I know it is not worse and it is worse."

"It isn't a fault."

"I am aware that it is not a fault," said Val. "I am aware of it in the way one is aware of a thing that is written down somewhere. It has not got into me and it has had four hundred years."

Kyra took her by both wrists.

"Right," said Kyra. "Then listen to me, because I'm only going to do this once and then we're never going to have to have it again."

"Kyra—"

"I have never once minded. Not once. Not a single time in four hundred years, and I am not being kind, I am being accurate, which is supposed to be your thing." She had hold of her and was not letting go. "I lie there and I wait for you and do you know what that is? It's about two minutes. Sometimes less. And I spend it looking at you."

Val did not say anything.

"That's the whole of the thing you've been keeping a figure on. It's the only two minutes in any given evening where I get to look at you and you're not looking back, because you've got your eyes shut and you've stopped arranging your face." Kyra's thumbs moved on the insides of her wrists. "It is the best part of the night and you have been putting it on a bill."

Val put her forehead down on Kyra's shoulder and stayed there.

"I could take it back," Val said, after a while.

"No."

"I do it in August anyway. It takes twenty minutes, I know exactly how, and it would solve—"

"No, Val."

Kyra got her by the jaw and lifted her head up, not gently.

"In August you do it so I can see the mark," said Kyra. "That is what that is. That is the one week in the year when you let a thing of yours be looked at on purpose, and you have done it every year since nineteen ten, and I wait three weeks for it to come back and I would wait a year." Kyra was fierce about it in a way she was about almost nothing. "And the first time you ever did it was on the Sweetwater so a needle could reach you. Both of those are the same reason. Neither of them is this one."

"It would be the identical act."

"It would be the identical act and a completely different thing and you know it, because you are the most precise woman on two worlds and you are currently pretending not to be." Kyra did not let go of her jaw. "If you did it for this, the waiting would turn into a thing that got fixed. And it was never a problem, so there is nothing to fix, and I would have to live the rest of my life knowing you altered yourself out of shame in a bedroom in Oregon."

"That is a very long sentence."

"I've been working on it since about nineteen minutes ago," said Kyra. "Say you won't."

"I won't."

"Say the whole of it."

"I will not take a blade to myself," Val said, "on account of a figure I am going to stop keeping."

"Better."

They lay back down after a while, because there was nowhere else to be and nothing else to do, and Kyra pulled the quilt up over the both of them with one arm.

"Nobody's ahead," said Kyra. "That's the rule. I said it in a kitchen and I meant it."

"I know."

"Nobody owes anybody. And you have been running one the entire time, in secret, against exactly one person."

"I know."

"You picked the one I care about," said Kyra.

And Val, who had not seen that coming and had no defense prepared for it, shut her eyes.

"Can I tell you something," Kyra said, "from a very long time ago."

"Yes."

"You're not going to like the beginning of it."

"I have had a considerable evening already," said Val. "Tell me."

Kyra got herself settled — flat on her back with Val's head on her shoulder, which was the arrangement for anything that was going to take a while.

"The evening of the fruit," said Kyra.

Val went still.

"That morning I'd called you a coward in front of eleven people," Kyra said, "and that afternoon you went down on the grass in the wet and I came back for you and made you eat four squares out of a tin, and we walked the last mile and a quarter and didn't say one word, and at the gate you tried to thank me and I wouldn't let you. You remember all of that."

"I remember all of that."

"Then we went in through separate doors." Her hand had found the back of Val's neck and stayed. "There were two into the wash room, one at each end, and no arrangement about who used which, and I came in the far one because I was wet through and too proud to stand about in the yard waiting for you to be finished."

"I did not know you were in there."

"You did not know I was in there," Kyra agreed. "Let me do this."

"You were at the other end with your back to me," Kyra said, "and you had just come out from under it, and you had all that hair down with the water in it, and it goes about three shades darker when it's wet. I had not seen it down before. Nobody had. You ran with it up in that thing you used to do with the two pins and I had been looking at the back of it for a month without once seeing what it actually was."

"It is not remarkable hair."

"Val, it is the palest thing on that planet and it goes gold at the ends in the summer term, and you have been told this before by people who are not me and you did not believe them either." Kyra let that sit. "And then you turned round."

Val did not say anything.

"And I saw the whole of you, which I had not expected, and the first thing I thought — the actual first thought, in order — was oh, she's dark."

"I had no idea what to do with that," said Kyra. "You were the pale one. That was the entire fact about you as far as the squad was concerned. Sorin the pale one, Sorin the cold one, Sorin who does not speak to anybody. And then you turned round and the rest of you was as dark as anything I had ever seen, thick and wild and untouched, nothing done to it, plainly not once in your life — and I stood there with my towel in my hand having what I can only describe as an argument with myself."

"About what?"

"About whether I was allowed to find it beautiful," Kyra said, "given that I had spent the morning telling a yard full of people you were a coward."

Val made a noise into her shoulder that was not quite a laugh.

"I keep mine short," said Kyra. "I always have. Since school, because it suits me and because I like being able to see myself, and it has never once occurred to me to want anybody else to do the same. And what I looked at that evening was the exact opposite of every choice I have ever made about my own body, and I thought it was the finest thing in that building."

"You never said."

"Of course I never said. I was eighteen and I was in a fury with you and it would have been like handing you a knife." Kyra's fingers moved in her hair. "I went to the far tap and washed my hands for about four minutes, and when you'd gone I stood there with them under the hot and I was so angry I could have put a fist through the wall, and I could not for the life of me have told you what about."

Val's breathing changed.

"You've told me that story," said Val. "In Trieste. You said you'd been annoyed in a wash room and never located the reason."

"I did say that."

"You have had two hundred and fifty years to locate it."

"I located it that night," said Kyra. "I've just never said it out loud until about ninety seconds ago."

Val lay there.

"Then I have one," Val said, "and I have had it longer, and you have been entitled to it since seventeen ninety-five."

"Since—"

"I told you in that room that I had been able to say it since a boot room. You never asked me what happened in the boot room." Val had her eyes shut. "You have not asked me in a hundred and fifty-five years."

"I've wanted to about once a month."

"I know you have," said Val. "I have watched you not do it, and I have never once decided to make it easier, and that is on my side of the page."

"Two weeks before the fruit, at the outside," Val said. "It was before Ellory, and I know it was before Ellory because I remember thinking that if we lost I would have to leave. You came in off a run and you were furious about something Rhone Tellis had said and you took everything off standing up in the middle of the floor like a person who has never in her life considered that anybody might be looking."

"That sounds like me."

"It is the single most characteristic thing you have ever done and you did it at eighteen years old with half the squad in the room."

"And you looked."

"I looked," said Val.

"I looked the way I look at anything. In order. I started at the top because that is where one starts, and I noted the jaw, which is firmer than mine and always has been and is the first thing about you that anybody registers, and it is why strangers think you are the older of us and why they are wrong." Her voice was very level. "Then the shoulders, which were a runner's shoulders and are still. Then the way the color comes up in the whole of your skin when you have been out in the cold, which mine does not do. Then the hair, which was wet, and which is not black whatever anybody tells you, and which I have been correcting people about since sixteen twelve."

"Val."

"And then I reached the end of it and started again at the top," Val said, "and it was on the third time through that I understood I had been standing in a doorway for rather longer than a person stands in a doorway."

Kyra put both arms round her.

"Three times."

"Three. Four. I stopped counting, which as you are aware is not a thing I do." Val's voice had gone thin. "And I had no word for any of it. Not one. I had a complete and ordered description of a woman and no idea on this or any other world what it was for, and I carried it for two hundred and forty-seven years, and when the word came I had to walk across a floor and make it up in front of you with nothing prepared."

"You did that beautifully."

"I did that badly and in English and at the wrong end of two and a half centuries," said Val, "and it is the one thing I have ever done that I would not change a syllable of, and it is also the one I would most like back, and I have never been able to hold both of those at once."

They were quiet for a while after that.

"The strange part," Kyra said eventually, "is that it isn't a memory."

"No."

"It ought to be. It's four hundred years ago, it's a wash room on another planet, everybody in it is dead except the two of us." She turned her head. "And you look exactly the same. Not nearly. Exactly. That's the same hair and that's the same everything, and if I put eighteen-year-old Val Sorin in this bed I could not tell you which of you I was looking at."

"That is true of you as well."

"I know it is."

"It is the thing people here never understand and never will," said Val. "They think the body is a record. It goes along keeping the reckoning of what happened to you, and you can read a man's life off his hands." She was quiet a moment. "Ours keep nothing. Everything that has happened to us in four hundred years is in our heads, and there is not one mark of it on either of us anywhere, except the two we put there on purpose."

"Except those."

"Except those," Val said.

"So when I look at you," said Kyra, "I'm not remembering anything. I'm just looking. It's the same woman in the same skin and I want her the way I wanted her standing in a wash room in a temper in my first year, and the only thing that has changed in four hundred years is that now I get to say so."

"Say it, then."

Kyra took her time.

"You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen with my eyes," said Kyra, "and I include the fold."

"That is a very large claim."

"It's an accurate one. You can check the figures."

"There are no figures."

"I know," said Kyra. "Isn't it awful."

The light had been up for some while.

It was at the wrists and along the inside of her forearms and under the jaw below the ear, and it had come up somewhere in the middle of all that and neither of them had said a word about it, because they had not said a word about it since about sixteen fifty and were not going to start.

It was enough to see by. It always was. In a dark room it made a warm shape of whatever it fell on, and what it fell on now was the two of them under a quilt in a house on a street where nobody knew their names, and the dark chestnut of Kyra's hair went nearly black in it except above the one ear where the copper came up regardless of what light you gave it.

Kyra was looking at her.

"What," said Val.

"Nothing."

"You are doing the face."

"I'm not doing any face." Kyra was absolutely doing the face. "Val."

"What."

"You're ready."

Val went still.

"When—"

"I don't know. Somewhere around the page is a bill." Kyra's mouth was doing something she was not entirely controlling. "You weren't watching. That's the entire trick of it and you've had four hundred years to notice and you've been too busy timing yourself to look up."

"That is not a mechanism."

"It is absolutely a mechanism."

"It is an anecdote," said Val, "with a sample of one, and I want it noted that I am objecting."

"Objection noted," Kyra said, and moved.

She came in close and unhurried, the way she had been doing it since a hut on a mountain, and put her mouth against Val's and stayed there a while before anything else happened at all, because that was how it went and had always gone and neither of them had ever wanted it faster.

And then they laced, and the light was up, and there was nothing on earth to hurry for, and nobody counted anything.

It had been meant to be an ordinary evening.

Some while later, in the dark, Kyra said, "Two minutes," and Val said, "Ninety seconds at the outside," and Kyra laughed so hard the bed moved.

— end of chapter two —

The arrangement was twelve years old by then and neither of them had ever said it out loud, because saying it out loud would have made it a policy instead of a habit.

The number was Anna Anderson's. There was one of it, it had been got at a post office on Union Avenue in 1936, and it was not going to be got again.

The name on a time card was whatever the time card wanted. Ann on one, A. Anderson on another, Nan at a cannery office during the war because a foreman had decided that was her name on the first morning and Val had not corrected him for four years.

Nobody had ever noticed. There was no reason for anybody to notice. A number goes to Baltimore on a quarterly return and a name goes on a card in a drawer in an office on the east side, and the two of them are in different buildings in different states and there is no man alive whose job it is to put them beside each other.

That was the arrangement. It had worked for twelve years and would go on working for six more, and the thing Val did not say out loud about it was that it had never once been tested.

Rutledge and Hoyt did bridges, culverts and drainage out of two rooms above a tire place, and in the April of 1951 they needed somebody to check other men's figures.

Val got an interview because she wrote a letter that was four sentences long and contained a correction to an error in their own advertisement.

Mr. Hoyt thought this was funny. Mr. Rutledge, who was older and had less to prove, thought it was promising, and gave her eleven columns off a job out past Gresham and left her alone with them for an hour, and when he came back she had found three mistakes and the one that was not a mistake but was going to become one in about four years when the fill settled.

"Where'd you learn that?"

"My father," said Val, which was true, and nobody on this planet was ever going to be able to check it.

It was the girl in the front office who nearly did for them, and she was about nineteen and she was only being thorough.

She had a card with four lines on it. Name. Number. Previous. References.

Val gave her the first two without any trouble at all.

"And where were you before?"

"A cannery office in Astoria until forty-five. Since then I have been at home."

"Six years." The girl wrote it. "And a reference? Somebody from the cannery would be best."

And there it was, in two rooms above a tire place, on an ordinary Tuesday in April, asked by a nineteen-year-old with a pencil.

Val had names. She always had names. She had a foreman called Haugen who had run that office for nineteen years and who had thought extremely well of her, and she gave his, with the spelling, and the street the cannery had been on.

She did not say the rest of it, which was that Lars Haugen had died in the winter of 1947, and that she knew this because she had read it in a line of agate type on a Thursday, and that the cannery had changed hands twice since and that there was nobody in that building who had been in it in 1945.

What she said was: "He may be difficult to reach."

"Oh, nobody ever answers those," said the girl. "I just have to write one down."

She wrote it down.

Val watched the pencil do it and watched the card go into the drawer, and she started on the Monday at a dollar ten an hour.

And walking down the stairs past the tire place she understood, with complete clarity and no satisfaction whatsoever, that she had just been saved by a girl who could not be bothered.

She did not tell Kyra that evening, which was not concealment and was not arranging either.

It was that Kyra came in at six with her own news, which was that she had talked her way into the office of a freight outfit on the east side by telling a man named Dressler, in considerable detail, that the load he was about to send over the coast range on the Thursday would be sitting in a ditch outside Elsie by four in the afternoon.

"And was it?"

"It was not," said Kyra, "because he didn't send it, because I told him not to, and then it rained nine inches in two days and the man who did send one is still getting it out of a creek." She was extremely pleased with herself. "I start on Monday. I sit in a room and tell men when to go."

"You have been doing that for four hundred years without being paid for it."

"I know. It's a scandal."

So they both started on the same Monday, which neither of them had planned, and which Kyra decided was an omen and Val declined to discuss on those terms.

It was a good spring. That is worth putting down, because there were not many left of that kind and because a great deal of what came after makes more sense if a reader knows that the two of them were happy that year in an entirely ordinary way.

Val liked the work. She liked it enormously and would have been embarrassed to say so — four hundred years of being the only person in any room who could see a wrong figure, and now a man paid her nine dollars a day to do nothing else.

Kyra came home with stories about men who had ignored her and men who had not, and the ones who had not got longer every week.

It came out in June, in the yard, over a hedge Val was failing to do anything useful with.

"Haugen," said Val.

"What about him?"

"I gave his name to the girl in the office in April and she wrote it down and nobody has telephoned anybody, and he has been dead for three and a half years."

Kyra took the shears off her, which was a judgment on the hedge rather than on the conversation. She had her hair up off her neck for the heat and the June sun was doing the thing to it that only summer did, which was to put the copper out at the ends where everybody else saw brown.

"All right."

"That is the whole of our security," Val said. "Not the paper. The paper was fine — the paper is always fine, the paper has been fine since 1710. It is that there was a question on that card that we cannot answer, and the only reason it did not matter is that a girl of nineteen has four hundred cards to do and nobody has ever once rung any of the numbers on any of them."

"So she saved us by being lazy."

"She saved us by being ordinary," said Val, "which is better, because laziness is a thing a person can stop doing. Ordinary is a system. There are four hundred girls in this city writing down four hundred names that nobody will ever ring, and that is not a lucky day, that is how the whole country is built, and it has been quietly holding us up since before either of us noticed."

"Then what's the trouble?"

"The trouble is that it is a thing being done for us by people who do not know they are doing it, and I would rather be held up by something I built."

Kyra cut a foot off the hedge in one go, which Val felt was excessive.

"Val, we have never once been held up by something we built. We've been held up by Frederick, and a woman who did our washing, and a girl of nineteen with a pencil. That's the whole list." She handed the shears back. "You've just never had to look at it on a Tuesday."

It stayed with her through the summer, and then it stopped staying with her, because that is what happens to a thing that does not come due.

Lars Haugen's name sat on a card in a drawer in two rooms above a tire place for six years. Nobody ever rang it. In 1957 the card came out of the drawer and had a second sheet stapled to it, and the second sheet had four questions on it too, and one of them was not the sort a girl of nineteen can fail to look at.

But that was six years off, and there was a hedge, and Kyra had cut a foot off it, and they had a reasonably spirited argument about that instead.

— end of chapter three —

The radio had been going all week about the men coming back.

They were coming out at a place called Panmunjom, a few hundred at a time, across a line, and it had been going on since the start of the month and there were photographs in the paper every day — men on trucks, men in new clothes, men being shouted at by other men with lists.

And the thing the radio could not stop doing, because it was August and there was nothing else, was asking what had been done to them.

Not of them. About them. There was a man on in the evenings who had opinions about what a person could be made to say, and another who came on afterward and disagreed, and the two of them had been at it for a fortnight.

Kyra had the radio on in the kitchen because Kyra had the radio on in the kitchen, and had done since she bought it in October 1930 and had never once been argued out of it.

Val had the newspaper and was not reading it.

They had eaten. The window was open onto the yard. Somewhere up the street a man was failing to start something with an engine in it, and had been for twenty minutes, and the whole of that summer was in that sound.

The man on the radio said something about the fourth day.

Kyra reached over and turned it down, not off, and said: "Tell me about the second room."

Val did not stiffen.

She had not stiffened at that sentence in a very long time and she was not going to start in her own kitchen with the window open.

"Trieste," said Val.

"Trieste."

And she gave her the paragraph.

I was taken out of the room where you were a little after four on the afternoon of the second day, and I was brought back to it on the fourth. In the interval I was held below, in a room on the court side with one window. There were four men in it. Two of them I had seen upstairs and two of them I had not. Nothing was done to me that left a mark, and I was not asked one question about you at any point. I was asked the same eleven questions in a different order for two days and I gave the same answers to all of them and none of the answers was true.

It is a hundred and twenty words. It has been a hundred and twenty words since the first time she ever gave it. It does not get longer when she is tired and it does not get shorter when she is not, and in three hundred years Kyra had never once caught a syllable out of place.

Then the pause.

Then: "Thank you."

And: "You are welcome."

The man up the street got the engine going, briefly, and lost it again.

Kyra turned her cup round on the table.

"Can I tell you a thing," said Kyra, "that I have never told you, and that I am fairly sure you are not going to enjoy."

"Given the evening, yes."

"It's about the pause."

Val put the newspaper down.

"There is a gap," said Kyra, "between the end of it and the thank you. It's always been there. You stop, and then there's the gap, and then I say thank you and you say you're welcome and we go and do something else."

"Yes."

"I've been timing it."

Val did not say anything at all.

"Not with anything. I can't count seconds, you know I can't, I've never been able to and you've told me so for four hundred years." Kyra had her hands flat on either side of the cup. "I time it the way I time weather. I know how long it is the way I know a load's going to be late. And I have been doing it since the fourth one and I have never once mentioned it, because the day I mention it is the day you start managing it."

"And?"

"It's got shorter."

The radio went on murmuring with the volume down.

"How much shorter," said Val.

"I'm not going to tell you that either."

"Kyra—"

"No. You'd have a figure inside a minute and you'd carry it for forty years." She looked up. "Shorter. That's the whole of what you get. The first ones were long enough that I used to wonder whether you'd gone, and tonight it was — it was a pause. It was the pause a person leaves."

Val sat with that for a while.

"There are two readings," said Val, eventually.

"I know there are two readings. I've had about ninety years on the two readings."

"Say them, then, and I will tell you if you have got them right."

"One," said Kyra. "It costs you less than it used to, because three hundred years is three hundred years and a thing wears down, and the gap is shorter because there is less to get over before you can speak."

"That is the first one."

"And two. It costs you exactly what it always did, and you have simply got better at it, and the gap is shorter because you have said it eight times now and a woman who has said a thing eight times says it faster."

"That is the second one," said Val, "and you have got them both exactly right, and I want to say the next part carefully because it is the only honest thing I have."

"Go on."

"I do not know which it is."

Kyra let out a breath.

"I have thought about it," Val said. "Not tonight — I have thought about it on and off for a hundred and fifty years, because I have known the gap was there even if I did not know you were measuring it. And I cannot get at it. I cannot tell the difference from the inside between a thing that has stopped costing and a thing I have become good at paying for, and I have the strong suspicion that nobody can, on either world, about anything."

"That's not an answer."

"No. It is the absence of one and I am handing it to you as it is, instead of picking whichever of your two readings would be kinder, which is what I would have done in 1710 and did."

"Did you?"

"The fourth time. On a stair in Boston." Val's voice did not move. "You asked me whether it was getting easier and I said yes, and I did not know whether it was, and I said it because you had the face on you that you have got now."

Kyra sat back.

"Two hundred and forty-three years," said Kyra.

"I did say it would not be enjoyable."

They sat in it a while.

"I'd still rather have this one," said Kyra.

"I know you would. That is the reason I gave it to you." Val turned the newspaper over without looking at it. "And there is one more thing and then we are finished with it for however long you want."

"Go."

"When the gap gets to nothing — and it will, because whichever of your two readings is correct, both of them end in the same place — I want you to know in advance that it will not mean I have stopped minding."

"You don't know that."

"I do not know it," Val agreed, "which is why I would like to have said it now, while I can still produce the sentence, rather than in some kitchen in some year when the gap is gone and you are sitting there trying to work out what it meant."

Kyra got up and went round the table — and the kitchen bulb got the pale of Val’s hair as she passed it, which at that wattage went the color of weak tea and had done in every rented room since the war — and stood behind her chair, which was the arrangement for anything that had got too large to be looked at directly, and put her forearms crossed over Val's collarbones from behind and her chin on the top of her head.

"Three left," said Kyra.

"Three."

"I've never once decided when."

"I am aware."

"It just comes up. It came up tonight because of a man on the radio talking about four days, and I didn't know it was going to until my mouth was already doing it." Kyra's arms tightened a little. "That's how I know I'm not collecting them."

"I have never thought you were collecting them."

"You have thought it twice," said Kyra, "and you were wrong both times, and I let it go."

The radio went on under the conversation with nobody listening to it, and at some point the news came round again and the man said the same figures he had said at six.

Val reached up and put her hand over Kyra's forearm and left it there.

"Turn that off, love," said Val.

And Kyra, who had not been called that by anybody in four hundred years until about three years ago and still went slightly stupid about it every time, let go of her and went and turned it off.

— end of chapter four —

It arrived in a brown envelope with everybody else's, which was the whole of the problem, because a thing that arrives with everybody else's cannot be declined.

Rutledge and Hoyt had taken on nineteen people since the war and had got to the size where a firm starts thinking about itself, and in the autumn of 1957 Mr. Hoyt announced a retirement plan. He announced it standing on the step between the drafting room and the front office with his hands behind his back, and he was pleased about it, and he had every reason to be. It was a good plan. He had gone to some trouble over it.

Val sat at the long table with her pencils in a jar and a run of other men's figures in front of her, and listened to a man give away money, and understood inside about eleven seconds that she was going to have to leave.

She had checked the arithmetic of that firm for six years. She was good at it in a way that had stopped being remarked on, which was the condition she arranged everywhere and had arranged four hundred times. Nobody had ever asked her anything.

The form asked four things. Name. Number. Years of service. Date of birth.

It was the fourth one, and it was the fourth one for a reason that had taken twenty-one years to arrive and had been coming the entire time.

Here is how it had worked since the Union Avenue post office in November 1936.

A number is a figure on a form, and the form goes to a building in Baltimore, and nobody in Baltimore has ever seen her. A face is a thing in a room. In twenty-one years the number and the face had never once been in the same place at the same time, and that was not luck, and Val could have told anybody the date she had worked it out.

A date of birth is the first document that puts them together. It is written in her own hand, next to her own name, in front of a woman who is looking at her.

The woman was Mrs. Thiel, who did the front office and was kind to everybody and had a son at Benson, and who came round the long table collecting the forms at about four.

She glanced at Val's on the way past. She was not reading it. She was squaring the stack.

"Oh — Anna, this one's gone wrong." Mrs. Thiel laughed. "Eighteen seventy-four. You've put your mother's."

Val looked up with nothing on her face at all.

"So I have," said Val.

"I'll give you another one."

"No need. Nineteen twenty-nine." Val held her hand out for the form, and put a line through the figure, and wrote the other one above it, and gave it back. "I was reading the man's dates off the Burnside drawings and I have put down the wrong century twice today."

"You and me both," said Mrs. Thiel, and went on round the table.

It was a good lie. It was the correct lie, delivered in about a second and a half, and it had the stupid small detail in it that makes a lie a fact.

And Val sat there afterward with her pencils in a jar and understood that she had just made it very much worse, because there were now two years in that building, in her handwriting, on the same sheet, with one of them crossed out — and in Baltimore there was a third one that had been accruing wages against it since 1937 and did not know about either.

She finished the page. She was four minutes late leaving and nobody noticed that either.

Kyra got home at six with her coat wet and an opinion about a man named Dressler who had moved four loads out of Clatskanie against her advice and lost two of them.

She got about a third of the way through it before she stopped.

Val was at the kitchen table with the notebook open and a sheet beside it, and she had taken her shoes off and had not put them anywhere, which in that woman was a condition.

"Right," said Kyra, and sat down.

"I am going to go through it in order," Val said, "and I want you to let me get to the end before you start, because I have been doing this since four o'clock and I have not been able to get out of it and I would like to be told I am wrong."

"Go."

"Anna is eighty-three. Ada is eighty. That is not an opinion; it is what is written in Salem and in Baltimore and on the deed of this house." Val had her finger on the sheet and did not need it. "There are four ways out and I have had seven hours on them."

"Four."

"Four, and they close in order, and I have done them twice."

"One. Anna retires. She is eighteen years past the age and she goes down and claims what she is owed, which is a considerable sum, and it is honestly hers." Val turned her hand over. "And then there is an office that expects her, annually, for the rest of a life that does not end, and sooner or later a clerk in that office wants to look at the woman. That is not a risk. That is a schedule."

"Two?"

"Two. Anna dies." Val said it flatly. "She cannot. A death wants a body and a doctor and a man who signs, and we do not have one and cannot get one, and I have been through four versions of getting one and every version has a living person in it who would have to be lied to for the rest of his life."

Kyra did not say anything.

"Three. She gives the number back."

"Can she?"

"There is no form," said Val. "I have looked. There is no form because nobody has ever wanted one. It is not a license and it is not a passport and it is not a thing a person surrenders. It was issued once, in 1936, at a post office on Union Avenue, by a man with a mustache who was bored, and it will exist after both of us have gone off this planet."

"And four," Kyra said.

"Four is the one we have been doing for three hundred and fifty years. We walk away. We are two other people in a town that is not this one, and we carry nothing, and we take work for cash and we are nobody."

"That has always worked."

"It has always worked," Val agreed, "and it worked in 1945, and it is beginning not to work now, and in ten years it will not work at all. Dressler would not have put you on his books without a number. Hoyt would not have put me on his. There is going to be a year — I cannot tell you which one, and I would very much like to be able to — when a woman of twenty-five with no number is not an ordinary woman with no number. She is a question."

"You said that in thirty-six."

"I said the opposite in thirty-six," said Val. "I said a person with no number in 1936 is ordinary and a person with no number in 1950 is a question, and I got us numbers, and I was right, and the numbers are the thing that is killing us now. I would like that noted, because I am not going to enjoy it later."

The kitchen did what kitchens do. The rain came on harder against the window over the sink and then let off.

"So there's no way out," Kyra said.

"There is no way out."

"Val."

"I do not have a next step." Her voice did not move at all. "I want to say that out loud because I have never said it, in four hundred years, to you or to anybody, and I have had seven hours to find a way of putting it that was not that, and there isn't one."

Kyra reached across the table and put her hand flat over Val's.

"All right," said Kyra.

They sat with it a while.

The lamp over the table was the bad one and threw everything down the length of the room, and what it caught of Kyra was the side of her face and the dark of her hair where the copper came up at the ear, which it had been doing in every kitchen on two worlds.

"Say the rest," Kyra said.

"There isn't a rest. That is the whole of the four."

"There's a fifth and you've been sitting on it since about half past four, and I know that because you have not once looked up at me." Kyra did not take her hand away. "Say it."

"We cannot die," said Val, "so we have to be born."

"Meaning."

"Meaning that the whole of my method for three hundred and fifty years has been to leave a person behind and become nobody, and nobody is no longer a condition this country allows. The way out is forward. Two women with full paper from the start — a registration, a date, a place, the whole apparatus — who are twenty-five years old in 1961 and will be forty in 1976 and will be dead on paper in about 2010, which gives us fifty years and is more than we have ever had."

"And Anna?"

"Anna stays where she is."

Kyra took her hand back.

"Say that again."

"She stays where she is. There is nothing to be done with her. The number sits in Baltimore with twenty-one years of wages against it and goes on sitting there, uncollected, forever, and the house gets sold out from under her by a woman who does not exist, and that is the end of it."

"That's not the end of it."

"It is the arithmetic—"

"I'm not arguing with the arithmetic," said Kyra. "I have never once argued with your arithmetic and I'm not going to start on a Tuesday. I'm telling you what you've just said and I don't think you've heard it."

Val waited.

"Jo Selby knew Anna Anderson," Kyra said. "Forty years. She knew Ada too and she called her Ada and she had that name in her mouth the last time she said anything to me at all, in a room, in thirty-seven, and she is in the ground at Rose City under her own." Her voice was perfectly steady and she was furious, which was a combination Val had learned to respect on a plateau. "You are proposing that we take the only name anybody who ever knew us has said out loud in sixty years, and leave it in a drawer in Maryland."

"Yes."

"Then say that it costs something."

"Kyra—"

"Say it costs something. I will do the whole of it. I will do every part of it and I will not complain once and you know I won't. I am asking you to say out loud that it is not free, because you have given me four ways and a fifth and not one word about what we are putting down, and if you do not say it tonight you will not say it, and in twenty years you will be standing somewhere and it will come up out of you sideways."

Val looked at the sheet for a while.

"Marjeta," said Val.

"What?"

"Everything we have ever left behind has rotted. A house in Maribor, a bench on a river, a grave with a name on it I said out loud at night forty years too late. All of it has gone into the ground and I have counted on that for three hundred and fifty years, and I did not know I was counting on it until about five o'clock this evening." She had her hand flat on the notebook. "This does not rot. It is a card in a drawer in a building and nobody will ever throw it out, and in two hundred years when there is nothing left of this street there will be a figure somewhere with my handwriting on the application and Anna Anderson's wages on it, and it will be the only thing either of us has ever put on this planet that outlasts us."

"Val."

"That is what it costs," said Val, "and I would like to go to bed now."

They went up.

Later, in the dark, Kyra said, "Fifty years is a long time, love," and Val said, "It is not," and neither of them said anything else, and some while after that Val got up and went down and put the notebook away in the drawer where it lived, because she had left it out on the table and could not sleep knowing it.

She stood in the kitchen for a minute with her hand on the drawer.

Then she went back up, and got in, and Kyra, mostly asleep, moved over about four inches without being asked.

— end of chapter five —

Kyra said it on a Tuesday, in the ordinary way, with her hands in the sink and her back to the room.

"It's started."

Val put the pen down and went and got the notebook off the shelf, and turned to the back of it where there was a page that had been running for three hundred and fifty-two years and had thirty-two figures on it and nothing else at all.

"When."

"This morning. I knew on the bridge." Kyra did not turn round. "Write the thirty-third."

And Val wrote the thirty-third.

Three weeks is the whole of it. It has never been more and it has never been less, and it is not dramatic, and in three hundred and fifty years neither of them had ever found a use for it beyond the fact of its arriving.

The three weeks went by.

The rain came in off the coast range the way it does in that city from the middle of October, and a man from the county came about the sewer line at the end of the block, and the street went on being a street. The Jorgensens sold up and went to California and the house stood empty into the spring.

And nothing happened to Kyra Davan at all.

On the twenty-second day Kyra said, at the table, without any lead-up: "Take it out."

"Take what out."

"The thirty-third. Take it off the page."

Val, who had been waiting for some version of this sentence for four days and had not built anything to put after it, said: "No."

Kyra got up and took her plate to the sink and did not say another word for the rest of the evening, and that was the beginning of it.

Here is the thing about Kyra Davan, and Val had known it since she was eighteen years old and had never once had to think about it.

She talks.

She is angry out loud and pleased out loud and grieving out loud and she has been since a plateau, and in four hundred years Val had watched her carry exactly two things in silence and had been present for the end of both. Kyra shouting at her was ordinary. Kyra weeping at her was ordinary. Kyra putting a plate in a sink and saying nothing for four days was not a mood and was not a sulk, and by the second day Val had stopped pretending to herself that it was either.

She waited two days more, because waiting was the whole of her method and had been for four centuries and it had been right about as often as it had been wrong.

On the fourth evening she stopped waiting.

She was out on the step in the cold with no coat on, which in that woman meant she had gone out for one minute about forty minutes ago.

Val put a coat over her shoulders from behind and sat down on the step beside her, which was wet, and did not say anything for a while, because the only thing she had was a question and she had already decided the question was the wrong instrument.

The light off the kitchen window came out past the both of them and went about six feet into the yard and stopped. What it reached of Kyra was the side of her face and the fall of her hair over the coat, dark chestnut and the copper in it where the light found it above the ear, the way it had been finding it since a mountain.

"It's cold," Val said, eventually, which was the worst opening she had ever made in her life.

"It is."

"I am going to do this badly," said Val.

"You don't have to do it at all."

"I do, in fact, and I want to say in advance that I have nothing prepared, because you will know that anyway in about nine seconds and I would rather have said it first."

Kyra's hands were inside the coat and her shoulders had come up and she was looking at the six feet of light in the yard.

"Four days," Val said.

"I know how long it's been."

"You have not gone four days without speaking to me since Trieste, and in Trieste there was a wall between us and a man with a list." Val looked at the side of her face. "I would like to know what this one has in it."

It came out flat and fast, which is how that woman says a thing she has been carrying.

"I told you a date and there wasn't one."

"Yes."

"I have told you thirty-two dates in three hundred and fifty years and every one of them was right, and I have never once checked and I have never once had to, and on the sixth of October I stood on that bridge and I knew, Val, exactly the way I have known every other time, and I was wrong." Her voice did not rise. That was the part. "I was wrong about the inside of my own body. It has never happened to me. Not on that world and not on this one. I did not know it could."

Val did not move.

"So take it out," Kyra said.

And Val, because she is what she is, reached for the only tool she has ever had.

"The intervals are not eleven years," said Val. "They are eleven years and some, and the some has run from three months to nineteen. There is a version of this where you were not wrong but early, and the thing arrives in February, and the entry stands as—"

"Don't."

"It is a legitimate reading of the figures and I can show you the figures."

"Val." Kyra turned and looked at her for the first time in four days. "Don't do that. Don't hand me a number. I have been listening to you hand people numbers for four hundred years and I have always liked it and I am asking you not to do it to me tonight."

And Val Sorin, who had arrived at every sentence that mattered having built it first, sat on a wet step with nothing in her hands and said nothing at all.

It went on for a while.

Then Kyra started to cry, and she did it without any noise whatsoever, and that was when Val understood how bad it was.

"Stop," Val said.

"I'm not doing anything."

"You are doing it quietly." Val had hold of her arm through the coat. "I have seen you cry perhaps forty times and you have never once done it quietly, not on two worlds, not in a blood court, not on a river, and you are doing it quietly on a step in the dark where I could have missed it, and I want you to know that it is frightening me."

Kyra put her head down.

"There it is," said Kyra.

"Say it."

"You'll tell me it isn't."

"I will not tell you anything," said Val. "I have just established that I have nothing to tell you with."

Kyra wiped her face with the heel of her hand, which she had done at eighteen and had never stopped doing.

"I am the instrument," said Kyra. "That's what you said in Portland in the war year and I have thought about it every single day since. Twenty-nine entries and every one of them came out of my mouth. You cannot see it, you cannot measure it, you stopped testing it, and the entire basis of the only record either of us keeps of anything that is ours is that a woman told you." She got the rest out on the second run. "And the woman was wrong. So there is no record. There is a page of thirty-two figures in your hand and no reason on this earth to believe any of them."

The kitchen window did what kitchen windows do. Somewhere up the street a screen door went twice.

"Come inside," Val said.

"I don't want to come inside."

"I am aware of that. Come inside anyway, because you have been sitting in the wet for an hour and I am going to get the book, and I do not intend to read it to you out here in the dark like a woman winning an argument."

Kyra came inside.

Val put her in the chair by the stove and put her hands round Kyra's hands, which were freezing, and held them there until they were not, and that took some minutes and neither of them filled them.

Then she got the notebook.

It is a small thing and it is not the original and it is not the fourth one either, and every time it has been copied out it has been copied out by the same hand. She opened it at the back and turned it round so that Kyra could see the page and set it on her knees.

"Look at it," said Val.

"I've seen it."

"You have not looked at it in about a hundred years. Look at it."

It is a page of dates. That is the whole of it. There is nothing beside any of them — no note, no weather, no place, no remark, nothing to say what any of them was or what it did or whether it came at the right time or the wrong one.

"Thirty-three now," Val said. "Read the last four."

Kyra read the last four.

"Now tell me which one of them is the one that did not happen."

Kyra did not say anything.

"You cannot," said Val. "Neither can I. It is a date on a page and it looks exactly like every other date on the page and it always will, and in two hundred years neither of us will be able to tell it from the thirty-first without being told." She put her finger under the line. "Every entry in this has nothing beside it. That is what the page is. You are not a blank in it. You are the thirty-third of thirty-three."

"That's a trick."

"It is not a trick, it is a description of an object, and you may check it yourself at any hour of any day for the rest of your life."

"It's still wrong."

"It is still wrong," Val agreed, "and I am not going to take it out, and I will tell you why, and it is not the reason I gave you in nineteen fifteen."

Kyra looked up.

"You said it was because I'd never been wrong."

"That was true and it was not the reason," said Val. "It was the thing I said instead of the reason, because the reason would have cost me something and I had already spent a considerable amount that evening. I have had forty-four years to notice the difference and I noticed it on about the second day of this."

She turned a few pages back, and then a few more, and held the book open on Kyra's knees with her hand flat on it.

"There are four hundred and nine names in here," Val said. "There is a bearing I took off a hull in seventeen eighty-nine, and eleven lines of a ship's own hand copied out four times, and a speed from a man in a field, and two reckonings of the year, and the dates of every document with either of our names on it since a customs house in seventeen ten. I took every one of those. I went and got them. Some of them I paid for."

She turned to the back again.

"There is one page in this book that somebody gave me."

Kyra's hands had stopped on the cover.

"It is the only thing on two worlds that no other person could have handed me," said Val, "because there is no instrument for it, and there is no observation for it, and there is not going to be one in either of our lifetimes on this planet, and the only way it could ever have got onto a page is you opening your mouth in a kitchen and telling me. Thirty-three times in three hundred and fifty years. Unasked. Every time."

"Val—"

"I would have kept it if every figure in it had been wrong," Val said. "That is the reason. I have never once wanted to check because checking was never what it was for, and I have known that since about the fourth entry, and I have let you believe for forty-four years that I kept it because you were reliable." Her voice did not move at all, which was how Kyra knew. "You are not in that book because you are accurate. You are in it because you are the one who talks."

Kyra put both hands over her face.

And Val, who does not do this, who has never been the one who does this, got down on the floor in front of the chair and took her by the wrists and pulled her hands away so that she could be looked at.

"There is one more," said Val, "and then you may do whatever you like."

"I can't—"

"You have not said the real one yet. You have said that you were wrong and that the page is worthless, and both of those are the outside of it, and I have been sitting out there in the wet working out what the inside is, which is a thing I am very bad at and have had to do without you." Val had her by the wrists. "May I say it for you?"

Kyra nodded.

"It is the last thing about either of us that is not on this planet's calendar."

Kyra made a sound.

"Everything else we have is theirs," Val said. "We count in their months. We have their names and their numbers and a date of birth each that a clerk wrote down. The marks on us were put there on a river in this country by a woman from this country. There is one rhythm left in the two of us that this world did not give us and cannot see and has never once interrupted, and it comes every eleven years and some, and it is yours, and on the sixth of October it did not come."

"Yes," Kyra said.

"And you did not want to say that out loud because saying it out loud is how a thing becomes the case."

"Yes."

"Then I will say the rest of it as well," said Val, "and you will not like this part either. It may be going. I do not know. I have no way of knowing and I am not about to pretend to you that I have, and there is a version of the next hundred years in which the thirty-fourth does not come and there is no thirty-fifth and the page ends at thirty-three."

Kyra's breath went.

"And if that happens," Val said, "then it happens, and I will write nothing, and I will still have the page, and I will still have the woman who filled it. The page was never the point and I have known that since the fourth entry and I have just spent four days finding out that I never told you."

Kyra's eyes went gold.

It went right out to the rim with no warning at all, the way it does when she is at the end of what she can hold, and it stayed a moment and went, and neither of them said one word about it, because they had not said a word about it since about sixteen fifty and were not going to start.

It was not evidence of anything. Val knew that better than anybody alive and did not say so.

She got up off the floor and shut the book and put it on the shelf, and came back and stood in front of the chair, and Kyra put her arms round her waist and her forehead against her and stayed there a long time in the warm.

"Say the date again," Kyra said, into her.

"The sixth of October."

"Say the whole line."

"The thirty-third. The sixth of October, nineteen fifty-nine." Val had her hand in the back of Kyra's hair. "With nothing beside it."

"With nothing beside it," said Kyra, and her voice had something back in it that had not been there for four days, and Val felt the whole of it go through the woman under her hands and out.

They went up later than they meant to and neither of them had decided anything in advance, which had stopped being remarkable somewhere around the turn of the century and was still not quite ordinary.

Val went first, the way she does, with her hands before she had anything to say, and what she said came afterward and badly and at length, and Kyra let her, because the two of them had been trading that particular office back and forth for four hundred years and tonight it was the other way round and both of them knew it and neither of them was going to remark on it twice.

The pale of Val's hair was the only thing in the room the street light could find, and Kyra had a fistful of it and her mouth somewhere under Val's jaw, and there was no hurry anywhere on the planet.

And then they laced, and the light was up, and the rain went on doing what it does there from the middle of October.

In the morning Kyra came down talking, about the sewer line and the county and a man called Trumbull who had no business selling anybody a heater, and did not stop for eleven minutes, and Val sat with her cup and let the whole of it go over her.

"You're not listening."

"I am listening to every word," said Val, "and I would like you to keep going for about another hour."

Kyra looked at her.

Then she poured herself a cup and sat down and kept going.

— end of chapter six —

The office was on the fourth floor and smelled of floor wax and somebody's lunch, and the man behind the counter was called Mr. Pelletier and had been doing the work for nineteen years and liked it.

That was the thing Val had not allowed for.

She had built the question on the bus. It was a good question. It belonged to a woman who was helping her aunt, and the aunt had gone into a home in Vancouver, and there was a muddle about a card, and the whole of it was constructed so that every true part was somebody else's and every false part was too small to check.

She never got to most of it.

"Oh, no," said Mr. Pelletier, about four sentences in. "No, no. You can't give it back."

"There isn't a procedure."

"There's no procedure because there's nothing to do." He had come up onto his elbows on the counter, which is what a man does when you have accidentally asked him about the part he finds interesting. "It isn't a license. People think it's a license. A license you surrender, you hand it over, somebody takes it off you — this isn't that. It's a record. It's your record of what you earned."

"And if she never works again?" Val asked.

"Then it sits there."

"For how long?"

Val had her hands in her coat pockets and kept them there.

Mr. Pelletier looked honestly delighted.

"Forever," he said.

And then he explained it, because nobody had asked him in a while.

He explained that it had been that way on purpose since the beginning. He explained what happens to a man who works forty years at eleven employers, and what used to happen to him, and what happens to him now, which is that every quarter of it is in one place under one figure and none of it can be mislaid. He explained that it is not reissued, ever, to anybody, and that this is not an oversight.

"That's the whole idea of it," said Mr. Pelletier. "Your name you can change. Women change theirs every Saturday. Addresses — people move, people go to California and come back. The number's the one thing that doesn't move. That's what it's for, see. Whatever happens to you, that's still yours, and it's still there, and nobody ever loses it."

Val sat on the fourth floor of a federal building and was told, kindly, by a man who was proud of his work, that the one thing she needed could not be done, and that its impossibility was the best feature of the system.

He was right. That was the other part. It was the best feature of the system, and she could see the whole of it, and if she had been asked to design it she would have designed the same thing.

"Your aunt's all right, though," he said, as she was getting up. "She's not in any trouble. There's no rule about not using it."

"No."

"People worry. There's no rule." He squared his blotter. "It's just there, is all. It'll outlast the both of us."

"Yes," said Val. "I had worked that out."

She walked down rather than taking the elevator, and stood in the lobby for a while, and then walked nine blocks in the wrong direction before she noticed.

It was March and the rain was coming in sideways off the river and she did not have the right coat.

At home Kyra had the kitchen table covered.

This was the inventory, and they had been doing it in pieces for four months, and it was not a difficult job. It was the opposite. It was a short list and it got shorter every time either of them looked at it, and that was its own kind of news.

The house. The bank on Hawthorne. A savings certificate. The water, the power, the telephone. Four pieces of paper at the county about the property line. The firm, which was finished anyway. A library card. A note from a dentist about a thing Kyra had never had done.

Nine items, and seven of them were the kind you cancel by not paying.

"Fifty years," Kyra said, "and that's the pile."

"It is a well-run life."

"It's a small one."

"It is the same thing," said Val, "said twice."

They worked through it. Val was good at this and it was restful to her in a way she would not have admitted to, and for about an hour the two of them sat in a warm kitchen taking a woman apart.

The house would be sold. That was not sentiment; it was nine thousand dollars, and they would need it, and a house sold by a woman of eighty-six who is never seen is a thing that can be done through a lawyer once and never again.

The bank was straightforward. The county was straightforward.

And then Kyra, who had been writing, stopped writing.

"Rose City," said Kyra.

Val put her pencil down.

"The care of the plot is paid annually," Kyra said, "in September, by Ada Anderson, and has been since 1937, and there is a card in a drawer in the office at Rose City Cemetery with that name on it in my handwriting." She was looking at the table. "And Anna Anderson is the one who stood at the back and said nothing, and Jo knew which of us was which, and she is the only person on this planet who ever did."

"Kyra."

"I'm not asking you to solve it. I'm telling you it's on the list."

"It can be transferred," said Val, after a moment. "The office will take the money from anybody. They do not care who pays it; they care that it is paid."

"I know they will," said Kyra.

"Then—"

"Then in September somebody who is not Ada Anderson walks in and pays for the care of a grave belonging to a woman she has never heard of, and the card gets a new name on it, and the old card goes wherever old cards go." Kyra's voice was level, which in her meant more than it meant in Val. "And that is fine. That is the right answer and I will do it myself and I will go on doing it, and in sixty years there will be a card in that drawer in the handwriting of a woman who was not born when Jo died, paying for a grave she has no business at."

"It is the same woman."

"It is the same woman," Kyra said. "It is not the same name, and the name is the only part of it that is written down anywhere, and Jo did not know a woman. Jo knew Ada."

"She knew Anna rather better," said Val.

"She knew Anna's handwriting. She had forty years of your figures in a book and she used to say you were the only honest thing on that street." Kyra did not look up. "And she came to my table every Sunday for thirty of them and told me about her brother-in-law, and I am the one who has been paying for the ground she is in, and we are going to leave that card in a drawer, and I would like us both to be clear about which of us is giving up what."

The rain got going properly against the window and neither of them got up to do anything about the one that did not shut.

"I went downtown," Val said.

"I know you did."

"There is a man on the fourth floor named Pelletier who has been in that office for nineteen years, and I went in with a constructed question and four layers under it, and I did not need one of them. He told me everything in about ninety seconds and he was pleased to be asked." She had her hands flat on the table. "It cannot be given back. It was never going to be able to be given back. And the reason is that they built it so that nothing a person earns can ever be lost, which is a decent thing to have built, and I have been sitting with that since two o'clock."

"You wanted him to be a bureaucrat."

"I wanted him to be a bureaucrat," Val agreed, "and he was a man who liked his job, and I came out onto Broadway and could not be angry at anybody, and I walked nine blocks the wrong way."

Kyra got up and came round and stood behind her chair, and put both hands on Val's shoulders, and left them there.

The lamp was behind them. The pale of Val's hair had gone the color of the lamp and the wet had got into the ends of it from Broadway and had not dried.

"Say the thing you've been not saying since Tuesday," said Kyra.

"I do not know which thing you mean."

"Yes, you do, girl."

Val sat for a moment.

"We are going to be very well documented," said Val, "and it is going to be the worst protection we have ever had."

"Go on."

"Every other time we have done this, the method has been to take nothing. A woman who carries no paper cannot be followed by it. That was true in Trieste and it was true on a wagon and it was true in 1894 and I have run it for three hundred and fifty years and it has never once failed." She turned her hands over. "In 1961 we are going to walk into a county office and ask them to write us down. Properly, with dates and a place and witnesses, so that we are the most thoroughly recorded people either of us has ever been. And every year after that the record will get better and there will be more of it and it will be easier to find, and the two women we are about to invent will be followable for the whole of their lives in a way Anna Anderson never was."

"And that's the plan."

"That is the plan," said Val, "and I have been through it four times and it is correct, and I would like it on the record that I can see exactly how it ends."

"How does it end?" said Kyra.

"It ends with two women in about 2010 who are eighty-odd on paper and twenty-two in a room, and nowhere left to go, because by then there will be no such thing as a person who is not written down." Val said it without any particular weight. "We get fifty years. That is the whole of what this buys. It is the longest run we have ever had and it is the last one of its kind, and the woman who comes after that will have to solve something I cannot see from here."

Kyra's hands did not move off her shoulders.

"Then we'll have fifty years," said Kyra.

They left it there, because there was nothing else in it, and ate at about eight.

Over the plates Kyra said that she had been out to Sellwood on the Thursday and had sat an hour with Hazel Brun, who had run the boarding house on Spokane Street for forty years and had a memory for other people's business that no one in that part of the city had ever got round.

"She's eighty-one," said Kyra. "She asked after Anna. She asks after Anna every time and I have never once worked out how she knows her."

"Everybody knows everybody out there."

"She knew my mother's name," Kyra said. "The one I used in 1931. I'd forgotten I ever used it."

Val said nothing for a moment, and then said that they should go out together before the weather turned, and Kyra said that they should, and neither of them thought about it again for six weeks.

— end of chapter seven —

The state of Oregon had thought about this, which was the part Val had not expected and never got over.

There is a form. It is for a person who was born in this state and never written down — born at home, born on a road, born to a woman who did not know she was supposed to or did not have the dollar or did not want the man's name in a book. The state had looked at that person in the late thirties and decided she ought to be able to exist, and had made a way for her to come in late and prove it.

They want three pieces. They want them sworn. And the sheet of what counts runs to a church record, a family Bible, a doctor's book, a voter's registration, a school roll — and the statements of people who were there.

"It is a kind door," Val said, at the table, with the whole of it spread out. "I want that said once before we go through it."

The rest of it she built the way she built anything, which is to say from the ground, in order, over nine weeks.

They would be sisters, because they had been sisters for two hundred years and the story was broken in. The mother was a boarder and there was no father on any sheet anywhere, which closed four doors at once and was the kind of ordinary nobody follows up. The births were at the house. No doctor, no midwife anybody could name now, and nothing registered, because a woman who does not register the first one does not register the second.

Nora Halvorsen, born the fourth of March, 1936.

Elsie Halvorsen, born the ninth of September, 1938.

"Halvorsen," said Kyra, when the names went down on the sheet.

"It is the second commonest name in that part of the city and the woman at the counter will not look up."

"I know why you picked it, girl. I'm just hearing it."

The house on Spokane Street had taken boarders from 1919 until a year or two after the war, and the woman who ran it was Hazel Brun, and Kyra had been going out there most months for nine years.

That had started as nothing. It had started because Hazel had a shed full of somebody's crated freight that nobody would come for, and had gone on because Hazel was good company and because she had a memory for other people's business that no one in Sellwood had ever got round.

She was eighty-two now. She was not failing. That is the thing to be clear about, because the easy version of this is a confused old woman and that is not what happened.

Hazel Brun had forty years of other people's lives in her head, in order, with the dates on them.

They went out on a Saturday in April with a cake, which was Kyra's idea and was not a disguise, because Kyra had taken a cake out there four times before. It was a bright cold morning and on the bus the light came off the river and up into the window and made the two of them exactly what strangers had been calling them since 1607, which was the fair one and the dark one.

Val had prepared a great deal. She had nine minutes of material and a run of answers to questions that would not be asked for a while yet, and she had been over all of it on the bus.

She used about nine words of it.

What she said was that there had been a woman at the house, before the war, with two girls.

And Hazel Brun put her cup down and said, "Oh — the Halvorsen girl."

Val did not say anything.

"She had the back room off the landing. She was no age at all." Hazel was looking at the middle of the table and seeing 1936. "There was a sister in Astoria she wouldn't go to. Thin little thing. And she had the first one in that room in the spring and I was downstairs with the kettle and Mr. Pfeiff was banging on the floor because of the noise, and I went up and told him what he could do about it."

"Yes," said Val.

"And the other one came after. Nineteen thirty-eight, nineteen thirty-nine. She never would have the doctor. I told her. I told her twice." Hazel shook her head at a woman who had been dead for twenty years in a country that had never had her. "She went off down to Klamath and I never heard another word from her, and I have thought about those girls, and I have thought about them a good deal."

Val sat in a warm kitchen in Sellwood and watched an eighty-two-year-old woman build the whole of it in under four minutes, out of nothing, out of one sentence, and believe every word.

She had not lied to her. That was the finding and Val turned it over for the rest of her life. She had put down a woman with two girls, which is a thing that happened in that house a dozen times over forty years, and Hazel's memory had come up and met it and furnished the room and put Mr. Pfeiff under the floor and sent the mother to Klamath Falls.

None of it was true. All of it was hers.

"Well, where are they now?" said Hazel.

And Kyra said, "You're having cake with them."

It was the correct move. Val had not planned it and would not have got there, and it was the correct move, because Hazel Brun looked at the two of them for about four seconds and then went off like a firework.

She was out of the chair. She had Kyra by both hands. She wanted to know everything and she wanted to know it immediately and she said four separate times that she had always wondered, and she worked her way round to Val, who stood up because there was no version of this where she did not, and was held onto at some length by a woman she had met once.

"I'd have known you," said Hazel. "I would. Look at the two of you."

The notary was a man on Milwaukie Avenue who did it in his front room and charged a dollar, and Hazel went down there on the sixteenth of May in her good coat.

She swore that she was present in the house at both births. She swore to the room, the season, the mother's name, and the absence of any doctor. She gave the dates and did not need to be reminded of them.

She was pleased the whole way through it.

On the step afterward she took Kyra's arm and said that nobody had needed her for anything in about nine years, and that it had been a nice thing to be asked, and that she hoped there would not be any trouble over it.

"There won't be any trouble," Kyra said.

The rest took until August.

There was a church on Umatilla Street with a cradle roll that had gone into a box in a basement in 1944 and had come out of it wet, and a man there who was glad to say in writing what the box had looked like. There was a school in Klamath County with two years missing out of the middle of the thirties. There was a Bible, which Val had been honest about from the start and which the state treated as it should be treated, which is to say not very seriously.

And there was Hazel.

It was Hazel who did it. Everything else was paper about paper. Hazel was a person who had been in the room, under oath, with the dates.

The certificates came in September, and they were not the ordinary kind. A delayed registration says on its face that it is delayed, and it carries the date it was registered and a summary of what was submitted, and anybody who ever looks at it will know exactly what it is.

Val had known that going in and it was still a strange thing to hold.

"It says it," Kyra said, reading hers at the kitchen table. "Right there. Registered 1961."

"It is supposed to say it. The honest version is the one that works, because the only people this ever happens to are people it honestly happened to." Val turned hers over. "A clean one would have been a forgery and would have had a number on it that belonged to somebody. This one is ours. It is the first document either of us has ever had that is not stolen from a dead child, and I would like to be pleased about it."

"Be pleased about it, then."

"I am working on it, my dear," said Val, and got it slightly wrong, and heard herself get it wrong, and left it.

Kyra put her hand over her mouth and did not quite manage it.

The numbers came in October, at a window on Union Avenue, twenty-four years and eleven months after the first two.

Nobody asked them anything. A woman of twenty-five getting a first number in 1961 was an entirely ordinary creature, and the clerk did not look up, and it took under four minutes for the pair of them.

Val came out onto the sidewalk holding two pieces of cardboard and found that her hands were not quite right, and stood there until they were.

"We can't go back out there," Val said, that night.

Kyra had known it was coming and had been working on the answer for a month and had not got one.

"She's eighty-two."

"Yes."

"She'll think we dropped her the minute we got what we came for."

"She will," said Val, "and she will be right, and there is no version of this where that is not true. I have looked for one."

"Say the reason out loud."

"The reason is that she has sworn to a thing in front of a notary, and the only way she is ever in difficulty over it is if somebody asks her about it twice." Val was standing at the sink with her back to the room. "If we are out there every month, we are two young women who turn up at the house of the woman who swore for them. That is a pattern. It is the only pattern in the whole of this and it is the only thing that could ever undo it, and it would undo her as well as us."

"And if we never go again?"

"Then she told a true story about two girls to a notary in May and never saw them again, which is the dullest thing in that part of the city."

Kyra sat for a long time.

"I've been going out there nine years," said Kyra. "Before any of this. Before we knew we'd ever need a thing from her."

"I know."

"I liked her. That's the whole of what I've got, and I know it isn't an argument. I liked her and she's got nobody and she liked us, and the last thing she'll ever have from me is a cake and a dollar at a notary."

"Yes," said Val.

"Don't do that."

"I am not doing anything. I am agreeing with you. It is exactly that and I am not going to make it into something better by talking about it."

And Kyra Davan, who had argued with that woman on two planets for four hundred years and won a fair share of it, said, "All right," and went up, and that was the end of the discussion.

She did not go out to Sellwood again.

Hazel Brun died in the spring of 1964 and neither of them knew it for some years, and when Val found it she found it in a line of agate type and did not say anything about it until the following week.

They had the names by the end of October.

They used them on everything from the first week of November, and the women at the bank got them wrong for a month and then stopped getting them wrong, and by Christmas neither of them had been Anna or Ada out loud in anybody's hearing.

In the middle of 1962 the Internal Revenue Service adopted the Social Security number as its taxpayer identification number, and from that year forward every return a person filed in this country had the figure on it.

They had got out with about fourteen months in hand.

Neither of them ever knew it.

— end of chapter eight —

They had seen it three weeks earlier and had said almost nothing about it at the time, which was not avoidance so much as the ordinary difficulty of discussing a thing while it is happening to you.

Val's light had been up. It was at the wrists and along the inside of the forearms the way it always was, and some of it had gone down where her hands were, and Kyra had looked down because a person looks at a light.

And had said, "Val."

And Val had said, "What," and Kyra had said, "Don't move," in a voice that had something entirely new in it, and had looked for about nine seconds, and had then said: "There's blue."

They came back to it properly in October, in the dark, afterward, with the light still up and neither of them in a hurry.

Kyra had it the right way round from the start, which Val found irritating and said so.

"It's not a light," said Kyra. "That's the first thing. Yours makes its own and this doesn't — I couldn't see it until yours was on it and I can't see it now because yours has gone down, and that's the whole of the difference and it took me about four seconds."

"It took me a fortnight."

"It took you a fortnight because you were busy constructing nine other explanations. I was looking at it."

So Val made her say what it looked like, which is where the evening turned into something neither of them had expected.

Because this was not a thing Val could see. She could reach it and she could not see it, not from where she was, not at any angle, not with every lamp in Multnomah County — and the only person on this planet in a position to look at it was lying beside her.

"Give me the account," said Val.

Kyra went very quiet.

"Val—"

"I am not making a joke of it. I made a joke of it in 1900 and you made a joke back and we were both pleased with ourselves." Val's voice was perfectly flat. "I am asking you properly, because for the first time in four hundred years one of us genuinely cannot see, and that is the entire condition the custom was built for, and it has never once been met between two women on either world."

And Kyra Davan, who had given the most beautiful accounts anybody on either world had ever given, and about half of which had been made up, gave a true one.

She reached for Sethal to do it. That was the thing neither of them remarked on and both of them heard.

"It's not one blue," said Kyra. "You know there are blues. There's the one in the vein under the skin of your wrist, where it's nearly not a color at all, and there's the last of the evening off the Headland in the fourth month, which is the one everybody means when they say blue and nobody can ever find."

"And?"

"It's the wrist one. Not the Headland. It's faint, Val, it's the faintest thing — if I hadn't had your light straight down on it I'd have gone another four hundred years and never seen it."

Four hundred years on this planet, and when they needed to say what a color was, the two of them reached back to a promontory where Kyra had once gone down at four miles.

Neither of them said anything about that.

Val lay there and took the description apart and put it back together and did not improve on it, which she noted.

"Say the rest," said Val. "You have been holding something since the twelfth and I have watched you not say it four separate times."

"It's the same blue as the men."

The room did what rooms do. Somebody's dog had an opinion three houses down.

"I know," said Val.

"You know?"

"I had it in the first eleven seconds. I have had it for three weeks and I have been waiting to see whether you would get there, which was unworthy of me and I am saying so." Val had her hand over her eyes. "Emrin. Deyn. Aro. Sven. Xander. Five men, one color, and it is on us."

"It's not the same thing."

"It is manifestly not the same thing. It is a great deal fainter and it is in the wrong place and there is no extension and nothing is going to come out of anybody." Val took her hand off her eyes. "And it is the same color, and I find that intolerable, and you do not, and I have been trying for three weeks to work out why we are different about it."

"Because I like it," Kyra said.

"Yes. That is what I could not get at."

"I like it, Val. I spent four years at eighteen with a man under my hands going a color I had no word for and no business understanding, and I did it because it was my job and because I was good at it, and I never once got anything out of it except being good at it." She turned over. "And now there is a thing that does the same trick on the two of us, in a bed, in a house nobody can get into, for no reason at all except that we like each other. I think that's marvelous. I've thought it was marvelous since the night I saw it."

"And I think it is a coincidence of chemistry that has arranged itself to resemble the worst hour of my life."

"I know you do, love. That's why you're the one who's been not sleeping."

She brought the cards home on a Thursday in November.

It was a fan of paint chips off a rack in a hardware store on Hawthorne, forty-some of them on a rivet, and she put it on the kitchen table in front of Val with the air of a woman producing a hat from a drain.

"Did you pay for that?"

"There is a man in that shop who has been letting me take things since 1958 and I will not answer the question."

"Kyra."

"I did not pay for it."

And Val understood, sitting at her own kitchen table with a stolen fan of paint chips in her hand, exactly what she had been given and why.

Kyra did not need a scale. Kyra had never needed a scale for anything in four hundred years. She thought in jar lids and tins and the last of the evening off a headland, and she had been perfectly content with the wrist one, not the Headland and would have been content with it forever.

The fan was not for measuring. The fan was for the woman who had spent four centuries with shades and no reference set, and who had been handed a thing to look at that she could not number.

It was a present wearing a joke, and Val did not say so, and Kyra would have been appalled if she had.

The names on the cards were the funniest thing that had happened in that house in nine years.

There was a Dresden and a Serenade and one called Whisper, which Kyra read out twice. There was a Mariner. There was something called Cathedral that was plainly gray.

And there was one, nine from the end, that stopped both of them.

"That's nearly it," said Kyra.

"Nearly."

"It's nearly exactly it and it's a shade too green, and it being nearly is worse than if it were nowhere near."

"It is considerably worse," Val agreed. "A miss of that size is an insult. I would rather the whole fan were wrong."

They took it upstairs, which is the sort of thing that only ever happens once in a household and which both of them regarded afterward as the high point of that decade.

And it did not work, and the reason it did not work was Val's, and she had it inside about forty seconds and said it out loud in the middle of everything, at length, and was entirely correct.

"This is not a standard illuminant."

"Val."

"I am serious and I am also not going to stop. A color card is read under daylight or under a specified lamp. That is the whole basis of the thing — the card and the subject have to be under the same light or the comparison means nothing at all." She had the fan in one hand and was looking at it with real distress. "And the only light this is ever visible under comes out of me, and there is not another source of it in this galaxy, and nobody has ever specified it, and nobody ever will."

Kyra began to laugh and had to put her face in the pillow.

"It is not funny."

"It's the funniest thing I have ever heard in my life."

"It is a permanent defect, Kyra. Do you understand what I am telling you? The only conditions under which that color can be seen are conditions in which color cannot be measured. Those are not two facts. They are one fact, and it is the same fact, and it will be true in a thousand years."

"I know," said Kyra, from the pillow. "That's why it's funny."

They got to the other thing somewhere around one in the morning, with the fan on the floor where it had been dropped.

"Is it near any of them?" Kyra said.

"Any of what?"

"The men. Is it near Emrin's, or Aro's, or Xander's. You saw all of yours and I saw all of mine and between the two of us that's five, and I'm asking you whether this one is near any of them."

And Val, lying in the dark with a woman she had known for four hundred and fifteen years, discovered that she had nothing to say.

"I do not know."

"You must have—"

"I recorded blue." Her voice had gone very flat. "That is what is in my head and it is all that is in my head. I was nineteen and twenty-two and a hundred and forty and I wrote down the time and the duration and the volume and I recorded the color as a category, because a category was what the form wanted, and I have four men in my memory and one word for all of them."

"Val."

"And I cannot go back and I cannot get more and there is no eleventh man coming. So I have a scale with forty shades on it, which you stole for me, and a subject I can look at any evening I like, and nothing whatever to compare it against, and I will go into the ground not knowing."

Kyra got hold of her and did not say anything for a while.

"That's what the cards were for, isn't it," said Val, eventually. "You did not bring them to measure anything."

"No."

"You brought them because you knew I had spent four hundred years wanting a scale and had finally been given a thing worth putting one against, and you found forty shades on a rivet in a hardware store and palmed them."

"Don't make it a speech, love."

"I am not going to make it a speech," said Val. "I am going to say thank you once, in the ordinary way, and then I am going to say the other thing, which is harder."

"Go on, then."

"I could study this."

Kyra did not move.

"Properly," Val said. "I have an instrument and I have a subject and I have the only two observers in the universe and we are both in this bed. I could repeat it. I could vary it — different hours, different weeks, hot and cold, before food and after. I could find out whether it deepens, and if it deepens I could find out when it deepens, and in about nine months I would know a thing about the pair of us that nobody on either world has ever known."

"And?"

"And I am not going to."

She said the rest of it into the dark, which was easier.

"I burned the notes in 1910 and I meant it, and this is the first time since then that the thing I would be measuring is you. Not a date you gave me. You, under my hands, on a Tuesday, with a fan of paint chips on the nightstand and a figure going down on a page afterward." Val had her eyes shut. "I want it so much that I have been awake about it, and I am putting it down, and I would like you to know that I have put it down rather than discovering in forty years that I never picked it up."

"Thank you," said Kyra, and nothing else, which was correct.

There is one more thing and Val never said it.

She got to it at about three, lying awake with a woman asleep across one arm, and she turned it over for perhaps nine minutes and then deliberately stopped, which was a different sort of putting down from the other one.

It is this. The blue on a Sethal man is a signal and it has a job. It says that the window is open and the sixty seconds are running and that what happens in the next minute is how a person gets made. Val had seen it four times and had been working, every time, with a clock going and a duty on her and nothing of herself in the room at all.

And it has arrived on the two of them, faint, in the wrist blue rather than the Headland blue, in the one act on either world that cannot make anybody.

She lay in the dark with that for nine minutes.

Then she put her face into Kyra's hair, where the copper was, and went to sleep, and did not hand it to her, and never did.

They kept the fan.

It went in the drawer in the kitchen with the string and the fuses, and it moved house with them in 1967 and again in 1991, and it was in a box in a garage in the Nehalem valley in 2007 when the water came up and it did not survive that, and nobody in either of those houses ever once explained to anybody what a forty-year-old paint fan was doing in the string drawer.

— end of chapter nine —

She got it out on a Tuesday, in the kitchen, over a pan she was not watching, with her back to the room — which was not an accident and both of them knew it.

"Val."

"Mm."

"When I go." Kyra moved the pan about an inch to the left for no reason whatsoever. "Come with me."

There was a pause of perhaps four seconds.

"Say more of it," said Val.

"That's all I've got."

"Kyra—"

"That is all I've got." She turned round, and her face was doing something she had no control over at all. "I have been trying to build the rest of it for about nine days and it will not come, and I have never had this happen to me in my life, and I would be obliged if you would take the six words and work the rest out yourself, because by all accounts you are very good at that."

Val put down what she was holding.

She did not do it quickly. She took it apart standing in a kitchen doorway with the pan going behind the woman who had said it — when I go, come with me — and she had it inside about twenty seconds, because she had been reading that woman since she was eighteen years old and because four of the six words were the ones that mattered.

"You are alone in it," said Val.

Kyra's chin came up.

"That's it. That's the whole of it. How did you—"

"You said come."

"It's thirty seconds," said Kyra. "That's what I get. It's not nothing — it builds, it's not a light switch, there's a whole thing that happens and it's marvelous and I would not give it back. But it's thirty seconds and I go up it at a dead run and I am by myself the entire way and then it's over."

"And I am watching."

"You're watching, love. You're always watching and I like it and that is not the same as being with me." She pushed her hair back with the heel of her hand, and the kitchen light got into the dark of it and found the copper above the ear the way every light on this planet had. "And I have been not saying this since about sixteen fifty because there is no version of it that doesn't land on you as I wish I had your problem, and I would rather have cut my own tongue out."

"That is approximately where it landed."

"I know it is. I've had three hundred years to work out that it would."

"Say what you want," said Val.

"I want you on my mouth when it happens."

"All right."

"Not after. Not as I'm coming down. In it, at the top, when there is the most of me and I am the least use to anybody." Kyra had both hands flat on the counter now. "Arranged beforehand, so neither of us has to decide anything in the middle of it. And I want to say the other part before you say it, because you're going to."

"Go on."

"It'll be quieter. Obviously it'll be quieter, you can't make that noise through somebody's mouth." She looked up. "That is not why I'm asking and if it ever becomes why, I want you to tell me and we'll stop."

"Agreed," said Val, "and I would have said it, and thank you for getting there first."

They did not get to it that night, because the pan burned and there was an argument about whose fault that was.

On the Thursday Val was early.

They were laced, and Kyra had her legs the way she liked them and Val was above her on her forearms, which was how they had done it since the pan burned and was the only arrangement in which the thing was going to work at all — because a woman cannot reach another woman's mouth at a precise second from alongside her without a great deal of shuffling about beforehand, and the shuffling about would have given the whole game away.

And she came down about eight or eleven seconds early. On the way up rather than at the top.

Kyra made a noise of pure outrage against her mouth, and got a hand into her hair, and held her off about six inches.

"No."

"I—"

"Not yet, you appalling woman, I was nowhere near—"

"I am aware of that now," said Val.

And then it happened anyway, about nine seconds later, with Val's hair still in her fist and Val's face a clear foot away from where it was supposed to be, entirely unaccompanied and extremely loudly — and the two of them lay there afterward in the wreck of it and Kyra began to laugh and could not stop for some considerable time.

"You were early."

"I have established that."

"You have never been early for anything in four hundred years. You were early for the fold."

"That is not—" Val stopped. "That is actually true and I have no answer to it."

"Four hundred years, Val. Four hundred years of you standing on a step at the correct minute like a bailiff and the one time it would be useful—"

"I was working from insufficient data."

"You were working from me," said Kyra, "and I am extremely available for further study," and put her face in the pillow and laughed until the bed moved.

On the Saturday she was late.

Not by much. Two seconds, perhaps three — and it was worse than early, because Kyra had already gone, and the whole of it was out of her before Val arrived, and what Val got was the tail end of something she had meant to be inside.

She was extremely quiet about it afterward.

"Val."

"Mm."

"Don't."

"I am not doing anything."

"You are lying there in the dark starting a tally," said Kyra, "and I can hear you doing it, and if there is one in this house by the morning I am going to be genuinely cross."

"There is no tally."

"Val."

"There is no tally," Val said, "and there is a considerable amount of thinking, and those are different, and you may hold me to the first one."

What there was, in fact, was a problem.

She had it clear by about two in the morning, lying on her back with a woman asleep across one arm, and it was the sort of problem she had been solving since she was a child and had simply never been handed in this particular form.

There was a curve. That was established. Thirty seconds, give or take, with a shape to it — it did not arrive from nowhere, it gathered, and anything that gathers has a shape, and anything with a shape can be projected.

What she did not have was the instrument.

She had spent four centuries reading that woman and had never once had to read her forward. Backward, yes — she could tell you nine months later what sort of mood Kyra had been in on a particular Thursday. But a projection wants a leading indicator, and Val had been going on the obvious ones, which were the ones that arrived at the same time as the event and were therefore no use to anybody.

So she went looking for an earlier one, which took about three weeks.

It was not the breathing. Everybody's breathing changes and it changes too late. It was not the hands, which were unreliable, and it was not the noise, which by definition was the thing itself.

It was between the shoulder blades.

There was a thing Kyra's back did — a gathering, a kind of drawing-in, down the whole length of her — and it arrived about four seconds before anything else did and it had been arriving for three hundred and fifty years and Val had been feeling it under her hands since Maribor without ever once asking herself what it was for.

Four seconds. Four seconds is an eternity. Val Sorin had put a man on his back and run a sixty-second window at twenty-two years old; four seconds was luxury.

She did not write it down.

She thought about writing it down for approximately one second and then did not, and lay there feeling obscurely pleased with herself about that, and went to sleep.

On the second Tuesday in October she got it.

They were laced and she was above her, on her forearms, with her face in the side of Kyra's hair where she had been keeping it for some time precisely so that the last four inches would be short ones. She felt the back go under her hand and counted two, which she would later admit to and would never live down, and came down and put her mouth on Kyra's mouth and stayed there.

And Kyra went up into it with somebody already there.

Afterward there was a long time in which neither of them said anything at all.

"Right," said Kyra, eventually, into her collarbone, in a voice that had come apart somewhere in the middle.

"Yes."

"Right."

"I counted two," said Val.

"I don't care what you counted."

"I counted two and I should have counted one and a half, and on the next—"

"Val." Kyra got up on an elbow and put a hand flat over her mouth, which was a thing she had never done in four hundred years and which Val found she did not mind at all. "Shut up. For one minute. Shut up."

She took her hand away after a while.

"I have been doing that by myself since I was eighteen years old," said Kyra.

"I know."

"Four hundred years, and every single time, up and over and back down, and there has been somebody in the room for three hundred and sixty of them and I have been on my own in there for all of it." Her voice was going and she was making no attempt to stop it. "And you got in."

"I got in."

"How long did that take you?"

"Three weeks," said Val, "and I would like to state for the record that it took me three weeks because I was looking in the wrong place, and that the right place has been under my hands since Maribor, and that I am not going to tell you where it is."

"You're not going to tell me?"

"I am not."

"Val—"

"If I tell you where it is, you will start noticing it," said Val, "and then you will be watching yourself for it, and then you will be doing what I did for four hundred years, and I am not putting that on you for any consideration whatsoever."

Kyra went very quiet.

"That's the elbows," said Kyra.

"That is precisely the elbows."

"You absolute—" She stopped. "You've been waiting four months to do that to me, haven't you."

"Nine months," said Val, "and it was worth every one of them."

It was quieter. Of course it was quieter.

Neither of them mentioned it that night, or the next, and when it finally came up it was about a fortnight later and it came up as a joke — Kyra observing, over a newspaper, that Arlene Dunbar had said nothing to her at the mailbox in a month and that she was beginning to feel neglected.

"There is that too," Val agreed.

"There is that too," said Kyra, "and it is at the absolute bottom of the list, and if it ever moves up it I want to hear about it," and turned the page.

It did not become the way things were done.

That was never discussed either and did not need to be. It happened perhaps four times that winter and not once in the spring, and the pattern — which neither of them would have been able to state and both of them followed without a word — was that it had nothing to do with wanting and everything to do with the walls.

A hotel in Seattle in the January, where the room next door had a child in it.

The week the Dunbars had Arlene's sister staying and every window on that side of the street was open.

The first fortnight in any new place, before they knew who was where.

And the rest of the time — which was most of the time, which was very nearly all of it — Val did not count anything at all. She lay there and watched a woman go up alone at a dead run the way she had been going up alone at a dead run since she was eighteen years old, and did not reach for her, and did not need to.

Kyra did not mind that in the slightest, which is the part worth putting down.

She had never minded it. Four hundred years of going up by herself was simply how she was made and she would not have swapped one evening of it. What she had wanted was not a cure. It was company, sometimes — and sometimes turned out to be the entire quantity she had been after, and she had not known that until she had some.

She said so once, in the February, in about nine words, at the moment it was needed and at no cost to herself whatever, which was the only way anything had ever come out of her.

Val took five weeks to answer it and then did, badly, in the dark, and Kyra lay there and let her.

There is one more thing and it belongs here rather than anywhere else.

Some time the following year — she could not have put a month on it, which was itself the point — Val understood that she had stopped doing the four seconds.

Not decided to. Stopped. The hand was still there and the back still did what it did, and at some stage she had quietly ceased to measure it, the way a person stops noticing a clock in a room they have lived in for a while.

She lay in the dark and went looking for the week it had happened in, which took her about a minute, and then put the question down unanswered, which took considerably longer and was the harder of the two.

— end of chapter ten —

The notice came on a Thursday and was perfectly polite about it.

The county wanted eighteen feet off the front of that block for a widening it had been drawing on maps since before either of them had seen the street, and eighteen feet was the porch and the step and most of the front room, and there would be an offer, and the offer would be fair.

Kyra read it twice and put it on the table and said, "Well, that's that," in a voice that had something in it Val had not heard for a very long time.

It took Val about four seconds to work out what the something was.

It was pleasure.

She did not say anything about it that evening, which was a decision and not an accident.

She watched instead. She watched Kyra go round that house for three days with a kind of lightness in her, opening cupboards she had not opened in four years and declaring things not worth taking. She watched her get the atlas out. She watched her say, on the Saturday, apropos of nothing, that she had always wanted to see what the east side of the mountains did in the winter and that there was a town out past Shaniko with about nine people in it.

And Val, who had been reading that woman across rooms since before there were roads in this country, understood that Kyra Davan had been waiting for a reason for twenty years and had just been handed one by the Multnomah County Board.

She let it run until Sunday, because there was no sense in doing it before she had the whole of it, and because the woman was happy and that was not nothing.

On Sunday she sat down at the table with the notebook and said, "Four miles."

Kyra came in from the hall with a cup in each hand.

"What's four miles?"

"How far we can go," said Val.

Kyra put the cups down with some care, which was worse than slamming them.

"Say that again."

"We can cross the river. We can go up to the heights or out toward Milwaukie, and there are about four hundred houses in that radius and we will find one of them." Val had her hand flat on the page. "We cannot leave the county. Not this year and not in ten, and I have been through it four times since Thursday and I have not been able to make it come out any other way."

"We have never once stayed anywhere—"

"I know what we have never done."

"Three hundred and fifty years, Val."

"Three hundred and sixty," said Val. "I am aware. I have the dates."

Kyra sat down across from her and folded her arms and did not shout, which with her was a form of courtesy and cost her something.

"Go on, then."

"The rule was that we moved every decade or so and became two other people, and the reason the rule worked is that moving erased us. You walk out of a town and the town closes over the place where you were. There is nobody to ask and nothing to ask about, and in four years the baker has you confused with a different pair of sisters and in twenty the only person who could have described you is dead." Val turned a page she did not need to turn. "That was true for three hundred and sixty years. It stopped being true at some point I could not name for you, and I did not notice the year because it happened everywhere at once."

"And now?"

"Now a move is a document."

She went through it the way she went through anything, in order, without heat.

A move means a new employer, and an employer means the number and the card and a man in an office looking at both. It means a bank in a town where nobody has been getting the name right for six years. It means a landlord who wants references, and references mean somebody being telephoned, and the somebody is in Portland. It means the records of two women following them across the state in a brown envelope, and every envelope has to be opened by a person, and every person is an occasion.

"And the certificate says what it is," said Val. "That is the whole of it in one line. It says delayed on its face and it says registered 1961, and in Multnomah County that has been seen once, in 1961, by a clerk who has retired. Every time we move, it gets read again by somebody new, with fresh eyes, who has never seen one before."

"It's a real certificate."

"It is an entirely real certificate," Val agreed, "and it is the only document either of us has ever had that is better the less often it is looked at."

The furnace came on under the floor and ran for a while.

"So the thing that kept us alive," Kyra said, "is now the thing that would do for us."

"Yes."

"And what keeps us alive instead is sitting still."

"Sitting still, and being so ordinary that nobody ever has a reason to open the envelope." Val closed the notebook. "I want to say it plainly, because I think if we do not say it plainly today we will spend the next thirty years pretending it has not happened. The decade rule is dead. It died somewhere in the last forty years without either of us burying it, and we are going to be in this county for the rest of this paper, which is about forty-five more years."

Kyra was silent for a while.

Then she got up and went and stood at the window with her back to the room, and the February light came in flat and gray off the street and did almost nothing to her, which February does, and left the whole of that dark chestnut the color of a wet fence.

"I was going to pack the truck," said Kyra.

"I know you were."

"I had it done. I had it done on Friday, in my head, the whole of it — what goes, what doesn't, which road, where we stop the first night." Her voice was quite steady. "I have not had that in twenty years and I did not know I had missed it until Thursday afternoon, and I had about three days of it, and they were good days."

"They were good days," said Val. "I watched you have them and I let them run and I am not sorry about that part."

"You could have told me on Thursday."

"I could have."

"Why didn't you?"

Val looked at the back of her for a moment.

"Because you were happy," said Val, "and I was going to be the reason you stopped being happy, and I decided that could wait until Sunday. That is the whole of my reasoning and I have no better version of it."

Kyra turned round.

"That's the nicest thing you've done all year, you know."

"It was three days."

"It was three days, sweetheart."

They found the other house in April, four and a half miles away across the river, which Val pointed out was over the figure and Kyra said she was going to let her have.

It was on a street with a laurel at the front and a bad gutter at the northeast corner, and the moving of them took one day and a man with a truck, and the man asked where they were coming from and Kyra said Lents and he said his wife was from Lents, and that was the sum of the interrogation.

There is a thing that happens when you stop.

Neither of them said much about it that spring, but it was there in the first week and it did not go away. On a street you are leaving, a neighbor is weather. On a street you are not leaving, a neighbor is a person who is going to get old in front of you, and then a person who is going to be helped out to a car, and then a name you say in the past tense to somebody at a mailbox.

They had done that in Portland already. They had done it with Jo Selby and it had taken forty years and been worth every part of it.

What was new was knowing, in April 1967, standing in a yard with a laurel in it, roughly how many more times they were going to do it before this paper ran out.

"Two," said Val, in the dark, some weeks later. "Perhaps three, if we are unlucky and the street is young."

"Don't."

"I have already done it. I did it the day we signed."

Kyra was quiet a moment.

"Then we'll be good to them," said Kyra.

"That is not a strategy."

"It isn't meant to be a strategy, love. It's the only part of this I get to decide."

Val lay there and thought about a number in a drawer in Maryland, and a card in an office at Rose City, and a house with eighteen feet gone off the front of it, and a county that was going to have the two of them in its files until about 2010.

"We are going to be the only permanent thing on that street," Val said.

"I know."

"I have never been the permanent thing anywhere. Not on either world. I have been the woman who was here for a while and then was not, for four hundred years, and I built the whole of my method on it, and as of February I am a fixture."

"How is it?"

"I do not know yet," said Val. "Ask me in nine years."

— end of chapter eleven —

Val had been somewhere else since the previous Wednesday and had been extremely pleasant about it, which was how Kyra knew.

She was perfectly fine. She did the shopping and she fixed the thing on the back step and she had an argument with the man about the water bill that Kyra would have paid money to watch. She slept normally. She ate standing up twice, which was a tell, but only a small one.

And on about the fifth day Kyra came down at two in the morning for a glass of water and found her at the kitchen table in the dark with nothing in front of her at all.

She did not ask about it then. She went back up, and lay there, and thought about it for three more days.

Wednesday was a nothing evening. The television was on and neither of them was watching it, and there was a program about a man restoring a boat that they had both seen before, and the window was open because it had been warm for the first week of April.

Kyra was lying along the couch with her feet in Val's lap, which was where they went, and Val had a book she had not turned a page of in about eleven minutes. The lamp was behind her and the pale of her hair had gone nearly white in it, the way it did under anything yellow, and Kyra had been looking at that instead of the boat for a while.

"Val."

"Mm."

"Can I have a word?"

Val put the book down on the arm.

That was the whole of what happened, and it took about two seconds, and in those two seconds Kyra watched her do the thing she always did — which was to decide, rather than to agree.

It was not a formality. It had never once been a formality. There had been a dozen occasions when the answer had been not tonight, and about four when it had been no with nothing after it, and Kyra had got up and made tea and that had been that.

Tonight Val said, "Yes."

She stood up and did it without any ceremony and without hurrying either, and folded them over the back of the chair nobody sat in, and sat back down.

Kyra got her own off with considerably less elegance and a certain amount of swearing at the couch.

And then they arranged themselves the way they had been arranging themselves since Maribor — side by side along the length of the couch, facing, Val's back against the cushions and Kyra's against the outside, hips drawn in close, close enough.

Nobody turned the television off. The man went on restoring his boat.

They laced.

Softly. That was the whole of it and had been for three hundred and sixty years and neither of them had ever had to say so — this was not the other thing, there was no build in it and nothing was going anywhere, and the pressure stayed down at the bottom of the range where a person can think.

Kyra got a hand into Val's hair at the back and left it there.

"Right," said Kyra. "You've been gone since last Wednesday."

"I have been here the entire time."

"Val."

"I am aware of what you mean," Val said.

And underneath, at the hips, she said something else entirely.

Kyra had been reading that woman in that language since the second winter and she got it instantly and without the slightest effort, the way you get a tone of voice. It was not words. It would never be words. It was a turn and a pressure and a particular slowness, and it was yes, and it was old, and it was not going to go away.

Not in those terms. There were no terms. But it arrived whole, the way a face arrives when somebody has stopped managing it, and the two of them lay there on a couch with a man restoring a boat in the background and both of them knew the other had just spoken.

"All right," said Kyra. "Thank you."

"Mm."

"Is it me?"

A single release and a return. No. Immediate, unambiguous, and so fast it was almost rude.

"Is it us?"

No.

"Good." Kyra's thumb moved in the hair at the back of her neck. "Is it something I can do anything about?"

And this time there was a pause — a real one, three or four seconds, which in that language is an age — and then something Kyra had felt perhaps nine times in three and a half centuries, which was Val attempting to answer a question the thing was not built to answer, and failing, and knowing she had failed.

That was the limit and both of them had always known where it was.

It could tell you that a thing was true. It could tell you yes and no and I am here and it is bad and about forty shades in between, and it could tell you the size of a thing and the age of it and whether it was moving.

It could not tell you what.

Fifteen thousand conversations in three hundred and fifty years and the thing had never once managed a noun.

"I'm going to have to ask you out loud," said Kyra.

"I know."

"You could have had this one to yourself. I'd have let you. I nearly did — I've been sitting on it since Sunday and I very nearly left you alone with it."

"I am aware of that too."

"Why'd you say yes, then?"

And Val, after a moment, said: "Because I have been carrying it since last Wednesday and I am extremely tired."

Kyra did not say anything. She put her forehead against Val's and waited, and kept the pressure exactly where it had been, and did not alter it by a particle, which was its own sentence and was received as one.

"I did a sum," Val said.

"All right."

"I did not mean to. I was doing something else entirely — I was working out the thing about the insurance, the one with the renewal dates — and I had a run of years in front of me and I put the wrong number at the top of it, and by the time I noticed I had already got the answer."

"What was the answer?"

"Nineteen seventy-four," said Val.

Kyra went absolutely still.

Not in the grip. In the grip she did the correct thing and did not change anything whatsoever, which took a quantity of discipline she would be quietly proud of for a decade. Everywhere else she stopped moving entirely.

"That's the girls," said Kyra.

"That is the girls."

"Four hundred and six."

"Four hundred and six," said Val, "in nineteen seventy-four, both of them, in the same year, because they were born on the same day."

The man on the television had got to the part about the varnish.

"It is not a prediction," Val said. "I want to be precise, because I have been precise about it for eight days and being precise is the only part of it I have been able to manage. Teor Casse lived to four hundred and six. That is one woman. It is not a limit and it is not a law and I have no idea what the actual distribution looks like because nobody has ever published one."

"But it's the number."

"It is the only number anybody has ever given me," said Val, "and I have had it in my head since I was a girl, and now it has a year attached to it and the year is six years away."

And underneath, the whole time, the grip was saying something.

Kyra could not have written it down. Nobody could have. But it was there, continuously, running under the measured voice and the entirely steady face and the precise and reasonable sentences about distributions — and it had nothing to do with distributions at all.

It was not steady. It was not reasonable. It had been going for some while and it was not going to stop.

That was the thing about it and it was the entire reason the arrangement existed. Val Sorin could lie on a couch and deliver nine careful words about sample size in a voice you could have set a clock by, and six inches lower down she could not lie about any of it, and had not been able to since Maribor, and had agreed to that every single time she had said yes.

"Val."

"Mm."

"Stop doing the statistics."

"The statistics are the only—"

"I know they are. Stop anyway." Kyra had her hand flat against the side of her face now. "I've got the other one. You've been giving me the other one for ten minutes and you can't help it, and I would rather have that than the sentences, and I want you to know I've got it."

Val shut her eyes.

And the grip did a thing Kyra had felt about four times in three hundred and fifty years and had never once been able to describe to anybody, including herself.

They stayed like that for a long while.

Kyra did not try to fix any of it, which was the discipline, and which she had learned at some cost. There was nothing to fix. There was no argument available and no comfort that would not have been a lie — they'll be fine was not something either of them could say, it's one woman was Val's own sentence coming back at her, and we'll see them again was the thing they had been not saying since 1607 and tonight was not the night for it.

So she did the only thing there was.

She stayed exactly where she was, at the same pressure, for about forty minutes, and let a woman who had been alone with a number since the previous Wednesday not be alone with it.

At some point the boat program ended and something else started and neither of them noticed.

"Six years," Kyra said eventually.

"Six years and three months."

"Of course it's three months."

"It is three months and six days, and I am not going to apologize for knowing that," said Val.

And Kyra laughed — properly, for the first time in eight days, with her face in Val's shoulder — and felt the whole length of the woman go loose against her, and underneath, quite suddenly, something eased that had been tight since the previous Wednesday.

They did not go upstairs.

They lay on that couch until about one in the morning with the television talking to itself, mostly not saying anything, and at some point Val fell asleep, which she almost never did first.

"Go to sleep, love," Kyra said, some while before that, into the top of her head, and got no answer and had not expected one.

Kyra lay there with a woman asleep against her and the grip still going, light, slow, barely anything at all — and thought that in fifteen thousand conversations over three and a half centuries she had never once got a noun out of the thing, not one, and had never needed one quite so badly as she had tonight, and had got it anyway because she had been willing to open her mouth and ask.

And then, because it was one in the morning and because nobody was awake to hear her be sentimental, she thought that the grip was not the conversation at all.

It was only how they knew the other one was true.

— end of chapter twelve —

They were stopped on the highway south of Oregon City in a line of cars that had not moved in nine minutes, on an errand that could have waited until Monday and that neither of them would afterward be able to explain.

It was the end of August and it was too hot in the truck and the windows were down and it made no difference. Somewhere ahead there was a thing involving a culvert and a flagman. The radio was going on about the business out at McIver Park, which was into its fourth day and which the man on the radio could not decide whether to be alarmed by.

Kyra had her arm along the sill and her hair up off her neck with two pins, which in that heat lasted about an hour at a time, and the sun was straight into the side of her so that the dark of it had gone to the copper the whole way down.

She said, "It's started."

Val did not move at all.

There is a version of that sentence that she had heard thirty-two times and could have recited in her sleep, and it had always arrived in a room — a kitchen, a stair, once a tram — and it had always been followed by her getting up and going and getting the notebook.

The notebook was four miles away in a drawer. The truck was not going anywhere. The man on the radio had moved on to the fair.

"When," said Val.

"Wednesday."

"It is Friday."

"It is Friday," Kyra agreed, "and I have had two days to decide whether I was going to say it in a kitchen like a civilized woman, and then I didn't, and here we are."

The line moved about a car's length and stopped again.

"Are you sure?"

"Don't."

"I am not doubting you. I am asking you, because the last time I did not ask you and I have had a considerable amount of time to think about that." Val had both hands on the wheel of a truck that was not moving. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," said Kyra. "It's the same as it has always been and it is not one thing different, and I knew on the Wednesday morning before I was properly awake, and I lay there for about four minutes deciding not to be pleased about it."

"Did you manage?"

"No."

They sat in it.

That was the whole of what the chapter of their lives permitted. There was a flagman somewhere ahead and a culvert and a line of cars, and neither woman could get out, and neither could reach for the other in any way that would have carried on a public highway in 1970, and so the two of them sat four feet apart in the heat with the thing between them and did nothing with it whatsoever.

Kyra moved her hand along the sill until it was against Val's leg, and left it there, flat, which is what there was.

"It is late," Val said, after a while.

"I know it's late."

"It is eleven years and about four months late, which puts it four months over the longest interval in the record, which was nineteen." Her voice had gone entirely level. "I am not making a point. I am telling you where it sits, because you will want to know and because you will not ask."

"Go on, then."

"That is the whole of it. It is at the long end and it is not off the end."

The line moved again, more than a car's length this time, and then stopped.

"There's a thing you haven't said," said Kyra.

"There is."

"Is it a number?"

"It is a number," Val agreed, "and it is a stupid number and I have been carrying it since Wednesday without knowing I had it, which is the second time this has happened to me in three years and I do not care for the pattern."

"Say it."

"I do not know what to call this one," said Val.

She had the whole of it laid out and it had taken about nine seconds.

In October 1959 there was an entry on that page. A date, with nothing beside it, which is what every entry on that page has. It was written down as the thirty-third because at the time it was the thirty-third, and then nothing came, and Val had refused to strike it and had been right to refuse and had not thought about it in some years.

And now there was this.

If the one that did not come still counts — if a thing that was called and did not arrive is still a thing that happened, in the way that a train that is cancelled is still on the timetable — then this is the thirty-fourth, and the page runs on.

If it does not count, then 1959 was a mistake and this is the thirty-third, arriving very late indeed, and there is a line on that page that is simply wrong and has been for a decade.

"And there is no way to find out," said Val. "Not in a hundred years. Not ever. It is a question about what a word means and there is nobody on this planet to ask."

Kyra looked at her for a long moment.

"Call it whatever you like."

"That is not—"

"Val. Call it the thirty-fourth, call it the thirty-third, call it the one in the truck. It is not going to change a single thing about what happened on Wednesday morning, which happened to me, in my own body, and I was there for it and I am telling you about it." Her hand had not moved off Val's leg. "You can have the page. You've always had the page and I like that you have it. You don't get to be unhappy about which line it goes on."

Val was quiet.

"The thirty-fourth," said Val.

"There you are."

The flagman turned his sign round and the line began to move properly, and they went on south and did the errand, which took twenty minutes and was not worth the drive.

They did nothing about it at all.

There was no dinner. Nothing was opened and nothing was said to mark it, and at some point that evening Val went and got the notebook out of the drawer and wrote a date on a page and put it back, and the whole of the ceremony took under a minute and neither of them mentioned that either.

That is what unremarked means. It is not that nobody noticed. It is that there was nothing available to do.

Later, with the window open and the heat still in the room, Kyra said: "You were glad."

"I was glad for about four seconds."

"And then?"

Val lay there.

"And then I worked out what I had been glad about," said Val, "and I have not been glad since, and I was going to carry it on my own and I have decided in the last minute and a half not to."

"Then don't."

"In 1959 a thing did not happen," said Val, "and for about a week I was frightened, and then I stopped. And underneath the stopping — not where I could see it, I want to be honest about the position of it — there has been a small quantity of something for eleven years that I have never once taken out and looked at."

"Which was?"

"That if that had gone, then we are not what we were. And if we are not what we were, then the figure might not hold either." Her voice did not move. "Teor Casse was four hundred and six. That is a figure about a Sethal woman. It is only about us for as long as we are still Sethal women in every particular that matters, and for one week in October 1959 I had a reason to wonder whether we still were, and I did not take the reason out and look at it, and I have been quietly keeping it in a drawer ever since."

Kyra had gone very still.

"And Wednesday closed it."

"Wednesday closed it," said Val. "We are exactly what we were. The rhythm is the same rhythm and it has not altered by a particle in four hundred years on a planet that has altered a great deal else about us, and that is the finding, and it is a good clean finding, and it points at nineteen seventy-four."

Neither of them said anything for some while.

"I've been doing the same thing," Kyra said, eventually.

"You have not."

"Not with the arithmetic. I can't do the arithmetic and I've never wanted it." She turned over. "But I had an eleven-year gap where my own body stopped telling me what it was, love, and there was a piece of me that thought — well. Maybe we're something else now. And I didn't look at that either, and on Wednesday morning I lay there for four minutes being pleased, and I have spent the two days since working out what I was pleased about."

"And?"

"Same as you," said Kyra. "I got there Thursday. That's why I said it in a truck."

Val turned her head on the pillow.

"You said it in a truck so that I could not do anything about it."

"I said it in a truck so that neither of us could," Kyra said. "Yes. I've had thirty-two of these and I know exactly what you do with them, and I wanted one where there was no notebook and nowhere to go and nothing to be done but sit there in the heat with it, because I thought if you had four hours of not being able to solve it you might get to the other end of it instead."

"That is the most calculating thing you have ever done."

"I learned it off a woman I know."

"It worked."

"I know it worked, sweetheart," said Kyra. "I watched it work in the mirror on the way past Canby."

— end of chapter thirteen —

The date moved, and that was the part nobody would ever have guessed about it.

A Sethal year is not an Earth year. The difference is small and it is not nothing, and Val had worked it out in a hut in the spring of 1608 with a stick and a flat stone and had carried both reckonings in the notebook ever since. It meant that a day on one calendar walked slowly backward through the other. It meant that the sixth month of a year on a plateau six miles inland of a yard arrived, on this planet, a few days earlier every time.

So it was not a date she remembered. It was a date she calculated.

She had calculated it three hundred and sixty-six times.

In 1974 it fell on the ninth of July, which was a Tuesday.

She had known that since February, because she always knew it by February, because the arithmetic was four minutes' work and she had never once been able to leave it alone until spring.

On the Tuesday itself she got up at the usual hour and did the gutters.

They had been three summers in that house and the gutters had been wrong in all three of them, and there was a joint at the northeast corner that a man had been paid to fix in 1972 and had not fixed. Val went up the ladder with a putty knife and a coffee can and took out a quantity of fir needles, and found a tennis ball, and came down and moved the ladder six feet along and went up again.

Kyra came out at about nine with her hair pushed up off her neck and stood at the bottom of the ladder holding it, which it did not need.

"There's a ball up here," said Val.

"Whose?"

"I could not tell you. It has been there some while. It has gone the color of the roof."

"Keep it," Kyra said. "We'll give it back to somebody eventually."

The morning went the way a Tuesday goes.

Val finished the corner and did not mention the corner. Kyra took the car and came back with three bags and a piece of salmon the man had been keeping for her, and had an opinion about the price of it that lasted most of the way through putting it away. The post came. There was a notice from the county about a road, and a thing from the bank, and a catalogue.

At about half past ten Val was standing at the sink with her hands in the water and no reason to be, and found that she had been there a while.

She went and sat down at the table and looked at the back of her own hands for a bit, and then at the window, which had the laurel in it and a piece of the neighbors' fence and nothing else.

And then she went and found Kyra in the front room and said it.

"It's today."

Kyra put the box down.

She did not say what is, which Val had allowed about a second for and had been wrong about, and she did not ask any of the four questions Val had ranked in order on the ladder. She stood in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides and the sun coming through the front window and standing in the dark of her hair, copper and all, the way it had stood in it on a mountain and in a blood court and in every kitchen since, and she looked at Val for rather longer than people look at each other.

"The ninth of July," Val said.

"All right."

"It moves. It is not the same day twice. I convert it in February and it has gone back three or four days from the year before, and in the spring of 1608 I worked out why and I have been doing the sum ever since, and this year it is today, and it is twenty past ten, and in Aventhal it is the fourth hour of the evening."

Kyra sat down on the arm of the chair.

"Three hundred and sixty-six times," said Kyra.

"Three hundred and sixty-six."

"I've never asked you what day it was," Kyra said.

"No."

"You know why."

"I have had a theory for about two hundred years and I have never tested it, which you may take as a compliment or not, as you like."

"Test it."

Val looked at the laurel.

"Because if you knew the day you would have a day," said Val, "and then there would be a thing you did or did not do on it, and you decided a very long time ago that you were not going to have one of those."

"That's the theory?"

"That is the theory."

"It's right," said Kyra.

She was quiet a moment and then went on, because she was the one who went on.

"I worked it out on the road out of the mountains. Not on purpose — I was counting something else and it came up next to it, and I could see the whole shape of what it would be if I let it, and I put it down and I have not picked it up since." She had her hands on her knees. "I know the month. I have always known the month. I made a decision in about 1612 that the month was as much as I was going to carry, and I have kept to it for three hundred and sixty years, and it is the single most disciplined thing I have ever done in my life, and nobody has ever known about it, including you."

"I knew about it."

"You did not know about it."

"I knew there was something," Val said, "and I knew it was in the summer, and I knew better than to go near it. Which is not knowing about it. I will grant you that."

"So," said Kyra.

"So."

"Four hundred and six."

"Four hundred and six," said Val, "as of the fourth hour of this evening, both of them, four hours apart, six miles apart, in two houses, the way it has been every year since the two of us were thirty-eight years old and I was eleven days past my date and being told about it by a man who found it funny."

Kyra did not say anything.

"I am not going to do the other part," Val said. "I did the other part in sixty-eight, on a couch, for eight days, and you were there for it and I am not making you do it twice."

"I'd do it twice."

"I know you would. That is not a reason."

And then the day went on, because that was all there was.

It is the thing nobody tells you and it is the whole of what the ninth of July was. Val had spent six years with that date out in front of her, and had told herself a great many sensible things about it, and had privately expected — not believed, expected, which is a different organ — that when it came there would be something to meet. An hour. A quarter of an hour. Some one moment in the afternoon that was not like the moment before it.

There was not.

At two o'clock she went down to the hardware store for a new section of gutter and a man called Al cut it to length for her and talked about the Cascades. At three she was back on the ladder. At four she came down and washed her hands and could not have told anybody what the previous hour had contained.

At five it was the fourth hour of the evening in Aventhal.

Nothing happened.

"I would like to have dinner," Val said.

Kyra was in the kitchen with the salmon out and the oven not on.

"We're having dinner."

"I would like to have dinner," said Val, "which is a different thing, and I am aware of how it sounds and I would rather you did not make me say the rest of it."

Kyra looked at her for a moment.

Then she said, "Twice a year."

"Twice a year."

"Always good."

"Always good," said Val, "and never long enough, and nobody ever planned the next one at it, which I used to find careless of all four of us and have had three hundred and sixty-six years to stop finding careless."

So they had dinner.

It was not a ceremony and neither of them would have survived one. Kyra did the fish the way she did it and burned the edge of it the way she did, and there was a salad out of the garden with too much of one thing in it, and they ate at the table in the kitchen with the back door open because the evening had gone warm.

They talked about Genie and Kal for a while, which they did perhaps four times a year and had never once planned either.

Val said the thing about the archive directorship, which she had said before and would say again, and Kyra said the thing about the four words, and both of them laughed, and it was the real laugh and not the other one.

Kyra said that Genie would be impossible about this, if she knew, and would have said something enormous and wrong and entirely sincere at the top of her voice in front of forty people, and that it would have been exactly right and nobody would have been able to say why.

"She would have made a speech," said Val.

"She would have made two."

"And Kal would have sat there."

"Kal would have sat there," Kyra agreed, "and said one sentence at the end of it and ruined everybody."

They did not plan the next one.

Val noticed that they had not, standing at the sink with a plate in her hand at about nine o'clock, and did not say so, and put the plate in the rack.

Later they were on the couch with the window still open and the light nearly gone out of the yard, and at some point without either of them deciding to they laced, softly, the way they did when nothing was going anywhere.

Kyra had a hand in the back of Val's hair.

"Say it," said Kyra.

"There is nothing to say. That is the entire content of the day and I have been looking at it since five o'clock."

"Say that, then."

Val was quiet for a while, and underneath, at the hips, she was not quiet at all, and Kyra did not alter anything by a particle and let her take as long as she took.

"I thought there would be an hour," Val said.

"I know."

"I did not believe there would be an hour. I want that distinction, because it is the only part of this I have got right." Her voice was perfectly level. "But I had put something aside for it. I had kept the afternoon clear in a way I did not admit to and would have denied if you had asked me, and at five o'clock I was standing on a ladder with a putty knife and the afternoon went past, and there was nothing in it, and there was never going to be anything in it, and I knew that, and I had made arrangements anyway."

"That's not stupid."

"I did not say it was stupid. I said I did it."

She shifted, and got her forehead against Kyra's, which was a thing she did perhaps twice a year.

"People here get a day," Val said. "That is what I have been trying to arrive at since about two o'clock. They get a day and a room and somebody comes and tells them, and then there is a week of things to do, and all of it is terrible and all of it is something, and at the end of it they are a person who knows."

"And you get a Tuesday."

"I get a Tuesday," said Val. "That is what I will have instead. Not grief — I have grief, I have had it since sixty-eight and it is in good order and I am managing it. The thing I will not have is the day. There will never be a morning on this planet when I find out, and there will never be anybody to tell me, and the whole of it will go past exactly like this one did, and I will be doing the gutters."

The grip said something then that had no words in it and would never have any, and went on saying it for a while.

Kyra held still and let it.

"Will you do it again next year?" said Kyra, eventually.

"The sum?"

"The sum."

"In February," said Val. "It takes four minutes. I will do it in February the way I have done it since 1608 and I will know the date by the middle of the month and I will not say anything about it, and then it will be a day in June or July and we will be doing something else."

"Tell me the day."

Val lifted her head.

"You have spent three hundred and sixty years not asking."

"I have," Kyra said. "And I've just watched you stand on a ladder on it by yourself and I've decided three hundred and sixty years was enough."

Val did not answer for a moment.

"It will cost you the thing you have been protecting."

"I'm aware of what it costs. I'd like the day."

"Then you will have it," said Val, "in February, and every February after that, for as long as there is a February."

And Kyra put her face down into Val's neck and stayed there, and said, "Good," and nothing else, and underneath, after a while, she answered what had been going on down there since about nine o'clock, and got an answer back inside half a second, which in that language is as fast as a thing can be said.

The ball stayed on the kitchen windowsill for the rest of that summer.

Nobody came to the door about it, and after a while neither of them could have said with any certainty which of the houses on that street had children in it, and in September Kyra put it in the drawer with the string and the fuses, where it remained.

— end of chapter fourteen —

It took nine months of paper to stand on that mountain, which Val noted at the time and found she could not be sorry about.

There was a visa arranged through an office in New York that answered letters in its own time. There was a form at the hotel in Prague and another at the one in Poprad, and a desk that kept both passports overnight and gave them back in the morning without comment. There was an itinerary that somebody somewhere had approved, and the itinerary said walking, which was true.

Two American women of forty and thirty-eight, on paper, who had come a long way to look at mountains. Nobody in that country gave them a second glance. The country had other things on its mind in 1976 and two middle-aged tourists with good boots were not among them.

"I have been through four frontiers in my life that were harder than this one," Kyra said on the train, "and three of them were in the same month."

They went up from the south on the second morning, off the path by eight, and were out of sight of anything by half past nine.

Val's leg held. It had held for three hundred and sixty-eight years and there was a ridge under the skin at the break that only she could feel, and at about the fourth hour it began to tell her it was there, the way it did, and she did not mention it and Kyra did not ask and the two of them went on up.

The slope had changed and had not. There was more scree in the gully than there had been and the trees had come up another hundred feet since the last century, and the shape of the ground was the shape of the ground.

At two they came over the shoulder and there was nothing there, which is what there was supposed to be.

The hull does not hide by being covered. That had taken them nine years to understand and they had both been wrong about it for the first four.

What it does is simpler and stranger. It arranges not to be the thing your eye goes to. Stand on that shoulder and look at the slope and your attention walks across it and comes out the other side with nothing missing, and if somebody asks you afterward what was there you will say rock, confidently, and you will not be lying.

It had done that for three hundred and sixty-nine years to shepherds and partisans and surveyors and, twice in the thirties, to men with instruments who had come looking for ore.

You get in by knowing it is there and walking at it anyway.

Kyra went first, because she always did. She put her hand flat on it about where the hand goes and stood there a moment, and the hull did the thing it does, which is not to open so much as to stop objecting.

"Still knows us," said Kyra.

"It does not know anything."

"Val."

"It does not know anything," said Val, "and I have been saying that since 1612 and you have ignored it every time, and I notice that I am the one who says it and you are the one it lets in first."

Inside it was the temperature it had always been, which was the only thing on that mountain that had not moved in a hundred and five years.

They went down the long run to the stowage with two electric lamps, because the ship gave no light in that section and never had, and the air smelled of nothing at all, which is a thing Earth cannot do anywhere.

Kyra went left at the bottom.

She always went left at the bottom and she had never once pretended otherwise, and Val had stopped pretending not to know about forty years after the first time.

The drawing was where it had been.

Kal had made it at six years old on a Sixthday afternoon in a house in Aventhal, and it was a house with too many windows and four people outside it and one of them considerably larger than the others for reasons nobody had ever got out of her, and it had been in that locker since a Fourthday morning in 1607 when a woman had packed three books and a set of plates that nobody weighed.

Kyra sat down on the floor in front of it with the lamp off to one side and did not touch it, which was the rule she had made for herself in 1700 and had never broken.

Val went on down the run and left her to it, which was also a rule.

Kal had been four hundred and six two years ago.

That was the fact in the room and neither of them had said it once in nine months of paperwork, and both of them had known since about the second week of the planning that it was the reason they were coming, and neither had put it in a sentence, because there was no sentence that did not make it worse.

Kyra sat in front of a drawing made by a six-year-old four hundred years ago and did not touch it and did not say anything.

She was down there about forty minutes.

What Val did with the forty minutes was go and look for a number.

She had come for it. She had been honest with herself about that on the plane and dishonest about it for the nine months before, and she went along the run to the forward section where the ship kept its own record of itself and sat down on the deck with the lamp on her knee and read the eleven lines for the first time in a hundred and five years.

She knew them. She had copied them out four times and could have written them on a wall in the dark.

She read them anyway, in case a hundred and five years had put something in them that had not been there, which is not a thing that happens and which she did regardless.

Here is what the eleven lines say.

They say when the fold was entered and from where, and they say the geometry of it, and they say what the ship did and what the ship was asked to do and the one place where those two differ, which is the whole of why they are on a mountain in the Carpathians and not in a yard six miles inland of Aventhal.

They say how long the transit took, which was fifteen seconds.

And there it stops.

What Val wanted was one more line, and it was not an unreasonable thing to want.

She wanted to know what fifteen seconds had cost at the other end. Not here — here was measurable and she had measured it, and she had a notebook with three hundred and sixty-nine years in it and two reckonings of the year and the conversion worked out on a flat stone in 1608. What she did not have, and had never had, was any statement whatever about what had been happening at home while those fifteen seconds were going on.

She went through the whole forward section for the best part of half an hour.

It is not there. It was never there. And sitting on a cold deck with a lamp on her knee, Val Sorin worked out why, which took about four minutes and was the sort of thing she was very good at and got no pleasure from whatsoever.

A clock measures against another clock. That is the whole of what a clock is.

The Sorren carried an excellent one and it ran for fifteen seconds and recorded that it had, and there was nothing aboard that vessel with any connection to a clock in Aventhal, because there was never any reason to build one — the ship was going out and coming back in a season and the yard would still be there and the figures would be compared on the ground, by people, in a room.

So the question has no instrument. Not on this ship. Not on this mountain. Not on this planet, and not in the whole of what this planet is going to build in whatever remains to either of them.

To answer it she would need a clock here and a clock there and some way to lay them alongside each other, and she has one of the three and will never have the other two.

She sat with that.

It was not a discovery and it did not change a figure anywhere in the notebook. She had added Earth years to the ages she knew for three hundred and sixty-nine years because it was the only sum available to her, and it was still the only sum available to her, and she closed the lamp down to its lowest and sat in a cold section of a dead ship and said, out loud, to nobody, "There is nothing to be done with that."

Then she got up and went and found the locker.

It was open. That is how it happens and it has always happened that way and it has never once happened while anybody was looking.

In 1700 it was the eleven lines. In 1789 it was a bearing. In 1871 it was a locker of rations, three-quarters of which had turned to a gray flour and a quarter of which had not.

In 1976 it was Aden's.

He had been the one who went and found the person who had been standing in the room. He had sleeves up in every memory either of them had of him, and he had written four words in a margin about a plate that was sweating, and the fitting had come out two days later and been replaced, and he had died in the fold with ten other people on the ninth hour of a Fourthday.

What was in his locker was a comb, a flat tin of some paste for the hands with a thumbprint in it, two unused shirts and one that had been worn, a bundle of printed sheets about an entirely different vessel that he had evidently been reading for interest, and a small square of cloth with a woman's name stitched into one corner that neither Val nor Kyra had ever heard in their lives.

No instrument. No number. Nothing that would get anybody anywhere.

A dead man's comb.

Kyra came up the run and stood in the doorway with her lamp down by her leg and looked at it for a while.

"Aden," said Kyra.

"Aden."

"Who's Teska?"

"I have no idea," said Val. "I have been looking at it for eleven minutes and I have no idea, and there is nobody alive to ask, and that is where it ends."

Kyra crouched down and put two fingers on the square of cloth and took them off again.

"He never said a word about her."

"He would not have. He was not that sort of man and we were not that sort of crew."

They put it all back. That was not discussed either.

And standing there with the locker shut and her lamp in her hand, Val found that she was doing a thing she had been doing without noticing since about 1700, which was carrying a figure.

Six. There had been six lockers that had never opened, and she had counted them in 1700 and recounted them in 1789 and again in 1871, and the number in her head this morning on the way up the gully had been six, and it was now five.

She stood there and looked at it for a while.

"Kyra."

"Mm."

"I am going to stop counting these."

Kyra turned round rather slowly.

"Say that again."

"I have had a figure for the lockers since 1700. I have never written it down and I have never mentioned it and I would have told you it was not a count, and it was a count, and I am stopping it. Now. Standing here." Val had her free hand flat on the bulkhead. "I want you to have heard me say it rather than find out in forty years that I had gone quiet about it."

"Why now?"

"Because a count implies a schedule," said Val, "and there has never been one."

She went through it once, because she was not going to be able not to.

Eighty-nine years, then eighty-two, then a hundred and five. A record, a bearing, food, and a dead man's comb. No order anybody could name, no interval that repeats, nothing that suggests the thing is working down a list or saving the best for last — and she had been quietly treating it as a budget for two hundred and seventy-six years, because a budget was the only shape she had for it.

"It is not giving us things," said Val. "It is waking up. It has been waking up since the second winter in whatever way a thing like this wakes up, and it does not know we are here and it is not deciding anything, and in a hundred years it may open four at once or none at all, and I will not be keeping a figure on it either way."

"That's the second one you've put down."

"It is the third," said Val. "You do not know about the other one and I am not about to tell you, because I stopped it in 1967 and it was between me and myself."

They came out onto the shoulder at about five with the light going long and orange up the gully, and it got into the pale of Val's hair the way it had been getting into it on that slope since she was seventy-eight years old, and Kyra stopped and looked at her for a second longer than walking required.

"What?"

"Nothing, love. Keep going."

They sat on the rocks a while before starting down, because there was no hurry and because neither of them wanted the next part yet.

"I did not get it," Val said.

"I know you didn't. I knew you wouldn't on the plane."

"You might have said."

"And you'd have come anyway," said Kyra, "and you'd have come with somebody telling you it was pointless instead of somebody carrying the other lamp."

Val did not answer that for a moment.

"It is not that the answer is bad," said Val. "I want to be accurate about where I am. It is that there is no answer and there is no road to one. Four hundred years of this planet getting cleverer every decade and there is not one thing it will ever build that gets me that number, because the thing I would have to measure is in another galaxy and has been the whole time."

"And Kal."

"And Kal," said Val.

"Yes."

"I came up a mountain for a line that would tell me something about my own daughters and about yours, and I got fifteen seconds and a comb, and I would like to go down now."

— end of chapter fifteen —

They came down into the noise at about seven, which neither of them had been prepared for and which Val afterward decided she ought to have been.

The valley had a town in it.

Not a village with a town's ambitions. A town — eight storeys of it in concrete on the north moraine with its windows going orange, and a second one beside the lake with a restaurant lit up inside, and a swimming pool under a roof, and a road with a line painted down it, and over all of it, up on the rise, two ski jumps standing against the sky like something left behind by a larger species.

There was music coming out of a loudspeaker on a pole. There was a bus.

Val stood on the last of the path with a pack on and took an inventory, because that was what she did with anything that had got away from her.

Six years. That was the span that mattered and she had it inside a minute — the championships had been in 1970 and most of this had gone up for them, and the rest had gone up since, and the whole of what she was looking at had arrived in the time it had taken the two of them to notice a peak was late.

Kyra did not take an inventory. Kyra stood on the path with her mouth slightly open and said, "They've put a swimming pool up here," in a voice that had four hundred years of hill country in it.

"They have."

"We nearly starved in this valley."

"We did not nearly starve. We were extremely cold and we ate badly for about five months." Val got the pack off one shoulder. "But I take the point and I am not going to argue with the way you have put it."

They ate in the restaurant beside the lake with the other guests, who were Czech and Polish and East German and two Finns, and nobody looked at them twice, and the food was fine and there was a great deal of it.

Afterward Kyra stood out on the moraine in the dark for some time, looking up at where they had been, which from down there was simply a slope with nothing on it.

"Val."

"Mm."

"I want to go down to Dymná."

Val did not say anything for a moment, which was not hesitation.

It was that she had been waiting three days for the sentence and had four separate things prepared and found that she did not want any of them.

"All right."

"That's it?"

"That is it. There is nobody down there who was alive in 1608 and there has not been for three hundred years, and the last reason to stay away went into the ground some time before the Americans were a country." Val came and stood beside her. "You are the one who has been keeping it. I have never once had a vote."

"You had a vote in sixteen forty-four."

"I laid out the arithmetic in sixteen forty-four and let you decide, which is not a vote, and you decided above the treeline and we turned round and walked back up." Val had her hands in her pockets. "And you were right, and I have said so perhaps twice in three hundred years, and I am saying it a third time tonight because I do not know when I will be back here."

They went down on the Thursday, on a bus, with nine other people and a quantity of crated glass.

It took most of the morning and the road went where the road had always gone, which was down the valley and around the shoulder and out onto the flatter ground where the stream lets go, and Kyra sat with her head against the window and watched it the whole way and did not say a word.

Val watched her instead, which was its own occupation and had been for four hundred years, and noticed that the light coming in off the fields got the copper up in the dark of her hair exactly as it had done on that road in the autumn of 1608, when they had walked it the other way with everything they owned on their backs.

Dymná was still there.

That was the first surprise and it took the ground out from under about half of what Val had prepared. There were perhaps sixty houses where there had been thirty, and most of the sixty were new, and there was a shop and a bus shelter with a timetable in a frame and a long low building with a yard full of machinery that belonged to the co-operative.

Somebody had put in a water main. There were wires on poles.

And the ground was the same ground. The street went up the way it had gone up, because a street goes where the water does not, and the church was where the church had been.

They walked up it slowly.

"That's the corner," said Kyra, about a third of the way. "Where the woman wouldn't open the door the first time."

"It is not that corner. It is the next one. There was a byre on this one and the byre is gone and the shape of the lane is wrong by about nine feet."

"Val, I was there—"

"So was I, and I have been correcting you about this valley since 1607 and I shall not stop at the end of my life."

Kyra laughed, suddenly and far too loudly for the street, and an old man outside the shop looked round at the pair of them with mild interest and then went back to doing nothing.

The churchyard had been cleared.

Not recently. Some time in the last century somebody had decided that the old part of it was more ground than the parish could keep, and the stones had come up, and the ground had been levelled and planted, and against the north wall there was a row of fragments set into the mortar — perhaps forty of them, broken, some with half a name, some with a date, most with nothing legible at all.

It is a decent thing to do with old stones. It is what a village does when it cannot keep them standing and will not break them up for a road.

They went along the wall from one end to the other.

Twice.

He was not there.

There was a fragment with a letter on it that could have been the first of his name and could have been four other letters, and Val looked at it for a long time and then said, flatly, that it was not evidence and that she was not going to pretend it was.

"You could," said Kyra.

"I could, and then I would have spent the rest of my life with a thing I had decided to believe, and I have never done that and I am not starting on a wall in Dymná."

"It's allowed. Just once. For him."

"It is not allowed," Val said, "and he of all people would have thought so too, and that is the only argument I have got and I think it is a good one."

They sat down on the wall.

It was about eleven in the morning and the sun was out and there was a tractor going somewhere behind the long building, and two children went past on the lane and looked at them and did not stop.

"Say it," said Val.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you have been building since the bus."

Kyra sat for a bit with her hands between her knees.

"I kept away from this place for three hundred and thirty years," said Kyra.

"You did."

"I stood above the treeline in sixteen forty-four and you gave me the numbers and I said no, and then I said no in seventeen-whatever, and then I stopped having to say it because it had become the thing we did." She was looking down the lane. "And it was right. I'm not sitting here telling you it was wrong, because it wasn't, and I'd do it again, and if we'd come down in sixteen forty-four somebody's grandmother would have taken one look at my face and we'd have had the whole thing again and somebody would have been hurt for it."

"Yes."

"So I did it properly and I never once complained about it, and the reward for doing it properly for three hundred and thirty years is that I get to sit on a wall in the sun and look at a place where there is nothing left of anybody I was protecting."

Val did not try to fix it.

That had taken her about two hundred years to learn and she was still not reliable at it, and she sat on a wall in Dymná and did not fix it, and put her hand flat on the stone about four inches from Kyra's and left it there, which on a public lane in a Warsaw Pact village in 1976 was the whole of what was available.

"It bought the thing it was for," said Val, eventually.

"I know it did."

"It bought three hundred and thirty years in which nobody came looking for us and nobody wrote anything down, and we are sitting here instead of being a line in somebody's register, and that is what it was for and it worked and it is not supposed to leave anything behind." Val turned her hand over. "A thing that works leaves nothing behind. That is how you know."

"That's a terrible comfort."

"It is the only true one I have got," said Val, "and I would rather give you a true one, sweetheart, than a good one."

They stayed about an hour.

Kyra walked the levelled ground once, slowly, in no particular pattern, and stopped twice for no reason that she could have explained and that Val did not ask about. Then she came back to the wall and said she was done, and they went down the lane toward the shop to wait for the bus.

And outside the shop an old woman was sitting on a kitchen chair in the sun with a bowl in her lap, and as they came past she said something about the weather.

It was not a question and it did not need answering. It was the noise a person makes to strangers on a warm morning in September, and in any other year of their lives they would have smiled and gone past.

Kyra answered her.

She did not decide to. It came up out of her the way the north does, in the valley's own speech, which she had not spoken since the autumn of 1608 and had not thought about in two hundred years — the words for a dry week and a late harvest, in the order the people on that street had put them in when there was no road, no wire, no main, and thirty houses.

The woman stopped moving her hands in the bowl.

She looked up at Kyra Davan with an expression Val would be turning over for the rest of her life, and it was not suspicion and it was not fear, and what it most resembled was a person hearing a tune they had been told about by somebody long dead.

She said something back. Slowly. Two or three words of it in the same shape.

Then she laughed and shook her head and said something else, in the ordinary modern way, and went back to the bowl.

On the bus Kyra sat with her hands in her lap for about nine miles.

"What did she say?" Val asked. "The second thing."

"She said I talked like her grandmother."

Val looked out of the window at the valley going past.

"Her grandmother," Kyra said, "would have been born about nineteen hundred. So whoever that woman learned it off learned it off somebody who learned it off somebody, and it has been going down that street in a straight line for three hundred and sixty-eight years, getting a little flatter every time, and it came out of my mouth outside a shop this morning in the old shape and she heard it."

"Yes."

"That's it, Val. That's the whole of what's left of us in this valley, and it isn't a stone and it isn't a name, and it's in a woman's ear for about four seconds and then it's gone." She put her head back against the window. "And I'm not sorry we came."

— end of chapter sixteen —

Kyra had gone up to Astoria on the Tuesday to sit with the Hallorans, who had been having a bad month, and was not coming back until Saturday.

She had said so four times, which was three more than necessary, and had stood in the doorway with her bag saying a fifth thing about the stove, and Val had put a hand on the back of her neck and told her to go and be useful to somebody.

By Thursday the house had gone strange. It always did. Four hundred years and a house without Kyra in it still emptied out faster than the arithmetic supported — the same rooms, the same number of chairs, the whole thing somehow further apart.

Val worked until six. She ate standing up. At half past seven she put the plate in the sink and stood looking at it for a while, and then went upstairs and changed her blouse, which was a decision she declined to examine.

She caught the bus down.

That was the first odd thing, and she noted it at the time. She could have walked, she liked walking, and she got on a bus because getting on a bus was the sort of thing a person did when they had somewhere to be.

Downtown was wet and doing its Thursday business. She walked four blocks with no destination, which she had not done in this city in twenty years, and she was aware the entire time of a particular feeling that she could not get a word round and did not especially want to.

If she had been pressed, at seven forty-five in the evening, on a corner, with the light changing — if somebody had stopped her and asked her what she was doing — she would have said, and it would have been the truth:

There is nobody waiting for me anywhere and I would like to find out what that is like.

The bar had a green sign and a door that stuck.

She did not drink. That was a settled fact about her and had been for a very long time — not a principle, nothing so interesting, simply that her body did an odd thing with it and she had never found the odd thing enjoyable. Kyra would have three over an evening and be fine. Val had a whiskey in Westport in 1850 and one on a mountain and about a dozen others in four centuries, and could have named every single one.

She had two that night before she stopped counting them, and stopping was itself the point, and she knew it was the point while she was doing it.

The place was warm and loud and had a jukebox somebody kept feeding. There were about forty people in it and a fair number of them were women, and nobody in that room had the first idea who she was, and Val sat at the end of the bar with her back to the wall and found that she was enjoying herself enormously.

The woman's name was Darcelle.

She gave it herself, at the bar, with no ceremony at all, and Val — who had been hearing names she could not place for four hundred years on two worlds — took it exactly as offered and thought nothing whatsoever about it.

She was somewhere in her thirties and she worked at a title company and she had a laugh that arrived about a half-second before the joke was finished, which Val noticed and liked and thought nothing further about either. She had come over because Val was reading the label on a bottle behind the bar with what she described as professional interest.

"You're reading the bourbon."

"I am reading the bourbon."

"Is it interesting?"

"It says it has been made the same way since 1870," said Val, "and I would like to see their records."

Darcelle laughed the half-second-early laugh, and sat down, and did not get up again for two hours.

It was easy.

That was the thing Val kept coming back to afterward and could never make sound like anything but an excuse. It was easy. Darcelle talked about a boss she hated and a brother in Klamath Falls and a car with a transmission problem, and asked Val what she did and accepted the answer, and did not once ask anything that required Val to remember what she had told anybody.

Nobody in that room was going to be in Val's life in a week. Nobody was going to notice that she did not age. Nobody was going to need a story about a sister, or a name for a deed, or a reason she had no family photographs.

For two hours Val Sorin was a tall woman at the end of a bar with an opinion about bourbon labels, and it was the lightest she had been since the Carpathians.

At some point Darcelle's hand was on her forearm and had been for a while.

"I'm going to say a thing."

"Go on," said Val.

"You've been looking at me since about nine o'clock and doing an extremely poor job of pretending you haven't."

Val considered several available responses, in order, the way she did, and then discovered that she was too far into the evening to bother with any of them.

"That is accurate."

"Well," said Darcelle. "All right, then."

The apartment was six blocks up, on the third floor, and had a good chair in it and a bad print of a boat over the sofa and a kitchen the size of a wardrobe.

Val was clear about every part of what happened in it. She wants that understood, and so does this chapter, because a great deal of what came afterward turned on it: she was not gone, she was not lost, and she did not wake up anywhere not knowing how she had arrived. She was drunk in the specific way of a woman who has decided to be, and she was present for all of it, and she said yes out loud more than once and meant it every time.

She would remember the whole evening for four hundred years and never once have the comfort of not remembering it.

The light came up somewhere in the middle.

Not much. The lamp was on in the other room and the door was open and it was nothing like a dark bedroom, and it went to the wrists first the way it always did.

Darcelle said, "Huh," and looked at her arm, and Val said something about the lamp, and Darcelle said, "Sure," in the voice of a woman who has decided not to think about a thing while a better thing is available, and that was the whole of it.

Val lay there afterward with her heart going and thought, with total clarity, that was a risk and you took it and you are going to have to tell her that part too.

And then did not think about it any further, which was also a decision.

The razor came out of a conversation about nothing.

Darcelle was in the bathroom doorway with a towel and a glass of water, complaining cheerfully about a sunburn, and something got said about summer, and something else got said, and Darcelle — who was direct about everything and had been all evening — made a remark about Val that was not unkind and not careful either, and was the sort of remark nobody had made to her in four hundred years because nobody had ever been in a position to make it.

"That is quite a lot of woman you've got going on down there."

"It has been there some while."

"I'll say it has."

And Val laughed, properly, and said the thing she would be taking apart for the next several decades.

"Take it off, then."

Darcelle stopped laughing.

"You're kidding."

"I am not."

"You're drunk."

"I am also not that," said Val, "and I want you to observe that I have been sitting here for eleven minutes, and that I am about to say it again." She looked up. "Take it off."

"Why?"

And there it was — the question, asked idly, by a woman with a towel, in a bathroom doorway in a building Val would never see again — and Val answered it honestly because there was nothing at all at stake in that room.

"Because it is the only part of me nobody has an opinion about," she said, "and I would like to find out what it is like to do something that isn't about anybody."

Darcelle said, "Okay," and went to get the soap.

And in the forty seconds she was out of the room, Val thought about the mark.

This is the part. Everything else in that apartment can be argued about and she argued about all of it for years afterward, in her own head, at four in the morning, and got somewhere with most of it.

Not this.

She sat on the edge of a stranger's bath and worked out, correctly and in order, that the band was inked low and would be the first thing to come out from under it, and that a woman holding a razor was going to see it from about eleven inches away and would certainly say something. She understood all of that completely. She had the whole picture.

And she decided it did not signify.

It took about forty seconds and she was entirely sober for all of them.

It took a while and it was not remotely elegant.

They did it in the bathroom with the light on and the door open and the radio going in the other room, with a pair of nail scissors first, which was the part that took the longest, and then a safety razor and a great deal of soap and a good deal of laughing. Darcelle was careful and competent and not precious about it. Twice she stopped and said you sure and twice Val said yes, and the second time she took the razor out of Darcelle's hand and did a stretch of it herself, badly, and gave it back.

It was, Val thought at the time, one of the more ridiculous things she had ever participated in.

It was also — and she was aware of this, in the moment, with the soap and the light and a stranger's radio — the freest she had felt in four hundred years, and she was not going to pretend otherwise later, and she never did.

Darcelle found it about two-thirds of the way through.

She stopped with the razor in the air and leaned in and said, "Well, hello," in the pleased voice of a woman who has been handed a thing she was not expecting, and then, "That is beautiful."

It is a plain closed band. There is nothing legible in it anywhere and there never was. It is a hundred and twenty-nine years old and it has not moved a hair's breadth in all that time, and it sits where nothing will ever show it.

"Thank you," said Val.

"Who did it?"

There were four answers available and Val went through them the way she goes through anything, which takes her under a second, and she gave the one she has been giving under pressure since a room in Trieste: the true one that cannot be used.

"Somebody I live with."

"Huh," said Darcelle, and went back to it. "They do nice work. My cousin's got one on her shoulder looks like a dog chewed it."

And that was the whole of it. Four words out and four words back, in a bathroom, over a radio, and the woman thought nothing of it whatsoever and never thought of it again.

Afterward Darcelle put a hand on her shoulder and said, "Hey. You all right?"

"Yes."

"You went somewhere for a second."

"I am extremely all right," said Val, and it was true, and it went on being true for about forty more minutes.

She called a taxi at twenty past two.

Darcelle walked her down, in a robe, and stood in the doorway with her arms folded against the cold and said, "This was a good night."

"It was a very good night."

"You're not going to call me."

"No," said Val. "I am not. And it is not about you and I am not going to insult you by explaining it."

Darcelle looked at her for a moment and then laughed the half-second-early laugh.

"You're the strangest woman I ever met."

"You have no idea," said Val, and got into the taxi.

It happened on Burnside.

It was not the promise. That is the part she never told anybody except one person, because it made her look worse rather than better: it was not the promise that arrived first. It was something small and physical and wrong — the way the seam of her slacks sat against her when she shifted on the seat, which was a sensation she had no file for, because she had not had that sensation since she was a girl in Aventhal.

She sat with that for about four seconds.

And then the rest of it came in all at once, the way it does, with the wet lights going past and a driver listening to a ball game.

You are not cutting one hair off your body because you have decided you're a problem.

Kyra's hand on her jaw, not gently. That bedroom, that November, in 1950, with a truck going down the far end of the street in second gear. Do you understand what that would be? That would be the waiting turning into a thing that got fixed.

And the rest of it, which Val had said out loud, in that bed, because Kyra had made her say the whole of it:

I will not take a blade to myself on account of a figure I am going to stop keeping.

Val sat in the back of a taxi on Burnside with her hands flat on her knees and thought, quite clearly: and I have not.

Because that was true. It was strictly, literally, precisely true, and she knew within a second and a half that it was the most contemptible sentence her mind had produced in four hundred years, and she had produced a few.

The third one arrived somewhere around Tenth and was the one she had not seen coming at all.

Who did it?

Somebody I live with.

And Val Sorin, who had held that answer in reserve under a blood court and had been proud of it for two hundred and seventy years, understood that she had just spent it in a bathroom on a question about a mark that was half of a pair, and that the other half of the pair was in Astoria sitting with the Hallorans, and had not been asked.

She did the arithmetic somewhere around Twelfth.

She did not want to. She did it anyway, because she is who she is and there has never been any help for it, and because the number was going to arrive whether she invited it or not.

Three weeks to anything worth the name. Four to be back to herself. Somewhere in between there would be a stretch of days that would be worse than either end of it.

And Kyra was home on Saturday.

So: two days. Two days in which the fact was going to be true and unmentioned, and then a woman was going to come through the door with a bag and a great deal to say about the Hallorans, and at some point that night or the next one they were going to go upstairs.

And Val was going to be ready before she was.

That was the one that got her.

Not the promise, which she had broken. Not Darcelle, who was nobody's business and was entirely permitted and about whom Kyra would want the details and would be pleased for her, because that was the arrangement and had been since Maribor and there had never once in four hundred years been a single moment's jealousy in either direction.

It was that the thing Kyra had refused — fiercely, holding her by the jaw, the only thing that woman had ever asked her not to do — had been done anyway, in a stranger's bathroom, for a reason Val had thought was excellent at midnight and could not now locate at all.

And the proof of it was going to be lying in their bed on Saturday, fast, and neither of them was going to be able to enjoy a single second of it.

The house was cold and smelled of nobody.

She stood in the kitchen with her coat still on for a length of time she did not measure, which was rare, and then went up and ran the shower and stood in it for a long while with her forehead against the tile.

Afterward she stood in front of the glass with the towel and made herself look, properly, in order, the way she looked at anything.

The bathroom bulb was a bad one and it took the gold out of her hair entirely and left it the gray of the sea under cloud, which was a thing Val had noticed about electric light in about 1890 and had never minded until that night.

It was not a stranger in the mirror. That would have been easier and it would have been a lie. It was entirely her, with one thing different, and the thing was not even dramatic — it was small and clean and completely unremarkable and about nine other women in that bar could have gone home and done the same thing on a whim and thought about it for four days at most.

And the band was sitting out in the open on a woman who had spent a hundred and twenty-nine years keeping it where nothing would ever show it.

"Well," said Val Sorin, out loud, to an empty bathroom in Portland, Oregon. "There you are."

And then heard what she had said, and who she had taken it from, and sat down on the edge of the bath.

She did not sleep much.

Around five she gave it up and went down and sat at the kitchen table in the dark with her hands round a cup of something she was not drinking, and did the thing she had spent four centuries doing, which was to take the whole of it apart and lay the pieces out and look at them.

She could have gone out and not drunk. She had chosen otherwise.

She could have gone home at ten. She had chosen otherwise, and it had been a good choice, and she was not going to let the end of the evening make a liar out of the middle of it.

She could have said no in a bathroom doorway, and been asked twice more, and said no twice more, and Darcelle would have laughed and put the soap away and nothing whatsoever would have been different about any part of that night.

And she had said take it off, then, and had been asked whether she was sure, and had been asked again with the soap already in the woman's hand, and had said it both times. And had taken the razor out of the woman's hand and done a stretch of it herself.

Nobody had done anything to her. She had been there the entire time.

And for forty seconds, on the edge of a stranger's bath, she had looked straight at the one part of it that could not be undone, and had gone on.

That is the sentence she could never get round, in that kitchen or in any of the kitchens after it.

She had not forgotten about the mark. Forgetting would have been a kindness and she was not going to be given one. She had taken it out, looked at it, understood exactly what would be uncovered and who would be looking at it and what would be asked, and had set it down again as insufficient, and had done it in under a minute, sober, in a good mood, with a woman getting soap in the next room.

The bad part — the part she would still be turning over on a different planet, a long way from that kitchen — was that she could reconstruct the reason perfectly and it no longer worked.

At midnight, in a warm apartment, with a woman she liked and would never see again: the only part of me nobody has an opinion about. It had been the truest thing she had said out loud all year. It had felt like taking off a coat she had been wearing since 1607.

At five in the morning, at her own table, in her own house, it fell over inside four seconds.

Because it was not true. Somebody did have an opinion about it. One person, exactly one, in the whole of two worlds — and the opinion was not that Val should be different. The opinion was that Val should not be. It was the only thing Kyra Davan had ever asked of her in four hundred years, and she had asked for it with both hands on Val's face, and Val had told a stranger in a bathroom that nobody had an opinion, and had believed it while she said it.

That was not a lie she told Darcelle.

That was a lie she had told herself in order to be able to say it.

She sat there until it got light.

At some point she caught herself composing — the first sentence, then a better first sentence, then the order to put it in, then which part to lead with and which part to hold, then a version in which the whole thing came out over the course of a week in manageable portions.

She stopped that too.

Not because it was dishonest. Because she knew exactly what it was: it was arranging. It was four in the afternoon and an ordinary face. It was the oldest thing she did, running itself in the dark in her own kitchen, and if she let it finish she would walk into Saturday with something prepared, and Kyra would know inside of a minute, and it would be worse.

So she put her head down on the table, on her arms, like a woman at the end of a long shift.

"Right," she said, into the wood. "Straight, then."

— end of chapter seventeen —

Kyra came in at twenty past four on the Saturday with a bag over her shoulder and a box of something from a bakery in Astoria and about nine hundred words already going.

Val met her in the hall and took the box and put it down on the table without looking at it.

"Don't take your coat off."

"What?"

"Take it off. I did not mean that. I meant—" Val stopped, and started again, and made herself do it the way she had decided at five in the morning to do it. "Kyra. I have to tell you a thing and I am going to do it badly and I am going to do it now, before either of us sits down, because if I sit down I will arrange it."

Kyra put the bag on the floor.

"All right," said Kyra. "Go."

So Val told her, standing up, in a hall, in about four minutes.

The bus. The bar with the green sign. The two whiskeys and then not counting. A woman called Darcelle who worked at a title company and had a brother in Klamath Falls. An apartment six blocks up with a bad print of a boat in it. The light coming up at the wrists with a lamp on in the next room and a woman saying huh and deciding not to think about it.

And then the bathroom.

She did not soften any part of it. She said what she had said and how many times she had said it and that she had taken the razor out of the woman's hand herself, and she got all the way to the end of it and stood there in her own hall with her hands at her sides.

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

Then she said: "Was she nice?"

Val blinked.

"What?"

"Darcelle. Was she nice? Did you have a good time? Val, you have been in this house for four hundred years and I have had about six of these and you have had four, and every single time you come at me like a woman handing over a bomb." Kyra was taking her coat off now. "Was she nice."

"She was—" Val had not prepared for this and it showed. "She was extremely nice. She had a laugh that came half a second early."

"Half a second early."

"Before the end of the joke. Every time. She was not waiting for the joke, she was—"

"That's lovely," said Kyra, and meant it, and hung the coat on the peg, and the wet had got into the whole of her hair on the walk up from the bus and taken it three shades darker, which it did and which Val had been watching it do since a wash room on a plateau. "Good. I'm glad. You went out and you had a night and somebody with a nice laugh took you home, and that is the best thing I have heard all week, and the Hallorans have had a shocking time."

"Kyra."

"Mm."

"I have not got to the part."

"You got to the part. You said the bathroom." Kyra went past her into the kitchen and put the kettle on, and her back was to the room. "I heard the part."

"You do not seem—"

"Give me a minute, Val."

So Val stood in the doorway of her own kitchen and gave her a minute, which was the longest minute she had spent on this planet since a courtroom in Trieste.

Kyra turned round.

"You didn't break it," said Kyra.

"I did."

"You didn't. Say it back to me. The whole of it. What you said in that bed in fifty — say the sentence."

Val said it, because she could no more not say it than stop breathing.

"I will not take a blade to myself on account of a figure I am going to stop keeping."

"Right," said Kyra. "And was it? On account of the figure?"

Silence.

"Was it, Val? Did you sit in that woman's bathroom thinking about the two minutes, and about being slow, and about me lying there waiting for you? Is that what was in your head when you said take it off?"

"No."

"Then you kept the promise."

"That is a technicality," said Val.

"It is not a technicality, it is the terms—"

"It is a technicality and I found it myself in the back of a taxi on Burnside at half past two in the morning, and I want you to know that it took me one and a half seconds to find it and one and a half seconds to understand that it was the most contemptible sentence my mind has ever produced." Val's voice had not risen and was not going to. "I am not having it from you. I refuse it. I had four hundred years of not cutting it and I cut it, and I do not intend to stand in my own kitchen and be acquitted on the wording."

"That's not what I'm doing."

"It is precisely what you are doing and you are doing it out of kindness, which is worse."

"Val—"

"I broke it. Say I broke it."

And Kyra put both hands flat on the counter behind her and looked at the floor for a second and said, "No."

"I'm not going to say it," said Kyra, "because it isn't true, and you would like it to be true because a broken promise is a thing you know how to hold. It's got edges on it. You can put it down on a table and look at it and decide what it costs and then pay it, and you have been paying things off since you were a girl and it is the only currency you have ever been fluent in."

Val did not say anything.

"I refused to let you cut it for a reason," said Kyra. "Do you remember the reason? Not the words — the reason."

"Because it would have been the waiting turning into a thing that got fixed."

"Because you'd have been doing it out of shame. That was the whole of it. That's what I had my hands on your face about. Not the hair — I could not care less about the hair, Val, it's hair, it does what hair does. What I would not have was you taking a blade to yourself because you'd decided you were a fault." She finally looked up. "And that is not what happened in that bathroom, is it."

"No."

And then Kyra was quiet for a while, and when she spoke again it had gone somewhere else entirely.

"There is a thing I do mind," said Kyra, "and it isn't that, and I've been carrying it since you got to the scissors."

"Say it."

"Since nineteen ten there has been one week a year when that comes out from under. One. And it comes out under my hand, with my razor, in August, because I ask for it and you let me, and then I get three weeks of looking at it and then it's gone again for another year." Kyra's voice was perfectly level, which in her was the loud one. "On Thursday it came out under somebody else's."

"Yes."

"Did she see it?"

"She did."

"Did she say anything?"

"She said it was beautiful," said Val, "and I said thank you."

Kyra sat down at the table.

"Did she ask who did it?"

"She did."

"And?"

"I told her it was somebody I live with."

And Kyra Davan, who had spent four hundred years knowing exactly what that sentence was and where it had been held and under what, sat at her own kitchen table and did not say anything at all for about nine seconds.

"I want to be accurate," said Kyra eventually, "because I am about to say a thing that will sound like the other thing and it is not the other thing, and if you hear it wrong we will be at this until Tuesday."

"Go on."

"I am not jealous. I have never been jealous of anybody in four hundred years and I am not starting with a woman in a title company who was good to you, and if I ever meet her I will shake her hand." She had both palms flat on the wood. "It is that there are two of them, Val. They were made on the same afternoon on a river by each other's hands and the only reason either of them means anything is that there is a second one. It is not a decoration. It is half of a thing."

Val did not move.

"And half of it got uncovered in a bathroom in April and looked at and admired and asked about, and the other half was in Astoria sitting with a man whose wife has got about a year, and nobody asked it anything at all."

Val had nothing.

That is worth putting down, because it had happened to her perhaps four times in her life and every one of them had been in a room with this woman: she went and looked for an answer, in order, the way she looked for anything, and there was not one there.

So she gave her the worst of it instead, which was the only thing she had left and was not an answer and was not meant to be.

"I thought about it," Val said.

"What?"

"Before. While she was out of the room getting the soap. I sat on the edge of a bath for about forty seconds and I worked out exactly what was going to come out from under it, and who was going to be eleven inches away when it did, and that she would certainly say something." Val's hands were flat on the table now, mirroring. "And I decided that it did not signify, and I was entirely sober, and then she came back in with the soap."

Kyra put a hand over her mouth and took it away again.

"You thought about it."

"I thought about it."

"Forty seconds."

"About forty. I would not swear to it inside ten." Val made herself keep going. "You did not ask me that and you were not going to, and if I had sat on it you would never have known, and I have been sitting here since four o'clock deciding whether to hand it over, and the deciding is the last of the arranging and I am done with it. That is the whole of what I have got. It is not better than the version where I forgot."

"No," said Kyra. "It's a good deal worse."

"I am aware."

"And you told me anyway."

"I told you anyway."

Kyra sat with that a long moment, and something in her face moved and did not finish moving.

"Right," said Kyra. "That's said and I'm not going to make you say it twice. It'll come up again in about nine years in the middle of an argument about a gutter and we'll both hate it and then it'll be done."

"That is a remarkably exact prediction."

"I've known you since I was eighteen." She reached behind her and took the kettle off without looking at it. "Now tell me why you went out."

And Val, who had got all the way through what she thought was the hard part and did not understand that she had not yet reached it, told her that too.

"There was nobody waiting for me anywhere," said Val, "and I wanted to find out what that was like."

The kitchen was extremely quiet.

Val watched it arrive. That was the awful part and she would still be able to describe it in another four hundred years — she watched the sentence go into Kyra Davan and she watched what it did on the way, and she understood, about a second and a half too late, what she had just handed over and to whom.

Kyra did not shout. Kyra, who shouted at fences and at the price of coffee and at a judge's clerk in Trieste, did not make any noise at all.

"Ah," said Kyra.

"Kyra—"

"No, that's — hold on." She put a hand up. "Hold on. I'm going to say this wrong if I do it fast."

After a moment Val sat down across from her, which was the wrong side and they both knew it, and neither of them moved.

"I have never once," said Kyra, "in four hundred years, wanted to be somewhere you weren't."

"I know."

"You don't know, because I've never said it, because it never came up, because it never occurred to me that it was a thing a person could want." Her hands were flat on the table. "Not once. Not in Maribor and not on the trail and not in the eighteen years we were in that awful flat in Lowell. I have gone places without you and I have had a perfectly good time and every single time some part of me was keeping a seat. I thought that was what this was. I thought it was the same in both directions."

"It is the same in both directions."

"It is not, Val, you got on a bus."

"I want to be careful here," Kyra said, "because I am about ninety seconds into something and I don't trust the first thing I think."

"Take the time."

"I am not going to pretend it doesn't hurt. I could. I'm good at it and you'd let me and we'd have a nice evening." She looked up. "It hurts. There. That's said."

Val started to say something and Kyra shook her head.

"Not because you went. Not because of Darcelle — I want that absolutely clear, sweetheart, I am delighted about Darcelle, I would like to buy Darcelle a drink. Because you needed somewhere to be nobody, and there is a woman in this house who has known exactly who you are since 1608, and it turns out that's the one thing I make impossible."

And there it was, out on the table between them, and it was worse than the hair by an order of magnitude and neither of them had seen it coming an hour ago.

Val sat with it for a long moment.

"I have to say a thing now," said Val, "and it is going to sound like the cruelest thing I have ever said to you, and it is the opposite, and I need you to wait until the end."

"Go on."

"I cannot be nobody with you. That is correct and you have got it exactly right." Her voice was doing the flat thing and her hands were not entirely steady. "But it is not because you watch me, and it is not because you know me, and it is not a failure in you, and if you take one more step down the road you are on you will arrive at the conclusion that you should know me less, and I will not have that, Kyra. I will not have it."

"Then what?"

"It is because with you I am the most somebody I have ever been."

Kyra did not move.

"Everywhere else on this planet I am a woman with a name on a deed," said Val. "I am four inches of paperwork. I am whoever a clerk wrote down in a county office in 1961. None of it is me and none of it costs me anything, and I can put all of it down at the door of any room I walk out of." She turned her cup a quarter turn and left it. "And then I come home and I am Val Sorin, who was born on the eighth terrace in Aventhal, whose father is dead in a year she cannot check, who has two daughters four hundred years away, who counted a man's spurts at twenty-two because she did not know how else to stay in a room. All of that is in this house. All of it is in you. You are the only place any of it exists."

"Val."

"That is not a burden. Do not hear it as a burden. It is the only reason I am still a person and not a set of papers." She got it out. "But there is nowhere to put it down. Not one square foot, in four hundred years, on two worlds. And on Thursday I got on a bus and for two hours I was a tall woman at the end of a bar with an opinion about bourbon labels, and Kyra, it was the lightest I have been since the Carpathians, and I did not know that was a thing I needed until it was already happening to me."

The rain came on outside, because it was April and that is what April does in that town.

"I can't give you that," said Kyra.

"No."

"I can't. I've been sitting here trying to find a way and there isn't one. The only way I could give you a night off from being yourself is by not knowing who you are, and I'm not doing that. I've spent four hundred years learning it. It's the best thing I've ever done."

"I am aware."

"So it's a real one."

"It is a real one," said Val. "There is no arrangement of this universe in which it comes out even. I have looked. I have been looking since Friday morning."

"Of course you have."

They sat with it.

It is worth recording that neither of them tried to make it smaller. That was the growth, if anybody was counting, and both of them would have been able to name it: two women who had spent four centuries handing each other softened versions of things sat at a kitchen table in Portland and let a problem be exactly the size it was.

The tea did not get made. The bakery box did not get opened until Monday.

"Go again," said Kyra.

Val looked up.

"I'm sorry?"

"Go again. Not tonight. But go again — next month, or whenever you want to, and don't ask me and don't make a thing of it." Kyra's chin had come up. "Get on the bus. Read the bourbon. Be a tall woman with opinions. And then come home."

"You have just told me it hurts."

"It does hurt. Both things are true and I'm not going to pick one to make this easier." She reached across and got hold of Val's wrist. "Listen to me. You need somewhere to put it down and I can't be it, and the alternatives are that you get it once every four hundred years by accident and feel like a criminal afterward, or you get it on a Thursday when you feel like it and I know where you are. I'd rather the second one. I'd rather it by a mile."

"Kyra, that is—"

"It's not generous. Don't call it generous." Her grip tightened. "It's selfish, Val. I want four hundred more years of you and I've just found out there's a thing you need that I can't make, and I would be an idiot to stand between you and the only place you can get it."

Val looked at the hand on her wrist for some while.

"I do not know how to accept that."

"I know you don't."

"I have nothing to give you back for it. That is the actual difficulty. There is no equivalent and I have been looking for one since you started the sentence."

"Nobody's ahead."

"I am aware that nobody is ahead. I have not been keeping one since fifty and I would like that noticed." Val put her other hand over Kyra's. "And I still cannot take a thing that large without something going in the other direction, and I am telling you that plainly instead of arranging it, which is the only progress available to me this afternoon."

"Then take four hundred years to think of something," said Kyra. "You've got them."

It got dark at some point and neither of them lit the lamp.

"Can I ask you something awful," said Kyra.

"Given the afternoon we have had, yes."

"Did you enjoy it? The bathroom. Not the evening — the actual thing, the soap and the scissors and the whole ridiculous business."

Val considered lying, in the interests of the household, and discarded it inside a second.

"Enormously."

"Right." Kyra sat back. "Good."

"Good?"

"I've been sitting here for an hour hoping it was worth something, because if you'd gone through all of this for a night you hadn't even liked I think I'd have gone up to that apartment and had words with the woman about her technique."

"How long," Kyra said, a while later.

"Three weeks to anything worth the name. Four to be myself."

"You worked that out in the taxi."

"I worked that out between Burnside and Twelfth," said Val, "and I would like it on the record that I did not want to and it arrived anyway."

"It always arrives anyway. It's the only thing about you I'd call a disability." Kyra got up and came round the table and stood behind her chair with both hands on her shoulders. "Four weeks. And then it's back and this whole thing will have left nothing behind it except a conversation."

"That does not seem like very much to show for it."

"Val." Kyra's thumbs moved once on the tops of her shoulders. "I would have traded the hair for that conversation on any day of the last four hundred years, and I'd have thrown in the house."

They did not go upstairs that night.

It was not a punishment and neither of them thought of it that way for a second; it was that the afternoon had emptied both of them out, and there was a bakery box on the table nobody had the appetite for, and Kyra fell asleep on the sofa at nine with her feet in Val's lap in the middle of a sentence about the Hallorans.

Val sat there in the dark with a woman's ankles under her hands and thought about the thing she had not said, which was that she had found out something on Thursday she was not going to be able to put down.

Not the freedom. The other one.

That she had spent two hours being nobody, and it had been marvelous, and at twenty past two in the morning she had stood on a doorstep with a woman in a robe and had not been able to get into the taxi fast enough.

She would tell her that eventually. It would take about a fortnight to find the words and it would come out flatter than she meant it, because everything did.

She sat in the dark and started work on it.

— end of chapter eighteen —

Val decided about it at ten past four, over nothing at all, and got about forty minutes of being normal before she gave it up entirely.

That was new too. She had not been able to hold it since the Thursday — the whole apparatus of the ordinary face and the remark about the fence and the five hours of drainage had simply stopped functioning, and she had a fairly good idea why and did not enjoy the reason. A body that arrives in ninety seconds does not require five hours of managing.

So at ten to five she came and stood in the kitchen doorway and said, "Come upstairs."

Kyra looked up from the sink.

"It's daylight."

"I am aware of the hour."

"Val, I've got my hands in a pot."

"Then put the pot down," said Val, "and come upstairs," and went, and did not look back, and Kyra stood there for a second with her hands dripping and then dried them on the cloth and came.

It was fast. It had been fast all week and neither of them had said one word about it.

They got as far as the bed and out of most of what they were wearing, and Val was there almost before they had settled — no wait at all, nothing to work through, the whole business over inside a minute and a half from a woman who had never in four hundred years arrived anywhere before Kyra Davan.

And she lay there, hip to hip with her, ready, running extremely hot, waiting for the other half of it.

And nothing happened.

She gave it a while.

That was not difficult. She was in no hurry — she had four hundred years of being the slow one and she was not about to become impatient the first fortnight she wasn't — and the light was coming in through the gap where the blind had never fit, and there was a woman beside her with her hair all over the pillow, dark and the copper in it where the light got in, and Val was perfectly happy to lie there.

After a few minutes she started doing what Kyra did.

She had been studying it for a very long time, in the way she studied anything, and she knew the whole of the method by now: the hand flat and slow, the mouth at the hinge of the jaw, the entirely deliberate nonsense about a fence. She did all of it.

"The Kesslers have taken the fence down," said Val, into Kyra's shoulder.

"Mm."

"They have taken it down and they are putting it back four inches further over, which is where it should have been in 1911, and I have said nothing to either of them about it and I would like a medal."

"Mm," Kyra said again.

Val stopped talking about the fence.

"Sweetheart."

"I'm here."

"You are not, though," said Val.

Kyra did not answer that, and Val did not press it, and instead put her forehead against the side of Kyra's head and stayed there and let the room be quiet for a while, because that was in the method too and it was the part she had understood last.

"There's no hurry," Val said, after some time. "Nothing's happening anywhere. Nobody wants either of us."

She felt Kyra's breath catch on that, which she had not expected, and which she filed.

"You've got all evening, and so have I, and so has the rain, love. Take whatever you want of it."

It did not work.

Val was not offended by that and did not take it personally for one second, which she would like recorded, because a younger version of her would have had a tally open before the light went. She simply observed it — ten minutes, fifteen, everything she knew how to do and a good deal she had worked out herself — and watched a woman lie in a bed with her eyes open and get no further.

And then Kyra put a hand over Val's wrist and stopped it.

"Val."

"I know."

"I need—"

"I know, Kyra."

"I need to talk," said Kyra, and her voice came apart in the middle of it. "I'm sorry. I need to talk and I can't do this, I've been lying here for twenty minutes trying to make myself and it is not going to happen and I am so sorry."

"Do not do that," said Val.

"I've never once—"

"Kyra. Do not do that." She got up onto an elbow. "Say the first part again and leave the rest of it off."

"I need to talk."

"Thank you. That is all of it. There is no apology anywhere in this room and I will not have one, and if you say sorry to me again this evening I am going to take it extremely badly."

And Kyra laughed, wetly, once, and put her arm over her face.

They stayed where they were. Neither of them got dressed and neither of them got up, and the rain came on properly at about half past five and went on for the rest of it.

"I said it was fine," Kyra said, from under her arm.

"You did."

"I meant it. I want that first. I meant every word of it at that table, Val — go again, get on the bus, I'd rather know where you are. All of that is still true and I am not taking one syllable of it back."

"I know you are not."

"And I have not stopped thinking about it for six days." She took her arm off her face. "That's the thing nobody tells you. You can mean a thing entirely and still have to catch up to it, and the catching up takes as long as it takes and it doesn't care what you decided in the kitchen."

"Say the shape of it," said Val.

"I don't know the shape of it. That's why I can't—"

"Then say the wrong shape and we will find the right one afterward. I have been doing that since fifty and it is the single most useful thing you have ever taught me."

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

"It isn't Darcelle."

"No."

"It genuinely isn't. I keep checking, because it would be so much simpler if it were, and it never is. I like the sound of her. I'm glad about her." She turned her head on the pillow. "And it isn't the mark either. I said that on Saturday and I meant it and it's finished and I'm not going back round it."

"Then what?" said Val.

"It's that you came back different and I didn't get a vote."

"Go on," said Val.

"You went out and you found a thing you needed and you had no idea you needed it, and that's — Val, that's good, I'm not sorry that happened, I told you to go again and I'll tell you again tonight." Kyra's hands had come up and were doing something aimless. "But for four hundred years there has not been one single thing about you that I found out afterward. Not one. Everything you have ever been I have been in the room for."

"That is true."

"And then a woman in a title company got there first."

The rain did what it was doing.

"Not to you," said Kyra. "I know it wasn't to you. She got to something about you, and she didn't even know she was doing it, and I've been walking around for six days feeling like a woman who came home and found the furniture moved."

Val lay there and took it apart the way she took anything apart, and then — and this was the new part — put it down before she had finished, because finishing was not what was wanted.

"I want to tell you something," said Val, "and I have never said it in four hundred years, and it is going to be a very odd present."

"All right."

"Jakob."

Kyra went still.

"Twenty-five years," said Val. "Trieste. And I want to be exact about this because the exactness is the whole of it: I was never once jealous of that man. Not for a minute, not in twenty-five years, and I would have said so under oath at the time and I would say so now."

"I know you weren't. I'd have seen it."

"You would have seen it. So hear the rest." Val's voice did not move. "I was not jealous and I missed you, and those are two entirely different things, and nobody has ever explained to either of us that a person can have the second one without the first."

"You never said."

"Of course I never said. The pact was the pact. Each of us tells the other and there is never any jealousy, and I was not jealous, so as far as I could work out there was nothing on my side to report." Val turned over onto her back. "There was a stretch of about two years — the twelfth and the thirteenth, I think, I could find it if you made me — where you were at his place four nights in five and I would come in at seven and eat standing up and go to bed at nine, and I did that for two years and never once mentioned it, because there was no word for what I had. It wasn't a grievance. He hadn't done anything. You hadn't done anything. I simply wanted you in the house and you were not in the house."

Kyra had both hands over her mouth.

"Val."

"I am not telling you this to make it even. I am not opening anything at all." Val found her hand and took it down off her face and held it. "I am telling you because you have spent six days believing you are having a feeling that is not permitted under the terms, and I want you to know that I had the same one for two years in 1692 and had no idea it was allowed either."

Kyra cried a bit then, without any noise about it, which was not her usual way of doing it at all.

Val did not say anything and did not soothe it and did not do the thing she used to do, which was to look for the practical part. She lay there with a hand on Kyra's sternum and let it run.

"Two years," Kyra said, eventually.

"About two."

"And you ate standing up."

"I ate standing up in a kitchen in Trieste for two years and read a great deal and once took an entire clock apart and put it back together incorrectly."

"You hate eating standing up."

"I do," said Val. "It is the worst thing about this planet and I have been to a blood court."

And Kyra made a sound that started as crying and did not end as crying, and got an arm round her, and did not let go for some time.

They talked for a long while after that, in the dark, about nothing in any order.

About the Hallorans, who were doing better. About the fence. About whether either of them could remember the name of the woman who had run the boarding house in Lowell — Kyra said Mrs. Pell, Val said it was Pelling and that Kyra had been getting it wrong since 1838, and Kyra said she preferred her version.

About the first winter on the mountain, once, briefly, and what the hut had smelled like.

And somewhere in among all of it Kyra stopped being a woman lying rigidly in a bed and became a woman lying in a bed, and neither of them remarked on that either, because remarking on it would have stopped it.

Val started touching her at some point and could not afterward have said when.

It was not a decision and it did not have a plan in it. It was the flat of her hand up the length of Kyra's back and down again, slow as weather, the way she had been taught by twenty-nine years of being on the other end of it. It was her mouth on the hinge of the jaw and under the ear and at the point of the shoulder, unhurried, going nowhere, with long stops in it.

And at some point she did something with her hand that she had not done before.

Kyra noticed. Of course she noticed.

"That's new."

"It is."

"Where did—" And then Kyra stopped, because she had worked it out inside half a second, and lay very still.

Val had about two seconds to decide and did not use most of them.

"She told me about it," said Val. "In the kitchen, about one in the morning, over a glass of water. It was not a demonstration and it was not about you and I had no intention whatsoever of bringing it into this house, and then I found that I did, and I want you to know before you feel anything about it that I was going to tell you regardless of whether you asked."

The rain kept on.

"Say it again," said Kyra. "The last part."

"I was going to tell you."

"Even if I hadn't noticed."

"Kyra," said Val, "you notice everything. But yes. Even then."

Kyra put her forearm over her eyes and breathed out, long, all the way.

"Do it again."

"Are you—"

"Val." She took her arm off her eyes. "Something came home. That's what I've been unable to get at for six days — the whole of it has felt like a thing that was taken out of this house, and it wasn't, and I could not find the sentence." Her voice was thick. "Something came home. Do it again."

So Val did it again.

It was very slow after that.

Not slow the way their evenings were slow, which was luxury. Slow the way a thing is when it is not certain it is going to happen — with pauses in it, and one or two places where it went backward, and Val stopping entirely twice and simply holding her until she started again.

And somewhere in the middle of that, a long way in, Kyra got there.

It came the way it had never come in four hundred years, which was gradually, and by degrees, and with the whole of her attention on it — and Val, who had spent four centuries being the one that happened to, lay there and understood something about her own life that she would not be able to put into a sentence for another nine years.

She did not do the ordinary thing.

She reached down instead and touched her — once, with one finger, as light as she was able, which was very light indeed. It was not a beginning and it was not asking for anything and both of them knew it inside a second.

And Kyra's whole body went soft at once, and then, after a moment, she curled around Val's finger and held it.

The faintest thing. Barely anything at all. Nothing like what she had done on a Thursday in fifty and nothing like what either of them had learned to do since.

Val did not move a muscle.

She took her hand away after a while and came in close and presented herself in the ordinary way, and did not grip.

That was deliberate and it cost her something, because she had been ready since ten to five and she was running very hot and the whole of her wanted to. She let the two of them touch and did nothing else whatsoever, and lay there, and waited.

It took a while.

And then Kyra gripped her — faintly, the way she had held the finger, hardly any pressure in it at all.

Val answered it with exactly as much as she had been given and not one particle more.

They went on like that for some time, at about a quarter of anything, with the rain going.

Kyra's grip came up by degrees. Not to full and not near it — it got to about half of what it had been on that Thursday in fifty and stayed there, and Val matched it the whole way and never once went first.

They laced gently and did not hurry any part of it and it was not like any other night either of them could remember, and at the end of it Kyra was crying again, and this time there was nothing wrong with it.

Afterward Val got both arms round her and held on the way Kyra had held her in 1950, which she had been waiting twenty-nine years for an occasion to return.

"I am going to say a thing now," said Val, "and I want it understood that I have not arranged it, and that it is therefore going to come out badly."

"Go on, love."

"I will wait for you."

Kyra went very still.

"For as long as this takes," said Val. "Six days or six months or eleven years. I do not care what it looks like on the way and I am not counting any part of it and there is no number anywhere in this, and if it takes a year of evenings where we lie here and talk about a fence then that is what we will do and I will not have lost one single thing."

"You waited for me for four hundred years," Val said. "You never once said it was a cost and I have recently learned that this is because it never was one, and I did not believe you at the time and I do now."

"Val—"

"Let me finish, I am nearly at the end and I will not get back on if you stop me." She had her mouth against Kyra's hair. "So here is what I have. It is not going to be as good as yours. I love you, and I am aware that is a sentence any two people on this planet can say and that it tells you almost nothing, and it is the best available and I am not going to improve on it tonight."

"It's fine."

"It is not fine, it is imprecise—"

"Val." Kyra got a hand up to her face. "It's fine."

"And the waiting is worth everything," said Val. "That is the part I can do properly, so I am going to do it properly. I have had four hundred years of being waited for and I understood exactly none of it until about six o'clock this evening, and now I have had one and a half hours on the other end and I would not trade them for the whole of the rest of my life on this planet."

"One and a half hours."

"It was ninety-four minutes," said Val, "and I am aware of what I have just done and I refuse to apologize for it."

And Kyra laughed — properly, out loud, the first one in six days — and got her arms round her neck and pulled her down.

It rained all night.

Some while later, mostly asleep, Kyra said, "Val."

"Mm."

"It's going to take a bit."

"I know it is."

"Not just tonight. It might be a while."

"Sweetheart," said Val, "I have four hundred years of practice at being the one who takes a bit, and I have been waiting all week to find out whether any of it was transferable."

"And?"

"It is entirely transferable, and I would like you to take as long as you need, and I would like the record to show that I am not counting."

"You're counting."

"I am counting," Val admitted. "But I am not writing it down."

— end of chapter nineteen —

There was still ash in the gutter on the north side of that street in the autumn of 1981, in the places the brush had not reached, going gray-white under the leaves.

The mountain had taken four hundred feet off itself the previous May, and had put a good deal of it down on three states, and the whole of the region had spent a year and a half sweeping. There were people in that city who kept a jar of it on a shelf. Somebody up the block had put some in a bottle with a label on it and a date.

Val went past that bottle on her way to the car every morning for nine years and found it funnier every single time, and never once said why, and the reason was this:

She had been standing on a slope in the Carpathians in the autumn of 1607 when the whole of the sky went brown for nine days, and nobody had ever worked out what that was either, and there had been no bottles.

Kyra said it on a Sunday, folding something by the window with the autumn light coming flat across her, which found the copper the way it always did and had never once found anything in Val but the pale.

"It's started."

"When."

"Friday. I didn't say Friday because you were doing the thing with the taxes."

Val got the notebook off the shelf and turned to the back and wrote a date on the page with nothing beside it, which took eleven seconds, and put it back.

And that was the entire ceremony, and both of them noticed how little it was, and neither of them said anything about that either.

It is worth stopping on, because it was not indifference and it was not healing.

In 1915 a date on that page had been a small astonishment and Val had sat down afterward. In 1959 one had not come and it had been a fortnight before either of them was right. In 1970 one had come and it had been the worst news of the decade and they had sat in a stopped truck with it.

In 1981 Kyra said it folding a sheet, and Val wrote it down, and then they argued about whether the Oldhams were going to sell.

That is what happens to a thing that has been going on for three hundred and seventy-four years. There is no lesson in it. It simply stops being the largest object in the room, and the two of them had been through enough in the preceding two years that a regular event arriving on schedule was close to restful.

What was not restful was Mrs. Oldham.

She had been across and two down since they moved in, and she was seventy-nine, and she had got to the stage of coming out onto her porch when she heard a car door because the day was long.

She had known them fourteen years.

And in September she said the thing, from her porch, perfectly pleasantly, holding a watering can.

"You two don't change, do you."

Val said something about good light and bad eyesight, which was the fourth of the dull answers and had been serviceable since about 1750, and Mrs. Oldham laughed and said something about the dahlias and went in.

And Val stood on her own walk with a bag of groceries and did the arithmetic.

Fourteen years. Not forty. Fourteen, and they had been settled the whole of it, and they lived four doors from a woman who had nothing left to do but look at a street.

She was in the kitchen before she realized she had not put the bag down.

"I know," said Kyra, from the table, without being told.

"You heard it."

"I heard it in June. From Mr. Sorensen, who said it to the back of my head while I was getting the hose off the reel, and I did not tell you because you had the thing with the taxes and then you had the other thing." She got up and took the bag. "And because I wanted to see whether it came round again before I made it a conversation."

"And it has."

"And it has."

They did it at the table, properly, with the notebook out, which they had not done since 1960 and which Val had been quietly hoping not to do again.

The halfway mark was the part that got her.

Twenty years of the Halvorsen paper gone. On the certificates Nora was forty-five and Elsie forty-three, and the thing about forty-five is that it is the last age at which a woman who looks twenty-two is merely remarkable. At fifty-five she is a subject. At sixty-five she is a question, and at seventy-five somebody writes to somebody.

"Thirty years," said Val. "That is what is left in it and it is a hard thirty, and the last ten of them are not going to be livable in one place."

"So we move."

"We move, and I have been through what a move costs since 1967 and nothing in it has got better, and it has in fact got worse by about one office a decade."

"Then we move anyway and we do it badly and we survive it," said Kyra, "because the alternative is sitting on this street until Mrs. Oldham's grandchildren are doing the sums, and I'd rather be a woman who moved than a woman they talked about."

"That is correct."

"Say when."

"Not yet. Four or five years." Val had her hand flat on the page. "Mrs. Oldham is seventy-nine and Mr. Sorensen has a bad chest, and I am extremely sorry to be saying this out loud in a kitchen, and the people who have noticed are going to stop being here, and the ones who replace them will start their fourteen years from nothing."

Kyra sat with that for a moment.

"That's a horrible way to put it."

"It is the actual mechanism," said Val, "and I would rather say it in here than have either of us pretend we are not relying on it."

And then she said the other part, which she had not planned and which arrived in her mouth the way the four words had on a stowage floor.

"I would like to be sorry about it and I am not, and that frightens me a little."

"Val."

"I have watched four hundred years of people and I have been fond of a great many of them, and somewhere in the last century I stopped being able to feel the difference between a person going and a season going, except with about four of them, and you can name all four." Her voice did not move. "Jo was the last one. There has not been one since, and there may not be another, and I do not know whether that is damage or whether it is simply what four hundred years does, and it is not the sort of thing a person can ask anybody."

Kyra came round the table and sat on the edge of it beside her, which was against the house rules and had been since 1894.

"It's not damage," said Kyra.

"You cannot know that."

"I can't know it. I'm telling you anyway, because you've just told me a thing you were frightened of and the alternative is me sitting here being accurate at you." She put her hand on the back of Val's neck. "You've got four. I've got four. They're not the same four and that's a conversation for another night. Four in four hundred years is not a woman who's gone cold, love. It's a woman who's been careful with a small supply."

"That is not an argument."

"No," Kyra agreed. "It's better than one. Go and put the shopping away."

The ash stayed in the gutter until the following spring, and then the city came and took most of it, and the bottle with the label on it was still in that window in 1990.

Mrs. Oldham died in the February of 1986, at eighty-four, which Kyra took harder than she expected to and did not mention for a week.

They did not move for nine more years.

And the notebook went back on the shelf with the thirty-fifth on the page and nothing beside it, where it sat untouched for eleven years, which was the longest that page had gone unopened since 1608 and which neither of them noticed at the time.

— end of chapter twenty —

It had been a good autumn and that was the whole of the trouble, in the sense that nothing was wrong anywhere and nobody had done a single thing that could be called a mistake.

Val had been told, repeatedly, over about nine months, by a woman with no talent for leaving things unsaid: more. Say it at the time. Start something. Do not arrange it. Come into the kitchen at four in the afternoon. Do not wait until nine.

And she had. All of it. She had come off four hundred years of being the most careful person on two planets and she had taken every one of those instructions seriously, because she took everything seriously, and she had been enjoying herself more than she had enjoyed herself since the Vayr.

So when it went wrong it went wrong in the direction nobody had been watching.

They were laced, and Val was above her on one forearm with Kyra's knee up on the outside of her hip, which was how it had been going lately and which both of them liked.

And Val was giving it rather a lot.

Not roughly. There was nothing careless in it and nothing in it that any outside observer would have called wrong — she was simply using more of herself than she used to, with more conviction, and had been for about four minutes, and had got a kind of momentum up.

And somewhere in the third of those minutes it had gone past the top of what Kyra wanted and kept going.

It is worth being exact about this, because the two of them would be exact about it afterward.

It did not hurt. Kyra would have said so if it had, instantly, with no difficulty whatsoever, because that hurts is a sentence any woman alive can produce.

It was that past a certain point more stopped being more. The whole thing was built the other way round — the lightest thing available was the strongest thing available, and had been since the second winter, and above a certain pressure it simply began to go away from her. Not pain. Noise. Too much happening in a place that did not want much happening in it, and the lovely narrow thing she had been going up had widened out and gone dull, and she was now some distance from where she had been four minutes ago and getting further.

So she used the channel, because it was there and because it was what it was for.

She eased off. Deliberately — took her own grip down to about a third of what it had been and held it there, which in four hundred years of that silent back-and-forth had always meant something in the neighborhood of gently.

And Val read it, and answered it, and gave her more.

That was the whole of the problem and neither of them would see it for another twenty minutes.

The grip could say a great many things. It could say I'm here and I've got you and I'm not letting go and about nine other things that neither woman could have written down. What it could not say — what four hundred years had never once required it to say — was less.

Because a woman easing off is ambiguous, and always had been, and nobody had ever had to find out. It can mean gently. It can also mean I am fading, come and get me — and that reading had been the correct one about eleven hundred times out of eleven hundred, and Val had four centuries of evidence behind it and went with the evidence, the way she always did.

She came down and gave her more.

Kyra eased off again, harder, almost to nothing.

And Val, who was certain now, and who had been told for nine months that she was to stop being so careful, and who was in the middle of the most confident year of her entire life, redoubled.

"Val."

Nothing. Val had her face in her hair and was some way down inside it.

"Val."

And here is where Kyra Davan — who had never in four hundred years had the slightest trouble saying anything to anybody, who said nine things a day and meant all of them — lay underneath the woman she loved and discovered that she could not find the word.

It took her perhaps four seconds. It felt considerably longer. Everything she reached for arrived with something on it: stop was too big and would frighten her, no was worse, that's too much had an accusation in it, and anything longer than two words was going to come out as a review.

"Softer," said Kyra.

Val stopped as though she had been unplugged.

Everything. Instantly. Grip, movement, the lot — and she came up off her forearm and got about a foot of air between them, and in the dark Kyra could see nothing of her face at all and did not need to.

"Oh," said Val.

"It's all right—"

"How long?"

"Val."

"How long, Kyra."

"Don't do this," said Kyra.

"I am not doing anything, I am asking a question—"

"You are asking for a number so you can go and be alone with it for a week, and I am not giving you one, and I want you to come back down here before you get any further away."

There was a pause.

Then Val came back down, which cost her something, and lay on her side facing her about six inches off, which was near enough to be in the same conversation and far enough not to be touching her anywhere.

"That is also a position," Kyra observed.

"It is the best I have."

"I know it is, love. It's fine."

They lay there for a bit.

"It did not hurt," said Kyra. "Start with that one, because I can see you building the other version and it's wrong. It did not hurt and if it had I would have said so in about a quarter of a second and you know I would."

"Then what was it?"

"It went past the top." Kyra pushed her hair back off her face with the heel of her hand, and what light there was off the street made almost nothing of it, which was its own kind of information, because that chestnut wanted a flame or a window and had never taken to a street lamp in ninety years of them. "That's the only way I can put it. There's a point where more stops being more. It isn't a wall, you don't hit anything — it just spreads out and goes dull and I start losing where I am. And I'd been losing it for about three minutes."

"Three minutes."

"Approximately three minutes. I don't count, Val, I've told you a hundred times I don't count."

"I was reading you the entire time," said Val.

"I know you were."

"I was reading you and I had you and I was wrong, and I want to understand how that happened, because I do not generally—"

"Because I told you with the grip," said Kyra.

Val went very still.

"I eased off. Twice. I took it right down the second time, to almost nothing, and I thought—" She stopped and started again. "Val, I have been talking to you in that thing since the second winter and it has never once failed, and I went to it the way you'd go to a light switch, and you read it the other way round."

"I read it as you going," Val said slowly.

"Yes."

"You ease off at the end. You always ease off at the end — it is the one reliable thing in the entire—" She stopped. "Oh."

"There it is."

"It cannot say less."

"It cannot say less. Four hundred years and it has never once had to, and the first time it needed to, it said the opposite." Kyra let out a breath. "And you weren't wrong, love. That's the part I want you to have before you go to sleep tonight. You read it correctly. You read it the way it has meant every single time since the second winter. The thing was broken, not you."

Val was quiet for a while.

"Then we will need a second signal," said Val. "Something in it that is unambiguous. Two releases in quick succession, perhaps, or—"

"No."

"It is a straightforward—"

"No, Val." Kyra got up on an elbow. "I know exactly what you're doing and I am going to stop you before it has a diagram. You are about to build a system in your head, and it will be a very good system, and in about nine months I will be lying here with three different grips to remember and you will be checking which one I did."

"That is unfair."

"It is entirely fair and you know it is."

"It is entirely fair," Val agreed, "and I would have done it by Christmas."

"So here's what we do," said Kyra. "If I need less, I'll say it. Out loud. Like a person. One word, in English, in the middle of it, and you will stop, and that will be the whole of the procedure."

"You could not find the word tonight."

"I could not find it for about four seconds. I found it." She was looking straight at her. "And I want to tell you what those four seconds were, because you are going to want to know and I would rather you had it from me. It was not that I couldn't say it to you. It was that everything I reached for had something on it — stop would have frightened you, no was worse, that's too much is a complaint, and anything longer was going to come out as a review of your performance."

"And softer had nothing on it."

"Softer had nothing on it," said Kyra, "so that's the one, and now we both know it, and next time it will take me about a quarter of a second."

Val lay there with her hands where they were and did not speak for a while, and Kyra let her have it, and the house ticked.

"I am going to be careful again," said Val.

"I know you are."

"I do not want to be. I want that on the record. I have had the best nine months of four hundred years and I know precisely what I am about to do, which is go quiet for about a fortnight and give you a great deal less than I have been giving you, and call it consideration."

"Val—"

"And I am telling you in advance, because I have only recently learned that telling somebody in advance is available."

Kyra put a hand flat on her chest.

"Listen to me. I would rather you went too far sometimes and I told you, than you never went anywhere at all."

"That is easy to say."

"It is extremely easy to say and I am going to keep saying it for about a century. Val, I had four hundred years of the careful version. Four hundred. I never once complained and I never once wanted anybody else, and I will not pretend that I have not enjoyed the autumn, because I have enjoyed the autumn enormously and so have you." Her hand had not moved. "You went past the top tonight. That is what happens when somebody is actually trying. The alternative is a woman who never goes near it, and I had her, and she was lovely, and I'd still rather have this one."

"That is the most backhanded thing you have ever said to me."

"It's the truest."

"Right," said Val, eventually. "Say it to me once more. The word."

"Softer."

"And I stop."

"You stop, or you ease, or you do whatever you like as long as it's less. You don't have to come off the bed and go and stand six inches away like a woman at an inquest."

"I will probably still do that."

"I know you will," said Kyra. "We'll work on it."

They did not start again that night, and neither of them suggested it, and that was not a punishment and both of them knew it.

What happened instead was that Val got an arm under her and brought her in and held on to her, hard, with her arms — which was older than the grip, and was the one signal in the entire four centuries that had never once been ambiguous in either direction.

Kyra got hold of her back.

"There you are," said Kyra.

— end of chapter twenty-one —

Nora and Elsie Halvorsen stopped in the spring of 1991 and were not replaced by sisters.

That was the part Val had expected to mind and did not. Three hundred years of the sister story — Maribor, Trieste, a wagon, a mill town, Hawthorne — and by 1991 it had become the thing that drew the question rather than the thing that answered it, because two women living in a house together in that decade were nothing at all and two sisters doing it at fifty were a small puzzle.

So they stopped being related, and took their own first names for the first time since a plateau, and became Val Mercer and Kyra Lund, who had met at work in Portland and had bought a place in the Nehalem valley because it was cheap and because one of them had wanted trees.

It took nine months and a considerable amount of money and it very nearly did not work, and the whole of it fits in this paragraph because that is how much room the end of a century leaves for it.

"That's the last one," Val said, in a car, in the autumn of 1991, with the folder on her knees. "I want that understood. Not the last one we will need. The last one that can be done this way."

They had been in the valley four and a half years when the river came up.

It had rained for a fortnight, and then it had snowed, and then it had turned warm and rained on the snow, which is the particular arrangement that country has for drowning itself, and on the seventh of February the Nehalem came out of its banks and went down the main street.

Kyra had known on the fourth.

She had not known the way a person knows a forecast. She had come in from the yard on the Sunday afternoon with her coat half off and said, "It's going to go," and Val had looked at her and asked how long and Kyra had said Wednesday or Thursday, and it was Wednesday.

By ten in the morning there were four feet of water in the lower town and a current in it that nobody had expected.

Kyra was out of the house at a quarter past seven and Val did not see her again until dark.

What she did that day is partly a matter of record, because a small town keeps one. She was at the Rose Avenue end at eight helping get two families up out of a single-storey house. She was on a boat at ten with a man called Delaney who had no idea what he was doing and did what she told him for six hours. She went in on foot three times, in water that was moving, because a boat could not get up between two buildings where a boat was needed.

And at about four in the afternoon, with the light going, she went in after a man who had gone off the back of a flatbed into the current at the bend by the mill lot, and came out of it two hundred feet downstream with him, on the far side, which three separate people watched her do and none of them ever satisfactorily explained.

She was not hurt. That is worth stating flatly because the alternative is a reader spending the chapter waiting for it. She took a bad knock on the hip against something under the surface and had a cut on her forearm that closed in four days instead of twelve, and that was all of the damage.

The man lived. His name was Reyes and he was fifty-one and he worked for the county, and he spent the rest of his life telling people about it and getting it slightly wrong every time, which Val considered the single most useful thing he ever did.

She came in at eight with her hair flat to her head and no color in it at all — that was the thing Val saw first, before the hip or the forearm, that the river had taken the copper out of it as completely as if it had never been there — and the whole of her gray with the cold, and she stood in the kitchen doorway dripping on the floor they had put in the year before, and Val took one look at her and did not say any of the four things she had prepared between two and eight.

She said, "Sit down."

"I'll wreck the—"

"Sit down, Kyra."

And she got her out of the wet things and into dry ones, and got food into her, and did not ask her one question about any part of it for three hours.

It came up at about half past ten, with the two of them on the floor against the sofa because neither had the energy to get up onto it.

"You're going to say the thing," said Kyra.

"I am."

"Say it, then, and let's have it over."

"Three people watched you cross a current that a boat could not hold station in," Val said, "carrying a man of fifty-one, in February, and come out of it on the far side, and the only reason there is not a photograph is that the fellow with the camera was a hundred yards up at the school."

"I know."

"Do you want to know what that is in my head? It is a notary's minute in Trieste. It is a line in a register that says two women, one of whom shone. That line is two hundred and ninety years old and it is still out there in a box somewhere and we have never once been able to do anything about it."

Kyra did not argue.

That was the thing that frightened Val more than the water had. Kyra Davan not arguing was a weather event.

"You're right," said Kyra. "All of it. You're not even slightly wrong and I'm not going to pretend you are."

"Then—"

"And I'd do every part of it again tomorrow, and the day after, and I want you to hear those two things in that order and not swap them round."

Val sat with that for a while.

"Tell me why," said Val. "Not the reason. I know the reason. Everybody in that town would give you the reason and it is a perfectly good one and it is not what I am asking for."

"Then what are you asking for?"

"I am asking what it is for, in you, and I have been asking it in my head since about two o'clock this afternoon, and I would rather have your answer than the one I have built."

Kyra looked at the floor for a long moment.

"Nobody has ever needed me," said Kyra.

Val did not say anything.

"That's not self-pity and don't you dare take it as any. I have been wanted a great deal. I've been loved properly by about four people and I've got one of them sitting on this floor." Kyra had her head back against the sofa. "Needed is different. Needed is a man on a flatbed at four in the afternoon who is going to be dead in ninety seconds unless somebody who can read that water gets into it."

"Four hundred years."

"Four hundred years, and we have spent every one of them being careful, and careful means useless. That's not a complaint. It's the arrangement and I made it with you and I'd make it again." She turned her head. "But I have been able to read moving water since I was nine years old and nobody has ever once had a use for it, and today about forty people did, and I am not going to be able to give that back now I have had it."

The house did what houses do. Something out in the dark went past with a siren on it and did not stop.

"I know," said Val.

"You don't have to—"

"I know, because I have had it too." She had her hands round her knees. "Nineteen fifty-one. Two rooms above a tire place and a man who paid me nine dollars a day to look at other men's figures, and I came home that spring more pleased with myself than I had been in two hundred years, and I never told you why and you never asked and you knew anyway."

"I knew."

"It is the same thing. A woman with a thing she is good at, and somebody who wants it." Val did not raise it at all. "And I am not going to ask you to stop. I want that said out loud tonight rather than drifted into, because I have spent six hours building the version where I ask you to stop, and it is a very good version, and I threw it away on the kitchen floor at about half past eight."

"Why?"

"Because in 1950 you had both hands on my face and would not let me take a blade to myself to be easier to live with," said Val, "and I have been waiting forty-six years for a way to say thank you for that, and this is it, and it is not a good one and it is what I have got."

Kyra put her hand over her face.

"That's not fair."

"It is entirely fair. I learned it off you."

So they set the terms instead, on a floor, in wet weather, which is how most of the serious things in that house got decided.

She would go. She would go every time and Val would not be asked to approve it.

She would take the training they were offering through the fire hall, and she would take it badly and argue with the man teaching it, and she would carry a card in her wallet saying she was allowed to be where she was going to be anyway — which Val pointed out was the first time in four hundred years either of them had voluntarily got themselves onto a list, and Kyra said yes, it is, and I'd like you to think about why that doesn't frighten me.

And the one rule, which Val asked for and got: when somebody watches her do a thing a woman cannot do, she tells her. That night. Not the version where it was nothing.

"Fine," said Kyra. "Done. Anything else?"

"One thing and it is not a term."

"Go on."

"You are going to be the woman who goes in," Val said. "In a town of two thousand people, for however many years we have left in this valley. That is a thing a person becomes and it does not come off, and in eleven years there will be another one of these and they will not even telephone you, they will simply assume."

"I know."

"I am telling you because I want you to have chosen it with the whole of it in front of you, and because if you are going to be visible for the first time since Trieste then I would rather it was for this than for anything else that has ever nearly happened to us."

Kyra was quiet for a bit.

"Say that last part again."

"Which part."

"The part where you'd rather it was this."

"I would rather it was this," said Val, "than a notary, or a judge, or a man with a list, or a bad week in 1705. If one of us has to be looked at, I would like it to be you, doing the only thing on this planet you have ever been better at than anybody, in front of people who are glad about it."

And Kyra laughed, once, wetly, and said, "God, you're strange," and put her head on Val's shoulder, and they stayed on the floor until the fire went down.

The water went out of the town over the following week and took a good deal with it.

Val did the books for the recovery committee because somebody had to, and found four separate errors in a county reimbursement schedule and was thanked for it by a woman who had no idea what she had been handed.

Kyra got her card in the April.

And eleven years later, in the December, it would happen again, and nobody would telephone her, and she would already be putting her boots on.

— end of chapter twenty-two —

Neither of them marked the four hundredth year, and it was not an oversight.

Val had known it was coming since about 1998 and had decided somewhere in there that she was not going to do anything about it, which for that woman was a considerable act of restraint and which she never once mentioned.

There is nothing to do with a number like that. It is not an anniversary of anything good. Seventeen people went into the ground on a slope in the Carpathians in the spring of 1607 and two did not, and the two have been here ever since, and a round figure does not improve it.

So the spring went past, and the summer, and in the first week of December the wind came.

It blew for the best part of two days and took the power out and a good deal of the forest with it, and then it turned warm and rained on a saturated hillside, and the Nehalem did what it had done in 1996 and did it worse.

Nobody telephoned Kyra.

That was the arrangement by then and had been for some years. She was on the roster, she had been on it since 1996, and when the water came up she put her boots on and went, and the only person who required any notification was the woman standing in the kitchen with her arms folded.

"Take the orange one," said Val. "The other one leaks at the shoulder and you know it does."

"The other one is lucky."

"The other one is wet."

It went on for three days.

Kyra was in it for the whole of the first two and most of the third. Val was at the high school with a clipboard and a card table, which she had not volunteered for and which she had been handed inside forty minutes by a woman who had watched her reconcile two lists and had drawn the obvious conclusion.

So that is where the two of them were for the four hundredth winter: a woman in moving water on the lower end of Bridge Street, and a woman in a gymnasium four hundred yards uphill, making sure that every person who had come through the door was on one list only.

It was, Val thought at various points over those three days, the most useful either of them had ever been in the same week on either world.

She said so, in the car, on the Saturday, which was a mistake and a good one.

"I have been thinking about something and I am going to say it badly."

"When have you ever—"

"Kyra." Val had both hands on the wheel. "I have been in that gymnasium for three days and I have been happier than I have been in about nine years, and I did not expect that and I have not got a tidy way to put it."

"Then don't put it tidily."

"I like being used," said Val. "That is the whole of it and it is not a dignified sentence and I have no better one."

Kyra looked out at the water going past the road.

"Took you four hundred years to get there," said Kyra. "I got there in ninety-six."

"You have always been nine steps ahead of me on this and about four behind me on everything else."

"That's about the ratio, love, yes."

The piece came out in the second week of January.

It was not an investigation. Nobody in that valley investigated anything about anybody; it was a small town that had been flooded twice in a decade and a woman at the paper had put together a page about what people had done, and it was kind all the way through, and that is exactly why it did what it did.

There were eleven photographs on the page.

Two of them were of Kyra.

One was from the December just gone — on the tailgate of somebody's truck at the top of Bridge Street with her hair in a wet rope over one shoulder and a blanket round a girl of about seven, taken on a telephone by a man standing in his own yard.

The other one was from February 1996.

The woman at the paper had gone and found it. That was the whole of the crime. She had gone down into a box in the back office and found the 1996 coverage and pulled a photograph that had run on an inside page in 1996, and she had put them beside each other, and under them she had written: The same volunteer, two floods apart.

Val read it standing up at the kitchen counter at ten past seven in the morning and did not sit down for nine minutes.

It was a nice piece. She wants that understood and so does this chapter. The woman who wrote it had meant a compliment and had delivered one, and four hundred people in that valley read it and thought good, and not one of them thought anything else, and not one of them was ever going to.

And the two photographs were eleven years apart and they were the same woman.

Not similar. Not well-preserved. The same, down to the jaw and the hairline and the particular dark of it with the copper up at the ear where the light got in, and the only difference on that page was the quality of the printing.

Kyra came down at half past seven and read it over her shoulder and said, "Oh, that's lovely of her."

"It is."

"Marcia. She lost her garage in it. She was at the school on the—" Kyra stopped.

Val did not say anything at all. She had decided on the ninth minute that she was not going to say anything, and was going to let the woman get there on her own, and was going to stand at a counter and be quiet about it, which was the single hardest thing she did that year.

It took about four seconds.

"Ah," said Kyra.

They did not discuss it that morning. Kyra went to work and Val did not, and when she came back at six the paper was still on the counter where it had been and neither of them had moved it.

"Say the arithmetic," Kyra said.

"You do not want the arithmetic."

"I want the arithmetic. I have wanted it since twenty past seven and I have been doing freight schedules all day with it sitting in the back of my head, and I would like it out loud from the person who does it properly."

So Val gave it to her, the way she had given it on a treeline above Dymná in 1644, which neither of them said out loud and both of them were thinking about.

"That page is in a box in the back office of that paper and it will be there in thirty years," said Val. "It is also on their website, which means it is in about nine other places already and will be in a hundred by the spring, and there is no box to go and look in for those and no fire that gets them."

"I know."

"Nobody has suspected anything. I want to be exact, because this is not 1705 and I am not about to let it dress up as 1705. There is no accusation and there is not going to be one and that woman will go to her grave pleased with that page." Val had her hand flat on it. "And the next time there is a flood, because there is always another flood, and somebody will go down into the box again, and there will be three photographs."

"Three."

"Three, and a line under them, and the line will not say the same volunteer. It will say something that ends in a question mark."

Kyra sat down at the table.

"How long have we got?"

"Five years. Six at the outside, and I would not take six." Val sat down opposite. "And that is the photographs. The paper is worse, and I have not mentioned the paper because I did not want to put two things on you in one evening, and I am going to mention it now because you have asked for the arithmetic and you get all of it."

"Go on."

"Val Mercer is fifty-two." She let that sit for a second. "And in 1991 I said that was the last one that could be done the way we have always done it, and I have spent sixteen years watching the country prove me right every single year, and I do not have a next one. I want that said plainly. There is no folder. I have nothing."

The house was quiet for a while.

"Then we'll find one," said Kyra.

"That is not—"

"Val, I have watched you find a dozen of them on two planets and I am not going to sit here and be told that the twelfth is impossible by a woman who has got five years to do it in." She reached across the table. "You've never once had a next one in advance. Not in Trieste, not on the wagon, not in fifty-seven. You get there and then you find it. It's the only unreliable thing about you and it has worked every single time."

"That is not an argument either."

"Nothing I say to you is ever an argument. You've got four hundred years of arguments and what you need is somebody telling you to get on with it."

And then they got to the part that mattered, which neither of them had gone near for two hours.

"I'll have to stop," said Kyra.

"Yes."

"Not the water. The town. I'll have to stop being the woman who goes in here, in this valley, where there are two photographs and a box in a back office." Her voice was level. "And I told you in ninety-six that I wasn't going to be able to give it back, and I meant it, and it turns out I'm going to have to."

"You are going to have to give back these people," said Val.

"Same thing."

"It is not the same thing and I want you to sit with the difference for a minute before you decide it is, because the difference is the whole of what we do next."

Kyra sat with it.

"There are other rivers," said Kyra, eventually.

"There are a great many other rivers, and most of them are within forty miles of this kitchen, and every one of them runs through a town with a hall and a roster and nobody in it who has ever seen your face." Val turned her hand over. "You do not lose the thing. You lose Marcia, and the man at the hall, and the Reyes family, and the girl in the blanket, who is seventeen now and works at the market and says hello to you by name."

"That's worse."

"It is enormously worse," Val agreed, "and it is the arrangement, and we have made it fourteen times, and I have never once got used to watching you do it."

They sat there until it got properly dark and neither of them put a light on.

"Five years," said Kyra.

"Five."

"So I get five more."

"You get five more, and you go every time, and I am not about to raise it again." Val said it without any weight at all. "I raised it once, tonight, because you asked me for the arithmetic. That is the only time it is going to be raised in this house."

And Kyra got up and came round the table and put both arms round her from behind and her face down into the pale of her hair, and stayed there for a long time, and did not say anything, because there was a thing being said that did not need any.

She went out nine more times in the five years that followed.

Twice for water, four times for the mountain road, once for a man in a barn, and the rest for things that turned out to be nothing and that she went to anyway.

And in the autumn of 2014 they loaded a truck and went eleven miles up the road to a town of about nine hundred people with a mill that had closed before it had a stoplight, and nobody in it had ever heard of either of them, and the fire hall took her on in the first fortnight.

— end of chapter twenty-three —

Val had been working on it for five years and the answer, when it came, was not a method at all. It was a hole.

Here is the hole, and she found it in the third year, and she spent the fourth and the fifth confirming that it was real, because a thing that good is usually a mistake.

A country that writes everything down has to decide what to do about the people it did not write down. There are men and women in this nation who were born at home in 1940 in a county that lost its courthouse, and who have worked and paid and voted and buried spouses, and who have, on paper, almost nothing. The system knows they exist. It has to. So it keeps a door for them, and the door is narrow and it is watched and it is extremely slow, and it is still there.

And the door does not ask where you came from. It asks who says you are who you say you are, and for how long, and it wants it from people with records of their own.

So it was not forgery and it was not theft and it was nothing either of them had ever done before.

It was two women with twenty-three years of tax returns, a mortgage, a vehicle, a volunteer card from a fire hall, a letter from a woman at a county office, a dentist, and a bank that had known them since 1991, going in through the narrow door and coming out of it with a different name on the far side.

It took nineteen months. It cost a great deal. There was a hearing in a room with four people in it and Val answered every question truthfully except one, and the one was not asked.

"Sorin," said Kyra, in the car, on the day the first of it came through.

"Sorin."

"You're going to have to say more than that."

Val sat with both hands on the wheel in a parking lot in Hillsboro and did not start the engine for about four minutes.

"I was going to put down something plain," said Val. "I had a list. I had nine of them and they were all perfectly good and I had been looking at it for a fortnight, and then the woman turned the form round and put the pen on it and I wrote Sorin."

"Did you mean to?"

"No."

"And then?"

"And then I looked at it for about nine seconds and did not cross it out," said Val, "which is the part I would like on the record, because the writing of it was an accident and the leaving of it was not."

Kyra was quiet for a moment.

"Give me the reason."

"There are two and the first one is the respectable one, so you may have it first. In four hundred years the danger has always been a name that connects to something — a parish, a register, a woman in Trieste, a card in Baltimore. Sorin connects to nothing. There is no Sorin anywhere on this planet and there never has been, and it is the only name either of us could possibly carry that cannot be traced, because the thing it traces to is in another galaxy and has never heard of this country."

"That's the respectable one," said Kyra.

"That is the respectable one, and it is true, and I checked it four separate ways."

"And the other one."

Val looked out of the windshield at a parking lot in Washington County.

"I am four hundred and eighty-four years old," said Val, "and I have been on this planet for four hundred and seven of them, and I have been Valeria and Anna and Nora and Val Mercer and about nine other things, and in a few years I am going to be dead to the rest of this world in whatever way we manage it, and I would like to be buried under my own name."

Kyra did not say anything at all.

"It is not sentiment. I have been through it as a question of exposure and the answer comes out the same way, and if it had not I would have written down something plain and been quite content." Val's voice did not move. "But it did come out the same way. And I find I am extremely glad about that, and I have been glad about it for nineteen months, and I did not tell you because I was not certain it would come through."

And Kyra Davan, who had got her own form two weeks later and had not needed nine seconds or a fortnight or a list, put her hand flat on the back of Val's neck in a parking lot in Hillsboro.

"Davan," said Kyra.

"I know."

"I wrote it before she'd finished turning the paper round."

"I know you did," said Val. "I have known what you were going to write since about 1991."

They came up into Calderveil on a Saturday in the first week of October with a truck and a trailer and everything they had, which was less than people assumed.

It is a town of about nine hundred, in a fold of the Coast Range with a creek through it, with a mill that closed before the place had a stoplight and a county that has been meaning to do something about the mill for longer than most people in the county have been alive.

There is a diner out on Route 9. There is a fire hall with a radio in it. There is a sign where the Salt Fork trail splits that somebody shot full of holes a long time ago, and nobody has replaced it, and nobody is going to.

Nobody in it had ever heard of either of them.

The thirty-eighth came in the second week.

Kyra said it on the stairs, with a box in her arms, in the middle of saying something else entirely, and Val went and found the notebook in a crate marked KITCHEN and wrote the date on the page with nothing beside it, standing up, in a house with no curtains in it.

"That's a good one," said Kyra, from the landing.

"It is an ordinary one."

"It's a good one, Val. First fortnight in a new town and the thing turns up on schedule like a dog that's found the house." She went on up. "Eleven years to the next."

"Eleven years to the next," said Val, and put the notebook on a shelf that had nothing else on it.

The fire hall took Kyra on in the first fortnight, which she had predicted and Val had not.

The man who ran it was called Bell and he looked at her card and at the twenty-three years of dates on the back of it and asked her one question, which was what she had done in oh-seven, and she told him, and he said, "Tuesday nights," and that was the interview.

Val got the library, two days a week to start, because the woman who had been doing it was eighty and tired and because Val reorganized the whole of the local-history shelf in an afternoon without being asked and then apologized for it.

And on the ninth evening, in a house with a box still in every room, they went up early.

There was no plan in it. That had stopped being remarkable somewhere around 1899 and had stopped being unusual somewhere around 1979, and by 2014 the arranging-at-four-in-the-afternoon was a thing Val did perhaps four times a year, for the pleasure of it, the way a person takes the long way home.

The room was dark because there were no curtains and the nearest light was a yard lamp two properties over, and there was a mattress on a floor and nothing else in the room at all.

Afterward Val lay there with the whole of the house quiet around her and did not say anything for a long time.

"Go on, then," said Kyra.

"I have not got anything prepared."

"I know you haven't. You've been lying there not having anything prepared for about eleven minutes, and I have been listening to you do it, and it's the best sound in the world and I'd like the rest of it now."

So Val Sorin, four hundred and eighty-four years old, in a dark room in a town of nine hundred people, said it.

Not arranged. Not in order. Not well.

She said that she had been frightened for sixty-six years about the paper and that it was over and she did not know what to do with herself. She said that she had spent nine minutes trying to find the right way in and had given up, and that giving up had taken her four centuries to learn. She said that she had done a sum in 1968 she wished she had never done, and that she had done it again that morning in a new kitchen and got the same answer, and that she was going to go on getting it and was not going to carry it alone anymore.

She said that there was nothing left in her that she was keeping back. She said it in those words, flatly, because they were the true ones and she had stopped looking for better ones about a decade earlier.

And she said how lucky she was, which cost her more than any of it, because she had never in four hundred and eighty-four years attributed one single thing to luck and did not believe in it and had a sum for everything.

Kyra let her get all the way to the end of it.

Then she said: "There you are."

"Do not make it a speech."

"I'm not going to make it a speech. I've been waiting four hundred years and I'm going to say five words and then we're going to go to sleep." She had her hand in the back of Val's hair. "You're the whole of my life, Val."

"That is six."

"Then shut up and let me have the extra one."

And underneath, the whole of it, the other conversation had been going on and neither of them had remarked on it, because they had not remarked on it since Maribor and were not going to start in a town of nine hundred people.

It was not saying anything that could be written down. It never had been.

It had the size of a thing in it, and the age of it, and whether it was moving, and all three of those had been running steady for some while and had not stopped when the talking did.

Val answered it, and was answered, and that was the end of the evening.

There is one thing left over and it belongs here.

In the November they drove out past the edge of town and up the logging spur and walked the last mile and a half, and stood on the shelf of basalt above Hallam Lake in the rain, which they had done in every decade since 1851 and which they would go on doing.

It is an hour from Calderveil. That was the whole of the reason they had looked at the town at all, and neither of them had said so to the other during five years of looking, and both of them had known.

Kyra stood at the edge of it with her hood down because she never used a hood, and the rain in the dark of her hair, and the copper in it where the light got in off the water.

"How much further," said Kyra.

It was eleven feet. She was asking nothing. It was the oldest joke in the catalogue and it had been running since a road out of Maribor in 1620.

"Not far now," said Val.

It was a lie, the way it had been a lie for three hundred and ninety-four years.

Val Sorin stood on a rock above a lake in Oregon with four hundred and seven years of this planet behind her and one ship on one mountain on the wrong side of the world and no distance to the right star, and said four words that had never once been true, and meant them exactly as much as she had meant them on a wagon and on a deck and in a room over a saddler's.

And eleven years and a little over from that afternoon, in a diner on Route 9, a waitress called Dee would put down two coffees that nobody had ordered, and the thing that had been coming for four hundred and nineteen years would begin.

But that is the next book.

This one ends with two women on a wet rock an hour out of a town that does not know them, with the light going, and nobody waiting for them anywhere, and nowhere either of them would rather be.

— end of chapter twenty-four —
— end of The Grip —