The Grip

By November the water has been gone five months and the city has mostly stopped talking about it, which is the part Val finds remarkable and does 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, eighteen thousand people in it on a Sunday afternoon — and the fill let go at four and the water came across in under an hour, and by November there is a flat place with willows coming up in it and a few slabs where things had stood. She has seen towns go, a great many of them, in four hundred years, by fire and by plague and by people simply walking away over a generation. She has never seen one go in an hour, and she has never seen one go while she was standing in it. The relief office is in a hall on the east side with a counter at one end and a stove at the other and about sixty people in it most of the day. Kyra has been going three afternoons a week since June, which started as carrying boxes and has turned into whatever the woman running it needs, which by November is mostly talking to people in a line — and she is extremely good at that, and the thing she is good at is not comfort: it is that she asks people questions they can answer. Val comes on Thursdays and does the books, because somebody has to and because the alternative is sitting in a house. The man comes in at about two. He is perhaps fifty-five and has a hat in his hands and has been in that line twice before, and he is trying to prove that he lived in a place that no longer exists. It is not an unusual difficulty that autumn: people went out of their apartments in the clothes they had on, and the rent books and the letters and the discharge papers and the insurance and the photograph of a wife with a date on the back were all in a drawer in a building on the floodplain, and the drawer went to the Columbia in an hour. The office can do a great deal for a man, and most of what it can do begins with knowing who he is. I had it all, he says. I had every bit of it. I know you did, says Kyra. I'm not asking anybody to take my word. You can ask. People do. I had a book, says 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, in the middle of a run of figures, has stopped. Kyra gets him sorted in the end, after a fashion, which takes most of an hour and involves a foreman at the yard and a man who had lived on the same stair and a form that goes somewhere else. She does it by asking who else was on his floor, and then who was on the floor below, and then where he got his hair cut, and by the end of it there are four living people in that city who will sign a piece of paper saying that the man is the man. Four people. That is what it takes. Val finishes her figures and rules off the page and sits looking at the ruled line for a while. They walk home because the streetcar is not worth it and because it has stopped raining for an hour, and the cold has put the color up in the whole of Kyra's face the way it does and never has in Val's. You went quiet, Kyra says, 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. Her hands are in her coat. Ask me. I'm asking. Four people. 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. 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, there would not have been four. There would not have been one. They go another block without saying anything. Jo, says 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. Her voice is entirely level, which is how Kyra knows. 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. She looks 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 takes her arm, which on that street at that hour is two women walking home in the cold and is nothing whatsoever, and which they have been doing in public since 1917. Then we put it somewhere else. 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. Her grip does 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, says Val, and mine had eleven steps in it. They do it on the Saturday and it takes an hour and ten minutes and costs four dollars a year. Into the box go fourteen documents, two certificates, a copied deed with an alias on it older than anybody in that bank, a notebook recopied four times in the same hand, and eleven sheets of something that is not paper and was not made on this planet. What does not go into the box is the one thing Val wants in it, which is a person. She does not say that on the Saturday. She says it in January, in the dark, in the middle of a conversation about something else, in about nine words — which is how everything gets said in that house that winter, because they both came out of the autumn with less surface than they went into it with. A box only proves a thing to somebody who will read it. Mm, says 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. She turns 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. And Val lies in the dark and does the arithmetic she has 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 took forty and was 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 ever worked is that she went into the ground at forty with the whole of it unexamined. So the thing she wants is a person who will know them for forty years and never once look. And the thing she has is a box in a bank and a woman beside her and a street full of people who have had six years of them and will get perhaps fifteen more before somebody starts doing arithmetic at a mailbox. She goes to sleep without solving it, which she learned to do about a hundred years ago and still dislikes. It stays where she left it for nine years — until October 1957, when a firm on the east side will announce a retirement plan and hand everybody a form with four questions on it, the fourth of which is a date of birth, and Val Sorin will understand inside eleven seconds that the thought she put down on a Portland street in November 1948 had not been about a flood at all. But that is nine years off, and in the meantime there is a winter. The hall on the east side closes in March when the money runs out, and the woman who ran it goes to work for the county and sends Kyra a card at Christmas for nine years. The flat place out on the floodplain stays flat. Somebody puts up a sign about a future industrial park and somebody else shoots it. And on an ordinary evening at the end of that February, with the rain going and nothing at all happening anywhere, Kyra comes in from the kitchen and stands in the doorway with a cloth in her hand and looks at Val for slightly longer than the errand requires. What, says Val. Nothing. You are standing in a doorway. I'm allowed to stand in a doorway. It's my doorway. I pay for half of it. And she goes back into the kitchen, and the rain goes on, and that is the whole of the evening — and in a year and a half Val will do a sum about those two minutes and the thing will come apart in her hands.

Val decides about it at four in the afternoon, over a seed catalogue she is not reading, and then spends five hours being entirely normal — she is good at that and has been for a very long time; she washes the two plates and puts the pan out on the step and says something about the Kesslers' fence that she has no opinion about whatsoever, and at no point does her face do anything at all. Kyra knows by about half past six. She knows because Val goes still in a particular way — not stiff, not tense, simply still, the way a needle goes still — and because she has been reading that woman across a room since before anybody put a road through this part of the country. She does not say anything. She never says anything. She gets up and puts the kettle on for no reason and stands there smiling into the dark of the window like an idiot. Upstairs, later, nobody goes near the switch by the door, because nobody ever does; what light there is comes in off the street through the gap where the blind has never fit and lies in a long stripe across the floor and up the side of the bed, and in four years neither of them has thought about it enough to move the bed. They take their time, because there is no reason on this planet to hurry and has not been for four hundred years. And then they arrive, as they always do, at the part where they wait. Kyra's body has always been quick about it — quick on a mountain and quick now, ready almost before she has decided to be, and she wears herself trimmed close and always has, and there is nothing in her way. Val is not quick. She has never once put a blade to her own hair in four hundred years and never will, and it is thick and dark and does not part for anything, and what comes easily to Kyra has to work its way through all of that and take whatever time it takes. It was so on a mountain and in Maribor and in a room over a saddler's in November, and Kyra has 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 begins to cry. She makes no noise about it; she would not have known how. Kyra feels it before she hears it — the breath going short and wrong against her collarbone, and then the wet — and she does not say what is it and does not sit up and does not let go. She gets one hand round the back of Val's head and the other arm the whole way across her and holds on and lets it come. All right. All right. I've got you. You're all right. It goes on for some time. I've got you. Nothing's happening. Nobody's anywhere. Take as long as you like. It stops eventually, the way it does, in stages, with a great deal of breathing in between. Val does not move her face. Kyra does not make her. I burned the notes, Val says, 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 does not stop moving on the back of her head. Say the rest. There is a count 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 is wrecked and completely precise, which is the worst combination she has. And I know the number. Kyra's hand stops. You know the number. I know the number, Val says. She gets herself up onto an elbow then, which takes some doing, and her face is a ruin and she does not appear to care, which in that woman is 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. Her eyes are 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. Her mouth goes. If it had one it would be she waited again. Kyra sits up properly. And every entry in it 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. A truck goes down the far end of the street in second gear and somebody shouts at a dog. Say the rest, Kyra says. 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. And Val is quiet for a moment, and then: I am a timing person. 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. 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 takes her by both wrists. Right. 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 has hold of her and is 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 does 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. Her thumbs move on the insides of her wrists. It is the best part of the night and you have been putting it on a bill. Val puts her forehead down on Kyra's shoulder and stays there. I could take it back, she says, after a while. No. I do it in August anyway. It takes twenty minutes, I know exactly how, and it would solve — No, Val. And Kyra gets her by the jaw and lifts her head up, not gently. In August you do it so I can see the mark. 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. She is fierce about it in a way she is 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. She does 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. Say you won't. I won't. Say the whole of it. I will not take a blade to myself on account of a figure I am going to stop keeping. Better. They lie back down after a while, because there is nowhere else to be and nothing else to do, and Kyra pulls the quilt up over the both of them with one arm. Nobody's ahead. 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, says Kyra — and Val, who had not seen that coming and has no defense prepared for it, shuts her eyes. Then: Can I tell you something from a very long time ago. Yes. You're not going to like the beginning of it. I have had a considerable evening already. Tell me. Kyra gets herself settled — flat on her back with Val's head on her shoulder, which is the arrangement for anything that is going to take a while. The evening of the fruit. Val goes still. That morning I'd called you a coward in front of eleven people, 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 has 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. Let me do this. You were at the other end with your back to me, 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. She lets that sit. And then you turned round. Val does 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. 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, given that I had spent the morning telling a yard full of people you were a coward. Val makes a noise into her shoulder that is not quite a laugh. I keep mine short. 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. Her fingers move 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 changes. You've told me that story. 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. I've just never said it out loud until about ninety seconds ago. Val lies there. Then I have one, 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. Her eyes are 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. 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. And then she gives it. Two weeks before the fruit, at the outside. 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. 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 is 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, 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 puts both arms round her. Three times. Three. Four. I stopped counting, which as you are aware is not a thing I do. Her voice has 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, 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 are quiet for a while after that. The strange part, Kyra says 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 turns 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, says 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 is 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 says. So when I look at you, 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. And Kyra takes her time. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen with my eyes, 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. Isn't it awful. The light has been up for some while — at the wrists and along the inside of her forearms and under the jaw below the ear, come up somewhere in the middle of all that, and neither of them has said a word about it, because they have not said a word about it since about sixteen fifty and are not going to start. It is enough to see by; it always is. What it falls on now is the two of them under a quilt in a house on a street where nobody knows their names, and the dark chestnut of Kyra's hair goes nearly black in it except above the one ear where the copper comes up regardless of what light you give it. Kyra is looking at her. What, says Val. Nothing. You are doing the face. I'm not doing any face. She is absolutely doing the face. Val. What. You're ready. Val goes still. When — I don't know. Somewhere around the page is a bill. 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, with a sample of one, and I want it noted that I am objecting. Objection noted, Kyra says, and moves. She comes in close and unhurried, the way she has been doing it since a hut on a mountain, and puts her mouth against Val's and stays there a while before anything else happens at all, because that is how it goes and has always gone and neither of them has ever wanted it faster. And then they lace, and the light is up, and there is nothing on earth to hurry for, and nobody counts anything. It had been meant to be an ordinary evening. Some while later, in the dark, Kyra says, Two minutes, and Val says, Ninety seconds at the outside, and Kyra laughs so hard the bed moves.

The arrangement is twelve years old by then and neither of them has ever said it out loud, because saying it out loud would make it a policy instead of a habit. The number is Anna Anderson's: there is one of it, it was got at a post office on Union Avenue in 1936, and it is not going to be got again. The name on a time card is whatever the time card wants — Ann on one, A. Anderson on another, Nan at a cannery office during the war because a foreman decided that was her name on the first morning and Val did not correct him for four years. Nobody has ever noticed, and there is 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 is the arrangement. It has worked for twelve years and will go on working for six more, and the thing Val does not say out loud about it is that it has never once been tested. Rutledge and Hoyt do bridges, culverts and drainage out of two rooms above a tire place, and in April 1951 they need somebody to check other men's figures. Val gets an interview because she writes a letter four sentences long containing a correction to an error in their own advertisement. Mr. Hoyt thinks this is funny. Mr. Rutledge, who is older and has less to prove, thinks it is promising, and gives her eleven columns off a job out past Gresham and leaves her alone with them for an hour, and when he comes back she has found three mistakes and the one that is not a mistake but is going to become one in about four years when the fill settles. Where'd you learn that? My father, says Val, which is true, and which nobody on this planet is ever going to be able to check. It is the girl in the front office who nearly does for them, and she is about nineteen and she is only being thorough. She has a card with four lines on it. Name. Number. Previous. References. Val gives 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 writes it. And a reference? Somebody from the cannery would be best. And there it is, in two rooms above a tire place, on an ordinary Tuesday in April, asked by a nineteen-year-old with a pencil. Val has names. She always has names. She has a foreman called Lars Haugen who ran that office for nineteen years and thought extremely well of her, and she gives his, with the spelling, and the street the cannery had been on. She does not say the rest of it, which is that Haugen died in the winter of 1947, and that she knows this because she read it in a line of agate type on a Thursday, and that the cannery has changed hands twice since and there is nobody in that building who was in it in 1945. What she says is: He may be difficult to reach. Oh, nobody ever answers those, says the girl. I just have to write one down. She writes it down. Val watches the pencil do it and watches the card go into the drawer, and she starts on the Monday at a dollar ten an hour. And walking down the stairs past the tire place she understands, with complete clarity and no satisfaction whatsoever, that she has just been saved by a girl who could not be bothered. She does not tell Kyra that evening, which is not concealment and is not arranging either: it is that Kyra comes in at six with her own news, which is that she has 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 is about to send over the coast range on the Thursday will be sitting in a ditch outside Elsie by four in the afternoon. And was it? It was not, 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 is 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 start on the same Monday, which neither of them planned, and which Kyra decides is an omen and Val declines to discuss on those terms. It is a good spring — worth putting down, because there are not many left of that kind and because a great deal of what comes after makes more sense if a reader knows that the two of them were happy that year in an entirely ordinary way. Val likes the work. She likes it enormously and would be 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 pays her nine dollars a day to do nothing else. Kyra comes home with stories about men who have ignored her and men who have not, and the ones who have not get longer every week. It comes out in June, in the yard, over a hedge Val is failing to do anything useful with. Haugen, says 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 takes the shears off her, which is a judgment on the hedge rather than on the conversation. She has her hair up off her neck for the heat and the June sun is doing the thing to it that only summer does, which is to put the copper out at the ends where everybody else sees brown. All right. That is the whole of our security. 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, says 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 cuts a foot off the hedge in one go, which Val feels is 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 hands the shears back. You've just never had to look at it on a Tuesday. It stays with her through the summer, and then it stops staying with her, because that is what happens to a thing that does not come due. Lars Haugen's name sits on a card in a drawer in two rooms above a tire place for six years and nobody ever rings it. In 1957 the card comes out of the drawer with a second sheet stapled to it, and the second sheet has four questions on it too, and one of them is not the sort a girl of nineteen can fail to look at. But that is six years off, and there is a hedge, and Kyra has cut a foot off it, and they have a reasonably spirited argument about that instead.

The radio has been going all week about the men coming back: a few hundred at a time, across a line, at a place called Panmunjom, with 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 cannot stop doing, because it is August and there is nothing else, is asking what has been done to them. Not of them. About them. There is a man on in the evenings who has opinions about what a person can be made to say, and another who comes on afterward and disagrees, and the two of them have been at it for a fortnight. Kyra has the radio on in the kitchen because Kyra has the radio on in the kitchen, and has done since she bought it in October 1930 and has never once been argued out of it. Val has the newspaper and is not reading it. They have eaten. The window is open onto the yard. Somewhere up the street a man is failing to start something with an engine in it, and has been for twenty minutes, and the whole of that summer is in that sound. The man on the radio says something about the fourth day. Kyra reaches over and turns it down, not off, and says: Tell me about the second room. Val does not stiffen. She has not stiffened at that sentence in a very long time and she is not going to start in her own kitchen with the window open. Trieste, says Val. Trieste. And she gives 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 has never once caught a syllable out of place. Then the pause. Then: Thank you. And: You are welcome. The man up the street gets the engine going, briefly, and loses it again. Kyra turns her cup round on the table. Can I tell you a thing 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 puts the newspaper down. There is a gap 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 does 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. Her hands are 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 goes on murmuring with the volume down. How much shorter, says 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 looks 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 sits with that for a while. There are two readings, she says, 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. 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, says 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 lets out a breath. I have thought about it. 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. Her voice does 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 sits back. Two hundred and forty-three years, she says. I did say it would not be enjoyable. They sit in it a while. I'd still rather have this one. I know you would. That is the reason I gave it to you. She turns 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 agrees, 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 gets up and goes round the table — and the kitchen bulb gets the pale of Val's hair as she passes it, which at that wattage goes the color of weak tea and has done in every rented room since the war — and stands behind her chair, which is the arrangement for anything that has got too large to be looked at directly, and puts her forearms crossed over Val's collarbones from behind and her chin on the top of her head. Three left, says 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. Her arms tighten 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, says Kyra, and you were wrong both times, and I let it go. The radio goes on under the conversation with nobody listening to it, and at some point the news comes round again and the man says the same figures he said at six. Val reaches up and puts her hand over Kyra's forearm and leaves it there. Turn that off, love, says Val. And Kyra, who had not been called that by anybody in four hundred years until about three years ago and still goes slightly stupid about it every time, lets go of her and goes and turns it off.

It arrives in a brown envelope with everybody else's, which is the whole of the problem, because a thing that arrives with everybody else's cannot be declined. Rutledge and Hoyt have taken on nineteen people since the war and have got to the size where a firm starts thinking about itself, and in the autumn of 1957 Mr. Hoyt announces a retirement plan — standing on the step between the drafting room and the front office with his hands behind his back, pleased about it, with every reason to be. It is a good plan. He has gone to some trouble over it. Val sits at the long table with her pencils in a jar and a run of other men's figures in front of her, and listens to a man give away money, and understands inside about eleven seconds that she is going to have to leave. She has checked the arithmetic of that firm for six years, and she is good at it in a way that has stopped being remarked on, which is the condition she arranges everywhere and has arranged four hundred times. Nobody has ever asked her anything. The form asks four things. Name. Number. Years of service. Date of birth. It is the fourth one, and it is the fourth one for a reason that has taken twenty-one years to arrive and has been coming the entire time. Here is how it has 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; and in twenty-one years the number and the face have never once been in the same place at the same time, and that is not luck, and Val could tell anybody the date she 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 is Mrs. Thiel, who does the front office and is kind to everybody and has a son at Benson, and who comes round the long table collecting the forms at about four. She glances at Val's on the way past. She is not reading it; she is squaring the stack. Oh — Anna, this one's gone wrong. She laughs. Eighteen seventy-four. You've put your mother's. Val looks up with nothing on her face at all. So I have, says Val. I'll give you another one. No need. Nineteen twenty-nine. She holds her hand out for the form, and puts a line through the figure, and writes the other one above it, and gives 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, says Mrs. Thiel, and goes on round the table. It is a good lie — the correct lie, delivered in about a second and a half, with the stupid small detail in it that makes a lie a fact. And Val sits there afterward with her pencils in a jar and understands that she has just made it very much worse, because there are now two years in that building, in her handwriting, on the same sheet, with one of them crossed out, and in Baltimore there is a third one that has been accruing wages against it since 1937 and does not know about either. She finishes the page. She is four minutes late leaving and nobody notices that either. Kyra gets home at six with her coat wet and an opinion about a man named Dressler who has moved four loads out of Clatskanie against her advice and lost two of them. She gets about a third of the way through it before she stops. Val is at the kitchen table with the notebook open and a sheet beside it, and she has taken her shoes off and has not put them anywhere, which in that woman is a condition. Right, says Kyra, and sits down. I am going to go through it in order, 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. Her finger is on the sheet and does not need to be. 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. She turns 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. She says 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 does not say anything. Three. She gives the number back. Can she? There is no form. 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 says. 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, 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. 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 rain comes on harder against the window over the sink and then lets off. So there's no way out, Kyra says. There is no way out. Val. I do not have a next step. Her voice does 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 reaches across the table and puts her hand flat over Val's. All right, says Kyra. They sit with it a while. The lamp over the table is the bad one and throws everything down the length of the room, and what it catches of Kyra is the side of her face and the dark of her hair where the copper comes up at the ear, which it has been doing in every kitchen on two worlds. Say the rest. 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. She does not take her hand away. Say it. We cannot die, 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 takes 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, says 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 waits. Jo Selby knew Anna Anderson. 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 is perfectly steady and she is furious, which is a combination Val 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 looks at the sheet for a while. Marjeta, says 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. Her hand is 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, says Val, and I would like to go to bed now. They go up. Later, in the dark, Kyra says, Fifty years is a long time, love, and Val says, It is not, and neither of them says anything else — and some while after that Val gets up and goes down and puts the notebook away in the drawer where it lives, because she left it out on the table and cannot sleep knowing it. She stands in the kitchen for a minute with her hand on the drawer. Then she goes back up, and gets in, and Kyra, mostly asleep, moves over about four inches without being asked.

Kyra says it on a Tuesday, in the ordinary way, with her hands in the sink and her back to the room. It's started. Val puts the pen down and goes and gets the notebook off the shelf, and turns to the back of it where there is a page that has been running for three hundred and fifty-two years and has thirty-two figures on it and nothing else at all. When. This morning. I knew on the bridge. She does not turn round. Write the thirty-third. And Val writes 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 has ever found a use for it beyond the fact of its arriving. The three weeks go by. The rain comes in off the coast range the way it does in that city from the middle of October, and a man from the county comes about the sewer line at the end of the block, and the street goes on being a street, and the Jorgensens sell up and go to California and the house stands empty into the spring. And nothing happens to Kyra Davan at all. On the twenty-second day she says, at the table, without any lead-up: Take it out. Take what out. The thirty-third. Take it off the page. Val, who has been waiting for some version of that sentence for four days and has not built anything to put after it, says: No. Kyra gets up and takes her plate to the sink and does not say another word for the rest of the evening, and that is the beginning of it. Here is the thing about Kyra Davan, which Val has known since she was eighteen years old and has never once had to think about: she talks. She is angry out loud and pleased out loud and grieving out loud and has been since a plateau, and in four hundred years Val has watched her carry exactly two things in silence and has been present for the end of both. Kyra shouting at her is ordinary. Kyra weeping at her is ordinary. Kyra putting a plate in a sink and saying nothing for four days is not a mood and is not a sulk, and by the second day Val has stopped pretending to herself that it is either. She waits two days more, because waiting is the whole of her method and has been for four centuries and has been right about as often as it has been wrong. On the fourth evening she stops waiting. Kyra is out on the step in the cold with no coat on, which in that woman means she went out for one minute about forty minutes ago. Val puts a coat over her shoulders from behind and sits down on the step beside her, which is wet, and does not say anything for a while, because the only thing she has is a question and she has already decided the question is the wrong instrument. The light off the kitchen window goes about six feet into the yard and stops; what it reaches of Kyra is the side of her face and the fall of her hair over the coat, dark chestnut and the copper in it where the light finds it above the ear, the way it has been finding it since a mountain. It's cold, Val says, eventually, which is the worst opening she has ever made in her life. It is. I am going to do this badly. 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 are inside the coat and her shoulders have come up and she is looking at the six feet of light in the yard. Four days, Val says. 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. She looks at the side of her face. I would like to know what this one has in it. It comes 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 does not rise. That is 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 does not move. So take it out, Kyra says. And Val, because she is what she is, reaches for the only tool she has ever had. The intervals are not eleven years. 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 turns and looks 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 has arrived at every sentence that mattered having built it first, sits on a wet step with nothing in her hands and says nothing at all. It goes on for a while. Then Kyra starts to cry, and she does it without any noise whatsoever, and that is when Val understands how bad it is. Stop, Val says. I'm not doing anything. You are doing it quietly. She has 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 puts her head down. There it is, says Kyra. Say it. You'll tell me it isn't. I will not tell you anything. I have just established that I have nothing to tell you with. Kyra wipes her face with the heel of her hand, which she did at eighteen and has never stopped doing. I am the instrument. 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 gets 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. Somewhere up the street a screen door goes twice. Come inside, Val says. 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 comes inside. Val puts her in the chair by the stove and puts her hands round Kyra's hands, which are freezing, and holds them there until they are not, and that takes some minutes and neither of them fills them. Then she gets 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 opens it at the back and turns it round so that Kyra can see the page and sets it on her knees. Look at it, says 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. Read the last four. Kyra reads the last four. Now tell me which one of them is the one that did not happen. Kyra does not say anything. You cannot. 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 puts 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 agrees, 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 looks up. You said it was because I'd never been wrong. That was true and it was not the reason. 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 turns a few pages back, and then a few more, and holds the book open on Kyra's knees with her hand flat on it. There are four hundred and nine names in here. 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 turns to the back again. There is one page in this book that somebody gave me. Kyra's hands have stopped on the cover. It is the only thing on two worlds that no other person could have handed me, 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. 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 does not move at all, which is how Kyra knows. You are not in that book because you are accurate. You are in it because you are the one who talks. Kyra puts both hands over her face. And Val, who does not do this, who has never been the one who does this, gets down on the floor in front of the chair and takes her by the wrists and pulls her hands away so that she can be looked at. There is one more, 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. She has her by the wrists. May I say it for you? Kyra nods. It is the last thing about either of us that is not on this planet's calendar. Kyra makes a sound. Everything else we have is theirs. 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 says. 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, 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 goes. And if that happens, 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 go gold. It goes 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 stays a moment and goes, and neither of them says one word about it, because they have not said a word about it since about sixteen fifty and are not going to start. It is not evidence of anything. Val knows that better than anybody alive and does not say so. She gets up off the floor and shuts the book and puts it on the shelf, and comes back and stands in front of the chair, and Kyra puts her arms round her waist and her forehead against her and stays there a long time in the warm. Say the date again, Kyra says, into her. The sixth of October. Say the whole line. The thirty-third. The sixth of October, nineteen fifty-nine. Her hand is in the back of Kyra's hair. With nothing beside it. With nothing beside it, says Kyra, and her voice has something back in it that has not been there for four days, and Val feels the whole of it go through the woman under her hands and out. They go up later than they mean to and neither of them has decided anything in advance, which stopped being remarkable somewhere around the turn of the century and is still not quite ordinary. Val goes first, the way she does, with her hands before she has anything to say, and what she says comes afterward and badly and at length, and Kyra lets her, because the two of them have been trading that particular office back and forth for four hundred years and tonight it is the other way round and both of them know it and neither of them is going to remark on it twice. The pale of Val's hair is the only thing in the room the street light can find, and Kyra has a fistful of it and her mouth somewhere under Val's jaw, and there is no hurry anywhere on the planet. And then they lace, and the light is up, and the rain goes on doing what it does there from the middle of October. In the morning Kyra comes down talking, about the sewer line and the county and a man called Trumbull who has no business selling anybody a heater, and does not stop for eleven minutes, and Val sits with her cup and lets the whole of it go over her. You're not listening. I am listening to every word, says Val, and I would like you to keep going for about another hour. Kyra looks at her. Then she pours herself a cup and sits down and keeps going.

The office is on the fourth floor and smells of floor wax and somebody's lunch, and the man behind the counter is called Mr. Pelletier and has been doing the work for nineteen years and likes it. That is the thing Val has not allowed for. She built the question on the bus, and it is a good question: it belongs to a woman who is helping her aunt, and the aunt has gone into a home in Vancouver, and there is a muddle about a card, and the whole of it is constructed so that every true part is somebody else's and every false part is too small to check. She never gets to most of it. Oh, no, says 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 has 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 asks. Then it sits there. For how long? Her hands are in her coat pockets and stay there. Mr. Pelletier looks honestly delighted. Forever, he says. And then he explains it, because nobody has asked him in a while: that it has been that way on purpose since the beginning; 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; that it is not reissued, ever, to anybody, and that this is not an oversight. That's the whole idea of it. 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. So Val sits on the fourth floor of a federal building and is told, kindly, by a man who is proud of his work, that the one thing she needs cannot be done, and that its impossibility is the best feature of the system. He is right. That is the other part. It is the best feature of the system, and she can 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 says, as she is getting up. She's not in any trouble. There's no rule about not using it. No. People worry. There's no rule. He squares his blotter. It's just there, is all. It'll outlast the both of us. Yes, says Val. I had worked that out. She walks down rather than taking the elevator, and stands in the lobby for a while, and then walks nine blocks in the wrong direction before she notices. It is March and the rain is coming in sideways off the river and she does not have the right coat. At home Kyra has the kitchen table covered. This is the inventory, and they have been doing it in pieces for four months, and it is not a difficult job — it is the opposite: a short list that gets shorter every time either of them looks at it, and that is 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 is finished anyway. A library card. A note from a dentist about a thing Kyra has never had done. Nine items, and seven of them are the kind you cancel by not paying. Fifty years, Kyra says, and that's the pile. It is a well-run life. It's a small one. It is the same thing, says Val, said twice. They work through it, and Val is good at this and it is restful to her in a way she would not admit to, and for about an hour the two of them sit in a warm kitchen taking a woman apart. The house will be sold — not sentiment but nine thousand dollars, which they will need, 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 is straightforward. The county is straightforward. And then Kyra, who has been writing, stops writing. Rose City, says Kyra. Val puts her pencil down. The care of the plot is paid annually, 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 is 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, says 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, says 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. Her voice is level, which in her means more than it means 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, says Kyra. 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, says 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. She does 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 gets going properly against the window and neither of them gets up to do anything about the one that does not shut. I went downtown, Val says. 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. Her hands are 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 agrees, 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 gets up and comes round and stands behind her chair, and puts both hands on Val's shoulders, and leaves them there. The lamp is behind them; the pale of Val's hair has gone the color of the lamp and the wet has got into the ends of it from Broadway and has not dried. Say the thing you've been not saying since Tuesday, says Kyra. I do not know which thing you mean. Yes, you do, girl. Val sits for a moment. We are going to be very well documented, 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 turns 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, 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? says 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. She says 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 do not move off her shoulders. Then we'll have fifty years, says Kyra. They leave it there, because there is nothing else in it, and eat at about eight. Over the plates Kyra says she was out to Sellwood on the Thursday and sat an hour with Hazel Brun, who ran the boarding house on Spokane Street for forty years and has a memory for other people's business that no one in that part of the city has ever got round. She's eighty-one. 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 says. The one I used in 1931. I'd forgotten I ever used it. Val says nothing for a moment, and then says that they should go out together before the weather turns, and Kyra says that they should, and neither of them thinks about it again for six weeks.

The state of Oregon has thought about this, which is the part Val does not expect and never gets 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 looked at that person in the late thirties and decided she ought to be able to exist, and 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 says, 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 builds the way she builds anything, which is to say from the ground, in order, over nine weeks. They will be sisters, because they have been sisters for two hundred years and the story is broken in. The mother is a boarder and there is no father on any sheet anywhere, which closes four doors at once and is the kind of ordinary nobody follows up. The births are 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, says Kyra, when the names go 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 took boarders from 1919 until a year or two after the war, and the woman who ran it is Hazel Brun, and Kyra has been going out there most months for nine years. That started as nothing — it started because Hazel had a shed full of somebody's crated freight that nobody would come for — and went on because Hazel is good company and because she has a memory for other people's business that no one in Sellwood has ever got round. She is eighty-two now. She is not failing, and that is the thing to be clear about, because the easy version of this is a confused old woman and that is not what happens. Hazel Brun has forty years of other people's lives in her head, in order, with the dates on them. They go out on a Saturday in April with a cake, which is Kyra's idea and is not a disguise, because Kyra has taken a cake out there four times before. It is a bright cold morning and on the bus the light comes off the river and up into the window and makes the two of them exactly what strangers have been calling them since 1607, which is the fair one and the dark one. Val has prepared a great deal: nine minutes of material and a run of answers to questions that will not be asked for a while yet, all of it gone over on the bus. She uses about nine words of it. What she says is that there had been a woman at the house, before the war, with two girls. And Hazel Brun puts her cup down and says, Oh — the Halvorsen girl. Val does not say anything. She had the back room off the landing. She was no age at all. Hazel is 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, says 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 shakes her head at a woman who has been dead for twenty years in a country that 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. And Val sits in a warm kitchen in Sellwood and watches 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 has not lied to her. That is the finding, and Val turns it over for the rest of her life: she 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 came 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 is true. All of it is hers. Well, where are they now? says Hazel. And Kyra says, You're having cake with them. It is the correct move — Val had not planned it and would not have got there — because Hazel Brun looks at the two of them for about four seconds and then goes off like a firework. She is out of the chair. She has Kyra by both hands. She wants to know everything and she wants to know it immediately and she says four separate times that she had always wondered, and she works her way round to Val, who stands up because there is no version of this where she does not, and is held onto at some length by a woman she has met once. I'd have known you, says Hazel. I would. Look at the two of you. The notary is a man on Milwaukie Avenue who does it in his front room and charges a dollar, and Hazel goes down there on the sixteenth of May in her good coat. She swears that she was present in the house at both births. She swears to the room, the season, the mother's name, and the absence of any doctor. She gives the dates and does not need to be reminded of them. She is pleased the whole way through it. On the step afterward she takes Kyra's arm and says that nobody has needed her for anything in about nine years, and that it has been a nice thing to be asked, and that she hopes there will not be any trouble over it. There won't be any trouble, Kyra says. The rest takes until August. There is a church on Umatilla Street with a cradle roll that went into a box in a basement in 1944 and came out of it wet, and a man there who is glad to say in writing what the box looked like. There is a school in Klamath County with two years missing out of the middle of the thirties. There is a Bible, which Val is honest about from the start and which the state treats as it should be treated, which is to say not very seriously. And there is Hazel. It is Hazel who does it. Everything else is paper about paper. Hazel is a person who was in the room, under oath, with the dates. The certificates come in September, and they are not the ordinary kind: a delayed registration says on its face that it is delayed, and 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 knew that going in and it is still a strange thing to hold. It says it, Kyra says, 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. She turns 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, says Val, and gets it slightly wrong, and hears herself get it wrong, and leaves it. Kyra puts her hand over her mouth and does not quite manage it. The numbers come in October, at a window on Union Avenue, twenty-four years and eleven months after the first two. Nobody asks them anything: a woman of twenty-five getting a first number in 1961 is an entirely ordinary creature, and the clerk does not look up, and it takes under four minutes for the pair of them. Val comes out onto the sidewalk holding two pieces of cardboard and finds that her hands are not quite right, and stands there until they are. We can't go back out there, Val says, that night. Kyra has known it was coming and has been working on the answer for a month and has not got one. She's eighty-two. Yes. She'll think we dropped her the minute we got what we came for. She will, says 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. She is 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 sits for a long time. I've been going out there nine years. 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, says 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 has argued with that woman on two planets for four hundred years and won a fair share of it, says, All right, and goes up, and that is the end of the discussion. She does not go out to Sellwood again. Hazel Brun dies in the spring of 1964 and neither of them knows it for some years, and when Val finds it she finds it in a line of agate type and does not say anything about it until the following week. They have the names by the end of October. They use them on everything from the first week of November, and the women at the bank get them wrong for a month and then stop getting them wrong, and by Christmas neither of them has been Anna or Ada out loud in anybody's hearing. In the middle of 1962 the Internal Revenue Service adopts the Social Security number as its taxpayer identification number, and from that year forward every return a person files in this country carries the figure on it. They got out with about fourteen months in hand. Neither of them ever knew it.

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 — at the wrists and along the inside of the forearms the way it always is, and some of it 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 come back to it properly in October, in the dark, afterward, with the light still up and neither of them in a hurry. Kyra has it the right way round from the start, which Val finds irritating and says so. It's not a light. 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 makes her say what it looks like, which is where the evening turns into something neither of them expected — because this is not a thing Val can see. She can reach it and she cannot see it, not from where she is, 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 is lying beside her. Give me the account, says Val. Kyra goes 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. Her voice is 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 has given the most beautiful accounts anybody on either world has ever given, about half of which were made up, gives a true one. She reaches for Sethal to do it — the thing neither of them remarks on and both of them hear. It's not one blue. 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 need to say what a color is, the two of them reach back to a promontory where Kyra once went down at four miles. Neither of them says anything about that. Val lies there and takes the description apart and puts it back together and does not improve on it, which she notes. Say the rest. 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. Somebody's dog has an opinion three houses down. I know, says 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. Her hand is 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. She takes 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 says. 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 turns 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 brings the cards home on a Thursday in November: a fan of paint chips off a rack in a hardware store on Hawthorne, forty-some of them on a rivet, and she puts 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 understands, sitting at her own kitchen table with a stolen fan of paint chips in her hand, exactly what she has been given and why. Kyra does not need a scale. Kyra has never needed a scale for anything in four hundred years: she thinks in jar lids and tins and the last of the evening off a headland, and she was perfectly content with the wrist one, not the Headland and would have been content with it forever. The fan is not for measuring. The fan is for the woman who has spent four centuries with shades and no reference set, and who has been handed a thing to look at that she cannot number. It is a present wearing a joke, and Val does not say so, and Kyra would have been appalled if she had. The names on the cards are the funniest thing that has happened in that house in nine years. There is a Dresden and a Serenade and one called Whisper, which Kyra reads out twice. There is a Mariner. There is something called Cathedral that is plainly gray. And there is one, nine from the end, that stops both of them. That's nearly it, says 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 agrees. A miss of that size is an insult. I would rather the whole fan were wrong. They take it upstairs, which is the sort of thing that only ever happens once in a household and which both of them regard afterward as the high point of that decade. And it does not work, and the reason it does not work is Val's, and she has it inside about forty seconds and says it out loud in the middle of everything, at length, and is 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 has the fan in one hand and is 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 begins to laugh and has 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, says Kyra, from the pillow. That's why it's funny. They get to the other thing somewhere around one in the morning, with the fan on the floor where it was dropped. Is it near any of them? Kyra says. 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 has known for four hundred and fifteen years, discovers that she has nothing to say. I do not know. You must have — I recorded blue. Her voice has 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 gets hold of her and does not say anything for a while. That's what the cards were for, isn't it, says 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. 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 does not move. Properly. 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 says the rest of it into the dark, which is 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. Her eyes are 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, says Kyra, and nothing else, which is correct. There is one more thing and Val never says it. She gets to it at about three, lying awake with a woman asleep across one arm, and she turns it over for perhaps nine minutes and then deliberately stops, which is 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 saw it four times and was 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 lies in the dark with that for nine minutes. Then she puts her face into Kyra's hair, where the copper is, and goes to sleep, and does not hand it to her, and never does. They keep the fan. It goes in the drawer in the kitchen with the string and the fuses, and it moves house with them in 1967 and again in 1991, and it is in a box in a garage in the Nehalem valley in 2007 when the water comes up and it does not survive that, and nobody in either of those houses ever once explains to anybody what a forty-year-old paint fan is doing in the string drawer.

She gets it out on a Tuesday, in the kitchen, over a pan she is not watching, with her back to the room — which is not an accident and both of them know it. Val. Mm. When I go. She moves the pan about an inch to the left for no reason whatsoever. Come with me. There is a pause of perhaps four seconds. Say more of it, says Val. That's all I've got. Kyra — That is all I've got. She turns round, and her face is doing something she has 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 puts down what she is holding. She does not do it quickly. She takes it apart standing in a kitchen doorway with the pan going behind the woman who said it — when I go, come with me — and she has it inside about twenty seconds, because she has been reading that woman since she was eighteen years old and because four of the six words are the ones that matter. You are alone in it, says Val. Kyra's chin comes up. That's it. That's the whole of it. How did you — You said come. It's thirty seconds, says 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 pushes her hair back with the heel of her hand, and the kitchen light gets into the dark of it and finds the copper above the ear the way every light on this planet has. 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, says 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. Both hands are 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 looks 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, says Val, and I would have said it, and thank you for getting there first. They do not get to it that night, because the pan burns and there is an argument about whose fault that is. On the Thursday Val is early. They are laced, and Kyra has her legs the way she likes them and Val is above her on her forearms, which is how they have done it since the pan burned and is the only arrangement in which the thing is 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 comes down about eight or eleven seconds early. On the way up rather than at the top. Kyra makes a noise of pure outrage against her mouth, and gets a hand into her hair, and holds her off about six inches. No. I — Not yet, you appalling woman, I was nowhere near — I am aware of that now, says Val. And then it happens anyway, about nine seconds later, with Val's hair still in her fist and Val's face a clear foot away from where it is supposed to be, entirely unaccompanied and extremely loudly — and the two of them lie there afterward in the wreck of it and Kyra begins to laugh and cannot 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 stops. 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, says Kyra, and I am extremely available for further study, and puts her face in the pillow and laughs until the bed moves. On the Saturday she is late. Not by much — two seconds, perhaps three — and it is worse than early, because Kyra has already gone, and the whole of it is out of her before Val arrives, and what Val gets is the tail end of something she had meant to be inside. She is extremely quiet about it afterward. Val. Mm. Don't. I am not doing anything. You are lying there in the dark starting a tally, says 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 says, and there is a considerable amount of thinking, and those are different, and you may hold me to the first one. What there is, in fact, is a problem. She has it clear by about two in the morning, lying on her back with a woman asleep across one arm, and it is the sort of problem she has been solving since she was a child and has simply never been handed in this particular form. There is a curve — that is established: thirty seconds, give or take, with a shape to it, because it does not arrive from nowhere, it gathers, and anything that gathers has a shape, and anything with a shape can be projected. What she does not have is the instrument. She has spent four centuries reading that woman and has 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 has been going on the obvious ones, which are the ones that arrive at the same time as the event and are therefore no use to anybody. So she goes looking for an earlier one, which takes about three weeks. It is not the breathing: everybody's breathing changes and it changes too late. It is not the hands, which are unreliable, and it is not the noise, which by definition is the thing itself. It is between the shoulder blades. There is a thing Kyra's back does — a gathering, a kind of drawing-in, down the whole length of her — and it arrives about four seconds before anything else does and it has been arriving for three hundred and fifty years and Val has 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 put a man on his back and ran a sixty-second window at twenty-two years old; four seconds is luxury. She does not write it down. She thinks about writing it down for approximately one second and then does not, and lies there feeling obscurely pleased with herself about that, and goes to sleep. On the second Tuesday in October she gets it. They are laced and she is above her, on her forearms, with her face in the side of Kyra's hair where she has been keeping it for some time precisely so that the last four inches will be short ones. She feels the back go under her hand and counts two, which she will later admit to and will never live down, and comes down and puts her mouth on Kyra's mouth and stays there. And Kyra goes up into it with somebody already there. Afterward there is a long time in which neither of them says anything at all. Right, says Kyra, eventually, into her collarbone, in a voice that has come apart somewhere in the middle. Yes. Right. I counted two, says 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 gets up on an elbow and puts a hand flat over her mouth, which is a thing she has never done in four hundred years and which Val finds she does not mind at all. Shut up. For one minute. Shut up. She takes her hand away after a while. I have been doing that by myself since I was eighteen years old, says 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 is going and she is making no attempt to stop it. And you got in. I got in. How long did that take you? Three weeks, says 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, says 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 goes very quiet. That's the elbows, says Kyra. That is precisely the elbows. You absolute — She stops. You've been waiting four months to do that to me, haven't you. Nine months, says Val, and it was worth every one of them. It is quieter. Of course it is quieter. Neither of them mentions it that night, or the next, and when it finally comes up it is about a fortnight later and it comes up as a joke — Kyra observing, over a newspaper, that Arlene Dunbar has said nothing to her at the mailbox in a month and that she is beginning to feel neglected. There is that too, Val agrees. There is that too, says 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 turns the page. It does not become the way things are done. That is never discussed either and does not need to be: it happens perhaps four times that winter and not once in the spring, and the pattern — which neither of them would be able to state and both of them follow without a word — is that it has nothing to do with wanting and everything to do with the walls. A hotel in Seattle in the January, where the room next door has a child in it. The week the Dunbars have Arlene's sister staying and every window on that side of the street is open. The first fortnight in any new place, before they know who is where. And the rest of the time — which is most of the time, which is very nearly all of it — Val does not count anything at all. She lies there and watches a woman go up alone at a dead run the way she has been going up alone at a dead run since she was eighteen years old, and does not reach for her, and does not need to. Kyra does not mind that in the slightest, which is the part worth putting down. She has never minded it: four hundred years of going up by herself is simply how she is made and she would not have swapped one evening of it. What she wanted was not a cure. It was company, sometimes — and sometimes turns out to be the entire quantity she had been after, and she had not known that until she had some. She says so once, in the February, in about nine words, at the moment it is needed and at no cost to herself whatever, which is the only way anything has ever come out of her. Val takes five weeks to answer it and then does, badly, in the dark, and Kyra lies there and lets 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 is itself the point — Val understands that she has stopped doing the four seconds. Not decided to. Stopped. The hand is still there and the back still does what it does, and at some stage she has quietly ceased to measure it, the way a person stops noticing a clock in a room they have lived in for a while. She lies in the dark and goes looking for the week it happened in, which takes her about a minute, and then puts the question down unanswered, which takes considerably longer and is the harder of the two.

The notice comes on a Thursday and is perfectly polite about it. The county wants eighteen feet off the front of that block for a widening it has been drawing on maps since before either of them saw the street, and eighteen feet is the porch and the step and most of the front room, and there will be an offer, and the offer will be fair. Kyra reads it twice and puts it on the table and says, Well, that's that, in a voice that has something in it Val has not heard for a very long time. It takes Val about four seconds to work out what the something is. It is pleasure. She does not say anything about it that evening, which is a decision and not an accident. She watches instead: watches Kyra go round that house for three days with a kind of lightness in her, opening cupboards she has not opened in four years and declaring things not worth taking; watches her get the atlas out; watches her say, on the Saturday, apropos of nothing, that she has always wanted to see what the east side of the mountains does in the winter and that there is a town out past Shaniko with about nine people in it. And Val, who has been reading that woman across rooms since before there were roads in this country, understands that Kyra Davan has been waiting for a reason for twenty years and has just been handed one by the Multnomah County Board. She lets it run until Sunday, because there is no sense in doing it before she has the whole of it, and because the woman is happy and that is not nothing. On Sunday she sits down at the table with the notebook and says, Four miles. Kyra comes in from the hall with a cup in each hand. What's four miles? How far we can go, says Val. Kyra puts the cups down with some care, which is 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. Her hand is 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, says Val. I am aware. I have the dates. Kyra sits down across from her and folds her arms and does not shout, which with her is a form of courtesy and costs 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. She turns a page she does 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. And she goes through it the way she goes 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, says 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 agrees, and it is the only document either of us has ever had that is better the less often it is looked at. The furnace comes on under the floor and runs for a while. So the thing that kept us alive, Kyra says, 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. She closes 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 is silent for a while. Then she gets up and stands at the window with her back to the room, and the February light comes in flat and gray off the street and does almost nothing to her, which February does, and leaves the whole of that dark chestnut the color of a wet fence. I was going to pack the truck, says 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 is 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, says 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 looks at the back of her for a moment. Because you were happy, 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 turns round. That's the nicest thing you've done all year, you know. It was three days. It was three days, sweetheart. They find the other house in April, four and a half miles away across the river, which Val points out is over the figure and Kyra says she is going to let her have. It is on a street with a laurel at the front and a bad gutter at the northeast corner, and the moving of them takes one day and a man with a truck, and the man asks where they are coming from and Kyra says Lents and he says his wife was from Lents, and that is the sum of the interrogation. There is a thing that happens when you stop. Neither of them says much about it that spring, but it is there in the first week and it does 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 have done that in Portland already. They did it with Jo Selby and it took forty years and was worth every part of it. What is new is knowing, in April 1967, standing in a yard with a laurel in it, roughly how many more times they are going to do it before this paper runs out. Two, says 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 is quiet a moment. Then we'll be good to them, says 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. And Val lies there and thinks 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 is 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 says. 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, says Val. Ask me in nine years.

Val has been somewhere else since the previous Wednesday and has been extremely pleasant about it, which is how Kyra knows. She is perfectly fine: she does the shopping and fixes the thing on the back step and has an argument with the man about the water bill that Kyra would have paid money to watch. She sleeps normally. She eats standing up twice, which is a tell, but only a small one. And on about the fifth day Kyra comes down at two in the morning for a glass of water and finds her at the kitchen table in the dark with nothing in front of her at all. She does not ask about it then. She goes back up, and lies there, and thinks about it for three more days. Wednesday is a nothing evening. The television is on and neither of them is watching it, and there is a program about a man restoring a boat that they have both seen before, and the window is open because it has been warm for the first week of April. Kyra is lying along the couch with her feet in Val's lap, which is where they go, and Val has a book she has not turned a page of in about eleven minutes. The lamp is behind her and the pale of her hair has gone nearly white in it, the way it does under anything yellow, and Kyra has been looking at that instead of the boat for a while. Val. Mm. Can I have a word? Val puts the book down on the arm. That is the whole of what happens, and it takes about two seconds, and in those two seconds Kyra watches her do the thing she always does — which is to decide, rather than to agree. It is not a formality. It has never once been a formality. There have been a dozen occasions when the answer was not tonight, and about four when it was no with nothing after it, and Kyra got up and made tea and that was that. Tonight Val says, Yes. She stands up and does it without any ceremony and without hurrying either, and folds them over the back of the chair nobody sits in, and sits back down. Kyra gets her own off with considerably less elegance and a certain amount of swearing at the couch. And then they arrange themselves the way they have 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 turns the television off. The man goes on restoring his boat. They lace. Softly: that is the whole of it and has been for three hundred and sixty years and neither of them has ever had to say so — this is not the other thing, there is no build in it and nothing is going anywhere, and the pressure stays down at the bottom of the range where a person can think. Kyra gets a hand into Val's hair at the back and leaves it there. Right. You've been gone since last Wednesday. I have been here the entire time. Val. I am aware of what you mean, Val says. And underneath, at the hips, she says something else entirely. Kyra has been reading that woman in that language since the second winter and she gets it instantly and without the slightest effort, the way you get a tone of voice. It is not words. It will never be words. It is a turn and a pressure and a particular slowness, and it is yes, and it is old, and it is not going to go away. Not in those terms — there are no terms — but it arrives whole, the way a face arrives when somebody has stopped managing it, and the two of them lie there on a couch with a man restoring a boat in the background and both of them know the other has just spoken. All right, says Kyra. Thank you. Mm. Is it me? A single release and a return. No. Immediate, unambiguous, and so fast it is almost rude. Is it us? No. Good. Her thumb moves in the hair at the back of her neck. Is it something I can do anything about? And this time there is a pause — a real one, three or four seconds, which in that language is an age — and then something Kyra has felt perhaps nine times in three and a half centuries, which is Val attempting to answer a question the thing is not built to answer, and failing, and knowing she has failed. That is the limit and both of them have always known where it is. It can tell you that a thing is true. It can tell you yes and no and I am here and it is bad and about forty shades in between, and it can tell you the size of a thing and the age of it and whether it is moving. It cannot tell you what. Fifteen thousand conversations in three hundred and fifty years and the thing has never once managed a noun. I'm going to have to ask you out loud, says 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, says: Because I have been carrying it since last Wednesday and I am extremely tired. Kyra does not say anything. She puts her forehead against Val's and waits, and keeps the pressure exactly where it has been, and does not alter it by a particle, which is its own sentence and is received as one. I did a sum, Val says. 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, says Val. Kyra goes absolutely still. Not in the grip — in the grip she does the correct thing and does not change anything whatsoever, which takes a quantity of discipline she will be quietly proud of for a decade. Everywhere else she stops moving entirely. That's the girls, says Kyra. That is the girls. Four hundred and six. Four hundred and six, says 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 has got to the part about the varnish. It is not a prediction, Val says. 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, says 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 is saying something. Kyra could not have written it down. Nobody could have. But it is there, continuously, running under the measured voice and the entirely steady face and the precise and reasonable sentences about distributions — and it has nothing to do with distributions at all. It is not steady. It is not reasonable. It has been going for some while and it is not going to stop. That is the thing about it and it is the entire reason the arrangement exists: Val Sorin can lie on a couch and deliver nine careful words about sample size in a voice you could set a clock by, and six inches lower down she cannot lie about any of it, and has not been able to since Maribor, and has agreed to that every single time she has said yes. Val. Mm. Stop doing the statistics. The statistics are the only — I know they are. Stop anyway. Her hand is 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 shuts her eyes. And the grip does a thing Kyra has felt about four times in three hundred and fifty years and has never once been able to describe to anybody, including herself. They stay like that for a long while. Kyra does not try to fix any of it, which is the discipline, and which she has learned at some cost. There is nothing to fix. There is no argument available and no comfort that would not be a lie — they'll be fine is not something either of them can say, it's one woman is Val's own sentence coming back at her, and we'll see them again is the thing they have been not saying since 1607 and tonight is not the night for it. So she does the only thing there is. She stays exactly where she is, at the same pressure, for about forty minutes, and lets a woman who has been alone with a number since the previous Wednesday not be alone with it. At some point the boat program ends and something else starts and neither of them notices. Six years, Kyra says 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, says Val. And Kyra laughs — properly, for the first time in eight days, with her face in Val's shoulder — and feels the whole length of the woman go loose against her, and underneath, quite suddenly, something eases that has been tight since the previous Wednesday. They do not go upstairs. They lie on that couch until about one in the morning with the television talking to itself, mostly not saying anything, and at some point Val falls asleep, which she almost never does first. Go to sleep, love, Kyra says, some while before that, into the top of her head, and gets no answer and had not expected one. And Kyra lies there with a woman asleep against her and the grip still going, light, slow, barely anything at all — and thinks that in fifteen thousand conversations over three and a half centuries she has never once got a noun out of the thing, not one, and has never needed one quite so badly as she needed one tonight, and got it anyway because she was willing to open her mouth and ask. And then, because it is one in the morning and because nobody is awake to hear her be sentimental, she thinks that the grip is not the conversation at all. It is only how they know the other one is true.

They are stopped on the highway south of Oregon City in a line of cars that has not moved in nine minutes, on an errand that could have waited until Monday and that neither of them will afterward be able to explain. It is the end of August and it is too hot in the truck and the windows are down and it makes no difference. Somewhere ahead there is a thing involving a culvert and a flagman. The radio is going on about the business out at McIver Park, which is into its fourth day and which the man on the radio cannot decide whether to be alarmed by. Kyra has her arm along the sill and her hair up off her neck with two pins, which in that heat lasts about an hour at a time, and the sun is straight into the side of her so that the dark of it has gone to the copper the whole way down. She says, It's started. Val does not move at all. There is a version of that sentence she has heard thirty-two times and could recite in her sleep, and it has always arrived in a room — a kitchen, a stair, once a tram — and it has always been followed by her getting up and going and getting the notebook. The notebook is four miles away in a drawer. The truck is not going anywhere. The man on the radio has moved on to the fair. When, says Val. Wednesday. It is Friday. It is Friday, Kyra agrees, 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 moves about a car's length and stops 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. She has both hands on the wheel of a truck that is not moving. Are you sure? I'm sure. 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 sit in it. That is the whole of what the chapter of their lives permits: there is a flagman somewhere ahead and a culvert and a line of cars, and neither woman can get out, and neither can reach for the other in any way that would carry on a public highway in 1970, and so the two of them sit four feet apart in the heat with the thing between them and do nothing with it whatsoever. Kyra moves her hand along the sill until it is against Val's leg, and leaves it there, flat, which is what there is. It is late, Val says, 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 has 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 moves again, more than a car's length this time, and then stops. There's a thing you haven't said, says Kyra. There is. Is it a number? It is a number, Val agrees, 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, says Val. She has the whole of it laid out and it has 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 refused to strike it and was right to refuse and has not thought about it in some years. And now there is 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, says 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 looks 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 has 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 is quiet. The thirty-fourth, says Val. There you are. The flagman turns his sign round and the line begins to move properly, and they go on south and do the errand, which takes twenty minutes and is not worth the drive. They do nothing about it at all. There is no dinner. Nothing is opened and nothing is said to mark it, and at some point that evening Val goes and gets the notebook out of the drawer and writes a date on a page and puts it back, and the whole of the ceremony takes under a minute and neither of them mentions 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 says: You were glad. I was glad for about four seconds. And then? Val lies there. And then I worked out what I had been glad about, 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, 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 does 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 has gone very still. And Wednesday closed it. Wednesday closed it. 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 says anything for some while. I've been doing the same thing, Kyra says, eventually. You have not. Not with the arithmetic. I can't do the arithmetic and I've never wanted it. She turns 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. I got there Thursday. That's why I said it in a truck. Val turns 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 says. 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, says Kyra. I watched it work in the mirror on the way past Canby.

The date moves, and that is 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 worked it out in a hut in the spring of 1608 with a stick and a flat stone and has carried both reckonings in the notebook ever since. It means that a day on one calendar walks slowly backward through the other — that the sixth month of a year on a plateau six miles inland of a yard arrives, on this planet, a few days earlier every time. So it is not a date she remembers. It is a date she calculates. She has calculated it three hundred and sixty-six times. In 1974 it falls on the ninth of July, which is a Tuesday. She has known that since February, because she always knows it by February, because the arithmetic is four minutes' work and she has never once been able to leave it alone until spring. On the Tuesday itself she gets up at the usual hour and does the gutters. They have been three summers in that house and the gutters have been wrong in all three of them, and there is a joint at the northeast corner that a man was paid to fix in 1972 and did not fix. Val goes up the ladder with a putty knife and a coffee can and takes out a quantity of fir needles, and finds a tennis ball, and comes down and moves the ladder six feet along and goes up again. Kyra comes out at about nine with her hair pushed up off her neck and stands at the bottom of the ladder holding it, which it does not need. There's a ball up here, says Val. Whose? I could not tell you. It has been there some while. It has gone the color of the roof. Keep it, Kyra says. We'll give it back to somebody eventually. The morning goes the way a Tuesday goes. Val finishes the corner and does not mention the corner. Kyra takes the car and comes back with three bags and a piece of salmon the man has been keeping for her, and has an opinion about the price of it that lasts most of the way through putting it away. The post comes: a notice from the county about a road, a thing from the bank, a catalogue. At about half past ten Val is standing at the sink with her hands in the water and no reason to be, and finds that she has been there a while. She goes and sits down at the table and looks at the back of her own hands for a bit, and then at the window, which has the laurel in it and a piece of the neighbors' fence and nothing else. And then she goes and finds Kyra in the front room and says it. It's today. Kyra puts the box down. She does not say what is, which Val had allowed about a second for and was wrong about, and she does not ask any of the four questions Val had ranked in order on the ladder. She stands 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 stood in it on a mountain and in a blood court and in every kitchen since, and she looks at Val for rather longer than people look at each other. The ninth of July, Val says. 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 sits down on the arm of the chair. Three hundred and sixty-six times, says Kyra. Three hundred and sixty-six. I've never asked you what day it was. 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 looks at the laurel. Because if you knew the day you would have a day, 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, says Kyra. She is quiet a moment and then goes on, because she is the one who goes 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. Her hands are 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 says, 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, says Kyra. So. Four hundred and six. Four hundred and six, says 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 does not say anything. I am not going to do the other part, Val says. 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 goes on, because that is all there is. It is the thing nobody tells you and it is the whole of what the ninth of July is: Val has spent six years with that date out in front of her, and has told herself a great many sensible things about it, and has 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 is not. At two o'clock she goes down to the hardware store for a new section of gutter and a man called Al cuts it to length for her and talks about the Cascades. At three she is back on the ladder. At four she comes down and washes her hands and could not tell anybody what the previous hour contained. At five it is the fourth hour of the evening in Aventhal. Nothing happens. I would like to have dinner, Val says. Kyra is in the kitchen with the salmon out and the oven not on. We're having dinner. I would like to have dinner, says 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 looks at her for a moment. Then she says, Twice a year. Twice a year. Always good. Always good, says 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 have dinner. It is not a ceremony and neither of them would have survived one. Kyra does the fish the way she does it and burns the edge of it the way she does, and there is a salad out of the garden with too much of one thing in it, and they eat at the table in the kitchen with the back door open because the evening has gone warm. They talk about Genie and Kal for a while, which they do perhaps four times a year and have never once planned either. Val says the thing about the archive directorship, which she has said before and will say again, and Kyra says the thing about the four words, and both of them laugh, and it is the real laugh and not the other one. Kyra says 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, says Val. She would have made two. And Kal would have sat there. Kal would have sat there, Kyra agrees, and said one sentence at the end of it and ruined everybody. They do not plan the next one. Val notices that they have not, standing at the sink with a plate in her hand at about nine o'clock, and does not say so, and puts the plate in the rack. Later they are 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 lace, softly, the way they do when nothing is going anywhere. Kyra has a hand in the back of Val's hair. Say it, says 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 is quiet for a while, and underneath, at the hips, she is not quiet at all, and Kyra does not alter anything by a particle and lets her take as long as she takes. I thought there would be an hour, Val says. 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 is 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 shifts, and gets her forehead against Kyra's, which is a thing she does perhaps twice a year. People here get a day. 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. 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 says something then that has no words in it and will never have any, and goes on saying it for a while. Kyra holds still and lets it. Will you do it again next year? says Kyra, eventually. The sum? The sum. In February. 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 lifts her head. You have spent three hundred and sixty years not asking. I have, Kyra says. 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 does 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, says Val, in February, and every February after that, for as long as there is a February. And Kyra puts her face down into Val's neck and stays there, and says, Good, and nothing else, and underneath, after a while, she answers what has been going on down there since about nine o'clock, and gets an answer back inside half a second, which in that language is as fast as a thing can be said. The ball stays on the kitchen windowsill for the rest of that summer. Nobody comes 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 puts it in the drawer with the string and the fuses, where it remains.

It takes nine months of paper to stand on that mountain, which Val notes at the time and finds she cannot be sorry about: a visa arranged through an office in New York that answers letters in its own time, a form at the hotel in Prague and another at the one in Poprad, a desk that keeps both passports overnight and gives them back in the morning without comment, and an itinerary somebody somewhere has approved which says walking, which is true. Two American women of forty and thirty-eight, on paper, who have come a long way to look at mountains. Nobody in that country gives them a second glance; the country has other things on its mind in 1976 and two middle-aged tourists with good boots are not among them. I have been through four frontiers in my life that were harder than this one, Kyra says on the train, and three of them were in the same month. They go up from the south on the second morning, off the path by eight, and are out of sight of anything by half past nine. Val's leg holds. It has held for three hundred and sixty-eight years and there is a ridge under the skin at the break that only she can feel, and at about the fourth hour it begins to tell her it is there, the way it does, and she does not mention it and Kyra does not ask and the two of them go on up. The slope has changed and has not: there is more scree in the gully than there was and the trees have come up another hundred feet since the last century, and the shape of the ground is the shape of the ground. At two they come over the shoulder and there is nothing there, which is what there is supposed to be. The hull does not hide by being covered. That took them nine years to understand and they were both 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 has 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 came looking for ore. You get in by knowing it is there and walking at it anyway. Kyra goes first, because she always does. She puts her hand flat on it about where the hand goes and stands there a moment, and the hull does the thing it does, which is not to open so much as to stop objecting. Still knows us, says Kyra. It does not know anything. Val. It does not know anything, says 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 is the temperature it has always been, which is the only thing on that mountain that has not moved in a hundred and five years. They go down the long run to the stowage with two electric lamps, because the ship gives no light in that section and never has, and the air smells of nothing at all, which is a thing Earth cannot do anywhere. Kyra goes left at the bottom. She always goes left at the bottom and she has never once pretended otherwise, and Val stopped pretending not to know about forty years after the first time. The drawing is where it has been. Kal made it at six years old on a Sixthday afternoon in a house in Aventhal, and it is a house with too many windows and four people outside it and one of them considerably larger than the others for reasons nobody has ever got out of her, and it has been in that locker since a Fourthday morning in 1607 when a woman packed three books and a set of plates that nobody weighed. Kyra sits down on the floor in front of it with the lamp off to one side and does not touch it, which is the rule she made for herself in 1700 and has never broken. Val goes on down the run and leaves her to it, which is also a rule. Kal was four hundred and six two years ago. That is the fact in the room and neither of them has said it once in nine months of paperwork, and both of them have known since about the second week of the planning that it is the reason they are coming, and neither has put it in a sentence, because there is no sentence that does not make it worse. Kyra sits in front of a drawing made by a six-year-old four hundred years ago and does not touch it and does not say anything. She is down there about forty minutes. What Val does with the forty minutes is go and look for a number. She has come for it — she was honest with herself about that on the plane and dishonest about it for the nine months before — and she goes along the run to the forward section where the ship keeps its own record of itself and sits down on the deck with the lamp on her knee and reads the eleven lines for the first time in a hundred and five years. She knows them. She has copied them out four times and could write them on a wall in the dark. She reads them anyway, in case a hundred and five years has put something in them that was not there, which is not a thing that happens and which she does 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 wants is one more line, and it is not an unreasonable thing to want: she wants to know what fifteen seconds cost at the other end. Not here — here is measurable and she has measured it, and she has 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 does not have, and has never had, is any statement whatever about what was happening at home while those fifteen seconds were going on. She goes 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 works out why, which takes about four minutes and is the sort of thing she is very good at and gets 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 sits with that. It is not a discovery and it does not change a figure anywhere in the notebook: she has 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 is still the only sum available to her, and she closes the lamp down to its lowest and sits in a cold section of a dead ship and says, out loud, to nobody, There is nothing to be done with that. Then she gets up and goes and finds the locker. It is 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 is 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 has of him, and he wrote four words in a margin about a plate that was sweating, and the fitting came out two days later and was replaced, and he died in the fold with ten other people on the ninth hour of a Fourthday. What is in his locker is 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 has ever heard in their lives. No instrument. No number. Nothing that would get anybody anywhere. A dead man's comb. Kyra comes up the run and stands in the doorway with her lamp down by her leg and looks at it for a while. Aden, says Kyra. Aden. Who's Teska? I have no idea, says 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 crouches down and puts two fingers on the square of cloth and takes 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 is not discussed either. And standing there with the locker shut and her lamp in her hand, Val finds that she is doing a thing she has been doing without noticing since about 1700, which is carrying a figure. Six. There have been six lockers that never opened, and she 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 was six, and it is now five. She stands there and looks at it for a while. Kyra. Mm. I am going to stop counting these. Kyra turns 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. Her free hand is 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, says Val, and there has never been one. And she goes through it once, because she is 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 has 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, says 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, says 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 come out onto the shoulder at about five with the light going long and orange up the gully, and it gets into the pale of Val's hair the way it has been getting into it on that slope since she was seventy-eight years old, and Kyra stops and looks at her for a second longer than walking requires. What? Nothing, love. Keep going. They sit on the rocks a while before starting down, because there is no hurry and because neither of them wants the next part yet. I did not get it, Val says. I know you didn't. I knew you wouldn't on the plane. You might have said. And you'd have come anyway, says Kyra, and you'd have come with somebody telling you it was pointless instead of somebody carrying the other lamp. Val does not answer that for a moment. It is not that the answer is bad. 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, says 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.

They come down into the noise at about seven, which neither of them is prepared for and which Val afterward decides she ought to have been. The valley has 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 is music coming out of a loudspeaker on a pole. There is a bus. Val stands on the last of the path with a pack on and takes an inventory, because that is what she does with anything that has got away from her. Six years — that is the span that matters and she has it inside a minute: the championships were in 1970 and most of this went up for them, and the rest has gone up since, and the whole of what she is looking at arrived in the time it took the two of them to notice a peak was late. Kyra does not take an inventory. Kyra stands on the path with her mouth slightly open and says, They've put a swimming pool up here, in a voice that has 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. She gets 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 eat in the restaurant beside the lake with the other guests, who are Czech and Polish and East German and two Finns, and nobody looks at them twice, and the food is fine and there is a great deal of it. Afterward Kyra stands out on the moraine in the dark for some time, looking up at where they have been, which from down there is simply a slope with nothing on it. Val. Mm. I want to go down to Dymná. Val does not say anything for a moment, which is not hesitation: it is that she has been waiting three days for the sentence and has four separate things prepared and finds that she does 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. She comes and stands 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. Her hands are 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 go down on the Thursday, on a bus, with nine other people and a quantity of crated glass. It takes most of the morning and the road goes where the road has always gone, which is down the valley and around the shoulder and out onto the flatter ground where the stream lets go, and Kyra sits with her head against the window and watches it the whole way and does not say a word. Val watches her instead, which is its own occupation and has been for four hundred years, and notices that the light coming in off the fields gets the copper up in the dark of her hair exactly as it did on that road in the autumn of 1608, when they walked it the other way with everything they owned on their backs. Dymná is still there. That is the first surprise and it takes the ground out from under about half of what Val has prepared. There are perhaps sixty houses where there were thirty, and most of the sixty are new, and there is a shop and a bus shelter with a timetable in a frame and a long low building with a yard full of machinery that belongs to the co-operative. Somebody has put in a water main. There are wires on poles. And the ground is the same ground: the street goes up the way it went up, because a street goes where the water does not, and the church is where the church was. They walk up it slowly. That's the corner, says 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 laughs, suddenly and far too loudly for the street, and an old man outside the shop looks round at the pair of them with mild interest and then goes back to doing nothing. The churchyard has been cleared. Not recently: some time in the last century somebody decided that the old part of it was more ground than the parish could keep, and the stones came up, and the ground was levelled and planted, and against the north wall there is 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 go along the wall from one end to the other. Twice. He is not there. There is a fragment with a letter on it that could be the first of his name and could be four other letters, and Val looks at it for a long time and then says, flatly, that it is not evidence and that she is not going to pretend it is. You could, says 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 says, 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 sit down on the wall. It is about eleven in the morning and the sun is out and there is a tractor going somewhere behind the long building, and two children go past on the lane and look at them and do not stop. Say it, says Val. Say what? Whatever you have been building since the bus. Kyra sits for a bit with her hands between her knees. I kept away from this place for three hundred and thirty years. 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 is 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 does not try to fix it. That took her about two hundred years to learn and she is still not reliable at it, and she sits on a wall in Dymná and does not fix it, and puts her hand flat on the stone about four inches from Kyra's and leaves it there, which on a public lane in a Warsaw Pact village in 1976 is the whole of what is available. It bought the thing it was for, says 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. She turns 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, says Val, and I would rather give you a true one, sweetheart, than a good one. They stay about an hour. Kyra walks the levelled ground once, slowly, in no particular pattern, and stops twice for no reason that she could explain and that Val does not ask about. Then she comes back to the wall and says she is done, and they go down the lane toward the shop to wait for the bus. And outside the shop an old woman is sitting on a kitchen chair in the sun with a bowl in her lap, and as they come past she says something about the weather. It is not a question and it does not need answering: it is 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 answers her. She does not decide to. It comes up out of her the way the north does, in the valley's own speech, which she has not spoken since the autumn of 1608 and has 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 put them in when there was no road, no wire, no main, and thirty houses. The woman stops moving her hands in the bowl. She looks up at Kyra Davan with an expression Val will be turning over for the rest of her life, and it is not suspicion and it is not fear, and what it most resembles is a person hearing a tune they had been told about by somebody long dead. She says something back. Slowly. Two or three words of it in the same shape. Then she laughs and shakes her head and says something else, in the ordinary modern way, and goes back to the bowl. On the bus Kyra sits with her hands in her lap for about nine miles. What did she say? Val asks. The second thing. She said I talked like her grandmother. Val looks out of the window at the valley going past. Her grandmother, Kyra says, 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 puts her head back against the window. And I'm not sorry we came.

Kyra has gone up to Astoria on the Tuesday to sit with the Hallorans, who have been having a bad month, and is not coming back until Saturday. She said so four times, which is three more than necessary, and stood in the doorway with her bag saying a fifth thing about the stove, and Val put a hand on the back of her neck and told her to go and be useful to somebody. By Thursday the house has gone strange. It always does. Four hundred years and a house without Kyra in it still empties out faster than the arithmetic supports — the same rooms, the same number of chairs, the whole thing somehow further apart. Val works until six. She eats standing up. At half past seven she puts the plate in the sink and stands looking at it for a while, and then goes upstairs and changes her blouse, which is a decision she declines to examine. She catches the bus down. That is the first odd thing and she notes it at the time: she could have walked, she likes walking, and she gets on a bus because getting on a bus is the sort of thing a person does when they have somewhere to be. Downtown is wet and doing its Thursday business. She walks four blocks with no destination, which she has not done in this city in twenty years, and she is aware the entire time of a particular feeling that she cannot get a word round and does 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 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 has a green sign and a door that sticks. She does not drink. That is a settled fact about her and has been for a very long time — not a principle, nothing so interesting, simply that her body does an odd thing with it and she has never found the odd thing enjoyable. Kyra will 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 name every single one. She has two that night before she stops counting them, and stopping is itself the point, and she knows it is the point while she is doing it. The place is warm and loud and has a jukebox somebody keeps feeding. There are about forty people in it and a fair number of them are women, and nobody in that room has the first idea who she is, and Val sits at the end of the bar with her back to the wall and finds that she is enjoying herself enormously. The woman's name is Darcelle. She gives it herself, at the bar, with no ceremony at all, and Val — who has been hearing names she cannot place for four hundred years on two worlds — takes it exactly as offered and thinks nothing whatsoever about it. She is somewhere in her thirties and she works at a title company and she has a laugh that arrives about a half-second before the joke is finished, which Val notices and likes and thinks nothing further about either. She has come over because Val is reading the label on a bottle behind the bar with what she describes 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, says Val, and I would like to see their records. Darcelle laughs the half-second-early laugh, and sits down, and does not get up again for two hours. It is easy. That is the thing Val keeps coming back to afterward and can never make sound like anything but an excuse. It is easy. Darcelle talks about a boss she hates and a brother in Klamath Falls and a car with a transmission problem, and asks Val what she does and accepts the answer, and does not once ask anything that requires Val to remember what she has told anybody. Nobody in that room is going to be in Val's life in a week. Nobody is going to notice that she does not age. Nobody is going to need a story about a sister, or a name for a deed, or a reason she has no family photographs. For two hours Val Sorin is a tall woman at the end of a bar with an opinion about bourbon labels, and it is the lightest she has been since the Carpathians. At some point Darcelle's hand is on her forearm and has been for a while. I'm going to say a thing. Go on, says Val. You've been looking at me since about nine o'clock and doing an extremely poor job of pretending you haven't. Val considers several available responses, in order, the way she does, and then discovers that she is too far into the evening to bother with any of them. That is accurate. Well, says Darcelle. All right, then. The apartment is six blocks up, on the third floor, and has a good chair in it and a bad print of a boat over the sofa and a kitchen the size of a wardrobe. Val is clear about every part of what happens in it — and the chapter insists on this, because a great deal of what comes afterward turns on it: she is not gone, she is not lost, and she does not wake up anywhere not knowing how she arrived. She is drunk in the specific way of a woman who has decided to be, and she is present for all of it, and she says yes out loud more than once and means it every time. She will remember the whole evening for four hundred years and never once have the comfort of not remembering it. The light comes up somewhere in the middle. Not much. The lamp is on in the other room and the door is open and it is nothing like a dark bedroom, and it goes to the wrists first the way it always does. Darcelle says, Huh, and looks at her arm, and Val says something about the lamp, and Darcelle says, Sure, in the voice of a woman who has decided not to think about a thing while a better thing is available, and that is the whole of it. Val lies there afterward with her heart going and thinks, 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 does not think about it any further, which is also a decision. The razor comes out of a conversation about nothing. Darcelle is in the bathroom doorway with a towel and a glass of water, complaining cheerfully about a sunburn, and something gets said about summer, and something else gets said, and Darcelle — who is direct about everything and has been all evening — makes a remark about Val that is not unkind and not careful either, and is the sort of remark nobody has made to her in four hundred years because nobody has 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 laughs, properly, and says the thing she will be taking apart for the next several decades. Take it off, then. Darcelle stops laughing. You're kidding. I am not. You're drunk. I am also not that, says 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 looks up. Take it off. Why? And there it is — the question, asked idly, by a woman with a towel, in a bathroom doorway in a building Val will never see again — and Val answers it honestly because there is nothing at all at stake in that room. Because it is the only part of me nobody has an opinion about, and I would like to find out what it is like to do something that isn't about anybody. Darcelle says, Okay, and goes to get the soap. And in the forty seconds she is out of the room, Val thinks about the mark. This is the part. Everything else in that apartment can be argued about and she argues about all of it for years afterward, in her own head, at four in the morning, and gets somewhere with most of it. Not this. She sits on the edge of a stranger's bath and works out, correctly and in order, that the band is inked low and will be the first thing to come out from under it, and that a woman holding a razor is going to see it from about eleven inches away and will certainly say something. She understands all of that completely. She has the whole picture. And she decides it does not signify. It takes about forty seconds and she is entirely sober for all of them. It takes a while and it is not remotely elegant. They do 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 is the part that takes the longest, and then a safety razor and a great deal of soap and a good deal of laughing. Darcelle is careful and competent and not precious about it. Twice she stops and says you sure and twice Val says yes, and the second time she takes the razor out of Darcelle's hand and does a stretch of it herself, badly, and gives it back. It is, Val thinks at the time, one of the more ridiculous things she has ever participated in. It is also — and she is aware of this, in the moment, with the soap and the light and a stranger's radio — the freest she has felt in four hundred years, and she is not going to pretend otherwise later, and she never does. Darcelle finds it about two-thirds of the way through. She stops with the razor in the air and leans in and says, 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, says Val. Who did it? There are four answers available and Val goes through them the way she goes through anything, which takes her under a second, and she gives 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, says Darcelle, and goes back to it. They do nice work. My cousin's got one on her shoulder looks like a dog chewed it. And that is the whole of it. Four words out and four words back, in a bathroom, over a radio, and the woman thinks nothing of it whatsoever and never thinks of it again. Afterward Darcelle puts a hand on her shoulder and says, Hey. You all right? Yes. You went somewhere for a second. I am extremely all right, says Val, and it is true, and it goes on being true for about forty more minutes. She calls a taxi at twenty past two. Darcelle walks her down, in a robe, and stands in the doorway with her arms folded against the cold and says, This was a good night. It was a very good night. You're not going to call me. No, says Val. I am not. And it is not about you and I am not going to insult you by explaining it. Darcelle looks at her for a moment and then laughs the half-second-early laugh. You're the strangest woman I ever met. You have no idea, says Val, and gets into the taxi. It happens on Burnside. It is not the promise — that is the part she never tells anybody except one person, because it makes her look worse rather than better: it is not the promise that arrives first. It is something small and physical and wrong, the way the seam of her slacks sits against her when she shifts on the seat, which is a sensation she has no file for, because she has not had that sensation since she was a girl in Aventhal. She sits with that for about four seconds. And then the rest of it comes 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 sits in the back of a taxi on Burnside with her hands flat on her knees and thinks, quite clearly: and I have not. Because that is true. It is strictly, literally, precisely true, and she knows within a second and a half that it is the most contemptible sentence her mind has produced in four hundred years, and she has produced a few. The third one arrives somewhere around Tenth and is the one she has not seen coming at all. Who did it? Somebody I live with. And Val Sorin, who has held that answer in reserve under a blood court and has been proud of it for two hundred and seventy years, understands that she has just spent it in a bathroom on a question about a mark that is half of a pair, and that the other half of the pair is in Astoria sitting with the Hallorans, and has not been asked. She does the arithmetic somewhere around Twelfth. She does not want to. She does it anyway, because she is who she is and there has never been any help for it, and because the number is going to arrive whether she invites it or not. Three weeks to anything worth the name. Four to be back to herself. Somewhere in between there will be a stretch of days that will be worse than either end of it. And Kyra is home on Saturday. So: two days. Two days in which the fact is going to be true and unmentioned, and then a woman is 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 are going to go upstairs. And Val is going to be ready before she is. That is the one that gets her. Not the promise, which she has broken. Not Darcelle, who is nobody's business and is entirely permitted and about whom Kyra will want the details and will be pleased for her, because that is the arrangement and has been since Maribor and there has never once in four hundred years been a single moment's jealousy in either direction. It is that the thing Kyra refused — fiercely, holding her by the jaw, the only thing that woman has ever asked her not to do — has been done anyway, in a stranger's bathroom, for a reason Val thought was excellent at midnight and cannot now locate at all. And the proof of it is going to be lying in their bed on Saturday, fast, and neither of them is going to be able to enjoy a single second of it. The house is cold and smells of nobody. She stands in the kitchen with her coat still on for a length of time she does not measure, which is rare, and then goes up and runs the shower and stands in it for a long while with her forehead against the tile. Afterward she stands in front of the glass with the towel and makes herself look, properly, in order, the way she looks at anything. The bathroom bulb is a bad one and it takes the gold out of her hair entirely and leaves it the gray of the sea under cloud, which is a thing Val noticed about electric light in about 1890 and has never minded until that night. It is not a stranger in the mirror. That would have been easier and it would have been a lie. It is entirely her, with one thing different, and the thing is not even dramatic — it is 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 is sitting out in the open on a woman who has spent a hundred and twenty-nine years keeping it where nothing would ever show it. Well, says Val Sorin, out loud, to an empty bathroom in Portland, Oregon. There you are. And then hears what she has said, and who she has taken it from, and sits down on the edge of the bath. She does not sleep much. Around five she gives it up and goes down and sits at the kitchen table in the dark with her hands round a cup of something she is not drinking, and does the thing she has spent four centuries doing, which is 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 chose otherwise. She could have gone home at ten. She chose otherwise, and it was a good choice, and she is 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 said take it off, then, and was asked whether she was sure, and was asked again with the soap already in the woman's hand, and said it both times. And took the razor out of the woman's hand and did a stretch of it herself. Nobody did anything to her. She was there the entire time. And for forty seconds, on the edge of a stranger's bath, she looked straight at the one part of it that cannot be undone, and went on. That is the sentence she can never get round, in that kitchen or in any of the kitchens after it. She did not forget about the mark. Forgetting would have been a kindness and she is not going to be given one. She took it out, looked at it, understood exactly what would be uncovered and who would be looking at it and what would be asked, and set it down again as insufficient, and did 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 will still be turning over on a different planet, a long way from that kitchen — is that she can reconstruct the reason perfectly and it no longer works. 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 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 falls over inside four seconds. Because it is not true. Somebody does have an opinion about it. One person, exactly one, in the whole of two worlds — and the opinion is not that Val should be different. The opinion is that Val should not be. It is the only thing Kyra Davan has ever asked of her in four hundred years, and she asked for it with both hands on Val's face, and Val told a stranger in a bathroom that nobody had an opinion, and believed it while she said it. That is not a lie she told Darcelle. That is a lie she told herself in order to be able to say it. She sits there until it gets light. At some point she catches 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 comes out over the course of a week in manageable portions. She stops that too. Not because it is dishonest: because she knows exactly what it is. It is arranging. It is four in the afternoon and an ordinary face. It is the oldest thing she does, running itself in the dark in her own kitchen, and if she lets it finish she will walk into Saturday with something prepared, and Kyra will know inside of a minute, and it will be worse. So she puts her head down on the table, on her arms, like a woman at the end of a long shift. Right, she says, into the wood. Straight, then.

Kyra comes 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 meets her in the hall and takes the box and puts 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 stops, and starts again, and makes herself do it the way she 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 puts the bag on the floor. All right, says Kyra. Go. So Val tells 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 does not soften any part of it. She says what she said and how many times she said it and that she took the razor out of the woman's hand herself, and she gets all the way to the end of it and stands there in her own hall with her hands at her sides. Kyra is quiet for a moment. Then she says: Was she nice? Val blinks. 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. She is taking her coat off now. Was she nice. She was — Val has not prepared for this and it shows. 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, says Kyra, and means it, and hangs the coat on the peg, and the wet has got into the whole of her hair on the walk up from the bus and taken it three shades darker, which it does and which Val has 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. She goes past her into the kitchen and puts the kettle on, with her back to the room. I heard the part. You do not seem — Give me a minute, Val. So Val stands in the doorway of her own kitchen and gives her a minute, which is the longest minute she has spent on this planet since a courtroom in Trieste. Kyra turns round. You didn't break it, says 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 says it, because she can 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. 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, says 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. Her voice has not risen and is 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 puts both hands flat on the counter behind her and looks at the floor for a second and says, No. I'm not going to say it, 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 does not say anything. I refused to let you cut it for a reason. 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 looks up. And that is not what happened in that bathroom, is it. No. And then Kyra is quiet for a while, and when she speaks again it has gone somewhere else entirely. There is a thing I do mind, 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. Her voice is perfectly level, which in her is 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, says Val, and I said thank you. Kyra sits 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 has spent four hundred years knowing exactly what that sentence is and where it has been held and under what, sits at her own kitchen table and does not say anything at all for about nine seconds. I want to be accurate, says 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. Both palms are 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 does 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 has nothing. That is worth putting down, because it has happened to her perhaps four times in her life and every one of them has been in a room with this woman: she goes and looks for an answer, in order, the way she looks for anything, and there is not one there. So she gives her the worst of it instead, which is the only thing she has left and is not an answer and is not meant to be. I thought about it, Val says. 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. Her hands are 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 puts a hand over her mouth and takes it away again. You thought about it. I thought about it. Forty seconds. About forty. I would not swear to it inside ten. Val makes 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, says Kyra. It's a good deal worse. I am aware. And you told me anyway. I told you anyway. Kyra sits with that a long moment, and something in her face moves and does not finish moving. Right. 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 reaches behind her and takes the kettle off without looking at it. Now tell me why you went out. And Val, who has got all the way through what she thinks is the hard part and does not understand that she has not yet reached it, tells her that too. There was nobody waiting for me anywhere, and I wanted to find out what that was like. The kitchen is extremely quiet. Val watches it arrive. That is the awful part and she will still be able to describe it in another four hundred years — she watches the sentence go into Kyra Davan and watches what it does on the way, and understands, about a second and a half too late, what she has just handed over and to whom. Kyra does not shout. Kyra, who shouts at fences and at the price of coffee and at a judge's clerk in Trieste, does not make any noise at all. Ah, says Kyra. Kyra — No, that's — hold on. She puts a hand up. Hold on. I'm going to say this wrong if I do it fast. After a moment Val sits down across from her, which is the wrong side and they both know it, and neither of them moves. I have never once, 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 are 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. And then: I want to be careful here, 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 looks up. It hurts. There. That's said. Val starts to say something and Kyra shakes 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 is, out on the table between them, and it is worse than the hair by an order of magnitude and neither of them saw it coming an hour ago. Val sits with it for a long moment. I have to say a thing now, 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 is doing the flat thing and her hands are 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 does not move. Everywhere else on this planet I am a woman with a name on a deed. 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 turns her cup a quarter turn and leaves 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 gets 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 comes on outside, because it is April and that is what April does in that town. I can't give you that, says 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, says 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. And they sit with it. It is worth recording that neither of them tries to make it smaller — that is the growth, if anybody is counting, and both of them would be able to name it: two women who have spent four centuries handing each other softened versions of things sit at a kitchen table in Portland and let a problem be exactly the size it is. The tea does not get made. The bakery box does not get opened until Monday. Go again, says Kyra. Val looks 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. Her chin has 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 reaches across and gets 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 tightens. 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 looks 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. She puts 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, says Kyra. You've got them. It gets dark at some point and neither of them lights the lamp. Can I ask you something awful, says 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 considers lying, in the interests of the household, and discards it inside a second. Enormously. Right. Kyra sits 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 says, 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, says 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. She gets up and comes round the table and stands 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. Her thumbs move 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 do not go upstairs that night. It is not a punishment and neither of them thinks of it that way for a second: it is that the afternoon has emptied both of them out, and there is a bakery box on the table nobody has the appetite for, and Kyra falls asleep on the sofa at nine with her feet in Val's lap in the middle of a sentence about the Hallorans. Val sits there in the dark with a woman's ankles under her hands and thinks about the thing she has not said, which is that she found out something on Thursday she is not going to be able to put down. Not the freedom. The other one. That she spent two hours being nobody, and it was marvelous, and at twenty past two in the morning she stood on a doorstep with a woman in a robe and could not get into the taxi fast enough. She will tell her that eventually. It will take about a fortnight to find the words and it will come out flatter than she means it, because everything does. She sits in the dark and starts work on it.

Val decides about it at ten past four, over nothing at all, and gets about forty minutes of being normal before she gives it up entirely. That is new too: she has 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 has simply stopped functioning, and she has a fairly good idea why and does not enjoy the reason. A body that arrives in ninety seconds does not require five hours of managing. So at ten to five she comes and stands in the kitchen doorway and says, Come upstairs. Kyra looks 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, says Val, and come upstairs, and goes, and does not look back, and Kyra stands there for a second with her hands dripping and then dries them on the cloth and comes. It is fast. It has been fast all week and neither of them has said one word about it. They get as far as the bed and out of most of what they are wearing, and Val is there almost before they have settled — no wait at all, nothing to work through, the whole business over inside a minute and a half from a woman who has never in four hundred years arrived anywhere before Kyra Davan. And she lies there, hip to hip with her, ready, running extremely hot, waiting for the other half of it. And nothing happens. She gives it a while. That is not difficult: she is in no hurry — she has four hundred years of being the slow one and she is not about to become impatient the first fortnight she isn't — and the light is coming in through the gap where the blind has never fit, and there is a woman beside her with her hair all over the pillow, dark and the copper in it where the light gets in, and Val is perfectly happy to lie there. After a few minutes she starts doing what Kyra does. She has been studying it for a very long time, in the way she studies anything, and she knows 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 does all of it. The Kesslers have taken the fence down, says 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 says again. Val stops talking about the fence. Sweetheart. I'm here. You are not, though, says Val. Kyra does not answer that, and Val does not press it, and instead puts her forehead against the side of Kyra's head and stays there and lets the room be quiet for a while, because that is in the method too and it is the part she understood last. There's no hurry, Val says, after some time. Nothing's happening anywhere. Nobody wants either of us. She feels Kyra's breath catch on that, which she has not expected, and which she files. You've got all evening, and so have I, and so has the rain, love. Take whatever you want of it. It does not work. Val is not offended by that and does 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 observes it — ten minutes, fifteen, everything she knows how to do and a good deal she has worked out herself — and watches a woman lie in a bed with her eyes open and get no further. And then Kyra puts a hand over Val's wrist and stops it. Val. I know. I need — I know, Kyra. I need to talk, says Kyra, and her voice comes 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, says Val. I've never once — Kyra. Do not do that. She gets 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 laughs, wetly, once, and puts her arm over her face. They stay where they are. Neither of them gets dressed and neither of them gets up, and the rain comes on properly at about half past five and goes on for the rest of it. I said it was fine, Kyra says, 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 takes 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, says 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 is 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 turns 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? says Val. It's that you came back different and I didn't get a vote. Go on. 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. Her hands have come up and are 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 does what it is doing. Not to you. 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 lies there and takes it apart the way she takes anything apart, and then — and this is the new part — puts it down before she has finished, because finishing is not what is wanted. I want to tell you something, and I have never said it in four hundred years, and it is going to be a very odd present. All right. Jakob. Kyra goes still. Twenty-five years. 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. Her voice does 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. She turns 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 has both hands over her mouth. Val. I am not telling you this to make it even. I am not opening anything at all. She finds her hand and takes it down off her face and holds 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 cries a bit then, without any noise about it, which is not her usual way of doing it at all. Val does not say anything and does not soothe it and does not do the thing she used to do, which was to look for the practical part. She lies there with a hand on Kyra's sternum and lets it run. Two years, Kyra says, 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, says Val. It is the worst thing about this planet and I have been to a blood court. And Kyra makes a sound that starts as crying and does not end as crying, and gets an arm round her, and does not let go for some time. They talk for a long while after that, in the dark, about nothing in any order. About the Hallorans, who are doing better. About the fence. About whether either of them can remember the name of the woman who ran the boarding house in Lowell — Kyra says Mrs. Pell, Val says it was Pelling and that Kyra has been getting it wrong since 1838, and Kyra says she prefers her version. About the first winter on the mountain, once, briefly, and what the hut smelled like. And somewhere in among all of it Kyra stops being a woman lying rigidly in a bed and becomes a woman lying in a bed, and neither of them remarks on that either, because remarking on it would stop it. Val starts touching her at some point and could not afterward have said when. It is not a decision and it does not have a plan in it: it is the flat of her hand up the length of Kyra's back and down again, slow as weather, the way she was taught by twenty-nine years of being on the other end of it; 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 does something with her hand that she has not done before. Kyra notices. Of course she notices. That's new. It is. Where did — And then Kyra stops, because she has worked it out inside half a second, and lies very still. Val has about two seconds to decide and does not use most of them. She told me about it, says 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 keeps on. Say it again, says Kyra. The last part. I was going to tell you. Even if I hadn't noticed. Kyra, says Val, you notice everything. But yes. Even then. Kyra puts her forearm over her eyes and breathes out, long, all the way. Do it again. Are you — Val. She takes 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 is thick. Something came home. Do it again. So Val does it again. It is very slow after that. Not slow the way their evenings are slow, which is 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 goes backward, and Val stopping entirely twice and simply holding her until she starts again. And somewhere in the middle of that, a long way in, Kyra gets there. It comes the way it has never come in four hundred years, which is gradually, and by degrees, and with the whole of her attention on it — and Val, who has spent four centuries being the one that happened to, lies there and understands something about her own life that she will not be able to put into a sentence for another nine years. She does not do the ordinary thing. She reaches down instead and touches her — once, with one finger, as light as she is able, which is very light indeed. It is not a beginning and it is not asking for anything and both of them know it inside a second. And Kyra's whole body goes soft at once, and then, after a moment, she curls around Val's finger and holds it. The faintest thing. Barely anything at all. Nothing like what she did on a Thursday in fifty and nothing like what either of them has learned to do since. Val does not move a muscle. She takes her hand away after a while and comes in close and presents herself in the ordinary way, and does not grip. That is deliberate and it costs her something, because she has been ready since ten to five and she is running very hot and the whole of her wants to. She lets the two of them touch and does nothing else whatsoever, and lies there, and waits. It takes a while. And then Kyra grips her — faintly, the way she held the finger, hardly any pressure in it at all. Val answers it with exactly as much as she has been given and not one particle more. They go on like that for some time, at about a quarter of anything, with the rain going. Kyra's grip comes up by degrees. Not to full and not near it — it gets to about half of what it was on that Thursday in fifty and stays there, and Val matches it the whole way and never once goes first. They lace gently and do not hurry any part of it and it is not like any other night either of them can remember, and at the end of it Kyra is crying again, and this time there is nothing wrong with it. Afterward Val gets both arms round her and holds on the way Kyra held her in 1950, which she has been waiting twenty-nine years for an occasion to return. I am going to say a thing now, says 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 goes very still. For as long as this takes. 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. And then: You waited for me for four hundred years. 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. Her mouth is 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 gets a hand up to her face. It's fine. And the waiting is worth everything. 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, says Val, and I am aware of what I have just done and I refuse to apologize for it. And Kyra laughs — properly, out loud, the first one in six days — and gets her arms round her neck and pulls her down. It rains all night. Some while later, mostly asleep, Kyra says, Val. Mm. It's going to take a bit. I know it is. Not just tonight. It might be a while. Sweetheart, says 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 admits. But I am not writing it down.

There is still ash in the gutter on the north side of that street in the autumn of 1981, in the places the brush has not reached, going gray-white under the leaves. The mountain took four hundred feet off itself the previous May and put a good deal of it down on three states, and the whole of the region has spent a year and a half sweeping. There are people in that city who keep a jar of it on a shelf. Somebody up the block has put some in a bottle with a label on it and a date. Val goes past that bottle on her way to the car every morning for nine years and finds it funnier every single time, and never once says why, and the reason is this: she was 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 ever worked out what that was either, and there were no bottles. Kyra says it on a Sunday, folding something by the window with the autumn light coming flat across her, which finds the copper the way it always does and has 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 gets the notebook off the shelf and turns to the back and writes a date on the page with nothing beside it, which takes eleven seconds, and puts it back. And that is the entire ceremony, and both of them notice how little it is, and neither of them says anything about that either. It is worth stopping on, because it is not indifference and it is not healing. In 1915 a date on that page was a small astonishment and Val sat down afterward. In 1959 one did not come and it was a fortnight before either of them was right. In 1970 one came and it was the worst news of the decade and they sat in a stopped truck with it. In 1981 Kyra says it folding a sheet, and Val writes it down, and then they argue about whether the Oldhams are 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 have been through enough in the preceding two years that a regular event arriving on schedule is close to restful. What is not restful is Mrs. Oldham. She has been across and two down since they moved in, and she is seventy-nine, and she has got to the stage of coming out onto her porch when she hears a car door because the day is long. She has known them fourteen years. And in September she says the thing, from her porch, perfectly pleasantly, holding a watering can. You two don't change, do you. Val says something about good light and bad eyesight, which is the fourth of the dull answers and has been serviceable since about 1750, and Mrs. Oldham laughs and says something about the dahlias and goes in. And Val stands on her own walk with a bag of groceries and does the arithmetic. Fourteen years. Not forty. Fourteen, and they have been settled the whole of it, and they live four doors from a woman who has nothing left to do but look at a street. She is in the kitchen before she realizes she has not put the bag down. I know, says 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 gets up and takes 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 do it at the table, properly, with the notebook out, which they have not done since 1960 and which Val has been quietly hoping not to do again. The halfway mark is the part that gets her. Twenty years of the Halvorsen paper gone: on the certificates Nora is 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, says 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, says 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. Her hand is 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 sits with that for a moment. That's a horrible way to put it. It is the actual mechanism, says Val, and I would rather say it in here than have either of us pretend we are not relying on it. And then she says the other part, which she has not planned and which arrives in her mouth the way the four words did 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 does 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 comes round the table and sits on the edge of it beside her, which is against the house rules and has been since 1894. It's not damage, says 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 puts 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 agrees. It's better than one. Go and put the shopping away. The ash stays in the gutter until the following spring, and then the city comes and takes most of it, and the bottle with the label on it is still in that window in 1990. Mrs. Oldham dies in the February of 1986, at eighty-four, which Kyra takes harder than she expects to and does not mention for a week. They do not move for nine more years. And the notebook goes back on the shelf with the thirty-fifth on the page and nothing beside it, where it sits untouched for eleven years, which is the longest that page has gone unopened since 1608 and which neither of them notices at the time.

It has been a good autumn and that is the whole of the trouble, in the sense that nothing is wrong anywhere and nobody has done a single thing that could be called a mistake. Val has 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 has. All of it. She has come off four hundred years of being the most careful person on two planets and has taken every one of those instructions seriously, because she takes everything seriously, and she has been enjoying herself more than she has enjoyed herself since the Vayr. So when it goes wrong it goes wrong in the direction nobody has been watching. They are laced, and Val is above her on one forearm with Kyra's knee up on the outside of her hip, which is how it has been going lately and which both of them like. And Val is giving it rather a lot. Not roughly — there is nothing careless in it and nothing any outside observer would call wrong; she is simply using more of herself than she used to, with more conviction, and has been for about four minutes, and has got a kind of momentum up. And somewhere in the third of those minutes it has gone past the top of what Kyra wants and kept going. It is worth being exact about this, because the two of them will be exact about it afterward. It does 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 is that past a certain point more stops being more. The whole thing is built the other way round — the lightest thing available is the strongest thing available, and has been since the second winter, and above a certain pressure it simply begins to go away from her. Not pain. Noise. Too much happening in a place that does not want much happening in it, and the lovely narrow thing she has been going up has widened out and gone dull, and she is now some distance from where she was four minutes ago and getting further. So she uses the channel, because it is there and because it is what it is for. She eases off — deliberately, taking her own grip down to about a third of what it has been and holding it there, which in four hundred years of that silent back-and-forth has always meant something in the neighborhood of gently. And Val reads it, and answers it, and gives her more. That is the whole of the problem and neither of them will see it for another twenty minutes. The grip can say a great many things: I'm here and I've got you and I'm not letting go and about nine other things that neither woman could write down. What it cannot say — what four hundred years has never once required it to say — is less. Because a woman easing off is ambiguous, and always has been, and nobody has ever had to find out. It can mean gently. It can also mean I am fading, come and get me — and that reading has been the correct one about eleven hundred times out of eleven hundred, and Val has four centuries of evidence behind it and goes with the evidence, the way she always does. She comes down and gives her more. Kyra eases off again, harder, almost to nothing. And Val, who is certain now, and who has been told for nine months that she is to stop being so careful, and who is in the middle of the most confident year of her entire life, redoubles. Val. Nothing. Val has her face in her hair and is some way down inside it. Val. And here is where Kyra Davan — who has never in four hundred years had the slightest trouble saying anything to anybody, who says nine things a day and means all of them — lies underneath the woman she loves and discovers that she cannot find the word. It takes her perhaps four seconds. It feels considerably longer. Everything she reaches for arrives with something on it: stop is too big and would frighten her, no is worse, that's too much has an accusation in it, and anything longer than two words is going to come out as a review. Softer, says Kyra. Val stops as though she has been unplugged. Everything. Instantly. Grip, movement, the lot — and she comes up off her forearm and gets about a foot of air between them, and in the dark Kyra can see nothing of her face at all and does not need to. Oh, says Val. It's all right — How long? Val. How long, Kyra. Don't do this, says 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 is a pause. Then Val comes back down, which costs her something, and lies on her side facing her about six inches off, which is near enough to be in the same conversation and far enough not to be touching her anywhere. That is also a position, Kyra observes. It is the best I have. I know it is, love. It's fine. They lie there for a bit. It did not hurt, says 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. She pushes her hair back off her face with the heel of her hand, and what light there is off the street makes almost nothing of it, which is its own kind of information, because that chestnut wants a flame or a window and has 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, says 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, says Kyra. Val goes very still. I eased off. Twice. I took it right down the second time, to almost nothing, and I thought — She stops and starts 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 says 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 stops. 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. She lets 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 is quiet for a while. Then we will need a second signal, says Val. Something in it that is unambiguous. Two releases in quick succession, perhaps, or — No. It is a straightforward — No, Val. Kyra gets 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 agrees, and I would have done it by Christmas. So here's what we do. 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 is 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, says 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 lies there with her hands where they are and does not speak for a while, and Kyra lets her have it, and the house ticks. I am going to be careful again, says 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 puts 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 has 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, says 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, says Kyra. We'll work on it. They do not start again that night, and neither of them suggests it, and that is not a punishment and both of them know it. What happens instead is that Val gets an arm under her and brings her in and holds on to her, hard, with her arms — which is older than the grip, and is the one signal in the entire four centuries that has never once been ambiguous in either direction. Kyra gets hold of her back. There you are, says Kyra.

Nora and Elsie Halvorsen stop in the spring of 1991 and are not replaced by sisters. That is the part Val expects to mind and does not: three hundred years of the sister story — Maribor, Trieste, a wagon, a mill town, Hawthorne — and by 1991 it has become the thing that draws the question rather than the thing that answers it, because two women living in a house together in that decade are nothing at all and two sisters doing it at fifty are a small puzzle. So they stop being related, and take their own first names for the first time since a plateau, and become Val Mercer and Kyra Lund, who met at work in Portland and bought a place in the Nehalem valley because it was cheap and because one of them wanted trees. It takes nine months and a considerable amount of money and very nearly does not work, and the whole of it fits in one paragraph because that is how much room the end of a century leaves for it. That's the last one, Val says, 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 have been in the valley four and a half years when the river comes up. It has rained for a fortnight, and then it has snowed, and then it has 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 comes out of its banks and goes down the main street. Kyra has known since the fourth. Not the way a person knows a forecast: she came in from the yard on the Sunday afternoon with her coat half off and said, It's going to go, and Val looked at her and asked how long and Kyra said Wednesday or Thursday, and it is Wednesday. By ten in the morning there are four feet of water in the lower town and a current in it that nobody has expected. Kyra is out of the house at a quarter past seven and Val does not see her again until dark. What she does that day is partly a matter of record, because a small town keeps one. She is at the Rose Avenue end at eight helping get two families up out of a single-storey house. She is on a boat at ten with a man called Delaney who has no idea what he is doing and does what she tells him for six hours. She goes in on foot three times, in water that is moving, because a boat cannot get up between two buildings where a boat is needed. And at about four in the afternoon, with the light going, she goes in after a man who has gone off the back of a flatbed into the current at the bend by the mill lot, and comes out of it two hundred feet downstream with him, on the far side, which three separate people watch her do and none of them ever satisfactorily explains. She is not hurt. That is worth stating flatly because the alternative is a reader spending the chapter waiting for it: she takes a bad knock on the hip against something under the surface and has a cut on her forearm that closes in four days instead of twelve, and that is all of the damage. The man lives. His name is Reyes and he is fifty-one and he works for the county, and he spends the rest of his life telling people about it and getting it slightly wrong every time, which Val considers the single most useful thing he ever does. She comes in at eight with her hair flat to her head and no color in it at all — that is the thing Val sees first, before the hip or the forearm, that the river has 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 stands in the kitchen doorway dripping on the floor they put in the year before, and Val takes one look at her and does not say any of the four things she has prepared between two and eight. She says, Sit down. I'll wreck the — Sit down, Kyra. And she gets her out of the wet things and into dry ones, and gets food into her, and does not ask her one question about any part of it for three hours. It comes up at about half past ten, with the two of them on the floor against the sofa because neither has the energy to get up onto it. You're going to say the thing, says 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, 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 does not argue. That is the thing that frightens Val more than the water did — Kyra Davan not arguing is a weather event. You're right, says 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 sits with that for a while. Tell me why. 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 looks at the floor for a long moment. Nobody has ever needed me, says Kyra. Val does 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. Her head is 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 turns 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. Something out in the dark goes past with a siren on it and does not stop. I know, says Val. You don't have to — I know, because I have had it too. Her hands are 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. She does 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, says 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 puts 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 get decided. She will go. She will go every time and Val will not be asked to approve it. She will take the training they are offering through the fire hall, and she will take it badly and argue with the man teaching it, and she will carry a card in her wallet saying she is allowed to be where she is going to be anyway — which Val points out is the first time in four hundred years either of them has voluntarily got themselves onto a list, and Kyra says yes, it is, and I'd like you to think about why that doesn't frighten me. And the one rule, which Val asks for and gets: when somebody watches her do a thing a woman cannot do, she tells her. That night. Not the version where it was nothing. Fine, says Kyra. Done. Anything else? One thing and it is not a term. Go on. You are going to be the woman who goes in. 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 is 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 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 laughs, once, wetly, and says, God, you're strange, and puts her head on Val's shoulder, and they stay on the floor until the fire goes down. The water goes out of the town over the following week and takes a good deal with it. Val does the books for the recovery committee because somebody has to, and finds four separate errors in a county reimbursement schedule and is thanked for it by a woman who has no idea what she has been handed. Kyra gets her card in the April. And eleven years later, in the December, it will happen again, and nobody will telephone her, and she will already be putting her boots on.

Neither of them marks the four hundredth year, and it is not an oversight. Val has known it was coming since about 1998 and decided somewhere in there that she was not going to do anything about it, which for that woman is a considerable act of restraint and which she never once mentions. 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 goes past, and the summer, and in the first week of December the wind comes. It blows for the best part of two days and takes the power out and a good deal of the forest with it, and then it turns warm and rains on a saturated hillside, and the Nehalem does what it did in 1996 and does it worse. Nobody telephones Kyra. That is the arrangement by then and has been for some years: she is on the roster, she has been on it since 1996, and when the water comes up she puts her boots on and goes, and the only person who requires any notification is the woman standing in the kitchen with her arms folded. Take the orange one, says Val. The other one leaks at the shoulder and you know it does. The other one is lucky. The other one is wet. It goes on for three days. Kyra is in it for the whole of the first two and most of the third. Val is at the high school with a clipboard and a card table, which she has not volunteered for and which she is handed inside forty minutes by a woman who has watched her reconcile two lists and has drawn the obvious conclusion. So that is where the two of them are 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 has come through the door is on one list only. It is, Val thinks at various points over those three days, the most useful either of them has ever been in the same week on either world. She says so, in the car, on the Saturday, which is 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 has 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, says Val. That is the whole of it and it is not a dignified sentence and I have no better one. Kyra looks out at the water going past the road. Took you four hundred years to get there, says 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 comes out in the second week of January. It is not an investigation. Nobody in that valley investigates anything about anybody: it is a small town that has been flooded twice in a decade and a woman at the paper has put together a page about what people did, and it is kind all the way through, and that is exactly why it does what it does. There are eleven photographs on the page. Two of them are of Kyra. One is 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 is from February 1996. The woman at the paper has gone and found it. That is the whole of the crime. She has gone down into a box in the back office and found the 1996 coverage and pulled a photograph that ran on an inside page in 1996, and she has put them beside each other, and under them she has written: The same volunteer, two floods apart. Val reads it standing up at the kitchen counter at ten past seven in the morning and does not sit down for nine minutes. It is a nice piece — she wants that understood and so does the chapter. The woman who wrote it meant a compliment and has delivered one, and four hundred people in that valley read it and think good, and not one of them thinks anything else, and not one of them is ever going to. And the two photographs are eleven years apart and they are 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 gets in, and the only difference on that page is the quality of the printing. Kyra comes down at half past seven and reads it over her shoulder and says, Oh, that's lovely of her. It is. Marcia. She lost her garage in it. She was at the school on the — Kyra stops. Val does not say anything at all. She 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 is the single hardest thing she does that year. It takes about four seconds. Ah, says Kyra. They do not discuss it that morning. Kyra goes to work and Val does not, and when she comes back at six the paper is still on the counter where it was and neither of them has moved it. Say the arithmetic, Kyra says. 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 gives it to her, the way she gave it on a treeline above Dymná in 1644, which neither of them says out loud and both of them are thinking about. That page is in a box in the back office of that paper and it will be there in thirty years. 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. Her hand is 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 sits down at the table. How long have we got? Five years. Six at the outside, and I would not take six. Val sits 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 lets 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 is quiet for a while. Then we'll find one, says 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 reaches 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 get to the part that matters, which neither of them has gone near for two hours. I'll have to stop, says 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 is 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, says 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 sits with it. There are other rivers, says 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 turns 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 agrees, 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 sit there until it gets properly dark and neither of them puts a light on. Five years, says 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. She says 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 gets up and comes round the table and puts both arms round her from behind and her face down into the pale of her hair, and stays there for a long time, and does not say anything, because there is a thing being said that does not need any. She goes out nine more times in the five years that follow. Twice for water, four times for the mountain road, once for a man in a barn, and the rest for things that turn out to be nothing and that she goes to anyway. And in the autumn of 2014 they load a truck and go eleven miles up the road to a town of about nine hundred people with a mill that closed before it had a stoplight, and nobody in it has ever heard of either of them, and the fire hall takes her on in the first fortnight.

Val has been working on it for five years and the answer, when it comes, is not a method at all. It is a hole. Here is the hole, and she finds it in the third year, and spends the fourth and the fifth confirming that it is 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 is not forgery and it is not theft and it is nothing either of them has ever done before. It is 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 has known them since 1991, going in through the narrow door and coming out of it with a different name on the far side. It takes nineteen months. It costs a great deal. There is a hearing in a room with four people in it and Val answers every question truthfully except one, and the one is not asked. Sorin, says Kyra, in the car, on the day the first of it comes through. Sorin. You're going to have to say more than that. Val sits with both hands on the wheel in a parking lot in Hillsboro and does not start the engine for about four minutes. I was going to put down something plain. 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, says 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 is 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, says Kyra. That is the respectable one, and it is true, and I checked it four separate ways. And the other one. Val looks out of the windshield at a parking lot in Washington County. I am four hundred and eighty-four years old, 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 does 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. Her voice does 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 got her own form two weeks later and did not need nine seconds or a fortnight or a list, puts her hand flat on the back of Val's neck in a parking lot in Hillsboro. Davan, says Kyra. I know. I wrote it before she'd finished turning the paper round. I know you did, says Val. I have known what you were going to write since about 1991. They come up into Calderveil on a Saturday in the first week of October with a truck and a trailer and everything they have, which is less than people assume. 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 has ever heard of either of them. The thirty-eighth comes in the second week. Kyra says it on the stairs, with a box in her arms, in the middle of saying something else entirely, and Val goes and finds the notebook in a crate marked KITCHEN and writes the date on the page with nothing beside it, standing up, in a house with no curtains in it. That's a good one, says 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 goes on up. Eleven years to the next. Eleven years to the next, says Val, and puts the notebook on a shelf that has nothing else on it. The fire hall takes Kyra on in the first fortnight, which she has predicted and Val has not. The man who runs it is called Bell and he looks at her card and at the twenty-three years of dates on the back of it and asks her one question, which is what she did in oh-seven, and she tells him, and he says, Tuesday nights, and that is the interview. Val gets the library, two days a week to start, because the woman who has been doing it is eighty and tired and because Val reorganizes the whole of the local-history shelf in an afternoon without being asked and then apologizes for it. And on the ninth evening, in a house with a box still in every room, they go up early. There is no plan in it. That stopped being remarkable somewhere around 1899 and stopped being unusual somewhere around 1979, and by 2014 the arranging-at-four-in-the-afternoon is a thing Val does perhaps four times a year, for the pleasure of it, the way a person takes the long way home. The room is dark because there are no curtains and the nearest light is a yard lamp two properties over, and there is a mattress on a floor and nothing else in the room at all. Afterward Val lies there with the whole of the house quiet around her and does not say anything for a long time. Go on, then, says 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, says it. Not arranged. Not in order. Not well. She says that she has been frightened for sixty-six years about the paper and that it is over and she does not know what to do with herself. She says that she spent nine minutes trying to find the right way in and gave up, and that giving up took her four centuries to learn. She says that she did a sum in 1968 she wishes she had never done, and that she did it again that morning in a new kitchen and got the same answer, and that she is going to go on getting it and is not going to carry it alone anymore. She says that there is nothing left in her that she is keeping back — she says it in those words, flatly, because they are the true ones and she stopped looking for better ones about a decade earlier. And she says how lucky she is, which costs her more than any of it, because she has never in four hundred and eighty-four years attributed one single thing to luck and does not believe in it and has a sum for everything. Kyra lets her get all the way to the end of it. Then she says: 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. Her hand is 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 has been going on and neither of them has remarked on it, because they have not remarked on it since Maribor and are not going to start in a town of nine hundred people. It is not saying anything that could be written down. It never has been. It has the size of a thing in it, and the age of it, and whether it is moving, and all three of those have been running steady for some while and have not stopped when the talking did. Val answers it, and is answered, and that is the end of the evening. There is one thing left over and it belongs here. In the November they drive out past the edge of town and up the logging spur and walk the last mile and a half, and stand on the shelf of basalt above Hallam Lake in the rain, which they have done in every decade since 1851 and which they will go on doing. It is an hour from Calderveil. That is the whole of the reason they looked at the town at all, and neither of them said so to the other during five years of looking, and both of them knew. Kyra stands at the edge of it with her hood down because she never uses a hood, and the rain in the dark of her hair, and the copper in it where the light gets in off the water. How much further, says Kyra. It is eleven feet. She is asking nothing. It is the oldest joke in the catalogue and it has been running since a road out of Maribor in 1620. Not far now, says Val. It is a lie, the way it has been a lie for three hundred and ninety-four years. Val Sorin stands 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 says four words that have never once been true, and means them exactly as much as she 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 will put down two coffees that nobody has ordered, and the thing that has been coming for four hundred and nineteen years will 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.