“I map everything. Occupational habit.”
“What is the occupation?”
“Knowing where I am.” I pry a chip loose. “You’d be surprised how many people don’t.”
He watches me work a moment longer than the work requires. Then he goes.
On the fifth day I find the blocked doorway.
It is at the end of the west corridor, past the section I cleared yesterday. The doorway is sealed with a different stone than the corridor walls. Rough-cut. Fitted without the care of the rest ofthe building. A mat of dead roots has grown into the seal and dried, brown and brittle.
I put my palm on the sealed stone.
Warm. Not the ambient heat of the building; something behind the stone, pushing through.
I hold my palm there and it seeps into my hand. Older than his compound. Deeper. A slow heat that has nothing to do with venom.
I go to the main hall. He is coiled near the supply room, sorting dried provisions.
“There’s a sealed doorway at the end of the west corridor,” I say. “The stone is warm.”
He stops sorting. His face has gone flat. Closed. Every line of expression pulled inward.
“Don’t go past the seal.”
“I wasn’t going to. I’m telling you it’s warm. It’s weird.”
“I know.”
I wait. He does not offer more. His hands are still on the provisions. His shoulders have changed angle. Whatever is behind that doorway, it costs him something to think about it.
“OK,” I say. I go back to the corridor.
I write on the sheet that has become my map of this place:sealed doorway, west corridor. Warm. He is not telling me what he knows.
That evening, after the meal, I sit on my bedroll with my hands on my knees and think about the warm stone, the closed look on his face, the pale spot on the floor where he coils.
Tomorrow the corridors will be narrow again, he will be close, and neither of us will pull away.
I am happy here. The thought arrives plain, without ceremony. It has been a long time since I had to recognize the feeling from memory.
I pick up the charcoal and draw the sealed doorway.
VADH
On the seventh morning, my venom in the bowl looks different.
I coil over it in the lower hall, my palms held above the rim, feeling the effort of drawing the compound through my glands, the slow drip into the vessel. The liquid pools. Cloudy. Amber at the edges.
But the amber is lighter than it was yesterday. I think.
I have imagined this before. Wanting a thing to be true can make your eyes lie. I pour the venom into the channel entry, and I put the color out of my head.
I go back to the upper levels.
She is already working in the west corridor, and I find her by the rasp of her work three corridors away. I have been able to place her for two days now. Which section she is in by the sound, when she leaves a room by the shift in the corridor air. A change so small it should not register, but now my body is tracking it.
This is new.
