“I know.”
I don’t like the thought of that, but this was the only way I could see through it.
“I kept meaning to send word. Kept meaning to. And then one night I walked back out to the crossing and it didn’t open. The space aroundit is dead and I still don’t know why. I’ve walked out there every night since. It hasn’t changed.”
Gunnar opens his mouth.
“If the next words out of your mouth aredid you try knocking,you’re sleeping in the hallway.”
He closes it.
“I ran theories for a year. Earth. The crossing. Me.”
Her. The fourth one. I’ve never once been able to finish it, and they’re not getting it.
“We know,” Gunnar says. He’s not grinning now. “We crossed at the clearing. The grass is dead thirty feet out, and there’s a shine on that rock, Erik.”
The room goes quiet in a way I don’t care for.
Three years of going out there alone, and it turns out the ground kept minutes.
What I don’t give them is last night. For the first time in three years, that clearing made a sound. Humming. Low, half a bar, gone before I could be sure I’d heard it. An hour later it was standing six inches from me in an elevator, wearing a green dress and asking my jaw if it required a membership.
It’s the answer to the question they crossed a realm to ask, and it’s sitting behind my teeth, and it’s staying there.
That one’s mine. They can have everything else.
“The stories,” I say. “The ones we all got at bedtime, back when we were young… They’ve been circling in my head all this time. In the stories, she was never just one man’s.” I look around the room at what’s left of the most disciplined unit in Teth. “I had a feeling it wouldn’t be only me. Hoped, maybe. Then tonight I watched the four of you come through her door and forget your names.”
“Three,” Gunnar says, from the blanket fort.
Nobody dignifies it.
“So now you’re here. We find out if the door opens for you, since it won’t for me.”
“And if it does?”
“Then we have a way home.”
The word comes out fine. It just doesn’t point to where it used to.
“And her?”
There it is. The question with the whole night folded into it.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know if she can cross. I don’t know if it’s safe for her to. Can you imagine what the Vestry would do? I don’t like it. The not knowing.”
Three years of watching her, and that’s the full report. I’ve got her Sunday order and her real laugh and the way she wins arguments with furniture, and on the only question that matters I’ve got nothing.
They’re too quiet.
“Does she know any of it?” Rayner. The first thing he’s said since her door shut.
“No.”
The word lands in the middle of the floor, and nobody picks it up.
“None of it,” I say, because they need to hear me say it all the way down. “Not Teth. Not the crossing. Not what any of us are. An hour ago someone fucked up and said four hundred. She knows it wasn’t a joke, she just doesn’t know why. That’s where she is. That’s the foundation we’re standing on. Which is basically nothing.”
