Four days after Mira left, Cael was still working on the same page.

  The chair was new — new to him, anyway. A depot on Creel, two streets west, sold it to him for six dollars: pressed wood, four legs, a back that leaned at a degree or two past vertical and didn't apologize for it. Carried it back under one arm. The woman behind the counter hadn't commented. It sat now in the corner at the angle he'd wanted, and three of the four days had gone by with the low thought it should have come earlier, without understanding why it hadn't.

  The clothes were a different calculation. One set since the condemned building — jacket from a donation box, the rest from necessity. At some point in week two the state of the pages had dropped out of his awareness. Mrs. Vanek had noticed. Nothing direct. What she'd done was mention, twice, in passing, that the laundry machine in the basement ran on Tuesdays and Saturdays, coin-operated, that the detergent was on the shelf above it, and that he was welcome to the shelf.

  A second set from the market — nothing that fit well, everything that fit fine — and a small eraser from the stationery shelf — working without one since Creel Street, hadn't noticed until now — and the machine on a Tuesday morning, Mrs. Vanek somewhere above, Karel supervising from the dryer top with the air of a building inspector who had found the situation adequate. First set on the line in the yard, second set on, and then back upstairs to sit in the new chair and understand that he'd been living like someone about to leave and had now, quietly, settled.

  The chair was there. The clothes were clean. That had to count.

  The figures from the second visit to the park filled the upper two thirds — the woman on the bench, the man with the dog, a kid he'd caught mid-stride across the grass. The lower third had been blank for two days while he worked out what went there. He'd tried the card. The two symbols hadn't resolved as he'd wanted — too composed, too controlled. He'd erased it and left the space blank again.

  The card was under the sill next to the book when he wasn't holding it. Never left anywhere public, symbols up. He hadn't decided.

  Being rescued by Ouranos is not the same as being safe. Mira's voice, which had lodged somewhere without asking — there whether he called for it or not. It trades one kind of fear for another.

  He'd been turning that over. No resolution in it. A thing he couldn't set down.

  Three months of incidents turned over in his head — everything walked past, heard between floors, clocked and filed and told himself wasn't his to carry. Every one pressed the same: you could. He could. He almost always could. That wasn't the question Mira had answered. What she'd answered was the one after it.

  The knock was Mrs. Vanek's — three raps, no-nonsense — but she was holding a clipboard instead of a wrench, and her color was better than the last time he'd seen her in the hallway. No episode today. She'd slept.

  "Rent's not due," he said.

  "I know when rent's due." She looked at the clipboard, then at him. "Water pressure on the third floor is dropping. You'll notice it in two days if I don't get to the valve this afternoon." She made a note. "Not your problem. Notice when it's fixed."

  He nodded.

  She didn't leave immediately. Her eyes went over his shoulder to the room — the boards, the book, the east window — with the brief inventory she'd built across years of this. Whatever she thought, she kept it.

  "The girl on the second floor," she said, to the clipboard. "She made a call this morning about storage." A short pause — not hesitation — more considered than that. "A lot of calls today. Early."

  He waited.

  "I'm telling you because you hear what goes on here and you shouldn't have to be surprised by it." She clicked the pen. The right hand, he noticed — steady this morning. "Whatever happens down there this afternoon, I'd rather you were ready for it than not." She turned and went back to the stairs without waiting for an answer.

  Cael stood in the open doorway for a moment.

  Then he closed it and sat back down with the sketchbook.

  Downstairs at half past two for no clear reason — or the clearest one: the room for six hours and his body didn't mind but some other part of him had run dry. He'd been like that more since Mira's visit. Less inclined to sit. More inclined to walk the city without a destination and see what the streets gave him.

  He got as far as the second floor landing.

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  The door to the left apartment was ajar — opened and left, not pushed closed. Behind it: a lamp, a strip of baseboard, a coat rack with two jackets on it. What leaked past the gap wasn't quite an argument — close enough. A man's voice, low, framing flat words in a tone that made them mean something else.

  "You're not going to carry all of that."

  A flat statement. Polite on the surface. Said by someone who doesn't need to threaten because the threat is already in the room.

  Cael stopped on the landing.

  The door opened fully. Sera came out first — a bag over one shoulder, a second smaller one in her left hand, chin up, the posture of a decision already made and not up for discussion. She was twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. He'd seen her twice in the stairwell and once in the entrance. Both times she'd glanced past him with the practiced non-acknowledgment of someone managing their exposure.

  Dav followed.

  Bigger than the voice had suggested — broad across the shoulders, a few years older, the physical size of a man who'd never needed to move fast. The weight of a man for whom this had never gone wrong yet.

  "You left the keys on the table," he said. Conversational. Careful with nothing in it. "You should take those."

  "I have what I need." Flat. Even.

  "You're going to need those keys." Flat, unhurried. He took one step toward her. "Let's go back inside and talk about this."

  She kept walking. Three steps toward the stairs — past Cael's landing, toward the ground floor — and then Dav's hand closed around her upper arm and she stopped.

  No yank, nothing dramatic. A hand placed exactly where it needed to be. The precision of practice.

  Cael crossed the last three stairs and stepped off the landing.

  He didn't say anything. He held at four feet and stood there — arms loose, weight on both feet.

  Dav heard him. He turned his head — a practiced rotation — taking in the situation without appearing to. His eyes tracked over Cael once. The assessment was fast and visible and when it finished something shifted in the back of it, briefly, before the flat calm came back down like a shutter.

  He'd seen it and had no category for it yet.

  It didn't move immediately. One more second — testing, Cael thought, or deciding — and then it dropped.

  "Who are you." Said flat. Not a question, quite.

  Cael didn't answer.

  Dav held his gaze for another beat. Then his gaze dropped to Sera — nothing in it — the look of a decision already made — and stepped back in.

  Sera paused. Then she turned toward the stairs, the bag in her hand, one step and then another, and Cael was about to let out the breath he hadn't taken when it came through the walls — low, almost conversational.

  "Come back inside."

  Sera stopped. Her hand tightened on the bag strap. She kept her back to it.

  It opened.

  Cael went back upstairs.

  He sat with the sketchbook and didn't open it.

  He'd done what Mira said. He'd stood there. It had dropped. Sera had two feet on the stairs and a bag packed and four days' calls made, and she would walk out, and that was what it was supposed to go.

  He opened the sketchbook. Put a line down. The beginning of a hand.

  The first sound came eleven minutes later.

  Below a shout entirely — compressed, wanting to be louder, held below a shout. Then an interior door taking an impact — the frame, the hinges, weight thrown against it. Then silence. Then the acoustic texture of something absorbing force. Walls deflect. This deflected nothing.

  He put the pencil down.

  Then Dav — low and even, a question at the edges. Cael couldn't make out the words across two floors of concrete and old wood. He didn't need to. He knew the cadence — it had come from the hallway. A man taking his time.

  Then the answer didn't come fast enough.

  The impact that followed was different from the first. Heavier. What had been upright wasn't. Then a second impact, and this one had a pitch to it that Cael's brain had ceased filing — it belonged to the category of things he was capable of and didn't let himself think about — what force costs when it lands on something that yields — the frequency a body makes discovering limits it hadn't agreed to.

  Being rescued by Ouranos is not the same as being safe. Still there. Level and reasonable, even now. She doesn't know who you are.

  He pressed his back to the wall and held it.

  Dav had left the window open. The east wind arrived with the street noise — the wrong-direction wind, the canal wind, carrying rot and standing water and the smell of whatever the city had stopped maintaining east of Creel. He'd noticed it before. Tonight it was heavier, bad air staying stagnant when nothing moves it.

  Thirty seconds. He counted them out and held the time, careful not to drop it.

  Then a sound that cut across all the counting — short, involuntary, a body losing its air, something it hadn't braced for. And under it, muffled by two floors and old plaster and the distance that was supposed to make this manageable: crying. Low, controlled, the kind that's trying to stay quiet. The kind you learn.

  He was on his feet before the thirty seconds finished.

  He made himself stop.

  Mrs. Vanek was in the hallway in a housecoat, Karel a pale shape behind her ankles, her color off — not her heart this time. Her eyes found him without preamble.

  "I'm not asking you to do anything I can stop." Low and even. "I'm asking you to do something I can't." She didn't look away. "I've called no one. There's no one to call."

  From below: another impact. Then crying, muffled, pressed down, the pitch of someone keeping it inside a room.

  Mrs. Vanek didn't look away.

  Cael went down the stairs.

  He stopped at the second floor landing — unmarked frame. Dav's voice on the other side — low and unhurried, one-sided, the pauses longer than conversation: a phone call. Underneath it, Sera's breathing — ragged, trying to find itself.

  He raised his hand and knocked.

  The voice cut off.

  He knocked again — deliberate, even — a knock that said: I know you're there and I'm not leaving — and then, because Dav had the math all wrong and it was time he understood, Cael put his fist through the door.

  Not the lock — the wood itself. It gave like all materials gave when he decided they should — without argument, without drama. Gone. His hand came through clean and he pulled back and there was a hole in the wood, large enough to see through. Dav's face on the other side.

  The math resolved.

  Cael reached through, found the interior handle, and let himself in.