Chapter 26

Baldr stands at his desk over the tipped jar of pens, counting them with one finger. Ninety-nine. His other wrist is bandaged where a dog bit it four days ago. He touches the inside of that wrist, where a thin thread used to pull.

He looks out of the window. Where the Protocol Tower stood for three hundred years there is a gap in the sky, full of falling snow and settling dust.

Baldr sits on the edge of the bed. Edda is rumpled and sleepy, clutching her knitted wolf.

He takes the card he signed for her five nights ago, "To little Edda, eight years old!", out of his cardigan pocket and folds her small hand around it.

She's asleep before he finishes the sentence, the card in her fist. He tucks the quilt around her, kisses her forehead, and leaves the door open a crack, the way she likes it.

He turns from the door. In his own armchair by the fire, barefoot, eight blades crossed on her back, sits Rougeina. The panther lies on the hearthrug as if it has always lived there. Already there.

Not startled. A man who has been expecting a visitor for a long time.

He crosses to his desk, slowly, and sits down behind it. On the desk among the decrees lies the fracture-record shard he took from Vigolas, glowing faintly. He picks one of the ninety-nine ordinary silver pens out of the tipped jar and turns it in his fingers.

the fire between them.

He writes fast and neat, without looking down: Rougeina: stop. The Signet glows white on the back of his hand as he signs.

Blink. She Swaps with the iron poker leaning by the fire. The poker, now where she sat, goes rigid in mid-air above the armchair, quivering, stopped. She is standing by the bookshelf.

He writes again: Rougeina: drop the blade.

Blink. She Swaps with a birthday card pinned to the wall. The card, now where she stood, drops flat to the floor. She is by the window.

whispering across the room.

taking a second pen from the jar in his left hand. Two pens now.

But she can't close the distance. Every time she Swaps toward the desk, a new slip is already being signed, Rougeina: step back., and she has to Swap away before the ink lands.

The wound from five nights ago has opened again, and the dark stain is spreading under her tunic. Her breathing is ragged.

sweat on his brow too, still writing.

The window, open, snow drifting in. Kompis climbs over the sill with Mingus at his heels and the silver pen in his hand. The real one.

glancing up. For a moment, genuine warmth.

already writing: Kompis: give me the—

The golden pulse line.

The blizzard of slips hangs frozen in the air. Baldr's pen is frozen mid-word. Kompis snatches a blank slip out of the frozen snowfall and writes with the old man's own silver pen. A thousand tries: his hand shaking, the letters crooked, the nib skipping, a slip tearing. He throws away every try that fails and keeps the one where four short words come out clean, in a perfect agent's hand, the hand Mother Sela taught him.

Baldr: put down the pen.

Kompis slides the slip across the desk. Blood runs from his nose and his knees are shaking. Baldr's own sentence is one word short of finished.

reading the slip. His own ink. His own pen. His own law.

It trembles. Then, slowly and neatly, the way he has put down a pen a hundred thousand times at the end of a day's work, he lays the pen down on the desk.

All around the room every signed slip in the air drops at once, like snow when the wind stops. The chair unfolds. The lamp relights. The clock ticks again.

looking at the order, then up at Kompis. A sad smile.

flinching as if he has been slapped.

Rougeina walks to the desk. She takes a shard from inside her tunic and sets it down in front of him: a soldier-woman being forced into a body far too old for her, and a label burning in the glass: ROUTED BY ORDER OF ARCHITECT THREE.

looking at the shard for a long time.

moving, for one beat, from her mother's shard to the other shard on his desk, the fracture record, where a silver figure stands inside a mirror. Then back. He says nothing.

turning his head toward the door that's open a crack.

A long silence. Then:

He takes off his reading glasses, folds them and lays them beside the pen, like a man putting himself away for the night.

Rougeina's silver blade passes through his heart, drawn as one line of light. Nothing else. The old man's eyes close. The fire burns. On the back of his hand the Signet lifts off the skin like a leaf, goes dark, and drifts up the chimney with the sparks, toward the peak.

(a) Baldr fades like breath on a mirror. The cardigan slumps, empty, in the chair. The folded reading glasses lie on the desk beside the pen.

(b) The wall of birthday cards: every silver signature, hundreds of them, unwrites itself at once, letter by letter, leaving rows of cards signed by no one.

(c) Kompis blinks. He is standing in a stranger's warm study with a silver pen in his hand and blood on his lip, next to an empty cardigan in a chair.

He watches a thread snap in the air and dissolve out of everyone in the world at once: out of the house, out of the city, out of him. Only one person is still holding the end of it. Rougeina.

picking up the slip on the desk. The silver ink reads: : put down the pen. The name in front of it is gone.

Rougeina picks up the fracture-record shard and slips it into her tunic beside her mother's. Kompis looks at the silver pen in his own hand, frowns, and puts it in his pocket without knowing why.

Rougeina stands at the threshold. She doesn't go in. In the light of the little moon-lamp Edda sleeps, the knitted wolf under one arm and the birthday card in her fist: "To little Edda, eight years old!" Below it, where a name was signed, there is nothing.

the only person in the whole world who remembers.