CHAPTER 26
Mateo
◆
Sixty-one beats to the minute. I have counted Inés's heart four times since dawn off the monitor at the end of the east passage, because counting is what I do when the thing I am protecting is fragile and the man coming for it is made entirely of patience and edges.
All morning the house has been turning itself from a home into a fortress, and I have listened to it gather.
Boots on the back stair, doubled. The gate motor cycling, locking, cycling again as Pavel runs the soldiers in and out and counts heads against a list. The dull iron tongue of the forecourt bolt going home.
A wall closing, board by board and man by man, around the things inside it that I cannot afford to lose.
I learned this sound at twenty-three with the smell of fire still in my hair, and I had hoped never to need it again, and I need it now.
Under all of it, threaded through like a finer thread through coarse cloth, runs that one small clean beep the whole hardening house is being built around.
Inés's heart, slow and steady and honest, the soft thing at the center of all the iron.
I am standing at the foot of her cot when Dr. Reyes finishes adjusting the line in the back of Inés's hand and steps back, satisfied.
"She's doing better than the chart had any right to predict," Reyes says quietly. "The surgery held. The heart's strong for its age. She should be on her feet inside the week if she rests. " She gathers her kit. "She'll do better here than in any flat across the city, if that's what you're asking."
It is what I was asking. I moved Inés under this roof at first light, ambulance to the gate, Pavel driving, Gael riding the door with his hand inside his coat the whole way and his eyes on every car on the cliff road.
I told myself it was medical. The truth is simpler and colder: I am gathering everyone I am not willing to bury behind one wall, while there is still time to build the wall.
"Thank you," I tell Reyes, and she goes, and I am left with the slow beep and the old woman asleep beneath it, small in the cot, her chest rising under the blanket on its own honest schedule.
Inés Costa's eyes open. They are her daughter's eyes, the same hazel-green, only faded, and they find me without alarm, which is its own kind of bravery in a woman who knows whose house she is in and what my name has done to her family.
"You're the wall," she says. Her voice is thin but clear, and she says it the way you state a fact you've already settled.
"I'm Mateo."
"I know who you are. " A ghost of Amara's dry turn moves across her mouth.
"I'm asking if you're the wall. My daughter writes me letters.
She doesn't say much, but I sew, and you can read a person by what they leave out of a seam.
" Her gaze holds mine. "She left a great deal out about you. That's how I know."
I do not have an answer that is both true and bearable, so I give her the one that is only true.
"I benefited from your ruin, Mrs. Costa.
I won't pretend otherwise to a woman in my infirmary.
The man who built it is my uncle. I intend to take everything he is and lay it at your daughter's feet, and it will not give you back your husband, and I know it. "
She is quiet a moment. The monitor beeps. Sixty-one.
"No," she says. "It won't. " Then, softer, surprising me: "But you didn't lie to a dying woman to make yourself easier to love.
Tomas couldn't do that either. He died holding nothing back.
" Her eyes close again, the brief strength spending itself.
"Take care of her, wall. She's carried everyone else her whole life and never once been carried.
Somebody ought to take a turn under her weight. "
I stand there longer than I should after her breathing evens, listening to the small honest beep go on under the boots and the bolts, and I think that this is the shape of the thing now: a soft sound at the center, and everything hard in me arranging itself around it.
Emil and Gael are waiting in the study when I come down, and the maps are already out.
They are maps of the house, not the city.
Emil has the ground plan of Sokol House laid flat under the lamp, sight-lines penciled in his exact hand, the gate, the forecourt, the cove stair, the boathouse, each marked with a small notation only he can read at a glance.
The black ledger sits closed at his elbow.
He cleans his glasses as I come in — a slow circular motion, the lenses held to the lamp — which means he has finished thinking and does not like the answer.
"Tell me," I say.
"Lev knows we have something for the Council.
" Emil sets the glasses back on his face.
"He has known since the day he came here to provoke you and you refused to bleed.
A man who cannot read your reaction will assume the worst, which in this case is correct.
He has moved his soldiers. Roman has been seen twice on the cliff road in two days.
The official who confirmed the seizure forgery is dead — Roman's work, cleaning the trail behind him — and the only people left who can damage Lev at the elders' table are the four of us and the woman upstairs with chalk on her wrist."
"He's going to grab someone," Gael says from the window.
He is not lounging today. He stands with his shoulders set, switchblade closed in his fist, not flipping it, which from Gael is a louder warning than the whistle.
"That's the play. He can't beat the proof.
So he takes a hostage and makes us no-show the Council or recant it.
Amara or Inés. Probably Amara — Inés is too sick to move and too sick to use, and he's not sentimental about the sick. " His jaw works.
"He grabs her, he owns the room. We walk in to bury him and he sets a photograph on the table instead and we're done."
"That is the correct read," Emil says. "I modeled eleven moves available to him. Nine of them open with taking her."
The foghorn would be out there if it were night. It is day, gray and still, and what I hear instead is the gate motor cycling again, and far down the east passage, faint, the slow beep of a borrowed heart. The whole house hardening around the soft sound. I let it settle into me.
"Then we make taking her impossible," I say.
"Pavel doubles the gate. No one in or out without your say after dark, Gael, and now your say in daylight too.
Pyotr is sending his own men — men loyal to Yuri's memory and not to the chair, which is to say men Lev can't buy back.
They sleep in the great hall tonight. Reyes stays in the house.
Inés does not leave that cot. Amara does not pass the gate. " I look at the plan. "And the cove."
"The cove's the gap," Gael says. "Always has been. Wall's high everywhere but the sea stair. You can't put a soldier on every wet step. " He taps the boathouse on the map. "But it's also the way out. Skiff's down there. Lev comes over the wall, we go down the stair. It cuts both ways."
"Then it's the fallback," I say. "We make a door of it instead of a wound.
We confirm the skiff is fueled and the route is clear, and if this house is ever breached, that is how Inés and Amara leave it and don't look back.
" It is Gael's own line from a rainy day a month ago, handed up the sea stair to her, and I watch him recognize it coming out of my mouth and something flicker in his face that is almost gratitude and almost pain.
"I'll have it ready by dark," he says.
There is a longer argument under the planning, and we have it the way the three of us have argued every hard thing since we were boys, which is fast and low and without ceremony.
Gael wants to strike first. I can see it in him, the coiled want of the blade for a clean target.
"We know where Roman runs," he says. "We know Lev's at Greywater.
We don't wait for him to come over the wall at her.
We go across the Sound tonight and we end it in his own glass house and we're home before the tide turns.
I'll do it myself. I'll whistle the whole way. "
"And then you are a kinslayer who murdered a Council elder in his home the week before that same Council was to judge him," Emil says, not looking up from the plan, his pen moving.
"And the old guard, who currently leans toward us because we are about to prove Lev is the kinslayer, leans away, because we have made ourselves the same animal.
You would win the night and lose the empire by morning.
I have run it. Forty-one outcomes. In thirty-eight of them, killing Lev outside the law makes Lev's case for him from the grave.
" He uncaps, recaps the pen. "Dead, he becomes a martyr the old men can rally to.
Stripped at the table, by their own law, in front of all of them — he becomes nothing.
A man can survive a martyr. No one survives being made nothing. "
I let them both finish. Then I rule, because that is the one thing a Pakhan cannot delegate.
"We do it Emil's way. " I say it quietly, which Gael has learned means it is decided.
"The sixteenth. We take the proof to the elders, we turn Pyotr, we strip Lev by the bratva's own law, and the chair stays clean under us after.
If we kill him in the dark, we inherit the dark.
I am finished inheriting the dark. " I look at my brother, the blade, who has caught a knife for me with his hand and called it Tuesday.
"I'm not asking you to swallow it, Gael. I'm asking you to hold it one more week. Be the wall this time, not the blade. I know what that costs you."
Gael holds my eyes a long moment. Then the switchblade clicks open in his fist, and shut, once, and he nods. "One week," he says. "But if he comes over that wall at her before the sixteenth, all of that's off, and I do whistle, and you let me."
"If he comes over the wall at her," I say, "I'll whistle with you."