Chapter 167: The Pier
Ryuji ran.
He did not decide to. His legs started before the rest of him had agreed, and he was past the cemetery gate and halfway down the hill before the old calm in his head finished its sentence. Alone, it said. Fast. You can reach the pier in six minutes if you do not stop.
Behind him, the false Keiko stood in the road with her hands folded and watched him go. She did not follow. She looked pleased.
Then Selene’s voice came up through the thread under his collarbone, small and tight, as if she were speaking through a keyhole.
Ryuji. Stop.
He slowed. His breath came hard. "Selene."
Do not run alone. I am on my way. I have only just learned how to ride this machine and I intend to use it. A pause, and a crackle that might have been a very large truck. Wait for the sound of it. Then get on.
"It’s a mile."
Then you will wait for the sound of it for one minute. Her voice softened by a hair. I am asking you. Please.
He stood in the middle of the hill road, chest heaving, every instinct he owned screaming at him to go. Sixty seconds. Sixty. He put two fingers on his wrist and found nothing, because his heart was hammering at a rate that meant nothing, and then, deliberately, he reached for the pulse that lived in the thread. Sixty-eight. Steady. Hers.
At fifty-one seconds the scooter came screaming up the road with Tetsu hunched over the handlebars and Selene wedged behind him, hair whipping, face set like a woman being carried into battle on the back of a goat.
"Get on," she said, in the common tongue.
"There’s no room."
"There is room if you hold on and do not complain."
He got on. Three people on a machine built for one, Tetsu’s elbows in his ribs, Selene’s arms clamped around his waist from behind and her chin jammed against his shoulder blade. The scooter lurched, coughed, and shot down the hill like a flung stone.
"For the record," Selene shouted into his ear, "I still have nineteen hours of anger."
"Noted!"
"I am telling you so you will not be confused!"
"I’m not confused!"
"You always say that!"
[System Log: Day 171, continued]
[THREE ADULTS ON A SMALL ENGINE. I HAVE FILED THIS UNDER "A SIGHT"]
[I CANNOT SEE THE PIER YET. I CAN HEAR IT]
[SOMEONE IS ARRIVING]
Light flared at the end of the pier before they reached it.
It was a clean circle of white, spread across the weathered boards like a cut from a sky, and in the center of it two figures stood with their arms around each other. One was tall and silver-haired and still wearing the traveling cloak Marro had pressed on her at the circle. One was small, young, and out of breath, holding a lantern that had gone out.
Mireille turned in a slow half circle, taking in the gray harbor, the cranes, the cold sea wind. Her mouth was open. Her free hand had gone to her chest.
"It smells like salt," she whispered. "Oh. Yui. It smells like home."
"It smells like diesel," Yui said, wiping her eyes. "But sure."
At the far end of the pier, a man stood with two paper cups in his hands.
He was thin and tall in a rumpled coat the color of old rain, hair tousled by the wind, shoulders a little rounded as if from a lifetime of bending over small print. He looked about forty. He was smiling at her with such open, boyish delight that for a moment even Yui, who knew better, forgot to breathe.
"Mimi," said Dmitri.
The sound that came out of Mireille was not a word.
She took a step. Then another. Her hand came up, trembling, and the younger man held out one of the cups with the same shy, hopeful gesture he must have made a thousand years ago on this same spot. Steam curled from it. The pier lamp caught the gold in his hair.
"You are late," he said. "The tea is getting cold."
"Mom," Yui said.
"He is alive," Mireille whispered. "He is alive, Yui. Look at him."
"Mom, wait."
"He is not dying. He is not gray. I thought he was old, I thought..." Her voice broke. "He is thirty-nine. He is exactly as I remember."
"That’s the problem," Yui said.
The man smiled at her gently. "Come and sit with me, Mimi. Just for a moment. Just until the sun is up. I have been waiting so long."
"Mom."
"I know," Mireille said. She had not stopped moving. "I know it is wrong. I know what he must look like now. I only want one moment."
The pier was very quiet. A gull cried somewhere.
Yui moved.
She was small and exhausted and had aged ten years in a ritual she had volunteered for, and she put herself between her mother and the thin man in the coat with her back to him and both hands flat on Mireille’s chest.
"Mom. Listen to me." Her voice shook but did not break. "I spent twenty years in fragments. I know every kind of fake door there is. They look right. They sound right. They feel right. And they have no smell."
Mireille blinked.
"The cup is steaming," Yui said, "and there’s no tea in the air. The sea’s right there and he doesn’t smell like salt. He’s not breathing, Mom. Look at his coat. The wind’s pushing everything else on this pier and it isn’t touching him."
Mireille turned her head.
The coat hung perfectly still. The hair did not stir. The man’s smile, lit from beneath by the lamp, was very, very patient.
"Oh," Mireille said, very quietly.
"He’s not here," Yui said. "He’s waiting for you to be tired enough to say yes."
The smile slid off the man’s face like water off glass.
"Clever girl," said a dozen voices.
Ryuji hit the pier at a dead run and skidded across the boards, with Tetsu a half step behind him and Selene still clinging to the scooter’s back seat, hair in her eyes. He put himself between his mother and sister and the thing at the end of the pier, and then, deliberately, he took one step back and to the side, so that Selene, stumbling off the wreck of the scooter, could stand at his shoulder.
"Beside," he said, without looking.
"Of course," Selene gasped. She was gray in the face. "I only wished to enter with dignity."
"You came in on a scooter."
"It was a very dignified scooter."
The thing at the end of the pier shed its coat of rumpled gray, and the outline of the young Dmitri blurred, rippled, and rebuilt. Taller. Straighter. A white coat, neat as a doctor’s, pale hair cut close. A face so smooth it had no age. In each hand it still held a cup of tea, and the steam from the cups did not move.
"Keeper," it said. It sounded almost fond. "At last."
"You lied about tomorrow."
"I lied about many things. It is the nature of an offer." It held out one of the cups. "I will make it again, and plainly, since you are a practical man. There are four of you who are dying. Dmitri, with a year of key-burn in his lungs. The old man in the grave, who is a pin and will be one forever. Your wife, whom I broke once and may break again. And you, who will turn the key in a friend, or watch the sky come down."
"I haven’t agreed to any of that."
"No. You would like to be asked a different question." The thing smiled. "Here it is. Open the Door. Here. Now. One turn. And Dmitri breathes. The pin sleeps. Mireille and Yui keep their twenty years. Your wife keeps her silver hair. Everyone you have ever loved keeps everything, and no one pays."
Ryuji felt it. He felt it like a hand closing on the back of his neck. It was so tidy. It was so clean. A ledger with a single line, and no cost, and no one to bury.
The key under his collarbone throbbed once, slow and hungry.
Beside him, Selene was very still.
"Ryuji," she said, quietly, in the common tongue. "Look at me."
He did not want to. If he looked at her, he would not be able to say no.
"Please."
He turned.
She was standing very straight, with her hands in her sleeves, her silver hair whipped across her face, her eyes enormous and bright. She did not look like a princess. She looked like a woman who had been awake for two days and had decided to be brave about it.
"I am not going to tell you what to do," she said. "I have learned that lesson. I will tell you what I will do. If you open it for love, you give it exactly what it asked for. If you open it for me, I will never forgive you." Her voice shook. "I will not need to be angry for another day. I will be angry for the rest of my life. Do you understand?"
"Selene."
"I mean it. I would rather be cold and alive and furious at you for sixty years than warm for one day in a world you opened." She drew a breath. "That is my vote. You said I did not have one. I do."
He stared at her. A laugh rose in his chest, hysterical and tender, and died there.
"You’re counting," he said, hoarsely.
"Someone must." She reached out and laid two fingers against the inside of his wrist. "Fifty-two. You are alive. You are here. Now say it."
"Say what?"
"No. You were about to say no. I could hear it."
He opened his mouth.
"No," he said, and it came out stronger than he expected. "I don’t trade."
The thing at the end of the pier tilted its head, the way a man might consider a child’s drawing.
"That is the second time you have said it," it said. "Do you know what it is I want from you, keeper? Not the key. Not the Door. I have waited four thousand years for something much smaller."
"Then say it."
"I want," said the thing, and its voice changed, thinned, slid down and sideways until it was no longer many voices but one, quiet, tired, entirely familiar, "for one of you to stop counting."
It was Ryuji’s own voice.
His blood ran cold. Beside him, he heard Tetsu draw in a sharp breath. Mireille’s hand went to her mouth.
"I have been counting alone since the day he took you in," the voice said, in Ryuji’s own flat, careful cadence. "Do you know how heavy it is? Do you know how long I have waited for someone else to carry it?"
"You’re not me," Ryuji said.
"No." The thing smiled his own smile. "But I wear your habits very well."
The seam in the sky above the pier was opening now, a thin vertical line of cold light a hundred feet tall, and the wind coming through it smelled of old coins.
"Count the cups, keeper," said the voice that was his. "I made three."
Ryuji looked down.
The thing at the end of the pier held two. Steam rose from them, unmoving. He counted them, once, twice.
Then he felt it, warm and light and perfectly balanced in his right hand, where it had no business being.
A third paper cup. Full to the brim. Steaming.
He did not remember taking it.