The long night (2)

"I have one," said Emeric, and cleared his throat in the manner of a man about to read a paper to a society that has been kind enough to invite him twice.

"Go on," said Vivienne.

"You are the steward of a house. Not the owner — the steward. The owner is gone, has been gone a long while, may never return. The house has rules, left by the owner, for the keeping of it: which rooms are to be aired, which doors are never to stand open past dusk, which key is never to leave the ring. You do not know why the rules exist. You have followed them faithfully for years, and the house has never once come to harm under your keeping. One night there is a fire in a room whose door the rules forbid you to open after dark. Someone may be inside. You do not know. The rule says the door stays shut till morning." He looked around, gravely. "Do you open it?"

"Yes," said Rafaela, before he had quite finished the sentence. "Obviously yes. A fire doesn't wait for morning. You open every door there is."

"Even the one rule that has never once failed you?"

"Especially that one. That's not a rule protecting the house anymore, if it's letting somebody burn. It stopped being that rule the second there was a fire behind it."

"I'd open it," said Kenji. "I don't need to know why the rule exists to know that a person, if there is one, outranks it. I'd open every door in the house before I let the rule decide for me who lives."

"I wouldn't," said Emeric, quietly, and the room, which had been moving toward a consensus with the easy velocity of water finding a slope, stopped. "I want to say why, because I know how it sounds, and I'd rather you heard the reasoning than assumed the worst version of it."

"Go on," said Vivienne, and there was no judgment in it, only patience.

"I don't know why the rule exists," said Emeric. "That's the whole of my case. I don't know what's kept safe by that door staying shut. It may be nothing. It may be that the room floods, or the floor gives, or there is something in that room that a fire loosens which is worse than the fire. I have followed the rules faithfully for years without asking why, and the house has never once come to harm — and I think that record means something. I think a house that has never harmed anyone under its own rules has earned the benefit of a doubt I cannot personally supply from panic, at night, with a fire going." He was very still as he said it, his hands folded with a precision that looked, to Neiman, like the discipline of a man holding something down. "I would try every other door first. I would call out. I would do everything the rules permit. And if it came to the last door, the forbidden one, with time running out and no other way — " He stopped.

"Yes?" said Vivienne, gently.

"I don't know," said Emeric, and it seemed to cost him something considerable to say it. "I have never once, in my life, not known what a rule required of me. I find I don't care for it."

"That's the honest answer," said Vivienne. "Thank you for staying inside it instead of reaching for a tidy one."

"I'd have thought less of him for a tidy one," said Beatrix, unexpectedly, and Emeric looked at her with such naked gratitude that Adaeze, watching, made a small sound that was not quite a laugh.

"I think," said Lucian, when his turn came, into the small pause that followed, "that I wouldn't be able to decide at all, standing there. I think I'd freeze, and somebody else would have to open it, or not, and I think that's the true answer, even though it's an awful one to have to say out loud." He hummed something very low, very slow, almost beneath hearing. "I don't like fires. I don't like the sound of them. They don't have a shape you can follow — they just get louder and then they don't. I don't trust anything that doesn't resolve."

"You wouldn't open it," said Rafaela, and it was not quite an accusation, but it was close to one. "You'd just stand there."

"I might," said Lucian, without any defensiveness at all, which seemed, somehow, to take the edge off her voice before it could properly land. "I'm not proud of that. I'm only telling you what I think is true, because that's what we're doing tonight, isn't it. Telling the true thing instead of the flattering one."

"That's exactly what we're doing," said Vivienne, and something in her tone, very briefly, softened toward him the way it had softened toward Idris the day before; Neiman noted it, filed it, and returned his attention to the circle.

"I'd open it and burn the rest of the rota deciding whether I regretted it," said Adaeze, "which I recognize is not an answer to the question you actually asked, but it is the true shape of how I make decisions, so I'm giving it to you anyway."

"I would open it," said Saoirse, "and I would tell the owner, if he ever came home, the most beautiful version of why. I don't think that's dishonest. I think it's the only kind of honesty that lets a person live with a hard choice afterward. You tell it plainly to yourself, once, in the dark, and then you tell everyone else the version that lets them forgive you."

"Those can be different versions?" said Beatrix.

"They're always different versions, darling. Nobody survives on the plain one alone."

"I disagree," said Beatrix, "but I don't think either of us can prove it tonight," which was, from her, very nearly a joke, and Margo, beside her, smiled without looking up.

Neiman, when it reached him, found that he had, for once, nothing prepared, and said so.

"I don't know," he said. "I think that's the honest answer, and I think it's a worse one than Lucian's, because his not-knowing comes from somewhere I believe, and mine, I suspect, comes from having spent so long imagining other people's crises that I've never had the discipline to imagine my own all the way through. I expect I'd open it. I expect I'd tell myself, afterward, a story about why, and the story would be flattering, and I don't think I'd examine it very closely, because examining it closely has never yet been useful to me." He paused. "I notice that's not really about the door at all."

"No," said Vivienne, watching him. "It isn't."

---

They rested, after that, for a while — not sleep, but a kind of loosening, in which the twelve of them broke, unhurried, into smaller shapes again: Margo and Adaeze resuming their long argument about words, this time concerning whether a recipe could be a lie; Kenji checking, gently, methodically, on each of them in turn, a ritual that had stopped needing an excuse; Rafaela pacing her forty-meter track with something closer to peace in it than there had been that morning. Beatrix sat with her ankles crossed and did not speak to anyone for some time, and when Neiman drifted near her again she said, without looking up, "You've asked me four questions today. I've kept the count."

"I didn't realize you were counting that as well."

"I count everything. It's not a special category."

He sat beside her, and for a while neither of them said anything, and it was, again, not an unpleasant silence, though it had, he thought, a different weight to it now than it had that afternoon — less an inventory being taken, more a truce being kept.

"You don't ask people things unless you already suspect the answer," said Beatrix, eventually. "I've noticed that as well."

"Have I asked you something I already knew the answer to?"

"You asked what I do with names, when they go. You didn't need to ask. You'd already worked out that I keep the person and lose the label. You asked it so that I would say it myself, instead of you saying it and being wrong about some small part of it." She considered this. "That's not a criticism. I do something similar. I state things so that people will correct the details, and then I have the corrected version, which is more accurate than anything I could have produced on my own. We use different tools for the same errand."

"That's a generous reading."

"It isn't generous. It's accurate. I don't have room for the generous kind." She glanced at him, briefly, sideways. "Beatrix — Idris — birthday," she said, in the manner of a woman reading three items off a short list. "He asked me at hour nine. I told him mine. He didn't ask anyone else yet. He's saving it, I think, for the end of the day, as he said he would."

"Did you mind him asking?"

"No," said Beatrix. "I minded that I couldn't remember why I minded things in general, which is a much larger problem, and not one you can solve for me by asking about a birthday."

---

It was some while later — closer, by Beatrix's ledger, to the seventeenth hour, though Lucian's private tempo put it nearer the nineteenth, and Idris, doing sums nobody had asked for, split the difference and declared himself unconvinced by both — that Kenji asked his question, and it was the one that cut nearest the bone, though nobody but Idris seemed to feel it happen.

"I have one," Kenji said, and there was something in the careful evenness of his voice that made Vivienne look up sharply, as though she had heard a change in a patient's breathing before the patient had. "You are one of two people who can make a decision. There is not time for both of you to decide together — the moment requires one voice, now, and there are more people who need help than there are hands to help them. You have a method. It is cold, and it is fast, and it has never yet been shown to be wrong when there was time to check it. Do you use it?"

There was a silence, and it had a different quality than the others had had; Neiman felt it settle over the group like a held breath that several of them had not chosen to hold.

"I don't think that's a fair question to have asked in this shape," said Idris, quietly, into it, "but I'll answer it anyway, because I think you've earned the asking." He did not look at Kenji. He looked at his own hands. "Yes. I'd use it. I think a method that's never been wrong, when there was time to check it, is worth more than my discomfort at using it under pressure. I think refusing to use a good tool because the moment is ugly is a kind of vanity dressed up as conscience."

"I wouldn't use it," said Kenji, and his voice had not changed at all, which was, Neiman thought, somehow worse than if it had. "Not because the method is wrong. I don't doubt the method. I doubt what happens to a person who learns to reach for it first, in the worst moment, instead of last. I think the method is patient. I think it will wait as long as you let it, and get a little easier to reach for each time, until one day it isn't the tool anymore. It's the whole hand."

"That's not a rebuttal," said Idris. "That's a fear about me."

"It might be both," said Kenji, gently.

"I'd rather you say the fear plainly than dress it as philosophy."

"All right," said Kenji, and for the first time all day something in his composure gave, not much, a hairline. "I'm afraid of a room where the only people trusted to decide are the ones who've made peace with deciding by numbers. I've seen what that room does to the people left outside it. I've been in it." He stopped there, visibly, deliberately, the way a man stops at the edge of a subject he has decided not to cross tonight. "That's the whole of it. I don't think you're wrong to trust your method. I think I'm right to be afraid of what happens after everyone else decides to trust it too."

Idris was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again his voice had lost its usual hedge entirely, which made it, oddly, sound less certain rather than more.

"I don't think I'm going to convince you," he said, "and I don't think you're going to convince me, and I think that's probably going to matter later, and I'd rather know that now than find it out at a worse time." It was, Neiman noticed, almost exactly Emeric's line from an hour before, borrowed without credit, and it fit Idris's mouth as if it had been made for it.

"I think it's going to matter later too," said Kenji, and there was no hostility in it at all, only a kind of sorrowful clarity, the tone of a man reading a chart he had hoped would say something else. "I hope one of us is wrong."

"So do I," said Idris.

Across the circle, Vivienne said nothing, but Neiman saw her watching the two of them with an attention that had nothing casual in it, filing the exchange the way Beatrix filed a fact, for later use.

---

It was Sophia, in the end, who broke the mood, and she did it the way she broke most things, by simply refusing to let it stay heavy for longer than she could bear.

"Okay, but can I ask one that isn't sad," she said, sitting up so fast the wire bird in her lap nearly fell. "Everyone's has been so — I love it, I do, I think it's really important, but I'm going to have a whole — I'm going to need, like, a week to recover from tonight, emotionally, and there's no week, there's not even a day left, so can I ask a fun one? Is that allowed? Vivienne, is that allowed?"

"It's allowed," said Vivienne, and there was, unmistakably, the ghost of a smile in it.

"Okay. Okay. If you could know one thing — just one — about any one of the eleven other people in this circle, right now, guaranteed true, no take-backs — who would you ask, and what would you ask them?"

"That's not fun," said Margo. "That's the same question with better manners."

"It's different," Sophia insisted. "It's not about what you'd do. It's about what you'd want to know. That's so different. Come on. I'll go first, obviously, since I asked it." She looked around the circle with her whole undefended face, and then, unexpectedly, did not choose the person everyone might have guessed. "I'd ask Beatrix," she said, "why she doesn't keep the names. Not the mechanism — I believe the mechanism, I believe you, truly — I mean why. What the very first name was, that didn't stay. I think there's a real answer under the fact, and I think it's the answer, not the fact, that I actually want."

Beatrix looked at her for a long moment, entirely without offense, in the manner of a woman being asked to hand over an object she has decided, long ago, never to take out of a drawer.

"I'm not going to answer that tonight," she said, at last, evenly. "I want it noted that it was a good question. The best one, so far. I'm not going to answer it."

"That's okay," said Sophia, quickly, and reached over without thinking and squeezed her hand, once, and let it go. "You don't have to. I just wanted you to know somebody wanted to ask it properly, instead of guessing at it sideways."

"I noted that too," said Beatrix, and something in her flat voice had gone, very slightly, unsteady, which was, from her, the equivalent of tears.

"I'd ask Neiman," said Vivienne.

The circle turned. Neiman, who had not expected to be named twice in one game, found himself arranging his face before he had decided what expression belonged on it.

"What would you ask?" said Sophia, delighted, leaning forward.

"I wouldn't say, in front of everyone," said Vivienne. "That would defeat a good deal of the purpose. I'll only say that I have a question, and that I suspect it's the only one in this circle he wouldn't answer even if the truth were guaranteed and there were no cost to it at all." Her eyes were on Neiman as she said it, level, unhurried, entirely without malice, and somehow that was worse than malice would have been. "I could be wrong. I'm frequently wrong about people I haven't finished reading. I don't think I'm wrong about this."

"That's not fair," said Rafaela, on his behalf, surprising him. "You can't just — say that and not say what it is. That's worse than asking."

"I know," said Vivienne. "I said it anyway. I think some things are worth being unfair about, once."

Neiman said nothing. He was aware of eleven faces, in varying degrees, turned toward him, and he was aware, with the particular unpleasant clarity of a man watching himself from a slight distance, that he had, for the length of several seconds, no prepared sentence at all — not a deflection, not a joke, not the small agreeable adjustment he made a hundred times a day without noticing he was making it. The silence sat there, undressed, longer than was comfortable, and he let it, because he could not, in that moment, think of anything to put over it.

"You may be right," he said, finally, and it came out quieter than he intended.

"I generally am," said Vivienne, without triumph, and looked away first, which was, Neiman understood, its own kind of mercy, and did not feel like one.

---

The game wound down by degrees, the way a fire does when no one is feeding it, not because anyone declared it over but because the questions grew smaller and the silences between them grew longer and more comfortable, until at some point it was simply talk again, ordinary and threaded through with small kindnesses that had not existed twelve hours before.

Lucian and Emeric had drifted back into their corner — the sostenuto, Emeric called it, with a straight face, and Lucian hummed his approval — and were now engaged in a long, quiet, entirely unresolved dispute over whether a locked room could have a sound of its own, Emeric insisting that stillness had a texture you could learn to read, Lucian insisting that stillness was only sound with its shoes off, waiting.

Margo had fallen asleep sitting up, her chin on her chest, and Adaeze had draped nothing over her, because there was nothing to drape, and sat instead a little closer than she needed to, as a kind of blanket made of proximity.

Rafaela and Idris had found, unexpectedly, a strange truce, built entirely out of numbers: she wanted to know the odds of things she could do something about — how far she could run before her body failed her, how fast a person could cross open ground under fire, whether panic made a person faster or slower on average — and he, delighted to be asked practical questions instead of moral ones, answered at a length that made her laugh, once, a short surprised bark of a sound that seemed to startle her as much as it startled him.

"That's the first time you've laughed," said Idris, faintly wondering.

"Don't make it weird."

"I'm only noting it. It's a category of thing I note."

"Note it quietly, then."

Saoirse had gone to sit with Kenji again, and was telling him, in a low voice, about a color she said she had seen exactly once, in a hospital corridor as a child, waiting for news that did not come the way anyone had hoped, a green so pale it was nearly a rumor of green, and how she had spent years afterward trying to mix it and never once gotten it right, because — she said this lightly, and then stopped being light about it, briefly, before catching herself — because she suspected the color wasn't really a color at all. It was a memory wearing one.

"I think you're describing grief," said Kenji, gently.

"I think I'm describing a wall," said Saoirse, just as gently, declining the correction without quite refusing it, and Kenji, wise enough not to press a woman who had told him the truth sideways rather than lose the telling of it entirely, let it stand.

Beatrix, for her part, had drifted near Saoirse's corner without quite joining it, the way she seemed to drift near most conversations she had not been invited into, at a distance calculated to permit listening without requiring participation. Saoirse noticed her before she had settled.

"You may sit properly, you know," Saoirse said, not unkindly. "You don't have to hover at the edge like a moth deciding about a lamp."

"I wasn't hovering. I was cataloguing."

"Is there a difference?"

"There's always a difference," said Beatrix, but she sat, all the same, ankles crossed, hands folded, in the posture she seemed to default to whenever she was uncertain what else to do with her body. "You told him about a color. A green. From a hospital corridor."

"I did."

"You said you'd tried to mix it for years and never managed it, because it wasn't really a color, it was a memory wearing one." Beatrix said this without inflection, the way she said everything, but there was, underneath the flatness, something that might, in a less careful person, have been called delicacy. "I wanted to ask what the memory was. I decided not to. I'm telling you that instead, because I thought you should know the question existed, even unasked. It seemed more honest than pretending I hadn't thought it."

Saoirse looked at her for a long moment, and something in her face — usually so quick to arrange itself into whichever expression the room most wanted — went, briefly, quite still and quite plain.

"That's a strange kindness," she said, at last, "telling someone the question you didn't ask."

"I don't have the other kind readily available," said Beatrix. "This was what I had."

"I'll tell you sometime," Saoirse said. "Not tonight. I've used up my whole day's ration of the true thing, I think, telling the doctor about the wall that wasn't a wall. I don't think I've got a second one in me before we sleep, or whatever it is we're about to do instead of sleeping."

"That's fair," said Beatrix. "I'll keep the question. It doesn't go anywhere, once I have it."

"I believe you," said Saoirse, and for a moment there was something almost wary in it, though she covered the wariness quickly, the way she covered most things, with a small bright laugh that did not entirely reach the rest of her face. "That's rather the trouble with you, darling. You never forget a single unflattering thing anyone's ever let slip, do you. It must be exhausting, carrying all of us around in that head of yours, every crack we've shown you, filed and dated."

"It isn't exhausting," said Beatrix. "It's the only thing I'm certain I do well. I don't resent it. I only sometimes wish people understood that being remembered accurately isn't the same as being judged." A small pause. "Though I recognize that from the inside, they can feel very much the same."

"They can," Saoirse agreed, softer now, and did not say anything further, and after a moment Beatrix rose again and drifted on, the way she had come, leaving behind her the particular quiet of a woman who has just been quietly, correctly seen, and is not yet sure whether she is grateful for it.

Neiman moved among all of this without quite belonging to any one part of it, which had become, over the course of the day, less a source of loneliness than a kind of privilege: he was the only person in the circle nobody needed anything from just now, and he found he could sit near any conversation he liked and simply listen, uncounted, for a while.

He ended, eventually, beside Sophia, who had gone unusually quiet — quiet for her, which was still more speech than most people produced in an hour — turning the wire bird over and over in her hands.

"Can I ask you something," she said, not looking at him, "and you don't have to answer if it's — if it's a Vivienne kind of question. I won't be offended."

"You may ask."

"Do you think it's already started? The game. Like — really started. Not the — not us sitting here. The actual thing." She looked up. "Because Idris said something, before, about how if it wanted to look natural it'd make sure nobody shared a birthday, and then he said if it looked too natural, that would also be suspicious, and I keep thinking — what if it's not about the birthdays at all. What if it's about whether we noticed we were being tested for noticing." She laughed, unhappily, at herself. "That sounded a lot smarter in my head."

"It sounded perfectly intelligible," said Neiman. "I think the honest answer is that I don't know, and that not knowing is very likely the point of the exercise, if there is one, which is itself not something I know."

"That's such a novelist answer."

"It's the only kind I have."

"I like it anyway," said Sophia, and settled the wire bird carefully on her knee, where it sat, badly made and entirely hers, and did not fly anywhere at all.

---

Vivienne, meanwhile, had settled near Margo, who had woken from her brief sleep with the disoriented crossness of a woman who has not meant to nap and resents having done it.

"You watch," said Margo, without preamble, once she'd got her bearings. "All day. You don't miss a thing, do you. I've been half asleep half the day and even I noticed you noticing."

"It's not a virtue," said Vivienne. "It's closer to a compulsion. I've made a profession of it because the alternative was doing it for free, in rooms where nobody wanted it."

"What do you smell like," said Margo, suddenly, tilting her head. "I keep meaning to ask and then something else happens."

"I don't know. I've never been able to smell myself."

"Chalk," said Margo, after a moment's consideration, sniffing lightly, professionally, the way she might have approached an unfamiliar spice. "And something underneath. Something that's been shut in a drawer a long while and taken out again. Not bad. Just — kept."

"That's a very particular description."

"It's an accurate one. I don't do the other kind." Margo studied her a moment longer. "You know what everyone's carrying, don't you. Not the little stuff. The real weight of it. You've read all of us already, first day."

"Not all of you," said Vivienne. "Some of you keep things I haven't earned yet."

"But you've got guesses."

"I have guesses." Vivienne's voice did not change, but something in her posture settled, very slightly, the way a person settles before saying a thing they have decided, on balance, is worth the cost of saying. "I think you're afraid of two things at once, and that they pull in opposite directions, which is why you haven't resolved either of them. I think you're afraid of losing the last person who still speaks to you in the language you actually trust. And I think you're equally afraid that you've already lost her, in every way that matters, and that the food is the last honest conversation you have left, and that when it stops being enough, there won't be anything after it."

Margo did not say anything for a long moment. Her jaw worked once, and stilled.

"That's a hell of a guess," she said, finally, low.

"I did say I had guesses. I didn't say I was pleased to have them."

"You could've kept it to yourself."

"I could have," Vivienne agreed. "I've been keeping things to myself all day, out of consideration for people who hadn't asked to be read. I don't think you're one of those people. I think you'd rather know that someone saw it than spend the rest of this pretending nobody had."

Margo looked at her for a long moment, something working behind her eyes that was not quite anger and not quite gratitude, and landed, in the end, somewhere adjacent to both.

"You're not wrong," she said, at last, rough. "I'm not going to thank you for it."

"I didn't ask you to."

"Good," said Margo, and turned her face back toward the white, and said nothing further, though she did not move away, either, which Neiman, watching from a small distance, understood to be its own kind of answer.

It was Beatrix who announced the twenty-second hour, in her flat and steady way, and it was at that announcement, and not before, that the first real cracks in the day's fragile truce appeared — not because the hour itself was alarming, but because four separate people disputed it within the same breath, and did so, for the first time since the ring that morning, with something close to real heat.

"It cannot be twenty-two," said Idris, sitting up sharply. "I've been keeping a rota-count since hour twelve, cross-checked against three separate watches, and by my figures we are at nineteen, perhaps twenty at the outside. That's a two-hour discrepancy. That's not a rounding error. That's a significant — "

"It's twenty-two hours," said Beatrix, without heat, "and eleven minutes."

"Based on what beginning point? You started your count at the first sound — the humming — and I have always thought that was an arbitrary anchor. We don't know how long any of us lay there unconscious before the humming began. Your whole ledger could be built on a foundation that's already wrong by an hour, two hours, we have no way of —"

"It's the only anchor there was," said Beatrix, and for the first time that day her voice sharpened, not loudly, but unmistakably. "I did not choose it because it was reliable. I chose it because it was available. You are welcome to propose a better one. You have had twenty-two hours to do so and you have not."

"I'm not attacking your count —"

"You are questioning its foundation in front of everyone, which is the same action wearing a more polite coat."

"That's not fair," said Idris, stung, and Neiman saw Rafaela's head come up at the phrase, the second time it had been used that night, and saw her open her mouth and, this time, think better of it.

"It's twenty hours by tempo," said Lucian, quietly, into the gap, not quite taking a side, "if it helps. I've been humming the same phrase, roughly, since we woke, just to have a thread. It's stretched. It's stretched a good deal since this morning. But I'd say closer to Idris's count than Beatrix's."

"Tempo drifts under fatigue," said Beatrix. "That's a documented effect. It's not a criticism of your method. It's a limitation of it."

"Everything's a limitation of something," said Lucian, mildly, without any offense at all, which took a little of the heat out of the air even as the disagreement itself did not resolve.

"I don't think the exact hour matters as much as —" Emeric began, in his careful, placating way, and was cut off, gently but firmly, by Vivienne.

"It matters to Beatrix," she said, "and it matters to Idris, and I think we ought to let it matter, rather than smoothing it over because it's inconvenient this close to whatever's coming. We've spent a day telling each other the true thing instead of the comfortable one. I'd rather we kept doing that for the last hour than start performing peace we haven't actually made."

There was a silence, and in it, the disagreement did not vanish, but it settled — not resolved so much as acknowledged, set down on the table between them where everyone could see it rather than smoothed under a cloth. Idris and Beatrix did not apologize to one another, and did not need to; something in the acknowledgment itself seemed to do the work an apology would have done, and after a moment Idris said, quietly, "I'd still like to know. When there's time to check it properly. Not tonight. Just — eventually," and Beatrix said, "So would I," and that, for the moment, was as close to peace as either of them required.

"For what it's worth," said Kenji, into the settling quiet, two fingers at his own wrist as they so often were, "my pulse puts us nearer twenty-one. Which agrees with no one, and I offer it only in the spirit of making the disagreement more thoroughly democratic."

That, at least, drew a real laugh — small, tired, genuine — from more of the circle than Neiman would have guessed capable of one at that hour, and for a moment the twelve of them sat together in something that was not quite peace and was not quite its absence either, a truce made of exhaustion and honesty in roughly equal parts, which was, Neiman thought, probably the only kind of truce a group of strangers could reasonably be expected to build in a single day.

"Whatever the hour actually is," said Vivienne, into the last of the laughter, "I think we are close. I think we ought to say, before it happens, whatever any of us hasn't yet said, because I don't believe this is a room that offers second chances of this particular kind, and I would rather regret having said too much than —"

She did not finish the sentence.

Because it was at that moment — mid-clause, mid-breath, with Idris half-turned to say something to Beatrix and Sophia's mouth already open around the beginning of some enormous unrelated thought and Rafaela on her feet again, restless, pacing the last few meters of her worn track — that the laugh came back.

It had no direction, as before. It arrived the way it had arrived the first time, not through the ears but into the space where their own thoughts were, whole and delighted and entirely unbothered by the fact that it was interrupting something.

_Oh, don't stop on my account._

Twelve heads turned to nothing, all at once, the ring breaking apart into stillness the way it had broken apart into motion the day before.

_Twenty-four hours. Time's time. I did say I'd send you somewhere, and I'm a being of my word, whatever else you decide I am by the end of this._

A pause, in which the white did not change at all, and in which every one of them, Neiman included, found they had stopped breathing in the ordinary way and started breathing in the careful, deliberate way of people bracing for a blow whose shape they could not yet see.

_Story one. Try not to disappoint me. It would be such a short game, otherwise, and I've gone to such a lot of trouble._

And the floor, which had held them without complaint for a full day and a full night, without warmth, without give, without a single mark upon its white and featureless surface, opened beneath all twelve of them at once — not violently, not even loudly, but with the calm, unhurried certainty of a curtain being drawn back on a stage that had, all along, been waiting behind it — and the white went out like a held breath finally let go, and Neiman, falling, thought, with the same flat, well-punctuated clarity he thought everything, Well. That answers Vivienne's question about second chances, and then there was no more white at all.