A Door That Breathed

We kept Tarrow away from the membrane.

That was the decision. The rest was equipment, timing, and the usual attempt to make a bad idea look like a procedure.

The passage had room for three people abreast until it narrowed at the pale surface. Up close, the dark veins inside it branched and joined beneath a skin too thin to be bone and too steady to be anything I wanted to call alive. Each slow rise lifted the silver line. Each fall let it sag against the rock.

Tarrow stood behind Pell, his salt-stiff arm pinned against his chest in a sling of leather straps. The stone had reached his jaw. He watched the membrane without blinking.

“Keep him back,” I told Pell.

“I am.” Pell checked the strap across Tarrow’s shoulder anyway. She had never trusted a restraint she hadn’t tested herself.

Tarrow worked his mouth around the words. “I can—”

“No,” I said. “You can stand there and keep the fire to yourself.”

His jaw clicked once. Whatever answer he had meant to give came out rough and indistinct. He looked down at the arm he could no longer use. The first fire had made it useful. Then it had made it stone. I had supervised both stages, which was a neat way of saying the contract kept finding uses for his suffering.

Jorren gave me the wedge he’d held in the chamber. It was a short length of bone, scuffed and dark from being crushed against the seam. He’d carried it out as if he expected the ribs to ask for it back.

“If the opening takes a wedge,” he said, “that should fit.”

“If it takes a wedge,” Neris said, leaning on Pell’s shoulder, “it’s already more polite than the last one.” Her injured leg was wrapped. She kept her weight off it and watched the shelf under our boots, as if the membrane were a distraction from the nearest way to die.

I looped the silver line around a spur of bone, then fed a length toward the membrane. The line could give us a measure of the pulse without putting anyone’s hand on the surface. It would also let us feel whether the thing pulled back.

Malk sat against the wall under Pell’s eye, wrists tied. “The client said the taker had to bring the fire to the door.”

“This is not the door,” I said.

“That distinction will matter to the client.”

“I expect it will.” I tightened the line around the spur. “They can explain it to you when they come to collect you.”

His gaze shifted to Tarrow. “My order was to bring him back alive.”

“Then you should be grateful I’m keeping him alive.”