<hr> Second night </hr>
Mom found him on the steps outside their quarters at about seven and stood over him with her arms folded until he looked up.
"Get up."
"Ma'am?"
"There is a little place at the end of that walkway with a green awning on it and I have been told they will feed anybody who sets down." She held out a hand and hauled him to his feet, and she was stronger than she had any business being. "Jax has been standin outside it for eleven minutes tryin to work out how to ask you."
T'ven felt his whole face go hot. "Mom."
"Don't you Mom me. Eleven minutes, T'ven Wilhelms. The boy is fixin to wear a hole in that walkway."
"How do you know how long he's been - "
"Because I have been watchin him out that window and countin," said Mom, "like anybody's mother would. Go on."
<hr>
The place with the green awning had eight tables and a boy of about fifteen running all of them, and nobody asked their names or wanted money, which T'ven had not yet stopped finding strange.
They got a table at the back. Jax sat down and immediately did not know where to put his arms.
"So this ain't - " Jax started.
"It is."
Jax stopped.
T'ven watched him work through about four sentences and discard all of them, and it was, he decided, the best thing he had seen since he got here.
"I'm gonna save us both some time," said T'ven. "You want to say somethin about the pancake house. You have been wantin to say it for two days and you keep gettin about halfway there and losin your nerve. And you have decided about six separate times that I don't want to talk about it, which is real considerate of you and is also wrong."
Jax stared at him.
"Are you readin me right now?"
"No," said T'ven.
"Then how - "
"Because you have been doin it with your face, Jax. It's a very loud face."
Jax put both hands over the very loud face and made a noise into them, and it came out in that deep bass of his, and two people at another table looked round.
T'ven laughed. Out loud. He heard himself do it and did not immediately go looking for whose fault it was.
"All right," said Jax, coming out from behind his hands. "All right. Fine. Then I'm sayin it."
"Say it."
"You went down like somebody dropped a coat," said Jax. "In the middle of that dinin room. And I got to you first because I was closest and there wasn't no thinkin involved, and then I was settin on that bed holdin you and I couldn't put you down."
"I know."
"No, listen. I couldn't put you down after." Jax was looking at the table. "You come round. You was fine. And I kept right on. And I have been tryin for two days to figure out how to apologise for that without makin it worse."
T'ven let it sit a second.
Then he reached across the table and took Jax's hand off the salt shaker he had been slowly destroying and held on to it.
"Don't," he said.
"Don't what?"
"Don't apologise. It's the only time in my entire life that somebody has touched me and it did not cost me anything." T'ven's voice came out steadier than he expected. "You have got no idea what that is. Everybody I have ever hugged, I got the whole of them. All of it, all at once, whether I wanted it or not. My daddy. The whole congregation, every Sunday, shakin hands at that door."
"T'ven - "
"You was so scared for me there wasn't nothin else in you," said T'ven. "That's all there was. Just that. It was the quietest I have been since I was fourteen years old."
Jax did not say anything for a while. He turned his hand over under T'ven's so they were palm to palm.
"That's the nicest thing anybody ever said to me," said Jax, "and I don't think you meant it as a compliment."
"I surely did."
"Then I'll take it."
The boy brought food neither of them had ordered, which appeared to be how it worked, and it was good, and for about forty minutes there was no ship in the sky and no locked room under the world and no church anywhere at all.
Jax told him about the parents. Not the bad part. The part before, when he was small and his mother taught him the names of birds, which T'ven had not expected and which he could tell Jax had not told anybody in a long while.
T'ven told him about the creek. About being twelve and having three best friends and no gift at all, and how that was the last summer of his life when a person could just be standing next to him.
"Do you miss it?" said Jax. "Not havin it?"
T'ven thought about a boy crying somewhere down under everything.
"I did," he said. "Up until about yesterday afternoon."
And Jax, who was not slow, and who had watched T'ven come off that plaza white as paper, said, "You gonna tell me what happened out there?"
"Yeah," said T'ven. "I am. Give me a minute to work out how."
"Take all night."
"Might have to."
Jax grinned at him. "Well, I ain't got nowhere to be."
<hr>
Dustin and Randall came in through the middle of the room.
Not through the door. There was a table with two men eating at it, and then there was no table, and then there was a table again, and Dustin and Randall were standing where it had been and one of the men had a fork stopped halfway to his mouth.
The other one was grown, and ordinary, and was holding half a sandwich he had plainly been eating somewhere else about a second ago.
"Sorry about your table," Randall said to the man with the fork. "He does that. He don't think about it."
"I think about it," said Dustin.
"You think about it after." Randall put the sandwich down on somebody's plate, apologised to them too, and looked around the room until he found T'ven. "You him?"
"Yes sir."
"Randall." He put his hand out and T'ven shook it, and there was nothing in it at all, nothing but a tired man in the middle of a room he had not chosen to be in, and T'ven liked him immediately.
"T'ven," said Dustin.
T'ven was already getting up. He did not remember deciding to.
"Now?"
"Now."
"How far?"
"Don't ask him that," said Randall. "He'll tell you and it won't help."
T'ven looked down.
Jax was still sitting there with his hand out flat on the table where T'ven's had been a second before, and he had not moved it, and his face - his very loud face - was doing something complicated and generous and not quite fast enough to hide.
"Jax."
"Go," said Jax. "I'll be here. I ain't goin nowhere."
"That ain't what I was gonna say."
T'ven put his hand out.
"I need you to go with us," he said.
Jax looked at the hand. Then up at him. Then at Dustin, who had not said anything and had gone very quiet in a way T'ven was beginning to learn meant pay attention.
"I ain't got nothin," said Jax. "I can't do nothin, T'ven. I drive a truck."
"I know exactly what you are." T'ven kept his hand where it was. "Take it."
Jax took his hand.
<hr>
It was like somebody shutting a door on a room full of people.
That was all it was. T'ven had spent three years in a world where every single person within forty feet of him was talking whether their mouth was open or not, and he had learned to live in the middle of that the way a man learns to sleep beside a railway. He had never once been given quiet.
Jax was quiet. Jax had always been quiet. That was the whole of it and it had never occurred to T'ven that quiet was a place you could stand.
He stood in it.
And with the noise gone he could hear how far it went.
"Oh," said T'ven.
"What," said Jax. "What. What did I do?" And then, because he was looking right at him: "Your eyes just went."
"Went what?"
"Green. Proper green. They do that." Jax swallowed. "They been doin it all night and I wasn't gonna say nothin about it."
"Don't let go."
"I ain't lettin go."
Somewhere - and it was not far, it was almost embarrassingly not far, it was the kind of not far you could drive in an afternoon - a boy was talking to himself in the dark to keep from being frightened. Making up a story. Doing both voices.
He was eleven. T'ven knew that the way you know a thing in a dream, without being told.
"His name is Bixby," said T'ven.
Dustin's head came round.
"Say that again."
"Bixby. He's eleven and he's counting somethin to keep hisself calm, he's - " T'ven's face changed. "He's in one of them storage places. The rental units, with the roll-up doors and the numbers on em. He's been in there four days."
"Nobody looks at those," said Dustin, very softly.
"No sir. Nobody does."
"Things are easiest where nobody's looking," said Dustin, and it was the same sentence he had said standing in front of a mountain three nights ago, and it did not sound funny at all now.
<hr>
It took eleven minutes.
T'ven never did get a clear look at how. There was a room, and then there was a door with a number on it that had no business being anywhere near a room, and it was coming up too slow.
Jax got both hands under it and put it the rest of the way with one shove.
That was the first time T'ven had watched him do anything with all that size. Seven foot four and built across the chest like a doorway, and in two days T'ven had seen him use exactly none of it except to sit down carefully on furniture that worried him.
Then Jax stepped back out of the light, all the way back, without being told.
"Randall," said Dustin.
And Randall went in.
T'ven understood it about a second later and had to look away for a moment. Four days in the dark, and the first thing that boy was going to see was a shape in a doorway. So they sent the one who was four foot four. Nobody had said a word about it. It was plainly a thing they had done before.
Bixby came out swinging anyway. Eleven years old, ninety pounds of him, and he caught Randall square in the mouth.
Randall said "ow" in a mild sort of way and sat down on the concrete.
That was all he did. He sat down on the floor of a storage unit with his legs out in front of him, level with a frightened child, and bled gently onto his own shirt and did not reach for him once.
After a while the swinging stopped and turned into something else, and Bixby came to him.
"I'm real sorry about your lip," said Bixby, later, in the back of the thing they had arrived in.
"I've had worse off smaller," said Randall.
Down the other end, Jax made a small strangled noise.
"What," said T'ven.
"Nothin."
"Jax."
"Nothin. It ain't - " Jax had gone a remarkable color and was looking very hard at the floor. "I'm just settin here bein grateful I ain't the one went in that door first, is all."
Randall looked at him. Then he looked at Bixby, who was four foot nine and had come out of that unit swinging flat and level with everything he had.
Then Randall worked out the arithmetic and started laughing so hard he had to hand the boy off.
"It ain't funny," said Jax, in a bass that rattled the seat.
"It's a little funny," said Dustin.
"It's a lot funny," said Randall, through his split lip.
Bixby, who did not understand one word of it and had not laughed in four days, laughed anyway, because everybody else was doing it and he was eleven and it had been a very long week.
T'ven sat in the middle of all that racket with his hand still in Jax's and thought that he had never in his life been in a room this loud and this quiet at the same time.
It wound down the way things do. Randall got a cloth for his lip. Somebody found a blanket.
And then Bixby said, out of nowhere and to nobody in particular, "I got real tired in there."
The whole vehicle went careful.
"Course you did, bud," said Jax.
"No, but I got - " Bixby frowned at his own hands, working at it. "There's tired where you go to sleep. And there's the other one." He pulled the blanket up. "I kept wishin the boy from my dream was there. He'd of knowed what to do. He always knows what to do."
Jax, easy as anything, in that big soft voice: "What's his name, bud?"
"Darren," said Bixby.
Nobody moved.
Bixby looked round at all of them, worried now.
"He ain't real," he said quickly. "I know he ain't real. He's just a boy I dream about. He's older'n me. He's got a hoodie with the string gone out of it and he tells me stories when it's bad." His chin went. "He tells em real good. He does all the voices."
T'ven's hand closed on Jax's hard enough to hurt him.
Doing both voices, he thought. Four days in the dark and he was doing both voices.
He learned that off somebody.
It was Randall who asked it. Randall, holding a cloth to his own mouth, in the mild voice of a man asking a boy about a bus timetable.
"Bixby. How many days was you in there?"
"Four."
"You sure about that?"
Bixby opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He looked, for the first time since the door went up, genuinely frightened.
"There's one I ain't got," he said.
Nobody said anything.
"I laid down cause I was tired and then it was different out. The light under the door was different." His voice had gone very small. "I thought I done it wrong. I thought I counted wrong."
Dustin got down on his heels in front of him. It put the two of them almost exactly eye to eye.
"You didn't count wrong," said Dustin. "You went to sleep and you didn't wake up when you meant to."
"Is that bad?"
"It happens to people who've had nothing to drink for a while." Dustin did not blink and did not soften it either. "It's why we came when we did."
"Oh," said Bixby.
Then, because he was eleven and had got hold of the wrong end of it entirely, he brightened.
"That's when I seen him, though," he said. "That's the only time I ever got to stay long."
And T'ven, sitting with a big warm hand in his and the whole vehicle gone silent around him, understood that this child had not been dreaming.
He had been somewhere.
He had been somewhere with Darren, and then somebody had opened a roll-up door and brought him back, and Darren was still there.
<hr>
T'ven found him inside of a minute.
He did not have to go hunting, in the end. That was the part he thought about for a long time afterward. Bixby had been holding the door open for four days and had not known he was doing it - an eleven-year-old in a storage unit with one friend, a friend he had made up, a friend who told him stories when it was bad.
T'ven went along that. It was like following a wire.
And at the other end of it -
It was not a voice. That was the thing he had not been ready for. Bixby talked. This one was not talking and had not talked in a long time, and what came off him was not words at all, it was the low steady sound a person makes underneath being a person, going on and on with nobody attending to it.
Jax had not let go of T'ven's hand the entire time. Not once. Not going in, not coming out, not while Bixby was screaming, not while Dustin knelt on the concrete and told a boy who did not believe him that nobody was going to put him back.
And in all that noise - the shouting, the roll-up door, the child - T'ven kept hold of the quiet.
And went further.
<hr>
T'ven's knees started to go and Jax got an arm round him and held him up without being asked.
"I got you."
"I got him," said T'ven.
"You got who?"
"Chicago," said T'ven. He was crying and he had not noticed. "He's in Chicago. He's under a building, there's a - it's full of machines, they're all runnin and there ain't a soul in there but him. He's been shot, Dustin. He's been shot and he's still goin."
He turned his head and found Dustin standing about four feet away, absolutely still, in the middle of a parking lot in the dark.
So T'ven did the other thing. The thing he had been able to do since he was fourteen and had almost never done on purpose, because there had never once been anybody he wanted to hand something to.
He broadcast it.
He gave Dustin the whole of it - the machines, the corridor, the cold, the sound underneath the boy - and Dustin took it the way you take something hot, all at once and without flinching.
Then Dustin put his hand over his own mouth.
"Twenty-six years," he said, into his palm.
"Sir?"
"I have been listening for that for twenty-six years." Dustin's voice was not a nine-year-old's voice at all any more. "I knew there was somebody. I have always known there was somebody. I could never find the room."
Randall came and stood beside him with Bixby asleep against his side and one arm round the boy to keep him there, and did not say anything, and put his free hand flat on Dustin's back.
"I got the room," said T'ven.
<hr>
Dustin did not go alone this time.
That was the whole of what had changed, and it had taken twenty-six years to change it, and nobody said so out loud because there was a boy in Chicago and no time in which to say it.
"Randall stays with Bixby," Dustin said. "Everybody else is out of the vehicle."
Randall already had the sleeping weight of the boy gathered up against his shoulder. "Go get him," he said. "We'll be right here."
They climbed down onto the blacktop, the three of them - Dustin, and T'ven, and Jax, who had not let go of T'ven's hand since a diner two hours and a whole life ago.
"Once you're through, you do what I tell you when I tell you," said Dustin. "It's going to be cold, and it's going to be loud, and he is not going to look like anything you want to see. Jax."
"Yeah."
"You remember the class?"
Jax swallowed. "Yes sir."
"Then you're the medic. T'ven holds the room. I hold the door." Dustin looked at the two of them, nine years old and older than the parking lot. "Ready is not a thing you're going to feel. Come anyway."
He opened the fold.
There was no spiral this time. No gold, no wine-glass note, none of the things he did when he did them to be kind. This one just tore open in the air like a seam giving out, a straight cold line with the dark leaking through it, and on the far side of it T'ven could see the edge of a floor that was not this floor.
"Go," said Dustin.
They went.
<hr>
<hr> Under Chicago </hr>
It was cold the way a walk-in freezer is cold, a cold with a hum living in it.
Machines. Rows of them, floor to ceiling, all lit and all running and all talking to one another in little green numbers, and not one living soul minding a single one, and the sound of the whole of them together was the sound T'ven had heard from a parking lot and mistaken for a boy. It was not a boy. The boy was underneath it. The boy was the small thing all the machines had been built around.
He was on a table in the middle of it.
Fifteen, maybe. Thin, the way T'ven was thin. Somebody had put lines into both his arms and a clip on one finger and a tube down his throat, and every one of those ran up into a machine, so that he was less a boy in a room than a thing the room was keeping. His head was turned to one side and his eyes were shut. Under the paper gown, high on the left of his chest, there was a dressing that had been white a long time ago and was not white now.
And there was a hoodie.
It was folded over the back of the chair beside the table, the way you fold a thing you mean to give back. Grey, worn soft, and the drawstring was gone out of the hood.
Jax made a sound.
"That's him," he said. "T'ven. The string's gone out of it. Bixby said the string was gone out of it."
"I know."
"He's real." Jax was already moving, already down at the side of the table, already doing the thing his hands had been wanting to do his whole life. "Okay. Okay. Airway, breathin, bleedin, warm, still. That's the order. That's the five. Marky said the five."
<hr>
<hr> The five </hr>
T'ven put one hand flat between Jax's shoulder blades, which was all the contact he needed now, and it left Jax both of his own.
Then he reached down into the boy the way he had followed the wire up out of Bixby, and found him. Not words. There were no words, there had not been words in a very long time. Just the low steady going-on, the sound a person makes underneath being a person, worn so far down and so thin that T'ven understood, all at once, why Dustin had never once been able to hear it. You could have stood on top of this boy for twenty-six years and never known he was there. You had to go down after him.
"He's here," said T'ven. "Jax, he's still here. I got him. Don't stop."
Jax did not stop.
The huge hands that T'ven had watched sit so carefully on furniture they would not break moved over that ruined boy as if they had been built for exactly this and nothing else in the world. He checked the tube. He put two fingers where Marky had shown him and counted against his own held breath. He laid the flat of his hand over the old dressing and leaned his weight in, slow, the way Marky had made every last one of them practise on each other in a bright room three days and a whole world ago, when it had felt like a game.
Bleedin is the one that kills you before I can get to you, Marky had said, small and precise, sleeves turned back exactly twice. So you are the doctor until I am. Five things, in order. Do them, and don't be clever.
Jax was not being clever. Jax was crying and counting at the same time and not letting either one interrupt the other.
"Pulse is there," he said. "It's bad, but it's there. He's breathin - the machine's doin most of it, but he's tryin underneath it. And I got the bleedin. T'ven, can you tell - is he - "
"You're doing it right." T'ven's voice came out of a steadiness he had not known he owned. "He got quieter. Not the bad quiet. The other kind. Whatever you're doin down there, he can tell somebody came."
Jax got his coat off one-handed and put it over the boy, because warm was the fourth thing. He did not move the head, because still was the fifth. Then he looked up at Dustin, who stood in the seam of the fold with one foot in Chicago and one foot in a parking lot, holding the whole cold room open by himself.
"That's the five," said Jax. "That's everything Marky showed me. He needs a real one now."
"Then he gets a real one," said Dustin.
<hr>
<hr> The Pineapple Ranch - Medical Bay </hr>
Bradley Dax had spent four minutes getting into position.
He had taken his shoes off out in the corridor. He had timed it against the sound of Marky humming to himself over a supply count - Marky always hummed when he counted, the same three bars, had done it since back when he was a program - and Bradley had a rubber spider in one fist and the patience of a man who had been planning this since breakfast, and he was exactly one silent step behind that small white coat with his arm already coming up when the entire far wall of the medical bay tore open and let out a cold wind, a smell of machine oil, a seven-foot delivery driver, a Southern boy with green eyes lit up like two road flares, a nine-year-old holding a rip in the world shut with visible effort, and a dying teenager on a table that had not been there half a second before.
Bradley screamed.
It was not a dignified scream. It was the whole-hearted scream of a grown physician holding a rubber spider, and it came up out of him before a single professional instinct could get its boots on. He dropped the spider. He staggered back into a crash cart. The crash cart rolled. And Bradley Dax sat down hard on the floor of his own colleague's medical bay wearing an expression of total metaphysical betrayal.
Marky did not turn around fast. He turned around exactly as fast as he needed to.
He looked at the boy on the table for one half of one second - and something crossed his small pressed face that T'ven would think about for a long while after, something that was not surprise at all, that was nearer to a man finding a door he had walked past every day of his life standing suddenly open - and then he was moving, and the humming had stopped, and the Chief Medical Officer of the Pineapple Ranch was the calmest thing in a room that held four other people losing their minds.
"Trauma. Gunshot, chest, left side, and old - days old. Somebody has been keeping him under." His hands were already on the boy. "This is a facility rig. Get it off him, all of it, it is not helping him, it is owning him. Bradley. Bradley."
"There was a spider," said Bradley, from the floor, faintly.
"You brought the spider." Marky did not look up. "Get off my floor and be a doctor. We will discuss your ambush later, and I promise you it is going in the record." He glanced once at Jax's hand, still pressed flat and red over the dressing, holding on because nobody had yet told him he was allowed to stop. "Who did the field care?"
"He did," said T'ven.
Marky looked at Jax. Looked at him properly - all seven feet four inches of him folded down over a rescued boy, shaking, still doing the fifth thing and the fourth and refusing to give up the third.
"Five things, in order?"
"Yes sir," Jax whispered.
"Then he is alive because of you, and I can take it from here." Marky's voice gentled by exactly one degree. "Let go now, son. That's it. My turn."
And Jax let go.
<hr>
T'ven caught him. There was a great deal of Jax to catch and he got the important part, which was the part that was going down.
They ended up on the floor of the medical bay with their backs against a cabinet, well out of the way of the small furious weather of Marky and a recovered Bradley and two more people in white who had come running at the noise. For a while neither of them said anything, because there was nothing that wanted saying and they both knew it.
Bixby's dream had a name, and a hoodie, and a pulse.
The pulse was bad. But Marky had it now, and T'ven had learned in three days that Marky having a thing was a different order of fact than anybody else having it.
"I passed," said Jax, after a long time. He sounded amazed. "T'ven. I finally passed the test."
"You surely did."
"Weren't no writin on it."
"No," said T'ven, and put his head down on Jax's enormous shaking shoulder, and shut his eyes, and for the first time since a diner with a green awning he let the quiet be the only thing in the room. "There never was. That's why you kept failin it."
Authors Note:
This seems like a good spot to stop for tonight. I don't think this counts as a cliff hanger. Maybe the cliff hanger police can send me some confirmation on it.
Here's where the story stops for the moment. There is more to come, just have to fix continuity errors.
Authors Second Note:
Sorry, I have been away and checked out for sometime. Life has been deeply unkind.
Happy Reading.