Two of Everything

POV: Dex

The bell of St. Cinder's weighed two and a half tons, and Dex had to hide a heart inside it without making it ring.

"It'll go in the crown," said Ma Tilly. "Under the canons. There's a hollow."

"A hollow?"

"The founder had it cast with a void. For the sound. Something about the harmonics." She held the lantern high. "Don't ask me. I only know my grandda's grandda stuffed his brandy in it when the Watch came for the church tax."

They stood in the belfry, in the dust and dark, on a platform of oak beams ten yards above the street. The tower was a square shaft of black stone, open on all four sides to the wind through louvered slits. Pigeons shifted and muttered in the rafters. A cold wet gust came in and made the lantern flame bow. And over their heads, hung from a beam as thick as a man's waist, in a cradle of iron straps and bolts, the bell itself: a great dull bulge of tarnished bronze, green at the lip, cast with a ring of saints in relief and a legend in Latin that nobody had read in a century.

The rope ran through a hole in the floor. The clapper, a bronze pear as big as a man's head, swung gently in the dark at the bell's center, ticking against nothing.

Day twelve, thought Dex. Eight hours.

He had not slept. He had not thought about sleeping. He had sat up all night on the stair of the tower with the black bundle in his lap and the cane across his knees, and listened to it. It beat. Slowly, once an hour, with a dull deep knock like a hand on a door. Each time it did, his own heart rose and fell. He had tried to hold his breath. He had tried to think of something else. He had counted, and sung, and recited the multiplication tables to the fifteens. It did no good.

It beat. He answered. That was all.

…

They did it with a ladder and a rope and an oilcloth sack.

Ma Tilly held the lantern. She did not talk. She was a vast patient presence in the dark, her shadow stretched up the tower wall like a giant's, and her face was shut. He climbed. He took the ladder one rung at a time, with the bundle strapped to his back and the cane hung on his belt, and the bad leg swung out behind him like a gate on a bad hinge. At the top he pulled himself onto the iron cradle and braced against the beam.

The crown of the bell was a little round shoulder, below the beam, ringed with six great curling bronze loops called the canons. He ran his hand across it. Between two of the loops, nearly hidden under a crust of green, was a narrow seam. A plate. He felt for the edge with his fingernails and pried.

It came away with a groan.

Behind it was a hollow: a cavity in the bronze the size of a hat, black and dry and smelling of old dust and cold metal and, very faintly, of brandy. He put in his hand. The inside was smooth. It was a good hiding place. It had been a good hiding place for two hundred years.

"Hand it up," said Ma Tilly.

He wrapped the sphere in three layers of oilcloth. He did it slowly, with his fingers numb on the cord, and he did not look at it. It lay in his arms in the dark like a sleeping animal. The pulse knocked once, against his ribs.

Thud.

His chest answered.

He did not know what it meant. He did not know whether it was the glass that called to him, or he to it. He only knew that when he let go, there would be a space in his arms where it had been, and that the space would be shaped exactly like itself.

"Dex," said Ma Tilly, quietly, from below.

"Yes."

"You're holding on."

"I'm thinking."

"You're holding on, lamb."

He closed his eyes. He put the sphere into the hollow of the bell. It went in with a soft heavy thump, and settled, and was still. He fitted the plate across it. He pushed. The seam closed.

He stayed there for a moment on the beam with his forehead against the cold bronze, breathing.

One hour, he thought. It'll beat once. And the bell will hum.

He climbed down.

…

"The clapper," said Ma Tilly.

They worked together. It took an hour. She had a block and tackle and a sailor's hands; he had arithmetic. Between them they swung the great bronze pear out of its yoke, and unbolted it, and lowered it on a rope to the floor of the belfry, where it lay on its side like a drowned man. Then they hoisted the empty yoke up against the bell and bound it fast to the beam with chains and lashing, so that the bell hung dead, a mute bronze hulk, a thing that could not ring.

When they had done, Ma Tilly stood back and wiped her face on her apron.

"There," she said. "If any fool pulls the rope, it'll go clunk. That's all. The Watch'll think it's broken."

"It is broken."

"Aye. Since half-past twelve this morning." She snorted. "Poor old girl. Fifty years she's called us to supper." She patted the bronze with a floury hand. "She'll be glad of the rest."

He said nothing.

She turned. She was a large, square, formidable figure, filling the narrow stair, with the lantern held low beside her. The light came up under her chin and drew deep shadows round the flat blue eyes. She was looking at him. Not at his face; at all of him, the whole of him, as a woman looks at a loaf that has risen strangely, to see whether it will hold.

"I'll not ask what's in the cloth," she said.

"Thank you."

"I'll not ask who he is, that you looked at, that morning, in the Hall." Her voice was very even. "I'm not a woman for asking, Dex. I've had a long life of not. I only wanted you to know that I could."

He met her eyes.

For a moment he saw something move in the depth of them, something old and tired and tender and terribly afraid. It was a look he had seen on her face only once before, the first night, in the dark, with the rain on the roof, when he was nine and ill and burning, and she had sat beside the bed and wiped his forehead and said, in a voice like a prayer, There now. You're safe, lamb. I've got you.

She knew, he thought, with a sudden cold clarity. She's always known. She's known since the day she dug me out.

She's been waiting for me to ask.

He did not ask.

"I'll be back by morning," said Dex.

"I know you will."

"If I'm not—"

"You will," said Ma Tilly, and turned to the stair.

…

They met at noon in the nave, on the benches, with a map of the pier spread on the stove-lid.

It was a rough sketch in Josiah's careful hand. Three hundred yards of jetty, each plank marked; the crane; the bunkers; the oil tank; the lighthouse. Seven crosses in red chalk. Dex stood at the head of the stove with a stick of charcoal and went down the list, and watched each face as he spoke.

"Hollis. The crane."

"Aye."

"You'll be on the jib, forty feet up, with the rifle and a clear field. You see the whole pier. You'll take nobody's life without my signal." Hollis nodded, once. He sat with his bandaged hands between his knees and his eyes on the map. He had not looked at Felix. Felix had not looked at him. They sat three feet apart, with a polite emptiness between them, like two men who have agreed to speak of the weather.

"Roz and Captain Pruitt. Behind the crates at the shore end, the third stack from the gate. Roz, you hear the carriages arrive. You'll tell the Captain how many hearts."

"Forty," said Roz. "If it's the Lamp Order."

"If it's forty, we don't fight. We watch. The Captain has a way out under the barge-slip, and a whistle."

"And you?" said Josiah.

"I deliver."

Nobody spoke.

"Felix," said Dex. "The oil tank. It's a hundred and fifty feet from the jetty's end. You'll have a fuse and a charge and an outlet. If I say the word, the tank goes. It makes a fire and a smoke and nothing more. No one inside it. No one near it. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly clear."

"No one near it."

"Dex," said Felix, in a small voice. "Yes. I know. Rule three."

"And Viv."

She was sitting on the end of a bench, with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms around them. She did not look at him. She had not looked at him since the flats. "The harbor lamp," she said. Her voice was light and flat. "The big one. At the end of the pier. It's got a brass reflector the size of a cartwheel. I can reach it. I'll be inside the glass, if you need me."

"If I need you."

"If you ask," said Viv.

He felt it go through him like a nail.

"Yes," he said. "If I ask."

He looked down the line of them. Six faces, in the red glow of the stove. A lean gunman from the Wyoming plains with a shadowed jaw. A tall midwife with her mother's life hidden in her dress. A grave tired man in a stranger's coat. A boy in cracked spectacles. A girl with a stolen name and a small cold fury in her eyes. They were looking at him. They trusted him. They were looking at him with that open, uncomplicated trust that he had spent his whole life learning not to give.

And in his waistcoat pocket, in a flat leather case, there lay a black glass sphere the size of a child's two fists, with a hairline crack from pole to pole, and a trick of mica at its heart.

Decoy B.

Felix had asked, at the beginning, what it was for. Insurance, said Dex. It's what we deliver. And the boy, bless him, had looked at it and said, with perfect candor, "Oh, I see! The, the decoy's the product. That's what's going to the buyer. And we keep the real one." And Dex had said: "Exactly."

He had not said which was which.

He thinks he's making a fake for me to cheat the client with, thought Dex. He thinks the real one is in the church.

And in a sense he's right.

It was the cleanest lie of his career. It was composed entirely of true sentences.

He looked at each of them in turn, one by one, in the firelight. And for each, as he looked, he wrote in his head, in the three neat columns of the ledger, the price that he was asking.

Hollis Quade. Owed: a horse. Price: a clear shot.

Rosalind Boudreaux. Owed: a mother. Price: a heartbeat.

Josiah Pruitt. Owed: a cause. Price: trust.

Felix Whitcomb. Owed: a father. Price: the truth.

Vivian Marchetti.

He stopped. He did not know what to write. The column stood blank in his mind, white as a field of snow.

"That's all," said Dex. "Eat. Rest. We go at eleven."

…

She found him on the roof at dusk.

He had not meant to be found. He had gone up to the parapet of the sacristy with a heel of bread in his hand, to watch the light go out of the harbor and think about nothing. The wind was keen. It smelled of salt and snow. In the west, over the Terrace, the sky had burned down to a sullen rose, and a wedge of cloud lay across it like a bar of lead.

She stepped out of the trapdoor and stood.

"I'll go if you want."

"No."

"I'm not here to fight."

"I know."

She came and leaned beside him on the parapet. She had washed her hair; it was loose on her shoulders, still damp, and it smelled of soap and coal smoke. She wore a man's coat over her gray dress, too big for her, with the sleeves turned back. She did not look at him. She looked at the harbor, where the lights were coming out one by one on the water, yellow and green and red.

"Tell me the truth," she said.

"After tonight."

"Dex."

"After tonight. I swear it."

"That isn't a promise. That's a delay."

"It's the best I have." His voice was low. "I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm saying it because, because if I tell you now, you'll do something. You'll try to help. You'll, you'll do something brave and stupid, and I can't." He stopped. "I can't have that."

She was quiet for a long time.

"Then say the price," said Viv.

"There isn't one."

"There's always one."

"Not for this."

"That's what you said on the flats."

"It was true then."

"Then I don't know what true means," said Viv, "when you say it."

She turned to him. The wind lifted a strand of her hair across her mouth, and she pushed it back, impatiently, with the heel of her hand. Her eyes were dark and bright and wet. They were so very close. He could see the faint freckles on her nose, and the small white scar on her lip where a house cat had bitten her at nine. He could count her eyelashes. He could smell the soap.

She was looking at him as she had looked in the wing of the theater, with her hand on his shoulder and her skirt in her fist. Frowning. Fierce. Utterly unguarded.

One, two, three, said the voice in his head. The floor is not your enemy.

He did not know which of them moved.

It was a hair's breadth. It was the width of a breath. He felt her warmth on his face, and her lashes lowered, and the cold sweet smell of her hair, and the whole roof seemed to tilt gently, like a boat in a swell. He thought: I'll kiss her. He thought: It'll be the first thing in my life that I haven't paid for. He thought: If I do, I'll tell her.

And if I tell her, she'll never be safe.

He stepped back.

It was a single pace. It cost him more than the Hush Stair.

"I'm sorry," said Dex.

She did not move. For a moment she stood quite still, with her lips parted and her eyes half closed, like a person who has leaned on a door and found it a wall. Then she opened them. Something went across her face. It was not anger. It was worse than anger. It was recognition, a bright quiet pain, the look of a girl who has asked for the same thing a hundred times, and been told no, and has just realized that it was never about her.

"Right," said Viv.

"Viv—"

"No. It's fine. It's, I understand." She straightened her coat. She tucked her hair behind her ear. She did it all with such small, exact, careful movements that he could hardly bear to watch. "Tonight. Pier Nine. I'll be at the lamp."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me," said Viv. "It's rule five. If it breaks, it was yours."

She went out through the trapdoor without a sound.

…

He stood there a long time.

The sky had gone dark. The wind had risen, and brought a thin sleet with it, which stung his face and ran down his collar. He did not move. He looked at the water, and the little lamps, and the long black finger of Pier Nine reaching out into the harbor, with the lighthouse at its tip like a pin.

He took out the ledger. He had meant to write something. His pen hovered over the page.

Vivian Marchetti, he wrote.

Under Owed he put: Everything.

Under Paid he put nothing.

Under Price, after a long moment, he wrote a single word, and then drew a line through it, and then, because the sleet was running down the page and the ink was beginning to smear, closed the book.

He found that he was humming.

It was soft. It was low. It was the tune that had no words, the one that wandered round and round and curved back on itself like a hand turning a ring. He had not known he was doing it. He listened, as if from a distance, and heard it climb, and fall, and take its long slow bend.

"You know what that is."

He did not turn. He did not need to. Ma Tilly stood in the doorway of the trapdoor with her shawl pulled over her head, a vast gray shape against the lantern light, and the sleet drifting down around her. Her voice was thick.

"I know it's a tune," said Dex.

"You know it's more than that."

"Do I?"

"Lamb—"

"Not tonight, Ma." He kept his back to her. He kept his eyes on the long dark pier. "Tonight I need to be cold. I can't be curious. I can't be anything that wants to know. If I ask you, you'll tell me, and if you tell me, I won't be able to walk onto that pier." His voice was quite steady. He was proud of it. "Ask me tomorrow. I'll ask you then."

For a long time she said nothing. The wind moaned in the louvers of the tower. The sleet hissed on the slates.

"Tomorrow," said Ma Tilly. "Aye."

She went down.

He stayed, one more minute, in the dark, with the ledger in his hand and the wet on his face. He thought: This is the last night. He thought: I have one night left to be Dex Hallam, and then I will be whoever I am.

And he thought, with a small cold clearness, as a man counts the last coins in a purse:

One night. One night to stop being Nate. And finish being Dex.