the way other people count coins.
Fifteen hundred and twelve. I know it's wrong. I lost count sometime during the seventh month, or maybe the eighth, and I started over from zero on a morning when the light on the opposite wall had exactly the color of September light. I decided it would be September. That it would be the beginning. Since then, I've been counting. But I know it's false. The real number is still somewhere in a day I've forgotten, between a ration of stale bread and a dreamless sleep, and no one is ever going to give it back to me. Fifteen hundred and twelve. I hold on to it anyway. Because holding on to a false count is still holding on to something. And here, you hold on to whatever you can. • Morning begins when the light touches the third stone on the opposite wall. I gave that stone a name in the first few weeks. I called it Dawn. Later I was ashamed of having named a stone—it was sentimental, and there is nothing more indecent than sentimentality in a cell—but the name stayed. When the light touches it, morning begins. When the light leaves it, it's afternoon. When the light disappears entirely, it's evening. And at night there is nothing left to count. Today the light reached Dawn maybe half an hour ago. I am sitting against the back wall. I haven't moved since. I watch it the way you watch someone you love who doesn't know you love them. I haven't spoken a single word out loud in eight days. It's a game. I wanted to see how long I could last without speaking. Not for the stones—they hear me even when I'm silent—but for myself. To check whether I was still capable of it. Whether I hadn't yet become someone who needs to speak in order to exist. Today is the eighth day. Maybe I'll make it to the ninth. We'll see. Silence no longer costs me anything. It's the opposite now that would cost me. Speaking. Letting a sound leave my throat. Feeling the air move inside me and knowing the stones are listening, that they are keeping it, that they will hand it over to a man who will write it on a parchment and carry it to another man who will read it. Everything I say is read. That is the secret of the Well. The walls do the guards' work for them. A long time ago, someone spoke to the stones of this place and asked them to remember everything said between them. And the stones, trusting and slow and fond of being spoken to, agreed. They still obey. It took me three months to understand. Three months during which I spoke, told myself stories, whispered ridiculous escape plans into my cupped hands. And every word was kept, transcribed by a scribe, carried to a man in gray who smiled when he came down to see me because he had already read what I said the night before. In the fourth month I saw that smile and I understood. I stopped speaking. That was my first death. The end of the Louis who spoke. • My name is Louis Vermillion. I think it often, even though I almost never say it out loud. Louis Vermillion. Son of Marielle and Arvel. Younger brother of Maela, who died at six from the red fever. I specify the red fever because people say many things about my family, and one day they may say she died of something else. They locked me in here because they believe I carry a word in my mouth. A word my mother supposedly whispered to me when I was a baby, or maybe even before, while I was still in her womb. A word that has belonged to the Vermillions for generations and that my parents never had time to give me before they came for them. People say—people say a lot of things—that my family once spoke to something they should not have addressed. My parents never told me. Not once. And when they came knocking on our door in the middle of a winter night, they didn't have time to explain. My father stood up and told my mother: Go see Louis. My mother came into my room. She looked at me in silence for maybe three seconds. Then she said the sentence, the only sentence, the one I still carry inside my body like a tooth that will not fall out: "If one day you need your brother, you will not have the right to be afraid of him." And then she left. I never saw her again. I have no brother. Maela was my only sister; she had been dead for years, and that was all. No brother. Not one. Except inside my body. • The hatch opens. A cup of water. A quarter of bread. Harder than usual—which tells me there is a problem in the kitchens this week. The bread is my newspaper. I crawl to the hatch. I take it. I crawl back to my place. I begin to chew. Slowly. Very slowly. And it is during the second bite that I hear it. A sound in the right-hand wall. The wall I share with cell number eight. Cell number eight had been empty for a long time. Several weeks, perhaps several months. Before that silence there had been a man in the eight for six months, and then one morning he gave up. I never knew what. The next day they came and took him. After him, no one. Except this morning there is a sound in the eight. I freeze with the hard paste in my mouth. I don't move. I barely breathe. The sound is a rustle. Someone is moving in the eight. Then silence returns—but it is no longer the same silence. It is an inhabited silence. A silence in which someone is breathing, softly, carefully, trying not to make noise. And it is at that exact second—exactly that second, not one before, not one after—that I feel it. My right hand, resting on my knee, begins to tremble. Not much. A slight twitch in the fingers, as if it wanted to close around something and was holding itself back. I look at it without moving the rest of my body. I know this urge in the fingers. I have known it for three and a half years, since the courtyard of the estate, since the horse. I was fourteen. A stallion had reared up in front of me. The hoof was coming down toward my head. And my right hand, without asking my permission, had risen and caught the horse's pastern in mid-motion, and squeezed, and the horse—a ton of animal that should have crushed me—had toppled sideways as if its legs had been cut out from under it. It fell. I heard a crack that was not normal. It didn't move again. I had killed it. My fourteen-year-old hand, in a second that was not entirely mine, had killed an adult horse. My mother came running. She looked at the horse, then at the stable hand—one look that told him everything—and then she pulled me inside. In the empty kitchen she took my trembling hand in hers. Hers did not tremble. She did it the way a woman does who has already wiped that kind of blood off other hands, at other times, and who knows exactly what to do. She looked me in the eyes and said, very softly: "Louis, you will never speak of this to anyone. Ever. What is inside you is a brother you did not ask for. He is of our blood. He has the right to exist. But he must not come out. Except if you have no other choice." I was fourteen. I nodded because that was what she expected. For three and a half years, between that day and the morning they came for us, the brother stayed silent inside my body. I thought he had left. I thought he had been a childhood accident. I thought that by never speaking of him I had made him disappear. I was wrong. Because in cell number seven of the Well, while someone breathes on the other side of a stone, my right hand is closing on nothing with a strength that should not exist in the arm of a boy who has been eating hard bread for fifteen hundred and twelve mornings. • I set the mouthful of bread down on the floor. Very gently. My body understood before I did that I must not move at all. I stare at my fist closed on emptiness. It trembles. Not from hunger. Not from exhaustion. It trembles the way something trembles when it wants to use something and is looking for a target. Not now, I think, as hard as I can inside my head. Not now. There is no one to fight. Go back in. Please. Go back in. The fist does not open. It stays closed. And something in the other cell—something my brother senses and I do not—something about this new neighbor who has just arrived—does not please the brother. The brother does not react to neighbors. None of the previous ones had ever made him react. Not the man who lasted six months. Not the woman who prayed in a language I didn't know. They were ordinary humans and the brother had no reason to notice them. This one, he notices. I close my eyes. I breathe slowly through my nose. I try to speak to the brother without words, because the stones hear words. I tell him inside my body, in the exact place where he sleeps, the place I cannot point to but where I always feel him—this is not the time. Let me listen first. Let me understand before you decide. The fist takes a long time to open. Finger by finger. Joint by joint. But it opens. When my hand is my hand again, I open my eyes. My palm is damp. Not with sweat—something thicker, coming from inside the nails that clenched too hard. A drop of blood beads in the hollow. My own blood. Drawn from me by an arm that obeys me and does not obey me at the same time. I wipe the drop on my trousers. And on the other side of the wall, the breathing resumes. More careful than before. Slower. As if the one in the eight had heard something through the stone—the stone's faint tremor, perhaps, when the brother clenched—and was adjusting his own rhythm in response. He knows I am here. He knows something just happened. And I know that he is not a prisoner like the others. • I should stay silent. That is exactly why I kept eight days of silence. That is exactly why I no longer speak to neighbors, ever, since the episode with the woman who prayed in an unknown language and died alone without my being allowed to comfort her out loud. I should stay silent because the stones listen, and everything I said would be noted, passed on, read by the priest within the hour, and tomorrow morning the priest would come down with his usual smile and say, Well, Louis, it seems we have a new friend, it seems we finally have someone to talk to, and I would have to look at that smile and feel my body want to vomit for the thousandth time. I should stay silent also because the brother is awake. Because he is awake because of this new neighbor. Because as long as he is awake inside my body, every word I speak is a word that could feed him. I don't know exactly how the brother works. But I know he likes to be called. And speaking out loud in this cell this morning is almost certainly a way of calling him. My mother never put it that way, but she didn't need to. I have fifteen hundred and twelve mornings of solitude to figure certain things out by myself. I know all of this. And yet, in this precise second, in this shared silence between cell seven and cell eight, under the light that touches Dawn for the fifteen-hundred-and-twelfth time, I feel something rising in me that I haven't felt in so long I don't recognize it at first. A desire. The desire to speak. Not to the brother. Not to the stones. To someone. On the other side of a wall there is someone. A human who breathes. A human who listens. A human who is strange enough to wake the thing that sleeps inside my body—and that, more than anything else, more than fear, more than caution, more than the priest's smile tomorrow morning—that is something I cannot not explore. Because the brother is not stupid. The brother does not wake for nothing. If the brother wakes for this neighbor, it means this neighbor is something I need to understand. And I cannot understand it by staying silent. So perhaps speaking right now is not calling the brother. Perhaps it is obeying the brother. Perhaps for the first time in three and a half years, the brother and I want exactly the same thing. • I open my mouth. My jaw cracks softly—it hasn't been used for anything but chewing hard bread in eight days. I feel the air enter, dry, dusty, a little old. I feel my tongue against my palate like something that no longer knows what it is for. I am going to say something. I know it before I decide. And before I can form the first word, the voice in cell eight beats me to it. A man's voice. Young. Calm. A voice that is not speaking to me, but to the opposite wall in the eight, to the stone itself, as if greeting someone other than me. The voice says, distinctly, without lowering its tone: "Hello, stones. My name is Séhn." And at the exact instant the name Séhn crosses the wall, my right hand closes again. Not slowly this time. Not finger by finger. All at once. My fist slams against my knee like a wolf trap snapping shut. My arm trembles from elbow to shoulder. A dry pain rises in my forearm, because my tendons are not made for this strength, because my body cannot house what the brother puts inside it without paying for it. I stare at my fist. In a half-second of icy clarity I understand two things at once. The first is that the brother did not simply sense Séhn through the wall. The brother recognized Séhn. There is something in the name Séhn, or in the voice that spoke it, or in the way the name crossed the questioned stone—there is something in all of it that the thing inside me already knows. Something that reminds it of a threat, or a debt, or a promise made long ago, before me, by another Vermillion to another Séhn or to something that resembles Séhn. The brother is three and a half years old when he is in my mouth. But the brother may be a thousand years old in my blood. The second thing I understand is that the Séhn in the cell next door, the Séhn who has just greeted stones that should not receive greetings, the Séhn who breathes carefully like a man who knows exactly where he is and accepts being there—this Séhn is not in the Well by chance. No one arrives in cell eight by chance. You are sent there. And you are sent next to me specifically. Someone, somewhere in this fortress or outside it, decided that this Séhn would be my neighbor. Someone calculated. Someone chose. And my body, through the brother, has just warned me. • I have to speak. Now. Before the scribe finishes transcribing "Hello stones my name is Séhn" and before the information climbs the chain to the priest. Because if I let Séhn keep talking to the stones, he might say something else, something that will also be noted, something that will interest them more than it should. I don't know yet who Séhn is or why he is here. But if the brother recognizes him, then Séhn is important. And if Séhn is important, then I must protect him from the stones, and protect him from himself, before I understand who he is. I must tell him to be quiet. The brother agrees. The brother pushes in my arm, in my throat, in my tongue, so the words come out. For the first time in my life I have the impression that the thing inside me and I are on the same line. I don't know if that is reassuring or terrifying. Probably both. I open my mouth. The voice that comes out of me—hoarse, low, astonished to exist after eight days of silence—says: "Shut up, idiot. They're listening." And at the exact moment the word "listening" leaves my mouth, my right fist opens at last. All at once. As if the brother, having gotten what he wanted, let go. As if he had needed me to speak, and now that I have spoken he can go back to sleep. My hand falls flat on my knee. Exhausted. Trembling. Alive. The silence that follows is the densest silence of my life. I hear nothing from the other side of the wall. Not a breath. Not a rustle. Séhn is processing what has just been said to him. He is deciding what to do with the warning. And he is perhaps sensing too that something else happened in cell seven at the same time as the warning. Something in the way the words came out. Something in the stone's faint tremor. I have just spoken for the first time in eight days. Not to a stranger. To someone who was sent. And for the first time in three and a half years, the brother and I have done something together. I don't know if this is the beginning of something or the end. But I know that in the hours to come, in the days to come, in the weeks to come—if I still have days and weeks—I will have to understand who the boy named Séhn in the next cell is. I will have to understand why the brother recognized him. And I will have to decide whether I really want to know. I close my eyes. I rest my forehead against the cold stone of the back wall—not the wall of the eight, the opposite wall. I breathe, slowly, trying to let the air pass without sound. And I wait.