Chapter 2 - Chapter 2 — What You Say to WallsThe silence lasts a long

What You Say to WallsThe silence lasts a long time. Not three seconds. Not ten. Several minutes. I count them in my head without realizing it, because counting is something I do when I no longer know what else to do. One. Two. Three. A full minute passes and cell eight makes no sound. Not a rustle. Not a breath. Nothing. I begin to wonder if I dreamed the voice. It's an old trick my brain has played on me since the sixth month. It invents voices. It invents footsteps that don't exist. Once it made me believe for an entire day that someone was shouting my mother's name at the far end of the corridor, and I spent that day trembling against the door waiting for them to come and tell me she was there—and no one came, because no one had shouted, because it was all coming from me. Since then I distrust voices that arrive when I am alone. But this one I did not dream. I know because the brother does not react to invented voices. The brother does not react to anything that does not exist. And the brother, the instant Séhn said his name, understood something—and the things the brother understands are always real. My right hand is still warm from the effort he demanded of it. My tendons pull in my forearm. The drop of blood I wiped on my trousers has already dried into a small brown scab, almost invisible, that would tell no one anything if someone came to inspect the cell. A discreet mark. A tiny proof that this morning was not like the others. Two minutes. Three. And then, at last, the voice returns. Lower this time. Much lower. Almost a whisper, but not quite—just enough sound for me to hear it through the stone, not enough for the walls to retain it with precision. I hope. I don't know exactly at what volume the stones stop hearing—I have never dared test the limit—but Séhn seems to know it. Or he acts as if he knows it. He says, in that carefully adjusted whisper: "They hear anyway?" I think. I think about the way he asked the question. They hear anyway—as if the fact that they listen was information he already had before he arrived here, and he was only confirming the technical detail. Not the question of a prisoner learning where he is. The question of a prisoner checking. I take my time before answering. Not out of strategy—out of prudence toward myself. Every word I am about to speak now will open a door. I want to know which door before I push. I choose a compromise. I whisper, as low as he does, without opening my mouth more than necessary: "Less well. But they hear." A short silence. Then a small sound from the other side of the wall—a sound that is almost no sound, something between a sigh and a laugh. A warm little hiccup of air. I don't understand at first what it is. Then I do. He is laughing. He laughs softly, to himself, without particular joy, like a man learning useful information and finding the situation ironic. It is not the laugh of a boy discovering horror. It is the laugh of a man confirming something he had already suspected. I have not heard a man's laugh in fifteen hundred and twelve mornings. I was not prepared to hear it. I didn't even know I needed it. But the moment that small sound crosses the stone between our two cells, something cracks inside my chest—not the brother, who is asleep again right now, but something else, something more fragile and more mine. Something that feels like touching a familiar object after searching for it a long time in the dark. Séhn's laugh stops. The voice returns, still whispered: "You've been here a long time?" • I don't answer right away. Because this question is a trap—not from Séhn, but from me. From all the answers I could give that would betray me. If I say fifteen hundred and twelve mornings, I give him information the priest has, the Order has, everyone probably has: Louis Vermillion has been locked up for about four years. But if I say a long time, it is an empty answer that tells him nothing about me. I end up choosing a third option, because it is the one that sounds most like my real voice: "Long enough to have stopped really counting. I pretend to count. But I'm fooling myself." A silence. Then: "That's more honest than counting for real." The answer surprises me. Not because it is funny or clever—because it is true. It touches something I had thought but never formulated: the real count is not a number, it is a gesture. And my gesture of counting falsely is truer than any number I could reach. I answer: "Who are you." It is not a question. It is a flat sentence placed between us the way you place a stone on a table. Who are you. Not where you come from, not why you are here. Just the identity. The smallest thing I need to know. He takes time to answer. I hear him thinking—literally, I hear his breathing change, become slower, like a man weighing his words before letting them out. "Someone you don't know," he finally says. "And who will probably never know you either, because in a place like this you never really know each other. You talk to a wall and you imagine the other person. You're always wrong." I listen to the sentence several times in my head after it has passed. It is beautiful. It is too beautiful for a prisoner who arrived in the Well last night. A man who has just been locked up does not speak like that. A man who has just been locked up stammers, cries, screams, begs. Or he stays silent. He does not produce constructed sentences about the human condition in prison. Séhn is not an ordinary prisoner. I knew it before; I know it better now. But I don't tell him that. Because the only way to learn who he really is is to let him believe I am taking him for what he pretends to be. I am Louis Vermillion. My mother taught me to read people when I was eight years old. She told me one day—I had forgotten, the memory comes back to me right now, pulled from the bottom of a drawer—Louis, when someone lies to you, let them lie. People who lie always end up saying more than people who tell the truth. So I let Séhn lie. Or tell the truth. I don't know which yet. I let him. I say: "You speak like someone who has already been in a place where walls listen." New silence. Longer this time. "Yes," he says at last. "I have already been in a place like that. Not the same one. Another one. A long time ago." "Where?" "Far from here. You wouldn't know the name." "Try." He sighs. A real sigh this time, not a laugh. And then he says a name I don't know, a name that sounds like a southern city, a two-syllable name that ends with a sound that is not part of the geographical vocabulary I was taught at school. Thélane. Or maybe Thellan. I don't hear the end of the word clearly. "It is not a public place," he adds. "It is not on the maps. You shouldn't try to look for it." I am not going to look for it. I have no access to maps. I am locked in a cell where the stones listen and my only contact with the outside world is a man in gray who smiles when he asks me questions about my mother. I am not going to look for anything at all. But the information stays in my head. Thélane. Or Thellan. A name. A place that exists, or once existed, where there were walls that listen. Which means the Well is not the only prison of its kind in the world. There are others. At least one other. And Séhn comes from one. • While we talk, something happens inside me that I did not anticipate. The brother is prowling. He is not fully awake—he is not trying to make me clench my fist, he is not sending strength into my arms. But he is not asleep either. He is in an intermediate position I have never known him to take, a kind of watchfulness, like an animal sleeping with one eye open. I feel him in my chest, just under the sternum, where he always lives. He is attentive. He listens to every sentence I say to Séhn, and every sentence Séhn says to me, and he evaluates. This is new. For three and a half years, between the horse incident and this morning, the brother has never done anything like this. He slept. Period. When he woke, it was suddenly, without transition, for one brief and violent action, and then he went back to sleep. He never prowled. He never listened calmly to a conversation. He never evaluated. I don't know what it means. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. But I know that while I am talking to Séhn I also have to manage this other presence inside my own body, this presence that is not neutral, that takes silent notes on the man in the next cell for reasons that belong to me without belonging to me. It is exhausting. I had not anticipated that talking to someone would tire me this much—not because of the conversation itself, but because of the double attention I have to maintain. My mind listens to Séhn. My body listens to the brother who is listening to Séhn. And I cannot afford to leave either of them unsupervised. After perhaps ten minutes of this double work I feel I need a break. I say: "I need to be quiet for a moment. It's not against you." "I understand," Séhn says immediately. Too immediately, perhaps. "Talking is tiring here. Take your time." I rest my head against the back wall. I close my eyes. I focus on the brother prowling in my chest. Go back to sleep, I tell him inside my head, as gently as possible, the way you speak to a cat that refuses to leave the bed. You did your job. You warned me. I know now. I'll be careful. You can go back to sleep. He does not go back to sleep. He stays watchful. He stays attentive. Which is information in itself. The brother does not stay watchful without reason. He does not choose to spend energy. If he remains attentive despite my request, it is because he senses the danger is not over. That Séhn has not stopped being Séhn for him. That the man in cell eight deserves continuous surveillance. I open my eyes. I look at Dawn, which is still shining softly on the opposite wall. I accept the reality of the day that is beginning: I am going to have to live in the company of a brother who is awake inside my body for the first time since the horse, and I don't know how long he will stay like this. An hour. A day. Forever. • I remember something during this pause. I remember school. It is a memory I almost never summon, because it is neither beautiful nor useful, but it comes back sometimes without being asked, like this morning. The school for sons of good families, in a wing of the neighboring estate, where they sent me three times a week when I was between nine and thirteen to learn things my father judged important. Arithmetic. Geography. The six ways to greet a lord. A little music, but not too much—my father thought music made boys effeminate. There was a teacher at the school who came from the south and had an accent. A kind man. A patient man. He liked me, I think, because I was attentive and I remembered easily what he said. He was the only adult at that school who did not treat my family name like a disease. The other boys didn't like him. They thought he spoke badly. They thought his accent was ridiculous. They imitated him behind his back. And one day—I was eleven, I think, maybe twelve—one of the other boys decided to imitate him out loud in front of the whole class, right in the middle of the lesson. A cruel, precise, prolonged imitation. The teacher fell silent. He looked at the boy. He said nothing. He continued his lesson as if nothing had happened, but in a more tired voice than before. I said nothing either. That is the memory that comes back. Not the imitation. My silence during the imitation. I was eleven. I could have stood up. I could have told the boy to stop. I was a Vermillion—even at eleven my name still carried a little weight that the other boys still respected somewhat, because at that time the weight of the Vermillion name had not yet become the humiliation it became after the Collapse. But I said nothing. I kept my eyes lowered on my desk. I let the teacher be humiliated because I was afraid that if I defended him the other boys would turn on me. It is a small memory. A memory without great drama. No one died. No one was hit. Just a kind man humiliated out loud while a child who could have helped him looked the other way. It happens in every school. It happens in every childhood. It is not a tragedy. But that is what I remember. And I remember it because, during my pause against the back wall, I realize something unpleasant about myself: that Louis—the eleven-year-old Louis who looked the other way while a kind man was humiliated—that Louis is not dead. He is still inside my body somewhere, and he is still capable of looking the other way when he should speak. And if Séhn turns out to be someone who needs to be defended one day, I don't know whether that Louis will be capable of defending him, or whether he will look the other way as he has already done. That is the kind of thought you have when you have been alone too long. You settle accounts with yourself that no normal man would have the time or the taste for. You identify precisely the moments when you were cowardly at eleven. You note them. You carry them. I open my eyes. The brother is still watchful. Dawn is still shining. The silence has returned between Séhn and me because I asked for a pause and he gave it to me. I owe him an answer. I cannot let this pause last forever—it would be rude, and even if Séhn is perhaps sent, even if the brother mistrusts him, I still have enough Vermillion blood in me to know that you do not leave another man without an answer when you have asked for a pause and he has granted it without protest. • I resume the conversation by changing direction. "You have a name," I say. "You gave it to me. Séhn. Do you want mine too?" It is a trap. Not for Séhn. For the stones. Because if I give my name out loud now, the stones will keep it, the scribe will transcribe it, and the priest will learn within the day that I have broken my silence with the new neighbor and that I have given my name. It will be noted. He will draw conclusions. He will come down faster next time. But if I do not give my name out loud, Séhn will understand why. He will understand that I am protecting something. And he will begin to ask himself more intense questions about me, which, if he is sent, will accelerate exactly what I want to slow down. So I must make a choice. Give my name and feed the stones. Or stay silent and stir up curiosity. I choose a third option. I whisper, even lower, in the voice one uses to say things one does not want the stones to retain: "I'll tell you later. Not now." "Why not now?" "Because right now the stones are listening even better than usual. I don't know why. I can feel it. Wait a few days." It is not entirely a lie. The stones always listen about the same. But I feel something in the air of the cell this morning—an increased attention, perhaps linked to the brother's awakening, perhaps linked to Séhn's arrival, perhaps linked to something I cannot see. Telling Séhn to wait is a way of gaining time without having to justify why. Séhn accepts without argument. It is almost suspicious. "All right," he says. "I'll wait." And there is something in his voice when he says I'll wait that makes me understand he is used to waiting. That patience is part of his trade, whatever it is. And that granting me these few days costs him nothing at all. • Later, much later in the morning, when the light has already left Dawn and begun to slide toward afternoon, I finally let a word slip. It is not premeditated. It is an accident. I am talking to Séhn about something else—the bread, the hardness of the bread, the kitchens that must be having problems this week—and in the middle of a sentence, for a reason I do not understand, I say when I was little, my mother used to give me bread that Louis never forgot. I don't even hear myself say it. I only hear it when Séhn reacts. His breathing changes—I know it now, I can interpret it. It is the breathing of a man who has just received information he was waiting for. After a very short silence he says: "Louis." And I understand that I have just betrayed myself. Not to the stones—I whispered low enough, I think, for them not to have retained it properly. But to Séhn. Séhn now knows my first name. And he heard it in the most credible way possible: as a slip. As a name I let escape without meaning to, which, for someone trying to find out who he is talking to, is a thousand times more valuable than a name given voluntarily. I swear inwardly. A curse that comes from my father, word for word, a curse I had not used in four and a half years. By the lower teeth. It was one of Arvel Vermillion's curses. A stupid, almost childish curse, but one my father reserved for moments when he was deeply annoyed. Hearing it in my own head makes me realize how annoyed I am right now. Séhn says again, still in a low voice: "It's a beautiful name." I don't answer. I clench my teeth, not with the brother, just with myself. I look at Dawn—which is no longer on the third stone now, which has slid to the fifth, because time passes even in cells where nothing moves. And after a long moment I finally answer, because I have to: "Yes. Some boys at school used to call me Luis. Without the o and the u. They thought it was funny." "You hated that?" "Yes. For a long time." "And now?" The question takes me by surprise. I had not thought about now. I was still thinking about the eleven-year-old Louis who lowered his eyes in front of the humiliated teacher. I was still thinking about the twelve-year-old Louis who cried in his bed over a mangled name. But Séhn's question forces me to think about the Louis of today—the one who is in cell seven, who has the brother inside his body, who killed a horse at fourteen and who may not have finished killing. I answer honestly: "Now I don't care. Because I realize the boys who called me Luis were afraid. And they were right to be afraid. And if I saw them again today I wouldn't hold it against them anymore—I would tell them they saw it earlier than I did." It is the longest and most honest sentence I have spoken to anyone in fifteen hundred and twelve mornings. Séhn stays silent a long time after that. When he finally speaks, his voice has something different—something lower, slower, as if the sentence he had just heard had touched a place in him he had not expected to be touched this morning. He says: "You are dangerous, Louis Vermillion." I don't know how to take the sentence. Is it a compliment? A warning to myself? A warning to himself? A statement? I don't know. But I take it the way you take a sentence you know you will replay later in the day, at night, the next day, for weeks—a sentence that will take on different meanings each time you replay it in your head. I don't answer. I have nothing to add. • • Three floors above the Well, in a small dimly lit room that smells of damp parchment and poor-quality ink, a man known as the second scribe finishes transcribing the last stones of the morning. His job is to receive the vibrations the walls of the Well send back to him through a complex system of cords wound around special stone nodes—a system he does not really understand, one he has only been taught to read the outputs of. The nodes tremble when the stones speak. Each tremble corresponds to a word. He now knows the trembles by heart after nine years of this work, and he can transcribe at the speed of normal conversation without consciously thinking about what he is writing. His hands know. This morning the second scribe is transcribing cell seven and cell eight in parallel. It is unusual—the eight has been officially empty for several weeks, but the nodes of the eight began trembling again toward the end of the last watch, which means a new prisoner was placed there last night without anyone informing him, and now he has to transcribe that one too. He notes it. He will report that to his superior—not because it is serious, but because he does not like not being warned. He writes: Cell eight—unknown prisoner, male, young from the voice—first recorded words: "Hello, stones. My name is Séhn." Cell seven—Vermillion, L.—reply: "Shut up, idiot. They're listening." The second scribe stops for a moment. He rereads the line from cell seven. They're listening. It is the first time Vermillion has spoken out loud in eight days—he knows because the cell seven register is marked prolonged silence since its last entry. Eight days. And the new neighbor in the eight makes him speak after only a few minutes. Interesting. He continues transcribing the rest. The two prisoners are whispering now, and some passages are hard to catch—the nodes tremble less precisely for whispers, and he sometimes has to guess the missing words from context. He does his best. He transcribes the words that reach him and puts question marks next to the ones he is not sure he read correctly. And then, toward the middle of the morning, something abnormal happens on his nodes. Not a tremble. A stop. The nodes of cell seven suddenly stop trembling for about four seconds—a total stop, as if someone had placed a hand on the cord to keep it from moving. Then the trembling resumes, but with a slight lag, as if the cord had been desynchronized. The second scribe frowns. He has seen this stop once or twice before in his work. Always in cells that contained special people. Speakers, usually. People whose mere presence interferes with the way the stones hear. A true speaker, even passive, even silent, can make the nodes hiccup. But Vermillion is not a speaker. He was told that explicitly when he began transcribing cell seven a little over a year ago. The prisoner has no known abilities. He is not a speaker. His family was; he is not. That was in the instructions. That is why he is transcribed simply, without special precautions. So why did the nodes just do that stop? The second scribe notes the incident in the right-hand column of his register. Cell seven—node interference, approximately 4 seconds, mid-morning. To be reported. He thinks for a moment, then adds a second line, because his nine years of instinct in this work push him to be cautious: Secondary note: the interference occurred immediately after the arrival of the new prisoner in cell eight. Possible connection. To be verified as priority. He looks at the line he has just written. He hesitates. Then he does a third thing, rare, something he almost never does: he takes a small separate piece of parchment from the main register, copies the information onto it, folds the parchment into quarters, and sets it aside to hand it personally to his superior at the end of his shift—instead of leaving it in the normal register where no one would read it for several days. He has a presentiment. Not a precise presentiment. Just the feeling that he has just transcribed something that is going to become important, and that it is better for the information to travel quickly. He returns to his work. Cells seven and eight have started whispering again. He transcribes. The two prisoners are now talking about bread, and kitchens, and unimportant things. The second scribe writes them down anyway, because it is his job, and because sometimes the important things hide in the unimportant sentences. And then, toward the bottom of his page, he transcribes a sentence he notes with particular care. A sentence from Vermillion that has just slipped from cell seven like a slip of the tongue: "Louis." The second scribe knows what that sentence means, technically. Vermillion has just spoken his own first name out loud for the first time in over a year. The registers show that the last time he pronounced Louis in his cell was about fourteen months ago—just before his period of extended silences. Fourteen months without pronouncing his own first name. And now, with a single new neighbor in the cell next door, the first name comes out. The second scribe adds a third note on his folded parchment: Cell seven—first name Louis spoken out loud for the first time in approximately 14 months. Probable trigger: the new prisoner in the eight, identified as Séhn. Connection to be investigated. He closes the parchment. He slips it into his sleeve. He continues his work as if nothing has happened. But in a corner of his mind he begins to wonder who this Séhn is, and why he was placed in cell eight without warning, and why no one told him that something exceptional was going to happen in the Well today. Because he feels, without being able to put it into words, that something exceptional is happening right now, under his nodes, in the trembling stones, in the two cells he is transcribing. He does not yet know that he has just become one of the first outside witnesses to the awakening of something that had been sleeping for a long time in the blood of a seventeen-year-old boy. He will probably never know. His name will not be remembered by history. He will not be a character. He will simply be a man who was doing his job one morning and who noticed an interference on his nodes, and who had the prudence to pass the information upward. But his folded parchment will travel. It will pass from the second scribe's hands to those of his superior, then to those of his superior's superior, then it will cross several offices of the fortress, and it will end up on the desk of a man who takes a special interest in interferences of the questioned stone nodes. And that man—who sometimes wears a mask when he interrogates prisoners, and sometimes shows his bare face when he reads reports in his office—will read the folded parchment in a few hours. And he will make a decision. A decision that will change what the usual priest had planned to do with Louis Vermillion in the days to come. • • In cell seven, Louis knows none of this. He knows only that he let his first name slip, that Séhn heard it, and that the brother in his chest is still watchful, attentive, silent, like an animal waiting to see whether the intruder opposite deserves to rise or to stay lying down. He closes his eyes. He rests his head against the back wall. And, in a very low voice, almost without moving his lips, he says one last sentence to Séhn before the pause he imposes on himself for the rest of the morning: "My name is Louis Vermillion. Now you know. Forget my name if you can. And if you can't, at least pretend to forget it. Please." On the other side of the wall, Séhn does not answer right away. When he finally does, it is in a voice Louis has not yet heard from him. Slower. Heavier. Almost sad. "I cannot forget," Séhn says. "But I can pretend. I am very good at pretending. It is almost all I know how to do." And it is on that sentence that the morning closes. Louis does not immediately understand why that last sentence disturbs him so deeply. He will understand only later—much later, when it will be too late to act on what he should have understood right then. But at this precise moment, in cell seven, under the light sliding down the opposite wall, he has only the vague impression that he has just heard a confession. A confession of what, he does not know. But the brother in his chest has just changed position. He was watchful. He is now one notch more tense. One notch closer to full awakening. And Louis, who is beginning to learn to read the signs of the thing in his blood, understands that the brother too heard Séhn's sentence. And that the brother understood, in his own way, what Louis has not yet understood in his. I am very good at pretending. It is almost all I know how to do. Somewhere, very far from cell seven, through the floors of the fortress, a parchment folded into quarters travels in the sleeve of a scribe climbing the corridors. And somewhere, in an office lit by a single lamp, a man who is not wearing his mask today waits for the morning reports to be brought to him. The fifteen-hundred-and-twelfth morning closes. The fifteen-hundred-and-thirteenth is about to begin. And for the first time in fifteen hundred and twelve mornings, Louis Vermillion is no longer alone—neither in his cell, nor in his body, nor in the fortress where someone has just decided that he now deserves new attention.