sleep that night. It is the first time in fifteen hundred and twelve mornings that I really sleep. I mean: deeply. Without waking three times an hour. Without startles. Without that pasty half-sleep that repairs nothing and leaves the body more tired in the morning than it was when it went to bed. No. That night I fall into sleep the way a stone falls into water, and sleep welcomes me like calm water, and I stay beneath it for several hours in a row without feeling anything. I wake just before dawn, on my back, on my pallet, in a position my body had not taken in a long time. Usually I sleep curled up, knees to my belly, fists closed on nothing. This morning I am lying flat, arms at my sides, palms open toward the ceiling like a dead man prepared for a burial that will never come. I remain motionless for a long moment without opening my eyes. I listen to my own breathing, which is slow, regular, almost human. I listen to my heart, which beats calmly without the desperate energy it usually has. I listen to the brother in my chest. The brother is sleeping. Truly. Not watchful, not waiting. Asleep. I don't understand at first. Yesterday, all day long, he had remained tense, attentive, one notch below awakening. Yesterday evening, when I began to fall asleep, he was still there, present, observing. And this morning he is no longer there. Or rather, he is there the way he was for the three and a half years before—sleeping at the bottom of my sternum, inert, silent, ready not to wake unless something extreme forces him to. He fell back asleep during the night. At some point. Between lying down and getting up. I don't know why. I don't know what it means. Did he decide that Séhn was no longer an immediate threat? Did he exhaust the energy he spent staying watchful all day yesterday? Did he learn something during my sleep, something about Séhn or about the situation, that allowed him to relax? I stay lying on my back and I ask myself these questions without finding answers. And then, after a long moment, a thought crosses my mind that is no more reassuring than the others. Maybe the brother did not decide to go back to sleep. Maybe he was calmed. Maybe during my sleep something or someone sent a signal to the brother that told him you can go back to sleep, I'll take over. That thought is stupid. No one can speak to the brother except me. No one even knows he exists, except my mother who is probably dead and perhaps the woman she may have spoken to before she died. The brother does not take orders from outside. And yet the thought remains. It clings. It refuses to leave. I finally open my eyes. • The light is not yet on Dawn. It is still in the lower part of the wall, climbing. I have maybe fifteen minutes before morning officially begins according to my measuring system. Fifteen minutes for myself alone, before everything starts again—the hard bread, the surveillance of the stones, the conversation with Séhn, the management of the double mind that has occupied me since yesterday. I don't move. I enjoy it. It is a strange concept, enjoying, in a cell of the Well. But that is the right word. I enjoy having slept. I enjoy the brother being asleep. I enjoy the absence of anguish in my chest, which is so rare it almost feels like a flaw—as if my body had forgotten something it was supposed to carry. And then I hear it, through the wall. Séhn is already awake. No precise sound. No speech. Just his breathing, which I already know—slow, calm, awake. He is sitting or lying somewhere in cell eight, and he is waiting for me to wake up too. I don't know how long he has been waiting. An hour, perhaps. Maybe two. I should find that touching. A neighbor patiently waiting for me to wake up so he can say good morning. It almost looks like friendship, the way friendship is imagined in children's books where two boys share a secret. Instead I find it suspicious. Because one thing I learned very early in life—my mother taught it to me, or perhaps school, or perhaps the Well itself—is that patience is never free. A man who waits patiently for something does so because he estimates the wait will be profitable. People who wait do not waste their time. They invest it. Séhn is investing his time waiting for me to wake up. Why? What is there to gain by talking to me early in the morning rather than at noon? Nothing, except perhaps one thing: the intimacy of a shared awakening. The feeling—artificial, constructed, but powerful—of being the first voice I hear in my day. The people you hear first in the morning take a special place in your head, a place that afternoon voices never reach. Séhn knows that. Or his handler knows it. Or whoever trained him knows it. • I decide to let him wait a little longer. Not out of revenge. Out of testing. I want to see how long he is willing to hold out in this morning silence before he breaks first. An ordinary prisoner, starved for company, would have spoken long ago—would have at least sighed loudly enough to signal himself. Séhn makes no sound at all. He breathes. That is all. He lets time do its work. I count in my head. One minute. Two. Five. After ten minutes the light begins to touch Dawn. Morning officially begins according to my measuring system. The fifteen-hundred-and-thirteenth morning. The first morning in a long time that does not resemble the previous ones. And Séhn is still silent. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. I begin to think he may never speak first. That he has enough discipline to wait for hours if necessary. That I will lose this test no matter when I finally give in. I give in after twenty-five minutes. "Good morning," I whisper, barely audible, lips barely parted. A silence of three seconds. Then: "Good morning, Louis." He uses my first name. The one I made him swear to forget yesterday. Or rather, the one I asked him to pretend to forget, to which he had replied I am very good at pretending. And now, this morning, he uses it. Which means one of two things: either he has decided that pretending is no longer necessary between us, or he is telling me, by this small use of the first name, that he will not pretend for very long when it costs him something. I do not react. I say: "Did you sleep well?" He takes time to answer. I hear him thinking—literally, his breathing changes, becomes slower, as if he is weighing the question from every angle before giving his opinion. "No," he says at last. "I didn't sleep. I don't sleep easily in new places. And you?" It is information he gives me freely. Perhaps too freely. I don't sleep easily in new places—that is the sentence of a man who has spent time in several different new places over the course of his life. A man who travels. A man who has no stable place where he sleeps well. It is not the sentence of a boy who has just been arrested for some reason. It is the sentence of someone who has already lived this situation many times. I answer: "I slept well. For the first time in a long time." "Good." And he says it in a sincere voice. Too sincere. A sincerity that does not sound acted. He is glad I slept well. It genuinely pleases him. And for one second—one single second—I allow myself to think that maybe Séhn is not only what the brother sensed in him. Maybe inside this prisoner with answers that are too well constructed there is a boy who is truly glad his neighbor slept for the first time in a long time. Maybe the two coexist. Maybe most people who do evil are also capable, at certain moments, of being sincerely happy for others. That thought makes me less mistrustful for one second, which is exactly the opposite of what should happen. I push the thought away. I focus on the situation. I say: "What do you want to know about me today?" • The question catches Séhn off guard. I hear it in his silence—a silence that lasts half a second too long, a silence that had not been anticipated in the script he was probably following mentally for this morning conversation. "Why this question?" he says at last. "Because you are going to ask me questions anyway. You did yesterday. You will today. I prefer to know in advance what you want, so I can see whether I can give it to you without betraying myself." "You think I'm trying to make you betray something?" "No," I say. "I think you are trying to get to know me. And to get to know me you are going to ask me questions that sound like friend questions but are also investigator questions. I prefer we skip the part where you pretend, and go straight to the content." Séhn stays silent for a long time. When he speaks again, his voice has something different—something more attentive, as if he has just realized he is dealing with an interlocutor who sees more clearly than expected. No panic in his voice. No retreat. Just a recalibration. "You are very intelligent, Louis," he says. "I think I underestimated that." "Don't flatter me. Ask your question." He laughs—that little warm hiccup of air I heard yesterday for the first time. But this time the laugh has a different tone. More restrained. More careful. Like someone laughing because he doesn't know what else to do. "All right," he says. "My question, if you're willing to answer it, is this one. What did your mother do for you when you were little that was different from what other mothers do?" • The question strikes me. Not because it is cruel—it is not. Not because it is indiscreet—my entire life has been indiscreet for fifteen hundred and twelve mornings; one more detail will change nothing. The question strikes me because it is precise. And because it resembles exactly, in its construction, one of the questions the priest has been asking me for a year. Did your mother speak to you, Louis? Did she whisper something to you? It is the same family of question. The same direction. It is someone trying to find out what my mother transmitted to me that other mothers do not transmit to their sons. Séhn has just asked the priest's question. With different words. With a different tone. But it is the same question. I close my eyes. My breathing does not change—I force it to stay regular, because I know Séhn listens the way I listen, that he can interpret a breathing that accelerates the way I would interpret his. I keep my outer calm. But inside, in my chest, I feel something happening. The brother wakes. Not suddenly this time. Not like yesterday when the fist closed on the name Séhn. Slowly. Gently. Like an animal coming out of its burrow because it has heard something it recognizes. The brother stretches inside my sternum. He becomes aware. He listens again, catching up in one go to the entire morning conversation he had let pass while he slept. He is awake in about half a second. And his first action, not outward but toward me, is a brief and clear push that translates in my chest into a precise, almost verbal sensation: mistrust. The brother tells me mistrust. Without words, without language, just with the shape his presence takes inside my flesh. He tells me: this man has just asked the priest's question, and I recognized it, and you should recognize it too, and if you don't I will impose it on you as obvious. I hear the brother. I understand. I already understood anyway, but the brother makes my understanding unavoidable—I can no longer sweep it under the rug by telling myself maybe I am wrong about Séhn, because the brother does not make mistakes, and the brother has just confirmed it for me. Séhn is linked to the priest. Or to the same network as the priest. Or to a faction that shares at least one question with the priest. I open my eyes. I look at Dawn, which is now shining fully on the third stone. I take a slow breath and I evaluate my options. Option one: answer the question. Tell a truth. See how Séhn reacts. That might teach me something, but it would cost me a valuable piece of information. Option two: lie. Invent an answer that sounds true but is not. The advantage is that if Séhn reports my answer to anyone, he will report false information. The disadvantage is that if Séhn is smarter than I estimate, he will detect the lie and it will put him on guard against me. Option three: refuse to answer. Directly. Honestly. I do not want to answer this question. It is the third option I choose, but with a nuance. • "My mother didn't do anything different from other mothers," I say. "She loved me. She scolded me. She taught me to read and write and to stand up straight when people spoke to me. She taught me to say 'my lord' to the old men who passed in front of the gate of the house. That's all." I am lying, of course. My mother taught me to break a nose with my forehead, and to strike a man's throat rather than his skull, and to let the brother out if I have no other choice. Those three things are things no other mother teaches her son of her own free will. But I cannot say them to Séhn. So I lie by listing banalities. And I add the nuance, because that is where my answer becomes interesting: "But she said a lot of goodbyes." Silence from Séhn. He doesn't know where I am going. He waits. "I mean," I continue, "she had a particular way of saying goodbye. Even when she was only leaving for a day. Even when she was only leaving for a few hours. She would come into my room, or wherever I was, and she would look me in the eyes for three full seconds, and then she would leave without adding anything. Three seconds of looking. No kiss, no caress, no useless words. Three seconds. That was her goodbye. It took me a long time to understand what she was doing." "What was she doing?" "She was looking at me for the last time, every time. Just in case. She lived her life like a woman who knew she might not come back, and so she said goodbye like a woman who knew every goodbye might be the last." I fall silent for a moment. I let the sentence float. Then I add, more softly: "So when she came into my room that last time—the night they came for my father and her—I knew immediately that this time was different. Because she didn't do her three seconds. She said something. And the times she said something when she left, it was always serious. Those were the times she was afraid she wouldn't be able to say goodbye with her eyes, so she completed it with words to make sure I wouldn't misunderstand what she wanted me to know." Silence from Séhn. Then, in a very low voice: "What did she say to you that night?" And there it is. That is the question Séhn has wanted to ask from the beginning. The real question. The one he skirted yesterday with conversations about bread and kitchens, and skirted this morning with how did you sleep and was your mother different from other mothers. All the conversations of yesterday and this morning were preparation for this precise question. He wanted to know what my mother said to me the last time she saw me. The priest gave him that mission. Or Séhn's handler. Or both. It doesn't matter. The mission is clear now. Séhn is here to extract from me the exact words my mother spoke in her last sentence. The brother in my chest pushes. A clear pressure. He tells me: now you know, give him nothing. I say: "I don't remember exactly." It is a perfect lie, because it is the one that protects what I must protect while remaining consistent with everything I have already told the priest for a year. I have never admitted to the priest that I remembered my mother's sentence. For the priest I am a boy who has forgotten. Séhn, if he reports this conversation back to his handler, will hear a version that fits the character I have built since my arrival. Nothing will betray me. "You don't remember?" Séhn insists, gently. "I remember the tone," I say. "Not the words. It was serious. I know it was serious. But the exact words melted away. You know how it is. When you are very tired and you hear something important, you retain the weight, not the shape. I retained the weight of what she said to me. I did not retain the words." Séhn stays silent for a long time. I hear him thinking through his breathing—he is evaluating whether I am lying or not, he is calculating the probabilities, he is weighing whether it is worth pushing further or whether insisting would make him look suspicious. He decides not to push. "That's a shame," he says. "But I understand. Words melt. The weight remains. That is a wisdom few people have." And he changes the subject. He talks about the air in the cell being dry this morning, about his back hurting because of the thin pallet, about the fact that he still hasn't seen the face of the guard who brings him his bread. Banality. A well-executed strategic retreat. He lets me win this round because he knows he will have other opportunities in the days to come to ask the question from another angle. He is patient. He is, as I guessed yesterday, professionally patient. I am not fooled. But I play along. I answer him on the banalities, I let the conversation drift toward unimportant subjects, and while we talk I feel the brother who remains awake now, actively awake, and who will no longer go back to sleep as long as Séhn is in the cell next door. The brother has understood the nature of the threat. And he keeps watch. • • While Louis and Séhn talk about unimportant things, a small piece of parchment folded into quarters travels through the corridors of the fortress in the sleeve of a young messenger. The messenger does not know what he is carrying. He was only told that it was urgent, and that the parchment was to be delivered personally to a precise man, in a precise office, on the third floor of the eastern wing. He was also told not to unfold the parchment on the way, and that if he did he would be severely punished. He has no intention of unfolding it. He is paid to transport, not to read. He prefers not to know what is on the parchments he carries—it is safer for him. He climbs the stairs, crosses two corridors, salutes two guards, and arrives in front of a dark wooden door with no plaque or name. He knocks three short knocks. A voice inside says to enter. The messenger opens the door. The room is small, simple, lit by a single oil lamp placed on a desk cluttered with files. A man is sitting behind the desk. He is reading some document. He does not look up immediately when the messenger enters. The messenger waits. He knows the procedure. You do not speak until you are authorized to speak. He remains standing, two steps from the door, the folded parchment held tightly in his hand. After a minute the man behind the desk raises his eyes. He is not wearing his mask today. The messenger has never seen him with his mask, in fact—he is not high enough in the hierarchy to have access to the man in his masked functions. To him this man is simply one administrator among others in the fortress, a little more important than some, a little less important than others. He knows nothing of what this man does outside this office. The man says: "You bring something?" "Yes, sir. From the second scribe of the Well. He asks that it be delivered personally and urgently." The messenger holds out the parchment folded into quarters. The man takes it. His fingers are long, thin, a little too pale for a healthy man. He does not say thank you. He does not dismiss the messenger immediately either. He unfolds the parchment while the messenger continues to wait. The messenger observes, because he has nothing else to do during these few seconds. He sees the man read. He sees the man's face change very little, almost not at all, but just enough for an attentive observer to notice the difference—a tiny contraction around the eyes, a breath that slows for half a second. The messenger does not understand what he has just seen, but he registers it. He registers it the way he registers every detail of the people to whom he delivers parchments, because one day one of those observations may be useful to him. The man reads the parchment a second time, more slowly. Then a third. Then he lays it flat on his desk, perfectly flat, perfectly aligned with the edge of the table, as if he wanted to give it a precise place among his papers. He raises his eyes to the messenger. "You may go. Not a word to anyone about what you delivered. If anyone asks you what you came to bring to this office, you will say you no longer remember. Understood?" "Yes, sir." "Go." The messenger leaves. He closes the door behind him. He descends the stairs faster than he climbed them. He does not look back. In the office the man without a mask remains alone with the folded parchment. He looks at it for a long time without touching it. Then he reads the three notes from the second scribe for the fourth time: Cell seven—node interference, approximately 4 seconds, mid-morning. To be reported. Secondary note: the interference occurred immediately after the arrival of the new prisoner in cell eight. Possible connection. To be verified as priority. 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. The man places the tip of one finger on the second note. He remains motionless for a long moment, staring at his own finger resting on the parchment, as if waiting for the parchment to tell him something else. Then he stands up. He goes to a shelf at the back of his office. He takes out a thick dossier and brings it to his desk. On the cover of the dossier, in black letters, is written a single word: VERMILLION. He opens it. He leafs through. He looks for something precise, and he finds it in less than a minute—a page, toward the middle of the dossier, that carries handwritten notes in a different handwriting from his own, a handwriting older, perhaps ten or fifteen years old. The handwriting of someone who is probably dead now. The page begins with this sentence: On the interferences of questioned stone nodes in the presence of Vermillion blood. The man reads the entire page. He already knows it—he has read it several times since he became interested in the Vermillion affair almost two years ago. But he wanted to reread it now, in the light of the new information from the second scribe. And in rereading it, something he had not fully understood the first time becomes clear. He closes the dossier. He puts it back on the shelf. He returns to his desk. And for the first time since he took charge of the surveillance of Louis Vermillion, he makes a decision that steps outside the strict framework of his instructions. He takes a pen. He writes a short message on a clean parchment. He does not sign it—he knows to whom he is writing, and the other person will know whose it is when she receives it. The message says this: Something has awakened in cell seven. I believe it is what we were waiting for. You were right. I apologize for not believing you sooner. The situation is now going to move faster than expected. Prepare yourself. He folds the message. He seals it with wax and his personal seal. He calls another messenger—not the one who just left, another, older, more discreet. He hands him the message personally with instructions to carry it to a precise address, outside the fortress, in the lower city that spreads beneath the prison walls. The older messenger leaves without asking questions. And the man without a mask remains alone in his office, sitting behind his writing desk, fingers crossed under his chin, thinking. He thinks of a sentence an old man once said to him, a very long time ago, when he was beginning his career and did not yet understand the deep stakes of his work. The old man had told him: When the Vermillions awaken, it is never gradual. They sleep for a long time, then they wake all at once, and everyone around them is surprised because no one had seen them move while they slept. But if they move while sleeping, watch closely. It means they were no longer sleeping. The man without a mask had not yet understood the full meaning of that sentence at the time. He understands it now. Louis Vermillion, in cell seven, is no longer sleeping. He has moved while sleeping. He made the questioned stone nodes tremble for four seconds this morning. He spoke his first name for the first time in fourteen months because of a neighbor he does not know. And in all probability he does not yet know himself that he is in the process of waking—because Vermillions, while they are waking, are generally the last to realize it. The man without a mask takes a slow breath. He has many things to organize in the hours to come. • • In cell seven, Louis is talking to Séhn about the hardness of the bread. He knows nothing of the folded parchment that has just reached an office on the third floor of the eastern wing. He knows nothing of the message that is leaving right now for the lower city. He knows nothing of the old man's sentence that the man without a mask is remembering about him. He knows only that the brother is awake now, actively awake, and that he will no longer go back to sleep as long as Séhn is in the cell next door. He knows that Séhn asked him this morning a cleverly disguised version of the priest's question. He knows that he managed not to betray his mother in his answer. He knows that he won a round and that there will be others. He also knows, without being able to explain it, that something important happened today. Not in his cell. Elsewhere. Somewhere in the fortress, or outside it. A decision has been made by someone he does not know, and that decision is going to reach him in the hours or days to come. He feels it the way one feels a change in pressure before a storm. He feels that time, in the Well, has just changed speed. He finishes his conversation with Séhn on banalities. He eats his bread. He drinks his water. He watches Dawn slide down the wall as it does every day. And he prepares himself, without knowing exactly for what, for what is coming. The brother, in his chest, keeps watch.
