Séhn asks me the question in the evening.Not during the day—during the day we talked about useful things: the sounds in the corridor, how to eat the hard bread without breaking your teeth, the seven kinds of footsteps I know by heart and that he is beginning to learn. An almost ordinary day, if you can call ordinary a day when the brother stays in a low heat in my chest the entire time, and every sentence I exchange with Séhn passes through a new filter. The filter of what the priest told me that morning. He is not what he pretends to be.I can no longer forget it. I do not want to forget it. But I must speak to Séhn as if I do not know, because if Séhn understands that I know, the entire dynamic changes, and I have not yet decided whether I want it to change or not.Evening comes. The light leaves Dawn for the last time. The wall darkens, the cell turns gray, and for perhaps an hour we both remain silent. The brother is calm now for the first time since morning—a gentle heat, almost pleasant, like that of a stone warmed by the sun that you keep against your belly.And it is in that calm silence that Séhn finally speaks, in a low voice:
"Have you tried it yourself? To escape?"I take time to answer.Not because the question is complicated. Because it is precise. Too precise for a prisoner who just arrived. An ordinary new neighbor asks whether escape is possible, not whether you have tried. The questions of a man who wants to learn.Séhn, on the other hand, does not want to learn. He wants to verify. He knows there was an attempt. He may even know the details. He is asking me the question to see how I will tell it.I could refuse. But the stones recorded my attempt at the time. Dozens of people in this fortress remember it. Lying would put me in a position where he would know for certain that I am lying to him about something else later, when the stakes are higher.I choose to tell it. But I will tell it in a precise way.I say:
"Yes. I tried once. About a year ago."
"Tell me."I close my eyes. I let the memory rise.•In the fourth month of my captivity I still had energy. I still had the head of a Vermillion. I thought I could save myself through intelligence, because strength did not belong to me but intelligence perhaps did. My mother had taught me certain things. Not how to fight—how to read people. She would sit me across from her, tell me a story with several characters, and ask me afterward which one had lied, at what moment, and why. I was wrong a lot at the beginning. I stopped being wrong.I stop. I realize I am telling him about my mother, which is exactly what he wants. I return to the story.In the fourth month I began to observe the guards. I was looking for a guard who had doubts. Guards who are happy in their job do not get corrupted. It is the others you have to look for. I spotted a young guard, maybe twenty years old, who always hesitated for a few seconds before closing the food hatch. Just a hesitation. Nothing spectacular. But a hesitation that meant he was looking at me, and that looking at me had become uncomfortable for him.That is who I began to talk to.I tell how I built the relationship. Three weeks of conversations through the hatch, softly, so the stones would not retain too much. I told him about my life before—the horses, the summer feasts, the books. I told him about my dead sister, because telling a young man about a dead sister opens a door he cannot close. Twenty-year-old boys cannot resist dead sisters.The guard's name was Rémon. He came from a small town in the north. His father had died in the war when he was eight. His mother needed him to send money. He did not entirely believe in the work he was asked to do. He thought I looked young to be locked up.An ordinary young man. A young man who could have been a friend in another life.After three weeks I felt he was ready. One night when he was on guard alone I asked him, in a very low voice: Could you help me get out of here? He did not answer right away. He left without a word. I thought I had ruined everything. I spent the night cursing myself. But the next morning he came back. And he brought me a key.•I tell the night of the attempt.The key that opened my cell without noise. The corridors I had never seen. My body that no longer knew how to walk fast after four months of immobility. Rémon stopping every twenty steps to wait for me. The three floors descended. The empty armory. The wooden door that opened onto an inner courtyard. And the sky for the first time in four months.I stopped breathing for perhaps three seconds. The sky was so vast it hurt.I tell of the second door, lower, narrower. The second key. The staircase that descended. The narrow tunnel that smelled of earth and rat. Rémon's lantern lighting exactly what it needed to. My ankles twisting on the stones. The iron ladder that climbed toward a hatch. Rémon pushing the hatch open. The square of real stars above us.I saw the stars for the first time in four months. I thought: I am free. I was not. But I thought it.I tell of the small abandoned garden, overgrown with wild grass, with an old stone bench. Rémon helping me out of the hatch. Rémon telling me let's sit for a moment, you're weak. Me sitting on the bench. Me breathing the night air, the air of the world, the air that had never been locked inside my cell. Me crying without realizing it because the air tasted of grass and dew and distant smoke.I was crying, and I was telling myself: There, I made it.And it was at that moment that Rémon sat down beside me, looked me in the eyes, and said: You know that's not true, Louis?•I do not tell the seconds that followed as a memory. I tell them as if I were still inside them.I saw in his eyes something I had not seen during the three weeks we had spoken through the hatch. Something patient. Professional. The look of a man who had just finished a long job and was pleased with his work.I understood in a single second.Rémon was not a young guard who had doubts. Rémon was an agent of the Order—perhaps not permanent, perhaps just someone they had trained for this mission. They had placed him in the corridor at the moment when my psychological collapse was becoming interesting. They had given him a role, and he had played it for three weeks without missing a single note.He did not smile cruelly. He simply looked tired—tired of having played a role, tired of having listened to the stories of a boy he was not going to help. He told me: We wanted to know whether you had someone outside. Someone you would run to. An accomplice, a cousin, a friend still alive in another city. We wanted to see whether you would run toward something or whether you would run just to run. You ran just to run. You have no one. That's what we needed to know.He looked at me a moment longer. Then he said, more softly: I'm sorry, Louis. Sincerely. What they're doing to you is not right. I don't agree with all of it. But I'm doing my job.And he took my arm gently, the way you take the arm of a friend you are telling about a death, and he led me back through the tunnel, through the courtyard, through the corridors, to my cell. He did not shove me. He treated me with the respectful gentleness of a man who had just betrayed a child and at least wanted the betrayal to be clean.•I stop. I say nothing for a long moment.Séhn does not speak either. He knows the story is not finished—he knows there is a conclusion missing. He waits.I continue, lower:
"The priest came to see me two days later. He told me, with a tiny smile I have never forgotten: You have no one outside, Louis. That's what we needed to know. And now, you see, you know it too."That was the day I died for the second time.The first time, I had died when I understood that the stones recorded everything. The second time, I died when I understood they could build a false hope around me with the precision of a watchmaker, and that I was not intelligent enough to tell the false from the true. That second death was worse. The first had cost me my speech. The second cost me my trust in my own judgment.I never tried again. I am no longer capable of trying again. I no longer trust any guard, any face, any promise.That is all.•Séhn does not speak for a long moment.I listen to his breathing through the wall. Slow. Measured. He is thinking. He is evaluating. And when he finally speaks, his voice is changed. Lower. More wounded—and that wound in his voice is either a very fine performance or something authentic coming from deep inside him despite his mission. I may never know which."And the guard?" he says.I do not answer right away. I do not see where he is going."Rémon. What happened to him afterward?""I don't know. I never saw him again."Séhn falls silent. Then, in a harder voice:
"I hope he's dead."I freeze.That is not the reaction I expected. An ordinary new prisoner would have said that's horrible, or you were unlucky, or nothing at all. Séhn wishes death on a man he has never met, in a matter that does not concern him, with a violence that goes beyond the situation.I ask, cautious:
"Why?""Because a man who smiles while betraying a child deserves nothing else."The sentence hangs in the air. I let it settle. And as it settles, in my chest the brother wakes with a start—not strongly, just a dry point, just enough to draw my attention. The brother does not agree. Or rather: the brother has noticed that what Séhn has just said, Séhn is saying to himself as much as to me.Séhn is talking about a man who smiles while betraying a child.Séhn is betraying me right now. Séhn is Rémon. Séhn is doing exactly what Rémon did, only longer, only more patiently. And Séhn has just condemned Rémon without realizing he is condemning himself—or perhaps he realizes it perfectly, and the sentence he has just spoken is a form of confession he cannot hold back because, somewhere inside him, he hates himself for doing what he is doing.Two possible readings. One simple. The other more complex. I do not choose. I keep both open.I say:
"I don't know what became of him. I prefer not to know.""Why not?""Because if I knew he was dead, I might be glad. And being glad about the death of a man, even a man who betrayed me, is something I do not want yet. I prefer not to know. That way I can keep believing he is somewhere in the world, doing the same thing to another prisoner, hating himself a little more each time."Séhn falls silent.The silence lasts. It lasts longer than the previous silences. I feel, through the wall, that the sentence I have just spoken has reached something in Séhn that I did not consciously aim for. In my chest the brother purrs softly—a new vibration I had not yet felt, a vibration that feels like satisfaction.The brother knows something I do not know. He knows that my sentence has touched Séhn. Not in his role as an agent. In his person. In the part of him that is perhaps not entirely an agent.Séhn finally says, in a voice barely audible:
"You are a strange person, Louis Vermillion."And he says nothing more. He simply leaves that sentence like a stone placed between us, and he is silent for the rest of the evening.I respect his silence. I lie back down on my pallet. The cell is black now. Dawn has not yet come. The only light that enters through the crack in the outer wall is moonlight, cold, pale, weak. I wait for sleep.It comes faster than usual. My body is tired from the day, tired from the story. And the brother, sated by the purring of a little while ago, falls gently back asleep beneath my heart.I sink.•I dream.I had not dreamed in a long time—I mean really dreamed, with images, people, movement. My sleeps in the Well were generally black and empty. That evening the dream comes.I see my mother.She is in a room I do not recognize. Not the bedroom where she came to see me the last night. Not the kitchen where she wiped my hands after the horse. Another room. Smaller. Darker. A room with a window, light, ordinary furniture. Perhaps an inn room. Perhaps a place of passage.My mother is sitting on a wooden chair. She looks at me. She is younger in this dream than in my last memory of her—she is perhaps thirty, not forty. Her hair is loose. Her eyes are as I have always known them—green, without Maela's brown ring, eyes that look straight and do not let go.She does not speak right away.She looks at me. For a long time. And in her gaze I read something I had never understood while she was alive—an immense fatigue, not the fatigue of a forty-year-old woman who dies for a secret, but something older, as if my mother carried inside her a fatigue that came from before her own birth.She finally says, in a very low voice:
"Louis. I don't have much time."It is not her usual voice. It is her voice, yes—I would recognize it among a thousand—but it has something thinner about it. As if she were forced to pass her words through a narrow opening and each word came out a little flattened.I want to answer but I cannot move my mouth in the dream. I can only think, and she receives my thought the way I received her words.Mom.That is all I think. Just that word. And the word is enough—she smiles slightly, a tiny smile, and in that smile I have my entire mother in a single second, all the years I did not have with her, all the times she kissed me and all the times she scolded me, compressed into a dream smile that does not last."Listen to me," she says.•She tells me nothing.She explains nothing about the brother. She does not speak to me about the family, or the heritage, or the rules, or the price, or any of the things I perhaps hope she will tell me. She looks at me in silence for a long moment. And then she says only, very simply:
"I am dead, Louis. You already know that, I imagine. But I needed to tell you myself."I feel something give way inside me—not in the cell, in the dream. An inner dam that had held for more than a year and that breaks all at once. I had always refused to know. I had kept my mother alive by default, because as long as I had no proof I could believe. And now I have the proof, and I can no longer believe.I cry in the dream. Without movement. Just tears flowing down a face that has no body.My mother waits for me to cry. She does not hurry me. She remains seated on her wooden chair, patient, the way she always was in life.When I finally calm down she says:
"I wanted to tell you two things tonight. Only two. I no longer have time for more."She pauses. She draws a breath—or the equivalent of breath in this dream where she may no longer have lungs."The first thing. I love you, Louis. I have always loved you. Even the times I was hard with you, even the times I did not explain what you wanted me to explain, even the times I scolded you for things that were not your fault. I loved you every second. I want you to carry that with you for the rest of your life. You were loved. You still are. And you always will be, even when I am no longer here to tell you."I cry again. Harder this time.•She continues, after a silence:
"The second thing is more difficult. I am going to tell it to you, but I am not going to explain it. I do not have the time, and you are not ready yet. You will understand it later, when you have met certain people you have not yet met. Until then you will carry it without understanding, and it will be uncomfortable, and you may hate me for not explaining it to you. But I prefer your hatred to your death. So I am telling it to you anyway."She looks me straight in the eyes."Louis. When your brother comes out of you next time, watch what he does. Not what he kills or what he strikes—watch what he does before. The way he moves. The direction he takes. Who he is interested in. And remember that you are not the one he protects."I understand that I do not understand. I understand that this sentence is meant to be a key, but I do not have the lock.Mom? I think. What do you mean, I am not the one he protects?She does not answer me directly. She says:
"You will look for the answer. You will find it. Do not ask me now. Do not ask me tonight. Keep the sentence in your head. Repeat it when you are alone. One day you will meet someone who can make you understand. On that day you will know you were ready."She leans toward me in the dream. Her hands are raised as if she wanted to touch me. But our bodies do not touch—the dream does not allow it, or the path she is using does not allow it. Our hands pass through each other like smoke trying to hold smoke.She looks at me one last time."Live, Louis. I ask you to. Live. Mourn me if you can, and then live. A woman you have not yet met will soon come looking for you. Let her. Trust her when she arrives, even if you do not know her, because I trusted her a long time ago, and my trust is still in her hands."I love you. I am leaving you. I do not know if I will be able to return."The dream begins to fade. The edges of the room dissolve. My mother's chair becomes transparent. I see her face moving away, or rather withdrawing gently, like a tide going out.Before disappearing completely she says one last thing, a sentence so low I barely hear it:
"And, Louis—do not tell anyone that I spoke to you tonight. To no one. Ever."And she is gone.•I wake with a start.I am on my back, on my pallet, in the cell. Dawn has not yet come. It is still night. My cheek is damp. I cried in my sleep without realizing it. The tears flowed and dried on my skin while I was dreaming.My mouth has a taste of blood.Not a passing metallic taste. A real taste of blood, frank, dense, that fills my entire mouth. I bring my hand to my lips. Nothing. My tongue is not cut. My gums are not bleeding. The blood does not come from my mouth in the physical sense.The blood comes from deeper.Someone paid for this conversation. I do not know who, I do not know how. Perhaps my mother herself, somewhere beyond. Perhaps me, without my knowing. Perhaps both. But the path she used to speak to me was not free, and something inside me has flowed so that it could exist.I remain lying in the dark, one hand on my lips, my mouth full of the taste of blood. I look at the invisible ceiling of the cell. I think of the strange sentence my mother gave me—you are not the one he protects. I do not understand what it means. I do not understand who he protects if it is not me. I do not understand why my mother would have placed inside my body a thing that does not protect me.But my mother said I would understand later, when I had met certain people. And I decide to trust my mother in death the way I would have wanted to trust my mother in life, if they had given me the time.I close my eyes. I let the tears flow again, this time knowing why. I mourn my mother, who has been dead for more than a year, and whom I mourn only this morning, on the fifteen-hundred-and-seventeenth morning, in a cell where the stones listen and where a creature I thought I knew keeps watch beneath my heart.The brother, in my chest, did not move during the dream. He remained silent. He neither purred nor pushed nor heated. He listened, perhaps. Or perhaps he was absent—perhaps while my mother spoke to me, he had disappeared elsewhere, into a place I cannot follow.I do not know.I know only one thing, and it is my mother's sentence that tells me: I do not truly know the thing that lives in my body. I thought I was beginning to understand it. I thought it was my ally. It may still be. But it may also be something more complex than that, and the alliance may not be exactly what I thought.You are not the one he protects.I will keep that sentence in my head. I will repeat it when I am alone. I will wait to meet the people I have not yet met.And outside, somewhere in the night, the woman my mother spoke of—the one who will soon come looking for me—may already be on her way.