The long afternoon (2)

"You are going to ask me why I sat down," said Beatrix.

"I wasn't."

"You were about to. It's the ordinary next thing." She kept her eyes on the white. "I sat down because I have finished counting the room, and the room has nothing in it, and so I have moved on to the eleven of you. It is the only material I have. It's not a compliment."

"I didn't take it as one."

"Good."

It was very quiet where they sat. The sound of the others had thinned with the distance, and then, as Emeric had said it would, stopped altogether; there was no murmur at the edge of hearing, no rumor of a conversation elsewhere. Neiman could see them, small and clear, the painter and the doctor, the pair of men with their heads bent, the two women who were arguing with their hands. But their voices had been taken out of the air, and the effect was of watching a film with the sound removed by someone who thought he was doing you a kindness.

"I can tell you where each of you was lying when I woke," said Beatrix. "If it's of interest."

"It is, rather."

"You were third from the left, on your back, with your right hand open on your chest. The one who talks was sitting up before you were, and she was the fourth. The one who hums was the first I heard. The one with the paint under her nails had an arm across her face and the arm was trembling from the shoulder, not the wrist, which means she was awake and had chosen not to be. The one who adds had his ankles crossed. He was lying like a man on a tomb. I counted it twice." She paused. "I was ninth. I'm not sure why I tell you. It's an inventory."

"It's very thorough."

"It's the only kind I have." She glanced at him, sidelong, without turning her head. "You may ask me something now. You haven't. I've marked it."

"What do you do with names, then?" said Neiman. "If they go."

"I keep the person."

"Is that enough?"

"It's more than a name. A name is a label somebody stuck on. It's not the thing. It comes off." She said this with no particular weight, but the last word seemed to fall out of her rather more slowly than the others. "It's the first to go. It's a general observation."

He did not ask what it was the first to go of. He noticed himself not asking, and knew, with the small dry clarity he had for such things, that she had noticed it as well, and had entered it.

"I said something to you before," he said, after a while, to change the ground. "I'm not certain you'll have kept it. About the paintings."

"You didn't say anything about paintings."

"I was going to. I've been thinking about it since the voice. It's the sort of thing one thinks about when there's nothing to look at. Why is it that in old paintings, and in every watch advertisement in the world, the hands of the clock say ten past ten?"

Beatrix turned her head.

It was the first time she had looked at him directly since she sat down, and it was not an unkind look; it was the look of a cashier who has been handed the wrong bill and is deciding how best to say so.

"That's two claims," she said. "The advertisements first. It's true. It's been true since roughly the middle of the last century. Ten past ten frames the maker's name between the hands, which makes it easy to read, and the hands are raised like a pair of arms, and it looks like a smile. Before that, eight-twenty was common, and it looks like a frown. That is the accepted account. I can't verify it from here." She paused. "The paintings, I can't help you with. Clocks in paintings show all sorts of hours. They are usually there to remind the sitter he will die. Name one that says ten past ten."

"I can't, actually."

"No."

"It's the kind of thing one says."

"It's the kind of thing you say," said Beatrix, and it was neither an accusation nor a joke, only a line of print.

"It was a nice thought, though."

"It was a wrong one. It might have been nice. I don't keep those separate." She lifted a hand, and looked at it, and set it back on her knee. "This is what I intended to say. There are twelve of us and no clock. Every one of us has been keeping time, and every one of us has a different answer. It is not a game. Time here is testimony. Each person's count is a witness, and no witness is the record. When the day is over I would like to collect every count, and see who kept it best."

"You'd win."

"I'd be the reference. That's not the same. I might be wrong. I have not been, so far. But it's not the same."

"What would the others say? About who kept it best."

"I don't know. That's what I want to find out." She said it quite simply, and for a moment she was almost young. "I prefer it when I'm not the only one who knows what time it is."

Neiman looked at the white and said nothing. It was not a hard moment to say nothing in.

"You told the one with the burned arms that the sentence was thin," said Beatrix, in the same level tone. "That's a quote. 'A thin, slow, unreliable version of whatever it was trying to say.' Then you told the one who changes languages that the sentence was fine and everyone was tasting a different soup. 'Perfectly all right,' you said. Those are both in the ledger."

"They can both be true."

"In the ledger they're contradictory," said Beatrix. "Beyond the ledger, I've no jurisdiction." She turned to him again, and her eyes were pale and attentive. "I'm not saying it's an error. I'm saying I have the two of them, side by side, and I don't find that they fit. I thought you'd wish to know."

"Thank you."

"It isn't a kindness."

"No," said Neiman. "It's a count."

The corner of her mouth moved, very slightly, in something that was not a smile but was the closest thing to one the face had. "Yes," said Beatrix. "That's right."

They sat there some while longer, and did not speak, and for a time it was not unpleasant.

---

"— because it's counterintuitive, that's what makes it good, you'd think it'd take, like, a hundred and eighty people, because a year's got three hundred and sixty-five days and you'd want to get about halfway, right? But it's twenty-three. It's twenty-three. You put twenty-three people in a room and it's a coin flip that two of them share a birthday. And I said, I said to my — to somebody once — that's insane, and they said, no, it's the pairs. It's not people, it's pairs. Twenty-three people is two hundred and fifty-three pairs, and every pair's a chance. So it's really about how many connections there are, and not how many people —"

"Two hundred and fifty-three," said Idris. "Yes. Sixteen point seven percent for twelve."

"That's us!"

"I've been trying not to say it."

"Sixteen point seven percent that two of us share one! Say it again! I love how you say a number. It's like a person reading their own will."

"It's sixteen point seven, if you ignore leap days and assume births are spread evenly across the year, which they are not, and I would hedge, but I wouldn't hedge much." He was sitting bolt upright with his hands on his knees, in an attitude of great, weary decency, and he had a small notebook's worth of expression on his face. "About one in six. Or, if you like: five in six that no two of us do."

"But if two did —"

"If two of us did, I'd want to know why."

"Because it'd be weird?"

"Because it would be evidence," said Idris. "I don't mean I'd know of what. But an event at one in six is not a strong signal. It's a thing that happens. If I were designing a room of twelve people, and I wanted it to look accidental, I'd make certain no two of us shared a date. And then I'd be afraid, in the middle of the night, that it looked too clean. It's not a rational fear. It's the sort of fear one has in a library."

"That's the most paranoid thing I've ever heard." She sounded delighted. "We should ask! We should go around and ask everybody!"

"Not yet."

"Why not?"

"If we ask first, we spoil the count. I don't mean I know what the count is. I mean it's cleaner if the thing is unasked, and then somebody produces the answer without knowing that there was a question. It's a — you'd have to run it as a test." He seemed embarrassed. "Ask me at the end of the day."

"Deal," said Sophia, and held out her hand, and he shook it, gravely, and both of them looked pleased.

Neiman had arrived at some point in this. He had not decided to; a certain gravitational disposition had brought him, and there he was, at the edge of a small crescent of the group, where the others had begun, without discussion, to drift back together. Margo had come, and lay on her back with her burned forearms across her eyes. The doctor was near the painter. Lucian and Emeric had returned by degrees, still murmuring. Vivienne sat a little apart, upright, with her hands in her lap, and as Neiman came into her line of sight she inclined her head to him, an acknowledgment as neutral as a signature, and looked away.

She had unpinned her hair. It had happened at some point when he wasn't watching. It fell almost to her waist, dark and straight, and it changed her face in the way a curtain changes a window: she looked younger, and no less exact. One of the pins she held between finger and thumb, and turned over slowly, as if it were a coin she was considering the value of.

"Sophia," she said. "You asked for a paperclip."

"I asked if anyone had — oh, is that — oh my gosh."

"It is not a paperclip. It will have to do."

"It's perfect," said Sophia, receiving it in both hands like a sacrament. "It's so good. Do you know what you can do with one of these? Anything. You can pick a — it's very good for — okay, you can't do anything with it, actually, not here, there's nothing to plug it into, but I could — I could —" She had it between her fingers and was already bending it, quick and deft, into a little figure eight, a loop, a spiral. Her hands, Neiman saw, never stopped, even when her mouth had. They were the steadiest thing about her. "It's the principle. It's the idea of a thing you can do something with."

"Then it was worth the trouble," said Vivienne.

"I'm going to name it. What do you call a — Idris, what's a good name for it?"

"I'd put the odds of a good name at —"

"Idris."

"Pin," said Idris, unhappily. "Its name is Pin."

"Pin! Perfect! Pin's going to help. Pin is — right, so, here's what I actually wanted to ask you." She bent the wire in her hands into a new shape and eyed it. "Because you've got the — you think about the odds of things, right? Everything? Like every single thing?"

"I do it whether I wish to or not."

"Okay. What are the odds that a thing gets used for what it was made for?"

"A thing?"

"Anything. Like a — a tool. Something somebody makes. What are the odds it ends up being used for the thing they made it for?"

Idris was silent for a moment. He was taking the question seriously; Neiman could tell, because he had stopped sitting quite so straight, and had let his shoulders come forward a little, like a man reading a menu in a language he almost knows.

"Lower than people assume," he said at last. "I'd say — I'd need a reference class, so I'd choose — I'd say most tools have a second life, and most of the second lives are not the ones the maker had in mind. The longer the thing lasts, the worse it gets. Most things outlive their reasons. I'd say for a durable object, over a long period, it's — I'd say most likely it's used for something else." He paused. "I'm sorry. Was that not the sort of answer —"

Sophia did not say anything.

It was, Neiman thought, a very small silence, no longer than a slow breath, and he would not have marked it but for the sheer unlikelihood of it. She had not stopped talking in four hours except to draw air. Her hands had gone still, the wire in them, the bent loop half-formed; her face, which did everything by halves, did nothing at all. It was the most abrupt piece of stillness he had ever seen, like a film stopped on a single frame.

He had time to think: That's an odd place to put a comma.

Then she said, brightly, "Anyway!" and her hands started up again, and the wire bent in her fingers, and she was off, saying it was so interesting, she'd only been wondering, it was a thing she'd been thinking of, in a general way, and had he ever noticed that a paperclip was actually a really elegant — and the small gap in the conversation closed over like water.

Idris, still frowning at his own answer, did not seem to have noticed. Beatrix, not far off, had her hands folded and her eyes on nothing. Margo, under her arms, lay quite still.

Across the way, Vivienne Hale had turned her head.

She did not look at Sophia, quite. She looked at the place beside Sophia, where the silence had been, in the way one looks at the mark on a wall where a picture used to hang. Her face did not move. Then she looked, briefly, straight at Neiman, who happened to be watching her, and he saw her see that he had seen. It was nothing. It was a flicker, less than a flicker. She looked away.

He was aware, obscurely, of having been given something, and of not knowing what it was.

"What are the odds we get out?" said Sophia.

She said it lightly, in the rush of a sentence, and then heard herself, and stopped. For once she did not finish. She held the wire.

"I don't have a reference class," said Idris.

"Guess."

"Sophia —"

"Just guess. One number. Don't hedge."

He looked at her for a long time, in his flat, unhappy, honest way, and his face did the thing that Neiman had begun to recognize, the slow uncoiling of a man who has decided to do something dangerous.

"Twenty," said Idris. "I'd say twenty. If I had to."

Nobody said anything.

"And I'd hedge," he added, in a smaller voice. "I'm — I'd hedge it down."

"Don't," said Sophia. She put her hand on his sleeve, quite gently, and left it there. "Don't. Twenty's good. It's — you know what? Twenty's a lot. Twenty's like a whole fifth."

"It's exactly a fifth."

"See?"

Neiman looked away. He was not certain why. He had the impression that if he went on looking he would be asked to do something, and in the absence of any information about what, it seemed safest to study Lucian's hands, which were moving on his knee in a small, fretful, wandering rhythm, as though there were a piano under them.

---

The trouble began at what Beatrix declared to be the seventh hour and a half, and which was, by Lucian's tempo, closer to the ninth.

It began, as most trouble does, from a position that both parties thought reasonable.

"I'm going," said Rafaela.

She had stopped running. It had taken her nearly six hours to do it, and it had not been a decision so much as a wearing out: she stood in the center of her track with her hands on her knees, breathing like a bellows, her cropped hair dark with sweat, and she had the wild, raw look of an animal that has run the length of its cage and found it exactly as long as it was on the first lap.

"Rafaela," said Emeric, gently.

"It's not — hear me out — it's not far. It's not. I just want to — the track's forty. Forty meters. That's nothing. That's — that's a ring. I want to go — sixty. Eighty. A hundred and — see if it changes. It could change. It's a — you don't know it doesn't."

"I don't know that it does."

"So we don't know —"

"The voice," said Emeric, and stopped, and smoothed his shirtsleeves, and tried again with visible care. "The voice said what we were to do with this time. It said to get acquainted. I take it as an instruction. It's — forgive me — I take all instructions as instructions. It said nothing about leaving. It did not say we might not. But it gave us a condition, and I do not believe one should go looking for the edge of a condition one has been given. It's — I'm aware it sounds rigid. It's only that in my experience the edge of a rule is where the rule *lives.*"

"That's not a rule. It's a gap."

"It's a silence. It's the same thing."

"It's the difference between — it said sit and talk. It didn't say sit and talk only. You can't just —" Rafaela's fists were opening and closing. "You can't just make up what it meant."

"I'm not making it up. I'm reading it conservatively."

"That's what everyone says who's afraid to —"

"If I might," said Lucian, in the voice of a man setting down a tray very carefully, "if I might — what if there's a — a middle. Like a — if we think of it as a — it's not that either of you is — it's a chord, you see, it's two notes and they aren't wrong, they only want a third —" He hummed something, fragile and rising, that did not resolve. "It's just that I don't like it when it's loud."

"It's not loud," said Rafaela. "It's — I'm not loud — it's urgent, it's — there's no time, do you see, it said twenty-four hours, and a — and —"

She could not finish it. The end of the sentence went out of her like air. Neiman had been looking at her without meaning to, and he saw her hand go to her hip, sharply, and close on nothing, as though there had been something there, and for a moment her eyes were not in the room. Then they were.

"— and if we don't do something," she said, in a lower voice, "we sit here. And it wins."

"Who wins?" said Emeric.

"Whoever it is."

"You're in or out?" Rafaela added, and swung on Neiman, who had not spoken. "You. You've been sitting there. Are you in, or out?"

"In," said Neiman, easily. "Certainly. I'd say it's only sensible to look."

"Thank you."

"Neiman?" said Emeric, at his other elbow, wounded. "You'd not — you said, earlier, that the perimeter was — that it would be foolish to burn the whole afternoon on a straight line."

"I did. I still think that. It's a great deal of the afternoon."

"You said in."

"I said it's sensible to look. I didn't say where."

"That's a —" Rafaela's lip curled, and she took a step toward him, and looked at him hard, a long, fierce, level stare, the look of somebody trying to place a smell. "You don't pick. You just go where it's — where the air is. That's not a — that's not picking."

"Well," said Neiman, and smiled, and let the sentence hang.

She looked at him a moment longer. He had the strange sensation of being weighed by a scale that did not care for the weight. Then something crossed her face that was not quite contempt, and not quite recognition, and was, for the length of a breath, both; and she turned away, sharply, like a woman who has caught sight of her own reflection in a shop window and does not care for the coat.

"It's a compromise," said Vivienne.

Nobody had seen her rise. She was standing at the edge of the little crescent with her hair loose and her hands still, and she did not raise her voice, and everyone turned.

"Rafaela wants to look. Emeric doesn't want to breach a condition we do not understand. Both positions are reasonable. Neither is a rule. I propose the following." She let a beat pass. "Rafaela may go as far as Emeric can follow her. He can track her, we've seen that. He will call out where she is. If he loses her, she turns back. She goes out by the number of paces that Beatrix counts. She returns in a quarter of an hour, or she does not go."

"Fifteen minutes," said Rafaela.

"Fifteen."

"And if there's something?"

"Then you come and tell us, and we go together."

Rafaela stood for a moment, working her jaw. "Fine," she said. "But if I get to the — if I find the edge —"

"Then you will have found it. Nobody here is in charge of you." Vivienne's voice softened a shade, as it had for Idris. "I'd ask it as a favor."

"Fine. Yes. Yes."

"Emeric?"

"I — yes," said Emeric. "Yes, that's — I can — that's perfectly fair. I'm obliged." He looked, on the whole, immensely relieved. "It was — I would not have known how to come to it myself."

"It's a habit," said Vivienne, dryly. "You learn."

It was the first joke Neiman had heard her make. It was so faint that most of them missed it, and Margo, who did not, made a small, low sound in the back of her throat, and Vivienne's mouth moved, briefly, in answer.

Rafaela went. This time she did not jog. She walked, in a straight line, arms swinging, and Emeric shut his eyes and murmured the distance, seventy, eighty, ninety, a hundred and twelve, forty, sixty, a hundred and forty, and Beatrix counted paces in a monotone, and at a hundred and sixty-one paces Emeric said, in a tone of quiet apology, "Lost her. She's gone. She's just — gone. It isn't that there's anything. It's only that there's no more of her."

She came back in eleven minutes. She had not found the edge.

She had, however, found something, and she stood at the rim of the group with her hands hanging and her breath quiet, and she said it like a woman telling a nurse a symptom: that at a hundred and sixty-one paces, when she looked back, she could not see them. She could not see any of them. She had turned around, and there was only white, and the white was exactly the white in front of her, and for the length of a breath she had not been able to tell which way was back.

"How did you find us?" said Idris.

"I —" She looked down at her hands, and then, unaccountably, at Neiman. "I don't know. I just walked. I just — I went the way that wasn't the way I was going."

"That's a very good instinct," said Kenji, quietly.

"It's not an instinct. It's — I don't know what it was."

"It was a return," said Emeric. He had opened his eyes. He was looking at her with the gravest tenderness, as one looks at a friend who has come back from a long illness. "One always knows, in a house one knows. I can't say whether it's — but it was there. When I could find you again. You came back toward something." He hesitated. "I don't think it was us."

For a moment nobody said anything. The white lay around them without a mark.

"Then we'll take it," said Vivienne, gently, "as a good sign. And we'll try not to draw a conclusion."

---

Sleep, when it came, came the way water comes into a boat: unnoticed, from below.

It was Sophia who went first, and not in the middle of a sentence, which Neiman would have laid money on, but at the end of one, mildly and all at once, like a child in a car. She had been talking to Lucian about a kind of circuit that could, if you were sufficiently annoying about it, be persuaded to sing. Her head went down onto her arm. The wire was still in her fingers. Lucian, who had been humming an answer, hummed on for a few bars, and then lowered the hum by degrees, until it was a thing you felt rather than heard, and then not that.

Kenji stood.

"I'd like it to be understood," he said, quietly, with a professional's absence of urgency, "that this is very much expected. Nine hours awake, more or less, with no food, no water, a large deal of fear, and no sleep-cue whatever. We ought to go by body. Whoever's tired ought to rest. Not all at once." He looked around. "I'm afraid someone should be awake."

"Watches," said Emeric, with an involuntary shine of joy. "One does, in a house one doesn't know. A rota."

"An hour each," said Vivienne. "Beatrix will keep the hours. Beatrix?"

"Ten minutes past nine, by the ledger," said Beatrix. "I'll take the first. I don't sleep well and I've no wish to begin."

"I'll take the second," said Rafaela, at once, with the roughness of a person confessing to a vice. "I can't. I can't sleep. There's no — I'll do two."

"Two, if you wish it."

"Idris," said Vivienne. "The third. Kenji, the fourth. Margo. Adaeze. Lucian, if you are able — if not, we'll excuse you." A small pause. "Emeric, sixth. Saoirse, seventh. Neiman, eighth."

"Certainly," said Neiman.

"I'll take the last," said Vivienne. "Ninth. I sleep briefly."

It was, thought Neiman, an exemplary rota. It was the sort of thing he might have written into a novel to show that a character was competent; and if he had, an editor would have asked him what she was so afraid of.

He lay on his back where he had been sitting. The floor was neither warm nor cool, and it took his weight without complaint. Around him, one by one, the small warm sounds of bodies giving up began: a sigh, a shifted elbow, a mutter in a language he did not have. Somebody's breathing was in fours. He did not want to think about whose.

He did not sleep. He was not surprised. He lay with his hands folded on his chest and looked up into a whiteness that did not know how far away it was, and listened to eleven people carry on the thing that people do in the dark, which is to be in a room and be alone. It was not, he found, a disagreeable exercise. There was a technique to it. One let the eyes go loose. One let the thoughts go out to the end of their tethers and come back, and did not look at what they had brought.

At some point, he was aware, Beatrix was standing over the sleepers with her hands clasped, counting. At some point she was gone and Rafaela was in her place, pacing, in a slow tight circle, forty meters wide. At some point it was Idris, and Idris was holding Sophia's pin, which had rolled out of her hand, between his finger and thumb, and looking at it as at a small unexploded thing.

Then it was his turn, and Saoirse, whom he had somehow not seen wake, was sitting up and rubbing her eyes and saying, with an enormous yawn, "It's all yours, darling. It's all white. You'll adore it."

---

He sat, and kept the watch.

It was, of all the things he had been asked to do that day, the one he was best at. He knew it at once. It required no opinion. It required a body, upright, awake, and pointed at the dark; and it was a matter of profound indifference to the dark whether the body agreed with it. He put his hands on his knees. He watched the eleven of them breathe.

They lay in a loose ring, as they had woken. He could see each of them at a distance he could have crossed in a dozen strides. The doctor slept on his back with two fingers curled against his own wrist, out of habit or vigil. The painter had thrown one arm over her eyes. Margo slept with her nose slightly lifted, drawing the air in small, hungry, disappointed sips. Emeric lay on his side with his hands tucked between his knees, like a man who has been told the house is not his. Lucian's mouth was moving, a very little, at the corner. Sophia lay curled up like a comma with her fist shut on nothing, and, quite near, Vivienne Hale, who had not gone to sleep at all.

She was sitting against nothing, upright, with her hair falling over one shoulder and her eyes open. She was not looking at Neiman. She was not looking at anyone. She was looking at Sophia, with the extreme, unresting attention of someone reading a very long document over a sleeper's shoulder, and he understood that she had been doing this for some time. That she would do it until she was relieved. That she was not going to say why.

He kept his eyes on the white.

It's the most sensible thing, to be afraid, he thought. It was the beginning of a thought, or the middle; it arrived in that flat, cool, well-punctuated voice he had, the one he had been listening to for years, and which had never, he supposed, been mistaken for a stranger's. And I am not. Which is, on reflection, a poor sign, and I say so in the way you'd say of a colleague, he's not been himself since the divorce. He watched the doctor's fingers move on his wrist. I ought to be afraid. I have been given all the necessary material. I have been transported to a dimension without features by an entity with a sense of humor, and told to solve a set of murders I have not yet heard of, and I am sitting here thinking that the pacing is slow. He was aware, faintly, that this was funny. He was aware, too, that the joke had been made so many times that it had stopped being a joke and become a load-bearing wall; and that a man who has made one joke for twenty years, in every room he has entered, has by that fact alone made a very complete self-portrait, and hung it where the door is.

They're all so good at something, he thought.

He did not intend to think it. It came in the way a smell comes into a kitchen. He had watched them all day, and they were good: they were each of them good, so specifically and improbably good that it had begun to seem like a kind of rudeness. She could taste the blood. He could hear the whole of a house. Somebody had stood in the middle of a hundred and sixty paces of white and known, without a map, which way was back. And he was a man who wrote novels, and the novels were fine, they were perfectly serviceable, they had sold in respectable numbers to the kind of people who read on trains. There was nothing in him you could put in a jar. He had a knack, not a gift. He had been watching, all his life, the people who had the other thing, and had made a modest living from describing what it looked like from outside.

Well. That was the job.

It was nonsense to mind it. It was a feeling of the kind one finds in the second act of a play, put there by the author to give the man a reason to do what he will do in the third. He had seen it done a thousand times, and done it, and he found he could stand at a considerable distance from it and admire the workmanship. He was calm. He was, as everyone kept saying, calm. It was, he supposed, the one distinction he had; and he could feel, quite distinctly, the exact width of the gap between the calm and the thing it was sitting on, as a man may know the thickness of a floor by the sound of a step.

He folded his hands.

At some point during the eighth hour, Sophia made a small noise in her sleep, and turned over, and said something that was not a word; and then, distinctly, in a voice with no run in it at all, a plain, flat, very young voice that he had not heard from her before: "I didn't know it would do that."

Nothing else. She turned again and was still.

Neiman did not move. He was quite sure, and remained sure, that he had heard it. He was equally sure that he had not been meant to. It seemed to him a fact of a very particular weight, and he held it a while, as one holds something in the dark, without looking, to learn its shape; and then, because he was who he was, he put it down where he put such things, and did not pick it up.

Across the ring, Vivienne's eyes had not moved.

Neither of them said anything. It was, he would think later, the closest they came that day.

---

"Twelve hours," said Beatrix.

They were all awake, or all as awake as they would get. It was not morning; there was no such thing; but there was a sort of collective surfacing, a yawning and rubbing of eyes and unlikely small kindnesses, Kenji looking at the tongues of the ones who would let him, Lucian humming a good-morning to nobody, Margo sitting up and sniffing, hopefully, and letting her face fall. Sophia had a crease down one cheek, and the wire in her fist was bent into something that looked, from a certain angle, very much like a bird.

"It's twelve hours, and four minutes, and nineteen seconds. It is halfway. I'll keep the rest of it, if you'd like."

"I thought it'd be more," said Sophia, hoarsely, delighted, appalled. "I thought it had to be at least — I'd have said sixteen. I feel like I've been asleep for a week."

"Nine and a half," said Idris. "Roughly. I'd say, with my rota-count, nine to ten."

"Fifteen," said Lucian. "I'm sorry. It's the — I can't — the tempo of it. It feels like fifteen."

"It's twelve," said Beatrix. "And four minutes."

"By my pulse," said Kenji, apologetically, "eleven and a half. I did my own watch as well as I could. I dozed, I think. I'm terribly sorry."

"Eleven and a half," said Adaeze. "Elf und ein halb. Onze et demie. It's a great thing when a room can't agree on how long it's been in the room."

"It's what I want," said Beatrix. She seemed, on the whole, pleased. "It's exactly what I want. Nobody's clock is the clock. That's what makes it testimony."

"We're the dust of time," said Adaeze. "The dust in a — what do you call it —"

"An hourglass," said Margo.

"Merci," said Adaeze. "Thank you. Something. I was in the middle of a — I've lost the language."

"You've found English," said Margo, with satisfaction.

"Twelve," said Neiman.

He had spoken almost to himself. Nobody was listening, or nobody seemed to be; Sophia had turned to Idris and was telling him, in tremendous detail, about a dream in which a shark had asked her to sign a form. But Beatrix's head came round, slowly, and her pale eyes rested on him, and she said, with great precision, as one reading from an index: "Twelve hours. That's what I said. It's what I told you it was."

"Yes," said Neiman. "I know. I was only counting."

"I know you were," said Beatrix. "It's all I do."

Vivienne, at the edge of the ring, had begun to braid her hair. She did it slowly, without looking, her eyes on the group. There was a little space around her, as around the fixed point of a compass.

"We have twelve hours," she said. "I would suggest that we use them a little differently. Th e first half was for finding one another. I think, if we are all willing, that we might now use the second to find out what we think." She paused. "We have been very polite. I don't expect it will last. I'd like to have said so."

Nobody answered her. Somewhere in the white, in the place they had named the south, Lucian had begun to hum again, and beside him, without knowing it, Emeric's breath had fallen into time.