The Drowned Year

The Drawing Key

A door is a question. The true key is the only answer it will sit still and hear. — The Cutter's Catechism, first leaf

The keyhole sat at eye level in the dead man's study door, and Pell knew the turn of it before her hand came up.

She had not meant to know. That was the thing Tallow was forever on about — that Pell read locks the way other people read a private letter left face-up, all at once and without leave. But when she leaned close to the door, the brass escutcheon warmed under her breath the way old metal does, and behind the plain wards of a plain lock there was a second shape folded in deeper. Patient. Waiting to be asked the right question.

"Hands behind you," Tallow said, without looking. "You're a cutter, not a customer. Cutters keep their hands —"

"— off the work until the master's read it." Pell put her hands behind her. "I know."

"Then know it standing further back."

The study smelled of beeswax and cold ash and the particular dust of a room shut up too long out of grief. Highquay light came thin and grey through the river-side window, the kind of upriver morning that never quite committed to being day. Out past the glass the Mourn slid by fat and brown toward the sea, and the tide-clock on the mantel ticked in tenths toward the turning, its little brass hand creeping down the ebb.

The widow stood by the dead hearth with her own hands folded so hard the knuckles had gone the colour of tallow. Mistress Auber. She had a deed, she had told them at the Wardhouse door, a deed to the whole of her late husband's holding, and her husband had hidden it somewhere in the last bad month of his dying, when his mind was already going out like a tide that would not come back — and he had been a careful man, too careful, and he had not hidden it in a drawer. He had hidden it in himself. Folded the knowing of it into the lock of his own study door, the way a careful keysmith-minded man might, so that no creditor and no cousin could ever wring it out of him while he lived. And then he had died before he gave anyone the key.

So now there was a memory in a door, and the woman it belonged to was dead, and the woman who needed it was standing by the hearth turning her wedding band round and round.

Tallow lowered herself onto the cutting-stool with a sound like a hinge wanting oil. She was sixty-four and looked older in the bad eye, the left one, gone the milky grey of a frozen puddle; the good one was sharp as a bit-file. She set the field bench across her knees — the little folding bench the Company let masters carry for sanctioned house-calls, vice and oilstone and the rack of blanks in their felt — and laid her right hand flat on the door, fingers spread.

That hand was spent. Pell had watched it her whole remembered life and never once seen it feel a thing. Tallow had paid it away years before Pell came to her, paid it to some door Pell had never been told the name of, and now the master read wardings with the back of the knuckles and the left palm and a long brass listening-pin, because the fingers that should have done it were dead as wax.

"Well," Tallow murmured to the lock. "What do you want, then. Hm." She tapped the pin against the plate, once, listening. "Old wards. Honest. He cut these himself, look — a tradesman's hand, square shoulders on the bit, he liked a thing to —" Her mouth worked. "Liked a thing."

She trailed off the way she always did, the sentence left hanging open like a door she meant to come back and shut. She tilted the pin. Frowned. Tilted it the other way.

"Deeper in there's a second cut," she said. "That's the memory-ward. That's our work. It'll be —" She turned the pin a third time and made a low irritated sound, because the milky eye could not help her and the spent hand could not help her, and the warding sat behind the brass keeping its mouth closed.

"It folds left," Pell said.

The room went still in a particular way.

Tallow's good eye came round to her, slow. "I haven't —"

"It folds left, then drops, then there's a — a stutter, near the throat of it. Like he caught his breath in the middle of cutting and started again half a tooth off." Pell's hands were still behind her back. She had not touched the door since the first lean. She did not need to; the shape of it was simply there, the way a tune is there once you have heard the first three notes, the rest of it leaning toward you, wanting to be finished. "Bow, shank, bit, ward," she said under her breath, naming the parts to herself, steadying. "The bit's short. Three steps and the stutter. It's a small door, Master. It's not asking for much."

Tallow did not answer for a moment. Her spent hand lay on the plate over the warding, and the good eye stayed on Pell, and there was something in it that was not pride and was not quite fear and was a near neighbour to both.

"Read it again," she said quietly. "With the pin this time, so I can —"

But Pell had already heard it whole. She always heard it whole. That was the thing no one would put a name to at the Wardhouse, the thing that made the older cutters go quiet when she walked the bench-aisle: that a warding she should have spent an hour drawing with wax and listening-pin came to her in the time it took to lean down and breathe on the brass. Most people felt nothing at a lock. Trained smiths felt the draw, the faint tug of a true key near its true door. Pell felt the door itself, its hidden inner shape pressing its question into her palm before she asked.

She did not say that. She picked up the listening-pin and read the warding again the slow honest way, out loud, and let Tallow nod along as though Pell were learning it and not merely repeating it back.

"Left, drop, drop, stutter, throat," Tallow said, when she was done. "Aye." A pause. "Quick study," she said, which was the most she ever gave, and reached for the blanks.

The cutting itself was the part Pell loved without complication. A brass blank from the felt rack — small, honest, no death-iron nonsense, no strange dark metal, just good plain stock for a good plain man's door. The vice took it with a kiss of its jaws. Then the files: the bastard-cut to rough the steps, the second-cut to true them, the smooth to bring up the shoulders clean. Pell did the roughing under Tallow's eye, the bench between her knees, and the bite of the file ran up her arm into her teeth, iron-dust and machine oil and the small grey curls of swarf falling away, and the warding in her head and the blank in the vice came nearer and nearer to the same shape with every stroke. Left. Drop. Drop. The stutter — there, a hair short, the way he caught his breath. She filed the catch of breath into the brass on purpose, because the door would only answer the key that had it too.

"He's coming up true," Tallow said, watching the bit take its teeth. "Don't fall in love with the file. You're not — a cutter cuts till the door says stop, not till the cutter says pretty." She held the key to her good eye, turned it in the grey light. "There. That's it asking the question." She set it warm in Pell's palm and Pell felt the thing every keysmith lived for and never got used to: the draw. Faint, near, sure. The little brass key turned itself a half-degree toward the door the way a needle finds the north, humming so low it was less a sound than a held breath in the bones of the hand.

It pulled. It wanted its lock.

"It's drawing," Pell said, and could not keep it out of her voice.

"Course it's drawing. It's true." Tallow took it back before Pell could enjoy it. "Now comes the part you stand back for. This part you don't help. This part you don't —" The unfinished sentence again. She turned to the widow. "Mistress Auber."

The widow stopped turning her ring.

"You know the manner of it," Tallow said, and now her voice changed, gentled, went careful as a hand around a candle. "I told you at your door and I'll tell you here, because a body should hear it twice before they pay it. A true key isn't quenched in water. A memory-door's quenched in a memory, like for like. To open the room in him where he put your deed, you give a room of your own. One you can't get back. The door takes it on the turn, whether or not it gives you what you came for. There's no — there's no part-payment. There's no after-you-change-your-mind." She held the warm key up between them. "So. You've thought what you'll give."

Mistress Auber's hands came apart. "I have."

"Then say it plain, to the key, and not to me. It has to be yours, and willing, and true, or it comes out blind and turns on nothing." A small dry pause. "And then you've spent it for naught, which is the only thing worse than spending it."

The widow stepped to the door. She put her hand over Tallow's hand over the warm key, both of them holding it now, the brass between their palms, and she leaned her head down close to it the way Pell had leaned down to listen.

"His laugh," she said.

Pell's stomach went cold and quick.

"He had a laugh," the widow said to the key, very low, as if it were a thing she did not want the room to overhear and steal a piece of first. "It came up out of him too big for him, it embarrassed him, he'd put his hand over his mouth like a boy. Forty years I — I can hear it now. I can hear it now." Her voice did not break. That was the terrible part. It stayed level, the way Tallow's stayed level, the way Pell would learn that everyone's stayed level at the moment of the turn, because the thing was too large to be carried by anything as small as crying. "I'll give that," the widow said. "Take the sound of him laughing. Leave me where the deed is."

And the key took it.

There was no light, no smoke, nothing for a customer to point at after and say there, that's what I paid for. There was only the warm brass going suddenly cool under their four hands — the heat leaving it all at once, annealed, the absence hardening into the steel — and the widow's face, which had been holding the laugh up like water in cupped hands, simply… let it run out between her fingers. Pell watched it go. The woman's eyes searched for it, found a flat place where it had been, a clean grey nothing, and did not understand the nothing, would never again understand it, because the very memory of the loss was inside the thing she'd lost. She would only know, ever after, that she could not call up her husband laughing and could not say why a thing so missed should be missing.

Then the key turned.

Tallow set it in the throat of the lock — it went home like a word into the right mouth — and turned it left, drop, drop, the small stutter, the throat. The study door's plain lock fell open with a click that was nothing. And behind it, in the widow, a different door opened, and her breath went in sharp, and her flat searching face came alight with one small recovered thing:

the loose hearthstone, third from the left, the one he always knocked his pipe against —

"Oh," she said. "Oh, the hearthstone. He'd no more hide a deed in a drawer than — oh, you foolish, careful man." And she laughed.

She laughed, once, at her dead husband's carefulness, and she did not hear that it was her own laugh now and the only one left in the house, and she crossed to the cold hearth and knelt and worked at the third stone from the left with her thumbs.

Pell stood back, as ordered, with her hands behind her and her heart going like a file. Shaken. Lit up. Sick with it and greedy for it both at once. She had cut a key that opened a room inside a person. She had felt it draw. And someone had paid for it in front of her, in coin you could not see and could not return, and the world had simply let them.

This was the trade. This was the thing she wanted to be cut into, the way the absence was cut into the steel.

She did not let herself look too long at the flat grey place behind the widow's eyes.

—

They walked down out of Highquay as the tide turned.

You could feel it turn even with your eyes shut, the whole city leaning over from ebb to flood, the river hesitating mid-slide and then beginning, grudging, to climb back. Every tide-clock in every shopfront ticked over together. Gulls went up off the Mourn in a sheet. Down at the waterline the mud lay bared and shining, and the smell of it came up the steps to meet them — low-tide mud, green-black and old, the breath of the riverbed — and Pell's throat closed the way it always closed, a clean animal refusal she had carried as long as she had carried anything and had never once been able to explain. She breathed through her mouth and put her sleeve to her nose and Tallow, a step ahead, said nothing, because Tallow never said anything about the mud, only walked faster past it.

The field bench was heavy on Pell's shoulder. Her arm still hummed with the morning's file. She was happy, in the raw exhausted way of having done a real thing, and so her guard was down, and so the rhyme came up in her without her calling it.

She was humming it before she knew she'd begun.

A little counting-song, four notes and turn, the kind of thing a child sings skipping. Flood to keep and ebb to give — she had no words for it, only the shape of words, and the tune ran ahead of her down the wet steps — shut the year and let us live — and she could not have said where she had learned it, only that it lived in the same locked room of her as the mud, the room with the missing year in it, the year before the Wardhouse, the year no one would draw for her, the door in her own head she had never once been able to read.

And as she hummed it, far off, something drew.

Not a door she could see. Nothing in the street, nothing in any shopfront. Something downriver and low and vast, lower than the Wend-Market, lower than the Sill, lower than anything had a right to be — a door so large and so locked that she had walked past the place it should have been her whole life and never noticed the silence where it stood. It pulled at her now. Not at her hand. At the missing room behind her breastbone, the way the little brass key had pulled toward its lock, north-true, sure — here, here, you know me, you know how I want to turn — and the rhyme rose to meet it as if the two had been cut to the same warding, as if the song were the key and the great far door the lock, and Pell stopped dead on the steps with her mouth still open on the tune and her whole skin gone to gooseflesh, because for one half-degree of a turn she had felt how to ask it.

Tallow's hand closed over hers.

The spent grey hand, the dead hand that felt nothing — it came round Pell's wrist and her humming mouth both, hard, harder than a numb hand should be able to grip, and the master had gone the colour of the bared mud, the colour of the milky eye, all the blood dropped out of her face at once.

"Stop." It came out of her cracked. "Stop the song. Stop —"

"Master, what is —"

"Don't reach for it." Tallow's good eye searched Pell's face the way the widow's had searched for the laugh, terrified of what it might or might not find there. Down at the waterline the flood came on, climbing the shining mud, and somewhere out past the rooftops the great locked silence sat where Pell had never noticed it sitting. "Whatever's pulling. Whatever you think you can — no. You felt it draw, I know you felt it draw, I saw it go right up your arm, but you put it down. You put it down, do you hear me, you set it down like a hot key and you walk away and you never, never go back and pick it up."

"I don't even know what it —"

"That door isn't ours, girl." The grey hand closed harder, over her wrist, over the last of the song. "Not yours. Not anyone's." Her voice dropped to nothing, to a held breath, to the place under the words. "Hum something else."

The Last Turn

A wall is only a door that has been made to forget it can open. Pity the wall. Pity more the hand that taught it. — The Cutter's Catechism, marginalia, hand unknown

The Provost's voice came gentle as oil on a hinge, and forty thousand people leaned toward it to be told it was kinder not to remember.

Pell stood at the rim of the Sill plaza with a satchel of finished keys against her hip, and she should not have come this way. Tallow had sent her to the Wend-Market for a coil of fine spring-wire and a paper of needle-files, and the quick road ran the upper colonnade, above the crowd, where the runners went. The slow road crossed the plaza. Pell had taken the slow road. She told herself it was the crush of bodies that had turned her at the Tollbridge. It was not the crush of bodies.

It was her hand.

Her right hand had been pulling since she came off the bridge — a small patient tug under the skin, the way a true key tugs toward its door when you carry it too near. Bow, shank, bit, ward, she said under her breath, naming the parts of a key she was not holding, the way you count your fingers in the dark to be sure they are yours. The pull did not ease. It drew her down the worn steps and into the press and it pointed, steady as a lodestone laid on water, at the wall.

The great escutcheon-plate. Three storeys of riveted bronze gone green and weeping at the seams, wide as a market street laid on its side, set into the lowest course of the Sill where the city stopped being a city. Above it the Wardenry's grey towers. Below it — nothing. Pale stone, blank as a thumbed-out word. The streets of the plaza ran toward it and then simply ended, the cobbles meeting the plate in a clean line no mason would ever cut on purpose, the way a sentence ends when the speaker forgets what they meant to say. Beyond that line had once been the Lowquay. Now there was the plate, and the word the city used for what the plate covered.

The Drowned.

Everyone knew the word. Pell watched them say it — the bargewife beside her, the chandler's boy on his father's shoulders, the old men with their hats already in their hands. The Drowned, the Drowned, a wet hush of it moving through the crowd like the first push of a flood up a drain. They said it the way you press a bruise to be sure it still hurts. And it did hurt them; she could see it; jaws working, eyes shining, a woman two ranks ahead pressing her knuckles to her mouth.

But when Pell looked closer — and Pell always looked closer, it was the one thing she was truly good at — none of them were looking at a face. They mourned, and their grief had no shape in it. Ask any of them who and they would say the Drowned, and ask them who is that and they would touch their chests where the ache lived and find, where a name should be, the same clean blank line the cobbles made at the plate. A whole quarter of the city wept over, and not one of them able to name a single soul they wept for.

It was the most natural thing in the world to them. It was the strangest thing Pell had ever seen, and she had felt it in her own chest too, the ache without an owner, and never once thought to wonder at it until today, with her hand pointing at the wall like an accusation she didn't know she was making.

On the Sill, above the plate, the Provost spread his arms.

Cassion Vire was a small man made large by stillness. He did not raise his voice; the Wardenry's brass horns did that for him, carrying it gentle and enormous out over the plaza, so that he seemed to speak to each of them alone and close, a kind uncle leaning down. He wore no chain of office, only plain grey, and somehow that was the grandest thing in the plaza.

"Latterquay," he said, and let the silence have it a moment. "My neighbours. You have come because the tide-clocks have told you what the almanacs told your grandfathers. The eleven years have run their course. The King-Ebb comes again."

A sound went through the crowd, low, more breath than voice.

"Eleven years ago," said the Provost, "this city took a wound. I will not pretend to you that it did not. I stood where you stand. I lost—" and here the velvet of him caught, just slightly, just enough, a hinge with one grain of grit in it, and Pell, who lived among hinges, marked it and did not know why "—as many of you lost. We do not speak the particulars. We have learned it is not a kindness, to ourselves, to keep tearing the bandage from the hurt. We named the grief, and we contained it, and the containment has held, and we have lived. We have lived, neighbours, eleven years, and married, and buried our honest dead in the honest ebb, and raised children who do not flinch at the water."

He let his hands fall, slow.

"At the turning of the King-Ebb," he said, "in three-and-twenty days, with the Company of Keys assembled and the wards loosened as they only loosen once in eleven years, I will perform the last and greatest mercy this office can perform. I will make the seal permanent. I will perform the Last Turn." The horns carried it bronze and final. "And the wound that is the Drowned — our grief, our wound, the hole we have learned to live around — will be closed for good and all. No tide that comes after will ever loosen it again. The past will rest. We will let the past rest, neighbours, as the dead are let to rest in the ebb, and we will stop bleeding into a thing we cannot mend."

Pell expected them to be afraid. They were not afraid. They wept, and the weeping turned, as she watched, into something worse than fear: relief. Let it rest. They said it back to him, ragged, grateful, a thousand mouths. Let it rest. A man near her was nodding and nodding and crying and nodding, mourning with his whole body a thing he could not have described to save his life, and glad past speech that he would soon be spared even this.

The pull in Pell's hand had become an ache. She closed her fist on it. It did no good. The plate drew at her, patient, enormous, and she understood, standing there with her knuckles whitening, that she had felt this draw before — three nights gone, at the bench, the far one, the door she could not place that had reached for her across the whole dark city until Tallow's grey spent hand had come down hard over hers. That door isn't ours, girl. Not yours. Not anyone's. Hum something else.

This was the door. The far door was the wall. The wall was the seal.

Pell began, without deciding to, to hum.

Flood to keep and ebb to give —

"You've got the look," said a voice at her shoulder, "of someone reading a notice they weren't meant to."

She came back into her body. A boy her own age or a little older, narrow and quick, hands shoved in a coat too good for the rest of him — a stolen coat, or a coat got the way Pell suspected most of his things were got. He wasn't watching the Provost. He was watching the crowd watch the Provost, with the flat assessing eye of someone pricing pockets, and under the assessment was a thing Pell knew on sight because she carried it herself: a person braced against a feeling he hadn't chosen.

"Free city," Pell said. "I can look where I like."

"Sure you can. Everyone here's looking exactly where His Worship the Door-Shutter wants them looking." He tipped his chin at the Sill. "Crying on cue, the lot of them. Listen to it. Forty thousand people sobbing their hearts out over—" he stopped. His jaw moved. He whistled instead, two low notes, tuneless, the way another person might swallow. "Over what, then. Go on. You're the clever-looking one. Tell me what they're crying about. Be specific."

"The Drowned," Pell said.

"Right. The Drowned." He turned to face her properly, and there was nothing sharp in him now, only a careful kind of trouble. "Who. Name me one. One person who was in it."

Pell opened her mouth. The clean blank line.

"You can't," he said, not unkindly. "Nobody can. I've asked. I ask everybody, it's a rotten habit. And here's the thing that keeps me up under the bridge." He dropped his voice beneath the horns. "My gran can. Sort of. Not names — she loses the names same as everyone, they go to water in her mouth. But she'll walk down to where Cooper's Slip used to run, except there's no slip there now, there's a wall, there's that wall, and she'll stand at it where the street just quits, and she'll cry like the world's ending at a wall that goes nowhere. And when I was small she'd say — she doesn't say it now, she got frightened of saying it — she'd say we came from somewhere no one remembers. Our people. Like that's a place you can come from." He laughed, and the whistle was right behind it. "Which it isn't. You can't be from a hole. But there it is. I'm from a hole, apparently, and so's she, and the Provost's about to brick it up for our own good."

"What's your name," Pell said.

"Joss." He said it like handing over a thing he might want back. "You?"

"Pell." The word tasted of everything she was not yet. She looked at his hands — clever, scarred at the knuckles, a faint shine of graphite ground into the whorls. "You pick locks."

His face did a quick frightened thing and then decided, all in one breath, to trust her, the way under-bridge people decided everything, fast or not at all. "Ordinary ones," he said. "Honest dishonest work. Not your sort." He nodded at her satchel, at the Wardhouse mark stamped in the leather, the crossed file and flood. "You're Company. A cutter."

"Apprentice." She made herself say the rest. "Cutter."

"Then you'd know." He leaned in. The Provost was speaking again, of mercy, of children who did not flinch at the water, and beneath it Joss spoke fast and low. "That wall. Does it feel like a wall to you? Because to my gran it feels like a door. And I'll tell you a thing I shouldn't —" the whistle, two notes, gone "— it feels like a door to me. I stood at it last spring and I had my picks in my hand before I knew I'd reached for them. A wall, Pell. Picks. For a wall."

Pell did not answer. Her right hand was still aching toward the bronze, and the tide-rhyme was still going round in her, low, unstoppable, shut the year and let us live, and she could not for her life have said where she'd learned it, and that — the not-knowing, the hole shaped exactly like a song — was suddenly the most frightening thing in the plaza, worse than the Provost, worse than the wall, because it was inside her, and the wall was only outside.

"I have to get to the Wend-Market," she said.

"Course you do." Joss straightened, the moment closing in him like a drawer. But he caught her sleeve, just for a second, light. "Pell. If your sort's going to be at the Last Turn — the Company, the cutters, all of you up there while he seals it — you'll be standing closer to it than I'll ever get." He wasn't whistling now. "Listen to it for me. Will you. Put your ear to it, your trained ear, and tell me if a wall's got any business sounding like that."

She didn't promise. She left him in the crowd, a narrow figure not crying, the only dry-eyed grief in forty thousand, and she went up through the Wend-Market with her hand pulsing the whole way, past the keyed arches where the door-keepers sold passage to Carrow and Tessamy and the salt-cities, past travelers stepping into a doorway here and out of one a hundred leagues gone, and she bought the spring-wire and the needle-files and did not remember paying for either.

The Wardhouse was dark when she came home, the forge banked low, the bench-lamps out. That was wrong. Tallow kept the lamps lit until the second ebb-bell; the old woman couldn't sleep without the smell of hot lamp-oil, she said, though she said most things to keep from saying others.

Light came from the back room. Pell stopped in the passage.

Through the half-door she could see Tallow at the little brazier they used for impression-wax, and Tallow was not melting wax. She was burning paper. Sheets of it, ward-charts by the ruled look of them, feeding them in one at a time with her good hand and watching each catch and curl, her ruined face — grey to the lips, the dead eye gone to milk, the right hand she never used hanging spent at her side — lit orange and unguarded in a way Pell had never been let to see. The old woman's mouth was moving. Counting. Turns, Pell thought. She counts her turns like a miser counts coin, and she is spending them now, spending something now.

Tallow took up a last thing from the bench. Not paper. A key — wrapped in a scrap of felt, but Pell knew the shape of a key the way she knew the shape of her own teeth with her tongue. The old woman held it a moment in her good hand. Then she crossed to the chest of narrow drawers where she kept the dies, and opened the bottom drawer with a key off her own ring, and laid the felt-wrapped thing inside, and shut it, and turned the lock.

And the lock answered.

Pell stayed in the dark of the passage long after the back room went black and the slow drag of Tallow's bad foot had gone up the stair. Then she went in. She told her feet not to and they went anyway. She knelt at the bottom drawer.

She did not need to open it. She never needed to open anything. She laid her bare palm flat against the cold wood over the lock-plate and let her gift go down into it the way she had since she was small, since before she could remember — and there was the hole again, the not-remembering, but she did not look at it now — let it sink past the wood to the felt and the iron beneath.

A key sat there. She found the felt, the small bones of bow and bit. And then she found — nothing.

Not a quiet key. Not a key carried wrong, gone politely still. Every key that had ever passed under her hand had said something, even the cheap ward-locks Joss would sniff at, even her own first clumsy blanks; metal cut for a door kept a little of the door in it, a hum, a held breath, the faintest draw. This key had none. It was a key-shaped place where a key ought to be and was not. It lay against her senses flat as a stone dropped down a well that never struck water. A key that opened nothing. A key quenched in a lie.

Blind, said some old word in her, out of the hole, out of the song, that's a blind key, little —

She snatched her hand back.

And then, because she could not help it, because she had never once in her life met a lock she could not read and the not-knowing of the song had already cracked the whole day open, she put her palm back and reached for the drawer's own warding — the shape of the lock Tallow had just turned, the simplest thing in the world, a thing Pell could read on a strange door across a plaza, a thing she had read off this very chest since she was tall enough to reach it.

The warding was gone. Not absent — guarded. Where the lock's secret shape should have lain open to her like a hand held out, there was a smooth, deliberate, deafening blank, a warding cut on purpose so that no reading hand could find its way in. And there was only one cutter in Latterquay good enough to ward a drawer against Pell, and she had just dragged her spent foot up the stair humming, very softly, the only thing she ever hummed, the thing Pell hummed too, and neither of them would ever say where it came from.

Flood to keep and ebb to give.

Pell knelt in the dark with her cold hand against the wood, the dead key on one side of it and the blind lock on the other, two silences cut to fit a girl who could hear everything — and for the first time in her life, she heard nothing at all.