Chapter 124: The Barn

Morning came through the high windows of the barn in long pale bars. Frost burned off the yard one patch at a time.

[Flux: 51%]

Damian woke on a cot behind a stack of Aldous’s ductwork crates. Somebody had hung a tarp from the rafters beside him to make it a room. The tarp smelled of oil and old canvas.

He lay there for a moment.

The ceilings kept changing. This one was twenty feet up and crossed with beams.

_ _

By eight o’clock the barn had sorted itself the way the group always sorted itself.

Sable claimed the flat steel bench beside the generator. Her tablet was open before the kettle finished boiling. She wore the grey cardigan she’d had on since the cottage and had pushed the sleeves to her elbows, which meant she planned to be there a while.

Elena took the kitchen corner. Aldous’s idea of a kitchen was a camping stove, two crates of tinned food and the kettle. She stacked the tins by type, then by date, then stood back and looked at the result with a researcher’s satisfaction.

“You’ve alphabetized soup,” Kira said as she passed.

“Categorized,” Elena said. “Alphabetizing would be insane.”

Kira had changed into fresh clothes: dark trousers, her boots, a charcoal long-sleeved top with the left sleeve pushed up over the healing arm. She set a perimeter schedule on a sheet of paper and pinned it to a beam. Four checks a day, two people on each, rotating. Her handwriting was small and square.

Eren sat at the workbench along the east wall with a leather satchel open in front of him. He lifted the Prior Collective documents out one folder at a time and laid them in rows. He touched each one before he set it down.

Mara had spread her framework across the end of Sable’s bench. She wore the same dark sweater and trousers as the day before, her hair tied back with a pencil through it. She was frowning at one page. Damian could see the frown from across the barn.

“Eighty percent,” she said, to nobody. Or to the page. “Still eighty.”

Sable didn’t look up. “It was eighty yesterday.”

“It was eighty at the cottage,” Mara said. “I’d hoped the drive might change my mind.”

“Did it?”

“No.”

_ _

Devian spent the first two hours learning the barn.

He walked the walls with one palm held an inch from the boards. He stopped at the generator and stood very still. He crouched beside the fuse box. He climbed the loft ladder and came back down with a coil of cable and a verdict.

“Two exits,” he said. “Three if you count the hay door, which I do. The generator runs rough. The charge it puts out has a stutter every nine seconds.” He set the cable on the workbench. “The wiring in the north wall is wrong. Someone joined two circuits that shouldn’t be joined.”

“Aldous?” Eren asked.

“A previous owner. Aldous fixed one of the three faults and left the others.” Devian looked at the fuse box. “I’d like to fix them.”

Eren studied him over the top of a folder. “You’ve never touched a fuse box.”

“I’ve mapped one for eleven years from the wrong side of a wall.” Devian picked up a screwdriver and inspected it like a rare instrument. “How different can it be.”

Sable made a small sound that might have been a laugh. She covered it with her tablet.

_ _

The sleeping arrangements took longer than the planning.

A barn has no rooms. It has cots, tarps and the optimism of whoever hung the tarps. Eren got the loft, since the ladder was the only barrier he’d tolerate. Sable and Elena shared a partitioned corner with a curtain made from a drop cloth. Mara took a cot behind the ductwork crates, two tarps down from Damian’s.

Kira stood in front of the remaining cot for a long moment. Then she dragged it to the far end of the barn, beside the main door, where she could see both entrances.

Devian watched her set it down. One eyebrow lifted a fraction. “That’s a prison cell.”

Kira tested the cot’s frame with her boot. She didn’t look at him. “That’s a sightline.”

“It has a bucket next to it.” He tilted his head toward the corner, deadpan.

“It’s a very good bucket.” She dropped onto the cot and crossed her arms, daring him to continue.

Devian considered her for a second. Then he nodded, as if conceding a point in a formal debate, and carried his blankets away.”I’ll take the couch equivalent,” he said, and carried a stack of folded blankets to the spot under the loft window. He set them down in a precise rectangle. “Easy access to the glass.”

He sat. The blankets didn’t make a sound.

“It’s a pile of blankets,” Damian said.

“It’s a strategic pile,” Devian said. “Don’t mock it.”

_ _

Kira found him at two in the afternoon.

“Perimeter,” she said. “You’re with me.”

The yard was cold and bright. Frost still held in the shadow of the barn wall, and their boots crunched on it. She walked the fence line a half step ahead of him. She didn’t speak. He didn’t either. The track ran away toward the road, long and empty, and at the end of it a grain silo stood against the pale sky with its weathervane bent at an angle.

[Flux: 44%]

They reached the north corner. She stopped to look at the field beyond the wire, hands in her jacket pockets.

“Quiet.” She said it to the field more than to him.

Damian followed her gaze. Frost still clung to the stubble in the shadow of the fence. “Yes.”

Her shoulders loosened a fraction. “Good quiet.”

He glanced at her profile, then back at the field. “I’d say so.”

A bird crossed low and fast over the stubble. She watched it go.

She nodded at the field. Neither of them mentioned the staircase. It sat between them as if it had been there all along, patient and heavy, like a fifth person walking the fence.

“Your Flux,” she said. “You’re dropping.”

He looked at her.

“Your shoulders.” She glanced at his hands, then back at the field. “You hold them higher when you’re running low. I noticed it at the farmhouse. It’s the same now.”

“You can’t read the number.”

“I can read you.” Her mouth moved at one corner. “Not the number.”

He said nothing. She started walking again.

“Sable’s window is open,” she added after a few steps. “Elena’s too. You should pick one before dinner.”

“Is that an operational recommendation?”

“It’s an observation.” Her ears had gone faintly red. She kept walking. “Don’t make it a conversation.”

He followed her around the fence, and the silo stayed small and crooked in the distance behind them.

_ _

They finished the loop at half past two.

The barn door was open. Light from inside lay in a long yellow rectangle across the frosted ground. Eren stood in it, one hand on the frame, watching them come.

“There you are,” he said. “I’d like everyone at the table.”

Kira slowed. “Now?”

“Now.” Eren’s face gave away nothing, and that was what made Damian look twice. The old man was too still. His left hand moved at his side, thumb brushing his fingers the way a man checks he’s still holding something.

Behind him Sable had already pulled out a chair. Mara had stopped frowning at her page. Elena stood by the stove with a tin in each hand. Devian sat on his pile of blankets and watched Eren with a faint, narrow attention.

Nobody had been told anything, yet everyone seemed to know it had started.

Eren stepped aside to let them in.

“I should have said this at the cottage,” he said. “I’ve been wrong about something for twenty-two years.”

Damian walked past him into the light.