Chapter 228: What the Stairs Remembered

Chapter 228: Chapter 228: What the Stairs Remembered

Persephone knocked on the stairwell gate of the 20th floor with her knuckles, because she had never once in her life been able to knock politely.

The gate was a wall of dark steel. After a moment, bolts turned, one, two, three, and it swung inward. Vanya stood behind it in a plain gray jacket with her blonde hair tied back, looking like someone who had been awake for several hours and had enjoyed every one of them.

"You’re early."

"I’m bored." Persephone held up a basket. "Rolls. Peace offering."

Vanya raised an eyebrow, took the basket, and stepped aside. "Come in. Don’t touch the map."

"I would never."

"You would."

"That’s the second time someone’s said that to me this week." Persephone slipped past her into the apartment she shared with Harold. A battery lantern glowed on a table beside a map covered in pencil marks. The place was spare and orderly, with a neatly rolled sleeping bag in one corner and a row of water jugs along the wall. It looked like a home made by people who expected to leave quickly. "Where’s Harold?"

"Here."

He had come in from the kitchen without a sound, a tall, quiet young man with a dish towel over one shoulder. When he saw Persephone, he gave a small, careful nod, which from Harold was practically a parade. She had been collecting those nods for weeks, ever since a conversation on the stairs about whether metal could feel cold. She suspected he did not know she was keeping count.

Vanya set the basket on the table and lifted the cloth. Harold looked at the rolls for a long moment, then at Persephone.

"Take one," Persephone said.

He did. "Thank you," he said quietly, and the way he said it, with both hands around the bread, told her more than a speech would have. Food was not a thing anyone took lightly anymore.

"So," Vanya said, folding her arms. "I told you I’d ask. I’m asking. There’s a convenience store and a small grocery on the hill north of here. Flooding stops about two blocks short of it. I scouted it from the boat yesterday, and it’s quiet. I need two more hands, and one of them can’t be Harold, because he’ll be carrying."

"And you want me."

"You’re fast, you’re quiet when you want to be, and you don’t ask stupid questions." Vanya shrugged. "That’s a short list."

"I’m touched."

"Don’t be. I’m not doing you a favor. You’d be doing me one."

"That’s the nicest invitation I’ve ever had." Persephone grinned. "Yes."

"You don’t want to know what you get out of it?"

"Food. Batteries. Something to do." She tilted her head. "And a chance to see what you’re like when you’re not standing at a rail looking disappointed in everyone."

Vanya’s mouth twitched, almost against her will. "I do not look disappointed."

"You do."

"Get your boots."

They took the interior stairs.

"The fire escape’s visible from the lake," Vanya said, as they descended past the 19th-floor landing, where Jason’s new steel gate gleamed faintly in the lantern light. "Somebody’s been watching that side of the building since the ambush. I’d rather not hand them a schedule."

"The dock’s on the sixth floor," Persephone said. "That’s a lot of stairs."

"Fourteen flights. Do you have a problem with stairs?"

"I have a problem with your stairs. They’re dark and damp and full of other people’s feelings."

"What?"

"Nothing."

Harold took the lead, a heavy pack on his back, one hand skimming the wall as though reading it. Vanya came second, and Persephone brought up the rear with her own lantern turned very low. The stairwell smelled of old concrete and rain. Somewhere above, water dripped steadily. Somewhere below, a door slammed, and a child’s voice floated up the shaft and fell away.

The building was quieter than it had been a week ago. Nobody stood in the doorways. Nobody called down the stairs. People had begun to move through the hallways in pairs, and to keep their doors shut. On the 17th floor a woman passed them going up, with a bucket of water and her eyes fixed on the steps. She did not speak. She did not look at them.

"They’re scared," Vanya murmured.

"They should be."

"I know." She said it flatly. "It isn’t my business."

"I know that too."

They walked on.

At the 13th floor, the stairwell opened onto a landing painted institutional beige, with a window slit that looked out on the gray dawn and a door to the hallway standing half ajar.

Persephone had not planned to stop. She had not thought about the floor at all. But the landing was cold in a way the others had not been, a clean, stale cold, like a room in which a window had been left open for hours. Her hand, trailing along the rail, tingled.

She slowed.

"Persephone?" Vanya said, from the flight below. ℴ

"One second. My boot’s loose."

She crouched as though to fix it. The door to the hallway was open perhaps a hand’s width, and through the gap she could see the corridor beyond. A row of doors. A strip of carpet. Someone had left a small tin cup on the floor against the wall, and a single folded blanket beside it, neatly squared. The place where the family had lain.

The tingle ran up her arm.

No, she thought. Not now.

It came anyway.

It did not arrive like a vision. It arrived like a change in the temperature of the room, and then she was no longer entirely on the landing. The beige walls went soft at the edges, and the light dimmed, and she was looking at the stairwell as if through water.

A shape was walking down.

It was a shadow, nothing more. A tall, dark outline moving with an unhurried, easy gait, one hand trailing lightly on the rail, exactly where her own hand lay. She could not see a face, or clothing, or any detail at all. It was only a darkness with the shape of a person, descending step by step, and it was quiet. It did not rush. It was not trying to be silent. It simply moved as though it belonged there.

And she felt it.

That was the part that made her stomach drop. She did not see the shadow’s thoughts, but she felt something wash through her, a sensation that was not hers. It was excitement, bright and sharp and a little breathless, the thrill of someone who has just done a thing they were afraid to do and found it easier than expected. Underneath the thrill was something else. Something thin and cold, running like a wire. Fear. Not fear of being caught. Fear of what it had just discovered about itself.

Both feelings pulled in opposite directions at once and neither let go.

The shadow reached the bottom of the flight. It paused on the landing, and for the briefest moment she felt it look up at her, though it had no eyes to look with.

Then it went on down, and the dark folded it away, and the world snapped back.

Persephone was on one knee on the concrete with her hand clenched around her bootlace. Her heart was pounding. Her head felt light, as though she had stood up too fast. She swayed, and caught herself with a palm against the wall, and the cold of the concrete grounded her like a hand on her shoulder.

"Persephone."

Vanya had come back up the stairs. She stood two steps below, studying her with a flat, measuring gaze. Harold had stopped too, further down, watching with his head slightly tilted.

"You’re pale," Vanya said.

"Skipped lunch." Persephone straightened, and her smile came up easily, the party-girl smile that had gotten her through four hundred conversations she had not wanted to have. "I’m fine. Dizzy. It’s the damp. Give me a second, and I’ll be as good as new."

"You didn’t skip lunch. You brought rolls."

"I brought rolls for you."

Vanya did not smile. She looked at the hallway door, at the cup and the blanket beyond, and back at Persephone’s face. Whatever she saw there, she did not push.

"We can turn back," she said.

"No." Persephone tied the lace, which had never been loose, and stood. "I’m fine. I want the grocery."

"Fine," Vanya said. "But you’re telling me if it gets worse."

"Absolutely."

She went down past them, and Harold fell in behind her without a word, his heavy tread steady on the steps. Persephone kept her hand on the rail and her eyes on the stairs, and did not look back at the landing.

They reached the sixth-floor dock a quarter hour later. The black boat was waiting under a tarp, slick with rain. Vanya pulled the cover back and began checking the lines with brisk efficiency, and Harold loaded the packs, and the world resumed its usual shape.

Persephone sat on the bench, with her hands between her knees, and let herself think.

She had been seeing things for weeks. Fragments, mostly. A man in a cardigan in the library, a stairwell that had felt wrong when she first passed it. She had told herself it was nerves. She had told herself she was tired. She had told no one, not even her father, because a thing you say out loud becomes real, and she was not sure she was ready for this one to be real.

But this was different.

It was walking down, she thought. Right where I stood. Right where they were found.

She had felt it. The thrill and the fear, braided together. She did not understand it. She did not know what she had seen, or whether it was truth or imagination or a trick of her own frightened mind. She did not even know whether it was the same night, or a different one, or something that had nothing to do with the family on thirteen at all.

But she thought of the little boy who liked to count doors. She thought of a blanket tucked to a child’s chin. She thought of her father’s calm, flat voice saying it would not have made a difference, and of the long silence that followed, in which every person at that table had understood that the killer might be someone the victims trusted.

I’m going to tell them, she decided. It came to her slowly, and then it stayed. Not now. When we’re home. I’ll sit them down and I’ll say it all, as badly as it comes out, and they can tell me I’m crazy.

She did not know what it was worth. She did not know if anyone could use it. But if there was even a chance that what she had felt on that landing could help someone, then keeping it quiet was a kind of cowardice she could not afford.

"Persephone."

She looked up. Vanya stood at the stern with the last line in her hand, and her eyes were steady.

"Ready?"

"Ready," Persephone said, and was surprised to find her voice almost normal.

Harold took the tiller. The engine caught with a low hum, and the dock slid away, and the gray water opened around them like a door. Persephone pulled her collar up against the mist and watched the building recede, tall and dark and silent behind them, with the thirteenth floor somewhere in the middle of it, as small as a window in a wall.

When they came home, she would tell her family. She was almost sure.