"Safe," she repeated, as if the word belonged to another language. "Get it."
He went. The blue tin was exactly where he had left it. He carried it into the front room with both hands, absurdly aware that he was treating a marble-sized piece of iron like a loaded gun.
She snatched the lid off and went still.
The sphere lay among the two pieces of leather cord, dull black except where the crack caught the lamplight. She lifted it in both hands. For a second, her shoulders shook. Then she pressed the iron against the hollow of her throat and held it there with her palm flat over it.
Color came back into her face in an uneven rush.
"Don't ever," she said. "Don't ever do that again."
"You were strangling."
"Then cut something else."
"There wasn't anything else."
"You don't understand."
"No," Marcus said, more sharply than he intended. "I don't. Because you haven't told me anything except don't."
She looked down at the sphere cupped against her skin. Her anger seemed to move aside, revealing the exhaustion underneath. "I know."
He got her water. She drank. He checked her temperature—101.8, still high but falling—and changed the dressing on her left side. She bore the work in silence, never moving the hand that held the sphere.
"What is it?" he asked.
"A grief iron."
"What's it for?"
She almost smiled, though there was no humor in it. "Grief."
He waited.
"It stays with me," she said. "That's the rule. It never leaves the keeper."
"Keeper of what?"
"Of it."
Marcus had spent the day afraid she might die in his front room. He was tired, hungry, and in no mood for riddles. But her fingers had stopped trembling once the iron touched her skin, and that fact unsettled him more than any story she might have told.
He slept that night in the chair again, because the only other bed was his own and because it seemed indecent to leave a feverish stranger alone downstairs. He woke several times. Once she was muttering. Once she was perfectly quiet, her hand still pressed to her throat.
At 2:47 by the clock on the stove, Marcus woke for no reason he could name.
The house was dark. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, the trees had settled after the storm. He lay in the chair—he had stretched out on the floor sometime after midnight with a cushion under his head—and listened to the ordinary inventory of sounds.
Then something knocked beneath the floorboards.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
The sound was neither loud nor faint. Each knock had the same measured weight, as if someone below the house had struck the underside of the floor with the heel of a hand. It came from no pipe he knew and from no direction he could repair with a wrench. It came from beneath the house's heart.
Marcus sat up.
The woman was already awake. In the dim light her eyes were fixed on him.
"You heard it," she whispered.
He wanted to say gas. He wanted to say water hammer, settling foundation, a branch against the stone. He had explanations stacked like lumber in his mind, but the three sounds had been too distinct, too evenly spaced.
"Where is it?" she asked.
"The sphere? You're holding—"
"No." Her hand flew from her throat. In sleep or in the shock of waking, she had let it slip. The iron sphere lay on the couch beside her hip, separated from her skin by the blanket.
"Marcus."
She knew his name because he had told her while changing the dressing. It still startled him to hear it.
"Put it back," she said. "Please. Put it back against my skin."
He picked up the sphere. It was cold enough to sting. Carefully, he placed it against the hollow of her throat and laid her palm over it. She closed her fingers around his for one second, pressing down.
The house waited.
He counted his breaths to twenty, then to forty. The boards beneath his knees neither warmed nor stirred. The silence held so completely that the absence of another knock became a pressure of its own.
No fourth knock came.
They listened until the refrigerator cycled off and the silence changed shape. Marcus became aware of his own breathing, of the blood in his ears, of the woman's hand still trapping his against her throat.
At last she released him.
"Does it always do that?" he asked.
"When it's off me long enough."
"How long is long enough?"
"It depends what else is near."
He looked toward the floor. "What else?"
She shook her head.
Marcus lowered himself into the chair. "You said it never leaves the keeper."
"That is the first rule," she said. "There are others."
He rubbed both hands over his face. He wanted coffee. He wanted daylight. He wanted a world in which a sound under a floor had a cause he could cut out and replace.
"What are the others?"
Her eyes were already closing, the fever pulling her back down. But her hand stayed where it was, the iron sphere sealed against her skin.
"Tomorrow," she murmured. "Tomorrow I'll tell you what I can."
Chapter 5 — What She Carried
By the third morning, Ilsa Marek could sit up without the room turning, and she told Marcus her name as if it cost her something.
"Marek," she said. "Ilsa Marek."
He wrote it on the back of a lumber receipt because his phone still had no reliable signal and because writing things down made them easier to believe.
"Is that your real name?"
"Yes."
"Was anything else you told me real?"
"I told you almost nothing."
"Fair enough."