The pump handle wears a coat of frost. Jasper's palm melts a print into it, and the print stays after he lets go.
He works the handle four times. Water lurches from the spout, cold enough to ache in his molars. He sluices it over his face and the back of his neck and stands still while it runs inside his collar. The ink on his wrist has faded to a gray smear. *Dance* is a rumor again.
Behind him the shop is dark except for the kitchen window, where Delphine's kettle climbs toward its whistle. The sky over the roofs is the color of dishwater. Bart's chimney is already smoking, and in this town the day starts when Bart's chimney says so.
He has not slept. Every time his eyelids drop, the list on the eighth sheet lights up behind them. *A hook. A villain. A crack. A face for the poster.* Around three he drew a box around it, then rubbed the box out with his thumb. The smudge made the list louder.
"You're up."
Milo stands at the corner of the shop with a canvas sack on one shoulder and a coil of rope across his chest. Frost has whitened the shoulders of his army jacket. His nose is red. He holds a lard tin out in front of him in both hands, the way a man carries a cake into a house where someone has died.
"So are you," Jasper says.
"I'm always up. You're up on purpose." Milo squints at him. "You look terrible."
"The mirror in my room agrees."
The boy snorts, a laugh he has not approved. He glances at the kitchen window, then the road. "I need a hand."
"With what?"
"A rope."
"Which end?"
"The one on the ground." He lifts the tin an inch. "The wire has to be brown by four when the sun gets on it. And it has to be now. After Bart's chimney, everybody's out. I rigged a seat last week, but a seat needs somebody on the other end."
"Why me?"
"Everybody else I'd have to explain it to." Milo hitches the sack higher. "Explaining takes longer than the job."
The back door bangs open. Delphine leans out with a scarf in each fist and a third around her neck, and her eyes go straight to the rope on Milo's chest.
"Milo Fitch! Have you eaten?"
"Yes."
"You haven't." She vanishes and returns with a cloth bundle that steams. She sets it on top of the lard tin, the tin tips, and he saves it with his chin. "Currant buns. Bart's overflow. Share them with the dog."
"What dog?"
Biscuit steps out from behind the rain barrel. He has been there all along.
Delphine's gaze runs from the rope to the sack to Jasper. Her mouth opens on a question and closes again. Jasper has not seen that happen to her mouth before. She goes inside and comes back with a knitted cap the color of a traffic cone, and she presses it onto his head with both palms.
"Ears go first," she says. She pats the wool flat. "Home by dark, the pair of you. I like to count."
The door shuts. The kettle screams.
***
They cross the stubble field with their breath trailing in short gray puffs. Frost crunches on the stalks. Milo walks with the long, bent stride of a boy nobody has ever asked to wait, and Jasper stretches his own to hold the gap to ten feet. Biscuit trots between them with a currant bun in his mouth, handed over by Milo at the first fence post, and carries it like a deacon carrying the collection plate.
"Pitch," Milo says over his shoulder, and shakes the lard tin. The contents slosh thick and dull. "Spruce, cooked down with beeswax from the grange cappings. Nobody counts cappings."
"Why wax?"
"Pitch alone goes brittle in the cold and cracks off the wire in a week. Wax keeps it giving." He holds up a finger, the tip black and glossy. "It has to stay warm till it's on. Once it stiffens, the bark won't take, and all I've made is a wire wearing a hat."
"And the sack?"
"Moss. The north side of the grange wall, behind Sylvie's bean poles. I wrapped it in cabbage leaves to keep it wet."
"Why cabbage?"
"Bart throws it out."
"Does Bart know you take it?"
"Bart knows everything. He tells it to you in seven versions so you can't tell which one's true." The boy vaults the split-rail fence without touching a rail and waits on the far side with the rope swinging. "You climb like a man getting out of a bath."
Jasper swings one leg over. His cuff catches the same splinter it caught yesterday, and the tear opens another inch. "I've had practice. Yesterday."
"Do it faster. Think less."
"Jasper Cole crosses the fence," Jasper says, low, "and takes advice from a teenager."
His teeth close on the next clause. Milo has stopped walking.
"You do that."
"Do what?"
"That. The talking. In the third one." He points the lard tin at Jasper, a small black accusation. "You did it yesterday in the woods. I was right behind you. You say your own name like you're in a book."
"It's a habit."
"From what?"
"From the voice." Jasper steps off the bottom rail. The frost under his shoe cracks wet. "For six years I told it where I was going. It took notes, a sentence at a time in the third person, so the transcript read clean. Nobody has listened since I got here, and my mouth keeps going."
"So it's talking to nobody."
"It's talking to Marlow."
"Who's Marlow?"
"The voice. I picked the name off a menu." His ears warm, and he keeps walking. "You can laugh."
"I'm not going to laugh." Milo falls in beside him, out of step, the sack bumping his hip. "I do it with Dodo. When it's late. I tell it what I'm about to do before I do it, in a low voice, so it won't mind." His eyes stay on the treeline. "It never answers. That's the point, I figured. Something you can say it to that doesn't say back."
Jasper has no reply. He walks.
"Last night I got Kentucky," Milo says.
"Is that a station?"
"A whole state, I think. Ronda's husband was on. He called her from a rest stop outside a place called Paducah, and she picked up. They talked for eleven minutes about the dog's ear and whether to take her in. Whether the drops were working." The boy's voice goes light and quick. "She said the dog shook her head at the drops. He said that was the dog's right. I wrote it down."
"You wrote down a conversation about a dog's ear."
"It's the best thing I ever heard." Milo scowls, daring him. "Nobody was selling anything. Nobody told them what to say. He sounded tired, she sounded tired, and they were both fine."
Jasper laughs from low in his chest, louder than he meant. A crow lifts off a fence post and complains its way toward the grange.
"What?" Milo demands.
"Nothing. That's a very good thing to have heard."
"Don't be nice about it."
"I'm jealous."
The boy studies him for three steps, hunting for the trick, and finds none. His shoulders drop an inch. "She's a nurse, I think. Ronda. You can hear it in how she says *drops*."
"Did they decide about the ear?"
"A preacher came in over them. I'll never know." Milo kicks a stalk, and it snaps. "That's the worst part of it. Nobody finishes."
They reach the trees. The woods take them in with a long yellow slat of sun and a smell of leaf mold and iron.
***
The hollow looks smaller by daylight. Ferns still ring the bowl, their tips browned by frost, and the great oak lies across the lip with its root wall dripping. Biscuit goes down ahead of them, swallows the last of his bun, and flops against the red bank with the thud of a dog arriving at work.
The brass padlock on the cellar door hangs shut, and Milo does not look at it. He walks past to the spruce at the edge of the hollow and lays a hand flat on the bark. "Morning," he tells it.
The tree stands eighty feet. Its lowest limbs start at twice Jasper's height, thick and drooping, and the copper wire climbs the trunk in loose spirals with a staple every arm's length. In the gray light the wire hardly shows: a line of rust, a trick of the bark. Jasper steps back and tilts his head until his neck pops, and forty feet up he finds it, a thread of bare copper laid against the green.
"That," Milo says.
"I see it."
"Anyone on the ridge with a lens would see it. Anyone with a drone." The boy swallows. "I thought about the drones last night. I didn't sleep."
"Neither did I."
"What did you think about?"
"A list."
Milo waits. Jasper does not elaborate. After a moment the boy shrugs one shoulder, and Jasper's own shoulders loosen.
Seventy feet up, a block of black iron hangs from a branch, a pulley no bigger than a fist with a rope threaded through it. The loose end lies coiled in the ferns, tied off to a gray stone the size of a loaf, a groove worn into it by the cord.
"Ninety pounds," Milo says, squinting up at it. "That's what's stamped on the side. It came off a junked hay trolley in Mr. Vance's scrap pile. I weigh a hundred and forty."
"Then it won't hold you."
"It's stamped by a liar." He grins at Jasper's face. "I tested it with a feed sack of bricks. It held a hundred and eighty for ten minutes. The sack's still in the barn."
"That's a sack of bricks."
"Bricks don't lie."
He unwinds the rope from his chest and shows Jasper how it goes. The rope runs from the block down the trunk to a plank seat, a foot-wide board notched at each edge with a loop around it. The long end comes back to the ground. A man on the ground hauls, and the seat climbs. A man on the ground lets it slip, and the seat falls. Everything depends on the man on the ground.
"You wrap it here." Milo drags Jasper to a young beech six feet from the spruce and takes two turns of rope around the trunk. "That's the brake. Friction holds most of it. You feed it through your fist, and you don't let go."
"What if I let go?"
"Then I find out if the ferns are soft."
"Milo."
"They are. I fell once. I was nine." He pats the seat. "Two words. *Moa* means let me down slow. *Quagga* means hold, I'm working. Anything else you can ignore. If I yell something else, I'm probably yelling at the pitch."
"What if you scream?"
"Then you'll know what to do."
"Do I?"
Milo thinks about it. "No. Hold
on, I guess."
Jasper hangs the traffic-cone cap on a fern frond and takes the rope. It is stiff, hairy hemp, gray with years, and it chafes his bare palms before he has pulled a foot. His hands are a writer's hands. They have held pens and the edges of screens, and neither weighed anything.
Milo checks the wrap, then Jasper's grip, and rotates Jasper's wrist a quarter turn. "Palm toward the tree. If it's toward you, it'll take the skin." He lets go. "Don't tell me it already has."
"It hasn't."
"It will." He settles onto the plank with the tin and the sack in his lap and nods. "Haul."
Jasper hauls.
***
The first three feet come easy. The fourth takes his weight. It runs through the rope into his forearms and down his spine, a hundred and forty pounds of boy that wants to go down. He drives his heels into the leaf litter. The rope slides a handbreadth through his fist, and the beech trunk eats the slack with a gritty hiss. He hauls again.
"Slow," Milo calls. "Don't yank. It swings."
"You said haul."
"I said haul. I didn't say like a goat."
Jasper hauls slower. Wrap and pull, hand over hand, and each pull lifts the plank a foot with the boy riding it, knees tucked, the sack bumping his chest. Bark crackles. At ten feet Milo is a pair of boot soles and a patch of gray jacket. At twenty he is a shape against the light.
"Quagga!"
Jasper holds. The rope bites. The beech takes the load and his palms take the rest, and a line of heat opens across both. He keeps his eyes on the plank and the pale trunk behind it. A person's whole weight hangs from his fists, and nothing tells him how to hold it.
"Okay," Milo calls from above. "I'm on the wire. This is the bad part. Keep it."
"Kept."
Bark flakes drift down onto Jasper's shoulders. A dry rustle, then a spatter of moss grit on the ferns. Milo's voice comes down the trunk in pieces, aimed at himself. "Warm. Warm. Come on. Take, you stupid thing. Okay. Yes."
Jasper evens out his breathing. Sweat prickles under the wool collar, and his shoulders hum a low steady note. Biscuit lifts his head, surveys the operation, and lowers it again.
"Can I ask you something?" Milo says.
"You're the one up a tree."
"That's why. I don't have to look at you."
"All right."
A pause. The block creaks. "What do they do for fun out there?"
Jasper smiles at the rope. "Which part of out there?"
"Where you live."
"The city."
"There's one city?"
"There are a lot of them. They all look alike." He shifts his grip. "It depends on the night. On Fridays there's a plaza near my building with a screen as tall as a church. Around nine a thousand drones lift off the roofs and fill the sky. They carry nothing. They glow. The crowd hums, whatever it hums, and the drones read the hum and turn it into a picture overhead. A wave, a face. Thousands of people stand in the cold with their heads back and their mouths open while the sky makes something out of them."
"What's the something?"
"Whatever they were all thinking about at once. Usually a horse."
"A horse?"
"Nobody knows why. It's always the horse. Last month it was eleven horses in a row."
Milo laughs, and the sound drops through the branches. Pitch scrapes. The plank swings out an inch and back, and Jasper tightens his wrap.
"What else?"
"There's a restaurant on the roof of the building next to mine. You don't order. You sit, and a menu of one arrives, because the table knows what you want. It's hot when you taste it. It's exactly what you wanted, and you couldn't have said so ten seconds before."
"That sounds like a spell."
"It's a very good recipe." He hauls a foot at Milo's grunt and sets the wrap. "You never wait. The elevator is already open. The train comes as you reach the platform. The shower runs at your temperature before you step in. A box of groceries lights up on your doorstep at six-forty and is in your kitchen by six-forty-five. Everything is on its way to you before you ask."
"And it's good?"
"Yes."
"Like a spell."
"It's so good you stop noticing you're in it." He hears the sentence leave his mouth and holds it up for a second. He had not meant to say it. "It's fast. It's exciting. You walk down a street at night and every window is lit and every sign knows your name, and you move through all of it as if it were built around you, which it is. I never once sat on a train with nothing to look at."
"What did you look at?"
"A screen."
"What was on it?"
"What I'd have picked."
Pitch scrapes the wire for a while. "Do you have a dog?"
"The building doesn't allow animals. There's a screen that does a dog."
"Does it do the ear thing?"
"What ear thing?"
"When she won't take the drops."
Jasper opens his mouth and shuts it again. "No. It does a dog that never needs drops."
"That's not a dog."
"No."
"What did you do when it rained?"
"The window told me when it would stop. I waited."
The boy goes quiet. The trunk creaks. A scrap of bark drifts past Jasper's face and lands in the ferns.
"What's an elevator?" Milo asks.
Jasper laughs, and the laugh cracks in the middle. "A room that goes up."
"Up *what*?"
"A tall building. You step in, a door closes, and you're on a different floor. You don't climb stairs. The room carries you."
"Does it ever drop?"
"Almost never."
"Almost?"
"They have a very good record."
"But it *could*."
"Anything could."
"Hm." Pitch scrapes the wire. "That's the worst idea I ever heard. I want to try it."
"I'll take you."
The words are out before he knows it. They hang in the cold between the trunks. The scraping stops. For a long moment only the block creaks above the leaves.
"Keep hauling," Milo says. His voice has dropped. "I'm not done."
Jasper hauls. The plank climbs six more feet. His shoulders burn, and sweat drips off his nose into the leaf litter.
"Are you happy there?"
The question drops out of the tree.
Jasper's hands close on the rope. It slips a handbreadth through his fist and burns across the skin, and for a moment the burn fills his head.
"Haul a foot," Milo says. "I'm snagged."
He hauls a foot. The rope hums.
"You didn't answer."
"I'm holding your weight."
"You can hold and talk."
"Quagga."
"That's the hold word," Milo says. "You can't use it for a question."
Jasper laughs. He cannot stop it. It comes out strangled and bent, and he leans his forehead against the rope while his shoulders shake. Forty feet up, the boy lets him.
"Fine," Milo calls. "Don't."
Pitch scrapes. Moss rains onto the ferns. Biscuit gets up, circles the beech, and sits down on Jasper's left foot.
"It's a good place," Jasper says.
"That's not what I asked."
"I know."
"Okay." Milo's voice comes down level, in no hurry. "Moa."
Jasper feeds out slack a hand at a time. The plank sinks down the trunk, sack swinging, Milo's boots finding the bark. His jacket is spotted with moss, and his hands are black to the wrist. He steps off the plank onto the leaf litter, looks up the tree, then at Jasper, then at the red line across Jasper's palms.
"That's a good burn," he says. "You'll want Dr. Voss."
"I'll want a bucket of cold water."
"Same thing."
***
They sit on the fallen oak at noon. The trunk is wide enough for two men to lie on, and years of the same pair of trousers have worn a smooth groove along the top. Moss shags the side Jasper takes. Milo takes the polished side without comment. Somewhere downslope the creek runs over its stones, and a squirrel scolds from the beech Jasper braced against all morning. Sun reaches the hollow in patches. The ferns steam where it lands.
The currant buns have gone cold in their cloth. They taste of orange peel and rope. Jasper eats two and gives Biscuit a corner of the third, and Milo watches with the narrow gaze of a boy checking a trade for fairness.
Jasper's hands lie open on his knees. Across both palms runs a red stripe the width of a pencil. He tilts them toward the light, and the stripe shines.
"Blister by dark," Milo says. "Soak them in the creek. No soap."
"Does it hurt?"
"Yes."
"Good."
"That's a weird thing to say."
"I haven't had a pain in six years I could point at."
Milo chews. "Never?"
"One headache. The companion told me where it was, and it was gone before I'd reached for anything." Jasper rubs a thumb across the raw skin. "I'd like to be the one who hurts, for a change."
"You're strange."
"I'm told it's a local specialty."
The boy's mouth twitches. He draws his knees up, bun still in one fist, and looks at the spruce. From the base the wire all but vanishes: a brown vine on brown bark, moss packed between the staples, gray-green bark pressed into the pitch in overlapping scales like fish skin. At forty feet the copper has dulled to the color of dead leaves.
"It works," Jasper says.
"From here. I'd have to get across the creek and up the ridge to know." Milo licks a thumb. "Five o'clock I'll look from the rock. If it still shows, I go back up."
"And I haul."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
Milo says nothing. A nuthatch walks down the spruce headfirst, stops at a staple, and taps it with its beak.
"I have another one," Milo says.
"Go ahead."
"You'll want to say something clever. Don't."
"I'll try."
"Why'd you come?"
Jasper opens his mouth. The answer has stood ready all week, polished by use, and it comes without effort. "Everline assigned me a story. A clip of this town went around the world, and my editor wanted to know whether the town is a principled stand or a place afraid of change. I came to find out which."
"Which is it?"
"I don't know yet."
"That's the answer you'd give the council."
"It's the answer I gave Hollis."
"He didn't buy it."
"He bought about half."
"I don't." Milo turns his head. His brown eyes are steady and red at the rims, and they stay on Jasper's face with the blunt patience of a child watching a pot. "You sound like the voice in the cellar. *A principled stand or a
place afraid of change.* You talk like the lunch box."
Jasper's mouth is dry. He swallows. A leaf drops onto the log between them and lies there.
"That's fair," he says.
"I'm not trying to be mean."
"It's accurate." He rubs a hand over his face and comes away with pitch from his temple. "Marlow and I wrote that sentence in the elevator. It went through four versions. Alan liked the third."
"But you said it."
"I said it."
"I don't care who wrote it. I asked why *you* came."
"I'm a reporter. It's the job."
"You could have said no."
"To Alan?"
"To a guy." Milo says it flat, as if naming the weather. "You could have said it's a dumb story and stayed home."
Jasper laughs, and the laugh ends as a breath. "Nobody says no to Alan."
"Why not?"
"He decides what happens next."
"But you could."
"I've never said no to anything." The sentence comes out whole, and for a moment he cannot tell whether it is a confession or a boast. "Not to a story. Not to a dinner. Before the voice there was a program on a screen, and it told me what I might like, and I liked it. I can't think of one time I stood in front of an offer and used the word."
"It's one word."
"It's a muscle. I haven't used mine."
"It's *one word*," Milo says again, turning the full weight of his gaze on the log between them. "You say it, and then you've said it. Nobody in Fair Hollow has trouble with it. We say it at council every week. Sometimes twice."
"I've noticed."
"Hollis says it to everybody."
"I noticed that too."
"Sylvie says it by asking you a question so you can't say anything back." The corner of his mouth lifts and drops. He peels a thread from his cuff. "Everybody says it to me. No, Milo, not the roof. No, Milo, not the generator. Every day. Yesterday you said it and gave me the reasons. *Not Everline. Not Delphine, not Sylvie.* Nobody ever said it to me like they wanted to hear what I'd say back."
Jasper looks at him.
The nuthatch has gone. Frost still clings to the underside of the log where the sun never reaches. Jasper stares at it: the exact white of the inside of a page.
"So why'd you come?" Milo asks. "For real."
"Alan sent me."
"Why did you *go*?"
Jasper opens his mouth for the second sentence, the one about duty and deadlines, and it is gone. He reaches for a third. Gone too. His hand closes on a boy of fifteen with a butter knife and an earpiece and a voice offering to find him a video.
"Because I thought I knew what I'd find," he says. "I thought it would take a week. A town with a hobby, and in the hobby a crack. I'd put my thumb in the crack and write what came out. That's the job. It always worked. I've done it forty times." He stops. "I haven't found the crack."
"Because it's not there?"
"Because every time I put a finger near it, somebody offers me bread."
Milo lets out half a laugh. "That's Bart."
"That's all of you." He flexes his burned hands, and the stripes pull. "The night before last I climbed the ridge and called my editor and told him the town refuses to be what we want. I meant it as an observation. He called it a headline. I stood there with the phone against my face and the lantern at my feet and knew I'd said the truest thing I'd said all week, and he had put a price on it before I finished the sentence." He lifts his eyes to the spruce. "I don't know why I came, Milo. I know why I was sent. I've never had to tell those apart."
The boy does not speak. The bun goes stale in his hand, and Biscuit rests his chin on his boot.
"I don't know what I'm doing here," Jasper says. "I've never said that out loud to anyone. I'm saying it to a teenager on a log."
"I'm seventeen."
"That's what I said."
"It's different." Milo sets the bun on the bark and picks up a twig. He peels a strip of green off it with his thumbnail, and the white underneath shows wet. "Would you stay?"
Jasper's head turns.
"If you could." Milo does not look up. He strips another inch. "If nobody made you go back. If Alan said write whatever you want, and the voice was gone, and the apartment, and the elevators. Would you stay here?"
The laugh arrives before the answer. It bursts out of Jasper's chest and rattles through the hollow, cracked and too loud, and Biscuit's ears go up. He claps a hand over his mouth. It keeps coming through his fingers, and the boy on the log watches him with the stillness of someone waiting for a kettle.
When it stops, Jasper's eyes are wet. He wipes them with his wrist.
"That's not an answer," Milo says.
"I know."
"A laugh isn't a no."
"I know that too."
"So say the other thing."
"I can't say the other thing." Jasper lowers his hand. His voice has gone ragged. "I have a lease. I have a job, a good one, with a staff and my name on a door. People rely on me to show up when I say. You can't stay in a place because it's the first time anyone offered you a rope and meant it."
"Why not?"
"People don't choose like that."
"How do they choose?"
"They compare and rank, and the number comes out."
"Who runs it?"
"The voice."
"And you don't have a voice."
"No."
"So who runs it now?"
Jasper opens his mouth. The woods stand around him, brown and still, and the old oak holds the sun on its bark in a long warm bar. He looks at his hands. Both are empty.
"I do," he says.
"How's it going?"
"Slowly."
Milo grins. It breaks across his dirty face and shows a chipped front tooth Jasper has never seen. "First thing you've said all day that sounded like a person."
"I'm told it's a specialty."
"Stop saying that."
"I will."
The boy tosses the stripped twig into the ferns and wipes his palms on his knees. When he speaks again his voice has gone quiet and rough. "Nobody's asked me. If I'd stay. They tell me. *You'll be a good one when you grow up.* Hollis wants me for the garage. Sylvie wants me for the seeds, I think. Cassius wants me to play." He picks at a thread on his sleeve. "Nobody says, *Milo, would you stay.* They say you will. It's different when you ask."
"Then I'll ask," Jasper says.
"You just did."
"I mean later. When you've been out and seen it. I'll ask you then."
Milo's head comes up. His eyes narrow, hunting for the catch, and find none. He looks fast at the spruce, and his ears redden from the lobes up.
"You'd have to take me," he says.
"I'd have to."
"You said that already. About the elevator."
"I'm not taking it back."
"Don't promise." The boy's voice cracks on the second word, and he coughs over it. "You said something yesterday about choosing it again tomorrow. Do that. Don't promise. Keep doing it."
Jasper closes his hand on his knee. The stripe across his palm opens and stings.
"Deal," he says.
"Deals end," Milo says. "Keep doing it."
"Then I'll keep doing it."
***
They clear the hollow by two. Milo coils the rope with a loop and a twist and hangs it from a low spruce branch where it will pass for part of the tree. He scrapes the last pitch from the tin with a stick and works the stick under a staple that has lifted. Jasper kicks leaves over the plank seat and steps back to judge. Plank in leaves, brown wire in bark. From ten feet away he cannot find his own work.
The creek has taken the afternoon light and turned it white. They cross on the four flat stones, Biscuit first, Milo second, Jasper last. The third stone rocks. Jasper expects it. He sets his weight early, rides the wobble in his knees, and stays dry.
"Look at you," Milo says from the bank.
"I was warned."
"Warned isn't doing."
"I'm learning that."
Milo walks beside him across the stubble. The wind off the ridge has dried the last of the frost, and the stalks lean one way together. Past the fence the green opens out, the chestnut in the middle of it, Bart's chimney sending a gray line straight up. Someone has hung a rug on a porch rail. A hammer taps three times, pauses, strikes once.
At the pump Milo stops. He hands Jasper the traffic-cone cap, which Jasper left in the ferns and the boy retrieved without a word. "Wash your hands. Cold, no soap. Then lard. Dr. Voss keeps some for burns."
"I'll ask."
"Don't tell her what for."
"I'll say I fell."
"She won't believe you."
"She'll believe I want her to." Jasper turns the cap in his fingers. "Milo."
"What?"
"The wire. I'll walk up to the ridge at five. You don't have to go alone."
The boy scuffs a boot against the pump base. "I might be late."
"I'll wait."
"I might not come."
"Then I'll look at it myself and tell you what I saw."
Milo thinks that over. He squints at the ridge, where the afternoon has put a thin gold edge on the rock. "Take Biscuit. He knows the way."
"I'll take Biscuit."
"And a lantern."
"I always take a lantern."
"Don't make it a thing." The boy turns and goes, long legs and a bent back, one hand tight on the strap of the empty sack. At the corner of the grange he lifts one arm over his head without turning, a small flat wave.
Jasper watches until the woodpile takes him.
He washes his hands at the pump. The water cuts across the stripes. He grits his teeth and holds his hands under until the cold numbs them. Biscuit sits at his feet with the face of a dog who has seen the whole day and will keep it to himself.
***
Dr. Voss opens her door with a dish towel over one shoulder. She takes in the pitch in his hair and his hands held out in front of him like a tray.
"I fell," Jasper says.
"Palms up."
He turns them over. She does not touch them at first. She tilts her head, and her lips move around some silent rhyme. Then she takes his right wrist between two dry fingers and rotates the hand toward the window.
"Hemp," she says. "Sliding under load. You held something that wanted to fall."
"A fence."
"Then the fence had a long rope." She crosses to a cabinet and returns with a jar of lard rendered with something green. "Rub it in. Twice today. Leave the blisters alone. If they break, wash them and come back." She screws
the lid on and closes his fingers around the jar. "Eat something hot tonight."
"I will."
"Sleep."
"Yes."
"You haven't been." She says it as a fact, the way she might name a bone. She asks nothing else. He stands on her step with the jar warming in his fist and does not leave for a while.
***
The room is cold. Jasper hangs the cap on the bedpost, where it glows against the gray wall. The lamp on the desk is dead, and the notebook lies where he left it. Above the bed the eight sheets hang in their row, his lines wobbling between them.
He fills the basin and soaks his hands. The water goes brown with pitch and pink where the skin has opened. He sits on the edge of the bed with his palms in the basin and the cold climbing from his wrists to his elbows until the ache reaches the back of his neck.
Marlow would have known the right salve. Marlow would have heard the word *burn* and had a tube at the door in four minutes.
He wants the voice. It is a plain, animal want, a hand reaching for a rail when the stairs go dark. He lets it stand. It does not go away. After a while it stops asking for anything and goes quiet in a corner of the room.
At five he walks to the ridge with Biscuit and a lantern, because he said he would. Milo already sits on the flat gray rock with his knees drawn up, watching the spruce a mile off. He says nothing when Jasper arrives. He lifts one hand and points.
The sun lies low on the hills, and the valley has gone gold. The spruce stands at the edge of the hollow, a dark cone against the light. Jasper looks for the thread of copper he described to Milo in the cellar. He finds a faint rust seam no wider than a crack in stone, and then he cannot find it at all.
"It's gone," he says.
"It's *brown*," Milo says. His voice climbs on the last word, and he clamps down on it. He takes his arms off his knees, rubs both hands over his face, and holds them there. "It worked."
"It did."
"I did it."
"We did."
"You pulled a rope."
"I did a lot of pulling."
The boy laughs into his palms. It sounds like a laugh with something else under it. Jasper sits down on the rock a foot away, and neither of them looks at the other. Biscuit lies between them. The tower on the interstate blinks red. Headlamps come on in the valley and slide south.
"Which one's Ronda's husband?" Jasper asks.
"Can't tell from here. Could be any of them." Milo squints down the interstate. "That's the strange part. On the radio they're people. From up here they're lights."
"Does it bother you?"
"I'd like to know which." He shrugs. "I'd like to know all of them."
They stay until the gold drains from the sky and the first stars show in the east. Milo gets up first. He brushes off the seat of his pants, shoulders the empty sack, and stands a moment with his back to the light.
"I don't need you to answer it," he says. "Tonight."
"All right."
"I just wanted to hear what it sounded like when someone asked."
"What did it sound like?"
The boy gives it real thought. "Like a door that isn't locked." He walks down the ridge into the dark with his hands in his pockets.
Jasper follows with the lantern, one careful foot ahead of the other. Biscuit's tail is a pale blur in front of him, and the lights of the town rise through the black trees one window at a time.
***
That night he lies on his back under the eight sheets and does not sleep.
The room fills with small noises. A beam ticks as the cold takes it. Downstairs a stair creaks under a woman who hums as she climbs. Wind pushes at the window, and the glass answers with a soft thin rattle. Past the green a rooster crows three hours early and quits when nobody joins him.
His palms burn. He holds them above the blanket where the air reaches them. Biscuit has climbed onto the bed uninvited and lies across his shins, a warm heavy weight that rises and falls. Jasper does not send him down.
*Would you stay?*
It sits in the dark above him, a plain question with no brand on it, in a voice that cracked on the second word. No one has ever put it to him. People have asked what he wants, and the question arrived with a menu. People have asked what he needs, and the answer was already on its way. Screens have asked him a thousand times what he would like next. Nobody asked if he would stay.
On his first morning Delphine asked whether he took sugar in his tea. He stood at her counter for the length of a kettle's rise and could not say. He remembers the steam and the spoon she held over the cup. He remembers that she waited.
He turns the boy's face over in the dark: the chipped tooth, the ears gone red from the lobes up. Milo asked it with a twig in his hands and did not look up, so that Jasper could laugh if he had to.
He reaches for the answer with a number attached. Nothing comes. He reaches for another and finds the sentence that begins *I don't know*. It lies in his mouth like a seed, small and hard, with weight.
"Jasper Cole," he says to the ceiling.
The name hangs in the dark. He closes his mouth on the rest of it and listens for what comes after. The wind. The woman downstairs, humming two notes, rising, then falling a step.
"Ask me tomorrow," he says.
His voice answers flat and hoarse, and nothing writes it down. Biscuit sighs against his shins and settles.
Jasper lays his burned hands on his chest and waits for morning.