At two o'clock on Friday morning, Elias lay on the cot in the locker room with his coat over him and the smell of smoke in his nose, and did not sleep.

He had tried. He had lain on his back in the dark for two hours, with his hands folded on his chest and his gloves still on, and counted the tiles in the ceiling, and the rivets in the steel lockers, and the seconds between each drip of the tap. It had not helped. Every time that he closed his eyes he found himself standing again at the foot of a table in a white room, and a black shape lay under a sheet, and the long gray bitterness rose from it into his throat.

The smell had not left him. It had gotten into the wool of his coat. It had gotten into his hair. He had washed three times that evening and changed his shirt, and still it was there, faint and sour and clinging, as if some small part of the thing had followed him home and taken up residence in his skull.

He had not gone near her.

That was the shame of it. All through Thursday, while Fenwick and Wade did the preliminary work and he sat in his office with a cup of tea and the fire marshal's report, he had not once set foot on the other side of the double doors. He had read about her. He knew the dimensions of the room, and the position of the bed, and the pattern of the burn along the ceiling. He knew that the smoke alarm had been silent. He knew that the door was found closed.

He knew that she had died of smoke.

It was in the preliminary notes, in Fenwick's round careful hand. Carbon monoxide, very high. Soot in the airway, deep, to the level of the bronchi. She had been breathing, in the room, for some time. She had been alive when the fire began, and alive when it reached her, and had gone on drawing breath through the dark.

It was the soot that he could not put down.

He lay on the cot and looked at the ceiling and thought: she was not asleep. She woke. Somebody had come into a hallway with a smell, and she had woken and risen from her bed and gone to the door. And the door had not opened.

The fire marshal had written, in a cold dry note: cause undetermined. Multiple points of origin. Accelerant suspected, not confirmed. There was no evidence of intent. There was no suspect. An old building in a poor street, owned by a company, with faulty wiring and a landlord who had not repaired it in years. It would be closed, he thought, by the end of the week. A tragedy. A pity. The smoke alarm had been missing a battery.

He sat up.

He did not decide. It came upon him in the dark as a tide comes up a shore, so gradually that he could not have said when the water first touched his feet. He found that he had swung his legs over the edge of the cot, and put on his shoes, and tied them. He stood. He took his coat from the hook.

He thought: you cannot.

He thought: you have been telling yourself that for eleven hours.

It was true. He had told himself it on the corridor floor, and at his desk, and in the car, and on the narrow bed in the little room with his hand on the door. I cannot go near fire. I cannot bear it. And it had been true. It was the most honest thing that he had ever said. But there was another truth beneath it, and he had known it since the moment that a man stepped between him and a table, and said, you do not have to touch her.

He did not have to.

It was the finest and most terrible thing that had ever been said to him. And he knew, with perfect certainty, that if he did not, no one would. They would close the file. They would send a card to a niece in another state. And somewhere in the city a man who had walked down a corridor with a can would sleep soundly, and wake, and have his breakfast.

He walked out of the locker room.

The lab was dark. He did not turn on the overhead panels. He went down the length of it by the light of the green lamp at the far end, past the shelves and the sinks and the great covered tables, and the smell grew thicker with every step. It was fainter than the day before. Somebody had opened the windows. But it hung in the air like a veil, and he walked through it with his jaw clenched and his breath held and his hands in his pockets.

Table two.

She was there. They had left her as she was, under a clean sheet, with the lamp lowered. He stood a yard from the foot of the table, and the white cloth rose and fell in a long unbroken line.

His knees were shaking.

He stood very straight, in the half dark, with his hands at his sides, and made himself look at it. He made himself look as one makes oneself stand at the edge of a high place. And then, very slowly, because he knew that if he stopped to think he would not do it, he began to take off his gloves.

The disposable layer. He had not put it on. The leather. He drew it away from his left hand, finger by finger, and laid it on the steel. The nitrile. It came away with a small wet sound.

His bare hand hung in the lamp.

It was trembling. It was trembling so violently that he could see the shadow of it shake on the sheet. He looked at it with a kind of dull astonishment. A white long hand, with a pale scar at the base of the thumb. It did not look like the hand of a man who had done this a hundred times. It looked like the hand of a child.

He folded back the sheet.

He did it only as far as he needed. He did not look at her face. He found, by touch and by the pale glint of the lamp, a small clean curve of bone, low on the left side of the chest, under the collarbone. It was not burned. It was the one place on her that the fire had not reached, a little island of pale gray skin, no bigger than the palm of his hand, protected by the folds of a nightgown.

He thought: I am sorry.

He thought: I will not look away.

He laid his hand upon it.

Sixty.

It is hot. That is the first thing. She is lying in bed on her side with her cheek against the pillow, and she is hot. The blankets are pushed down. The room is dark, and there is a smell. It is a sharp smell, like paint, like the thing that Sal used to use for the engines, and she does not know why it has come into her bed. She thinks, I have left the stove on. She thinks, it is only the stove.

Fifty-two.

She wakes. It is all at once. A sound is in the wall, a low soft rush, like the breath of a great animal. She sits up. The window is orange. It is not the orange of a streetlamp. It is a shifting flickering orange, and it moves on the ceiling in waves.

She says, "Oh."

Forty-six.

The smoke alarm has not sounded. She looks up at it, in the corner above the door, and it is dark. It is a small white disk with a dead green eye. Sal put it up. He put it up before he died, with a stepladder and a screwdriver and a great deal of swearing, and she has never once heard it. She has never needed to. She thinks, quite calmly, that it ought to be screaming.

Forty.

She is out of bed. She is in her nightgown. The floor is hot under her bare feet. She goes to the door, because that is what one does, and puts out her hand, and the knob is warm. She turns it. It turns. And the door opens an inch, and stops.

Something is holding it. There is a thin hard line, a chain or a rope, drawn tight from the outside. She pushes. It gives a little, and holds. Through the crack there is a roar of heat and light, and a stench like a furnace, and a long low sound, which she thinks is the wind.

Thirty-three.

"Hello?" she says. She does not know why. It is only that someone is there. In the narrow gap, in the glare of the hall, she can see the edge of a shape, a shoulder and a sleeve, moving away. It is a man in an orange jacket. There is a patch on the arm. A white square, with a name stitched on it in black. HARBOR TERRACE.

"Hello! Please! The door!"

The shape stops.

Twenty-six.

It turns. She sees his face, for a moment, through the slot, red-lit and flickering. He is not young. He is perhaps fifty, with a heavy gray jaw and a pair of small tired eyes. He has a red plastic can in one hand, swinging, and in the other a lighter, and his face is wet with sweat. His mouth is open.

"Lady," he says. "Lady, there's, they said it was empty. They said all the fourth floor was empty."

"Please," she says.

"They said there wasn't nobody." His voice cracks. "God. Oh God. I didn't know there was..."

Nineteen.

"Please open the door."

He looks at her. For a long moment he stands in the heat, with the can swinging and the light dancing on his face, and she thinks: he will do it. She thinks: he is a person. He will put down the can. She sees his hand twitch toward the chain.

Then something moves behind him, in the smoke. A telephone rings. It is a small tinny sound, in the pocket of the orange jacket, and he takes it out and looks at it. He listens. His face changes.

"Yes, sir," he says. "Yes, sir. I understand."

He puts it away.

Twelve.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm so sorry, lady."

He goes.

Eight.

The smoke is in her lungs now. It is thick, and sweet, and each breath burns. She goes down on her knees by the door, with her mouth against the crack, and sucks at the thin air. Behind her the room is full of light. It is a beautiful light. It is the color of the inside of a shell, and she thinks, quite calmly, that she has never seen the room look so lovely.

Five.

Sal.

She sees him. He is standing at the window, in his shirtsleeves, with his back to her, in the old brown light of the evenings, looking out at the street. He is fifty. He is hale. He turns, and smiles at her, and holds out his hand.

Three.

I am coming, she thinks.

Zero.

Elias came back into his body with a sound that he had never made before.

It was not a cry. It was lower, and rawer, and it came out of him in a long breaking sob that tore at the back of his throat. He was on his knees. He did not know how. He was crouched on the cold tile with his arms wrapped around his ribs, and his bare hand lay beside him on the floor with the fingers curled, and the tears were pouring down his face.

He had not known that he could.

He had not wept in twelve years. Not at a graveside, not on a stair. He had not wept when they told him, or when they showed him the place, or on the night that the last of the smoke went up from the ridge. He had stood among policemen, with a stranger's hand on his shoulder, and a rose in his fist, and the tears had simply not come. They had been shut away, somewhere far down, like a locked room.

They came now.

They came in great shuddering waves, one after another, from the very bottom of him, and he could not stop them. He knelt on the floor of the lab with his forehead against the cold steel of the table leg and sobbed like a child. It was not for her. It was for her, and for a hundred others, and for a woman at a window with a lamp, and a house on a hill, and a man in a study who had been, perhaps, at that very moment, in the dark, a little way beyond the door, and had not been able to open it.

He had not been there. He had been four hundred miles away. He had sat on a step in a stairwell with a library book on his knee, reading, while the whole of his life went up in a roar of orange light.

And this woman had been there. She had gone down on her knees at a door, in the heat, and said please, and been left. She had been alive for every second of it. She had not been spared a breath. And now he knew. He knew what it was. He had been inside it, in her skin, with the light on the ceiling and the air turning to knives, and he understood at last, in his own body, what he had never allowed himself to imagine.

That was what it felt like.

That was what they had felt.

"Mother," he said.

It was a whisper. It was hardly a sound. It came out of him quite without will, broken and cracked, in a voice that he had not used in twelve years.

"Mother."

The cold was coming.

He felt it gather in his chest. It was not so bad as the other times. It was a slower thing, a heavy chill, a creeping, as if the fire had been a long way off and the frost was merely taking its turn. His hands were turning blue. His breath came in short white pulls. But he did not care. He lay on the floor and wept, and the room went in and out of focus, and a long dark time seemed to pass.

"Elias."

It was very quiet. It came from the dark above him.

He did not look up.

He did not need to. He had known it would come. He had known it from the moment he took off his glove. He had stood by a table at two in the morning and told himself that he would not be found, that this time he would do it alone, in secret, and put himself to rights before dawn. And some small honest part of him had known, quite coolly, that he lied.

He heard the step. It was soft and swift. A knee came down on the tile beside him, and a warm heavy weight settled at his side, and a coat fell across his shoulders, wool and cedar and rain.

"I have you," said Luke.

His voice was very low and rough, and it shook.

Elias did not ask how.

That was what he noticed afterward, with a kind of distant wonder. He lay on the lab floor in the half dark with his face wet and his body shaking, and a man who ought not to have been there had come out of the night as if he had been waiting behind the door, and he did not ask. He did not say, how did you know. He did not say, why are you here. The question simply did not arise. It had been worn away, little by little, over six weeks, like a stone under water, until nothing was left of it but a smoothness.

"She smelled the smoke," he said.

It came out thick and halting.

"She woke up, and there was, there was a man in the hall. He was, he had a can. He said that they had told him no one was there." He swallowed. "She could not get out. The door was held. She said please."

"I know."

"She said please, Luke."

"I know." The arm came around him. It did not close. It hovered, a quiet weight, across his back, an inch from the cloth. "May I?"

"Yes."

He was drawn in.

It was not like the other times. He was not carried, or laid, or put to bed. He was simply gathered, slowly, in the dark, against a broad warm chest, with an arm about his ribs and a hand cupped at the back of his head. He felt the rough wool of a sweater against his cheek. He felt a heartbeat, steady and rapid, under his ear. He did not lie down. He sat on the floor of the laboratory with his back against a steel table leg and his face pressed into the side of Luke's neck, and was held.

It was the closest they had ever been.

His forehead rested against the bare skin above the collar. It was warm. It was smooth and alive and faintly damp, and the pulse beat in it like a small bird. He could feel the rise and fall of breath. He could smell the clean sharp scent of soap, and under it the dark faint smell of cedar, and something older and more familiar than either, something that belonged to a man at the end of a hall.

He wept into it.

He did not try to stop. He had no strength for it. He lay in the circle of that arm and shook, and the tears ran down into the collar of a stranger's shirt, and a warm hand stroked, slowly, once and again, the back of his head. It did not speak. It did not murmur. It only moved, with a great slow patience, as one strokes a creature that is frightened of the dark.

"When I was eighteen," said Elias.

He said it into the man's neck. His voice was a thread.

"My house burned. A fire, at night. I was not there. I was at school, in another state, and they telephoned." A breath. "My family was inside. All of them. They did not, no one came out."

The hand in his hair went still.

"I never saw it. They would not let me. I stood at the gate, afterward, and there was only the, only the shape. I did not know how it was. I did not know whether they had slept, or woken, or called. I did not know whether it was quick." His voice cracked. "For twelve years I did not know. I told myself that they had not felt. I told myself that it was a gas line, and they had gone to sleep."

"Elias."

"And now I know." He pressed his face harder against the warm skin. "She did not go to sleep. She was awake. She was awake for all of it. And it was, it was," He broke. "It was exactly what I thought."

He felt the body against him go rigid.

It was only for an instant. A single great tightening, from the shoulders to the spine, as of a man who has been struck from behind. The arm around his ribs clenched. The hand at the back of his head tightened in his hair, and then, quickly, with a visible effort, eased. Above him, he heard a breath dragged in through the teeth.

He lifted his head.

Luke's face was a few inches from his own. It was in shadow, lit only from one side by the faint green gleam of the lamp, and it was white. His jaw was locked. The muscles at the hinge of it stood out in two hard knots, and the tendons of his neck were drawn like cords. His eyes were open. They were fixed on some point in the dark beyond Elias's shoulder, and they were wide and bright and full of tears.

They fell. They did not make a sound. They ran down the planes of his face and gathered in the hollow of his throat, one after another, silently, as water runs from a broken pipe.

"I am sorry," said Luke.

It was barely audible.

"For what?" whispered Elias.

"That you know." His mouth was shaking. "That you should have had to find out. In such a way. Alone." He drew a long, ragged breath. "I would have given anything, I would have given, if I could have spared you."

He did not say what.

Elias looked up into the ruined face, and felt a very strange thing happen inside him. It was a slow, vast, trembling shift, like the turning of a great stone door. He had told a man the truth. It was only a part of it. He had not said the name, or the hill, or the man at the end of a row of photographs. But he had said, my house burned. He had said, I was eighteen. And the man had listened as no one had ever listened, with his whole body, with his bones, as if every word had been laid on him like a hand.

He had listened as a man listens to a thing that he already knows.

Elias did not say it. It was not a thing that could be said. He felt it settle in the quiet like a stone at the bottom of a pond, and let it lie.

"Now you know," said Luke.

It was a whisper.

He bent his head. His forehead came down against Elias's, very lightly, and rested there. Their eyes closed. They sat on the cold tile in the green dusk of the lab, two men in the arms of a single coat, forehead to forehead, with the tears of one running into the hair of the other.

And the thing that Elias thought, as the cold went slowly out of him, was a simple one. It came without surprise, as a fact comes to a man who has been walking toward it for a very long time.

And so do you.

He did not say it. He did not ask. But he knew it, as he knew his own heart, and he held it in the dark with his eyes shut and did not let go.

They sat there until dawn began to grey the high windows.