The garage beneath Highland Tower was a concrete cave lit by tubes of gray fluorescent light, and at three in the morning it was as empty as a church after a funeral.

Luke brought the car down the ramp in low gear, with the headlights sweeping across rows of silent vehicles, and parked it in the far corner, in the bay marked 31-A, beside a pillar. He turned off the engine. The sudden silence rang. A drip of water fell somewhere in the dark, and a ventilation fan turned slowly overhead, and the smell of cold oil and rubber came in through the vents like a breath from a cellar.

Neither of them moved.

Elias sat in the passenger seat with a black leather book in his lap and his bare hand still lying over the other man's on the gear lever. He had forgotten it was there. He looked down at the two hands, one pale and one brown, resting together in the gray light, and felt, quite distinctly, the sensation of a thing slipping from one frame to another. A man had wept beside him. He had wept himself. It had gone on, quietly, for a long time, in a warm car, along a river, and now it was over, and the world outside was concrete and cold.

He took his hand away.

"We are not finished," he said.

His voice was hoarse. It sounded strange to him, a little thin, like a voice heard through a wall.

"No."

"There is the rest. The clothes. The car. The, everything that we touched." He drew a breath. "I should like to begin at once. It is the first hour that matters. After that, it is only a matter of how much remains."

Luke looked at him.

"You have thought about this."

"I thought about it on Thursday, in the bath." He pulled on his glove. "I have not done it before. But I have spent eleven years taking things away from the dead that they did not know they were carrying. It is the same work, turned round."

He got out of the car.

He had prepared in the usual way, which was to say too thoroughly. On Thursday night, between two and three in the morning, he had gone down to the garage in his stocking feet and laid out, on the floor of the bay beside the pillar, a small, plain, orderly kit. Two folded sheets of heavy brown paper. A roll of tape. A bottle of colorless fluid, and a clean cloth, and a plastic tub. A cardboard box of large paper sacks, the kind that grocers use, with their tops folded down. A pair of scissors. He had written a list on a card, and slipped it under the lid of the tub, and said nothing about it to anyone.

It was all there. It was exactly as he had left it.

He knelt, and spread a sheet on the concrete.

"Come here," he said. "Stand on this."

Luke came. He stood in the middle of the paper in his dark coat and his stocking feet, with a faint expression of bewilderment, like a man being measured for a suit. Elias walked around him once, slowly, with his hands behind his back. He did it as he would have walked around a table. He looked at the shoulders, and the collar, and the knees of the trousers. He looked at the soles of the shoes.

"Take it all off," he said. "Everything. Item by item. Hand it to me."

"Here?"

"It is a car park. Nobody is in it."

"It is thirty degrees."

"You will not be cold for very long." The corner of his mouth moved. "I am sorry. I find that I have a manner. It is the one that I use with the residents. It is rather authoritarian."

"I do not mind it."

"You will."

But Luke undid his coat.

He did it without a word, and slid it from his shoulders, and held it out. Elias took it in both hands. It was heavy and damp and smelled of snow and cedar and the cold iron of a stairwell. He turned it over, and looked at the lining, and shook it once, lightly, over the paper. A few small pale flecks fell out, like dust. He folded it inward, so that the outer surface was on the inside, and laid it in a sack. He wrote on the sack with a marker. COAT. L.

Item by item.

The scarf. The cap. The gloves, which he held at arm's length, and turned, and looked at. The jacket beneath. The shirt, and the vest, and the trousers, and the socks, each folded, each sacked, each labeled in a small square hand. Luke stood on the brown paper in the cold, with his arms crossed over his bare chest and his teeth beginning to chatter, and did not complain. He gave each thing up in its turn, with that same grave dry patience, as a man gives up the parts of a life.

"Shoes," said Elias.

"They are new."

"They are going to be old." He took them. He turned them over and examined the soles, and set them on a sheet of paper, and went over each tread with a stiff brush, from the heel to the toe, and caught the scrapings in a tub. A little gray dust. A grain of grit. A tiny sliver of paint. He looked at it under the light of a small torch, and nodded, and sealed it.

"What are you looking for?"

"Everything that is not yours." He did not look up. "A building leaves a little of itself on whoever visits it. I wish to know what we took, so that I may be sure that we took nothing more."

"And if there is something?"

"Then it goes into the fire."

He gave Luke a pair of gray sweatpants from a bag, and a sweatshirt, and a pair of rubber sandals, and watched him put them on. He did not look away. It was clinical. It was entirely impersonal. He might have been watching a patient dress after an examination. And yet something in the very coolness of it, in the bare gray light, with the man standing barefoot on the cold concrete and the white breath going up from his chest, made a small hot color come into his own face, and he turned abruptly and began on his own clothes.

He worked in silence.

It did not take long. He had done it before, in the abstract. He knew where to look, and how, and for what. He stripped himself in the cold with a swift economy that surprised him, and dressed again in the second set from the bag, and sacked and labeled each article in order. The wool of his coat. The leather of his gloves, which he held for a moment in his hand before he put them in. Four hours earlier they had lain on the cover of a ledger. They carried a small dark smear of the cold dust of a vault.

When he straightened, there were eleven sacks along the wall.

"The car," he said.

They did the car together.

It took an hour. Elias had brought a small vacuum, battery-driven, with a narrow nozzle, and he went over the seats with it, in long overlapping strokes, from the top of the back to the front edge of the cushion. He did the floor, and the pedals, and the carpets. He worked in a straight line, up and back, as he would have worked on a mortuary floor. Luke followed with the cloth, and the clear fluid. He wiped the wheel, the gear lever, the handles, the dash. The fumes were sharp and cold. They made Elias's eyes water.

He found a hair on the headrest of the driver's seat.

It was a single dark hair, an inch and a half long. He lifted it with a pair of forceps, and held it to the torch, and looked at it for a moment. It was not his. It was too thick, and too straight. He felt something move in his chest, small and quiet and irrational, a ridiculous warmth, like the touch of a finger. He sealed it in a tiny envelope.

"What is it?" said Luke.

"A hair."

"Mine."

"Yes."

"You are keeping it."

"It is evidence." He did not meet his eyes. "It must be logged."

"Of course."

A pause.

"It will go in the fire," said Elias.

"Of course," said Luke again. His voice had changed, very slightly. There was a note in it that Elias did not look at too closely. "I am very glad that you are so thorough."

He sealed the envelope. He put it in his own pocket, not in the sack, and went on with the dashboard.

At a quarter to five, he stopped.

He had been bent over the rear seat with the narrow nozzle, working at the seam where the cushion met the back, and he straightened to ease a cramp. He put his hand to the small of his back. He stood a moment, with the vacuum humming in his fingers, in the gray cave of the car park, and looked at what he had done.

The car gleamed. It was cleaner than it had been when it left the showroom. Every surface shone faintly under the lights, and a faint sharp smell of solvent hung in the air like the smell of a hospital. The sacks stood in a neat row along the wall. The brown paper lay folded in the corner. His own hands, in their leather gloves, were as steady as stones.

He looked at them.

They did not shake. That was what struck him. They had not shaken, once, since the vault. They had moved across the seats, and the wheel, and the pedals, with a quick quiet exactness, and never faltered. He had done it all with a calm and a competence that he would have been proud of in a surgeon. He had not been afraid. He had not been sick. He had not, in the whole of the last hour, had a single moment of doubt.

He had been good at it.

He stood quite still in the dim light, with the vacuum humming at his side, and a cold, bright, startling thought went through him. It was not a feeling. It was a recognition, like seeing one's face in a shop window and not knowing it for a moment. He was a very good thief. He was, in fact, remarkably good. He had a mind that saw what had to be done and a pair of hands that did it, and no trace of hesitation at all. He had been born to this. He had been trained for it, by eleven years of cold rooms.

He thought of a quiet young man in a plain white coat, hunched over a body at two in the morning, with a pen. He thought of the care with which he had once examined a stranger's fingernails.

It was the same care. It was the very same.

"Elias."

He started. The vacuum buzzed in his hand. He turned his head, and Luke was standing a few feet away, in his gray sweatpants and his rubber sandals, with his arms folded over his chest, looking at him. He had been watching for some time. Elias saw it in the line of his shoulders, which were quite relaxed, and the angle of his head. His face in the gray light was very still.

There was pride in it.

It was open and unmistakable, a warm bright shining thing, like the look of a man watching a child cross a room for the first time without a hand. It lay in his eyes, and the set of his mouth, and the quiet pull at the corner of his lips. It was a look of such plain unreserved admiration that Elias felt it reach him like warmth from a fire.

And behind it, deep down, like a stone at the bottom of a clear pool, there was something else.

It was pain.

It was not sharp. It was a dull old patient ache, the kind that has been there so long that one has forgotten what it was like to be without it. It lay under the pride, quite plain, as a shadow lies under a tree, and the two together made a face so naked and so complicated that Elias could not look at it directly.

"You are watching me," he said.

"Yes."

"You look as though you are watching something that you love, and fear."

"Yes," said Luke.

He said it simply. He did not look away. He stood in the cold garage with his arms wrapped round himself and his bare feet in the sandals and the pale light on his hair, and he said it as a man says what he sees.

"I did not want you to be good at this," he said. "I want you to know that. I thought that it would be the thing that I would hate. I imagined it, in the old days, in the dark. I thought, if he ever knew, if he ever came, I should want him to be clumsy. I should want him to be afraid." His mouth shook. "I should want him to be anything that did not look like me."

"And?"

"And you are doing it as I would have done it. Only better." He drew a short breath. "I have never seen it done so well. I cannot tell you what it is to watch. I am so proud that I can hardly stand. And I should like to take you out of this place and put you in a room with a window and a book, and lock the door, and never let you touch another thing that was not clean."

Elias said nothing.

"I know that I have no right."

"No."

"I only want you to know."

"I do not want to be good at it either," said Elias.

It came out very quiet.

"I thought that I would find that I could not do it. I thought that my hands would shake, and I should have to be sent home. I rather hoped that they would." His voice was thin. "And they did not. I did the whole thing in an hour without a tremor. And I think, I think that I enjoyed it."

"Elias."

"Not the thing itself. The order of it. The knowing what to do." He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes. "It is a terrible thing to find out about oneself. That one has been trained all one's life for the very task that one most wished to be spared."

"It is not a terrible thing."

"It is a very frightening one."

"Yes," said Luke. "It is that, too."

They stood looking at each other across the empty bay.

It was very cold. The ventilation fan turned slowly in the ceiling. A pale vapor drifted from the nostrils of each, and rose, and was lost in the glare. Elias felt, quite suddenly, that if he stood there a moment longer he would weep, and the thought was so absurd, and so tired, that he set down the vacuum on the roof of the car and walked across the concrete to the pile of sacks.

"There is one more thing," he said.

He had taken the ledger from his coat.

It was the last of the things that he had not done. He had carried it through the whole of the long cold hour in his breast, against his heart, and had not once taken it out. He drew it forth now, in the gray light, and held it in both his gloved hands. It was warm from his body. The brown leather gave faintly under his fingers.

He took from the box a flat, clean envelope of stiff gray card, the kind used for the storage of old documents, with a flap and a string. It was acid-free. He had bought it, in a stationer's, on a Tuesday, for eleven dollars. He slid the book inside. He did it very slowly, with a faint tenderness, the way one lays a child in a cradle, and tied the string, and closed the flap.

He took out a marker.

He held it above the white square at the corner of the envelope, and did not write. For a time he stood there with the pen suspended, and the light humming above him.

Then, in the small square hand that he used for labeling the dead, he wrote.

MERCER, T. A. LEDGER.

And beneath it, in a smaller line, as a matter of ordinary form:

CHAIN OF CUSTODY. E. T. M. / L. A. H.

He looked at it.

He had written his own initials first. He had done it without thinking, from a habit so old that it was part of his hand. It was the way that he signed all things, on every label, in every drawer, in the cold: the examiner first, and then the one who had assisted. It was an ordinary thing. It was a convention. But he stood with the pen in his fingers and the ink drying, and saw that the two sets of letters lay side by side on the gray card, in a plain black line, like the names on a door.

He had put them there as partners.

"It is correct," said Luke, behind him, very quietly.

"It is only a form."

"I know." There was a faint tremor in the voice. "It is a very good one."

They burned the clothes at half past five.

It was in the basement of the tower, in a room that Elias had not known existed. A heavy door, painted green, at the end of a long concrete passage, with a sign on it that said BOILER. Luke had a key. He had a great many keys, Elias had discovered, to places that he had no business with, as a man has who has been patiently doing a thing for twelve years. They went in together, carrying the sacks.

It was hot. A great black furnace crouched in the corner, with a small round iron door and a gauge on the front. It roared faintly. A pipe the thickness of a man's thigh ran up out of it into the ceiling. The air smelled of gas and hot iron and the faint dry odor of dust. A single bare bulb burned over the door.

Luke opened the iron door.

A wall of light and heat came out, orange and dancing. It threw their two shadows on the opposite wall, tall and black and wavering. Elias stood in front of it with a sack in each hand, and felt the heat on his face, and on his gloves, and on the front of his coat.

Fire.

He had forgotten.

It came to him slowly, in the red glare, as one remembers a word. It rose in him from somewhere very far down. He saw the orange. He heard the soft roar. He smelled the sharp clean smell of burning, and a long dark shoulder of a hill, and a window with a lamp. His hands, on the sacks, began to shake.

"Elias."

He did not hear.

"Elias. Look at me."

A hand closed on his arm. It was warm. It pulled him back, one step, and another, out of the heat, and turned him round, until his back was to the furnace and his face to a pair of dark eyes in the dim light. They were very close. They were steady and quiet and full of a great gentleness.

"I will do it," said Luke. "Go and stand by the door."

"I can."

"I know that you can." The voice was soft. "You have done everything else. You do not have to do this. I should like to. It is not so very much."

"It is the fire."

"I know."

"It is the only thing that I cannot."

"I know that, too." A small hand-shaped warmth moved on his arm, rubbing once, very lightly, up and down. "It is quite all right. Stand by the door."

He went.

He stood against the cold green steel of the door, with his arms wrapped round himself and his eyes shut, and listened. He heard the small clank of a lid. He heard the faint slither of paper sacks, and the rustle of cloth, and the quiet greedy sound of a flame finding something to eat. He smelled wool, and leather, and burning hair. It was a thin sweet smell, very ordinary. He breathed it through his nose.

It was only clothes.

He opened his eyes.

Luke was standing in front of the furnace with his back to the room. He was throwing in the sacks, one by one, with a slow steady swing of his arm, as a man throws seed. The orange light lit him from the front and made a dark cutout of his shoulders. His left arm was bare to the elbow. The sleeve of the sweatshirt had been pushed up, and the long pale shining band of an old burn lay across the inner wrist, and ran up the arm, glowing very faintly in the firelight like the surface of a pearl.

He flinched.

It was only a flick of the head as the heat struck him, and a tightening of the jaw, and Elias, who had heard a man say in a corridor I cannot either, understood at once what it cost. He stood in the heat and the glare and the soft roar, with the thing that had taken his arm and half his life burning at his knees, and he fed it, with a hand that was not quite steady, the clothes of a long night. He did not look at it. He did it because the other could not, and because it was a small thing that he was able to give, and he gave it with his teeth set.

The last sack went in.

The door clanked shut.

Luke stood for a moment with his hand flat on the black iron, and his head bowed, and his shoulders rising and falling. The heat poured from the furnace in long soft waves. In its light he looked very tired. Then he turned, and wiped his brow with the back of his wrist, and came across the floor.

"There," he said. "It is done."

Elias looked at him.

He could think of nothing to say. He had a thousand things in his mind, and all of them seemed too large. He stood with his back to the door and his arms wound round himself, and then, quite slowly, he unwound them. He put out a hand. He laid it flat against the front of the man's gray sweatshirt, over the breastbone, where the heart was.

It was beating hard.

It was warm. It was alive. It beat in the palm of his glove like a small trapped bird, rapid and light, and under the quick rhythm of it, deep and steady, ran the long slow breath. He kept his hand there. Neither of them spoke.

"You could stop," said Luke.

It was barely audible. He was looking down at the hand.

"You could stop now. It is a thing that you may say. We have the book. We have the envelope. It is enough, for a time. We could put it all away, in a drawer, and go upstairs, and sleep, and you would never have to do it again."

"I know."

"I would not think any less of you."

"I know that you would not." Elias lifted his eyes. "That is the difficulty."

"Elias."

"I could stop." He heard his own voice, level and low. "I know that I could. It is the thing that I should do. It is the plain right thing, and I have known it since the garage." His hand tightened, a very little, on the cloth. "And I do not think that I will."

Luke's breath caught.

"It is what I am afraid of," said Elias. "More than the fire. More than the, than any of it. That I have been given a door, and the choice, and I am going to stay where I am." He swallowed. "That I find that I wish to."

They stood in the red hot dark, with the iron door at their backs, and the small round window of the furnace glowing like an eye.

"Come upstairs," said Luke, at last. His voice shook. "Please. It is nearly dawn."

They went up together.

It was in the lift, between the second floor and the third, that Elias took off his glove.

He did it without a word. The cage hummed upward in its shaft, with the light flickering on its brass, and the two men stood against opposite walls with a yard of carpet between them. He drew off the leather, and the nitrile, and held them crushed in his left hand. He put out the bare right one, across the space, with the palm up.

Luke took it.

They did not look at each other. They stood in the hum of the rising car, holding hands, in the cold gray light of a Saturday morning, like two people at the end of a long and difficult journey who have not yet arrived and do not yet wish to. Elias felt the warm dry strength of the fingers closing over his. He felt the pulse in the wrist. He felt the small scar at the base of a thumb.

The numbers climbed. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.

"Thirty-one," said the lift, in a small recorded voice, and the doors slid open.