The Hearth Contract

Chapter 6: Open It Outside

After dinner Rennie climbed up on the kitchen chair, laid the tablet flat on her knees, and called her father.

He picked up on the second ring. First would have been better — first meant he had been holding the phone already — but second was fine. She had a scale.

His face came up. Behind him there was a lamp and no window. It had been like that all week.

"Dad. Did you miss me?"

"Yes." He looked past her, into the kitchen. "Where's your mom?"

"She's in the study. She said she had to talk to her teacher." Rennie said that part in her mother's voice, flat, with the door shut on it. "Do you miss her too? I can go knock. I'm allowed to knock. I'm not allowed to go in."

"Let her talk." Something in his face eased. "How is she?"

"Fine." Rennie thought about it, because her father liked the true answer and could hear the difference. "She's in the study a lot. She made soup."

"Good," he said. "Soup's good. I'll be home the day after tomorrow."

"Okay — wait." She set the tablet on her knees and put both hands up in front of her and counted. Two fingers. She looked at them a while, to be sure. "Two sleeps."

"Two sleeps."

"Because school starts Monday, and you and Mom are both walking me. Both." She got the tablet back up. "And not just at the end. People who come at the end aren't walking me, they're picking me up."

"Both," he said. "Door to door."

She watched his face to make sure he meant it. He meant it.

"Dad, I have to tell you a thing, and you can't tell Mom."

"That's two things already."

"Uncle Wick ate the phone," Rennie said.

Her father was quiet for a second.

"Which phone?"

"The one that goes across." She said it short, the way her mother said it with her back turned at the counter. "Mom brought it home from the other place. It can still call over there. It's a phone that gets hungry — that's why it costs so much, that's why we only use it when it's important. Uncle Wick ate the part inside that does the talking, so now it's mostly just the phone part." She thought about that. "He got in trouble."

"I bet he did."

"There were people over there who put the talking parts into things on purpose, so they could get in through them." She was getting the order right, she was fairly sure. "Mom's teacher got almost all of them. And then everybody's fire ate one."

"Which one's your mom's?"

"Uncle Wick." Rennie put her chin down on her forearm. "She carried him home inside her."

Her father looked at her for a while without saying anything. That happened sometimes. He was a long way off with his face still on.

"Does your mom know you know all that?" he said.

"Everybody knows," Rennie said, with the patience you use on grown-ups who have lost track of the days. "You know."

He laughed once, through his nose.

"Two sleeps," he said. "Tell her I said to feed you a vegetable."

"Mom cooks," Rennie said, deeply offended.

"That's the part I'm worried about. Put the tablet on the counter, not the floor."

She put the tablet on the counter and went to find her mother.

* * *

The study was the one room in the house with no fire in it, by arrangement, and Wick had opinions about the arrangement. Tonight he was somewhere down the hall.

Vesper opened her messages. The thread with her teacher sat at the top, where it always sat, and her question from before dinner was still the last thing in it.

She closed that thread and opened the house thread.

The house thread ran over the relays, which made it the most expensive way to talk to anybody in either world, and it showed. Marlowe wrote short. Desmond never had.

Vesper: Anyone up. Can a fire be sent across, or is that only for things that don't bite.

Marlowe: It can go. A relay doesn't care what's in it. The weight is the weight, and the crossing is four times everything.

Vesper: So it doesn't need a box.

Marlowe: Nothing crosses in a box. Nobody ever believes that part.

Vesper: Do we know the number.

Marlowe: Nobody knows the number until it's charged. Assume more than you want to spend.

Marlowe: Is it for Rennie?

Vesper: Yes.

Marlowe: Then I'll ask on this side. Don't buy anything out of the lower market.

Vesper: Desmond. Any progress on the beds.

Desmond: Nobody caught. But I have a lead, and the lead is a fire.

Vesper: Explain.

Desmond: I bought a backtrace glass. Don't ask what it cost, and don't remind me what I said about that man's glass four years ago. I remember what I said.

Vesper: I remember it too.

Desmond: It caught the last hour. A fire came up out of nothing and went through the beds. All of them. I had stock in there two hundred years old. The whole collection. One night, and then it was gone.

She read it once the way he had paid for it — the glass, the market, two hundred years of a man's work bought one decade at a time and gone in an hour. It made her angry on his behalf. Then she read it again, as news.

Vesper: Why do you think it came here.

Desmond: The last frame is the one you want. It was eating, and then a strike came down on it and put it out, and after that there was nothing on the glass but the air where it had been.

Desmond: And the air had a shape. I have seen that shape exactly once before.

Desmond: You. The greenhouse, the night of your strike. Your self came out of you and went home. I was standing forty feet away and I have never forgotten it.

Desmond: The glass went dark three months ago tonight.

Three months.

Her husband's coat had still been on when he came in from the yard and said something had come in. After that, nothing. Nothing on the ward line, nothing on the roads, nothing burned, nothing buried, for three months. She had walked the ward line twice that first month and then stopped, and told herself it was because there was nothing to find.

Ansel: Vesper. Fires are born out of the world, not out of the house. They don't come good and they don't come bad. They come hungry, and then they learn, and what they learn depends on whoever's holding them.

Ansel: Half of them never learn at all. Don't treat it like a person and don't treat it like weather. Find it before it's strong enough to want something.

Desmond: It's already strong. Two hundred years of my stock is a ring, maybe two. If it's on your side, keep your hands in your pockets and find it.

Desmond: Also, the fires in the keeping. Nobody's been inside since Halloway left, and I'm not going to be the one who goes, so you're waiting on him like the rest of us.

Vesper: Understood. I'll talk to my husband.

Desmond: I'm sending you what's left of one of the beds. See if your tracking gets anything off it.

Desmond: Open it outside.

Vesper: Outside.

Desmond: Outside.

Above all of it, the names on the thread. Marlowe, Desmond, Ansel, Vesper. And under them a sixth, added four months ago, which had not written one line — not even the night the beds burned.

She was still looking at that when the relay took its cut out of her trade account, four times the local rate, the way it always did, and something that had been on the other side finished arriving.

She tapped the file open the way Desmond had shown her, and the root fell out into her hand.

It was a root the size of her fist, curled in on itself and black the whole way through. When it touched her palm she felt what was left in it: one thin thread of heat, working its way up out of the black.

She held it under the lamp and did the arithmetic twice, because she didn't like the answer. If it had been eating for three months and nothing had burned, then either it was the most careful fire anybody had ever seen, or it wasn't going anywhere yet. Either way she had met it before. She remembered her own first three months on this side: not much. Most of it she spent on a bathroom floor, learning which way the water went down.

So: find it. Catch it. Keep it quiet and fed until Rennie was old enough to take it, and hope that a fire which had eaten a man's greenhouse in one night would be patient while a five-year-old grew up.

Wick came down the hall and stopped in the doorway, low and orange, and stayed there. He never came further into this room than the doorway.

"So it's a fire," he said. "On this side. We find it, and Rennie takes it."

"No."

"Why not. That's the thing you've been chewing on for a year."

"Because it ate a greenhouse in one night, and she's five."

Wick considered that from the doorway.

"You're going to keep it instead," he said.

Vesper didn't answer.

"Fine," said Wick, and went back down the hall.

The root was still in her hand, warm at the core.

"Mom."

A small head came around the doorframe and stopped there. That was the rule, and she was good about the rule.

"Come here."

Rennie came at a run and hit her at the hip and stayed.

Vesper got her free arm around her. "Did you finish with Dad?"

"Mm." Rennie turned her face up. "Dad says he misses you."

Vesper looked down at her for a second. Then she picked the phone up off the desk.

Heard you miss me?

Also — Desmond's greenhouse didn't burn. It was eaten, three months ago. Our three months. I'll show you what came of it when you're home.

Rennie was up on her toes by then, which was how she read anybody's screen, and she got far enough to see the first line before Vesper turned the phone face down on the desk.

Rennie put both hands over her face and stayed like that.

"Bed," Vesper said.

"You're not even mad," Rennie said, from behind her hands.

"No," said Vesper. "Bed."

Rennie went, hands still up, all the way to the door, and kept them up until she was around the corner.

When the door was shut, Vesper opened the bottom drawer of the desk and laid the root on top of the folder with the class list in it. It was still warm. She closed the drawer.