After the Last Answer

At dawn, people discovered how tired they were.

The change happened almost at once. As the water fell, men and women who had lifted weights through the night found they could barely carry a mug. A ringer sat on the stair and fell asleep before finishing a sentence. Nessa cried quietly over a pair of ruined shoes, then became angry with herself because other people had lost houses.

Sela handed her a cloth.

“You’re allowed to be cross about the shoes. Just don’t ask the people with the houses to comfort you.”

The lower quays were flooded, but the city stood. The old dry dock was full of timber, mud and things that could not yet be identified. All the households moved out of the overflow street had been accounted for. There were injuries, broken roofs, boats driven onto steps. There would be work for longer than anyone wanted to count.

Iona sat in the tower’s dry room with her boots off. Somebody had given her socks too large for her. She had folded the toes under her feet.

Tarin brought two bowls of broth. He hesitated in the doorway.

“You can come in,” she said.

“I didn’t want—”

“I lost a kiss, not my ability to know who’s at a door.”

He came in. She immediately regretted the sharpness.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m tired.”

“So am I.”

He sat at a careful distance. They drank the broth without speaking. It was too salty and the best thing she had ever tasted, although she no longer trusted such rankings.

Afterwards she took out her notebook. The page beneath the arch had survived. The ink was slightly blurred at the edge.

He asked. I said yes. There was a lantern on the step and I held his shirt. I was not thinking about the sea.

The words belonged to her. She recognised the pressure of her own pen. Beyond them was an absence with clean edges.

Tarin looked towards the window while she read. He was giving her privacy in a room too small for it, and she loved the effort before she was ready to name the feeling.

“Was it good?” she asked.

He turned back.

“Yes.”

“You’re hardly going to say it wasn’t.”

“No. But it was.”

She closed the book.

“You can tell me about it sometime. Not as though you’re returning something. Just as a thing you remember.”

“I’d like that.”

She held out her hand. He took it without pretending that this was the same moment beginning again.

Later they went down to the workshop.

The door had swollen open. Mud covered the floor and reached halfway up the benches. A drawer lay in the street. Some of the tools would be recoverable. Some would not. The marks on the doorframe were still visible, though the wood beneath them had split.

Iona stood in the entrance with her coat unbuttoned and felt a dull, unreasonable anger that the world had not saved one small room for her in exchange for everything else.

Tarin stayed outside until she asked him in.

They began with the tools that were easiest to reach. He laid them on a plank in the street. She washed mud from a pair of pliers in a bucket, then began to cry without stopping the work.

He took the pliers from her only when she held them out.

There was no public celebration that day. Someone tried to organise one and was told to come back with shovels. The ward watches remained in their towers. When officers arrived to discuss returning the clappers, the ringers asked for the request in writing and for the names of the people prepared to sign it.

No request arrived before the next tide.