Chapter Four
•••
As soon as he’d seen Jin safely over the parapet, Miles retraced his steps to the basement cafeteria, careful to make no wrong turns. He was apparently early for lunch, as only a few heads turned in suspicion to follow him. It occurred to him that he was less conspicuous here in his tattered garb than if he’d been wearing his full-on Imperial Auditor grays, a suit so severe as to signal Serious Person Here anywhere in the Nexus regardless of the vagaries of local fashion. Street Refugee Here was a much better choice for his current needs.
The scattering of tables was divided from the cooking area by a long serving counter, with metal cupboards above. He made his way around it to find a sort of large electric samovar promising tea. Next to the dispenser was a mismatched collection of mugs, with a hand-lettered sign over it, Wash your cup! He couldn’t quite tell if these were personally owned or up for grabs, which gave him a perfect opening for conversation with the woman, evidently Ako’s replacement, who was stirring a ten-liter pot of soup.
He addressed her, “May I use one of these?”
She shrugged. “Go ahead. Wash it after, though.” She tapped her spoon on the pot rim and laid it aside. “You new here?”
“Very new.”
“Rules are, cook what you want, clean up after yourself, replace what you use, contribute money to the pantry when you can. Sign up on the cleaning duty roster on the front of the fridge.”
“Thanks. Just tea for now . . .” Miles took a sip. It was stewed, cheap, bitter, and served his purposes as a prop in both senses. “You been here long yourself?”
“I came with my grandmother. It won’t be much longer.”
As he was figuring out how to lead her on to parse that, a familiar, querulous voice sounded from beyond the counter: “That soup ready yet?” A tall, bent old man stooped to peer through the serving hatch. Impressive white mustachios drooped down, framing his frown, and wriggled as he spoke. Like an insect’s palps, ah.
“Another half hour,” the woman called back. “Just go sit.”
“I believe I’ve met him,” Miles murmured to her. “Name of Yani?”
“Yah, that’s him.”
Yani shuffled in to collect a mug of tea from the dispenser. He scowled at Miles.
Miles returned a cheery smile. “Good morning, Yani.”
“So, you’ve sobered up. Good. Go home.” Yani clutched his mug in two hands, to average out the shakes perhaps, and shuffled back to one of the tables. Miles, undaunted, followed and slid in across from him.
“Why haven’t you gone away?” asked Yani.
“Still waiting for my ride. So to speak.”
“Aren’t we all.”
“Jin says you’re a revive. Did you really have yourself frozen a century ago?” That would have been just about at the end of Barrayar’s Time of Isolation, on the verge of a torrent of new history all of which Yani had more-or-less slept through. “I would think the oral chroniclers around here would be all over you.”
Yani vented a bitter laugh. “Not likely. The people here are glutted with revive interviews. I thought the journals might pay me, but there are too many of us up walking around. Nobody wants us here. Everything costs too much. The city’s too big. Settlement was supposed to be more spread out. Hell, I thought the terraforming would be halfway to the poles by now. The politics have gone all wrong, and nobody has any manners. . . .”
Miles made encouraging noises. If there was one skill Miles had honed in his youth, it was how to please an old man by listening to his complaints. Yani needed no more than a nod to launch into a comprehensive denunciation of modern Kibou, a world with no need nor place for him. Some of his phrases were so practiced they came out in paragraphs, as if he’d told them over to anyone who would stop to listen. Which, by this point, was no one—the few other residents who drifted in gave Yani’s table a wide berth. His rheumy eye brightened at this new audience who didn’t show visible signs of wanting to chew through his own leg to get away, and Miles’s suspect druggie status was temporarily forgotten.
As Yani maundered on, Miles was thrown back in memory to his own grandfather. General Count Piotr Vorkosigan, planetary liberator, un-maker and re-maker of emperors, and cause of a lot of that history that Yani had missed, had sired his heir late in life, as had Miles’s father, so that it was more nearly three generations between grandfather and grandson than two. Still, they had loved each other after their own peculiar fashion. How would Miles’s life have altered if Piotr had been frozen when Miles was seventeen, instead of buried for real in the ground? His impending return always a promise, or a threat?
Like a great tree the old general had been, but a tree did not only give shelter from the storm. How would Barrayar be different if that towering figure had not fallen, permitting sunlight to penetrate to the forest floor and new growth to flourish? What if the only way to effect change on Barrayar had been to violently destroy what had gone before, instead of waiting for the cycle of generations to gracefully remove it?
For the first time, the notion occurred to Miles that it might not be vote-grubbing alone, nor even the lack of medical progress in reversing geriatric decay, that caused the cryocorps to freeze more patrons than they revived.
Yani had now segued into a long screed about how his cryocorp had cheated him, evidently by not delivering him into this new world physically youthful, rich, and famous, which was roughly where Miles had come in on this rant. Yani seemed a time-traveler who had found out the hard way that he did not like his destination any better than his point of departure, failed to notice the one common factor was himself, and now could not go back. So just how many like him were haunting the streets of Kibou? Miles made the emptiness of their mugs an excuse to grab both and take them for refills.
As he was washing his mug and topping up Yani’s, Miles murmured to the cook, “Is it true Yani was rejected for being a revive?”
She snorted. “I daresay nobody wanted him around a hundred years ago, either. I don’t know why he thought that would have changed.”
Miles muffled a smile. “I daresay.”
The half-smile caught her eye, and she looked at him more closely. “You’re not very old. Are you sick?”
Miles blinked. “Do I look that hung-over?”
“I thought that might be why you were here.”
“Well, I have a chronic medical condition, but I don’t much care to discuss it.” How had she guessed? A seizure disorder hardly showed on the outside like, say, skin lesions. Miles suspected a conversation at cross-purposes, again, and that he’d just been handed a clue. So what was it?
But before he could follow this up, she turned away and said, “Oh! Tenbury-san!”
A lot of heads swiveled at the entry of a man in threadbare coveralls, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and an enormous quantity of hair, but the looks were mostly followed up with brief nods or friendly waves. The greetings were returned as silently. The man came into the kitchen area. He shoved his hand into his thatch of brown-gray beard to scratch his chin, greeted the cook with another nod, and held out a familiar carafe, which she took to rinse and refill with coffee. “Your lunch is all ready, Tenbury-san,” she called over her shoulder. “Sack’s in the fridge.”
The man grunted thanks and went to poke inside the industrial refrigerator. He was not, Miles, realized, actually of a bearlike build under all the mad hair, but lanky and pale. He pulled out a cloth sack, turned, and eyed Miles. “You’re new.”
“I’m a friend of Jin’s,” Miles answered, not quite directly. Or at least, he collected me.
“Really? Where is the boy?”
“I sent him to run an errand for me.”
“Eh. Good. Time he did some work.”
“There’s a faucet leaking in two-ten,” the cook informed him.
“Right, right. I’ll bring my tools after dinner,” said the man. He took the carafe and ambled out.
“Who was that?” Miles asked, as the cook picked up her spoon again.
“Tenbury. He’s the custodian here.”
Miles dimly remembered that term going by a few times earlier, and wondered if its meaning was as far outside the usual as Suze the Secretary’s. But if he really wanted to know where the power came from and the sewage went to, now was his chance. Should he wait for Jin to broker an introduction? Miles didn’t have infinite time to explore, here . . . his feet were already in motion, deciding for him.
He waved his own thanks to the cook, dropped the refilled mug by Yani, rapped a friendly farewell on the tabletop, and made it to the door just in time to tail Tenbury’s receding footsteps. The worn rubber soles on Miles’s scavenged shoes were as silent as he’d hoped. Hinges squeaked; Miles nipped around the corner to discover a door closing again on another stairwell. He drew a breath and followed.
The steps descended into stygian blackness. His breath quickened. To his intense relief, a sudden glow reflected off the walls ahead—Tenbury had unshipped a hand light. So, the man didn’t see in the dark like a werewolf, good. At the fourth landing, the scrape of a heavy door being shoved open was followed by loss of the reflected light. Miles sped his steps, put out his hands, and found the handle. He opened this door more cautiously, turning sideways to slide through the gap and easing it closed with the minimum sound.
The bobbing light receded to his right; he turned after it, thinking of will-o’-the-wisps luring unwary travelers to their doom. As he followed, he became aware of tiny twinkles dancing in the corners of his vision like floating fireflies, adding to the night-swamp effect. He blinked, and they resolved into scattered indicator lights, green for all’s-well, tacking randomly up the corridor walls on either side.
Reluctantly, Miles reached out and let his hand trace across the now-familiar bumps of closely-set banks of cryo-drawers. Except these were not abandoned and cleared, but working, or a portion of them were. Well insulated, the drawer faces were at room temperature—there was no danger of his skin freezing to the surface and trapping him in a growing cocoon of icicle-glass, really. He drew in his hands anyway, making his way down the center of the corridor by witch-light.
He stopped short as, at the end of the corridor, another door opened. Ordinary office-lab-living-quarters glare temporarily blasted his eyes, making a nimbus around a hairy head that fortunately did not turn around. The door shut, and Miles was plunged into blackness once more. As his night vision came slowly back the dense dark was relieved, if that was the word, by the scattered green specks. He could just make out his corpse-light sleeves.
So, he hadn’t found the pumping station or the electrical transformers. He’d found the deeper secret of this place—working cryochambers. A number of mysteries fell neatly into place.
Suze and companions were running a secret cryocorp. No—a cryo-cooperative. And, unless he missed his guess, unlicensed, untaxed, and uninspected. Clandestine, off the books in every way.
Kibou-daini—a whole planet so obsessed with cheating death that even the street people managed to scavenge hope.
Which beat living, and dying, in a cardboard box all to flinders, Miles had to admit. He opened his mouth in what might have been a silent laugh. And I thought I’d pulled some audacious stunts in my time . . . How the hell Suze and whatever helpers she’d suborned had managed to palm an entire facility, back when this place was being decommissioned and stripped, its patrons shifted to the elegant new Cryopolis on the west end, gaudy with its floodlit pyramids, was a tale Miles was suddenly dying to hear.
Bad choice of phrase, my Lord Auditor.
Less than a third of the cryo-drawers in this corridor sported those glow-worm lights, and how many other corridors might there be? Plenty of room for more customers. And, because his mind worked that way, he considered how easy murder by cryo-drawer would be. The ultimate shell game, one live body hidden among hundreds of dead ones. Asphyxiation would come quickly in the sealed black box, even without the freezing, and no one would know where to look till much too late. . . .
It’s nothing I haven’t undergone before.
It was curious how much that reflection didn’t help.
He stepped forward to the end door, raised his hand to touch the cool metal surface, and just stood there for a minute. Then, curling his fingers into a fist, he knocked.
The creak of a chair. The door opened partway, and a hairy face thrust through. “Yah?”
“Tenbury-san?”
“Just Tenbury. What did you want?”
“To ask a few questions, if I may.”
Beneath shaggy brows, dark brown eyes narrowed. “Did you talk to Suze?”
“Jin took me to see her this morning, yes.”
Tenbury’s lips pursed amid their thatch. “Oh. All right.” The door swung wide.
Miles did not correct the misperception that Suze had therefore gated him into this covert community, but slipped inside at once.
The room was part office, part control chamber for the banks of cryo-drawers, and part living space, or so the unmade bedroll by one wall and the piles of personal junk suggested. Beyond, another door stood open on what might be some sort of repairs facility. Miles glimpsed workbenches and racks of tools in its shadows. There was only one station chair, by which Miles guessed this Tenbury was less sociable than Suze, but the custodian politely gestured his guest into it and leaned against a control console. Miles would have preferred it the other way around, so as not to risk a crick in his neck, nor the embarrassment of swinging his short legs above the floor. But he dared not impede the useful exchange he’d started, so he sat and half-smiled upward.
Tenbury cocked his head, and echoed the cook’s observation. “You look too young for us. You sick or something?”
Miles repeated the reply that had seemed to work before: “I have an incurable seizure disorder.”
Tenbury winced in sympathy, but said, “You’d do better to go back to the docs. Off-planet, maybe.”
“I have. It was costly.” Miles turned out his empty pockets as if to demonstrate.
“That why you ended up here? Broke, are you?”
“In a sense.” It wasn’t as if Miles was trying to beat a fast-penta interrogation through excessive literalism, yet he found himself oddly reluctant to lie outright to this man. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“Yah, it always is.”
“Can you show me what I might be getting into? If I stayed here, that is?”
The hairy eyebrows jerked up. “You’ve nothing to worry about with my work. Come on, and you’ll see.”
Tenbury led through his shop, which seemed half-engineering-half-medical. Dismantled freezer parts lay strewn across a workbench. “I keep a portion of the chambers usable by cannibalizing the others,” Tenbury explained.
Miles encouraged the tech to expand upon the arcana of his craft with much the same noises he’d used on Yani, to better effect. When Miles had absorbed as much about how cryochambers were built as he could stand, he asked, “But won’t you run out of parts?”
“Not for a while yet. This facility was originally set up to serve twenty thousand patrons. In twenty years, we’ve only accumulated about a ten-percent occupancy. I admit we started much smaller, back when. We can go for decades yet. Till I’m gone, for sure.”
“And what then? Who are you relying on for your revivals?”
“We don’t need anyone to do the revivals, yet. Anyway, they’re much trickier.”
Indeed. “Who does the cryoprep, then?”
“Plant nurse. You’ll meet her sooner or later. She’s real good, and she has an apprentice, Ako, too. I need to get myself a couple of youngsters like that, I guess.”
Miles didn’t marvel at this. Emergency cryoprep was a common enough medical procedure that even he had learned it, at least theoretically, as part of military field-aid. Under nonemergency conditions there were doubtless more refinements, resulting in less cryo-amnesia and other unwanted side-effects, after. Less trauma to start with left less trauma to recover from, but to choose to go down to that darkness in cold blood, so to speak, while still breathing . . . “It’s still frightening to think about,” he said honestly.
“For most folks, it’s a last choice, not a first one. We all come to it in time, though. No one wants to go of a coronary in the night and not-wake-up warm and rotting. Safer not to wait too long.” Tenbury’s lips twisted. “Although some of the corps are trying to increase market share these days by encouraging folks to freeze early. I’m not sure if the math works out.”
“It does seem an inelastic demand, yes,” agreed Miles in fascination. “More customers now can only mean fewer later. A short-term strategy for such a long-term enterprise.”
“Yah, except maybe for those who’d miss their chance.”
It was Miles’s turn to tilt his head in consideration. “I suppose they’re not up to one-hundred-percent market saturation, even now. What about the religious types?”
“Oh, yah, there are still a few refusers.”
“Refusers?”
“You’re not from around here, are you? Figured from your accent, but I’d have thought you must have been on Kibou longer. In order to end up here, I mean.”
“It was something of an accident. I’m glad I stumbled on you, though.”
Refusers, like revives, were another item the careful corps tours had neglected to mention, but they hardly needed even Tenbury’s brief explanation, which he obligingly supplied, for Miles to figure out. Tenbury’s judgment was that those who chose burial over freezing for superstitious reasons were a self-limiting phenomenon. Miles thought of those fringe utopian communities that had practiced strict celibacy and thus died out within the first couple of generations, or non-generations, and nodded provisional agreement.
Tenbury then kindly took Miles through the far door, out of the workshop and into another corridor—thankfully lit, though even with illumination the general effect was of an unsettling cross between a space station corridor and a morgue. There he opened an empty cryo-drawer, recently reconditioned, and pointed out its features, rather like a very restrained used-vehicle salesman.
“It seems . . . small,” said Miles.
“Not much head room,” Tenbury agreed. “But you’re past sitting up suddenly by the time you arrive in it. I’ve often wondered if folks would retain any memory of their time in these, but the revives I’ve met all say not.” He slid the drawer closed and gave it a fond thump to seat the latch.
“You just go to sleep, and then wake up in a future somebody else picked for you. No dreams,” Miles agreed. “Blink out, blink back in. Like anesthesia, but longer.” An intimate preview of death, and doubtless a lot less traumatic when the blink out part wasn’t accomplished by a needle-grenade blowing out one’s chest, Miles had to allow. He spread his palm on the drawer-front. “What happens to all the poor frozen people”—or frozen poor people—“if this place is discovered by the authorities?”
A brief, humorless grin ruffled the beard-thatch. “Well, they can’t just let us thaw and rot, then bury us. That’s illegal.”
“Murder?”
“Of a sort. One of the grades of murder, anyway.”
So this place was not as futile an effort as Miles had first guessed. Somebody was thinking ahead. How far? Who might find the future legal responsibility for these frozen souls on their hands? The municipality of Northbridge? Some unwitting entrepreneur, buying the rediscovered property for back taxes without inspecting it first? Cheating death, indeed. “Illegal at the moment, then. What happens if the law changes?”
Tenbury shrugged. “Then several thousand people will have died calmly and without pain, in hope and not despair. And won’t know the difference.” He added after a thoughtful pause, “That would be an ugly sort of world to wake up in anyway.”
“Mm, I don’t suppose the authorities would go to the trouble and expense of reviving folks just to let them die again immediately. Blink out, and . . . stay blinked.” There were worse ways to arrive at an identical fate. Miles had seen many of them.
“Well, I need to get back to work,” Tenbury hinted away his uninvited visitor. “I hope this helped you.”
“Yes, yes it did. Thank you.” Miles let Tenbury shepherd him back through the shop to the first corridor. “I suppose I’d better go feed Jin’s pets. I did promise the boy I would.”
“Odd kid, that. I had hopes for a bit he might apprentice to me, but he’s more interested in animals than machinery.” Tenbury sighed, whether in regret or bafflement Miles was not quite sure.
“Um . . .” said Miles, staring up the darkened corridor.
“First door on your left,” said Tenbury, and thoughtfully held his office door wide to light the way till Miles had found it in the gloom. The stair rail and a careful count of the turns guided Miles after that. He emerged again in the basement near the cafeteria, and from there found his way back up to Jin’s roof via the interior stairs.
Emerging into the daylight and greeted by milling chickens, he thought, Damn, but I hope the boy makes it back here soon.
The big downtown tube-tram transfer station was just as confusing going back as forward, Jin found when he’d taken his second wrong turn. The crowd made him nervous, and it was only going to get worse as the time edged toward rush hour. He needed to get out of here. Scowling, he turned around a couple of times, reoriented himself, and made his way upstream through an entry corridor, bumping a lot of folks going the other way.
What was in that big thick envelope Consul Vorlynkin had handed to him? It crackled against his skin. Entering the second-level rotunda, he dodged out of the way of a woman with a pram, then leaned his shoulders against a pillar and fished out the letter. To his disappointment, it wasn’t sealed with a bloody thumbprint, but it was certainly sealed. No peeking. He sighed and thrust it back inside his shirt.
He finally found the right escalator, and rode it up two flights to the top-level gallery. He was worried about his animals. Would Miles-san take proper care of them? You never could tell, with adults. They pretended to take you seriously, but then laughed behind your back at the things that were important to you. Or said that because you were just a kid, you would forget it all soon. But Miles-san had seemed to genuinely like Jin’s rats, letting Jinni sit on his shoulder and nibble at his hair without flinching. Jin could tell when grownups didn’t really appreciate how sleek and funny and friendly rats could be, and they didn’t bite hard at all unless they were accidentally squeezed, and who could blame them for that?
The squeeze on Jin’s shoulder made him jump and yelp. If he’d been equipped for it, he might have bitten the hand as well, but all he could do was twist and stare upward. Straight into the face of his worst nightmare.
Brown hair, a pleasant smile, the blue uniform of municipal security. Not just a tube-tram safety officer; their uniforms were green. A real policewoman, the sort who’d come for his mother.
“What’s your name, child?” The voice was friendly, but the undertone steely.
Jin opened his mouth: “Jin . . .” Oh, no, that wouldn’t do. Lying to grownups made him scared inside, but he managed, “Jin, um, Vorkson.”
She blinked. “What kind of name is that?”
“My Dad was a galactic. But he’s dead now,” Jin added with hasty prudence. And half truth, for that matter. He tried not to think about the funeral.
“Does your mother let you come downtown alone? It’s school hours, you know.”
“Um, yes. She sent me on an errand for her.”
“Let’s call her, then.”
Jin held out his skinny wrists. His stomach felt cold and quivery. “I don’t have a wristcom, ma’am.”
“That’s all right. You can come along to the security booth, and we can call her from there.”
“No!” In a panic now, Jin tried to wrench away. Somehow, he found his arm cranked up behind his back, hurting. His shirt tail came loose, and the envelope dropped to the pavement with a loud slap. “No, wait!” He tried to dive for it. Without releasing his arm, the woman scooped it up first, staring at it with a deepening frown.
She murmured to her own wristcom, “Code Six, Dan. Level One.”
In moments, another policeman loomed. “What ho, Michiko? Catch us a little shoplifter?”
“I’m not sure. Truant, maybe. This young fellow needs to come to the booth and call his mother. And get ID’d, I think.”
“Right.”
Jin’s other arm was taken in an even stronger fist. Helplessly, he let himself be marched along. He was wild for a chance to break away, but neither grip slackened.
The security booth had big glass windows overlooking the rotunda. It was cool inside, and when the door shut a wonderful silence fell, which usually would be a relief to Jin, but not now. A lot of screens were running, and Jin realized that some of them were from vidcams that looked right into people’s faces as they went up or down on the escalators. He hadn’t noticed them among the noise and confusion and hurry of the place. The woman plunked him down in a swivel chair. His feet didn’t quite reach the floor.
The wide man, Dan, held up a light pen. “Let me see your eyes, child.”
Retina scan? A red flash. Jin squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, and clapped his palms over his face for good measure. But it was already too late. He heard the man moving away to his comconsole.
“He’s scared, Dan,” said the woman. Jin peeked through his fingers to see her holding up the envelope, squeezing and rattling it like a birthday present. “Think the reason might be in here?”
A ping from the console. “Aha. I believe we have a match. That was quick.” Officer Dan looked up and asked, “Is your name Jin Sato?”
“No!”
“It says here he’s been missing for over a year.”
Without letting go of Jin’s arm, the woman edged around to look at the holoscreen. “Good heavens! I’ll bet his family will be relieved to get him back!”
“No, they won’t! Let me go!”
“Where have you been hiding for a whole year, son?” Officer Dan asked, not unkindly.
“And what is this?” Michiko asked, hefting the envelope and frowning.
“You can’t have that! Give it back!”
“So what’s in it?”
“It’s just a letter. A, a very personal letter. I’m supposed to deliver it. For, for some men.”
Both officers went rigid. “What sort of men?” asked Michiko.
“Just . . . men.”
“Friends? Relatives?”
Relatives were not a good thing, in Jin’s world. “No. I just met them today.”
“Where did you meet them?”
Jin’s mouth clamped shut.
“Not addressed. Not postal-sealed. No legal reason we can’t peek, is there?” said Dan.
The woman nodded and handed the envelope over. Dan popped a folding knife and slit it open from the bottom, holding it above the countertop. A thick wad of currency thumped out, followed by a fluttering note.
It was more money than Jin had seen in one place in his life. From their widening eyes, it was more money than the two security officers were used to seeing in one lump, too, certainly in the hands of a kid.
Dan riffled the wad and vented a long, amazed whistle.
Michiko said, “Drug ring, do you think? Feelie-dream smugglers?”
“It could be—gods, it could be anything. Congratulations, Michiko. Shouldn’t wonder if there’s a promotion in this.” Staring at the envelope with more respect, Dan belatedly pulled a pair of thin plastic gloves from his pocket and donned them before he picked up the note. It seemed to be printed on half a flimsy.
Dan read aloud, “We must trust that you know what you are doing. Please contact us in person as soon as possible.” He turned the note in the light. “No address, no date, no names, no signature. Nothing. Veery suspicious.”
Michiko bent to look Jin sternly in the eyes. “Where did you meet these bad men, child?”
“They weren’t bad men. They were just . . . men. Friends of a friend.”
“Where were you taking all this money?”
“I didn’t know it was money!”
Michiko’s eyebrows rose. “Do you believe that?” she asked her partner.
“Yah,” said Dan, “or he might have taken off with it.”
“Good point.”
“I wouldn’t have! Even if I had known!”
“No one can threaten you now, Jin,” Michiko said more gently. “You’re safe.”
“No one did threaten me!” Jin had never felt less safe in his life. And if he blabbed, Suze and Ako and Tenbury and everyone who had befriended him wouldn’t be safe, either. And Lucky and the ratties and the chickens, and big, beautiful Gyre . . . Lips tight as he could press them, Jin stared back at the officers.
“Call Youth Services to pick up the boy,” said Michiko. “The rest of the evidence had better go to Vice, at a guess.”
“Yah,” said Dan, his gloved hands sliding Jin’s precious envelope, the wad of cash, and the note into a transparent plastic bag.
“My animals,” Jin whispered. Such a simple task Miles-san had entrusted him with, and he’d screwed it all up. He’d screwed everything up. Between his scrunched eyelids, tears began to leak.
With a grating noise and a puff of powder, the bolt popped out of the concrete.
“Finally,” breathed Roic.