The Owl Throw

The chest freezer had a girl asleep on it.

Dev noticed at first grey, when the light through the forced doors turned the tarmac outside the colour of dishwater. Priya was curled on her side on the lid with her rucksack under her head and both hands pulled up inside her hoodie sleeves. The right sleeve, the one with the knife, was tucked under her cheek.

Her mouth was open. The hood cord had slipped out of it and lay wet on the steel.

He looked away before she could wake up and catch him looking. Then he went to the gap and stood with the red bar against his leg and watched the van, because that was a thing he could do without anybody having to talk about it.

The window came up when the sun cleared the bus garage.

[Two occupants rested safely. +2 Zone Points. Total: 3.]

Down in aisle seven, the hum dropped half a note. He felt it in his back teeth, the way you feel a lorry idling outside before you hear it.

Margaret came out from among the dog beds at seven, winding her watch, and stopped beside the freezer. She looked at Priya for a long moment. Then she took the fleece throw off the end display, the one with cartoon owls on it, and laid it over the girl without tucking it in.

Neither of them said anything about it.

* * *

The counter at till three had a crack across the laminate from a dropped crate of cider in 2021. Dev opened the purchase window over it, because Priya had said show me and he didn't know how else to show someone a thing only he could see.

So he read it out, and she wrote it down.

She'd pulled the paper roll out of till three and was writing on the back of it with the stock-count biro, the curling paper pinned flat under her left forearm.

"Light," Dev said. "Two points. Restores power to the overheads and the doors."

"Doors," Priya said, writing.

"Ward. Six. Says it hardens the threshold against..." He squinted. "Against intent. I don't know what that means."

"Means people," said Margaret, from where she was sorting plasters by size.

"Pantry. Four. Regenerates one shelf a day."

"Which shelf?"

"Doesn't say."

"Clinic," Margaret said, before he got there.

"Three."

"Three," she repeated, the way she'd say a blood pressure she didn't like.

Priya tapped the biro against the roll. "Light. Obviously. You get the strip lights, the floodlights out front, the sign. You flash the whole sign at him. He can't miss a supermarket."

"Neither can anyone else," said Margaret.

"So? Nobody else gets past the creatures either."

"People can."

"I've got stitches for nine people and painkillers for about four," Margaret said to Dev, not to Priya. "Clinic first. I'm not doing an amputation with kitchen scissors because you wanted a nice sign."

"Nobody's getting amputated."

"Not yet, love."

The cord went straight into Priya's mouth. Dev, who had kept his own mouth shut through four years of complaints about the self-checkouts, recognised a person deciding not to say a sentence.

There was a line at the bottom of the window, greyed out, that he almost didn't read aloud.

"There's another thing," he said. "Says a second Rule slot opens at three occupants."

Both of them looked at the doors.

"I'm not buying anything," Dev said.

Priya's biro stopped. "You've got three. Light's two."

"I know."

"So you can afford it."

"I can afford it today." He pushed his glasses up his head, then felt for them, then left them. "I don't know who's coming through that gap tomorrow. Or what they've got wrong with them. Or whether I'll want a wall more than a lamp. If I spend it now, I've spent it on a guess."

"That's what buying is."

"Not on stuff I can't take back."

She looked at him for a while. Then she wrote across the receipt roll in capitals, DAY 3: 3 PTS. NOTHING. DEV SAYS WAITING, and underlined WAITING twice.

"That's going in the ledger," she said. "So when you do spend it, I can check."

"Good."

"I mean it. I'm keeping all of them."

"I know you mean it. That's why it's good."

She rolled the paper up tight and pushed it into her hoodie pocket next to the bell, and didn't argue for Light again. Margaret, sorting plasters, said nothing more about Clinic either, which Dev counted as the same thing from a different direction.

* * *

The hardware aisle was four metres of extension leads, cable ties and a single row of battery lanterns nobody had bought since the Christmas power cut. Dev took the biggest. Square, orange plastic, a handle on top and a switch you could press with a thumb, six D-cells already in the box.

He clicked it on in the aisle. White light, flat and ugly, filled the shelf.

"That'll do," Priya said. "Except it's slow. The bulb fades out. He'll see mush."

"He saw it last time from a kitchen switch."

"Your mum's kitchen was across a road, not a river."

She took the lantern off him and went to the cardboard bale by the stockroom. Ten minutes later she came back with the front cut off a crisp box, shaped to the lantern's face, hinged along the top with gaffer tape so it flapped up and down. A tab stuck out the side for a thumb.

"Lantern stays on," she said. "You flick the flap. Clean on, clean off. Nobody over there mistakes it for a fridge door."

"Where did you learn that?"

"YouTube." She didn't look at him. "Before."

Margaret was standing at the stockroom door with her hands folded over the watch.

"One climb," she said. "My count. You come down at twenty, whatever you see, whatever he does, whether he's waving a flag with your name on it."

"Twenty."

"Not nineteen because you were nearly done. Twenty."

"Twenty," Dev said.

"And if your nose starts before then, you come down on the nose."

"That's not a number."

"It's my number."

He clicked the pricing gun in his other hand. Once, twice. He hadn't known he was holding it.

* * *

They went up at dusk, because Priya said the torch had always come on while the sky was still lighter than the buildings.

Margaret took the bottom rungs of the ladder in her wellies. Priya stood beside the toilet-roll cages with the bell in her fist so it couldn't ring. Dev climbed with the lantern hooked over his wrist, and at the top he turned the lever and put his shoulder to the hatch.

Cold air. Gravel. A pigeon on the dead air-conditioning unit, which looked at him as if he was late.

[Beyond threshold. 00:60]

The hook went in. Deeper than yesterday, and faster, and lower down, as if something had been waiting in the old bruise for him to come back.

"Sixty," said Margaret below him. "Fifty-eight."

He got his elbows onto the roof and set the lantern on the gravel facing the river. Flap down. Thumb on the switch. Light on behind the cardboard.

The flats stood across the water against a lilac sky. All dark.

"Fifty-two."

"He's not there," Dev said.

"Then you come down."

"Give it..."

"Forty-nine. I'm not giving it anything."

He lifted the flap. Dropped it. Lifted, dropped. Lifted, dropped. Three square bursts of white across the roofs, so clean they surprised him.

Gap. He held the gap the way Mum used to stand at the switch, long enough for a kid on a football pitch to look up.

Three more.

"Forty."

Nothing. The bus garage roof. The black ribbon where the river ran. Halsey Street like a shoebox stood on its end.

"Thirty-six."

The world tipped a little left. He held the gravel.

Third floor, right-hand end. A point of yellow.

It came on and stayed on.

No flicks. It held, steady, a pin of light, and then it moved. It swung slowly down and to the right, along the line of the river, downstream, away from the bridge, and stopped. He followed it past the dark warehouses to where the water went pale and broken, a long white seam across the river in the last of the light.

The weir.

The beam held on the weir. One second. Two. Three.

Then it went out.

"Twenty-four," Margaret said. "Devon."

He looked at the place where the light had been and couldn't make his hands let go of the gravel.

"Twenty-two."

Something warm ran over his lip.

"Twenty-one. Come down."

He came down. He dragged the lantern back through the hatch and let the lid crash onto his shoulder, and the countdown blinked out at eighteen, and the hook let go of him all at once like a fist opening.

It left the bruise behind. Bigger than before.

[Bond strain. Recovery incomplete. Toll increased.]

He got three rungs down before his legs stopped agreeing to it. Margaret's hand found the back of his belt and held on.

* * *

The staff room smelled of instant coffee and the bin nobody had emptied since Monday. Dev sat in the plastic chair with his head tipped forward and blood dripping off the end of his nose into a FreshWay carrier bag.

"Forward," Margaret said. "Not back. Back and you swallow it and then you're sick on my floor."

"It's my floor."

"Pinch."

He pinched. She held the gauze pad under his nose with her other hand and looked at the watch, not at him.

"Ten minutes," she said. "If it's not stopped in ten, we pack it."

Priya stood by the lockers with the receipt roll out, not writing.

"Right," she said. "Bus garage to the steps down to the towpath. Ninety seconds if you leg it. Towpath to the weir walkway, thirty. The walkway's about a hundred and fifty metres and it's wet, you can't sprint it unless you want to go in. Two minutes, two and a half. Then up the other side, past the boatyard, to Halsey. Another minute."

"So four," said Dev, through the gauze.

"Four is me. On a bike, then off it. Four and a half, five on foot."

"And I've got sixty."

"You've got sixty seconds of a fist in your chest," said Margaret. "And then nothing. Nothing at all, from what that thing told you."

She lifted the gauze. Still bleeding. She put it back.

"He pointed at the weir," Dev said.

"He pointed a torch."

"At the weir. He swung it all the way down and held it there."

"He might have been looking for his slippers."

"He was telling me where to come."

Margaret took her hand away from his face and wound the watch. One click. Two. She did it slowly, and when she was done she held it to her ear for a moment, as if it was the watch she was asking.

"A beam is not a reason," she said.

"I know," said Dev. "It's what I've got."

At twelve minutes the blood had not stopped, and she packed it, and he sat there with cotton up his nose and a taste like old coins and the bruise in his chest humming in time with aisle seven.

Priya wrote something on the receipt roll. He didn't ask what.

* * *

Full dark came down at seven, and with it a voice.

"Hello the shop."

Dev was at the gap with the bar across his knees. He looked up.

A woman stood out on the tarmac, two steps back from the threshold, hands in the pockets of a long grey coat. Thirties. Hair pinned up. She stood the way people stand at a bus stop, as if waiting was normal and would be over soon.

Behind the van, something ridged shifted and went still.

She did not come to the gap. She did not try the doors. She just stood there.

"Keeper," she said. "May I?"

Dev got up. Margaret was already behind him; he didn't know when she'd arrived. Priya came out of aisle two with her left hand inside her right sleeve.

"Who are you?" Dev said.

"Selene Marsh." She smoothed the lapel of her coat with two fingers, once, a small tidy movement. "I saw your lantern. I'd have been here sooner, but I wanted to see if anyone answered it first."

"You saw both," said Priya.

"Everyone between here and the gasworks saw both. That's what lights are for." She looked at Dev. "That was very brave and very loud."

"What do you want?"

"Shelter, eventually. I'm not in a hurry." She tilted her head toward the dark aisles behind him. "You've had two rest. Three points, roughly. You haven't spent them, or your doors would be working."

Dev's thumb found the pricing gun in his pocket and squeezed the trigger with nothing loaded. Click.

"How do you know about points?"

"The same way you do. It told me." She smiled, not unkindly. "Can I ask you something about yours? How many roots has it put down?"

Nobody moved.

"Under aisle seven," Selene said. "Under the tile. Fine ones, like hair. Three days in, I'd expect five or six. More if you've been going out."

Margaret's hand closed on the back of Dev's belt again. Not pulling. Just there.

Dev hadn't counted the roots. He had looked at the core once, at dawn on the first day, and put the tile back over it, and never told a soul outside these walls where it was. Margaret knew. Priya had worked it out from the hum. That was all.

He looked at Selene's feet.

Low black boots, polished. Dry. The hem of her coat was dry. Under the dead floodlights, in the faint blue glow from the threshold, there wasn't a speck of river on her anywhere.

The weir path was always wet. Priya had come over it soaked to the knee.

"Which way did you come?" Dev said.

"Over the water." Selene glanced downriver, toward the place the beam had pointed. "Same as your brother will have to."

He hadn't said brother. Not out loud. Not tonight.

"Sixty seconds is only the default," she said. "Every Keeper starts there. It stretches, if it's fed correctly. I could have you across that weir and back inside a week." She took her hands out of her pockets and showed him they were empty. "I'd need to come in to show you. You'd need to let me."

Priya said, very quietly, "Don't."

Margaret said nothing at all. Her other hand was on the watch.

Selene waited on the far side of the glowing line with her dry boots together, and Dev stood on the near side with the bar in one hand and the gun clicking in the other. The third occupant, the one who would open a second Rule, stood one step away and asked to be let in.