31.

The Question After Waking

Rainhill, 126 AGH

Ilva had brought the cord in a paper bag, where it had acquired two knots that Elara did not remember making.

“Those are yours,” Elara said.

“I haven't touched it.”

“You put it in the bag.”

“It was in the bag when I got it.”

Elara turned the little workboard over on her knees. The clipped end of the cord was still sound. Below it the blue and cream strands passed through one another in a loose, complicated lump. There was no reason to cut them. If Ilva would hold the board still, she could get the first loop free.

Her friend stood beside the bed with the bag open, waiting to be given something else to do. Her short brown hair had flattened on one side beneath her hat. Elara wanted to put that right as well, which was absurd. Ilva could spend the whole afternoon with flattened hair. It would do her no harm.

“Sit down. You're making me feel that we're late.”

Ilva moved the chair close. In the continuity ward, other people's preparations had a habit of becoming Elara's appointments. There was always someone coming after lunch, or before the evening meal, with a question that mattered and a reason it could not be left much longer. The cord had been Elara's request. She had asked for it yesterday, when she still felt equal to undoing it.

She worked a fingernail beneath the cream loop and drew a little slack through. Ilva held the board at the far end. They had made cords together long before there was a ward in their days, passing the work between them according to whose eyes or fingers had had enough. Now Elara's fingers would not keep the loop open. She tried again with both hands resting on the coverlet.

“I can pull this bit,” Ilva said.

“Wait.”

Ilva pulled it.

The small opening closed on Elara's nail.

For a moment she could not find a sentence that was both fair and worth the breath. She freed her finger and looked at Ilva.

“I said wait.”

“I thought you meant the other end.”

“I meant you.”

Ilva put both hands flat on the board. Her broad shoulders rose, then settled. “All right.”

Elara felt sorry immediately, and then annoyed that she should have to be sorry. Ilva had done the thing she had asked her not to do. Nothing about Elara's illness had made that less irritating. She worked the loop loose a second time, more slowly, and laid the freed cream strand across the coverlet.

“There. Now you can.”

Ilva drew the blue through. The knot opened so readily that they both stared at the length it had concealed.

“We could have done that yesterday,” Ilva said.

“We did do that yesterday. Before you put it in the bag.”

“I didn't put it in the bag.”

Elara remembered herself gathering the work from the chair, displeased with its loose ends, pushing it out of the way before supper. She looked down at the blue strand.

“Well. Somebody should have told me not to.”

Ilva's mouth moved before she let herself smile. That restraint was worse than the smile would have been. Elara gave her the remaining knot.

“You can have that one.”

They settled to it. Ilva used the point of a blunt wooden pick from the bag while Elara held the part already made. It was meant to lie flat, a narrow blue pattern running along cream. The last stretch had begun to twist. Elara wanted to see whether it would flatten under a gentler pull, but holding it up to the light was more work than she had expected. She lowered her hands.

Ilva pretended to be absorbed in the knot. Elara knew the pretense because her friend had stopped making progress.

“You can say it,” she said.

“Say what?”

“That I should put it down.”

“I was going to say I don't like the cream.”

Elara looked at her.

“You liked it when we bought it.”

“It looked different on the reel.”

“It was wound round something.”

“Yes. I think that suited it.”

Elara laughed and had to lean back before the laugh was quite over. Ilva reached for the board, then stopped with her hand halfway. This time Elara let her take it.

From the corridor came the brief clatter of a tray being set down badly, followed by someone asking for a cloth. The ward had a life at the other side of the door. Elara liked hearing it when it was something as ordinary as a spill. She disliked the lowered voices that sometimes followed the use of her name.

In a few days they would attempt to continue her life in a second body. She had been living toward the attempt for so long that its nearness sometimes seemed like another postponement. There was still today to get through, and tomorrow, and something she had to ask the clinician without Ilva looking at her like that.

The clinician knocked at the open door and asked whether she was ready for the afternoon review.

“Nearly,” Elara said.

Ilva had finally opened the second knot. She spread the strands across the board to show her. The blue lay beside the cream, longer than Elara had thought it would be. She could picture the next crossing and the one after that. It was the holding that had become difficult.

“Leave it like that,” she said. “On the shelf. I'll want it.”

Ilva set it down with the pick beside it. Then she moved her chair so the clinician could come close to the bed.

*   *   *

The following morning Elara asked Ilva to wait outside the smaller room where the consent review was to take place.

Ilva said, “Of course,” too quickly, but went. Elara watched the door shut. She was glad to be alone with someone she did not have to comfort.

The clinician moved the papers within her reach. Elara had a supported chair and a place to rest her arms. She had been offered the review in her own room, but she wanted, for once, to arrive somewhere for a purpose and leave when it was done.

Her first signature was on a copy from 118. The name looked brisk. She remembered signing it. The permission had been for a somatic sample from her own body, from which the Darsen works could begin growing a recipient. The works had opened the year before. She had asked questions then too. Eight years did not make her old signature the signature of a stranger, but she could hardly bear how much time it seemed to have had.

Beside it lay the separate clinical authorization from 124, and the record of the recipient's supported transport to Rainhill in 125. B-R01, the papers called it. She had seen that designation often enough to hear the letters without reading them.

“If I say no now,” she said, “what happens to all of this?”

The clinician looked at the papers, then back at her. “The transfer doesn't take place.”

“I know that. I mean the years. Bringing it here. Everybody who's ready.”

“Those things have happened. They don't authorize what we do to you next.”

“There must be people who would be angry.”

“There may be. They won't be the people deciding.”

Elara rubbed the edge of the first copy between finger and thumb. It was unpleasantly easy to imagine telling Ilva that they were going back to the room, that nothing would happen, that the hope which had occupied so much of their speech was over. It was equally easy to imagine staying here until someone mistook her silence for agreement.

“And you would still look after me.”

“Yes. Here, with the care this body needs. Refusing wouldn't change that.”

This body. Elara put her hand flat on her own forearm. She did not like the phrase, though she had used it herself. The clinician waited.

“It hasn't been anyone else?” she asked.

“The recipient?”

“Someone who was there before.”

“No. It was grown from your authorized sample. It has had no earlier independent occupant. That history has been checked separately from your permission for the procedure.”

Elara nodded. She had known the answer, but she had wanted to hear it in this room, on this day, from the person asking her to proceed.

“And this one ends.”

“Yes.”

“Not asleep somewhere.”

“Its functioning will end irreversibly. We cannot restore it afterward or use it to bring you back if the attempt fails.”

The clinician did not hurry on to the next paragraph. Elara found herself wanting that hurry. She wanted the sentence put behind them as something already considered, so that she could spend her attention on the part in which she woke.

Her left hand was still on her arm. She moved it to the table. It left a warm place beneath the sleeve.

“I've heard people talk about copies,” she said.

“What have they told you?”

“That you could keep one. Somewhere else. If it went wrong.”

“There is no stored Elara to recover. The transfer uses one temporary lumium channel. Its material is consumed in doing the work. It isn't a lasting store we can return to.”

“But the records.”

“Descriptions, measurements, things you've told the observers. Those remain. They can help us compare what happens. They cannot be made to wake.”

Elara looked at the closed folder that held her earlier answers. She had been impatient with those questions. One of them had taken most of an afternoon because she kept remembering something else she wanted to add. It had never occurred to her then to envy the folder for being able to remain on a shelf.

“What will you know if it works?”

The clinician asked whether she wanted the fuller account again. Elara shook her head.

“Tell me what you'll be able to say.”

“That a living person continues in the recipient. That she recognizes people and retains learned abilities and memories we can compare with records made beforehand. That the observations of her body, including the trained magical examinations, support the finding. And we'll need to see it continue. Waking once would not be the whole result.”

“That she is me.”

“Evidence of your continuation. Yes.”

Elara held the clinician's gaze.

“That's a different answer.”

“It's the answer I can support. I can't show you an uninterrupted experience from one side of the procedure to the other. I can't measure a soul, or settle every argument about copying. I can tell you what we're attempting and what we'll have to observe before we call it successful.”

For a while Elara said nothing. Beyond the door, a chair scraped. Ilva was still there. The sound made her want to finish quickly, and then made her resent wanting to finish quickly.

“I don't want to wake up just to be frightened of having done it.”

“I can't promise you won't be frightened.”

“No.”

“We can help you when you are.”

Elara drew the present consent toward her. The explanation on the page was familiar. She read it again, including the part she had been trying not to see: the original body could not continue to act after the procedure. There was no word she could alter to leave that option open.

She was dying in it. She knew that in more ways than the people around her needed to explain. Still, when she imagined laying the pen down, she felt a sudden, fierce attachment to the weight of her hand. It was here. She knew the effort of lifting it, the way her thumb came against the pen, the relief of setting it down again. She wanted more time in the life that had taught her those things. She wanted it so badly that she was willing to attempt this.

“I want to go ahead,” she said.

Her voice sounded impatient. The clinician asked if there was anything else she needed answered before signing.

“You'll ask me again on the day?”

“Before we begin.”

She signed. The pen made a small extra stroke at the end of her surname because her hand had tired. She resisted the impulse to tidy it.

“Tell Ilva when she can come in afterward,” she said. “If I'm awake. Don't leave her outside because she's forgotten to ask the right person.”

The clinician wrote the instruction down and read it back.

That afternoon an independent observer came to finish the preprocedure record. The observer had taken no part in growing the recipient and would take none in the transfer. Elara had been told who would hold the comparison material, what it would be used for and who could see it. Now she corrected the account of a wet evening at a concert with Ilva.

“We didn't lose the cushion,” she said. “She took it home. It was dripping all over her shoes.”

The observer struck out the word and asked her to check the change.

Elara read it, remembering Ilva's indignant refusal to abandon something she had paid for. The memory brought back the cold, and the ridiculous care with which they had carried the soaked cushion between them when they finally left. She had forgotten that part until just now. She asked for it to be added.

*   *   *

On the morning of the procedure Ilva arrived before Elara had finished with the care worker, and stood in the doorway holding the empty paper bag.

“You can come in,” Elara said.

“I thought I should wait.”

“You can wait in the chair.”

The workboard was on the shelf. Ilva picked it up before sitting. Somebody had laid a clean cloth over the cord, and she folded that carefully, too carefully, into a square on her lap.

Elara wanted to tell her to stop. She also wanted her to go on folding it, because when she stopped she would have to say something. The care worker checked what Elara had brought and what would remain in the room, and asked whether the pillow was at a useful height. Elara said it was. A minute later she had to admit it was not.

When they were alone, Ilva said, “I can stay here.”

“They'll tell you where to wait.”

“I meant afterward.”

“I know.”

Ilva looked down at the workboard. Her fingers went to the loose strands.

“Don't wind them together,” Elara said.

“I wasn't going to.”

“Put the paper between the blue and the cream. Then fold it over. Otherwise we'll have to start with those knots again.”

Ilva did as she was told. She was good with her hands when she stopped trying to anticipate three instructions at once. The folded paper kept the strands apart; the cloth went around the board; the whole thing would fit flat in the bag now.

“Like that?”

“Yes.”

Ilva held it a moment before putting it down. Elara could see the small cleft in her chin, the pressure of her lower lip against her teeth. It was a face she knew so well that she wanted to look away and spare them both what looking at it was becoming.

“I'm frightened,” she said instead.

Ilva's head came up.

“I know.”

“You don't have to say anything about it.”

“I wasn't going to be very good at it.”

Elara reached across the narrow space. Ilva met her hand and held it without squeezing. They sat that way until the clinician returned.

The last question was asked plainly. Elara answered yes. Ilva let go only when there was work to do that required the space beside her.

In the preparation room Elara heard someone repeat her name and another person check it against the record. She answered a question about how she was lying. A cuff was adjusted so that its edge no longer pressed a crease into her arm.

She had expected to keep thinking about Ilva. Instead she was intent on a fold in the sheet beneath her heel. She moved her foot a little. The fold moved with it.

“There,” she said, when the care worker smoothed it out.

Her heel rested flat.

*   *   *

The hand was farther away than she expected.

Elara tried to lift it and saw the fingers move against the sheet. She had meant to bring them nearer her face. For a moment she could not tell whether the movement was too small or the distance too great. Then a voice beside her said her name, and she turned toward it.

“Ilva?”

The clinician leaned into the part of the room she could see. “She's waiting. I'll have her brought in.”

Elara tried to say thank you. The first attempt made very little sound. She swallowed, surprised by where she felt it, and tried again.

“You're in the continuity ward at Rainhill,” the clinician said. “It's afternoon. The transfer has taken place. I'm going to keep checking how you're doing while you see her.”

The words were understandable. She was grateful for that before she had understood what they said. There was a window beyond the clinician, a pale edge of light along its inner frame, and she recognized the washed-out green of the wall. The bed was different. Or she lay differently in it. Her feet seemed too far toward the end.

She moved a hand again. This time she watched from the beginning and could follow what happened between intending the movement and seeing it. Her fingers touched the folded edge of the sheet. She kept them there.

Ilva appeared in the doorway with her coat still on and one hand caught in the strap of her bag.

She stopped.

Elara had been waiting for the broad familiar face to come close. Instead she saw Ilva look at her hand on the sheet, then at her face, then back at the hand. The pause could not have lasted very long. Elara had time to hate it.

“Come here,” she said.

Ilva crossed the room. There was a chair beside the bed, and she put the bag on it, then realized what she had done and moved the bag to the floor. Her coat pulled tight beneath her when she sat.

“You've still got your hat on,” Elara said.

Ilva touched the hat as though someone had put it there without telling her. She took it off. Her cropped hair lifted at the crown and remained flat at one temple.

“I came straight in.”

“I saw.”

Ilva's hand came to the edge of the bed. Elara wanted it and did not want to ask for it now. She had asked once, before the procedure, without having to consider what her friend would recognize in the hand she offered.

“Would you like some water?” the clinician asked.

Elara nodded. The cup came within reach, supported from below. She tried to close her hand around it, found the position awkward and stopped. The clinician waited for her grip, then helped her bring it to her mouth. A little water ran against her lower lip. She swallowed the rest. It was cool and tasted strongly of the cup.

“Again?”

“No. In a minute.”

Ilva found the cloth before the clinician asked and held it where Elara could take it. Elara wiped her mouth. The small movement tired her enough that she let her arm lie down again without trying to make it look deliberate.

“You can put your coat over the chair,” she told Ilva. “You're sitting on it.”

“I know.”

“Then get up.”

Ilva got up. Elara watched her pull the coat free, and for a moment the annoyance was comfortable. She knew how long Ilva could remain in an uncomfortable position rather than interrupt a visit to fix it. The familiarity did not undo the pause at the door. She wanted both things to be true and could not yet bear them together.

While Ilva put the coat down, the clinician asked Elara to follow a simple movement and tell her what she noticed. There were other people farther back in the room. One entered an observation; another checked something Elara could not see without turning. Ilva sat down again and put her bare hand beside Elara's on the sheet.

This time Elara moved her fingers until they touched.

“What happened to the other body?” she asked.

Ilva became very still. The clinician drew her chair closer.

“Its functioning ended during the procedure. The end is irreversible. It cannot wake or act again.”

Elara looked at the clinician's mouth. She had heard exactly what had been said. There was no kindness in making the person repeat it.

“It's ended,” she said.

“Yes.”

That morning, she had been bothered by a fold beneath her heel. She remembered wanting it smoothed out. The want was still so close that she could almost make it present, but the foot beneath the sheet did not feel as that foot had felt. She tried to remember the pressure more exactly and could not hold it. It had already become a thing she remembered.

She had wanted the attempt. She wanted this room, Ilva sitting in it, the water she might ask for again. She was not sorry to be awake. Still, she had left the morning without knowing which small discomfort would be the last one she would ever have there. The thought made her cry before she found a way to say any of it.

Ilva's fingers closed around hers. The clinician stayed until Elara could speak.

“I thought I'd be glad,” she said.

“Are you?” Ilva asked.

“Yes.”

Ilva nodded, with tears on her own face now, and did not ask Elara to choose a better answer.

When the clinician needed to continue the observations, Ilva moved her chair back. Elara watched the space open between them and found that it did not frighten her as much as the first pause had. Ilva was taking the coat off the back of the chair so it would not fall. She was still here.

Afterward, when Elara had rested, she asked about the cord.

“It's in the bag,” Ilva said. Then, hastily, “Properly.”

“Show me.”

Ilva unfolded the cloth and the paper. The strands lay straight. She held the board at an angle so Elara could see without lifting her head.

There was the twisted stretch they had meant to fix, and the part above it where the blue went through neatly. Elara did not try to reach for it. She was glad Ilva had kept the loose ends apart. She was also too tired to say so, and let her eyes close while her friend folded them away again.

*   *   *

For the next two days, moving a familiar object required an attention Elara had never given it before. A cup had a weight as well as a place to put her fingers. The end of a sleeve could catch against the edge of the table. When she meant to set something down, she had to look at the surface until it was there.

Sometimes she became cross before she became tired. Sometimes she felt tired and then discovered she wanted to try once more. The care workers had to ask, because she could not always tell them first.

On the third morning an observer brought the preprocedure record into her room. A second observer sat by the window with a separate set of notes. Both had examined her before the transfer; neither had performed it. Elara remembered the one by the window asking her to slow down during the first plaiting demonstration, back when she had been annoyed at having to show so simple a thing.

The folder remained on the observer's side of the table. Its answers had been recorded before the procedure and held outside the transfer team. Elara would not be shown them while she was trying to answer. She knew that arrangement. What she had not anticipated was the temptation to look.

They began with people and places. Elara recognized the observer who had corrected the cushion story and remembered being dissatisfied with the first version. She identified others she had met during the preparations. A question brought back the corner of the consent room, where the chair had scraped outside while she tried to decide what to say. Another took longer. She could remember a visitor's face and what they had discussed, but the name would not come until the observer had moved on.

“Wait,” Elara said. “I have it now.”

The observer returned to that entry and noted the delay along with her answer.

Then they asked about the concert.

“The cushion was Ilva's,” Elara said. “She'd bought it specially because the seats were hard. Then we had to stand in the rain with it afterward.”

“Why did you have to stand?”

“We didn't have to. We thought the rain would stop. It hadn't been raining very long, so we thought it would stop.”

As she said it, she could remember Ilva assuring her of this more and more firmly while the rain kept coming. They had stood at the edge of a shelter that did not quite cover them. Someone had been waiting to close the door behind them. Elara remembered his politeness becoming less polite, and her own wish that Ilva would stop looking upward and let them leave.

“She wouldn't put the cushion down,” Elara added. “There wasn't a dry place for it. By then she was holding the wet side against herself and protecting the dry side from nothing.”

The observer wrote. Elara saw the second observer turn a page. It was odd to tell the incident to people who were interested in something other than Ilva standing there with a wet square pressed to her chest. She wanted to know whether they had pictured it. Instead, one of them asked what color the concert tickets had been.

She could not remember.

There were things around the tickets that she knew. Ilva had kept both. There had been trouble getting them out of a pocket because she was already carrying the cushion. Elara could see her trying to manage it all, the papers bending. The color was blank.

“Pale,” she said, then stopped. “I don't know. Don't put pale.”

“I'll record that you can't retrieve the color today.”

“Did I know it before?”

“You supplied it in the earlier record.”

Elara wanted to ask what it had been. She also wanted to remember without being told. She sat looking at the closed side of the folder until the observer asked whether she wished to pause.

“No. Go on.”

The next memory came readily, with a detail she had forgotten was in the first account. The missing color remained in the room for her, although nobody else returned to it. She found herself listening to her own answers for changes that the observers might hear more clearly than she did.

At the break, she asked, “How much does that one count?”

“It's part of what we record,” the observer said. “So are the things you do recall, and the circumstances in which we ask. We don't decide the whole finding from one answer.”

“You don't leave it out because the rest looks good.”

“No.”

That was not the reassurance she had wanted, but she was relieved to hear it. She would have trusted the morning less if the blank place had been rubbed away for her benefit.

They rested before the skill demonstration. A care worker moved the table so Elara could support her arms, and Ilva's workboard was brought from the shelf. The observers had a record of the order in which she had made the crossings before the transfer, along with other learned tasks she had agreed to demonstrate. Today the cord was only one part of their work.

Elara looked at the last sound portion of the plait. She knew which strand came next. When she tried to take it, her fingers caught two together.

She let them fall and began again.

“You can tell us what you're trying to do,” the observer said.

“I know what I'm trying to do.”

“Which strand did you mean to take?”

Elara looked up. The observer waited without making the request more gentle.

“The outside blue comes across here,” she said. “The cream has to stay loose until I've got it through.”

She held the cream with one hand and took the blue with the other. The crossing was loose but correct. She drew it into place. On the next one she pulled too hard and made a ridge.

“That's my hand,” she said. “I didn't mean it that tight.”

“Show us where you'd loosen it.”

She did. The second observer leaned forward enough to see, then sat back and wrote in the separate notebook.

For several crossings Elara forgot about the ticket color. The work wanted her attention in a more useful way. She could feel the strand passing through her fingers and judge, a little better each time, when to stop pulling. The ridge eased. A short flat stretch appeared beneath it.

Then her arms grew heavy all at once.

“How much longer?” she asked.

The observer checked the clock. “We have a few minutes left in the time we agreed.”

“I'd like them back.”

The observer closed the notebook. The one beside the window marked the stopping point before helping remove the board. Nothing was left balanced on Elara's knees for her to manage after they went.

Later the clinician reviewed the findings with her. The memory and skill records were being considered alongside repeated physiological observations and the examinations carried out by qualified magical practitioners. Independent observers had made their own comparisons. The record did not depend solely on what Elara said about herself now, or on Ilva's recognition, or on the appearance of a few inches of cord. The results so far supported a continuing living participant. The question of whether that result would hold still required time.

Elara asked about the ticket color. The clinician found the note rather than dismissing it.

“They'll keep checking what changes,” she said. “And what doesn't. You can ask to see the findings as we go.”

“I wanted to remember it.”

“I understand.”

Elara was not sure she did. She was not sure anybody could understand quite the particular wish to see a color again in an event that remained almost wholly present. It had been a poor evening, she thought. Cold, wet, and Ilva stubborn about leaving. She would have liked to stop spending this afternoon in it.

“Could the table come closer?” she asked. “I can't reach my cup.”

The clinician moved it, and stayed while Elara found a grip that let her take a drink herself.

*   *   *

Ilva brought a darker blue on her next visit.

“I was passing the shop.”

“Were you?”

“Near enough.”

She laid the small reel on the table, beside the cream she had decided she disliked. The new blue was almost purple in the shadow. Elara liked it immediately and did not say so, because Ilva was looking at her as though liking it might be too much to ask.

“We haven't finished this one,” she said.

“It'll keep.”

“It had better. You bought enough.”

Ilva put the reel away and drew her chair up to the table. She had come later than usual. For part of the morning Elara had been pleased to have no visitor expected; then she had become impatient with the empty chair and angry with herself for listening at each footstep. Now Ilva was here and she wanted to spend the time on the cord, not on accounting for why she had missed her.

They spread the strands out. Elara could manage better with her elbows resting, but Ilva kept lifting the far end of the board as if a change of angle would help. Every time she did it, the loose ends slid.

“Leave it down.”

Ilva lowered it. Elara found the outer blue, passed it across and held the crossing with a finger while she reached for the cream. Ilva began to gather the loose strands together.

“No. Hold that one.”

“This?”

“The cream. The other cream.”

Ilva changed her hold. Elara drew the blue through, but it caught beneath the strand Ilva was holding. She had closed the space Elara needed.

“Let it go.”

“I am.”

“You're pulling it.”

Ilva's hand opened abruptly. Elara's pull carried the loose ends off the table and into her lap.

“Oh, for pity's sake.”

Ilva looked up at once. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes.”

The chair scraped. Ilva was already half out of it, looking toward the door.

“Sit down,” Elara said. “I'm talking about the cord.”

“Your hand jerked.”

“Because you let go.”

“You told me to.”

“After you pulled it tight.”

Ilva sat, but she was watching Elara's hand now. Elara gathered the strands. She could feel herself becoming clumsy with anger, which would only give her friend more to look at.

“They said to tell someone if there was a change,” Ilva said.

“Then tell them I've asked you to hold this three times.”

She heard how sharp it sounded. Ilva put her hands in her lap.

The cord lay between them, a muddle again. Elara wanted to throw it onto the shelf and say she was tired. She was tired. She also wanted to spend time with Ilva without having to make every impatient word safe to hear.

“I want you to help me do this,” she said. “I can't do both ends comfortably. But I need you to look at which strand I'm showing you.”

Ilva leaned forward. Elara laid the two cream strands apart and placed a finger on the one she meant.

“Here. Just keep that loose.”

“All right.”

They began again. Ilva held where she had been shown. Elara made the crossing, then the next. The room was very quiet. She wanted Ilva to say something ordinary and knew she would be annoyed by an effortful attempt to do it.

“That blue's underneath twice,” Ilva said.

Elara looked.

“It isn't.”

Ilva kept her finger on the cream and waited.

Elara traced the last two crossings. The blue came up where it ought to have been covered, then disappeared under both pale strands. She had made a little closed loop that could not be persuaded into the pattern by pulling harder.

“It is,” she said.

Ilva bent closer. “We could leave it.”

“And have that in the middle?”

“It could be the front.”

“The front of what?”

“Whatever this is going to be.”

Elara tried to picture it presented with the fat blue loop uppermost. It looked as though the cord had swallowed something it could not digest.

“Give me the pick.”

Ilva found it in the bag. She did not take over. Elara opened the loop, drew out one strand and had to stop because she had loosened the crossing above it too. Ilva held that place while she repaired it. The blue came free, then the cream, and their last quarter of an hour diminished to a short length of straight thread.

Ilva inspected what remained.

“It's getting shorter.”

“We're undoing it.”

“We were doing it before. That didn't seem to help.”

Elara began to laugh. The plait pulled taut between them when she moved, and Ilva had to follow it with her hand, which made her laugh too. Elara set the pick down before she lost it. For a while neither could resume. There was the excellent flat work near the clip, the wobbling stretch below, and almost nothing to show for this visit except the part they had just removed.

“I might like the cream more if there were any left,” Ilva said.

“You can hold it next time. That seems to preserve it.”

Ilva looked at her, heard the joke and made a face. Elara was glad she had risked saying it.

They worked a little longer. When Elara stopped, Ilva laid the loose strands across the table instead of gathering them up at once. She had something to say; Elara could see her postponing the beginning.

“When I came into the room,” Ilva said at last. “That first time. I stood there.”

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

Elara rubbed the pad of one finger against the blue thread. She had imagined this conversation several times, and in each version she had been able to make Ilva understand exactly what the pause had felt like. Now Ilva had brought it up herself, and Elara could think only of how much she had wanted her to cross the room.

“I needed you to come and sit down.”

“I know. I was trying not to stare. Then I saw you looking at me, and I didn't know what I was doing.”

Elara nodded. It did not account for everything. She had not expected it to.

“Your hat was still on,” she said.

“I remember.”

“That was very like you.”

Ilva's mouth trembled, then steadied. She reached for the folded paper and put it between the blue and cream.

Elara watched her hands. She did not have to forgive a whole theory of who she was. She could let her friend be sorry for standing at the door. It would still have happened tomorrow, but so would this afternoon, in which they had made less cord than they began with and had enjoyed some of the work.

“I have to go at five,” Ilva said. “I told someone I'd meet them.”

“Then you should go. It's nearly that.”

Ilva looked at the clock and stood. She took the dark blue reel out of her bag again and left it beside the workboard.

“For when we manage to finish taking this one apart.”

Elara reached for it after she had gone. Held close to the light, it was blue again. She turned the reel once and set it within reach.

*   *   *

By the fourth week, Elara was saving the darkest corner of her bread until the end of supper. She ate the rest with what sauce was left on the plate, then took her time over the crust. She still tired. Sometimes a movement that had gone smoothly in the morning wanted all her attention later. Her care plan changed as the staff saw what she could do, and she learned to tell them when she had spent her strength on something they had not been there to watch.

The findings had held through repeated reviews. The clinician went over the latest independent observations with her, including what remained awkward and what had improved. The sustained living continuation was now the team's finding, supported beyond the first waking. It was the first successful case of its kind.

Elara read the account with the clinician beside her. In one paragraph she recognized the long, irritating business of bringing a cup to the right place. In another she found the missing ticket color, still honestly missing. She was pleased by the report and impatient to reach the end of it. She had asked to go into the courtyard, and the next page concerned how that might be managed.

On the chosen morning Ilva came with a clean cloth for the workboard and a cup Elara preferred to the ward's heavier one. Elara was sitting at the edge of the bed when a researcher knocked. The researcher wanted an additional interview about the changes Elara had noticed while doing familiar work. A colleague was available now; would this be a useful time?

“I made a crossing yesterday without looking down,” Elara said. “I only noticed after I'd done it.”

“And when you looked?”

“It was right.”

She raised a hand to show where the blue had gone. Through the door she could see the wheeled chair the aftercare worker had brought for the longer part of the journey. She had been waiting for that chair since breakfast. She put her hand down.

“How long?” she asked.

“About twenty minutes, if you're comfortable. We could stop sooner.”

She could say yes and still go outside later. She knew what later tended to become after a morning of questions. She would be tired, lunch would arrive, someone would need the chair, and the visit would begin to feel like a favor everybody had rearranged themselves to provide.

“I'm going out now,” she said. “Could we do it tomorrow afternoon?”

The researcher checked a book. “I can. My colleague will have left, but I can take the questions. Two?”

“Two.”

“I'll come and ask then. If it isn't a good day, tell me.”

Elara agreed. The researcher went to find the colleague, and the aftercare worker came in with her shoes.

The outing was already part of the day's care arrangement. Deferring an additional research conversation had not changed it. Elara knew this, but she had watched the worker's face when the researcher left, and was relieved to find the same practical impatience with a shoelace that would not lie flat.

“That will bother you in a minute,” the worker said. “Let me do it again.”

Elara waited. Ilva was putting the board into its cloth and the pick into the small pocket of the bag. The cup, filled only partway, stood on the table.

“I'll take those,” Elara said.

She tucked the light bag against her side and took the cup in her free hand. Then she looked at the hand she was meant to give the worker for the short walk to the chair.

“Perhaps not.”

Ilva held out her hand for the cup. Elara gave it to her.

They walked as far as the corridor chair, with Elara's attention on the floor and the worker's support. She wanted to look toward the courtyard door, but every time she lifted her head she lost the easy measure of the next step. At the chair she turned carefully and sat. She was irritated by the effort it had taken and glad the rest of the journey could be made sitting down.

Ilva followed with the cup held away from her coat. Somebody carrying folded linen made room for them at the turn. The courtyard door was propped open. Elara felt the air on her face before the chair passed through it.

There was a bench along the sheltered wall, with space beside it for the chair and a low table close enough to reach. The worker helped Elara settle, checked the arrangement and stayed nearby. Ilva put the cup on the table, sat on the bench and began to unfold the workboard.

“Not yet,” Elara said.

Across the courtyard, a little bird was trying to pull a dry strip of grass into the fork of a climbing plant. Its nest was tucked close to the wall. The strip lay crosswise against two stems, and every time the bird pulled, the stems bent toward it together.

Ilva followed her gaze.

“Too wide,” she said.

The bird put it down and picked it up again at almost the same point.

Elara waited for the new attempt. It was exactly like the last one.

“It hasn't noticed.”

“Perhaps it likes doing that.”

The bird tugged so hard that its body tipped backward. It recovered, made a small furious movement with its wings and began again.

Ilva leaned forward. “If somebody moved the end past that stem, it would go.”

“You'd frighten it away.”

“I'm not going to climb the wall.”

“You were looking as though you might.”

Ilva settled back against the bench. The bird abandoned the strip and disappeared into the climbing plant. A moment later its head came out lower down. It looked at the grass from the other side of the obstruction.

“There,” Ilva whispered.

It took hold, pulled the strip through, then tried to turn with it. The far end caught behind another stem.

Elara laughed. Ilva pressed her lips together, watching. The bird moved sideways, still holding the grass, until the end slipped free. Then it backed into the fork and was hidden except for its tail.

They waited. The tail moved. A small piece of the strip fell to the paving.

“It didn't want all of it,” Ilva said.

“You were going to climb the wall for that.”

“I was going to sit here and be useful at a distance.”

The bird emerged empty-beaked and flew across the courtyard. Elara kept looking at the place where it had gone. She had forgotten to notice whether the chair was comfortable. Now that she considered it, it was comfortable enough to remain in for a while.

She asked for the board. Ilva set it on her lap, with the lower edge supported by the cloth so it would not slide. Elara spread the strands. In the outside light the cream was warmer than it had looked in the room.

“I think you were unfair to this,” she said.

“I'm not going to like it just because we've brought it out.”

“You don't have to. Hold it there.”

Ilva held it. Elara made a crossing and eased it into place, then another. She could hear leaves moving above them and, from inside, someone calling for a door to be held. The little bird came back with something new, but she missed what it was because the blue had caught against her sleeve. She freed it and finished the crossing.

After a short while she put the work down. She could have done more. She wanted to stay outside for the rest of the visit instead.

Ilva folded the paper between the strands. Elara took her cup from the table and drank, watching the nest while she waited for the bird to come out again.

“Could we come here tomorrow?” she asked.

“I can't get here before eleven.”

“That's all right. My interview's at two.”

“We'll ask about the morning.”

Elara nodded. Eleven was something she could imagine without having to imagine the rest of her life around it.

Ilva lifted the cloth to cover the workboard.

“Bring the other blue,” Elara said. “I want to see what it looks like out here.”