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Arsenic had never minded waiting. Now and then on assignment, she had considered the possibility that she might be no more capable of it than another operator of suppressing their curiosity or their solemnity or their natural, useful impatience, but she dismissed the question each time: it never changed what she was sent to do. She could have told to the zeptosecond how long she had been sitting as the clouds and the sun chased one another across the autumn afternoon and it neither dismayed nor assured her, a lean hawk of a woman with the same greenish cast to her blonde hair as to her blue eyes and a face too pale for either. She folded her white-skirted legs against the hillside and waited, as elegantly and stilly and indifferently as if she had been painted, and the voice that carried over the crest of the hill said with the apology of a personal affront, "It's half the month. It's missing."
Because she had watched him canvassing the slope of the field from its crown of ash trees like cut yellow paper to the dry stone wall that edged its foot, she had no questions about her partner's own capacity for persistence, for all that his dry, distracted air suggested that he was thinking of two or three other things all the while. He looked curiously boyish, bending to inspect a bloom of lichen or twirl a fallen ash-key, and then his close-cropped hair flared silver in the sun as he straightened, his dark suit and overcoat giving him an equally surrealist look against the crisp emptiness of the countryside. It was still weather for walkers, picnickers, none of whom they had encountered. She had not needed an investigator's readings to tell her that there would be none.
She said instead, briskly, as her companion slid down to a grateful seat beside her, "Missing, Zinc?"
"Yes, from that wall to just about those trees. Time's not stopped, in here—it's running quite normally, all things considered. Look—" He spun the ash-key between his fingers again, then let it fall between them, deliberate as a quirked brow. "It isn't slow, it isn't racing to catch up, it isn't even the same time over again. It just isn't November. Nineteen days, six hours, twenty-three minutes and forty-seven seconds short. Such a pity, all those mists and mellow fruitfulness."
When she pressed her fingers into the grass and let time leach a little of herself into the white roots of the soil and the chill of last night's rain, she could grasp the shape of what he meant: not quite a break, except that somewhere this asymmetrical parcel of air and earth had gone out of joint with the fractionally starker, tawnier fields around it. "Is it expanding?"
"It's stable. But the discrepancy might be progressing. They used to be able to walk through here," he added, gazing down the tumble of small fields, tree-fringed, to the woods and the haze of the horizon beyond. There were roofs scattered among the late-leaved blaze, the blink of a spire and the cut of the motorway. A timelessly pastoral prospect to the human eye, as though every ell of its land were not shot through with time and its residues, a powderkeg of history. She had let her control slip, or perhaps he was just pursuing the same train of thought: Zinc murmured, "Et in Arcadia ego," and Arsenic rose to her feet so decisively, it took her a striding second to recognize that the other element had not followed her with the same purpose, or at all. When she swung round, she saw him standing where she had left him, his hands quietly empty at his sides. She would have been less perturbed by another of his theatrical human quotations. Almost expressionlessly, his eyes roved across the fieldscape, then her. His mouth braced down a little, as though on something neither of them had said; unfamiliar and unmistakable, it sounded inside her thoughts instead. Arsenic.
Deliberately, she raised her voice. "Zinc?"
"This job will go much more efficiently if you fill me in."
"I thought we would start with the wall."
"We could do that, yes." Diffidently and strange as the physical distance between them, "I thought we could wait for a technician."
"A technician? For a dry stone wall?"
"It's a technology, Arsenic." Her incredulity must have caught him on the raw; he stared levelly back at her now, peculiarly prim and foursquare on the wind-rippled hillside and not nearly as easy to overlook as she had thought him in the company of more flamboyant partners. He said carefully, "There's a . . . concentration in the stones. It's not as strong around the coppice. If the trigger was set off some time ago—and there's nothing here to suggest a recent trauma—that wall represents the site of the most sustained human interaction in the last two centuries. I'd like it examined more closely before either of us goes in, guns blazing."
Sharp as a wrongness of time, she was suffused with the remembered camaraderie of Phosphorus or Antimony or even Lead, operators and specialists of her own make and mettle. In the face of stellar remnants and cave art prowling the torch-flashed dark, she had never found herself having to argue the obvious case: "Zinc, if we send for a technician for a wall, we may as well send for a technician every time we step inside a house. Or cross the street." She could feel what needed doing in the tips of her nails, in the roots of her hair that the breeze feathered out. "Unless you'd be more comfortable leaving the job to me?"
He could not have misheard her: he gave no sign of it, not a tremor in his frequencies, not the faintest actinic flare in his dark eyes. He could have been printed in black and white except for the pale blue of his tie. When the rumors ran, as they intermittently did, of games played in the shadows and sides that could be taken but never seen, Arsenic had always wondered how she would tell if one of their own went over; she knew then that with Zinc, she never would. Perhaps it had already happened. Even when he gave an acknowledging little shrug and stumped down the hill toward her at last, she only watched him until they reached the wall, its long-edged mosaic of limestone moss-splotched, fern-sprung at the base, its mottled grains reflecting the afternoon like bone. "It's marvelous work," Zinc commented blandly.
This close to the source of the irregularity, it did not matter if he was with her or not; it would all be a matter of record and she had a job to do. Equally coolly, she replied, "As you said, a pity," and reached out to lift the nearest chunk of stone from the top of the wall.
It happened too quickly for her to cry out in protest or warning; it did not happen too quickly to hurt. No mortal wound of the body could have unmade her, she had no more real need for blood than bone, but she was bleeding out as the stone turned greener than lichen, greener than moss in her hand, a flood-tide of Arsenic pouring out into time. She could not stanch it, anchor herself anywhere except in the interstices of the wall which seemed to be all that remained of the world, dense with ancient silts and curled fossils and so much, too much, never enough time. The limestone was soaked in echoes of the ocean it had been laid down in, its crystalline shallows long since crushed into whale-backed hills, but the dream it held of the land drowning could be found in every quarry and chalk pit. She would have to tell Zinc—had he simply seen her vanish, drained like rainfall into thirsting karst? The field ran down to the wall more than topologically. The ghost that bound the stones was the wall itself.
Violence had never been done here, not even theft; the fantasy of it had done harm enough. Day after day of carting and hauling and setting the stones, cursing the expense and glancing over, always over at the neighboring fields that spread further, grazed fatter than this allotment of thin-ploughed soil, a mean, weary covetousness sinking into the backbone of the enclosure as it rose and thickened and throve until the wall itself had become a resentment of what it must divide, a hunger for what it could not claim. Long after the man who had loathed to see it was dry ink in a parish register and dust under a stone of his own, the wall had gone on wanting for him, insatiate and insensible; if it could not have space, it would have time, and obliging time had spilled itself eagerly out of the grasses of the field and the fleece of the sheep and the strength of the humans who lived and worked within its ambit, a hoard of days nicked and gnawed from history while the strain at its borders sheared ever closer to a break. If they could not seal the fault between time that was and time that should have been, some other team a few decades on would find summer in winter, blossom instead of windfalls or worse. It had caught Arsenic into the course of its envy, Zinc the interloper on her ground. She was not convinced, even so, how much use a technician would have been.
Zinc? It was just as hopeless trying to reach him from two hundred years down in a ghost of human greed, but she could picture him as exactly as if he had heard her, leaning his weight on the stacked face of the wall with his arms folded thoughtfully, the same musing crease to his face. For an instant that was no such thing, she did miss Phosphorus with his incendiary shortcuts or Lead who could have wrapped her against the appetite of the wall. Zinc was a diplomat, a conversationalist. There was nothing in the dry grey linkage of stones for him to charm or disarm. Zinc— His image inside her head frowned slightly; she realized he was holding the stone she must have dropped, its weathered planes braced between his fingers, filled with a light as acid as limes.
It might have been economy, not kindness; it did not matter if it was neither of those things. The wall had drawn her down to its beginnings. In the future of its present, she lingered on its hill. She was Arsenic and where she had once set foot, in the sponge of the earth and the pleating of leaves, in the fine grind of watercolors and the pages of a glove-turned book, she could always be found waiting. To be lost and leave time shattered was sheer waste.
She fell out of time into night, as clear and hard as frost; the earth caught her against the knees and elbows and she did not quite roll with the momentum of nearly three lost weeks, but it was not until she could see the wheel of the stars in their shrouds of distant time that she was sure of the date. The tang of smoke came from a bonfire in the next field over, the metallic fizz of sparklers and the raucous noise of human youth daring itself in the dark. The shoulder supporting her was cold as the night around them, the overcoat she was rolled in not so much warm as humming like a power line. A heron-blue patina was melting off it like fog. Lying across the rime-whitened grass in the starlight, she saw the sprawled and hummocked remains of a dry stone wall no one had maintained in close on a century.
Not at all solicitously, which she would not have been able to bear, Zinc said, "The last of the family died out in 1921, but the wall had begun to deteriorate even before then. Some of its stones were taken to repair other, more necessary walls, others were left to collapse under wild growth and weather. By 1948, it was of no agricultural value and while it was never deliberately cleared, even the local heritage societies never seem to have thought it worth rebuilding." He sounded as absent as if they had just been discussing the subject by the placid waning sunshine of mid-October, except for the slight emphasis as the beginning of her question touched his mind. "It has no reputation for the supernatural. It's simply not important."
"Then it's over?"
Arsenic had never heard him sound dryer. "Is it?"
She had to shift apart from him to tell, though she kept his coat loose around her shoulders, trailing over the half-buried edge of the slumped wall; he linked his arms around his knees like a child at the seaside and did not shiver as she assessed herself for fractures and inclusions, echoes clinging with a patience as terrible as her own. The ground would always be salted with what it had cost her to break the haunting at its root, but she had gathered her own self out of it as scrupulously as she knew how. Its memories were in her head, not its motivations. This time when she prised the rough, lichen-smeared stone from the grip of the soil, all she could have dissolved into was its lost and locked-in sea.
Down the slope of the field that no longer stopped at a wall, human voices cheered as sparks looped and sputtered into the night: one more impression of memory on time. Zinc's amusement beside her was a spangle of edges, half of them against himself and as much a part of his nature as his cold comfort, the coat she still wore. Even his hand coming gently to rest on her sleeve was an irony in the ease with which she accepted it. He never would go over to the other side and she never would know it from him.
"Yes," Arsenic said finally, setting the stone carefully back in its socket of stiff earth. The last of its luminescence faded from the imprint of her fingers. "It is."
They walked up the hill together, dark against the sparklers and the stars. Whatever waiting remained to be done, it would be elsewhere.