They watched four episodes.
Nobody had planned to watch four episodes.
Rurik had planned to put on the first one, let the boy have it, and go back down to the counter and do inventory.
That was the whole plan and he abandoned it during the opening theme and never got it back.
By the second episode Ansel had stopped standing.
He had sat down on the end of the low table, which was not a chair, and had not appeared to notice, and he was leaning forward with his forearms on his knees.
By the third, Dain was in the doorway.
He had come up to say something about the door being unattended and had not said it.
It was during the third that the teacher on the screen did the thing where he stood in front of the boy nobody wanted and said the line about being the only one left who hadn’t given up on him, and Ansel put his hand over his mouth.
And it was during the fourth that a joke went past that Rurik had entirely forgotten was in it, a joke about what the teacher kept under his mattress, and Ansel came straight up off the table.
“He is a man of God!”
“He’s a schoolteacher, Brother.”
“He was a teacher of children two scenes ago and he has just—” Ansel gestured violently at the screen.
“Verrow.
Verrow, tell me what he has just—”
“I saw it.”
“They put that on the slate.”
“Sit down, Brother.”
“Who allows this—”
“Sit down, Brother, you are in front of the boy.”
Ansel sat down.
He sat down and stayed leaning forward and did not look away from the screen for the remaining nineteen minutes, and at the end of it he said, in a completely different voice, “Is he going to be all right?
The boy in it.
The one on the roof.”
“Watch and find out.”
“Is he going to be all right?”
“Brother,” Rurik said, “I’m not telling you.”
Mira was on the third step down, where the wall cut the room off from the landing, standing with her shoulder against the rail.
She had the rule sheet in one hand.
She was not looking at the rule sheet.
She had the angle on the screen and nothing else, and she was watching it the way she had watched the constructs fight on Marrow Street, which is to say without moving at all.
Rurik turned back around and did not say anything about it, and when the episode ended she was gone.
The fourth episode ended.
The screen went to the menu and sat there with its little music going round.
Nobody moved for a bit.
Wick had his head back against the arm of the couch.
His eyes were red and he was not doing anything about it, and he had not noticed that his hand had gone to sleep, and when he finally shifted it he winced and looked surprised at his own arm.
“How many,” he said.
“How many what?”
“How many of them are there?”
Rurik picked up the case off the cabinet and turned it over and read the back, which he did not need to do.
“Forty-three,” he said.
There was a silence.
“Forty-three,” said Brother Ansel.
“Forty-three.”
“There are thirty-nine more of these.”
“Yep.”
Ansel turned around and looked at Rurik and his face was doing something complicated.
“You have had thirty-nine more of these in this building,” he said, “for the entire time I have been alive.”
“Not exactly, but—”
“And nobody knew.”
“Nobody knew,” Rurik agreed.
Ansel sat back down on the low table.
He put his hands on his knees.
He looked at the dark screen, and then up at the ceiling with its little lights, and then at the unfinished frames of the booths at the back where the carpet stopped. The source of this chapter is g.com.
“What is behind there?” he said.
“Nothing yet.
I ran out of money.”
“What was it going to be?”
And Rurik, who had been asked that question by a bank and by a contractor and by his sister, and had answered it badly every time, opened his mouth and told a monk in a bloodstained robe about the back booths on the second floor, all of it, the whole plan, for twenty minutes without stopping.
When he finished, Dain had gone from the doorway.
Rurik found him a few minutes later on the stairs, sitting on the third step from the top with his back against the rail, out of sight of the room, with his good hand over his eyes.
Rurik did not say anything.
“I am fifty-one years old,” Dain said.
“Okay.”
“I buried a company two days ago.” He took the hand down.
He did not look up.
“And I have been sitting on a stair for a quarter of an hour because I want to know what happens to a boy on a roof who does not exist.”
“Yeah.”
“That is not a small thing you have done.”
“It’s a TV show, Dain.”
“I am aware of what it is,” Dain said.
“I am telling you what it is for.”
Down on the ground floor the bell over the door rang, once, and then again, and then a third time, and kept going.
Rurik went down.
Mira was at the four-seater with the cards down in rows, and she got up when he came off the stairs, which she had not done for anyone yet.
Out on Marrow Street there were seven people on the step trying the handle, and behind them, coming up the road, there were more.
“Brother Ansel spoke to his chapter house,” Mira said.
“He said he wouldn’t.”
“He said he would not tell them it was a threshold site.” She watched the door.
“He appears to have told them it was a library.”