The man came in fast and low with his back to the doorframe and a knife already out, which Rurik thought was a reasonable response to a door appearing in a wall.
The bell rang.
The man’s head came up at the sound.
He tracked it to the brass strip above him, held there a second, and his shoulders came down half an inch.
Then the door swung shut and Marrow Street stopped existing.
Rurik watched him take that.
The noise cut out all at once, the way it had for Mira, and the man’s mouth opened and he turned around and put his free hand flat on the door, and stood there pressing on it like a man checking a wall for a draft.
“Air conditioning,” Rurik said.
“It’s cold in here on purpose.
Don’t worry about it.”
The man spun back around with the knife up.
He was maybe fifty, grey through the beard, blue surcoat gone brown down the left side in a way Rurik chose not to examine.
His left arm was hanging wrong from the shoulder.
There was a lot of noise coming out of him and none of it was words yet.
“Okay,” Rurik said.
“Okay.
I’m going to stay behind the counter.”
“What is this place.”
“It’s a store.”
“There is no store here.
I have walked this street twice this morning—”
“I know.
I just got here.”
The man’s eyes went past him, and Rurik watched them start doing the thing that he had waited ten months to watch somebody’s eyes do.
Up.
Across.
The ground floor ran back forty feet to the stairs, tables on the left, the long counter on the right, and above all of it the mezzanine rail with the second floor open behind it and the third floor stacked above that, and every shelf on every level lit from underneath so the spines glowed.
Four thousand volumes.
Rurik knew the number because he had entered every one of them into a spreadsheet himself, at night, alone, in a building nobody came into.
He had designed that sightline.
He had spent money he did not have on that sightline.
He had stood outside on the sidewalk in the rain in March and looked in through his own window and thought if they just come in, if I can get them in the door, it does the rest.
Nobody had ever come in the door.
The man in the blue surcoat lowered the knife about six inches, and did not appear to notice that he had done it.
“I have to sit down,” he said.
“Second table’s got a bad leg.
Take the one by the window.”
The man did not take the one by the window.
He took the one against the wall, with the room in front of him and both stairwells in his line of sight, and he put his back against the plaster and slid down into the chair in stages.
Rurik came around the counter with a glass.
He’d filled it from the tap under the bar.
Four cubes out of the machine, because the machine still worked, because whatever had moved the building had apparently not troubled itself about the icemaker.
He set it down.
The man looked at the glass.
He did not move.
“It’s water.”
“It is cold.”
“Yeah.”
“It is the fourth month of a siege.” The man’s voice had gone flat and slow.
“The cisterns are open ground.
Anything cold in this ward is in the ground under the counting house and the counting house is on fire.”
“It’s just water,” Rurik said.
The man picked up the glass with his good hand.
He didn’t drink it.
He held it against the side of his own neck, under the jaw, and shut his eyes, and sat there.
Rurik went back behind the counter and did not say anything, because the thing he had learned in ten months of running a business was that when a customer goes quiet you let them go quiet.
After a while the man drank.
He drank the whole thing without stopping and then sat looking into the bottom of the glass at the ice, which had not melted, and he tipped it and one of the cubes slid down and he caught it in his teeth.
“There is a woman behind me,” he said, still looking into the glass, “who has been standing in the same place since I came in.”
“That’s Mira.
She works here.”
“She has not moved.”
“She does that.”
“There is a sign on her.”
“It’s a name tag.”
The man turned his head.
Mira was at the four-seater by the window with the card box open in front of her.
She had gotten the shrink-wrap off at some point, which had taken her a while, and the rule sheet was unfolded flat on the table and she was reading it with one finger under the line.
The tag was pinned high on the left of her coat, slightly crooked, because Rurik had handed it to her and she had put it on herself and he had not yet worked up to mentioning the angle.
It said MIRA, and under that, in smaller letters, ASK ME ABOUT NEW ARRIVALS.
“What is she asking me about,” the man said.
“Don’t worry about it.”