Twenty minutes before the roof fell, I walked into the theatre's closed door.
My blue eye had shown it open. Through the green, the door was gone, and the lintel above it was feeding a small yellow flame. I had been watching the flame when my nose struck the wood.
Inside, my brother swore. The latch rattled.
“Iseth? Why didn't you knock?”
“Your roof's coming down.”
He took my wrist. I recognized the rough patch below his thumb, where he held the carving knife, and let him draw me inside. My cane struck the doorpost. Neither eye showed his hand on me.
“How much of it?” he asked.
I closed the blue eye. The little auditorium lay under a mesh of fallen beams. Smoke drifted through the opening above the stage. Our painted moon, which had survived three changes of emperor in the plays, lay face down among the seats.
“The part over the audience. Berian, get out.”
“I've already sent for the watch. A lamp went over behind the screen. I thought I'd put it out, but it's in the wall.”
Now that the door was open, I could smell it. Under the theatre's familiar glue and dust was something sharp enough to reach the back of my throat.
“Who's here?”
“Only me. I was getting your things together.”
He had asked me to come at four. One last afternoon dividing what could be sold, what could be kept, what neither of us could bear to discuss. I had brought wrapping cloth. It hung from my shoulder in a bag, absurdly clean.
Berian tapped the wall twice, our old signal, and I followed the sound toward the stage.
There are people who find my eyes useful. A green eye looking twenty minutes ahead, a blue eye twenty minutes behind: merchants hear that and start proposing arrangements. Then a chair moves between the two views and I fall over it. They seldom propose a second meeting.
Nothing I do brings the images closer. If I stand in a street, I see that street as it was and as it will be. Its old walls hide its old rooms; its future walls hide its future rooms. I cannot look around a corner without taking my body around it. The sounds belong to now. So do splinters, boiling kettles, and a hand held out for me to take.
Berian learned the distinction before he could read. He used to sit beneath the kitchen table and tap a spoon against a leg while I crawled toward him. When I found him, he would announce some enormous prize: a kingdom, six elephants, the moon. Usually I received half a biscuit.
At thirty-four, I still followed his taps before I thought about following them.
“The upstairs rooms?” I asked.
“Empty.”
“Tesset?”
“Finished on Monday.”
“Did you pay her?”
His next tap came from farther away.
“I'm trying to save your puppets.”
I stopped. In my blue eye, the boards ahead were clear. In my green, one of the roof beams lay across them. The cane found a heap of fabric that belonged to neither picture.
“Leave them. We need to warn the shops.”
“I told you, I've sent someone.”
“Who?”
A cough came from above us. Then a woman's voice, muffled by the ceiling.
“Berian? There's smoke up here.”
His shoe scraped the floor.
“I thought she'd gone.”
“You said she finished on Monday.”
“She did. I didn't know she'd come back.”
He was moving while he spoke. I heard the backstage door bang and his feet on the narrow stairs beyond it.
I went back to the street, sweeping my cane low, and shouted fire until another voice took up the word. A man wanted to know where. I pointed behind me and struck the doorframe hard enough to hurt my knuckles.
“Here. Here.”
There were footsteps, a dropped object, someone yelling for the watch bell. I stayed long enough to hear the bell begin. Then I went inside again.
I had moved away from the theatre three years earlier, after our mother died. Berian had stayed. He wrote new plays for fewer children and charged less whenever a parent hesitated over the price. He had always been extravagant with things that were nearly gone: money, candles, his own patience. On good afternoons I could sit behind the screen and supply all the voices while he moved the figures. On bad ones he would ask me to look at tomorrow, though I could no more look a day ahead than he could.
Now my green eye showed the painted screen burning. I shut it. The old auditorium in the blue was so peaceful that I shut that too.
“Tesset,” I called. “Can you hear me?”
Something heavy struck the floor upstairs. She cried out. I heard Berian say her name, and then the tinny jangle of coins.
“Are you at the window?” I asked.
No answer reached me. The backstage door was hot against my wrist. I found its handle with my sleeve over my hand and pushed it open.
The stairs were where they had always been. So was the third tread that tipped forward when stepped on. I knew these things with my feet, which was different from knowing whether there was something on the fourth step now.
There was. My cane caught under it, and I nearly followed the cane down.
“Stay there!” Berian shouted.
His steps came toward me. He was coughing, and I heard his shoulder drag along the wall as he felt his way down.
“Where is she?”
“Out. She's out through the window.”
The dressing-room window opened above the upholsterer's low awning. I had climbed down that way at fourteen to avoid a visiting aunt who wanted to pray over my eyes. Berian had lowered me by the wrists until my feet found the awning frame.
“Can you get down the stairs?” I asked him.
“Yes. Move back. I have the box.”
I put a hand on the wall and felt my way down. Above me he made a short, startled noise. Something struck the treads in several hard blows, then his weight hit my shoulder and drove me against the door.
For a moment all I could hear was his breathing. He had my arm in both hands.
“My ankle,” he said. “Don't pull. Don't.”
“I haven't pulled anything.”
He gave an odd little laugh that turned into coughing.
I could not see him sprawled on the steps. Through the blue eye, the staircase was empty. Through the green, the upper part had fallen away. His head might have been bleeding. His foot might have been pointing in the wrong direction. I had the pressure of his fingers and his breath against my neck, and I had to choose what to do with those.
“Let go of my arm. Put yours over my shoulders.”
He was heavier than I remembered. We got him down one step, rested, then another. He tried to help and made a sound I had never heard from him, thin and furious. By the time we reached the street I could no longer feel the shoulder under his arm.
People took his weight. Someone asked if there was anybody left inside.
“No,” I said.
From above came a frantic banging, followed by Tesset shouting my brother's name.
I turned toward her voice. The green eye showed a broken window with smoke pouring out. The blue showed glass reflecting afternoon light. Neither showed her.
“She's still there.”
Berian was coughing too hard to answer.
“You told me she was out.”
“I thought she could get out.”
“You said—”
“There was smoke. I couldn't reach her. I called to her to use the window.”
Her fist struck wood again. Each blow sounded weaker than the one before it.
A stranger told me to wait for the watch. Another said there was a ladder in the next yard. I caught that voice and made him repeat it.
“Bring it to the upstairs window,” I said.
“Where are you going?” Berian asked.
I had already found the doorpost with my cane.
He called me by the name he used when we were children, a small foolish shortening that nobody else knew. I kept going.
Inside, I had to crouch to breathe. The carpet had bunched across the aisle; I found its ridge on my knees. From this height, the future view was mostly a blackened beam that would eventually lie inches from my face. I closed both eyes and went by touch.
At the stairs I called up to Tesset.
“Talk to me.”
“My foot. There's a rail on it.”
“The costume rail?”
“Yes. He knocked it. I can't—”
She coughed for so long that I thought she had stopped being able to breathe.
“Keep making a noise,” I said. “Anything.”
She began to bang again. I went up toward it, pushing the fallen object on the fourth step aside with my shoulder. It rolled with a wooden rattle; my fingers found a splintered stool leg. My cane had stayed behind somewhere. I did not remember letting go of it.
At the top, cooler air brushed my forehead. I crawled into it. Tesset caught my sleeve before I found her.
“Can you see?” she asked.
“No.”
Her fingers tightened. I could have given her the longer answer, but she was trying to put my hand where it was needed.
Tesset guided my hands along the fallen costume rail, explaining between coughs. One iron foot pinned her ankle; the other was caught under a bench. She was sitting beneath the open window, bent around the trapped leg. When I touched her cheek by mistake, it was wet.
We tried lifting together. The rail scarcely moved. Tesset let out an angry sob and struck it with her free hand.
“He said come back today. He said I'd get all of it.”
“What?”
“My wages.”
There was a hot rush behind me. I leaned over her and felt the heat pass across my back.
“Tell me where the bench is.”
She put my wrist against its edge. We changed our positions in a series of awkward, frightened movements. I pressed my shoulder under the rail while she worked her heel sideways. Something at my left palm hurt; I ignored it until the hurt became too large to ignore, and by then she was free.
She said, “I've got it out,” twice before I understood.
Below the window, someone shouted that the ladder was ready. A wooden end struck the sill. I began to stand and hit my head on the rail.
“Wait,” Tesset said. “Wait. Give me your hand.”
She placed my good hand on the window frame. Then she climbed past me, gasping each time she put weight on the injured foot. I held the back of her dress until somebody below said he had her.
It was Berian's voice.
When my turn came, I could not find the first rung. I put my foot out into air, withdrew it, tried again. The two images beyond my eyelids would have given me an empty wall and a smoking ruin. I kept them shut.
Tap. Tap.
“Below your right foot,” Berian said. “A little to the left. That's it.”
He stayed there, counting me down, while strangers held the ladder. At the bottom he put his hand over mine. I felt the familiar rough patch and started crying so abruptly I could not stop.
He said my name. Only that, several times.
Behind us the building made a long noise, almost leisurely, and the crowd drew back. Someone carried me far enough that fragments struck the street without striking me.
Twenty minutes had passed since I walked into the door. I knew because, when I opened my blue eye, I could see myself arriving across the street: the bag of wrapping cloth, my cane, the white lock escaping from my red braid. The earlier Iseth hesitated outside the theatre, then disappeared behind the open door as Berian pulled her in.
I wanted to call to her. I had wanted that often enough to know better.
The green eye showed watchmen moving through a black shell. It showed daylight where there should have been a roof. It gave me no reason the fire had begun, no measure of what either rescue had cost.
A woman washed my hand and wrapped it. I felt each turn of the cloth. She told me not to touch the burn, and I told her I wasn't touching it, and she apologized because apparently I had only been reaching for my other sleeve.
Across the street, Tesset was arguing with someone who wanted to cut away her shoe.
“I can't buy another pair.”
Then, after a pause, more quietly: “All right. Cut it.”
Berian sat down beside me with a grunt. There was a metallic click at his knees.
“The moneybox?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Give Tesset what you owe her.”
“I will.”
“Now.”
He did not answer. I could hear the watchmen shouting to one another, the scrape of debris being dragged from the doorway. The fire still crackled, but its hungry roaring had subsided.
“It's all gone,” Berian said.
I turned my head toward the dressing-room window. In the blue eye, it was shut. Soon I would see it open. Soon I would see her calling for us while I was helping him down the stairs.
“The moon, too?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Mother would have hated that.”
I said nothing. His knuckles brushed mine, then wool rasped beside me. Once, when I was small, he had spent a whole evening cutting a second moon because I had cried at the part of the play where the first one was swallowed. Our mother had told him that children must learn how a story ended. He had made the spare anyway.
“I went back for her,” he said. “You know I went back.”
“I heard you.”
“You know that room. Two rails of costumes, the dressing table, that bench nobody's shifted since Mother. The big rail had come down across the lot, and the smoke was so thick I was feeling for things with my shins. I shouted myself hoarse. I couldn't get near her, Iseth. Not without climbing over the whole wardrobe.”
I could imagine it. Smoke made people stupid; fear made them say things they wished were true. He had hurt his ankle, and afterward he had stayed beneath a burning wall to bring us down. I wanted those facts to make one person, somebody I could take home and be angry with for a long time.
“Why was she there?” I asked.
“I told you. I didn't know she'd come back.”
“She said you told her to come today.”
He drew in a breath.
“There were things to settle. Her last week, her key, a cloak she's wanted cheap since spring. She went up to fold the good costumes, and when it went quiet I thought she'd done and gone, let herself out the back the way she always does. You remember how she—”
“Her wages,” I said.
“That too. Of course that too. I was downstairs, Iseth. I was down there with your puppets.”
An iron buckle knocked against something near my knee. A watchman introduced himself by his office and asked if I owned the theatre.
“We both do,” Berian said.
“I was asking your sister.”
“Half,” I said. “My brother has the other half.”
The watchman asked about the lamp. Berian began describing where it had stood and what had knocked it over, and his voice found a steadier rhythm. “Brass, about so high, on the shelf behind the screen. That shelf has always leaned. I've been meaning to take it down for years.” He began giving dimensions; his sleeve brushed the watchman's coat, and I imagined his hands making their familiar shapes. I remembered the way he could make a whole stage out of a kitchen table if a listener would let him.
The window opened in my blue eye.
Tesset pushed it out and bent forward. Her mouth was moving. I could not hear what she had said twenty minutes earlier; I could hear Berian now, describing the overturned lamp.
Smoke passed behind the woman at the window. Then my brother appeared beside her.
He was close enough to help her.
I watched his hands take hold of the little moneybox she carried. For a moment they both held it. Tesset pulled it toward herself, and he pulled harder. Her mouth opened. He got the box away from her.
She reached after him. He backed into the room, striking the costume rail with his hip. It tipped. She went down out of sight.
The earlier Berian looked toward the floor. He took a step forward. He stopped.
All this time the present Berian was talking beside me. Something about the oil. Something about how quickly the fire had spread.
At the window, his earlier face turned toward the stairs. He left with the box.
“You reached her,” I said.
Both men fell silent.
“Iseth?”
“You said you couldn't get near her.”
His hand came onto my sleeve. I felt him begin to turn my shoulders away from the theatre, then stop himself.
“What are you looking at?”
“The window.”
“Which eye?”
His grip loosened before I answered.
“Twenty minutes ago.”
The buckle knocked again as the watchman moved closer.
Berian said, “I was going to come back.”
I remembered his arm across my shoulders. His assurance that she was out. My own voice telling the strangers there was nobody left inside. He had let me say it.
“You took the box,” I said. “The rail fell. You saw her fall.”
“I panicked.”
That might have been true. It did not change any of the things I had seen.
“She had hold of it,” he said. “I told her to let go. I didn't mean—”
The watchman asked him to put the box on the ground.
“My sister knows me.”
I shut the blue eye. I did not want to go on watching the window. But closing it did nothing to the voice beside me, or the wrapped hand in my lap, or Tesset coughing across the street.
“Iseth. Tell him I helped you down.”
“He did,” I told the watchman. “He guided me down. After we got her free.”
My brother's hand tightened once on my sleeve.
“Before that,” I said, “he left her upstairs. I saw him leave.”
The watchman made him let go of me. Cloth slipped across the bandage, and the pain was so immediate that I bent over it. I could still hear Berian. He was asking to speak to me alone.
If I stayed here, in twenty minutes I could see the face he was making.
“Take him somewhere else,” I said.