Nina found them at dawn — Sid still lying beside Danny, one arm around him, neither of them moving. She had known before she crossed the room. The quality of the silence told her. She had been dreading this quality of silence for two weeks.
She made a sound that Sid had never heard from a human being before. Not crying — not the crying he'd heard her do in the early mornings with her face in her hands. This was something below crying. Something that came from a place in the body that didn't have language.
She gathered Danny to her. She held him the way she'd held Sid on his first morning — with her whole self, without reservation — and she rocked slowly on the floor of their room while the Ash went about its morning outside the thin walls.
Sid sat against the wall and watched and understood, in his bones, that the woman on the floor was experiencing something that his entire previous life had never taught him to see clearly.
Grief. Real grief. The grief of someone who had loved completely and lost completely and would carry both things — the love and the loss — every remaining day of her life.
Marcus Hale would have watched this and felt nothing.
Sid Cole sat against the wall and felt it like a stone in his chest.
The days after Danny's death were the strangest of his two lives.
He did things. Practical things, necessary things — he helped Nina manage the arrangements that death in the Ash required, which were minimal and sad and involved Marta and Yusuf and a small gathering in the lane where people who had known Danny said things about him that were true and insufficient. He helped Zara, who was two and didn't understand but understood that something was wrong and clung to both in the way small children cling when the ground has shifted.
He did these things and he did them differently from how he had done things before.
He didn't know how to describe the difference yet. He just felt it — a quality of attention that was new. When he brought Nina water she was sitting and he handed it to her, he stayed. He sat beside her instead of retreating to his corner. He didn't speak. There was nothing useful to say. But he stayed, and she leaned against him slightly, and he let her, and neither of them said anything, and that was different from everything that had come before it.
He held Zara when she cried. He had not held her before — had not held anyone, had accepted Nina's holding in those first bewildering days but had never given it. He held Zara now, her small face pressed against his shoulder, her small hands gripping his shirt, and he held her without impatience, without calculation, without the constant low-level resentment that had coloured every moment of his first four years.
He held her and she stopped crying, gradually, the way children stop crying when they feel the thing they needed to feel, and the stone in his chest was still there but it was doing something. It was changing something.
He went to Vera's tea stand for the first time two weeks after Danny died.
He had observed Vera for months from a distance — the old woman at the stand in the east lane, the one everyone came to. He had assessed her as an information node and filed her as "approach when useful."
He went now not because she was useful. He went because he needed to sit somewhere that wasn't the room, and the stand had a low wall beside it that was out of the main flow of the lane's traffic, and something about the quality of the old woman's presence — the way she didn't demand anything from the people who came to her, didn't require them to perform being alright — seemed relevant to his current state.
He sat on the low wall. She brought him tea without asking. He hadn't expected tea.
"Danny," she said. Not a question.
"Yes," he said.
She sat in her chair and poured her own cup and said nothing more. The lane went about its business around them. After a while a woman came with a dispute about washing lines and Vera listened and suggested and the woman left slightly less burdened. A man came with news from Bloc Two and exchanged it for older news from Bloc Seven. Children passed in a group, noisy and purposeful.
Sid watched all of it.
He had watched it for four years and seen a system. Inputs and outputs. Resources and leverage.
He watched it now and saw something else. He saw Danny in the group of children — not Danny literally, but the principle of Danny. The boy who sat beside you on the step and gave you a stone and asked for nothing. The principle was everywhere. In the woman whose washing-line dispute was about being seen and heard. In the man exchanging news who lingered to ask about Vera's health before he left. In the children who moved as a group because groups in the Ash were safer and warmer than individuals and everyone knew this without needing to say it.
Connection. That was what he'd been looking at for four years and not seeing.
The Ash was not just a system to be mapped. It was a web of people trying to hold each other up with what they had, which was never enough, but which was what they had, and which they gave anyway.
He sat on the low wall with his bitter tea and felt the stone in his chest shift into a different position.
"He followed me everywhere," Sid said. Not to Vera especially. Just to the air.
"I know," she said.
"I didn't — I wasn't" He stopped. He didn't have the words for it and the words that existed weren't adequate and he was four years old and this was not a feeling his vocabulary had been built for.
"You're here now," Vera said.
He looked at her.
"That's all now means," she said. 'Here, now. That's where it starts.
He finished his tea. He sat on the low wall until the light changed and then he went back to the room, to Nina and Zara and the thin walls and the cold, and he sat with them for the evening and this time he was there.
It was not redemption. It was not a transformation. It was the first evening of a boy trying to figure out how to be something other than what he'd been, in a world that needed him to be better than he'd been, starting from the only place he could start: here, now, with what he had.
Danny's smooth stone was still on the windowsill where Sid had left it months ago.
He picked it up.
He put it in his pocket.
He kept it there.