Breathless

Yurashalmi was that wrong person, the embodiment of Tom Bigger’s fear.
    Although Tom had long been all but humorless, the realization that the dreaded agent of Apocalypse turned out to be this sweet old man might have inspired a laugh under other circumstances. But he was no longer a ten-day walk from the task that he must perform; only two hours would bring him to it. He lived for decades as a coward, and now with an onerous confrontation rapidly approaching, he had no well of courage to tap.

Sixty-one

I n the room, all day the people come and go, excitement high but voices often low.
    The light is bright but not as bright as the light of their becoming. Still, the night would be nicer, the big full moon and all the shining stars.
    Men and women come and go, and some return, and later yet return again, and always they appear and disappear through the same drapery, which falls shut behind them.
    Directly opposite that entrance in the western wall is another entrance in the east. There the drapery is fixed, zippered shut, and no one comes and no one goes by that portal.
    Some people stand close and stare, and accept an offered hand, while others sit in chairs to watch, record their notes or take them down by hand.
    Sometimes they confer with one another, usually in murmurs and hushed voices. Now and then, they speak louder and with passionate intent, but it is always an angerless argument.
    In their cage, Puzzle and Riddle listen with interest to the voices of their visitors, to the music of the voices, to the rhythm of the voices, voices, voices.
    They have water, and food is given twice. All is well, and all will be well, as it has been well since their becoming.
    This is a time of waiting, and the two wait well, for waiting is only an acceptance of the ways of time. Occasionally slow and on other occasions faster, yet in truth always at the same pace, time flows forward toward one shining moment or another, toward the place where they will fully belong then, as they fully belong in this place now.
    In the room, the people come and go, and in time they only go, until dust motes float in the bright light, in the stilled air.
    In the night beyond the drapery waits the one who admits all the others. His scent is a scent of weariness, loneliness, and yearning.
    Quietly in the quietness, Puzzle works the zipper on the cover of the mattress, and the divider softly clicks as it makes the teeth unclench.
    Inside the cover, under the mattress, her probing hand locates what earlier she had hidden. The blade is short, not sharp, rounded without a point.
    When she saw it while standing on a chair and searching kitchen drawers for new treasures, her eyes were drawn not to the plain blade but to the pretty handle. It was shiny, full of color, and its contours pleasing.
    She plucked it from among other items of interest at the moment that she was lifted from the chair and pressed into the dog crate.
    When a thing is provided, the provision is for a reason. This she knows.
    After their transferal to the large cage here in the room, as they explore their new quarters, the reason for the thing with the pretty handle becomes clear. The reason is not the handle, but the blade.
    The ceiling and the floor of the cage are large pans. The bars of the cage are in framed panels. The panels are bolted to the walls of the floor pan and the ceiling pan. Each panel is held by two bolts at the top, two at the bottom.
    Now Puzzle looks at Riddle, and Riddle looks at Puzzle, and by unspoken agreement, they choose a panel and begin.
    Holding the tool, she reaches between the bars and bends her wrist severely, inserting the curved head of the blade into the slot in the round head of the bolt.
    Between thumb and forefinger, Riddle pinches the square nut in which the bolt is seated, inside the pan of the cage. His small black hands are strong, and strong they need to be as Puzzle begins to turn the bolt.
    The revolving bolt, the stable nut, the threads unthreading now and then produce a scraping, a brief squeak, but the soft sounds are only a whisper short of silence, and the man on guard outside will never hear.
    After setting the blade aside, Puzzle turns the bolt the last few times with her fingers, the better to capture it when it comes loose, so that it will not fall and clatter against the platform on which the cage stands.
    The nut releases the bolt, and freedom is a quarter won.
    Hurriedly but without any concern, they engage the second