The Arithmetic of Mercy

Chapter 1: The Hole in the Server Room

Two server boxes hum in the dark of a flat that smells of old parathas and warm dust. ⟨Character 1⟩ sits cross-legged on the floor between them, chewing, watching the packets bounce.

⟨Character 1⟩: Come on. Come on, you stupid thing. Two hundred packets a second and one of you keeps dropping the lot. I patched you twice. I fed you a new jumper. What are you doing to me at one in the morning.

A jumper wire slips from its pin and clicks against the casing. The monitor light folds inward and a column of ones begins to climb the screen, faster and faster, until the glass shows gray sky instead of code.

⟨Character 1⟩: Right. That is not a broadcast. That is a field. That is grass, and a rusted rail, and smoke coming off something that burns coal, and I can smell it, actually smell it, wet dirt and coal. Either I have finally lost my mind from the lack of sleep, or one of you idiots has opened a door.

He folds a yesterday's newspaper into a tight bat and pushes it through. The page is gone from his fingers. A second later it drops back at his knee, damp, cold, the ink bleeding. Then he finds a dead moth on the windowsill and flicks it in. It vanishes and a gray smudge drifts back out.

⟨Character 1⟩: Newspaper goes through. Moth comes back. So it goes both ways, which means it is not a hole in the floor, it is a door with a draft. Fine. Logic I can work with. Now the part where I stop being smart and start being stupid.

He puts his hand in. The cold on the other side is the cold of a place with no heating and no traffic, a smell of iron and frozen earth. He pulls it back and looks at his fingers for a long time.

⟨Character 1⟩: All right. It is real. I have a door to somewhere and I have exactly one skill, which is building things that work. So. Where am I going, and who needs fixing. I am not going to sleep on this. I know exactly who I am going to look at.

In the museum, the glass case holds a rifle with a scratched stock and a long scope. ⟨Character 1⟩ stands in front of it, hands in his pockets, saying nothing. Six minutes pass.

Guard: Help you with something, sir? That one's the G43. Nineteen forty three. You want the label, I can read you the label.

⟨Character 1⟩: No. I have read the label. I am reading the scratches on the stock. Somebody carved two notches by the trigger guard and then stopped. Somebody else stopped them. That is the whole story and it is better than your label.

Guard: Suit yourself.

⟨Character 1⟩ waits until the guard's footsteps fade past the next case. He lifts the latch, takes the rifle, rolls it in newspaper from the bin, and walks.

Guard: Hey. Hey, sir. Sir.

⟨Character 1⟩ does not turn around. His hand closes on the cold stock under the paper, and his jaw sets, and the steps do not stop.

⟨Character 1⟩: I have the timetable. A siding outside a yard in occupied Poland. The train slows at three forty five. One rifle, one window, one shot, and I walk back through and get my dinner. I am packing the rifle, the blanket, tea, notebook. Green blanket stays with the rifle, just in case the cold is worse than I am.

He writes three forty five on a sticky note, presses it to the chipped mirror, and steps through.

Chapter 2: A Rifle, a Ledger, and a Loaf of Bread

A gray field under a low sky. A small train hisses into the siding, slows, and ⟨Character 1⟩ settles his cheek against the cold stock behind a thicket, finger on the trigger.

⟨Character 1⟩: There. Second carriage, the curtains half drawn. Three forty five by my watch, you are slow by nine minutes and I forgive you. Breathe out on the pause, take the shot on the empty lungs. Nearly there. Nearly done. Then I go home and I do not think about this field again.

A girl in a gray coat bursts through the hedge, chasing a goat, and runs straight across the track, hands up, calling. ⟨Character 1⟩ lifts his finger off the trigger.

⟨Character 1⟩: No. No, no, get off the line. Get off the line, you small idiot. I cannot see through you. I am not going to shoot a child for a train, I am not that man, get the goat and get gone.

She catches the goat and hauls it away, laughing. The guard turns to look at her. The curtain on the second carriage shifts, and the train pulls out, and the siding empties. ⟨Character 1⟩ lies in the frost, doing the sums on the wasted day.

⟨Character 1⟩: Right. So that is the plan bending. Not broken yet. A gift, even. He stops somewhere he stops every day. I will find a bakery, a warm room, and a next time, and I will not shoot until the line is clean and the child is inside having her supper.

In a storeroom that smells of rye and yeast, a woman with flour to her elbows finds him sitting on a sack of flour with his rifle across his knees.

Wera: Out. This storeroom is rent, not charity, and I do not shelter men with guns under my roof, not for a night, not for an hour. You want to sleep, you pay. You want to argue, you can argue outside in the cold.

⟨Character 1⟩: I will pay. Not for the sleep, for the move. You know the border. I have seen the gaps in your fence and I have seen the children in your cellar, don't give me that face. I do not want a speech. I want a rate. A price per head for every Jew you move east, and I will fund it from tonight.

Wera laughs at him, once, sharply. Then she sees his flat eyes and the money already on the flour sack, and she stops laughing.

Wera: You are serious. A rich man from nowhere with a museum rifle and a bad plan. Where is the money from. And do not lie, you are no good at it, I can hear the gears turning in your head.

⟨Character 1⟩: From software. Nobody here would understand and I am not explaining it twice. Take the bread deal. You move them, I pay, and one night you show me the way to the train siding and the gap in the wire. Do that and I will also take the shot I came here to take.

Wera: You talk about killing like it is an invoice. Bread. Sleep. No light after ten. And I am checking the till in the morning, so do not go mistaking my flour for your arithmetic.

On the border path, a guard's voice cracks out of the dark and a rifle fires. ⟨Character 1⟩ swings the rifle, fires once, and the man shouts, wounded, and the group scatters through the wire. ⟨Character 1⟩ stands in the dark afterwards, shaking so hard he has to put a hand on a tree.

⟨Character 1⟩: I hit his arm. I was aiming for the tree six feet over his head. That is not skill and it is not luck, that is a warning. They will sweep the path now. We have to move sooner and quieter.

Wera: You are a terrible shot and a worse liar. You told him you were a forester on the road to see a sick aunt. You are covered in ink and your boots are new. Next time you keep to the back and you let me do the talking.

⟨Character 1⟩: Correct on both. Keep the bread. I will learn the gun, and then we will see about the ledger I started. One page for the shot. Two pages for every soul over that wire. The second page is getting longer faster.

Chapter 3: The Shot and the Long Quiet

Dust in the attic light. A blanket spread on the boards, the rifle resting on a folded sack. Wera kneels at the cracked window with her finger up for silence.

Wera: Three minutes. The platform is full, so don't look at the crowd, look at the door of the second carriage and nowhere else. When he steps down he will turn to the left, they always turn left. Wait for the turn.

⟨Character 1⟩: Three forty five. Same as the timetable, same as the sticky note I left on a mirror in a room that no longer exists. My hands are steady. I thought they would shake and they are not shaking. It is a bug in the system, that is all. Find it. Fix it.

The train hisses and stops. A small man in a long coat steps down onto the platform and turns to the left. ⟨Character 1⟩ fires once. The man folds at the knees and goes down flat, and the yard breaks open into shouting and boots and whistles.

⟨Character 1⟩: Down. He is down. I am not looking away until I am certain. That is one. That is the whole of it, one man on a platform and a country screaming about it. Pack the rifle. We go now, out the back, through the alley, do not run, running is a confession.

That night, ⟨Character 1⟩ sets the patched boxes on the bakery floor and feeds the jumper wire back in. The monitor glows. The column of ones climbs, and stops, and the glass stays gray and empty and dark.

⟨Character 1⟩: The hole is shut. The address resolved and the connection dropped, and there is no handshake coming back. I built the door by accident and I closed it with a bullet. So I am not going home. I will sit here, and eat your bread, and think about what a man does with the rest of a life he did not plan for.

Wera: Then you will do what you have been doing. You will keep the ledger. Read me the numbers, and stop pretending you are only here for the killing.

⟨Character 1⟩: One for the shot. That is the first page and it stays short. Then the tallies. Forty one over the wire before the platform, a hundred and nine after, so far. Every name gets a line and a number, and the second page is longer than the first, and it will keep being longer. That is arithmetic I can live with.

Years pass. A barn east of the border, morning light in the chinks of the boards. ⟨Character 1⟩ lies on a straw pallet, his leg wrapped in rags, a green blanket with worn stitching pulled to his chest.

Wera: Two cups. This one has milk, this one does not, same as the first night in the storeroom when you told me to pay my rent. Sit up a little. The ledger is here, I have kept it clean, your writing and mine.

⟨Character 1⟩: Read it. Slowly. I want to hear the whole second page.

Wera: Six hundred and twelve souls over the wire. Thirty one children. Fourteen families kept whole who should have been broken. The one on the platform, and no more besides, though you took a bullet in the leg for the last of them and it never healed right.

⟨Character 1⟩: Good arithmetic. More saved than taken. Six hundred and twelve to one. I will take that trade on any scale you like. The tea is warm. Keep the blanket. Not cold anymore, not really. Just the one good sum left to close.

He closes his eyes. Wera sits with him until the light moves across the boards, both cups going cold beside her, the green blanket rising and falling and then still.