Rewriting Under Pressure

The pursuit began in the bakers' alley at a quarter past three on a Thursday, and Iyla's legs were running before the rest of her had finished accounting for why.

Three behind her. Two in the loose grey coats the Society favoured for fieldwork. Behind them, walking — not running, walking — Saroya.

She ran toward the river. Thirty seconds in, she understood that running was someone else's strategy. Running was what they had expected her to do, because running was what people who could not rewrite the street under their pursuers did, and she could.

She turned the corner of bakers' alley into the small unnamed lane that ran down to the dye-pits, and as she turned she took out the notebook. She wrote on the run, the pen jumping: the lane behind me ends in a wall, brick, taller than a person, no door.

She did not look back. She was already past the next corner.

Behind her: three pairs of boots arriving at speed, a shuffle, the sharp exhalation of a person who has run into masonry. Then Saroya's voice, calm, in the tone of a woman noting an interesting development.

Four streets to the river. She took the second, not the first — the first ran past the Fountain of the Civil Argument, where no voice could be raised, and she wanted a raised voice in reserve today, in case it came to calling for Tev.

She wrote, jolting: the second street has, at its midpoint, a stall selling rope, a coil on the left at hand height.

The stall was there. She took the coil. The stall-keeper, a woman she had not invented, said something brisk about payment, and Iyla said over her shoulder, "I'll come back with a story," and the woman said, "they all say that," and Iyla, despite everything, grinned.

She reached the river. Three bridges she had written in October; the nearest a low stone one. She did not want stone.

At the bridge she stopped, and wrote: the third plank from the far end gives under the third person to cross it.

She read it back. Too clever — too pleased with itself, and an Author pleased with herself was an Author about to be wrong. She crossed it out and wrote underneath: this bridge is made of wood, and as I cross it, it is sound; and after I have crossed it, the far end of it is no longer attached to its bank.

The bridge held under her boots. On the far side she turned. The first grey coat reached the near bank, set a foot on the first plank, and the far end of the bridge let go of the stone with a small, almost apologetic sound, like a door closing in a house where someone was asleep. The grey coat stepped back. Looked, briefly, irritated. Behind him Saroya arrived, took in the bridge, and looked across at Iyla with a small note of professional appreciation and a larger note of patience.

Iyla ran on. The far bank she had never described in any detail, and the underdescription was beginning to tell: the ground vague underfoot, the buildings on her left an approximate frontage that would not resolve into doors and windows when she glanced at it. The vague places were the easiest places for the Society to walk in from the side; vagueness, she now understood in a way she had not understood on Tuesday, was a door.

She stopped. She was breathing badly. She made herself breathe.

She wrote: the far bank, from the old wooden bridge down to the bend, is a row of seven houses. Painted, north to south: blue, blue, yellow, white, white, green, red. The red house has a black door. The black door is locked. The key is in my left coat pocket.

Her hand went to the pocket. The key was there, heavy in the way of a key carried for years.

She had a small wrong moment then — the houses, when she looked up, were six. She counted again. Six. She had written seven and the world had given her six, and standing on the bank doing the arithmetic was not a thing she could afford for very long. She wrote, faster: the row is six houses, north to south: blue, yellow, white, white, green, red. She did not look up to check. She ran along it.

She reached the red house, unlocked the black door, went in, locked it behind her. A locked door was a thing the Society could simply unwrite. So she wrote, on the inside of the page: the red house has, on its ground floor, one room, no windows; in the far wall, a hatch onto the bend in the river downstream of the bridge, big enough for a person.

She looked up. The hatch was where she had said, big enough for a person and not a millimetre more.

She climbed through. She came out on the river bend in the sideways dust-gold of the afternoon. Two minutes, maybe, before they worked out the geometry.

She wasted the first of them. She tried to write one long sentence that would close the hatch, make the river uncrossable, summon Tev, and hide her footprints all at once. The sentence did none of it; the world received it the way an overfull cup receives the last pour, and gave her nothing.

She crossed it out. Three short ones, in order.

One: the hatch closes and the wall behind it is brick.

Two: my footprints from here to where I am going are a day old.

Three: Tev knows I am here.

The three held where the one had not. Short sentences, she noted in the small free corner of her mind that was still taking notes on the method even now — short sentences were how you wrote under pressure, because the world could agree with a short sentence in the time you had, and a long one asked the world to hold its breath.

Behind her, the small sound of brick where a hatch had been. Ahead, footsteps — unhurried in a different way from the grey coats', the unhurried of a person walking toward her on purpose, and the purpose was Tev. She walked on, into the part of the city she had not yet had to revise, notebook open in her hand, pen uncapped. She was not, she now understood, going to be allowed to put either down for some time.