The lid

They met him properly in a hotel room in Mitte at eleven the next morning, which Bob said was the worst possible venue, and Bob was right.

"You don't take a man like that into a room with a minibar," he said, in the corridor, hip-high, in a bathrobe he'd refused to give back to any hotel in three countries. "You take him somewhere with a floor he trusts."

"He lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in Neukölln with a damp patch."

"Then you take him to the damp patch."

They took him to the hotel. He arrived at ten to eleven, early, in the same grey jacket, having clearly not slept and having clearly shaved, which broke Ricky's heart a little. Rose opened the door herself, in the hoodie, no sunglasses, because she'd thought about it for an hour and decided the poster would make it worse.

"Hi," she said. "I'm Rose. I can see two days into the future. I've been able to since I was eleven, and I've never once not been able to see past a person until you." She stood aside. "You're the only thing in my life that's ever been a surprise. Come in, there's coffee, it's terrible."

Kappa came in. He looked at Ricky, and at a woman he'd seen on the side of a tram, and at a knee-high creature in a bathrobe with a face like a boot, and then down, at the shoebox on the desk with holes in the lid, which was where the sound was coming from.

The sound was: "Is that him? Is that him? Let me out, I've been in a box since Tempelhof—"

Rose took the lid off.

And the thing that had been born on a shelf in New York fourteen days earlier stood up in a shoebox, the size of a loaf, the colour of nothing anyone had a word for, and looked at the man in the grey jacket, and every hair on Ricky's arms went up, because the floor of the hotel went right, for the length of a breath.

"Oh," said XO. "It's you. I've been pointing at you since I was four hours old, I've never seen you, I didn't know you'd be so tall—"

"Hello," said Kappa.

"Welcome back," said XO, and then, immediately, mortified: "Sorry. That's the only thing I know how to say to people. I say it to everyone. I said it to a customs officer."

Kappa sat down on the end of the bed, slowly, without being asked, which is what people do when their legs decide without them.

"My grandmother says that," he said. "Every time. Every single time I walk in. She's been saying it since I was four." He looked up. "Why do you all say it?"

Nobody answered.

"Right," said Kappa. "Okay. Then I think you'd better come and meet her."

···

She was on the fourth floor of a hospital in Wedding, in a room with a window that looked at another window, and Ricky felt her from the lift.

He'd braced for the ordinary tired old of a building where people have been frightened for a hundred years, and the hospital was that, and under it, in one room, something else. Not old, not new, not the solid board walking ahead of him with a bag of grapes. This was still. Somebody had stopped the music in there, on purpose, a long time ago, because they wanted quiet to work in.

He'd felt it once before, faintly, through a pavement on Sonnenallee, and had told Frau Adler it was a lid.

With his hand flat on the corridor wall, he understood he'd been wrong about the shape. Not a lid over a thing. A hand held flat over a drum, held there for twenty-eight years, and the arm was tired.

"She's ninety-one," Kappa said. "She sleeps a lot. She'll think it's Tuesday."

"It is Tuesday," said Bob, from knee height, and Kappa laughed, and stopped, and looked at him.

"Why did that—"

"Later," said Rose.

···

She was the smallest thing in the room and the room was hers.

Every one of them felt it, even Rose, who'd walked into rooms for ten years knowing exactly what was in them. Leni was propped on three pillows, hands on the blanket, the machines doing their small work beside her, and she looked at the door as they came in, at her grandson, the dragon, the girl, the kobold in the bathrobe, and her eyes went past all of them and stopped on the front of Ricky's jacket, where a small warm shape had gone completely still.

"Ah," said Leni.

And the stillness moved. Ricky felt it go through the floor like a sigh.

"You hatched," she said. "Somebody kept you warm."

"Forty-seven years," said XO, from the zip. "A man in New York. He has a stool."

"Good. Good. That's the part nobody ever does." Her voice was small and had no give in it at all, a voice like a stone, and Kappa, halfway through putting grapes on the side table, had stopped dead with his hand out. "Kappa, my darling. Sit down, you're making the furniture nervous. And you—" to Bob— "come in properly, I'm not having a kobold hovering in my doorway like a delivery. I've got about four days and I'd like them tidy."

Bob came in. He sat on the floor by the bed with his back against the wall and his big hands on his knees, and didn't say a word for twenty minutes, and Ricky understood, later, that the kobold had sat down the way you sit down in a church.

"You know what we are," said Rose.

"I know what all of you are. I've known since your first record, girl, and I bought it, and it was better than the second one." Leni's mouth did something that had been a smile eighty years ago. "I know what you are, dragon. I know what the small one is, better than it does. And I know what my grandson is, and I've known for twenty-eight years and eleven days, and I'm not telling you today."

"Oma—"

"Not today. Today I'm doing the other thing, the hard one. You've been standing outside a door for a year, all of you. Berlin, four times. The tunnels. That poor girl looking at forty thousand faces. Did you never wonder why you kept nearly finding him?"

"You," said Ricky.

"Me. Since he was born." She turned one hand over on the blanket, slowly, the way you'd turn a key. "I'm very good at being quiet. It's the only thing I've ever been the best in the world at, and I've been doing it over him since the day my daughter put him in my arms, and I'll tell you what it costs, because nobody asks: you have to be quiet too. You can't hide a thing you're standing next to unless you stop being anything yourself. Eighty years I could have—" She stopped. "Well. Never mind eighty years."

"Why now?" said Kappa. His voice wasn't good. "You've been ill since spring. You've been— why is everyone suddenly— why now?"

"Because I'm dying, my love, and a hand that lets go slowly is worse than a hand that lets go." Leni looked at him with absolute steadiness. "It's been slipping since March. Every week a little more of you gets out. That's your visions. That's the hall going right for an hour and forty minutes when you stood in a room with another of your kind. That's a dragon feeling one step on a wet pavement. All the same thing: me, getting tired, in instalments." She breathed. It cost her. "And what leaks out of a badly closed door, other people can smell. So no more instalments. We do it today, in this room, with all of you standing here, because when I let go the whole world is going to feel it, and I'd rather you were here than reading about it."

Rose stood up. "Wait. Wait. If you're the only thing hiding him—"

"Yes."

"Then the second you stop, everything that's been looking for him for a year knows exactly where he is."

"Yes," said Leni. "That's why I waited until somebody came who'd stand in front of him. That's the whole of it, girl. That's the only thing I've been waiting for. Not for him to be safe; he was never going to be safe. For him to not be alone."

She looked at Bob.

"Kobold. Will your people come?"

"They're already coming," said Bob. He hadn't moved. "They started walking when I sat down."

"Good," said Leni. "Then take my grandson's hand, all of you, or don't, I don't care about the theatre of it. Kappa. Come here."

He came, and sat on the edge of the bed, and took her hand in both of his, the way he had a thousand Tuesdays.

"You're going to feel very strange," she said. "Everyone's going to look at you. It's the worst thing in the world and I'm sorry, and it's better than the alternative, which was you on a train platform for the rest of your life wondering why the ground was wrong." She squeezed his hand. "I've been holding my breath since 1997, my darling. I'd like to put it down."

"Don't—"

"Ah," said Leni. "Welcome back."

And she let go.

···

Ricky was on his knees.

Not from the letting go. From what was under it. The stillness went out of the room the way a held note stops, and what came up in its place was a beat he'd spent his whole life learning to feel and had never once felt at full strength: older than the council, older than the golem, older than the brass on his grandfather's shelf, and, at the same instant, so new it came through the boards like light under a door.

Both at once. Not two things. One thing, doing both.

The window rattled. Somebody's monitor alarmed and stopped. Four floors down, every car alarm on the eastern side of the car park went off together, and a nurse in the corridor said was war das, and in a swimming bath with no water in it in Prenzlauer Berg an old woman put down a thermos and said, out loud, to nobody: "Oh, there you are."

And on the front of Ricky's jacket, the small thing said, in a voice of pure astonishment:

"Oh. Oh, he's enormous."

Kappa sat on the edge of the bed holding his grandmother's hand and looked round at a room full of people on the floor.

"What," he said. "What. What did I do."

"Nothing," said Leni, and her voice was smaller now, and lighter, the voice of somebody who has put down a suitcase. "You just stopped being covered up." She patted his hand. "Sit still for a bit. Everyone's going to be very rude about you for a few days."

"Am I— is this— what am I?"

"Tomorrow," said Leni. "I'll tell you tomorrow. I've been rehearsing it for twenty-eight years, I'm not doing it now, I'm tired and there are people on my floor." Her eyes closed. "Somebody find that kobold something that isn't a bathrobe."

Rose got up first. She always got up first.

"How long have we got?" she said quietly. "Before something comes."

Bob, still against the wall, still not having moved, said: "Two days."

Rose looked at him.

"That's not you seeing," he said. "That's me counting. That's how far away they'd have to have been to miss it, and how fast a person in a good coat can travel." He put his big hands flat on the floor, feeling something none of the rest of them could. "Two days. Maybe three, if they argue about who goes."