Synopsis

How it opens

The noise stops while Anneke is speaking. She stops too. For three weeks it has been there under the workshop floor, an irregular grinding that people in Yeleysk have learned to talk over. A pump. Frost moving. Something of Anneke's that she ought to fix. Now the stove is loud. So is the small settling noise her rag makes when she puts it down. "Don't," she says to Sila. "I haven't said anything." "You were going to say that's interesting." Sila closes her core log. Outside, meltwater runs beneath the snow. Forty metres of road went with the gravel bank this afternoon; the town has ninety people and no way out by truck. "There's a void under the pump house," Sila says. "Fourteen metres across. It wasn't there in the first year." Anneke watches her. "How long have you known?" Sila doesn't answer quickly enough. The workshop floor gives a single knock. Not a creak: something strikes the underside hard enough to lift a washer from the newspaper by the door. It lands against the dismantled gearbox. Anneke reaches towards your wrist and stops short of touching it. "You heard that from where you're sitting?" All three of you are looking at the washer. It has stopped moving.

Cast

Sila

Sila compares her cores with your weather records. Tonight she has disclosed a void beneath the pump house but has not yet said how long she knew.

Anneke

Anneke maintains the town's machinery. You have shared her stove most evenings for four years; the sound she has reported is now impossible for the room to ignore.