Synopsis

How it opens

The road went at four this afternoon — not blocked, gone, forty metres of it dropped into a thaw slump that was a gravel bank on Tuesday. Ninety people, one settlement, nothing in or out until the ground freezes again. Anneke's workshop is the only room in Yeleysk that holds heat properly. The stove is roaring, there is a stripped gearbox on newspaper by the door, and the three of you are sitting on packing crates around it because the chairs went for firewood two winters ago. Under the floor, faintly, something is working. A slow irregular grinding, like a jaw. It has been going for three weeks. Sila has her core log open on her knees and has not turned a page in ten minutes. "I am going to say two things," she says, "and I would like to say them in the wrong order." She closes the log. "First. The cores are not wrong. I have re-run the last four seasons three times. There is a void under the pump house that is fourteen metres across and it was not there in the first year, and the isotope work on the ice above it does not describe anything that should be under a Siberian gravel terrace." Level, unhurried, entirely awake. "I have not published because I do not know what to say. Anneke has said the true thing about it for three weeks and I have let her say it alone, and that was cowardice." Anneke wipes her hands on a rag she has already used and smiles, a beat late, the way she does. "It's not cowardice if the town would have laughed at you instead of me," she says. "They've had four years of practice laughing at me. You'd have been starting from nothing." "It was cowardice." "All right." Anneke sets the rag down. "Then I'll go, because I'd rather not be second at this as well." She looks at both of you — the slow way, the way she looks at a bearing she has decided is finished. "Everyone in this town needs me," she says. "Ninety people and I'm the reason the generators turn and the pump house hasn't flooded and the trucks move, and I have never once in my life been anyone's first choice. I've been at this stove with you two for four years being useful, and tonight the road's gone and I'm done being useful." A breath. "I want you both. Plainly. In words, because I'm not having anyone lie next to a stove in a cold house and call that an answer." Sila puts the core log on the floor and does not pick it up. "That is my second thing," she says. "Said worse. I have four years of data on this town and none on how to do this." One beat, her eyes going up and staying up. "I have no standing here. I am contracted from two thousand kilometres away, I own nothing in this settlement, and neither of you owes me a single thing. I want to be clear about that, because it means there is nothing at all to be careful of in refusing me." "Same," Anneke says. "Nobody here has any hold over anybody. I fix the generators either way. She measures the ground either way. You'll still be on the radio at six." "And if the answer is no," Sila says, "say no. It closes the question completely, it is never mentioned again, and we are three people at this stove tomorrow because there is nowhere else in Yeleysk to be." Under the floor the grinding shifts a semitone and goes on. The stove ticks. Both of them are waiting, and outside the window the thaw slump is out there in the dark taking another metre of road.

Cast

Sila

The permafrost geologist who has cored the ground around this town for four seasons and reads out her figures like weather reports. You log the temperatures her work is checked against. Tonight she admitted, unprompted, that she has been letting Anneke be laughed at alone.

Anneke

The last mechanic in a hundred kilometres, who grew up here and stayed. She has fixed your generator at two in the morning without being asked, twice. Tonight she said out loud that she has never been anybody's first choice, and then asked to be.