The floor intervening is flat and clean, with puddles here and there standing upright inside silver wire frames. That stifling feeling comes back again, like troubled sleep with the heavy covers piled on top of me. The area above the cavity is glowing with luminous moss, a pale sulfur color. As I come near, an all but invisible halo appears in the crêche, a head conforming to it and causing me to recognize other objects there as the outspread arms and legs, the crumpled torso.

Over the breathing, the eyes, living, gaze steadily at me. Their color is obscured by a golden lustre that seems to be an effect of the halo, for beneath it I can see blackness. The face appears through a kind of glare, as though I saw it through a membrane. A pale, spear-shaped nose points down toward black whiskers as straight as straw on a thatched roof. Hollow breath crosses his hidden mouth. His cap and his tunic are black, the light paints two glistening streaks on his black boots.

I imagine he will impassively raise a gun and cut me down where I stand. Just an idle thought, because, though he lives, I see too where the light twinkles on his abdomen, on the blood that soaks the cloth of his uniform, and the ragged spot where the bullet entered. Arms and legs lie on the ground without the slightest visible tension—they are paralyzed, alive but inert. There is an armband on his right arm, with insignia identifying him as a Narrator.

His thought is the same, his eyes, which quiver with life although they barely move, seem to have fixed on my armband, which feels almost to burn or tingle with the intensity of his attention.

His halo shimmers from time to time, like a guttering candle. There is an air of seniority about him, which convinces me the Narrator I met in the clearing must have not been a fully qualified Narrator, but a subordinate officer to this one, an assistant. At the same time, I notice his Narrator’s bars are struck through with a black line, possibly only a loose thread, and I am not about to move it to find out, but perhaps he isn’t yet a full Narrator either. We had no ranks ourselves.

The Narrator before me draws a long breath. A new vigor comes into his breathing, although it may be vigor borrowed against his life. His eyes, brimming with animation, have settled on my face with a heavy-lidded, dead fixity. Suddenly, I look to the side and step quickly to a puddle gathered there in the roots—my own eyes, I see reflected, have those same sooty waves in them, just faintly, there on the whites beneath the irises. His eyes are still on me, pupils halved by lowered lids. There is something so expressive in them, I forget my eyes and walk over to him, drop down on my knees beside him. The hand by my foot is white as snow; the white, powdery skin of his face is yellowed by the halo light.