The furnace room smelled of wet brick and old pennies. Its ceiling was low enough that Hal bowed without noticing. Twelve narrow iron doors lined the far wall. Behind them, the city's noon fire moved closer through pipes and chambers, gathering every unused death on its way.
Hal laid June on the coal table. Elia kept hold of the red spool.
“When the doors open,” he said, “put the thread through the brass eye.”
A small ring protruded above the centre door. It was the size of a buttonhole, polished by hands Elia had never seen.
“And then?”
“The fire follows the thread to the witness.”
“I am the witness.”
“Yes.”
“What does it take?”
Hal looked at June. “How did you choose her from the rest?”
“I remembered the mitten.”
“It takes that.”
“A mitten?”
“Everything you used before you found the mitten. The scar. Her tooth. The numbers. The fire burns the whole search.”
Above them, the dead children whispered again. Three hundred and twelve voices pressed through the floorboards until Elia could no longer separate them.
The bath scar. The leaning tooth. The backward five. Toast between teeth. The thread had crossed all of it to reach this child, and Elia felt the route tighten inside her.
“How much stays?”
“Your name. Her name may stay, the way an address stays after a family moves out.”
The leftmost furnace door clicked open.
It was eleven fifty-four.
Elia tried to gather June quickly. First fever. First day of school. The afternoon the girl cut her own hair and hid the braid in a flour jar. Each memory sharpened when she reached for it, as if the fire had already placed a hand beneath its chin.
“Can she wake without it?”
“She can wake.”
“Will she remember me?”
“Probably.”
“That seems cruel.”
Hal's mouth tightened. “I didn't say it was kind.”
At eleven fifty-six, three more doors opened.
Heat crossed the room. The spool sweated red dye into Elia's palm.
June's face remained quiet. Elia bent and kissed the place beside her eye where the first dead girl had carried a tram-ticket bruise. She waited for recognition to arrive in the child's muscles. Nothing came.
Upstairs, carts rolled toward the chapel doors.
Elia fed the loose end through the brass eye.
The thread pulled hard enough to cut her finger. The spool leaped from her hand and hung in the air, turning. Red line ran from the brass ring, across the table, and up to the five stitches in June's mitten.
Hal gripped the furnace rake. “Say her name while you have it.”
“June.”
The centre door opened.
Blue fire touched the thread.
“June.”
The spool spun, paying out thread.
First went the way newborn June had settled along Elia's forearm. Her arms jerked upward, suddenly empty of an old knowledge. Then went the exact brown of the child's eyes, the tune she used for tying shoes, the reason pear soap made her laugh.
“June.”
The name became a sound Elia had heard often. She could no longer place the room where she first said it.
The fire crossed the washroom in her mind. It found the height marks behind the boiler, the chipped cup at breakfast, a hundred socks turned right-side out. Each vanished with a soft internal catch. Elia remained standing. Her hands kept reaching toward the table after they forgot why.
At eleven fifty-nine, the whispering upstairs stopped.
The twelve doors opened together.
For one instant, three hundred and twelve small shadows stood inside the brick, each facing a different way. One raised a blackberry-stained hand. One adjusted a paper crown. One held a silver fish toward somebody beyond the fire.
Then noon arrived.
The thread flashed white.
June arched on the coal table and coughed. Air entered her with a ragged, furious sound. The red stitches beside her thumb snapped one by one.
Elia saw a child sit up.
The child had dark hair, a yellow coat, and tears already moving down her cheeks. She threw both arms around Elia's waist.
“Mum.”
Elia held her hands away from the child's back. She looked to Hal.
He looked at her, then down at the rake.
“Who is this?” she asked.
The child released her and struck the front of Elia's apron with both fists.
The last red stitch hung from the grey mitten. Its knot remained outside.
“I'm June,” the girl said. Her nose was running. She wiped it on the yellow sleeve. “June Noll. I hate pear soap. You burn toast and scrape it black-side down so I won't see.”
Elia knew the surname. She touched the name badge pinned to her own apron.
The girl noticed and swallowed.
“Same as you,” she said.
Above them, empty wicker carts bumped gently against one another. The furnace doors cooled. Somewhere in the washroom, the kettle Hal had switched off gave a small metal tick.
June took off the grey mitten. She placed it in Elia's open hand and pressed Elia's thumb against the little knot on the outside.
Elia turned the mitten over. Five small holes remained where the stitches had been. Her fingers followed them from left to right, testing the torn wool.
“Do you have more of this thread?” she asked.
June looked at the ash caught in the lines of Elia's palm.
“No,” she said.