Kappa Gets a Kralle

On the night of day seven, Kappa did something stupid on purpose, which is different from Dobbel, who did stupid things by arriving at them.

Kappa went down to Gate Four alone at four in the morning and put both hands flat on it.

The reasoning, written in the log beforehand because Frau Vesper had trained that too, was this:

The protection is fitted to the nearest unprotected creature. All the mice near Gate Four are now protected. If I am the nearest unprotected creature, it should come to me. Then it will be on a person, and a person can tell everybody what it feels like, and nobody will be able to call it a mouse problem again.

Underneath, in different handwriting, Mirell Kawa later wrote: This was brave, correct, and completely unauthorised, and I have recommended against any punishment, and I have also told this apprentice never to do anything like it again, and been told "no promises", which I have put in the file.

The lights went amber. The clack came.

And nothing happened to Kappa at all, for eleven seconds, which is a very long time to stand in an amber corridor with your hands on a wall.

Then something cold closed around Kappa’s left ankle, over the boot, and tightened, and there was no pain — that was the strangest thing, there was never any pain — just a weight and a snugness, like a hand that has taken hold of you kindly and is not going to let go.

Kappa looked down.

It was beautiful work. The band was lined with felt. The four hooks curved back toward the heel, their points resting against the sole. There was a flimsy tucked into the top of the boot.

SCHUTZPROGRAMM K Protective issue. Do not remove. This is a protection, not a punishment.

Kappa turned around — away from the gate, toward the corridor, toward the way home — and walked, and the hooks did nothing at all, and the walking was easy.

Then Kappa turned back toward the gate and took one step.

The hooks bit the deck.

Not into the foot. Into the floor. Four points caught the plate and held, the way a cleat holds, and the leg simply stopped, mid-stride, and Kappa’s whole body kept going and came down hard on one knee and both palms.

Kappa sat on the deck plate in Section Nine at twenty past four in the morning with a bleeding knee, and did not cry, and did the one thing that actually mattered, which was to take out the log and write it down while it was still exact:

Day eight, 04:22. It does not hurt. It does not warn you. It does not stop you leaving. It only stops you going one way, and it does it without telling you which way, so you learn by falling.

I had to find out by falling over twice which direction my own feet were not allowed to go in.

Nobody told me. There is nobody to ask. The paper says it is a protection.

Tilk has had this on both feet for eight days. Tilk is forty times smaller than me. Tilk did not do anything at all.

Then Kappa went up three decks, slowly, on one good knee, and found Mirell Kawa in the Mäusewerk at five in the morning, awake, with the thermos, waiting — because she had read the log entry at midnight and had decided, after twenty-two years of this work, that she was not going to stop it, and was going to be sitting there when it got back.

“Well?” she said.

Kappa put the bleeding knee and the steel ankle up on the counter next to rule five on the wall.

“It’s not a protection,” Kappa said. “It’s a leash. A very kind, very well-made leash, and it was put on me by something that meant well, and I still can’t walk where I want to go.”

“Good,” said Mirell. “Now you are a witness and not just an apprentice, and tomorrow you are coming with me to the office with no windows, and we are going to do the only thing that has never been tried.”

“Which is?”

“Talk to it,” said Mirell Kawa. “Properly. With a chair for it, if it had anything to sit in.”