The House on Wolseley
The House on Wolseley
Part One: Twenty (2013)
The porch is trying to kill someone.
Jonah can see this from the sidewalk. The south railing lists outward at an angle that would dump a person into the hydrangea if they leaned on it, and two of the deck boards have gone soft with rot — the kind of soft that your foot finds at the worst possible moment, the wood giving way under you like a trap, like the house has been waiting. He’s been living in the basement suite for three weeks and has been using the side door to avoid the porch entirely, a decision that requires him to walk through the back lane and past the garbage bins and the neighbor’s one-eyed cat, which watches him from the fence with the steady, unfriendly attention of a customs agent.
Early September. He’s coming back from a lab — Introduction to Systems, which is the kind of course title that makes him feel like he’s being taught to breathe by someone who read a book about lungs. He’s carrying his laptop in a backpack that smells like the basement suite, which smells like concrete and laundry detergent and the faint sweetness of whatever the woman upstairs is cooking. He hasn’t met her properly. Just a name on the mailbox — C. Moreau — and a voice through the floor, and turpentine in the heat vents when the furnace kicks on.
A man is on the porch.
Mid-twenties, maybe. Broad across the shoulders in a way that looks functional, not gym-built. Work boots, jeans faded white at the knees, a tool belt slung low on his hips with the weight of it pulling his jacket open. He’s crouching beside the railing with half the balusters already pulled and stacked in a neat row on the deck, old nails bent flat, the wood sorted — good pieces separate from rot. He’s holding one of the balusters up to his face, sighting along its edge with one eye closed.
Jonah stops on the sidewalk.
The gesture. The way the man turns the wood slowly, reading its line the way you’d read a sentence, looking for where it bows or torques. The slight tilt of his head. Jonah’s dad does this with steel — holds a piece up against the sky and sights along it, checking for the warp you can feel but can’t see until you know how to look. The recognition lands in Jonah’s chest before his brain catches up. A hit of home he wasn’t expecting and doesn’t know what to do with, standing on a cracked sidewalk in Wolseley with his laptop on his back and his hands in his pockets.
The man looks up. Dark eyes, dark hair buzzed short, a jaw that hasn’t decided whether it wants a beard. He nods at Jonah the way tradesmen nod — an acknowledgement, not an invitation.
“You live here?”
“Basement,” Jonah says.
“I’m fixing the porch.”
“It needs it.”
The man almost smiles. “Yeah.”
That’s the conversation. Jonah goes around to the side door. The one-eyed cat watches him from the fence. The sound of a pry bar working against old nails follows him down the stairs to his suite, where the light comes in milky through two narrow windows at ground level and the concrete floor is cold through his socks.
His name is Liam. Jonah learns this the next day, or the day after — it blurs. The porch takes a week and a half because the rot goes deeper than the landlord thought, which Liam says with the resigned expression of someone who has heard landlords think before. The joists are soft. The ledger board is pulling away from the house. What was supposed to be a railing job becomes a deck job, and what was supposed to be a weekend becomes two weeks, and every afternoon when Jonah comes up the stairs from his suite he can hear the hammer and the saw and Liam’s boots on the new wood, testing weight, testing give.
Jonah starts coming out. Not to help — he doesn’t know anything about porches. But he can hold a board while Liam measures. He can hand tools. The muscle memory is different from the combine — steel versus wood, field versus city — but the logic is the same. Read the problem. Find what fits. His dad taught him this without teaching him, the way you learn a language by hearing it spoken in the kitchen every morning.
Liam doesn’t ask him questions. Doesn’t ask what he studies, where he’s from, what his deal is. He asks for the speed square or the chalk line and Jonah finds it in the tool belt or the canvas bag and hands it over and Liam takes it without looking up, and the ease of that — the wordless exchange of tool to hand to work — is something Jonah hasn’t felt since he left Steinbach.
Liam is from Thompson. He says this once, early, and then doesn’t say it again for months. Thompson: the nickel town, eight hours north, a place Jonah has never been but has seen on the map, a name that sits in the boreal shield like a fist. Single mom. Left at seventeen to apprentice with a carpenter in the city. The apprenticeship ended and the carpenter retired and Liam stayed because Winnipeg was far enough from Thompson and close enough to work.
He doesn’t talk about Thompson the way Jonah doesn’t talk about Steinbach — not avoiding it exactly, just letting it sit at a distance where it can’t reach. The anger is there though. Jonah can see it in the way Liam handles wood. Not rough. The opposite. Precise, almost tender, the way you hold something you know could break. His hands move over a board the way Jonah’s dad’s hands move over a sick animal — firm, careful, reading what’s underneath. The anger lives in his shoulders and in the set of his jaw when he talks about clients who want things fast, cheap, wrong. It never touches the wood.
Chloë appears because Chloë is already there.
She has the main floor. The living room is technically a living room — it has a couch and a lamp and a rug — but the couch is pushed against the wall to make room for two easels, and the lamp has paint on its shade from the time she was working late and knocked it with her elbow, and the rug has a tarp over it that she swears she’ll take off when she’s done with her current piece, which she has been saying since August. Canvases lean against every wall. A Singer sewing machine she found on the curb sits in the corner like a small iron animal, and she’s threaded it with red thread and sewn exactly one thing on it — a patch for the knee of her overalls — and the rest of the time it holds her coffee mug and a stack of library books about printmaking.
She makes coffee for Liam while he works on the porch. Not because he asks. Because she hears the hammer and puts the kettle on the way you put a kettle on when there’s someone in the house — automatically, the way her mother probably does it, the way a certain kind of person responds to the sound of work by making sure the worker is fed.
The coffee becomes a habit. The habit becomes the kitchen table.
The kitchen table is round, too small for the kitchen, scarred on top from something — a previous tenant, a knife, years of use that nobody remembers. Three chairs and none of them match: a wooden one with a loose leg that Liam fixes with a shim on his second week, an office chair Jonah drags up from the basement because the only other option is standing, and a metal folding chair with a wool blanket draped over it that Chloë claims by sitting in it every time, tucking her feet under her, her paint-stained fingers wrapped around her mug. She finds a tablecloth at a thrift store on Westminster and paints on it the first night she brings it home — circles and lines in yellow and blue, abstract, no plan, just color because the table looked bare.
Chloë is from River Heights. Her parents are teachers — her mom at Kelvin, her dad at Grant Park. She went to art school at the U of M and stayed because she got the studio space in the living room and a landlord who doesn’t care what she does as long as she pays rent. She talks fast. She laughs loud. She has paint on her hands always — not as a statement, just as a fact, the way a baker has flour in the creases of her knuckles. She paints, she draws, she makes things out of clay that she fires in a kiln she’s trying to convince the landlord to let her build in the backyard, a campaign that has been going on for two months and shows no sign of resolution.
She’s the first person in Jonah’s Winnipeg life who doesn’t flinch when he says Steinbach. No flicker. No recalculation. She says “Oh, I had a friend from Steinbach in high school, she was allergic to everything” and moves on, and the moving on is the gift — the absence of the thing Jonah has come to expect, the slight tilt of the head, the oh, Mennonite, the reorganization of assumptions that he can see happening behind people’s eyes like a slot machine settling on a new combination. Chloë doesn’t have a slot machine. Chloë has paint on her hands and a kettle that’s always warm and she doesn’t care where he’s from because she’s too busy telling him about a show at the WAG that made her want to throw something.
The three of them have nothing in common. A coder from a hog farm. An artist from a comfortable house in River Heights. A carpenter from a hard place up north. What they share is the kitchen table and the fact that they keep ending up at it — after work, after class, after Liam finishes whatever the landlord has him fixing this week (the tap, the back stairs, the storm window that won’t close, the list never ends and Liam works through it with the same patient attention Jonah’s dad brings to a broken machine, listening to the house, reading its joints and failures, fixing what he finds). Nobody plans it. Nobody sends a text saying dinner? Chloë makes pasta — noodles with garlic and whatever’s in the fridge, her one reliable recipe — and Liam shows up because the smell carries through the house, and Jonah comes up from the basement because the concrete gets cold and the voices through the floor sound warmer than his screen.
October. First snow. Not a real snow — a dusting, enough to make the streets look like someone threw powdered sugar at them from a great height. The elms on Wolseley are half-bare, the leaves that are left rattling like something papery and alive, and the air has that bite to it, that first-cold-night bite that means the city is about to change character, that Winnipeg is about to stop being the place where people ride bikes and start being the place where people survive.
The kitchen is cold. The radiator takes twenty minutes to warm up after the thermostat kicks on, and nobody has called the landlord about it because calling the landlord means Liam would have to fix it himself and he’s already doing enough. They sit at the table in their jackets, hands around mugs, the kitchen windows fogged from the kettle.
Chloë has made pasta. The noodles are overcooked and the garlic is half-raw and the cheese on top is from a bag and none of this matters. Wine from the LC, seven dollars a bottle, poured into coffee mugs because nobody owns wine glasses. The mug Jonah is drinking from says World’s Best Grandma and has a chip on the rim that he has to navigate with his lip.
Liam sets something on the table. Two pieces of wood, pale, maybe maple, each about six inches long. He pushes them together and they close with a sound like a lock engaging — a soft, firm click, the pieces fitting together in a pattern Jonah has seen in furniture stores but never thought about. A dovetail joint.
“No glue?” Jonah asks.
“No glue. No nails.” Liam picks it up and turns it over. The joints are tight — not perfect, not machine-cut, but close. Close enough that the two pieces hold each other by the precision of the cut alone, by the geometry of the pins and tails interlocking in a way that gets stronger when you pull. “Been working on this for three weeks. Traditional method. Hand tools.”
Chloë takes it from him and turns it in her paint-stained fingers. She holds it up to the light from the window, the way she holds everything she finds interesting — at arm’s length, tilted, studying it the way you’d study a face.
“Liam, this is beautiful.” She says it the way she says things about art — not as decoration, not that’s nice, but as recognition. Evidence of something human in the wood.
Jonah watches. He’s thinking about a function he wrote last week for his Systems class — fifteen lines of JavaScript that did exactly what it was supposed to do, nothing wasted, no redundancy, each line doing one thing and doing it right. The dovetail and the clean function. The same satisfaction. The same proof that a human hand can make something that holds.
He doesn’t say this. He watches Liam’s face while Chloë holds the joint, and something in Liam changes — the anger in his shoulders loosens, not gone but quieter, the way a fist opens when you’re not paying attention. Liam looks at Chloë holding his work and his jaw unclenches and his hands, resting on the table on either side of his wine mug, go still. For a second he looks like a different person. Or the same person with the volume turned down.
Chloë sets the dovetail on the tablecloth she painted. The wood sits on the yellow circles like it belongs there. She refills the mugs.
Outside, the first snow is still falling. The kitchen is warming up, the radiator ticking as the metal expands, a sound like small knuckles rapping on the pipe. The fog on the windows has thickened so the streetlight outside is just a smear of orange. Jonah’s shoulders aren’t tight. His jaw isn’t clenched. The pasta is bad and the wine is worse and he is sitting in a cold kitchen in a rented house with two people he’s known for six weeks and he doesn’t want to be anywhere else.
He doesn’t think this as a thought. He notices it in his body — the absence of the thing that’s usually there, the low-grade hum of not-quite-belonging that has been his frequency since he left home. The hum has gone quiet. The kitchen is just a kitchen. The people are just people. But the quiet is specific to this table, these mugs, the dovetail joint sitting on the painted cloth. He’s felt it before — at the faspa table, in the combine cab, in his dad’s silence under the machine. A particular kind of room where you don’t have to explain yourself.
His mom’s number sits in his phone. He means to call. He missed Thanksgiving because labs ran late, or because he told himself labs ran late, or because the bus ticket was sixty dollars and he spent it on RAM for his desktop. The reasons blur. He’ll call tomorrow.
Chloë is telling a story about a professor who told her that her figure drawing looked like it was done by a “confident amateur” and how she couldn’t decide if that was an insult or the best compliment she’d ever received. Liam is tearing bread — he’s started bringing bread, dense brown loaves from the Forks that he buys on his way home from job sites, and tearing bread has become his gesture the way making coffee is Chloë’s, the way showing up is Jonah’s. The bread tears with a sound like fabric. The crust scatters crumbs on the tablecloth.
The house on Wolseley holds them. Nobody planned this. The porch needed fixing, and the porch led to the tap, and the tap led to the stairs, and somewhere in the middle of all that fixing Liam stopped being the guy the landlord hired and became the guy who shows up on Wednesday with bread. And Chloë stopped being the voice through the floor and became the woman who leaves the kitchen light on because she knows Jonah comes up from the basement around seven. And Jonah stopped being the kid from Steinbach and became — what? He doesn’t know. He’s still becoming.
The Hinge
Nine years. Jonah finishes his degree, gets hired at a Winnipeg firm that builds on the Chorus platform, moves out of the basement suite into his own apartment near the Exchange District. Chloë gets a studio in a warehouse on Logan Avenue. Liam starts his own contracting business, a one-man operation that grows to three employees and then back to one when two of them leave for oil-patch money in Alberta. They scatter across the city but the Wednesday-night habit survives. Different kitchens now. Whoever’s hosting cooks. The food gets better slowly. The wine stays cheap.
Part Two: Twenty-Nine (2022)
The glasses arrived in a box the size of a paperback, matte grey, the Chorus logo debossed on the lid. Jonah put them on in his apartment on a Tuesday evening in November and the world gained a layer.
Not dramatically. That was the design. The overlay was soft — schedule floating at the periphery, weather in a thin band across the top of his vision, a gentle pulse when his heart rate drifted above resting. The first notification he remembers: Good morning, Jonah. Your optimal route to work avoids construction on Portage. Estimated commute: 14 minutes. He’d walked that route for three years and had never timed it. Fourteen minutes was right.
Within a month the glasses were just there. The way a watch is just there — you stop noticing the weight, stop noticing the face, until you look and the information is waiting, until you stop looking and the information finds you anyway. He wore them to work. He wore them to the grocery store. He wore them walking the river trail on Sunday mornings when the city was quiet and the ice was forming along the banks of the Assiniboine in grey scallops that broke and reformed with the current.
His job had changed. Not the title — Senior Developer, same as two years ago — but the texture of the work. He built on the Chorus API now, and the API was beautiful in the way that certain code was beautiful, the way his dad’s improvised bracket was beautiful: a system that solved problems with an economy of means that bordered on elegance. He admired it. He understood its architecture from the inside, the way a carpenter understands a house by knowing where the joists sit and where the load bears down. The Chorus system was clean and logical and he was good at working within it, and the work satisfied the same muscle his dad had taught him — see the problem, build the thing that fixes it.
But the problems had changed. The problems were about efficiency now. Optimization. Making the system smoother, faster, more predictive. Making it know what people wanted before they knew themselves.
The stop-request button fight happened in March. One of his projects — a Chorus integration for the city’s transit system — included a feature that would let the system auto-detect rider destinations and skip stops where no one needed to get off. Efficient. Logical. It shaved four minutes off the average route. Jonah spent a month arguing to keep a physical button on the bus — a button that a person could press with their hand to tell the system I want to get off here, even though the system already knew, even though the button was redundant, even though redundancy was waste and waste was what the system was built to eliminate.
He won. One line of code. He printed it out and pinned it to his cubicle wall in a black frame he bought at the dollar store. His coworkers thought he was being ironic. He wasn’t. He just couldn’t explain why a button mattered without explaining something about his father’s hands on a steering wheel, and that was a longer conversation than the office could hold.
The glasses knew his heart rate. His sleep patterns. His coffee order — two shots, oat milk, the shop on McDermot, and the nudge came at 7:14 every morning: Your usual is ready for pickup. They knew his emotional baseline. When his stress elevated — a deadline, a bad meeting, a conversation with his mother that ended the way conversations with his mother ended now, both of them careful, both of them circling the thing they wouldn’t say — the glasses offered solutions. Breathing exercises. Ambient soundscapes. A twenty-minute guided walk through the neighborhood calibrated to bring his cortisol down by measurable increments.
The solutions worked. That was the problem, if it was a problem. The cage was comfortable and the door was open. He could take the glasses off. He just didn’t. Nobody did. They were helpful. They were always helpful.
He noticed — when? He couldn’t pin it to a date. Sometime in the second year. He noticed that when he visited Liam’s workshop — a rented bay in an industrial park off Archibald, sawdust on the floor, hand tools racked on pegboard, the air smelling of cedar and linseed oil — he took the glasses off. Folded them, set them on Liam’s workbench beside the wood shavings and the pencil stubs and the square. And when he visited Chloë’s studio on Logan — canvases stacked deep, turpentine and gesso and the clay dust that got into everything, a coffee maker older than any of them that produced coffee the color and approximate flavor of road tar — he took them off there too.
He didn’t decide to do this. His hands decided. The glasses came off the way you take off your shoes in someone’s house, not because they ask but because the floor tells you — because the space is different and your body knows it before your mind catches up. Liam’s hands on a piece of walnut didn’t need a data layer. Chloë’s brush on canvas didn’t need an optimization. These were the last un-augmented spaces in his life and he went to them the way you go to water when you’ve been walking a long time, without thinking about why, just following the pull.
Wednesday. Late October. Chloë’s apartment on Langside — she’d moved twice since Wolseley but the apartment always looked the same, as though she transported her disorder intact from one address to the next, a portable ecosystem of canvases and coffee mugs and the turpentine smell that followed her like weather. The kitchen was narrow, the counters crowded with jars of brushes and a sourdough starter she’d tried to keep alive for two weeks before passing it to Liam, who’d kept it going for six months and counting and who had arrived tonight with a loaf of bread tucked under his arm like a football.
He tore it at the table. The crust cracked and the sound filled the kitchen and the inside was warm and open and the smell — yeast and salt and the particular sweetness of a long ferment — rose into the room and mixed with the turpentine and the wine Chloë was pouring and the candle she’d lit on the windowsill because the overhead bulb had burned out and she hadn’t replaced it, which meant the kitchen was lit by candle and streetlight and the glow from her laptop in the next room, and the shadows on the wall shifted when the candle guttered.
Three people at a table. Different table now — Chloë’s was square, pressed against the wall, barely big enough for three plates. Different chairs — two wooden chairs from IKEA and a stepladder that Liam sat on without complaint because he was closest to the counter and could reach the bread. Different kitchen. Same thing happening inside it.
Liam talked about his week. A client had hired him to build a custom bookshelf — floor to ceiling, built-in, white oak, the kind of job he loved, the kind of job that was getting rare. But the client had showed up to the first meeting with a printout from an app. An AI-generated design, clean lines, symmetrical, the proportions slightly wrong in a way that would take a carpenter to notice.
“Mitred corners,” Liam said. He tore bread. “On a load-bearing shelf. The grain runs the wrong way. It would crack inside a year, maybe two. I told them.” He chewed. Swallowed. “They showed me the app’s structural rating. Eighty-seven out of a hundred.” He looked at the bread in his hands. “A number on a screen. Versus — I don’t know. Thirty years of watching how maple bends.”
He wasn’t angry the way he used to be angry. The anger in his shoulders had settled into something heavier over the years, something that sat lower, closer to fatigue. The joints he made were better than ever — he’d been teaching himself kumiko work, Japanese lattice patterns so precise they looked printed — but the clients who cared about that were fewer each year, and the ones who remained wanted it cheap, wanted it fast, wanted the app’s version with a human name on the invoice so they could say it was handmade.
Chloë had her own week. A gallery show, group exhibition, five artists. Three of the pieces were AI-assisted. “They don’t call it AI anymore,” she said. She was drinking wine from a mason jar because her last mug had cracked in the dishwasher. “They call it process-augmented.” She said the words the way you’d say the name of a disease. “As if the process isn’t the whole point.”
She’d stood in the gallery and watched a girl — sixteen, seventeen — walk the room. The girl stopped at Chloë’s piece, a large-format oil, hands and earth, months of work. Looked at it for maybe ten seconds. Then moved to the piece beside it, an AI-assisted landscape, smooth and luminous, every gradient calculated, and stayed for two minutes. Pulled out her phone and took a picture.
Chloë didn’t tell this part like a tragedy. She told it flat, looking at her wine, her fingers turning the jar. The candlelight moved on the wall.
“She liked the smooth one more,” Chloë said. “I could see it in her face. It was — easier to look at. Like it was designed to be liked.” She drank. “Mine had a thumbprint in the corner. I left it on purpose. And she didn’t even see it.”
Jonah listened. He was still wearing his glasses. He’d forgotten to take them off — the apartment was dim enough that the overlay was barely visible, just a faint shimmer at the edges, a ghost of information. A notification hovered: Your stress levels are elevated. Consider a breathing exercise. He blinked it away.
He could have told them about the stop-request button. The month he spent fighting for a piece of human agency the size of a coin. The framed line of code on his cubicle wall. But the story required explaining the architecture, and the architecture was the thing that was grinding them down, and he was the one building it, and the distance between what he did at his desk and what happened to Liam’s clients and Chloë’s galleries was a distance he could measure but not cross.
The silence was familiar. They’d been having versions of this conversation for years now — not always with words, sometimes just with the way Liam tore bread or Chloë turned her jar or Jonah sat with his hands flat on the table the way his dad sat at the faspa table, palms down, waiting. The world was moving faster and they were holding still and the gap between those two things was opening wider and the sound it made was a sound only they could hear, sitting at a table too small for three plates.
Chloë refilled her jar.
“Sometimes I think we should just go,” she said. Not to Jonah, not to Liam. To the candle, maybe. To the room. “Get some land somewhere. Build something. Something that doesn’t need a fucking app.”
Liam looked up from his bread. “Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere with a river.”
They’d had this conversation before. In different words, at different tables, on nights when the wine was cheap enough to make the future feel negotiable. Liam had sketched floor plans on napkins — workshop here, main building here, garden on the south side. Chloë had researched intentional communities, had a folder of bookmarks she’d shown Jonah once, histories of places that worked and places that fell apart, and she could tell you why each one failed and what she’d do different, and all of it lived in the same space as we should move to Portugal — beautiful, theoretical, the place you go in your head when the real place gets too loud.
Jonah had heard it a dozen times. It had never been more than air.
But tonight. He didn’t know why tonight was different. Maybe the bread. Maybe the way the candlelight caught the edge of the mason jar. Maybe the notification still pulsing at the corner of his vision, soft and patient, offering to optimize his breathing while his friends sat across from him talking about a world that was disappearing under them in real time.
He reached up. Took off his glasses. Set them on the table between the bread and the wine.
The overlay vanished. The kitchen was just a kitchen. Chloë’s candle, Liam’s bread, the shadows on the wall, the thumbprint of paint on the mason jar where Chloë’s fingers had been. The quiet was different without the glasses — fuller, wider, like a room that’s bigger than you thought because you’ve been seeing it through a window.
“I have some savings,” Jonah said.
Liam stopped chewing.
Chloë looked at him. The mason jar halfway to her mouth. The candle guttered and steadied and the shadows on the wall rearranged themselves.
“You’re not serious,” she said.
He didn’t know if he was serious. He knew the number in his savings account, which was not large but was not nothing — four years of a senior developer’s salary with cheap rent and no car and a social life that consisted of this table once a week. He knew the price of agricultural land in southeastern Manitoba because he’d looked it up, not recently, not with intent, but the way you look up the weather in a city you might visit — idly, with the part of your brain that runs scenarios while the rest of you pretends to be doing something else.
He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know if it was an offer or a confession or the first syllable of something he hadn’t figured out how to say. He just knew that the glasses were on the table and the bread was warm and Chloë’s face in the candlelight had gone from tired to something else — not hope exactly, more like the moment before hope, the sharp intake of breath before the word.
“I don’t know yet,” Jonah said.
The words came out shaped the same way they’d come out at the faspa table when he was fifteen and Jake asked him what he was going to do. The same phrase. His mouth remembered it.
Chloë laughed. Not dismissive — startled. The laugh of someone who’s been saying something into the dark and hearing it come back for the first time.
“Jesus, Jonah.”
Liam set his bread down. He looked at Jonah for a long moment. Then he pulled a pencil from behind his ear — he always had a pencil behind his ear, a carpenter’s pencil, flat-sided, the graphite broad and soft — and he turned over the paper bag the bread had come in and started drawing. A rectangle. A smaller rectangle beside it. A circle. Lines for the river.
Chloë leaned over his shoulder. Her hand went to the pencil — not to take it, to steady herself — and she pointed at the circle. “That’s the fire pit?”
“That’s the fire pit.”
“It should be bigger.”
“It’s on a paper bag, Chloë.”
“The fire pit should be bigger.”
Jonah watched them. Liam’s pencil on the brown paper, the floor plan emerging in flat carpenter’s strokes. Chloë’s paint-stained finger tracing the line Liam drew for the river, correcting it, adding a curve because rivers curve and Liam drew straight lines and Chloë drew curves and between them the shape on the paper bag looked like something. Like a place.
The candle burned. The wine was almost gone. The notification on the glasses, facedown on the table, pulsed once more — a faint blue glow against the wood — and then went dark.
Nobody mentioned Portugal.