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I set my own volume down on the stone beside me, cover up, the railway crossing facing the clouded sky. The girl in the cream coat keeps waiting where I left her, perfectly composed, and I turn her face away from me by setting the manga on top of her.

The Last Province Has No Moon falls open on its own. The spine learned this years ago. The pages here are soft at the corners from how many times I’ve returned to them. Radka of Varn, Eighth Road-Saint, stands in the pass. She’s planted with her weight low, knees bent, the railway-steel sword angled down across her body so the flat catches the bad light. Her weapon is a piece of dismantled rail with an edge ground into it, still showing the bolt holes. Her forearms are thick near the elbow, the wrists too broad for the bracer straps, tendons standing up under the salt-cracked skin. Her coat has gone the color of dried blood and dust. One wolf ear is pinned flat against the wind; the other turns back toward the road.

Behind her, smaller than her sword, the column of refugees. Migiwa Tetsuno drew them almost as marks, a blur of hundreds dwindling into the white of the page. A hand-cart, a child carried high, a person bent under a roll of canvas. They aren’t characters. They don’t need to be. The point is that they’re getting smaller, getting away, getting through, thanks to the broad back planted between them and the monsters coming down the pass.

You don’t even see the horrors that Radka is facing. Two pages, and the threat stays off-panel. She’s exactly where she’s needed, doing the work assigned to her. You could measure her effect. Count the people behind her. Count the ones still walking. A single directive driving the Eighth Road-Saint’s will: stand here, hold this weapon, and nobody behind you dies.

I run my thumb down the gutter between the panels, the white channel where nothing is drawn. Where the reader does the crossing instead of the character.

Radka knows what she’s for. She’s tired; the artist gave her heavy eyelids and the fold of her belly over the belt. But nobody questions whether her standing there means anything. Somebody asked her to be a wall and she became a wall and the people got through, and tomorrow she’ll do it again on the next ridge, for nobody’s name but her own.

A crag martin skims past San Pedro church’s tower, gives one thin call, and the wind brings the Urola river up to me, brine and rot and wet stone. The page lifts at the corner. I place my volume of Rain at the Crossing there to press it flat.

Voices come up out of the alley before the people do. French, two of them, the unhurried French of people on holiday who have decided the rain is finished for the day. A man and a woman, both somewhere past fifty. They come out of the gap between the church flank and the apartment block and they stop before the San Pedro church like everyone stops.

The man tips his head back, searching for a top edge that arrives later than the body expects. The tower ends flat against a sky going the color of wet slate, those horizontal bands staked like something a giant assembled. Blue-gray and smoke-gray and brown. The few slits in the stone only prove how much stone there is around them. The man lifts his phone and steps back, and back again, and leans his whole upper body backwards at the hips to fit the tower into the frame.

The keys press into my thigh. The phone presses too, the other pocket. I should call my parents. Call now while there’s light, while the conversation can end before the drive and not during it. I work the phone out of my jacket. The screen wakes to nothing; no missed calls yet, which means there’s still a version where I’m the one who chooses the moment.

As my thumb hovers at the unlock, my misbehaving heart starts up again, fast, like it did this morning at the Tabakalera café when Maialen set her coffee down and I understood from the careful way she did it that my comic book series was already over. I can hear my mother’s voice before I have it. Cancelled is what the publisher did. Not what the work is. My mother will say something kinder than the truth and shaped like a frame around me, and I will have to thank her and feel myself become the version of me she keeps.

I set the phone face up on the stone beside me, next to the manga. A few minutes more.

The French couple drift toward the opposite end of the parapet that borders the terrace, obstructing the view of the vine-covered façade of a home. I look back down at Radka.

The pass. Her broad back to me, to all of us, the railway-steel sword moving. Tetsuno drew the swing as three overlapping ghosts of the blade, so you read the speed without a single line of motion-blur cheating, and at the end of the arc the thing she’s killing, one of the moon-hatched ones, wrong jaw and too many joints, is already coming apart, the head sailing away in an arc. Behind Radka, the road empties uphill, thousands of people reduced to weight, to the fact that they’re escaping. And down at the hem of Radka’s coat, half-hidden in the faded oxide-red, a child. A small fist closed on the waxed canvas, knuckles white, riding the coat as it snaps with the swing. Radka doesn’t look down. Doesn’t need to. Her body is the wall and the wall is holding. Radka swings the sword and a child lives another hour.

I drew rain. I drew rust at the base of a timetable board nobody would ever stand and read, taped schedule curling behind glass, because it was true. Because a real crossing has a board like that and I couldn’t bear to leave it out. I put my whole life into the parts no one was looking at. The honest parts. And they weren’t enough. Maybe that’s the answer and I don’t want it: that earnestness isn’t a craft. That you can render every drainage grate in Gipuzkoa with love and still have made nothing the world will carry forward. Tetsuno put Radka’s stand in volume three, and it will outlive us both. I put everything I had into a story that has been politely closed. I’m starting to suspect the failure wasn’t in the rendering. It might be lower than that. Some absence in me.

The phone goes off against the stone. It buzzes with one hard shudder of plastic on rock, jumping a half-centimeter sideways, and then it rings. The screen, face-up where I left it, says Mom.

My chest closes like a fist around nothing. I let the phone ring twice more, watching the little photo of her she set herself years ago, the one where she’s squinting into the sun at the Zumaia beach and laughing at whoever held the camera. Two more rings and it will go to voicemail and then I’ll have to explain why I didn’t answer. I pick it up.

“Hi, mom.”

“Eneko.” Her voice arrives already arranged, warm and forward. She’s been holding words all afternoon. “Are you in Zumaia already? Did you take the early train back or the one after?”

“I’m in Zumaia.” A martin banks close to the tower and is gone. “By San Pedro.”

“By San Pedro.” My mother’s voice suggests this is charming, that I have stopped somewhere with a view to call her. “So. Tell me. We’ve been waiting all day, your father pretending he wasn’t. What is it? What are we celebrating?”

The wind moves the open manga under the paperweight of my own book, Radka standing in her pass with the railway sword, the child gripping her coat hem. I put my thumb on the corner of the page that was lifted.

“Mom—”

“Is it the second printing? Or… no. Don’t tell me it’s the other thing, the one you wouldn’t talk about, the screen people.” A small breathless laugh. “I won’t say anything. I know you don’t like me getting ahead of it.”

“It isn’t that.”

A short pause on her end, then her voice drops a register and sharpens at the edges.

“Eneko. What’s wrong with your voice.”

“Nothing’s wrong with my voice.”

“Something’s wrong. Did something happen with the car? Are you hurt? Did you not eat today?”

“Mom. The car’s fine. I’m fine.” I look at the gray uprights on the parapet, the worn ones that today look like teeth. “I met Maialen. The series is cancelled. Rain at the Crossing. The orders weren’t enough and the returns were high, so they’re not commissioning a continuation. The volume that’s out there is the last one. There won’t be a collected edition.” I lay it down like you’d set tools on a cloth. “The numbers weren’t a disaster. They just weren’t enough.”

The martins come round again, distant, then close, then thinning.

“Oh, Eneko.” A breath. “Oh, my love. I’m so sorry. After everything you put in.”

“Mom. There’s something else she said. My editor.”

“What did she say?”

I look at the cover. The girl in her cream coat, her umbrella tilted just so. I don’t want to repeat it. It would be easier to let my mother keep the version where the sales numbers simply didn’t add up. But otherwise she’d hear the shape of the thing I’m concealing, the way she always does, and ask in a softer voice, which would be worse.

“She said the girl wasn’t alive.” The stone seat feels cool through my jeans. “The co-protagonist. She said the boy was alive, but the girl just… stood where I needed her to stand.”

A pause. In it I hear the kitchen behind my mother, back in Segura. A chair scraping.

“Eneko, that girl was the first thing anyone looked at. You remember the volume with the festival, the one with all the lanterns? I showed it to Arantxa at the lab. She picked it up and her eye went straight to her. The girl on the page. People look at her first. That’s not nothing.”

“That’s exactly what she said, mom. More or less.” I press my thumb into the soft place under my eye, then the other, rubbing slow. “That’s the problem. The eye stops there because there’s nowhere else to go inside her.” I tip my head back against the gray, and high up the martins are working the air around the blunt stone of the tower, a loose knot of them unraveling and re-tying, their thin calls arriving after the birds have already turned. “You can stare at something forever and it can still be empty.”

“Now that’s not fair to yourself.” She comes in quick, the way she always has. “Listen. The page with the umbrella, in the second volume, where she’s under the awning and the rain is coming off the edge in those threads… you spent, what, three weekends on that rain? We talked about it. You did the reflection in the gutter water by the kerb so it broke around the leaves. Who does that? Who even sees that the reflection breaks?”

“Mom—”

“No, let me. People don’t look that long anymore. They scroll. They want the thing in one second and then they’re gone. You gave them something that needed an hour and they gave it a second.” Her voice firms, the conclusion sitting there as if the evidence had assembled itself. “That’s not your failure, my love. That’s theirs. You always saw what other people walked straight past. You were like that at six years old.”

There it is. I close my eyes. I came here… not here, the bench, but home, the whole drive I haven’t started. I came here to be told that it hurt and that it was allowed to hurt, and instead I’m the one holding the phone steady while my mother does what she has to, rescuing me, lifting it out of my hands before I’ve finished setting it down.

“Maybe,” I say. The keys press into my thigh. “Maybe they didn’t look long enough.”

“Of course maybe.”

“But it could be both.” I keep my voice level. “It can still be good and have failed. The rain can be good and the gutter can be good and the boy can be alive, and the girl can be hollow, and it can fail to sell, and all of that can be true at once. You don’t have to give the failure to someone else for me to survive it. I just… I need it to be allowed to be dead. And good.”

The kitchen is quiet behind her. I can hear her wanting to give me the version that holds, and I wait, eyes still shut, for her to find a way to say yes.

“All right,” my mother says. A small sound under the word, a kitchen-chair sound, a thing being moved. “But you should tell your father this part yourself, because if I tell it I’ll get it wrong and he’ll be cross with me for the wrong reasons.”

“You don’t have to—” I start, but I hear the change in the room around her voice, the warmer close acoustic of the kitchen giving way to something flatter and harder, a corridor, then the cool open echo of the garage. Her steps. And then, under her breathing, a sound I would know anywhere: one of my father’s tools being set down on the bench. The clack of a man putting a thing where it lives before he turns to listen.

“Joxe Mari,” she says, off to the side of the phone. “It’s Eneko.”

Her voice goes wide and slightly hollowed, the speaker flattening it. I’m in the garage now too, in the cold of it, near the worktop.

“Tell your father,” she says.

“Dad,” I say.

“I can hear from your mother’s face it isn’t good news.” His voice arrives plain. “She’s gone careful. So. What is it.”

No slope to climb with him, no warm hand reaching down to pull me up before I’ve fallen. I’m grateful and I dread it in equal measure.

“The series has been cancelled. Rain at the Crossing. Not enough sales. The volume that’s out is the last one.”

A working pause.

“How many short were you.”

“Maialen didn’t give me a number like that.”

“She didn’t say how many you needed.”

“No.”

“Who decided it.”

“The publisher.”

“Not her, then. And if the orders changed. If the numbers moved. Can they look at it again, or is the door shut.”

“I don’t know if—”

“Because we could buy copies. I could ask at the plant. The ones with kids who like that sort of thing. Not as charity. As orders that show up in whatever they count. I’m not saying twenty copies brings a dead thing back to life. I’m asking whether there’s a place to put a hand. Whether anything in it still moves.”

The floor goes out from under me quietly, just my father standing in his garage among things with edges and weights and part numbers, turning four years of my life into stock that might be shifted through his work buddies. Their kids. A clipboard going around at the canteen. My book something you order to be kind, the way you’d buy a calendar off the firemen.

I look down at the cover of my book I’m using as a paperweight. The boy and the girl and the lowered barrier, the rain I ruined my eyes drawing. It looks like it belongs on a school table now. With a tin beside it.

“No. No, dad. Don’t do that.”

A clear no closes that proposal for him.

“Then the next one has to sell.”

I keep my eyes on the church tower so I don’t have to keep them anywhere else. Make something people want, or stop asking us to treat this as work.

“That’s not me telling you to stop,” he says, his voice adjusted as if he felt a wheel go loose under his hands. “I can hear you’ve heard it wrong. I’m not telling you to put the pens down. You’re a craftsman. You go back to the table and you keep working. That’s all. A man goes back to work.”

“Not tonight,” my mother says from very close to the phone.

“I didn’t say tonight,” my father says, mildly stung. “Did I say tonight.”

“Tonight I’ll be busy anyway,” I say. “I’m coming up. I’ve got the bag in the car already. I thought I’d just… come for the weekend.”

My mother makes the sound she makes when it costs her to hide pleasure.

“Oh. Oh, well. I’ve got chard, I was going to do it with garlic, but that’s not a dinner, that’s a side. Did you eat today? You didn’t eat. I’ll do the hake. No, you’ll be tired from the road. Cod. I have cod in the freezer, the good loins, I can do it in the green sauce, you always cleaned the plate with bread when you were small… Joxe Mari, do we still have those white asparagus, the ones from your brother? For starting. And then the cod. And I’ll make rice pudding.”

It costs nothing to let her plan a dinner around the version of me that finishes his plate, and for a second I almost want to be that long-dead boy.

“No,” my father says as if placing a tool back exactly where it lives. “Stay tonight. Come up in the morning.”

“What?” I ask.

“You’ve had the day you’ve had. It’ll be dark before you reach Segura. You don’t know the road wet, not the lower stretch past Beasain, not in the dark with… Sleep at home there. Come in the morning. Or leave the car. I’ll come down and get you, I’m not doing anything.”

I’m already standing. My legs decided for me. Just on my feet with the phone hot against my ear and my free hand reaching for the stone bench. I take my own book, the boy and the girl who are never allowed to cross, and I press it under my arm as if I don’t want anyone to see it over my shoulder.

I’ll come down and get you, my father said. As if I were fourteen and the last bus had gone. As if I had spent the afternoon explaining slowly, with the right words, why the story I created wasn’t good enough for the world to want, and the takeaway from that explanation, the practical conclusion my father drew from all of it, is that I shouldn’t be trusted with a car after dark.

The wind comes over the parapet and gets into the manga where it lies open. The pages go over by themselves, fanning, and I get these flashes of Radka, the wall of her, past the pass, past the stand. She’s bent over a pot scraping a black crust of burned food off the bottom with the edge of a spoon, wolf ears flat, annoyed at herself. The wind turns the pages again. Radka is losing an argument with a child about where wet boots go. The boots are on the wrong side of the door and they’re going to stay there because the child has decided, and Radka, who has stood alone in a pass between thousands of people and monsters that fall out of the moon, can’t make a small child put boots where boots belong.

I close the manga and pick it up. The stone where it lay is dry now in that shape, a clean pale rectangle in the damp.

“I’m fit to drive.”

Not drunk. Not falling asleep at the wheel. Not crying, not going to cry. I look at the hand that’s holding the manga and it’s steady. A perfectly steady hand. I meet all the conditions. That my father has heard something underneath my voice that makes him want to drive an hour down to a church terrace to take a set of keys off me, that isn’t on the list. If it were, I’d never get to drive anywhere again.

“I’m fit,” I say again, quieter.

My mother starts to say something, the cod or the road or both, but my father talks over her.

“Call me when you get there. When you’re in the door. Not from the road.”

I shake my head.

“When I’m at the door. I’ll use the doorbell, dad.”

I’m already moving, the manga and my comic book both clamped against my ribs, the keys still pressing my thigh, and I step off the terrace onto the inclined street where the one lane drops away between the wet vine-fronts and the parked cars, down toward the silver back of the Ibiza waiting at the kerb. Segura is an hour. For an hour I can be a man with one task and a road that I know, and at the end of it a lit door and a plate of cod, and nothing to explain to anyone, nothing to make mean anything, just the headlights and someone else’s white lines.

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Author’s note: today’s songs are “Jim Cain” by Bill Callahan and “Sadness as a Gift” by Adrianne Lenker.