It is the sixth day. Yudith has the metal spoon in the left pocket of her trousers. It is a spoon from her mother's kitchen, without engravings. She has kept it there since Tuesday, when she understood that the beam of the building on calle Bolívar sounded different at the point where the broken part rests on the floor slab below.

The municipal team of La Guaira moves forty meters further east. The team leader Ochoa says that quadrant number four is closed. In quadrant number four there remain Yudith and an old man named Rafael, who brought Yudith water on the first day and who since then comes back every morning with the yellow canteen. Rafael does not dig. He watches where Yudith digs. It is the pact.

Yudith lowers herself until she is kneeling in the dust. Her left knee trembles. For six days her left knee has been trembling. She strikes the spoon against the beam. Three short blows. She waits. She counts twenty-two seconds. She strikes again. Three short blows. She waits. It is the code she invented on Tuesday. No one knows it.

Ochoa calls her. He calls her by her surname. He had never done that. Yudith does not answer. She strikes the spoon. Three short blows. She waits.

Rafael shakes the yellow canteen against his hip. It is his way of saying now. But Yudith no longer hears Rafael's way of saying it, she hears only the beam. The beam has a sound that in the morning is open and in the evening is closed. At this moment the beam is closed. It means that the void beneath her is small. It means that there is still something pushing from inside.

She strikes the spoon a third time.

Ochoa arrives. He has another man with him, a tall one Yudith does not know. An official from the United Nations. Yudith understands this from the blue vest and from the fact that the vest is clean.

"Yudith," Ochoa says in Castilian, "we have another fire in Macuto, the team has to move. Get up."

Yudith lifts her face. She looks at Ochoa and feels for the first time since Tuesday the effort of holding her head up. Her neck trembles. It is not only the knee, now. It is also the neck.

"Fifteen minutes," Yudith says.

"We do not have fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes."

Ochoa turns toward the UN official. The UN official does not speak. Ochoa says in a low voice that that quadrant has been closed since Tuesday, that if there had been anything they would have answered the blows of the first teams, that the logic of the sixth day is different from the logic of the second. The official nods. It is the way officials nod in situations where there is no need to say no.

Yudith strikes the spoon against the beam. Three short blows.

She waits.

The void beneath the beam is small. Yudith counts twenty-two seconds. She no longer knows why twenty-two and not twenty. On Tuesday she had thought that twenty-two is the number of the street. Now she no longer knows.

At the twenty-second second the beam answers.

It is not a blow. It is something less. A contact. As if something had touched the beam from below without force. Yudith holds her breath. She strikes a single time. She waits.

A contact.

Yudith turns toward Ochoa and says nothing. Her face has already changed before the word comes to her. Rafael shakes the yellow canteen. Ochoa says in a low voice to bring the pincers and the saw, and to call the doctor, and to wake the mother who is sleeping behind the orange truck.

The extraction lasts two hours. The child of La Guaira is three years old. His name is Manuel Alejandro. He has a broken leg and a strange thing in his right eye. He cries softly, a crying that does not yet have the strength to be a real crying. The mother cannot stay on her feet.

Yudith remains two meters from the crater, on her knees. She hides the spoon in her left pocket. She does not want anyone to ask her about the spoon. She knows that if anyone asked her about the spoon she would have to explain the twenty-two seconds and the code, and the twenty-two seconds do not belong to the official account, they belong to her.

When the truck leaves with Manuel Alejandro and the mother, Ochoa passes close to Yudith. He tells her she has to come to Macuto, now, that the fire is still active. Yudith nods. She stands up. Her knee no longer trembles. Her neck trembles.

Rafael comes closer with the yellow canteen. Yudith drinks a sip. Her hands are so dirty that the neck of the canteen turns grey. Rafael says something Yudith does not understand, perhaps a word in Guaraní, perhaps an old greeting from his childhood. Yudith gives him back the canteen.

She climbs onto the truck. The spoon in her left pocket presses against her thigh.

In Macuto, when they ask her which building she comes from, she says the number. She does not say quadrant four. She does not say the spoon. She does not say the twenty-two seconds.

The team leader of Macuto gives her a pair of gloves. Yudith puts them on. She looks at her own hands inside the gloves and for a moment does not recognize them as hers. Then the team leader points out to her the wall to bring down.

Yudith begins.