Chapter 104: The Thing Under the Skin

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 104: The Thing Under the Skin

The mark moved.

Cole was shaving. That was the whole of it — six in the morning, bad light, half a face of foam, and in the mirror the dark patch under his left ear slid maybe two millimetres toward his collarbone and stopped.

He put the razor down.

Leaned in.

It was where it had always been. Exactly where it had always been. He pressed two fingers against it and felt his own pulse and nothing else, and stood there long enough that the foam started drying on his jaw.

Then it moved again.

Not a slide this time. A pull, under the skin, like something small adjusting its grip.

Cole did not flinch.

He noticed that he hadn't. A normal person would have. Most people's bodies handle something living in my neck moved on its own with more drama than his had.

He finished shaving.

He told Aldric first. Not Vesper, not Mia. Aldric, because Aldric had spent forty-one years around things that weren't supposed to exist and had the useful quality of not being shocked by any of them.

Aldric looked at his neck for a long moment.

"May I?"

"Go ahead."

Aldric pressed a thumb against the mark. His face did something.

"It pushed back," he said.

"It what?"

"It pushed back. Against my thumb." He took his hand away and looked at it like it might have changed. "That is not a birthmark, Cole. I want to be clear that I've been assuming it was some manner of resonance scarring this entire time, and I was wrong, and I should have said something sooner. It's a thing. It's in you and it's aware of pressure."

"How aware."

"I've no idea. I pressed it and it pressed my thumb. Draw your own conclusions."

Cole looked at himself in the hallway mirror. Black hair he hadn't combed, a face he'd never thought much about and which had, for reasons he found tedious, made two separate girls at school walk into doorframes this month.

The mark sat under his ear. Dark now. Nearly black, where six months ago it had been a barely-visible smudge.

"It's bigger," he said.

"Yes."

"How much bigger."

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"Roughly double since I met you," Aldric said. "I noticed in October and assumed you were aware and didn't want to discuss it."

"Aldric."

"I know. I know." He rubbed his face. "Mia's spoken to me about this. I'm working on it."

They ran the test that afternoon, out in the alley, because the alley was where Cole did things he didn't want witnessed from a window.

The theory was simple: if the thing responded to pressure, find out what else it responded to.

Reeve threw a rock at him.

"That was not the agreed methodology," Aldric said.

"It's a methodology." Reeve was already picking up another one. "You said stimulus. A rock is stimulus. Cole, don't dodge."

"I'm not going to dodge."

"You always dodge."

"That's because you always throw."

The second rock came in and Cole didn't move, and half a metre from his face it stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped, in the air, and dropped straight down.

Nobody said anything.

"Do that again," Cole said.

Reeve threw four more. Two stopped. Two hit him, one in the shoulder and one, humiliatingly, in the ear.

"So it's not reliable," Vesper said. She'd been writing everything down, the notebook out and doing an ordinary job for once. "Two out of six."

"It's not unreliable. It's selective." Cole rubbed his ear. "The two that stopped were the two coming at my head."

Vesper stopped writing.

"It's protecting your head."

"It's protecting something." Cole flexed his fingers. The tremor was still there, always was now, running low through his hands like a struck bell that had never fully stopped ringing since Marguerite. "That's not a power. Powers do what you tell them. This did something I didn't ask for and didn't know it could do."

"That's the opposite of reassuring."

"I didn't say it was reassuring. I said it was interesting."

Corvin's people came at nine that night.

Not assassins this time. Corvin had learned something from the phone call, which was unfortunate, because what he'd learned was don't send them to the apartment.

They took Cole outside a corner store four blocks from home, six of them, professional, and they were good — they'd picked a street with no cameras and they moved like people who'd rehearsed this in a room with a floor plan drawn on it.

The first one got a hand on Cole's shoulder from behind.

What happened next took four seconds and Cole could not, afterward, account for two of them.

He remembered turning. He remembered the man's wrist coming apart under his hand with a sound that was not a sound a wrist makes. He remembered gold at the edges of his vision — low, banked. Not the door from the Marguerite fight. Something smaller. Meaner.

Then there was a gap.

Then he was standing in the middle of the street and five men were on the ground and one was running and the mark under his ear was so hot he could feel it through his collar like a coal.

He caught the runner in eleven strides.

"Wait— wait, wait—"

Cole put him against the wall of the store, one hand, feet off the ground. The man was forty. Twice his weight. It cost Cole nothing at all, which was the part he'd think about later.

"Corvin sent you."

"I'm contract, man, I'm just contract—"

"That's not a no."

"Yes! Yes, Corvin, he pays through a—"

"I know how he pays." Cole leaned in. There was no anger in his voice. That was what made the man start shaking. "I made him a promise about my family. He listened. So he came after me instead, which means he heard me, which means he thinks there's a version of this where he stays clever and stays alive."

"I don't— I don't know what you—"

"Tell him there isn't."

He let go. The man dropped, stumbled, stayed upright.

"Tell him exactly that," Cole said. "Don't soften it. If he asks whether I looked angry, tell him no. Tell him I looked like I was scheduling something."

The man ran.

Cole stood in the street with his hands shaking and five people breathing on the pavement behind him and the mark burning under his ear.

Four seconds, he thought. I've got two of them.

He didn't tell anyone about the gap.

He told them about the fight, all of it, the six men and the wrist and what he'd said to the runner. Dana wrote it down. Mia was furious for eleven minutes and then hugged him and then was furious again. Vesper listened without saying anything at all.

He left out two seconds.

Later, upstairs, alone, he stood in front of the mirror again with the light off and pressed his thumb against the mark and said, out loud, feeling ridiculous:

"Was that you?"

The mark pushed back against his thumb.

Once.

[End of Chapter 104]