Chapter 105: Two Seconds

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 105: Two Seconds

He tried to get them back.

That was how he spent Thursday — sitting on the floor of the alley behind the community centre with his back against the wall he'd read the fracture lines out of, working through the fight one frame at a time like a man checking a till that had come up short.

Hand on his shoulder. Turn. Wrist.

Then nothing.

Then five men down and one running.

He could do it forwards and backwards and from either end and the gap didn't move. Two seconds, cauterised, with clean edges on both sides.

"It's not repression," Aldric said. He'd come along because Cole had asked and had spent most of the afternoon sitting on an overturned crate with his coat collar up. "I want to be clear about that, because it's what everyone reaches for first. Repression is messy. It bleeds. You'd be getting fragments, sounds, a smell. This isn't that."

"What is it?"

"I've only seen this shape once before. On a woman whose file I processed in the eighties." Aldric said it evenly. "Two minutes missing out of a Tuesday. Same clean edges. The Ministry assessor wrote it up as a partial dissociative episode and closed the case."

"Was it?"

"No. She'd been edited. Very precisely, by somebody good at it." He looked over. "I'm not suggesting that's what happened to you. I'm telling you what the shape is normally caused by, and asking you to consider that a gap with clean edges usually means somebody put it there."

Cole thought about that.

"Nobody touched me. There were six of them and they were contract."

"Then the gap was put there from the inside."

He kept trying anyway, which was probably the most honest thing about him.

He found a rhythm to it: sit, breathe, put his thumb against the mark, and go looking. Not with Verdict — Verdict was an argument and he had nothing to argue with here. Just attention. Pressing on the place where the two seconds should have been the way you press on a tooth to find out which one it is.

On the fourth attempt he got something.

Not a memory. A texture. The way a room feels when you walk into it and somebody's just stopped talking.

And underneath that, buried so far down it barely registered, a shape that wanted to be a word and wasn't quite.

He sat with it a long time.

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"Anything?" Aldric said.

"No."

That was the fourth lie of the week and he noticed it as it left, which meant he was up to noticing about half of them now.

Dana found the report on Friday.

"Six men," she said, spreading printouts on the table. "You said six. The police report says five hospitalised and one at large."

"That's six."

"That's five and one. Read the injury list."

He read it.

Fractured wrist — that was his, he remembered doing that. Two concussions, a dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs.

And one man with a collapsed lung.

"I didn't do that."

"You did it in the two seconds you don't have," Dana said. She wasn't being cruel about it. She was being a professional, which was worse. "That's the only place it fits."

"A collapsed lung isn't a punch. That's — you'd have to drive something into the chest cavity. Force in a very small area."

"Yes."

"With what?"

Dana didn't answer, because there wasn't an answer, and they both sat with that for a second.

"There's something else," she said. "It's the reason I brought this over instead of calling."

She turned a page.

"The man who ran. He filed a statement. Voluntary — nobody asked him to. He walked into a precinct twelve hours after the incident and gave a full account, which is not a thing contract muscle does, ever, under any circumstances."

"What did he say?"

"He said he ran because you let him. He said it three times in the statement, unprompted." Dana looked up. "And he said something the transcribing officer flagged as 'subject appeared distressed and unreliable.'"

"Which was?"

"He said you weren't looking at him when you said it. He said you were looking slightly to his left, at nothing, and that whatever you said, you weren't the one saying it."

Cole didn't tell Vesper that night. He told her the next morning, which he counted as an improvement and which she did not.

"Twelve hours."

"I wanted to check the report first."

"You had the report at four in the afternoon. Dana brought it to the apartment." Vesper wasn't angry, which was worse than angry. She was doing something careful with her face. "Say the actual reason."

"That is the actual reason."

"Cole."

He stopped.

"Because if I say it out loud, then somebody else knows it," he said. "And right now there are two seconds where I hurt a man in a way I don't have a mechanism for, and I said something I didn't say, and as long as nobody else knew, it was still a filing error. Once you know, it's a fact."

Vesper let that sit.

"That's the most honest thing you've said in a month," she said. "It's also exactly the thing you promised you'd stop doing, in a kitchen, in front of me."

"I know."

"I'm not going to yell at you about it."

"I'd prefer it if you did."

"I'm sure you would. That's a much cheaper way to close the conversation than actually changing." She stood up, took her mug to the sink, rinsed it. "Tell me next time before the twelve hours. Not because you owe me. Because if the thing in your neck is acting while you're not home, I'd rather more than one person is counting."

He went back to the alley that night by himself.

Sat down. Thumb on the mark.

"Okay," he said. "I'd like to try this a different way."

Nothing.

"I know you can hear pressure. You pushed back on Aldric's thumb and you pushed back on mine and you stopped two rocks out of six, and you took two seconds off me on Tuesday and put a man in a hospital with something I don't own."

Nothing. The alley smelled like cinder block dust and old rain.

"I'm not asking you to leave," Cole said. "I want to be clear about that, because I think if you could leave you'd have done it eighteen years ago. I'm asking you to stop taking the seconds. You want the wheel, fine, we'll talk about it. But you don't get to drive while I'm asleep in the passenger seat."

The mark went hot.

Not a flicker — hot, sudden, hot enough that his hand came away from his own neck on reflex, and for about a second and a half the whole alley was lit gold from somewhere under his collar.

Then it went out.

Cole sat in the dark, breathing, hand stinging.

"Yeah," he said. "Okay. That's a start."

[End of Chapter 105]