Chapter 110: What Her Brother Was For

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 110: What Her Brother Was For

Trina Vossberg wasn't hiding well.

That was the first thing Cole understood about her, standing in the stairwell of a building in the east district on a Saturday morning with a bag of groceries she'd left on the landing because she'd heard him coming up and panicked.

She was in the doorway with a kitchen knife held in a grip that told him she had never once used a knife for this.

"I know who you are," she said.

"Okay."

"I'm not — " Her voice broke somewhere in the middle. "I'm not going to fight you."

"I know."

"Then why are you here?"

Cole picked up the groceries and held the bag out.

"Because you left these on the landing," he said, "and eggs don't last."

Her flat was one room and a kitchen corner. Clean. Everything that could be folded was folded.

On the wall by the window: eleven photographs of the same young man, arranged in a line, with dates written underneath in marker.

The last one was from February.

"His name's Dov," she said. She hadn't put the knife down; she'd put it on the counter, which was different. "He's twenty. He went for classification in February and the machine did — whatever it did to you. And then they took him for observation and he's been in a Ministry care ward for eight months and I'm allowed to see him for forty minutes on the second Sunday of the month."

"What's he like?"

She stopped.

"What?"

"You've been talking about what happened to him. I asked what he's like."

Trina sat down on the arm of a chair like her legs had stopped consulting her.

"He's annoying," she said. "He's — he hums. All the time, he doesn't know he's doing it, he's done it since he was four and I used to scream at him about it." She was crying and talking at the same time, badly. "And now he doesn't. That's the thing. I go in and he's quiet. Eight months and he hasn't hummed once and nobody in that building even knows that's wrong."

Corvin had found her in September.

He hadn't threatened her. Cole had known he wouldn't — threats were what you used on people who had something left to lose, and Corvin, whatever else he was, was not stupid about incentives.

He'd offered her a transfer.

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"Out of Ministry care into a private facility," Trina said. "He said there's one up north. He said it's — he showed me pictures. There's a garden. He said Dov could have his own room and I could visit whenever I wanted, not the second Sunday, whenever, and it wouldn't cost me anything because somebody else pays for those."

Cole felt the floor tilt.

"A trust," he said.

"He didn't say trust. He said 'it's already funded.'"

Lian Chen's account. Fifteen years, never late. Not one account. A mechanism. Corvin hadn't invented anything — he'd found a forty-year-old administrative habit sitting in a filing system and used it as currency, because it cost the organisation nothing and it bought him a twenty-three-year-old woman who'd do one small thing.

"What did he ask you to do?"

"Prop a door." She wiped her face with her wrist. "That's all. That's all, he said one door, one night, and I wouldn't even have to be there, and I said no."

"You said no."

"Four times." Her voice went up. "Four times, from September to January. And then in January I went in on the second Sunday and Dov had a bruise on his arm nobody could explain and a nurse said he'd been agitated, and I sat in my car in the car park for an hour and then I called the number."

Cole stood in a one-room flat with eleven photographs on the wall and understood something he'd been circling for two chapters.

He'd come here to get a name.

He had the name. He'd had it since Friday. What he'd actually come for was the thing he was now holding, which was a twenty-three-year-old who'd said no four times, and who had bought her brother's safety with a piece of folded cardboard, and who had not — this was the part that mattered — she had not asked a single question about what the door was for.

"You didn't ask who was coming through," he said.

"No."

"Why not?"

Trina Vossberg looked up at him, and for one second she was not frightened at all.

"Because if I'd asked, I'd have had to decide," she said.

He didn't touch her.

He'd walked up those stairs not knowing what he'd do, which was rare enough that he'd noticed it on the way, and somewhere around the third landing the thing in his neck had gone hot in a way he now recognised as anticipation, and he had told it — out loud, on a stairwell, like a lunatic — not this one.

"What happens now," Trina said.

"Now I ask you a question, and the answer decides it."

"Okay."

"Corvin's transfer. Did it happen?"

She shook her head.

"He said after. He said once the door thing was done." Her hands had gone into her sleeves. "That was three weeks ago. He doesn't answer. I've called eleven times."

Cole nodded slowly.

"Right," he said.

And then he did something he had not planned, would not have predicted, and would spend a considerable amount of the next year turning over in the dark.

He sat down on her floor.

"Second Sunday's tomorrow," he said. "I'm going to come with you."

The mark went off in the ward.

Not the corridor. Not the car park. In the room, forty minutes into a forty-minute visit, with Dov Vossberg sitting up in a Ministry bed with his hands in his lap, not humming.

Cole had come to look. That was all he'd intended — to see the February one, to see what eight months of observation looked like on somebody who'd broken the same machine he had.

What he saw when he opened Foresight was nothing.

Not damage. Not a fracture line. Nothing — a young man with a hole where the reading should be, the same hole the Chamber had found in Cole on Ranking Day, except Dov's had been sitting untouched in a hospital bed for eight months while a system with no category for it filed him under observation and waited.

And the thing in Cole's neck saw it too.

It moved.

Not a twitch. It unfolded — the same word from eighteen years ago in a copper room, the same unhurried opening of something that had been waiting, and this time Cole felt it go all the way.

Gold came out of his collar and filled the room.

Trina screamed. A nurse in the corridor dropped a tray. Every light on that wing died and came back at half power.

And Dov Vossberg's head came up.

He looked at Cole.

And in a voice that had not said anything in eight months, in a language Cole had never studied and understood completely, the twenty-year-old in the bed said:

"You came back."

Then he started humming.

[End of Chapter 110]