Chapter 116: The Woman Who Reads Backwards

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 116: The Woman Who Reads Backwards

Her name was Odile Sarkis and Iris had to call in something to get her, which she wouldn't explain.

"She doesn't do this anymore," Iris said, on the drive. "She stopped in 2011. She's going to do it once, for you, and then she's going to tell you never to contact her again, and you're going to accept that gracefully."

"What is she?"

"Retrospective resonance. She reads what's already happened to a person." Iris took a corner. "The Ministry rank her A. That's a clerical fiction. There are four people in this country above the S scale and nobody's supposed to know the category exists, and she's one of them, and she's spent fourteen years running a bookshop to avoid being the other thing."

"What's the category called?"

"Sovereign." Iris said it the way you'd say a word in a church. "One per country, usually. Not awarded. Applied. You get it when what you are stops being a personal matter and starts being an infrastructural one."

The bookshop was the kind that doesn't make money and isn't supposed to.

Odile Sarkis was sixty, small, in a cardigan with a pen through the bun in her hair, and she looked at Cole for about a second and a half and then said, "No."

"You haven't—"

"I'm aware of what I haven't done." She came out from behind the counter and locked the front door, which Cole noted was not a refusal. "Sit at the back. If I start bleeding from anywhere, the answer is still no, but I'd like you to get me a chair first."

"I'm going to look at what's behind you," she said. "That's all. I don't do futures, I don't do sideways, I don't do anything clever. You've got a past and I can read it the way you'd read the back of a book."

"Has anyone ever—"

"Stopped me? No. It isn't that kind of thing. It doesn't touch you." She sat down opposite him. "Most people don't feel anything at all. A few feel cold. One woman in 1994 sneezed."

"That's it?"

"That's it. I look, I tell you what I saw, you go home and never come back here."

Vesper was standing by the shelves with her arms folded. Iris was by the door. Nobody sat.

"Ready?" Odile said.

"Yeah."

She looked at him.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Cole felt nothing.

That was the first forty seconds — Odile Sarkis with her eyes on his face, unblinking, perfectly still, and Cole sitting in a chair in a bookshop feeling absolutely normal and slightly bored and aware that his left foot had gone to sleep.

He shifted his weight off it.

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't talk."

"Right."

Another twenty seconds.

Then something at the very back of his attention — behind his eyes, behind the mark, behind whatever room in him he'd been calling the door since Marguerite — noticed her.

It wasn't a feeling. It was the click of a thing turning over.

Cole turned his head and looked at her.

Not at her face. That was the part Vesper couldn't explain afterward, and tried to, three times, and gave up on. He didn't look at Odile Sarkis.

He looked at a point about four inches to the left of her head, at nothing at all, and he held it — and Odile Sarkis, who had read three hundred and eleven people and never once been noticed doing it, came out of her chair so fast she took the table with her.

The lamp went over. A stack of paperbacks went across the floor.

She got as far as the wall and stopped, with both hands flat against it, breathing like someone who'd been under water.

"What was that," she said.

Cole blinked.

"What was what?"

He didn't know.

That was the thing he kept saying for the next ten minutes, and it was true, and it was the least useful true thing in the room.

"I felt nothing. I shifted my foot. Then I looked over."

"You looked at me."

"I looked at a bookshelf."

"You looked at where I was standing," Odile said. "Not my body. The place I was doing it from. There is no direction to it, Mr. Vale. There is nothing to point at. It is not a place, and you turned your head and put your eyes on it like a man checking who'd come into a room."

Iris had not moved from the door. Her posture had changed entirely.

"Odile," she said. "What did you see. Before that."

Odile Sarkis sat down on the floor with her back to the wall, which Iris said later was the single most alarming thing about the whole afternoon.

"I got eleven years," she said. "Backwards from today. Ordinary. A boy, a sister, a flat above a laundry, a great deal of toast. Nothing that isn't in his file."

"And before eleven years?"

"There's a wall."

"He's eighteen."

"I'm aware of how old he is." Her voice was not steady. "I have read children. I have read a four-year-old, once, for a custody matter, and it was distressing and it worked. I go back until there's nothing left to go back through. With him I got to seven years old and the reading stopped."

"Stopped how?"

"Stopped like a corridor with a door at the end of it," Odile said. "A closed one. And I have been doing this for forty years and I have never encountered a closed door in a person, because people are not built with doors, Ms. Calloway, they are built with rooms that get smaller."

"What's behind it?" Cole said.

"I don't know."

"Could you open it?"

"I didn't try," Odile said, "because the moment I got close enough to see what it was, something on the other side of it looked back at me, and then you turned your head."

The bookshop was very quiet.

"You should go," she said.

"Odile—"

"I'm not frightened of you. I want that understood, because I think people are going to start being frightened of you and I don't think that's the correct response." She was still on the floor. "I'm frightened of the fact that a door in a seven-year-old had already been closed. Somebody shut it. That is a thing a person did, deliberately, to a child, and they did it well enough that in forty years I have never seen the technique before."

Nobody spoke for the first ten minutes of the drive.

"Seven," Vesper said eventually.

"Yeah."

"That's — " She stopped. "Cole, that's the year your father left."

Cole looked out the window.

"Yeah," he said. "I noticed."

[End of Chapter 116]