Chapter 123: The Sixth

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 123: The Sixth

They came for Aldric on a Wednesday afternoon, in daylight, at a supermarket.

That was the choice that told Cole most about them. Not a house at four in the morning. A Tesco car park at half past two, with Marek standing eleven feet away holding a bag of shopping, because a man who has been guarded for nine days gets bored and wants to buy his own bread.

Marek's account, afterward, was four sentences long and he apologised for all of them.

"I looked at the trolley bay. There was a woman by the trolley bay." A pause. "And then I was looking at the trolley bay again and it had been — I don't know. It had been a minute."

"You didn't move."

"I didn't want to move. That's the thing I can't make sound right." Marek had his hands flat on the roof of the car and wasn't looking at anyone. "I wasn't frozen. I was fine. I was standing in a car park holding shopping thinking about nothing in particular and it was completely comfortable and it lasted a minute."

Nobody told him it wasn't his fault, because two people tried and he put his hand up both times.

Aldric was sitting in the passenger seat of a car that was not Marek's car.

Alive. Upright. Seatbelt on, which was the detail that made Dana put her hand over her mouth.

He was humming.

Six.

She was standing at the other end of the car park with her hands in her coat pockets, and she had not moved when the shouting started, and she did not move now.

Thirties. Dark hair cut blunt at the jaw. She was not dressed like Ansel or Voss or any of them — jeans, a good coat, the flat quiet clothes of a woman collecting a child from school. She looked ordinary in a way that was worse than a uniform, and she was watching Cole cross the car park with an expression of mild, patient interest.

"You're faster than the file," she said.

"Give him back."

"He's in a car." She tilted her head at it. "I haven't taken him anywhere. I've been standing here for six minutes waiting for you."

Cole got within eight feet of her and something stopped him.

Not a wall. Not force. His own legs, deciding — a half-second of complete, reasonable certainty that eight feet was close enough and that there was no need to go further, arriving in his own voice, in his own head.

He looked down at his own feet.

"That's good," he said.

"It's the only thing I do."

"You made me not want to."

"I made you finish a thought," she said. "You were already having it. Everyone is. There's always a sentence in a person that says this is close enough, and I don't put it there. I just move it to the front of the queue."

"Name."

"No."

"You know mine."

"Everyone knows yours. You broke a machine in front of four hundred people and then let a man film you not hitting somebody." She said it mildly. "I've read your file eleven times and I've watched the garage footage and the car park footage and the school one, and I'd like to say something about that and then I'd like you to hit me, because we're both aware that's where this goes."

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"Say it."

"You are the only person I have ever read," she said, "who has two sentences in him about the same thing, and they disagree, and neither of them is yours."

Cole did not move.

"That's not an insult. I don't do insults, they're inefficient." She put her head very slightly on one side. "I've been inside four hundred people. Everybody's a crowd — that's normal, that's just being a person. But you've got two that are load-bearing, and one of them is eighteen years old and the other one is not, and I cannot tell which of them was talking to me a minute ago."

She did not fight him. That was the thing Cole found hardest to think about afterward.

He got the last eight feet by putting Verdict on the sentence in his own head — telling a thought that it was wrong about the distance, which cost him a nosebleed and about four seconds — and by the time he got there she had taken her hands out of her pockets and was simply standing with them at her sides.

"Hello," she said.

"You took nine caretakers."

"I took six of the nine. Marguerite did two and one of them died on his own in 2019, which I'd ask you to be accurate about, because I don't want credit for a heart attack." She said it without any pride at all. "Verrin's mine. This one's mine."

"Why him."

"Because he remembers a room with thirty chairs in it," she said, "and there are four people alive who do, and I've now got two."

Cole hit her.

Properly — no reading, no correction, six foot four of him coming off the mark and putting everything through her sternum, and the mark on his neck went hot and the door came up behind his eyes and he let it, for the first time on purpose, and held it for about three seconds.

She went off her feet and across the bonnet of a parked Vauxhall and onto the tarmac on the other side.

She got up.

Slowly, badly, spitting blood, with one arm not working properly — and laughing, in a thin winded way, like a woman who'd had a question answered.

"There it is," she said. "God. All right. I see why she's frightened."

"Who's frightened."

"Ask her." She was still getting her breath. "I'm not being coy, I genuinely can't be the one to tell you. Not won't. Can't. There's a sentence in me about it and I put it there myself, years ago, and it holds a lot better than the ones I put in other people."

"Then tell me what you took from Aldric."

"Nothing yet." She wiped her mouth. "That's the part I came to say and then you hit me, which was fair. He's whole. Look at him — he's sitting in a car humming and in about four minutes he'll ask you what happened to his shopping."

"You smoothed Verrin in nine hours."

"Verrin knew the room and the ledger and the rotation and he'd already talked to a journalist once." She straightened, wincing. "This one's eighty-two and he came out of Kaelmoor on his own and everybody knows where he lives. Taking him is a waste. I came to find out whether you'd get here in under seven minutes."

"And?"

"Five and a half," she said. "That's somebody's problem and it isn't mine."

She walked away.

Cole let her, which he could not entirely justify afterward, and which had something to do with a nosebleed and a man in a car and the eleven seconds it would have taken to close that distance again.

At the edge of the car park she stopped.

"One professional courtesy," she said, "because you've cost me an arm for about a month. There's four of us who can do what I do. Ansel thinks there's four and he's counting himself and he's wrong, because he's not in my four — he does something adjacent and slower and he's never once been told." A pause. "Nobody in that organisation has an accurate map of it. Not one person. I'd think about why that is."

"You're telling me your own structure's compromised."

"I'm telling you it's designed," she said, "and I've been inside it for nineteen years and I still don't know how many of us there are, and last month I found out there's a seventh doing something with money that I'd never heard of."

Then she was gone round the corner of the building, and Marek was shouting, and Aldric — in a car, with his seatbelt on — opened his eyes and said:

"Where's my shopping?"

That night, Cole did not sit in the kitchen.

He went up onto the roof, which he never did, and made one call that lasted under a minute.

The only part anyone else heard was the end of it, because Mia came up looking for him and stopped in the stairwell doorway, and what she heard was her brother saying:

"—no. Leave her alone. She told me something useful."

Then: "I'll handle the money one myself."

And then he turned round and saw her, and smiled, and said, "Hey. You eaten?"

Mia said she had.

She did not ask who he'd been talking to, and could not have said why she didn't, and at the time it did not seem like the sort of thing you'd remember.

They went down together and Aldric was in the kitchen eating the shopping he'd been so determined to buy himself, complaining that somebody had put his bread in the wrong cupboard, and for about an hour it was an ordinary evening.

[End of Chapter 123]