Chapter 144: Nothing to Declare

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 144: Nothing to Declare

The problem with leaving the country was that Cole legally did not have a classification, and every immigration system on earth is built on the assumption that a form can be filled in.

Iris solved it in nine days and would not explain how.

"You're travelling as an unranked civilian."

"I'm not unranked. I'm—"

"You're Category Zero, which is a designation that exists in one country's paperwork and nowhere else." She slid the documents across. "Outside these islands you are a tall eighteen-year-old with a passport. Enjoy it. It's the last time in your life it'll be true."

JFK took four hours because of Dov.

Not because of anything he did — because a twenty-year-old with eight months of inpatient resonance care on his record and no discharge summary triggers something in a system that has never heard of Fairhaven.

They put him in a side room. Trina went with him and did not ask permission.

Cole and Dana and Vesper sat in arrivals for three hours and forty minutes and watched America go past.

That was the first thing, and none of them had expected it to land as hard as it did.

The signage.

RANKED INDIVIDUALS — PROCEED TO LANE 4. CERTIFICATION REQUIRED.

Lane 4 was busy. Not a special queue in a corner — a proper lane, four desks, moving fast, with people holding laminated cards the size of a driving licence and a colour-coded strip down one side.

"They've got lanes," Reeve said. He had his face near the glass. "Look at that woman. She's just — she's showing a card and going through. Like a bus pass."

Dana was reading a wall-mounted notice and had gone very quiet.

"Their scale's different."

"Different how?"

"It's not E to S. It's numbered." She photographed it. "One to nine, and nine's at the top, and there's a line at the bottom that says Tier 1 designation carries no restriction and no obligation."

"So one's the lowest."

"One's the lowest and it's on a public notice in an airport." Dana put her phone away. "Ours doesn't publish the scale in public buildings. I've been in this work eleven years and I've never once seen the ladder on a wall where a member of the public could read it."

Reeve was still at the glass.

"There's a nine," he said.

"What?"

"On the chart. There's a little note under nine." He squinted. "Tier 9 — designation by federal review only. Current holders: 3."

Dana came over.

"They publish the number," she said.

"Is that a lot? Three?"

"I don't know. That's the point." She was looking at a laminated poster in an airport. "We have forty S-Ranks and we don't publish that either, and I have spent four months trying to find out what sits above them, and a country I landed in three hours ago has put its answer on a wall next to a sign about liquids."

Unlawfully taken from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Dov came out at half four.

He looked fine. That was the thing everybody noticed and nobody said — he came out of a four-hour secondary inspection looking better than he had in the departure lounge, and Trina came out behind him looking like she'd been hit.

"They were nice," Dov said.

"Dov—"

"No, I mean it. They were nice, and they had a form for me, and a man called Officer Reyes filled it in and asked me twice whether I understood what he was writing down." He held up a printed slip. "I've got a number."

Cole took it.

PROVISIONAL DESIGNATION: TIER 2 — UNRESOLVED. REVIEW AT 180 DAYS. NO RESTRICTION.

"They classified you in four hours," Dana said.

"Yeah."

"Our country had you in a bed for eight months and never once put a number on you."

Trina said the useful thing in the taxi, which surprised everybody including her.

"They asked him if he understood."

"Trina—"

"Twice. The man asked him twice." She was looking out at a city she had never seen and did not appear to be taking any of it in. "There's a box on a British form that's been crossed out for thirty years and a bloke at an airport desk asked my brother the same question twice in four hours because it's on his form and he's supposed to."

Nobody said anything.

"I'm not saying it's better here," Trina said. "I don't know anything about here. I'm saying I've just watched a stranger do a thing for free that nobody's done for my brother in twenty years."

The hotel was in Midtown and was paid for by a shell company of Iris's, and at eight in the evening Cole stood at a window on the fourteenth floor and looked at a city with the lights on.

He had never been anywhere.

That was the fact he had not prepared for. Eighteen years, one country, four towns, and a bakery on Arden Row — and now eleven million people below a window, none of whom had read a bulletin with his photograph on it.

Nobody down there knew what Category Zero was.

He stood there for about forty minutes, and at some point Vesper came and stood next to him and neither of them said anything for a while.

"It's loud," she said eventually.

"Yeah."

"Not the noise. The — " She gestured at all of it. "There's too much of it. I've spent a year learning how to not be noticed in towns with one high street and I've got no idea how you do it here."

"Probably easier."

"That's what I keep telling myself and it isn't working." She leaned her forehead on the glass. "Cole, there are eleven million people down there and I can't feel a single one of them looking at me and I've been standing here for four minutes waiting for it and it hasn't happened."

"Is that bad?"

"I don't know yet," Vesper said. "It's the first time in a year. I'll tell you in the morning."

Dana came in at nine with a laptop and the first real finding.

"I've got them."

"Got what?"

"The forms." She put it on the bed. "American equivalent. The Bureau publishes retired documentation after twenty-five years — it's a statutory requirement, it's been law since 1978, and there is a website."

"You're joking."

"There's a website, Cole. There's a searchable archive with a filter, and I have spent four hours on it in a hotel room, and I could have done it from my kitchen at any point in the last three years if I'd known it existed."

The American form was not called KF/7.

It was called BR-114 (Consent to Assessment) and it had been in use from 1961 to 1997, and Dana had nineteen scanned examples of it.

It had fourteen boxes.

Cole read it twice before he spoke.

Boxes one through eleven were, allowing for the language, the same eleven that survived on KF/7c.

Box twelve was Offer declined — record and withdraw, the one that vanished from the British form between 1994 and 2009.

Boxes thirteen and fourteen had never been on any British version at all.

Subject advised of duration.

Subject advised of terms of recovery.

"Recovery," Dana said.

"Yeah."

"Not removal. Not integration, not stabilisation, not any of the eleven words our lot use." She had both hands flat on either side of the laptop. "Recovery. That's what you call it when you're getting something back that was yours."

Vesper, from the other bed, said: "Duration."

"What?"

"Box thirteen. Advised of duration." She had her knees up and had not moved for an hour. "That's a length of time. Somebody in America, in 1961, was legally required to tell people how long it would last."

Nobody slept much.

At about two in the morning Cole went down to the lobby because the room had stopped being a room, and sat in an armchair near a window, and watched a city do the thing cities do at two in the morning.

A man came and sat down in the chair opposite him at twenty past.

Late fifties. Ordinary coat. A paper cup of coffee from the machine by the lifts.

"You're the British one," he said.

Cole did not move.

"There's a few of us who watch the arrivals," the man said pleasantly. "Nothing sinister. It's a courtesy thing — somebody comes in unranked, somebody says hello. I drew the short straw."

"Who's we?"

The man drank some coffee.

"That's the wrong first question and I'd like to give you a better one," he said. "Ask me why an American form from 1961 has a box about duration on it."

"All right. Why?"

"Because over here," the man said, "they used to give it back."

[End of Chapter 144]