Chapter 173: Number Thirty-Eight

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 173: Number Thirty-Eight

15:28

It took Dana six hours to find a way into the east annex, and at the end of them she put the phone down and said, "There isn't one."

"There's always one."

"Not today." She turned the laptop round. "They've changed every access code in the building since yesterday. They've pulled the stair camera off the maintenance list and fixed it. Dobson's been moved to the car park." A pause. "And at two o'clock this afternoon, the Ministry assigned a licensed operative to the main entrance. Not security. An operative."

"Who?"

Dana scrolled.

"Thomas Oduya," she said. "S-Rank. Number thirty-eight on the list they published last night."

Reeve, on the arm of the sofa, looked up from his phone.

"They've put the bottom of the list on the door," he said slowly. "The bottom. Of their own list." His face did something complicated. "Cole, they've put him there so that if you go through him, it's number thirty-eight. They're making it a ranking."

"It's already a ranking," Iris said, from the window, without turning round. "They just didn't expect it to be one they'd lose."

15:41

The east annex had a wide flight of stone steps up to the entrance, and at the top of them, in front of the glass doors, a man was standing with his hands behind his back.

Early thirties. Very still. A plain dark jacket with a small silver pin on the lapel that meant nothing to most people and a great deal to anybody who'd ever looked at the Ministry register.

There were about forty people on the pavement across the road.

Nobody had told them anything. They had simply seen who was standing on the steps, and then seen who was walking up the road toward them, and stopped — the way people stop for an accident, or a wedding — and got their phones out.

Cole stopped at the bottom of the steps.

Oduya looked down at him.

"Mr. Vale."

"Mr. Oduya."

"I'd like to say before anything happens that this isn't personal." He had a quiet voice, and he meant it. "I was rung at one o'clock and told to stand here. I've been S-Rank for four years. I've never been asked to stand anywhere."

"There's an old man upstairs," Cole said. "In Room 4B. He's seventy-three. Somebody's taking his memory out of him, one piece at a time, and they've been doing it for three weeks, and they're finishing it by teatime."

Oduya did not move. But something went across his face.

"I wasn't told that."

"No," said Cole. "You were told you were number thirty-eight."

The crowd across the road had gone very quiet.

Oduya looked at him for a moment longer. Then he looked past him, at the forty phones held up at chest height across the street, and something in his posture changed — not softened. Decided.

"I'm still going to stand here," he said. "I'm sorry. I gave my word at one o'clock. I don't know how to not have given it."

"I know," Cole said. "I'm not asking you to move."

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from NovelPhoenix. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

He went up the steps.

Oduya's Conviction came up to meet him — Cole felt it arrive, a solid pressure in the air at the top of the stairs, like walking into a wall that wasn't there. It was a good Conviction. Clean and resolved and honest, the kind the Ministry had built its whole scale to measure.

I keep my word.

Cole walked into it.

He did not push. He didn't read it, he didn't correct it, he didn't say anything to it at all. He simply kept walking up the stairs, at the same speed he'd been walking since the bottom — and the wall that wasn't there met him, and held, for about a second.

Then it gave.

Not broke. Gave — the way a door gives when the person behind it realises they were only leaning on it. Oduya took one step back, and then another, and found himself standing to one side of the glass doors with his back against the frame, and his hands still behind him, and his word, somehow, still kept.

He had stood there. He had not moved. Cole had simply gone past.

Across the road, forty phones caught it.

It was not a dramatic video. That was why it was the one that went round the country by six o'clock. A tall boy walking up a flight of stone steps at an ordinary pace, and a man in a dark jacket at the top of them, and the air between them shimmering for one second like heat off a road — and then the boy was at the door and the man was against the frame, unhurt, blinking, and the boy stopped with his hand on the door and said something to him too quietly for any phone to hear.

What he said was: "You kept it. Tell them you kept it."

Thomas Oduya stayed exactly where he was until the building closed that evening. When a reporter asked him the next morning what had happened, he said, "I stood where I was told and he walked past me," and would never say anything else about it.

15:52

Room 4B was on the second floor.

The corridor outside it was empty. The door was closed. And through it, faintly, came a voice Cole recognised, speaking very gently, the way you'd speak to somebody falling asleep.

He opened the door.

There were cups by the water cooler. The blinds were down.

Aldous Bellamy was sitting at the long table in the chair where he had sat on the review panel for forty-one years, in a tie, with his hands folded in front of him. His eyes were open. He was listening to the man across the table from him with polite, slightly puzzled attention, like a man at a lecture on a subject he didn't follow.

And across from him, with one hand resting on the table an inch from Bellamy's, sat Ansel.

Ansel looked up.

"You're early," he said. "I'd hoped you'd be later."

"Stop."

"I'm very nearly finished." Ansel did not take his hand away. "I've been doing it properly — three weeks, a little at a time. It doesn't hurt him. It's the kindest way there is. I've always done it the kind way. You know that."

"He wrote a note, Ansel. Three weeks ago. If I sign anything from now on, it isn't me."

"I know he did. I was there when he wrote it." Ansel's voice did not change. "He wrote it in the first session, when he still understood what was happening. And then he signed an order two days later with the same hand, and didn't remember writing the note." He looked at Bellamy. "That's what the tenth pass is, Cole. It's the part of him that knew, taken out a little at a time, until only the part that signs is left."

Cole crossed the room.

He did not hurry, and he did not look at Ansel. He crouched beside Bellamy's chair and looked up into the old man's face, and found what he'd known he would find — calm, polite, completely smooth. Almost finished.

Almost.

Down in one corner, where the 1966 seam had been — the four inches Cole had opened in a café — there was something left. Not much. The width of a word.

Aldous.

A woman in a kitchen with a yellow thing in it, saying his name like she was cross with him. Ansel had been three weeks smoothing everything round it, and had not been able to make himself take that last piece.

Cole looked across the table at him.

"You left it," he said.

Ansel's face did not move.

"You've been three weeks at this and you've left the one thing he got back. His name. The woman in the kitchen." Cole's voice was very quiet. "You couldn't do it."

"I was going to do it at four."

"No, you weren't," Cole said.

The gold came.

Not all of it. Not the street, not the van. A thin line of it from the corners of his eyes, down along his jaw — just enough that the room went a shade warmer and every cup by the water cooler rattled once on its saucer — and he put two fingers against the back of Bellamy's hand and did not say the word.

He didn't need it. There was nothing owed here. There was only a door that somebody had been pushing closed for three weeks, and a boy on the other side of it, holding it.

He held it.

Ansel took his hand off the table.

Then — slowly, like a man who has not done something in a very long time and has forgotten how his knees are supposed to go — he got up out of his chair, and came round the end of the long table, and stopped in front of the boy crouched beside Bellamy.

And went down on one knee on the carpet of Room 4B.

Nobody had looked at him. Nobody had told him to. Reeve, in the doorway, would say afterward that it was not like the corridor, not like the carpet at the nursery, not like any of the people who had sat down.

"They fell," Reeve said. "He knelt. He chose it."

Ansel knelt on the floor with his head bowed and one hand on his knee, and when he spoke his voice was not steady at all.

"I don't know why I'm doing this," he said. "I want you to know that. I have absolutely no idea why I'm doing this."

[End of Chapter 173]