Chapter 87: A Wall That Lies About Itself

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 87: A Wall That Lies About Itself

The blueprints took up the whole table and half the floor.

"Don't stand on the northeast corner," Dana said, without looking up. "That's the only copy."

Reeve stepped over it.

Cole crouched at the edge with his elbows on his knees. Paper only told you so much. Paper couldn't tell you where a wall had been quietly getting away with something for eleven years.

"I want to try Foresight on the drawing."

"It's a drawing."

"Yeah."

"It's ink." Reeve gestured at it. "It's not a wall. It's a picture of a wall."

"Verdict works on ideas sometimes. I don't know why. Nobody's going to tell me why." Cole put two fingers on the northeast corner. "Give me a minute."

It came slower than it did on real things, and thinner, like reading through water.

But it came.

A support beam, second reinforcement, wrong specification. Not dramatically wrong — half a grade under, the kind of substitution a contractor makes on a Friday and nobody checks. It would hold under every load the building had been designed for. It would come apart under one applied in the wrong place on purpose.

Cole took his hand off the paper.

"There," he said, and tapped it. "Support beam. Wrong spec. Went in during the second reinforcement."

Aldric leaned over. He'd been quiet all evening.

"I signed off on that reinforcement."

"I know."

"I walked that corridor twice a week for eleven years." Aldric sat back slowly. "I told myself the building was the one honest thing in that place. Everything else lied. The walls didn't."

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"Nothing's honest for eleven years straight," Thessaly said. "It just hasn't been asked the right question yet."

Thessaly wanted the beam as the entry point and said so in about nine words.

"Cleaner than a fence. No climbing, no dogs, no timing a patrol."

"It's load-bearing," Reeve said. "If it's holding up the northeast section and we take it out—"

"Then the northeast section comes down."

"That's what I'm—"

"I'm agreeing with you." Thessaly tapped the blueprint. "That's records storage. Active files. Bringing a records room down on top of the records isn't an entry, it's an arson."

Everyone looked at Cole.

"I can do it small," he said.

"Can you?"

"Don't know."

"That's not an answer I can plan around."

"It's the honest one." He sat back on his heels. "I've never taken a piece out of something and left the rest standing. Every correction I've made has gone all the way through. This is the first time I'd be trying to stop halfway."

Thessaly looked at him for a moment.

"Then practice," she said.

He practiced for four days in the alley on a stack of breeze blocks Marek stole from a skip.

The first three attempts, the whole stack came down.

The fourth, the whole stack came down.

On the fifth he got one block out of the middle and the rest held for about two seconds and then came down, and Reeve said "that's progress" in a voice that was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

On the eleventh he got a block out and the stack stayed up.

He sat down on the alley floor for a bit after that.

"You alright?"

"Nosebleed."

"That's not an answer to the question."

"It's the one I've got," Cole said, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Eleven goes. That's the thing. It took eleven goes and I'll get one in the actual building."

The rest of the evening was logistics, and logistics is mostly people arguing about minutes.

Thessaly ran response times off Aldric's staffing memory, then wrote a second set of numbers next to them with a question mark because Preston's point about dates had stuck in everyone's head like a splinter. Marek and Reeve walked the entry choreography in the hallway until Mrs. Adeyemi banged on the ceiling.

Vesper drew.

Not the other kind. She sat with the blueprint and a pencil and copied the northeast section out at a bigger scale, neatly, with measurements, and when she was done she had something clearer than the original.

"Where did you learn to do that?"

"I don't know," she said, and put the pencil down, and did not pick it up again that night.

Cole stayed up after the others went.

Aldric came back through at one for a glass of water and found him still at the table.

"You could have used it against me," Aldric said.

"Used what?"

"The beam." He filled the glass. "Eleven years. My signature's on the sign-off sheet for that reinforcement. If that building had ever come down, that's the piece of paper they'd have found."

"Wasn't looking for that."

"No. I know." Aldric drank. "That's rather the thing I came back in to say, and I've now said it badly, so I'm going to bed."

He got to the door.

"It'll be a small hole," he said. "The beam. Don't let anyone talk you into making it bigger than it needs to be. Small holes are how people survive buildings."

[End of Chapter 87]