Chapter 96: The Part He Doesn't Remember

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 96: The Part He Doesn't Remember

Marguerite was in the street at dawn.

Not hidden. Standing in the middle of the road outside the laundromat with her hands at her sides, in a coat that had been expensive in a decade nobody alive dressed for, waiting.

"Corvin exceeded his authority," she said, before Cole reached the kerb. "Sending men into a residence wasn't sanctioned. I'm here to say that, and to see what you intend to do about it."

"Go home."

"That isn't an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting at six in the morning."

She watched him for a moment. Something in her recalculated — he saw it happen, the small adjustment of a professional revising an estimate.

"You're angrier than you're presenting."

"Yes."

"That's honest. That's new." She took one step, and it was not a threatening step, and that was what made it worse. "Show me, then. I'd like to see it properly before I decide how to write you up."

He did not decide to move.

That was the first thing. Not he moved fast — he did not decide. There was Marguerite two metres away, and then there was his hand around her wrist, and the intervening moment had no content in it at all.

She was already trying to pull back.

That registered as strange, distantly, because he hadn't seen her strike and she had clearly already thrown it.

"Let go," she said.

The mark went hot.

He came back on the other side of the street with his shoulder against a parked car and no memory of crossing.

Marguerite was eleven metres away, on one knee, with blood at the corner of her mouth. The windshield of the car beside her had come apart — not shattered outward, inward, the way the glass had cracked on a delivery van in a street a year ago while a man called Ron Delgado forgot what his hands were for.

A streetlight was out. The one beside it was flickering.

Somewhere down the road, a car alarm was going.

"Wait," Cole said.

His voice sounded wrong to him. Not deeper. Slightly behind, like a dub.

"How long was that."

Marguerite did not get up.

"Nine seconds," she said.

He checked himself and found nothing. No cuts. No bruising. His hands were steady, which was the part that frightened him most, because he had just — as best he could assemble it — crossed a residential street and put a woman through a windshield, and his hands were completely still.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"I didn't—" He stopped. Tried again. "I don't have the middle of that."

"No." Marguerite got up slowly. She did not brush herself off, which for her was equivalent to screaming. "You wouldn't."

"What does that mean?"

"It means I have seen that precise phenomenon twice in my life, and on both occasions the person afterward asked me how long it had been." Her voice had lost its flatness. That was the worst thing in the street. "You asked in the same tone. The same words. I would very much like to know why that is, and I have no framework for it at all."

"Who were they?"

"One of them I processed in 1974."

"And the other?"

Marguerite wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at the blood on it as though it were an unfamiliar object.

"I'd prefer to answer that in a room with a door," she said.

Three doors down, Mrs. Adeyemi's front window had blown out.

Cole saw it as the adrenaline dropped — the glass across her step, the curtain moving in her living room, an eighty-year-old woman standing in her own doorway in a dressing gown with her hand over her mouth.

He crossed to her without thinking about Marguerite at all.

"Are you hurt?"

"No. No, I — " She was staring past him at the street. "What happened? There was a sound like a — I don't know what it was like."

"I don't know either."

"There's glass in my kitchen." Her voice was very small. "It's at the back. The window's at the front. How is there glass in my kitchen?"

Cole did not have an answer for that.

He'd find out the next day that four windows had gone on that street, all of them facing away from where he'd been standing, and that nobody in the neighbourhood could agree on which direction the sound had come from, and that two people had described it as a voice.

Marguerite was still in the road when he came back.

"You're checking on her," she said.

"Yes."

"Before finishing this."

"There's nothing to finish. You can't beat me and I don't know what I'd be doing if I tried." He was aware of how that sounded. He said it anyway. "I don't know what happened in those nine seconds and until I do I'm not stepping into another one on purpose."

Something crossed her face.

"That is the correct response," she said. "It is also not the one I would have predicted from you, and I dislike being wrong twice in one morning."

"Tell me who the other one was."

"No."

"Marguerite—"

"I am not refusing to punish you." She was already turning away. "I'm refusing because you will go and look it up, and you'll find a name, and you'll go and find the person attached to it, and I would rather you did not do that until I understand what I watched happen just now."

She got to the end of the street.

"Cole."

He looked up. She had never used his name.

"For eleven of those nine seconds," Marguerite said, "you spoke."

"That's not — nine seconds doesn't have eleven."

"No," she agreed. "It doesn't."

He sat on the kerb for a while after she left.

Mrs. Adeyemi's son arrived at seven and started sweeping glass. Somebody's alarm was still going four streets over. The laundromat opened at half past and the owner came out, looked at the road, and went back in without saying anything to anyone.

Cole put his hand on his own neck.

The mark was cool. Not warm, not pushing back — cool, and still, and entirely ordinary, the way it had been for eighteen years before any of this.

"Did you do that," he said.

Nothing.

"I'd like to know whether I did that," he said, "or whether you did, and I'd like you to understand that I'm asking because there's an old woman three doors down with glass in a kitchen at the back of her house and she's going to be frightened of her own street now."

Nothing.

He sat there until his legs went numb.

He told them at eight, all of it, including the nine seconds, because he had promised in a kitchen and because Mia had already seen the windows.

Dana wrote 9 SEC on a pad and circled it twice and put her pen down.

"That's not a power," she said.

"No."

"That's a blackout."

"Yeah."

"People with blackouts don't get to decide when they have them." She was not being cruel. She was being what she was. "Cole. If that happens in a room with us in it—"

"I know."

"I'm not finished. If that happens in a room with us in it, I want to know what the plan is, and I want to know it now, while you're sitting down and calm and nobody's bleeding."

Cole looked at the table for a long moment.

"Run," he said.

Nobody said anything.

"That's the plan. All of you. If I go quiet and my voice comes out wrong, you don't try to reach me and you don't stand in front of anybody to protect them from me." He said it very evenly. "You get out of the building and you take Mia with you."

"Cole—"

"That's the plan." He stood up. "I'd like somebody to write it down."

Aldric wrote it down.

[End of Chapter 96]