Chapter 36: A Professional Opinion

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which grown men handle a delicate matter delicately, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry into a burned office. What does the cleverest man in the room need a week and a file to find, the driver finds at a glance, and the father will deny until the end of the world? Do not say the weather. The weather, as it happens, is about to turn.

The fire had been put out in eleven minutes, by a building that seemed to have been expecting one.

By the time the executive floor had stopped dripping, the office looked like the scene of a very small war. There was soot on the windows and a smell of wet carpet, and a broken chair lay in the middle of the floor like something that had lost an argument. Mr. Lotus stood beside it with a pink sheet of paper in his hand. He had not moved since he read it for the third time.

The doors opened. Igred came in first, with his coat steaming, and then Mr. Vale, whose tie was still perfectly straight, which was, in its way, the most alarming thing in the room.

Mr. Lotus did not turn around.

"How?" he said.

Nobody answered.

"A boy. Twelve years old. In my office, in my chair." He turned the word over as if it were a stone he had found in his shoe. "What did we even get from that?"

He looked at his man, and the man was Igred, and Igred looked back at him with the mild, bottomless patience of someone who has been asked to explain the sea.

"Sir," said Igred. "I am a driver. A part-time bodyguard. Do not look at me." He tipped his head, very slightly, to the side. "Look at your detective over there."

Mr. Vale straightened a cuff that did not need it.

"Well," he said, in a calm voice. "The boy clearly has an Antisocial Personality Disorder." He considered this. "But honestly, these days, who doesn’t?"

Igred made a small sound, which he turned into a cough.

"From the information we gathered," Mr. Vale went on, "he is highly calculated, calm, and manipulative. He blends in exceptionally well, and he maintains a perfectly normal facade. There is a complete lack of genuine empathy or remorse. He mimics emotion in order to manipulate others. And he is rarely impulsive." He paused. "Which makes his story with Miss Lotus all the stranger."

It must be said, in the interest of the true account, that this was a very thorough assessment. It was wrong about nearly everything except the facts.

A clever man can read a boy from head to toe, and miss the oldest thing there is to know.

"Meaning?" said Mr. Lotus, in a calm, angry, carefully controlled voice.

"Meaning, it does not fit."

"Then can you tell me why he helped my daughter?"

"Oh, of course." Mr. Vale nodded, quite pleasantly. "I more or less guessed it, and I confirmed it the moment we asked him the first time."

He did not say what it was.

Igred laughed. It was a deep, rich, unhurried laugh, and he had the decency to look slightly ashamed of it.

"Then why torture him?"

"I wasn’t." Mr. Vale’s voice did not change. "If anything, I wanted to see what else he was hiding." He frowned, then, for the first time, at something that was not in the room. "But it is odd. He did not break. He simply... disconnected from reality, somehow. And he is hiding several things. How he got out, for one. A Ghost Item, perhaps, or a hidden Essence, though I doubt it. He is newly Awakened, and the only person in his old life who is Awakened is far away, and has no idea that he is. So how?" He shook his head. "He is a true anomaly."

"Mr. Vale."

"Yes, sir?"

"Stop avoiding the question." Mr. Lotus’s knuckles had gone white around the pink paper. "Why would somebody like that help her?"

Mr. Vale looked at him.

It was the look of a man who has been asked to say a very small sentence aloud, in a very quiet room, and who is quite convinced that saying it would bring a disaster down upon the earth. His mouth opened. His mouth closed. He turned, with great dignity, and looked at the ceiling.

"The driver knows," he said. "Ask him."

Igred sighed, and it came from somewhere near his boots.

He looked at Mr. Vale with one tired eye, the way a man looks at a colleague who has left him holding the last box.

"Fine," he said. "You coward. I will do your job."

He turned to Mr. Lotus.

"He has a crush on her, sir. It is puppy love. She is probably his first."

The silence that followed was a remarkable thing. It was the kind of silence that arrives when somebody has dropped a very small pin, and the pin was a grenade.

Mr. Lotus did not shout. That was the dreadful part.

He lifted one hand, palm out, almost politely, the way a man lifts a hand to say after you.

There was a sound like a freight door closing on the other side of the world. The air between them folded, and Igred went backward across the office in a straight line, upright, with his hands folded in front of him like a man being carried out of a church. He passed through the window without touching the glass. It simply was not there by the time he arrived. For a long moment, the whole executive floor listened to the sound of one very large man falling forty stories, with great composure.

Then, very far below, there was a faint, distant splash.

It was the fountain that nobody sat beside.

A moment after that, a car horn honked twice, politely, in the street. It was the sound of a driver informing his employer that he was perfectly fine, and would wait with the car.

Mr. Lotus lowered his hand.

"She is ten years old," he said, to the hole in the wall where the window had been. His voice shook very slightly with the effort of not shouting. "Nobody is allowed to have a crush on her."

Then he turned, with great and terrible calm, toward his investigator.

The investigator was gone.

There was a wet footprint on the carpet, and another beside it, and the tall doors were still swinging gently on their hinges, as though somebody had passed through them at the speed of a man who had finished his shift. In the middle of the long desk, pinned down by a letter opener, was a small, neat note.

Now that you have been answered, I will keep working at a distance, until you calm down. I will send any further information your way.

—V.

P.S. I have kept the napkin.

The wisest man in any room is the first to leave before the boom.

Mr. Lotus read it once. He did not read it a second time. He folded it, and put it carefully in his pocket, next to a sheet of pink paper.

In the long silence that followed, the sprinklers gave one last, thoughtful drip. Far below, the horn honked again.

"And where," said Mr. Lotus, softly, to nobody at all, "is my daughter tonight?"

There was nobody left to answer him.

TO BE CONTINUED...