Chapter 100: The Thing He Doesn't Say

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 100: The Thing He Doesn't Say

He told Reeve two days later, at the corner store, buying soda neither of them wanted.

"Corvin picked you on purpose."

Reeve set the bottle down. "I know."

"You know?"

"I'm not stupid, Cole. He called the guy who's spent his whole life wanting to matter and offered him something important to be the only one who knows." Reeve's mouth twisted. "That's not subtle. That's barely even a strategy. It's just — accurate."

Cole didn't have a response ready for that.

"How long have you known?"

"About an hour after I hung up. Took me that long to stop being angry enough to think properly." Reeve picked at the bottle label with his thumbnail, peeling a strip off. "The worst part isn't that he read me right. It's that for about ninety seconds I actually considered it. Not doing it. Just — considered. What it'd feel like to be the one holding the important thing for once."

"That's not a betrayal, Reeve. That's just being a person."

"Says the guy who's never once in his life wanted to be noticed."

"I broke a scanner in front of four hundred people and got a nickname out of it."

"You hated that."

"Yeah," Cole admitted. "I did."

"Exactly." Reeve set the strip of label on the counter. "You were going to warn me gently. Weren't you. You had some whole approach worked out."

"Maybe."

"Don't." Reeve picked the bottle back up. "That's the thing I actually can't stand. Not him calling me. You deciding how carefully I need to be handled."

"That's fair."

"It's really not, but I appreciate you saying it." He paid. They walked out. The street was cold and starting to get dark early the way it did in November. "If he calls again I'm telling everyone. Immediately. Not because you asked. Because I don't want to be the guy this works on."

"Okay."

"That's it? Okay?"

"You don't need me to approve your decision, Reeve."

Reeve looked at him sideways for a second, then laughed — short, surprised, real.

"Yeah," he said. "Alright. Look at you."

They walked half a block without saying anything.

"For the record," Reeve said, "if it ever does work on me. If I ever do something stupid because somebody found the right sentence." He didn't look over. "I'd want you to stop me. Not gently."

"I know."

"That's not a promise."

"No," Cole said. "It isn't."

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Vesper was on the fire escape when he got back. She'd been there for a while. There was a blanket involved, which meant she'd planned it.

"I want to ask you something," she said, before he'd fully sat down. "And I want you to not be clever about the answer."

"That's a hard limitation to put on me."

"I mean it."

"Okay." He sat. "Ask."

She didn't, for a second. Just held the mug she'd brought up with her, not drinking from it.

"Do you actually want this," she said. "Whatever this has turned into. Or is it just that I'm here and everything's dangerous and we keep ending up on the same fire escape."

Cole thought about being clever. Genuinely considered it, felt the reflex arrive fully formed — some deflection, some joke, something that would have made her laugh and let them both keep not-saying it for another two months.

"I want it," he said.

Vesper looked at him.

"That's it?"

"You told me not to be clever."

"I didn't think you'd actually listen." She set the mug down. Her hands weren't quite steady. "I've been building an exit out of this conversation for three weeks. I had a whole version where you said something funny and I laughed and we went back inside."

"Sorry to ruin it."

"Shut up." She was almost smiling. "I don't know what I am, Cole. That hasn't changed. There are years of me missing and a drawing of your face I don't remember making and I might not be a person who gets to have normal things."

"I know."

"That doesn't bother you?"

"You've met me," Cole said. "I broke a government scanner by standing near it. I've got a mark on my neck that's older than I am. An ancient woman took one look at me in a library and nearly had a heart attack." He shrugged. "I'm not exactly shopping for normal."

"That's not the same thing."

"No. It's worse, probably." He turned to look at her properly. "I'm not saying this because we're the only two weird things in the room and it's convenient. I've had months to talk myself out of it. I'm annoyingly good at talking myself out of things. It didn't take."

Vesper was quiet.

"Say something," he said.

"I'm trying to decide if I believe you."

"Do you?"

"Yes." She sounded almost annoyed about it. "That's the problem. You're the only person I've ever met who I can't read as performing something, and I've spent a year and a half assuming everyone was."

"I perform constantly. Ask literally anyone."

"Not with me." She said it flatly, like a fact she'd checked twice. "That's the part that scares me more than the missing years."

He didn't know what to do with that, so he did the only thing that seemed honest, which was to reach over and take her hand — the shaking one, the one that hadn't fully stopped since Marguerite — and let her feel it tremor against her palm without apologizing for it.

She didn't let go.

"That's not getting better," she said.

"No."

"Are you scared?"

"Yeah."

"Good." She shifted closer, blanket and all, until her shoulder was against his. "I'd be considerably more worried if you weren't."

They stayed out there a long time. Nobody came looking for them. At some point she kissed him, or he kissed her — neither of them could have said afterward which, and both of them argued about it later for years, badly, with no evidence on either side.

Down in the apartment, Mia looked up at the ceiling, heard absolutely nothing, and said, to no one, "Finally."

Four hundred miles north, in a town where nothing had changed in forty-one years, a man in an expensive coat walked down Main Street in the dark.

The woman was still watering her flowers. She always was. Same three flowers, same four notes hummed and never finished, the same six inches of motion she'd been making since before the man had gone grey at the temples.

He stopped a few feet away. He didn't speak. He never did, not anymore — he'd tried, the first decade, and she'd never once looked up, and eventually he'd stopped being able to survive the not-looking-up.

The strange part, the part he'd never said out loud to Marguerite or Voss or anyone else in forty-one years, was that he couldn't remember her name.

He knew that he'd known it. He knew there had been a time when saying it was the most ordinary thing in the world, when it lived in his mouth a dozen times a day and cost him nothing. The knowledge of the absence was perfect. The thing itself was gone.

So he came, and he stood, and he watched a woman water three flowers, and he had no idea who she was. Only that some part of him underneath everything had decided, a very long time ago, that this was worth building a life around.

Ansel stood there for eleven minutes. He'd timed it once, years ago, and found that eleven was exactly how long he could hold it before the thing in his chest that had no name and no memory attached to it started to hurt in a way that made driving home difficult.

At eleven minutes he turned and walked back to the car.

"Soon," he said, to nobody, to the street, to a woman who would never hear it. "I'm almost finished. It's almost whole."

The town went on being frozen behind him. The flowers, which had been watered every day for forty-one years and had not grown a millimeter in any of them, went on not growing.

[End of Chapter 100][END OF VOLUME TWO]