Chapter 103: The Quiet Years

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 103: The Quiet Years

Aldric said it at eleven in the morning, four hours into a conversation nobody had planned.

"You don't know about the Quiet Years."

Dana looked up. "Should I?"

"It's public." He seemed genuinely thrown. "It's not classified, it's not redacted, it's in the Ministry's own published record and there are four papers about it. I assumed it was — " He stopped. "I assumed everyone knew and had decided not to think about it. That's what I've been doing for twenty years."

"Aldric."

"Nineteen seventy-nine to nineteen ninety-one," he said. "Twelve years. In that period, thirty-one new Convictions manifested worldwide."

Reeve laughed. He stopped almost immediately.

"That's not — say a real number."

"That is the real number. Thirty-one. Global." Aldric had his hands flat on the table. "The baseline before it was about four thousand a year, and the baseline after it was about four thousand a year, and in between there were twelve years where the world produced thirty-one."

"That's not possible," Dana said.

"It happened."

"No — I mean it's not possible to hide. Four thousand a year going to nothing isn't a statistic, it's every school in the country noticing." She was already shaking her head. "There'd be a generation. There'd be a gap in the licensed population that you'd see in every workplace for forty years."

"There is one," Aldric said.

Dana stopped.

"There's a gap in the licensed population between the ages of thirty-four and forty-six," he said, "and if you ask anyone in the Ministry about it they'll tell you it's the recruitment shortfall from the restructuring, and they will believe that, because it's what they were told during induction and nobody has ever had a reason to check."

"I've been in Compliance-adjacent work for eleven years."

"Yes."

"I have never once noticed there aren't any forty-year-olds."

"No," Aldric said. "Neither did I, for twenty."

Dana had her laptop open inside ninety seconds and it was worse on a screen.

The graph looked like a fault in the printing. Four decades of a steady band, then a line that fell off the bottom of the chart and lay flat along the axis for twelve years, then came back up as though nothing had happened.

"Official position?"

"Reporting-methodology artifact." Aldric recited it. "Four papers. All four concluded the drop was an artefact of inconsistent international classification standards during a period of institutional restructuring."

"Do you believe that?"

"I believed it for twenty years because it was easier than the alternative and because I had a job." He said it flatly. "All four papers were funded by the same foundation."

Nobody asked which one.

Mia did the arithmetic out loud and then wished she hadn't.

"Four thousand a year. Twelve years."

"Mia—"

"Forty-eight thousand." She had stopped writing. "Forty-eight thousand people who should have manifested something and didn't."

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

"That's not necessarily—"

"No, I know it's not necessarily people taken. It could be people prevented. It could be people who manifested and got recorded as nothing." She looked up. "That's worse, isn't it. That's not better. If they were prevented then there are forty-eight thousand people walking around right now who are wrong in a way nobody's ever told them about."

The kitchen was quiet.

"That's a good point," Aldric said, "and I want you to know I have never once had it, in twenty years, and I've thought about this a great deal."

Cole went out.

Not dramatically — he said he wanted air and he took the stairs, and Vesper found him on the second-floor landing sitting on the step with his forearms on his knees.

"Forty-eight thousand," she said.

"Yeah."

"I keep trying to see it and I can't. I can see Elena. I can see Bellamy, and Dov in a bed, and the woman with the flowers." She sat down two steps below him. "I can't see forty-eight thousand. It's just a word that means 'lots.'"

"No."

"What?"

"It's not a word that means lots." Cole was looking at the wall opposite. "It's four hundred people in a town like Kaelmoor. A hundred and twenty times."

Vesper didn't say anything.

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't be sorry. That's the first version of it I've been able to hold."

Dana found the local number that afternoon and it was the only useful thing anybody did all day.

"Regional breakdown. It's in the third paper, as an appendix, and I don't think anybody's opened it since 1994." She turned the laptop. "Everywhere else on earth goes flat in 1979 and stays flat until 1991."

"And here?"

"Here it goes flat in 1979 and comes back in 1987." She let that sit. "Four years early. We're the only region on the chart that does that."

Aldric leaned in and read it twice.

"Kaelmoor burned in 1985," he said.

"Yes."

"And two years later this region starts producing Convictions again while the rest of the world is still at nothing."

"Yes."

"That's—" He sat back. "That could mean four things and I can't tell you which."

"Name them."

"No." Aldric shook his head. "I've spent four months handing this house conclusions and half of them turned out to be twenty-two months old. I'll tell you what the data says. I'm not going to tell you what it means today."

Dana looked at him for a second and then, unexpectedly, nodded.

"Fine," she said. "Then we sit with it."

They sat with it for the rest of the day and got nowhere, which was the honest outcome and which nobody enjoyed.

Reeve put the graph on the whiteboard. Somebody wrote 48,000? under it with a question mark that got heavier every time anybody looked at it. Elena made three attempts at saying something and abandoned all three.

On the fourth she got it out.

"I was born in 1993," she said.

Everyone looked at her.

"Two years after it ends. Dana's 1989, which is in it." Elena had her hands round a mug she hadn't touched. "I've been sitting here for an hour doing the thing where you check whether it's about you, and it isn't, and I feel — I don't know what I feel. Relieved and disgusting about being relieved."

"Elena—"

"I'm not fishing. I'm saying it because somebody in this room was going to work it out and I'd rather it came from me." She put the mug down. "Dana was born inside the Quiet Years and has a Conviction. That's one of thirty-one, or it's one of the ones that got recorded as nothing, or the regional thing means it doesn't apply here in the way we think."

Dana had gone completely still.

"I hadn't got there," she said.

"I know. You were doing the graph." Elena almost smiled. "Somebody's got to do the people."

At six Mia came back from the library with a printout.

"There's a fifth paper," she said. "It isn't funded by anyone. It's a master's thesis from 1996 and it's got eleven citations and none of them are from the last twenty years."

"What's it say?"

"Mostly what the others say." She put it on the table. "Except the conclusion. The conclusion says the methodology explanation doesn't hold, because if it were an artefact of inconsistent classification standards, the drop would be uneven between countries, and it isn't. It's identical everywhere. Same start date, same depth, same recovery."

"Meaning what?"

"She doesn't say. She says it's outside the scope of the paper." Mia's jaw was set. "Her name's Ines Bravo-Okafor and she'd be about sixty now."

"Same Okafor as—"

"I checked. No relation. I asked Mr. Okafor at lunch and he didn't know who she was."

Dana had her inside forty minutes.

Not the woman — the trail. A doctorate never completed. An academic post held for nineteen months in 1998 and 1999 and then nothing. An address in a city eleven hours north, current as of a council tax record from 2021.

And, in 2003, a name change.

"That's not necessarily—" Reeve started.

"People change their names for a lot of reasons," Dana agreed. "Marriage. Divorce. Wanting to be somebody else." She was already writing it down. "And sometimes they change them because a man came round and offered to clear out their mother's house."

Cole was last up.

He stood at the whiteboard for a while with the graph on it and the number underneath it and the question mark somebody had gone over four times.

Twelve years. Thirty-one people. A line lying flat along an axis, and then, in one region only, coming back up two years after a town burned.

He didn't have a theory. That was the part that would matter later — that on the night they learned about the Quiet Years, Cole Vale stood in front of a whiteboard for eleven minutes and genuinely did not know what it meant.

He turned the kitchen light off and left the lamp on, because the lamp stayed on now, and went to bed.

[End of Chapter 103]