Chapter 108: Corvin Doesn't Wait

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 108: Corvin Doesn't Wait

Corvin found out about the corridor on Friday morning.

Not from a report. Nobody reported it, because Ansel didn't file reports about things he did on Thursdays, and that was the crack Corvin had been waiting eleven months to get a hand into.

He took it to Voss himself. In person. Which was a mistake and he knew it was a mistake, and he did it anyway, because he'd spent six years being told to earn the comparison and had run out of patience with the arithmetic.

"He was in the boy's building," he said. "Alone. Unsanctioned. No transcript, no escort, no filing."

Voss didn't look up.

"I'm aware."

"You're—" Corvin stopped. Recalibrated. "You knew."

"He called me at six on Thursday evening and told me what he'd done and why, in considerable detail, most of which I didn't need." She turned a page. "He's been telling me about his Thursdays for fifteen years, Corvin. You've been in this organisation for six. Did you imagine you'd found something?"

He went back to the northern facility and sat in his office with the bad coffee for two hours.

Then he made the call he'd been saving.

"It's time," he said.

"You said a month." The voice on the other end was young and wary and had been waiting for this since October. "You said I'd have a month to get closer."

"You've had four. Circumstances have changed."

"What do you want?"

Corvin looked at the wall. There was a water stain on it shaped like nothing at all, and he'd been looking at it for six years.

"I want a door left open," he said. "That's all. One door, one night, and I'll tell you which one four hours beforehand. You don't have to do anything else. You don't have to be there."

Silence on the line.

"And then we're done," the voice said. "You tell me what you promised and we're done."

"Then we're done."

Mia's Ellison cohort ran a Saturday lab session, which was new, and which she'd been complaining about for a fortnight and would have physically fought anyone who tried to stop her attending.

She left at eight.

Cole walked her to the bus stop because he'd started doing that, and because she let him, and neither of them had ever discussed the arrangement out loud.

"You don't have to do this."

"I know."

"It's a bus stop. Four blocks. In daylight."

"I know."

Mia looked at him sideways. "You're going to do it anyway."

"Yep."

"Okay." She adjusted her bag. "Just checking whether you'd become a reasonable person overnight."

The bus came. She got on it. Cole stood at the stop for another thirty seconds after it pulled away, which he also didn't discuss with anyone.

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The lab building had four entrances.

Three of them required a card. The fourth was a fire door on the north side that stayed locked from the outside and opened from the inside, and which had, at 4:40 that afternoon, been propped with a folded piece of cardboard.

Mia noticed it at 6:15 on her way out.

She noticed it because she noticed everything — because she had spent a year in a house where noticing things had become load-bearing — and she stood in the stairwell looking at a folded piece of cardboard in a fire door for about four seconds.

Then she took a photo of it.

Then she went back up two flights, found a different exit, called Cole from the third floor, and said: "Someone propped the fire door on the north side and I'm not using it."

Cole was there in eleven minutes.

He didn't run. That was a thing he'd learned — running arrives out of breath — so he moved fast and arrived able to do something, and he came in through the main entrance with his card in his hand like a person who belonged there.

Mia was on the third floor in a lab with the lights on and eleven other students, which was the single best decision anyone made that day.

"Show me the photo."

She showed him.

"Anything else?"

"Grey car in the visitor lot since about four. Nobody got out."

"Did you—"

"I got the plate. Cole, I've been living in this house for a year, give me some credit."

The three men came up the north stairwell at 6:40.

They'd been told the door would be open and the door had been open, and they'd been told the girl took the north exit at six-fifteen every session, which had been true for four consecutive weeks.

They found Cole in the stairwell instead.

He was sitting on the fourth step from the bottom with his elbows on his knees.

"Hi," he said.

The one in front had time to get most of a sentence out.

"We're not here for—"

Cole stood up.

Later, when Thessaly asked him to walk through it, he could account for all of it — every second, no gaps, which was the part he actually cared about. He'd been afraid of the gaps.

The first man he took at the wrist and the elbow and put into the wall, and the wall took a dent out of the plaster that the university would bill someone for in March.

The second had a baton and got it halfway up.

Cole didn't correct it. He didn't need to. He caught it, took it off him, and hit him once with it in the meat of the thigh, which is not a killing blow and which drops a man instantly and which, more to the point, means he will be in a hospital bed for four days answering questions.

The third one ran.

Cole let him get to the door.

"You'll want to hear this," he said, and something in his voice made the man stop with his hand on the bar. "Because you're the one who gets to carry it."

"Tell Corvin I was on the fourth step," Cole said.

The man was breathing hard. He didn't turn around.

"Tell him I was there twenty-two minutes early, and that I knew which stairwell, and that the door he had propped was propped by somebody whose name I will have inside a week." Cole's voice hadn't risen once. "Tell him my sister found it herself. Sixteen years old. She photographed it, she used a different exit, and she called me. He built four months of work around a girl walking through a door and she noticed the cardboard."

The man made a sound.

"And then tell him the last part, exactly how I say it." Cole took one step closer. "I gave him a rule. One rule, on a phone, after the last time. Not me — them. He heard it. He understood it. And he decided the rule was a thing you could get around if you were clever enough about which building you did it in."

"I'm just—"

"You're just contract. I know. You'll be fine. You're going to walk out that door in about nine seconds." Cole stopped. "Tell him he doesn't get another one. Tell him I'm not going to threaten him again, because a threat is a thing you say when you still want somebody to choose differently, and I've stopped wanting that."

The man ran.

Mia came down forty minutes later, after the campus security she'd called had arrived and taken statements and looked at two unconscious men and one very calm eighteen-year-old and decided, collectively, to let the Ministry handle it.

She sat down on the fourth step next to him.

"You were sitting here."

"Yeah."

"For twenty minutes."

"Twenty-two."

She was quiet for a bit.

"That's a horrible image," she said. "You just — sitting on a step in the dark, waiting for people. I don't like it."

"No."

"I'm not saying don't do it."

"I know what you're saying."

She leaned against his arm.

"I did good, though," she said. "Right? With the door."

Cole looked at the dent in the plaster, and the baton on the floor, and his little sister sitting on a stairwell step at seven at night after a Saturday lab session she'd fought to attend.

"You did better than good," he said. "You did the thing nobody trains for. Anyone can fight. Almost nobody looks at a propped door and takes a photograph."

"It was just cardboard."

"It was cardboard folded twice and pushed into a latch, which is what you do when you want a door to look shut from a distance." He stood, and pulled her up after him. "Somebody taught them that. Somebody's been doing this a while."

Three hundred miles north, at nine that evening, Corvin's phone rang and he let it go to voicemail because he'd recognised the number.

He listened to it twice.

Then he sat in an office with a water stain on the wall, and did nothing at all for a very long time, which was the first genuinely sensible thing he'd done in eleven months.

[End of Chapter 108]