Chapter 109: The Name Inside a Week

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 109: The Name Inside a Week

He'd said a week. It took four days.

Not detective work. Dana ran the campus side — who had card access to the north stairwell between four and five on a Saturday, which came back as eleven names, then six after she filtered for people actually on site, then three after she checked who'd signed out early.

Three names. None of them known to anyone in the apartment.

"That's it, then," Reeve said, and he said it too fast, and Cole heard it.

He didn't say anything about it that night.

He sat in the kitchen with the three names on a piece of paper and did the thing he was actually good at, which was not reading people — anyone could read people if they paid attention long enough — but reading the arithmetic of a situation.

Three names with card access. Fine. That was how you'd get a door propped if you were doing it directly.

But you don't need card access to prop a door from the inside. You need to already be inside. Which meant the three names were the wrong list, and had been the wrong list from the moment Dana started building it, and Cole had let her build it anyway for four days because he wanted to see who'd be relieved when it came back with strangers on it.

He turned the paper over and didn't write anything on the back.

"You're being weird," Reeve said on Wednesday.

"I'm always weird."

"You're being specifically weird. You've been looking at me since Saturday."

"Have I?"

"Yes. You do a thing where you look at somebody for about a second and a half longer than a person needs to and I've watched you do it to other people for six years and it is deeply unpleasant from this side."

They were on the front steps. Cole had a soda he wasn't drinking.

"Okay," he said. "Ask me what you actually want to ask."

"Do you think it was me?"

"No."

Reeve's shoulders came down about an inch.

"Then why—"

"Because Corvin called you," Cole said. "In November. On your phone, not mine. And you told everyone about it within an hour, which was the right thing to do, and which also means Corvin now knows exactly how you respond to being contacted, and he is not a man who wastes a data point."

Reeve sat with that.

"So he tried me and I failed his audition."

"He tried you and learned you'd tell. Which means whoever he went to next, he was already fairly sure about." Cole turned the can around. "That's the part I've been sitting with. He had four months. He picked somebody who wouldn't tell."

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Dana came in on Thursday with a fourth list and a face like a closed door.

"Cleaning contractors," she said. "Nobody thinks about cleaning contractors. The lab building subcontracts to a firm that subcontracts to a second firm, and the second firm files no personnel records at all with the university."

"How many people?"

"Fourteen on the Saturday rota. I've got eight names. Three of the remaining six are casual shifts filled the same morning."

"That's not a list, that's a fog."

"It's a fog with a shape." She sat down heavily. "Cole, the reason nobody files records for these people is that most of them are Unranked. Failed classification, no license, no formal employment record anywhere. They get paid weekly in cash by a company that exists on paper for about nine months at a time."

The kitchen went quiet.

Aldric put his tea down.

"I need to say something," he said. "And I'd like to say it before anyone gets further into the list, because it's relevant and it's going to be unpleasant."

"Go on."

"Kaelmoor was maintained by eleven people over forty-one years. I was one. Hollis Verrin was one." He folded his hands. "Nine of the other ten were Unranked. Recruited out of exactly that kind of work. Cash, weekly, no records, no license to lose."

"Why them?"

"Because they were already invisible," Aldric said. "The Choir didn't make them invisible. Society did that first, and then the Choir walked in and offered them the first job in their lives where being invisible was an asset instead of a wound."

Cole went out that night and didn't tell anyone where.

The east district was a forty-minute bus ride and he took it with his hood up and got off two stops early on purpose, because the thing he wanted wasn't at an address.

He found it outside a laundrette at eleven at night: four men and a woman sitting on upturned crates, drinking, off-shift, wearing the polo shirts of a cleaning firm whose name Dana had given him that afternoon.

He didn't approach. He sat on a wall across the road, and he watched, and he did the arithmetic.

Five people. All of them had Convictions — everybody did, that was the load-bearing assumption of the entire field. None of theirs had resolved. He could feel them from across the street, the way you can feel a radio in another room: something playing, too quiet to name.

I was never going to be anything.

I am not the problem here.

One good year. That's all I need. One.

Don't look at me.

Don't look at me.

Two of them had the same one.

Cole sat on the wall for an hour and forty minutes and didn't speak to any of them, and got the last bus back, and stood in the kitchen at one in the morning with his hands flat on the counter.

Vesper was awake. She'd waited up, which she didn't mention and he didn't thank her for.

"Did you find him?"

"No."

"But you found something."

"I found forty-eight thousand people," Cole said.

She didn't say anything.

"Aldric said it weeks ago — twelve years, four thousand a year, somebody taking them faster than they appeared. And I did what everybody does with a number like that, which is nothing, because forty-eight thousand isn't a thing you can picture." He turned around. "Tonight I sat on a wall and read five of them. Two had the same Conviction. Word for word the same. Don't look at me."

"Cole—"

"That's the whole business model." His voice was very flat. "You don't need to hunt people whose Convictions are about being unseen. You put out a job advert. They come to you, and they're grateful, and nobody files a record, and when one of them stops showing up on Tuesdays there's no one whose job it is to notice."

Vesper came and stood next to him.

"So we're not looking for a traitor," she said.

"We're looking for somebody who took the only offer they'd ever been made." Cole's hands hadn't moved off the counter. "And I told a man in a stairwell I'd have their name inside a week, and I meant it as a threat, and now I've got four days left and I've started hoping I don't find it."

He found it on Friday.

Not through Dana's lists. Through the simplest thing in the world — a supervisor at the second subcontractor, when asked whether anyone had quit recently, said yes, actually, funny you ask, one of the casuals hadn't come back since Saturday and hadn't collected her last envelope.

Her name was Trina Vossberg, which was a coincidence about a surname and nothing else, and she was twenty-three years old, and she had been Unranked since her classification at eighteen.

And she had a brother in Ministry long-term care who had been there since February.

One of the other two, Cole thought, standing in an office that smelled like industrial floor polish. February. May. Now.

She's got the February one.

[End of Chapter 109]