Chapter 121: Two of Eleven

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 121: Two of Eleven

Hollis Verrin would not leave his house.

"I've been in it thirty-one years," he said, on speakerphone, in a voice that had gone thin since the last time Dana called. "I've got a chair I like."

"Mr. Verrin—"

"I'm aware of the list. You told me about the list." A pause. "I've counted the names. I did that the first night. I know there's two of us."

Aldric, sitting across the table with his hands round a cup he wasn't drinking from, said nothing at all.

They sent Thessaly and Marek up on the Tuesday and Verrin let them sit in his front room and drink tea and check his windows, and then at eight o'clock he told them politely to go home.

"He's not being stupid," Thessaly said, on the phone from the car. "That's the annoying part. He's made a decision. He says if they want him, they'll have him, and he'd rather it happened somewhere he knows where the light switches are."

"That's stupid."

"That's considered," Thessaly said. "There's a difference and he's earned it."

Cole spent that week doing something he didn't explain particularly well.

He went out to the alley in the mornings and stood there.

Not training. Reeve came down twice to watch and got bored both times, because what Cole was doing was putting two fingers on the mark below his ear and standing very still for forty minutes, and then going upstairs and eating toast.

"Anything?"

"Not yet."

"What are you actually doing?"

"Asking."

"Asking what?"

"That's the problem," Cole said. "I don't know what the noun is. I've tried talking to it. I've tried thinking at it. On Monday I stood out here for an hour telling it what I wanted in complete sentences like a lunatic and got nothing at all."

"So what's changed?"

"Nothing's changed. That's why I'm still out here."

Reeve looked at him for a second.

"You know most people would call this praying," he said.

"Yeah," Cole said. "I've been trying not to."

On Thursday, the door of the community centre — a fire door, locked, the kind that only opens from inside — clicked open in front of him.

He hadn't touched it. He'd been four feet away with his hand on his own neck, and he'd wanted it open in the ordinary way a person wants a door open when they're standing in the cold.

It swung about six inches and stopped.

Cole looked at it for a long moment.

"Okay," he said. "Thanks."

He stood there another minute waiting to see if anything else happened.

Nothing did. He went in through the open door and it shut behind him on its own weight, the way fire doors do, and that was the whole event.

He told Vesper and nobody else, which he was aware of doing, and which he did anyway.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

"It opened a door."

"You asked it to?"

"I wanted it. That's different." He turned his mug. "I've been out there nine mornings trying to ask it for things and getting nothing, and then I stopped asking and just — wanted something small, and it did it."

"That's not a power."

"No. That's cooperation." He said it flatly. "That's worse. A power does what you tell it. That thing decided."

The call came at four on Friday morning.

Not from Verrin. From a woman called Anneka Verrin, who was sixty and lived eleven miles away and had been phoning her brother every morning for nine years because that was the arrangement.

He hadn't picked up at seven. Or eight. Or nine.

She'd driven over at three in the morning because she couldn't sleep and the light in his front room was on.

They got there in fifty-one minutes, which Thessaly achieved by breaking most of the rules she normally enforced.

The house was fine.

That was the wrong thing, immediately. No forced door, no broken glass. A front room with a reading lamp on, a Western folded open on the arm of a chair, and a cup of tea on the side table that had gone completely cold and had not been drunk from.

Hollis Verrin was sitting in the chair.

He was alive.

He was also not there.

Cole knew it from the doorway before anyone said anything, and he didn't need Foresight for it — the man was sitting upright with his hands on the chair arms, breathing, eyes open, and he did not track Dana crossing the room in front of him.

"Hollis." Anneka had both hands on his face. "Hollis. Hollis."

Nothing.

Aldric had stopped in the hall and had not come any further in.

"They didn't kill the other nine," he said. His voice had gone somewhere flat and very old. "Did they."

Cole put his hand on Verrin's forehead.

Foresight went in easy and found nothing wrong.

That was the horror of it and he'd think about it for weeks: no damage, no fracture line, no wound. The man was intact. Every part of him was precisely where it should be and functioning exactly as designed, and there was simply nobody sitting behind it.

He went in further and hit a wall.

Not a door. He'd been braced for a door — for the thing Odile had described, the closed corridor at age seven. This was different. This was a flat, smooth, completely featureless surface where a person's interior ought to start, and it had been made recently, and it had been made fast.

"Someone smoothed him," Cole said.

"Can you—"

"No."

"You did Bellamy."

"Bellamy had a crack in him." Cole took his hand away. "Sixty years of being re-done, and every time they did it they left a hairline. There was something to get a finger into." He looked at the flat nothing behind an old man's eyes. "Whoever did this is better than whoever did Bellamy. This is one pass and it's perfect and it took less than nine hours."

Dana had gone very still by the window.

"Ansel does this."

"Ansel does it over weeks. He told me that himself, in a corridor, and he wasn't lying about it because there was nothing in it for him to lie about." Cole straightened. "Whoever came through that door last night did in one night what he needs a month for."

"Then it isn't Ansel."

"No."

"Then who's better than Ansel?"

Nobody in the room had an answer.

Anneka Verrin, who had not followed any of it and had not asked to, said, "Is my brother in there?"

Cole looked at her.

He had spent a year learning to tell people true things and had gotten good enough at it that he no longer reached for the kind version first, and this was the only time all year he wished he hadn't.

"I don't know," he said. "I'd have said yes about Bellamy and I'd have been right. I don't know about this."

"That's not a no."

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

The thing in his neck went hot.

Not the slow warmth. Hot — sudden, sharp, the way it had gone in the corridor at the hospital, and Cole felt the door come up behind his eyes without being asked.

He almost let it.

That was the part he told nobody about for a long time: he stood in a stranger's front room with his hand six inches from an emptied man and a passenger offering him something, and for about a second and a half he considered it.

"No," he said, out loud.

The heat dropped away so fast it left him light-headed.

Anneka Verrin looked up. "Sorry?"

"Nothing."

They got Verrin into an ambulance at six and Anneka went with him and Dana followed in the car, and Cole and Aldric stood on the pavement outside a house with a reading lamp still on in the window.

"One," Aldric said.

"Don't."

"Eleven caretakers. Nine like that, presumably, wherever they've been put. Hollis this morning." He was looking at the window. "One."

"Aldric."

"I'm not being dramatic. I'm doing arithmetic and I'd like somebody to hear me do it out loud, because I have spent forty-one years being the man who knew things, and it appears that the knowing is the thing they're collecting."

Cole didn't have an answer for that.

"Go home," he said. "Not yours. Ours."

"That's the sensible option, yes." Aldric didn't move. "I'd like to say something and then not discuss it."

"Go on."

"If it happens to me," Aldric said, "don't try. You'll spend yourself on a man who was already a bad use of everyone's time, and I'd rather the last useful thing I did was stop you."

He got into the car before Cole could answer.

Cole stood on the pavement on his own for a minute.

Then he took his phone out, and he did not call anyone in the car, and the call lasted about forty seconds.

He put the phone back in his pocket and got in the car and Dana asked who that was and he said Iris, and it was not Iris, and nobody checked.

[End of Chapter 121]