Chapter 152: Refusal to Fade

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 152: Refusal to Fade

Reeve made a list, because that was what Reeve did when he was frightened, and the list was bad.

1. Look it up.2. Don't panic.3. If it's bad, tell Cole.4. If it's really bad, tell Dana, because Cole will do the thing.

He looked at it for a while and then crossed out number two, because it wasn't a task, it was a hope, and he'd been told off about that by Thessaly twice.

The textbook entry was one line and it was useless.

Refusal to Fade — rare persistence-type Conviction. Typically manifests as enhanced endurance, recall, or resistance to fatigue. Low combat application.

He read it four times.

Low combat application. That was the bit that stung, which was stupid, because he'd known his Conviction for three years and nobody had ever described it as having any application at all.

He'd just never seen it written down.

He tried the forums next, which was a mistake, and spent forty minutes reading a thread from 2019 where a man with a username about fishing explained at length that persistence types were "basically the Ministry's filler category" and that "if you get RtF on your card just accept you're a stamina build and go into logistics."

There were forty-one replies. Most of them agreed.

One of them, from an account that had posted four times in six years, said only: anyone else notice nobody on here has RtF for more than two years?

Nobody had answered it.

Reeve looked at that post for a long time. Then he looked at the date on it. Then he looked at the account's profile, which said last active 2020, and closed the laptop, and sat in the dark for a bit, and got up to find Dana.

He went to bed at one and did not sleep and at three he got up and did the thing he'd been avoiding, which was ask Dana.

She was awake. Dana was always awake. She was at the kitchen table with the card folder and a mug of something cold, and she looked up when he came in and didn't say anything, which was the most Dana thing in the world.

"Can you look something up on the Ministry system?"

"No."

"You did it in the car park that time—"

"I did it once, with Halden's login, for a reason, and she got suspended the next week." She put the mug down. "What is it?"

"My classification history."

Dana looked at him for about four seconds.

"Sit down," she said.

He sat down. That was the thing about Dana — she didn't do reassurance, she did chairs.

"Bell said something."

"I know. Cole told me."

"He said it like he was frightened of it, Dana. That's the bit." Reeve had his hands flat on the table and made himself take them off it, because Cole did that and he didn't want to be doing Cole's things. "A man nobody can remember looked at me in the street and got frightened, and I've been the one who carries the bags for a year, and I want to know why."

Unlawfully taken from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Why do you think?"

"I think it's probably nothing and I'm about to be very embarrassed."

"And?"

"And I think it probably isn't," Reeve said.

Dana did not use Halden's login.

She used Graham's, which was a commercial solicitor's access to a public-facing records portal that nobody in the Ministry thought of as a risk, and it took her forty minutes and a lot of swearing, and at twenty to four she turned the laptop round.

"Your file."

"That's it?"

"That's your file. Initial assessment at fourteen, reassessment at sixteen, current classification." She tapped the screen. "Refusal to Fade, D-Rank, stable, no action."

"No action."

"No action is normal. It's what they put on everybody who isn't a problem." Dana did not turn the laptop back. "Reeve, I want to show you something else and I want you to sit with it for a minute before you say anything."

She pulled up a second search.

Every individual in the region's records with the same Conviction. Twelve years of data.

There were eleven names.

"Eleven," Reeve said.

"Eleven. Including you."

"That's — okay, that's not many, but it's rare, it says it's rare—"

"Look at the right-hand column," Dana said.

The right-hand column was current classification.

Ten of the eleven said the same thing.

Reclassified.

Not re-ranked. Not reassessed. One word, and a date, and every date was within two years of the person's first assessment.

"What does reclassified mean?"

"It means the Conviction on the file isn't the one they started with." Dana's voice had gone very flat. "It means somebody went back and changed it. Ten people in twelve years came in as Refusal to Fade, and inside two years every single one of them was recorded as something else."

"Something else what?"

She clicked the first name.

Reclassified: Resonance Fatigue, E-Rank. Monitoring discontinued.

The second.

Reclassified: Resonance Fatigue, E-Rank. Monitoring discontinued.

The third was the same. And the fourth.

Reeve sat very still.

He was aware of his hands on the table and he did not move them, and he was aware that he was doing the thing Cole did, and he did not care.

"They're all the same."

"They're all the same."

"Resonance fatigue. That's — that's what they write when somebody's power gets weaker. That's the thing that happens when you don't use it."

"Yes."

"So ten people came in with the same thing I've got, and within two years every single one of them had got weaker, and nobody looked into it because it says monitoring discontinued."

"Yes," Dana said.

"And I didn't."

"And you didn't," Dana said.

He made himself read the other six.

He didn't have to. Dana would have told him. But there was a thing Cole said once, in the car after Margaret Oyelaran, about how the easy version of a fact is the one that lets you stop — and Reeve had spent a year watching other people read the hard version while he held the bags, and he was not going to have somebody else read this one to him.

Six more. Resonance fatigue. Monitoring discontinued.

The youngest was fifteen. The oldest was forty-four. One of them had a photograph on file and she was grinning at the camera with a gap in her front teeth and a school jumper on, and the photograph had been taken at her first assessment, and her reclassification date was nineteen months later.

"Can we find her?"

"Probably."

"Can we find out what she's like now?"

"Reeve—"

"I want to know if she's all right," he said. "That's all. I want to know if the girl with the teeth is all right, because if she's all right then maybe it's just — maybe it's just a word on a file. And if she isn't, I want to know that too."

Dana wrote the name down.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Why?"

Dana did not answer.

"Dana. Why am I the only one?"

"That's what I've been sitting here trying to work out for twenty minutes," she said. "And I think I've got it, and I'd like you to look at your own file one more time, and look at the bottom, under no action, at the bit that isn't a field."

He looked.

It was small. A scanned annotation, handwritten, in the margin of his sixteen-year-old reassessment, so faint that the system's text recognition had not picked it up and it did not appear in any search.

Three words.

In a neat, unhurried hand.

Hold. Do not.

Reeve had seen that handwriting before.

He had seen it on sixty-one letters in a carpet showroom in Gessen, and on a card from a petrol station noticeboard, and on the margin of a ledger, and on a four-line letter addressed to the young man who read the drawer.

He had seen it on a man who lived eleven minutes away and brought a bottle from 1961 to a flat above a laundrette because he'd never been invited anywhere.

"That's Ivor," he said.

"That's Ivor," Dana agreed.

"Ivor wrote on my file. When I was sixteen. Before any of — before Cole, before any of it, before he'd met any of us—"

"Yes."

Reeve stood up.

"Reeve—"

"It's four in the morning."

"I know what time it is."

"He's eleven minutes away," Reeve said, and he was already putting his shoes on, the wrong way round, and not noticing, "and he's been sitting at our kitchen table for a month, and he's never once said he knew my name before he met me."

[End of Chapter 152]