Chapter 153: Eleven Minutes

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 153: Eleven Minutes

Reeve realised about halfway there that he'd put his shoes on the wrong feet, and decided it didn't matter, and it turned out to matter quite a lot.

It was ten past four. The streets were empty in the particular way streets are empty at that hour — not quiet, vacated, a bus shelter lit up for nobody, a fox crossing the road without looking at him.

He had his phone in his hand the whole way.

He did not ring Cole, and he would think about that for the rest of his life.

He had a reason.

It was a bad reason and he knew it was bad while he was having it. The reason was that Cole would come, and Cole would handle it, and Cole would stand in Ivor's kitchen and read the old man in about four seconds and get the answer, and Reeve would be standing in the corner holding the thing he'd found.

Again.

Hold. Do not. That was his. It was his file and his name and his handwriting-in-the-margin, and for once in his life he wanted to be the one who asked the question.

Ivor's door was open.

Not wide. About four inches — the same four inches as a man's bungalow in Wellhurst, the same four inches as Hollis Verrin's front door on the morning he was found in his chair.

Reeve stood on the landing and looked at it.

Every single thing Thessaly had ever told him said turn round. He had heard her say it perhaps forty times in a gym in the east district. If a door's open that should be shut, you don't go through it. You go back down the stairs and you ring somebody.

He pushed it open.

The kitchen had four things in it, the way it always did.

A table. Two chairs. The bottle from 1961, unopened, on the counter where it had been for a month.

And Ivor, sitting in one of the chairs with his hands flat on the table, looking at Reeve with an expression Reeve had never seen on him.

"Oh, no," Ivor said. "Oh, you foolish boy."

There were three of them.

Reeve didn't see them until they moved, which was the first thing that made his stomach drop — they had been standing in the flat the whole time, in the hallway and by the window and behind the door he had just walked through, and he had looked straight at all three of them and his eyes had simply not stopped.

Not Bell. Bell was one man.

These were three people in plain clothes who moved the way Thessaly moved, and the one behind the door shut it very gently, and turned the key.

"Reeve Ashcombe," said the one by the window. A woman, forties, a lanyard tucked into her coat. "Refusal to Fade, D-Rank, stable. We were told you'd come."

"Told by who?"

"By a man who stood in the street yesterday morning and was surprised," she said. "He doesn't get surprised. It's been noted."

Reeve looked at Ivor.

Ivor had not moved his hands off the table and Reeve understood, very slowly, that it was because he couldn't — that there was something about the way the old man was sitting that was not a choice.

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"I'm sorry," Ivor said. "I wrote hold on your file in 2024 because a boy in a D-Rank assessment described the colour of the room's paint after the room had been repainted. And I have kept every one of them I could find, and I have lost ten, and I would have given a great deal for you never to have walked through that door."

"You kept—"

"Later," Ivor said. "If there is one."

The woman with the lanyard took a folder out of her coat.

It was a Ministry folder. It had the crest on it. It had a form in it, and Reeve recognised the form, because he had spent three nights reading a copy of it in a kitchen above a laundrette.

KF/7c. Eleven boxes.

"This won't hurt," the woman said. "I want you to know that, because the ones who fight it are the ones who get hurt, and I've done this ten times and I've never once needed to hurt anybody."

"Ten times."

"Ten times." She uncapped a pen. "The girl with the gap in her teeth was the fourth. She's twenty now. She works in a nursery in Halden Cross and she's very happy, and she has absolutely no idea that she used to be able to remember everything."

That was when Reeve understood what reclassified meant.

Not killed. Not taken. Filed down. Ten people with the one Conviction in the world that meant they could not be made to forget — and somebody had sat each of them in a chair and taken it off them, carefully, until they could.

And they were fine. That was the horror of it. They were in nurseries and offices and they were fine, and they had no idea.

He ran.

Of course he ran — it was the only thing available, and the door was locked, and he knew it was locked, and he went for the window instead. Third floor.

He got four steps.

The man from the hallway took him across the kitchen table and put him face-down on it, not roughly, with the practised care of somebody who had done exactly this before and had learned that roughness caused bruises and bruises caused questions. Ivor's hands were eleven inches from his face and still flat and still not moving.

Reeve fought anyway.

He fought badly and uselessly and with his whole body, because it turned out that was the only thing he had ever been good at — not being strong, not being clever, not being the one who understood things.

Refusing.

He kicked something and it swore. He got an elbow into a ribcage. He screamed, properly, the way you scream when there's no plan left, and the woman with the lanyard put her hand flat on the back of his neck —

— and he felt it start.

It was not pain. She had been telling the truth about that.

It was the sensation of something being eased. Like a hand pressing a crease out of a sheet. Like the moment before sleep when a thought you were holding simply isn't there anymore and you don't mind.

He felt his own name start to go soft at the edges.

Reeve. Reeve Ashcombe. Seventeen. Kayode, Ade, Mum. The judo term in Year Eight. A fire extinguisher on wet grass. A frying pan. Cole on the ground saying—

It was slipping.

He could feel the exact shape of every single thing that was slipping, which was the worst part, because that was his Conviction, and it was the last thing going, and it was going carefully.

The kitchen went cold.

Not a draught. The temperature dropped the way it had dropped in a school corridor a year and a half ago, like a hand over a candle — and the woman with the lanyard felt it too, because her hand came off his neck.

The strip light over the sink flickered.

Then every light in the flat went out.

In the dark, somebody was coming up the stairs.

Not running. That was what Reeve would remember — lying across a kitchen table with his cheek against the wood and his own name half-gone, hearing footsteps on a stairwell at twenty past four in the morning.

Unhurried.

One at a time.

The way a man walks when he knows there's nowhere for anybody in the room to go.

The man who had turned the key moved to the door and put his shoulder against it, and Reeve heard him breathing, and it was the breathing of somebody who had done this ten times and had never once needed to put his shoulder against a door.

The woman with the lanyard said, very quietly, "Who else did you tell?"

"Nobody," Reeve said. He was crying and did not know when he'd started. "I didn't tell anybody. I didn't ring him. I didn't—"

The footsteps stopped outside the door.

The key the man had turned from the inside turned back.

By itself.

The door opened.

In the frame, against the light from the landing, there was a figure that was too tall for it — that had to dip its head very slightly to come through — and for about a second nobody in that kitchen could see his face.

Then they could.

Gold. All the way across. Not in the eyes — out of them, up the side of his throat, along the jaw, a line of light across a face that did not have any expression on it at all.

Cole looked at the three of them.

Then he looked at Reeve on the table.

Then he looked back at the woman with the lanyard, and said, in a voice that was flat and quiet and nothing like his:

"You've got about four seconds to take your hands off him."

[End of Chapter 153]