Chapter 154: Four Seconds

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 154: Four Seconds

Nobody in that kitchen used the four seconds well.

The man at the door used his to decide. Reeve could see him doing it — a professional, ten jobs in, working the problem the way he'd been trained to. A boy in a doorway. No weapon. Three against one.

He decided wrong.

He came off the door fast and low, the way Thessaly moved, and he got about halfway across the kitchen.

Cole did not step aside.

He put one hand out, flat, and caught the man by the front of his coat mid-stride — caught him the way you'd stop a door swinging — and the man's whole body stopped with it, feet leaving the lino, momentum going somewhere it had no business going.

Then Cole put him into the wall.

Not thrown. Placed. Hard enough that the plaster came away in a shape, and the man slid down it and sat on the floor and did not get up, and his eyes were open, and he was very carefully not looking at anything.

Cole had not looked at him once.

"Three," Cole said.

The one in the hallway had a weapon.

Reeve never found out what it was. He saw a hand go into a coat, and he saw Cole's head turn about a quarter of the way toward it, and the hand stopped.

Just stopped. Halfway out of the coat.

The man stood in the hallway of a flat in the north of England at twenty past four in the morning with his hand inside his own jacket, and for a moment his face did something Reeve had only ever seen on people in films, right before the end.

"Don't," Cole said.

The man took his hand out of his coat. It was empty. He held it out to the side where everybody could see it, and then he knelt down on the hall carpet without being told to, and put both hands on his head.

"Two," Cole said.

The woman with the lanyard had not moved.

She was the only one who'd used her four seconds properly. She had taken her hand off the back of Reeve's neck the instant the lights went, and she had spent the time looking at Cole — really looking — and whatever she saw, she had understood it faster than either of the men.

"I'm not going to fight you," she said.

"No."

"I want to be clear about that. I've read your file. I know what you did in the garage and the gymnasium and a stairwell in Inwood." Her voice was steady and her hands were not. "I'm not stupid. I'm going to step away from him and I'm going to let you take him and I'm going to go."

"No," Cole said. "You're not."

He crossed the kitchen.

Not fast. The way he had come up the stairs — one step, then another, unhurried, filling the room — and the woman with the lanyard backed up until the counter stopped her, and the bottle from 1961 rocked once and settled.

He stopped about a foot from her.

"You did this ten times."

"Yes."

"The girl with the teeth."

"She's happy—"

"I know she's happy." Cole's voice did not change at all. "I've got four people in my flat who've been happy for forty years because of people like you. One of them's ninety-one and she can't say her own name."

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He put two fingers against her collarbone.

Not a strike. Barely contact. And Reeve, still half across the table with his cheek on the wood, watched the gold that was running up the side of Cole's throat go down his arm and into his fingers — and the woman's face went completely white.

"What are you—"

"You believe you're kind."

"I—"

"That's your Conviction. That's what you're standing on. I make it not hurt." Cole did not raise his voice once. "Ten times. And you've told yourself for years that because it doesn't hurt, it isn't anything."

"Please—"

"It isn't kind," Cole said. "It was never kind. It was just quiet."

The gold came down his arm and into his fingers.

"Settled."

And the thing she'd been standing on for ten years broke.

Reeve felt it. Everybody in that flat felt it — a sound that wasn't a sound, like a pane of glass going in another room — and the woman with the lanyard folded at the knees and sat down on Ivor's kitchen floor with her back against the cupboards.

She didn't scream. She didn't cry.

She put her hands in front of her face and looked at them, turning them over, the way you'd look at hands that had just stopped belonging to you.

"It's gone," she said.

"Yes."

"You've — I can't — it's gone—"

"You can go and work in a nursery," Cole said. "I hear they're very happy there."

He turned his back on her.

That was the thing Reeve would describe to Mia two days later, and get wrong three times, and eventually say: he turned his back on her like she wasn't there anymore. Like she'd stopped being a thing he needed to keep track of.

He went to the table.

And every bit of it changed.

"Hey."

Soft. His own voice, all the way back.

He got one hand under Reeve's shoulder and the other behind his head and eased him up off the table, carefully, like lifting something that might have a crack in it, and sat him in the chair.

"Reeve. Look at me."

Reeve looked at him.

"What's your name?"

"Reeve."

"Full name."

"Reeve Ashcombe." It came out wet. "Reeve Andrew Ashcombe, seventeen, I've got two brothers, Kayode and — and — "

He stopped.

"And Ade," Cole said.

"And Ade." Reeve's face crumpled. "I knew that. I knew that, I've known that my whole life, why did I—"

"Because she got about a minute," Cole said. "And you fought her for all of it. That's why you've still got everything else."

Ivor had moved his hands.

He had been sitting at that table for four hours, unable to lift them, and at some point in the last minute whatever had been holding him had simply stopped, and he had not said anything about it.

He took the bottle off the counter and looked at it for a moment.

Then he put it on the table in front of Reeve.

"I've had this since 1961," he said. "I brought it to your flat because I'd never been invited anywhere and I understood that you're supposed to bring something. I'd like you to have it."

"I don't—"

"You walked through a door that you were told not to walk through at four in the morning, on your own, to ask an old man a question he should have answered a month ago." Ivor's voice was not steady. "Nobody has done anything that stupid on my behalf in four hundred years."

Cole stood in the doorway on the way out and looked back at the three of them.

The man against the wall. The man kneeling in the hall with his hands on his head. The woman on the floor staring at her own palms.

He did not threaten them. He did not say anything clever.

He said: "Tell her I'm coming."

"Tell who?"

"The person who sent you," Cole said. "You know who. Tell her I found out what reclassification means. Tell her there's ten people I'd like back."

And he took Reeve down the stairs, one step at a time, with Reeve's arm over his shoulders and a bottle from 1961 tucked under the other.

Nobody followed.

Nobody in that flat moved for a long time after the door shut.

The man kneeling in the hall stayed kneeling until the sun came up, and when a neighbour found him at seven he said that he was waiting for permission, and could not say from whom.

It was eleven minutes home and it took them twenty-five.

Reeve could walk. He kept saying so. He said it at the corner and again at the bus shelter and a third time by the fox, which was still there, sitting on a wall, watching them go past with complete indifference.

"I can walk."

"You're walking."

"I mean on my own."

"I know what you mean," Cole said, and did not let go.

Somewhere around the second street, Reeve said the thing he'd been holding since the kitchen.

"I didn't ring you."

"I know."

"No, I mean — Cole, I didn't. I thought about it the whole way there. I had my phone in my hand. I decided not to." He stopped walking, which meant Cole stopped too. "Dana didn't know where I was going. I didn't tell her the address. I left before she could ask."

"Okay."

"So how did you know?"

Cole did not answer for a moment.

The streetlight above them was one of the old sodium ones and it made everything orange, and the gold was gone from his face now, all of it, and he looked tired and eighteen and very ordinary.

"I woke up," he said.

"You woke up and you knew?"

"I woke up in my coat," Cole said, "on the stairs outside Ivor's flat, with my hand already on the door."

Reeve stared at him.

"I don't remember getting dressed," Cole said. "I don't remember the walk. I don't know how I knew which flat. The last thing I remember is going to bed at half one."

He started walking again.

After a moment, Reeve followed.

Neither of them said anything else all the way home, and at the front door Cole stopped with his key in the lock and said, without turning round:

"Don't tell Vesper. Not yet."

And Reeve, who had just been saved, and who had eleven years of wanting to be the one who carried something important, stood on a doorstep at a quarter to five in the morning and understood that he had just been handed exactly that.

[End of Chapter 154]