Chapter 159: Settled

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 159: Settled

Mia had the curtain open two inches and her forehead against the glass, and she had stopped breathing properly about a minute ago.

Her brother was standing in the road.

Not on the pavement. He'd stepped off it, into the middle of the street, where the white line ran under forty dead streetlights, and he'd stopped there with his hands in his coat pockets like somebody waiting for a bus that was late.

All of them were looking at him.

She could see that much. She couldn't hold them — her eyes kept sliding off, the way they slide off a word you've misspelled — but she could see the shape of it. A street full of heads, turned the same way.

Then the nearest one moved.

It came from the left, from the bins by the laundrette, fast and low, and Mia's hand hit the window before she knew she'd moved it.

Cole didn't turn round.

He took one step toward it — Thessaly's thing, flinch forward, the thing he'd practised four hundred times in a gym in the east district until Mia was sick of hearing about it — and the construct arrived at the space where he'd been and found him inside its reach instead of outside it.

He put his hand on its chest.

It stopped. Mid-stride, the way a film stops. And then it wasn't there.

Three more came. Then five.

She would try to explain it to Dana the next day and fail. It wasn't a fight the way fights are on television. Nobody circled. Nobody shouted. Things came at her brother from the dark and he moved about as much as a man moves to get out of the way of somebody in a corridor — a half-turn, a step, a hand — and every time his hand landed, something stopped existing.

He wasn't hurrying.

That was the worst part and the best part and she couldn't decide which. There were at least forty of them and her brother was not hurrying.

Then one got behind him.

She saw it — a shape detaching from the bus shelter, coming in at his back where he couldn't see — and she banged on the glass with her palm and he couldn't possibly hear it and it hit him.

He went down onto one knee on the tarmac.

Mia's breath went out of her in a sound she didn't recognise.

He got up. But he was slower getting up, and two more were already moving, and Mia understood — suddenly and completely, the way you understand you've missed a step on the stairs — that he couldn't see them. Not properly. Not all at once. Her eyes kept sliding off them and so did his, and he'd been doing it by feel, and there were too many to feel.

The window at the other end of the flat banged open.

Reeve.

He was leaning out of the kitchen window three floors up in a T-shirt with his hair on end and Lottie Farr's address still in biro on the back of his hand, and he was shouting.

"LEFT! Cole — left, by the post box, two of them—"

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Cole turned left. Two things that had been coming at his blind side met a hand each and stopped.

"Behind you — no, further — the one by the chemist's—"

He turned. It stopped.

Mia stared at Reeve.

Reeve was not squinting. He wasn't guessing. He was leaning out of a window at half past three in the morning looking down at a street that her eyes would not hold, and he was calling it like a man reading the numbers off a bus. She'd watched him do the same thing with Bell, on the doorstep, a week ago. There, by the post box. There, by the corner.

He could see every one of them.

"Three at the corner. They're waiting. They're — Cole, they've stopped coming one at a time—"

They had.

Mia saw it happen and it was the most frightening thing she had ever seen. Every shape in the street stopped moving at the same moment. The ones at the corner, the ones by the bus shelter, the ones stretching back down onto Barrow Street further than she could see.

And then, slowly, all together, they began to walk.

Not at him. Toward him. From every direction at once, closing in on one tall figure standing on a white line, the way water closes over a stone.

"Cole," Reeve said, from the window — not shouting now. "Cole, there's too many. There's too many, I can't call them, they're everywhere—"

Her brother stopped moving.

He took his hands out of his pockets.

That was all. He stood in the middle of the road with his arms at his sides and his head slightly lowered, and they were thirty feet away, then twenty, then fifteen, a ring of shapes closing from every side.

Then the light came.

Mia had seen it once before, in a photograph somebody took in a swimming pool, and she had not believed the photograph. Gold, not in his eyes — out of them, running down from the corners like light through a crack in a door, down his throat, along his jaw. The street was so dark that it lit his face from underneath, and she saw his face, and her hand came off the glass.

It wasn't his face.

It was his face. It was his jaw and his nose and the scar on his chin from falling off a wall when he was eight. But there was nothing in it she knew. It was calm the way deep water is calm. It was looking at forty things that had come to take her brother's best friend, and it was not angry, and it was not afraid, and it was not anything at all.

His lips moved.

She didn't hear it through the glass. Mrs. Adeyemi, at her window one floor down, did — and would tell her son the next morning, and he would not believe her either — that it wasn't loud. That he said it the way you'd close a book.

"Settled."

Every one of them came apart at once.

No noise. No flash. Forty shapes in a ring around her brother simply stopped being there, all together, as though somebody had drawn a line through a column of figures.

And then the streetlight at the end of the road came back on.

Then the next.

Then the one after — one by one, all the way down the street, the way they'd gone out, in reverse. Like a hand going back along a table relighting candles.

He stood there in the lit road for a while.

Mia watched the gold go out of his face, slowly, from the jaw up, and when it was gone he was just her brother — tall and tired in a coat, with blood running from his nose onto his top lip and one knee of his jeans torn open. He wiped his face with the back of his wrist.

Then he looked up at her window.

At her, specifically. He found her two inches of open curtain in the whole dark front of the building on the first try, and he lifted one hand, very slightly, and she understood it the way she'd understood him her whole life:

I'm all right.

She pressed her palm against the glass. She didn't trust her face to do anything else.

She heard him come up the stairs.

Everybody did. The flat had gone completely quiet and they all heard the street door, and then his feet on the first flight, and the second — one step at a time, slower than when he'd gone down.

Vesper was standing in the hallway where she'd been standing when he left.

She hadn't moved in twenty minutes.

He came up the last three steps and stopped on the landing in front of her, bleeding, and neither of them said anything, and Mia watched from the kitchen doorway as Vesper looked at him and then — without a word, without deciding anything out loud — put both arms around his neck and held on.

"You came back up the stairs," she said into his coat.

"I said I would."

It was Reeve who broke it, from the kitchen window, in a voice that had gone very small.

"Cole."

"Yeah."

"Come and look at this."

Mia got there first.

Across the street, in the building opposite — in the windows of the flats above the chemist's, above the bookies, above the closed-down café — there were lights.

Not house lights.

Small, rectangular, blue-white, held up at chest height in dark rooms. One in every third window. Then every second. More coming on as she watched, down the whole length of the street.

Phones.

And under one of them, on the first floor opposite, somebody had put a sheet of A4 paper against the glass with three words written on it in marker, big enough to read from across the road.

WE SAW THAT.

[End of Chapter 159]