Chapter 160: One Point Nine Million

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 160: One Point Nine Million

Voss watched it nine times, and nobody would ever find out.

It was a bad recording. Portrait, shaky, shot through a window from across the street, with somebody breathing hard behind the camera and saying oh my God under their breath every few seconds.

She did not care about any of that.

She scrubbed back to the moment the ring closed and let it play at quarter speed, and watched a boy in the middle of a road take his hands out of his pockets, and lower his head, and —

She stopped it there.

His face, lit from underneath. Gold running out of the eyes. And an expression on it that she had not seen on anybody for a very long time, and had not expected to see again.

She let it run on. Watched the light come out of him, and the ring of shapes come apart, and the streetlights come back on one by one down the whole length of the road. Then she scrubbed back and watched his face again.

Marguerite, in the doorway, said: "Forty."

"I can count."

"Nobody's ever done forty."

"Nobody's ever been sent forty," Voss said, and did not take her eyes off the frozen face on the screen. "Leave me, please. And Marguerite — whoever sent them. I'd like a name by morning."

By seven in the morning the video had one point nine million views and Mrs. Adeyemi had given an interview to a regional news crew in her dressing gown.

"He's a lovely boy," she said, into a furry microphone, on the pavement outside her own front door. "He fixed my kitchen window. Badly. But he came back and did it again."

"And last night? What did you see?"

Mrs. Adeyemi considered the camera.

"I saw a young man stand in the road so the rest of us could stay in bed," she said. "And I'd like it noted that I had my husband's walking stick, and I would have used it."

The clip got four hundred thousand views on its own by lunchtime. Somebody put music under it.

Mia's phone had not stopped since six.

She sat at the kitchen table in her school uniform with it face-down in front of her, buzzing against the wood every few seconds, and did not turn it over.

"Aren't you going to look?"

"No."

"Mia—"

"It's the same as last time." She had both hands round a mug. "It's forty messages from people in Cole's year who I don't like, forwarded to people in my year, forwarded to me. Except this time there's two million of them."

It buzzed again.

She turned it over, read the top notification, and put it face-down again.

"Jordan's sent a crying emoji," she said. "Again."

School was cancelled for the whole street.

Not officially — nobody official had done anything yet — but at eight o'clock there were four news vans parked outside the laundrette and a man with a long lens on the wall by the bus shelter where, eight hours earlier, something had stepped out of the dark and hit her brother in the back.

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Thessaly came at half eight and closed every curtain in the flat without asking.

"Nobody goes near a window. Nobody answers the door. Nobody says anything to anybody with a lanyard." She looked round the kitchen. "And nobody posts anything, Reeve."

"I haven't posted anything."

"You've got your phone out."

"I'm reading." He turned it round. "Somebody's worked out it was me at the window. There's a thread. They're calling me — they're calling me the Spotter."

Nobody laughed. Then Marek did, just once, into his tea, and Reeve threw a teaspoon at him, and that was the first normal thing that had happened in the flat in twelve hours.

The Ministry came at half past ten.

Not a raid. Two cars, not vans, parked neatly on the double yellows outside, and a woman in her thirties with a lanyard and a tablet who knocked on the street door and waited to be buzzed in like somebody delivering a parcel.

Cole opened the flat door himself.

"Priti," he said.

Priti Raval — the compliance officer from a kerbside in an alley a lifetime ago, who had filled in eleven forms about a kebab and apologised twice, properly — looked up at him, and her face did something complicated.

"You remember me."

"You apologised. People don't."

"No," she said. "They don't." She held up the tablet, not quite meeting his eye. "I'm sorry. I'm here with a Section Nine notice. Voluntary attendance for assessment. Today."

"And if I don't volunteer?"

Priti Raval looked at him for about a second, very steadily, and he watched her decide to tell him the truth.

"Then there's a second notice," she said. "It's already signed. And the people who serve it won't be me."

The argument in the kitchen took under three minutes and Cole won it by not having it.

"I'm going."

"Cole—"

"There's four news vans outside and a Section Nine with a second one behind it." He was already putting his coat on. "If I don't walk down those stairs with Priti, somebody comes up them this afternoon with a battering ram, on camera, in front of Mrs. Adeyemi and her walking stick."

"Then let them," Mia said. "Let them do it on camera. Let two million people watch."

He stopped.

It was a good argument. It was, in fact, better than his.

"You're right," he said. "And I'm still going. Because the people who serve the second one will be ordinary. And I'm not going to do to ordinary people what I did to those things last night, and I'm not sure anymore I could stop myself if they came through that door for Reeve."

Mia went quiet.

That was the first time in her life he'd told her he was frightened of himself, and she heard it, and she let him go.

Reeve didn't.

He caught Cole's sleeve at the door. "Take me."

"No."

"I'm serious. If they put you in a room with something in it, I'm the only one who can—"

"They sent forty of those things for you last night." Cole looked down at the hand on his sleeve. "Forty. The record was four. You're not walking into a Ministry building the morning after, with two million people knowing your face, so somebody with a lanyard can find out what you can do."

"You're doing it again. The deciding."

"Yeah," Cole said. "I am. Tell me I'm wrong."

Reeve opened his mouth. Then he let go of the sleeve.

"You're not wrong," he said. "I just hate it."

Iris was already downstairs.

Nobody had called her. She was standing on the pavement in a coat that cost more than the flat, between the street door and the four news vans, and every camera on the street had turned toward her, because she was the only S-Rank in the county anyone could name and she had never once been photographed outside a building she didn't own.

"I'm coming with you," she said.

"You don't have to—"

"I'm aware of what I have to do." She turned to Priti, who had gone slightly pale. "Ms. Raval. I'll be accompanying Mr. Vale as his representative. I assume that's in order."

"It's — yes. It's in order."

"Good." Iris opened the car door herself. "Then we'll go in yours, and I'll sit in the back with him, and the cameras will get a very nice photograph of an S-Rank getting into a Ministry car of her own free will."

She looked at Cole.

"Get in," she said, quieter. "Look bored. It's the only thing they can't use."

They took him to the east annex.

Not the new building on Marling Street, where he had been classified the previous autumn. The old one — low brick, 1970s, the building whose Chamber had been installed twelve years before anyone had a Ministry to install it.

Not this one, a voice had said to him, once, outside a chemist's.

He had not thought about that in weeks.

He thought about it now.

Room 4B had been refurbished. There were cups by the water cooler now — a full sleeve of them, still in the plastic. Somebody had finally noticed. He found that he minded, and could not have said why.

There was also, sitting alone at the long table with a single folder in front of her and her hands clasped on top of it, a woman he had not seen in two months.

"Halden," he said.

"Sit down, Cole."

"You're suspended."

"I was reinstated at eight o'clock this morning. By phone. Specifically for this." Halden did not look up from the folder. Her voice was perfectly level and her knuckles were white. "I've been assigned your reassessment. It's to be completed by five."

"Okay."

"It's not okay." She finally looked at him, and he got it in about half a second, and wished he hadn't. "They've told me what result to find."

[End of Chapter 160]