Chapter 165: See You, Mate

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 165: See You, Mate

He went out for bread on the Saturday because Thessaly said he couldn't, and because the flat had run out, and because he had not been outside in daylight since he'd stood in the road.

"Hood up," Thessaly said.

"It's forty seconds to the shop."

"Hood up, Cole. There's two million people who've seen your face lit from underneath."

He put the hood up. It did not help at all.

The first one was a woman at the bus stop.

She was about fifty, with shopping bags, and she looked at him as he came past and then looked again, and he watched her recognise him and braced for it — the step back, the phone out, the careful handling he'd had from strangers since Category Zero.

She moved her shopping bag off the seat next to her.

"You can sit, love," she said. "If you're waiting."

"I'm not. Thank you."

"Well." She put the bag back. "If you are."

The second one was a boy of about eight on a scooter, who stopped dead in the middle of the pavement and stared and said, very loudly, "You're the lights man."

His mother caught up with him and went red and started to apologise, and then looked at Cole's face properly and stopped apologising halfway through.

"He's been talking about it all week," she said. "He watched it on my phone. Forty times."

"Forty-one," said the boy.

"Forty-one times." She put a hand on her son's head. "He wants to know if you're a superhero. I said no, I said you're just a lad who lives up the road. Is that right?"

Cole looked at the boy on the scooter, who was waiting for the answer as though it was the most important thing in the world.

"I'm just a lad who lives up the road," he said. "But I'll tell you something if you promise not to tell anybody."

The boy nodded so hard his helmet slipped.

"The lights were already going to come back on," Cole said. "I just stood there so they'd have somewhere to point."

The boy thought about that with his whole face, scooter forgotten, and then said "Cool," in a voice of absolute reverence, and his mother mouthed thank you and steered him away.

The third one wasn't kind.

A man outside the bookies, forties, a roll-up in his mouth, who watched Cole come past and said, clearly enough to carry, "Freak."

Cole kept walking.

"Forty of them things on my road at three in the morning because of you," the man said, louder. "My kids were in that building. Who asked you to live here?"

Cole stopped.

He turned round. The man took a step back without meaning to, and hated himself for it — Cole watched him hate himself for it — and then Cole said, "Nobody. You're right," and turned back round and walked on.

The man didn't say anything else. Cole thought about him for the rest of the day, which was more than he thought about the woman at the bus stop, and he knew exactly what that said about him and didn't like it.

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The shop was the corner one. The one he'd been going to twice a week for four years, where a man called Mr. Rahman had served him bread and milk and once, in a snowstorm, a hot water bottle he hadn't asked for — and where, the week after Category Zero, Mr. Rahman had stopped looking up from the till.

Cole had not been back in since.

He stood in the doorway for a second with his hood up.

Then he went in and got a loaf off the shelf and put it on the counter, and Mr. Rahman rang it through, eyes on the till, the way he had for six months.

"Two forty," he said.

Cole paid.

Mr. Rahman gave him his change, and put the bread in a bag, and held the bag out across the counter — and then, as Cole took it, looked up.

Properly. For the first time since October.

"See you, mate," he said.

Cole walked home with the bread and did not trust himself to say anything to anybody for about ten minutes.

Vesper was on the landing when he came up. She took one look at his face and said, "What happened?"

"Nothing. Mr. Rahman said see you, mate."

Vesper, who had been with him on a bus four months ago when he'd told her about the shop — the first thing he'd ever told her before telling Reeve or Mia — understood exactly what that meant, and didn't make him say it, and took the bread off him and went inside.

The freezer broke on the Sunday.

It had been making a noise for a fortnight, a sort of wheezing rattle every few hours, and on Sunday morning it stopped wheezing and started leaking, and Reeve found a puddle under it and a bag of frozen peas going soft.

"Landlord says it's done," he reported, off the phone. "Compressor. He says it can't be fixed and he'll get a new one in due course, which means March."

"It is March," said Dana.

"Next March."

Mia was at the table doing homework. She didn't look up.

"It's not done," she said.

"Mia, the landlord's a heating engineer, he knows what a compressor—"

"No," Mia said.

She said it to her maths book, not to the freezer. Not raised, not stressed. The same way she'd said it on the landing, two days ago, about a door in Fen's house that hadn't been knocked on yet.

The freezer clicked, shuddered — and began, steadily, to hum.

Nobody spoke.

Reeve looked at the freezer. Dana looked at the freezer. Marek, in the doorway with a bag of ice on his lip, looked from the freezer to Mia and back again.

Mia turned a page of her maths book.

"Mia," Cole said carefully.

"I know."

"That's twice."

"I know." She still hadn't looked up. Her ears had gone pink. "The landing light on Friday. It's been buzzing for a month and I said no to something else entirely and it stopped. I didn't do it on purpose either time."

"How do you feel?"

Mia thought about it seriously, because it was a serious question.

"Annoyed," she said. "It's the first interesting thing I've ever done and it's a fridge."

Thessaly took her into the bedroom for an hour that afternoon and came out looking thoughtful.

"Well?" Cole said.

"She can't do it on purpose. She can't do it when she's calm, she can't do it when she's angry." Thessaly sat down. "She can only do it when somebody's told her a thing is fixed. Final. Can't be changed. And she believes them, and she decides not to accept it anyway."

"That's Defiance. That's on her form."

"That's what's on her form," Thessaly agreed. "What isn't on her form is that it works on things. The Ministry wrote oppositional resonance, moderate and assumed it meant a teenager who argues. It's never occurred to anybody that a girl who won't accept that something's final might be able to make it not final."

She looked at Cole.

"I'd like her at that house on Tuesday," she said. "And I'd like everybody to understand that I've never said that about anybody who wasn't trained."

Vesper found him on the fire escape on the Monday night.

She sat down next to him and kept quiet, and he did not ask, and eventually she put her head on his shoulder, which she had not done since before Agnes.

"After Tuesday," she said.

"What?"

"The thing I understood at Agnes's. The thing I haven't told you." She didn't lift her head. "I'll tell you after Tuesday. When Fen's all right and Mia's home and everybody's back up the stairs."

"You don't have to—"

"I know I don't. I've decided." She was quiet for a moment. "You let your sister hold the phone. On Friday. Mia told me. You sat there and wanted to take it off her and you didn't."

"Yeah."

"That's the thing I was waiting for," Vesper said. "I didn't know it was, until Mia told me. But it was."

Mia's phone went at ten to two in the morning.

The whole flat heard it, because she had set it to the loudest ring it had and left it on the kitchen table, and she was down the hall and had it in her hand before it had rung twice.

Cole was in the kitchen doorway before she'd read it, dressed, with his coat already on. He had not been asleep. He had been lying on top of his covers in the dark since midnight, waiting for exactly this, and had not admitted it to himself until he heard the phone.

She turned the screen round without a word.

mia theyre here

theyre early theyre outside

theres a van and theres a woman and the woman is just standing in the road looking at my window and my mum is still asleep

mia please

[End of Chapter 165]