Chapter 97: Nobody Says the Word Blackout

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 97: Nobody Says the Word Blackout

Halden came at nine.

Not officially. She parked round the corner and came up the back stairs and stood in the kitchen without taking her coat off, which told everyone what kind of visit it was.

"Four windows," she said.

"Five. Mrs. Adeyemi's got a second one in the kitchen."

"Five windows, a crater in the road surface, and a car that Compliance has already collected." She put a folder on the table and didn't open it. "There's a report being written. I've seen the draft. It says 'localised resonance event, cause undetermined, no casualties.'"

"That's generous."

"It's not generous, it's deliberate, and I'd like you to think about who benefits from it being written that way. Because it isn't me." She finally sat down. "Somebody above me looked at a street full of broken glass and decided not to open a file. That's the second time this year."

She wanted to know what he remembered.

He told her. Nine seconds of nothing, a woman on one knee eleven metres away, hands that didn't shake.

Halden wrote none of it down.

"Say the word," she said.

"What word?"

"The one everyone in this room has been walking around since I came in." She looked at him levelly. "Blackout. Say it out loud, because if you don't, you'll spend a fortnight calling it something else and you'll lose the fortnight."

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"Blackout."

"Right." She stood. "Now stop telling people you won that fight."

Marguerite reported to Voss the same morning, bruised across the sternum, standing straighter than the injury allowed.

"He put me through a windshield and I do not have a mechanism for it."

Voss listened without moving.

"Describe the eyes."

"Gold, and then something past gold that I don't have a word for. A door, at the nearest." Marguerite's voice was not steady. "Something opened, and it was open for nine seconds, and during those nine seconds he was not entirely the boy who arrived on that street."

"You said before that he spoke."

"He did."

"In what."

"I don't know," Marguerite said. "And I would like it recorded that this is the first sentence of that kind I have said to you in forty-one years."

Voss was quiet for a long moment.

"Bring me everything," she said. "Every scan. Every reading since Ranking Day, including the ones engineering couldn't parse. I want to know how deep this goes before he learns to reach it on purpose."

"And if he already can?"

Voss looked at a window that showed nothing at all.

"Then I have made an error of a size I have not made in a very long time," she said, "and I would like to know its dimensions before it finishes revealing itself."

Cole spent the afternoon fixing a window.

Mrs. Adeyemi's son had boarded the front one. The kitchen one at the back was small and awkward and nobody had got to it, so Cole measured it badly, went to the hardware place on the corner, came back with the wrong size, and went again.

She made him tea he didn't want and watched him work.

"They're saying it was a gas thing," she said.

"Right."

"On the news. A gas main." She stirred her own cup. "There isn't a gas main under that road, love. It's all electric down this side. Has been since they did the flats."

Cole kept measuring.

"I'm not asking," she said. "I want you to know I'm not asking. I've lived here forty years and I've got a good idea about when not to."

"Okay."

"But there was glass in my kitchen and my kitchen faces the yard." She put her spoon down. "And I'd like somebody in this street to have said that out loud to another person, so I've said it to you."

He got the pane in at four and it wasn't level and she said it was fine.

On the way out she caught his sleeve.

"Was anybody hurt?"

"No."

"Was it you?"

Cole stood in an old woman's hallway with a screwdriver in his hand.

"I don't know," he said.

Mrs. Adeyemi patted his arm twice, the way you do when a thing is settled, and let go.

"Well," she said. "That's honest, anyway."

[End of Chapter 97]