VOLUME THREE Chapter 101: The Woman at the Bus Stop

Undefined Conviction

VOLUME THREE

Chapter 101: The Woman at the Bus Stop

December came in cold and stayed there. Vesper took the crosstown bus twice a week now, out to a community clinic in the east district where a doctor Dana trusted ran unofficial resonance screenings for people who couldn't afford Ministry rates. She'd started going for herself — trying to get any reading at all on the years she couldn't account for — and kept going because the waiting room was full of people nobody else was helping.

The east district was one of the places the Ministry had stopped patrolling sometime in the nineties. Officially it was a resource allocation decision. Practically it meant that if your Conviction never manifested into anything usable, you ended up out here eventually, in a neighborhood where nobody checked your license because nobody had one.

That's where it happened.

She'd been sitting in the shelter at the stop for maybe six minutes, hood up against the wind, when an old woman sat down at the other end of the bench.

Ordinary. Grocery bag, scarf, hands wrapped around a paper cup. Eighty, maybe. She looked at Vesper the way people on benches look at each other, which is to say barely.

Then she looked again.

And her face came apart.

Not dramatically. She didn't gasp or stand. Her mouth simply opened slightly and stayed that way, and her eyes went wet, and the paper cup tilted in her hands until coffee ran over the edge and down onto her coat and she didn't seem to notice at all.

"Oh," she said.

Vesper sat very still. "Are you okay?"

"I'm sorry." The woman was crying now, openly, without any apparent embarrassment about it. "I'm so sorry. I don't — I don't know why I'm doing this."

"Do you know me?"

"No." She said it immediately and then looked confused by her own certainty. "No. I've never seen you before in my life. That's the—" She stopped. Wiped her face with the back of a hand that had started shaking. "I'm eighty-three years old. I've buried a husband and a son and I have not cried in eleven years. Not once. And I looked at you just now and something in my chest — "

She stopped again. Tried twice more to finish the sentence and couldn't.

"It felt like coming home to a house that burned down," she said. "Does that make any sense? I don't have another way to say it."

Vesper couldn't answer.

"Are you somebody?" the old woman asked. "You look like somebody. Not famous. That's not what I mean." She shook her head, frustrated with her own mouth. "I sound insane. I know I sound insane."

"You don't."

"I do. I've been the person on the bench before. I know how it looks." She wiped her face again. "I'm not going to ask you any more questions. I don't think I'd like the answers and I'm too old to start carrying new things."

The bus came. The woman didn't get on it. She just sat there holding her ruined coffee, staring at nothing, and when Vesper stood up she reached out and caught her wrist — light, not gripping, more like someone confirming a thing is really there.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit NovelPhoenix for the authentic version.

"Whatever you are," she said, "someone loved you very much. I don't know how I know that. I'm quite certain it isn't my memory."

Vesper didn't go to the clinic. She went home instead and sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinets, which is where Cole found her forty minutes later, still in her coat.

He didn't ask. Just sat down next to her on the floor.

"An old woman cried at me," Vesper said eventually.

"Okay."

"At a bus stop. She'd never met me. She said it felt like coming home to a house that burned down." Vesper's voice was very level, which Cole had learned meant she was nowhere near level. "She said someone loved me very much and she was sure it wasn't her memory."

Cole was quiet.

"Say something."

"I'm thinking about what to say."

"Don't think. That's how you end up managing me."

"Fine." He leaned his head back against the cabinet. "Aurelia looked at me and nearly went into cardiac arrest. A woman at a bus stop looked at you and grieved. That's not the same reaction."

"No."

"I've been trying to figure out why for the last ten seconds and I've got nothing good."

"I have something," Vesper said. "It's not good either."

"Go ahead."

"People are afraid of you." She pulled her knees up. "Not just Marguerite. Ansel can't look away from you. Voss is rearranging four decades of planning around you. Aurelia recognized your eyes from thirty years before you were born and what she felt was fear."

"And?"

"Nobody's afraid of me. They're sad." Her voice cracked slightly on the last word and she pushed through it. "Whatever's underneath both of us — whatever it is that old people and ancient things keep half-recognizing — it's not the same thing. You get fear, Cole. I get mourning."

Cole didn't have an answer. The refrigerator clicked on, ran, clicked off.

"That's worse," he said finally.

"Why?"

"Because fear means they think I'm dangerous. Mourning means they think you're already gone."

Mia came in around six and found them both still on the kitchen floor, which she absorbed without comment, took a yogurt from the fridge, and stepped over Cole's legs on her way out.

"Whatever this is, you're in the way of the drawer," she said.

"We'll move."

"You won't." She paused in the doorway. "Vesper, you've still got your coat on. You've been in here since four."

"I'm aware."

"Cool. Just checking whether anyone was going to mention it." She left.

Vesper snorted, quietly, which was the first almost-normal sound she'd made in two hours.

"Your sister's going to run the world someday," she said.

"She's going to run a lab and terrify everyone in it." Cole shifted. "You want to hear the thing I've been not saying?"

"Always."

"I don't think either of us is going to like what's at the bottom of this." He turned his hand over — still shaking faintly, still hadn't stopped since Marguerite. "Every time we get a piece, it's worse than the last piece. First it's a mark. Then it's a face in your notebook. Then it's a woman at a library. Now it's a stranger grieving you on a bus bench."

"So we stop looking?"

"No." Immediate. "I'm saying I'd rather we agree now, while it's still theoretical, that we keep going even when it stops being theoretical. Because I think there's a version of this where one of us finds something and wants to protect the other one from it, and we've both got a bad record on that."

Vesper considered it.

"Deal," she said. "Whatever it is. Both of us, or neither."

"Both of us or neither."

They shook on it, sitting on a kitchen floor in December, which was somehow more binding than anything either of them had ever put in writing.

Later, upstairs, Vesper opened the notebook.

She hadn't drawn in it since the raid. Hadn't wanted to. The last page still had the older Cole on it, gold-eyed and tired and sad in a way she hadn't understood then and still didn't.

She turned to a fresh page and put the pencil down and let her hand do whatever it was going to do.

It took eleven minutes. She watched it happen the way you watch someone else's hand, distantly, without much say in the matter, and when it stopped she looked at what was there and felt the floor tilt.

Not a face this time.

A room. Enormous, impossible, ceiling too high to have a top. Two chairs. One of them enormous. One of them ordinary.

And in the ordinary one, drawn in her own handwriting in the corner, four words she had absolutely no memory of choosing:

I told you so.

[End of Chapter 101]