The E-Rank Husband

Chapter Seven: Zero's Mercy

The Council had given Zero thirty days to show its face. Wyatt answered them before the sun came up, the only way Zero could.

He wrote the orders at the cellar table a little after three in the morning, under the bare bulb, while Verity and Elsie slept on the mattress in the corner. He didn't write them in anger. He had been angry for days, and anger made careless orders. He wrote them the way Winifred had taught him, slowly, reading every line back as if the person it touched were standing in front of him. There were two orders. He checked each of them three times, sent them to Odessa and sat in the dark, waiting for the city to wake.

At six, a bus driver at the Lowside depot tapped his card on the reader, and the screen flashed green with a letter he had never seen beside his name. He tapped it again. He took it to his supervisor. By half past six there was a queue of drivers outside the depot office, all holding their cards up to the light like men checking banknotes for forgeries.

Every E-rank card in the Lowside had turned to C.

It happened to thousands of people at once, at bus stops and laundry counters and the gates of the brickworks. People stopped in the middle of the pavement and stared at their cards. The baker on the corner held his up against his own shop window, read it twice, then sat down on his doorstep and covered his face with his floury hands. Strangers showed each other their cards. Somebody started crying, somebody else started laughing, and soon it was impossible to tell which sound was which.

In the cellar, Elsie's card buzzed on the table beside her school bag. She picked it up, frowned, then went very still. Verity found hers on the floor by the mattress, its string trailing, and turned it over to read the new grey C. She looked across the room at her husband, who sat at the table with a cup of tea gone cold, and she didn't say a word. She didn't have to.

At eight o'clock, children walked through school gates that had turned them away a week before. The guards checked their cards, checked them again and stepped aside. Some of the children held their parents' hands so tightly their knuckles went white, and some of the parents didn't let go even at the door.

The second order reached the courts at nine.

It was shorter than the first. By authority of Rank Zero, every proxy contract in Highmoor was void, effective immediately, and every person serving a sentence in another's place was to be released. The city jail argued for an hour, then two, but no one in Highmoor could refuse a black envelope. At noon, the main gates opened and three hundred E-rank prisoners walked out into the daylight in grey smocks, blinking, most of them carrying everything they owned in a paper bag. They had been serving rich men's sentences for crimes they had only read about.

Their families were waiting. Word had crossed the Lowside faster than any bus, and the street outside the jail was packed from wall to wall.

Deep inside the same building, in the remand wing, Peregrine Varley was lying on a narrow bunk when his lawyer came to the bars, pale and sweating.

"The second contract," the lawyer said quietly. "The one your father arranged last week, in case the trial went badly. Your proxy is gone. He walked out at noon with the rest of them."

Peregrine sat up slowly. For the first time in his life, there was nobody left to take his place.

The Lowside celebrated until long after dark. People dragged tables into the street and covered them with whatever they had. Someone found a fiddle, and someone else found a drum. The baker on the corner, his eyes still red, opened his shop and gave away every loaf he had baked that day. Verity had gone up to help him before Wyatt could argue, and she stood behind the counter in her apron handing bread to anyone who came, her C-rank card hanging on a string around her neck.

In the upper city, nobody was dancing. The Seven Houses panicked. Phones rang in every great house at once, lawyers were pulled out of lunches, and two of the Houses demanded that the Council sit again that night.

At the top of the Varley tower, Hallam stood in front of a wall of screens with a glass in his hand that he had forgotten to drink. Every channel showed the same pictures, the jail gates, the tables in the street, the baker crying on his doorstep. He watched it all without expression, then set the glass down very carefully. For twenty years, the Houses had survived Zero by assuming it was afraid of being found. Nothing afraid would empty a jail and lift a whole district in a single morning. Zero wasn't hiding anymore.

Zero was coming for them.

Across town, Humphrey Whitcombe sat alone in his study with the evening bulletin on. The camera swept across the Lowside, the music and the lanterns and the crowded tables, and settled on a young woman in an apron laughing as she handed a loaf to a little boy. A C-rank card swung on a string at her throat. It was his daughter. Humphrey reached for the remote to turn it off, and his hand stayed where it was. He couldn't look away.

But every order leaves a trail.

In a back room at the Rank Office, the Assessor sat over a map of Highmoor spread across a table under a single lamp. Two red pins marked the moments the orders had entered the system. From each of them, thin pencil lines ran back through the city's relay stations, narrowing street by street, hour by hour, until both lines ended in the same place. One phone signal, three streets from where the servant had last been seen.

The Assessor laid the silver head of his cane on that spot and held it there.

"Zero lives in the Lowside," he said.

Behind him, his men waited in silence. He didn't turn aroun

d.

"Bring me everyone the servant loves."