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Chapter 82: The Second Page
The knock on the front door was polite, and Evan's mother, who had not yet put down the rolling pin, opened the door two inches and said, "Is this one polite too?""I have brought my own tea, madam," said Cassian Voss.He had. Two paper cups, one in each hand, and he held them out through the gap with the grave courtesy of a man presenting credentials. Evan's mother looked at the cups, and at his hat, and at the grey in his face that had not been there at nine that morning."You have been running," she said."I have been walking very quickly. I do not run. It frightens the junior staff." He cleared his throat. "May I come in? I am afraid I have news, and it is better delivered sitting."She let him in. She did not, Evan noticed, put down the rolling pin.Voss sat at the kitchen table with his hat on his knee and told them in four sentences what had happened since noon.The Archive had been closed by order. Miss Park had not been seen at her desk. Dispatch had received, by hand, a sin
Chapter 81:The Doormat
It turned out that you could climb a stair and whistle.What you could not do was talk.Evan found this out on the first landing, when he turned to say wait to Serena and what came out of his mouth was four notes up and three down. His lips would not make another shape. The tune had taken the whole of his breath and was running it like a wheel, round and round, and if he let it drop for even half a bar he could feel the dark at the end of the corridor lifting its head.Serena saw his face."Don't try," she said. "Just climb. I will talk for both of us. I am extremely good at it when I am frightened."She went up the stair a step ahead of him, in his father's coat, with one hand trailing along the wall for balance. She counted the rounds under her breath. He did not ask her to. It was just something to hold on to."Eleven."Something cold touched him under the ribs."Twelve."He could not say afterwards when he lost the sound of rain on tin. It was gone by the second turn, and what had
Chapter 80: Ellis
There was nowhere to sit but the floor.They sat on it. Serena folded herself down in the borrowed coat with her back against a shelf of lit vials, and Evan sat across from her with his legs crossed like a boy at a school assembly, and the old man on his stool looked at them both for a long time with an expression Evan could not name."My name is Ellis," he said. "I was a clerk. Fourth grade. I had a desk by the window and a lamp that smoked." He glanced at Serena and away. "I will tell you everything. I am sorry. It will take a little while, and I must keep whistling the whole time, or the rim will open, so you will have to forgive me if I seem inattentive.""The rim," said Serena."The tune holds it shut. It is the oldest thing I own." He lifted a hand and let it fall. "I began it the night I signed, four hundred and one years ago. It was not meant to be done for so long."He whistled four notes, and stopped, and smiled apologetically."It is very hard to talk and whistle. Evan. You
Chapter 79: The Gallery of Small Things
His mother gave him a flask.It was a dented tin one that had gone on every picnic of his childhood, and it was full of tea. She screwed the cap on herself. She did not argue. That was how Evan knew how frightened she was."I will sit on the stairs," she said. "The ordinary ones. If I hear anything I do not like I will be unreasonable about it.""Mum—""I have been unreasonable before. I am extremely good at it." She put a hand against his face, briefly, and took it away again. "Go down. Find out what your father paid for. Come back up and tell me. And do not let that girl go in anywhere without a coat.""I do not need a coat," said Serena."I did not say you needed one. I said I wished it."Serena took the coat from the peg.It was Evan's father's, and it was too large for her, and she put it on without asking, and neither of them said a word about it. He saw her shoulders settle into it. The old brown wool seemed to know her.Then they went down.The stair turned three times. The fi
Chapter 78: What Do You Want
"Don't ask me," said Serena.They had been at it for ten minutes. The brown page lay flat on the table between her hands, the torn edge pressed against its twin, and she had not looked at Evan once. His mother had retreated into the pantry on purpose and was moving tins from one shelf to another, very slowly, in the way of a woman who wished to be present without being a witness."The page says I ask," said Evan. "With nothing in my hand.""And I will say yes.""You don't know that.""I have said it in every version." She said it flatly, without any bitterness at all. "It is the one answer I have never had to think about. Do you understand why he could not do it? The first one?" Her finger touched the last line of the page without quite resting on it. "It is not hard to ask a question. It is hard to stand in a room and hear someone you love say yes to the worst thing you can imagine. It is so much easier to sign. You do it with a pen. You do not have to watch anyone's face.""Then I w
Chapter 77: The Other Half
"I would not lift that glass," said Voss.Evan had already lifted it.It came away in his hands with a small dry sound, like a held breath finally given up, and he set it on the floor against the table leg. The paper underneath did not stir. It lay there in the lamplight, seven lines long and one line short, with its ragged edge pointing at him like a finger."It has been under that pane," Voss said, "since before the Registry had a roof.""And nobody has ever touched it.""Nobody who was not a Witness has ever been able."Evan did not answer. He was thinking about a rope.He had never linked to something he could not see. Two things, three seconds, the way a nail and a lock were briefly the same thing: that was the whole of what he could do, and every time he had done it he had known both ends. But the torn edge in front of him was one end. He did not know the other. He thought of it as asking a question with a rope tied to the question, and throwing the rope into the dark, and waiti
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