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Chapter 88: The Coat
They went down the way they had gone before, but there were more of them now, and it felt like a procession.The room under the stairs was waiting with its door open. The old brown coat hung on Serena's shoulders as they stepped into the plaster cell, and she looked back once at the lit kitchen, at the soup bowls and the biscuit tin, and then she followed Evan down the stone stair into the smell of salt and river and iron.Evan's mother came after her with a lamp, and Voss behind with his hat clutched to his chest, and last of all Tobias Fenn, who had insisted, who had said in a small cracked voice that he did not know why but he would feel a great deal worse if he did not.The vials had brightened.It was the first thing Evan saw as the stair turned. All along the shell-coloured wall, in row on row of little glass niches, the tiny lights had grown, as if a wind had gone down the gallery and fanned them. They were beating faster. He saw Tobias put out a hand to one without touching, a
Chapter 87: Everything He Knew
It turned out to be very difficult to drink tea and whistle at the same time.Evan found this out at the kitchen table at ten o'clock that night, with his mother holding the cup an inch from his mouth and the tune running steadily on, and he found it out all down the front of his shirt."Do not look at me like that," said his mother. "You will take it in the gaps.""There are no gaps," Serena said, on his behalf, since he could not. "He does the hang and the settle and goes straight round. There is no place to put a cup.""Then he will go thirsty." She set the cup down with a clack. "I will not be told by a tune what my son may drink."Tobias Fenn, at the far end of the table, had a bowl of soup in front of him and was eating it with a total, dazed concentration, as though it were the first soup in the world. Voss sat beside him with his hat on his knee. He had said that he did not eat. He had been given a bowl anyway. It was empty. He looked at it with the wondering embarrassment of
Chapter 86: Do You Consent (b)
Evan had never seen the whole of the board at once. It had always been a place where one name lit at a time. Now it was covered, floor to ceiling, in small white script: every name that had ever been ranked in Halcyon, in rows, thousands upon thousands of them, each with its single letter at the side. A. C. F. B. F. D. F. He saw his own, near the bottom, in the F column.They were coming off the glass like snow.Each letter fell as a spark falls, slow and bright, and as it fell it loosened, and each spark that dropped from the board drifted out over the heads of the people in the hall and went, like a moth to a lamp, to somebody.A woman in the gallery put both hands to her mouth. She had been standing at the rail with a clipboard, a clerk, a stout grey woman who had stood at the back of every Ceremony for thirty years. She said, in a voice that carried, quite distinctly, "Hush-a-bye, my little one," and stopped, and stared at her hands, and sat down on the floor and wept.A young man
Chapter 85: Do You Consent
The tune went down the hall like a rope paid out over water.Evan had not known it could do that. He had thought of it as a lock, a closed thing, a wall he held up with his mouth. But a wall that was whistled was also a sound, and a sound goes where it is sent. It went out across the polished boards, over the heads of the four hundred, and up into the high windows, and everyone in the Rank Hall heard it at once.They turned.It was a small thing, four hundred heads turning. It made a sound like a flock of birds changing direction. The girl in the green dress, Ruth Aldous, halfway to the dais with her foot lifted, stopped in the middle of the stride and stood on one leg like a heron.Serena took off Evan's father's coat.She laid it over the back of the keeper's chair, neatly, as one lays a coat on a hook, and stepped forward to the edge of the dais in her plain grey dress with her hands at her sides. She looked suddenly very small. She looked nineteen. She was, Evan thought, in the wa
Chapter 84: Plainly
The second bell rang as Tobias Fenn reached the foot of the dais.It was the same flat iron note as before, one stroke, and it went through the Rank Hall like a hand drawn across a wet plate. Every window along the high walls shivered in its frame. Four hundred and twelve people took a single breath, in perfect unison, and held it.On the black board behind the dais a white line appeared.It was a thin line, a hair's breadth wide, running from top to bottom through the middle of the glass, and it glowed like the edge of a blade held up to a lamp. Evan had seen it once before, on a morning not long ago, and he had thought, with the idle fancy of a boy in a queue, that it looked like a seam."Thumb, please," said the Needle, very kindly.Tobias held out his hand.Evan wrote.He did it without deciding to, the pencil already moving, in his father's blunt capitals with the flat bar through the V. He did not look at what he was writing. He felt the third coin of the round go out of him as
Chapter 83: Three Questions
The Rank Hall was the largest room in Halcyon, and Evan had been quite sure, from the morning he first walked into it, that it was haunted.He had stood in it once, at nine in the morning on his eighteenth birthday, in a queue that went out the door and down the steps and round the block. A man in grey had called a number. He had walked forward. They had pricked his thumb with a needle no longer than a pin, and a light had gone up on the tall black board at the end of the hall, and next to his name, in white, a single letter.F.He had been told it was the lowest rank there was. He had been told this very kindly.It looked different at dusk.The hall was full.Four hundred and twelve young people stood in a long double line down the middle of the floor, in the cold light of the high windows, wearing the stiff clean clothes of those who have been told to look their best. Nobody spoke. Nobody fidgeted. They had the look of people at the foot of a very tall staircase who have been told t
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