The Fate Intercessor

Chapter 15: Eleven Minutes

“Vic? Where are you? I’ve been calling since Tuesday.”

Leanne’s voice came through the phone Priya held to my ear, and the sound of it did something to Victor’s chest that had nothing to do with his heart. I could feel him down in the dark of his own head, perfectly still, like a man in a dark house who’s heard his name from the next room.

“I’m at the office,” I said. The words came out thin. “Lee, I’m okay. I mean, I’m not. I need you to listen.”

“You sound awful. Are you sick? Is it your chest? Vic, is it your chest?”

I closed my eyes. She’d known. Three weeks of a hidden pill bottle, and she’d known the whole time, the way a person knows the weather by their knees.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my chest. I should have told you.”

A sound came down the line, a sharp breath, half a sob. “I’m getting my keys. I’m in the car in two minutes. I’m coming.”

“It’s a twenty-five-minute drive.”

“Then I’ll make it fifteen.”

“Lee. Wait.” The siren had gotten louder. Out in the lobby, someone was shouting for the doors to be held open. “Before you drive, I have to say something, and I need you to hear all of it. I’ve done something terrible.”

She didn’t answer. I heard a door close on her end, and the jingle of keys.

“I took money. A lot of money, from the pension fund, for three years. I’m going to be arrested. I just told the state agents, and it’s on tape.” The marble spun lazily. I held onto Priya’s hand and kept going. “I should’ve told you the first week. I couldn’t make myself. Every day I didn’t, it got harder, and then it was just the way things were. I’m sorry. That isn’t enough, but I’m sorry.”

The line was so quiet I thought it had dropped. Then, very low:

“The Brandt thing. The man at the funeral who wouldn’t shake your hand.”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was about the layoffs.”

“It was about me.”

I heard her breathe in. I braced for it, whatever came: the scream, the click, the long dial tone. A man who’d done what Victor had done was owed all of them.

“Okay,” Leanne said.

I didn’t understand.

“Okay.” She sounded scoured out, but steady, the voice of someone who’d been bracing for a different disaster for six weeks and had just been told the real name of it. “Okay. That’s awful. We’ll figure out what comes after that. Right now I’m getting in the car. Stay on the line.”

“I can’t—”

“Then talk to me while they carry you.” Her engine turned over. “Tell me about the roof.”

I almost laughed. Almost. “How do you know about the roof?”

“I didn’t. You just said it.” Her voice cracked at last, a single clean break. “Oh, Vic.”

They got me onto the stretcher in under three minutes. I remember the paramedic’s hands, brisk and calm, and the smell of antiseptic, and a ceiling light sliding past like a slow white fish. Somebody cut the sleeve of my jacket. Somebody said pressure’s dropping. Priya had run alongside as far as the doors and then stopped at the threshold, one hand pressed over her mouth, getting smaller.

The ambulance doors shut with a thud that felt very final.

“There you are,” the Intercessor said.

He was sitting on the bench by my head, with his hands loose between his knees. The paramedic worked at my wrist without noticing him. I didn’t have the strength to be surprised.

“Is he dying?” I asked. My lips barely moved.

“He’s been dying for three weeks.” He kept his voice low. “Cardiomyopathy. The doctors told him in September, and he didn’t tell anyone. It’s what he was doing in the elevator, in the lobby, the whole time you were carrying him around. You weren’t going to outrun it.”

“You said fix his fate.”

“I said change it.” He looked at the ceiling, at the white light sliding past. “I’ll give you the version I give everyone. Victor Lang was going to die tonight. On the roof, or on the sidewalk, or in his bed with the note in his pocket. His heart was going to stop either way. What hung in the balance was what he’d leave behind him when it did.”

“A lie.”

“A lie and a girl named Priya Nair with a felony.” A pause. “That was the crooked thread. Not his death. The way he meant to arrange it.”

I thought about the roof, the ledge, the neat little note. No one else knew. It had been his last piece of bookkeeping, and the only one that mattered, and he’d done it wrong.

“So it’s over,” I said. “I did it. The business, the unfinished thing.”

“Almost.”

“What’s left?”

The Intercessor didn’t answer. I turned my head on the stretcher and saw that he was looking, not at me, but at my chest, and that his hand had come up halfway to the lapel of his gray coat.

“Cal.”

“Don’t say my name like that.”

“He’s awake,” he said. “Victor. He’s been listening to the whole call. I think he’s been waiting.”

I felt it before I understood it.

It was the sensation of a door opening in a house I’d been living in. The gray room in the back of Victor’s mind, where I’d found him sitting on the floor with the lights off, had changed. One lamp had come on. The figure was on his feet.

Is she still on the phone?

The voice was dry and cracked and entirely unlike the confident baritone I’d been wearing for two hours. It was a tired man’s voice, a man who’d forgotten how it felt to be asked something.

She’s in the car, I said. She’s coming. Phone’s with Priya.

Is she angry?

She said okay.

A silence. When he spoke again, it wasn’t to me.

Okay, Victor said, very softly, to nobody, to the lamp. She said okay.

The ambulance took a corner. The paramedic said something to his partner about eleven minutes, and the number landed oddly in my head, like a coin dropped in a well.

Eleven minutes, I said. That’s what we’ve got.

I know. I felt him step forward in the dark, the way Rian had at the Hales’ couch, with a kind of terrified courtesy. I’ve been a coward for a long time. I was hoping to be allowed one more thing.

Anything.

Let me say it to her. Myself. Not you. Me.

The ambulance siren rose and fell. Overhead, the white light slid across the ceiling, and across the gray shape of the man beside me, who had gone completely still.

“It’s the last one,” the Intercessor said. He’d bent close, almost an apology. “He has to be the one. You know that.”

I looked at the white fish of light going by, and I let go of the wheel.