The One-Star Husband

Chapter Eight: Let Me Fall

By the small hours, Graziella Moretti was below one, and her name was on the morning's Dimming list.

Enzo had watched the number cross the line at a quarter past two. Within a minute, the Bureau's notice arrived on her phone. Inspector Thrale's officers would come for her at first light.

She sat at her own kitchen table, sewing, as if this were any other night. A child's coat lay across her knees with a button half attached. Lucia had cried herself to sleep upstairs. Ottoline sat by the stove with her phone in her lap, watching the number, and Ozzie Tolliver lay asleep on the sofa in the front room in his scorched jacket, because there had been nowhere else to take him.

Graziella bit off her thread and looked at her son.

"Whatever you're thinking, don't," she said. "Let me fall."

He didn't answer. He was reading Ozzie's drive on Ottoline's phone, and had been since they got home, scrolling past council members and judges' sons, looking for anything that would show him how the Critic thought. At ten to three, he found an entry that wasn't an order at all.

It was a payment, logged yesterday afternoon to the Santoro family. Three stars, promised and not yet delivered. Beneath it was a single line of text. For the number of an old phone.

He read it three times.

Teo's daughter, Pia, needed a heart operation, and the one-star ward couldn't schedule her for a year. A family with three stars could have her seen within a week. The Critic had offered exactly that, and all it had asked in return was a number. In the car, Ozzie had told him how the Critic hunted. It never chased people, only numbers. Ever since Teo fixed that cracked screen, the Critic's people had been watching it, and the moment a signed order left that phone, they would know exactly where the Lodestar was standing.

Enzo stood up and put on his jacket.

Teo's garage was four streets away, the shutter half raised and a light burning inside. Teo sat at his workbench with the old phone in front of him, its new screen gleaming under the lamp. He didn't look up when Enzo ducked under the shutter. He couldn't look at him at all.

"They told me they only wanted to know whose it was," Teo said to the bench. "They said nobody would get hurt."

Enzo picked up the phone and put it in his pocket. Then he took out his wallet, every note he had put by since the docks, and laid it on the workbench beside Teo's hand. It was enough for Pia's first consultation and not much more. He left it there and went, and neither of them said goodbye.

He couldn't use the phone now. Any order he sent from it would light a path straight to his mother's kitchen. So he would do it the founders' way. Dorcas had told him once, on the pier, that before the city had phones, the Lodestar wrote its orders on paper and sealed them with the star. No machine could follow a sheet of paper.

Back at the kitchen table, he wrote the order in plain capitals on a page torn from Lucia's exercise book and folded it into an envelope. Graziella watched him without a word. When he asked for wax, she rose, took a stick of red sealing wax from the drawer where she kept her parcel labels, and held it over the candle herself. It dripped onto the envelope in a dark pool. Enzo pressed the brass star into it with his thumb beside it, and held them there until the wax took hold.

Graziella lifted the envelope from the table before it had cooled.

Dorcas came to the back door at half past five with a scarf over her grey hair. Graziella insisted on taking the envelope to her herself. She handed it over and held on to it a moment longer than she needed to, her thumbs resting on the seal, as if she were keeping it warm. Then she let go.

The cameras were already live when the sun came up over Lowbridge. Forty-one people walked toward the gate in a loose grey line with officers on either side: an old man with a stick, a mother holding her son's hand, a boy no older than Lucia. Graziella walked in the middle of them in her good coat, her back straight, exactly as she had been ready to walk ten years ago.

Enzo stood behind the barrier with Ottoline and Lucia, close enough to see the dew beaded on the gate's iron bars. Thrale waited beside it with a clipboard.

Then someone pushed through the crowd. Dorcas, small and out of breath, held the envelope above her head and ducked under the barrier before anyone could stop her. She broke the seal with her thumbnail and read aloud, in a voice that carried over the river.

"By order of the Lodestar, every vote ever cast by the Critic's farms is struck."

For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then every phone on the bridge began to chime at once. Forty-one ratings jumped together, past one, past two, and the gate could not take a single person through. Thrale stared down at his clipboard while his officers looked at one another.

Behind the cameras, on the giant screen that carried the Starboard to the bridge, one name was moving the other way. Rafferty Abernethy's five stars had been bought, vote by vote, for years. Now they collapsed, four, three, two, until they stopped at two point two. Somebody in the crowd laughed out loud.

Graziella walked back across the bridge. She didn't hurry. When she reached the barrier, Lucia threw herself into her arms, and Graziella held her tight and looked over her daughter's shoulder at her son.

Thrale's face had turned a dark, mottled red. He strode across to Dorcas, took her by the arm and told her she was under arrest for obstructing a Dimming. She didn't argue. An officer took the broken seal from her fingers and dropped it into an evidence bag, and Thrale held the bag up to the morning light.

Pressed into the red wax, beside the star, was a thumbprint.