The One-Star Husband

Chapter Seven: Pier Six

They waited for dark.

Pier Six stood at the far end of the docks where the cranes gave out, a long tin warehouse with its windows painted black. Enzo had walked past it every morning for five years on his way to the ships, and he had never once seen its loading door open. Tonight it stood ajar by the width of a hand, and through the gap came a faint blue glow, like moonlight on water.

Ottoline crouched beside him behind a stack of pallets with her hood pulled up. "That's it?"

"That's it."

They crept to the door. Inside, the warehouse was a maze of steel shelves running back into the dark, and on every shelf, cheap phones sat charging in rows by the hundred. Their screens lit and dimmed in slow waves, thousands of small blue faces waking and sleeping. Each one was a citizen who didn't exist, and each one had a vote.

At the far end, behind the window of a plywood office, a boy sat hunched over a laptop. He couldn't have been more than twenty, thin and unwashed, swallowed by a hooded jacket two sizes too big. Every few seconds his phone buzzed, he read it and he typed. Then a ripple of light ran down the shelves as a few hundred phones woke at once to vote for or against whoever the message had named.

"One boy," Ottoline whispered. "One boy and a room full of phones."

Headlights swung across the pier. Enzo pulled her back behind the pallets as a van rolled up and stopped. Four men climbed out, and each of them carried a red petrol can.

They didn't speak. One walked straight into the office, took the boy's phone and laptop, shoved him back into his chair and came out again, sliding a heavy bolt across the door behind him. The boy began hammering on the glass. The other three moved between the shelves, emptying their cans over the rows of phones, and the sharp smell of petrol rolled out through the loading door.

Enzo understood. The Lodestar's audits had burned the farm's accounts, all forty thousand struck and useless. A farm with no accounts was nothing now but evidence, so the Critic was burning the evidence, and the boy along with it.

The last man struck a match. The fire ran up the shelves in seconds, leaping from row to row while the phone screens burst into crackling sparks. The men were back in the van before the first window blew.

"Enzo," Ottoline said, catching his arm. "No."

There was a rain barrel beside the loading door. He tore off his driver's jacket and pushed it into her hands, collar and all. Then he pulled his jumper over his head, plunged it into the barrel and tied it across his mouth and nose.

He went in through the smoke the way he had once gone down into the hold for Gus's boy, low and fast, with one arm over his eyes. The heat pressed against him like a hand. Phones popped and hissed on either side. He found the office by the sound of fists on glass, threw his shoulder at the door once, twice, and felt the bolt tear out of the plywood. The boy was curled under the desk, choking. Enzo hauled him over his shoulder and ran back through a tunnel of fire toward the grey square of the loading door.

He came out onto the pier and dropped to his knees on the wet planks, and the boy rolled off his shoulder, coughing as if he would never stop.

Ottoline was beside them at once, the jacket pressed against her chest. Behind them, the warehouse roared. Part of the roof sagged and fell in, and a column of sparks rose into the night.

The boy lay on his back and watched it burn. His face was black with soot and his eyes were streaming. Nobody needed to tell him what had nearly happened. The Critic had meant to let him burn with it, and he knew it.

"Ozzie," he said at last, when he could speak. "Ozzie Tolliver." He looked up at Enzo. "You came in for me."

"Yes."

Ozzie stared at him a moment longer. Then he reached down, pulled off his left shoe and peeled a small flat drive from inside the sole.

"I kept copies," he said hoarsely. "Every order he ever sent the farm. Names, dates, what they paid. I figured one day I'd need something he couldn't take off me."

Ottoline plugged it into her phone. The screen filled with a list that kept scrolling, thousands of entries long. Enzo recognised names from the news, men who sat on the Bureau's own council, paying to lift themselves up and sink their rivals. And there, regular as a salary, month after month, was the Abernethy family account.

Ottoline stopped scrolling. She didn't say a word. She only looked at her family's name on the screen for a long time.

"Go to the bottom," Ozzie said. "The oldest one's from before my time. It was already in the records when they gave me the job."

She scrolled down. The first order on the drive was ten years old.

Graziella Moretti. Below one by dawn.

Enzo read it twice. He was back at the Bureau counter under the humming lights, with Lucia shivering in his coat. For ten years he had wondered who had done it to his mother. Now it was one line of text, with a date and a f*e beside it.

"There's something else." Ozzie pushed himself up on one elbow. "Tonight's order. The one I was meant to start at nine, before they came." He swallowed. "He's got a second farm across the river, bigger than this one. If I didn't run it, they'll be running it over there. Right now."

"Whose name?" Ottoline asked.

Ozzie didn't answer. He was looking at Enzo.

Enzo's phone lit up in his pocket. Years ago, he had set an alert on his mother's rating, and he had never once heard it sound. He took the phone out. Graziella's number was falling. Two point six. Two point one. One point eight. And the old phone that could stop it was sitting in Teo's garage on the other side of the city.

"Same name," Ozzie said quietly. "Same words. Below one by dawn."