The One-Star Husband

Chapter Six: Two Is The Line

By breakfast, Ottoline's number had started falling again.

Enzo watched it over her shoulder at the cutting table. One point three. One point two. By the time Lucia left for school, it was one point one, and the shop was filled with the soft, steady sound of Graziella's machine, as if nothing in the world were wrong.

He knew exactly what this was. The Critic had dragged the Commissioner's daughter from five stars to one in a single night, and now it was finishing the job slowly, in daylight, where the whole city could watch. It wanted her Dimmed from a one-star shop in the Underbank. It wanted to see who would catch her.

At noon, the news showed Benedict on the Bureau steps. A reporter shouted a question about his daughter's rating. The Commissioner paused with one hand on the car door, the door Enzo had held for four years, and said only, "She made her choice." Then he got in and someone else drove him away.

Ottoline didn't watch. She hemmed the same cuff three times, unpicking it and starting again, while her number slipped another hundredth and then another.

At dusk, the bell over the door rang. Inspector Thrale stood on the step in his long coat with a folded paper in his gloved hand.

"Ottoline Abernethy," he said, almost politely. "I have your Dimming notice."

Graziella rose from her machine and went to the door, and somehow her small body filled the whole frame. "She's eating," she said. "You can wait."

Enzo took his wife by the hand and drew her into the back room, between the rails of coats.

He knew what this would tell the Critic. Anyone in the city might have been the one to save Lucia. But if the Lodestar caught the Commissioner's daughter here, in this shop, the Critic would know it was standing close to this door, close to his mother and his sister. He thought about that for one long moment. Then he looked at his wife's number, barely above one, and took his mother's sewing scissors from the shelf.

Ottoline watched him cut open the seam Graziella had sewn shut. He drew out the brass star and took the old phone from his inside pocket. He pressed the star to its back and his thumb to the glass, and when he typed, the crack across the corner swallowed a letter, so he had to start again.

Audit every vote cast against Ottoline Abernethy since the Star Report. Strike every one from a false account.

He sent it and nodded at the phone in her hand. She looked down. One point five. Two point eight. Four. Beside her name, small and unmistakable, sat the broken star.

From the front of the shop came the chime of Thrale's phone. Enzo heard the inspector swear under his breath, then the bell, then the door closing. When Graziella sat back down at her machine, she didn't look toward the back room at all.

Ottoline sank onto a crate of buttons. "Tell me," she said.

So he told her all of it. The Bureau counter in the small hours and the docks after. Dorcas on the pier with the star in her open hand. The seat the founders had hidden above the Bureau and the one law that came with it: the Lodestar had to stay a one-star and could never touch its own rating, and the day that rating reached two, the seat would leave him forever. Then he told her the part he had dreaded most. He had married her because Dorcas asked him to. The Critic had a client in her father's house, and Dorcas had needed someone inside it.

Ottoline listened without interrupting once. When he was finished, she took out her phone and opened his rating. She looked at it for a long time. Then her thumb moved slowly across the stars, one, two, three, four, toward the fifth.

He caught her hand. "Don't. If I reach two, it's gone."

She looked at the number beneath her thumb. One point eight. He watched her understand the message she had turned face down the night before.

"Four years I couldn't decide what to give you," she said. "Now I'm not allowed to."

She set her phone face down on the crate and left her hand in his.

They started that night, around the cutting table, after Graziella and Lucia had gone upstairs. Ottoline knew her father's Bureau from the inside, every office and archive and which clerks kept which files. Every account in Asterholm, she explained, was logged in the registry on the day it was made, with the place it was made from.

"Nobody checks, because nobody's allowed to," she said. "But a records officer could pull them."

Enzo called Dorcas. She listened, asked two short questions, and said she would have the creation records for all forty thousand accounts that had attacked Lucia before morning.

Teo arrived at eleven with grease still on his hands, the way he always did when Enzo's old phone needed him. He had kept it alive for five years, changing batteries and soldering wires, and never once asked why a one-star docker cared so much about a phone that old. Tonight he turned it over under the lamp, frowned at the cracked screen and said he'd take it home and have it fixed by tomorrow. He looked tired. His daughter, Pia, had been in and out of the one-star ward all month. Enzo walked him to the door and watched his oldest friend go up the street with the phone in his pocket.

Ottoline fell asleep at the table with her head on her folded arms. Enzo stayed awake beside her, listening to the last trams rattle over the river, until his own phone rang in the grey hour before dawn.

It was Dorcas. She didn't bother with hello.

"I have them," she said. "All forty thousand. Every one of those accounts was born in the same building, a single warehouse on Pier Six."

Enzo looked toward the window, where the sky over the river was beginning to lighten. He knew Pier Six. It stood two hundred metres from the dock where he used to carry crates, and for five years he had walked past its doors every morning without once wondering what was inside.