CHAPTER 17 #2
“That one took the longest.” He turned his head a few degrees toward the window and brought it back level. “Does the page give a marker for the end of stage four?”
“There is no marker for the end of stage four.” My hands wanted paper, so I gave them paper and squared a stack that was square already. “Stage four does not end. That is the entire function of stage four.”
I stopped again and let the room be quiet. He did not offer me water. He did not offer me a chair nearer the desk, or any of the small mercies that get produced when a person wants the talking to stop. He sat there and let me be the one holding it.
“Stage five has no name on the leaf. There is a marker, and then a blank where the name should be.” The blank is a hand’s width across and somebody ruled it. “The men who wrote this did not need to call it anything among themselves.”
“Read me the marker, then.” He asked for it without any weight on it, the way a man asks for the rest of a sentence he has already guessed.
“The subject can no longer complete a sentence that begins with what he wants.”
He held the room longer than a man usually holds anything, and I let him have it. It was his to hold, and I had taken enough off him already.
“You asked me what I want. The sentence will not assemble, Avery. You are holding the page that says why.”
I kept my finger on the last line. There was nowhere else in that room for my hand to be that was not the page or his face, and one of those was not mine to reach for.
“I have been inside the Protocol for twenty-two years.” He said the next part without any change in him at all. “You are the first person who has ever put it to me in order.”
My chest tightened and the next breath would not settle it. The next part belonged to me, and there was no arrangement of it that did not cost. The longer I sat there, the more clearly I could hear myself deciding to keep it one more day.
I turned back to the third leaf. It carries a rust ring where a clip used to sit, and the ring is on the wrong side for the way that file was kept. That is how I knew somebody had taken the thing apart and put it back together in a hurry.
“The leaf does not say reversible. I wrote reversible, so that you would need me.”
He picked the leaf up and held it into the lamplight.
He read the four lines of it that matter.
Then he set it down and squared it against the others with one finger, and nothing at all arrived in his face.
His eyes came up, slate and level, and stayed on me.
What came instead of anger was slower, and it took him a moment to find where he had put it.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“You can be angry with me. The thanks is worse.” The words came out steadier than I wanted them. Steady is what my voice does when I am frightened of something I have already done.
“I am not angry.” He said it to me this time and not to the desk. “I told Rook. He asked me in the kitchen whether any of it could be undone, and I told him the page said it could. I do not repeat things I have not read. He has been carrying it ever since, and it has made him easier to be near.”
The lamp did its cold sound. Downstairs a door closed on its spring, and I knew which door it was and who had gone through it. There was no arrangement of my hands on that desk that made the room any better.
“I will tell him myself.” My voice did the steady thing again and I hated it.
“That will be you and not me. I am not going to carry it down the hall for you.”
“I was not going to ask you to.”
“You were going to hope.”
“I did.” I put my hands on the ledger book and left them where they landed. “For about four seconds, and I would like that noted somewhere too.”
He was right. He said it in the flat courtesy he uses to offer a person coffee, and that was worse than being shouted at by anybody I have ever stood in front of.
I had come in holding the only advantage I have ever had over any of the three of them.
I had put it on his blotter and squared it against his other papers, and now there was nothing in my hands but a ledger book.
“I am taking the second layer to the state.” I said it to his face and I did not hedge it. “The leaves, the transcript, the names in the margins, and an affidavit with my own name at the bottom.”
“Six people die. The first is Wren Halloway, because she is the only one outside this building who can put you inside it.”
“Wren has a library card and a bad lock on her door.” My voice did nothing I asked of it. “She has no idea what she is standing next to.”
He gave me the count without lifting a hand off the chair arm.
It came out in the voice a man uses to give a stranger a train time.
“Then Cecily Pryn, for the same reason in a different department.” He named them in the order they would happen in.
“Then two men on the roll whose names you have never been given. The paper gets hung on somebody, and those two are nearest to it.”
He stopped and made sure I was with him before he finished the count.
“Then Rook, because he will drive to Harrowgate by himself and put it in front of them out loud.” He took the last one himself, with no change in his voice for it. “Then me, and mine is the only name on that list anybody would call fair.”
The count went into me in order, one name at a time. There was nothing wrong with his arithmetic. I have checked worse numbers than that for people who badly wanted them to come out some other way.
“You are telling me that to move me.” My hands had gone back to the cover of the book without being sent.
“I am telling you because you asked me once for the version I do not protect you from.” His hands had not come off the chair arms since he sat down. “If I wanted to move you I would use a better instrument than a list of names. I have several, and you would not see any of them coming.”
“Then tell me not to do it.”
“I will not do that.” He let the refusal stand by itself for a moment. “You would not believe me if I did, and you would be right not to.”
“And if I do it anyway?”
“It is yours to spend. I will not spend it for you.”
I closed the ledger book and put my hand flat on the cover.
I kept it there until the paper stopped being warm from the lamp.
He did not ask me what I had decided. He did not ask me for time, and he put no condition anywhere near it.
He sat where the sequence had put him and let the question stay mine, and that cost him more than any sentence he had spent on me all afternoon.
“You could have lied to me about the count.”
“You would have found the number inside a week.” He turned the letterhead face down without reading it over. “After that, nothing I told you would have been worth the paper it was on. I would rather be somebody you can check.”
I picked the transcript up, squared it under my arm, and got as far as the doorway.
The oak reported a weight that belonged to none of us, and the Custodian’s courier came up the Sable Wing corridor with the winter-table summons held out in front of him.