CHAPTER 25 #3
I go down. The desk is oak; the desk is heavy.
I am on the bleached oak floor with my knees against the brick of the wall and my back against the desk and the sat-phone in my left hand and my right hand at the pocket of the peacoat where the brass pencil and my mother's pin are.
The cold of the floor through the wool of my trousers is the cold of January in a building with the heat off. The window is two feet above my head.
The firefight is twelve seconds of the wrong-sound — the dry, fast, paired claps of the silver-tipped 9mm at the door and the deeper return-fire from the corridor and the bright punctuation of Henrik's CZ Scorpion three flights down at the stairwell — and the twelve seconds are the length of time it takes a round to leave the third floor of a brick textile mill and travel three blocks east at the angle of an apartment window onto the south facade of a Beaux-Arts terminal building and find a thirty-foot stained-glass skylight in the third-floor boardroom and put the round through the dome of the skylight from underneath.
The window in the east wall of my apartment is over my head.
I lift my head an inch above the desk.
The skylight goes.
The cobalt blue and the yellow and the red panels of the 1924 stained-glass skylight of the boardroom on the third floor of two hundred Fitzroy Street fall outward.
From the angle of my east window the dome is a small bright thing in the iron-yellow of the cold-snap streetlights, the dome breaking the way a thing breaks that is meant to break inward and is instead breaking outward, the cobalt and the yellow and the red panels falling outward into the air over Fitzroy Street and catching the iron-yellow of the streetlights below them as they fall, and the streetlights of Fitzroy strike the inside of the boardroom through the broken skylight from above, and the inside of the boardroom — the long oak table where Marcus pitched me the audit twenty-eight days ago; the portraits of the long-dead board members; the green-shaded brass desk lamps at the four corners — is lit from above by a light that should have come from below.
I see it for one second. I see it the way you see a thing that is happening too far away to do anything about and too close to ever stop seeing.
The boardroom in pieces under the streetlights.
The boardroom in which Marcus stood at the head of the table at fourteen-hundred on the eighteenth of November and said, Eliza Quinn, you are going to tell me there is a hundred and fifty million dollars of variance in a logistics line and you are going to be right.
The boardroom in which Julian was in the room for eleven minutes and said four sentences to me and the auditor catalog began. The boardroom lit from above. The boardroom that is now a vessel for the wrong light.
I put my head back down behind the desk.
"East side," I say into the sat-phone. The voice goes through clean. "East window. Skylight at Wren-Hale. Stray round. Boardroom is down."
"Copy," Henrik says from the stairwell.
"Holding the door," Sebastian says above me. "Two down. One more in the corridor. Coming."
The third clap and the fourth. The corridor goes quiet.
"Up, Quinn," Sebastian says. "Fire escape. North side. Now."
The Sargent reproduction is on the wall over the writing desk. The Sargent reproduction is unbroken.
I do not look back.
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The fire escape on the north side of fourteen-oh-two is iron painted black; the paint is flaking in the cold; the rungs are eighteen-gauge steel and the eighteen-gauge is what the auditor names when the auditor is afraid.
The treads are wet from the morning's flurry that did not stick.
Sebastian is two rungs above me and one of Henrik's team is two rungs below me and the alley is at the bottom of the fire escape and the Mercedes is at the head of the alley and Henrik is at the wheel.
The cold-snap air on my face goes through the cream silk and the cashmere and the borrowed coat and the peacoat and finds the skin at my collarbone. The breath is white. The breath is mine.
We are in the Mercedes by twenty-two-fourteen.
We are out of the alley by twenty-two-fifteen.
We are turning west onto Hawthorne by twenty-two-sixteen.
Sebastian is beside me in the back seat.
The drive is at my left ribs under the cashmere; the cold plastic against the warm skin and the cashmere over the plastic and the cream silk over the cashmere and the peacoat over the silk and the wool of the borrowed coat over the peacoat — the redundancy on the body the way the audit-hash chain is the redundancy on the empire.
My mother's nursing pin is in the right pocket of the peacoat. The cobalt enamel of the pin warms slowly against the wool. The clasp on the back of the pin opens and closes once under my thumb without thought; now you are mine, Quinn.
The brass pencil is in the right pocket of the peacoat with the pin. The cap goes off, on, off, on under my thumb. The 0.5mm sits in the brass at the eraser end.
Sebastian beside me.
The sat-phone in my left hand.
The Mercedes going west on Hawthorne at thirty-eight miles an hour through the cold-snap streets toward Foundry Square and the granite tower at the head of it.
Tomorrow: the vote.
Tonight: the cold.
I close my fingers around the pin in my pocket.
I close my fingers around the brass pencil beside it.
I close my fingers around the small cold plastic of the drive at my left ribs under the cashmere.
The auditor names the units. Three objects.
Three pockets. The body holds the redundancy and the redundancy will hold tomorrow morning at eleven o'clock in a room with brass sconces and the council seated and Julian at the head and the saber on the wall on the floor below.
The Mercedes climbs the slow rise out of the rail district and the granite of the financial district comes up against the sky in the cold-snap light, and Sebastian beside me does not speak, and the sat-phone in my hand does not ring, and I do not look east.
The skylight is in me.
The mother's pin is in my pocket.
The pencil is in my pocket.
The drive is at my ribs.
Sebastian is beside me.
The cold is what survives the night.