CHAPTER FOUR
Cassius
The second night I go back to Pell Street to kill her.
I want that on the record, in my own words, because everything that comes after is built on it and because there is a version of me that would leave it out.
Four hundred years produces a certain kind of man.
Not a monster — a procedure. I have spent a century and a half being the thing Vespera sends because I am extremely good at doing the necessary thing at the necessary time and then going home, and on the second night the necessary thing is arithmetic so simple a child could do it.
One anchor. One death. Nobody else finds out. Lucien stops looking. The Ferrow stop looking. Aurek, wherever he is, never learns. Nine hundred of us go on living in a grey room, which is survivable, because we have survived it for two centuries.
And one woman who cleans up other people's worst days does not get sixty years in a basement being drawn off a pint at a time.
That's the honest arithmetic. It even has mercy in it, if you hold it at the right angle, and I have four hundred years of practice at holding things at the right angle.
So I go to Pell Street.
There's a laundromat with two windows and a flat above it and a fire escape that's rusted solid, and the front door has a bell panel with three names on it and one of them is KELLEHER in ballpoint on a strip of masking tape.
She's in the laundromat.
Half eleven at night, in a building she lives above, with a machine going, sitting on a moulded plastic chair with her boots up on the one opposite and a paperback on her knee that she is not reading.
The strip lights are the colour strip lights are.
There's a man at the far end folding towels with enormous care and no urgency, and she says something to him, and he says something back, and she laughs.
I stand across the road for two hours and eleven minutes.
Here is what I do in that time. I map the door, the panel, the sight lines, the two cameras — one dead, one pointing at the change machine.
I calculate that if I wait until she comes out at the front and crosses to the door of the flats, I have four seconds on an empty pavement, and that four seconds is three more than I need.
And I don't move, because the whole time, the wind is coming down Pell Street from the east.
Rain. Detergent. Hot lint from the dryer vent, which is an entire smell I have never in my existence encountered, sweet and scorched and appalling and fascinating.
Fried onion from something two streets over.
The wet-stone smell of a city that has been rained on since 1698 and which I have walked through for a century and a half as though it were a photograph of a city.
And under it, threading through it, making all of it possible: her.
At one o'clock she takes her washing out, and she is bad at it — she's overloaded the machine and half of it's still wet, and she stands there holding a soaked duvet cover with an expression of such total personal betrayal that I make a sound out loud on a pavement in the dark.
At ten past one she says goodnight to the man with the towels and comes out onto the street with a laundry bag on her hip.
Four seconds.
I have my hands in my coat pockets and my back against a wall in a doorway forty feet away, and Wren Kelleher walks up her own front step and shoulders the door and drops her keys and swears at them and picks them up, and I stand in the dark and let the necessary thing not happen.
It isn't mercy. I want to be clear, because she'll ask me one day and I'll have to answer it.
It isn't love either. I've never spoken to her.
It's that for two hours and eleven minutes I stood in a wet street and smelled a city, and somewhere in the second hour I understood that if I crossed that road, it would stop — not just the rain and the lint and the onion, all of which I would lose the moment her heart stopped — but the other thing.
The thing I have been very carefully not naming since a roof in the rain.
That there is a room in this world with a door in it, and I have been dead outside it since 1626, and for the length of one lit window on Pell Street it was open.
◆ ◆ ◆
So instead I do my job, which is a thing I have not had to force myself to do since the Coolidge administration.
There is a fledgling in this city, weeks old, unregistered, and somebody made it.
That is the actual crime. A new one is not a criminal; a new one is a fact, like weather — twelve days out of the ground they're barely a person, they can't hold a thought past the next heartbeat they hear, and every single thing they do is somebody else's fault.
Making one is the only thing in the Covenant that carries an automatic sentence, and every one of us knows it, which is why nobody in Ashmoor has done it since 1991.
I start with the register.
The vault keeps a book. It's kept by Halloway, who has kept it since Lincoln, and it lives in a steel cabinet behind his desk in a room off the lower hall that I have walked past several thousand times and entered perhaps nine.
He's at the desk when I come in. He always is. Grey cardigan, half-moon glasses he doesn't need, a fountain pen, and a wooden tray of index cards squared to the corner of the blotter.
"Cassius." He doesn't look surprised. "The register."
"How did you—"
"Because a fledgling took Trevor Ansel and you told the Matriarch so on Monday, and the register is the only object in this building that answers that question.
" He's already unlocking the cabinet. "You'll want '91 to now, presentations and makings, and you'll want the shipping list as well because half of them come in on the water and never present at all. "
He puts three books on the desk and stands back.
I go through them for two hours. He doesn't leave and he doesn't hover; he sits at his own desk with his cards and works, and the only sound in the room is a fountain pen and my own hands turning paper.
The register says this: no makings in Ashmoor since 1991. Eleven registered residents. Four visiting entries this year, all Ferrow, all departed. Nine shipping presentations since 2019, all logged, all placed with sponsors, none unaccounted for.
Which means either somebody made a person in this city and lied about it in a book that Halloway has kept immaculately since Lincoln — or somebody brought one in.
"You've been at that page a while," Halloway says.
"1974."
"Ah." He puts down the pen. "That was a bad decade for the docks. Containers came in and the crews got smaller and stopped knowing each other, and a great many people came off ships in this city and were never presented at all." A pause. "Is there a name you want?"
There isn't. There's a column, and it runs down the page, and about a third of the entries in the seventies have no maker recorded and no departure and no death — just a line, and a date, and a hand that isn't his.
"Do you keep the ones who leave?"
"I keep everything," Halloway says. "Nobody has ever asked me for it."
I look up at him then, properly, possibly for the first time in seventy years. Unremarkable face. Glasses he doesn't need. A man who has sat in the back of that vault every Friday since before the Civil War with a minute book on his knees while I came and went and killed things.
"Thank you," I say.
Something moves behind his face — very briefly, and I do not have the equipment to read it, because I have never once tried.
"Not at all," says Thaddeus Halloway.
◆ ◆ ◆
I find the fledgling's trail on the third night and it is exactly as bad as I expect.
Three sites. A stairwell off Marsh where somebody bled out and was moved badly.
A dosshouse under the Skell approach where the smell says two nights, maybe three.
And a basement flat on Cadger Row with the door off its top hinge and a spray pattern on three walls at a height that means the man was standing when it happened, and standing when it kept happening.
Whoever it is has been in this city at least two weeks, is feeding every other night, is not being taught, is not being fed, and is not being cleaned up after by anybody.
I stand in the ruin of somebody's front room and understand, with a kind of cold that has nothing to do with the temperature, that this is not a maker who lost control of his creation.
This is a maker who made one and left it.
You do that for one reason. You do it because a starving fledgling in a strange city is the loudest possible instrument for finding something, and because it will keep going until it finds it, and because when it does, you will hear about it.
I go to Pell Street at four in the morning to tell her to run.
The lights are off. The bell panel says KELLEHER in ballpoint. There's a laundromat below and a rusted fire escape and a flat with no one in it, because Wren Kelleher is not home, and the wind is coming from the east, and she is nowhere in it at all.