CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Cassius
Wren sleeps at four. Marisol doesn't.
I find her on the terrace at half past, in my coat, which she has taken off the hook with the confidence of a woman who has decided that a coat is a coat. She's got the bolo across her knees and she's looking at the black where the sea is.
"You can't drink out here," she says. "It's freezing."
"I don't feel cold."
"That's sad." She shifts over on the bench about six inches, which is an invitation from a woman like this. "Sit down. I want to ask you something horrible."
I sit.
"How long does she have," Mari says, "if this all works? Best case. Everything goes right, nobody eats her, the claim holds. What does her life look like."
The honest answer takes a while to assemble.
"She lives," I say. "That's the first part and it's not nothing; last Friday she had two days. She keeps her work if she wants it. She'd have to move — the flat on Pell Street is a threshold but it's a threshold with one door and a landing. She'd need money, which I have, and she'll hate that."
"She'll hate that so much."
"She'd feed me twice a month, and I'd feed her back, and we would both find that far more complicated than either of us is admitting.
" The wind comes up the cliff. "And in thirty years she'll be sixty and I'll be this, and in fifty she'll be eighty and I'll be this, and the thing I've done to her will be the central fact of her life, and she'll have signed for it in a week when she was frightened. "
Mari is quiet.
"You could turn her," she says.
"No."
"I'm not suggesting it—"
"No, and you should know why." I look at my hands.
"Anchor blood doesn't survive it. Whatever she is, it's a living thing; it goes out with the pulse.
Turn her and the world goes grey again and she's a fledgling with an ordinary appetite who remembers being the most valuable object on the continent.
" A breath I don't need. "It's been tried.
In 1790. It's why Aurek stopped trying to keep them and started drinking them. "
"Jesus."
"Yes."
She turns the bolo over on her knees.
"She likes you," Mari says. "That's the actual problem, isn't it. Not the court, not Friday. If she hated you, you'd feed her the blood and take the deal and it'd be a transaction, and everyone'd be fine."
I don't answer.
"Yeah," she says. "Thought so."
We sit there for a while, the human and the dead man, watching a sea neither of us can see.
"For what it's worth," Mari says, standing up, "if you get her killed, I will spend the rest of my life becoming a problem for you. I want that on record. I have a very boring kind of patience. I once took a landlord through eleven months of small claims for a fridge."
"Noted."
"I mean it, Cassius."
"I know." I take the coat off her shoulders as she shrugs out of it, and hang it on the hook, and hold the door. "You'd be surprised how few people threaten me anymore. I've missed it."
◆ ◆ ◆
At two she comes back down.
I hear her on the stairs and I have about four seconds to decide whether to pretend I haven't, and I don't, because we have a bond as of four hours ago and pretending is now a thing neither of us can do.
"Can't sleep."
"No."
"Because of the drill or because of Friday?"
"Because there's a woman in my guest room with a machete and a girl in my spare bed who has three days left of a locked door," I say, "and a list in my coat with four names crossed out."
Wren comes and sits on the arm of the sofa with a blanket round her shoulders.
"You've got that map out again."
"I've had it out since Tuesday."
"Show me."
So I show her. Ashmoor on a survey sheet from 1998, and eleven pencil crosses on it, and the four that are crossed out twice.
She looks at it for a long time, and then she does the thing that I have watched her do to a room four times now and that I will never entirely get used to.
"They're not random," she says.
"No. They run up the coast road—"
"No, that's not what I mean." Her finger goes down on the paper.
"Look at the type. That one's a ground-floor flat.
That one's a bungalow. That's a ground floor.
That's a basement. That's a ground floor with a side return.
" She looks up. "Every single one of them is a property you can get to the back of without going through a communal door. "
The room goes very quiet.
"Cassius, whoever's doing this isn't picking people," Wren says.
"He's picking addresses. He's doing exactly what I do when I quote a job.
Access, egress, what's behind it, can I get a van up it.
" She sits back. "That's not a hunter and it's not a soldier.
That's somebody who has spent a very long time being extremely organised about small things. "
"That's most of my kind."
"Is it?" she says. "Is it, though? Because from what I've seen you lot are basically eleven dramatic people in a basement having a row about a symbol."
◆ ◆ ◆
There are three hours between Marisol going to bed and the sun, and I want to say what I do with them, because it is the whole of my life and nobody has ever asked.
I check the house. Not because anything is wrong — because it's four in the morning and I have done it every night since 1974.
Terrace door, seaward glass, the two skylights over the stairwell, the shutter mechanism in the basement, the generator that runs it, the second generator that runs the first one. Eleven minutes.
Then I sit down and I don't do anything.
That is the part that would frighten people, if they knew.
Not the killing. The sitting. A man who does not sleep has eight hours of dark and about two hours of tasks, and the arithmetic of that has never once improved in four centuries, and what fills the gap is thinking, and there is only so much a person can think about before he starts going back over the same ground with his hands behind his back like a warder.
I have a system for it. I read. I have read the wall in that room twice through — everything from Herodotus to a book about lighthouse maintenance that I bought because it was raining — and it works the way pacing a cell works, which is that it passes, and nothing lands.
Tonight is different, and it's different in a way I do not enjoy.
Because there is a woman asleep upstairs, and another one in the guest room with a knife under her pillow, and for the first time in fifty years the house has breathing in it — two sets, at different rates, and I can hear both, and I cannot stop hearing both.
And underneath it, all the time, one of them is a bell.
At half four I go down to the basement and stand in the dark room with the shutter closed and put my back against the concrete, and I make myself do the thing I have been avoiding since Sunday, which is to say it plainly to myself in a room with no one in it.
Here it is.
I have a list in my coat with four names crossed out.
A fledgling was made and abandoned in this city as an instrument for finding her.
Somebody has been at this for a year — before the roof, before the rug, before I had ever heard of Wren Kelleher — which means whatever is coming was already coming, and everything I have done since Friday has been a man arriving late to a thing already in motion.
And on Friday I am going to stand in a vault and let her say yes to me in front of eleven people, and I am going to let her believe that it makes her safer.
It makes her legal. That is not the same word.
I stand in a concrete room under my own house until the sun comes up over the water where I can't see it, and I do not sleep, because I don't, and at some point I say her name out loud into the dark for no reason at all.