CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Cassius
She doesn't wake up for three days.
I want to be honest about those three days, because there's a version of this I could tell where I was competent.
And I sit in the front and do nothing, because there is nothing, because I have already given her everything I have to give and the rest is arithmetic.
Two pints is survivable. Three is not, reliably, and she was somewhere in between.
Here is the part that will not leave me alone.
The mouthful I gave her on the dock did not save her; it bought about ninety minutes, and it is the same substance that killed her, because she had four ounces of it in her a week ago and it is the entire reason she was able to open her own arm nine times on wet boards and feel absolutely fine.
I did that. Not Halloway. Not Lucien. There is a page in the green book — ninety-six — that says it does not put anything back, and I have read that book, and I did not once think to say it out loud to her.
That's my fault in this. Not the eleven seconds in Rimebrook. That one I can at least account for. This one is the thing I actually did.
◆ ◆ ◆
The doctor puts four units into her over two days in a bedroom in a house on Ivory Hill that the court keeps for exactly this and that I did not know existed.
On the second night Vespera has herself carried in, in a dressing gown, grey as paper, and sits in a chair by the bed for six hours.
"Sit down, Cassius."
"I'm all right."
"You are standing in the corner of a bedroom like a coat stand and it is upsetting the doctor." She adjusts the blanket over her own knees. "Sit down. I want to talk to you about the timber."
"Matriarch—"
"They cut it into eleven-inch lengths," she says.
"That's the thing to hold on to. Halloway has been removing ward-boards from a house in Rimebrook for eleven years and he has been sharpening them, and there are now, somewhere in this country, several hundred pieces of the only material in the world that will not close in one of us.
" She looks at her own side. "It's rather changed my view of the next decade. "
"How bad is it?"
"It's not healing. It won't." She says it flatly, the way she says everything.
"I have a hole in me that will be there in a hundred years, and I am told that when the weather turns I shall feel it, which I understand is called arthritis and which I find deeply embarrassing.
" A pause. "Her family did this to us. I want you to know that I know that, and that I am choosing what to do with it, and that the choosing is taking me some effort. "
"Vespera."
"Yes."
"Two hundred and six," I say. "That's what he told me on the dock. Two hundred and six marks left holding him."
"I know. I read the minutes." She's quiet for a while.
"Cassius, I've been Matriarch of this city for a hundred and ninety years and the whole of it — the Covenant, the feeders, the Fridays, all of that unbearable machinery — was built on the assumption that we are simply what we are, and that the grey is the price of the years.
" Her hands are folded. "And last month a cleaner told a room full of my house that we're not sick, we're wounded, and that it happened at a specific address on a specific evening, and that there is a man in the ground who did it. "
"Yes."
"Do you understand what happens to nine hundred people in this hemisphere when that gets out?"
I do. I've been thinking about very little else.
"Some of them will want him dead," I say.
"Some of them," Vespera agrees, "will want him woken up, and asked."
◆ ◆ ◆
Here is what the three days are actually like, since nobody has ever asked me and I have four hundred years of not being asked.
The bond does not go quiet. That is the thing I had not understood about it, in eleven days of having one.
It is not a telephone; you cannot put it down.
It is a room with a door in it, and there is a woman on the other side of that door, and for three days what came through it was almost nothing at all — a flicker, a heartbeat's worth, then long grey stretches where I sat in a chair in a dark room and could not tell whether the silence was sleep or the other thing.
I have stood outside a house in Bruges on my sister's birthday forty-three times.
This was worse, and I want that written down, because for two hundred years I have used Ilse as the measure of what a bad night is, and on the second night in that bedroom on Ivory Hill I found the top of the scale and it was not her.
At about four on the second morning I said her name out loud into an empty room, and there was no reason to, and I did it anyway.
◆ ◆ ◆
Marisol Ocampo asks me a question on the second night that I have not been able to put down since.
She's in the corridor outside the room on Ivory Hill at four in the morning with a paper cup of something, and she has been there for two days, and she looks about nine years older than she did on Thursday.
"Can she feel you?" she says. "Right now. In there."
"I don't know."
"Guess."
"I don't like my guess."
"Yeah, well." She drinks. "Guess anyway. I've been sitting in a corridor for two days and you're the only person in this building who knows anything and everybody else keeps giving me pamphlets."
So I tell her.
"It runs both directions," I say. "That's the whole point of it.
And what I have been getting for two days is almost nothing — a flicker every few hours, then long grey stretches — and I have not been able to tell whether that's sleep or the other thing.
" My hands are on my knees. "But it isn't nothing.
And if it's not nothing on my side, then on hers, wherever she is, she has got a piece of string with a very frightened man on the end of it, and she has had it the whole time. "
Marisol thinks about that.
"Good," she says.
"Good?"
"Cassius, she's been in the dark for two days.
" Her voice cracks straight down the middle and she carries on anyway.
"You think I want her in there on her own?
Let her have the frightened man. Let her have the whole frightened man.
That's the first useful thing anybody in your entire species has managed all week. "
◆ ◆ ◆
On the third day, at about four in the afternoon, when I'm sitting in a chair in a dark room with the shutters bolted and my hands doing nothing, the door in the wall opens.
That's the only way I can put it. Three days of a gap under it and then it opens, from the other side, about an inch.
And something that is unmistakably, gracelessly, furiously Wren Kelleher comes through it, and the first coherent thing it contains is:
where's my cat