CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Cassius
The world comes back on the second of December at about nine in the evening, in a flat above a laundromat, while a woman is complaining about a VAT return.
It always happens the same way now. There's no fade; there's a moment, and it's usually stupid, and this one is her putting a mug down on a coaster she does not own and never has.
Detergent. Fabric softener from the dryers below. Rain on a window. The inside of a lived-in room — dust and radiator and old paint and paper and hot laptop and, under all of it, her.
"You've gone," Wren says, without looking up.
"It's back."
"Oh." She puts the pen down. Her whole face changes. "Oh, good. That's early. That's — it's been nine days, that's earlier than last time."
"It's getting shorter each way." I sit down. "The window's shorter and the gap's shorter. I've been tracking it."
"Of course you have."
"I've a spreadsheet."
"Cassius."
"You made it. Three weeks ago. On my phone." I show her. "You said, and I quote, if we're going to be a couple of freaks about this we may as well have columns."
She laughs so hard she has to put her head on the table, which is a thing she does about once a week now and which I have come to think of as the single greatest achievement of my existence.
And then, still face-down on the table, she says: "Why's it getting shorter?"
"I don't know."
"Guess."
"I don't like my guess."
She sits up.
"The green book says an anchor wakes," I say.
"It gets louder. Your grandmother wrote that it comes on in your thirties and that by the end it can be smelled across a county, and every woman in that line who wrote about it wrote about it as a danger — hide, move, go north, keep out of cities.
" I turn the mug on the coaster. "But nobody in that book ever completed a claim.
Not one. Six generations of wardens and not a single one of them ever let one of us drink freely and drank back. They were far too sensible."
"So there's no page for us."
"There's no page for us," I agree. "And you're getting louder, and I'm holding more of it for longer each time, and I have absolutely no idea what that means at year two, let alone at year fifty."
Wren looks at the window for a while.
"Would you do it again?" she says.
"In a heartbeat," I say. "And that's not romance, that's the honest answer and it frightens me, because it's the same sentence Aurek would give you."
"No, it isn't."
"Wren—"
"It's really not," she says. "He'd have said I'd take it again. You said you'd be given it again." She shrugs, and picks the pen back up. "You've been doing that all week, by the way. The frightened thing. It's like sitting next to a boiler."
"I'm aware. It's an unpleasant gift."
"Yeah, well." She goes back to the VAT return. "You're stuck with it now. Both of us are. So you can be frightened on the sofa like a normal person."
◆ ◆ ◆
We plan it at her kitchen table on the last Sunday of the month, three people and a legal pad, which is how everything in this business now happens.
Marisol runs it. That was decided in about four seconds and nobody has revisited it.
"Right." She clicks the pen. "Salem. Say we go. What do we actually need."
"Daylight hours," Wren says. "Because I'm the one going down and Cassius can't be in that shop between six and four, so whatever I'm doing down there I'm doing it with him asleep in a van outside."
"I don't like that."
"Nobody likes that, Mari, that's why it's on the pad."
"Timber," I say. "Whatever's left of that floor is two hundred and thirteen years old and salt-eaten. She can't cut new marks into wood that crumbles. We'd need to bring board in — old board, ship timber if we can get it — and lay it before she cuts a single one."
"Where do you get eighteenth-century ship timber?"
"You buy a building," I say, "which is what Vespera has done, and you take the roof off it."
Marisol writes that down without visible reaction, which I have come to understand is her highest expression of alarm.
"Fourth thing," Wren says. "And this is the one nobody's saying.
" She puts her pen down. "If I go down that hole and it turns out there's nothing left holding him — if it's four boards and a bad feeling — then we're not doing a repair, we're doing a first line, and I'm eleven feet underground with the only material in the world that works, on my own, in the dark, with him looking at me. "
Nobody says anything.
"So I want a rope," she says. "Not a ladder. A rope on a winch with Mari on the handle, because a ladder needs two hands and a rope needs none, and if I say the word I want to leave that hole like a cork."
"Wren—"
"And I want it written on the pad," she says, "so that in four months when we're standing on Peabody Street and everybody's being brave, there's a piece of paper that says we agreed this in a kitchen in November while we could still think straight."
◆ ◆ ◆
At eleven, Vespera rings.
She never rings. She has an assistant and a records-keeper and, until October, a knife.
"The nail salon," she says.
I stand up.
"Sylvie's been on the ground in Salem for nine days," Vespera says.
"I told her not to go into the basement and she has not gone into the basement, because she is the only person in my house who does what I say.
" A pause. "But she's been sitting on the building.
And on Tuesday night at about three, a Ford Transit with Rhode Island plates pulled up on Peabody Street and a man with one hand unloaded eleven boxes into the shop. "
Across the room, Wren has gone very still, because she can feel the bottom drop out of me from four metres away.
"He's putting it back?" I say.
"That's what Sylvie thought too." Vespera's voice is perfectly level.
"He isn't. He's cutting the boards down.
She's been through the bins. There's sawdust and there are offcuts and there are two hundred and eleven eleven-inch stakes in that shop, Cassius, and every one of them is sharpened, and none of them are going into a floor. "
"Then what's he doing?"
"He's arming somebody," she says. "And I would very much like to know who, and I would like to know before he finishes, because Sylvie counted the timber against the surveyor's plan and there is not enough of it left to hold anything."