CHAPTER 5 #2
“Tell me the rule,” he said.
“Rule Four. Nothing touches me that I have not agreed to out loud, and I am agreeing out loud.”
“Rule Seven is live from now.” He waited for me. “It stays live until I tell you we are finished, and it never needs a reason attached to it. Say that you have heard me say it.”
“I have heard you. It does not need a reason.”
He took the cup and the tablet off the desk and set them on the shelf behind him, out of the way, and let them knock against the wood.
“Both hands down on the desk,” he said. “Everything you are wearing stays exactly where it is.” He gave me the time to get that far. “Nothing comes off you, and I am not going to put a hand anywhere on your skin.”
I put my hands down. The desk has a metal edge along the front of it and it took the heat out of my palms before I had finished arranging them.
“There will be six,” he said. “I will say the number of each one first. I am not going to say anything else at all until they are finished.”
He said six and there was six, and it was not the noise I had braced myself for.
He said five and there was five. He said four.
He said three, and somewhere in the middle of three my hands stopped lying flat and started holding on, and the metal edge had a temperature I could feel in the bones of my fingers.
Then I made a sound I hadn’t decided to make.
That is what happened and I am not going to dress it up. It was a sound with no committee behind it. It was out in the room before I knew it had left, and it was nothing like a complaint, and he did not stop or slow down or say one word about it.
He said two. He said one. Then he stopped exactly where he had said he would stop, and the room went back to being a room with a table in it.
His burned right hand came flat between my shoulder blades and stayed. He did not rub. He left it there while my ribs did whatever they were doing, and he did not take it away at the point where that would have been reasonable, and after a while I stopped shaking.
“Perfect,” he said.
Then he talked, which I hadn’t expected and wouldn’t have known how to ask for. He didn’t ask me how I was and he didn’t tell me that I was all right. He stood where he was with his hands behind him and explained himself, in order, the way another man would have apologized.
“I gave you a choice because you took one away from yourself in that stairwell, and I wanted you to have one back,” he said. “That is the first thing. It is the whole reason there were two and not one.”
“I said each number before it happened so you always knew how much was left. That is the mechanism. There is nothing hidden inside it.”
He picked up the cup, looked into it, and set it down again without a sound.
“I took nothing off you for a reason. The first time a person is inside this, she should be able to walk out of the room looking like herself.”
“I stopped where I said I would stop.” He waited. “A number I go past once is worth nothing afterwards.” His feet had stayed where they were since I came in. “Then all you have got is a man in a room with you.”
“You will want to know why I said nothing else while it was happening. Anything else I said would have been for me.”
My breathing came back down to something ordinary while he was doing it, and I worked out what the talking was for, and that he was never going to say so.
“Who taught you to write a card like that?” I said. “You didn’t build it at a table on your own.” His face did the thing it does before a refusal. “Somebody put you in the way of learning it.”
“I have written this card before.”
He said it the way a man puts a document back into a folder.
I had the next question sitting ready behind my teeth and I could see the door already shut behind the sentence, and I have deposed enough people to know when the next question is the one that costs you the witness.
I let it go. It was the first time since they took me that I wanted to know something about him rather than something out of him.
I ran the bath afterwards because my hands wanted a job to do.
The tub is cast iron and the water hits it like a bell that goes duller as the thing fills, and I sat on the edge of it with my sleeves pushed up and listened to the note come down.
The nail on my right index finger had stopped bleeding and started catching on every piece of fabric it met, which is the only category of injury I’ve ever found genuinely rude.
Cassian was in the corridor when I came out, standing on the brass strip in the floor, not pretending to be there for any other reason.
“Your mother has had two of ours outside her house in Beacon since first light,” he said. “She does not know that they are there.”
He let that stand on its own before he put the rest of it down.
“She is not going to be told, and I did not ask you first, and I am saying that part out loud so you do not have to catch me at it.”
I kept the thanks to myself. I did not object either, and both of those were things I chose and not things that happened to my face.
“She has a bad left knee,” I said. “She’ll talk to anybody who stands still for her. Tell them not to stand still.”
Matteo came down the corridor with my work coat over one arm and a square of white paper folded shut in his other hand.
He put the coat on the table in the long room and opened the paper out flat with two fingers, the way you open something that might still be alive.
The thing sitting in the fold was the size of a shirt button, gray, with a fine dark line running all the way round its edge.
Rian came in behind him and stayed on his feet by the door. Cassian’s burned hand opened and closed once at his side, slowly, and I don’t believe he knew that it had.
“I took the lining out along the left hip seam,” Matteo said. “The stitching there is newer than the coat.” He put one short nail against the edge of the paper. “It’s not the stitching you did yourself with desk scissors, and it’s not any of mine.”
The room got colder without anybody in it touching anything.
“Tell me whose it is,” Cassian said.
Matteo turned the square of paper a little, until the thing in the fold sat straight to him.
“This one is not ours, and it has been listening since before we took you.”