Chapter 22: Nobody Important

(True-but-unseen account)

If you are searching for a Chapter in which the monster has a deep voice and a cruel laugh, close this book now. Dear Reader, here is a riddle to carry into the room ahead. What does a monster sound like? Do not answer quickly. Everyone who has ever been wrong about it was wrong with great confidence, and at least two of them are in this Chapter.

By the time Hadjer stepped inside, the gap in the boards had gone from rust to ash.

She stopped one pace past the threshold. Behind her, Carter leaned a shoulder against the doorframe and kept his eyes off everybody, as though saying, I have no idea what is going on, and I want no part of it. The wood where her palm had rested was still gray, and out on the porch, every green thing in sight was wilting in her presence.

She had counted the room on the way in: one Arthur by the lamp, one crouched on the steps with a dandelion. She put that on a shelf for later. The shelf was getting full.

"I got NileCorp," she said. "I got my family’s name. And I got the word revenge." She did not take her eyes off the couch. "For what?"

"Your father is evil," said Lyra. "I hate you for it."

She said it to the ceiling, and she did not add anything.

"That’s the whole speech?"

"That’s the whole speech," said Lyra, as if Hadjer were not worth the explanation.

"I gave you my trust." Hadjer’s voice did not rise. It narrowed. "I gave you my generosity, and everything else I had that was worth giving, and you spat in my face and let me call it friendship. You made a fool of me."

"You were easy to make," said Lyra, with a smirk.

For a moment, nothing in the room moved, not even the dust. Then Hadjer took out her phone.

"My father is one phone call away from the truth," she said, frustrated.

"Am I finally going to get to talk to the devil himself?" said Lyra, with a hint of anger.

"On speaker." Hadjer set the phone on the counter beside the unopened envelopes, face up. "We’re settling this whole thing today. We have better things to do."

It rang twice.

"There’s my girl!"

Arthur had braced for many things in that moment. He had not braced for the voice to be warm. It did not fit Lyra’s story at all. But then, she had never actually met him. She had only heard about him.

It was a good voice. It came from somewhere with a thick carpet, and it had a smile in it, and it sounded exactly like every father in every advertisement for a lake house. "Your driver called and said you’d waved him off. Is everything all right, sweetheart?"

On the couch, Lyra went very still.

She had spent years doing this man’s voice. She had built it out of other people’s stories and her own bad nights: flat, bored, a voice for a monster. Now the real one was on a kitchen counter in a boarded-up house, and it called people sweetheart. Something in her face came loose, like a girl who has leaned on a wall her whole life and has just been told it was painted.

"Dad," said Hadjer. "Lyra’s the girl I used to know. She said you’re evil. Why would she think that?"

"Lyra? Your little school friend? Your mother told me about her. I thought this day might come." A pause, pleasant and unhurried. "Yusuf. Yes, her father worked for me. Good engineer. Why, did something happen?"

"She won’t say. Did something happen to him?"

"Oh, sweetheart." It was the sigh of a man who has been asked to explain the weather to a ten-year-old.

"It’s sad adult stuff. Yusuf wanted a promotion. He was a good engineer, truly, but the job that came with it needed more than that. It needed people skills. The other candidate had better connections and was better with people, and Yusuf didn’t like that. Well, who would? So he decided to fight back. There was an old, faulty filter that everyone already knew about, and he used it, quietly, as payback. He thought he could take the man down with it."

On the couch, Lyra’s lips parted.

"Everyone important knew about the problem by the end of that year," the voice went on, kindly, "or at least was reminded of it, and nobody did anything. Me included. I won’t pretend otherwise. One thing led to another, and a man like that gets crushed under the weight of his own bad choices. It’s sad. It isn’t a crime."

"Even so." Hadjer’s hand had closed around the edge of the counter. "How can you poison people?"

He laughed. It was a real laugh, easy and unoffended.

"I’m not poisoning anyone. I’m a businessman, Hadjer. The filters weren’t repaired because the people who needed them weren’t important enough to get them fixed. Nobody cares about the unimportant neighborhoods. You’re too young for this. It’s complicated. So many people are responsible for things like this, and none of them care. And honestly, nobody asked for it to be fixed. The ones who came did it as a threat, like Yusuf, and none of us respond kindly to threats." The voice warmed. "Come home, sweetheart."

"No." It came out hard. "I care. I want the filters fixed."

He laughed again, as if she had asked for a second slice of cake.

"Sure, sweetheart. It’ll take some money and some time, but I can do that for my princess."

Hadjer’s whole face changed. It was a small thing, hope arriving where she had not made room for it.

"Really?"

"Baby girl." Gently, fondly, with the patience of a man who had been through this many times. "I built you a whole zoo because every time you saw a cute animal in a reel or anywhere else, you wanted it. This is easier than the zoo. The problem with the filters was never the filters. The problem was that nobody important ever asked." The smile in his voice widened. "Now come home. It’s getting late, and you’ve been staying out too much lately."

The line clicked off.

Arthur had been listening to people say terrible things all week. This was the first time the worst sentence had arrived in the nicest voice. In the doorway, Carter, who knew something about being nobody important, looked at his shoes.

When two people tell you what they saw,

the kindest voice may be the one that breaks the law.

Nobody spoke for a while.

"He said yes," said Hadjer, to the counter. "I asked once, and he said yes. It took four seconds."

She did not say it as if she were pleased. She said it like someone reading a number off a gauge that had just gone past red.

Lyra had not moved. Years had come out of her face all at once, and what was left looked younger and very tired. Her mouth opened, shut, opened.

"Of course," she said, almost too softly to hear. "Of course he did."

"And I didn’t do it for you," said Hadjer. It came out cruel, and she heard it come out cruel, and she did not take it back. "Honestly, after what you did to me, I have every right not to care. Even if my father really were evil, which he isn’t, you had no right to take it out on me."

"It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it?" said Lyra, in a voice that held envy now.

"Yes. And don’t mistake that for me being easy anymore. I have no kindness left in my heart for the likes of you, so watch your tone," said Hadjer, in the cruelest voice she could find.

"Look at you. That little hero of yours sure changed you." Lyra turned her head, and her eyes landed on the one thing in the room Hadjer still seemed unsure of.

Hadjer saw it happen and could not stop it.

"Funny," said Lyra, quietly. "You have two of him now, and neither of them seems to include you. A copy on the porch for the sad girl, and the real one in here with me, listening to my sad story. Trouble in heaven, Hadjer? Maybe he’s thinking of switching sides."

Hadjer looked at Arthur.

"Which one are you?"

"This one," said Arthur, which was as true as a sentence can be while still pointing the wrong way. She had already decided that the one on the porch was the clone, because the one on the porch had just told the dusk that fences were only rivers that had given up.

"And that one out there is a copy."

"Something like that," he said. "I’ll explain. Not here."

"Not here." She put it on the shelf. Then, without turning her head, she said to Lyra, very evenly, "You’re losing. The people you work for sent you out with a bottle and a terrible plan. Nobody switches to the losing side. And he’s mine. He just needs better communication skills."

Lyra’s smile stayed where it was. Everything behind it left.

"That’s my girl," Arthur murmured, to the lamp.

A person whose floor has just fallen out will agree to almost anything.

Arthur knew it, and disliked knowing it, and asked anyway.

"Lyra." He said it gently. "How about you switch to our side instead? All I understood from your story is that you’re alone and in need of help. I won’t lie and call myself a hero, but I have no problem with a mutual benefit."

Her mouth opened. Her eyes went wide and blank, and her back arched off the couch as though a hand had closed around something inside her. One palm flew to her throat. On her wrist, beneath the cuff of the gray sweatshirt, the mark flared white, and the plaid fringe of the couch curled away from the heat.

"Stop," said Hadjer. "She can’t help us. She can’t even help herself."

"I know. I’m sorry."

It lasted four seconds. When it ended, the mark did not go out. It went steady and white, the way a line does when someone has picked up the other end, and under Hadjer’s sleeve her own mark answered with one long pulse that she felt in her teeth.

Arthur understood, a half-second too late, what he had done.

Every face in the room had turned to the girl on the couch, as faces do. In the one moment nobody was looking at the ceiling, the cable above the lamp moved.

He had known for most of an hour that the lamp was not swinging on its own. The cable had been the wrong shade for a cable. He had said nothing, and he had stood directly beneath it with his hands loose, in a body that cost nothing, because a thing that has waited a week for a chance will take the first one it’s offered.

It dropped, long and slim, every inch of it the color of the room.

Arthur’s hands were already up. He caught it behind the head with one hand and below the middle with the other, the way you catch a plate that has decided to leave the cupboard. Carter swore. Hadjer stepped back. The creature hung between Arthur’s fingers, shuddering, with its mouth shut.

It had never once opened its mouth.

Its tail wound around his wrist, not tight, but the way you hold a rail on a train that has started to move. Its head did not turn toward his throat. It turned, with great effort, toward the back of the house. The kitchen. The back door.

"It isn’t attacking me," Arthur said. "It’s leaving her."

Hadjer took a step closer without thinking, and the serpent lost its colors. Plaid went to gray. Gray went to nothing, to the dull shade of a thing being slowly poisoned by someone standing too near, and for the first time anyone could see it properly: pale, thin, a small, tired animal with a pinprick eye.

"That’s my two thousand wasted coins," said Hadjer.

"Back up a step," Arthur said. "You’re hurting him."

She did, at once, the way she did it twelve times a day for twelve different things. She did not look at anyone while she did it.

"I was waiting for the right moment for him to get me out of here," said Lyra, hoarse, from the couch. "I never named him. I don’t like him, and he’s terrible at following instructions."

"He’s a snake," said Carter, with feeling.

A leash is a thing you only feel

when what’s on the other end tugs real.

Outside, an engine that had been idling on Alder Street for the better part of an hour cut off.

The quiet that followed was the kind that comes with a visitor. On the porch, the body at the rail stopped in the middle of a sentence about rivers. Carter turned his head toward the yard.

Footsteps crossed it. They were not hurried. They were the footsteps of a man who has never been late and sees no reason to start.

"Evening," said a pleasant voice.

He stood in the doorway with his hands at his sides. He wore a plain gray jacket and no apron, and his smile stopped just short of his eyes, exactly where Arthur had last seen it. The sunburn was gone, as if it had come off with the apron. His hands were spotless.

He looked down at the brick propping the door, and with the toe of his shoe he set it back precisely where it had been.

"You’re the man from the cart," said Hadjer.

"I was a man at a cart. This evening I’m a collector." He inclined his head. "Miss Lotus. Miss Lyra. The contract mentions a Stage Two, and I’m here to take you to it, Miss Lotus. Page nineteen, subsection C. The clause nobody reads."

"I read it too," said Arthur, with a smirk. "It also says a player has to be in the stage for the Game to start."

"Quite right. But you made it difficult for us to move Miss Lotus to Stage Two, so we moved Stage Two to her. The Game of Life has started." His eyes moved to the white mark on Lyra’s wrist. "Her mark reported a breach a moment ago. I was already around the corner. I don’t set the terms. I only come when they haven’t been met."

A small mechanical hummingbird drifted in past his shoulder and hung in the air, with a glass lens where its eye should have been. The collector turned to it and straightened his jacket.

"Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies for the delay. This year, Stage Two has ended up with some unwanted guests, who have made a mess of our schedule."

"I’m not playing," said Hadjer.

"Sorry to break it to you," said the collector, in a sing-song, mocking voice, "but the Game of Life will cut you like a knife. It ain’t right. You will fight to run from the light, so you’d better be bright."

He smiled at the lens, and then at her.

"Welcome to Stage Two."

TO BE CONTINUED...