Chapter 170: Tidying

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 170: Tidying

From Our Awakened Nation: Key Stage 3 History (Ministry-approved text, 2019 edition), Chapter 1: "The Hallam Manifestation"

Before 1911, there were no Convictions anywhere in the world.

On the morning of 14th March 1911, a nurse named Edith Hallam, working at a fever hospital in the north of England, laid her hand on the forehead of a dying boy and told him — in her own words — "You are not finished yet." The boy recovered by the evening. Within a year, Hallam had been joined by forty-one others across the country.

We call this the First Manifestation. It is the reason our nation leads the world in Conviction safety, and the reason the Ministry was eventually founded to protect all of us.

Discussion question: Why do you think Convictions appeared when they did?

The third floor of the east annex was all offices, and every one of them was empty except one.

Cole took the stairs because the lift camera worked. He took them two at a time, and on the second landing he passed the young clerk who had held the door for him that morning — sitting on a step with a trolley jammed across the stairwell below her, eating a sandwich — and she looked up and pointed without a word.

Third on the left.

He didn't stop. He raised a hand as he went past, and she raised her sandwich back, and neither of them said a word, and it was the most comfortable exchange he'd had with a stranger all year.

The office door was open.

Halden was sitting behind her desk with her hands in her lap and a cup of tea going cold in front of her, and she looked perfectly fine. Hair tidy. Jacket on. Reading glasses pushed up on her head.

Across the desk, in the visitor's chair, the woman with both arms in plaster was sitting with her legs crossed, talking quietly.

"—and it's really not important," she was saying. "It's a number on a screen in a basement. You've seen a great many numbers. You'll see a great many more. This one can go."

"It can go," Halden agreed. Her voice was calm and reasonable and slightly far away.

"It's close enough," the woman said gently. "Isn't it? What you've got. It's close enough."

"It's close enough," said Halden.

Cole stood in the doorway.

The woman did not turn round. She didn't need to. She was watching his reflection in the dark window behind Halden's desk, and she smiled at it.

"You're quick," she said. "I'd heard you were on minus two with the courier."

"Stop."

"I'm nearly finished." She did not stop. "She saw a number this morning that she wasn't supposed to see. So did the old man in the basement. So did you, but you're not mine to tidy." She tilted her head toward Halden. "This is all it is. Tidying. She won't miss it. She'll have a slightly better afternoon than she would have done."

"Nine hours," Cole said. "Hollis Verrin. You took nine hours on him and he never came back."

"Verrin was a whole person. This is one number and one torn piece of paper." She looked at him in the glass. "I'm not a monster, Cole. I'm careful."

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He didn't argue with her.

He crossed the room — not fast — and crouched beside Halden's chair, the way Reeve had crouched in front of Corvin an hour ago, and looked up into her face.

It was calm. That was the worst of it. Calm the way a lake is calm when something has just gone under.

And inside it, sitting at the very front of her mind where the Sixth had slid it, a sentence in Halden's own voice.

It's close enough.

He had seen that sentence before. Not in Halden. In himself — in a Tesco car park, weeks ago, when the woman across the desk had moved it to the front of his head and stopped him eight feet short of her, and he'd had to tell a thought in his own mind that it was wrong about the distance.

It had cost him a nosebleed and four seconds.

He did it again. For somebody else, this time.

"No," Cole said quietly, to the sentence. "It isn't."

It was not like breaking Harriet Slade's Conviction on Ivor's kitchen floor. There was no gold, no word, nothing anybody watching would have noticed. A boy crouched by a desk, and his nose started to bleed, and he put two fingers very lightly against the back of a woman's wrist.

And the sentence at the front of Halden's mind — the calm, reasonable, final sentence — found out it was wrong.

Halden blinked.

Her hand came up off her lap and went to her own mouth, and she looked down at Cole crouched beside her chair, and then across the desk at the woman with her arms in plaster, and every bit of colour went out of her face at once.

"You," she said. "You were — you were in my head—"

"Only a little," the woman said. "It's gone now. He's seen to that."

She stood up, carefully, the way you stand up with both arms in slings, and did not look at all afraid. She looked, if anything, interested.

"That was clever," she said to Cole. "You did it to yourself last month. I'd wondered if you could do it to somebody else."

"Sit down."

"I'd rather not." She turned toward the door. "I've got another appointment, and I'm late for it. The old man in the basement—"

"Sit down," Cole said, and looked at her.

She sat down.

She did not choose to. He watched her not choose to — watched her knees go, and her whole body fold back into the visitor's chair, and her face do a thing he had not seen it do at Barrowgate, or on Fen's street, or in a Tesco car park with her arms still whole.

She was surprised.

She sat in the chair with her plaster casts in her lap and stared at him, and said nothing.

"Oh," she said at last. Very softly. "So that's what it feels like."

"What?"

"The thing I do to everybody else." She looked down at her own knees as though they belonged to a stranger. "I've been moving sentences to the front of people's heads for nineteen years. Nobody's ever done it back." She laughed, once, and it came out unsteady. "It's horrible. Isn't it. I always assumed it was kind."

"Who sent you to tidy her?"

"Same people who always send me." She was still looking at her knees. "A letter. Typed. No name. It comes through a door I've never seen anybody open, and it says who and when, and I go." She lifted her eyes. "I've never once asked who writes them. I'd like you to know I'm thinking about it now, for the first time, in this chair."

Halden had not moved from behind her desk.

She was gripping the edge of the blotter and breathing carefully, like somebody counting, and when Cole looked at her she said, in a voice that was nearly her own:

"The order."

"What order?"

"The one she tore up. Voss. On Friday." Halden reached down, very slowly, and pulled open the bottom drawer of her desk, and took out an envelope. "I kept the pieces. I don't know why. I put them in an envelope after she'd gone and I've been looking at them every hour since."

She tipped them out onto the blotter. Two halves of a Ministry form, torn cleanly down the middle.

The Sixth leaned forward in her chair to look, and then — very deliberately — leaned back again, and turned her face to the window. As though there was something on that page she had decided, just now, sitting in a chair she couldn't get out of, that she would rather not know.

"There's a countersignature," Halden said. "Bottom of the second page. The deputy director from London signed where it says authorising officer. But the form needs two signatures for a Class One, and there's a second one in the box underneath, and I read it on Friday night and I've been trying to remember it all morning, since she—"

She stopped.

She put one finger on the lower half of the torn page. On the box. On the second signature, small and neat.

And Cole watched her face as the thing the Sixth had nearly taken came all the way back — every piece of it, the Friday night and the torn page and the hour after hour of looking — and watched it go from relief to recognition to something he had never seen on Halden in eighteen months, not in any interview room, not on any phone call.

Fear.

"I know this," Halden whispered. "Cole. I know this signature. It's the one on the letter that hired me."

[End of Chapter 170]