Chapter 171: The Register

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 171: The Register

Federal Bureau of Awakened Affairs — Public Register of Designated IndividualsTier 9 (designation by federal review only)

~~Current holders: 3~~

Current holders: 4 (one provisional; foreign national; designation under review)

Last updated: 09:14 EST

They walked out of the east annex together at twenty past nine, and nobody stopped them.

Corvin first, on his own feet, looking at everything in the lobby as though he'd never seen a potted plant before. Reeve behind him, grey and still bleeding slightly, with Thessaly's hand under his elbow. Vesper. Gerry Doyle, who had decided on the stairs that he was not going back to the basement today or possibly ever. Halden, holding a brown envelope against her chest with both arms.

And the Sixth.

Nobody had asked her to come. When Cole had stood up to leave Halden's office, she had stood up too, with her arms in their slings, and walked out behind him, and when Thessaly turned round on the stairs and looked at her, she'd said, quite calmly:

"I'm not going to be any trouble. I'd just rather not be left in a room on my own right now."

Thessaly had looked at Cole. Cole had looked at the Sixth.

"Walk at the back," he'd said.

She walked at the back.

Mark Dobson did not look up as they crossed the lobby.

He raised one hand off the desk as they went past — just the fingers, the way a man lifts his fingers off a steering wheel to thank another driver — and put it down again, and went on typing, and Cole saw that he was typing nothing at all.

The clerk with the sandwich was standing by the doors. She held one open.

At the bottom of the steps outside, a man with a camera saw who was coming out and lifted it — and then saw the rest of them, a boy with blood on his lip and a man in a good coat blinking at the sky and a woman with both arms in plaster walking carefully at the back — and lowered it again without taking the picture.

Dana rang at twenty to ten.

"Are you sitting down?"

"I'm on a bus."

"Then hold on to something." Her voice had the careful edge it only got when she was trying very hard not to shout. "The American register changed at quarter past two our time. The Tier 9 line. The one they put on airport walls."

"And?"

"It's said three for years. It says four." A pause. "One provisional. Foreign national. Designation under review."

Cole looked out of the bus window at the high street going past.

"That's not necessarily—"

"Cole, there's one foreign national on earth who's been in the news for five days straight, and an American immigration officer met him at JFK and said that wasn't a four." Dana let out a breath. "They didn't announce it. They didn't put out a statement. They just changed a number on a page and waited for someone to notice."

"Has anyone noticed?"

Stolen from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Reeve's phone," Dana said, "has not stopped since half past nine."

It was everywhere by lunch.

A three to a four. A single line on a government web page in another country. And by one o'clock there were forty thousand posts about it, and a screenshot of the old register next to the new one with a red circle round the number, and somebody had made a graphic with the four American Tier 9s as silhouettes — three of them labelled with names nobody in Britain had ever heard of, and the fourth one tall, with its hood up, labelled only ?

Mia sent it to him without comment.

Then, a minute later: you look taller in it than you are

Then: no you don't actually

The Ministry responded at six o'clock.

Nobody had expected it to. It had never once in its history published who held what rank — Dana had said so in an arrivals hall at JFK, the day they'd seen the American scale on a wall next to a sign about liquids. It was a matter of national security. It was not a thing the public needed.

At six o'clock, it published anyway.

Ministry of Awakened Affairs — Statement and RegisterPublished 18:00

In the interests of public confidence, and in light of recent speculation concerning foreign designations of UK nationals, the Ministry is today publishing, for the first time, its register of licensed S-Rank individuals.

There are currently thirty-eight (38) licensed S-Rank individuals in the United Kingdom. They are listed below in order of seniority.

[…]

7. Calloway, I.

[…]

38. Oduya, T.

Additionally, the following classification is recorded for completeness:

CATEGORY ZERO — unranked — 1 entry.

The Ministry does not recognise foreign designations of UK nationals. No UK national holds, or is eligible to hold, any rank above S.

"They've put you at the bottom again," Mia said.

She was standing in the kitchen doorway with her phone, and it was the exact thing she had said six months ago in front of a television, about a graphic with a white box underneath the ranking ladder.

"Under all of them," she said. "Under thirty-eight people. Recorded for completeness."

"It's just a list."

"It's not just a list." She came in and put the phone face up on the table. "Read the last line. No UK national holds, or is eligible to hold, any rank above S. They didn't need to write that. Nobody asked them. They wrote it because a number changed in America this morning and it frightened them."

Iris, at the end of the table, had her own phone out and was reading her own name at number seven, with no expression at all.

"She's right," Iris said, without looking up. "That last line is the only honest sentence in the statement. Everything else is a list. That line is a reaction."

The internet disagreed with the Ministry within ten minutes.

By seven there were tier lists. Hundreds of them. People had taken the thirty-eight names off the Ministry register and arranged them into rankings of their own — by fights they'd seen, by rumours, by who'd been on the news — and argued about it in the comments with the ferocity people usually save for football.

And every single one of them had the same thing at the top.

A blank box. Or a question mark. Or a screenshot of a boy holding a woman's wrist in the middle of a lit street. Above all thirty-eight names, above Iris at seven and whoever was at one, above the four silhouettes from America.

Reeve read one out loud, from a thread with nine thousand replies.

"The Ministry put him at the bottom because they can't measure him. Everybody else put him at the top because we watched him."

The kitchen went quiet.

"That's quite good actually," Marek said.

Out in the hallway, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and both plaster casts in her lap, the Sixth had been listening to all of it. She had not been offered a chair and had not asked for one.

"I'm not on it," she said, to nobody in particular.

Reeve leaned back to look at her through the doorway.

"None of us are," she said. "Nineteen years. Not on theirs, not on the Americans'. We're never on anybody's list." She looked down at her casts. "I used to think that was because we were above them."

Halden came at nine that night.

She stood in the doorway of the flat with the brown envelope still held against her chest the way she'd held it all day, and she did not come in.

"Not here," she said. "There's a camera on the bus stop across the road, and the Ministry has access to every camera in this city, and I've spent a decade watching them use it." Her voice was steady. Her hands weren't. "Tomorrow. Somewhere with no cameras at all. I'll show you the name and then I'm going to need somebody to tell me what to do with the rest of my life."

"Halden—"

"Tomorrow, Cole."

She turned to go. Then she stopped on the top step.

"You should look at the register again," she said, without turning round. "The Ministry one. They updated it at twenty to nine. Nobody's noticed yet, because everybody's arguing about the top of it."

Cole stood in the doorway and watched her go down the stairs, one hand on the rail, the envelope still pressed against her chest, until the street door closed behind her.

Then he opened it on his phone.

Thirty-eight names. Iris at seven. The same statement, word for word.

And at the bottom, underneath it all, one line had changed.

CATEGORY ZERO — unranked — 2 entries.

[End of Chapter 171]