“The radio?”
“Yeah. Even though I was scared, I was thinking, That thing is cool. I wanted to see it work.”
“And if it had gone off, you would have noticed.”
“I would have noticed. Yeah.”
“Are you sure?” I say again.
He nods. Of course he’s sure. I’m sure too. I can see the truth that I feared rising up slowly from below.
Ms. Tarjin stops me on the way out, calls my name at the green door.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” I tell her. “I’m not.”
“Are you in danger?”
“I—” It sounds so stupid. But it’s the truth. “I am. And—we all are. I think the whole—” I shake my head at the enormity of it. The ridiculousness. “I think we may all be in danger.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure yet. I don’t know. But I’m going to try to stop it.”
This is a strange thing to say, and surely it is a strange thing to hear said. But Ms. Tarjin just nods, looks at me, at the life of the State proceeding behind me. The coffee shop next door, the brightly painted small houses. One of those palms that stands taller than all the ones surrounding it, extending itself far above the world, as if straining with curiosity.
“Okay. Well.” Ms. Tarjin smiles and places her hand on the side of my face. “Come back. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, and I linger just a moment more, just a half a moment, before I get back in my car.
Maybe there will be a world where that happens. Maybe the world will unfold in such a way that I do return, find my way back to the green door in the red frame. It’s the smallest moment that I’ve experienced in a long time, small and immediate, shared between two humans, but it’ll keep me going awhile. I know it will. I will live in a world for the next little while in which everything works out, and I come back like she said, and then who knows what happens after that?
For now I point the car back downtown, and back toward the Plaza.
The anomalies did not start on the lawn in Los Feliz, they did not start in the apartment on Ellendale. The first of the anomalies was in my own fucking office.
The upstream untruth, from which all the others flowed, was Arlo Vasouvian saying that he radioed about a car crash outside Grand Central. A case that, had I been dispatched to handle it, as I should have been, would have prevented me from being assigned to the Los Feliz case. To Mose Crane.
Arlo said he radioed but my receiver did not register the call, and that was the unaccountable event. That was the first anomaly.
“Oh no,” I say, my hands tight on the steering wheel, the city racing past me. “Oh no.”
I press the button for the ninth floor, shaking off the memory of Aysa Paige insisting that we go now.
Stone of the ninth floor, big Woodrow Stone, the Spec Service’s Chief Liaison Officer to the Permanent Record, works at a big desk with a bowl of popcorn in front of him at all times. He pushes handfuls into his mouth with one hand while he runs his consoles with the other, staring at seven different screens at the same time, weaving together stretches with a magician’s touch. He is a master of the various dials. He is an assembly artist. He is not a pleasant human being.
“What?” he says when he sees me come in, jabbing a thick finger at Stop on the machine in front of him, bringing whatever piece of reality he’s watching to a sudden freeze frame. “What do you want?”
“There’s a stretch I need to see.”
He sighs, a heavy man’s heavy sigh, making sure I know how irritated I have made him by my presence. I tell him what I need, and he says, “Isn’t that the same thing your partner was wanting? That girl?”
“Ms. Paige.”
“Right, right. Well guess what? It’s already processed for return.”
“But it’s still here?”
“Yeah. Well… yes. Physically. But it’s been processed.” This is his fiefdom, his keep, and Woody in his sluggish way is active in its defense. There is a process that defines the request I’ve just made: officer engages with the Liaison, the Liaison files with the Record, the Record upon due consideration produces the desired stretch or stretches. Woody heaves himself up out of his chair, pulls open the filing cabinet behind him. “Lemme get you a G-9.” He looks at his watch. “Actually, it’s after six. So this’ll be tomorrow. Or, actually—”
“Actually,” I say, “I need to see it right now. Where is it, Woody?”
“What?”
“I need to watch it now.”
I reach across him, to the slot on the side of his screen, and eject the stretch he’s been reviewing. For a split second I imagine someone watching us, in some far future, in the basement of the Permanent Record, some officer or archivist who for some reason has requested this stretch for review, the reality being generated in this room, right now: Laszlo Ratesic makes a rash demand of Woody Stone, who pushes back…
“The fuck are you doing, Ratesic? No.”
“Where is that stretch?”
“Ratesic. C’mon.”
Woody’s eyes make an unconscious flicker to the rolling cart parked in the corner, behind me, loaded with unsorted stretches marked for return. I can feel it in there, sense what I need, and it comes to me too, how to get it.
“Woody,” I say, finding the right voice for it. Reining myself in. “Did you know that she’s dead?”
“Who?”
“Ms. Paige, Woody. My partner.”
“The…” Woody’s voice catches, he has to start again. “The girl?”
“Speculator,” I say. “Agent. My partner.” There are more words. Hero. Martyr. I skip them. I’ve got him already: Woody is gawping at me, his face slack with sad disbelief.
“That girl is dead? Dead how?”
“It was in the Authority.”
“I didn’t—” He looks at me imploringly, his thick chin trembling a little.. “I didn’t see it. I’m in here, man. I’m working. Will you tell me?”
He liked Aysa in their brief moments together, and he’s stricken now. I take it. I use it.
“She and I cracked an anomaly, okay? A big one. There was a grave assault in progress, and Aysa died in the field.”
“Wow.” He shakes his head, and then, in his bafflement and grief, requests a two-step verification, confirmation of what he knows he heard. “She died?”
I nod. He keeps shaking his head. He’s as big as I am, Woody Stone, maybe even a little bigger. Bigger around the middle, with a sagging gut and thick legs. Stubble and sallow cheeks, a life lived staring at screens. “But you cracked it? The anomaly you were working? You dug it down to the truth?”
I am silent. “I’m trying, Woody. I’m trying.”
I wait. He grits his teeth. Glances up at the capture above his desk, bearing witness. “All right. Well—all right.”
He goes over and crouches at the laden cart and paws through it. He scatters stretches like playing cards on his rug and sorts through them until he finds the one I’m after. He slides it in and cues it and steps away, back into the far corner of his office, his mouth twisting in discomfort at his role in this malfeasance.
“Play,” I tell the machine, and I watch it how Charlie would have watched it. I watch it how Aysa would have watched it: leaning forward, eyes narrowed, pulse active, alert and alive.
And then, before Woody can stop me, I tell it to play again.
Three times I watch Mose Crane crawl up the pitch, and three times he falls, flailing, and three times I stare at that smudge of shadow, which is pointing in the wrong direction. It is pointing west—a shadow that would be cast in the late afternoon, not at daybreak. The shadow makes no sense. Except it makes sense as a marker, a symbol, a representation of an idea—that this is supposed to be a clue. This is supposed to draw me in. There is no question. The shadow is there and there is no question that it is there, but it is not a shadow cast by a person, it is not the shadow of the frame of a skylight. It is a shadow of something that was never there, a mark left to draw me, a false clue.