The Faces

His name was Eli, and he was eleven years old, and until that morning he had never seen his own hands.

He told them so on the steps of the Park Street church, in a high shy voice, holding them out in front of him as if they were something he had been lent. He was a small, thin, solemn boy with a cowlick and large brown eyes, and a blue wool coat two sizes too big. The sleeves hung over his knuckles. He kept pushing them back. He sat on the cold stone steps with his knees together, a little apart from the others, and every so often he reached up and touched his own cheek, very lightly, with the tips of his fingers.

"It's nice," he said. "I didn't know it'd be so nice."

"What is?"

"Having a face." He thought about it. "It's warm."

Zoe, sitting next to him with her chin on her fist, made a small noise in her throat and looked quickly away.

They had come down from the Common in the late afternoon, if it was afternoon, and found that the whole backward city had changed. The street that had been full of blank oval smudges was full of people. Not many yet, but some. A scattering. They stood in doorways and on corners, a baker in a floury apron, a woman with a pram, two old men leaning on a lamppost. Each wore a new, uncertain, wondering face. They looked at one another in the gray light, and then, one by one, they turned and looked at the four strangers coming down the hill.

Nobody spoke. Then an old woman in a green headscarf stepped out of the crowd and took Archie's hand in both of hers and kissed it.

"Thank you," she said, in a cracked whisper.

"I haven't—"

"You broke the glass." She was crying. "Do you know how long it's been? How long we've stood here? I had a husband. I had a daughter. I had a, a dog, oh, oh, the dog. I could not remember what he looked like." She pressed his hand to her wet cheek. "I can see him now. I can see his ears."

Archie stood very still. He had never been thanked like that in his life. He did not know where to look.

"It's Zoe," he said finally. "It was Zoe. She broke the first one."

"Then thank her."

"She's," he looked round, "she's over there. Being hugged."

She was. She stood at the top of the church steps in a ring of the newly faced, being embraced from all sides by strangers, and Venn, who had been trying to look dignified at her side, had been swept off his feet by a very large baker and was being kissed on both cheeks while he squawked. Jin hovered at the edge, adjusting his glasses and looking as though he would like to be anywhere else. A child tugged at his sleeve. Without a word, he crouched and let her touch his spectacles.

…

Eli told them about the building.

They sat on the steps of the church in the last of the pewter light, the four of them and a growing ring of listeners, and passed round a loaf of bread that someone had fetched from the bakery, still warm. It was good bread. It was real. Venn put away half of it himself. Eli perched on the step above Archie with his chin on his knees and told it in a small clear voice, as a child tells a thing he has been told not to say.

"It's by the river," he said. "Past the bridge. It's a big gray place with lots of windows. They say there's a lab in it."

"A lab?"

"Like in the pictures. Like in a movie." He frowned. "It's got lights on. All night. Nobody goes in. My mum said not to. She said the people who go in don't come out."

"Do you know who runs it?"

"Nobody does."

"Has anyone been inside?"

"Mr. Pell did." A pause. "He said it was cold, and quiet, and there was a room with a lot of pictures. And a man in a window." Eli's voice dropped. "Mr. Pell's not got a face yet."

Archie and Jin exchanged a look.

"A man in a window?" said Zoe, gently.

"Mr. Pell said he was sitting. At a desk. With papers. He was writing and writing. He didn't look up." Eli picked at the cuff of his coat. "He had a face, but it wasn't a real one. It was like when you draw it, but you've forgotten the eyes. Mr. Pell said it wasn't even trying to be kind."

"What did the man write?"

"Mr. Pell didn't say."

The old woman in the headscarf touched Archie's arm.

"It is where the Mirror comes from," she said. "That is what my mother told me. A long time ago, before the gray. She said there was a house by the river where the first people came, and the first glass was made. She said it was, what was the word? A source."

"The source of the Mirror."

"Yes."

"That might be where the way out is," said Jin, softly.

"Or the way in," said Venn.

"Yes," said Jin. "Or that."

…

They set out at dusk.

It was not far, Eli said, a mile or so along the river road. The streets were thick with the new-faced, and as the little party passed they lined the pavement in silence, hat in hand, in the manner of a village watching a funeral cortège. Nobody spoke. Nobody followed. But as the four came to the corner of Charles Street, a girl of perhaps sixteen, with a long dark plait and a face like a fox, darted out of the crowd and thrust something into Zoe's hand.

"It's all I've got," she whispered. "I don't know if it'll help."

It was a small round compact mirror.

Zoe turned it over. It was a plain tarnished silver thing, the size of a coin, with a hinge on one side and a cracked clasp. She opened it. For a moment the surface was dark. Then, very slowly, it cleared, and she looked into it, and let out a breath.

It showed her face. Just her face. Tired, smudged, and beautiful. It was not twisted. It was not young or old. It was not a better Zoe or a worse. It was only the girl who held it, who looked back with the faint puzzled smile of someone seeing a stranger who is very much like herself.

"It's honest," she said.

"It's the only one," the girl said. "I kept it hid. All the years." She shrugged, embarrassed. "I thought I might need it to remember."

Zoe closed it gently. She slipped it into the pocket over her heart, where the pendant sat, humming, against her skin. The two small warm things lay together there like a pair of sleeping birds.

"Thank you," she said.

"What's your name?" said the girl.

"Zoe."

"I'm Rosalind." She grinned, unexpectedly, a wide sly foxy grin. "I'd like to be like you when I grow up."

"God help you."

"I mean it."

"I know," said Zoe, laughing, wiping her eyes. "I know. That's the scary part."

…

In the real lab, a world away from the gray river, a door closed with a click.

It was a small, expensive sound, like the lid of a jewelry box. William Cross stood in the doorway of his office with his coat over his arm and a satisfied expression on his face. He had been to see the lawyers. He had spent two hours with them in a glass-walled room in Boston, in an expensive suit, and had listened to them talk for a long time about injunctions, and affidavits, and the doctrine of unclean hands. At the end of it he had smiled and said "Thank you, gentlemen," and picked up his coat.

The injunction had been denied.

It would be appealed, of course. The appeal would fail. A judge named Pettigrew, who owed Cross Capital a certain kindness in connection with a golf club, had ruled that the plaintiff's evidence was "inadmissible, speculative, and obtained under circumstances of dubious provenance." Dr. Ferrara had been advised to confine himself to the medical aspects of his research. A schedule had been set for the transfer of the primary keys.

He had four days.

William sat down at his desk. He loosened his tie. He pulled a bottle from the bottom drawer, an old Armagnac, and poured himself a small glass, and drank it slowly, and looked at the dark window.

He had always known there would be a day of reckoning. It had been in the plan from the beginning. He did not regard himself as a cruel man. He regarded himself as a realist. He believed in outcomes. In the end, he thought, nobody remembered how a thing was done; only that it had been done, and that a few thousand people, a few million, a few billion, were the better for it.

And if four dying strangers had to be retained in situ for the greater good, well. They would have died anyway.

He set down the glass.

He opened the second drawer of his desk, the locked one, and took out a thin gray folder. It held a single sheet of paper. On it, in his own neat hand, was a diagram of five concentric circles, and at the heart of them, in red ink, a small square, and a word.

CORE.

Beneath it he had written a line.

If the Gate is closed to me, I will go in.

He looked at it for a long time. Then he closed the folder, and locked the drawer, and turned off the lamp.

…

They reached the river at nightfall.

It was black and slow and silent, a wide band of dark glass between two embankments, and it reflected nothing at all. The bridge arched across it, gray and narrow, with a rail of rusted iron. On the far side, a hundred yards up the bank, they could see the building: a long, low, ugly block of poured concrete, three stories high, with a flat roof and a hundred rectangular windows.

Every window was lit.

They stood at the foot of the bridge and looked at it, in a row, like four children at the door of a haunted house.

"That's it," said Eli, in a whisper.

"You can go back now," said Archie.

"I want to see."

"You can't."

"I want to." The boy lifted his chin. "I want to know what it is. I've been scared of it all my life. And I don't want to be scared any more."

Archie looked at the small solemn face in the dark. He thought of a great many things: of a boy with a pebble in his fist, in a nursery in Thornkeep; of a child with a hobbyhorse; of a little girl named Lily, in crayon, on a card.

We have to stop leaving them behind, he thought.

"You can come as far as the bridge," he said, gently. "And you can wait. And if we're not out by morning, you go and find Rosalind and tell her everything. All right?"

"All right."

"Promise."

"I promise." Eli solemnly put out his hand. Archie shook it.

They crossed the bridge in single file, with the dead river beneath them and the lit windows ahead, and none of them said a word. Halfway across, Zoe slipped her hand into Archie's. He glanced down at her. She was looking straight ahead, with her chin up, and her mouth set in a thin determined line. But her fingers, laced through his, were shaking.

He squeezed them.

She squeezed back.