Ninety Seconds

POV: Hollis

The pocket watch on the plinth said eleven minutes to one, and it was the only honest thing in the room.

Hollis watched the second hand sweep. It was Felix's watch, a cheap brass thing from a pawnshop on Cinder Street, and it ticked briskly and without a flaw, which made a pleasant change. He had been staring at it for six minutes. He had stared at it so long that his eyes had begun to see the tick, a small bright flicker with each stroke, like a candle flame in a draft.

"Ninety seconds," said Felix, again.

"I heard you the first time."

"I just want to be sure that everyone understands it. It's very important." He was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the plinth, with a black glass sphere cradled in each arm and a pair of brass calipers sticking out of his pocket. His spectacles had slid to the end of his nose. "The cup's a weighing cradle. It's attached to a spring, below, in the plinth. The spring reads the mass. When it drops, the ward knows. The moment the Heart, I mean the, the Stone, comes out, the lever lifts, and there's a delay of, I think, about ninety seconds, while the Council's clerks are alerted. Then the bells."

"And in the ninety seconds."

"We put Decoy A in the cup. And the spring reads the weight, and the lever drops again, and nobody ever knows."

"If the weight's right."

"It's very nearly right." He swallowed. "It's a hair under. About the weight of a, of a sparrow. It's the best I could do without a proper oven. But the spring has a tolerance, you see. A, a play. I think it'll forgive it."

"You think."

"I have a ninety percent confidence."

"Felix," said Hollis, gently. "That's the sort of number a man gives when he'd like to be told it's all right."

"Is it all right?"

"No," said Hollis, and smiled at him. "But I like the number."

Felix colored to the roots of his hair. Hollis looked away, hastily, at the watch. He had found, in the last quarter hour, that it was a good deal safer to look at things that ticked.

…

He had not told them the rest of it.

He knelt by the plinth on the cold glass with his hands flat on the iron frame of its base, and felt the metal under his palms. Not felt it. His hands could not feel. They lay on the black iron like two pieces of wax, numb and blind, and sent him no news of heat or cold or grain. But there was another way to know a thing. It came up through the bone of the wrist, a low silent hum, a presence, like the sound of a crowd behind a thick wall. He closed his eyes and let it come.

There.

The plinth was not stone. It was iron, wrapped in a veneer of marble, the way a bad man wraps himself in a good coat. Inside the shell there was a frame: a cage of rods and braces, a heavy spring in a housing, a lever of blackened steel, a little brass pawl that clicked. He could feel all of it. He could feel the weight of the sphere pressing down through the cup, through the shaft, onto the spring. And he could feel, just beyond it, a thin cold thread of tension, ticking steadily away, like the last grains in an hourglass: the alarm, waiting to be tripped.

Ninety seconds, he thought. From the moment we lift. That's the Council's allowance. That's what they gave us to cheat the dead.

And I can make it a good deal longer.

It was the thought he had been avoiding for ten minutes. It sat in him like a stone in a boot. He did not want to do it. He had been burned three times tonight already, in the Hall and the corridor and the red light, and his hands had gone dead, and his father's whistle was gone from his head like a candle blown out. He knew, with a gambler's precise bleak arithmetic, what it would cost to do more.

But there was a way to hold the spring. If he laid a hand on the housing and bent the brass pawl, a quarter inch, a hair, so that it caught on the lever and held, the plinth would go on believing that the weight was there. It would read a full cup when the cup was empty. It would buy them minutes. Not ninety seconds. Minutes. Time enough to swap the sphere and test the weight and walk out of the room like men leaving a church.

It's a bet, he told himself. You've made worse.

No, said a quiet voice in him. You haven't.

He put his hand flat on the iron, and opened his eyes, and said, "Ready when you are."

…

They came in a rush: Roz and the Captain through the shelves at a dead run, the Captain with a green ledger clutched to his ribs, Roz with a look on her face like a woman who has swallowed a lit match. "Company," she gasped. "Seven men. A minute." And Dex, who had not moved from the plinth in all that time, looked down at the watch, and then at Hollis, and said, in the voice of a man ordering a cup of tea:

"Then we have a minute."

"Boss—"

"Now, Mr. Quade."

Hollis took a breath.

He reached.

It was not the hurricane of the corridor. It was a thing smaller and finer, a surgeon's work. He felt the pawl, a nub of brass no longer than his thumb. He felt the notch in the lever. And he leaned on the metal the way he leaned on a bullet, with the same cold flat intention, the same small bright certainty, and the brass did not so much yield as consent. It bent. It slid a hair's breadth over. It clicked, softly, home.

Hold.

The tension in the spring stopped. The thin thread of the alarm quivered, and held, and hung there like a fly in amber.

A weight dropped out of his mind.

He knew what it was. He knew it by the way it left: a quiet falling, like a coin down a well. He looked after it. He felt for it, quickly, in the first stunned second, and saw a woman in a gray dress, standing at the front of a schoolroom in a wash of dusty light, with a ruler in one hand and a piece of chalk in the other. She was tall. She had a long sallow face and a mole on her chin. She wore her hair in a knot so tight it pulled her eyebrows up. She had taught him to read. She had taught him the shape of the letter Q, and had said, with a dry smile, There, Hollis. That's you. You're always the odd one out.

Mrs. Teague.

He could not see her face.

He could see the dress. The ruler. The long gray shadow of her on the blackboard. He could see the chalk dust in the air. But where her face had been there was a smooth pale oval, blank as an egg.

Say it out loud, he told himself. It was the thing a man says, in a card game, when he has lost a hand and wants the table to think he hasn't.

"Mrs. Teague," he said hoarsely. "My first schoolteacher. Her face."

"Written," said Dex, without looking up.

…

"Lifting," said Felix.

He had one sphere in his left arm. The other lay on a fold of felt beside the plinth. With his right hand he reached for the black glass in the cup, the real one, the one with the faint pink heart inside, and Hollis heard the breath go out of him in a single shuddering sigh.

"Count," said Dex.

"One. Two."

The real sphere came up out of the brass like a stone out of a pond. It was heavier than it looked. Felix's arm sagged. For half a second the thing hung in the air between them, black and perfect and utterly still, and Hollis, who had not meant to, looked at it, and felt a chill go down his spine and settle in the base of his skull.

It had a pulse.

He could feel it. Not in his hands. In his chest. A slow dull knock, deep in the sternum, as if someone had reached into his ribs and rapped on the bone. Thud. It came from the glass, and it came from nowhere. It went through the floor.

"Three," said Felix. "Four. Five."

"Decoy," said Dex.

The false sphere went down into the cup. It rocked. It settled. It sat there in the pearl light, black, perfect, flawless, a mica-pink glimmer pulsing slowly at its heart, and Hollis stared at it with every nerve in his body drawn tight.

Please. Please. Please.

He felt the spring take the weight. He felt it hum. He felt the pawl hold, and the lever hold, and the cold thread of the alarm lie quiet. For a moment the whole machine hung between two worlds, the real and the false, like a gambler's last card turned half over.

Then the spring sank a quarter inch, with a tiny soft click.

The thread did not move.

"Weight's reading," whispered Hollis. "It's, it's taken it. It's holding." His voice sounded strange to him, thin, a boy's. "It's holding. The ward thinks it's the Stone."

Felix let out a sound like a kettle.

"Seventy-one seconds," said Viv, from the door.

"It's fine. It's fine. We've got minutes, I've bent the pawl, we've got all the time—" Hollis stopped. He had heard something. A sharp, bright, ringing sound from the other side of the room: boots on glass. A great many boots. They were running. "Almost all the time."

…

"Out," said Dex. "The service door. Now."

It was behind the plinth, in the curved wall of the chamber. A narrow iron door, half hidden between two shelves, with a heavy bolt and no lock. Josiah had already dragged it open. Beyond it lay a short passage, a plain arch of brick with a rail running down the middle, and at the end of the passage, a gate. It was a great iron grille, rusted and black, set in a frame of old stone. It hung half open on a counterweight. Beyond it was the dark.

"The Cinder Line," said Josiah. "It leads to the coal tunnels."

"Is that the way out?"

"It is the only way that does not go past them."

They poured through the door in a stumbling, gasping line. Felix first, with the real sphere wrapped in his coat. Then Roz. Then Viv. Hollis stood at the threshold, counting heads, and found that someone was missing, and turned.

Dex was standing at the plinth.

He was looking at the false sphere in the cup. He looked at it for exactly three seconds, with no expression at all, as a man looks at a grave. Then he turned and walked to the door, and plucked the real sphere from Felix's arms as a mother lifts a child from a stranger.

"I'll take it," he said.

"But—"

"I'll take it, Mr. Whitcomb."

Felix let go.

Dex wrapped the glass in his black coat. He folded it to his chest, close, and shifted the cane to his left hand. And Hollis, who was nearest, saw something that he would think about for a very long time. A quiet pause. A change of the shoulders. As the black ball settled against the boy's breastbone, it gave a single dull knock that Hollis felt through the stone, and Dex's whole body answered, like a ship rocking on a swell.

Thud.

Hollis blinked.

Coincidence, he thought. He's got a bad leg. He's tired. It's the, the echo of the, of the...

The boots were in the Archive.

…

They came through the shelves in a gray tide.

He saw them through the arch of the doorway as he stood, rifle up, in the narrow passage, with his dead hands on the stock. Seven men, eight, in the dove-gray coats of the Watch. Torches. Bayonets. A sergeant in front with a wild unshaven jaw and a whistle clenched between his teeth, and behind him, at a shambling run, a pale freckled man with a bandage round his head and his pistol in his fist.

Dray.

He was on his feet. He had come to. He ran with his shoulders hunched and his face set and a kind of bitter, bleak determination in his eyes, and the others streamed on either side of him, and the vials rattled on their shelves as they passed. The sergeant raised the whistle. The first notes of it shrilled out, high and shrill, through the vaulted dark.

"Gate!" cried Josiah. "Hollis, the gate!"

He looked at it.

It was forty feet behind him, at the end of the brick passage. The iron grille hung from a great rusted chain that ran up through a ring in the roof to a counterweight of cast iron, and it was held half open by a single stout pin. Cut the chain, and the gate would fall. A thousand pounds of iron, on its hinges, across the passage. It would seal them from the Archive like a lid on a pot.

It was a shot of sixty yards in bad light. He could not feel the trigger. He could not feel the stock. He could not feel his hands.

Well, he thought. There it is.

It was the old feeling. It was the long cold stillness that had come to him in the ring, with the crowd roaring, and the trick shot set up, and a woman's life tied to a post. It was the high clear note in the ears. It was the thing he had been running from for ten years and the only thing he had ever been good at.

He braced against the wall. He put his cheek to the stock. He could not feel it. He knew it was there.

Straight through.

He fired.

The bullet left the barrel with a flat bright crack, and he felt it go. He felt it as he always did, a hot thin thread in the dark, spinning, with a mind of its own. And he took hold of the thread, and he bent it. He sent it wide, to the left, around the stone pillar that stood between him and the chain, in a long lazy curve, like a fish around a post. It sang. It swung. It came out the other side exactly where he had meant it to, and struck the iron link at the very top of the chain, where the rust was thinnest.

The link burst in a spray of orange sparks.

The chain snapped. The counterweight dropped. And the great black grille came down on its hinges with a roar that shook the walls, slammed into the stone, and rang like the end of the world.

…

Somewhere behind it, a man screamed with rage.

Bayonets thrust through the bars. A hand clawed at the iron. Dray stood against the grille, with his freckled face pressed to the black rods and his eyes enormous, and as Hollis watched, the Lieutenant's gaze came up and found him in the dark. For a moment the two of them looked at one another across forty feet of passage and a thousand pounds of iron.

Then Dray took a step back, slowly, and lowered the pistol, and Hollis, who knew a man deciding not to fire when he saw one, nodded once.

"Come on," said a voice at his shoulder.

It was Felix. His face was black with soot, his glasses were cracked, and he was holding out a smoking bottle in each hand. "I put a little, I mean a lot, in the passage behind us," he said. "In case they get through. It won't hurt them. They'll just, they'll be coughing till Tuesday."

"Felix—"

"Come on, Hollis."

He took Hollis's elbow.

Hollis went. He let himself be pulled down the long brick passage, away from the grille, away from the shouting, into the dark where a faint cold wind was blowing and somewhere a great way off a river of iron wheels was beginning to rumble. His hands hung at his sides. His ears were ringing. He had forgotten how to feel his feet.

Ahead of him, in the dark, Dex was walking with the black ball against his chest.

He walked with a limp. He always did. But there was a kind of steadiness in it now, a deep unvarying rhythm, like a heart. Thud, step, drag. Thud, step, drag. And as he walked, the ball in his arms gave its slow soft pulse, and Dex's whole body beat with it. It was the same. It was exactly the same. Hollis, who had spent his life reading the tells of men at a card table, could see it as plain as day: the hitch in the shoulder, the dip of the head, the catch in the breath, all in time with the thing in his arms.

That heart, thought Hollis, is keeping time with him.

He didn't want to know why.

He decided, quite deliberately, as a man decides to leave a card face-down, that he would not ask. Not tonight. Not until he had to.

He followed the boy into the dark.