Come Home, Son

POV: Felix

The letter came on the second morning before Black Noon, in the hand of a boy who didn't know what he was carrying.

Felix was on the church roof with a bucket of lye and a stiff brush, scrubbing the sphere's stand, when the boy's whistle came up from the lane. It was a small fair-haired boy in the gray-and-silver cap of a Meridian Trust messenger, with a satchel across his chest and the pink raw ears of a child who'd been told to run. He hopped from foot to foot at the bottom of the ladder. He called up in a high clear voice, with the faint, bright self-importance of the very young:

"Message for Master Felix Whitcomb! By hand! I'm to wait for no reply!"

Felix looked down.

The bucket slipped from his fingers. It fell to the leads with a clang and rolled, and the gray lye ran in a long thin tongue toward the gutter. He did not notice. He had gone cold from the scalp down, as if someone had poured water down his collar.

"Who sent you?"

"I'm not to say, sir. Only that you'd know the hand."

The boy put the envelope in his palm, touched his cap, and ran. By the time Felix had gotten down the ladder he was gone, a flicker of silver at the end of the lane.

He stood in the churchyard with the letter in his hand.

It was heavy, cream-colored paper, laid linen, the kind the Trust ordered by the ream. His name was on the face in a long, sloping, flawless copperplate. Every letter of it was one he'd have known in his sleep. He had seen it on birthday cards he'd been too old for, and on school reports with Satisfactory in the margin, and on the bottom of a hundred cheques. A hand that had never in its life been hurried.

He broke the seal.

…

Felix,

I will not ask how you came to be where you are. I have been told. I do not blame you for it. You were always an impressionable boy, and you have fallen among people who understand the uses of sentiment.

It is time to come home.

All is forgiven. Your room has been kept. Your mother's piano has been tuned. Mrs. Aberdeen has asked daily whether you have eaten.

Give me the Aldridge boy, and your name is yours again. I ask nothing else. You need only tell me where he will be on the morning of the twenty-eighth. You need not look at him. You need not speak to him. You need only send a line to this address, by any hand, and the thing is done, and no one will be harmed.

I have always wanted what was best for you. You have never believed it.

Come home, son.

A. W.

He read it through twice. Then he sat down, quite abruptly, on a gravestone.

The churchyard was empty. A few old yews, a path of broken slate, a line of washing at the sexton's door. The morning was gray and still. A sparrow worked at a crust on a headstone and paid him no mind at all.

Come home, son.

It was the first time his father had ever written those words. It was the first time, in twenty-one years, that he had been asked for anything.

He realized that his hands were shaking. He realized, too, with a kind of dull horror, that he was crying: not loudly, not in sobs, but in long quiet streams, like a faucet left running. He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth.

He wanted to go.

God help him, he wanted to go.

He wanted his room. He wanted the green-shaded lamp and the bed with the blue counterpane and the shelf of clockwork that no one had ever looked at. He wanted Mrs. Aberdeen's cocoa. He wanted his mother's piano, though she'd been dead nine years and he had never learned to play it. He wanted to be a boy who did not know what his father had done. He wanted, more than any of it, for the man who had written come home to have meant it.

He might have, thought Felix. That's the horror. He might have.

…

He found Hollis in the stable.

Hollis was sitting on an upturned bucket with a rag and a can of oil, working at the cylinder of his revolver, in a patch of thin gray light from the door. He did not look up. He had the look he wore when he was thinking about nothing, a loose, quiet look, like a horse in a pasture. Felix stood in front of him with the letter held out in both hands.

"From my father."

The rag stopped.

Hollis set the revolver on his knee. He wiped his fingers carefully, one at a time. Then he took the letter, and read it, slowly, moving his lips a little at the long words. It took a good while. When he had done he folded it along the creases and handed it back.

He didn't say anything.

Felix waited. He waited for don't be a fool, or burn it, or you'd be dead by Tuesday. He had braced for all of them. He had been braced for them since the churchyard. But Hollis only sat there with his big dead hands on his knees, and looked at him with those warm light-brown eyes, and waited too.

"Aren't you going to tell me what to do?" said Felix.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you'd know I was telling you," said Hollis. "And then it'd be mine. I'd rather it was yours."

Felix opened his mouth. Shut it. Something in his chest turned over, very painfully, like a key in a lock.

"I want to go," he said.

"I know."

"Is that wrong?"

"No." Hollis put the rag down. "Wanting's not a thing you can be wrong about, Felix. It's just what's there. What you do about it's the part that counts."

It was the longest speech he had ever made. He seemed embarrassed. He picked up the revolver again and bent over it, and the silence in the stable thickened and softened, and was not unfriendly.

Felix sat down beside him, on the straw, and put his back against the stall.

They stayed like that for a long time.

…

The test was at noon.

Josiah had brought it from the Watch Station House in a canvas satchel, with the unhappy care of a man carrying something that might go off. It was a Charter-glass assayer, the portable kind, of the sort used by the Watch to examine confiscated vials. A brass cylinder the size of a pint pot. A glass probe on a coil of wire. A dial with a quivering needle, and a little ivory-faced gauge that measured, in percentages, how true a thing was to its source.

"Dray lent it," said Josiah. "He says he did not."

"What does it do?" said Hollis.

"It rings the glass. If the glass is real, the needle goes to a hundred. If it is a fake, it sinks. The Assayer's man at the Auction will use a better instrument. But this is what the Watch has."

They set the sphere on the kitchen table. Felix touched the probe to the base. There was a faint bright ting, like a spoon on a wineglass.

The needle trembled. It rose through the fifties, the seventies, the eighties. It paused at ninety. It trembled again.

It settled at ninety-seven.

Nobody breathed.

"That's good, isn't it?" said Hollis, at last.

"It's very good," said Felix, slowly. "It's extraordinarily good. It's better than I ever hoped." He bent to look at the gauge. "But it isn't a hundred."

"It's a fake. It's not supposed to be a hundred."

"The Assayer has a better instrument."

"It's three percent."

"Three percent is a note." He straightened. He was white about the nostrils. "Three percent is a note that a trained ear will pick out in a quiet hall. It's a flaw in the shape of the ring. I can hear it, if I listen. It's the thing that will make him say hmm."

"Felix—"

"It needs something. I don't know what." He pushed his spectacles up. "There's something it's missing. There's something about the real one that I haven't got."

He sat down at the table. He stared at the globe, and the globe stared back, clear and cold and almost right.

It was Roz, in the end, who said it. She had come in with a basket of linen and stopped to watch.

"The crack," she said.

Felix looked up.

"In the real one. It had a crack, didn't it? Pole to pole. A hairline." She touched her own throat. "I saw it when Dex held it. I heard it too, in a way. A sort of flaw in the beat. Like a bell that's been struck too often."

"The Undervault," said Felix, slowly. "I saw it from the Hall of Hands. A black glass sphere, with a seam from the top to the bottom, so fine you could hardly see it. I thought it was a mold line." He sat very still. "It isn't. It's a wound."

"Give yours a scar," said Roz.

…

He worked on it into the afternoon.

It took the finest of Hollis's gravers, and a steel pin as thin as a hair, and a cold, quiet patience he hadn't known he possessed. He turned the globe in the window light, and bent over it, and drew the point down the curve of the glass in a single unbroken stroke. Not a scratch. A fault. A slender line of strain, cut so fine it was visible only at certain angles, and then only as a whisper. He ran it from pole to pole. He followed the memory in his head of that long, thin, terrible seam.

When he lifted the pin he found that he was not breathing.

He put the probe to the base.

The needle rose. Eighty. Ninety. Ninety-five. Ninety-eight. It hovered, as if listening.

It stood at a hundred.

Hollis whooped. It was a startled sound, like a startled owl, and he clapped a hand over his mouth. Roz laughed. Josiah, by the window, allowed himself the faintest tightening at the corner of his eyes. Felix just sat there, with the pin still in his hand, and looked at the dial, and could not feel his face.

I did that, he thought. With my hand.

He did not know whether to be proud or ashamed. He thought, on the whole, he was both.

…

Dex came to him at dusk, as he had known he would.

He came into the kitchen limping, with his cane tapping on the flags, and sat down across the table. The lamp was lit. The sphere stood between them under its cloth. Dex looked at it, and then, with his dry gray eyes, at Felix.

"Josiah says it's perfect."

"It's a hundred. On Dray's gauge."

"That's what I said." Dex rubbed his eyes. "I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it. If this fails, if the Assayer hears it, if the sun doesn't come, if the sphere is dull or the hall wise or the day goes wrong, it's mine. My ledger takes it."

"Dex—"

"Rule five. I made the plan. If the plan breaks, the plan was mine." He said it quietly. "You don't carry this. I'll say that out loud, in front of anyone you like."

"No."

Dex stopped.

"No," said Felix. He was very pale, and his voice was low, but it did not tremble. "Not just yours. Mine too."

"You didn't—"

"I built it. I made the lie. I carved the crack. I put the thing in the hall with my own hands." He drew a breath. "I'm not a boy you can protect, Dex. I'm not going to stand behind you, and watch you pay, and say it wasn't me. I was on that pier. I burned that man. I will not do it again, and I will not hide from it either. Put me in the book."

For a moment Dex only looked at him.

"Both of us, then," he said.

"Both of us."

Dex held out his hand across the table.

It was a thin hand, ink-stained, with a callus on the first finger from the pencil. Felix looked at it for a moment. Then he took it. The grip was cold and hard and brief. It was the first time, he realized, that anyone in that room had shaken hands with him as an equal.

…

It was late when the others went to bed.

The kitchen was quiet. The stove ticked. Felix sat at the table with the envelope in front of him, and the lamp turned down, and listened to the old church creak and settle round him. He had read the letter nine times. He knew it by heart.

Hollis came in from the stable with straw in his hair. He didn't speak. He pulled out the other chair, and sat, and took out a cheroot he didn't light.

"You've not answered it," he said.

"No."

"You going to?"

"I don't know." Felix rubbed his eyes under his spectacles. "Hollis. If I'm not a Whitcomb. If I'm not his. Then what am I?"

"A chemist."

"That's a trade, not a name."

Hollis considered it, turning the cheroot in his fingers.

"Well," he said. "If you wanted. I've been told it's a good name." He did not look up. "Quade. It's not much. It's got a horse thief in it and a man who shot his own foot at a rodeo. But it'd fit you better than that coat."

Felix stared.

He had been about to say something clever. It was gone. He tried to speak and found that he was laughing, and then that he was crying, and then that it was impossible to tell the one from the other. He put his face in his hands. His shoulders shook.

After a minute he felt a heavy warm hand on the back of his neck. It stayed there. It did not tell him to stop.

"Thank you," he said into his palms.

"It's only a name," said Hollis, gruffly.

"No," said Felix. "It isn't."

…

He did it at the stove, alone, long after midnight.

He had meant to do it earlier. He had meant to do it in a rage, with a flourish, in the sight of everyone. But in the end it was only a quiet thing, a boy at a stove in the dark. He opened the iron door. The embers glowed. The room smelled of coal and cinders.

He took the letter out of its envelope. He unfolded it. The paper was thick and cream-colored, and in the glow it looked like a piece of skin.

Your name is yours again.

He read the line, once more. He tore it from the page, a single narrow strip, ragged at the edges. He held it between thumb and finger.

Then he threw the rest into the fire.

The letter caught at once. It curled, blackened, lit from within with a pale blue flame. He watched the copperplate go, line by line. Come home. All is forgiven. Your mother's piano. It was gone in a breath.

He stood there with the one scrap in his hand.

Your name is yours again.

It was the cruelest sentence his father had ever written. It was cruel precisely because it was so nearly true.

He kissed his fingertips. He pressed them to the paper, once, very lightly.

Then he let it fall.