Subject Zero: Faceless

Wren found him on the berm at the change of watch, which was where she’d have found anyone she was looking for that week, and she sat down on the sandbags an arm’s length off and looked at the valley instead of the mask.

”Hollis told me.”

He said he would. He held the slate out over the sandbags, into her line on the valley.

”He said a quarter of your name is mine and that I’d be insufferable about it. I want it on the record that I didn’t consent to being a quarter of anything.” She kept her attention on the valley. The ward line across it had come up an hour ago, one unbroken thread from end to end. ”What part.”

The watching. Your name means a quiet thing that watches everything and misses little. I kept the watching. The rest I built from a bird and a board game.

Wren was quiet long enough that he thought she’d let it go. ”That’s the part I’d have picked,” she said finally. ”If anyone had asked. Which they didn’t, so it’s academic.” She stood and brushed grit off her trousers. ”The liaison’s been in the command tent since noon. Ilsen says Marrow had her back in twice. I’m telling you because you’d have counted the hours yourself and I’ve saved you the trouble.”

Thank you.

”Don’t. It’s the watching.” She went down the berm to relieve Cade, and he stayed where he was until the liaison came out of the command tent, and then he went to find her.

* * *

Sela’s tent had the flap down when he reached it, and she opened it herself when he scratched the canvas, and let it fall shut behind him with a small deliberate motion he’d seen her make with a door.

”A tent’s a room if the flap’s down,” she said. ”I’ve decided that. Sit.”

He sat on the end of the cot. She took the folding stool, and the notebook was on the table between them with its cover closed, and she saw him see it and left it where it was.

”Marrow asked exact questions. Where, when, what the slip said, who handed it to me, who I gave it to afterward. He asked them twice with the order changed, which is what a good officer does to a witness and a bad one does to a suspect, and I couldn’t tell you which he thought I was.” She folded her hands. ”Renner asked one question. The number. I gave it to her. She wrote it down and didn’t say whether it was on her sheet, and I didn’t ask, and she didn’t offer.”

She’d have told you if you’d asked.

”I know. That’s why I didn’t.” Sela looked at the notebook rather than at him. ”I want to tell you the rest of him. I’ve wanted to since the roof. I’ve set out to three times today, and each time I reached the same place and stopped, and I’m going to try a fourth time now with you in the room.”

Then start.

She started.

”He was Class I when I met him. Provisional, like you were. Younger than you — younger than me, then, which is saying something. He’d been out eight months and he’d stopped flinching at doors and he wrote on a slate because he’d been told to, not because he had to. He talked when he wanted. He didn’t want to often.” She said it evenly, a report she’d rehearsed to herself so many times the words had gone smooth. ”The room I told you about, where the record and what I saw came apart — it was an assessment. A technician put a hand on him to move him into the rig’s frame. He’d been told, in writing, that nobody would touch him during assessment without asking first. It was the one condition he’d asked for and the only one they’d granted. She didn’t ask. He took her wrist.”

Broke it, he wrote.

”Sprained it. He let go before it broke. I watched him decide to let go.” Her hands stayed folded. ”The report said he initiated. ’Subject initiated physical contact with assessment staff, unprovoked.’ I was asked whether that was accurate, and I said it was, because the officer asking me had written it, and I was ten weeks into a posting I wanted very badly, and I told myself the word unprovoked would matter to nobody.” She stopped. ”It went in his file. It was the first hostile entry in it. Everything after read it first.”

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

He didn’t write anything. She had told him once that his own containment-ward report had been written to read reckless, because reckless kept a case open. He knew now where she had learned to do that.

”Six weeks later the transfer slip came across my desk. Two stamps. A routing line that was an index. I signed it because everyone signed what came across that desk, and I took it for a records category, and I put it in the outgoing tray.” She was looking at the notebook. ”I didn’t see him again. His name came off the roster the same week. I asked once where he’d gone and was told the question was above my file, and I asked once more, a year later, from a different posting, and was told the same thing in the same words, and I—”

She stopped.

It was the place. He knew it was the place before she’d finished the syllable.

Her hand moved to the notebook. It didn’t open it.

You stop in the same place every time, he wrote. After the second asking. Before whatever you did next.

She read it. She didn’t answer.

I’ve watched you do it three times — the roof, the night the courier talked, and now. You reach the second asking and the answer, and then you stop, and your hand goes to the book or the parapet or the pen. He held the slate where she could keep reading it. I don’t know what’s on the other side. I know where the edge is.

”Yes,” Sela said, after a moment. ”I think I should.” She didn’t look up from the slate. ”You’ve been able to do that since a truck bed. Read what’s under a face. You’ve never once turned it on me. I’d have felt it. I don’t know how, but I’d have felt it. You haven’t.”

I don’t need it for this. You’ve shown me the edge three times. Watching was enough.

”That’s worse,” she said. Quieter than Wren had ever said it, and with something like relief in it. ”The Sight I could have called an intrusion. This I asked for. I asked to be on the list.”

You’re on it.

She opened the notebook.

She turned past the middle, where the entries about him would be — the ward week, the board, the night he left for the Ninth Front, Corvale — back to the first page, and turned it so it faced him and held it flat with one hand, and he looked at what was written there.

A date, in her hand. He knew the week without working at it. The week four rifles had come through a holding-room door because of two words. Under the date, four digits. Under those, the rest of the page blank.

”That’s the first entry,” she said. ”I sat down the night I filed your ward report to write what I’d actually seen in that room, and before I’d written a word about you I wrote that. I’d decided by then I wouldn’t put his name where it could be read, and what I thought could wait. So: the number off the slip, which I’d been carrying in my head for longer than I’d admitted to myself. I wrote it down because I understood, sitting there with your report in front of me, that it was the only thing about him I was ever going to be allowed to keep.”

He looked at the four digits. He didn’t reach for his belt.

His slate hung there with thirty-one numbers on it in his own square hand, copied off a sheet dated this month, and one of them copied twice. He could have unclipped it in the time it took her to close the book. He could have laid the two columns side by side under her lamp and known at once whether the number on the first page of her private accounting was struck through or pending on an inventory a courier had carried out of a valley that wanted him back.

He didn’t.

You want to know if it’s on the sheet.

”Yes.”

Do you want me to look.

The silence went on long enough that the camp’s noises came into the tent. A truck turning over in the motor pool, somebody’s laugh cut short, the relief going up the berm in pairs.

”No,” Sela said. ”Not yet. Not tonight.” She closed the notebook, and her hand stayed flat on the cover. ”Renner already knows. That’s the part I can’t get past. She wrote the number down this afternoon and she has that sheet in her tent, and she’s Corps Intelligence, so she’ll have checked before she’d finished putting the pen down. She knows and she didn’t tell me and she didn’t need to, because I didn’t ask. Somewhere in this camp the answer exists on two pieces of paper and I’m the only person who’s touched both of them and doesn’t have it.” She looked at the mask. ”I’ll ask you before I ask her. When I ask. That’s the most I’ve got tonight.”

Then it stays on my belt until you do.

”It stays on your belt.” She let out a breath. ”There was a night I had the answer within arm’s reach and chose the not-knowing for one more day, and I knew exactly what I was choosing.”

It’s kept.

He stood. She stayed on the stool. Once she’d have walked him out as far as her orders allowed; here the flap was the whole of the distance she had to give. He put his hand on the canvas.

”Rook.”

He turned.

”The place I stop. You said you know where the edge is.” Her hand was on the notebook’s cover, and she looked at the hand rather than at him. ”It’s the second time I asked, and the answer, and what I did after I’d been given it. That’s the piece. I’m telling you that much so you’ll know the size of what I’m not telling you. It isn’t large. It’s the whole of it anyway.”

I’ll wait for it.

”I know you will.”

He went out, and let the flap fall, and walked the length of the berm to the north corner, where Cade nodded him onto the sandbags without a word. He sat with the rifle across his knees and the valley’s ward line whole in front of him, and took the watch.