Chapter 26B: The Visit

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Thursday 26 September.

"You are going to want me to be a better man than I am, because it is more comfortable, and because you are sixteen and it is your job to find reasons. I would rather be audited than comfortable. Auditing is what I am good at. It is why I got here."

— Marcus Harlow, eleventh day of custody

Weave-Quake Counter: 51% instability. Node-failure projection: T+34 d. Rebaselined against a held circuit. The load is off the wall and onto a machine, and the model has never been run on this basis before. Deposition, eleventh day. The question this week: what was the first thing you did on the fifteenth of September, and who told you to do it?

THE WARD ON SUB-LEVEL 2

The warder on the corridor was called Achebe and had been told that the girl coming up the stairs was to be let in without being searched and without a second person present, and had been told that by a Headmistress in a note, and had read the note twice, and had said, "Right," in a way that suggested he had a number of further questions.

Inside: a good room. Cotton sheets. A window that was a panel showing a recorded valley, and it was raining in the panel, and it was the wrong weather for October, and Lyra decided within about four seconds that she was going to lose her mind in there or be fine, and that which of the two happened would probably be decided by what the man in the corner said.

He was standing at the panel, not sitting.

"You should sit down," Lyra said, from the doorway. "You've been standing for the whole time I've been on the stairs."

"I am not going to sit down with you," said Harlow. "You have come here to be talked out of something and I have spent nine days working out what, and I would rather do it standing up. Sit down. You have a stick coming and a bad shoulder and the chair by the table is the only one that will take both."

It was, she found, annoyingly, true.

"You have about twenty minutes," he said. "The warder is not lying to you. I asked them to tell you the truth about it even when it worked in my favour, because I have discovered in the last nine days that I would rather be caught than comfortable, and it turns out that is nearly the same thing."

WHAT HE COULD NOT STOP

"The Council has a machine," Harlow said. "It is called a translator. It is running. It is held open by a thing in a housing under the floor which I have spent eleven years being unable to read and which a nineteen-year-old student advocate is to read in four hours, in October, while I sat in a good room writing letters."

"I know what the lattice is."

"Yes." He turned from the panel. "Then you know that the machine is running on a person, which means that on Thursday the Council are going to be asked to authorise a machine that is carried by the dead, and that the answer is no, and that when the answer is no, the machine stops."

"And then?"

"And then the load goes back onto a wall under eleven thousand people who have not been told anything." He said it without any drama. "I have run it four thousand times. There is no arrangement of the remaining time in which the wall holds. There is one, and it is you, and you already know that, and you have known it since the seventeenth of September, and you have been chewing on it alone, which is the most predictable thing you have ever done."

"You did not come here to tell me to do it."

"I came here to tell you what I tried to do last Tuesday and what happened, because in eleven days nobody has asked me, and it is the only thing in the last four years that I am not ashamed of, and I would like somebody to hear it and then do as they like." He put his hands on the table. "Last Tuesday I cancelled the draw."

"You what?"

"I cancelled the Protocol's draw schedule. All of it. At four in the morning, in a room under this mountain, by my own authority, with no warrant, on a Monday night." He said it flatly. "It worked. It is still cancelled. The machine on this level has been running on the lattice alone since the twenty-fourth, which is the only reason it is running at all."

Lyra put her hand flat on the table. She was not sure why she had done it. The table was institutional steel and gave her nothing but a faint cold.

"So why hasn't he used it?"

"Because the machine on this level is not the machine on Sub-level 7." Harlow's mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "There are two installations, Lyra, and I built the one on Sub-level 7, and the Council is ratifying the one on this level, and I have spent four months being extremely careful never to say so in a room with a microphone in it."

The cold of the table moved up her arm and settled somewhere behind her sternum, where the warm thing usually was, and the warm thing was not there, because the warm thing had gone into a machine on the fifteenth of September.

"Where is the Sub-level 7 machine."

"Under the East Tower, three hundred metres from where you woke up in a locked ward in September, and it is running, and it is the one with the second housing, and it has been running continuously since the eighteenth of May." He said it in the voice of a man reading a charge sheet. "I have been in a locked room since the fifteenth of September. I did not start it. I cannot stop it. Nobody in this building knows about it, because the one person who knew about it has been lying to me about it since May in order to keep me funded, and I have spent four months believing a woman who has a wrist device and a silk charm and no visible means of support."

"Elara Vance is not the asset," said Lyra slowly. "Elara Vance is fifteen years old and she signed a card she did not understand and she has been in the machine ever since."

"Elara Vance is a recruitment," said Harlow. "The Security Chief found her at the Clinic on the eleventh of September and put her in front of me, because I have a well-documented weakness for children and a documented inability to read a consent form. The letter on your sketchbook on the first day of term is not the asset. The asset has never once told you anything." He turned his face, and for a second the mask came off it entirely, and what was underneath was not a monster. "Mirembe Blackwood is the asset. She has been the asset since 2009, and I have known since the twentieth of May, and I have said nothing, because the alternative was that the whole network walks, and eleven thousand people—"

"Eleven thousand people," said Lyra.

"Eleven thousand people," agreed Harlow, "on a wall that has been failing since Kyoto, under a programme that every member of this Academy voted for in 2009 and is going to vote for again in December, and I am not going to stand in that room and tell them that the only reason they slept last night is a lock I turned in a corridor at four in the morning. So I have done nothing, and you have been chewing on the arithmetic by yourself, and your father is on the 14:40 train."

She sat in the good room for nine minutes after he finished, and he stood at the panel where the rain was falling in the wrong month, and neither of them said anything for a while.

"You are going to want to know why," he said eventually. "Why I told you. You will have a theory and I would rather pre-empt it than have you construct one."

"Because I am the person you decided about."

"That was in May. Last Tuesday I did it for a different reason and I am not proud of it." He turned round. "I did it because you are going to be in a room in four days and you are sixteen years old, and because whatever you say in that room is the only thing in the entire process that is not going to be written by a man in grey, and I have spent nine days in a good room discovering that I do not want to be the only voice in this."

"That is not an unselfish reason."

"It is the least selfish one available to me," said Harlow, "and I am aware of how that sounds, and I would like to draw your attention to the fact that I have not asked you for anything at all, which is a sentence I have not been able to construct since 2009."

"You want me to go into the machine."

"I want you to know what the machine is, and where it is, and who is running it, and that the person running it has been lying to me for four months and to you since the first day of term." He looked at his own hands. "What you do about it is not a thing I am permitted an opinion about, because I am the last person in this building with standing to have one, and because I have already had a standing once and it cost a fifteen-year-old girl everything she had."

There was a bell in the corridor. In nine minutes, a warder named Achebe would open a door.

"Marcus," said Lyra.

He looked up.

"You gave the deposition's third question to the tribunal in your own words," she said. "That is a thing a person does when they have decided to stop managing how they come across. My father says that is a chore and not a reward." She stood up, which took longer than it should have. "It is a chore. It is also the only thing anybody in this building has done since the fifteenth of September that I know was not a technique, and I have been extremely starved for techniques."

"I am sorry," said Harlow, "and I would ask you to be careful with it, because I am extremely good at being sorry and I have done it four hundred times and I have never once been sorry in a way that lasted me past a Tuesday."

"Yes," said Lyra. "That is what I am afraid of."

She got to the door.

"Lyra." He had not moved from the panel. "The other thing has been running since the eighteenth of May, under the East Tower, and in four months it has taken four people. One of them is a third-year seer who came back to this campus in September and has been in a corridor outside my ward twice without knowing I was on the other side of the door."

"Elena."

"And the other three."

"Two of them are on the board in Ward C in the second colour. The third is not on any board and has not been for four months, and his name is Tobi Fadipe, and he was nineteen, and he is in Sub-level 3 in a care programme in Bellhaven, and I have known since the eighteenth of May, and I have done nothing, and I would like it recorded that I have now said the name out loud to a sixteen-year-old who cannot see, in a room, in the middle of the week, instead of saying it in a deposition in a fortnight, because I would like one thing I have done to be unmanaged."

The warder opened the door.

Down the stairwell, on the fourteenth step, Lyra sat down, because her legs had stopped being available.

She had a name. She had had a name since the eighteenth of May and it had been in a building and it had cost nothing, and it had belonged to a nineteen-year-old boy in Bellhaven.

That is what the man is for, she thought. Not the machine. The man. He is the reason the council cannot move. He is a lock in a corridor and he has been a lock for four months and he has just opened himself and I do not know whether to be glad or frightened, and I am going to find out tomorrow at nine o'clock in my room, with three people, because that is what the note says, and because the note is the only thing in this entire building that has ever been on my side.

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