The rest of the day at the firm was a long, slow theatre of humiliations.
Hartwell & Crook had announced, by internal email at ten past ten, that Henry Pike was on extended leave for personal reasons; that Diana Hollis would be assuming oversight of his client portfolio; and that the firm would, in light of recent developments, be holding an all-hands meeting on Friday at two o’clock in the largest boardroom on the second floor.
The internal email had been written by someone who had not yet realised that, post-Reckoning, internal emails were also visible at a slightly different layer, and that the air around the message — when Edwin opened it on his screen — was glowing with the faintest possible Footnote.
Drafted three times. Approved by a person not at this firm.
Edwin set that aside later, too.
He spent most of the morning trying to do work. There were now three opened files in front of him. He knew, cold-eyed and clear, as a man now told twice in two days that he was load-bearing, that he was not going to finish any of them. He filed his notes, in case Lila or someone like her ever needed them. He cleared down his email. He made three modest acts of professional courtesy — a thank-you to the manager who had supervised his ACA, a reminder to a junior in the corporate team about a deadline she’d been afraid to mention to her own partner, an apology by email to a client whose query he’d been ignoring for three days. Doing this, he was more himself than he could remember having been in weeks. Maybe months. Reconciler, the system had said. You have spent your hours among ledgers and the small lies that ledgers conceal. He spent his hours, that morning, as cleanly as he could.
Lila was at her desk all afternoon. Twice he saw her stand up, pick up a file, walk to a partner’s office, and walk back without delivering it — the theatre of looking like she still worked there. Twice he saw her catch his eye across the floor, do a tiny inward roll of her eyes, and go back to typing. Petros walked past at three with a cart of fresh stationery that the firm did not need, and gave Edwin a single calm nod that Edwin understood, without it having to be said, to mean tonight, in the back kitchen, same time as yesterday, if you can.
Edwin gave him the very smallest possible shake of the head. Not tonight. Petros’s eyes, without changing anything else about his face, registered it, accepted it, and moved on. The cart of stationery rolled past Sandra’s empty desk, around the corner, and out of sight.
Lila had, between four and five, picked the pub. Not their usual after-work place. Not anywhere either of them had been in the last fortnight. Somewhere with a back door, away from both their flats, the kind of pub where a man following them in would have to drink alone in a corner without a phone signal and would be conspicuous about it. By the time he and Lila left the building at eight, in their separate elaborate routes — Edwin out the front, Lila through the kitchens and the loading bay — they had agreed, by a series of texts pretending to be about a tax matter, where to meet.
The pub Lila chose was off Liverpool Street, at the end of an alley most people walked past without noticing, with no sign and a frosted window and the particular patient gloom of a pub that had been refusing to be gentrified since 1983.
The publican was a man called Jack, who was approximately seventy, and who had — Edwin saw, Ledger Sight newly attentive and his three-day-old Debt-Sensitive passive prickling behind it — been a Settler since before Edwin’s mother had been born.
Jack noticed Edwin without surprise.
“First time in here since you turned, lad?”
“First time.”
“Pint?”
“Please.”
“On me. Just the one. Don’t make a thing of it.”
Edwin nodded, because he understood, in a way he would not have understood three days ago, that the pint was not free — that it was, in some specific way, a settlement. Jack had been sitting in this pub for forty-five years watching people sort their own lives out, and was paying him a professional courtesy that he was not, on this occasion, going to extend twice. Edwin took the pint to the corner booth. Lila, opposite him, eyebrows up, was charmed.
She was also, Edwin saw, slightly thinner around the eyes than she had been yesterday morning. They had both been running on three hours’ sleep and adrenaline for the better part of forty-eight hours.
“So,” she said. “Cheapside.”
He told her.
She did not interrupt. He got through the last of it — the coffee with Ada, the quick lesson Ada had given him about how to walk through a city without conspicuously glowing at every Defaulter and debt-creature in a half-mile radius, the way Ada had then, with unsentimental calm, given him her card — when Lila held up her hand.
“Stop a second.”
“What.”
“Don’t move. Look at me. Drink your pint.”
He drank his pint.
She shifted her gaze, very slightly, past his left shoulder.
“There’s a car,” she said quietly, without changing her expression.
“Where.”
“On the kerb, opposite the door. Estate. Tinted windows. Dark. Driver hasn’t moved in forty-five minutes.”
“That’ll be the Cornhill car.”
“Yeah. I thought so.”
He took another pull from his pint. He thought about the Footnote on the wing mirror — Liquidator on retainer. Owes nothing. Owed: pending.
“Lila.”
“Yes.”
“Without making it obvious.”
“Yes.”
“Read it. Not Recall. Just whatever your sight gives you. Tell me what flags.”
She held his eye. Her focus shifted past his left shoulder, slower than his but steadier, the way a Witness read something she intended to remember accurately. Edwin watched a flicker of concentration cross her face, and watched her note, using the precise mental discipline of a tax associate, what came back.
Her eyes opened.
“Liquidator on retainer,” she said quietly. “Standing nineteen. Brought in by someone who hires Liquidators by the week. Owed: pending — which means somebody has not paid for tonight, but is going to — and the pending is going to be paid by, give me a second—”
She closed her eyes again.
“—a number ending four-four-seven-one.”
He stared at her.
“Lila.”
“Yes.”
“You’re a natural at this.”
“Tax for two years, Marsh. Tax. Forensic accounting and lying to people about it on the phone. This is — this is going to be very satisfying.”
He laughed, in spite of himself.
He used his own Discrepancy, more carefully than hers, focused tighter on the car itself rather than its driver. The car flagged in a single bright thread. Hire car. Picked up that morning, paid in cash, fake documents that were good enough to fool a rental clerk but not the universe. The driver had owned the actual car they would be using next week. The rental was for tonight only. Tonight was, in some way, a visible job; the rest of the week was not going to be.
He shared this with Lila, in low quiet sentences.
“So tonight they’re advertising,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“They want us to know they’re here.”
“I think so.”
“Same outfit as Cornhill. Different car. Same money.”
“Same money.”
She drank her pint slowly, and stared at her hands for a moment, and then at him.
“Edwin.”
“Yes.”
“Two days ago I was reconciling deferred tax for a Saudi telecoms group, and you were down the corridor doing whatever Pike was making you do, and the most exciting thing in either of our weeks was that the Pret at Bank stopped doing the chicken caesar wrap.”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to know that I am — broadly — fine with what is happening. I am not, on balance, planning to come apart. I do, however, want you to know that I am noticing this is happening, and I am — clocking — that it is happening.”
He glanced at her.
She held his eye for an uncomfortable few seconds, giving him the exact Lila-look that meant don’t be gentle with this, don’t make it soft, just hear it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Same.”
“Good.”
“Lila.”
“Mm.”
“For the avoidance of doubt.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not going anywhere either.”
“Good,” she said briskly, and finished her pint. “Right. Let’s go.”
“Go?”
“Out the back. Jack’s pub has a back. Old pubs always do. We split up at the corner. You take the long way to the tube. I’ll walk to a different one. They’re not going to follow us both.”
She finished her pint. She caught Jack’s eye across the bar. Jack, without breaking the wipe of the glass he was working on, tilted his head minutely toward the back corridor.
They went out the back. Jack’s back corridor smelled of damp, old beer, and a functional kitchen at the far end. The fire door at the end of the corridor opened onto a narrow alley behind the pub, with bins and a grease trap and a single working light at the alley’s far end.
Jack was leaning in the corridor when they passed him.
“Lad.”
“Mr—”
“Jack.”
“Jack.”
Jack stared at Edwin for an entire minute, then glanced at Lila, then back at Edwin.
“They had two cars on you tonight,” he said. “One out the front, one round the corner on Bishopsgate. The corner one’s pulled away. The front one’s still there. So go that way” — he pointed, with two fingers, in a direction Edwin would not have thought of — “and don’t stop walking until you’re at Moorgate.”
“How did you—”
“I’ve been here a long time, lad.”
“Thank you.”
Jack did the little dignified nod of a man who did not, on principle, accept thanks for things he counted as professional obligation. Edwin nodded back.
The cold hit Edwin in a smaller way than yesterday, mostly because Lila was with him and a half-pint of Jack’s bitter was sitting warmly behind his ribs. They walked together to the corner of Bishopsgate. They stood there in the dark, the snow coming down again in slow careful flakes.
“Marsh.”
“Yes.”
“Be fucking careful.”
“You too.”
She hugged him, briefly, hard, like she hadn't hugged him before — the hug of a person who was not going to let on that she was frightened, despite being very frightened. Then she pushed him toward the cab rank and walked the other way.
He turned back, once.
He should not have. Petros had said. The dark estate car was pulling out of the kerb opposite the pub, and turning, slowly, the way Lila had gone.
[Stat Gain: Standing +1]
[Standing: 12]
The system text wrote itself in the air at his shoulder, for reasons he did not, in that moment, have time to interrogate.
He pulled out his phone, called Lila, and told her about the car.
“Yeah,” Lila said. “I clocked it. I’m getting on a 149. They’ll lose me at Stoke Newington.”
“All right.”
“And Marsh.”
“Yes.”
“Get home. Don’t be brave.”
He got into the cab.
The driver was a man in his sixties who had, by the look of his ledger, been driving cabs in this city since the Reckoning had been a rumour. There was no writing of any concern on him. He glanced at Edwin in the rear-view mirror, took in the tired, not-recently-shaved set of Edwin’s face, and did not, for the entire forty-minute crawl through the tail end of the rush hour, attempt any conversation.
Edwin was grateful in a way he did not, in the moment, have the resources to express.
He did not, the entire way home, look out of the back window. He did, twice, check his phone for messages from Lila. The first time she sent a thumbs-up, the second time she sent a single short text: home, locked in, done. He locked his own phone, leaned his head against the cab window, and let the cold of the glass press against his temple.
The cab dropped him at Emperor Kebab at twenty to eleven.
Yusuf, behind the counter, was wiping down for the night. He did not say anything. He gave Edwin the quick nod that, in the new world, was beginning to do the work of a great many sentences. Edwin nodded back, climbed the back stairs to his flat, and locked himself in.
