THEY KILLED THE WRONG MAN

CHAPTER THREE

Ethan's POV

There was a rhythm to the Warrens when you stop finding the sound so startling.

It was three days later and I had mapped the majority of Cael Street and the four blocks around it. Not intentionally, I was not the sort of man who made plans on paper, but simply by going through the spaces. The location where the food vendors would be set in the morning. What end the yellow-green stripes collected at night. Which of the buildings had exterior working lights and which did not, and what that meant regarding the ownership of the buildings.

The yellow-green bands were Knox's men. It had occurred to me by the second day, without having to ask anyone, that some things do not need to be explained, how they moved, how other people moved around them, the small adjustments people made when they took a turn and saw that color approaching. A radius of given space. A particular attribute of not-looking. I had grown up in an environment where men had been owed deference which they had not merited, and I had also become familiar with the architecture of it even in a world I had been living in seventy-two hours.

I had not even yet seen Knox himself. I was not looking for him. I was seeking something to eat that cost less than six credits and a means of knowing what the Towers were, because the tower in the east, with its blue-white pulse, could be seen at the end of the Cael Street on clear mornings and something about it that was drawing me in a direction of which I had no language yet.

It was on the fourth morning as I was reading a discarded news sheet outside a convenience store when someone sat down on the step next to me without asking.

“You are in Bale's old room” she said.

I looked over. She was young--mid-twenties, small, with a dark jacket that had too many pockets to be purely decorative and a wristband that was gray like mine but worn in a different way, the way people wear things that they have chosen and not things that they have been assigned. Her eyes were to do something I knew, cataloguing. She was reading the space round me as I read spaces, and she was doing it more quickly.

"Bale?" I said.

“Past tenant. He went away without any explanation.” she said with no inflection that would tell me whether suddenly was good or bad, which in its turn told me something. Four days have been spent here, and you have not paid the Knox collection of Knox.

"No one collected."

"They will. Thursday." She gazed at me obliquely. "You have a gray band. New register?"

"Unregistered," I said. "Provisional."

There was a change in her face. Not surprising exactly. More like the realignment that somebody comes to when information comes in which is more interesting to them than they had anticipated.

"Provisional," she repeated. "From the Bureau?"

"Yes."

“How many hours was the assessment?”

I gazed at her suitably. “Does that matter?”

“Standard assessment is half a minute. More than two minutes means the machine was unable to assign it to a category.” She threw back her head. "How long?"

"What do you want?"

She almost smiled. It never came to professional cordiality--it was the utterance of one who saw in a particular type of man something that was invigorating. I deal in information. I am not attempting to sell you anything to-day. I am trying to decide whether you are worth knowing. She got on her feet, and she flattened the jacket. “Thursday. Knox collectors will be around nine in the morning. You are to have payment on hand.”

She started walking.

“And if I don't?" I said.

She stopped. Did not look back. “Then you will see what rate you are going to be absorbed at prematurely.” She said it with such smoothness that it took me a whole three seconds to digest what she had said, and by the time I glanced up she was around the corner and over the fence.

I sat on the step a long time.

Absorption rate.

She had an idea as to what I was carrying. Before she sat down she had known it. She had come to see me in particular, which meant that she had an informer within the Bureau, or within the information which came out of the Bureau, and she had decided to tell me that she knew, without telling me what she knew, which was a very special kind of move, the kind that provided leverage without showing it.

I returned to the room, and sat upon the cot and contemplated Thursday.

Thursday came. So did they.

Two of them, nine-fifteen in the morning, knocking on the door, at the rhythm of people who knock because it is procedure and not because they think the door should not be opened. The one before that was broad and deliberate with a yellow-green band and the flat face of a man who has already completed this one task more than he cares to count. The man behind him was a younger person and was carrying a payment reader.

The broad one said, "Collection.”

"I don't have it," I said.

He looked at me. Then he gazed upon the gray band. Then looked back he at me, and I watched him make that decision with the dullness of a man whose habit it was to settle a matter of this sort.

It then took four minutes before what happened next occurred.

I counted because I know.

The initial blow fell upon my left shoulder, a palm-push, D-rank kinetic, short and sharp, the type of skill that is aimed at establishing control in the short term, rather than inflict damage. I could feel it come and I could feel what was beneath it: in my chest something shifted, tightened, absorbed. Not pain. Not adrenaline. A filing, the feeling of a clockwork being fed on and what it does with it is somewhere down and structural.

The second blow was more severe and hit my sternum. The third one was of the younger who had laid aside the payment reader and which told me that he had done this before irrespective of how young he appeared.

After four minutes the broad one next thrust took his hand and landed on my chest and did little or nothing.

He felt it. I read it in his face, the particular bewilderment of a man whose bodily functions have not been functioning in the way they have always been, that transient inventory of the self of what might have gone wrong. He pushed again. Same result. Less than nothing, and in fact, since what came flying back at him on my side was something I had not intended, and could not fully explain, a rebound of pressure that caused him to take two steps in the door-frame.

He was looking at his hands.

He looked at me.

"Leave," I said.

They left. The younger was already in the hall. The wide one waited a moment longer, standing in the door, with his hands at his sides, and something working back of his eyes that was not so much fear as the thing fear is made of, and then he turned and followed.

I closed the door.

I was in the middle of the room and I breathed and counted. I felt more. Not, that is, physically larger, but more internally dense, as though something hollow had filled. My hands were firm. The feeling was already dying but I could feel the remnant of it, the trace of something taken in and held in a place where I had no words to describe the place.

I wondered about what Mira said about absorption rate, how flat it was as though it was the answer to a question already answered.

I had to discover her before Knox was aware of what had been happening which was within the hour.

I threw my coat on and sought.