Chapter 11 What Mira keeps

On Wednesday, she gave him the fifth name.

Outside of the transit corridor office. Her coming to his room for the first time meant something — that whatever she'd been working through since they met had reached its end. It was time.

She sat on the crate he brought in from the alley, placed the tablet on her knee, and looked at him with her dark eyes that did not speak. The she said “before I give you the fifth name, I want to tell you something about the fourth one.”

Ethan waited.

"Councilor Dray. The financial tie to the containment facility I was referring to.” She turned to him and opened something on the tablet. “It's not just financial, he's a part of the facility oversight committee under the medical services designation and he does a quarterly review of the containment protocols.” She paused. “His protocol was reviewed six weeks ago, at which time it was noted that the suppression infrastructure was operating within the expected parameters and was recommended to continue the existing sedations rotation.”

Ethan read the document on the tablet. The formal language of a review. Operating within acceptable parameters. Sedation rotation. The bureaucratic terminology that institutions create when they must talk about human beings without having to talk about them as human beings.

Ethan said, "He knows that the dampeners are not right.”

“The review does not indicate any flag on the calibration, I do not know if he knows.” She withdrew the tablet. “Either the calibration error has not been detected in 11 years of quarterly reviews, or it has been detected and the record documenting its detection is not available.’

Ethan said, "The other one.”

She looked at him.

“If the calibration mistake was just left undiagnosed, then the reviews would be routine results in each metric, but Rael's still in containment after eleven years, so the suppression is working well enough to keep it in check, so the dampeners are still having some effect, but they're not correcting.” He paused. “What they're feeding on is not suppression; it's an absorbing talent that just converts the signal that's suppressed. Rael has been fed by the suppression infrastructure for 11 years.”

Mira's movements were very quiet.

“Continuous dampener exposure,” he said carefully, "at full conversion efficiency, would have an absorbed capacity for eleven years of talents that would be sizable.”

It took a long while for the room to go silent.

“He's not being silenced,” Mira said. Her voice was even. It was the evenness that cost her, he could hear in the flatness, the vibration that she kept under the surface pushing against the surface.

“It's the sedating it trying to dampen him down.” Ethan studied her intently. “His brain is sedated for six hours a day, and when it does wake up, he's conscious in a body that has been soaking in consumed capacity for a decade and a half.”

Mira placed the tablet on her knee and stared at the wall behind Ethan's head, but did not say anything for a good while. He allowed her to remain silent. This wasn't the sort of info that could have a proper instant reply and he was not going to perform comfort at her since it would not aid.

With a finality, she said, "How much would he have?”

“I have been developing for three weeks and have ingested Knox's entire B rank discharge, along with a handful of lesser discharges and as of yet I cannot fully map the reservoir.” He paused. “Rael has been in the room with a constant dampener exposure for 11 years.”

She closed her eyes for 3 seconds. opened them. She switched to the flat professional mask.

She said, "The extraction. Before you open the door, the sedation must be cut when you go for unit three.”

"Yes."

“If you take away the sedation, and he's got eleven years of capacity that have never been available to him and never been released.”

"Yes."

"He will not be the same as he was when they put him in there."

"No," Ethan said. "He will not."

She absorbed this. He.noticed the way she was taking it in: not simply the information about her brother's condition, but the way she was processing what she would find when the door opened. It had taken her fourteen months to prepare for a rescue. The man she was trying to save had been altered by being locked up—and those changes weren't being taken into consideration.

“Does he pose a threat,” she asked.

“I don't know. I don't know what eleven years of bottling up and drugging and caging does to a talent-bearing person.” He held her gaze. “When I go for him, I have to be developed enough, whatever he doesn't even know he's carrying — I can absorb it.

“What you need to do is be able to take whatever he has built up," she said.

"If necessary. Yes.”

She stared at him for a good while. The dark eyes that gave nothing back gave back for a fleeting second, a depth of feeling.

“For how long?” she asked

“Until I am ready to deal with it myself.” He pondered the location of the reservoir and what path it would take based over the last three weeks. “It will be hastened by the Tower challenges, if I can output C and higher in controlled engagements, then the timeline is considerably shortened.”

“It is necessary to go through the Towers properly.”

“I must get inside the Towers, if it is appropriate or not is another matter.” He paused. “There is a gap in the Tower Access Code. Unregistered are not explicitly forbidden from challenging through unregistered means, without record of advancement. The Bureau's code is designed to control registered individuals, and did not take into account the one who had been classified as unregistered.”

Mira looked at him. “You have discovered that there is a missing part in the Access Code.”

"Yes."

“Harmon will be informed of any activity that may be associated with your name that takes place on the Tower.”

Ethan said “I need him to monitor Tower activity while I am doing something else. let him watch the Towers, the Towers are not the move.”

"What is the move?"

He said “the contractor list for the containment facility will be provided. That's the name you said I'd know, I want it.”

She tugged at the many pockets in her jacket, and pulled out a folded page and showed it to him.

He took it. Unfolded it. Read the name at the top of the page.

He read it twice.

Then he carefully folded it up and placed it in his coat pocket and sat in silence for a while, before he spoke.

Harmon is not only financially involved with the facility, he said.

"No," Mira said. “It was designed by him twelve years ago, and he presented the idea to the council as the answer to this problem: the council paid for it and he still runs it.” She paused. “He is not the jailer of Rael in the bureaucratic sense; he is creating the cage.”

Ethan glanced at the pocket of his coat where the folded page was.

In the corridor he considered Harmon. The composed face. The rehearsed delivery. The one crack where he first walked and the manner in which the composure had flowed in and settled over it like water over a rock.

He considered the implications of the man who had given him his gray band and sent him off for eleven years in the Warrens with nothing, had constructed the room where Rael Doss had waited.

What was under his sternum was very quiet. Not dormant. On the lookout for something that is still in the way.

“The fifth name,” he said.

Mira checked out the tablet. She then held it out to him.

He read it.

He then turned his eyes to her and spoke, "This one is related to the Tower Authority's internal control unit.”

“Yes, he's the council's direct line to the division that official rank can't speak to the.” She paused. “When the council feels twhat you're doing is no longer manageable with institutional means he will be called.”

“When they cease to use Harmon and begin using something else.”

"Yes."

Ethan looked at the name. He saw the structural map to which it was attached and the lines of authority and finance and enforcement, from seven names at the top of the city down through every official institution and into the Warrens and then down into a room in the mid district where a man had waited for 11 years for a door to open.

He pondered the thing inside his sternum, what Knox's network was giving him, what Mira's information was giving him, what it needed to become, before that door could open safely.

He said “I need two more months.”

Mira nodded. Small definite nod.

“Let them get the sixth name in one month," he said. “When you're ready, the seventh.”

"Yes," she said.

He stood. He put the coat on. He came up to the door and came to a halt.

He explained “the facility oversight committee was established..Dray's review is quarterly, when will it happen next."

She examined the tablet. "Six weeks."

“I must see what is being discussed in that review before Dray publishes it.”

"I will have it."

Ethan again said, "Before he files it. Not after."

She looked at him. "Before," she confirmed.

He went out to the corridor, and down the steps and out to Cael Street, where the Warrens shuffled around him with their familiar dull murmurs, and their pale wristbands, and their yellow green bands that were no longer turning towards him, and the tower to the east was beating its slow blue light into the air of the afternoon.

Two months.

He had things to do in those two months that were going to determine whether the door opened safely, or not at all, and he was going to do them all, and at the end of them, he was going to open a door that opened up in the mid district, and he was going to walk through a corridor and to a door marked unit three and he was going to open it.

He started walking.