Chapter 4 What lives behind the sternum
Cael Street's room was $60 a week.
He'd located it following the pamphlet's district map to the Gray Warrens, where he'd asked the first person whose appearance indicated that they were a roomer, not a householder. Without speaking, the man looked at the gray band, named a price and extended his hand. On the way, Ethan had counted out the credits that he had converted in the street exchange and followed the man upstairs to the room which had a cot, a window which didn't close all the way, and he could see the wall of the alley across from the room.
He had slept for fourteen hours.
Not peacefully. The type of sleep in which the body shuts down everything because it doesn't have the capacity to keep them running. He dreamed of the alley as something he had imagined to own. Regarding the flickering of the streetlights. The expression on his sister's face when something got to be too hard, he knew that this one would always appear the way it did. He awoke each morning with his hand to his left, below the ribs, and each time discovered this to be empty and lay in the dark of a room he did not know and gazed at the ceiling, waiting for his heart to calm.
On the third day, he was not able to return to sleep.
He was still laying the cot when he heard the noise of the warrens through his window. The sounds were like the night before, familiar in form, mistaken in detail. Traffic noise, voices, the distant mechanical noise of the transit line two blocks north that he was unable to use as it still needed to be a registered band. The everyday sound of a district coming alive and out of its sleep, with an undertone of what you could only hear in these places when they were left to rule themselves and ruled themselves the way they were ruled themselves, by whoever was willing to rule them.
He sat up. He clenched his hands onto his thighs, and he considered his situation.
He was in another world. He was dead, and he had awakened in some other place and the some other place was a city he knew, city of ranked power, palpable on every wrist, enforced by every institution he had encountered thus far. He had a gray band and a proposed classification that Director Harmon had given him temporarily, and he still had 60 credits to sustain him for one more week.
He was also, apparently, something the assessment panel of the Bureau has read and immediately flagged up at Director level, which means that whatever he was carrying was significant enough for a man like Harmon to come to a corridor at the 6-hour mark to manage his own.
He wasn't sure what it might have been. He could feel it – the pressure there since he woke up, the pressure that had responded to the panel, reacted to something. It was not painful. It wasn't obtrusive. It was just there like something that has always been there and was only now noticed.
He needed information. He'd have to learn more about the rank system, what the Towers were, and what exactly he was not able to access and what he was able to access. He wanted to find out what the yellow green bands were and how and who had scanned the street on the night of his arrival and who ran the Warrens.
He needed it all, and he didn't have it, and he couldn't get it unless he went outside and began to listen.
He wore a coat and went outside.
In daylight, the Warrens were dense, noisy, and were like a town that wasn't expecting any change. They were all within close proximity and some looked better than others, and the streets were narrow enough to have the upper floors almost touching in some places. The food vendors lined the main road, as though they had been doing it their whole lives, and they set up like they did it every day. There was a social geometry, in which one could see the colors of F and E prevailing, the few D ranks working their way through the crowd with slightly more room being granted them than the others, an unconscious social geometry that had been in operation long enough to become instinct.
Ethan walked and he didn't say anything.
He took a look and after one hour learned the colour order. Registered ranks were lowest with White. It was covered by a layer of pale yellow on top. Green above that. The darker the hue the more rank and less asking for space. The grey band was more of a decision that he wasn't worth classifying than a rank. He was seen in the way of someone who had been branded as irrelevant, and he knew the feeling, having lived within it, his whole first life.
He traveled down the main street three times when he saw them.
Three men wearing yellow-green bands were standing around, moving together. They had a man in his fifties with a white band face the wall. One of the men spoke. It was a rhythm; a cadence of a conversation that no matter what was said on the other end, there was just one possible outcome.
The man paid. He withdrew a transfer from his vest pocket, handed it to them and was handed an empty card, and the three men went away without a hurry.
Ethan watched them as they walked away. He kept in mind the direction they went in and noted the time.
The rest of the day was given to him for mapping the pattern.
By nightfall he had found six different collection points in the Warrens, all catered by the yellow-green bands, which were working in rotation and could be timed. He had not asked for any information. He had only been watching – he could do that – there was no training involved, no wrist band, no knowledge of the world he had landed in, he was just patient and attentive, willing to be still while others were moving.
He sat out on his steps as the light went out and he pondered what he saw.
The warren was run by the yellow-green bands. Not officially, not through the Tower Authority, not through the Registry Bureau, not through all of the institutional structures that the pamphlet had listed with its thin, cheerful optimism, but on the ground. There was not an arbitrary selection of the collection. It was well planned and well executed.
In the corridor he thought about the face of Harmon. The one second crack.
He considered the feeling of pressure behind his sternum as if it had been recognized.
He didn't know at that time what he was. But there had been something in this world that had announced his coming before he could breathe, and a Director had come to his aid to bury the announcement, and the men with bands of yellow-green had been on the streets looking for him within twenty minutes of his awakening.
Three days later he discovered the answer to all those things.
He was standing on the wrong corner at the right time. When he stepped out of a doorway, he broke three of his fingers in a blaze of non-stop violence—it did not require a word. Ethan knelt on one knee, with a sharp ache in it that was present from the beginning, and then something else happened that couldn't be explained by the pain.
It stopped.
Not gradually. Immediately. The pain had vanished, its place taken by the pressure behind his sternum growing, deepening, the structural thing that had been there in silence all these years, waiting for just this to be fed into it.
He checked out his hands. Straight. Unmarked. As though nothing had happened to them.
The man who had broken them stared at his own hand and its expression was one Ethan could not guess at. He then glanced at Ethan. Then he hurried out of here, not so confident, as he had come in.
Ethan knelt on the pavement for a long time when he was gone.
He pushed his fingers down, one after the other. Solid. No pain. No swelling. He pressed his palm flat and felt the pressure behind his sternum sitting deeper and heavier than ever before, something had settled into a new level and it wasn't leaving.
He stood up slowly.
He didn't know what had taken place. He knew that there was something that had. He knew the panel had read it and Harmon had buried the reading and sent him out to a world that had people who looked for whatever he was, and the only thing that returned was the memory of pain, so that's what he had absorbed.
He fastened the coat in place.
He returned to the room and sat on the cot and gazed at his hands in the darkness for a long time.
There was something in him. But it had always been there; and dying and waking and entering into this life had turned it on. He didn't know which of the two. He was not aware of its significance or what it may develop into, nor why Harmon had been frightened by the panel reading.
He was to discover.
Not tonight. Tonight he was going to be a man who four days back had been found dead and still didn't know what all of these meant. He was going to allow himself to be wobbly for one more night.
He will begin his inquiries tomorrow.
Tonight, he sat in the dark and breathed, and let whatever it was settle into him.
