Chapter 30: Re-Measuring [pt 1]
They didn’t rush him out, which Theo appreciated. Back up the steel stairs and into the open air, the house felt different now that it was almost his.
The afternoon had gone soft and gold, and the lake lay out past the porch like a sheet of hammered silver, flat and bright, so still that the far trees stood on their heads in it.
Wind came off the water in slow pushes, carrying the smell of it, cool and green and a little mineral, the smell of somewhere that had never had a city breathing on it. Reeds leaned along the shoreline. A heron stood in the shallows on one leg, pretending to be a stick.
The porch boards were warm under his sneakers. Theo walked the length of them once, slowly, one hand trailing the rail.
Inside, the rooms smelled of dust and old sunlit wood, the particular quiet of a place waiting for people. The four bedrooms were plain and good, full of light in the afternoon, big windows looking out at the treeline. And under all of it, from the open steel door, the basement breathed its cool dark breath up into the hall, patient, enormous, drinking the warmth of the day.
’Thall would see the lake first thing every morning...’
He stood in the doorway of the largest bedroom and let himself picture it for a moment. The wheelchair by the window. The water. Somewhere far from a hospital ward and its front door that anyone could pay to walk through.
Then he stopped picturing it, because there was still work to do.
Ms Harcourt was all business now, the earlier doubt long gone from her voice. Mr Sarn, the lawyer, was more careful still.
"We do this properly," Sarn tapped the folder. "Nothing signs today that I have not read twice. We hold the property with a deposit, I review the title and the reinforcement permits at my desk, and you sign at the end of the week when I tell you the ground is solid under your feet."
"That’s fine," Theo replied. He’d have wanted it done today. But he’d also learned that the people who told you to slow down were usually the ones worth listening to.
He put the black card down again, and Ms Harcourt took the holding deposit with a smooth quickness. It was clear that she had decided, somewhere back at the restaurant, never to misjudge a hoodie again.
Afterwards they dispersed at the roadside. Ms Harcourt drove back toward the agency to start the paperwork. Mr Sarn shook Theo’s hand, said he’d call, and folded himself into a grey sedan. That left Billy, who insisted on driving Theo himself.
"Where can I drop you, Lord Theo?"
"Just Theo. And the city’s fine. My district, if it’s not out of your way."
Billy waved the concern off, and the long green road unspooled back the way they’d come, the smudge of towers growing on the horizon until it swallowed the mirror.
Theo watched it come and thought about the bank director’s advice. Be awakened and hold a license, or stay close to someone who does. Once you begin to spend a lot, the government gets nosy. He’d just put a deposit on a one-point-six-million-dollar house in a hoodie. He supposed that counted as spending a lot.
’Right... the license. And then the Tower.’
Billy dropped him at the edge of his district, and Theo thanked him and set off on foot.
The district branch of the Hero Association was nothing like the great beacon-tower downtown where he had awakened.
It was a squat grey building four floors high, wedged between a pharmacy and a shuttered noodle shop, its glass doors smudged with the day’s handprints. Inside it smelled of floor wax and old paper and too many people. A tired queue coiled toward a row of counters under humming fluorescent lights.
Theo joined the line. In fact, he stood in it for the better part of forty minutes, which gave the clerk plenty of time to form an opinion of him before he even opened his mouth.
"Yes?"
The clerk was a thin man with reading glasses. He pushed up his forehead. His eyes did the now-familiar tour of Theo’s dressing and arrived, unimpressed, back at Theo’s face.
"I’m here to collect my Hero License from my awakening. The name’s Theolyne Chadwick."
The clerk typed without much interest, then paused. He pulled the glasses down onto his nose. He read the screen, and then he read it again, and the corner of his mouth did something that wasn’t quite a smile and wasn’t quite kind.
"Chadwick. Right."
He released a short breath through the nose.
"Yeah, there’s a reason you never got that license, friend. Says here your awakening was... flagged. Classification incomplete. You came in below the scale."
He turned the monitor a few degrees, not enough for Theo to actually see it, just enough to perform it.
"They couldn’t decide if you were F or something under F. There’s a note. You want me to read you the note?"
’They really wrote that down...’
"You don’t have to," Theo said.
The clerk read it anyway, quietly enough to keep it between them, which was somehow worse.
"’Awakened mana heart negligible. Ranked F provisionally pending Association determination.’ Provisionally."
He sat back.
"So there’s no card to collect, because nobody ever finished processing you. Honestly, most people in your bracket just don’t come back for it since you can be classified as a civilian."
Theo took that without flinching, the way he took most things.
"Then can we finish it now?"
The clerk sighed the sigh of a man whose afternoon had just grown a task.
"Policy says a stale or incomplete classification has to be re-measured before we issue anything. You’d have to go back on the reactor. You sure? It’ll read the same, and then you’ll have wasted both our times and your money and you’ll have it on paper this time that you’re the lowest rank in the building."
Theo nodded.
"I’m sure."
The clerk shrugged, stamped a slip, and jerked his head toward a side room.
"Reactor’s through there. Try not to get your hopes up."