Come on, Laz. Come on. Get it together.
You can’t see much of Petras’s house from here. It is a modern structure, a single slab of deep gray, its frontage mostly hidden by hedgerow, its full shape obscured by moonlight. A thing of stone and glass, arrogantly defiant of gravity, built back from the road and cantilevered out over the valley below.
The house radiates. The house holds the monster. The house is a monster, looming, reaching into the darkness.
Paige has questions. One or two more questions formulating in that nonstop mind of hers, I see them bubbling in her, but more than that I can see the energy itself—she has questions but they’re all incidental. Fuel for the fire. She is ready to roll. She is itching to go. This is something, man—that’s what Ms. Paige is thinking.
I remember her on the bench outside the judge’s chambers, my young partner, trying to puzzle out the judge’s act of self-slaughter, her lip curling at the idea of such a radical reaction to something so small.
Whatever else she knows, she knows that this—the story I’ve told her, the story of Charlie, the story we’re part of now—this is not small.
“Your brother went back into that house?”
“He did. There was no way to stop him. He thought—the way he put it—he thought he had to catch a monster.” I look at her. She is looking through the windshield at Petras’s house in the darkness. “He thought there was a monster.”
“Not literally?”
“You know, I don’t know. I was never really sure.”
Using the information Charlie provided, Mr. Vasouvian along with Mr. Alvaro and the rest of us on the thirtieth floor planned a raid on the warehouse in Glendale. We waited for a week, two weeks; waited and hoped that my brother would come to his senses and get out of there. But an Off Record house could not be countenanced, and soon enough, with or without Charlie, it was time to act.
Three units of the Service went in together, along with half a battalion of regular police. We made nine arrests, all of whom were subsequently charged with grave assault on the Objectively So and exiled for their crimes.
“And what about your brother?”
I just shake my head. I’ve reached the end of the story. I can’t tell any more.
I don’t know if he thought there was a literal monster or not, but here we are. Staring at Petras’s house.
You were right, Charlie. You were always right.
For once I have a gut feeling, the kind Charlie got every day his whole life. There are only a handful of people in the State who could arrange the kind of careful unseen sabotage of the Record that Charlie was convinced happened, but Laura Petras is surely one of them. She did it before, and she escaped apprehension, and now she’s doing it again.
Bringing another house off the Record. Her own house.
Mose Crane, itinerant construction man, freelance contractor, must have been among those who worked on the project. Maybe he knew and maybe he didn’t know the nature of the alterations he had been asked to undertake on this property. Maybe he only later realized.
But he did figure it out, I know he did, because six months later he decides to turn his knowledge into easy money, to use this piece of discovered truth like a crowbar, like a lockpick. To blackmail the judge and the Acknowledged Expert with what he knew. And that’s what he’s doing, prowling around the judge’s house, when he dies, drawing the attention of the Speculative Service. Petras and her allies have to work fast, they send Doonan scuttling to Crane’s last known residence, two steps ahead of us, to remove all evidence of his connection to Petras.
Paige is in motion before I’ve finished this last piece of explanation. She’s feeling for her weapon under her coat, opening her door. “All right,” she says. “So let’s go get her.”
“No—wait,” I say. “Stop.”
“Why? We have to go now, don’t we? We have to go right now.”
“We are going to wait until she comes out—tail her to work, pull her over. This is something we gotta do very carefully. As quietly and inconspicuously as possible. This isn’t some kid we’re talking about. This is one of our Acknowledged Experts.”
“Well, so—that’s all the more reason. Right?” Aysa is staring at me, stunned and agitated. Her voice is hot with urgency. “For us to work fast. To go in now. Laszlo. She knows we’re onto her. She has to know.”
“Or she thinks we think it’s about Sampson, about Tester. Something small—”
“She’s smarter than that, Laszlo. Laszlo: we gotta go in. Now.”
“Just a second, Paige. Give it a second.”
“No.” She shakes her head. She hisses, “Why?”
She’s right. I know she’s right. I am sitting here doing what I’m always doing, which is trying to figure out what to do, and she is getting out of the car, patting her holster for her weapon, looking at me evenly through the window.
“Are you sure—in your heart, Laszlo, are you sure that this woman is what you think she is?”
I nod. Monster monster monster. I am sure. For once, I am sure.
“All right, then. Let’s go.”
Paige goes first and I stay close at her heels, matching her stride, directly behind her, an animal pack, a pack of two.
The air changes, you can feel it change, as we pass through the high hedgerow separating Mulholland Drive from the Expert’s house.A short driveway, lined with wide flat pavers. A desert garden, the glistening knifepoints of succulent cactuses in the wan moonlight.
“Here,” I say very quietly as soon as we step across the hedgerow and onto the lawn proper. I whistle softly to draw her attention, and then I crouch and point. “Look.”
The capture is a remarkable forgery, specific in every detail. I snap my fingers in front of it and it moves, minutely, just like a real one. The lens blinks open and closed, open and closed when I move my face; when I snap my fingers, the beak of the microphone jerks up, like a bird’s. I look at Paige and can see that she is feeling what I am feeling, the wavering world, the air rippling and bending with the unacceptable reality: a dead capture. A forgery. A deliberate undermining of the foundation of the State.
It is galling. Horrifying to think of it—so much reality unrecorded, moments racing past. A hundred moments, two hundred. I stand here, counting. If you split each moment then you quickly reach infinity, all the moments in the world going unrecorded—a quantum of moments. A forever of reality, disappearing as soon as it appears. I am standing in the center of a radius of absence. You don’t realize what a comfort reality is until you leave it, what a good strong feeling is the truth under your feet and in the air around you, how nice it is to be surrounded at all times by the truth. To know that everything is being added to the ledger, that everything that happens will be true and will be true forever, that everything that is is, that everything that has happened has happened and will have happened forever.
And it doesn’t feel good. It feels terrifying. I feel like I might float up above the Earth, float away, crash down into the sea somewhere. I look to Paige, staring at the dead captures, the row of dummies, and I can tell she is feeling what I am feeling, the world reeling, the sky becoming suffused with the thick truthless air. We are off the Record
“Hey. Hey,” I say urgently. “Water is made of two hydrogens, one oxygen. Hey.”