He waited for her at the end of Fenwick Lane on a Wednesday, in the cold that had settled over Backlund since the weekend and showed no interest in lifting.
Twelve minutes past noon.
She left the office at twelve and went the same direction each day, which he had established over three mornings of watching from the bench across the street with a newspaper and a posture calibrated to suggest a man eating a late breakfast rather than a man waiting.
She came around the corner and saw him and did not stop walking.
“Mr.
Colford,” she said, when she was close enough.
“Miss Aldham.” He fell into step beside her, which was the only way to have this conversation without it looking like the conversation it was.
“I wanted to speak with you before you came to your own conclusions.”
She walked for a moment without answering.
Her pace did not change.
She had a canvas bag over one arm, lunch or errands, and she kept her eyes on the pavement ahead in the way of someone who had already prepared for exactly this approach and was now deciding how much of that preparation to show.
“My conclusions about what?” she said.
“About the difference between the Edwin Colford you’ve been watching since I returned and the one you were expecting.”
Another silence.
Shorter.
“Fielding told you,” she said.
“He told me you’d gone to see him.
He didn’t tell me why.”
That was not true.
Fielding had told him why.
He said it anyway to see what she would substitute for the reason Fielding had given her.
She glanced at him once, the first time since he’d fallen into step.
The glance had the quality of measurement without the quality of surprise, which meant she had anticipated something in this range and was recalibrating to the specific.
“I went to ask whether you were well enough to return,” she said.
“I was concerned.”
“I know,” he said.
“I wanted to thank you.”
She absorbed this.
He watched the slight adjustment it produced, not much, a fraction of a degree in how she carried her shoulders, and waited.
“You don’t remember,” she said.
He said nothing.
“August,” she said.
“What happened in August.
You don’t remember it the way it happened.”
He kept his register exactly where it was.
“My recollection of that period is incomplete.”
She stopped walking.
They were at the corner of Fenwick Lane and a narrower street that ran south, the kind of junction where two people could stand without obstructing the pavement if they stood correctly.
She positioned herself without appearing to position herself, which told him she had chosen this corner on purpose before she left the office.
She had been planning this conversation too.
He adjusted his model of her in the place where he had been storing her as a reactive variable.
“Edwin.” She said it the way Fielding had said it in the waiting room doorway: as confirmation of something she was still checking.
“In August you came to me with a piece of paper.
You’d found it in a property file at work.
It had a symbol on it, and below the symbol a set of instructions, and you wanted to know what I thought it meant.” She looked at him without looking away.
“I told you to leave it alone.
I told you what kind of paper it was and where it came from and why it was in a property file at Aldermast’s at all, and I told you that none of it was something a person like Edwin Colford had any business knowing.”
He said: “What kind of paper was it?”
Her expression did not change in any large way.
Something in it settled, the way a door settled when someone on the other side confirmed they were there.
“You don’t remember any of it,” she said.
“Some of it.” He kept his voice at Edwin’s register: careful, with the frayed edge of someone who had been unwell and knew it.
“Not all.”
She looked at the street for a moment.
When she spoke again her voice had dropped to the level of a conversation for two people.
“It was a formula,” she said.
“For something called a Beyonder potion.
Written in a hand I recognized, because I had seen that hand before, years ago, before I knew better than to look.” She glanced at him again.
“The property the file concerned was a house in Cherwood End.
The previous owner died in August 1887.
The paper had been in the file for seven years.”
Seven years in a property file.
Something in that house.
Edwin had found it at work, in an ordinary deed transfer, and had brought it to Miss Aldham because she was someone who would know what it meant, and whatever she told him had not been sufficient to stop him from pursuing it, because the annotations in the drainage book were not the notes of a man who had dropped something.
They were the notes of a man who had kept going.
“The oval symbol,” he said.
“In his notes.”
She looked at him.
Her expression now had the quality of someone confronting a larger gap than they had prepared for.
“His notes,” she said.
He had made an error.
The slip was small: his notes instead of my notes.
She had caught it.
He could see the catch happening in the stillness that followed.
“I’ve been thinking of that period as separate,” he said.
“From the outside.
I don’t fully inhabit those months.”
She considered this.
He did not know whether she accepted it.
“The oval symbol is a marker,” she said, after a pause that cost her something.
“Used by a particular group in Backlund.
They leave it on materials they’ve already processed, things that have been exposed to Beyonder activity and retain a residue.
It’s a warning for people who know to read it.
A way of saying: this has been touched.
Do not touch it again.”
She resumed walking.
He went with her.
“Edwin touched it again,” he said.
“Edwin took the formula home,” she said.
“That is the last I know with certainty.
When he came back to work two weeks later he was the way Fielding described.
And three days after that, you are standing at the end of my street looking like Edwin but answering questions the way someone answers them when they are reconstructing the answer rather than recalling it.”
He walked with that for half a block.
“What would you like me to say?” he asked.
She stopped again.
Not at a planned corner this time.
She stopped because something had arrived in the conversation that required stopping for.
“I would like you to tell me,” she said, “whether Edwin Colford is in there somewhere.
Or whether I have been worrying about someone who is gone.”
The cold air moved between the buildings.
Somewhere two streets over a cart wheel caught on something and the driver called out to the horse.
He thought about the correct answer.
He thought about the true answer.
He thought about whether they were the same.
“He’s not gone,” he said.
“But I can’t show you where he is.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
He could not fully read what the look was doing.
He catalogued it and found that the category he reached for first was not strategic.
He corrected toward strategic.
The correction took longer than it should have.
“All right,” she said.
“Then we proceed as we have been.”
She turned and walked.
He watched her go and stood with the conversation and found two things he could not resolve.
The first: she had accepted an answer that should not have been sufficient.
Either she had accepted it because it was the answer she needed to function, or because she had already concluded something about what had happened to Edwin and had decided the person now occupying the situation was preferable to the alternative.
He did not know which.
His model of her did not have the resolution to distinguish them.
The second: whether Edwin Colford is in there somewhere.
He had answered that question as a performance problem.
He had answered it as: what does Edwin’s social network need to hear.
He had not answered it as the question it also was, the one underneath, the one she had been asking.
He put that aside.
He had the drainage formula now, or the shape of it.
He had Cherwood End, and a house, and a property file at Aldermast’s that had been sitting for seven years with a marked document inside it.
He started walking.
The cold had settled into his coat in the few minutes he’d been standing still and he walked faster to work it out.
The Cherwood End property file was at the office.
He found it at the end of the working day, in the archive room that Aldermast’s kept in the building’s back basement, between three years of conveyancing records and a stack of outdated municipal maps.
The house had been sold twice since 1887, both transfers handled by Aldermast’s, both routine.
The formula was not in the file.
Of course it was not.
Edwin had taken it home.
Edwin had, from what the ledger annotations suggested, spent six weeks working with it or around it or toward it, in the back pages of a drainage textbook, in the kind of code a careful man uses when he wants to remember something without it being legible to anyone who finds the book.
And then something in August had altered his cognitive functioning in a way a physician could see and describe, and then Edwin was gone, and the formula was still in the room that Fang Yuan was now sleeping in, somewhere he had not yet found it.
He had been in this body twelve days.
He had searched the room on day one and found a ledger, a letter, seven shillings, and a book.
He had not searched the room with the assumption that there was something in it worth hiding.
He went home.
He searched the room for two hours.
The formula was folded inside the cover lining of the drainage textbook, pressed flat, the cut in the lining so clean and close to the spine that it was invisible until you knew to press the cover from the inside.
A single sheet.
Dense handwriting.
At the top, the oval symbol with its diagonal line, and below it in Edwin’s hand: Do not.
See: C.A.
C.A.
Catherine Aldham.
He had written a warning to himself and then proceeded past it.
Fang Yuan sat with the formula on the desk in front of him and did not read it yet.
He had been in this world twelve days.
He had found the entry point to its metaphysical system in a dead man’s book, in a room that dead man had been using for six weeks to work toward something Miss Aldham had told him to leave alone and that Fielding had watched eat into his cognition from the outside.
He had found it through no particular cleverness.
He had found it because he was already inside the situation Edwin had created, and the situation had waited for him to look in the right place.
That was not how he preferred to find things.
He looked at the formula for a long time without reading it.
Then he read it.
The newspapers the following morning carried a short piece, six lines again, a continuation of the Tingen story.
A name had emerged from the investigation: a boy, a student at the school in question, described by the correspondent as having “displayed characteristics of an unusual and alarming nature before disappearing from the town.” The unnamed authorities had expanded their investigation to two neighboring regions.
He read this on the bench outside with his coffee going cold.
The boy in Tingen had displayed unusual characteristics.
The investigation had expanded.
He put these two facts together and let them sit next to what he now knew about Beyonder potions and formula residue and the way the metaphysical substrate moved through objects and through people.
He was not concerned about Tingen.
The situation there was not his problem.
It was the problem of unnamed authorities in Loen, in a kingdom across the Sonia Sea, involving a boy he would never meet.
He put the newspaper down.
He looked at the formula in his coat pocket, folded back into its shape.
He had one item.
One formula.
He did not know yet whether he had the capacity to use it, or what using it would cost, or whether the cost was one he could meet with twelve days of context and seven shillings and fourpence in accumulated funds.
He picked the newspaper back up.
He needed, in order: more money, more information about how potions functioned in this world’s system, and a decision about whether Edwin Colford’s situation was a resource or a liability.
The coffee was cold.
He drank it anyway.