In an all-night café by the tram loop, over a plate of eggs he didn't touch, a girl Alex had met an hour ago told him that by her count, he should already be dead.
The café stayed open for the wall crews. It had six tables, a television showing the Hunter rankings with the sound off, and a smell of hot oil.
The girl sat with her back to the wall, where she could see the door. Alex had watched her check the ceiling before she sat down, as if she expected part of it to come down on the table.
She was soaked. Her red-brown hair was coming loose from its clip, and for a second Alex felt he'd seen that clip before, though he couldn't think where. She had a small white scar by her left eyebrow. Her heart was still going fast from the road. Alex could hear it from across the table, a little quicker than the clock over the counter.
Her notebook sat between them, squared paper with a hard cover. She kept one hand flat on it.
"I'm Alex," he said.
"Mara."
'She knows when I was supposed to die, and all I know is her first name. What else has she seen?'
"Start again," he said. "Slowly. Nobody's about to get run over."
She told it in order, like a report.
"Four weeks ago I started seeing numbers over people. Eleven people before today. Four of them died." She stopped. "Seven didn't. Eight, with the boy."
"Because of you," Alex said.
She didn't answer. She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table.
"And I'm twelve."
"You're not like the eleven. Theirs move. Yours doesn't."
She glanced above his head, fast.
"Your turn," she said.
He'd used the walk here to decide how much to tell her, and he'd landed on about a third.
"About a month ago, I got better," he said. "All at once. My eyes, my hearing. I'm stronger than I was. Quicker."
"I saw quicker."
"A doctor signed it off as a late growth thing."
"Is it a late growth thing?"
"No."
"My parents left me something," Alex said.
"What was it?"
"I have no idea. It's gone now. That's when it started."
Her eyes kept drifting to his mouth, and she kept dragging them back up.
"And the teeth," he said. "Yes."
"I wasn't going to mention them."
"You were."
"Eventually..."
He didn't tell her about the hunger, or the tunnel under the wall, or the writing he saw in the air.
Then the writing came. It showed up low on the left, small and green, for the first time in days.
UNRECOGNIZED OBSERVER DETECTED.
CAUTION ADVISED.
'Days of nothing, and it picks now? In front of her! Does it mean her?'
Through the green words, he could see Mara writing the date at the top of a clean page.
"What?" she said, without glancing up.
"Nothing."
She gave him a long look and let it go.
She wrote CASE 12 at the top of the page. Under it she wrote: Reads 00:00:00. Subject alive.
"Subject?" Alex said.
"Would you rather I put your name?"
He thought about his medical file. Arthur had put his thumb on the doctor's signature and said the man didn't sign those himself.
"No," Alex said.
She capped her pen.
"I've had four weeks to think about what the numbers are," she said. "I still don't know. But every one I've seen was counting toward the same thing, and yours has finished counting." She pressed her thumb into the page. "So whatever happened to you a month ago... whatever puts those numbers over people thinks it's already killed you."
She turned the notebook around so it faced him. Four dead, with a time and a place beside each one, in small square capitals.
***
On Thursday, Alex told Arthur a small part of it.
Arthur Kessler was in the depot store, signing out blades for Saturday, counting them under his breath and touching each handle as he went.
"I met someone," Alex said. "A girl. She can tell when a person's about to get hurt. Minutes before it happens."
"Nine," Arthur said to the rack. "Ten."
"She did it with me standing right next to her. She was right."
"A feeling," Arthur said, and kept counting.
"It's more precise than a feeling."
Arthur raised his eyes from the sheet. "And she's told you a thing or two about yourself."
Alex didn't answer.
"Keep her away from the Service," Arthur said, and went back to counting.
'That's it? I tell him a girl can see death coming, and he counts blades?'
***
On Friday night, Alex couldn't sleep, so he walked down to the tram loop.
At one in the morning the loop was empty. He picked a pebble out of the gutter and weighed it in his palm. Every summer the kids on Wall Road threw stones at the wall, and the best arm on the street hit the concrete maybe a third of the way up. Nobody had ever reached a light.
The nearest one sat in its cage forty meters up, on top of the wall the whole city lived behind.
He threw.
The pebble went up past the black rain streaks and the rivets and hit the cage dead center, with one small, clean tink. He heard it rattle back down the concrete and drop into the road behind him.
He clapped a hand over his own mouth to keep the laugh in.
Up on the walkway, a voice said, "What was that?"
"Bird," said another one. Nobody came to the rail.
Alex could hear both of them. Two hearts, forty meters up, one slow and one quick from the cold. He stood in the road with his hand still over his mouth, listening to them beat, and the laugh went out of him. And he was hungry again.
He walked home fast, and didn't look up at the wall again.
***
So Alex wasn't ready for Saturday.
At seven in the morning, the east gate was cold and loud. The gate crew was hosing mud off the ramp under the wall lights. By the truck stood the civilian they'd been told to expect, in a bright city safety jacket way too big for her, holding a tablet against her chest.
Mara.
"You're the escort," she said.
"You're the pylon surveyor!"
"I asked Mr. Barrett for it."
"You asked for this?"
"He said I need to be outdoors more."
'She asked for it. She knew provisionals go out of this gate...'
Her eyes went to the gray stripe on his sleeve.
"I didn't know," she said.
"Neither did I."
They both turned toward Arthur. He was ten meters away, checking a strap. He had very good hearing.
The job was a quarterly check of the sensor pylons along the east corridor, steel posts with a lamp and a sensor on top. They had to check each one was standing, powered and reporting. Arthur was supervising, from the back.
Lina Fairley was a Rank One Hunter, two seasons in. She walked point with a rifle and hardly talked. She smelled of gun oil and cold air. She checked Alex's blade strap without asking and moved it up a hole. She had a child's hair elastic around her wrist, a pink one, next to her watch.
Kai Rourke was twenty-four, a provisional from the same intake as Alex, and very pleased about it. His jacket was new, and he'd ironed sharp creases down both sleeves.
He shook everyone's hand with both of his, Mara's too. He'd brought a paper bag.
"My mother," he said, holding it open. "She thinks they don't feed us. Take two. She counts."
They were sesame rings, still warm. Alex could smell the toasted seeds and the butter through the paper. Lina took one without breaking step.
"Your mother fed the last intake too," she said. "Two of them are still on the wall. I put it down to the sesame."
Kai asked Mara what a pylon surveyor did. He walked backward to see her face while she answered.
"If a pylon's down, I log it," Mara said. "Then a crew comes out and fixes it."
"So if you weren't here, nobody would know they were broken," Kai said.
"Somebody would know eventually."
"That's the same as nobody," Kai said. He turned around and nearly walked into the gate.
Alex liked him straight away.
'Every party has a guy like that. The one who brings snacks... you keep that guy alive!'
While the gate was opening, Mara dropped back beside Alex. She kept her eyes on the back of Kai's head, and a little above it.
"The one with the bread," she said, barely moving her lips. "An hour and twenty-three."
Alex went cold.
"Is that close?"
"It's the longest one I've ever seen. Whatever's going to do it is waiting out there."
The gap in the gate was wider now. Through it, Alex could see green.
'Out there... so how do we keep him alive out there?'
"If it kills you," Arthur said to all of them, from the back, "you weren't ready."
Mara turned her head. "Is that the policy?"
"The policy's longer."
The gate shut behind them.