The corridor outside his room ran in two directions and Sebastian had no idea which one went down.
He stood there in a dead man's clothes — grey trousers, a shirt with actual cufflinks that had taken him four minutes and one small injury — and considered the problem. The carpet had a worn stripe in it, faint, running left. Traffic. Everyone in this house walked left.
He walked left.
The stripe took him to a staircase and the staircase took him to a hall with a clock in it, and by the time Aldric appeared at his elbow he'd already worked out that the room with voices in it was the one he wanted.
"The dining room is through the second door," Aldric said, to nobody, adjusting a vase that did not need adjusting. "The first is a cupboard. Your grandfather also went into the cupboard, sir, and he was born here."
"Thanks."
"I said nothing."
The dining room was long and cold and had been designed for about thirty people. Six places were laid at one end of a table built for twenty, which produced the specific desolate effect of a restaurant an hour before closing.
Sebastian took two steps in and did what he'd always done in a new room, which was count exits and read faces, and the faces stopped him.
Four people were looking at him. Not politely. They were looking at him the way you look at weather coming in.
They watched him die, he thought. Near enough. Eleven days.
"He walks," said the man at the near end of the table. Early thirties, heavier than he wanted to be, a napkin already tucked in. "Miracles."
"Marcus," said the woman across from him.
"I'm delighted. I'm expressing delight."
Sebastian did the arithmetic fast. Marcus: brother, older, resentful, sitting closest to their father, which meant he'd chosen that seat. The woman was in her eighties, upright as a fence post, with rings loose on the fingers. At the head of the table, a man in his sixties was reading a letter and had not looked up.
And there was a fourth, in a grey suit, at the far side with a briefcase against his chair leg. Not family. Nobody in the room found it strange that he was at breakfast, which meant he had been at breakfast for a long time.
"Sit down, boy," said the old woman. "You're standing in the draught and it's not good for you."
There were two empty places. Sebastian looked at both, and one had a glass of water already poured at it, which he decided was a message from somebody, and sat there.
Nobody objected. Good.
He had a moment of something close to relief, and then he looked down at the setting in front of him and counted four forks.
The old woman was Great-Aunt Odile, which he learned when Marcus said Aunt Odile, the salt, and Sebastian filed the name away with the gratitude of a man being thrown a rope.
The man in grey was Pell. He learned that when Pell said, "Good morning, Mr Jules," and Sebastian said "Morning," and there was no correction, which meant Pell called all of them that and had never been on first-name terms with anyone here.
His father he did not learn, because his father had not spoken.
Food came out. Eggs, kippers, a rack of toast in a silver holder that had gone cold in transit from a kitchen apparently located in another county. The service was done by a single girl of about seventeen who was doing the work of three and knew it.
Sebastian left his hands in his lap and waited.
Marcus picked up the second fork from the outside. Sebastian gave it four seconds and picked up the second fork from the outside.
"You're eating slowly," Marcus said.
"I've been ill."
"You've been asleep. There's a difference. I've had the doctor here twice a week at seventy an hour to tell me you were asleep."
"Then I'm sorry about the seventy an hour."
Marcus's chin came up. He'd been braced for a fight and had been handed an apology, and he sat with it for a second not knowing where to put it down.
Aunt Odile made a small dry sound over her tea.
"He's got better manners than he had," she said. "Fever's improved him."
"Aunt."
"I'm eighty-four, Marcus, I'm allowed observations."
The door at the end opened and a woman came in fast, with a folder under one arm and ink on the side of her right hand.
She was about twenty-seven and dressed three years out of date, and she had the specific gait of a person who has been awake since four and has decided that walking quickly is the same as being rested.
"Don't get up," she said, to no one who had.
"Lucia," said Marcus. "There's food."
"I ate."
"You ate in the study."
"I ate," Lucia said, and sat, and pulled a plate toward her that she did not intend to use, and it was so practised that Sebastian understood it was a daily transaction and that both of them knew it was a lie and that neither of them had ever once said so.
Then she looked up at Sebastian and stopped.
It was not a long look. It lasted about as long as it takes to check a number against a receipt. But she went through his face carefully, feature by feature, and something in her posture changed by an inch, and Sebastian understood that of the five people at this table, this was the one who was going to be a problem.
"You're up," she said.
"Seems to be the consensus."
"Do you know what day it is?"
"No."
"Good," she said, and looked back down at her folder. "That's the right answer. Weiss said you'd lie about it."
The letter came down.
Ambrose Jules had a face that had been handsome and had gone hollow behind it, and he folded the letter along a crease that had already been folded several times, which told Sebastian he'd been reading the same page all morning.
"The thirtieth," he said.
The table went quiet. Not dramatically. It went quiet the way a room does when someone mentions an illness everyone already knows about.
"Ambrose," said Pell, "we did discuss —"
"We discussed it. I'm saying it out loud, which we have not done." Ambrose turned his water glass a quarter turn and did not drink from it. "On the thirtieth we will meet the arrangement, or we will discuss the arrangement. Those are the two available mornings. Marcus, the yard accounts by Friday."
"They're not going to be good."
"I didn't ask for good, I asked for Friday."
"I've had Marchetti's people through the yard twice this month," Marcus said, in the tone of a man reporting weather. "Photographing. They photographed the cranes."
"They're entitled."
"They photographed the cranes, Father."
"They're entitled," Ambrose said, and picked up the letter again.
And that was it. The name went past like a car on a road. Nobody explained it, because everybody at that table had grown up with it, and Sebastian sat holding the wrong fork and understood two things at once: that this family was going over a cliff on a fixed date twenty-nine days out, and that in four months of going over it, not one of them had asked the obvious question.
Lucia was writing in her folder. Marcus was eating. Odile was looking at the empty wall behind Ambrose's chair, where two pale rectangles sat in the silk, and she was looking at them the way you look at a grave.
Sebastian put the fork down.
"What happens if it isn't met?"
Marcus's knife stopped.
Pell's hand went to his briefcase and then didn't do anything, which was worse.
Ambrose looked up from the letter for the first time since Sebastian had walked into the room, and Sebastian saw the man's actual face, unguarded, for about a second and a half. He'd seen that face before. He'd seen it on a lieutenant outside Kunar who had just been told the second vehicle wasn't coming.
"Jules," said Lucia.
"It's a question."
"It isn't a question, it's a—" She stopped. She'd closed the folder. "You know what happens."
"Tell me anyway."
The girl came in with the coffee, saw the room, and left again without putting it down.
"We would vacate," Ambrose said. "The house, the yard, the Chandler Street property. There's a schedule. Mr Pell has it. We would be given, I believe, fourteen days."
"Twenty-one," said Pell.
"Twenty-one. There you are." Ambrose folded the letter one last time. "It won't come to that. Eat something, you've been ill."
He stood, and everyone made the small adjustments people make when a man stands, and he walked out with the letter in his hand and did not take his coat, which meant he was not going anywhere and had simply needed to be somewhere else.
Marcus put his knife down with a click.
"Well," he said. "Marvellous. Eleven days unconscious and you come down and do that."
"Somebody was going to."
"No. That's the thing. Nobody was. That was the arrangement about the arrangement." Marcus balled his napkin and dropped it in his eggs. "You were always the one who couldn't leave a stone unturned, and look — fever hasn't touched it."
He left. Pell left after him, murmuring, briefcase swinging.
Odile stayed where she was. She reached across and moved the salt an inch closer to Sebastian's hand.
"Good," she said. "I've been waiting four months for one of you to say it."
Lucia hadn't moved.
She sat with the closed folder under both hands and looked at him across four feet of table and eighteen feet of nobody, and she took her time about it.
"You didn't know," she said.
"Know what."
"About the twenty-one days. You asked and you didn't know." She tipped her head. "You were in the room when Pell explained it. In March. You sat there and you asked him about the interest calculation and you were insufferable about it."
"I've been ill."
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being true."
Something blinked in the corner of his vision.
[Daily Objective] Exhaust today's Spending Limit before Settlement. $1,000 remaining · 15h 42m
Sebastian did not flinch this time, which he counted as progress. He picked his cup up so his hands would have a job.
A thousand dollars. In a house that owed enough money to lose its cranes to a photographer, in front of a woman who had ink on her hand at eight in the morning because she'd been doing the accounts since four, he had been set the task of wasting a thousand dollars before midnight.
"What," Lucia said.
"Nothing."
"You made a face."
"That's my face."
She stood, and gathered the folder, and paused with her chair half pushed in.
"Weiss said there might be gaps," she said. "Memory. After a fever like that. He said not to make it worse by testing you."
"That sounds sensible."
"It does." She pushed the chair in. "I'm going to test you anyway."
She was at the door before he answered.
"Lucia."
"Mm."
"How much is it? The arrangement."
She didn't turn around.
"Ask Aldric," she said. "He's the only one who'll tell you the real number."