“When is this going to happen?”she asked.
He smiled.“If I knew, I might not tell you.But I don’t.Not yet.I am not the author of this act.Merely…” He wobbled his head, searching for the word.“A critic.I have some sense of the shape of the play, not its staging.”
Her temper flared once more, hot and bright.“You dragged me all the way out here to tell me someone might do something connected to the fifth commandment, somewhere, some time soon, and it might upset me?”
“You came because you needed to know,” he said mildly.“And because you cannot bear the thought of a puzzle that you are not solving.”
She leaned in, putting her face close to the glass.Her reflection ghosted over his, overlapping for a moment: her dark eyes, his pale ones.“Listen to me, Elijah.If this is a game — if you are winding me up for your own entertainment — I can make your life very small.Whatever scraps of privilege you have left?Gone.No books.No notebook.No interviews.No nothing.You’ll sit in your cell and count the cinderblocks until you forget how words work.”
Across the glass, his eyes lit with something that might almost have been amusement.
“Agent Valentine,” he said.He lifted his shackled hands a centimeter, then let them fall, the chain clinking.“They have already taken everything from me that can be taken.Bar the only thing that cannot be taken, because it is the only true thing that matters.”
“And that is?”
He smiled, slow and serene.“The knowledge that I was right.The knowledge that the spirit does not die just because the flesh is circumscribed.Let them remove my books.Let them take my light.It changes nothing.The work goes on.With or without me."His gaze deepened."But I thought you, of all people, deserved a warning."
“A warning I can’t use,” she said.
“I think you can,” he replied.“You know the signs.You know how zeal looks when it curdles.Pay attention to the small blasphemies around you — the jokes about ‘leaving the old folks to rot,’ the stories of children who are too busy to answer the phone.Somewhere in that sea of casual cruelty, one tide is turning.Watch.I think you will feel it.”
She wanted to hit something.Preferably his face.
Instead she sat back, forcing her grip on the phone to relax by degrees.The plastic creaked faintly.Bailey shifted against the far wall, the faint rustle a reminder that she was not alone, no matter how it felt.
“Time,” the officer said quietly.
They still had ten minutes by the clock.Kate read the subtext.Bailey had seen enough of Cox’s behaviors to know when the conversation had gone as far as it could safely go; when the balance between information and psychological contamination had tipped.
Cox must have read it too, because he inclined his head, as if they’d just completed a polite business lunch.
“I’m glad you came,” he said softly.“Truly.It is a comfort to know that whatever else happens, you will be there.Bearing witness.”
“I’m not your witness,” she said.“I’m the one who cleans up your mess.”
“Two sides,” he murmured.“Same coin.”
“I told you already,” Kate said.“I’m not buying your goods.”
“Alas, you inherited the factory.”
She put the phone back in its cradle with more force than was strictly necessary.The line cut with a soft click.On the other side of the glass, Cox remained seated, watching her.The chains at his ankles gleamed dully.
She stood.
For a second, her hand hovered over the glass.She had the absurd urge to touch it, to prove to herself that it was real, that he was contained, that there was a barrier no rhetoric could cross.To confirm, by the simple solidity of the surface, that he could not reach her in any literal way.
She dropped her hand before it could land.
Bailey opened the door."This way, Agent."He sounded more terse than she'd expected perhaps because she'd made his day that little bit harder.Or perhaps because, like everyone else who'd had to spend time in a room with Elijah Cox, he was feeling the itch to scrub something — hands, thoughts, the inside of his skull.
She tried a polite smile, but got grey rocks back.
The walk back out felt longer than the walk in.The air seemed thicker, the fluorescent lights harsher, buzzing at the edge of her hearing like angry bees.Rivera returned her possessions one by one, each item suddenly trivial and precious: the weight of her phone, the tick of her watch, the cool metal of her hair clip.Symbols of normal life.Of the outside.
She signed another form confirming she had survived her visit intact.
“Everything okay?”Rivera asked, not unkindly.
