Alex looked at the phone screen, then at his own feet, then back at the Colonel.
Alex- " Sir, I bought these from the shop near the bus stand. Four hundred and fifty rupees. The man gives a free pair of socks. You should go, the whole college goes there. "
The Colonel didn't smile. He put the phone back in his shirt pocket and stood up from the plastic chair slowly, like his knees were older than the rest of him.
Colonel- " Can we go inside? Or do you want your neighbours to enjoy this? "
Alex glanced down the lane. Mrs. Banerjee from two houses down was already on her balcony, pretending to dry a bedsheet that had been dry since morning. She was seventy, a widow who had lived in the lane longer than the electric poles, and she had sent Alex a steel tiffin of fish curry every Sunday since the funeral. In return, she expected to know everything. The vegetable cart man had stopped his cart. Two small boys were standing next to the Gypsy, staring at the soldiers' rifles with their mouths open.
Alex- " Inside is better. "
He unlocked the gate, unlocked the door, and let the Colonel in first. One soldier followed. The other stayed outside next to the Gypsy, where the small boys asked him if the gun was real and he told them to go home.
The Colonel walked into the hall and looked around the way a doctor looks at an X-ray. The sofa. The cushion Serena had thrown at him on Friday, still on the floor. The shelf with his parents' photo. The kitchen door, half open, with one clean pan on the stove. He took his time with everything, and Alex let him, because the house had nothing to show.
The gold-edged notebook was in his inventory. The phone and the memory card too. He had put them there at seven in the morning, out of an old habit from Zaroth. Never keep the important things where a door can be opened.
Colonel- " You live alone. "
Alex- " My parents died last year. Car accident. "
Colonel- " I'm sorry. "
He sounded like he meant it, which was more than most adults managed. He sat on the sofa without being asked. Alex sat on the dining chair across from him. The soldier stood near the door with his hands behind his back, looking at nothing.
Colonel- " My name is Arvind Varma. Until last month I was running a small unit in the north that nobody had heard of. Now I'm running a slightly bigger unit that nobody has heard of. We study unusual events. "
Alex- " Like gas pipes. "
Colonel- " Like gas pipes. "
Varma took a small notebook from his pocket. Not gold-edged. A cheap one with a cardboard cover, the kind they sell at railway stations.
Colonel- " Let me tell you what I know, and you tell me where I'm wrong. Yesterday at 9:31 a crack opened in your college ground. Animals came out of it that don't exist in any book. A red wall that our instruments still can't explain appeared around the field. A man in a mask killed eleven of those animals with sports equipment. "
He turned a page.
Colonel- " Then something very large came out. Our sensors, which were sitting in a truck four kilometres away, recorded one spike of energy so high that it broke two of them. Two seconds long. After that, the crack closed by itself. Cracks don't close by themselves, Mr. Alex. We have watched four of them in the north. They grow. They never close. "
Alex kept his face blank and a little scared, the face of a college boy who had never been inside a police station.
Colonel- " And at the same time, a white van at the east gate had a dead engine that our mechanics say is perfectly fine. The man in the driver's seat had a burn on his chest in the shape of a sun. The man in the back keeps telling everyone about a gas pipe, word for word, the same sentence every time, like a recording. "
Varma looked up.
Colonel- " Who were they? "
Alex- " Sir, I don't know. I was in the washroom. "
Colonel- " For twenty minutes. "
Alex- " I was scared. I locked myself in. "
Colonel- " Which washroom? "
Alex- " Behind the pavilion. The one with the broken tap. "
He knew it had a broken tap because he had walked past it at 2 AM putting chalk runes in the grass. Varma wrote something down. He didn't look like he believed it. He didn't look like he disbelieved it either. He looked like a man who collected small facts and put them in a pile until the pile became a shape.
Colonel- " Then there's this. "
He took a folded paper from the back of his notebook and opened it on the coffee table. It was a list of names, printed, with a column of numbers on the right. Alex recognised the format at once. It was the clipboard from yesterday. The men in blue overalls.
Most of the numbers were 1. A few were 0. Halfway down the second page, one line had been marked with a yellow highlighter.
Alex. 2.
Colonel- " Our handheld units measure one thing. Exposure to the energy that comes out of those cracks. Normal people read zero. Anyone who was near the field yesterday reads one. It fades in a week. Two means you were close. Very close. Or it means something else that my scientists can't explain and don't like. "
Alex- " Maybe the machine was faulty. The man tapped it. "
Colonel- " He did. That's why it says 2 and not something higher. "
The room went quiet. Outside, the vegetable man finally moved on, shouting about cauliflower. Alex could hear the Colonel's watch ticking. He could also hear something else, very faint, under everything, through the contract with Riya. Six bells, far away. The southern one still faster than the others.
He made a decision.
Lying to this man was not going to work. Varma had the shoes, the twenty minutes, the scanner, and the patience of someone who had already waited for four cracks to grow in the north. He would keep coming. He would watch John. He would watch Sara. He would park a Gypsy outside this lane every Sunday until something broke.
But there was a difference between not lying and telling the truth.
Under the table, Alex opened his inventory with a thought, and in the back bedroom, behind a closed door, he called a summon.
It was the same Tier 4 thing he had sparred with in this house a hundred times. Grey skin, long arms, no face to speak of. He felt it appear on the bedroom floor, crouching, waiting for an order. Through the link he gave it one. Then he sent the black coat from his inventory into its hands, and the South City mask after it.
Disguise was his skill, not the summon's. But illusion was older than both of them, and a simple illusion could ride on top of a summon like a jacket on a hanger. A tall figure. A long dark coat. A blank black mask. From a distance, the same man the college CCTV had seen.
From a distance was all he needed.
Colonel- " Mr. Alex. I'm not here to arrest you. If I wanted to arrest you, I wouldn't have come myself, and I wouldn't have sat in the sun for forty minutes on your plastic chair. I'm here because something is coming out of the ground in my country, and I have a feeling you know more about it than my whole unit. "
Alex- " Sir… "
He rubbed the bridge of his nose. For a second he looked less like a colonel and more like somebody's tired father.
Colonel- " In March, one of the northern cracks opened behind a village school in the hills. At night, thank God. Nobody inside. But the things that came out walked eight kilometres before we found them. I lost nine men that night. Good men. We had rifles and they had teeth, and the teeth won. "
He tapped the CCTV frame in his pocket.
Colonel- " Yesterday, one man with a javelin did what my whole platoon couldn't. Do you understand why I'm sitting in your house? "
Colonel- " Just tell me who he is. The man in the mask. "
In the back room, the summon opened the window. Alex felt it climb out, quiet as a cat, onto the sunshade, then up the drainpipe to the roof. It was clumsy with the coat on. It knocked a flowerpot off the parapet. Somewhere at the back of the lane, a dog started barking.
Alex looked down at his hands.
Alex- " Sir. I promised him I wouldn't say. "
Varma's pen stopped moving.
Colonel- " So you do know him. "
Alex- " He saved me once. Before all this. And yesterday, when the ground opened, he found me behind the pavilion and told me to stay there and keep my mouth shut. He took my… "
He let his voice crack a little. It wasn't hard. He had been a scared boy for most of his life on this planet. The muscle memory was still there.
Alex- " He said if anyone came asking, I should tell them to talk to him, not me. "
Colonel- " And how am I supposed to do that? "
The summon reached the roof of the house across the lane. The one with the big black water tank. Alex settled it there, standing, with the afternoon sun behind it, so that it would be a dark shape against the light and nothing more.
Then he pushed the smallest thread of his aura into it. Not Tier 6. Not even Tier 5. Just enough for a scanner in a parked Gypsy to start screaming.
Outside, a sharp electronic beeping began. Then the soldier by the Gypsy shouted.
Soldier- " Sir! SIR! On the roof! "