Chapter 10: The Second Keeper

The gold market was at full Tuesday volume by the time they reached it.

The apprentices’ market behind it was louder — the shouting Calloway market that had warned itself of Elliot earlier in the morning, and which, in the past two hours, had gained the additional tempo of imminent end-of-crossing-point trade — but the gold market was, in its own register, working. The alcoves were open. The vendors were calling. The air was warm and thick with the smells of food being made for sale. Bread. Roast onion. Something fried with cumin. The persistent, unidentifiable sweet pastry that Elliot had walked past two hours earlier and was still not sure about.

The bread alcove was on the corridor’s south side, two carriages forward of Vesh’s tea-bar. It was the largest of the food alcoves Elliot had seen on this train — a wide opening into a small but properly ovened workspace, with a counter that ran the alcove’s full width and a long shelf behind the counter on which loaves were arranged in tidy ranks, sorted by type and by hour.

A woman stood at the counter. She was perhaps thirty-two. She wore an apron that had been white that morning and had become, in the course of working a morning, the colour of a working apron. Her hair was tied back. Her hands were dusted to the elbow with flour. She was wrapping a small loaf in a square of brown paper for an older customer, and she was doing it with the small, precise economy of a person who had wrapped a great many loaves and who had decided, at some point in her career, that wrapping a loaf was a thing worth doing properly.

She finished the wrap. She handed the loaf across. She received chits. She thanked the customer. The customer left.

She looked at the next person in line.

The next person in line was Petris, who had positioned himself in it without, Elliot noticed, attracting attention. Elliot was behind him. There were two more people behind Elliot. The line moved at the Calloway pace.

Mette saw Petris.

Her hands did something. It was not large. It was a small, contained gesture — a brief, almost-stilled movement of the wrist as she set down the wrapping paper she had been about to pick up. Her face did not change. Her eyes did not widen. But her hands, for one second, told the truth that her face had been disciplined to keep.

She knew, Elliot saw. She had known since first bell. And she had known, since first bell, that this conversation might come.

“Warden,” she said. Her voice was steady.

“Mette.”

“What can I get you.”

“A small loaf of the dark, please. And a word, if you have one.”

“I have one. I do not, at this counter, have privacy.”

“I gathered. The back, perhaps.”

She looked at the line behind them. There were two people. She looked toward the alcove’s interior. A girl of perhaps sixteen — apprentice, by the apron — was working an oven at the back, with her sleeves rolled up and her face turned toward the heat.

“Tava,” Mette said. The girl looked up. “I’m taking five minutes. The dark, the brown, and the oat are ready. The white needs another four. The customers know the prices.”

The girl nodded. She did not, Elliot noted, look at Petris with any particular curiosity. The warden’s coat had clearly been seen at this counter before.

Mette wiped her hands on her apron. She came around the counter. She unlocked a small door at the side of the alcove and stepped through it. Petris and Elliot followed.

The room beyond was not, by any honest measure, a back room. It was a space behind the alcove of perhaps six feet by four, with a shelf of small pots and a cracked stool and a small high window through which the parallel light came in pale yellow. It smelled of yeast, and of the deeper, older bread-smell that gets into the wood of the rooms where bread has been made for a very long time.

Mette closed the door behind them.

She stood with her back to it. She looked at Petris. She looked at Elliot. She looked, Elliot saw, very tired — the tiredness of a person who had been carrying something heavy for several years and who had, in the past three hours, been bracing herself for the moment when the carrying ended.

“Maren,” she said.

It was not a question. It was a name spoken into a small room by a woman who was, in saying it, declaring her relationship to it.

“Yes,” Petris said.

“This morning.”

She closed her eyes. She kept them closed for perhaps four seconds. When she opened them, she was — by Elliot’s reading — back in her working register.

“I am not a brave woman, Warden,” she said. “I want you to know this before I say anything else. I am a woman who runs a bread alcove and lives in a small berth in the green section and who has, for the past eleven years, gone to her work, sold her bread, cleaned her counter, and gone home. I am not the kind of person stories happen to. I had been hoping, in fact, that the morning would arrange itself such that no story would happen to me. I had not, when I heard about Maren, expected the warden to come to my counter. I had been hoping that the carriage of his death would close around him and that I would be left alone. That hope, I see, is now finished.”

“Mette.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anyone else who would know what I am about to ask you?”

“No.”

“Then say what you can. We have, by the warden’s clock, an hour and twenty minutes. I will use what you give me to pursue the man who killed Maren Toll. I will not, in the using, name you. The Conductor will be told what I know without being told from whom. This is a promise the warden’s branch can, in narrow circumstances, give and keep. The narrow circumstances obtain.”

She looked at him. She looked at Elliot.

“You’re the Meridian man.”

“I am.”

“Maren spoke of you. Or rather — Maren spoke of the kind of person you are. He said there would be others. He said, on this train and on the others, there were always others. He said the trains kept finding them, and the trains kept disposing of them, and he had decided that he was not, on balance, going to be disposed of.”

“He told you about the Passage,” Petris said.

“He told me about the Passage.”

“What he had learned.”

“Will you tell us.”

She looked at the floor for a long moment.

“Maren Toll,” she said, “arrived on The Meridian eleven years ago.” Her eyes lifted. “He arrived with what he understood to be his complete memory of his previous life, like the man in front of you, and like — by his account — at least three others he had identified on that train across the four years he was there. He was, at the time of his arrival, twenty-eight years old. He had been a shipwright, I think — that is what he told me, though he said the word as if he were not certain it was the right word. He kept the knowledge of his retention to himself. He learned the train. He did good work. He came, in time, to the attention of the Conductor of The Meridian, who was — by his account — gentle with him in a way that he found more frightening than any cruelty would have been. The gentleness was a gentleness of interest. He felt the Conductor was working out how he worked. He did not wish to be worked out. When the crossing point came, he ran.”

“And on this train.”

“On this train, he became a clerk. He did the work he was given. He met Mr Shen and the others. He bought bread from me on his way to work each morning, the way other clerks bought bread. Eventually he stopped, on some mornings, for a longer conversation. Eventually, on one of those longer conversations, he told me what he was. I think — I think he chose me because I was a person without a record. There is no archive of bakers’ lives. There is no inner office about the gold market. He chose me, perhaps, because he correctly judged that telling me would not show up in any cabinet.”

“And what he told you.”

“What he told you. The piece of it he was certain of.”

She drew breath.

“Maren had spent his eleven years on the trains,” she said, “thinking about why he had retained his memory and others had not. He had concluded, by a long route I could not follow even when he tried to walk me along it, that the memory wipe in the Passage is not a property of the Passage itself. It is imposed. It is done deliberately, by someone, or something, that decides what each arrival is permitted to remember. The wipe is not a feature of dying. It is a feature of the arrangement. And the arrangement, by his account, has been running long enough that nobody on any train remembers when it began, but it is being maintained, currently, by the same — agency, was his word — that maintains the trains themselves.”

The room was silent.

“He did not know who,” Mette said. “He did not know whether who was the right word. He had — and this is the part of what he said that I have, in the years since, found most difficult — he did not know whether the agency was a person, or a system, or something older than either. He believed only that it was aware. And he believed that any retained memory was, from the agency’s point of view, a leak. And that leaks were, in the agency’s habit, sealed.”

“He had been a leak for eleven years,” Elliot said.

“He had been a leak for eleven years.”

“The Conductor of his train protected him.”

“He thought so. Yes. He thought the Conductor of his old train had been quietly protecting him by keeping him close, by giving him work, by being interested. He thought the same of mine, on the days he was charitable. He thought the Conductors knew what he was, and that they had, at some level, decided they were curators rather than enforcers. He was not sure of this. He hoped it. The hoping was not, on his bad days, a thing he relied on.”

“And the records he was looking at.”

“He had begun, in the past year or so, to suspect that the agency operates — or has operated, at certain moments — through people on the trains. He believed there was a pattern in the arrivals records of his first year that, if he could see it cleanly, would reveal who had been brought aboard with — alterations. Or instructions. Or influence. He could not articulate it more clearly than that. He believed, also, that the pattern would be readable only in his own arrival window, because that was the window he had himself observed. He started visiting the archive three weeks ago because he had decided, finally, to look.”

“Did he find the pattern?”

“I do not know. He had not, on our last conversation, found it. He had been excited. He had said the pages he had been working with had begun to give him something. He had said —” she looked at Petris — “he had said he was going to bring his findings to the Calloway warden’s branch before the bell, because the bell would change everything. He believed that whoever had been preventing his looking would, in the four hours of the parallel, decide to act.”

“He was right.”

“When was the last conversation.”

“Yesterday morning. He bought a small loaf of the brown. He did not pay. He said he would pay tomorrow. He often said this. He always paid the next day.”

“He did not, today.”

She did not, Elliot saw, cry. He had seen the kind of grief that did not cry. Doss, on the morning of her brother’s death two months ago in the Meridian’s farm carriages, had not cried; she had instead, for the rest of that day, banged her baskets at a higher frequency, and the carriage had let her bang. Some kinds of grief came out as work. Mette’s grief was, evidently, in the same family.

“Mette,” Petris said.

“Yes.”

“Will you cross.”

“No.”

“You understand we are asking.”

“I understand. I am answering. I will not cross. I am Calloway. I am not a person who would, on another train, be useful or safe. I am a baker. I will, when you leave this room, go back to my counter, and finish the morning. The bell will ring. The trains will pull apart. I will continue to be a baker on a train where, until this morning, exactly one person knew what I knew, and where, after this morning, the Warden and the Meridian man know also.” She looked at Elliot. “I am trusting you with my life by telling you this. I am not asking for a promise. You will keep me safe, or you will not, and either way I will know it from the carriages in the next year. I have made my decision. I am the kind of person whose decisions are made and then carried.”

Elliot looked at her.

“What you’ve told me will go to the Conductor of my train,” he said. “I will not name you. I will, in the doing, do everything I can to make sure your name is not put to it. I cannot promise that no one will ever come for you. I can promise that I will not be the reason that anyone does.”

“That is enough.”

“It isn’t.”

“It is what is on offer. I will accept it.” She breathed in, breathed out, and her shoulders, almost imperceptibly, dropped. “There is one more thing.”

“Yes.”

“He told me, a year ago, that if he died before the next crossing point, I should send a message to the Meridian, to a man whose name he gave me. He did not write the man’s name down. He gave it to me twice, in conversation. He told me to commit it to memory. The man was not, he said, the Conductor. The man was not, he said, anyone in the Conductor’s service. The man was a person Maren had once known on The Meridian who would, if approached carefully, be a useful pair of hands.”

“What was the name?”

“Mr Plum.”

The room was, for a long moment, quiet.

Petris turned his head, slowly, toward Elliot.

Elliot, for one second, did not breathe.

“Plum,” he said.

“Mr Plum, yes.”

“You’re sure of the name.”

“I am sure of the name.”

“Did he say anything else about Mr Plum?”

“Only that Mr Plum, if approached carefully, would understand the message.”

“What was the message?”

“That I had it. That if Maren did not, then I did. That the bell had rung.”

The bell, Elliot thought. The bell that was, at this point, not yet the bell. The bell was the one that was coming. The one that, in fifty-something minutes, would mark his crossing back. Mr Plum, if approached carefully, would understand the message.

He thought of Plum.

He thought of Plum, who had said be careful, today, and who would, at this moment, be at his workstation in Carriage 74, assembling a clock for a girl whose grandmother had owned it.

He thought of Plum, who had a past in the First Carriages that the Conductor of The Meridian knew about and did not act on.

He thought of Plum, and the small uncovered moment from the morning of Plum’s eyes lifting to his.

“Mr Plum,” he said, “is my friend.”

“Yes.”

“And he was Maren’s friend.”

“He was Maren’s something. I do not know more than that.”

She looked at the door.

“I have to go back to the counter,” she said. “The line will be lengthening.”

“Mette.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“Do not thank me, Mr Marsh. Do, though, what you said you would do.”

She unlocked the door. She held it open. They stepped through it.

In the alcove, the apprentice Tava was wrapping a loaf for a woman with two small children. She did not look up. Mette took the wrapping paper from her without speaking, and the apprentice handed it across, and Mette wrapped the next loaf as if the past five minutes had not happened, and the customer took her bread and paid in chits and said thank you, and Mette said thank you, and the line moved on.

Petris and Elliot stepped out into the corridor.

They walked perhaps four paces before either of them spoke.

“Plum,” Petris said.

“Plum.”

“You did not, in any of our previous conversations, mention a Plum.”

“I did not.”

“Will you mention him now.”

“I will.”

They walked.