She nodded, suddenly aware of the dryness in her throat, the way her pulse had picked up somewhere between her collarbones.Her palms had gone damp.She flexed her fingers once, twice.
Through the glass, she could see him.
He wore a pale grey jumpsuit, not orange.The color washed him out further, made his skin look almost translucent under the fluorescent lights.His formerly long hair had been clipped short, the iron-grey patches more obvious now, tufts sitting stubbornly against his skull as if resenting the imposed neatness.
There had been weight loss too; his jaw was sharper, the bones of his hands more prominent where they rested on the table.Chains ringed his wrists and ankles, fastened to a bolt in the floor so that any movement would be slow, constrained, emphasized by sound.
He looked, Kate thought, like a priest after a long illness.Or a man who had spent the last three months being stripped deliberately of everything that made him feel like himself and had chosen to make even that process part of his narrative.
When he saw her, he smiled.
Not broadly.Not like a man greeting an old friend.The smile was small and intimate, with a lift of the eyebrows, as if they shared a joke nobody else in the room could hear.
She ignored the way her stomach clenched and sat opposite him, the metal stool cool under her thighs.She lifted the phone from its cradle.After a moment, he mirrored the gesture, chains chiming gently.
“Agent Valentine,” he said.The line made his voice faintly metallic, as if he were calling from underwater.“You came.”
“You asked,” she said.
“I prayed,” he corrected her gently.“But yes.I asked.It’s good to see you.”
“You look well,” she said.It was only partly a lie.For someone who’d been through a stabbing and a self-induced case of sepsis, followed by a manhunt, a rooftop arrest and a supermax transfer, he looked better than many.That was unsettling in itself.
“You always did prefer the truth, even when you’re being polite,” he said.“I appreciate that about you.”
“Let’s save the compliments,” she said.“You said you had information about an imminent divine action.You’ve got forty minutes.”
“Ah.”He inclined his head.“Straight to business.”
“You don’t have a lot else to recommend you.”
He laughed, soft and almost fond.“You wound me.And yet you came.Isn’t that interesting?”
“What’s interesting,” she said, “is that you had your shot.Multiple shots.Now you’re here, chained up like a dog.So if there’s another threat out there, you’re not the one I’m worried about.”
Something flickered in his eyes.Annoyance, perhaps, or respect.With Cox it was always hard to tell whether you’d scored a point or fed him a line.
"You are right," he said."In a sense.My own active work is concluded for now.I am bound.Quite literally."He rattled his shackles lightly, metal against metal."But the work itself — the sacred work of rebuke and correct — does not depend on my hands alone.But, Kate, it never did."
“You’re talking about your followers.”
He tilted his head.“Such an ugly word.Followers.As if they were sheep, blind and stupid.No.I am speaking of those who have heard and understood.Those who have seen what I have seen, Kate: the rot at the heart of our so-called civilisation.The abandonment of duty.The casual desecration of a covenant that once meant something.”
“Spare me the sermon.And I prefer Agent Valentine.”
He smiled again.“You came to church.You knew there would be preaching.”
She tightened her grip on the phone.The plastic bit into her fingers.“You told the warden there was an imminent action.Something planned.I assume you weren’t referring to any of your old cases, since we both know you’ve been locked down too hard to orchestrate much of anything.”
He considered that, then nodded slowly.“Imminent is perhaps the wrong word.Imminent, to you, implies schedules and logistics.To me, it means only that the storm has reached the horizon.”His eyes sharpened.“But yes.There is another.”
Another.The word slid under her ribs like a thin blade.
“A copycat?”she asked.“Someone who reached out to you?Wrote to you?Visited you?This had to be before the transfer, right?Or was it while you were on the run?”
“A new actor,” he said thoughtfully, without answering the question.“That is what I would call them.An instrument in the orchestra, picking up a theme.”
“Name,” she said.“Location.What do you have, exactly?”
