Midnight Processing

Jarrah's POV

I felt Malia go cold under my arm, and I knew what I had to do before I knew what to say.

"He's lying," I said.

I said it to the room, to the brass grille, to every man standing with his hand on a weapon. But it was for her. The speaker hissed in the silence, and my own voice came back from the stone, steady and much too loud.

"I've read an index and nothing more. Your mother's name was on it. I told you that the night the lights went out, and I told you the same hour I could stand." I turned my head so I could see her face. "That is everything. I have never opened the file. I couldn't. Nobody could."

"Careful, Jarrah," said Alastair softly from the grille. "A man who protests loudly begins to sound practiced."

"Then I'll stop talking to you."

I reached up and put my fist through the crackling little speaker. It wasn't graceful. The brass folded inward with a bark, wire spat, and the voice cut off mid-breath. My knuckles split. The ringing quiet afterwards felt like a held note.

Nobody said a word. Marcus, in the corner, let a very slow breath out through his nose.

"That was childish," I said.

"That was brilliant," said Teo, and then clapped a hand over his mouth.

Malia hadn't moved. She stood with her ring-hand pressed to her stomach, looking at the ruined grille. I waited for her to pull away from me. I'd braced for it, the way you brace for a fall you can see coming.

"Say it again," she said.

"Say what?"

"That you haven't read it."

"I haven't read it." I held her eyes and didn't blink. "I swear it on every name I own. If I had, I'd have found you in the first minute and told you, whatever it said. I promised."

She searched my face for a long time. I let her. I understood, with a plain and terrible clarity, that this was the real test. Not the tunnel, not the doors. A single sentence from a man whose whole life had taught her to hear the lie inside the kindness.

"All right," she said.

"All right?"

"I believe you." Her voice trembled, and she steadied it. "But he's put it in my head now, and I can't get it out. So I'll be watching you, Jarrah. Not because I think you're lying. Because I need to be sure of myself."

"Good," I said. "I'd think less of you if you didn't."

By midnight the vault had settled into a thick, weary hush.

Marcus had put a man on each of the bars, rotating every hour, and set the rest of us to sleep where we could. Someone had found blankets. Someone had found, God knows where, a flask of whisky, which went round in silence and came back lighter. The dead lay under their tarp at the far end of the antechamber. Nobody looked at it, and nobody forgot it was there.

I should have slept. My side throbbed in time with my pulse, a dull and complicated pain, and the burn on my forearm had begun to weep through its bandage. But sleep wouldn't come. I lay on my back on a pile of folded sacking and stared at the vaulted ceiling, where a single hanging lamp swayed in some draught I couldn't feel.

Callan's face came, the way it did when I was too tired to stop it.

Not the last time I saw him. The last time was blood and pavement, and I'd spent two years learning not to remember it. The other time. A dock at six in the morning, mist over the water, him with a paper cup in each hand, passing me one without a word. He never asked how I was. He'd just stand there beside me and drink his terrible tea until I felt like talking.

I'm going to open this for you, I thought to the ceiling. I'm so close. You'll finally get to say it.

The ceiling didn't answer. It never did.

I heard a soft movement beside me, and then a blanket settled across my chest, and Malia lay down on her side next to me with her back to the wall. She didn't say anything. She kept her left hand folded on her stomach where the ring caught the lamp.

"You're supposed to be asleep," I murmured.

"So are you."

"I'm resting my eyes."

"Your eyes are open."

"They're resting open."

A tiny breath of laughter. She shifted closer, and I felt the warmth of her along my good side. For a while we lay there in the semi-dark, listening to the men breathe.

"What was he like?" she asked, very low. "Callan. I know what you've told me. I know he's the reason all this exists. But I don't know what he was like."

I hadn't expected the question. I turned it over for a long time.

"Quiet," I said at last. "He wasn't clever with words. He was clever with people. He'd notice the thing you hadn't said, and then he'd just... move a little closer. Never made a fuss. Never asked you to explain it." My throat tightened. "He used to say that most trouble in the world comes from people who needed someone to sit beside them and didn't get it."

"That's you," Malia said. "That's what you did for me today."

"I learned it from him."

"Then he's still here."

I couldn't answer that. I put my hand over my eyes, and I felt her fingers close on my free wrist, and neither of us said anything for a very long time.

I must have drifted, because the next thing I knew was a soft chime, bright and distinct in the dim.

I was on my feet before I'd finished waking. My ribs lit up. I ignored them. Malia was already standing at the machine, one hand on the faceplate, the other pressed against her mouth.

On the screen, in clean white digits, was a number I hadn't dared to expect for hours.

99%.

"Midnight," she whispered. "It's exactly midnight."

I checked the old brass clock on the wall. She was right. One minute after twelve, by the clock. The bar was a thin green band almost to the edge of the screen. Only a sliver remained, narrower than a fingernail.

"How long?" Marcus had come up behind me. His voice was rough with sleep.

"I don't know. It's slowed again." I stepped in beside Malia. "The last percentage might take an hour. Might take ten minutes."

"Might take the rest of the night," said Marcus, "and then some."

"Then we wait." I looked around at the men gathered in a loose ring behind us, haggard, bandaged, watching the screen as if it might be a window onto something holy. "Everyone stays put. Nobody speaks unless it's about the doors. If anything changes, I want to hear it."

They nodded. A strange, solemn quiet fell. The antechamber had always been a place of old stone, but now it felt like a church in the minutes before a service. I could hear the lamp creaking on its chain. I could hear Teo's breath, uneven, and Marcus's boots shifting. I could hear my own heart, absurdly loud.

The bar crept forward by a hair.

"Do you want everyone to stay?" Malia asked me, barely audible. "For whatever it says?"

I wondered the same. Whatever lay on the other side, it was about Callan. It was about her mother. It might be about the people in this room.

"No," I said. "I'd rather it were us."

She nodded. "Marcus," she said, a little louder, "could you take the men to the doors? I'd like to have this part with Jarrah."

Marcus looked at me. Then at her. The ring on her hand caught the light. I watched him decide, in the quiet way he decided most things, that he'd been right about her from the start.

"Aye, miss," he said. "Doors it is. We'll be calling if anything changes."

They went. The footsteps faded down the stone. The antechamber emptied around us, until there was only the lamp and the hum and the two of us, side by side, facing a green bar that did not seem to be moving at all.

She found my hand without looking.

Her fingers laced through mine, tight, and the ring bit into my knuckle. I didn't mind. I held on, and the two of us stood there in the dim and watched the sliver of dark at the end of the bar become thinner.

"I'm scared," she said.

"Me too."

"I thought I'd feel braver by now."

"I think that's how it works. You get braver, and then there's always something bigger." I squeezed her hand. "Whatever's in there, I'm not going anywhere. If it's about your mother, I'll sit with you while you read it. If it's about Callan, I'll sit with you while I do. If it's about neither of us and it's something worse, I'll still be here."

"And if it's about my father?"

I'd known she would ask that. I'd been circling it all night.

"Then it's about him," I said. "And you're not him. You were never him."

She closed her eyes. Her grip tightened. "I've wanted to hate him for years, and I could never manage it. I kept thinking, He's still my father. Twenty-two years of Sunday dinners. He taught me to ride a bike. He sat up with me when I had the flu." Her voice thinned. "What if I read this and I find out I've been loving a monster, and I *still* can't make it stop?"

I pulled her against my chest. Her cheek found my collarbone.

"Then you can't," I said gently. "Love doesn't ask for permission. It doesn't mean you're wrong, Malia. It means you're someone who is loved, and some people don't deserve it, and that's their failure. Not yours."

She let out a long, shaky breath. We stood like that, her face in my shirt, my chin resting on her hair. The bar was a razor's width from the edge.

Then it stopped.

I felt her stiffen before I saw why. The green stripe froze. The little animated pulse that had run along its length all night went dark. For a long, stretched moment the screen did nothing at all.

Then the white text rewrote itself.

DECRYPTION COMPLETE. 99.9%.

FINAL RELEASE REQUIRES MANUAL CONFIRMATION.

PRESS TO OPEN.

Beneath it, in the centre of the glass, a single square button pulsed softly, the colour of old bone.

"It's waiting for us," Malia whispered.

"Someone wanted it to be a choice." I stared at the button. The same unsettling thought crossed my mind that I'd had in the cistern: Someone wanted us to survive long enough to reach this machine. "Whoever built this, they wanted whoever read it to want it."

"Do we want it?"

I looked at her. In the lamplight, her face was white and set, and her eyes were open wide. She was looking at me and not at the button.

"I do," I said. "But I'd understand if you didn't."

"I want to know what happened to my mother." She tightened her fingers in mine. "And I want to know who killed Callan. Even if it breaks me."

"It won't break you."

"It might."

"Then I'll be there to put the pieces in a safe place."

A tremor of a smile passed across her mouth. She turned to the screen. Slowly, together, as we'd done at the valves, we raised our joined hands. I felt her pulse hammering in my palm. I felt my own matching it.

"On three?" she said.

"It's a good number."

"One."

"Two."

Our fingers reached the glass at the same instant, and as I pressed down beside her, I heard, faintly, from the end of the tunnel behind the doors, a single, unhurried knock on the steel.

"Three."

The screen went white.