Chapter 4·Ruth Vale · Manchester

Ruth Vale. Manchester. Thursday 11 March 2032, 18:40.

Gavin had the news on loud with a can in his hand, and Poppy was on the floor in front of him doing the horse jigsaw, and Ruth was stood in the kitchen doorway with the tea towel and watched the back of his head.

"They've got a bloke on now," Gavin said. "Some professor. Says it's real. Says the data's real, anyway, he's been through it." He drank. "They've all been through it. Every lab in the world's been through it since dinner and not one of them's come on and said it's a fake. You'd think one would. You'd think one would just say it."

"Yes."

"Poppy, love, shift your feet, I can't see the bottom."

Poppy shifted her feet. Eight, and she had decided on her own, without saying so, that the thing on the telly was for grown-ups and nothing to do with her, and she was giving the horse everything she had.

Ruth went back in the kitchen and dried a plate that was already dry.

"Ruth."

"Yes."

"Come and watch this."

She went and stood behind the sofa. The professor was a thin man with a beard who kept touching his glasses, and under him a bar said VERIFIED in capitals, and then, smaller, the name of a university.

"Anyone can read the mechanism," the professor said. "It's all there. It's written to be read. What I can tell you is that the biology is, is coherent. It hangs together. I've had it in front of me for six hours and I can't find the place where it stops making sense. I'm not saying it works. I'm saying nobody's found the reason it wouldn't."

"So it's real," the presenter said.

"I'm saying nobody's found the reason it wouldn't."

Gavin turned round on the sofa and looked up at her, the whole body turning, as he had at the bus stop twelve years back, when she had thought it was boyish.

"What d'you think?"

"I don't know."

"Come on. What d'you think."

She had read it forty times since the stockroom. On her break, and at the till between customers, and on the bus, and in the downstairs toilet at home with the door locked, once more, all the way through, slowly, and then the fourth line on its own, and then the seventh. Deliberate harm to a human body or mind. Mind. They'd put mind in.

"I think," Ruth said, "that if it's real, then next Thursday there'll be a lot less people."

"Yeah." He looked at the screen. "Yeah, there will."

He went quiet, and she watched the thought come, and his mouth did a small thing.

"They'll never do it," he said. "Not all of them. Some of it's going to be, what, honest mistakes, isn't it. People who didn't know. There's got to be a." He waved the can. "They'll have thought of that."

"Line six," Ruth said.

"What?"

"Line six. An accident's not a crime. They thought of it."

He looked at her longer than he needed to, and then he turned back.

"Right," he said. "Good. Well. That's alright then."

Poppy put the last piece of the horse in, and looked at it, and started taking it apart again.

He came to bed at eleven, which was early for him, and lay on his back, and she lay on her side facing the wall with her eyes open and listened to him not sleep. Twelve years. She knew the sound of him not sleeping like she knew the boiler, and there was a noise he made, a settling, that meant he was going under, and it never came.

At ten past twelve he said, "Ruth."

"Mm."

"You awake?"

"Yes."

"The harm one. Do you think that's, like, everything. Or is it only." He stopped. The house ticked. "Is it proper harm. Like proper."

She thought about the fourth line, and the twelfth, and about a Thursday.

"I don't know, Gav."

"No." He breathed out. "No. Nobody does, do they."

He turned over, away from her. After a bit she heard the settling noise, and then he was asleep, and she lay with her eyes open and did the sum again from the start, as she had on the bus. Six days. Six days and then a Thursday. And then every day after that, for the rest of her life, or his, whichever, in a house where the seventh line was the law, and the ninth line was the law as well.

Failing to act is not an act.

She had not read that one forty times. She had read it once, in the stockroom, and put the sandwich down, and had not needed it again.

She got up quiet, as she had learned to, and went and stood in Poppy's doorway, and Poppy slept like a dropped thing, arms out, and the horse jigsaw was on the floor by the bed in a hundred pieces for tomorrow.

Ruth stood there a long time.

Then she went down in the dark and sat at the kitchen table with the light off, and did nothing at all.