Three Months

I am the one who is going to commit it.

I have been carrying the number pointed the wrong way since the morning I woke. Three months, three months, a stone in a coat pocket, the distance to a thing already done, the way you hold the date of a death that has happened. And the stone is not a past at all. I turn it over in my mind and look at the front of it for the first time, and it is a future, and it has weeks in it, and the weeks are mine to spend.

I sit very still in Cosima's chair with the river going to ink outside and I do what has always kept me from coming apart, which is that I take the enormous thing and I cut it into pieces I can hold.

One: the night is not behind me. It is ahead of me. Thirteen weeks, an autumn evening, uncoloured, default grey, in a calendar I can open whenever I want, which means I can also see it coming, which is the one mercy in this, the only mercy. The dead do not get to see it coming. I am not the dead. I am the woman with the diary.

Two: the call has not been made. The lure is written but the phone has not rung. The original Talia is out there on her rails, off lately, not herself, waiting for the only call she can still answer, and the finger that has to dial it is on the end of my own arm, resting on the cold glass, not dialling. As long as I do not dial, she does not go down the stairs. As long as I do not go to the basement, there is no one at the bottom of it.

Three.

I cannot find three.

I sit there and I hunt for the third piece, the comforting one, the one that says and therefore I am safe, I simply do not make the call, and the count fails me, because the body answers it before my mind can. The hand on the glass turns itself palm up, slow, fond, a small offered gesture, and the appetite says, in the voice that is mine and is not, You won't have to dial. You'll want to. The night comes and you'll be so tired, Talia. You've no idea how tired you're going to be. And I'll be right here, rested, the way I've always been right here. You can't stay awake for weeks. I only have to win once.

I take my hand off the glass.

I have been learning, since the first itch of the label at the back of my neck, that the body is a country I am occupying and not a country I own. I know its routes and its grips and the espresso it reaches for and the cruelty it leans toward, and I have learned to hold all of it off by main force, for an hour, for a meeting, for thirty seconds with my back to a wall. But that was the war I thought I was fighting, a war of mornings, a war of one hard hour at a time. This is a different war and the sleeper has just told me the shape of it, plainly, the way Elliot lays a page on a table. She does not need to beat me every hour. She needs to beat me once, on one night, thirteen weeks out, when I am tired enough to let the hand dial. She has all the patience in the world and nowhere else to be, and I have to win every single day between now and then, and she only has to win the last one.

That is not a fight I can win by holding still.

So I stop holding still.

I open my eyes and look at the grey entry, my own name in the founder's diary, and instead of the dread, which is no use to me, which is exactly the tiredness she is counting on, I make myself do the cold thing, the Talia thing, the thing I did to Lantern when it would not work: I treat it as a system, and I ask what it needs to run. The murder is not a moment. It is a machine with parts. A call has to be placed to a junior who will come. A reason has to exist for her to come, a problem with the Lantern files, just us, no one else. A place has to be waiting, the old riverside studio, the basement, the stairs. A notebook has to be carried down to make the lure ring true. Take away any one part and the machine does not turn.

And I am sitting on most of the parts.

I am the one who would make the call. I am the founder who would invent the problem with the files. The notebook is not even in my hands anymore, Damien carried it out under his arm, which I cursed all afternoon and which I see now, with the floor going steady under me, which it has not done since the glass room, may be the most useful thing that has happened. The lure is in the wrong building, in the wrong man's possession. And the basement, the old studio across the river, I know where it is, the feet know where it is, I could walk it in the dark, which means I could also, in daylight, with a founder's authority and a founder's chequebook, do something to it that a victim never could.

I could take the room away.

The thought arrives clean and bright and entirely mine, and I sit with it to be sure, because the appetite has a gift for handing me Talia-shaped thoughts with Cosima's fingerprints on them. But no. This one is mine all the way down. There is no cruelty in it, no daylight burn, no empire. There is just a junior designer looking at a broken system and reaching, the way she always reaches, not for the part that screams but for the quiet part that everything else depends on, and pulling it.

I open the property records the body knows the login for. Halcyon still holds the lease on the old riverside studio, a sentimental dead cost, the founder's birthplace, kept for the documentary B-roll and the founder's myth. Mine to end. Mine to gut. Mine to fill with builders and skips and noise and witnesses from now until winter, so that on a grey autumn evening there is no quiet basement to meet anyone in, only a site with a key safe and a foreman and lights that stay on. You cannot do a private murder in a building full of strangers in hi-vis. You cannot lure a woman to a stairwell that is a building site.

I phone facilities first, because a founder who wants a thing done tonight does not wait for email, and the cello does it sweet and fluent and unanswerable, the heritage studio, refurbished, begin immediately, spare no cost, I'll put it in writing, get me a foreman by morning. The man on the other end says yes the way they all say yes to the founder, and I hang up, and I open the email to confirm it in writing, and I let the cello pour that out too, because for once the founder's voice and the junior's want point the same way and I do not have to fight my own mouth. I am the most public face in the city and I am about to spend the company's money to do up the room where I am scheduled to die, and the irony of it is so large and so dark that I laugh, one note, in the empty office, and somewhere under my breastbone the appetite does not laugh, which is how I know I have found a real move.

And then the appetite stops being still.

It does not argue. That is the thing I will think about later, in the dark, with the dog two rooms away. It does not say don't, does not pull my hand off the keys, does not raise the cold clean want it raised over the Delete key. It simply, quietly, the way you turn a key you have had in your pocket the whole time, reaches past me, and the hand finishes the email I did not finish, and adds a line I did not write, in the founder's brisk warm voice, to the founder's facilities lead, under the founder's name.

And of course, do hold the basement. We'll want one room kept as it is. For the film.

I read it three times. For the film. Petra's film, the documentary, the founder's birthplace, the one room we keep untouched for the cameras, a perfectly reasonable, perfectly public, perfectly defensible reason to leave one quiet basement room exactly as it is on a grey autumn evening a season from now. The sleeper has not fought my plan. She has improved it. She has let me gut the building and keep the murder room, and dressed the keeping in a reason the whole world will applaud, and she did it in my own hand while I was congratulating myself on a clever move, and the cursor is sitting after the word film, blinking, waiting for me to press send on an email I half wrote and she half wrote and neither half of which I can now untangle from the other.

You see, the appetite says, fond, patient, not unkind, the worst thing she has ever sounded. We're rather good at this together. You'll dig it out, this part, the way I dug out you. And then you'll be tired, and you'll keep the one room, because you'll have a reason, you'll always have a reason, and the reason will be true. That's how I did all of it, Talia. Every single thing. I never once had to lie. I just kept the room.

I take my hand off the mouse. I put both palms flat on the cold glass, the anchor, the only ground I trust, and I read the email I cannot prove I did not mean, and the cursor blinks after the word she gave me, and out in the corridor, soft on the carpet, coming closer, a key card beeps the eleventh-floor door, and a voice I do know, that I have loved and lost and live beside, says my wrong name into the dark like he is checking a room he is afraid is empty.

"Cosima? You're still here. Facilities just rang my phone in a flap, apparently I'm who they ring when they can't get you. Something about you gutting the old studio tonight, this minute, spare no cost?"

Adam is in the doorway with the prototype over his heart and the light from my screen on his face, and I have not pressed send, and I cannot tell him that the half of the email that keeps the murder room was written by the woman he is going to marry, with the hand he is about to take.