The place where the river bent was called Deadman’s Reach, a name left over from the days when the port handled more bodies than cargo. Finch had read about it in a municipal history of the docklands, a monograph so obscure that only three people had ever checked it out of the Archive. He had been one of them. The other two were dead now, or as good as dead, their names filed away in the catalogue of the forgotten.
He walked through streets that grew narrower and darker with each block, the sodium lamps thinning out until the only light came from the moon, a cold sliver behind racing clouds. The map was still in his coat, the photographs still encrypted on his phone, but these things no longer felt like assets. They felt like weights, dragging him down toward a place he did not want to go.
The warehouse loading bay had told him everything he needed to know about what the state was willing to do. The overturned chair. The scattered papers. The stain spreading across the concrete. He had not gone inside. He had obeyed the message on his phone, partly because he was afraid of what he would find, partly because he was afraid that whoever had sent the message knew more than he did. In the Republic of Veridia, knowledge was not power. Knowledge was a liability, and the people who possessed it had a way of being administratively removed.
Deadman’s Reach was a curve in the river where the water slowed and deposited the debris of the city: rotting timber, plastic bottles, the occasional shoe. A stone jetty extended into the black water, its surface slick with algae. At the end of the jetty, a figure stood motionless, looking out at the river.
Finch approached slowly, his footsteps loud on the wet stone. The figure did not turn.
“You came,” the figure said. The voice was male, rough, the voice of a man who had been speaking to himself for too long.
“You sent me the message.”
“I sent you the message. I also sent you the note under your door. The one about the bones.” The man turned, and Finch saw his face clearly for the first time. He was perhaps sixty, with a face that had been handsome once and was now simply weathered, the skin tanned and lined from years of outdoor work. His eyes were pale blue and watchful. “My name is Elias Crane.”
The name hit Finch like cold water. Elias Crane. The researcher. The man who had been detained for three years in the Blackwood Centre. The man Helena had tried and failed to contact. The man who, according to every account Finch had heard, had been broken by the state and was now living in silence in a hardware shop in Ketterdam.
“You are supposed to be in Ketterdam,” Finch said.
“I am supposed to be a great many things. A scholar. A husband. A man with a future. None of them turned out to be true.” Crane pulled a cigarette from his coat and lit it, the match flaring briefly in the darkness. “Helena Mire told me you had found the boxes. She called me two days ago. I told her I would not speak to you. Then I changed my mind.”
“Helena is in trouble.”
“Helena is in more trouble than you know. But she is alive. For now.” Crane drew on the cigarette, the tip glowing orange. “The blood in the warehouse is not hers. It belongs to a man named Viktor Sorin. He was a source of hers, a former guard at the Blackwood Centre. Someone found him before she could. The blood is a warning. She has gone into hiding. I do not know where.”
Finch felt something loosen in his chest, a knot of terror he had been carrying since he knelt at the loading bay. Helena was alive. But the state had reached her source, had silenced him, and the blood on the warehouse floor was proof of what they were capable of.
“Why did you change your mind?” Finch asked. “Helena said you refused to speak to her for years.”
Crane was silent for a moment, staring out at the river. When he spoke, his voice was quieter, the roughness giving way to something that sounded like grief.
“Because I have spent twenty years being afraid. Twenty years working in a hardware shop, pretending I had never been a scholar, pretending I had never found what I found. I let them take my life from me, piece by piece. My thesis. My freedom. My wife, who divorced me while I was in detention because she could not bear the visits, the searches, the questions. I let them take everything, and I told myself it was survival. But it was not survival. It was a slow death. And when Helena told me you had found the boxes, I realised that I have been waiting for someone to finish what I started. Someone who would not be afraid.”
“I am afraid,” Finch said.
“Good. Fear is sensible. But do not let it stop you.” Crane dropped the cigarette and ground it under his heel. “The Blackwood Centre. You need to understand what it is. It is not just a detention centre. It is a monument. The state built it in 1975 on the site of the largest Aethonian burial pit. They built it to cover the evidence. But the detainees have seen things. When the ground shifts, when the rains come, things come to the surface. Bones. Fragments of clothing. A child’s shoe. The guards collect them and destroy them. But some of the detainees have kept records.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I was one of them.” Crane turned to face him, and his eyes were hard. “I spent three years in Blackwood, Dr. Finch. I saw the bones. I saw the guards carry them away in black bags. I saw detainees who asked too many questions taken to the isolation wing and returned broken, or not returned at all. The Blackwood Centre is a crime scene. It has been a crime scene for fifty years. And the people who run it are the same people who signed the execution warrants in 1962. Their names have changed, but the bloodlines have not.”
Finch thought of the map in his coat, the red crosses marking the mass graves. He thought of the double cross west of the Aethon Valley, the site Craven had told him about. The site where the state had built something large enough to deter anyone from digging.
“The Blackwood Centre,” he said. “That is the double cross.”
“Yes. The largest of the pits. The state poured concrete over it and called it a foundation.” Crane reached into his coat and withdrew a folded piece of paper. “This is a list of names. Detainees who have been held in Blackwood for more than two years without a hearing. Some of them have seen the bones. Some of them have kept records. One of them, a man named Karim Bashir, has been documenting the site for a decade. He is a geologist by training. He knows how to read the soil, how to date the fragments. The state has kept him in detention because he knows too much.”
Finch took the paper. The names were written in a careful, cramped hand, each one a life suspended in the amber of administrative detention.
“How do I reach them?”
“You do not. Not yet. The Centre is sealed. Visitors are searched. Correspondence is monitored. The only way to get information out is through the guards, and most of the guards are bought or afraid. But there is one guard, a woman named Anya Kessel. She has been working at Blackwood for fifteen years. She has seen things that have troubled her conscience. Helena was cultivating her as a source before Sorin was killed. Kessel is now the only person inside who might be willing to talk.”
“How do I find her?”
“You do not find her. She finds you. If she thinks you are worth the risk.” Crane looked at him steadily. “But there is something else. Something you need to know before you go any further.”
“What?”
“The third signature. The one that is smudged on the execution warrants. Craven told you it belonged to Aldric Mire.”
“Yes.”
“Aldric Mire was not just Helena’s grandfather. He was the founder of the Interior Section. He designed the Aethonian clearance. He wrote the memorandum that recommended the extermination. He was the architect of everything the state has spent sixty years trying to hide.” Crane paused. “And Helena knows. She has always known. Her father told her before he died. She has spent her entire adult life trying to atone for what her grandfather did. That is why she became a journalist. That is why she pursued this story. Not because she wanted to expose the state. Because she wanted to expose her own blood.”
Finch felt the ground shift beneath him. Helena had known. All along, through every conversation, every warning, every carefully chosen word, she had been carrying the weight of her grandfather’s crimes. And she had not told him.
“Why did she not tell me?”
“Shame. Guilt. The fear that you would judge her for what her grandfather did before she was born. The same reason any of us hide the things we are most ashamed of.” Crane’s voice softened. “She is not her grandfather, Dr. Finch. She is the opposite of her grandfather. But she is still a Mire. And in this country, names matter more than truth.”
The river lapped against the jetty, black water on black stone. Finch stared out at the city lights reflected in the water, and he understood that the story he had stumbled into was older and deeper than he had imagined. It was not just about the murder of twelve hundred people. It was about the murder of the truth itself, and the complicity of everyone who had looked away, and the terrible weight carried by those who had looked back and tried to make it right.
“What do I do now?” Finch asked.
“You go to the Blackwood Centre. Not as a visitor. As a detainee.”
The words hung in the air between them. Finch turned to look at Crane, and the older man’s face was completely serious.
“The only way to get the evidence out is from the inside. The state will detain you eventually. Varga has made that clear. You have forty-eight hours before the offer of the declaration expires, and after that, they will find a reason to arrest you. If you are going to be detained, you might as well be detained on your own terms, in a place where the evidence is.”
“How do I get myself detained in Blackwood?”
“The same way I was. The same way Karim Bashir was. The state has a provision for that. Section 47 of the Immigration Security Act. It allows for the indefinite detention of anyone deemed a threat to public order. The definition of threat is flexible. All it takes is a complaint from a government agency.” Crane looked at him steadily. “VIDA has already opened an investigation into you. It would not take much to escalate that investigation into a detention order. If you push them, if you refuse to sign the declaration and make it clear you intend to publish what you have found, they will detain you. And when they do, you will be inside Blackwood. Inside the crime scene. Close to Bashir, and Kessel, and the bones.”
Finch thought about what Crane was proposing. It was madness. It was a calculated, desperate madness that required him to walk willingly into the maw of the machine that had destroyed Crane’s life and a dozen others. But it was also the only plan that made sense. The evidence was inside Blackwood. The witnesses were inside Blackwood. And the state was going to put him there anyway, one way or another.
“You are asking me to sacrifice my freedom.”
“I am asking you to use your detention. To make it mean something. To do what I could not do.” Crane’s voice cracked slightly. “I spent three years in that place, and I did nothing. I kept my head down. I survived. And I have spent every day since wishing I had done more. Do not make my mistake, Dr. Finch. If you are going to go into the dark, go with your eyes open. And bring something back with you.”
Finch folded the list of names and put it in his pocket beside the map. The two documents seemed to belong together, the dead of 1962 and the living of the present, their fates intertwined across six decades.
“Where is Helena?” he asked.
“I told you. I do not know.”
“You are lying.”
Crane was silent for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. “She is in a safe house in the northern moors, not far from Craven’s cottage. She is scared, and she is hurt, but she is alive. She wanted to come tonight. I told her it was too dangerous. The state is watching her more closely than they are watching you. If you are detained, you may not be able to contact her for some time. Is there a message you want me to give her?”
Finch thought about what he wanted to say. He thought about the grandfather, the smudged signature, the sixty years of lies. And he thought about Helena’s face in the warehouse, the terror in her eyes, the weight she had carried alone for so long.
“Tell her that I know,” he said. “Tell her that it does not matter. Tell her that we are not our grandfathers. And tell her that I will see her when this is over.”
Crane nodded. “I will tell her.”
He turned to leave, then paused. “One more thing. The note under your door, the one about the bones. I did not send that. Someone else is watching you, Dr. Finch. Someone inside the system. Someone who wants the truth to come out as much as you do. Be careful. Not everyone who helps you is your friend. And not everyone who is your friend can help you.”
He walked away into the darkness, and his footsteps faded, and Finch was alone on the jetty, the river sliding past in the dark, carrying its cargo of secrets toward the sea.
He pulled out his phone and looked at the screen. No messages. No calls. The city was asleep, or pretending to be. Somewhere in the Interior Ministry, a report was being written. Somewhere in VIDA, Sonya Varga was preparing her next move. Somewhere in the northern moors, Helena was waiting for news.
And somewhere beneath the Blackwood Immigration Removal Centre, the bones of the dead were stirring in the dark, waiting for someone to speak their names.
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