The Frequency of the Dead – Chapter 17
Running in the Dark
Days eight and nine were spent in preparation and in finding Petra. This came first, before any plan for the relay station, because Mira had decided — with a stubbornness she recognized as her own particular brand of ethics — that she would not attempt to expose the archive while Petra was still missing. If they took the archive first and Petra’s captors panicked, they might destroy evidence. They might destroy Petra.
It was Ost who found her. Another letter arrived — a different address this time, forwarded through a mechanism Mira didn’t understand, which arrived at the hotel where she was still staying. It contained a street name and a unit number, with three words: She is here.
Rook was skeptical. “It could be a trap. Ost is unpredictable — he sent you to Lindhaven for his own reasons, he may be sending you here for his own reasons.”
“What are his reasons, do you think?”
Rook was quiet for a moment. “I think Vilhelm Ost is a man who built something monstrous and is now, at the end of his life, trying to find a way to end it that he can live with. He’s not an ally. He’s not an enemy. He’s something in between — a man negotiating with his own history.” A pause. “That makes him unpredictable but not necessarily treacherous. He needs the archive destroyed as much as we need it exposed. The difference is we want the truth public. He wants the truth controlled.”
“Then we disagree on the outcome,” Mira said, “but we agree on the immediate step.”
She went to the address. A storage unit complex south of the city, the kind of anonymous, key-coded place that could hold anything and answered to no one’s curiosity. Unit 44. The key code — she sat with this for a moment and then tried the Julian date from the signal’s second layer, and the door opened.
Petra Sulc was inside. She was sitting on an air mattress, wrapped in a thermal blanket, reading a book by the light of a camping lantern. She looked up when the door opened with the expression of someone who had decided that continued calm was the only dignified response to an undignified situation. She was thinner. Her silver-black hair was disheveled. But she was unharmed.
“I wondered when you’d get here,” Petra said.
She had been held, she explained, by two men who had been careful not to touch her or threaten her — they had simply locked her in and left her with supplies. They had taken her equipment and then told her, on the second day, that if she made no noise and no contact, they would release her “when it was over.” This, Mira understood, meant: after day eleven, after the purge cycle, after the archive was locked permanently and the evidence was gone.
Mira helped her out into the night. Cold air, a pale sky. Petra breathed it in deliberately. “Are we stopping them?” she asked.
“We’re going to try,” Mira said.
“Good,” Petra said. “I would like very much to try.”