4308.275 · October 1, 1988 AD
The Verdict in the Chamber
In the candlelit chamber, the door opens and the Strangler returns. He tells Violet why she is here, and the reason is so small it nearly breaks her — a collision in the rain, an object dropped, a girl who became a liability by accident. She fights him. She does not stop fighting. Her last word is her sister's name. The candles burn on.
The door opened and James Brown walked in.
He moved the way he always moved — without hurry, without hesitation — and the candlelight caught his face as he crossed the threshold. Violet saw him clearly and the recognition completed itself at last: the man from the arcade, the shadow in the Silver Queen, the voice in her bedroom. All of them the same man. He stood before her with his hands at his sides and his eyes holding the flat attention of someone for whom this was simply the next thing to be done.
He told her why she was here. The explanation was mundane and monstrous in equal measure. The arcade. The rainstorm. The collision in the crowd. An object had fallen from his pocket when she stumbled into him — small, metallic, its surface shifting strangely in the candlelight when he produced it from his coat. He called it a Portal Key and spoke of what it did with a reverence that cracked his composure open, revealing underneath a fervour closer to mania than anything Violet had encountered in the twelve days since the investigation began. He spoke of Clivilius, of passage between worlds, of his role as Guardian. The words were enormous and the reason behind them was tiny. She had bumped into a stranger in the rain. Something had fallen. She had become a loose end.
The absurdity of it was worse than the terror. Every thread she had followed since the newspaper blew into her path — Sally's journal, the anonymous letter, Clarke, Glasson, the Silver Queen, the glow in the scrub — all of it had been secondary. The primary reason she was chained to a stone floor was an accident in a crowd.
She told him so. He told her ignorance was no excuse, and the way he said it made clear that the verdict had been passed long before the trial began.
He circled her. The candle flames bent as he passed, and the shadows on the walls bent with them. Violet tracked him with her eyes because she had decided, somewhere beneath the fear, that she would not give him the satisfaction of looking away. She was terrified. She was also furious. The two things burned together in her chest and she let them burn, because the alternative was to lie on the stone and wait for what was coming, and a Dallow did not do that.
Her mother's voice reached her from somewhere deep in memory. A Dallow never breaks. The words had been spoken so many times across so many years that they had become part of her the way her bones were part of her, structural rather than decorative, and she drew on them now with everything she had left.
She told him he was wrong. That he did not know her. The words shook but they held.
He told her she would break. They all did.
She told him never.
His hands closed around her throat, and the world contracted to the pressure. Cold fingers, steady, experienced, the grip of a man who had done this before and who knew exactly how much force was required. Her airway collapsed. Her lungs were denied the next breath. She clawed at his wrists, kicked against the stone, arched her spine against the chains, and the metal rattled through the chamber with a sound like something breaking.
Her vision narrowed. The candle flames blurred, doubled, dissolved. The edges of the world bled to black and the black advanced inward, closing over everything except a diminishing circle of amber light at the centre.
The faces came in the order a dying mind chose for them. Her father. Her mother. Her friends. Each one vivid, specific, and unbearable. And then Jasmine — her smile, her laughter, the locket warm against her chest, the promise that Violet would always come back.
Her last breath carried her sister's name. It was barely a sound — more vibration than voice, forced through a throat that could no longer produce speech — but it existed in the chamber's air for a moment before the silence took it.
Then the silence took everything.
James Brown released his grip and stepped back. His breathing was steady. The work was complete. He looked at what lay on the stone floor — the body of a girl who had fought him harder than most — and then he turned away, because what remained was no longer the thing that had interested him.
The chamber settled into stillness. The candles burned lower. The shadows stilled. The air, which had been disturbed by struggle, grew heavy and quiet again.
