Edvane Stories

Lysand DaVivi received the warrant from Orpheus at eleven minutes past midnight. It came folded twice, sealed with the grey strip used for ordinary relocations, which meant the subject was expected to cooperate. Orpheus slid it across the desk.

“Ric Mank,” he said. “Municipal records. Continuity through reassignment.”

Lysand placed the warrant inside his coat. The office provided him with two meals per shift, clean gloves, weatherproof boots and a room overlooking the eastern viaduct. In return, he carried inconvenient people out of their lives.

Mank lived alone above a shuttered stationery shop. He opened the door before Lysand knocked, wearing an oversized coat and holding a small leather case.

“I have three objects,” he said.

Lysand inspected them beneath the hall lamp. A brass ruler, a photograph of two women standing beside a fountain, and a municipal service medal engraved with Mank’s former title.

“The medal is inadmissible.”

“I served twenty-one years.”

“The title has been withdrawn.”

Mank looked down at it for several seconds, then placed it on the table beside the door. His fingers remained there for a moment after he let go.

The error had been minor. Mank had copied an obsolete district designation into a public register, briefly revealing that seven streets officially cleared twenty years earlier remained occupied. The register had been corrected by noon, but Ric’s life required longer as far as Streindarke was concerned.

They crossed the city on foot. Mank asked whether his annuity would follow him, whether his new rooms would have heat, and whether correspondence from his sisters would be redirected. Lysand answered only where the warrant allowed. At the residence block, Custodian Hansa waited beneath a yellow lamp. She checked Ric’s case, signed the transfer receipt and handed him a card bearing another name.

“You will find gratitude assists settlement,” she told him.

Mank turned back before the door closed. “Do people ever return?”

Lysand had been asked before. He gave the approved response. “That question has no authorised answer.”

Hansa led Ric inside. Lysand stood beneath the yellow glow until the lock engaged, then returned to the Night Relocation Office to collect his next warrant.

◆ ◆ ◆

Janet Steven did not open the door until Lysand announced the authority he presented with. When she finally admitted him, she was barefoot but fully dressed, with her greying hair pinned neatly behind her head. The rooms smelled of burnt paper, because she had destroyed some of the evidence herself, though not enough to alter the warrant.

“You took your time,” she said.

Lysand removed his gloves and began the inspection. The household register named Janet as childless. The walls disagreed. Pencil marks climbed the kitchen door-frame, each dated in a careful hand. A pair of small shoes had been hidden beneath the bed. School exercises were folded inside a loose panel beside the stove. Behind the sitting-room mirror he found a photograph of Janet with one arm around a dark-haired boy who looked a little too solemn for his age.

“These articles are prohibited,” Lysand said.

“He was eleven when they took him.”

“The register contains no such person.”

“The register never kissed him goodnight.”

Lysand placed the shoes and papers in the sack whose contents were destined for destruction, while Janet watched. She wanted to plead but showed no emotion until he reached for the photograph. She grabbed his wrist. Not strongly, but it stopped him. “They told me silence would preserve what remained,” she said. “Then they removed what remained.”

Lysand freed his hand gently. “You have been classified as unable to adjust to corrected circumstances.”

“I adjusted for nine years. It made no difference.”

Unlike Ric Mank, she was not permitted a case. Lysand escorted her through the streets of the lower wards and into the service passages beneath the civic quarter. She asked no questions until they reached the underground carriage, with its blacked-out windows.

“Will I see him?”

“I do not know where he is, Miss Steven.”

“That was not my question.”

The carriage conveyed them beyond the districts marked on public maps. At the receiving station, Custodian Hansa waited beside an iron door. She removed Janet’s coat, searched its lining and crossed her name from the warrant before Lysand had signed the transfer. The photograph lay among the confiscated belongings. Hansa examined it for a moment, then slipped it into her own ledger rather than the furnace chute.

Janet saw it. “My son’s name was David,” she said loudly.

Hansa opened the iron door. “Names are often the final symptom,” she replied. Janet repeated his full name as they took her through. The door closed before the third syllable had finished echoing.

Back at the office, Orpheus approved both relocations and issued Lysand his meal token. The soup was hot. His room remained his own. For a few minutes, he always thought it sufficient.

◆ ◆ ◆

Orpheus issued the third warrant when the office clocks were moving towards three. It bore no district colour and had been folded beneath a black retaining strip, the sort used when a relocation had been added after the night’s routes were settled.

“There is no receiving delay,” he said. “You will take this one directly east, DaVivi.”

Lysand accepted the warrant unopened. The subject’s name was concealed beneath the destination seal, a precaution reserved for cases involving attachment, influence or prior acquaintance. Orpheus watched him place it inside his coat, then returned his attention to the ledger.

The address belonged to a quiet street near the old concert halls, where every doorway carried the same brass civic number and every curtain had been drawn to the approved height. Samson Le Bon answered before Lysand reached for the bell. He was a tall man, wearing evening clothes, and composed enough to suggest that he had spent several hours preparing to be observed.

The warrant permitted no discussion in the doorway. Lysand entered, removed his gloves and broke the first seal.

The name beneath it was Canto Barbi.

She stood at the far end of the hall with one hand resting on the bannister. Time had altered her face without making it unfamiliar. Her hair was shorter, her bearing quieter, and the dress she wore belonged to a life of respectable dinners in well-heated apartments. Lysand felt recognition enter his mind with none of the violence he might once have imagined. It was too complete for surprise. He read the charge from the warrant.

Persistent retrospective attachment.

Repeated visits to restricted locations.

Improper inquiries concerning a former civic association.

Conduct tending towards instability within the present household.

Canto listened, while Samson remained beside the door, his expression neither wounded nor indignant. He had known enough, Lysand realised, though perhaps never the whole of it. She was permitted a coat, one case and three personal objects. Canto chose a plain purse, a small silver comb and a room key whose number had been filed away. Nothing in the case suggested the years she had spent with Samson. No portrait, no letter, nor token of domestic life.

When Lysand asked whether she understood the order, she said that she did.

Samson asked only whether she had known which Nightporter would come. Canto answered that she had not known. She had merely continued until the city was forced to send someone. Outside, the rain had begun. Lysand opened the second seal beneath the streetlamp and found the destination printed in red.

Canto watched him read it. “Do you know where they are taking me?”

For the first time that night, Lysand gave an answer not written for him. “I know where they are not.”

◆ ◆ ◆

The destination lay beyond the eastern administrative quarter, in a corrective residence whose name Lysand knew but had never visited. He folded the warrant and returned it to his coat. There was no need to tell Canto what awaited her. The red print had already done that. They followed the approved route through covered streets where the rain struck the glass roofs and ran in narrow streams towards the gutters. Streindarke was quiet at that hour, though never empty. Bakers worked behind shuttered windows. Orderlies crossed between buildings in pale coats. Other Nightporters passed at a distance with their subjects beside them, each pair moving under the pretence that nothing final was happening.

Canto kept pace, although her coat was too light for the weather, and rain had darkened the shoulders before they reached the hotel quarter. Lysand remembered another coat, hung beside a stove while water gathered beneath it. They had been younger then and had mistaken secrecy for freedom. The rooms they borrowed had seemed large enough to contain an entire life, provided neither of them looked towards the door.

“I thought you had left,” Canto said.

“I tried to find where they had taken you.”

“And when you could not?”

“I took this work.”

She looked at the insignia on his coat. For a moment he saw the office as she must see it. The clean boots, the authorised gloves, the small metal mark of a man Streindarke trusted to carry others into absence.

“The records were closed to me,” he said. “Nightporters were allowed to see more.”

“Did they?”

“Enough to keep me looking. Never enough to find you.”

The post had eventually yielded only a room, regular meals and the gradual habit of obedience. Lysand had stopped expecting to find her long before he stopped searching. Canto had been given another name, then a marriage to Samson Le Bon. She spoke of him with no bitterness. He had been decent, which made leaving harder, and he had understood that some portion of her life remained beyond his reach.

“You wanted them to notice you?” Lysand asked.

“I wanted them to move me.”

“They might have sent anyone.”

“They did.”

The answer was not an accusation. She had revisited old streets, applied for sealed records and stood beneath windows she knew were watched. She had not expected Lysand specifically. She had only tried to place herself once more inside the machinery that had carried them apart.

The route took them past the hotel where they had last been together. Its entrance had been bricked up and the upper floors divided into administrative rooms.

Canto glanced towards the blank wall. “Do you remember the room?”

“I remember the width of it. The height. The smell.”

She almost smiled.

At the relocation interchange, Custodian Hansa examined the warrant. She stared for too long at Canto, and then at Lysand. She warned him that retrospective attachment had a tendency to contaminate officers who mistook recognition for obligation. Lysand nodded, signed the passage register and continued east. He followed the official route for another quarter mile. Beneath the elevated roadway, where three service passages divided around a disused pumping station, he turned left instead of right.

Canto noticed. “This is not the way,” she said.

“Correct.”

This wrong passage grew darker, descended and swallowed the sound of the rain behind them.

◆ ◆ ◆

The passage ended at a transit station abandoned before the eastern lines were rerouted. Its ticket window had been boarded from within, and the brass letters above the door had gone green with damp. Lysand unlocked it with a key that did not belong to his official ring, and beckoned Canto to follow. She obliged and found herself in a narrow room smelling of dust and oil. A lamp stood ready on the table. When he lit it, the place revealed itself. There were tins of food stacked beneath a bench, two travel permits sealed in wax, folded maps, money in several currencies and a bundle of clothing wrapped against damp. Nothing had been placed there recently. The paper had yellowed. One of the maps bore district names Streindarke had since abolished.

Canto moved towards the pegs beside the outer door. Two coats hung there. The smaller one was dark blue, with a repaired tear beneath the right sleeve. She touched it with the tips of her fingers before turning to him.

“You kept this.”

Lysand set the warrant on the table. For years he had renewed the food, replaced expired permits and checked that the outer lock still opened. At first he had done it because he expected to find her. Later, because abandoning the room would have meant admitting that the city had completed its work. He removed the metal insignia from his coat and placed it beside the warrant.

Canto looked around at the preparations he had made for a future he no longer believed possible. Yet here was evidence of a hope that survived without either of them tending it.

“How far does the road go?” she asked.

“Beyond the eastern boundary.”

“And after that?”

“I don’t know.”

Lysand had spent years giving uncertainty to other people while keeping none for himself. Now the words felt bearable for once. Canto put on the blue coat, and it still fit her. Lysand opened the outer door. Rain moved across the empty road beyond it. Somewhere above, Streindarke continued counting, correcting and receiving.

Canto stepped outside first. Lysand followed and pulled the door closed without locking it.

This story was inspired by the song ‘Nightporter’ by Japan. If you enjoyed this Streindarke story, you may also enjoy His Pretentious Love