Chương 11: The Gate to the Tiers

The gate didn't have a handle. It didn't have a panel either, or a seam I could get a nail behind, or any of the honest hardware a working door has to let you open it. It was a slab of clearance twice my height, set into a wall that gave nothing back, and it stood there like the rest of that maintained level, made for the people who counted, and made to look straight through anyone who didn't. I put my hand flat against it anyway.

The half-open grip in my arm wouldn't let the fingers settle flat; they stood a little off the cold, as they'd stood off everything since the shaft. I read the gate through the heel of my palm. [Request denied. No clearance class on record for this asset.] Same blue as the arches downstairs, the same drawer pulled open and found to hold no slot my shape fit. The difference was the arches had only been counting me. This one said it to my face.

"There's a way around," Sefa said. She'd set her back to the gate and her eyes on the corridor we'd climbed; the sensible arrangement, watch the dark that might still hold the thing that watched.

"There's always a way around. Down two, cut the freight side, back up. Long. But it's there."

"Not for me, it isn't." Down two and over was back into the counted ground, back under the arches that had spent all morning learning my outline. Down was a held breath I couldn't take again.

"Objection logged," Errata said.

"For the record, and for whatever a record's worth to a thing that's about to forge one against itself. Read it fast. Every breath you stand here it draws a cleaner picture of the noise where a person ought to be." The dry went clinical.

"And you won't find a back door this time. I already looked."

"There's always a back door."

"Downstairs, there was. They built those decks when building a thing still meant leaving yourself a way in to fix it; rust doesn't check your class. Up here they stopped trusting their own techs and paved the service paths over. This is clearance to the bone. No honest way under it."

"Then the dishonest way."

"Then the front, and you're not going to enjoy living in the half-second it gives you. A handshake like this one trusts itself before it trusts you: it asks who you are and believes the asking a beat before it checks the answer, because in a hall full of people who matter the question was only ever manners." The snark thinned into the clean register she keeps for when my hands matter more than her opinion of them.

"Lie to it in that beat. Be a class. Long enough to be through, and not one breath past."

"And after the beat?"

"After, it checks, finds it shook hands with nobody, and writes the nobody down somewhere it can't reach yet. We'll argue about the somewhere later, preferably somewhere with a second way out." I read the front of the lock as I'd never let myself read a door before. In the blast-door, a life ago, I'd gone under the thing, slid beneath the part that checked your class into the old service path the builders left for people like me. There was no under, here. They'd sealed the honest way and left only the proud one.

So I went straight into the lock's face, into the half-second where it held its hand out into the dark and waited, certain, to be told whose hand had taken it. To lie I had to know the truth's shape first: what a class felt like from the inside, the clean confident outline of a thing the System kept a drawer for. I'd spent a whole life being the opposite of that, a smudge it slid its eye past and never filed.

I built the shape anyway, out of the same boxes that had been refusing me since dawn: took the grammar they were written in and wore it, for half a second, like it had always been mine. I tried not to notice how little it cost me to do it. That was a thing to be afraid of on a deck where I had time to be afraid. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. I gave the gate a class, and the gate believed the asking. It didn't announce it.

It didn't welcome me, or tell me to proceed, or do any of the warm bureaucratic theater the smaller doors performed. The slab simply stopped being a wall, unsticking from its frame and hauling up into the dark overhead with the ease of a thing that had decided I belonged and never once thought to wonder why.

"It took it," Errata said, and the dry had a hairline running through it.

"Carole. It took it. It thinks you're allowed." Then, recovering, brisk:"For the record, the gate stood open when we arrived. We assumed an invitation. We are polite, law-abiding nobodies, and this did not occur."

"Go," I told Sefa. She went low and quick under the rising lip while it still cleared her by feet, small and warren-quick, certain of the gap. On the far side she turned and looked back at me through the gap, not at the gate, the way she'd stared at the blast-door, but at me, with something I had no second to spare for reading. I followed.

The slab came down behind us into its seat with a weight I felt through my boots, final as a stamp coming down, and the deck I'd lived my whole life beneath was on the wrong side of a door I'd lied my way past.

"The kid's got the right reflexes for a place that wants to drop on her," Errata observed.

"Shame about the company she keeps." The corridor on this side went up. Not a deck but a ramp, a pale clean grade climbing toward light that came from fixtures built to be admired, into air with the scrubbed nothing-smell of a place that had never in its life had to make do. At the gate, all this had still been something I was looking at. Now I was in it, and there was no looking at a thing you were standing in the middle of. [Anomaly profile: 16/100. Access event unresolved: no class on record.]"There it is," Errata said.

"The handshake came round to check, and it can't find the class it let through, because there wasn't one. It can't find you. So it's done what it does with a hole in its own records, flagged the hole and gone looking for the shape that fits it." Level, flat, every joke stripped out of it, and that flatness was the warning.

"Sixteen. And that one didn't come off a kill or a part. It came off the lie. You'll find the lie is the dear kind." Sefa kept her back to the wall up here too, except this wall was clean, and she touched it and took her hand away and touched it again, like she didn't trust it not to be wet.

"Never been up," she said. Not frightened but affronted, a kid finding out the world kept floors nobody had let her stand on.

"Whole life under it. Never once up."

"Don't touch anything that lights." I didn't tell her it would be all right. I had no figure for it, she'd have heard the lie under the words, and a kid who'd run my decks this long knew I didn't spend a lie on comfort when I'd just burned my good one on a gate. I stood at the foot of that bright climbing hall and felt the size of the thing settle onto me. Down was sealed.

Down was where I knew every seam, where I could have gone grey and still for a year, except they were emptying the dark a deck at a time, and I was written now into a building that had run out of dark to lose me in. Up was the one direction left that I'd chosen instead of been driven into.

"Up," I said.

"Up is where they keep the things that look for us," Errata said, and didn't reach for the joke that should have come after.

"The arches were the building noticing you. Up there is where the noticing lives, where a thing with a class and a purpose reads the flag this gate just raised and comes down to see what raised it. You're walking toward the eye. You know that."

"I know." A silence, and then, quieter, as if she had heard her own sentence played back:"... Us. I said us." She didn't take it back. I started up the hall the System had built for its betters. Sefa came after me, because down was sealed and I was the thing in her sightline most likely to still be moving in an hour. That was the whole of what we were to each other. It was enough to climb on.