Chương 13: Impossible

Forty meters of patience ended the moment the thing behind us decided we'd come far enough. It quit the edges of the dark and walked into the last of the Tier light and stood between me and the runner's mark, and let me look. The factory wardens never let you look; they came on dull and certain and died of it. This one wanted the half-second that reading it would cost me, and spent nothing to give it.

"Behind me," I told Sefa, flat.

"There's no behind," she said, low, not arguing, counting.

"There's no door, either." A kid who'd stayed alive knowing where the small dark was, telling me there wasn't any. I'd had the size wrong. It was small, built like a blade, every part of it shaped for the cut. The cheap units wore their rushed seams like old scars; this one wore none I could find. Plating flush. Joints quiet. The chest-grille seated clean over its sensor core because nobody had been in a hurry to stamp it. Down home the grille smiled. This one had never been rushed enough to smile. It just watched.

"... That isn't line work," Errata said, and the dry had gone out of her voice.

"Nobody rushed this. Somebody slowed down on it." A pause where a joke usually lived.

"I don't have one for slowed-down. I would like one. I would like one quite badly." I went for the gap the only way I had. I watched it move and waited for the tell: the cycle to count, the clamp run hot, the half-beat a build gives up because it was cut to a quota and quotas don't buy grace. It didn't give me one. It read me instead. When I shifted my weight it had already turned to where the weight would take me; when I baited left it didn't chase, it settled where the bait meant I'd go.

The factory things chased. This one solved, and every sum came out at me a half-step early, and I understood, with the cold I get right before a thing goes wrong, that it was better than I was at the one trick I owned.

"It's not biting," I said.

"It doesn't have to bite. It's already got you on paper. Every clever move you make is one more line of the proof," Errata said, fast.

"And before you spend four seconds being impressed: if you die on this threshold I get swept up with the loose stock and filed somewhere with a very poor view. Our interests have never aligned this well. So MOVE." I moved, and it cost me the Veyr to do it. I leaned on the regulator to throw a hard vent and break its line; the clamp gave the knock it had promised me for two days, louder, uglier, a sound I'd handed straight to a thing that listened for sounds. It re-found me off the noise before my foot came down.

"It's already on the new line. It always will be. You don't have the legs for this. You've got one lie left in the tank, the good one, the one that slipped its sweep on the concourse. Don't spend it being clever." We weren't going to out-fight it. I'd known that since it let me look.

"Then what," I said.

"Then stop fighting the thing it's good at. New plan. I'd like my objection minuted before we both regret it."

"It's good at all of it."

"It's good at being sure. A cheap build hedges; this one won't: it's too well-made to flinch, and the better the hand, the harder it bets the whole pot on the read. So give it the read. Be exactly where it knows you'll be." Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

"And die exactly where it knows I'll be."

"No. In the half-beat it's certain, it stops checking. That's the seam, the only one a careful build can't help leaving, because the care is what makes it sure. Sell it the shot. Then don't be the shot." So I gave it me. I broke for the dark past its shoulder along the one line a cornered thing takes, the line its arithmetic wanted, and felt it commit, all of it pouring into one certain shot at the place I was going to be.

"Now. All of it's forward. Don't flinch first." Then I wasn't going there. I spent the lie. I threw the Veyr the other way with everything left in it; the coolant dumped my heat-shape into the air in a gout that stopped being a signature and became only noise, and something inside the part tore past mending to pay for it. For half a beat I was nothing it could read. For half a beat it fired into a Carole-shaped certainty that wasn't there, and didn't check, because nothing made that well knows how to doubt itself.

I put the kinetic discharge into the clean grille over its core from a hand's length out. The grip wouldn't close; it hadn't closed right since the shaft, and it didn't now, and the discharge tore out of a hand locked half-open and took the feeling in my arm out with it. [Host integrity: 44%. Continued operation not advised.] The careful thing came apart at the one place it had never thought to armor, because nothing armors the part it trusts most.

It folded without drama, all at once, nothing left over: the failure of a well-made thing, total and then done. The quiet came back. My arm wasn't in it. The mark on the wall past the wreck was still pointing. I dug the core out of the grille before the silence finished settling. It came free clean, no rushed welds to argue with, set the way a thing is set when somebody cared about the setting. [HARVEST: Seeker-class ranging core. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 33%.]"Thirty-three," Errata said, and didn't round it down, and didn't make it a joke.

"The cheap ones read low because they're crude, nothing in them to argue with. This one isn't crude, and it still reads low. Somebody built it to go in clean." The voice dropped.

"It would just... fit. I keep reaching for glad about that. Bank it, and I'll tell you why I can't reach it when there's a wall at our backs that isn't this one." Then the meter caught up to what I'd made of myself. [Anomaly profile: 18/100. Enforcement asset offline. No correction class on record.] Eighteen. One for the kill and one for how loud I'd been doing it, on ground that watched everything. Two nearer the number Errata wouldn't say out loud, the one where the watching quit being patient.

I put it where those went: under later, under the cost of the door I was standing in. Then I turned, and Sefa wasn't looking at the wreck, or at the dark where the System's thing had gone quiet. She was looking at me. She'd watched the whole of it, watched me walk into the line a trapped person takes and then not be trapped, watched me know what a thing built to know me would do and do it to the thing first. She'd seen me move like it had moved: economical, certain, nothing in me that wasn't for the cut.

There was awe in it, and I'd have taken the awe. Under the awe sat the other thing: the small, still math behind the eyes of someone working out, quietly, exactly what you are. A kid learning the size of the teeth on the thing that had been keeping her alive. I clocked it and set it aside with the rest. I said none of the things that would have made her stop looking at me like that.

The things that would have worked were warm, and I'd handed her nothing warm yet, and I wasn't going to start on a threshold with my arm hanging dead off my shoulder.

"You're not like the people in the hold," she said. She wasn't asking. She'd found the word for me before I had one.

"Are you." I went to the marker without answering, because the marker was a door and the question wasn't one, and because I had no answer that was both true and kind and only room to carry the one.

"She's not wrong," Errata said, gentle now, for once not selling a thing.

"File it under later. We've got a wall full of later, and a door in front of it."