Chương 15: Unremarkable

I spent my first full day in the hold trying to be furniture, and failing at it the way you fail at a thing you were once expert in. Being unseen had been my whole career. Thirty-one years of it: be the hand that fixes the leak, be too small to bill, be the gray nothing the shift-boss steps around. I knew how to take up no room at all. But you cannot be furniture with a lamp lit under your skin.

The seam in my forearm threw its faint cold light through the cloth every time the drum-fires guttered, and every time it did, some patch of the dark went quiet and then, carefully, busy, people finding work that faced the other way. I'd walk a corridor and it would open ahead of me and close behind, every room finding somewhere else to be. So when Renn waved me over to the corner the hold called the clinic: a bench, a lamp wired off the nearest drum-fire, a man with clean hands.

I went, because at least at the bench there was a reason for someone to be looking at me. He had my arm across his knee before I'd quite agreed to it, sleeve pushed past the elbow, both thumbs walking the seam where the core sat under the skin. He worked like Tam worked the reclaim stack: as if the machine in front of him were the honest part, and only the people were complicated.

"Whatever you put in here, it's winning," he said. Not a question.

"Hold still." I held still. I'd had hands on me before: the System's cold clinical kind, Sefa's hauling kind, my own, which fixed the thing and never once felt it. Renn's were a third kind. He pressed slow along the scar-line, found each place the metal had argued with the flesh and the flesh had lost, and didn't hurry past a single one. A man taking an inventory he meant to act on. He paused at the forearm, where the Veyr seam ran hot.

"This one's new. And it isn't healing like the rest. It isn't really trying to."

"It's load-bearing," I said.

"It doesn't get to heal. It gets to work."

"Mm." He didn't argue. He kept the inventory.

"His read is better than mine, and I live in here," Errata said, which from her amounted to a standing ovation.

"Your pulse came down eleven points the second those hands took the weight of the arm. I'm logging it as equipment fatigue. The equipment rests easier when nobody's bracing it to be hurt." The careful pause, the one she took when she had said a true thing by accident.

"The equipment does. That's the whole of the finding." Behind me the reclaim stack knocked its double note, and Tam swore at it without malice, like you swear at a thing you've kept breathing past its right to it.

"Relief seat," she said, not to me exactly.

"Still soft. I repacked it two cycles back. It laughed at me."

"Pack won't hold a seat that's lost its face," I said.

"It wants machining. Or it wants replacing."

"It wants a whole new stack. We want a lot of things." She wiped her hands down her front and looked at me a moment past what shop-talk asked for.

"Good to have a second set of eyes in here that knows what it's looking at. Even the loud kind." Then back to her machine. Nobody else all day had wanted something from me that didn't have fear in it. Someone set a cup down by my good hand without making a thing of it, warm, carrying the soft mineral tang the reclaim left in everything Tam talked into lasting one more day. A child drifted over to watch me drink it.

Six, maybe; the age that hasn't yet sorted the world into things you're allowed to be curious about and things you run from. He studied the cold light under my skin like a fish in a tank, a problem worth getting nearer to. No one taller than a water drum had looked at me that way since I'd come in.

"Does it hurt?" he asked. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

"Yes," I said, because lying to a child is how you teach him the wrong rooms are safe. He took the answer, nodded like we'd closed a fair trade, and wandered back to whatever work six-year-olds find in a place like that. And for the length of one breath the corner was only a corner: lamp, cup, careful hands, a machine breathing wrong in the dark and a woman keeping it honest. A place getting on with the ordinary work of being a place.

I felt the stillness come up around me, warm as bathwater, the way it does just before you notice you've slipped under. I caught it happening and sat up out of it before it closed over my head. Because the cup was a debt. The child would learn the flinch. They all did. And the quiet I was sitting in was eighteen-Heat quiet, which is to say borrowed, charged against a meter two short of the number Errata still wouldn't say out loud.

Somewhere past the drum-fires there was a man I hadn't forgotten from the night before, the one who'd been pricing the rest of them against whatever I'd fetch handed up. The hold's peace and the hold's danger were the same fact, looked at from two sides. I knew better than to trust either one.

"Take the water," Errata said.

"A host that accepts what's offered reads as one of the herd, and a thing that reads as one of the herd gets sold up the line slower than a thing that reads as a guest. Drinking it is sound positioning." She let that sit, then set it down lower, in case I'd missed the door she was holding open for me.

"Positioning. That's the entire reason." Renn had moved to the wrist, to the regulator's housing where the second Component sat, and his fingers found the place where it knocked.

"There," Errata said, instant, a woman pointing at the one line on the bill you'd hoped she would skip.

"That. The knock. I have a thread open on the knock. I have had it open since the freight corridor."

"I know about the knock," I said, barely aloud, for the one listener who would hear it.

"It used to wait for the third cycle. It's down to the second now. Give it a week and it will spare us the suspense and knock without stopping. I could set it right in the time this man takes to wrap a wrist. I have offered. More than once. With drawings." A beat, the pedantry going soft at the edges where she kept the worrying.

"It runs like a stair with one bad tread runs. Beautifully, right up until the morning it's the tread you've put your weight on." Renn turned the wrist to the lamp and went quiet, the particular quiet of a man reading worse news than he means to lead with. Under his hands the thing I'd been building out of dead enforcers put up its own accounting, cold and unbothered, as it always did when it caught me looking too long.

[LOADOUT — 2 components: Enforcer core (kinetic discharge) · Veyr relief-regulator (pressure vent). Host instability: persistent — grip locked half-open; regulator degraded past tolerance.] Past tolerance. I'd known that two nights back on the threshold, spending the regulator past mending to go dark for a single kill, feeling something in it tear and ruling the tear affordable. Errata had owned a number for it then and rounded it down to spare me. Renn owned a face for it now, and rounded nothing off it at all.

"Here's what I have." He laid both hands flat on the bench, a man putting his terms on the table.

"I can clean the seams. I can keep the new one from turning septic, most likely. I can buy the arm a little time." Then he looked up, and it stopped being a medic's look.

"What I can't touch is the rest. You're losing. The fights you win, sure. I hear about those. But you. There's less of you in here than there was the day you came in, and you're the one who keeps spending it, and you'll do it again the first morning a part's worth more than a piece of you." He said it without heat, like reading a gauge.

"I can patch the body. I can't patch the part of you that's already decided the body's negotiable."

"That's not a wound," I said.

"That's an opinion."

"It's a chart." Almost a smile, and gone.

"I read charts." He wrapped the wrist, neat and unhurried, and let me go. The arm worked. The seams were clean. I'd bought a breath, and I knew the price of it down to the decimal, and I knew exactly who'd be sent the bill. So I drank the rest of the warm water he'd set by my hand, in the borrowed dark, and left the part he'd opened lying there between us, unanswered, where I could keep an eye on it.