Chương 18: Hunt Deeper

Sefa found the unit before I did, which was the first thing that went wrong. We were three service levels under the hold and deeper into watched ground than I had any business taking her, in a maintenance gallery where the light fell from everywhere at once and gave nothing a shadow to stand in. Up here I read wrong, a smudge on a clean pane.

I'd come anyway, because a flagged profile and forty people standing too close to it needed something I didn't have yet, and the only place to get it was down where the better parts walked around inside better enemies. I told myself that was the reason. The part, not the forty.

"You could say the why of it out loud, if you wanted," Errata said.

"I'd keep it for you. I keep everything that gets left lying around."

"I'm here for a part."

"You're here for a part," she agreed, far too easily, and let it lie. I'd told her to stay at the hold. She'd been waiting two galleries down with a route already scratched into the dust, which was Sefa for no. Now she was half a gallery ahead of me, low against a power riser, doing the thing where she got somewhere first and looked pleased about it. She lifted two fingers without turning around, the sign for hold, and I held.

"... Oh," Errata said. The good kind of oh, the one she made when she found something she wanted.

"The tall one on the inner line. Watch it walk: nothing in it fighting anything else, every piece moving in the same half-second. That's a phase-regulator. That's the part that takes a thing built out of arguments and makes it stop arguing." The connoisseur's hunger slid out of her before she could think better of herself.

"Rip it. Rip it before it finishes its round and walks back into a depot, because I will want it for a year and you will have to live with me wanting it." A thing built out of arguments. I was wearing one. The idea of a part that made the argument stop sat down behind my sternum and would not get up again.

"Can I take it clean?" I said, under my breath.

"Define clean." A pause, and then she relented, as she always did once she had had her half-second of being precise at me.

"... No. But you can take it fast, and fast is the version where the kid is behind the riser before the noise starts. Get her behind the riser, Carole." I went up to Sefa in the camera's blind quarter and put my mouth near her ear.

"Inner line. The tall one. I take it at the corner, then you're gone."

"Fourth pass it loops back on itself." She'd worked it before I got there; she always had.

"Camera turns off the corner every fourth pass. I put you there, you've got the time it's looking away." She gave it to me flat, a parts list read off a wall, no weight on the impossible part of it, all of it on the timing.

"I'm not going behind the riser. Behind the riser I can't see the corner. You want it called, you want me where I can call it." She was right, which was the trouble with her.

"You call it, you move. Second it's down, you're not there."

"Sure," she said, which was not a yes, and slid forward to where she could see.

"I do like her," Errata said, and seemed to resent it.

"She runs on exactly enough fear to keep moving and not one gram past. Efficient. Efficient isn't the same as enough, and I'd like that on the record before it matters." The unit came around on its fourth pass, and I read it as Errata had told me to, not the armor, the agreement. The regulator held it in lockstep, weapon-cycle and guard-cycle folded into one beat, so there was never the open most builds couldn't help leaving.

Except the regulator had to hand the beat off to itself, every cycle, and in the hand-off there was a quarter-second where the two halves came unfolded and the thing was only parts again, which everything is if you wait long enough. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Now," Sefa breathed. I stepped into the hand-off and put the discharge through it. The core in my forearm woke and gave, and the grip that never shut clean anymore didn't shut now either. The shot went out through a hand locked half-around nothing and took some of the feeling in my fingers with it, the old tear, the body I'd cobbled out of corpses billing me for the use of itself.

The discharge went in clean regardless, into the quarter-second where the unit had come unfolded, and the agreement that held it together stopped being kept. It came apart at every seam at once, which is what a thing does when the part that made it stop arguing is the part you're already reaching for. I had my hand in its chest before it finished dropping. [HARVEST: Phase-Regulator. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 52%.]"There she is," Errata said, soft, in the voice she kept for good work when she forgot to be unimpressed.

"Don't slot it here. Bank it. Fifty-two is a sit-down number, not a standing-in-a-gallery number." The regulator came loose into my palm, still warm, still working to hold two halves of a dead thing in step. I closed my torn hand around it, and the light in the gallery came up hard, every clean panel of it suddenly interested. [Anomaly profile: 23/100. Correction notice issued.]"Twenty-three," Errata said.

"You bought the part on credit. The meter's only the statement coming round."

"Move," I said, already moving, and that was when I saw Sefa hadn't. She was still at the corner, and it was worse than frozen. She'd gone a step forward to watch the unit come apart, because she was fourteen and had never once been able to not look at the thing she shouldn't, and the corridor the noise had called something into was the one she stood at the mouth of. I heard it before I saw it: the heavy, even tread of a sanctioned thing that had been told there was an irregularity to attend to.

I did not decide to cross the gallery. I was just across it. I got a fist in her collar and took her off her feet and into the riser's shadow, and the responding unit came through the space where she'd been without slowing, because it hadn't been sent for her. It had been sent for the noise, and she'd sat herself down in the noise's chair. We went still in the dark together. Her heart went under my forearm like a thing trying to get out of a box. Mine was worse and quieter, and I kept it out of my face.

The tread came level with us. It passed. It faded out down the gallery and was gone.

"She doesn't know how close that was," Errata said, and didn't make it a joke.

"You do. That's the line I'd write into the file, if I kept one on you. I keep one on you. It's the only record I've ever enjoyed." When the tread was gone for certain I let go of her collar. She came up grinning, the adrenaline wearing the shape of fun, holding the grin out to me like we'd pulled something off together.

"Told you the corner worked," she said.

"Camera never even turned." She was grading the route. She'd been a half-second inside a sanctioned unit's reach and hadn't felt it, and the not-feeling was the part I couldn't get warm again after.

"You don't get ahead of me," I said.

"Ever."

"You needed that part." She wasn't grinning now; she'd heard something in it and gave it back flat, a kid who'd been right and knew she'd been right.

"I read the corner. I called it. I got you to it." Both true, and that was the whole problem, and it sat in my torn hand next to the warm dead part I'd come three levels into watched ground to take. I had the thing that would put a wall between the System and forty people who'd let me in on sufferance. The only way I'd found to get it had a fourteen-year-old standing in the noise's chair, pleased with her own nerve, not one piece of her doing the math on how near the floor had come up.

"Walk," I said.

"In front of me. We're not finished. I've got what we came for, and now I have to make it run, and you're going to be nowhere near me when I do." She walked in front of me. She didn't argue, which from Sefa was the loudest thing she'd said all day.