Chương 19: The Cost of Being Useful

The plan was to make it quiet, which was the last plan of mine the day let stand. We were climbing back toward the hold the slow way, Sefa in front of me where I could see her, three service levels of watched ground still between us and anything I'd have called dark. A patrol unit stood in the junction ahead, sanctioned and unbothered, walking the rounds of a corridor nobody was meant to be unclassed in.

"The tall one's half asleep on its feet," Errata said.

"Take it at the turn, and do me the courtesy of venting it this time, since you've spent three levels promising the kid you'd be careful."

"That's the plan. Kill it, vent it, go quiet." Dump the kill-shape out through the Veyr regulator before the signature finished leaving the room, and be a smudge on the clean pane again before the System blinked. I'd been riding that trick since Stratum Zero.

"You don't have a plan. You have a habit and a clamp I have asked you eleven times to let me touch. Go."

"It works." I put Sefa's eyes on the far wall with two fingers and stepped into the unit's gap. The core in my forearm woke and gave. The discharge went through the seam clean, the unit folded, and I reached for the vent to swallow the noise. The vent didn't fire. I felt the clamp let go like a stair giving under your weight in the dark: the whole structured certainty of a thing that had always held, and now didn't.

The kill-shape had nowhere to go, so it went into me, up the wrist and into the grip that still wouldn't close clean, billing me on the spot for the door it used to have. And the kill I'd just made stopped being quiet. [Relief-Regulator: tolerance exceeded. Pressure venting offline.]"That's the clamp," Errata said.

"I know it's the clamp." I was already turning, already counting exits the junction didn't have.

"I told you to recalibrate it. You said later."

"Yes," I said, through my teeth, with a dead unit at my feet and my arm cooking and the light coming up hard in every panel for a hundred meters each way.

"And I would do it later."

"This is the later. This is what later looks like." Then the dark at the far end of the junction moved, and it moved fast.

"There," Errata said, and the jokes went out of her voice between one word and the next.

"That's a closer: light frame, ranging core slung high, made for one job, and the job is the gap between it and a thing that just made noise. You made noise." The open mouth of the junction, the bright stretch between it and the dead unit, was where I'd put Sefa. In front. Where I could see her. She'd already turned to look. Of course she had.

"She's in the open."

"It knows. It'll read her before it reads you: she's nearer, and she's moving, and it re-finds a mark off motion. Don't fight it. You cannot out-shoot that and carry her. Look at the kid and move her." I looked at the kid. The closer's whole shape laid itself out for me: the high core, the lean of it, the half-beat it would need to re-task the moment its mark changed vectors. One half-beat.

The cost of crossing the bright stretch to spend it laid itself out cold beside it, and I did not like a single number in the column.

"Then give me the odds I reach her."

"No." You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"Errata."

"I run every number you have ever handed me. I am not running that one. Go. Now, while it's still deciding which of you it wants." So I went, which is the version where you don't get to know whether it worked until it already has. Out across the bright stretch with no vent left to hide behind, loud as a struck bell, the cobbled core screaming exactly what I was to anything in the Stack with ears.

I took the fist of pressure I couldn't dump and put it into the seam where the closer's core re-tasked, and for one half-beat the thing lost the mark it had been closing on. The mark it had been closing on was a fourteen-year-old who had finally, fully understood she should be running, and wasn't, because her feet had done the worse thing and stopped.

I got a hand in her collar for the second time in an hour, took her off her feet and out of the closer's re-found line, and dropped us both into the dead space behind a coolant riser. The closer came through the bright stretch where she'd been standing and over-ran the corner, its core still hunting the place we weren't. We went down into the dark together. Her heart was going under my arm. Mine had stopped doing anything I could feel, which was its own kind of information.

The closer cast around the junction, found a dead unit and a cooling flare and no live anomaly it could resolve, and went off to file the irregularity it hadn't closed. The light let go of the panels one at a time. The quick tread faded up and out. [Anomaly profile: 25/100. Correction notice issued.] Sefa didn't grin this time. She sat with her back against the riser, her hands not quite steady, and she didn't grade the route, and she didn't tell me the corner had worked.

The not-saying was the loudest she'd been since I met her.

"The corner…" she started, and didn't finish it. Somewhere in the half-beat I'd spent crossing to her she had done the math the whole world had always done about her, and the answer had come back close, and she'd heard it land.

"She's alright," Errata said.

"You're not. But she is. You can be not-alright later, later being a thing you're famously fond of."

"I had it read."

"You had it read. You also had her standing in the one spot the read couldn't reach in time. Both true. I'd file them on the same line." I got her up and checked her over with hands that were doing fine, thank you, steady as a bench vise, because I had thirty-one years of practice keeping the rest of me out of my hands. She was whole. She was breathing.

"You went loud," she said. Not a route-grade, just a fact, set flat on the shelf where she kept facts.

"You don't go loud."

"I do now." She turned on me then the look she'd given the wreck in the gallery, except the shape she was working out now was me, and how near it had come, and she had no clean word for it either. And then the deadpan that had carried me through a dead unit and a failed build and a thing made to close distance on a child failed too, with no more warning than the clamp had given.

"Fuck," I said. Once. Under my breath. I turned my head off her to say it, because you don't set a word like that down anywhere near a kid, one hard word for the half-beat where I'd had the odds in front of me and refused to hear them and gone anyway. Then I put it away, all of it, behind the bench vise, where it stays for the people who can't afford to watch it move.

"You're fine," I told her, and made it true by making it flat.

"Walk." She walked. In front of me, where I could see her, the same place I'd put her when the place I'd put her was the thing that nearly got her killed.

"The vent's gone," Errata said, quiet now, the engineer counting a loss instead of the clerk scoring a point.

"Properly gone. You field-strip a new one off something deeper, or you do the rest of this loud. I'd have taken the eleven-times version. Nobody asked me."

"You can say it."

"I'd never. I'll only think it, at a volume you've learned to hear. Which is worse. But I'd never say it." Twenty-five on the meter and climbing, three service levels of watched ground overhead, and not one quiet move left in the whole build to spend on the climb home. And under that, where the cold math lives, a sum I'd run a hundred ways since Activation had changed its answer while I wasn't watching: what I'd pay to keep one particular person breathing. It used to come out a number.

I shut the file before it finished, and we climbed.