Chương 24: The Flooded Tier

The reclaim gallery had been dry that morning. By the time Tam got me down the ladder the water stood at my knees and lit from underneath, the cold blue-white a flooded run goes when something live has drowned in it with its charge still up. The wrong kind of bright.

"He's past the second bulkhead." Tam stayed on the rung above me; she keeps the hold's water and air breathing on a fault older than I am, and she'd read this the second she saw it and known it was past her hands.

"Went down to clear the strainer before the stack backed up. The seal let go behind him." She'd run out of things to do with her hands.

"There's a unit drowned in there, Carole. A maintenance-class off the upper run, its cell split, the whole pool gone live. I can't get to him. The water won't have me."

"It'll have me," I said. I could see him, forty feet on, past a bulkhead half-dropped in its frame and jammed there: Joss, one of the forty, a young man I knew by face and a name and nothing under it, up on a strut with the flood climbing his shins. Between us the drowned unit's cell threw its charge across the surface in a sheet, white where it broke on the walls, then dark, then a sheet again. A rhythm with no mercy in it and, because it ran off a dead machine, no give in it either.

"Don't," Errata said.

"Wasn't asking."

"I know. I'm logging the objection for the record, because in roughly nine seconds you're going to wade into standing water with a live discharge in it, and one of us should be able to say afterward that it went down in writing as idiotic." Then the performance dropped out of her voice and she got fast and exact, which is the nearest thing to tenderness she allows herself.

"The cell cycles. It dumps, it builds, it dumps. In the build there's a half-second the water's only water. Count with me. The dead beat is the fourth. You cross on the fourth or you don't cross." I counted it. One, the sheet. Two, the dark. Three, the build, the hair on my arms standing for it. Four, the surface gone still and only itself, and then the light again. The new part kept the count for me.

The old build would have made me do the arithmetic and pray it landed in order; this one let me read the cell and the jammed bulkhead and the climbing waterline at once, one motion. I hated, a little, how easy it had gotten to be this fast. I went on the fourth. The water took me to the waist and tried for my feet. I got a hand on the jammed bulkhead and felt the frame shivering toward letting go, holding back more flood than the gallery behind it could pretend to want, and losing. No time to read it gentle.

I put the core through it. The discharge went off loud enough to feel in my teeth, the kinetic shove I keep for armor I've no business scratching, and the slab tore out of its frame and went under, and the grip that won't close clean anymore took its price in feeling: two fingers and the wrist under them gone to static. The gap was mine. So was the gallery: with the bulkhead gone there was nothing left between the flood and the level overhead but me, standing in it, loud.

I went through on the next four, and the count was wrong. Tearing the slab out had given the water more room, and it took the room, and the cell's rhythm rode the new volume half a beat slower than it had, so the sheet came back while my trailing foot was still in it. It caught me up the calf, a white line of every muscle in the leg firing at once, and I dropped to a knee in the flood and got up, because down all the way was the end of the sentence.

"And I will reclassify this entire level a derelict hazard and file every meter of it for decommission by my own hand if it does that again," Errata was saying, in the part of the noise that's only mine, furious and pretending to be procedural.

"I know the schema. I will bury this corridor in process so deep its grandchildren get audited. Now get UP and recount. The beat runs long now, that's the one kindness in the whole stupid room. Go." If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. I recounted. The dead beat ran long, just as it had said. I crossed the rest of it and got a fist in Joss's collar and hauled him off the strut into the only second the water would lend us.

He came all elbows and panic, too scared to be any use and too alive to leave behind.

"It's live, it's still live, I can't…"

"Look at me. Not the water." I got my face in front of his until he did.

"You don't count it; I count it. When I move, you move. When I stop, you stop dead. If I put you down, you stay where I put you. Understand?" He got out something close enough to yes. He still couldn't time the beat. A man counting a thing he can't read is a man who guesses, and a guess in here was a body. So I'd take the beat away from both of us. I put the core into the drowned unit's split cell and dumped it.

The arc went out of the water like a held breath let go, the sheet gone dark and staying dark, and the second discharge cost me the same wrist and a fresh line on the meter I'd feel later. The pool was only water now. Filthy, rising, cold enough to bite, but only water. The unit lay where its cell had killed it, half under the strainer Joss had come down to clear.

I knew the part before I'd decided to want it: the discharge-focusing array behind its arm, the piece that takes a loose kinetic shove and makes it a point, the thing my build had been short of since I'd started thinking about what came next. My hand was in the seam before the rest of me had finished calling this a rescue. [HARVEST: Discharge-focusing array. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 38%.]"A moment of silence," Errata said, "for a maintenance unit that drowned at its post and is now being robbed in the same breath it's mourned. It wanted to point things. It had a whole career of pointing things ahead of it." A beat, lower, the small grief laid down over the larger one she won't pick up.

"Carry the boy. Grieve the optics on your own time." I carried the boy. We came up out of the dead pool with Tam reaching down before we'd made the last rung, and she took him in both arms and a sound she'd been holding behind her teeth since the seal went.

"Got you, I've got you, breathe for me now." She wasn't saying it to me. She didn't look at me at all, and I was glad of it; I hadn't got my face back yet to where it would bear it. I came up last, into ordinary air and a sudden ordinary cold, while underneath me the System finished its accounting of how loud I'd been about a stranger. [Anomaly profile: 31/100. Correction notice issued.] Thirty-one.

Two for the noise, none of it a kill, all of it me deciding a man on a strut was worth a brighter line in a file two corridors from the only place in the Stack I'd agreed to call mine. The meter doesn't argue with me. It keeps the record in a steadier hand than I'll ever manage. And the record this season runs the same as the one I'd read off that doubled-up Enforcer in the too-clean corridor: I get better.

The better I get, the better the thing they're drawing up to find me gets, because every loud good thing I do is one more page of me for it to study. Joss was shaking, putting my name into a sentence I didn't take, because Tam had him and Tam was the right hands and mine were already counting what the next hour would cost and where it would land.

The Heat rode higher than it had any business riding this early, a weight I could feel under the wet, climbing toward a number I did not want to be standing on when it arrived.

"That cost us," Errata said.

"I know what it cost."

"You'd do it again." I was already moving, up, out, the leg dragging, toward the part of the night that came next. There was no version of the arithmetic where the answer came out different, and I'd stopped pretending to run it.

"Yeah," I said.

"I would."