Chương 28: She Chooses Them

I came back down into the hold with the answer Adoma had told me not to bring her, and the place knew it before I'd cleared the last duct. That was the new thing, the one that had got worse all week. A month ago I'd have crossed this hold like a draft under a door and nobody would have looked up. Now forty people went quiet by degrees as I passed, a section going still around a meter on the wall, nobody wanting to be the nearest body to the loud thing. I was the loud thing. I was the meter.

Tam had been three days in the cold over it, and the rag she used to keep on the reclaim housing was still there, because no one had yet worked out whose job it was to move a dead woman's rag. Adoma had a runner's route picked out for me before I'd got my breath back. She didn't lay it out like an eviction. She laid it out like one tech handing another the right wrench.

"Wet stair clears on the third cycle if you go grey through it. Sefa knows the grade. Two days' water by the door." She read my Heat off my skin as she had since the first night, a figure she budgeted the whole place around.

"You go tonight, the file you're carrying goes with you, and we're nobody again by morning. That's the last mercy in this for any of us. I'm holding it out with both hands."

"I know you are," I said.

"I'm not taking it." The quiet that dropped had Sefa in the middle of it, cross-legged on a crate with the map she usually kept behind her teeth scratched onto a scrap of panel, because she'd heard the shape of this back on the eighteen-line and had already started turning it into a route. She didn't look up. She was the only one in the hold the sentence didn't frighten. Adoma it frightened. She didn't wear it as fear. She wore it as arithmetic.

"Staying is a count that only climbs," she said.

"You end one of us just by breathing our air, and you know it, because running sums is the whole of what you do. Tam's not a week cold and you were standing in the room." Not cruel, the reverse. She thought I'd dropped a figure and was handing it back across the table.

"Whatever's in you that calls staying the kind thing has it backward. It is going to cost me people I can't reorder off a shelf."

"It reached in here once already with me doing nothing at all," I said.

"It opened a file the morning it found me, and it settled part of that file with Tam, and I never lifted a hand toward it. That's the line you've got wrong. My walking out doesn't close the file. It means I'm two Strata away when it works down to the next non-conforming entry, and the next entry's the water, and the one under that is the kid who decided my arm was a lamp." She didn't answer. She'd read the same ledger. She'd only hoped I'd let her not say it with her mouth.

"You gave me a way to save you by leaving." I held her eyes, because some things you owe a person to their face.

"I found a better one. It's worse for me."

"We're not yours." She didn't raise her voice for it; she never did.

"You don't owe this place a death."

"No. I owe it nothing." I let the flat of that stand, because it was true, and the true one was the only version worth handing her.

"That's not the reason. Somewhere back down here it quit being a place I was hiding in and started being mine. I didn't decide it. It read that way and I checked it twice." The driest voice I had, the one I keep for the things I can't turn into a joke.

"You don't argue someone out of a reading, and Errata's been trying to for a year."

"She's not wrong," Errata said, for me alone.

"I have never once won that argument. I've logged three objections. They're filed with the objection about my existence, in the drawer for things the universe declined to take comment on." So I named the rest of it out loud, in front of the people it was for, because a plan you only ever say inside your own skull is just a tidy way of keeping the door open to not doing it. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

To end a thing that comes down a column to be thorough, I had to be enough to be standing at the foot of the column when it got there. There was nowhere in the Service Tiers to get that big. I had to go up. Two Strata up, past every floor I had no class to set foot on, in the make of an Auditor-class core. A thing built two tiers above anything I had ever put down, no use to me anywhere but inside, which was also the likeliest place for it to kill me from. Sefa looked up for that.

"Up's three lifts and a transfer, and we've no class for any of them," she said, flat, already pricing it.

"I can run you to the second lift through the dry chase. Past there it's your trick, not mine. I don't have one for past there." No awe in it. A route with a missing segment, reported clean as a capped chute.

"I know," I said.

"Just so it's on the record." She bent back to the scrap. Errata had stayed quiet across the whole naming, which out of Errata is its own kind of racket.

"You hear yourself," she said.

"You mean to walk two Strata into the shop that builds the things sent to hunt you, lift the heaviest item off the shelf, and seat it in a body that won't close one hand on a good day. As your engineer I am required to note that the host is non-standard, the part is lethal, and the operator is an idiot of long standing." A beat.

"As the idiot's only friend, I started reading the lift cycles four minutes ago. Both notes are in the same file. I contain a great deal." There was a joke under that, like always, and under the joke the other thing, the one I'd stopped pretending I couldn't hear. To keep the forty people who'd made me back into something that could be hurt, I was going to go and make myself a degree less of one. That was the whole shape of the trade. I didn't say it.

Saying it wouldn't improve it, and Errata had read it off me anyway. She always did. I asked her the question you ask when you've quit performing for the room.

"Can I beat it?" She didn't reach for the joke. That was how I knew she had run the real number and not the kind she rounds in my favour.

"Not yet," she said.

"Okay." I let it stand as the whole of the answer, no softer than it came. Then I picked my hand up off my knee, the one the first core had left half-shut a year back, and made a fist of it, because it hurt. Not yet was not no, and the gap between the two was the only room I had ever once been handed to work in. Adoma watched me do it. Whatever she'd kept back to talk me out of the door with, she put away unspent.

The hold was very still around us: the cable-girl, the six-year-old gone to sleep against somebody's knee, Tam's rag on the housing, the whole count of them I'd just refused to carry out the door. She didn't tell me it would work, because she wasn't built to lie to make a room feel better.

"Then don't lose," she said, which was the far edge of what her arithmetic would spend on a blessing, and went to put the two days' water back in the stores.

"For the record," Errata said, "the objection stands."

"Noted."

"I'm not done. The objection stands, and beneath it there's a second line, smaller." The dry went out of it for exactly as long as the words took.

"Not yet. But we both know you mean to make me revise that, and I do hate revising. So go on and force the correction."

"Obviously," I said. And I turned toward three lifts I had no class for, with a kid drawing me a route that ran out at the halfway mark and a hold at my back I had just chosen, out loud, in front of all of it. Then I went to learn the shape of a door built two tiers over my head.