Chương 29: The Plan

There's a kind of problem you don't solve by being smarter. You solve it by being a different size. I'd needed to be a different size since the column came down a corridor to be thorough and took Tam off the hold's books without raising its voice. I had the threat's shape, and I had a number under it I couldn't beat, and the distance between the two was two tiers wide. The only way to close two tiers in the days I had was to lift the size off something that already carried it.

I sat at the dead edge of the hold, where the scrounged light quit and the smell of forty people staying very quiet began, and read the Stack like a bad panel, looking past the rooms to the wiring: what carried load, and what only looked like it did.

"I'd like it on the record that I think this is a terrible idea," Errata said.

"Logged."

"I haven't said which part yet."

"Log all of it and save us the trip." The part that closed two tiers had exactly one name. An Auditor-class kinetic core, a discharge built two tiers over the ceiling I'd spent the whole climb scraping my knuckles on. Having it wouldn't make me bigger. That was the piece nobody who ever said just find a better part understood.

It would make me a person holding a thing designed to kill whoever held it, and then the plan came down to one open question: whether I could read it into running before it read me into the floor. Not yet, Errata had told me the night before, in front of the whole hold, when I'd asked her straight. She had a gift for the small mercy. Not yet was a long road from can. So I went looking for the road.

I read up, two Strata, past every floor I had no class to stand on, to the clean levels where the cores lived behind clearances I would never wear. Up there the grid read wrong: no honest wear on it anywhere, every line kept, nothing left to fail, no dark that somebody hadn't decided to light. I followed it until I found what the cores hung off, and the System told me what it was, cold, in its own hand. [Auditor-class enforcer. Core: kinetic discharge, Class II. Conformance authority: full. Disposition: active.]"There it is," Errata said.

"Two over you, and it doesn't chase. Mark that one: it's the good news and the bad news in a single coat. It schedules. It sits where the work is carried to it, and it audits, and on every record I can still reach it has never finished a job and left something moving. You can't walk up to it. Every sensor between here and there would file you at forty meters and close the file before you'd finished bleeding into it."

"Give me the number."

"I ran it eleven ways. You live in one of them. In that one you come down short an arm, so I've stopped counting it as survived and started counting it as negotiated." No round in it. The day she stopped rounding in my favour was the day I knew the figure was true.

"Then I don't go loud."

"There's no quiet road up. I checked while you were still feeling brave. They stopped leaving the old service paths under these floors. It's clearance to the bone up there, the same as the gate you forced to land us in this Stratum, except now the asking gets read before your answer's out of your mouth. You cannot fake a class at that depth." Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

I tried it anyway, because being told a door is locked and finding it locked under your own hand are different sizes of knowing. I read for a sanctioned seam: a salvage authorization, a maintenance schema, any handle the old world had left under the new one like it had at the blast-door, a year and a lifetime back. The Stack answered with the line it kept under my name. [Request denied. No clearance class on record for this asset.]"Predictable," Errata said, and the dry rose under it, the particular warmth of her enjoying the worse idea before she'd let herself say it.

"You don't have a class. You're the fault the whole class system was built to catch. Which is the entire solution, if you'd stop reading only the part of the map it's willing to hand you." I'd caught the shape of where she was going before she got there. She was pointing at the ground I was already sitting on. Every road I could read filed me, because every road I could read was one the System had built to be read on. So the road had to be one it had never built.

The hold itself sat in a fold the grid had simply quit counting, a blind spot the size of forty lives, the only reason any of them were alive to be quiet at my back. There were other folds. And if you knew the dark well enough to thread them into a line, there was a whole road of them, climbing up under the clean floors where no surveyor had ever set foot, because nobody with a clearance had ever needed to. Off the audit. Uncounted.

The one direction a thing that schedules couldn't have scheduled, because it had never been told the ground was there to walk.

"For the record," Errata said, "I'd like to file the complete objection now. Item one: the host is non-standard. Item two: the part is lethal. Item three: there's no road up the System doesn't own." A beat.

"Item four, and I want it minuted that I despise item four: there is one road up the System doesn't own, because the System never drew it. The objection is finished. So, to my professional sorrow, is the plan." And there was the gap, filed in her own hand at the bottom of a complaint about itself. She'd objected her way straight into the answer, which was the most her thing she'd done all week. The answer had a person standing in it.

I'd built the back half of this year out of keeping that person three corridors clear of anything with teeth. The only unwatched road ran through dead ground, and dead ground only worked with the one body in the Stack that read it as grade and chase instead of as nowhere. Taking her up into the make of the things sent to hunt me was the reverse of every call I'd made since the pressure shaft. It was also the only call left on the board.

I could keep her clear, or I could stay alive to be the thing that got her later. Both was not on the table, and telling myself otherwise would only be a tidy way of holding the door open to losing the whole plan in place of the part of it I couldn't stand.

"You've gone quiet," Errata said.

"You only manage that around a sum you'd pay not to finish."

"I'm pricing the kid." A panel ticked behind me, the exact tick of someone lowering their weight onto the vent cross-brace I'd told her twice was not a chair.

"You need my warrens," Sefa said, out of the wall, not a question.

"I need your warrens."

"Say please."

"No." A silence while she worked out what the no had cost me and whether to bill for it; the grille shifted.

"Fine. I'm coming all the way in, the whole climb, not just to the second lift or the edge. Go up blind and you don't come back down. I priced it too. I'm better at it than you." Flat as a capped chute. A route with no missing segment, the missing segment being the part where she stayed down here, where the grid had agreed to forget her. She was right, and she knew the exact size of how right she was, because she knew the size of every dark inside a mile.

The smart move and the move I'd have spent my bad hand to dodge had come out the same move. Lately they kept doing that.

"I know," I said, and hated that it was the smartest thing either of us had said.