Chương 30: Hunt the Auditor

Sefa went through the dead warren like water through a grate, finding the gap before the gap had finished being one. I went through it like a woman handed the map and told where the gaps were and trusting none of it. The route had not been cut for a grown body. It resented me at every bend, and I had two hours on my hands and knees to learn the exact shape of the resentment, in a part of the Stack the System had never thought worth the price of a light. We were climbing.

That was the part my body kept refusing to believe, that the only road up to the clean floors ran down here first, through the worst of the dark, under everything.

"You're drifting left," Sefa said, not turning.

"Live bus, left wall, past the seam. They never capped it. I'm not telling you twice." I came off the left wall.

"She told you once," Errata said, in the place only I could hear her, and she was delighted.

"I want it clear I'm not enjoying this to be cruel. I'm enjoying it because she is better in here than you by a margin I've stopped trying to round, and you keep proving the figure with your shoulder. You drift toward the wall that kills you because you're tired. She doesn't get tired. I've checked." I'd been bracing for the meter the whole climb. I run loud, the core under my arm throws a cold light I spend half my life smothering, and down here I'd quit bothering, because there was nothing to smother it for.

I'd folded through a crush that should have lit me up, and dumped a seized joint twice. By any honest accounting I had been a beacon for an hour, and the number in the corner of my eye sat where it had sat since the hold. Thirty-four. It had not twitched.

"It isn't reading me," I said.

"It can't," Errata said.

"It only bills what it can see, and nobody ever told it to look here. Up top you're an anomaly. Down here you're not even quiet. You're unwritten. There's no page with this corridor on it for your name to land on." A beat.

"Enjoy the stretch. It's the only part of your life that isn't evidence." So that was the trick the whole insane plan hung on, laid bare and working: I could do the loud thing in the dark the grid had stopped counting, and the dark would eat the cost. The dead zone wasn't safe. It was just off the books. A run of decking ahead had gone soft with old water. I put a hand out to bar Sefa back from it, on the reflex that stops a kid at a curb, and my hand closed on nothing.

She was already past, three feet up the far wall on a bracket I hadn't seen, looking down at the spot I'd meant to save her from.

"It holds on the bolt line," she said.

"Not the middle. Step where I stepped." She gave it as a spec, not a kindness.

"You do the arm-out thing a lot. Don't. If the floor takes me it takes you reaching after, and then it's two of us down and nobody up top to count it." I put my arm down. It is one thing to bring a child into the worst place in the Stack. It is another to be corrected by her on the etiquette of it. We went still in a maintenance throat while something swept the clean floor above us, a wash of white attention moving in its order, near enough that I read its edges through the deck.

Sefa had us folded into the dark a half-second before I'd have called the freeze. The light went by.

"Third time tonight her read beat mine to the stop," Errata said, when we could move again.

"I've revised the model. If I were underwriting this climb I'd insure her and list you as the weather." Then the warren gave out against a grille, and through it the clean tier opened, colder than cold, every surface kept, lit by something that didn't flicker. And in the middle of it, working, was the thing we had come two tiers and two hours of dark to take. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. I'd read its profile at the hold, off the System's own math.

Up close the math had been generous. It turned in a slow circle as it worked, unhurried, auditing the room around a shape it had already put on the floor, and I read it the only way I know: for the gap, the cycle, the half-second of blind. There wasn't one. It did not reset. It did not rest. It audited without stop, the room and everything in it, as a condition of being switched on. [Auditor-class enforcer. Audit cycle: continuous. Conformance authority: full. Disposition: active.]"There's no idle state," I said.

"No." The dry had gone out of her.

"I told you two tiers. I rounded down. That is a unit that finishes what it starts and has never once left a room with a job half-done. You wanted a window. It doesn't have one. It is the window, and it's shut." I looked at it a moment longer than was smart, because a part of me had already started the thing I do: taking it apart in my head, fitting it to my hand, spending the core it carried before I'd earned the right to.

"You're not going to leave it," Errata said. Not a question.

"You came up here for that, and now you've seen it, and you want it more, not less. You're going to find a way to try the thing that kills you."

"Obviously." And then the slow circle stopped being slow on our side of the room. Whatever I'd done, shifted my weight, leaned on the arm, let the core's light climb the half-inch I always let it climb when I forget, it read. Two tiers up, the audit-circle swung off the floor it worked and came around toward the grille, and the clean light reached in after us, and the number in the corner of my eye at last moved. [Anomaly profile: 35/100. Correction notice issued.] Thirty-five.

Two hours and a child's nerve to hold it under that, and I'd spent the lot to stand in a doorway wanting a thing I could not lift.

"Out," I said. Below me, Sefa had gone quiet and exact, already reading the whole shape of it faster than I could.

"We can still leave," she said.

"If we go now. Before it finishes the turn." Every part of me that had said obviously a breath ago wanted to argue it. The smart half, the half she'd shown up the entire climb, knew the kid was right, right about this as she'd been right about the bus and the soft floor and the freeze. I had come for the thing, and the thing had a window after all. The window was now. The window was leaving.

"Go," I said, and we went, loud, the build lit, my name landing on a page for the first time in two hours, empty-handed, a tier hotter than we'd come down and nothing in our fists to show the heat for. We dropped back into the unwritten dark, and the number stopped where it was. Thirty-five, holding. Up there it had cost me one move to make it climb a single point. Down here it couldn't find me to charge the rest. Sefa didn't say she'd told me so. She wasn't built for it.

She put us back on the road down and let me carry being the slow one. Errata didn't speak until the third bend, and the lightness was nowhere in her.

"On the way out," she said, very quiet.

"In the half-second it swung that circle onto us. I saw the one true thing about it."

"Which is."

"It files before it fires. It's a clerk. It logged us as a correction before it moved to make us one. I watched it write the line first, then reach." Something underneath the words that wasn't a joke at all.

"There's a gap in it, in the paperwork, not the gun. Next time we bring that."