Chương 32: Installation Risk: 72%

The core sat on Renn's tray where he'd made me put it down, and an hour out of the wreck it still hadn't gotten any less wrong to look at. Hot, when nothing dead should still be hot. Whole, when it had no right to be. A thing built for clearances two above the ones I'd been born under, waiting on a scavenged steel tray to find out whether I was its host or its last bad idea. The whole room smelled of solvent and old blood, which was the smell of every promise I'd ever made my own body and not kept.

"Round it down," I said.

"No." Errata, in the place only I could hear her.

"Not this one."

"You always round it down."

"I rounded the Veyr from sixty-six because two points of mercy cost you nothing you were ever going to spend. This is not the Veyr." She stopped. She had no working reason to stop, being a thing built never to need the half-second, and the stopping was the whole message.

"Seventy-two. I'm not shaving it to be kind. I'm handing you the true one because you'll do this whether I'm gentle about it or not, and you should go in holding the real number instead of the one that lets you sleep." Renn looked up from the tray. He'd never been able to hear the other half of these conversations, and had long since quit pretending the half he got wasn't the worse one.

"Seventy-two percent of what," he said.

"Of it killing me on the way in." He took the number and turned it over without comment.

"And the rest of it?"

"It works."

"That is not a thing a body should agree to," he said, and reached for the strap anyway, because he'd been at this long enough to know which arguments were already finished.

"You're going to install it anyway." Errata didn't make it a question. She'd watched me decide it on the floor of the kept tier with the thing still warm from the kill.

"Obviously," I said. I'd worn that word smooth on her, one bad door at a time: I've already chosen; stop holding the door like the choosing is still going on. She knew exactly what it meant. She held the door every time regardless, and made me say the word out loud, because that was the only shape her caring could take and still pass for telemetry. So I said it.

I lifted the core off the tray and set it to the open seam under my arm where the last four had gone, and started to read myself like everything else I'd ever made run. The first four had taught me what an install is: you don't make the part fit you, you find the one thing it can't run without and rebuild yourself around leaving that one thing alone. The first four had been mine to reach.

This one stood two tiers over my head, and the instant it touched the seam my body did what every looter's body had ever done to an Auditor core. It threw it. Not a flinch but a whole refusal, old and total, the animal under the maintenance tech recognizing a thing it had no business holding and trying to be rid of it before it could root. [INSTALL: Auditor-Kinetic-Core v4. 2. Host architecture non-standard. Rejecting.]"There," Errata said, fast and low.

"That's the push. That's the one that does it. Every body that ever slotted one of these on hope died right there, in the first half-second, certain it could win the argument. You can't win the argument. Don't get into it." I didn't have hope. I had the read. I went down into the refusal and found the one thing the core couldn't run without and would never get from me on its own: a draw that didn't break.

My body drew the human reflex: pull and check and pull again, the flinch back off a thing that hurts to test whether it still hurts. The core had no use for a current that flinched. It needed one unbroken line, and everything in me that made the line break was the same part still arguing with the pain. So I read for that part, and I quieted it. I found the place where I argued with my own current and I read it shut, the same read that puts a sweep to sleep or springs a clamp.

Except this time what went quiet under the read was me. The pain didn't stop. I stopped objecting to it. And the core felt the objection leave the line, and at last began to draw. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. [Host integrity: 17%. Continued operation not recommended.]"Carole." Renn, far off, on the wrong side of a body that had become a readout.

"Your arm is a temperature I don't have a number for. Stay in the room."

"She's staying," Errata said, to no one who could hear her, and then the part I hadn't braced for, the speed going out of her all at once.

"I know this hand," she said. She wasn't talking to me. She was reading the core's make down where the writing on a thing lives, the same place I was reading my own arm, and what she found there stopped her cold, and nothing we'd lived through yet had managed that.

"The one who wrote this," she said, slow, unguarded, close to afraid, "and the one who wrote me, they sign the same. Same hand on the bench. I came off a desk; so did this; it was the same desk." A pause I could have walked the whole hold through.

"Don't think about it. I'm going to be extremely busy not thinking about it myself." I had no room to think about it. I had a piece of his family seating itself into the meat of my arm and a number in the corner of my eye saying the meat was losing the argument I'd refused to have. But I heard the thing under the deflection: for one half-second the cleverest voice I knew had been a woman finding a relative on a slab. I filed it where I keep the things I'll be afraid of later, when there's time to spend on it.

Then the draw caught, clean and unbroken and mine, and the core stopped being a wound and became a part. The temperature broke. The refusal let go. Under the readout, the arm was mine again. It came back a half-beat faster than I did. I felt it before I had a name for it: Renn loosening the strap, my hand closing on the edge of the tray to push myself upright a clear beat before I told it to. It wasn't reflex. I knew my reflexes; I'd built half of them.

This was a hand running the number itself and acting on the answer without sending the question through me first. The core ran its draw without asking the arm's leave; now the arm had the habit. The part of me I'd quieted to host the thing hadn't switched all the way back on, and the quiet where it used to be felt exactly like being good at this. Renn watched my hand finish a motion I hadn't finished choosing. He didn't say anything clever. He never had.

"I can patch the body," he said.

"I keep telling you. I can't patch the part of you that keeps deciding the body's negotiable." He set the strap down and looked at me steadily, a doctor with a chart he'd read too many times.

"That part's thinner tonight than it was this morning. I can see the place it used to be."

"Patch what you can still reach," I said.

"Leave the rest. I keep my own count on what that costs, and I haven't missed a day." I made myself look at the meter, because the one discipline I'd never let the build take off me was knowing the price. [Anomaly profile: 36/100. Correction notice issued.] One. The loudest thing I had ever done to myself, a two-tier core screaming itself awake inside a host with no clearance to hold it, and the meter charged me a single grudging point.

"No," Errata said, reading my face before I'd finished arranging it.

"Don't be relieved. That's not the bill. That's the tip the grid skimmed going past, because the hold sits in a pocket nothing audits properly and an off-book account doesn't settle in real time. Thirty-six is what leaked. The rest is in a drawer with your name on the tab, and a drawer like that opens the next time anything gets a clean look at you and writes down what it sees." She let it sit.

"And the one point it did charge put you on the wrong side of thirty-five. Your account held just under it this whole time, by design. You're over it now. Quietly. On credit. But over." Sefa was in the doorway. She'd come down with me and held the road on the way back up, and she didn't startle at much; she wasn't startling now. She was doing the thing she did: taking the inventory, grading the work by what it cost to get done.

"Your hand," she said. Flat. Articles dropped, no awe in it anywhere.

"Moved before you did. Picking up the tray. I watched it do that." She looked at me the way she'd look at a route that had changed since she last ran it.

"You came back different than you went up." That wasn't a question. It never was, when Errata said it.

"Obviously," I said. The word came out flat and sure, the one I keep for things already decided. This time I held onto it like a rail in the dark, not because I still believed it, but because it was the last thing in my mouth that sounded like me.