Chương 40: Always Was

The sensible thing, with a Hunter built to your name already somewhere up the Stack and your profile lit like a struck match, is to run. I had been sensible for thirty-one years. It kept me alive and small and nobody's, right up until the morning the apocalypse turned being nobody into the one condition you couldn't survive. So I did the other thing instead. I checked my build, and I checked the hold, and I checked the kid who hadn't left, and then I faced the dark the Hunter would come down out of.

The build I trusted, because the build was the part of all this that was mine, not the parts; anyone could pry the parts off a corpse, and most who tried died wearing what they'd pried. The reach was mine: the knack of looking at a piece of the machine that was eating the world and seeing where it wanted to be set. An Auditor's core sat in my arm running two clearance tiers above anything I was rated to touch, and it ran because I read it, not because I held it.

The meter in the corner of my eye sat at the red I'd spent the whole apocalypse climbing to, holding now, with nothing left to measure that would matter more than the thing already on its way. That was the cost, totalled. It was also the win. Because here was the win, and I made myself look straight at it: the doorway was shut. The section I'd filed would be left alone for a while.

The people who should have been a line in a cull report by now were across the hold counting water instead, and the count was the most ordinary sound left in the world. The System had a word for me at last, or almost a word, set down in the place it had always left blank. [Asset profile: non-conforming. No clearance class on record. Correction: open.] Still no class.

I'd read my way up onto Cleared, the rung the System kept for the climbers it sanctioned, and it had looked at me standing there and declined to count me even so. Non-conforming was the nearest thing to a name it would give me. It would sooner open a correction than open a file. Correction: open, a case with one item in it, top of a queue with nothing else in line, and the item was me. I checked it for a seam, out of pure habit. There wasn't one. I hadn't expected one.

You don't argue with the System about whether you're a problem; you only get to pick which kind.

"You're admiring it," Errata said.

"I'm reading it."

"You're admiring it. You've got the face you get over a clean weld." A pause, dry.

"It is a clean weld. The machine unmaking the species sat down and made you official, by hand. Most people have to die to rate this much paperwork. You managed it breathing." I let the morning go on around us. Adoma had the count running: heads, then water, then the lamps that still held charge, the same order she put the world back into every time it came apart. None of them knew yet that the doorway hadn't been the worst of it.

I'd decided in the night that they could have a few clean days before they learned that running was the rest of their lives; it had cost me nothing to decide, and I'd have paid anything to give it. That was the part I'd had wrong about myself at the start. I had thought I was doing all of it to stay alive. Staying alive was a thing I'd been good at like holding your breath, without joy, and only because the alternative was worse.

Somewhere back in the dark, around the time I stopped running and started building, the arithmetic had shifted under me and I'd never felt it move. I wasn't keeping myself alive any more. I was keeping them. The defiance had been real, and the surviving had been real. But under the both of them, in the place I never looked, was the thing that had been moving my hands the whole time. I had chosen these people. I was not going to be the reason one of them stopped counting.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Sefa came along the wall with a coil of line over her shoulder, because Sefa carried the next thing before anyone thought to want it. She stopped beside me and looked up the dark with me, unbothered, sizing it like a duct she meant to climb.

"When it comes, you'll be loud," she said.

"Probably."

"Then I move them before. Not after." She turned it over once.

"Quieter, before." She said it like a stock level, a fact about the world I'd be a fool to take personally, and went to stow the line where the line went.

"I've been keeping something from you," Errata said, once the kid was out of earshot.

"A correction of my own. Logging an erratum."

"On what."

"My first assessment of you. Day one, the crawlway, you with your arm in a dead junction and the species ending around your ears. I had you filed as an asset with four seconds of runtime left and no idea what was coming for it." The clerk was back in her voice, the precise little contempt she used to carry the things she couldn't say straight.

"Strike four seconds. Amend to: indefinite. The no-idea-what's-coming I'm leaving in the record: you just walked toward a Hunter to buy a maintenance count three quiet days. But the runtime was wrong. I want it on the file that the runtime was wrong." I had nothing to say to that. Or I had too much, which came to the same silence. I found the kid's line-coil worth a long look.

"When we hit Operator," Errata went on, sparing us both, "remind me to tell you what an Auditor's core does to a body already running one. There's a trick to making the two of them argue. It will be appalling. You'll love it." She said we without any weight on it, the same as everything else she reported. She hadn't always talked like that; for a long time she had only ever said you. I let the we stand.

Taking it apart would have meant admitting I'd heard it, and there are things you keep by not looking at them straight. Up the Stack the thing kept coming, in no hurry, my name its only instruction. I had made it. Not by setting a part where it wanted to go but by being the one piece on a swept floor that wouldn't lie down when the rest did. Everything I'd put inside myself to reach this morning had cost a piece of the woman who climbed out of that crawlway. The arm answered a half-beat ahead of me now.

The count finished itself in my head before I'd thought to run it. The cold got into my voice when I wasn't minding it. The gaps were clean and they were permanent, and I was going to go on widening them, because the bill for not widening them was a hold that didn't see another morning.

"Which technically makes you the monster," Errata said, not cruel about it, just reading the figures, the same as she had every night since the first.

"Always was," I said. Behind the thing on the stairs stood all the questions I hadn't earned the clearance to ask yet: who built the parts, who signed the order, what I'd be by the time I reached the desk it had all come down from. They would keep. They were the next long stretch of dark, and I'd read my way into that too. The Hunter would not keep. So I went to meet it.

I'd met the first of them with my arm in a junction box, the night the lights turned blue and a hum came up under everything, back when I thought the announcement had nothing to do with me. It had everything to do with me, and I went up into the dark to meet it.