Chương 42: The Cost of Killing It

The Hunter was three landings below me and going cold, and the climb kept trying to tell me that meant I'd won. It's the oldest lie the body tells you after a fight. You're still standing, so the standing must mean something. I'd killed the thing the System grew to bring my number down, and some animal part of me wanted to file that under safe, wanted to sit on a dead step, let the shaking find somewhere to go, and call it a night.

"Don't," Errata said. She didn't wait for me to say the wrong thing out loud anymore; she headed me off at the thought.

"Whatever you're about to decide because your hands stopped shaking, decide it later. A dead Hunter isn't a smaller problem. It's the receipt for a bigger one."

"I know what it is."

"Then quit climbing like a woman who's done for the night." I kept climbing. The dead throat of the Service Tiers ran up forever from there, ladder-lit and silent, and the hand I'd spent killing the thing rode useless in my jacket and billed me again at every landing. The lattice I'd torn out of it rode cold against my ribs, uninstalled, a Hunter-class part, seventy-eight percent of a bad idea, no good to me tonight and not into that arm ever.

All that power, ripped warm out of a corpse, and not a gram of it could do anything about the next ten minutes. That was the shape of the whole year. The part was never the thing that saved me. Around the fourth landing the other plan showed up. The sane one. It always waits until your pulse comes down to make its pitch, because it can't win the argument while you're scared, just while you're tired. Turn around. Get the hold. Go. I stopped.

One boot on the next step, the plan laid out clean: back down to the blind spot, get Sefa and Adoma and the forty, take the maintenance runs nobody watched, put a mile of dead habitat between all of us and whatever came next. [We've noted irregularities in your asset profile. To restore conformity, please remain available.]"Remain available," I said, to nobody.

It had watched me open a Hunter like a tin of something and its single note was that I should hold still, please, and wait to be collected at my convenience. The fear wanted me to run and the System wanted me to stand still, and the worst part of the climb was how hard it was getting to tell those two apart: they ended the same place, with my people in the open and my number in the room.

"You're doing the leaving arithmetic," Errata said.

"Let me save you the time: you'll get it wrong in a flattering direction. What does the number measure?"

"Me."

"You. Not the Tiers, not the gantry. You. It isn't weather you can drive out from under. It's a verdict the machine re-runs on your signature every time you use what you are, and it reads forty-four wherever you happen to be standing. Walk a hundred miles, you've walked the forty-four a hundred miles. Walk it onto a road with forty people on it, and now it's reading them too." So running didn't lose the hunt. It just chose who else got to stand close to it.

"The hold, then." Thin, and I heard it being thin.

"We move them."

"On what legs. The hold isn't a place they love, it's the one pocket of Stratum One the System's eye slides off. Adoma didn't trade for a roof, she traded for a blind spot, and the blind spot is bolted to the life-support keeping forty people breathing air nobody meters. Pull them out of it and you don't have a hold on the move. You have forty people in the open, off the air, with your number stapled to the back of the column." The dry left her for a second.

"And going down to them now, at forty-four, with something classed already turning to look, that isn't hiding in the hold. That's painting it." This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it I started climbing again, because standing still was the same as agreeing, and I wasn't going to agree.

"Then I peel off." The last door.

"Alone. Walk it away from all of them and let them go dark."

"Ah. The noble one." She didn't get the edge off in time.

"You leave to keep them safe, and the morning after you're gone, here's what you've actually carried out of the room: the only reason nothing's looked hard at that blind spot in a year. You. You're not the danger sitting next to them. Well. You are. But you're also the only thing standing between them and every other danger in the Stack, and nobody sends a Hunter after forty quiet nobodies. They send it after you. Subtract the you, and you haven't saved them.

You've stopped being the reason no one's bothered to count them." A beat.

"Don't make it noble. It's cover management. You're the cover. Pulling it is a bad plan in a kind one's coat." Three doors. I'd checked all three on the climb, the way you check a bad weld from three angles to be sure it's the weld and not the light, and every one of them opened on the same room: somebody I was supposed to keep breathing, standing in the path of my number. All but one. The door that didn't feel like a door at all, because it didn't lead out. It led up.

"Say the part you're not saying," I told it.

"You first. It's your want. I just keep the books." So I said it, climbing, into the dark where the Service light gave out.

"I can't keep them safe." It came out flatter than I meant, and truer for landing flat.

"I've never once kept anything safe in my life. I keep things running. That's the whole skill. I read a machine until I know what it's doing, and then I'm the only one in the room who can put a hand inside it and change what it does." The next stretch of stair took the words a moment.

"The thing hunting them is a machine. So I don't keep them safe by standing in front of them. I keep them safe by understanding it well enough to reach in and make it stop. For me that was always one sentence, not two."

"There it is," Errata said, quiet, and for once she didn't bill me for the warmth. Because there was the other half, the half that pointed the wrong way up the stairs. The answers kept fitting me. The thing on the gantry hadn't only been bigger than the last one; it had been built nearer my measurements, grown around my file, and it had said as much itself. A System getting unlucky with one woman doesn't tailor. Somewhere a hand was reading what I'd done and turning a dial to match it, sizing the next thing to me.

Weather doesn't aim.

"Up-Stratum," I said.

"In the live machinery. Something's reading me and turning the dial."

"Probably several somethings. Don't draw it a face yet; you'll get attached." The lightness thinned out.

"But the dial is real, and a dial has a near end. You want the number to stop climbing, you stop running from the far end of it and go put your hand on the near one." The stair ran out at a gate. It was less a door than a seam in the world. Below it, the dead familiar dark I'd climbed out of. Above it, the Operant Levels, clearance-lit, humming, awake, the bright I'd stared up into from the gantry with a dead Hunter cooling at my feet.

A reader plate sat in the wall at the threshold, patient, waiting to be shown a clearance I didn't have and was never going to. I didn't have one to show it. I showed it the back of my dead hand. [Request denied. No clearance class on record for this asset.]"No class on record." Errata read it off like a line she had been saving all night.

"It's told you that since the hour you Activated, and it still thinks it stings. It built this door to keep out everything with a class. It never once thought to build it against a woman who hasn't got one." A beat, warm under the cold.

"The worst place in the Stack to stand is the only place your number ever comes down. Come stand somewhere we're not allowed." I turned off the dead reader plate, to the seam I could feel in the wall beside it: the service run under the clearance, the unwatched gap that the people who fix a machine slip through while the people who own it never think to look down. My hand would close by morning. The climb wasn't going to wait that long.

I set my good hand to the seam and started up, out of the dark I knew and toward the bright I didn't, because the only road that didn't run straight through someone I loved ran straight at the thing doing the hunting.