Chương 62: Rebuild

The cover was a dead servicer bay two levels under where the net had last run warm, the kind of nothing the floor forgot to watch, and I had maybe an hour before the search upstairs thought to widen and come down. An hour was enough. An hour was enough to stop being a woman other people had to carry. For three days I'd let the crew prop a thing that couldn't hold its own weight. Dilan had read a corner I should have read myself.

Sefa had walked the half-step ahead of me I used to walk for her, and neither of them had made me say why. That was its own kind of debt. I set my back to the cold wall, wedged the stolen light where it would show me my own ribs, and started taking myself apart. The governor came out in pieces.

"Mind the lower lace," Errata said. She'd gone quiet and exact, the register she kept for real work.

"It's fused to the housing. Pull straight, or you take good tissue with the bad."

"I know where it's fused."

"You knew where the last one was fused too, and you let it sit three months past a recalibration it begged you for. So forgive me if I narrate."

"Then narrate quietly."

"I don't have a volume. I live in your skull. The noise out here is entirely your own." I pulled straight. It came, slick and warmer than three days dead had any business being, and I held the weight of it a breath longer than the work asked. A year ago it would have been just a part. Now it meant three days of being a weight other people carried.

"Done," Errata said.

"Now you've a hole in your build the size of the thing you wouldn't let me touch." A beat.

"I'm not going to say it."

"You're saying it."

"I'm noting it. There's a difference, and the difference is that I'm being gracious." Two Strata she'd hounded me about upkeep, and two Strata I'd answered with later. Later had a cost now, and a name: the hole under my ribs.

"The new one, we do properly," she said.

"All the way through. Not the version where you nod and do half with your mind already three rooms ahead."

"Agreed," I said.

"This time." The pause that came back ran a quarter-second long. She hadn't budgeted for being heeded; two Strata of nagging, and the once it landed, it threw her.

"…Right," she said.

"Good. Well." And then, because sincerity was a door she couldn't hold open: "Write it down somewhere I can see. I want it on record that you agreed." I set the new part in my lap. I'd ripped it crossing the cull-line eleven nights back: the sequencer that kept a sorting floor on its beat, taken in transit because I was passing and it was there. I'd banked it at seventy-one without a real read.

"Seventy-one was the rip number," she said, already into the part beside me, half a step ahead of where I was.

"You grabbing it blind off a moving line with an arm coming down. Read it now. Properly. We have an hour, which down here is practically a holiday." I read it: the strange before the steady, the thing the last part had taught me at a price.

"Lower coil first. Feel where it wants to sit." Her voice had dropped into the surgeon's calm, the one she kept for when my hands were inside me.

"Don't drag it onto your own count. You dragged the governor onto your count for a year and it quit on you in a corridor."

"I remember the corridor."

"Then give this one the grain. Where it wants to go, go with it, and stay out of its way." I gave it the grain. The number came down while I read: not because the part changed, but because I had. Eleven nights ago I'd have forced it to fit me and called the fight steadiness. Tonight I read how it wanted to sit and routed myself to meet it, and the risk slid off the cold seventy-one toward something I could carry.

"Seat it slow," she said. I seated it slow, a hair at a time, my own breath the metronome. It went in clean, no shove, no reject. The cadence reached past the housing into the cobbled mess of me (the Auditor core, the Veyr regulator, the rest of what I'd cut out of dead things up and down two Strata) and found the empty place the governor had left. For a moment it sat half in, neither seated nor spat back, the whole build hung waiting to learn whether it would hold or turn on me like the last one had.

Then it caught, and held, and was mine. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. [INSTALL: Operant Line-Sequencer. Host architecture non-standard. Installation risk: 53%. Integrating.]"Fifty-three. From seventy-one." A connoisseur's grudging quiet.

"That's not the part, that's your hands. Don't let it go to your head."

"Says the one who made me read it twice."

"And you did. Once. We'll see if the habit survives your next bad idea." The quiet came back. Three days of running raw, every read a thing the floor could lean toward, and now the build held its own beat and kept the going low.

"Listen to that," Errata said.

"Nothing. No spike, no spill, no plate three rooms over waking up to wonder what you are. I'd half forgotten what you sound like quiet." She let the quiet run a moment before she spoiled it.

"Cleaner than the governor ever kept you, if we're being unkind to the dead." [LOADOUT — Operant Line-Sequencer integrated. Cadence governance restored; the build reads regulated. Host instability: settling, runs to the part's beat.] I was whole again, a notch sharper than whole, and I let myself have one breath of just that: a thing rebuilt by hand and rebuilt better, the oldest clean feeling I had left.

"That seat was clean work," Errata said. Then, fast, before it could be a feeling: "Within tolerance. Adequate. I've logged worse." A pause that got away from her.

"Considerably worse. Stop smiling."

"I'm not smiling."

"You're thinking about it. Same thing, for tax purposes." I had been close. And then the part settled the last of itself into place and showed me its deep (the under of it, beneath the System's fresh stamp) and I read what four-tenths of a second across a moving line had never let me read. It was old. Older than the floor it had kept time on, older than the mark on its face, made before the System and only painted over by it. The governor had been old like that too.

I knew the wrongness now, the same wrongness, a face I still couldn't place. I went down into the strange of it, deeper than I'd managed with the first one. Errata flinched. No sigh, no sharp word, no dry door swinging shut on a joke. A flinch, the thing she never did: the deflection that had covered two Strata of questions catching, for a beat, on something I couldn't see.

"Careful with that one," she said. It came a half-beat early and a shade too level: what a true thing sounds like when you reach for the cover and the cover isn't there.

"Why?" The pause was the tell. She ran every figure the instant she had the inputs; she never reached for an answer she already held. She reached for this one.

"…No reason," she said.

"Old stock. The seat's good. Move on." I knew that sound. I'd spent a year learning the difference between the things Errata wouldn't say because they weren't worth saying and the things she wouldn't say because they were. This was the second kind. Something in the part had reached her where she kept whatever it was she kept, and she'd shut the door fast enough to let me see the door. I didn't push. You don't pry a thing out by hand when straight is the only way it comes.

She'd taught me that herself, two minutes and a lifetime back. I put it where I'd put the first part's strangeness, under later, where the bill was already running. I had a growing collection of laters. This one weighed more than the rest, and I kept that to myself. [Anomaly profile: 55/100. Unsanctioned integration logged for Operator review.] The number moved because I'd put a sanctioned part in an unsanctioned body; the floor could read that on me, quiet or loud. One point.

I'd known it would cost, and it cost what it said. The Heat was the easy ledger. The other thing didn't go in a box. I packed the dead governor into the bag of parts I couldn't make myself leave for the floor to find, killed the stolen light, and put my hand flat to the wall to listen for the warmth coming down. Nothing yet. The hour had held. I was steadier than I'd been in three days, and quieter, and a notch sharper than whole.

I also had a part under my ribs keeping a beat that wasn't mine, set there by a hand from a before nobody had a name for. That was the cost I'd walked in knowing. The one I hadn't was quieter. Somewhere in the dark I couldn't read, Errata was carrying the same wrong thing I was. And she'd just decided (for the first time since she bonded to me illegally and started keeping me alive) that there was a thing about the two of us she'd rather I didn't know. We left it there, under later, the both of us.

"You've gone quiet," I said, a few rungs up the shaft.

"I'm conserving," she said.

"It's a long climb, and you talk enough for both of us." She hadn't gone quiet for the climb. I went up the long way, on the quiet I'd just bought back, and let her not tell me the whole way home.