Chương 65: Almost Clear

Dilan dropped into the wall ahead of me: a maintenance ladder that hadn't been there until he put a hand to the right panel, a service stub the whole level had forgotten it cut.

"Forty meters of nobody's problem," he said, his voice floating up out of the dark before I'd finished deciding to follow.

"Lets out one wall short of the refit floor." A beat, because he could not leave a silence alone.

"You're welcome."

"You haven't put us on the floor yet." I went down after them.

"Ye of little route." Sefa came last, silent, one hand on the rung above her head the whole climb down. Up here she hated everything: the bright clean corridors, the hum that never stopped, a whole Stratum awake in a manner the Underdecks never had been. One level down she could read the dark blind. This high she was a kid in a place that wanted her catalogued, and she knew it, and she would have killed me before she said so. What she said, when her boots found the stub floor, was, "Smells serviced. Recent.

How recent."

"Two cycles," Dilan said.

"Crew won't be back till the next."

"You know that. Or you want that."

"I know it. Banked the rotation last month." A grin I could hear in the dark.

"You want to live up here, you learn what's swept, and when."

"Hm," Sefa said, which from her was a passing grade.

"See, that's the thing about her…" Dilan started.

"Don't," Sefa said.

"…never wrong about a wall."

"Walls are easy." She fell in behind us.

"People lie. Walls only fall on you." Dilan laughed, short and pleased, and let her have the last word, which was its own kind of knowing somebody.

"She's checking his work," Errata said, in the place only I could hear her.

"Nobody taught the child to do that. She taught herself, which is the worse story and the better soldier." I didn't answer. I was reading the wall. Here was the thing about a good night, and I'd had so few of them I still didn't trust the shape of one: everybody did their own job, and none of the jobs touched. Dilan moved us through forty meters of dead service line he knew better than the people who'd laid it.

Sefa caught a pressure seam I'd have walked us straight into and named it in three words before I'd finished tasting it on the air. And the great awake machine that wanted every one of us processed and shelved talked to me the whole way in, in the only language it had, and I understood every word. The refit floor opened below us, a cathedral of paused work: units half-stripped in their cradles, housings hinged back, mid-service and waiting on a crew two cycles out.

I crouched at the lip of it and let the read come up through my hands, unforced now, a thing I'd stopped having to reach for.

"Third cradle," I said, low.

"The unit they pulled a regulator off and didn't finish." Errata went quiet, and the quiet had weight to it. Then, soft, with the hunger she only let off the leash around a good part: "Oh. Oh. Rip that. Carole. Rip that one before the night notices you want it."

"Sell it to me."

"It's the piece you've been faking by hand for two years." Fast now, the connoisseur off her leash.

"Your kinetic core fires, then it has to stop and think about firing again: that gap, the half-second hole you cover with your own timing every single time, the one that's going to leave you a beat slow on the night it matters and get you killed for the privilege. That part closes it. Carries the discharge across the hole, so the whole build stops being an argument and starts being one swing." A pause.

"I have wanted this part since before I knew it was the thing I wanted. Take it. I will never ask you for anything again." Another beat.

"That's a lie. Take it." Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! Which was the joke and the order in the same breath, and also the exact call that decided what my loadout would be on the night it had to carry all of us. I took it. Clean: no kill, no discharge, nothing the floor could hear. Just my hands and a quarter-turn, and the part came up out of its dead cradle like it had been waiting on somebody who could read it to come and ask.

We seated it in the stub on the way out, in the dark, because you never install on an open floor and Dilan would not let us stop moving until the route was shut behind us. I put my back to the cold curve of the wall and opened myself and read the part down into the gap. The work came easy (Cleared now, the high-tier stuff read like a thing I'd drafted myself) and it went where the hole had always been and bridged it. [INSTALL: Operant Through-Line. Host architecture non-standard. Integrating — discharge cycle continuous.]"Hm," Errata said, when the build closed the gap clean and held it for the first time. Then, fast, before I could feel anything about it: "That's the part doing what it's rated to. The part gets the credit; I want it on record." A beat.

"… You read it true and seated it clean. I'll grant you that much, the once. Now stop looking pleased and mind your cooling margin: that part doesn't know how to stop." I wasn't smiling. I was feeling what it cost. The build ran continuous now: no pause to cool, which meant it would run flat-out and bright right up until it cooked, with no cycling back to safe and no half-second left over for me to be clever in. The part did the clever now.

The hole I'd covered with my own two hands for two years was the machine's to keep, and I'd handed it across, and it had taken it. It took everything I gave it. That was the one thing it knew how to do. I didn't let that sit. There wasn't room, and there wasn't a point. [Anomaly profile: 56/100. No new activity logged.]"Fifty-six," Errata said, quiet.

"You seated a part the System would faint over, and it didn't lift its head, because you ran it like you were nobody at all. You're getting very good at being nobody who's about to be a problem." The number under the joke was the one that counted. Fifty-six, and the meter only ever went the one way, and it did not have far left to climb. We came up out of the stub into the forward cell an hour before the level woke, and for a little while there was nothing anybody had to do. That never happened.

That night it happened. Dilan sat on the edge of the cell's one good crate with a route-slate across his knees, not working it, just holding it, liking the weight. Sefa had folded down against the wall with her chin on her knees, almost asleep and furious about it. The water tasted of rust and I drank it. Three of us and a slate and a node that didn't exist yet. I'd run crews before. This was the first one I'd ever been in no hurry to leave.

The fury in Sefa finally lost to the sleep, and I watched the kid go under and thought a thing I'd long since decided. The night we met, she'd clocked the cold light leaking up my arm and said, flat, that she wanted one, and wasn't fool enough to seat it without knowing the cost first.

She could have the cost from me for free; the core she'd get over every objection I had breath left to make, because a year of learning what these parts take past the number on their box had left me exactly one clean thing to hand the kid, and it was the not-having of what I carried.

"Three jumps," Dilan said, to the slate, to nobody.

"What's three jumps."

"The node. The one the System forgot to finish." He turned the slate so I caught a corner of nothing on it: a dead spur, an unbuilt junction, a place the map simply stopped.

"First two are banked. Real routes, not wishing. The third's a guess." A shrug, and the shrug was the most careful thing he'd done all night.

"When you get this thing off everyone's back, when there's no schedule left to be on, come find me out there. I'll have it standing by then. I'll have made it nice." I should have said the cold thing. There's no off the schedule. There's only less on it. I'd built a whole life out of saying the cold thing first, so nobody could spend it on me later. I didn't say it.

For the length of one breath I let myself stand in a half-built node a long way from here, the schedule a thing we used to live under and didn't now, and I let it be real. Just the one breath. Then I set it down, careful, like a part you can't afford to drop.

"Make it nice," I said.

"I'll know if you cut the route short."

"Ye of little route," he said again, pleased, and went back to holding the slate. Errata didn't fill the quiet, which from her was the loudest thing she could have done. Then: "You let yourself have that." It wasn't a flag or a question. She'd watched me go two years without letting myself have anything, and she knew to the gram what it cost me to set this one down gently instead of breaking it first so it couldn't be taken off me later. Yes, I told her. A small crime, admitted.

"Good," she said, and left it there, which from her was a speech with a band playing under it. So I sat in the warm dark with my build at last singing one clean note, a kid asleep against the wall and a friend three jumps from a door they meant to build themselves, and I let the meter read fifty-six in the back of my skull, and for the length of that hour, with all of it almost in reach, I felt safe. That was the part I'd keep. That I'd let it get that far before I put it down.