Chương 66: The Cost of Being Near Her

The deep core sat behind one more door than we had a route for, and Dilan was already three meters into finding us the one that wasn't a door.

"Vent chase runs the length of the gallery," he said, crouched at a grille with his fingers reading the frame like I read a kill.

"Crews use it to move without booking a corridor. We use it to be a thing the corridor never booked." A tug, and the grille came off its lugs without a sound.

"Two hundred meters of nobody. Lets out on the core's loading floor."

"And on the loading floor?"

"On the loading floor you do the part I can't." A grin I could hear more than see.

"Ye of little route. I got us this far on mine." Sefa went in second, low, one hand spread flat on the chase wall, listening to it for a lie.

"Cold," she said.

"No crew this shift." A beat.

"Don't make it warm."

"Errata. Talk to me about the floor."

"Objection logged." She came in dry and fast, the partner-voice she'd grown into up here.

"You're about to put four loud people inside a tube engineered to carry sound to the one room you don't want to be heard in. So. Walk the cross-braces, not the panels: the braces are sprung, they'll eat your weight. And the warden on station runs its sweep every nine seconds, left to right. You cross on the return." A pause.

"That was the objection and the solution, in one breath. I do both now. Note it for my review." So we went on the braces, in the dark, in the count she kept.

"Short brace here," Dilan murmured back down the line.

"Long step. I've got your hand across it, you want it."

"I don't want it," Sefa said, and took it anyway when the gap came, and neither of them said a word about that. A hundred and eighty meters of it, everybody doing their own job, none of the jobs touching. A good night, and the last clean thing we did. Then the chase opened on the loading floor, and the warden wasn't on its nine-second sweep. It stood still, faced our way, because something up the stair had told it to, not because it had heard us. We hadn't given it a thing to hear.

Because a desk a long way above had finally added up the column of small unscheduled nothings I'd been doing all over its house, and decided to stand a body in the room while it thought about me.

"Nine seconds is a lie tonight," Errata said, very fast.

"It's not sweeping. It's waiting. Carole…" It saw Dilan first. Because Dilan was first. Because Dilan was always first. I could have killed it quiet. On a longer night I'd have spent the nine seconds, found the seam in its build, and slid a death through it with nothing the floor could hear. I didn't have nine seconds. I had the half-second before it corrected the unbooked thing standing in its doorway, and the only death I owned that crossed a half-second was the loud one. I opened my hand.

The discharge went out of me bright, and it didn't stop being bright. The Through-Line carried it across the gap I used to cover by hand, on and on, no cough, no cycle back to dark, a clean continuous line of me written down the loading floor in light. It put the warden down through the one seam I'd read going in. It was the best kill I'd made up here. It was also a flare up a chimney, and I'd lit it, and it climbed, and the whole awake house turned its head toward the place it climbed from.

[Corruption signature located. Remediation in progress. Thank you for your continued compliance.]"Back in the chase…" I started.

"Dilan…" He was already moving, already toward the spur he'd banked, because the exit was the thing Dilan thought in, the same as I thought in seams.

"Left dog-leg, drop at the second junction, stay on my…" Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

"…go, I've got Sefa, GO…"

"When we're clear," Errata said, "remind me to tell you the thing about…" The remediation came down the spur Dilan was running for. It came fast, the floor's own answer to the light I'd made, and it didn't care which unbooked thing it reached first. It reached the one in front. Errata didn't finish the thing about. There wasn't any more of it. It didn't look like anything. That was the worst of it.

There was a person running (fast, certain, three jumps from a door he meant to stand in and make nice) and then the floor squared what it found against what it's allowed to find, and there wasn't. No mark. The System doesn't leave a mark when it does the tidy version. It only closes the gap between a thing that's there and a thing that isn't, and Dilan had been the gap. I went down beside him with my hands already moving, because my hands knew their one trick. Read the thing the System has touched. Find the seam.

Reach in. Make it give the wrong answer back. I'd built a whole life out of being the one who could reach in. I put my hands on Dilan and reached in to read him and there was nothing to read. A body isn't a system. There's no seam in it, no cycle to wait out, no part to pull and run truer than its build intended: only the fact of it, flat and finished and not a thing I could argue with.

"Fuck," I said. Once, quiet, to the hands that had never yet failed to find a way in. The dry thing I say instead of the true thing had finally run out of true things to stand in for. The route-slate had come off his belt when he fell. It lay open with its corner of nothing still lit: the dead spur, the unbuilt junction, the place the map gave up. Three jumps. Two banked and the third a guess. Nobody was going to make the guess now. [Anomaly profile: 57/100. Correction ongoing.] Fifty-seven.

The meter had ticked itself up one notch for the brightest thing I'd done up here, and it had nothing at all to say about the rest, because the rest wasn't its kind of number. It counted me. It had never once counted them. A man had stood in a quiet room four nights ago and offered me this not happening. One signature, Marek said, and the hold's off the schedule by morning; nobody else has to be on a table for you to prove a point. Level, and almost kind.

I'd told him I wouldn't be corrected, and I'd been proud of how cold I got it out. Every person who stood close to me stood there on my refusal. Dilan had stood the closest (out front, on point, where he always stood) and the dark I wouldn't stop working in had come down a service spur and reached him first. He'd been right. Not that I should have signed; right about the cost, and that I'd let someone else pay it, the same as always, because the cost never once came to find me. Sefa hadn't moved.

She had her back to the chase wall and her tools still on her, and she was looking at the slate, not at Dilan, because Dilan was the thing she couldn't look at and the slate was the part of this her hands might do something with. I watched her reach for the task in it: the grade, the seam, the three flat words that turn a wall into a thing you can stand under. There wasn't one. A route with the runner gone is a line on a slate.

She got that far, fourteen and quicker at the cold math than any child should be, and then the math ran out from under her and left her standing in the open with nothing to make.

"We have to move," she said. Flat. A route's grade.

"It logs the kill, then it sweeps the spur after. We've got…" She reached for the number, the count that turns a dying floor into a thing with an exit on it, and it wasn't there.

"I don't have the number. Dilan had the number." And then, not flat, the first words I ever heard her say that she couldn't drive the weather out of: "I don't know the way back. Dilan knew it. I don't."

"I know it," I said, which was a lie, and the only kind thing I'd said all night. She didn't move.

"You don't know it either."

"No." There was no point lying to her twice in one breath.

"But I read us in, every brace of it, and a floor I can read forward I can read backward. You stay on me. You do what I say the second I say it. You don't look at anything I tell you not to look at." I got my hand under her arm and stood her up with me.

"That's the job now. That's the only job. Can you do the job." A long breath. Then she took it, because the only other thing left was coming apart on a hot floor, and coming apart was a thing she'd decided against a long time before tonight.

"I can do the job." Errata stayed on the line and said nothing, which wasn't the same as gone. She knew to the gram what it cost me to lie to her gently instead of saying the true cold thing first. She didn't make me do it twice. She held where she was, in the place only I could hear her, and left the quiet the size it was.

I picked up the slate and closed it, careful, like a part you can't afford to drop: the same care I'd practiced on it four nights back, on the only future I'd let myself want, the night before the night I spent it. Then I took the kid back into the dark I'd refused to stop working in, and went looking for a way home I'd never once needed to learn, because Dilan had always known it for me.