Chương 75: Correction Inbound

I didn't sleep on the proof. I'd told myself I would (that a person carries a hard thing better in the morning) and instead I sat against the cold wall at the mouth of the hold and watched forty people breathe and didn't sleep at all. Sefa in her corner, a knife loose in her fist. Adoma's bad shoulder rising and falling. Renn folded over his own knees by the lamp.

The fact I'd climbed for sat in my chest, a swallowed coal: the cull had never cared who complied, and I was the only one still breathing who could read it off the page. So I was up and halfway to the stair to walk the coal off when the System found the words for what it meant to do about me. [We have reviewed your recent activity and noted sustained non-conformity. To restore order to the affected sector, a remediation has been scheduled for the next service window. Please ensure all assets remain available. Thank you for your continued compliance.] It came in the kind voice. The one that hoped I was having a restful cycle.

"Amending the customer copy," Errata said, and there was no joke under it, just the clerk reading fast.

"'Remediation' is the word it reaches for when it doesn't want to name the forty people.

'The affected sector' is here. This room. The hold.

'The next service window' is a little under two hours from now." A beat, while she decided whether to soften the last of it and chose not to.

"'Please ensure all assets remain available' means hold still. They'd sooner not chase a thing they've already booked."

"Under two hours," I said.

"A little under. I'd round it up for you, but you've never once moved faster for a kinder number, and we're spending some of it now." I knew the shape of it before she finished. I'd spent two Strata learning to read this exact thing (the grammar of a scheduled sweep, when it fell and where and in what order) and gotten good enough this past week to reach into one and bend it off the people I loved. The System had read the lesson back to me. Same grammar. Same patient hand.

Pointed now at the floor under my boots, written in an order I'd taught myself to know on sight. That was the part the proof hadn't warned me about: not that they would come for the hold, but that I'd know the handwriting, because somewhere in the last month it had started to look like mine. There was no fight to win standing here. You don't out-stab a calendar.

The one thing in the Stratum that could call a booked sweep off was the scheduling-core's own local reach, three hundred vertical feet up in the live Levels, in the geography I'd nearly died in twice this month, and getting to it before the window opened meant climbing away from the forty and leaving them sitting exactly where it was going to open. I woke Sefa with a hand on her shoulder. She came up out of sleep sharp, knife first, reading my face faster than I could have made the words.

"How long," she said.

"Under two hours. It's a sweep, and it's for the hold."

"Then we go down. You go where?"

"Up. The core's the only thing in the Stratum that can turn a sweep, and it won't turn from here." She didn't waste breath on the unfairness of that. She'd run that arithmetic a hundred times this month and she ran it cold.

"The old water gallery, then. Past the dead grilles, off every map they bother to keep." She was hauling Renn up by the collar before I finished, pitching her voice flat and low across the dark to fold forty frightened people toward the back wall. At the lip of the deeper stair she looked back once.

"Go up. We'll hold the deep. Don't be slow, and don't die on a step being clever." Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! The second box found me on the first flight up. [Retrieval Operator assigned to remediation. Subject may yet elect voluntary correction. Please remain available.] Marek. Coming down the schedule with it: unhurried, sanctioned, certain he was the kindest thing on the floor.

To retrieve me, or to keep me off the core; from where I stood it was the same stair either way. And underneath it, unspoken and still lying on the table between us, the old offer. Come in. He'd have the hold off the schedule by morning. A day ago that had been the cruelest true thing he could say to me.

Tonight I carried the page that proved it had never been true at all: that off the schedule was only ever later on the schedule, that the door he'd built his whole corrected life on opened onto a calendar that always came back around. And I wasn't going to get to show him: not in the next two hours, not in time to keep one person on this floor off a table.

"For the record," Errata said, as I took the flights two and three at a time, "I am filing on this."

"Filing what."

"All of it. A remediation order issued without a countersign from the sector warden: procedural defect, escalable. A consignment manifest with the recipient redacted, which I can hang three more violations off. By the time I'm done there will be a backlog on this floor that outlives whoever's counting at the top of it." Her voice didn't climb. It went the other direction, down and flat and exact, which was how I knew she meant it.

"They put my person on a list. I happen to know the form that takes people off lists. I intend to use all of it."

"That won't move the window."

"No," she said.

"Climb anyway." So I climbed, and I did it loud: no time to be quiet, no time to be nothing the floor was hunting for, only speed up through watched ground that lit a shade brighter at the anomaly of me with every landing. Every door I passed knew I had. Two floors up a warden plate came off its post and turned its blank face down the stair after me, falling into the straight patient line those things walked when they'd decided what you were.

"Don't," Errata said, the instant I measured it for a kill.

"A kill up here is a beacon, and you've nothing to spend on a beacon tonight. Run it."

"Running it." I read the next three landings and took the ugly route, through a maintenance throat too tight for the plate to follow clean. It stayed behind me, gaining slow. One more thing on the stair, then. And I was paying for it in the only coin I had, the quiet I'd hoarded all book, spent now by the fistful.

Above me the live Levels hummed their even hum, indifferent, and threaded under it now (faint, if you had the reach to feel it, and I did) the sweep beginning to assemble itself down the schedule toward Stratum One. I felt it the way you feel a tide decide to come in. Patient. On time. Already moving. The stair turned and turned.

Below, the hold had gone the particular quiet of a held breath, the warmth of forty people draining into the deep dark behind Sefa's flat voice, dropping further under me with every flight.

"The odds, with the usual joke on top…" Errata started, and stopped. There wasn't a joke that fit them. There was no funny version of a number that started bad at the bottom of that stairwell and got worse the higher I climbed away from it, and she was too good a clerk to pretend the figure rounded anywhere kind.

"Left at the broken rail," she said instead.

"Climb." The arithmetic was simple and it was the worst I'd ever run. Under two hours. One stair. The cull coming down it for the hold, Marek somewhere on it between me and the core, the core the only thing in the Stratum that could call the whole thing off. Everything I'd built and everyone I had left, collapsing onto one floor at one time, on a schedule I'd taught myself to read and could not, from here, reach far enough to change.

So I climbed toward the machine that was coming to kill the people I was climbing to save, and I didn't let myself run the math on whether I'd be fast enough. There wasn't a version of that number I wanted to hear.