Chương 9: Level

I came up off the last of the rust onto a floor someone had mopped, and I disliked it inside three steps. Underdecks floor tells you things: where the runoff goes, where the deck's worn thin, where a man stood a shift too long and left the shape of his boredom in the metal. This one had been dragged pale down the middle, the grime swept to a tide-line along the wall, even and tended and telling me nothing at all except that something up here cared to keep it that way.

Which, on the whole, I would rather not have known. A floor you can read is a floor that's on your side. A clean one has made other arrangements. Sefa was somewhere ahead around the bend, out of sight, doing the thing she was for, finding the way on while I came up slow behind her with the heavier feet and the louder build. When the patrol came, then, it came to me. Which was how I'd have arranged it, if anyone had thought to ask.

"One unit, sanctioned," Errata said.

"Don't let the gloss fool you. Actually, do, a little. The gloss is the most honest thing about it." It rounded the bend at a walk, and I had a second to look at it before it had one to look at me, and a second was a great deal more than I'd needed in a while. It wore a sanctioned rig: factory plate, seated true, a seam everywhere the schematic promised a seam and nowhere it didn't.

Down in the deep I'd learned my enemies the cheap way: the rushed fastener, the clamp run past the coolant to save a tenth of a credit, the build that fails because somebody built it to fail a little. This one had no rush in it anywhere. It was correct.

"Mark-Two, current issue," Errata said, and there was a sommelier's sigh in it.

"Built to spec, by a press that's stamped ten thousand of its brothers exactly this. Beautiful, the way a tax form is beautiful. And that, Carole, is the entire trouble with being sanctioned."

"It's never a surprise," I said.

"It is never a surprise. Same press, same torque, same cycle as ten thousand brothers, every last one of them killable just this well. Its discharge runs on a four-count and rests on the fifth. It has to. They all do. It's in the casting."

"You like this one."

"I respect this one. I'm about to enjoy watching it lose to something held together with spite and bad decisions, which is a different feeling, and a better one." Down in the deep this would have been a scramble: me inside its reach on a prayer, trading hits I couldn't afford, winning ugly or not winning. Up here, on the clean floor, with a second I didn't need, I waited for the four-count instead. It came on, raised the arm, and I read the cast of it the same as I read everything now.

There: the seated seam where two stamped plates met true, the one gap a perfect build can't help leaving, because it's still a thing made out of parts. On the fifth count its discharge rested. I stepped into the rest and put the core through the seam. The discharge kicked down my arm with that half-second of cold I'd given up expecting to befriend, and the grip behind it never fully closed. It hadn't since the shaft, and it wouldn't again; that was a thing about my hand now. But I didn't need the hand to close.

I needed the seam, and the seam was where I'd put it. The unit came apart along the line I'd read in it. [ENFORCEMENT ASSET TERMINATED: Enforcer, Mark-Two. Salvage window: 40s.] And then, for the first time since the world ended, the System gave me something instead of taking it away. [LEVEL 2.]"Well," Errata said, as near to startled as she got.

"It counted you. It actually wrote it down. I'd assumed the integer was decorative for things like us, a courtesy the System extends to assets it means to keep." A beat.

"It does not mean to keep you. And it counted you anyway. Make of that what you like; I'm choosing not to." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. I stood over the thing a moment longer than the salvage window asked for, and I'll be honest about what I felt, because there wasn't much of it and it didn't last. I felt good. It wasn't relief; I knew relief well, and this wasn't it. This was the other thing, the one I didn't have a word for yet.

The fight had gone exactly as I'd seen it go, clean from the first count to the last, my build doing what I told it and nothing I hadn't. Somewhere in the middle I'd stopped bracing for my own hands to turn on me. For about four seconds I'd been a person who was good at a thing and knew it, and it had been a long while since I was good at anything that wasn't only staying alive. I didn't look too hard at what the thing was. You don't, when it's the first good in a while. You let it be good.

"That was," Errata began, and stopped, and started again in the flat voice she used when she was pleased and would sooner be deleted than show it.

"That was within parameters. Don't let it go to your head. There's no room left in there for it, and I've seen the schematics." I almost said thank you. I knew better. Thank-you was a thing you said to people, and what Errata and I had was closer and stranger than that and didn't take to being named. Like the build, it ran best when I didn't poke it. I crouched to the rig anyway, out of an old habit that hadn't yet heard the war was over, and Errata made a small sound of professional distaste.

"Leave it. I mean it. Leave it. It's a clean part and a correct part and you'd hate it inside a week. A factory core does one thing as it was drawn, forever." A pause.

"Also: that kill was a touch better than you have any business being. Once is an anomaly. Twice and I'd have to start respecting you, and neither of us would survive it." So I left it. I stood up off a perfectly good Component with thirty seconds still on the window. Down in the deep, thirty seconds meant thirty seconds of prying like my life hung on it, because once it had. I left it because mine were better now. That was a new kind of rich, and I let myself enjoy it: walking away from money on the floor.

Good seconds end fast up here, I'd learn, not with a sound, but with the lack of one. Errata went quiet first. She always went quiet first.

"Carole." Not the pleased flat voice. The other one.

"This floor is clean because it's watched. And we just did something loud and bright on a stage somebody keeps swept." [Anomaly profile: 14/100. Unsanctioned signature logged: enforcement kill, maintained sector.]"Fourteen. Down in the dark, fourteen is nothing. The System can't be troubled to look at what it's already thrown away. Up here, fourteen is a number somebody reads. Different fourteen. Worse fourteen." I looked up. You do that, when you've felt a draft off a door you can't see.

Far above the clean corridor, where the Stack went from rust to the high cold tended glow we'd climbed up underneath, nothing moved that I could swear to. But the glow looked different now, the way a still room feels different the moment someone in it turns their head. The good drained out of me then, slow, like warmth leaving a hand, not all at once, just enough to remind me it had been borrowed. Sefa came back down the wall, quiet, having missed all of it like she missed everything outside her own job.

"Clear ahead a hundred feet," she said, "then a gate. Big one, sealed, the kind that means the floor stops being ours and starts being somebody's. I don't like the look of it." She wiped her hands down her thighs.

"Why are you staring at the ceiling?"

"Habit," I said.

"You always say that one too." I didn't tell her I was staring at the ceiling because the ceiling had, for half a second, stared back.

"Walk," Errata said, gently, which from Errata is a siren.

"Enjoy the two. You earned the two. But the next thing that comes up here to read us won't be a patrol, and it won't be impressed, and it won't cycle on a four-count you can stand and wait out." So I walked.