CHAPTER 6
Eliza
◆
Marcus pours a glass of water without asking whether I want one and sets it on the floor between us. He does it the way people set down birds.
The corridor lights are down to the cobalt night-mode strip along the baseboard, and the silver lighter cycles open-shut once in his right hand before he lays it flat to the steel beside his thigh, the way a man lays down a knife in a kitchen of strangers.
"Why did you choose Senna?" he says.
That is the question he opened a bottle for. I let the silence run. I have been awake for forty-six hours now; my pulse is a slow flat eighty; my left ankle has gone numb against the steel, and the cold of the floor is creeping up through my boots.
"Because she's the only fixer in this city who has ever done a fair trade with me," I say. "Twice. Both times I came in expecting to be cheated. Both times she didn't. I think she is the only person who could have vouched for me at your door at seven in the morning without you laughing."
Something in his face narrows down to a single thing in the room — nothing in it moving but the slow settle of his attention, the way a man goes when he has stopped attending to everything else — deciding, I think, whether to be patient with me or with himself.
"Senna doesn't laugh easily. I have seen her laugh perhaps three times in eight years. She laughed at your name when she called me from the back room. I have decided to take that as data."
He pulls a thin white pill-case from his shirt pocket, thumbs it open, takes a single breath mint, and shuts the case again with the soft snap of plastic on plastic.
"I'm going to ask the same thing in reverse. Why did she vouch?"
I rub the gold-rim eye and let myself think before I answer, because Marcus can tell when I am lying and I do not want to bother. The chip under my left bra strap is a small warm coin against my sternum.
"Three years ago she ran me a route map of the Sector-9 ducts when she did not have to.
I had paid for the ducts. I had not paid for the cross-tunnels.
She gave me the cross-tunnels because she said I would need them.
That night I needed them. I sent her a bottle of pre-Network grappa I had stolen out of a Vexis exec's locker.
I think she drank half. The other half is, I assume, currency. "
Marcus laughs once, quietly — the kind of sound you make at a clean cut in a knot.
"Senna does keep half-bottles for currency. The grappa is still in her safe. She told me once it has gone sentimental on her and she can't trade it. I think she meant she likes you, darling. Senna does not like easily."
Darling. He has been throwing the word around since the antechamber, and I decided by 07:30 the day before that he uses it on everyone — salt on everything when you have stopped tasting your food.
He turns the silver lighter once against the steel, a quarter-rotation and back, and the cobalt strip-light along the baseboard runs pale across the thin scar under his jaw.
"Senna pinged me twenty minutes ago. The eastern arterial got rerouted by a Vexis convoy at zero-three-hundred and her courier had to swing wide. She wanted me to know our perimeter just got noisier."
I set the shape of his hand against the floor beside the wrist-cuff blip from earlier, two facts of the same night, and hold them where I can compare them later. Vexis at three in the morning. He has been awake for the same hours I have.
A Vexis convoy reroutes the eastern arterial and it reaches us as a courier swinging wide and a man cycling a lighter on a steel floor.
That is the whole machine of this place, the part nobody draws on a map.
Four sectors down from the corporate apex the grid thins out — metered power the sector authority bills to a shell, a utility feed the Trace pays into a registry that lists this block as a flooded sub-basement condemned nineteen years ago.
Sector-6 is the seam where corporate surveillance stops being worth the cost of running it, and the men live in the seam.
The Trace is the cover charge: a bar that moves enough legitimate liquor and laundered runner-cash to keep one bored sector inspector fed and incurious, which is the only kind of safety this city sells.
Nobody is not looking because the four of them are clever.
Nobody is looking because down here the looking does not pay, and the day it starts to pay, this address is a drowned room with a false floor and everyone in it is already somewhere else.
The whole place is built like the window-screen I will catch tomorrow on the Common-Room wall — a square of bracketed glass welded crooked into the concrete, throwing an alley that does not exist, lit so a tired eye reads it as daylight and a way out.
A false front bolted over a flooded basement, kept just convincing enough to live behind. I file that the way I file an exit. It is the first time since I came down the ladder that I have understood what kind of debt keeps the lights on.
"It is late. You will lie awake whether or not you are in your bunkroom. I will lie awake whether or not I am in mine. You may choose where you prefer to do it. I will not be insulted."
I drink the water. He poured it at almost cellar temperature; there are no ice cubes in the bunker.
"Bunkroom. I want to learn what bad sleep here sounds like."
"Wise. The water recyclers fluctuate at three-fifteen. The fridge compressor cycles every forty minutes. Adrian walks the upper level at twenty-two-hundred, midnight, and three-thirty. Luca walks the workshop at every hour that is not on the hour. I do not walk."
"Why not?"
"Because if I walk, somebody worries. They will not say so. They will worry."
He stands. He does not offer a hand. He steps back so I have a clear line down the corridor to the spiral stair, and he puts his back to the steel hatch above the bar's service door so I do not have to feel watched.
I take the glass with me.
---
The bunkroom hatch seals behind me with a soft pressurized draw, and the corridor — Marcus's silence, the fridge compressor, the cobalt strip-light — falls away to nothing. I set the half-full glass on the steel ledge by the cot, where the cold of the floor has already followed me in.
In Bunkroom D I do not undress.
I sit on the cot the way I have sat on every cot since I was fourteen — legs over the edge, feet flat, knife in my left hand, blade closed, hinge against the meat of my palm.
The mother-of-pearl handle is cool. I bought her this handle at eleven, with money I had earned running a courier line through a Sector-7 alley I should not have been in.
The amber LED on the drive is somewhere two levels below — slow-pulsing, eating my deadline. It is the first night since the heist I have not slept in a corridor of my own making, and I do not know how to think about safety as a room someone else has built.
I press a flat thumb to the surgical scar at the inside of my left wrist, hard enough to feel the ridge of it, and the small ache anchors me.
The hand-poked silver-wire tattoo on the inner left forearm is warm to my own pulse.
I am still receiving. I drink the water down to nothing by 04:00 and set the empty glass on the steel floor where I can find it in the dark, and the not-sleeping settles in around me the way it always does.
---
I come out of Bunkroom D at 09:00 into the Common Room and the low gray light of the east-wall window-screen, which has been on all night, casting its dishwater glow across the rug.
From across the room it looks like a tall window onto a Sector-6 service alley.
Rain falls at thirty-five degrees off-vertical.
An old enamel sign hangs off a fire escape across the alley, three letters illegible, one letter N.
The wind moves the sign back and forth at two-second intervals.
As a piece of mood-engineering it is excellent.
It is also six millimeters off-true on the vertical.
I look at the screen sideways. The bracket holding it to the east wall has been welded with one diagonal stitch — quick weld, two passes. The screen, rigid, has been bolted to a crooked bracket and never re-shimmed. The image inside it runs a degree clockwise of true.
He aimed for true-vertical and missed by a degree because the bracket is welded crooked. He kept the bracket. He left it because it was close enough to feel like a window, and that tells me who built it.
Luca. Marcus would have re-machined the bracket because Marcus does not let anything about his upholstery offend his eye. Adrian would have torn the assembly out and remounted it true. Luca set it crooked and forgave it.
The fake puddle in the foreground has been rendered with a faint iridescence over the gray — the kind of detail you only put in if you have been homesick for an actual alley.
Adrian comes out of the corridor and goes into the Ops Room without looking at me. Marcus comes out behind him with two phones in one hand and a piece of toast in the other and goes into his office.
I go into the workshop.
---
Luca sits at the middle workbench with a half-eaten bowl of rice and beans by his right elbow and the loupe ring flipped down over his right eye.
He works a circuit board the size of a credit card with the soldering pen in his left hand.
The platinum bleach at the front of his hair has gone gray-white under the clinical lights, and the smudge of solder grease at his left temple is identical, almost, to the one that was there the day before.
He hasn't washed his face. He has been here all night.
He looks up through the loupe, then thumbs it aside off his eye, then settles it back down, the way his hands rummage for a thing to hold while the rest of him talks.
"Did you sleep?"
"No."
"Good. Neither did the bunker. We can be useless together."