CHAPTER 13
Eliza
◆
Light rain on Day thirteen, on since dawn, and by two in the afternoon the window-screen on the east wall has stopped being weather and become wallpaper.
The cobalt floor-strip under the kitchenette pulses slow at eight-second intervals, and the coffee in my mug has gone room temperature, and somewhere down the corridor a faint irregular hiss from the workshop says Luca is testing a contact with the iron and has not slept the way a person sleeps.
I have made a decision and I am going to lose a fight about it.
"No," he says.
"Cade."
"Eliza."
I open my hands at my sides so he can see them empty, so he can see I am not coming at him with the closed-hand shape he reads as cover.
"I am going to Sector-Five. Hael had a husband. I have an address. Ninety minutes, back before dark. I am not asking permission. I am informing you."
"Then I am informing you back. " His head tilts a fraction to the left, the way it does when he has already decided how a thing ends, the throat-scar going thin under the lamp.
"Not happening. Sit in my office and I will explain it to you.
Stand in the corridor and I will explain it to you.
Walk out, and the corridor scanner will register the egress, and Adrian will be at the Trace before you make the manhole.
The first two are negotiation. The third is theatre. Choose."
The Ops Room door is across the Common Room behind me, shut.
I caught the heat sign of the prosthetic warming when I crossed — a half-second flash off the lattice through the gap above the threshold plate, a thing I have only learned to read since Day eight.
Adrian is listening. He has chosen not to walk in. He is letting Marcus do this.
The workshop iron pauses on a long breath.
Luca has stopped working — I can feel it down the wall, the absence of the small steady tick of his hands at a joint, which is the one signal that ever means he has gone quiet.
He is listening too. He has set the iron in its cradle and left a contact half-finished, because the argument in the next room has become the more important circuit.
"You are not letting me leave."
"I am not."
"You — three of you — have written rules I did not sign."
"You signed the rules at the antechamber door on Day one when you handed Senna the drive and walked into our basement.
You signed them when you let me lock you in Bunkroom D.
You signed them when you ate our food and asked my friend Luca what he was doing with his hands at three in the morning.
The rules signed you, Eliza. I am the one who is going to enforce them this afternoon. "
"Hael had a husband."
"And Hael's husband has been dead twelve hours."
I am moving before I have weighed it. Not at Marcus — past him, a hard left out of the corridor mouth and across the Common Room toward the antechamber turn, where the iron ladder runs up to the steel hatch and the Trace's service floor above it.
Four strides. I have the first rung in my left hand and my right on the cold lip of the hatch ring before the cobalt floor-strip has finished one pulse.
I am fast. I am quiet. I am up two rungs.
The hatch does not give. Palm-locked from the bunker side, and the override is keyed to a hand that is not mine, and I knew that going in and went anyway, because going is the only sentence I have left.
A shadow fills the ladder well below me — not Marcus.
Adrian has crossed from the Ops Room at the speed of a man who already had the geometry solved, and he does not grab me.
He sets his human left hand flat on the rung above my fingers, not on my fingers, blocking the climb without touching the climber.
The prosthetic hangs at his side, the brushed-bronze lattice gone cold-quiet in the gloom — no warmth in it at all, which on him is the steadiest thing he owns.
"Down," he says. One word. Not unkind.
I do not come down for a beat. The shake is in the long muscles of my forearm now, fine and electric, the decision still queued and refusing to clear.
Then the body settles it before the argument does: I come down a rung, and another, and my boots find the concrete, and Adrian steps back the exact distance that turns a block into an escort and leaves me my own square of floor.
My hand at my thigh closes without my asking it to, the knuckles whitening against the seam of my trousers before I make them open again, knuckle by knuckle, the way my mother used to set down a soldering iron she wanted to throw across a bench.
Marcus has come to the edge of the Common Room. He has said it gently from the start. His voice has dropped half a register; I do not know yet what that means about him, but I know it makes the sentence land softer than it should.
"How do you know," I say. Up at the dead hatch, not at either of them.
"Senna walked a body bag past the Trace at oh-six-hundred.
She pinged me on the second line at six-fourteen.
The bag had the shape of an adult male five-eleven.
Hael's husband matched the file. The Black Cell has been pulling cleanup since the day Hael went dark.
They did not leave him. There is nothing in Sector-Five for you to walk into except a uniform with orders.
Do not waste your knife on a uniform with orders. I am asking you. Please."
He says please. It lands rough at the edges, not polished.
The operational fear — losing me to a uniform on a Sector-Five corner — sits where he means it to, out front, audible.
But his voice drops a quarter-tone lower on the please than it did on the do not waste your knife, drops the way it does not on the tactical sentence, and the drop has nothing to do with Sector-Five.
I file the gap. There is a second fear under the first, and he is spending the first to keep me from hearing the second.
I let a breath out through my mouth at the same rate I took it in.
"I am humiliated, Cade."
"I know."
"And I am not taking a body bag's shape on Senna's word and yours.
A five-eleven adult male is the file. The file is not the man.
" I am already running the route in my head, the way I run any closed system for the one gap nobody warded.
"Hael ran his husband's medical port through a Sector-Eight maintenance relay so the girlfriend's clinic would not flag the second registration.
That relay still answers a ping if you know the handshake.
He used my handshake — I built it for him eighteen months ago.
If the port stopped reporting in the last twelve hours, the relay logs the exact minute it went dark.
That tells me whether the body in the bag had a working heart this morning or three days ago.
I am not walking to Sector-Five. I am walking to the sub-level console and I am pulling that log myself, and you are going to let me, because it is the one thing in this that is mine to read and not yours to brief me on. "
Marcus is quiet for a beat — the still, weighing quiet of a man re-pricing a deal he thought was closed.
"From the console," he says. "Not the surface relay. You ping it once, passive, no return signature, and Luca watches the line for a trace while you do it."
"Luca watches. Not babysits."
"Watches. " A concession, and he gives it cleanly, the way he settles a debt he has decided is fair. Behind me, near the hatch, Adrian says nothing, which from him is a yes.
So I will get to verify it with my own hands on my own architecture, and I will choose the bunker because the log told me to, not because three men told me to. That is the difference, and they have just conceded it, and we all know it.
Winning does not take the heat out of my face. I have won the operation and I am still humiliated I had to be peeled off a ladder to get here, and the two states do not cancel.
"I am going to be in this corridor for one more minute," I say.
"Then I am going to either turn around and go upstairs and try not to put my fist into the rail, or I am going to walk past you.
If I walk past you, you are going to put your hand on my arm.
If you put your hand on my arm, I am going to take it off you.
Do not touch me unless you know which version of this we are in. "
He stays in the jamb, one shoulder against the frame, and folds back the rolled cuff of the slate shirt a single careful turn it did not need — the old broker's tell come loose where he thinks I cannot price it.
The two parallel knife scars on the back of his left hand look almost decorative in the corridor light; the throat-scar at the underline of the jaw goes invisible at this angle and visible again as he settles his weight.
"Come to my office," he says, low. "We are going to talk about something else."
I hold on his face and run it for tells, the way I run a sealed door for the wiring behind it, hunting the place where the performance thins.
It has thinned. He is bare-faced in a way I have only seen once, at lunch, when Luca made a joke about coffee and Marcus did not bother to assemble a laugh for it.
"Marcus."
He breathes out at the name. The first time I have used it in the corridor. I did not plan it. He nods once.
But first I go down.
The spiral stair takes me to the sub-level, six racks at eighteen degrees and the ozone-and-metal smell of the server farm, and I sit at the console and bring up a clean outbound line.
Luca comes down the ladder behind me and says nothing, only stands at my right shoulder, loupe ring down over his eye, watching the trace meter and not my hands.
I key the old handshake from muscle memory — the one I built Hael eighteen months ago, four characters and a parity flip he never bothered to rotate — and I send one passive ping to the Sector-Eight relay and let go.