A Want Like Ours #2
"The latch may finish before the lower gate clears you."
"And we don't know whether leaving after it finishes ends contact."
"Correct."
Oliver smiled without humor.
"I liked the old mysteries better."
Pell leaned over the old pressure dial.
"There is still the original sounding line."
Marin looked at him. He pointed below the modern route plate.
A copper needle trembled beneath zero. The old quarantine builders had used outside tide as a reference before ships were admitted.
Halvek had preserved the line because his route geometry needed a stable external position.
Anchor House was forcing that old reference to agree with an interior condition. The sea had not agreed to anything.
Marin felt the shape of the problem.
"The lower sluice."
Pell's expression changed. "That floods the sounding trench."
"It restores the actual sea reference."
He looked toward the lower stair, measuring the distance and the water that would have to occupy it. "It may also flood us."
"Yes."
"I dislike how quickly you say that."
"You can dislike it while moving."
He did. Venn sent two sailors with him before Marin had to ask. Their boots struck the lower stair three at a time as the eighth tooth seated behind them. The steel bypass answered with another metallic complaint.
"Moved a quarter inch!" the engineer shouted from the gate.
Marin checked the old drainage marks on the wall, then looked up to the gallery. "Kelm. Tide."
"Below the second notch." He had looped Halvek's restraint line through the rail so both hands were free if the sea door failed.
"Keep it open. If the bypass goes, get the manual chain moving before the surge brake seats."
Kelm glanced at Halvek, then at the chain housing six feet away. "With what hands?"
"Find more."
"A cruel staffing model." He jerked Halvek upright by the restraint line. "Commander, I appear to require an additional criminal."
Venn hauled Halvek upright by the back of his coat and shoved him against the gallery rail.
"You will remain attached to me."
Halvek looked almost pleased by the phrasing.
"Commander, I assure you that is not necessary."
"Your preferences have suffered a catastrophic loss of jurisdiction."
Oliver laughed once inside the chamber. The sound broke halfway through. Marin turned. His knees had bent. One hand pressed against his sternum. Darkness moved in narrow branching lines beneath the skin of his throat and vanished when she tried to focus on them.
"Oliver."
His head lifted.
"Here."
"Name."
"Oliver Hawkins."
"Tomorrow."
His face tightened, and Marin understood the word had become more difficult under load rather than less.
"What is in it?"
Oliver swallowed. "Payroll." Ordinary obligation landed in the chamber beside blood and black glass. Marin kept going. "And?"
"Jasper complaining about the Kraken." His breathing hitched. "You pretending not to inspect my ribs while I pretend not to notice."
"I do not pretend."
"Cruel time to correct me."
The answer was weak enough to reassure her more than a polished joke would have. Seraphine stood at the manual continuity reader with both hands gripping the edge of the table. She had not touched a control. Marin saw the effort in that restraint and made herself use it rather than reward it.
"Reader?"
Seraphine checked the needle before answering.
"Self-reference stable. Orientation stable.
Contact rising." The ninth tooth caught.
The speaking tube vibrated. Oliver's shadow turned toward the far wall.
The shadow ignored Marin and the machinery and turned toward something beyond the basalt.
The same direction it had turned outside Anchor House.
A pressure brushed Marin's awareness. No voice.
No body. No sexual heat. Only distance made suddenly intolerable, the sensation of an empty space insisting that nearness would change it.
Bhodi did not recoil. Darkness snapped toward the far wall, not leaving Oliver so much as throwing itself between him and the pressure.
The refusal struck through the room without voice, brutally simple after everything Hunger had learned from him: No.
Mine. For one heartbeat the CONTACT needle broke away from SUBJECT as Hunger answered something the instruments had not been built to classify.
Then the other pressure vanished. Bhodi surged back around Oliver so hard both needles struck together against the same mark.
Marin's pulse jumped. Venn saw the board.
"What was that?"
Oliver looked at Marin. His expression carried surprise and something dangerously close to curiosity.
"Later," she said.
He swallowed.
"Agreed."
The ninth tooth held. The second pressure had solved nothing. Bhodi's return had tightened R2. Hunger first. Pell shouted from below.
"Sluice is locked!"
Marin was already moving.
"Venn."
"Go."
She ran down the lower stair. Her injured palm struck the wall at the first turn.
White pain flashed up her arm. She kept going.
The sounding trench lay beneath the main room, narrow and black with old mineral deposits.
Pell and the two sailors had leverage bars through the spokes of a wheel built for quarantine crews twice their size. The wheel did not move.
Black glass filled three teeth of the gear. New work poured directly into old iron. Pell saw Marin looking.
"We can break the wheel."
"Then we lose the sluice."
"Yes."
"Unacceptable."
"You are becoming difficult."
"Be useful."
Marin opened Perception only around the gear housing.
Old iron. New glass. Different material histories forced to behave as one machine.
Binding did not need to strengthen a relationship.
It could make the wrong relationship expensive.
She pressed both hands to the housing. Pain opened the stitches in her palm.
She ignored the warmth under the bandage and fixed the black-glass insert to the basalt wall behind it.
"Turn."
Pell stared.
"The glass is still in the gear."
"Turn."
The sailors heaved. The iron gear tried to rotate. The glass did not. Metal screamed. One tooth tore around the fixed insert. Then a second. Marin's vision narrowed with Strain.
"Again."
Pell joined the bar. The wheel moved. Seawater hit the trench with enough force to knock Marin sideways. Venn, who had apparently decided orders were suggestions when Marin ran toward flooding, caught the back of her coat before her knee struck stone.
"Up."
Marin coughed.
"You were told to stay above."
"I delegated."
A sailor lost his footing. Pell caught him by the belt. Black water climbed to Marin's thighs. The old pressure pipe hammered against its brackets. Above them, Anchor House gave a sound like a ship taking strain under too much sail.
"Move!" Venn shouted.
They climbed. Water followed through channels cut before Hollowfang existed. When Marin reached the sounding room, the first sheet of seawater crossed the floor around her boots and entered the four stone-post channels. The old pressure dial swung through zero. R4 shuddered.
ROUTE ACCEPTED.
The plate flickered.
ROUTE ACCEPTED.
Then:
ROUTE DISPUTED.
Halvek made his first frightened sound. It was quiet, but Kelm heard it and looked delighted.
"That one I liked."
The fifth assembly stopped between teeth. For a breath. Then the pawl forced forward. The tenth tooth caught. Pell reached the board beside Marin, soaked from the waist down.
"The old reference slowed it."
"Did not stop it."
"No."
The open-route engineer shouted.
"Half inch!"
The steel splint had bowed into a shallow curve.
The lower gate was beginning to close around it.
Marin looked at R1 through R4. R4 disputed.
R3 complete. R1 fixed. R2 still aligned.
The system no longer required perfect agreement.
Repetition had taught it tolerance. Of course Halvek had allowed for noise.
The eleventh tooth started to move. Oliver went completely still.
Marin's body reacted before her reasoning. She crossed to the glass.
"Oliver."
His pupils had widened until only a thin sapphire ring remained. Blood ran from one nostril.
"Name."
Nothing. Seraphine's breath broke. Marin did not look away from Oliver.
"Second prompt. Oliver, identify me."
His eyes moved. Found her.
"Marin."
Air returned to the room without relieving anything.
"Do you want extraction?"
His gaze flicked toward the open gate behind him and stayed there long enough that Marin's body began moving before his mouth did.
"Yes."
Her hand closed around the manual release. The iron was cold through her wet glove. She had built the door to obey that answer. Oliver shook his head. "Wait." The word stopped her harder than a shouted command could have.
"You just said yes."
"I want out." His voice shook, forcing him to breathe before he could finish. "I don't think the room is going to let out mean finished."
The eleventh tooth moved another fraction.
Marin kept her hand on the release without pulling.
One answer had not invalidated the other in the three seconds between them.
She had spent the evening dismantling mechanisms that treated an earlier choice as permission to ignore a later one.
Fear did not improve that logic when it belonged to her.
Oliver's attention shifted past her shoulder.
He was not looking at Halvek or any control.
His gaze had acquired the distant precision Marin associated with near possibility, and she hated recognizing it here.
"What do you see?"
Oliver pressed his left hand to the glass.
"Not enough to call seeing."
"Then what?"
"The next catch."
Marin looked at the fifth assembly. The tooth hung one width from seating.
"The pawl?"
"The moment it finishes moving."
Cold entered her stomach. His exclusion. The third verified use if he did it. Narrow. Immediate. Terrible.
"Cost?"
Oliver's mouth moved without humor.
"You ask that as though I have developed accounting."
"Oliver."
"Unknown."