CHAPTER 16 #3
"Black Cell rig. " I set the cable down square to the table's edge — Marcus's small ceremony, borrowed into my hands without my deciding to borrow it. "They put a man on our parapet six hours ago and we watched a six-hour-old snowfall the whole time."
"How long until you can rebuild the feed."
"Three days for parts. The screen stays black until the strike is over."
"Then the screen stays black."
Marcus comes in at seven with a cup of tea for me and a folded slip of yellow paper.
Senna: out of the city until 11am tomorrow; her brother with her; runners scattered.
No leaks. Wren: notified; on call. He hands Adrian the slip and me the tea, stands at my shoulder a second, and steps back. The tea is hot. I drink it.
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By ten the strike is a drafted skeleton on the projection: south bay, elevator bank, Sector-1 corridor.
Three contingencies for Ivor Kade, two for Tarn's office defenders not going down when the auth packet goes out, one for the auth packet not going out at all — because Adrian's planning includes the case where Luca dies in the bunker before he can send it.
I have not realized I have been keeping that case off my own planning until I see it on his.
He does not call attention; we draft it.
At ten p.m. Adrian closes the projection.
"Common Room," he says. "Sleep tonight. We work tomorrow."
I follow him out. The diesel-heater hum is a low chord under everything, and the recycle vent overhead breathes its slow even breaths, even and even and even.
Luca is on the couch, his loupe-ring set on the table beside a folded square of solder-grease cloth, both faceup, both still — his hands at rest, which is the one configuration I have never once seen them choose on a good day.
Marcus is at the far end, book closed across his thigh. Waiting.
The east-wall window-screen is black.
I have stopped seeing it sometime in the last six hours — the trick of the screen. It has been a window because we have let it be one; now it is a black panel because we know, and you cannot unknow a black panel back into a window. I stand in front of it. The black does not show my reflection.
I put my palm flat against the glass. It is cool but not cold, and the diesel-heater hum carries up through the wall into my hand — proof that machinery is still trying.
The window is dark, the bar is gone, the clock is running, I let myself think, and the soft thing in me does not soften the words.
I turn back to the room. Adrian has taken the chair opposite the couch, prosthetic on his knee. None of them will go to bed before I do; they are waiting for me to choose a place so they can settle around it.
I sit next to Luca, and he lifts his arm to let me tuck against his side, the St. Eligius medallion at my own throat — his, since the server-farm stair, mine to wear since — catching warm amber where my temple meets his shoulder.
Marcus reaches along the back of the couch until two fingers find the inside of my elbow, where my pulse lives, and stay.
Adrian keeps the chair, the angle, the door in his sightline over our heads — holding the perimeter so the three of us can stop holding it.
The window-screen is black behind my shoulder.
I let two fingers stop once, gently, against the surgical scar at the inside of my left wrist. Then I let the hand fall open on my thigh, palm up, the silver-wire tattoo catching warm amber — I am still receiving — and Marcus's eyes go to the wrist, to the open hand, and stay.
He keeps the distance he promised me he would keep.
Nothing in his face moves at all, which from Marcus is the same as a hand laid over mine.
Nobody says anything.
The black panel sits behind me, matte and absent and honest. Then a warmth ticks once under the cuff at my left wrist, brief as a struck match going out — a scan-warning, sleeved against the silver wire.
One degree hotter than yesterday's. The thread has been climbing since the rooftop, half a notch at a time, and this is the next rung of it.
Every day of my life the answer to that small heat has been the same: swallow it, log it behind my own teeth, hold the line by myself till the night burned down.
Tonight I do the thing my mother never got to teach me.
I do not let go of it, and I do not seal it away alone — I let it lie where my pulse meets Marcus's two fingers and stay warm there, six days out and harmless yet, and I leave the men their sleep.
Marcus's fingers shift a half-millimetre at the bend of my elbow, settling into the place the rhythm just changed.
He has priced it off my pulse the same as he prices a man off a held breath — and found whatever he was reading for.
He says nothing. He does not lift his hand. He stands the watch with me.
Six days. The window stays dark. Somewhere above us, on a rooftop the cache can no longer see, the man with the fine-edged shear lays his palm flat to the next sleeve of cable and takes its measure.