The number came first, before the room did.
11:52, glowing up at me from my own palm, which I didn't remember lifting. No AM, no PM, and no date line, because the phone had nobody to ask. Just those four digits sitting in the dark.
Cold concrete under my hip. Steel shelf against my spine. The suit warm over every inch of me from throat to wrist, so I was cold and warm in the same breath, and neither cancelled the other. I lay there for a while doing nothing, waiting for the ceiling to explain itself. There was no ceiling to find. There was no window either, and the door was still locked. The dead bolt's little brass tongue sat in the phone light, exactly where I'd left it.
Morning or night? I honestly didn't know. I had to do arithmetic.
The ceiling came down at 2:14. If this was 11:52 that same morning, I had been out for nine hours and thirty-eight minutes. If it was 11:52 the next night, I'd lost almost a day, and I would have expected my body to have a few things to say about it. Hunger. A bladder with a grievance. A mouth like the inside of a boot. I checked. My body said nothing, which meant it was no help at all.
So: the battery. Nine percent. I'd been burning the screen on and off as a lamp, but not for long, and a phone sitting idle in a dead network bleeds slowly. Ten hours fit. A day would have drained it flat. I told myself that was the answer and decided to believe it, with a confidence of maybe seventy percent, which for the evening I'd had was practically a signed affidavit.
"Ten minutes," I said to the dark. My voice came out gravelly. "Ten hours. A month. Same difference."
Nobody laughed. The shelves ate it.
And under it, under me, under every thought I tried to line up in order, the beat went on.
RUUL.
Colorless. Level. The same one I'd fallen asleep to, and I listened for the seam where it would have stopped and started again, a hitch, a rest, the quiet of a refrigerator cycling off. There wasn't one. It had gone on through every hour of that arithmetic. It was going on now, steady as a pulse that wasn't mine.
I'd slept. It hadn't.
I was annoyed at the clock, mostly. It was easier. I thumbed the screen dark to save the nine percent, and lay there in the warm, with the beat, and the number still burning behind my eyes.
Ten hours. Whatever it had been doing, I hadn't been there for it.
I woke the phone and angled its thin light over the legal pad. The screen still said nine percent. I turned to a clean page and wrote INVENTORY at the top.
My fingers found two bumps behind my ears. Smooth, warm, the size of rivet heads. I brought my hand forward along the collar, feeling its close fit against my throat. When my fingers reached the side of my neck, I lowered them. I knew where the collar ended at the back. I knew where the injection had gone in.
I wrote what I could touch.
Ears: 2 bumps. Smooth. Warm.
Neck: collar snug.
Left arm: struts, shoulder to forearm.
Ribs: struts.
Right thigh: tear sealed. Faint dark line.
Right ankle: stiff. Strutted.
I checked each line against my body. The arm had shattered. The ribs had given. The gash in my thigh had left blood down my leg, and the ankle had folded under me on the fall. My pen kept moving. One entry, then the next.
At the bottom of the page I wrote:
Pain:
The pen rested on the paper long enough to leave a dark point after the colon. I pressed my thumb against the strut on my left arm, then against the ribs beneath it. Both held firm. I added the word.
Pain: none.
I read the line again. The other entries told me where I had been hurt. This one told me I could be hurt again and keep walking on it. I held the pad steady with my bare hand and looked back up at the strut on my arm.
The strut was moving.
I almost missed it, because I was looking for the wrong thing. I'd been reading the arm as a finished object, a record of what had been done to me, and a record doesn't change while you hold it. But the long dark bar along my forearm had shifted against the yellow hexagons. It was a hair, no more. Between the wrist clasp and the elbow, the arm had a bend that was not supposed to be there, a shallow bow where the bone had broken and been left to think about it. The strut sat along the outside of that bow like a hand pressing on a bent page.
It clicked.
The sound was tiny, a click down in the bone. The bow eased. The arm settled a hair straighter, and the strut sat a hair tighter against it.
I looked at the legal pad, and then at the bag by my knee. At the bottom, under the granola bars, was a pencil. I keep one because pens die at the worst possible moment. It was the least alien object in that room, and I took it out like a person reaching for a handrail.
I laid it along the outside of my forearm, point to the wrist and the eraser end past the elbow, and pressed it flat against the two ends of the bend. Between the pencil and the bone-line in the middle there was a gap. I measured it with the first two fingers of my right hand, side by side, and they fit. Two fingers, almost exactly.
I checked the phone. 11:58. I wrote it down.
11:58. Gap = 2 fingers.
Fingers are a terrible unit. Nobody calibrates them. I would have given a great deal for a set of calipers, and a lesser amount for Kevin to tell me I was doing the thing again. I wrote fingers (mine, right hand, index + middle) underneath, so that whoever audited this later would at least know what had been used.
Then I waited, which I am bad at, and I did it badly. I ate half a granola bar. I drank some water and counted the shelves, nine across, five high, and the boxes on the third one, which were labeled by year. The RUUL kept its beat in the back of my head, steady as a dryer in another room. Every few minutes the arm would draw my eye, and I'd make myself leave it alone. A gap is a thing you can't watch close. It only changes when you look away.
At 12:40 I laid the pencil along the arm again, same ends, same pressure.
One finger. Then the second finger, held up beside it, and a little under the width of the first. Three quarters of it, give or take.
12:40. Gap = 1 and 3/4 fingers.
I looked at the two lines on the page, one above the other. Two. One and three quarters. It was a small difference. I read it three times anyway.
Orthodontist, I thought. That's what this was. You go in with a mouth full of wire, and somebody gives a screw a quarter turn, and you leave. Nothing visible happens. You come back in a month, and the teeth have moved. Tighten, wait, tighten. It was not a comparison I would have wanted to say out loud, and I said it out loud anyway, to the shelves.
"Braces."
Nobody argued with me. It made the thing bolted to my bone sound like a thing with a billing cycle.
But the number was going down. I had spent my whole working life reading figures that other people brought to me, and finding the place where they disagreed. This one was mine. I had measured it with my own hand, against a pencil, and it went one way. I could not remember when a number had last gone that way for me, and I did not look hard for the reason it settled me. I had an idea of where I'd file that, and the drawer said not today.
I turned to a fresh line and wrote the next time to check: 1:20. Then I rested the pencil on the page next to it, where I could reach it, and let the arm lie across my knee while it worked.
It was slow, and it was measurable. I could do it again and get the same answer. I decided that was worth something, and that I could give it an inch.
Since there was nothing else to do, I opened the door.
I did it on purpose, pressing the bruise. I sat with my back against the shelving and the phone dimmed on the concrete and I let myself think her name.
Jules.
The hair came first, because it was the funniest. She cut it herself, in her bathroom, with kitchen scissors, and every single time she missed a piece at the back. A little tuft, like a cowlick with ambitions. I had told her about it once in the first month and she'd said, "Cici, it's a signature." Then the sneakers, white, with everything, with the gray suit she wore to the briefings, scuffed at the toe from kicking the leg of her desk while she read. Then the mug, WORLD'S OKAYEST ANALYST, which she bought for herself because she said nobody else was going to.
Then the grip. Hard enough to hurt. Hard enough that I'd looked down in Conference B to check my fingers were still the same color.
And it came. It came up from the floor of me like water in a basement, my throat going tight, my eyes starting to heat.
A hand laid itself over it.
It was gentle, and that was the worst part. It didn't shove or slam. It smoothed, one long warm pass from somewhere under my ribs to somewhere behind my eyes, and everything the water had lifted settled back down flat. My throat loosened. My eyes cooled. I could still feel where the grief had been. Its shape stayed, exact as the outline of the pain in my arm that I wasn't having. I wanted to cry and what I got was the outline of crying, an outline with nothing inside it.
"She was my friend," I said.
I said it to the shelves and the dark and the warm collar at my neck. I said it like a person reading a charge into the record.
RUUL ran on, even and colorless. The suit offered no word and no apology. Nothing changed, which was the answer.
My jaw was tight. My hands had closed, and I opened them one at a time, and they closed again.
The suit wasn't broken or confused about what I was. The suit had looked at the size of what was coming up in me, measured it against whether I could still work, found it over the limit, and filed it. That was all. It had done the same on the stairs, the same in the corridor, probably a dozen times in the night while I slept. Anything big enough to stop me, it took out.
She had held my hand. She had said three inches of steel, baby, and laughed, and I was not even allowed to be sad about it. It was the one thing I had left to give her, and something else had taken it out of my hands and called it maintenance.
And then, rising through the flat calm like a nail through a board, I hated it.
It was clean. It was hot. It had edges. It didn't come up from the basement; it was just there, whole, in my chest, and when the warm hand moved toward it I braced for the pass of the iron, for the soft erasure, and it didn't come. The hand stayed where it was. The anger sat in me, burning, and nothing touched it.
I turned that over. The suit could press flat my fear, my pain, my grief, and it would not, or could not, press flat this.
Fine, I thought. Then this one's mine.
I held on to it like the pencil. Like a number that went down when I measured it. It was the first thing since the ceiling came down that I knew for certain no one else had put there.
I kept it on my lap, with the arm, and did not let go.
My fingers began to shake around the pencil. I pressed its point to the notebook to steady them, and the line ran across the page. When I looked up, the shelves tipped left. I put my palm on the concrete and waited for them to settle.
My mouth was lined with paper. I wanted salt badly enough that I could almost taste it.
KARESH VEN TAL.
Blue-white, inside my head. A beat later: KARESH VEN TAL. RUUL kept working beneath it. I looked at the phone. Just after two. The suit had been at my arm for hours, and now the tremor ran all the way to my shoulders.
A light pressure settled against my right side, under my elbow, urging me toward the door.
“No.” My voice came out dry. “That hall has things in it.”
KARESH VEN TAL.
The pressure held. I had water, drinks, granola bars in the bag beside me. I pulled it closer and gripped the strap, thinking through what was left. My hand shook harder. The room leaned again while I sat still.
I could keep the door locked. I could stay here until my legs gave out on the concrete. That was the whole calculation.
I took the notebook, hauled the bag onto my shoulder and got to my feet. The pressure stayed with me as I crossed to the door, gentle enough that I wanted to shove it away. I turned the lock.
The door swung inward on a dark so complete that my eyes might have been shut until I blinked and the lashes brushed my lids. Cold, stale air. Concrete dust, the dry-chalk smell of it, coming up in the back of my throat.
I stood in the doorway with one hand on the frame. The pressure at my right elbow leaned, gentle and sure. I stepped out and pulled the door shut behind me, because leaving it open would be an invitation, and the latch gave its small click, and I flinched at my own noise hard enough that the frame locked in my ribs.
Nothing answered. I started to count.
Seven steps along the wall, my palm flat on the paint. The wall was a rumour under my hand, cooler than the air, there and then there. A door frame, metal edge, handle. One. Nine steps. Another. Two. I kept the phone dark in my pocket. I had walked this corridor on a good day, with a badge and a coffee and somewhere to be, and I had never once counted anything on it. Now I counted like the numbers were handrails.
The suit was warm all the way around me, and the pressure at my side did not hesitate. Left a little. Straight. It had no doubt in it anywhere, and I hated how much easier that made my feet.
At the corner I stopped and listened for ten full seconds before I let myself round it. Grit crunched under my boot. I eased my weight off it and the crunch died.
The click came from far above.
Dry, quick, one position. Then the answer, from somewhere else, a floor away at least, and I was already against the wall with my shoulder blades on the concrete and my mouth open so my breathing would stay quiet. Under the clicks, a long scrape, slow, something heavy hauled across a floor by a thing that did not care what it scratched. Dust sifted down somewhere ahead of me. It landed with a whisper.
I counted the scrape. Four seconds. Five. It stopped. The two clicks traded once more, and then nothing, and the nothing was worse.
The pressure leaned again, patient. This way. I went.
Eleven steps. Twelve. I had lost the door count somewhere in the freeze, and I decided it was four. Four doors. Probably four.
The wall under my left hand changed. Flat steel instead of paint, a vertical seam, a push bar cold as a coin. I knew this door. I knew it, and I did not turn my head. I put my eyes on the floor, on the grey blur of it a yard ahead, and set my feet down where the pull said to set them, and I counted. Five steps. Six. The heat of that door stayed on the left side of my face the entire way, a place my cheek refused to point at, and I let it. If I turned, I would have to know something. Knowing could wait. It had waited ten hours, and it was good at waiting.
Seven. Eight. The steel gave way to paint again, and my shoulders dropped half an inch from where they had crept up.
Past the second corner the clicks came again. Closer, or only clearer, down through the ceiling in a thin dry rain. I flattened to the wall. One answered pair. Then the tail, a slow drag, right over my head or three rooms off, and my thigh began to tremble inside the suit while the suit kept the leg, firm and steady, from taking me down. I breathed through my teeth. I counted the clicks, because counting was the one thing I was good at, and when the count ran out the pressure at my elbow leaned again, exactly as before. No rush in it. It could wait on my fear as long as I needed. That was the part I could not decide how to feel about.
Another turn. The air changed.
Faint at first, so slight I thought I had invented it. Plastic. Cold water on cold plastic. A hum, low and electrical and wrong in a building that had gone silent, the sound of a machine somebody had forgotten to tell about the end of the world.
The pull firmed, no longer a lean but a hand at the small of my elbow, walking me. I put out my palm. Doorframe. Light came from somewhere inside, a dim cold glow, a cabinet face lit blue-white, rows of colored packages, and beside it, on a stand, a jug of water, full to the neck, holding that glow in a ring along its shoulder.
I had walked this whole floor in the dark, on trust, and it was standing there waiting.
The pressure on my right side stopped at the doorway. And the voice, KARESH VEN TAL, that blue-white metronome I had been carrying around like a tooth, got louder. Here it was loud enough to lean on.
A green exit sign hung over the far wall and poured its sick light across the linoleum. A round table, two chairs tipped on their sides. The room was cool and smelled of old coffee and floor cleaner. I crossed it low, one hand trailing the table edge, and reached the cooler, and the spout was still dripping. Gravity had kept working on its own all night, with nobody asking it to.
I put my mouth to the spout. I did not look for a cup. The water was cold enough to ache in my teeth, if aching had been something I did anymore, and I drank until it went down wrong and came back up through my nose, and I stood there bent over the cooler, coughing, eyes streaming, still not done. The metronome slowed. It did not stop.
Then the vending machine, against the back wall, intact and dark and full of colored packages, like a shop window after the town has left.
I had my badge out before I had decided anything. It was already in my hand, already lifted, the lanyard swinging, and I held it to the reader flat, a little to the left where the sensor was fussy. I waited for the little red light.
It did not blink. Of course it did not blink.
One bark came up from somewhere I had not known was still loose, then another, and then I was swiping a badge at the end of the world, and the laugh ran on without me. Eleven weeks of access levels, four surface doors, one door on U1, and this machine, and I had stood at it holding my little laminated face up to the dark like a ticket to a show that had closed. Jules would have died. She would have told it by the printer, to anyone who came by, with every pause in place. I kept laughing a good beat past where it was funny, bent over my own knees, because the end of the laugh was a place I did not want to go, and above me, thin and dry through the ceiling, the clicks went on. I got the sound down to my teeth. I wiped my face.
Then I made a fist of my left hand, the one with the struts along the forearm, and put it through the glass.
It went in with a sound like cold rain on a roof. No jolt, no sting, no shock racing up to the shoulder. The glass fell in sheets and the arm just kept going, as if it had been told in advance what was on the other side. A rule broke. I did not feel sorry about it.
Sports drinks, three of them, blue and orange and something red. I drank the first standing and the second crouched and the third with my back against the cooler, and on the third the voice went green and gold, falling like leaves. DOLEK. The metronome quit.
For about as long as it takes to breathe in, I was done.
Then it started again. KARESH VEN GRETH. Same blue-white, same patient beat, and the pressure on my right side swung round toward the broken front of the machine like a compass finding north.
I ate. I went down on my knees in the glass, which did nothing to me, and tore wrappers with my teeth. Granola bars, one after another, oats and sugar and no taste to speak of. A bag of peanuts, orange dust on my fingers, my fingers in my mouth. A honey bun, sticky, obscene, gone in three bites. I crouched there on the linoleum like something that had been fed on a schedule, and it was good. That was what I couldn't get around. Being ordered to eat did not bother me half as much as how good it was. Eleven granola bars. I counted, because counting is what I do when I'm not allowed to do anything else.
DOLEK. Green and gold, falling.
I sat in the wrappers, breathing. Somewhere in the middle of it, with peanut dust on my tongue, the thing had surfaced, and now it came back up and stood in front of me. TAL had turned into GRETH. KARESH had stayed. Water, and then food, same first half, same VEN, one word swapped. Whatever it was saying had parts.
It watered me, and when that was done it fed me, and the whole time it was ticking me off a list. I did not know where on the list I was. But I had something to write down.
I didn't write it in the break room. The ceiling over the vending machines had started to tick again, a pair of dry clicks and then the answer from farther east, and the floor above us was full of things going door to door. I stuffed what was left into the canvas bag. Six drinks, four granola bars, a packet of crackers with the orange cheese smear. I carried it down the corridor with my shoulders up around my ears, back along the wall, counting doors.
Records 1-C let me in. I locked it behind me and stood with my forehead against the steel for a count of ten. The air in there was cool and dry and smelled like paper, and the emergency strip over the door laid a gray-yellow light across the shelving. I stacked the drinks against the wall where they had been. Then I went to the supply shelf by the door and took a legal pad, because I am who I am, and three pens, and tested the first one on my thumbnail. It worked. The blue-black line sat on my skin for a second, a small, legal, ordinary thing.
I sat at the steel table. The chair was a bad chair. The suit hummed its RUUL under my ribs, steady as a dryer in the next room, and I let it.
I wrote the date, which I had to work out. Then:
KAH-RESH VEN TAL = WATER
I sounded it out as I had heard it, and the spelling was my own guess. I had no other. The pen scratched. It was the only sound in the building that belonged to me.
KAH-RESH VEN GRETH = FOOD
I looked at the two lines. Anyone would have. They sat there one on top of the other, and the front halves lined up so exactly that my eye slid straight down them like a finger down a column. KAH-RESH VEN, and then the swap. Same front, different back. TX-4471-CE, AR-0916-CE. The suffix is the family and the number is the individual. Somebody had decided that a long time ago, and somebody had decided this, and the two somebodies had the same habit. I have read a lot of filing systems. You can always tell when a person built one on purpose.
So the front half meant something on its own. It showed up when the water showed up and again when the food did, and it stayed put while the back half changed. I wrote it on its own line.
KAH-RESH VEN = I NEED
Then I stopped, and the pen hovered. I did not like it. Maybe it was right. It had been right twice, at the cooler and on the linoleum, a hand on my side turning me toward each thing toward each thing. But I had been told what I needed all night, with a needle at the base of my skull, and I had not signed anything.
I drew the question mark after it. Small, hard, the hook pressed deep enough to dent the next page.
I DON'T KNOW THIS? I NEED?
It landed somewhere under the sternum, a click like a drawer shutting on the right file. It was the first time since 2:14 that I had felt like the person who had gotten up that morning and picked out a blouse. A question mark is the most honest mark there is. It says I've got a claim and I'm not willing to sign it yet.
Overhead, something scraped along a ceiling and went on. I looked up, waited, and counted four before it faded. Then I looked down again at the page in the gray light, at my handwriting with its right-leaning slant and the crossed sevens Jules used to make fun of, and I started a second column for what I did not know.
Whatever else it had done to me, it hadn't taken this. I turned the pen over in my fingers. The ink was still wet on the question mark.
Then it came back.
THEL VEN ESE. Blue-white, laid across the back of my neck as if it had been waiting out the other two phrases in the hall and had just now been let in. Patient. It had no hurry in it at all, and that was the part I took personally.
I looked at the notebook. Blue meant need. Two data points, both confirmed by a hand on my side and a satisfied green-gold afterward. So: a third need. Fine. I was a professional.
Water first, since it was closest. I cracked a bottle and drank half of it standing up, tepid and plastic-flavored, and waited. Nothing. The phrase came around again, the same weight and the same wide-open blue.
Granola bar. Oats, honey, a chip of something chocolate pretending to be chocolate. I ate it in four bites and logged the crumbs on my sleeve as a variable I could not control. Nothing.
Sleep, then. Maybe it wanted me down. I lay on the concrete in the aisle with my hands on my stomach, the strut along my ribs ticking against the floor every time I breathed, and I shut my eyes. That was a mistake. With my eyes shut there was nothing to look at but the blue, sitting in the dark behind my lids like a coat somebody had left over a chair, and it did not care that I was horizontal. THEL VEN ESE. I opened my eyes and counted rivets in the shelf above me until I was sure I had been the one to decide to get up.
I walked the aisle. Eleven steps, turn, eleven steps. The phrase kept pace with me, step for step. I did it eight times. On the ninth I stopped at the table, put both hands flat on it, and said the only thing I had left in the kit.
"Cici Johanssen."
It came out wrong. Flat, a badge number read to a guard, and under the flatness something moved in my chest and flinched, because the last person to use that name on me had said it gently, with a flashlight in his hand and someone else's blood on his shirt. Cici. Go. And here I was spending it on a machine, to see if it had a lock that took that key.
It did not. The blue sat there. It took my name and gave back precisely nothing.
"Okay," I told the ceiling. My voice was steadier than I was. "Is there an English button? A language setting? Some kind of, I don't know, accessibility menu?"
Above me, faint, the clicking started up and then went away. The suit hummed its patient blue. Nobody had ever sat through a worse customer service call.
I sat down and wrote it all out, because that is what I do.
water = no. food = no. lying down = no. walking = no. own name = no (no.)
THEL = ? VEN = ? (VEN in KARESH VEN = "I"? "me"?) ESE = ?
A need I don't have the part for.
Persistent. Polite. Does not escalate.
Same blue every time.
I looked at that last line for a while. Same blue, same weight, no louder at 2:51 than at the first pass. Whatever it was, it would still be there at midnight, and I could not spend the rest of the afternoon flinching every time it asked. I needed a handle on it. Something to put on the file tab.
I wrote the Nag, underlined it, and my mouth did something it had not been authorized to do in nine hours. It was not a smile. It was in the neighborhood.
"Hi, Nag," I said.
The blue stayed exactly where it was, and I knew perfectly well I had won nothing. A name is what you give a stray so you can stand to have it on the porch. But I said it again, just to hear it in the room, and for the first time since the ceiling came down I had said something out loud that was mine.
The afternoon went on without me. At 3:40 I ate a granola bar. At 3:55 the tail-scrape passed overhead, slow, and I counted it out and wrote down the number. At some point between those two I started thinking about forty-one percent.
Kevin's raw tensile logs, two years old. A second cut at the same spot, 41 percent shallower, identical force. Somebody had circled it. Somebody else had written instrument error beside the circle in a tidy hand and moved on to the next page, and I had been the only person in the building who read both and thought: that is not what an error looks like. An error is scattered. This had been a figure, and figures are a kind of sentence. I'd said so in a briefing, in a room, with my face going hot. Nobody had written anything down.
I could keep my theory. Or I could have the number.
The box cutter lay on the table by my right hand, orange plastic, a snap-off blade and a thumb slider. I pulled a fresh sheet toward me and wrote the header: Test 1. Right hand, dorsal. Cut approx. 1 in. Depth: skin only. Then I turned my hand over on the paper, knuckles up, and looked at it for a moment. A bare hand. Mine. A freckle near the second knuckle and a scar from a childhood bike, and between them a long, clean stretch of skin.
I slid the blade out. Click, click, click. Three notches, which seemed like a lot of ceremony.
I set the edge below the freckle and drew it toward my wrist.
A line opened. It was bright, almost cheerful, red welling up along it in a string of beads that ran together and spilled sideways across the tendons. No heat. No sting. The plastic handle pressed into my fingers, and from the place where the metal went in came nothing whatever; I looked at the cut as at a photograph of someone's hand. My own fingers did not twitch. My own fingers stayed still. The stillness registered as flatly as the cool of the room, and I let it go by, because there was a procedure to run and procedure is a good place to stand.
4:17, I wrote, and thumbed the timer on the phone. Eight percent. The screen threw a small blue square on the steel.
Then I sat with my hand held flat above the page, so it wouldn't drip on the data, and waited.
The strut under my left sleeve changed pitch. The pitch dropped, like a dryer's note when the load tumbles over. RUUL had been a rhythm under everything all day, and now the rhythm quickened, tighter and brisker, like someone working harder at a task they'd been handed. The beads stopped running at 4:21. The line stopped being open at around 4:30 and became a seam, pinkish, the edges leaning toward each other. I wrote times. I wrote edges apposed. I wrote no swelling.
I did not write that I had watched it for thirty-four minutes without once looking away. I did not write that I had been faintly disappointed when it slowed.
At 4:51 the seam closed into a thin dark line, a ghost of itself, and a single warm word went through the back of my neck, green-gold and unhurried. SHEN. It was not the Nag, and it was not a question. It sounded, if anything, like a door being closed gently by someone who had finished.
"Noted," I said.
4:51. Closed. 34 min. Cut was 1 in., no pain at any point. Suit appears to respond to wound, not to request.
I read it over. It was a good entry. Clean, dated, repeatable, the kind of page you could hand to someone who had never met me. I capped the pen and laid the box cutter down beside the paper, and my right hand lay beside it, perfectly ordinary, the faint line below the freckle still pink at the edges.
I picked up the box cutter and set the edge on the dark line below my freckle. Same place. I drew it across with the same pressure I’d used at 4:17.
A thin red line opened. I held my hand beside the first entry and looked from one to the other. The blade had gone in; the cut was visibly shallower.
“Forty-one percent,” I said, and laughed once. Kevin’s logs had said it. I had said it. Instrument error was what they’d put in the file.
I started the timer. At eleven minutes, the line had closed. The last red bead disappeared, and I gave myself that long to enjoy being right.
Then I put the blade against the seam again.
The edge pressed a narrow dent into my skin. I pushed harder. The dent deepened, held, and pushed back against the steel. A bright tick came from the cutter. Its tip skittered across the table and stopped beside the legal pad.
SHEN.
Warm, plain, behind my ears. I turned my hand over under the emergency strip. The skin was whole. The faint seam was still there.
“What for?”
My left arm had gone through the glass, and the damage had shown before any feeling did. The cutter had crossed my right hand twice. I had watched both cuts with the steady interest I used to bring to someone else’s test results.
The room was cool enough that the steel chilled my bare fingers. I set the cutter down and touched the seam. It was my hand, ordinary under the thumb. The change was on the outside.
What had it removed to make room?
My pen lay beside the pad. I left it capped. I placed the broken tip next to it, where I could see both pieces of the blade, and kept my hand on the table. The suit’s warmth stayed against my skin. The question stayed with me.
I wrote it down, because the notebook is where I put whatever I can't carry.
Test 4. Ankle. I turned my right foot against the strut until the joint objected, and the word came up clean and red, a single sharp stroke behind my ears.
ASKA.
No pain, only the word. I wrote it on the pad with the time beside it, 12:51, and under it, 1 injury = ASKA.
Test 5. Wrist. The left, the one still knitting. I pressed my thumb into the soft place above the strut where the pencil gap had been closing all day. ASKA. Same word, same red. I wrote = ASKA and underlined it.
Test 6. Both. I turned the ankle and leaned my thumb into the wrist at the same moment, and held them there, counting.
ASKAI.
Red, sharp, and doubled. It was the same word with something added to the end, like a tail. I lifted both and the tail went out of it.
I did it again, in case I was making things up. Ankle: ASKA. Wrist: ASKA. Both together: ASKAI. Three for three.
"Plurals," I said, to the room and the steel table and the stacked boxes. My hand had come up over my mouth. "It has plurals."
The warmth in my chest was entirely mine. I checked, because I know what the suit's warmth feels like by now, a steady heat laid over my skin from the outside. This came from under my sternum and rose, as it had in my first year, when I found the one footnote that made two reports collide. I was sitting on the floor of a records room in a stranger's armor, wearing three small anchor marks on my arm and two rivets behind my ears, and I was thrilled about grammar. Somewhere above me hunters were checking doors, and I was thrilled. I let it be funny. I laughed into my palm until it ran out.
It was a good feeling, and I didn't trust it. I knew exactly what else it was. It was the feeling of not looking at the stairwell door.
I let myself have it anyway.
I turned to a clean page and ruled it into columns. First, every blue-white shape I had caught since the garage, in order. KARESH VEN TAL, KARESH VEN GRETH. Those settled at the end of the phrase, level, and stopped when I drank or ate. Blue = wants, I wrote at the top of the column. Everything it asked for in that color was something it lacked.
Then the other ones, the ones that climbed. THEL VEN ESE, the Nag, bright and patient, rising at the tail. The first faint version I'd caught through the glass, the one I'd written as thel ven ese? in my own bad ear. I laid them side by side. Different hours, different volumes, one in a corridor with a hunter in the room. Same last word. I went back through the pad page by page, looking for any other rise, any question-shaped phrase that stopped on something else, and found none.
Rises = ends in ESE, I wrote. ESE = question marker. (3 instances, 0 exceptions.) Then, because I am who I am: n = small.
The rest went down quickly. MUR, red, repeated, run. ASKA, one hurt; ASKAI, several. VOR, black and heavy, a severity flag on top of ASKA. SHEN, the one that came after the cut healed, change or adapt, and I put a question mark on it and left the mark there. DOLEK, green and gold falling like leaves, the stop at the end of a need.
I read the list through once. It wasn't much. Eight lines. I had been handed a language by someone who couldn't wait for me to learn it, and I had eight lines.
I tore nothing out. Above the glossary, in the best handwriting I own, I wrote FIELD REPORT, FROM INSIDE, and drew a box around it, and then a second box inside the first, because the first looked weak.
Every other report on this suit had been written by someone standing at the stand with a clipboard. This one had a witness. I intended to be believed.
The pen stayed in my hand. I had run out of words to test, so I set the pad beside my knee and put my bare fingers against the suit.
The hexagons gave my fingertips a faint grip. I worked down my right arm, inch by inch, as I would have checked a relic somebody had delivered without a description. On the outside of my forearm, the pattern dipped beneath my thumb: a smooth, shallow hollow. Empty.
I pressed it.
ORSAAR NETH.
The words arrived evenly, colourless. The suit usually gave me blue-white want, red alarm, or that falling green-gold when I finally did something to its satisfaction. This sounded like an announcement of the next stop, delivered to an empty platform.
I pulled the pad back onto my knee. Outer R forearm: hollow, empty. ORSAAR NETH. No colour. I added a question mark after the phrase, then moved my hand to my hip.
There was another hollow on the outer curve. I pressed it and ORSAAR NETH came back in exactly the same level voice. My left hip gave me the same answer. I wrote both down before reaching behind me.
That took some arranging against the shelving. I slid one hand up my back until my fingertips found a hollow high above the frame, then reached across with the other for its partner. Each press brought the same four syllables, at the same volume. I felt around each rim once more to be sure of what I’d touched, and put my hands back in my lap.
R hip: empty. ORSAAR NETH. No colour.
L hip: empty. Same.
Upper back, R/L: empty. Same, twice.
Five hollows. Five answers. I held the pen above the next line while RUUL kept its quiet rhythm under my skin. Then I set the pen down and left the line blank.
Five hollows in a column, and the column was the problem. I had always hated a list that stayed a list.
I looked at the first line again. Outer R forearm: hollow, empty. Then I looked at the struts running down my left arm and along my ribs, and the thought I'd been walking around all night turned and faced me.
The frame had been filed under OR. Orthopedics. It had its own stand in Lab 3, three feet from the suit, and for two years it had been catalogued as a medical curiosity, a leg brace, something for a body that came apart at the joints. It had arrived in separate pieces. Nobody had ever put the frame against the suit. I had put the numbers against each other, the spacing of the mounting feet to the spacing of the clasps, and written the ratio in a report that went into a folder. It matched to the millimetre.
I had called that a coincidence worth flagging. The suit had called it a Tuesday. It had been a brace for the same reason a door is a wall until somebody opens it.
So the frame had never been a brace. It had always been part of the suit, and the suit had been standing in a lab with its arm out for something to lock onto.
I ran the rest one after another, until they stopped being reports. TX-4471-CE, the suit, warm against my skin. OR, the frame, bolted into me. The GL tile. The MM bracket. The AR ornament, which had come in through a different building on a different manifest. And the slab in V7 with no prefix at all, the one nobody would explain to me. Six numbers. One suffix. Six departments that had each been handed a piece of the same thing and had never once been in a room together.
It's six. I counted.
Kevin, with an almond in his cheek. He had been right. It was six. He had simply counted pieces and called the total a collection.
The click came then. It was the old click, the one I got at my desk when two reports that had never met finally agreed with each other, and it went through me like setting down a box I'd been carrying up stairs. For one second it was pure pleasure.
Then it had nowhere to go. I turned my head, actually turned it, toward the shelving where Kevin would have been sitting with his bag of almonds, so I could say It's called reading. The shelving held archive boxes. Jules would have torn the entry apart in the margin, line by line, and enjoyed it. Remy would have gone quiet, the way he did when I'd landed somewhere he'd hoped I wouldn't.
I picked up the pen anyway. An entry nobody reads is still an entry.
Artifacts CE-suffix = one object, in pieces. Suit (TX) + frame (OR) = confirmed fit. Remaining: GL, MM, AR, V7 item. Suit is incomplete.
I drew a line under it. I wrote a question mark after it, and looked at the mark, and crossed it out hard enough to dent the page underneath.
The thing I had spent eleven weeks studying from the outside had two of its pieces on me. The hexagons lay warm against my wrists. The struts sat in my bones. By the catalogue's own logic, I had been entered in the collection while I slept. I did not write that down.
RUUL kept up its rhythm under my skin. I thought about the words I'd been pressing out of five empty hollows, in that flat voice like an announcement on an empty platform, and I stopped hearing them as an alarm.
ORSAAR NETH. Missing pieces.
They weren't lost. Nothing in that building was ever lost. It was filed, and I had read the paperwork, and I knew which drawers.