It hurts that Mom is dead, but Ellie’s not sorry that Mom’s not back. Mom spent her life stopping maintainers from perverting the universe. Doing exactly that to bring her back is, at best, ironic, at worst, corrupt. The Mom Ellie knew would not want to be alive again and her rage at being yanked back would brand fear on everyone responsible. Or, worse, Chris might have brought back some Mom-shaped monster. She’d work to pervert the universe more rather than work to stop it.
From the depths, Ellie rises until she only skims the waves of Chris’s grief. When Chris makes it to shore—if Chris makes it to shore—maybe she can take some comfort, solace, or whatever she needs to deal from the fact that she was willing to sacrifice her life for Mom and Ellie was not. In any case, Ellie’s done trying and failing to navigate these waters.
“Get out,” Chris manages between sobs. “Go hide in Boston, Ellie, and don’t ever come back.”
The three exchange glances. Ahdi makes the lid seam reappear on the coffin. Chris, however, remains in the coffin and continues to cry. Ahdi restores the door into the room. It’s an infinity before anyone manages a word.
“When do you leave, Ellie?” Ahdi’s tone is kind and gentle. “I’ll see you off.”
“The Amtrak back to Boston leaves around ninePM.”
“OK.” Ahdi nods. “I need to check to make sure everyone has kept their word. And you two should update the Chief Architect. I’m sure she’ll want to hear it in person. I’ll see you at the station.”
Ahdi disappears. Ellie raises her eyebrows and shrugs at Daniel. There really aren’t any words that are right. Slowly, the two see themselves out.
CHAPTER 24
Ellie rings the Chief Architect’s doorbell. A tallish, solid man opens the door. This one has brown rather than blond hair. He meets Daniel’s gaze and instantly adopts the demeanor of an ice wall. His face grows serious and his body becomes taut but not stiff.
“What do you want, Daniel?” The man’s voice is harsh and his gaze never leaves Daniel.
Ellie is half tempted to jab him in the stomach to find out what happens if the attack he’s braced for comes from her rather than Daniel. Instead, she waves to get his attention. He shifts ever so slightly, and Ellie decides he might have blocked her attack or at least would have seen it as it came.
“Have we met?” Daniel, for his part, is his usual somewhat befuddled.
Maybe it’s because the stakes at the moment are so low, but Ellie is amused that half the people who see Daniel assume Daniel must be out to kill them. If Daniel were trying to kill someone, Ellie suspects they’d never see it coming. Part of her wants to say nothing and see how long the ice wall can maintain his vigil. However, all of her has a train to catch.
“Hi, I’m Ellie.” Ellie waves again. “We’re here to see Mary. I called ahead.”
At the sound of her name, a relieved expression relaxes onto his face. The ice wall melts back into a man.
“Oh, right. She’s expecting you. I’m her son, Ray.” He shakes Ellie’s hand. “Come in.”
He leads them through the family room and gestures at the stairs. Daniel gets a wide berth as he passes by. Ellie follows him down into the basement.
Only as many folded planes of air as will fit ring the room. There aren’t any at all beneath the tables. The room looks even more composed, a carefully cultivated microcosm where everything has a place and every place has a thing. The Chief Architect sits at a table in front of a folded plane of air. Daniel’s annotations are attached to it at odd angles. Her hands are deep in one of them, opening its folds and crevices. She turns to Ellie and Daniel as they reach the foot of the stairs.
“Hello, Ellie.” She refolds the annotation she was inspecting. “Daniel.”
The Chief Architect swivels her chair around to face them. Daniel stays by the stairs, trying not to loom and failing. Ellie steps forward to deliver the news.
“We can show that the side channel you demonstrated is a long-standing bug. However—”
“Good.” The Chief Architect nods. “Jerry told me that his team is putting in a fix for it as we speak.”
Daniel growls softly. Ellie doesn’t hear it. She feels it just as she can feel his body grow taut, ready to punch Neeson into next Tuesday. That Neeson isn’t here is beside the point. The Chief Architect doesn’t notice.
“He did?” Ellie’s eyebrows rise. “As we speak?”
If the Chief Architect wondered about all the activity in the skunkworks, Neeson has presented her with a reason why. It’s a lie, but it serves the purpose. She, however, probably wasn’t wondering. Not that many maintainers ever notice changes as they are made. Neither she nor Ellie is one of them.
Giving the Chief Architect a reason makes Ellie’s job harder.In her mind, she shoots rays of hate at Neeson, not that they are a thing. Maybe they would have been if Neeson and his crew had succeeded in changing the rules of the universe. For a moment, she feels a tiny bit sad that the rules haven’t changed. Then it hits her that a universe where Neeson made rays of hate a thing is also one where the only people who get to shoot them are Neeson’s chosen few, and she feels a bit guilty.
“That surprised me, too.” The Chief Architect nods. “Jerry is usually a stickler for process. But we don’t have a Chief Builder right now and everyone who has to do the work is already working with him on the audit anyway. The fix is apparently quite involved.”
The reason there isn’t a Chief Builder right now is because Mom is dead. Ellie hasn’t even thought about that rat’s nest until now. Dread pools in her gut. Who ends up coordinating the builders is not her fight, she hopes. The power struggle is yet another way to corrupt the system that Neeson has already corrupted so much that he nearly rewrote the physics of the universe to suit his whims. Nothing within the system stopped him.
“It’s not only the one bug.” Daniel stands next to Ellie. “There are whole families of bugs of the same sort.”
