Page 123 of Soft Erasure

Edward didn’t look at either of us. He had gone back to the glass and the white light coming up off his own front circle. Whatever was on his face was on it where nobody would be required to log it.

The machine that had priced every breath of mine for a year was being carried out of the building in cases. The only thing in me with any weight to it was a man the family had put outside its own boundary that morning. He had walked into my kitchen through a wall, handed me the instrument of his own ending, and told me to choose it because it was mine.

The band warmed once against my wrist and printed nothing, and this time it wasn’t a fault. There was nothing left at the other end to print it.

Across the city a boy went on being handed out in portions by a family that had just lost everything it owned except him.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Tuesday

The door read my band at six and let me through, the same as it had every morning for thirteen months.

Sixty-six sat on the panel above the jamb. It had not moved since the Garden Room. Two days had gone past this building and the number had nothing to say about either.

The hallway didn’t belong to Crownhill anymore. New badges hung on old lanyards. The two women wearing them worked door to door with a clipboard held between them, in a gray that was not the Institute’s gray. A flatter shade, with none of the polish in it. They checked names against a list and didn’t smile at anyone they passed. The not-smiling told me more in four seconds than a year of the smiling ever had.

Four doors down a unit stood propped wide with a box outside it. I had passed that door for a year and never seen the inside of it, or the woman who lived behind it. Now it was open to the corridor, and there was nothing left in it worth shutting it for. A man on a stepladder worked the ceiling seam above her hallway, taking down what had been fixed there and bagging each piece separately, the careful work of somebody handling another person’s exhibit. It had been reading her all year. Now she was a box in a hallway and the reading was going somewhere neither of us would ever be shown.

Somewhere below, a voice I knew carried up the stairwell shaft. Penelope, asking a question that didn’t get the answer she expected. I could not make out the words, only the register, clipped where it was usually smooth.

I went back inside and left my own door on the latch instead of the deadbolt. Some old arithmetic in my hands still wanted an exit. There was nowhere left for one to go.

The panel woke at nine without my having touched it.

Not the watermark. Not WELLNESS. One line, in a font the building had never used on me.

RECEIVERSHIP NOTICE: All resident monitoring devices remain in service pending judicial review. Do not attempt removal.

I read it standing, then sat down with it and didn’t get up again for a while.

The knock came at ten. Two, evenly spaced, low on the door where a hand at shoulder height would not have reached.

She was in the flat gray, with a folder she didn’t open and reading glasses pushed up into her hair. Older than the women working the clipboard. She kept both hands on the folder, and she didn’t once look at my wrist, which put her outside every single person who had stood in that doorway in a year.

“Ms. Vale.”

“Ashford,” I said. “Sherry Margaret Ashford.”

“The order has both.”

I let her in.

She didn’t sit, and neither did I.

“I’ve been appointed receiver over the Institute’s residential holdings,” she said. “That includes this floor and everybody standing on it. I’m going door to door because a panel is a poor way to hear it.”

“Hear what.”

“That the residential program was never a separate entity.” She said it the way a person says a thing she has already said eleven times before lunch. “Counsel spent yesterday arguing it was. The books say otherwise. It was one company. It always was.”

Somebody had told me that would be said by Tuesday, and he had been right about the day.

“What happens to us.”

“Nothing fast.” She didn’t soften it. “Every file the program held is evidence now. That includes yours. It goes to a court, not to a family, and no one in this building gets to decide what is in it anymore.”

“And this.” I put my hand over the band.