Page 32 of Soft Erasure

“There’s no DEEP happening, Amber. Just a check. The officers are here to verify that the noise complaint logged by the building was unfounded. They will verify it. They will leave.”

“What noise complaint.”

He looked at his wrist. He didn’t wear a watch; he wore a band of his own, smaller, older than mine. It showed him a number. The number was a number for me.

“At one-fifty-two this afternoon, your unit logged a sustained vocal event. The monitoring unit in the smoke-detector casing, the one with the extended microphone, picked up a song.”

“A song.”

“A lullaby.”

I had been folding a shirt at one-fifty-two, at the breakfast bar. The laundry had come back from the building’s service that morning, in a paper bag tied with a ribbon, like a gift. I had been folding the shirt and I had been, I now remembered, humming.

I didn’t know the song.

The song had come from the body, the same place the seven-count had. It had been there before the band. Before the room.

“What lullaby,” I said.

“That’s a question for Wednesday.”

He smiled. The elevator smile.

“Sign the permit, please. It’s a formality. It confirms that the welfare check was authorized. By you, today, in real time. The officers can leave.”

“You have my signature already.”

“We have a draft of it. The full version requires today’s mark.”

“Today’s mark.”

“A second initial. Below the A. To confirm intent.”

Caleb came around the corner from the elevator, in the press-conference blazer, the friendly one. He had a clipboard. My second initial was printed on it, where my hand was supposed to go.

Family, the body said. It said the word the same as it had said it in the car, on day one, with no permission from the mind that kept the inventory.

The band didn’t move for the word. The band had never moved for the word.

The word went through me and raised nothing the instrument could read, and that was the part I could not file: that the body would hand me a man as kin and the machine on my wrist would call him safe, and both would be wrong about why.

“Hey, Amb. Just a formality. Sign and we’re out.”

The chain was on.

The chain was a courtesy.

I held the chain.

I did the breath. The metronome sat behind me on the counter, unmoving. It read the body, and mine had gone still against the door.

In, four. Hold, three. Out, six. Out, seven. He had set the instrument there to hold me at the hour my body picked. It held me. The seventh was mine anyway. I took it off the end of the count the instrument was built to stop, and the theft was the only seventh in the room that belonged to me.

“No DEEP without my permission,” I said.

The band warmed.

Adherence: 81 → 79.