Page 33 of Soft Erasure

The number was lower than I’d watched it go before. The hallway, on the other side of the chain, became a hallway that could be unlocked by a man with a key Cabot had been hired to admit.

“DEEP isn’t on the table, Amber,” Matthew said. “I told you. No DEEP without your permission. The phrase is yours. You said it yesterday at the breakfast bar. I heard you.”

“Then why is the green line at my door.”

He looked at the wall. He looked at the seam of his ring. He looked back.

“That’s the elevator chrome catching the light. It does that on this floor at this hour. It’s a property of the metal.”

“It’s a property of your hand.”

He held still.

The wrongness of him was a fixed thing. It didn’t move when I looked straight at it. What moved was the other thing, the thing at the same temperature that would not separate from it, so that reaching for the fear alone I came up holding both, the fear and the pull, one object with two faces, and the object was warm. I hated that it was warm.

The taller officer at my door cleared his throat.

“Ma’am. The permit.”

I closed the door.

I didn’t slam it. I let the latch settle on its own, then locked the deadbolt and the chain over it, though the chain had already been on, because doing it twice was a thing the body wanted.

The door, on the other side, didn’t respond.

There was a beat of quiet.

Then the green came. Not under the door. Not on the wood. In me, the way it came now at every seam. A thin green line at the gap at the floor, low and close, because my eye had been taught to put it there. I crouched. I touched the wood. Warm. The radiant heat from below. The green was mine.

He had crossed the hall without a sound.

He didn’t knock.

He didn’t call my name.

He didn’t need to.

His ring was at the base of my door, in the one angle the cameras didn’t log, because the angle was the seam. Inches of wood stood between his hand and my back, and my back had a measure for the inches, the same as it had for the count. I didn’t move toward the door. Not moving was the whole of what I had, and it wasn’t the same as not wanting to.

I sat on the floor with my back to the door. The matchbook was in my hand. I had decided things on floors before. I didn’t remember which floors. The body remembered. The body was keeping the file.

I counted. In, four. Hold, three. Out, six. Seven.

In, four. Hold, three. Out, six. Seven.

I thought about the suit again. The suit meant the Institute, and the Institute meant other rooms, other women on other floors with other numbers climbing and falling on other wrists.

The tray went to all of them. The song came up in more than one mouth.

The man in the suit kept a column for each of them, the same column I had started keeping for him.

I didn’t know the names of the women whose mornings he read. I knew the building ran looser when his attention was elsewhere, and I didn’t want it looser when he was gone.

I wanted the arrangement.

I had started to want the hand that made it. That was the one thing I couldn’t put on the inventory, because the man who built it had not built a column for that.

After a long minute, the green line went out.