Page 47 of Soft Erasure

The band on my own wrist warmed.

Adherence: 71 → 74.

The system was paying me for the almost.

It read the finger at my collarbone as containment and walked my number up for it. Three points.

He had built the system to read the finger that way before he built the finger into the afternoon.

That was the floor I kept finding under the floor. Not that he reached for me. That the reach was worth points.

That tonight he would read three points on a screen and know exactly what the hollow of my collarbone had done under a hand that never landed, because my body had reported it in the one language the building let me speak, and no one had asked me first.

He took the finger back.

Three seconds coming away, one beat past the place the count would have closed if I’d let it close. The hollow went cold where the heat had been, and the cold gave me away as surely as the warmth had. He held that pause now in a chrome box, over a bone, with two witnesses and a camera and a number doing his arguing for him.

The doors opened on three.

Jess stepped out. She didn’t look back. Noah looked back.

He looked at my band, then my throat, then my eyes, in that order, with the seriousness of a child who hadn’t been told why and was working it out anyway.

They closed, and we rode down. He didn’t speak. I didn’t speak.

Then the car stopped going down and went up instead, past five, past six, to one of the buttons with no number on it, because a hand up there had called it and the car answered the hand.

The doors didn’t open.

We stood at a floor I had no name for, and then it carried us back down, indifferent, on someone else’s command, never on mine.

He stood at his distance and read the chrome.

The doors opened on the lobby.

He stepped out first, onto the marble, and turned back to me. His eyes found mine. He smiled. The elevator smile.

I had enough of them filed now that I no longer had to say the sentence to myself. I heard it anyway.

“Good,” he said. “We’ll do that on Wednesday.”

He crossed the marble and went out the front door. The door breathed open for him without asking. No door in either building had ever asked.

Penelope was at the desk with the tablet flat in front of her.

She smiled at me the smile she kept for a resident whose number had gone up.

She had the three points before I was off the marble. Everything that happened in that box had reached the desk ahead of me.

I didn’t go to the desk. I didn’t go back to the car either.

Seventy-four didn’t run the elevator, and the hand that made it run had just walked out the front of the building.

I took the service stair. Five flights.

No plate, no card, nothing at the door that asked what I was at seventy-four.

The stairs took anyone, and that was the whole of their kindness.