Page 97 of Soft Erasure

The dome above the north fire stair ran on the city’s circuit, off an engineering review twenty years old. Willson had told me so weeks back, flat, in the voice she kept for what she put on a record.

At eleven I carried my own sheets down the hall to the linen closet I had no reason to use.

Jess worked the residence floors, and a woman carrying her own laundry read as restless and nothing worse. That doorway was the one place a resident and a housekeeper could stand for a moment without either of them filing a reason for it.

She brought the cart even with the door and didn’t break stride.

She kept her eyes on the towels she was squaring and gave me half a second of having heard me.

I kept my voice under the cart’s noise, in the pitch she had taught me without ever teaching me.

“The north stair. Does it still keep.”

She didn’t slow.

A towel came up off the stack, got folded once against her forearm, went down square. “Forty-eight,” she said, to the towels. “Same as it ever did.”

I had what I came for and I didn’t move, because there was something in the set of her shoulders she had not spent yet. In thirteen months she had never once given me more than I asked for.

“Somebody’s been asking me about retention.” Another towel, squared, set down. She still had not looked up. “Facilities. Second time this month.”

She didn’t say who had asked, and I didn’t ask her, because asking would have made her look up.

Then she was past me, the cart going on toward the service lift, already somewhere else.

I stood there holding a stack of sheets I had no reason to hold and understood that the last bar was being counted too.

Forty-eight hours.

The footage went to a server Willson had a key to, and Crownhill could not undo the circuit without filing a permit Penelope didn’t want filed.

Forty-eight hours, she had said. Unless I pull it. Then it’s mine.

They had built a cage with one bar in it they didn’t own, had known about the bar for twenty years, and had decided a permit was the more dangerous thing to file.

Facilities asking Jess about retention was not Facilities.

It was the same reach that had gone for the south corridor, because a man who closes a camera with his own hand does not stop at one.

He was working the room the same as I was, from the other side, with a longer arm and more days than I had.

A permit stood between Edward and that reel and he knew it, which was why he was asking instead of reaching. He would go on asking only for exactly as long as asking stayed cheaper.

Three days to Wednesday. Two of them sitting on a server, filling and emptying and filling, and a man with Edward’s patience counting them off.

And here was the thing I had not let myself hold until I was standing in a doorway with laundry I didn’t need.

The relay had come back on one beat too late.

It started logging when the light came up warm and we were already apart and walking, and so the alcove’s own lens, which fed Penelope’s server and nobody else’s, had missed him crossing the last inch and caught the after instead.

Everywhere the cameras reached, he had stopped a half-inch short of me for thirteen months.

The seam was the one place he had not.

I wanted the footage kept anyway.

I’d like to be able to call that strategy. It was not.