Page 18 of Soft Erasure

At 6B I put my wrist near the plate and the door read the band and let me in. I didn’t have a key. I was the key, as long as the number said I was. The tablet had moved again. Two inches left. The building had been in the room while I was not, and whoever had done it had known I couldn’t prove it. I noted the distance. I didn’t touch it.

Adherence: 92 → 95.

Arrival number. I had carried his error downstairs and handed it to the woman who would wear it. The system had paid me three points for the errand. It paid for the reporting. Somewhere a record now said Penelope had been careless. The building could be made to lie. I’d just watched myself do it with the true thing, aimed.

Be good.

The tablet stayed where it was. I noticed, late, what I had missed at the desk. Penelope’s tablet case had no maker’s mark. Neither had the plate the toast came on. The only mark anywhere near him was the thin green seam in the ring’s band, and that one he had chosen to wear.

At noon there would be a room of women above eighty-eight, and every one of them had answered his question once. Which do you prefer. Every one of them was an answer, walking around in good shoes.

I was the only one, as far as I knew, he had ever kept awake to hear the answer live.

The orange juice glass got rinsed and set upside-down on the rack. The system would log a woman cleaning up after herself. It would not log what the body was deciding underneath. Not the card. Not the phone number. The seam. The small true thing.

Four to six weeks. That was what I had.

I was going to need less.

CHAPTER FIVE

Trim

The metronome was on the kitchen counter at six.

It was Matthew’s. His name was not on it. Matte black as the band, its small face lit when I sat down, though I hadn’t touched it. The tick was built not to sound like a tick. A small breath. Tch. Pause. Tch. Long enough to remind me to take one.

I hadn’t asked for a metronome. It had come in the night, as the tablet once had. One more thing in my kitchen I hadn’t put there, left by someone the cameras didn’t log, because the cameras didn’t log Penelope.

The third tap was at the door. Not a knock. A tap. A knuckle on wood the way a doctor taps a patella, looking for a reflex.

I opened the door.

Matthew. The dove-gray again. Same brand as the one I owned. He carried a small black box the size of a paperback, like a thing he had already opened. The tray was someone else’s morning. This was a different morning.

“May I come in.”

It had the shape of a question. The content already had an answer.

“You let yourself in yesterday.”

“Yesterday was different.”

“How.”

“Yesterday I had a tray. A tray is a reason. A box is a request.”

He stepped back half an inch and waited in the hallway. He was teaching me he could be denied.

Not closing the gap was the more dangerous move, and he knew exactly what watching him choose it did to me. I wanted to close it myself, and I hated that I wanted anything from him at all. The wanting was its own trap, and I said the only word that mattered anyway.

“Come in.”

He came in without sitting and set the box on the island. A courier’s box, a small red sticker on top. LEGAL PORTAL — NEW MEDIA — A. VALE, 6B. Below it, a thumb-pad reader.

“This was delivered at five-fifty. I signed for it. The signature is yours, technically; your power of attorney was filed during the program.”

“Whose attorney.”