Page 27 of Soft Erasure

CHAPTER SEVEN

Valley Suites

I read it more than once. The line didn’t soften. Matthew had granted me the seventh count in his own hand, dated before I existed, and a thing granted was a thing that could be taken. I couldn’t tell which I held.

The phone had gone dark beside me. The line stayed lit in me.

When I opened my door to the hall, a padded envelope leaned against it.

No return address. The blue at the edges was the wrong blue, too bright, the blue a hotel chain used because it photographed cleanly in a brochure. VALLEY SUITES.

I brought it inside, closed the door, and sat at the breakfast bar. I opened the envelope at the seam, not at the flap.

Inside: a small velvet pouch the size of a pill bottle, stamped on the side, WARD & HUXLEY. Folded around it, a single sheet on the wrong-blue letterhead. VALLEY SUITES, ROOM 1426. Held indefinitely. Provisioned. Under it, a line I read twice: NO KEY ISSUED TO SUBJECT.

Subject. Not guest. The room had been held for me and readied for me. No key issued in my name, because a key is a thing you give a person you mean to let out. I didn’t have a key. I never had. I was the key, and the number on my wrist was the hand that turned me.

Adherence: 84 → 81.

I laid the sheet down. Then the pouch. The pouch was the one I could not read.

Two soft taps at the door.

A woman’s hand, by the sound of it.

I opened.

She was holding a loaf wrapped in a tea towel. Her name was Jess, from the floor below mine, and she had a baby on her hip. A small boy, dark-eyed, his fist in his mouth, his other hand reaching, instinctively, for the metal edge of my doorframe, which he gripped with the seriousness of a man holding a railing.

“I made too much,” she said. “Wanted to introduce myself before the building did it for me.”

I let her in.

Jess moved through the apartment with the efficiency of someone who had cleaned rooms for a living. She set the loaf on the counter and unwrapped it with the baby still on her hip. The bread was warm. It smelled of butter and salt, the most living thing the apartment had held since I arrived.

The baby’s eyes had found my wrist.

Jess noticed.

“Noah,” she said, soft. “Eyes.”

Noah didn’t move his eyes. He was looking at the small charm on the band’s link, a tiny enamel disc, fingertip-sized, with a 7 etched into it. The 7 was on the inside of the band. He couldn’t have seen it, but he was looking at the place the 7 lived.

Adherence: 81 → 84.

The system had rewarded me for being looked at by a baby. I made the note in the inventory in my head.

I had the note before I had the feeling.

“Postpartum,” I said. It was Jess’s word, from the note under my door. As far as I knew, I had never had a child, and no idea why it should buy me anything. It should have caught like a lie. It didn’t. My body had a word my mind didn’t, and used it.

“It’s a word that opens doors here,” Jess said, rocking the baby without interrupting the rock. “Don’t use it cheaply. But use it. They have to give ten minutes to a woman who’s just had a baby, and they can’t say no.”

“How long since.”

“Since what.”

“Since you needed it.”