Page 62 of Soft Erasure

Under the not-deciding it was already back at the top of the stair, reaching for the hand I’d stopped with my own mouth.

The band warmed at my wrist.

Adherence: 67 → 70.

Seventy was the sill of the pool. The building had taken the water off the table and set it back within reach, for a word.

The system had paid me for it. It read the invocation as a woman regulating herself well and moved the number up, three points, a reward for competence.

It had not read a refusal. It could not read a refusal.

It read the clean consonants and the level tone, and the three points were the ones my mother had spent my whole childhood teaching me to earn.

Be good, in a language with a number instead of a hand.

I stood. Irene fell in at my shoulder without a word. We took the stair.

She left me on the landing between five and six, where the domes didn’t reach.

Jess was in the hall on six. She had taken the service stair too.

Noah was still at her chest, asleep, her hand still on his back. Her face was wet.

“Amber.”

“Yes.”

“Not today. Don’t ask me today what I am to this building, or how I knew about the pills, or the hand. Ask me Saturday.”

She gave me Marlowe and Co., a coffee house three blocks past the ones the building let me cross. A back booth. A woman named Lauren who had been a patient once.

“Three o’clock. Out the back of the lobby, through the courtyard service door. Mateo holds it.”

She pressed her mouth to the top of Noah’s head.

“I have had a thing to tell you for two weeks,” she said. “Saturday I tell you.”

She turned to go. Everyone in this building who had helped me had also, at some hour, held the other end of it, and I’d stopped being able to tell the two apart. I let her be both, and let her go.

I let myself into 6B.

I sat at the breakfast bar. The band held at seventy. My hands were shaking, and the shaking didn’t show, because it was under cortisol, in the place the machine had no number for, the place a body goes when it has been winning for eleven minutes after losing for thirteen months.

I had won the room. I had made the film worthless, left the three pills in the bowl, put his own green on his own chest in front of the people he most needed not to see it.

He had watched me do all of it, and smiled the elevator smile, and said next Wednesday. The band was paying me three points for my own defiance, and he had not lost a thing he could not use.

He had a Wednesday for the woman who breaks his session in public. It was the next column over from the Wednesday for the woman who does not.

He would price the win, and build the next room out of it.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

No Count

For three days I carried the bill around the apartment, waiting to find out what was on it.

The courtyard service door had been in the building as long as I had. I hadn’t been able to see it until Wednesday, when Jess said it out loud in the hall on six.