Page 16 of Graceless

Corners. Glass. Angle of light. Street beyond: empty, correct, quiet. The scan held for half a second, and then it bent — back toward her, toward the line of her neck, the lock of hair against it, the tendon that surfaced when she tilted her head under the raking light. I corrected. The scan bent again. The correction cost more the second time, and I sat in the small chair in the small basement and understood, flatly, that I was in a situation with no precedent and no protocol and no exit that I intended to use.

"Why'd you run away?" she said.

I looked back at her. She was working, not looking at me — she'd waited until her back was half-turned to ask it.

"On Fifth," she said. "After. You didn't walk off, you — went. Like the building was on fire. People who save someone's life usually stick around for the part where they get thanked. You ran like you stole something."

I had. Approximately.

"You were safe," I said. "Staying served nothing."

"Staying served nothing." She repeated it flat, an appraiser reading a bad signature. "You know normal people say 'you're welcome,' right? Or 'it was nothing.'"

I went still — the old stillness, the one that empties rooms.

Her hand paused on the varnish. Her shoulders came up a half-inch.

She was right to be afraid of me. She was the first person in a century to read me correctly. I looked away and gave her back the room, and hated that it was necessary, and hated more that it was true.

"It was not nothing," I said.

She turned around at that. Whatever she found in my face, she held it a moment, then nodded once, and went back to work.

The morning moved. She narrated — to the panel, not to me, a running commentary that had the cadence of long habit. A hog-bristle hair, four hundred years old, preserved under sixteen coats of a fool's varnish: "Everything you do wrong in this job is permanent."

She worked the varnish back from a scarred patch low on the panel — old damage, repaired once, badly — and instead of taking the repair down and hiding the whole history under new paint, she cleaned it, steadied it, left it legible.

"You could make that invisible," I said. "You're leaving it where it can be seen. Why?"

She turned around. Surprise crossed her face, then something slower.

"Because the client should know the truth about what he owns without being made to feel stupid for owning it."

"Hm," I said.

"Hm." The swab came up and pointed at me. "'Hm' is not a word. It's a sound refrigerators make."

"So I sound like an appliance."

"You —" She stopped. Pointed the swab with more intent. "Yes. Exactly. A large one the insurance company installed. That's what you are and that's what I'm calling you."

She turned back to the panel. But she was smiling at it. I could see the edge of it past her shoulder.

The light was going. She was cleaning her brushes, saying something about tomorrow, about the varnish along the bottom edge, about —

It brushed the edge of the field.

I was standing before the chair finished scraping. At the window. Corners, glass, street — the stoop, the laundromat, the gate. Nothing. Dusk and parked cars and nothing, and the nothing was wrong, the way a room is wrong after someone has left it.

"—Barrett?"

"The alley gate." I didn't turn around. "Does it hold."

"It's — you assessed it. You wrote it up. What⁠—"

"This window. The latch."

"Barrett." A brush hit the counter. "What the hell?"