Chapter 64: A Clock You Can See
Three nights later they stuck me on the graveyard rotation, watching the stock while the crew slept.
Watching the stock meant Rue.
She had the same shift. Whether that was chance or whether she'd asked for it, I couldn't tell, and not being able to tell was itself information. Most people in this operation are about as smart as a hammer. Rue isn't. And the smart ones are the only people down here who can actually get you killed.
So I watched her the way you'd watch a loaded gun somebody left on a table. With respect. From the side.
The hut held six of the long crates and one filler too far gone to shelve. A boy, nineteen maybe, laid out flat on a cot because the dosing had done something to his legs.
Rue changed his line without being asked. She wet his lips with a cloth. She talked to him in a low nothing-voice about a soccer team, and he couldn't answer her, and she talked anyway.
"You could just let him sleep," I said.
It wasn't a criticism. It was a line cast out to see what she'd bite.
"He's not asleep. He's alone." She tucked the blanket in around him. "Those aren't the same thing, and one of them I can actually do something about."
I filed that too.
We sat a while. Somewhere out on the black water a gate hummed at the very edge of hearing, and my tattoos gave a low answering itch that I was, slowly, getting better at ignoring.
"You watch the exits," Rue said eventually. She wasn't looking at me.
"Everyone watches the exits."
"No. People watch the door they came in by." Flat, like a diagnosis she'd already written down. "You watch all four. You've checked that loose slat in the north wall twice since you sat down. And you already clocked that the padlock on the supply case is a five-pin you could rake open in under a minute."
She turned her head.
"You watch the exits like somebody who's planning to use them. Porters watch their own feet and pray."
And there it was, face-up on the table between us. She'd been running me the exact same nights I'd been running her.
I could have played dumb. I had the whole dumb little face ready to go, Taylor's face, wide and grateful and slow. But Rue had laid a card down on purpose, and playing dumb now would have insulted us both.
In this line of work you sometimes trade one small piece of the truth to buy a much larger piece of trust. You have to move fast when you do it, before your good sense catches up and talks you out of it.
"You short the doses," I said.
Her hands went still. Just for a second. Then they went right back to tidying a kit that did not need tidying.
"You bleed a hair off every measure into a second vial when you think nobody's looking," I said, quiet. "And you've been at it long enough to be smooth about it. A week per kid, maybe."
Her jaw set. I kept going.
"You can't stop the machine, so you're picking its pockets for time. And nobody's caught you, because everybody down here watches their feet and prays."
We looked at each other in the dark for a long moment. Two people who'd each just handed the other a knife and a good reason to use it.
"So we both hang," Rue said at last. Dry. Almost amused. "If either of us ever feels like talking."
"If either of us ever feels like dying," I corrected. "Talking gets us both nailed to a wall. But neither of us is a talker, and that's the entire reason we're both still breathing."
Something eased in her then. A fraction.
It wasn't trust. Trust was a bridge too far for people like us, and we both knew it. It was recognition. The lonely relief of finding out you are not the only sane person in a burning building.
She let herself have that much.
"How long have you been in?" I asked.
"Long enough to know it doesn't have a bottom." She looked over at the boy on the cot. "You start out thinking you'll find the worst of it eventually. A room, or a man, or a machine. Something you can burn down."
She shook her head, once.
"There's no room, Taylor. It's shelves on top of shelves, forever. Every time I climb one, there's another warehouse sitting on top of it. So I stopped climbing. I steal weeks now."
"Then why not run?"
She smiled at that. It was not a nice smile. It was the smile of a woman who'd had this exact argument with herself a hundred times and lost every round.
She reached up, slow and careful, and pulled her collar aside.
The fracture was worse than three nights ago. I was almost sure of it. The blue had branched, a second hairline splitting off the first, faint as a crack in old glaze.
It was reaching for her throat.
"I can't run from the thing that's inside me," she said. "Got dosed about eight months back. An accident, or a test. I've never been sure which."
She let the collar fall back.
"It's slow because I keep it slow. I know exactly what these doses do. I'm the one who measures them, and I've spent every trick I own buying myself time."
"Rue..."
"It's a one-way door. I've walked forty people up to it and watched them go through. I know exactly what the far side looks like."
Then she picked the cloth back up and wet the boy's lips again. Matter-of-fact. A woman with work to do.
"So whatever it is you're building," she said, without looking at me, "and don't insult me, you're building something. Build it fast. Most people down here are on a clock they can't see."
She glanced up. For one second the tired cracked, and something underneath it looked straight through Taylor's face to whatever I actually am.
"I'm on one you can."