Chapter 14: The Count True
The lift let him out on six and Tommie walked the last forty meters with his boots still carrying the pen's grit. The corridor smelled of hot insulation and the fry-oil ghost of somebody's late ration. Their door read his cuff and opened on the flicker.
The console over the galley table threw its dim, stuttering light across the room. Schematics he'd printed three weeks ago still lay fanned on the floor by the rack of tools. Hazel sat at the table with the succession file open on the screen, one hand flat on the surface, the other around a cup that had gone cold an hour ago.
She didn't stand up.
"You ate?" he said.
"No."
He dropped his bag by the door and unzipped the jumpsuit to his sternum. The silver chain sat in the hollow of his throat, tacky with sweat. He didn't sit down yet. He stood behind the second chair with his hands on its back and read the file over her shoulder, though he already knew most of it.
"Okay," he said. "Tell me."
She turned the screen so he could see the whole thing. The lease register. Her name in the executor field. The start date three months out. The compensation line tied to sessions logged and readings sold.
"I signed the count true," she said. "Twenty-three cradled, drivers nominal. I'm the manager of eleven-seven at close of shift. Four hours from now."
He'd heard it through the comm. Hearing it again in the room, with her face lit from below, put it somewhere else in him.
"And the intake on my spur."
"Billed to his account. Routed down your rack because a manager was going to hold it and a manager was going to log it. The house wanted the paper clean from both ends. If it comes down the freight spur and it goes into eleven-seven and both ends read eleven-seven, there's no seam anywhere for a survey to put a knife in."
"The pen logs it as freight."
"The pen logs it as freight. I log it as inventory. Two true statements, one object." She took her hand off the table and put it in her lap. "Curtis knew you were behind the rack."
"I know."
"He said to ask me what the count true costs."
"I'm asking."
She looked at him then, really looked, and he saw how far back in her skull she'd gone. Twenty hours awake did that to a face. So did signing something.
"It costs what it always cost," she said. "Somebody webbed goes in, and nobody ever signs them out unless the offload cut says so. It costs the chair. It costs me sitting in it."
Tommie pulled the chair out and sat down across from her. He put his hands flat on the table, palms up, the way he did when he wanted her to see he wasn't holding anything.
"Which was it, Hazel? Did you sign it to keep me out of it, or did you sign it because you want the seat?"
The console flickered between them. Down through the floor the construction bays kept their low industrial hum, the same note they lived on top of, and Hazel's jaw worked once, twice.
"You think those are two different things," she said.
"I think you've been studying for that degree for two years while you carried drinks to men who never learned your last name."
"I have."
"So which one?"
She stood up. The bodysuit shifted as she moved, matte charcoal sliding toward violet along her ribs and hips, the light-responsive polymer waking to the room. She walked around the table and took his face in both hands and tipped it up to her.
"I signed it because you were on the other end of it," she said. "And I want the chair. Both. That's the answer. You don't get one without the other and you don't get to make me pick."
Then she pulled him up out of the chair and down onto the bunk.
He landed half on her, half on the mattress, and she got his jumpsuit open the rest of the way and shoved it off his shoulders. The fabric came away stiff with pen grease. She put her mouth on his collarbone and bit down, hard enough to leave it, and Tommie made a sound he hadn't meant to make.
"It's still in you," he said against her hair.
"Eight hours in and it's still loud," she said. "Everything's been loud since Jelani. Every seam in this suit. Every time you breathe near me." She took his hand and put it between her legs, over the polymer, and he felt the heat coming through it like a stove left on. "Don't be careful with me."
He wasn't. He got the suit's seam open along her spine and peeled it down her arms, and she came out of it pale and small in the console light, ribs showing with every breath, nipples hard from the cold air and from nothing else. He put his mouth on one and she arched up off the bunk and swore at the ceiling, one flat filthy word, and her hand went into his hair and held him there.
He worked down her belly with his tongue, tasting the synthetic residue off her skin, until he got his mouth on her cunt. She was soaked, slick and open, and the compound made it worse, made every stroke of his tongue a whole event. She bucked against his face and ground down on him and said his name twice, the second time like a threat.
"Inside me," she said. "Now. I've been awake too long to be teased."
He kicked out of the jumpsuit the rest of the way and got on top of her. When he pushed into her she grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his forehead against hers and watched him the whole way in, her grey eyes gone wide and clinical and wild at once. She was tight and hot and her hips came up to meet him.
He fucked her slow at first, because she'd asked him not to, and she bit his shoulder for it. Then hard, the bunk frame knocking the wall panel in a rhythm, and she got a fist in the blanket and her heels into the back of his thighs.
"Harder," she said. "I want to feel it tomorrow while I'm signing things."
He gave it to her harder, and the wall knocked, and the console flickered, and down below the bays hummed. She came with her teeth in his jaw and her nails in his back, shuddering and clamping down on him, and he followed her a few strokes later, buried in her to the root, emptying into her while she held his hips still with both hands.
They lay there breathing. Sweat cooled on his back. She kept her legs wrapped around him so he couldn't pull out yet.
"Close of shift," she said, into the side of his neck. "Four hours."
"Then you're the chair."
"Then I'm the chair." She turned her head and looked at the ceiling, and her hand slid up his spine to the nape of his neck and stayed there. "The first reading comes through the tribute desk the day after. And I get to choose whose."
He pulled out and rolled onto his back.
The bunk creaked under the move and the cold got into the wet patch she'd left on the sheet. His cock slid off her thigh, still slick, still half-hard, and she made a low noise in her throat that wasn't complaint and wasn't praise.
"Stay," she said.
"I'm right here."
She rolled onto her side and looked at him. The console flickered and put its light under her cheekbone and in the hollow of her throat. Twenty hours awake and the compound still in her, and she had the flat, steady look of a woman who'd already spent this night twice in her head.
She put her hand flat on his stomach and pushed it into the mattress. Then she came over him.
Her knees went wide on the bunk and she sat up across his hips with her hands on his chest, and she put her cunt down on the root of him and ground, getting the both of them wet without letting him in.
"Still loud?" he said.
"Everything's loud." She reached back and took his cock in her fist, worked it twice, thumb rolling over the head until he sucked air through his teeth. "You're not done. I can feel it."
"I've been up since six yesterday."
"Then lie there."
She lined him up and sank down on him in one slow push. All of it, to the root, her ass settling heavy on his thighs, and she stopped there with her eyes closed and her mouth open and breathed through the fullness like it was a job to be got through.
"Fuck," she said. "There it is."
She started to move. Not fast. She lifted off him almost all the way, slow, so he felt every ring of her drag up the length of him, and then she came down hard enough that the bunk frame knocked the wall. Up and down, over and over, until the sheet was twisted under his knees and there was sweat standing in the small of her back.
He got a hand on each of her hips and held on. Her tits moved with every drop and her nipples were still hard, and the polymer suit lay in a heap on the floor where he'd peeled it, still faintly shifting through its colors on its own like something alive bleeding dry.
"Harder," she said. "You can use me. I've been waiting all night for you to use me."
He planted his feet and fucked up into her. She braced her hands behind her on his shins and leaned back and rode it, taking him at an angle, her whole cunt gripping and letting go, wet enough that it made a sound every time he bottomed out. She reached down and rubbed herself while he did it, two fingers, fast, no art to it, and watched his face the whole time.
"You want the chair," he said, breathing hard.
"I want the chair." She drove down on him, grinding. "And I want this. And I want you to stop asking me which one, because I'm going to take both, and you're going to help me."
He caught her by the waist and pulled her down onto him and held her there and fucked up into her short and hard, the way that finished her. She came with her head back and her hand still on her clit, swearing at the ceiling in that flat, filthy way of hers, and her cunt clamped down on him in long pulses he could feel all the way into his gut.
He came a few strokes later. Not pulled out this time. She locked her ankles behind his back and took it, and when he was done she stayed sat on him with his cock softening inside her and her hands braced on his chest.
The console flickered. Down through the floor, the bays hummed their one low note.
She leaned forward and put her forehead against his and breathed there a while. Then she got up off him, slow, and felt the spill come out of her and run down the inside of her thigh, and she didn't wipe it. She sat back on the bunk and picked her cuff off the bedpost and checked the time.
It was 0450.
"Two hours and ten," she said.
"To the shift close."
"To the chair." She set the cuff down and looked at him. "The tribute desk reads from the register. First reading I sell gets logged against my name as manager of record. I get to pick whose." She let that sit. "I already know whose."
Tommie stayed on his back and looked at the wall panel. The wall panel looked back, cracked down one corner where the bunk had been knocking it for two years.
"Whose," he said.
"Ours." She said it the way she said everything she'd decided: flat, final, no lift at the end. "I'm going to sell our fourth-corridor testimony to the tribute desk and put the pair of us on the ledger by name. Front of the book where a survey can find it. If the volume's going to eat people through my signature, then my signature's going to be on the one reading that says what's down there."
He turned his head and looked at her.
"You know what that does to us."
"I know what it does to me." She pulled the blanket up over her lap and left his side of the bunk bare. "Which is why you get to say no. I want it, but I want it with you saying yes more. So say it or don't."
The console flickered once and held.
Tommie watched her face in the flicker and didn't answer right away. The wall panel ticked as it cooled. Somewhere three decks down a shift horn went off, muffled through the hull, and neither of them flinched at it.
He reached across the bare half of the bunk and got a hand around her wrist. Then he pulled, and she came, and he folded her in against his chest with one arm under her shoulders and the other flat in the small of her back.
She fit the way she always fit. Small against him, cold feet finding his shins, her forehead tucking under his jaw. She didn't say anything. She got a hand on the silver chain at his throat and closed her fingers around the little links.
"Say it," she said, into his collarbone.
"You already know what I'm going to say."
"I want it out of your mouth."
He lay there with her breathing against his neck and thought about the register. His name in a house book, hers next to it, reading score tagged, the pair of them a line item on the sheet the booted man's account drew on. Twenty-three cradled in a bay under six meters of grit, and the pair of them signed across the ledger like a claim.
"Yeah," he said. "Do it."
She didn't move for a second. Then her hand tightened on the chain and she pressed her mouth flat against his throat and held it there, not a kiss, just the pressure of her, like she was stamping something.
"Say why," she said.
"Because if you're going to be the name on that volume, I'd rather be the second name on the page than watch it from six floors up." He got his hand up into her hair and pushed the sharp bob back off her face. "And because you'll sell it whether I say yes or no. I'd rather be in it with you than argue about it."
"Fuck you," she said, but soft.
"You asked."
She laughed once, through her nose, and it was the first easy sound either of them had made in two days. Then she went quiet again and lay across him, and the console flickered, and the cold air crept along the sheet where it wasn't covered.
He ran his thumb up the knobs of her spine, slow, the way he'd do on any other night. She let him. Her breath evened out against his throat and the cage of her hand on the chain loosened by degrees.
"Two hours," she said at last.
"Then we sleep an hour."
"I can't."
"You can." He pulled the blanket up off the foot of the bunk and laid it over her back. "Shift close is a signature. It doesn't need you awake for it."
She raised her head and looked at him, and he saw it, the thing that had been sitting behind her eyes all night. Not the seat. Under the seat.
"The reading," she said. "When they log our testimony, they'll want it described. On the record. Corridor four, the breaker, what I pulled, what you saw down the throat. The archive clause protects patrons, not inventory. My name goes in as the one who brought it to the desk."
"I know."
"And the booted man's account already bought the readings of specific pairs. Wendell heard it through the wall. Somebody on that ledger has been buying what's down there for years, and the first thing I do in the chair is hand them a confession with my name on the cover."
Tommie lay still and looked at the ceiling. The chain sat under her hand and under it his pulse.
"Then don't name him," he said. "Name us."
"That's the same page."
"Then it's the same page. Let him read it. Let them all read it." He turned his head and found her eyes. "If the volume runs on paper, then the paper we put our names on is the only piece of it that says what it is. You sign true at close. You sign us true after. If a survey ever digs through eleven-seven, the record says the pair of us stood in corridor four and pulled the breaker, and the manager on the count was the one who put it there."
Hazel held his eyes a while. Her jaw worked the way it did when she was running the arithmetic on something and not liking the total.
"There's a difference between a confession and a receipt," she said.
"There is."
"And I've been sitting at this table for two hours trying to figure out which one I'm writing."
"Write the receipt." He shifted under her, one arm tightening. "You're not sorry about the count. You're sorry I found out. Put that on the page instead."
She dropped her head back down and lay against him, and her hand came off the chain and spread flat on his chest, over the muscle, where she could feel it going.
"You're good at this," she said.
"I'm good at the pen."
"You're good at me."
He didn't answer that. He pulled the blanket higher and got both arms around her and held her until her weight went slack and her breathing changed, and the console flickered on the wall and the bays hummed their one low note up through the floor. Two floors of station between them and a bay of cradles, and down on the tier the droid pen sat dark with its pin bolted home and its spur clean.
He watched the ceiling until the flicker steadied to a flat glow. Then he slept with her on his chest, and the last thing he heard before he went under was Hazel muttering someone's name against his collarbone. Not his. A woman's, twice, quiet, like a list she was still checking off.