Chapter 10: Consent Registered

Consent Registered

The lid was up, her hands were on the keys, and she hadn’t played anything yet.

Milo did the arithmetic. Six feet of tile between his heels and the door. The door swung inward, which would cost him half a step he didn’t have. The tray was behind her, the table was between them, and the harmonium was the only thing in the room she was touching. The syringe was still in his hand, wet at the tip. She could hear him breathe. She could probably hear him think.

“Get out,” she said, slower the second time, as if he were hard of hearing instead of just standing there.

“I’m going,” he said. “I’m going in about a minute. I want to talk about the minute.”

“Give me one reason.”

“I’ve got nine.”

“Nine.” Her chin came up. Her eyes were open and aimed about a foot to the left of him. “You had all night for one.”

“You’ve moved,” she said. “Two steps. You were by the tray.”

“Look—“

“Where were you at nine.”

“We’re doing this again.”

“We’re doing this,” she said, “until one of us stops.”

Her fingers moved. Not down — sideways, feeling along the gap between two keys until she found the one worn smooth, and when she touched it the harmonium answered with a wheeze of old wood and old leather, a thing being asked to work after a long time in a dark room.

“He’ll hear it,” she said.

“Who.”

“From the waiting room.” Her head turned a few degrees toward the wall, the way you turn toward a window you already know is there. “It carries. It always carried down here.”

Milo looked at the wall. On the other side of it was a hallway with a dead fish tank in it, a carpet with a stain in the middle, and a great many empty chairs.

“Sure,” he said. “He’ll hear it.”

“Don’t.” Her hand flattened on the keys. “Don’t do the voice.”

“What voice.”

“The one you do. The one that agrees with people so they’ll stop talking.” Her finger found the key again. “I’ve been listening to it all night.”

He set the syringe down without looking. Missed the tray. It clicked on the tile and rolled, and he listened to it roll, and when he looked back at her both her hands were on the keyboard and her shoulders had changed.

She pressed down.

The system got there first.

the Hymn — BINDING PROPOSAL
Do you take this man, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, from this hour forward, until death do you part?

The window hung in the corner of his vision. It was addressed to her. He read it anyway.

“Go to hell,” she said.

CONSENT REGISTERED.
10%

Her head came around. “No.”

20%

“No, I said—“ She said it to him, across the top of the keyboard, with her whole face. “I said no. I said no, I said—“

40%
70%

“Say something,” she said. “You’re standing right there, say something—“

100%
BINDING COMPLETE.

“That’s not what she said,” Milo said. “That’s not—“

He hadn’t touched the window. He wanted that noted somewhere.

There was no sound to it.

One moment she was a woman sitting on the edge of a table with her hands on a keyboard, and then the weight of her went out of the room all at once, and something crossed the tile and hit him in the left forearm and buckled his knees. A single key stayed down. The note it made was thin and went on too long, and then the bellows gave out and it stopped.

He got a hand on the table.

Three inches up from his wrist, on the inside of his left forearm, there was a mark. It was the color of the burn scars on her arm. It was a staff — five thin burned lines, four notes sitting on them, a bar line at the end — and he knew what it was for without being told. A single ghost made its own mark, and you called it by touching it, and that was the whole of the ceremony.

“Hello?” said a voice from inside his arm. “Hello. What is this. What is this, what did you do—“

The sound didn’t come in through his ears. It came up through the bone.

“You lying, cheating, cheap little—“

“You’ve got a place,” Milo said. “No rent. No stairs. No weather.”

“Get me out.”

“I’m basically doing you a favor.”

“You tricked me.”

“You said no to a form. The form said yes.” He turned his arm over. The mark went with it. “Take it up with the form.”

“You’re a nasty piece of work, kid,” Blood-Eye said. The voice came from the inside of his skull, where it always came from, flat as a man reading a gauge.

“Coming from you.”

“I’m not the one who did it,” Blood-Eye said. “I’m the one watching.”

“Say it back,” she said, from inside his arm. “Say you’re a liar. Say it back to me.”

Milo didn’t.

“Where am I?” she said. “Why is it dark.”

He opened his mouth. It had been dark where she was standing, too; he knew that for a fact, because he’d spent the whole night watching her not see anything. He didn’t say it. He put his thumb on the mark, not hard, just to see, and the whole left side of him lit up with a warm note like a struck glass, and she flinched inside his arm.

“Don’t do that.”

“Noted.”

He sat down on the operating table, because his legs had gone somewhere and hadn’t come back.

The panel came up when he let go of the mark.

the Hymn — BOUND
GRADE II — HIGH
CORE 200 / 400
LOYALTY 20%
SKILLS 0 / 1

Twenty percent.

Milo turned the number over. Twenty was good. Twenty was not nothing. He’d walked her out of a room she’d been shut in since six o’clock, out of a building with no lights and no staff and no other door, and she was too proud to say thank you, so the system had said it for her. That was the story he went with. It wasn’t a bad story. It had the shape of a true one.

Above the panel, one line stood on its own.

BREAK +300
BREAK POINTS 598

He’d take it.

Then the rules, which were short, because the system had no interest in being read. Grade I: no skills. Grade II: one. The second didn’t open until Grade III, and Grade III took cores she didn’t have and wasn’t going to find standing in his arm being angry about it. So: one skill, hers, now.

“What are you doing,” she said.

“Shopping.”

EXCHANGE — 200 BREAK POINTS
SKILL UNLOCKED.

THE LAST VERSE — LV 1
Harmonium tone scrambles the minds of everything that hears it. Area stun.
SPIRIT 50 · COOLDOWN 180s
STUN: 40s at Grade II and below. 20s at Grade III and above.
EXECUTE: targets under 5% health.

BREAK POINTS 398

He read it twice.

Then he laughed, one short ugly sound, out loud, in an empty surgical theater. The harmonium didn’t answer. The key she’d pressed was still down.

Area. Not one target — everything that hears it. And a stun wasn’t a hold. A hold was Blood Pit: four walls of pressure and a body that couldn’t move. But the mind kept running right through it. A mind that kept running could still be doing arithmetic, could still be giving orders to whatever it had bound to it. You lock a man up and he uses the lock as an office.

This didn’t lock anything. This went in and took the arithmetic out.

Even four seconds of that would be a gift. Forty, at her grade and below, was a standing reservation for everything on this floor.

The execute got a longer look. Five percent. Under five percent, the song didn’t bother stunning you; it finished the sentence. Fine, except he had no way to push anybody down to five percent. That was the problem, and it was a tidy one: he had a finisher he couldn’t charge and no hands to swing.

One slot left. Three contracts, two filled, one open, and the open one had to be damage — a hitter, something with teeth, a body that went in first and left people low enough for her to finish. She had a second skill that would do damage all by itself. The panel said so, two hundred cores away, at a grade she wasn’t reaching tonight and might not reach in a month.

He’d have to find the hitter before midnight, or buy cores, or rob somebody.

Inside his arm, she went quiet. Not asleep. Quiet the way a room goes quiet.

“I had a plan,” she said, finally. “For after.”

Milo looked at the mark on his arm instead of at the harmonium on the floor, lid still up, one key sunk.

“Everybody does,” he said.

“I’m going to make this cost you.”

He pulled his sleeve down over the staff. The cuff only covered the bottom half of it. He pulled it down a second time, as if the second time would do something the first time hadn’t.

The PA cracked. It cracked all over the room at once, ceiling and corners and the table he was sitting on, the way a PA does when it’s louder than the building wants it to be.

“Attention, all examination candidates.”

Static.

“One hour to midnight.”