The Proximity Contract

Chapter 2: No Strings

He slept badly, in pieces, and in the longest piece he watched himself die.

Not the way the book had done it. The book had been quick—a paragraph, two lines at most, the death a story hands a character it has finished with. This was slower. This had hands in it. It came apart in stages, and the pain kept arriving on time, which was the worst of it, because by the third or fourth time it came he had already decided it was over.

He woke with his heart going and the sheets wet under his back.

The room still smelled of the night before—liquor, and under the liquor something colder he had, by now, decided not to think about. He turned his head. There was a man standing at the foot of the bed with his back to him, working his arms into the sleeves of a suit jacket.

Looking at the back of him, the night started coming in. The mouth. The hands. The voice that had said get out and then hadn't made him. His own hand, which he remembered closing over the man's, once, and did not remember deciding to.

None of it came back the way a memory comes back. It came back the way something you have been told about yourself comes back—all of it in order, none of it his.

He was in pain everywhere, all the way down. Shoulders, hips, the backs of the knees. The tiredness had gotten in underneath all of it and settled there. When he tried to roll onto his side the body refused to move that way, so he stopped trying and lay still and looked at the man's back.

He didn't know what he was supposed to do. He didn't know what he was supposed to say. The quiet went on long enough that he began to consider shutting his eyes and letting it finish itself without him—letting the man dress and go, and take the whole night out of the room with him, so that neither of them would ever have to say any of it out loud.

He was still deciding when the man turned around.

Elliot's eyes were still open. Then the two of them were looking at each other, and neither of them stopped.

He was tall, and broad through the shoulders, and dressed for a day that had nothing to do with this room. Under the light, his face had no business being that good—fine, still, his mouth pressed shut. Nothing moved in his face at all.

The eyes were cold. He looked at Elliot the way a man looks at a bill he has already decided to pay.

Elliot looked away first. He didn't know where he had found the nerve the night before; he was not a person who did things like that. The liquor had done the work of an entirely different man.

"There's a card on the nightstand," the man said. "The room's yours as long as you want it."

His voice had the same temperature as the rest of him.

It was a line out of a book, almost word for word. Elliot had read that book.

Except that he hadn't forgotten whose room it was. He knew who had come through the door first. He knew who had reached out and put both arms around a stranger before anything else had happened, before the drug had done anything at all—and after the drug, nothing that happened had been his to decide.

He got himself up onto his elbows to say it properly.

"You don't have to—"

That was where the voice gave out. What came out of him was gravel. The effort of it tore at something, and then the cough came up and folded him over and kept going, and it dragged on every bruise he owned. He got a hand over his mouth. It went on until his eyes went hot and stung at the corners.

A glass came down on the nightstand.

The coughing stopped.

He noticed the glass. He didn't pick it up.

"I'm not playing hard to get," he said, when the room let him. His voice was a ruin. "I'm an adult, and I know what was mine in it. Last night wasn't only your problem—I came into your room without asking. I don't want anything from you for it, and I'm fine, and I won't come looking for you."

That was the true version, as far as it went. And in one narrow way the night had gone better than it could have: whatever else he had done since he woke up in this world, he had not gone to room 302. He had not gone near Julian Prescott. It wasn't much, but it was the only thing he had managed.

The man didn't answer.

He looked at Elliot for a few seconds—flat, unhurried, nothing arriving in his face or leaving it—and Elliot let him do it, and didn't look away. He wasn't ashamed of last night, and he wasn't going to pretend to be.

Then the man's gaze moved off him, and he turned, and he walked to the door.

He didn't take the card.

The door shut. Elliot lay there and let the quiet close over it. Whatever else, the man had decided there was nothing here worth continuing. He hadn't asked a single question. He hadn't even asked Elliot's name.

Fine. Elliot wasn't going to get up and follow him down the hall to say more. More would look exactly like the thing he had just told the man it wasn't.

Besides. He had something more important to do.

He got the water down. It helped. Then he lay back and asked it in the only place there was to ask—inside his own head, where the voice had come from.

Are you the system that brought me here.

Nothing came—no block of capitals, no sentence, not even the feeling of being listened to and set aside.

He waited. When he had waited as long as he could stand to lie still, he said it out loud, to the ceiling.

"System. Are you there."

The air conditioner kept doing what it was doing.

He lay there and gave the silence time to turn into something else. It didn't.

This was the part he had no frame for. Refuse, and you die—that was what the voice had said, in a block of capitals, in complete sentences, without explaining any of it. He had refused. He wasn't dead. And last night he hadn't finished what he had been sent to do either, and he was alive, and no door had opened under the floor of his mind to put him back where he came from.

He moved his hands.

Those, at least, still answered. Fingers, wrists, forearms, his own all the way down—no lag, no drag, nothing like the seizing-up that had taken him in the corridor and on the stairs. He ran a slow inventory through the rest of himself and everything came back where he had left it.

He thought about it for a while. Then he made himself look at the part he didn't want to look at: last night he had not been able to stop himself until he had been near that man, and after that, somewhere in the middle of it, his hands had started answering him again.

He did not want that to be the rule. He couldn't make it anything else. Two points were not a pattern. Two points were a coincidence, and he didn't trust it.

He knocked two fingers against his own forehead a few times, which fixed nothing, and got up.

The shower helped, mostly. He stood under it until the water went from hot to warm and stayed there anyway, and when he got out, the mirror gave him the report.

Bruises everywhere the mirror could reach—neck, collarbone, both hips, one long one down the side of his thigh. His forehead, scraped red. The knuckles of his right hand split and crusted over, his own doing, from the wall in the fourth-floor corridor. And when he turned his head to see the back of it, the bite: two arcs, unhealed, still beading red at the edges like it had happened minutes ago instead of hours.

He looked at it a second longer than he meant to.

Nobody had ever bitten him before. He hadn't known it was something anyone wanted. Nothing about how it had been done had been gentle, and he hadn't come away with anything worth keeping.

He touched his forehead once and stopped looking at the mirror.

The card was still on the nightstand.

He picked it up off the nightstand by one edge and carried it down with the face turned away from himself, and did not read it, and did not plan to.

Downstairs, the lobby was bright in a way the night had done nothing to prepare him for. A woman was behind the desk now, in uniform, watching a screen.

"Somebody left this in the room I was in," he said, and set the card down on the counter. "It isn't mine."

She picked it up and turned it over and read the front of it.

"And the name?" she said.

"I don't know," he said.

She looked at the card again, and then at him. He waited out the second of it—the name going off the card and into her and staying there—and said, "Thanks," and walked away before she could ask anything else.

Up on the fourth floor he put what little he had into the bag he had arrived with, and then he did the only thing left that was his to decide.

If he stayed in Bellhaven, he stayed inside the story's reach. Julian Prescott was here. So was the omega the book had written to end up beside him. And whatever the book meant to do with the character wearing his face, it meant to do it here, in these streets, among these people. According to the book, this was about the point where it started. Except he hadn't done the one thing that set it off, so whatever came now was not something he had read.

He wasn't going to stand in Bellhaven and wait to find out.

So he bought a ticket, one way, to Port Sterling, and called a car to the airport, and on the way tried the voice once into the window of a stranger's back seat.

Nothing.

He tried it again at the gate, and nothing came there either, and then he was on the plane.

Port Sterling came up out of the window at the end of it like any other city, and that was what he needed—a city that belonged to nobody, that meant nothing, that had no one in it he was supposed to become.

He rented a room by the week—$385 a week, two weeks paid up front—and found a coffee shop two blocks up with a corner table, a window, and coffee that wasn't good.

On the first morning he sat in it and tested his hands under the table. Open, closed, open.

Left. Right. Left. Right.

Everything answered.

On the second morning he did the same thing in the same chair, and the woman behind the counter had his order ready before he reached the register, and something about that—a stranger in a city that didn't know him, remembering one thing about him—did more for him than it should have.

On the third morning he did it again, with the coffee going cold in front of him, and wrote a list on the back of the receipt. Money. An address that wasn't by the week. A job. Somewhere to be on a Monday. He looked at the list, and without meaning to, he thought: this could be the shape of it. If he stayed far enough from Bellhaven—from the book, from Julian Prescott, from whoever the book had picked out to stand next to him—then none of it would be able to find him. The body would go on answering to him. He was going to get to keep that.

He was reaching for the cup.

His hand went somewhere else.

It came up off the table, turned over, and hung there in the air, palm up, fingers open. He watched it do it. He had not told it to.