BONDED ENEMIES

Chapter 10: The Fifth Floor

The pen and the paper had been given to him for the report he had still not written. He sat on the end of the bed with them on his knee, drew two strokes — a hook and a tail — looked at what he had made, and dropped them both into the wastebasket, pen first, paper on top of it.

Then he went out with his hands empty, got into the elevator, and pressed five.

Two weeks in this house, and the man had given him one rule. The kitchen was open. The garden was open. The study door was his if he wanted to risk it. The fifth floor, no. Silas Vance had said it once, without raising his voice, the way he said everything that mattered, and he had not said it again, which was worse, because once had been enough.

In two weeks the Admiral had come to his door only when there was something to be signed. He did not knock otherwise.

So Kestrel pressed five.

He had it worked out before the car started. A number that would ring in the Admiral's pocket at three in the morning if he wanted it to. And a reason for the man to come and stand in front of him.

The car stopped. The doors opened.

Light from inside the car fell out across the landing and stopped where the floor stopped being lit. Past that it was dark. The air coming in was cold, and there was nothing in it at all.

At the end of the corridor stood one door, a thin line of light along its edge that did not move. Under everything else, something hummed — low and steady, going on and on, like a cooler in a restaurant kitchen after closing.

Kestrel put one boot out of the car. Then the other. He took four steps and stopped.

The floor out here was clean. Cleaner than the floors he was allowed onto, which had people walking over them all day.

In fourteen days, nobody had come up here that he had heard. Whatever the Admiral kept behind that door, he kept it alone.

He thought about walking to the end and putting his hand flat on it.

He had walked through the wrong door before, on other stations, and known the price before he got to the handle. He stood in the cold until it came through his shirt, listening to a floor with nothing on it but a hum. Then he got back into the car and pressed one.

The doors shut on the humming.

Silas was not in the habit of eating at night. He lay on his back in the dark and waited for it to go away, and it did not go away. Ward had said it would come and go, and that when it came he should eat. That had been the whole of the advice, and it had sounded like a man covering himself on paper.

He got up. He told Hollis to make him something, anything. Seven dishes came up on the wall with pictures beside them, and he took the first one, because it was the first one.

Tomato and beef noodles.

Then he opened his door, and the panel beside it showed the car climbing. Three. Four. Five.

It stayed at five.

He stood at the elevator with his arms at his sides and his face shut, and waited, and counted, and it stayed at five longer than it takes a man to press a button and turn around.

Then it came down.

The doors opened on Kestrel, and Kestrel flinched — one half-step back, his weight already on his rear foot, before he caught it and stood still.

"Why are you standing here scaring people?"

"I told you to stay off that floor."

"Paper," Kestrel said, stepping out past him. "You never gave me paper."

"I gave you paper."

"You gave me paper and no address." He spread his hands. "Where does it go when it's finished? By hand? As a file? You have told me exactly nothing about that report except that you want it, and you want it the way you want everything, so I came to ask."

"You went up to my fifth floor to ask me about office supplies."

"For your number," Kestrel said. "That part was true."

Silas looked at him and could not find anything false in it.

"What's up there?"

"That isn't yours to ask."

"Then it's worth something."

"Everything's worth something to you."

"Everything is worth something." Kestrel stepped back and rapped the elevator door twice with his knuckles. "You keep a whole floor in your own house that nobody uses. You've got one rule and it's about a button. And you get that face on you when I press it. What am I supposed to think."

"You aren't supposed to think about it at all."

Silas had come down here with three sentences ready, in the order he meant to use them. One of them involved the Tribunal, and would have cost Kestrel the house, the terminal, and the run of the building. They were good sentences.

He took out his own screen and held it up between them with the code showing.

"There is a number on this," he said. "It rings on that and nowhere else. You use it for the report. You use it if something comes up that I would want to know. And you don't go up to five again."

Kestrel looked at the code. Then he took out his terminal and scanned it. The screen beeped.

Silas had never written that number down. It was not in a directory, not on a card, and it had been in nobody's hands but his own. Now it sat in a star pirate's terminal with a name on it and no photograph.

"You're trading with me," Kestrel said, pleased about it.

"Get in the car."

He put the screen away, stepped in, and pressed one, and Kestrel got in after him. They rode down without speaking, Kestrel at the back of the car with his hands in his pockets, watching the numbers tick from two to one.

The elevator had carried a visitor to five without asking anyone. Silas would go through the log tonight and find out why. He was not going to do it standing in a car with the man beside him.

Hollis was pulling noodles when they came down. It had flour to the elbows. It folded the dough, pulled it, and let a strand fall through the air, curling once into an eight before it dropped back into the pot, and then it did it again.

They stood in the doorway and watched.

"Will Mr. Kestrel be eating as well, sir?"

"No," Kestrel said. "Two."

"Hot or mild, Mr. Kestrel?"

"Hot."

"You order it, you eat it," Silas said. "Nothing gets wasted in this house."

"Two bowls of noodles." Kestrel said it the way he said everything, as if it settled something much bigger.

In this house there was not one thing he did not want to be bigger than, and Silas was meant to see it.

Half an hour later Hollis set both bowls down in front of him. Both were wider than his head.

Kestrel looked at them. He looked at the pot. He looked back at the bowls, as if somebody in the room might have made a mistake. Then he swallowed.

Silas picked up his chopsticks and watched him do the arithmetic, and something in his shoulders let go for the first time that day. "Two bowls," he said. "You said two bowls was nothing. Scared?"

"Who's scared?" Kestrel said. "I'm worried about your money."

Then he got the chopsticks in his fist and went at it, mouthfuls the size of his thumb, and Silas ate the way he did everything, at his own speed, small bites, no sound.

"How do you eat like that?" Kestrel said, with his mouth full. "It'd take you a year."

"It isn't a race."

"Everything's a race."

He got halfway down the second bowl and slowed. Then he choked, thumped his chest twice with the flat of his hand, and kept going, and by the time he came up for air the first bowl was empty and the second was going the same way.

Two bowls against one, and they finished inside a minute of each other.

Silas ate all of his. He had not expected to; that was not how meals had been going lately.

He put the chopsticks down, took the napkin from beside his plate, and wiped his mouth. "You're still here."

Kestrel opened his mouth to answer and produced a burp with tomato and beef all through it. "I'll sit a while."

"Full?"

Kestrel turned his head and looked at him, insulted, and put one hand up with the fingers spread. "Seven-tenths. At most."

He got up in stages — a hand flat on the table, then up, then a hand on the back of the chair — and left the kitchen by the stairs instead of the car, and Silas heard him going up slowly, resting at the turn.

Hollis came for the bowls.

"Leave them."

Silas stood at the counter. His own bowl was empty. The other two still had a hand's width of broth in the bottom of each, dark with tomato, everything else gone.