The Shadow Sire

Chapter 9: The Second Floor

“Ma,” he said again, in case she'd missed it.

She hadn't. Her face didn't move, which he was beginning to understand was how she did things. Then she took her hand off the frame and went back down the stairs, one step long and one step short, her gait going away down the stairwell, and the door at the bottom of it closed.

Dinner came up from the yard the way it always did: the cart, the bowls, the cans, the count. Berries got one bowl of kibble and one can. Tonight the cart came up one can short and one bowl of kibble long, and nobody explained it, and Rook did the arithmetic out of habit and got the same answer twice.

He ate his half bowl dry and did not raise the subject with the matron. She had a whip. She had also put a thumb through a woman's eye, and he had watched her do it from the inside of the woman, which was not an argument a man could make out loud and expect to keep his teeth.

Down here the light was the clock. There was no sky to check it against, so the pen ran on a schedule like a store runs on one: lights up, lights down, and the talking of the whole building winding down with them, upstairs and down, room by room, until the last of it quit. The pen did well on the happiness index. Somebody came around with a form about it, and Rook saw no reason to file a complaint.

The singing started before the lights were all the way down. It always did. He had worked out the order of it: the fryers sang because they had been fed, the women sang because the fryers did, and Pearl sang loudest and a little ahead of everybody else, like a girl who had never once been wrong. Two people in the building did not sing. One was the sire in the men's pen, who had not sung or laughed or stood up in years. The other one was working.

She came up last, the way she did, and jerked her chin at the bed. He got on it. She took the old blanket off the shelf and laid it on the boards and lay down on it, in the place where the last matron had stopped breathing.

He knew the place. The dying had come through him in that room once already, throat first, his own wind cut off while somebody else's hands did the work. The boards were the same boards. Nobody had done anything about them.

He lay facing the wall with his eyes half shut and his breathing slow, and he watched her.

Her eyes were bad in the dark. Years of reading a newspaper in a room with no window in it, and the paper was still by the bed in a soft-edged stack. With the lights out she couldn't see him, and better than that she didn't count him as a thing that was alive and might be looking, so her face stopped being managed.

It went one way and then the other. For a while it was the face of a woman working out where to put his head so it would come off in one piece. Then it was the face of a woman thinking about wiping his face for him, and not liking that she was thinking about it.

A plain, honest i***t — that was the whole of him as far as he knew, and he did not know far. How a man like that collected that much hate, plus the other thing, whatever the other thing was, which was worse and which he had no use for at all.

In his coat pocket, folded small, there was a hair. He didn't take it out.

The killing had explained one thing, and the thing it had explained was why the matron's post had to be hers. She was mean enough. That was the whole qualification. Send a new one down and the new one would have to try her, and trying her cost money.

He had worked out how the rat-kin would count it, because there wasn't much else to do in a pen but count things for other people. A dead matron was a dead matron, and the old one had been old. What they couldn't afford was a fresh one sent down into a yard with the Countess already in it, and the same fight starting over — feed lost, days lost, a litter lost. Livestock killing livestock wasn't a thing anybody wrote up. Nobody had burned the building. All the owners needed to be sure of was that she hadn't gone crazy in general and wouldn't start in on the rest of the stock. Murder or self-defense made no difference to them. Whoever was standing at the end had been in the right. If a berry's right and wrong was worth anything to anybody, they could come down the stairs and ask.

Which left the question that wouldn't sit still.

Why kill her at all.

The old woman had not been on the Countess's side, but she had not gone into that room with a knife in her head, either. A person carrying a knife in her head sees knives in everybody else's hands. She should not have turned her back on a woman younger and stronger than she was. She had turned it gladly, and leaned in close to do it.

So the Countess had walked in with it already planned.

Matron wasn't a job you got hired into. A matron was a dam who was done having litters, kept on to mind the ones who weren't. The Countess had dropped plenty of kids in that yard. She and the old woman had been in the same room, day and night, for years. Whatever was between them could have kept. It could have kept a week, and she hadn't given it one, and the only thing that made that night different from any other night was that she was in labor.

Whether the labor was real or put on, a birth down here killed women or left them too weak to lift a bucket. He had seen what it cost, and he had seen the after of it in the yard, in women who walked like they were carrying something that wasn't there. Nobody with a choice does both jobs the same night. So she had a reason, and the reason had needed the night.

Then there was the child. He had tried the count of it more than once and it wouldn't come out. The numbers in that yard went up and up and sometimes they went round again, and whether the one she'd had in that room was Eight, or whether Eight was somebody else's and the Countess's was a number he had never heard said, he couldn't get to from where he sat. He couldn't put a date on that room, either. The yard talked about the old woman the way people talk about weather that had already passed.

Whatever the number had been, nights had gone by since, and she had spent them doing something. Getting the job. Working for rats, for a bed with a door on it.

And the last of it wasn't a maybe at all. He had called her Ma. Six did not know that word. Six was fat and small and had maybe forty words, and that was not one of them. The Countess knew it. Something had crossed her face when he said it and gone back under, and it had not been surprise.

He held the questions at a low flame, the way you hold a thing you don't want to burn and don't want to eat yet, and he waited.

After a while she rolled over, and the look came off him, and the back of the room got easier to lie in.

He stretched out all the way, since the bed was his, and slept in three seconds. That was a trick he had.

Somebody had put a box of fried chicken down in front of him and nothing hurt anywhere, and he ate it in five minutes, and the bones came out cleaner than a dog could leave them.

Somebody sat down next to him. The face wouldn't come; it was warm, that was all, warm like a kitchen, a father and a mother both at once, and Rook's shoulders locked up before he told them to.

He made himself stay.

“This is terrible,” he said, and threw the last bone down on the paper, and wiped his hands on his pants. “Does your cafeteria put body armor on the chicken? That much breading, I've got the roof of my mouth cut open.”

“Ah — I'm sorry.” Warm, easy, no offense taken. “I bring you all this way and can't even feed you. Next time I'll order in. You can pick. What do you want?”

“s**t,” Rook said, the way a kid says it. “What do you mean, next time.”

“I was going to tell you. There's a lot of work here I could use a hand with. The Consortium has decided to move you out of the District. I'll be your guardian.”

“Handler.”

“You like that better? All right. You can call me an old bastard too, if it helps.”

Rook was moving around on the seat now and couldn't stop it. “You want the thing I've got. Cut it out of me, then.”

Nothing.

“The Consortium's been climbing the walls for it, I bet. Anyway, it's not like I—”

“Kid.” The person cut him off, gently. “You don't want to come to me?”

“Sure I do.” The flattery came out of him then, all of it, the way a thing comes out of a man who has been holding it looking for somewhere to put it. “An honor. My folks, wherever they're buried, are rolling. It's one hell of a—”

“But ever since I sat down,” the person said, “I've had the feeling you want to go out that window.”

“…”

The person got up and pushed the window open and looked out and down. Then he turned around.

“This is the second floor. There's a thick mat of grass down there. You can jump if you want to. Jump?”

He stood with the light behind him and Rook still couldn't see him. Only the one word, going around and hitting the inside of his ear, over and over, until it knocked him awake.

Light: all of it, the pen's kind, white and flat out of the ceiling strips, and the pen already loud. Feet overhead. Water running somewhere. A kid crying and getting told to quit it. The Countess was long gone. She had killed a woman on those boards and she still hadn't woken him for work.

He sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees and his head down, waiting for the dizziness to let go.

The dream was already leaving. He knew he'd had one; he couldn't have told you one thing about it.

Then the loudspeaker out in the yard popped, and music started up — bright, brassy, a tune with claps in it — and under the music a voice, warm and careful, the way they talked when they wanted you to believe them, began to speak to everybody.

Rook stood up. The room tilted and then it settled, and he went to the tap to wash his face.