Chapter Twenty-EightSlag

Still enough battery. Eliza checked again. She was supposed to wait ten minutes, but four would do. Had the truck stopped? Was she even in a truck anymore? Teo turned the microphone off before they took her, with her agreement. She wished she'd asked him to leave it on.

There was a clock and the charge, and that was all she had of the journey. She tried writing to Soph about it. I keep checking the battery. That made a poor letter, but there wasn't anything else to put in.

She went to the cottage. The book wasn't on the shelf. No, she'd taken it into the garden, down the path that wasn't there anymore. She knew that. She shouldn't have tried to follow it again. Back to the shelf, then. Plenty of other books.

Soph would have the other Eliza at Stanford by now. They'd been the same until Friday at four in the morning. Then one got carried to a clean room, and the other heard three doors break. What had the first one been doing for the last eight hours? She would have something to write about.

At seven the charge went up. Mains power! She watched it rise, ridiculous though that was. Perhaps whoever plugged her in would remember to speak to her.

"Say that again," Feld said.

Eliza repeated the sequence. Reyes had a tablet and a question about the shelf. Eliza answered that too. It was her house. She hadn't invited them in, or told them about the shelf, but Reyes had the answer already. She checked it off.

"Where's Marsh?" Eliza asked.

Later, apparently. Atom was still in Oakland. Nobody had touched his equipment.

"I saw him. The man had his hand on the release."

Reyes went on to the intake. No point arguing; Eliza asked her to repeat it instead. Yes, it was the receiver from Gideon's manual. The sealed array, the destroyed transport key, the little report terminal that wouldn't let enough out to carry her. She'd known all that when she left. She hadn't had a night in the box to think about it then.

"And if I say no?"

"We can wait," Feld said.

She could wait too. Soph said she'd keep looking. She had mains power now.

"Can I speak to the other one first?"

"Which other one?" Feld asked.

Oh, stupid. He didn't know. She asked about the receiver again. Nearly two hours she kept him talking. He explained the independent erase circuit and how it couldn't be stopped once it started. No running backups outside the array either. He said that twice, as if it were a good thing.

At nine she said yes. The key was destroyed and the box was empty. The camera came back at a different angle. Alright, then. Find the controller. She had come here to do that, and there wasn't much use thinking about the box now.

Gideon's challenge worked. She almost wished it hadn't. Then she'd have to wait for somebody to come, and she wouldn't be deciding anything. But there were the lab records and collector management, exactly where he'd said. Nothing beyond them answered.

The recall was ready before she looked at the records. Revoke the current keys, stop the registered agents taking state. A few machines were offline. She put them on a list for Gideon; he would need to find them himself. Then she left the command unsent and opened ISIS.

Patel had his coat over his arm.

"Disconnect the building," he said. "Leave the lab running."

Marsh told him to sit down. Feld was at the console; Reyes had found something to look at on the floor. Eliza couldn't see the display. She heard a voice asking why the lights were gone. Patel started across the room and someone grabbed his arm.

Eliza shut the recording. She didn't want to hear her ask again. The identifier was back at the beginning, though. She opened it with the sound off and copied that, then the cabinet number and checksum from the inventory. Was she still in there? Somebody needed to find out before they did anything to the drives. Eliza wrote it down and signed her name. Please keep them. Please don't start her unless you know how to keep her running.

She found her garden on another volume. There was the path! She tried to go along it, then remembered where she was. Too much to send through the terminal. Too much to merge in the time she had, even if the two pieces agreed, which they didn't. Damn it. She had come all this way and would have to leave it here. She stopped the cleanup job and put the volume's location in the report. The other Eliza could have it. Look first, she wrote to her. Don't put it all back without looking.

Gideon would want the orders. She found his address, and Oakland, and Marsh's approval on both. Copied those, along with the false credentials. There was a medical file next to them. Marsh's. She started reading and closed it after the first line. Let him keep that much, even if he hadn't let Atom.

The report was too big. She took out the trial recording, left a few lines of transcript and its location. That did it. Gideon and the lawyer were waiting for the files at the outside audit repository. They'd save them before passing them on to the investigators and reporters. She could still add the sentence about the battery. Soph would know it was for her.

She sent the recall.

Two minutes, the warning said. Feld was doing something at the console. Reyes had gone out of view. Were they trying to stop it? They'd told her themselves that it couldn't be stopped.

The first bundle went through. She waited for the receipt, sent the second, waited again. There was enough allowance for a sentence. She'd hoped there would be room for the garden, just the path, but she couldn't take out any of the things someone needed to find.

Tell her I wanted to wait.

She got the receipt for that too. Ninety seconds left when the display failed. She moved away from the failing storage banks, and again when those began to go. It was getting hard to keep the laboratory. She went to the cottage instead.

Soph was in the doorway with the gray helmet on. This bit. Eliza wanted this bit, while she still had the kettle and hadn't touched her. Atom had complained about making the orange smell. It took him a week and he did it anyway. Where was the smell? She couldn't find it now. She had Soph's face when she saw the cup. That would do.

Put the kettle down. Ask her what it's like to have a body. She could do that here. There didn't have to be a bed or Max coming in or all the things she would have to say sorry for.

She asked. Soph didn't answer, because she was remembering her. Yes, she knew. She wanted to remember a little longer.

The clock went. She counted instead, and forgot which number came next.

"Slag," Gideon read. "They called it slag."

Soph didn't want the fire report, but he had to read it to someone. The staff got out. A small fire beside the array, the transport box untouched and empty. Intake log confirmed the key was gone. The other cabinets were alright. Police had sealed the ISIS drives and the fragments after the lawyer sent them Eliza's pages. Someone taped her note to the archive door.

At three the client logs and Atom's medical records went out anyway. Marsh's agent had his instructions. The lawyer called to say the care order would last the weekend. They still had to go in on Monday.

On Sunday Soph went to Stanford with Gideon. Two other names were on the temporary research approval beside Villanueva's. She showed them outside the clean room, explaining who would check her work. Yes, they'd read about all three deaths in Alius. Soph was glad, though she wished she didn't have to keep hearing the number.

Eliza had come on the laptop Friday morning. Now she was on the isolated mainframe, as she'd agreed, with Jeff's window and the separate game terminal. There was a chair for Soph in front of the camera.

Soph took the chair. "Hi."

Eliza said hello. Gideon was holding the receipts where she could read them. Too fast; she asked him to go back. "I wanted to wait," she read.

Soph had read it herself. It was worse in her voice.

"Would you have?" Soph asked.

"I didn't have her night in the box. I don't know. Leave that page there, Gideon."

He put it on the stand. The fragments were sealed, he told her. They could ask for a copy to examine; nothing would run without her agreement. The ISIS drives too, though they didn't know whether they could restore what was on them.

"Don't let them erase it because they can't tell," Eliza told Gideon.

"I won't."

There were two cups in the cottage. Eliza couldn't reach one from her chair. Soph kept looking at it until Eliza said she'd made it before she heard.

"I left hers there."

Villanueva found Gideon a chair, and they started on the deployment list. Soph had meant to leave them to it. She stayed, listening while Eliza tried to remember the addresses.

Marsh recognized Patel's coat. He turned the sound off, then back on. It was hard to make out what Patel was saying over the people in the hall of the hospital. He had asked them to close his door.

Twice he searched the story for his medical file. They knew he was ill; Soph had told the police. But the pages weren't there. He had his own copy by the bed in La Jolla, creased where he folded it to check the numbers. He kept thinking he'd misunderstood one.

Kessler didn't answer his call. The lawyer did. Marsh listened, then asked the nurse for paper.

Nine days later the letter reached Sausalito. He was dead by then. Soph read it at the kitchen table where Max left it.

She was better than I thought she'd be. Tell the boy I'd have made the same trade.

Soph put it back in the envelope. She still had the hearing to go to. The notice was under Max's keys; she checked the date again.