The Deal

He began to write on the second night.

He told himself it was nothing. He sat in the corner of the bank's dark vault, with his back against the cold steel of a safe-deposit wall, and a lamp at his elbow, and Thomas Crane's red pencil in his hand. He had a stack of ledger paper from the manager's desk. He opened to a clean page. For a long time he only looked at it.

It isn't betrayal, he thought. It's a record.

He wrote the date. It was a habit. There was no date here, in the Mirror World, but he wrote it anyway, a number he made up. Then, slowly, in a small cramped hand, he began to describe what it had felt like to wake on a station in the sky.

It was easier than he'd expected.

That was the horror of it. He had half imagined that it would feel like lying. It did not. It felt like keeping a journal, the sort of thing a sensible man did on an expedition, and as the words came, he found himself forgetting why he had started. He described the sensation of falling through white. He described the strange thick moment of arrival, when a body he had not known he possessed settled over his mind like a glove. He wrote about the dryness in his throat on Meridian-7. The smell of the plant room. The odd cold ache in the sternum when he stood too near the Guardian.

Subjective latency approx. four seconds, he wrote. Proprioception returns before vision. A sense of weight, then of limb. Memory remains intact. The mind seems to supply the missing details of the body from itself.

He sounded like a scientist. He sounded, God help him, rather good.

He wrote for three hours. When he stopped, the lamp had burned low and his hand was cramped, and the page in front of him was covered in close black lines. He looked at it. A strange feeling came over him, half shame and half pride.

It's well written, he thought.

He folded the sheets in thirds and tucked them into his coverall. Then he sat for a long while with his head against the safe, listening to the faint, distant sound of Venn breathing in the next room.

At the edge of the lamplight, almost invisible, a mirror hung on the wall of the vault. In it, a thin man in a gray suit was applauding without sound.

…

"You're up late," said Jin.

He was standing at the vault door with a lantern in his hand. He wore a coat over his coverall. His glasses caught the light, hiding his eyes, and the lantern threw his shadow huge and crooked across the steel.

Archie closed the ledger.

"Can't sleep."

"Neither can I." Jin came in. He settled himself on a stack of old deposit boxes, holding the lantern between his knees, and for a while he merely sat. "I've been thinking about Venn."

"How is he?"

"Stable. Weak. I don't like it." He rubbed his eyes under the lenses. "The pulse hurt him more than it should have. The Dimension isn't built to transmit damage from outside. It's built to simulate. Someone has found a way to make it real."

"I know."

"Do you?" Jin looked up. His eyes were mild and gray and very direct. "You've known a good deal, lately. You always seem to. It's remarkable."

"I don't follow."

"I'm only saying." He rotated the lantern in his hands. "You're very calm. Since the door. I'd have expected you to be shaken. I was. Zoe was. Venn was out cold. But you came through it like a man who'd already made up his mind about something."

"I haven't."

"No?"

"No."

"What's in the ledger?"

It was said so lightly that for a moment Archie didn't understand it. Then his heart gave a hard thick lurch.

"Notes," he said.

"Notes."

"A journal. I thought I'd keep one." He heard his own voice come out smooth and level, a perfect imitation of someone's. "It helps me think. I used to keep sketchbooks, you know. This is the same thing."

"May I see?"

"It's personal."

"Of course." Jin smiled faintly. "I wouldn't dream."

He stood. He took up the lantern. At the door he paused, and Archie saw his head turn a little, as if he were about to say something more. He did not. He only said, "Goodnight, Archie," in a tone that was perfectly pleasant, and walked out.

Archie sat alone in the vault. His hands were trembling.

That wasn't so hard, said the warm voice at the back of his head.

That was easy.

…

Zoe asked him on the fourth day.

They were walking down a long gray avenue between rows of silent shopfronts, with Venn between them on a makeshift stretcher of coat and pole, borne by Archie at one end and Zoe at the other. Jin had gone ahead to scout. The faceless crowd moved on either side, slow as water. Some of the shop windows held displays. Mannequins in coats. A tray of cakes. A rack of hats. All of them reversed, the lettering mirrored, the prices inscrutable.

"Archie."

"Mm."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You don't seem it." She was walking backward, so as to see his face over Venn's chest. She looked tired and thin and unbearably sweet, with her cap pulled down over her eyes. "You've been so quiet. You don't eat. You're up at night, writing. I hear the pencil."

"It's nothing."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it's true."

"Is it?"

He kept his eyes on the road.

"I'm fine, Zoe," he said. "Really. I'm just tired. I've a lot on my mind. Venn. The others." He made himself smile. "I'm trying to figure out the next step. That's all."

She was silent for several paces.

"Okay," she said at last.

"Okay."

"If you want to talk—"

"I know."

"I'm here."

"I know. Thank you." He swallowed. "I'm okay."

She nodded, and turned, and walked on.

It was the first time he had ever lied to her. He understood that now. It had been a small lie, a soft one, easily told and easily forgiven. It had come out of him as lightly as breath. And as he walked, with the stretcher pole biting into his shoulder, he felt something go out of the air between them: a thread, a warmth, a quiet unspoken lean toward each other that he had come to depend upon without knowing it. It did not snap. It only slackened. It simply grew less.

You can fix it, said the voice. Later. When it's over.

When they're safe.

He bent his head and walked on.

…

Every night, the voice grew louder.

It was not William's. It had never been William's. William said very little: a word now and then in a mirror, a gentle, courteous prompt. Thank you, Archie. That was most useful. Please include the Guardian's physical description. Might you say more about the sensation of falling? He was never harsh. He was never demanding. He asked as one asks a favor from a friend.

The voice that grew was Archie's.

It was patient. It was reasonable. It spoke in the tones of a man he had been for fifteen years, and had hoped, in a hundred small ways, to leave behind. It said: Don't make a fuss. It said: Just keep your head down. It said: You can't fight this man. Nobody can. You'll only hurt the ones you love. And it said, most softly of all: This is what you're good at, Archie. This is what you've always been good at. Absorbing it. Taking it. Making sure everyone else is all right.

Why change now?

He had a nightmare in the Mirror World.

In it he was standing in a long glass hallway, and on either side of him, in the walls, in the floor and ceiling, hundreds of mirrors reflected his face. A hundred gray-suited Archies. A thousand. Each of them smiling, mild, contented, with a paper cup in one hand. Each of them bowed.

"Good boy," said a hundred voices, all in the same pleasant baritone.

He woke with the lamp still burning, and Thomas's pencil in his fist, and a page half filled with writing. He looked at it.

Subjective sense of identity remains stable under transfer, it read. No dissociation reported. Subjects retain full self-recognition, although the sense of "mine" attached to the body is gradual and incomplete.

He had written it without knowing. His hand had simply gone on.

He stared at his own writing for a very long time.

Then he picked up the pencil and, with infinite care, went on.

…

In the lab, a small gray envelope arrived on Luca Ferrara's desk.

It came by courier. It was addressed in a lawyer's hand. Luca turned it over twice, frowning, before he slit it with a thumbnail and unfolded the single sheet inside.

Notice of Transfer of Controlling Interest.

Pursuant to Article 14(c) of the Operating Agreement between the Ferrara Dimensional Research Institute and Cross Capital Partners, effective this date...

He read it, slowly, once. Then again. His face did not change. His lips moved faintly at certain words. When he reached the end, he laid the paper on the blotter, squared it with the edge of the desk, and sat looking at it with his hands folded.

Otis, hovering in the doorway, said: "Dr. Ferrara? Is something wrong?"

"No," said Luca.

"Because you've, you've gone kind of gray—"

"It's a routine matter." He smiled. It was the old, gentle, tired smile, so sweet and so empty that Otis felt his throat close. "Some paperwork. It's nothing. Please, Otis. Go home and rest."

"I could stay."

"Go home."

Otis went.

Luca sat alone in the lab, among the humming pods, for a long time. Then he took off his glasses and put his face in his hands.

In the observation suite, behind the glass, someone was drinking a very good cup of coffee.