The cortex got quieter in the second week.
Not the silence of a building emptied out — STAR Labs was busier than it had been in months, with breach monitoring expanded to four shifts and Cisco hiring two interns Iris had recommended from the journalism school's data side — but the quality of the noise changed. The undercurrent of the last six months, the low constant hum that had been the question of when does Zoom come back, was gone.
What replaced it was the noise of people doing things on schedules.
Cisco scheduled his coffee runs.
Caitlin scheduled her panels.
Barry scheduled his patrols around a normal sleep cycle for the first time since November.
I sat at my workstation in the cortex on the morning of February 4th and watched the four of them work and ate a granola bar Caitlin had put on my desk before her first scan of the day, and the building did the work of being a building, and I let myself, for the first time in a year, not be tracking a deadline.
There was no deadline.
The calendar in my apartment kitchen had vacation across the first week of February in pencil and Cait's birthday circled on the 4th in red, and Joe's PT thing on the 12th, and after that — for the first time since I'd kept a calendar in this body — the days were blank.
It was a strange kind of blank.
It looked like rest.
It also looked, depending on the light, like an empty page that I hadn't yet decided how to fill.
---
The cellular integrity readout had stabilized at 69% on Day 302 and had not moved since.
I'd been watching it the way a person watches the screen on an at-home blood test that they don't want to be checking but cannot stop checking. Every morning, before coffee. Every evening, before bed. The number had held at 69 for nine days running. Caitlin had run a panel on Day 305 and pronounced the number real — the cells in my body were now operating, permanently, at a tension nine percent tighter than the body Harry Griffin had woken up into a year ago.
I'd asked her what that meant practically.
She'd said: less reserve. You'll get tired faster than you used to. Recovery from physical exertion will take longer. Healing of normal injuries will be slower. You won't notice it most days. You'll notice it on the days when your body needs to do a thing it used to be able to do at 97% reserve.
I'd nodded.
I'd asked her what I should do about it.
She'd said: Don't do anything you can't take back. And rest more than you think you need to.
I was trying.
I had the granola bar on my desk every morning. I drank water more than I had used to. I'd swapped one of my two daily coffees for a tea Caitlin had picked out at a specialty shop the day after Christmas. I went to bed at 11 instead of 1.
The 78% recovery percent the System had projected for me was — Caitlin had been clear — the functional recovery, not the integrity recovery. My powers would come back. My capacity would come back to its new ceiling. The 69% was the new floor under everything.
I lived with the floor.
It was a thing you could live with.
---
Cisco knocked on my workstation's open door frame at 11:14 AM the morning of Cait's birthday.
"You buy the cake?"
"I bought the cake."
"You hide it where she won't find it?"
"I hid it where she won't find it. It's at my apartment."
"Why your apartment."
"Because she has been at her own apartment for three days running and she has not been at mine since the day after the trap, so the cake is safe at mine."
"That's good logistics, Harry."
"Thank you."
He stepped into the workstation. Closed the door behind him.
I lifted my head.
He pulled up the visitor's chair. Sat down.
"Okay," he said. "I want to ask you something I have been not asking you for nine days."
I waited.
"You stopped running the cover signal."
"I noticed that."
"You haven't done a hunt since the night before the silo."
"I noticed that too."
"Are you going to."
I considered.
"Eventually."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer I have. The honest version."
"What does eventually mean."
I thought about it.
"It means that the System is being patient with me in a way it has never been patient with me before. The PP drain didn't kick in on Day 7 the way it usually does after I stop hunting. There's been no recommendation message in the System log for a hunt for nine days. It is acting like it understands what I just spent."
"And if it stops acting that way."
"Then I do a hunt."
"Carefully."
"Carefully. With the file in your hand within seventy-two hours. With the call to Caitlin. With the contract."
"Joe."
"Joe still doesn't know specifics."
"Are you going to tell him."
I held his look.
"Eventually."
"That word again."
"Yeah."
He sat with it.
"All right."
"All right?"
"All right. Just — Harry. Don't let eventually be never. Joe asked me about you on Tuesday."
"What did he ask."
"He asked if I trusted you."
"What did you say."
"I said more than I trust most of the people on the planet. He nodded. He didn't push. He's waiting for the rest of it. He's going to be patient because Joe is patient. But the longer it sits, the more it weighs."
"Yeah."
"Okay. End of the conversation. Cake at your apartment. Six o'clock. I'm bringing the candles."
"Bring matches too. I have one match in the apartment and it doesn't work."
"One match."
"I told you, I'm bad at apartments."
He laughed.
He went.
Reading more than one of my novels? Good news — one Patreon, all of them.
patreon.com/TheFinex5
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰
― DECREE ―
More chapters reign FREE upon unwrittenrealm.com.
The throne acknowledges.
▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰▰