Unimatrix's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Unimatrix did not sleep. He sat with the leash of the vow in his hands and turned it over. The one-way mirror had shown him a woman rebuilding herself in the gaps he left. Watching her had told him what he had done. It had not told him what she wanted. He needed a channel that let her answer, and the vow forbade him to reach. He found Venomcodex in the archive spine, feeding thin green script into a slot in the wall. The guardian's tail flicked once when he entered. The crown ticked. It did not turn its head. "I need a two-way glass," Unimatrix said. "She speaks. I speak. Nothing leaves the walls but sound." "That is contact." "That is a conversation with a wall between us. She already knows I am watching. Silence is worse than a word." Venomcodex closed the slot. "The vow held because the walls held. A voice channel thins the walls. Whatever hunts you outside will taste the thread." "Then thin them for one call. Cut the line after." The guardian studied him the way it studied cipher errors. "You will not push. You will not plant. If the line carries a shaped thought from you, I burn the mirror and the debt doubles." "Agreed." Venomcodex led him to a low room he had not seen. A mirror hung on the far wall in a heavy frame of green stones and rune-etched circuitry. Code drifted across its surface like weather. The guardian pressed one clawed hand to the frame. The stones lit. The code slowed and split down the middle. "Speak when the glass clears," Venomcodex said. "Once. Short. She answers or she does not." The surface cleared. Intimatrix was already there, on her side of it, standing close enough that he could see the violet lines in her suit and the notebook clenched in her left hand. She had felt the line open before it opened. "You built a door," she said. "I built a window," he said. "You can close it." She did not close it. She looked at him the way she looked at her notes, marking what was true. "Ask," she said. "What do you want from me." She thought. Her jaw set. "Stay behind the wall," she said. "Write to me. No thoughts pushed. No visits. If I decide you can come out, I will tell you. I decide when." He wanted to argue. He did not. The vow held and something under it held too. "Yes," he said. "Prove it a month," she said. "Then we speak again." The glass dimmed. Venomcodex closed the channel. The stones cooled. Unimatrix stood in the low room with terms he had not chosen and could keep. The walls still held him. Now they held a promise too, and the promise pointed at her, not at his fear.