2026-07-22-load-bearing
Ninety seconds, if I don’t rush it. I don’t rush it.
The vault smells of cold stone, brass gone waxy with age, a decade of undisturbed dust. Corliss built his door to punish patience: three tumblers, a rolling code, a system that assumes anyone gifted enough to reach it has earned the right to wait. My hand is in the panel to the wrist, feeding the code back on itself, when Amy crouches beside me, close enough that I catalogue her perfume: the second-best bottle, the one she wears when she isn’t planning to be charming and brings anyway, just in case.
“Time,” she says, not looking at me. She’s looking at the ceiling grille, chin tipped at it, already decided it isn’t a problem.
“Forty-three left.”
“The dispenser is set dressing, darling. The criminal equivalent of a NO SOLICITING sign.” She said this an hour ago, in recon, with the specific delight she reserves for her own cleverness. I filed the disagreement. Filing costs less than arguing with her once her mind’s made up.
“You’re early,” says a voice with money behind every syllable of it. Tim leans into the doorway, jacket cut close, weight settled onto one hip, grin already in place, one eyebrow split by a scar too clean to be an accident and too old to still explain.
“I’m punctual.” Amy straightens, shoulders back, unhurried, a woman who decided decades ago that surprise was for other people. “You’re trespassing.”
“So is half the underworld tonight. Word’s out Corliss isn’t coming back for his things.”
“I know why we’re both here.” She tucks a loose strand back into the knot at her nape, a gesture that has nothing to do with her hair and everything to do with making him watch her hands. “I don’t know why you’re surprised.”
His grin doesn’t move. His thumb finds his cufflink and turns it once.
Nine point five seconds left on the lock. I feed the last digit through. The door gives.
“Scanned this place myself, three hours ago.” He steps over the threshold, unhurried, certain of his welcome. “Clean. No surprises.”
“Your scanner reads what’s here.” Amy moves past me for the ledger, already reaching. “Not who’s about to be.”
The circuit spikes before the grille finishes opening. Point six seconds. Odorless, colorless, calibrated to organic nervous systems. My hand is still in the panel when I read it. I am not organic.
“Amy.” My voice doesn’t change. There is no version of me built to let it.
She turns, ledger in hand. “What–” The word doesn’t come out clean. Tim’s hand finds the wall. The floor didn’t move. He did.
“That’s not decoy gas.” He says it lightly. His hand stays on the wall.
“No.” I stay in the panel, feeding an override I should have fed an hour ago. The grille stutters. Doesn’t stop. There isn’t time left to make it stop the right way.
Amy goes down first, the knot at her nape coming loose against Tim’s shoulder as he catches her – reflex, not romance – and follows her down half a second after, the two of them collapsing into each other in the doorway, her hand fisted in his jacket, his arm the only thing between her and the stone.
I pull my hand free of the panel. Servo lock engages at both knees. I’m already standing. I was built to open doors, to carry a case in each hand, not a person, and never two at once. My own architecture allows for more than that, in a tolerance spec I have never had cause to test.
I test it now.
I choose them both.
One arm under Amy, one under Tim, the ledger wedged against my hip because leaving it would mean none of this bought anything. The load transfers wrong at first, then right. I do not go down.
Tim’s eyes are open when I lift him. Barely tracking, pupils blown, but open, and pointed at my face, not my arms. Whatever he finds there isn’t mine to choose. I am watching the color leave Amy’s jaw, the slack starting at the corner of her mouth, and for however long that lasts I am not cataloguing it, not filing it anywhere. I am machine, moving fast, and something in me that isn’t machine at all would like both of them to keep existing.
“You’re afraid–” he starts.
He doesn’t finish it. He wasn’t looking at what I could carry. He was looking at what my face did while I carried them.
The air outside does the rest: cold, clean, enough of it that his hand finds Amy’s without either of them deciding to let it.
I set them down on the dock stones. Amy’s breathing evens first. His hand is still around hers when it does, and neither of them moves to fix that.
“What happened in there?” Amy says it to him, not to me. Her voice is steadier than her hand.
“Bad air.” Tim’s grin comes back, crooked, not yet steady. “Corliss never trusted anyone enough to let them breathe easy around him.”
Neither of them looks at me long enough to ask the real question. Why I chose to save him. Why I didn’t leave him to die.
Their hands are still joined when I look away first. I did not choose to look away first. Four seconds too late to do anything about it.
I fold my hands. I stand the way I always stand. Whatever Tim saw in my face is already resetting to default, unremarkable, unaudited.
The ledger sits between them on the dock stones, unopened, in the gap their hands have not quite closed.
I keep everything else to myself. I do not yet have a word for what happened, what is happening, to me.
I suspect I will have a great deal of time to find one.
