Seven Roots

"Seven," Selene said.

Dev sat cross-legged on the tile a hand's width inside the threshold, the red bar laid over his shins, the gap in the doors between them like a mouth that wouldn't close. The blue glow lit her boots from below.

"Seven what?"

"Roots. You wondered how I knew there'd be five or six. I said more if you'd been going out. You've been going out." She tilted her head at his face, at the cotton still plugged in one nostril. "So, seven. Go and look. I'll wait."

"I'm not leaving the door."

"Then send someone." She smiled at Margaret, who stood behind him with her arms folded over her cardigan. "Matron could count them."

Margaret didn't move. Dev hadn't told Selene her name, let alone what she liked to be called. He filed that next to brother and the dry boots, in a drawer that was getting full.

"Priya," he said.

Priya was already walking. Her trainers squeaked away down aisle seven. A scrape of tile, a pause. Then her voice, flat and furious.

"Seven."

Selene didn't look pleased with herself. She looked like someone who'd been told the time and found it matched her watch.

"What does fed correctly mean?" Dev said.

"What it sounds like."

"It sounds like you want me to ask again."

"It means a core is a growing thing, and growing things want particular conditions. Yours has had two sleepers and a lot of fright. That's thin soup." She smoothed her lapel with two fingers. "Give it the right meals and the leash gets longer."

"What meals?"

"I'll show you."

"Tell me."

"It's easier to show you." She said it the way a dentist says small scratch. "Some of it you won't like in words. In practice it's quite ordinary."

"How do you know any of this?"

"I pay attention."

"To what? It's been three days. Nobody's had a manual."

Selene studied him, then crouched, neatly, coat tucked behind her knees so the hem didn't touch the tarmac. Her eyes were level with his now. Grey, or the glow made them grey.

"Devon," she said. "I will answer a great many of your questions. That one, not tonight."

"Then when?"

"When you trust me enough that the answer won't make you shut the door."

Priya came back up the aisle and stopped behind the end display of tinned peaches. Her left hand was inside her right sleeve again. Her right hand was in her hoodie pocket, and Dev heard, very faintly, a thumbnail ticking on metal.

"Can I try something," Priya said, flat.

She didn't wait for him. She stepped up beside the gap, put her arm through it as far as the elbow, and flicked the bike bell once.

Ching.

It went out bright and thin across the tarmac. Behind the van, the ridged thing unfolded. Dev had been watching it for three nights and still wasn't used to the way it moved, all its plates shifting at once, a sound like someone shuffling roof tiles. It came out into the dark with its blunt head low and swinging, turning toward the bell.

Selene was crouched directly between it and the door.

"Selene," Dev said. "Get up."

She didn't. She stayed exactly where she was, forearms on her knees, and watched him rather than the creature.

It came on. Ten metres. Five. Dev's hand was on the bar and his weight was already tipping forward toward the line, and Margaret's fingers hooked his collar, hard.

The creature passed Selene close enough that its ridges nearly brushed her coat sleeve. It did not turn its head. It did not slow. It walked past her the way you'd walk past a bollard and stopped dead at the glowing seam of the threshold, nose to the light, where the bell had been. It stood there breathing its wet, clicking breath. Priya had already pulled her arm back inside.

Then it lost interest and went off toward a car alarm that had been sobbing somewhere near the gasworks since lunchtime.

Selene stood up, brushed nothing off her knees, and put her hands back in her pockets.

"Well," she said. "Now you know something else about me."

* * *

"She's a key," Priya said. "That's what she is. She's a key that already has the door."

They were at till three in the half-dark, far enough back that Selene was a grey shape beyond the glass. Priya had the receipt roll out and wasn't writing on it. She was jabbing the counter with it.

"It walked past her. It went for a bell and walked past a whole person. You don't get that from paying attention."

"I know," Dev said.

"She knew the roots. She knew Matron. She knew about your brother, and you didn't say anything about your brother, I was standing right there."

"I know."

"So why are we even standing here?"

Click. Click. The pricing gun, empty, in his hand. He didn't remember taking it out.

"Because she's the only person who's said the words across that weir," he said, "and meant me."

Priya's face did something complicated and then went hard. "She's said it. That's not the same."

Dev turned to Margaret. She'd taken the stool behind till four and sat very upright with her hands in her lap, one thumb on the watch face.

"Matron."

"No."

"I haven't asked yet."

"You're going to ask me what I think. I'm telling you no." She looked at him over her glasses, the way she'd presumably looked at junior doctors for four decades. "It's your door, not my ward."

"You've got opinions about everything else. Blades. Points. My nose."

"I have." She checked the watch, a reflex. "And whoever you let in, I'll be awake for. That's what you get from me. Not a vote."

Click. Click. Click.

Margaret reached across the gap between the tills, took the pricing gun out of his hand, and put it face down beside the bagging area. She didn't say anything. She left her hand on it.

"Three occupants," Priya said. "That's what this is. Three's more points at dawn, and three opens another Rule. You'd get paid to let her in."

"Yes," Dev said.

She'd been ready for him to argue. He watched her lose the next sentence.

"I'd get paid," he said. "And she might be the way to Ky. And she might be exactly what you think she is. All three. I don't get to pick just one of them."

"You do, actually," said Priya. "That's literally what the door's for."

She walked off toward the stockroom. Halfway down the aisle she stopped, came back, slapped the receipt roll down on the counter beside the gun so he would see it, and walked off again.

He didn't read it. He looked at Margaret.

"What's the worst thing a person can do in here," he said, "that the Rule doesn't stop?"

Margaret thought about it properly. He liked that about her.

"Anything at all," she said, "to someone who's awake. Or to something that isn't a person."

He looked down aisle seven, where the hum lived.

"Right," he said.

* * *

He went back to the gap and stood this time. Selene was waiting exactly where she'd been, feet together.

"Terms," Dev said.

"Of course."

"You sleep where Matron can see you. Every night. Wherever she says."

"Yes."

"You don't go into aisle seven. You don't stand at the end of it, you don't lift a tile, you don't touch anything on the shelves, and you don't send anyone else to do it for you."

A small tilt of the head, as if the last clause had surprised her. "Yes."

"And by morning you tell me one true thing about my brother. Something real. Something I can check."

Selene smiled. It was a nice smile. That was the problem with it.

"By morning," she said.

"That's not a yes."

"It's a yes with a time on it. You put the time on it yourself." She glanced past him at the dark aisles, at Margaret's shape by the tills. "May I?"

His mouth was dry. Behind him the hum changed faintly, the way a fridge does when its door has been open too long.

"Come in," Dev said.

She stepped through the gap sideways so her coat didn't catch. Her polished boot crossed the threshold, and the glow along the floor flared once, bright as a struck match, and settled.

[Occupants: 3. Rule slot 2 available. Rules cannot be revoked at Level 1.]

He'd had the words since till three. He said them anyway as if he'd only just found them, out loud, to the store.

"Rule two. Nobody touches the core but the Keeper."

The hum dropped a note and held. Something settled under his feet like a lid going down on a jar, and the tile in aisle seven, forty metres away, gave a single soft tick he felt in his back teeth.

[Rule 2 set.]

Selene stood just inside, coat still buttoned, and looked at him with real interest for the first time.

"That's a good one," she said. "Most people think of it later."

Margaret had come up from the tills. She stood at his shoulder and spoke low enough that only he heard.

"And if you're the one lying on the floor, Devon? Who touches it then?"

He didn't have an answer. She didn't seem to expect one.

* * *

Priya was in the stockroom. He'd heard the toilet-roll cage rattle as she dragged it, and when he reached the doorway she was sitting on a flattened multipack with her back against the foot of the yellow ladder, hood up, knife hand inside her sleeve.

The receipt roll was in her lap, the newest line still wet.

DAY 3 NIGHT: LET HER IN. RULE 2. DIDN'T ASK ME.

"You weren't asking," Dev said. "You were telling."

"Same difference." She didn't look up. "Rule two's good. I'd have picked it."

"Then come back out."

"I'm all right here."

"You can't see the door from here."

"I can see the ladder." She pulled the hood cord into her mouth and chewed it. "Somebody should."

He stood there long enough to know she meant it. Then he went back out.

Margaret had built Selene a bed: three flattened banana boxes, layered, with a folded tablecloth from the seasonal aisle on top, laid in the mouth of aisle three, square in the line of sight from the first-aid shelf. Margaret's own pillow was already on that shelf, propped against the bandages.

"There," Margaret said.

"Thank you," said Selene. "That's very kind."

"It's not kind. It's visible."

Selene took off her boots, set them side by side at the foot of the boxes, and lay down in her coat. Margaret sat on the shelf's edge with her knees together and wound her watch. One click. Two. She did it looking at Selene, not at the watch.

When Selene got up an hour later for the staff toilet, Dev saw Margaret's wrist turn. When Selene came back and lay down, it turned again. Margaret wrote something on the back of a plaster box with a biro. A time.

Two people in the building now with somebody counting them.

* * *

It was gone two when he stopped being sure he was awake.

He'd moved from the gap to till three, because from the stool he could see the door, the mouth of aisle three and the dark slot of the stockroom all at once, if he kept turning his head. He'd stopped turning his head. His cheek rested on the cool edge of the counter beside the dead card reader, his hand on the pricing gun where Margaret had left it.

A basket scraped.

He opened his eyes. Selene sat on an upturned shopping basket at the end of the till, coat draped round her, boots back on, hands folded. She wasn't looking at him. She was looking out through the glass at the forecourt, at the van, at nothing.

"You should be on your boxes," he said.

"Matron's asleep. I thought you'd rather I was where you could see me."

He looked. Margaret's head was tipped back against the bandages, her mouth slightly open. The watch hand rested on her knee.

"She'll be furious," Dev said.

"She'll be furious with herself." Selene smiled at the window. "Was it always this quiet? At night. Before."

"Mostly. Taxi drivers at four. Lads who wanted energy drinks and a fight about the price of energy drinks. A woman who came in every Thursday for one lemon."

"Just one?"

"I never asked."

"No," Selene said. "You wouldn't."

The car alarm by the gasworks had finally died. The store hummed. In the stockroom, a cage creaked as somebody shifted against it.

"The flats on Halsey," Selene said. "Damp. The lifts were always broken, even before. People hung washing over the landing rails and the council sent letters about it."

"You lived there?"

"I paid attention."

He was too tired to be angry about that one. He let his head lie on the counter.

She said it the way you'd read a label off a tin, without weight, without looking round.

"Three, pause, three." A small breath. "In. Now. Both of you."

Dev sat up.

The stool skidded. The pricing gun went off under his palm, empty, a single dry click that seemed very loud.

Nobody alive knew that. The flicks, yes, anyone on a roof could have seen those tonight. But the words had only ever been in their mother's mouth, at the back door on Ashby Road, with the kitchen strip light buzzing over her head and Ky pretending to be deaf out on the green. Dev had never said them to anyone. He'd always assumed Ky hadn't either.

Selene turned, finally, and looked at him. Her face was calm and a little sorry.

"That's one," she said. "It isn't morning yet."

She smoothed her lapel with two fingers, once.