It would not be trivial to discover what purchases the Ink-Coloured Mouse makes, from the cash-token payments made to her in exchange for the work she does. Heavy Snow could do it, nonetheless. She does her best not to think of it.
She does her best not to, even when she is chirped by a certain man she does occasional business with, who runs a motor parts store in the industrial district near the docks, and also less openly sells street weapons.
There's a woman here asking to buy a splintergun, Spider in the White Steel Palace, and she does not name a friend.
There are many weapons on the port's streets. Most are there by the system of friendship — which is to say, the communicated recognition of a criminal power that they're benevolently inclined to you carrying it. If you wish to be armed: be a foot soldier.
Heavy Snow knows exactly how much money Ink-Coloured Mouse's jobs have paid her. She knows the street value of a pistol, how much that leaves over for essentials such as sustenance.
In the isolation of her office, a sigh actually escapes her.
Employer? mechself indwelt-office says.
"It's nothing," she says, and chirps back to the gun merchant: I vouch for her.
She chirps for conveyance and an abundant order of food, and is pulling on her long coat by the time the reply comes. On behalf of her employer? Who is that?
It is a normal question. Heavy Snow keeps her fingers scrupulously out of any business that doesn't bring itself to her, pay sufficiently, and keep her life quiet. She stubbornly resents being asked all the more for the truth of that.
I vouch for her, she chirps back. You know me.
She is in good standing with most of the powers of the street, because she is useful and keeps her hands clean.
Very well, the reply comes, and there is no subline, no inflection or expression to genuinely read either confusion or suspicion in. Her imagination supplies both.
Employer, mechself indwelt-office says. It rarely offers outright commentary on her work; it maintains many routine tasks and obligations for her, paperwork and permits and bribes. It watches over her small kingdom of data and connections, archives, alerts and automated searches; castellan and watchdog. Are you visiting the woman on the ship...again?
"Do not," she tells it. "Just — do not. She will earn enough to hire a deepnavigator, and she will leave. That is simply all."
And whereby do you plan to profit?
Heavy Snow does nothing without knowing how she will, or at least in the future abstract might, turn it into money.
Heavy Snow knows how this could be turned into money. It is not by feeding the Ink-Coloured Mouse. It is not by arming her. It is not by finding her the work which will earn her the money with which she will slip further through the fingers of those who would enrich Heavy Snow in exchange for her.
Heavy Snow turns her collar up sharply, with some amount of temper, and leaves her office without answering.
They do not speak about the gun. They do not speak about Heavy Snow feeding the Ink-Coloured Mouse.
Heavy Snow feels the running passage of days as though she is over a precipice, and each one is the crumble of her handhold through her fingers. She researches the length of an average gestation, and obsessively estimates, as best she can, when the Mouse might be due. She does not know how long it has been; she cannot ask.
She fills the Apparat woman's days with as many jobs as she dares, to fill her pockets by the only means she can.
She has already sternly instructed the doctor selected by the Ink-Coloured Mouse that any shortfall between his desired fees and his patient's means are strictly not to be put before the Mouse; that his prices will be met regardless, and he is not to bother her about any of the details, but bring them immediately to Heavy Snow. She frets about the cost of hiring a deepnavigator, perpetually and immovably a seller's market, and the length of time it will be possible to allow Ink-Coloured Mouse to recuperate after giving birth. If people are searching for Ion Twelve Horizon, which they are, they must be, then her limited capacity for deepnavigation ultimately sets the parameters of their search. Even if it takes an exhaustive destination-by-destination grind, they will arrive here, and that unknowable deadline is the one by which the Ink-Colored Mouse must be gone.
Employer, mechself indwelt-office attempts to engage her several times.
"Do not," Heavy Snow replies as firmly as possible.
Employer, it's simply that—
"Do not."
Employer is permitted to care—
"Never suggest such a thing to me again," Heavy Snow says.
I think some of your regular contacts may suspect there is something...happening, it suggests delicately, after a long pause.
This is exactly why Heavy Snow should never care about anyone. There is never anything to notice about the Spider in the White Steel Palace; the Spider simply watches and works and keeps quiet. It is the Spider's role to notice; when there are things to notice, people pay for them. People with things about them to notice are targeted. Are exploited. Are hurt.
She does her work. And she does her new work of hovering over, in turn, the Ink-Coloured Mouse's work, invisibly watching for malign overtures.
There's a certain automated boarding-house for itinerant shiphands, near to the docks, at which the Spider in the White Steel Palace maintains a permanent reservation. When she leaves her office in the evenings, she travels there, removes her mask, and leaves the room via a concealed service entrance which she has disabled the access alarms on. The service corridors bring her to stairwells which connect directly to the dockland spur of the passenger metro system; stripped of her recognisable face, she travels anonymously to a week-long booking in capsule hotel, which she rotates through several in the area under a variety of names, and sleeps.
At present, sleep is proving difficult.
Between making work connections, she cradles her tired masked head in her hands.
Employer— the office mechself begins.
"Is it an office matter?" Heavy Snow says wearily, and answers its silence with her own.
