Ynez Barquero

The Slip

The document sleeve is soft at the corners from handling and holds a single sheet: a company-school correction slip, dated 2134, recording a fault in a nine-year-old's speech and the remedy applied.

The family kept it the way families keep such things, which is to say without ever discussing why. It became the most valuable object they own in 2179, when the brokers worked out that a retention has to be shown to be inherited. A marker somebody learned to perform is a marker any actor can perform, and a certified tell that turns out to be an impression is a fraud the buyer wears in front of a tribunal. So provenance is required at signing, and the only provenance that exists for a beaten-out register is the paperwork of the beating.

Ynez produces the sleeve at every lease. The brokers handle it carefully. She has watched a man from a Rim compliance house hold her grandmother's punishment record by its edges, with both hands, the way you hold something valuable, and has never found the correct thing to feel about it.

She does not say beaten. She says corrected, and she corrects other people who say otherwise, including her own family, including once at a funeral.

The Ear

The scouting was not the broker's idea.

Ynez can hear a live tell in a stranger's speech in about two sentences, which is a skill nobody taught her and which she cannot switch off. She grew up in a house where the sound was policed, and a child raised inside that policing develops an ear for exactly what is being policed. What was once the reflex that kept her family employable is now the most commercially useful faculty on Sump Row.

She brings them in. A neighbour's break, a fruit-seller's flattened diphthong, a boy on the corner whose grandmother came from the same district as hers. She takes a finder's share and she is better at it than anyone the brokers pay, because the brokers are listening for a deviation from a standard and Ynez is listening for home.

Eleven households on her street now hold registered retentions. Nine of them she found. Three have already been struck, which means three of her neighbours have watched a lease go to nothing on a schedule she helped set in motion, and two of those still speak to her. She has not stopped scouting. When Hollis Sarr asked her about it, at his table, in the pause after a reading, she said the tells were going to be found either way and she would rather the finder's share stayed on the street. Then she said that she had noticed she always says that sentence in the same words, and that she had started listening to herself say it.

The Clause

Every lease she has signed since 2181 carries a clause she wrote herself, in her own wording, forbidding the buyer from retaining the sample beyond the term.

No broker has ever objected. The clause is initialled, filed, and honoured to the letter by firms with no reason to breach it, because the sample does not have to be retained to do the damage. It has to be used, once, in front of a system that is learning. The strike arrives on schedule regardless, and the contract remains in perfect compliance the entire way there.

She knows this. She was told plainly, by the second broker, who was not being cruel. She writes the clause into every lease anyway, and when asked why, she says that a person should be able to point at the place in the document where they said no.

The Niece

Talia is eleven, lives four doors down, and has the vowel.

Nobody has registered her. The Assay does not certify people, only markers, and the marker is already registered — but a household with a second living speaker is worth more, because it can supply longer, and the brokers have begun to ask, politely, in the way that is not really asking.

Ynez has been told the strike on her retention is likely inside two years. She has run the arithmetic on what two more years buys and what it costs, and she has not written it down, and it is the one subject on which she will not finish a sentence. Asked directly, she says the girl is eleven. Asked again, she says the girl is eleven, and then she stops talking, which on Sump Row is understood to be an answer.

Appearance

A compact, still woman who sits when other people stand, with a document sleeve on her knee and a pencil behind her ear on bulletin days. Grey coming in at one temple only. Work-thickened hands that she keeps folded, because the brokers watch hands and she learned early that watching goes both ways.

Voice

Unhurried, low, and one beat longer in the second syllable than the person she is talking to — which is the thing being sold, audible in every sentence, including the ones about not selling it.

She does not perform the vowel. She has been asked to, at signings, by a broker who wanted to hear the product before initialling, and she said the page was the product and let the silence run until he initialled.

Sample Dialogue

"Corrected. She was corrected. You can use the other word at your own table."

"It's four numbers on a list. I circle it, I see if it's still there, I go inside."

"They don't have to keep it. That's the part people get wrong. They only have to use it."

"She's eleven."

Open Questions

• Whether the non-retention clause was ever anything but a place to point at
• What she will do the first quarter the number is not on the list
• Whether Talia gets asked before she is old enough to be asked