CHAPTER 4 #3
"Don't worry. I am the only one who saw it.
" His voice has dropped — the register I will learn later is what Luca does when something matters more than he is going to say it matters.
"You can keep your secrets, Quinn. I just wanted you to know I see them.
Because the alternative is that you wear a chip around three men who can read a room, and one of them clocks it, and you do not know which one or which day.
I would rather you knew. That is — I am going to call that ethics. I am open to argument on the term."
My left hand starts toward my forearm and I stop it at the second knuckle, fold it back into a fist against my knee, and hold it there — the old nerves-tell my mother worked out of me by twelve and I finished burying myself by sixteen, lifting twice in twenty-four hours like a wire that remembers current.
Vale saw the gesture last night. Renner has just named the thing it was reaching for.
My count of who can read my body's signature has doubled in twenty hours, and the room has done nothing to stop counting.
Luca does not look at my hand. He looks at the calibration board, and his fingers find the soldering pen again and begin, idly, to turn it end over end against the bench. He is letting me have the moment without an audience.
"You can keep the chip," he says, mild, to the board.
"You can also, at some later day when you have decided I am trustworthy, give it to me to read.
I will not read it without your consent.
I will not even look at the substrate. That is a different sort of ethics. Also open to argument. Mostly from me."
"Renner."
"Quinn. " He meets my eye for a second, the magnifier still raised from before, then sets both palms flat on the bench and stands.
"I am going to step out to the sink for ninety seconds.
I have solvent on my hands and your shirt is clean.
When I come back we will be done with the chip conversation unless you choose otherwise. "
He steps to the workshop sink. The water runs. The pipes thump once and settle.
I am alone in the workshop.
I sit on the stool with my hands at my knees for nine breaths.
My pulse, which had climbed near a hundred when he named the chip, comes back down to ninety-two and holds.
The prototype hangs in the hoist at chest height, fingers half-closed around an absent object that feels less absent the longer I sit with it.
I get off the stool.
I do not mean to walk to it. The body walks.
I am at the hoist before I have made the small interior decision to be there.
The titanium has the matte of a thing built to absorb light rather than throw it back, and the bronze filament tracing the forearm is beautiful in the small frightening way machines are beautiful when they have been built out of grief.
I reach up. My fingertip touches the bronze.
It is cold.
The man who wears the working pair walked past my door at twenty-two-hundred in soundless calibration, and now I am touching the prototype, the first arm Luca built for him, the arm that was — for nine months — his hand.
A hand that does not exist, and a hand that does. Replaced and kept, dark in this room and warm in another, both of them the same man's, both of them true at once.
The water shuts off at the sink. I draw my finger back from the bronze.
I am on the stool again by the time Luca comes around the bench, drying his hands on the towel he keeps on the rack and refolding it in three before he hangs it.
He does not say anything about my having moved; he has seen me move and decided not to make a thing of it.
He sits opposite me, picks up the calibration probe, and says, brightly:
"Delicate problem. Look here. " He taps the trace. "What is wrong with the angle of that solder pad."
I lean in. I find the error in eleven seconds.
He grins — the small grin of a teacher who has set the test at the level the student needed it set — and turns the board, and I solder a half-millimeter correction that takes me the rest of the morning to finish properly because my hand keeps shaking once and then steadying, like a tuning fork tapped twice.
He does not comment on the shake. He does not comment on the steady.
He counts my taps under his breath in a language I do not have, and only stops when my hand stops.
By the time the calibration is good — nine percent down to four — it is twelve-hundred and Luca says, "Lunch. I will go up and find food. Stay if you want. Or come."
I say, "I will stay."
He nods. He goes.
I sit on the stool with the soldering pen warm in my hand, the calibration board clean, the workshop's white light over everything, and I look at the prototype in the hoist with the same finger I have just been using to solder.
The fingertip is still cold from the metal. The pad does not yet know it is cold. The body knows.
I have touched a hand that does not exist, and I do not yet know whose hand it is, and on my wrist-cuff a faint scan-warning pulse blooms once at the inside of my left forearm — a single soft amber, two hundred kilometers out and closing the gap by a kilometer an hour — and I do not yet carry it up to the men above me, because the body is still receiving, and the body will know whose hand this is before I sleep again.