CHAPTER 11 #3
He stays inside me for a long count. The chest under my palm slows degree by degree, and I press my forehead to his and breathe with him.
His human hand cups the base of my skull, fingers threaded up into the wet hair there.
The engineered arm braces flat up the length of my back, holding me upright when I have stopped being able to do it myself.
"Hi," I say, finally.
"Quinn. " His mouth twitches at the corner. "Eliza."
"Hi."
"Hi. " He brushes the cobalt ends of my hair behind my ear with the prosthetic — the finest motion the engineered hand can do. "Status."
"Yes. Yes."
"Tell me if you are not."
"I will. Adrian. " I put my palm flat on the starburst scar. "I am not in a hurry to leave this couch."
"You are not walking anywhere on your own legs. Stand. Slow. I have you."
He stands with me still on him, one arm under the bend of my knees — the strong arm — the other behind my shoulders, my face against his throat.
The human pulse at his carotid is fast. He has not let himself show it until now.
I press my mouth there once, soft, against the pulse, and his stride hitches one step on the rug, a single break in a man whose gait does not break, and then he keeps walking.
The bath is small. He sets me on the edge of the basin and the assessment begins before I notice it has — two fingers at the inside of my wrist for the pulse, the back of his prosthetic at my forehead for temperature, his pale eyes reading the dilation of mine in the bath-lamp.
He runs the shower until it is warm. He does not speak while he undresses the rest of me. He keeps the bra on; the chip stays.
"Drink. " He puts a tin cup of water in my hand before I have registered the tap closing.
I drink. He watches the swallow at my throat. He nods once. The cup goes back on the shelf.
He picks me up again and steps us both into the shower, no ceremony in it, the way he would extract a body from a kill zone — efficient, full attention, no wasted motion.
He soaps me with the bar of plain soap that lives on the shelf and the engineered palm covering more area than the human hand because that is the more efficient sweep.
He rinses my hair with the human hand on my forehead, shielding my eyes.
He kneels at one point — kneels, in the cramped bath, the engineered arm taking weight at the tile — and washes between my thighs with the same brief unhurried attention he gave the pulse at my wrist.
"Lift your chin."
I lift it. He rinses my throat.
"Sit up — slow."
I sit. He dries me. He does not let me dry myself.
He wraps me in his white cotton shirt — three sizes too large for me, falling to mid-thigh — and rolls the left sleeve to my elbow with the kind of folded precision a man uses on a sidearm at field-strip, then the right, two clean turns each, the cuff edges even.
The buttons close over the medallion and the bra and the small thickened spot where the chip lives.
The cuff at my left wrist he leaves loose, over the scar, over the tattoo, the only soft thing in the whole sequence.
He carries me down the steel spiral stair into Bunkroom A.
I have not been in Bunkroom A before. The room is exactly as I had assumed: military cot with a wool blanket folded military-tight at the foot, footlocker, single chair, the wall-rack for the prosthetic charging plate. No personal effects.
Except.
On the small steel shelf above the cot are two pre-Network books, spines out, in a language I cannot read. The lettering looks Latin. Adrian sees me see them. He says nothing. He peels the blanket back with one motion of the engineered arm and lays me down.
"Water. " Another tin cup, set within reach of my right hand on the footlocker. "When you wake. Before you stand."
"All right."
He gets in behind me. Not lover-soft. He arranges me — engineered arm across my waist as a brace, human arm pillowed under my head, my body angled toward the door so his is between me and it.
Bodyguard configuration. It is the only shape he knows for putting a person in a bed: a perimeter, a body between the threat and the thing being kept.
Then the cot defeats him. It is too narrow for the geometry.
My shoulder is half off the edge and his arm cannot do both jobs at once — the brace at my waist and the angle toward the door — and I feel the exact second he runs out of procedure.
The whole long line of him goes still behind me, not the deliberate stillness of the scar, a different one, the stillness of a man at a console he cannot solve.
He has extracted bodies out of kill zones in less time than this. He does not know how to simply hold one that is not in danger.