CHAPTER 14 #2
I push the left sleeve. She takes my forearm in both hands.
Her hands are warm and clean. She reads the surgical scar inside the wrist, then tracks down the silver-wire tattoo along the inside of my forearm, the hand-poked line that says, to me, I am still receiving.
Her thumb does not touch the tattoo; she has, I see, learned how to read which ink is voluntary and which is owed.
She turns my hand palm up. She turns it palm down. She makes a small noise.
"Color is better. Sleep is better. You're eating."
"Yes."
"You're warm."
"Yes."
"You are being touched."
She says it without looking up. She says it the way she says blood pressure and capillary refill and patient is oriented to time and place — a clinical observation, a check on a chart, the same flat tone for all four boxes.
I do not answer. There is no answer to give.
She lets go of the arm and pats the back of my hand once with two fingers. Her glance goes to the office door and comes back to me, and her mouth does the thing where it almost smiles and then thinks better of it.
"Sleep is one of the four things that keep a body alive," she says. "The other three are warmth. Food. Being touched. You have all four. That is the entire chart. Good."
She stands up. She picks up the bag. She moves toward the spiral stair.
"Renner. Up. Let me see the eye."
Luca, on the couch, looks up baffled. "What's wrong with my eye?"
"The one you are going to take a punch in, the next ten days," Wren says. "I am going to put a dressing in your kit. Stair, please."
She goes down. He follows, the chestnut hair falling past his ear as he ducks the low pipe at the stair head, probe still in hand. I stand at the kitchenette with my coffee and listen to the boots fade on the steel.
She has written being-touched onto a chart as a good sign. I have been a closed system for twelve years and a medic in pale blue has just told me that being touched is one of the four things that keep my body alive, in the same tone she uses for warmth and food.
---
Adrian appears in the Common Room doorway at five past eleven.
"Quinn. Pistol drills. If we are going to take Tarn, you are going to hold a sidearm."
"I have shot before."
"I have not seen you. Ops Room."
He turns. He goes. He does not wait for me to say yes; the expectation of yes is implicit in the geometry of his back going through the doorway.
I drain the coffee. I put the mug in the sink. I go.
---
The Ops Room is cold blue light and the smell of gun oil. The weapon rack on the north wall — four rifles, six sidearms, two flechette pistols, three edged weapons. My pupils take three seconds to adjust and Adrian gives me the three seconds.
He has laid two Mk-V Vexis pistols on the concrete table. Matte gray, palm-fitted, no chrome. Magazines beside them. A small box of practice rounds. A foam target at the far wall, six meters — a generous distance for a beginner, a tight distance for a soldier.
"Mk-V," he says. "Mid-frame Vexis sidearm. I carry one. Renner carries one. Cade carries one. You will carry one. We do not carry Mk-VII because Mk-VII is what they used on your mother, what they used on Holst, what they will use on us if they get to use anything. Pick it up."
I pick it up. The weight settles into my palm — eight hundred grams loaded, maybe nine. My hand is small for it. I shift my grip down the backstrap. He watches.
"Show me your stance."
I show him. Feet shoulder-width, weight forward, both hands on the pistol.
He walks around me without comment, looks at my shoulders, looks at my elbows.
He stops behind my right side. His human hand comes around my wrist — gentle, unhurried, the knuckles knotted from old breaks — and adjusts my grip half an inch up the backstrap.
His prosthetic palm settles, light, on my right shoulder, and the brushed-bronze plate is cool through my shirt.
"Half inch up. Higher. There. That gives you the bore axis.
That gives you less muzzle rise. Good. " Brief, the good not loose.
"Trigger finger straight along the frame until target.
" He nudges my finger off the trigger with his prosthetic thumb, the titanium ring on his left thumb catching the cold blue light as it passes. "There."
"Vale."
"Quinn. " He has not noticed the Vale is the early one; he has not graded the slip; he has not made anything of it. He is teaching me to hold a pistol the way he teaches Luca to ratio a hoist.
"Eyes open. Both. Front sight focus. The target is going to look soft; that is correct; the front sight is what is going to be sharp. Press the trigger slow. Surprise yourself. Twelve rounds. Center mass."
I press the trigger slow.
The first round is high right, off the foam.
I correct. The second is center. The third is center.
The fourth is center. The fifth is center.
The sixth is high right. The seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth are center.
The eleventh is high right. The twelfth is center.
Ten of twelve in center mass. The room smells of cordite now, sharp and clean, and my ears have closed down to a small humming the way they always do when ordnance has been near.
He drops the magazine. Catches it. Sets it on the table.
"Good. You will hold a Mk-V for the strike. I will not give you a Mk-VII. We do not carry Axiom weapons."
"You said."
"I am saying again. Memorize. You will be offered one in a moment of pressure. Refuse it."
"Why would I be offered one."
"Because a Mk-VII is on Tarn's hip and you will be in a room with Tarn and there will be a second when picking it up is the answer. There will be a second when it is more efficient. We are not efficient with that weapon and we will not be efficient with it. Tell me you understand."
"I understand."
He nods once. He picks up the empty magazine.
He walks me through clearing the chamber, dropping the magazine, reloading, clearing a stovepipe with the heel of my hand.
Three times each. The prosthetic palm comes back to my shoulder on the last drill, and this time the lattice warms — a slow heat that bleeds through my shirt and settles in the muscle at the top of my back — and I hear him exhale once through his nose, a small steady breath the calibration sequence rides on, one, two, three, four; three back.
His hand stays on my shoulder for forty seconds — the longest deliberate thing he has done all morning, and I count every one of them.
The weight of it is exact, neither soft enough to ask for anything nor firm enough to take it. I hold still under the warm bronze and let the hand stay.
He lifts the prosthetic. Steps back. Picks up the second Mk-V — clean, oiled, empty — and a drop-leg holster from the side cabinet. He brings them to me.
"Yours. Logged. Renner will narrow the backstrap by a thirty-second of an inch tonight. Right hip. Put it on. I want to see the carry."
I put it on. The drop-leg sits on my right thigh; the holster cups the muzzle.
He kneels — Adrian Vale on one knee in his Ops Room, calibrating my thigh strap — and takes the slack out of the strap through the trouser.
His knuckles do not touch my skin. He tightens until the holster does not bounce when I shift weight. He stands.
"Walk to the door. I want to see the carry."
I walk to the door. The pistol rides on my hip.
The weight pulls at the right side of my body the way a tool does, not a costume, and somewhere under my left collarbone the small ache from yesterday turns over once and finds a new shape.
The thought comes in my mother's voice again — a woman with a sidearm — and this time my mother is not laughing.
I stop at the doorway. I turn.
He has stayed by the table. The cold blue light is on his shoulders, his prosthetic at his side matte and quiet, fingers held in the calibration rest. He gives me the narrow, weather-dry almost-smile that is the closest thing he has to applause — there and gone before the cordite settles.
"Good."
That is the end of the drill.
I take one step into the corridor. The Mk-V is heavy on my thigh, present and balanced and not unkind.
Marcus is asleep with a blanket I draped on him.
Luca is in the medic bay being fitted for an eye not yet cut.
Wren has written that I am being touched and called it good.
The bunker is the only place I have ever lived that has rooms.
I put my palm down on the grip of the pistol the way Adrian put his hand on my shoulder, and the cuff against my left wrist ticks once — a single scan-warning, so faint I could mistake it for a hiccup in the air handlers, except that the cuff does not hiccup.
It only ever reports. One sweep, a hair longer than the one I logged before it, dragged across the bunker's outer ring and gone.
I keep it to myself for now, fold the warning down into the cold spot it leaves under my collarbone the way I would close a drawer.
Tarn moved two men out of the harbor office at four this morning, and now something out past Sector-6 has reached a finger toward us and pulled it back — and four seconds is too patient a rhythm for whatever is learning the shape of where we sleep.
The foghorn sounds again. Four counts.
I check the grip on my hip once, and I go.