CHAPTER 15
Eliza
◆
The four of us are working.
That is the new sentence in my head. The four of us are working. The strangeness of owning it presses at the underside of my sternum like a coin slipped into a pocket I had sewn without ever noticing my hands at the thread.
Adrian is at the perimeter monitor against the west wall, prosthetic at his side, fingers running the calibration sequence one, two, three, four; three back without his eyes leaving the screen.
He reads three sensor returns at once the way another man chews gum.
Marcus is at the secondary console, slate button-down sleeves rolled, the silver lighter cycling open-close-open at three seconds on the desk beside him.
Worthless, worthless, worthless, he sings under his breath as intercepts come in, the cadence of a man cataloguing the price of bread.
Luca is at the main console with me. We are pre-caching the Layer 3 key-schedule into a portable rig, so that when the layer decrypts we can lift the architecture into the workshop the way you lift a wet thing out of a bowl.
Loupe ring down over his right eye. A small smudge of solder grease at his temple from before dinner.
I am at his right on the rolling stool, both elbows on the console, the silver-wire tattoo on my inner left forearm against the cold metal. A mug of black tea sits at my left hand, made before dinner, forgotten, bag still in.
I take a sip. It is over-steeped to the taste of a leather belt left in hot water. I drink it anyway, because it is mine, and because Luca's hand is two centimeters from mine, and because if I do not have something to do with my mouth I am going to ask him a question I am not ready to ask.
"Slow your write-rate by fourteen percent," Luca says, low. "We are pushing the buffer."
"Fourteen."
"And a half."
"You said fourteen."
"Refining."
Marcus, without looking up: "Renner. Are you flirting with my decryption tech."
"I am directing my decryption tech. Flirting would require a different rate-setting."
"Adrian," Marcus says, "Renner has just made a tolerance joke. We are losing him to whimsy."
Adrian, without turning: "Note it in the log."
That is the joke he makes once a chapter. Marcus's right eyebrow does not move. He goes back to his intercepts.
I drink the bitter tea. He has called what we have done a thing that is between us. There is a difference.
We work through 16:00 and 17:00. Layer 3 ticks to seventy-three.
Once, only once, Luca's knee touches mine under the console.
He moves it. He puts it back. I keep my eyes on the progress bar.
Somewhere above us the bunker's pressurized-air recycle stutters, draws, and resettles, leaving a half-beat of clean silence on the far side of it.
I note the shape of that hiccup beside the wrist-cuff blip from 04:30, two small wrong notes in a quiet building, and tell myself I will raise it at the next handover with Marcus.
At 18:00 Adrian closes the perimeter panel and stretches at the shoulders, the click of his prosthetic fingers running one, two, three, four; three back. "I am taking the upper watch. Cade — you and Renner have until 22:00 down here."
"Copy."
His pale gray-blue eyes find me for one second. He does not say Quinn. He nods. Then he is at the ladder and the hatch hisses closed above him and we are three.
The hum has not changed. Everything has shifted half a centimeter to the left of where it was. A fine tremor lives in the long muscles of my forearms, the kind that arrives when a decision is queued in the body before the head has caught up.
Luca clears his throat. "I need to test a sub-routine. Workshop. Eliza, will you come up?"
I almost laugh. He is the most uncomfortable I have ever heard him outside of grief. "You can test it down here."
I am not sure why I am making it harder. He is not sure why either, by the way he stills. The loupe ring magnifies his eyelash and makes him look like a man under glass.
"I cannot," he says, very low.
Marcus, calm, paying attention: "I will come too. I have not been in the workshop since the calibration arm broke. I would like to see what the two of you have done with the bench."
The way he says the two of you is not loaded. The way he says I would like to see is.
He has set the lighter flat on the desk, his right hand resting beside it, fingers spread and motionless. He is taking a headcount and a measure of the floor before he will let himself speak, and the hand does not move at all while he does it.
"Okay," I say.
I lift the mug. The bitter tea catches at my upper lip. I take it with me.
---
The workshop is bright clinical white. Luca dims the wall panel to seventy, and the U of workbenches glows softer under the corner sconces. Ozone, citrus, a clean cloth drying on the rack.
I set the mug on the leftmost bench. Luca lays out a calibration board he does not need, a probe beside it, a second one, over-explaining with his hands.
Marcus closes the door, turns the lock. The bolt sets with a small mechanical thud. He leans back against it, one ankle crossed over the other, and runs a thumb slowly down the row of buttons once, top to third. It is the courtly habit that surfaces when he has decided to wait a thing out.
I climb onto a workshop stool, because if I do not put my back to something I am going to put my back to a man. The mug of bitter tea is at my elbow. I look at it because the alternative is looking at either of them.
"Querida," Luca says, very low.
He has used it once before, and only at the threshold. The small Spanish exhale at the end of the word sits in the air a beat longer than the word itself.
I look up. He has folded his hands on the bench, fingers laced, knuckles a little white at the tops. The held stillness is louder than any movement would have been.
"I would like to ask you something."
"Ask."
He opens his mouth. He closes it. His thumb turns the calibration probe a half-rotation on the bench and sets it down again, squared to the edge, his hands looking for the words his mouth has lost.
Marcus, soft from the door, no fixer-smile at all: "Renner is going to ask if you want him in here. So am I. We have not talked about it. We are talking about it now."
Oh, I think. Oh.
His pale-green eyes are on me direct. The throat scar moves once when he swallows, and he keeps his hands behind him at the small of his back, the way you stand in the company of a thing you do not want to startle. He is asking.
The workshop is silent except the soft white noise of the clean-bench and the diesel-heater hum, and the temperature drops in a narrow column at the back of my throat where my breath catches.
I take a sip of the tea. It has gone bitter to the edge of punishing. I swallow. I put the mug down.
"I want both of you," I say.
Luca's breath goes out of him all at once, the way it does when a circuit he has been afraid of finally closes clean.
His hands come off the bench and he steps to me, not fast, steady, each foot set down where he has rehearsed it over and over in his head across the last two weeks.
Marcus turns the lock once more, just to be sure, then comes too.
Luca stops in front of the stool. He does not touch me yet. "I am going to ask you a more specific question."
"Ask."
"Will you lie down on the bench. The clean one. I have wiped it three times since dinner."
"Why the bench."
"Because I want to be at your face. And at your hips. And at your feet. And I cannot be at all three from the floor."
That is Luca. He has thought about the geometry. The almost-laugh turns into a long exhale, and the hinge of my jaw, which I had been holding shut hard enough to ache without knowing it, drops a quarter-inch and stays there.
"Yes."
He cups the back of my skull in one hand, the solder-callused pads of his fingers warm where they spread into my hair, and tips my forehead against his. The platinum bleach brushes my eyebrow. Citrus and ozone, very close.
"Tell me where the stop is, querida."
"I did not build one in."
The loupe ring catches my gold-rim left iris in the warm pull of the dimmed lamp. He waits. I nod, slow.
"There is no stop tonight. Keep going."
His mouth lands on mine then, slow, the kiss of a man who has practiced in his head for two weeks and is afraid of getting it wrong.
His palm spread over the curve where my skull meets my spine, thumb at the hinge of my jaw, the other staying very still at his side, because he is making me come to him first.
"Eliza," Marcus says, low, beside us now.
I open my eyes.
He has come around the stool. He has put down the door, the watching, the negotiating, the suit, and there is just the steady weight of a man who has stopped being the witness and started being the second answer. "Name what this costs you and I will pay it. Any price. Now or later."
"It is already paid."
He kisses my temple. He kisses the soft place under my ear where the jaw begins. He sets his mouth at the corner of mine while Luca is still on the rest of it, and the two men do not touch each other but their breath crosses at my chin.
I do not know whose hand pulls me up off the stool, and it might be both. Luca walks me backward three steps and lifts me onto the clean-bench, where a drop-cloth has been laid down at some point. Of course it has. He raises the surgical lamp and turns it warm and low. The light goes amber.
I lie back. The ceiling is concrete and a single white run of conduit. Then Luca is over me, palms flat on the bench on either side of my ribs, the chestnut hair past his ear falling forward, and the ceiling is no longer the thing I am looking at.
"I am going to take this off," he says against my collarbone.
"Yes."