CHAPTER 20 #3
Luca has moved to my left, his right shoulder to mine, having clearly done the geometry and chosen the lightest-load angle for both of us.
His hand settles at my shoulder, the same touch he uses to seat a component he does not want to stress.
The platinum front lock falls across his eye when he leans to read the cross-street; he leaves it, both hands busy elsewhere — one steadying me, the loupe-thumb already worrying the edge of his sleeve.
Marcus is at my left elbow, his grip the lightest of the three.
He is pricing the street a beat ahead of what it will do — which mouth of which alley would give first, where a man would have to stand to watch us — his gaze running a fraction ahead of us toward the harbor end.
The silver lighter has stayed shut in his coat the whole walk back — no three-second cycle of the lid, none of the small open-shut he runs when his hands have something to settle.
Tonight his hands have nothing to settle.
I have never been touched by three men at once in a non-erotic frame, and I had thought it would feel like crowding, and instead it is something close to carried, a word that arrives in my mouth without ceremony.
I am walking on my own legs — and there is a hand at my back and a hand at my shoulder and a hand at my elbow, and the windward side is shielded by a man six-foot-two, and the route is being watched by a man who has been watching streets for eleven years.
I let it be. I decided in the kitchen that I would let it be.
At the third block we slow for a Sector-12 patrol drone passing high.
Marcus turns his back to it and angles his jaw out of the sightline; Luca tips his face down and lets the platinum lock screen it; Adrian's hand at my back goes a fraction firmer, and the four of us keep walking like four people who are not worth the drone's image-storage budget.
The sea-rain comes down harder for two blocks and then eases as we cross into Sector-6 and the canyon walls cut the wind.
I taste salt on my lip again, under the cold, and against the inside of my left bra strap the chip rides with the small steady weight that has been my mother's weight since I was sixteen.
The Sector-6 service stair is behind a row of refuse bins three blocks from the Trace, which is no longer the Trace, which is no longer anything. We do not talk about the Trace. None of us looks west.
At the antechamber, Luca puts his shoulder to the wall so we can stack two-and-two for the scan. Adrian and I take the inner pair. The cobalt floor-strips are pulsing safe. I am still tasting Adrian.
We step inside. The corridor seals behind us with the quiet hiss of cold air pushing the warmer city air back out, the sound I have come to read as the door between the world and us closing on the right side of me. Home, if I let the word into the protocol voice, which I am still working up to.
Adrian palms the inner lock. The retinal scan goes through Luca, Marcus, me. The door opens onto the Common Room — amber lamps, woven rug, workshop door closed, east-wall window-screen still a flat black rectangle, the diesel-heater humming low.
We stop in the corridor before we go in.
It is Luca who speaks.
"Querida. Tonight. The workshop. If you want."
He is looking at the cobalt strip along the corridor seam, turning a strip of solder over and over between his fingers in his coat pocket — the busywork his hands reach for when the rest of him is waiting on an answer he is not going to push for.
I pull a long breath of bunker-warm air through my nose. The salt is still on my lip, fainter now, a residue and a promise.
"And Adrian," Marcus says from behind me. The voice has dropped half a register.
Adrian, beside me, his fingers running the calibration sequence at his side — one, two, three, four, three back — slow and considered. "Yes."
I look down at my hands — pink from the cold and not shaking, which surprises me both ways.
The pad of my right thumb finds the small surgical scar on the inside of my left wrist and presses, flat — the gesture I have used since I was eleven for the moments when I want to remind myself my body is still mine — and none of them looks down to watch me do it.
They have all learned to give me that part of myself back.
"Yes. " I say it to the corridor first, the way I say most yeses worth keeping. "The workshop. Tonight. The three of you."
Luca's hand on my shoulder warms through the sweatshirt.
He nods, once, very small. Marcus's grip on my elbow goes from a check to a press and releases.
Adrian, beside me, says nothing — he does not need to repeat himself, and he has already said yes for tonight in the kitchen, in the kiss, in the salt on his mouth.
The scanner picks up the inner-circle code and pulses cobalt.
I am the first across the threshold. Three men cross after me, in order: Luca, then Adrian, then Marcus.
I have shown them my mother's last room.
Tonight I am going to take three of them into Luca's workshop and be held by all of them.
For twelve years the arithmetic was mine alone — one girl, one signal, one ceiling.
Tonight the arithmetic runs to four, and I have walked into enough rooms blind to recognize that I am walking into this one steady.
I lick my lower lip. The salt is still there.
For twelve years that kitchen was a room only I had ever stood in with my eyes open; tonight I walked three men into it, and they carried out everything I have never been able to set down alone.
The small man in the gray three-piece suit does not know yet that the door is open. He will.
We are the ones who are going to come looking — and for the first time since I was fourteen, I am not the only one in the room who knows the way in.