CHAPTER 27 #2
It is on and showing the rooftop above the bunker — real-time, sunset, the late-December sky cold-orange behind the sensor mast, the antenna dark against the colored air.
The screen carries the bay's sound too, faint: a distant foghorn cycling four seconds on, four seconds off, the harbor reminding the city it is there.
Luca must have closed the rerouting last night at 04:00 and tested it through the day on a hidden console; he has given us the view back without saying so, and the sound back with it.
"Renner. When did you do that."
"Three forty-seven this morning. While you were sleeping. " His thumb keeps its count; he does not look up. The chestnut hair falls past his ear as he reads. "It needed two hours of redundancy. We have a window again."
"We have a wall too."
He looks up. The thumb stops. He smiles — the warm tired one I have only ever seen for a system that worked. "Ambos."
Adrian, a flat amused exhale: "We have always had a wall. The window was the surprise."
I sit beside him. The good arm comes around my shoulders.
His human hand finds the cropped hair just above my collar.
Luca leans his head against my knee. Marcus comes from the kitchenette with two mugs of tea, a third for Luca on the table, a glass of water for Adrian — Adrian wants water more than tea, and Marcus has clocked that without being told. He sits in the chair opposite.
The room belongs to itself now; his face has stopped patrolling it for exits; the white pill case of breath mints in his shirt pocket goes untouched for once, and his hands are quiet on his knees.
He has gone, for tonight, the rest of the way into the room.
We do not speak for a long time. Adrian's chest rises and falls under my cheek in the slow even rhythm of a body allowed to rest. Luca's hair smells of citrus solvent under ozone, and under that the iron of his blood drying in his hairline.
Marcus's amber-cardamom cologne is faint; he came in washed.
Eventually he reaches for one of the three pre-Network books on the small bookshelf — not Henry Adams. A thin dark-leather volume, the gilt nearly gone from the spine.
"Cicero," Luca says, reading the spine without lifting his head from my knee. "De Officiis. You have not opened that in eleven years."
"I have not."
"Why now."
"Because I have read enough rhetoric to know what I want my mouth doing in this room tonight, and Cicero is the man who wrote the chapter I want.
" The throat-scar moves once as he swallows, and his whole body turns a few degrees on the rug, settling toward me.
"You asked me to read aloud when this was over. The four duties. May I."
"Yes."
He opens the volume and reads. The translation is careful and the cadence flatter than Henry Adams's, but his voice makes the dead Latin sound like it was meant for a kitchen at the end of a long day.
Wisdom in seeking what is true, he reads, and then he stops reading and says the next one as himself, slow, trying out a word he is not sure he has earned — "Justice.
Which the old man says is only giving every person the thing that is actually theirs. " He finds his place again.
Courage in greatness of spirit. And the last he does not read either; he closes his eyes over it.
"And the temperance. The keeping of yourself in some kind of order.
" The section on what a man owes others by virtue of being a man.
The section on speaking, which he does read, because the words are better than any he would put there himself: Speech, which has the power of conciliating men to one another, ought to be employed in promoting harmony.
He keeps the reading-stillness the whole time, the held attention he wears when he is taking the measure of a person, except now the person he is reading aloud to is himself.
Luca's eyes close. Adrian's good hand at my nape stays where it is; his thumb is at the small hollow under my ear. The blast door has finished closing the upper world out.
Marcus reads for a long time. The kettle goes cold. He stops at the end of a chapter, sets the book on his lap, and his pale green eyes come back to me.
"Eliza."
"Marcus."
"I want to come over there."
"Come over here."
He walks to the couch. Adrian shifts his good arm so Marcus can sit at my other side; Luca lifts his head and rises onto the cushion at my feet. The four of us are on the one couch.
I turn to Adrian first.
The vertical scar through his right eyebrow is narrow and white under the amber overhead, and he has not shaved since Day 21, so his jaw is rough when I put my left hand against it, the surgical scar on my inner wrist riding the edge of his stubble.
He turns into the palm. He kisses the inside of the wrist. His mouth is warm and dry; the kiss is barely a press; it lasts a long time.
"Adrian."
"Eliza."
"I have chosen you. I am telling you. I am not asking what you choose. I know."
"Tell me yes."
"Yes."
He kisses me.
His mouth is slow, his good hand at my jaw, the prosthetic staying dark at his side and resting matte-cold along my shoulder, weight only, the man under the surface here for tonight in a way the surface has nothing to do with.
He is careful of the right forearm because he saw Wren dress it.
He is careful of the right hip because I winced sitting down.
He kisses me the way a man learns the rooms of a house he is coming back into after a long absence, taking each doorway in order, and when he shifts and pulls me into his lap — slow, no weight on the bruised hip, his good arm under my back, the other arm a quiet matte-cold weight at my side — his mouth finds the inside of my left wrist again, the surgical scar, the silver-wire tattoo at the elbow crease, the small cut above Wren's gauze, each given its own breath.
He works the sweatshirt off without hurrying — careful of the hair, careful of the medallion — and folds it on the back of the couch the way a man folds a flag.
I am bare against him. He is in his charcoal shirt, sleeves at the elbows. I work the buttons the rest of the way down. His starburst scar at the lower left abdomen is shiny under the lamp; I put my hand on it. He breathes out.
"You have known where it was for eleven days."
"I have known."
"It aches in cold weather."
"Today is cold weather. Yes."
He slides his hand down the back of my pants.
Works the soft pants down and off. He is slow about everything — the bruises, the cut, the work — and the slow is the apology and the consent in one motion.
His mouth at my throat. At my collarbone where the prosthetic palm has been many times.
At my breast — warm, a long press, his thumb at the other nipple in a careful circle.
I am opening for him without doing anything.
The other two are watching. They are giving him this.
Luca has put his hand over Adrian's good hand on my hip — once, briefly, a brother's permission — then withdrawn to my left ankle.
Marcus is at my shoulder; his palm on my upper arm, his eyes on my face.
Tonight I am taking them one at a time, and they know it.
Adrian's human hand finds mine, low and slow, and squeezes once. The question without sound. I squeeze back, and he breathes out against my temple, and that is the whole of the asking between us tonight.
"You are sore."
"You are slow."
"Slow."
He undoes his belt with the human hand and pushes the slacks down only enough.
He is not coming out of his clothes. He is gathering me onto him.
I lower onto him slowly. The slide of him into me is hot and full, and the bruise on my hip does not flare because he has tilted my left leg and braced my right knee with his good arm, the geometry a recon mission he has been running inside my body for a month and has finally been cleared to execute.
"Eliza."
"Adrian. — A half-inch back. Hold the angle."
He holds the angle. A clean adjustment to a position, taken exact, without argument, logged and kept.
We move slow. His good arm under my back; his other arm at my side warm by skin only; my hand on the starburst, his mouth at my throat. My pulse at ninety-four. His — I have a hand on his sternum — is at sixty-eight, even now. The calmest man I will ever touch.
I come slowly. I come for a long time. I bury my face in his shoulder, and the hand I have kept on his abdomen all this while does not go to my own wrist. For twelve years it would have.
Tonight it presses flat into the starburst scar instead — the wound the Mk-VII gave him, the wound the Mk-VII gave my mother, the two of them under one palm.
My fingers spread over the knot of it and hold.
Marcus sees where my hand has landed. He lays his over it without lifting it away, his palm warm across the back of my fingers, the scar between us.
The lattice along my shoulder warms once, briefly, a low gold pulse no brighter than the workbench lamp, Adrian letting himself feel what just happened, and then it goes matte-cold again.
Adrian comes a few seconds after I do. Quiet. His good arm tightens. He does not give me the long form of my name; he is too tired for it. He says it against my temple instead, very low. For half a heartbeat I am not sure I have heard it.
"My girl."
He has spent that phrase exactly twice before. This is the third. He waited an extra night for it because he could, and he means it, and the count does not hold against a thing meant this much.
I am receiving.
He stays inside me for a long minute after. Eases me off — slow, hand under my thigh — and re-arranges my sweatshirt over my shoulders, just enough that the room cannot see all of me. He pulls me down along the couch, my head on his good arm.