CHAPTER 4 #2
"Yellow-greening already. " She stands. "It will be tender for four more days.
You did not crack the periosteum. You bruised the muscle belly.
Do not climb today. " She pulls out a thin dermal patch in a sterile sleeve.
"I am applying a patch. It will pull the swelling down by midnight. Do not pick at it."
She kneels again, peels the backing, presses the patch to the bruise. Her thumb seals the edge down with one firm pass. The patch warms once at the skin and goes neutral.
"Eat the beans," she says, standing. "You are three kilos light. The bunker has rice and beans and tea. You can have it back by Day Fourteen if you eat."
"Day Fourteen."
"I count in days now. So do you. " Her pale blue eye on me, a half-second.
"He told me you would. He is not wrong often.
" She angles her head a fraction toward the corridor.
"Marcus also said to tell you Senna picked up Vexis traffic at oh-four-twelve — a low chatter ping, two hundred kilometers west, nothing pointed at us yet.
He wanted you to know he is not keeping that from you. "
The detail lands behind the breastbone, and I let it settle without changing the set of my shoulders.
"Understood."
She picks up her bag. She does not look at my arm again. She does not ask whose chip is under my left bra strap. She walks out, and the server-farm hum closes around me.
I sit on the table for another twenty seconds.
A woman has just read me and not taken from me.
My thumb finds the surgical scar at the inside of my left wrist and presses flat, twice, then rides up to the silver wire above it — the small private check that says the line is still open, that the body is still receiving, that somewhere on the other end of twelve years of dead air a signal is being sent and may yet be answered.
The long cord at the side of my neck unknots by a half-degree. Of all the gestures my mother coached out of me, this is the one I kept on purpose.
---
Luca finds me on the spiral stair at ten.
He has been awake at least as long as Adrian.
His chestnut hair is pushed behind one ear, the platinum bleach at the front catches the corridor's amber, and there is a smudge of citrus solvent at his left temple, a thin oily streak where he has wiped his face without thinking.
The loupe ring is on his right index finger, swung up off his eye, ready.
"Quinn. " His voice is warm. "Workshop. I have a console for you and a question I want to ask you in a room that is not this corridor."
I follow.
The workshop is a sudden change of register.
Bright clinical white from a high overhead bank, three workbenches in a U, the clean-bench under positive-pressure at the far wall, components in shallow drawers down the left wall, each labeled in Luca's hand in a small neat font. The smell is ozone and citrus solvent.
And there, on a steel hoist at the center of the U — suspended at chest height — is an arm.
Matte black titanium. A long brushed-bronze filament running the length of the forearm's underside. A mid-bicep seam. A Vexis-Mk-IX terminal yoke at the shoulder attachment. The fingers are partially closed, as if around an absent object. The metal is dark.
I stop two steps inside the workshop door.
Mk-IX. Combat-grade. Late-generation. The brushed-bronze finish belongs to one current builder, and I am standing in his workshop, and the prototype is the same arm worn by the man two corridors away — same finish, same matte black, same proportion at the deltoid attachment.
A repair piece, or a backup, or a trophy that has decided to look like a prototype.
Luca walks past it without looking at it, the way a parent passes a sleeping child without checking — checked already, the eyes already done that work. He gestures me to a stool at the second workbench.
"Sit. I'm not going to ask you to solder. I'm going to ask you to watch me solder and tell me when I make a small error. You are going to find this insultingly easy. That's the point."
I sit. The stool is steel and cold. He bends to the board, the loupe already down over his right eye and throwing a brief gold flare off the overhead bank. He picks up the soldering pen in his left hand. It hums once warming.
"Tolerance," he says, half to me, half to the board. "Zero-point-three micron at the trace. Acceptable range, ten percent. We are nine percent off. That is closing. " He sets the iron down and looks at me over the loupe. "Did your mother have one of these?"
"Yes. " I am surprised to hear myself say it.
"Whose?"
"Hers. She wore it on her right index finger. She was left-handed but did detail work right-handed because the loupe was made for the right. I have always thought that was a stupid design choice."
Luca laughs. Once, surprised, like a small key turning. "It is. The loupe should be ambidextrous. I have built two ambidextrous ones. They sit in the third drawer down on the left wall. You can have one before you leave. If you leave."
He picks the iron back up, left-handed, and lays a bead I cannot fault.
He is showing off, gently, the way a man shows off when he wants the room to relax around him.
He sets the iron down and switches to a calibration probe, wiping a thread of solder-grease off his thumb against the cloth folded at the bench-edge before he closes his grip on it. He measures. He nods.
"There. Nine percent down to seven. Acceptable."
I let my eye drift to the arm in the hoist.
He sees the drift. He does not pretend he has not.
"You are going to ask me whose," he says, mild.
"Whose, Renner."
He sets the probe down and squares it to the bench-edge with one fingertip before he answers — everything in this room kept at right angles to everything else.
He looks at the arm with a small private fondness, the way you look at a project you have been with longer than you have been with most of the people in your life.
"His original. The Mk-IX I built him three years and four months ago.
I keep it in the hoist because I built him a second one nine months back, when he took a hit on the lateral plating that I would not let him walk around with un-replaced.
He is wearing the second. The one in the hoist is the prototype.
It is also, for what it's worth, the first arm I ever built outside Axiom.
So I keep it. It is sentiment. I am sentimental about exactly two things in this workshop. The prototype is one."
"What is the second."
"My grandmother's photograph. It is in my bunkroom. You will not see it today. " A small smile. "Maybe Day Six."
I look at the arm.
The first arm — the one Luca built for the man Axiom had thrown away — hangs at the center of the U like something between a relic and a tool, and I have the strange small instinct that I am being introduced to a third person in the room without anyone naming him.
Luca pushes the loupe up. The hazel-brown eyes are warm. He is not finished asking me things.
"I'm going to ask you one question," he says, in the same warm conversational register he asked me about the loupe.
"You can decline to answer. I will not ask twice.
I will not tell the other two. " He lays the soldering pen down beside the calibration board, parallel to its edge, and folds the grease-cloth in half and sets it square on top.
His hands, which have not been still since I walked in, go still.
"Who made the chip you are wearing under your left bra strap, Quinn. "
The world does not stop. It does the thing the world does when a person says the right wrong thing at the right wrong moment — it gets very slightly quieter.
The server-farm hum three floors below drops into the back of my hearing.
The workshop's white light turns a fraction colder.
The hands he has not stopped moving have stopped, and that — a maker whose whole body is usually doing three things at once gone abruptly idle — is louder than the question.
I have not un-taped that chip in front of anyone since I walked into the antechamber yesterday. The last hands on it were mine, alone, behind a closed door — re-taped in the dark of Bunkroom D, the strap never showing. He cannot have seen it. He cannot have heard it. He cannot —
He is watching me with the half-smile of a man who has just set a problem on the bench between us and is waiting to see whether I want to solve it or walk around it.
He is not enjoying my surprise; he is doing me the courtesy of being honest about the size of the disadvantage, and that, I realize, is what is throwing me.
"How," I say.
"The fabric over it has a magnetic strain signature.
The chip has a sub-millimeter ferrous shell — old construction, pre-Network casing, the kind people stopped putting in chips eighteen years ago because the corporates started building scanners that caught them.
I built the scanner that catches them. It is on the wall at the workshop door.
It pinged three percent over baseline when you walked in.
Nobody else in this bunker is going to walk past that scanner today. I have made sure of it."
The kindness of it lands a fraction of a second before the precision. He is telling me he saw the chip and he is also telling me he has already buried the secret where no one else will find it.
"Renner."