CHAPTER 9 #2
I put both hands in his hair. A small Spanish exhalation goes against the inside of my thigh — half a word, half a breath — and the heat of it raises every hair on my legs at once.
He hums against me, low — a frequency I take in my pelvis.
He lifts off for one second, raises his eyes to mine, holds his finger an inch from where he intends to put it.
Waits. I press my hips down into the floor and then up into his hand.
He puts one finger inside me — right index, knuckle-deep, slow — curls it, finds the place I could not have given him a map to.
I make a sound that is not a word.
He goes back to my clit with his mouth, finger working in slow precise pulses inside me, and I am gone faster than I have ever been with a hand in my own life.
I press a flat thumb hard to the surgical scar at the inside of my left wrist — I am still receiving, the only message my body has ever known how to send — to keep from making the noise that wants to leave me.
Two men are sleeping somewhere above us. I press at the scar instead of biting the back of my hand because the scar is the only part of me that does not bruise, and because pressing it sends the one signal I have ever sent into the dark: that I am still here.
I come.
It arrives as a closing, not a wave — a long slow contraction that climbs the spine and pulls a sound out of me, half-bitten, that he hears anyway.
He does not stop until I have stopped, and then he lifts off and presses his forehead to the inside of my thigh, breath fast against my skin like he is the one who has been undone.
"Dios," he says, against my thigh. "Eliza."
I cannot speak yet. I put one hand in his hair and leave it there.
The amber LED above me ticks slow. Only my body has changed, and only for the next four minutes, and then we will have to go back to being people in a bunker with a Tarn-grade payload and a forty-eight-hour countdown.
He lifts his head. The lower half of his face is wet — my own wet, mine. He sits back on his heels and looks up at me with the face of a man who has just been handed a piece of architecture he did not believe could exist.
I have seen that look once before. He gave it to Adrian's prosthetic in the workshop yesterday with the bench open. You are a system I cannot solve. I am going to spend the rest of my life solving you anyway.
He gives me the look.
I look away. I have not cried since I was fourteen, and I am not going to start in a server farm at three in the morning.
He lets me have the wall I have put up. He reaches past it instead of through it.
He gets up. Pulls my underwear back at my hips. Fastens my trousers. Lifts my shirt over my head.
He retrieves the loupe ring from the rack.
He picks up the square of bench-cloth he keeps folded by the probes — gray, citrus-solvent-stained — and wipes the loupe glass first, two slow passes, the way he would clean it before a precision job.
Then he turns the same cloth and brings it to my temple, where there is a sheen of sweat at the hairline, and wipes that too, with the same pressure. Same cloth. Same care.
"Stay there. One minute."
He goes to the clean-bench and comes back with a small enamel cup, steam coming off it. Citrus-leaf, from the tin his grandmother sends with the jam. He has had it on the bench for eleven days. I have watched him not offer it to anyone.
"Drink. Slow."
I drink. It is hot and faintly bitter and tastes of the green peel of a fruit I have never eaten.
He watches the first swallow and takes my left wrist between his thumb and his index finger — not on the cuff, not on the scar, not on the tattoo, but on the soft pad below the heel of the hand — and presses, the way he tests a solder bead for set.
Three seconds. He is reading the pulse, and he wants me to feel him reading.
"Good," he says.
He releases the wrist.
He stands me up. Not to a bed — he does not have one down here.
He walks me to the workshop stool, the high one he sits on for close work, and lifts me onto it and turns me so my back is against his sternum.
His arms come around me at the ribs, loose — the burn-scar palm flat across my breastbone, the soldering-callused palm flat at the bottom of my belly.
He is not holding me. He is being a wall.
"I have been thinking," he says, against my hair, "about a new prosthetic. Not for a person. For the elder Sofia's dog."
I do not speak. The cup is warm in both my hands.
"The mongrel she keeps in the courtyard with the wire stump.
She wired it herself in the eighties with field-radio parts and it has held for forty years, which is a sin.
Last week she let me look. The bearing in the hip is scored and the wire has work-hardened to the point where one more bend will snap it.
I would not normally rebuild a dog. I am going to rebuild this dog. "
His chin is against the top of my head. The medallion at his sternum presses at the base of my neck through the fabric of my shirt, the same temperature as his skin.
"I will use the Mk-VII shoulder bearing — overkill for a dog, but it is what I have.
I will replicate the original wire-armature aesthetic on the outside because the dog is hers and the wire is hers.
She will pretend she has no opinion. She will then send me three jars of jam in one shipment instead of two, and the jars will arrive smelling of bergamot, which is how she says thank you. "
He keeps reciting. Tolerances. Wire-gauge cross-references. The way he will file the seam where the new socket meets the original eighties armature so it looks as old as the rest. The whole specification, in his voice against the top of my head, while the cup of citrus-leaf tea cools in my palms.
He does not ask me if I am all right. The schematic is the asking.
When the cup is empty he takes it from my hands and sets it on the bench. He sits on the stool beside me, hands on his own thighs, palms up.
I put my left forearm across his palms.
He pushes the sleeve back with his right hand — slow, gentle — until the hand-poked silver-wire tattoo is showing, from the bend of my elbow to the inside of my wrist where the surgical scar runs.
His fingers do not touch the ink. His fingers hover.
"Eliza."
"Yes."
"Who did this."
"I did."
He lifts his eyes from the tattoo to my face.
"You did this."
"At sixteen. With a sewing needle and ink I made from a printer cartridge. On the second anniversary."
"Of?"
"Of the night they shot her."
He does not ask which night they shot which her. He has heard enough of my story to know there is only one.
His fingers come down. They route around the surgical scar — the one I pressed, the one with the small fresh half-moon of thumbnail still printed on it — and around the chip under my bra strap, and they settle, light, on the coiled silver wire at the inside of my elbow.
He does not lift them.
"This is the most beautifully made thing I have seen in fifteen years," he says, quiet. "I have built three hundred prosthetic limbs. I wrote the Mk-IX architecture. I built a cybernetic dog at seventeen. I have not seen a hand do this well."
"Who taught you to use the needle."
"Nobody."
"Nobody."
"I had her old training files."
"On the chip."
He glances at my left strap once and back up to my eyes. I nod.
"You taught yourself a hand-poke at fourteen and waited two years to use it on yourself."
"Yes."
His eyes close. He breathes once through his nose, the breath of a man who has just realized something the size of a room is in the room with him.
When he opens them there is something I will not be able to name until I am alone again.
Not pity. Closer to the way he looked at the prosthetic on the workbench.
He lifts his hand from my forearm to the small silver disc at his sternum. Closes his fingers around it. Opens them.
"This is St. Eligius," he says, holding the medallion between his thumb and forefinger.
The disc is small, worn smooth at the edge.
"My grandmother gave it to me when I was eight.
He is the patron of metalworkers and machinists.
She is Spanish, she is alive, she lives in a coastal village six hundred kilometers east and sends me citrus jam twice a year by courier. She does not know what I do."
He drops the medallion back against his sternum.
"I want you to know I — am also from somewhere. You showed me an old grief on the inside of your arm. I am showing you an old love at my throat. That is the trade."