CHAPTER 21
Eliza
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The workshop has been turned warm.
Luca did it while we were still in the corridor scraping sea-rain off our coats.
By ten on the nose, the overhead bank is off and the surgical lamp on its articulated arm pulled low, bulb dialed to soft amber.
Two workbench lamps angle at the walls — honey on metal.
Every loose tool racked. The drop-cloth on the main bench paper-white, unfolded.
Three cotton pillows at the head. Glass jug of water and four small cups on the side-table.
The pressurized-air recycle ticks over to its low-filtration mode and lets out the half-second harmonic flutter it always lets out, and then settles. The air is ozone and citrus solvent and something else I do not have a name for: absence, maybe. The absence of work, in the place where work lives.
I sit very still inside that absence, and the muscle along my jaw begins the slow unclenching of a wrung cloth giving back its first inch of slack. My breath goes warm at the back of my throat, then cool past my teeth; the small careful trembling in my thighs has nothing to do with cold.
I press a flat thumb to the inside of my left wrist, twice — the surgical scar cool under the pad. Then I climb up onto the bench in Luca's sweatshirt and sit on the drop-cloth with my bare legs crossed and my hands flat on the paper, and I wait.
They come in a sequence I have not arranged.
Adrian first — the brushed-bronze of the prosthetic catching low gold along the seam at his bicep — nods once, crosses to the workshop chair Luca has carried over, sits.
Charcoal shirt I have not seen, sleeves to the elbow, titanium ring on his left thumb.
He sits the way he sits in the Ops Room: forearms on his thighs, both palms open, watching.
Luca next. Clean white tee, chestnut hair pushed back behind his right ear, the platinum bleach damp at the tips.
His eyes go for a second to the St. Eligius medallion lying small and pale-silver below the hollow of my own throat — his by his grandmother's hand, mine since the server-farm stair, the one thing I have kept on every hour since.
His loupe ring is off his right index finger, set on the side-table next to the water; the lens catches the lamplight in a tiny half-disc of brightness, a small moon held still on metal.
Marcus last — he goes last into every room, and tonight is no exception.
Slate button-down, sleeves rolled twice to the forearm, throat-scar a thin pale line under the jaw.
He walks to the head of the bench, turns the silver lighter once over in his right hand and pockets it, and sets his palm down on the drop-cloth a knuckle's width from my knee.
He has the settled look he wears when he has already taken the headcount and decided to walk all the way into the place anyway, and at the corner of his mouth there is a dry beat that does not become a smile — the amusement he keeps for the few he means it with.
The room is so quiet I can hear the bench-lamp's filament hum.
I rehearsed this for an hour in my head and the rehearsal was useless, because the rehearsal had three men in a row and a checklist, and now they are not in a row, they are around me at three different distances and three different temperatures, and the body knows what the brain did not bother to imagine.
"Adrian," I say. My voice is steady, which is the first surprise. "Luca. Marcus."
The names land one at a time and each one moves something.
Adrian's bicep seam ticks one notch warmer at the second name.
Luca's left hand opens flat against his thigh, fingers spreading still, the smudge of solder grease at his temple catching honey-light when he turns his face.
Marcus's hand on the drop-cloth flattens, one knuckle settling after the next, like a man laying down a card he means to keep on the table.
"Querida. " Luca, low, the workshop register he keeps for the clean-bench. "I would like to ask you something."
"Ask."
"Tell me where the stop is."
The bench under my palms is paper-cool. "There isn't one. Keep going."
His mouth moves — barely a softening at one corner, teeth catching for an instant at the inside of his lip — and the small index-against-thumb count I have watched him run at every console is nowhere; his hand on the lip of the bench has gone uncharacteristically still, the maker's hands quiet for once with nothing in them.
His eyes move over me the slow way they move over a board he is about to commit to — reading the architecture of something he means to spend the rest of his life building.
"Name the price of this," Marcus says, at my head, his voice gone the half-register lower it goes when he is fully present. "Whatever it is, I am paying it tonight."
"There is no price. There is only this."
He breathes out. Just once. I have only heard him breathe out like that one other time in my life — his office, his palm flat on my sternum, a water glass in his other hand.
Adrian holds where he is, perfectly still, the way he stands a perimeter he has already cleared and decided to guard — stillness as the thing he does instead of wanting out loud.
He will not advance until I name him; that is the geometry he and I have built.
I lift my eyes to him over the top of Luca's shoulder.
"Tell me yes," he says, low, from the chair. Military, brief. He clicks his prosthetic fingers in the calibration sequence — one, two, three, four; three back — a man taking inventory of his own readiness before he allows it to be used.
"Yes."
He stands. The long even step he uses when he is choosing the angle of approach.
Stops at my left, prosthetic side, close enough that I feel the heat coming off the lattice before I feel him, and waits for Luca's mouth to find mine first because Luca is in front of me and he is ceding Luca the front.
Luca's mouth is warm, tastes of mint. His hands come up under the hem of the sweatshirt; thumbs stroke once, twice, against my ribs — the question of an angle — and he pushes the sweatshirt up and over my head in one slow motion.
I am bare-breasted in front of three men in the warm amber of the workshop, and the hand-poked silver-wire tattoo down the inside of my left forearm catches the lamplight along its faded curl, the small lifted ridges of the ink saying what they say, I am still receiving, and I am.
Marcus's mouth comes to my shoulder from behind — the shoulder with the small black-star burn — and he does not ask about the scar, he just puts his mouth on it like he has been waiting eight days for permission to know it.
His hand at my hip. The slate of his shirt against my back smells of amber-cardamom and something cleaner under it, soap.
Adrian's prosthetic palm to my collarbone — the brushed-bronze lattice gone warm now, the deeper steady heat I have learned to read against the matte-cold it goes in the Ops Room when he is working a way out.
Warm means he has stopped working it; warm means he is only here.
His jaw, usually set on its half-degree of readiness, has come loose; his mouth is parted.
The prosthetic flat across my collarbone, thumb against the side of my neck, and the warmth softens my whole spine into the long slow exhale I have not let myself have in a room with a door for twelve years.
"Hand here," he says, soft, to Luca, and slides the prosthetic an inch to make room for Luca's hand at the side of my throat.
Three hands settle on me at once — warm bronze on the collarbone, warm palm at the throat, the still cool of Marcus's grip at my hip — and none of them moves, the held stillness of three operators waiting for the small word that will let them begin.
"Luca," I say.
He leans in. His mouth at my mouth, slow.
His hand sliding down from my throat to my breast — the right one, thumb at the nipple — and the breath leaves me.
He drops his head to my throat and lower; his mouth closes over my breast, warm, slow, his teeth careful.
Behind me Marcus's mouth moves along the top of my shoulder toward the burn-star, unhurried, and Adrian's prosthetic has slid from my collarbone to my sternum, between my breasts, the bronze warm against the bone.
I am sitting on a workbench in a Syndicate bunker with three men's mouths on me and my body has gone to honey.
The math of the last twelve years was solitary; the math of right now is plural and warm and arrives faster than the solitary math can resist.
"Adrian. " His name in my mouth.
His pale gray-blue eyes find mine and hold them the way they held mine in the basin reflection in Bunkroom D — the unflinching read he gives a thing he has decided is his to keep, saying I see her in you — and I do not have the schema for being looked at like that more than once.
He moves the prosthetic from my sternum down my belly, slow, the bronze trailing warmth across cream-pale skin.
His human hand goes to his belt, undoes the buckle one-handed without looking down. Marcus's hands have come around my ribs from behind, palms spread flat to cup the weight of my breasts from below; I lean back into him on instinct and his head dips, mouth at my ear.
"Darling," he says, only loud enough for me. "You are doing this. Tell me what you want."
"Adrian first."
Marcus's hand presses once against my breast and slides down to my hip.
He does not argue — courtly even now, he yields the turn with a small inclination of his head, almost the pre-Network half-bow he gives a room.
He kisses the place behind my ear he learned in his office, steps back, and the slate of his shirt is gone from my back.
The cool of the workshop fills the place where his chest was.
Then Adrian is in it — between my knees, prosthetic palm back to my sternum, his human hand spreading warm at the small of my back, and he lifts me easy, light, slides me to the very edge of the bench so my hips are in his.