CHAPTER 21 #3
The workshop has gone still. No sound except the filament hum and four people breathing.
Luca is still in me. Adrian's prosthetic on my sternum.
Marcus's hand in mine. Four feet away, the mother-of-pearl knife sleeps in the back pocket of the trousers folded over the workshop chair, and the chip — my mother's archived files, hidden in the bra-strap kicked under the chair an hour ago — sleeps with it. None of them have gone near either.
They have touched everything else. The inside of my chest has gone from the tight closed brass-box weight I have been carrying since I was eighteen to the warm slow give of a hinge that has finally been oiled and worked.
Luca eases out, careful. His thumb strokes my hip. "I will carry you to the bath."
"You are exhausted."
"Exactly the right amount of exhausted."
Adrian's prosthetic comes off my sternum slow; Marcus's hand stays in mine because Marcus has decided I will not be untouched even for a heartbeat.
Luca slides his arms under my knees and shoulders and lifts me.
I weigh nothing in his arms — I have not weighed nothing since my mother carried me — and the lift catches a sound in my throat; Adrian's prosthetic comes to the side of my face until Luca has me steady.
They carry me to the bath like a relay — Luca through the workshop door; Marcus takes my weight for three steps to the bath bench; Adrian runs the hot water, tests it with the back of his prosthetic wrist where the calibration is best.
"Warm. Not hot. Renner — pillow under her hip when she lies back."
Marcus, the bare-faced post-coital smile, not the fixer-smile: "Vale. I have been bathing women since you were in basic."
"Then do it well."
Luca laughs low into the side of my hair. "Quiet, both of you. You are scaring her."
"They are not scaring me. " I press my forehead to his shoulder. "I am scared of myself. They are background noise."
All three laugh — Luca low and warm, Marcus quick and bright, Adrian a single thin exhale, the nearest his mouth ever comes to a laugh. I have never made three men laugh at once.
Luca lifts me into the water. Adrian sits at the rim, prosthetic palm cradling the back of my head against his forearm.
Luca takes a soft cloth and starts with my shoulders — slow, careful at the small scar on the inside of my left wrist where his mouth has been; he lets the wet cloth sit there as if the heat might leech the old hurt out of the surgical line.
Marcus is at my feet, washing my left foot ankle to instep, between the toes, careful, like he does anything.
I am being washed by three men.
My body finds its inventory the slow way: thighs sore in the deep muscle, hips loose, throat tender from Luca's stubble, left breast tender from Marcus's mouth, sternum warm where the bronze sat.
The pulse at the side of my neck has dropped to its low blue tide, and the small careful thing at the center of my chest — the thing that has spent twelve years measuring whether the room is safe — has gone quiet and pleased.
Marcus rises and returns with a clean folded square of cotton and a small thing in his palm I do not see clearly until he kneels at my left shoulder.
The silver lighter.
He puts the cotton square down on the rim.
He takes my left hand from under the water — careful, lifts it dripping — and dries the palm against the cotton, each finger drawn dry in turn.
Turns the palm up. He places it — closed, cold, the metal antiqued and warmer along the etching where his thumb has lived against it for eleven years — flat into the center of my palm and folds my fingers over it.
He holds my fist closed with his own hand wrapped around it.
"Hold this," he says, low. "It was my father's, then mine. It is going to be yours for tonight."
The metal is cold in my palm, the weight of an antique ten-cent piece doubled, the etching he has worn smooth at the seam just barely a ridge under my thumb.
Marcus's hand is warm around my fist and the metal is going warm between us, and somewhere under all of it I understand — without the language for it yet — that this is the move; he has handed me the thing he uses to think with, and asked me to think with it for the night.
"Marcus. " I do not have anything else to say.
"Hold it. That is all."
I hold it. Adrian's prosthetic at the side of my face, bronze warm.
Luca rinsing soap off the inside of my left wrist with his thumb against the silver-wire tattoo, mapping the hand-poked needlework one more time.
Marcus's hand around my fist; the metal warming; the bath warm; the workshop's surgical lamp lighting everything through the open door the color of honey.
They get me out together — Luca on the right, Adrian on the left, Marcus with the cotton towel. Marcus brings me Adrian's charcoal shirt from the small shelf; Adrian must have folded it before any of this began. The sleeves come past my fingertips. I am still holding the small antique weight.
"Common Room," Luca says. "Nest. I built one."
"You build everything," Marcus says, dry.
"I built this very well."
Adrian carries me this time. Marcus's hand stays around mine where the small antique weight is cradled between our palms, metal warmer for the two of us holding it.
The prosthetic arm under my knees, his human arm under my shoulders.
The charcoal shirt smells of clean cotton, metal-and-oil at the seam, the warm-bone smell of the man under it.
The Common Room has been built into a nest. The rug under three layers of blankets — wool, cotton, the soft fleece Marcus brought back from Sector-9 a year ago — and the long couch pushed forward a foot so the floor takes the geometry.
Pillows from Adrian's bunkroom and Luca's.
The blankets stacked the way Luca stacks his component racks — by use, accessible at the edges.
Adrian sets me into the nest and does not let go.
He sits, then lies down with me against his chest. Luca lies down on my other side — head on the rug, body curled in, hand at my hip.
Marcus brings the small reading lamp from his office and plugs it into the kitchenette socket and the room goes a single warm yellow.
The cuff over the silver-wire tattoo gives one faint stuttered tick against my left wrist — a scan-edge, half a heartbeat, gone before I can be sure of it — and I file it where I file a Senna sweep and let it go, because the warmth has already closed back over the place it touched.
He carries his book in. The Education of Henry Adams — the most dog-eared of the three.
He sits with his back against the couch behind us, his thigh under my foot — I move my foot deliberately so it is under and not just near, and he lets me, his hand resting on my ankle.
He opens the book to a page marked with folded paper, clears his throat, reads in the affected period accent he keeps for Luca and which Luca has refused to laugh at on principle for two years.
"The Dynamo and the Virgin," he reads.
Luca, into my hair, very low: "He has chosen the chapter on purpose."
"What chapter. " My voice is half-asleep already.
"The writer in front of a forty-foot dynamo, saying he should pray to it the way a thirteenth-century peasant prayed to the Virgin. The chapter where a man learns to pray to the thing he has built."
"On purpose."
"On purpose."
Marcus reads — about the dynamo's silent half-revolution, about the line of force, about a kind of awe that does not have a god in it but does have the awe — and the metal in my fist is hot now from the heat of my own palm.
Adrian's prosthetic across my waist; his human hand has found my other hand, the empty one, and his fingers are in mine, the titanium ring on his thumb cool against my knuckle.
Luca's hand at my hip. Marcus's hand around my ankle.
Four bodies touching, none on top of the others, and I have ended up at the centre of them the way a small stone settles into a slow drift of snow — lifted there by the way each of them has chosen the place from which to lean in.
I close my eyes. Marcus's voice goes on, the cadence shaped by a man who learned to read aloud in a colder house than this one, and I follow it down toward sleep.
The heater hum drops to its warm low note as the night-cycle turns over.
The workshop surgical lamp is still on; someone will get up later to turn it off, but not yet.
The metal in my palm is warm; my fingers are wrapped around it, and Marcus's hand is wrapped around my ankle, his voice shaping the next sentence above me as if the night will keep.
Adrian. Luca. Marcus — their names in the order I have come to know them, the math not what I expected and, for tonight, sufficient.
The page turns.
The dynamo turns.
The man in the book stands in front of the thing his century built and finds he has no word for what it pulls out of him except prayer — the old reverence, with no god left in the middle of it, only the turning.
I lie at the centre of the thing these three have built around me tonight, four bodies and no walls, and what moves through me has the same shape and the same missing god: not faith in anything overhead, only the warmth, and the low turning of the heater, and the slow even breath of three men who each chose, alone, to lean toward the same point until the point was me.
The hinge that has been rusted shut in the middle of my chest since I was eighteen stays open.
It does not argue itself closed. For the length of one chapter of one book, I let it stay open and do not stand guard over it.
I sleep.