Sol wakes up threshing, sopping wet. Half-light greets him, brings a splinter of moon. Slowly, he wades from the hinterlands of brittle sleep to recognize the room.
We’re in the Cat Flap. We’re on the run.
For a time, he sits naked on the bed until the dead air leaves him shivering – worried, in some way, that he might otherwise return to the same dreams. Should he check on Y? Probably it’s better she rests for now. So instead he turns on the TV to an unlikely-looking threesome. He watches, loosely fascinated, but finds after a few minutes that the video’s making him feel ill. It’s not because of its content, per se, but the fleshy colour it turns the walls. What signals have been absorbed by all this peeling plaster? It’s easy to imagine a substance like asbestos, leeching in.
Sol flicks on from porno to porno to porno, until he finds what appears to be a compilation of headcam war footage. A smoking compound, tracer rounds in the night, harrowed land. The dark sheets around him stripy with salt. Boom – another soldier. Rattle – another. And then the newslines that mass in from the margins: For the king he/she gave. Next of kin have been informed. Cut-and-paste headlines on government troops, loyalist militias, terrorists, extremists – words that seem to mingle, melt, and mean increasingly little. Atrocities so common as to be glazed over, now, and relayed with such dilute reasoning. Reporters only ever dipping their toes – or straight up conniving. He thinks: How come nobody ever asks why?
Sol looks at the ceiling and regards his body, his face, in the mirror. It’s like the rings slake out from his eyes in real time; his torso covered with baggy flesh in liquefaction. “Prick,” he tells himself, and swings off the bed. He enters the room’s small ensuite – a plastic shower pod – and showers in water so cold it pushes all the air from him.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow. Sol keeps thinking about tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes, does it? And he knows he won’t sleep again now. Better to crack on, surely. Get things rolling. He goes on wrestling the quandary as he dresses; as he pads down the stairs to the waiting room. No sign of anyone, but there’s a lingering odour of damp fires. It’s not the Sierra, either – he’d left that too far away. No, this is closer. He goes in Mel’s reception cage and picks up the phone.
The dialler clicks. The tone carries.
“Hello?”
“Irish.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Sol? What time is it?”
“Has it turned up?”
“Has what turned up? What’s this number you’re on?”
“Irish,” Sol says. “Is the car there? The gear?”
“Solomon… you seen the clock, man?”
“I’m asking you.”
Irish sighs. “Jesus, yes, it’s all here. Came in a bin lorry, the clever bastards.”
“That’s good,” Sol says. “They’re early. And if I tell you there’s a change of plan–”
Irish coughs, asthmatic. “This better be worth my angelic slumber. The heartburn you’re causing me.”
“I know,” Sol says. “I know.”
“Well what’s going on?”
“Honestly?”
Sol considers telling Irish just enough – that people came looking for the Lexus after all. Nothing more than necessary. Nothing more than believable. Which by extension means nothing of Y, of Roy, or of the things he’s seen and done. Assuming the two dead bikers were the same bikers present the morning Irish jacked the Lexus, and that Sandy was the only other person linked to the scene, everyone directly connected is now out of the equation. Only the unseen structures persist. And in any case, Sol’s overriding selfishness will force the issue. He might tell himself it’s for the better good, but the truth is simpler, more reckless than that: Y is all that matters.
“Honestly,” Irish says.
“It’s fine,” Sol tells him. “There’s not enough time.”
“Then what’s this changed plan?”
“You got a pen?”
“I’ve always got a pen. Spit it out.”
So Sol gives Irish his instructions – poring his way across a mental image to relay its nuances. When he’s done, he closes his eyes, holds them shut. A long exhalation through his nose. “You get all that?”
“I got all that. God knows I wish I didn’t. But I’ve got it.”
Sol nods, wired now. “You’re my favourite,” he says.
Irish coughs again. “And you’re deeply fucken tapped.”
Tools over his shoulder, Sol waits at Y’s door. He aches with anticipation, muscles constricting his joints. Is it too early? Would more sleep be worthwhile? Would he do a better job?
He enters Room Three regardless. Inside, Y’s awake too – eyes pinned to the mirror above her. Her arms are crossed, pharaonic. The sheets still drawn to Bowie’s chin.
“Hiya,” he says, sitting at the foot of the bed.
Y blinks.
Sol wants to add some nicety, some attempt at reassurance. The room still as he unfolds a length of tarpaulin from his bag and lays it in the space between the bed and the partition wall. “Sterile,” he says to her.
In the wet room, Sol dilutes a quantity of bleach in a mop bucket and leaves several tools in there to soak. Then he splashes his hands and forearms with the dregs of Mel’s tiger-striped bottle, and uses one of Cassie’s exfoliator brushes to scrub them down.
“Never had to blame my tools,” he tells her, kneeling at her side, before giving her a promise he can’t be sure to keep.
Sol pulls away her sheet, rolls it deftly into an extra cushion for her head. He cuts off a length of string and divides the tarp into eight – weighting down the string’s ends with old spanners.
He smiles a little. “We’ll start with your left knee,” he says. “The craggy one.” Wiring and substructure here spills through a long fissure, a rupture. The wound has exposed visible seams in the skin layer, which he peels away from the kneecap. Beyond this, he’s able to access the muscle wall – a second peelable membrane that sits above the motor unit site. There’s very little blood.
It’s a strange and beautiful thing, the way they’ve done it, and this alone distracts him from the surrealism of the whole. So many pieces, sealed against translucent pods and beads of biology. Black-edged joins where the connectors meet Y’s organic matter. Pure engineering, pure maths: a spotless jigsaw constructed with precision-machined pieces, whittled spindles and micro-cogs. Power drives and strengthened tendons. Pluses and negatives and motor controls.
He thumbs alloys, follows wires. He unscrews the knee unit delicately, carefully. Mapping Y, never less than staggered by her intricacies.
Down on the tarp, Sol starts his first exploded diagram in earnest. After the knee, he removes the artificial sections of Y’s fibia and tibia, which are sealed off from her real bone by what appears to be a series of delicate valves and coverings. He extracts wiring looms and support structures, along with a set of clever-looking muscle modules, until Y’s left leg resembles a hollow assembly above a blizzard of parts on the tarp.
Sol makes a note of bent fixtures and panels behind the knee. He takes the pencil from his mouth and marks the joins.
Then he starts on her second leg, applying what he’s learned from the first. The knee system isn’t as badly damaged, but the case is loose around her moving parts, as though violently shaken for too long.
By her ankle, the tight coil of a spring-loaded Achilles tendon, Sol takes a break. He looks up and feels he should ask her for something. Forgiveness, at least. In the mirror, Y watches with an expression impossible to describe – not pain, not fear. Not thankful, nor thankless. Curiosity, compulsion. Wouldn’t that be something, to imagine her willing him on?
Sol continues, meticulous and entranced. Time soon ceases to matter or even to be; the whole universe shrunk down, condensed and confined to these four walls and the replications of them above; sensations only the pins and needles of his hands and feet, cut off under his weight; and the only sounds the clink and chink of his tools. His hardened hands maintain their steadiness, and the deconstructed pieces of Y become as gems, pearls from the ocean bed. Her soul counted out in little treasures.
Sol’s distantly aware of pain from his own limbs, but he doesn’t stop. His tools – only a few proving much use – have become a part of him. As his fingers move around, the calluses burning, he starts to feel a pure form of relief. As if, in doing this, he’s reaffirmed to himself that Y isn’t an object, not a subject, not a thing. And never – never – a toy. Watching her eyes watch him, he understands that pieces alone can’t form a person. And that whether he was created divinely, or was delivered by evolution, his own meat was not entirely pointless – he could have a purpose after all.
Soon he completes her single arm. The elbow structure seems intact, but the wiring, an elegant yarn, is desoldered; the mother unit drifting towards Y’s soft tissue like an unmoored craft.
Next he starts on her double-jointed shoulder. The most fiddly section, to his mind, as well as the most sophisticated – even despite the appearance of several cheap fixings. Progressively he unravels a labyrinthine configuration that starts on the opposite side of Y’s neck: a series of panels which reveal a missing section of trachea and larynx beneath the tattooed square – though he wouldn’t know these names – and in their stead some sort of chip and speaker, wired carefully into the encased biology of her throat. His tools seem magnetized to this setup, and here more than elsewhere he needs to pause to appreciate the marriage of the pieces they left and the parts they added. It’s both terrifying and sublime. Then he works outwards towards the doubled joint, removing delicate modules and breaking them down separately, displaying them on the tarp in their own orbits. He reaches the servos of her new shoulder next to the wrapped-up ball of her own, the clavicle apparently strengthened to bear extra weight, and the ligaments replaced with struts of tensile material.
Twinned joint fully derigged, Y’s third arm at last comes away in one whole piece, synthetic skin and all. With the city pulsing through the walls, he breaks it down into its major components.
This done, he stands up. His legs are close to buckling.
“Does it hurt?”
Y doesn’t blink.
“Promise?”
Y blinks.
“Have I missed anything?”
Y blinks downwards.
Sol motions to her chest. “Here?”
Nothing.
Her stomach?
A murmur from her naked throat.
Sol kneels again. He rolls up her T-shirt and looks across Y’s hairless belly until the seams catch the light. From her navel to her lowest rib is a panel. He pushes at the skin. It gives, and he goes inwards, past subdermal screws and plates, until a tiny compartment opens out, and a cylinder, seven or eight inches long, slides free. This he can’t break down further. Sense tells him no organ would sit here; that it’s not a replacement but an addition. He rolls it over in his hands and finds a faint warning triangle etched into it. He thinks of Jeff and thinks of Sandy and goes cold.
He puts the cylinder to one side. Y’s still watching him. “Is it what I think it is?”
Y blinks.
Tight breaths. Tight little breaths.
“And you know how to use it?”
Nothing.
Bastards.
“There’s one last bit,” Sol tells her. He taps his head and gently rolls her over. Then, using needle-nose pliers and a damp cloth, he removes the accumulated grit and gunge from her nape, her hairline.
What had the young privateer pressed? Sure enough there’s another subdermal panel under the lowermost plate of her skull. Here Sol finds a bank of rudimentary I/O switches, each jacked into the boss of her spinal cord. He unscrews the switches carefully, lays them out with the rest. So that now Y is almost completely incomplete; a whole galaxy of parts. Colonies of disparate components, enamelled by indefinite light. Each square of tarp its own distinctive lab culture.
Sol closes his eyes to the fragrance of sweat and oil. Burning there in the darkness, his father’s voice: If it don’t work, take it all apart and put it back together again.
He doesn’t take another break before he starts unbending and cleaning and reassembling the pieces of Y. In fact, he only hesitates when he goes to reattach her third arm. She blinks rapidly at him until he grasps why he must continue. For better or worse, it’s part of her. Keeping this in pieces implies Y’s modified body is something she should be ashamed of – gives her one less thing to reclaim.
With Sol and the woman upstairs, Mel locks and bolts the front door. She can’t remember the last time the Cat Flap closed like this, or what might have closed them. She’s found a packet of cigarettes, though, which she takes to be a sign, a portent.
Inner door barred, Mel turns off the foyer screens and fans. She tuts at the puddlewater Sol’s toolbag has trailed in.
A time check. The girls will start arriving for their shifts any minute. So at the back door, Mel unfolds a plastic chair and sparks up – her feet wedging open the door, and the cold, damp air bringing in the smell of burning rubbish. It’s all Mel feels she can do to keep a nightwatch like this, with the clouds lit red above and a paroxysm of jagged thought threatening to burst in her. A haze of smoke expands across her view of abandoned terraces, denuded trees, analogue aerials, chimney pots. Not for the first time tonight, an old habit feels more tangible than the ghosts that usually haunt her from negative space.
Cassie arrives first, as Cassie always does.
“Hi sweet,” Mel says, hoping not to scare her.
“M? You doing out here?”
“We’re closed tonight.”
“How come?”
“Just head home, Cass. I’ll pay you all double tomorrow.”
“But we’ve got–”
“Don’t hang about. And if you see any others on their way in, tell them the same from me.”
Cassie’s jaw sets. “It’s him again, isn’t it? You know I can call heads down here.”
“No. It’s not him. Just get yourself home. And anyway – this lot round the corner’ll be kicking off the second that fire’s out. We’ll have cordons both ends of the road.”
“You seen the size of it? Won’t be going out any time soon – they’re still chucking stuff on it.”
“No,” Mel says. A weary sigh. Then: “Please, love. I’ll make it up to you when I can.”
Cass looks out the gate. The little square yard with its dented tin bins. “Fine,” she says.
Mel smiles sadly. “Everything’s grand,” she says.
“You swear?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you take it easy.” And Cassie waves and heads back through the gate.
Mel sparks up another cig, resumes her vigil. Thick clumps of ash have started to fall in the yard. Again a temptation gnaws the insides of her arms, accompanied by a taste – bitter – that makes her salivate. There’s already a pile of dimps at her feet, and her fake eye is sore, sticking.
Then it’s dark. The early hours rolling around. And sooner still the inevitable arrives at the Cat Flap’s front door. Mel was dreading this sound: bone on steel, the building ringing with it. She removes her blanket as the thumps come again; eases the back door shut and moves along the corridor towards a certain fate. Down here, at this time, you’re so used to hearing laughter, pleasure, and the peace is unnerving. She pauses at the stairs: from Cassie’s room comes the faintest report of clinking, dink-dink tinkering. A gentle interaction of precious metal that’s almost xylophonic. Is it folly to guess? Silly to presume? She takes the stairs and wonders if she should go in, but a lifetime of distracted looks and bad moods has taught her not to interrupt Sol while he’s working.
Knock knock knock. And a voice, stern and crisp: “Open up, Melanie.”
From the landing, black damp risen as if to a high tide mark, she looks down at Jase. Suited, booted, immaculate. He’s alone, which surprises her. Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe –
Mel goes back downstairs and enters the little kitchen alcove; washes her hands. She stoops down to the washing machine and picks out a pair of sheer stockings.
As she goes to the reception cage, she carefully pushes one of the stockings into the other. Puts the paired stockings down, and opens the shutters remotely. Her little camera flickers on, slaved monitor hissing.
Jase looks into the camera.
“Wondered when you’d show up,” Mel says into the output. She puts the stockings in her pocket.
“You going to let me in?”
Mel comes across the waiting room. She unlocks the inner door, unbolts the outer. Deep breath. She opens the door a crack and talks to him through the shutters.
Jase peers through. “Melanie,” he says. “Sorry it’s so late. Got a few?”
“Might do,” Mel says back. “What tripe you flogging now?”
He grins and puts a finger to his cheek. “You look knackered. Rough night?”
She slides the chain. Jase looks coiled, holding something back. She opens the door wide and almost reconsiders.
“I’m fine,” she tells him. “I’m fine.”
Jase steps into the building, taller than Mel remembers. “Didn’t realize you shuttered the doors up here,” he says. There’s not much between them in the hallway, and the tinted glass dims their skins to a sickly hue.
“Huge bonfire over on the supermarket. I thought there’d be trouble. Usually boots off.”
“The bins, is it? Saw a few things smouldering over my way too. But still – been a while since they did a collection.”
“Mmm,” Mel says.
“So. Let’s cut to it. How’s our little helper getting on?”
He does know. Mel’s sure of it. He knows Jeff’s gone and now he’s blagging. She swallows. “Good.” Swallow. “Really well, yeah. He gets on alright with the girls.”
“Great news,” Jase says. “I’m made up for you.”
Change the subject. “You want a brew, something to eat? Come through, yeah – can’t see you properly in here. I’ll get the kettle on while we chat. Filtered, so it tastes pretty good.”
“Go on then.”
Jase walks ahead of her. Into the waiting room. She closes the inner door and clocks the outline of his wallet with a lump in her throat – this could be easier than she thought.
Now? Do it now?
“Where’s the big man then?”
“Nipped out for us. Milk. A few other essentials…”
“What, like proper milk?”
Mel racks her brains. Was there any this week? It’s a dance. It’s like a dance. “Yes,” she says, a little too firmly.
Jase stops where he is. His eyebrows rise a touch. “You’ve got him doing long days then? Because I think you should–”
“Cold in here, isn’t it?” Mel interrupts. “That bloody heater on the blink.”
“It’s fine, Melanie,” Jase says. His voice is getting terser.
“Well–”
“Listen. You need to know when your next delivery’s coming.”
Mel’s heart sinks. She could crumble right there. How did she not see it coming?
She puts a brave face on it. “Our next what? Come through, come through, come on – this foyer’s too nippy… Got a much cosier spot for the guests I know.”
Jase stops pretending altogether. He turns full on. “How long did you think we’d let you enjoy a free service?”
Mel’s trembling. She knows she can’t let on. He knows. “Come on,” she says. “We can talk about it.” She shocks herself by touching his arm, rotating him towards the corridor. It seems to take him by surprise, too, and he moves there without resistance, apparently diverted. With his back turned, she crosses over herself, and – there, yes – dips into his pocket; two fingers like slivers, pincer-poised. She manages to sneak his wallet straight out.
Breathe. Breathe.
Jase strolls down the corridor oblivious to her theft. Straight ahead. Head reacting to a bang, something dropped upstairs. “I just think we need to have a sit down and a good chat,” he says over his shoulder. “Wanted to ask a few things about your ex, too, actually. Head office interested for some reason.” He’s calm again. The veneer quickly reapplied. “And bend your ear about payment terms, your expectations, whether or not you want to extend your trial, and when we can expect you to start retiring your current stock.” He smiles at her. There’s a distilled cruelty in his face, but Mel nods and smiles sweetly back. Play the game.
They draw level with the store cupboard door.
“It’s just by there, Jase,” she says to him. “Yep, just round that way.”
Now Mel pulls the stocking from her jeans pocket and simultaneously plucks her fake eye from its socket, lower lid, upper lid, an uncomfortable feeling of suction as it comes out unlubricated. Thwock. She drops the ball into the combined stockings, weighs it, and halts on her front foot.
Jase hears her shoe squeak and gain traction. He turns to find her hand in rotation – a grey rotor blur at the end of her arm.
Mel doesn’t falter. She swings for him; her eyeball glances off his shoulder, connects with his neck. More from astonishment than pain, Jase crashes against the partition wall.
“Bitch,” he says.
Mel makes a second attempt. This time the ball connects above his right ear with a deep crunch that resounds in the tightened space. Jase looks like he wants to say something else, something intangible, but Mel cuts him off with a third strike on his cheek. His face swells instantly.
“You can say that again,” Mel tells him, breathing heavy.
Jase whimpers, on his backside with a hand out to steady him, the other up and defending his face. Mel reaches across him and opens the storeroom door. The smell of it, of Jeff. Rotten food. She swings the makeshift cosh once more, into his knee this time, and the glass ball halves on impact. Jase screams in pain, clutches his leg, and Mel kicks his shoulder so that he collapses into the cupboard.
She raises her hand. The two halves of her eye jangle in the stocking. Perfect friction. Jase doesn’t speak, but crabs backwards from her in retreat.
Mel grabs the door handle, pulls it to. She locks it and pockets the key.
“There,” she says to herself. “There’s your fucking retirement.”
The waiting room is peaceful. Mel sits in a wreath of blue smoke that hangs in the room like a rain cloud seen from a distance. She watches the smoke churn, impossible fluid, while absentmindedly tracking the conjunctiva of her empty socket with a finger. She listens to Jase pounding the cupboard door. He’d tire soon, wouldn’t he? She’s already turned out his wallet – a credit card, a clip of petty cash – on the floor. On top of the pile, a set of calling cards inscribed with two overlapping circles, wrapped in a list of local addresses. Who are these people? Who are their Jeffs? And who will turn up next?
Sol sleeps at the foot of Cassie’s bed like a cat by the fire. In one hand, a multi-tool with attachments splayed. In the other, loosely, his collar, turned up into his chin. He’s snoring.
Y stands up on the bed to begin with, angling pressure down through her feet. Her curious weightlessness has persisted. She articulates her knee and hip joints – carefully shifting weight from the ball and arch of one foot to the other.
Now she stretches upwards. All three arms, the stem of a flower in time-lapse, pushed up, hands and fingers straight, splayed, before they blossom into three petals and spread, a satisfying pop sounding off in her doubled shoulder. Each arm feels so new. Even the splits in her skin have resealed themselves.
From this bloomed stance she dives forward to touch her toes. Her back lengthens, and her stomach muscles engage. It’s the best kind of stretch: relief bordering pain. Long lengths of pleasure.
She smiles, then: how liberated she feels to escape that locked-up body, her doppelgänger in the ceiling mirror. The afterimage of the reflection is now stark but dreamlike: her limbs open, Sol discovering the truths of her implants and biomechanics, untangling her pieces as if she were constructed from a series of interconnected lockets. The decorated face of this stranger on her chest, his half-head rolled and manipulated into new shapes depending on Sol’s progress. But what strikes her most is the bliss she feels. A reconciliation with herself, almost. As if she accepts now she won’t get her old self back – that her old identity is gone – yet recognizes that she alone has forged a new one, shaped it herself. Not under orders, but in spite of them. Not uncaring, but filled with a compassion; a will to resist that the makers could never scrape clean.
Y looks down at Sol. Is friendship right? Is this man a friend? Would she do the same for him? Objectively, she thinks there’s an answer: despite the opportunity it presented, she’d responded instinctively to the unconscious Roy’s ankle injury without even knowing who he was. The basics of wound treatment, triage, had flooded to her from some hidden reservoir. Whatever the makers had deleted, there’d been no empathy bypass. She felt for him, this man, this damp human, fatty and unmodified, just as she’d felt for the brothers and sisters who couldn’t sleep in their cradles.
Oppositely, however, stands the partitioned memory of her response to Jeff’s advances. The ferocity, the skin and mechanics of another Y – one who’d crushed Jeff’s throat and pushed his glitzy eyes deep inside his head, her bulk against his assumed right to dominate her. Acceptance or not, induced or teased out: barbarity is also part of her, entwined with her. She knows she can mete out lethal force on her terms as well as the makers’. That with these three hands, it’s easy enough to take as well as give.
So yes, she’d do the same for Sol.
Down from the bed, she crouches and touches his face – hot, sticky. His yellowy eyes open, adjust, and there her face glistens on the bowls of his irises.
“You’re up,” he says.
Y nods.
Sol rubs his stubble. “Look at you.”
Y smooths down her arms. She demonstrates for him her fresh dexterity, hesitating briefly when his eyes brim over.
He sniffs it up and says, “You don’t hurt? You aren’t just saying?”
Y shakes her head.
He laughs through the tears. “Even without that thing in you?”
Y looks to the corner of the room. A sports bag with both handles fastened. She crackles.
“You need something warmer on,” he tells her. She observes him closely, his body language at variance with his words. He’s either completely overawed or coping with an untenable guilt. “Have a good root in these drawers before you catch your death,” he adds. Then, looking away: “I’ll… I’ll just be downstairs with Melanie.”
What is Sol frightened by? Does his relationship with the woman complicate something? After he leaves, Y humours him and rummages for a while – finding a second pair of tracksuit bottoms and a hoodie. These she matches with long knitted socks and a pair of low heels that make her walk strangely. She doesn’t like the way they stretch her calves.
Clomping out of the room, she stops by the dresser. A thousand other times she might not have; might not have even noticed the object Sol left on its corner, or recognized it as technology from the other side. Her other side. But the object, this little square, metallic circle at its core, is definitely a detail of the sister-world. And as she picks it up, she knows without question what it’s for.
A knotty ball of certainty glowing inside, Y holds the square closer. Written down one edge, in glyphs she can read, are two words: BINARY DECODER. Y holds the device to her throat and feels the primordial pull of two opposing magnets desperate – or destined – to meet.
Y follows the sound of Sol’s voice along a first-floor corridor she doesn’t recall being carried through, paralyzed as she’d been around the rebar running from nape to spinal base. With the throatpiece in place, she relishes a new sensitivity to the environment; calibrates herself to the frequency of passing traffic, animals calling, a rich cocktail of polymer fumes, carbon molecules. Compounds forming or breaking down. She reaches a staircase; takes the stairs in twos, attuned and silent. Perfect noise between her ears, a melody of precision, her head vibrant with sensory mass.
Y lingers in the doorway unnoticed and sees Melanie balled up, legs crossed, trying to occupy as little space as possible on the waiting room bench. Sol’s stooped over a washing basket marked LOST PROPERTY.
“Alright to use the phone?” Sol asks Mel.
“Do I have a choice?”
Sol gives her the thumbs-up. He’s got the phone to his ear when he finally notices Y in the doorway. “Oh,” he says, and lowers the handset to his chest.
Y steps out of the heels and enters the foyer self-consciously, finding it odd that the woman simply accepts her presence. She’s seen that glassy stare before: perhaps the woman’s been sedated in some way.
“Sit down then,” Mel says to her, patting the bench. “You’ll make me feel uncomfortable.”
“Found you a fleece and a shell jacket,” Sol says, gesturing to a pile of clothing. “More than enough to be going on with anyway. Definitely good enough for a quick shower. And some boots. What size are those–”
Sol stops talking. Mel takes notice.
“What is it?” she says.
“Y?”
Y opens her mouth and emits a low crackle that rises with a shape, a timbre, through an unstable register. As she babbles, crackles, her tongue against her teeth, she finally lets out two definable words: “Good hello.”
Sol’s mouth hangs open.
“Hel-lo,” Y says again. The paired syllables leave her throatbox with a sound of metal scraping metal. “Man Sol.”
Mel unwinds from the bench and plants her feet. She’s glaring at Sol, willing him to respond.
Y shrugs. “It’s me, man Solomon.”
The mundanity of the environment serves to amplify Y’s voice, and Sol starts to sweat. He tries to say “What?” but it’s stifled, trapped. To Y he looks visibly weakened – a loosening of his posture she takes to signal either relief or capitulation.
“Sol,” Mel says. “What’s wrong?”
Y steps backwards.
Sol clears his throat. “Do it again,” he says. Clearer now. “Say it again.”
“Hello,” Y repeats, her mouth clicking. This time she looks embarrassed by it: the motorized translation of so many little ones and zeroes, compressed and squirted through the valve of her throat.
“You’re talking, Y.”
“But Y is not the principal moniker,” she says.
It takes effort, Sol realizes. Does it hurt her? Does it chafe? “I don’t–”
“There is sorry,” Y says.
“Sorry?”
She points at her third arm, more urgent. “There is… theirs are… there are apologies.”
“For what?”
“The abode of Sol, your ally – the man Roy.”
Sol clutches his forehead. The oddest sensation that gravity’s failed. Again the powerful urge to hold her, to make this a celebration of them, and of providence. And yet he’s breaking up inside. The noise of the throatpiece is as alien as it’s frightening.
“Roy wasn’t a friend, not a real friend,” Sol says. He holds his nose. “Sometimes you meet people and you try to turn your cheek. Even when they’ve got an arm round your neck.”
“He was our friend,” Y says. The throatpiece bobs on her neck. And then she begins to laugh, her whole body convulsing, and the module translates it as a hacking cough.
If it’s not painful, it’s tickling her, Sol thinks. “I found that thing,” he says, touching his Adam’s apple. “The thing over your throat. In a car, with a biohazard suit. There was this crate, and a woman. Sandy–”
At the very mention of her name, Y scowls and begins to chirrup angrily. Sol grimaces and steps back – Y’s module’s shrill at the top end. How insensitive could he be? Of course she and Sandy had met. But does this confirm that the Audi’s crate held Y’s accessories? Or do more of them have her tattooed, expandable throat?
Y grunts. “Sandy is a betrayer,” she says.
“She’s gone,” Sol tells her, picturing the abject spray on the interior of Sandy’s windscreen, the gun barrel poking from her ribs. Y was sleeping then; couldn’t have known. But what difference does it make? “I can’t do this,” he says. And with that he severs the link; turns and crouches down to pick through more clothing. “Maybe these,” he mumbles, pushing away scarves and gloves. “All these warm things.”
“Sol,” Mel says.
“Can I use your phone again?” he asks.
Mel shakes her head. It’s not his fault. Where others might consider it rude, even obnoxious, she recognizes the diversion. Sol’s scared witless, and now he’s disengaged to protect something of himself. That stubborn selfishness prevailing. Anything to avoid what really seems to be happening.
Sol produces a mid-length peacoat, navy, heavily bobbled, that he tries on for himself; pulls tight round his body. He turns and makes a satisfied face as if Y has left the room entirely, or never came in to start with. “Got taste, your forgetful johns,” he murmurs.
Y is locked. Patient. Is she being respectful of the situation? Or simply analyzing it? It jolts Mel to realize another woman might comprehend Sol, has invested the time necessary to. And by the way Y gawps at her, it’s clear she’s noticed the hollow eye socket, too. “Sol,” Mel whispers, rearranging her fringe to hide the cavity.
He ignores her.
“I think she needs you.”
“Who needs me?” Sol asks. “No one needs me. I can’t.”
Y crosses the room. A broken stride, a distortion or imbalance on one side. She picks up and envelops herself in the fleece he’s found. “Good base layer,” Mel says. “Sol, I think you should listen.”
“You don’t understand,” Sol says under his breath. “You never understand.”
Behind him, Y puts two hands on Sol’s shoulders. A third, tentatively, in the small of his back.
Mel inhales.
“A steeple,” Y says, letting go and pressing her three hands together into a pyramid. The module’s attempts at restraint are lacking, and her words sound more sinister than soft.
Carefully, Sol straightens up. He drops the sweater in his hands. “A steeple?” He twists to her, takes her two hands in one of his.
Carefully she places her third hand on his chin. “No,” she says. “A tower.”
“A tower.”
“My tower,” Y says. “Where the circles convene.”
Sol blinks at her.
“I must revoke the father’s ownership,” she says. This time the words are perfect – the module enunciating each one with unnerving precision.
“Your father?”
“Not mine.”
“But the person who sent you.”
A curt nod. Then, “He sent all. He watches.”
“From the tower.”
“Yes,” Y says.
“I think I know where it is,” he says. “Your tower.”
Mel exhales. While she doesn’t get what they’re talking about, he’s come back from some edge, returned to them. Now she’s witnessing their fears entangle. A perverse thought pops: I already had my time with him.
“I’m sorry for what they’ve done,” Sol says. “I am.”
“Why?” Y asks. She taps the throatpiece. “I have a name. I found my name.”
“Then tell us,” Sol says.