Lucas sat on the sofa for a while, cycling down the old machinery and nudging his OS toward hibernation. The adrenaline of being out there again slowly leached from his fibers, leaving guilt in its place. Erin was right—he’d have to be a complete and utter fool to forget what had happened the last time he had been out in the world with a badge clipped to his waist.
By the time the wheels in his head stopped spinning, the fire was reduced to a glowing mat of embers. The room was chilly, and his good leg was asleep. He gripped the armrest and pushed out of the sofa. The one positive thing he could say about his prosthetics (the arm and leg at least) was that they didn’t suffer from fatigue; they never cramped up, and they didn’t fall asleep. He stood there as the blood made its way into the lesser veins and capillaries of his good leg, and it felt like an army of ants were moving under his skin, chewing their way through muscles, tendons, and flesh.
He shifted his weight off the prosthetic as the imaginary neural insects finished off their feast. When they were gone, he headed down the hall to the kitchen and got himself a glass of milk from the fridge. He wondered how the kids were doing upstairs, what dreams were going through their little subconscious universes.
With Alisha added to the mix, there were now five children in the house, all kids whose biological parents had failed them and the system had given up on. Some had come from bad homes. Some had come from terrible homes. Some had come from no home. But somehow, magically, they had ended up here, with him and Erin. It didn’t take a degree in Freudian therapy to understand that both of them were trying to fix the broken parts of their own childhoods. But now with Alisha joining the Merry Pranksters, it looked like they had reached critical mass. They had no plans to expand the ranks any more. At least that’s what they had promised themselves.
Lucas counted the milk cartons in the fridge, making sure that there was enough for breakfast tomorrow; it was amazing how much milk kids could go through in a day. There were still six full half-gallon cartons, so he allowed himself another glass. Then he scavenged a piece of dry cheddar from the back of the meat drawer.
After he finished putting the dishes in the rack away, he grabbed an apple—there was always a big bowl of fruit on the island—and checked the back door. The lights were still on in Dingo’s apartment, and on any other winter night he might have gone over; Dingo could always be relied on for a beer and a little conversation when Lucas couldn’t sleep. But he needed to get to bed. After checking the lock for a second time, he headed down the hall.
The apple tasted like it had just come out of the fridge, and he stopped and adjusted the programmable thermostat. He inspected the front door and headed up the stairs in the dark.
He paused just past the pink elephant night-light on the landing. Laurie was camping out in Alisha’s room, zipped up in a sleeping bag on the floor. Alisha was in the bunk with the dog, and the room smelled like canine farts and baby shampoo, but she looked at peace. She had taken to Lemmy, and if there was one thing that Lucas knew, it was that nothing helped a kid like a big furry friend who liked to lick you on the face. And Lemmy, even though he looked like a brute (the result of his Great Dane and mastiff genes), loved kids. He tended to gravitate toward the children who needed the most support, and Lucas and Erin had learned to watch how Lemmy approached newcomers to help guide their own advances—the technique wasn’t gospel, but Lemmy demonstrated instincts that often bordered on mystical.
He then stopped across the landing, beside Maude’s bedroom. She slept with the door locked, and it was an indulgence they allowed her for now. (She had agreed to let Erin keep a key around her neck.) He could hear her breathing on the other side, a metronomic rasp that was somehow in time to the house. The girl, now thirteen and already a young woman, had spent seven long months in an upstate institution before coming here. Preceding that, her years had been marked off in a middle-class home over on Staten Island—a place she was doing her best to forget. She was still uncomfortable around men, and Lucas never spent time alone with her; he didn’t want her to feel even remotely uneasy, so he always waited for her to come to him. She had been with them for two years now, and he had worked hard to gain her confidence. And it was finally paying off. When they sat her down to ask if they could legally adopt her, she gave him a hug—a real hug—and nothing he could remember beat that feeling (not even that first big breath after he woke up in the hospital missing a few of his parts). It was one of the greatest accomplishments of his life.
He checked in on Damien and Hector, all tucked away and sleeping as if the world didn’t have men with rifles in it. Lucas made sure that they were covered and kissed them both on the foreheads. It wouldn’t be long before Damien became a surly teenager, and Lucas wanted to get all the kisses in before the deadline.
Back in their room, Erin was under the covers, and since Lucas had done a head count, he didn’t have to make sure they were alone. Sometimes one of the kids snuck in at night. It was usually when they had a bad dream or it was the night before a court date or a thunderstorm was hammering the city outside, but every now and then, he found Erin in bed with a little hummock of blanket that was doing its own breathing.
He closed the bedroom door softly and padded into the bathroom. He needed a shower, but he doubted he’d be able to wash the day off; Kehoe and his world wouldn’t be excised by something as simple as Irish Spring.
As he let the water heat up on its trip from the basement tank to the third floor, he stripped off the day’s clothes and dumped them in the hamper. Taking clothes off was a lot easier than getting them on, but it still took a few minutes of practiced contortions and, as usual, the jeans were the worst. He hoped that the next fashion revolution would turn its back on straight-legged denim and maybe go baggy, giving him a few years of reprieve. After all, joy was in the little things.
When he was finally nude, the bathroom was filled with a thick weather system of steam. He took off his arm; it was a much more complicated construction than his leg, and the humidity built up in the joints and could get funky. But unless he wanted the added possibility of a somersault through a plate glass shower stall, he needed the leg.
He stepped into the travertine booth, the walls adorned with enough knurled aluminum handles to satisfy a rock climbing school. Back in the beginning, they had been indispensable, but now, starting his second decade as the mechanical man, they were there because he didn’t feel like going through another bathroom renovation. Besides, as he got older, his shitty balance might make a comeback. And getting older looked like a real possibility these days.
The water was a shade below boiling, and he let it pelt his back. The scar tissue took a little longer to heat up than the rest of him, and as the warmth slowly spread through his system, he geared up for his end-of-the-day mental shutdown.
But this wasn’t an ordinary day. Not by any sort of metric. He couldn’t shake the image of Doug Hartke’s gray matter splattered all over the vinyl dashboard in frozen chunks.
Or Kehoe’s clumsy attempt at getting him back.
Lucas was no stranger to the machinations of the bureau, and he recognized a deeply flawed geometry in the way Kehoe had behaved. And if there was one thing he knew about Kehoe, it was that the man never did anything without a predetermined reason. There was always a plan.
What was going on?
And what wasn’t Kehoe telling him?
Fuck it, he thought. It’s over. You’re out.
As the hot water softened his muscles and the steam cleared out his lungs, the night’s storyboard faded, and once again he was just a university professor taking a shower.
He started to nod off under the steam, and he shut down the big jet and stood there, drip-drying his parts for a few seconds before stepping out of the tropical booth.
As he toweled off, he looked at the mirror, and his eyes did that weird thing that made everyone uncomfortable. His good eye somehow had perfect mobility, yet another of the thousand tiny miracles hidden inside the big one of him still being alive. But the orbit that housed his prosthetic had been put back together with a few titanium brackets and a beautiful ceramic insert, handcrafted by an artist in Okinawa. Problem was, it had zero motility, and whenever he shifted his gaze, he had to move his entire head; otherwise, the disjointed chameleon effect made it appear as if the tubes in his head were overheating, and it freaked some folks out—more rather than less. It was a party trick that he intentionally brought out only for special occasions, but every now and then it just kind of slipped by, and the result usually had someone looking for the exit. Which led to his habit of wearing sunglasses in public—inside and out. Lucas understood that a few of his new and improved physical traits voyaged well into the uncanny valley and began to scale the far side.
He was wrapping himself in a towel when there was a soft knock.
“Yeah?” he said, louder than he should have at this hour.
Erin came in wearing her flannel robe and a grumpy face.
“What?” he asked.
“Those assholes are back,” she said and left the bathroom.