Graft (12 page)

Cassie's sitting there, a slender joint on the burn. “He gone?”

Mel nods. The smell of green is dizzying. “What the bloody hell was that all about? You heard what he said?”

Cassie grimaces. “He's not far wrong about it, M… Jeff's been prowling all day. Heard him outside mine before – even caught him leaning into the door when I opened it.”

Mel tries to mask the despair of knowing her gut feeling was right. A breath before she speaks again. “Where are the others now?”

“Stropped off home.”

Mel shakes her head. “Look at the state of it.”

“It's sortable,” Cassie says. “Dustpan and brush. But Mel, don't give them a hard time. He was way out of line that punt – too much coke probably… too much swag. And Jeff… you tell me. He's been acting like king of the castle. He bounces up there, opens the door and–”

“And what?”

Suddenly Cassie looks uncertain. “I'd just keep him locked up, if I were you. Get to the bottom of what he's playing at, going after clients like that. No wonder it booted off.”

Mel feels pale. “What did he do?”

Cassie doesn't reply.

“Cass.”

Cassie sighs. “He went in there with his hands down his pants. The girls said it was like he saw something and decided he wanted a go himself. Like he just couldn't help it.”

Mel finds herself leaning on the counter, head swimming.

“If it was me,” adds Cassie, two fingers scissoring, “I'd chop it off.”

T
omorrow came
. They extracted Y before sunset, when purple skies gave into brown, and thin clouds like cracks appeared and ran to the serrated horizon. Several armed makers escorted her across the training lawns and down the mansion's drive. “You're ready, you're ready,” they chanted, like an incantation.

They passed rock gardens where the flowers had faded into blue and brown, a thousand sad things left unwatered, and Y noticed that the sprinklers were limp, dribbling, and that even the drinking fountains were off. Everything was losing its colour.

She walked her last walk in this place with bare feet, her training pumps in two hands, her third hand coiled into her chest, taut over the pendant. She thought of her brothers and sisters left behind, with their incubators fixed above, and wondered if they'd leave today, too.

The grass was still tickly, its heat from the day starting to dissipate. She found she could scrunch her toes and pull little clumps from the soil – a final act of petty rebellion. She tried to smile to herself, but a numbness stayed her. Whatever happened in the bursor room had exhausted her. Her shoulders wouldn't rotate properly, and the articulation of her joints was different. In her mind she kept revisiting the space; remembered the anger, the warmth in her hands. Then she felt frustrated: it was all too abstracted – another misremembered dream.

What would she miss? Certainly not the asinine things the makers and their minions said when they woke her. Certainly not these lawns. In fact, she'd miss nothing except perhaps the homeliness of routine. The structured monotony of life here. Now, she knew, it was only her ability to adjust that mattered.

At the same time, she knew she was good at adjusting. She'd become even better at forgetting. By design she'd become a woman of sinew and tough, gristly meat – there was no capacity for floundering. And if she came back here, it would be to do one thing.

Beyond the mansion's gates sat a matt-black vehicle with enormous caterpillar tracks. For a time she stood in the warm breeze of its exhaust vents, until someone behind, another maker in a surgical mask, gestured towards the top hatch. Y climbed it and turned to the mansion, its immaculate lines. In the odd light it was the colour of baby teeth; had the smoothness of bone. She blinked at it. It was him. It was all him, here.

A maker on the ground said, “You've done him proud. Our finest work yet.”

And the whole squad saluted her in unison.

Y lowered herself through the hatch, her sore lats taking the strain. Her feet found purchase on something hard, and she found herself in a cramped hold that reeked of disinfectant. She took a seat on a slab bench facing inwards. The surfaces were greasy with oil and condensate. With the engine running, everything squeaked and rattled around her. The disinfectant stung her eyes.

She wasn't alone. Three others sat on the opposite bench, one hooded, two asleep. A troop escort dropped in after her; stood on the footplate beneath the turret. He pushed the gun up its channel and out on its rails. Then he turned and kneeled and cuffed Y to a pipe.

“Wanna watch her if I was you,” he told Y, pointing to the hooded traveller opposite. The hooded head rose, flopped again. “Yeah, that one. Spitter.”

Y closed her eyes.

“Look at me, girl.”

Y looked at her bonds, the pipe.

“I said look at me.”

Y defied him again. She stared at the top of the passenger's bowed head, saw patterns in the hood's weave.

“Dickhead,” the escort said, and tutted. “Was only gonna say you'll want to keep shuffling. Give you piles that bench will.”

Y responded by tensing her muscles.

You could snap him if you wanted to.

The thought jolted her. Intrusive at best. It exploded from nowhere – but she knew in her bones, in her molten insides, that she ought to believe it.

The rattles intensified. Something clanged against the hull, and the transport juddered and rolled away.

The escort stood up. His hips swivelled left and right; swung his gun turret accordingly – the squeak of the mechanism audible even over the engine.

Y closed her eyes and tilted her pelvis. She braced against the seat. When she opened them again, the escort was back down in the hold, sitting on his platform. He was skinning something with a small knife: a red fruit with a sharp smell. “Only a short hop to the Slope,” he said, tearing out a segment and eating it. “So listen up.”

Y watched a line of juice run from the corner of his mouth.

“Bet they haven't told you about the Slope,” he said, chewing wetly. “They never do.”

Y looked down. Only that once, in the canteen. She shook her head.

“It's cosmic up close,” he told her, eyes blazing. “Everything's this weird colour. But it isn't a place for humans. The Slope isn't tarmackable – you can't wire it, run a staircase down it, make it safe. It won't roll out the red carpet for you. We shouldn't be using it, to be honest. No one should've found it. Beggars belief we even did. And surprise surprise, it's got a million ways to let you know you aren't welcome.”

The escort looked young; seemed younger even than her. There was a little rash of hair on his chin.

“Fucked-up climate on there as well,” he went on. “Goes widthways forever – they sent parties both directions, and only a few came back. The ones who did say there's creatures beyond. Forests of gore, canopies of skin, failed teeth. Mad stuff like that. And it's always cold, and slippery – this crazy white dust on everything. Ruins your boots, like lime, you know? And the wind, the stories you hear about that wind – it kicks up from nowhere and puts the powder in the air. It'll sand down your suit and flay you to bone if you even look at it the wrong way. And then he'll find a way to collect you. He owns all of it, that way.”

Y listened. In her mind's eye, the mansion was receding.

“Then you've got these random, spilled-over slips,” the escort said. “Anti-holes you can fall in, lose things down. Like your feet. Your legs if you're really unlucky. Or the slips that open up and dump second-world shit on you. Silly bastards on the other side not using the official bridge in here, you know? And what else…” He scratches his head. “Ahh, stormdunes. Ruthless like waves: they'll slide over and smother you. Shred everything they pass, when they're big enough. And there's ash. Your breathing gear has to chew through that stuff when it starts spewing. Man, the Slope's just nasty… a nasty place.” The escort smiled. “But needs must,” he said. “Otherwise they'd find the mansion, wouldn't they? And that'd be no good for business.”

Y started to feel ill.

“You'll be grand, though. Honest. I'd just feel lucky you've got a trolley squad, anyway. Most of you – them, sorry – go boxed up, on sleds.” He nodded, as if the comment were simple fact – as casual as a comment on the weather – then shook his head and looked away as if he'd only just remembered he wasn't meant to speak about it. “Most of you, yeah.”

And the transport lumbered on.

R
oy's four pints down
, with a fifth, just poured, foamy on the bar. He taps at his head. Way too drunk to drive now, though somewhere in there he decides he'll try regardless.

The jukebox cranks out vintage Roses, Mondays, Carpets – predictable tunes for a border pub, where the lucky-rich and damned cross paths. Carefree, mad-fer-it Manchester, repurposed and sold back to the bare future through a haze of nostalgia. The barmaid serving them with a watch-yourself glare. She's got one earbud in – techno music leaking – and her fingers sweep over a tablet when she isn't serving.

Roy peers over his pint glass horizon and sees her with cream wings, blinks, and realizes they're just the curtains across the bar.

“Want a drink?”

The barmaid glances up from her tablet. “You say something, mate?”

Roy pushes a note across the bar. “A drink with me.”

She looks him up and down. “I don't drink with strangers.”

“Course, love,” he says, palms out. He turns over his hand and notices blood under his fingernails.

“Love? I ain't your love, you condescending little shit. Keep your drinks and those grubby mitts to yourself.”

“So stuck up,” Roy slurs. “What about our morale?”

The barmaid slams a short glass on to the bar just an inch from Roy's hand. He jumps.

“Think I haven't heard all that? All your bullshit? Sad-sack old dicks like you playing Billy-big-bollocks 'cos I'm a young bird with something going for myself? 'Cos you think you still run the world from Didsbury?”

Roy hasn't got anything for that.

“Thought so.” The barmaid kisses the back of her teeth, goes to serve someone else. Then, over her shoulder, she adds: “Sooner you old twats cop it, the sooner we'll get back on track.”

Roy taps the note on the bar. Then he winks into space, slides his eyes towards the door. “You keep that.”

The man she's serving nods at Roy. “Had enough, you have.”

“Fuck off,” Roy says. “White knight.” He topples from his stool, heads for the toilet. On the way he spots two men with eyes on him. Wilbers on the prowl – their blank brown uniforms hanging off them.

“Any
labouring
jobs going?” Roy asks as he passes.

The men ignore him. Look right through him.

He stops, turns. “Oi – yeah. Where's your child catcher parked?”

One of the men pouts at him.

Roy grabs his gut, shakes it. “Wouldn't lift me out of here if you tried.” Then he opens the toilet door and wobbles to the urinal. From the sounds of it, someone's indulging a bad habit in the cubicle alongside.

Peeing with one hand, Roy leans back and slaps the wall. “Council!” he shouts. “You're gripped!” The person in the cubicle simply laughs in response.

Back in the bar lounge, the Wilbers have gone. Roy takes his jacket from the stool, flicks the Vs at the man across the bar and heads for the door.

“And don't bother again!” the barmaid shouts after him.

It's raining outside, and a fine grey mist has drawn in. Without thinking, Roy fumbles the keys, gets back in the mark's car. Starts it. He looks up at the roof liner. Then at himself in the rear-view mirror. A swollen cheek, greasy forehead. He sees the mark's exploded face again, the Reverend on the backseat, applauding it all –

And through his beer fog, he remembers now the news that greeted him when he came off that crane gantry: the first responders bundling him into an ambulance. The heat of the fires and the weird-smelling wind. Roy blinks. The cold has drawn tears. So many questions still over there, over those hills. The drone attack and all the birds that followed…

Jesus, he's drunk.

He asks himself then, his reflection: “Where to?” As if he really doesn't think that anywhere else will do.

B
y now Sol's
dialled 999 too many times to count. Each attempt yields the same result: his breath looped through the mic and out through the speaker.

Hollow, he paces the customer room with his overalls done up to the neck. The woman sits in stasis, her sheets damp, the sofa eating her up, the rootball of her double shoulder set forward like she's trying to curl into herself. He watches her and listens to the rattling windows and with every lap understands that his night is sliding towards the inevitable: a call to the last person on Earth he wants to call.

In the gaps between dialling, he asks the woman for information. Names and addresses; parents and friends; doctors, teachers or institutions. Anything.

“Writing it down might help,” he says, looking at her ruined lips. “Anything at all. We're going to get hold of someone for you. Just try and tell me something.”

But there's nothing. It's like she isn't here at all – her eyes clouded, implacable. He looks helplessly over the dirty marks on her arms and neck where he's touched or held her and finds himself wanting to clean her, erase them from her skin, as if this alone might be enough to help her start anew.

Next he tries an old roadmap; guides her shaking finger to the paper. “Manchester,” he says, outlining the city's uneven shape, without considering how she might not think his way; might not possess an engineer's perspective, the deconstructor's curious mind. Then, farther out: “Greater Manchester. Cheshire. Yorkshire. Liverpool over there. And this is the whole of the north west. This is the whole country. And this, this is the continent… You don't remember
any
of this?”

He holds her finger and pleads for her to show him home. For her to see something she recognizes.

“Please,” he says.

But there's only blinking. The blankness of catatonia. The smells of oil, solvent, rust. And the sound of Sol's pulse in his ears.

He dials the nines. Failure. He moves around in Spirograph circles, appetiteless, knowing he should try to eat anyway. There's little on offer here, except a jar of gone-off synth-milk that smells like eggs. All he can do for now is pour glasses of water, guide it through the tiny gaps in her lips…

Occasionally, though, her mistiness passes, and she seems more tangible in the room; watches the walls, the clock, with fascination. Sol flits around her, a drifting moth, trying to capture her attention before she slips back into her private void.

It gets to well past midnight. He dials once more. It rings. It rings. It rings.

“Hello caller. What's your emergency?”

“Oh my God,” Sol whispers. “Oh, thank Christ.”

“Hello? Can I help you?”

“Yes,
no
– holy
shit
I need an ambulance. Old Trafford, workshop off Chester Road – as soon as you've got one ready get it out here and–”

“Sir, you're blurting,” the operator interrupts. “I'll need you to calm down for me. Can you do that? I'm here, now. You're going to be fine. Calmly, now, tell me what's happened. This is a triage call. Do you understand what that means?”

Sol goes on: “It's – I've found someone. She's… oh my God. She's been kidnapped or something. I don't know. She can't understand. She doesn't, she can't speak and–”

“OK,” the operator says. “OK. Sir, let's breathe. You're hard to follow, and the line's bad. Is she injured?”

“No,” Sol says. He looks at her. “I don't know. Her mouth's sealed up–”

“Sutured?”

“No, closed up. Like with
staples
.”

“Right,” the operator says.

“Right?”

“Sir…”

“Help us!”

“Sir, I'm not sure we can do much for you here. Not like this.”

“What?” Sol stares at the patchy floor. “What do you mean?” Rubber marks from his boots. Flecks of mud and grit on his scuffed toecaps.

“We're only responding to serious injuries tonight. I'd recommend taking her to a walk-in clinic. Your current waiting time's about three or four days. Where did you say you were? Old Trafford? I mean there's a mobile clinic in Ordsall… Can she drink at all?”

Sol looks at her. “I…”

“I know it's not ideal,” the operator says. “But if she can take fluids, and you can keep her warm, it's probably your best bet.”

“She's got something wrong with her knees,” Sol says. “They're
bleeding
.”

“Sir…”

“Don't do this to us. Please. Please don't…”

“Sir, you have to understand. We have other callers waiting.”

“But she's got
three
–”

The line dies.

Sol hammers the nines once more. Dial tone.

“Fuck!” he shouts. “Fuck it!”

The woman's eyes snap to him. He stares back at her, holding the phone to his head.

“I'm sorry,” he says. He goes to her. He takes a hand, and she doesn't protest, and he says, “Help me out. I can't do it on my own.”

Her eyes drop. Sol can almost feel her disengage.

Then an idea: what about the note – the circle-monogrammed paper that came with her? He unpockets it: reads and re-reads it. It's so matter-of-fact. Shopping-list banal. It says:

Accessories to follow. Still in transit. Cash in glove box. Any problems, try Knutsford first.

Sol recalls the scene. The Lexus pulling out, the noise of Irish on the bonnet. The note – was it left for the driver in leathers? Or
by
him? Sol still believes the driver was collecting the Lexus: his unsureness behind the wheel suggested he'd never driven it before. And then the motorbike with its smart pillion passenger – it was too coincidental. Maybe this woman had dropped off the Lexus and swapped places with the man in leathers, making this a link in a chain; the bike a sort of getaway vehicle. Looking at it coldly, it makes sense to Sol that way – if you're hiding something like this, some grim cargo, you'd never leave a car so conspicuous on a street like that. Not without protection, and certainly not for long. The whole area is renowned for thefts. Sol and Irish were part of that. And yet the old man told them he saw decent cars parking there. Did it happen regularly?

Accessories to follow.

Sol holds his neck. For a human? Is that what it means? Something moves around inside him. Pictures coming together. He goes to the car: the cash isn't a lie – there's at least a grand in the glovebox. He flicks through it. Is this, what, a transfer payment?

Now Sol feels way out of his depth. And still the solution could be the call he doesn't want to make, that he keeps putting off. Because if the services can't help, who will?

Sol swears. He's only remembered three numbers his entire life.

Irish's, Miss Wales'.

And Mel's.

He looks at the three-armed woman on the sofa and dials.

“Who's this?” Her greetings were always sharp, clinical.

“It's me. It's Sol.”

“It's late,” she tells him.

“I'm in trouble.”

“Call someone else.”

“Please, Melanie. You've got pals in the force.”

“The force? Not anymore.”

“One of your customers…”

She sighs so dismissively, so disappointedly. Sol imagines her false eye jerking in its socket. Remembers the sweet-smelling fluid secreted from its tearduct when she was happy. “You get yourself into a mess,” she says. “You get yourself out of it again.”

He finds himself whispering to her, mumbling about the staples, and she goes silent before she tells him to unpick them.

“Start by her cheeks and work towards the middle,” she says. “Jaw clamped.”

“I don't have the tools.”

“You're a mechanic.”

It goes on like this. And just as Sol marks shapes on the cold floor, he can hear Mel pacing too.

“She has a name,” Mel says. “She must do. You need to find a thread, keep pulling, unravel her.” Then some mention of warm clothing and vitamins. She tells Sol to head home before the sun's up. “You'll have to feed her and bathe her. Then you need to let her go. Take her somewhere. Hospital. I don't fucking know. Jesus, why am I still talking to you?”

Finally, inevitably, the conversation veers into a personal wasteland – the tersely guarded emotions left in the wake of their relationship. She tells Sol to hang up on her; that he just isn't her responsibility anymore. He left her, remember – has he forgotten that? “And listen,” she says. “I got myself sorted, didn't I? I got out of that bed without your help.”

“I know,” he says. “I know what you did.”

“Then there's no conversation. You can't be ringing me like this.”

“But Mel,” he says. “She's got three arms.”

The line goes quiet.

“Three, Mel.”

“I heard you. Tell me that again.”

He tells her that again.

“No.”

“It's true.”

“No, Sol,” Mel says. “Oh no. You stupid,
stupid
prick.”

R
oy hears
the lev before he sees it. The distinct whine of the craft's motor slows to a crackle as it matches the car's speed.

He looks at the clock with a sinking feeling. Why didn't he dump the car? He cups his hand and smells his breath. “Bastard,” he says.

A cone of light breaks from above, bleaches everything. “
Bastard
.” He eases off. No clue where he is.

“When it's safe to move over and stop, please do so.” A woman's voice, distorted by the craft's hailer.

Roy continues, plays oblivious. He's got ten seconds max before a second warning. Thirty before the lev's EMP cannon comes out. Roy knows the lev must be close to the roof – its engine wash sends rain whirling into eddies round the wing mirrors.

“Bastard!” He reaches for his revolver, pushes the business end into the roof lining. The broken tube of his homemade silencer a flowered daffodil on its end. He hesitates, holds his breath, tightens his trigger finger.