Graft (29 page)

Across the road there's an old banger well beyond its last legs; sagging oddly and smoking, its bodywork either perforated or missing. A Ford, possibly. Yes, she recognizes the shape. It'd be strange if Sol's old passions hadn't rubbed off, hadn't crossed the membrane.

Mel moves to get an angle on the pavement. A sharp intake of breath. He's down there, his slender head shining, and in his arms there's a woman. Mel scans her, too: a young but hard-looking face, petite by old-fashioned appraisal, but powerful – dark-skinned, tautly held; the legs of a dancer, a gymnast, an athlete.

And a third arm.

“
God no,” Mel whispers. She wants to scream, slap herself. And even as she says it she knows Sol has detected her presence somehow; that he's staring up at the window.

Too late.

So Mel goes downstairs and unlocks the door.

“Thank Christ,” Sol blurts. The woman's eyes are burning up.

Mel drags him inside by one sleeve and pushes him along the hall, before squeezing past to lean out of the door – checking left, checking right. She scans the dark windows in the squat over the road, weighs up a young boy teetering forward with two bin bags all but covering his face. The faint tang of toxic smoke on the air tells her they've started burning rubbish already.

“Through there,” she says, shooing Sol into the waiting room. “Go.” And she joins them.

Sol stands motionless with the woman in his arms. “Need to move the car,” he tells her. His eyes are red and streaming, and his forehead looks burnt. “We can't keep it there.”

“You stink,” Mel says. “The pair of you.”

“Tell me where I can put her,” he says. “A spare bed, mattress. Anything soft.”

Mel shakes her head. “Don't do this to me.”

“Just a day, a couple of days. A week tops.”

“A
week
? They'll know. They'll be here before that.”

Sol's jaw muscles contract. “We'll get to that.”

“One night,” Mel says. “No more.” She enters the reception cage and pretends to check the rota. “One night,” she mutters again.

“It means the world,” Sol says.

Mel nods reluctantly. “Cassie's off, so you can have her room. It'll cost you, though. A night's takings, plus the launderette charge.”

“You said she's off.”

“Off the rota, yeah. Cassie isn't ever off. Never.”

“I'll sleep anywhere – outside if I have to. It's this one I'm bothered about.”

Y's eyes shift to Sol's mouth. Mel catches her quizzical expression, isn't sure how best to read it.

“You shouldn't have done this,” Mel tells him. He looks old to her, his physique strangely diminished. “Look at the state of you.”

“No choice,” Sol says. “And I won't be long.”

Mel sighs, relents. “First floor, third room on your right. Door's marked three.”

“Thanks,” Sol says, and leans at her slightly. “Front pocket, just in there – can you grab my keys out? Tools are in the car boot – if you wouldn't mind getting them as well, I'll…” He pauses, as if suddenly conscious of how immense their companionship once was.

Mel sways. She nods unsurely. “Alright,” she says. “I can do that.”

And now – is he smiling at her?

“Front left, chest pocket,” he says. “The big one.”

Mel tugs at his pocket flap. It's colder than she expects. The material's greasy, and his smell up close is weird, denatured. She keeps her fingers against the front of the pocket, avoiding studiously his chest wall. With a kind of release she feels the cold keys.

“Leave them out here,” he tells her, “and I'll get rid of the car.”

Sol carries Y away. Mel listens to him climbing the stairs, Cassie's door creaking open, and the door chain jangling against it.

U
p in Cassie's room
, Sol lays Y on the bed and folds its thin top sheet over her. “I know,” he says. “I know.”

He empties his pockets onto the side. Fluff, a powdery receipt, a few pence. Then the strange disc-like item he'd found in Sandy's car. This he places, precise and careful, on the makeup dresser – almost like he's trying to inset a gem.

“What about a change of clothes,” he says, and starts rooting in Cassie's chest of drawers for anything that might fit her. In this he presumes Y wants to wear women's clothes, well aware that his attempts at clothing her so far have been inadequate. But it also feels dangerous to decide her identity should be drawn from what really amounts to a differently tailored shape or colour, the simple taper of a garment. If she doesn't understand or care for these things, isn't he imposing a certain system upon her?

He searches regardless, until, by the toys and the bottles, the gels and liquids, the pads and the hair bobbles, he finds a stack of uniformly black T-shirts. He removes the top one – on it a classic Bowie image cracked from washing. It'll do.

Y's spine makes a creasing sound as he shifts her up the bed, props her against the headboard. “You got hollow bones, you, or what?” he says. “Try this one,
Space Oddity
. It'll be more than big enough on you.”

She doesn't respond.

“I'll keep them closed,” he adds. “Promise.” And he sticks to his promise – peeking only to reposition her double-arm in the sleeve hole without popping too many stiches. “There,” he says, her head bristling through the neck hole. Then, almost embarrassed: “Can always ask what else is knocking about.”

Y releases a croak.

“Try and rest,” he tells her, realizing immediately how little that means. He sniffs hard. “Or I'll stick the telly on if you want.” Without another thought he puts it on anyway – flicks channels until he finds a picture, and recognizes it, with a terrible heat, as a porn spool.

You stupid prick –

Sol slaps the off button. “Maybe not,” he says. The flush has him remove his sweater, and now he can smell himself. “Maybe just try to sleep,” he says, unsteady from the stink. Y's shoulders settle into her frame, and he notices her studying herself in the mirrored ceiling. “I'll try too – just a nap. And then I'll be back. You believe me, don't you?”

Something about the way Y is set on the bed – her tendrils of wiring now hidden from sight but stark beneath the shirt, her bald head, doubled arm, the tattoo on her neck – makes her appear both real and unreal. As if Sol could run a finger over her skin, feel a certain warmth, but still find a circle of dust on his fingertip.

He lowers his eyes and leaves the room.

M
el's pacing
when he returns to the reception. Chewing the skin off her thumbs, rubbing her sleeves with obsessive fervour.

“Mel–”

“You've got a nerve,” she hisses, shaking an unmarked bottle at him. His toolbag is on the floor by the door.

“You nearly killed us,” Sol says.

Mel sits down, takes another swig. “She hurt?”

Sol sits on the bench opposite. “Yes.”

“Fuck.”

The foyer screens fizz with interference.

“Tell me,” he says.

“Tell you what?”

“Who he was.”

“Who?”

“Give over, Melanie. The guy you sent.”

“No,” Mel says. “Sent? No… it wasn't like–”

“Who was he?”

“Oh God, Sol, what did he do? I just needed to know. I couldn't believe you'd bought one–”

“I found her,” he says, cutting her off. “No buying.”

Mel looks away. “He was only meant to check. I had to know. Why you'd ever need one…”

“Well he brought it all down with him.”

A single tear, oddly shaped, runs from Mel's false eye. He knows it'll be painful for her. “Maybe he told them,” she says. “I don't know. I don't know!”

“Them?”

She nods. “Jason.”

“Who the hell's Jason?”

Mel lets out a sharp sob. “It's just so fucking stupid. I've been so, so stupid.”

“No,” he says, clawing at his neck. “You're never stupid. Try harder.
Try
. For her – not me.”

Mel stands, crosses the foyer and snakes a slender arm under the counter. She returns to him with a ream of rolled paper, wearing a guilty look he knows better than most. “I didn't know what else to do,” she tells him, her tone softer, maybe even self-reproachful. “I thought he'd come back. That's what he said. I was going to work it out from there. I wondered if you'd got her from Jason.”

Sol unfurls what's clearly meant to be a catalogue – coverless but for an illegible title. The body of it has been mashed together from poor quality photocopies – a lot like the ska-zines he used to read. All those forgotten sounds and colours of his youth, a memory of his dad coming home from the garage, whistling something –

Sol flicks through the catalogue in a masochistic frenzy. It layers up on his heart. Torsos with multiple arms. Extra breasts, openings. Extra anything. Pitiless marketing lines in page-corner flashes; special offers like
Double up for double your money
. Captions talk of modular parts and scarless patches, seamless joints; clinical hygiene and realistic textures. Inbuilt languages, “technique packs”. There are swatch samplers you can send off for; skin tone comparison kits; and a whole section, almost a subcatalogue, of wigs. Design-your-own tattoo sets, hints at embeddable weapons, bladed attachments,
household essentials
. The word “appendage” over and over again. He flicks on to find features about near-future developments, a bizarre interview with some well-meaning developer who talks dispassionately about military, ethical and medical applications, as if total unwavering exploitation isn't the bottom line.

As if these people aren't sold as dolls.

By the last page, Sol has come unstuck.

“You use them here?”

Mel looks shocked. “No. None of them – not one.”

He places the catalogue under the bench and clasps his hands. “Then what's this about? What is it?”

“A ma… a man came. Jason, right? And Jason left Jeff with me… oh God it just doesn't make any
sense
–”

“You make your money from this place. Tell me what's in it for you.”

“Nothing,” she says. “Because we only had Jeff in. Like a way to diversify – that's what Jason said. Diversify. A free trial, another income stream. All these frigging
phrases
. But he's like a dog with a bone. He told me they don't sleep, or need it anyway, and the
overheads
, and I figured Jeff could be protection, for the doors. There was this night he did something bad, and we got him in the scary cupboard…”

Sol is blank.

“And you called and I was just sitting there, and I thought, I've got to
see
. It was too much. I couldn't – I couldn't see why you had one to yourself. I couldn't see you like that.”

Sol slowly places his head in his hands. Squeezes his scalp. “But why would I tell you? Why didn't you come yourself?”

“Because it's you. It's
you
.”

“But we're over.”

She swigs from her bottle, splashes it down her top on release. “You think I don't know? Better than anyone?”

“Don't bullshit me. That's all I want.”

“I'm not,” she says. “The girls, Sol… they can't just go on the streets, out there with the Wilbers, the council. I can't just turf them out, close it all down. Their lives are here. Their network is each other.”

“Bollocks to the Wilbers,” Sol says. “Bollocks to them.”

“I'm just saying. It's a safe place, this. That's how we've made it.”

“I saw lorries out there,” he says. He splits his fingers, points at his eyes. “Crates and crates, like a production line. This Jeff – he come with organs? Accessories?” He points at the ceiling. “Because she did. Whoever she was meant for – whoever's meant to have her – had organs spare.
Spare organs
.”

Mel looks bleary, unwieldy.

“That's not a life,” he says. “Any way you cut it.”

Now it's Mel's turn to snap. “And you sit there, don't you, Solomon, lecturing. Who are you to say what living should mean? You think it's always like that? You think the women here don't live? That there's shame in all this? Here's a shitty truth for you, sunshine: it's a
better
life sometimes. The places they come from, the things they've been through…”

Sol shakes his head bitterly. “Go and ask her that,” he snarls back. “Go and see if it's a better life. You know how I found her? A pair of pipes stuffed down her throat, sucking white paste through her nose.”

“So you're rescuing her, are you? Playing the big hero? Are you gonna rescue the rest of us next?”

“You're getting me all wrong. I'm not comparing choice and pressure. I'm only talking about her. Just her, people like her. And we came here because I know you care.”

“But I don't,” Mel says. “Not about you. Not enough. You look after your own now.”

“Jeff's dead,” he says. “So if Jason's due back, you'll need to be ready.”

Mel glares at him. Another swig from the bottle, her skin blotching. “Dead,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Fine,” she says.

“Do they know about you and me?”

She shakes her head. “I don't think so.”

Sol stands up, crosses the waiting room and takes Mel's bottle. Sips from it. “Then,” he says, “that's a start.”

S
andy's convoy
left the motorway to take a longer route south – something about state security massing at a checkpoint ahead. Y didn't understand much else of the transmission, but the driver turned and said, “Britain today.”

Owing to the diversion, Sandy's offroader led the convoy down an undulating country road, sides densely overgrown. Brambles squealed against the vehicle Y travelled in, their berries smearing on the windows. She could smell their sharpness.

Y's driver kept a bracelet of beads wrapped around his indicator stalk, which rattled incessantly. “Too much dithering,” the driver said to his cohort, an unkind-looking man with a rifle propped between his legs. “I need my sleep.” But the other man said nothing, and Y only saw his face from oblique angles, crops of his features in the driving mirrors. Clearly, idle chatter was off the table.

By a layby, Sandy's vehicle, the lead vehicle, sounded its horn three times. The whole convoy slowed, then stopped. Sandy's driver stepped out and took the opportunity to relieve himself by a tree. His back to her, Y noticed a few grazing animals through holes in the bordering hedgerows of the field beyond him. They were dirty, emaciated things, but they brought to mind the view from the mansion grounds. Like there, the sky here was birdless – a wide smeary grey, threaded with blueish gaps that ran through it like varicose veins. Surprised, Y found herself missing the skies above the mansion.

She was pulled from her reverie by shouting. New orders being barked down from the front and relayed by each driver in the convoy. Her driver got back in, muttering, and said to his silent cohort: “All the same, these bloody bureaucrats.”

As they moved away again, Y thought of the water faucet on the mansion lawns, rationed liquid passing her lips.

Before her, and behind them, the transfer vehicles continued to descend through the countryside. Owing to their new orders, however, the gaps between each vehicle had increased by thirty yards. Something had changed back there, and Y thought her driver was tenser. She couldn't have known that this way they would minimize losses if there was an ambush, an IED or drone strike. She wouldn't consider that the vehicles' seatbelts, crumple zones, under-armour or bulletproof glass would only do so much.

Eventually the convoy rejoined the motorway. “But we're stopping again soon,” the driver said impassively, and sure enough another service road welcomed them after another few miles.

At the end of this road sat a unique building – a cottage inset between banks of heavy evergreens. As they came into its grounds, away from the road, it became clear that the cottage's traditional walls were cut away to reveal a tinted glass fascia. Inside, visible joists and floors, sepia under the glass, gave the building the appearance of an opened dolls' house. Silhouettes moved between its floors.

Was this Manchester? Y's stomach twinged. Of course it wasn't. She knew that as fact somewhere in there, in some kernel of knowledge, some tiny fortress of her mind the makers hadn't razed.

An armed woman waved them towards a lowered barrier. “Last in, first out,” the guard said, mocking. Apparently overthinking the barrier, Y's driver stalled the vehicle and swore loudly. The guard put her hand on the roofline as the driver restarted it. “And if you need a mechanic, you only need to ask nicely.”

Here Sandy's convoy broke up: the heavier units rolled closer to the house, while the four-by-fours split off towards the forest. It felt rehearsed, ordinary. By the cottage were privateers on their rounds, and some of the younger children – brothers and sisters – were already out of their seats and stalking across the turf towards the entrance.

At last the minder in the passenger seat turned to speak. His face startled her: his eyes were like Chaplain's, threw intense colour. “You wait, beautiful,” he told her. His voice was detached and even, and his eyes were locked to the belt crossing her chest. “They taught you patience, did they? Sandy's taking you from here, so keep it locked. Be a good girl.”

Y nodded as politely as she could, squinted as light through the vehicle's sunroof was reflected back from his face as a hundred suns.

“I mean it,” the man said. “Invested a lot in you. You've got debts to repay, now. All this transport doesn't come cheap. And if you say, do, or even so much as think about pulling anything on us – anything at all – between now and then, I'll have that pretty little mouth closed up faster than you can blink.”

After this he left and slammed the door. Y watched him walk away: a stooping gait, wiry and lithe in comparison to their thick-beamed driver.

Y wanted to get out of the car, now. Being cramped up in here created a yearning in her to do warm-down stretches under the trees, a breeze over her skin. As it was, the driver had left the window down as if she were a dog, and the forest seemed to thicken the longer she looked at it.

Y waited. Y despaired. Had she touched a tree like that before? Climbed one, even? She could imagine holding a hand to the bark and closing her eyes, sensing the tree as it aged in symphony with her, the vibrations of its growth rippling outwards like its rings.

Then something else caught her attention. A gleam in the cottage's glass, temporarily disturbed – like a bird's shadow had crossed it. And a distant noise, a wailing, followed by an enormous crack that jolted the vehicle.

Looking up through the sunroof, Y saw a mirage of two enormous birds, their reflections swimming in the glass of the cottage. As she followed them, she realized they were getting larger. Privateers outside were starting to notice, too – a commotion broke out by the main doors.

“State drones!” someone yelled. And still they came closer, wheeling the cottage like it was carrion.

Sandy appeared in the porch, running from it, hair tumbling from her high ponytail. She was shouting, “Your headscarves! Put on your headscarves!”

Roaring, the first drone hovered above the cottage, steady and poised. The second drone looped away and disappeared. Frightened, though not exactly sure of what, Y tried all the locks, then slapped on the nearest window until it was smeared with oil from her hands.

There was another crashing noise, a breathless rattle, as the second drone buzzed the group at low altitude. Its sonic boom pounded the vehicle's windows, and so many people, running in streams from the cottage entrance, tripped and went over.

Shielded by the cottage, an anti-aircraft weapon wound up and began to fire.

While everything told her to stay still, to embrace patience, her training, and despite the escort's threat, Y flopped onto her side, drew her knees up to her chest and kicked the off-roader's window with both feet.

The first impact felt like it shattered her knees. The second was more painful, seemed even less effective. And just before the third she saw the drones shimmer again in the house glass.

Sandy reached Y's offroader just as a drone launched its first salvo. Paired missiles spiralled down behind the cottage – presumably meant for the AA battery. The result was horrible – a demonic bloom that seemed to burst then eat itself, leaving only a braid of smoke that hung there, slowly distending.

Sandy was going wild outside. She hammered on the window glass. “Y!” she shouted, “keep it together!” But her words were lost under a steady prattle of small arms fire, and through the sunroof Y saw the drone gain altitude, shrink to a speck. She sat up. It was clear that the dropoff point – this exchange point – had been discovered. So were they her salvation, up there in the sky? Or were they delivering something worse?

Behind Sandy, privateers were running across the cottage lawns with ash tumbling off them, the air hazy. Something sticky was in their hair and across their shoulders – brownish, a clumpy powder. A man cut through the flow and made his way towards them. It was the driver, Y saw, with his mouth opening and closing mutely. The off-roader's locks sprung and the doors swung open. Sandy barrelled into the back head-first, face paralyzed with confusion. She cupped Y's cheeks and said, words seemingly lodged in her throat, “It's gas – they're using gas!”

Sandy's eyes were childlike, seeking. Her composure had evaporated. Y looked down into the gap between them, at their identical physiques. And there she saw the little tooth hanging from Sandy's neck, displaced from her tight collar, which beneath the madness of war was gently tickling Y's skin.

A little tooth. A manacle –

Y wasn't frightened anymore. Wrath supplanted her. She took Sandy's pendant in her fist and hauled; brought Sandy up and across her body, head crashing against the door. The opposite door was still open, and thanks to her training, a tending towards self-preservation in situations she could control, Y slid feet-first towards it. Released, so close to being free, Y pushed Sandy's feet over and scrambled across the bench seat, tumbling out into long grass. Her escape was rather more convulsive than graceful, and she nicked both shins on the footplate, clattered on all three forearms into the soil. Wheezing, she rocked back and collapsed against the tyre wall, knees aching. The noise above was abominable. The gas haze was spreading. She got up, covered her face and dashed for the treeline. Only as she got there did she find the tooth fragment embedded in her palm.

Sandy gestured madly at the driver to follow their cargo, and set off in pursuit. She could tell Y was running faster than she ever could – lithe and straight – her hands up and protecting her face from the ash. That speed would be a good thing in any other setting, certainly. She saw Y reach the treeline and scream into her hands just as another sonic boom rang out. Sandy's legs were swept out by the overpressure. She herself cried out, defeated, and down in the dirt, winded, she fought to breathe; her head in her own hands, gasping like a landed fish. Dust billowed over her skin and caught in the fine hairs of her arms.

A grid of green laser passed over. Sandy looked skyward, and knew the hovering drone had dropped its target perimeter, was parsing the terrain.

Sandy also knew what came next. Over the last few years, her various trips had shown her plenty of drones in action on the open motorway. This strike was consistent with the state's modus operandi, not least because the style of attack – sudden and uncompromising – hadn't been altered since the infamous footage the state distributed as a warning, as their proof of concept. That had been the strike drones' first official outing – a raid on an ultra-nationalists' training base in the Pennines. Sandy still remembered the stories: impossible-sounding accounts of thousands of startled birds sweeping into the gape of the valleys and out again through Manchester.

Conversely, Y – who was now in the forest and out of sight – didn't have a clue what was about to happen. Sandy might have sighed in another setting. This poor woman wouldn't know until it was too late. And yet there was a small mercy in that: she'd only really feel pain for the few moments it took for the phosphorous shells to burst and rain their awful jelly; for the globs of it to feast and devastate her nerve endings. So perhaps her sigh was talking more to the waste of all this. Their painstaking process of selection, augmentation, delivery. The cost alone. The Manor Lord's personal approval.

Was it worth it? Was it worth doing all Sandy had done to rebuild her own mind?

Y reappeared among the trees now, going unhindered in the grass. Her three muscular arms were outstretched, hands open. Her shorn head a buttercup yellow. Sandy saw that there was a stream between them, but knew it would offer little relief when the phos came. You can only extinguish phos as long as it's underwater, so when it's in your hair, your choice is simple: burn or drown.

Sandy didn't see much point in getting up. She couldn't outrun the drone. She couldn't outrun her choices.

“Yasmin!” she called. It was emphatically wrong to use the name, but Sandy alone had found this woman, specified her mods, marked out her special dispensations. The boss had been specific on one thing only: that he expected the best possible return on investment. His way of saying, Sandy gleaned, that he wanted the woman who would be Y to do what Sandy couldn't.

But then again
, Sandy thought,
we're all replaceable.

Sandy squinted up at the drone as the grid retracted. Any picosecond now, an inferno was coming –

Only nothing happened. The drone hung a beat longer. Then it soared away.

Sandy exhaled and rose shakily. She pawed the line wrapping her throat where her pendant chain had bitten like a garrotte, and set off for the trees. Y's driver had now intercepted her at the treeline, the off-roader sprawled precariously over the stream. As Sandy came closer, she watched Y's escort – Keating she believed he was called – shepherding her back into the vehicle at gunpoint. By the time Sandy reached them, hair sticking to the sweat of her face, Keating was astride Y on the back seat, and her three arms were trapped beneath her.

“Keating?”

The man swivelled, implants fierce, and Y's knees were bleeding into the fabric. In one hand Keating held high an industrial stapler, fangs exposed. It looked to Sandy so much like a sacrificial dagger.

“Keating!” Sandy shouted. “What are you doing?”

“Fuck off!” the escort hissed. In his other hand there was a small pistol.

“No,” Sandy said. “Don't.”

“Why?” Keating said. “They think he can't exert himself here? They have to
learn
.”

Sandy went forward and took his wrist.

“Not her,” she said. “She's too val–”

Keating shot Sandy through the abdomen.

“She's mine,” Keating said. And the forest went muffled.

Sandy slid into a silent, painless lake beneath the trees. There, fading in her depths, she listened to Keating's steady breathing as he set about locking Y's mouth.