Graft (7 page)

The second handler is out in the Channel. Sol's heard it's a derelict sea fort from the Second World War – a hacker commune whose business involves getting information out of Europe without lines of black marker through the juicy bits. An island province, guarded by mercs whose only task is protecting the server farms that pay their wages. The handler there talks to him impassively, unfazed by the request.

Sol's third connector is somewhere back on land, or at least some way beneath it – a common theme. She has a neutral accent, a colder manner, and a reliable line.

The fourth handler is somewhere more exotic: apparently Argentina.

The fifth – Sol's actual contact – takes the call from a repurposed killbox at the heart of the abandoned SAS complex in Hereford. Here they're anxious about security, and understandably so: their station is more like a nation state. Sol hears the connecting clicks, a series of antiquated modem sounds, and finally a voice, crisp as an October morning, with a Swansea accent.

“Mr Manchester?”

“Miss Wales,” Sol says, confused by how she can tell. “You know I can't stay away long.”

“Been a while since we last heard off you, hasn't it?” He can hear her smile. “Missed that voice of yours I have. Shaky down there are you? Getting giddy?”

“Has been time. Can't say no to easy money though. How's tricks?”

She chuckles. “Don't laugh and you'll cry. Four tells me you're after heavy comps, eh? The market's a bit crap, to be honest. Dire for months now.”

“Shit,” Sol whispers. “Not even ceramics?”

“Dismal, babe. Unless you've got a trowel, a field and a few spare years. Saying that, if you've got cash spare for a courier and a guard we're good for blast film. You're looking at steel, steel, or rewelded steel.”

Sol sighs. “Who's shifting it?”

“Old plant north of Cambridge. Handful of ex-council boys moved there – they did a lot of the riot conversions down that way. Not been running materials for long, mind, but doling out DIY kits since Birmingham kicked off.”

Sol picks his nails. “Is the steel all stripped out?”

Miss Wales pauses to look over something. “Yep. Says structural here. And God knows how, but I know they got hold of some dumper truck buckets recently…”

“Balls,” Sol says. Thick or no, stripped-out metal means dirty metal – sometimes without serial numbers filed off. Put another way, people get whisked off on state holidays for less. It's exactly the kind of shipment they send drones out hunting for.

“Timeframe?” Sol asks.

“How long you got?”

“Till yesterday.”

Sol hears paper rustling, a pen clicked on. “Let's have a look. I'll be with you now.”

Sol waits.

“You there?”

“Yep.”

“It's a few days at a push,” Miss Wales tells him. “Be a bin truck that drops it, so you'll have to cover fuel.”

Sol looks at the ceiling, does the maths. “Fuel, yep. Right.”

“How many heads you want with it?”

“Fewer the better.”

“I can book it in with a driver and guard for now?”

“Yeah OK – and what's the insurance on that?”

“Let's see… vanilla… No letters. One CS. And our standard drone waivers – nothing's insured if they have a pop, etcetera… The usual drill.”

It's enough. The essentials. These are the risks of the motorway network.

“
And you're sure I'd be waiting for anything else?”

“
Definitely. We've got MoD bods coming straight to us, it's getting that ropey.”

“Christ. Well, I'll send a pigeon over with your bonus. Thanks for the help.”

Miss Wales laughs. “My pleasure, treasure. Paygate's open when you're ready.”

“Go for it,” Sol says. “And cheers again.”

“Don't be a stranger.”

Static.

Sol paces over to the Lexus as he waits for the automated voice to cut in. He runs a hand over the car's roofline and thinks back to earlier – two hundred quid? That Roy was a cheeky sod. He stands by the bonnet, rubs away a streak of muck that looked like a scratch. The payment confirmation tone rings out. “Charge accepted,” the robovoice says. Then, to finish, a cartoon fanfare telling him the funds have gone.

Sol hangs up and puts the phone on his belt loop. He feels anxious to get going – knowing he won't be satisfied unless he does a good job. It's always this way when they take on a new client.

He stops by the Lexus' boot, distracted, deciding to clean it out now before he goes home.

He opens the boot.

He looks in.

And the workshop spins out, disintegrates –

The pieces all fall away –

Black and purple, heat, dizziness –

Nausea –

Because in the boot of the Lexus.

There's a body.

T
he driller came
to Y's cradle side. He said, “Wakey-wakey!” and, “Guess who's got his hat on!”

Y opened her eyes. She was learning to suppress the terror now, to embrace the dark tower that stood sentinel through the night. The driller was looming, enormous. He glowered at her. “You kids have it all in here – where's your get up and go?”

Y pulled away her sleep feeds, patted down her cradlewear. She hissed at him, her version of a sigh. The driller smiled vacuously. “Come on, flower. Let's turn that frown upside down. Get out of that pit and get warmed up…”

His voice went through Y. The sentiment was metallic, grating. Almost sarcastic.

Y got ready while he watched. It didn't bother her. The whispers about brothers and sisters in dark rooms downstairs made it seem easy, and in any case the driller was dispassionate, his eyes dull with a doctor's seen-it-all glaze. He was actually making notes on the development of her frame. Live-tweaking his drill routine.

Y wore a black vest, black shorts, and the pendant. Her feet were bare. The driller stood her to attention and they set off through the cradle suites, out through an impressive corridor whose walkway shivered with uncanny radiance. On the way, they passed bustling kitchens, a bowling green, engineering workshops, a cavernous shooting range. Guard squads marched around in single file, so close to each other their movements looked mechanized. The floors were cold and bitty. To Y these rooms beyond her cradle suite felt permanently askew.

Intrigued, Y looked into the last area for a second or two – enough to recognize the shapes stretched across a target board. A moment more and the truth hit her: the boards weren't static at all. At the far end of the range, whimpering on a leash, was an enormous bovine creature with fabric pinned to its flanks. Printed on the fabric was the outline of a man.

“No rubbernecking,” the driller said. He took her shoulder and hurried her along. “We'd never waste someone like you on senseless violence like that.”

He watched me. He said he was my father.

As they continued, Y heard a barrage of shots. The sounds – high-pitched, rattling – made her jump. When the noise was over, she couldn't hear the creature whining.

Now they reached the cavernous atrium, marble-walled and gilded. Her footsteps carried in here – echoed upwards to a vaulted ceiling. Y listened to the liquid sounds of water fountains that caught light and sent resonant wave paintings cascading up the walls. Ripples of colour and texture, no two the same. Behind them, a red staircase led away into the mansion's upper tiers. Its bannister appeared to be made of bone.

The driller took her through the double front door and into the grounds.

Outside, a realm away from Y's cradle cooling systems, it was early but already sweltering. Over the hot season, the lawns turned a crisped heather colour, and the milking animals rallied themselves against the perimeter fence for a few feet of shade. The colours beyond this perimeter ran from gold to bronze, striking next to the purple sky. The driller often said it was the best view in the world.

He sniffed the air. “Smashing day for it!” he said, as if to suggest every day wasn't exactly the same.

Y started down the steep steps to the lawn. She knew what “it” meant. Together they crossed a slim natural bridge over a pond, the prickle of dry grass under her feet. In the water, slender metal snakes spiralled and snapped at each other, and her ankles pulsed in response.

She should be used to this by now. The exertion, the sun, the sweat. She'd done it for a long time, after all. But every session felt like a fresh trial. And despite the searing heat, the ragged blisters on her hands and feet, she was drilled again and again – heavy muscle stretches, body weight exercises, toning, free weights, contortions, circuits. It went on for two hours before she was allowed to rest.

“One, two, I'll break you!” the driller screamed in Y's face, keeping up his relentless pace. “Three, four, you're good for more!”

A hundred pressups, a hundred more. Lunges, squats, burpees – until it seemed it wasn't sweat but a certain future dripping out of her. Her body bristled beneath the blazing sun, and the pendant sat boiling against her skin. Nothing but reps and sets, and her driller's lust for more. Y hated that sun. Every second, minute and hour she was in it. The tingling afterwards. Her stinging lips, cracked and sore. Her shaking arms and cramping legs.

As the session went on, several other pairs – brothers and sisters with their own personal drillers – filtered from the mansion into spaces on the lawn around her. She noticed, when she was able to, that they all did the same thing at the same time. There was a click-track to keep rhythm, and the drillers screamed the same motivational lines in unison. The coordination amplified their words; transformed their orders into an enveloping white noise that came from all directions.

“One, two–”

Breathe in with the rep…

“Three, four–”

Breathe out with the neg…

Until the click-track stopped, and the drillers marched their projects to a nearby water fountain.

Y's driller placed her sweaty palm on a reader which blooped and screened a message:

“Better to be nobody out here,” the driller told her. Y blinked at him. “Now drink,” he said. “Half a litre. We don't want any bloating, do we?”

Except Y could drink to drowning. She stood there, rapt by the water's sound, wishing she could squeeze herself out of her skin, a tube of tenderized meat, and lie in the fountain pool. That she could be left to soak there, absorbing the liquids, a shuddering mass in osmosis–

She drank like a thirsty dog.

“Enough,” the driller said. “You're drinking
his
water, remember.”

And in that moment, she thought she hated removing her mouth from the faucet more than she hated the star in the heavens above.

“Very good,” the driller said. “Now. Inside to bathe, please. As hot as it'll go. Then stretch out, with emphasis on those quads. When you're finished, return to your cradle for repairing nutrients.” He said this last line like an advertiser, smugly pointing at her, standing in a vulgar pose. “I'll see you again in forty-eight hours – unless our father wants to see you first.”

O
nce upon a time
, Mel looked like a stickman scribbled out. You could rest your pint in the recesses of her collarbones; sharpen pencils between the ligaments of her wrists. Her hospital bed bleeped. The room thrummed with it – pipes and lines, drips and cables. So many tubes. And a strange thing happened to time there – as though Mel existed in an endless corridor from a filmed sequence, her bed in motion as her heart was massaged by the machine cocoon.

Sol didn't look much better. Far too long sitting there beside her. He saw it in the mirror when he washed his hands: his brow wrinkles deepening by the hour, his eyes retreating into his head.

Sometimes, he'd take Mel's hand – cold and oilless, the skin soft but undernourished and yellow. She had such smoker's nails, he thought, and in the dark he squeezed her fingers as he mumbled his sonnets, his tired apologies. He wept quietly whenever he acknowledged the question that seemed to linger in the room with them:
Did I put her here?

Sol would've prayed for Mel if he thought it might save her. But the doctors said it was too late for intervention, and it felt like God had already given up.

Instead, he apologized some more. Of course he did. And then at other times, his sentiment changed. Of course it did. Because
she
should be sorry and
he
should feel sour.

The truth, of course, was that they shared responsibility. Her trackmarks – the scabs on tried-and-tested holes – came from a third party: an unseen incubus that stalked their relationship. The incubus gave her livid bruises, took her fingernails down to the quick. And the same incubus fed Sol's ego – filled the vacuum whenever there came an inkling he gave more attention to the vehicles at work; smothered a fear he'd abandoned her to this fate, just as Sol's father had his mother.

Nurses swept through the room. There were bed washes to prevent sores. Sol felt like he only ever said, “Any news?” He worried they'd grown bored of his voice, its moribund inflection, and, distracted, he often forgot what they told him.

There are things you think you should do in hospital. Behaviours you've learned from old TV, or from other visitors and relatives. And there are things you think you shouldn't: nod at other families; pay too much attention to the monitors.

There were also things Sol could say to Mel that he never imagined saying to anybody. He told her he thought death was close for her. And he would pick out details – comment on the fact she still had her earrings in. Small things like this reminded him so powerfully of their past selves; of two people cohabiting and setting out their boundaries. He knew that after a late shift at the garage, after he'd collected some milk on the way home and they'd eaten food together, they'd go to bed and she'd take out her earrings and false eye and reach over his chest to put them on the side.

Time had done such things to them. Their relationship was being stubbed out. Scratched out. And increasingly, obsessively, Sol came to believe that the best thing about eyes – whether you had one, like Mel did, or two, like he did – was how they gave you the option to look away.

One morning he couldn't bear the kind way the nurses looked at him. They'd been nothing but sympathetic and diligent, and yet he felt embarrassed to be seen there with Mel. They were endeared to his vigil, he knew, but this didn't shift an uncomfortable feeling they judged him; that they thought he lacked the will to prevent this happening in the first place. That wasn't him, he told himself. It wasn't the man he thought he was. Sol spent his life fixing things, and here lay something wretched – no, some
one
wretched – he lacked the capacity to fix. She had pushed him to see the outer limits of his personality; confronted his flaws, his pure weakness. He hated how it made him feel. And so, in an act of arch selfishness – shrinking from the opportunity to make himself a better partner – he leaned in to Mel with a fattening tear hanging from his nose. It'd been too long, he told himself, already dismissing his self-analysis. Too much had changed, and too much was still changing.

Something frayed had finally snapped.

“Mel,” he said to her, and watched the tear fall and splash from her chin into the channel of her neck. “I love the bones of you. But I'm going now.”

And that was how he left her.

R
oy's life
is full of codas. So while the names, objectives and cover stories change, he considers repeatedly the unspoken rules of engagement in his transactions – in the debiting and crediting of life and limb.

One of the critical rules is this: don't expect the truth. When Roy takes contracts from the Reverend, he can expect just enough to run with, just enough to let his imagination fill the gaps, or paper over his reservations. It's why, as he leaves Sol in the workshop to return to the Rose, it's confusing that Havelock told him so much, and so earnestly. It said lots about the things Havelock wasn't saying.

Roy lights a cigarette, opens the window. Takes in Manchester air, its scent and taste. The smog and ceaseless drizzle. The ratty bars and risky streetfood.

What's that bastard up to?

Roy has to be careful: he knows you can seriously overthink this stuff. Drive yourself barmy. And does he really care as long as the fee clears? As long as there's food in his guts by the end of it? These are the pressing questions, most of the time – albeit two questions the Reverend would punish him for asking.

Ahead, the sky's shod in black-blue bruise. In his mirrors sits the lone headlight of a motorbike. Beyond, the dark jags on the horizon where the moors and gritstone tors run stitches between counties. Closer, he sees the silhouetted, attenuated servants of Manchester: her cranes and towers, her surviving chimneys and masts, all wanting to drag Roy back into the past. To a single dark day up a crane gantry –

But don't go there. Distract yourself.

Roy uses a pocket shortband scanner to keep an ear to the ground. It's one of the more useful things about the council returning to old tech. As long as you dodge the lev-bikes, which run on a different network, it's a good way to get gossip. Most of the time the scanner garbles things: fragmented sequences, clicking, Morse code signals. Occasionally, though, there'll be something juicy. Something to listen to, and simultaneously avoid…

Tonight, though, there's nothing.

Another glance behind. Roy wonders if the motorbike is trailing him. It could've overtaken a dozen times already, and the way the rider hangs back reeks of someone trying too hard to appear normal. He shakes his head. Probably it's sleep deprivation – the wrong instincts flaring.

Distract yourself, Roy.

Roy pushes his cig dimp through the gap in the window and watches the sparks burst. The biker reacts, swerves, before pulling up alongside the car. Roy sees his own face warped across the rider's mirrored visor. He raises his eyebrows. The biker lingers fleetingly, then powers ahead.

Roy exhales.

Distract. Yourself.

Now he thinks about this evening's job – his visit to the workshop. On the passenger seat his roadmap is still open, overwritten so thickly in biro that its planview city resembles a snakes and ladders board.

The workshop was southwest of town, Old Trafford, a place on its arse long before the rest of the city. That side of Manchester is a pain to access: nationalist insurgents had previously bombed a hole in the Mancunian Way, and without public funding allocated to fix it – or the mock beneficence of a megacorp with pocket change to spare – the road's stayed closed. A brutalist sculpture coming out in weeds.

The diversion had taken him down Deansgate from the far side. Not a pleasant option, but more or less his only one, unless he risked a dicier jaunt through Salford. He thinks about the filthy people who'd glanced up from their foraging to casually process his potential worth. Further along, he'd seen how the Beetham memorial lamp, turned off during the riots and blackouts of 2018, was now reduced to nude superstructure. When he'd started to see bodies, he was grateful for his nondescript car.

These bodies of Deansgate intrigued him a lot. There was no ignoring them: the majority were left in situ as grim markers, warnings against something vague and oppressive – the descent of man, or a viral form of neglect. Their stillness fascinated him – though when he considers what he does for a living, he knows in his heart it shouldn't.

Perhaps it unsettles Roy that the bodies hadn't been his marks. It's almost like he's forgotten people can die without his involvement – without a fee or a motive. In this alone, he knows death has skewed him. Just as he knows death sat alongside him as he watched Deansgate's bodies being scoured by human carrion – that death pointed to the skeletal children, the husks, as they scavenged trinkets and treasures to sell on the markets.

How do you help these people?

Roy knows the answer: you don't. That just like the garage man he went to see, just like anyone trying to put food on the table, Roy and the rest of them are too busy finding their own way forward, no matter the internal cost or conflict.

Eventually he'd found the workshop. Its doors were open, so he'd deliberately parked his car with full beams facing inwards. Yes, that was a good move. That was him at his best, and the Reverend would've approved. He'd got out, checked his pockets and zipped his coat to the neck.

Inside the workshop, Sol had been working on a purple Transit hiked up on a lane. Roy had cleared his throat and stood there on the threshold, a vampire asking to come inside.

T
he body
in the Lexus is wrapped up like leftovers. A woman. It's hard to tell if it's the light or the clingfilm that makes her skin so grey, but under the sticky layers, Sol can see welts on her naked skin; the brown flakes that form a patina on her legs; the rings of bruise around her wrists. She's faceless, depersonalized – her head covered from the neck upwards in tape, with two lengths of tube exiting the mask at the nose.

Sol is shattered by it. He gawps down at her, disturbed and helpless, his lungs compressed. He closes his eyes, watches constellations die, a deafening ringing in his ears. Nausea grips and sends the workshop spinning: a blur of products and tools and banal fixtures.

He looks back at her and finds himself gripping the boot lid. The woman's utterly alien – a splinter in the real. Something inserted here from a world infinitely crueller.

On her torso, on her tin ribs, there's a folded note. He leans closer to find it's monogrammed with a distinctive symbol: two circles intersecting.

Then he screams.

Sensing his closeness, hearing his noise, the woman's body spasms.

She isn't dead.

As movement ripples through her, every muscle seems to contract and relax. Each sinew carved out, inked into place. The cords that model her swell to capacity; her veins and tendons standing, shuddering, and settling by turns. He wonders, so briefly, if her laser-thin waist was machined to size.

And then there's the bottle. Sol takes it out, confused to find a thin white paste in the bottom. Food, he guesses, logical, deductive, until the searing realization: she's had to take it through her nose tubes. He retches then, and his eyes begin to water. The thought loops back –
through her nose
.

He says, “God help us,” and the woman thrashes silently in the boot. “No, wait, no,” he pleads, and when she squirms on to her side, Sol sees something else.

A third arm.

Now Sol goes faint, field of vision pinched.

Reeling, he dares to look again. Narrowed eyes. Right there: a third arm that looks as naturally articulated as the others, connected to a thicker joint on one side. He fixates on the deltoid muscles flaring around it, stretching out the clingfilm.

He says, “Shit,” and touches her side. “
Shit
.” This time she freezes under his hand. His voice breaks, squeaks, as he flounders for the right thing to say. “You're safe,” he tells her. “You're safe.”

The woman rolls on to her back and tries to reach out; tries to burst from her wrapping.

Sol reaches in and pulls her head to his shoulder. She's heavier than she looks. He sits her up on the boot sill and holds her upright by the shoulders, simultaneously horrified by her sliminess – yellow moisture trapped between her skin and the clingfilm – and ashamed by his disgust. If he lets go, she'll slide away from him like unset jelly.

Sol prays Irish hasn't forgotten his keys. That no one else will see…

He eases the woman down to the workshop's cold floor. Laid out, all three arms cable-tied behind her back, it's more obvious that the woman is unusually short. Stocky is also the wrong word – too vulgar – but he can tell she has a carefully restrained power. Her shoulders carry such definition, hewn tone. A wildness that, coupled with the blankness of her mask, scares Sol no end.

He props her up against the Lexus bumper. This time she holds herself. He darts away as if she's a lit firework. Think.
Think
. There – a felt rag covering an engine block by the tool shelves. He shakes it out, smells loosened dust. He doesn't know where it's been – if there's glass fibre caught in the material, metal filings or damp oil – but it's all he has to hand. His mind is fragmenting. He returns and carefully wraps her. “Your mask,” he says, and touches her head with two fingers. She flinches, but he holds them there and with his other hand starts to unpeel her, trying carefully to ease the pressure on her face.

Only the mask won't come, and the woman stays silent and still. There's a relief that she's alive, and a fear she might now die here, like this. Self-preservation, maybe – and with that a flash of anger that she's even here at all.
What has Irish done?