Coil

by Ren Warom

  “The pager,” he mutters between frozen lips. “I beeped Stark when he was in the cavern.”

  He rifles through pockets, frantic, energised, oblivious to the streaks of grime and the smears of rotting fluids his filthy gloves leave on his clothing. He finds the hard rectangle of the pager in his back pocket and sends a fleeting thanks to whatever quirk of fate prevented his falling backwards into the water before punching in Stark’s code.

  Minutes later, the comm on the floor bursts into life, jumping up and down on the concrete as it vibrates in frantic response.

  Chapter 19

  Inky red spurt of blood, a watery emulsion. Metal sticks against bone. He angles the rod, thrusts it down between fibula and tibia, his hands sure, keeping pressure constant against the stubborn refusal of the body. Corded arms burst out in sculpted hillocks. Perfect tension. His face is a serene mask. Beauty is agony. Sweat spatters from his brow to mingle with pools of blood, a human ichor. The faintest click and the rod connects. He twists it until it secures deep into the socket embedded at his ankle.

  Blood slips in slow rivulets, coiling down the ridge of his foot with each swift movement. His hair falls, lank with heat, over a faraway amber gaze. This is pain and pain is beauty. It is his penance. Burneo flicks the top of the pole, a practiced twitch of the wrist, to settle into the outer casing on his knee. Gives a final twist, hearing with a soft, dreaming smile the deep thock that marks the settling of the new joint. Takes thick, black catgut and darns the ripped, bloodied muscle and flesh back around the metal pole, paying no mind to the look of it. Perfection, beauty, lie not in appearance, but in evolution of form.

  He is the machine-man. Mix metal with his bone, his blood with oily machine residue. His body, his penance, is a construct, a work in progress. It is his message to her, unspoken, carved into the matter of his substance. He raises his head to the ceiling, the reflective orb of his mercury eye rolling and rolling, the amber glazed, faraway in lucid dreaming. His gift has been delivered. The tide is rolling in, bringing the past back to him like stones from the deep scoured smooth by persistent pressure. Ah, but it hurts worse than the invasion of cold steel into soft tissue.

  Dirty sewer waters drip from leaking pipes somewhere in the distant vault, metres above his reformed countenance. He stands. A vision. A terror. A jerking, elegant array of limbs and machinery; mottled, scar-riddled flesh revealed by muggy yellow light.

  Chapter 20

  Cast iron chairs throw spiked shadows over the slippery red floor, sending black jagged shapes into a sleazy neon glare, diffused through smoke. Bone’s at the corner of the bar, drinking fast, beating alcohol at a brain made frenzied by exhaustion. He sits, leather-backed and vacuous, staring at his reflection in the bar’s polished steel surface. The last moan of a dying blues tune rings hollow through the room, laying melancholy waste to his inner ear. He’s physically wrecked, managed only an hour of broken, terror-filled sleep before giving it up as a bad idea and opting instead to spend his time actively pursuing alcoholic paralysis. Unfortunately, he’s still fucking sober.

  It’s been almost a day since receiving his gift, deep in the belly of the sewers beyond the lake, and the hours have bundled together in a blur so dense, it sits in his head like a tumour, insidious. He and Stark waited seven long, cold hours for the Buzz Boys to arrive, enduring a skeleton-mangling journey to the morgue to autopsy the Gift’s remains in a closed room, under lock and key. He worked without Nia’s assistance, couldn’t cope with the thought of her perceptive gaze looking at him, through him. The questions that would surely follow. She’s the only person who can look at him and see everything he’s trying to hide, and he’s not willing to discuss what happened in the sewer. Not yet, maybe not ever.

  An hour or more in conference followed the autopsy. Bone told Stark a heavily expurgated version of his encounter with Burneo whilst they waited for the Buzz Boys, how the man-machine seemed to have been waiting for him, and his direction to Bone’s gift. Bone’s autopsy only confirmed what he already knew, that this gift was indeed from Burneo and that such a pointed redesign of Rope’s intent, and the determination to lead them to it, can only constitute an about-face in his commitment to the killer’s game.

  This conclusion has Stark sparking like a cannon about to loose. He plans to convince Burton, his boss, to petition the Notary for authorisation to mobilise whatever resources he can for a return to the sewers. He’s almost one hundred percent certain Burneo will be down there, waiting for them. That he’ll lead them to Rope. He expects Bone to join him. Thinks it’s important that he comes. But Bone’s unbearably on edge about everything.

  He needs time to come to his own conclusions about what happened between him and Burneo, what happened when he found the Gift. His memories of those moments have taken on the bleary queasiness of a drunken dream, one of his worst. He can still hear the screaming, a sound he’ll never forget. It’s left him a thinning hollow, filled with static, and after all this drinking and thinking, he’s only sure of one thing; Rope’s not only the puppeteer behind these bodies, he’s also pulling Bone’s strings. Bone doesn’t yet know what the bodies mean, only that the idea of them being for him repulses him and fills him with a slow, curling dread. Who wants to be known, to be seen, to be sought after––even intellectually––by a creature like Rope? Thanks to the subconscious parallel between Leif and Rope, he feels more haunted than ever, as though his father stands right behind him, waiting to see him fail.

  He’s afraid he’s failed again already. Thinks there must be another important connection he’s missed, like the tags, but he can’t figure out where it might be, can’t see the wrong numbers in the equation. He lifts his glass and drains the contents, one long gulp of fire down his aching throat. He thinks there are tears waiting to come, or laughter. Either way, he’s losing it. Lost it. Has no idea how to start finding his way back to whatever sanity he once had. He signals to the bar man, points at his glass and waits, head pounding, stomach floating in the abyss, thoughts diffusing much like the mist of smoke curling sinuous coils through the close-walled claustrophobia of the Wail.

  As he sits there, feeling deranged, a woman appears out from a thick eddy of smoke as if materialising. Gleaming in gold and fire orange, glaring as a bar sign, she strolls to the sharp curve of the bar, tips a head haloed in peacock blue to stare at him with laser-bright eyes, and smiles, her teeth white razors in the neon. He feels his balls tighten. Shit.

  “You look as though you could do with sleeping,” she murmurs and her voice curls between rasp and ripple, husky enough to send tremors through his skin.

  He laughs. Coughs. “Sure could.”

  “What you drinking?”

  “Gas-malt.”

  She chucks her cred chip towards the barman. “Another gas-malt, on me. I’ll take a beer. Asian. Nothing lite.” She’s got long, prehensile fingers just like his, all bones and edges, and on her left hand, they’re dipped in gold right down to the first finger-joint. Bone reaches out and strokes one.

  “Implanted. Tricky.”

  Her eyes sparkle. Predatory. Nice. “Real gold, too. Eighteen carat alloy.”

  Bone’s impressed. “Gold’s for conducting, not modification. You’ve got a fortune as your fingertips.”

  She grins, a vicious spike of humour. “Funny.”

  He accepts his gas-malt and lifts the glass towards her, his eyebrows raised. “Cheers.”

  “No sweat.”

  “So what do I call you?” he asks. “Gold fingers?”

  She turns to face him. Her long cheekbones knife down, making her chin appear pointed, a delicate weapon. She has a smile like treacle. It sticks to her face. Looks like it might slide off at any moment. “Lever.”

  He chokes. “What, like the car?”

  “Nope, like that’s my name.”

  “You Mech?”

  “Not even a little.”

  He wipes spilt drink off his chin and chuckles. “I’m Bone.”

 
“No. You’re the Bone-Man.”

  Awareness rips through him, bright and hard as his attraction to her. So, she’s Zone folk, or gang—he really can’t tell which because there’s something slightly off-key about her, as if she’s only wearing gang, not living it. But knowing his honorific means she must be one or the other, and this is a play for him. It’s happened before and usually irritates, but not this time. As if sensing that, she smiles again, in slow motion, like a crocodile. It takes forever for those sharp teeth to flash between juicy lips, making his head spin and contract beneath that band of throbbing pain. He’s finally heading for mildly pissed, definitely completely screwed in the head after yesterday, but he’s not imagining the pull he feels towards her. It’s viral. She’s about ten years too young for him, but he decides that doesn’t matter. He’s going to let her play this out to wherever she wants it to go.

  He touches her on the elbow. “So, exec, or com?”

  She grins, slugging a great mouthful of beer. “Neither. Freelance.”

  “Freelance?”

  “I freelance organs.”

  Bone stares in amazement. “Pardon?”

  She touches a gold tip to her juicy bottom lip and rolls expensive eyes. “You know, get organs and sell where I can, mostly to brokers. It pays better than licensed.”

  He’s stunned. “You buy?”

  “Course not. I harvest.” Lever flicks a stray ice-cube on the bar. It shatters to pieces on her solid fingertip, the shards sliding off towards the floor.

  Bone’s blindsided. “Well, fucking hell. Nice to meet a fellow meat.”

  Her laugh is like cancer. Invasive. “I like that.”

  The music stops and they sit, drinking in the quiet, keeping each other company. Bone tries to recollect when he’s felt comfortable in this situation. Never. But here’s this woman with blue hair and a Mech name he feels totally at ease with. He’s attracted to her, of course he is, but she feels familiar, too. Feels like he’s lost a body part and she’s sitting there, wearing it.

  “Did you ever,” she asks at last, pinning him to the bar with a long look, “feel trapped in your own skin?”

  Bone shrugs. “Whatever. Doesn’t everyone?”

  Lever tips her head, and tendrils of shaggy blue slice across the white slate of her face. Tribal, like woad stripes. He wonders if she’s practiced the move in a mirror. “I guess not,” she says, her expression cryptic, oddly pleased in a way that makes him a little uncomfortable.

  “Why?”

  “You’re the first person I ever asked who answered yes.”

  “You ask a lot of people?”

  “Everyone I meet. Hundreds, nearly.” She smiles cadaverously. “They’re all too busy adorning their flesh, making it into an ornament, to understand what I mean.”

  “So, what about it?”

  Lever’s eyes devour his face like his thoughts are carrion and she a vulture. “Nothing. Except for all that delicious muscle and tendon. Wrapped in red inside, and no one can see. I look in the mirror and I see my face and I try to imagine it just bone and glorious red muscle. Makes me feel free.”

  Bone sips his malt. His stomach sways, a boat on the ocean of her words. “Maybe it’s because of our work,” he murmurs.

  “Or maybe it’s because we’re sick of the skin we’re in,” she replies.

  Bone has no response. Ever since he can remember, there’s been that slow burning sensation of skin closing in tight around him. Strangulation in stages. Not the physical organ, as such, more the fact that he can never walk away from the person he is. His skin locks him into this identity, and he’d give anything to be anonymous, unrecognisable. Even his skin. He flexes his fingers through a sticky patch of half-dried beer. Long, bony fingers for a bone-cutter. It takes only a second to imagine fine drops of blood curling off the white stretch of a tendon. He thinks of bone-spider fingers. Thinks of the Gift. Skinless. Recalls the rush of unwelcome excitement and is stunned to find that this was the reason. What kind of man envies a corpse the loss of its skin? He’s overwhelmed with sadness and self-loathing.

  “I’m going to enjoy fucking you,” she says out of nowhere, hooking him with a neon green glare, almost angry with delight. She stands and chucks her empty beer bottle at the barman. Holds out her gold-tipped hand. “Come on. I need a fuck. Now. With you. Or I can find someone else.”

  He takes her hand and catapults off his seat. “Don’t do that,” he says. “I’m not arguing.”

  She laughs, pulling him out of the smoke infested club into the thick belching roar of the street and tugs him until they’re running. It feels good, a little young and stupid, a touch desperate. He’s known the island of Gyre West, isolated in the left aorta of the Spires, his entire life, but he loses track of where they go. Maybe it’s her, or the drink, or the promise of sex, maybe just the sluggish indigo of night, but he can’t tell, in the end, one black, choked street from another. When they arrive at a skinny mansion house sliced into apartments, somewhere out on the island’s edge, he doesn’t know where the hell he is anymore, but she’s kissing him in the elevator and he doesn’t give a fuck.

  Lever sheds her top and silver-mesh bra on the elevator floor for some sour-faced old bugger of a guard to find in the morning, and they stumble into the topmost room––a gallery of sorts. End up fucking like animals in the centre of a harsh circular rug covered in shapes like leaves, surrounded by his trousers, jacket, shirt, and boots, her tight leather skirt, heels, and silver-mesh panties. They make a tangle of limbs and gleaming sweat, blue hair and gold, mouths fused as if they’re on fire, and their flesh melts together. It’s brutal, all teeth and nails and violence, limbs striking the hardwood floor beyond the rug, bruises blooming on pale flesh.

  She has a snake tattooed down her back. An incongruous mod. It writhes in copper coils from her neck, across her shoulders and down her spine right to her arse. He’s never liked tattoos but he traces this one with his tongue and rakes it with his nails, drawing blood until the copper is tinged with beads of red. It’s hypnotic, gorgeous, moving against her movement, writhing of its own accord, and shines under the light like oil on water, a luminous sheen. His attraction to it, to her, is ravenous. He loves the hard rasp of her gold-tipped fingers tearing channels down his rib-defined chest. The scent of her, raw and drugging.

  He loses himself in the sleek texture of her flesh, in the sharp sting of nails, the dragging flare of gold fingertips. The heat suffocates him, burns his skin. He’s dripping with sweat, with blood, and filled from head to toe with a pain so intense it can’t be anything but pleasure. An orgasm of startling intensity builds from his bones, through the strung-out web of his nervous system, and into his muscles, radiating out to his extremities. Lever leans down as his body succumbs, whispers in his ear. He can barely make out the murmur through the clamour of his body, but the effect on him is immediate and powerful. His whole body explodes, lightning sensations bursting through him, agonising in intensity, and in the background of his mind, something fights to be unleashed.

  As his orgasm shudders away, Bone’s mind relaxes and calms. Body so drained he can feel it only at a remove he opens his eyes to share the moment. Instead, he begins screaming.

  The skin of her head has split in a long fissure from forehead to nose, oozing thick, dark blood. It slowly widens, dropping by degrees away from her face, revealing a mask of raw muscle. Loose skin slips down her neck, gathering to ugly folds, and the split creeps down her torso, peeling away with a noise of paper sliding down metal. Exposing sticky muscle and gelatinous red breasts, fat-less and androgynous. Uncovering a stomach of perfect statue-like composition before splitting her pubic hair to fork down her legs, sending her slithering bloodily into his lap. Cast in crimson she curves over him, her eyes rolled back to sclera, their boiled egg hue shocking pale against the bloodied surround, white in the red, and he’s screaming so loud it fills his ears with a deep, buzzing burr. He tries to pull away, scrabbling at her slippery thighs with cla
wed fingers, only to find he’s still inside her, and despite their slickness, her legs won’t move from round his waist.

  Her skin sags, drops to the floor with a thud that makes him think incongruously of the weight of the integumentary system. How it functions. The impossibility of what he’s seeing. Lever’s eyes roll back to irises, dazed and aware. She untangles herself and rises above him on exposed kneecaps, a thing of woven bone and coiled tendon. She pushes away to stand, leaving two perfect, red handprints on the scored expanse of his pale chest. Black spots spiral over his pupils, the first signs of too little oxygen. His scream is hoarse, fractured, and refuses to end. Rearing away from her, from whatever she is, he curls in on himself, eyes fixed on her and glazing with horror as she follows the impossible with the inconceivable.

  She stretches up towards the ceiling, attenuating to unnatural length, disentangles to an amorphous mass of muscle, bone, and tendon, and then, like the copper coiled snake decorating her shed skin, she coils herself around her own bones. Becomes a writhing tangle of innards and draped muscle. A blood-smeared jigsaw with the oval, green-eyed, meat draped skull set atop. Absurdly, Bone notes the glittering gold tips of her fingers sparking diamonds of light from within the ravage. His screaming fractures to a halt as his throat packs up, grinding to uselessness. Lever looks from him to the caul of her skin and explodes upwards, tearing through the ceiling in a sinuous movement of unbelievable power. Drops of blood fall from the jagged spars of roof tiles, landing with soft splats like fat rain on a face, and the light fixture, half-destroyed by her passage, sparks and flickers like a strobe. In the silence and dust swirl of her departure, watching her rise to the starless sky, his reason fogs. An unaccountable itching sensation crawls across his forehead. The meatless flop of skin wavers in his sight, a graphic mirage, and his mind collapses.