Coil

by Ren Warom

  Bone’s stunned to silence. Spaz knows every freelancer his gang employs. The sly bastard didn’t need to send Bone here; he could’ve told Bone everything there is to know about Lever himself. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or lose his temper, and somewhere beneath, he worries that he misinterpreted Spaz’s reaction to the snake. Perhaps it was only recognition. He looks at those copper coils between Nathaniel’s palms and that irrepressible tug of knowledge hits hard, eliminating his fears. The snake is important. He feels it. Knows it. He’s known it since he first touched it when he was fucking her.

  Nathaniel lays the skin flat on his knees. “How did you get this if she’s not dead?”

  Bone leans forwards, touching his fingers to the snake’s coils because he can’t help himself. Nathaniel watches Bone’s fingers move just as Spaz did, but his dark eyes are shuttered and inscrutable.

  “She left it for me,” Bone says, not really thinking about what he’s saying and not really caring anymore.

  “I see.” Nathaniel treats Bone to a very straightforward look. “So, is that all you needed? I can’t help you, and I have an appointment coming.”

  Bone sits back, his mind in a kind of turmoil, swirling round and round and encased in heat. He could go. But that’s not what he wants. Not really. What he really wants is to leap into the unknown, into the abyss. He wants to choose, for once, what scares him instead of having fear forced upon him, and if he’s honest with himself, he can’t leave this parlour without doing that. He takes a deep breath.

  “No,” he says, “I’m not done. I wanted to ask if you’d scratch me. With that snake. Just as it was.”

  “As it was.” It’s no question. It’s a statement groaning with meaning Bone is desperate to comprehend, but doesn’t dare query in case he breaks the moment, breaks his resolve. Nathaniel places the skin on his workbench, a phantasm of glass etched with writhing, ghoul-like figures, and reaches out, not for his usual guns, but for one resting in its own exquisitely rendered glass rack. “Take off your shirt,” he says.

  “What about your appointment?” Bone asks.

  “Fuck it,” Nathaniel says. “I get to be the lucky bastard who pops the Bone-Man’s mod cherry. Under these circumstances, I’d tell even Spaz to go fuck himself.”

  The prickles on Bone’s spine sharpen and dig deep. His organs turn slow, aching somersaults as his body acknowledges the sudden loss of solid ground. He can almost smell the ozone scent of clouds brushing the undersides of his feet and adrenalin scours through him, making him light-headed. He shrugs off his jacket, and barely able to feel his fingers, pops his shirt buttons one by one.

  Nathaniel spots the sore, puckering wounds caused by Lever’s gold fingertips and chuckles. “Yeah,” he says, almost to himself, “you met Lever all right.” Then he frowns. “Did she wound your back?”

  Bone shakes his head. “No,” he replies. “I wounded hers.”

  Nathaniel looks at the long square of skin on his workbench. “Doesn’t look wounded to me,” he says. “Looks like it’s been well cared for.” He points at the roll bar behind Bone. “Turn round and lean over that.”

  He waits till Bone’s in position, then sets his needle to Bone’s back and begins, freehand, to mark the outline. The pain of the needle is a revelation. It hurts worse than Bone expected, but it’s good pain. With every fresh pass, he can feel himself solidifying. This tattoo will not only change who he is, the way he’s seen, it’ll change the way he sees himself. Every time he looks at his face, he’ll know who he is. He’s the Bone who chose. It’s such a huge difference, it feels almost unreal.

  Nathaniel’s breath cool on his burning skin, Bone asks, “What’s she like?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I only knew her for a few hours,” he says, smiling.

  Nathaniel draws more ink into his needle and settles back over the blood-smeared symbol tangling over the skin of Bone’s back. “I’ve met her maybe three times, myself, all told.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “That she’s trouble. I heard of her before I met her. She’s young, reckless, takes too many chances. That, and her tenacity, is what secured her the position with the Establishment.” The drone of the needle accompanies his voice like a counterpoint in a symphony, uplifting and strangely moving. “She took the pain like you are. Without fear. That Skat you saw with me earlier. Medlock, his name is. Wants to be scratched for the notoriety. Can’t handle the pain because of it. Your reasons have to be solid. He’ll find out the hard way. They always do.”

  Bone squints as spectres of light like handfuls of gold dust dance off the water, lancing into his eyes. He can’t think of anything to say, and so remains silent. Nathaniel stops only once to tell his appointment, a skinny-looking freak with a wasp-thin waist and black eyes, to come back tomorrow at the same time. Otherwise, he remains bent over Bone’s back, deep in concentration. Hours pass, and the pain of the needle flows over Bone, building him bit by bit as it forms the snake on his skin. His chin digs hard into his forearms, and his legs start to cramp, but he’s never felt so content.

  “Going to add a haze of red melting into the copper here, to soften it,” Nathaniel says, finally snapping the silence. “Lever’s had no such haze, but I want this to be the best work I ever do. Your skin’s the perfect canvas, like a sheet of ice. I can live for free till I rot on the type of renown this’ll bring me.”

  Bone thinks of the blood his nails drew up into Lever’s snake as they fucked, and watches Nathaniel fit a new needle into his gun, filling it with a colour somewhere between dried blood and deepest poppy. He drifts off as the drilling heat begins again, and his gaze is drawn up to the sky, sucked higher and higher, until he’s sure he can see beyond the farthest atmosphere. Dragging his eyes away with an effort, he focusses on Nathaniel’s profile, reflected in the glass, intense with concentration. He’s not really in the mood for talking, anymore, but there’s something else he needs to ask before they’re done here.

  “What is this snake, this tattoo? I know it’s nano, intelligent. But in what way? Like IM shit, or something more?”

  Nathaniel stops again for a moment, considering. He starts back in with the needle and says, as if picking his words with great care, “It’s deep wet-tech. Not remotely like usual nano-ink, more intelligent. It’ll link to your neural networks, sync with your brainwaves. React to your moods, your thoughts, but not in a static way, not like feedback. It thinks, not like we do, but as near as damn it in a basic sense, improvising movement and response based on your rhythms and emotions. Perhaps even more. It’s deeper tech than I can understand, in truth. I’m just a scratch.”

  “So, it’s alive?”

  “In so far as nanotech can be alive, yes, it is.”

  “What will it feel like?”

  Bone senses Nathaniel’s shrug through the needle. “I don’t know. I don’t have one, and I’ve never asked. But it won’t start interacting with you until you’re healed. It has to build connections first, make contact as it were.”

  “Fuck,” Bone says, light-headed, “I picked a hell of a thing for my first mod.”

  Nathaniel lets out a short bark of amusement. “No shit. Just this red, then we’re finished. Sorry it’s a bit of a marathon session, but you have to do it in one sitting or it won’t activate, the nanites’ll fail to synchronise with each other and die off. Not much’ll kill them once they’re all set, but until they are, they’re vulnerable. How’s your pain level?”

  Bone shrugs. “It hurts.” He doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter.

  Night draws in over the lake, and heat begins to morph to pain that fills Bone hard as a skeleton, binding him deep into his own flesh and then catapulting him outside of himself. He concentrates on the clouds dissolving through the dark grey of the sky, hypnotised by the rhythmic movements as they billow and fade, thinning to a haze and dissipating like smoke. By slow degrees, his mind revolves around what’s happening here. He can’t begin to regret it
. It feels right. Nathaniel continues for another forty minutes, making the session nine hours in total, before replacing the needle with his spray gun, suffusing the sore skin with a fine wash of cool antiseptic solution. Chuckling at Bone’s moan of relief, he swipes away with a clean cloth, his hands gentle, clearing the blood so he can view his work.

  “My finest work yet,” he says proudly. “Better than Lever’s by a clear mile, and I actually took greater care with her at times. Thin skin she had, delicate. You could see the veins beneath, see the blood pumping.”

  Bone peers round at Nathaniel. “She looked like she had no skin.”

  “So do you,” Nathaniel says as he adds a layer of protectant from a different spray gun. He begins to dismantle the needle gun. “You can shower as normal, but don’t over clean this or it won’t heal. You can spread salve or antiseptic cream if you need to, thin and even, just once every twenty-four hours. It’ll scab over in a couple of days. Don’t pick it, or you’ll disrupt the process, not to mention destroying my finer work. At which point I’d hunt you down and ram this here needle up a choice orifice.”

  Bone chuckles. “You got it.”

  “How you feeling?” Nathaniel asks with a sudden grin. “Different?”

  Bone cranes to see his back reflected in the glass. Seeing it there, etched permanently on his skin, makes him want to burst out laughing. It’s amazing. Beautiful. The snake looks real, just as it did on Lever, but on his skin it looks like it’s waiting in the cool shadow of a rock, coiled to strike at unsuspecting prey.

  “Different? Oh, yeah. To say the least.”

  Nodding understanding, Nathaniel says in a gentle tone unlike his usual, “It’s customary to get your permanent mods at puberty, you’re, what … mid-thirties?”

  Bone dips his head. “Thirty-five.”

  A disbelieving snort escapes Nathaniel. “That’s a long time naked, man. A long time. Might be wise to cut yourself a little time to get accustomed to it.” Nathaniel hands Bone his shirt back and says, “You can stay in the Zone a while. There’s places open all night serve good drinks, good food.”

  “Don’t be fooled by my honorific; I’m not Zone folk, I still can’t hang around,” Bone replies, fumbling with buttons. “I’ll be thrown out over a fucking gate rather than through it.” His hands are shaking. It’s not that nagging urge for alcoholic ease, though he certainly could use a drink; he’s actually feeling rather hungry.

  “I’m sure Spaz has told you this already, but you’re different. That’s why you have an honorific. You’ll be okay here for a night, no problem.” Nathaniel strips his gloves off and washes his hands with brisk motions under the antiseptic spray gun. “You go back out through Adorn, stick to the left, along the eastward edge of the Pier, and find a place called Neophyte. It’s a Skat bar, rough and noisy as hell, but the barmaid’s a good lady, good as they come. She’ll look after you, and she’s a friend of Lever’s. Knows her far better than I. You can pick her brains and satisfy that burning curiosity I’m sensing I did nothing to get rid of. But I wouldn’t mention this business with Lever’s skin.”

  “Hah, no, not a good idea.” Bone pulls his jacket on, wincing as the heavy weight of it awakens a chorus of pain. “Thank you. For everything. What do I owe?”

  Nathaniel holds his hands up, white teeth gleaming like stars. “No, Bone-Man, this was my pleasure. Like I said, I can mooch forever off this job. You just wear it with pride.”

  Bone thinks of Leif’s face, and he’s amazed by how little he cares what his father would say about this. “Oh, I am. You have no idea.”

  He shakes Nate’s hand warmly and leaves his parlour, gentle ripples of pain swelling and ebbing beneath the harsh weight of his jacket and shirt. Wrapped in serene excitement so intense it consumes him whole, he trails the streets of the Arcade, still heaving with vibrant life. Strolls through the tunnel, back into the manic overload of Pier Five proper, and for the first time, he’s not merely an observer, or seeker of information; he’s an interlocking piece of the construction. The sudden collapse of his isolating bubble shouldn’t feel this good. But it does. Some small, essential part has begun to wriggle its way loose, pulling towards the icy sky, straining to join with the black of night.

  Bone wanders along the east side of the Pier to the club called Neophyte. It’s tiny, a rusted shed of corrugated iron and old cement formed into chaotic bubbles. Inside, a live band stands cramped on a stage of upturned steel crates, tearing at their instruments in violent, eye-clenched rage, the singer roaring with incoherent anguish at nothing but the smoke. The room is filled with Skats, piped up, bonged up, and toking on massive reefers. He squeezes through cramped tables to the bar. To the barmaid Nathaniel said would be his caretaker tonight. She doesn’t look caring, her face unbending as iron under a rioting mess of red and purple dreads.

  “You want a drink?” she shouts over the racket.

  “Gas-malt,” Bone says, wondering if this is the right woman. Perhaps her shift has been and gone. But then, a smile of pure silver glimmers through the iron and he sees what Nathaniel meant. She slaps a hand on the bar, as though tickled by some mad joke.

  “Comin’ up, sugar.”

  The malt, when set before him, makes him groan with profound satisfaction. It’s perfect. The whisky a syrupy brown so rich it looks like poured caramel and the petrol a soft olive, slightly smoky and reeking of engine metals. He downs it in one, feeling it ignite in his belly, and orders another. She sets two more down before him and grins widely, silver all through.

  “I like a man who can drink.”

  “I like to drink.” He shifts his stance at the bar, closing his eyes and smiling at the scrape of material against his sore skin.

  The woman leans across the bar, her arms folded before cleavage as luxurious as the falls in her hair. “You don’t come to the Zone to change, do you, Bone-Man?” she says, her eyes curious and sharp with interest. “But today you seem different. Today I feel change took you by surprise.”

  Bone shakes his head and says with no small pride, “Today, I took change by surprise.”

  “That’s the best way to take it.” She reaches a slender, ring-laden hand over the bar to him. “Ebony. Ebony Waits. You’ll get to know me.”

  He shakes the proffered paw. “A pleasure.”

  “You look like a man with a hankering for a good, solid meal,” she says, soft and warm and entirely silver.

  “I could eat a fucking herd of cows,” he tells her.

  Ebony busts out a laugh, explosive and luminous as a bomb blast. “Lucky for you, the lout who passes for a chef in this dump used approximately an entire herd in tonight’s attempt at stew. One hot bowlful of cow coming up.”

  They exchange a moment of absolute cool before she rushes off to serve another punter yelling for “more beers now, Ebony babe” over the din. Content to wait and knowing she won’t forget him, Bone turns to view the stage, his gas-malt cradled in loving fingers. He tunes into the noise. It’s not discord or aggression, but harmonious melding of bloody fury and pounding rhythms, a heavy reservoir of human gasoline. Fuel for the soul. He falls forwards into it, letting it ride over him.

  Several hours later, when Ebony’s shift is ending, his phone vibrates. Bone wrestles the phone from his pocket, yelping as it pulls his jacket too hard against sore skin. Ebony’s promised to escort him to the Bullet, so he can get home; maybe grab some sleep, so he can turn up at work later somewhere near to functional. He’s been hoping to finally find the time to ask her about Lever, the bar being too full to grab more than a few minutes banter here and there. He checks the screen and groans.

  “What the fuck, Stark, it’s a bit bloody early.”

  “Early?”

  “As in, it’s already tomorrow.”

  “Well, go and get some fucking sleep then,” comes the brusque reply. “Miracle of fucking miracles, I finally got green lit for going after Burneo. We hit the sewer at first light. I’ll stream you the location and the exa
ct time. Don’t be late.”

  Several hours of drinking wipe out in one fell swoop, leaving Bone way too sober. This business with Lever has offered a temporary, much needed diversion from the unpleasant realities of the Rope case. His failings. Those expectant, nameless corpses. He’s terrified of going back to the sewer, but his new understanding of the nature of choice has strengthened his connection to those corpses. Their choice was stolen, too. That they chose to get their tags is incidental, they didn’t choose what came afterwards. The look on their faces is eloquent proof of that. He has no choice but to help them.

  “I’ll be there,” he says, and hangs up, watching as the flickering lights of his cell announce the arrival of Stark’s stream. He glances at the location and groans yet again, even more profoundly. There’ll be no time for talking; he needs to sleep, and soon. Dawn comes in three hours. Ebony strolls around from the bar, winding a scarf about her neck. “Ebony?”

  “What’s the matter, hon?”

  “Change of plan,” he says with a rueful smile. “Can I possibly surf your sofa for the night?”

  Ebony puts her arm through his and gives it a little squeeze. “Of course, you can,” she says, and as they walk out into the brisk cold of early morning, she adds playfully, “Just lucky my girlfriend’s not over. A pretty boy like you on my sofa would take one hell of an explanation.”

  Chapter 24

  Bone hurries along scrubby pathways, wound between mountainous factories, worried he might be late. Last night, contorted onto Ebony’s tiny sofa, he did the unexpected: slept. Deep, dreamless sleep. He feels so awake now, it’s like light pours through his skull, illuminating every last corner. He reaches a row of massive silos and squeezes through the gap. Just ahead, over a wasteland of gravel and brush, the ground falls away to a steep bank. At the bottom, on the opposite side, sewer hub portals yawn in the base of a concrete wall, covered in Establishment graffiti. Bone squints hard, but he can’t see anyone there, meaning he’s not the one who’s late. Grinning, Bone runs across the wasteland and over the edge of the bank, his feet sliding on loose gravel.