Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2012 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Elizabeth Bear

  “You’re the doctor?”

  The newcomer’s voice was a melodious, rough-edged alto, like the women who smoked tobacco in old movies. It took Molly a moment to reconcile that voice with the thick, broad body. She saw the faintest hint of breasts under the tan shirt where she hadn’t noticed them before.

  “Yes,” she said, stepping around her desk. She passed the examining table and storage shelves in three strides. Her tank top slid wetly against her skin as she stuck her hand out in offering. “You are?”

  The woman paused, then took Molly’s hand. Her fingers were hot to the touch, red with sunburn. She must not have worn gloves. “Jada.”

  Molly frowned. “What do you need?”

  “Right to the point,” she said. She tugged her hand away and in one smooth yank pulled her shirt over her head. Then she stood straight, shoulders back. Molly flinched but forced herself to look. Jada was heavily muscled, dense as a tree trunk and probably just as hard, but that wasn’t what was breathtaking. It was the scars.

  “You recognize these?” the woman asked.

  Designs snaked over her torso, down into the temp-reg pants, up to her neck. The left side of her rib cage was a silvery mass of letters and symbols, all jumbled; there was a stylized sun around her navel with waving lines of light. A crane, its legs hidden by the waistband of her pants, spread its wings over her right side and torso. There were smaller signs hidden around the larger; three simple slashes crossed the space between her collarbones. Her skin was as readable as a novel, her flesh a malleable masterpiece made with knives. Some of the scars were still pink, and a spiral design on her left breast was an angry, fresh red.

  Murder scars, Molly thought. Syndicate badge. The sheer number of them made her throat constrict. She took a step backward, as if one step would make any difference to a skilled killer.

  “I need a new set,” the woman said, sticking out her bare, untouched arm. “Here.”

  “You must have an artist—” Molly began.

  “Not down here,” the syndicate woman said. She turned her head, looking out the open window at the road. Her mouth formed a thin line as she paused. Molly saw that her ears were pierced with a multitude of silver hoops that hugged the curve of the cartilage. “I need the new marks done now. I can pay you more than enough to make it worth your time.”

  New marks for a new murder, and Molly immediately wondered where this woman had earned the right: on the stations, or locally? She unclenched her jaw. “Why?”

  There was no reason for any syndicate to set foot on old Earth, or what little of it was still habitable, beyond trading for young, desperate, attractive flesh to bring to the stations—unless they were running from the mil-police. Molly suspected that the only reason the station governments bothered to dispatch the police downside at all was to apprehend the occasional syndicate member; they certainly didn’t do much else.

  After a strained silence, Jada replied, “Does it matter?”

  “Money’s not enough,” she said. “Not for one of you.”

  Jada smiled with a cool edge. She wound her shirt around her fist and lifted her chin. Molly kept her eyes on the woman’s face instead of her bare torso, though the scars drew her gaze like the sucking gravity of a black hole. “I’ll bargain you the story. Or any story. I’ve got plenty.”

  “Who did you kill?” Molly ground out.

  “Oh, that,” Jada said. A look passed over her face like a flickering shadow, there and gone before Molly could grasp it. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her mouth dry as she waited for the answer. “No one you know.” She paused, then spoke again, bleak hurt punching through her prior composure. “My partner.”

  Molly hated that it melted her for a moment, and worse, that it pricked her curiosity.

  She was used to hurting. Downside, people lived their lives hurting, starving, scraping by. They wilted, underfed and wounded; tender, fleshy flowers exposed to the scouring radiation of the sun barely filtered through the damaged atmosphere. What she’d had in her pockets upon her deportation had made her the richest woman in the town—a tablet, a few hundred in station currency in her bank, and a medical degree. The money had run out fast on things like setting up a house, before she realized that she would never have it again, and the tablet was bound to die soon, and her degree had only gotten her clinic the monetary sympathy of one of the vast corporate aid–machines stationside, the kind that made people feel good about donating their pocket change to help the needy. The stipend went to the clinic, in any case, to her monthly restock orders brought by courier from the port-city thirty kilometers away and the occasional extra tool. That enviable wealth she’d brought with her could not put food on the table every night or clothes on her back. She hadn’t once in her life gone hungry until the first week on Earth.

  There was no such thing as a tourist, planetside.

  “Why here?” she finally asked.

  Jada cut her a sharp glance. “Because this is where I’ve washed up.”

  Molly smothered her questions—did you abandon your syndicate, are they hunting you, who are you, how did you end up here, are you stuck downside—and crossed the room again. She sat behind her desk, the wood chair digging into the backs of her thighs. Jada shook out her shirt and slipped it over her head again. The tan fabric hid the scars and the flush that had begun to redden her pale skin.

  “How much?” Molly asked.

  “I’ve got a few thousand in station currency stowed away,” she said as she walked up and planted her hands on the desk. “I want the whole arm. He deserves that much of me. Will you or won’t you?”

  Molly closed her eyes to avoid looking at the woman leaning on her desk, her curious desperation a palpable pressure. Still, she was aware of the shadow cast over her, the undeniable presence.

  She thought of the fibrous lump she’d felt with fear-stiffened fingers in her right breast almost a year ago, the phenomenal cost of importing a gene-therapy. She ground her teeth against the knowing, and the acceptance, wishing she didn’t need the money like she needed air.

  It hadn’t been anyone she knew. That was enough.

  “It will take a few days,” she said.

  Jada nodded, a short jerk of her chin. “When can you start?”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “I’ll start the story when you start cutting,” Jada said.

  “All right, fine,” Molly replied, equally short with her.

  Another moment of silence stretched between the two women as Molly pushed her chair back and strode to the examining table. Another person might have spoken to fill it, but Jada wasn’t that person. She let it hang. Molly snagged a box of sanitation-wipes from the wire shelf in the corner and used two to wipe down the thinly padded table.

  “Let that dry while you tell me what you want done,” she said.

  “Start with flowers,” Jada said, still leaning against the desk behind her. “Then do whatever seems right, once you hear the story. That’s the point, memorializing it.”

  Molly nodded. Her pulse pounded out of control, adrenaline washing in a stinging-hot rush through her veins. She was glad to have her back to the room while she inspected her supplies. This was outside her realm of experience. When she cut someone, it was quick and for a reason, and they didn’t feel it. She didn’t peel their skin off while they watched. It was almost embarrassing that the thought of doing the scars made her more nauseated than working for a syndicate killer.

  “Do you have a preference in utensils?” she asked.

  Jada answered from right behind her, “Scalpel, if you have a small, sharp one.”

  Molly narrowly managed not to flinch at the touch of breath on the nape of her neck, cooling the dampness of sweat. Thousands, she reminded herself, but out loud she said, “One other thing,” as she found the right size of blade in her case. They weren’t intended for reuse, but there was no way to justify throwing away a perfectly good instrument. Instead, she kept everything well sanitized. “If th
e police show up at my door, what happens?”

  Jada pressed fingertips to the edge of her shoulder blade from behind, at the soft spot where muscle joined muscle. She stiffened. Jada pressed so gently that it didn’t hurt, but it was a hint.

  “I forced you,” she said quietly. “Just like this. No marks. But you were afraid. So you helped me, because you had to, right?”

  “Right,” Molly said, half-strangled.

  Jada’s touch slipped away and she moved to sit on the edge of the table. Molly glanced at her from the corner of her eye.

  “I’ve had—run-ins with them before,” Molly admitted.

  Jada shook her head. “You think I didn’t guess you were from stationside the minute I stepped through the door? Your accent isn’t native. You shake hands.”

  “I see,” Molly said. Her face heated with a blush that would be nearly invisible beneath her brown skin, darkened further from years in the heavy-UV sunlight.

  That was one of the first things the locals had joked about when she’d come to start the clinic nearly a decade ago, having just received a license to do aid-work after her deportation—Westerner, even though there hadn’t been such a thing as a “west” for some time, just the stations far above. It stuck in the language all the same. She looked right, but spoke wrong.

  “No one comes here for pleasure, so I know you got sent.” Jada shrugged those wide shoulders, not smiling. “Syndicate pull some strings?”

  “You could say that,” Molly answered, not smiling either.

  “I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” she said. “You’re doing humanitarian work, being a good girl, and you’ve got an even bigger reason to be afraid of a syndicate worker. They’ll believe the story if you believe it.”

  Their eyes met. Molly nodded.

  “Off with the shirt,” she said. “You don’t want it getting bloodied.”

  “I don’t think it’ll matter,” Jada said.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  The other woman stared at her, eyes narrowed, and pulled the shirt over her head once more. The scarring was no less shocking the second time around but Molly made herself look. With ungloved hands she touched a few of them, palpating. The wounds were mostly surface damage but done wide enough that the skin wouldn’t knit quite right. The smaller patterns, like the spiral at the top of Jada’s left breast, were harder ridges. The scars went deeper.

  “Do you treat the wounds with anything to keep them open?” she asked.

  “There’s a sealant,” she answered. “Keeps out infections and doesn’t let the edges knit. I’ve got some in my pack.”

  “All right,” Molly said as she rolled on a pair of thin gloves.

  She ran a disinfectant wipe over the scalpel though it shone clean already. It was best to be sure. Her hands didn’t shake. The adrenaline had disappeared under the prepared calm she’d mastered years ago and far away, learning how to help people. This was the opposite of that, or maybe it wasn’t.

  “Flowers?” she checked.

  “Flowers,” Jada said. “I’ll talk, you cut.”

  Molly wiped down Jada’s arm as well, the sharp smell of antiseptic wafting in the hot air. She traced her fingers carefully over the area, feeling the joins of muscles and the intricacies of Jada’s flesh.

  “No anesthetic?” she checked.

  “No,” Jada said.

  Molly shook her head.

  “Your decision,” she said.

  There was no delaying any longer. She braced the skin at the top of Jada’s upper arm with one hand and laid the edge of the scalpel to it. Blood beaded under the blade as she traced the first narrow line.

  Jada’s breath shuddered out, but her arm stayed still. Molly reminded herself how much practice the woman had had at this, reminded herself not to be impressed.

  “So—”

  “Here’s your story,” Jada said.

  The Dawnslight syndicate were big into flesh-trade, pharmaceuticals, weapons—if the police didn’t like it, we did it. By “we” I mean my boss, the head of the organization. Trade was not my job. As you probably figured from the badge scars, my job is to be a weapon. Point me in the right direction and say go; I will do what needs doing. There’s no other way to make it to the top of a syndicate. You have to be the best.

  I was the best. Or probably one of the best, because Eten—my partner, yeah—was also very, very good at what we did. We met when we were scrub assassins way down-rank. We clicked. Eten was this pretty thing, he was so thin, like you could break him with your hands. But you couldn’t. I couldn’t. He would slip right out of your grip and leave you holding air while he kicked your teeth in. I liked Eten, a lot.

  Those years were tough. The work was messy and it didn’t pay half as good as you think it would.—Here she paused while Molly tugged on a slippery bit of skin, and said, “You need tweezers for that.”—We were good, though, so good we moved up, but we always moved up together. I was maybe seventeen, maybe nineteen when we got drunk and realized we might want to fuck. It was weird, I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you, you’re looking at this friend you’ve had for years who’s always got your back and you think, well, shit. He’s gorgeous. I want him.

  That turned out better than it does for most people, I think. It made us a real pair. We knew each other’s movements, we knew each other’s thoughts. There was no getting between us for a job, but outside of that, we had some edges that didn’t mesh. Eten was different about killing, for one thing. I don’t feel anything when I finish a job, I never did. I don’t mean I like it, I really mean I don’t feel much. It doesn’t make me happy, or sad, and I don’t get a thrill out of it. It’s work. Like taking out the trash or scrubbing floors. It’s mechanical.

  Eten wasn’t mechanical. He was fucking talented, but it upset him.

  Maybe ten years later, we caught the eye of the big boss in Dawnslight. He needed his personal guard-head replaced. Nothing nasty, the last guy was just getting too old. I told him we came as a pair, because he only asked for me, and he said fine. He took us both, gave us a big house, all the things we needed.

  The problem was that we’d never been privy to much business before. Sure, you know you’re killing this guy because he stole a shipment of this or that, but you don’t see the numbers. You don’t grasp it.

  —The blood was starting to make a slick mess in and around the petals of the third flower. Molly sat back and snagged a clean towel. “You bleed too much.”—

  We both saw the ledgers: the number of kids from downside shipped to the stations and where they got stuck, the weapons we sent in trade, the sheer goddamn scale of the pharm business and who we denied drugs to and who we sold them to and for how much.

  It’s one thing to execute somebody for betraying your boss. It’s another to see how many people your boss is killing with swipes of his pen on his tablet. It bothered me, yeah, but I felt like a jackass, because like I didn’t know. If I hadn’t known, it was because I was being blind on purpose. So I kept going. But Eten had problems with it. I saw them. I started doing the jobs for both of us; he started staying on at the boss’s place to do security.

  It wasn’t like he was bored, he had incursions and assassins and rivals to deal with while I went off snipping the buds of people who were making trouble. It worked, for a little while. He started kissing all the new scars I’d got and I thought he maybe had decided to love me again, no matter what else we were doing.

  I was wrong. I was big, bad wrong. Because love isn’t enough when something in you is just broken and nobody cares. He wasn’t saying “I love you.” He was saying sorry.

  I found that out when the mole came to me, her face all white, and said she’d gotten wind of a tip-line flowing to the police. A tip-line with some very important and very impossible information about Dawnslight. There wasn’t a name, but there weren’t many options for who it could be, and I knew. I knew as soon as she walked in the door, before she even said it. I knew, I knew.

>   I still wonder if they promised him some kind of immunity, or if he even fucking cared anymore.

  “All right, enough,” Jada said through her teeth, breathless.

  Molly stopped. She looked up from her work, four raw-wound flowers with wide petals dripping red pollen. It wasn’t as hard as she’d imagined it would be, once she got the trick of the scalpel and tweezers. The thin metal pan she was using for—scraps, she supposed she should say, though that did disgust her—would need to be emptied, the flesh incinerated.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Jada barked a laugh. “That’s not how storytelling works. I’ll come back tomorrow, I’ll tell you some more. You said it would take a few days.”

  Molly laid down the utensils in the pan and stripped her bloody gloves off. Her hands had begun to tremble, much delayed. She had a feeling she knew exactly where Jada’s story was going. Of course she’d killed him, they’d already covered that. But—if it had been simple, if it had gone well, there would be no reason for Jada to be planetside, getting a scarification from a small-town clinic in what used to be India from a woman whose name was not actually Molly and who did not belong.

  “The sealant?” she asked, wrenching herself away from that line of thought.

  Jada slid off of the table, cupping the towel to her arm to catch the dripping blood flow, and made her way to the door where she’d dropped her bag when she came in. Her feet slid with her weight instead of stepping; clearly she was feeling the pain. She squatted and dug through her pack for a moment. Molly looked down at herself and found a splotch of blood on the hem of her tank top, a dull maroon color.

  Jada returned with the sealant and pressed it into her outstretched hand. The bottle had a squirt top, which struck Molly as silly for no reason she could pinpoint. She squeezed some of the bitter-smelling liquid onto a small wad of bandages and dabbed it over the wounds. It took her several minutes to cover them sufficiently, spent in a quiet that was strange after an hour or two of listening. Jada seemed to be made of silences and stories with no room for any chatter.