by Tam MacNeil
The walls in this bedroom are painted a kind of soft purple, and the windows are framed in a flouncy, fussy kind of fabric. There’s a twin bed with a white bedspread in the middle of the room, and the whole ensemble is covered in a canopy like a Disney princess bed. A desk against one wall holds an old computer, a mirror covered in cut out magazine pictures of teenage stars with messy hair. The pictures are faded, badly faded, and he recognizes one of the faces as Seb Stoames, whose considerably less chubby and more rugged face is currently gracing all the movie theatre posters in town. There’s dust on the computer, and the desk.
He knows he shouldn’t stay. He knows this room will be off limits. The girl who used to inhabit these rooms is clearly gone, has been gone for a long time, but people only keep things that matter to them. If Cameron catches him in here, he’ll be angry, and there’s nothing he wants to avoid more than making Cameron angrier than he already is.
He slips back out into the hall and draws the door shut, holding the handle turned until the door is settled and the lock won’t click. He can still hear murmuring voices downstairs. Nobody knows what he did.
He goes into the library. He likes books, always has. His first day on the street he went to the library, because he didn’t know where else to go, and he sat there reading and warm and safe and pretending he had a family still, till the security guard came round and told him he had to leave. In winter the library kept him alive. He could thaw his frozen hands under the warm water taps and sort of dry his clothes with the hand dryer, and the books took his mind away from everything that was so bad. It was where he took Sean after he found him bleeding from his mouth, shivering and sobbing, in the alley.
“What happened?” he’d asked. Hadn’t meant to. Had learned by then that you kinda keep your mouth shut and don’t look at other people, but Sean was about his age, and he was bleeding and trying not to cry.
“He fucking punched me,” Sean had whispered, touching his mouth and then looking at the smear of blood on his hand. “Ow. My teeth.”
“Why’d he do that?”
“Because I’m not big enough to punch him back.” Sean looked at him furious, defiant. Then, suddenly, he grinned. “Stupid asshole shouldn’t have kept his wallet in his back pocket.” He held up a small leather billfold.
At the time Alex didn’t understand what Sean meant. He hadn’t been on his own very long yet, and a part of him had always sort of held out hope that it was all some kind of terrible dream, the shinigami, the way his family was there one night and then gone in the morning. But he had started to get lonely. And he had started to want friends again. Sean, pugnacious and bloody but grinning, seemed like a candidate. Alex had taken a chance. “Hey, uh, I know somewhere you can use the bathroom.”
“What the fuck do you care? You think I’m gonna share this with you?” Sean had glared at him.
“No. It’s just… you’re bleeding. You gotta get cleaned up or people’ll…” he shrugged. He wasn’t entirely sure what people would do, but he knew if you didn’t look tidy they didn’t treat you right.
Sean stared at him, but he let Alex take him down to the library.
Sometimes he used to pretend he was a hero on a quest, so he just carried on, and pretended that Sean was his companion. The fantasy books were his favourite. The suffering part was important, it was what made the hero able to defeat the villain at the end, and the companions were what made the quest bearable. He bathed Sean’s cut up mouth in the library bathroom sink and nobody said anything till the security guard caught them.
“Something you boys want to tell me?” the old man had said.
“He fell in the parking lot,” Alex’d lied. It had come to him easily. “I texted my mom, she’s on her way. Don’t worry, we’ll clean up after ourselves.”
The security guard had frowned, but he nodded. “Alright, son.”
Sean looked at him and cracked that grin again. “Nice,” he said when the security guard was gone. He looked into the billfold he was holding clenched in one hand. “There’s twenty five bucks in here,” he’d said. He’d looked at Alex. “Uh, you hungry?”
Always. The answer was always. It was what made them such easy prey.
It’s been a long time since Alex was allowed to go to libraries and just sit and read, but he buys paperbacks sometimes, in airports and train stations, and he still likes fantasy stories. Cameron doesn’t. He reads the engineering journals, and the political magazines, and he has a full collection of everything every written by or about Churchill, and Alex couldn’t give a fuck about that guy. He sits in the library wishing for a book till he hears Cameron call his name. When that happens he hurries down the stairs.
Chen is waiting at the door. She looks at him and smiles and says nothing and Alex would like to rush her and smash her head against the door, because she’s the only person who could have known the place they’d pick, the only person who could have hidden so well that Sean couldn’t find her, the only person who could have done this to him, because she trained them both.
“I kept it tidy,” she says. “You should thank me.”
He ignores that. “What happened to Sean?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“He's dead?”
She shrugs, smiles. She knows but she’s not telling.
“You’re a fucking bitch, you know that right?”
The smile hardens. “Keep talking nice and next time maybe I’ll cripple you.”
The door to the study slides open and Cameron appears. He is neat again, looks cool and comfortable, and he smiles at them both.
“Good,” Cameron says, and Alex realizes he’s being looked over. “The shirt suits you, Alex. Chen, you drive.”
She nods, and stands aside to open the door. Alex follows Cameron out to the car. It’s late afternoon, and cooling off. He wishes he knew what day it was, how long it’s been. He can guess by the bruising and the scabbing, but can’t really be sure.
Chen drives while Alex sits in silence beside Cameron and Vancouver goes sliding by. He can see the crumbled mass of the tower that the mech destroyed, the massive craters in the street. Traffic is bad, the city rerouting itself after serious damage, but he knows where they are going. To SysCorp, and to the mech lab.
There the usual pro-shinigami row of protestors standing at the gate. Their numbers have been swelled by anti-domestic security nut jobs, and Chen has to pilot the car slowly to the gates. The gatehouse guards look grim and tired but they jump to a kind of ragged attention when they see who it is, and Cameron nods at them.
In the parking lot, Cameron looks across the seats to Alex, reaches over and smoothes the collar of his shirt. “Your eyes are still red,” he says while Alex holds still. When he’s done with the collar he looks Alex in the eye and Alex avoids his gaze. “I’m sorry that I had to hurt you, Alex, but you understand why I had to, don’t you?”
Alex nods.
“Good boy. Now, come on and smile. You’re good looking when you smile. No one will notice your eyes.”
He nods again and does as he’s told. He’s good at it.
Five
Chen stays in the car but he and Cameron get out together. Cameron walks him through security and nobody does anything but nod at him or say, Good Morning, sir as he passes, and no one says anything to Alex. These people are communications and reception and service, all front-of-house and over stuff. Anybody who knows him is a few floors up, in operations, or in the mech lab.
They take the elevator down, to the lab. It makes his heart jump in his chest, makes him anxious, a part of him had hoped, had believed, that Cameron was lying about piloting the mechs, that he had been saying those things to scare him, but now he’s not so sure.
They go into the lab, past the laboratories, past the offices, to the boardroom where two women and a man are all waiting. They all turn when Cameron leads him in. He looks at Cameron, who is smiling, and easy, and genial now.
“Good morning Dr. Campbell, Dr. Sunil,
Dr. Brown,” he says looking from face to face as he says the names. Dr. Campbell is the only one Alex knows. He’s tall, white, dark-haired. Dr. Sunil’s a black-haired woman in a stained up lab coat, and Dr. Brown is petite and blond and looking him up and down like she’s measuring him.
“Cameron,” Marshall Campbell says. “Good to see you.”
“I’ve brought you all a treat.” It’s that voice and that smile he uses for TV appearances, for gala nights and press conferences. “I’ve brought you your new pilot.” He looks at Alex and Alex knows his role. He smiles at them all.
“Hello.”
“A volunteer?” Dr. Sunil asks.
“Yes,” Cameron says. “A volunteer.”
“Stand there,” Marshall says, pointing to a spot on the carpet. Alex does as he’s told, hands in pockets, then out, then in pockets again. “Yeah,” he says. “He’ll do.”
“He’s too short,” Dr. Sunil says.
“How old are you?” The other woman, Dr. Brown, asks. She has a faint British accent, and smiles just a little as she asks.
“Uh, twenty four,” Alex answers.
She shrugs small shoulders. “It’s only an inch or two, but it’s a bit late for forcing bones.” She frowns. “Ever had a broken leg?”
“No ma’am.”
Dr. Brown nods. “Well,” she says, “We might be able to get a couple more inches out of him.”
“That’ll take weeks,” Dr. Sunil says, frowning.
“Take longer to rebuild that chassis again.”
Dr. Sunil’s frown deepens. “I suppose we have to put the ports in anyway,” she says with a sigh.
Marshall looks back at him. “Turn around,” he says. It’s a bit weird, but Alex turns in a small circle. “Walk to the table and back.” Alex walks to the table and waits. He glances at Cameron who smiles at him and relief washes over him; he’s doing this right. He walks back to where he was.
“He’s limping,” Marshall says. Cameron shrugs.
“Bruising,” he says. “He’s fit enough to get started.”
Marshall’s eyelids droop. He smiles faintly. “This is the one you extracted the other night isn’t it?”
Cameron inclines his head.
“So it's not just the leg, is it?"
"No, there's a bullet wound in the shoulder. But he's been seen and pronounced fit."
Marshall hmmms softly. "And where’s the other one?”
Cameron shakes his head. “He is not available for piloting.”
Alex’s stomach clenches. He wants to ask but knows that now is not the time so he doesn’t. Instead he looks at Cameron, but Cameron gives nothing away, but he does smile at Alex. That eases the knot in his stomach just a little.
Dr. Brown makes an unhappy noise. “If he’s injured then the growth hormone…”
“Actually, it might help,” says Dr. Sunil thoughtfully.
They look at each other, then Dr. Brown smiles. “Yes,” she says. “I suppose it might.”
Cameron looks around the room like a proud father. “Well, I’m glad this has worked out so well for us all,” he says, and Alex can tell by the tone of his voice that Cameron is going and Alex is staying. He has heard that voice before, when deals were being done with warlords and opposition politicians. He wants to ask about Sean, he wants to know what’s happened to him but there’s no opportunity.
Dr. Brown has already opened a hard-case that lies on top of the table. It looks kind of like a gun case, but inside are a bunch of small objects, bottles, a syringe, a pack of sterile wipes, a thick piece of rubber band, tubing. She opens one of the sterilizing wipes, then pops the cap off the syringe and fills it from one of the bottles.
“Come here,” she says. She wipes the inside of his arm. Alex has never liked needles. He fidgets a bit. “Now, now, hold still,” she says. “Won’t take a moment.” The needle slips under skin, the fluid is cold as ice water, he feels it pass into his vein and spread out, like a stain.
He smiles, trying to be friendly, make a good impression. If he behaves maybe this’ll be quick and then he can catch Cameron and ask where Sean is. “Uh, I’m Alex,” he says. Dr. Brown looks at him and smiles.
“Not any more,” she says.
When he wakes up, his skin is full of holes. Holes in the backs of his arms and the backs of his legs. He can see some of them, feel the presence of others. He raises one hand and feels for the one at the nape of his neck. It hurts, the skin puffy, raw, sensitive to touch, and ringed with metal. When he takes his hand away his fingers have a thin film of clear, sticky fluid on them.
He can hear people talking quietly, and moving around and he realizes he’s lying in a bed that’s not in a med ward or a hospital, but in a sort of cell that is the size of a city apartment. He looks around. There’s a toilet and a sink, no mirror, and two other beds, metal ones, the type that fold out from the walls.
He hurts. His legs ache like someone’s been beating on them and he remembers something about growing bones and making him taller and he supposes this is part of it. He supposes there’ll be a doctor or a nurse near by, that this is some kind of post-op recovery room. There must be someone he can ask. He raises his head but it takes so much effort and he’s so tired and the room is dark.
“Well, well, look who’s awake,” someone says.
“Nope,” says another voice, and Alex is out again.
It takes a few days for Alex to get clear of the drugs, or to get used to them, it's hard to say, but pretty soon he’s sitting up in bed in spite of all the shots he's been getting lately.
There are two others that live in the tank with him, Joel is a couple inches taller than Alex, his hair buzzed right down to nothing, his dark skin crisscrossed by scars. Evie is the one Alex has seen before. She’s blond, on one side of her head anyway, there’s no hair at all on the other side, only a ragged burn scar. She’s the one who was in the mech the day he and Sean saw the techs opening the cockpit. She was the one whose eyes were full of blood, and who screamed like the pain was killing her.
They talk a little, and Alex sleeps a lot. They come and go, while Alex recovers and in between times, they talk a bit. First they tease him, scare the shit out of him, tell him stories about the cage, which is what they call the place where the pilots actually work. They tell him that once he’s plugged in the mech’s body will feel like his body. They tell him about broken bones and burns, the horror of being on fire and not able to put out the flames, and he doesn’t sleep at all that night. Then one morning the tank door rolls open like the sound of a jail cell. The tech calls, Breakfast, then training. Everybody.
Evie gives him a grin and follows the guy out. Alex goes to follow too, and Joel leans over, catches his arm.
“They never throw you into a fight your first time. It’ll be a simulation. Scary as hell, but not real. Don’t worry about it.”
Evie glances over her shoulder and smiles at him. “But you’re still going to piss yourself. Everybody does.”
There’s a suit threaded with metal that fits like a wetsuit. The cage is a wirework basket, and there are plugs that fit into the ports in his arms and his legs. Getting into the suit is awkward and weird, it’s how he imagines a wetsuit feels. He steps up into the cage and steps back into place. The ports slide in, legs, arms, neck, shoulders, back. At first it’s nothing, just a sensation of pressure at the ports. The tech does up the straps that hold him into place and says, “Looks good. Now comms and oxygen.”
He brandishes a mask, the kind that Alex has seen before. He remembers Evie, before he knew she was Evie, and the blood pouring out from under the mask.
“Do I have to have that?” he asks.
The tech nods. “Yeah. Open up, there’s a plate that goes on your tongue.”
The thing that goes into his mouth is somewhere between a mouth guard and a microchip. The man buckles it in place, tightening the strap behind his head so that it pulls at Alex’s mouth like a bit.
“Bite hard.”
He obeys. The plate gives just a little under the pressure. A hum fills the air, like something electronic powering up fast.
“Ok, stop. It’s working. That’s the cannon trigger. Bite for three seconds, boom. That's a long range weapon. Got it?”
He nods. The movement pulls his mouth just a little, just enough that he can taste blood. The guy reaches up again and Alex jerks his head back. “Hold still,” he says and pushes the helmet down over Alex’s head. It pulls on the plate too and the plate cuts his mouth a little more. He glares at the tech through the window of the helmet.
The tech grins at him. “The blood puts a little extra iron and salt in the saliva. It’s good for the sensors.” He slaps down the visor and all of the sound goes away. Then he gives Alex a big thumbs up and points as a head’s up display flickers to life.
“Pilot, raise your left hand.”
It’s a voice right in his ear, almost inside his head. He looks at his left hand. It’s not easy, the visor is foggy. But he can see his arms slightly extended, as if seated in a theatre chair.
“Raise your left hand, Pilot.”
It’s a command and he wants to obey. He tries. It should be easy, but the cage around all the parts of him makes it impossible to do. He thinks about it, stares at the hand that won’t move and the arm that won’t command it.
“Pilot. Raise you left hand.”
He can’t. He’s panting, sweating but the muscles won’t work. Everything is exhausted. He hurts. Even his bones ache.
“Try the electrical,” someone says. It doesn’t hurt. It’s something worse than that; his muscles move, contract, but they do it without him. He strains until his muscles are going to snap, until the mech moves around him and then, suddenly, like waking up, the interface explodes into life in his head and he can feel the mech, enclosing him like a cocoon, as if his flesh is made of metal, as if he is colossal and he is impervious and he is strong. It is wonderful.
“Systems all on line,” someone says in his ear. “Well done, Pilot.”