Graft (36 page)

“This!” Yasmin shouts, pointing down the conveyor line.

Sol doesn't need persuading. They charge along it, deeper and deeper, until they enter a red-lit space with a rubberized floor. A strange odour meets them – it imprints on Sol the idea of an abattoir, the stink of frightened animals. Between dark corners, the far wall's covered in wires and box units similar in size and shape to the device that wrapped Roy's toilet. The thicker cables create a square on the brick.

“They cross here?” he asks.

Yasmin shrugs. “Not me,” she says.

Sol looks about, fascinated by the grim efficiency of the place. Trays marked IN on the walls, and a store of trolleys and pallets labelled similarly. A crate of bandages and supplies tipped out and left to soak up what's on the floor. Propped-up panels from broken crates–

“In,” Sol says. Trying to see what's missing, trying to understand. Again he looks to the equipment arranged on the wall. Is this an auxiliary transfer space? It'd be ridiculous if it didn't smell so tangible. And anyway, the science is irrelevant: he's already seen Roy's top half vanish, had his glimpse of extraterrestrial space. Maybe it's odd that he's never tried to deny the vision to himself. Maybe it was too pure, too convincing–

“You came through the tower?”

Yasmin's throat thrums. “Yes.”

OUT.

“
And that thing over there,” he says, pointing. “Rigged on the wall. It's like the kit we saw at Knutsford. Like they had round the portaloo.”

Yasmin nods and skips past him to a set of weathered crates whose lids aren't fully sealed. She prises one open. “In,” she says, and points inside.

“Go on then,” Sol says.

And that is pretty much that.

I
n the dark
of the trans-crate, their arms and legs tangled and buttocks numb, Sol and Yasmin try to breathe slowly. As they do, the crate around them creaks gently, like an old ship. The air is thin and hot, and they share water and open a cereal bar he found secreted in his overalls. It's stale – probably months past its use-by date – and coated in a bitter synthetic chocolate.

“Energy,” Yasmin's artificial voice grates – intimately close, sinister in the dark. The cereal bar leaves a fine dust when it's broken, and the two of them feel it powder their faces, sticking to their sweat. “After you,” Sol says, handing her a piece. But they bite down simultaneously, chew dryly.

Occasionally, voices carry down from ducting above, and at one point a set of heavy boots rings in the room itself. On the whole it seems quieter: the radio chatter has died down, and the most immediate danger with it. Sol reckons they've been in the crate an hour, possibly more, and is sure he can hear tracked vehicles moving in to clear things. They listen with hearts slowing and quickening by turns; wallow in the scent of must and rough timber; savour the gooey debris in their teeth.

“Too many limbs in here,” Sol tells her. His coccyx feels like it's being ground into a nub.

Yasmin taps him in three places at once.

“It's you,” he whispers. “You're a bloody limb party.”

After another half an hour, they find themselves shuffling to find comfortable spots, silently consulting each other on their positions. Wool and skin and breath mingling. Whenever they hear a noise, they stop mid-movement – teenagers fumbling on a narrow bed.

Eventually there comes a more consistent sound. Another generator, Sol decides –a unit running diesel with bad additives. Listening to the rhythm of it, its chains and sprockets, he realizes crates are being transferred along the conveyor belt into their room.

“They're starting up again,” he whispers.

Next news, their own crate starts to move. A sudden lurch, a scraping – though Yasmin seemed to be expecting it, and immediately clamps Sol's mouth. Sol wedges his elbows in the crate corners, body rigid.

Outside there's shouting. Voices that resolve as another language entirely. Their crate shifts across the space and is dropped without ceremony onto another creaking structure – a pallet, Sol guesses – before it's dragged along the floor.

It stops, and someone taps the box. This precedes a bang – a washing sound, pebbles in water, and a flash that penetrates the crate's joints.

Sol thinks:
We're palletized freight
.

The loudest voice guides the passage of their crate, with at least one or two others making alarmed pleas about something. A problem? Is their crate an anomaly?

Next comes a terrifying drone that rises in frequency and intensity until it's just white noise. The crate handlers, yelling across the space to actually hear each other, fade to irrelevancy.

Gradually, the noise reaches a climax. A sizzle at the extremities of the spectrum, and Yasmin and Sol cover their ears. Then a wash of static electricity, crackling, every hair on their bodies prickling, and for the briefest of moments, Sol and Y can see actually see each other's faces lit from 
inside
 the crate; some bizarre reversal of natural law, like a cartoon electrification that reveals the unlucky character's skeleton.

The white noise drops.

A quieter man speaks. An imperious tone. “Slip three… is…
on
,” he says.

Sol thinks:
Three.

Sol thinks:
There's more than one crossing point.

And Sol's father whispers in his ear:
That's just the economies of scale, son.

Then Sol finds himself floating, limbless, torso apparently separated out. Yasmin's hands seize his ankles, tighten, and finally let go. “Is that it?” Sol asks. It all seems so straightforward.

“No!” he hears another worker shout. A moment to register the voice isn't answering his question. Flustered, the worker continues: “Turn it off.
Turn it off!
That's not Plastic you're sending it to! That's not the right place!”

“Stop fussing,” the calmer worker replies. “They're used – they're all empty. They'll only get dumped or burned.”

“But you'll have trolley teams tripping on wreckage for weeks–”

The voices wane. Sol doesn't have any more capacity for worry. In its place he feels himself shuddering. There and not. Here and not.

Nowhere and nothing…

T
hrough the slip
, Sol and Yasmin are liminal. The trans-crate is around them and then is gone; its particles and atoms fragmenting, rebonding, meshing; creating new structures – unfurling arrangements of wood and plastic, ink and alloy. Their bodies, too, are torn to pieces and remade inside their fabrics again, existing as streams of particles on some separate plane, yet still intact, functional on another. With sublime objectivity, this separation of self, comes the shock of seeing your insides in linear time, speeded up preposterously so that only machines might capture your passage, your contrail: organs filtered through a childhood X-ray, a CT scan, a mammogram, a trace test, wavelengths from across the light spectrum or beyond. You are as your creator(s) made you, or not. As the maker(s) remade you, or not. And inside that box, neither here nor there, as you transcend the slip to the sister-world, arrive comets and hard diamond points, nanoscopic drill-tips boring into your vision, ventilating your perspective. And as you marvel, as you gape, new elements scorch through these tunnels into thin flesh, make mauve rivers of your capillaries, illuminating floaters before recreating them as whole new suns, fired by universal truths. And these fresh galaxies, unexplored, annihilate your thoughts and fears and concepts of all but the twinkle of your self and both the vastness and the minuscularity of you; a speck in the borderline, a spark in the borderlands. And you realize: this slip is a no-man's land. It's the space between. It's the line between your interior and the physical world, distending, bending back to meet itself.

Somewhere in there, in all of this, their cosmic tangling, the two of them, a woman called Yasmin and a man called Sol, find each other and plug themselves into a shared connection, a fresh being. They feel this change their journey, even as they can't see one another, only the blurred starfield around them, the infinity of the cosmos extending away. But they can feel each other. And in that immortal grip is a rubbery birth-sac of bones. A many-tentacled hydra. A slop of something. Polyps and gristle. A chowder of crucial tissue. A damp powder, forgotten then refound. It's warm there in that space, so tender and amniotic, and their nerve endings shiver with the closeness.

Soon the diamond points harden. The galaxy visions soften, spiral right back to a singular orb, balancing in the gloom. Serenity, wonder, as tangible objects drift past. Panels?
Those are crate panels
. And then the black. A stiff wind in the face. That stench again – the spoiled meat.

Sol blinks. Before him, Yasmin's eyes bright green to balance the dark. He wants to sneeze. “Yes?” he says, but he doesn't know why.

Yasmin drops Sol's hand. There's a fine coating of something on the crate floor, slat-lit where the crate's joins have expanded. It looks like frost, except it has the flyaway quality of dust or glass powder.

Does it change you the same way, this jump? Were those slats in the crate there before? Or were they all, as in Sol's revelations, put back together differently? He certainly feels heavier, and there's a sense he's still moving.

“You've done that before?” he asks Yasmin. A sort of relief floods his system – the curious certainty they've lost something.

But where's this now? And why is he so accepting of it?

Yasmin taps him and puts a finger in the box's strange powder frost. She quickly writes OUT.

“I feel mashed,” he tells her.

Yasmin nods.

“Then say something,” he says. “Why aren't you saying anything?”

Yasmin comes closer to him. She points to her naked throat. Sol could count every dash of her tattoo.

Sol clutches her shoulders. “How?” he cries, searching for the throatpiece on the crate floor. “How?”

Yasmin stays him with all three hands, holds his chin up to hers and touches them together. She shushes him. She spreads out the dust. Then she draws something else.

Sol follows her finger as it goes.

The stroke of an I. The turns of an N.

T
rekking upslope
, metres ahead, Yasmin realizes it'd be easy to leave the man Sol here in the scree. Why not let the Slope's winds clean him down to his bones, and then, later, to dust? A savage end to meet in his world, certainly. But a kind of mercy here in hers.

Yasmin assumes they'd arrived around halfway up the Slope. That for whatever reason, the slip had malfunctioned and jettisoned them far north of Plastic, just as it had the bisected man she and Karens' trolley team had discovered. The difference being, through some dint of luck, that she and Sol had survived their entry; clambered from the trans-crate intact and started moving, driven onwards by Yasmin's tenacity alone. She'd been surprised that fifteen fingers pointing up the Slope was enough to convince him. Astounded, too, that the muddy skies lurking in her mind were in fact much cleaner – that the black mists were considerably whiter.

So is it relief or hysteria she feels to be here? Or just the simple force of will that motivates her? Some bond, forged in her first journey, has made the Slope familiar, reassuring beneath her feet, regardless of its enormity, its apathy to life. And as they hike its face, tendons starting to pinch, Yasmin doesn't worry about making it, but fantasizes about the entrance she'll make at the top. A daydream: strolling into the mansion's atrium and chaining herself to its bone bannisters; dragging it backwards, the whole house and its Manor Lord, into the Slope's shifting dunes; and watching the wind excoriate its brick, cladding, its roof. Witnessing the mansion walls' smoothness eroded; its sterile insides split open and peeled; its cradles flayed with unrelenting pressure. Until all that remains are her brothers and sisters, safe in trolley team suits, running free down the Slope to Plastic's black market, where, emancipated, they hear the ruffling and snapping of the tarp that covers everything, then make their own journeys onward.

Or is it just vengeance? Yasmin isn't sure you can avenge nothing. In reality, she's still fighting for a collection of vague memories. The remote glimpses from another woman's past.

“Wait,” Sol pleads. “Please. Just a minute.”

Yasmin stops for him. He's struggling badly with the angle of ascent, and already staggering. Just as she enjoyed a new lightness in his world, he carries the burden of extra weight in hers – and she should have known. She yanks the bag off his shoulder and brings him into her; to share what she can of her warmth. A sort of affection. She has him drink some water, pours a little on his head. She knows, however, that they can't rest for long, that this can't keep happening, and nods encouragement. They continue.

Sporadically the couple chances on the scraps of previous expeditions – at one scene a pile of ragged screed, torn sections of the black, waxy material that Karens' trolley squad wore. There are other redundant materials too, and Yasmin recognizes at least some of it as elastic cloak-suit fabric. It's lightweight, so she drapes a section of it round Sol's shoulders in an attempt to insulate him.

Drink more water.

The airstream often switches and brings a nettling wind directly downSlope. The further they travel, the harder this wind makes it to move, and with increasing frequency Yasmin has to abandon her footing, her rhythm, to help Sol find his. Extremities fading, they stop and start, dodge and tack, until he begins to falter in earnest, feet dragging clumps from the Slope's pallid face, his shadow stretched behind as a leash.

The first time he stumbles, she's there to catch him. He goes to his knees, one foot flat, the other turned beneath his backside. With a flashback of Fi falling face-first, she promises to stop it happening again. Sol bows against the wind and roars, guttural, standing again. His hands are bleeding where he's steadied himself, and the dust's opened microcuts in his cheeks.

Yasmin turns up his collar, wraps more of the cloaking material around his face.

Drink more water.

The second time he falls harder. A desperate bark, his mouth a rectangle of pain, tongue white with dehydration. Sol submerges his hands in the surface silt, but his forearms collapse under his weight, exhausted beyond the point of failure. He'll not get up this time, she thinks, and kneels to his side, crackles into his exposed ear. Sol stirs. “I can't,” he tells her. “I can't.”

Yasmin tugs the cloaking material on his back.

“Too heavy,” he says. “I can't carry myself. Why don't you get on with it. Just bin me off. I don't care–”

Yasmin places her second and third hands on his shoulders. She grips him, leans backwards, gets him into a sitting position, his feet and legs lotus-like. His cuts are starting to weep.

Yasmin croaks an imperative. She gestures skywards and down at his feet. Sol pitches to his knees. She rearranges the sheet of cloaking material about his chest and pulls up the peacoat's hood with her third hand.

“Cheers,” he manages.

Yasmin nods, imploring, and points upSlope. Down at her feet, alternating. Left, right. Left. Right. Sol pushes off his knees, and the heaviness slides back to his feet. Within a few yards his thighs are boiling with acid. Yasmin pushes against his lower back as he slogs on, twisting her own feet twice in succession because she isn't following the terrain.

“Keep going,” Sol says. “Keep going.”

To reply with nothing comprehensible racks Yasmin's heart. Another compulsion to leave him in these winds. It'd be a delirious way to go, crawling into the Slope's edifice. Total white-out–

Sol trips again. Yasmin catches him this time. She measures him, and her muscles catch and stay themselves. She trembles under his weight. It's no use –

“I only let you down,” Sol says.

Lithely she props him with her third arm and darts beneath him so her back and shoulders support his stomach and ribcage. His arms flop over her shoulders like unreeled hoses, his depleted body jigsawed into the receiving contours of hers.

One, two, I'll break you.

She pushes his dead weight right through her tri-planted hands. Up through her centre of gravity towards a new one; pivoting till she's worked out the sweet spot between Sol's bulk and her own.

Three, four, you're good for more.

Hunched, set against the Slope, Yasmin places one foot into the scarp face, digging in her toes. She builds up to the next movement – a balancing act controlled by her core. Slowly, she brings her other foot to bear. Digs in. Breathes out. Her stomach muscles ripple.

One, two.

Yasmin starts to build momentum, little increments of speed as she grows confident in her power, her balance. And then, gritted, grimly, she begins to carry Sol upSlope, all three arms stabilizing the man distributed across her spine. From a distance they must resemble some clockwork creature, metronomic in its steps; a machine that marches surely into the granular wind, its double head set low in makeshift scarves, with sails of dark material whipping off it.

Impossibly it goes on like this. An hour. Two hours. Miles. There's no way to gauge it. No other trolley squads coming down or up. No more detritus, bodies or otherwise.

Sol stirs here and there, tapping softly on Yasmin's shoulder as if in appreciation, but he can't seem to find any words to relieve her of the drudgery; the arduous shovelling of her boot toes into the diagonal; the constant rocking motion he creates; and the decoloured world – unyielding white, bleaching to such an extent she finds it hard to know if she's even the right way up.

Internally, Yasmin's focus has shifted to making little journeys. Great voyages from metre to metre. She climbs the Slope steadily and methodically and purposefully, taking short, even strides to preserve her energy and maintain pace. Left over right over left. One. Two. Three. Four. She inhales with each footfall, exhales for the length it takes to land two more. Thinking in threes over fours – left, out, right, out, left, in, right, out – until the syncopation is naturalized and her mind floats ahead, fixates on forcing away the burn, correcting her slanting shoulders, ignoring the cramp in her feet.

What was that?

Over there?

She alters course towards it. A half-melted cube of luminous green plastic. From it, a dark-haired arm extends outwards, flensed down to the bone on one side. In its hand, a pistol, a Luger, held in a death grip.

She glances up at Sol, passenger and cargo. He's unconscious, hasn't seen it.
Protection
, she thinks, lowering him, herself, to carefully unclasp the gun.
Protection
.

Now she must get there. The unlikely sight of these remains a reminder they both do. And yet with an unknown distance still to go, the Slope twisting round an outcropped ridge – a topographic quirk – Yasmin begins to hallucinate the transit camp beneath the mansion ridge, green-edged; its concrete outbuildings; a wick-hot glow from bioluminescent pots; and a barracks full of trolley operatives. They welcome her, bathe her body in flower essences, feed her polished fruits, delicately sliced fish and meats, before letting her sleep on a film of warm air in a sterile chamber, free of coldness and teeth and of men with glinting eyes. Free of these things but gainful of another: a recording of a voice, maternal or paternal, deep or soft – anyone's voice but the Manor Lord's, or the man Keating's – and this voice extols her name over and over
: Yasmin, Yasmin, Yasmin.

The razor outcrop vanishes. All things left behind out here. Yasmin notices the scree starting to level; the incline of it tapering. Sol's still unconscious, a frozen string of mucus attaching him to Y's twin shoulder-mount.

One, two.

And on she climbs through the pale hellscape with Sol on her back. This man who knows as much or as little as her; who knows in himself what she's suffered, and how she intends to conquer it. Until the silty surface gives way to ground that's harder, rougher, and Yasmin's boots start to roll on clumps of rock; lift clods of soil; slip on hardy vegetation.

She stops and croaks back at Sol, and the wind doesn't take the sound. The man stirs, muffled in her shoulder, and stretches his legs against the stirrups of her crooked arms.

“Where?” he manages.

Yasmin sets him down. Collapses into the earth. For a little while at least, they lie in the scent of disturbed soil, blinking at uninterrupted sky.

Yasmin stretches and massages her muscles. Sol sips drinking water with gloves wrapped around his boots, head bowed, uncertainty displacing fear, some feeling creeping back into his fingers and toes. She closes her eyes –

No
.

Yasmin crackles again, points across the escarpment. Sol shrugs. Yasmin points again, this time with an agitated noise.

Now Sol sees.

A narrow causeway, and at its end a concrete tent. Sol laughs deliriously. How ordinary. A tent. And beyond it, on a ridge further above, are the silhouettes of more.

“Sleep?” he asks her. “Is that what you mean? Is it safe?”

Yasmin nods.

He tries to smile but his lips are cracked, and it clearly pains him. “Think I can walk this bit?”

Yasmin nods.

“Thank you,” he says. “For what you did.”

A half-shrug as though she's tentative to admit she did anything. Or was it a guilt that she'd considered leaving him down there full stop?

In any case she stands up. Despite crippling exhaustion, she helps Sol do the same. Limping, each the other's crutch, they advance for the hut.

The hut door's open. The hut's empty. A wooden cot in the corner. A wicker chair.

Sleep-deprived, Slopeblind, Sol falls in and melts on a cool, matted floor, patently designed to soak up bootwater. Yasmin follows him in, setting down the bag. She's more guarded – a reflex flaring, alertness kicking in. But the space is anodyne.

Yasmin swigs from a bottle of water. She looks down on him and considers all things for a time, her heft against the in-swinging door, and her heart still brisk.

They're here.

I'm back.

She unfastens her boots and begins to peel off her layers, each progressively damper.

For a while at least, she wants to simply be.

W
ill
it ever go dark up there in the concrete tent? Yasmin waits on brown skies, purple hues, but through a single frosting window on the far wall, the sun hangs, simmering, a moulding orange. She follows the Slope's curving edifice, coast-like, towards the horizon, where a peninsula juts into an ocean of space. In the out-sweeping curve of this, overhangs cast weird shadows across the Slope's powder. It's definitely less harsh up here, despite the exposed tops, though the wind still buzzes the windows and keeps her awake. She wonders if animals roam nearby. If a bursor might wander into view from the forbidden wilderness, the edgelands Chaplain once told her about.

The man Sol is snoring. Several times Yasmin hears him gasp a name, followed by what sounds like a plea.

Such a journey they'd made together. Alpha returned to Omega. She reflects on their silent pact – an understanding, a common humanity. Little wonder their plan hardly seems a plan at all, rather a feeling they've acted on. As if it were naturally occurring – each the other's active ingredient.

For Sol it was also a choice, of course. A choice, you could argue, to do something more than simply exist – or anyway make amends for something, however self-interested it was. But then only Yasmin knows the scale and the depth of the mansion's machinations, the Manor Lord's interminable pursuits. For her, as for the man who'd claimed her, it's about control. And while she's swimming back to the surface without knowing exactly what will happen after that first desperate breath, she knows all the same what she'll say when the surface resettles: “I will not serve you.”

You're going home
.

Yasmin wakes with a jolt. She curses in her way. The blood-sun has arced its way down to the east, hazy behind driven Slope dust. She tips forward – how long was she asleep? – and clutches her stomach. It's still habit to reach for the connective pads; to pull away the wires and regulators and remove the drip needle.