Graft (38 page)

Yasmin's more intrigued by the trans-crates, however. Sol can tell by her breathing that she's agitated. From the corner she too holds up a packing slip, laminated and fastened to one of the lids.

Sol nods assent. He gets it. If these crates are going to the house, they can stow away again. Or is it too easy? A grafter knows all about diminishing returns –

Yasmin pries at the corners of the crates, straining against the heavy staples. Sol imagines her arms, sinewy as a labourer's, working beneath her fleece top and shell jacket. The twin beams of her clavicle stepped out with the strain. He doesn't see her pause; can't relive in her mind the flash of Keating's staple gun.

Exactly the kind of staple gun she's spotted down on the floor.

She heaves open the trans-crate and points inside.

“Empty?” He crosses the space, checks the packing slip. A small, innocuous-looking box inside. “It'll do,” he says. He flips the packing slip. “And look here – the house icon, see? Another like this and we'll have one each.”

Yasmin weighs the benefits of extra space versus the risks of separation. She scoops up the staple gun and passes it to him.

“It'll be a luxury,” he tells her, fake-smiling in a way that says he needs to convince himself first. “First class.”

Yasmin wrenches open three more crates; grimaces at the hermetically sealed boxes inside them. Realistically, there'd only be room for one in these crates anyway.

A motorized growl on the wind. Sol swears and looks at his wrist
.
Ascribing meaning to random patterns. How often do the half-tracks come past? How long have they been in here?

“Yes, go,” Sol says, pressing her towards the first empty crate. “I'll close you up.” They round on it, and she springs inside. “If and when we start moving, tap your panels. I'll knock back.”

She looks at him expectantly, eyes pixelating at their edges.

The growl is getting louder. She shoos him, three hands flapping.

“Remember to knock,” he says, and secures the lid. Enough staples to secure its corners. “Keep knocking!” he shouts, before he drops the sports bag and Luger into his own crate. Mindful of splinters, he hopes the damage won't warrant inspection. He fires more staples into each corner from inside, at least enough to make the lid look secure.

It's colder in the crate than he expected, and his heart is hammering. Alone with his breath and Roy's gun and the bag, the scale and depth of things threaten to overwhelm him. He could hyperventilate just thinking about it: a system so sophisticated, so efficient, that it must be almost easy to work within. So successful it almost carries a legitimacy – workers calling it “logistics”, or “shipping”. So finely tuned that coming generations could probably maintain it with ease. And so entrenched that any given worker – supplies driver, brochure designer, escort, crate mover, leafleter – might not even recognize their complicity. You play your part without ever really having to think about what happens at the next level down. A perfect machine, silent and infallible and productive.

Testing his space, Sol stretches out and loses somehow his notion of the crate's dimensions, as if it's grown bigger since he got inside. But something disrupts his exploration; something against his hands. It's cold, smooth in texture, and he slaps it, drawing a slight reverberation. Hollow, definitely, but thick-shelled. How had he not seen it?

In the dark he runs his hands over the object. The approaching half-track filling his ears. The object in Sol's crate is maybe a foot tall, ovoid in shape. At its base there's a powerpack with adducted fans that whir soundlessly, regulating something, and a bitter coldness emanates from them. He paws around the egg and finds a flatter segment on its front, a fascia with its own panel, and by the top, its narrowest point, a different material – even colder to the touch, and slippery. Glass.

He shuffles closer. Pitched onto his knees in the darkness. He stares into the egg for a time, as the half-track draws close and stops. The next pickup. Definitely the next pickup. The engine turning over, and the store door swinging –

Then, as Sol's eyes adjust, the carrier reveals its cargo: a faint blue outline visible through the egg's glass fascia. The curvature of a delicate nose, nostrils. A tiny philtrum widening out, a crown on the top lip. The littlest eyelashes splayed over fatty cheeks.

Sol stifles his own cry: a shout he has to smash at the root. His mouth blocked with it, head pounding, eyes scorched closed. The sound released as pressurized air. Filled with such hatred, he goes to punch the crate wall but remembers just in time –

Sol is desolate, frightened. He's never felt more disillusioned. And that's when the workers start to move his trans-crate. When they slide it along the store floor, up on their moaning hydraulic lift, and into the half-track proper.

He curls up, trembling as the air chills and more crates are packed in around him. Two either side, shells scraping. He sobs then in a womb of silence and leeching cold, while Roy's empty Luger seems to crystallize in his hand. Another crate slots in above, and things go completely black. He wonders, hopelessly wonders, if that's Yasmin up there. Another cube in the puzzle.

Three times he tightens his fists and presses knuckles into the panels, and three times he stops himself. He can't knock yet. Can't risk it. So he waits with nothing to distract himself from the metal egg, the infant, a yolk in its chamber, the gnawing fan. A stowaway with a life stolen away.

Sol can't see anything, but knows his exhaled breath is denser, close to solid. Desperate for warmth, he tugs his socks over his jeans, pulls up his hands inside the peacoat's sleeves, retightens the collar around his chin. The infant's freezer unit works harder still, pumping its polar air against his ankles, his knees, his neck. He searches for the water – finds the bottle rattling, contents half-frozen, and tries to warm it under his armpit. Should he knock now? Should he risk it? The sound of the fan is all the company he has. But he holds off, keeps holding off –

He wipes his face and shivers violently. Lungs rattling. He could swear his tears have started freezing on his cheeks.

And then, at last, he knocks for Yasmin.

He knocks.

He knocks.

He knocks–

M
ovement
. The half-track on its way. In blankets of humidity, Yasmin taps out rhythms: knock, knock-knock, knock-knock-knock. Sometimes with two fists and sometimes with one.

Sol doesn't reply. Or if he does, she can't hear him.

Rationally, Yasmin knows it won't take long to reach the mansion – but the half-track has a pendulous motion, a top-heaviness in every bend, and it makes her feel ill.

Distractions are scant. Still nothing from Sol. And so in preparation she maps and remaps her cables, her cradle. The rows and rows. The training suites – the target ranges, the food classes. The shifting walls of the entrance hall. The water fountains outside. The bursor room – a scene playing out behind a screen of memory like shadow puppetry.

Tense.

Tense up.

Knock on the walls.

Yasmin pictures Chaplain's compound eyes – the optics of her makers and drillers, blinking. Melanie's empty socket, its leathery pit. The third-eyed harridan from the feeding vault.

Disgusting little creature–

One by one, Yasmin rubs them out. One by one. Until a lone figure remains, crimson in his robe –

When the half-track stops, Yasmin coils.

Her crate is loaded onto another rack, another conveyor in another processing facility. Over its clattering mechanisms, another man shouting. It sounds like “Oh!” Then, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh
no
–”

Sol? Was it Sol?

The belt stops. The line judders, discharging a wave of vibrations that pass along the line and beneath Yasmin's crate.

“Bronze,” the man says, tenor grim. Then, surer of himself: “Bronze!”

A radio crackles.

~ This is Bronze. What are you doing?

“You need to get down here.”

~ No. Next delivery's in thirty minutes. Shape up – you're down on all targets today–

“
There's something. There's something in here.”

~ Infant crate?

“
It's not alone.”

~ Alone? What's not? Come again?

“
Frozen.”

A quiet.

~ Stop the belt. I'm coming. If this gets out, we'll–

“
Wait. Wait. There's something else.”

~ That's twice you've interrupted me now. Just hold the belt. I'm coming.

Yasmin explodes from her crate, lid disintegrating around her shoulders. The staffer turns, startled, and Yasmin barely notices the warehouse at all. She's surrounded on all sides by hundreds and hundreds of trans-crates, some dismantled, many stacked into half-pyramids, all of them racked and tagged. A city.

The staffer can't bring a word to bear.

Yasmin sprints along the belt, hurdling crates, to meet him. A blaze of fists and teeth, saturated – each motion sending spray from her skin. Nothing else escapes the staffer's mouth, though there's a kind of jumbled, appraising look in his eyes, and with it, Yasmin realizes she's spun his skull too far. She looks at her hands and the line is silent and the crate city groans and her ears are roaring.

It had felt automatic.

Sol is foetal in his trans-crate. He looks serene there beneath a vernix-like frost, face relaxed, with a strand of frozen fluid leaving his mouth, gummed against his peacoat collar, and the Luger held to his head like a cushion. His jeans tucked into his socks. The staple gun clutched in his other hand, cradled in his breast.

Yasmin heaves him up by his shoulders, the back of her third hand burning with cold against his cheek. There's a wrinkling sound as his coat comes away from the crate floor, and she brings him into her body as a solid sculpture, his iced face turned into her neck. Here she holds him with her coat unzipped and top pulled open to the sternum so she can press her hot skin against his. She holds him there on the emergency-stopped conveyor belt, shivering, repeating his name in a river of code, over and over until his skin is revealed fully by her thaw and her fleece is saturated with meltwater. The conveyor, now clean in this patch, drips silently. Sol's body slackens, slumps, falling deeper into her. With two arms wound tightly around him and her third stroking his forehead, she rocks him and rocks him until his mouth hangs open again, and the dark frozen liquid runs away down her stomach. But even now there's no breath across her skin.

A loud siren tears through the warehouse.

Yasmin holds up Sol's face and touches her forehead to his – wishing more than anything that she could disassemble and reassemble him as he had her: find his own little I/O toggle, rekindle his heart–

Yasmin rears back. She opens her throat. The howl briefly supersedes the alarm, resounds through the whole space. She lowers Sol back into his own crate, a casket, and reaches for the bag, the device, the staple gun. She heaves back the lid and staples it shut.

Now she hops off the line and crouches to the staffer. Without blinking, she bolts a single staple through his lips. A concession to what they've made her; a guarantee they'll know who came here.

The rest is instinctive:

Yasmin pelts from the warehouse floor to a central stair gantry, mesh and steel, and takes the stairs with such power they bow under her weight. At the top is a barred door marked PERSONNEL EXIT. She misses a chance to see the warehouse hive in its entirety; the strange brutalist beauty of its twined and ribboned belts, the quiet systems that attend them. But it doesn't matter. She barrels through this door bag-first, and on through the corridors hedged with spiral wires and ducting, lined top and bottom with pipes and transformers and stamped metal flooring. She takes more railed gangways, rigging torn from future battleships. She reaches the next stairway, encased in a shaft of smooth concrete. The rail of it winding round the central column like a parasitic root, extending all the way up to hell above.

At the top of the column, legs ragged, she finds lockers, shower rooms, an open-plan changing room. A worker cleaning himself in a tiled quarter, overalls and boots stacked neatly on a bench. Stopping here only to examine the doors – TOILET BLOCK, WAREHOUSE ENTRANCE, CELLAR ACCESS, EMERGENCY EXIT – Yasmin continues, taking the latter with her doubled shoulder, and enters a new corridor, gilded and veneered. From behind comes a wash of strange music, discordant notes. She accelerates to full speed again, feet like rain on glass, arms pistoning, the bag bouncing off her back.

Two makers stand in full view of her. Yasmin arrives with such pace they don't even notice till they're on the ground, their delicate masks adrift. She continues without pause, the impact hardly registering.

More doors. More choices. HOUSE ATRIUM. CRADLE SUITE ONE. She takes the door on the right, explodes into a room of brothers and sisters, lined in, sleep-induced, and feeding.

Yasmin's course takes her to the suite's central console – the tentacled boss of it. Here she stops, gathering what she can of her breath. Her ribcage hurts, too big for her skin.

“Target!”

The suite crackles. A barrage of inch-long darts spin past and embed themselves in the hardware, fracturing hard plastic. A squad at arms. Without hesitation Yasmin bunches as many wires as her three hands will hold and pulls until the unit's superficial fittings break away and many of the wires are instantly stripped from their brackets. She keeps pulling. Keeps pulling. A new volley – another barrage. This time Yasmin feels a dart lodge in her back – a sparkle of pain, then a numbing. It waggles there a moment, kinetic energy transferring. Again she tugs at the gathered wiring, rotating her wrists to wrap each cluster over her hands, and reapplies the force. The wires snap, slide free, sparking off. An alarm wails. The squad's closing her down. And now in the commotion her brothers and sisters have begun to wake and stand. Yasmin turns to see the nearest of her attackers trip over a spun-round cradle arm. He sprawls face-first, arms bent up behind his torso, and the slap of his landing carries.

Yasmin screams in binary: “Malfunction with me!”

At the far side, another dart cluster fizzes overhead. She kicks open the door marked CRADLE SUITE THREE and goes again for its heart. Here the alarm has already roused the sleepers, many of whom are out of their cradles, holding their ears, with feeding and monitor lines still attached. When they see Yasmin coming, her three arms powering, they simply stand aside, too confused or shocked to comprehend. But when they see the squad following, they react with fright – clambering over their cradles, jumping away, their distress surging.

The second core. This time Yasmin's had practice. She tears into the panels to get more purchase; drags more wires free and rips them from their fittings. Her hands are bleeding – several fingers clawing up owing to damaged tendons. But it doesn't matter. It won't matter…

When she turns, she can no longer see the chasing squad for carnage: the suite detonating. All of her brothers and sisters are running towards the exits, or simply at each other, or towards the oncoming makers. Collision after collision – bodies cartwheeling, bouncing. And then something else: a small but swelling group of brothers and sisters have started tearing at the suite's structures themselves. Pulling away extrusions and cradle limbs to arm themselves, to attack other cradles, to defile their comfortable prison.

While the shooting seems to have abated, the dart in her back has delivered its complete load. It leaves her stooped in gait, slower to react. She pulls it free, feels a warmth roll down under her fleece into the crack of her buttocks. Yasmin opens her mouth, releases another cry, in part a command. Her brothers and sisters echo her. Their response is cathartic. But her back is throbbing now, a screen descending – and she knows in her marrow she won't have long.

CRADLE SUITE FIVE. Already emergent. Her brothers and sisters have seen or heard or intuited what's happening in the suites beyond theirs; have already shed their lines. Yasmin calls it on the hoof – she doesn't need to stop here, doesn't need to do any more. And so she powers through the crowd to the far side. Between blinks, her eyes streaming in the onrushing air, she realizes that five-strong packs of her brothers and sisters are turning on their drillers, the harridans, the makers.

And then she stops. Just stops. Yasmin with her shoulder bag. Yasmin in her prime. Because the number of the suite clicks in, like a lock's last digit rotating into place. A gliss of recognition. This is Yasmin's old suite, the birthplace of Y, and so the corridor adjacent must run to the atrium, out to the drilling lawns.

And to the grand stairway that sweeps up from the mansion entrance. A final Slope, ready for ascension.

J
ase is still
on the floor when Mel opens the store cupboard. She finds him humiliated, self-nursing – all the sharpened edges blunted. His head has ballooned.

“Melanie…” he starts.

“No more words, Jason,” Mel says. “No more smarming.”

“You won't–”

She holds up his wallet. “I already have.”

Jase scowls – an attempt to focus, to apprehend. An aspect of seeking.

“What's your PIN?” she asks.

“My PIN?”

With her other hand, she holds up the doubled stockings, the glass-ball halves rubbing against each other. “Need me to jog your memory?”

“You've lost it.”

“No,” she says. “But I do have some chores. How's about when I'm done, we see if it's come back to you?”

“You can't just lock me in here.”

“Well, see, that depends on your perspective. You remember one of the first things you said to me?”

Cautious, he shakes his head.

“I just want your business, you said.”

“Did I?”

Mel backs into the hall. “You did,” she says, and closes the door to a crack. But now, Jase, you're
part
of my business.”

M
el needs
four binbags to carry Sol's mess from Cassie's room. Balled-up tarpaulin, sheets, pillowcases and hand towels, rolls and rolls of tissue, small bins full of crusted flannels, slivers of plastic, strange metal fastenings, a moist Bowie T-shirt. She attacks the task with urgency, tumbling slack cotton over her arms with the efficiency of an industrial bailer. Muttering at the state of it. Hairs and skin and stains. A muddled smell of baby oil and rubbing alcohol.

She piles it all on the landing by the stairs as she flits in and out of the room, methodical and sad all at once, stripping Cassie's bed back to its yellowed mattress; shaking out dead flies; revealing naked fabric the colour of sun-blasted bones. The room quickly becomes a poor facsimile of itself: sterilized, made absent of material colour.

The trinkets she doesn't touch. A vanity mirror draped in plastic jewellery, hair bobbles, miscellaneous lids for unseen products. A cupboard filled with cheap fantasies on wire hangers. Photos of foreign lands, floral prints, fractal designs. She picks up one of their frames and realizes Cassie's kept the stock display photography inside it, complete with tiny crop measurements, corporate watermark and all. The picture itself is a beach scene, a model holding up another model, both grinning at their false paradise, the sky a paradigmatic blue. Mel turns the photo frame over. Into the reverse, Cassie's scratched
2027
. Mel wells up, her fake eye throbbing. Was it Cassie's dream, ambition? Inspiration for an alternate future?

Mel comes to the window, eye scanning the back yard, black-seamed, and the terraces it borders. The wasteland beyond. She wonders if, given that Sol and her never legally divorced, she'd count as a widow soon. Or if she, on this path to some fate unknown, will make him a widower. What's her own dream?

She takes the binbags outside in two hands, straining through the gate onto common land. Round the corner, what's left of the bonfire: a pyre of blackened metal frames, many resmelted and tangled into new profiles. There's no one about, the crowd long since dispersed. She goes over in her slippers, the four bags spinning smoothly by her sides.