Graft (8 page)

“Let's get you warm,” he says, though he can see his breath and his fingers are frozen. He tears the film between her calves and stands her up, the idea being to take her into the workshop's break room. She's clearly disoriented, leaning into him, solid to the touch. He does what he can to keep her inside the felt rag. They amble, his ribs supporting her.

When he tries to move a box of ignition coils from the break room sofa, it turns out she can't stay on her own two feet.

The woman crumples into a pile, chest first. Her head lolls forward. She lets herself go; a bladder held for too long. Fluid not caught by the clingfilm streaks off towards the break room door, the inspection pit beyond.

“You're OK,” he says, mining for platitudes. “You're OK.” He takes her shoulder and brings her towards him. “What we're going to do, right–”

What are you going to do?

Sol kneels there, simply looking at her, until his thoughts coalesce. “What we're going to do right, is we're going call for help, an ambulance, the council, as soon as we've got all this off your face.”

Again Sol pulls at the tape. Again no luck – and the momentum makes the woman slump further. She tries to move herself, and the felt sheet comes away, exposes her powerful back. Her muscles flutter as she tries to release her bound forearms. It pains Sol to watch. And now he can see the next problem: gashes in the crooks behind her knees. Sol tries to scaffold her as they move. They could be some fused-together creature, jerking towards the sofa. “Christ,” he mutters at one point, as if he suddenly paused to take in the scene.

“Roll on to your belly,” he says, now they've crossed the gulf. “Let me get at the ties.” No response. He decides to demonstrate what he means – tugging at the plastic wrap, making popping noises. Slowly she comes to understand him, and with pliers, cutters, and brute force, the ties and clingfilm come away. Her hands, all three, cold and blue, fall limp by her sides. He takes her fingers and squeezes them; whispers again: “We'll get you sorted, OK? Your head now. Let's sort your head now.”

Strung together, he can't help thinking his words sound exactly like something he'd say to a customer.

Y
hadn't experienced
the cradle suite's deep cleaning cycle before. It was apparently no small feat – each subject being woken and ejected from their cradle and sent to one of the subterranean vaults to wait. With a subject absent, the makers could methodically drain and flush food lines, steam the cradle pods, refit worn padding, and, if necessary, adjust doses for the next stage of a subject's development.

For Y it meant an early rise, a rending away from the dark tower that now felt more like her dream-protector, or at least a sanctuary from the casual horror of her days. She woke to the driller's smiling face and burning eyes – rubine in the lowlights – suspended above her own. His breath was metallic.

“Deep cleaning day,” he said. “The suite's making its way down to Canteen Five for a treat. Full meal, they tell me, with no controls. The harridans will see to you there. Thank you very kindly indeed.”

Y was intrigued, if wary. She undid her lines, pulled out wires, tugged at monitoring pads. She hated the canteens like she hated the sun – the homogenous food, its lingering smell. The matronly women the makers called harridans. And the waiting. But the thought of no controls was tantalizing.

“Careful,” said the driller, watching Y disengage. “Expensive, those.”

Y slipped into her daywear. A gown. Shorts for underwear. The driller nodded politely and made a show of looking away when he was meant to – again to maintain the illusion of dignity. She took the opportunity to skim-scan the tablet in his hands:

SUBJECT: Y-----

PERSISTENT CRADLE OVERRIDE SUSPECTED. REQ: WETWARE REBOOT AND SECURITY UPHAUL. WEAPONS 
Y/N
/DISENGAGED. ISOLAT–

“Oi!” the driller said.

Y jumped.

“Got my eyes peeled,” the driller told her. “You little monster. Now off you pop. There's a good egg.”

The driller moved on to the next cradle. Y heard his patter, identical lines, as she drifted into the lane and latched onto a small group heading the same direction. Together they marched over glowing arrows; took heed of a flashing screen at the boundary of the suite. This had their tags illuminated, with more arrows showing the route. Realizing Y was with them, the others slowed to let her pass. She ignored them and followed the arrowed route all the way to a service corridor, its walls daubed in yellow-black hatching. The air turned chilly.

Here the arrows pointed down a narrow gantry. The lights came on as she walked, clicked off again behind her. This shuttering went on for a while before she reached the cage-door of a service lift. Y went in, descended.

The doors came open at last. Y stepped out into an archway twice her height – a sort of tunnel entrance. The floor arrows flickered again, and she followed them through a heavy curtain designed to keep the cold out, where immediately the sound swelled: a busy vault before her, hundreds of her brothers and sisters in there – more than she had ever seen in a cradle suite, come to that. The fuggy smells of cooking, the clash of cutlery, the bustle of brothers and sisters. Discordant music cut through: a nocturne teased from a tuneless grand piano by a hunch-backed harridan in the corner. Its agonizing melody ran in a circular pattern.

Surely they couldn't be cleaning out every cradle on her floor at once.

An old harridan sprang from nowhere and took Y's shoulder, span her round. She wore a third eye. Y recognized wet-tech: reader optics set flush in her forehead, unlike her driller's full-eye implants.

“Hand,” the harridan said.

Y showed her palm.

The harridan huffed and sniffed at Y. She chewed her tongue as if tasting something. “Cleanup, eh? Filthy urchins, the lot of you. And will you eat?”

Y didn't know how to react.

“Hmm?”

So Y nodded. In truth the thought of real food made her queasy now she was here. But choice… the very idea of choice –

The harridan scowled. “No manners, either?”

Y shook her head. She felt confused.

“Disgusting creature,” the harridan said. “Bestial. You youngers have it so easy. You want to try being a settler! Still, it seems you're on strict calories, so you'll get what you're given. And now I must ask: have you seen our little friend RF?”

Y shook her head. She'd never even heard the name.

The harridan's third eye flared: she cupped her hands and beamed into them a shaky image of a face, turning slowly in a red orb. The orb spilled lines like a star during a solar storm. “This is RF,” the harridan said, “who escaped during drills. In time we shall discover him, if the Slope or the guards don't claim him first. But should you learn anything…”

Y shook her head. She'd hadn't heard of the Slope, either.

The harridan glimpsed the chain around Y's neck, and pulled out the pendant from Y's shirt. Her third eye ebbed out, opacity returning quickly. “Oh,” she said, holding the pendant in her palm. “Well, go on then. You can see the queue. And please be mindful.”

Clutching her pendant, Y joined the food queue seething along the vault's left side. Brothers and sisters nearby were sharing stories about this boy called RF, some more outlandish than others. He'd given his driller the slip after a violent assault. He'd sprung over a perimeter wall. He'd shattered his cradle casing and strangled his driller one morning. He'd fled down the Slope, across the Slope, and into the fringelands beyond.

It went on and on. Everyone in the line. Everyone in their huddles and gangs and cliques.

Something flapped in Y, though. It excited her to think you could escape. That you could be submitted to the mansion's persuasions, and still possess the temperance, the will to leave.

But no one spoke directly to Y about the escapee. And those who noticed her, those who saw her angling to be invited into the conversation, simply looked away, gawped at her pendant, or unsubtly turned their backs.

At the counter, Y pointed to the most colourful, appetising foods. Fresh items, brilliant-coloured vegetables, gleaming seeded fruits. A platter of thinly sliced meats from a larger joint that sat shining in its juices.

The server caught Y's eye and said something under her breath – almost like she recognized her. The server lifted a plate and shook her head. Then she slopped out a runny mixture from a separate container. A thin, grey gruel. There was the faintest hint of pity on the server's face as she handed it over.

Y blinked. The server didn't budge. “Your calories,” she said.

Y went like a pariah between the tables. She slammed down her plate when she spotted a gap. Several others were talking there, but as she wiped her spoon against her gown to clean it, they stopped.

Y nodded at them. They looked at each other.

And they moved.

No one else joined Y. She sat in silence, shovelling the tasteless food into her mouth. Despite the food's thinness, its texture was lumpy, and as she chewed there was the occasional crunch – fragments, shell perhaps. It hurt her teeth, made her doubly careful. The next time it happened, a spike that electrified her whole gumline, she became fearful of it happening a third. She began sifting through every small mouthful; filtered the gruel against her palate. She realized she was trembling; that her breathing had changed. She wanted to stop eating but couldn't risk the response to that, either.

The noise around her seemed louder than ever: histrionics and nonsense, tattle and blather. Two more spoonfuls and she knew she couldn't go on, tortured by the shining vegetables on what looked like every other plate, the despairing colour of what stared up from hers.

Until there was a booming noise, and the music stopped, and hundreds of spoons and forks and knives fell to the tables.

“Brothers and sisters!” the door harridan shouted, glee in her voice. The diners wheeled excitedly in their chairs. The piano's last note rang out and died on the air.

“Brothers and sisters: your Manor Lord!”

There were gasps, and a sudden flatness came over the room. Y looked up as a tall figure emerged from the canteen archway. The figure stopped there, feet pushed together, and gestured at the congregation with an extended arm and a flat palm, as though he were scything crops.

Y took him in. This man the harridan called their Manor Lord wore ceremonial dress, richly red, regal, a self-styled emperor in velveteen trousers, asymmetric shirt, and a floor-length cape detailed with luminous thread. He scraped an oversized sceptre along the floor, its head an unfamiliar skull.

“Children,” he said quietly. “I am home again.”

Y had never seen or heard of the Manor Lord before now; knew nothing of his importance or role. But as he stalked the tables closest to him, stooping to inspect his subjects' plates, the halting atmosphere gave way to a charged, nervous energy. Nobody could look at him. Nobody seemed to even breathe.

By a young boy's table, the Manor Lord picked up a slice of meat, sniffed it, and dropped it again. He scoffed at the boy and said, “There's nowhere in two worlds I'd rather be.”

The boy looked at him.

“Did you hear me?” the Manor Lord asked him, voice measured. “My boy?”

“Yes,” the boy said. “Welcome home.”

Y felt a disconnect, a shift.

“And what is it you do for me?” the Manor Lord asked him.

“I will be a soldier,” the boy said. “I will fight. I'll kill.”

The Manor Lord lifted the boy clean from his chair by his collar, held him aloft. The boy didn't resist or cry out. He simply hung there, neither limp nor alert.

“An exemplar,” the Manor Lord said, rotating the boy with his other hand. “Obedient, polite. Young and already strong.”

Y thought the boy's eyes might have been closed.

Then the Manor Lord placed the boy back into his seat and tapped him on the head. “Fight bravely. For our enemies are massing.”

The Manor Lord continued through the tables, inspecting the plates, pausing to consider a row of women, Y's age or older, before nodding curtly to a harridan nearby. On this signal, inscrutable, two of the women stood up and began to recite a poem or song in another language. It was a murmuring, disorientating sound, and someone at the back released an anguished squeak.

Y wanted to turn, to see. To understand. But the Manor Lord was drawing closer to her table, and the weight of his presence was crushing.

Closer, he was weirdly youthful, with small features crowded into the middle of his smooth face. It was like some kind of suction had pulled them away from their starting points. His hair was slicked back, the longest layers bunned up at his crown, and his cape produced a strange rubbing sound as he walked.

Closer still. He stood at end of her row. For a few seconds, he looked directly at Y, directly into her, then down to her neck, and the pendant, where his gaze remained. The world might have stopped for that instant, frozen on its orbit. Y knew, then, that he recognized her – even if she didn't recognize him. The shivers came automatically, impulsively, but she managed to keep it together.

He looked away again, just as the women finished their recital. He passed Y, turned on his sceptre and rounded her table. This close, Y could see the cape in full. On its outside were set hundreds and hundreds of little stones, off-white in colour, glossy in the light. She gripped her pendant, understanding it was formed of the same material, and with her other hand dug her fingers into her legs; had to stifle a noise.

The stones weren't stones at all. They were teeth.

The Manor Lord snorted. “You'll rise for me next time,” he said. His voice carried to every corner; there was no need to shout. Again he used his strange, flat-palmed salute to gesture at the harridan standing stiffly by the entrance – a paragon of obedience. “And you should learn from your elders,” he added.

The stress was palpable. Y's hairs were all on end –

“Did we all enjoy our food?” the Manor Lord asked. “We're so lucky to have such talented chefs looking after us while our makers clean out our sties, aren't we?”

Silence.

The Manor Lord plucked a plate from the nearest table and angled it to the room. What was left there slid off and splashed around his boots.

“I said, did we enjoy our food?”

“Yes, father,” the room said. Y felt her throat vibrate involuntarily.

“And aren't we lucky?”

Another murmur.

“Good,” the Manor Lord said. He was beaming. “Because, as I said to my chefs earlier today, it's not often we have an escapee on the menu.”

He let it settle in. He watched their faces. And by the time the first of them had vomited, the Manor Lord had spun one-eighty on the fulcrum of his sceptre and walked straight out again.

Stunned, Y turned to the chef's hatch – tried to see the woman who'd served her.

It was like the server had been waiting. She was staring right back. Y couldn't be sure, but it looked like she mouthed something to her. Then another chef pulled down the shutters, and the whole canteen erupted.

In the midst of their minor riot, Y stayed completely still. The line was drawn. The link was clear. And she could've been wrong, hoped in some way she was, but the chef's whispered word had looked a lot like “Tomorrow”.