Sing Me Your Scars (Apex Voices Book 3) (9 page)

“Do you see what I’ve done?” Big says.

“Many improvements, many indeed,” Little Big says, in a thick,
raspy voice. “The old design was piss-poor at best.”

The new one watches from his box; his eyes are blue, like the
wall. Big holds up the panel for my back, shaped thin at the waist with a tiny
hole in the center. I think my insides will leak out, but after Big puts in the
panel, he attaches a tiny silver key.

It frightens me more than hurt and blood, and I don’t know why.

§

The new one holds in his screams for a long time.

§

I am healed, but Big hasn’t taken me out of the room. He
remakes the red one’s waist as tiny as mine and gives the collared man to
Little Big. That night, when everyone is quiet, I reach back and touch the key.
The perfect man didn’t have a key, and I don’t understand why I do.

I turn the key to the left, but it won’t move, so I turn it to
the right. It clicks once, and I bite my lip before a shout can escape. I keep
still for a long time, hoping no one else heard the sound.

I turn the key again. One tiny turn. One little click.

The blue-eyed man speaks. “My name is William. What is yours?”

I close my eyes.

“Please. What is your name?”

I have no name. I wait until the darkness swallows up his voice
before I sleep.

§

The one in red dies.

When Big finds her, his shouts and screams fill up the room, loud
enough to send echoes through my head. He places her on the table and takes me
out of my box. First he wraps a string around my waist, then he holds it around
hers, nodding because we are exactly the same.

He leaves me on the table next
to her while he opens up her skin. Her icicle fingers brush against mine. On
the inside, she is purple and grey and slippery and bits of broken metal. He
lifts up each piece. Little Big comes in and laughs; the scratchy sound hurts
more than Big’s screams. Big pushes him out of the room.

Sharp metal presses against my
side, my heart beats crazy-scary-heavy, and the pinch-sting comes. I cry out.
Big smiles because I am pink and red and unbroken. He closes me back up with a
new line of stitches, black against the white of my skin.

§

After my skin eats the stitches away, I turn my key again. A
sound drifts into the air, a quick little chirp. I hold my breath and look
through the gloom. No one moves, no one speaks. The sound lives in my head, not
in the room. I turn the key, and a shape takes form in my thoughts, a small
shadow moving across a blue not-wall. I know this shape, I remember it. Footsteps
thump outside the door, and I close my eyes, my head heavy with chirps and
moving shapes and tucked far behind, a sound I don’t want to remember.

§

Little Big leaves but forgets to turn out the lights. The
collared man folds his hands together, and his tongueless mouth moves without
sound. The blue-eyed man is awake, too, with his remade arms folded across his
chest. The new pieces inside him click and spin.

“His prayers won’t do any good. Not anymore,” he says.

I don’t know what a prayer is.

“They’re gone for the night,” he says. “It’s safe to talk.”

I shake my head.

“Can you talk?” he asks.

I turn my face away.

“Please,” he says. “Talk to me. Tell me your name.”

“No,” I whisper, cringing at the sound of my own voice, all hard
at the edges and soft in the middle.

I turn my key and think of shapes and blue not-walls and a wide
expanse of green.

§

Big remakes the legs of the woman in black but doesn’t smile
when he finishes. He stops in front of my box and taps on the glass until I
look up. He taps the glass again, harder, and then a third time, harder still,
and I hear a small sound, like a finger bone cracked in two. The gears on his
forehead click to a stop, tick backward, once, twice, and move forward again.
With a shake of his head, he walks away.

Little Big breaks the collared man in two pieces and fills in the
empty spaces with metal and tangled wire.

§

I turn my key, and a word rushes in:
Naomi.
Is this
the dark shape? I say the word aloud, feel it slip and slide on my tongue.

“Is that your name?” the blue-eyed man asks.

Naomi.

Is it?

§

Big doesn’t come back.

No one will be perfect. No one will leave.

§

Big tapped the glass too hard, and now there is a crack, a
line with shattered edges, all the way at the top. I stay crouched down, away
from the crack, turn my key, and remember. The dark shapes were birds that
fluttered and circled and sang. A little hand tugged mine, and we ran across
the green and under the birds, under the blue not-wall. A pain tugs deep inside
where metal and flesh stick together, and I try to turn the key back, to take
it away.

I am afraid of what I’ve forgotten.

I try to pull out the key, but it won’t move. I try to bend it,
break it, but it is harder than bone.

I am afraid I will never remember.

§

“Where were you before this place?” His blue eyes are bright
under the lights.

“I have always been here.”

“Even when you were a child?”

I turn my key. Wide, dark eyes. Chubby fingers. A soft voice
whispering.

“I had a daughter with hair the same color as yours. Her name was
Lucy. They took her away,” he says, his voice breaking in little pieces.

They took me away and made me almost perfect. Maybe they made
Lucy perfect and let her go.

“When did you forget?” he asks.

The pain reaches out and my eyes burn.

“Naomi, when did you forget you were human?”

The pain digs in knife-sharp, and I slap the glass with my hands.
Big changed most of me, but he left my hands the same. I strike the glass
again; a small star blooms at the edge of the crack.

I forgot everything the day I
couldn’t remember her name. The one with the little hand. I turn the key, but
it won’t give me her name.

§

Little Big smashes the collared one with a hammer. Shards of
metal fly up and bounce off my glass, specks of red spatter the walls. He
laughs and shakes the hammer in front of our boxes but doesn’t break the glass.

§

“Naomi, you’re still human.”

Inside, the gears move.

Am I?

§

“They call themselves gods, you know. Maybe they are, I
don’t know. They say they killed the old god.”

The collared man said the same thing, but the words mean nothing.
The key has not shown me god yet.

“They’re remaking, changing, everything. The oceans are black
now.” He laughs, but the edges are hard. “I didn’t even believe in god.”

I turn my key until I find the ocean, the kiss of water drops on
my skin, the salt taste on my lips. She ran into the blue-green water,
splashing, and I said, “Be careful, be careful.”

“Naomi, please, why won’t you talk to me?”

Because I can’t remember her name.

§

Little Big takes the woman in black out of her box and cuts
off her arms. He puts her in the cage where the collared one used to live, and
she sits in the corner, motionless. She doesn’t weep like the others.

In a rush, Little Big leaves the room; I never see him again.

I hit the glass until another star appears.

§

“Naomi?”

§

I think about gods and birds and the key in my back. I think
about the crack in the glass, how it stretches almost to the bottom now. Every
day,
slap-crack.
I think about scars and stitches holding me in
place.

Tearing me apart.

I’d like to leave the blue room and see the ocean. I’d like to
remember the little one’s name. I turn my key, and the gears click.

I’d like to be human again.

§

Slap.

Crack.

Until the glass falls like rain. I
remember the taste and the way it turned my hair into wet tangles. Before they
took me away, before the remaking and the pain. There are still holes in my
memory, spaces for forgotten things, but I remember enough, and if Big finds
me, I won’t let him put me back in the box.

I step to
the edge. Thick dust covers the wooden table and the floor and shimmers like a
grey veil. I think we are the forgotten things now. Broken, remade into almost
perfect, yet left behind.

“Naomi, be careful,” the one with
the blue eyes says.

William.
His name is
William.

“I will,” I say.

I will break his glass, too, and
find a way to free the others. I won’t leave anyone behind. I hope my legs are
strong enough to break my fall, but I am not afraid.

I remember her name.

Sugarsin bumped into Henry VIII at a yard sale.

One minute she was making her way between two tables draped with
a floral cloth and loaded with a haphazard array of junk; the next, she rounded
the table, and her shoulder struck something hard and unyielding. She said,
“Sorry,” glanced up, and froze in place.

He’d been placed off to the side like an afterthought, next to a
wrought iron coat rack and an umbrella stand in the shape of a penguin. No one
had bothered to wipe the dust from his face or brush the cobwebs from his hair,
and dark stains riddled his doublet and hose. At least his codpiece was intact.

In spite of the grime, there was no mistaking his visage,
captured in the prime of his youth before he went to fat and ruin and rage. She
checked the nape of his neck, under his hair, and smiled. The factory seal
remained intact, which meant no one had altered his programming. He was an
older model, an unsuccessful one, despite the massive media campaigns. Too
old-fashioned for anyone but the faux-flesh collectors.

And for her.

The company called them
historical companions
—to amuse your friends and family
. Sugarsin always
thought it would be interesting, albeit strange, to have one, but even after
the price on the Henry model was reduced by half, it was still more expensive
than she could afford. She thought of her house, the quiet; it might be nice to
have some signs of life, even of the artificial variety. And how many strippers
could claim to have a Tudor king in residence?

She took a step back and bumped into another shoulder, this one
attached to a living man with sculpted biceps, a cleft chin, and hair artfully
dyed grey at the temples.

“Interested?” the man asked.

“Yes, I am,” she said with a smile. “Can I ask why you’re selling
him? Does he still work?”

“He worked fine the last time we turned him on. He was a gift for
my wife, but she hated him. They wouldn’t take him back, so he’s been in the
attic ever since. We don’t have the manual anymore, though, but I think you can
probably find it online.” His eyes, an unnaturally bright shade of green,
dropped down to her cleavage, then back up with a grin.

“How much are you asking?”

“If you can carry him yourself, you can have him for free.”

Sugarsin bit her lower lip. Free usually meant broken, but what
the hell. She could clean up his clothes and put him in the corner of her
living room. “Okay, I’ll take him.”

The man nodded. “Good, good. My wife will be happy. His accent
was too heavy for her to understand so I got her a John Wayne instead.”

Sugarsin laughed out loud.

Despite his earlier statement, he ended up helping her carry
Henry to her car.

Once home, she paid the
neighbor’s son to help bring him in. She found the on switch located in the
center of his back but hesitated. After being offline for so long, he’d need to
stay on for at least twelve hours, and she had to get ready for work. She
pushed a strand of ginger hair out of his eyes. They didn’t use real human hair
on all the models (it was an extra, and pricey, option), but she was lucky.

She removed his clothing to run it through the wash. Nude and
anatomically correct, he gave the appearance of a sleepwalking man who had
wandered into her house and paused while his dreams caught up. A cold shiver traced its way down her spine. No, he
wasn’t a man; he was a robot and nothing more.

“All right, Henry,” she
whispered. “We’ll get you setup tomorrow.”

§

When Sugarsin walked through the door at Whirlygigs, the
gaze of the new bouncer followed her until the dressing room door shut. She was
something of an oddity, the only natural at the club; all the other women wore
enhancements like a second skin. In Lulu’s case, her enhancement
was
skin, a removable artificial layer of ivory pale to cover up freckles and other
unacceptable imperfections. Silicone and injectables still remained high on the
list of wanted, and expected, adjustments, but technology moved faster than
tips on a Saturday night.

Born two years before fetal manipulation was approved, Sugarsin
had genetic luck on her side, and thanks to her mother’s alcohol-induced sense
of humor, she didn’t need a stage name.

Mouth set in a tight line, she pulled a costume from her bag. She
was dressing as Anne Boleyn tonight, more than fitting. Although
she’d
get to keep her head.

She had the right hair for the part, no wig required, but her
eyes were the wrong color, not that it mattered. The men and women who came to
the club didn’t care about the costumes—she could go on stage with a burlap
sack—they wanted what was underneath.

Once dressed, she adjusted the choker around her neck and waited
by the stage curtain with the vibration of the heavy techno music thumping
through her body. In her gown, she felt like a displaced time traveler. New
dancers always looked askance at her costumes, but the owner indulged her choices
because she had a steady, loyal, and well-paying clientele, attracted to the
real.