Yarn (13 page)

Green bristled, but did not reply.

In a flash Kira pulled out her needles and screamed. "Go or I will release the blind snakes of your gut!"

I cursed myself; I had just started another fight. "I learned so much from you, Kira, I'm grateful for your belief in me, I really am, but when I started I didn't know you actually
killed
each other. And your new flagship seemed like self-destruction. There are a dozens of them!"

When Kira glanced at me angrily as if to curse me, the green saleswarrior drew her silver shears. "Get back or I'll cut your cut," she said.

Kira laughed at her. "Is that your warTalk? Is it from a beginner's textbook or the back of a cuisine court coupon?"

Green jerked her shears at Kira's face, but she didn't flinch. Instead, she snapped her needles at the woman's mouth and said, "Let me knit your tongue into a true beast of language."

"Kira, please… I'm just saying that this move is too dangerous. We're going to be killed."

Without taking her eyes from the other saleswarrior, she replied, "Words of disgust! Would you rather die of time and boredom?"

Green said, "Let him go."

"Get your own talented Remon." Curling a lip, Kira moved closer. "Who are you, salescut?"

The green saleswarrior bristled. "A jobber."

"A jobber!" Kira snickered. "A jobber of what? Cloth? Felt?
Backing?"
She shook her head. "Maybe you're a jobber of torn buttonholes."

Green's mouth tightened. "He doesn't want to knit your boy panties for you anymore."

I said, "Casper Union is going to come back. They're going to kill us."

Kira turned and glared at me. "Without the threat of death there is no life! Those fallen heroes of skivvé have given everything for us." She shook her head slowly. "In our post-capitalism and dragons… in our glorious fashion… in our loveeffort… I will knit and I will kill until the very last fiber of my blood."

While she glared at me, the green saleswarrior smashed her scissors against Kira's needles. Kira was knocked off balance, and Green bashed her shoulder into Kira's chest. The maneuver seemed crude compared to the deadly ballet of the knitters.

And yet Kira was knocked flat onto the hallway floor. Her needles clattered against the store window. She looked small and defenseless. The squashed tube of her blue skivvé rested across her thigh. "Wrinkled fighter!" she cried at Green. "Iron your ways! No warTalk! No grace!"

"You sick, knitting cut!" The green saleswarrior pulled back her shears.

"Stop!" I shouted.

Green froze. Her eyes met mine.

I pushed her away from Kira and began running down the hallway as fast as I could. A second later, I heard Green following.

As we flew down one set of showstairs after another, I kept checking behind us but Kira hadn't followed. Finally we came to an entervator port. While I still was catching my breath, we boarded.

Part of me felt guilty that I had left Kira, another part was elated to be away from her, her needles, and her lust for blood.

"Thank you for stopping me." Green eyed me. She wasn't as young as Kira, nor was she as old as Vada. But her eyes were confident. "You still want to leave skivvé knitting?"

I nodded and said, "What do you think will happen to Kira?"

"I don't know."

"Do you think she'll come looking for me?" I hated to add her to my list of enemies like Casper Union, the ghost who killed drap-de-Berry, and Withor.

Green shook her head. "Even if she did, it's a huge city."

I slumped forward and held my head in my hands.

We exited at the lowest level,
the Keep
as it was called, and Green led us past the tourist places to a dim little cuisine court. We sat at a small round table. We ordered from a bored waitressrebel in beetle green super-shorts and were soon snacking on cabbage, octopus pancakes, and mercury waters.

I asked Green, "So, who are you?"

She smiled as if she had been waiting for my question. "Pilla."

 
"And how do you know me?"

"I've heard a lot." She smiled as if at a private joke.

"From where?"

Pilla opened her mouth and then turned her head to a look at the scraggly man approaching our table. He plunked down in the seat next to me.

"Why meet in this lonely selvage hole?"

Pilla nodded at the man while introducing me. "Kastle owns a famous costume store. I think it'd be a good place to work for a while."

"YeOld#1CostumeShoppee," he said proudly, "is the second largest in Seattlehama. Our salessoldiers are completely dedicated to our grand mission of economically and fashionably dressing the tourists in their epic dreams."

I wished he would just go away so I could talk to Pilla. "Salessoldiers?" I asked her. "I thought you said this was safer."

"It is," she insisted.

"You can work your way
up
to salessoldier," said Kastle, "but you'll start in our alterations army. We all work from shopping dawn to dusk. It's hard but rewarding." He smiled dimly, but I didn't know what to say.

"He's interested," Pilla said. "He can do it."

The man narrowed his eyes as he glanced from me to her and back again. "You start tomorrow." He opened a case and handed me a shiny screen. "That's got all our costumes. Look them over. You'll have to get your own hand-Juki, so I've put a small advance on a MasterCut." He slid a rubbery purple card toward me, stood, and said, "Welcome.
Remon
." With that, he shrugged at Pilla and headed off.

"I don't want this," I told her. "
Alterations army?"

"Relax." She laughed and then peered at me. "This is just a place to start. You'll be sewing plushes and wovens. Believe me it's better than that loopy world of knitting."

"Who are you, really?"

Pilla seemed taken aback. "I'm here to help. Come on." She stood. "Let's get your equipment. I think you're going to like this."

"I want a straight answer. How do you know my name?"

She sat back down, wiped her face with a crumpled silk napkin, and sighed. "I know you through Withor."

SEATTLEHAMA: RASH

YeOld#1CostumeShoppee, or
Number Two
as the employees called it, was part of the Golden Triple Quadruple Best Mall on the lowest level. It was
the
most touristy mini-mall in a giant touristy maxi-mall of a city. The space was famous for the Electri-Coco ceiling, which pulsed a constellation of perfumed beauty faces, perpetuity lace, and scenes from the most famous epics. Here the hundreds of salessoldiers wore costumes from komiks, dream, and nightmare. Bang, rage, and throb beats ricocheted in the air. And everywhere were thousands of masks, jackets, puffs, acid-dukes, hump-wigs, podium shoes, and plasticott swords for rent. When the trains from other cities disgorged their customers, they rushed straight at us.

I worked in the alteration rooms, where t'ups of all sizes and ages crowded in with their newly rented and ill-fitting costumes. Stepping up on the platforms before the mirrors, they stripped down to their foundation and waited impatiently as we fitted, tacked, and hemmed up the Choky Bears, Reginald Ball Faeries, and Blackwitch Breaths.

"If you make it through the first week," said Dill, who worked next to me, "get some good support hose and mud-soled shoes. And be glad you're not down in renovation. When these costumes come back, they have to use scrapers to get off all the dried bodily fluids."

The job wasn't easy. Many of the t'ups were anxious and rude. They complained about the materials, the length of the dwindle skirts, the lack of fringe on the jackcoats, the cheapness of the plasticott worms woven into the Commander Sheppard blazers. They wanted us to hurry and to make them look "just so" when that meant tall instead of short, slim instead of lumpy, gorgeous instead of unsightly.

But it was all worth it for the chance to use the Juki Magni-Needle 66-11 Handseamer with the liqui-thread attachment. A flexible cord stretched down my right arm from the power and supply pack on my back to the detailer wand that I held in my hand like a small pistol. It operated as an extension of myself, and it was a thing of beauty.

I simply pointed the laser tip of the wand and smoothly hemmed or stitched. I could do stretch, decorative, seaming, safety, double or pick stitches by selecting the shift. And while the other fixers hurried to adjust the length of sleeves, pants and attached bow, gloves and capes in the same amount of time, I could reach the Juki up pant legs, down jacket backs, and inside the panels of plush bellies like a plastic surgeon, and tuck and smooth the cloth exactly.

In the last throng of customers on my first day, a young man stepped up onto my platform. When he pulled off his hobble pants and his leather reverse shirt, he stood nude. But that wasn't what shocked me. His entire torso was covered in sores just like my father's: pink and yellow and centered with a crusty white.

"Yeah… I know," he said with a proud smirk. "I burn too bright."

As I worked gingerly to fix his sleeve length, stitch on his ties and hem his pants, my hands were shaking. Should I tell him that he was dying? Didn't he know?

When he was done and stood primping the fluff down the front of his shirt, I worked up my courage and pointed to his chest. "What are those?"

He didn't take his eyes from his own reflection, just smiled. "Honorary cancers of glamour and dream."

It sounded like warTalk, and I didn't know what it meant.

I sought Dill out after my shift. "That customer in the hobble pants. Did you see him? He was covered in sores."

"Oh him," Dill laughed. "He's awfully fashionable. He's a serious Xi burner." Dill tucked his long white hair behind an ear and leaned in. "Some of us from the shop are going to a Xi boutique later. You should come and test it out."

"What's Xi?"

"It's a special yarn. It's kind of against the law, but it's big. Supposedly virgins spin it, and when they're done, they die. It's very cosmic and dimensional. It makes you dream in pure fashion. You definitely need to test it!"

Ten of us sat at an archipelago of little tables at the nearby cuisine court. While they ate and complained sociably about customers, costumes, bosses, friends, and lovers, I picked anxiously at my food, worried about what I was going to find.

We headed near the bottom of the city to a dark hallway where the storefronts were covered in thick drapes. The sales warriors here were all young men with enormous frosted hairdos, paint slacks, and choke coats. I heard one say, "Desire burns the night burns the desire burns a hole in your
night desire
."

We crowded into one of the places seemingly at random, entering a room dressed in tarnished silver and moss green. From behind a lichen-covered plinth, Pilla stepped forward, greeting and air kissing my companions. She stopped when she saw me. She suppressed a smile. "Hello again."

In the shocked silence of the cuisine court the day before, I had asked her how she knew Withor.

"We work together sometimes."

"You're a yarn and cloth jobber like him?"

"I deal with specialty yarns."

I tensed. "I'm never going back to Withor. He was a smuthead."

She laughed, pleased. "I don't want that either. You're with me now." She shook her head. "You should have heard him rant about you."

"He made a fortune from my yarn rips and paid me almost nothing. And he insulted me every other sentence. What was he complaining about?"

"He's a bigoted old bag." She frowned. "He hates that you have some gift, though he'd never admit it. Honestly, he loathes anyone with talent. He pretends that he's the platinum sewing needle."

I studied her face, her overworked hair, the crackle pattern of her lips, the warmth in her chocolate eyes. I had that feeling again that I had met her before. "On my last yarn rip, I didn't get the yarn and didn't go back."

"I heard something about that."

"Is he looking for me? Is he angry?"

She eyed me mischievously. "We're just not going to tell him."

I debated whether I should mention it, but did. "He has my papers."

She nodded thoughtfully. "They're not going to be easy. You just have to stay out of trouble until we can get them."

After all of Kira's war Talk, Pilla's plain talk was an air I hadn't known I missed. "So, why are you helping me?"

"Your talents are valuable. But whatever we can make, I'll share it fairly."

I picked up the MasterCut. "What percentage are you taking?"

She had scoffed at that. "YeOld#1 doesn't pay enough to worry about. But it's a safe place to practice sewing. Later we'll figure how to
make
."

"I don't know if I should thank you or not."

Pilla eyed me. "You'll thank me."

Now she escorted all of us Number Two employees into a dim room with several couches and small beds. Swirling sounds-I couldn't call it music-filled the space. On the way, Pilla had opened a large black closet and pulled out a sad-looking off white cardigan, which she now held up. She asked, "Who's going to lead?" I noticed that she was wearing rubber gloves. The group clamored for her to go first, but she kept begging off. "I've got to work the closet," she said several times.

Clearly this cardigan was special, but why, I didn't know. The texture, sheen, and thickness of the yarn reminded me of the scarf I had seen pulled from drap-de-Berry's neck after she had been killed.

One of the salessoldiers from the front of Number Two stripped off his Steam jacket and shirt. He had a half-dozen of the same sores on his shoulders and the back of his neck. "Hand me that cutting sweater. I'm freezing in here!" The other employees laughed as if he had told a joke.

I eyed the sweater and his sores and wondered if my dad had worn Xi.

"Wait," said Dill. "Tane just joined Number Two today. He's never burned Xi before. I think he should have the honors."

"A Xi virgin?" cooed several of the women.

"Burn! Burn!" chanted others.

Pilla held the sweater toward me, but I didn't move.

"Strip," Dill ordered with a smile.

"Put it on!" complained the half-naked salessoldier.