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Derma’s first prosthesis was a clunky, makeshift thing, thrown together by Yukinojo in the hectic days and weeks following the Tekkadan base’s destruction and the survivors’ flight from Mars. It was made of scrap metal, heavy and unarticulated but for a single elbow joint, with a rough hook welded to the end. The cushioning was prone to shifting to one side, leaving bare metal to chafe at his skin, and the harness was a mishmash of repurposed Tekkadan belts, stiff and inflexible.
But it was a wonderful thing all the same, even if looking at it made Derma want to cry.
It was made for him, just for him, and not only by Yukinojo, but with other people chipping in too, donating parts of a uniform they couldn’t replace. They didn’t even have to hurry; the trip to Earth would take months, and going back to Mars (if they could go back to Mars) would take just as long, and for that whole time, there would be nothing to do but get under the Turbines’ feet. Derma didn’t need an arm replacement and they made him one anyway; Yukinojo fitted it to him with a frown and a careful touch while Yamagi explained how to move the shoulder of his good arm to make the prosthesis’s elbow bend and release. Dante had flicked the belt he’d donated—right in the center of the harness, with his initials scratched into the underside of the buckle—and assured Derma that he’d get the hang of it in no time.
As far back as he could remember, Derma had never been given a gift like this—and he hated it.
The weight was all wrong; it threw off his balance more than losing the arm to begin with. It clunked against him when he walked like he was constantly bumping into something he couldn’t see. It made the stump of his arm itch at first and it just got worse the longer he wore it, until, when he’d sit in a bunk at the end of the day and peel it off, his skin was left red and throbbing for more than an hour. The belt buckles chafed against his back, leaving tender welts that blistered and broke. Sometimes one would slip and drag at his whisker, sending a shock of not-quite-pain shooting down his spine.
He’d felt worse, obviously he’d felt worse, but all the pain in his life had never felt so wrong as this. Strapping some foreign thing to himself every morning made his skin crawl, especially on the days when he could still somehow feel his arm—not the prosthetic one, but his own arm, impossible sensations of goosebumps or prickling heat. Yukinojo called it phantom pain, said even he still got it sometimes, and Derma hated that too; he was given this amazing thing and he and even his missing arm couldn’t be grateful and just like it.
And he couldn’t just not wear it and hide in his and Dante’s loaned room all day, no matter how much he wanted to do exactly that, just crawl into a corner and put his head between his knees and sit there until his heart stopped. Dante wouldn’t let him, for a start.
Dante had thrown himself into taking care of people. He told Derma, “I can’t do what Chad and Eugene do”—by which he meant make leadership decisions, so far as Derma could tell—“but I can follow orders.” Orga—and Mikazuki, and Akihiro—had all given the same last command; it hung unspoken in the air like a promise you were on the verge of breaking. Making sure it didn’t get broken, in the current situation, meant making rounds and checking on people. One at a time, one after another, even when they snapped at him or ignored him or cried on him, Dante shoved food under people’s noses or dragged them out of their rooms for a walk around the ship or whatever it took to make sure that everyone was upright and breathing for another day.
Derma trailed behind him, urgently finding anywhere else to be when crying started, but otherwise sharing the workload where he could, or doing any of the basic upkeep chores he could get the Turbines to give him. He put the prosthesis on every morning and cleaned it off every night like Yukinojo had shown him and managed to stay busy enough to evade a detailed report for almost a month before Merribit cornered him with a demand to check on how his stump was adjusting.
“The shape of a residual limb changes over the first year or so,” she said, all reasonability even as she stood there blocking any obvious escape routes, “so it’s normal to need to adjust things a few times early on.” Finally, he dropped his head and allowed himself to be herded down to the medical bay.
There was a dangerous quiet as she and the Turbines’ ship doctor peeled the prosthesis off to expose the mess beneath it, cracking skin and a constellation of raised sores, swollen with fluid. He had assumed them to be just bad blisters, but the word the women traded back and forth in worried undertones was ulcers.
The verdict issued was, “No prosthesis for at least twelve weeks while you heal. After that, we’ll see.” Forty-eight hours in the medical bath would have sped things up to just one week, but the doctor had favored the natural healing process and Derma hadn’t argued, not wanting to tell her how grateful he was for the excuse. Afterward, Merribit escorted him back to his room, ordered him to rest, and, in a grief-muted voice that left Derma’s stomach flipping with nausea, apologized for not checking in with him more regularly.
He curled up in the bunk and tried to doze while the painkillers lasted—Tekkadan had never been able to afford things like that, and it was a nice change from the worsening-by-the-day pain from the prosthesis.
He woke up some time later to the sound of Dante opening the door and walking in. He sat down in front of the bunk, wearing an expression of hangdog guilt that kicked Derma in the chest with the force of his own ingratitude, jolting him unpleasantly awake.
“You don’t have to apologize,” Derma said before Dante could find the words to. “I told you I didn’t like you looking at it so you wouldn’t look.”
“But you were right by me. I should have noticed anyway.” Right to the point, as always. Dante rubbed the back of his neck, eyes narrowed, mouth gathered into a pained scowl.
“You don’t know anything about amputations, Dante.” The words came out flat and accusatory, and Derma looked away, misery knotting his throat. What does Merribit think she’s doing? he thought. Like I don’t know how to hide things.
Silence hung between them for a long minute, underlined by the constant low hum of a ship that sounded nothing like the Isaribi.
“You don’t have to earn family.” Dante’s words came out in an awkward tumble. “I mean, not family like us. You already did that.” When Derma just stared at him, he huffed a weak laugh and gave Derma a lopsided smile. “Akihiro used to worry about the same stuff.”
Derma felt his eyes go round at the name, which called up memories that crowded into the room like a living presence, heavy and solid and warm—Akihiro’s soft smile and his hand on Derma’s head, as real as the lost arm. His breath came suddenly sharp in his lungs.
“Comes with the territory,” Dante quipped. He flicked one thumb down the front of his jacket, over his left shoulder, tracing a stripe they no longer wore. Then he rocked back and up into a crouch, one arm resting over his knees as he reached out to ruffle Derma’s hair. “We’ll figure it out, okay? And if we don’t, I’ll be here anyway. Promise.”
“I’m just gonna drag everyone down,” Derma whispered, trying to pull away and scrub at his burning eyes.
Dante snorted. “How? I’d like to see you try to get us further down from here.” He tightened his grip and rocked Derma’s head back and forth, voice drawing out as he taunted, “Dooo yoouur wooorst.”
“Ugh! Let go, you ass!” Derma squirmed, struggling to pry Dante’s hand off with only one good arm and no good leverage.
Dante just laughed, right up until Derma ducked into a crouch and came up in a headbutt.
And, well, at least it was something else to think about for a while.
Long before Derma’s residual limb was healed enough to put the prosthesis back on, Yamagi had decided to quietly dispose of it. He’d lurked outside while the Turbines’ ship doctor gave Yukinojo a lecture about “letting a child soldier with survivor’s guilt wear a prosthesis without adequate supervision,” which, once past the immediate heat, had included a list of changes that would need to be made so that the next prosthesis would be “serviceable by the standards of modern medicine.”
Name changes loomed over everyone, as well as the tangle of what happens next, finally too close to ignore, which did not leave much time to work on an upgraded replacement. The Turbines’ new ship didn’t really have the sort of manufacturing capabilities they’d need, anyway. On Earth, though…
Once they’d gotten settled into the safehouse Makanai had provided for them, Yamagi turned the problem over in his head for a few days. He talked to Tekkadan’s adults—the old man, Merribit and Dexter—about materials, construction, medical considerations and the lingering cloud of expense. He made lists, did math, mulled over timeframes and, when he had every bit of it pinned in place on the skeleton of his argument, tracked down Chad to see about asking the Prime Minister for another favor.
The man was already doing a lot for them, that was true, because Tekkadan had put him in office, and Chad had saved his life. There was one more thing, though, by Yamagi’s reckoning: Tekkadan’s Mars Branch had ended the conflict between Arbrau and the SAU. Mikazuki and Akihiro had landed on the field and brought an end to things where even Gjallarhorn couldn’t. Those two were both gone now, but maybe their service was worth as simple a thing as a prosthetic arm for a surviving family member.
Chad had looked surprised at first, his eyebrows raising, but as Yamagi’s explanation had gone on the expression had faded into a small smile, a gratitude in his eyes that probably had everything to do with still not being used to other people caring about what happened to (ex-)Debris.
Yukinojo, of course, would have made a prosthesis for any of the group that needed one, but Yamagi knew himself well enough to admit that he would not have been as closely involved with a prosthesis for anyone else as he was with Derma’s, and for one simple reason. It was a selfish reason, probably, and damned if he’d say it aloud in the face of Chad’s generous interpretation of his motives.
So what he did not say at any point in his explanations or cajolements was, “He was Shino’s, so I’ll look after him.”
When Shino made squad leader—back when Tekkadan was still Tekkadan and not just a beaten-down clutch of survivors—he had crowed about it for days on end. He’d sauntered in and out of the base’s mobile suit hangars making elaborate shows of squinting at the machines and sizing them up, bantering back and forth with an elated Dante about which ones his squad would pilot. He’d spent hours bragging to anyone who would listen (especially Ride, who was easy to wind up) about his squad members, how amazing they were, Dante’s hacking talents and quick reflexes, or Derma’s simulator results and intuitive grasp on teamwork, which had impressed even Azee.
Shino had loved them, his Ryuusei Squad.
What could Yamagi do but love them too?
The funding arrived in the form of a discreet banking account with an opening deposit that shot Nadi’s eyebrows towards his hairline. There was one requirement—the prosthesis would have to be made on Mars. The Prime Minister was grateful, said his aide, but he couldn’t have his name connected to taboo body modification.
Yamagi, the one responsible for any money coming through at all, shot the man a venomous glare and stalked out of the room without a word. Nadi heaved a sigh but confirmed that the amount would be sufficient before he left the aide with Dexter to finish sorting out details.
Yamagi had retreated to the safehouse’s back porch with his data slate full of schematics.
“Do you think we can at least buy materials here?” he asked as soon as Nadi had the door closed. “Everything’s going to be more expensive on Mars and the quality’s going to be worse.”
“We don’t know that.” Nadi crossed his arms. “I’ve got contacts back on Mars that I don’t here. And if we go with the half-metal frame, these days that’s cheaper on Mars too.”
“We do know that. All the plants and refineries on Mars are run by gangs, or might as well be. Everyone there’s just focused on making as much money as they can while the government’s changing. If we buy materials there, we won’t have any kind of guarantees about quality or speed or long-term performance.”
“If Earth could get materials more reliably here, then they’d be getting them here,” Nadi returned. “They can’t even enforce a trade embargo because everyone knows they don’t have any other good options to source from. I know everyone talks like Earth is some kind of paradise, but just because everything looks prettier here doesn’t mean they don’t have their own production problems. At least on Mars I know what the criminals look like.”
Yamagi scowled, the expression pinched and mutinous. Finally, he snapped, “I can’t believe he stood there and said that right to your face. After everything we did for them.”
Nadi sighed again. “But they still paid for it,” he said with finality.
“But…” Yamagi’s hands had gone tight on the data slate’s casing, the tension obvious even through his gloves.
“If it disgusts them but they do it anyway, it still gets us what we need and them something to think about. People don’t change quickly, but they do change.”
After the mining collapse that had taken Nadi’s feet up past to the ankles, Maruba had thrown himself into finding better-paying work, supporting both of them while Nadi had healed. He’d been the one to talk Nadi into prostheses in the end, even if it took him weeks to be able to look at them once they were in place.
In Maruba’s case, of course, getting comfortable with body modifications just made him more willing to use it on kids, but a lot about Maruba had changed as he’d gotten older—and richer. In the end, maybe he’d swung back to thinking of modification as inhuman after all—he hadn’t even tried to contact Nadi during the Gjallarhorn assault on CGS.
Nadi shook the thoughts off—no one wanted to hear about Maruba’s younger days, definitely not one of the kids his staff had abused with such impunity. There was still work to do to make sure those kids made it to adulthood intact.
“We’ll look over it again,” he said aloud and leaned over Yamagi’s shoulder to swipe the screen away from the electronic blueprint to the materials list. “…Dura mater housing? Like in the Alaya cables?”
“…I had a thought,” Yamagi said slowly. “The Alaya-Vijnana System lets you interface directly with the data from whatever machine you’re hooked up to.” The shape of the idea spilled through Nadi, a cold clarity for the elegance of it, and also just how taboo it was—so taboo he wasn’t even sure where to start explaining it to this apprentice mechanical renegade standing in front of him. “The more humanoid, the better, and what could be more humanoid than this? And it wouldn’t even be a very complicated machine, so the risk of damage from neural feedback would be basically nonexistent. He’d carry the weight easier, and if it worked at all like it did for Mikazuki—”
“Running it through a cable will tell everyone with eyes that he’s walking around with nanomachine augmentation just hanging off his shoulder,” Nadi cut in. “He’s wanted by Gjallarhorn. We can’t give him something like that.”
“He could wear something over it,” Yamagi protested, turning to face him.
Nadi could feel his blood pressure rising. “Like his tank top or the jacket with the symbol of a banned organization on it? He doesn’t own anything that’s gonna hide an augmentation like that.”
“He can buy something when we get back.”
“It will get out!” Nadi clamped his hands down Yamagi’s shoulders. “Someone’ll see it, and then they’ll report it, and—”
“He deserves to have the best thing we can make him!”
“He deserves to live!” Nadi gave Yamagi a single hard shake. “You can’t make it up to the dead by making things harder for the living!”
Yamagi’s nostrils flared in a sharp intake and he stared up at Nadi, lips twisted with grief and wide eyes gone dangerously glassy. A jolt of guilt cut through Nadi’s frustration and he let the boy go, taking a step back and looking away, scrubbing a hand over the back of his head.
“Sorry. Sorry, but just—listen to me. A missing limb isn’t the end of the world. Plenty of people everywhere get by with less than the best thing money can buy.” He drew in a breath and let it out. “Community goodwill is only gonna get us so far, Yamagi. We can’t give him something that’s gonna draw the eye like that. It’s too dangerous for everyone.”
The response was a short, uneven inhalation that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle, followed by a whispered, “Okay.”
The pair of them stood in awkward silence for a few minutes, watching the wind ripple through the trees lining the property. Treacherously, one bit of Yamagi’s proposal began to tug at Nadi’s thoughts, an insistent little hum from the part of his brain that had been doing patch jobs on not enough funds for the better part of a quarter century. Not a very complicated machine—the risk of neural feedback would be basically nonexistent. Just a bit of data, hardly anything…
“…What about a radio transceiver?”
“What?” Yamagi blinked.
Nadi exhaled a gusty sigh. You might have not yelled at him if you’re just gonna entertain the notion anyway, he rebuked himself. All right. Think it through…
“There’s a lot of reasons the Alaya-Vijnana uses a cable,” he began, feeling his way through the hypothetical. “The connection’s more stable, more secure, and you get better transmission regulation than you would with a wireless connection. A whisker’s delicate enough as-is. But practically speaking, we use radio to send data all the time. You just can’t rely on it for combat because—”
“Because of Ahab Drive radiation.” Yamagi’s head lifted with understanding. “It interferes with radio waves.”
“But nothing with an Ahab Drive is allowed inside cities. Which is where we’re gonna be, if we’re all just doing the civilian thing once we get back.”
“And if it’s just a mechanical arm with a few different functions… You could get that on a microchip, and pair it to something in the arm.”
“You’d need two pair-links.” And dammit, it was so easy to fall into this back-and-forth with Yamagi, who in a better world would have been pushing the whole mobile suit engineering field forward, not stuck forever at the intersection between what circumstances demanded and what their funds could buy. “One for the arm and the chip, and one for the chip and the Alaya implant. The implant’s not programmed to transmit information on its own. There’s microchips, but that means more spinal surgery.”
“A physical conduit could—but that just takes us back to the cable problem…” Yamagi raised one gloved knuckle to his mouth, eyes narrowed behind the loose fall of his hair.
“Yeah. But before we get too into all this”—he waved a hand vaguely—“we need to talk to Derma. S’not doing him any favors to hash all this out behind his back.”
“…Right.” Yamagi flushed at the reminder, hand dropping to his side again. “Sorry.”
“I’m sorry too,” Nadi answered gruffly.
“You were right, though. I wasn’t…” He trailed off, eyebrows tangling.
“Hey,” Nadi interjected before the kid could get going again. “It doesn’t help anybody to get torn up over it. We’ve just got to stop trying to make his decisions for him.”
Yamagi nodded, a quick, shallow dip of his chin. “So we need to talk to him, then. I wonder where he is…”
“Wherever Dante’s at, no doubt,” Nadi snorted. “C’mon. We’ll go ask around.”
When Yamagi and the old man called Derma over to talk prosthetic stuff, Dante made a point of tagging along. He found himself a wall to lean on and listened intently as they explained some extremely cool-sounding ideas about their next model.
“And you might even get some sensation back,” Yamagi wrapped up, “depending on how the Alaya-Vijnana interacts with the phantom pain you’ve been feeling. I’m hoping having something concrete to attach those feelings to will give them more—verisimilitude, I guess.”
Derma gave Yamagi a blank stare at the last word—You and me both, Dante thought—then bowed his head, his expression troubled.
Yamagi angled his data slate back up over his chest, frowning. “…What’s wrong? You don’t have to worry about what it costs; we’ve already got that—”
“It’s not the money,” Derma mumbled, even though just three days ago Dante and Chad had had to talk him out of scrapping the whole endeavor when Chad had made a well-intentioned comment about looking forward to seeing the tech Earth money could buy only to find out Derma had no idea what he was talking about.
Dante ran the explanation back in his head, going over the technical stuff. Half-metal frame, strung with nano-myotube “muscles,” a light nanoskin weave over that, thumb with a rotating joint in the base and segmented finger-pieces, three hinge joints apiece.
“It’s your prosthesis,” Yukinojo chipped in, glancing at Yamagi, who had raised his slate up like a shield and was peering at Derma from behind it worriedly. “You’re the one who gets to decide what we do with it.”
It’s not the Alaya connection; you’ve been using those practically since you could walk, Dante thought as they waited for Derma to speak, watching the kid’s hand stray up to his empty sleeve. So what is it? The surgery, or the—wait, the radio. Dante lifted his head in sudden realization.
“If it works with radio, that means it’ll get messed up by Ahab waves,” Derma said, and Dante winced to have pegged him so right. “I can’t fight like that. Can’t you just use a connector cable?”
No one answered him at first. Yukinojo was giving Yamagi another meaningful look while Yamagi just stared at the floor, and Dante, heart full of sympathy and head full of frustration, fought the urge to turn around and start banging his forehead on the wall.
“A connector cable would stand out too much day-to-day.” Yukinojo broke the awkward hush first. “We could get away with things like that before, but not when we’re trying to keep a low profile—someone with an Alaya-Vijnana port using it for a prosthesis this high quality… It would raise too many questions.”
“That’s why I said I didn’t want anything fancy,” Derma said, a trace of heat working its way into his voice, his posture drawing tighter.
“This is such a good opportunity.” Yamagi said the words at a quick, pained clip. He winced when Derma turned to him but rallied. “If we waste it we won’t get another chance.”
“Why make it so nice when we’re just going to—” Derma caught himself on the sentence, eyes skating wildly away for a heartbeat, then finished it with “—to have to replace it in a few years, anyway? How am I supposed to afford that next time?”
“It’s a half-metal frame,” Yamagi pleaded. “The only thing we’d have to replace is the outside weave and the cables, and that’ll be a fraction of what it costs now because we’ll already have the mold. In the long run—”
“Why are you treating this like some kind of reward for me screwing up?!” Derma clutched at his shoulder, his breathing gone suddenly ragged, and Dante took half a step forward, the last few weeks of worry for the kid rising up like a shadow at sundown. “Just make it junk! That’ll be easy to afford for the rest of my stupid life!”
“Hey.” Dante stepped between him and the other two. “Hey. If you pass out right now I’m gonna have to drag you back to bed. Let’s go sit down, okay?”
Derma glared at him, face gone waxy. “Like you wouldn’t do it anyway,” he muttered but didn’t resist when Dante towed him away by his good arm.
Later, Dante mouthed over his shoulder at the two mechanics left staring after them.
“Need a painkiller?” he asked once they’d made it out of the room. “I know where Merribit’s got the first aid kit stashed.”
Derma just shook his head, eyes on the floor, so Dante walked them out to the backyard, around the house and into the deep shadows beneath its northern eaves. Putting his back against the brick, he slid down into an easy sprawl to the grass and looked up at Derma expectantly. After sulking about it for a bit longer, the kid joined him.
“They’d do the same thing for any of us—y’know that, right?”
Derma buried his head against his knees and groaned. “Can we just not talk about it?”
“Gonna have to talk about it eventually.” Dante elbowed him. “Might as well be when you’re feeling talkative.” Derma wasn’t, often; usually he shut down any and all questions about how he was feeling with a muted, “It’s fine.” An outburst could do some good that way, a kind of emotional pressure valve Dante’d been a soldier more than long enough to see the usefulness in.
Derma swatted at him half-heartedly.
“If it helps, you can think of it as something to help you get more work done,” Dante offered. “I mean, where’d we be if the old man didn’t have his feet? We’d have never even gotten off the ground.”
“It’s not the same,” Derma said to his kneecaps. “He’s a mechanic. And his feet don’t have any parts that’d get shut down by an Ahab Drive.”
“It’s totally the same, though. You’re not any different from the rest of us just because you don’t know how to do anything but fight. Nobody else does, and we’re all still gonna have to find something else.”
“You know how to do stuff other than fight.” Derma turned a tired glare up at him. “You’re good with computers, remember?”
“Well—and Chad knows how to fly starships.” Dante stumbled on the backpedal but rebounded as best he could. “What, you think we got taught that stuff back when we were getting processed for sale? You think we were just born knowing it? If you wanna know how to do something other than fighting, just pick a topic and ask around. You can borrow my data slate if you want; we’ll dig up lessons or something.”
Derma’s mouth twisted around a scowl, his eyes sliding away.
I know it’s scary as hell, kiddo, but we’ve got our orders, Dante thought, reaching over to ruffle Derma’s hair. Aloud, he said, “We’re all gonna be right there learning next to you. Might as well get the cool robot arm while it’s on the table. Who cares if the next one isn’t as nice? At least you had it for a while, right?”
That earned him a disgruntled snort and another unconvincing swat, but temper was infinitely better than morose dissembling, so he chalked it up as a victory anyway and fell quiet to enjoy it, like a good winner, and wait for the next conversational sally.
“…You and your data slate.” Derma said after a long silence. “Doesn’t it bother you how easy it’d be to lose that? How can you stand having such nice things?”
“Because I deserve nice things and so do you,” Dante answered promptly, regretting that he hadn’t brought the slate with him that day. “The world shits on us enough. I try to take advantage of it when something up there feels guilty every now and again.” Dante tilted his chin up at the sky vaguely.
Derma paused, eyes tracking the direction of Dante’s nod.
“…What are you talking about?” he asked after a few long seconds.
“Huh? Oh, uh. It’s something my—something I heard about back—before.” Shit, I haven’t thought about this in—what, twelve years? Geez.
Dante rubbed his neck. “Before” wasn’t something you talked about much when you were Human Debris. It was all right for the real kids to do it, talking about the siblings they were supporting or the father who was out of work or whatever, but Debris had an understanding, among themselves, that whatever family had come before was long gone and that talking about it would do nothing but hurt. There was always someone with a sadder story, anyway, and no way to know what memory could set someone off in a way that’d be dangerous to everybody else.
“There’s something that watches the world and tries to—to guide it down the best road,” he explained, halting on words that hadn’t ever really been his own.
His uncle had talked about it sometimes, back when he and Dante’s dad had come back from all-day shifts at the factory. “Everyone does their part,” he’d said as he sat on the floor and stretched out the aches and pains. “It ain’t pretty for everyone, but the world’s got so many parts, can’t everyone be having a nice one.”
Derma was giving him an extremely skeptical side-eye. Dante shook off the memory.
“Like—the world’s so messed up that fixing it is gonna take a long time,” he tried, “and sometimes people have to get through some real shit to be where they need to be when the time’s right, y’know?”
“…But Gjallarhorn…” Derma said slowly, like he was trying to put a machine back together and had just found a part he didn’t know what to do with.
“Not Gjallarhorn, something...” Dante struggled to find a working metaphor. “It’s not something that’s in the world, it’s something bigger. Like how you can’t see radio waves.”
“How does something that isn’t in the world have anything to do with what’s happening in it?” Derma asked, sounding doubtful.
“How does the sun make stuff grow on planets it’s so far away from?” Dante countered. “It’s a soul thing. Like how praying helps the soul go where it needs to.”
“Does that even work for us…?” Derma looked down again, voice low. He drew in tighter on himself. “Masahiro said…”
Akihiro’s brother. Dante’d never met him, hardly heard a thing about him, but the scraped-out grief in Akihiro’s eyes after the Brewers fight wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot. It was a worst-nightmare kind of scenario, the kind of thing you heard horror stories about—exactly why you didn’t talk about people from before the stripe, because who knew when you’d trip over something like that?
But we’re talking about it now, so what the hell, right?
“What’d he say?” Dante scooted a bit closer, ready to throw an arm around Derma’s shoulders if the kid looked like he needed it.
“…That being reborn is just for humans.” The answer came soft and reluctant. Definitely time for the arm-around-the-shoulders plan, Dante thought and pulled his companion into a sideways hug.
“Hey,” he said in a fierce whisper, bending his head close. “We’re humans too. No matter what anyone tried to do to us or take away from us. We’re humans too.”
Derma didn’t answer, but after a tense moment, he leaned into the hug with a shaky exhale. Dante tightened his grip.
“You don’t have to decide about the arm right away,” he said into Derma’s hair. “It can wait until you’re ready, okay?”
Derma nodded, burying his head against Dante’s shoulder. He breathed unevenly through his mouth, his stillness punctuated with quick, sharp shudders. Gradually, the warm wetness of tears began to seep through Dante’s jacket sleeve.
Derma put off the decision—waiting until he was ready, he told himself. Tekkadan, what was left of it, spent the next few days on paperwork, name change registrations and relocation waivers for everyone, and more complicated stuff than that for Eugene and Chad. Something about apartment leases, was all Derma heard about it.
Then it was into final departure preparations. Long looks from Yamagi and Yukinojo punctuated those last days on Earth any time they were in the same room with him, which he avoided as much as he could get away with. It was too late now to get Earth materials for the prosthesis, so there was nothing to talk to them about, not yet.
On the day they left, Takaki came for a last visit. He spent most of his time with the original members, his old friends, talking with Ride or Atra, or giving Chad an emphatic handshake. In the flurry of activity, though, he surprised Derma with a brief, tight hug—for Aston, he said, with a lingering empty ache in his smile.
And then it was back to a Teiwaz-chartered ship and, thanks to Mars and Earth being on opposite sides of the sun from each other, a forecasted two months of nothing meaningful to do. By the time we get back to Mars, I’ll be able to wear a prosthesis again—it was harder to avoid the thought than it was the mechanics. His balance was finally adjusting and that felt like almost as much of a betrayal as the phantom pain that still sometimes woke him in the night.
Dante had come to some kind of decision on his own. He’d swerve off to go talk to Atra, or hole up in his bunk with his data slate, intently reading something he’d put on it during their last week on Earth. When Derma finally asked about it one night, he blushed—actually blushed—and fiddled with the device for a minute before turning it around. The title took up most of the screen. Foreign Atlases: Mapping the Road to Recovery from Childhood Violence.
“I guess it just finally hit me that this stuff doesn’t go away,” he said in response to Derma’s stare. “Not without—without somebody doing more about it than anyone ever did for us. And I want to—y’know, do it right. Instead of just guessing.”
What did that mean? When was Dante even going to be in a position to do anything about some stranger’s trauma? With no idea what to do with the answer, Derma just gave a noncommittal grunt and rolled over to try and go to sleep.
The next cycle found him down in one of the holds, moving from one shipping container to the next with a bucket of damp rags to scrub down any grimy corners or odd patches of clinging dust. It was the sort of chore the Turbines were only too happy to pass along to their unofficial passengers, tedious and detail-oriented work that still had to be done several times a week—more, in the places that any clients were likely to see. A few of the others were working in different areas of the hold, but they were a quiet group today even for the circumstances, leaving Derma free to focus on the task and think of nothing much, doing his best to ignore today’s low-key disembodied throb.
At least until a familiar blond head appeared on the overhead walk, alert eyes scanning the room and catching Derma’s gaze. Yamagi pushed off from the walk, falling slowly towards him. He was empty-handed today, no data slate or set of tools, and no cleaning supplies either. And that probably meant he was just here to talk.
Derma’s stomach clenched at the thought, but it was too late now to try and duck out of sight, so he just looked away, flipping the lid of his bucket closed so the dirty rags wouldn’t drift off during the conversation.
“…Hey,” Yamagi said as he landed. It wasn’t an I need something from you kind of statement; it was too quiet and too tentative for that. “Do you have a few minutes?”
Derma hesitated, listening to the distant sounds of the other boys making their way around the hold. Down on the floor like this, and as quiet as it was, even whispers would probably be overheard. Having to listen to whatever this was going to be was bad enough without a batch of other people listening in too. But it wasn’t like there was a time limit on the cleaning—"Do the whole hold in an hour or no protein bars for you tonight," came a booze-slurred taunt out of a shadowed memory of the Brewers, as if that kind of order was even possible—so there’d be no getting out of it on that count.
Finally, he looked around and up at the end of the catwalk, where it dead-ended into a corner of the ceiling. The inner machinery and the ventilation systems would be louder up there, loud enough to cover what he could only hope wouldn’t turn into another argument.
“Up there okay?”
Yamagi nodded and pushed off again; squashing the urge to flee now that his back was turned, Derma followed suit. Yamagi caught himself on the guardrail and flipped himself over onto the steel grating, still a little removed from the very end. Once Derma had joined him, bracing his good arm on the walls to maneuver into a sitting position, Yamagi closed the distance, tugging himself down to lean against the rail, back to the rest of the hold. For a long moment, he said nothing, staring down at his white gloves.
“I wanted to apologize,” he said at last, and Derma swallowed the first bitter taste of bile.
“…You just wanted to make me something nice,” he managed. “It’s not your fault it’s too nice for me.”
“It’s my fault because I wasn’t thinking about you,” Yamagi said, shaking his head. “It’s the most basic thing to think about, for prosthetics, and I didn’t think about it even once.”
Derma glanced over at him, brows lowering. “If you’d have done it for anyone, that just means you’re being nice,” he said, because it was true, even if Yamagi apologizing for something like that felt backward to what Tekkadan and everyone in it always said about helping family. But Yamagi just shook his head again doggedly before he went on.
“I wouldn’t have, though.” He took a deep breath, his eyes closing, then exhaled through his nose. “It’s—it’s because you were with Shino.”
Derma blinked, then hissed under his breath, gripping his shoulder as the sting of pain at the name echoed in a lancing jolt down his non-existent arm.
“It’s fine. What about Shino?” he managed when Yamagi stopped to give him a concerned look.
The other boy hesitated, then looked away again, folding his hands over his elbows.
“…I really cared about Shino.” His cheeks colored, a flush of pink visible in the brighter lights near the ceiling, leaving Derma with the acute sensation that Yamagi was saying more than what just what he was speaking. “So when he died, I decided I wanted to protect what he’d left behind. That meant everyone, but especially it meant…”
“…Me and Dante?” Derma hazarded. “But Shino liked everybody. I don’t think we—”
“He adored you,” Yamagi interrupted, then added, “Sorry. But it’s true. I never saw him as happy as when he was bragging about his squad.”
Shino had always looked happy, as far as Derma could remember. There were the odd close calls in combat, but even on the battlefield, Shino more than anyone Derma had ever met had been high energy in a way that went deeper than posturing or bravado.
“I—didn’t know.”
Yamagi nodded another confirmation. “I wanted the people he cared about most to have the best thing I could make them.” A shadow of pain hung on his face, dogging at unhappy words. “I still want that, because I know he would have wanted it. But that kind of thinking is wrong for something like this, so… I just wanted to say I’m sorry. And maybe ask what you want out of a prosthesis, when you’re ready to talk about it.”
He gave Derma a sideways glance that Derma looked away from, holding on loosely to his drifting, empty sleeve.
“I’m not—not ready to talk about it,” he mumbled. “It’s just hard to think about. I don’t really want anything, but I know need to get something.”
“You don’t have to,” Yamagi said slowly. “Plenty of people can’t afford it and have to make do anyway. It just—seems like a shame to not, when you can.”
“I’ll work better with one than without. If I’m gonna stay I need to be able to work."
Yamagi absorbed the words for a long minute, before eventually asking, “What kind of work do you want to do? If we can figure out what you’d need to be able to do that kind of work effectively, we can make a design with that in mind.”
“I don’t know.” Derma heaved a heavy sigh. “Fighting’s all I’m good for, but now…” Yamagi went to open his mouth, a protest Derma cut off with, “Good at, I mean.”
The two of them sat in silence for another little while, Yamagi frowning at his knees, Derma with his eyes turned towards the bay.
“I read…” Yamagi began, faltered, and began again. “I’m not trying to get under your skin with this, but I read that most people who lose a limb need to get back to feeling as whole as they can before they really start feeling better. It helps with the phantom pain, even. Would feeling like you could fight if you had to—help, do you think?”
“I’d definitely like it better than knowing I can’t,” Derma snorted. He hesitated, aware of the bitter bite that had been in the words. “Would—would that Alaya connector help with that?”
“When Mikazuki lost movement in the right side of his body, he always got it back when he hooked up to Barbatos. I don’t see why it would be different for you.”
“Are you sure that’s an Alaya thing and not a Gundam thing?” Derma asked.
“What, like did it only happen because of Barbatos?” Yamagi asked, sounding a little startled.
The conversation with Dante about guiding spirits came back to Derma suddenly, all mixed up with old space stories about haunted wrecks. Barbatos holding Mikazuki’s capability hostage like a temptation to keep coming back—the image of Masahiro hanging about Akihiro’s shoulders when he sat in Gusion’s cockpit with that familiar distant blankness in his eyes.
“I just mean—mobile suits are really advanced,” Derma stuttered, trying to push away superstitious memories. “Would just an arm work the same way?”
“I think so.” Yamagi tilted his head. “I talked to the old man about this already, but you know how mobile suits feel more natural to pilot than mobile workers?”
Derma could count the number of times he’d piloted a mobile worker instead of a mobile suit and not need both hands to do it, but he nodded understanding anyway. That first time in a mobile worker, on the bridge outside Edmonton, had come naturally, like Alaya hookups always did, but it had felt weird all the same, like he was trying on a different body for a day. He’d gotten out of it feeling a wobbliness on his own two feet like the balance shift between zero-g and gravity. He’d always chalked it up to him being a spacer who’d used mobile suits for most of his life, rather than an earther puttering around on three wheels.
“It’s because the Alaya-Vijnana is trying to make the machine an extension of you, and your brain’s used to you being bipedal with four limbs.” Yamagi flushed again at the last words, ducking his head. “I mean, mobile suits are more human-shaped, so the human brain interfaces with them more easily. So having a prosthetic arm hooked up should feel even more natural than that. As long as we don’t put thrusters or gun mounts or anything crazy on it.”
The last bit sounded a little like a joke, or maybe a redirect. Derma huffed a short laugh, more through his nose than anything, and summoned up a wan smile. “Right.”
“Do you—want to go ahead with that plan?” Yamagi ventured.
Anything that makes me stop waking up feeling like I’m sleeping on some stranger’s arm when there’s not even anything there anymore, Derma thought. But that was getting ahead of himself.
“But that’s gonna be the expensive one, right?” he asked, the relief at the thought of having something he could think of as his arm again swept away by a wave of fresh doubt.
“That’s the one that might take surgery,” Yamagi hedged. “I think how much that costs will depend most on if the old man can find anyone willing to do it.”
Derma sighed again, looking down. “…Are you really sure it’s okay to spend that kind of money on me?” he asked softly.
Yamagi straightened up, eyes lifting up to meet Derma’s as his face brightened. He smiled, a quick flash, there and then tamped down again with his brisk answer. “At this point, we’d get in trouble if we didn’t spend it on you. The Prime Minister was pretty clear that he wasn’t funding Tekkadan’s activities; he was making a gesture for a friend of a friend.”
Derma gave him a quizzical look that Yamagi waved aside. “Earth Branch stuff from before, when Akihiro and Mikazuki went to help out.”
Akihiro again. He’d probably want Derma to have something nice, even as he’d also understand why it felt so wrong to take it. But then, he was as staunch about Orga’s last order as anyone had been—“We’re not some Human Debris who can die anywhere now. Your job still lies ahead."
Orders are orders. I guess if getting a good prosthesis is gonna trick my brain into trying to feel like a human again, I don’t really have a choice.
He squeezed his empty sleeve again, biting the inside of his lip before dropping his head in surrender. “Okay,” he relented. “Okay.”
This time Yamagi made no attempt to hide his smile.
They made it back to Mars without much incident and began the lengthy process of moving on. They settled into a smattering of apartments owned by a Teiwaz subsidiary Nadi hadn’t even known was a Teiwaz subsidiary, innocuously ramshackle places scattered across Chryse. Left to his own devices, Nadi would have started looking for work—a job wasn’t romantic, but it was concrete, and the kids needed concrete—but at Yamagi’s insistence, he put it off a bit longer in favor of finally starting on Derma’s second prosthesis.
That meant pulling looking up old contacts and being careful about how he went about it. The old CGS guys were right out; Orga’s coup had drawn a line in the sand and Nadi’d stayed firmly planted on the kids’ side even as everyone else but Dexter was being forcibly shoved over it. There was no sign that Arianrhod was in active pursuit, nearly half a year out from that last attack, but that didn’t mean that a tip-off from the wrong person wouldn’t bring retribution to their doorstep.
Tekkadan had had suppliers of their own, though, and Admoss’s not-insubstantial connections, and the Prime Minister’s funds would buy cooperation along with parts. More important, though, as they were getting a start on the early steps, was finding a doctor who’d go along with the last one. Teiwaz had doctors, of course, but Teiwaz didn’t work with whiskers—not, at least, when you didn’t have the internal clout to ask the right people. Tekkadan didn’t have that clout anymore, not via Kudelia, and not even via Merribit, who’d quit the organization after Naze Turbine’s death (showed up at Nadi’s berth after midnight looking like a woman lost) in order to not be tapped as an information source by McMurdo Barriston going forward.
Nadi’s doctor, a man named Freysen Cline who Nadi had known for decades, didn’t work with whiskers either, but at least he was a start.
And so, once they’d gotten the fabrication process underway and started Derma wearing short caps on his residual limb to get his skin adjusting to it again, Nadi gave Cline a call to invite him out for drinks and “catching up.” The doc was thrilled to see him alive and with a girlfriend to show for all his troubles, right up until the moment Nadi started asking questions about connecting prostheses to nanomachine technology.
Two drinks and over an hour of wheedling did not change his mind.
“I’d lose my practice if it got out, Nadi. I’m sorry, but I just can’t. Not even for one of—of them.”
Merribit set a hand over Nadi’s own and apologized with a gracious smile. She bought the man a good whiskey as thanks for his time. And then she went to work.
Nadi chipped in when she nudged him but mostly kept his trap shut in favor of nursing his beer and his mixed feelings of admiration, attraction and terror.
Cline was a strong-willed man—even with all Merribit’s plying, he still didn’t bend on doing the surgery himself. But after another hour and another whiskey, he bowed his head to stare at the tabletop, frowning and scratching absently at a roughly chipped set of initials left by some previous patron.
“I can’t do it myself. But… I might know someone you could go to.”
“Oh?” Merribit asked, setting down her mimosa. “Who?”
“There’s a woman up in the Argas neighborhood. Just opened up, her sign says she does ‘consultation’ work—fewer regulations about it when it’s just advice, you know? I hear she’s in from the Dort Colonies.” The doc took another swallow of his whiskey, then plunked it back down with a hard sigh. “Look, you didn’t hear this from me,” he went on, “but I think she’s in with one of those gangs of street kids. One of my nurses lives up that way, and she says there’s always one or two of them hanging around the building now, keeping an eye out. Sometimes even going in and out.”
Nadi frowned. “Not every gang of street kids have the whisker,” he pointed out.
“These do. The kids with that implant, you know they don’t bother with trying to hide it,” Cline countered. “I don’t know what she’s got worked out with them, but I know it’s something. She gets soldier-types in, too—the clean-cut kind. I heard she hasn’t even had a break-in yet.”
“A break-in… Looking for drugs?” Merribit guessed, and the doc nodded gloomily.
“Everyone who doesn’t want to work out of the hospital gets a break-in eventually, whether or not they even keep drugs on-site. And maybe it’s just that she’s too new for it to have happened to her yet, and she’s not exactly advertising, but…”
“But?”
“But who comes all the way from Dort to do medical work out here and then doesn’t even try to put heads together with the people who’ve already been practicing here for years—for best practices for the patients, if nothing else?” He shook his head. “There’s Inner Sphere arrogance and then there’s having something to hide. Just—can’t shake the feeling it’s more the second than the first.”
Merribit and Nadi exchanged a look, Merribit arching her eyebrows. Nadi shrugged, tilting one hand out in a What’re you gonna do? kind of gesture. S’not like we don’t have our own stuff to hide. Merribit dipped her chin and turned back to the doc.
“What’s her name?” she asked. “It can’t hurt to look her up, at least.”
Cline snorted at that, draining the last of his whiskey. “Wouldn’t be so sure about that,” he grumbled. “But if you’re set on it, the name she’s giving the neighbors is Zonda Marin.”
Yukinojo’s tip took them to a woman who by Yamagi’s estimation had to be either ex-Gjallarhorn or way, way Outer Sphere. Her military posture and crisp enunciation said Gjallarhorn, but her bald-faced, blistering disdain for the body modification taboo said Outer Sphere. The local kids hanging around her office (and they definitely were local, with an unmissable street urchin blend of ready poise and casual lounging) didn’t tip the scale one way or the other, but they were clearly watching her back—one of them had pulled out a handheld radio when he thought the group had passed on by.
Whichever it was, though, the doctor—who had the darkest skin Yamagi had ever seen, darker even than Yukinojo’s, and a cascade of black braids—listened to Yamagi’s ideas with a fierce interest despite her clipped bedside manner.
"Yes, it's obviously entirely possible," she said when he explained his thoughts. "It's just not a combination any doctor with a practice would risk their reputation on." Her lips pursed in annoyance. "The people who could afford it wouldn't want it, and the ones who don't have the luxury of caring how it looks also don't have the luxury of paying for it."
“Is it really going to stand out that much?” Derma asked, looking ill-at-ease in a second-hand white dress shirt Atra had scrounged up for him for the excursion, its empty sleeve pinned up neatly at his shoulder. Standing behind him, Dante gave his good shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
“That depends more on how the prosthesis looks and how much clothing you wear over it than anything I do. Part of body modifications being taboo means most people won’t even look at it too closely unless you force them to. Just keeping your implant covered will take you most of the way there.”
“So this is something you can do yourself, then?” Yamagi seized on what he felt was an important part of the doctor’s answer. “You wouldn’t have to refer us somewhere else?”
“No, I’m quite capable of handling it myself,” she replied, quick and flat. “Particularly if you’re going to be providing all the components. Do you have a timetable for that?”
Yamagi cast a sidelong look at Yukinojo, who’d been uncharacteristically silent through the visit, but the old man didn’t answer.
“A few weeks, we think,” he said, looking back at the doctor. “But the computer chips can be ready faster if you need to check them?”
“I’ll get you a messaging ID you can send the code to and give you some specifications on materials. Just keep in touch with that and we shouldn’t need more than a last-minute check. But—” she punctuated the sentence by turning to look at Derma “—I'm not formally agreeing to anything before I see what's already been done. We also need to talk about your medical history and the risks involved with spinal surgery.” She looked at the other three over the rims of her glasses. “We need some room. One of you can stay, but the other two should go back out to the waiting room.”
“I’ll stay,” Dante piped up and Yamagi nodded. He moved to leave, then looked back when Yukinojo didn’t immediately follow.
“Just—yell if you need us,” the old man said, giving the other two a hard look before he allowed Yamagi to tug him out the door. Doctor Marin watched them leave, her face impassive.
“Stairwell?” Yamagi whispered in the hallway outside the tiny consultation office. On the right-hand side was the door back to the waiting area; on the left, another door, which the wall-mounted shelf full of boxes of gloves and facemasks suggested lead to an examination room.
Yukinojo nodded and headed off through the right-hand door. Yamagi followed in silence, mindful of the strangers sitting in the waiting area, tending to runny-nosed children or listening to the news coming in over the LCS line of a data slate one of the visitors had brought. A few of them shot him and Yukinojo watchful or disinterested glances as the two of them moved to the exit, but no one interfered.
“What’s wrong?” Yamagi asked once they made it out to the cramped, steep staircase that lead down to the street and the entrance to the repair shop beneath the doctor’s office.
“She’s…” Yukinojo trailed off and scratched his head, giving the door a furtive look.
“Should we get Dante and Derma and leave?” Yamagi pressed. “She wasn’t very nice, but she seemed like she knew what she was talking about.”
“I don’t doubt it,” the old man groused. “That’s because she’s Gjallarhorn. Or—was, probably.”
“But that stuff she said about the taboo… I was thinking she had to be from the Outer Sphere to be saying that so openly.”
“Being used to power lets you speak openly, too,” Yukinojo said, low-voiced. “And it’s not like Gjallarhorn doesn’t buck their own rules about that stuff—Fareed had some kind of surgery done, too, remember?”
“But he wanted to overthrow Gjallarhorn—” Yamagi began, then broke off when the old man shook his head sharply.
“It’s not actually about what she says or thinks,” he said. “It’s the boots.”
“The—boots?” Yamagi blinked. The only thing he’d really noted about the doctor’s clothes had been her white lab coat and her glasses—real metal frames, not like the makeshift leather straps Dexter wore.
“Black heels, white toes—that’s basic issue Gjallarhorn uniform. And she wasn’t the only in there wearing them—one of the guys on the back wall listening to the news was, too. And the quality’s too nice to be second-hand; they’ve still got some shine on ‘em.”
“Do you think they’re some kind of—of plant?” Yamagi looked back at the entrance, heart rising in his throat.
“Nah. They’d be smart enough to change shoes if this was some kind of deep cover thing.” Yukinojo drummed his fingers on his arm. “But if they’re just—laying low, or got discharged or something, the boots’d still be nicer than anything they could get around here on the cheap.”
“But if they’re Gjallarhorn, then what are they doing with street kids watching out for them?”
“Gjallarhorn’s been doing a lot of house-cleaning, is my guess. Kids aren’t gonna care who they are as long as they get a good deal out of it.” Yukinojo scratched his chin, gaze resting on the hours posted on the door at the top of the stairs. Grudgingly, he added, “And a doctor in the neighborhood willing to do implant work is a real good deal. There’s hardly anybody you can go to when those things go bad, y’know.”
Yamagi nodded solemnly. CGS had always brought in lots more prospects for Third Division than wound up staying, either because they left when they found out an implant was required or because they got the implant and then it didn’t take. He’d once met the eyes of some kid he hadn’t seen before or since, lying limp and boneless in the bed of the truck that would take all the rejects and failures back to their neighborhoods. The boy’s eyes had been wide open in his otherwise slack face, his pupils shrunk so small Yamagi couldn’t distinguish them in the near-black of his irises. He wouldn’t have even known if the boy was alive or not, save for the way his head craned to follow Yamagi as the truck pulled out towards the gates.
He still sometimes saw those eyes superimposed over other faces when he had nightmares about people dying. He kept a tiny fragment of text saved on his data slate describing the shape and color of Shino’s eyes, just to make sure he never lost their golden-brown warmth to that memory-devouring black.
“Do you think—we should ask about it?” he asked, pushing his morbid thoughts away.
“Only if she starts asking us about how we came by the money for this. Sometimes secrets on both sides are good for the working relationship.”
Yamagi tilted his head, giving the old man a pained look through his bangs. “Do you really mean that?”
“I’m sure telling myself I do right now.” Yukinojo rolled his eyes demonstratively and straightened up off the wall. “C’mon; let’s get back in there.”
Yamagi, Yukinojo, and whatever old contacts Yukinojo had dug up finished the new prosthesis right on schedule. They hardly let Derma wear it at all—it wasn’t built to actually be able to move much without the Alaya link, so it was even more of a dead weight than the last one had been. It was, Merribit said, more to get the skin of his stump (which everyone, now including Doctor Marin, insisted on referring to as his residual limb; getting his own thoughts there was a work in progress) adjusting again than anything else.
The prosthesis was working, though. A few days after they got it in and did the initial fitting, Dante dragged Derma down to the tool shed (co-opted by Yukinojo under the pretense of doing repair work for their landlady) to show off the arm hooked up to his data slate, the way it moved when he tapped in commands, elbow bending and unbending, thumb swiveling through three positions, the way the finger-pieces could close and open.
It definitely wasn’t as sleek as the design Yamagi had proposed back on Earth, but Derma found that more reassuring than disappointing. The digits, a little more squared-off than normal fingers, but still shaped to resemble them, were built around a single joint apiece, simple hinge joints for the two (just two, not the original tri-jointed four) finger-pieces, and a more mobile saddle joint in the thumb-piece. The elbow mechanism wasn’t contained in a jointed shell, just a rubbery black material to cushion and insulate its inner workings. That meant the rest of the prosthesis fell in two main sections. The part above the elbow was pretty plain, just a grey metal cylinder welded together lengthwise except for the socket where it attached to his—residual limb. Below the elbow, it looked a little nicer, sculpted to be more, well, arm-shaped, with graceful, clean construction that curved out from the elbow and swept back in towards the wrist.
The pretty swoop down the shell towards the hand-piece contrasted with the plain, functional black of the elbow-casing. Yamagi had apologized for the mismatch when they first rigged it up to him, but Derma had just shaken his head.
“It’s nice,” he’d said, rolling his shoulder experimentally. “But not too nice.” And he’d given Yamagi a rueful smile, which Yamagi had returned with a soft sigh and a crooked smile of his own.
They made the return appointment with Doctor Marin for a week after.
Actual medical procedures were, it turned out, scheduled after-hours or on days when the doctor’s office was “closed.” Or maybe that was just for the taboo stuff; Yukinojo had been stubbornly emphatic that they avoid prying about her motivations and anything else that might get them into trouble. Derma didn’t care much one way or the other; it wasn’t like the woman was much for small-talk. Anyway, he hadn’t eaten or drank anything since dinner last night and the anticipation fluttering in his empty stomach kept him way too distracted to even think about things like that.
(He’d had an empty stomach, too, when Kudal Kudan had pinned him down with an effortless strength and laughed as the cackling nutjob the Brewers called an onboard medic shot nanomachines into his spine, but he was pretty sure that was just a coincidence. He had also been telling himself all week that this time was going to be nothing like that time.)
Even despite the distraction, though, the empty office did make the doctor’s bodyguard more obvious.
The man looked kind of fresh-faced to be Gjallarhorn, sandy-haired and freckly, but then again, a bunch of Fareed’s allies had looked that way too, and Yukinojo had been right about the boots—Mars’ reddish dust scuffed the white toes, but not enough to obscure them completely. Likewise, his coat jacket did not quite conceal the gunmetal gleam of his back-holstered pistol. But he also didn’t pay them much mind once they entered, just gave them a once-over, a nod of greeting and a flashed smile, and then went back to staring out the window.
Derma worked on ignoring the man and his own brimming anxiety, focusing instead on Yamagi and Dante, who were running last minute checks on the microchip’s programming. The chip itself was the size of a pinhead and tucked with neurotic care into a plastic case in one of Yamagi’s belt pouches. Doctor Marin had taken both the prosthesis and Yukinojo to the back; she was disinfecting the socket, and he was, as he’d borrowed the Turbines’ words to say, “protecting their investment.”
“Are we sure we’re ready to do this today?” Yamagi fretted, staring intently at the scrolling lines of gibberish on his data slate. His fingers strayed to the pouch and pressed over the outline of the tiny box inside. “Once we lock the channels, there’s no going in to tweak the code.”
“We’re fine,” Dante declared with stout confidence. “I’ve hand-tested it, you’ve hand-tested it, we’ve run it through simulations a thousand times, and the doc’s gonna look at the results one last time too just to be safe.” He paused, then grinned with a lick of mischief. “And if we somehow missed something, we’ll just throw a program into the arm to intercept and reconfigure the commands.”
“Solve it with hacking?” Yamagi asked, sighing, then threw a glance at the man at the window.
“I like solving problems with hacking,” Dante laughed, grinning wider at the muffled snort from the bodyguard.
With that, the door opened and Yukinojo stepped out, the body of the prosthesis tucked under one arm as he balled up a face-mask and scowled down at a pair of pale green, enormous paper socks tied on around his own prostheses. Dante stared at them, then broke down into snickering, drawing a glare his way.
“Haha,” the old man grumbled. “Yamagi, she says she’s ready to give the code a last look. You and Derma get back there.”
Light-headed, Derma drew himself to his feet. "This is it?" he tried to ask, but his numb lips refused to cooperate, letting Yamagi beat him to the question.
“So this is it. You think everything’s okay?” The other boy hugged his data slate protectively close.
“Yeah.” Derma expected Yukinojo to hesitate—he was usually so wary—but he just strode over to take Yamagi’s vacated chair and start unfastening the things on his feet. “I think we’re good to go.” He shot Derma a smile, reaching up to give him a gentle smack on his good shoulder. “You’ll be out before you know it.”
“You’ll do great in there!” Dante stood up hurriedly as well, jerking Derma back into a quick, rough hug. Derma rolled his eyes and slapped at Dante’s arm.
“All I’m gonna do in there is pass out. It’s gonna be lame and I just wanna get it over with, so let go already.” Kinda shitty bravado, but it’d have to do.
“Yeah, yeah.” Dante first tightened then released the embrace, pushing him forward.
He and Yamagi headed for the back, leaving the other two to banter and bicker over Dante’s insolent, “Cute booties, old man.” Yamagi closed the door on Yukinojo’s growled response and the two of them looked over at the doctor.
She stood at the door at the back of the hall, busily pinning up her braids in a massive bun at the back of her head. When she finished, she waved them over and held a hand out for the data slate. Mute, Yamagi handed it over. After a moment, he frowned to himself and stepped around to look at it alongside her. Derma fidgeted. With nothing to do but wait, anxiety was catching up to him again.
I made it through the Alaya-Vijnana surgery the first time, and the doctor said this procedure isn’t anywhere near as dangerous, but there’s always a chance… If I don’t wake up, if something goes wrong, if—if I end up even worse…
Pain from his missing arm twanged again. It had been a persistent ache through most of the day—it was always bad when he was stressing about the prosthesis, like some backwards part of his brain was still worried about taboo breaking or some other stupid thing. Derma closed his eyes.
Close and release, he thought, trying to visualize himself folding in and then stretching out the lost limb. It was one of several exercises Yukinojo had tried to teach him that he usually ignored in favor of focusing on work. Close and release.
“It all looks in order to me,” came Doctor Marin’s voice after a while. Derma opened his eyes again in time to see her lowering the data slate. “Go ahead and cut the outside channel.” She held onto the slate as Yamagi nodded and reached over, fingers tapping over the screen.
“Okay,” he said, voice low, and pulled the microchip out of his belt pouch, holding it up to her. At his other side, his free hand had curled into a fist. “It’s ready to go.”
“Then you know where the waiting room is.” The doctor took the little box and put the slate back in its place, ignoring or not noticing the twitch of aggravation in Yamagi’s expression. “Derma? It’s time.”
Derma gave her an uneven nod and, as she turned towards the back door, moved to follow her. He fell short as Yamagi caught his wrist.
“Hey,” Yamagi whispered, eyes cast aside. His grip was rigid, and for all that the amputation had been nearly eight months ago, Derma still felt himself trying to reach over with his left arm to cover Yamagi’s hand with his own. When that failed, he fell still, clumsy and inelegant with dealing with whatever emotions the other boy was wrestling with.
“The code’s perfect,” Yamagi told him (or told someone, anyway). “It’s going to work great.” After another awkward second, he leaned in, giving Derma a quick, tight hug. “Good luck.”
Derma nodded, reaching to pat him on the back, but Yamagi pulled away before he could make it, turning on his heel and striding out the door at the other end of the hall.
“…Shall we?” Doctor Marin said after what was as close to a tactful few seconds as Derma had yet heard her manage.
He nodded, swallowed, and turned towards the other door. She opened it for him and ushered him into a room hardly bigger than a closet, but lit brightly as a business office. A locker and short bench stood on the left side of the space, a handwashing station on the right. Yet another door waited in front of them, this one with strips of plastic affixed at the top and bottom to block airflow.
“There’s a medical gown in the locker. You can leave your things on the bench.” The doctor gestured to the stuff on the left then looked down at him. “Do you need any help changing?” When Derma shook his head, she nodded and stepped back into the hall. “Then just knock when you’re finished.”
Derma gave himself time to take one deep breath after she closed the door, then pushed into motion, shucking his jacket and stripping out of his tank top. Unlacing and toeing off his boots came next, followed by his socks, and, after a bit more wiggling, his pants and underwear. He left the lot of it in a pile on the floor for time being, moving to the locker and opening it to find several of the promised hospital gowns, all the same pale green as Yukinojo’s booties.
He pulled one down and gave it a quick examination. He’d never actually worn one of these before; he’d been unconscious for the amputation and they’d had to dig him out of his Rodi for that anyway. He still didn’t quite know if that operation had been to take the arm itself off or just neaten up the job Arianrhod had already done of it.
Arianrhod. Gjallarhorn. And here he was, about to be alone and unconscious with an ex-Gjallarhorn doctor and no one else even there to see what she was going to do to him. Why isn’t she with them anymore? Did she get hit by the Mars Branch downsizing? Was she one of Fareed’s? Didn’t they court-martial a bunch of people over that thing in Edmonton?
The cool air raised goosebumps along his bare skin and Derma shook his head violently, forcing the whirling thoughts away. There’s no more time for that, he told himself. Yamagi and the old man decided this is safe enough. Yukinojo even came back here himself to check things out and he said it was gonna be fine. Get it together.
He turned back to the bench and propped one foot up on it, laying the gown over his knee and working his hand up inside the fabric. Once he had the whole thing bunched up over his arm, he gathered a handful of the papery cloth and pulled it on over his head, twisting his shoulders and adjusting the gown until it felt more-or-less in place. Then he gathered up his own clothes and moved them to the bench, tucking his boots underneath it.
Doctor Marin stepped back in at the sound of his knock and gave him a quick once-over. Once she nodded approval, she walked them over to the other door, opening it up to reveal the operating room. It looked a little over twice the size of the last room (so maybe three closets? his thoughts filled in), polished off-white tiles on the floor and a lone low table waiting at the center of the room with a pushcart and a large operating light parked on either side of it. A curtain hung half-open around the table and cart, suspended from a curved rail bolted into the ceiling. At the far back, two more wheeled racks with hanging curtains were arranged in front of something oblong—another table?
“Have a seat on the table there.” She pointed to the one in the middle of the room. “I’ll be in in just a minute.”
Derma nodded and walked over, feeling tiny and exposed in what he knew, intellectually, wasn’t really a very big room at all. He cheated, a little—swerved around the back of the table to get close enough to see that it was a medical bath parked behind the curtain racks.
I’ll have to remember that, he told himself, the thought faint against a rising hum of white noise in the rest of his brain. I bet they’re too expensive for whatever her cover story is.
Curiosity satisfied, he boosted himself up onto the table, the thin paper covering it crinkling under his weight. Once there, he could see the box of gloves and the shoulder socket of his prosthesis sitting on the cart. He shut his eyes again and focused on his breathing. In and out, he thought. Close and release.
Through the door, he vaguely made out the sound of cloth rustling, then running water. In and out. Close and release. The door opened again—it couldn’t really have been a full minute, could it?— and the doctor stepped in, now wrapped up in a surgical apron, her hair and shoes covered. A mask hung around her neck, shifting slightly in place as she walked over and, a little fussily, adjusted the angle of the cart.
“This should be fairly quick,” she told him. “Do you have any questions before we start?”
“Why are you doing this?” The question blurted out of him, out of nowhere, out of the static of anxiety in the back of his mind—wherever it came from, it was out before he could stop it, and Derma hunched his shoulders together as the woman blinked at him, nonplussed. “I mean, doesn’t it bother you? The implant, the prosthesis, the—the taboo?”
“Have you been worrying about that the whole time?” Doctor Marin raised her eyebrows, but the gathered downturn of her lips rendered the expression sharp rather than surprised. “I can’t go into the details, but the short answer is that my professional opinion is that the taboo is a load of asinine dreck.” When he stared at her, she just stared back, folding her hands together on the table in front of her.
“Let me elaborate, then. I feel the taboo is intended to keep the development of cybernetic enhancement buried in Gjallarhorn science labs and out of the hands of the general public. Whatever justification they may have for that, it has the collateral effect of stymying any possible development in prosthetic and assistive devices that would help you and thousands of people just like you over the entire system. It is draconian, domineering, and cruel, and until they outlaw it outright, I will continue to take work like this.” She paused, cleared her throat, and reached up to adjust her glasses. “Any other questions?”
“Uh…” Derma tried to mind his mental footing.
“I’m sorry if that was a bit much,” she said with a short sigh. “It’s something I feel strongly about. Please. Do you have any other concerns at all?”
No kidding that you feel strongly about it, geez. Derma gathered his thoughts and ventured, “You said there was a chance I wouldn’t wake up…”
“It’s a very, very low possibility, but it is always a possibility to be aware of,” she answered. “But in the event that it does happen, there are still any number of avenues to take in waking you up again. The odds of you not coming out of this procedure better than you went in are astronomically low, believe me.”
He nodded slowly. “And the odds of—paralysis…?” He winced a bit even saying the word.
“Marginally higher,” she granted, “but this is not even close to the riskiest surgery involving an Alaya-Vijnana port I’ve ever undertaken.”
“What was the riskiest?”
“Doctor-patient privilege,” came the brisk reply. “But he was younger than you and he’s still walking today, if that helps.”
Derma nodded again. And, well, if he was going through the list of worries…
“If something goes wrong later on… Can I come back to you about it?”
“If something goes wrong later on, I’d practically pay you to come back to me about it.” She tilted her head to one side, dark eyes serious behind her glasses. “I hope I’ve made it clear that is a field of particular interest to me.”
That, finally, dislodged a laugh from Derma’s knotted stomach. He tried to squash it back down when she raised an eyebrow at him but felt the smile still tugging traitorously around his lips. “I—Yes, ma’am, you made it pretty clear.”
“Mm.” She half-turned away, pulling out a pair of gloves and starting to work them onto her hands with efficient care. “Was there anything else?”
“No, ma’am.” He sighed, trying to breathe his tension in, out and away. “I think that’s everything.”
“Good. Then lay down on your stomach for me, arm at your side, face turned to the right.”
He obeyed, staring at the empty wall and listening to her working at the cart, a drawer opening and closing, followed by the thin metallic clank of a tray being set down. A plink of glass followed, the sound of a nail flicked against a syringe. Then her hand dropped down to his arm, her fingers sure and quick as she pressed against his skin for a vein.
“You’ll feel a prick,” she said above him, just before the tiny shock of pain. “And I’ll count down from ten. Ten, nine, ei—”
And the world slid away into dark.
Not quite two hours after they went in, the doctor emerged with Derma in tow, his jacket draped over her arm. The rest of his clothes were in place if a bit skewed, the socket end of the prosthesis visible past the end of his sleeve, but his brain was obviously out somewhere past Neptune. She guided him into a soft collision with Yukinojo, where he slumped to a rest and, after a few seconds to process, looked up at the old man in obvious confusion. Dante found himself torn between concern and a pressing desire to take pictures.
They kept the rest brief—the doctor helped Yamagi fit the prosthesis on and ran Derma through a handful of very preliminary tests. When she was finished, she moved to take it off again, then blinked as he moved it away with a loose-limbed, watery insistence.
“Arm’s back,” he slurred. “Wan’ keep it on.”
Dante grinned at her sigh, exactly the same kind of sigh Yukinojo or Merribit or even Yamagi were always making about boys being stubborn. “All right. It seems to be moving well enough.”
After a last bit of negotiation, she saw them out the door with a brief, authoritative, “Take him home and let him sleep the drugs off. Make sure he doesn’t spend all night with the prosthesis on and call me in the morning.”
The ride back to the apartment was quiet, Yukinojo at the wheel of the car and Yamagi in the front seat looking through the aftercare instructions the doc had left in his keeping. In the back, Dante sat with his shoulder wedged up against the window, his other arm slung comfortably around Derma. The kid had been too woozy to complain when Dante had hauled him up into his lap, so now lay shored up against his chest, breathing evenly.
“…Dante?” Derma stirred, just enough to look down at the prosthetic arm, its casing gray and sleek, that lay unmoving down the line of his side, balanced on his hip.
“Yeah?”
“D’you think it’s—okay to enjoy this?” As Dante watched, the prosthesis’s fingers moved, one joint at a time, like testing the flaps on mobile suit’s vernier engines. Derma stared at the process, his eyes foggy.
“Duh,” Dante answered. He ducked his head to nose at Derma’s hair. “I think it’s gonna work out fine. Get some rest, kiddo.”
The new arm folded in at the elbow with a whispering hum of cable, barely audible over the road noise. In the rearview mirror, and from over the back of the seats, Dante could feel two other gazes as Derma’s metal hand, warmed from the late-day sun, closed around his own. The motion was smooth; the grip easy and sure. That’s an Alaya-Vijnana link, all right, Dante thought, pleased.
“Mm,” Derma hummed, and his eyes drooped closed. “Okay.”
Dante shot a grin towards Yamagi and Yukinojo, shifted into a more comfortable position, and leaned back to enjoy the ride home.