Mal was in the middle of picturing what her sister’s life had been like when the doors opened—if she’d been sent off to a private school or provided the best private tutors, if she’d found anyone she loved, or if she’d been trained and hardened for a corporate life and had all empathy excised like a disease and discarded. If she was still the same sweet girl with a crooked smile Mal cherished in memories. The doc was asleep at his desk again.
“You silly old man,” Mal whispered. She shuffled up beside him, grabbed a slip of paper from one of the nearby stacks, and used it to tickle his nose. It was immature, but she didn’t care. It took a few tries before he jolted awake, and Mal would have cackled if her ribs were whole.
“You’re back late, you little shit,” he said. He sat up and rubbed the sleep from the corners of his eyes. “Twenty years ago, I would have shot someone waking me up that way.”
“I need your help, Doc,” Mal said. She leaned on the desk, each breath like sucking air through a thick sheet of bubble wrap. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she was slowly turning blue.
“What the hell happened?” he asked. His eyes shot open, wide awake, and took in her pained expression. When she pulled her hand from her pocket, he grimaced.
“Got shot,” she said. She unwrapped the soaked gauze slowly to reveal the hole, raw and inflamed and still oozing. She couldn’t feel the fingers anymore, and she knew that was a bad sign. “Also broke a couple ribs. Hard to breathe.”
“I can see that, you idiot. I meant how,” he said. He stood and beckoned her to the surgery table and turned on the overhead machine when she laid down.
“ZenTech team showed up. Took care of them, though,” she said. She didn’t tell him about Bagley or Banks and the ill-advised crusade. If she was able to avoid some of the coming lecture, it was fine to leave him in the dark. He’d understand. Probably.
“You took on an entire retrieval team and survived?” he asked. The machine swung into place above her, the hydraulics purring smooth like a kitten; the Doc had gotten to the needed maintenance, then. That was reassuring. “You were supposed to be long gone before they arrived. I told them to send a team along with you, but they didn’t listen. Bunch of dipshits trying to run this place an awful lot like the corporations they claim to despise. Acceptable losses. What horseshit.” He spat on the floor, knowing he’d have to clean it later.
“It’s alright, Doc. I enjoyed it,” Mal said. She wheezed out a small laugh, and regretted it. Her face paled and she felt like throwing up.
“Of course you did,” he said. He patted her on the head as the machine started to work. It scanned her chest first, feeding the x-ray images directly into his network. The expected lecture never came. “Crazy girl, you’ve been running around with a rib shoved in your lung. It’s impressive you walked in here at all, let alone that you’re still pulling pranks.”
“Is it bad?” Mal asked. She’d closed her eyes and tried to think of other things as a distraction—Nadia’s soft embrace, the lead on her sister, how much she loved her new pistol, but nothing worked.
“Nah. Not really. It’s an easy fix, but you’re gonna feel like you were run over by an industrial steamroller for a few days,” he said. He flipped a toggle with his network and the machine jerked over to her hand. When it fed those images to him, the Doc frowned. “That, however, is gonna be a problem.”
“What’s wrong?” Mal asked. She cracked her organic eye and looked up at his expression. She’d only seen that look when members came in with the kind of wounds that required a complete overhaul and implant replacement. Her heart sank a little, but it had still been worth it.
“You’ve got three options,” he said. He shared a couple pages with her on the network she didn’t bother to understand. They were full of technical diagrams and illustrations. “Option one, we try to heal it up, but the damage is severe and you’ve left it too long and picked up an infection. Chances are, if you don’t lose the hand outright, it’ll never regain full motion or feeling. The bones and tendons will ache something fierce for the rest of your life. I don’t recommend it.”
“That doesn’t sound too good,” she said. If she was ever going to be one of the mercs that was lauded as a folk hero by the masses, all those like her that yearned for a champion to lead them to a better life, then she needed two hands. “But I don’t really have the credits for an implant.”
“I can pull some shenanigans for the payment of the cleaning job. Call it hazard pay, or whatever the fuck,” he said. He flipped to the second page. “Option two, we replace it with something new below the wrist. It still runs the risk of the infection spreading and your body rejecting the metal in the crossfire.”
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“Third option?” she asked.
“We replace the entire arm.” It was the nuclear solution, one that required extensive support on her collarbone and shoulder blade so it wouldn’t stress her frame with added weight. “I have something nice in stock, and it’ll take about as long to heal as your ribs and lung. It’s what I’d go with, if I was in as sorry a state as you are.”
“Whatever you think is best, Doc. I trust you,” Mal said. She closed her eyes again.
“Let’s take care of the ribs first,” he said. He headed over to a cabinet to retrieve a vial of painkillers and equipment. When he came back, he inserted an IV in her good arm and injected muscle relaxers and a nice bit of morphine. They went to work immediately, and he chuckled as Malory groaned. The Doc slotted various things into the overhead machine and directed it to her ribcage. “I’m gonna need you to undress if you don’t want it tearing through.”
“Sure,” she said. She shrugged out of her jacket and lifted the shirt to reveal a fat purple bruise. It radiated from raised welts where Banks’ knuckles had landed.
“Try not to flinch,” he said. The machine inched closer and stabbed her with a dozen needles to apply local anesthesia. When she was numb, it cut into her soft skin and spread it wide enough for little metal clamps to reach inside. A suction tube guzzled away the blood as it dug in deep. The Doc guided it remotely to snag the rib from her lung and shimmy them all back in place. Once it was done, the machine assistant inserted a tube to drain and inflate the lung.
“Thanks,” Mal said. The morphine made her loopy, and she could see the ghost at a distance mesmerized by the sight of fluids it hadn’t possessed in decades.
“Now that they’re back where they belong, they should heal on their own. Tube stays for a few days until the lung is good. Try not to knock it when you’re moving about,” he said. He moved the arm out of the way and inspected the site.
“Take the whole arm,” Mal said. She lifted the mangled hand and waved it at him. It left after-images as it went, and she giggled a bit. She was surprised to find it didn’t hurt.
“Alright,” he said. He headed over to the expanse of implants on the shelves and rooted around until he found what he was looking for. He walked back holding a container with a product image that was sleek and black—elegant lines and curves and servos. It evoked flowing ink on a page. “I’ll have to put you all the way out. You want some synth-skin over it? Supposed to help trick your brain into believing it’s the real deal.”
“Nah,” she said. She’d always been partial to the raw look, and the implant was beautiful all on its own. “I could use the rest, anyway. Fix me up, Doc, and I’ll see you on the other side.”
“Sure thing,” he said. He grabbed a syringe and fed various compounds into the IV. She was out in seconds, and he got to work carving.
While the Doc was removing her flesh to make her something more than human, bolting steel to bone with thick screws and threading delicate nerves and abused muscles into countless wires, tubes, and interfaces, Malory dreamed of a reunion with her sister—they were at Luna Paradise theme park, lost in the House of Mirrors. Maya clasped her hand tight, as if letting go could catapult them back into the void, and she led the way. They wound up stuck at dead ends where they were forced to shuffle past so close together to go in another direction. Malory relished each time she sensed her sister’s warmth, and they laughed at their reflections. The ones that made them taller, shorter, wider, bulged on top and the sides; the ones that made them shorter, shrunk their heads, or just their torsos. They spent hours making funny faces, sticking out their tongues and scrunching eyebrows, and playacted scenes from Maya’s favorite horror films until the dream faded. When Malory woke, she was in her room, and she was crying. When she went to wipe the tears, she smacked herself in the face with a new metal hand, and reality came flooding back. She flexed each finger, marveled at the movement of joints and how she could feel it all. The arm was new, and it was hers.
In the month of downtime, Malory never left her room. When she wasn’t twisting and flexing the metal limb, endlessly impressed that the hand could rotate a full three hundred and sixty degrees at the wrist, she was obsessed with the station footage collected from the hack on the CCTV camera. It ruled her life, and there were entire days where she didn’t eat. The Doc had to force her. Every person there that day was sorted, catalogued, and stalked, including the workers. She followed the routes they took through the station, where they came from, noted if they stopped at a vending machine or for a piss—she watched it all once, twice, again and again and again until she found it. Near the exit, a blur where there should have been a man, a shadow on the wall, and three pedestrians giving it the unconscious space of a gulf in social class. That blur was the man she’d seen, the man that took away her sister. Once she had a sighting, she backtracked every instance meticulously until it disappeared into one of the business suites for a meeting that hadn’t been recorded. When she packaged up the footage and gave it to the Doc, he said it was promising. That even secret meetings left a trail on the net a skilled hacker could follow to a new lead.
When the recovery period ended and she wasn’t at risk of reaggravating her ribs, Malory practically ran out of the lab. She had a plan, one that gnawed at the back of her mind for the entire month, the ghost or the implant poking and prodding at the mess of her emotions with a cavernous want, a yearning to incite violence on the deserving, and Malory was going to follow through. ZenTech deserved it, but there was something else that needed doing first—two friends that deserved a proper send off. She rode the elevator up, jumping in place, her pistol strapped firmly in its holster. She practiced aiming with the new arm, and found it effortless. When the doors opened at the lobby, there was a tall man waiting to board, and she froze mid-draw. A dark pinstriped suit, worn with authority, hair slicked back smooth as if a single loose strand was pedestrian and so very revolting. The man lifted an exquisite mechanical hand in a wave.
“Good evening,” the Stranger said. His voice was melodic, dangerous, the mocking canary in a coal mine. He smiled, a facade to disguise the hungry beast of prey. His pupils spun like clockwork gears, and they recognized her at the same time Mal recognized him.
