Coil

by Ren Warom

  Swift as a rising tide, the drone of bees fills his head, morphing to become the shatter of broken glass … a sharp searing in the skull … distant laughter rising like wind … Bone jackknifes. Glass, pain, laughter, boom loud as thunder, smashing against the insides of his skin. He gasps for air, clawing at a sudden constriction on his chest, and he realises he can’t see. No light strobing, no flop of skin, just endless pitch, cold as the depths of the ocean. He tries to tell himself this is not real, it’s not real. It’s impulses, ghosts in the wires, misfiring signals, nothing but bad dreams, trauma, the aftermath of shock. But they inhabit him like his breath. Like gold fingertips in skin, they bury deep until there is nothing but glass, cold, dark, pain. Terror bubbles up, acid sour, carrying with it a scream from the pit of his belly, unstoppable.

  The splintering pain in his throat snaps the grip of the nightmare for a second, and realising he has a way to fight, he screams again and again, until darkness leaches from his vision. But seeing is worse than blindness. The sputtering bulb, the ragged hole in the roof, the empty sack of skin laid on the round rug amongst those shapes like leaves, these are his reality and they are a nightmare all of their own. He struggles for air, his throat filled with shards of pain hard as glass. Lever’s blood drips from the broken ceiling in slow motion, lights travelling the surface of each droplet. As they hit the carpet, the floor, they spread to form small, perfect circles, like his blood on grey concrete, and in the back vaults of his mind, searing fierce as a brand to flesh, blood becomes … bright red circles … red in the white …

  He heaves, helpless, choking on a throat full of vomit. Barely manages to lift his head before every last drop of alcohol in his system hits the carpet in one heaving wave. His ribs creak under the pressure of the deluge and he groans, the sound bubbling as vomit pours from his mouth and nose. Hot and cloying, it soaks the carpet, splashing his hands, knees, and arms. He’s shaking violently now, a compulsive, full-body shudder worse than tremens. Ingrained knowledge informs him calmly that he’s in deep shock, therefore in big trouble. But he can’t move, stuck on his knees in a rank pool of vomit, holding onto consciousness by sheer force of will. If he passes out, he won’t wake up.

  As he kneels, fighting the urge to give in and sleep, the first amber fingers of dawn stretch across the window, edging delicate light into the room. The incongruity of it hits hard, driving him out of his stupor, his shock, and into coherence.

  “Daylight?” His voice is a broken husk, crackling with pain. “How?”

  He met Lever no later than midnight, and they spent all of two hours together, so where’s the night gone? Stolen. The loss of time feels like an act of violation. Kneeling there, naked, makes it worse. Filled with an unbearable need to cover up, he stirs out of the pool of vomit. His whole body below the waist is smeared with congealed blood, hideously uncomfortable, and those two handprints stand out in stark relief on the ghastly, half-torn canvas of his chest, smeared a little by his frantic clawing. He uses his shirt to wipe off the worst, and then, hands shaking, he scoops his trousers from the floor and pulls them on unsteadily, sighing with relief. With tentative fingers, he touches the deep grooves Lever left in his chest.

  “I’m a fucking mess.”

  He sways and coughs, unable to breathe for a moment. He’s a tripwire, seconds from losing it completely again, so he does the only thing he can to steal distance from unbearable proximity and forces himself to dispassion, to see the scene from the perspective of a Mort. Taking a breath he feels in every inch of his scream-burnt throat, he crosses to the skin, nudging it with his toe because looking at it says nothing about the realness of the thing. To his relief and horror, he feels the weight of it shift against his foot. He steps away, circling it, his limbs slowly gaining strength. The overwhelming shock response reduces to teeth chattering shivers as his mind works the angles, coming to the only logical conclusion.

  “Transmog.” He whispers it to himself, as though saying it aloud will conjure demons.

  It’s the forbidden zone of alchemic meddling, painted monstrous by decades of Notary propaganda based on trials in the heady, early days of deep genetic experimentation. Transmogrifications gone hideously awry, the results inhuman and insane. Bone’s no fan of the Notary, but he’s read the papers backing their campaign written by the late Walken Grey, the century’s most eminent geneticist, when he was a mere graduate, no more than nineteen. Lever’s nothing like the Transmog case studies Grey recorded. She maintained her shape, spoke and acted with coherence, shed her skin and lived—fucking flew. It wouldn’t be Grey’s mistake, despite his youth when he wrote the papers. His legacy speaks for itself.

  So, what exactly is going on? If transmog is illegal, its results so devastating, how was she able to get it? Was she the first successful patient? Somehow he doubts it. Where there’s one successful mod, there’s always more. So, are the Notary lying, or is this a Zone secret?

  “What the hell is Spaz up to?” he wonders because, if it’s Zone-based, Spaz knows about it.

  A rush of needle-sharp adrenalin pulses through him, the excitement as impossible to ignore as the heavy ache of fear in his gut. He has to know. He has to find out, find her. She knew his name, made a definite play for him, and brought him here. He thinks she wanted him to see this; why else talk about skin the way she did? But why him? Why his eyes? It’s like Rope, someone or thing reaching out to him for an unknown agenda. It should sicken him, perhaps, what with transmog being what it is, but instead he’s excited. This is important. Means something to him personally. Here’s evidence that nothing is immutable or set in stone; that even the skin you’re trapped in need not define you. Reeling, he goes through her skirt pockets, struggling with the fabric and hunting for some clue that might lead him to Lever, to answers. But there’s nothing. He throws down the golden scrap in frustration and grabs the sheath of skin instead, before he can stop himself. It drips blood in still-congealing blots onto the weave of the carpet.

  “So long to congeal,” he rasps, entranced, and touches the thick, wet blood left on his chest. It’s the same. “Must be important, some necessary by-product or co-factor. No way to tell without equipment.”

  He looks at the skin. Between his shaking hands is her tattoo, that gleaming copper snake winding her spine, as though it came from within her body. It’s lost the sheen that entranced him when they were fucking––gone dull, lifeless. Something special, then, some kind of specialist ink, most likely intelligent. Probably nanites of some kind. He’s struck afresh by the incongruity of the mod. Gang members have tattoos; it’s ritualistic, hierarchic. Members of the Illustrated Movement also wear them, but they’re an art collective whose skin is tattooed, laser-cleared, then tattooed again, used for everything from advertisement to fashion modelling. Tattoos are not popular as personal mods. Lever’s tattoo is definitely personal, and it’s better scratchwork than any he’s seen on the IM, which is saying something. The work is incredible. Intricate. He’s never seen anything like it, yet the fluid congruence of the coils tugs at his mind. He should know this, shouldn’t he? His head swims, the impact of the night’s events straining to crash in on him. He holds onto the skin for dear life.

  “What is it, Lever? What?” he mutters, studying each liquid curve. “I need to keep it,” he tells himself, and is surprised by the depth of conviction: a physical need.

  Placing the skin on the floor, he rifles in his jacket pocket for a sheathed surgical blade given to him by Leif. It’s a relic, more sturdy than the throwaways he uses at the lab. He oils and cleans it often, keeps it to remember that there was at least one thing they understood about each other: the work. Kneeling by the skin, refusing to question his motives, he carves around the copper coiled snake in a neat, wide rectangle from shoulders to buttocks. As he cuts, methodical, barely paying attention to the swift work of hand and blade, he realises he’s no longer shaking, but crying. Soundless floods of tears washing her skin clean of blood. He has to get home, get to
safety, before he succumbs to shock.

  He folds the skin, placing it in his jacket pocket, the sheathed blade beside it, and pulls on his leather jacket, zipping it up over the mess of his chest. The lift is empty, her top and bra gone, but he doesn’t stop to wonder about it, just presses the button marked “G.” Within minutes, he’s strolling down the street, soothed by the pain of freezing air and no longer lost. Unable to fathom how he became lost in the first place, he puts it down to drink. Wanders home in a daze, his hand tucked into the pocket of his jacket, curled around the folded section of her skin. He looks up into the clearing sky. Somewhere out there, skinless Lever coils among the clouds. It makes him dizzy just thinking about it, as though he stands on tiptoes over an abyss of improbable depth, arms outstretched, preparing to leap.

  Chapter 21

  Back in his apartment Bone takes a long, very hot shower, scrubbing hard at the wounds on his chest, buttocks, and thighs. Erasing the remains of those dried handprints, the residues covering his lower body. It’s only when he’s drying that he thinks he should’ve taken a sample, that perhaps her blood might hold the most important clues. He contents himself with a sample scraped hastily from the back of her skin and tries to sleep, twisted up in blankets too restraining, choking his body. He throws them off but he’s still stuck in his skin, sweating, aching, and his dreams are worse than usual, colliding with images of Lever, flashes of those red circles.

  He wakes after less than an hour with a shout, sweating hard. Takes another shower and dresses for work, craving routine, normality, a break from the madness of Rope, the desperate longing sparked by Lever. It’s nearing on nine in the morning, and he’s missed the car they send to chauffeur him to Lower Mace by hours. He can’t walk there, it’ll take all day, longer, and so he catches the Bullet. Sits screwed up in a corner by a window, trying not to panic, trying not to think, and holding on tight to that skin in his pocket, as though it can keep him safe. Arrives at Lower Mace mortuary full of piss and vinegar. He wants whiskey. Fuck the whiskey, he wants petrol, the pure cold burn of gasoline.

  The bitter chill of the morgue does nothing to revive him. Draws his skin tight across his bones, making him think of Lever again, and then again. He wants to go to his jacket, slip a hand inside the pocket and touch the leather of her skin, caress the hardening edges. It’s going to need curing soon, if he intends to keep it. He’s not sure how rational that would be, but he can’t bring himself to throw it in the furnace. The tattoo, the snake, it’s too significant to destroy. He’s not sure what to do with the sample either. He’s fairly expert on DNA mods, but this is transmog, there’s no stored gen baseline for him to compare to, and asking at the Zone feels too dangerous.

  Nia’s too angry at his tardiness to talk to him. They work in thick, uneasy silence on several corpses requiring immediate autopsy. Lower Mace population alone stands at around 18.4 million, and mortuaries drown in bodies, in nameless flesh. Ninety percent of the time, all a Mort can do is cut bodies up to locate and record mods for chasing in the Zone, then dump the bodies, crudely stitched, in the cooler for the Scorch Boys. They’ll go to the furnace en masse, the fuel that drives the machine, an endless, churning mill of self-sustaining production. If one of these bodies should gain an ID, and the family can afford an urn, it’ll be filled with nothing but nameless ash, the residue of some countless hundreds burnt on the same day, in the same furnace. Today, with untapped energy like nervous agitation in his bones, the memories of last night buzzing his mind, the thought stops Bone in his tracks. Pulls him away from the lab to isolated rooms daubed in blood-red paint. To the empty horror of bodies stripped of all self, too similar to his for comfort. And then to Lever, who chose to lose herself, to let all identity fall away at once.

  How casually she discarded her skin.

  What was it she’d replied in the Wail? “Maybe it’s because we’re sick of the skin we’re in.” Bone thinks it over, twisting it this way and that. Every which way he looks at it, translates to the same meaning he felt then. Skin as entrapment, the unrelenting grip of definition. His skin is nothing but a prison, and he no longer knows why he’s wearing it, why he’s colluding in his own suffering. The feel of the scalpel nicking into bone and jarring awakens him to the fact that he’s still working, driving on automatic pilot. He looks closely at the cut. His incision, though a trifle deep, okay, very fucking deep, is still perfect. He finds it amusing, but Nia finally snaps.

  “What the fuck is up with you? You come in stupid late, looking ten times worse than normal, which by the way is bad enough, and now you cut a fucking valley in this poor bastard? Please tell me you haven’t found a new drug of choice.”

  Respecting her right to be mad, Bone wonders what to say that won’t sound insane. There’s not much he can take from last night, from yesterday even, that won’t sound like he’s gone off the deep end of crazy. He drags off a glove and strokes a hand through his hair, unusually sensitive to the harsh pull of follicles under his palm. Hits upon the one part of it he can admit to. He hopes it’s enough.

  “I got laid last night,” he rasps, tugging a clean glove on and wincing at the pain in his throat. He knew it’d hurt to talk, but this is ridiculous, like he’s swallowed a handful of scalpel blades.

  Nia’s surprised laughter rings in his ear sharp as the shatter of glass. “Oh, is that it? Shiiit. And there I was worrying myself into early wrinkles. So, who was it?”

  “A woman.”

  Rolling her eyes, Nia says, “Honey, I kind of guessed that bit. Never had you down for anything other than straight. I meant, what was her name.”

  “Oh.” Bone smiles. “Lever.”

  Nia blinks. “Lever and Bone, Bone and Lever. Sounds like a bar. Probably a good one. I’d go, at any rate.” She sluices leaking fluids and adds gently, “You sound horrendous, hon, truly. Shoot me if I’m prying, but what the hell did you and Lever get up to?”

  Bone’s lost for an answer. If he starts to go over what happened to make his throat hurt like this, his head will start hurting, too, and he’ll drop his basket right here in front of Nia. He pulls whatever random bullshit he can out of midair. “Ran out of cigarettes, bought some cheap shit from a vendor. I think they used gun powder.”

  Nia quits sluicing and fixes him with a leery eye. “Tell me you’re kidding. Because they do use shit that’s potentially explosive, you know.”

  “I know. I try not to buy them.”

  “Yeah, right,” Nia scoffs. “Just like you try not to drink liquid suicide. Oh, look.” She rears back, aping shock. “Gas-malt and a gunpowder cigarette makes a Bone-bomb.” Nia throws him a look of pure disgust. “You utter fucking remedial!”

  He bites his lip and watches her sluicing his incision in angry sweeps. The water swirls round and round, becoming copper coils. His thoughts turn to that square of skin in his pocket, the inert shape of the snake, and that rush of familiarity comes again like a compulsion. Thoughts of the snake, of Lever, of transmog, race circles in his head, blurring into one another. Lost in the whirlpools and desperate for stillness, Bone grabs a spreader from the rack and rams it into the twisted torso of the corpse on the trolley, tugging hard against the torque of ribs and rigor mortis. Ribs creak, then crack, and the chest pops wide open, spraying whipped viscera into the room. Bone and Nia leap back.

  “Fuck! Frag bullets.” Bone’s furious. “Sorry, Ni.”

  “Fine. It’s fine,” Nia says with the calm of a soul on the verge of homicide as she plucks bits of scrambled intestine off the front of her blue scrubs. “At least it provides an interesting visual of my Bone-bomb allusion.”

  Bone suppresses the urge to laugh at the comical distaste on her face. She’d probably punch him. She begins a lavish sluice of the floor, nozzle held at an exaggerated distance. Still raging, Bone’s thoughts rush down the drain with those scraps of purplish red, lumps of faecal matter, and shards of bone. His stomach drops after them, hard and hurting, and in the new made quiet of his mind, anoth
er image unfurls. Lever. The tower of her flesh rising above him, coiled like a snake. Like the tattoo. Cold sweat explodes down his back. The walls of the lab distort, close in, transforming into a glass prison. His body twitches like fingers, like the urge to chase a bad habit. He tries to calm himself. What she did seemed impossible, magical, but it’s just a mod, and he’s a Mort. Finding mods is his business. He can make cold, hard fact of this. Find the way to her freedom for himself. He needs to start tracing her. Start with the scratch and see where it leads.

  Bone yanks at his chest, his gloves, rolling the gored scrubs about the balled up ruin of his gloves and lobbing the resulting wad into the corner bin. “I’m out of here.”

  Nia pauses her sluicing, her shoulders tense. “Pardon? First you’re hours late, then you want to leave after less than ninety minutes of actual work? We’ve got a cartload coming from the Buzz Boys at Precinct 60 after this lot’s done. Zeoger’ll want them processed stat.”

  Bone shrugs, beyond caring. “Zeoger’s not my boss. We’re doing these as a favour to him, not an obligation. We both know he’s taking the piss.”

  “He’s not the only one.”

  “Huh?”

  Nia rushes the remaining gore down the drain with jerky swipes of the sluice. “I saw the records. You had a new Rope victim. Why was I not called in?”

  He sighs, wishing she’d picked another moment to broach this. All he wants is to get the hell out, and now he has to add lies to abandonment. If she ever finds out, he’ll lose the only person who gives half a damn about him. “Did you look in the drawer?”