Spin State - Chris Moriarty [192]
She thought back a cautious yes, and felt him hear it.
“Have you asked the techs about that?” Cohen asked out loud. “It hurts like the devil.”
Li realized he was talking about her arm, that he was feeling it across the intraface, that he could feel everything she felt. She flexed it cautiously. Stiff. Definitely not great. But it would get her through. Hopefully.
“It’s fine,” she said.
“It’s agony. I don’t know how you stand it.”
She looked across the little distance between them and had a sudden shadowy glimpse of herself as he saw her. A fierce dark mystery, gloriously tangled in a too-fragile body, slipping away from him down a hall-of-mirrors perspective of increasingly pessimistic statistical wave functions.
“It’s late,” she said. “I need sleep even if you don’t. Let’s not worry about anything but tomorrow, all right? Let’s just get the job done and go home.”
Something flashed behind Arkady’s eyes.
Together?
“That’s not tomorrow’s problem.”
Be careful, Catherine.
“You too.”
KILLING VECTORS
This is the patent age of new inventions
For killing bodies, and for saving souls,
All propagated with the best intentions.
—George Gordon, Lord Byron
Anaconda Strike: 8.11.48.
The rats were leaving, boiling up out of the pit like survivors of a firebombing.
“They know the roof’s hung up,” Daahl told Li when one skittered into the room, panicked, and ran over her foot before it found its way back out. “There’s a big fall coming. I wouldn’t stay down there any longer than you have to.” He glanced at her, his pale eyes flashing blue as a Davy lamp’s flame in whitedamp. “I wouldn’t go down at all, frankly.”
They were at the strikers’ de facto command center in the Pit 2 headframe. It had taken Li and Bella a long, hard day and much of a night to get there, traveling through the tunnels beneath the birthlabs.
Cohen had ridden Li all through that long night journey—if ridden was the right word for it. He heard every thought, felt every twinge and misstep. And she felt him, knew him, all but was him. Finally she understood Cohen’s habitual confusion of pronouns. I, you, we. Yours. Mine. None of those words meant what she was used to them meaning. And none of them meant the same thing for more than a breath or two.
There were still borders between them, even now that the intraface was fully up. There were doors and walls, some of them solid enough to keep him out—or, more often, to keep her out of him. But no line of separation stayed put long enough for her to set a mark on it and say, Here I end, here he begins. In the end the walls only reminded her of how tangled up in him she was, how impossible it was to think or feel or even breathe without brushing up against him.
The headframe had changed since Li’s last visit. Strikers crowded the creaking corridors. Someone had brought in a truckload of mattresses and microlaminate blankets, and people were bedding down in the halls and changing rooms, even cooking on home-built methane stoves. Everyone was moving too fast, talking too loud, their voices pitched a little high for comfort. Li knew the mood. She’d seen it in students, navvies, line workers. It was the feel of any ragtag amateur army waiting for the riot troops to move in. But of course, she’d always seen it from the other side of the lines.
She pushed that thought away and stepped to the window. Someone had parked a mine truck outside so that its undercarriage partially shielded the window. She scanned the horizon between the truck’s wheels. The night was dark except for a scattering of cloud-strafed stars. The flat plain of the coalfield stretched away for miles, broken only by mountainous tailings piles and the rust-gnawed bones of mining machines. The place was chaos on infrared. The tailings piles were smoldering, as always. The junked vehicles and empty oil barrels still threw the sun