The artisan district smelled like peanut oil and exhaust.
Caleb walked the cracked alley with his old jacket zipped to his throat. The morning shift sirens were going off down the hill in three different keys. The shutters on the bay across the street were rolling up in a long screech of unoiled metal that nobody on the street paid attention to.
Three men were standing in his path.
Salvage gear, the kind you bought off a contractor who had gotten it off another contractor who had gotten it off a corpse. Iron wrenches at their belts. The smell off them was sweat and bad liquor and something chemical he did not want to name.
They had Tali against the chain-link.
She had her welding kit clamped to her chest. The pink in her hair was the only color in the alley. Her jaw was set in the way her jaw set, which Caleb had only known her one day to recognize but was already starting to recognize.
"Drop the box," the one in front was saying. He tapped the side of her crate with the head of his wrench. "We'll walk it to the quartermaster for you. Small fee."
He reached for her hand.
Caleb closed the distance without thinking about it.
He got the back of the man's collar in his left fist and pulled him off his feet, hard, the way you pull a dog off something dead. The man came around faster than he should have. The wrench came around with him.
It hit Caleb's shoulder.
The bad shoulder. The one Iharu had taped that morning. The pain went down to his elbow in one bright line.
Caleb did not let go.
He caught the wrist on the second swing. He felt the joint give before he heard it. His forearm went into the man's throat. The man went into the brick wall the way a sack of something heavy goes into a wall, which is not gracefully.
The wrench hit the gutter.
The other two reached for their belts.
Caleb did not draw.
He tapped the Rank D pin at his collar.
The matte black finish caught the alley light for half a second. They were close enough to read the silver around the edge. They were close enough to know what it meant.
"I'm late."
That was all he said.
The two men got their hands off their belts. They came forward only long enough to scoop their leader off the brick and drag him down the alley by his armpits. Nobody looked back.
Tali waited until they were out of sight.
Then she let out a long breath through her nose like a kettle finally remembering to whistle.
"I had a plasma torch."
"In the back pocket."
"In the back pocket."
"How long does a plasma torch take to draw."
"...Longer than that."
She blew a small bubble. It popped. She wiped grease off her cheek with the back of her wrist and managed to put a new streak there in the process.
"Shop opens in ten."
"Yeah."
"Don't be late."
She picked up the crate and walked.
The shop was already humming when he got there. She had skipped past the front door and gone in through the bay.
Caleb stood on the fitting platform in his briefs and tried to think about anything that was not the air temperature.
Tali circled him with a datapad, frowning at it the way she frowned at things that were not behaving. The new undersuit sat halfway up his hips, the chest panels hanging open. The fabric was heavier than it looked. He could feel the sensors running along his ribs already, cold, like a row of pinprick teeth.
"Military sizes you off a tape measure."
"Yeah."
"Tape measure works on canvas. Canvas is dumb. Canvas just hangs there."
"Sure."
"Reactive weave is not dumb. Reactive weave reads your nervous system. Off by a quarter inch, your shoulder goes the wrong direction when you swing a rifle."
She set the datapad down on the bench. She stepped onto the platform.
"Arms."
He raised his arms.
She put her hands flat against his thighs and dragged the fabric up.
He kept his eyes on the rust pattern on the ceiling panel directly above her workbench. He had counted it before. Twenty-three rust spots in a roughly triangular arrangement. He started counting again.
Her palms went under the waistband.
"Pelvic nodes," she said.
She put her hand inside his briefs.
He counted rust spots.
She had professional fingers. They were the same fingers he had watched solder a circuit board the day before with a steadiness most surgeons would have respected. They were also her fingers, which she had decided to put where she had decided to put them, on the grounds that the sensors needed to align with his pulse.
She moved.
He kept counting.
"Heart rate just jumped," she said, mild.
"Has it."
"It has."
"The sensors are calibrating."
"The sensors are calibrating."
She did the thing she was doing. He stared at the ceiling. He had been working in disposal yards for five years. He had once held his hand inside a Class-3 carcass to manually clamp a ruptured fuel line. He had a very developed talent for being in his body without being in his body.
He used it.
"Tali."
"Mm."
"Lock the nodes."
She gave him one last pull that was very slightly slower than the one before it and pulled her hands back out.
"Spoilsport."
"I don't tip."
"Noted."
She stood up.
Her palms went flat against his stomach and she walked them up his ribs to find the chest seams. Her fingers were cold from the inside of the waistband. He felt the seam press in along each rib in turn. She zipped the suit up to his collarbone. The fabric contracted against him in one long inward squeeze, like the suit had decided to be there.
She stepped back.
She was not smirking anymore.
"I treat my builds like a financial investment, scrubber."
"Okay."
"The suit won't tear. The seams will hold. But it doesn't save your life if you don't let it move you."
"Okay."
"Keep it in one piece. Upload telemetry by nightfall."
"Yeah."
She turned away and was already adjusting the cuff on her welding mask before he had his harness off the bench.
He did not say thank you.
He did not think she wanted him to.