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. They smelled of sweat, bad liquor, and something chemical Caleb preferred unnamed.
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 held on.
He caught the wrist on the second swing and heard the joint give a beat after it happened. 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 left his weapon alone and 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. None of them turned 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 black compression shorts and tried to think about the cracked ceiling instead of the air temperature.
Tali had shoved a privacy screen halfway around the platform with her boot and called that bedside manner. She circled him with a datapad, frowning at it the way she frowned at misbehaving hardware. The new undersuit sat halfway up his hips, the chest panels hanging open. The fabric carried more weight than its thickness suggested, and the sensors already ran cold along his ribs 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 pointed two fingers at the waistband.
"Pelvic harness sits wrong, the whole suit reads your stride like a drunk forklift," she said. "I can lock the factory defaults and let it punish you in the field, or I can align the external tabs now. Your call."
"Do the tabs."
"Good. Sensible survival instinct."
She gripped the outside of the suit and dragged the fabric up with short, clinical tugs. No wasted touch. No apology. The work had the same precision as her soldering: pressure, angle, correction.
Caleb kept his eyes on the rust pattern above the workbench anyway.
Twenty-three rust spots in a roughly triangular arrangement.
He counted them twice.
The first pelvic node clicked into place against the compression layer. The second gave a faint green blink on her datapad. She adjusted the tension strap by millimeters and made a satisfied sound through her gum.
"Heart rate just jumped," she said, mild.
Caleb kept his eyes on the rust spots. "Has it."
"It has."
"The sensors are calibrating."
"The sensors are absolutely tattling."
She moved to the side seam and tightened the last external lock.
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.
That talent served fittings too, right up until Tali reached for the last nodes.
Caleb used the only warning he could afford. "Tali. Lock the nodes."
"Mm." She snapped the final tab closed. "Spoilsport."
"I don't tip."
"Noted." She stood up.
Her palms went flat against his stomach and walked up his ribs to find the chest seams. Her fingers were cold from handling the internal sensor strips. The seam pressed 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.
The smirk had left her face.
"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 kept the thank-you to himself. She seemed like the kind of person who would invoice him for saying it wrong.