SSCS 03: Installment 28 of 35
Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
This is Installment 28 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
Either way, I could tell I wasn’t blushing this time. “If you show me the project you’ve been working on, will you take me to the noodle shop again after?” I was looking down now, too, but got to watch his beautiful, brown, long-fingered hands jump up in answer to my question.
“If you like. I guess I’m close enough to done Elka won’t say anything if I step away for a bit.” He gestured when he spoke, and his movements were easy, as though he hadn’t had steel rods fastened into his elbows yesterday. Past the sleeves of his tunic I couldn’t see more than the knotted tendons of his wrists, couldn’t check for new scars.
…Those Monsters We Have Dreamed About
Installment 28: 22.0313
***
The noodle shop was bright today, and warm, filled with many customers. The noise and bustle gave me a chance to think a bit as we waited for our orders to be served up. I wanted to be thinking about Jack’s hands – the fine, long-fingered shape of them as he’d handled the pieces of his project to show me – but I kept seeing the charred edges of his skin where the etched and painted metal had been joined into him. How had it been so clean today, that metal? How had there not been even a trace of blood?
All of the pieces Jack was working on had been laid out on a metal rack standing behind his work table. As Jack had said, most of them looked like they were complete, but there were a lot more of them than I’d seen bolted onto him in the Machine yesterday. In fact, aside from the elbow-bars, the only other pieces I’d recognized were the pieces Jack had yet to finish, the ones that bolted into his ankles – the ones that they’d definitely tested on him before. Although Elka had been putting ominous pressure on the speed of progress of my Bell, it seemed like the progress of Jack’s work spoke of a much sooner deadline, at least, perhaps, for Jack.
“Have they said what you’re working on next, after the project you’re on now is done?” I asked, as we took our bowls and settled at the same window-side counter we’d been at last time.
“Nm.” Jack shook his head, eyes down as he slurped up a long line of noodles. He finished and I was treated to a brief white flash of smile before he added. “Probably something else for the machine. The last project I did was installed down there already. You probably didn’t see it, though, at inspection yesterday. All down low.” He looked down again, almost shy. “I did the inscriptions on all of the gutter-channel claddings – they said they wanted to see how my work turned out on something that wasn’t too important.” It seemed he had memories of yesterday, too, but that they weren’t at all like mine.
I shook my head, then added (truthfully), “Too many feet.” Jack flashed another smile, in agreement, then went back to his noodles. My own noodles were delicious, salty and wet, the broth so heavy with the under-flavor of meat that I almost wanted to lick at my teeth and be sure they weren’t showing. In the shop, I could smell everyone breathing, and the susurrus of their heartbeats quietly echoed the bright pounding of the rain from the other day. Jack did have beautiful, brown, long-fingered hands. Carefully, I didn’t lick at my teeth, but I did brush my hair back over my shoulder, to see if his eyes would follow the motion.
“Well, they put you on something important right away,” he added in eventually, once his bowl was half empty. “I guess…” He frowned, and shook his head. Such beautiful, long lashes – if I was quiet, and careful, I could draw this conversation out a long time, sit here in the warmth of the noodle shop and forget about the city.
“Have you ever walked down to the river?” I asked instead, and my question clearly startled him out of whatever else he’d been thinking. “Have you ever seen the old Palace, built out of bricks the color of the sky when there isn’t any smog?”
“Why are you-” We weren’t supposed to talk about the old Palace, everyone knew that, and Jack pushed himself half-up, as though meaning to leave. But I knew the words that would pull him back.
“I’ve found out what Maia was afraid of,” I said. He froze, just as I knew he would. “And the other ones too. You see…” I lowered my voice, leaned forward so that he leaned forward too and I could whisper the rest. “– we were all dreaming.”
……Cold water lapped over my feet and made me stumble. But Jack’s hand was in mine, and he steadied me, and together we straightened up and gazed out across the water. The distance was smudged with city haze, but on one side of the horizon a blue and white building shimmered just above the water’s surface. It sprawled up from half-way out into the river, too far to make out the decorative details, but one wall was smudged out with brown and green, held up by the long root-branches of a banyan tree.
On the other side of the horizon, the cracked, black form of the city’s skyline shuddered slightly, before the edge nearest the water broke off, and great, spine-covered tentacles reached up out of the water to pull it under.
Jack’s hand was tight in mine, and I looked at him, made sure he was looking at me, and said, “This hasn’t happened yet.”
–– And then I blinked, and found myself again standing inches away from my bell-Template. But it was Jack who was standing up on my stool, holding one line of the molding form we’d just pieced together using my dandelion plate. I turned my head, just in time to find Elka coming around the end of the bamboo screens.
“I need his help to finish it, Elka.” My eyes were black, and so were Jack’s, I’d made sure of it. So Elka just scowled, and hunched in on herself a bit more than usual, but then turned back and stumped away.