Feeling the urgency to her core, she slipped her sweater farther down her shoulder. The mirror shook in her grip, and she used both hands. She’d been chipped, and that bothered her more than anything she’d learned in the last day.
White-faced, she stared at her reflection. His hands were warm on her back, his pressure firm as he palpated the skin. She saw it in his eyes when he found it, his gaze meeting hers through the reflection past his swinging dreadlocks. “You’ve done this before?” she asked when he took a scalpel from its wrapper.
“Unfortunately, yes.” Brow furrowed, he touched her back again, swabbing it down to make a cold spot. “Sorry, but there isn’t time to numb it.”
She nodded, and then her breath caught as he cut. Her stomach clenched, and she watched the blood flow. The pain was tolerable even as he pressed on it.
“Tell me if you get woozy,” he said. “It’s not a big cut, but people are funny. Lots of pressure now.”
Her teeth clenched as he pushed as if trying to get a sliver out. The hand mirror shook when something white and red slid out of her, the size of a grain of rice. Moving fast, he grasped it with a wad of gauze. “Here,” he said, extending it to her. “You going to pass out?”
“No.” Her shoulder throbbed, then burned as he cleansed it. The gauze was in her grip, the stark red and white riveting.
“You okay?”
His voice was kind. Peri set the gauze on the shelf under the mirror to tug her sweater back into place. The tape over it made a bump, alien and reminding her of what they’d done. Bill had chipped her. “I’m fine,” she said, but inside she was reeling, not from the cut or the blood, but in the realization that if Silas had been right about this, maybe he was right about everything else.
“We’ll send them on a chase,” the man said as he collected his things. “All part of the service. Liz will be here in a second, so don’t hit her, okay? You might pull your tape off.”
Pulse fast, she leaned against the sink. Her world was coming apart, and there was no one to catch her. How did this happen? The chip sat on the shelf, and she checked her phone. Five minutes. It seemed longer, and she gathered her coat to leave, the need to run strong.
“Whoa, hold on,” the man said as she headed for the door. “Wait until Liz gets here. How long since you’ve eaten?”
Liz? Bet that’s not her real name, either. “Just a few minutes ago.”
“Mall food,” he said in disgust. “Did you sleep last night?”
“On the bus,” she said as a dark-haired woman wearing a bright blue nylon coat walked in. Her eyes were exaggerated with swirls of soot to confuse the facial recognition software, and Peri’s brow furrowed. It would be hard to match that with what Squirrel had in his cart.
“Hi, Squirrel,” the woman said brightly, her expression souring when she saw Peri. “You’d better be worth it,” she said as she belligerently handed Peri a stick of body paint.
“That’s enough,” the man said sharply, and Peri clicked the soot stick open, leaning into the mirror to apply it. “If you don’t want to help, you shouldn’t have come.”
“Oh, I’ll help, but I’m doing this for Silas, not her.” The woman shrugged out of her blue coat and handed it to Peri when she straightened, looking for approval. “I owe him.”
But the approval never came, and Peri stiffened when the woman snatched up Peri’s new coat with an appreciative sound. “If you hurt Silas, I’ll be all over you like a rabid dog,” Liz said, settling into Peri’s coat with a smile. “Oh, this is nice. If they catch you, I’m keeping it.”
“I saved his life once,” Peri said. “I’ll do it again.” Am I really that short? she wondered as she slipped the soot stick into a pocket to keep, but their heights were nearly identical.
“Yeah, from a dart he got protecting you. Walk for me. Didn’t you have a hat?”
“I threw it away.” Seeing her logic, Peri paced before the sinks.
“I think I’ll leave out the pained hunch,” Liz said drily. “Where’s the chip?”
Squirrel had put it in a tiny specimen bag, bloody gauze and all, and taking it, the small woman dropped it into a pocket. “Put on my hat and coat and go,” she said, pointing to the door. “They’re getting antsy. Don’t look at Silas when you leave. You think you can do that?”
Liz snorted when the doctor helped her into the blue coat, and Peri’s jaw clenched as she put on the rough, knitted blue-and-white stocking cap, thinking the pompom tassel ridiculous. “Thank you,” Peri said when Squirrel adjusted the nylon monstrosity about her.
“Don’t thank us,” he said, smiling wryly. “We’re trying to close you down.”
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Peri didn’t know anymore. Pace slow, she held her head up so she wouldn’t look as if she was hurting.
But she was. She’d never felt so alone.
“What do you think?” Peri heard Liz say as she hesitated at the door by the CLOSED banner, out of their sight and not yet in the hallway.
“I think you need to lighten up,” the man said. “And I think that Silas needs to get over it and do his job.”
“His job?” Liz scoffed. “What do you expect? He hates drafters.”
“He does not hate drafters,” came Squirrel’s quick, angry answer. “That woman is half starved and emotionally ready to crack, and much of it’s his fault. He knows the barriers to self-sufficiency that Opti instills in their drafters, and him trying to force her to break them when she has no resources isn’t helping anyone, least of all her. He has a job to do, and if he doesn’t start doing it, we’re going to lose everything, Peri included.”