The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels

SPEAKING PARTS by M. Christian

Pell remembered seeing Arc’s eye – like it was the first thing she’d ever seen. Tourmaline and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal sphere, the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera shutter’s, as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer, but built by surgical perfection not found anywhere in Pell’s knowledge. The woman’s left eye was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman looked around the gallery – as if the engineers who’d removed her original wet, gray-lensed ball had orchestrated a kind of music to accompany their marvelous creation: a background tempo of perfect watch movements to accompany whatever she saw through their marvelous, and finely crafted, sight: Click, click, click.

An eye like that should have been in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple human skin and bone, Pell had thought. It should have been in some other gallery, some better gallery – allowed only to look out at, to see other magnificent creations of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds and blues, his shallow paintings were an insult to the real artistry of the woman’s eye.

That’s what Pell thought, at first, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.

Pell didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind of ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell lived with the biting truth that she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.

But later, right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s implant, the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray penetrating right one – and Pell forgot about the tourmaline, onyx, silver and gold machine.

She had finally seen Arc, herself – the woman, and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her, the eye was cheap junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.

She wasn’t Arc at first. First she was the woman with the perfectly created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman where she didn’t belong. Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it was cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but, still – she was oil: she didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite the cheapness of the gallery. You could tell, cataloging her bashed and scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt; that, amid clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks that she was a hum, a discordant tone in the finely meshed posing in Jare’s tiny South of Market studio.

The woman was aware of her discrepancy. She wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of vin very ordinaire, stopping only once in a while to look at one of Jare’s paintings.

Holding her own wine tight enough to gently fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress-lines, Pell watched her, stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong – woman with the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too closely or too intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination she’d scare her off – or, worse, bring down an indifferent examination of Pell: a sad ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that was nothing more than a glance of the eyes. The woman would see Pell but wouldn’t – and that would be an icy needle in Pell’s heart.

Pell had already taken too many risks that night. She already felt like she’d stepped off the edge and had yet to hit the hard reality of the ground. Traps and tigers: beasts and pitfalls for the unwary loomed all around Pell. She moved through her days with a careful-footstep caution, delicately testing the ice in front of her – wary of almost-invisible, cloudy lines of fault. She knew they were there; she’d felt the sudden falling of knowing that she’d stepped too far, moved too quickly, over something that had proven, by intent or accident, not to be there. Pell didn’t push on the surface, didn’t put all her weight, or herself, on anything.

But then everything changed – she’d seen Arc and her eye.

The plastic chimed once, then collapsed in on itself. Turning first into a squashed oval, the glass cracked, splintered, then folded – the white seams of stress turning into sharp fissures of breakage. The red, freed of its cheap plastic prison, tumbled, cascaded out and down onto her.

Pell had worn something that she knew wouldn’t fit with the rest of the crowd. The official color of San Francisco, she knew, would fill the place with charcoal and soot, midnight and ebony. White, she’d decided, would pull some of their eyes to her, make her stand out – absence of color being alone in a room full of people dressed in all colors, combined.

“Looks good on you.”

The shock of the wine on her white blouse tumbled through Pell with a avalanche of warmth to her face. The decision to wear cream had come from a different part of herself – a part that had surprised her. She’d relented – abandoning safety for one night in the risky endeavor of wearing something that the rest of the crowd in the tiny gallery wouldn’t. She was furiously chastizing that tiny voice, that fashion terrorist that had chosen the blouse over other, blacker ones, when it decided to have a last say, a last statement.

And so Pell responded, “Not as good as you would” to the tall, leggy, broad-shouldered girl with the artificial eye. Which was beautiful, but not as beautiful as the rest of her.

Pell’s reason was Jare. While secretly she could never wrap her perceptions around the gaunt boy’s paintings, she still came when he asked. Jare, Pell, Fallon, Rasp and Jest. They weren’t close – but then foxhole buddies aren’t always. They weren’t in combat, but they could be. All it would take would be one computer talking to another – no stable job history, thus conscription.

All it took were two computers, passing pieces of information back and forth. Till that happened, they hid and watched the possibility of a real foxhole death in a hot, sweaty part of Central America fly by.

Foxhole buddies. It was Jare’s term – some fleck of trivia that’d hung around him. They didn’t have an official name for their tiny society of slowly (and in some cases not too slowly) starving artists, but if they did then Pell was sure that Jare would smile at his trivial term being immortalized among a band of too-mortal kids.

That was Jare. While the rest of them tried to focus on pulling their paintings (Pell, Jare, and Rasp), music (Jest), and sculpture (Fallon) as high as they could, there was something else about Jare – something, like his paintings, that refused to be understood. His techniques were simple enough, broad strokes of brilliant color on soot-black canvas, but his reasons were more convoluted.

Or maybe, Pell had thought earlier that evening – before turning a beige blouse red and seeing the woman with the artificial eye for the first time – they both are simple: like his works, broad, bold statements designed to do nothing but catch attention. He was like his paintings, a grab for any kind of attention – an explanation too simple to be easily seen.

In the tiny bathroom, Pell tried to get the wine out of her blouse. Contradictory old wives’ tales: first she tried cold, then hot water. The sink ran pink and so, soon, did her blouse.

The woman with the eye stood outside the door, a surprisingly subtle smile on her large mouth. Every once and a while she’d say something, as if throwing a bantering line to the shy girl inside to keep her from drowning in embarrassment.

“Who’s he foolin’? I can do better crap than this with a brush up my ass.

“You should see this chick’s dress. Looks like her momma’s – and momma didn’t know how to dress, either.

“Too many earrings, faggot. What year do you think this is?

“Hey, girl. Get out here with that shirt – better-looking than this fucking stuff on the walls.”

Cold water on her hands, wine spiraling down the sink. Distantly, Pell was aware that her nipples were hard and tight – and not from the chill water; that down deep and inside, she was wet. It was a basic kind of primal moisture – one that comes even in the burning heat of humiliation. Finally, the blouse was less red than before. Planning to run to where she’d dropped her old leather coat to hide the stigmata of her clumsiness, her excitement in two hard brown points, she opened the door.

The tall woman smiled down at her, hot and strong. In one quick sweep of her eyes, Pell drank her tall length, strong shoulders, columnar legs. She was trapped, held fast between the hot eyes she knew must have been staring at her, pinning her straight to her embarrassment, and the presence of the woman.

Her eye, the eye, clicked a quick chime of precision – as if expanding its limits to encompass the totality of Pell. Pell did not mind her intense examination. It added, with a rush of feelings, to the quaking in her belly, the weakness in her knees.

“Gotta splash. Wait right here.”

Of course she waited.

After a few hammering heartbeats, the door opened and she came out – butchly tucking her T-shirt back into her jeans – and Pell was again at the focus of her meticulously designed sight.

“You live anywhere close? I’m tired of this shit. You?”

“Down the block. Just on the corner,” Pell said, trying hard not to smile too much.

The woman downed the small sample of red in her glass and, looking for a place to put it down, and not finding any, just dropped it with a sharp plastic clatter on the floor. “Show me. It can’t be worse than here. Too many fucking artists.”

“Arc. Named myself: didn’t like the one the old man stuck me with,” she said as they walked out the front door.

Pell wanted to paint her. She refused herself.

Naturally she resisted after Arc had frowned and snorted at the gallery, at Jare’s streaks of black on red. But she resisted for other reasons – the same reason that she didn’t allow herself to imagine what Arc might look like under flickering candlelight or reflective with a gleam of post- or pre-passion. Pell kept thoughts of her lips on the tall woman or putting her hard beauty, her street wise elegance down on rough sketch paper because she felt the night crystal… no, glass around her. Fragile magic was whipping around them as they walked the short walk from Jare’s too crowded, too noisy, too artistic space to Pell’s tiny flat. She doubted Arc could feel it, but for Pell it was a chandelier hovering around her, clear and invisible, but sharp and precarious – one wrong move and it would break and she would be standing on a too busy San Francisco boulevard all by herself.

The apartment was a score. Expensive, yes – too expensive to really live in, but it was still a prize in a city that tried to hide the fact that one out of ten people slept in a doorway or in an abandoned car. A friend of a friend of one of her Foxhole Buddies had scored it – a happenstance of urban mythology: an apartment for rent. The toilet barely worked, the shower didn’t (she’d taken to sponging herself in the cold, slightly brown, almost yellow water from the sink) and the only furniture she could afford was old, broken, or too ugly for even the hungry-eyed scavengers: her mattress was on the floor, her dishes were all chipped, her only chair wobbled like it sat on a ship at sea.

Key in lock. The same sticking door frame that forced her to lift and push. Frantic jangling thoughts of whether she’d cleaned recently, just how many dirty dishes were in the sink, and if she’d left her usual panties on the floor.

If the dishes in the sink had grown a brilliant fungus, or a pair of wadded underwear stained weak colors of dirt were underfoot, her guest didn’t notice or say. What she did, flopping hard on Pell’s bed, was smile an arc of teeth and say, “Hungry?”

Food was not on Pell’s mind. Nothing much was, actually. The only thing that seemed to be living between her ears was an ache to pick up a pen, pencil, or brush and trap this woman – hold her on a piece of paper, on something she could frame on her wall.

She nodded absently as the woman reached for Pell’s phone, dialed a number. After a moment, she passed the phone over, saying, “Give them your cash number. I’m tapped right now.”

The fastfood guy spoke so fast as to be all but unintelligible. The image of zits and splattering grease was strong in Pell’s mind as she rattled off her numbers and confirmed the purchase.

When she hung up, Arc was sprawled out on her bed, staring at the ceiling. “What a crock of shit.”

Pell didn’t know what to say. All thoughts of art left her as she stared at the woman’s soft tummy peering out like a pale, toothless smile between jeans and T-shirt.

She wasn’t – Pell realized, sitting down in a moment of heart-hammering bravery on the side of the bed next to her – really all that pretty. But then Pell never really found “beauty” to hold up. Beauty, she thought to herself, was fragile and temporary. Like the weather – rain following sun following snow. Arc’s forehead was high, her thin brown hair pulled back into a thin severe ponytail – so severe as to make her look as if her skull was simply painted the color of bleached earth. Her face was luckily saved from the shallowness that Pell had seen too many times. Her cheekbones were broad commas under her eyes. She lived on the street – Pell knew that without asking – but she hadn’t been run over, run down. She had stolen some of the street, used it to keep herself strong. While it was her left eye that had caught Pell, snapped her attention to its elegantly constructed utility, its artistic function, it was her right eye that kept her staring, looking at the bow-string and hardwood woman. Her right was pure gray, a kind that comes from raw iron behind heated by hard years, then suffused with air – a wind developed from a pure determination not to let the ground, the pavement, streets and sidewalks win. Her left eye was technological brilliance. Her right was steel: hard and reflective.

Her body was long and lean, her legs being her best feature. They had the strength good legs have from walking everywhere. Under her T-shirt her breasts were small and conical, with a kind of gravity-defying shape that instantly had Pell dreaming of their color, the way they moved; her nipples were twin dark points, crinkled areolae visible even through the thick cotton of the T-shirt.

“You know that guy?” Arc said, still on her back, still staring at the ceiling. Like the rest of the tiny apartment, the ceiling was bare, empty save for a thin yellow water stain. Her eye click-click-clicked as she looked up at the ceiling. Pell wondered what she found so fascinating. It took her a while for the woman’s words to pass through her mind, layers of puzzling till she knew she’d meant Jare, Jare’s show.

“Sort of. He’s a painter. Not really a friend of mine, but I help him and he helps me sometimes.”

“Cocksucker,” Arc said, bringing herself up onto her elbows. “He owes me. Told me to come and just hang out. He said he’d credit me. Not a lot but enough, you know? I can make better for doing a lot more but this sounded easy, so I said ‘sure’. Asshole. Didn’t pay me up front, then says that he was only going to shell out if he got enough people. Then only if someone bought one of his fucking paintings. Fuck him.”

“He’s like that,” Pell said, seeing a quick montage of Jare approaching Arc on the street – seeing a chance for her hard presence, her burning will. The shallow people he’d invited to the show might not remember his paintings, his red streaks on soft black, but they might remember her, Arc’s style and strength, and thus him.

“You like him?” Both the steel and the steel gray eye looked at Pell.

She shook her head. “Not really,” Pell said, finally answering her question. Her face had gotten hot under Arc’s intense perception. Click-click-click. Cannon barrels of perception. Click-click-click. Pell wondered what she found fascinating in her. Like her apartment, Pell was simple and plain. She knew that and often relished in her plainness – it was a carefully constructed ring around herself, a barrier of mediocrity. She knew her hair was dull and flat, black but spared a kind of style. Her face, she knew, was soft and full – a dull moon. She knew her nose was too small and her eyes too big. Her teeth were good, at least, but they were like a child’s – delicate and fine. Her body was sturdy and that’s how she used it. Wide hips and fat tits. She also walked everywhere but with Pell the softness stayed, locked her down to her suburban heritage – marked her for what she was: a tourist in the city. She had come to see it, not become a part of it.

“Good,” Arc said, leaning back onto the bed again. “Just wanted to make sure.”

Pell didn’t know what to say, so didn’t say anything. Half-formed words and sentences tumbled through her mind but couldn’t congeal enough to be spoken. So they sat together – quiet, clumsy – till the food arrived: a big black man wearing Kevlar body armor and carrying a huge foam container marked with the bold red swatches of Chinese characters. The food was food, and they filled the silence with quick eating.

When the food was gone, Arc yawned: “Fuck, I’m tired.” She pulled off her shirt, showing breasts pale and white, beautifully shaped sculptures of pale skin. Areolae like rough brown coins, nipples like dark finger-tips. “Shitty day. Good night,” she said, crawling into Pell’s bed and fumbling for the line switch to her broken lamp.

Pell didn’t move. Frozen, she watched her hunt.

“You coming?” the woman said finally and, not smiling, reached out and took her hand. Her eye, her single artificial eye, looked at Pell with more warmth and sincerity than did her gray, real one.

But the hand was there, out and firm. Strong and real. A gesture in more ways than just an invitation to crawl in.

So Pell did, removing her clothes and moving into the small bed with a fluid, natural motion that defied her quaking nervousness. Long arms, still somehow cold from the night out, wrapped around her. Taller, Arc’s head was above her, the woman’s breath a periodic hot wind through Pell’s hair. For the smaller woman, Arc was a strong, corded neck and the slope of a hard chest. A fluttering excitement surged through her, and it was all she could do to resist scooting farther down, to see close up, to have Arc’s brown nipples close to her lips.

A rough pat in the top of her head snapped Pell out of her tense anticipation – tilting her head up she looked into one crystal, one gray, eye… and a face stone still.

The same part of Pell that wore that dress, that stepped outside her constant fear, moved her face close and kissed Arc on her cool lips.

Click, one real, one not looked hard at her. Arc’s gaze was penetrating and distant at the same time – holding for too long. Then she lunged – predatory and quick – returning the kiss, but lip to lip, so hard that Pell pulled back suddenly, fearing bruising. But ever stronger, Arc pushed further, roughly parting Pell’s lips and striking with a hard, dry tongue.

A beat, maybe two, of Pell’s fast-hammering heart, and her tongue met Arc’s in the hot duel. The force was strange to Pell, an oral fistfight when she was used to dancing – but her body welcomed it, even though her mind was chilled by the roughness: her nipples became aching points, so hard as to hurt, and deep between her lips her clit jumped as if shocked and the hidden folds of her cunt grew hot with moisture.

Arc’s hand was similarly hard and quick, from somewhere it came between them – grabbing Pell’s right breast in a muscular clamp. Gentle caresses, butterfly kisses, stroking touches… the shock of the grip, the strength was a hard rush – Pell felt her cunt gush hot moisture, felt a voltage shock in her clit, her nipples. She gasped, breaking their kiss and breathing heavy into Arc’s face… who laughed, deep and brass. Grabbing the heavier girl in those two strong arms, Arc pushed her further up the bed, flopping Pell’s bigger breasts into her firm face. Pell started the scream, the cry, long before Arc’s teeth met on her left nipple – but let it continue out in a sharp animal sound. On their own, her arms reached down to push the strong woman away – to force her clamping teeth off her nipple – but there was no strength in them, no real desire to break the agony. Her clit, already throbbing, reached out on its own and clamped her legs together in a thigh-clenching near-masturbation.

Then a hand, now warm, reached down and yanked them apart. A smashing ache snapped up through Pell – the initial throb of a sprain – but, again, she let the pain rock up through her, just another kind of stimulus. Deep down, she was crying – fear quaking her, making her sweat cold, her breathing shallow, but she was also too far into it to care, to ask for it to stop. She was more scared of the pleasure she felt, that she was so wet, that her clit was so damned hard, than what she imagined Arc would do.

Her legs were wider apart than they had ever been before – for no one else she’d opened them, allowed them to be forced apart. She showed her cunt to Arc, buried under the cheap sheets – she spread, hungry, wet and open for her.

Sensation, down among the short, brown curls, the wide, wet lips, the pink finger of her hard clit. At first she didn’t recognize it, couldn’t place it – a filling, a firm thrust that went deep and long into her. For a moment, puzzlement and near-panic flashed through her, and her yawning legs almost snapped shut: dick? Was there something obvious about Arc that she’d missed?

No, that wasn’t it – besides, Pell was too far along to really care if she was being fucked by the woman. Fingers, yes – rough, hard, fucking fingers. She didn’t know how many… not one, not two, maybe three: she hoped not four. But fingers, yes, Pell was being finger-fucked, hand-fucked, by Arc.

She repeated it to herself, a mantra, with the hard-edged and mean images that came with it: finger-fucked in her hot, wet cunt. Fucked by a butch’s hand. Fucked with her legs open – images, words, thoughts that would have made her blush, now just made her cunt drip onto the cheap mattress.

Arc’s fingers became a brutal beat into her – one, two, three, four. A hammering, as fast as she could – or almost as fast as she could. Cold fear again, the thought of internal bruising, of warm wet from blood and not just from hot moisture, having her cunt not just fucked but beaten.

She came – with a wave of shame and fear, thinking of hot blood, she came. It was a hard, fast ride – a teeth-clenching, body-rigid come and slammed her soft, spread legs down around Arc’s brutal hand in a tendon-aching lock.

The quakes went on and on and on, rolling down into a body-quiver, a whole self tick that seemed to follow the beating of her near-spasming heart. Distantly, she was aware that Arc was moving up the bed to spoon up next to her.

After a point Pell fell asleep, a dreamless empty, to the soft clicks of Arc’s eye, watching her as she did so.

In the morning, Arc was gone. Though she was never proud of it, Pell spent most of that morning looking through her cheap, broken or worthless possessions to see if Arc had taken anything.

The inventory turned up nothing missing. Nothing was left, either. No note. No number left conveniently for her to find. Nothing at all.

Pell spent the rest of the day staring at her pad, frozen in the middle of her own gesture, her own reach to trap the girl in pen and ink, paint and charcoal. She stared at it for what felt like hours, crippled by having her own natural eyes, her own native perceptions.

After a point she got up and moved around the apartment, putting down things and picking up others, absently cataloging the minutiae of her little life – wondering how the woman would have seen them – either through her click-click-clicking sight or through her gray real one so used to seeing things at a street level.

She was two people, walking around doing nothing. One of her was somewhere else, distant on a plane of excitement, who desperately wanted the woman again, fevered for her hand in her wet cunt, for the pain that had been so much a part of her pleasure. The other Pell, though, was frightened – who didn’t want to spread her legs again – even in masturbatory memory of the night previous: who was terrified that she had enjoyed any part of it.

One side won. Without a conscious thought, she found herself in her small bed, the sheets still faintly smelling of herself. Rest, she told herself, tired. But she found herself moving against the firm resilience of the mattress, pushing her pelvis down into it, calmly relishing in the memory, the sensations. After a point, she knew she could not go any further – couldn’t escape, so she brought her hand down between her legs, finding herself wetter, her clit harder, than ever she could remember.

At first she started down a very familiar road – one finger gingerly, softly stroking her hard nub… but Arc intruded – or rather the hard memory of her. Just one finger wouldn’t do; soft thighs pressed together wouldn’t work. No, after a single moment of fear and shame, she parted her legs – again – as wide as she could and slipped two of her own fingers (three being too frightening) into the molten wetness of herself.

She imagined a lot of things, under the cool sheets of her small bed. Arc’s touch, the sight of her brown nipples, the cool strength of her in the bed, and then she came, she bellowed and roared in a powerful wave… thinking of a slight amount, just the tiniest trace, of blood on come-slick fingers as Arc had fucked her the night before.

Sleep again, this one lit by dreams of crystal and gray – of clockwork clicks and a cool presence, burning but also remote, removed. After a long few hours, she awoke to darkness beyond the dirty windows.

Getting up to shower, and prepare something simple and cheap to eat, she noticed the bill, laying forgotten and discarded near the crumpled remains of the night before. The meal had been expensive. Very. And Pell could not help but think, couldn’t stop herself from pondering, how much Arc charged for a night, and if that amount was the same as a very expensive meal of Chinese food.

Pell hadn’t forgotten her. It was a long time, yes, a week and some days, but Arc’s memory was strong in her mind. At first it bothered Pell a lot to have the tall woman’s face, mannerisms and voice still lurking around every corner in her mind. But soon it became a background of the city, a rhythm to her existence. Water from the faucet was Arc washing her hands after eating. A window was how she’d seen the woman’s face reflected there, caught her watching Pell again with her steel-gray and just plain steel eye. Her dirty underwear on the floor pinged a memory of the fear she’d felt, walking into her place that night. It took her a long time to finally pick them up and add them to her laundry bag – simply because she subtly enjoyed the memory of that rush of panic at seeing them: the first time they’d been together.

Other memories, the first sight of Arc’s hard nipples, her teeth setting down onto Pell’s own, Arc’s fingers slamming into her wet cunt. The ornate mandala of her artificial eye, the clicking of her examination, the music of Arc’s sight: How could she ever forget?

No, she hadn’t forgotten, but when the buzzer sounded she actually wasn’t thinking of her. She was working, having caught sight of a book’s partial title in a store window the day before: The Peacock… The images that’d tumbled through her imagination at seeing those words brought her almost running back to her tiny place and forced her pencil into her hand. The Peacock Eye was what she thought she’d read, though she was sure that wasn’t the title, and that was what she started to draw. First with smooth sweeps of charcoal and graphite and then with a fine camel-hair brush that’d cost her breakfast, lunch and dinner for three days, she started in.

An hour later, the eye started to look like the image she’d formed from that half-seen book. She was lost and alone, caught up in the storm of sketching. It was a good feeling to be not herself, to be captured by the pursuit of the work. It felt great not to just sit on the edge of her bed and let the room, and everything in it, remind her of Arc and that night.

The medium was paper, ink, charcoal and graphite. The image was the eye on the end of a peacock feather. She’d filled its center with geometries and forms like steel gears, compass points, brass fittings, screws and miniature bolts. The form seemed to stare out at her with a cool logic, an immaculate watchmaker’s perception.

Then she heard it, deep inside her mind – shattering the turmoil of creation: Click-click -

– click.

Then the buzz of her doorbell. Getting up, numb from the hard revelation that Arc still lived deep within her, she went to the door.

“I need someplace,” the tall woman said from the street, looking up at Pell through the heavy iron security gate with one hard, cold mechanical eye, and one red-rimmed with a patina of almost tears.

She wouldn’t talk – at least, not much: “Just let me sit over here, OK?” was what she said, coming in and sitting in the left-hand corner of the room, wedged in between Pell’s kitchen door and her brick-and-board bookshelf. There, she slumped over so that her head rested on the dog-eared familiarity of Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries.

Drawing her long legs almost up to her chin, Arc closed both her eyes – bloodshot real and too clear, too crystal, artificial, and gently rocked back and forth.

Pell wanted to touch her, wanted to pull the woman into her arms and mimic that rocking, to take her back to a place where, somewhere, she was small and vulnerable. But she didn’t. It wasn’t that she wasn’t able to – it was as if a cold truth had dropped down onto her shoulders: that this, what she was seeing, was just about all of Arc. If she did go down there, drop down into the pain, then she might be walking through the woman’s last shut door, last safe place.

So she didn’t, though she wanted to.

Instead, for three hours without moving, she sat on the edge of her mattress and calmly watched Arc. For those three hours, Arc remained as she had been since she walked in: head on the softness of a well-read paperback, knees pressed into her strong skin, eyes closed. The only sounds she made were her rattling breaths, in and out, past lungs that had either cried too much or could break the clouds to start, and her eye – which, soft, muffled, clicked and gently whirred within her puffy lid.

After three hours Pell had to go piss. After, she made some Darjeeling tea and put it at the woman’s feet. Arc didn’t stop making her two noises, didn’t open her eyes (one fake, one real).

Pell went back to her bed, her mattress, and watched Arc till her eyes grew hot and heavy.

She must’ve, she realized with some horror, fallen asleep – but the embarrassment and disgust with herself was tempered with silk and a single hot, slow, breath on her eyelids and forehead – faded with the tender sensation of Arc’s long, lean body slowly slipping into the bed.

Cool, almost cold, before – Arc was warm, near burning, and her skin seemed… real, silken. For a long time, they just held each other – an embrace of soft skin, of breaths mixing on each other’s shoulders. Pell remembered Arc’s slow, ragged breathing, the way she seemed to suck each breath in on the verge of a shattering moan. Then – after how much time, Pell could never be certain – Arc moved forward and kissed Pell’s shoulder – as much as the roughness before, this kiss sent even more current tingling through her. It didn’t seem to be Arc behind the kiss as much as the small child within her. It was a hungry kiss, a kiss of reassurance – the same kind of grounding happened when her strong hands reached up and cupped both of Pell’s heavy breasts.

It wasn’t so much sex. Pell realized afterwards, as something simpler… if not love, then just need. A need for touch, sensitivity, contact. Even when Arc’s lips dropped down to Pell’s soft nipples and started to kiss them, then suck, it was more a comfort, more a simple need than a burning passion. Still, lips were lips, and Pell felt her body respond – a growing fire deep in her cunt. Not a throbbing excitement, no, but still an excitement all the while – and, despite the heavy silence in the tiny apartment, she found her throat purring out deep vowels of pleasure.

In the soft, warm darkness, touching Arc’s skin was like touching something too hot, too smoldering. Maybe it was because she’d been crying, been holding herself too tight, too much together – but the heat was there, nonetheless. As Pell slowly slid her hands down the tall woman’s long form, she mixed new sounds with her bass purr – a kind of hissing excitement, a sensual amazement that one person could be so hot, so burning.

Soon – very soon – a patina of sweat slid under her fingertips, making it easier for her to see Arc’s body with her touch. Uniqueness added puzzlement to her amazement. Pell’s was soft, full – gentle belly, plump breasts, large nipples, soft ass – but this one, this woman in her arms, allowing her to touch, she was so different, so unique. Soft, yes; her skin was like oil over polished marble – the architecture of her body was quick and sudden… no languishing valleys, but rather hip-bone, cords of firm muscles, rib, rib, rib, the even hotter swell of a breast – even more silken, soft – the surprising roughness of a hard nipple skipping across her fingertips, even more heated breath on her shoulder.

Muscles, her body was like a finely honed tool – sharp and hard, but there was something else, lurking just on the edge of her senses: tears, maybe? Arc seemed more open, more real than the tall city warrior Pell had seen those other days, other nights. Her hand slipped down, found iron-firm thighs pressed too tight together, felt a brief scratchy tangle of ill-kept pubic hairs. Gently – because she wasn’t altogether familiar – Pell pushed them apart.

Arc could have stopped her. Pell really had no chance of victory in their match: those cords of honed muscle could have easily stayed locked, could easily have resisted even Pell’s most frantic of attacks. Maybe tears? Maybe because Arc seemed to be burning up with a tightly-controlled fever of need – supposition, wonder for another day. The fact was, Pell gently pushed and – very slowly – Arc spread her strong legs aside for her.

The smell of her excitement was harsh and rich. Pell found herself, in the dark, sucking it in through her nose – a long nasal tone. It was so unusual, so strange… her own cunt, she knew, was almost odorless, tasteless. But Arc’s, it seemed, had a hard-edge kind of smell – a deep, natural smell that reminded Pell of locker-rooms, of her own pits after a long walk. It wasn’t unpleasant – but then Pell didn’t think that anything about Arc could ever have been that.

For some reason, putting her lips to where her fingers slowly explored never crossed her mind. Later – after dawn – she’d regret it, but understand a bit. She was inside more than her lips and tongue ever could be: the strong woman had parted herself, opened herself out of need. Pell was in her deepest parts – to simply stick her face down there and lick… like pissing in church.

So it was with her narrow fingers that Pell explored her. First, that tangle that continued from a hard mons down into a even thicker one. It was a complex knot, something that Pell instantly knew may not have been untied by gentle touches for a long time. She hesitated, stroking calmly up and down the hairs for a minute, two, uncertain how much to push. But the heat – the burning fires of Arc, the gentle glide of her body next to her, the smell of sweat, and cunt, finally pushed her into executing a gentle parting.

Wet… so wet. Wetter than anything Pell had ever felt – like thick, hot soup. Between them, a kind of steam built – something that completely obscured reason. Normally, Pell would never have been so bold, but with her finger slowly licking up and down Arc’s hot, hot cunt… from deep cunt-hole to the hard, hard point of her too erect clit… she had to do something with her mouth. Arc’s was too far away, a hot bellows on the top of Pell’s head, but something else was just as close… and just as tasty. In a beat of her heart, Arc’s left nipple was in her mouth. Salt. Knotted hardness, the smoothness of the rest of Arc’s breast against her cheek, her lips. Pell sucked, filling the early part of her mouth with Arc’s nipple. All she could hear was the pounding of her own heart, the heaving breaths of Arc, and the whispering of the sheets as they slid over her body.

Movement… Arc twisted her body slightly, shifting herself onto her back. For a moment, her nipple popped free of Pell’s hungry lips. A frown whipped across Pell’s mouth, but the heat was on her and – beyond reason or thought – she quickly climbed on top of the larger woman, spreading her legs wide to straddle her – lips again seeking the cool wetness of her well-sucked nipple. It took some twisting of her own, but in a moment Pell’s hand was once again deep in Arc’s hot cunt.

Another slight twist, Arc lifting her body slightly – frightened for a moment that this was some kind of way of trying to get her to stop, Pell released the hot nipple and tried to see Arc’s face in the darkness. Nothing. Nothing but a soft sound, the sound Arc had been making all that time – a kittenish moan, a childish groan. The hand was a shock, but one that built the heat right up again – Arc’s hand hunting out for Pell’s, taking it and pushing it back down into Arc’s molten cunt.

Again, Pell started to work her, feeling her own cunt turn fluid, melt in its own hot juice. As her fingers energetically worked Arc’s lips, hole, clit and all three quickly, Pell felt something – a glancing touch. For a moment, puzzlement flashed through her – then she realized, the knowledge like a skyrocket bursting through her. So fast, hot and bright that Pell had to put her own free hand down between her own hot thighs, into her own volcanic recesses. So hot, so tight, so good.

Meanwhile, Arc continued to fuck her own asshole with one, then two, then three fingers. The bed softly smelled of earth, shit and hot cunts.

Arc came, a primal female cry – deep and bass. Her body went rigid, a board with tits, a hard body pushed to the limits of hardness. Her breath exploded into Pell’s face as she panted, heaved and cried out.

Pell felt her come – felt Arc’s hands work her asshole as Pell’s worked her cunt. Later, Pell couldn’t remember if she’d come as well – the explosion from Arc was so special, so shattering, that it had torn away any memories Pell had had of anything she’d been feeling. That moment was pure Arc – a night in a secret, deep church. She’d been lucky to have witnessed the service, the ecstatic blessing being a witness.

Sleep came like a velvet blanket thrown over Pell. No dreams, again, but the cloudy memory of sometime during the night, a kiss landing on her cheek.

The next morning she awoke to find Arc, again, gone.

Pell saw her again, soon after. Living in the city for as long as she had (was the difference between tourist from the suburbs and resident?), Pell was finally starting to understand the clockwork of its people. A day or so before and the desperate Sad-SACs would be prowling for anything or anyone that could mean bucks till their next Subsistence Allotment Check. A day or so after and the streets would be filled with walking psychotic landmines – having spent their biweekly fortunes on whatever chemicals they preferred.

The fifteenth or so of the month was the best time to go out and get supplies. Anyone who depended on their Subsistence Allotment Checks would be too busy haunting their mail drops or be too happy that they would be coming to bother her. Random crazies were impossible to predict – so you always expected someone or something. Feeling good that she’d taken living in the city to heart enough to anticipate street insanity made Pell feel more like a resident, less like a prisoner.

The day was crisp, edging towards too warm. But since the HotFace^TM personal scorcher her father had given her was too big to carry in a pants pocket, she had to wear her leather coat again. Stepping out and quickly locking up her place, Pell knew – with a flash of heat as quick and as sharp as the single small arm’s round that echoed from the Minimal Income Housing Facility up the street – that she’d be sweating streams by the time she made it to the market, two blocks away.

The street was vibrant in the unexpected sunlight. The expectation of income made the Sad-SACs giddy and flirtatious, without the cruel desperation which other days – such as when the money started to run out – brought to their eyes. Pell’s place was one of a sagging parade of typical San Francisco tattered Victorians. Hers was somewhere between the worst – metal-plate window-shields bolted to rotten wood, the whole bay front sagging from the weight of too much fear – and the best – a lady’s paint only five years too old, streamers of older, better paint jobs, peeling from its peaked roof. Hers was simply gray, with boxed edges from a previous owner who had somehow decided to convert 1890s gingerbread to 1950s stucco.

Keeping her hand in the ring-trigger of the HotFace^TM, Pell moved among Sad-SACs looking expectant, happy and always hungry, other kids with haunted looks that meant that they, too, were hovering on the edge of conscription, and the usual buzzing fringes either too far gone or too keenly focused to match either population.

Pell guessed that she probably appeared as the latter – her eyes clouded inward with a sudden thought of Arc. A fat, black ball of a man, legs spindly twigs, arms twitching from involuntary palsy rolled by in a homemade electric cart – its donut wheels compressed down by his bulk till they acted more like treads. Pell noticed absently that he was naked, and shined with a contouring mirror of perspiration as he rolled towards and past her. His left eye was a tubular prosthetic, darkly tunneling forward as he rolled.

A Latino boy proudly displayed willingness to drop off the dole and into combat by obviously spending most of his SAC on a pair of intense insect green, surely-as-soft-as-silk pants, and a beautiful purple coat fringed with antique wooden rosaries as he moved with dancing steps from behind her, to next to her, to beyond her. His face was long and thin, with an expertly precise mustache. The fingers on his artificial left hand were a dull matte of industrial design, humming butterflies as he played an invisible guitar, or clicked the trigger of an imaginary weapon.

Like a pool of deep cultural waters, a small knot of black-shrouded Arab women flowed by across the street. It was hard to say their numbers as their hands and eyes (all that was visible) seemed to churn and emerge from one unifying mass of their robes. Watching them but not really looking at them. Pell caught one foot as it emerged from the cloth, it was chrome leading to a finely-machined ankle and, no doubt, ending in an artistically-created leg.

A callow-faced young woman slouched in a doorway, hardness in her downcast eyes. The street had carved years on her cheeks and body with scars – like a prisoner’s years sloppily etched on the walls of a cell. She wore a pair of slashed fatigues splashed with white and black urban camouflage, and an ancient T-shirt that might have said something a long time ago. As Pell walked past, she caught a glimpse of the girl’s ancient steel-and-tubular arm, bent and broken, hydraulics (of all things) splattering her old uniform with glossy oil. She wrapped her mechanical in her real, covering it – as if its malfunctions were disgusting, to be hidden.

The street rolled by her as she walked. A parade of average people. Keeping her hand on the tiny flame-thrower, she walked past a cross-section of the city. Reaching the corner (halfway there) she was gently surprised that she hadn’t thought of Arc – and her eye – as she’d passed those who also opted for the cheaper-than-replacement option. It felt good, a surprising justification for the way she felt about the tall woman.

A reflection caught her eye as she waited for the light to change, a convoy of squat Army personnel carriers roaring by at a shuddering 50 mph – automatic guns calmly tracking her heat signature, seemingly too eager for their masters to release them to the task they were assembled for. Needing an excuse to escape the high velocity intensity of the tracking guns, she turned.

Something bright lanced into her eye, a splinter of sunlight off something silver and gold. Tourmaline and onyx. A chance of stature, placement and angle of reflection. Arc’s eye gleamed at her from across the street as the woman turned, saw her, and smiled – quick, reflex – before frowning and turning to walk away, fast.

It was days later. The few groceries Pell was able to afford were safely in her cabinets and her rattling refrigerator. Jare, who’d vanished since that night at the gallery, had shown up on her doorstep two days before, tears gagging in his throat as he carefully unfolded the conscription notice that’d been slipped under his door. It had taken most of the night for her to calm him down – and, still, even after she’d finally managed to get him to stop crying for more than two minutes and out the door, he seemed ready to break into a pile of pure porcelain at any moment.

She hadn’t heard from him since. The Conscription Notice had told him to report to the Treasure Island Induction Center in two weeks. She suspected he was either hiding in his tiny apartment, too petrified to move, or was, in vain, trying to scheme his way out of it.

A sense of calm had visited Pell. She knew it was an eye, that winds were tearing apart everything she knew just outside her door but, still, her heart beat regular and her breathing was clockwork. She knew it was just a matter of time before she got her own notice. She had worked through most of her SAC money already. The dream that she was going to be able to fulfill the government’s cold illusion of crawling up the economic ladder with her SAC money was almost over. Wide awake and startlingly calm, she slowly began to clean her apartment.

The door buzzed.

“You going to let me in?” Arc said from the landing, looking up with a pure white smile. Her eyes were hidden behind cheap black sunglasses.

Arc was strong. That was one of the things that reached between the two of them and tugged, hard, at Pell’s heart. But it was a kind of strong that was precious and priceless because, for Pell, it had come with tears. The strong only share their tears with you if you’re special, trusted.

“New?” Pell said as she tried to make good coffee out of freeze-dried beans and yellowish tap water.

“Nice, isn’t it?”

Pell wasn’t looking but she knew that Arc was – staring at her own right hand with a connoisseur’s squint, daring its perfection to show her a loose screw, a matted sensor dot, a dull gleam to the polished metal. Her concentration was a Geiger-counter series of clicks from her eye.

Arc had tried to show it to Pell without really waving it under her nose – so, instead, the street girl had acted like a child trying to catch the eye of an adult, to have Pell notice, to ask, about the new prosthetic.

“He’s a freak – but at least the fucker’s got taste.”

It was beautiful. There was no denying that. It didn’t have the jeweler’s magnificence of her eye but, still, it had the clean loveliness of a perfect machine. Minimal extravagances, no filigree or bevels. It was the beauty of a revolver, the sensual streaming of a missile. Pure form has its own form of elegance.

“Japanese tech. All the way. See the chop at the wrist. Danomoko. Grow the whole thing in solution, I hear. Just feed juice to those little robots and they grow the thing. Stronger than fuck. Neurofibre optical hookup to meisomolecular fibres. Feels just like a hand, moves just like one, too – but motherfucking fast and strong.”

Cool metal glided along Pell’s cheek. She shivered, mostly from the coldness of it. Looking down at the hand, she saw the puckered ring of tissue where it mated to Arc’s wrist, a rubber gasket. Absently she noted the hand wasn’t black at all, as she’d first thought, but a deep kind of blue. Like, she imagined, the blue that the sky gets just before it passes into space. Dark to the point of lightlessness.

“Wasn’t expensive, actually,” Arc said, stepping back and running it – her hand – up and down the corded muscles in her strong legs. “Not that he told me or anything. I thought about having it taken off, you know? Replace it with a cheaper one and pocket the change but, hell, I thought it’s a fine hand, right? Besides, gotta keep the freak coming back for more. Wouldn’t do to see him with a cheap thing stuck on my wrist.”

“That makes sense,” Pell said, turning from the cheap microwave with two steaming cups of almost, but not quite, coffee in her hand.

Arc patted the bed with her new hand. Pell sat down next to her and, for some reason, put her head on the taller woman’s shoulder.

Arc got quiet and tensely sat up straight. The motion was soft, though – not a twitch and definitely not a pull-away. Just a slight electric shock of the contact. After a few thudding heartbeats, Pell felt Arc’s new metal hand reach up and stroke her ugly brown hair.

Neither said anything for a long time. Arc repetitively stroked Pell’s hair and Pell did nothing but let her. Finally, Arc moved a bit more than usual, a kind of squirming on Pell’s old mattress, and Pell straightened up. Her head felt loose and full of sparkles, like she’d held her breath for too long.

“Hey,” Arc said, turning to look at Pell with her one steel and one steel gray eye, “I saw where your friend lived – but it don’t look like he’s there any more. Get sent?”

Pell nodded. “Month or two ago. Could have probably slipped to Australia but he waited too long.”

“Hey, if we’re lucky, maybe he’ll buy it, ya know? One less artist to worry about…”

Arc laughed and so did Pell, even though it wasn’t funny. After a point they stopped talking, it got dark, and they snuggled together under Pell’s old sheets. Pell expected the new hand to get in the way, to be a burst of shocking cold when Arc touched her: but was surprised when, if she closed her eyes, she could almost not feel the difference.

Almost not feel the warm metal of Arc’s hand – grown in a vat of microscopic robots, sold to a mystery, given as a present, or as part of an exchange -

Almost not feel the strength of it – a strength beyond that which Pell loved in Arc. As she touched Pell, it seemed not to be the same contact – to come from the same woman. Arc’s touch was gentle, yes, loving… if that could be the word. But it was also fast, covering Pell’s slightly larger, definitely softer body. Not a slow progression, as before… lips, chest, breast, nipple… more hurried, rushed: straight to her already swollen nipple, the cooler fingers of the artificial hand gripping tighter than before, much faster.

They had not even completely crawled under the covers before Arc’s hand grabbed her. In shock, Pell pulled away, sending a bolt of agony through her body when Arc’s hand did not let go. After, Pell thought – believed – that perhaps the mechanism just wasn’t responsive enough. She knew it was a lie, but she had to believe it, nonetheless.

Pell turned, eventually freeing herself. Turning, she sat and looked at Arc as the taller woman crawled into the old bed. Her eyes glimmered – the artificial with the click, click, click stare of her perception, the gray with a shimmering concentration. The lights were on this time, neither of them moving to turn them off.

The gunmetal hand reached out and laid itself, warm and cool at the same time, on Pell’s inner thigh. Reflexively, Pell started to close it – but Arc pushed with its artificial strength, spreading Pell even wider. To hide the nerves that made her shake like the room was cold (it wasn’t), Pell laughed – but it sounded like Arc’s new hand: artificial and cool.

“I want to fuck you,” Arc said, looking straight into Pell’s eyes. Click, click, click and cool gray. There was a strength there – that strength: a dramatic firmness, a theatrical burst of power. Pell felt her knees go weak and her cunt start to warm… soften, melt.

The hand started to stroke her, slowly, up and down – swell of her ass-cheeks to the tuft of hair at the top of her mons. Up and down, up and down, fine mechanics following the contour of Pell’s cunt, fingers sweeping through her tangle of pubic hairs. Back and forth, up and down – then one finger, out a bit more than the others, slipped between her lips. The motion slowed, hesitated – the finely-machined metal was cool, but not cold. She could feel its hardness press up, against the opening to her deep cunt. Arc held it there – held her new hand there – and Pell could feel her own pulse against the cool metal.

“I’m going to fuck you -” brass in those words, a metal as hard as her new hand. Pell, frightened and filled with a chilling excitement for the power in Arc’s voice, grabbed a pillow from behind her and positioned it – quickly, feverishly – so she could lean slightly forward, to get a better view.

Click, click, click – Arc’s view seemed to synch with hers, the taller woman’s gray, artificial sight was between Pell’s passionately spread legs, hypnotized by her own actions, by the slow up-and-down, up-and-down of her artificial fingers between Pell’s moist cunt-lips.

The hand was smooth, its action more precise, more finely engineered than anything Pell had ever seen. Where she’d expected joints, hinges, sockets, and the like, instead there seemed to be immaculate mechanisms. She couldn’t tell exactly how – a combination of every hinge, every joint, or a Japanese paper-folded mentality of design – but the gunmetal flesh of the hand just seemed to move. It was more a study in flesh and blood, executed in machined metals, than an approximation of a hand’s actions.

And two, then three, of its blue-steel fingers were deep inside of her.

No fingernails. She’d noticed that. Smallish indentations, yes, but not cosmetic details. Watching the first two fingers of Arc’s new artificial hand, her metal prosthesis, slide in and out of her cunt, Pell had a clear view of the thumb – a space, that small bit of sculpture, a bow to the needs of some woman, somewhere, to paint their metal art with some kind of gaudy color. For Arc, though, it remained blue-steel, polished. It was its own art, its own beauty.

Four, and hard steel tapped against Pell’s G-spot. The shivering started then, the pressure deep within herself. Like taking a piss, like holding it back. A kind of slow, building force that started somewhere inside her cunt and spread, tightness, firmness, up through her body.

She shivered – just slightly. In and out, in and out, the fingers precisely fucked her. “I’m fucking you,” growled Arc, locking a click, click, clicking stare into Pell’s quivering eyesight. For a beat, or thousand, of their hearts they locked like that – Pell into gray and machinery, Arc into Pell’s softer eyes. Hold, hold, hold – Pell thought she was close, on the lip, looking down to where the real Arc lay, hiding. Then a clicking, hard, blink, and Arc turned her head away, looked to the side, and then down – down to where her false hand was fucking Pell’s very real, and very wet cunt.

Four. Pell knew it must have been that number – in concentration and to remove herself from the memory of Arc breaking the stare, she leaned slowly back and closed her eyes, trying to lose herself in the in-out, in-out fist-fucking. It wasn’t a hard rhythm, yet, wasn’t a hard fuck, yet.

“Now I’m really going to fuck you.” Strength touching on anger, firm words from Arc. Four fingers and something else, a new – sharper – kind of pressure.

Pain. Pell screamed – no, cried – no, yelled. She made some kind of noise, a mix and match – her own kind of strange movement to match the elegant watchmaker workmanship of Arc’s hand. It was a sound that went all kinds of way at once. Frightened – both from the sound and the tearing pain between her legs – Pell put her hand down – quick – and tried to stop Arc’s thrusts…

… no fingers. A hard steel wrist, a ring of rubber where artificial met natural, a seam of skin. No fingers there – all of them gone, hidden deep within her own cunt.

The reach to stop became a reach to explore. Moving herself carefully up, Pell reached down between her legs and touched, keeping her eyes tightly closed. Arc wasn’t fucking her – just wrist, rubber gasket, slick skin, hard metal – suspended in her cunt.

Pell started to breathe hard, fast. The orgasm came, quick and hard, from a direction she didn’t expect – the surprise, fear and shame forcing her eyes even more closed. It was a soft come, a jittering come. No screams, no cries, no lip-biting, not even a clamping together of her wide-open legs. It was a body-rush, an electrical charge that went from dull glow to brilliant light.

The shame was a heat on her face, in her cunt. The ghostly image continued to hover, just out of reach, just out of understanding, on the verge of her mind. She didn’t want to see it, but also felt its allure was too strong to bury away.

Arc, slowly, started to fuck her harder and harder – wet noises from between her legs, feeling to Pell like somewhere distant, removed. Dimly, she was aware that she was even wetter than before, that her juices were flowing, streaming down onto Arc’s brand-new hand. No, not juice – piss, maybe. It felt like something inside herself had just let go, draining out of her. She let it, entranced by the feel of the fluid pouring out of her, and the sense of hot release.

A second orgasm – more familiar and welcome – rocked her, tearing her eyes open, forcing her shaking hand down between her legs, feeling the gasket again, the hot skin again, the cooler metal – again – but this time the fast, then slowing, piston action. As she touched, then gripped – hard – Arc’s wrist, the clenching of her cunt around the metal prosthesis slowed, dimmed. It didn’t stop, not for a long time.

“Push,” Arc finally said, and she did: like birthing or taking a shit – a swelling pressure, a bearing down, and she eased out the metal. Even though her eyes stayed closed, she opened them long enough to catch a sight of glistening metal fingers, flexing and flashing in the dim light, strands of cunt-juice webbing between them, the smile on Arc’s face… that might – just might – have been as cold as the metal they were made of.

The mattress was soaked from her ejaculate. Wordlessly, Arc pushed her off – making Pell a little nest of the faded blankets, the pillows, that had escaped the drenching, and neatly flipped it over. Watching her through slit eyes, Pell knew that the stain, the dampness, would linger, but was beyond caring.

Then, carefully so as not to disturb her, Arc moved her back, tucked her in and – just before the silence that came before sleep – squeezed her throbbing ass-cheeks with her new metal hand, and said in a gruff voice: “You are a good fuck.”

The last thought Pell had that day, before being drawn down into unknown – forgotten – dreams, was that she’d wished that Arc had really fucked her, really touched her with – hard flash of fear and shame again, the image that had pushed her over into that first come – even the raw skin of her fleshy arm, the cauterized stump of her real self.

They stayed together for most of the next day, rolling to and from Pell’s bed stopping only to make bad coffee and sprint through the chill, nipping air of the apartment.

It was a sweet time – as if the hard sunlight that streaked through Pell’s windows had somehow pushed aside the shadows of the night before. Arc’s kisses were passionate, and several times the thought of bruised, purple lips skated across Pell’s mind, but they were gentle in her way – and lingered long enough for a dancing touch of tongues.

One time, reason forgotten, Pell had gotten up – gone to the stained sink and washed her hands. Arc had stepped up behind her, a cat tracking a spot of light on the floor, and grabbed her – first her ass, which made Pell yip like a startled child, and then, when she whipped around, hands still dripping, her tits. Arc had held her there, hands on her tits, fingers (some real, some metal) rubbing casually back and forth across her soft, then hard, nipples. Then Pell had leaned forward, just a little, and closed her eyes. The kiss had felt soft, fleeting, and all too real – a real kiss from the real Arc.

She’d also made Arc laugh. Hard and real. It was a treasure, a prize. They’d been kissing – just that – lost in the landscape of each other’s lips, the sweetness of their breaths, when that other, that loud and rambunctious part of Pell, reached down and tickled the tall street girl under the ribs.

Arc had exploded in a booming, percussive laugh that had rung and bounced around the tiny apartment like a frisky dog. Arc had wiped tears from her face, returned the tickle and told Pell that if she did it again she’d “Break your face.”

A short time later, as more and more sunlight slowly started to come in the dirty windows, exhausted, they slipped into the cool, slightly smelly bed. They’d held each other for a long time, spooning together, unintentionally matching their in and out breaths. Slowly, Pell had slipped quietly into a sleep. She’d dreamed of floating, drifting on a lake dotted with the mountain ranges of pure white clouds, like warm, insubstantial icebergs.

When she awoke, Arc was gone.

The next time, it’d been raining. Pell had seen her before, in the rain, but this time Arc’s urgency scared her. Pell had been asleep, rolling in and out of half-remembered dreams, worried because the Foxhole Buddies hadn’t heard from Jare in over three weeks. She didn’t really miss him, her embarrassment and self-hate over that a burning kind of ache behind her eyes, but it was a reminder that his fate could be any of theirs. That day she’d checked her bank account, compared it with the SAC statement of the week before. She’d stared at the flimsy paper strips for long, heart-rapping minutes, trying to perform some kind of mathematical legerdemain on them to make them calm her panic. But no matter how many times she added, subtracted and counted on whatever extra income she could acquire, the verdict was still zero in six months. Ten if she didn’t eat. A year and a month if she moved out and lived on the street.

The bed was a safe haven. She’d not washed the sheets, or thoroughly dried the mattress, since Arc had spent the night. The smell of her – of them – was a bath that she floated in, not having to put her head out to face the next day or the one after that.

The buzzer was a scream of reality, one that almost forced her back under the covers. She almost ignored it, leaving the world outside to vanish in the surprisingly hard spring rains. But then someone started banging on the gate – the sharp percussive clangs rattled up and through her apartment, making her teeth ache and her eyes squeeze shut.

Then a voice carried against the clamor, just a few pieces of words – not enough to make any kind of sense. But the tones spoke direct and hot to her.

Wearing only a large T-shirt, Pell stood in the doorway, looking down at Arc. The woman had a large plastic garbage bag over her head and was pounding on the metal gate with her matt black hand. “Are you going to let me in or what?!” she screamed, panic rippling through those tones that had got Pell out of bed.

Inside, Arc threw the bag aside and grabbed a pile of Pell’s laundry off the floor and quickly, feverishly, started to dry her right leg.

“Fucking Swiss. They know how to build them but can’t weatherproof for shit. Get too much on the joints and the servos hesitate. Bitch for an arm, fucked for a hand, but for a leg it means falling on your fucking face. Shit. It’s pouring out there. You got a hair dryer or something?”

Pell didn’t, and said so. She slowly closed the door. A pool of water distorted the worn wood floor, slowly bringing it back to a more natural shade of brown.

Finally Arc seemed satisfied she’d dried her leg satisfactorily. Her eye clicked with its finely tuned and expertly manufactured sight as she scanned her new leg for any sign of moisture. Then, wadding up Pell’s shirts, underwear and socks into a mottled ball, she tossed them, hard, into a far corner. “I was gonna get it sealed, you know, but couldn’t find a place that would do it good enough.”

Pell stood, folded her arms, and felt a chill race through her. “New present?”

“Yeah. Everyone’s a freak, right? Guess, in his case, he likes to improve on people. Not that I need any improvement or nothin’. Just gets off on it, I guess. Likes the metal, the way it feels. Likes taking a bit and giving a bit. I don’t fucking know. He pays for it and that’s good enough for me.”

Pell sat down on the bed next to her. She wanted to reach out and touch Arc’s arm, to feel the corded mnemonic fibres, the brief chill of the ferroceramic framework, the humming current of its circuits, the glistening neuroservos. She wanted to pull herself close to Arc, to hold her and lean against her. Yes, she wanted to lean against someone strong and firm.

The room was cold – brushing her hand against Arc’s arm made a shiver dance up her hand. Pell gathered up the blankets and shawled them over her pale shoulders. As Arc tucked herself in, Pell jumped up and pulled her T-shirt over her head. Arc’s breasts were hard and small, her nipples tight and dark. Pell had seem them before, of course, but not so erect. They seemed almost cracked from the cold, as if all their heat had been sucked out of them, all the life. A thin shine spotted parts of her body where the rain had managed to slip past the trash bag.

Naked, she jumped down next to Pell and pulled some of the covers over herself. Pell had seen a flash of her, naked and firm – corded muscles, a skeleton ghosting through her pale skin, the puckers of arm and leg where the prosthetics mated with skin – as she moved. She realized as Arc snuggled under the thin blanket that the image burning still in her mind was not her ghostly skin, but the way the metal of her, the alloys of her, had gleamed in the dull rainy-day light. It reminded her of the first time she’d seen Arc – what seemed like eons ago. It had been her eye. The metal and jewels of it. Not the woman.

“It’s freaky,” said Arc next to her, face and body obscured by the sheets, the blanket. Pell could feel her body warmth and the cool firmness of her artificial elements against her skin. “But it pays, ya know? Gotta keep food in the belly, that shit. Freaky but at least you gotta say that he has taste, right? At least the man pays for quality.”

“What does he do with the real parts of you?” Pell said before she realized she’d said it.

“Fuck if I know. Sells them. Jerks off over them. They’re gone, you know? Gone. Still me here, right? Still me – just a little tougher.” The last came as a barking laugh, a deep, chesty sound that was as different as her giggling laugh under Pell’s tickling fingers as Arc’s real skin was to her new elements.

“Still me -” Arc said, worming a real, human arm through the sheets, the blanket to hug Pell clumsily. A sudden touch of cold metal echoed the movement, telling Pell that her other arm was also around her.

It seemed cold in the little room. “Doesn’t it disturb you?” Pell was finally able to ask.

“He’s a creep – like they all are. Fucker pays – get it? I don’t really give a fuck about him – he just gives me the cash, and the toys.”

“Tell me about him.” Not jealousy, the heated emotion wasn’t there. But she wanted to know why – to understand the slow replacement, the methodical mechanical encroachment into Arc’s life… into Pell’s life.

“Fuck, I don’t know,” Arc said, looking uncomfortable, fixing her real/artificial stare at a point somewhere over Pell’s head. “He’s a guy, you know. Rich fucker. Lives somewhere up in North Beach. Big place. Art and shit – but classy stuff – not like your jerk-off friend.”

“Is he old?” The question was inane, but the only thing that came to mind.

A burst of hard laughter. “Aren’t they always? Fuck, I don’t know. Like a dad, kinda – he ain’t all wrinkles or shit. Latino, I think. Speaks English good enough, though.”

“Where does he get the money?” Pell’s words went with her hands, gently stroking the real flesh, the real skin of Arc’s untouched shoulder.

“Not as expensive as you might think. People will give lots for real meat.”

“Then he sells them?”

“I guess…” Her clicking sight glanced over Pell’s, then dropped down to her plump nipples. Casually, like touching something just to be assured of its texture, Arc stroked warm fingers across, seemingly fascinated by the way Pell’s skin responded: areola raising, nipple tightening, lifting from the satin skin. “Doesn’t say, don’t ask.”

“What does he do?”

Arc was quiet for a long time – so long that Pell thought that she’d tripped, fallen into a trap. As guilt rose over her pushing, her strident inquiries, Arc slowly started to speak: “Just lets me in – calls me first, you know. Then lets me in. Big, fancy place. A catalog, magazine, TV kind of place – matching shit, you know. He just sits there, in this big chair. Watches me as I come in -”

A cool chill between Pell’s legs – too hard fingers playing with the tangle of her pubic hair. She didn’t want to, but two of those fingers – much stronger than flesh – pushed her thighs apart. She couldn’t tell if she was wet or not, didn’t feel anything except for a slight chilliness across her nipples, but guessed that since it was Arc down there, she must have been.

“I take it off for him, you know. Just take it off. No strip or nothin’. Just take it all over and stand there. He’s dressed, you know – fancy suit. Expensive shit. Doesn’t jack off or anything, just sits there and watches me. Doesn’t even sweat – bastard.”

Wet, yes – shockingly, embarrassingly wet, thinking of tall and lean Arc standing in front of her swarthy patron. Was his cock hard? Part of Pell wanted it to be – for him to be visceral and primitive. Throbbing but too corked to take it out, to stroke it and thus show himself for the little monkey he really was. But she also wanted it to be flaccid, a soft dick in silk boxers – the deep and impenetrable sexuality of the fetishist, the elaborate and methodical orchestrations of the truly fixated. Maybe his sexuality was in his touch, the way he ran dark-complexioned fingers across corded, street-strong muscles, or – deeper, darker, and Pell got even more wet – not across skin but across alloys, plastics, servos: the fetish of replacement, a chrome and metal hard-on for rebuilding, remaking.

“He just sits there and looks at me. Sometimes, I don’t know why, I get all wet – like I want him to jack off or something. Other times he’s just a john, you know? But he doesn’t – jack off I mean. Christ, I don’t know if he even gets a boner -”

Wet, yes – Arc’s hard fingers sliding up and down her swollen cunt-lips, from hard clit to puckered asshole. A rhythmic stroking. Pell looked down at Arc’s own nipples, seeing them hard, hard, hard – and hoped it still wasn’t from the cool air.

“He just watches me, you know. Looking at my hands, my legs, my face. Sometimes he moves his hand, you know, like this -”

Glistening with cunt-juice on three fingers, the hand came up, whispering along the stained sheets, to demonstrate: a model showing off this season’s line in artificial fingers, hands, wrists, arms.

Then Arc smiled, bent down and kissed Pell again – a sweet kiss, with no bite, no hammering tongue. Just a match of lips – silk to silk. Again, as they kissed, exchanging hot breaths, cool metal between Pell’s spread thighs, cool fingers in her too hot cunt.

“When he finds something he likes, something about me, he’ll hold his hand up and I’ll stop right there and just let him look. Then he’ll pay me and send me away.”

The hand was cooler than before – almost chilled – and Pell put her legs together. But Arc was stronger, and pushed them apart – hard.

“Then he’ll get me back – in a day, sometimes a fuck longer. He’ll still be sitting there in that chair, still in a fucking suit. But this time he’ll have a box on the table – some Japanese thing, wood and everything, you know. I’ll take the box and leave.”

Arc was playing with her asshole, ringing it with slick, cool metal fingers, tapping gently at her back door. Fear made Pell’s ears ring and she, for a moment, pushed herself further up the bed, with the illusion of going for another sweet kiss – but really to escape the penetration. Arc met flesh with the back of her head, though, bent her down and pushed her – too hard – towards her tight nipples, and at the same time pushed a single artificial finger inside Pell’s asshole.

“He’s got this doc, over in Chinatown. Private place. Real fancy. I just show up, right, and he does it. Real classy shit, even a fuckin’ mint on my pillow when I wake up. Don’t even see the fuckin’ knife. Just go in, take a fuckin’ pill and wake up – a little more.”

Arc’s fingers pushed hard, deep into Pell’s asshole. There was a feeling like having to shit, a deep pushing sensation that matched Arc’s movements into herself.

“I just walk in there and that box is sitting there, waiting, for me. Nurses like fuckin’ geishas, pasty-faced and quiet as shit. Give me this little blue thing on a satin pillow.”

How many fingers now? Hard to say, hard to focus. Words in Pell’s ear, Arc’s tight little nipple in her hungry sucking mouth, Arc’s cold metal fingers in her burning asshole. The world was tight, complete – none of it, not one element, was the reason for the fire in her: the finger – or fingers – methodically fucking her asshole were cool, strong and persistent in their in-out, in-out pumping; in her mouth, Arc’s nipple tasted of hot skin and salt, the roughness of the tight flesh like a delicious treat that she rolled around in her savoring mouth; the words were strange, unusual and frightening – and this fear made it all the more wrong, all the more disturbing, all the more hot.

Arc moaned, a growling sound like something a jungle cat might make. Her flesh-and-blood hand stroked the back of Pell’s head, tangling itself in her hair. Sharp pulls as strands broke under her passion were like gentle fireworks in Pell’s mind.

“Fuck… one time I didn’t zap out so quick. So I got up and looked in that box. Fuck -” Growl again. “- it was an arm, that time. Already had the hand. Real pretty thing, all metal and smooth. Like jewelry, you know. Like fucking jewelry. Strong, yeah, and firm – lot better than skin.”

Two fingers, yes, Pell could feel them – and the fear of tearing, the fear of blood, made her clench down hard, a shitting clench that stopped Arc’s methodical fucking for only a second, till she grabbed Pell’s hair and pulled her away from her so-sweet (really salty) priceless nipple. That shock, that cascade of pulling hair, the strain on her neck, released her control and her asshole relaxed. Then three fingers in her asshole – yes, three…

Satisfied that Pell wasn’t going to clamp, wasn’t going to stop, Arc shoved her back towards her chest, her small, hard tits, and – yes – her nipples. Again, Pell hunted with her lips, sought with her hunger, the knotted points and started to suck, lick, nibble and even bite – as if this tit, this nipple was the source of all life, all love… all desire.

“Opened it up – and there it was. But I saw something else. Man, it’s pretty – don’t you think? So strong, so clean – perfect, fuckin’ perfect. As perfect as someone can make it – like fuckin’ art. Art, jewelry – fuckin’ jewelry.”

How many fingers? Pell didn’t care. The only thing in her world was Arc’s fingers, her asshole, Arc’s flesh-and-blood fingers on the back of her head, and Arc’s tight, hard nipple in her mouth – and her cunt: her hungry, hungry cunt. All it took was a quick shift of her body, a tiny movement to free her hand – then, there, her fingers parted her wet cunt-lips, scooped a bit of the slippery juice and started to work her throbbing clit. The first was a shimmer of power that raced from the pulse in her tiny, hard bead up her spine and to her lips – which started to shake around Arc’s nipple.

“There was fucking come on the metal. Sure as shit. Ain’t that freaky? Just a little, like someone had missed cleaning it all up. Fucker that jacked off on it, thinking of them cutting my arm off, slicing it away like fuckin’ meat and sticking that beautiful thing on me -”

There, right there. Fingers in asshole, finger on clit, mouth on tit, real skin on the back of her head, Pell broke the suction with Arc’s nipple and cried as the come tore its way out of her, ripped through her throat in a selfless cry of beautiful release. To burst it further, make it fly faster, Arc fucked her harder – slapping her artificial fingers deep within Pell, pounding her puckered asshole.

It lasted for moments, minutes, longer than anything before – a rolling, surging peaks-and-valley kind of cascade of orgasms. It put spots before Pell’s eyes and clamped her thighs around the machine in her asshole.

When it finally faded, leaving behind the hammering of her heart, it also left her the sight of Arc looking down into her eyes – click, click, click – and smiling, wide, broad, and true. “See, I knew you’d like it,” she said. Holding Pell still, they both rolled off into sleep.

Pell tried to remember everything she knew about prostheses – about the mating of flesh and machine. Looking out the window, she counted them. Five in half an hour. Some days there seemed to be more, others she almost never saw any. They were all but invisible through their consistency. How many cars did she see in a day? How many computers? How many security cameras? How many did she not see, but were there anyway? She didn’t understand the mechanics behind any of them but she still lived with them daily.

Her only intimate knowledge was her father’s bank account. She guessed that she really should have known more about the breakthroughs she’d heard – one item, a “polymonic mycelin-sheath” buzzed through her mind but its context was meaningless – after all, her father had ridden the technological wave. Even though most of his claims and patents hadn’t held up in court, he’d still managed to make enough in the boom to give his daughter a little nest in the city. Not enough. But a not a little, either.

Thinking of her father and the money was lead in her belly. Instead she thought about the more physical manifestations of artificial limbs, organs. She knew that they were cheaper than they had been – though the ones that Arc had were more expensive: craftsmanship always cost. She knew that you could sell an arm, a leg, an eye and buy a replacement with a little cash left over. It was common among people her age, SAC money disappearing, to sell something to keep conscription at bay – but between selling and buying, the income wasn’t all that great.

By presidential decree, first choice of donor limbs always went to returning vets. Looking out her window, she realized that some of the people she guessed were all flesh and all blood were more than likely made up of someone else’s flesh and blood – eyes, ears, legs, arms, hands – and those that clicked, hummed and glimmered under the unexpected sunlight were veterans of only trying to escape the war.

Get busted and the courts offered you a deal: leave something behind and you can walk free (unless you left your legs to pay your fine).

Turning away from the window, Pell went back to her sketch pad. Charcoal and fine line, she’d indulged herself in filling in some of her preliminary sketches of Arc. She didn’t really know when the fear of capturing the woman had gone, but one day it had. Possibly because she expected the woman to reappear. Arc was a part of her life. It felt good.

But there was an ache as well. Something had altered. Like the ground shifting beneath her feet so that left wasn’t quite left any more – as if the whole world had subtly changed – she saw Arc differently. Strong, yes – but there was something else. An edge that hadn’t been there since she’d seen Arc’s tears. It was a jagged edge, something that Arc seemed to secretly delight in showing Pell.

Like her “client”. Sitting on the edge of Arc’s bed, she’d spun a long and detailed tale of him. European. Possibly Spanish. She’d even visited him at work, at one of the posh citadels downtown. NeuroGen, Pell remembered. She described his breath, said it smelled of cloves. His skin was dark and shone as if he sweated – but his skin, Arc said, was never damp. He had a gold tooth, far in the back of his mouth, that you could see when he laughed. It was always done, these detailed stories, without a sense of affection. Pell had the sense that Arc was sharing with her – showing her life to her. The man wasn’t anything except a client – but one with an unusual inclination. He liked to give her gifts. What he did with Arc’s original parts, he never said, or Arc didn’t say.

Arc also took meticulous pride in showing Pell her newest additions, giving her endless details of manufacture, limitations, degree of workmanship.

The sketch pad was bulky so she laid it out on the floor. With the first sketch, she’d tried to capture Arc as she’d first seen her. Not her eye. The woman. The sheet of slightly off-yellow paper in fact was blank, undrawn, around that part of her face. Only her gray eye, and not her steel eye, looked out at Pell from the paper.

Lying with her soft belly on the hardwood floor, Pell flipped through the sketches. She knew that she’d failed to capture Arc as she’d walked back and forth through her life but the memories still stirred by the sketches were strong and thrilling to her. The day they’d gone out for coffee. The night Arc had awakened Pell with a nightmare – Pell had held the woman for hours, it’d seemed, while Arc cried from her real eye and heaved air in panic. The day they’d stayed inside and made love for hours.

The last one. Half a face. A torso hovering on an off-yellow void. Just one eye, a nose, a smile, one ear. That was all that remained of Arc.

Pell stared at the sketch for long minutes, and tried not to think of the next sketch she might make.

Days, weeks. Maybe a month. A blur of time, a cascade of events: Arc standing, naked in front of the dirty windows – long, hard body gleaming with elegant artificiality. As Arc moved like a slow dancer, Pell at first thought the performance for her benefit, and slowly started to rub herself. Then she noticed Arc’s eyes tightly shut, the dance just a movement, a testing, of her real, and artificial parts.

Arc and Pell in bed together. Hard darkness outside – deep night. They were masturbating together, sweet kisses – butterfly wings – breasts and nipples grazing each other, tingles of feedback sensuality, hands between their legs, working ecstasy. It was a game with natural rules: don’t touch, save for glancing lips, and savor the pleasure of the other. Pell lost, with three fingers deep inside the wet folds of her cunt, with her clit a hard finger nestled among them – with her other hand, she brushed Arc’s working fingers, needing to know that she, too, was feeling pleasure.

She encountered stillness. No movement. A coolness, a hardness. Why, she wondered when next Arc left her world for a few days, a week, had she expected her to rub herself with her real, flesh and blood, hand? Two choices: meaty reality, or cold artificiality?

Arc didn’t want to talk of her benefactor, but, still, some information leaked out… tiny portions of information. Pell found herself storing them, building a picture of Arc’s time when she wasn’t with her. She imagined details, things she knew she didn’t have any knowledge of: his eyes, for instance, were jade green. His breath smelled of cilantro. He had an accent, somewhere with palm trees, white-painted houses and a sea so blue as to appear cinematic.

She never asked, but she wanted to. She wanted to frame the words, even more than the explosive “love”, to put them out. To ask to capture her lover live, sitting still and poised for her charcoal, her pencils. She didn’t though and, like “love” it was an invisible thing between them. But like she could think of Arc as her lover when the strong girl wasn’t there, wasn’t really there, she could still sketch from memory.

The next sketch she did make, and the one after: fractions of her, pieces separated by blank, white paper. Lips and one gray eye. One hand. The slight rise of her smooth belly, the swell of her mons. The slope of her breasts – the way they seemed a natural extension of her firmness, her muscles.

But the drawings she wanted to make, craved to make with an energy that scared her, was to fill in those blank areas, those sections of cool metal, state-of-the-art technology. She wanted to sketch out the whole of her – but not what she could see.

She had no reason to be there. She didn’t belong there – cars glided past on silent induction motors, the occupants just shadows through bullet-proof glass. The few that walked the streets of the Financial District wore suits that would have kept her off the street, away from Induction, for years. They were uniformly clean, manicured, and poised.

Walking through the cool, shadowy canyons between the black-glassed towers she never once saw a copper eye, a steel hand, a plastic leg. She saw a bald man in a shimmering black suit, his eyes hidden behind a complexity of image-intensifying glasses. One of his hands was flesh and blood but black, a powered matt darkness: his crime hadn’t reduced him to mating metal, plastics and “polymonic mycelin-sheaths”. Money can bring you anything – even skin and bone.

Pell walked the cold canyons for most of the morning, getting cold, suspicious stares from the men and women she passed. Arc had bragged to her, “that big place – all silver and gold, on the corner of California and Sansome”. The office where her benefactor had seen her once. It didn’t exist. Arc had told her – it slipped out – that his name was Guerrera and that he was some kind of corporate attorney, working for an office of NeuroGen.

Pell walked in the shadows of more money than she could ever count in her lifetime, money that would drown her if she had to swim in it. She walked past men and women who could buy her, every limb, digit, and organ on a whim. These people didn’t have the blade of Central America hanging over their heads, the horrible sucking vacuum of the street. That woman with the sterling silver cortical jacks on the back of her neck, that fat man in the cream-colored suit carrying a tattooed briefcase made of human skin, that young boy in the sailor’s suit – their world was easy, malleable. With the right application of money and fear, disease, hunger, vanished. It was a comfortable insulation against the rest of the world – anything painful or frightening.

Pell walked, looking for the silver and gold building on the corner of California and Sansome, looking for the offices of NeuroGen, for Mr Guerrera.

She didn’t know why she’d come downtown – no, she did know: she was well aware of her reasons, but they weren’t realistic. They were a child’s reasons, pleads and begs: “Find someone else to buy a piece at a time.” She couldn’t offer money; she thought about offering her body – but she wasn’t Arc. She was young and flesh and blood. If he liked the caress of steel and rubber, then she doubted that Mr Guerrera of NeuroGen would find her interesting.

Pell walked downtown till the sun peered over the tops of the highest buildings, casting a brilliant, long shadow through the heart of this people’s territory. She walked and walked but never once found anything close to a silver and gold building on California and Sansome, an office of NeuroGen, or a Mr Guerrera who liked to buy girls one part at a time.

Later, as darkness started to fall, she wandered the rest of what Arc had told her, looking for the house, looking for the Chinese clinic. Looking until there wasn’t enough light to really see – or, for the first time, seeing for the first time.

Arc was lying back on her bed, smoking a black cigarette. It smelled: the bite of distantly burning rubber. Her one real eye was dilated, the pupil pushed back till there was barely anything left of her gray iris. It was a bottomless pit that was endless soaking up the details of Pell’s ceiling.

There was a company called NeuroGen. It was a big one. Worldwide. They manufactured a tailored virus that strengthened neurons, made them easier to connect to “polymonic mycelin-sheaths”. They didn’t have an office in San Francisco, or even Los Angeles.

Pell was laying at the foot of the bed, at Arc’s feet – head on the cold strength of one of her artificial legs. Turning her head, Pell could see up between Arc’s legs: the pinched skin around her upper thighs where technology mated with flesh. The curves where hips turned into ass. The seam of her hairless cunt, her dark folds.

Pell wanted to touch her, to put out a hand and place it, careful, on the architecture of her cunt, to feel the heat of her reality – but was unable to reach far enough past the metal to reach what skin remained. She could see but not touch.

There was no Mr Guerrera employed by NeuroGen. There was no Mr Guerrera listed anywhere in the city that she could find. The building on the corner of California and Sansome was a black glass tower. Had been there for twenty-five years. It was solely owned by a Japanese banking conglomerate. Had been for twenty-five years.

Turning her head, Pell looked down Arc’s long body. Steel and copper, electronics she didn’t understand. High-impact ceramics, “intelligent” plastics, artificial skin. She looked at Arc and saw materials and machinery. They were beautiful in their design, elegant in their purpose.

Pell looked up at her and saw their purpose.

She didn’t know what to do. The future was dead, frozen – the world was just her, her tiny apartment and her sudden understanding of Arc. The paths that she could go were fuzzy, unimportant against the pain, the revelation: she would go back to her father. She would live on the street. She would be conscripted and die – her epitaph like Jare’s, an automated email message saying “DEATH NOTIFICATION” but meaning a young man’s body in the jungle. She would sell some drawings, some paintings, earn enough so she could afford flesh and blood, and not have to settle for steel, iron, copper, plastic. Fuzzy futures, part of someone else’s history.

Suddenly, she needed Arc. Needed her complete and whole. Needed to touch her, to make contact.

It had been a long time since that other Pell appeared – the brave ghost that lived somewhere in the young girl. The last time had been blood-red wine on a white dress, a burst against San Francisco black. She had been alone, needing company and love. Then, there, on her bed in her little place, she had the same feeling again.

Getting up, she crawled up Arc’s long body. Seeing her coming – click, click, click – the tall woman turned a slightly frightened face her way, looking down her body. Then she sighed, a heavy sound ringing of exhaustion and – maybe – fear. She ground out the smelly cigarette on Pell’s battered nightstand, blowing out the last of the smoke with two jets of blue smoke from her narrow nostrils.

Pell kissed her, tasting the reality of the harsh smoke on her breath. She was straddling Arc, her heavy breasts and tight nipples pressed against Arc’s smooth chest. She hoped that she was wet, hoped that her cunt was dripping – but honestly didn’t care. Spreading her legs, she dropped herself down till her cunt-lips spread over the coolness of Arc’s prosthetic left knee.

No, not that. She wanted reality, honesty. She wanted the real person, the real woman, Arc. Moving again, she slid herself against Arc’s upthrust leg, breaking their kiss and pushing her breasts against Arc’s face. Tender kisses – hesitant but with a restrained hunger, landed on their slopes, skipped across her nipples.

Pell knew what she wanted, knew in an instant – but she didn’t have the tools to ask, didn’t have the tools to even frame the request.

She wanted one of those metal, plastic, alloy, legs off. She wanted the raw reality of Arc’s stump, the chopped-off harshness of her. Real flesh, real blood, real scars. She wanted to make love to that, to take it into herself – through her mouth, through her cunt, through her heart. She wanted it, could see it, taste it, feel it. An abrupt mass of scars, like a tightly closed mouth. The black dots where the electronics emerged to mate with the limb. It wasn’t the ugliness of what she knew was between Arc and her limb that had her weak, pulsing with desire; it was the thought of finally making love to Arc, the real one, the painful and raw one.

A hand between her legs, slipping between her thighs. A hand between her legs, slipping between her cunt-lips – finding her clit. A gentle tap, a smooth rhythm, and with it Pell let her mind race, let her mind go where her lips couldn’t.

A loosening of the socket, a few minor adjustments to divorce rubber gasket from leg, then the peeling of rubber from raw stump. The smell of it, like old worn clothing, like a well-exercised armpit. Maybe dirt, maybe something like earwax. But real, solid, raw. She’d like to taste it, to bring a bit of Arc into herself. Something like snot, maybe something like cunt-juice when she hadn’t washed for a while. Real, though – so real.

She wanted that reality in her. She wanted to lie back, to spread herself as wide as she could, to swallow that actuality – to have Arc move herself, position herself to those scars, that tissue, was pressing harder and harder against her lips. She wanted Arc inside her, wanted the pure skin, the pure gristle, the pure essence of Arc inside her cunt, inside her. She wanted Arc to make love to her – with nothing in the way.

There, right there – the thought of stump pushing aside lips, of wetness closing around scars, of a bigness beyond any fist, pushed Pell over. The come wasn’t something really physical, though it did have all the notes, all the tempo: it was a shaking, an emotional blast through her body. Like a come, she shook and squirted clear liquid down onto Arc’s fingers, soaking the bed once again. Like a come, she felt faint, felt her heart hammering in her chest. Like a come, her breath was short and quick.

Unlike just a come, the feeling lasted, a cool sadness. A knowledge of futility. Only in her dream, only in her fantasy – raw reality. Only in her mind, the real Arc, the real flesh, the real bone.

She wasn’t tired, but she crawled up and curled up onto Arc’s body. She knew she must have been heavy, but didn’t care. She felt her sweaty skin slide over Arc’s cool body and, slowly, she positioned herself so that all she touched, all she made contact with, was nothing but Arc.

Arc left in the morning. If she would come back or not, Pell didn’t know. She cared, of course, but didn’t know if Arc did.

She sat by the dirty window for close to an hour, feeling the revelation, the secret knowledge. At the end of that hour she wanted Arc all the more, feeling privileged at having touched as much as she had.

Pell had finally seen Arc, herself. That was the real time ahead, the real choices: maybe Pell would leave – walk away from the memories of days with Arc. Maybe she would stay, and watch her lover barricade herself within an artificial body – retreat against Pell’s caring, her love.

Maybe she’d be back, maybe with more parts, maybe with less. Maybe she’d never return, her details fading into a simple melancholy at the sight of cool metals, plastics replacing flesh. Two roads, two ways to go. But one thing was certain, as sadness or as love, Arc would be whole and real in her mind.

But, for certain, if she returned, Pell would be there – to touch as much of her as she could, for as long as there was something to touch.