I blushed and approached the wall. Close to my back, the cement radiated cold though my clothes and uniform. If I was forced to strip like Mizra and Uzdal had, I would freeze. Would Devich show me pity if I started to turn blue?
"Take quite an interest in your fellow collectors, don't you?" Devich muttered. He didn't sit, but remained standing in front of his chair, arms crossed, lips thin. Sharp shadows gave his face planes of anger and an appropriate green hue.
I held back a retort, a spider-bite. "Is it really a concern of yours?"
"They're my team," I answered instead. I fought against anger, against the need to scream in his face, tell him everything that had happened and how desperately I had needed him when he wasn't there. But that wasn't his fault. I could have searched, couldn't I? Found a building I hardly remembered, or a home I had no address to. "Of course I take an interest in them. But I have-" I drew the words out, dropped my voice, hoped he understood and didn't think my association with collectors was making me dull and unhinged "-other interests."
Devich had been sorting through his slides again. He paused, summoned them back into his palm. "Do you?"
"Oh yes, interests outside of collecting. Consuming ones."
Devich looked up. His thin lips struggled against a rising smile. "Consuming? Have trouble controlling these interests?"
"Oh yes. But they give me exactly what I want."
"Well, aren't you lucky?"
"I've come to think so." The tension shifted, and I found it easier to breathe. Taking my clothes off was growing rapidly less frightening. "If only I could show you," I whispered the final words, hoping they wouldn't carry further than Devich, past his body to Mizra and Uzdal or over the screen to Kichlan.
Devich cleared his throat loudly. Finally, he sat, looking uncomfortable, his hands in his lap. "So." He cleared his throat again. "Shall we proceed?"
I grinned. "Oh, absolutely." I pulled my blouse over my head as Devich dragged a stiff leather case out from beneath his chair.
He left me in my camisole and the small drawers I had worn beneath my uniform. Both were simple things, secondhand clothes Valya had soaked in lime powder and left in the sun for days before allowing me to wear.
If Devich noticed anything different in the underwear, he didn't remark. But then, apart from the softness that came from factory-spun cotton and inner linings of silk, they weren't all that different from my usual, ever-practical fare.
"Now." Devich stood. "Let me see."
Goosebumps rose along my arm as he lifted it. It wasn't the cold anymore. He turned my hand gently; light from the suit surged and shone in patterns over his face. But he wasn't watching the suit. Instead, his eyes held mine. They swam with strange letters, symbols I could not read and had not seen before.
"What happened?" he whispered. He was so close to me, touching me, and it was difficult to remember that there were other people in this room. That we were not alone.
I breathed in his smell. Tension in my shoulders, tension I hadn't known existed, eased out.
"I was thrown out," I mouthed the words, voice as silent as I could make it. "The landlord sent two men to take me away."
Devich's hand tightened on mine. For a moment we were joined, hand to hand, eye to eye. Closer than sex, it felt, simple and truthful. I squeezed him back. Gently, he placed my hand against my hip and moved to pick up my left. He hadn't checked my suit once.
"You got away?" He pretended to bend over my wrist. Even nodded before releasing my hand and leaning into my neck.
I could feel the heat from his breath, the warmth of his body as it arched over mine. Made it very hard to concentrate. Very hard to keep up the pretence of a reluctant debris collector and her technician.
"Yes. I got away." I didn't extrapolate. I didn't even like to think about that evening in any detail. But he deserved a better explanation than that. "I didn't know where you live. I still don't. I wanted to go to you, but I didn't know where. So I came here instead, found a new place to stay, new clothes."
Not entirely honest, not exactly accurate. But close enough.
Devich touched my waist. He ran fingers around the edge of my suit. They set me shivering. "I'm sorry," he murmured in my ear.
Over his shoulder I could see Mizra and Uzdal's backs. Their technician was fiddling with Uzdal's waist. I took the moment to lean against Devich. He slipped his hands beneath my camisole, stroked upward over smooth skin and scar alike, to cup my breasts gently. His palms were warm, and left a cool breeze when he released me and returned to the suit.
"I should have told you where I live. I should have given you an option. Somewhere safe to run to. I guess-" he touched my chin with one finger and turned my face to his "-I never imagined you would need one."
He kissed me. Something hurried, something desperate, the press of his lips so hard my teeth nearly cut my own mouth. Then he stepped away and drew a sharp instrument from his bag. "I wouldn't concern yourself," he said, suddenly very loud. The bubble we had created around us, the small, warm world popped with the sound. "It doesn't hurt."
A quick glance up told me the technician was watching us. How much had he seen?
"If you say so," I answered. "I hope not."
"Trust us, Miss Vladha. We know what we're doing." Devich crouched at my feet. "Give me your wrists again." I held out a hand. He gripped it softly, and inserted the thin edge of the instrument between my skin and suit.
There wasn't much space to insert it in. He pushed gently, and I winced as it cut into my skin.
"Careful!" I hissed. Blood trickled down from beneath the silver band. He pulled a kerchief from his pale coat and dabbed it away.
"Wonderful," he said.
"Wonderful? That hurt." I frowned down at him.
He balanced himself, one hand high on my bare thigh. My frown vanished.
"Apologies. But it is wonderful. No distinction between suit and skin, even after time, even after use. This is very, very good. And look." He lifted my hand up; I peered at the suit.
Something was moving in the cut he had made. Tiny wiggling things like insect legs, but a pale, silvery blue. They struggled, kicking out into the air he had opened me to, dancing a bizarre and violent dance.
I felt faint, but Devich's grip on hand and thigh kept me upright. "What is that?" I choked out.
"The suit." How could he possibly sound so calm? "It's the best bond I've seen. Look, it doesn't want to be separated from you. It won't allow it."
The legs were sewing me up. Using threads of that same, pale metal, like thinner versions of themselves. Their stitches were tight, and together formed a tiny plate, an extension of the band itself, tugging skin together, covering the cut. Stopping the bleeding.
I didn't know what to feel. Sick, for the thing inside me, the thing Devich had put there. Or a desperate sense of how unfair this was. If I had fallen with the suit on, if Tsana had cut me up with the suit on, would it have sewn me together? Would it have allowed me to be maimed?
"I told you, didn't I?" Devich let go of my hand and started on the other. He didn't prod this time, didn't cut. Merely pulled at the skin and looked for a gap. I already knew there wouldn't be one. "You will be stronger, you will be better." He leaned forward, so close to my pelvis his lips were nearly touching my drawers where they stretched over bone. "Than any other collector."
Did that include my team? I was hardly better than any of them. But he didn't know, how could he understand? Gaps between suit and skin didn't mean anything, not in the tiring, dirty everyday.
"Devich?" A new voice in our close dialogue. The other technician.
Devich, not the least bit fazed, simply leaned away from me and looked over his shoulder. "Yes?" He still held the sharp, hooked instrument in one hand and was touching the skin below my waist with the other.