Inhabited - chapter 23 (with images) (Patreon)

The pain has a different geometry this morning.

Yesterday it was a hot iron settled in the bowl of the pelvis, anchored and dense. Today something has shifted, a tighter sharper pull caught somewhere deep behind the left ovary, yanking taut every time she changes position. She lies on the mattress and tracks the tension line up into her lower back while the flat gray light bleeds through the blinds.

She rolls onto her right side in slow segmented increments, keeping the core muscles slack, and gets her feet to the floor. She pushes up with her arms.

The hook bites. She stops breathing, eyes watering, waits for the tissue to stop objecting. When it settles back to its dull throbbing baseline, she stands.

She goes to the bathroom. Sitting on the toilet is its own problem, the impact on the tailbone first and then the wait, because nothing empties cleanly on a flare day. Everything in there is too inflamed to move easily past everything else. She sits with her forearms on her thighs and her head hanging and waits it out. The bathroom smells like the lavender soap on the sink edge, and underneath it, faintly, the bleach in the grout.

She stands, washes her hands, opens the drawer. She takes the mefenamic. Eight left.

Back in the main room, she goes straight to the desk and picks up the halo. Yesterday's knot is still in her hair from sleeping. She pulls it loose and pulls it up high on her head the way the rig needs it, ties it off. The motion pulls the same shoulder as yesterday and she makes a sound through her nose that she doesn't quite decide to make.

She adjusts the lumbar support. Fits the halo. Pulls the visor down.

The white-out. The dark. The physical body stops.

She loads into Fatima's digital loft. The sunlit ocean, the exposed brick.

She doesn't want the sunlight today. She brings up the environment controls and kills the rendering. The loft dissolves into a black void, no horizon line, no light source. Better. She opens a raw terminal window. It floats in the dark, a flat rectangle of green text.

She needs to assemble the pieces she's been carrying across eight bodies.

The halo array tracks her finger movements in the empty air, translating them into keystrokes.

The routing syntax goes in first, the command lines from Ruth's customer-facing ticketing software, clunky, designed for support drones, but pointing directly at the null bucket where the dissociation reports have been buried. She types it from memory the way you remember a phone number you used to call. Then the enterprise directory pathway, the authentication protocols she'd mapped from Nadia's firm in Tribeca. The protocol tells the NovaSphere servers she's pinging from a registered commercial node with clearance. The green text cascades down the floating screen.

The hard part is the timing.

She brings up the proxy layer handshake protocol and watches the latency monitor. The system pings the server, asking for a current admin credential. The proxy absorbs the request. There is a 1.2-second window while the server waits for a response.

She types the deprecated token sequence, the one the engineer had written on a folded piece of printer paper in Elena's office, pressing hard with a ballpoint like she knew it needed to survive. Legacy project credentials.

She hits execute as the latency window peaks.

The terminal freezes. The cursor blinks.

If the handshake fails, the token sequence burns permanently. The door closes and she's done.

She holds her breath. The avatar has no lungs. The reflex fires anyway.

The screen flashes.

The green text wipes. A new directory tree populates.

Root access.

She's inside the session archive. No graphical interface, no map. Just the raw text of every body that has ever logged in, stretching out in the dark further than the terminal can render.

She runs a query.

Search: Osei, Michael

The terminal hesitates. A block of logs materializes.

He had been an active user. Press environments, developer lounges, unlisted community boards. Hours and hours of it logged over months. She scrolls to the bottom of the list.

The final entry: about a month ago.

She opens the log file. The session environment is a locked private instance. Not a public lounge. Somewhere he built, or somewhere someone invited him.

She looks at the termination code.

Standard logouts generate a clean sequence. Cache saved, port closed, signal dropped cleanly. Osei's termination code is an interrupt. A hard abnormal stop. The system hadn't closed the port. The connection had simply vanished, severed at the hardware level. The rig had lost power, or been forcibly disconnected while the session was active.

She pulls the metadata block attached to the interrupt.

The IP address. The MAC address of the physical machine. NovaSphere logs the physical routing node of every active session to optimize server loads. She highlights the IP and runs a reverse geolocation trace.

The coordinates resolve to a residential block in Brooklyn.

A street name. An apartment number. Fort Greene.

She stares at the glowing green letters in the void. A real place. A physical door on a physical street. She is looking at the last known location of a man who has not been seen in about a month. She has found a way home.

The system throws a warning prompt in the corner of the terminal. The automated security sweep is beginning its cycle. The bypass won't hold against an active sweep.

She wipes the terminal cache, kills the query, drops the connection.

The white-out.

She pulls the visor off.

The Crown Heights apartment comes back fast. Cold air, gray light, the pull behind her ovary reasserting itself immediately, the shoulder aching where she keeps catching it wrong. The ThermaCare patch on her back has cooled to lukewarm. She peels it off, drops it in the trash.

Her phone vibrates on the desk.

Sofia.

She stares at the name. Fatima's instinct comes up the way the rest of her does — ignore it, text back in an hour, find a deadline or a bad pain day to point at.

She answers.

"Hey," she says. Fatima Kardar's voice, slightly husky, tired.

"Hey." Sofia's voice is careful on the other end. "I saw you were online. I didn't want to interrupt if you were with a client."

"Just finished."

A pause. Traffic in the background. Sofia's outside somewhere.

"I have a meeting near the park this afternoon," Sofia says. "Free around two. Do you want to get a coffee? Or I can come to you if that's easier."

There it is. Sofia always gives her the out. It's what the friendship has become — Sofia engineering escape hatches in advance so the refusal doesn't have to be explicit.

The hook behind the ovary makes itself felt. The sheer logistics of getting dressed, down the stairs, into a hard chair in a public place with no control over when she gets to leave. Fatima's body is already at a deficit just from the archive work, just from sitting at the desk.

"Let's get coffee," she says. "I'll meet you."

The silence on the line is total. Long enough that Fatima can hear traffic on Sofia's end. A horn somewhere.

"You want to go out."

"Yeah."

"Okay. Where? Sorry. The place on Vanderbilt?"

"Two o'clock."

"Two. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, see you."

She hangs up.

The preparation begins.

A shower is not happening. She doesn't have the balance for standing under falling water and the heat would only make the inflammation worse. She goes into the bathroom and runs the tap to hot, wets a washcloth, wrings it out. Leans her hip hard against the counter for the weight.

She works the cloth across her neck and collarbones first. The warmth lifts off the skin in a small humid drift. She does her chest, holding the cloth flat against her sternum for a second before moving it. The fabric is rough enough to feel. She rinses it, wrings it, runs it under one breast and then the other, the cotton warm against the skin, slower than she meant to be.

She does her armpits. She does her stomach, careful around the patch, lifting the hem of the sleep shirt. She rinses the cloth, soaks it again, runs it down the inside of one arm and up the other. The water against the inside of her elbow is good in a way she does not have language for. She does the back of her neck. She holds the cloth against her face for a second longer than necessary. It is warm and that is almost all it is.

Deodorant. A face wipe, the kind with a little tint that functions as moisturizer if you use enough of them. The dry shampoo is on the shelf above the toilet. She works it through the dark thick hair in sections, then pulls it up into a high knot that will stay out of the way. The motions are mechanical. But underneath them she is, briefly, present in this body in a way she has not been since waking up in it.

The closet. She needs a waistband that sits completely below the worst of it. The long black linen skirt is there, elastic, soft, wide, and she steps into it slowly, one hand against the doorframe, and eases it up. The cream-colored sweater, the one that falls past her hips. Flat soft-soled boots she can step into without bending.

She peels a fresh ThermaCare from the box. Presses it to the inside the waistband of her underwear, against her stomach, low. Second-to-last patch. She makes a note in Fatima's phone to order more. She probably won't be here when they arrive. But Fatima will need them.

She picks up the keys and goes.

The stairs. The cold. The four blocks to the subway, each crack in the pavement a small problem, the wind finding the gap between her collar and her neck and staying there. She keeps her arms crossed over her stomach, holding the heat in.

The G train is not crowded in the afternoon. She gets a seat.

She gets off at Clinton-Washington and walks to Vanderbilt. The café is small. White tile, marble tables, the smell of espresso and burnt sugar. Sofia is already there, near the window, a tortoiseshell clip in her dark curly hair, olive-green coat over the back of the chair. Her laptop is open but she snaps it shut the moment she looks up.

There is an involuntary thing in Fatima's chest at the sight of her. A small low jolt that lands somewhere south of the sternum and pulls forward, and her face goes warm before she has a chance to decide anything about her face. Her pulse does something at the base of her throat. The skin behind her ears goes hot. Lower down, beneath the linen waistband and underneath the pain, she feels a stir that has nothing to do with the pain, a small drawing-together sensation in the lowest part of her belly.

The warmth could be Fatima's, archived, surfacing the way Fatima's apartment layout surfaced, the way Fatima's professional reflexes surface when she touches a vector line. Or it could be hers. It could be her responding, in this body, to a woman she has never met before.

She doesn't know. She walks toward the table anyway. The shoulders gather inward briefly, the way they do under any direct attention now, and she lets the gathering happen.

"You made it," Sofia says.

"I made it."

She looks at the chairs before she sits. Metal, no cushion. She considers asking to move to the booth along the wall, but Sofia has already straightened in her seat, and making it a thing would require an explanation, and the explanation would shift the whole gravity of the afternoon. She pulls the metal chair out and lowers herself down, bracing on the table edge, keeping her face neutral while the impact registers.

"I got you an oat milk latte," Sofia says, pushing a mug across the marble. "Still your order?"

"Still my order. Thanks."

Sofia wraps both hands around her own mug. She's watching, not in a pointed way — Sofia doesn't do pointed — but carefully, the way you watch someone who keeps almost falling down.

She doesn't give her anything to see. She drinks the coffee.

"How's the brief?" she asks, nodding at the closed laptop.

Sofia blinks. "The brief?"

"The zoning board appeal. The Navy Yard development."

A small exhale. "Yeah. The city is trying to expedite a permit without running the secondary soil impact study."

"Are they going to get away with it?"

Sofia starts talking. She talks about administrative law hurdles, about an uncooperative judge, about the volume of paperwork her team is drowning in. She talks the way people talk when they've been waiting for someone to ask. Not just answering but unpacking. Spreading things out on the table to see what they look like.

She listens. Not in a monitoring way, not with one eye on the clock. She keeps her eyes on Sofia's face and stays entirely there. It is an effortful kind of attention, the kind you have to choose.

About ten minutes in, Sofia stops mid-sentence.

She's holding her mug partway to her mouth. She sets it back on the saucer.

She looks at Fatima.

The careful distance in Sofia's eyes shifts. Microscopic. The softening around the corners, the way her hands loosen on the mug. She doesn't say anything. She just settles, the way a room settles when a sound finally stops.

Underneath the table, everything is coming apart.

The metal chair offers nothing. The muscles in her lower back are locked in a rigid spasm trying to protect the front of her. The pain has been pulling steadily for the last forty minutes. A hot wave of nausea moves through her stomach and she squeezes her thighs together under the linen skirt and holds the ceramic mug tighter so Sofia won't see the small tremor in her fingers.

"Tell me about the soil impact study," she says.

Sofia tells her. They sit there another forty minutes.

When Sofia finally checks her watch she makes a small pained noise. "I have to go meet the senior partner."

"Go."

They stand. Standing is worse than sitting. The extension of the hip flexors pulls everything taut and the edges of her vision go dark for a second. She grabs the table edge, rearranges the sweater hem, makes it look like that was the thing she was doing.

They walk out together. The cold hits.

They stop at the corner. Sofia turns to her and doesn't do the air-kiss. She steps in and puts her arms around her.

The coat is cold from outside. Sofia's neck above the collar is warm. She smells like vetiver, and underneath that, faintly, the dry clean smell of her hair. Fatima's chin fits at the place where Sofia's shoulder meets her neck the way it has fit there before, many times, the body finding the position on its own without consulting her. Sofia's hand settles flat between her shoulder blades. The other hand is at her lower back, just above where the patch is, careful in a way that is probably not consciously careful, just the hand placing itself where it has always placed itself.

The thing from earlier comes back. Stronger now, with the contact. Sofia's body is small and warm against her own, and she can feel the line of Sofia's collarbone against the side of her face and the soft rise of Sofia's breath through the wool of her coat, and the heat in the lowest part of her belly draws inward again, gathers into something that exists in a part of the body the pain has not been able to reach. Her hand on Sofia's back presses, a fraction, before she has decided to press. Sofia's hand on her own lower back presses back.

She holds Sofia a second longer than she should have. Sofia doesn't pull away. She is the one who eventually steps back, and she does it slowly, her hand sliding from Fatima's shoulder down along her arm before it lets go. The cold rushes into the space where the warm body had been.

"It was really good to see you," Sofia says against her shoulder, just before stepping back. "Really good."

"You too."

Sofia gives her one last look, pleased and something underneath it she doesn't name, and turns and walks toward the subway.

She stands on the corner.

The cold in the empty space where Sofia had been is doing something. Her body is awake in a way it has not been awake in two days. The warmth is still there, low, real, and Fatima has not moved to walk away yet because the body is, for one second, taking inventory of what it just felt and is reluctant to set it down. The cold gets through the sweater. She turns and starts walking toward the train.

Then whatever was holding her up stops.

She barely makes it to the subway. The stairs down to the platform she takes one at a time, both hands on the railing, not looking at anyone, the tears from the pain involuntary and hot at the outer corners of her eyes. The train ride back is a blur. She leans against the doors with her eyes closed.

She drags herself up the stairs to the apartment.

She gets the door open.

She drops her keys on the floor. She takes two steps into the living room and her legs give out and she goes down onto the cheap rug, pulling her knees to her chest, the cream sweater bunching up around her waist. She presses her forehead against the rough synthetic fibers and she does not move. The pain is not localized anymore. It is everything from the waist down, total, consuming, and the tank is completely empty and the bed is too far away.

She lies on the floor of the quiet apartment as the afternoon light outside the windows begins to fail.

The rug smells of old dust and whatever the landlord uses in the hallways.