Inhabited - chapter 25 (with images) (Patreon)

The blank holds for a second, a suspension she has come to know, and then lets go.

The first thing she registers is what isn't there. The pelvis is quiet. No grinding, no fire low in the gut, nothing catching when she breathes in. The hips are just hips against the mattress, and for a few seconds that is the whole fact of the world.

She opens her eyes.

The ceiling is white. A small uneven patch of plaster near the crown molding, shaped vaguely like a thumbprint pressed into wet clay.

Sofia Lopez. Thirty-three. Fort Greene. Environmental lawyer.

She pushes herself up on her elbows. The room is dim, early morning light filtered through bamboo blinds. A dresser in the corner. A potted snake plant on the windowsill that hasn't been watered in a month, the lower leaves yellowing at the tips. The duvet is dark blue linen, soft from a hundred washes.

She sits up. Nothing hurts. The realization arrives slowly, not as thought, just as a thing that becomes true when she moves.

She is inside Fatima's friend.

The woman from the coffee shop on Vanderbilt. The one with the tortoiseshell clip who tried to build a bridge Fatima was too exhausted to cross.

The recognition lands and the body answers it before her mind has finished landing. A heat low in her belly, a slow opening warmth, like a switch that was already half on. She knew she had been pulled toward this body across the marble table. She had told herself it was Fatima's loneliness, Fatima's hunger for some kind of contact, the longing for intimacy of a body daily navigating pain. It had not been only that. She had wanted to look at this woman and had kept looking.

She lies back against the pillows. The duvet is heavy across her hips. She does not move for a few seconds. She is alone. Sofia is alone, has been alone, has not been touched by anyone gently in weeks.

She slides one hand under the hem of the t-shirt she has slept in. The cotton is thin, washed soft. Her palm against her own stomach. The skin is warm. She moves the hand up under the shirt and rests it against the underside of one breast and stops there for a long beat, just feeling the weight of it across her palm, the soft give, the slight cool of the skin where the duvet had not been covering. She does not have to do anything yet. The body has waited.

Sofia's breasts are heavier than the others have been. The skin under them is softer than she expected, and there is a faint crease where the underside meets the ribcage that the body knows about and the mind is learning. Her thumb brushes across the nipple and the nipple is already firm, has been firm since the recognition, and the small drag of cotton across it sends a sharp clean line down through the chest into the belly. She makes a small sound she did not plan. The sound is not loud and there is no one to hear it.

She moves the other hand under the waistband of the cotton sleep shorts. The hair between her legs is dark and curls around her fingers. She is wet. She had known she would be wet before her hand got there. Her own surprise registers as a distant thing, several rooms away from where the rest of her is paying attention.

The pull she had felt toward this body across the café table is still here, intact, magnified by being inside the body it was directed at. She finds the place she is looking for. The body knows exactly where it is and her hand goes to it without consulting her. The first slow circle of her own fingertips against herself moves something deep in her thighs and her hips lift slightly off the mattress.

She lies there in Sofia's bed with one hand under the t-shirt and one hand between her legs, and she takes her time. She is curious. Slow at first, two fingers, and the pleasure builds in a wide circle that has no center and is everywhere along the inside of her thighs, the small of her back, the underside of her breasts, the hollow at the base of her throat. Heat gathering in.

There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of it, when she has the brief unconnected thought that someone has touched her this way before. Not Cara, not Diane. This body has been touched this way before, by a hand that paid attention. The ghost of the hand is in the body's response. She does not pursue the thought. The hand is gone. The body is here. She is the one moving the hand now. She puts a small pillow behind her, strips off her clothes and tosses them on the floor.

She is wet enough that her fingers slide easily, and she works two of them inside herself while the heel of her hand keeps the slow pressure where her body wants it. She tilts her hips slightly to meet her own hand and her breath goes ragged.

It builds slowly. Not toward a peak. Outward, like heat moving through a room. The skin of her arms goes briefly cold and then warm again. Her thighs tense and her belly tightens in a long slow contraction. It rolls through her in a series of waves, each one slower than the last, and at some point in the middle of it her hand stops moving and the body keeps going on its own. She presses the heel of her hand flat against herself and rides it out with her teeth set against her lower lip and the dark blue linen of the duvet tangled around her legs.

When it ends she does not move for a while. The duvet against her thighs. Her own breathing in the quiet room. The radiator clicking on somewhere in the building. Her hand still resting where it is, warm and a little wet, the body settled around it.

She lies there a few minutes longer. The light through the bamboo blinds has gotten incrementally brighter. Her hair is damp at the nape from where she had been pressing her head into the pillow. She rests her hands flat against her stomach, palms down. The body is quiet now. Settled.

She swings her legs over the edge of the bed. Bare feet on a cheap rug, scratchy synthetic fibers, gray with a faint geometric pattern.

She stands. The body holds itself differently from Fatima, from Elena. Her step lands flat. She walks toward the bathroom.

The floorboard right outside the doorframe creaks. She had stepped over it, placing her foot to the left of the seam, before anything told her to. She stops in the doorway. Looks down at her bare foot.

She didn't know the floorboard creaked. She just walked around it.

She touches the doorframe. The wood is painted a glossy white, chipped near the strike plate. She knows the chip is there before her thumb finds it. She stands in the quiet hallway for a long moment. Nine bodies in. Whatever wall exists between what she carried in and what belongs to the host is getting thin. Or it was always thin and she is only noticing it now. She moves through Sofia’s apartment like she belongs there.

The bathroom tile is cold under her feet. She flips the light switch.

She looks in the mirror.

Dark curly hair, chaotic from sleep. Dark eyes, a straight nose. It is the face she had looked at across a marble table two days ago, studying it while she pretended to be someone else. Now it looks back at her, moving when she moves. The skin is olive, clear. A small pale scar on the knuckle of the left thumb, the kind kids get from breaking glass.

She turns on the tap and splashes cold water over her face. The shock against her skin is clean. She reaches for the dark gray towel on the hook behind the door before she has consciously decided to reach for it.

She uses the toilet. After Fatima, doing this with no pressure, no warning ache, no negotiation between the bladder and whatever else was unhappy in there, it almost makes her laugh sitting there. She finishes, washes her hands with a bar of cedar soap, and goes out to the living room.

One bedroom. High ceilings. The bookshelf on the far wall is crowded with thick hardcovers, the bottom two shelves half empty, books leaning against invisible gaps. A credenza holds a stack of mail and a set of keys.

Then she sees the corner by the window.

A NovaSphere rig on a low wooden side table. Mid-range consumer model. The halo array rests neatly over the visor. The heavy cable is coiled in a loop on the floor. A thin layer of dust sits on the black plastic casing, thicker on the visor than on the cable. Which means the visor was the part she stopped touching first.

She stares at it.

An environmental lawyer. The rig does not belong to the rest of the apartment. It sits in the corner like something bought in a hurry and then quietly stopped being used. The man Sofia had been seeing stopped picking up his phone, and Sofia had thought, maybe, in there. Maybe in there is where he is. She put it on. She got dizzy. She left it in the corner and never went back.

She leaves the rig where it is and walks to the kitchen.

The coffee filters are in the cabinet above the microwave. She reaches up and grabs one, puts it in the plastic cone. She takes the bag of ground coffee from the shelf and makes the pour-over.

She drinks it standing at the counter. Outside the window above the sink, the alley between buildings is in deep shadow. From the apartment overhead, faintly, the sound of someone's television.

She goes back to the bedroom and opens the closet. The wardrobe is structured, deliberate, expensive but unshowy. She pushes the hangers aside, finds dark denim jeans and a gray wool sweater. She pulls underwear from the drawer, finds a bra in the same drawer. Sofia keeps her bras folded. The sweater goes on. She sits on the bed's edge and pulls on socks, the wool a little scratchy at the ankle.

Everything fits.

Sofia has a hybrid schedule. Tuesdays are work-from-home. Today is Friday but the same applies, she finds, when she touches the calendar app on her phone. A meeting at four. Otherwise the day is hers.

She takes the coffee to the small desk in the living room. Meticulously organized. A stack of manila folders, a closed laptop, a ceramic cup holding three black pens.

The laptop does not ask for a password. The camera scans her face and the screen unlocks.

The email client is open. The Navy Yard development project.

She reads the brief at the top of the inbox. A dense ninety-page PDF, a secondary soil impact study the city is trying to bypass to expedite a commercial zoning permit. Arsenic levels, industrial runoff, administrative law hurdles. She reads, and Sofia's mind gets to work, which is entirely different from how her own mind usually thinks.

Where her own mind would look for the exploit, the structural flaw to force open, Sofia's mind looks for the precedent. It builds stairs. It takes the information and arranges it into an organized structure of consequence and liability so methodical that working inside it, even briefly, is intimidating.

She works for two hours. Drafts a response to a junior associate, using Sofia's clean declarative sentences. Flags a discrepancy in the soil sampling dates from an appendix on page forty. She does it because the body wants to. The deep satisfaction of a functional, highly trained mind sorting chaos into order is real and present, and the desk keeps the rest of it pushed down for now.

At eleven, she leans back in the ergonomic chair and stretches. The spine pops twice.

She looks at the ceiling for a moment.

Three blocks away, on Vanderbilt, is an apartment with her name on it. Michael Osei. Her body.

The questions he had been asking. The sources he was working. She stepped into all of it and it fit. They fit because they were her questions. Or because she has been asking them for so long they have become hers. The distinction stopped mattering somewhere around Maren. She got too close, fell into the platform, and woke up in someone else's life, and the work since then has been getting back to whatever piece of herself had still been writing the story when she fell.

Fatima had accessed the NovaSphere session archive. Found Osei's last login. Interrupt code flagged a hard physical disconnect. The IP resolved to a residential block in Brooklyn.

Fort Greene.

She gets up and goes to the bathroom. Brushes her teeth. Sofia's face in the mirror is just Sofia's face now, which is its own strangeness. The tortoiseshell clip is on the sink edge. She twists her hair up and clips it. The skin on the back of her neck registers the cold air for the first time. She had not known the hair had been keeping it warm.

She goes to the hall closet. Long olive green wool coat. A dark gray scarf. Keys from the credenza.

The walk down the three flights is nothing. The knees do not ache. The lungs do not catch on the second floor the way they had been catching in Fatima.

The cold on the street is so clean it almost takes the top of her head off. Sharp light. Bare trees. Brownstones with the roots of dead trees pushing up the pavement in long ridges. A woman with a grocery cart goes past the other way, the wheels clattering on the concrete. She takes the G to Greenpoint.

The walk from the station is short. Six minutes, maybe seven. She turns off Manhattan Avenue and onto a quieter side street.

Two steps up to the heavy wood door. Then the floor giving slightly under her boots, soft in the worn center of the room. She finds the back table, the one against the rear wall facing the door. Unbuttons the coat and sits.

At ten minutes to noon the door opens.

Brigid walks in wearing her unbuttoned coat, the thick gray scarf looped high around her neck. She looks ragged. The skin under her eyes is bruised and slack, the lines around her mouth set. The toll of the last few weeks is written across her face: the check-ins, the strangers, the paranoia, the slow dismantling of her own life. She looks like someone holding a weight who has forgotten how to put it down.

Brigid stops near the counter. She doesn't know Sofia. Has never met her.

She scans the room. A woman in a red sweater typing on a laptop, dismissed. A couple arguing quietly over a pastry near the window.

Then Brigid looks at the back table.

The eyes lock. Brigid does not know the dark curly hair or the olive coat, but she knows the posture. The still, patient look of the person she has been meeting across five different boroughs in a parade of different faces.

Brigid's jaw flexes.

She walks down the narrow aisle, past a chair pushed too far out from one of the marble tables, and stops in front of the back wall.

"Who are you today," Brigid says. Pitched low, underneath the hiss of the milk steamer. No greeting.

"Sofia Lopez."

Brigid pulls the wooden chair out and sits. The legs scrape loudly against the tile. She pulls a small black notebook from her coat pocket and sets it on the marble, but doesn't open it.

"The lawyer," Brigid says.

She nods. "Fatima's friend."

Brigid looks at her for a beat. Then: "Fatima found the archive."

"I know. I was there. I tracked the IP," she says, bringing her voice down. "It resolved to a residential node. An apartment building on Vanderbilt."

Brigid stops tapping. Looks up.

"On Vanderbilt."

"Yes."

Brigid looks toward the front window. A delivery truck rattles past, vibrating the glass.

"About a month," Brigid says quietly. "He has been offline four, five weeks."

"I know."

"If he just moved, or sold the rig, the IP wouldn't mean anything. But a hard disconnect. While looking at the suppression architecture." Brigid turns back to the table. The exhaustion in her face hardens into something colder. "He's in that apartment."

"We don't know that."

She looks at the marble table. A small dark stain near the edge, shaped like a crescent moon.

She had been chasing him. The address had looked like an answer from a distance. Now, with Brigid's face across the table, it looks like a door.

"We have to go there," she says.

"It is a physical building. We don't have a key. We don't have a warrant. We are two women walking into a Brooklyn apartment to look for a missing person."

"We find a way. A super, a fire escape. The front door might just be a deadbolt."

"And if he is in there." Brigid's voice flattens further. "What’s the play?"

"We find what he left behind. The documentation, whatever he had that made them pull the plug. Once we have it we get out and give it to Meg's contact in the press."

Brigid stares at her. The café continues its low oblivious hum. A barista calls out a name. Someone laughs near the espresso machine.

"Okay," Brigid says finally. She closes the notebook. "Tomorrow morning. The hallways will be empty."

"Ten o'clock. Corner of Vanderbilt and Myrtle."

Brigid stands. Slides the notebook back into her pocket. Doesn't say goodbye, just turns and walks back down the narrow aisle and out the door. The two steps down. Gone.

She stays at the table a few minutes longer.

Sofia's hands on the cold marble. The scar on the thumb she already knew was there. She rubs it with her other thumb.

The walk back is slow. Cold wind bites at her face. She passes a dry cleaner, a bodega with a faded awning, a row of brownstones with cracked concrete steps. She turns the key in the lock and pushes the door open.

The apartment is warm. The silence is thick.

She takes off the coat, hangs it on the hook by the door, leaves the shoes on the mat.

She goes to the desk. The laptop screen is dark. She taps the spacebar and the environmental law brief glows bright white in the dim room. Arsenic levels. Soil contaminants. A document holding a city accountable for the dirt it builds on.

She closes the laptop.

She walks into the bedroom. The bed is still unmade, the blue linen tangled where she pushed it off this morning. She sits on the edge of the mattress. The afternoon light outside the window is already starting to fail, the sky going a flat bruised color above the fire escapes across the street.

She lies back against the pillows, still in the wool sweater and jeans. Listens to the radiator knock in the wall.