Page 30 of Love, Nemesis
“Don’t bust yourself up, please. I tuned up your arm and replaced the synthetic skin, but you’ve neglected it,” Mech said, lifting her leg up on the desk before reaching forward to rub her ankle. “And don’t let Jasper get you into any trouble. He’s got that glint in his eye.”
“Will do,” Ana said, slipping off the table after inspecting her left arm as she flexed her fingers.
“Hey,” Jasper called before he tapped his hand against the door frame and walked off again.
“Coming,” she replied, exchanging glances with Mech before she reached for her raincoat near the door.
“Take care of yourself,” Mech said, her cool, gray eyes watching heavily beyond her spectacles. “And next time you both sleep out in the rain, consider wearing those rain jackets.”
Ana shifted her shoulders in the plastic. “I want to feel it.”
“He’s feeling it too, you know.”
Ana approached the wall beside Mech, where she examined several shelves with large jars lined across them.
She knew Jasper’s feelings. She’d watched them like a spectator far removed from their influence, more so in recent years. They were beautiful in all of their compassion and sympathy. He felt more deeply than anyone she knew, and she admired him for it.
Mech turned in her chair, removing Ana’s Atlas from her coat pocket. She offered it back to her. “This is harder for him than it is for you. Remember that,” she said as Ana took the Altas, returning it to her belt. “It’s still functioning properly. Jasper insisted on checking the readings too. Do you want to know exactly how much time you have left?”
“No,” she said, looking back at the jars. She could gather a vague reading from looking at her Atlas clock. The specifics didn’t concern her yet.
Ana lifted a finger, tapping a jar with a ball of black sludge floating in it. The thing responded to the sound, squirming toward her finger against the glass. “What’s this?” She withdrew her hand.
“A very rough prototype.”
“Of what?”
“A human heart. Jasper saw one in the other room. I thought he would run out. He’s still so superstitious, a Mystic at heart, even though he acts like a Statesman.”
“They’ve come a long way from fake fingers and toes,” Ana said, disturbed by the revelation, but doing her best to wrestle back any obvious dislike. It wasn’t very patriotic to show any distaste for practices the Var had approved. “I didn’t think they’d dive back into this.”
Mech still rubbed her ankle in focused circles, and so Ana snuck a glance at the papers on her desk. She thought she might catch a glimpse of evidence that would tell her how long they’d been dabbling in the forbidden practice, but instead found a series of documents on Chronos.
Odd.
Chronos was the emergency Atlas that was tied to all of the criminals in the city. It was a fierce and powerful weapon. Ana had seen it only once, the device capable of freezing and entire battlefield in time.
It was a strange topic for Mech to be studying so diligently.
“Other substitutes have too many issues. Other options just don’t give like skin does either, even with the gels and buffers we make. You know we’ve been having issues for years. We had to explore something else. Madness pairs much better with human cells.”
Ana kept her arms by her sides, watching the writhing heart reach out like a ravenous parasite. Disgust writhed similarly in the put of her stomach and she couldn’t help but voice the smallest objection, despite her better judgement. “It mutates human cells. I think the prosthetics work just fine.”
“No one argues that it’s dangerous, but we can control it.”
The heart stilled in the center of the glass again, pulsing as if there were something inside of it trying to break out. It squirmed.
She heard her watch in the silence, something that was always certain amid obscurity. Whether it was a reminder of life or death, she wasn’t sure.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
“Ana,” Mech said.
Tick.
