Sounds Filthy
Ifucked something up. Way up. Because in the past four days Ben has been more of a machine than usual, and that is saying something. I can’t afford to lose my only friend aboveground. God, I thought I was being so daring, so unexpected.
Just do something unexpected.
But I kissed a machine and glitched him.
Ben wanted something polite. He wanted a friendship with clear borders, no static, no crossed wires. And for once, I could have played along. He could have gotten me a job up here. I could be sending smug little comms to Josh from a tidy aboveground apartment.
Now Ben’s going to send me packing. I can feel it.
And I have nothing. Not one thing on the controlled burn. It’s been a week and a half—ten days since I first started combing through the IS for any mention of it, ten days of searching, scanning, cross-referencing. I spend my mornings hunched over Ben’s sleek console, the data streaming past my tired eyes. But the shopkeeper was right—every sixty years, something wipes out about 30 percent of the population. It looks like an accident, except that the numbers are too precise. Nature doesn’t do precision.
We are halfway through the calendar year. Sixty years since the Dark Day Mine Collapse. If anyone is keeping count, we have an appointment with the grim reaper.
Reaper.
I type it in. The screen flickers with information.
Three hundred years ago, the Iku patriarchs and matriarchs volunteered for the first implants after the Flesh Wars.
Two hundred forty years ago, the Ikus were accused of setting fire to new settlements.
Sixty years ago, the Ikus sold all their mining equipment and went into food production.
Where the Ikus go, disaster follows.
I don’t know what it means yet, but it feels like something with teeth.
Still, every night I go to bed with nothing but a stiff neck and a hollow, gnawing ache where my hope should be.
Ben doesn’t come to my room. But every day, like clockwork, the mannies pull me away from my endless search and into the world.
One day, it’s a park—a real park, not the grim underground ones filled with an LED sun and synthetic grass, but one with towering trees that rustle in the wind. The mannies watch me closely, silently cataloging my every reaction, And I know—I know—Ben is watching too. I can feel it, like static in the air.
The next day, Victorian artist Elton, big dumb Hank, and butler-of-my-nightmares Crispen take me to a pond, the kind of idyllic place I used to hear about in romance radiocasts. The water is still and glassy, reflecting the sky in a perfect, undisturbed mirror. The mannies stand at the edge, and I turn to face them. To face him.
“I’m not going to jump you, Ben,” I say. The words feel stupid, but I miss him. He was good company.
I’m surprised to hear his voice clear as day casting through Elton, who unhelpfully opens and closes his mouth off cue. “I’m not sure I can say the same, Fawl. My desires are base and bottomless. You deserve better.”
What does that makeme, then…? Every second, I think of the way his skin felt under my hands—too hot. And just for a moment, I thought Ben might pull me down underneath him, press me open, and slip himself slick and heavy inside me.
“I don’t know what to do with you.” Ben’s voice is so earnest, coming from Hank this time as he lifts me from the shore of the lake.
“Let’s find a library,” I say. “After you make nice with Lily and teach your family not to fuck with you, I’ll get a job. And this will be—” I swallow. “This will be a nice memory.”
Ben’s voice turns wistful. “A very nice memory.” Elton wipes my bottom free of leaves and studies them like the sickly Victorian artist he resembles. It’s such a human gesture.
“Is this you or them? Like…the way they act?” I ask.
“There is nothem. They are husks; they could be birds or ice cream cones.”
“Then why make them people shaped?”
There was a pause.
“Didn’t God makeusin his own image?”
