Chapter 3: What the Compound Left Behind
The lift carried them up through ninety meters of station rock, and Hazel kept her palm flat against the steel wall the whole way, feeling the vibration crawl up her wrist like something alive. The amber was still in her. Not fading, not the slow taper Jelani had promised at the three hour mark. It sat behind her sternum and hummed, and every point where her skin touched anything, the wall, her own sleeve, the seam of her bodysuit, lit up with a small clean flare of sensation that had no business being there.
Tommie stood with his shoulder against the opposite wall, eyes half closed. His jumpsuit was zipped to the mid chest and she could see the sweat drying on his collarbone, the silver chain hanging against it. He had not said a word since the sanctum. Neither had she. There was nothing to say that would survive the fact of the recording node humming under Jelani's table, the two dozen lenses, the file with their names in it.
The lift doors opened onto the transit spine and the noise of the station came back in a rush. Freight haulers, the far-off grind of the construction bays two tiers down, the tinny music bleeding out of a noodle stall. Hazel walked with her jaw set. Every footfall rang up through her knees. The polymer of her bodysuit shifted from charcoal to violet with each step and she could feel that too, the light responding to her skin, her skin responding to the light, a loop she could not get out of.
Their quarters sat at the end of a catwalk above the bays. Tommie keyed the door and the console inside threw its usual sickly flicker across the clutter: schematic printouts taped to the bulkhead, a rack of tools, a galley counter the size of a prayer mat, a bunk built into the wall with a shower rail bolted above it. The hum of the droids below came up through the floor plates.
Hazel got the door shut and stood in the middle of the room with her hands at her sides.
"How long," she said.
"Since the injector? Four hours, maybe more." Tommie pulled the chain out from under his jumpsuit and turned it over in his fingers. "It should be stepping down."
"It's not stepping down."
"I know."
She crossed to the console and woke her study module. The screen bloomed, and there it was, her coursework, the section she had been grinding through for two weeks: Pleasure House Management, Module Nine, Records, Consent, and Custody. She had read that clause four times and never once felt it in her teeth. Now the words sat on the screen and every letter had a texture.
"Archive clause," she said, more to herself than to him. She scrolled. "A permanent record of a patron or practitioner may be held only where the subject retains a right of access, a right of erasure, and a right of review. Absent those three, the record constitutes an instrument of control and is void."
Tommie came up behind her. He did not touch her. He did not have to. She could feel the heat coming off him at the distance of a handspan, and the amber turned it into something like a hand.
"He gave you the erasure," she said. "One file. After each session."
"He gave me one wipe of the open file. The archive node stays."
"That is exactly the instrument of control the clause names."
"Yeah." He reached past her and killed the console light, and the room fell down to the glow of the emergency strip over the bunk. "And I took the deal anyway, because the alternative was he keeps everything and I get nothing."
Hazel turned around. In the low light his eyes still had that fixed intensity, and the sweat on his throat shone. She put her fingers on the zipper tab of his jumpsuit and pulled it down, slow, one tooth at a time, and every tooth was a separate small event going straight up her arm.
"You did fine," she said. "You got us the erasure. Nobody else would have gotten that out of him."
"I let him put a doorbell under his own table."
"You let him put a doorbell under his table so that the next time we go down there, we decide when it starts. That is not nothing." She peeled the jumpsuit off his shoulders and it fell to his waist. The silver chain lay flat on his chest. She put her mouth on the skin beside it and he made a sound low in his throat, and the sound went into her too, through her jaw, through her teeth.
"Shower rail," he said.
"What?"
"Shower rail." He nodded past her. "You keep saying the compound is still holding. I want to know what else it does before it lets go."
She understood him. She got out of the bodysuit, and the polymer sighed from violet back to charcoal against her thighs, and the air on her bare skin was cold enough to make her nipples stand up hard and tight and she felt that like a struck bell. Tommie stepped out of the jumpsuit and kicked it aside.
He took her wrist and walked her the three steps to the shower rail, the steel bar bolted above the bunk, cold and pitted from years of station humidity. He lifted her hand and laid her palm flat on it.
The cold hit her whole body at once. Not her palm. Her whole body, every nerve she owned, as if the rail had a current in it. She gasped and her knees dipped.
"Cold," she said. "Fuck. It's cold."
"Good cold or bad cold?"
"Good. Don't stop."
He moved her hand along the rail, dragging her palm down the length of it, and the drag was the point, the friction of pitted steel against the ridges of her palm, and she felt it in her cunt, a deep answering pull, like someone had hooked her low in the belly and drawn the line taut.
She turned, took the rail in both hands, and pulled herself up off the floor, letting her feet hang, her whole weight on her shoulders, and the strain in her arms turned into warmth, and the warmth spread down through her chest, her stomach, the inside of her thighs. Tommie stood behind her and put his hand flat on her back, between her shoulder blades, and dragged it down her spine, and she arched like she had been hit.
"Do it again," she said.
He did it again. Slower. His palm from her neck to the base of her spine, and then both hands on her hips, pulling her back onto him. The head of his cock slid along her from behind, along the wet line of her, not inside, just along it, and the contact was white hot, brighter than it should have been, brighter than any drug she had ever taken in any club on this station.
"That's not the compound," she managed. "That's just you."
"No," he said. "It's both."
He pushed in. Slow, one long stroke, and she gripped the rail and let her head drop, and the stretch of him going in was so loud in her nervous system that she could not separate it from the cold of the rail or the hum of the droids down below. He held still inside her and she felt every ridge and every fold of him, the pulse in him, the half-second stutter of his breath against her shoulder blade.
"Move," she said.
He moved. He fucked her against the bunk wall, one hand braced on the bulkhead, the other flat on her belly so he could feel himself inside her with every stroke, and the sounds she made were not sounds she usually made, higher and more broken, and she was aware of every part of it: the rail, the cold, the floor plates buzzing, his balls against her clit on every in-stroke, the sweat running down between her small breasts. She came once like that, and it did not release anything, it only raised the pitch.
Tommie pulled out. She turned. He picked her up by the waist and put her down on the galley counter, and her bare ass hit cold steel and she cried out and came again right there, just from that, and he was between her legs before the second one finished.
"Inside," she said.
"I know."
He fucked her on the counter, and the counter edge bit into the backs of her thighs with every thrust, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and her ankles around the small of his back and let the cold steel do what it was doing to her. He finished inside her. She felt it, every pulse of it, spasm after spasm, and the amber did not fade.
The amber did not fade. Tommie stayed inside her until his cock softened and slipped out on its own, and she felt the loss as a distinct small grief. He lifted her down from the counter and her feet hit the floor plates and the vibration of the droids two tiers down came up through her heels and into her knees and she had to grab his shoulder.
"Still?" he said.
"Still."
They showered because they were filthy, sweat and Jelani's incense and each other, and the water pressure on this tier was a joke, a thin warm drizzle from a head that had been repaired with wire. The drizzle hit her shoulders and ran down her spine and she stood under it with her eyes closed and felt every separate drop like a fingertip.
Tommie soaped her back. She soaped his chest. Neither of them got hard or wet again, not exactly. They were past that. It was something else, a low continuous hum under the skin, a readiness with no target, and they dried off and fell into the bunk and lay facing each other in the dark with the emergency strip throwing its thin red line across his jaw, and she could hear his breath and her own and the station groaning all around them, and it took a long time to sleep.
She woke to the console chiming.
Tommie was already up. He was at the desk in his undersuit with a mug of the terrible station coffee and his jaw set in a way she knew. The amber was gone. She could tell the instant she sat up, the way you can tell a fever has broken, everything dialed back to its ordinary volume. The console screen was lit. There was a single line of text.
She read it over his shoulder. It was not a message, it was a summons. A time, two nights out. A node number. No name. He did not need a name.
"He wants another session," Tommie said.
"He wants another session."
Hazel pulled her knees up under the blanket and looked at the flickering screen. The archive clause was still open in her study module on the other tab, Records, Consent, and Custody. She had a sudden and very clear picture of the node in Jelani's floor, humming along under the obsidian, holding the last ten minutes of the two of them in full image and sound.
"He's going to ask for more than a wipe this time," she said.
"Yeah."
"And what are you going to give him."
Tommie turned on the stool. The mug was going cold in his hand and he did not seem to notice. "What I gave him last time. The session. Nothing more than the session."
"That is what he already has."
"Then I need to make sure the session is the only thing I am paying with." He set the mug down. "He probed me about the dock logs. Tirrell's crew. I told him nothing.