She was right. Back when they’d built the second B&B, this was a common fixture of their days—some big, hard technological challenge they’d have to solve together, downloading tutorials and tapping the global walkaway frequency to find someone who could get through the problem. Sometimes, they’d labor over a trivial technical problem for weeks, stumped, until, one day, something worked, and the experience would be sweeter for the bitterness of the struggle.
He drained his coffium and looked at the party preparations all around him, and remembered he was a walkaway. He was living the first days of a better nation, doing something that meant something. His existence was a feature and not a bug.
Limpopo smiled. She’d read his thoughts.
“Drink up,” she said to Gretyl. “Let’s get down to it.”
Etcetera felt the tension melt out of his back, replaced with warm purpose. Work needed doing, and he could help. What more could anyone ask for?
*
When Gretyl shucked her suit, she was a mass of aches that had not manifested when she was deep in work, hacking at the damaged carrier train with saws, blasting it with cutting torches, hammering at unyielding metal and polymers.
She stood by the airlock, smelling her stink. She groaned and put her forehead to the wall.
“You okay?” Tam looked genuinely, embarrassingly concerned. When Tam joined the Walkaway U crowd, Gretyl mothered her, helping her navigate the opaque waters of the academic enclave. After the attack, Gretyl watched with pride as Tam transformed into a dervish, ferrying people and supplies into the tunnels, risking her life, strong and inspiring.
Since she’d lost Iceweasel, Gretyl’s world had smashed to fragments. Even at the best of times she felt like a fractured vase that had been glued together by a cack-handed repairer, cracks on display for all to see. Damaged goods. Tam had flipped their script, trying to mother Gretyl in a way Gretyl hated, not least because she needed it.
“I’m okay.” Gretyl tried to starch her posture, paint on a smile. Working on the engine was hard, but it gave her a break from all-consuming fear for Iceweasel. The worst part about being mothered was her own pathetic need to be mothered.
“That’s good. Because honestly, you look like chiseled shit.”
“Thanks.”
“Someone had to tell you the truth, dude.” Tam slipped behind her. Her hands gripped Gretyl’s shoulders. “You’re tight as a tennis racket.” She squeezed experimentally, strong thumbs digging into Gretyl’s shoulders. Gretyl groaned. Now Tam’s hands were on her, she felt the tension, like a rubber band pulled to the breaking point. Despite herself, she leaned into Tam, and Tam squeezed back. Gretyl groaned again.
“Come on, then.” Tam continued to knead. “Tell me where it hurts.” Gretyl heard the grin. Tam was enjoying this. Gretyl gave up. “What are you doing now?”
“Gonna find somewhere to sleep.” The spacies’ complex, crowded before they arrived, was now thronged, and it was a juggling act to find a free bed—or even a corner where bedding could be placed temporarily—in the evening. “We stopped for a late lunch and I was gonna sleep dinner. I mean skip dinner.”
“You’re in luck.” Tam worked the knots. “Seth and I found a place. It’s big.” She squeezed. “And comfy.”
Gretyl groaned. “Come on then.” Surrender felt good.
The room was big enough that Gretyl felt guilty. But it was a weird shape, with low ceilings in places, uneven flooring in others, the result of a weather event that buckled the bulkheads, introducing cracks whose temporary seals no one had made permanent.
It was lit with constellations of throwie lights, scattered in smears across the ceiling and walls, and there was a spacie-style adaptive sleep-surface, millions of sensor-embedded foam cells, like a living thing that cuddled and supported you according to an algorithm that second-guessed your circulation, writhing in a way that was disturbing and wonderful.
Seth was already lounging in his underpants, sipping lichen tequila from one of the glass bulbs that were everywhere in Thetford, though she hadn’t met the prolific glassblower.
He waved the bulb blearily and called out a greeting. Tam barked at him in mock drill sergeant to pull himself together and offer their guest hospitality. He climbed to his feet, found booze and another bulb—elongated like a teardrop, shot with swirls of cyanotic blue and rusty orange/red—and poured. She started to wave it off, then caught the smell and relented.
Fuck it. She took a burning sip, swirling it through her foul-tasting mouth, and letting it trickle down her dry throat.
“Hot towels.” Tam snapped her fingers. Seth groaned theatrically but pulled on drawstring pants and stepped out.
“You don’t need to—” Gretyl said.
“Oh yes we do.” Tam pinched her nose dramatically. Gretyl shrugged. She probably did stink—the B&B’s onsen was far behind, and the weeks underground after the bombing of Walkaway U had accustomed her to a baseline of BO that fulfilled every default stereotype of stinky walkaways.
Tam rifled through chests crammed into a crawl space, consulting her interface, coming up with a pair of silk-like robes, chucking one to Gretyl. They kicked their dirty clothes into the sizable pile left by Seth, shrugged into the robes, and collapsed into bed.
Seth wheeled in an insulated chest. He popped the lid, releasing fragrant steam. There were showers at the spacies’ compound, but swollen numbers had driven everyone to the wikis for alternatives from other walkaways, and the towels were a winner. It wasn’t easy to bathe yourself with them, but that was a feature, not a bug, far as most people were concerned.
Seth flopped down between them. “Okay, I’m ready.”
Tam slugged him in the arm—Gretyl saw that she kept her middle knuckle raised, driving it straight into the meat of his bicep. “No. Way.”
He rubbed his arm. “Ow.”
“Yes,” she explained. “Ow. Want another?” She made a fist. Gretyl saw they were both trying to suppress grins. Young love.
“Okay, who’s first?”
“Guests first,” Tam said.
Gretyl wanted to object, but lying on the bed, swaddled in the soft robe, sapped her of her residual strength.… Groaning—theatrically, this time—she shrugged out of the robe, feeling her skin goose-pimple as the recirculated air kissed it.
The first heavy, wet, fragrant towel made contact, draped across her back with a wet slap followed by a spreading heat that was like a languorous tongue, and then it was joined by another, wielded by Tam, across the backs of her legs. Tam rubbed along her sore, tight hamstrings. The four hands scrubbed at her through the heat, strumming her aching muscles, clever thumbs and grinding knuckles, elbows in the unyielding knots. Where the towels slipped, her wet skin shrank from the air currents.