The Cello
Chapter 7

A9 glanced curiously across the row of cactus that separated them again. His hands worked as normal; slicing, bagging, slicing, bagging. There was no real difference in his pattern of his work -- and she knew it better than anyone -- but yet somehow there was. Something in the way his gaze would wander and yet not look at anything at all. It troubled her. Everything in her quiet world was carefully arranged, symmetrical, and settled. She relied on its steady patterns. E7 had always fit snugly into that pattern, like a cube into the corner of a box, but today his edges were not quite so clean.

“I still don’t understand why you took another cultivation day,” She said, hands working, but eyes fixed on the boy across from her.

It took a moment for his human eye to lose it’s strange haze, and when it did she still got the sense that he wasn’t really with her in the field, but somewhere far away.

“Cultivation days are enjoyable.” He said, shrugging a set of mismatched shoulders.

“But there is only one cultivation day in a week.” She replied.

Finally, he seemed to really look at her.

“What do you replace enjoyable?” He asked.

The question struck her as entirely irrelevant, and one more evidence that E7 must not be well, so she promptly ignored it.

“The enforcers only allow one cultivation day.”

“I spoke to the man in my unit whose cultivation day is today, and he agreed to give it to me,” The boy responded.

“Did you receive approval?” She asked, even toned, but her discomfort at the blatant disregard for schedule was rising.

“They don’t much care which of us is in the woods, as long as there are the correct number.”

“You should have gotten approval.”

There was a silence between them again as A9 dropped one, two, then three bulbs into her pouch. A small array of different uncomfortable feelings rose up in her but were immediately extinguished.

“What do you replace enjoyable?” E7 asked again. When she looked up she somehow knew he’d been looking at her.

The way you have always fit in the corner of the box --- always, until today.

“Schedules.” She answered shortly, ”Patterns and things that fit together. Why do you ask such things?”

She hadn’t quite wanted to give him the satisfaction of a full answer, but she wasn’t certain she wanted to go to the effort of ignoring him either.

He shrugged again. At that moment a familiar message flickered in the bottom of her vision; a message so familiar she didn’t need to read it to know what it said. It was the call to return to base. She dropped the last bulb into her pouch and began down the endless corridor of prickly green, knowing he would be right behind her. In half a step he had caught up with her and walked by her side, the distant look having returned in full force.

She was slowly coming to the conclusion that E7 must have metal sickness.

Following his gaze, she took to watching the sway of the wires that hung from tall wooden poles Along the edge of the field. They hung evenly one atop the other like swooping parallel lines; a pattern. She actually particularly liked them. It was a kind of basic evenness that helped sooth her thoughts. Birds sat atop some of them, mostly little birds chattering in their high pitched way. Although there was a crow too, sitting on one of the lower wires and watching with it’s beady eyes as they passed.

It flapped it’s wings and let out a loud nasally caw. The little birds stopped chirping for a moment, as if they had just realized the bigger birds presence, but immediately resumed their chatter. It was something else that had stopped that got the girl’s attention.

E7.

He had halted in his tracks and stood staring up at the birds with a look of incredible realization on his face. She just watched in curiosity as his eyes flicked here and there, and the wonder in them grew more potent. Finally, they came to rest on her.

“What are the symptoms of metal sickness?” She mentally inquired of Nine. He replied in a voice only she could hear, listing them flatly;

“Dizziness, swelling in flesh to mechanic sutures, paralysis, stiffness of muscles, and delirium.”

Nothing but the delirium seemed to afflict him. She silently hoped he’d been speaking to Seven. What else could it have been? The caw of a crow does not put that kind of look on a person’s face.

There was half a smile on his lips, pleasant but strange, as he trotted up to her. She started forward again and they walked in relative silence for another mile. Whatever Seven had said to him had somehow brought him back to himself, and for that she was happy. He seemed, for the most part, to be a perfect cube again. It was very likely that today had just been a strange deviance that would never repeat itself. It was, after all, a Saturday, and strange things seemed to happen more often on Saturdays than any other day.

As the looming mother ship lights grew steadily closer, E7 cleared his throat and adjusted his pack beside her.

“Do you know what I replace enjoyable?”

Unauthorized second cultivation days?, she wanted to ask. Thinking better of it, she just glanced at him and waited for him to finish.

“The way your heart beats.”