The Clarity of Cold Steel
Chapter 53

SQUAT IRON VATS stand at attention at regular intervals for as far as the eye can see. Ten feet high each they stand, their domes crowned in gleaming steel webbed in converging rows of hexagonal bolts. A window sits dead center in the belly of each vat, and within each window, a human-shaped figure’s floating in some sort of anomalous liquid.

I lean against the near one, leaving a bloody smear across the glass, and peer inside. A woman floats within. She’s beautiful, stunningly so, an ethereal mermaid with her long hair flowing out in waves of drifting seaweed as she stares dead ahead, her numb eyes half parted, my reflection in duality upon the two of them. From the tubed breathing apparatus strapped round her nose and mouth, bubbles trickle up in silver lines like schools of tiny fish darting for the surface. Muslin wraps wind round her torso and pelvis, covering what society dictates should be, but they don’t fully cover the topographical map etched into her abdomen in a flowing script of surgical scar. Her left arm is missing, from just above the elbow. Her right foot, too.

A readout on the front of the vat turns a cylinder of paper ever-so-slowly, a series of ten ink-rods marking lines, sliding up and down minutely, continuously monitoring some amalgam of bio-statistics or mechanics or something. What the hell do I know?

“Hello?” I wave a hand in front of those twin silver crescents staring back at me. What color are they? I lean forward, squint. Blue? Brown? It’s too dark to tell. I rap on the thick glass.

The mermaid blinks and for an instant, reacts, animal panic contorting her form, her fingers curling into claw, scrabbling for her face, the breathing apparatus — then she halts as her fingers palpate the metal tubes and glide over the mouthpiece like some blind woman reading her own face. She begins to settle, drifting back to lifelessness once more, just a floating thing breathing, chest rising and falling back to regularity.

I notice a brass plaque riveted above the vat window. ABL-376 is etched into it. Pieces begin to fall into place. The number Shakespeare gave me is XXG-547. Sweet Sally had talked of grids and warehouses. She was spot on, it seems.

I walk the row, replace ABL-387 next to it, then ABM-112. Seems the letters mean location somehow. The numbers? I haven’t a bloody clue. I slog on, pressing my side, feeling like something inside’s tearing with each step.

The next vat row over starts with BCG-431. It’s a young boy inside it. Eight or nine years old. He has no legs. No eyes, either, though the attitude of his head is such that he appears to be gazing off upon some distant vista. Looking at him jolts hard at something inside me, something I want no part of, something I can’t currently handle, so I quit looking.

And I gimp on.

Voices suddenly meander out from somewhere within this massive warehouse of hibernating corpse. They’re garbled and shot and impossible to ascertain the source of. But they’re near. That’s for damn sure. Footsteps follow the voices in cascades, a group of people moving at a trot, taking a fervent constitutional. Seems to be moving along the edges of the room.

A search grid.

I duck between two vats, stepping, or stumbling rather, over hose, hissing, cursing beneath my breath as something inside tears. For a moment, I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t anything. I wait for it to pass. It doesn’t.

I continue on anyway, working my way through this technological jungle scape, cutting through row after row, ducking beneath vines of cable and ductwork branching out in a myriad of directions all tangled and intertwined amongst static tarns of upright fluid. A shallow hiss fills the air as steam is released from the crown of one of the nearby vats. I crawl out from my iron valley and see yet another row of vats lined up, winnowing one another away to forever. I nearly collapse, but etched into the vat across the way are the letters and numbers WWS-223.

I nod to myself. Getting closer. A metal door slams shut somewhere far off in the infinite twilight, followed by more footsteps. I can’t care right now. The world’s getting blurry. I’m sweating like a bastard but shivering, too.

I duck through another row and creep out, wary as an antelope at a watering hole. Where are the lions? Sometimes it’s worse when you can’t see them. The nearest vat reads XXM-223. Finally. The right row. So I take a stroll, nearly a tumble, catch myself on a vat, heart pounding harder and harder as I close in on the coordinates.

I stop in front of XXG-547, sitting right where it’s supposed to be.

A scrawny Hindu kid’s inside, hooked up just like the mermaid, just like the countless rest, except that his lone arm is cuffed to a d-ring, and his body is secured to a series of iron rods hash-marking behind him. Restraints? Long lines of puckered scar form a letter ‘Y’ across the front of his bare chest like someone performed an autopsy on him. But he’s alive, if you can call this that. Tubes from the unseen peripheries of that vat snake their way inside his body in five places, at the abdomen and throat, three into his chest. Burrowing in like worms. He stares dead ahead, chest expanding and contracting through aid of the apparatus.

I glance left and right into rows of infinity then knock on the thick glass. “Hey, Gortham.”