The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (14 page)

“Oh, dear,” Yvette said.

“Burns,” Delauchen said.

“I know. Get your arms up,”
Yvette said, reaching for him. “No, no, Delauchen, up over your head. You can
be such a child, sometimes. Come on, I’ve got you.”

The pain
passed once the sweater came off. He sat there, numb for a moment before
cracking open a cider for himself and taking a long pull.

“I got you something else.”
Yvette reached over and pulled a new rice paper sketchpad out of her knapsack
along with some charcoals. “Why don’t you sketch something for me?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, something beautiful. There
is plenty here to work with.”

He took the offered pad, opened
it and ran his hands across the blank, creamy smooth sheets of paper.

“But….” he swallowed and tried
to settle his feelings. “I didn’t bring you anything.”

She looked up from her pile of
knitting tools and yarn.

“Delauchen, you’re so dense
sometimes. Just seeing you is good enough. Okay?”

He nodded. “Okay.”

A couple of bottles of cider
later, Delauchen noticed the fading light of the Eastern Sunset casting long
shadows through the Orchard. He sat back against the apple tree, stretched the
kinks out and considered his sketch in progress.

Like his previous efforts, many
of Yvette’s best features were crafted with loving care, curls, dimples, smile
and so forth. He used to spend hours in the trenches sketching her, usually on
the day when it was her turn to clean the weapons. She always seemed angry,
distant for some reason he could never quite fathom.

He started to work on her eyes.

This afternoon it had been
different. Yvette knitted away on the sweater, a faint smile that grew when
she’d catch him snatching glances at her. She didn’t seem angry now, and he
couldn’t remember her ever knitting before.

“You’ve been awfully quiet,” he
said.

She looked up, “I’m just
enjoying the moment.”

“It’s nice this evening,” he
said. He used his charcoal to draw a faint orb into the space where her left
eye would go. “Clear skies. Warm.”

“Dry.” Yvette chuckled. “I like
the fact that it is dry here.”

He nodded in agreement. “Dry is
definitely good. I’ve seen enough mud to last me a lifetime.”

Happy as he was, he still
couldn’t sort it out. Either Yvette was dead or she wasn’t. And where was
Thalia? How had Yvette found them and managed to get furlough at the same time?
He felt like he had been handed an algebra problem. If only he’d done better,
he’d have been in the Brigades Artillery instead of another stupid Frontist in
the trenches.

“It was cold the morning we
went over the top,” Yvette said, her focus back on her knitting. “The blizzard,
you couldn’t see your hand before your face.”

“I remember,” he said. The
ill-fated Winter Offensive had happened a couple of months after they’d
separated. Yvette had been moved to another part of their brigade and Delauchen
was alone when the storm blew down out of the Northern Reaches. Suprema
Strategic Velaysia felt it would mask their attack from the orbiting Invader,
enabling them to take the entrenched enemy, supposedly hibernating, by
surprise.

Not one of their better
plans,
he
thought.

“My feet hurt so much from the
cold, I wanted to cry,” he said.

“Some guys were pissing on
their feet to warm them up,” Yvette said. “Only made it worse. A lot of them
were inducted into the Brigades Invalid. Frost bite. I think some of them did
it on purpose. I think I might have done it if I could.”

She fell silent and continued
to knit.

“How….” He was afraid to spoil
it, the moment. “How, rather, what happened? You didn’t come back.”

“You noticed?” Her knitting
needles continued to clickety-click away with their one-two-one-two beat.

“Of course I noticed,” he
snapped, angry more with himself than anything.

“But that is why you ended it,
isn’t it? Afraid to let anyone get to close.” She met his eyes. “As if you are
the only one that has suffered.”

Damn it, keep your head
up, Delauchen,
he
chided himself. Yvette wasn’t his mother. She wouldn’t smack him for looking at
her.

“I never said that,” Delauchen
replied. That much was true.

“You
didn’t have to.” She returned to her knitting. “I’m not stupid.”

“But you’re alive. Why didn’t
you find me? Did you end up in another Brigade?”

She shook her head slowly.

“When I saw the Knitter with
your locket this morning...” the answer kept slipping back into his muddy mind
“...I knew you were still alive.”

Yvette nodded; her knitting
needles continued clicking along.

“I figured you threw the locket
away,” he said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“I didn’t throw it away.”

Delauchen was confused.
“But...the Knitter had it. I saw it.”

Yvette reached under her blouse
and produced a locket, the same heliotype locket he had given her years ago.
The same locket the Knitter had worn. “Delauchen, listen very carefully.”

He looked up.

“I—Still—Have—It,” she said.
“Do you understand?”

He shook his head. “No, Yvette,
I don’t. Nothing makes any sense.”

The only way it would make
sense is if Yvette Mobori and the Knitter he’d seen that morning were the same
person.

And that just wasn’t possible.

“May I see
it?” She nodded at his sketchpad. “You seem more inte
rested in your sketch than me
anyway.”

“What?” He looked down,
embarrassed with himself. “Yeah, sure.”

Yvette set her knitting aside
and took the offered sketchpad. She was silent for a long time, her fingers
tracing the charcoal features of her face on the pad. Delauchen imagined he
could hear the skin of her fingertips sighing across the paper.

A tear fell onto the pad. She
sniffed and looked up, her shoulders rising and falling with each tortured
breath.

She sniffed a second time.
“I’ve done it again.”

The realization started to sink
in. Delauchen waited for her to stop crying before opening his mouth.

“We’re not at Kalentine Orchards,
are we?” he asked, easing the tear-stained sketch pad out of her hands.

“Depends on your perspective
and philosophy about such things, but physically there right now?” she shook
her head, her curls swaying back and forth across her face. “No, Delauchen.
We’re not at Kalentine. In fact, we’re not too far away from the Southern
Front, in physical terms.”

“So, you’re the Limb Knitter?”
he asked, feeling incredibly stupid. He still didn’t want to buy it. “Two
meters tall and smells like a month-old corpse? Forgive me, Yvette, but you
don’t look like any Knitter I’ve ever seen. You certainly don’t smell like it.”

“She,” Yvette corrected, “is
not an it and she is sitting here in front of you. What is the last thing you
remember?”

“Thalia and I were talking
about...” He shook his head. “She said something about me making the Knitter
cry.”

“Do you remember getting hit?”
Yvette asked. “I do because I was there. It was a downward fragmentation air
burst. You lost both arms, had shrapnel in most of your body. You also took a
pretty good chunk of dirt in the face which busted your retinas. Those are
going to be the hardest to fix.”

“A nightmare,” Delauchen said.
“I think it was a nightmare.”

“About?”

“Something bit me, wound me up
in some sticky goo.” He looked at the spider, now consuming her apple mite on
the web. “Spiders. I think it was about spiders.”

She held up the sweater,
exasperated or disappointed, Delauchen wasn’t sure. “Here, may as well try it
on now.”

Delauchen wasn’t quite so sure
after the last painful attempt. He looked it over. “Is this going to hurt?”

“Not if I got the sleeves
right,” Yvette said. “Arms are pretty tricky, especially the hands. Your brain
remembers how long they were, even if they aren’t there any more.”

He took hold of the sheer, warm
red sweater, rubbing it between his fingers.

“What happens if this fits?” he
asked.

This time Yvette looked away.

“Well?”

She picked at a bit of cheese,
avoiding him. “You’ll go back to the Front.”

“And what about you?”

She shrugged. “What does it matter?”

“Do you have someone?”

“Are you kidding me?” she
asked.

She never liked being
alone,
he
remembered. “It must be difficult.”

“It hurts, plain and simple,
Delauchen. Try on the sweater, will you.”

“What if I stay?”

She looked up, “What about
Thalia? You going to abandon her for me, are you?”

Shit,
he thought, angry with
himself for forgetting about Thalia. “Is she okay?”

“Try it on and I’ll tell you.”

Delauchen took a deep breath,
clenched his teeth and pulled the sweater on. His hands eased through the
sleeves. He paused to gather his courage at the edge of the cuffs before he
shoved his fingers through.

He stretched and flexed. A
perfect fit. Yvette looked satisfied with herself.

“Well?” he asked.

Yvette looked off down the road
of apple trees. “I saw a Harvester come for her.”

What the hell am I
going to do now?
“A
Harvester? Why didn’t you save her?”

“Because you were there,
asshole! You were bleeding to death. I had to kick the rats off of you and drag
your ass out of one superbitch of an artillery barrage,” Yvette said. “What
else was I supposed to do? For some reason I can’t fathom, I still love you.”

“So, the Brigades Invalid have
her,” he said.

“Did another two years in the
trenches make you deaf? Yes, probably. Damn, you are so bloody dense,” she
said, exasperated with him. “You never change.”

“How will I ever get back to
her?”

Yvette grabbed Delauchen,
pulled him to her and kissed him hard. He fought it for a moment but she turned
out to be surprisingly strong, more so than he remembered. Delauchen found he
didn’t really want to pull away in any case.

When they finally parted, he
felt his knees buckle.

“I’ll finish up now,” she said
quietly, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “You won’t remember a
thing.”

“Yvette, don’t.”

“It’ll be better this way. You
can find someone else,” she said, disappointment etched on her face.

She’s not my mother,
he told himself.
She
won’t hurt me.

“Yvette.” Delauchen steadied
himself, took a deep breath and met her gaze. Yvette’s wet and heavy eyes
grabbed hold and wouldn’t let go. He held himself there with the woman who had
come back for him. She shook her head and looked away when the moment lasted
longer than she had anticipated.

“I love you,” he said. “Is
there a way?”

The horizon was dark now with
the first of three moons climbing into the sky. Her face was carved out of
reality with soft blue light. She faced him.

“Yes, there is.”

After a moment of pondering, he
made up his mind. “Anything. Whatever it takes.”

Yvette let out her breath and
nodded. “All right.”

Yvette disentangled herself
from Delauchen’s egg and laid him down in the warm mud near her chamber. She
took her time covering the egg, slathering the mud around the brown, leathery
surface before easing him down into the bubbling depths. Once she was done, she
stood under a warm stream of mineral water and cleaned the aftermath from her
heavily modified form. Only then did she dress and go for something to eat.

In the next chamber, the buzz
saws had come to a stop. Mud and blood splattered, the lone Invalid Harvester
rinsed its blades free of chunked flesh and muscle, chipped bone and clotted
blood. It was silent except for the sound of running water ringing off the
silver blades to dribble on the stone floor. Six black drums, harvest pods, each
with the molting snake sigil of the Brigades Invalid, filled the corner of the
chamber. Four more drums, those of Invalid Inductees, were already strapped to
its back.

Yvette nodded to the silent
cyborg.

“There should be enough scrap
to hold you and your Initiate for the next couple of days,” the Harvester said,
its voice a mash of metallic echoes and vibrations. “The current engagement
continues unabated, thus, there will be more tomorrow.”

“And the one I mentioned? Were
you able to induct her?”