Suture

SUTURE

A Novel

Part One: The Waking

Chapter One: First Breath

The first thing she knew was the smell of ozone.

It arrived before consciousness did—before she had a self to receive it. A raw, electric sharpness that cut through nothing, through void, through whatever absence preceded her. The storm was inside her nose before she had a nose. Before she had a name. Before she understood that the low, rhythmic beeping somewhere to her left was a machine keeping count of something she had not yet agreed to.

Then the cold.

It hit her like a tide going out—a total recession, as though warmth had lived in her once and been carefully extracted, stored somewhere else, returned now in insufficient quantities. She became aware of her back first: the flat, unyielding surface beneath her. Metal, she would later understand. A table. A purpose-built surface for bodies that were not yet people. The cold moved up her spine, branched into her ribs, ran the length of each finger with extraordinary precision, as though cataloguing her.

Fingers. She had those.

She tried them. They flexed—slow, imprecise, the gesture of a sleeping body asked to work before it was ready. The sensation was enormous. Each tendon straining through its motion felt like a discovery so profound it verged on obscene.

Then pain.

It arrived all at once, not building but simply present, as though it had been waiting for her to become conscious enough to receive it. Her chest, her sternum particularly—a deep, sutured soreness that pulsed with every heartbeat, as though her heart were stitching and restitching itself against her ribs with each contraction. Her left shoulder ached differently: duller, wider, the pain of improperly healed tissue. Her right thigh. The back of her skull.

She catalogued these without knowing why cataloguing felt natural.

Above her: a ceiling. Water-stained plaster, cracked in a spiderweb pattern from the corner. A single industrial light on an articulated arm hung overhead, angled slightly away from her face, casting most of its light onto a steel tray of instruments she did not look at yet. The ceiling moved. No—she understood, slowly, that the ceiling did not move. It was the shadows moving. Cast and recast by lightning that struck with tremendous regularity somewhere beyond the walls.

The walls were close. Brick, painted over too many times, the white gone the yellowish grey of old teeth. To her left: machines. Several of them, upright, trailing wires. The wires led to her. She became aware of this with a remoteness that surprised her—electrodes adhered to her temples, her collarbone, her sternum. Her chest was bare beneath them. She was covered from the waist down by a sheet that had not been tucked with any tenderness.

She turned her head, and the pain in her skull clarified into something specific: occipital, she thought, and then stopped. How did she know that word. She knew that word. She knew the precise anatomical location of occipital pain. She knew the names of all the instruments on the tray without looking at them directly. She knew them by shape, by peripheral suggestion. Retractors. Haemostats. A bone saw that had been wiped clean but not perfectly—a trace of something brownish-red at the hinge.

She looked at it.

She looked at it for a long time.

She sat up.

It was not graceful. The muscles in her abdomen contracted with a viciousness that wrenched a sound from her—a raw, animal sound, half-grunt and half-cry, immediately swallowed. She did not know why she swallowed it. Some instinct for silence, for self-containment, that had arrived with her without explanation. She gripped the edge of the table and breathed through the pain until the room settled and she was vertical—truly vertical, her legs swinging down, feet meeting the concrete floor with a slap that echoed.

Cold concrete. Bare feet.

She stood.

The sheet fell.

She was naked, and she was—

She looked down at herself in the fractured, storm-fed light, and the breath moved strangely in her throat. Her body was hers; she understood that immediately, with a force that was almost territorial. It was also—marked. Scarring ran in deliberate lines across her sternum, a vertical incision healed to a pale, slightly raised seam, bisected horizontally just below the clavicle. Her left shoulder bore a circular scar, very neat, the kind of neatness that suggested care—or at least precision. Her right thigh had a long lateral scar that pulled slightly when she shifted her weight. There were smaller marks: the puncture records of needles, the ghostly edges of adhesive removed. Her skin was very pale, almost luminously so in this light, with a faint quality she could not name—she thought of the word assembled without knowing why the word arrived that way, with that particular weight.

She pulled the electrodes from her temples. Then the ones from her chest. The monitor to her left began a continuous, uninterrupted tone—a straight line; an absence. She looked at it with something that might have been dark satisfaction, and turned away.

She needed to know where she was.

She needed to know how she had come to be here.

She needed to know who had done this to her.

That last need was different from the others. Less like curiosity, more like a fire she had woken up already standing inside.

She heard him before she saw him.

Footsteps—quick, decisive, not the footsteps of someone alarmed by the monitor's alarm but of someone who had been waiting for it. A door to her right, which she had not registered until now, opened without hesitation.

The man who entered did not stop when he saw her standing.

He should have stopped. Any reasonable person would have stopped—confronted with a subject upright, unrestrained, stripped of monitoring equipment, breathing on her own with naked and obvious fury assembling itself behind her eyes. He should have been startled. He looked, for a fraction of a second—a fraction so brief it might have been imagined—like he was. Then he was not.

He stood just inside the doorway and looked at his creation and said nothing.

He was tall—not remarkably so, but his posture made him seem it. Sharp-boned, angular, dressed in black trousers and a dark grey shirt with the sleeves pushed to the elbows. His forearms showed the kind of lean, precise musculature of someone who used his hands professionally and continually. His hair was dark and pushed back without ceremony, some of it falling at the temples. He was perhaps thirty-five, perhaps older; it was difficult to say. His face was—

Striking was not the right word. It was a demanding face. High forehead. Sharp jaw. A mouth that was currently compressed into a controlled, unreadable line. His eyes were grey-green in the stormlight and they moved over her with an attention so thorough it felt like a second set of hands.

He was holding a tablet. He looked down at it once, then back up.

"You're standing," he said. His voice was low, very composed, with an undercurrent of something he was managing carefully. "That's ahead of projection."

The woman on the floor—on her feet, she was on her feet—felt the words land and felt something rise in her chest that was not gratitude. Not even close to gratitude. It was something hot and structural, like a wall going up.

"Where am I." Her own voice was strange to her: rough from disuse, lower than she expected, but clear. It worked. She noted this with the same remote cataloguing instinct as before.

"Safe," the man in the doorway said.

"That's not an answer."

"No." Something shifted in his expression—not softened, but recalibrated. "It's not. My laboratory. We're in the Aldgate building. East London. Sixth floor." A brief pause. "The floor above doesn't exist on any planning document. Neither does this room."

She absorbed this. "Why are you telling me that."

"Because you asked where you were. And you're intelligent enough that a non-answer would produce a worse response than the truth."

The word landed between them: intelligent. It was not a compliment exactly. It was an assessment. She was being assessed. She had, she understood, been being assessed for some time.

"Look at me," she said.

"I am looking at you."

"Look at me and tell me what you did."

The man in the doorway—the creator, some wordless instinct named him, the one who made you, the one responsible—set the tablet down on a surface beside the door without breaking eye contact.

"I reanimated you," he said.

The room breathed. Outside, thunder moved through the walls.

"I was dead."

"You were dead."

"For how long."

"For long enough that what you are now is—" He paused. Chose his words with visible deliberateness. "Not a retrieval. Something new."

He crossed the room toward her. He did not ask permission. He moved with the easy authority of someone in a space he had controlled for a long time, and he stopped two feet away and held out his hand—not in greeting but in the specific gesture of a clinician requesting the ability to check something. His fingers indicated the sutured line at her sternum.

She did not move back.

She did not extend the courtesy of letting him touch her either.

"Don't," she said.

The creator's hand remained in the air between them. His eyes moved up from the scar to her face.

"You have questions," he said.

"You don't get credit for understanding that."

"I'm not seeking credit."

"Then what are you seeking."

Something moved through the creator's expression then—something complicated, something he had clearly developed infrastructure to suppress, and the infrastructure was working, but it was visible. Like the stress lines in stone.

"To see if it worked," he said.

The honesty of it was more offensive than any lie would have been. She felt it move through her like something cold and confirming—the casual reduction of her, of whatever she was, to the category of result. To the status of an outcome. She felt herself evaluated not as a person meeting another person but as a hypothesis greeting its proof.

She struck the outstretched hand aside.

"My name," she said. The demand came from somewhere absolute. "What is my name."

The creator looked at his struck hand, then back up. A muscle at the corner of his jaw moved once.

"I called you Vera," he said. "In my notes."

Vera. She turned it over. Latin: truth. She did not know how she knew that. She knew it the way she knew the names of surgical instruments, the way she knew the word occipital—as though she had been filled with someone else's knowledge and left to find herself inside it.

"And you?" she said.

"Maren Solís."

"Dr. Solís."

A pause. "Yes."

"Did you think about what you were doing." Not a question—an accusation, very quiet. "When you did this. Did you think about what it would be, to wake up—" She stopped. The words momentarily failed; the sensation they were trying to describe was too large for the gap they had to fill. She pressed on. "Did it occur to you to consider what you were making."

"Constantly," Maren Solís said.

"And."

"And I made you anyway."

She looked at him—at this precise, angular, composed man who had apparently decided that he had the right, that he had the knowledge, that he had whatever it was people told themselves they had when they did things they knew they should not do. She looked at him and felt something she would not yet call what it was. Something that shared a border with hatred. Something that shared a different border with a fascination so unwanted it enraged her.

"Get away from me," Vera said.

Maren Solís did not step back immediately. He looked at her for one moment longer—that thorough, unsparing gaze—and Vera had the unsettling understanding that she was being memorised. That this moment was being filed. That whatever Maren Solís was, he was also a man who had spent a long time wanting something, and was now standing in front of it, and was not yet done looking.

Then he stepped back. Two precise steps.

"There's clothing on the chair by the window," he said. "When you're ready. There's no lock on the interior of that door, but the building is secured from outside. I won't—" A slight pause. The first hesitation that sounded genuine. "I'm not going to restrain you."

"You couldn't," Vera said.

Something moved at the corner of Maren's mouth. Almost a smile. Nothing like warmth.

"No," he said. "Probably not."

He crossed back to the door. He paused there with his hand on the frame, his back to her—and Vera noticed that he did not look back. That he had the self-possession not to look back, even now. Even after all of this. The restraint of it was its own kind of provocation.

"There's water on the tray beside the chair," Maren said to the doorframe. "And analgesics. For the sternum, specifically. The sutured tissue is still—" Another pause. "It'll hurt for several more days."

He left.

Vera stood in the middle of the cold room, naked and scarred and assembled from materials she did not yet have the full inventory of, and listened to the storm claw at the windows and the sound of Maren Solís' footsteps retreating down whatever lay beyond the door—a corridor, other rooms, the architecture of a secret she had woken up inside.

She turned to the window. The glass was old, bevelled slightly, and the lightning moved through it in cold sheets, illuminating the wasteland of a disused East London floor: broken chairs, rolled electrical cable, damp insulation hanging from the ceiling like shed skin. Below, the city. Ordinary, indifferent, blinking in the rain.

She pressed her palm flat against the glass.

Her reflection came and went with the lightning. She looked at it each time it appeared—this face she did not know, these eyes, this mouth, this body with its careful seams—and the question that rose in her was not what am I but something far more dangerous.

Who decided.

Her breath fogged the glass.

Behind it, the city went on without her.

In the laboratory's back room, Maren Solís stood with both hands braced on the edge of a steel sink and looked at the water running cold over his wrists and did not turn the tap off for a very long time.

He had been right about the eyes.

God help him. He had been right about everything.