The needle is a straightened fishhook. The thread is dental floss I traded three D-cells for last winter, back when I still had things worth trading.
I hold both in my good hand and try not to think about what the bad hand is attached to.
Gus hovers at my shoulder—the uninjured one—his single optical sensor casting a cone of blue light across my work. Blue for concern. He’s been cycling through blue for the last hour, ever since I crawled back through the gap in the corrugated sheeting that passes for my door.
“I know,” I tell him. “I know.”
He flashes white. Snark. You don’t know anything, you’re about to sew yourself up with a fishhook.
“Arjuna would’ve been nicer about it.”
The white stutters, then shifts to purple. We don’t talk about Arjuna. Except I just did, which means my head isn’t where it needs to be, which means I need to focus.
The cut runs from the top of my shoulder to just above my collarbone. Deep enough that I saw something white in there before the blood welled up—muscle, maybe, or the fascia over bone. I’m not sure. Arjuna would’ve known. He memorized a medical textbook when he was five because he liked the diagrams, and he’d info-dump about anatomy while I was trying to sleep, his small voice rattling off Latin words in the dark. The deltoid muscle originates at the clavicle, Kak. Did you know? Did you know that?
I knew. I always knew, little brother. I just didn’t know it would matter.
The shack stinks. It always stinks—open sewer runs six meters from my door, close enough that I can hear it gurgling through the gaps in the walls—but tonight the smell is worse because I can’t close those gaps. The plastic sheeting I usually stuff in them is pressed against my shoulder, soaked through with blood that’s finally starting to clot. So the cold gets in, and the smell gets in, and both of them settle into my bones like they’re planning to stay.
Two months until winter really hits. Maybe six weeks. The old ajumma who sells rice from the cart on Jalan Melati says it’ll be bad this year, worse than last, and last year I watched three kids from the next block over stop moving one morning and never start again.
I had Arjuna to keep warm then. His furnace of a little body pressed against mine, stimming himself to sleep with his fingers drumming patterns on my arm.
Now I have Gus. Gus doesn’t generate heat. Gus doesn’t generate anything except commentary.
White flash. Are you going to stare at that needle all night, or—
“Shut up.”
I pour the last of my rice wine over the wound. It’s not alcohol enough to truly sterilize, but it’s what I have, and Arjuna died because I didn’t have enough of what I needed, so this time I’m using everything, all of it, even if it means I have nothing left to trade tomorrow.
The pain is extraordinary. Clean and bright, the kind of pain that washes everything else out, and I hold onto it like a rope because the rope leads somewhere and the alternative is a dark room I can’t afford to enter.
Not tonight. Not with a wound that needs closing.
I make the first stitch. The fishhook is too thick, tears the skin more than it should, but it holds. That’s all that matters. Holding.
Gus dims his light to a soft amber. Caution. Slower. You’re shaking.
I am shaking. I didn’t notice.
The parka I’m wearing is older than I am—army surplus, Indonesian military, probably from before the Collapse. It smells like the man I took it from, who was dead in a doorway three winters ago and didn’t need it anymore. The sleeve is pushed up past my elbow now, baring skin that’s gone gray with cold, and I think about how the dead man’s skin looked the same color before I stripped the coat off him.
Gray is the color of not enough blood flow. Gray is the color of giving up.
I make the second stitch. The third.
Gus orbits me slowly, his light cycling through colors I don’t have the bandwidth to translate. Probably worried. Probably telling me I’m an idiot. Both are true.
The wound is from a knife. I don’t think about whose knife. I don’t think about why the knife, or what came before the knife, or the way my torn clothes are wadded in the corner because I can’t stand to look at them. I think about the angle of entry and the depth of the cut and the fact that infection sets in within six to twelve hours if the wound isn’t properly cleaned, and I cleaned it, I cleaned it the best I could, but the water here isn’t clean either so maybe I just traded one kind of dying for another.
Fourth stitch. Fifth.
My hands remember doing this for Arjuna, the time he cut his foot on a piece of scrap metal and the wound went septic anyway because the floss wasn’t enough and the rice wine wasn’t enough and nothing I had was ever enough—
Gus bumps against my cheek. Warm plastic, the faint hum of his rotors. His light is blue again, steady and soft.
“I’m fine,” I tell him.
He doesn’t flash white. Doesn’t call me a liar. Just stays there, hovering, his single eye watching me work.
I finish the last stitch and tie it off with fingers that feel like they belong to someone else. The wound looks awful—puckered and angry, the floss standing up in stiff little peaks—but it’s closed. That’s what matters. Closed means healing. Closed means a chance.
I pull the parka back up over my shoulder, ease my arm into the sleeve. The fabric catches on the stitches and I bite down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
Outside, someone is screaming. It’s distant—three blocks over, maybe four—and it cuts off the way screams here always cut off, sudden and complete.
Gus flashes red.
“I know,” I say. “I know.”
I curl up in the corner where the walls meet, where the drafts are slightly less murderous, and I pull my knees to my chest. Gus settles into the hollow between my neck and shoulder, his rotors spinning down to a whisper.
The sewer gurgles. The wind moans through the gaps I can’t fill. Somewhere in the dark, a rat is gnawing on something that sounds wet.
I close my eyes and I don’t sleep and I wait for morning.