He watched her take off her blouse and his breath came very short at the sight of all that woman’s flesh and at the eagerness in her own eyes. He felt the radiant heat of her boiler (which she could never let die she told him, which ate and ate fuel incessantly, old and broken and unreasonably greedy) and saw the dark pewter of her harness where it met the pasty flesh of her upper thighs like a tide. His own clothes were off him in easy layers and he stood shivering and thin and scrawny, prick bobbing erect and adolescent, heart and passion filling him so that it was hard to swallow.

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep.

Heal me , he thought, not understanding what he thought, hoping for a reconfiguration. There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. Breathing fast again. His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar.

-My Remade girl, he said wondering, and she forgave him that, instantly, because she knew he would not think it again.

It was not easy, with the stubs of her legs pinioned in metal, in a tightV , parted only slightly, with only two inches of the inside of her thighs below her cunt in flesh. She could not open to him or lie back, and it was not easy.

But they persevered, and succeeded.)

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Shekel came to Bellis and asked her to teach him to read.

He knew the shapes of the Ragamoll alphabet, he told her, and had a tentative sense of which sound each letter made, but they remained esoteric. He had never tried to link them and make them words.

Shekel seemed subdued, as if his thoughts were outside the corridors of the library boats. He was slower than usual to smile. He did not talk about Tanner Sack, or about Angevine, whose name had peppered his conversations recently. He wanted only to know if Bellis would help him read.

She spent more than two hours, after her shift, going through the alphabet with him. He knew the names of the letters, but his sense of them was abstract. Bellis had him write his name, and he did, scratchy and inexpert, pausing halfway into the second letter and skipping ahead to the fourth, then going back and filling in lost spaces.

He knew his written name, but only as strokes of a pen.