Second Skin - Chapter 0016

Chapter 16 — Ceiling

The name hung in the air after it was spoken, and neither of them said anything else.

Sebastian stayed leaning against the workbench, his back against the metal edge and his hands braced behind him, looking at the warehouse as if he were seeing it for the first time. He wasn’t. His mind was far away, and his eyes just slid over things without stopping on any of them: the machines hunched in the corners, covered in a dust that was no longer dust but crust; the strip of gray light falling from the hatch and dying before it reached the floor; the trusses up above, rusted, crossing each other in the dark; the drops falling somewhere in the back, one at a time, patiently. He knew all of it. None of it was being seen.

What he saw was the whole situation, all at once, and it didn’t fit.

He had powers. That was the word from cartoons and documentaries, and he avoided it inside himself the way you avoid stepping on a rotten stair, because the word came dressed up as something good and nothing here was only good. He had something, that much was true. Something that saw for him, that closed his cuts for him, that climbed sixteen meters of rope for him, and that charged a price for it he still didn’t know how to read. The conversation an hour earlier had explained a lot and solved nothing. Forty-eight thousand calories a day was a price; it wasn’t the price. The real price was somewhere deeper, and Sebastian had grown up watching his mother read the fine print on the bills, so he knew the big number was never the whole number.

The creature didn’t seem to want to hurt him. He felt that. It wasn’t a conclusion; it was a feeling that came up the same wire the answers came up, a kind of calm on the other side, without teeth. Except that feeling proved nothing. If a thing like that could read what he thought, it could also choose what it let him feel. It could be true. It could be a well-told lie, the kind that doesn’t even need words. He had no way of knowing. He had no test for it, no multimeter to touch against that calm and see if the number checked out.

And beneath everything, deeper than the doubt, was the fear that it was exactly as the creature had said. That if someone tried to take it out of him, he would die. The worst part was that it made sense. The rat in the article had died. The amphibians and the cats had died, not from the substance, but from being cut open to remove it. And the thing clinging to his stomach, his heart, his lungs, had said with all the calm in the world that the separation would leave damage he wouldn’t come back from.

Except there was the other side, and he had already been there once, an hour earlier, and now he went back to check whether the reasoning still held. It did. Cletus Kasady had been separated from Carnage. Someone had done it, somewhere, somehow, and the man had survived: he was in the photo, in an orange jumpsuit, on his knees, smiling at the camera like someone who had won. Kasady, by now, with two death sentences on his back and decades between him and that photo, was probably already dead. The creature wasn’t. The creature had been in the square the day before yesterday, whole, without him. So there was a way. At least one. For that generation, for that man, in that era, with whatever someone had used. Whether there was a way for him, with a thing from another generation lodged in three organs, was a question nobody in the world knew how to answer. Not even the thing.

And all of this was running through his head out in the open, with no door, because there was no door anymore. He knew the creature was listening. He knew that while he weighed whether it was lying, it was on the other side, watching him weigh it. It was a new situation: distrusting someone right in front of that someone, unable to lower his voice. He couldn’t stop thinking. And he couldn’t think quietly.

He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand, hard, until he saw spots. He sighed. The sigh came out bigger than he meant it to and echoed for a second between the machines before it died.

He spoke to the warehouse, the way he had learned to speak that afternoon. With his mouth.

“Well. You gave me these powers.” He looked at his own hands resting on the edge of the workbench. “Do you know how far I can push my body now?”

“No.”

The answer came clean and without delay, and after it came the rest, in the same weightless voice of someone listing something they had known for a long time.

“Unlike my brothers and my father, I never got to put my true abilities into practice. So I can’t answer your question.”

Sebastian sat with that for a moment. It made sense, too. The creature had said, an hour earlier, that its father had never put it to the test, that he had kept it locked up inside, isolated, and that the little it knew about itself it had taken from him. It didn’t know its own weaknesses. It wasn’t going to know its own limits. It was like asking a freshly assembled engine how many miles it could handle. The engine doesn’t know. Only the road does.

He looked around again, and this time he saw.

The machines. They had been there forever, since the first time he came down the iron ladder, fourteen months earlier, and he had never thought of them as anything more than shadows with shapes. Scrap iron. Dead people’s things. There were half a dozen scattered around the warehouse, some pushed against the walls, others planted in the middle of the floor, on concrete bases or cast-iron feet that had sunk into the floor over time. None of them had a name. None of them had a use. They had weight, though. Weight was the only thing those machines still did.

“Well.” He pushed his back off the workbench. “We can test it.”

The one he chose was about ten steps away, half in shadow, half out. He suspected it was an engine, or had been one: a block of cast iron, square, a meter and a half tall by a meter and a half wide, with ribs along the sides like a radiator’s, a thick shaft sticking out of one side, and an identification plate that rust had eaten until only the outline of the bolts remained. It was big. More than big, it was dense; you could tell it was dense from the way the iron closed around the shaft, no gaps, no thin sheet metal anywhere, and from the way the concrete had given a finger’s width around its four feet. The kind of thing you put somewhere with a crane and never take out again.

Sebastian did the math he did with everything, without meaning to. The volume. How much of it had to be solid and how much had to be air. Cast iron was heavy, he knew the rough number from reading so many scrap sheets, and he came out at about a ton, give or take, with room on either side. He shrugged at his own math. It made no difference at all. Nobody lifts a ton. Nobody lifts three hundred kilos over their head. Until Thursday, he’d had trouble getting Frankenstein up six flights of stairs.

He took off his jacket and tossed it on the workbench. He crouched in front of the block, fit his fingers under the edge, where there was a gap between the rib and the foot, felt the rust flake against his palms, and set his feet on the ground the way he’d seen the men at the market set their feet before hoisting a sack. He breathed. He bent his arms and pulled.

For an instant, nothing happened.

It was a long instant. His arms pulled and the iron stayed where it was, and the feeling was the usual one, the one of his whole life: pulling at something the world had decided wasn’t going to move. He knew that feeling better than he knew most people. He was about to let go. Somewhere in the back of his head, he had already started laughing at himself.

Then the engine came up.

It came up the way a box comes up when you expected it to be full and it’s empty. The block’s feet left the concrete, the front ones first, then the back, and the whole thing came along with his arms, and Sebastian had to take half a step back so he wouldn’t fall on his butt with it on top of him. It wasn’t light. That was what didn’t add up, even while it was happening: it was heavy. He felt the weight in every place weight is felt, in his wrists, his shoulders, his lower back, the backs of his thighs, and the weight was real, the heaviest thing he had ever held in his life, heavier than the bike, heavier than anything, and still his arms kept rising. He brought the block past his waist. Past his chest. It stopped there, the iron pressed against him, and he felt the cold come through his T-shirt. Then he turned his palms over, bent his knees, and pushed.

The engine stopped above his head.

Dark, dripping rust onto his face, its shaft pointing at the ceiling like the mast of a boat. His arms extended, locked at the elbows, trembling a little. A vein swelled on his forehead, on the left side, and he felt it swell, felt his face boil, felt his feet dig into the concrete until it seemed they would sink into it. He counted. One. Two. At three, his shoulders started to burn. At four, his elbows wanted to bend and he didn’t let them. At five, he stopped fighting: he took a step back, threw his body forward and shoved the engine with whatever strength he had left, before the thing decided on its own where it was going to fall.

The noise was that of a car falling from the sky.

The block hit the concrete corner-first, two meters ahead, bounced, rolled once onto its side and stopped. The floor cracked around it, a white crack opening in three directions. The dust of more years than he had been alive rose all at once from the nearby machines and hung in the strip of light. Something metallic, way in the back, came loose from wherever it was and rolled until it stopped, and then the warehouse went quiet again, the drops falling as before, as if that were the most normal thing in the world.

Sebastian stood looking at his own hands, open, the mark of the rusted edge running across both palms.

He bent his arms. Straightened them. Rotated his wrists, one at a time, the way he did after spending hours with the soldering iron. Nothing popped. Nothing had given way inside, no tendon, none of those ligament injuries the boys from the soccer team went limping down the hallway with. His shoulders burned. That was all. They burned the way they burned after a whole day of pedaling, an honest pain, the pain of a used muscle.

There was no arguing with it anymore. A thirteen-year-old boy, skinny enough that the teachers put him with the weakest group, had lifted off the ground something that weighed close to a ton and held it up for five seconds. There was no chart where that fit. There was no record, no athlete, no adult. He knew the human ruler because he had spent his life at the bottom end of it, and what he had just done wasn’t on the ruler. It was off it. On another page.

There were people like that. He had always known it, like everyone knew it: mutants with powers too big, too strong, too hard to contain, people who were born knocking down walls without meaning to. But those people got found. They were selected, early, and taken to facilities made for them, where they could be what they were all the way, with no one around to break, with no one to be broken. He had grown up hearing that this was good, that it was for their own good and everyone else’s, and it probably was. Except he wasn’t one of them. He hadn’t been born with anything. He was thirteen, had a shift to work off for Mr. Williams on Monday, and a mother and a sister in an apartment on Hadley who counted on him, and there was no facility anywhere, in any place, made for a boy with a thing stuck in his lungs.

He was sweaty. The sweat had run down the back of his neck and soaked his collar, and his T-shirt clung to his back; his shoulders throbbed in a familiar way, the way they did after climbing 145th with the battery almost dead. That reassured him, strangely. It had been effort. Muscle, breath, vein. It wasn’t magic, it wasn’t a trick by someone behind a curtain: the body had done it, his body, even if it had help.

He smiled.

He knew he shouldn’t. He knew it clearly. The world he was in now, the one from the day before yesterday on, was a world where black things with too many teeth lifted cops by their vests in the middle of the square, and he had no illusion that a ton would be much use against one of those. Half the city, if it could choose, would ask for a power to become a hero. He knew that because he had been that half his whole life. And he knew, now that he had the power in his hands and rust on his palms, that it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t ask and receive. There was a creature in the middle, and a deadline, and a hunger, and no one to ask.

He smiled anyway. He couldn’t help it.

He took a few steps back, to the edge of the strip of light, and stood still for a second, measuring the space around him the way he measured a street before going down a hill with no brakes. Then he bent his knees and jumped.

He didn’t jump hard. That was what scared him later, when he rebuilt the moment: it hadn’t been a jump with a run-up, with gritted teeth. It was the jump of someone who wants to see how high they’ll get. His legs straightened, the floor vanished, and the wind, which shouldn’t exist in a closed warehouse, hit his face and threw his hair back. He rose through the strip of light, went through the dust still hanging in it, and when he realized he was still rising he could no longer see the floor up close: he saw the machines from above, the workbench, the open laptop, the mess of boxes, everything small and tidy, some six meters below his feet.

Six meters. Two stories.

Then gravity remembered him.

The climb ended without a jolt, an instant of nothing at the highest point, and the fall began. Sebastian didn’t decide to turn. His body turned. It spun in the air as if it had always known how to spin, his hips pulling his torso, his torso pulling his head, without the usual panic, without the world turning to mush, and when the concrete arrived his feet were already under him, waiting. He landed. His knees bent as much as they needed to and no more. No jolt to his spine, no stab in his heel, none of those pops he heard inside his own body every time he jumped off a one-meter wall.

He laughed. He laughed out loud, alone, and the laugh hit the walls and came back.

After that, for a while, he stopped thinking.

He jumped again. Higher. He spun in the air, a full turn, the warehouse passing before his eyes like a sped-up video, and landed on his feet. He ran to one of the machines, climbed it in two steps, leaped off it, did a somersault in midair without having arranged anything with his body, and his body finished the somersault exactly where the floor was. He jumped backward. He jumped sideways. He jumped from one machine to another, a five-meter gap he didn’t even measure, and landed on the rusted lid of the second with a clang of sheet metal and stayed crouched there, laughing. He did a flip, something he had never tried in his life, because a boy who can’t see a meter past his face doesn’t try flips, and then he did another, and then a double, which came out crooked and still landed on his feet. His body responded before he gave the order. That was the difference, more than the strength, more than the height: there was no delay. His whole life there had been a distance between wanting and doing, a second of more or less, of fogged lenses, of knees that didn’t hold, of breath that ran out before the end. The distance was gone. He thought it and he was already there.

And he wasn’t alone in it.

He noticed in the middle of a jump, without stopping. The joy wasn’t coming only from him. It came up the wire, from the other side, something like his but not the same, rawer, wordless, and it hit his and bounced back, and the two kept growing in each other like two speakers turned to face each other. Scourge was feeling it. It was feeling the wind, the spins, the floor arriving and falling behind, and Sebastian couldn’t tell whether the creature felt it on its own or through him, and in that moment he didn’t care in the slightest. He let it go. He let the flow carry them both, and for a few minutes the warehouse that had been closed longer than he had existed was the lightest place in the city.

He stopped in the center of the warehouse.

He came out of one last jump and landed with both feet together, arms open, knees locking at the right moment, and stayed there, planted, without needing one more step to keep his balance. The gymnasts on TV did that. They landed and didn’t move, as if the floor had come to them instead of the other way around. If someone had been sitting at a table with a scorecard in hand, it was a ten. A solid ten, no argument.

There was no one. He bowed anyway, a small bow, to the machines.

He looked at his hands.

They were the same. That was what didn’t add up: the thin fingers, the nails with the shadow of grease that never came off, the skin too pale over the knuckles, the mark of the engine’s edge already fading from his palms. The hands of someone who spends the day holding handlebars and a soldering iron. Nothing about them said what they had done.

Then he looked at the wall.

It was to the right of the workbench, the biggest wall in the warehouse: exposed brick up to a man’s height, covered in paint that had once been gray, and from there up, sheet metal, metal panels bolted to columns, rising and rising until they were lost in the darkness of the trusses. He had seen it the first time he came down there and every time after, and he had never thought of it as anything more than a wall.

It was the last test. He knew it was. He had saved it for last without agreeing with himself that he would, the way you save the farthest delivery for last, the one you most want to make. Strength, he had seen in the locker room and on the rope. Jumping, he had just seen. But this, this was the thing. It was in every cartoon Camila watched, in every video he froze frame by frame, in the way the man in red and blue came down the face of a building as if the face were a sidewalk. It was the power he had wanted most in his life, and Sebastian had thirteen years of wanting it piled up in his chest.

He walked over slowly.

He laid his right hand on the metal, at shoulder height, with the care of someone touching a wire without knowing whether it’s live.

The metal was cold. That was all, in the first second: cold, and smooth, and a little dusty. He waited. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, a click, a tug, something that would let him know. Then he tried to pull his hand away.

His hand didn’t come.

He pulled again, harder, and his palm stayed stuck to the metal as if someone had put glue on it while he wasn’t looking. It didn’t hurt. There was no suction, there was nothing he could see at the edge of his fingers, no black thread, no suction cup: it was just his hand, on the wall, not wanting to come off. He laughed again, a short laugh that came out through his nose. He raised his left, stretched his arm as far as it would go, well above his head, and touched. It stuck.

He let go with his right.

He didn’t think about how you let go of a hand that’s stuck; he simply wanted it to let go, and the hand came, clean, with no effort at all. He placed it higher. It stuck. He let go with his left and moved it up. And he kept climbing like that, hand over hand, his feet dangling in the air, his whole body hanging from the fingers of one hand at a time, like a boy climbing a rope that didn’t exist. His fingertips didn’t hurt. That was what he would remember later: there was no strain in his fingers at all, the weight of his body didn’t pull at his joints, his nails didn’t scrape. His hand touched and the wall held it, and he would never be able to say, not that day or any other, whether he was holding the wall or the other way around.

His chest tightened. Not from effort. It was something else, something he hadn’t felt like that since he was very small, maybe ever: what you feel when the thing you always wanted, the thing you never asked anyone for because you knew there was no point asking, happens without warning on a Saturday afternoon, in a dirty warehouse, with no one around to see. He swallowed. His throat closed in a knot and he left the knot there.

About three meters off the ground, he stopped and adjusted himself. He brought his knees up, pressed the soles of his sneakers against the metal, and felt, through the worn rubber, the same grip: his feet stuck. He straightened his legs. He let go with one hand, then the other.

He was standing on the wall.

Vertical, perpendicular, his body at a right angle to the floor. His hands free at his sides. He looked up, and up was the wall continuing, gray, and then the dark. He turned his neck and looked down: the concrete, the workbench, the engine lying on its side, everything turned sideways, three meters below the soles of his feet, and his own body refusing to understand why it didn’t fall. His stomach wanted to fall. His body didn’t. He took a step. His leg moved the way a leg moves on any floor, his foot came loose, moved forward, stuck. He took another. He walked two meters of wall like someone crossing the kitchen to get a glass, and then he stopped and looked ahead, at his own open hands in front of his face, against the metal.

“This…” He heard his own voice come out crooked. “This is amazing.”

“It is.”

It came right away, along with his, and for an instant Sebastian didn’t know who had said what. The creature was feeling it. He was sure now, it wasn’t just the euphoria of the jumps: what came up the wire was his own amazement, handed back, turned up a little, and when he took the next step, the joy on the other side took the step with him.

That was when he noticed something else, and he kept it.

It wasn’t just that they both felt. It was that it felt what he felt, in the same measure, at the same instant, with no delay at all. On Friday, in front of the mirror, the fear had come from it to him. Now it was his joy going to it. The wire ran both ways. And, at least that afternoon, his side seemed stronger: he got excited and it got excited, he was amazed and it was amazed, as if the creature had no mood of its own, or had one and his was bigger. As if it copied him. Emulated, he thought, with the word from the manuals, and the word stuck.

Strange. Strange and important, probably, and he pushed it into the same corner where he kept the questions that didn’t fit in the day. It wasn’t the time.

He climbed the rest of the way.

He walked up the wall, one foot after the other, his body horizontal to the world and vertical to himself, and the metal went from gray to black as the light from the hatch fell behind. He reached the place where the wall met the trusses, a span of crossed iron, with bolts the size of his fist and a crust of rust that flaked under his fingers, and went through it without thinking, one hand on a beam, one foot on another, as if it were a ladder someone had left there for him. On the other side of the trusses was the real ceiling: the roof sheeting, corrugated, freezing, with the wind scraping along the outside.

He put one foot on it. Then the other.

And he was upside down.

His head hung toward the floor and the blood went to it, and for two seconds he felt his face heat up and his eyes throb. Then it passed. His body settled, or the thing inside him settled his body, and he walked. He walked across the warehouse ceiling as if he were walking down the sidewalk on 125th Street, one step at a time, unhurried, his arms loose and pointing down, his hair falling the wrong way. The sheeting made a low drum sound with each step. Between one truss and the next, through the gaps, he could see the floor.

The floor was more than ten meters away.

He stopped right in the middle, at the highest point, and looked. The workbench was a small rectangle. The laptop, a pale square. The engine, a dark smudge lying on its side, with the white crack in the concrete around it. Everything down there, everything far away, and him standing on top of all of it, upside down, with nothing between him and the fall but a thing no one in the world could explain.

The thought arrived whole, a single word, and he didn’t push it away.

Fall.

It wasn’t a decision. It was a wish, a clean wish, with no fear around it, and he noticed there was no fear around it and didn’t find that strange. He closed his eyes. His feet came unstuck.

The fall was long and it wasn’t. He didn’t count. He felt the wind first, the same wind that shouldn’t exist in there, rushing up his face, slipping in through the collar of his T-shirt, tearing the warmth of the sweat off his skin, and he felt his stomach rise into his throat and stay there, and he felt, behind all of that, a joy no fall had ever given him before: the joy of falling and knowing. Of not falling alone. He let it happen. He let his body go straight down, head first, without moving, like something thrown from a window, his eyes closed and his face turned toward the oncoming concrete.

And then, a meter from the floor, maybe less, the back of his neck lit up.

It was the tingling. The same one from the locker room, the same one that had pulled his head away from the tiles an instant before the hand slammed into them: a small shock at the base of his skull, a wordless warning, and his body obeyed the warning before his head knew about it. His middle twisted. That was how he felt it: his belly, his lower back, everything between his chest and his hips, turning all at once, with a precision that had nothing to do with him, his hips dropping, his torso rising, his legs swinging under and his feet driving into the concrete with a dry thud that shot up his shins and stopped at his knees.

He didn’t open his eyes to do it. He opened them afterward.

He was standing. Almost in the same spot he had started from, his knees half bent and his arms open, and the whole warehouse around him, still, with the dust still drifting slowly down through the strip of light, as if nothing had happened.

He looked at his hands.

Again. He had looked at them ten times that afternoon and they were still the same, and he still didn’t believe them. Everything had the feel of a dream, of something shallow, one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming and decide to jump off the building just to see. Except he had a sweat-soaked T-shirt on his back and rust on his palms and a taste of iron in his mouth, and the engine was lying right there five steps away, the floor cracked around it, and none of it was shallow.

Something was happening to him. Something big, bigger than anything that had ever happened in his life, and he didn’t know how to react. He was afraid, because none of it was safe, because there was a creature in the middle and a deadline and an extraction that killed cats, and the fear was there, at the bottom, refusing to leave. He was happy, because finally, finally, he had a power, and it was his power, the power of the man he had spent his whole life looking up at. Both things at once, neither one making the other smaller. He didn’t know how to feel. Truly, he didn’t know.

He stood there, looking at his hands, breathing. And what came out of him, when it came out, came out loud, to the warehouse, to the machines, to Scourge:

“This is better than I imagined.” He shook his head slowly. “And I’d actually imagined all of this was going to be a disaster.”