I crouched next to him. This close, I thought maybe there was something familiar about him.
Neds strolled over. “What are you going to do with him, Tilly?” Right Ned asked.
“I don’t know. Check his pockets, will you? See if he has a name. If he’s really House Gray, we might have trouble on our hands.” I was already pushing his hand to one side so I could get to his wound. It was deep and bad. Might be from a crocboar. Might be from any number of beasts that grew up hungry and mean out on the edges of the property.
I could mend him enough to get him to a hospital hours away in my old truck on these old roads. If he hadn’t lost too much blood, he might survive.
I stood. “I need the sewing kit. The medicines.”
“Tilly,” Right Ned said. “I don’t think that will work.”
I was already halfway across the kitchen toward the bathroom, where I kept all the supplies for taking care of Neds and Grandma.
“Tilly,” Left Ned snapped. “Stop and listen, woman.”
I did not like being bossed around by that man. Either of them. I turned.
Neds hunkered next to the stranger, his shotgun in easy reach on the floor beside him, his shoulders angled so the shirt stretched at the seams. He’d pushed the man’s jacket sleeve back to reveal his arm up to his elbow.
Stitches. The man had a thick line of charcoal gray stitches ringing his entire forearm. Not medical stitches, not medical thread. Life stitches, like mine.
I instinctively held my own hands out, turning them so they caught the light. Thin silver stitches crossed my palms and circled my thumbs, making the gold-brown of my skin look a little darker. Just as those same silver stitches tracked paths across my arms and my legs, and curved up my stomach, my breasts, and around one shoulder. Just as stitches traced my left ear to the curve of my jaw and ran a line across my neck. I kept my hair free to cover them up. If I wore gloves and long-sleeved shirts and pants, no one knew I was made like this.
Made of bits.
Not quite human.
Stitched like my father’s other illegal creations.
The only other people in the world who were stitched were the galvanized. Warriors, historians, counselors—they were prized and owned by the heads of the Houses. Rumors said they were owned against their will and put on display in the fights during the annual Gathering of Peace, and any other politically influenced event. Owning a galvanized was proof of the House’s wealth and power. Rumors said they were the reason the Houses were no longer at war with each other, because the galvanized refused to be involved in House-to-House conflict.
Rumors also said they were immortal.
The galvanized began as a medical curiosity, then went on to become oddities, supersoldiers, historians, while remaining technological and medical guinea pigs. Tired of being owned and used, the galvanized walked away from the Houses. It became known as the Uprising, and once people saw that the galvanized refused to follow House rules, they too defected from House control.
The Uprising saw thousands of people fleeing from multigeneration debt to the Houses and forming their own House—House Brown—which they intended to run democratically as a loose collective of people unhappy with House demands and injustices.
The galvanized stood with them. In an attempt to kill House Brown and its promise of freedom, the other Houses banded together to wage war on House Brown, vowing it would never be recognized as a legitimate House. Years of guerilla resistance and war nearly brought the world’s system of resource management crashing down. The Houses finally agreed to a peace treaty drawn up by the galvanized.
House Brown would have no voice in world affairs or the affairs of Houses, but they would be left alone. In exchange, the galvanized would return to the Houses; give up their rights to be considered human; and become servants, slaves, and subjects once again.
The galvanized had agreed to those terms. No one knew why.
I’d never once in my life met a person stitched like me.
Until this man. This stranger bleeding on my floor.
“You’ll need the other thread,” Right Ned said. “Hospital out here won’t know what to do with him, or with us for having him.”
I was nodding but my body seemed far away. “He’s . . . he’s . . . like me. I thought galvanized were different. Immortal and perfect.”
“He’s hurt.” Neds strolled over to me.
He touched me only in the most urgent of times.
Contact for him, he had told me, was an intimate sort of thing. He knew an awful lot about a person if he put his hands on their skin for too long. He said he respected me too much to do that, to know things about me I wouldn’t want him to know.
But he touched me now, his warm fingers brushing oh so lightly across my palms.
