Free Skin by Kathe Koja Page A

was pure chaos, they're crazy out there so use it: "Don't stop," her features as if heat-changed behind thick stage makeup, its color the dry pink of spoiling meat. "They're only people. Right, John Henry?" and Tess's rictus smile, all of them waiting for her to signal the beef at the doors: her job, somehow, from the very first: give the go.
        Heat. And steam, wet smoke above their milling heads, they were eyes, eyes, mouths already yelling, hands already overhead. The room filled in minutes and there were, still, more, pushing, underfoot in the soundless whoop of strobes, painful screeching of miked metal twisting slowly past tolerance, long combat legs striped in black and chrome silver, leaping incredible to a soundtrack noise so dense it was blood music, terror and strange comfort, consuming and consummation all in one. Backlit vampire grin, the solo flamenco across a bed not of nails but of chipped and shivering wire, Tess's newest construct, still embryo but forced to service: Mme Lazarus, flipping endless its long file-nails, the looped montage of screams and the booming whip of light and Bibi creeping through the audience with a handful of rusty pins.
        And that same audience responding in a brutal burst of energy, the loop from those who show to those who see a whining circle of current, faster and faster until the show's official end, scattergun Xenon bursts, a dazzle like the end of the world and it was suddenly flesh, hot moving wall and they were everywhere, fighting, shoving, trying to climb the constructs, trying to grab Bibi's arms, trying to take from Tess Mme Lazarus's black-taped control box. No longer content to be viewers, now they were participants, Tess kicking shins, pounding elbows and she scrambled like a cat upstairs, Jerome and Bibi and no one knew where the other three were. The building emptied shouts into the street, "Surgeons!" and breaking glass, yelling their heads off and sailing rocks at the windows.
        Still where they tumbled, staring at each other: Jerome's jellied nose and shirt tom to the nipples, Bibi's makeup highlight for her growing bruises, bright and comic as a clown. Tess's underlip felt strange, sausage-swollen, her arms and legs ached as if she had been running for hours. Tiny glass droplets skittering across the floor like thrown roses.
        And outside, still and continuous as the leathery coughing of beasts in the dark: "Surgeons!"
        Cold, the morning air on her tired eyes; Jerome stretched like a puppy on half a sleeping bag, pale grease-striped face too young in sleep. He had spent most of the night making multiconductor cables, vinyl jacketed, Teflon coated, silent shadow as Tess struggled with Mme Lazarus, wanting more of her than just geek curiosity, just a pair of moving arms and metal files. Still dissected on the worktable and Tess leaning her head against the glass, sighing, then the voice in her ear: "John Henry doesn't get tired."
        Out all night and still those clear pale eyes, handing Tess a plastic cup of coffee. "I found us a place," she said, stepping over Jerome to sit on the unmade couch-bed, motioning for Tess to sit beside her; her smell like sweat and other people's smoke, the peculiar dense aroma of clubs now amplified in the room's chilled stillness.
        "Guess where it is," and then instantly, "That gas station! Remember?" Muffled into her cup, "The one across from the old foundry, that we wanted to use before?" and from her pocket a beignet, miraculously unsquashed; she broke it in half, gave the larger half to Tess. "I tried to get the foundry, first, but the guy who owns it, nobody knows where he is, and the holding company wants money before they'll even talk. A damage deposit," her pinking grin, the bruises gone to faint exotic wash beneath her eyes, fierce prizefighter angle of her jaw. "So there's a for-rent sign on the gas station, I called the number and the guy said yes right away."
        Wiping