Free Hammered by Elizabeth Bear

safety strap over the grip of the pistol one-handed.
    “It’s still amazing to watch you do that.” His head oscillates slowly from side to side. Admiration or rue?
    I drop the crushed apple into a biohazard bag in the corner by the stainless steel sink. There are still droplets of water on the floor from Simon’s handwashing. “Amazing? Yeah. As amazing as walking out of twenty years of service with a combat-drug-and-painkiller habit to dull the hyper-sensitivity and the hurting. So get off my back about the booze, already. I’m entitled to one or two vices, considering how many I gave up.”
    He turns the water on so I can rinse my sticky metal fingers and he pats me on the shoulder. “All right, Jenny.But do me one favor?” I dry my hands on the towel he hands me.
    “What’s that?”
    He pokes me in the ribs. “Eat something once in a while?”
    I leave Simon’s office with a head full of unanswered questions and an ache in place of my heart, having promised to stop on the way home and find something for breakfast. I could have taken surface trans—Hartford’s long-contemplated light rail never quite materialized, but electric buses run until ten o’clock or so, although not into my neighborhood. I took one much of the way to the medical building.
    Hartford isn’t a big town. That’s one of the reasons I like it. The morning promises fair and cool, the first traces of autumn outlining the leaves of a few caged trees that haven’t yet choked. First time I was here, in ’35, ’36—whenever it was—it had almost as many trees as in Toronto. Tugging a black leather glove on over my left hand, I decide to walk.
    I leave the buckles of my jacket open, the sidearm in plain view as I follow Jefferson Street east to Main before turning north, parallel to the river but out of sight of it. My body shakes with the aftereffects of adrenaline and my boosted reflexes. In the service, I learned to self-medicate, the way a lot of people with more organic problems than mine do.
In fact, you might say I have an inorganic problem. Hah.
When I got out, I couldn’t get the combat drugs anymore. The Hammer, guaranteed to make you just as invincible and focused as a dose of PCP, but without the recreational effects. Also allegedly nonaddictive. Like cigarettes and caffeine. So I learned to make do with less legal things. It took me about four years to wise up.
    I was lucky to have good friends.
    When they reconstructed me after the bad one, the army modified just about everything about the way I respond tothreat, from my endocrine system to muscle memory. The human body isn’t meant to withstand what mine has been engineered to do. There are prices. My heart still hammers in my chest. The edges of my vision hang dark in the long minutes before the enhanced reflexes let go of my nervous system, but I force myself to breathe slowly, look calm, walk with as little trace of a limp as possible.
    I’m paranoid. I’m also pushing fifty, and the two are not unrelated.
    An early hour, for this neighborhood. It makes the street quiet. Park Avenue and Main Street, by ratty little Barnard Park. Here, at the edge of the barrio, I pass three gangsters in Hammerheads colors—Face’s boys—standing in the shadow of a doorway. Up late. Nothing but a house fire would have gotten them out of bed this early.
    One of them nods to me, a single sharp jab of his chin. I return the gesture, no eye contact, and a third of a smile. They never know what to make of me, these kids. I’m not one of Razorface’s old ladies—except in the sense of being old as their grandmothers—but they know he trusts me. And most of them were
raised
by their grandmothers, so I do receive a certain amount of respect on that front, too.
    I’m certain none of them understand the real deal, and I bet it drives them buggy.
    When you save somebody’s life—especially another warrior’s—you’re brothers. Maman taught me that. Face’s mama apparently taught him