his face is pale with strain. “Leave me alone,” he whispers.
“Absolutely not,” I say, marching over to him. “You are destroying yourself. Tell me how to get this thing off you.”
“No,” he breathes.
I kneel in front of him and touch his face. “Look at me,” I say gently, stroking my thumb over his clammy cheek. His brown eye meets mine. “You must take care of yourself, or you will not be able to fight.”
He lets out an unsteady breath. “I don’t feel safe—”
“Bo, please. Do you feel safe with me?”
His chuckle is hoarse. “Never. But I do trust you.” He closes his eye. “With some things. Help me undo the arm first?”
He murmurs instructions and I follow them carefully, my fingers slipping over gears to find latches that disconnect the framework over his human arm from the shoulder of the suit. It is tricky, slow business because I am scared that the spiders on his armor will awaken and slice off my fingers. Finally I open the arm like a clam and find his naked, trembling limb inside. His fingers twitch as I carefully pull the metal arm loose and set it on the dirt.
“No,” he snaps, then clamps his eye shut and softens his tone. “Please. Do you have a blanket in your pack? If the exposed gears get grit in them, it will wear them down.”
I retrieve my sleeping blanket from my pack and lay it over the ground, then set his metal arm on it before returning to him. Next he has me take off his helmet, but he asks me to leave his mask in place. His ebony hair is plastered to his head. I smooth damp strands from his face as he tells me to open the chest plate. He has strapped his tools, a bottle of machine oil, a length of cable, and a sack of spare parts across his ribs, over a dirty, sweat-stained undershirt. There is a small compartment beneath the armor over his abdomen that holds a loaf of flatbread and strips of dried beef.
With his teeth clenched, he stares at the rock wall as he explains how to unhook the armor from his machine limb, the one that’s connected to his body at the stump of his amputated left arm. We leave that in place, since he’s accustomed to wearing it and I believe he needs it to feel whole. Once his upper body is freed from its metal cage, Bo himself removes the metal frames over his legs. His flesh hand falters over the latches, but his machine hand is smooth and skittering and sure. His worn trousers are cleaner than his shirt, but still damp with his exertion. His ankles are swollen and bruised, and so is his wrist. There are worn, blistered spots at his elbow and along his collarbone. If he removed his pants, which I know he will not, I am sure I would see more blisters and bruises—signs that this metal skin he wears is eating him alive.
“How long have you been wearing this?” I ask, trying not to wrinkle my nose at his smell. He left the Ring almost a week ago for my sake, something he said he would never do. He came after me because he was unwilling to let me go. And as angry as he is at me, he is still my friend, still my Bo, my Ghost.
“I tried to take it off last night,” he mumbles, his eyelid drooping with fatigue. “But I couldn’t quite manage it. I am sorry. I know I am a filthy mess.”
I take a cloth from my pack and pour a bit of water from my canteen over it. “Let’s clean you off, then.” Moving slowly so that I can sense his needs, I peel the soggy shirt from his skin and run my cloth over his flesh. He shivers as my fingers pass over his bare stomach and lies back on the blanket. As the sun dries the sweat from his hair, I clean his body, my jaw tight with anger as I see what he has done to himself. “Bo, you must spend more time out of these frames than in them.”
His fingers skim my arm as I hand him my canteen. He drinks slowly before sinking back to the blanket. “How much advance warning do you expect us to have before the machines arrive, Wen? An hour? More like a few minutes. It takes me several to get the armor