Chapter Fifteen

Stitches

“Why have you had so much plastic surgery?” Jenna questioned, coming up behind Sardius and tapping him on the shoulder.

He swung around. “Does it make you feel like I’m less authentic because I’ve had my face and body worked on so often?”

She shrugged, trying to hide any discomfort she may, or may not, have been feeling. “I’m just trying to understand. I want to understand all the little parts of you.”

“Well, just as the doctor said, muscles get wrecked in zero gravity. The longer someone stays in zero gravity, the more their muscles lose density, reactivity, form, and obviously, strength. It is very common for thugs to wait around spaceports to rob travelers and army personnel who have been in deep space for too long. They’re easy marks. I had to have appointments to get new muscles put in before I went down to the surface. Don’t get the wrong idea. Nothing like that would happen in the Octavia system, but it would have happened where I come from.”

“And the work you had done on your face?”

“I had to have several operations before I could see you. I thought you knew that. My face was messed up before I went to prison. In the prison, I wasn’t roughed up until the night of the riot, and then, I was very roughed up. It wasn’t anything I couldn’t take, but I wasn’t cute anymore. When I came to this system, the people who found me booked me for facial reconstruction surgery before I was conscious. They knew no one wanted to go on looking like that. That first doctor did what he could, but mostly he just wanted to rebuild my nose so I would be able to breathe through it again.”

Jenna winced.

“Don’t cry for me,” Sardius said with a gasp like Jenna’s discomfort was worse than the damage to his nose had been. “I’m okay. I’m used to being pragmatic about how I look and what constitutes me. It’s not a huge sacrifice to let Dr. Russell have a go at me. The thing that concerns me the most about it is that you will be without a bodyguard while she works on me. That’s worrying. I need to find someone to take care of you while I’m out of commission.”

“You don’t need to do anything special for me. I can go underwater and spend time with Favel in his mansion. He’s been hinting that construction on my palace is far enough along for me to go for a dive to see it for myself. I could do that. I’d be safe with the Octavians.”

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He shook his head. “If I was convinced that the Octavians would care for you effectively in times of danger, I wouldn’t be here at all”

“Hmm…” Jenna murmured. “Back to your face. You said that how you look now is sort of how you looked before all the surgery?”

“Try not to fret it, but I lied when I said that to Dr. Russell. She’ll probably be able to piece that together when she cuts me open, or maybe not. I just didn’t want her to get too curious about me. That’s the last thing we need. So, I said I’ve always looked sort of like this.”

“You didn’t?”

“I had a bad burn when I was a teenager. I had to choose a new face then. This face was the one I chose out of a data bank of faces the last doctor had on offer. Considering my existing facial structure, I could choose fifteen different combinations and this general shape was the one I decided on. It’s interesting that I chose this facial shape as a teenager because it is the closest thing in appearance to your eleven matches through the universal matching algorithm… though you can tell by looking at me that even still, I’m not very close. I’d be closer if I was still looking the way I used to before I was sent to prison.”

Jenna clucked her tongue. “That’s funny because I find you more attractive than Armen or Fallcet. I guess you don’t really know what you want until you see it.”

“Too bad I’m only on loan,” he said, keeping up his barriers to their intimacy before he continued. “The muscles are a different matter.” He smiled and put up his bony bicep in a little show for her. He didn’t seem to know what to do with compliments. “They don’t make me feel weird about who I am or how I look. New muscle day is the best day. They train up faster and work better than real muscles. You’ll hear different accounts from different boxers, fighters, and military yokels, but I enjoyed my first set more than I’d ever enjoyed my natural muscles. I wouldn’t mind taking new ones from Dr. Russell if she wanted to swamp mine out.”

Jenna tried not to let on how weird she found all that. Instead, she ran a hand along the bones in his back and tried not to think of all the crabs she’d eaten when she still lived in a city by the sea. How much were his insides like the inside of a crab? The guy in The Clube didn’t call him crabman for no reason.

She had to think of something else. She tapped her cheeks and asked him to help her out of her dress. She had been asking Misha for dresses with built-in corsets. Then she always had an excuse to have Sardius help her out of them.

As he worked with the laces, she asked him, “How did you get burned as a teenager?”

“Sorry. I can’t tell you that kind of story. The only part of that story that matters is that I lost what I looked like and I had to make a large collection of choices too fast. I’m disappointed that Brazel thought I was young when she looked in my ear. I hoped that was over now.”

“Isn’t there a place we can speak privately?” she said over her shoulder.

“I’m working on it,” he whispered back. “I’ve almost got a place.”