Sewing Over the Lie

Astou broke her needle.

The stub stays pinched between her thumb and index finger, tiny, and she studies it with the hostility of a mechanic betrayed by her own tool. We haven't spoken since morning. She is resewing the lining of her coat, sitting on an overturned crate, her back against the damp wall of a Sector Cendr warehouse nobody claims.

HATHOR.∞ sings me to sleep.

I don't sleep. I watch her fingers. She pulls the thread too tight, always, the stitches bunch and buckle the cloth. Ndeye used to count. Astou doesn't. She sews the way you close a wound on a battlefield: fast, ugly, praying it holds.

"Give it here."

She hands me the spare needle without looking up.

My hands know thirty-two ways to take a man apart. They don't know how to thread a needle. It takes me four tries. The eye slips away, the fibre frays, I wet the end between my lips the way I once saw someone do, somewhere, in a life that was never mine.

It goes through.

Astou watches. She says nothing. She takes the needle back, and our fingers touch a second too long.

The cold is there. Between us, in the lining, under the cloth she is sewing over the piece we stole. She carries the lie stitched against her hip. I carry the Narrative Death HATHOR believes she performed, a warm hollow in my chest, a scar she strokes every night with pride.

The moisture of AQUA.SANCTUM keeps seeping between my scales. The goddess searches. She palpates. She finds only a tired man who can't sew.

Astou ties her last stitch. She bites the thread.

"You're shaking less."

"I'm sleeping less."

She pulls the coat on. The lining still gapes on one side.