Page 10 of Skyn (After the End #3)

Alas, a Pervert

When the door creaks open, I’m still standing there—arms out, head tilted back like some desperate priestess hoping for rain.

It’s a wild thought, one I absurdly want to share with Josh.

I even start to turn, instinctively reaching for him.

“Josh, I—” But reality crashes back. Josh isn’t here.

He’s with Dru, probably unpacking in their new place, sharing sweet smiles over a fancy lamb dinner.

And here I am, alone, aboveground for the first time. There’s no victory in it though. I feel gutted. Betrayed. The realization grinds like rocks in a tumbler, sharpening my resentment into something lethal.

“How much did they pay you?”

The voice snaps me out of my thoughts, and I flinch. I didn’t hear him come in. I blink, and then he’s there, a man, or a machine, or maybe some strange thing in between, looming in the doorway.

Dear God.

I don’t know what I was expecting, but not this.

He moves like he owns everything, even the air around him.

Behind him, three human-shaped bots move with eerie precision, like they’re a single monstrous creature split into parts.

The bots are all I want to focus on, because the machine is terrifying.

The man bots have name tags: Crispin, Elton, and Hank.

Crispin is the tall one, built like he was designed to carry very heavy trays or possibly me if I ever tried to run.

Elton is the smallest, which is misleading because he moves like a knife in a bad mood.

And Hank. He looks sweet and dumb and terrifying in a Hulk smash type of way.

Okay, so my machine comes with three nightmare nannies.

Whoever this is, he’s no ordinary man. Three neuro-linked mannies?

The sheer amount of brainpower it takes to control them all at once…

No one belowground has even dreamed of seeing this.

This is a trick, right? How insanely beautiful.

How utterly, ridiculously gorgeous this man is in a way that makes my stomach hurt. I’m actually dizzy.

Shit!

Am I being poisoned?

Did they feed me mushrooms?

I’ve seen people with cybernetic parts before—1 percent, maybe 4 percent at most. But this…person looks like he’s 80 to 85 percent metal, if not more. I don’t have a wand or anything, and you can’t tell that type of thing just by glancing, but he just looks like he has a platinum heart.

Curiosity tugs at me. I step closer, forgetting for a moment that I’m stark naked, save for sunglasses, and vulnerable in the way only a body without mods can be.

But his skin—it’s a marvel: dark, rich—the kind of tone that implies years of sun exposure, a luxury I can barely fathom.

Where his flesh meets his cybernetic parts, there’s no harsh divide, no jarring interruption, just a strange, terrifying beauty.

My hand reaches out before I can stop it, hovering over the place where flesh turns into unyielding metal.

One of the mannies glides forward, moving with a kind of deadly grace, like it’s ready to intervene.

“Sorry,” I murmur, trying to laugh it off, though my voice shakes a little. “Maybe I should’ve offered you a drink first.”

God, what am I even saying?

There’s nothing quite like standing bare-assed next to a fully clothed person to make you feel utterly out of your mind.

But that skin…miraculous. The metal doesn’t fight the flesh; every damned seam is smooth, like molten platinum was poured over his body and left to set.

His irises are dark, nearly black, with these blue cybernetic pupils that give me the unsettling impression that he can see everything—every flaw, every scar, every thought—whenever he wants.

He walks toward the bed, and there’s no clicking, no grinding of gears as he moves.

None of that rusty-train-car sound that plagued Josh’s secondhand arm.

I’ve seen this machine’s face before, but I can’t place him.

“Somebody said we were supposed to get married?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady. I chuckle at the end, so he can join in on the absurdity.

“The event you anticipate has already transpired.” He shakes his head, and the metal ripples like skin. How is that even possible? His voice is low, flat—without joy, without sorrow. Just empty. “We are husband and wife.”

“Now?” I blink, incredulous.

“Now.” He repeated it like a fact, nothing more.

“Where was I?”

I didn’t even get cake. No dress, no vows, no nothing. This is ridiculous.

“In absentia,” he replies, as if this is a thing that happens all the time.

“Did you get cake?” I shoot back, trying to grasp at some thread of normalcy.

His response is bone-dry. “That was a low-probability statement.”

“Okay, so we are Mrs. and Mr…”

“Iku. Benjamin Nehemiah Iku,” he says.

Shit, it’s him. The son. The face. THE Ben.

His gaze is the opposite of his tone—hot and questioning. It drifts from my face, tracking the slope of my bare shoulder, pausing at the diamond set into my collarbone. He’s staring at it like it’s an anomaly, a glitch in the system. I forgot to cover it. Shit. At least the Chins didn’t see.

“Was it a contest?” he asks, his voice faintly curious.

I blink, thrown off. “What?”

He tilts his head, his expression neither cruel nor kind, just…intent. “How did they select you? I find it unlikely they would choose an intelligent wife.”

I tap my diamond, feeling the cool metal under my fingertips. “Oh, this?” I try for casual. “I…kind of hid this.”

A flicker of muted surprise. Then a twitch of something he quickly tamps down. “Bigger fools than I thought,” he murmurs, almost to himself. “Did my brother promise you anything? Do you owe allegiance to him or another sector? If you try to lie I will sense it.”

“No and no,” I say, holding his gaze steady, refusing to flinch.

“They have calibrated your allure with such”—his voice falters—“exquisite detail,” he finishes. “But I won’t give my brother the victory of carnal weakness. I will leave you and your body in peace,” he says, a cool finality in his tone. His eyes flick to my mouth, just for a second.

I shouldn’t be able to feel his eyes, but I do.

The assessing aspect of his gaze chills me. Is he calculating how much Iku MEAT he could get out of me?

He doesn’t move, though, and neither do I. His eyes stay on me. For a man determined to leave me in peace, he seems perfectly content to hang out here and torture me with his hot looks.

I need to make him an ally. I just don’t know how.

The usual methods seem…ineffective. He’s joining a growing line of men who don’t seem overly ensnared by my feminine wiles.

Wasn’t that the entire deal here? I was brought up to be someone’s unmodded fetish, a pliant curiosity from the mines to be ogled, controlled, and fucked.

I thought it was a way I could get information, control him a little with his, like, burning desire for my body or whatever. I don’t know…

“Listen,” I say, my pulse quickening, “I volunteered because you had some kind of need? I was promised a pervert.”

The machine laughs—or chokes, or…he emits a wheezing sound that make me want to take a step back. He looks up, surprised at the noise himself.

“I am sorry to disappoint,” he says. The corners of his mouth rise.

“Why would your family go through all this?” I ask. I overheard enough. Their whispers, their sideways glances. “Whoever sent me here wants to see you hurt.”

There’s a sharpness to my voice, an edge I don’t even try to soften. It isn’t for him—I barely know the guy—but I feel real anger directed at the faceless people who reached for me in the railcar, talked about me like I was something they could have anytime they wanted.

It’s a strange kind of solidarity, standing here with this man who likely feels just as trapped as I do, though I’d never have guessed that at first. It’s becoming our first united front as husband and wife: hating those assholes who are turning the screws.

“Those guys can go get fucked, am I right?”

I don’t expect him to laugh, and he doesn’t, but I catch the smallest flicker in his eyes, like maybe he agrees. Maybe this is something we can share.

“You’re here to embarrass me,” he says, finally throwing me a bone.

There’s no anger in it, no bitterness, just a quiet resignation that settles over him like a shadow.

“There was a plan in place, bigger than me, bigger than the sector, and I disrupted it. I didn’t want those deaths on my hands. The bad meat.”

The food supply is so tenuous, a tiny ripple could lead to war or starvation. “That tainted meat has got everybody spooked,” I say. “It’s got folk thinking about another burn.” I test out the vendors theory, but the man is giving away nothing with his face.

“Forty-nine deaths and rising. Too few if you ask some people,” he continues, “So they tried to set me up with an embarrassingly unsuitable fiancé. They think arranging a zero-percenter marriage—just about the most socially taboo thing you can do up here—is punishment.”

I frowned. “Is it?”

“No. I doubled down and married you.”

No hesitation, just a hot, flat statement that honestly leaves me a little breathless. They had tried to arrange an embarrassing engagement- a spoonful of poison, and he instead, swallowed the whole caldron. So, he’s not dead inside. He’s just pissed enough to be petty.

“We weren’t supposed to be married,” I say. I remember the conversation in the railcars—they expected him to fold at the sight of me.

“No, I was supposed to fall in line. You were a threat. And now you’re my wife.

” Elevating a skin bride to a public legal marriage in a prominent family leaves too many questions about desirability—and who is on top of that hierarchy of desirability—open.

He’s betting that it will cause the family more harm than they anticipated. And he’s probably right.

His audacity almost makes me like him. But I can’t afford to, especially if he turns out to be behind the plans to destroy my sector.

“I should tell you that th-there is a—you are emitting a smell. Is this a mine smell? Or—” Ben stammers.

It’s cute that he’s being delicate. I stink like metal and oil and rust and sweat.

“No, I just had a long, hot, sticky day. Could you spare the water?”

“We have plenty of water to spare. My bots can help you soak this dirt off.” His three monsters walk stifly toward me.

“Whoa…I… They’re neuro-linked, right? Do your manny bots see what you see?”

“They do.” He says this flatly like all his sentences, but his gaze is the opposite of his tone. His eyes drift from my face to the slope of my bare shoulder, pausing at the diamond gleaming in my collarbone. And my pulse is betraying me, thumping against the cool metal of my diamond.

“Alas, a pervert,” I say.