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Drivesuit scars go deeper than the skin; it’s nerve damage, pain that doesn’t heal. Anchorage will twinge in his shoulderblade down to his fingertips for as long as he lives, just in case he might ever be in danger of forgetting.
On the Wall it was always worst in the mornings, after a night sleeping on the rock-hard public barrack beds or, if he was less lucky, some patch of frozen dirt or steel floor somewhere. There had been a few times when the spasms in that arm got so bad that he spent the whole grueling sunrise climb waiting to seize up and fall.
Now he wakes up after a night on the standard-issue PPDC mattress with both shoulders locked up, both hands clenched and burning. Mako is awake before his gasp of pain; she rolls over and props herself up on one elbow, tracing the welts with her fingtertips.
The edges of her nails drag gently over the scars that follow his nerves, medial, radial, ulnar, up to his shoulder and cutting across his ribs. They tangle in a knot over his heart; Anchorage whitish and puckered on the left, the Anteverse angry red and blistered on the right. Her touch is cool, soothing, working out the stiffness and kneading the muscles back to life.
Raleigh watches her, breathlessly waiting for the agony to subside. She’s wearing one of his old Academy t-shirts, and she as leans over him the neckline rides low on her collarbone, revealing the terminus of her own web of scars, much fainter than his. She never ran Gipsy alone, but the damage they took was enough to mark her, to change her.
As she moves from his left arm to his right, he reaches up and slides his thumb over her clavicle sharp as a blade, over the pattern of faint, branching scars. Her badge of honor.
“You’re beautiful,” he murmurs. “Did I ever tell you?”
She captures his hand without releasing pressure on his shoulder, and kisses the calluses on his palm. “Yes,” she says. “So are you.”