“Verity?” A soft voice broke the spell.

Chance pulled away slightly with a growl, ready to pummel whoever had interrupted them. He was frustrated by the interruption, but it cleared his head. What had he been thinking? Kissing a girl like Verity, knowing what he was. It was like she had him under a spell, overriding his self-inflicted celibacy with nothing more than a sassy mouth and cute as hell smile.

He turned his head and instantly saw where the voice came from. In horror, he dropped his hands from her waist and rushed to the woman lying in the apartment doorway.

“Imogen?” Verity came forward, and Chance held up a hand.

“There's—there’s a lot of blood.”

He looked back down at the girl. Blonde hair had been matted down with blood and dirt. Her clothes were so stained he wasn't sure what color they were intended to be. But the layers of long skirts and tight fitting, high-collared shirt announced clear as day where she'd come from. She was an ecovangelist.

“Is she your friend?”

Verity nodded, hand over her mouth as she shook staring at her bloodied friend.

“Open the doors, we need to get her inside.” Chance reached down and scooped the girl up in his arms. He carefully kept his cybernetics from touching her, tucking it under her skirts. The last thing this girl needed was to get the shit scared out of her by a cyborg.

Verity unlocked the main door with shaking hands and led the way up one flight of stairs to her apartment door. He watched as she unlocked four bolts. Good, at least her apartment was somewhat secure. When she opened it, the smell of mildew and mold washed over him.

He ignored Verity, as he strode into the space and laid the girl down on the threadbare mattress on the floor. Her apartment was oppressively tiny and bare. “Open the windows. She needs fresh air.”

Verity moved as if in a daze. She locked the door, bolting it back up and attaching the chains for extra security. She opened all the windows and rushed to get a glass of water. When she came to his side, she kneeled down, handing Chance the drink before placing both hands on the girl's legs.

Chance lifted the stranger’s head gently and handed her the glass of water.

With a shaking hand, she took it and gulped it down.

“Imogen, how did you get here?”

The question confused Chance. She didn't ask what happened or why the girl was covered in blood. Her injuries appeared to horrify but not surprise the strange young waitress.

"I—they—" Imogen broke down in tears and Chance helped her lay back down.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to talk right now, whenever you’re ready,” Verity soothed in a gentle voice. A new side of her exposed itself to Chance, the side that loved this girl and would do anything for her. It gentled her, but Chance knew just how strong love could make you.

"We have to check her injuries and see what happened,” he said.

Verity shook her head. “No, the hospital, we should take her to a hospital.”

“Not in Cyn City. If you go there and can’t pay, you’ll leave without a kidney, or worse.”

Verity studied him, hard. “Then you need to leave."

Chanced stared in shock. "I'm not leaving her like this."

“I have to undress her and check her injuries. You can’t be here. It's not proper.”

Chance had half a mind to remind her of the searing kiss they’d just shared and how she wasn’t really one to talk about what was proper. But the interloper was an ecovangelist.

Verity suddenly made a lot more sense.

The ecovangelists were a nutjob cult of separatists who insisted the earth could still be viable despite all the science to the contrary. They lived completely separate from the rest of humanity with their own communities, their own laws, and their own beliefs. He didn't know a ton about them. No one did, but he knew they had reverted to a lot of the puritanical thinking from earth past.

“I'm not leaving. I’ll sit in the hall or the bathroom and wait for you to clean her up a little, but I'm not leaving you here alone with her. What if you need medicine for her or a doctor? I could comm Enver…”

“No,” the girl whispered. "No doctors. No more doctors." With that, her eyes fluttered shut, and Chance knew she’d lost consciousness.

“I have to—" Verity wrung her hands and stared at Chance with impossibly big eyes on her elfin face. “What do I do?”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and he could practically see the panic rising up off of her like steam from the concrete in summer.

“Okay, I understand you don’t want my help with cleaning her up, but she’s covered in blood. How are you going to do this when just seeing Enver in the bar had you practically passing out? You really need to let me at least get her help, so she doesn’t develop some kind of infection.”

Verity visibly twitched, her hands still gripping each other as her eyes darted from Imogen’s blood-soaked clothes to the wall and back again.

“I promise I’m not going to look, touch, or do anything inappropriate. And you’ll be here the whole time, so you can just use your pressure point mojo to knock me out if I do.” He gently joked, trying to keep his voice even. When was the last time he’d tried to reassure someone he wasn’t a threat as opposed to the other way around? When was the last time he’d cared?

Normally, he’d walk right by the girl on the street. Cyn City wasn’t known for compassion, and people passed out or bleeding wasn’t an uncommon sight. And if he did help, he’d drop them off at a cynker or medic and go about his day. He had other shit to do: check in on Enver’s patient, set up for tonight’s fight, count out last night’s winnings from the safe and potion it out for the fighters, Garvan, and himself. And at some point, he still had to get some fucking sleep either at home or in the cot he kept in one of the back offices at the Ball & Joint. He’d eaten and gotten the girl inside. What made him so desperate to stay and make sure she survived?

Verity’s faint nod and relieved exhale explained it all.

Fuck, if he wasn’t under that girl’s spell.

“Get me something sharp, scissors if you have them, some warm water with soap, and a cloth to wipe her down.”

Verity nodded, her pale lips starting to show some color again.

Good, he did not need for her to faint.

As she rummaged around her apartment, Chance checked over the girl's face and head. She had some serious bruising, and a cut on the side of her head that could have been from a metal-tipped boot. She likely had a concussion but didn’t seem too bad off. The bruises would fade, and the cut would have bled a lot, which explained the blood but didn’t look serious.

He itched to comm Enver. He was a trained human medic cum military cyborg.

But Imogen had been clear. No doctors. No more doctors.

What the hell had happened to her?

“Here.” Verity held out a pair of scissors and a strip of thin cloth that looked like it had been ripped from the bottom of a dress. “I’m heating water now, because the tap only runs cold.”

“Okay. I’m going to take off her shirt.”

“You can’t—”

“I have to see where she’s hurt.” Chance used the scissors to cut off the girls top and then eased it out from underneath her limp form. That seemed better than unbuttoning it, less intimate. Verity watched but didn’t protest, as he pressed his fingers against her skin, probing the blooming purple bruises and cuts. He avoided touching her skin with his metallic hand, using it only to readjust her camisole when necessary. It was stained but not nearly as bloody.

“I think most of the blood came from her head. She doesn’t seem to have any cuts on her torso or arms.”

The kettle whistled, and Verity hustled off to pour the water into a bowl. It steamed, leaving droplets of water on his metal geared arm as he reached for the dish.

“I should wash her,” Verity pulled it back out of his grasp.

“Just let me get the blood off. You can do the rest.”

She set it on the floor next to the bed and began ripping the strip of fabric into smaller pieces. “When we were younger, Imogen and I used to run out into the dust fields past the electromagnetic fences. We’d get so dirty just standing in the wild open air. It even tasted different on the other side. I always imagined that’s what the whole world would taste like.”

Chance dipped a cloth into the hot water and soaped it up. Before washing the girl’s arms and neck, he wiped away what years’ worth of grime.

“When we’d get back to the compound, we’d wipe down like this. Stripping to our unders and checking each other for any remaining dirt. She should have come with me when I left. This never should have happened.”

Chance listened to the regret in her voice and wanted to ask more about where she’d come from, why she’d left, but like dealing with a stray animal, if he pushed too hard, she might run.

He dropped the rag on the stripped wood floor and grabbed another to dry Imogen off before moving to her face and head. He wiped away as much blood and grit as he could, but the girl winced in her sleep when he touched the cut on the side of her head.

“We need to cut her hair.”

“What?” Verity asked. “No.”

“We have to. There’s no way to get it clean, and the oils and dirt in her hair could cause an infection. I’ll cut just around the injury…”

“It’s right on the side of her head, everyone will see it.”

“It’s better than dying.” He shrugged and began cutting her hair.

Verity looked away. As he worked, she got up and banged around in the kitchenette.

He trimmed her hair short, so it wouldn’t fall into the wound and accidentally heal up inside. Once he had the side short enough, he could wash her head, and see the real extent of the damage. The unfortunate girl had been beaten severely. Head injuries bleed a lot, so he was glad to see only one area where the skin had broken.

He used his precise cybernetic hand to pick out debris while holding the wound open and then used the soapy water to clean as much of her head and hair as he could.

“Here.” Verity held a smelly bowl in his face.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been that hungry.” He recoiled from the putrid scent.

“It’s not for you, put it on the cut.”

“What the fuck is it?”

“A poultice,” Verity moved behind him and sat next to Imogen’s head, calmer now that the blood had been washed away, even though the wound still slowly oozed. “Charcoal, Tea Tree Oil, and Thyme.”

“You have all that, but you don’t have food?”

“It lasts longer.” Verity shrugged, as she dipped her fingers into the mixture and slathered it onto her friend’s bald spot. She covered it with one of the cloths and laid a thicker strip over the top. “Keeping it warm will help draw out any impurities.”

“Because you were studying to be a healer.”

“A midwife.”

“With the ecovangelists.”

She took a shaky breath. “Yes.”

“Let’s take off her shoes and see if she’s hurt anywhere else.”

They worked together to remove Imogen’s skirts, but Verity wouldn’t let Chance cut away the knee length under shorts she wore, promising to check her for injuries even if there was blood when he left. He washed her blistered and bloodied feet and legs, watching as she applied more of the poultice to the cuts on her shins. They were smaller, probably from running or falling.

When the girl was clean Verity covered her with the careworn blanket she had at the foot of the bed and kissed her on the cheek.

“Thank you,” she said, standing and facing Chance.

“Shit,” He was covered in blood, his shirt completely ruined and soaked through. Blood and that charcoal shit was smeared all over his front. He pulled off his shirt without thinking. He couldn’t go walking through the streets like that. Someone would make the wrong kind of assumptions, and while the cops didn’t do much in the slums this was a pretty good way to call the wrong kind of attention.

He grabbed an unused cloth, dipped it in the now cool water, and wiped the blood away from his chest and arm as best he could, his cybernetic arm would need to be properly cleaned later, but running a dry cloth over it removed most of the grime. He didn’t see any towels or furniture in the tiny studio apartment. He’d seen worse places, with holes in the walls or even the floor, but this wasn’t the kind of place he wanted Verity to live. It was too run down, the mold too pungent, just waiting to take root in her lungs like a cancer.

When he finished, Verity’s eyes bored through him. The look on her face was dark, her mouth slightly open, and a fire in her eyes caused a corresponding throb of need in him. Their kiss came to mind, passionate, unintended, probably a terrible idea, and something he desperately wanted to do again.

“Now, you really have to leave.” She ran her eyes over his body, as she spoke, and his skin set aflame. There was no hiding the tattoos that ran across his chest and cut off where his arm had been replaced. The thin layer of plesh that protected the connection from his organic shoulder to his metal arm must have looked alien to her, but the rest of his body responded like a man’s.

“Do you have anything I can wear?”

“No, No, you have to go.” She rushed to the door, her fingers struggling to unlock the bolts.

He approached from behind, and she turned around. Even under the overwhelming smell of blood and charcoal, she drifted up to him on a breeze of lavender.

“I can’t walk around without a shirt on.” His eyes drifted to her lips. Soft and full.

“Turn yours inside out.”

“I could wash it in the sink and just wait for it to dry.” He inched closer. “I’m sure we could think of some way to pass the time.” He shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t take advantage. Her friend was lying injured just across the room, but he couldn’t stop the magnetic draw that pulled him forward.

When their lips met again, it was electric, like the arc of a welder, hot and bright. He reached forward, and her soft body conformed to his embrace.

Verity wrapped her arms around him, running her fingers across his shoulders and back like tiny feathers. She shook in his embrace but reached out for him with her tongue, pushing up against his chest. Her hands explored his flesh, running over his shoulders and down his chest. When she discovered his nipple ring, she gasped against his mouth.

“I promise, not all of me is metal,” he whispered against her lips, pressing his hips forward and eliciting another gasp from her sweet little mouth.