Fits Like Yourself

The stairs to Dr. Amakawa's workshop were steeper than the physiotherapist had warned her, and Sayo Tachibana took them one at a time, right foot first, exactly as the rehabilitation manual described. The limb managed every step without complaint. It always did, and that was the part she had never been able to explain to anyone.

The workshop sat above a noodle counter on the lower decks, and the smell of broth followed her up the stairwell until it gave way to something sharper, a mix of solder and warm oil and tea that had steeped too long. A card was taped to the door in small, careful handwriting. It said *Knock, then wait, then knock again.* She knocked, waited, and knocked again, feeling faintly foolish about all three.

"It's open," a voice called from inside. "The card is for people who don't listen."

The room beyond was long and crowded in an orderly way. Shelves ran from floor to ceiling along both walls, holding limbs and casings and coils of cable, and every item wore a tag in the same small handwriting.

A workbench stood beneath a skylight that showed nothing but the underside of the deck above. Near the door, an old household android sat in an armchair with its chest panel hanging open, holding a paper magazine up in front of its face.

"Don't mind Mr. Bell," said the man at the workbench. "He's waiting on a valve. It was supposed to arrive Tuesday, so he's decided to enjoy himself in the meantime."

"I have," the android confirmed, without lowering the magazine.

Dr. Renji Amakawa did not stand right away. He was finishing something small and wired that he held in his right hand, while a slender secondary limb, unfolded from beneath the forearm of his left, steadied a probe against it. The left arm itself was heavy and dark, built for lifting things she suspected were much larger than a valve. The smaller limb moved like a patient finger, exact and unhurried.

When he had set the work down and wiped his hands on a cloth, he looked at her. His eyes went to her right leg first, and then, briefly, to her face.

"Dr. Osei sent you," he said.

"She told me you'd know what to do with me. She also told me not to say she said so."

"She's careful. It's a good quality in a physiotherapist." He nodded toward a stool. "Sit, if you like. Or stand. I'd like to see you do either."

"I already sent you the diagnostics."

"I read them. They're very clean."

"That's what everyone says." She sat, a little harder than she meant to. "They're very clean. It's within tolerance on every test, and the clinic ran them twice."

"And?"

"And it's wrong."

She hadn't intended to say it so flatly. At the clinic she had always softened it, using phrases like *not quite comfortable* and *still adapting.* Here the plain word came out first, and it sat in the air of the workshop without embarrassing her, which surprised her.

Renji nodded as if she had said something reasonable. "Wrong how?"

"I don't know. That's the trouble." She pressed her palms against her knees. "You know when someone finishes your sentence, and they get it exactly right, and it still isn't what you were going to say?"

"Yes."

"It's like that. Every step. It does the correct thing, and it isn't what I was going to do."

The android lowered his magazine by an inch. "That's rather good," he said.

"Thank you, Mr. Bell, but you're not part of the consultation."

"I am always part of the consultation."

Renji ignored this and crouched in front of her, stopping a respectful distance from the leg. "May I?"

She nodded. He touched the socket rim with two fingers of his right hand and tilted the limb a few degrees each way, watching her face rather than the joint. Then the small limb slid out from under his left forearm, four thin segments ending in a probe no wider than a pencil lead, and she stared before she could stop herself.

"Does that bother you?" he asked.

"No. It's just very..."

"Efficient?"

"I was going to say small."

"It is small. That's what it's for." The probe found a port beneath the ankle housing that she had never managed to locate herself. "How long since the accident?"

"Five months. This limb has been seven weeks. The first one was a loaner."

"And the cause?"

"A cargo lift at the docks. It isn't a story."

"I didn't ask for a story. I asked so I'd know what I'm looking at when I look at the socket."

"Oh." She let out a breath. "The cable went. That's all."

"That's plenty."

He plugged a lead into the port and studied a tablet propped on his knee. She watched the lines run across it, green and steady, and understood none of them.

"Alignment is perfect," he said after a while. "The gait model is current. Response time is faster than the last three I've seen from this line. It's a very good limb."

"So I keep hearing."

"You're hearing it because it's true." He unplugged the lead. "Would you walk to the door for me?"

She walked to the door. It took eleven steps, and each of them was the same length. She knew because she had counted them on the way in, and the count had come out the same as it always did.

"And back, please. This time, don't try to walk well."

"I don't know how to not try."

"Then walk badly."

"On purpose?"

"If you'd like."

She tried. It was harder than it sounded, because her left leg loosened into a shamble while the right kept its neat, unbothered arc. The effect looked ridiculous, as if two people were sharing one body and had not been introduced. Halfway back she started to laugh, and by the time she reached the stool she had to sit down.

Renji's mouth moved slightly. It was not quite a smile.

"Stop there," he said. "That's plenty."

"Was it useful?"

"Yes."

"Because I looked ridiculous?"

"Because the limb didn't." He tapped the tablet. "You asked it to be sloppy, and it wasn't. It took what you sent and tidied it. Were you even before, when you walked?"

"Never. Madame Ilyin used to say I walked like I'd lost an argument with the floor."

"Then it's a good walk," Renji said, "and it isn't yours."

She looked at him for a moment. He said it without sympathy and without drama, the way another man might mention that a shelf was crooked. Somehow that made it easier to hear.

"I'm going to soften the ankle," he went on. "It's a guess, and I'd rather guess out loud than in silence. Try it."

The adjustment took a few minutes, most of it his small limb working at something inside the housing while he asked her to shift her weight forward, then back, then forward again. When he told her to walk, she crossed the room and returned.

"Better?"

"Softer," she said. "It's the same sentence in a quieter voice."

"Then that wasn't it." He made a note on the tablet without any visible disappointment. "Most of what I do is finding out what something isn't. It saves time later."

"What do I do in the meantime?"

"Do you have footage of yourself from before the accident? I don't mean performances. Rehearsals, warm-ups, anything where nobody was posing."

"The company films everything."

"Then bring me the parts where you weren't thinking about the camera."

"That's most of it. I stopped noticing it years ago."

"Good," Renji said. "Bring that."

At the door she paused with her hand on the frame. "Dr. Amakawa, what if you can't find it? What if it's just... me, and it never feels right?"

"Then I'll tell you that," he said, "and I won't charge you."

"Come again," Mr. Bell called from his armchair, lifting the magazine an inch in farewell.

"He says that to everyone," Renji said.

"I mean it to everyone," said Mr. Bell.

The Lantern Company rehearsed on the fourth level of the old Harbor Exchange, in a long hall whose tall windows looked out over the docks and the slow freighters waiting beyond them. Sayo had been cleared for light rehearsal three weeks earlier. That meant she was allowed to work on the Tidewater duet at half speed, with no lifts above the shoulder and a physiotherapist's note taped to the wall by the door.

She stood at the edge of the floor now, waiting for the count, with Kenzo Arai across from her stretching his hamstrings against the barre. He had been her partner for six years. He also had the habit of humming the wrong melody under his breath when he was nervous, and he was doing it now.

"That's not the tune," she said.

"It's a close cousin."

"It's from a different piece entirely."

"Then it's a distant cousin. Are we starting or are we waiting for Ilyin to stop pretending she isn't watching?"

Madame Ilyin, seated at the end of the hall with a clicker in one hand and a cup of tea balanced on her knee, did not turn her head. "I am watching," she said. "I am simply not making a fuss about it. Begin whenever you are ready, Sayo."

The music started, a slow rolling figure on cello that Sayo had known for so long she could feel its bars in her ribs. The entrance came on the fourth count. She crossed the floor on the diagonal, arrived at her mark, and let the music carry her into the turn.

It was clean. She could feel that it was clean, the way she could feel a glass set down on a level table. Every step landed where it was supposed to land, and the turn closed precisely on the count.

Ilyin's clicker sounded once. "Again."

She went back to the edge of the floor and did it again.

"Again."

The third time, halfway through the crossing, she caught herself listening to her own feet the way she might have listened to a stranger walking behind her on an empty street. She finished the phrase and stopped. Ilyin was watching her now, openly, with the clicker resting against her chin.

"Everything you did was correct," Ilyin said.

"I know."

"I don't say that as praise."

"I know that too."

"Good." The old woman took a slow sip of tea. "Take ten minutes. Drink some water. Do not go and stare at yourself in the mirror, please. It makes you frown."

Sayo went to the water fountain instead. Kenzo followed a moment later, folding a towel around his neck.

"For the record," he said, "you hit that count so hard I felt it in my molars."

"It isn't a hit. It's just... there."

"That's what I said." He leaned against the wall beside her, and his voice dropped into something less comic. "Sayo, are you all right?"

"It works. Everything works."

"That isn't what I asked."

"It's what I've got." She pressed the button on the fountain and watched the water arc, and she did not look at him. "Run the lift with me at half speed. The low one. I want to see if it's better in your hands."

They ran it twice. The first time, Kenzo's hands came to her waist a fraction too soon, and he muttered "Sorry, early." The second time he waited on purpose, counted the beat inside his head, and was early again anyway.

"That's not you," Sayo said, though she couldn't have said how she knew.

"It's a little me."

"It isn't."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he shrugged, said "Once more," and they ran it a third time, and a fourth.

She brought the recordings on the fifth day, carried in a thin case that she held against her ribs the entire way up the stairs.

Renji was alone at the workbench, and the armchair by the door was empty. A small tag on its arm said *Valve received. Back Thursday.*

"He's gone for the fitting," Renji said, seeing her glance. "He'll be unbearable when he returns."

"How is he unbearable now?"

"He's patient. Afterward he'll be patient and healthy. I don't know how to plan for that."

She almost laughed. Instead she set the case on the bench and opened it. "There are about forty hours. I pulled the rehearsals, mostly. There's one of us just warming up in the corridor, and one where I didn't realize the camera was still on."

"Show me the one where the camera was still on."

They watched it on a large flat screen at the end of the bench, the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder. It showed the rehearsal hall after everyone else had left. A younger Sayo, hair in a messy knot, crossed the floor alone, talking to someone off screen about dinner, waving her hands as she went.

"That's Emi," Sayo said. "My sister. She was on a call. She was telling me what she wanted to cook."

"What did she want to cook?"

"Egg rice, probably. It's always egg rice." She stopped, a little embarrassed. "I wasn't dancing. I was just walking."

"I know. Go back a few seconds."

She rewound the clip. Renji leaned in.

"There," he said. "Stop. Now, slowly."

He stepped the footage forward one frame at a time. On the screen her old right foot rested flat on the floor. Then it rolled inward, barely, no more than the width of a finger, and only afterward did the whole leg push off.

"Look at the foot before the step," Renji said. "There. It moves first."

"That's just... warming up. Isn't it?"

"Maybe. Watch it again. Every step, before the push, you roll the ankle inward a little. Every single one."

She watched. It was true, and she had never once noticed it. "That's such a small thing."

"It is. Have you ever felt it?"

"No." She frowned at the screen. "I'd have said I just walk."

"That's the right answer." He pulled a set of thin pads from a drawer and held them up. "I'd like to put these on your thigh, above the socket. They read the nerve signals in the residual limb. It's what the prosthetic reads, too. I want to see what you're sending."

"Will it hurt?"

"It'll be cold, and Mr. Bell isn't here to make it funny."

The pads were indeed cold. He stuck them in a tidy row and turned a screen toward her, where a set of jagged lines started to scroll.

"Now think about taking a step," he said. "Don't take it. Just think about it."

She did. The lines jumped. A ripple of small, uneven spikes came first, ragged as a handwriting sample, and then after a moment a large clean surge rolled up behind them.

"That's the ripple, and that's the surge," Renji said. "The limb waits for the surge. It ignores the ripple."

"Why?"

"Because in most people, the ripple is noise. Muscle twitches, a loose liner, a sneeze. If the limb answered every one of those, it would kick at nothing all day long. So it waits until it's sure."

"But mine isn't noise."

"I don't know yet. Let's find out." He touched something on the tablet. "I'm going to lower the threshold. It'll listen to smaller signals. Stand up, please, and walk slowly."

She stood. She took one step, and then the limb did something entirely its own. It jerked forward a hand's width past where she wanted it, then twitched sideways as she shifted her weight. It lashed out and struck the leg of the workbench hard enough to make the tools jump.

"Damn it—"

She started to tip. Renji's left arm swept out and caught her under the elbow, and the heavy dark hand closed around her forearm with startling gentleness. It held her upright without any effort at all, like a hand steadying a child.

"That's too far," he said mildly.

"It kicked the bench."

"It did. In fairness, the bench was very close." He lowered her to the stool. "It's listening to everything now. That's not an improvement."

"You made it worse."

"I made it honest about how much you say without meaning to. Turns out it's a lot." He was already restoring the settings, his small limb working quickly inside the housing. "I'm sorry about the elbow. That was the arm, not me. It gets ideas."

She rubbed the place where his hand had been. It didn't hurt, but the memory of the strength lingered. "So the ripples matter."

"Some of them matter. Some of them are noise, and I can't tell which is which yet. The limb can't either." He handed her a narrow band of soft gray material, thin as a bandage. "Wear this over the socket liner. It records the signals. It doesn't control anything, so it can't go wrong. Wear it for a week and do what you'd normally do."

"That's all?"

"That's the hard part," Renji said. "Move without thinking about moving."

Emi was cooking when she got home. Sayo could smell it from the hallway, warm and buttery and faintly sweet, and the sound of a spatula ticking against a pan followed her through the door.

"Egg rice," she said.

"It's always egg rice." Emi didn't turn around from the stove. "You say that like it's a criticism. You eat three bowls every time."

"Two."

"Three, and you steal from mine."

The apartment on Level Twelve had one main room, one bedroom each, and a window that looked out at another window. Emi worked nights in the hydroponics bays and rarely got an evening at home, and when she did, she cooked as if the stove had personally insulted her. She was three years younger than Sayo and had the same dark eyes, but she moved more quickly and talked with her hands.

They ate at the little table by the wall, and for a while the talk was small. Emi complained about a supervisor who kept moving the humidity settings and blamed the crew. Sayo described Ilyin's scarf, which had gotten longer, and Kenzo's humming, which had gotten worse. Emi refilled both their bowls without asking.

Somewhere in the middle of the second bowl, she stopped with her spoon in the air.

"It's quiet," she said.

"What is?"

"Your foot." Emi looked down at the floor beneath the table. "It's been quiet all night. It's been quiet since you got the new one, actually. I didn't notice at first."

"My foot is always quiet. It's a foot."

"It used to drum on the table leg. Every meal, I'd hear it, *tap tap tap-tap*, like somebody was sending a message. Dad used to put a folded napkin under it so the table wouldn't shake."

Sayo put down her spoon. "I never did that."

"You did it constantly. It drove me crazy." Emi grinned. "I used to threaten to hide your shoes."

"I don't remember it at all."

"Because you weren't doing it on purpose. That's the whole thing." Emi tilted her head. "Try it."

Sayo held still, then moved her right foot up and tapped it against the table leg, three times, in a neat steady rhythm. It felt stiff and staged, like a line she had been handed to read.

"No," Emi said at once. "That's a metronome. That's what the limb does when you tell it to. Mine wasn't a rhythm, it was more like... you'd tap, and then you'd skip one, and then you'd tap twice fast, and there was no reason for any of it."

"I can't do that on purpose."

"That's what I'm saying." Emi picked up her bowl. "I mean it in a nice way. I actually kind of miss it. It was the only sound in this house that wasn't me complaining."

Sayo laughed, but it caught somewhere in her chest. She looked down at the dark space under the table, at the plain gray foot resting motionless on the floor, and didn't say anything for a moment.

"Say something," Emi said.

"I'm remembering the napkin."

"That's my point. You *don't* remember it. I do."

"Then tell me about the napkin."

Emi did, and it took the rest of the meal, and by the end Sayo was laughing again.

"So the whole thing," Renji said, three days later, "starts with the band."

He had the recordings laid out across two screens. One showed the ordinary week she had lived through, a long ribbon of signals, and the other showed the limb's own record of what it had decided to do with them. She stood beside him with her arms crossed and looked at both, trying to see what he saw.

"This is a walk to the tram," he said. "This is a meal. This is you sitting in an office while someone talked at you for forty minutes."

"That was the company accountant."

"I can tell." He pointed to a section of the ribbon that was nearly flat. "That's the limb sitting still, and it's very good at it. It holds position without a flicker."

"That's good, isn't it?"

"It's excellent. It's better than you ever were, I'd guess."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's a diagnosis." He zoomed in. "Now look at this. It's the same stretch, but it's your nerves instead of the limb's response."

The second ribbon wasn't flat at all. It rose and dipped in small irregular pulses, a restless little pattern that never quite repeated itself.

"That's a lot of activity for someone sitting still," Sayo said.

"It's your leg fidgeting. It's trying to. The limb reads that as noise, so it holds the joint perfectly rigid instead." He glanced at her. "When did you last sit anywhere and not move at all?"

"I'm a dancer. I don't think I've ever sat still in my life."

"Then this is a very strange week for you."

She sat on the stool. "Emi told me I used to tap my foot. It sounds ridiculous, but she says it was the only thing she could rely on in the house."

"Tapped it how?"

"She said there was no pattern. Two taps, then a skip, then three fast. I couldn't do it on purpose when she asked."

"Of course you couldn't." He set down the tablet. "Would you mind if I tried something? I'd like you to sit here and talk to me about something else. Anything you like. Don't think about your leg."

"You want me to make small talk."

"I want you to be bad at small talk. It shouldn't be difficult."

She laughed. "Fine. What do you want to know?"

"Tell me about the egg rice."

She started with the egg rice, and it turned into the story of Emi and the supervisor with the humidity settings, and that turned into the story of the hydroponics bays, where Emi had once tried to rescue a tomato plant from a jammed irrigation line and come home soaked to the waist and triumphant. She was in the middle of describing the tomato when she noticed Renji wasn't looking at her face.

He was looking at her right foot.

She glanced down. The gray boot was tapping against the floor. It wasn't a steady beat. It tapped twice, paused for a moment, and tapped three times fast.

She stopped talking.

"Don't," Renji said quietly. "Keep going."

"It's doing it."

"It's doing something."

"That's it. That's the—" She pressed her hand against her mouth for a second and took it away again. "It's really doing it. It's not me, and it is. I don't even know."

"It's the idle allowance." He was watching the screen now, not her. "I changed one setting last night. I told the limb it could let small movements through when you aren't asking for anything. It's a gentler version of the threshold change that nearly took the bench out, because this time it applies only when you're at rest."

"It sounds right."

"Listen to it again."

She did. The foot tapped, paused, tapped, and her stomach turned slowly over.

"It's too even," she said.

"Yes."

"The gaps are the same. It's not... it doesn't skip at the right places."

"No. It's imitating you. It's not being you yet." He looked, for the first time, faintly pleased. "That's a better problem than the one you walked in with. It means we're in the right room."

She sat there for a while after that, tapping without meaning to, letting the foot say whatever it wanted. For the first time in seven weeks, she could feel the sound in her heel.

The good mood lasted until the next rehearsal.

She had told herself it would be different. The foot was drumming under the table again, more or less; Emi had confirmed it on Sunday with a grunt of grudging approval, and it had even brushed the barre once when she wasn't watching. She walked into the hall with her shoulders loose and her chin up, and for the first twenty minutes she almost believed it.

Then they started the duet, and Ilyin's clicker sounded on the fourth phrase.

"Again."

She reset. She ran it. The click came again.

"Again."

By the sixth attempt she could feel her jaw tightening. The steps were perfect. They landed on the count with the accuracy of a hammer, and each time the floor answered her a fraction too briskly, like a door that closed before she had finished walking through it. Kenzo's hands kept arriving at her waist a beat early, and each time he apologized, and each time it made her want to scream.

"Take five," Ilyin said, and dropped her clicker into her lap.

Sayo walked to the far end of the hall, sat on the floor with her back against the wall, and put her head down on her knees.

Kenzo came over a minute later. He didn't say anything at first. He just sat down a body-length away, stretched out his legs, and studied his shoes.

"You're going to tell me I'm doing fine," Sayo said into her knees.

"I was going to say you're doing it exactly right."

"That's worse."

"I know. I don't know how to say it without making it worse." He rubbed the back of his neck. "You know what you used to do, on the landing?"

She raised her head. "What?"

"You used to be late."

"Late?"

"Not sloppy. Late on purpose. You'd come down a hair after the count, like you were letting the floor catch up to you." He held up a hand, fingers spread, and lowered it slowly through the air. "I've been catching you for six years. I learned it in my hands. I don't even count with you anymore. I just wait for the bit where you settle."

"I don't settle."

"You do. It's the thing you do. It's what I mean when I say you feel like you." He winced. "That came out badly."

"It came out fine." She said it more sharply than she meant to, and saw him flinch. "So it's my fault your hands are wrong."

"That's not what I said."

"It's what you meant."

"It's not." He turned to face her fully. "Sayo, I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying I've got hands that expect you to land a certain way, and now you land differently, and I'm trying to find where that is. I don't care how you land. I just want to find it."

She stared at him. The hall was quiet except for the far-off sound of Ilyin shuffling papers.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That was unfair."

"It was a little unfair."

"I'm having a terrible day."

"I noticed." He leaned back against the wall beside her. "For what it's worth, I'd rather catch you early every time for the rest of my life than catch someone else on time."

"That's the nicest thing anyone has said to me all week."

"Don't tell Ilyin. She thinks I'm rude."

"You are rude."

"Only to people I like." He got to his feet and offered her a hand. "Come on. Once more, and I'll try not to be early."

She stayed behind after everyone left. The hall emptied out slowly, the lights above the far end clicking off one panel at a time, until only the windows remained, dark and full of the slow gleam of freighters. She stood in the middle of the floor and tried a single turn in silence.

It closed exactly on the count.

She did it again. It closed exactly on the count again, and then she lay down on the boards, staring at the ceiling, and waited for the feeling to pass.

"He's right," Renji said the next afternoon.

"Who is?"

"Your partner. About the landing." He had the footage up again, not the whole week this time but a single clip, the same rehearsal, the same crossing, looped over and over. "Watch the moment your foot meets the floor."

"I've watched it a hundred times."

"You've watched *you.* Watch the floor." He tapped the screen. "When you land here, the weight doesn't arrive all at once. It comes in. It's late by maybe a hundredth of a second, and it goes on arriving after the foot is down. It sinks."

She watched. She could see it now, faintly, like noticing that a familiar word has an extra letter. "I didn't think that was something."

"It's most of the something." He switched the screen to a recording of the current limb. "Now look at this."

The new clip was as tidy as a diagram. The foot came down and stopped, the moment it touched the floor, as though it had been told to.

"It brakes," Renji said. "It hits the mark and locks. It's very sure of itself."

"Kenzo said I was late on purpose."

"How late?"

"I don't know. He said a hair."

"Show me."

He cleared a space in the middle of the floor and set a small speaker on the bench. Sayo picked the cello piece from the Tidewater duet, and it filled the workshop, slow and rolling. She stood at one end of the cleared space, and he stood at the other with the tablet in his hand.

"I'd like you to walk to the count," he said. "Nothing else. Just walk it, four steps, and land on the fourth."

She walked it. He shook his head. "Again, but late."

"How late?"

"However late you used to be."

She tried, and it felt entirely made-up. The limb didn't know what late meant, and neither, at that moment, did she. Halfway through the second try, the workshop door creaked, and a familiar voice said, "Don't stop on my account."

Mr. Bell stood in the doorway with a fresh valve in his chest and a small paper bag under one arm. He had the pleased, faintly smug air of an android who had recovered from something.

"You're back," Renji said.

"I am completely well. I've been told I may resume my duties." He crossed the room and sat in the armchair. "What are we doing?"

"Timing her landing."

"May I help?"

"You may sit quietly."

"I'm capable of a great deal more than sitting quietly." Mr. Bell rested one hand on his knee. "I can keep a beat."

Renji looked at Sayo. She shrugged. "Why not?"

Mr. Bell began to tap his knee, slowly and clearly, in time with the cello, a soft click of finger against casing. It was steadier than any metronome she had ever used. She found she could lean against it.

"Now," Renji said. "Four steps. Land on the fourth."

She walked it against the tap, and the limb landed on the beat. It hit and held, tidy as ever.

"That's the brake," Renji said, and turned to the tablet. He worked with the small limb for a few minutes, muttering under his breath, then straightened. "I've told it to yield after contact. It'll let the weight go on arriving for a moment instead of stopping. Try again."

She tried again. This time the foot came down and kept going, sinking a little, like a step onto sand. It was closer, and her heart jumped, but the sink came too early and too deep. She dropped a hand's width below where she expected to be, and the whole line of her body wobbled.

"Ooh," said Mr. Bell.

"That's too much," Renji said, and adjusted it. "Again."

They went through it seven times. On the fourth, the limb sank so gently that she barely felt it. On the fifth, it stayed rigid, and she swore at it. On the sixth, it gave way too far, and she lurched sideways into the armchair, and Mr. Bell said, "Do be careful, I've just been repaired," and shifted his elbow out of the way.

"Each one is close," she said, breathless, laughing in spite of herself. "Each one is so close."

"It's a matter of when to yield and when to stop." Renji frowned at the screen. "A walk needs a different landing than a leap. A quiet landing needs a different sink than a loud one. One setting can't do all of it."

"So what do we do?"

"It has to decide the way you decide, before you know you're deciding." He put the tablet down. "That's the ripple, again. The early signals. The limb needs to know which ones to trust, and I can't tell it that from a bench."

"You keep saying that."

"I keep being right." He rubbed his eyes with his good hand. "I've been measuring you doing what I ask you to do. I need to see you doing what you'd do."

"That's what I'm terrified of."

"I know," Renji said. "That's why I'm going to ask Bell to help."

She got bumped on the platform two days later.

It wasn't dramatic. A commuter with a heavy bag swung around too quickly and clipped her shoulder, and the platform was crowded and her balance was off for half a heartbeat. Then her right leg gave, softly, under the weight of the collision, the way a knee gives when it's been taught how. She stood there, upright, with her hand on a pillar and no memory of having decided anything.

The commuter apologized. She said it was fine, and for once it was true.

"I didn't fall," she told Renji when she arrived, still a little out of breath. "It absorbed it. I didn't think about it."

"That's the new yield." He was at the bench, cleaning something with a tiny brush. "It's rougher than I'd like, but it's working."

"It's not the same as dancing."

"No. Not yet." He set the brush aside. "I have an idea, and you won't like it."

"I don't like most of your ideas."

"You don't like most of my ideas *at first.* Bell, would you mind?"

Mr. Bell was already rising from the armchair, holding his paper magazine like a hymnal. He seemed delighted to have been asked. "I have been wanting to do this for weeks."

"Do what?"

"Read aloud," said Mr. Bell.

Renji cleared the floor in the middle of the workshop, stacking two crates against the wall and shifting a small cabinet with the heavy left arm as though it were made of cardboard. He set the little speaker on the bench and turned to her.

"Here is the difficulty," he said. "The moment you know I'm watching, you do it correctly. It's what any professional would do, and it's exactly what I don't want. The limb is learning the version of you that performs for me."

"So you want me to dance without thinking."

"I want you to dance while thinking about something else."

"That's impossible."

"It's rare. It isn't impossible." He glanced at the android. "Bell will read. Pick some music you know and dance to it. Don't try. Just listen to Bell, and let yourself get annoyed with him."

"Annoyed?"

"It helps."

Mr. Bell cleared his throat. "*Horoscopes,*" he read, in a ponderous voice, "*for those born under the sign of the Crane.*"

"I'm a Crane," said Renji.

"You are *not* a Crane."

"I'm a Crane on my mother's side."

"That isn't how the zodiac works, and I resent the implication," said Mr. Bell, and Sayo laughed so suddenly that her shoulders loosened, and she pressed the button on the speaker.

The cello came up, low and slow. She stood in the cleared space and waited for her body to begin, and Mr. Bell read on.

"*You will meet someone tall this week. A great opportunity may arise involving a door.*"

"That's very specific," Sayo said.

"They're always specific. It's how they get away with it."

She started to move. It was stiff at first, a little wooden, and she was aware of Renji at the bench pretending to sort screws and not sorting them. Mr. Bell read on about a coming financial windfall, and she took the first turn, and it was correct, and she was annoyed at how correct it was.

"*Beware,*" Mr. Bell read, "*of taking advice from a person with more than one arm.*"

"That's targeted," said Renji, not looking up.

"I didn't write it, I only read it."

She laughed again, and this time she didn't stop moving. The laugh went into her hips, and the next step was wider than the last, and then she stopped listening to her feet altogether. Somewhere around the second phrase, her right ankle rolled inward a hair before the push, and she didn't notice. Her weight came down on the fourth count, a little behind it, and kept arriving, and the foot sank into the floor and stayed. It was slow and heavy and loose, like a hand let go of a rail, and it was hers.

She turned again. She landed late on purpose.

Then she stopped in the middle of the floor with her arms half raised, and the cello carried on without her.

Nobody said anything. Mr. Bell had lowered his magazine to his lap.

"I felt that," Sayo said finally, and her voice shook. "I felt the floor. It came up to meet me."

"Don't move," said Renji.

He had crossed the workshop without her hearing him and was bent over the screen with his good hand flat against the bench. The thin lines were scrolling across it, and he was reading them the way she had once seen a conductor read a score, with his lips barely moving. She watched him for what felt like a long time.

"Ripples," he murmured. "Ripples, ripples. That's the early roll. There's the idle. And that's the sink." He tapped something. "Do that again."

"I can't just do it on command."

"You just did."

"I was distracted."

"Then you'll need Bell's help."

"I am delighted to assist," said Mr. Bell.

She did it again. It took three tries, and on the third, Mr. Bell read a passage about the migratory patterns of certain seabirds in a voice so grave that she had to bite her lip to keep from laughing, and the landing came down soft and late and exactly right. Renji caught it on the screen and saved it.

"That's enough for the profile," he said. "It can learn from that. It'll keep learning for a while. It won't be perfect on the first day, and there'll be moments it drifts, but the shape is there."

"What did you change?"

"Nothing, really. I watched." He glanced up, and for the first time since she had met him, he looked openly tired and satisfied. "The limb needed a model to follow, and it's had the wrong one since the day it was fitted. I gave it a better one. The rest was yours."

She sat on the stool, because her legs had gone unsteady, and looked at the tablet. The profile had a name in the corner. The factory setting she had come in with was still listed above it, in gray letters: *Standard Adult Profile 7.* Beneath it, in the same small handwriting she had seen on every shelf in the workshop, he had typed a new one.

*Sayo.*

She looked at it for a moment, then at him. He was busy putting the tools back in their drawer.

"What do I tell the clinic?" she asked.

"That the limb passes every diagnostic."

"Is that all?"

"It's true," Renji said. "They'll like that."

At the door, she turned around. Mr. Bell had picked up his magazine again and was pretending very hard to read it.

"Come again," he said, without looking up.

"He says that to everyone," said Renji.

"I mean it," said Mr. Bell, "especially to her."

Ilyin's clicker did not sound.

The music rolled on through the fourth count, and Sayo crossed the floor on the diagonal with her shoulders loose and her chin level, and she let the turn come when it came. Her weight arrived a hair after the beat, the way it always had, and kept arriving. The floor came up beneath her and held her, and she felt her right foot answer it, easy and unhurried and slightly out of step with everyone else in the room.

Kenzo's hands found her waist for the lift. They came exactly when they were supposed to, no sooner and no later, and he raised her without a word, and set her down again.

The music ended. The hall was quiet.

"Well," said Ilyin.

Nobody moved.

"Once more, please. From the entrance." The old woman took a long sip of tea. She had not looked up from her cup, but her voice had a warmth in it that Sayo had not heard since the accident. "And do not make a fuss about it."

They ran it again. They ran it four times that afternoon, and Kenzo caught her every time. Between runs he hummed the wrong melody under his breath, and Sayo told him it was a distant cousin, and he said it was a first cousin at least.

At the break, she sat on the edge of the stage with a towel around her neck and her legs dangling over the drop. The others had drifted off toward the windows. The afternoon light lay long and gold across the floor, and Kenzo dropped down beside her with two cups of water and handed her one.

"Late," he said quietly.

"On purpose."

"I know." He drank. "I've been waiting six weeks to say that."

She smiled into her cup. Beneath her, the heel of her right boot had started to knock softly against the riser, tapping twice and pausing and tapping three times fast. She didn't notice. Kenzo did, and he glanced at her foot and then out toward the docks, and he didn't say a word about it.

Out past the windows, a slow freighter turned in the harbor and began to move, without any hurry at all, toward the open dark.