Chapter 3: Clearance

The head went on last, and the world went out.

Reese had cut a vent low in the throat for herself — a mesh slot at the creature’s collarbone, angled down, enough to see the floor and the knees of a crowd. That was hers. Back where I stood there was foam against my face, no light at all, the reek of contact cement, and the two of us breathing up what air there was. The garage was gone. The work light was gone. What I had instead was heat, instant and total, the inside of the shell climbing toward a hundred degrees in the time it took to seat the last clip — and Reese, who I couldn’t see at all anymore, only feel: her shoulders against my chest, her hips cinched to mine in the belt, the back of her skull tipped under the jaw mechanism.

“Okay,” she said, and her voice came to me muffled and close, carried up through her own body more than through the air. “Stand us up.”

We stood it up, and it tried to kill us.

The head wanted the floor. Twenty-two pounds of it, cantilevered out past the front of her on the neck, and the second we came off our heels it pitched us forward like a dropped ladder. I did the only thing the math allowed: I threw my hips forward into her and hauled my shoulders back, turned myself into the counterweight, and the head stopped three degrees off vertical and hung there, trembling, held up by nothing but my pelvis jammed into the back of hers and my spine straining the other way.

“Don’t—” Her breath was going hard already. “Don’t ease off. If you ease off we go over.”

I didn’t ease off. I couldn’t. There was no standing inside this costume without driving my body into my sister as hard as I could — the brace and the grind were one push, the same muscle, no doing the one without the other. To hold the monster’s head off the concrete I had to press into her and keep pressing, all day, every second, and the instant I stopped we both went down in front of four hundred people.

We took a step. The hips had to roll together or the whole rig scissored, so they rolled together, her leading and me following a half-beat back, grinding, and in the dark with nothing to look at and nothing to do with my hands but hold her hips and nothing to think about but the heat and the push and the friction of her working against me step after step, my body did in under a minute what it had taken the whole bare-harness run to do the night before.