Chapter 78 | Getting My Wives New Equipment

Chapter 78: Chapter 78 | Getting My Wives New Equipment

Kai had been awake since before five.

He was not anxious. He was thinking.

He lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling and thought about the locking pin. The wheelchair fault he had fixed in eleven minutes with a replacement part. He had felt good about that. Quick. Efficient.

He thought about the standard audio reader Mira used every night.

He thought about the discharge-model wheelchair Shira had been running the Gale Strike form in for forty-three consecutive mornings.

’I have been spending like someone with nothing,’ he thought. ’I don’t have nothing.’

He got up.

He made tea.

He left cups outside both doors.

He sat at the table and opened his phone and started searching.

—--

Breakfast.

Shira came out. Mira came out. They ate.

Halfway through Kai said: "We’re going out this morning."

Shira looked at him.

"Where," she said.

"Medical equipment district. I want to get you both something."

She looked at her bowl.

"The wheelchair," she said.

"Yes."

She ate.

Mira’s board came up.

What else.

"Audiological equipment."

She put the board down and ate.

Shira said, to her bowl: "How are you paying for it."

"I’ve been putting money aside," he said.

She looked at him. He looked at his tea. She looked at her bowl.

"Fine," she said.

That was the whole conversation about money.

’She’s not going to ask further,’ he thought. ’She never does.’

’That ends today.’

—--

The cab arrived at ten.

Both wives were at the door before Kai had finished locking the apartment.

’They’ve been ready,’ he thought, looking at them. ’Both of them.’

He said nothing.

They went downstairs.

—--

The cab to the medical district took eighteen minutes.

Mira’s board appeared twice over the front seat. First to confirm the address. Then:

Wheelchair first or audiological center.

"Wheelchair first," Kai said.

The board: Correct answer.

Shira made the sound. Not quite a laugh.

Kai looked at the road.

’Both of them ready at the door. Shira already knew what we were going for. Mira had already looked up the order.’

’They’ve been thinking about this too. Waiting for it.’

He kept that to himself.

====

The specialist rehabilitation supplier was clean and quiet in the particular way expensive places were.

The woman at the desk looked up when they came in. Her eyes went to Shira’s wheelchair , not the way most people looked, reading the damage , more like a professional reading a specification.

"Former combat hero model," she said. Not a question.

"Discharge configuration," Shira said. "Standard issue."

"How long."

"Three months."

"You’ve been compensating the whole time."

"Yes."

The woman looked at Kai once. Briefly. Then back at Shira.

"Come through," she said.

The demonstration area had three chairs in a row.

The woman brought out the carbon-frame model. Kai had read about it that morning. Active-response suspension. Joint geometry rebuilt for upper-body strength users with spinal injury profiles.

"Try it," the woman said.

Shira looked at the chair.

She transferred herself across the movement practiced and precise, no help needed. She positioned her hands on the armrests.

She was quiet for a moment.

Then she ran the first movement of the form. Just the shoulder rotation. One beat. Testing.

The chair did not fight her.

Not even slightly. The suspension took the momentum and returned it as support instead of resistance. Like the difference between pushing against a wall and pushing against air that pushed back correctly.

She stopped.

She ran it again.

Kai felt it through the Nerve Sense , the signal traveling differently than it ever had inside the apartment. Past the usual cutoff. Clean. The flicker arriving.

Eight beats. Nine. Ten.

She stopped at ten.

She had never held it that long before noon.

She sat with her hands on the armrests and looked at them.

She said nothing for a moment.

Then: "How much."

The woman told her.

Shira looked at Kai.

He had already transferred the payment.

She looked at the tablet in the woman’s hand. At the confirmation on the screen.

She looked back at Kai.

She said nothing.

But the line of her jaw changed. The armor version giving way to something quieter underneath. Something she did not cover immediately.

"Custom fit takes forty minutes," the woman said. She was very professional about all of it. "Tea in reception."

Mira was in reception with the board ready.

How many beats.

"Ten," Kai said.

She held the board.

The form.

"Yes."

She lowered it.

She wrote one word and held it up.

Good.

He sat next to her.

"The audiological center is two blocks over," he said. "After the fitting."

I looked it up, she wrote. The RF-7. It produces frequency output at the fourteen percent Resonance threshold.

"You researched it."

Last week. She held the marker. After the tactile resonance session improved.

He looked at her.

She was looking at the floor.

She wrote slowly. She held the board up without looking at him — like she had decided to say something and did not want to watch him read it.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know if we had that kind of money yet.

He read it.

’Yet,’ he thought. ’She was waiting. She thought he was building toward something and she was giving him time to get there.’

"We have it," he said. "We’ve had it for a while."

She held the board.

She wrote: You should have said.

"Yes," he said. "I should have."

She held the marker for a moment.

Then: Don’t do that again.

"I won’t."

She put the board in her lap.

The corner of her mouth moved. Very small. She covered it almost immediately.

’Not angry,’ he thought. ’Relieved. She was waiting to ask and did not know how.’

He filed that away under things he was not going to repeat.

The audiological center was two blocks on foot — he pushed Shira’s new chair while Mira navigated beside them, cane tapping the pavement rhythm he had memorized in the first week.

The technician inside was a man who knew what a Resonance Gift was. He did not treat Mira like a patient. He laid out the demonstration unit on the table and explained the frequency range ,the specific hertz window that corresponded to Resonance Gift activation in combat-class users and then he looked at her and asked her Gift’s base frequency without any particular weight attached to the question.