Chains of Loss by Robert Page A

know the word.  It didn’t matter.  Mycah was too intent to be annoyed. “Bolt.” 
    “Okay.  Lemme just…”  Before she could stop him, he reached down and plucked it from her ribs.  It tugged a little as it came loose.
    She stared at it in disbelief.  It had only extended about three centimeters into her flesh. 
    “I’ll get the other side for you too.”  She felt another tug on her back and Derek offered her the remains of the bolt’s shaft.  Combined, the two pieces of the bolt were only about half what she had expected.  The ends had been melted away. 
    Mycah was so stunned that it took her a few seconds to remember to check her wound.  There were two holes in her vest, in the front and back of her right side, where the bolt had passed just under the straps of her backpack.  There was no corresponding wound in her side.  She had been entirely restored.
    “Derek…”  He waited for her to take a breath.  “Did you do this?”
    “Sure.” 
    She couldn’t keep the question in.  “Did it…cost you?” 
    “What do you mean?”
    “Did you have to give me…parts?  Like the eye?”  She found herself deeply disturbed.  If he had used his own eye when that had been all he had, might he have used parts of their attacker?
    “No.  I just used the shroud.”
    “And it healed me how?”
    He looked puzzled for a moment.  “It just took what was in the wrong place and put it in the right place.  It bolted your ribs together, re-wove blood vessels and muscle tissue, patched your lungs and diaphragm, reinforced the appropriate membranes and extracted the bolt by the method it deemed least invasive and most advantageous.”
    “Advantageous?”  The pieces he’d given her were too short.  There had to be some inside.  She tried to keep her breathing slow, to avoid hyperventilating, but the urge was strong.
    “I had to do a bit of patching, but the bolt was actually kind of useful.  See, at first I assumed it was just steel, but it turned out to be made of a titanium alloy – low purity, but still something I didn’t expect to find lying around.  Titanium’s biocompatible, so it was ideal to integrate into your systems.”
    “…integrate?”  She was feeling a bit sick now.  Did it mean what she thought it meant?
    “Your cybernetics needed a source of material to work with.  Titanium’s ideal for some applications.  We don’t have enough of it for much unless we were to use your knife thingies.”  He was smiling as he spoke.  It was entirely matter-of-fact for him, but she still hadn’t understood.
    “Where is the rest of the bolt?  Is it still in my lung?”
    “Well.  A little bit.  The shroud broke most of it into microparticles and migrated it to deposits along your bones.  Your nanites will break them down later when they’re in full self-propagation mode.”
    She shook her head.  “That still doesn’t tell me.”
    “Hmm.  Well, then.  Let me do a demonstration.”  He reached in his pocket and pulled out the cloth again.  She stepped back, then steadied herself; she was still dizzy.  He took the remains of the bolt and placed them into the cloth, then folded it up.  “This is the industrial shroud.  It’s not really for use inside a person; more for making or fixing tools.  It’s the one I make the map out of.” 
    She nodded.  She didn’t see any difference between that cloth and the other one, but she could trust that Derek knew about his own tools.
    “Let’s say I want to make something out of the rest of this bolt.  It’s mostly iron, with some titanium; it’s an alloy, so they’re pretty well mixed together.  I tell the shroud to separate them first.” 
    He opened the cloth again.  There were two metal bars there now, but they were definitely not made of the same metal.  “Making them into simple forms is easy.  Since I don’t want to use the iron right now, I’ll set it aside.”  Another fold and opening, and one bar