"Desert water," he said. "Nothing fancy, but it's cold."
"Thanks." She didn't look up.
Boon didn't walk away. He stood there a moment, then asked in the tone one uses to ask about a machine, not the tone one uses to ask about a disability.
"That right knee joint on your braces. How long has it been off-axis?"
For the first time, Piper looked up at him.
Something flickered across her eyes. Not irritation, but astonishment.
In 11 years of sitting beneath people's stares, she had grown used to two kinds of people. The kind who looked at her and quickly looked away, and the kind who looked at her with eyes dripping with pity.
No one had ever asked her a question like that, a technical question, a question that treated her as a normal person using a broken piece of equipment. "How do you know it's off?"
"I heard it. Every step you take, that right joint makes a small sound.
Metal doesn't make that sound unless the pivot is forced at the wrong angle." Boon sat down on the edge of the step, keeping a respectful distance.
"And it hurts you inside of the knee. Sometimes it runs up to your hip.
Am I right?" Piper was silent for a long time.
The desert wind blew past, carrying red dust. Then she spoke, her voice so small it nearly dissolved into the wind.
"For 11 years I told them it hurt. Doctors, engineers, specialists, every last one of them."
She laughed, a laugh with no joy in it at all.
"They told me I was imagining it. Said I was hypersensitive.
Said their equipment was perfect. And the problem was me."
Boon looked down at the braces.
The outer shell was sleek, its lines as beautiful as a piece of tech jewelry. But to the eyes of a man who had taken machines apart his whole life, he saw other things.
Weight-bearing was dumped entirely onto one side. A strap cinched exactly where an artery ran and that fateful knee joint designed to look slender in advertising photos, not for an actual human being to walk on.
"You're not imagining anything. These braces were built wrong.
Not wrong in the medical sense, wrong in the mechanical sense. And mechanics is what I know."
Piper stared at him as if searching his face for signs of a cruel joke, but on the mechanic's face there was only the plain rough-hewn seriousness of a man who had just finished diagnosing a broken machine.
Piper. Mrs.