บท 1: The boy in the box

The first thing he ever saw was the scowling face of a handsome man.

The man was perched on the metal edges of a box and looking down at him, his eyes a pale blue against his golden brown skin. A thin metal line ran from his left eyebrow down his eyelids, cupping his sharp cheekbone before disappearing into the dark hairline near his ear.

The look in the man's eyes made him recoil further into the box, even as he couldn't look away from the metal on his skin and the strange glow of his pale eyes.

Why was he in a box?

Next, he saw a girl's pretty face, her hair was tightly curled, secured on each side of her head by two messy buns. It was an unnatural white shade, in deep contrast with her shimmering brown skin. Her cat-like green eyes seemed to be glowing too -- almost as if she was inspecting him.

"Well fuck," she said, her upturned nose wrinkling in annoyance.

"I said no people, that motherfucker knows I don't move humans," the handsome man said, his face twisted in obvious contempt. He turned to him, inside the box. "Who are you?"

That was a good question, but one he didn't have an answer for. "I don't know," he said truthfully.

The girl laughed. "What do you mean you don't know?" She leaned over to inspect him closer, her face inches away from his own. If he looked closely he could see her irises spinning, the reason for that eerie glow. "I can't get a read on him." She turned to the man, "You think someone scrambled his circuits?"

The man grumbled. "Who the fuck knows, but we can't stay here." He reached into the box and grabbed the nameless guy by the arm, making him flinch and struggle in his grip. "Quiet, do you want to be caught? You're coming with us."

"I don't know you."

"By the looks of it you don't know even yourself," the girl grinned, her mouth pink like chew-gum.

He had a lot of information floating around in his head. If he really concentrated, he could even find that he knew the glowing eyes the two of them had were optic implants, same with the circuit on the left side of the man's face, and the thick silver band around the girl's throat -- which he thought was a necklace at first, but he now realised was an implant too.

He knew all of these things, but not his name, age, place of birth -- nothing. Try as he might, he came up empty.

He stopped struggling and let the man pull him out of the metal box he had been curled into. When he looked back at it, he was surprised by how small it was. He couldn't believe he had fit inside.

Unceremoniously, the man gripped him by the shoulder and turned him around to pull down on the back of his underwear.

His first reaction of was immediate alarm, but then the man said, "I-V-O, Ivo, I guess that's your name," reading out loud. The stretchy waistband snapped against his skin and the man moved towards the door.

Ivo. Ivo. Ivo. He repeated the name in his head. Trying it out for size. It fit. But he had no basis of comparison either way.

The girl raised a sceptical eyebrow at the man's retreating back. "Are you sure that isn't just the name of some lux underwear brand, Davi?"

The man, Davi, didn't answer. He didn't care. He was peering out the transparent panel on the metal door in the room they were in.

For the first time, Ivo (he guessed it was as good a name as any) looked around their surroundings. They were in a small room, surrounded on each side by ceiling-high metal shelves filled with containers of varying sizes. He could see the empty space on the bottom shelf where the box he'd been in was pulled out.

Why had he been inside a box? He couldn't understand why someone would have done that to him.

"We need to go while there's no one around," Davi said, bracing himself on the door. "Alina, get him something to wear."

"Me? What the fu--," she grumbled under her breath but still took off the tight-fitting, half-sleeve, jacket she'd been wearing and handed it to Ivo.

He thought the jacket was black but under the overhead fluorescent bulbs he could tell it was actually multicoloured like an oil spill. Ivo put it on without a word. It fit a little tight, but not too bad. Alina was slim but tall.

She was wearing a black plastic top under the jacket, it cupped her small breasts tightly, and left most of her midriff bare. Ivo looked away quickly, but not before noticing the colourful tattoos running down from her shoulders into her elbows, and then spilling from her back towards her stomach. It seemed to him like a nature scene, filled with birds and fish he couldn't identify. The colours in her skin shimmered when she moved.

She crossed her arms in front of her slim chest with a smirk. "Now he has a jacket and no pants, any solution, circuithead?"

Davi finally turned away from the door and gave Ivo an annoyed once-over.

Some form of silent communication passed between him and Alina, who put up her arms in the air and said, "No, I'm not giving him mine, your turn."

Davi sighed, grimacing, and took off his own jacket as well. Under it he wore a black slim-fit long-sleeved shirt, which clung to every plane of his defined chest and abdomen like a second skin.

He pulled the shirt over his head and then handed it to Ivo. "You can wear it as a skirt."

Ivo stood there like a fool, the thin shirt slippery between his fingers.

He couldn't take his eyes off Davi's naked torso. Inked just like Alina's although his tattoos were all abstract and geometric shapes, black and stark against his golden skin.

But it wasn't the tattoos that had caught Ivo's eye. He was enraptured by the flashes of brilliant light running down in thick chrome bands down the sides of Davi's abdomen, framing his abs and disappearing into the divot of his hips, hidden by the waistband of his pants.

Davi caught him looking. "What, you've never seen mods before?"

No. Ivo was sure he hadn't. Worst yet, looking between Davi and Alina he had the woozy, light-headed feeling he had never seen anyone else besides them.