The Tailor's Second Skin

Kade Voss liked the way a good stitch made the world behave. In his small storefront, under the buzzing sign that read VOSS—Bespoke Haptics, his hands made order of unruly filaments the way a conductor made sense of a swarm of sound: deliberate, exact, a little possessive. The shop sat on the elbow of a narrow street where neon ran like rainwater, pooling in gutters and painting the metal awnings in saturated blues and bruised magentas. Outside, a vendor sold kelp crisps dusted with pepper and something that tasted like the sea, and a string quartet of advertising drones chimed an off-key jingle about modular empathy socks. Inside, the air smelled of oiled leather, solder, and the faint sweetness of heat-treated silk. It was the kind of smell that told you people had spent long hours right where they were.

He held the client’s sleeve up to the light and watched the micro-filaments catch the glow. The sleeve had come in with a list of preferences in a neat, clinical font: low-latency, negative-feedback dampener, discrete tactile band. Kade tended to descriptions like that the way other people tended to crossword puzzles—an easy choreography. He pinched two microfilaments with a pair of tweezers, pulled them tight, and threaded a nano-needle through a seam that was barely there. The needle shivered as if it had opinions and Kade’s fingers steadied it. He murmured to it the way a man talks to obstinate engines. The stitch took. The sleeve folded like a satisfied hand.

Jun lounged on a crate of reclaimed loom parts, chewing on a sugar-stiffed stick while he watched Kade work with a critic’s half-smile. Jun’s hair was cropped so close metallic chips would probably sing if you ran a magnet across his scalp. He had a cybernetic choir of piercings along one ear that occasionally blinked. Jun’s laugh came out like a pop—too honest for the city—when Kade muttered an aside about the needle’s temperament.

"You’re going to anthropomorphize the filament next," Jun said. "Then you’ll name it and put it on a tiny leash."

Kade didn’t look up. "If it behaves," he said. "I’ll crochet it a sweater."

Jun snorted. "That’s never going to be a sentence I thought I’d hear in a life where the vending machines sell bottled thunderstorms."

Outside, a municipal cart trundled by, dispensing steaming cups of pulse-tea for calibration rituals—tea infused with a dust of conductive mint that sent a faint, warming fizz through the tongue when you sipped. People in the neighborhood swore it helped settle the hands before delicate contact work. Kade had sold a hundred sleeves to festival performers who wanted their audiences to feel applause on the skin; he’d also patched more than one relationship in private work. None of that explained why his own hands had grown reluctant.

A small bell chimed when the door hissed. The courier was precise and unsmiling, wearing the standard courier coat with the guild’s discreet sigil embroidered on the collar and a palm-sized parcel compressed to unnerving efficiency. Kade wiped his fingers on a rag and took the package. The courier’s gaze lingered. "Registered delivery for Kade Voss. Sender's name marked as private. Signature required."

Kade set the parcel on the counter and frowned at its weight—too light for something important, too heavy for a simple trinket. Jun hopped to his feet, curiosity already overtaking the crate like a second heartbeat.

"Everything hush-and-secret these days?" Jun asked, peering at the parcel as though it might be a joke.

Kade slit the seal with a blade that had been filed thin enough to peel arguments away from the seams. He found a folded note inside, written on paper of improbable thickness and stamped with an ink that refused to glow under the shop’s usual light. The name at the top stopped his hands from doing their usual work. He looked at Jun, and the air between them made a small, private sound—the one that happens when something used to familiar tilts slightly and becomes remarkable.