Copper Script

by K.J. Charles

He extended his pint glass. Joel tapped it with his own. They both drank, Joel contemplating his glass furiously because he’d given away perhaps a bit more than he’d wanted to. He hated his self-consciousness about his injury, so he tried to act as if he didn’t feel it, including refusing to wear a wooden hand to fill out the empty sleeve-end. He would gladly thump anyone who sneered at the hook, even while it gave him the horrors. He hadn’t told anybody except his doctor about his plans to get hold of the German device, because I want a working wooden hand sounded like the stuff of fantasy. And he’d just blurted it all out to Fowler. Prick. They sat in the kind of silence you might expect when one party had just dumped a great lot of feelings on the table and the second party had no reason to care. Or at least that was how Joel felt, and he couldn’t seem to find a way back into the conversation. They’d been doing fine before—two pints’ worth of fine, chatting about this and that, sharing funny stories—and if his bloody hand had ruined it, he was going to kick himself for a week. Then Fowler said, “So will you do it?” “Do—?” “The test.” He paused, then added, “I wish you would.” “Because?” Joel said, and then, “Because you still don’t trust me. Not ‘still’. I mean, you don’t trust me. It’s always in the back of your mind that you think I’m a liar or a cheat or some kind of Svengali genius capable of setting up an elaborate deception scheme.” “Not the last one. I’ve discard...