About two months after they move from bustling Niihama to the former megalopolis of Tokyo, Jane gets a request for a house call. A client needs their existing prosthetic face feminized without losing ghost integrity, and the family wants it done at home. There's enough biology in this one that she'll have to split the work with a med-tech, but looking at the map alone makes it sound like a good idea, even if Jane weren't predisposed to jump at such requests. They have to take the Tsuruga Shinkansen about halfway along its arc, and then change to a local train, and then change to a rickety super-local train that feels like it had wanted to be a streetcar when it grew up.
On the first leg of the trip, Jane settles into her chair and crosses her arms over her traveling kit bag that she holds in her lap.
Daria, settling beside her, suddenly says, "I like your hands."
Jane is called back from contemplating the details of the job. "Hmm?"
Daria does one of her infinitesimal shrugs followed by an equally nigh-indiscernible head tilt, indicating the bag that Jane grasps and how she is grasping it. "I liked them when they were spattered with paint, on the other side of the world from here. I like them spattered with bio-print resin and nano-polymer flakes now. Just figured you should know." Daria turns and looks out the window.
It's not a far leap to I like how you're earning our living with them, and more fundamentally to I like how your hands helped make me a body that I'm not dying inside. But Daria isn't the sort to say that out loud, let alone here.
They're waiting on the platform for the local when Jane realizes, first, that she's hungry, and second, she actually has yen in her pocket to fix this if she wants. There's even a vending machine right here, offering... pancakes?
The option that balances price and likely filling-ness in the middle of the menu comes with a topping of some kind. Her translator program gives up after telling her that it's from a plant. The name seems to be based on some hyper-specific cultural tradition that has gone through multiple rounds of meme-cycling before becoming nearly arbitrary. "Screw it," she mumbles to herself, and forks over 400 yen.
"Can I try it, too?" Daria is leaning around her. She has a waxpaper-wrapped block of cyborg food in her jacket pocket. It's edible to bio-bodied humans, nutritious even, but it's not made with flavor because the primary market couldn't detect it anyway. Feeding Jane's sensory data while she tastes food into Daria's pathways has been a gamble that's nearly always failed, producing nasty imbalances and clashes of flavor components, but Jane is happy that Daria continues to want to try. With one hand, Jane holds her can of rolled pancake, while with the other, she fishes out their connector cord. Daria finds one end and, without fuss or hesitation, jacks it into one of the connectors on the back of her neck. Jane peels the top off the pancake can and starts shaking the can to slide out the food within, while Daria rises to her tiptoes and connects the other end where it belongs under Jane's onyx-black hair.
Jane takes a bite.
Daria makes an odd face.
"I don't know what that is at all," Daria says.
Jane has to pause and think about it. And then she giggles with her mouth full. Trying to chew and swallow and laugh and talk all at once is something of an ordeal. At last she says, still holding a hand under her mouth to catch cake crumbs, "It's lingonberry, babe. Goddamn lingonberry."
They catch the local train, and then the rickety super-local. And then the mist is rising off the stream at the bottom of the valley, and they cross the pedestrian bridge between the two rugged hills, greenery dripping and spilling down the rocks towards the water below, and it's the most nowhere they've been in a long time.
When they cross the valley, they see the edge of the village further along the hillside. Jane recognizes the inn where they are supposed to meet their med-tech connection. She remembers the job, all the planning for it. All her worries about it. And then Daria says, "All right, I adore your hands."