Lifel1k3

  “Grandpa’s gonna ghost me, for cert,” she sighed.

  “How’s he gonna find out?” Lemon scoffed.

  “Domefights get broadcast all over Dregs. Even Megopolis, sometimes.”

  “Mister C never watches the feeds. You need to relax, Riotgrrl.”

  “You don’t think someone’s gonna make it their business to mention his granddaughter’s an abnorm?” Eve’s voice was rising along with her temper. “‘Oh, hey, Silas, saw Evie on the feed the other night, frying an eighty-tonner with a wave of her hand. What’s it like having a deviate in the family?’”

  Lemon scowled. “Don’t talk like that.”

  “What, true?” Eve spat. “And what about when the Brotherhood come knocking, huh? Those psychos nail you up for having an extra toe, Lem. What you think they’re going to do to someone who can fry ’lectrics with a wiggle of her fingers?”

  Lemon sighed. “Tell her to relax, Crick.”

  The little logika riding in Eve’s backpack simply shrugged.

  “He can’t talk,” Eve said. “I asked him to be quiet for five minutes.”

  “. . . What for?”

  Eve rubbed her temples. “You did just see me get punched in the brainmeats by eighty tons of siege-class badbot, right? I have a headache, Lem.”

  Lemon looked the little logika over. “Crick, I know you have to follow any order a human gives you as long as it doesn’t break the Three Laws. But being asked to shut up isn’t technically a command. You could probably still speak without blowing a fuse.”

  “Don’t encourage him,” Eve growled.

  “How about sign language? The little fug wouldn’t technically be talking then?”

  Lemon grinned as Cricket activated the cutting torch in his middle finger and slowly raised it in her direction.

  “See, that’s the spirit!”

  Eve tried to smile along, but failed utterly. Lem could usually jolly her out of her funks with enough time and effort, and her bestest had both in abundance. But looking around at the mountains of refuse and rust rising into that starless sky, Eve couldn’t quite shake the memory of that scream building up inside her. That Goliath collapsing like she’d fried every board inside it just by wishing it.

  She had no idea how she’d done it. Never been able to do it before. But she’d earned the Brotherhood’s attention now, and probably worse besides. Her machina was OOC; it’d taken her months of scavving out in the wasteland known as the Scrap to find the parts she’d needed to build Miss Combobulation. It’d take months more to build another. And in the meantime, she wouldn’t be Domefighting, which meant she couldn’t make more creds for Grandpa’s meds.

  As far as troubles went, hers were stacking up to the sky. It’d take a lot more than the comedy-duo stylings of Miss Lemon Fresh and the Amazing Cricket to shake the grim off her back.

  “Come on,” she sighed. “We ain’t getting any younger. Or prettier.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Lemon huffed.

  Hands in pockets, her crew in tow, Eve stomped on through the trash.

  Four hours later, they were almost home. Dawn had hit like a brick, and the quartet stopped for a breather in the shade of a mountain of grav-tank hulks and corroded shipping containers. The sun was only just past the horizon, but Eve could already feel the heat in it, blistering at the world’s edge.

  Los Diablos and the WarDome were just a smudge in the distance behind them. Engaging the telescopics in her optical implant, Eve scanned the Scrap—a desert of a million discarded machine parts, corroding shells and the occasional gutted building, stretching as far as the eye could see.

  The whole island of Dregs was covered in the flotsam and jetsam of a golden age. A disposable age. Grandpa had told her that a long time ago people used to come out west looking for gold. Broke their backs for it. Murdered kin for it. It struck her as ticklish how the centuries had flown by and humanity hadn’t moved an inch.

  Two years she’d lived here. Two years since she and Grandpa had fled the militia raid that took her home, the rest of her family, left her with a headshot that should’ve ghosted her. She could barely remember their flight across the desert, the dingy coastal medstation where Grandpa had installed the cybernetics that saved her life. From there, they’d bartered passage to Dregs, ferried across black water to an island of trash where no Corp bothered to stake a claim. Not quite a home. But something close enough.

  Something to fill the empty where home used to be.

  Eve touched the Memdrive implanted in the side of her head, the silicon chips studded behind her right ear. Her fingertips brushed the third chip from the back—the ruby-red splinter containing the fragments of her childhood. She thought about the man who’d given them to her. The last piece of family she had left on this miserable scrap pile. Pieces of him eroding away, just like the landscape around her. Day by day by day.

  Lemon was slumped cross-legged on a rusted tank, welding goggles over her eyes, eating from a can of Neo-Meat™ she’d fished from her backpack. Kaiser looked on, tail wagging. Even though he was a cyborg, the puppy in him was still compelled to beg from anyone who had food.

  “Want some?” Lemon mumbled to Eve around her mouthful.

  “. . . What flavor?”

  “I’d guess salty colon, but . . .” Lemon frowned at the label. “Whaddya know. Bacon.”

  Eve caught the can Lemon threw her way. She scraped out the last of the vaguely pink mush with her fingers, shoveled it into her mouth. It was lukewarm, tasted like sodium and cardboard. A smiling humanoid automata on the label assured her the contents were UNCONTAMINATED BY HUMAN HANDS! and contained 100% REAL MEAT™!

  “What kind of meat is the question,” Cricket muttered.

  “Human flesh tastes just like chicken, supposedly,” Lemon said.

  “Point of order,” Cricket chirped. “I’d have thought you’d be cracking wise a little less, Miss Fresh. All the troubles you got . . .”

  “We forgot ’em for a minute,” Lemon sighed. “Thank you, Mister Cricket.”

  “I live to give.”

  “Crick’s right.” Eve stood with a sigh, booted the empty Neo-Meat™ can into the scrap. “The Brotherhood will be gunning for me, and Miss Combobulation just got turned into a very fancy paperweight. I gotta figure out how to get more scratch for Grandpa’s meds. And then I gotta figure out how to tell him his only granddaughter is a deviate.”

  “Don’t say that,” Lemon growled.

  “You prefer ‘abnorm’?”

  “I’d prefer if you didn’t spew any of the Brotherhood’s brown around me.” Lemon folded her arms. “You’re not an abnorm, Riotgrrl.”

  “You be sure to point that out when they’re nailing me up.”

  “Anyone waves a hammer at you, I’ll put my boot so far up—”

  The roar of distant engines cut Lemon’s threat off at the knees. Eve squinted northeast, saw tiny black specks flitting in the skies over Zona Bay. Activating her telescopics again, she scanned the ashtray-colored sky.

  “Fizzy,” she breathed.

  “What is it?” Lemon asked, sidling up beside her.

  “Dogfight,” she replied. “Oldskool rules.”

  Four dark shapes were dancing across the heavens toward Dregs. Three looked like Seeker-Killer drones, manufactured by Daedalus Technologies—man-sized, wasp-shaped, peppering the air with luminous tracer fire. The fourth was a flex-wing chopper, beaten and rusty and barely airworthy. It had no Corp logo, but whoever was flying it had the skillz, snapping back and forth between sprays of fire, slamming on the air-skids and blasting one of the Daedalus drones from the air with a rattling autocannon.

  The engines grew louder, the distant popopopopop of the S-Ks’ guns echoing across the Scrap as the chase approached the island. Kaiser gave a low-pitched growl—a signal that he must be really annoyed. Eve knelt beside him, gave him a hug to shush him.

  Glancing back to the dogfight, she saw the indie take out another Seeker-Killer, its smoking r
uins tumbling from the sky. She was wondering if the flex-wing might live to fight another day when a burst of bullets caught it across the engines, sending it pinwheeling through the air. Miraculously, the flex-wing managed to catch its final pursuer in a return burst, and the last drone crashed into the ocean, setting the black water ablaze.

  “Bye-bye, lil’ birdie,” Lemon muttered.

  Lem was right; the damage was done. The flex-wing was losing altitude, dark smoke smeared behind it. Only one way it was going to end. Question was where.

  Eve followed the craft’s arc overhead, flinching as the ship tore its belly out on a mountain of old auto wrecks. She lost sight of it behind a ridge of corroding engines but heard it crash, a screechskidtumbleboom echoing in the ruins around them.

  She grinned down at Cricket, tongue between her teeth.

  “Don’t even,” the logika groaned.

  “Oh, come on, we can’t let someone else scav on that?”

  “It just spanked three Daedalus S-Ks out of the sky, Evie. They’ll have heard the noise in Los Diablos. Sticking around here is dumber than a box of screwdrivers.”

  Lemon scoffed. “It’s ‘dumber than a box of hammers,’ Crick.”

  “It’s not my fault Grandpa wrote me crappy simile algorithms.”

  “You’re the one who just pointed out how much trouble we got,” Eve said. “Imagine the scratch we might make on salvage like that.”

  “Evie—”

  “Five minutes. You game, Lem?”

  Miss Fresh looked her bestest up and down.

  “What’s Rule Number One in the Scrap?” she asked.

  Eve smiled. “Stronger together.”

  Lemon nodded. “Together forever.”

  Eve scratched Kaiser behind his metal ears. “Whatcha think, boy?”

  The blitzhund wagged his tail, his voxbox emitting a small wuff.

  “Three versus one.” She grinned at Cricket. “The ayes have it.”

  “That’s the problem with democracy,” the little bot growled.

  Eve sighed, looked at Cricket sidelong. Grandpa had built him for her sixteenth birthday—her first without her mother or father. Her sisters or brother. Not even the bullet to her head had scrubbed away the memory of their murders. But the first night Cricket sat beside Eve’s bed, watching with those mismatched eyes while she slept—that was the best night’s sleep she’d had for as long as she could remember. And she loved him for it.

  But still . . .

  “I know the urge to worry is hard-coded into that head of yours,” Eve said. “But true cert, Crick, you’re the most fretful little fug I ever met.”

  “I am as my maker intended,” he replied. “And don’t call me little.”

  Eve winked and shouldered her pack. With a nod to Lemon, the girl turned and trudged down the slope, Kaiser close on her heels.

  Scowling as best he could, Cricket followed his mistress into the Scrap.

  1.3

  WINDFALL

  The four of us huddle together. Our parents and brother dead beside us. So close to dying, I feel completely alive. Everything is sharp and bright and real. My eldest sister’s arm around my shoulder. The warmth of her breath on my cheek as she squeezes me and tells me everything will be all right.

  Olivia. The eldest of us. The epicenter. She taught us what it was to love each other, my three sisters and my brother and me. To be a band, thick as thieves. The Five Musketeers, Mother used to call us, and it was true. Five of us against the world.

  The beautiful man glances behind him, and another soldier steps forward. A woman. Sharp and beautiful and cold.

  “Faith,” Olivia whispers.

  At first I think she’s praying. And then I realize the word is not a plea, but a name. The name of the soldier now leveling her pistol at Liv’s head.

  “Please,” I beg. “Don’t . . .”

  The Five Musketeers, my father used to call us.

  And then there were three.

  Eve double-checked the power feed to her stun bat as they moved, creeping down the tank hulks with the sun scorching their backs. Both she and Lemon wore piecemeal plasteel armor under their ponchos, and Eve was soon dripping with sweat. But even the most low-rent scavver gangs had a few working popguns between them, and the protection was worth a little dehydration. Eve figured they’d be done before the sun got high enough to cook her brain inside her skull.

  The quartet made their way across rusting hills and brittle plastic plains that would take a thousand years to degrade. Kaiser went first, moving through the ruins with long loping strides. Cricket rode on Eve’s shoulders. She could see a couple of nasty-looking ferals trailing them, but the threat of Kaiser kept the big cats at bay. Dust caked the sweat on her skin, and she licked her lips again. Tasted the sea breeze. Black and plastic. She wanted to spit but knew she shouldn’t waste the moisture.

  They scrambled into a new valley, a telltale trail marking the flex-wing’s skid through the sea of scrap. The ship was crumpled like an old can against a pile of chemtanks, black fumes rising from the wreck. Eve sighed in disappointment, wondering if there’d be anything at all left to salvage.

  “Never seen one of these before,” Cricket said, looking over the ruined ship. “Think it’s an old Icarus-class.”

  “Irony!”

  Cricket raised one mismatched eyebrow. “What?”

  “You know,” Eve shrugged. “Falling from the sky and all.”

  “Someone’s been glued to the virtch.” Lemon smiled.

  “Mad for the old myths, me.”

  “No Corp logo, either,” Cricket frowned with his little metal brows.

  “So where’s it from?” Lemon asked.

  Cricket simply shrugged, wandered off to poke around.

  The ship’s windshield was smashed. Blood on the glass. One propeller blade had sheared through the cockpit, and when Eve looked inside, she saw a human arm, severed at the shoulder and crumpled under the pilot’s seat. Wincing, she turned away, spitting the taste of bile from her mouth. Moisture loss be damned.

  “Pilot’s for the recyc,” she muttered. “No rebuild for this cowboy.”

  Lemon peered into the cockpit. “Where’s the rest of him?”

  “Clueless, me. You wanna help strip this thing, or you planning to just stand there looking pretty?”

  “. . . This a trick question?”

  Eve sighed and got to work. Pushing the bloody limb aside with a grimace, she searched for anything that might be worth some scratch: powercells, processors, whatever. The comms rig looked like it might get up and walk again with some love, and she was in it up to her armpits when Cricket’s voice drifted over the plastic dunes.

  “You ladies might want to come see this.”

  “What’d you scope?”

  “The rest of the pilot.”

  Eve pulled herself from the flex-wing’s ruins, scowling at the new bloodstains on her cargos. She and Lemon stomped up a slope of rust and refuse, Kaiser prowling beside them. At the crest, Cricket pointed down to a pair of legs protruding from the tapeworm guts of an old sentry drone. Eve saw a bloodstained high-tech flight suit. No insignia.

  She crunched down the scrap, knelt beside the remains. And peeling back a sheet of buckled metal, she found herself looking at the prettiest picture she’d ever seen.

  It was the kind of face you’d see in an old 20C flick from the Holywood. The kind you could stare at until your eyelids got heavy and your insides turned to mush.

  It was a boy. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Olive skin. Beautiful eyes, open to the sky, almost too blue. His skull was caved in above his left temple. Right arm torn clean from its socket. Eve felt at his throat but found no pulse. Looking for ID or a Corp-Card, she peeled open his flight suit, exposing a smooth chest, hills and valleys of muscle. And riveted into the flesh and bone between two perfect, prettyboy pecs was a rectangular slab of gleaming iron—a coin slot from some pre-Fall poker machine. The kind you popped money into, back when money was made of
metal and people had enough of it to waste.

  “. . . Well, that’s a new kind of strange, right there,” she murmured.

  There was no scar tissue around the coin slot. No sign of infection. Eve glanced at the boy’s shredded shoulder, realizing there should’ve been more blood. Realizing the nub of bone protruding from his stump was laced with something . . . metallic.

  “Can’t be . . .”

  “What?” Lemon asked.

  Eve didn’t reply, just stared at those lifeless irises of old-sky blue. Cricket slunk up behind her and whistled, which was a neat trick for a bot with no lips. And Eve leaned back on her haunches and wondered what she’d done in a past life to get so lucky.

  Cricket modulated his voice to a whisper.

  “It’s a lifelike,” he said.

  “A what?” Lemon asked.

  “A lifelike,” Eve repeated. “Artificial human. Android, they used to call ’em.”

  “. . . This prettyboy is a robot?”

  “Yeah,” Eve grinned. “Help me get it out, Lem.”

  “Leave it alone,” Cricket warned.

  Eve’s eyebrows hit her hairline. “Crick, are you smoked? Can you imagine how much scratch this thing is worth?”

  “We got no business with tech that red,” the little bot growled.

  “What’s the prob?” Lemon asked. “He looks armless to me.”

  Eve glanced at the severed shoulder. Up at her friend’s grin. “You’re awful, Lemon.”

  “I believe the word you’re looking for is ‘incorrigible.’”

  “Let’s just get out of here,” Cricket moaned.

  Eve ignored him, planted her boot on a twisted stanchion and tugged at the body until it tore free. It weighed less than she’d expected, the skin smooth as glass beneath her fingertips. Eve unrolled her satchel, and Lemon helped stuff the body inside. They were zipping up the bag when Kaiser perked up his ears and tilted his head.

  The blitzhund didn’t bark—the best guard dogs never do. But as he loped behind an outcropping of gas cylinders, Eve knew they might be in for some capital T.