LIFEL1K3 (Lifelike)

1.1 Manifest

Almost everybody called her Eve.

At first glance, you might’ve missed her. She wouldn’t have minded much. Hunched on the shoulder of a metal giant, she was just a silhouette amid the hiss and hum and halos of glittering sparks. She was tall, a little gangly, boots too big and cargos too tight. Sun-bleached blond hair was undercut into an impressive fauxhawk. Her sharp cheekbones were smudged with grease, illuminated by the cutting torch in her hands. She was seventeen years old, but she looked older still. Just like everything around her.

A black metal sphere sat in the socket where her right eye should’ve been. Six silicon chips were plugged behind her right ear, and a long oval of artificial flesh ran from her temple to the base of her skull. The implant obviously wasn’t made for her—the skin tone was a little too pale to match her complexion.

It was just about the right shape for a nasty exit wound.

“Testing, testing…y’all hear me out there?”

The girl almost everyone called Eve clamped a screwdriver between her teeth, glanced at the monitors across from her work pit. A high-def image showed the arena above her head, three hundred meters wide, littered with scorched barricades and the rusting hulks of previous competitors. The EmCee stood in the spotlight, wearing a sequined jacket and a matching bowler hat. There was no need for a mic. Her voice fed directly to the PA via implants in her teeth.

“Juves and juvettes!” she cried. “Scenekillers and wageslaves, welcome…to WarDome!”

The crowd roared. Thousands of them clinging like limpets to the Dome’s bars, humming, thrumming, feet all a-drumming. Most were the worse for stims or a bellyful of home brew, drunker still at the thought of the carnage to come. Their vibrations sank into Eve’s bones, and she couldn’t help but smile. Tasting her fear and swallowing it whole.

“Showtime,” she whispered.

“In the blue zone,” cried the EmCee, “the condemned! A fritzer, fresh from the border of the Glass, with the murder of seventy-two accredited citizens on its head. Brought here tonight for a taste of oldskool justice! All y’all give this fug a warm and fuzzy Dregs welcome. Some volume, if you please…for GL-417!”

Blue floodlights arced at the Dome’s north end, and the floor panels rolled away. A hulking lump of robotic menace rose into view amid a hail of spit and jeers. Eve’s insides turned slippery cold at the sight on her monitor. Her cutting torch wavered in her hands.

Hard to swallow your fear with no spit, isn’t it?

The robot in the blue zone loomed ten meters high. Bulky as a battleship, it looked like a high-speed collision between an earthmover and some armored knight from the history virtch. It was a heavy-combat model, Goliath-class, and the thought of a bot that lethal throwing down under the Dome lights sent punters lunging for their pockets and bookies scrambling for their tabs.

This was going to be a fight….

“This is going to be a massacre,” said a tinny voice in Eve’s left ear.

Ignoring the warning, she finished her welding, her dark goggles held up to what she thought of as her good eye. Talking true, the glossy black optical implant that replaced her right peeper saw better than her real one—it had flare compensation, a telescopic zoom, low-light and thermal imaging. But it always gave her headaches. Whirred when she blinked. Itched when her nightmares woke her crying.

“How’s that, Cricket?” she shouted.

“Targeting only shows a 13.7 percent improvement.”

Cricket peered out at her from the pilot’s chair with his mismatched eyes. The little robot’s face couldn’t show expressions, but he wiggled the metal slivers that passed for his eyebrows to show his agitation. He was a homunculus of spare parts, forty centimeters tall, the color of rust. There was no symmetry to him at all. His optics were too big for his head, and his head was too big for his body. The heat sinks on his back and across his scalp looked like the spines of an animal from old history virtch. Porcupines, they used to call ’em.

“Well, it’s showtime, so it’ll have to do,” Eve replied. “That Goliath is big as a house, so it’s not like it’s gonna be tricky to hit.”

“This might sound stupid, but you could always back out of this, Evie.”

“Okay, now why would you think that’d sound stupid, Crick?”

“You know better than this.” Cricket scrambled down to the floor. “Shouldn’t even be throwing down in the Dome. Grandpa would blow a head gasket if he found out.”

“Who do you think taught me how to build bots in the first place?”

“You’re punching too far above your weight on this one. Acting a damn jackass.”

“Grandpa’s gonna wipe you if he hears you swear like that.”

Cricket placed one hand on his chest with mock solemnity. “I am as my maker intended.”

Eve laughed and scaled across to the cockpit. The fit was snug; her machina stood only six meters high, and there was barely enough room for her beside the viewscreens and control sleeves. Most of the machina competing in Dome bouts were salvaged infantry models, but Eve’s baby was Locust-class, built for lightning-quick assaults on fortified positions during the CorpState Wars. Humanoid in shape, what it lacked in bulk, it made up for in speed, and it was customized for bot wrecking—serrated claws on its left hand, a jet-boosted pickax on its right. Its armor was painted in a violent camo of black and luminous pink. Eve dropped into the pilot’s chair and shouted down to Cricket.

“Does my butt look big in this?”

“Do you want the truth?” the little bot replied.

“Do you want me to disable your voice box again?”

“Seriously, Evie, you shouldn’t go up there.”

“It’s an opening spot, Crick. We need the scratch. Badly.”

“Ever wonder why you got offered first swing against a bot that big?”

“Ever wonder why I keep calling you paranoid?”

Cricket placed his hand back on his chest. “I am as my maker—”

“Right, right.” Eve smiled lopsided, running through the start-up sequence. “Jump on the monitors, will you? I’ll need your eyes when we throw down.”

Eve was always amazed at how well the little robot sighed, given he didn’t have any lungs to exhale with.

“Never fear, Crick.” She slapped her machina’s hide. “No way a bot this beautiful is getting bricked by some fritzer. Not while I’m flying it.”

The voice piped up through the speaker in Eve’s ear. “Right. Have some faith, you little fug.”

“Aw, thanks, Lem.” Eve smiled.

“No problem. I can have all your stuff when you die, right?”

The engines shuddered to life, and the four thousand horsepower under her machina’s chassis set Eve’s grin creeping wider. She strapped herself in as the EmCee’s voice rang out through the WarDome above.

“And now, in the red zone!” A roar rose from the spectators. “A fistful of hardcore, homebuilt right here in Dregs. Undefeated in eight heavy bouts and swinging first bat for Lady Justice here tonight, get yourselves hoarse for Miss Combobulation!”

The ceiling over Eve’s head yawned wide. Winking at Cricket, she spat out her screwdriver and slammed the cockpit closed. A dozen screens lit up as she slipped her limbs into the control sleeves and boots. Hydraulics hissing, engines thrumming through the cockpit walls as she stepped onto the loading platform for the WarDome arena.

As she rose into view, the crowd bellowed in approval. Eve shifted her legs, her machina striding out onto the killing floor. Gyros hummed around her, static electricity crackling up her arms. She raised her hand inside her control sleeve, and Miss Combobulation gave a soldierboy salute. As the mob howled in response, Eve pointed to the two words sprayed in stylized script across her machina’s posterior:

KISS THIS.

Eve’s opponent stood silently, the microsolars in its camo paint job giving it a ghostly sheen. Unlike her machina, the Goliath was a logika—a bot driven by an internal intelligence rather than human control. If all were well in the world, the First Law of Robotics would’ve prevented any bot raising a finger against a human. Trouble was, this Goliath had fritzed somewhere along the line, ghosted a bunch of settlers out near the Glass. Wasn’t the first time it’d happened, either. More and more bots seemed to be malfunctioning out in the wastelands. Maybe it was the radiation. The isolation. Who knew? But bot fights were serious biz now, and execution bouts always drew the biggest crowds. Eve didn’t have a problem beating down some fritzer if it meant scoring more creds.

Truth was, a part of her even enjoyed it.

Still, despite her bravado, Cricket’s warning buzzed in her head as she took the Goliath’s measure. It was easily the biggest bot she’d rocked with, tipping the scales at eighty tons. She chewed her lip, trying to shush her butterflies. Her optical implant whirred as she scowled. The artificial skin at her temple was the only part of her that wasn’t slick with sweat.

If I didn’t need this fight purse so bad…

“Now, for the uninitiated,” crowed the EmCee, “Dome bouts are true simple. The convicted logika fights until it’s OOC—that’s ‘out of commission,’ for the newmeat among us. If the first batter gets OOC’ed instead, another batter steps up to the floor. You beautiful peeps have sixty seconds until betting closes. We remind you, tonight’s execution is sponsored by the stylish crews at BioMaas Incorporated and the visionaries at Daedalus Technologies.” The EmCee pointed to her two-tone optical implants with a flirtatious smile. “Building tomorrow, today.”

Logos danced on the monitors above the EmCee’s head. Eve watched the big bot on her screens, calculating her best opening move against it. The tinny voice in her ear spoke again—a girl’s tones, crackling with feedback.

“I got a bookie here running four-to-one odds against you, Riotgrrl.”

Eve tapped her mic. “Four to one? Fizzy as hell. Hook us up, Lemon.”

“How much you wanna drop out them too-tight pockets, sugarpants?”

“Five hundred.”

“Are you smoked? That’s our whole bank. If you lose—”

“I’ve won eight straight, Lemon. Not about to start losing now. And we need this scratch. Unless you got a better way to conjure Grandpa’s meds?”

“I got a way, true cert.”

“A way that doesn’t involve me getting up close and sticky with some middle-aged wageslave?”

“…Yeah, then I got nuthin’.”

“Make the bet. Five hundred.”

“Zzzzzz,” came the reply. “You the boss.”

“And remember to get a receipt, yeah?”

“Hey, that happened one time….”

“Thirty seconds, your bets!” cried the EmCee.

Eve turned to her readouts, spoke into her headset. “Cricket, you reading me?”

“Well, not reading you, no,” came the crackling reply. “I can hear you, though, if that’s what you mean.”

“Oh, hilarity. Grandpa been adjusting your humor software again?”

“I’m a work in progress.”

“I’ll tell him to keep working.” She squinted at the Goliath looming on her monitors. “I’m gonna fight southpaw and go for the optics, feel that?”

“Right in my shiny metal man parts.”

“You got no man parts, Crick.”

“I am as my maker intended.” A metallic sigh. “He’s such a bastard….”

Lemon’s voice crackled in Eve’s ear. “Okay, we good to go. Can you see my fine caboose? I’m over by the Neo-Meat™ stand.”

Eve scanned the crowd. Scavvers and locals, mostly, letting off steam after a hard week’s grind. She saw a Brotherhood posse, six of them in those oldskool red cassocks, preaching loud over the Dome’s noise about genetic purity and the evils of cybernetics. Their scarlet banner was daubed with a big black X—the kind of X they nailed people to when the Law wasn’t looking.

Down by the arena’s edge, Eve glimpsed a tiny girl in an ancient, oversized leather jacket. A jagged bob of cherry-red hair. A spattering of freckles. Goggles on her brow and a choker around her throat. A small hand in a fingerless glove waved at her through the WarDome bars.

“I got you,” Eve replied.

The inimitable Miss Lemon Fresh jumped on the spot, threw up the horns.

“ ’Kay, bet is onnnnnnn, my bestest,” she reported. “Five hundo at four to one. Let’s hope you didn’t leave your mojo in your other pants.”

“You got the receipt?”

“That happened one time, Evie….”

Eve turned her attention back to her opponent, fingers flitting over the enviro controls inside her gloves. She’d heard a rumor that the Domefighter rigs in the big mainland arenas were all virtual, but here in Dregs, WarDome bouts were strictly oldskool: recycled, repackaged, repurposed. Just like everything else on the island. A confirmation message flickered on Eve’s display, signaling environmental control had been transferred to her console. She tilted the deck beneath the Goliath a fraction, just to test.

The big bot stumbled as the panels beneath its feet shifted. Eve wondered what was going on inside its computerized brain. Whether it knew it was going to die tonight. Whether it would have cared if it wasn’t programmed to.

The crowd bellowed as the floor moved, the interlocking steel plates that made up the WarDome floor rippling as Eve’s fingers flexed. The EmCee had retired to the observation booth above the killing floor, her voice still ringing over the PA.

“As you can see, environmental controls have been passed to the first batter. Under standard WarDome rules, she’ll have five wrecking balls to throw, plus surface modulation. For the newmeat out there, this means…Aww, hells, ask your daddy what it means when I send him home in the morning. Ten seconds to full hostile!”

A countdown appeared on the monitors, Daedalus Tech and BioMaas Inc. logos spinning in the corners. The mob joined in with the count, palms sweaty on rusted bars.

“Five…”

Eve narrowed her eyes, a razor-blade smile at her lips.

“Four…”

Miss Combobulation coiled like a sprinter on the blocks.

“Three…”

The Goliath stood, still as stone.

“Two…”

“Stronger together,” Lemon whispered.

“One…”

“Together forever,” Eve replied.

“WAR!”

Eve lunged, her Locust leaping off its skids and sprinting across the Dome. The floor beneath her tilted into a ramp as she thumbed the enviro controls, her machina sailing into the air with a four-thousand-horsepower roar. The Goliath raised one three-ton fist to smash the Locust to pieces, but at Eve’s command, the floor beneath it shifted. The big logika stumbled, feet skidding on the deck as Miss Combobulation landed on its shoulder. Boosters fired as Eve thumbed the controls, her pickax punching through the Goliath’s right optic and clean out the back of its skull.

“First strike to Miss Combobulation!” cried the EmCee. “Death from aboooove!”

A roar from the crowd. Eve’s smile widened as the sympathetic impact rolled up her arm. She was tearing her pick from the Goliath’s skull when the big logika’s fist closed around Miss Combobulation’s forearm, crushing the armor like paper.

“It’s got you!” Cricket yelled. “Get loose!”

Eve felt the pressure through her control sleeve, the auto-dampeners cutting in before the pain registered. She lashed out with her claws, tearing up the Goliath’s shoulder, and with a squeal of metal, Eve and her Locust were slung clear across the Dome. Miss Combobulation crashed into the bars, pulping a few fingers not pulled away quickly enough. Eve bit down on her tongue, head slamming against the pilot’s seat. Rolling with the worst of it, she twisted back to her feet as the Goliath charged.

“You fizzy in there?” Lemon asked.

“All puppies and sunshine…” She winced.

“Use your environmentals!” Cricket yelled.

Eve’s monitors were filled with damage reports, scrolling a hundred digits per second. She kept the floor moving to break up the Goliath’s attack, thumbed her controls to unleash the first of her five allotted wrecking balls. An enormous sphere of rusted iron swung down from the ceiling, the big bot skidding to a stop to avoid it. Miss Combobulation was back on her feet, skirting the Dome’s edge as Eve dropped another ball on the Goliath’s blind side. The rusty sphere clipped its shoulder, spanging off the case-hardened armor, to the crowd’s delight. The big logika crouched low, sidestepped a third ball. Eve tasted blood in her mouth as her fingers danced inside the control glove, herding the Goliath back to give herself enough room to play.

She kicked Miss Combobulation’s stirrups, weaving into strike range. Shifting the floor again, she wrong-footed the big logika and raked her claws across its damaged shoulder. The Goliath’s counterpunch went wide as the floor shifted again, and Eve melted away between the wrecking balls like smoke.

“Still got some war in her, folks!” the EmCee declared.

A red bellow rose from the mob. The Goliath’s right arm hung limply at its side, a quick scan showing its shoulder hydraulics had been torn to scrap.

“Nice shot,” Lemon’s voice crackled in Eve’s ear. “I’m all tingly in my pantaloons.”

“Learned that one watching old kickboxing virtch,” Eve replied.

“I thought you watched those for the abs and short shorts?”

“I mean, I wasn’t complaining….”

“Evie, don’t get cocky!” Cricket warned. “You need to press while you can! That Goliath will get a read on you soon!”

Eve wiped her brow across her shoulder, all adrenaline and smiles.

“Easy on the take it, Crick. I got this fug’s ident number now.”

The Goliath had retreated to take stock, a barrier of crumpled metal between itself and Miss Combobulation. Its right arm bled coolant, the hole in its eye socket spewed bright blue sparks. With three wrecking balls now swinging across the Dome and only one working optic, Eve knew the big bot would have a hard time tracking targets. All she needed to do was strike from its blind side and never stay still long enough to eat a straight shot.

“Right, let’s send this badbot to the recyc.”

With a twitch of her fingers, Eve sent her last two wrecking balls arcing down from the ceiling, scything right toward the Goliath’s head. But to the crowd’s bewildered gasps, the big bot lumbered up onto a barricade and snatched up one of the swinging chains. Tearing the wrecking ball from its mooring in the Dome’s ceiling, the bot crunched back onto the deck, rusted iron links looped around its knuckles. It drew back one massive arm, ready to throw.

“Sideways moves on this Goliath, folks! Looks like it’s a street fighter!”

“Watch out!” shouted Cricket.

Ten tons of spherical iron flew right at her—enough to pulp her Locust into scrap. Rolling aside, Eve tilted the floor, springing into the air with claws outstretched. She seized a wrecking ball swaying overhead, sailing over the Goliath’s swing, falling into a perfect dive right at the big logika’s head. Time shattered into fragments, each second ticking by like days. The crowd’s roar. That glowing optic fixed on her as the Goliath drew back one massive fist. Lemon’s war cry in her ear. Cricket’s crackling warning. The thought of two thousand clean credits in her greasy hands, and all the happy a prize like that could buy.

Eve raised her pickax with a roar, veins pounding with the thrill of the kill as she stabbed the enviro controls to tilt the floor and stumble the Goliath into her deathblow.

Except nothing happened.

The plates beneath the Goliath didn’t shudder an inch. Eve’s roar became a scream as she stabbed the controls again, bringing her pick down in a futile swing as the Goliath punched her clean out of the sky.

The impact was deafening, smashing Eve forward in her harness, teeth rattling inside her skull. Her machina was sent sailing back across the Dome, raining broken parts and blinding sparks. Miss Combobulation crashed on the WarDome floor, squealing and shrieking as it skidded across the deck.

“Oh, Combobulation is OOC!” the EmCee cried. “Batter up!”

Smoke in the cockpit. Choking and black. Eve’s readouts were all dead, everything was dead. Thin spears of light pierced the broken seams in her machina’s armor. Every inch of skin felt bruised. Every bone felt broken.

“Riotgrrl, get up!” came Lemon’s voice in her ear. “Badbot’s coming for you!”

Eve heard heavy footsteps, coming closer. She stabbed the EJECT button, hydraulics shuddering as the cockpit burst open. Gasping, spitting blood, she tried to claw free of the wreckage, tried to ignore the sound of the incoming Goliath. Impact ringing in her skull. Coolant, fried electrics, blood. The logika stalked toward her, hand outstretched.

What the hells was it thinking? Second batter was on its way up. The Goliath should’ve been turning to deal with its next opponent. But the bot was bearing down on her, raising its fist. Like it wanted…

“Get out of there, Riotgrrl!” Lemon cried.

Like it wanted.

Eve tried to drag herself free, but her foot was trapped in her control boot. Lemon was screaming. The crowd baying. She looked up into the crystal clear blue optic looming overhead and saw death staring back at her, eighty tons of it, fear and anger rising inside her chest and boiling in the back of her throat.

She refused to flinch. To turn away. She’d met death before, after all. Spat right in its face. Clawed and bit and kicked her way back from the quiet black to this.

This is not the end of me.

This is just one more enemy.

Static dancing on her skin. Denial building inside her, violence pulsing in her temples as the Goliath’s fist descended. Rage bubbling up and spilling over her lips as she raised her hand and screamed. And screamed.

AND SCREAMED.

And the Goliath staggered.

Clutched its head as if somehow pained.

Sparks burst from its eye sockets, cascading down its chest. The big bot shuddered. And with an awful metallic groan, the hiss of frying relays and the snapcracklepop of burning circuits, it tottered backward and crashed dead and still onto the deck.

Eve winced as it hit the ground, the stink of burned plastic mixing with the taste of blood on her tongue. The crowd was hushed, looking on in shock at the skinny, grease-stained girl still trapped inside her machina. Hand still outstretched. Fingers still trembling.

Were they seeing things? Were they smoked? Or had that juvette just knocked an eighty-ton logika on its tailpipe with a simple wave of her hand?

“Evie,” came Lemon’s voice in her ear. “Evie, are you okay?”

Eve stared at the hushed crowd all around her.

The Goliath’s smoking remains.

Her outstretched fingers.

“Think I’m a few miles from okay, Lem….”

1.2 Democracy

The blond man looms above me. Tall as heaven. Twice as beautiful. He steps closer and I wonder why his boots squeak like frightened mice. And then I look down, and I see the floor is red. And I remember.

On my face. On my hands. None of it is mine. All of it is.

Father.

Mother.

I…

My brother, Alex, is just ten years old. He makes things, just like our father. Breathes life where there was none. For my fifteenth birthday, he made me butterflies. There are no such things as butterflies anymore, and yet he made them for me all the same.

And he could always make me smile.

The beautiful man raises his pistol, and Alex looks down the barrel into forever.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks.

The beautiful man does not answer.

And I am not smiling anymore.

I am screaming.

They used to call it Kalifornya, but now they called it Dregs.

Grandpa had told Eve this place wasn’t even an island before the Quake. That you could motor from Dregs to Zona and never touch the water. A long time ago, this was just another part of the Grande Ol’ Yousay. Before the country got bombed into deserts of black glass and Saint Andreas tore his fault line open and invited the ocean in for drinks. Before the Corporations fought War 4.0 for what was left of the country and carved out their citystates beneath a cigarette sky.

Eve checked that the coast was clear, stole out from the WarDome’s innards, Lemon in tow. A boom echoed in the arena’s belly, accompanied by a trembling roar. Another bout had started, and Eve could hear iron giants colliding inside, rumbling applause. Her mouth tasted of copper and her belly felt full of ice. The memory of her outstretched hand and the collapsing Goliath burned bright in her mind.

As if things hadn’t been bad enough already…

The Dome’s meatdoc had given her a fistful of pain meds and offered a bioscan, but she’d just wanted to get out of there. She’d seen those Brotherhood boys at the bout tonight, and after what she’d done, they’d surely be gunning for her. Time to get home while the getting was good.

An old billboard, faded with time, stood near the Dome’s rear exit. Kaiser lay in the gloom beside it, eyes burning softly, his tail starting to wag as he caught sight of her.

“How’s my handsome boy?” Eve smiled. “How’s my good dog?”

Kaiser wuffed and rolled over so Eve could scratch his belly. Lemon knelt beside her, fussing over the blitzhund and stroking his rib cage. Kaiser’s hind leg began kicking as they found his sweet spot, his pistons hissing, the heat sink that served as his tongue lolling from his mouth. After a few minutes of glorious torture, the girls finally let him up, and the blitzhund shook himself like a real dog would have, shivering the dust from his hull.

Kaiser wasn’t a logika, like Cricket. He was technically a cyborg, but his only organic part was a chunk of cloned Rottweiler brain and six inches of spinal cord plugged into an armored combat chassis. He’d looked almost real once, but his fur had started wearing off a year back, so Eve had stripped him to the metal and spray-painted him with an urban-camo color scheme instead. He looked skeletal now, all plasteel plates and hydraulics. She liked him better this way. It seemed more honest than pretending he was a real dog. Grandpa said it’s always better to be shot at for who you are than hugged for who you aren’t. Most days in Dregs, someone was bound to be shooting at you, anyway.

Eve heard smashing glass, a drunken yell out in the night. She and Lemon hunkered in the shadows of the Dome, waiting to see if the Brotherhood or some other flavor of trouble had found them. Minutes ticked by as they crouched there in the dark.

Lemon brushed her long cherry-red bangs from her eyes. The girl wore a choker set with a small silver five-leafed clover, toying with the charm as she whispered.

“Maybe we better jet, Riotgrrl.”

“We lost our whole roll on that bet,” Eve replied. “Got no creds for a ride.”

“We should set Kaiser on that bookie’s hind parts. True cert.”

“Technically, Miss Combobulation did go down first. ’Sides, you really wanna stick around here and argue over creds with the Brotherhood on the prowl?”

Lemon chewed her lip and sighed. “Lovely night for a walk?”

And so they began the trek back to Tire Valley. Kaiser stalked out front, his eyes lit up like headlights in the dark. Cricket rode in Eve’s backpack, the little bot’s oversized head wobbling atop his shoulders. They cut off-road, into a forest of towering wind turbines and rusted cranes and metal shells. Lemon’s eyes were on the shadows around them, her electric baseball bat slung over one shoulder. She clearly knew this was no time for a pop quiz, but the questions were backing up behind her teeth.

“So,” she finally said, stumbling through the trash.

“So,” Eve replied.

“You wanna talk about what happened in there?”

“You mean the part where my enviro controls fritzed or the part where I fried every circuit inside that Goliath just by yelling at it?”

“I couldn’t hear over the crowd. But it must have been a very naughty word.”

Eve engaged the low-light setting in her optic, her vision shifting to tones of black and green. She could see the shapes of the scrap piles around them, the distant warmth of the sun beyond the horizon. That Goliath, crashing to the deck over and over in her mind.

“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 ruins 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 CorpCard, 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.

“Trouble,” she said.

Lemon nodded, hefted her electric baseball bat. Eve slung the satchel over her back with a grunt, pulled out her own beatstick. It was similar to Lemon’s: aluminum, fixed with a power unit and a fat wad of insulated tape around the handle. The bats were Grandpa’s design, and they could pump out around 500kV—enough to knock most peeps flat on their soft parts. As a clue to where she was likely to insert it if push came to shove, Lemon had nicknamed her bat Popstick. But in keeping with her love of mythology, Eve had painted her bat’s name down its haft in dayglow pink.

EXCALIBUR.

Grandpa had gotten paid with some basic self-defense software on a repair job last year, and he’d uploaded it onto Eve’s Memdrive so she’d be able to protect herself. She wasn’t too worried about the chances of a brawl, particularly with Kaiser around. But still, anything could happen this far out in the Scrap….

“Best come on out!” Eve called. “Sneaking up on a body like that’s gonna end dusty.”

“Lil’ Evie, lil’ Evie,” called a singsong voice. “You a long way from Tire Valley, girl.”

Eve and Lemon turned toward the songbird, half a dozen shapes coalescing out of the haze. She didn’t even need to see the colors on their backs to recognize them.

“Long way from Fridge Street, too, Tye.”

Eve looked at the scavvers, each in turn. Their gear was a motley of duct-taped body armor and salvaged hubcaps. Most weren’t much older than her. A big fellow named Pooh was armed with a methane-powered chainsaw and a ragged teddy bear tied around his neck. The tall, thin one called Tye drew an old stub gun from his trench coat.

She’d bumped into the Fridge Street Crew a few times during her own runs, and they were usually smart enough for parlay. But just in case, Eve thumbed her bat’s ignition and the air filled with a crackling hum.

Rule Number Three in the Scrap:

Carry the biggest stick.

“We were here first, juves,” she said. “No need to tussle on this.”

“Don’t see no standard planted anywhere.” Tye turned his palms toward the gray sky and looked around. “Without colors on the dirt, you ain’t got official claim.”

Cricket stepped forward, held up spindly, rust-colored hands.

“We were just leaving, anyway. It’s all yours, gents.”

Tye spat in Cricket’s direction. “You talking to me, you little fug?”

Cricket frowned. “Don’t call me little.”

“Or what, Rusty?” the boy scoffed.

“Just leave him alone, Tye,” Eve said.

The boy’s teeth were the color of coffee stains. “ ‘Him’? Don’t you mean ‘it’? Damn, check this flesh, sticking up for the fugazi.”

“Fugazi” was slang for “fake.” No one was quite sure of its origin anymore, but the word was a slur used to describe anything artificial—cybernetic implants, bots, synthetic food, you name it. Its short form, “fug,” was a common insult for logika, who were treated on the island as second-class citizens at best, and as simple property at worst.

Tye looked to his boys and waggled his eyebrows.

“These girls gone stir-crazy living out there alone with old Silas,” he grinned. “Prefer the company of metal to meat now. Maybe they haven’t met the right flavor.” The boy grabbed his crotch and shook it, and all his crew guffawed.

Lemon drummed her fingers on Popstick’s grip. “You shake that thing at us again, your sister’s going to bed disappointed tonight.”

The crew all howled with laughter, and Eve saw Tye bristle. He needed to save face now. Bless her heart, but Lemon’s mouth was going to get her into serious brown one day.

“Shut it, scrub.” Tye hefted his stub gun, aimed it in Lemon’s general direction.

“You really want to kick off over this?” Eve watched the crew fanning out around them. “We’re walking away. You can have the salvage.”

“And what’s that in your pack, lil’ Evie? Already scavved the best of it?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Smelling me some lies.” Tye aimed the gun at her face. “Show me the bag, deviate.”

Eve felt the blood drain from her face at the insult, her jaw clench tight.

“Oh yeah, I seen what you done in Dome las’ night,” Tye continued. “News was all over the feeds. Your grandpa might be the best mechanic this side of the Glass. And maybe he’s racked up some goodwill fixing busted water recycs for folks and whatnot. But you think anyone’ll cry if I ghost you right now? Some trashbreed abnorm?”

Lemon lifted Popstick with a growl. “Don’t call her that.”

Tye sneered. “Pony up the salvage, lil’ Evie.”

Eve sighed to make a show of it. With a grunt, she slung her satchel off her shoulder, tossed it onto the ground between them. Lowering the gun, Tye dawdled over and knelt by the bag. Pawing through it, confusion hit him first, disbelief following, realization finally smacking him around the chops as he turned to his boys.

“True cert, juves, this is—”

Three steps and Eve’s boot connected with his face, smooshed his nose across his cheeks. The boy tumbled backward, stub gun sailing into the trash.

“You fu—”

Eve stomped on Tye’s crotch to shut him up, lowering the business end of Excalibur to his head. Pooh arced up his chainsaw, but a low growl made him glance over his shoulder. Kaiser was crouched in the shadows, eyes glowing a furious red.

“Ain’t scared of your doggie, lil’ Evie,” Pooh scoffed. “Bot can’t hurt no human.”

“Only logika have to obey the Three Laws.” Eve smiled. “Kaiser’s a cyborg. Got an organic brain, see? Bigger one than you, maybe.”

Kaiser growled again, metal claws tearing the scrap. Staring at the knives in the blitzhund’s gums, the juve lowered his chainsaw, pawed the teddy bear at his throat.

“Folks gonna hear about this,” he told Eve. “Your name ain’t dirt since last night. I caught talk the Brotherhood’s already heading down to nail you up. Maybe the Fridge Street Crew throws them some love when they come knocking?”

“There’ll be plenty of love waiting,” Eve growled. “Believe it.”

“Eve, let’s go.” Cricket tugged on her boots.

“Crick’s right, let’s jet, Riotgrrl,” Lemon muttered.

Eve lifted Excalibur, swinging it in an arc at the assembled scavvers.

“Any of you scrubs follow us, I’ma get Queen of Englund on your asses, you hear?”

“Don’t need to follow you.” The bottom half of Tye’s face was slick, blood bubbling on his lips as he talked. “We know where you live, you abnorm freak.”

Eve lowered her bat to Tye’s cheek, live current crackling down the haft. “You ever call me an abnorm again, I’ma teach you what the baseball feels like.”

She looked around at the assembled scavs, flashing her razor-blade smile.

“The Chair will now take your questions.”

The threat hung in the air like smoke. Talking true, the same part of Eve that threw down with that eighty-tonner last night was hoping these juves would make a Thing of it. But one by one, she watched the crew deflate.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought….”

Eve hefted her satchel back onto her shoulder. Heart hammering in her chest despite the bluster. And with a sharp whistle for Kaiser and a nod for Lemon, she turned and motored, fast as her oversized boots would stomp her.

1.4 Wake

Our feathers painted red. Our cheeks wet with tears. Three pretty birds in a bloodstained cage. And Tania the prettiest of them all.

She was the softest of us. The shallowest. It didn’t matter if she wasn’t fierce. Or clever. Or brave. Because she was beautiful. That was enough for Tania.

But there in that cell, I saw the depths of her. Depths even Tania had never swum. When it was all I could do to stop myself flying to pieces, she was hard as iron. Dragging herself to her feet and staring at those four killers in their perfect, pretty row.

A soldier stepped forward, blue eyes and dark hair. Tania didn’t blink.

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.

The soldier didn’t reply.

His pistol spoke for him.

By the time they reached Tire Valley, the sun was almost peaking, and Eve’s fauxhawk was drooping with sweat. She gulped down some water with Lemon, poured the last of it on Kaiser’s head. The air around Cricket’s heat sinks was shimmering, his mismatched eyes filmed with dust. They stuck to the shade as best they could, marching in Dunlop, Michelin and Toyomoto shadows. Black rubber cliffs reaching up into a burning sky.

Grandpa had told her there were automata who worked in Dregs a long time ago, back when what was left of the Yousay still blew smoke about rebuilding. The bots divided most of the island into zones and carted different scrap to designated areas. So Dregs had a Neon Street, Engine Road, Tire Valley and so on. Lemon had told her there was a cul-de-sac somewhere near Toaster Beach lined with nothing but battery-powered “marital aids,” but if it existed, Eve had never found it. For every big stretch of turf in Dregs, there was a gang who ran it. And the Fridge Street Crew was among the dirtiest.

“Grandpa’s gonna be so flat with me,” Eve sighed.

“Toldja.” Cricket shrugged his lopsided shoulders. “We shoulda gone straight home. Now what’ve we got? Some broken red tech in a bag and Fridge Street lining up behind the Brotherhood to put a knife in your tenders.”

“This body will be worth it, Crick.”

“It’s worth a life stretch in a Daedalus factoryfarm.”

“Pfft.” Lemon shook her head. “How many CorpCops you seen round here lately?”

“Are you familiar with the First Law of Robotics, Miss Fresh?”

Lemon sighed, spoke by rote. “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”

“Correct. That includes standing with my hands down my pants while my mistress does things liable to get herself perished.”

“You’re not wearing pants, Crick.”

“Just sayin’. They outlawed those things for a damn reason.”

“Your concern is noted in the minutes, Mister Cricket,” Eve said. “But we got zero creds, and meds don’t buy themselves. So don’t tell Grandpa about it yet, okay?”

“Is that an order or a request?”

“Order,” Eve and Lemon said in unison.

The bot gave a small, metallic sigh.

They trudged on in silence. Eve ran her fingers over Kaiser’s back, pulled her hand away with a yelp as she discovered the blitzhund was scalding hot. Dragging off her poncho, she slung it over him to cut the glare. Kaiser wagged his tail, heat sink lolling from his mouth.

She’d seen an old history virtch about the Nuclear Winter theory once. All these scientists messing their panties about what’d happen when the fallout blotted out the sun after mass detonation. Seemed to her they should’ve spent more time worrying about what’d happen after, when all that carbon dixoide and nitrogen and methane released by the blasts ripped a hole in the sky, and the UVB rays waltzed right through the ozone and started frying humanity’s DNA. Abnorms and deviates had been popping up ever since. “Manifesting” was the polite term for it, but polite didn’t have much place in Dregs.

Of course, everyone had heard talk about deviates who could move things just by thinking on it, or even read minds, but Eve figured that was just spit and brown. Because as fizzy as “mutation” might have sounded in old Holywood flicks, most folks didn’t get superpowers or Godzilla smiles or even great suntans in Dregs. They just got cancer. Lots and lots of cancer.

And the few folks who did get “Special”?

Well, the Brotherhood got them dead.

The quartet was deep in Tire Valley when an automated sentry gun twisted up out of a cluster of old tractor tires, spitting a plume of methane smoke. Hoping the voice-ident software wasn’t fritzing again, Eve started singing some antique tune Grandpa had made her learn. Beethovey or something…

“Da-da-da-daaaaa. Da-da-da-dummmmmm.”

The gun slipped back into its hidey-hole, and they rolled on. Eve had to sing at a couple more automata sentries on the way, dodging the thermex charges Grandpa had laid for uninvited guests, finally rounding a bend to find home sweet home.

It was a series of shipping containers and antique trailer homes, welded around the hulk of a heavy thopter-freighter that had crashed here years ago and buried itself up to the eyeballs in trash. The freighter’s engines had been slicked with grease to spare them the rust that was slowly eating the rest of the ship. Methane exhaust sputtered from three chimneys, and the structure rattled and hummed with the songs of wind turbines and coolant fans. It was surrounded by mountains of tires and the remnants of an old 20C amusement park. The rusted spine of an ancient roller coaster could be seen cresting the trash around them, like some corroding sea serpent swimming through an ocean of garbage.

Eve strolled up to the freighter, banged on the hatch.

“Grandpa, it’s Evie!”

Dragging her wilted fauxhawk from her eyes, she banged on the door again. She heard slow whirring from inside. Pained, labored breathing. The vidscreen beside the door crackled to life and two rheumy eyes peered out from the display.

“We don’t want any,” a voice said.

“Come on, Grandpa, let us in. It’s hot out here.”

“ ‘Grandpa’?” His voice was all gravel and broken glass. “I used to have a granddaughter once. Damn fool stayed out all night and half the day. Got herself the cancer. Died screaming with her eyes swollen shut and her belly full of blood.”

“That is foul, Grandpa.”

“You kinda remind me of her, actually.” A wet cough crackled through the speaker’s hum. “She was better-looking, though.”

“Come on, I wore my poncho, cut me some rope.”

“The dog is wearing your poncho, Eve.”

“He was hot!”

“And where’s your gas mask?”

“I look defective in that thing.”

“And you’ll be the belle of the ball with a faceful of basal cell carcinoma, won’t you?”

“Are you gonna let us in or what? Kaiser’s brain is probably roasted by now.”

The door cranked wide enough for the group to squeeze inside. Grandpa waited beyond, slumped in his old electric wheelchair. The chair had no manual controls—directions were jacked straight from Grandpa’s brain via the wetware implant at his wrist.

The old man was thin as a starving gull. A shock of gray hair. Eyes sharp as scalpels pouched in sandbag sockets. Wheezing breath. It made Eve’s chest hurt to look at him—to remember what he’d been and see what he’d become. Instead, she looked at the floor and crooked a thumb at her co-conspirator.

“Fizzy if Lemon stays over?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Grandpa frowned. “She’s stayed over for the last ten months.”

“Always polite to ask.” Lemon leaned down, kissed him on his stubbled cheek.

“Away with you and your feminine wiles, Miss Fresh.”

Lemon grinned. “How you feeling, Mister C?”

“Like ten miles of rough road.” The old man coughed into his fist, loud and wet. “Better for seeing you, though, kiddo.”

Kaiser pushed past Eve, still boiling hot. He padded down the hallway, shaking off Eve’s poncho and slinking inside his doghouse. Motion sensors activated the coolant vents, and his tail started wagging in the recycled freon.

“It’s almost midday.” Grandpa scowled up at Eve. “Where you been?”

Apparently, Grandpa had continued in his Surly Old Bastard traditions and hadn’t watched the newsfeeds. He’d no idea about the Dome or what’d happened there. The Goliath. Her outstretched fingers. Screaming…

“Went to WarDome last night to watch the bouts,” she said. “Hit Eastwastes on the way home, looking for salvage.”

Grandpa glanced at Cricket.

“Where’s she been?”

“Just like she said.” Cricket nodded his bobblehead. “WarDome. Eastwastes.”

“Oh, so you believe him and not me?” Eve sighed.

“His honesty protocols are hardwired, chickadee. Yours only work when it suits you.”

Eve made a face, wrangled her satchel off her back, started peeling away her plasteel armor. Underneath, she was wearing urban-camo cast-offs and a tank top that predated the Quake. She stashed Excalibur near the door. Despite the lawlessness in Dregs, Grandpa wouldn’t allow guns in the house, and with her nightmares being what they were, Eve was only too glad for it. Some old grav-tank pilot’s armor and Popstick were the only armaments keeping her bat company.

She looked sideways at the old man, tried to sound casual.

“How you feeling, Grandpa?”

“Better than I look.”

“How’s the cough? You take your meds? How much you got left?”

“Fine. Yes. Plenty.” Grandpa scowled. “Although I sometimes hear this annoying voice in the back of my head, speaking at me like I was a three-year-old. Is that normal?”

Eve leaned down and kissed her grandpa’s cheek. “You know, the whole lovable grouch thing? Really working for you.”

“I’ll keep it up, then.” He smiled.

Kicking off her heavy boots, Eve made fists with her toes in the temperfoam, relishing the air-con on her bare skin. Then, hoping the desalination still was back online, she hefted her satchel with Lemon’s help and shuffled off in search of something to drink.

Grandpa coughed as she padded up the hall, dragged wet knuckles across his lips. Glancing at Cricket, he muttered softly.

“Salvage in Eastwastes, huh?”

“Yessir.”

“She find anything good?”

Cricket looked from Grandpa to the satchel the two girls were hauling away, the beautiful red prize coiled inside.

“No, sir.” The little bot shook his head. “Nothing good at all.”

“You know, for the reddest of red tech,” said Lemon, “he’s not hard on the eyes.”

Eve looked at the body laid out on her workbench, stripped of its bloody flight suit, a pair of skintight shorts leaving just a little to the imagination. Smooth olive skin, hard muscle, a thousand different cuts from its journey through the windshield scored across tanned pseudo-flesh. Its brow was smashed inward, its right arm sheared off at the shoulder, that coin slot riveted between its pecs. And yet, it was somehow flawless.

More human than human.

“It’s not a ‘he,’ Lem,” Eve reminded her bestest. “It’s an ‘it.’ ”

Eve leaned close to its face—that picture-perfect face from the cover of some 20C zine. Brown curls, cropped short. A dusting of stubble on a square jaw. Smooth lines and dangerous corners. She tilted her head, ear to its lips. Her skin tickled at the kiss of shallow breath, hair rising on the back of her neck.

“I swear it had no pulse….”

“Am I smoked, or is he a lot less banged up than when we found him?”

Lemon was right. The tiniest wounds on the lifelike’s skin were already closed. The deeper ones were glistening—healing, Eve realized. She peered at the ragged stump where the lifelike’s arm used to be and wondered what the hells she’d signed herself up for.

Lemon pointed to the coin slot riveted into the boything’s chest. “What’s that about?”

“Clueless, me,” Eve sighed.

Lemon hopped up on the workbench, cherry-red bob snarled around her eyes. She brushed the dust off her freckles, poked the six-pack muscle on the lifelike’s abdomen.

“Stop that,” Eve said.

“Feels real.”

“That was the whole point.”

Lemon hooked a finger into the lifelike’s waistband and leaned down to peer inside its shorts before Eve slapped her hand away. The girl cackled with glee.

“Just wanted to see how lifelike they got.”

“You’re awful, Lemon.”

Eve’s work space was a shipping container welded in back of Grandpa’s digs, cluttered with salvaged scrap and tools. Spray-foam soundproofing on the walls, junk in every corner. Flotsam and jetsam and twenty-seven empty caff cups, each with a tiny microcosm of mold growing inside (she’d named the oldest one Fuzzy). The door was a pressure hatch from a pre-Fall submarine, the words BEWARE OF THE TEENAGER spray-painted in Eve’s flowing script on the outside.

“So what we gonna do with him?” Lemon wagged her eyebrows at the lifelike. “Fug’s still breathing. Can’t sell him for parts now. That’d be mean.”

“It’ll be a tough sell, anyways. These things are outlawed in every citystate.”

“What for?”

“You never watched any history virtch or newsreels?”

Lemon shrugged, toying with the five-leafed clover at her throat. “Never had vid as a kid.”

“They were only outlawed a couple years back, Lem.”

“I’m fifteen, Riotgrrl. And like I said, we never had vid when I was a kid.”

Eve felt a pang of guilt in her chest. She sometimes forgot she wasn’t the only orphan in the room. “Aw, Lem, I’m sorry.”

The girl let go of the charm, waved Eve away. “Fuhgeddaboudit.”

Eve dragged her fingers through her fauxhawk, looked back at the lifelike.

“Well, BioMaas Incorporated and Daedalus Technologies are running the show now, but GnosisLabs was another big Corp back in the day. They made androids. The 100-Series was the pinnacle of their engineering. So close to human, they called them lifelikes, see? They were supposed to give Gnosis the edge over the other Corps. But the lifelikes got it into their heads that they were better than their makers. They somehow broke the Three Laws hard-coded into every bot’s head. They ghosted the head of GnosisLabs, Nicholas Monrova. The R & D department, too. Whole company came crashing down.”

“Sounds kiiiinda familiar,” Lemon said. “Gnosis HQ was on the other side of the Glass, right?”

“True cert,” Eve nodded. “They called it Babel. I seen pix. Big tower, tall as clouds. But the reactor inside went redline during the revolt, ghosted everything within five klicks. Babel just sits there now. Totally irradiated. Most peeps figured the 100-Series all got perished in the blast. But Daedalus Tech and BioMaas got together and outlawed lifelikes afterward, all the same. First thing they’ve agreed on since War 4.0. Every pre-100 android got destroyed. And nobody’s seen a 100-Series since Babel fell.”

Lemon nodded to the body on the bench. “Till now.”

“True cert.”

“How you know all this stuff, Riotgrrl?”

Eve tapped the Memdrive implanted in the side of her skull.

“Science,” she replied.

First developed as a rehab tool for soldiers returning from War 4.0 with Traumatic Brain Injury, the Memdrive was a wetware interface that transmitted data from silicon chips to a damaged brain, allowing TBI sufferers to “remember” how to walk or talk again.

In the years after 4.0’s end, the Memdrive was adopted for civilian use, allowing people access to encyclopedic knowledge of almost any topic. For the right scratch, anyone could become an expert on almost anything, from programming to martial arts. Of course, average peeps could never afford a Memdrive rig, especially not in a hole like Dregs. Grandpa must have pulled some fizzy moves to get Eve’s after the…

…well. After.

The militia raid had taken almost everything from her. Her family. Her eye. Her memories. But Grandpa had given them back, best he could, along with everything he knew about mechanics and robotics from his job on the mainland—all bundled up in clusters of translucent, multicolored silicon inserted behind her right ear.

She supposed he figured a hobby would keep her busy.

Out of trouble.

Her mind off the past.

One out of three isn’t bad.

Lemon hopped off the workbench, did a slow circuit of the body.

“So prettyboy here’s one of these bloodthirsty murderbots, you figure?”

“Maybe.” Eve shrugged. “Other androids always looked a little fugazi. Plastic skin. Glass eyes. This one looks too close to meat to be anything other than a 100.”

“And Fridge Street knows we salvaged him. If they tell the Graycoats—”

“They’re not gonna tell the Law,” Eve sighed. “Not when they got a chance of claiming it themselves. Fridge Street is all about the scratch.”

“Seems to me prettyboy’s worth less than zero. Can’t sell him. Can’t tell anyone we got him. Remind me why we hauled this thing in from the Scrap?”

“I don’t remember you doing much lifting.”

“I’m too pretty to sweat.”

Miss Fresh leaned close to the lifelike’s face, ran one finger down its cheek until she reached the bow of its mouth.

“Still, if we can’t sell him, I can ponder a few uses for—”

Pretty eyes opened wide. Pupils dilated. Plastic blue. Eve had time to gasp as the lifelike’s left hand snaked out, quick as silver, and grabbed Lemon’s wrist. The girl shrieked as the bot sat up, wrenching her into a headlock so fast Eve barely had time to draw breath.

Eve cried out, snatching up a screwdriver. Lemon’s face was flushing purple in the lifelike’s grip. Perfect lips brushed her earlobe.

“Hush now,” it said.

Eve’s lips drew back in a snarl. “Let her go!”

The lifelike glanced up as Eve spoke, those pretty plastic eyes glinting in the fluorescent light. Its grip around Lemon’s throat loosened, mouth opening and closing as if it were struggling to find the words. A word. So full of astonishment and joy, it made Eve’s chest hurt without quite knowing why.

“You…,” it breathed.

Lemon seized the lifelike’s ear, bent it double, and flipped it forward. The bot sailed over Lem’s shoulder and came crashing down on a ruined survey drone in the corner. With a wet crunch and a spray of blood, the thing found itself impaled on a shank of rusted steel.

“Ow,” it said.

Eve pushed Lemon back, her screwdriver held out before her. Lem had one hand pressed to her throat as she wheezed and blinked the tears from her eyes.

“That hurt, you fug….”

The lifelike winced, kicked itself off the shank it’d been impaled on, leaving a slick of what looked like blood behind on the metal. It collapsed with a thud, one hand pressed to the wound, right beside that coin slot in its chest. Eve snatched a heavy wrench off her workbench and raised the tool to stave in the bot’s head.

“Ana, don’t,” it said.

Eve blinked. “…What?”

“Ana, I’m sorry.” The lifelike raised its bloody hand. “I didn’t know it was you.”

“My name’s not Ana, fug.”

“Prettyboy got a screw loose,” Lemon wheezed. “Hole in his skull let the stupid in.”

Bang, bang, bang.

“Eve?” Grandpa’s voice was muffled behind the soundproofed door. “Lemon? You two solid in there?”

The lifelike blinked, looking at the hatchway. “…Silas?”

“How do you know my grandpa’s name?” Eve snarled.

A frown creased that perfect brow. “Don’t you remem—”

“Eve!” Grandpa yelled, banging the metal with his fist. “Open the door!”

“Silas!” the lifelike yelled. “Silas, it’s me!”

Grandpa coughed hard, his voice turning an ugly shade of dark.

“Eve, have you got a boy in there with you?”

Lemon and Eve glanced at each other, speaking simultaneously. “Uh-oh…”

“God’s potatoes!” Grandpa roared, banging again. “I’ll not stand for it! This is my roof, young lady! Open this door right now before I get the rocket launcher!”

“Silas, it’s Ezekiel!” the lifelike yelled.

“Will you shut up!” Eve hissed, kicking the lifelike in the ribs.

When Grandpa spoke next, it was with a voice Eve had never heard before.

“…Ezekiel?”

The lifelike looked up at Eve again. Imploring.

“Ana, we need to get out of here. They’ll be coming for you.”

“Who’s Ana?” Lemon looked about, totally bewildered. “How do you know Mister C? What the fresh hells is going on here?”

Eve lowered the wrench, hands slick on the metal. The lifelike was looking up at her with pretty plastic eyes, full of desperation. Fear. And something more. Something…

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“Ana, it’s me,” the lifelike insisted. “It’s Zeke.”

“Eve.”

Grandpa’s voice echoed through five centimeters of case-hardened steel.

“Eve, get away from the door. Cover your ears.”

“Oh, crap,” Lemon breathed. “He really did get the—”

The blast was deafening. A train-wreck concussion lifting Eve off her feet and tossing her across the room like dead leaves. She collided with the spray-foam wall, hitting the ground with a gasp. Grandpa wheeled through the ruined doorway in his buzzing little chair, smoking rocket launcher in hand, hair blown back in a smoldering quiff. He scoped the scene in an instant, pointed to the lifelike and growled.

“Kaiser. Aggress intruder.”

The blitzhund leapt through the hatchway, seizing the lifelike’s throat in his jaws. A low growl spilled from between the hound’s teeth and a series of damp clicks echoed within his torso. His eyes turned blood red. Eve shook her head as Grandpa hauled her to her feet. The lifelike remained motionless, hand raised in surrender. Eve figured she’d probably be the same with a blitzhund wrapped around her larynx.

“Wonderful invention, blitzhunds,” Grandpa wheezed, hauling Lemon up by the seat of her pants. “Daedalus Tech invented them during the CorpWars. They can track a target across a thousand klicks with one particle of DNA. ’Course, the smaller ones only have enough explosives to take out single targets. But a big model like Kaiser here?” Grandpa coughed hard, spat bloody onto the deck. “If he pops, there’ll be nothing left of this room but vapor. Think you can heal that, bastard? Think we made you that good?”

The lifelike croaked through its crushed larynx. “Silas, I’m not here to hurt you.”

“ ’Course not.” Grandpa was ushering both shell-shocked girls toward the door. Cricket was beckoning Eve wildly. “You just happened to be in the neighborhood, am I right?”

“Ana, stop.”

Eve realized the lifelike was looking at her, the world still ringing in her ears.

“Ana, please…”

“Shut up!” Grandpa’s roar came from underwater. “Breathe another word, I—”

And then it started. That awful cough. The sound that had kept Eve awake every night for the past six months. Grandpa tried to push Eve through the door even as he bent double in his chair, coughing so hard she thought he might bring up his lungs. The cancer had him by the throat. Claws sinking deeper every day into the only thing she had left….

“Grandpa,” Eve breathed, hugging the old man tight.

“Silas, she’s in danger,” the lifelike pleaded. “I came here to warn you. Ana was on the feeds. Some trouble at a local bot fight last night. She manifested in front of hundreds of people. Manifested, you hear me? Fried a siege-class logika just by looking at it.”

“Not…,” Grandpa wheezed, “not possib—”

“Silas, they’ll know. One of them is bound to be monitoring the feeds. Even the data from a sinkhole like this. They’ll come for her, you know they will.”

“Grandpa, who is this?” Eve’s voice was trembling, her real eye blurred with frightened tears. “What’s going on?”

“Ana, I’m—”

“Shut up!” Grandpa shouted at the lifelike. “Shut…your t-traitor…mouth.”

The old man fell back to coughing, bubbling breath dragged through bloody teeth.

Eve held him tight, turned to Lemon. “Med cabinet!”

“On it!” Lem wiped the blood from her ears, stumbled down the hallway.

Grandpa was choking, fist to his lips. Hate-filled eyes locked on the lifelike.

“Just breathe easy, Grandpa, we got—”

“We got two tabs left!” Lemon dashed back down the hall, skidded to her knees. Two blue dermal patches were cupped in her palm. “Cabinet’s dry, Evie. This is the last.”

“No, that can’t be right,” Eve said. “Why didn’t he tell me we were so low?”

“He didn’t want to worry you,” Cricket said in a sad little voice.

Eve slapped the tabs onto Grandpa’s arm, massaged his skin to warm them up. Lemon returned with a cloudy glass of recyc, holding it to his lips. Eve’s heart wrenched inside her chest as he sipped, started coughing again.

Don’t you dare die on me….

The lifelike was staring at her, those blue plastic eyes locked on hers. “Ana, I—”

“Shut up!” Eve shouted. “Kaiser, it speaks again, tear out its throat!”

The blitzhund growled assent, tail wagging.

What the hells could she do? No meds left. No scratch. That dose might see Grandpa through this attack, but after that? Was he going to die? Right here? The only blood she had left in the world? She remembered sitting on his lap as a little girl. Him holding her hand as he nursed her back to health. And though the memories were monochrome and jumbled and fuzzy at the edges, she remembered enough. She remembered she loved him.

Eve dragged her fist across her eyes. Took a deep, trembling breath.

A claxon sounded throughout the house, cranking her headache up to the redline. On top of everything else, something had just triggered the proximity alarms….

Grandpa was trying to get his coughing fit under control. He wiped his knuckles across his lips, flecked in red. His eyes had never left the lifelike.

They’ll come for her, you know they will.

“You…,” Grandpa coughed, wet and red. “You expecting c-company, Eve?”

“No one who’d be welcome.”

“Go ch-check cams,” he managed. “K-Kaiser’s got this in…hand.”

“Mouth,” Lemon murmured.

The old man managed a bloodstained grin. “Don’t start with…me, Freshie.”

A quick glance passed between Eve and Lemon, and without another word, the girls were dashing down the hallway. They bundled into what Grandpa wryly referred to as the Peepshow—a room with every inch of wall crusted in monitors, fed via sentry cams around Tire Valley. The alarms were tripped anytime someone arrived without an invitation. Most often, it was some big feral cat who loped into a turret’s firing arc and got itself aerated, but looking at the feeds…

“We,” Cricket said, “are true screwed.”

Lem looked at the bot sideways. “You have a rare talent for understatement, Crick.”

Eve’s eyes were locked on the screens. Her voice a whisper.

“Brotherhood…”

1.5 Ruin

Just us two. Marie and me. The two youngest sisters. The closest. The best of friends.

Only she’d known my secret. Held it safe inside her chest. Father would never have approved. Mother would’ve lost her mind. But Marie held my hand and laughed with me, breathless with my excitement. She loved that I was in love.

Loved the idea of it more than I did.

She was crying now. Holding on to me like a drowner clings to the one who swims to save her, dragging them both down to the black. But when the pistol clicked, she glanced up, up into the face of the soldier looming over us. Long curling hair, the color of flame. Eyes like shattered emeralds. Beautiful and empty.

The name HOPE was stenciled above her breast pocket.

I almost laughed at the thought.

“None above,” Hope said. “And none below.”

A sun-bright flare.

A deafening silence.

And only I remained.

The Fridge Street Crew had warned her that the Brotherhood was posse’ing up. Eve hadn’t realized just how serious they were taking it.

She looked out through the view from Turret Northeast-1 just as something blew the feed to hissing static. Looking at Northeast-2, she could see a small army of Brotherhood boys, dolled up in their red cassocks and tromping toward Grandpa’s house. Oldskool assault rifles and choppers in hand. Scarlet banners set with the image of their patron, St. Michael, waving in a rusty wind. And marching in the vanguard, absorbing the withering hail of auto-turret fire, came four fifty-ton Spartans.

The machina were classic infantry models, responsible for most of the heavy lifting during War 4.0 in areas where the radiation was too hot for meat troops. They stood thirty feet high, the crescent-shaped heat sinks on their heads giving them the silhouettes of old Greek soldierboys from the history virtch. They were painted scarlet, snatches of mangled scripture on their hulls. Long banners flowed from their shoulders and waists, adorned with the Brotherhood sigil—a stylized black X.

“Grandpaaaaa!” Eve yelled.

A Spartan stomped up to Northeast-2 and smashed it to scrap. Eve felt a distant, shuddering boom as the thermex charges at the turret’s base exploded. She glanced at the screen for North-3, saw the Spartan on its back, smoking and legless. But the rest of the posse was still moving, just a few minutes shy of ringing the front doorbell.

Eve glanced at her bestest. “These boys mean biz.”

Lemon was looking down the corridor, back toward Eve’s workshop. Her face was unusually thoughtful, brow creased.

“What did Mister C do back on the mainland? Before you moved here?”

“He was a botdoc,” Eve said, watching the Brotherhood march closer. “A mechanic.”

“You remember where he worked?”

“Lem, in case you missed it, there’s a very angry mob outside our house carrying a cross my size. What does this have to do with anything?”

“Because that lifelike acted like he knew you. Like you’d forgotten him. And he called you by a different name, Evie. Someone in this game isn’t dealing straight.”

Eve knew Lem was right, but, true cert, impending murder just seemed more of a pressing issue right now. The Brotherhood mob was posse’ing around their three remaining Spartans, about a hundred meters from the house. The machina were armed with autoguns and a plasma cannon on each shoulder, and those things could liquefy steel. The house had only two auto-sentries on the roof, and against the bigbots’ armor, they weren’t going to be much help. As far as capital T went, Eve couldn’t remember being in much deeper. But she gritted her teeth, forced her fear down into her boots. She was a Domefighter, dammit. This was her home. She wasn’t giving it up without a kicking.

The lead Spartan’s cockpit cracked open, and a brief blast of choir music spilled across the Scrap. A barrel-chested figure in an embroidered red cassock vaulted down onto the trash, holding an assault rifle engraved with religious scripture. He wore mirrored goggles and had sideburns you could hang a truck off, a big greasepaint X daubed on his face. Eve knew him by reputation—a fellow who tagged himself the Iron Bishop.

“I am cometh not to bring peace, but a sword!” he bellowed.

“Amen!” roared the Brothers.

The Iron Bishop held out his hand, and a juve slapped an old microphone into his palm. With a flourish, the Bishop held the mic to his lips, his voice crackling through his Spartan’s public address system.

“In the name of the Lord! The Brotherhood demands that all genetic deviates housed within this domicile surrendereth themselves immediately for divine purification!”

Eve scowled, tried harder to swallow her growing dread. “Purification” basically meant getting nailed up outside the Brotherhood’s chapel in Los Diablos and left for the sun. The Brotherhood was always crowing about the evils of biomodification and cybernetics, and they had a major hate-on for genetic deviation. But they were big enough that the local law didn’t want to push the friendship. So if you happened to be born with a sixth finger or webbed toes or something a little more exotic, sorry, friendo, that was just life in the Scrap.

Cricket sat on Eve’s shoulder, peering at the feeds with mismatched eyes.

“Aren’t they hot in those cassocks?” he chirped.

“They make ’em out of Kevlar weave,” Eve murmured. “Bulletproof, see?”

“Got a bad feeling on this,” the bot said. “Right in my shiny metal man parts.”

“Keep telling you, you got no man parts, Crick,” Lemon sighed.

“Yeah,” said a tired voice. “I’m such a bastard.”

Eve turned with a surge of sweet relief, saw her grandfather sitting at the doorway in his electric wheelchair. But standing behind him…

“Um,” Lemon said. “Should he…be here?”

The lifelike.

It stood behind Grandpa in its high-tech flight suit, bloodstains on the fabric, Kaiser’s teeth marks on its throat. Old-sky blue eyes flitting from screen to screen.

“Grandpa, what the hell is that thing doing out here?” she demanded.

“Had a chat.” Grandpa wiped his lips with a bloodstained rag, eyes on the monitors. “Reached an understanding. So to speak.”

“Did you miss the part where this thing nearly choked Lemon to death?”

Grandpa tried to turn his cough into a scoff, smothered with his fist.

“You’re the one who…brought him inside, my little chickadee.”

“We thought it was dead!”

“I’m sorry, Mistress Lemon.” The lifelike’s voice was smooth as smoke. “My brain was damaged in the crash. I mistook you for a threat. Please accept my apologies.”

The lifelike’s pretty blue stare fell on the indomitable Miss Fresh. Its smile was dimpled, sugar sweet, about three microns short of perfect. Eve could see the girl’s insides slowly going mushy right before her eyes.

“Oh, you know.” Lemon’s face was a bright shade of pink. “It’s only a larynx.”

“Ohhh my god,” Eve began. “Lemon…”

“What?” she blinked.

“And you, Mistress Eve,” the lifelike said. “I’m sorry for any—”

“Oh, I’m Mistress Eve now?” she demanded. “What happened to Ana?”

“Again, the crash…my head injuries.” It glanced at Silas. “I’m afraid my brain trauma led me to mistake you for someone else. I apologize.”

“Brain trauma’s all better now?”

“Yes. Thank you, Mistress Eve.”

“But you’re still mistaking me for someone else?”

A blink. “I am?”

“Yeah.” Eve stepped closer, looked up into the lifelike’s eyes. “A true cert idiot.”

She stared into that fugazi blue. Searching for some hint of truth. Feeling only revulsion. Warning. Danger. This thing wasn’t human. It might look it, sound it, feel it. It might be as beautiful as all the stars in the sky. Problem was, the smog was usually too thick to see the stars anymore. And there was something wrong here. Something…

“Arguments later.” Grandpa nodded to the monitor banks. “Brotherhood means biz. Time to talk them out of it, Ezekiel.”

The lifelike broke Eve’s eye contact with seeming reluctance.

“I can do that.”

Spinning on its heel, the thing called Ezekiel marched down the corridor. Its gait was a little lopsided, as if the loss of its limb had thrown it off balance. Still, a regular human would already be dead if they’d had their arm torn from their shoulder, and Eve was freaked to see the thing moving at all. It got half a dozen steps before her voice pulled it up short.

“Hey, Braintrauma.”

The lifelike turned, one perfect eyebrow raised.

“Exit is that way.” Eve crooked a thumb.

Ezekiel glanced about the corridors and, with a flash of that almost-perfect smile, headed toward the front door. Lemon leaned out the hatchway to watch it go, whistling softly. Eve plucked Cricket off her shoulder, set him down in Grandpa’s lap.

“Cricket, look after Grandpa. Grandpa, look after Cricket.”

“Where you think you’re going?” the old man rasped.

“Out to help.”

“Hells you are. I’ll try some parlay, and if that doesn’t work, Ezekiel can deal with them. You got nothing to throw against a mob like that.”

“And what’s the lifelike going to throw against those Spartans?” she asked. “It’s only got one arm. And it’s not getting through ballistics-grade plasteel with just a pretty smile.”

“That dimple, though,” Lemon interjected.

“Look, that’s his…problem, not yours,” Grandpa wheezed. “You stay…here.”

“This is our home, Grandpa. And these dustnecks brought an army to it.”

“That’s right, Eve. An army. And there’s…nothing you can do to stop them.”

Eve looked down at her fist. Remembered the WarDome last night. The Goliath and a little myth about a kid called David.

“Yeah, we’ll see about that.”

Ignoring her grandpa’s shouts, she stalked down the corridor to the armory, slapped on some plasteel and headgear, threw her poncho over the top. Snatching up Excalibur, she checked the power levels, noticed Lemon suiting up beside her. The girl dragged on an old grav-tank pilot’s helmet, clawed the shock of cherry-red hair from her eyes and hefted Popstick with a grin.

“Stronger together,” she said.

“Together forever.” Eve smiled.

__________

A thousand suns were waiting for them outside. A thousand suns inside a single skin. The metal underneath her was hot to the touch. The scorch in the sky broiling her red.

“You gentles got no biz…on my property.”

Grandpa’s voice crackled over the PA as Eve popped out of a rooftop hatch and hunkered down behind one of the autogun emplacements. Lemon crouched beside her, pushing the oversized helmet out of her eyes and surveying the mob.

“You got thirty seconds before…I start getting unneighborly,” Grandpa growled. “And then I’m gonna jam that cross…up your as—”

Grandpa’s attempts at “parlay” trailed off into dry coughing, and the old man cut the feed. The Iron Bishop spoke into his mic, voice bouncing off the tires around them.

“Handeth overeth the deviate, Silas! Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!”

Eve blinked. “…Did he just say ‘handeth overeth’?”

Lemon stood up, helmet slipping over her eyes as she howled. “Don’t call her a deviate, you inbred sack of sh—”

Eve pulled Lemon back down behind the autogun barricade as the more enthusiastic Brotherhood boys fired off a couple of random shots. Molten lead spanggged off rusted steel. Eve winced. Her head was aching, her optical implant itching.

Peeking back over the barricade, she fixed the Spartans in her stare. Last night’s bout was replaying inside her head. The way that Goliath had dropped like a brick onto the killing floor. The way she’d blown every circuit inside it just by willing it. She had no idea how she’d pulled it off, or if she could do it again. But this place was her home, and these people were her family, and letting someone else fight her battles just wasn’t her style.

So Eve stretched out her hand, fingers trembling.

“What’re you doing?” Lemon hissed.

“Trying to fritz one of those machina.”

“Riotgrrl, I’m not su—”

“Hsst, I’m trying to concentrate!”

Eve gritted her teeth. Picturing the leftmost Spartan collapsing into ruin. Trying to summon everything she’d felt last night—terror and fury and defiance—to curl it up in her fist and send it hurtling into the Spartan’s core. Sweat gleamed on her brow, the sun beating down like sledgehammers. The fear of losing Grandpa. The suspicion she was being lied to. The lifelike’s hollow, plastic stare and perfect, pretty eyes. She pulled all of it into a tight, burning sphere in her chest—a little artillery shell of burning rage.

These dustnecks wanted to nail her up? Bring her an ending? Well, she’d conjure them an ending like they’d never seen….

Eve drew a deep breath. Standing up from behind the barricade, she imagined the Spartan falling in a cloud of burning sparks, burned the picture in her mind’s eye. And then, at the top of her lungs, she screamed.

Screamed.

SCREAMED.

And absolutely nothing happened.

The Brotherhood boys started laughing. Bullets started flying. A lucky shot bounced off her torso guard, knocking her sideways. And as the indomitable Miss Fresh dragged her back behind cover, a shard of supersonic lead blew Eve’s helmet right off her head.

The pain was sledgehammers and white stars. Eve cried out, dirty fingers feeling about her skull to see if it’d been perforated. The hail of fire continued, she and Lemon crouched low as the air rained bullets for a solid minute. Eve was wincing, flinching, heels kicking at the roof beneath her. Thankfully, the shot seemed to have killed her headgear and nothing else. But still…

“That was a little on the wrong side of stupid,” she finally managed to gasp.

Lemon was staring wide-eyed at Eve, pale under her freckles. “You nearly got your dome blown off! Warn me when you’re gonna do something that defective again, will you?”

“Never again,” Eve muttered. “I promise.”

“Where’s this damn murderbot, anyways?” Lemon poked her head over the barricade once the firing stopped. “Shouldn’t he be…aw, spank my spankables….”

“What?”

Lemon chewed her lip. “You want bad news or worse news?”

“Um…worse?”

“No, that doesn’t work. Supposed to ask for the bad first.”

Eve rubbed her aching temples and sighed. “Okay, bad, then.”

“Tye and his little posse of scavverboys just rolled up.”

“Oh.” Eve nodded slow. “And the worse?”

“They brought the entire Fridge Street Crew with ’em.”

“Juuust fizzy,” Eve sighed. “Seriously, what is with this day?”

Peeking over the barricade, Eve saw a warband of Fridge Street thugs rolling up from behind the looping curl of some old roller coaster track. She spotted Tye and Pooh riding on the backs of beat-up motorbikes behind the older Fridge Street beatboys. The boss of the crew—a one-hundred-and-twenty-kilo meatstick in rubber pants who called himself Sir Westinghouse—climbed out of a modded sand buggy and started jawing with the Iron Bishop, apparently delighted to discover they were all here to lay the murder down on the same juvette.

Grandpa’s bellow crackled over the PA.

“What is this, a dance class reunion? You scrubs get the hell off my lawn!”

Sir Westinghouse stepped forward, a bruiser beside him handing over a bullhorn.

“Your granddaughter jumped a bunch of my juves out in the Scrap this morning, Silas!” Westinghouse bellowed. “Jacked some sweet salvage that rightways belongs to Fridge Street. Suggesting maybe you better limp out here and jaw on it.”

“I got…a better suggestion,” Grandpa called.

“And what’s that, old man?”

“Check your six.”

Eve watched Sir Westinghouse frown and look behind him just as one of the cassock boys flipped back his hood to reveal a prettyboy face and eyes just a touch too blue. The lifelike had a machine pistol in its one good hand, probably lifted from whatever Brother it’d stomped for the robe.

Lemon did a little bounce. “Clever boy.”

Every Brother and Fridgeboy had his fingers on his trigger. Eve strained to hear the lifelike talk over the machina hum and clawing wind.

“I’ll give you one chance to walk away,” it said. “All of you.”

“That’s him!” Tye slapped Sir Westinghouse on the back. “The lifelike!”

The Fridge Street chief glanced at the juve, back at Ezekiel. “So you’re the fugazi, eh? Look around you, prettyboy. You got an army against you.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Ezekiel said softly.

Westinghouse guffawed. “Who you trying to fool? You forget the Golden Rule? The Three Laws won’t let you hurt us, fug.”

The lifelike blinked at that. Its pistol wavered, and Eve wondered if…

“My maker thought the same thing,” Ezekiel said.

And then it moved.

Eve had seen fast before. She’d seen epinephrine-enhanced stimheads playing snatch on street corners in Los Diablos. She’d seen top-tier machina fights beamed from the Megopolis WarDome—the kind that got decided in fractions of a second. She’d seen fast, true cert. But she’d never seen anything move like that lifelike moved then.

The Iron Bishop raised his assault rifle behind the lifelike. And quicker than flies, Ezekiel spun and popped two rounds into the Bishop’s eyes. In almost the same instant, it dropped three of the closest Brotherhood thugs with headshots and finally blew out the back of Sir Westinghouse’s skull, painting Tye’s face a bright and gibbering red.

The air was scarlet mist and thin gray smoke. World moving in slow motion. Peeps shouting, firing at the lifelike as it grabbed a nearby Brotherhood thug to use as a shield. Lead thudded into the Kevlar cassock, muzzles flashing like the strobe light in Eve’s dreams, flickering as the figures danced and fell, the stink of blood uncurling in the air.

Eve covered her ears as the rooftop autoguns fired into the mob. The Spartans opened up with their own ordnance, one spraying a storm of hollow-points at the lifelike, the other unleashing its plasma and melting one of the rooftop sentries into slag. Lemon winced and hunkered lower, fixing Popstick with an accusing glare.

“Who brings a baseball bat to a gunfight?”

Eve peered out the side of the barricade. Eyes fixed on the Spartan, teeth gritted in a snarl. Stretching out her hand once more.

“Come on…,” she pleaded.

“Eve, what are you doing?”

“Why won’t it work?” she spat, furious. “Why can’t I do it again?”

Hails of burning lead raked their cover, pitter-pattering on the steel. Eve heard cries of panic, screams of pain. Lemon peeked out over the barricade, whistling softly.

“Look at him go….”

Eve’s eyes fell on the lifelike, widening in amazement. Ezekiel had scrambled up the back of the closest Spartan and, as if the metal were tinfoil, torn the ammo feed from its autoguns to stop it firing on the house. Wrenching its plasma cannon toward the Spartan beside it, the lifelike melted the cockpit and the pilot inside into puddles. The Brotherhood scattered into cover, Fridge Street laying down the lead on Ezekiel as it twisted and dodged, almost too fast to track.

Noticing the rooftop autoguns were OOC, two of the braver Fridgeboys made a dash for the house. Whether to seek cover or wreak havoc, Eve wasn’t quite sure.

“Finally!” Lemon cried.

Eve’s bestest leapt off the roof with a howl, dropping a Fridgeboy with 500kV crackling through his brainmeats. Kaiser was waiting inside the front door for the other one, and the scavver was soon dashing back to his comrades with his shins torn to ribbons.

Ezekiel dropped from the Spartan’s shoulders, grabbing a Kevlar-clad corpse to shield itself as it weaved through the hail of bullets. Even with only one arm, it carried the body effortlessly, gleaming with what looked a lot like sweat as it rolled into cover behind a stack of tires near the house. A pile of old retreads had been set ablaze by the plasma, thick smoke rolling over the yard and burning the back of Eve’s throat.

She realized Cricket had crawled up onto the roof beside her. The little bot was tugging at her boots and yelling at her to get back inside over the roar of the remaining Spartan’s autogun fire. Lemon was safe with Kaiser below. But Eve was still trying desperately to unleash whatever it was that had dropped that Goliath in the Dome. Eyes narrowed. Temples throbbing. Muscles straining.

Come onnnn….

“Eve, come on!”

She reached deep inside herself. To the place she’d fallen into when that Goliath raised its fist above her head. The moment she’d looked down the barrel pointed at her skull. A moment of perfect fear. Of defiance. Thrashing and kicking against that long goodnight.

This is not the end of me.

This is just one more enemy.

The Spartan jerked back like Eve had punched it. It trembled, as if every servo inside it were firing at once. She grinned as a cascade of sparks burst from the machina’s innards. And spewing smoke, the Spartan stumbled and crashed face-first into the scrap.

“Eve…,” Cricket murmured. “You did it.”

Eve punched the air. “Eat that, you dustneck trash-humper!”

As their last machina fell, the Brotherhood broke. Two of their Spartans were OOC, the Iron Bishop’s machina standing abandoned as the Brothers dragged their fallen leader away. With the death of their own boss and Ezekiel still laying down bullets from its nest of tires, most of the fight had been taken out of Fridge Street, too. They were stepping off quick, scattering into the Valley.

Eve scoped the bloody battleground that had engulfed her front yard. Some of the meanest, toughest beatsticks in Dregs had stepped up with a fistful of capital T and were now scuttling away with their tails between their legs.

Wiping the sweat from her good eye, the girl winked at the little logika beside her.

“Think you can chalk up a win for the good guys, Crick.” She smiled.

And that’s when the first bomb fell from the sky.

1.6 Impact

Red on my hands. Smoke in my lungs. My mother, my father, my sisters and brother, all dead on the floor beside me. Hollow eyes and empty chests.

The soldiers stand above me. The four of them in their perfect, pretty row.

They have only one thing left to take from me.

The last and most precious thing.

Not my life, no.

Something dearer still.

A silhouette looms.

Raises a pistol to my head.

“I’m sorry,” a voice says.

I hear the sound of thunder.

And then I hear nothing at all.

No warning. No telltale whooooosh like in the old Holywood flicks. Just the blast.

And fire.

And screams.

A second incendiary fell, landed in the middle of the retreating Fridge Street Crew, sending Pooh and his teddy bear off to the Wherever in pieces. A third bomb blew the Brotherhood boys about like old plastic bags in the wind. Eve and Cricket looked up to the sky, the girl’s belly turning cold as she saw a light flex-wing with a faded GNOSISLABS logo on the tail fin swooping through smoke.

“This is not good…,” Cricket said.

The flex-wing zoomed overhead, cutting down anything that moved. The craft made another pass, mopping up everything still twitching. And finally, with the kind of skillz you really only see in the virtch, the pilot brought the ’wing down to a gentle landing on the trash and skipped out the door in the space between heartbeats.

“Riotgrrl?” Lemon’s voice drifted up from the verandah below. “You fizzy?”

“Stay behind cover, Lem.”

“No doubt. I’m too pretty to die.”

Eve’s eyes were fixed on the newcomer, standing ankle-deep in the mess she’d made. A woman. Barely more than a girl, really. Nineteen, maybe twenty. She wore combat boots and a clean white shift, hood pulled back from a perfect face. Short dark hair cut into ragged bangs. Some kind of sidearm Eve had never seen before at her hip. And in her right hand, the sheathed curve of what might have been a…

“Um, is she carrying a sword?” Lemon yelled.

“Looks like.”

“Who does that?”

The newcomer scanned the carnage with eyes like a dead flatscreen. Eve’s stare was fixed on her face, telescopics engaged. She could see that the newcomer’s irises were dull, plastic-looking. Just like Ezekiel’s. Her face was flawless, beautiful. Just like Ezekiel’s. The way she moved, the way…

“She’s a lifelike,” Eve breathed.

A barrage of images in her mind. Old black-and-white freeze-frames, blurred and smudged with the press of time. A beautiful smile. Soft skin against hers. Laughter. Poetry. It was as if—

“Have you ever been in love, Ana?”

“I think…”

“Kaiser,” came Grandpa’s voice. “Aggress intruder.”

The blitzhund was a snarling blur, dashing out the front door toward the lifelike. Eve’s heart was in her throat, her blood running cold.

“Kaiser…”

The blitzhund barreled like a heat-seeking missile right at the newcomer’s throat. Quick as blinking, the lifelike drew the sword from its sheath. A flare of magnesium-bright current arced along the blade’s edge, and faster than Eve could scream warning, the lifelike brought the weapon down toward Kaiser’s head.

A shot rang out, smashed the blade from the lifelike’s grip. Eve glimpsed Ezekiel, crouched behind its tangle of tires, smoking machine pistol in its hand. Kaiser hit the female lifelike like an anvil, snarling and tearing. The lifelike rolled with the momentum, punching up through Kaiser’s belly. And as Eve watched in horror, the lifelike tore out a handful of her dog’s metallic guts and kicked him thirty meters down the Valley.

“Kaiser!” Eve screamed.

The lifelike was on its feet, bloodied wrist clutched to its chest. Ezekiel opened fire, Eve’s jaw hanging loose as she watched the newcomer dance—literally dance—through the hail of molten lead, down into the cover of a Spartan’s wreckage. Ezekiel’s pistol fell quiet, shots echoing along the Valley.

“Eve, come on,” Cricket pleaded, tugging at her boots.

The house PA crackled, and Eve heard Grandpa’s voice, thick with fear. “Evie, come inside.”

The newcomer raised its head, calling across the scrap.

“Good heavens, is that you, Silas?”

Eve gritted her teeth. So this lifelike knew Grandpa, too. Just like Ezekiel. Her mind was racing, desperately trying to fill in gaps that just didn’t make sense. How did any of these pieces fit together? Maybe Grandpa hadn’t been an ordinary botdoc? Maybe busted recycs and automata weren’t the only things he’d been tinkering with when she was off learning to become a Domefighter? Whatever the explanation, a slow anger was twisting her insides. Someone was lying here. Someone was—

The house rumbled beneath her. Rust and dirt shivered off the structure, and Eve realized the old engines on the thopter-freighter had started, kicking up a storm of plastic and dust. Grandpa must have been really hard at work all those months she’d been building Miss Combobulation at the Dome. He must have fixed—

“Mister C fixed the engines?” Lemon yelled.

“Lem, get in the house!” Eve shouted. “Help Grandpa! I’ll be down in a second!”

“…What are you gonna do?”

“I gotta get Kaiser!”

Eve turned to the trash pile the blitzhund had been booted into. She could hear pained whimpers, faint scratching. He was still alive. But he was hurt. The engines were a dull roar, the world trembling around her. Grandpa was calling her name over the PA. Cricket was still tugging on her leg, his voice pleading.

“Evie, come onnnn.”

She clenched her jaw, shook her head. Time enough for questions when Kaiser was safe. She knew Cricket would follow her anywhere, but she wouldn’t let him get hurt, too. She handed over Excalibur, nodded to the hatch.

“Cricket, go get Lemon and take her back in the house.”

“Eve, it’s too dangerous up here, I’m supposed to—”

“That’s an order!”

The little logika wrung his rusty hands on the baseball bat’s handle. His heart was relays and chips and processors. His optics were made of plastic. And she could still see the agony in them.

But as always, the bot did what he was told.

Eve scrambled down the rooftop into the rising dust cloud, weighing her chances. Glancing among the carnage, she saw the Iron Bishop’s Spartan, still standing among the smoking corpses. As she crept out among the bloody scrap, she heard the female lifelike call from behind cover. Its voice was lilting, almost as if it were singing rather than speaking. And Eve could swear it sounded…

…familiar?

“Lovely to see you again, Ezekiel,” the newcomer called.

“You’re a terrible liar, Faith,” Ezekiel called back. “I always liked that about you.”

“I should have known you’d beat me here.” A smile in the song. “Been watching the human feeds again? Practicing in the mirror to be like them? It’s pathetic, Zeke.”

“And yet here we both are.”

Eve dropped onto her belly as the newcomer twisted from cover, sidearm raised, unleashing a volley of something razor sharp and whistling at Ezekiel’s cover. A series of tiny, pin-bright explosions tore the tires to ruins. Through the growing dust storm, she saw Ezekiel break from the shredded rubber, leap behind a stack of trashed auto hulks.

The lifelike reloaded, raised its pistol too fast to track. Sparks arced and ricocheted as Ezekiel ducked out of cover and blasted away. Down on her hands and knees, Eve crawled on through the trash, listening for Kaiser’s whines. A stray bullet whizzed over her head, the stench of burning tires making her dry-heave.

Grandpa bellowed over the engine roar. “Evie, get inside, dammit!”

Eve peered up from her cover. She was almost close enough to make a dash for the Spartan now, but she didn’t dare without knowing where the enemy was. Her eyes met Ezekiel’s across the ruins, and the lifelike shook its head. Gesturing that she should head back to the house. She heard a whimper somewhere out in the trash.

Hold on, puppy….

She was drenched, sweat burning her eyes. She tore off her poncho, tossed it away. On her belly now, crawling toward Kaiser’s voice. Ezekiel saw she was refusing to retreat, seemed to decide distracting their opponent was the best way to keep Eve un-murdered.

“I don’t want to fight you, Faith,” it called.

“I don’t blame you.” Faith’s reply rang somewhere out in the tangle of metal and bodies. “I can’t help but notice you’ve misplaced one of your arms.”

“I only ever needed the one to beat you.”

The lifelike’s laughter rang across the scrap.

“Pride cometh before the fall, little brother.”

“You’d know, big sister.”

…Brother? Sister?

Eve caught sight of movement, saw the newcomer crouched beside a tumble of old tires, slowly creeping around Ezekiel’s flank. And over the rising engine roar, the house groaning in its metal bones, she heard another soft whimper.

Kaiser…

There might be only a handful of meat in him that was real, but that handful needed her. If she broke cover, she’d be seen for sure. But if Grandpa was worried enough about this lifelike to try to get the house airborne, there was no way Eve was just going to leave her dog behind to rot.

She dashed out into the open, sprinting toward the Iron Bishop’s machina. Grandpa hollered over the PA. Ezekiel cried a warning as Faith rose from cover, pistol in hand. Trash was crunching under Eve’s boots, her lungs burning. But she ran. Fists flailing, heart hammering, across the bodies and wreckage, vaulting into the Spartan and slamming the cockpit closed. Stabbing the ignition, she slipped her arms and feet into the control sleeves. The machina roared to life around her, its engines thrumming in her bones.

Whatever the hells was happening here, this was something she knew.

This was something she could do.

Her plasma cannon vomited white heat, incinerating the newcomer’s cover. The thing called Faith was already moving, dashing toward Eve’s Spartan when Ezekiel appeared from cover and charged shoulder-first into Faith’s belly. The impact was thunderous, tearing a long furrow through the scrap as the lifelikes fell into a rolling brawl. Fists blurring. Blood and spit and wet, crunching thuds.

Eve lumbered through the wreckage in her machina, heavy feet crushing metal like it was paper. She scanned the scrap, caught sight of Kaiser in a pile of old retreads. He was dragging himself with his front paws, hind legs motionless. Eve tore the tires aside, reached down with huge, gentle hands, cupped the wounded blitzhund to her Spartan’s chest.

“It’s okay, puppy,” she breathed. “I got you.”

Kaiser licked the Spartan’s hand with his heat-sink tongue.

Eve lumbered back across the battleground, through the black smoke and rising storm of dust and dirt, toward home. The house was shuddering now, the squeal of tortured metal rising over the engines’ thunder. She couldn’t see Ezekiel or the other lifelike. Eyes fixed on her front door. The welds across the house were splitting, the freighter finally getting some lift, the rest of the homestead shearing away under its own weight. Eve ran hard as she could, every colossal step bringing her closer.

Forty meters away.

Thirty.

A proximity alarm screeched in her ear. Eve had time to hunch as three hundred kilos of engine block crashed across her Spartan’s back. The machina was sent stumbling, gyros whining. Another impact, this time into her legs, an enormous tractor tire bringing the Spartan to its knees. The thing called Faith leapt high onto her Spartan’s back, tearing out handfuls of cable. The hydraulics in Eve’s left arm lost pressure, Kaiser tumbling from her grip. Eve reached back with her good arm, seized the lifelike and hurled it as hard as she could. Faith crunched into a twisted loop of roller coaster track, belly tearing open. Pseudo-blood spilled on rusted steel. Lips and teeth slicked ruby red.

Eve tore free of her harness and hit the cockpit eject. Bursting out into the rising roar, she seized Kaiser’s scruff and dragged him toward the house. Dust in her good eye. Blood on her tongue. Kaiser whimpered, tried to crawl as best he could. He was so heavy. How would she lift him through the hatch? How could she—

A figure appeared beside her. Blood-spattered skin and eyes of fugazi blue.

“I’ve got him!” Ezekiel shouted. “Go!”

Eve stumbled toward the house, ribs and arm and head aching. The freighter was almost two meters off the ground now, still rising. Eve hauled herself through the doorway, boots kicking against the hull. Ezekiel leapt through the hatch in a single bound right behind her, Kaiser under its arm. Eve was on all fours. Chest pounding. Throat burning. And somehow she found breath to scream.

“Go, Grandpa, go!”

The house shuddered beneath her, its engines roaring in protest. Metal snapping, welds shattering, whole sections tearing away as the freighter rose into the sky, raining dirt and dust and crud. She was tossed like a plaything against the walls as she tried to stand, bouncing into Ezekiel’s chest. The lifelike caught hold of her, the pair of them falling to the deck in a tangle. Eve looked down at the sweating, blood-soaked thing beneath her—this thing that wore the shape of a beautiful boy. A boy who’d just saved her life. A boy who wasn’t anything like a boy at all. She could feel its body, hard and warm against her own.

“Are you all right?” Ezekiel asked.

Eve pushed herself away, palms slick with pseudo-blood. If she didn’t know better, she’d have said the blood looked real. If she didn’t know better…

“I’m fine.” She turned to Kaiser on the deck beside her. “You okay, puppy?”

The blitzhund was dented and torn, the hole in his belly spitting sparks. A quick glance told her the damage wasn’t anything she couldn’t fix—nothing meat was ruined. Flooded with relief, she hugged him fiercely. His tail wagged feebly.

Ezekiel was watching her, those too-blue eyes fixed on hers.

“What’re you looking at?” she scowled.

A nod to Kaiser. “He’s a machine.”

“So?”

“So you still love him.” That almost perfect smile curled its lips. “It’s sweet.”

Eve shook her head, dragged herself to her feet. “You’re a weird one, Braintrauma.”

Grandpa’s voice echoed over the house PA. “Eve, you all right?”

She hobbled to a comms pad, stabbed the TRANSMIT button with bloody fingers.

“I’m okay. Kaiser’s ambulation is shot. But he’s alive.”

“In a world of stupid…that was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.” A hacking cough crackled through the speaker. “He’s an artificial, Eve. He gets hurt so you don’t have to.”

“Really? You’re chewing me out now? I love you, Grandpa, but time and place?”

Silas seemed keen to say more, but his transmission dissolved into another coughing fit. Lemon and Cricket appeared at the end of the corridor, the little machina still clutching Excalibur. The girl pounded toward Eve and caught her up in a rib-crushing hug.

“You okay, Riotgrrl?”

“Fizzy.”

“Did you know Silas could fly this thing? Did you even know this thing could fly?”

“Grandpa’s definitely pro at keeping secrets.” She glanced at the lifelike, now hauling itself up the wall with its one good arm and testing its right leg gingerly. It looked like it’d had whatever passed for the stuffing kicked out of it. “You fizzy, Braintrauma?”

“I’ve had worse beatings,” it replied. “Trust me.”

“Can you carry Kaiser with only one arm? I need to take him down to the worksh—”

The ship lunged sideways, sending Lemon into Eve and Eve into the wall. Cricket yelped and tumbled across the corridor, ending upside down against the bulkhead. There was a loud metallic crunch, a long squeal. The freighter shuddered again, rolling up onto its port side and sending everyone to their knees. Ezekiel grabbed Eve to stop her cracking her skull open on the bulkhead. Its arm was like warm iron, wrapped around her chest and crushing the breath out of her.

“Get off me…,” she gasped.

“What was that?” Lemon demanded.

Eve was pulling herself to her feet when the internal PA crackled. Grandpa’s voice was hoarse with pain, almost drowned out by roaring wind. “Eve, she’s in—”

The transmission dropped dead with a hiss of static.

Ezekiel met Eve’s frightened stare.

“Faith…,” he said.

“Grandpa!” Eve snatched Excalibur from Cricket’s hands and bolted down the corridor. Lemon ran beside her. Cricket wailing in protest. She could hear the lifelike bringing up the rear, limping badly after its beatdown.

They ran through the warren of corridors, up to the cockpit, tearing open a hatchway and stepping out into a rushing gale. The windshield was smashed to splinters, glittering on the floor. Grandpa’s electric wheelchair was on its side, wheels still humming. Wind howled through the shattered glass. Eve could see ashen sky beyond, the island of Dregs sailing away beneath their feet. Black ocean in the distance. No one at the controls.

“Grandpa?” she cried.

Lemon peered out through the broken windshield.

“…Mister C?”

A bloodied hand reached down from outside, slammed Lemon’s head into the console. She collapsed, blood dripping from her split brow. Eve clenched her fists as a figure dropped in through the broken glass. Blood crusted in its ragged bangs. Glistening wounds in its belly and chest. Eyes the flat gray of a dead telescreen.

“Hello, Ana.” Faith smiled. “You look wonderful for a dead girl.”

Thinking only of her grandpa, Eve swung Excalibur with all her strength. Faith parried with a forearm, hissing as the shock rocked it back into the console. The lifelike recovered in a heartbeat, slapped the bat from Eve’s hand with almost casual ease.

Eve still had the self-defense routines in her Memdrive to fall back on, landing a decent jab on the lifelike’s jaw before a single punch drove the breath from her lungs. She was seized by the throat, hauled into a choke hold.

“Gabriel will be so pleased to see you,” Faith whispered in her ear.

Eve struggled to speak against the lifelike’s grip. “What did you…do with—”

“Silas? He’s in my flex-wing, dead girl.” The lifelike thumbed a control at its belt. Eve heard engines roar to life above her head. “Don’t worry. I’m taking you both home.”

“If you’ve…hurt my…grandpa—”

“…Grandfather?” A sharp smile twisted those perfect lips. “Oh, you poor girl. What has he been telling you?”

Black flowers bloomed in Eve’s good eye. Tiny star flared and died as her pulse slowed. A roaring in her ears. A white-noise hiss. And beneath it all, a little voice, high and shrill. Yelling her name.

“Evie!”

A dark shape barreled into the cockpit, a silhouette in the light of a too-bright sun. Eve felt an impact, heard a wet crunch. She fell to her knees, hacking and coughing, stars in her eyes. Cricket was beside her, begging her to run. She was dimly aware of shapes moving in the cockpit—two figures, a dance of fists and knees and elbows. Blinding sparks. Metal tearing. The pilot’s seat uprooted. The console crushed like an old caff cup.

The freighter wrenched to one side. Eve rolled across the deck, struggled to her knees. Cricket was roaring over the pulse in her ears, the pain in her head. She could see Faith and Ezekiel, hands at each other’s throats, their brawl shredding the case-hardened steel around them as if it were wet cardboard.

She pressed her hand to her throat, still trying to breathe. Cricket was at the controls, trying to pull the barge up from its dive. Faith broke Ezekiel’s hold, kicked the lifelike against the console, bouncing Cricket off the walls and snapping the control wheel off at the root. Pawing along the deck, Eve’s fingers wrapped around Excalibur’s hilt. And with a muffled curse, she cracked the bat across Faith’s spine.

A surge of 500kV. A burst of current. Faith cried out, landed a thunderous punch to the side of Eve’s head. Eve heard a damp crunch as the lifelike’s fist collided with her Memdrive, felt a blinding flash of pain. She dropped to the deck, gasping and clutching her skull. White light behind her eyes.

Ezekiel was on its feet, roaring Faith’s name and smashing the lifelike across the head with the broken wheel. And with a desperate cry, Ezekiel drew back its boot and kicked Faith out through the shattered windshield.

Faith tumbled toward the black ocean below. But over the static in her ears, Eve heard engines snarl on the ceiling above, squealing metal, and seconds later, a flex-wing roared down in pursuit of the falling lifelike.

Blood rushing in her temples. Vomit on her tongue. Blinding sparks in her eyes; broken images flickering in her head like some old 20C movie projector. The console was smashed to scrap, the controls a broken mess. The thought that her grandpa was inside that flex-wing flashed in her mind, shouted down by the knowledge that she couldn’t see the horizon through the shattered glass anymore. All she could see was black. Breakers made of Styrofoam. Gnashing waves, the color of sump grease.

The ocean.

She shook her head, trying to clear it.

But we’re flying in the sky, aren’t we?

Ezekiel dragged her into the copilot’s seat. Threw Lemon on top and strapped them both in. Her stomach lurched as the barge listed farther, the pain in her head growing worse. The engine roar swelled, louder and higher. She realized gravity wasn’t working right, that Cricket was bouncing along the ceiling. She could hear Kaiser barking in the background. Ezekiel yelling. Turbines screaming. Staring out through the shattered glass into a black and smiling face. So close she could almost kiss the waves.

Kiss them goodbye.

“Ana, hold on!” Ezekiel was roaring. “Hold on!”

He keeps calling me Ana.

“HOLD ON!”

But my name is Eve….

Her stomach in her throat. Holding Lemon tight.

She realized she didn’t want to die.

She hadn’t liked it much the first time.

Impact.

1.7 Preacher

Dust howled across the wreckage of Tire Valley, tumbled and tossed in the grip of a blood-warm wind. The trash was black and smoking, the tires melted to bubbling puddles. A crater littered with broken shipping containers and shattered wind turbines was all that remained to mark the spot where the house of Silas Carpenter had once stood.

Tye lay in the dust, hand on his belly, staring up at the blistering sun.

He didn’t know how long he’d been sprawled there. Hours, easy. His hands were sticky red. His stomach felt full of acid and broken glass.

His crew was dead. Sir Westinghouse, Pooh, the Fridgeboys. All wasted by that crazy brunette in her flex-wing. When they’d rolled up to the Valley, Fridge Street had expected a tussle, true cert. But what they’d gotten was a massacre. Somewhere in the mix, Tye had bought himself a bullet in the gut and a one-way ticket to Coffin Alley.

God, he was so thirsty….

The rev of a motor and the soft squeak of brakes caught his attention. He tried to lift his head, but it hurt too much. He heard slow boots crunching in gravel, the chink of spurs. Graycoats, maybe? ’Bout time they showed up. Damn lawmen were never around when you needed ’em. But maybe they could stitch him up, maybe they could…

“Hey,” he called feebly. “H-hey, help!”

He heard a low growl, joined by a high-pitched yapping. Craning his neck, he clapped eyes on a pair of dogs standing among the scrap. One was huge, black, feral-looking. The second was the kind of cute you’d expect to find sitting in a gramma’s lap. Small, white and very fluffy.

Tye could swear their eyes were glowing.

“Mary,” said a deep, graveled voice. “Jojo. You hush now.”

Tye heard crunching footsteps, the creak of leather. With a wince, he pulled himself up onto his elbow, caught sight of a tall fellow in a dusty black coat, a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. But though he almost wore the right color, this fellow surely wasn’t the Law.

His face was weatherworn but handsome, his eyes a pale and shocking blue. He was packing serious grit—a long-barreled rifle slung on his back, two custom shooters at his hips, a belt loaded with frontline tech Tye didn’t even recognize. A red glove covered his right hand. Snug in his breast pocket was an old, beaten copy of the Goodbook. And at the top of his button-down black shirt, encircling his neck, the man wore a pristine white collar.

“Y-you a…priest?” Tye asked.

“Preacher.” The man tipped his hat. “Howdy.”

“Howdy?” Tye coughed, holding up his bloody hands. “I got a bullet in my belly, Preacherman, how the hells d’you think?”

“Mmmf,” the man grunted. He fished inside a pocket and stuffed a wad of what must’ve been synthetic tobacco into his cheek. Blue eyes took in his surroundings as he stroked the stubble on his chin.

“You just gonna stand there?” Tye hollered. “I’m gutshot, Preacher, go get the Graycoats. I need me some—”

“I’d shush that hole of yours, boy,” the man said. “Unless you want another.”

Something in the Preacher’s voice made Tye fall quiet. Something that reached past the broken glass and acid and planted a cold, wriggling fear inside his gut. The Preacher scoped the remnants of the battle, the bodies and the ruined Spartans, the smoking tires. He nodded to himself. Spat a long stream of brown juice into the dirt.

“Well, you boys surely made a mess.”

Tye clutched his punctured belly, licked at dry lips.

“Listen, you g-got any water? I’m real th—”

“Lookin’ for someone,” the man replied, still scanning the trash. “Blond piece. Fancy hair. Skinny scavvergirl, ’bout yay high.” The man gestured vaguely.

“Y-yeah, Evie.” Tye winced. “I kn-know her.”

“Where’s she at, boy?”

“She…she jetted. Her and her grandpa Silas. Took off…in their damn h-house, if you believe it. After that brunette in the flex-wing b-blew my crew all to hell.”

“Mmmf,” the Preacher grunted.

“Mister, I’m r-real thirsty….”

The man ignored him, wandered off into the Scrap with the big black dog. The fluffy white one simply sat on the trash and eyeballed Tye. He couldn’t see what the preacherman was doing, concentrated instead on ignoring the pain in his belly. He didn’t know how long he lay there. The minutes pooled together like the blood on the ground beneath him. Finally, he heard footsteps approaching across the trash again. Raising his head, he saw the Preacher looming over him.

The man was holding a dirty poncho, partway burned, splashed with red. He held it out to Tye, and the boy saw writing on the inside collar:

Property of Eve Carpenter. If found, please return to Tire Valley. If stolen, screw you, trash-humper.

“This her?” the Preacher asked. “Evie Carpenter?”

“Y-yeah,” Tye whimpered. “That’s her.”

The Preacher held out the poncho to his dogs. They snuffled the fabric, eyes still glowing softly. The little white fluffball growled like a broken chainsaw. Tye groaned as the pain in his belly surged. He could taste blood in his mouth now.

“Preacher, I’m h-hurt. I’m hurt real bad.”

“Yup,” the man replied, eyes still on the scrap.

“You’re a f-fellow of the Goodbook. Ain’t you g-gonna help me?”

The Preacher sighed. “I reckon.”

Reaching to his belt, the man drew out a hulking pistol.

“H-hey, whoa, whoa!” The boy raised his bloody palms. “You’re a holy m-man, you don’t got no right to lay a killin’ on me!”

The Preacher took aim between Tye’s eyes.

“Boy, I got the only right.”

BOOM.

The man looked about the battleground one more time. Studying the patterns and the poetry. Listening to the wind. Satisfied his blitzhunds had the scent, he threw the poncho over Tye’s shattered head.

Spat into the dirt.

“Mmmf,” he grunted.

Spinning on a spurred heel, the Preacher strode off into the Scrap.