LIFEL1K3. Jay Kristoff
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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