LIFEL1K3. Jay Kristoff
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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.
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