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.”