A machine with its own onboard intelligence, capable of independent action.
The streets of Los Diablos were no place for a kid.
The capital of Dregs was a rusting cesspit. A reminder of humanity’s greatest age, and greatest folly. Built in the heart of a scrap pile, Los Diablos wasn’t a city, it was a meat grinder, chewing up people and spitting out the bones. If you were born there, you grew up sharp, you grew up hard or you didn’t grow up at all.
Lemon Fresh had taken the first option—she was too short for the second, and the third sounded like zero fun. As a girl who’d been found in a detergent box as a baby, she’d had a tougher life than most. But she’d been running the Los Diablos streets since she was knee-high to a cockroach, and in her fourteen years in the sprawl, she’d learned a trick or two.
Like how to spot a tasty mark.
She was lurking in the shade of an auto-peddler, green eyes narrowed behind dusty goggles, scoping her next meal ticket. The old man was seven kinds of crusty, jawing with one of the local parts dealers and stopping occasionally to smother a septic cough behind an oil-stained fist. He was a newcomer to Los Diablos, and he didn’t look much fancy, true cert. But she’d heard he was some kind of tech genius, and Lem figured a gent like that had to be carrying some decent scratch.
His name was Silas Carpenter.
The girl that Crusty was rolling with looked a little sharper. She was tall, a little gangly, sun-bleached blond hair undercut into a flashy fauxhawk. A black metal implant sat in the socket where her right eye should’ve been, and silicon chips were plugged into a Memdrive behind her right ear. Her peepers were exactly where they should’ve been, which is to say, on the street around them. But Lemon Fresh hadn’t survived fourteen years in this dumpster of a city on her looks alone.
Fabulous as they were…
She cruised through the crowd, quiet and smooth as exhaust fumes, eyes on her mark. Old Crusty lifted an oscillator from the parts pile, asking the blond girl’s opinion and drawing her attention away. And Lemon slipped in, quick as blowflies on roadkill, and slit the old man’s pocket.
She figured he’d be carrying some loose cash, ration cards. And so when three shiny credstiks tumbled into her greasy palm, Lemon took a second to register it. Blinking hard. Imagining, just for a second, all the happy that amount of scratch could buy. It was stupid of her, talking true. The kind of stupid that gets you killed.
The blond girl collared Lemon in a blink. Coming to her senses, Lem sank her teeth into Blondie’s wrist, twisting and slipping out of her poncho. And like that, she was sprinting off through the mob, leaving Blondie and Crusty with nothing but a torn shred of clothing.
It had been sloppy of her to get spotted. But after thirty minutes of tripping and twisting through the sprawl, she figured she’d got away clean as…well, clean as anything could be in an armpit like LD. On shaky legs, she made her way back to her hideout to lie low for a spell. Grinning like she’d won the sweeps. And curled up under a cardboard roof, clutching those credstiks to her chest like a mother with a newborn sprat, she finally fell asleep, dreaming of better places and better days.
She woke to a metallic growl. Looked up into a pair of glowing red eyes. A cybernetic dog loomed over her, metal teeth bared in a snarl. She bolted upright, scrambled back into a corner, her cutter raised in her fist. Past the cyberdog, Lemon saw Crusty and Blondie blocking the exit from her hideaway.
“Hey there,” Lemon said.
“Hey yourself,” the bigger girl replied.
Blondie was looking at her with narrowed eyes, an electric baseball bat slung loose and lazy over one shoulder. The dog looked like it wanted to eat her, and considering it was made out of metal, that was an impressive trick. But Crusty looked around at the squalor Lemon lived in, his sunburned face softening. And though she’d never really had one, he spoke with a voice like she supposed fathers used.
“You live here?”
“Not usually,” Lemon replied. “My mansion’s at the cleaner’s.”
The old man chuckled, and even the tall girl managed a smile. Lemon had learned young that a wisecrack could sometimes save you from a beatdown—it’s hard for some folks to stomp a sprog who can make them giggle. She wasn’t ass-backward enough to live in a squat with only one exit. But looking at the cyberdog, the torn poncho in the girl’s hand, Lemon Fresh had a feeling these two might be able to find her again if they had a mind to. So she tossed the credstiks at the tall girl’s boots, her knife still clutched in her other fist.
“It’s fizzy, I wasn’t hungry anyway.”
Crusty glanced to Blondie, raising one unruly gray eyebrow.
“What do you think, Evie?”
Blondie stared Lemon up and down. She looked at the filth and crud Lem lived in, the cardboard roof over her head, the credstiks in the dirt.
“I think she needs it more than us,” she said, softlike.
The old man smiled, nodded to the stiks. “Keep ’em.”
Lemon stared, a dozen different emotions punching on inside her head. Disbelief. Suspicion. Confusion. Strange enough, and despite the streetwise part of her brain’s objection, it was pride that won in the end.
“Don’t need your pity,” she growled, rising to her feet.
“Not pity,” Blondie shrugged. “You earned ’em. Fifth rule of the Scrap, right?”
Lemon blinked, taken aback. “Takers keepers.”
“Takers keepers,” Blondie smiled.
Lemon’s brainmeats were all tumbled, and she was furiously looking for the angle. Fourteen years on the streets had taught her nobody in this world was nice unless they had an angle. This city chewed up dreams and spat out misery, and folks who lived here never gave you anything without a taking in return.
So what did these two want?
“Are you two smoked?” she finally asked. “Or just defective?”
The old man looked around her squat again, then met her eyes. “You ever want a decent meal,” he said, “come out to Tire Valley and look us up.”
Ah, she nodded. There it is.
“You’re too old for me, Gramps,” Lemon replied.
He laughed then, a laugh that turned into a long, racking cough.
“I like you, kiddo,” he said.
They let her keep the credstiks. And they wandered away without another word, leaving Lemon bewildered in their wake. And when she mooched up to their doorstep after the scratch ran out, they fed her, just like they said. They let her stay, let her belong, let her think maybe there was something more than the meat grinder she’d grown up inside. The old man never asked her for anything, not once. And though it’d always be the name he wore inside her head, she never called him Grandpa to his face. She called him “Mister C” instead.