“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