Our feathers painted red. Our cheeks wet with tears. Three pretty birds in a bloodstained cage. And Tania the prettiest of them all.
She was the softest of us. The shallowest. It didn’t matter if she wasn’t fierce. Or clever. Or brave. Because she was beautiful. That was enough for Tania.
But there in that cell, I saw the depths of her. Depths even Tania had never swum. When it was all I could do to stop myself flying to pieces, she was hard as iron. Dragging herself to her feet and staring at those four killers in their perfect, pretty row.
A soldier stepped forward, blue eyes and dark hair. Tania didn’t blink.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said.
The soldier didn’t reply.
His pistol spoke for him.
By the time they reached Tire Valley, the sun was almost peaking, and Eve’s fauxhawk was drooping with sweat. She gulped down some water with Lemon, poured the last of it on Kaiser’s head. The air around Cricket’s heat sinks was shimmering, his mismatched eyes filmed with dust. They stuck to the shade as best they could, marching in Dunlop, Michelin and Toyomoto shadows. Black rubber cliffs reaching up into a burning sky.
Grandpa had told her there were automata who worked in Dregs a long time ago, back when what was left of the Yousay still blew smoke about rebuilding. The bots divided most of the island into zones and carted different scrap to designated areas. So Dregs had a Neon Street, Engine Road, Tire Valley and so on. Lemon had told her there was a cul-de-sac somewhere near Toaster Beach lined with nothing but battery-powered “marital aids,” but if it existed, Eve had never found it. For every big stretch of turf in Dregs, there was a gang who ran it. And the Fridge Street Crew was among the dirtiest.
“Grandpa’s gonna be so flat with me,” Eve sighed.
“Toldja.” Cricket shrugged his lopsided shoulders. “We shoulda gone straight home. Now what’ve we got? Some broken red tech in a bag and Fridge Street lining up behind the Brotherhood to put a knife in your tenders.”
“This body will be worth it, Crick.”
“It’s worth a life stretch in a Daedalus factoryfarm.”
“Pfft.” Lemon shook her head. “How many CorpCops you seen round here lately?”
“Are you familiar with the First Law of Robotics, Miss Fresh?”
Lemon sighed, spoke by rote. “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”
“Correct. That includes standing with my hands down my pants while my mistress does things liable to get herself perished.”
“You’re not wearing pants, Crick.”
“Just sayin’. They outlawed those things for a damn reason.”
“Your concern is noted in the minutes, Mister Cricket,” Eve said. “But we got zero creds, and meds don’t buy themselves. So don’t tell Grandpa about it yet, okay?”
“Is that an order or a request?”
“Order,” Eve and Lemon said in unison.
The bot gave a small, metallic sigh.
They trudged on in silence. Eve ran her fingers over Kaiser’s back, pulled her hand away with a yelp as she discovered the blitzhund was scalding hot. Dragging off her poncho, she slung it over him to cut the glare. Kaiser wagged his tail, heat sink lolling from his mouth.
She’d seen an old history virtch about the Nuclear Winter theory once. All these scientists messing their panties about what’d happen when the fallout blotted out the sun after mass detonation. Seemed to her they should’ve spent more time worrying about what’d happen after, when all that carbon dixoide and nitrogen and methane released by the blasts ripped a hole in the sky, and the UVB rays waltzed right through the ozone and started frying humanity’s DNA. Abnorms and deviates had been popping up ever since. “Manifesting” was the polite term for it, but polite didn’t have much place in Dregs.
Of course, everyone had heard talk about deviates who could move things just by thinking on it, or even read minds, but Eve figured that was just spit and brown. Because as fizzy as “mutation” might have sounded in old Holywood flicks, most folks didn’t get superpowers or Godzilla smiles or even great suntans in Dregs. They just got cancer. Lots and lots of cancer.
And the few folks who did get “Special”?
Well, the Brotherhood got them dead.
The quartet was deep in Tire Valley when an automated sentry gun twisted up out of a cluster of old tractor tires, spitting a plume of methane smoke. Hoping the voice-ident software wasn’t fritzing again, Eve started singing some antique tune Grandpa had made her learn. Beethovey or something …
“Da-da-da-daaaaa. Da-da-da-dummmmmm.”
The gun slipped back into its hidey-hole, and they rolled on. Eve had to sing at a couple more automata sentries on the way, dodging the thermex charges Grandpa had laid for uninvited guests, finally rounding a bend to find home sweet home.
It was a series of shipping containers and antique trailer homes, welded around the hulk of a heavy thopter-freighter that had crashed here years ago and buried itself up to the eyeballs in trash. The freighter’s engines had been slicked with grease to spare them the rust that was slowly eating the rest of the ship. Methane exhaust sputtered from three chimneys, and the structure rattled and hummed with the songs of wind turbines and coolant fans. It was surrounded by mountains of tires and the remnants of an old 20C amusement park. The rusted spine of an ancient roller coaster could be seen cresting the trash around them, like some corroding sea serpent swimming through an ocean of garbage.
Eve strolled up to the freighter, banged on the hatch.
“Grandpa, it’s Evie!”
Dragging her wilted fauxhawk from her eyes, she banged on the door again. She heard slow whirring from inside. Pained, labored breathing. The vidscreen beside the door crackled to life and two rheumy eyes peered out from the display.
“We don’t want any,” a voice said.
“Come on, Grandpa, let us in. It’s hot out here.”
“‘Grandpa’?” His voice was all gravel and broken glass. “I used to have a granddaughter once. Damn fool stayed out all night and half the day. Got herself the cancer. Died screaming with her eyes swollen shut and her belly full of blood.”
“That is foul, Grandpa.”
“You kinda remind me of her, actually.” A wet cough crackled through the speaker’s hum. “She was better-looking, though.”
“Come on, I wore my poncho, cut me some rope.”
“The dog is wearing your poncho, Eve.”
“He was hot!”
“And where’s your gas mask?”
“I look defective in that thing.”
“And you’ll be the belle of the ball with a faceful of basal cell carcinoma, won’t you?”
“Are you gonna let us in or what? Kaiser’s brain is probably roasted by now.”
The door cranked wide enough for the group to squeeze inside. Grandpa waited beyond, slumped in his old electric wheelchair. The chair had no manual controls—directions were jacked straight from Grandpa’s brain via the wetware implant at his wrist.
The old man was thin as a starving gull. A shock of gray hair. Eyes sharp as scalpels pouched