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 in sandbag sockets. Wheezing breath. It made Eve’s chest hurt to look at him—to remember what he’d been and see what he’d become. Instead, she looked at the floor and crooked a thumb at her co-conspirator.
“Fizzy if Lemon stays over?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?” Grandpa frowned. “She’s stayed over for the last ten months.”
“Always polite to ask.” Lemon leaned down, kissed him on his stubbled cheek.
“Away with you and your feminine wiles, Miss Fresh.”
Lemon grinned. “How you feeling, Mister C?”
“Like ten miles of rough road.” The old man coughed into his fist, loud and wet. “Better for seeing you, though, kiddo.”
Kaiser pushed past Eve, still boiling hot. He padded down the hallway, shaking off Eve’s poncho and slinking inside his doghouse. Motion sensors activated the coolant vents, and his tail started wagging in the recycled freon.
“It’s almost midday.” Grandpa scowled up at Eve. “Where you been?”
Apparently, Grandpa had continued in his Surly Old Bastard traditions and hadn’t watched the newsfeeds. He’d no idea about the Dome or what’d happened there. The Goliath. Her outstretched fingers. Screaming …
“Went to WarDome last night to watch the bouts,” she said. “Hit Eastwastes on the way home, looking for salvage.”
Grandpa glanced at Cricket.
“Where’s she been?”
“Just like she said.” Cricket nodded his bobblehead. “WarDome. Eastwastes.”
“Oh, so you believe him and not me?” Eve sighed.
“His honesty protocols are hardwired, chickadee. Yours only work when it suits you.”
Eve made a face, wrangled her satchel off her back, started peeling away her plasteel armor. Underneath, she was wearing urban-camo cast-offs and a tank top that predated the Quake. She stashed Excalibur near the door. Despite the lawlessness in Dregs, Grandpa wouldn’t allow guns in the house, and with her nightmares being what they were, Eve was only too glad for it. Some old grav-tank pilot’s armor and Popstick were the only armaments keeping her bat company.
She looked sideways at the old man, tried to sound casual.
“How you feeling, Grandpa?”
“Better than I look.”
“How’s the cough? You take your meds? How much you got left?”
“Fine. Yes. Plenty.” Grandpa scowled. “Although I sometimes hear this annoying voice in the back of my head, speaking at me like I was a three-year-old. Is that normal?”
Eve leaned down and kissed her grandpa’s cheek. “You know, the whole lovable grouch thing? Really working for you.”
“I’ll keep it up, then.” He smiled.
Kicking off her heavy boots, Eve made fists with her toes in the temperfoam, relishing the air-con on her bare skin. Then, hoping the desalination still was back online, she hefted her satchel with Lemon’s help and shuffled off in search of something to drink.
Grandpa coughed as she padded up the hall, dragged wet knuckles across his lips. Glancing at Cricket, he muttered softly.
“Salvage in Eastwastes, huh?”
“Yessir.”
“She find anything good?”
Cricket looked from Grandpa to the satchel the two girls were hauling away, the beautiful red prize coiled inside.
“No, sir.” The little bot shook his head. “Nothing good at all.”
“You know, for the reddest of red tech,” said Lemon, “he’s not hard on the eyes.”
Eve looked at the body laid out on her workbench, stripped of its bloody flight suit, a pair of skintight shorts leaving just a little to the imagination. Smooth olive skin, hard muscle, a thousand different cuts from its journey through the windshield scored across tanned pseudo-flesh. Its brow was smashed inward, its right arm sheared off at the shoulder, that coin slot riveted between its pecs. And yet, it was somehow flawless.
More human than human.
“It’s not a ‘he,’ Lem,” Eve reminded her bestest. “It’s an ‘it.’”
Eve leaned close to its face—that picture-perfect face from the cover of some 20C zine. Brown curls, cropped short. A dusting of stubble on a square jaw. Smooth lines and dangerous corners. She tilted her head, ear to its lips. Her skin tickled at the kiss of shallow breath, hair rising on the back of her neck.
“I swear it had no pulse …”
“Am I smoked, or is he a lot less banged up than when we found him?”
Lemon was right. The tiniest wounds on the lifelike’s skin were already closed. The deeper ones were glistening—healing, Eve realized. She peered at the ragged stump where the lifelike’s arm used to be and wondered what the hells she’d signed herself up for.
Lemon pointed to the coin slot riveted into the boything’s chest. “What’s that about?”
“Clueless, me,” Eve sighed.
Lemon hopped up on the workbench, cherry-red bob snarled around her eyes. She brushed the dust off her freckles, poked the six-pack muscle on the lifelike’s
