Fifteen
When I come in the back door, Spike is so startled she drops her spoon in a bowl of sticky mash.
“Taj!” She shakes her head, quickly regaining both spoon and sangfroid. “I’m not going to be able to cover for you this time. Somi knows you were gone.”
“That’s because I told him this time.”
“Oh.” She looks vaguely disappointed. Her swollen eye is open now, but the bruise around it has turned various spectacular shades of purple, yellow, and green, like half her face is covered in sickly clown makeup. “You’re still doing the toilets.”
“I figured.” I sigh. “Got you a present.”
Her eyebrows shoot up as I dig a paper bag from my pack. It contains small hard balls, virulently green in color; Spike holds one up and peers at me quizzically.
“Bearings?” she guesses.
“Candy.” The word is barely familiar; I mime putting something in my mouth. Hesitantly, Spike sets the green ball on her tongue. “Suck, don’t swallow.”
She closes her mouth, still expecting a trick, and then gives a sudden squeak of delight.
“It’s sweet!” she manages.
I grin. “Enjoy.”
“Where did you get these?”
Weslai gave them to me when I asked him for something to bring my family in the Heap. The gesture improved my opinion of the fixer considerably. To Spike, I simply waggle my eyebrows mysteriously and point upward.
“’oo went to Malkuth?” she says, a little impeded by the candy. “’eally?”
“I’ll tell you the whole story sometime.” I pat her shoulder. “Right now it’s time for another of my trademark collapses into bed.” I didn’t get much sleep last night.
My room is a disaster; more than usual, I mean, thanks to Rekas’s thugs.
I sweep debris off the bed and pass out for a while.
When I wake up all my limbs are cramped and sore from last night’s exertions, so I spend a while lying on my back like a dead beetle.
Eventually I coax them into motion again and make it as far as the bathroom.
There’s no time to waste lying around, though.
I’ve got three days to get the Mark 4 up and running.
First step is to assess the damage done by the Clawmarks—fortunately minor, though they swiped a few sigils that were lying around.
I jury-rig my broken worktable with a spare length of wood and spread out my remaining parts, making a mental note of what I’m going to need.
Ekkeban is startled, to say the least, when I stroll in with Weslai’s sack of bits and an extensive shopping list. As I hand over the money, I have a brief moment of doubt; the sack is enough to feed us for months, and I’m blowing it all on runic parts.
Then I remember Spike’s eye, and my resolve hardens.
It would be enough to feed us, except that Rekas would take most of it, and even then he’d soon be back for more.
I need to solve this problem for good, not just buy us another few weeks, and Ky is my best shot.
So I let myself give in to the desire for shiny things, and now I have a stack of red sigils and even a precious handful of oranges.
Star, still in his thief body, clambers up through the trapdoor to watch me work.
Now that I have the parts, I lay out the basic control infrastructure of the Mark 4—a central socket where his foundation sigil will go, surrounded by a cradle of threading wire studded with FAST and NIMBLE enhancers.
This is the core, the runic equivalent of a brain.
Ordinary runics, like the idiot, have a bunch of sigils surrounding their foundation in order to enable complex behavior.
Star’s cores are much simpler because the THINK sigil does most of the work.
The wire loops out from the core in several redundant paths—important for resilience—to the base of each limb, where it connects to the primary MOVE sigils.
These are all orange, something I’ve never been able to afford before.
Star will have more raw power than ever.
Along the wires and inside the limbs themselves are more enhancers, FAST and STRONG, necessary to maintain the right balance between power and flexibility.
[Statement: I appreciate your attention to detail.]
Thanks.
[Worry: it would be very awkward if you were to forget a screw and my head fell off mid-fight.]
I’ll keep that in mind, I send dryly.
[Observation: the limb base joints seem vulnerable.]
I thought about that. I’m going to try to build a little armored collar around them if we have time. I just don’t want to interfere with your range of motion.
[Satisfaction: I knew there was a reason I kept you around.]
I snort, laying out more sigils. After a moment, though, I pause.
You’re okay with this, right? I know I asked you before, but you’re going to be the one doing the actual fighting here. I know you can’t really get hurt, but…
[Dismissal: this will be safer than fighting Twisted. I am unlikely to be lost forever under a pile of junk.]
That’s true.
[Observation: if you are killed, I am sure Weslai can find a buyer for me.]
He means it as a joke, so I laugh. But I’m not sure it’s funny.
And… you don’t mind fighting other runics? Breaking them? It’s not killing them, not exactly, but somehow it still feels unsettling.
[Certainty: no. You have seen them. They are not like me.]
I know. I hesitate. What about Pader? It doesn’t bother you?
[Dismissal: why should killing a human bother me? You meat creatures are so fragile you die accidentally all the time.]
I guess moral scruples are my department, then. I don’t regret telling Star to do it—Pader was going to kill Ky—but the ease with which Star’s blade went through his throat is engraved in my memory. I close my eyes for a moment and shake my head.
As long as you’re on board. You can change your mind.
[Assertion: that would leave you “up shit creek,” an expression I do not understand.]
Nobody does. I shrug. I’d find some other way.
[Dubious: alternate options are lacking. In any event, this path seems promising, and I wish to pursue it.] He pauses a moment. [Admission: I am… curious.]
Curious? This is new. What about?
[Clarification: about my nature. My origins. I have no memories prior to when you first awakened me.]
I found your THINK sigil in the Heap, attached to a tangle of wire.
[Agreement: you have told me. I was part of a construct, then. Something that was discarded from “Above,” as Ky terms it.]
Probably.
[Reminder: there will be a judge from Above at the Ascent. Perhaps they will be amenable to answering questions.]
My skin prickles. I’m not sure I like this line of reasoning. We have to be careful. What if they want to take you back?
[Reassurance: I will not allow that. I simply wish to know more.] Star pauses, his optics glittering. [Query: are you not curious about your origins?]
I know my origins.
[Challenge: do you?]
Why, do you want the talk? When a man and a woman love each other very much, or have had too much to drink, or just made some poor decisions, then they engage in human mating behavior. A little bit after that, if you’re unlucky, you get a tiny human.
[Query: is the risk of tiny human why you have yet to engage in such behavior?]
I snort so hard I nearly drop my tools. There are other issues, too.
[Hmmm.] I’m never quite sure how much of his incomprehension of humans is a put-on. [Clarification: this is not what I meant. I refer to the origin of humans in general.]
What? There have always been humans.
[Assertion: there have not always been humans here.]
Why?
[Reasoning: the Asshole adds junk faster than the scavengers break it down.
The Heap grows higher every year. Given enough time, it will fill the cavern.
Any process that cannot continue indefinitely must have an end, and any process that has an end must have had a beginning.
Conclusion: the Heap came to be in the relatively recent past.]
I pause, fascinated in spite of myself. How long?
[Analysis: not more than three centuries ago.]
That’s recent, is it? I laugh again. Who cares? Three centuries might as well be forever. The Heap will keep going long after we’re dead, anyway.
[Precision: long after you are dead.]
I glance over at his shining mechanical eyes, not sure if he’s joking. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a proper expression to read.
Well, I say, keep an eye on it for me.
[Agreed.]
The next couple of days pass in a blessedly uneventful fashion, except that Somi seems to be avoiding me.
I spend the bulk of my time in my room anyway, where the Mark 4 is gradually taking shape.
Working on runics always improves my mood, and being able to afford the parts I want makes it so much sweeter.
The Mark 3 was a long series of kludges and compromises, so starting over from scratch feels like a breath of fresh air.
Ameliana stops by to pull the stitches from my leg wound, which I’d honestly almost forgotten about.
She produces a distressingly sharp knife to do this, and I have to fight down a moment of panic, but ultimately my healing is pronounced satisfactory and I get out of the encounter with only a few heart palpitations.
Afterward she spends quite a while in Somi’s room, presumably undergoing some palpitations of her own.
By the evening of the third day, Star’s new body is finished.
As finished as it’s going to get without more parts and sigils, anyway; they say runics are never really completed, only abandoned.
I transfer his foundation sigil back from the little thief body into the much larger Mark 4.
Somehow I’m expecting his voice to have more bass afterward to match his bigger frame, but he sounds the same as ever.
[Exclamation: oh my.] The legs ripple, their motion smooth and even. Star bounces up and down, then tries a jump. He springs so high that his landing rattles the whole building. [Decision: I like this very much.]
Good. Get used to it for a while. Preferably without breaking things.
[Query: where will you be?]
I sigh. I need to talk to Somi.
My brother is downstairs, taking a quick dinner in his room while Spike minds the bakery.
He’s cleaned up much more assiduously than I have, so that you’d never know there was a bust-in except for the lack of furniture.
He’s cross-legged on the bed, eating off a tray.
I lounge awkwardly in the doorway for lack of anywhere else to sit.
“Hey,” I open unimaginatively.
“Hey,” Somi says, mouth full of mash-bread.
“We haven’t gotten to talk much. How’s the bakery?”
He wiggles a hand back and forth, chewing. “Back up and running, at least. The Clawmarks were careful to leave the equipment alone.”
“No point breaking the stuff we need to make money for them, I guess.”
He nods. “Everyone knows we got hit, though. It’s scared some folks off.”
“Shit.” I blow out a breath. “Did Ameliana look at Spike?”
“Yeah. She’ll be all right, thank the moon.” He looks up at me. “Your… thing. You want to talk about it?”
I try not to bristle. I’m not here to start another fight. “Not really.”
“But it went… well?”
“So far.”
“Spike said you were on Malkuth.”
“Yeah.” I take a deep breath. “I’m going back up tomorrow morning.”
I wait for him to chastise me, to tell me I’m taking too many risks, to ask pointed questions. Instead he takes another bite of his bread, chews, and swallows.
“Okay,” he says eventually.
“I may be a little while,” I say, like someone probing a broken tooth with a tongue. Waiting for the pain.
“Okay.”
“I’ll try to send word back.”
“Okay.”
“How long until we need to make our next payment to Rekas?”
“Three weeks.”
“I’ll have some money before then.” I’ll have to.
He nods slowly. He looks older, somehow, as though he’s aged ten years in a few days.
“Somi…” I trail off, not sure how to say, Why aren’t you screaming at me? We’ve been together a long time, though, and sometimes words aren’t necessary between us.
“You were right,” he says.
“I usually am,” I say, lightning-fast sibling reflex. “What about?”
“What you said the night Rekas’s thugs came. You can handle yourself. We do need the money. For a long time I thought, if I just worked hard enough, it would always come out right in the end. Fara used to say things like that. But it’s not true, is it?”
“No. Sometimes the world stomps on your face and there isn’t shit you can do about it.” I shrug uncomfortably. “You just do what you can. Fara knew that, too. When things got bad she’d do… whatever she had to.”
Somi looks at the floor. We both know—now, at least—what Fara’s other job was, the one that kept her out nights. But we don’t like to talk about it.
“I miss her,” he says quietly. “I wish she was here.”
“Me too.” I swallow a knot in my throat. “But it’s on us now.”
“Yeah.” He looks up. “Do I need to tell you to be careful?”
“Dunno. Did I listen the first seventeen thousand times?”
“Not really.”
“Better try again, then.”
The ghost of a smile crosses his face. “Good luck, Taj.”