Chapter Two
***
ASINGLE AMBER TRICKLEof beer caught his eye.
Gunner pumped the wort through the calandria that marked the end of the boil. He sat back as it flushed into his jacked-up whirlpool tank to separate out. Some of it dripped onto the floor from where a minor leak had formed. The beer dribbled until it fell from the tank to splash onto the ground, where it was quickly caught up in his ship’s ventilation.
He couldn’t see behind the copper piping—which was foraged from other parts of his ship—while the centripetal force pushed the debris into the bottom middle of the tank. And as such, the fragrant aroma of hops filled his bathroom.
He grabbed a nearby cloth and wiped his hands but didn’t try too hard for cleanliness. His eyes drifted from the machinery to his nails, cracked and tainted. His hands would never be clean again. Not even a chemical cloth, designed for sanitization, could scrub the grease, sweat, and blood that had long ago fouled his cybernetic skin.Not even if he released the beast inside him, letting the metal shift and having his cybernetic cells rebuild him from the inside out.
He was dirty.
And doomed to remain so.
“Take it.” Gunner thrust the cloth at Browning, his partner in beer brewing, and number three in his life. She came after his AI, his second due to unwavering loyalty based on cracked-up codes.
“Yes, sir.”
His steps echoed through the small lavatory-turned-brewery as he checked the process over. The silence that followed was a low hum to his ears. Even Browning was a quiet little lamb beside him, holding his garbage as if she was created for it.
Which, in a manner of speaking, she was.
He couldn’t remember the last time he was in the direct presence of a living, breathing human. The toys he surrounded himself with were all he knew now, and as he calculated how long it would take for his beer to finish brewing, he also knew the inevitable quickly approached.
The next drop-off point with Stryker.
Gunner turned full-circle, grounding himself in his enclosed territory, and taking it all in.
The heat in the room was rising, albeit slowly, which would spoil the fermentation.
He swiveled on his heel and headed for the control panel, pressing his hand up against the greased-streaked glass.
Two of a kind. We’re both covered in grease.
He programmed the temperature to lower once the whirlpool was done, setting himself a countdown to remind him to return. The time ran down by seconds. It felt like an internal pull, the kind of pull that kept your eyes checking the clock on the other side of the room while you’re trying to fall asleep.
Gunner ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back, and pulling it tightly before letting it go.
Just then, the ghost of something warm, teasing, with soft skin, edged with a porcelain nail ran from the middle of his neck to slide in subtle waves down his spine, ending with a light tap on his lower back at the waistband of his jeans. When it left him, he rolled his shoulders and accepted the calculated touch for what it was.
Fake.
Browning stepped away from him like a shadow at dawn, there one moment, soft and shaded, and gone the next, bleached out by the sun’s ever-watching spotlight.
But the countdown and the swirl of the whirlpool continued on in reality.
Browningwasfake—a specifically designed android—and he hated and loved it every time her programming pretended not to be. Gunner grabbed hold of her long brown hair and tugged lightly, eliciting another response out of her: a coy smile just for him. He dropped his hand and shook the feel of her off.
“Need something more from me?” she asked ever-so-sweetly. He didn’t answer.
Maybe it’s time.His lips fell into a frown.Time for fucking what?Gunner glanced away from her, uneasy in the way his contraptions always made him feel. He moved to the whirlpool to watch the deep amber liquid swirl.
