I glanced at my Morphon, the vid still going. The scooter was glowing like it was on fire. “Update on the kid?”
“He’s deceleratin’, Shining Sugah. That battery’s all but blown.”
“Can you drop an ARVAC and tell him he needs to stop and get off?”
“Hmmm. No. None a mine got any speakers. But I’ll mount a comms unit on one tonight. That’s a good idea. We can warn unwanted visitors away. I like it!”
At my feet a cat appeared and wound through my legs to say hello before abandoning me. She put her front paws on one of Mateo’s metallic feet and gave a demanding, “Mrower.” Combined with her body language it meant pick me up. Until recently, the former USSS SunStar captain had ignored the cats, but a week past, Mateo had ripped an oversized upholstered armrest from a vehicle in the scrapyard and installed it to the bottom of his face shield as a cat perch. The mostly cyborg man folded and retracted his longer legs, settling himself close enough to the ground for Spy to leap to her new chair and relax comfortably.
The gray cat looked at me and hissed.
I thought about hissing back but grinned at her instead, showing teeth. She turned her head away, regal as the queen she would become when the current queen passed, not that Tuffs was infirm. The current queen was far more fit than she should be for her guesstimated age. But despite her apparent good health, Tuffs was old, and we had no idea how long our mutated bio-mechanical nanobots would keep a cat, or one of us, alive.
Spy, along with Tuffs’ other cats, had been hiding during the day for most of the last few weeks, not happy at the construction crews and the noise. I expected them all to calm down now that the place was mostly finished; the noise of electric equipment and the generators that kept them running had stopped, and the strangers were gone.
Cupcake said, “You been working in the heat all day, Shining, sweating. You best stay away from our visitor.”
So I didn’t accidently transition the kid. Got it. I was dangerous. A single touch of my skin was enough to pass along my nanobots and start to transition a human into whatever I was.
Wordless, I pulled on work gloves while watching the vid of Amos’ quad approaching the kid on the road. They both came to a stop and said a few words, but Amos didn’t transmit the audio. Moments later, the kid laid his bike on the side of the road and climbed slowly, and what looked like painfully, into the quad. Amos didn’t help him, which was odd to me, but Amos seemed to have the rare ability to understand what people needed and wanted, so there must be a reason he didn’t reach out to help the kid.
They headed back. As the ATV turned into the drive, the bike battery on the highway blew, a hot white flame on the drone’s cam. The delayed boom of the explosion followed, echoing in.
Wherever the kid had come from, he had no way home now.
Amos drove straight to the UC container. Most of our remaining MBBs—Medical Battlefield Bays—and our one high tech General Surgical Bay, were set up in the new Urgent Care, along with medical supplies to feed the bays.
Spy jumped to the ground and raced into the dark, after the ATV.
Mateo and I were left alone under the partial moon.
Jolene transferred the vid on my morphon from the ARVACs to Urgent Care. Mateo observed multiple images on his war-tech screens. The kid limped inside, one arm tight around his waist, dried and fresh blood all down one side of his pants,his face purpled and bloody. This wasn’t the result of an accident on the scooter. Someone had beat the kid.
Mateo growled.
Amos requested a private discussion, and I tapped my Morphon as I put in an earbud.
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Kid refuses treatment until he talks to Shining Smith.”
“Okay. On my way.”
I looked at Mateo through his silk-plaz view screen. He made a gesture that could have been a shrug, or a misfire of his neural system. He was mostly cy-bot now, his body unable to live outside his neural-net-controlled suit. Which the Gov or the military would confiscate if they ever found him, and toss his damaged body to the gutter. War vets never got the respect they deserved.
Leaving Mateo in the moonlight, I crunched across the ground to the med unit, tucking my gloved hands in my pockets to remind me not to touch anything, not let my clothes brush against anything. I was a queen. My nanos could infect any human and some animals, as the cats’ sentience and formation of their own nest proved. I did not need to infect another kid and then have to take care of it, and I blessed all that was holy that my other thralls, Evelyn, Wanda, and her kid Alex, were safe for the night at their place in Naoma. My nest was too big already.
As I entered the UC, the kid collapsed. Amos caught him before he hit the floor, placed him in the triage med-bay, and the clear cover sealed shut, evaluating, stabilizing, and treating the boy’s wounds. The readout stated he had multiple stab wounds, a systemic infection, and his liver had been cut nearly in half. If he survived, he’d be inside for seventy-two hours. So much for any info I might have obtained from a child that knew my name.
???
I didn’t sleep well. At four a.m., I rose, drank a pot of coffee, checked the books and Cupcake’s latest updates to the inventory. She had organized a previously unplundered container at the very back of the junkyard, and the report included motorcycle wheels and body parts. Parts were important, hard to reproduce, and harder to manufacture. Beneath the inventory, Cupcake had listed everything I needed to know to carry out my day. Cupcake was the most organized person in my nest, and if I’d needed a thrall assistant—which I didn’t—she would have been perfect. Thralls were complicated and Cupcake needed me to need her but I had bigger plans for her than a record keeper.
I checked myself in the mirror. I was dressed for the cooler weather as well as for my token—or maybe not so token, depending on certain people’s moods—blood sacrifice, wearing jeans, butt-stompers, an ocean blue tank top, and a used leather riding jacket I had taken in trade early in the junkyard’s history. I’d cut off the fringe and the silly patches some wannabe biker chick had stitched on. The jacket was weathered, had a few holes, and gleamed where the patches had been torn away.
The roadhouse’s new riding leathers, kuttes, shirts, and other gear were on hold until after the colors were approved by the top men of four motorcycle clubs at this morning’s . . . whatever this was going to be. The tight, cropped tank top I wore had a back that dropped deep below my shoulder blades, and if I’d ever been inked with club colors, the tattoo would have shown. The tank top would also show everyone who rode in for the spectacle, that I was sacrificing blood today. Eventually, if I had guessed right and managed to heal after a tat, without the ink being shoved out of my body by nanobots, I’d have a full back tat of the roadhouse colors.
Leaving a biker club wasn’t easy. Wasn’t done often. And was intended to hurt. A lot.
