Our lips were blue and our limbs like popsicles when we finally pulled ourselves onto the rocks to dry in the sun. Gizmo was nearby, and I asked to see his hand, which had all sorts of tools attached to it. He removed it to show me how it was constructed.
“You made this?” I asked. It was like a rubber-lined glove that fit over the parts of his hand that remained, but instead of four fingers, it had a screwdriver with removable heads, a retractable pocket knife, a slender piece of metal that resembled a lockpick, and a tiny little saw for the pinky with a rotating guard to cover it. (Gizmo cautioned me to be careful because it was very sharp.) The fingers were “jointed” too, and he could adjust them with his thumb and lock them into place.
“This is incredible,” I said.
“Its construction is really quite simple,” he said modestly. I returned it to him and he fitted it back into place. I didn’t ask who bit him or how, because Artemis had told me it was considered to be rude.
“He modified Artemis’s arm and my leg too,” Cipher said. “He was the go-to guy for the amputees at The Admiral.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It was a group home for the unsupervised youth of D.C.” Cipher said. “That’s where the three of us met, Artemis, Gizmo, and I.”
“What about Macon?”
“We picked him up along the way. He was heading north from his hometown, Macon, Georgia.”
“Does anyone around here use their real name?”
“Just you,” Cipher said.
“Why is that?”
“Most of us are leaving something behind and starting fresh. Meeting new people lets you be someone else. Clean slate, you know?”
“I don’t want to be anyone else,” I told him.
“Count your blessings, Kitten. Or should I call you Joshua?” he asked.
“Kitten is fine,” I said, feeling a little bashful about it. I didn’t want him to know how much I liked it. “What about Teresa? How did she come up with that name?”
“We named her Mother Teresa because she takes care of us all, and we needed something to call her because she didn’t say much in the beginning.”
“She didn’t speak?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
Cipher and Gizmo exchanged a glance. “It’s her story to tell,” Cipher said at last. “But I’d be careful about asking. She doesn’t like to talk about it.”
It must have been horrible to render her speechless like that. Some things I didn’t need to know.
“Why’d you leave D.C.?” I asked instead.
For a long, awkward moment, neither of them spoke, then Cipher said, “There was a fire at The Admiral. A bad one.”
“Did anyone get hurt?”
“Yes,” Cipher said while Gizmo fiddled with his bionic hand.
“Anyone you know?”
“Everyonewe knew,” Cipher said.
“Did they–”
“Yes, Kitten, they did,” he said, cutting me off.
