#mechrat

[skelligaladan]

The NEW CHAPTER is Online 

A car chase with a giant mechanical rat! Yeahhhhhhh!!

[dreamcloudlanding]

D.va: “So, that’s my plan.”

Junkrat: “That’s your plan? You’re crazy!”

D.va: “You’re calling me crazy?”

Junkrat: “Never said it was a bad thing.”

[finding-flight]

Prologue (Mechrat Part 0)

I didn’t cry when I was told that my father was dead.

Instead, I said “Thank you” and closed the door in the pimply face of the nervous-looking messenger. He hadn’t wanted to give the notice to an eleven-year-old, but I had told him that there were no adults home. I had lied, of course—my mother was home, but she was sleeping off a hangover.

It wasn’t really like losing a father to me. I barely remembered him, anyways. He left a long time ago to fight somewhere—Great Rome, according to the paper—and had never come back. I knew that he probably wouldn’t. I had seen enough body bags come through this town to know what happened to soldiers from poor towns. I was always one of the kids on the playground telling off the bright-eyed children who said things like “When Daddy comes back…” There were no daddies coming back to this town, or uncles, or older brothers. Not until the war was over, at least, and the war wasn’t ending anytime soon. Their contracts were only for five years, but even a little kid like me knew that the town was dying. Without their drafted men and volunteering women sending money home, soon nearly every family in Thummin would be depending on welfare alone.

The little slip of paper had a code stamped on it, so I took it to the kitchen, turned on the table-screen, and slotted the paper into the reader. I had to stand on a chair to see the yellowed screen, but with my hands braced on the table and my legs stretching to their fullest extent, I managed to read the information the military saw fit to give us.

I barely skimmed over the details of my father’s service, focusing instead on the “what now?” Apparently, there would be a pension, but it was tiny—probably enough to support my mother’s alcohol habit, but not enough to keep us fed and clothed or to keep up with the mortgage and utilities. And my mother was unemployable, I knew. In her more sober moments, she sometimes talked of getting a job, but the few times I saw her actually go out and try to land one, she was always told, with varying degrees of politeness, that they couldn’t afford to take a risk on someone unreliable.

I sighed and leaned my elbows on the table. What would we do? Maybe we could move in with my grandparents. Or one of my mom’s siblings. We would be a burden, I knew, but if we applied for welfare and sold the house, maybe that and the pension would be enough to keep all of us afloat.

I didn’t tell my mother right away. She came stumbling into the kitchen around two in the afternoon, still in her nightgown, one hand pressed to her head. I stayed quiet until she had made herself a cup of coffee—black with vodka, her favorite—and sat down at the table, then spoke up hesitantly.

“Um, Mama?”

“Yeah, baby?” she mumbled, reaching for one of the browning bananas in the fruit bowl.”

“Are you feeling okay?”

“’M fine.”

“Well, um, this came today while you were sleeping.” I pushed the paper across the table at her.

She yawned, not even reaching for the slip. “Jia, Mama doesn’t have her contacts in. Just tell me what it is.”

I bit my lip. I hadn’t wanted to tell her, myself.

“Is it those bastards down at the electric company? Because I told them that I sent them the check.”

“Um, no, the electricity’s fine,” I said. “It’s from, uh, the army.”

That woke her up much more effectively than the spiked coffee. “Is it about Daddy?”

I nodded.

“Well?” she asked. I could hear that familiar fear creeping into her voice, and I looked down at the paper, unable to meet her worried gaze. Knowing that my father was dead was so much easier than knowing that my mother had lost her husband.

“He, um, Daddy…”

“Jia, is he okay?”

I shook my head.

Mama silently reached for the paper. I timidly slid it across the table, and she scrabbled at it with shaking hands, eventually scraping it up and holding it in front of her face, squinting at the neat black type.

It was silent in the kitchen for what seemed like a long time. Then, Mama started crying, in fits and starts at first, like she was trying hard to not cry in front of me. But before long, she was full-on bawling, head down on the table, gripping the notice so hard that it crumpled.

“Mama, we need that,” I said, standing on my chair to lean over the table and gingerly tug the paper out of her fist. She didn’t exactly resist, but she didn’t give it to me, either. I smoothed out the paper as best I could and tried to think of what to do. “Um, Mama, do you want anything?” No reply.

I sat back down, figuring that she would eventually collect herself and then we would discuss what we were going to do to survive.

Any time now.

After twenty minutes of watching tears and snot slowly seeping onto the table, I said, “Mama, what are we going to do?”

I had hoped that this would spark some discussion, but instead, it just ushered in a fresh wave of sobbing.

“Mama, stop crying,” I said desperately. “You still have me, right? So we need to figure out what to do about money.”

No response. I sighed, hopped off my chair, brought Mama her bottle of vodka, and then went to find the phone.

It took several rings to reach my uncle. “Rachel, I’m busy,” he grunted.

“Uncle Prad? It’s me.”

He sighed. “Jia, I can’t play phone with you right now.”

“Um, okay, but…we got notice that Daddy died today, and Mama won’t stop crying.”

  * * *

  The funeral was like most funerals around here: short and tired. Everyone was tired. The memories shared were tired. The condolences were tired. Basically, you could have swapped out the dead body for another one, and anyone who arrived late wouldn’t have been able to tell who had died.

I spent most of the funeral staring at a picture of my dad, trying to remember what he looked like outside of photographs. Instead, I just ended up picking out which features I had gotten from him. I thought I had his hair—it was definitely the same dark brown, but his was too short for me to tell if it shared my unruly thickness. I had his nose, too—thin and small, but oddly round at the end. And I thought I had his mouth, but maybe that was just because he looked unhappy in his official military portrait, and I looked grumpy whenever I caught sight of myself in the mirror.

The similarities ended there. My small, grayish eyes were my mother’s, as was my narrow build and sharp chin. We had the same suntan-defying skin, flat ears, and slumping shoulders. It was like my father had had the same effect on my appearance as he had had on my life: there, but only noticeable under close scrutiny.

After the funeral, a few friends and family members walked us home. We had driven from the funeral home to the cemetery, but Mama couldn’t face getting into the big, black car again, so we walked. It was really only about a mile and a half, but Mama was wearing high heels and intermittently crying, so it took us over an hour to get home. When we did, everyone busied themselves with making tea and getting Mama warm water for her feet and basically any other helpful thing they could think of that didn’t require making noise. I just sat at the kitchen table. No one disturbed me or tried to get me anything. I wasn’t the bereaved around here. They had to take care of Mama.

The friends gradually trickled out, and by dark, I was left with the relatives. They were all in the living room with Mama, but they kept on glancing at me like they wanted to me to leave, so I said that I was going to go to bed. I made a big show of slouching to my room and closing the door. I heard footsteps as someone first peered down the hall to make sure I was in my room, and then went back to the living room. I counted to thirty and then tiptoed back out, pressing my back to the wall near the living room doorway and sliding down it to sit on the floor.

“—money,” Aunt Liddie, Mama’s sister was saying. “It just won’t be enough.”

“I’ll sell the house,” Mama said. “I can live with…with someone. We can rotate, even. The pension…”

“Won’t be enough,” Uncle Prad said. “Rachel, I’m sorry, but none of us can afford to put up both you and Jia.”

“I’ve tried to get work,” Mama said, her voice breaking. “I just…I can’t. Everyone knows I have…I have trouble keeping focused…”

“Focused” here meaning “sober”, I thought uncharitably.

“Rachel, no one’s blaming you.” This was Aunt Jenma, Uncle Prad’s wife. “We know you can’t afford the help you need. And we’re sorry you have to go through all this.”

There was a slight pause, and then everyone started agreeing, probably due to a dirty look from Aunt Jenma.

“But…but I don’t know what to do,” Mama said.

“Well, we’ve thought about it.” That was Grandpa’s voice. “There is an option. Rachel, it could make life a lot better for all of us.”

“What do you mean?”

There was a long pause. Then, Uncle Prad said, “We could send Jia to MALREC.”

“MALREC?” Mama repeated, her voice frightened but also hopeful, as if she had been cast a lifeline of dubious durability.

“MALREC is a great place for kids, they say,” Aunt Jenma said quickly. “They feed them better than their parents could, most of the time. And the medical care is the best. Plus, she’ll make friends. She’s always had trouble with that here.”

I was turning the word “MALREC” over in my head, trying to figure out where I’d heard it before. It seemed to me that a long time ago, there was a boy at school who just up and vanished one day. I was almost sure that he had gone to live at MALREC, and I remember hearing someone—an adult—saying that they were jealous. From what my aunt was saying, it didn’t sound at all bad. At least they’d take care of me, which was more than this bunch of alcoholics did.

“I just don’t know,” Mama said.

“I know it’s soon,” Grandpa said. “We don’t want to take Jia away right after your loss, but you should think about it.”

“It’s not that,” Mama said. “I’ve heard a lot of people say that they’ve tried to get their children into MALREC. They won’t always take them.”

“They’ll take Jia,” Grandma said, speaking up for the first time since I started eavesdropping. “I’ve heard they’re looking, and she’s just about the right age. Plus, she’s strong and healthy. They’ll pay a good price to take her, and then you’ll get monthly wages.”

Wait, they were paying for me? I had figured MALREC must be some sort of government aid program, like a boarding school for kids whose families couldn’t afford to keep them. This sounded a whole lot like work.

“I…you think?” Mama asked, hope beginning to crowd out the fear in her voice.

“I’m sure,” Grandma said. “And with that money, well, honey, any of us could take you in.”

Aha. So I’d be sent off to some government facility to build skyships or fighter planes or whatever, and all my relatives would split the money in exchange for keeping a roof over Mama’s head and alcohol in her belly. The money-grubbers were selling me.

I paused to think for a moment while everyone agreed that child labor would make taking Mama in much easier for them. Actually, this deal didn’t sound so bad. If this MALREC was filled with people like me, I probably would have an easier time making friends. Plus, I wouldn’t have to take care of Mama all the time, and maybe I wouldn’t even have to go to school. And it would be nice, just once, to go to the grocery store and actually buy good food instead of saving money for the alcohol fund.

I listened for a while to make sure that Mama was good and convinced, and then tiptoed back to my room. I crawled into bed, but I was too excited to get to sleep for a long time. When I did, visions of shiny airplanes and grease-covered, wise-cracking friends paraded through my dreams.

Two weeks later, a government car showed up in front of Uncle Prad’s house and hauled me off to the chopshop.

[finding-flight]

Hey, remember when this was a writing blog?

Haha, me neither. But I do vaguely recall that there was a story called "Mechrat" on here that I posted updates for sporadically, and I've decided to start that up again. Here's what that will look like:

I'll be posting from the beginning of the story, so no need to go back and read all the old posts.

Everything old will be revised (now with fewer info dumps!)

Shiny new prologue and other additional stuff as I see fit.

I'm going to try to post once a week.

In the likely event that I don't manage to revise or write enough each week, I'll post something, which will probably mostly consist of old short stories I wrote for class.

For those of you who don't remember Mechrat or followed me after I stopped posting it (I assume most of you fall into one of those categories), here is a short synopsis, which demonstrates, among other things, that I suck at writing synopses:

In the not-so-far future, the world is torn between an ever-expanding nation that seeks world domination and a small confederacy of countries determined to not be taken over by it. When a very important factory in the former nation is visited by teenage saboteurs, a young disabled worker finds herself in the intriguing but annoying position of being freed from her terrible job by being taken away by the enemy. Of course, that's before they all crash in the middle of nowhere.

Eh? How about that synopsis? I should do this professionally. Anyways, prologue to follow as soon as I proofread it and stuff.

[finding-flight]

Part Eleven of the Mechrat Story

“Hi, Kina!” I chirped.

Kina looked at me curiously. “Um…hello, Jia.”

I sat down next to her with a little bounce. “What’s with you?”

She was still giving me that strange look. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I…well, I’ve never seen you…smile like that.”

“Smile like…?” I suddenly realized that I was grinning ear-to-ear. “Uh…oh, right. Um, sorry?”

“You shouldn’t be sorry for being happy,” Kina said. “I’m just a little confused.”

“That I’m happy? Why?”

“Well…we’re stranded in the middle of nowhere. Our only hope for rescue is from our enemies. Half of us are incapacitated. We can’t gather food fast enough. Our families are likely starving because they’re not getting a paycheck from us. RUE just had an instrumental facility destroyed. You had a bad fight. And the last thing you said to me was ‘This sucks.’ So yes, I’m a little confused that you’re happy.”

“Oh.” I laughed. “Well, yeah, you make a pretty good argument.”

Kina looked at me with concern. “You didn’t eat any of those mushrooms, did you? Because I thought they looked a little—”

I burst out laughing. Or giggling, really. Had I ever giggled before in my life? I sure hoped not. “No, Kina, I didn’t eat the mushrooms. I’m fine. It’s just…”

Kina looked me up and down. “It’s just what?”

“Finn…kinda…kissed me.”

“What?”

“Okay, so we made up, and then Kess came out of nowhere and told Finn to kiss me, so he did. Well, I mean, not exactly just like that, but—”

“Jia!”

I started at her reproving tone. “What? Kina, I got kissed. By a boy. Most best friends would be jumping up and down right now!”

“He—is—an—ARC—agent,” Kina hissed.

“I know, but—”

“Jia, we’ve been over this. They’re murderers and they’re on the wrong side. This boy is confusing you.”

“Yeah, he’s a little confusing, but it’s not like I’m switching sides or anything.”

Kina looked angry, which was extremely disconcerting. “Jia. I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

I went on the defensive. “Well, why not? I like him, and it’s not like anyone else is going to take an interest in me. So what if he’s an ARC saboteur? He’s the one person who doesn’t judge me by my appearance and isn’t put off by me talking out.”

“I’m not put off by you talking out!” Kina said, upset.

“Well, yeah, Kina, hence you being my best friend. I meant guys.”

“But—that’s not even the issue, Jia. Finn’s evil.”

“No he isn’t!” I protested. “How can you say that?”

“You said that yourself!”

“No I didn’t! I said he was bad, not evil, and that’s just because I was mad! It was all a misunderstanding!”

“You saw this all so clearly yesterday! Why are you suddenly in love and everything else doesn’t matter?”

“Because, Kina, when I’m not mad, I can think clearly and I can realize that sometimes, differences don’t matter.”

Kina looked at me in disbelief. “Don’t matter? The differences are that we’re on opposite sides of a war! Finn kills people like us! He might have killed people we know!”

“Not people like us, people on our side. And why are we on this side, anyways? Just because we were born here. If we’d been born in British Germany, we’d be on his side.”

“Are you saying that the ARC is right?”

“Of course not! I’m just saying that if we’d been raised on their propaganda instead of ours, we’d think like them, too. It’s not Finn’s fault that he’s seeing the facts wrong.”

“So you think you can get him to change, then?”

“No, and I’m not going to try. That just leads to shouting matches and us getting mad at each other. Besides, it’s not like he could change sides. Sabotage could be considered a war crime.”

Kina shook her head. “I can’t believe this. You were always so level-headed, Jia.”

“Me? Level-headed? Since when?”

“You have radical ideas, but you’re always logical about them. You never bought into fantasies like other people did. And now you’ve decided that you and an ARC war-criminal can live happily ever after?”

I flushed. “And what about you? Since when were you so cynical?”

“Since you started acting irrational! Why can’t you understand this? He is on the wrong side.”

“And I don’t care, Kina. I like him, he likes me, I’m not likely to find someone else, and I don’t want to.”

“You’re jumping for the first boy who flattered you,” Kina said. “How do you know he’s not just manipulating you?”

“Finn wouldn’t do that.”

“How do you know? You’ve only known him for a few days! And you spent some of those days hating him!”

“He’s not the type to manipulate. Why are you so bad at reading people?”

“Why are you so bad at reading the situation? You can’t do this, Jia! You’re turning your back on your friends and your nation!”

“We’re never going to see this nation again, brainless,” I snapped. “I’m not turning my back on it, I’m just making the most of my future.”

“You—are—an—idiot!” Kina snapped.

That brought me up short. I’m pretty sure Kina had never insulted anyone in her life. Certainly not me. Making my voice harsh to not let her know how hurt I was, I snapped back, “Well, at least I’m not completely blind.”

“You are. You can’t see how this will hurt you.”

“You know, I’m done arguing with you,” I said. “I’ve already had one shouting match and I don’t want another one. I’m going to give you some time to get used to the idea, and then I’ll come back and talk some sense into you. I don’t want us to get all bitter over this and end up not talking to each other like Finn and I did.”

Feeling very mature, I stood up and walked away, but Kina’s voice stopped me.

“You know, back home, when I was little, I used to hear warnings about boys. People said that you should never pick boys over friends because boys come and go but friendships would last forever. I never really paid attention, because I never really thought that anyone would actually do that.”

I turned around. “Why are you making such a big deal about this?” I asked. “I care about you both. I don’t want to choose between you and Finn.”

“Well, you’re going to have to,” Kina said, turning away.

I gaped at her for a moment, then decided that no good would come out of staying there and walked away. Feeling rather lonely, I went to find Kess. She was sitting on a slim birch that had fallen over and hit a large rock, creating a handy bench several feet off the ground.

“Hi,” I said glumly.

“Hi, lovebird,” Kess returned.

Two words and I already felt better. “Shut up,” I muttered.

“Aww, is little Jia embarrassed?” Kina teased.

“Hey, lady, I have a boyfriend and you don’t. You should be the one who’s embarrassed.”

That made Kina laugh. “If I had your boyfriend, lady, I would definitely be embarrassed.”

I made a sound of indignation and sat beside her on the fallen tree. “I beg your pardon! What, pray tell, is the matter with my boyfriend?”

“Well, he talks too much, he can be obnoxious, he’s short, he’s loud, he’s homely—”

“He is not!”

“Meh.”

“Well, he has the advantage of existing,” I pointed out. “Which puts him above your boyfriend.”

“Dagger to the heart. You have hit upon my insecurities, my friend.”

I snickered. “I’m deeply sorry, dear. Maybe you should date Taj.”

“Oh, please, no!” Kess groaned. “One’s bad enough!”

“One what?”

“Person wanting me to date Taj.”

“Who’s the other? Finn?”

“Taj, airhead.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Taj. Wants to date you.”

“Yep.”

“Huh.”

“You said it.”

“How come you won’t?”

“Seriously? We’re saboteurs. You know about the government trying to kill us, right?”

“Well, yeah…”

“So I’d be upset already if Taj died. If he was my boyfriend, my performance would be seriously affected. Besides, dating a teammate is unprofessional and can also result in a negative affect on performance.”

“Are you quoting the saboteur’s handbook or something? That’s the flimsiest avoidance of expressing emotion I’ve ever heard.”

Kess laughed uncomfortably. “Yeah, I guess. But even if it weren’t for the potentially-dying thing…Taj is such a control freak.”

“You can say that again.”

“But I mean, I like him. He’s my best friend.”

“I thought that was Finn.”

“You’re glorifying your boyfriend again. No, Taj and I have been friends forever. But he’s not the least bit romantic, and I don’t think of him that way. Why am I talking to you about this, again?”

“Probably ‘cause I’m your only female friend here?”

“Yeah, probably.” Kess elbowed me. “So, enough of me. What was with the doldrums when you got here?”

I sighed. “Yeah, so now we have to talk about my friend problems? Kina’s mad at me about Finn.”

“Hold up. Kina’s mad at you?”

“Yeah, so it’s serious,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. I decided to give her some space before we started yelling at each other.”

“Ah, learning from past mistakes. Very wise,” Kina said mockingly.

“Cut the jokes,” I muttered. “Kina and I have never fought before, and I think this is something she’s really serious about. So, what do I do?”

“You’re asking the wrong person. Talk to Finn about emotional stuff.”

“Yeah, because talking to Finn about Kina hating him will work real well.”

“It might. Finn’s all charming. If he talks to Kina, she might warm up to the idea of you two dating.”

“Can you even call it dating if we’re in the middle of nowhere and there’s nowhere to go on a date? And the only thing we’ve done is kiss once?”

“Okay, whatever you want to call it, the point still stands.”

“I don’t think it will work. Kina’s been pretty cool towards him.”

“Well, give it a try.”

I sighed. “I don’t want to make it worse. Maybe I’ll tell him to talk to her if I can’t bring her around by myself.”

“Suit yourself.”

“So what do I say to her?”

“Girl. Ask. Finn. I blow stuff up, okay? Not so big on the social skills.”

“So much for girl talk,” I grumbled.

“Your boyfriend is more girly than I am,” Kess pointed out.

“No he’s not!”

Kess smirked and tugged my braid. I shoved her away. Unfortunately, she was a Dancer and I was an uncoordinated, one-armed Mechrat, so she nimbly scooted away and I fell off the log.

“Ow,” I complained.

“Your fault,” Kess said airily.

I picked myself up. “Jerk. I’m going to go talk to my girly boyfriend.”

“He’s out being a hunter-gatherer.”

“I’m going to talk to my not-so-girly Planter friend.”

As it turned out, I didn’t get to talk to Daxt, because before I could find him, Taj stood up and called one of his shut-up-and-listen meetings in which he told us about the increasingly dire food situation. It mostly boiled down to the fact that the people who didn’t work were down to two meals a day and the rest of us were getting much smaller lunch portions.

By the time it was over, Finn was back, so I went over to him and surveyed his catch.

“Hey, you got a deer,” I said.

“Not a very big one,” he sighed. “I’m going to go back out.”

“You look really tired,” I said skeptically, looking him up and down. It was already dusk. He wouldn’t find food very easily.

“I’m fine.” He gave me a thin smile. “Shouldn’t have chased Kess.”

I smiled back. “Well, but that was funny.”

He laughed and nodded. “So, what’s up? You look…preoccupied.”

“Oh…I’ll tell you later. You’re tired enough already. I’ll probably give you a headache talking about it.”

He didn’t press the subject, which made me think that he was more tired than he was letting on.

“Hey, Finn,” I said. “Just a little while longer, right? I mean, a skyship will come along at any second, you know.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Any second.”

I considered for a moment. “Can I give you a hug?”

“What kind of a question is that?” Finn stood up and enfolded me in his arms.

I was no good at hugs in the first place, and only one arm made it hard, but I didn’t really care, and neither did Finn, apparently.

“Well, good luck getting more food,” I said eventually.

He kissed the top of my head and released me. “Thank you, Lizard Queen.”

I laughed, put my hand on his shoulder, and pulled him back to kiss him. “Goddess,” I corrected.

“At least,” he agreed. “See you later.”

“Later,” I echoed.

He kissed me once more, then turned away and slowly melted into the darkness. I watched him go, then turned back to where several mechrats were building up the fire. I went to join them, then stopped as I felt the prickling sensation of being watched. I blocked the glare from the fire with my hand, squinting past the glare.

From the other side of the fire, Kina was glaring at me.

--------

So, yeah, I ended up writing more Mechrat, after all. Yay, me! This is mostly a lot of talking, but I like it, mostly. Probably I won't like it later and will end up re-writing it, but whatever. Also, the bit about Taj liking Kess: out of left field? Maybe. Random? Kinda. Not meant to be? Very possible. Planned even before the Finn/Jia relationship? You bet. Anyways, so now Jia has gone from fighting with Finn to fighting with Kina. Poor girl, seems she can't please everyone. But geez, Kina has to be feeling pretty betrayed right now. YMMV on who's in the right here, opinions of Finn aside (and no, he's totally not homely). Okay, I'm rambling, so I'm gonna stop now. Please to have constructive criticism?

[finding-flight]

Part Ten of the Mechrat Story

By the next day, things were progressing in a disastrous manner. More people were out for the count, several of the withdrawal victims from yesterday were worse, and everyone was tired, hungry, and miserable.

At lunchtime, I sat—well, collapsed—next to Kina with my sorry excuse for a meal.

“What is taking those ARC people so long?” I grumbled.

“It might take them a while,” Kina said, trying to keep the strain from her voice. “It takes weeks to starve to death. We’ll be okay.”

“I bet those weeks are no fun,” I said, in no mood to look on the bright side.

“No,” Kina agreed, “but we do have some food. We’ll survive.”

“What is taking those ARC people so long?” I repeated.

Kina sighed and apparently decided that talking to me was going nowhere, as she started concentrating on her own tiny portion of food.

“This sucks,” I said once the silence had extended for several minutes.

“Mm,” Kina agreed.

I wished that I had someone else who would join me in my angry rants, but I didn’t really want to talk to the saboteurs more than necessary, partly because Kina didn’t want me to, but mostly because I was avoiding Finn.

After a few more minutes of silence, I got up and decided to see if I could make myself useful. I decided that Daxt was the safest person to go to about this, so I wandered over to him.

“Can I do anything?” I asked. “I’m depressing myself sitting around doing nothing.”

“Yeah, please,” Daxt replied distractedly. “Sorry, but since we know you aren’t going to collapse or anything, you’re on food gathering duty now.”

“No problem. Just give me a partner so they can hold the food.”

“Great. Go talk to Finn.”

“Uh…what?”

“Finn’s in charge of all that. Now, sorry, but I gotta run, there’s this problem with the shelter with all the sickest people…”

“Wait a—”

“Later!”

“Great,” I muttered.

Finn was already briefing a group of mechrats on the food-gathering plan, so I went to stand over where they were. I planted my feet firmly on the farthest edge of the group and directed my gaze at them.

“Hi,” I muttered. “I’m supposed to help with the food thing.”

“Yeah,” Finn acknowledged, not looking at me. “So, um, same thing we’ve been doing, everyone. Stay within sight of at least two other people. We’ll be moving from trap to trap and gathering whatever’s edible along the way. Any questions?”

I had a lot of questions, starting with what was edible and what wasn’t, but I wasn’t about to ask Finn. Instead, as we marched off into the woods, I turned to the girl next to me.

“Hey, can I be your partner?” I asked. “I can’t carry stuff in my shirt like you’ve been doing.”

“Sure,” she said. “No problem.”

Well, that solved most of my problems; I’d just leave the finding to her and only do the actual gathering myself.

I managed to avoid the bulk of the awkwardness by simply staying near the edge of the group. I convinced my partner to stay further out than anyone, saying that if we were together, we only needed to keep one other person in sight. This worked well until we started looping around to go back to the camp. We were so far away that we actually started running into people coming the other way.

After the first few people came by and we informed them that we’d already foraged through the area and they should try further away, I stopped paying attention and let my partner handle telling them everything. We’d get to turn around once we finished digging up these stupid roots, anyways, since everyone else had picked everything up ahead on their way back. I just wanted to be done with the whole thing.

I wasn’t paying much attention when my partner started talking to another mechrat, telling him to move along—I was too busy trying to pull up another stupid root. However, my ears pricked up when I heard her tell him, “Oh, yeah, that would be great. My partner’s having trouble pulling them out of the ground, and there’s a lot of them.”

“We’re getting help?” I asked, temporarily ceasing my mostly-futile efforts to uproot the alleged food in order to wipe my brow.

“Yeah,” my partner said, coming around a large bush to assist in the war on roots.

“Excellent,” I said. “We seriously need it.”

“Glad to be of…”

I looked up in horror as the voice trailed off. Darn it, I had been this close to avoiding him the entire thing.

Finn looked about as thrilled to see me as I was to see him, but he couldn’t very well retract his offer, so he kept his gaze on the ground as he knelt to dig our dinner out of it.

The silence stretched out awkwardly as we tugged and dug and yanked the blasted plants. I don’t think the other mechrat noticed, but Finn and I certainly did. On the bright side of things, we were both working as fast as humanly possible in order to get as far away from each other as quickly as we could.

Unfortunately, working this fast caused a bit of an incident. I gave the root a ferocious yank and it quite unexpectedly came out. Off-balance, I began to topple backwards. My instinct was to catch myself with the hand that wasn’t holding the root, but, of course, that hand didn’t exist anymore. I was on my way to landing ungracefully on my back when Finn’s hand shot out and grabbed my wrist, steadying me.

“Um, thanks,” I muttered, shifting to the more safe position of kneeling on the ground rather than squatting.

“No problem,” he told the ground.

Had he caught me without even looking at me? Was that even possible? And why had he done it in the first place? It’s not like I would have wounded anything except my pride. Was it just an instinctive reaction? Did he just do it to make me question everything?

If so, it was working.

I glowered at the remaining roots. Why did Finn have to act so nice all the time? I knew plenty of people who acted like jerks but were actually kind, but I’d never met someone who acted kind but was actually a jerk.

Eventually, we finished uprooting our dinner and started heading back to the camp. I carefully positioned myself so that my partner was in between me and Finn and assigned myself the task of watching my partner’s shirt-full of squirrel food to make sure that nothing escaped from it. To my gratification, I did have to save the food once, so I didn’t feel completely ridiculous.

We were some of the last ones back to camp, so everyone was running around trying to get everything done before the sun went down. In the shady woods, I hadn’t realized how much time had passed, but the sun was creeping towards the horizon at an alarming rate, and we hurried towards what appeared to be the food-drop point.

When we were only a few yards away, another mechrat who was using his shirt as a bag hurried towards the same point, his gaze fixed on his squirrel food. Not paying attention to where he was going, the poor guy crashed right into my poor partner, causing both to them to crash to the ground amid cascading berries and roots.

Finn and I both burst out laughing, then caught each other’s eye for the first time since the fight and quickly shut up. Unfortunately, we averted our gaze back to the two woebegone gatherers and cracked up again.

The boy was apologizing and attempting to help the girl, who was more focused on not ruining the food. Finn and I knelt to help them, still attempting to contain our laughter. Eventually, I just told the two mechrats to hold still while Finn and I cleared the food away from them so they wouldn’t squish any. The situation was so ridiculous, with the two frozen like semi-mechanical statues and Finn and I reaching around them like some bizarre game of Twister that I couldn’t stop laughing and neither could Finn. Fortunately for my avoidance of Finn but unfortunately for the squishable food, both my fellow mechrats eventually started laughing as well. Then the boy started laughing so hard that his entire body shook and his outdated mechanical arm gave out, causing him to fall over again and squish a cluster of blueberries. That set off the girl, and in between laughing and trying to stop him from squishing anything else, she fell, too. She missed most of the food, but by this time, we were all laughing so hard, it didn’t really matter.

“Maybe the freezing thing was a bad idea,” Finn said.

“This is a lost cause,” I laughed.

“No, we’re almost done!” my partner said, scooping some of my hard-earned roots out of the way.

By this time, our plight had attracted an amused audience, so we enlisted help from some of them and managed to get most of the food to the drop point, though the boy who had crashed into us had a spectacular purplish stain on his side, and both he and my partner were dotted with various colors from berries, dirt, and grass.

When the entire ordeal was over, I started making my way over to the river. Foraging and then laughing my head off had made me extremely thirsty. However, before I had gotten more than a few paces, I heard a voice behind me.

“Jia—”

I didn’t turn around, instead burying my head in my hand. “I don’t want to talk, Finn.”

“If you would just—”

I ignored him, breaking into a sprint towards the river. To my great relief, he didn’t follow me.

When I got to the river, I ran upstream to the “girls’ section,” stripped off my clothes, and jumped right in. The cool water had a calming effect on me, and I was able to somewhat clear my thoughts. I knew that getting it wet would ruin my braid, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want it. I was definitely going to cut all my hair off as soon as I could find someone to help me.

I didn’t stay in the water for very long, as I was sure I would eventually be needed elsewhere, and besides, dinner was on its way. So I climbed out, dried myself as best I could, and went through the hassle of putting my clothes on one-handed. I was sitting on a rock, trying to squeeze the water out of my ridiculously long hair, when I became aware of someone leaning against a tree off to my right and slightly behind me.

“Nice braid,” Kess commented..

“Don’t start,” I muttered.

“Did you know that Finn saw his mother murdered right in front of him?” Kess asked conversationally.

“What?” I asked blankly.

“Yep. He was seven at the time. He lived in this town that got attacked. A soldier broke down his front door. His dad was halfway across the world at the time, so it was just his mom to defend the home and four kids. She had a gun. She told the soldier to leave. Instead, he attacked her, knocked the gun out of her hand, drove her up against the wall, and rammed four metal fingers through her throat.”

“He…he had a prosthetic arm?” I whispered.

“Sure did. Pretty nifty use of technology, don’t you think?”

I tried to come up with something to say.

“You aren’t going to convince any of us to change sides,” Kess told me. “But, you know, you’re pretty lucky that Finn’s acting like he is. If it was me, I’d hate every one of you. But he feels for you; he really does.”

“Yeah, right. He said we make him sick.”

“There’s Finn and his way with words,” Kess sighed. “He meant that thinking about what was done to you makes him sick.”

“How do you know?”

“Because one, I feel the same way, and two, that’s what he told me a couple days ago. You know,” Kess gave me a sideways look, “Finn really likes you.”

I willed myself not to not blush. “How do you know?”

“Please. Finn is so not subtle.”

“Why would he like me? I’m ‘mutilated,’ like he said. I’m on the opposite side of the war, and I’m hardly good-looking.”

Kess shrugged. “So maybe Finn has questionable taste. That’s not the point.”

“And I’m sure that you’re going to tell me the point whether I want to know or not.”

“Of course. The point has two parts. One, Finn is my partner. The last thing I need is some ungrateful jerk of a mechrat to break his naïve little heart and have him moping around messing up missions. Two, Finn is my friend. If you don’t like him, fine. But if you keep messing around, getting him to braid you hair and then yelling at him and hurting him, you’ll need more than a new arm when I’m done with you, capiche?”

I couldn’t help but smiling a bit. “Two-part point taken.”

“Good. You hungry? I could eat the metaphorical horse. Or maybe I could metaphorically eat a horse, because I don’t think a metaphorical horse would be particularly filling, but I couldn’t actually eat a…”

Laughing slightly to myself, I followed a cheerfully rambling Kess back to camp.

---------

I wandered reluctantly through the trees surrounding the camp, hoping I wouldn’t find who I was looking for. Of course, I did.

“Hem. Uh, Finn…”

He looked up. “Hi.”

“I’m…” if I had had two hands, I would have been twisting them in discomfort. “I’m, uh, sorry I yelled at you and gave you the cold shoulder. I was out of line.”

“It’s okay.”

“So…friends?”

For once, Finn’s smile looked forced. “Sure. Friends.”

I backed away and managed to sort of cross my arm across my chest. Oh, no. We are so not doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“The ‘I’m-upset-and-I’m-not-over-the-fight-but-I’ll-pretend-like-I-am-and-go-on-with-a-very-plastic-relationship-because-I’m-a-nice-guy routine. Definitely not.”

“Well, I’m sorry you feel like that.”

“There you go again! You’re supposed to be comparing me with lizards, not emotionlessly agreeing with me and trying not to say something offensive.”

He smiled reluctantly. “Right. Lizards.”

“You’re agreeing plastically again. Just say something Finn-like.”

“Sorry. I’m not in the mood.”

“I did not go to all the trouble of formulating and delivering an apology for this, you know.”

“Well, for goodness’s sake, don’t strain yourself.”

I gave him a suspicious look. “Are you mocking me?”

He met my judicious gaze with a wide-eyed, innocent look. “Who, me?”

“No, the lizard, of course.”

That elicited a genuine laugh. “Heaven forbid I should intrude upon your reptilian conversation. Perhaps I should leave.”

I grinned. “That’s more like it. I never thanked you for my braid, by the way.”

“You still haven’t.”

“Thank you, Mr. Literal.”

“Don’t bother. I only did it to save your hair from a terrible fate. You’re so undeserving.”

“And you’re quite the judge of beauty.”

“You know it.”

“Hey, Monkey-man!” Kess unexpectedly popped out from behind a tree. “Stop flirting and just kiss her already!”

“Hey! Get back here!”

I watched, laughing too hard to move, as Finn chased Kess in a weaving pattern through the trees. The two flew past me, and then Finn stopped, ran back to me, and kissed me right on the mouth.

“Sorry. Orders!” he said, then turned and chased after a madly-cackling Kess again.

I didn’t stop laughing until after Finn had caught Kess and educated her on why eavesdropping was a very bad idea. I seriously loved these crazy idiots.

-----

A/N: Well, that didn't take as long as expected! Just another short section before they make up. I figured that there wasn't a whole lot they could actually do other than glower at each other, which isn't very interesting. Anyways, feedback, as always, is greatly appreciated!

[finding-flight]

Part Nine of the Mechrat Story

As it turned out, we had a lot bigger problems than my emotional crisis in the morning.

“What’s wrong with them?” Kess asked, staring at the mass of shivering mechrats with a distinctly unnerved expression.

I looked over my fellow workers. They were mostly huddled on the ground, moaning and clutching various body parts. Over twenty in all. My heart sank.

“Antidepressant withdrawal,” I sighed. “I tried to warn you.”

“How come it’s just them?” Kess asked. “Why not all of you?”

I rubbed my forehead. “Different types of medicine. The type I take doesn’t cause withdrawal symptoms as fast.”

“How fast is ‘not as fast?’”

“Um…I want to say about a month.”

“Okay, not a problem. Anyone else going to go all withdrawal-y on us?”

“I don’t know.”

Kess sighed. “Great. We have two dozen useless mechrats and for all we know, we could have more going down the drain.”

“Did you say ‘withdrawal?’” Taj asked, coming up with the rest of the saboteurs. “Three questions. What kind, what are the symptoms, and how can we stop it?”

“Antidepressant withdrawal, and as far as I know, the only thing that can stop it is more antidepressants,” I replied, looking directly at Taj and avoiding Finn’s eyes. “Maybe you should ask a more medically-inclined mechrat.”

“Symptoms,” Taj prompted.

“All, right, all right. Um.” I tried to remember the symptoms. “Some of them won’t be so bad. I think…some of them might just be really irritable or anxious. I guess those ones can still work. And then there’s…uh…well, headaches. Nausea. Insomnia, I think. Or fatigue. Or both.” I glanced over at a mechrat who was holding his head and flinching. “Oh yeah, there’s this thing where you feel like you’re getting an electric shock through your brain. And I think you can, like, hallucinate.”

The saboteurs stared at me, aghast.

“But it’s not like they all happen at once,” I said quickly. “And not everyone will get all of them. I’m pretty sure we’ll just have a lot of migraines and barfing. I’m sure a lot of people won’t even get withdrawal.”

“Why did it all happen to everyone at once?” Zake asked.

I considered this. “Well, we all take our medicine at basically the same time. It probably happened to most people some time during the night, and of course no one noticed because we were all asleep. I bet some people started getting withdrawal way earlier, but yesterday was so miserable, it wouldn’t really be the news of the century if someone was nauseated or had a headache.”

“Makes sense,” Zake allowed.

“But I’m really not the expert here,” I said. “How come you’re asking me?”

“You’re the mechrat spokesperson,” Taj said as if this was obvious.

This was news to me. “Um. What?”

“Mostly ‘cause you talk,” Daxt explained. “Everyone else does their best to communicate with us in monosyllables. So Taj decided that if we have to ask the mechrats anything, we ask you. And you’re supposed to talk to the rest of the mechrats and tell us what they’re saying.”

“Whoa, back up,” I said. “They don’t talk to me, either. I’m the crazy ranting person, remember?”

“They’re more likely to talk to you than to us,” Finn informed the ground near his shoes. I spared him a glance in order to shoot him a glare, than redirected my attention to Taj.

“Seriously, you can ask me questions, but don’t expect me to know anything about what everyone else thinks and wants. They keep that stuff to themselves. We’re not supposed to complain in MALRC, anyways. Force of habit will prevent them from voicing their opinons.”

“Fine,” Taj said. “But you have to at least help us question everyone here.”

“Uh…question?”

“Kess,” Taj commanded, completely ignoring me, “you go ask everyone affected for their exact symptoms. Write them all down, make a list of the most common symptoms, and report back to me. Daxt, Zake, and Jia, you three question everyone else. Ask them if they know when they’re likely to experience withdrawal. I want a list of everyone who might potentially go through withdrawal within the next two weeks.”

“Two weeks?” I interrupted. “I thought we’d be out of here in a couple days!”

Taj gave me a glare and I suddenly remembered Kess mentioning that he had a Look of Death. It was a pretty good one, too, and I felt like squirming in discomfort. “We must plan in case of an emergency,” he said icily.

“Right. Sorry.”

“As I was saying—”

“Before you were so rudely interrupted by a completely legitimate point made by someone who has the brains to realize that you are most definitely not the boss of—”

Taj redirected his Look of Death to Kess and cut her off. “As I was saying, Daxt, Zake, and Jia will also ask everyone if they know anything about alleviating the symptoms. Finn will go look for food. I’ll be in charge of the people who were already questioned. Most of them will go after Finn and look for food. Some of them will go get water, some will gather firewood, and so forth. Any questions?”

“Amazingly, our tiny brains have managed to comprehend your brilliant plan,” Kess said, whacking Taj on the shoulder.

To my complete amazement, Taj smiled. “Then get to it.”

I was still in shock at the fact that Taj had a really nice smile and actually looked somewhat handsome when he wasn’t dead serious, so it took a second for me to realize that I was being left behind. I quickly scurried after Kess, Daxt, and Zake while Taj went to inform the rest of the mechrats what was going on. I received a pen and a piece of paper from an only slightly charred notepad and headed off to my designated section of mechrats to begin the interrogation.

The process didn’t take as long as I had feared. Most people didn’t know any more about antidepressant withdrawal than I did, and only a handful suspected that they might get symptoms in the near future.

“So, you think you might get withdrawal in the next two weeks?” I asked my last questionee.

“Two weeks?” he asked. “Uh…well, maybe. I mean, I hope not?”

“Just answer yes or no,” I sighed.

“Um…I guess yes. Better safe than sorry.”

“Great.” I extended the paper and pen to him. “Write your name here. I can’t write at the moment.”

“Right-handed?” he asked, taking the paper.

“Yep.”

“Sorry.”

“No big.” All right, that counted as the most unbelievable lie I ever told. Rather than continue the blatant lies, I took the paper back. “Thanks. Try not to go into withdrawal before we get rescued.”

“Um, yeah, I’ll do my best.”

Kess was still finishing up her questioning of the poor withdrawn people, so I headed over to Daxt and Zake, who had finished before me.

“Find out anything useful?” I asked.

“Not too much,” Daxt said. “Couple suggestions about what to do with the mostly-useless people. Someone said we should make them litters, which might be a good idea for some of them. Not sure they can walk.”

“Any good ideas on how to magically obtain food for people who can’t get it themselves?” Zake asked.

Daxt shook his head, sighing. “Sorry. I think we’re going to be counting on Finn a lot for that.”

“And of course Finn will drop from exhaustion before quitting if there are still people in need,” Zake said, rolling his eyes.

I suddenly found my list much more fascinating than it had been moments before. Fortunately, the two saboteurs didn’t seem particularly interested in continuing this line of conversation, and instead started wondering when the food was going to show up.

“Of course, this poses another problem,” Daxt said earnestly. “Do the incapacitated people get priority, or do the ones actually working?”

“And what about the people who throw up?” Zake asked. “Should they get more food?”

“Maybe they won’t be hungry?” I suggested.

“I hope not,” Daxt said. “We already are running on way less food than usual, and now we have less people to get food in the first place. This could turn into a huge problem once we start having to go farther for food.”

“Farther?” I asked, confused.

“Yeah, when we run out of food near camp,” Zake said. “We’ll have to organize shifts, or maybe have an exclusive gathering group of the most endurant people.”

“Oh.” Of course. Duh. I was so far out of my league here. These guys were calculating all sorts of solutions I couldn’t even think of.

When was that stupid ARC rescue getting here?

“Hey,” Kess said, approaching us and dragging Taj along behind her. Apparently, she’d decided to report back to all of us instead of just Taj. “Here’s the scoop. We have twenty-two people who are seriously affected. Mostly splitting headaches and nausea. And irritability. I think I got told to shove off about seventy times.”

“Focus, Kess,” Taj said, sounding irritable himself.

“Okay, okay. We have four people who flat-out can’t move. They could barely talk to me. They’re going to be the biggest problems, but I wouldn’t recommend any of these people for particularly hard work.”

“What about the depression itself?” Taj asked. “Anyone suicidal around here?”

“Not as far as I could tell,” Kess said. “I mean, they’re all pretty miserable, but I’d be miserable if I was in their condition, too.”

“All the same, someone should keep a close eye on them,” Taj said.

“Dang, there goes another person who could be doing work,” Daxt said.

“Kina,” I volunteered.

“What?” Taj asked, as if my making a helpful suggestion had completely blindsided him.

“Kina,” I repeated. “She’s a really nice person and she’s very observant and helpful and all that. Besides, she’s not, you know, in real great shape, so she wouldn’t be all that helpful at the whole manual labor thing, anyways.”

“Good, then Kina has that job,” Taj decided, ever the authority. “Is she around here?”

“I haven’t seen her,” I said, looking around. “I guess you sent her to go get food.”

“Well, as soon as she gets back, brief her,” Taj ordered.

Brief her. No, I certainly wasn’t explaining a situation to my friend and asking a favor of her. I was most definitely briefing her. Military people.

Complete snakes.

How weird that that joke had been funny yesterday and now it just inspired a mix of annoyance, pain, and anger.

Stupid Finn. Must stop thinking about stupid Finn. Grr.

Thankfully, a distraction soon presented itself: breakfast. Breakfast was pretty measly, but definitely better than nothing. As I devoured my tiny portion of squirrel fare, I explained to Kina about her new job, which she accepted with much more grace than I would have. Afterwards, Taj stood up and presented a new challenge: shelter-making.

As it turned out, the saboteurs were no more knowledgeable about this than the rest of us. The result of our collective ignorance was a lot of trial-and-error, some crazy ideas, and several people getting buried under collapsing flimsy structures. Then there was the problem of the completely incapacitated withdrawal victims. We eventually ended up moving them all together and then building up a shelter around them, which wasn’t very easy, but was definitely easier than trying to move them into an already-built structure. By the time everyone had access to a shelter that we hoped would deflect most of the rain, it was near lunchtime.

Lunchtime presented another dilemma. The not-so-incapacitated withdrawal victims had been put in charge of food preparation under the supervision of several more capable people. As a result of this rather slow method of cooking, I’d been smelling roasting food for over an hour. Unfortunately, what I was smelling was meat. And it smelled delicious. And I knew exactly where it had come from.

And I really didn’t want Finn to see me drooling over his hard-earned kill and devouring it like there was no tomorrow.

Why did Finn have to be the competent trapper person? Why not Zake or someone? Zake was good with physics and mechanics and all that, right? Surely he could be the sneaky rabbit trapper.

Assisted by the 7.3 earthquake in my very empty stomach, I eventually decided that the best way to pretend that I didn’t care about Finn was to eat my lunch like I had no idea that he had worked his rear off to trap it. I quickly joined the line to receive my portion and went to find Kina. She, of course, was still attending to her patients.

“Hey, Kina, go get some food!” I said. “Look, we have—what is this, squirrel? First squirrel food and now squirrel itself. I guess you are what you eat, right?”

“I had some already,” Kina said.

“Like it?”

“It was very nice,” she replied politely.

I took a bite of meat. “Ummmm,” I said, closing my eyes. “Heaven.” I opened one eye and looked at Kina. “Bet if we weren’t in Middle-of-Nowheresville this would taste disgusting.”

Kina managed a little laugh, and I congratulated myself on bringing Kina out of her mega-depressed state.

Wait a minute.

“Hey, Kina,” I said casually, “you getting any of this withdrawal?”

“Me? No. I’m on the same medication you are.”

“Yeah, but…you’re not feeling depressed, are you?”

“Well, I am upset about my family and about being stranded, but I’m not clinically depressed, no.”

“Okay, well, you’re supposed to be watching people, but no one’s watching you, so if you get all depressed, let me know, okay?”

“I’ll do that,” Kina said. “Thank you.”

“Here to help.” I ate the last of my squirrel. “Ah. So good.” I glanced over at Finn. “I mean, you know, it’s more filling than the berries and stuff.”

“Yes,” Kina agreed, following my gaze. “You haven’t made up with that boy?”

“Wha—who, Finn?”

Kina gave me a steady look. “Jia, everyone heard you yelling at each other.”

I felt my face redden. “Oh. Uh, well, no, Finn’s a pig and he’s being totally stupid about his side being great and our side being evil.”

“Well, good,” Kina said.

“Good?” I repeated, incredulous. “Are you sure you’re feeling all right? Since when do you approve of animosity?”

“I just don’t think we should get very close to these saboteurs,” Kina said forcefully. “They’re still our enemies. I don’t like the idea of you being attached to any of them.”

“Well…about that. They kinda made me the official mechrat representative without asking me.”

“Mechrat?” Kina repeated, appalled.

“Hey, I like the word,” I said defensively. “Come on, it sounds like something I would come up with. It’s not like they’re brainwashing me.”

“All right, if you want to use that word. I really don’t mind you being our representative. If you’re in their confidence, you can keep them from making all the decisions without us.”

“Well…Taj kind of spearheads everything.”

“It’s still better than nothing. At least we’ll know what’s going on. Just don’t get close to any of them. Remember, they’re not your friends.”

“Why can’t they be?” I objected. “We’re going to be living in their countries. If we want to survive there, we’ll have to get used to ARC people.”

“Civilians,” Kina said. “The people we’ll live with in enemy territory. But not enemy soldiers. Not these saboteurs. They’re killers, Jia.”

“Yeah,” I said uncertainly. “Yeah, they are. I guess you’re right.”

---------

A/N: Look, a shiny new part! I went into mega-overdrive-writing mode, which essentially means that I started writing and refused to stop until I was done. This is usually a good thing, but sometimes it happens at four-thirty AM. It's currently seven, and I am extremely tired. If there are any spelling errors or typos in this, I am very sorry. My typing, spelling, grammar, and proofreading abilities do not tend to be at their best at this hour.

[finding-flight]

Revised Part of the Mechrat Story

After dinner, I twisted my hair fruitlessly, trying to contain the mass of locks in one hand. I had had little choice but to take it down to wash the ash out of it, but putting it back into its customary knot was proving difficult. I was regretting my laziness in not cutting it. In the chopshop, I never took time to have another girl cut my hair. Instead, I just put it up in a simply knot that kept it out of my way and safe from the machines. My hair hadn’t been touched by scissors since before my family had sold me, and the result was a thick, elbow-length brown mane that was definitely not manageable with one arm.

I was practically snarling in frustration when a voice behind me said, “You shouldn’t put your hair up.”

I turned around to see Finn walking towards me. “Why not?” I asked. “Because we’re going to do something else that will make us so disgusting we’ll have to wash our hair again?”

“No,” Finn said, sitting down next to me, “because you have beautiful hair.”

Ridiculously, this made me blush. “Please,” I said. “You don’t have to make me feel better. I’ll just ask someone to do it for me later.”

“I mean it,” Finn insisted. “Your hair is pretty.”

“Oh,” I laughed. “So I should keep it down to distract from the rest of me.”

Finn grinned. “The rest of you is pretty, too.”

“Oh, right,” I said, joking along. “I forgot, random mechanical parts are fashionable nowadays. Everyone loves the underfed look, too, and fish-belly-pale skin’s so attractive. And who doesn’t love missing arms?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? We both know that everyone in the chopshop loses their looks in a hurry, and I was no beauty to begin with. I’m over it, Finn, I promise you won’t hurt my feelings by agreeing with me. I’m just thankful it isn’t worse. I know people who are practically falling apart where they’re not mechanical.”

“I don’t care,” Finn proclaimed. “I still think you’re pretty.”

I eyed him suspiciously. “What are you comparing me to?”

He pretended to take my question seriously. Looking around, he pointed. “That.”

I followed his gaze. “The…rock?”

“No, the lizard on the rock.”

I raised my one arm in celebration. “Yes! Queen among lizards!”

“Goddess at least,” Finn said with a straight face. “If it came to a choice between the two of you, you’ll be happy to know that I’d break the gecko’s heart in an instant.”

“I’m flattered beyond words.”

“You should be. Reptiles are trophy wives where I come from.”

“You don’t say.”

“Oh, yes. I know many a wife who’s a complete snake.. Then again, many husbands are, too. And so are unmarried people.” He looked around, then whispered conspiratorially, “Military types.”

I laughed. Finn had a way of always cheering me up. It was so easy to relax around him. He was completely nonjudgmental and knew when to joke and when to be serious. Right now, he had joked me out of my frustration.

I swatted a curtain of unruly hair over my shoulder. “Do you happen to have scissors?” I asked.

“No, but I have a very sharp knife and I know how to use it.”

“Will you cut my hair?”

Finn’s smile slipped. “I thought we agreed that your hair was pretty.”

“I thought we agreed that I was as attractive as a lizard.”

“More attractive than a lizard. I don’t want you to cut your hair. It’s nice.”

“But it’s inconvenient, and I can’t put it up by myself anymore.”

“You aren’t a factory worker anymore, Jia. You don’t have to worry about it tangling in something and killing you.”

“I know.”

Finn sighed, reaching out and running his fingers though a strand of my hair. “Why don’t I just braid it, instead?”

“You know how to do that?”

“Why the surprise? I have three little sisters and no mom.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s been like that for a long time. So, can I?”

It was my turn to sigh. “Suit yourself.”

“Great!” Finn said, his grin returning as he scooted behind me and began finger-combing my hair into three parts. “I’ll have you appreciating beautiful hair, yet.”

We lapsed into silence as Finn worked on my tangled hair. It was kind of nice, sitting peacefully by the stream, feeling the sun on my face and Finn’s deft fingers in my hair. It was somehow comforting, and I was reminded of home, before my mother started drinking away her troubles and our money, before my father came home from the war in a body bag, before my aunts, uncle, and grandparents began conspiring with my mother to sell me to the chopshop.

“I glad you did it,” I said presently.

“Hm?” Finn didn’t pause from his braiding.

“I’m glad you blew up the chopshop and got us all out. Even though my arm’s gone, and even though we crashed and we’re stuck out here. That place…it was terrible. I would much rather be out here, waiting for rescue from the wrong side, than be stuck in there. I don’t even care that we crashed. I’m just glad that we’re out.”

Finn’s fingers stopped moving. “It wasn’t an accident, you know.”

“What wasn’t?”

“The crash. That wasn’t just bad luck.”

“W-what do you mean?”

“That was specifically engineered to kill us. You didn’t think it was odd that all the soldiers got out before the parachutes caught fire? And the pilots?”

“They—they were the only ones awake.”

“But the pilots should be the last ones out. And why were the soldiers awake in the first place?”

“I don’t know, but—”

“There wasn’t any malfunction, Jia. They damaged the controls, then set off some kind of explosion. We’re saboteurs; we know when something’s been tampered with. We were supposed to go down in flames. They just didn’t count on Zake being good enough to keep the skyship under control.”

“But…but why would they want to kill us? Sorry about your conspiracy theory, but if they wanted us dead, they would have told you to leave us inside the chopshop. Then they’d kill all of us, not just the kids, and not lose five good saboteurs.”

“They don’t want you dead. They want us dead. The saboteurs.”

“Okay, that makes even less sense. You’re crazy, Finn. Unless this is some really elaborate joke?”

“I’m sane and I’m serious,” Finn said. “Truth be told, we’ve been expecting this for a long time. That’s why all five of us were in the same skyship. We didn’t want all of you going down with us.”

“You were expecting to be shot out of the sky?”

“No, that was a stroke of luck, actually. They could have been a lot more direct about offing us, and then we’d be offed. But we knew that it was only a matter of time before they tried to kill us.”

“Why?”

“It’s kind of hard to explain. Let me begin at the beginning. I guess it really started when Taj turned eighteen. Everyone expected him to become an ordinary soldier. Almost every saboteur does. The pay’s better and the risk is less. But Taj said he was staying. That made the higher-ups kind of miffed, but they let it go. But then Daxt did the exact same thing. Then they got nervous and asked the rest of us what we planned to do. We told them that we had no intention of becoming soldiers. And they can’t make us. Our superiors like us where we are. We’re effective and we’re experienced. They don’t want some team of novices to replace us. Saboteurs die in droves, you know—only the good ones live, and then lots of them leave. Having a complete, experienced team is a valuable thing. But the political bigwigs think differently. See, we know a lot. It comes with the job. We have to be told a certain amount of information to be effective. And we’re smart. Really smart. I’m not bragging; it’s a fact that saboteurs have to be intelligent. So even if we aren’t told things, we’re capable of figuring it out.”

“I don’t get why this would make them want to kill you,” I said.

“Stand by, I’m getting there. The more missions we go on, the more we learn. We can build on past experiences and predict what the military is planning on doing. And our job, obviously, is extremely high-risk. Now do you see where this is going?”

“Kind of,” I said. “Do enlighten me.”

“If a saboteur with three, four years of experience gets captured, they would have a lot of very useful information, and there are a lot of very useful methods to get it.”

“The bigwigs, as you say, think you’ll crack under torture and let out a bunch of military secrets.”

“You got it.”

“So they’re killing you before that happens.”

“Exactly.”

“And you still think you’re on the right side?” I asked incredulously.

“Your side sends children off to be chopped up and mechanized, darling.”

“Okay, but you’re working for them willingly.”

Finn’s hands moved slightly in my hair and I figured he’d shrugged. “Gotta help for as long as possible.”

“Why don’t you just become soldiers?”

“Because we’re good at what we do. You think beginners could pull off a stunt like what we just did? Even if they got past the electronic and human security, and if, by some stretch of the imagination they got all the mechrats out safely and quickly, at the very least the Dancer would be dead. And this is a major leap. Maybe it won’t stop soldiers from coming back with mechanical limbs, but it sure as heck stop them from coming back with superhuman strength or guns built into their pinkies or something.”

I was still trying to wrap my mind the entire thing. “But…there has to be something you could do. You could tell someone.”

“Anyone who could do something about it already knew. Except for the people we report to, but all the bigwigs would have to do is claim we were paranoid. I mean, really, it isn’t like there’s solid evidence.”

“No, but…I mean, it makes sense.”

“Doesn’t matter. The longer we’re there, the bigger the risk is. There are some people who would do anything to keep a person from being a saboteur for more than four years. Obviously. When Taj turns nineteen, they’ll probably send him an arsenic-laced birthday cake.”

“I can’t believe that you’d willingly work for people who you know are trying to kill you. And you say you’re sane.”

“Well, if we survive their ‘accidents,’ they’ll have to stop. There are only so many times you can try to kill someone before it stops looking accidental. Then they’ll just have to accept it. We’re here to stay and we sure as heck aren’t easy to kill.”

“You really are insane,” I said cheerfully.

“Maybe so,” Finn said, a smile back in his voice. “Here, hold this a second.” He handed me the untied end of my braid.

“So, you’re really this devoted to ARC?”

“Completely,” Finn affirmed. “The entire planet being under one rule is a foolproof recipe for disaster.”

“Why? There would be no war. No competition over resources. No language barriers after a few generations. There would be a common structure that everyone could rely on.”

“You sound like a propaganda recording.” Finn took the braid back and began tying it off with a bit of string. “People won’t go for it. Too many cultures. They have their own values and customs. They’ll rebel.”

“Only because they think like that,” I argued, turning to look at him as he dropped the braid. “You people think it’s inevitable that RUE will fail, so you won’t even try. If you would just realize that the ‘people who won’t go for it’ are you—”

“Yeah, they’re us, and that’s why we’re fighting. You know what we say in the ARC military?”

“What?”

“‘RUE the day.’ It’s our reminder that no matter how bad it gets, we have to keep fighting because the alternative is a world that will turn totalitarian and then anarchic. You’re making a huge mistake. RUE already lets people be sold into chopshops. That’s not such a stretch from slavery.”

“They wouldn’t do that if you wouldn’t fight!”

“Jia, how can you defend them?” Finn’s voice rose to a near-yell. “Look at yourself! They’ve mutilated you! I get sick every time I look at any of you! It’s disgusting!”

“Then maybe you should leave!” I yelled back. “What have you done? Stab guards, incinerate scientists, leave survivors horribly injured? And you can’t even look at people who are hurt?”

“What I do is war. They’re mutilating you for experiments!”

“Why is that worse than what you do? They’re saving and improving thousands of lives. Maybe the way they do it is horrible, but at least they aren’t killers like you!”

“We killers saved your lives!”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have, seeing how we make you so sick!”

“That’s not what I—”

“Shut up, Finn. You’re on the wrong side and you’re every bit as bad as the scientists that we all hate. You’re just flashier about how you ruin lives.” With that, I got to my mismatched feet and stalked off into the trees, not stopping until Finn was well out of sight and earshot. Then I sat down again and let out an angry growl.

He was just so wrong about everything! And how could he say that I was disgusting? I had thought that he liked me. Maybe not in a romantic way, but at least as a friend. Tears rolled down my cheek from my real eye, and I swiped at them angrily. This was ridiculous. I didn’t cry. I never cried. Okay, so I almost cried when I found out that I was going to be armless for the rest of life, but that was justifiable. What was wrong with me?

Okay, so other than the fact that I had thought I’d made a real friend for the first time since I met Kina, but I was supposed to be tougher than this.

No one made an attempt to approach me as I sat and stewed and tried to calm myself down. I didn’t blame them. I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been a thundercloud hovering over my head or if I had been snorting fire from my nostrils. I saw a few people skitter by, but they kept their heads down and avoided my eyes.

I didn’t move until darkness had completely fallen and everyone was asleep or trying to fall asleep in spite of prosthesis-induced pain. Then I carefully stood up and picked my way to the camp. We hadn’t had time to build shelters, so people were just sprawled out of the ground wherever there was space. I picked a spot near the edge. So far away from the fire, I was freezing, but I didn’t much feel like being around people.

I was sure I would just be a bundle of joy in the morning.