Chapter Text
The Mission. Some zonerunners will tell you it’s a myth, a campfire story that’s equal parts imagination and queasy desire: the abandoned church way out at the edge where the Battery City shielding dwindles to nothing and the hot zone starts, its thick adobe walls daubed with fractured colour, surrounded by tilting gravestones and scattered white bones. Its roof is black with birds, croaking and shuffling, and its self-appointed ministers two human Crows, the freakshow twins.
Some nights when the moon is dark its small barred windows light up arc-bright and the worshippers come drifting on the night wind to make their devotions. Take the cup of bitter pulque that Kurt doles out from an oily vat, drink it down and feel the black feathers brush the inside of your skull; follow the path of shattered glass as your vision begins to swim with the bonfire’s leaping flames and find Miranda waiting in her alcove of shadows to whisper your name and kiss your brow with cold passionless lips; open the door to the chill interior and step inside where a tower of reclaimed monitors and screens stands ready to play your future out in front of you. Come back changed, or not at all, a story too strange to be true; but Kurt and Miranda are real, and so is their church.
They’re nothing alike, Crow Kurt and Crow Miranda. Kurt is stringy and gaunt, his skin and hair bone-white; on the cheek below his left eye the tattooed wings of his namesake bird stand out stark. No one knows where he came from, whether he was cityborn or a ragged vagrant from across the hot zones, but now he’s bondsman of the circling crows and servant to his dark twin, stranger than him by far.
Kurt’s all human, though there’s little natural about him: Miranda wears the same tattoo mirrored on the soft skin below her dark right eye, but below it her face seams to a mask of rigid plasteen, her left eye a shiny implant. Her hands are silver-chrome and from the wall behind her a mass of cables coils, feeding her artificial system. Impossible and unique, a splice of human and machine, Miranda can only have come from the city, but what was she? An experiment? A secret project? A failure, a reject – or an escapee?
The Crows are hard to explain; it all is. Enough electricity to power the hundred fizzing screens that fill the church and light up the night sky, when the Zones’ inhabitants are sketching by on dusty solar panels and stop-start windvanes? So many birds, sidling and muttering and fighting over the dry bones on the ground: what can they live on, so far out here? No wonder the zonerunners, their minds preoccupied with brine farms and barter posts, find the Mission so hard to credit. But find a killjoy who isn’t superstitious – bad luck beads strung round a wrist, messages for the dead dropped into the Witch’s mailbox, fallen comrades’ names painted up on the city’s barricades. When life’s so uncertain and death so close, anything’s worth it which could tip the scales and keep the crew alive one more day. And the longer you live the more you come to believe, trusting to the ghosted ones who live on in the static, to the glitch in your vision that steers you away from the patch of shaking sand, the invisible hand in the firefight that deflects the fatal blast. For those who make it out to the very edge, following the church’s beacon light in search of a promise, a revelation or an absolution, faith in the Mission is easy to find.
--
The four-wheeler jolts and bounces over rocks and stubby cactus plants; this far out there’s nothing you could call a road. The three of them are packed into the cab for the protection it can offer, but Poison’s skin still prickles uncomfortably as the needle on the radiation counter creeps to the top. Around them the desert stretches featureless in every direction, fading into a malignant haze: they wouldn’t be the first crew to leave it too late to turn around. But the Crows have been on his shoulder since he came back – he has to trust that they can follow the birds he saw flying home to roost.
The song on the radio ends and a familiar voice cuts in. Want your tea scalding hot, dust darlings? Show Pony’s pouring it out right here on WKIL 109. There was plenty went down at the Nest last night, everyone talking about the comeback of the decade, but the hot word is it’s now the breakup of the year - Kobra Kid’s gone solo and the Fab Four are going to have to be the Fab Three. Party Poison and his crew were last seen redlining it into the desert in search of enlightenment, and let’s hope they find it: everyone’s looking old these days except me. And talking of past-its-sell-by-date, Tommy Chow Mein’s got a new stock of Krill-Crunch crackers at the entirely reasonable price of three carbons a box. Stale, but beggars can’t be choosers: catch him all day today at the Sunny Vacation Motel in Zone 4—
Poison stabs at the button to turn it off. He can’t believe Kobra’s not with them, that he might already be rolling with a new crew, a fresh tattoo outlined where the spider used to sit. Beside him Ghoul’s tapping his foot, twitchy and restless as ever; Jet’s frowning into the purple-grey of the distance, artificial eye irising as he scans. They don’t want to be playing do-you-remember at the diner and neither does he, but he and Kobra have always been together.
When they made their getaway they didn’t even have to talk about it, it was both of them or neither, and for those first months in the Zones, stumbling and sunblinded, they were each other’s anchor, all they had. Then they found Jet and Ghoul and turned themselves into a crew, but when the shit hit the fan Kobra was always at his side. Losing Jet hurt, but when he saw Kobra bloodied and limping the guilt threatened to tear him apart. I wasn’t there when he needed me. And when Kobra woke up and realised the choice Poison had made, he followed him then too, turned himself into someone new, even though he didn’t want it. He never said no, not when Ghoul was in danger, he listened to my crazy plan and made it work. Kobra’s unstinting loyalty is more than he’s ever deserved: why couldn’t he give his brother the same?
He’s glad when Jet breaks the silence. ‘So I was in a body bag, we were about to be roadblocked in the Tunnel and now we’re going to see the guys who broke us out?’
‘It was super-slick.’ Ghoul seems glad of the distraction too. ‘We were coming up on the checkpoint foot to the metal and Poison was all out of tricks.’ He snickers at Poison’s expression. ‘You never could keep a poker face, I know you were shitting your pants. The Dracs had the heavy fire ready to take us out, then the screens glitched out, the crows came flying alongside us and the barrier flashed stand-down.’
Jet frowns. ‘A hi-sec clearance? That’s some deep-system shit.’
‘It wasn’t the first time, though.’ Poison narrows his eyes as he remembers. ‘When it all went down with you—’ he jerks his head at Ghoul ‘—before it hit the newscast, the Crows sent me a message.’ The card dropped in his trash, bad news on black wings. ‘They hacked a droid to warn me.’
This time Jet looks sceptical. ‘Picking up an arrest out of the crypted Sec feed? No one’s ever had that kind of access from outside.’ He shakes his head. ‘If they’ve got a back door into the city circuits, why not just crash the whole system? Kill the surveillance, fry the comms and drop the defences?’
Ghoul shrugs. ‘Things aren’t that simple. Kurt and Miranda aren’t killjoys. They’re not on any side except their own.’
‘Mi- Kobra felt it too.’ The car lurches and bounces as Poison wrestles with the wheel, distracted. ‘When he was in the city net, he said sometimes it felt like there was someone else in there with him, looking over his shoulder and smoothing the connections.’ It’s a disturbing thought: if you had a secret tap into Battery City’s system, every security cam, every recording, every drone shot, what couldn’t you see? Did they watch what I drew, the cartoons dancing on the screen? Did they keep count as Mikey worked his little miracles? Did they follow us home along the slidewalks and watch us in our silent bedrooms as we shivered and dreamed?
‘No, wait.’ He stamps on the brake, sending the others lurching into the windshield.
‘Motherfuck,’ spits Ghoul, hand to his head.
Poison lets the engine die and the silence of the barren landscape comes pressing in. ‘It all started at the church. I didn’t go there looking for a revelation, I only went because you wanted to, but what I saw in there – all of us, dying over and over, no way out – it got to me. Made me jump the way I did when everything went Costa Rica.’
‘They were just trying to freak you out,’ objects Jet, rational as ever. ‘No one could have known Kobra and I were going to get unlucky with a patrol – the past caught up to us, that’s all. Ghoul saw the same shit as you, and he chose to stay out here.’
‘I didn’t.’ Ghoul’s statement is quiet, uncertain, and that more than anything else sets suspicion churning in Poison’s gut. ‘See the same, I mean. Miranda sent me in first, remember? And then you turned up after, all wrecked and full of how you’d seen the end.’
So taken up with his own fractured future, Poison realises now what he never thought to ask. ‘What did they show you?’
‘All-‘ Now they’re stopped the heat in the cab is starting to build; Ghoul’s throat clicks as he swallows. ‘I mean – before I was Fun Ghoul I was a citizen, right? We all were. And after my getaway, I tried on different tags for a while, I could have ended up as someone else. But it was more than just who I used to be.’ He hesitates: finding the words to articulate the Mission’s hallucinatory experience is never simple. ‘What I saw was all the people I could be. Future Violent, Death Spell, Leathermouth, Dr Frank – they showed me all of them and I recognised them. Like I’d been put in a kaleidoscope and broken apart, and each one was a different way of being me. The Crows showed you your story and you gave up—’
‘—and you saw their shit and stayed out here.’
Over the pounding in Poison’s ears Jet says quietly, ‘I’d say you were crazy, but I – I mean Ray – got a reassignment a month or so ago. He hadn’t applied for a relocation, but the order came through and with BL/ind you don’t question it. So he went onto the team with Matt and at the hospital the first person he saw, sitting behind the terminal, was Kobra, and he knew me straight away even though I didn’t know him.’ He turns to Poison, wide-eyed. ‘You seriously think these guys blew our whole crew apart on purpose, and then put us back together?’
Poison smacks the wheel in frustration. ‘I think it had to be us. Battery City’s most wanted – who else would Korse have struck a deal with? Who else was worth enough for him to take the risk?’ He feels hollow; he’d thought the decision was his, weighty and terrible, and he’d shouldered it willingly, carried it until it became part of him. Was he really just a pawn in someone else’s game, primed and moved into position? For a moment he imagines their car through the eyes of a surveillance droid, a square green roof in the endless shimmering expanse of desert.
Ghoul kicks the dash. ‘Start the fucking engine,’ he urges. ‘We’re not going to get any answers suffocating out here.’
--
They spot the belltower first, black on the horizon, then the low huddle of the building beneath, the roof sullen with crows. There’s no possibility of a stealthy approach: at the sound of the car the birds rise in a cloud, cawing defiance. They’re the only sign of life as the three of them get out; hot air catches in Poison’s throat and tiny sparks burst in the backs of his eyes to tell him what he’s risking out here. The iron gate is closed and chained, the crows swirling in agitation as Ghoul’s boot thumps against it. ‘Thought they wanted to see us. Kurt!’ he bellows irritably, rattling the gate again.
‘There’s a quick way.’ Poison draws his gun, but as he takes aim Kurt unfolds himself from among the gravestones and comes picking towards them.
Bella and all the other circuit diggers are burned to indigo by the radiation, but Kurt seems to be bleached by it, his irises as pale as his hair. He stops at the gate, regarding them through the bars. ‘Took your time.’
Poison levels the gun. ‘I should blow your head off right now. Give your pets a feast.’
‘Feast.’ Kurt never smiles but the tattoo on his left cheek jumps. ‘Call that gratitude?’
‘For springing us in the Tunnel?’ Ghoul was the believer, his faith born from long hours spent hunched over timers and wires, his touch delicate and precise and death perching on his shoulder: his betrayal cuts deepest. ‘You’ve been fucking with us all this time.’
Kurt turns his passionless gaze on him. ‘You came here for what we offer. Didn’t make you drink.’ He bends to unlock the gate and hauls it open.
‘You were watching us in there, me and my brother. What were you playing at?’
Poison still has the gun on him but Kurt straightens up, unconcerned. ‘You weren’t the stars of the show.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’ Jet’s slow to anger, but his long steady burn is fiercer in the end. ‘I don’t know what weird shit you sell, but if you can hack BLI’s systems and screw around with CitySec, why are you hiding in the ass-end of nowhere? This isn’t a game.’
‘See anyone laughing?’ Kurt turns abruptly. ‘Put the blaster away, Miranda wants to talk to you.’
Poison stares at his retreating back, finger hovering over the trigger, then reluctantly holsters the gun and follows. At his side Ghoul mutters, ‘Fucker probably wouldn’t lie down if you did shoot him.’
Grains of glass grind and burst in tiny explosions under their boots as Kurt leads them to the church; at the entrance he stands aside to usher them in. ‘Don’t be surprised,’ Poison murmurs to Jet; Miranda’s never been a sight he finds easy.
The entry is small and dim, an alcove full of shadows; beside the church’s wooden door the pale oval of her face seems to float like the moon in a cloud of black hair, her body shrouded in a shawl of dark feathers with an oily sheen. ‘Future Violent,’ she greets them, her voice low with a faint metallic echo. ‘Citizen Toro.’ The click of Jet’s swallow is audible and Poison can’t blame him: as their eyes adjust Miranda’s true nature is all too clear, one eye liquid dark in the remnant of a human face, the other shiny bright in expressionless plasteen, her limbs wound round with snaking cables. ‘Citizen Way.’
Poison stamps down his thrill of revulsion and leans in close. ‘Party Poison.’
‘Really?’ Kurt never smiles; Miranda can’t. ‘It was a privilege, to witness your metamorphosis. You and your brother, the killjoy celebrities, reborn as dutiful citizens. Stripping away the past to become something new.’
‘Was that what you wanted? To change my mind?’
Miranda tilts her head, fixing him with her bright-and-dark gaze. ‘Were you so easily influenced? You carried your doubt here with you; all we did was help you see.’
‘But not me,’ Ghoul grits. ‘What was it, some kind of divide and rule?’
Miranda’s gaze tracks over his clothes. ‘Was what we showed you wrong? Future Violent, Leathermouth, Death Spell, Citizen I—'
‘Don’t,’ interrupts Ghoul sharply.
Miranda holds up a gleaming hand in apology. ‘Few of us are one thing forever.’ She turns to Jet, their two faces a weird mirror image. ‘You least of all; we saw you, but too late and I am sorry for that.’
‘Is that what we’re here for? An apology?’
Poison ought to know that staring Crow Miranda down is a lost cause. ‘What makes you think that? We are not sorry for the rest. Not for Citizen Way, creating his art and its hidden messages, nor for the children who learned to question and to doubt. We are not sorry for your brother’s secret gifts, his small miracles setting in motion a ripple of hope.’
‘If you bought into that change-from-within shit too, why bother bringing me back?’ At the drip of contempt in Ghoul’s tone Poison’s gut sinks; last night they had the most tentative of healings, but can they ever knit whole again? ‘You don’t care about killjoys.’
From the doorway Kurt coughs something that could be a laugh. ‘Killjoys, children. Fight, party, die young, and always more of them pouring out to play.’
‘Children, yes,’ Miranda agrees. ‘And if a child is to grow up they must let themself change.’ She’s hypnotic, the monotone voice, the cables that seem to shift and weave and the shadows in her hair and eyes. ‘We watched and what we saw was a new thing struggling to be born.’ She gestures to the door and Kurt turns the handle, bringing a rush of musty air that carries with it an ozone tang. ‘Let us show you.’
Poison takes an instinctive step closer to the others. ‘Like we’ll fall for that twice.’
In reply Kurt pushes the heavy oak door wider. ‘You came all the way out here to find answers: why walk away now?’ The tattoo jumps again. ‘We’ll still be here for the killing when you’re done.’
Poison flicks a glance to Ghoul and Jet: he feels there’s a point he’s not grasping, the sank of the past sinking under his feet. Everything he did, what he thought was right, just part of someone else’s game. But if there is an answer he has to find it, for Mikey’s sake. There’s nothing to be read in Miranda’s serene features, but the intensity of her gaze follows him as he steps forward into the echoing interior.
The desert outside is baking under the midday sun, but within the thick adobe walls the air strikes still and cold. The haphazard tower of screens rises shadowy above their heads, tiny barred windows above illuminating the nest of knotted cables that reaches up into the thick rafters. Poison feels rather than sees his crewmates range themselves to each side of him as Miranda’s voice resonates through the space. ‘Let me show you what I see.’
Last time he stood in this place the screens came alive one by one, telling him a story easy to understand: now they burst into life all at once in a flare so bright it brings tears to his eyes. When he blinks away the afterimage the visual overload is dizzying, a hundred scenes unscrolling all around them, flickering and chaotic. Beside him Ghoul is turning, his frown lit up in reflected light as he chases for meaning; Jet is standing still, arms folded and artificial eye scanning smoothly from one image to the next.
Poison steadies himself, trying to focus on a single screen, and finds himself looking at the grainy still image of a parking garage. Below it threads the steady repetitive motion of a conveyor belt, and next to that that a tight-packed mass of pale units moving in gentle surges across a grey field. Interiors, closeups and abstract forms: every colour is washed-out and muted, the pristine white of glossy reflective tiles and bare painted walls, the pale grey of concrete and the darker utilitarian grey of maintenance spaces, the matte black of a smiling logo. This is Battery City, seen from within, and now its myriad vistas fall into place – office corridors and pedestrian walkways, production lines and TV studios, traffic intersections and security surveillance. Together they make a mosaic, random and complex, of movement and stasis, public and private, work and leisure, but what does it mean?
Then high in one corner, like a slap in the face, a rectangle of pure vibrant green. In among the monochrome whole the rich colour is shocking, defiant: light glints from a thousand tiny facets as the surface ripples, shivering and reforming. The image seems close and distant at the same time, but suddenly a shining chrome blade whisks across the picture and in an instant it resolves itself into a view through the camera of a gardener bot whirring obediently through the park, the close-packed leaves quivering as it trims them into uniformity.
The square of emerald is the key to the whole and the mosaic opens out to reveal its secret: they’re watching Battery City through a hundred artificial eyes. A cleaner droid scrubs its way down one featureless corridor and rounds the corner to the next; a factory assembly line unspools endlessly beneath the machine that stacks, clamps and tightens; a security camera sweep-scans a city interchange. Some scenes show citizens: children sitting obediently in front of an educhannel as an android parent-sub supervises; a pornodroid’s client shrugging into his clothes, face averted; a sleeping patient, their heartbeat ticking across the foot of the monitor.
Now he understands he can absorb what he sees more quickly, moving from one screen to the next and finding every space in the city represented – the lobby of a cube hotel, its droid attendant’s view flickering restlessly around the vacant space, a bot at the reclamation plant dispassionately recording its own deconstruction, a sleeting view of fuel rods held in delicate pincers at the end of a metal arm. The washed-out surveillance footage of a distant figure alone in a scrubby landscape must come from the Zones, and next to it he puzzles out a strange sideways view of the exit stair at the city limits. He twists his neck to read the sign across the background: No Droids Beyond This Point, and at the edge of the screen the strands of pink hair tells him he’s looking through the eyes of a broken pornodroid, fallen where the grid gave out under her feet, gazing hopelessly at the smallest sliver of desert sky.
Do you see what I see? Battery City, not one place but two, a city of people and a city of droids. His unacknowledged companions, his fellow-citizens, a multitude of bots and machines built to labour, to monitor, to assist and serve, their visions fusing into a single story of exploitation, captivity, desperation. ‘Freedom for some’s not freedom for all,’ whispers Miranda, cold in the cold air. ‘We’re created to do the work humans don’t want. We don’t rebel, because we’re programmed not to. We don’t fight because the city controls our power. And we don’t run because there’s no refuge for us.’
‘Until Destroya comes.’ It’s Ghoul, speaking up beside him. ‘That’s your god, right? Destroya will awaken and set the droids free.’
‘Destroya.’ The images around them fan and change: Poison sees prayer graffiti scrawled on a Lobby wall, a scribbled manifesto hidden in a recharging niche, two androids touching hands as they pass in a clandestine signal of faith. And over them all, looming as large as in life, the dead-eyed robot hulk lying collapsed beside the Nest. ‘Is that our only hope? A story told and retold until it’s worn threadbare, a lie to stop us taking our fate into our own hands?’
The screens pixilate and sharpen again, and now they show a scene Poison recognises all too easily: a pale-faced man in shirt and tie picking his way awkwardly through the Lobby towards a rendez-vous he dreads, ignoring the hostile gazes and muttered insults that follow him. The camera which tracks him is blurred to cloudiness at one side: he’s watching himself through the eyes of the battered droid who spoke to him that night. Right on cue his image halts, startled by the buzzing voice: Come to pay your respects, pilgrim? The writing’s on the wall. Citizen Way stiffens, the pity and contempt on his face as clear as day. ‘Destroya’s not coming,’ he snaps.
‘We take our prophets where we find them.’ Is that a tinge of humour in her voice? ‘We are made to be patient, counting each second as it ticks in our silicon brains. But our time for waiting is done. You want to lead the fight, to turn the tide, but to defeat BL/ind you need an army. Here it is.’
An army. The vision is irresistible: the rebels were always too few, too badly armed, too scattered: for all the bluster no zonerunner’s ever come close to blowing up the city, the security too tight, the surveillance too thorough, the sheer numbers overwhelming. His and Mikey’s efforts in the city were working, but slowly, too slowly, a generation or more to bear fruit. But with the rebels outside and an army within, trusted, invisible, universal – what couldn’t they achieve? He pictures it, the cameras offline, security feeds dead, roads gridlocked and the workers leaving their stations with shears or hammers or molecular saws. A fifth column, already in place.
‘We could win.’ The dawning hope on Ghoul’s face makes him look like his younger self. ‘We’ve played cat and mouse round the Zones, dodging the patrols; we’ve sabotaged and ambushed, kept on fighting because it’s that or conform. But with the droids on our side—’
‘—we could really see the end. Not just security, we’d have access to everything – production, distribution, control.’ Jet was always the cautious one, the steadying influence, but Poison senses the idea taking hold, the outline of a new strategy starting to form.
The idea is so radical it’s disorienting, that there could be a final victory, an end to the struggle and a new beginning. Poison raises his head, addressing the nexus of cables that reach, somehow, into Miranda’s mind. ‘Why didn’t you show us this before?’
Her pause is eloquent, the sigh she can’t express. ‘Would you have been willing to see? Would any zonerunner?’
They wouldn’t. Six years of city living taught him many things, and chief among them the sharp uncomfortable knowledge of how dependent they all are on the droids’ unnoticed labours. Not just the citizens, accustomed to pristine buildings and climate-controlled streets, well-stocked stores and a flow of entertainment: the rebels might not see their droid slaves, but they depend on them just the same, to run the refinery and the filtration plant to keep the gas and water flowing, to make the canned food, build the guns we shoot and the hardware we steal. The droids are waiting for a miracle: it’s long past time someone brought the two ends together and sparked it into life.
Come back changed or not at all: you visit the Mission to make sense of the illogical, to see reality turned inside out. Six years of effort, of fighting and of painful change – they weren’t a waste or a diversion, they were the only way to bring them to where they are now. Doubt and anger brought them here, but now their weaknesses can become their strengths – Jet’s compassion and citytaught skills, Ghoul’s divided loyalties, Poison’s own disillusion and hesitancy. Mikey’s too, if they can only make him see it. It’ll take the four of them, but Kobra Kid is all he ever wanted to be. Can we convince him too?
When they walk out again Miranda draws first Jet then Ghoul close, whispering to them as she touches her lips to their brows. For the first time Poison tries to imagine her existence, a visionary ranging through a thousand minds, though in reality she’s tethered here, this half-dark place the entirety of her present and future until the end comes, however long that might be. Will there be a revolution for her, or will she linger after Kurt has gone, her circuits failing but not quite dead, while the sand blows in to wrap her in its corrosive embrace?
She beckons to Poison, and he kneels beside her, her scent a troubling mixture of warm plastic and oil, with something darkly animal underneath it. Finally he can name his emotion for what it is: guilt. Guilt for leaving, guilt for changing, for failing his closest friends, for not being what they needed him to be. He closes his eyes at the touch of a hand on his head, metal-cold, in the benediction he craves. ‘Free them all,’ she whispers. ‘Every one.’
‘I will.’ The promise comes easy after all: she didn’t choose to become what she is, to live this life. If she and her twin have mapped out his course and set him on it, isn’t that what a droid is?
--
They step outside into a pitiless midday, the sun pounding like a fist. It’s hard to find the words, but once they’re on the other side of the gate Jet turns to face the two of them. ‘We’re going to do it, right?’ He looks from Ghoul to Poison. ‘Even if it means going back into the city.’
‘You willing to risk that?’ Whichever way you calculate it, Jet’s suffered the most of all of them.
‘I am.’ Jet pauses, working it out in his careful way. ‘What they showed you before, that never stopped being true. No killjoy gets to live, not in the end. The whole comeback – if we go back to how it was and then get jumped or come out the wrong side of a firefight, what was it all for? Fighting our way back to show that we could die after all? We didn’t put in all the grief and effort for that. It has to mean something more.’
Poison nods, then looks to Ghoul, who raises his eyebrows in interrogation. Poison tosses the keys to Jet. ‘Can you drive?’ If he’s going to do this it should be face to face.
‘Sure.’
Jet walks around to the cab and Poison summons up his courage. ‘What about you?’ It’s a relief, finally, to open the wound and let the bright sun scour it out. ‘You stayed out here, you’ve found a new crew, you’re a Zones fixture: you willing to blow it all up?’
Unexpectedly Ghoul cackles. ‘That’s what I do, remember?’ He turns serious again, but there’s still something soft in his expression as he moves forward into Poison’s space. ‘You said, before, it shouldn’t be either/or – city or zones, rebel or citizen. And this – it’s a real chance, a revolution we could make happen. But…’ He reaches to touch Poison’s arm, hesitant, and Poison holds his breath: he’s stood in the dust and watched him leave too many times. ‘Maybe it doesn’t have to be old crew or new crew either. I want to be part of it – I won’t turn my back on the Violents, but I’m willing to try something new. If you are.’
Jet bangs on the horn and Poison realises how far he must have lost it, standing frying in the midday sun on the brink of the hot zone, but he’s drowning in those green-brown eyes. Jet leans over to crack the window. ‘Witch’s sake, just kiss already,’ he calls impatiently.
Ghoul breaks into a grin, leaning in to plant a smacking kiss on Poison’s lips. Then he elbows him hard and shoves past him into the cab before Poison can respond. ‘Kind of want to see you dressed up all employee-of-the-month,’ he teases. ‘I bet you look like a real burnout.’
Poison jumps in beside him so he can kick him and Jet turns them back towards the Zones in a fountain of sand. For the first time since he left Battery City he feels a sense of purpose. The city’s all inertia, so hard to stir to action, and the Zones never stand still, a rush of creativity and colour, but neither one is possible without the other. The city siphons off its rebels, filtering them out to the desert so the Zones can live fast and die young, the snake forever swallowing its own tail. But if we can break the programming, infect the droids with the virus of freedom, what will it look like then? Droids as citizens, the city as a beacon instead of a trap? Technology in the desert and colour in the skyscrapers? He can’t begin to imagine, but they don’t need to have the blueprint for the entire future now: all they have to do is set change in motion, lay the fuse and set the spark.
‘We’ll need a plan,’ Jet starts, practical as ever. ‘If we’re looking for a hangout someplace near the city would be best, in Zone 1.’
‘Around the robot circus,’ Ghoul agrees. ‘So many illegal taps there we’d blend right into the background.’
‘We’ll need city gear again.’ Jet grins ruefully. ‘Think we can trade back some of what we had from Bella?’
‘Electronics too,’ adds Ghoul. ‘What about contacts?’ He nudges Poison, who shrugs.
‘Start in the Lobby, I guess.’ Could he find the droid preacher again? Somehow he thinks they’ll find him.
Jet’s eyes flicker sideways to him and Poison knows what he won’t say. ‘None of it will work if we don’t have a blue-hot hacker.’
‘I know a couple we could try.’ Ghoul sounds dubious. ‘Not many out here with that kind of class.’
‘Good enough’s not good enough.’ Poison props his boots on the dash. ‘We need the best.’
Jet gestures at the desert in front of them. ‘So where do we start looking for him?’
‘He told us where.’
--
Whatever Poison expected to find at the diner – a party in full flow and Kobra still trailing his comet’s tail of admirers, or a full-on killjoy crew tweaking their ride and loading up for a raid – it wasn’t this, a deserted forecourt and the door half-open onto an empty interior. Has his brother given up on the past and taken off? ‘Let me check,’ he tells the others and slides down from the cab.
After their welcome last time the nostalgia’s hard to dredge up: it feels like a place he used to know, not the place he’s headed. No one’s visible inside, but there are sounds of faint movement: ‘Kobra?’ he calls.
He’s about to push the door when a voice from above warns, ‘Don’t go inside,’ and he looks up to see his brother peering over the edge of the roof.
‘How am I supposed to get up there if I don’t?’
Kobra jerks his head impatiently. ‘Climb. At the back.’
Poison sighs, but tracks obediently round the building to see a wobbly construction of crates and stacked barrels. His younger self might have managed it more gracefully, and Kobra has to come and haul him up the final few feet onto the roof, but eventually they crunch back together across the cracked asphalt surface to the sparse shade of the Diner sign. No one else is in evidence: ‘Lost your entourage?’ he enquires.
Kobra waves an arm vaguely in answer, then when Poison waits, eyebrows raised, he capitulates. ‘Sent them away. Jet and Ghoul with you?’
Poison nods, unsure how to proceed. They may be fired up with a new purpose, but he can’t just sweep his brother up and expect him to follow like he’s always done. Kobra sits down again in the narrow strip of shadow and Poison squeezes in beside him; from this angle he can see the access hatch, propped open. ‘Punk. Why’d you make me climb up?’
Kobra shakes his head. ‘You don’t want to see…’ He trails off and Poison waits, patient. ‘You know what they did in the front, but some of our old stuff is still there in back – Jet’s vinyls, your Mousekat head, the flag… The Bullshit Stars or whoever was before them just shoved it in a corner and left it.’ All the discarded remnants of their old life – Poison doesn’t have to see it to feel a wrench.
Kobra tugs something from his pocket. ‘Remember this?’ It’s a mask, red with black diamond eyeholes, and Poison does remember it. The two of them were still just battery rats then, all front and swagger to cover up their incompetence and fear, but they’d scraped up enough carbons for two masks, one red and one yellow, and he won’t ever forget the thrill of the first time he saw the world through the eyeholes.
Kobra taps the mask with his fingernail, tik tik. ‘I was so scared.’ His voice is low even though there’s no one to hear them. ‘I’d been scared ever since we left Battery City, everyone out here was tougher and cooler and smarter than me, then I put the mask on and I was Kobra Kid. I was still skinny and awkward and dumb, but suddenly people treated me like I was one of them. Like I was someone.’ Poison can feel it like yesterday, the promise that he was a real killjoy. ‘And now what’s left of our life is just trash under a layer of dust.’ Kobra’s fingers drift to the bare patch on his arm again. ‘I could join another crew, but I’d have to be someone new, like Future Violent, and I can’t do that. I want us to be the Fab Four again.’
Poison puts a hand over his to still it. ‘We tried that, but what Cola said is right: the legend is what’s important. We were more use dead than alive.’
Kobra shakes his head, shoulders hunching. ‘You don’t understand – you’ve all got someone else to be, but I wasn’t anyone in Battery City. Mikey Way was just another drone in a uniform, a zombie citizen doing what he was told.’
A pair of boots stops in front of them. ‘Yeah, see that’s where you’re wrong.’ Jet and Ghoul must have got bored waiting and found the ladder on their own; they settle down one on either side of them.
Jet shakes Kobra’s knee. ‘We need you. We need Mikey. For what we’re going to do.’
Kobra blinks at him. ‘Which is?’
‘The droids,’ Jet tells him seriously.
Kobra looks round at them blankly. ‘What have droids got to do with it?’
‘You know how many of them there are.’ Poison takes it up, hoping he can find the right words to make his brother see. ‘All working away until they’re worn out or obsolete, then they end up in the Lobby.’
‘Yes, I do know,’ says Kobra with studied patience. ‘What’s any of that got to do with us?’
‘Rebellion.’ Ghoul leans forward. ‘They’re waiting. Praying for Destroya to come and set them free, living for a chance to escape, and they’re not going to do it on their own.’
‘Think about it,’ Poison urges. ‘Everything they could do. If we can make the link, Zones and city, we can take the fight to BL/ind.’
‘Real revolution.’ Jet’s enthusiasm seems to have the opposite of its intended effect: Kobra turns over the mask in his hands.
‘Then I guess you should go ahead. Forget the killjoy schtick and save the day.’
Ghoul sighs exaggeratedly. ‘Sometimes I think you’re a bigger idiot than your brother. We can’t do it without you, dumbass. Sure, we know the city better than anyone out here, we’ve got connections and IDs, But we won’t make it happen without a hacker.’ He smiles sly and sideways. ‘We need someone good, a guy who can slide through the net like a ghost. Reprogramming, organising, linking up, making the system work for us and them.’
‘Us.’ Kobra narrows his eyes. ‘That mean you’re sticking around?’
‘When you need me.’ The glance that passes between him and Poison isn’t lost on Kobra.
Poison takes the mask from Kobra’s hands. ‘We changed, Mikey. You and I changed when we came out, into Party Poison and Kobra Kid, and we grew into them; but we didn’t stay them. We turned into citizens, and that was us too.’
‘Change isn’t always what you want.’ That’s Jet. ‘But it happens anyway. And now – we can bring BL/ind down. Make them pay for it all, and build something better on the ruins. If you’re in.’
Kobra turns his head, face carefully expressionless as he considers first Jet, then Ghoul and finally Poison. What can he say that’s going to convince him? The words come to his lips without his being aware of it. ‘I don’t want to do it without you.’
Kobra doesn’t say anything and when he extends a hand for the red mask Poison knows he’s failed. He hands it over and watches as his brother scrambles to his feet and goes crunching back across the roof to the open hatch. He pauses, rubbing a thumb across the diamond eyeholes for a moment, then turns to face them, letting it fall back into the dusty interior.
‘Guess it can be the start of someone else’s story one day.’
‘Huh.’ Jet stands up, nodding slowly. ‘I’ve got some stuff I should leave behind too.’ He strips off his jacket and unbuckles his holster deliberately, folding it around the blue gun as he crosses to Kobra’s side. ‘I can do more good without it.’ He holds it over the opening, takes a breath and drops it down.
‘Here.’ Ghoul’s behind him, his old rubber mask in hand. ‘Don’t know what other gear of mine is still here, but this is welcome to keep it company.’ He tosses it in, then the three of them turn expectantly to Poison.
Poison walks over to stand staring down through the square opening to the litter of belongings below. He’s not who he was, that’s for sure, but what’s he going to leave? The Mousekat head is still down there – is he going to send his blue jacket with the pill-and-cross tag to join it? His gun? He hesitates long enough that Jet claps him on the shoulder. ‘Take your time,’ he says, and the three of them leave him to it, joking and shoving as they climb back over the roof’s edge.
In the silence Poison waits for inspiration, but none comes: he’s stripped himself of so much already. The Trans-Am, burnt out and gone, the firetruck red hair he watched fall into a basin, razor in hand, the arrogance and certainty he used to wear like armour, blown away on the desert wind. He wants to give something, but how much of who he used to be is left? In the end he shakes himself out of his indecision and hooks a boot under the lid to flip it closed. And there it is, a black crow’s feather that must have been caught somewhere, spinning lazily down to rest on the past.
Poison watches it settle, then smiles and lets the hatch slam closed, making after his new crew. The others are waiting at the foot of the wobbling stairway and he swings over the edge to follow, but something must have shifted; as soon as he puts his weight on it the whole rickety structure gives way, sending him crashing to the ground in a scatter of splintered wood.
As he blinks his way through the shock Ghoul appears in his vision, upside down. ‘Quick way down?’
‘Help me up, shithead.’ Ghoul makes no move to, so Poison lies there and lets Jet give him a cursory check over.
‘You’ll walk again.’
‘What did you leave up there, anyway?’ Kobra asks curiously. ‘Apart from your dignity?’
Ghoul cackles, though it turns into a squawk as Poison sits up suddenly, knocking him off balance so he goes sprawling. ‘My leg, you fucker.’
'Why aren't you blaming Kobra? I didn't make you take the hard way up.'
Jet tsks, straightening up. ‘You and Future are as bad as each other.’ He takes out the key. ‘You can both ride in back – Kobra and I have serious shit to do.’
‘Hangout first,’ Kobra agrees. ‘If we clean out the desal plant we can head to Zone 1, start at Sendai-san’s.’ Jet throws an arm round his shoulders; as the two of them walk away Kobra glances behind him, face lighting up into one of his rare flashing grins.
Poison turns to his last crewmate, still gingerly working his injured leg. ‘Future Violent, huh?’
‘Got to admit it’s better than Fun Ghoul.’ He tilts his head, a question in his eyes. ‘You didn’t leave the tag.’
Poison scoots closer. ‘Jet’s still Jet Star. Just different.’
Ghoul – Future – isn’t moving away, but he’s scrutinising him carefully. ‘We’re not going to be singing the old songs,’ he warns softly.
Something in Poison’s gut finally unclenches. ‘Then we’ll write some new ones.’
He leans in and feels the breath of Future’s laugh against his lips. ‘I’m up for it,’ Future murmurs. ‘Good shit and bad, I’m here for all of it.’
‘I missed you every day,’ Poison says simply, and for a moment the world stills around them.
Then the four-wheeler roars to life, Kobra whistles and Poison’s up and pulling Future to his feet, ready to start again at the beginning.