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One
It started with a strange thing.
In the desert strange things went on all the time. Stories got around. Sometimes it was only a tired-crazy friend of a friend, or a fever dream told by Runners who’d crunched too many nitros at once and tripped out all over the landscape, or something half-remembered from a comic book they had read Before. But other times genuinely unexplainable shit just happened . It was something every Runner eventually accepted, like the everywhere-always dust.
On the afternoon a strange thing happened upon the Fabulous killjoy crew, Party Poison stood outside the old bathroom that the Girl had reclaimed as her crashpad, rubbing his temple. The door locks in the diner had rusted out of any usefulness a long-ass time ago, so he didn’t have to be standing out there, but he didn't want to just barge in on the kid. She'd not been acting too like herself in the past couple days. Reminded him nothing more than animals crawling under things not feeling too well, or maybe one of them had offended her somehow and she was sulking. Either way. It’d been entirely too long that she’d been in her room. She needed air and eats. It was up to him to get her out. He knocked the same way he punched, all knuckles and with no room for mistakes. “I know you can hear me honey. It's grub time. Open up.”
“Go away.” The eleven year old's voice was muffled by the door but there was still a definite whine in it.
Poison sighed. “I’m not budging,” he said, trying to be calm and patient. “What's been going on with you? You're gonna end all withered pale, you stay in there for much longer.”
“It's not...” She made a noise that had half a chance of being a sniffle.
Was the girl getting sick? He tapped on the door. “If there's something going on with you we have to talk about it, sugarhead. Even if you ain’t too comfortable with the whole thing.”
“I know that , it's not even--- I can't put on any of my shirts,” Girl mumbled.
... oh, Party thought. She had been getting taller lately, and was about that age. Idiot not to’ve realized it sooner. “We'll find you some new shirts,” he said. “Uh. And whatever else you need, Cherry'd know where to grab them, sure. Are you--”
“No, I mean--” The door scraped against itself as Girl pushed it open from her side and stepped out.
Poison stared for a second. It wasn't often he doubted his own head, doubt could get you real dead real fast in the Zones, but him and the three others had partied pretty hard the week before and he'd taken his fair share of trinkets. Mild eye-waves were usually the least of what party-poppers could give a person. “Uh. Want to tell what’s all this?”
“They showed out properly a couple days ago.” Without looking at Poison directly, Girl shifted the bundle of blankets she'd clutched to her chest instead of a shirt. The wings fluttered a bit when her arms moved. “My backs' been itching fierce for a long time, but I just thought.” She shrugged, and the wings went up and down along with her shoulders. “I didn't mean a secret by it, exactly.”
“Shiny,” Poison said, still processing. Then he stepped back, letting out a string of choice words that made the motorbaby grin (a bit wobbily, which concerned him, but it turned out there were more pressing things). “I'll be back,” he promised, and then went back out to the garage to share the news.
*
Later the same afternoon found the motorbaby perching on the hood of the Am. Much more relaxed. Instead of clutching blankets she’d got given an old apron to wear, one Ghoul had used to keep his jacket clean when he'd been greasemonkeying. It was tattered and covered with oil smears but after Party sacrificed a can of spray-on paint to the cause it was tattered and smeared and bright blue, which was just shiny. Plus, Ghoul had hacked off about half of its length so it hit Girl's waist instead of her knees and tied the top ribbons up solid. Altogether it made a decent halter top for her while leaving more enough room for her extras.
Ghoul himself sat behind her on the car, legs folded up pretzel-like, gently combing his fingers through the scraggly feathers. Real feathering. Huh. They reminded him of the small quick birds that sometimes flitted from branch to branch out in the bare trees by the road. It fit, he thought. Girl and the little birds had similar bright voices.
“Ow!” Girl yelped, twitching away as Ghoul's fingernail caught on one of her feathers. “Be careful. ”
Ghoul freed the feather carefully. “My bad. These are definitely wings,” he announced to the group. “The bone's all the way set into her shoulder, and the feathers are set into the bone.”
Over in the corner Jet Star nodded, still fiddling with his guitar. He'd been as shocked as the others when the small one had walked in but he'd accepted it as just as another wave in the frequency, like he did most things.
Kobra had gone eye-bright and analytical. Now he came around to the side of the car where Ghoul and Girl were sitting. “Can you stretch them? Flap?”
Girl made a considering noise and shrugged off Ghouls' hands, then awkwardly slid off the front of the car's hood and stood up. She narrowed her eyebrows in concentration, keeping her arms tight to her sides, and-- slowly, a bit awkwardly, her wings unfolded themselves from her back and spread out. The brown feathers (striped with lighter browns and speckled with pale beige) glowed gold in the sunlight from the entrance of the garage. Her angel-shadow stretched across the floor and the back wall. It was a treat to see. “A little?” She answered Kobra uncertainly, trying to crane her neck over her own shoulders. “I can keep them like this for a bit, I did that before, but... it feels like I've been walking too much, except in my shoulders.”
“They hurt?” Jet asked, looking up with concern.
“Negatory. Just, feels like...” Girl's wings gave a half-hearted twitch forward. “Stretching.”
“Coming up on your six again,” Ghoul said, sliding onto his feet. He’d noticed some dust and sand caked into the lower feathers. Carefully, he pulled his fingers across the bottom half of the girl's wings again. A shower of sand bits rained from the packed feathers down to his feet. That can't've been comfortable. He tapped one of the top bones of her left wing, feeling its thickness between his fingers. “How long have you been hiding these?” He chided. “They shouldn't be this crooked.”
“Do you have previous experience with younglings morphing half-avian, Ghoul?” Kobra asked drily. Twitchy in his blood, he'd wandered over to the entrance of the lean-to garage while Girl was stretching and was now half-leaned out of it looking over their patch of hot desert. “You've got some shit to share with us, my friend.”
Ghoul spared a second to flip Kobra off. “Just common sense, snakeface. Look at the lines of the bones, they're all lopsided.”
After a beat of silence Kobra shrugged an affirmative.
Girl's shoulders hunched. “I thought they looked shiny,” she mumbled.
“Oh, he didn't mean it like that, sugarhead,” Jet Star said. He got to his feet and walking over to them. It was surprising to the others that he’d kept from hovering for that long. “It's not something we’d thought of, that's all.”
“Why didn't you tell us?” Poison said loudly, his first real contribution to the conversation since the motorbaby had walked behind him into the room. “We could have helped you earlier.” He was sitting on a discarded van seat on the dust-dirt floor a couple feet away from the rest of them. When he wiped his hair out his face the dye left red sweat-streaks on his hands.
“Didn't need help,” Girl shot back, giving her wings that half-twitch again. After a few seconds of silence, she looked down at her feet and kicked up some dust self-consciously. “I thought you might try to cut them off or something,” she admitted. “Having a freak on the team isn't exactly milkshake.”
Poison blinked. “Where'd you get that from?”
“Don't know,” Girl muttered. She refolded her wings against her back, fluffing them a few times before they settled. “... you're not going to kick me out or nothing, right?”
“We're not--” Poison snorted. After a second of bickering back and forth in his brainpan, he leaned forward so he was looking at her directly. He needed to be as crystal as he could. “Look, we'd drive straight into the city-hive for you, sugar. Of course we won't kick you out.”
“Oh.” Girl didn't know what to say so she just scuffed at the dirt again, going red a little. She hated it when she acted like a little kid around the crew. Of course they wouldn’t have kicked her out ‘cause of some stupid grow-ins. She was stupid.
“Hey, hey,” Ghoul said, noticing her face. “It's all clear skies motorbaby. Mean, you catching shut-eye well enough? Hungry like normal?”
“Yeah.”
He spread his hands, there's that shit solved then. “If you feel a powerful need to peck at some roadkill or something tell us. Otherwise it's all just shiny.”
“We should probably go take her to see the Doc,” Kobra said, leaning against the side of the Am again. “Just for shits and giggles. See if he's seen this sorta show before.”
“She'll need a new jacket,” Jet added. “I mean. Do you want one, Girl? That'd be good?” He nudged her shoulder a little.
“... milkshake,” she replied, looking up. “I want to keep my vest though.”
Ghoul nodded and dusted his hands off, a bright grin on his face. “We can help with that.”
&
Two
It'd only fit with such a transformation that the motorbaby got a tranformative name.
Kobra had the starting brain-flash for the word. He was leaning on the outside wall of the diner smoking cigarettes and ostensibly watching out front for cars when it came to him.
The Girl herself at the time was in the main room of the diner, dancing. The transistor radio she'd put on a perch on the dusty countertop and tuned up loud to DJ Hot Chimps' station, which'd been pumping out jumping tunes all day. Girl wasn't super sleek on her feet or rhythm-oriented but she was fast. All bending elbows and knees and flourishing turns. Her wings fluttered in the slipstream she stirred up, flexing out when she raised her arms or spun a twirl that was nine parts a catch-herself-before-she-faceplanted.
Kobra considered her wings from his spot just outside the cracked glass doors. They're stunted and scraggly grown, yeah. Their colouring and existence made them kind of miracled anyway. Kobra had never really paid attention to birds--- unless they were smile-faced Crows, or the kind that hang around dead things-- but he knew that he'd seen Girl's kind of wings before. The name was stuck in his grey matter somewhere. He idly tried to remember it as he finished his smoke. He was thinking of other things too: how the patrol he'd take soon would be, and the bonfire that was happening later in the week out at the border where he could score some things and some other things, and how Girl's dance moves were almost in lines with his fighting style. She was tall enough now to get leverage, he could start teaching her some hand to hand. He could ask her about it if she rolled out with him on patrol soon. Then, through a thought-jump he doesn't quite understand himself, the name for the small brown bird that Girl shared her wings with was in his head. Huh.
He tapped out his smoke on the wall and went inside, keeping out of range of the mosh pit that was written in the dust patterns on the floor.
Girl paused, looking over at the door-squeak that interrupted her noise. When she saw it was Kobra she grinned. “Do you wanna dance?”
“Negatory this moment.” Kobra leaned on the diner counter, out of her way. “Figured what bird you look like,” he added conversationally. “Ghoul was muttering about it before but I twigged it now.”
“Yeah?” Girl didn't know any names of birds, besides sandgulls and the ones with white masks you ran from. She'd like too though. She stretched her wings and used their wind to swoop over to Kobra, catching herself on the edge of the counter with a giggle.
He smiled down at her the blink-and-miss way he did. He moved over so she could hop up and pulls some sweetsticks out of his pocket, offering them over. “You look like a brown-bird, a little wren.”
She took two. “Shiny.”
Kobra nodded, the thought floating off now that he’d let it out. One of his old elbow issues cracked when he stretched his arms, making him wince. But it wasn't too bad today. He could still ride. “You want come with a patrol, sugarhead? Take a bike to the east highway and back, shoot anything city-shaped and moving.”
“Right now?” The girl stopped eating for a second, considering. Her head twitched to the side.
Bird, Kobra thought, and he couldn't remember if she did that head thing before or not. “Right now,” he confirmed. “Just grab the noisemaker and we can roll out.”
“Sure!” She hopped off the counter, grabbing her jacket with one hand. The radio she snatched up smoothly as she passed it, hefting it up on her shoulder like a proper boombox should go.
Kobra followed her into the garage and out to the motorbike parked in front of it. They stopped just inside the shade the shadow of the garage threw so Girl could manoeuvre her various attached parts through her jacket properly. When she'd finally gotten it dealt with she stood in the sunlight for a second, her wings stretched wide like she was showering in it. “Wren?” She said, looking over at Kobra. Her wings and her jacket made quite the picture together, which she seemed to relish. (She'd learned from the best.)
He nodded.
“It's my name,” she announced. “I just decided. Cause I like it. I like it a lot.” Her feathers seemed to puff up with pride, and the scouring wind.
Kobra looked at her for a couple calculating seconds. Then he said, “Well, we'll just have to call you it from now on, huh?”
“Huh,” Wren agreed, her smile bright on her sun-smoothed face.
And so they did.
Everyone still shouted “girl” in the diner if they wanted her over to them. Poison in particular still called her honey on and off, as he had since she'd first shown up at the diner. But Wren was her name. The motorbaby liked Wren, was proud of it. 'The Girl' as a name was perfectly fine, too, but Wren felt more free.
&
Three
No matter what kind of extra-natural happenstances go on, there's some universal truths in the desert. One of them’s that all Runners gotta have dinner. Even ones with wings.
The Fabulous killjoys killed things to eat sometimes. They’d be too generous to call it “hunting” but they set up traps for anything they could get their hands on: eggs, snakes, non-rad'd mice, lizards, birds.
It was the last one gave Party Poison trouble one day.
He and his crew had gone out to a outcrop of trees that local Runners excused as a forest and laid traps, a couple days before. When they went back to it they found they'd caught a pretty decent haul of two pigeons and four snakes. They killed the struggling animals, dismantled the traps, stuffed the carcasses in canvas bags, hiked back to the diner through the heat. In the back room of the diner Ghoul and Poison bled out the animals and picked most of the pigeons' feathers off. Kobra, Jet and the motorbaby had stood watch out front. After that was done they waited the sunset out, went outside as soon as it wasn't soul-burning hot anymore and started up a bonfire in the back lot with leftover diesel and wood planks.
Kobra stuck the transistor radio from the Am in the sand, closer to the heat than was probably good for it. It pumped out loud warbly tunes to the accompaniment of the cicadas and weedhopper bugs in the dried grasses around them. All in all, it was almost a party.
They roasted the meat and passed it around on one plastic plate, along with hard kibble and a couple strands of green stuff they'd traded around for. Each Killjoy took a few pieces of each and chowed down.
Until the pigeon gets to Wren, who stared at it for a second, then passed it over to Poison.
Poison gave it back, gesturing for her to eat. Food can be scarce in the desert, and you have to eat when you've got it. He would've thought she'd got that by now.
But she shook her head 'no' all the same and tried to pass it back over again.
“Goddamnit, sugar, just take some and eat your damn food. What's wrong with you?” Poison huffed.
She bristled, setting the scrap of cloth she was holding her food in down in the sand. “Hey! There isn't shit wrong with me. I am eating my food, just not the bird. Look, Ghoul isn't eating pigeon either, and you're not sniping at him. ”
Ghoul looked up from his own pile of grub-- which was, admittedly, pigeon-free. His eyes flicked between Wren and Party (who was glowering). “Bean poles got a point,” he said.
Poison put his face in his hands. “Not fucking helping, monster-brain.” But he didn't push it anymore. The girl had been stubborn as a stuck door lately and you can't make someone fucking eat if they don't want to.
Wren waited for something else from him but when nothing was said she shrugged. Then scarfed the rest of her food, sand particles and all. She dusted off her hands on the knees of her jeans as she stood up. “It'd be yougnawing,” she said to Poison, and with that skittered off around the side of the building. Probably up to the roof. Being higher up had been a usual thing for her lately.
The rest of them were quiet for a hot second after Wren left. They were all thinking the same thing, more or less: that Wren's not a baby anymore but she was still young, she hadn't seen everything yet. Yeah, there was enough food in the general Zones to find when you looked for it, but there was also a hundred different-special ways to go crazy out in the sands even if you weren't dumped out here already loose in the brainscrews. You got ambushed by the wrong people, the really wrong people, and shit could happen. Wren'd thrown the word out like it was a joke or unbelievable, but the others knew better.
Then Poison spoke up, glaring at Fun Ghoul over the fire. “Do you fucking know how dangerous picking and choosing is out here, motherfucker? We've already got enough problems, she has to be able to eat. ”
“How long do you think I've been vegheaded, motherfucker?” Ghoul set down his food. “I do alright. Look, I'll make sure she gets grub. It won't kill her. The sugarhead's making her own choices, we shouldn't be shutting her down.” People leave the City to be free-minded, and go hard or go fucking home, as far as he's concerned. Any limit on a thought that didn't hurt no one--- no one who ain't trying to to hurt someone else first, anyway-- was plain-faced bullshit through and through. “And it would be,” he added after a second. “It would be, if she's seriously part-avian, which sure fucking seems so. You can't be pissed at her for saying that when it's true. And you sure as fuck can't be pissed at me. ”
Party glared at the ground for a couple minutes, then rose from the log he was sitting on and stomped off through the sand.
Kobra Kid let out a ' tch' sound and finished a bit of his snake. (It wasn't same-eating, as much as in the early days before the hunger really set in the others' had teased him about it. Unlike the kid, his name was only a name.) Then he got up from the fire too and went off into the dark to find Poison and distract him.
But, Ghoul noticed, neither of them argue the point. He considered that a win for him and the motorbaby both.
&
Four
A few weeks later the crew were out making a water run when they hit a nest of Dracs. Wren got nabbed.
They all noticed her gone. Jet's the one who actually sees her get hit over the head and go down hard in the sand then get bundled up into the Dracs van and sped away with the Killjoys shooting everything they have after them. He'd told the others in the car while adrenaline was still near to high to see; Ghoul swore a blue streak at the reflection of the Dracs in the rearview and Poison almost swerved off the road.
It was horrible. But it was always horrible. Bullshit had went down before and it would go down again. When you live in the Zones, that was something you learned to accept.
They'd get her back.
Whenever Dracs stole somebody they'd take them to Re-Education Centres. The Centres were basically giant holding tanks BLI had set up in the desert a long way back, when the fight had only been first starting and no one had estimated how much punch the desert-dwellers could bring. They were built denser with more security in the Inner Zones (One straight out to Three), rising out of the parched ground practically every four hundred feet, with nine yards of security alarms and dogs and douchebags in suits. One could take a Runner days to get through. The Centres built past Three, though, were way easier to crack open; out in Zone Six they were nothing more than concrete boxes. They were also easy enough to understand once you got into them (though generally you wanted to stay away as much as you could).
That was good news for the Fabulous crew, since the five of them had been out in Zone Six when Wren got grabbed. It was extra-easy-peasy because they’re only a few minutes drive away from the Doc when it happened, and he had a network of eager eyes all up and down that part of the desert, friendly to the Fabulous ones by a large part and the small part that ain't Didi knew to ignore about them.
The four of them spend a couple hours to patch up their wounds, then set themselves up to go rescue their fifth. They didn't waste any seconds worrying.
At least, not until Show Pony rolled up. The ladyboy was always rolling up to the Killjoys, but this time their eyes are dark and their face is no better. “She’s not in a centre out here,” they told the Killjoys. Their hands were crossed over their cropped shirt, fingers digging into their forearms. “Some ‘joys saw the van with the plates you caught going farther in.”
“How much farther?” Jet straightened up.
Show looks angry and sad all in one. “A study facility,” they said. The words were strange coming from their mouth, way too formal and oddly shaped. “Over in Five.”
Ghoul swore angrily at the air.
Centres had been BL/IND's oldest attempt to get the desert back into its corporate fists; study facilities were the newest. Only a couple of months back lines of heavy white trucks had trundled out of Bat City, heavy on Route Guano. The swarms of Dracs in the trucks had took over some buildings that were leftover from the Pig Bombs in each zone past Two, fixing them up City-bright and fitting them with things that'd rip any-unauthorized one going in or out apart. No one knew why the Dracs had picked the far out Zones. Some would tell you that it was just a convenience thing for the nobodyfaces; this way they could exterminate from two sides instead of one, like a explosion duo running toward a center line. Whatever reason they were there, the ones out in Six had gotten shut down fast; some wild heavy-armed Runners out there had lobbed firebombs and handgrenades into the building's window-holes, before the Dracs could set up fireproof and shock absorbing filler plastic, then had shot anything that tried to run out after the explosions rocked the bricks apart. The buildings in Three and Four had gone the same way. But in Five they had grown roots, swelled with all of the Dracs from the failed operations that'd flooded back there to escape the fire from other sides. Now there was all kinds of City shit peppering the Zone, most notably the Dracs patrols coming in and out from newly lit-up places with LABORATORY spelled out in fluroescent letters on their fronts. All desert-dwellers had learned to take wide paths around those building.
And their motorbaby was in one of them. Party ground his teeth.
“What kind?” Jet Star asked like someone who already knew the answer, hands tight on his helmet almost enough to make it crack. There were three types, as far as anyone non-BLI knew. Bio Fuels, where trucks full of plants disappeared; Ecosystem Management, where Dracs hauled drugged up animals and birds; and the last kind---
“Genetics advancement,” Show Pony spat out.
-- where they put people.
“They’re taking her to a fucking slice and dice."
Kobra stood up, snapping his visor down with a sharp motion of his hand. “We have to find her now. ”
The others could only agree.
*
They found the building. That wasn't the hard part.
They drove in full-throttle, burning rubber onto the sleek grey asphalt that was glaringly out of place in the dust-filled hills. The front doors of the building were cracked glass with a kind of twisty ladder painted on them. They slammed open and closed as Dracs poured out and into formation on the asphalt. There were dozens, maybe as many as fifty, all yelling in their weird gargling language that made no sense to anybody without a chip in their brain.
Fast as a snake Ghoul unrolled his window, pulled out pins on two grenades using his teeth, took one in each hand, lobbed them low to the ground in two directions. He dove to the floor of the Am, covering his ears even through his rebreather with his hands, and the other men mimicked him on all sides. Seconds later a shockwave rocked the Am and debris-filled smoke came sailing into through the window Ghoul left open, peppering the seats and the Killjoys' backs with bits of rock and broken glass. It took a while for the air to clear, but when it did there were no more garbled voices. A thin wail filled it instead, rising and falling rhythmically; the building's security alarm.
Ghoul looked up when Jet tapped him on the shoulder, all made eye-contact with each other, through their rebreathing masks. Everyone still alive, not cut too bad. At a sharp gesture from Poison they picked themselves up and got out of the car.
There were more Dracs just inside the door of the building, waiting in the shadows of the offices. They started firing when they saw the intruders, but the killjoys all shot first. And kept shooting.
Another universal desert truth: there is a lot of shit in the Zones. All killjoys see it. There needs to be a strong stomach in them for it, 'cause the one’s who don’t have strong stomachs either go crawling snot-faced back to the City or die in a matter of weeks.
The Fabulous ones have been around the sands for a long time, seen their fair share of bugs running along the underbelly. Still, things they find in the warren-like lower floor of the slice and dice make Poison feel like not eating for a long time. It took each of them three reloads of their blasters to get through to the basement floor where the holding cells and other non-official rooms were. When they reached the last stair Party was cradling his left arm, Jet limping pretty bad and both Kobra and Ghoul had rank-smelling burns across their chest and shoulder respectively. They all kept moving, determined to the grave.
The silence in the basement was almost worst than the eardrum-scramble of the firefight. It was set up like sets of wheels: main rooms hubs that hallways full of rooms spoked out from, surrounded by one long perimeter hallway that didn't lead anywhere except in. The Fabulous ones step over the Drac corpses they’d so recently made and walk around the white halls slowly, trying every door. There were a couple of supply rooms with shelves full of vials and complicated-looking dormant machines; a couple morgues full of stripped, sterile bodies; a few laboratories full of oozing convulsing people who would only be bodies given short time. Kobra Kid executed these ones, pity and disgust in equal measure on his face. A clean shot to their heads and they laid still.
One door the Killjoys opened presented a circular operating theatre that looked like it was prepped for surgery, though the City-brained surgeons that must have been in it had scarpered when the alarms lit up. Half a dozen machines lined the walls, all still hooked up and humming softly. A sterile tray was covered with things for pulling and cutting and staunching and sawing and cauterizing. Beside the tray, right in the middle of the room, a steel-edged operating table stood polished bright enough to blind under the industrial lights. Three sets of flexible plastic straps hung off its sides, restraints for some poor bastards' ankles and waist and shoulders, but they were adjusted wrongly for the size of the table. They looked like they would fit a child.
Jet Star jerked back when he first opened the door; Poison felt nauseous; Kobra's hand dropped heavily onto his shoulder and squeezed. But there was no one there, and no blood on the floor. The only thing they could do was keep looking.
They went through all the rooms in the basement, and then through them again. The thunderstorm look on Fun Ghoul's face darkened with every handle pass, and by the third he started bashing at anything that looked like it wasn't a part of the wall. Smashing open supply closets and cabinets. It wasn’t just frustration, it was the way your eyes started to run blind after a while-- the walls and ceilings and lights and fucking door knobs of this place are all white all over bastard-face smile stamped onto every screen in every room and all the hallways. Poison's head was throbbing fit to burst. And all through it there was the alarms ringing insistently. They didn’t have much time.
The fourth circle around to the same hub room, Ghoul grabbed a loose plank from the ground and smashed it against a smooth silver panel in the wall so his head didn't actually explode from the anger. Under the pressure, the panel made a strangled beeping noise and then popped apart.
All of them stared. Behind the panel that was apparently a door was an empty space, about four feet deep, with thin metal cords crawling up the concrete wall in the back of it. An empty elevator shaft.
Kobra stepped forward and poked at a smaller panel on the wall beside it. Stray sparks kept forcing Kobra to flinch back from the equipment. “I can't get anything from it,” he had to say finally, turning away with his mouth set into a thin line. “Even with my glove, it'll just get fried.”
Ghoul swore a blue streak that would be impressive if the mood in the room had been anything but tense and panicked. He turned away on his heel viciously, like the air and the floor had personally offended him, and he kicked a downed Drac's gun across the room.
The others followed it with their eyes, their blasters hanging loose at their sides.In the clatter and crack of the heavy plastic skittering across the concrete floor, and the heavy sound of failure that followed it, none of the assembled Killjoys heard the soft woosh of wings in air. Only Kobra heard the heavy thud of feet on concrete behind them.
He flinched around and swung his blaster out straight. Then froze.
She was standing by the doors, her little-bit-lopsided wings out and flapping slightly like she was trying to get her balance back. Her wings had gotten big, it was so obvious, when he’d been missing seeing her for a day or so, and especially in the cramped sterilized walls of the compound. Blood trickled from a few places on her forehead, the lights wash her skin out sick and her arms were bruised, but her eyes were bright. Her hair was all out of place like it should be and she even still had her bright clothes (minus her patched jean jacket), and she was fine.
At the other end of the room, Ghoul spun on his heel again and suddenly locked eyes with her at the end of his turn. He made a noise he’d have trouble describing when the others mocked him for it later, while Kobra just stood there with a raised gun. Poison and Jet turned too.
Wren smiled at them. “I found you,” she said, like a revelation.
The four of them converged on her then, shouting and laughing. Her wings tightened against her back again as she hunched up for a second, like a frightened bird, but then she threw arms around their shoulders, too.
It was a good moment, a sweet moment, and Poison wished it could’ve lasted longer but he had to pull back and raise his voice. “The alarm's are all triggered up with calling reinforcements--”
“We have to go,” Wren answered, pulling away from Ghoul and Jet's enthusiastic hugs and Kobra's tight grip on her hand. Her face went serious. “They'll be on the road from the outer Zones by now and there'll be too many of them.”
“There could not fucking be too many of them, ” Ghoul snorted, half-boasting but with the anger from before running clear through his tone and on his face. He waved an arm out at the room they were standing in, with its five bodies on the floor, and the facility beyond it. (They'd been in here for almost an hour-- if it weren't for the automatic air scrubbers installed in the walls, the whole place would stink with death.) “Proof positive, if you doubted that.”
Wren looked at him and smiled. “Ain't doubting anything,” she said. “Ever.” She fluffed her wings a little, knocking them into the door behind her, to emphasize the point.
“Smart Girl,” Poison said, with his own echo of a grin. She rolled her eyes at the old nickname, but there was no time to argue.
It took the five of them another couple minutes after that to find their way out of the rabbit warren basement, but from there it was a straightshot to the Am. The Dracs had taken Wren's gun when they took her in, but she'd took one from one of the bodies on the way out and borrowed a battery pack from Jet. “We can paint it when we get back to the diner,” he'd said as he passed the fuel cells over.
“Yeah,” Wren had replied, snapping her new gun back into place with a practiced ease. She had looked up straight into the camera by the front door, flipped it the bird and then shot it down like a true Runner would.
On the road she sat sandwiched between Jet and Ghoul, her legs sticking straight out so she could rest her spray-painted boots on Kobra's armrest. Both of the Killjoys beside her leaned into her shoulders. Ghoul budged her boots over so he could share Kobra's armrest footrest. It had only been a couple hours without them, but they had been long hours; Wren was grateful for the closeness and the familiarity, and the others were slowing easing out their panics.
Poison had radioed Doctor Death-Defying’s personal incoming to tell him and Pony the good news. Wren laughed when she heard Show Pony's celebratory 'YEAH' and declaration of love from the crackly radio.
“How'd you do it, motorbaby?” Doctor Death-Defying's voice was gravelly and appreciative over the speaker. “They told me you've even got your colours still, not a ‘joy in a dozen who can pull off that.”
“My feathers too,” Wren replied, grining even though he couldn't see her. “And you wouldn't believe me if I told you.”
“Try me, little dust angel,” the doctor answered amused. “But be quick-like, this frequency's gotta be hopping soon.”
Wren snorted at the ‘little’, because she wasn’t anymore. “Fine.” Her wings stretched behind her against the seat and she reached back to run her fingers through the feathers, fluffing them and cleaning them out at the same time. She was, in a word, preening. “I flew.”
*
When they rolled into the Diner the square mess of a radio pirate van was already there. No sooner do they slide to a stop as the dusty van's door slid noisily open and Show Pony came out on their skates, skating over to the Killjoys.
Wren unhooked her seatbelt and climbed over a complaining Ghoul to the door. (She wasn't worried. When Ghoul actually complained, it was with punches.) When she got out the door she hit the dust on her feet, her wings spread out proudly.
The ladyboy's eyes went wide for a second and they slid to a stop. They rubbed their eyes, then rubbed them again, feeling their forehead in a way that made Wren laugh.
“You're not sun-sick,” she said like it was obvious, and then, with her Fabulous-bred instincts, twirled. “They're pretty, aren't they?”
“Real pretty, motorbaby,” Pony agreed after a second. “You, uh. You got them grafted...?”
“No, they grew in.” Wren turned her back to Pony and flexed her wings again, taking care to spread the feathers extra wide. (That was a new trick. It turned out her wings could learn, like she'd learned to walk when she really was a baby.) “See? You can feel them if you want.”
Show Pony didn't say anything for a second, but Wren could hear them skating closer. Rough-ended wondering fingers pressed between her shoulder-blades carefully, feeling for any kind of metal or velcro that would hold such a costume on. She tried her very best not to hit Pony with her wings when they pressed on the top flying-bone, which always made her twitch on a reflex. “My name's Wren now,” she added.
“Real pretty,” Pony said again after a moment. They skated out from behind her so she could see their approving nod. “Real life-saving too. Is that how you flew?”
“Yeah,” Wren answered, and her answer-smile was as bright as the sun.
&
Five
While it started with a strange thing, it never really ended, because life especially in the Zones wasn't a comic strip. Everything happened and kept happening, always.
It took about the same while for the Fabulous crew to be normal again after they got the motorbaby back as it always did after they’d rescued someone. There were noticeable changes in the Diner for a while: everyone more protective of Wren, the girl herself keeping two blasters strapped to her belt instead of one, agreement to up the perimeter-keep sweeps to two an hour. But killjoys rarely really learn from their mistakes, so after a couple weeks the extra precautions blew off like sand in wind. Wren kept the extra gun, though, because she liked the balanced weight of them on her hips. She named them Quick and Fire.
Over months Wren's wings finished growing and her feathering changed, the browns and golds deepening and the feathery layers filling out. She got her earlobes pierced at a meet-up, poured straight vodka on them to keep it clean until the holes healed then carried crystals around in her ears wherever she went. When she was thirteen, or there around 'cause time in the desert was more relative than other places, she kept her hair mostly cut to the quick. Her feathers only got bigger and more in the way, but that was part of the whole point. The others’ changed too.
It never really ended, but there was a quiet moment that Poison thought he would draw for the last panel of one issue if he ever made a mag out of their days.
The sky had been misty and bright, falling quickly into sunset. There had been a storm loud-heavy enough to make all the furry and winged things run for the hills. Air smelled like ozone. All of their crew had spent the afternoon kicking cans across the diner floor; being outside was a relief. Wren was sitting on the Trans Am trunk with Ghoul, the others leaning against the doors, all of their faces tipped toward the sky. As they watched, sandgulls and sky-crows came out from their hiding places and started diving the ground for fresh-flooded food.
Poison had looked over at Wren on the trunk. “You wanna go rustle some mice, too, wing-brain?” He’d joked.
It wasn't a very good one, but the other Joys laughed at it. Wren had flipped the bird to him in response without looking away from the sky. He'd casually bopped her on the top of her right wing-bone with the back of his hand, and she'd ignored him, smiling bigger then.
All of them together and safe as safe could get out in the desert. Air filling up with squawky natures songs. The birds closest to the Diner catching the thermals radiating up from the building's roof and spiralling lazily on the warm air like it was the easiest thing in the world, around and up and around and up.