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After dusk, just when the last remnants of the city had gone to sleep, Mona set out to do what had to be done. Clouded in the lingering smog that obscured the sky at all times, she grabbed the bag of stolen clothes and tools that she had carefully collected over the past weeks and left. She didn't check if G'Throkka had actually fallen asleep, she didn't check if Vi—her Mech, her other half, the only person who knew what she would do tonight—still stood in the garage, unmoving without her input, she simply headed out and trusted that her makeshift family would be safe.
No matter how many times Mona maneuvered the labyrinth that she called home nowadays, the winding, packed alleys and cluttered main streets still sent her wandering in circles, missing the correct turn and leading her further away from her goal before making a sharp twist and sending her back on the right path. She'd never get used to this place and its strange, alien buildings towering over her, nor to the way the stagnant, freezing air seemed to push back against her, trying to get her to simply return home and forget all about tonight.
Walking still didn't come easy to her. It had been over two years, and while her legs had healed as much as they ever would, she still struggled with finding balance—both metaphorically and physically. Movement without her tail still felt as strange as this place to her. Her center of gravity had irreparably shifted, her sense of her body permanently thrown off its axis, and her previously sure-footed gait had turned into an uncertain stumble. Normally, she had her cane to give her some of the lost balance back, but she didn't take it with her for the same reason that she would change out of her clothes: the possibility of contamination.
Having been born already mutated gave her an advantage in withstanding the wastelands, but she had more planned for tonight than a simple, illegal trip into the area outside the domed city. Leaving never felt right, not after Mona had learned firsthand that the wall existed for a reason, but she had no choice. Visiting the wastelands two years ago had brought her into this mess, today it would be what finally brought her out of it too.
Eventually, she found herself at her first destination; the inner side of the wall built to protect the residents from the outside. Mona had made her way out many times already, but today the task in front of her sent nauseous waves down the back of her head. If she'd been caught any of the times prior, it would've landed her in serious trouble—there was no telling where she'd been and what she'd potentially bring back into the city—but today it would be the end of her. One look at her protective gear, at the giant, folded up hazard bags, at the big cleaver hidden below both of those and everyone would know exactly what she planned to bring back. She couldn't let that happen.
Vi's improved circuit was almost ready, Vi's cobbled together tail was almost ready, she couldn't fail now. Not when they'd all worked so hard on this.
Mona reached for the back of her head and gently caressed it. The nervousness wasn't her own, and while she knew that Vi couldn't actually feel the touch on the port that permanently connected them both, her acknowledging its reservations proofed enough to soothe it. Mona couldn't blame it. Her fate wasn't the only one depending on not getting caught.
With practiced ease, Mona dismissed her own nagging worry, and focused on the task at hand. She slipped an ancient manhole cover out of its inconspicuous place on the ground and revealed something that shouldn't be accessible from inside the city any longer: the sewers of old, belonging to the ruins this place had crawled out of. They deliberately hadn't been connected to any of the sewers and passages the city used, out of the simple fact that they stretched into the wasteland on the outside and would only bring in unwanted mutation.
Thankfully, whoever had made that choice had neglected to encase every possible entrance in cement, which meant Mona had been gifted the possibly easiest way to leave the city undetected—exactly the crime she committed right this moment. She lowered herself into it, pulled the manhole cover back above the hole, and slipped down the rusted ladder. It had been mended in some places—one of the many signs that she wasn't the only one using this path—but Mona still found it safest not to unnecessarily stress it. If it broke on her, the best case scenario left her with injuries and having to wander the sewers in hopes of finding another intact exit, while the worst case scenario ended with her at the city gates, dehydrated and dying after days of fruitless searching.
Not exactly a pleasant thought.
Nonetheless, she kept going down this route time and time again. The risk was diminishingly small compared to the reward this night would finally bring her. Vi barely worked—which wasn't surprising considering she found it on a junkyard and lacked the means to acquire replacement parts legally—but after tonight that would finally be changed.
With hope burning inside her like a blazing sun, Mona continued onward, marching down the dark, damp tunnel. At this point, she'd grown past the need for light to navigate this space, the ground stayed even and, with one hand on the wall, it wasn't exactly hard to walk in a straight line. Forty steps, and she passed below the city wall, unnoticed by the guards above. Another hundred, and she reached a fork, took the left path and continued on. Two-hundred more steps, and her hand brushed against another ladder.
She stopped, and sat down her bag. With steady hands, a steadiness that came from staring down her opponents time and time again and never faltering, she pulled out the stolen hazmat gear. Then, without fanfare, without hesitation—because if she couldn't make her mind up now, she couldn't do what had to be done later—she stripped out of her thick clothes, bundled them up in her jacket, and stuffed them behind the ladder. The thin, flimsy plastic of the hazmat suit didn't seem like it could protect her from anything at all, but Mona had to trust it. She knew safely handling mutagen was possible, and she knew that this seemingly useless layer of plastic played a big role in it.
The suit felt horribly wrong against her naked skin, already sticking to her body from what little sweat she produced. It sat too tight in all the wrong places, and too loose in all the others—one of the many disadvantages of being mutated—but Mona breathed through it. As much as she would've preferred to wear more clothes below it, they wouldn't have made a difference. Normal fabric wouldn't do anything to keep the mutagen spills off her body anyway, and anything thicker than her top wouldn't fit. The outside would be cold, and Mona would have to stay in it for hours, but she'd already braced herself for that when she forced her exhausted body out of bed earlier that night.
Next, she pulled a makeshift combination between a fanny pack and a satchel from her backpack, as well as some of the folded hazard bags. Unfolded, they'd be over half her height, which had to be big enough—she couldn't find bigger ones during the night of her break-in, and going back to the same research facility seemed too dangerous even for her. She tied the satchel around her waist, stuffed the bags inside and finally got out the tools. An old handsaw, a big cleaver and a knife she'd gotten sharpened in exchange for more than what was fair.
The first two went into the satchel as well, but the knife stayed in her hand. It made climbing the ladder harder, but Mona would never again enter the wastelands without being ready to fight for her life at any given second. She'd thought herself above that, an impossibly long time ago, and had bitterly paid the price for it.
Once she reached the top, she stayed and listened. No heavy footsteps or shouting, nothing at all that indicated the wasteland might be anything more than abandoned. She knew life still existed in this place, scavengers and officially dispatched groups, transformed animals and monsters that had never been at home on this planet, they were all there, somewhere in the ruins of a country built on blood.
With her heart pounding—with excitement and fear and anticipation mixing into a cocktail flooding her senses—Mona pushed open the manhole cover.
Everything looked just as it had a few days ago. Ancient buildings stood crumbled around her, some broken during the war that waged destruction on the country, some broken afterwards once all the humans had fled and nobody could maintain them. Grief lingered on the streets like a ghost, forever haunting remnants of a civilization Mona had never known. There'd been people here, once. Walking down the same road, staring up at the same skyscrapers, living their lives without knowing what would happen to this place eventually.
The smog that was ever-present in the city didn't cloud the night sky at all from here. Mona knew perfectly well that the domes had been constructed to keep the contaminated air out of the cities, but whenever she entered the wastelands, she couldn't help the creeping sense that the domes also kept the humans and their pollution away from the rest of the planet. Despite the ruins around her, despite knowing that everything from the air to the water to the ground was poisoned beyond salvaging, despite the creatures roaming around that wouldn't hesitate to kill her, despite all that Mona found the wastelands utterly, staggeringly beautiful.
Above her, far past the top of even the highest skyscraper, the night sky shone like a glittering tapestry. A giant streak of white dominated the distant canopy, bleeding countless stars like an open wound, forever hanging above her head. Looking up at the countless giant suns—far away enough that they only appeared as a small dot—always soothed Mona. No matter what had happened on Earth, the universe would continue on its unknowable course.
Mona climbed out and closed the manhole cover, silently thanking the rotting buildings for towering over her and obscuring her sudden appearance from the sentries posted outside the city gate. If she'd been younger and more naive, she'd make her way up one of the buildings to longingly gaze at the unmoving protectors of her temporary home, one on each side of the gate, their metal forms easily twice the size of Vi. Real life relics from the time before. She'd dreamt of piloting one of them—of protecting her city from whatever horrible threats her young brain could form—until she realized what they really stood for. Now, she just dreamt of seeing them burn.
Tonight would bring her one step closer towards making that dream a reality. She'd gotten all the parts she could from inside the walls—either by trading or stealing or building them herself from scrap—now all she needed was to acquire the missing circuitry. A grizzly task for sure, but that wouldn't stop Mona.
With determination propelling her onward, Mona followed the path that would lead her to her goal. Wind pulled and pushed at her, its coldness razor-sharp through the hazmat suit, but Mona didn't mind. She'd always loved the feeling of wind as a child, a feeling that was absent in any of the domed cities. Even now, it was a sign of freedom, of no longer being fenced in by laws and regulations that only served to keep her down.
It took almost two hours to walk where she had to go. Halfway there, the scenery abruptly changed. No longer was she surrounded by the decaying corpses of long lost buildings and the lifeless veins of a dead city, no longer anything around her resembled a place where life had once lived in. Only rubble was here, now. All the homes and stores had been violently torn down, all the streets shattered, all the living beings unlucky enough to have been here infected, mutated, and killed.
She'd reached the battleground where the Kaiju named Lorqa had finally been slain.
Its corpse had long since been removed and stripped for parts, but this place would stay dead. The final battlegrounds had been stained with mutagen even more thoroughly than the rest of the wasteland, rendering this site utterly unable to support any form of life. Plants had been the first to go, their leaves and roots twisting into grotesque shapes before finally wasting away. The animals had been next, their forms diluting and expanding until they no longer resembled their former self. Most had grown infertile. Those unlucky enough to bear children had given birth to the monsters that still roamed the wastelands to this day.
Nothing she could do about it, though. Some things could never be undone.
Eventually, after carefully climbing over shattered livelihoods for what felt like ages, the desolate city returned. Buildings on this side were much smaller; they still towered over Mona, but no longer reached up into the darkened sky like they were trying to steal the stars. The wind still whipped around her like a feral animal, And Mona found herself dreading the way the cold would creep up on her in a few hours. Not much further now, at least.
Mona tensed before she knew why. Her whole body turned as rigid, as unmoving as the houses around her. From further ahead came a noise. Something fell, crashed to the ground, and shattered.
Moving took more effort than she could afford, and so did staying stealthy. Still, step by agonizing step, Mona moved towards the nearest building. The door had already rotted out of its hinges. She stepped inside, leaned against the wall so she couldn't be seen from the outside and bit her tongue bloody.
Her hand with the knife shook. She steadied it with the other. If something—someone—it didn't matter—walked through the door, she'd be ready.
She couldn't hear over the pounding of her heart. Memories returned to her like blotches on her skin. Unwanted, invasive. Her mouth tasted like iron. Tremors moved through her like earthquakes. She dug her fingers into the hilt of the knife and teeth further into her tongue. Her blood was warm. Her whole body felt warm. Too warm. Sweat drained out of her pores. Plastic stuck to her skin.
It hadn't happened like that. She hadn't felt like this when it had happened. Too careless. A brush with the wrong person-monster-mutant-human. Pain, horrible pain, worse than she'd ever felt while boxing, bone exposed and flesh oozing, tears in her eyes and cries on her lips-
She needed to open her eyes, it would help her focus on the moment again.
With a calm that hadn't been there before, she realized her eyes had fallen shut in a futile attempt to force out the memories. She opened them again, gasping for breath as if she'd been running. Blood splattered out of her mouth and onto the lower part of the vizor of the suit, transfixing her with its saturation.
At some point her legs had given out. She knelt on the ground now, knife still in front of her like a shield. Before she could feel a fresh wave of panic at losing control of herself like that, heavy comfort spread along her head, down her shoulders—the same feeling like a hug from her mom that could heal every emotional wound—and Mona desperately relaxed into it. One hand stayed clutching the knife, the other went up to the back of her head, pressing against the port connecting her to Vi. She clung to it like a lifeline, and Vi tightened its metaphorical grip as well.
Mona lost track of how long she sat there, balancing a half-synchronized state with her Mech. Vi sat in the back of her head, riding on her every thought like a passenger and Mona gratefully let it help her calm down. She knew it wasn't good for her brain to force such a strong connection to her Mech from so far away, but the potential consequences were distant while the comfort was already surrounding her.
Eventually, after her body stopped shaking and her mind calmed down, Mona pushed herself up again. Vi retreated until its presence was barely there anymore. Mona took a deep breath—suddenly thankful her body has had enough sense not to throw up—and glanced outside the door frame.
Nobody was there. The street lay as empty as ever, no hints of any sort of life. No other scavengers dragging loot around, no feral creatures on the hunt for food, nothing. The only movement was caused by the wind blowing around a few pieces of ancient trash that would never decay, now forced to eternally dance through the abandoned air.
With another breath, Mona forced her hands to stop shaking. When that didn't work, she tucked them below her armpits, careful not to damage the suit with her knife. It was pathetic. She hadn't lost control of herself in such a long time, and now she'd been pushed over the edge by the breeze knocking something around. She needed to be better than that, if she slipped up like this during a proper Mech fight she'd be done for. Fuck, even now she would've been done for if something had actually attacked her. With a shaking body and a barely coherent mind she wouldn't have been able to fend off even the weakest of beasts, no matter how sharp her knife was.
She stepped outside the derelict building, back onto the perforated road. A dark grey mixture of clouds still covered the sky, with only a bit of moonlight poking through. Without the stars to aid her, Mona had no idea how much time she'd just lost—back in the city she would've had her half-broken phone, but with its location data being monitored she couldn't exactly take it with her. If she wasn't back before sunrise, she couldn't enter the city anymore—not without giving away her entrance point to passerby.
Heading back now would be safer. Heading back now also made her whole body ache with disappointment and frustration.
A sinking feeling settled deep inside her stomach—the same sinking feeling she used to get when entering a fight against an opponent she had no chance of beating—and she turned her back to the city. A decision she would regret soon, perhaps, but it still didn't feel like she had a choice at all. If she turned tail and ran now, she might not get another opportunity until it was already too late; until her treasure had already been harvested.
The last leg of her journey took years and no time at all. Her mind still raced with thoughts of sudden attack, but with each block she passed unhurt they quieted down a little more. It still left her more exhausted than she'd liked. Walking back would be much harder than she'd anticipated, especially after she'd fulfilled her goal.
Then, unexpectedly, she arrived.
Her treasure lay in the middle of a former plaza. Its iridescent scales weakly reflected what little moonlight shone on them, rendering its dead form into a giant heap of silver. Mona stepped closer towards the carcass. It towered over her, its alien beauty captured for all eternity by the mutagen that had contaminated its lifeblood so long ago. If she hadn't seen it in the same position days ago, Mona would have thought it still alive.
Once an organism had been thoroughly contaminated—the case for everything within the wastelands—death loosened its inescapable noose just a bit. As clearly evidenced by the corpse in front of her, those mutants could still die, but their bodies would stay forever untouched by decay and rot.
They wouldn't, however, stay untouched from scavengers. Mona had merely gotten lucky in discovering this body before anyone else. She'd be the first one to desecrate it.
But before that, Mona gazed at the corpse she held in reverence a little longer, dutifully committing its countless details to memory. While it hadn't given its life to be used by her, it still felt horrendously wrong to take without remorse, without pausing to consider the behemoth right in front of her.
Its six legs with long, gnarly claws resembled no natural animal she'd ever seen, and neither did its head with the elongated snout, resting on one of the front legs as if it merely took a nap. If she looked closer, Mona could make out two sets of differently shaped scales on each side, likely hiding dead eyes beneath them. As expected of something that had lived in the wastelands, its body had been littered with scars. Scales had gone missing here, or discolored over there, but the injury that took Mona's breath away—that made her legs tremble with recognition—was a badly healed stump between its hind legs. A stump that had, once upon a time, been a tail.
When she'd just found the body, Mona had noticed it as well, of course, but had been able to push it out of her mind. Now, it was the only thing she could focus on. A creature so different from her, bigger and stronger and likely more violent in life, but it still carried the same injury. Did that kill did? Did the sepsis spread through its body, unstoppable despite the mutagen in its veins?
She'd never know. Somehow, that only made it worse.
In life, it would've been a majestic creature, with its strong legs and shimmering scales. In death, melancholy clung to it like a cloud. It felt wrong. Something so powerful—so wonderful—shouldn't be dead. And yet, Mona knew exactly how unjust death could be. Her parents were dead. It was a truth still too painful to think about often, and yet she carried it with her every step of her way. This would be for them, too. One step closer to avenging their deaths.
Mona moved closer, her steps the only sound breaking the silence between her and her salvation. With a care she didn't know she still possessed, she placed a hand against its side. The scales were cool to the touch, chilled down by the cold air whipping around the wastelands like a bad omen. If Vi had accompanied her and lain down next to it now—its form bigger than her Mech—Mona would be looking at two frigid, broken hunks that nobody besides her spared a second thought to.
Had it died alone? Had it left behind a nest of fledglings, forever ripping away their chance at survival? Or had it still been juvenile itself, condemning its parents to a futile search? Did it have a partner, or a herd? Had it wandered the wastelands without companionship? Would the answers to these questions even matter?
With dread slowly pooling in her stomach, Mona gave the dead creature a pat. She swallowed, finding another reason to stall in the act, if only for a moment—despite knowing she'd already wasted more than enough time earlier.
A deep breath, then another, and Mona more firmly grasped the creature, using its shoulder as a handhold. Her other hand—holding the knife—she placed on its second shoulder, then pulled herself up. Familiar pain shot through her legs at the sudden stretch as she wretched one upwards to push her foot against the shoulder. The newfound foothold served as the perfect leverage to force her body further up, and Mona clamped one hand over the creature's torso and finally pulled herself onto its back.
She paused to breathe again. The short climb hadn't winded her—even though she had been forced to dial it back significantly, her body still remembered her old strenuous regime—but she still needed to center herself. Trepidation and anticipation mixed into a nervous jitter of emotions and Mona felt simultaneously horribly excited to be doing something so forbidden and sick to her stomach about the atrocity she would commit.
To give Pilots the precise control that successfully steering a Mech required, they needed to fully synchronize with it, but also—even more importantly—there needed to be something they could feel. Though Mona would never have the pleasure of testing it out, she knew that prosthetics often came with synthetic nervous systems, but those wouldn't suffice for piloting a giant hunk of metal made for fighting. Synthetic wouldn't cut it. What Mechs needed to work were real, untampered nerves.
Nerves that Vi lacked. Nerves that needed to be long enough to fill its chassis. Nerves that wouldn't decay.
In the shared privacy of her mind, Mona had gone over this night countless times. Where to place the knife, how careful to cut down, how to seperate the usable nerves from the rest of the organism.
She raised her knife, poised the sharpened edge against the scaly neck, and-
Hesitated.
"Vi?" she vocalized, breaking the long silence that had surrounded her with words underlined by a not-quite echo inside her suit.
The faint presence at the back of her head grew stronger.
Mona swallowed. "I…" She wasn't good with words, not the important ones, anyway. They always got stuck halfway up her throat, rendering her silent against her will. With Vi, she didn't have to fear the sudden tied tongue. Vi still understood her, still understood that she needed it by her side right now.
Together, the lines between Pilot and Mech blurring in this act that would unify them further, they plunged the knife into the body before them.
Blood trickled out. She'd expected it to be something else, anything else. Instead, she stared at blood the same color as the specks on the inside of her vizor. She stopped again, transfixed, staring at the red that greeted her. Before she could freeze in place gawking at a creature so different and yet so like her, Vi nudged her hand downwards. Not unkindly, merely with the same insistence Mona had displayed when replacing its broken parts. Mona simply let it happen, and focused on fending off the emotions that suddenly welled within her.
Only once the knife was almost fully submerged did she hit bone. The spine. More precisely, cervical vertebrae. Home of sixteen spinal nerves—provided the mutation hadn't changed that. She'd find out.
First, though, she had to lay bare the spine. Cut away excess tissue without damaging the long, spindly nerve cords she desperately needed. Then, she'd have to extract the nerves, break them out of the bone and blood they belonged in.
She had a long night ahead of her.
At the end, gore covered Mona from head to toe—and not just her. Chunks of meat and red puddles littered the plaza around her, drenching the ground in mutated remains. None of the earlier tranquility still lingered, driven away by spilled blood.
Even though she was freezing, Mona couldn't be more thankful for her hazmat suit. It had successfully withstood its first test, passing with flying colors. No mutagen had gotten to her, no twitching-itching-burning feeling beneath her skin making itself known. The little speck of her own blood could no longer be seen; the vizor was coated with red from the outside, only allowing Mona to glance through a few select openings.
Pride and disgust raced each other to a crescendo inside her heart, but Mona barely registered it over the exhaustion clinging to her body.
Countless long, half-translucent, half-white strands of nerves had been packed into plastic bags, smearing both the inside and outside with sticky blood. Hours of physical labor had been put into getting them, days of planning this trip, months of looking for a suitable carcass and years of the—now hacked up and strewn across the entire plaza—animal growing.
More than anything else, Mona wanted to clean up the mess she'd made. She couldn't bear to see the once beautiful creature massacred like that. She wanted to put it back together, chunk by chunk by chunk, apologizing for each cut her hands had guided.
She couldn't, though. Not if she wanted to be back inside the city before sunrise.
With one final look, she committed her atrocity to memory and swore it wouldn't be in vain. She wouldn't forget the stunning iridescence, or the quiet strength of its untouched body either. She'd carry all of this with her until she reached her goal—until she killed Shredder.