Chapter Text
Tessa had always liked the dump itself, but the walk there was the best part, still. The dump was work. Good work, granted, picking through wreckage that made her hands feel useful and her brain go quiet, but the walk there was just hers and she could let her mind wander. Twenty minutes of open air and dirt path, no walls and nobody watching her every move.
She had slipped out of the side door, through the kitchen. The one the human staff used for deliveries. Two of the household's standard Workers had been hauling crates through it and she'd slipped past them with her bag over her shoulder. The Worker Drones had no interest in questioning the family's daughter, and the human staff had long since learned that Tessa James Elliott's comings and goings were her own business.
Her mother was somewhere upstairs and her father was in his study. Good enough for what she wanted to do. She'd be back before dinner.
The path from the manor grounds cut through scrub and dry grass, skirting the edge of the swamp where the crows nested. She could hear them above her screaming their gorgeous racket; all overlapping croaks like they were arguing about something important. Tessa loved crows, loved anything dark and mean and strong enough to fight back.
She hitched her bag higher and kept walking while the sun was still high, the sky a washed-out blue. Plenty of time to dig through scraps, and she would dig and find something worth dragging home, and she would be back in her room before her mother even thought to check.
The bag on her shoulders was full of useful things she had gotten into the habit of bringing over the years. Wire cutters, a roll of electrical tape, a torch, and three zip lock bags for small components. She'd learned the hard way about screws being lost in the bottom of a bag. Tiny servos and capacitors and spring-loaded joint connectors had a way of vanishing into seams, and she'd once spent forty minutes turning her bag inside out looking for an array module that had wedged itself into a fold.
Coming home with a bag full of new things to play with made her feel like a pirate stashing away treasure and she liked the thought of herself wearing a fancy hat and holding a sword and having a revolver in her pocket. The dump usually had plenty of things she could put away and be a dragon about. Usually it was just Worker Drone parts, which were the most common discard in the JCJenson product line - at least around these parts. There were plenty of rich families around the area that seemed to throw them out like used tissues. She would find lots of things.
And maybe even someone new.
She always looked. Every time she went to the dump, she checked the fresh piles first, the recent discards, the drones that had been thrown away whole and improperly disposed of. A crime, according to the armband on hers, and yet common enough that she found an reactivated, scared one, several times before.
The dump flared out across a shallow valley about half a mile past the swamp. A cocktail of sun-heated plastic and corroded metal and organic decomposition hit her as soon as she stepped near the heaps of trash. JCJenson logos were on everything. Broken crates stamped with the corporate branding and packaging foam with the little in spaaaaace!!!! tagline printed on it in space gray.
Tessa picked her way down the entrance slope and headed for the eastern quadrant. Compacted earth and crushed debris formed a rough ramp where the disposal trucks drove in. The western side was mostly household appliances and industrial scrap, heaps of dead monitors and stripped conveyor components. The eastern side was bodies-
Well.
She didn't think of them that way, exactly. She didn't let herself. They were just drones. Products. JCJenson said so on every piece of documentation, every VHS training tape, every branded poster in every corporate office. Worker Drones are JCJenson property. Dispose of according to local guidelines. And the local guidelines said to shoot them with a patch and chuck them in the dump.
But they had faces with expressions. Hands that had held things, carried things, served things. Bodies that someone had built to look like people on purpose, because JCJenson knew that customers liked their servants to seem human enough to talk to and inhuman enough to throw away.
Tessa crouched at the edge of the nearest pile and started digging. There were some servos she could use, maybe, if she polished the rust off the metal parts. She found two in the first arm assembly she cracked open. One with a crack in the plastic casing and one intact. The intact one went into one of the zip lock bags and then she kept digging. Another arm, this one stripped already, nothing useful in it. A full torso with the chest panel caved in where the display sat. Most of the components inside looked melted from what was probably some kind of electrical overload. Oh well.
Fifteen minutes of methodical picking produced three good servos, a handful of usable wire connectors, and one STM32 microcontroller that still looked fine but went into the maybe zip lock bag because she wouldn't know until she tested it.
No new drones today. A few bodies too damaged to salvage, but all of them with dark cracked visors and no sign of life. A head, separated clean from the neck joint. She picked it up, turned it over in her hands, checked the cranial housing. Cracked through from the shot. She set it back down gently, facing up, which was stupid and she knew it was stupid, but she did it anyway, every time and would, probably forever.
"Sorry, mate," she said to nobody, because there was nothing in there that would understand. She wiped her hands on her dress and stood up.
The sun had moved into a lower position than she'd expected. She had apparently been here way longer than fifteen minutes. The light had gone from white to gold, the shadows stretching long across the scrap piles making shapes on the dirty ground that could be anything if she put her mind to it. She should go home.
She shouldered her bag, heavier now with the salvaged parts, and started picking her way back toward the entrance ramp.
And that was the moment the gecko came into view.
It was a small one, maybe a couple of inches from nose to tail tip. Dark brown with gray, perfect to hide in the rocks and scrap around it, which is why she almost stepped on it. It was sitting on a rusted panel at the edge of the path, but when her foot came down close it flinched like any lizard flinched - but wrong. Lopsided and dragged its back left leg behind it.
Tessa stopped and stared at it.
The gecko froze, one eye swiveled toward her, its throat pulsing. Something had gotten it. A bird, maybe, or it had been caught under shifting debris - the leg bent at an angle that meant it needed to hold its body crooked to compensate, all its weight on the other three legs.
"Oh, no." She crouched down slowly. "Oh, you poor thing. What happened?"
The gecko watched her. It looked severely unimpressed with the universe.
"Yeah, fair," she said. "Reckon I'd be suss about a giant too. Stay there- I'm not gonna hurt you. Stayyy-"
She set her bag down carefully and reached for the gecko with both hands, slow and careful, the exact same way she'd learned to approach the dump drones. Low voice, make yourself small. You're big and human and they're scared and the only thing you can do about that is prove you know it.
The gecko bolted.
It shot sideways off the panel, dragging the bad leg, moving faster than something that hurt should have been able to move and skittered across loose gravel and disappeared behind a chunk of concrete.
"Oi- wait!"
Tessa went after it, and, of course, she knew she shouldn't. She wasn't that stupid. She could go home, unpack what she had got at the dump and eat dinner with her parents in silence and then do some studies. She knew all of that just like she knew she shouldn't dig up corpses for hair or draw summoning circles on her floor but the knowing never stopped her from the doing.
The gecko was behind the concrete chunk, pressed against the rough surface, its chest heaving. She could see the damaged leg clearly now and determined that, yes, it looked fixable. She could get it into one of the bags, pad it with something soft and take it home. She had never set a leg before, but she'd rebuilt entire servo assemblies from scratch and bones were just organic hardware, right? So how hard could it be?
"Come on," she muttered, inching her hand along the ground toward it. "Come on, just let me-"
And it bolted again. This time downhill, away from the dump's main floor, toward the rocky slope at the edge where the terrain dropped off into rougher ground.
Tessa followed, crouched low with her hands close to the ground and her teeth set, watching the gecko. "Come on, you stupid-" She was watching its tiny body jerk across the rocks, the dragging leg leaving a faint scrape mark in the loose dirt, and she was calculating angles in her head. If she could get ahead of it, cut off the route, herd it toward a flat surface where she could corner it-
She was watching the gecko instead of her feet. The ground changed under her right one mid-stride. Solid gave way to loose gravel. The scree shifted and her foot went somewhere it shouldn't be and she went with it.
There was surprise, somewhere, in that moment. The feeling of balance vanishing, of her weight committing in a direction her legs hadn't planned to. She grabbed for something but her hand caught only a jut of stone that crumbled immediately under her fingers.
Then, she fell.
The slope took her fully. Her hip hit it first, and the impact knocked the air out of her lungs in a sound that was less a scream and more an indignant bark. Her bag swung wide on its strap and tangled with her arm, and she was tumbling, shoulder over hip, the world a smear of gray rock and pale sky then gray rock, sky, rock, sky rock - and each time her body found a new point of impact. Knee against sharp stone, elbow raking across it, the back of her skull connecting with a flat surface so hard everything went white.
Her right arm hit a gap, caught in it and the forearm snagged between two rocks as her body kept moving while the arm stayed where it was. Something in the middle of it gave way with a sound that reminded her of a green stick snapping, and the pain exploded behind her eyes and it was stronger than anything that she'd ever felt before.
She screamed while she was still sliding. The rocks tore at her dress, the skin of her palms and pulled her hair as she tried to slow herself with her left hand on a piece of soft rock that gave way right away, and then the slope leveled out and she hit the bottom with a final graceless thud that punched the breath she had recovered back out of her.
Everything was very bright. Her skull throbbed and her vision pulsed. There was copper on her tongue and she was looking at the sky, which was gray, which was, she was looking at the sky and it was gray, and-
Dark, and then it was gray.
Then there wasn't anything.
Rain on rock was the first sound she could hear. Which was very weird, because it shouldn't have been rain on rock, specifically. It should be rain on glass, or the manor roof, maybe, if she had fallen asleep hiding in the attic again. But it was none of that. It was, as it were, rain on rock and the noise filled the space around her and she was very aware of it before she had any sense of where around her was.
Tessa opened her eyes and it felt like opening an old, heavy door into another dimension altogether. She blinked, hard, and the blurry mess in front of her separated into shapes. A slope of rough stone rising above her, scrubby plants clinging to cracks in the rock, a sky heavy with clouds. Rain fell on her face and she flinched, and that movement informed her in very clear and immediate terms that moving was going to be a huge issue.
A deep nauseating throb centered in the back of her skull. She reached up to touch it, slow and shaky, and realized three things in quick succession, which were that she was reaching with her left hand because her right arm was pinned against her chest. Her left wrist was screaming at her in the background of the larger pain and when her fingers found the back of her head, they came away dark and wet and warm.
"Oh," she said. Her voice didn't sound right at all.
She lay still for a moment, her hand falling next to her head. The rain kept coming down. It was light now, just a drizzle, more mist than drops, but the clouds above her were dense and dark in a way that promised it would get worse again eventually. She could feel water pooling under her shoulder blades, soaking through the back of her dress and lapping against her neck.
The fabric of it was shredded across the front skirt part and the skin showing beneath was raw and bloody. The right sleeve was torn at the shoulder seams and her arm-
She looked at her right arm and her stomach flipped. The forearm was visibly swollen already, the skin puffing up tight and shiny between her wrist and elbow. And the angle was wrong. Really, really wrong. It didn't look too dramatic, admittedly. But she sure could feel it. Could feel the wrongness as a physical sensation, hot, deeply internal awareness of two surfaces sitting against each other that should not have been separated. Every micro-movement sent a flare of pain through her elbow into her shoulder and down her fingertips. Those were also tingling. She tried to wiggle them and three of them responded and one of them only twitched pathetically and the pinky and the thumb stayed exactly where they were.
"Oh-" she repeated, rougher. "Okay. Okay, okay, okay-"
She was fourteen and at the bottom of a rocky slope near the dump and she had fallen because of a gecko and the scree had- Right, yes. That. And now her arm was broken and her head was bleeding and it was raining and- Wait. What time was it?
She couldn't tell. The cloud cover had swallowed the sun completely and the light was flat and directionless. Could be four in the afternoon or six in the evening. She'd left the manor around two, maybe. She'd spent an hour at the dump, maybe. Maybe, maybe. Say half three when she'd started chasing the gecko. But she didn't know, couldn't know, because she had been unconscious for- Well, she didn't bloody know, did she now? She didn't fucking know and there was no way to tell because her phone was in her room because she was stupid and didn't use it for much in the first place and who would she even call? Her mother? Yes, hello, Mother, I fell down a slope and broke my arm while disobeying your orders directly, could you please come and pick me up?
She was so dead.
J would now call her an idiot in corporate language and she would definitely deserve it. Who chased down a gecko in a dump? Her! She was the idiot! But J would also look at her with a worried look and make sure she would got home somehow. God, she was so dizzy.
Tessa pressed her left hand flat against the wet ground and pushed herself up to sitting. Her vision went black at the edges and her stomach lurched and she had to stop, halfway up, braced on her left arm with her right cradled against her ribs and her head hanging forward while she waited for the world to stop spinning. The rain hit the back of her neck. Cold- Wait. She was shaking. When had she started shaking?
Eventually the things around her stayed in one place and she could look around. She was sitting at the base of the slope, the ground flat-ish except the dips that were now forming pools of water. The slope above her rose at a steep angle, maybe ten feet to the top and the surface a mess of broken rock and clay and useless crumbling limestone juts that had given way under her hand on the way down.
Her bag was not on her shoulders anymore. She looked around and spotted it about seven feet to her left, half-buried under loose scree that had accompanied her on her way down. The strap was broken and separated from the base. She could see the zip lock bag with the salvaged servos poking out of the top and couldn't help but curse them, because they had been the reason she had even come out here and now she was sitting in the mud getting rained on.
For a second she thought about crawling over to retrieve the bag, but the thought was so exhausting that she almost laid back down. She sighed, deep and long and then stopped because her ribs hurt as the air went in.
"Get up," she told herself. "Get up, you bloody idiot. This is your fault so get up and go home."
She got her legs under her with her knees complaining. The road rash was deep enough that bending the joints stretched the raw skin and made blood well up and her eyes water. Eventually, she was kneeling, and used her left hand against the rock wall for balance to stand up. The sore wrist protested every pound of pressure she subjected it to. The pain in her head swelled with the altitude change, sending the world swimming for a few seconds in a nauseating bloom. She stood there, swaying, left hand on the wall, right arm pressed tight against her stomach, looked up and wondered which demon she had pissed off the last time she had used the Ouija board.
The slope towered over her. She could see the edge where she had gone over. It looked so bloody close. She could see the scrubby grass at the top, the flat ground of the dump's perimeter, the mundane world she had fallen out of. Right there. Right. Fucking. There. Just a short, steep climb away. If she had two working arms she could probably scramble up in under a minute. She'd climbed worse, exploring around the dump, had climbed worse barefoot even.
But, she only had one working arm and it was the left one that was already constantly hating every second of existing.
She reached up with said hand and grabbed the nearest rock. Tested her weight on it. The rock held and she found a foothold and put her foot on it. Then she pushed up.
She made it about two feet before the foothold crumbled and her shoe slipped and she went down on her knee hard, the impact jolting through her whole body and slamming her broken arm against her ribs. The pain hit her like a truck, blanking everything else, and she heard herself make a sound she didn't recognize and hadn't authorized and it sounded animal and weird. She clung to the rock face with her left hand, her fingers digging in, her forehead pressed against the wet stone, and breathed slowly.
She tried again, this time more carefully. Found a different ledge to put her foot on, wider this time, more stable, too. Wedged her shoe into it and pushed. Made it three feet up, this time and reached for the next handhold. Her fingers closed on a jut of rock and she pulled. The rain had made the surface slick, and her grip slid off the stone like it was slathered with butter, and she, once again, went down.
This time she landed flat on her back, the impact driving the breath out of her for the third time over the course of the day and then she lay there, blinking up at the rain. Her arm was a hot bar of agony from shoulder to fingers, her head pounded, and the sky was lower than it had been a while ago, heavier and the rain slowly picked up.
She got up, gritted her teeth, stubborn in all the right ways of a fourteen-year-old girl. This time she scrabbled further left, where a root system from one of the scrubby plants provided something to grab onto and- she pulled on it and it tore free from the clay in a spray of dirt and rainwater, right in her face, and she slid back to the bottom on her hip. The shredded fabric of her dress rode up as the rock scraped fresh abrasions across her thigh.
"Bloody- bloody hell-"
She was crying, she realized. The wetness of her face had reorganized into something warmer and saltier than the rain. She wiped her eyes with the back of her left hand and the motion pulled at her wrist and she made a sound that was half a sob and half a hiss, and felt her chest hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the fall.
She sat down hard, on the wet rock, because her legs were shaking too much to hold her and because standing was using energy she could feel draining out of her with every breath. She pulled her knees up to her chest and pressed her broken arm against her stomach and wrapped her left arm around her shins and made herself as small as she could and let her shoulders shake and her lungs gasp and her eyes leak and her nose run. The rain kept falling on her, cold and without empathy, getting worse by the minute while she sat there feeling so, so, sorry for herself.
Think, think! She had to think. She was clever, wasn't she? She'd repaired drones, she could think her way out of this. She could think-
She couldn't think.
The nausea had risen to something that sat in her throat and she realized it slowly, sluggishly and terribly. Her mind wasn't working right. Nothing was.
Tessa pressed her face against her knees. The fabric of the dress was soaked through and cold and smelled like mud and blood. Her head throbbed, her arm throbbed, the rain was getting heavier, heavier, heavier. Thickening into actual drops that hit the rocks with audible force.
That stupid gecko. She'd done all of this for a stupid gecko that was probably hiding under a rock somewhere, dry and fine, while she sat here bleeding and broken in a rain like the absolute drongo she was. Why couldn't she just walk past broken things for once?
The cold was setting in. Colder, now, burrowing into the marrow of her bones. She was shaking harder. Wanted to go home. Wanted to be in her room with the fairy lights on and the candles lit and her drones around her.
The rain ran down her face and into her collar and down her back and she sat there, at the bottom, in the dark that was coming and sobbing and she was alone.