“It wasn’t me,” - Leo’s protest continued.
“Yeah, real funny, my dude. It wasn’t you, and no one stole your keys, and actually if you think about it selling video evidence of our minister of finance holding a red gown party to a random enchanter from a jump host that’s trivially traceable back to Moss which we specifically agreed not to sell is fine, nothing to worry about,” - Sel stormed on. June could not tell if the thin blanket over their voice was compression or background noise.
“No, I swear, it’s not…”
“Are we really going to play this game?!” - the witch exploded into screaming. June had not heard them scream before, although they had not had a chance to talk much, - “We have an emergency here, thanks to that fucking trick not-you pulled! Moss is scared shitless, she’s holed up in her host and refuses to come out! I had to wire an explosive to her heart and now I need to babysit her all day all night, she’ll set it off if she thinks I got arrested!”
“Hold on, why would she…” - June tried to interject.
“Shut up, I’m not done. Leo, please, please just fucking do it. Like, I get it. We agreed not to use it, you couldn’t hold yourself to it, that’s fine, shit happens. But the jump host was accessed with your keys. Either it was you, or your keys were stolen. It can’t be neither. So please stop acting like a child. We need to resolve this fast. If it’s the former, you’re a bastard, but we can move past this. If it’s the latter, I will end this call, take Moss’ heart out of the rack, set the apartment on fire and hike out through the woods. Give me an actual explanation, man, if not for my sake then for hers.”
There was a long silence in the channel, GRANITE-12’s speaker crackling with what almost felt like accumulating decoder errors.
“Okay,” - Leo finally responded, quiet, - “I have an explanation. I think. It’s not what you posit, but it’s still pretty bad.”
“Can’t be worse than the idea of feds listening in on us right now,” - the words were somewhere between a wheeze and a giggle.
“I wired out the DRM module from the new proxy sleeve. And bought a few hearts pre-loaded for bathypelagic hosts. Don’t ask where, you won’t like the answer. Powered them on before jammer sigils went up, so I have a pretty high bandwidth connection until a few more fail. And I’ve been direct diving.”
Shard’s coolant pumps kicked up a gear at that notion, eliciting a startled yelp from the armorsmith. Its eyesight sharpened twofold. June was taken aback by just how tightly bound they were, even several walls apart, even many hours into complete physical separation. The sensation of docking clamps’ pressure on Shard’s hide, cheap scrap plating replaced with dull blue interlace of scale sheets overnight as a part of their payout, felt as natural as the report of hairs on his flesh and blood arms. He felt irrationally compelled to stretch, yawning, and tug the heavy steel cuffs off of his armored wrists. He had to actively recall he couldn’t do that.
“Oka-a-a-y?” - mistrust still tainted the witch’s voice like a dead dog would to a well.
“I leave ghosts. Like, a lot. Back in the Tidepools days, I never got to notice, because the developer API abstracted ghost squashing pretty aggressively. But now that I see the whole process, they’re like… I caught a few. They have partial imprints of my CNS, whole regions if I read the diagnostics right, somehow even my heart tissue tags along for the ride. And they mutate fast. They must have coalesced somewhere, reconstructed enough neural functionality to extract the keys’ hex from my visual memory. Probably not the whole thing, but enough to bruteforce the blanks. So…” - he trailed off, not having the heart to complete the thought.
From the witch’s side, there was only steady, deep breathing. Sel was trying their best to not explode again.
“So the explanation is that you are now a spirit,” - June hummed out, grinning into the tarp-patched roof. External-Mola leered at him from his cot before returning to his morning routine, rubbing some herbal ointment into his crooked knees.
“Yes.”
“I gather we are not as different neurologically as you claimed.”
“Oh, fuck you, still keeping those tallies,” - Leo laughed grimly, - “Botched proxies do everyone the same.”
“Incorrect, actually. Some people just die.”
“Weren’t the statistics for that kind of really misinterpreted?”
“Not if you ask Mothcage. Shard was basically the entire reason she broke up with me, and bailed on the operation.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah.”
As the witch’s breathing exercise came to a slow stop, June could finally resolve the intermittent crackling weaving itself between their words. It was gunfire, distant but never yielding, like a region-spanning choir of August crickets.
“Okay,” - Sel finally resumed, voice small and strained, - “That’s something. I take it. I’ll go tell Moss. Hopefully it calms her down. But we’ll need to verify it.”
“Actually,” - June interjected again, - “Before conducting an investigation, perhaps focus on getting my boyfriend out of the walled city? You know, the one that is said to be scheduled for a glassing in two or three weeks?”
An unpleasantly long pause.
“Oh, shit, we hadn’t told you yet,” - the witch sounded even more squashed, somehow.
“Told me what?”
An even more unpleasantly long pause. Dread began to coalesce at the edges of June’s mind.
“They closed all the gates and invalidated travel permits. All the districts are walled off from each other. No one is allowed to leave.”
“Because holding a few million people hostage worked so well to calm Widow down in 2035 they just can’t help but try it again,” - the witch finished for him in a sarcastic wheeze-chuckle.
The chief mediator’s head craned upwards, grey buzz-cut stiff against the wet draft of the field hospital. Their face looked as though she hadn’t slept at all since the takeover was finalized, working straight from the bare cot despite the Little Widow medics’ protests. She dished out post assignments, organized Cage’s part in the process of bridge repair, and accepted inquiries from townsfolk, who were now beginning to trickle back into their homes.
The inquiries were mostly of the complaint variety. Several pairs of eyes burrowed into his back when he pushed past the queue, one particularly grim from a woman in a yellow rubberized butcher’s apron. He was glad that he wouldn’t have to linger.
“Yes.”
There was a corroded, broken fiber of exhaustion trailing through the deadpan voice.
“I need the truck.”
“That request has already been granted.”
“No, you gave me a truck. I need the truck,” - June nodded in the direction where the ravaged fort square should have been beyond the tarp walls, - “It and however much diesel it fits, after I tear off the gun and load my mech onto it.”
Chief mediator put down her pen, and reached out to the bedside crate for a half-full water cup. The vessel made it halfway back before slipping, thumped to the dirt floor, eliciting a wince. A Little Widow wearing a nurse’s armband darted to the bed, cleaned off the cup, refilled it from a flask on his daypack, and held it up to the official’s lips, all without a word. The mediator did not resist, letting her shaking hands drop back to the bandaged stomach.
June realized he still hadn’t heard her name uttered even once. Not from the blue garrison making toasts in his name (they were more than happy to divulge their own, as long as they were off the clock), not from the residents hushing outside, not from the Little Widows. Though the last one was expected. Dead men don’t let their tongues grow long.
“We had plans for it. Why?” - the official stared back stiffly, fingers twitching. Did June piss her off?
“I have had a change in schedule. I have to be under the walls of Moscow earlier, at least four or five days. Only the old machine is fast enough.”
He had no idea how much time he would actually need. But it wasn’t going to be much either way.
The official spent a few seconds with her eyes half-closed, carried on the shallow waves of town’s multihead whispering.
“You were quite instrumental yesterday. Fine. You can take it. Hear my strategic assessment in return,” - of course she’d say that, - “At least two army frames escaped northeast, along with some footsoldiers. They are heading along the main road. The closest outpost is Point 712, on top of the old Voronezh-North airfield. We know for sure Voronezh-North has engaged their own jammers, it appears to have been a nation-wide order. Thus, the strays would not be able to report contact from long range. It would be fortunate for us if they failed to reach the airfield and report.”
They stared each other down for a second. June was annoyed (impressed?). Even half-knocked out, internal bleeding stabilized mere hours ago, the chief mediator was still keeping up pressure, tugging at her web. She got to squash the off-chance of reinforcements, and to keep her hands free.
He could feel their cooling system churn up again, a spike of baleful admiration somewhere between the heart and the stomach. A slow smile crept out of the folds of his being, spreading across his face, slithering into its rightful domain like flame over a puddle of spilled biodiesel.
“It would indeed,” - Two nodded.
June felt distinctly, piercingly watched walking out of that tent. He swung around, but scanning the post-shock town center yielded no relief. Just more residents darting about, throwing glances, sure, but nowhere near the kind of gaze he was expecting. It’s as if the wounded walls themselves stared him down in contempt.
June couldn’t judge them.
The mangled door was a ruptured lung wall, turning a steady by-flow of brisk autumn air into a sickly, irritating whizzle. The war horse’s heater barely managed to keep up, even after June turned it to the max. Mesh-reinforced windshield kept in one piece, but the web of cracks was a pain to see through. The gearshift was still sticky with fragments of the previous driver. Unplanned ventilation was the only thing keeping the smell somewhat tolerable.
June’s driving experience was spotty at best - just a few hours piloting his grandmother’s pickup, many years ago. The name was the only thing these two objects shared.
The soft-wheeler wagon at home was cranky, but complacent. It wasn’t fast, but it didn’t need to be. What it needed to do was survive, season after season, in the maze of potholes and sunken wreckage of the Brest boneyards as its owners made their strange living, finding new purpose for organelles of dead demigods. It needed to make it safely over fast streams, sliding silt and treacherous mud, and be good to go the next day. And all that, it did. Its spread-out, cautious gait curved after the earth, golem-like firmware having learned to anticipate changes in terrain through decades of service. It would get where it needed to be, eventually, like the creature of habit it was.
The pre-Word army truck, on the other hand, could wear “a brick on wheels” as a charitable description. It had no regard for fuel economy, road integrity, tire life expectancy or passenger comfort. The amount of diesel it burned every mile would have been enough to heat a small home for half a day. It kicked and jerked at any slight and lapse in reign, the very act of controlling it feeling like a violation. Of himself or the machine? June wasn’t sure. It took him twenty minutes of frantic manual lookups to even wrangle it into switching to second gear. All the experience since only validated his hitherto abstract disdain for combustion engines. As much as Shard, and that new interdisciplinary thing nesting on the border, enjoyed the idea of being propelled by explosions, even they could agree that putting explosions on the inside was fucking stupid.
There were three things June turned to for soothing that anguish: they were moving even faster than anticipated, the alternator topped out Shard’s batteries within an hour, and that gap in experience was getting quickly bridged. Leo’s new friend from inside the walls was on the call with him, and appeared to have both technical information and historical trivia about diesel engines in boundless supply. That supply was getting poured onto June in buckets, and he had little choice but to absorb it. Neither the speaker’s sister nor Leo had succeeded in interrupting, and he had taken over the call entirely. It was tiring, but undeniably useful. Maybe a few hours of this unstructured datastream would be enough to field-dress minor malfunctions. He could barely focus on the rant, more immediate task of keeping the horrible creature aligned with his intent taking most of the bandwidth.
The eastward road, maintained evidently once per whenever, spun and wound through the young forest like a child playing pretend-seamstress with a discarded stretch of fishing line. The old maps would have you believe these were mostly fields, broken up by desolate clusters of forests and buzzing caravans of power pylons. The pylons still stood, for the most part, clusters of mud nests clinging to insulator mounts and access ladders, but everything else was different. The woods were siphoning back into their rightful domain, ground spewing forth armies of flexible young stems. Every few kilometers he would pass by some strange attempt at halting the process - brittle husks left by controlled burns, patches of sproutlings chopped down sloppily and just left there, simply turning into fertilizer for the next wave. There was no pattern to it, no discernible benefit. June simply assumed that it was someone’s personal war against the trees, futile as those come.
It was in that serpentine tangle between puffy rolls of yellowing inexorability that he was yanked back into alert. A sight for sore eyes by the road’s sprouting side - an army exosuit, slumped back against some lone sort of shack just a few steps off into the grasses, front canopy agape, pilot nowhere to be seen. It sailed past in the passenger seat window, scratched hide seeming almost serene on the wet backdrop of shed leaves. Wafts left in the war-horse’s wake minced a thin trail of smoke emanating from the torso into ribbons.
June didn’t know whether what he felt looking at that thing was a pang of nostalgia or a spike of thrill. A memory surfaced, one of sitting in a pose just like that, proxy inside vacant of neuron bindings, tracking subsystem vacant of directives, fading hand in hand with the sputtering day as dusk washed across a boundless fen… Wait, that couldn’t be right.
“Niko, I deeply appreciate the information,” - he lifted one hand off the wheel, reaching towards the sling bag tucked near the second seat glovebox. The little speck of mercury licked at his bandaged fingers, danced across the stolen falx’ rubber-lined hilt, - “But I will have to interrupt you for a minute.”
“…And I mean, the converter sieve could instead be lined with… Wait, something happen?”
“Not yet.”
He focused on the road ahead, and gloved fingers clutched the cloth-wrapped driver’s wheel. Turn right, pothole. Turn left, trunk. The foliage, though fading, still obstructed vision.
Turn right, old wreck. Turn left. Longer, uninterrupted stretch of patchy pavement. There they were.
June’s eyes narrowed on the figures rapidly growing in the midday dazzle of branch shade ahead. Two squelchies and a limping suit with a chipped maul, progressing at a snail’s pace. Either oblivious to the roar of his wretched stallion, or too tired to turn around. The rest must had run off into the woods, deserting. Good.
Shard tensed up under its tarp, trying to sneak a glance of the target. June felt their intersection like a demanding absence in his stomach.
“Obstruction on the road. It will be not long, do not worry.”
“Alright?..”
“Obstruction?” - Leo’s voice pitched in, unjustly concerned, - “What kind…”
“I will be back in a minute,” - with a hand encumbered by dancing metal, June smashed the side of the laptop tucked into the front seat, awkwardly flipping the speaker switch.
The soldiers turned, finally alert to their approach. Wild gesticulation sprung their way, mingled with desperate shouts. Urging him to stop for them.
He switched down a gear, eliciting a strained short creak from the machine under him. With the helmet already on, he pulled the visor down to obscure his face before the soldiers got too close. They seemed to buy the act, staying on the side of the road. It only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough.
Now, the Two willed itself into being. Pedal to the metal, wheel to the right. Swerving straight into the center of the group. The humans screamed and dove sideways, loose gear bouncing across cracked asphalt, throwing themselves to the ground with barely a meter of clearance from Its wheels. The suit was much too slow. Side armor whined against the truck’s bumper-ram. It did not fail, but the pilot seemed to have a hard time staying upright as it was. The war hammer’s steel-beam handle bashed impotently against the bent bonnet as the destabilized machination fell backwards.
Carried by the leftover momentum, Two leapt out of its seat, kicked out the perforated door, erupted from under the tarp, tearing shoddy hemp rope. It skidded to a stop and also crashed down into the worn bitumen, two faces to three foes. The humans scrambled towards their spilled arms. A waste-weld guisarme and a machined longsword. The pilot caught the chain’s first strike on the pole of their maul. Two charged ahead, closing distance before the polearm could be brought into play. Two snapped the chain’s loose end back around and pulled. Wicked hook was tossed to the side, replaced with a short axe, soldier backing away towards the treeline. Pull force was insufficient, momentarily locking the metal shell in a tug of war with the suit still scrambling to get up.
Coming in for a right swing from no more than ten paces, Two’s flesh eyes bore down upon the humans like cutting room floodlights. Their faces registered clearly, alight with terror at the eventually-consistent harmony of its movements. Axe-wielder bald and fire-scarred, wrinkled skin glistening under a patched leather coif, other framed by a disheveled dark blonde beard and a helmet similar to its own. The pilot’s visage was yet to be known, covered fully by overlapping laminar plates of his machine. The falx swing touched down at an obtuse angle, diverted by a half-fumbled dodge from the already-confused axe wielder, plowed along the outer kevlar sleeve of the brigandine. Two put its whole weight into the chain near the hammer’s head, jamming the handle into the earth. With a piercing screech, green gauntlets lost grasp, weapon flying to the side and crashing through some unfortunate young birch by the roadside.
The squelchies’ shock was short-lived. The axe-wielder turned their dash around and stepped into a low swipe; Two’s meat frame let itself fly past, reducing cumulative momentum enough to block, even though the falx was on the wrong side. The swordsman was momentarily stuck behind his comrade, unstable on wet grass, struggling to step around. The pilot had gotten up, partially assisted by the tug; it stood taller than Two, even if light by army standards. Chain whipped around Two’s fist to a resting position, and it lurched forward, sending a flurry of punches into the sides of the front canopy. A barrage of deafening clangs overwhelmed both’s microphones, birds bursting from wet pine branches in fireballs of black static, power claws pushing dents into olive and green steel strips. The pilot stumbled a step back towards the center of the road, another step, another step, yielding slow due to weight difference but unable to return blows this close, massive gauntlets landing flatly on Two’s shoulders and back, only managing to leave scratches and rip attachment mounts. The distance between two sub-engagements shortened.
The falx fluttered into Two’s left meat appendage. The strong one. It backstepped out of the next powerful axe swing. The bald man was left momentarily exposed, overcommitting. Two braked, shortening the distance again, and sent a diagonal at his upper torso, aiming the falx’ wicked tip at the shoulder and neck, where rivets were absent from the fabric. A flat blow crashed into its own armor vest from the right. Its upper organ cavity beamed with new pain. It only managed to moderately scratch the axeman before falling to the packed earth; it rolled away and brought itself up on one knee, now facing both squelchies up close. The broadsword had come at it in overreach, desperate to prevent imminent casualty. Two returned to stance, and so did the humans. They were back to square one, none wounded gravely, though in a new orientation.
Two growled through its teeth. The swordsman charged, screaming. The dance continued.
The pilot found foothold three of its steps behind Two’s other back, stalling retreat. A heavy gauntlet closed around Two’s shoulder, bending structural caging under snake-armor sheets with an excruciating whine, and a heavy knee strike to the canopy sent Two flying back towards the truck. The impact inched the bumper guard ever closer to annihilation, and Two paid it no heed as it used its failing to right itself back. The swordsman began a horizontal cleaving strike, the axe-wielder held closely behind and a step to the left.
Two lurched forward and dove, in one time and two places.
The falx’ bend caught the broadsword at the tip, diverting it upwards, showering wet asphalt and grass with sparks as it ground its way to the hilt, metal eating metal; the curved blade snapped two thirds through, but Two’s shoulder had already crashed into the soldier’s chest. The sword’s hilt impacted its neck, a dull cyst of pain immediately forgotten. From behind itself, in eyes of tempered glass, Two saw the axe descend upon its flesh’s back, and sprung up, narrowing the angle to prevent penetration. Two barrelled sideways, skirting the edges of suit’s reach, chain singing again, aiming for the legs, but the pilot had dropped to a low stance, catching the end in their fist; the tug of war reignited as a mad dance of a crashing space tether, Two tracing a desperate, incomplete orbit as the army suit spun in place, vile creature of memory pulled taut between them; then, the soldier’s grasp slipped, and both stumbled apart, Two’s heavy half screeching across the left side of the road, right next to the squelchies.
The swordsman flailed on the patchy expanse, swing split to a sputter. Two’s lighter half found itself locked chest to chest with the axeman, proximity forcing both to disarm. Two’s back ached, but the spine was intact. That’s what mattered. Two clung to the fire-tainted man and flung itself away from the swordsman, still attempting to contribute; the toppled soldier’s sword tip nicked his comrade’s foot, pained grunt let out in response. It separated and stepped back just in time to avoid an underhand dagger strike aimed for its stomach. The heavy frame sprung back up, just in time to meet the gaze of the army pilot grasping the handle of their polehammer again. The bald man advanced on Two in a last desperate series of jabs; its own ankle holster tempted it, far out for the situation, and it had to cede, jumping back again and again, unable to keep pressure.
The pilot was rearmed. The swordsman was getting back up. The pilot stepped forth.
Two growled, a deep, guttural sound leaving streaks of scalding acid on the back of its fuel intake.
Another panicked dagger stab of a soldier in stumble-forward overdrive. Another step forward by a weapon that could render its limbs into junk with a single good strike. It knew what that felt like last time, maybe a decade ago.
Another vast wave of bitter rage crashed over the landscape, palpable like a corpsefly landing on an extended tongue. Inside Two, it rebounded and refracted into a whirring kind of elation, synthetic muscle shuddering in melodic unison. It felt right, impossibly right for the slightest of moments, all the while the armored human’s systems screeched, fighting against his movements. Then, Widow’s cry was gone again, but an inspiration from that brief, impassionate broadcast had planted itself in the auto-loader of Two’s mind.
It fell to all fours with its heavy half, kicking up great clumps of the already weakened pavement, and jumped towards the squelchies. The swordsman spotted it first, scrambled out of the way with a wild frightful cry. The axeman did not, allured by the proximity of its vulnerable neck, by a backstep deliberately half-hearted. He only managed one panicked glance back before the power gauntlets closed around his shoulder, lifting him off the ground, tearing him from his assault, helpless, bones cracking under unsustainable load of the vest-burdened torso. The knife clinked uselessly against armor gaps of the empty pilot cage as Two set off on collision course with the mech, dragging the screaming man by its side. The pilot flinched, confused, concerned, cornered, unsure what stance to take, unsure what to target. With a joint two-throat roar, Two spun its whole body around and lobbed the human at the suit like a plague projectile of a trebuchet, strips of dislodged cloth, plate and skin still clinging to its claws. The human’s body embraced the laminar front like an overripe peach would a cheese grater. The pilot stumbled back, doused in bountiful crimson, distraught, disoriented, and under their fumbled handle bash Two dove, tackling them to the ground, spreading the man caught between a rock and a hard place further into incoherent protein garble, though still scared, still screaming, still trying to get away. Its hind claws pinned the army mech’s elbow to the ground, and with a simple downward contraction of its half-ton mass it brought two fists down on the anvil, and again until sparks flew, and again until shielding began to give with a croak, and again, and again, and again.
Two’s flesh fingers converged on the handle of the discarded guisarme, and it leapt towards the swordsman, paralyzed by the onslaught. The wicked long hook sailed in a grove-chopping motion and bit down on the man’s right calf, trembling hands failing deflection. The swordsman screamed, almost toppling. In the periphery of its soft cameras, Two saw something crackle and light in the anvil-mech’s left gauntlet, free from the weight, too late to act. A terrible, deafening brilliance erupted between their frames, and it was flung off the soldier, raining rivets into the mess, howling in anger from all its mouths. It spun through the air, landing on three limbs. It sent five quick thrusts at the swordsman, one blocked, others tattering his front armor. The swordsman was beginning to run out of breath.
A reverberating, ringing groan ripped from the army mech’s speakers as it pulled itself upright once more, using the maul’s beam for support. Its left charge-actuated gauntlet let off smoke, jammed in the extended position, fingers locked in a fist for the foreseeable future. Two of the canopy plates had crumped and partially peeled off under the assault, though the underlying impact cage largely held. Through these new gaps in its crimson-renovated canopy, Two could see the pilot at last, brown eyes bulging under a coating of offal and sweat.
Two turned both frames to the mech, keeping an eye cluster back on the swordsman. That seemed to no longer be necessary.
“Shubin, where the fuck are you going?!” - the pilot roared at his compatriot, who was beginning to back away into the grid of young birch by the side, trailing red. The mech’s step was unsteady, movements overcorrected or undershot. A kind of empathy pinged deep inside Two, a recognition of struggle. That probably wasn’t just fear and exhaustion, the way his arms jerked. Something was dying in the motor mapper, or the proxy itself.
But it didn’t matter. He would die either way.
“I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” - tears streamed down the reddened, choking face, mixing with sweat in the greasy frame of a beard as the sword’s tip thunked into the legions of withering grass.
“COME BACK HERE YOU BASTARD!”
But it was too late. The swordsman turned and ran, adding a new color to the young forest’s quiet palette.
Two cackled, howling in a cadence it had not expected from itself, fresh gore slithering down its whole front, varnished wood firm in its fingers. A firefly of ethereal mercury fluttered along the weapon in its hands, tracing guisarme’s edges with an almost sensual devotion. The air was fresh, the air was iron.
“Fuck you! Fuck you! FUCK YOU!”
Two circled the soldier, in two opposing directions. The man in the suit spun erratically between their headings, exacerbating the mounting failures of bodily control.
Two took a chain swing at the soldier’s legs, a feint retracted halfway. The soldier retaliated, spinning to respond with an awkward, off-kilter hammer motion. The massive thing crashed into the dirt, and he struggled to lift it back into position. The light half jumped in range and swiped at a now-exposed hydraulic artery inside a beaten-up leg; the pilot yelped and flailed with his extended fist, falling forward on one knee, servos unable to cope with the stress alone. Two stepped back out of range in time, and brought another downwards chain hit on the hammer barely off the ground. It slipped out of the mech’s weakening grasp, and before the pilot managed to pick it up again, Two closed the distance. Its kick flipped the mech on its back, leaving the torn canopy unprotected, and, regrabbing the polearm for a downwards attack, Two thrust the blade through the dazed pilot’s neck. Synthetic muscle locked up against itself, tearing the handle out of its fingers, and then the machine went limp, some crucial circuitry of the proxy suit evidently ruined in the process.
The human inside gurgled, paralyzed from the neck down, suffocating on his own vital essence. The truck’s engine fired on idle, mule-machine having come to a stop against a tree trunk off to the side, never put on handbrake. Birds warned each other in the humid distance. Somewhere, way off the road, the fleeing swordsman was crashing through spiky bush. But, otherwise, it was quiet.
It laughed again, inspecting itself for damage. A rib was probably cracked, and the power fist had sheared segments of tan-brown hide off its heavy half’s side, exposing the shifting synthetic muscle and dull grey frame underneath, and the shoulder whined with report of a joint bent slightly out of alignment.
It strolled to the machine and hoisted itself down, reluctantly, not bothering with the tarp anymore, then clambered into the car’s broken temple. The truck was undamaged, barring the bumpers, blunt body impacts almost laughable in comparison to the anger it bore the other day.
Two switched back to first gear, and steered onto the road. The transmission whined, following its orders begrudgingly, and the engine creaked with concern as the fresh skirmish sailed past the shattered passenger seat window. But the thing picked up pace. It was back on the road.
To where?
It felt like it was forgetting something.
It scanned the cabin again, looking for some kind of clue. A heavy case of a laptop sat to the right, askew from the impacts. Several things were plugged into it, none particularly remarkable. A charging cable. A flash drive. A small external microphone, with a physical switch on it. A switch that was on.
It thought it recognized something on the screen. Its right soft hand found the speaker switch.
That one was off.
It turned the speaker on. Immediately, it was assaulted with a cacophony of sobs and cries and screams.
“SPEAK. SLOW.”
“…lease don’t be dead please don’t HOLY SHIT! HOLY SHIT! June! June! June are you okay?!”
“NEGLIGIBLE. DAMAGE.”
A silence filled with the whizzing of air through the doors. A lick of cold on its carapace.
“June, is that you?..”
“OBSTRUCTION. CLEARED. MAINTAINING. COURSE.”
There was a descending chime, and the other party disconnected.
It took Two a few minutes to realize they probably expected someone else. Something smoldered like hair at the edge of its understanding, but it could not be bothered to extinguish the flame. So it simply kept driving towards a meaningless waypoint, blunt kingdom of the season of rot sailing past in fluffy streaks of iron-red and fat-yellow.