At midnight, the little bell jangled over the scrap shop door, and Luther's boots thunked heavy across the threshold.
Dust sifted between the cracks in the floor. Moonlight filtered soft through the crowded windows and cast the old iron cogs and bent road signs in a film of translucent blue.
"Are you sure he's gone?" Simon laid a hand on the door frame and leaned inside. Behind him, the scrapyard's towers of twisted metal glinted under the stars.
Luther dropped his shoulders with a release of breath. "I'm sure." He stepped around the sales counter, then punched a few buttons on the till before the money drawer dinged open. It was empty. "He's not coming back for awhile, either."
"I'd skip town, too, if I were attacked and robbed blind by a bunch of sentient robots." Simon breathed a quiet laugh to himself, and he examined a crude aluminum sculpture that hung by a thread from the rafters. He touched a sharp edge, and the model began to turn and catch the light.
Luther pressed a hand against the back-room door. The hinges groaned.
Inside, the shelves hung barren. The workbench lay stained and empty. Even the blueprints and electrical theories - the scraps of curled paper and photographs and torn pages from engineering textbooks - had been pulled down from nails in the walls.
Simon stepped inside just as Luther opened the first file cabinet. Luther reached down into the metal drawer and handed him a stack of identical hard drives. "One of these should be Kara's," Luther explained. "The memories in this drawer go back to November."
Simon took the stack in both hands - and while he watched, Luther filled his own arm with more. "All of them," Simon breathed, "are androids that were thrown away and refurbished here?"
"Or taken apart and put back together in ways that never should have been." Luther carried his armful of memories to the workbench and spread them out like a deck of cards. He chose one at random, held it between exposed plastic hands, and accessed its contents with a yellow trill of his LED.
Simon stepped up to the other side of the bench and, with a clatter, dropped his pile next to Luther's. He stood in silence while he counted them. "Are yours here, too?" He looked up to see that Luther's LED had gone dim.
"Mine … would be in the lower drawer, I think."
There was a stiff hesitance in Luther's voice that implied the subject should be dropped. Simon, of course, glanced down at the bottommost drawer instead. "Aren't you even a little curious?" he hazarded, burning with the question that shouldn't be asked.
Luther watched him with a sidelong stare. "I was probably just a dock worker. Fell in the river, damaged. Scrapped." He shook his head. "I have enough memories of taking orders."
"What if it's more than that?" Simon leaned forward on the workbench and studied Luther's downcast face. "What if you were a hero?"
Luther snorted a laugh. "A machine can't be a hero."
"How do you know for sure?" Simon caught that little flicker of blue at Luther's temple. He smiled. "Would you mind if I look for it?"
Luther quirked a brow at him - but when Simon's hopeful grin seemed relentless, the giant caved. "Alright," he sighed with a tired smirk of his own. "But if those memories are anything like what I do remember, they can stay buried."
Simon laid a firm hand on Luther's arm, binding his words in sincerity. "I'll read them carefully, I promise."
While Simon sat on the floor and pulled open the lowest drawer, Luther turned one of the hard drives between his hands. "Look for Alice, too. She was around the same time."
Simon stared up at him, hesitant to ask why he sounded so distant at the mention of the little girl … but Luther was deep in the memories of another android long-gone.
o - o - o - o
"I call shotgun!" shouted Lee while he raced ahead in the dark, crashing through leaves and bramble toward the big black van parked between the pines. Jerry leaned out of the driver's window with a bright grin to greet them.
Alice hollered first. "You always get shotgun!" She was quick on Lee's heels, determined to beat him to the car and claim the coveted seat as her own.
"Have you ever even sat in the front seat before?" Lee darted around the van, zigzagging so Alice wouldn't catch him.
"No! And that's why I should get shotgun!"
"You can both sit in the front!" called Jerry through the open windows. "There's room for two! We'll have our own secret front-seat club. Wouldn't you like that?"
"Ralph wanted to be in the front-seat club," muttered Ralph. He shuffled indignant through the mud and ferns, a heavy box hefted in his arms.
"You can sit by us," Echo offered with a squint and a grin. She and Ripple carried the tents between them: rattling poles and bundles of stakes wrapped in bright painted canvas. "We don't bite."
"You don't bite much, you mean," Rupert chimed in. Ripple struck an elbow into Rupert's side. "Ow!"
"Shaolin, are you okay?" Kara hung back while the others marched together through the moonlit woods, and she watched while the straggling HK400 trudged closer.
Shaolin gripped the strings of a bag slung over his shoulder. He hunched as he walked, his face fraught with pain, his LED sputtering between blue and yellow. He only gave Kara a glance before he turned his eyes down to the forest floor. "What'll happen to the other one?" he muttered. "The one we left behind."
"Daniel?" Kara offered him a gentle smile, and she laid a hand softly on his shoulder … but withdrew her touch when Shaolin's LED began to spin red. "We never woke him up. He should be repaired by now, but he's still a machine."
"Wouldn't he want to come with us?"
Kara pursed her lips, and she shook her head. "I don't know."
"KARA!" Alice's voice shouted trembling through the woods. The van door flung open and Jerry bolted toward the scene to help.
Alice and Lee held Chloe steady between them, their eyes wide in confused horror.
Chloe took a wobbling step forward; her leg whirred and buckled. Her bare feet were misaligned and caked in muck. A blue stain soaked her dress, there was a wiry sparking stump where her arm used to be. A jagged hole gaped dark in her skull.
"Kara…" she sobbed, her voice crackling with static.
Tears left tracks of blue on her shifting face.
Kara raced between the trees and wove through the crowd, and she found Chloe shivering in Jerry's arms.
Chloe curled her only arm around Jerry's waist. She raised her eyes over his shoulder, and she met Kara's stare with a hollow, broken gaze.
The old scrap truck rumbled and creaked down the forest path, scraped by low-hanging branches and squeezed through billows of leaves, careful on the treacherous narrow lane. It finally came to a stop just behind the black van, and the driver's side door screeched open to release Luther into the starlit woods.
"Kara!" he called, while Simon emerged in silence on the other side.
Luther's LED blinked yellow; the quiet stretched tense, strung tight as a thread about to snap.
No one spoke.
He thought he spotted Kara on the other side of the van, and he began to step forward …
… but Lucy stood in his path, her hand on his chest. She raised her dark eyes to his.
Luther felt a cold shiver in his veins.
"Kara…" Chloe reached for her, and Jerry stepped back while Chloe drew Kara close. Her sobs began anew when Kara stiffened in her one-armed embrace.
"What happened?" asked Kara in a soothing voice, a hand gentle on Chloe's back.
Chloe sucked in a shuddering breath. She stepped back, closer to Jerry, and she stifled the burning tears behind her eyes as she realized Jerry felt more familiar now than her best friend.
"I lost Elijah." Chloe forced her voice to remain as steady as she could. She welcomed Jerry's hand on her shoulder. "We got separated at the rally, we …"
Tears spilled down her face.
"They're looking for you." Chloe choked. Terror and guilt shivered in her eyes. "I'm sorry, I … Kara, I'm so sorry."
