Chapter Three: The Scrapyard

The Shima brothers run a recycling operation in the warehouse district, a short tram ride away from Mech's storage unit in the engineering ward. Recycling is a substantial economic force within a colony as large and established as Khemkhaeng City. At a certain point, it makes the most sense to leave the collection and breakdown of materials to private businesses rather than the Republic government.

And breakers are recycled just like anything else.

Mech's collection is unlike the scrap heaps she sees. She's spent long hours bartering, scavenging, and, yes, occasionally looting for pristine breaker parts that oughtn't rightly exist on the open market. She hears the sounds of saws and crushers. Feels the heat of kilns. She sees breaker bodies and limbs in broken stacks and piles. She watches functioning breakers walk amongst the wrecks, preoccupied with their own tasks. Their indifference to the carnage fills her with a sort of dread that she can't fully articulate.

It really isn't Jobel's fault that he hadn't gotten a check with more zeroes on it. She knows that. Everything else is his fault, but not that. The reason wholesalers like the Shima brothers won't pay anyone, let alone a rube Jobel, top dollar for her inventory is very simple: There isn't a thriving market for the repair of breakers, which were, after all, designed to be disposable. Recyclers deal in weight and volume, not condition. It is their contacts within the Republic bureaucracy, knowing which materials were most valuable to whom and on which planets, that brings their profit.

In a way, she finds that vaguely encouraging. Large recyclers like the Shima's deal in so much scrap on a daily basis that losing her meager contribution likely won't be a sore point for them. It might be a simpler transaction than she originally thought, even if the brothers have a rough reputation.

The warehouse district is a mad combination of cramped markets and workshops populating large, general purpose buildings the size of aircraft hangars. The merchants, mechanics, and recyclers with the largest claims take up the largest footprint of floor space, leaving smaller vendors to built up when they cannot build out. It creates a vertical landscape of ladders, stairways, and elevators unique to the lunar colony, where so many businesses and residences operate on the ground floor and no higher.

There is a cafeteria-like background roar of ambient sound. The ground under Mech's boots is a squishy sludge of lunar dirt, machine oil, and soot. The air is hot and smoky but -thanks in no small part to the colony airbreakers- is mostly clean. The back of her neck stings, and it takes a moment for Mech to understand that she's walked through a shower of sparks cascading from a level above. She swats the sensation away.

She moves at a rapid clip. She's worried about Cypress' deadline, true enough, but she would rather not be spotted for other reasons. The last thing she needs is to be recognized by another breaker in dire need of a repair job that she doesn't have the time or materials for. She doesn't think her heart could take it.

Firebreakers were the hardest. The poor things would burn through their factory parts long before their essential vitality started to wane. She often sees it in their eyes; The frustration of a body that will not serve as diligently or as fiercely as the mind demands.

Except breakers don't have minds. Not exactly. She tries to remind herself of that, even if the information seems reluctant to adhere to her unconscious thoughts. And yet, whatever it is that draws her to them, makes her yearn to understand them, it's not something so conventional and easily understood as a computer.

She locates the Shima brothers' ground-level garage quickly, much the same way Jobel did. Theirs is one of the few operations large and established enough to warrant signage outside of their rolling garage door. Beneath their name and license number, it features a crude cartoon dragon holding a wrench in one talon and a gold coin in the other. A slogan is painted in a fading shorthand: You break it, we buy it!

Mech lets herself in. She's greeted by the sight and smell of hot metal. There are too many omni-directional shop lights and loud noises for her to sense much else. The sound of tools and humming Varrick batteries fills her ears. There's heavy music playing somewhere, from tinny, worn speakers that reduce the song to a mid-frequency wail.

'Ken Shima.' Mech raises her voice to be heard over the din of the garage.

Movement to her left. Mech turns. Squints through adjusting eyes. Shades her brow with one hand.

A breaker, a metalbreaker according to its tarnished gray and gold mask, tilts its head at her quizzically before looking down again. A man in protective goggles with a shock of black hair sprouting from the top of his pate is hard at work disassembling an engine. The breaker assists in handling the immense weight of the machine, manipulating overhead chains to suspend it several inches off the floor. The man chews on a chemstik with an animal intensity.

'Ken Shima?' Mech repeats. She waves a hand.

The man makes no indication that he hears her. He revs a power hammer in his fist and knocks a ring of bolts from a coupling with a practiced efficiency that Mech can't help but admire. The pieces hit the concrete floor with hard, chunky thumps.

The metalbreaker looks at Mech again, seeming to apologize on the man's behalf with a shrug.

There's a tick, a twitch in the breaker's movement that Mech recognizes. The gesture of shrugging causes a domino effect of hydraulic glitches that move through the machine's humanoid body. It's a common defect of metalbreakers in service longer than a couple of years, caused by an enamel build up in the nerve pistons of the motorized spine. If left unchecked it could cause-

The twitches increase until they are full-blown spasms, and finally the breaker can maintain its task no longer. The chains go slack. The heavy engine drops to the floor with a crash.

The man in the goggles looks up at the metalbreaker with a snarl.

'Get it together, tin-head!' the man sneers. He lifts the power hammer and fires. The tool's heavy bolt smacks the breaker sharply in the thigh. 'I keep telling you to warn me when you're gonna go screwloose.'

The breaker offers a short whistle of apology, but beyond that does not protest the treatment. Its movement steadies. It regains its focus and lifts the engine once again.

'Hey!' Mech practically shouts this time, and finally the man looks up. The chemstik dangles from his lip as he takes a moment to register her.

'What?' the man replies sharply. It's a tone that is accustomed to challengers.

Mech wants to say something to the man about the breaker, about how he's treating the machine, but moves past it with a resigned gulp. You couldn't re-educate colonists who were accustomed to thinking of breakers as 'things.' Not in a short conversation that was already feeling adversarial. Besides, it would do her no good to antagonize the very person she'd come to bargain with.

'Ken Shima,' she says again. She reaches into her coveralls to find the check. 'I want to cancel the sale of-'

'Office.' The man jerks the thumb of his free hand to a door at the rear of the garage space. 'Ken handles that stuff. I'm Ting. I handle this stuff.'

Mech starts to reply. The man -Ting- is already back to his work of breaking down the engine. The power hammer fires. Pieces fall. Mech rolls her eyes.

'Nice to meet you too, I guess.'

She's about to proceed to the office door. Something stops her. She looks at the metalbreaker. She can picture in her mind exactly the component and exactly the defect that causes the machine to spasm and glitch. The knowledge, the certainty that she could fix it in under sixty seconds, gnaws at her. All she would need is a-

Her eyes fall on an errant screwdriver left on a nearby rack. Her lips purse in thought.

Mech takes a step toward Ting bent over his engine. She claps her hands together and waits for a response. Engrossed in his task, vision occluded by his goggles, he seems perfectly oblivious. He revs the power hammer and dismantles a series of brackets.

She looks at the metalbreaker. It steals a glance at her. The servos around its eyes form a questioning expression.

Mech picks up the screwdriver. Lifts a finger to her lips. Offers a half grin.

'Shh… Hold still.'

Fifty-seven seconds later, Mech opens the door to the office, knocking as she does so.

What she hears when she enters doesn't make immediate sense. It's the sound of soft music and male voices. Not speaking, but cooing. Moaning. Almost like the sound of-

'Hey!'

There's another change in light quality. Another lingering instant of Mech's eyes adjusting. She doesn't see the interior of the office until she's well through the doorway.

A man, Ken presumably, is hastily pushing his glass computer monitor back into its housing in his desk. A rugged, handsome face frozen in dewy ecstasy flickers on the screen before going dark. The moaning persists for another instant before the speakers cut out.

Mech's eyes go wide. 'Oh!' is all she can manage.

'What's the big idea?' Ken asks indignantly. Beads of sweat catch the light on the dome of his shaved head. He's roughly the same age as Ting, but longer in the limbs and narrower in the face. Mech guesses the brothers have thirty or thirty-five years to her own twenty-two.

'It's business hours!' Mech says. Later she'll wonder why that part that seemed to upset her the most.

'And it's my business!' Ken shoots back. He exhales sharply. Wipes his face and head with a nearby rag. He stares at the ceiling for a moment and seems to collect his thoughts in the interim. When he speaks again, his tone is professional, if still a bit flustered. 'I'm very sorry, what can I do for you?'

It seems insane to Mech that Ken's solution to what just transpired is to ignore it as quickly and efficiently as possible, but she realizes she doesn't have any better ideas. Or any other choice.

She retrieves the check from her pocket. 'You bought a storage locker of spare breaker parts from my boyf- ...From a guy named Jobel. Must have been sometime yesterday evening.'

She steps forward and lays the check on the desk.

'That's your signature, isn't it?'

Ken doesn't pick it up, merely leans over the read it from his seated position. He looks up at Mech.

'Are you a cop?' he asks.

'...No,' Mech says cautiously. 'Why?'

'You did that like a cop in a mover,' Ken shrugs. 'I've never actually seen someone take a paper from their inside pocket and lay it on a desk like evidence.'

Mech's face screws up in consternation. She feels her neck get hot. 'Do you remember or not?'

'Sure,' Ken says. He points at the check. 'That's the standard rate for scrap. I don't renegotiate.'

'It's not scra-' Mech pauses. Swallows the barbs she had wanted to attach to her words. Tries again. 'It wasn't Jobel's property to sell. I want it back.'

'I don't do refunds, either,' Ken frowns. 'It's the law for recyclers. Otherwise people would treat this place like a pawn shop.'

'But-'

'If this Jobel guy took your stuff without your permission, talk to the constable. If you can prove it was yours, and that you came by it legally, you can keep the check plus whatever the courts decide to carve out of his hide.'

At the mention of courts, the air in the office… flexes. For Mech, the sensation is barely discernible from the swelling, perturbed pressure rising in her chest. For Ken, if feels as though two huge fingers are jammed into his ears for half an instant. He winces and looks around the room for the source of the disturbance. Finds nothing.

'Did you feel...' he starts to ask. Mech meets his gaze without expression. He trails off. Dismisses the event with a wave.

She thinks to herself: No more of those. Get a grip.

'Please, make an exception,' Mech persists. She speaks with a cool levelheadedness that she doesn't feel.

Ken sighs. 'Look, the minute someone leaves with one of those checks, whatever they left behind becomes private property of the company, no matter how it got here. This isn't the mall. It's not as simple as refunds and exchanges. Inventory and bookkeeping has to be amended. I have to put a call in with the bureau, and they don't like us freewheeling with the numbers. It's a whole thing. I'm sorry if you got ripped off, but it's not my problem. And I think we both know you don't have a license to store all that stuff anyway.'

'It was all in pristine condition," Mech says. She dislikes the whiny edge that threatens to undercut her point. She fights to keep her tone even. 'Please, you can't just melt it all down. I worked so hard to get it all.'

'Breaker parts mostly get stripped down and reprocessed, not melted. In any case, maybe it's time for a new hobby. Maybe try collecting something that other people can't mistake for junk?'

That word again. Mech sees Jobel's awkward, disheartening sneer in her mind's eye. 'Junk.' She feels her annoyance and frustration as it congeals and becomes words. She feels her lips curling into a snarl. She opens her mouth to speak.

Before she can, a third voice joins the conversation.

'Did you touch my breaker?'

Mech and Ken turn to look at Ting standing in the doorway. When he's not bent over an engine, he's still a bit shorter than Mech. His goggles are now perched on his forehead. The clean circles of pink flesh they leave behind over his eyes are a sharp contrast to the rest of his face, which is a sooty, grease-streaked gray.

'What?' Ken replies. 'Why would I-'

'Not you,' Ting says. He points a rough, meaty finger at Mech. 'What'd you do?'

Mech reads his tone, measures his demeanor, and makes a decision. She tilts her head, gives him a contemplative stare, and says: 'What do you mean?'

'Is it busted?' Ken asks.

'The opposite,' Ting says, pushing out an indignant lower lip that makes the chemstick poke the air in front of his face. 'He stopped glitching. He's steady as a rock.'

'I'm sorry,' Mech frowns, 'but are you accusing me of something?'

Ting chews onerously on the plastic stick in his mouth. This close, Mech can see the deep teeth marks in the small stimulant-administering device.

'Why don't you just ask Pine?' Ken asks. Mech is thankful for his interjection. Ting looks about ready to start frothing at the mouth and barking.

'You know I can't understand that one,' Ting says, turning to his brother. 'It just whistles.'

Mech knows this is typical behavior for mistreated elemental breakers. It takes a great deal of effort not to say so.

'Ting, get back to work,' Ken says flatly. 'Stop looking for excuses to come faff around in my office.'

''Faff around'?' Ting goes red in the face.

Mech takes a cautious half step back from him. For a moment, she's certain the tuft of spiky hair on the top of his head is going to blow off like a cork.

'Don't you forget what mom said!' Ting exclaims with a snarl. His fists clench and his forehead bulges with veins. 'When I'm in the office, you treat me like an equal! You're just four minutes older than me, and only eight centimeters taller!'

At this, Mech cannot help the way her eyebrows jump into a perplexed furrow. She's grateful that Ting seems to have forgotten her entirely.

Before Ken can respond, Ting whirls and stomps his way out of the office. He throws the door closed haphazardly behind him.

For what seems like far too long, Mech and Ken can only blink at each other.

'Family business,' Ken offers, opening his hands in a shrug. It seems enough of an explanation to him, and Mech doesn't wish to probe further.

'Look,' she says, 'I'm not asking you to do anything criminal, am I? I just-'

'Are you Anika the Mechanika?'

A bubble seems to pop in Mech's brain, shorting out her motor skills for a brief instant. Her mouth hangs open mid-speech.

'Sorry?' she manages finally.

Ken props an elbow on the desk and perches his chin in his hand. He regards her with far more investigative eyes than he did before. 'You are, aren't you? The 'breaker doctor'? You do realize that every breaker you patch up is one that I don't make money on recycling, right? Why would I want to do you favors?'

'There's nothing illegal about fixing breakers,' Mech says defensively. It's all that comes to her mind. And it's not the entire letter of the law. There was nothing illegal about fixing breakers you owned. Mech chooses to ignore that last part, though she suspects the pending lawsuit against her will be sure not to.

Ken cocks his head. He points at the office door. 'Did you fix Pine? That's our metalbreaker out there.'

Mech looks at the office door, then back to Ken. Finally, she glances down at the check still on the desk. It turns her stomach that she should be so concerned over it, but it seems to be the most important item in the room at the moment. It might be the only document that proves she ever owned her stock of replacement parts.

'Check's yours either way. And I could probably never prove it to anyone, even if you did muck around with our breaker. We don't have cameras.' Ken shrugs. Then he flashes a sardonic grin that doesn't seem as hostile as Mech might have expected. If she didn't know better, she might call it warm.

'So?' he asks. His smile doesn't falter.

Mech thinks: Because he knows.

She maintains her composure as long as she can. It's about three seconds before the absurd tension in the rooms gets its hooks into her though. After that, she cannot help the pinched smirk that appears on her face. She's accomplished at the art of detachment, but she's always been terrible at bald-faced lies.

'Of course I did,' she says finally.

Ken absorbs this, then rolls his head back and howls with laughter. It surprises Mech enough that she actually jumps a few millimeters off the ground.

'Sorry,' Ken manages. He wipes an eye with the heel of his hand. 'It's just that Ting is miserable at fixing things. Pine has been twitchy for weeks, and Ting just got approved for a factory defect trade-in. He's the type that hates every breaker he gets, but can't wait for a new one. You might've just ensured that he's stuck with Pine for another six months.'

It breaks Mech's heart that breaker lifespans are discussed in such callous, cursory terms. She compartmentalizes the thought and keeps the sardonic grin pasted to her lips.

Ken sighs, the laughing fit has gone. He crosses his arms and leans back in his chair.

'There's all sorts of stories about you, ya know,' he says.

'Like what?'

'Is it true that you're an airbender?'

Hearing the word out loud causes Mech's stomach to somersault in her ribcage. Her palms feel suddenly damp.

'I'm an airbreaker supervisor,' she finally manages. 'In the sub-levels.'

'So that's a 'yes.''

Mech rolls her eyes. 'I don't have the tattoos or commune with flying bison if that's what you're asking. Why does it matter?'

Ken shrugs. 'Just curious, I guess. What do you see in them?'

'Who? Airbenders?'

'No, airbreakers. Breakers in general. I know this business. I know you're not making any money patching them back together. I'm willing to bet you actually lose money.'

It's a question that's been put to Mech in some form or another several times. And while she has many academic points about the dignity of machines and the satisfaction of knowledge and service for it's own sake, the truth is far more complex. And, without knowing why, Mech chooses this moment to try and articulate it.

'Have you ever seen a breaker get recycled?' she asks. Ken starts to nod, but stops when she raises a hand. 'I don't mean the non-elementals. The servitors and custodians. Have you ever seen one like Pine get decommissioned?'

Ken looks through the fogged glass of his office toward the work floor. The sounds of Ting's power hammer reverberate through the wall.

'No,' he says after a moment's thought. 'No, I don't think I have, actually.'

'It's...haunting,' Mech says quietly. 'I've spent twelve hours a day surrounded by elemental breakers for the past five years. I know we all want to think that they're what VGI says they are; Disposable automatons. Believe me, I wish I could go back to buying into that. When you talk to one -really talk to them- it's not like talking to a tin can. They think. They feel. And when you see the life ripped out of them… You see things in their eyes.'

'What do you see?' Ken asks.

Mech swallows. Wets her dry lips.

'They're afraid.'

Mech stands outside of the Shima brother's garage much the way she entered: Feeling tired, deflated, and disgusted by the check burning a hole in the inside pocket of her coveralls. The hustle and noise of the warehouse district swirls around her. She feels the grit and soot settling into her clothes and hair.

In the end, Ken had been sympathetic but ultimately unmoved by her plight. She wants to feel scorn or anger for him, but she'd never detected anything in his demeanor worth her venom. The rules for recyclers are ironclad, and the Shima brothers have much more to lose by breaking them than she had considered.

None of this helps the fist that forms in her gut when she thinks of Cypress alone and minus one arm in her storage locker. If he's discovered in such a state, especially after his designated gate check, the airbreaker will be summarily dismantled on sight by the Khemkhaeng police.

She turns and appraises the Shima brothers' building. On the western side, the structure is closely flanked by several other shops. On the eastern side, however, there is a narrow alley that presumably leads to the rear of the garage.

Mech doesn't enjoy the series of thoughts that transpire in her head. Especially now that she considers at least one of the two Shimas to be a decent sort of man. But the wheels of her mind turn all the same.

She may not be able to recover her entire inventory, but she knows for a fact that somewhere in that garage there is a suitable replacement for Cypress' arm.

She tries to make her walk casual as she enters the alleyway. As though she has business that just so happens to lead her in this direction. She's careful not to creep or conduct herself in a way that might seem suspicious to a passerby.

As she had suspected, the Shima brother's lot extends beyond their garage. The building continues about twenty meters past the front, but after that the lot is encompassed by a high perimeter fence. Even from her vantage point, Mech can see tall stacks of scrap and machine parts pushed up against it.

The fence is tall. But not so that it could dissuade a motivated individual from climbing it. And, as Ken Shima himself had admitted to her, the building has no cameras.

Mech reaches out. Wraps her fingers around the rough chain links. Tests her grip.

If you get lucky, you could be in and out in less than five minutes. What's the harm?

Mech holds her breath. Places a booted foot into the crux of a chain link. Braces her weight against it.

'I really wouldn't do that.'

Mech practically leaps off of the fence. The sound that escapes her throat is something between a gasp and a shriek. She whirls around to face the speaker.

She doesn't know what she had expected, but what she sees takes her aback.

A woman, perhaps Mech's age or slightly older, stands in the threshold of the alley. She wears a placid, inscrutable look on her face, made all the more enigmatic by the deep black of her cybernetic eyes. Her clothes are wrong for the warehouse district. Where most inhabitants, including Mech, protect themselves from the dirt and grime with a thick set of coveralls, the woman wears fresh, fashionable clothes that could have been pulled off a mannequin in one of Khemkhaeng's shopping centers. Perhaps most unusual of all is her hat. It is a black knit pulled down tight over her scalp, just above her eyebrows. It clashes fiercely with the modern style that the woman seems to embody.

'Do what?' Mech asks dumbly.

The woman ignores the question. Strides forward with an easy confidence that gives Mech the jitters. She reaches out with one hand, the palm turned downward.

'It's Anika, isn't it?'

Her palm stops within arm's reach of Mech. After a moment's hesitation, Mech takes it. The woman gives a firm, singular shake.

'Nian Basoori. Pleased to meet you.'

'Mech.'

'Sorry?' The woman -Nian- cocks her head.

'No one calls me Anika. It's Mech.'

Nian smiles. 'Of course.'

There is an awkward pause that hangs in the air between them.

'You're not Kay-Po,' Mech blurts.

The black glass eyes narrow. 'I'm not what?'

Not a Lunite either, Mech realizes. She even has a tan. From Earth..?

'Khemkhaeng Police,' Mech says, emphasizing the first syllables of each word by means of explanation.

'Ah,' Nian intones. 'No. No, I'm not.' The woman is neither difficult nor confrontational, but at the same time seems slippery and steadfastly prepared to offer as little of herself as possible.

'What do you want, then?' Mech asks, growing flustered. 'And… Wait- How do you know my name?'

'Maybe we could find a place to talk about that,' Nian offers. Still, Mech senses a guarded, inscrutable energy about the woman. The presumptuousness of it, the impression that she is being 'handled' in a way she cannot detect, begins to eat at Mech's nerves.

'Sorry,' Mech says, brushing by the woman. It's not hard. Nian is slight of frame and shorter than Mech, and offers little resistance. But even in that moment, Mech senses that the only reason she finds it easy to maneuver past Nian is because Nian allows it. The feeling only serves to irritate her further. 'I don't go to second locations with creepy girls who got lost on their way to the fashion district.'

Nian looks down. 'I like these clothes,' she says mildly.

'Good for you,' Mech says without looking back.

'What if I told you I can make your civil suit go away?'

Mech stops. Turns.

'What?'

Nian looks up to the top of the Shima brothers' perimeter fence. 'Is there a part you need? Maybe an arm for your airbreaker friend Cypress, right? That's what got you into trouble in the first place, isn't it? You repaired a firebreaker that didn't belong to you. Then later that day it burned down a senator's four car garage, isn't that so?'

The dearth of information that Nian is in possession of makes her feel overwhelmed, as though she might be drowning. She grasps for a response. 'That's not how it happened,' Mech insists after a moment.

'I know,' Nian says. Mech tries hard to find the scorn or sarcasm she would have expected. It's not there.

'I'm sorry, but what is this?' Mech asks, no longer bothering to mask her distress and irritation. 'What do you want?'

'A great many things, Mech,' Nian says. Mech finds it hard to pull her gaze away from the dark, reflective pools of her artificial eyes. 'But mostly, I want to help you.'

Mech can't help it. She laughs. For the first time, Nian seems genuinely surprised, and in its own small way, Mech finds some satisfaction in that. Up to this point, she's felt as though she were under a microscope. Seeing Nian disarmed by her amused outburst feels like a miniscule but substantial victory.

'It's just,' Mech puts a hand over her grin, 'It feels like people have been trying to 'help' me all day, and I've honestly never felt worse.'

Mech gazes upward. Sighs. She breathes the way the airbenders of Earth taught her. She feels the emotions, the pent up energy, the waves of psychological turbulence leave her and dissipate into the air around her. She feels… not peace, but stability. Stability is enough. She checks her watch. She has one hour before Cypress' gate check.

'I wouldn't worry about your airbreaker,' Nian says, as though reading Mech's mind. 'I have someone looking after him.'

Mech chuckles again. She wonders if the universe has chosen this day to specifically target her with people and situations designed to fill her with stress and confusion.

'Okay, Nian Basoori,' Mech says at length. 'I know a place.'