Chapter 2:

Countdown: 177 Days Remaining.

Makoto picked his way over the crumbling wall of what used to be a bar, as evidenced by the shattered glass littering the area. Because of the immense heat needed for glassblowing, only the most expensive bottles were still made from it, leaving this particular location in the slums one of the only businesses that had thrived. He racked his memory for the name, certain he’d walked past it a hundred times on his way to school, but he'd always had his mind otherwise occupied. Besides, with no intention of ever indulging in spirits, he had no reason to store the name in his memories.

He gazed at the forlorn remains, abandoned in the raids, and felt a pang of regret over never having walked in. Such an experience would have been unique, to see the inside of a millenia old establishment, even though being 17 would’ve prevented him from drinking.

Now that experience, like so many others, had been reduced to a pile of rubble, stains, and ashes.

Makoto knelt between two slabs of concrete and removed his respirator. The cold air bit his face, but he forced himself to withstand it long enough to sniff for any trace of alcohol. If rumors were true about the strength of it, even just one bottle could burn long enough to provide ample energy for his entire camp. Those who have been too weak to walk could take their first steps in months from the energy he could convert out of the heat of pure flames. It would go far beyond the basic maintenance he had been doing.

But Makoto knew he wasn’t the only one with such knowledge, and he doubted even a drop of usable fluids would remain. He extinguished the spark of hope in himself with the grim realization that this location had already been picked over.

The rubble didn’t lie naturally in place. Most of the larger pieces had fallen perpendicular to their remaining bases, but smaller chunks of concrete had been piled in the corners. The wiring had been stripped from them as well, leaving nothing useful. The vague outline of overlapping footsteps in the ashes told him many feet had wandered his path.

I knew it was a long shot anyway, Makoto thought, stifling his disappointment. He’d been lucky once, in the beginning, but hadn’t found anything useful in a long while.

He continued to look, knowing the thought would always trouble him if he didn’t inspect every nook and cranny of the establishment. If even the smallest drop remained, it could provide at least a little help.

Part of the counter still stood, the lone survivor in the establishment. Makoto walked over to it, wishing the former bartender or owner had mechanical organs and kept maintenance supplies nearby.

As to be expected, the bar had been raided of anything useful. Broken glass littered the counter space along with the regular debris. If he heightened his sense of smell, Makoto could just barely pick out the sting of spirits among the suffocating heaviness of the dust and bitter ashes. Along with it lingered the subtle metallic smell of unaltered blood, something he hadn’t smelled since his early days in medical training. He winced at the thought of how the bartender had likely met his end.

Much like the rest of us will meet ours, now that we have almost nothing left. With a gloved hand, he scraped at the thin sheet of ice covering the counter, absent-mindedly wondering how long it would take for something so mundane to kill him.

He’d learned in school that summers used to be hot, a long time ago, before the sun all but abandoned the planet. Now this was the best they could hope for, a -8 degree Celsius day in the dead of summer with a vague sheen of light in the sky.

Makoto was about to leave from behind the bar when he noticed a discrepancy in the dust before his feet: it was a little too regular in its disturbance. The larger pieces of debris seemed almost too uniform, their patterns repeating.

Freezing where he stood, he listened for any sounds. If someone was nearby, he couldn’t hear them. Mechanical lungs made little breathing sound, and mechanical feet could muffle footsteps. Even with his heightened hearing, Makoto knew he could miss the usual signs of another Defective.

He pulled his monocle out of the pocket of his shirt with slow, nearly silent movements, and used it to scan the room for heat signatures. Nothing stood out amidst the rubble.

Until he looked down and noticed that the floor before his feet was faintly red with the outline of another person. Although the heat signature was distant, it was directly below him and moving almost imperceptibly.

His instincts told him to move away, to leave before the person noticed him, but something about the figure’s lethargic movements stopped him.

If there’s someone in need, I have to help them.

Swallowing down his inhibitions, Makoto nudged the ashes with his foot, only to find that the toe of his shoe went directly through it. The area around his foot shimmered ever so slightly, something normal human eyes wouldn’t be able to detect.

An illusion.

He tapped the edge of the monocle’s frame to activate the illusion clearing feature, something he’d reluctantly kept despite the energy it cost. Eliminating the shimmer allowed him to see the dim outline of a ladder on the other side of the trap door, but he couldn’t see far enough down to make out whether the figure was conscious. With a deep breath, he descended.

The rust flaking away beneath his hands told him the ladder was cast of iron and quite old. Its hinges groaned, the same sound the ladder to his hideout made. Makoto hoped it would hold long enough to allow him to reascend.

His feet had hardly touched the ground when the illusion above his head broke and a hand grabbed his shoulder. Something cold pressed into the back of his neck, and a faint light illuminated his silhouette against the wall before him.

“How did you find me?” said a voice behind him. Makoto’s trained ear immediately analyzed it for any details about the owner: Male, between 17 and 19. Same prefecture, perhaps even the same neighborhood where Makoto lived in the Before. The slight airiness in his words suggested at least one, if not both, of his lungs had been replaced, and the replacement was deteriorating.

Before Makoto could answer, the stranger pressed the object harder against the back of Makoto’s throat. He guessed from the two prongs that it was likely a taser, fashioned in a similar manner to those the authorities used against people over a millenia ago, when they did little damage to human organs and mainly incapacitated. To Makoto’s mechanical heart, a strong enough shock would prove fatal.

“I was exploring the bar,” Makoto said. “Looking for anything I could use. I was behind the counter when I noticed the illusion and that there was someone below the floor. I thought you might need help, so I came down.”

The pressure against his nuke lessened a little, but the hand on his shoulder remained strong. “What kind of help?” There was a mocking lilt to the voice now, as though the stranger couldn’t believe Makoto would be of any use to him.

“I’m a Surgeon,” Makoto said simply, letting the implications sink in. When the stranger didn’t budge, he added, “Your lung needs maintenance. It won’t collapse immediately, but I’d give it no more than a week.”

Finally, the hand relaxed and the taser moved away. Two footsteps behind him carried the stranger to a safer distance, giving Makoto the space to turn around.

“How did you know about my lung?” As suspected, the stranger was another boy close to Makoto’s age, with red hair so dark it almost looked black. One blue eye shone brighter than the other, giving away that it was fake, though that didn’t stop it from displaying the same mistrust as his real eye.

“Your voice gives it away. A mechanical lung, especially a failing one, injects more air into words than an organic lung.”

“And you can fix it?” The stranger raised an eyebrow, looking Makoto up and down as he spoke.

“I have all my tools with me, so yes.” He wasn’t phased by the disbelief. Even his camp members had taken time to trust in his abilities.

“Why would you help me?” Suspicion gave way to curiosity, and the stranger leaned a little closer, studying Makoto’s face to read his answer before he could voice it.

“I took an oath,” he said with a shrug. In the same motion, so as not to waste energy, Makoto let his backpack slip off his shoulders. He unlocked it with a glance and pulled out his scope along with the thinnest multitool he’d been able to hang onto since his home was raided.

The pair stood at a standstill for a moment, gazes fixed on each other but neither daring to move. At this distance, Makoto could hear the stranger’s heartbeat -- it was regular, albeit a little fast. He’d always found the sounds of a regular heart to be comfortingly rhythmic, and so unlike his own.

“Alright,” the stranger said. His posture relaxed, shoulders dropping and fists unfurling, but his jaw remained tense. Makoto looked for any signs that it had been replaced, since mechanical jaws tended to be stiffer, but he saw no scars on the boy’s face.

Makoto waited for the boy to sheath his taser, which indeed looked similar to the ones he’d learned about in his history courses, before stepping closer.

The boy stood stock still as Makoto unfastened his jacket and unzipped the center of his shirt, looking for the port he knew would be centered in his ribs. The skin around it had been pulled taut, and the edges reddened with irritation.

Removing the glove on his right hand, Makoto gently prodded the irritated skin, and a slight gasp escaped the boy. The swollen stiffness beneath the surface warned Makoto that an infection was starting, a common problem with shoddily sutured ports. His eyepiece confirmed that the temperature around it was three degrees higher than the rest of the boy’s body, which was several degrees lower than it should be to maintain homeostasis.

“You’re lucky I found you,” Makoto said. “A couple more days and you’d be dead from the infection.”

“What a crime it would be for another Defective to die,” the boy muttered. The bitter edge to his voice was all too familiar to Makoto, and it mirrored his own emotions. “It’s not as if anyone cares about us anymore, now that the Pure have abandoned us.”

“Not all did so by choice,” Makoto said, a little too defensively.

The boy gave Makoto a look of curiosity, certainly detecting that there was something more to Makoto’s response. Instead of pressing the matter, he asked, “What’s your name?”

“Makoto.”

“No last name?”

“I don’t know it,” Makot said with a shrug. He’d never asked about his family history, and the opportunity to ever do so had been taken away months ago. “It never came up.”

The boy nodded, still giving Makoto a curious look. “I’m Rui,” he said, wincing again as Makoto applied a numbing salve to his irritated skin. “What are you gonna do with that anyways? Do you even have a way to cure it?”

“Type 1 infections like yours are simple. Once you remove the infected tissue, the port will instruct the skin to heal, and in a few days it’ll be like nothing ever happened.” He cut into the numbed area as he spoke, and drew out an inch all around the port. Then he tapped the other end of the multitool twice to change it into a thin needle, already threaded, and sewed the incision.

When he moved on to checking Rui’s lung, the issue stood out immediately -- the front wires had degraded and become frayed. Two of them hung on by a nanothread, almost invisible even with Makoto’s scope.

Thankfully, however, Rui’s other lung was still organic. It had shrunk to half capacity from disuse, but the tissue appeared healthy.

“I’m going to reroute your airway to focus on your organic lung while I fix the mechanical one,” he said, glancing up to make sure Rui was listening. The intensity of the gaze fixed upon his startled Makoto, but he kept his surprise from showing on his face. “It’ll be harder to breathe for a few minutes.”

Rui nodded, and his body stiffened as he braced himself for the change. The first few breaths came out as short gasps, but he quickly adjusted to breathing shallowly.

Makoto worked quickly to detach and discard the old wires, reaching into his pack for new ones. They were a little aged already, having been salvaged either from ruins or… He preferred not to think about where else he retrieved materials.

Once the new wires were set in place and he had checked the energy readouts to ensure the lung functioned at full capacity, he routed Rui’s airways back to how they were, letting his organic lung return to being a backup.

“That should hold you for a while, probably longer than you’ll need anyway,” Makoto said. He removed the multitool and unscrewed the scope, closing the port with a simple swipe of his finger. Rui fixed his clothes, tightly winding the red belt of his jacket around his thin waist.

“Yeah, it won’t do me any good once the weather turns cold,” he said. His eyes adopted a faraway look, staring blankly at the wall behind Makoto. “Not unless things change.” He didn’t sound convinced that would happen.

Makoto nodded regardless, ignoring the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He didn’t bother asking what could change now, since the Rebels had been wiped out two months ago. “I’ll leave you alone now,” was all he said, and turned away.

“Wait.” Rui reached out and grabbed Makoto’s arm using the same strength with which he’d gripped his shoulder. “Thanks,” he said once Makoto looked at him. His pale lips formed a half-hearted smile, but his blue eyes didn’t match the expression.

Makoto nodded, and tried again to make for the ladder. This time, Rui let him pull his arm free. “Where are you going?” he asked.

Makoto paused a couple rungs up from the ground. He hesitated on how much to say and how much to withhold. What would I even call our camp anyways? Home? “Wherever, I guess,” was what he settled on. Vague enough to seem aloof but not outright dismissive.

“Let me come with you then.” Stones scraped against the ground, and Rui grunted as he picked something up. To Makoto’s ear, the strain the object caused him made it likely to weigh between 20 and 30 pounds. It thumped against Rui, and Makoto assumed he had swung a backpack onto his back.

“I prefer to travel alone.”

“No problem. You’ll be alone, and I’ll be alone, coincidentally behind you.” A footstep clanged against the bottom of the ladder.

Makoto listened for any sounds outside before poking his head out of the hole. The illusion had disappeared while he had been fixing Rui, but he hadn’t detected any movement since.

Regardless, he still lowered his voice to say, “That’s not quite alone now, is it?” When he was fairly certain the coast was clear, Makoto let himself crawl out of the hole and back into the icy air aboveground.

“Sure it is. Besides, I’m bored, and you’re clearly not good at avoiding conflict so you shouldn’t be out on your own. Someone else might’ve killed you, you know.” Rui climbed out behind him and stretched.

“Doesn’t really matter to me,” Makoto said. “We’ll all be dead by winter, so who cares if it’s a little sooner or later?” I can’t let him go near the others, not with that taser, so I can’t go back until I lose him. He replaced the balaclava and respirator over the top of his head and face -- anything to preserve the warmth he desperately needed as energy.

“That’s certainly an outlook on life,” Rui said with a dry chuckle, adjusting a respirator over his own face. “Call me an optimist, but I still think things can change. We might survive winter, but you won’t know if you get yourself killed before that.” He rushed around to stand in front of Makoto. A spark of mischief twinkled in his eyes. “Or, we could spend that time wreaking havoc and make the Pure sorry they left us.”

“I’ll pass.” Makoto stepped to the side and continued out of the bar.

Rui caught up to him and shrugged. “Eh, even just scavenging around beats staying alone underground.”

“I don’t think I’ll do much more scavenging today. I need to rest soon,” Makoto said, keeping his tone neutral.

“We’ll find a place to settle down then, and pick up again in the morning, right? Better when there’s a little more light out.”

Makoto nodded, looking up at the sky. A few stars poked holes in the dark night, offering almost as much light as the dying sun did during the day. With their appearance, however, came humidity and a cold that clung to every inch of his skin. He needed to find shelter sooner than later if he was going to have enough energy to make his way to camp later.

Rui didn’t seem nearly as tired. His steps were lighter, airier than Makoto’s, and he kept pace with ease, staying no more than a foot behind at all times. His voice had shifted too, becoming more cheerful and easygoing.

His personality is completely different from when I first saw him, but I don’t know which one’s real. He’s too dangerous to keep around.

As Makoto rounded the corner with Rui in tow, chattering incessantly, he resolved himself to sneak away the moment Rui appeared asleep. Staying around a chameleon could prove dangerous if his colors changed.