The Bug

They boarded one of the inner-city trains, which was much smaller and less comfortable than even the depot shuttle, but also blessedly empty. Their only company was the row of silent advertisements playing on the overhead screens.

Enfie spent the entire ride apologizing. Apparently her theatrics had earned her a medical evaluation, and despite the immediate diagnosis of: ‘she’s fine, can’t you see we’re busy?’  she still had to wait for someone to take her statement before they let her go. Mayfly tried take responsibility for not just waiting at Finchie’s like she was supposed to; it hadn’t even been an hour, she really ought to have just gone for the muffin.

In the end it was fine. Uncomfortable and more than a little bit scary, but, bizarre as it was, if Kaster had really wanted to lose his arms, then she supposed there was no harm done—so to speak.

Enfie still seemed uncomfortable. “Lavoie is a very frustrating man with very particular opinions about religion,” she said, when Mayfly inevitably asked who he was. “We both do a lot of traveling, and just about all our encounters end with his incessant proselytizing. I’m so sorry sweetheart, he was not supposed to be in New Cazzer. I never would have sent you to Finchie’s if I’d known.”

It took some convincing, but eventually she relented that it was neither of their faults. 

Below them New Cazzer’s outskirts were squat and bruised with neon. This mottled rim beneath the wall, Enfie said, was the Dauden district. When New Cazzer had spread out from the shadow of the pillar, the people who worked on the inner-more sections stayed out here in trailer estates and water-rotted longhouses. They were never welcomed into the loftier districts that they raised, and so Dauden became home to outcast communities of smiths and masons and steelhands. Destitute but capable, they built their meager home into something more than dirt and rubble, if only just. Now when the trains came in, no matter how far in or up they went, they passed through the lowlights of Dauden first.

Questions came. Mayfly pointed and Enfie answered. Cable lines and cell towers, REM-motels and tenements, storage facilities, digital storage facilities—which she didn’t understand even when it was explained to her. In fact, she didn’t understand most of the things she was told, but she did enjoy the telling. Plenty of wild and fascinating things to take her mind off of Lavoie’s sermon.

They got off at a station that looked the same as where they’d gotten on. Everything else looked the same too, but Enfie swore they were on the north end, now. Mayfly followed her past the dark windows and chained doorways of daytime businesses, and the bright lights of things still open. Music pounded through the walls, people were gathered on porches and rooftops.

Mayfly began to wonder where the houses were, when Enfie came to a stop. They stood before a low building with doors wide enough for a car all along its length. An unlit sign hanging on the front read: ‘Talis’s Bodyshop.’

“This is it!” Enfie said.

Mayfly still wondered where the houses were. “I thought your friend’s name was Bezzy?”

“It is! The garages belong to the business, Bezzy just rents out a little apartment in the back. Hardly ever leaves the place, really. But that’s okay! Nothing wrong with a homebody.”

Enfie punched a code into a keypad on the door, and let them both in. They stepped into what looked like an empty office, cramped with a few desks and cabinets. On one wall was a long window to the interior garage. Inside it was mostly dark, but a single light hung over a car at the end. It was boxy, its hood was dented, its body rusting, and its lights were cracked, but on its side was the fading, peeling remains of a mural of flowers.

“Pretty,” Mayfly mumbled, following Enfie absently to another door at the end of the office. This one had no keypad. In fact, it had no keyhole, and no handle to speak of either. It was a flat slate of steel and the only feature she could see was a single glass bubble near the top.

Enfie knocked lightly. There was an instantaneous and very loud scrambling on the other side, which didn’t seem to faze her. She waggled her fingers at the little bubble.

“Password,” came a muffled demand through the steel.

“Bezzy, you can see us.”

A pause, then: “Password.”

“Fine,” Enfie said with a huff, leaning closer to the door. “Reduced-fat mayonnaise. And that’s really more of a passphrase, you know.”

A rapid series of clicks and whirs and heavy thunks on the other side. Slowly, the door opened to darkness, and the hunched figure of a young man with a quilt draped over his shoulders. He poked his head out; he had shaggy black hair, and his artificial eyes sat in pits. His irises cycled through the color wheel as he stared at them.

“Saw you on the news,” Bezzy said. He had a nervous, nasally voice. “Thought you might’a been snatched up by the guards. Where’d they take you? They put anything on you? They give you anything?”

“Oh, just a headache.”

“Gotta scan you anyway."

Enfie just smiled, and Bezzy’s attention shifted down to Mayfly. He sniffed loudly, coughed into his quilt.

“She your friend?”

“Did you catch a cold?” Enfie asked. “Do you have tea? I can make you some tea.”

“I’m fine. Is this her?”

“Your eyes are super cool,” Mayfly said. She stuck out her hand, but Bezzy flinched so she took it back. “My name’s Mayfly, it’s nice to meet you!”

He just shook his head and gave Enfie a flat look. “She’s a snake.”

“Bezzy she is not a snake.”

“She stole your necklace.”

“I lent her that, and it just got her in trouble anyway,” Enfie said. “She helped save a train full of people from a murderous ferromancer. She’s not a snake.”

“Fine. But if she steals anything—” he looked back down at her. “Hey, you steal anything, I’m putting your name and face on the militia’s most-wanted list. You got it?”

“Bezzy stop being silly! Can we come in, please? It’s been a long day.”

Grumbling, he stepped aside and let Enfie through. As Mayfly followed, he pointed two fingers at his own eyes, then at hers. She didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, but she did it back to him just to be safe. The door shut, and the only light came from the blue of a single television screen hanging on the wall that read: ‘INPUT 1.’ Behind them, the sounds of a dozen locks clicking back into place, then scuttling footsteps as Bezzy hurried past them.

“Don’t move!” he said, now a smudge in the dark rummaging through a slightly bigger smudge on the ground.

His quilt slid off, and in the hazy light of the screen, Mayfly saw metal glint. She fumbled around for Enfie’s hand and squeezed it. Soon enough Bezzy was back, and a brief flash from something in his hands illuminated Enfie’s prosthetic arm. A few moments later, another revealed the squint on her face.

“You’re clean. Hah. My work holds up to militia scrutiny. That’s goin’ in the sales pitch.” He turned to Mayfly. It was difficult to tell in the dark, but his silhouette seemed odd, excessive. “Your turn, maybe-snake.”

“Wait, Bezzy—”

“No buts, safety first. Even if she’s cool, she’s got gear, and I don’t know what’s on it, or if someone’s tracing it, or what. You come in here, you get scanned. Rules.”

“No, I understand, you can scan her just—well, she's—”

A bright flash, Mayfly winced and looked away. For several moments no one said anything.

“What the fuck.”

“Language, Bezzy.”

Another flash, then another. Silence, then scoffs of disbelief. “What is this? What is any of this? No serial code, no manufacturer…”

“She doesn’t—”

“No ID, no graft data, no—no components? No components. Arms, empty. Legs, empty. Head, empty. I’m not even picking up vital-sync. It’s like she’s walking around in a shell.”

“Armor.” Mayfly offered. “My friend said it’s kinda like that.”

Another flash aimed at her chest. “…That’s not a pulse. That’s not even kind of a pulse. Enfie why does your friend have no pulse?”

“Well,” Enfie laughed anxiously. “That’s funny, actually. Remember when I said she was fascinating, and that you’d really want to meet her? See, so, it turns out that Mayfly is a little…special! She isn’t—might not be—exactly like what you might call, in the strictest sense, entirely human.”

“As in, ‘mass-modified-transhumanist-what-does-it-even-mean-to-be-human-anymore,’ or, ‘gerbil piloting a metal suit’?”

Mayfly giggled; she hadn’t heard many jokes today, it was nice. She decided then that Bezzy was alright.

“As in…maybe…maybe, she might be, apparently, possibly, maybe…a Titan?”

There was a click, and the apartment’s lights hummed to life. Mayfly jolted at the sight of Bezzy out of the dark. He was spindly, with a face that reminded her of the older boys in the Valley who were just becoming adults, though that youth was somewhat drained by his paleness. What surprised her though were his arms; she’d been right before, there was excess.

Three thin, black rods sprouted from the metal hive of each shoulder, bowed that so, when aligned, they resembled a proper arm well enough. But they weren’t aligned, they were split into six individual arms, each ending in a hand with fingers that were too long and had too many joints. One trio clutched a tiny machine to his chest, two more cupped his agape mouth.

“You’re lying.”

Enfie shrugged. “I’m not lying, I'm…inferring. She can do things, Bezzy—she came out of a technoscape!”

“You saw her come out of a technoscape.”

“No but she described it! And unless you think a thirteen-year-old is studying metallogenesis, I don’t see how she could know any of that and not be covered with rot. And—and, one of the magi in the attack was a ferromancer. Bezzy, he was literally ripping the train apart, and he couldn’t even touch her. And look! Look!” Enfie hunched down to Mayfly. “Sweetie is it okay if we show him your arm?” Mayfly nodded and held it out for them. Bezzy drew closer, colorful eyes swirling. “The marbling, the gold eyes, the white hair! Tell me she doesn’t look like someone pulled right out of the Epic of Eunathe?”

“Haven’t read it,” Bezzy said absently. He was honed in, holding up the little device to her arm. More flashes. He squinted at a screen on the back. “But I’ve seen Titans in shows and comics. She’s…pretty close, sure. But tons of people get their gear modeled, or painted for that. Maybe she just does cosplay.”

“Is that like swordplay?” Mayfly asked. They both looked at her. “I’m not allowed to do that.”

“Okay,” he mumbled. “Or one of a million other explanations that aren’t: ‘she’s an ancient weapon.'’”

Mayfly gasped. A weapon? She still didn’t know what a Titan was—Enfie hadn’t elaborated on the train, because of the crowd—but she was absolutely certain that she wasn’t a weapon. In her whole life she’d never hurt a single person on purpose, ever. She was even gentle with the chickens.

She would have protested, but Enfie was smiling deviously, and that was immediately more interesting to her. “Hah! See? You’re curious. That means she can stay.”

“She can stay,” Bezzy snapped, “Because as far as I can tell she’s not bugged, and because you’re vouching for her. Which, by the way, makes her your responsibility, because apparently she doesn’t have any parents I can complain to.”

“Well, she has a mother.”

“Her name’s Margie,” Mayfly said. “She’s back in the Valley. I came to Gen to find a flower for her!”

Bezzy blinked, and then shot Enfie an irritated, exasperated scowl. “I have to get to work,” he said. Two of his multitude of arms snatched up the quilt, and it passed effortlessly between more until it was slung back around his shoulders. It draped him like chitin. “The couch pulls out. Don’t answer the door. Don’t touch the thermostat. Don’t bug me unless something’s on fire.”

“Can I bug you to bring you some tea?”

“Fine, you can bug me to bring me some tea," he said. "...Thank you.”

Enfie smiled, and though it looked like she really wanted to hug him, she didn’t. Instead, she just smiled and shuffled off to the kitchen. Rather than leave the apartment, Bezzy just scurried off to the adjacent room.

“Thank you Bezzy!” Mayfly called.

His eyes flicked around uncertainly. With a curt, awkward nod, he vanished into the dark and shut the door behind him. Locks clicked.

“He’s a good boy,” Enfie said, setting a little pot on top of what must have been Gen’s idea of a stove. “A little shy, and he swears now and then, but he’s sweet.”

“I like his metal bug arms.”

“You should tell him that tomorrow, I think he’d appreciate it. For now though, why don’t we try to get a little sleep? We’ve certainly earned it.”

“Yeah.” Mayfly wandered to the middle of the room, looking up at the blue-empty screen, then back at the couch. She studied it carefully. “Hey Enfie?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“What’s the couch gonna pull out?”