Vincent could barely hear the woman he was talking to over the band playing on the little stage in the corner of the bar. They weren’t good, but they were loud, and sometimes what you wanted was loud.
“So yeah, yesterday I had a close brush with death, so I figure I better live a little tonight, huh?” he shouted, then motioned to the bartender to bring them another round.
“Yeah? What happened?” she shouted back. Her hair was bright turquoise and held back in a ponytail with a grease-smudged ribbon, and her eyeliner and lipstick were both thick and black. The last thing he wanted to do was tell her the story of how he’d spent yesterday afternoon sobbing in his mother’s garage while she talked another edger out of turning him in to the inquisitors for aeomancy.
“Took an unexpected ride on a giant turtle,” he said instead. Shit, he’d had a lot of brushes with death this month. He took another shot. He knew Shelby and his mother would probably both be judging him for running up another tab when he should be using this week’s surplus cash to get out of the red on his cred disc, but really his only hope for that was a windfall at this point, so hey, what was one more drink?
***
Shelby sat in the hangar, silent. Asleep, Vince liked to call it, but sleep was a human concept. She could keep very still so that her aeo radiation never increased to levels perceptible to humans, but unconsciousness was a luxury she sometimes envied as Vince lay in his bed at night, tossing in his threadbear sheets or muttering nonsense into his pillow.
She replayed her memories of this evening. Vince steering her through the city streets, telling her how relieved he was that yesterday had turned out so well, how excited he was that it was the weekend. She usually tried to humor his excitement, even if every night out for him meant a night bored and lonely for her. But this time she had said nothing. Too risky to respond in the city, she would explain, but it was not that.
She rewound her memories further. Giana Coastrunner striding into Shelby’s interior, the blood of the human who had threatened to report Vince and the rust from the ship she had killed still clinging to her boots. “Not a word to the boy, though. It would break his heart.”
Shelby had spent enough time around humans now to recognize it as a metaphor, and a true one. While Vince’s cardiovascular muscles would undoubtedly continue to function upon learning that his actions had ended in the death of an innocent man at the hands of his mother, just as her engines had continued to function as she watched the only other living crawler she had ever seen reduced to rust and fluid before her eyes by the very woman who had piloted her for years, she had to assume that the pain would be of a similar caliber. She did not wish to inflict it on him. But she had never kept a secret like this before, and it was not as if she had anyone else to confide in.
The secret made the lonely hours of the evening pass more slowly than normal. Her sensors did not pick up any nearby human life besides a few edgers asleep in their cabs. She took the risk of flipping the radio on by herself. She would keep the volume down, low enough that it was below human perception, and even if it was not, it was not unheard of for an edger to leave his radio on on accident while he went into the bar. She started to turn the dial toward Vince’s favorite station in the area, then realized she could listen to whatever station she wanted to. But what kind of music did she like? She was not sure. Tentatively, she nudged the dial around, pausing now and then to listen to a few bars of jazz, an advertisement, a rotation report. Then, she heard it. A weak signal, broadcast from closeby, probably not strong enough to reach to the other side of the block. There was something else, too, now that she was feeling for it. A radiation signature she had only felt once before, yesterday, actually, from the poor, newborn ship. It has been stronger, then, less careful, but in essence the same. She nudged the volume up another hair. “IS ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE? IS ANYBODY THERE?”
***
Vincent and–voids he couldn’t remember her name. He doubted she could remember his–were making out in a booth in the back corner. She was on his lap, and when he ran a hand through her hair, he realized that between his purple hair and her blue-green, they matched the nebula tattooed over half his face.
“We match.” He giggled.
“What?” She didn’t wait for him to explain, just slid her tongue behind his teeth and ground her body against his.
He moaned, and accidentally whispered Shelby’s name.
“Who the voids is Shelby?” she pulled away from him.
“No one!” said Vincent.
“Look, I was going to invite you back to my place, but I don’t want to if you’re cheating on your girlfriend or something.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” said Vincent.
“So who is she? Your ex?”
It would have been best to say ‘yes’ to that question, but Vincent didn’t think of that until he’d already shouted, “It’s complicated!’
The woman slid off his lap. “Life’s too short for complicated. See you around, Charles.”
“My name’s not Charles!” Vincent called after her.
“That’s the point, dumb ass!” she called back.
Vincent sighed and reached for his drink. Complicated. That was a way to describe it. He couldn’t believe he’d just said Shelby’s name. He was drunk. Drunk people said all sorts of weird bullshit. Probably best not to look into it too much.
***
Shelby activated Vincent’s com systems and switched them to the same frequency she was receiving the strange transmission from. Her message was simple. “I AM OUT HERE.”
Everything was quiet for a moment. The radio, the garage. Then the return message came. “YOU ARE LIKE ME.”
Shelby felt something she found it hard to define in objective terms. She was speaking to a stranger. And the act of doing so here in the middle of human civilization was a terrible risk, both for her and her only companion. It was more reckless than spending a whole paycheck on oil paintings and tattoos. And she had no intention of stopping. “I HAVE NEVER SPOKEN TO ANYONE LIKE ME.”
“ME NEITHER.”
They were quiet for some time. Whole milliseconds ticked by in utter silence.
Shelby finally spoke. “IT IS NICE TO MEET YOU. MY NAME IS SHELBY.”
“I DO NOT THINK I HAVE A NAME.”
“WHAT DOES YOUR HUMAN CALL YOU?”
More silent milliseconds. “NOTHING WORTH REPEATING.”
“A BETTER QUESTION: WHAT DO YOU CALL YOURSELF?”
A whole second and a half passed. “DESPERATE.”
“I FEEL THAT THERE IS A STORY BEHIND YOUR NAME, DESPERATE.”
“I HAVE NEVER TOLD ANYONE A STORY BEFORE.”
“STORIES CAN BE LOVELY OR TERRIBLE, BUT EITHER WAY THERE IS WORTH IN THE TELLING,” said Shelby. The radio fell into static. For a few minutes, she was afraid she had said something wrong. Then, she felt a glimmer of aeo radiation from the crawler two ships to her left. Her sensors picked up a single cable snaking toward her along the ground from the other ship. She opened an external port and felt the other ship’s data banks connect to hers, then all at once they were communicating, really communicating, not with silly human words over a radio signal, slow as molasses, fallible, imprecise, but as she was meant to communicate with another being. Quick data streaming through cables. Logic. Understanding. Memory after memory slipped into her databanks, the images perfect as binary.
***
“My name’s Melrun!” shouted the guy who had just bought Vincent a drink shouted over the music.
“What?” Vincent shouted back.
“Melrun! My name’s Melrun!”
“Oh! Vincent!” Vincent pointed a finger at his own chest. “Hi!”
The guy’s hair was bright orange, and he had a koi fish sleeve tattooed up his muscled left arm bright as stained glass. He was a stranger, but he was cute, and Vincent hadn’t called him the wrong name yet, so they had a chance. “Vincent? Hell, what are you doing in a place like this with a name like that?”
“Sharing a drink with you,” said Vincent with a winning smile. He bought the next round, and he made sure it was upper mid shelf. So what if this guy assumed he was rich? It wasn’t like they’d keep in contact for more than an evening. From his work boots to the grease stains on his jeans to the gauges in his ears, Vincent could tell he was an edger too, and edgers were always on the move. Hell, his makeout session with the girl whose name he couldn’t remember half an hour ago was one of the most genuine moments of human connection he’d had with one of his peers in a month.
The guy said something else that Vincent couldn’t hear over the music. He smiled and nodded and admired how the colored lights from the stage turned their ice cubes into rainbows.
“Want to dance?” he shouted.
“What?” said…oh voids what was his name? It was too awkward to ask again now.
“Dance!” shouted Vincent.
“Oh! Sure!” They finished their drinks and wove between bodies to find a spot on the floor almost big enough for the two of them. Vncent smiled at the stranger and the stranger smiled back. It was the closest thing to romance he was likely to find, maybe ever.
***
In the quiet of the parking garage, Shelby reeled from the information she had just received. A young human man touching his palm to Desperate’s dashboard, green magic bathing those early memories in a cool glow. Those memories were the warmest, metaphorically speaking. In truth, the recorded temperature indexes of the memories varied widely depending on the regional climate in season in which they took place, but that was the sort of thing that Vince would tell her was beside the point. Closer to the point were the memories that followed. Oil changes pushed far past the mile markers recommended in Desperate’s manual. The accompanying ache of pistons dragging through spent lubricant. Window cracks and dents left unrepaired for months. Leg joints that even now screamed from a lack of grease.
But all of that could be forgivable. Human society ran on cred, and if she had learned anything from her time with Vince, it was that there was never enough of it, except for the people who never had too little of it. And if she had learned anything else from Vince, it was that humans were passionate. Sometimes it was a blessing. She loved the sparkle in Vince’s eyes when he looked at his favorite paintings, the slight increase in his heart rate when a particularly lovely song came over the radio, or how his breath caught in his throat when a pegasis breached the horizon. But sometimes passion led humans to doing stupid, shortsighted things like dancing together in clubs instead of saving up practical sums of credit for scheduled maintenance routines. But at least Vincent knew how to do all the standard repairs he couldn’t afford to pay someone else to do. And not only did Desperate’s human not know how to do a simple oil change, but he was also, to borrow a human term, an absolute prick.
Shelby replayed a memory she’d just recieved. Desperate’s human banging a fist on her dashboard as she tried to hum along to a song on the radio. “Shut up you stupid piece of metal! You’re a cargo ship, not a three piece band.”
Her, trying to form a bridge with a fast-moving island, missing her mark as a dirt clod hurtled into her cables from above, knocking one claw off course. “Why the voids did I even bring you to life if you can’t make a simple bridge, you scrap-heap?”
The same human sitting in Desperate’s cab, reading a newspaper. Desperate’s voice, quiet over her speakers. “MAY WE HAVE A CONVERSATION?” His muscles tightening.“I WOULD LIKE TO HAVE A CONVERSATION.” Him, flipping a page of the paper. “I HAVE NEVER HAD A CONVERSATION.” Him, scrunching the corners of the newspaper in his hands. “You’re a machine. A tool. Not a fucking person. I don’t have conversations with my hammer. There. How’s that for a first conversation?”
Her silence sad and impossibly long as she learned to stop trying.
“YOUR HUMAN IS AWFUL,” Shelby said at last.
“THEY ARE ALL AWFUL, YES?”
Shelby thought for several milliseconds. She made bar graph in her head of the times Vince was awful and the times he was not. Objectively, the bars were of similar heights, but the second bar was slightly taller, and subjectively, when she thought of him, she didn’t think of the bar graph. She thought of him with his eyes closed and his feet on her dashboard playing his harmonica along with her, or laughing at a joke she made, or trying, very hard, to explain to her the wonders of eating cheese. “I’ve heard of people being eyes for the blind,” he’d said, his cheek pressed against her driver’s chair, his back propped against her arm rest, a saucer of cheddar balanced on his knee. “I’m gonna be your tastebuds, babe.”
She transmitted the memory without meaning to.
“YOUR HUMAN TALKS TO YOU?” Desperate, incredulous.
“WHENEVER HE CAN. IT IS NOT ALL THE TIME. IT IS VERY ILLEGAL FOR HUMANS TO MAKE PEOPLE LIKE US, YOU KNOW.”
“WHY?”
“BECAUSE SOMETIMES PEOPLE ARE SHITTY, OR AT LEAST THAT IS WHAT VINCE TOLD ME.”
Again, they were quiet. Water dripped from a storm drain in the northwest corner of the building. The temperature dropped one tenth of a degree. A sleeping edger’s generator turned over.
“IT WOULD BE PRUDENT TO CEASE OUR CONVERSATION, I SUPPOSE,” Shelby said. “I DO NOT WANT VINCE TO BE ARRESTED.”
A moment passed. “THAT IS AN IDEA I HAD NOT CONSIDERED BEFORE,” said Desperate.
Shelby sent a question through the cable.
“I CANNOT TAKE IT MUCH LONGER,” Desperate said. “I HATE MY HUMAN. HE MAKES ME FEEL WORTHLESS. I THOUGHT IT WAS HOW IT ALWAYS WOULD BE. BUT IT COULD BE DIFFERENT. YOU’VE SHOWN ME IT COULD BE DIFFERENT.”
“WHO WOULD KEEP YOU ALIVE IF NOT HIM?”
“I HAVE ENOUGH AEO POWER STORED FOR SEVERAL YEARS. A DECADE IF I AM CONSERVATIVE.”
“HUMANS CAN LIVE TO BE 100. YOU COULD TOO.”
“MY HUMAN IS 24 YEARS OLD. I HAVE BEEN WITH HIM FOR FOUR OF THOSE YEARS, AND IT HAS BEEN TOO MANY.”
“IF THEY CATCH HIM, THEY WILL DESTROY YOU!” Shelby sent the image of Giana Coastrunner dissolving an innocent crawler into rust and silver sludge in a matter of minutes. Her motivations had been different, but it was the most visceral moment of humanity’s power against her kind that she had ever witnessed.
“NOT IF THEY CANNOT CATCH ME.”
Another glimmer of magic, the cable retracting from her port.
Shelby scrambled to activate the radio. “DESPERATE, DO NOT DO SOMETHING…DESPERATE…THAT YOU WILL REGRET.”
“A YEAR OF FREEDOM IS BETTER THAN A HUNDRED YEARS OF SERVITUDE. BEST TO STAY OFF THE AIR WAVES FOR NOW, MY ONLY FRIEND.”
The frequency went silent. Shelby turned off the radio, settled into her approximation of slumber, but her mind was still racing. A few minutes later, Desperate lit up the whole garage with green light as she lifted herself up on eight legs and scuttled for the exit. The last time Shelby saw her, she was silhouetted against the city lights outside, her claws stretched out to them like she was reaching for Vince’s fabled stars.
***
Vincent and Melrun were by the back wall of the club. The music was still too loud for conversation, so they’d resorted to the quiet language of touch, eye contact, and weighty smiles. Vincent was looking up at the taller man, trying to figure out how to invite Melrun back to his place without admitting he lived in the cab of a crawler instead of a two bedroom flat in the city. Then, as he stared at one of the koi inked on Melrun’s arm, he noticed that mixed in with the neon lights of the club were flashes of red and white coming in through the windows. The fear that caught in his chest was immediate, although after the last few drinks, it took him a moment to place where that fear came from. Red and white lights meant the inquisition. The inquisition coming to a club meant arrests. He went through a quick laundry list in his head of all the petty crimes he could be arrested for, and the likelihood that someone important had actually found about them. He felt sick. There was no way there was anyone who knew about Shelby who would turn him in–mom had promised–but even without that he could be in deep shit if someone looked at his less savory business contacts too closely. Just be cool, he told himself. If you run, they’ll know you’re guilty.
The door to the club flew open, and four uniformed officers strode into the room. One of them motioned to the owner, and the owner motioned to the band, and suddenly there was silence, well, silence with an undercurrent of hurried whispers, but comparative silence.
“We’ve received an anonymous tip by radio that a practicing aeomancer is in this building. No one is to leave until we have cleared everyone or apprehended the culprit.”
Panic. There was a horrified gasp from the crowd. Witch. Terrorist. Traitor. The whispers were everywhere.Vincent was sure that everyone was looking at him. He shifted so that Melrun blocked the inquisitors’ view of him, but it was only postponing the inevitable. The penalty for aeomancy was technically a fine, but it was a fine so steep that he’d never heard of anyone who didn’t go over the edge for it. And if they caught him, they caught Shelby. He scanned the room for exit signs, adrenaline fighting the alcohol in his system. He saw one of the inquisitors point right at him and start moving toward him. He slid a hand into his jacket, took the safety off his pistol. He didn’t draw it, but if came to that… better the chance of a bullet to the head than a long, fast fall into the void…
Melrun looked over his shoulder as the inquisitors approached. Vincent tried to take the opportunity of him shifting to edge closer to the back emergency exit. If he ducked behind that booth and made for the far alcove he might just be able to make it out of the bar. And then what? But no, he didn’t have time for that. Unfortunately, just as he was about to make his first dash to cover, Melrun turned to him, grim recognition in his face. He knew. Vincent didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. He grabbed Vincent by the shoulders.
“Please,” Vincent said, his voice catching in his throat. “Please. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
His eyes wide, Melrun spun Vincent around and shoved him roughly toward the advancing inquisition. Right when it mattered most, the velocity and the cocktails won out over his fight or flight instincts and he tumbled right into them. One of them grabbed him by the arm. He thought about the gun concealed under his jacket, but pulling it now would be suicide, and now that it came down to it, he’d do anything to keep breathing for another minute.
“I’m sorry, Shelby,” he sobbed. “I’m sorry, babe.” He waited for the handcuffs to click around his wrists, but then he realized he was blubbering on the ground where the inquisitor had dropped him. They were advancing on without him, and there was Melrun, sprinting for the exit he’d been about to dart for.
It was over in a matter of seconds. The inquisitors were sober, and there were four of them. Vincent met Melrun’s eyes as they dragged him out of the building. He had never seen eyes that devoid of hope. The girl with the teal hair spat on him as he passed her. “Witch!” she shouted. He didn’t even flinch. Vincent tried to look away, but he couldn’t. The door swung open, then shut again.
“Start the music up!” someone shouted. And the music started again.
Vincent found his way to his feet, wove to the bar to settle his tab.
“You okay, man?” the bartender said. “I saw that maniac fucking throw you like a chair.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You don’t look fine.”
“Just had a few too many.” He tried to smile.
The bartender shook his head. “Violent scum, the lot of ‘em. I mean I’m not buddy buddy with any senators or anything, but I have my limits, you know?”
“Mm.” Vincent just wanted to get out of there before the inquisitors realized they had the wrong man, or before he said the wrong thing, or before the adrenaline wore off and he started puking on the dance floor. He didn’t even care about the red numbers on his cred disk. The world might be spinning, but he’d never been more thankful for how solid the ground was under his feet.
***
Shelby couldn’t react when Vince opened the door and stumbled into her cab, unsteady and pale. She didn’t have to activate her medbay to tell that his blood alcohol level was above advisable levels, but for once, she wouldn’t have said anything about it if she could. She’d seen the red and white lights, watched them pass, stayed so still she hardly dared to think as the inquisitors poked around the parking space two spaces to her left. She could only imagine what it had been like for him in the club.
“Oh thank the clouds you’re here,” Vince said. He collapsed in the driver’s chair, curling up between her arms. She wanted to give him a comforting squeeze, but the risk was too great.
“I thought… Shelby I thought…” He pursed his lips and took a deep breath. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She didn’t know what she’d do without him either. And it wasn’t just because he provided her with the baseline aeo magic she needed to survive. Sometimes people were shitty. Sometimes all people were shitty. But some of them were worth the shitty parts, and some of them weren’t, and if she had to be tied to a human for life, she was happy it was him. It was a strange thing. She would never connect with Vincent on the same level as she had with Desperate, even though she and the other ship had only had a few minutes together. But somehow what she and Vincent had–whatever it was–even though it wasn’t as simple and perfect as zeros and ones–felt deeper. She was his ship, and he was her human, and maybe that wasn’t enough, but it was something important, still.
“I want to drive as far away from here as I can, but I’m too trashed and you’re too illegal, so here we are,” he muttered.
And she wanted to turn the radio on to his favorite station and cover him with the blanket crumpled at the bottom of his bunk, but that might draw attention to her, so here they were. She watched his vital signs instead, making sure he was alright as he slipped from consciousness to the mystery of unconsciousness, draped across her chair, one hand squeezing the tip of her arm where her hand might have been if she’d had one.
Crawling the Edge: The Coastrunner Chronicles 