“Don’t call me that!”
Grimm blinked sweetly. “Call you what, love?”
The bulbs above their heads exploded, Grimm cursing as he stepped aside from the shower of broken glass. The electronic screen on a nearby treadmill popped, the air conditioner rattled and fell silent as the room went black.
Lemon stood still in the aftermath, chest heaving, fingernails biting her palms. She drew a deep breath, sat down on the edge of the ring, legs hanging over the side, elbows and chin leaning on the ropes. Grimm moved slow, sat beside her. Not too close, but close enough to let her know he was there.
“…All right?” he asked after a long quiet.
“I’m all right.”
“You told me it works best when you’re angry.” He shrugged. “I was trying to get a rise outta you.”
“It worked.”
“Sorry, love.”
She turned on him with a glare, but found him grinning, hands raised as if to ward off a punch. His eyes were shining with mischief, his smile friendly.
“Not the face,” he chuckled.
She punched him hard in the arm. “You piece of…”
“Mercy!” he cried, flinching away. “Have mercy, milady!”
She landed a few more solid punches into his shoulder and bicep, found herself grinning along with him. His smile was infectious. The bass in his laugh made her chest vibrate in the best kind of way.
“You’re a shit,” she said, flipping her bangs out of her face.
“Oi,” he said, raising a finger. “Swear jar.”
They sat together in the dark for a spell. Not saying anything at all. She liked that about him. She always turned into a motormouth when she was nervous. It was hard to keep the words behind her teeth. And though being this close to him did make her nervous, for some reason the quiet felt right. She could feel the heat radiating off his skin. Wondering if he’d notice if she shifted a tiny bit closer. Wondering if she was that brave.
“Grandpa, eh?” he finally said.
“Yeah,” she finally sighed. “Mad, right?”
“True cert,” Grimm nodded. “But family’s Robin Hood. Family’s important.”
She nodded back, understanding what he meant all too well. You never know how badly you need something when you grow up without it. And Lem had spent most of her life alone. She’d had her first true taste of family with Evie and Cricket and Silas. But then it had been torn away, and she was starting to realize how desperately she missed it. And now, with the possibility of it in front of her again, not just a grandfather, but a home, people just like her, she was truly beginning to understand how important family was to her.
“…Where’s yours?” she asked, studying him sidelong.
He breathed deep. Brown eyes fixed on the dark in front of him. She could tell he was somewhere else then.
Somewhere not so long ago.
Somewhere bad.
“When the Brotherhood came for me…me mum and dad, they…”
Grimm shook his head, eyes shining.
“They say it gets easier with time, you know?” He sighed. “They’re liars.”
Lemon didn’t need to hear the details to hear the hurt in his voice. But she liked this boy enough to want to make it go away. Even though he made her nervous. Even though the last boy who kissed her got his nose broken. Even though she’d never been very good at this sort of thing. And so, she put on her braveface. Her streetface. Summoned the nerve to pull herself just a little bit closer. She took his hand, squeezed it hard enough that she hoped he wouldn’t notice the shakes.
“You’ve still got some family left, freak,” she said.
He grinned at her in the dark. Lemon felt warm all the way to her toes.
“Glad you’re here, love,” he said.
“Yeah,” she smiled. “Yeah, me too.”
The average time it takes a plastic water bottle to degrade is around four hundred and fifty years. The worst offenders take a thousand.
Preacher read somewhere that back before War 4.0 broke out and the ocean was still blue, the amount of plastic in the sea outweighed the amount of fish. But as the bounty hunter plunged off that cliff in Paradise Falls, clinging to a dimwit’s back and plummeting hundreds of meters into a canyon full of discarded soda and water and detergent bottles, he surely found it hard to feel bad about it.
Come to Daddy, lovely, lovely plastic.
He was more metal than meat. But it was still a hell of a long way to fall. Snowflake and he tumbled, end over end, toward the plastic below. The lifelike curled up into a ball in preparation for the hit, satchel strapped over his shoulder, Preacher strapped to his back. And as that swamp of bottles and wrappers and buckets and toys rushed up toward them, the bounty hunter shouted into the Snowflake’s ear over the roaring wind.
“You’re a goddamn idiot, you know that?”
Impact.
He couldn’t remember taking a worse hit in his life. He landed back-first, plunging into a cushion of styrofoam and polycarbonate, the wind knocked right out of him. His brain was rocked inside his titanium skull, steelweave ribs compressed to the point of shattering. But all that plastic served as a kind of crumple zone, diffusing the energy of their impact. Not saying it didn’t hurt like a flying kick to the lovegun, but as they tumbled down through the detritus and splashed into the river of slurry at the bottom of Plastic Alley, Preacher realized he was still alive.
Well, that’s good news.
Except now, they were sinking.
Less than good news.
He was more metal than meat, sure, but the meat part of him still needed oxygen. And with his cybernetics all fried, his life-support systems were offline, which meant he had to breathe the regular way.
Hard to do under a swamp of liquid plastic.
As he sank farther into the sludge, Preacher risked opening his eyes, rewarded with a sharp petrochemical burn, a sea of black. He realized the Snowflake wasn’t moving—probably knocked cold by the fall. From the bounty hunter’s limited experience, it seemed these lifelikes could regenerate from almost any kicking they took, given time. But they got hurt just like regular folks.
And it turns out lil’ Miss Carpenter is one of them.
And that was the confusticating part. The girl he was chasing was supposed to be a deviate, capable of frying electrics with a glance. Lifelikes couldn’t do any such thing. And yet, Preacher had seen that girl take a bullet to the belly and get right back up again. He’d seen her pull a man’s heart out with one hand. And she was posse’ed up with five other snowflakes. No way she was anything but one of them.