survivors—persons who absolutely were not going to lie down and die.
And so Ezra and I trained.
I gave him three shots. Any more than that, and he would too quickly exhaust what little ammo we had left for the rifle. But he needed to know how it felt, needed to feel the rifle charge up in his hand and the slight sizzle of the air around the muzzle as the blast whipped off.
I collected the black one-armed wreck of Maggie’s doppelgänger, sitting it upright. It stared blankly off into the distance, the red paint of its mask chipped and scraped, waiting for Ezra to miss.
Ezra took a knee, lining up his shot through his AR glasses, the tiny red crosshairs wobbling with his unsteady grip. Lighter than the shotgun, it still was a heavy weight in his diminutive hands, and he shook.
He pulled the trigger, and the familiar fwoosh of evaporating oxygen around the insanely hot ball of plasma filled the air.
And then the wreck exploded, Ezra’s shot striking dead center.
He smiled big and broad, and he looked right at me. “I knew it!” he said.
“Knew what?” I asked.
“That you lied about the hitboxes.”
I smiled. I hadn’t, but I was going to let him have this. It was, after all, likely to be the last tiny victory we would get.
Chapter 11000
Facets
Nothing quite prepares you for the first time you encounter one. Until that afternoon, I didn’t even think they were real. They were an idea, a proposition, another hollow promise in a war overflowing with hollow promises. But when you see them, you get it.
Ezra and I had hoofed it for half a day across the yawning suburban sprawl with little to no contact with anyone or anything whatsoever. There were a couple of times in which we saw bots off in the distance, their glinting metal giving them away long before they even had a chance to notice us. We hid and waited them out before returning to our careful trek farther and farther into the outer rings of the city.
“Hello, Pounce,” I heard from the shadowed porch of a nearby ranch-style home. This particular block was unmarred by the fighting. There were plenty of burned-out husks of homes a stone’s throw away from where we stood, but here had been missed by both war and flame.
Ezra and I stopped dead in our tracks, each clutching our weapons.
Then the bot stepped from the shadow into the light. It was a small, unassuming thing. Just a late-model, midrange domestic—nothing fancy, but not a cheap plastic number either. I didn’t know this bot, but somehow it knew me.
“How can I help you, friend?” I asked with a little bass in my voice. I wanted to make it perfectly clear that I wasn’t messing around.
The bot was a kind built to be expressive—to be able to smile and wink and generally put humans at ease. But it didn’t. Not at all. That was uncommon. Expressive bots were emotive by their very nature. We were hardwired to be. But this bot was cold, emotionless.
And its eyes glowed a bright yellow—a sign of distress.
You didn’t see a lot of bots with yellow eyes. It meant they were suffering some sort of drive malfunction, that they were likely to behave erratically and might cause someone harm. But this particular bot was cool, controlled. And weirder still, he somehow knew who I was.
“You know what we want,” he said.
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
He motioned at Ezra, and I fired without thinking.
It was a hell of a shot. Right through the eye and into the inside of its metal skull. The slug rattled around inside, shredding its optical network before ricocheting down into its core.
The bot dropped to its knees before slowly faceplanting on the sidewalk.
Ezra and I exchanged glances before we both shrugged at one another. “Nice shot!” he said.
“Thank you.” I waited for him to follow up with something, perhaps snark or a joke. “You probably could have done better, though. Right?”
“Nope,” he said. “That was some nice shootin’.”
This was a little troubling. We were actually in a considerable amount of danger, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. Like he’d given himself over to the adventure of it. This wasn’t optimal, but at least he was moving and in good spirits. When the dam broke, and I was positive that it would, he was going to be a mess. It’d be a lot better if we weren’t on the move when it happened. So I let