Hullmetal Girls

by Emily Skrutskie

  There’s an unspoken agreement in the air. We don’t have to be in each other’s heads to understand it. No one speaks until the marshal does.

  She finally exhales. “What did I do to deserve you lot? Is there some huge past sin I’m supposed to atone for and you all are the way I’m meant to do it?” When no one gives her an answer, she snaps her headpiece back. Her eyes are livid. She’s not exhausted—she’s enraged. “I thought having a glitchy integration in the batch was going to be the worst thing I had to deal with. Then there was the emotional override, and I then thought that would be the worst of it. But today proves that apparently none of you are capable of behaving like functional Scela.”

  None of us have anything to say, so none of us say anything.

  “Lih and Ganes, your training will continue. Tanaka and Un-Haad, you’re on suspension pending psych evals.”

  Key bristles, and I brace for her to rat me out as the one who started it. “You didn’t suspend Praava when she got people killed with her outburst aboard the Aeschylus.”

  “Because we left her problem behind on the Lancelot,” Marshal Jesuit snaps. “Whereas with you two, the problem seems to follow you wherever you go. And with…new information now in the mix, I really don’t need more problems. So until either one of the psychs sorts you out or we reprogram your exos entirely, you’re grounded.”

  “What about our salary?” I blurt before the exo can advise against it.

  “Suspended,” Marshal Jesuit says. “No work, no pay.”

  My hands quiver. Even with the metal woven through them, keeping them steady, I can feel the tremors starting. I can feel the dyeworks ink sinking into them, staining them irrevocably red. I inhale, and my breath feels tainted too, my throat scarred by the thick, smoky, impossible-to-filter air of the Reliant’s sublevels. And suddenly the weight on my back isn’t my exo’s metal—it’s a lifetime of work in the darkened hell of the textile plants. It’s everything I’ve just inflicted on my sister. I bow my head and whisper thanks that no one else can feel the crushing wave of panic settling over me.

  There’s no time to wait.

  I have to act.

  The marshal didn’t really specify what “grounded” means. I notice that at some point on the shuttle ride back to the Dread, she relinks Praava and Woojin, so I suppose being isolated from the exosystem is part of it.

  I’m not complaining.

  When we unload, some sort of instruction takes over them, and they immediately depart without so much as a look, leaving me, Aisha, and Marshal Jesuit on Assembly.

  “Dock your rigs,” the marshal says. “You’ll still be bunking with the rest of your unit, but outside of the dorm, I don’t want to see you within twenty feet of each other until after the psychs clear you. I’ll schedule your evals.”

  “What are we supposed to do in the meantime?” Aisha asks.

  The marshal shrugs. “Keep out of trouble. If you can manage it.” She turns and thunders off across the deck, leaving me and Aisha in the shadow of the shuttle.

  We ignore each other through the rote task of disassembling and docking our rigs. Each rattle from her bay makes my exo bristle territorially, but I focus on stripping my enhancements off my body, feeling more and more drained as each one loosens out of my plugs. Between the strain on my muscles from my stint with the Archangel’s memories and the sore spots from Aisha’s fists, my body has been through a hell of a lot more than it was built to handle today.

  And my body hasn’t had the worst of it. My mind’s been turned inside out several times over, each revelation more shattering than the last. In my exhaustion, the notion of a psych eval is running circles around my head. No doubt they’d discover that I’ve unlocked—if not the actual substance of my memories, the actual self they’ve buried—the general gist of what’s locked down in my head. What would they do to me for that?

  Considering that they were willing to take an unwilling girl, flay her, and rebuild her into a Scela body, I’m not sure I want to entertain the possibilities.

  But if I’m going to avoid that outcome, I have to—

  I should—

  The exo’s digging its heels in, trying its best to protect me from that line of thought, but I argue against it. My exo’s supposed to keep me safe. The General Body’s threatening me. Please, spirits alive, just let me try to save myself, I groan internally.

  It relents.

  I check to make sure Aisha’s left her bay and find her skulking toward the halls that lead to the main body of the Dread. She won’t be any help, as the bruises on my face testify. But there’s no way she’s getting information off this ship without help, and I think I know exactly who one of her conspirators is.

  * * *

  —

  “Holy shit, Tanaka,” Zaire says when he sees me. I’ve managed to keep myself hidden in the crowd gathered around his ball-and-cup game, but as the rest of his watchers start to disperse across Assembly, he picks my swollen face out of the crowd. “I take it the assessment was rough?”

  Assessment? I almost blurt. After all that’s happened in the past day, I nearly forgot that this morning was supposed to be our final test. “Nothing we couldn’t handle,” I reply as I approach his blanket. As he continues tucking his winnings away, I kick over the middle cup—I’m so sure it’s in the middle one.

  “Nope!” Zaire grins as I reveal nothing but worn, slightly stained fabric beneath. “Guess again. Or don’t. Actually don’t—nothing to see here.” He bundles in the blanket, sweeping away the final cup before I can kick it over. “To what do I owe the pleasure? My charm? My good looks?”

  “A mutual friend,” I tell him evenly, tapping the side of my exo ridge.

  His eyes narrow, his posture hunching slightly as he beckons me closer. I take a knee next to him. “Is she…in you right now?” he whispers.

  I bite down on a consternated sigh. The bruises on my face smart, and my exo is sputtering with quiet humor over this charade. “Aisha got it worse than me in the assessment. She’s stuck in Medical, but this can’t wait. She’s telling me that if you don’t help me—if you’re standing between her and the duty that keeps her siblings safe—she’ll shuck your ribs from your spine.”

  “Well, that does sound like the Aisha we know and love,” Zaire says. His eyes have lit up. Seems like he’s the kind of human who can’t resist a challenge, which is exactly what I’m banking on. “I’m gonna need one thing from you before you tell me anything else,” he says, his tone darkening.

  “What’s that?”

  “Your first name.” He flashes his human grin again.

  Surprisingly, I find it halfway charming. Maybe I’ll never understand what the old Key had with Kellan. The feelings I had for him have been wiped from my brain, and I don’t even know if there’ll be any recovering my capacity to feel like that. But—and I’m so glad no one else is in my head for this thought—Zaire kind of makes me want to try.

  * * *

  —

  Zaire navigates Assembly with so much grace and ease that I start to suspect he could do it blindfolded. And he can’t be much older than me. I’m about to ask how long he’s been working this deck when he throws up his hand, catching me across the chest. I follow his push back behind the wing of a shuttle—the exo’s amused at me letting a human steer me around—and we duck out of sight as a dockworker walks past.

  “Why are we hiding?” I hiss. It takes a certain amount of control to get my voice down to something quiet, no thanks to the exo. “You’re a dockworker—no one’s going to suspect you’re up to something.”

  Zaire rolls his eyes. “Yes, but if you really want to make this clean, you make sure people don’t even suspect you were anywhere near the thing you’re trying to get to.”

  The exo prickles, urging me to reprimand him for daring to talk back to a Scela, and I almost hush
it out loud.

  “C’mon,” Zaire says once the dockworker’s out of range. He grabs me by one of the ports on my wrist and yanks me off across the deck. I try to keep my footsteps light, which is a tall order given the extra metal—and spirits know what else—weighing me down. Trying to sculpt my motions into anything close to “sneaking” just makes me feel like a horse.

  We pull up against the hull of a shuttle. The shape and size seem right to me, but I never got a good look at the ship’s ID number. Fortunately, Zaire knows his deck. “This is the one,” he says, pressing a palm against the hull. “Shipped out this morning, mission was aborted, returned unexpectedly early. Interrupted a very nice nap I had going on.”

  “Fascinating,” I deadpan. “Get me inside.”

  “Easy, robot girl. I like to go slow on a first date.” Before I get a chance to react, he swings around the docking struts and up to the pilot’s door. “Now usually you need a fob coded to the door to get inside these things, but—” He ducks under the hull, rolls onto his back, and flips open a panel. “In an emergency, say, a fire on deck, there has to be a way to get into the ship from the outside and rescue the pilots. Hence—”

  He twists something, and the door pops open with a dull thud.

  I bare my teeth in the closest thing I can approximate to a human grin.

  “Just smile your normal way—it’s okay,” Zaire says, his gaze turning soft. My exo snatches an embarrassed blush back from my cheeks. I guess he’s used to working with Scela, enough so that he can read our faces as easily as any other human. I offer him a hand as he crawls out from beneath the ship.

  He takes it, realizing his mistake too late. I pull him to his feet with a force that lifts him nearly a meter off the ground. Zaire’s limbs flail every which way, his eyes bugging out. At the sight, a sharp, excruciatingly loud peal of laughter bursts out of me. I clap my hand over my mouth as he lands.

  So much for stealth.

  Zaire stares at me for a breathless moment, his legs bent like a newborn foal. “Get in the shuttle,” he whispers, and I don’t need to be told twice.

  He slams the door behind us once we’re both inside, then ducks to the front-facing windows, peering out to see if any of the noise we made attracted any attention. After a moment, he nods. “Okay, we’re in. Now what?”

  I step up to the controls. “We need coordinates of the planet this ship went to this morning. Or something like that.” I glance up at him.

  A beat of silence passes.

  Zaire holds up his hands in defeat. “Key, I’m a dockworker. I appreciate your faith in me, but I don’t know anything about computers. I got the tricks of the ship’s mechanics down, but as far as this…”

  A second wave of embarrassment washes over me and I order my exo to shut down my facial muscles, just in case I have any uncontrollable notions of expressing my mortification. “Sorry,” I mutter.

  “I’m flattered, though,” he offers, the edges of his mouth quirking up. “Hey, there may still be hope. You’re the one with the computer thing wired into your brain—I’ll bet you can do it.”

  I consider it. “If the exo knows how, I’m not sure it would tell me,” I say, peering over the instrumentation as I rush through the data my systems have on this type of shuttle. There’s really only the bare minimum—an emergency protocol for an event where I might have to fly the ship on my own, and not much else. I run my hands over the controls as if touching them will jar the information I need out of the recesses of my exo. Nothing comes to mind.

  Then my hearing pricks up—footsteps.

  Scela-heavy footsteps.

  Walking straight for our shuttle. I meet Zaire’s bulging, panicking eyes. He hears them too.

  “Hide.”

  It took me way too long to track down Nani. With the raw wound of losing my salary rending holes in my rational thought process, it was nearly impossible to figure out which of the hundreds of bays was hers, even with her name and pilot status marked clearly on the tag chained to the mesh. But God’s luck was on my side—Nani left her fob collection hanging undisguised on a hook in her bay.

  So much for security.

  Now that the pilot’s ring is safely tucked into the pocket of my uniform, it’s just a matter of identifying the ship we flew out on. I approach the long-range shuttles, scanning their identification numbers with holy reverence humming through my veins. I wonder which one of them was the first to travel to Alpha 37, the first to fulfill our grand destiny before the General Body swept that destiny under the rug.

  I swipe the jangling mess over the scanner and the pilot’s door pops open with a low thud. I check over my shoulder again, then clamber inside the cockpit and pull the door shut behind me. My nerves feel overloaded with equal parts anticipation and dread.

  The ship’s interior is dark but for the subtle glow of emergency lights. I move to the pilot’s chair and perch myself on the edge of it, scanning the instrumentation for the fobhole. This part does require a bit of guessing. I know the right fob’s on the ring, but it takes twenty-three wrong guesses to find it. When I slide it into the socket, the instrumentation glows to life, and my exo shivers along with me. It’s thrilling to think that I have several tons of metal and explosive force under my control. A ship’s a hyperpowered body with a few exponents attached, and the machine on my back loves that notion.

  Something shifts in the rear of the shuttle, and I nearly jump out of my exorig. It’s nothing. Just some equipment not strapped in right, I chide myself. But there’s suspicion curdling in the exo, urging me to check just in case. I never expected it to be the more paranoid one.

  “Hush,” I breathe.

  I don’t know anything about shuttles, and the exo hardly knows more. This is the first time I’ve been in the cockpit of one—before, I’d only really seen this area on casts. I can’t let that unfamiliarity freeze me. Can’t stop imagining what will happen the moment Yasmin knows my money isn’t coming. Can’t stop thinking about my sister’s hands getting redder and redder. Can’t stop seeing my brother waste away on the lower levels of the Panacea.

  I’ll give Yasmin something better than money. Something she’ll value enough to keep my siblings safe. Something that will clear my debt to her forever—that will put her in my debt. If she wants a planet, I’ll give her a planet. I’ll gift-wrap the new world for her. Anything if it will keep Amar and Malikah safe.

  But that requires extracting the coordinates from this machine—if they haven’t been wiped already. I refuse to consider the possibility. Right now, the only obstacle I’ll allow is the fact that I have no idea how this thing works. I reach into the exo, straining to find something relevant about this ship. It suggests a button on the instrumentation panel, and I press it, reading the label above a split second too late.

  “Ignition sequence started,” the ship announces.

  “No, no, no—” I groan through my teeth, jamming the button again, but that doesn’t seem to do any good. A low rumble starts up from deeper in the ship. It’s quiet, barely noticeable outside the shuttle, but in my head it sounds like the rattle of reentry. If the engines fire, I’ll be caught for sure. I flail into the exo again, and again I’m offered a button to press. I don’t care about labels—I jam my hand down on top of it, and mercifully the pitch of the rumble breaks. The ship falls silent, and I lean back in the pilot’s chair, pressing one hand over my rapidly beating heart.

  A prayer flashes through my head, but I don’t dare voice it.

  Frozen in place, I scan the deck outside the windows. No one seems to have noticed the ship that just nearly flew out of here unbidden. I let myself relax, the gentle cushion of the seat cradling me as I slide my eyes shut.

  Then someone sneezes. Someone who’s very much inside the ship. It’s quickly followed by a familiar voice whispering, with the deadened resignation of someone who already knows
they’re busted, “Fucking human.”

  I whirl around in the pilot’s chair as the divide between the cockpit and the shuttle body slides open. Key Tanaka and Zaire spill out, the most unlikely pair in God’s domain. It looks like it was an honest miracle the two of them fit in the tiny space, and I can’t help but notice the dents on Zaire’s warm brown skin where Key’s metal pressed into him.

  I meet Key’s eyes. “You.”

  “Me,” she replies. The swelling is starting to settle and darken on her face. I don’t regret that it’s there.

  “You two…,” Zaire says slowly, “…are not working together.”

  But Key ignores him, a spark lighting up her eyes. “After that whole rant about not going anywhere near the Fractionists for the sake of your family, this is the first thing you do?” she says, gesturing to the glowing ship controls humming guiltily behind me.

  The urge to punch her is rising again. My exo feeds me memories from the elevator, whispering the joy it would give me to slam her head into the shuttle wall. She’s going to mess this whole thing up for me—ruin my chance to secure my siblings’ safety—and that’s the thought that catapults me from the pilot’s chair. My headpiece snaps halfway down, and she recognizes the threat enough to step back, tucking the human behind her as her own headpiece creeps down her forehead.

  “You wouldn’t,” Key says, low and even.

  It would draw attention to the shuttle. It would get us caught. But it’s so, so tempting. So tempting that it hurts when I pull my headpiece back up and force my fists to unclench.

  Key raises an eyebrow.

  I purse my lips, mind spinning for an explanation that doesn’t make me look like a hypocrite. You’re on your own, the exo snickers.

  “They’re pulling my salary because I’m on suspension for something you started. Now I need something to head off Yasmin. To keep Malikah out of the dyeworks forever. To keep Amar away from the experimental treatments. For my family, I’d…” I pull up short, dropping my gaze to the human interloper peering from behind her. “She brought you in on this?”