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Chapter 1
Grace.
If you're reading this…fuck, I hate it when people start letters like that, but Dr. D wouldn't have given you this if I wasn't dead. Or worse.
I wish I wasn't. I wish I was there with you, holding your hand, feeding you mashed carrots, watching you grow into the beautiful woman I know you're going to become.
I wish a lot of things, to be honest. I wish the bomb had never been dropped. That we could go out in the sun and sit around in shorts and t-shirts. That pills weren't the norm. That BLI had never…wasn't…
I wish your mom was still around. But I'm kind of glad…no. I'm grateful, for you. Not for her, but, shit, I'm not a writer, Gracie. You're the fucking light of my life. Whenever we go out on a mission, I'm terrified that I'm never going to see you again. It might be selfish to say that, but I guess I'm kind of a selfish guy. I kind of like having you all to myself, you know? With your bright eyes and your wide smile.
I don't know if we're all gone, or if some of us are left, but if Ghoul's still there, tell him that reading over people's shoulders is rude, and calling them "Huge fucking idiots” for writing so slowly is even ruder.
You don't remember this, but I do. The first time I got to hold you, you looked up at me and giggled instead of crying. The nurse that handed you to me looked pissed off, because you wouldn't stop bawling when she was holding you. I have never loved anybody as much as I love you. You saved me. So many times. You have no idea how hard it was, back in the City. When they took your mom, I thought I was going to lose it. But you put your little hand on my knee, and said, "Daddy, everything will be okay," like you knew something I didn't. "I've got you, and you've got me," you said. I'll never forget that. And if I do, then you'd better smack me right in the face, because without you, I would have gone over to BLI instead of fighting back, fighting for our lives.
I'd better stop before I start crying onto the paper. And Ghoul is getting restless. Someone has to take him outside or he's likely to start wrecking things.
Hold on, baby girl. Remember me. And don't stop fighting, my little motorbaby.
R
* * * *
Her hand on his waist used to be all that mattered. The way she smiled, wide and proud, could light up a room. It used to happen all the time: Grace would wobble on her pudgy legs, or he’d find the remote for their television wedged between the cushions of their worn couch, and she’d smile like she wanted the whole world to see.
As time passed, Grace grew up, he started working longer hours, and the smile slowly stopped coming until there were days, weeks, when she wouldn’t smile at all.
He couldn’t understand what he’d done.
“I’m just tired,” she’d say. They both worked in Battery Towers: he in A, she in C. She never told him what went on over there, but every day her face was more tired, and there were more lines around her eyes. Her skin lost its bright edge, and her eyes that glow they’d had when they first met.
“It’s nothing,” she’d say.
Their late-night sessions, hiding up in their master bedroom with paper and a coloured pencil, dwindled to four a week, then two, one, until one day, Ray traced a sun in the burning orange of the pencil, and she pushed the paper off the bed. He kept it with the others all the same, beside smiling faces, beside portraits of Grace drawn with her steady hand. He could never quite manage to get the lines right, or the shading realistic, but she did, every time. Her work was light but powerful, dark at the edges or in the deepest shadows of their curly-haired girl’s face.
She drew him once, titled it “My Ray of light”. They’d giggled about that, and kissed in the lengthening shadows of the evening.
Lingering touches became hard to manage. She turned her face away when he tried to kiss her, left him only the bare expanse of her cheek, white and small beneath his large, tan hands.
One day when he came home to the whites and grays of their kitchen, she was at the table, her head in her hands, with a letter on the black wood of the table. The white paper crinkled at the edges with contrast, floated on the wood like it almost wasn’t there.
“Sit,” she said. Her voice was even, and her eyes dark.
He sat on the chair that always seemed a bit too small for him. Waited.
“I...” She shook her head. “I am...was...pregnant.”
“But we haven’t,” he said.
“It’s from when we did.” Her fingers scratched at the surface of the table lightly. “They found out, in C. The pills we take, they...we make them. In C.”
He started. She never talked about what they did in C. Said it was classified.
“We have to test them. Not on animals, because things take differently with humans. They don’t have the brainpower, the thoughts, the emotions that we do. So prisoners, insurgents, they’re all in our building. The ones nobody knows about. The ones who don’t show up on the front page. We catch them, when they’re running about the City, listening to music, going to Hyper-thrusts. Crash queens, motorbabies, junkpunks who want to rebel. Scarecrow catches them, takes them, and we test out our things on them, mark them as one of ours.”
She took a deep breath, and turned away from him. Pulled down the collar of her shirt past the back of her neck. “Right here,” she said. “The BLI logo. When they found out that I was...pregnant, they...” She shook her head, and turned back to him. “It’s gone now, because of that. Whatever it was going to be.”
Ray remembers the spark of light he got from holding Gracie. She’s four now, almost five, still little enough that she can sit on his shoulders. “Oh,” he said.
“I’m done,” she said. “With them.”
Them?
“BLI,” she elaborated. “The pills. All of it. And so are you. I know what these drugs do, and...you need to be off them.”
“But they protect us,” he said.
“No.” She shook her head. “They protect them.”
“Genetic diseases,” he tried.
“You don’t have any.”
“You?”
She shook her head. No.
“I trust you,” he said. She moved her hand across the table and took his.
Her smile was sad. “I know.”
That was the last time she smiled.
* * * *
At her funeral, Ray didn’t cry. Gracie was confused, her little hand wrapping around two of his fingers. They didn’t give drugs to children, and they didn’t give drugs to him anymore. He didn’t feel quite as numb as he used to, there was feeling in his fingers and a beat pulsing through his leg. He heard music when there was none, imagined stanzas taking place in his mind.
He could draw her, still. Better than before. His hand was steadier now, but quicker, too. He didn’t stop drawing her, neck unblemished, eyes bright, until his pencil broke.
That night, he sat at the kitchen table and cried. He cried for the day she had told him about all of this. For the day she told him where the Killjoys were and when. For the day right after that, when a Scarecrow delivered her to their front door, her eyes blank and a scar at the back of her neck.
For that night, when she lay down in bed and said, in a dead voice, “Goodbye, Ray.”
For the hour after, when her heart had stopped beating.
A soft voice shocked his face out of his hands. Tears were still pouring down his face, dripping onto the table. Gracie came up to him, and her eyes were sad, but bright.
“Daddy,” she said. “Everything will be okay.”
What did she know? She was five. “Thanks, baby,” he said, but she shook her head.
“I’ve got you, and you’ve got me. That’s all we need,” she said. “Mommy’s happy now. You need to be happy, too.”
Wave-Heads, Ray, her voice came to him as he wiped his face dry. They’re hanging out with some Wave-Heads on Saturday. This could be our chance to get out of here. To change things. Down, underground, at Murph’s. I don’t know how to get to it, but they said to ask someone with colour in their hair.
“Pack your things,” he said.
“Ooh, are we going on a trip?” Her little face brightened, and he nodded.
“Pack everything you love,” he said. “We’re not coming back. Don’t forget your toothbrush, baby. And put it all in your schoolbag, okay?”
“I’m not three, Daddy. I won’t forget my punkin’ toothbrush.”
* * * *
Grace was tall enough so Ray could put a hand on her shoulder as they walked through the dark and dripping sewer. Well, it wasn’t technically a sewer, it was one of the city’s emergency drains, there in case it ever rained too much for the hard, dry ground of Battery City to take. That didn’t change the fact that it was still terrifyingly dark and gross. There was some kind of plant, a dark, dingy green on the dripping, sloping walls of the tunnel. There was an intermittent patter of tiny claws on concrete, bouncing off the walls and into his ears. The more he flinched and shrank, the more Grace seemed to be loving the entire experience. She jumped from puddle to puddle, giggling with every splash beneath her grey rubber boots. She’d...they’d bought them for her, when it had rained on her fourth birthday, last year. Everyone had smiled, with bright, sparkling eyes. And now she was using them beneath the city, slipping on the dirty floor and catching herself on the even dirtier wall.
If he’d known what these tunnels were like, if he had known the way they would make his shoulders bend forward in a vague effort to shelter himself from the eyes he could feel on his every movement, he might not have led them down here, but...
But there was nothing left for them on the surface. Grace had a few playmates, sure, but the schools were BLI-sponsored, pumping the children of the City full of misinformation and no common sense. They were being fed with nonsense and drivel, grey pills and white pills, being led like fat oxen to a life of labour and brainlessness, that would end only in death. He couldn’t have that for her. She was bursting at the seams with life, growing every day, and she needed to be in an environment that would support that.
He didn’t feel anything but fear for her as they walked down the slowly lightening tunnel. She needed this. He had to keep going for her. Even if there was nothing left for him in this life, he had to protect her. She was his life, now.
The bits of concrete he could see beneath his feet were not made of the lifeless grey substance he’d become so accustomed to up on the surface. It seemed to be a dark brown in the dim light, shading into a bright pink near the vague flickers of the neon lights near what looked like a doorway. Sand mixed with glass and rock, that sparkled mutely with every step.
The door was a large steel monstrosity, breaking through the monotony of the tunnel with its bright neon sign. The pink light choked, and buzzed, the glass tubes in set in the shape of some kind of extinct tree. He stared at it, and then at the place he imagined was a sliding panel, meant to reveal a pair of eyes. It was slightly lower than the height of his head.
He couldn’t muster up enough courage to lift his arm from his side. He’d chosen the brightest clothes they both owned, but working at BLI meant that he didn’t have much in the way of anything other than black and white. He had some jeans left over from the days when he’d been slightly thinner around the waist, and trying to figure out his rebellion against his parents. What he had ultimately landed on, after he had apparently bought a light pink shirt (salmon, his mind supplied, though he didn’t know exactly what a salmon was), was that working for BLI would bring him happiness, marriage, and his parents would be proud of him.
Now that he looked back on it, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why he’d thought that resembled a rebellion in any way, shape, or form.
Finally, Grace stepped forward, and rapped her little knuckle on the door after looking up at the unmoving Ray. “Hey!” she shouted, lowering her voice as though she knew that they probably wouldn’t let a little girl into a Hyper-Thrust. “We need in!”
The slot in the door slid open with a screech. A pair of eyes, rimmed in some kind of smudged, black substance, and slightly obscured by what looked like sharp black hair, peered out at Ray. “Password?”
Shit. “We’re here to see the fuckin’ band,” Ray growled. “Let us in.”
The eyes narrowed. “Hm. That’s not the password.”
Ray shifted his weight, and shoved his hands deep into his pockets. Had she...had there been anything else he was supposed to say here? “This is Mulch’s, right?” he asked, unsure.
“Ah,” the eyes said, and the door swung open. “Enter.”
The eyes belonged to a face with dark hair. The top of the man’s head barely reached Ray’s shoulders. “Hey,” he said, a crooked grin on his face. “Here for the band, huh?” His eyes flickered down from Ray’s face to his chest. When he caught sight of Gracie, trying to hide behind Ray’s leg, the grin quickly turned into a frown. “Dude, wait. You can’t bring a kid in here.”
“Why not?” Ray asked. “Against the law?” He stepped forward so that he was about a foot away from the man, hoping that his build and slightly expansive hair would be more intimidating than his voice. “‘Cause if you asked me, I’d say this whole damn place is against the law.”
The man’s adam’s apple bobbed, but he folded his arms across his chest. “You can’t bring a kid in here.”
“Ohhh.” Grace melted into his leg, still holding onto his hand with her little one. The eyes she shone up at him were bright and hopeful. He had to hand it to his little girl: she was spectacular. “Daddy, it’s them! I wonder which one is Mad Gear. Do you know, mister?” She peered out from behind his leg, almost shyly, to look at the door guy, who was still scowling. Her grey eyes were wide in her face as she looked up at the man, and she brought one hand up to play with one of her curls as she bit her lip. “They’re my favourite,” she whispered.
Ray looked from her up to the man, and leaned a bit closer. “I won’t let her drink, for Christ’s sake,” Ray muttered. “She just...she just wants to see her favourite band.”
“They have instruments,” she breathed, the very picture of an angel. “Shiny. Daddy, think they might let me touch ‘em?”
The man in front of Ray sighed. “Fine.” He held up his hand, raising his fingers with every point. “Don’t let her drink, don’t let her near the drugs.” To Grace, he smiled. “Enjoy the show, sweetheart. It’s gonna get real loud in here.”
“The louder the better,” Gracie grinned. “I like my music like I like my chocolate, loud and dark.” She moved forward, and did a little hop so she could punch the man on the shoulder, and then booked it towards the bar, where a seat had just opened up.
Ray shook his head, and followed after her. It was tough to get through the crowd that she had so easily slipped beneath, and by the time he got up to the counter, she was leaning on it, trying to catch the attention of the bartender with her little hand. The man on the seat next to her turned his head, an eyebrow raised at the five-year-old on a bar stool at a Hyper-Thrust. “Hey there, little lady,” he said in a growly voice. Ray pushed at the people milling around, trying to convey his urgency with the points of his elbows.
“Excuse me!” Grace exclaimed, mostly ignoring the large man in favour of flagging down the tall, tanned bartender. “Can I get some service over here?”
“I can serve you,” the man said.
Grace turned her head to the side as Ray squeezed between people that were really standing too close to each other. “No thank you,” she said.
“You like this kind of place, huh?”
Ray shoved at the last person standing between him and his daughter, and ran to stand between Gracie and the man. “I think she said no,” he growled, trying to look as menacing as possible.
“Hey.” The guy held up his hands in a defensive gesture. “No harm meant, dude. Businessmen gotta take chances, if you know what I mean.”
Ray stared. He couldn’t even think up a response that could properly encapsulate how disgusted he was right now. Luckily, a tanned hand shoved its way between him and the guy. “I think you’d better go,” the bartender said. His eyes were dark, even next to the black of his short, curly hair.
The man grumbled something, but left, much to Ray’s relief. He slid onto the stool as quickly as he could. “Gracie,” he said, eyes still wide from rushing over. “You can’t just talk to strangers, okay?”
She was leaning on the counter, staring at the bartender with wide eyes.
“I think you’d better leave, too,” the bartender said to Ray. He was eyeing Gracie suspiciously, like he’d thought the high-pitched call for service had been from an older woman. “I don’t know who let you in here, but we don’t serve drinks to four-year-olds.”
“Excuse me,” Grace said, clearly offended by the implications in the bartender’s voice, “I’m five. And I wanted some water, thank you very much. The nice man at the door let us in.”
“Hm.” The man’s hands moved quickly, and he slid a glass of water in front of Grace. “Fine.”
Ray watched as he moved away, going down the counter to serve the other patrons. He’d better find the Killjoys before the bartender kicked them out of the place. He moved his eyes over the backs of heads, a bright array of colors that had to have come from some bottle or another (though he couldn’t imagine where anyone would find something like dye in the middle of the City); reds, blues, and pinks were scattered among the more natural shades of blonde, brown, and black. Long, chestnut hair caught the corner of his eye, a light face with bright eyes, sharp nose and a delicate chin. She turned, and Ray’s breath caught in his throat before he looked away, tore his eyes from the stranger in front of him.
It wasn’t her.
It couldn’t be her.
Grace tugged at his elbow, and Ray turned towards her smiling face. It was a blessed relief after the shock of seeing someone who wasn’t there in the face of someone who was. She’d left the white straw dangle over the edge of the glass. “Who are we looking for again, Daddy?”
“Killjoys,” he said, reaching past her to replace the straw before it fell onto the counter. “One of them has red hair, and --”
“There they are!”
Ray froze. What the hell? How had she managed to find them so quickly? He turned his head to trace the path of her pointing finger, at the exact pair of heads they were looking for. The blonde one had his arm slung around the short guy from the door, and the red one had his arms folded across his chest. They both looked vaguely angry and out of place, strangely solid against the shifting mass of the crowd. They were here. Why? Why had they come out of the desert? Why were they here? And how, how had she known?
“Daddy,” Grace said. “Are you shy?”
Ray frowned, glancing down at Grace. It was almost painful to look at her after...this close to her mother’s...but it was a relief too, seeing that she was living on in their bright and brilliant daughter. He saw her shoulders shift, and it clicked the second before she slid off the stool. He moved, barely managed to grab her before she took off again. “No, baby, don’t...they’re unpredictable, okay? We don’t know them. Remember what I said?”
“Strangers,” Grace echoed, with a roll of her eyes. “We should be their friends, Daddy. Maybe then they’ll like us.”
Ray glanced down, he was still holding her under the arms. She’d gone limp, in the way that he recognized was her trying to make him let go. Her gap-toothed grin at him shoved a wave of overwhelming sadness down his throat, and he squeezed her tight. “Don’t worry, Gracie, everything will be fine. I promise.”
When he looked up, the Killjoys were gone. The void where they had been standing was uncomfortable. Where there had once been reds and blues, there were blacks and whites, the colour of a people with no choice.
He scanned the crowd quickly: it really, really shouldn’t have been this difficult to find such bright people in such a dark room, and he was taller than a lot of the people in it, but he just couldn’t see them. Grace wiggled in his arms, and he put her down on the seat, twisting and turning and trying to find the people they’d come here for.
“You got some mighty pretty hair, Mister,” Grace chirped.
“Grace,” Ray muttered, a vague frown creasing his brows when he turned back to her. “What did I say about talking to stra--”
He cut himself off with a snap, because the sharp eyes appraising his daughter were wide, set above a sharp nose, and a mouth full of small, sharp teeth. The eyes narrowed as they looked Grace up and down, bouncing from her hair to Ray, where they settled, darkening with every second. The Killjoy looked back at his daughter, and tilted his head up a fraction. “Thanks,” he said, finally.
Ray was afraid to move. The blonde Killjoy was right behind the red one, looking more bored than anything else, though his eyes sparked when they peered around the red one to look at Grace. “Who’s the idiot punk who brought a kid to a Hyper-Thrust?” he asked. His voice grated at Ray, along with the dark eyes that had taken the red Killjoys’ place on Ray’s face.
Ray swallowed. “That would be me,” he said, voice low.
“Bad idea,” Red said. “Place is gettin’ raided tonight.”
“In twenty, if my calcs are right,” Blonde said. The door guy under his arm sighed, and tapped his fingers on the counter. The blonde Killjoy squeezed the arm draped across his shoulders, and tilted his head towards the shorter man. “Clear ‘em out, Thrill.”
The door guy grimaced, but cleared his throat. “Hey, Cobra, accident time.”
“You want me to crash it?” The bartender curved the edge of his large mouth upwards. He glanced at Ray, a wicked glint in his dark eyes. His voice had a slight lilt to it when Ray listened in. “Close your daughter’s ears, Daddy boy.” He nodded at Thrill, looking only too pleased to be doing so. “Wave of sound comin’ at you, Thrill.”
Ray had only a second to realize that the command was meant for him. He clapped his hands over Grace’s ears, and the man pressed something beneath the counter. A siren thumped through the stereos, drowning out the band. The heads in front of them milled around, and began filing out the sides of the building. Beneath his hands, Grace was shaking with laughter, her face a mask of delight as she giggled at the bartender. The man was laughing with her, and his eyes were so dark they might have been black. He reached a hand out for her to high-five, and as she did, the sound ended.
“That’s a powerful high-five,” Cobra said. “You stopped the alarm with the power of your arm.”
“Stop bein’ so damn poetic, Cobra,” Thrill said. “Gotta run, Kid.” He looked up at the Killjoy, and beckoned him down for a quick kiss on the lips.
So the bartender was Cobra, but the Killjoy was Kobra Kid. That wasn’t confusing. The red one must be Party Poison, then. Ray could see the butt of his yellow gun peeking out from under the arm he reached across the counter to shake Cobra’s hand. “Stay shiny, Cobra,” he muttered. His eyes glanced across Ray on their way to the door, but he brushed past the man without a look back.
Fuck. He had to stop them before they left. He had to...he had to do something. “Wait,” Ray said. Kobra Kid, finished watching Thrill disappear through one of the doors, turned back to raise an eyebrow to Ray. “I...” Ray’s shoulders slumped. He didn’t...he didn’t know how to say this, how to do this. He hadn’t ever, ever thought he’d need to join a gang, or do anything so far from legal.
“Can’t,” Kobra said. “You’ve got a kid.”
“Hey,” Grace said. “I’m as junkpunk as you, crash queen.”
Both of Kobra’s eyebrows lifted up to disappear beneath the hair that hung out over his forehead. “Crash queen?” he asked. “You don’t know what that means, kid.”
“Do too,” Grace retorted. She stood up on the stool so she could look into Kobra’s eyes. “I saw you kiss that boy. You’re no better than a crash queen, at least, if you ain’t gonna hear us out.”
Ray shifted on his feet. “We don’t have anywhere to go,” he admitted.
“Why would we ever let a stiff like you come with us?”
“I worked at BLI,” he said. “I know things.”
Kobra shook his head. “Not good enough.”
“I know things about their security. About the pills. I know about...” he glanced over his shoulder, and cleared his throat. “Scarecrow.”
“Can’t trust you,” Kobra said.
“They killed my wife,” Ray blurted. “BLI.” He felt blank when Kobra’s mouth twitched. Using his dead wife to get into a gang of motorbabies, deadset on defying the largest corporation the world over. Just thinking about her made his head ache.
Grace sniffed. “They killed my mommy,” she whispered.
“We can trust ‘em.”
Ray turned to see Party Poison at the door. His eyes were still as wide as they had been before, but the look he gave Ray was different than it had been before. More lasting.
When he looked back, Kobra was staring at Party, and the two seemed to be doing a lot of face-twitching and eye-shifting. Finally, his eyes flickered back to Ray’s with a sigh. “Can you shoot, big guy?”
“Hell yes,” Ray said.
“Scarecrow, huh?”
Ray nodded. “When we’re in the desert,” he muttered. “Not until we’re far away from this steaming heap of a city.”
Grace hopped down from the stool and took his hand as they followed the Killjoys out of the bar. “I’ve decided: I want a gun, Daddy,” she said.
“When you’re thirteen, baby,” he said. The words might once have brought a grin onto his face, but by now, he’d forgotten how.
Chapter 2
“Ready, Kobra?”
Kobra nodded his entire head, visor already shielding his face from view. The words littering the front were white against the reflective black of the lens, but they were crafted from the same material as the visor beneath, and didn’t obstruct his vision. Jet had discovered that after he’d tried Kobra’s helmet on for size. It had been almost hilariously small on his large head, but nobody had laughed. “Fuckin’ ready, Party.”
“How ‘bout you, Jet?”
He grunted, safe within his plastic cage. “Yeah,” he muttered.
They were heading into the city to do a raid of one of the smaller BLI hospitals. Their medical station was severely lacking in the diner that Jet Star and Grace were now forced to call home, thanks to the corporation. At least once a week they ran into problems: burns from ray guns, bloodied noses, sprained ankles. So far, most of their injuries had been minor, but something bad was going to happen one of these days.
They’d driven the Trans Am to one of the underground docking stations that they’d been using. They weren’t always able to get in or out of the City undetected with the spider-infested vehicle, but they were able to keep it shielded from view by keeping it in the tunnels that snaked beneath the City.
“Guns primed?”
The command always came from Party before Jet led them aboveground, large shoulders much more capable and strong than either Party’s or Kobra’s. Kobra was fiddling with some sort of device, a map-maker, he’d called it.
“Left,” came the whisper from behind him.
Jet replaced the heavy metal cover over the way down into the tunnels after the last boot had clunked down onto the gray concrete of the surface. They were outside of the back of the hospital, just around the corner from where the ambulances ferried in their dead or dying patients.
Hospitals had been large affairs at one point in history. Jet could vaguely remember a time when his mother had rushed him to a large and foreboding building, a vision of white and grey, that towered up into the blessedly blue sky. They’d wrapped his arm in a hard material that he’d worn out of the hospital with pride, navigating his way among the crying people in the Emergency Room, some with stomach aches, and others with sprained limbs or broken fingers.
People didn’t need hospitals for much anymore. With Better Living Industries’ medical innovations, they’d all but eradicated the worst of the genetic diseases. Cancer had become a thing of the past, a hushed glance and a small orange pill took care of most of its forms. The pills were doled out at clinics, and grocery stores, but backup supplies were usually kept in hospitals, small warehouses peppered throughout the City. Broken limbs were treated at clinics with BLI’s BoneGlu and a numbing white pill, burns were slathered with a similarly white ointment. Patients were often given three to five days rest from their work, but burns happened fairly rarely: homes didn’t burn down very often in the City. It was members of Scarecrow or Korse’s Draculoids that received the worst of these, from insurgents and their ray guns. The white of the ointment blended in with their suits, which likely made the colour coordinators in D delirious with joy.
“Remember,” Party hissed, when they’d made it to the door that opened into the storage room, “burn ointment first. Pills in labeled bottles only.”
“Not our first time,” Jet muttered. They’d been on five of these runs before, trying to track down a hospital far enough away from a Scarecrow station that they could pack the empty duffle bags on their backs full of medical supplies before the Crows were able to get to them, but close enough to the city so that it actually had supplies they would need in it.
Party took a deep breath, and slipped into the room, gun leading the way. Jet turned and followed Kobra in, keeping an eye behind them so that they couldn’t be caught unawares. He heard a whistle from Kobra as he pulled the door shut, and the rustle of the bags. There was no time to look at what they were piling into the bags, but Jet took a second to decide where he would go.
Kobra was over by the machinery, pulling tools and devices into his bag. They’d be scalpels, needles, all the things that BLI surgeons used when they were cutting people open to fix major problems. They didn’t often have the luxury in the desert to have all of the pills that the whites did, so they had to make do with more rudimentary methods. Kobra had allegedly been studying medical things before he’d followed Party into the desert, but Jet honestly couldn’t tell with those two sometimes.
Party was around the back, grabbing bottles and bottles of pills. Kobra had probably drilled into him which ones he should and shouldn’t take, because his hand skipped over a few and pushed others into the waiting folds of his bag, calmly and precisely.
Jet moved to the unoccupied corner, where more pills lined the shelves. Whites were the most important, Kobra had said. Jet reached for the blues he could see in front of him, differentiated from one another by size and shade, and tugged the rows of pills toward him. He knew a few things about pills, mainly from some late-night coaching sessions with Kobra Kid, but some from midnight meetings with...
He swallowed, and reached for some greens. Lots of greens.
Green is the new white. At least, it will be, until they dye them white, too. But they aren’t going to do that for another two years. Maybe three. So just watch out. They’re stronger, because they’re experimenting with them, but they’re working on keeping the motor functions intact while the pain is wiped away.
There were some oranges on a lower shelf, and he stuffed his bag methodically until he could barely close the zipper. “Time,” he grunted.
“Should have two minutes left,” Kobra said, from the other side of the room. “Done here.”
“Me too,” Party answered.
Jet straightened up, and hooked his arms under the straps of the bag. He could wear it on his back and have two arms free for shooting. Kobra preferred to sling it over one shoulder, and Party wore it like Jet did. The two were shuffling under their bags when the door to the City creaked open.
Jet pointed the gun. It could be a civilian, or a hospital worker, but he saw a flash of white and pulled the trigger without thinking. The garbled noise from outside propelled him forward. He shoved his shoulder into the door, and it swung open, smacking whatever was behind it.
Before it could get up from where he’d knocked it to the ground, he shot the Drac in the head.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the Drac he’d apparently stepped over on his way out. There was a mark on its stomach, brown and black, that was sending smoke up into the air, tiny tendrils fleeting and grey.
“Did it?” Kobra asked, behind Jet, his eyebrows implying call for backup?. He didn't need to say it.
Jet shook his head. “Didn’t have time. Let’s go.”
They sprinted off for the darkness of the tunnels. Jet Star bent his head as he ran, feet pounding against the pavement and heart pounding against his ribs. The tunnels would swallow them and leave no trace that they were ever there except the Dracs on the doorstep of the hospital, where the dying went to die, and the dead stayed that way.
He could still remember the first Drac he’d killed, a week after he’d joined the Killjoys. The way that its body had fallen, head lolling uselessly on slumped shoulders. The puff of dust that had risen from the uncaring desert floor. The way its warped, robotic voice had cut off, mid-sentence.
They didn’t, couldn’t, speak English. It was easier and cheaper to wipe the minds clean, leave a blank slate, and to fill the vessels left behind with a fresh, unrecognizable language.
Jet had been a member of one of the squad responsible for training the Draculoids this language once they’d been stripped of their humanity. They had to be refreshed once a year, because they had to be wiped once a year so nothing could resurface from their previous brains. They didn’t require much: their vocabulary consisted of a hundred-odd words based mainly off an ancient signing dialect that divers used to use, back when water had been safe, and the divers had been human.
He hadn’t felt anything then, not when he’d seen their blank faces staring up at him. He hadn’t blinked once, had just commanded “Repeat after me”, and they had. They were books waiting to be written in, shaped like humans, but simple machines conditioned to respond to certain actions and sounds. Another squad was responsible for replenishing their muscle memory.
When he’d shot the Drac, mid-response, he’d felt the burn of eyes in the back of his head, and had turned to see Kobra staring at him from behind reflective sunglasses. He’d tucked his gun into its holster, and shrugged. “It was about to call for backup,” he’d said.
Kobra had stepped out into the blinding sun from the protection that the diner offered, and peered above the rims of his sunglasses. “How do you know?”
Ray’d glanced back at the body. All Draculoids were male: Korse wouldn’t have it any other way, but they weren’t human. He couldn’t think of it as a person. It was just a machine in a flesh-and-blood prison. “Language,” he’d finally said. “I used to teach them.”
Kobra had glanced up at him before reaching down for the Drac’s gun. He’d popped the energy cells from it, and tucked them into his pocket. “Can you teach us?”
Jet had shrugged. It wasn’t a very complex language, but the way they’d taught it back in the Towers had been binary codes, videos and pictures that the Dracs memorized because it was the only thing they knew. As the year progressed, they would become more adept at handling insurgents and civilians. Occasionally they would learn as they went, about context, and different types of body language, but all of that knowledge was lost with each wipe. They were the cheapest form of artificial intelligence that the universe had to offer, and all it took was a tiny purple pill.
Turning prisoners into Dracs had turned out to be the easiest way to get rid of crime, second only to the pills distributed across the City. The majority of the population were made complacent by the pharmaceutical technologies that BL/Ind had come out with. And those that weren’t...well, he shuddered to think of building C with their testing facilities.
“Sure,” he’d said. The empty gun had fallen from Kobra’s fingers onto the empty body below it, and Ray had looked away.
Some days, when the sun was tucked behind a single, beige cloud, and the breeze was light enough to cool the skin without kicking up too much dust, the Killjoys would sit outside the diner, and soak up the filtered rays.
On days like these, Jet liked to let Gracie out, to play in the irradiated countryside. He could remember, as a child, being able to run around the city, the country. Shrubs were few and far between, even back then, but there had been water carving through the land that hadn’t been full of toxins. She didn’t have any of those things, but she didn’t need them. She was currently sitting next to the large robot-refuse doll they’d found, leaning back with her palms on the uncaring, dusty ground.
When it was this perfect outside, every now and then, Thriller would emerge from wherever he and his gang hid when they weren’t in the City, running the Hyper-Thrusts they’d set up beneath the city, pouring out light and music into the desolate tunnels. Jet watched from his perch on the doorstop of the diner as Kobra Kid left the makeshift shooting range he’d set up with Party Poison when the red and black bike skidded up to the diner.
The red helmet tumbled into Thriller’s waiting arms, and his grinning face appeared, sweaty and dusty, but beaming nonetheless. From the distance they were at, Jet Star couldn’t make out any words, but he could see the answering way that Kobra’s shoulders seemed to lighten before he leaned in.
Jet looked away. Thinking about the way that Thriller’s hands were cupping Kobra’s face, or the way Kobra had to steady the bike when Thriller forgot to put up the kickstand made his heart ache for something he could never have. He shoved it down, locked it into that place in his chest that held the memory of a pair of eyes that twinkled just like Grace’s did, or hands that gripped his, soft but steady. Dwelling on the past would do him no good. Grace was almost six, or she had already turned six. Every day in this desert was a blur like every other day.
He could no longer remember the way it had felt to wake up in relative coolness, or the touch of non-acidic rain on his skin. He wished that he couldn’t remember the way his wife’s face had looked when she had bid him farewell, her eyes already dead, or the way her skin had been mottled and black on the back of her neck. He wished he could forget the pinpricks of clean skin glaring at him in angry red from within that black, smiling face.
He couldn’t remember how to smile.
He couldn’t remember a lot of things, but every time he watched a Drac fall, he saw himself in that empty body, the lights gone from its eyes.
He felt the air at his side displace when Party lowered himself to the wooden seat. Jet shuffled over a bit, though Party didn’t require nearly as much room as he did. The man was wiry, and thin, but it always felt a bit like he took up more space than he actually did. It was the way his eyes looked, and the set of his shoulders. Jet’s own shoulders were strong, but not as strong as Poison’s.
He looked away from the green-brown eyes, afraid of what he might see in there. Maybe afraid of what Party wouldn’t see in his.
“They grow so quickly,” Party said.
Jet blinked the dust out of his eyes, and nodded his head. He could hear footsteps now, Thriller and Kobra making their way into the diner to share a can of beans and a bit more, probably.
Party sighed beside him. “She’s already sprouted a whole foot in the air. She’s like a little bean. You’ve been with us for what, almost a full year, now?”
Jet shrugged. “Probably,” he muttered. His hands had new calluses now, where the gun fitted right into his palm. He’d painted it blue because he couldn’t look at oranges anymore. He would have stayed with the whites and blacks, but Party had put a hand on his shoulder, and told him to pick a colour that reminded him of the past. The only thing he could think of that didn’t make him retreat was the blue of the clear sky, so he’d chosen that.
“It’s probably her birthday soon, huh?”
“I don’t know,” Jet muttered. The breeze was picking up now, blowing the longer strands of hair into his face. They twisted and curled just like Grace’s did, but his were too heavy to sit on his head for very long.
He stared down at the scuffed tips of his boots. He didn’t know. He didn’t know what day it was. “I don’t,” he said, and felt something in his throat. He frowned at the intrusion, and shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know what day it is.”
“When’s her birthday?”
Jet tucked some hair behind his ear, and worried at his lower lip with his teeth. “May,” he said. “Third.”
He glanced to the side. Party was smiling. “Didn’t miss it then,” he said.
“Fuck,” Jet muttered. “Thank...” God? Luck? Time? “Shit, I don’t even know. If I’d missed it...” He took in a breath, and squinted out at Grace, who was pretending to shoot at the cans Party and Kobra had set up earlier. “This all, me, you, all of it, it’s for her, you know?”
Something made his heart clench in his chest, and Jet let out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Shit,” he muttered. He squeezed his eyes shut, and leaned forward, to put his forehead on his knees.
Party didn’t say anything. When Jet straightened up, he saw the other man leaning against the frame of the door, watching Jet calmly.
“She’s all I’ve got,” Jet blurted. “I, fuck. They, BLI, they. One day, she...she just...they brought her home, right. Two Crows, masks on, hands on her shoulders. She was smiling, but there wasn’t. There wasn’t anything in her eyes, like. She was, they’d done something to her. It was probably my fault. Fuck, it was definitely my fault. I mean.” Jet choked, and buried his face in his hands, turned away from those bright eyes. “She started talking about throwing away the pills, and, and going to Hyper Thrusts, and. I let her. I didn’t stop her, or take her away, take them. And then when they brought her home, she just walked right past Gracie, and went upstairs. And Grace, she was so confused, expecting a hug from mommy. But she didn’t even see Grace standing there, arms outstretched. She thought she’d done something wrong, she started crying, and I couldn’t fix anything. When I got upstairs, she was lying on the bed, eyes up towards the ceiling. And she t-turned to me and said that...she just said, ‘Goodbye, Ray’.”
Her voice hadn’t wavered, or changed. It had been the stoic response he’d programmed into every one of his Dracs, for when they were ready for sleep. Or termination. They said, in their warbled, monotone language, “Goodnight”. And when they’d been wiped too many times, and the pills weren’t working properly, or when they’d been injured too badly, or had gotten too old to function in the way that Korse, the City, needed them to, they were put onto a table as white as their uniforms, and they said, “Goodbye”.
They never used names: they didn’t know them. They didn’t know English either.
They’d played with his wife’s mind, had done something to her, and then, when whatever they had been playing with hadn’t worked, when they had broken her, they had trained her to go to bed and to say the termination sequence.
In English.
Using his name.
Somebody knew. Somebody upstairs. They wouldn’t have bothered to put his name into the sequence unless they wanted him to pay attention, wouldn’t have made her wait until he walked into the room to say goodbye.
Jet finished the story with a sob that heaved out of his chest and fell onto the desert floor in a million pieces. It felt like he was dying, with the tears streaming down his face, and the breath clawing at the sides of his throat. He sobbed until no tears were left, until he could only sit there and try to breathe, to function properly.
A large hand splayed itself between his shoulder blades, but he didn’t pull away. When his shaking finally ceased, he was left staring at the dead ground beneath his feet. Tiny shoes inserted themselves into his line of sight, toes wiggling at the end of the material.
“It’s going to be okay,” Grace whispered.
Jet Star let his daughter wrap her arms around him. “I’m fine, baby,” he managed, and wiped the tears from his face. “Can you get me my sunglasses?”
“Sure thing, Daddy,” she said, and smiled up at him. Full of life, and energy. Jet waited until she was well inside the diner to turn his slightly swollen eyes on Party, whose hand was now clasped around his knee.
He looked straight into Party Poison’s eyes. Party blinked, once, surprised at the contact, but leaned forward. “It is going to be okay,” he said, in his gravelly voice.
“It might,” Jet said, voice hoarse. “But not for me.”
He tore his eyes away from Party’s confused face, and looked out at the horizon, an empty and shapeless mass of brown. He felt like the desert sometimes, empty and cold, ragingly hot with no reason, unflinchingly hard.
“There isn’t anything left for me.”
Chapter 3
“You have to watch,” he warned her, as he knelt back, letting her aim on her own. “It kicks up, so you have to hold it steady enough. Now, prime it.”
She tugged back on the upper section of the gun, and brought it up to the level of her eyes. “How much does it kick?” she asked, one eye closed.
“Enough,” Jet said. “You’ll see. Just go for it.”
She bobbed her head. Her hair swayed slightly in the light breeze. It stuck out from her head fairly far now, even though it grew slowly. Grace pulled the trigger, and light shot out from the end of it as the gun kicked up into the air. The shot was wild, flying high over the cans.
“Ow!” Grace exclaimed, her index finger in her mouth. “The trigger is sharp.”
Jet reached over to look at her finger, and quickly took the gun back. “That’s enough for today,” he said. Fuck, why had he been so reckless?
“No, it’s okay,” she said, trying to pull her finger away. There was a small cut on it, but her whole finger was small. “Come on, Daddy, let me try it again, please?!”
Jet gripped her tiny hand in his, and tugged her back to the diner. They had to get her cut looked at before infection set in, or some other shitty desert disease. “Maybe when you’re older,” he muttered under his breath, and shoved his gun back into its holster.
Grace was a quick eater, always too eager to be off doing something other than siting in a booth at a broken down diner to stick around while the adults finished their meals. If you could call eating straight from a can a meal.
Party Poison watched her run off, hair bobbing along behind her as she did. When he turned back towards the booth, he glanced at Kobra Kid, and then met Jet Star’s eyes with his own. He was always making eye contact, something that had been hard to get used to.
“I, uh, think Gracie might need a haircut,” he said, clearing his throat. His mouth was a thin line.
Jet’s eyes scanned Party Poison’s head, from scalp to flame-red tip, and then looked past the diner booths to see a flash of Grace disappearing through the door to the outside. “Oh,” he muttered, trying not to frown. Her hair had been getting long recently: he just hadn’t thought much of it. “Yeah, I guess she does.”
He wasn’t too busy staring off into the distance to miss the look that Kobra and Party shared with each other.
Show Pony, Dr. Death-Defying’s rollerskating henchman, stopped by the diner to check up on things every now and then, to get a bottle of pills for the Doc, or to drop off some supplies. He rifled through the things in their garage, and it wasn’t uncommon to hear his voice coming from there on the odd days that he visited.
It wasn’t often that he heard Grace’s voice answer back, though.
Jet took a deep breath, and opened the door to see Grace and Show crouched around a bike that Show had picked up somewhere and brought back to them.
“Daddy!” Grace leaped to her feet, and rushed over to the door. “Show Pony was just showing me how to use a motorcycle. He says I can’t drive it yet.”
Jet frowned. “Of course you can’t,” he said. He blinked away from the image of her face falling, and twitched his eyes up to Show Pony, who was smiling sheepishly.
“I didn't let her behind the wheel,” he said. "Not really."
Jet nodded. Show Pony was nothing if not responsible. He hadn’t even known where his own daughter was.
He walked out of the garage after ruffling a hand through Grace’s now-shorter hair, and closed the door behind him.
There was something wrong with Jet Star’s gun, but he didn’t want to tell anyone. The batteries always seemed to be low: so much so that he found himself keeping new ones in his pockets at all times.
He was looking down at the slightly melted tip when Party Poison walked into his room without knocking.
“Yours too?”
Jet looked up, forehead creased. “Working slowly?” he asked.
“Running out of power, yeah,” Party nodded. “Mine’s doing the same thing.”
“Someone else is using them,” Kobra said, coming up from the hallway behind Party. “That’s the only explanation. Maybe it’s Grace?”
“I told her not to,” Jet mumbled. But there wasn’t anyone else there. They were all alone, in the wilderness. He glanced from Party to Kobra, and sighed. “I’ll talk to her,” he finally said. The two walked out of the room in sync, something they did often without seeming to realize.
Gracie was out back, digging around with a small piece of metal she’d found in the garage and asked to use.
“Grace,” Jet said, walking out to meet her. “Have you...” He paused, when she looked up at him with her wide little eyes. “You know you can tell me...anything, right?”
Grace hesitated, and nodded.
“Have you...have you been using our ray guns?” Jet paused, and watched the way her lip set, and her eyebrows drew together. “We’re running out of power quicker than we used to, and we need that power to defend ourselves in the zones.”
Grace swallowed, and blinked rapidly. “I’m sorry,” she choked. “I didn’t know...I just...” She wiped her hand over her eyes, and looked down at the ground, “just wanted to be like you.”
He hadn’t seen Gracie cry since her mother hadn’t woken up that night. Jet started forward, and stopped. She was so small, so fragile, on the ground. She looked like she might break if he touched her, but he leaned forward and put his hand on her shoulder anyway.
It didn’t cover her up as much as it used to.
“I’ll stop,” she said, after she’d heaved a few sobs into Jet’s chest. “I wanted to learn so I could help.”
“You don’t need to help,” Jet said, working to speak past the raw feeling in his throat. He didn’t know what thought was worse: that his baby girl thought that he needed help protecting himself, or that she didn’t think that he could protect her.
Sometimes, Jet found himself staring off into the distance, fixated by nothing more than a small pile of sand in a corner, or the paint peeling from the walls of the diner. He didn’t even notice that Grace had run into the room until her tiny hand was tugging at the sleeve of his leather jacket.
“Daddy,” she said, eyes bright. “Look at what I found!”
Jet looked from her face down to her hands, traced past her dirt-coated neck down to her outstretched hand. Nestled into her tiny palm was... “A rock?”
“A special rock, Daddy,” Grace said, rolling her eyes. “Look.” She held it up in the air, caught between her index finger and her thumb, and twisted it around. When he didn’t say anything (what was he supposed to be seeing?), she sighed, and twisted it again. “Look, Daddy, it sparkles!”
She watched him, confused and dismayed, as he let his eyes fall closed, and pushed himself to his feet. “Good job,” he said. He patted her head, and walked out of the diner and into the blinding light of day. When he peered over his shoulder, he saw the blonde tips of Kobra’s head advancing on Grace, his eyes wide when she held the shiny rock up to him.
The echoes of “Just look at how that catches the light” followed him even after he slammed the door closed behind him.
The Killjoys went into the zones closest to the city when they wanted to forage or trade, and retreated to 3 to hide out in the diner, their refuge. Sometimes, the heaps of colourful trash were hard to get into, but some required only a few quick shots out the side of the Trans Am.
Jet stepped over the corpse of the Drac he’d just dusted, and ducked under the gate leading to the dump. It was where BL/Ind had stashed all traces of colour they’d been able to find in the city, things from stores, things people still manufactured illegally in the tunnels. The dump right outside of a Scarecrow station was where they’d found the dye for Poison’s hair, and the one just a mile away from a hospital was where Kobra had dug up a battered glove, and a mangled controller from some kind of game, a wicked glint in his eyes.
This dump didn’t often yield much profit, but Jet knew what he was looking for this time. He ducked past the refrigerator with the Bl/Ind logo on its side, stepped over the heap of wires, and turned a corner.
There, wrapped in a pillowcase, was the thing he’d seen a few weeks ago and hadn’t bothered to take. It was a towel, ripped at one corner and frayed at the edges, but a vibrant blue in the middle. Little yellow ducks bordered its edges, orange beaks open in surprise and delight. He folded it up as small as he could, and pushed it into his bag along with the pillowcase, which was striped, and in fairly good condition.
He thought he’d seen some detergent for washing clothes around here, but when he looked in the freezer behind the refrigerator, all he saw were empty water bottles. He took the two that still had lids, and walked back to the Trans Am.
“Find anything we can use?” Kobra asked, without looking up from a small pile of wires he was straightening out.
Jet shrugged. “Water bottles. Some stuff for Grace.”
Poison stalked back, hands somehow deep in the pockets of his tight, off-white jeans. “Nothing,” he told Kobra before he had a chance to ask. “Let’s ride before they send backup.”
The Dracs that Jet had shot had been sitting in a small both. As the Killjoys walked past it, they could hear garbled phrases coming from the communicators that the Dracs used when they were told to.
Group B-17, report.
Come in.
Is backup requested.
Group B-17, report.
Jet grimaced when the garbled phrases washed over him, and he waved the Killjoys on. Scarecrow would send someone to investigate soon, and they needed to be long gone by the time that happened.
When they pulled back into the garage, Jet was the last out of the car. He left his bag in the garage, but pulled the towel and pillowcase out of it. Fingers slowly rubbing over the rough loops of material, he walked up to the room that Gracie had decided was hers the second she’d stepped into it.
He knocked on the door - she was almost seven now, and was starting to protest when he didn’t knock. She must have picked it up from Kobra, whose door Jet always knocked on before entering.
“Grace?” he asked.
The door opened up in front of him, and Grace folded her arms across her chest. “What is it, Daddy?”
She wasn’t wearing her vest. He could see it sitting on the chair she’d managed to pilfer. He hesitated, fingers working at the material beneath his hands, and then thrust it out to her. “Found this for you,” he said. “You didn’t have one, and I thought you might need it.”
Grace reached out and took the blue fabric, eyebrows creased together. “A towel? Party Poison got me one of these last week,” she said.
He froze. Party Poison, who washed his hair once a month at the most, had noticed that his little girl needed a towel before he had. Party Poison. Not Jet.
“W-well,” he said, not sure what to do. “I thought you might need another one. Anyway.” He shrugged. Fuck.
He turned around, and walked away to the stilted beat of his pitter-pattering heart.
He wasn’t very good with cars. He was better with people, figuring them out, and working out how to work around them. But someone had to put the Trans Am back together whenever one of its pieces fell off. He was under it, fixing one of the looser couplings, when he heard Party Poison’s voice muffledly waft through the crack between in the door to the diner and the garage.
“Hey, Grace.”
“Hi.”
There was a pause, and Jet screwed the coupling back in place, hands slipping from the grease. “Want to come shoot some cans with me out back?”
Jet Star pushed himself out from under the car. His hands were smudged with grease, but he wiped them on his pants. He pulled open the door to the diner, and held up a dark brown finger. “What the hell, Poison?”
Party Poison shifted his weight from foot to foot. He ran a hand through his red hair, slightly brown at the roots, and cleared his throat. “I just thought,” he said, pursing his lips, “if she’s going to be using the guns anyway, might as well be under some adult supervision.”
Jet’s eyes narrowed. He folded his arms across his chest, ignoring the sweat dripping down his temple from being outside in the heat. “She’s my daughter, Poison,” he spat. “Don’t you dare.”
“Daddy,” Grace said, from behind him.
Jet had positioned himself between her and Poison. He glanced over his shoulder, and shook his head. “No. Gracie, be quiet.”
“But,” she said.
Jet turned around to face her. “Grace, if you can’t be quiet, you’ll have to go to your room.”
“Daddy, I’m almost seven,” she huffed.
“Me and Poison here have to have an adult conversation,” Jet said, as calmly as he could. His hands were gripping his arms fairly roughly. He was about to tell her to leave when Party Poison cleared his throat again.
“Come on, Jet, you’re being unreasonable.”
“Don’t,” Jet seethed. “Look.” He moved back to Party. “It’s really great, that you and Kobra have helped us so much. Really. And I totally appreciate it. But you two are nosy as fuck for two people who don’t want their ridiculous secret identities to be revealed to the world. I get that. I get that you need to be holed up in your little shell, closed off from the world, secluded in the desert, away from the City. I get it, I really do. But you have to back the fuck off my shell.” He stepped forward, using the height he had over Party to his advantage. The other man stood his ground, calm as could be. “If you think you can just jump in and take over my job as Grace’s dad, you’re going to be out of luck, do you hear me?”
Party pursed his lips, and tilted his head to the side. “Jet Star,” he said, his voice infuriatingly even.
Jet growled, voice low as he loomed over Party.“Don’t talk to me like I’m a fucking child, Party Poison. You can’t just step in here, all high and mighty, telling me how to live my life. You don’t know what it’s like, what having a child is like. Gracie’s too young to understand any of this, and you’re all just ready to take advantage of that. You’re no better than BLI, like this, brainwashing a child, and making it look like all we have are fun and games, like killing is all a big joke to us.”
Party’s eyebrow twitched, but Jet didn’t back down. “Jet,” he said. His voice was slightly strained, but still calm. It made Jet want to strangle him.
Behind him, Grace sniffled. Jet was about two seconds from pulling his own hair out, and he turned around. “What did I tell you?” he snapped. “I told you to go to your room, Grace. Can’t you listen? Do you not know how to do that? Go. And stop that sniffling. Toughen up.”
Tears were streaming down Grace’s face. The second Ray’s mouth closed, he saw the hurt and betrayal in her small, round eyes. She clapped her hands over her mouth. Fuck. Ray stopped, chest heaving, and started to reach a hand out for her.
She choked on a sob, and flinched away from his hand. Ray’s throat tightened up when she wouldn’t meet his eyes, and just turned around and ran into her room. The slam of her door against the frame echoed through his bones.
A hand on his shoulder turned him around, until he was back to the wall with Party Poison’s finger in his chest. Jet could barely feel it.
“Fuck, Jet Star,” Party snarled, eyes ablaze. “That is exactly why I was going to take her out here. I’m not trying to...to take over your fucking job, Jet, but maybe someone should. You don’t even look at her anymore!” He shook his head in disgust. “Nobody’s trying to teach her that killing’s a joke. But she’s a kid and she needs to be allowed to have some fun every once in a while.”
He backed up, turned on his heel and made to go outside, leaving Jet up against the wall.
“Besides,” he added, just before slamming the door shut behind him. “It would be good for her to know how to take care of herself, since you’ve clearly lost interest in doing it for her. She can’t even learn from example, because you can barely take care of yourself, let alone a child.”
Jet swallowed against the lump in his throat. His hands were damp with sweat, and he flexed them once, wiping them on his pants. The sweat bled through the grease, making his palms dirtier than they had been before. He couldn’t think, didn’t know what he should do, so he walked up to Grace’s room, and knocked on the door with one shaking hand. “Gracie,” he said, voice catching on itself on the way out, cracking like the dry ground of the desert outside.
The “Go away!” that came from her room made his mouth dry.
“I just,” he said, hands trembling at his side.
Grace flung the door open. Her eyes were swollen, and her nose was red. Tears glistened from her cheeks, and her breath was coming out in uneven gasps. “Go away! I...” She sniffed, her entire body wracking with a sob. “I hate you,” she snapped.
Jet stepped back, eyes wide. “What,” he tried to say, but couldn’t get past the first two consonants.
“I...I hate you,” she said. “You n-n-never let me do anything. And you always go away, and...and...and...Party Poison would be a million times better at being a daddy than you are.”
The door slamming in his face made him stumble back, eyes stinging. It felt like he’d been slapped, punched, kicked. He couldn’t do anything except fall on the ground, couldn’t do anything to stop the tears that came from his eyes. His heart burned within his chest, strained against its cage, and he just sobbed into his dirty hands for the life he’d somehow managed to break into a million pieces in under a minute.
When no more tears would come, he wiped his face, and slumped back against the wall. Without Grace, his life was nothing. He pushed himself to his feet when the outside door opened, and Party Poison walked in, looking relaxed.
Jet couldn’t even bring himself to care.
“We have to go into the City in five,” Party mumbled, on his way into his room. “Get Kobra.”
Jet did as he was told, knocking on Kobra Kid’s door. When it opened, he blinked. His face felt numb, but it was probably in a normal expression. “We’re going in,” Jet mumbled. “Five minutes.”
Kobra scanned Jet with his light eyes. “Okay. Is everything...alright? You fine?”
Jet shrugged. He pulled his lips into a smile. “Fine,” he said, an empty chuckle traveling through his hollow chest. “Just fine.”
When Kobra shut his door, Jet let his smile fall. He stopped by Grace’s room, and said “Goodbye” to the cold wood of her door before going to sit in the Trans Am. He leaned against the window, and let his eyes fall shut against the glaring light of day that kept trying to shine its way into his empty shell of a body.
Chapter 4
The stairwell had been concrete, and his footsteps had echoed mockingly back into his ears. The place was dead quiet because it was barely past three in the morning. People wouldn’t be waking up for the day for another few hours.
They’d come into the city to help Thriller and his motorbabies evacuate a Hyper-Thrust, and they’d finished off a few Dracs, each one emptier than the last.
When they’d left the still-smoking bodies behind, Party Poison had mentioned something about investigating another Hyper-Thrust, and Kobra had twisted his lips, and let his fingers stray idly down Thriller’s arm. Jet had watched them go, feeling the danger of an hour pressing upon him.
On the one hand, it was a lot of time to keep out of sight of stray patrols. But on the other, he wasn’t sure if it was going to be enough time for what he needed to do.
He had emerged aboveground in the pool of a street lamp, white and dingy. Everything looked clean, even at night. The street were swept, the walls immaculate. It was driving him crazy, all of that perfection.
He barely managed to avoid two sets of Dracs, and stopped just short of wandering into the line of sight of a Scarecrow station. It was set up one block away from a pair of small apartment complexes, about six stories high.
Just the right height.
His hand slipped on the handle of the door when he pulled it open, and again on the door to the stairwell. He paused at the third floor to peer into the hallway, almost cheering for the unknowing act of defiance of the building owners.
The night air was blessedly cool on his hot skin when he shot at the lock and pushed open the heavy door. The roof was one of the older types, with the strange, pebbly surface that BLI didn’t even manufacture anymore. Everything was supposed to be smooth and the same.
By the time he’d managed to get up to the edge, his legs were shaking. He propped himself up on the lip of the roof, a small, raised ledge that he curled his hands around. The ground wasn’t that far away, but he remembered his training. Humans could survive long falls, but only if they did it right, landing properly and accounting for angles and trajectories. Even the shortest fall could kill you if you hit your head.
Jet took in a deep breath of the cold, clinical air. It wasn’t clean: there was still lingering radiation floating around like the heaviest pollution, trapped by the daily goings-on of the population and the height of some of the skyscrapers. But it was different from the desert air, it made his lungs feel trapped like they were inside a hospital. It was good that he’d gotten Gracie out of this place and into the desert. She could thrive there, surrounded by the Killjoys and their friends. She was already good at using a ray gun: he’d seen holes in cans that were too many to have come from Kobra and Party and their practice sessions.
He didn’t know how to live anymore, and it was clear that he didn’t have it in him to be a proper father to her. He just wasn’t good enough, observant enough. He had thought that he’d had it in him, to be a father by himself, but he wasn’t like Party Poison. He wasn’t strong and resilient.
She’d said it herself.
Without Grace, he...there wasn’t anything left for him. Anywhere. He’d forgotten what it was like to feel. It was no better than being on the pills again. And at least then, he had thought that he’d been happy. But he couldn’t betray her like that, couldn’t stay in the city while she was out there, couldn’t take the chance that she might come back and find him working for the enemy. He couldn’t take the chance that they might one day be on opposite ends of a battle.
Party Poison would take care of her, anyway. Kobra Kid too: he was a tech-head, and not always very good at interacting with people but his heart was full of life. They were all burning with it. They knew what family was, and what you had to do to protect it, and if Ray couldn’t be there for her, then they were the only two that he could think of who could do a decent job of raising her. It wasn’t like they’d be alone: he knew that Dr. DeathDefying and Show Pony could pitch in to help out when the Killjoys went on missions. He’d taught Grace how to find Dr. Death based on his radio transmissions in case anything ever happened while they were out.
He pulled off his helmet, and held it under his arm. It would only get in the way, and hopefully it would look like he’d been wearing it when he fell if it only rolled a few feet away from him. Kobra might be able to figure out that he hadn’t, but he wasn’t the type to divulge more information than he should. And without his helmet on, he could die as Ray, and not as the mask he’d been hiding behind.
He stepped up onto the ledge. The breeze was picking up. He could feel it cooling the slight sheen of sweat on his skin from limbing up six flights of stairs. The whites of the walls, all the way down, were so clean and pure. He could already imagine what they would look like if they were streaked with red instead. It would probably come as a shock to BLI: they hadn’t seen a great deal of suicides since 2015, when they’d modified one of the happy pills a little too much, and there had been an outbreak of people leaping off Battery Towers.
At least he wouldn’t have that far to drop. It was a bit hard to maintain his balance on the thin ledge. His scuffed toes were barely hanging over the edge, but he had to bend his knees to keep standing upright.
He closed his eyes. At least he’d said goodbye to Grace before he’d left the diner.
He took in a breath, long and slow, bracing himself for it being his last.
Ray lifted his foot from the ledge.
A clatter of metal, and the warbled cry of a Draculoid made him falter. Arms windmilling, he barely caught himself, and stepped back down to the roof. What the hell had that been?
The sound had been fairly loud, so it must have come from near him. He checked the alley below the one he’d been about to step into, but it was still as empty as it had been before. He put his helmet back on and ran over to the other side.
Two Dracs were piled in the middle of the alley. A man was breathing hard, stance still steady. He looked over his shoulder, and ran off down the alley as Ray watched. He’d recognized the Drac’s call for assistance, and it was clear that the man had as well.
He couldn’t see perfectly clearly from this height, but it hadn’t looked like he’d had weapons on him. And if Scarecrow was coming, then he’d need help...
Ray snapped his visor into place, and ran down the stairs as quickly as he could, taking them by twos and threes when he could use the railing to support himself. The man wouldn’t be in the alley anymore, but he could just check the Drac’s bodies for guns and batteries, which they occasionally carried in their pockets.
His feet pounded against the dark ground, making for the two white bodies piled on top of each other. They were still breathing, but the man had done a good job of incapacitating them. Ray primed his gun, which he’d pulled from its holster on his way down the stairs.
A flash of colour that wasn’t the blue of his own gun caught his eye and made him turn his head to the side.
The sight in front of him made him step back in awe. Somehow, the paint was splashed high above Ray’s head: shining arcs, dripping vibrant streaks down the smooth, once-white wall. Now it was a chaotic pattern of colours that squeezed at Ray’s heart.
He stepped back again, ignoring the gun whining softly in his hand. The more he looked, the more he saw: greens rising from the ground like violent trees, clashing where they met blues that were suspended up high like a vast, unmoving sky. Reds were cutting through it all in what Ray had previously thought were random stripes, but when he tilted his head back, he could see that it was a series of words.
This is not forever.
Ray thought suddenly of Gracie, with the coloured pencils he’d found at one point, with her fleeting grins and the way that she was getting bigger every day. He thought of the Trans Am, roaring through the desert and kicking up sand in its wake, of the way Party Poison had made them push it back to the diner rather than leave it out in the desert. He thought of Kobra’s rare smiles, and the way he’d so gently put one of their few bandages on Grace’s elbow when she’d skinned it.
One of the Dracs groaned. Ray tore his eyes away from the mural to stare into the empty-eyed mask with an emptier being inside it.
He felt Gracie’s hand on the gun, unsure of how hard to pull the trigger. He saw the emptiness in his wife’s eyes in the last few seconds before she’d closed them forever. But he also saw her sketches of their curly-haired child, and of the twinkle in her eyes whenever she’d laugh. After they got off the pills, her eyes were brighter than ever, and remembering the look on her face brought a smile to his.
He pulled the trigger, a spark of something flaring in his chest. He suddenly had an urge to talk to the man who had painted on the wall, and who had inadvertently created a work of art on the ground with two Draculoids. Yellow paint was seeping from the bodies like blood, and it was beautiful.
He stepped over the puddle of painted blood. A shout from down the alley, the direction the man had run in, made him pick up his pace.
“Fucking ENOUGH!”
The Dracs had probably called for backup. The man hadn’t looked like he’d had any weapons, and Ray remembered that the Scarecrow station had only been a block away. He would probably be needing help right about now. Draculoids had a limited vocabulary and were wiped once a year, but Scarecrows...they were a different breed. They had a much more expansive verbal and visual dictionary to rely on, and were allowed to learn and adapt. The pills they were given every day cost more to manufacture than the once-a-year Drac wipe, but they kept the Scarecrows’ brains a a constant level of awareness and emptiness. They were void of emotion and had no concept of pain.
Ray reached the end of the alley and peeked his head around.
What he saw made his mouth drop. Three Crows were lying on the ground, with Party Poison a few feet away. Ray felt the necks of all three Scarecrows. Two were still alive, and their pill-infused bloodstreams were probably healing their wounds and restoring their minds. He left them on the ground and checked Party’s pulse. It was steady, which was a relief. He reached into his pocket for a piece of cloth he’d used last week for his greasy hands, and decided it was better than nothing for the blood dripping from Party’s nose. It wasn’t broken, so Ray just mopped at it as best he could, and then slapped Party’s cheek.
Party groaned, and his eyes snapped open from behind his mask. “Jet Star?” he asked, voice thick. “God, fuck that little man. I was not expecting him to move so quickly.”
“He can’t be on the pills,” Ray said. He helped Party to his feet. “There’s...” he paused, thinking back to the mural. “He was painting the walls when some Dracs found him.”
Party grunted, and brushed off his pants. His hands flew to the base of his skull, and he winced. “Fuck, my head hurts.”
“You going to be okay to drive?”
Party nodded. “I’ll be fine. Me and Kobra are done, so we figured we’d go back to the diner. I don’t know where that little punk went, so we’d better head to the AM. You do what you needed to?”
As they walked off, Ray thought back to the edge of the roof, with the dizzying drop to the concrete. The mural flashed upon his mind, the drips of paint fresh and alive. “Yeah,” he said. “I did what I needed to.”
“Gracie,” Ray said. Party Poison and Kobra Kid had made him carry in the small, unconscious man, deep in slumber after his impromptu surgery in the desert. He’d laid the man on a couch that Kobra had dressed up like a bed, and gone right over to Grace’s room.
She was still sleeping, so he slipped in, trying not to be terribly loud. “Grace,” he said, voice quiet. He shook her small shoulder, and she shifted, opening her eyes sleepily.
She blinked in confusion. “Daddy?” she whispered.
“I’m sorry,” he said, kneeling down by her bed. “I’m so sorry.”
She sniffled, and wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand. “For what?”
“For everything. For not taking care of you. For not...not being a good enough father. I just...I thought I was doing what was best for you, and after your mom...” his voice caught on something in his throat, and he swallowed. “I lost myself, and that wasn’t fair to you. I just, I love you so much.”
Grace blinked, and reached her arms out, tugging him in for a hug. “You’re good enough, Daddy. You’re the best. I didn’t mean what I said before.”
Ray buried his face in her shoulder.
“I love you,” he whispered.
Grace sighed happily in his arms. “I love you too.”
“And I promise,” Ray said. “I promise I’ll trust you. I’ve seen the cans you use for target practice, and you might even be better than me with a ray gun. Hey, uh, we brought home a guy.”
“He gonna be a Killjoy, too?”
Ray shrugged, and squeezed Grace. “Maybe.” He pulled away, and ruffled her hair. “Go to sleep, motorbaby.”
Grace giggled when he tucked her covers close to her. “Love you.”
Ray smiled. “Love you, too.”