Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Part 3

“Time since incident: four minutes and fourteen seconds. Requesting aid. Requesting aid for user: Zina.”

His voice phased in and out.

Where was she?

Who was he?

Why was she…

Ugh. Why did her head hurt?

Little by little, a piece of herself returned. Her consciousness was reassembling. Where she was. What she was doing. And finally, what had happened.

Her pelvis had pressure around it, like she was…

Yes.

She was hanging from a ladder in the middle of a spacious cube.

She was scavenging.

She heard the trickle. Something falling into a pool on the floor.

She held herself up, grabbing the ladder to take some weight off the harness.

“User is responsive. Starting diagnostics,” Ed said flatly. He turned to Zina. “Ma’am, you have a laceration on your head and a concussion.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she groaned. “I know.”

“Ma’am, the most advised next step is to remain still until a medical professional can assess you.”

She began working at the knot around her waist. “Not really in the cards, Ed.”

“Then please do not fall asleep within the next twenty-four hours.”

She carefully coiled the rope around her arm. “Promise. Let me get down first.”

She pulled the rope tight and tested the anchor she had tied earlier. It seemed strong enough for what she needed. The only things she really hoped were that the ladder would hold and that she had enough rope.

She breathed heavily.

Zina slipped the rope through the second rung and let the rest fall toward the ground. Then she touched her head. She wasn’t bleeding too badly now, but she still felt weak.

Very weak.

She unclipped herself from the first rung and slowly began her descent.

It was the slowest, most difficult, most meticulous shimmy of her young life.

Then she had a feeling.

A small feeling.

Some sort of intuition kicked through the haze of her half-lit mind. She took the flashlight and pointed it below her.

She was right.

She didn’t have enough rope.

About ten feet above the ground, her rappel ran out.

“Good… good,” she muttered, holding the rope tight between her legs.

She inched lower until she reached the end of it. Then she grabbed the last length of rope and wrapped it around her hand.

Slowly.

Carefully.

With a lot of pain.

She let herself hang from the end.

Her grip tightened until her knuckles ached. Then she began to swing.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

When she felt like she had enough momentum, she let go.

She hit the ground at an ugly angle and tried to roll with it, but there wasn’t enough clean space. Between the fallen arms and the cramped floor of the cube, her shoulder clipped hard against the ground and sent her rolling straight into the corner.

She stayed there for a while, leaned against the edge of the chamber and breathing through it.

In the meantime, she dug some old oil towels from her pack and tore them into strips.

She tied them together, then packed them beneath the head strap she’d been using for her flashlight.

“Man, I really fucked myself up this time.” She leaned her head back against the main structure of the arm.

“You also seem to have sprained your wrist in the fall. I recommend—”

“Ed, silence.”

She interrupted him as she picked herself up. Ed stopped mid-sentence.

As heavy as her body had ever felt, she looked at her prize.

The arms lay there like a crushed bug. Deflated and left to their own devices. Like ancient treasure waiting there just for her plundering.

She grinned at it and pulled out her torque wrench.

Then she began to work.

Breaking through that pesky enamel. Bolt by bolt, each one falling to the floor.

She kept rubbing the material between her fingers whenever she got the chance. It felt alien. It most certainly wasn’t steel. Some sort of material she had never seen before.

“What’s it made of?” she asked Ed.

Ed flickered and calculated.

“Indeterminate alloy.”

“Indeterminate,” she muttered. “Sounds pricey.”

With a sharp pop and a heavy thud, it hit the ground.

It didn’t roll. Not really. It wasn’t perfectly round. The protrusions where the arms had once bolted into it jutted out unevenly, making it lean hard to one side.

She went to grab it.

It slipped immediately from her hand.

Zina growled, crouched lower, and grabbed it with both hands. With a strained grunt, she managed to hoist it maybe a foot off the ground before her arms gave out.

It dropped again with another brutal thud.

“Estimated weight: one hundred sixty-nine pounds,” Ed said.

“What?” she screamed. “Why? Why is it so goddamn heavy?”

“It appears to be made of a hyper-dense material,” Ed replied immediately.

She wiped her face and stared down at it like it might suddenly offer her a pep talk. Some wisdom. Anything.

“Hyper-dense, my ass,” she muttered. “I’m not leaving without it.”

She retrieved her rope from the opposite side of the room and took off her backpack.

She rolled the core into the sack and zipped it up. Then she placed the rope beneath the backpack and wrapped the ends around her arms.

With a grunt and gritted teeth, she lifted it.

Her legs wobbled. Her brain still pounded. Her body was already sore, but she took the first step.

Then the next.

Eventually, through many breaks, many times screaming into the Pit, and many more times nearly losing her balance, she walked it back.

Down the cocked ladder.

Around the corner.

Past the ever-leaking pipe.

Over the bridge.

Through the nightfall of dusk that had long since kissed the sun goodnight.

Over the fallen building and past the motorcycle, she lurched, slipped, and cursed her way back to the beginning.

“Ed,” she said through heavy breaths, “time.”

With a small buzz, Ed appeared.

“Time is currently three thirty a.m., ma’am.”

She lowered the pack very slowly onto the trolley. With the most sincere feeling of self-gratification, she let her body fall to the ground.

She lay there for quite some time before reaching for the nearby lever. Her arm barely moved it.

So she kicked it instead, still spread out on the ground.

As the gears began to move, she couldn’t help but laugh.

“We did it, Ed.”

“It is still advised that you do not sleep right now.”

“I’m not gonna sleep. Too excited.”

The trolley came to a grinding halt.

To her surprise, a young man called out in a hurry, voice sharp with concern.

“Zina.”

Her head tilted up from her prone position.

The young man she had said hello to earlier. What was his name? Anchovy? Advel?

Advant.

That was it. Advant.

He ran to the tram.

“I knew you were taking too long,” he said flatly. “Oh, gods. You are roughed up. We need to get you to the infirmary.”

She tried to kneel, but immediately lost her balance.

“I’ll be fine.”

“No, you won’t be,” he barked.

She blinked at him, confused. No one had ever been here to greet her like this. Not in her domain.

“Here.” He started to lift her, trying to pull her arm over his shoulder.

“I can walk on my own. It’s my head anyway.”

Under the soft glow of the ever-luminous bulbs, he studied the wound. The blood on the rags had dried. Part of her hair was stiff with the same browning liquid.

“Stubborn girl,” he muttered, still helping her to her feet.

“If you want to do something, uh…” She leaned against the awning of the tram. “Could you grab the sack?”

Advant went over to investigate it. The rope still clung to the bag as support. He tried to lift it.

It didn’t budge.

“What did you bring?”

Eventually, he did what Zina had done earlier and kept the bag low, dragging it more than lifting it.

She just smiled. “A lot of apples.”

“The rumors are true. You are insane,” Advant muttered under his breath. “Well, let’s get you to the infirmary first. Then you can collect your spoils after.”

Zina stumbled alongside him. He adjusted the pack often as they climbed the staircase slowly.

Eventually, he got her to the office of the town physician.

The physician complained that it was five in the morning, which, to be fair to him, it was. But to be fair to Zina, he also didn’t see much work.

Most of his patients were Zina.

By the time the doctor finished with her, it was somewhere around six or seven. He established that she had gotten lucky. The cog had struck her mostly flat. Otherwise, she probably would have had a gear sticking out of her skull right now.

He looked at her wrist too, but all he did was put it in a small makeshift splint.

By the end of it, she looked very apparently injured by something recent.

When she came out, Advant was still waiting.

She cocked an eyebrow. “I got it from here.”

“I…” He sat almost shrunken on the bench near the office. “Lucan is looking for you.”

“Sweet. I can show him what I picked up.” She grinned. “This shit’s gotta be worth something good.”

Advant didn’t answer.

She went to the backpack.

Then stopped.

It was loose.

The bowling-ball-sized object was gone.

Advant awkwardly looked away.

“Where is it?” she spat.

“He…” Advant swallowed. “He already took it. Got a dolly and took it with him.”

A pause fell between them.

Almost disbelief.

“Ah, man.” Zina groaned. “You weren’t supposed to ruin the surprise!”

Somehow, Advant got even smaller on the bench, like a child caught breaking the family vase.

“I’m just gonna… go now,” he said slowly.

Zina narrowed her eyes.

Now she was suspicious.

“What did he say?”

“Uh. I should leave.”

“What? What’s wrong?”

Advant avoided her eyes.

“He wasn’t all that impressed. You should probably go see him.”

Zina huffed and stormed off, scowling back at Advant as she went.

He ruined the surprise. He deserved it.

But before she left, he almost said something. He raised a hand toward her, maybe to stop her, maybe to warn her, but she paid him no mind.

Her mind was on Lucan.

She made her way to the tinkerer’s house.

Mai was noticeably absent from the road. Usually she was there playing with bugs, or waiting around to greet her, or pretending not to wait around to greet her. But today the path was empty.

The house was eerily silent.

Zina stepped through the doorway.

The door was unlocked.

Lucan wasn’t working. He wasn’t turning any tools, soldering components, or welding anything shut.

He stood at the workbench instead, arms folded, white hair shining in the morning light spilling through the window beside him.

And beside him, she saw it.

Her prize.

Her labor.

Her effort.

The torsion core leaned on one of its hinges next to him on the bench.

“Man, I was gonna surprise you with it,” she said, trying for levity.

“Oh, you surprised me. Sit down, Zina.”

She knew what that meant. Lucan wasn’t his typical cranky. He was upset-upset.

But what had she done? She did good. She did great.

She limped tiredly to the nearest chair and nearly collapsed into it.

“Zina. Look at you.” His voice held tight. “Do you even know why I’m upset?”

“Because I hurt myself again?” she said, genuinely grasping.

“You almost got yourself killed!” he yelled. The volume hit harder than she expected.

“Where do I even begin?” He pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose, breathing through it. “It’s not just that you got injured. I know how you got this. Let me rephrase that. I know what you had to do to get this object.”

“Yeah,” she muttered, trying to hold onto the win. “It was a real pain in the ass.”

He sighed, but she responded first.

“But the bigger the pain in the ass, the more it’s usually worth.”

“You don’t even know what it does.”

“That never stopped me before. I’ve brought back plenty of things I don’t know how to use.”

“Critical thinking, Zina. Critical thinking.” He looked at the object, almost presenting it to her. “Have I ever requested one?”

“No, but it’s made out of indeterminatium or something like that.” She gestured toward it. “It’s gotta be expensive.”

“Maybe to a collector in Osteum. Maybe to a museum.” Lucan’s hand fell back to the bench. “But to us, Zina? It’s useless. It can’t be dismantled. We can’t smelt it down. It’s just going to sit in storage.”

“We can sell it!” she almost shrieked.

“No. Not if no one wants it.” His voice sharpened. “And let me tell you, not a soul wants this.”

A flood of emotion rushed through her. Anger first. Then something closer to panic. What little energy she had left made her hands start to shake.

“I was just trying to help! I thought…” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Now Mai gets to see you all beat up,” Lucan said. “Like it’s normal. Like you’re out there on a suicide mission every time you go down.”

That hurt.

More than the bruises. More than the cut on her head.

She really didn’t want Mai seeing her like this all the time.

“Maybe if I had a little help out there, I wouldn’t bring back useless bullshit!”

“You need to calm down. Don’t you talk to me like that in my own home.” His voice snapped back like a viper strike.

“Maybe I wouldn’t be out there thinking I need to haul back the most valuable thing I can find!”

She pushed herself up from the chair. Lucan took one step toward her.

“Zina.” He took a deep breath beneath her yelling.

He looked at her.

Almost completely gone.

This one had almost taken her.

“If I could just…” She bit her lip. “Just be slightly less of a fuckup, I could make you happy for once!”

Her speech broke in and out. Peaks and valleys in her cadence and volume as she watched Lucan approach.

Then the tears came.

Maybe it was the disappointment of bringing back something useless. Maybe it was spending all that energy for so little success. Maybe it was because she was hungry, thirsty, and tired.

She couldn’t tell.

He stopped right in front of her.

Then he hugged her.

“Please,” he said quietly. “Don’t do that again.”

That was all he had to say.

That was it.

All the screaming didn’t matter anymore.

“And please,” he added, hands still resting on her shoulders, “take a shower.”

Through a few more tears, she smiled.

Just slightly.