9.

We made our way through the tunnels for what felt like the zillionth time that day, stopping, thank God, at the Withergate Motel. The tilted sign which read 

𝚆𝙸𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚁𝙶𝙰𝚃𝙴
𝒮𝑜𝓇𝓇𝓎 𝒶𝒷𝑜𝓊𝓉 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒷𝓇𝑜𝓀𝑒𝓃 𝒽𝑒𝒶𝓉𝑒𝓇 :(

was hung by two pieces of rope and knotted to a batten. A fluorescent light flickered next to it. Underneath, bright-red, mechanical arms were placed on both sides of the double-door, one making a head-sized fist and the other doing the V’s. 

“Seems . . . cosy,” I said.

“Try living here with no money and having a kid work your ass off all day.” Silver laughed as the doors slid open. He stepped inside.

Rogue and I followed.

The interior wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. The walls were brown, like the ventilation pipes, and expanded into a hall more than ten times the size of Badger’s apartment. Absolutely gigantic. Grated stairways trailed along the walls, forming a second floor across which four rooms were divided. One of the doors was ajar, and through it I could see that the room was fully lit. The bottom cross-section was the same: four rooms, four keycard slots.

But where are the workers?

At the centre was a hollow table, and standing in the middle of that hollow table was a robot, but it wasn’t an android or Joe-shaped automaton. Its square head was hidden in a cowl. The arms were blocky, and cogs lay idle on the shoulders, cobwebbed and grimy. Built into the chest was an LED printer, graffitied with hearts, names—ℳ𝑜𝓃𝓀𝑒𝓎-𝒲𝓇𝑒𝓃𝒸𝒽, 𝒞𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒, 𝒮𝒾𝓁𝓋𝑒𝓇, 𝒢𝒽𝑜𝓈𝓉𝒻𝒶𝒸𝑒—guns, and a single underlined quote which proclaimed: Make Luv, Not Money!

“Charlie!” said Silver with puerile excitement, extending his arms as if to receive a hug. 

“This is it?” I said.

“Him,” said Silver. “And yes, this is him. The bot himself!”

We stepped to the table. Charlie must have run out of juice, because the guy wasn’t moving. Wasn’t talking either, if it could even do that. 

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Rogue, rubbing her nose with her sleeve. 

Silver approached Charlie without saying a word, and that childish excitement was replaced with, if not sadness, worry. “You alright, buddy?” He turned one of the robot’s cogwheels and spiders scurried out from the shoulder plate. “. . . What happened?”

“Looks like Charlie’s . . . well, not lookin’ too good.” I crossed my arms, and Silver dropped my backpack next to a wastebasket. “You sure this place is open for business?”

“One moment!” a voice called from the second floor. “I’ll be down in a sec!”

“Monkey-Wrench?” Silver walked around the table, looking up.

"Guess that answers that," I mumbled.

After a ruckus of objects being shoved over, a woman dressed in a rosy boilersuit emerged from the half-open door. Her two-tone hair, one half black and one half cyan, fell to the tip of her shoulder as she clanked down the stairway with those ruthless combat boots. “Can I help you folks?” She cleaned her hands with a piece of flannel cloth, flashing us a gap-toothed grin. 

“You can start by tellin’ me what happened to Charlie,” said Silver.

“Oh!” She pursed her lips at Charlie, seemingly shocked that this mysterious man knew the robot’s name. “Well he’s been out for years. Been meanin’ to get rid of him for a while now but—”

“You’ll do no such thing,” replied Silver, wide-eyed. 

The pale lady chuckled with shock and tossed the cloth into the wastebasket. “Right . . . So can I fix you folks a room? Upstairs or downstairs?”

“Monkey-Wrench,” said Silver.

“That’s my name.”

Albeit a very strange one.

“You really don’t recognise me?” he said. 

She drew back and eyed him for a good couple of seconds, her brow furrowed. “Should I? I mean, I’ve met a lot of people over the years.” 

“Surely you remember,” he said, and then stepped into the annular space within the table.

“Hey,” she snapped, vaulting over and shoving him, “this is off limits!”

“How can you forget, kid?” said Silver softly. 

“Sir,” she said, “I don’t remember you. And even if I did, that’s no excuse to touch my property.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “Lucy,” he said.

Her purple irises dilated. She was left speechless for a moment. “How do you . . . ?”

“Ten years ago, you took a fugitive more than twice your age into your motel and worked him like a dog. He owed it to you to work off all those nights without payment because getting a job in the City wasn’t much of an option. He left one day, saying he would leave to the Dust and join a civilisation of scavengers after meeting one face to face, but not before you told him to write his name next to a woman, who took off to The Marble the previous year.” He pressed his forefinger under one of the names on Charlie’s printer.

She snatched his wrist, removed it, and said, “Get your hands off—!” She paused, her eyes frozen on the word he had pointed to. “. . . Silver. . . .” She eyed him a second time, and strangely enough, it seemed as if she had begun to remember. 

Silence swept through the motel. 

“You came back.” Her mouth was frozen in a circle. “You finally came back,” she said gravely. 

“Sorry,” he said. “Things came up.”

“Ten years worth of things?” she said, scrubbing her fingers through her hair. “Why didn’t you at least get an Infrared and tell Badger—”

“Because times were tough, okay?”

“Because you don’t trust Jet-Corp tech anymore? That was it, right? You promised.”

“I know I did, kid—”

“I’m not a kid anymore,” she said. “That little girl’s long gone, Silver, long gone.”

Rogue and I looked at each other in silence, and I could tell she was thinking the same thing as me: Should we say something?

“Look,” Silver said, more controlled, “I’m really sorry. Shit happened, I found a community where I could survive. You know all this. For ten years I was . . . well, I was working. I still owe you for everything. I won’t forget what you did for me. Please, Lucy, I understand you’re mad, but . . . God, we’re knee-deep in shit right now.”

“Karma’s a bitch,” she said, folding her arms. “I’ve been waiting for ten goddamn years for you to come back and you never even sent a fucking card, much less a dime. You know how hard business has been since people stopped coming to the Underground? Real bad. I barely have enough to buy food and water, let alone keep Charlie re-pumped every couple of months. Life’s been hell.”

“I’ll pay you back,” he said.

“How?”

He explained to her the situation with the Grand Fiesta.

“God,” she said. The waning anger in her voice was a good sign. “So you’re not just doing something that pays well for your own gain. Why didn’t you stop by sooner?”

“Time constraint,” said Silver. “But listen . . . about Charlie. . . .”

She rubbed her nose with her sleeve. “Follow me.” And she led all three of us to the back of Charlie. She grabbed a screwdriver from her boot and began twisting the robot’s fuel compartment open. 

Ten seconds later a loud clank sounded out, and the hatch released. Stuffed inside was a large empty canister glowing dimly with a red liquid no more than a pencil high. Webs were knitted around the pressure-tubes and cogwheels, housing black house spiders that had grown to the size of my thumb. Disgusting. 

“See?” she said. “No melted weave means no life. Charlie hasn’t been up in years.”

“Melted weave?” Rogue sat on the table, dipping her legs in the hollow. 

“The stuff that powers Jet-Ships,” I said.

Monkey-Wrench nodded. “The compound most robots run on,” she said. “To buy even a litre costs at the very least a couple hundred.”

“That’s no problem,” I said. “5000 for my cybernetic hand, five grand for you. That should solve it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Who are you again? Sorry, not to be rude or anything.”

“Ashe,” I said, crossing my arms. “But if anyone asks, my name’s Alexa.”

“Alexa?” she said, her tone softer than it had been moments ago. “What’s goin’ on?”

“A lot,” said Rogue. “Like too much to sum up right now.”

That was true; at this rate, if I kept standing here listening and chatting, then I might faint from exhaustion. “We’ve been through hell,” I said.

Silver pointed at me. “Her, especially.” He explained the surgery. 

Monkey-Wrench dipped her shoulders, pressing her folded arms against her waist. She let out a sigh. “Alright. You got any cash on you?”

Silver stared at her, then slowly shook his head. “Not today, but tomorrow. I have some allypus meat to sell.”

“Keep it,” she said with yet another sigh, fetching two keycards from the drawer. “You two can check in. Red-haired girl, what’s your name?”

“Rogue,” she said. “If anyone asks—”

“I just won’t say your names, how's that?” 

“That works.”

Monkey-Wrench tossed her a keycard, and it slipped through Rogue’s fingers. “You can have the top, Room 4. And Ashe”—she tossed it in my hand—“you’re in Room 3, right next to her. Just let me have a quick chat with Silver. I don’t want you girls standin’ around like zombies, ya hear?”

“Gotcha,” I said. “And thanks.”

“No problem, hun. Hope you get a new hand soon.” She smiled. It was weak, but a smile nonetheless. 

Rogue flapped the keycard across her fingertips as we walked up the stairway. “She’s nice,” she whispered. 

I yawned. “I hope everything works out for her. I feel bad about what happened. Seems like a lot of trauma if she had to lose a friend, even if it is a bucket of nuts and bolts.”

She nodded. “Night, Ashe.” She swiped her card through her slot. 

“Night.”