Nice Shot

Tonight's News

The video was filmed three months before anyone but the person holding the screen ever saw it. The whole thing was a mere two minutes long, meant to be stored discretely in a private database, enjoyed in brief, and tucked away again.

On the turning, tilting screen, a messy, colorful, chaotic picture blooms, then slowly coalesces into a warm, close, comfortable night in the lounge of Jacob’s cafe. Mikhail “Mike” Chilton, to the left, is laid back on an old ratty couch with his arm around one of his dearest friends. Charlie “Chuck” Haynes is front and center, tilted into Mike’s side, holding a nearly-empty bottle of beer. As the camera pans right it finds Jacob himself, local vegan edifice and illegal weapons supplier, leaning onto the back of the couch, then some young, short, smiling women wearing pink and lavender overalls, and then their brother, Bato “Texas” Chrisobal, moving so quickly the camera turns him into a blur of black and red. Dutch hadn’t been there that night (thank God) because he had had an urge to paint that wouldn’t let him rest, but a smattering of women from the last functioning branch of the Detroit Public Library System, one present because she’s dating one of Texas’ sisters and a few more just along for the ride, laugh and open dripping glass bottles in the background.

The camera follows Texas for a minute, then pans left again, following a burst of sound; a couple of giggles, a friendly shout. It rolls past the girls again, now laughing, then Jacob, shaking his head and turning to walk away, and then finally to the left side of the couch, back where it had begun, to show that Chuck and Mike had closed the miniscule gap between them.

Mike’s hand, its silver rings and knuckle-scars, holds tightly around Chuck’s back, wrinkling the fabric of his soft blue shirt. The hand holding Chuck’s now-empty bottle of beer has rolled close to the camera, low, and a bit of yellow light exposes the raised shining scars that his black and blue Burners tattoo usually covers up. When the camera reaches Chuck’s face it sees that his shield of hair had been pushed back, over an ear with an unfilled piercing-hole, showing his cornsilk eyebrows and eyelashes over his closed eye, the curve of his cheek. Then the watcher frames the kiss, holds still as Mike puts a hand under Chuck’s chin, as they separate and come together again.

In the last five seconds of the video, Mike pulls back; his eyes open halfway. They crinkle again in fondness when they see the person recording him.

“Hey,” he says, softly, gently chastising.

Two things happen in the last two seconds of the video. The person holding the camera laughs, a low, breathy chuckle, a tenor tone not easy to recognize as male or female. And Chuck’s bright blue eyes open and his uncovered face turns to the camera, for once and in a rare moment completely identifiable as Charlie Haynes.

—

Julie was fastidious about keeping her two separate pools of data separate. She never put anything on a public drive or cloud, she never allowed outside access of any kind—they couldn’t even connect to each other. She had two separate, physical drives connected to two separate comm systems, both mounted on a bracelet; one silver, one gold. She wore the silver one in Deluxe where it better fit her father’s uncompromising aesthetic and the gold one in Motorcity where it matched her car. She would change them out at the border and tuck the one she wasn’t wearing into her glovebox.

In the drive in the gold bracelet, among the files of backup codes for her car, her weapons, and the virus she used to worm into Kane Co. machines, she kept some photos and videos of her friends. Nothing serious. Moments of laughter. Swimming in Lake Erie. Driving in the shotgun seat of Stronghorn on the way to pick up some groceries with Texas as he rambles about halo halo. Dutch fixing Nine Lives. Jacob singing to himself in the kitchen. Chuck, who is so nervous, and so anxious about how he is seen and perceived that he almost never lets himself breathe calmly, feeling so comfortable and so relaxed at home that he kisses his best friend on the couch at a little family party.

Sometimes Julie badly wished she had those videos up there in Deluxe, to watch them in moments where balancing her double life felt like too much. But she knew she would never compromise Dutch or anyone else by bringing videos of them having fun in Motorcity up into Deluxe, where they might be seen, recorded, hacked, or even stolen from her.

Of course, Julie never got hacked. But one could never be too careful.

— 

“They hacked me,” Julie snapped into the comm, indignant, smacking the heel of one hand against the bottom of Nine Live’s wheel. On the dash of every other Burners’ car, her little icon turned bright red and fumed pixel clouds of smoke.

“Oh, no way. No one hacks Emily,” said Texas, dead serious, and swung Stronghorn around like a pendulum to ram it into the nearest motorcycle. The universally black bikes favored by the helmeted members of Zero Day, both festooned with cycling rainbow strips of LEDs, swerved away from Stronghorn’s rapid advance.

“Texas, NO—” Julie snapped, but it was way too late. Stronghorn’s nose dipped as Texas accelerated and then picked the nearest bike right up off the ground. For a few perilous, winding seconds, the Zero Day bike was riding on Stronghorn’s front end; then Texas pitched them off of the road and down to the ground below.

Julie screamed in her throat. The cyclist who had ripped her data out of the air with an impressively merciless exploit soared, bounced, spun, corrected, and drove away, absolutely impossible to follow or to trace.

The Burners routed Zero Day without too much more trouble, especially not after Chuck jammed their comms. They sped away in a goose-like wing, more concerned about their personal data than putting up a front. Then the Burners regrouped and headed home.

She tried to track exactly what they had stolen once they got back to Jacob’s garage to eat and decompress, but it’s hard to pick out absences without evidence of their presence. Zero Day’s work was surgical; anything they took had been cut out like it was never there. Julie identified some of the personal music collection missing, a handful of videos, some recorded diary entries (she never mentioned her father while in Motorcity, even to herself, so her secret was still safe), a shopping list and a file in which she had been idly remaking a partially shattered stained glass window in the Most Blessed Sacrament in retro ASCII art.

She forgot all about the video of her friends sharing a comfortable embrace.

—

Mike and Chuck weren’t out out. Everyone close to them knew, but they didn't spread that information around freely. The two of them almost never displayed their relationship in public—no more than the same comfortable holding and hugging Mike would do with all of his friends—and rarely spoke about it, either. Their near-silence on the sweet secret was taken by most everyone around them as a cue to keep it quiet themselves, though few really knew why.

Julie did. She knew that Mike would tell everyone in the world about his special affection for his oldest friend without a thought in his head if it were his choice. It was Chuck, and it was Chuck’s insecurity.

Julie didn’t blame him. Chuck was being constantly harassed about not being a man, or not enough of a man, or not the right kind of man. He was pushed around and mocked even by his friends for being a coward, for hiding behind the other Burners, for striking out with girls, sometimes before they even noticed him. He lived grasping to the edge of respect with his fingernails.

Julie also noticed his scars, which he never talked about, and which she did not think were unrelated.

She didn’t really know how Mike and Chuck thought about themselves. As best friends, if she was to take them at their word. ‘Best friends with benefits’ didn’t sound like something Mike would settle for, but he was as soft for Chuck as oil in a running engine. If Chuck needed time—distance—even to lie, to pretend in front of most people that Mike Chilton wasn’t his boyfriend—Mike would let him have it.

Mike wasn’t mad at Chuck for it. Neither was Julie, really. Chuck’s covered-up, hidden, hard-packed love, like all of his emotions, flared in volatile bursts out of his tightly clutched hands when he couldn’t contain it anymore, and then one got to see how big it was, and how sorely treasured; his fear, his fierce anger, his unhappiness, his discontent, his love. To Mike, surely, it didn’t feel like only being allowed tokens of affections, slipped out of the sleeve, metered out miserly; it felt like being close enough for the unbelievably rare look at the unbelievably beautiful thing, like aurorae out of season and out of place, like a flower that blooms once a year in the night, a miracle repeated, because the miracle trusted him.

Or so she assumed. She was Chuck’s friend too. Sometimes, when he was being withdrawn, surly, passive aggressive for long enough, her patience with him would grow steadily thinner. But when you see someone clinging to steel bars with shaking hands through his sobbing, the tears going down the cheeks as he shields you from the enemy’s view with his own trembling body, you love that person anyway.

—

When the video was released to the common community channel of the anarchist collective bookstore, it spread to the rest of Motorcity in twenty minutes. Flat.

What infuriated Julie in retrospect was that Zero Day hadn’t even tried to get anything for it. There had been no attempt to extract funds or further data, to bargain or to blackmail. They stole the video of Local Gang Leader and Domestic Terrorist Mike Chilton swapping spit bisexually with his software engineer, they realized what they had, they made it public commons out of the goodness of their hearts, they washed their hands of it and left.

What infuriated her at the time was that it was a massive violation of privacy that was going to hurt both Mike and Chuck badly. She ran down the road to the hideout (Nine Lives was at the garage, she had decided to do a little errand on foot just to walk around the town and talk and enjoy a slow day and that sure showed her) watching endless iterations of her video play on personal comms, shared screens, the stupid hot gossip community bulletin run by the 105.3 KROK jackasses, reflected in the stagnant puddles she broke with her boots.

When she finally reached the garage, panting, stumbling through the door, she found Mike, Dutch, and Jacob all standing in a row, watching the stupid fucking thing on loop, silent and considering. Mike had his fist on his chin and a blank look on his face like he was trying his best to understand whatever complicated mechanical puzzle Dutch and/or Chuck were working through. Jacob had his hands on his hips and sighed like he was solemnly watching an engine breathe its last. Dutch was slowly shaking his head.

“Guys—” Julie gasped. “I—”

Mike snapped his fingers to point his forefinger at her. “Stolen from you by Zero Day when they raided us on the road.”

“Yes. I’m—”

“You took it that night a few months back when Tex’s sisters were celebrating Remembrance Day with us,” Jacob said. “Took me a little while to pinpoint when this was.”

“Yeah. Yes. That’s—”

“Thank God I didn’t hang out that night,” sighed Dutch.

“Yeah?...” Julie asked, propping herself up on the doorframe.

“Because this is everywhere everywhere in Motorcity,” Dutch continued, “and it’s going to be everywhere else up in Deluxe by the end of the day.”

Julie instantly realized he was right. There weren’t many people who went between the cities physically like she did, but there were a few. (They all ignored each other when they saw each other.) Data could go where bodies could not, and faster.

Julie leaned forward to wheeze. She knew she was safe. She had watched the video a dozen times. The person behind the camera—herself— hadn’t said a word, you couldn’t see any part of her at any point, and the only noise she had made was a little, breathy chuckle at the end. She couldn’t be identified by just that.

Chuck, however, would not be so lucky.

“Where’s Chuck?” she asked.

Mike closed the video with a quick huff of air. “Taking some time alone,” he responded, “but I’ll check on him.”

—

No one ever learned how the video jumped from the world below to the world above. No one ever does figure out who does that sort of thing, it seems. In this case, it could have been Zero Day themselves, proud of their work and eager to show it off. It could have been a mole in Motorcity with a professional line back upstairs, or someone upstairs who used backchannels to get news and media from downstairs. In either case, it was in Deluxe by the end of the day.

It stayed quiet for a few hours, scrolled by in favor of more exciting things than a leaked personal video. Then, inevitably, someone who watched the news often enough recognized Mike Chilton and watched the video all the way through.

It started spreading, slowly, hushed and furtive. Then it broke out of backchannels and into the open and then it spread like the fireball of a hijacked gas tanker slamming into a brick wall. Dutch knew what he was talking about: there was nearly no one in Detroit, Deluxe, Motorcity, outskirts, or anywhere else, who hadn’t seen the video of wanted criminal Mike Chilton making out with his boyfriend by the end of the day.

Everyone knew Mike Chilton. A few personally, everyone at least by name. Both Mike and Chuck had grown up in Deluxe before defecting, separately but nearly simultaneously—Charlie Haynes had vanished only two weeks before Mikhail Chilton crashed out. There were people who knew them, and some well.

“Holy shit,” said Deluxe, as a rhetorical body; “that’s Mike Chilton.” And then one member of that body, furtively, feeling they must be wrong but knowing that was the man they used to watch being shoved bodily into his desk before quickly looking away, said, “Is that Chuck Haynes?”

It couldn’t be Chuck Haynes. He was dead. His body had been found in an incinerator outside the R&D department of Kane Co., officially called an accident but rumored to have been a moment of bullying or hazing that went just a touch too far. Nor would Charlie “Chuck” Haynes, an infamous crybaby with scarred wrists and perpetually hunched shoulders, resurface making out with a gang leader and sporting tag tats in the instance that he had survived.

But a single still frame of his opened blue eyes, the very last second of the video, visible from Mike pushing his hair back to kiss him, aimed at Julie in the microsecond before she stopped recording, eventually made the truth undeniable. That was Chuck fucking Haynes, who had, apparently, staged his own death, defected to Motorcity, joined (or started?) a street gang, and was now making out with Mike Chilton in hell.

Abraham Kane put an actual, real, no-shit and no-excuses cash bounty on Charlie “Chuck” Haynes’ head by the time the sun set.

—

Original Note:

LIVE LIVE FAST FREE IT’S TWO THOUSAND AND TWELVE ANNO DOMINI

I am playing a little fast and loose with this fic. What I mean by that is it would be impossible to determine exactly which point in the timeline it takes place in because I’m not fussing about that. I’m generally sticking to canon but pulling in the occasional headcanon or vintage fanon that we used to put in all the Motorcity fics (like Texas being born in Motorcity and having a huge family there or like Mike and Chuck being childhood friends that came to Motorcity at and/or around the same time, a fact that was ‘word of God’ but not exactly canon). The thought of Chuck and Mike being outed without their consent came to me, and I whipped up a pretty good story around it without getting too into the weeds about details.

Couple quick things: Mr. Mike Chilton is named after the Chilton brand of auto repair manuals, so I named Mr. Charlie Haynes after the Haynes company for cars and auto repair manuals. (I see a few last names used for him in fandom these days, but based on my research there is no canon last name for him, so I picked my own.) Both companies are still chugging, at least their publishing arms, though I think they’ve both been acquired by big five publishers now. They were, I might add, Chilton & Haynes for a bit there......

Similarly, I gave Jacob the last name Power in a later chapter; he’s named for the J. D. Power used car catalogues. These are some librarian-ass names for car characters, but I have my own truth, I guess.

I’m old school as a fic writer, so I’ll put in A/Ns like this as I go, but that’s all for now! Hope y’all enjoy the ride!

—

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Million Dollar Man

Within the selection of Deluxians who knew Chuck, there was a special subset of people who were not, in fact, surprised by this turn of events. Some of them had been seeing grainy zoomed footage of someone in Domestic Terrorist Mike Chilton’s passenger seat, a blond blur surrounded by bright screens, and had known deep in the pits of their stomachs who the blond blur was all along.

Both wanted men had become wards of the company at a very young age. Mike and Chuck were both orphaned in the disastrous construction incident in which several dozen Kane Co engineers were all crushed to death while repairing the northern edge of the dome under conditions that none of them knew were incredibly dangerous and unstable. The corruption-caused and frankly avoidable disaster had made a good handful of single parents and complete orphans in one tremendous crash. Chuck had had a single mother to start with, who had never known exactly who was the father of her son; Mike’s parents had met on the job and had been killed on the job together. To both Mike and Chuck, who were about the same age when it happened, what this meant was that their earliest memory of life was awful pain.

Deluxe had been uniquely well-set to take care of the orphans it made as there was nothing Deluxe liked better than people it could mold into what it wanted them to be from a young age. With Chuck so smart and inquisitive and Mike so bold and honest, both of them were quickly put on paths that played to their strengths but discouraged the dangerous tendency they shared of questioning the way things were. An engineering and military career, respectively, that gave them all the tools and toys they could ask for in return only for loyalty, should, by all accounts, have been appealing enough to keep both in line through sheer comfort.

But there were flaws in Kane’s plan. There were always flaws in the plan, because those plans were not really made with the wellbeing of their subjects in mind, and cracks between what Abraham Kane thought those ‘swine’ wanted and what real people actually wanted widened. Mike enjoyed being needed and respected and complimented, but he couldn’t ignore the faces and voices of the people he was sent to suppress. Chuck should have been content with the interesting and fulfilling work he was given, but his skittish and scattered personality made him a target, and the inhumane structure of Deluxe’s Research and Development Department led to his life getting worse and worse as he was targeted by jealous colleagues or enforcers of norms, and then targeted worse when he did not defend himself. All of this might have led to both men being stifled in their separate coffins if they hadn’t had each other.

They never stopped being friends.

Chuck hid scars and bruises from Mike, Mike hid his gnawing doubts and growing mental dissonance, but they could see on each other that something was wrong, and that proof was the evidence they needed, eventually, to trust themselves. Chuck thought he would never see Mike again when he staged his death with a medical corpse and ran away to Deluxe, but he knew as he ran that he was right, and that it was not him who was wrong but the world around him. And Mike, who had been away on assignment and hadn’t learned Chuck had disappeared until mere days before he defected himself, had known deep in his heart that something was rotting around him and had needed only the moment of pure clarity to see it for what it was.

Only two weeks after Chuck ran away, Mike found him again in Motorcity.

They had always been together. There were people who knew them. Men who fought with Mike and men who worked with Chuck, averted their eyes from the brawling or the bullying. There had been supervisors. Colleagues in the break room. Neighbors. The other orphaned children who were raised alongside them.

There had been people who had always but silently known exactly who the person sitting shotgun by Mike Chilton was and who only saw confirmation when his face appeared on his arrest warrant, scrolling between screens of advertisements and weather warnings of a coming storm.

—

Chuck laid with his face pressed into Mike’s chest and sobbed. Mike grasped Chuck’s shoulder, silently. 

Then Chuck made a gargling noise, like a whirlpool forming around a drain. Mike’s head titled up, his burry eyes focused; he leaned minutely and morosely back as Chuck launched to his feet and screamed.

He nodded sympathetically as Chuck slammed a fist into the wall, smacked it a few more times, and then turned around, grabbing his hair and emitting a noise between a shriek and whimper. Mike watched him slowly run both his hands down his face, standing still, holding his breath, before finally letting it all out in a sigh that had him collapsed forward by the time he was done.

After that, he turned around, arms dangling at his sides. “This sucks,” he said, moderately.

Mike smiled. It was always better for Chuck if he could get it out of his system. He was much less likely to pack it all down and build up to an explosion if he was around people he was comfortable with and could just… let it out as it came. “Julie never meant for this to happen.”

“I know she didn’t, dude!” stressed Chuck, gesturing with both arms.

“It was just supposed to be a video of her friends that she kept for herself.”

“Yeah, I know! Then Zero Day swiped it and decided to just… spread it to the whole world! I’m so sick of those creeps.”

“Well, make sure you let Julie know you’re not mad at her,” Mike said, because he needed to make sure Chuck understood his point. “She’s really upset this happened.”

Chuck crossed his arms, leaning forward like a scarecrow half-cut from his post, almost level with Mike sitting on the edge of the bed. “Well, I am a little mad at her, but that’s not fair, so I’ll tell her we’re square.”

“Why are you mad at her?”

“Because I don’t like having my picture taken in the first place! She knows that! And it’s exactly for this reason. I don’t want…”

“Julie’s more careful with her data than anyone. This was a freak accident. If that Zero Day vulture had sideswiped me instead of her, Deluxe would have had a hundred photos of you sleeping in the front sea of Mutt instead,” Mike countered with a grin.

“I—I do not sleep in Mutt. There’s no way to sleep in Mutt. That would be like sleeping in a—in a burning house! How could I sleep in Mutt?”

“You crash on the way back to the garage all the time,” Mike teased. “Once the adrenaline wears down, you are sleeping like a baby.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Yeah-huh.”

Instead of drawing himself up to his actually considerable height to be intimidating, Chuck defied what the normal spine can do to lean even further into Mike’s space. “And you take pictures of this?”

“All the time, buddy.”

“Delete those,” said Chuck. “Open your comm. Right now. Show me your folders. Delete—”

Mike had already started laughing when Chuck lunged futilely for his wrist, where he wore the data bracelet Julie had gifted him with on his last birthday (a patch of supercharged steel embedded in dark, tooled leather, made to fit under his jacket so it couldn’t catch stray flashes from the live lightning he used as a melee weapon). Chuck scrambled for its clasp and, despite him being by far the bigger guy, Mike somehow kept it firmly out of his reach. Chuck shoved him onto the bed with sheer unhappy energy and Mike went with it, falling back and letting Chuck, having accomplished his true, unspoken goal, curl up on top of him.

“This sucks,” he whined again.

“It’s kind of funny.”

“It sucks.”

“It’s a little funny.”

“Maybe to you. You don’t care how…”

“What?”

“That’s not fair,” Chuck admitted quietly. “You do care how people see you, but you just… look better than me, so it’s not as hard for you to like how you look.”

“You look great.”

“Sure.”

“You have always hated having your picture taken,” Mike reflected. Even when they were kids, sleeping back to back in a bed together, long half-idyllic years of play interspersed with mandatory training for the positions and lives that had been chosen for them, which as they aged slowly tore them apart.

“Yeah. I hated that it… that you couldn’t go anywhere you weren’t being watched,” Chuck muttered, sideways on Mike’s chest. “Glass walls. Cameras and private comms and security drones and guards with body cams watching you all the time. There was never real privacy, not even at ‘home’. Not really. Someone was always watching, someone could always find you, no matter what. It was never really dark. You couldn’t lock a door, couldn’t actually keep someone out of your room. You could never actually be alone.”

Those were luxuries that Chuck relished in Motorcity. Darkness—when the power grid failed, the dome above kept all light away, and the world was as dark as a cave; you could hide from someone else in the same room. Doors could be locked and chained, windows firmly shut and shaded, and no-tech or low-tech houses with no cameras and no surveillance flourished. Chuck could go home, go to his own, private room, lock the door, and know that no one and nothing could get to him unless he allowed it.

Mike didn’t enjoy those things at first, but in cathedral silence watching the cold lake from the silent shore, or hearing everyone else chatter downstairs as he and Chuck laid silently in bed, or knowing he was living a moment of connection and love that would never be known to or witnessed by or understood by anyone else had a magnificence that all the lights of Deluxe could not illuminate and all its screens could not capture, and those gifts were only given in the silence, darkness, and privacy that he so avoided.

It was hard for Mike to be alone with his thoughts. He did manage if Chuck was with him.

“I get it, buddy.”

“Now I’m the evening news. Ugh.”

“It was going to happen eventually,” Mike grumbled. “We did what we could to keep the rest of your identities secret—except for Texas, who wanted everyone to know exactly who he was immediately—but all of you were going to be found out eventually. It’s the price of fighting against the system.”

“I know…”

“Sometimes I wanted everyone to know who you all were,” said Mike, looking up to the ceiling, watching the stars they had placed on it to mimic the sky above Detroit in their little room, “Because I wanted to tell the world, whenever Kane shoved a camera in my face, yes, this is Julie, and Dutch, and Texas, and Chuck, and they’re amazing. They’re fighting for you every day, and they’ll keep fighting for you until you’re free, because they’re all that amazing.”

Chuck groaned weakly. Mike thought he could feel the heat of his blush on his chest and smiled.

‘Their’ room was Mike’s room. Jacob had happily given both of them rooms at the garage once the reality of the Burners had taken form. He had one heck of a building to himself and the cars (and the store and the cafe), and unlike Texas with his family, Julie, who usually went home to Deluxe, and Dutch, who paid rent on his own apartment and preferred it that way, the two of them never really made roots anywhere else. Now that they had street territory, anyway, and then it made sense to stay in the center of it.

Chuck’s room was in the basement of the building, right by the server room, sometimes loud with its humming; they didn’t usually hang out there. Mike kept it as Chuck’s space alone. They spent their time together and often slept together, just like they had done as children, in Mike’s room.

There was no doubt now in Mike’s mind that they would always be together. The two weeks of separation by the dome hadn’t been long, and they had been so chaotic he hadn’t been aware of most of them, but he had had a long time to think about how that could have gone. They could have been separated forever, living in two opposing worlds. One of them could have easily failed and died in their attempt to escape. Or Chuck might have not accepted his apologies for not noticing—not wanting to notice—how bad his life had become.

“I’m going to kick Zero Day’s stupid LED asses for this,” Chuck finally said, with a low, miserable sigh.

Mike smiled. “I’d love to see that. We getting Blond Thunder out of the garage?”

“No,” Chuck continued, monotone, “We are not getting Blond Thunder out of the garage for this or for anything. We’re putting out butts in Mutt where they belong.”

—

The rest of the Burners, and a few neighbors, were standing in a cluster around Jacob’s counter when Mike and Chuck finally got back downstairs, whispering excitedly. Julie, who was always scanning the room, no matter where she was, so intently she never missed someone coming in or out, caught the sight of them descending the stairs and broke away with a nervous smile.

“You’re back!” she said, strained. “Guys. Uh, Chuck, I—”

“OH,” interrupted Dutch, vaulting from behind the counter, where he had been standing next to Jacob and idly adjusting the kava ‘coffees’ he was pouring with whatever flavors made them potable, “Now here’s the million-dollar man!”

Chuck looked at Mike. Mike pointed at himself, visibly confused. Dutch pulled Chuck into a lazy headlock, making him squeak like an old hinge. “You proud of yourself, man?” Dutch laughed.

Chuck responded with a warped “get offa me” and some heatless play-fighting with Dutch, who laughed through it. Mike smiled vaguely at both of them, but turned his eyes to Julie.

“Well,” said Julie, still anxious, “Not quite a million.”

“What’s that mean?” asked Mike, as Dutch and Chuck shoved at each other behind him. He grabbed Dutch’s collar to pull him back a bit, sheerly on instinct; this friendly fight was getting a little close to the Texas Event Horizon for comfort.

Julie winced and looked at Jacob. Jacob, who looked oddly amused, brought up a colorless screen from his highly modified comm system and showed them a large image of Chuck’s frozen face.

It was a screenshot of the very last moment of the linked video. With his hair pushed back, his eyes open, the single-second look of calm trust Chuck had met Julie’s eyes with right before he realized she was filming, the picture was incredibly recognizable. No room for error. Superimposed text on the top and bottom of the poster read:

CHARLIE “CHUCK” HAYNES

WANTED BY KANE CO. ADMINISTRATION FOR CHARGES OF DOMESTIC TERRORISM, MURDER, ACCOMPLICE TO MURDER, DESERTION

DANGEROUS INDIVIDUAL APPROACH WITH CAUTION OR ALERT AUTHORITIES

REWARD $800.000

“EIGHT—” said Chuck, and choked on his own throat.

“Chuck’s not a murderer,” said Mike, affronted.

“Texas doesn’t have any wanted posters,” added Texas, clearly most upset about this. “Texas would have been a million dollars.”

“Neither does Mike,” sighed Julie, crossing her arms, “but everyone knows who Mike is already. No need to put out a bounty on his head, there’s been a smear campaign against his character for long enough that most people up top just hate him enough to turn him in anyway. No one knew who Chuck was before now, so Kane wants to build up animosity against him fast.”

“No way,” sighed Chuck, bending toward his own wanted poster, perhaps convincing himself it was real, “he’s still after Mike. He’s just realized that he has a new angle that he can get him with, which is exactly what I knew would happen if word got out. Kane’s just found another way to hurt him.”

A short, natural silence followed Chuck’s unassailable conclusion. Everyone here knew Abraham Kane well enough to know Chuck was right. Chuck was wanted, but he was wanted as bait.

Julie started saying Chuck’s name, but half a second later Mike started speaking, and he was facing Chuck, so he didn’t see her open her mouth and breathe in. “Eight hundred is chump change for Kane,” he said, “which is what I find insulting about this, personally.”

“But it isn’t chump change for the sort of security grunt who will get ideas when he sees that poster,” Chuck responded.

“Or for the gangs down here,” Dutch inserted, “Which should be the first thing we worry about. Kane could spend a mil without noticing, but for someone defending their street or their home in Motorcity, it could mean a lot.”

Startled, Texas said, “Whoa, partner. No one in the city is going to give up their own to Kane for some stupid money. We’ve got what we need here.”

“There are many who are so ethically opposed to Kane they would never take the deal,” Julie half-agreed, “but that’s not everyone. Some people are more desperate than others. Kane can get distracted or myopic, but he—and his board—are still strategists. That’s enough money to make us nervous and defensive and the gangs who don’t really like us to ask themselves what they think we can get away with. We’ll want to be careful while going out for a while, but we still want to act cool.”

“Oh, easy for you to say,” Chuck started, a little whining, a little aggravated, and he stopped short when he saw how Julie wilted back. It wasn’t like her.

“Julie’s right,” said Mike confidently, pulling Chuck into his side. “Things will be tense for a while and it’s smart to lay low for a bit. Most people in Motorcity mind their own business, but we’ve got some busy-bodies too. Let’s stick close to Chuck and show a united front. Leave no openings. Just in case.”

They all agreed. Chuck looked at the floor and grumbled. Julie excused herself for the bathroom.

—

Mike did feel bad about cutting Julie off, but he knew both of his friends. Julie wanted to apologize, they both wanted to talk it over, and they did not want to do it with everyone else standing there and staring at them.

Chuck wouldn’t really accept the apology unless it was done in private and he could react to it honestly. Julie wouldn’t accept a half-measure or a half-hearted acceptance.

He knew they’d come together eventually.

—

Original Note:

I didn’t try converting modern USD to imaginary future Kanebucks since there isn’t an established monetary system in the show, unless I’m misremembering. You can make it a bounty for gold bars or circuitry or future cryptocurrency in your head, just consider the USD bounty a localization, lol.

I wanted to post the first two chapters at once for a solid foundation, I'll take my time editing and revising the rest. I have a full draft so they will all be posted, I'm just not rushing it. See you then!

—

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Some Ideas, Mostly Bad

In the pale dawn of the next morning, the lower ranks of the Kane Co. Research and Development Department were gathered around a silent, cold breakfast. Everyone shuffled through independent, muted feeds, but as separate as they were, those feeds were all nearly the same.

It took exactly one person clearing their throat to say “So. Did—” before a fist was slammed into the table and its owner said “I knew Haynes was a faggot.”

“Oh my God, grow up,” snapped one of the only female members of the electric sweatshop that spent their days developing weapons technology for a despot.

Shouting followed both of these remarks equally. Some of the people in the room were new to the department, just excited by the proximity, but there were plenty of people here who had known Chuck well. They had bullied him, or else failed to defend him from the bullying.

“How the fuck did he live?” wailed one stressed veteran, cutting through the noise. “Y’all’re thinking about his dick and I was up all night trying to figure out how he fucking lived through being burnt alive.”

“It was a dummy,” someone responded impatiently; and another, “it was a medical corpse, we were using them to test new types of plasma—” and “He shot it with the gun? Or did he set a corpse on fire?” “He killed him, I’ve told you all—” “But we did DNA samples on it!” “He fucked with the testing strips before leaving; don’t you remember how it kept fucking up for months after?” “No, he didn’t; I faked the results instead of doing his DNA because I didn’t want to do it.” “You what—” “We all knew that it was him in the incinerator! Why would I test?”

And so on. Years of secrets came to light in minutes. Legitimate and substantiative accusations of having ‘driven him to this’ or ‘fucked him up that way’ were made and spirited defenses against the accusations rejected. The number of people, it turned out, who had known all along that Chuck Haynes had been bullied to death and kept the burning of his corpse in the company incinerator quiet was ugly. They defended him now, since they would never see him again—

--until a worry started running through the room, in trickles, in syllables, that they might see him again. The truth was out, now; his name was flickering on big screens above the streets with a bounty underneath it. Chuck was alive, he was dangerous, and, by their own estimation of a man and his worth, he had nothing to lose. What would stop him from coming back for revenge on his tormentors, now that he was—

—that. The man in the posters. A Burner. The Burners’ programmer; God, they should have known, after all this time of marveling at the tech the Burners had, their cars, their weapons, their viruses, the subtlety of their communication software, how effortlessly it jammed, hacked, corrupted. Every time the Burners slipped right under a hacked and malfunctioning security camera, every time they disabled all the bots sent out to follow them in a wave, every time they shut down a building to kidnap someone and drag them to Motorcity, the magic trick had been a flick of Chuck’s fingers. The files of the research he had done in the company, now shamelessly appropriated into Kane Co. proprietary copyright, sat in the lab right next to them.

They should have recognized his work. They had stolen it all and fed it to their machines long ago.

Some of them had. Other meetings took place after work that day, quiet meetings in homes or on streets, lasting no more than two minutes so that their lingering didn’t clock as suspicious activity to the surveillance bots; some of them had absolutely known.

“I was just glad he wasn’t dead,” one whispered to another, under a blazing Kane Co. street lamp that denied them the ability to see the stars (though low-hanging Venus glowered dully through the gloom), "I was just glad he survived, though I can’t believe he became…”

“You know he tried to kill himself?”

“Yeah. I saw him in the bathroom. Fixing the bandages on his arms.”

“The poor fucking kid.”

“He’s sure not a kid anymore.”

“I just knew it was him, you know? Even though I couldn’t believe he was alive. I read the reports about the technology the Burners were using. No one could figure out how they were so efficient at jamming Kane Co. tech. I just knew it was him.”

“I know. I didn’t want to say anything…”

“But you just knew.”

“You just knew.”

—

The Burners made a few bets on which gang would make the first tentative move at Chuck’s bounty as they bolted the windows and refreshed the cybersecurity on the garage door. Far and away, the most popular bet was ‘the Duke, duh.’ The Duke was many things, but perhaps most fundamental to his character was being an opportunist. There were dark horses, like Zero Day coming back to capitalize on the bounty they had generated, or Mama’s Boys busting in (because they could), but absolutely no one expected Foxy to knock sharply on the front door just after midnight.

She had two of her girls with her, but they clearly weren’t there to fight. Their motorcycles were shut down, their helmets were under their arms.

“Let’s talk,” Foxy offered.

Mike looked at Chuck, then Julie. Julie tilted her head one way, then another, then shrugged.

The three Amazons moved sleekly into the base and sat themselves at Jacob’s counter. Jacob raised his eyebrows and squared his back against the wall; the Burners gathered nearby, some behind the counter, some around. Roth buzzed uncertainly at Dutch’s shoulder.

“I’m very happy now that we chose to shake hands with you,” said Foxy.

“Oh?”

“I would have hated to just learn now that we had been fighting with brothers all along.”

Mike’s eyebrows rose to his hair. Dutch’s shoulders rolled back. Texas made a soap-opera gasp of shock. “You’re all siblings,” he whispered intensely. “Is Mama your mama too?”

One of the Amazons put her hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle. Another one rolled her eyes. Foxy said, “We’re siblings, though not in the sense of the word you’re using.”

“It doesn’t smell to Texas.”

“Roll it up to the curb for me, too,” Mike interrupted. “What do you mean by that?”

Foxy paused for a second, still as a waiting snake, looking up through her bangs at Mike, but she did explain. “I mean that my Amazons are all women who love women,” she said, “with very few special exceptions. And we do things the old way, where the girls like us and the boys like you stick up for each other. Or did I misunderstand that video I just saw?”

Mike was a little dark to flush easily, but a ripe redness had started crawling up his face as Foxy spoke. He stammered when he responded, but with an embarrassed happiness. “No, you—yeah, yes, you—yeah. You saw it right. We’re the same way. Not exactly the same, probably? Similar, for sure. Yeah.”

Chuck, who was standing next to him, resorted to just turning around so he didn’t have to look at the cooly smiling Foxy. “You’re queer,” she said.

“I’m not really up on the lingo,” Mike admitted. “It wasn’t—okay in Deluxe. But we’re—I’m bisexual. Yeah.”

It wasn’t just the terminology that wasn’t alright in Deluxe. All associated actions weren’t alright either. Deluxe approved only child-bearing couples and put them in their visible cubes to raise their picturesque and on-display families; people who couldn’t have children were meticulously paired with each other and kept from the rest. Petitions for celibacy were approved, but not for same-sex partnerships. In reality, a person could get away with a covert homosexual relationship, but that was in addition to the approved heterosexual marriage. It wasn’t an alternate option, it was a secret you kept—a life Mike wouldn’t have been okay living even if any of this had occurred to him up top.

He had always had eyes for some select men in his life, though hadn’t admitted to himself when he was young what he was thinking; he found himself, suddenly, with new eyes for Chuck when he first saw him bruised and split-lipped in the soft oily light of Motorcity. He still hadn’t really understood what he was feeling until he heard that word: bisexual.

He loved that word. It felt like rediscovering a song or a story he had loved as a child, when he had it explained to him. Suddenly the other half of his world opened to him and he could see the whole horizon.

It still felt a little awkward to say it out loud. He could feel how warm his ears were, and even knowing his Burners would never judge him, it was a little hard to meet their eyes right now. He looked up to Foxy, and saw, to his surprise, a genuinely warm expression on her face.

She tempered it immediately, casting her eyes down. Her normal chill had returned when she looked back up. “Good. We’re understood. This is why I’m glad we made peace already instead of me learning I had been fighting my brothers. Mr. Haynes—”

“Yeah,” squeaked Chuck through his hands, still standing with his back to Foxy. Mike bit his lip to stifle a chuckle.

“I was surprised seeing that video, because even though we have been working with the Burners in the past, and you and Chilton often enough, I had no idea you were together. Usually I have a good radar for this. What this indicates to me is that you weren’t out.”

“No, I was not,” grumbled Chuck, “But I certainly am now.”

“It wasn’t your choice.”

“To become Deluxe’s most wanted overnight and face the mockery of every other gang in the city?” he asked, uncovering his eyes to look over his shoulder—not that his face could be seen through his hair. “Uh, no.”

“You can tell anyone who mocks you to fuck off, and send me their way if they don’t,” Foxy responded calmly. “But this is important, so let me have a straight answer—you weren’t public about your relationship before.”

“No.”

“Or your bisexuality.”

“No.”

“And you were outed without your consent or permission.”

“That’s the size of it,” he sighed.

The giggly Amazon, her face suddenly falling from mirth to dour seriousness, said, “It was Zero Day, wasn’t it? That was their M.O. exactly.”

Chuck whirled around to say “yes” the same moment Mike did. Julie followed them up with a terse, unhappy explanation.

“They stole that video from my personal comm in a sideswipe on the road. I have no clue how they got through the shields around Nine Lives to do it. It was meant for private use.” Julie stood cross-armed and tense.

Foxy nodded without looking at her. “That disrespect doesn’t ride while the Amazons are on the road,” she said, voice low. “While we’re still in Detroit, our rights are going to be respected. And if someone disrespects us, or our sisters, or our brothers, we teach them to give us the same respect they give everyone else. If you want to teach them, we’re with you. We’ll do it ourselves, if you like.”

Mike leaned back. Chuck stood like a statue behind the bar. Jacob raised his eyebrows and said ‘huh’. It was Dutch, to everyone’s surprise, who leaned slowly forward over the counter, eyes sliding over to Mike. “You know?” he said.

“Dutch,” said Mike.

“She’s not wrong,” he argued, putting out his hands. “That was crazy disrespect. It should have been your choice when you told everyone or if you told anyone. Especially since this sort of thing can be so dangerous! Now Chuck has a price on his head and we all gotta walk on eggshells until the heat dies down. And this wouldn’t have even happened if you had a secret girlfriend; it would have been a moment of gossip and then gone.”

“Well, no, not for me,” Mike argued, “Kane wants Chuck as a hostage to get to me, or else I don’t know him, and I do. The same thing would have happened if he found out I had a girlfriend.”

“Not the same,” Dutch disagreed. “Not exactly. I grew up in Deluxe too. I didn’t get fair treatment, and guys like you didn’t either.”

“In the city I grew up in,” Foxy continued, “Those of us who were like us defended each other. We stood up for each other, even against people in power. It was the only way we survived. When our brothers died, the sisters buried them. When we were oppressed, our brothers lifted us up. If you go out to fight, we fight together.”

Mike took in a deep breath, let it out, and with maybe a touch of reluctance, said, “No. We’ve got to lay low. I’m not going out to fight anyone right now. Chuck has a target on his back right now; we’re all going to stay in the garage a few days until the buzz dies down a little bit. Everyone knows he rides in Mutt, too, so going out on a drive is… kind of dumb, even if we’re doing it to go find Zero Day.”

“You have a point,” Foxy admitted. “We don’t have to send them the message now. We can serve this dish cold.”

Mike shook his head. “No. I won’t stop you, but I don’t like fighting with the other gangs. We’re all the people of Motorcity. I fight against Kane. No one else. Unless I’m forced to defend myself.”

“It can be easily argued that this is defending yourself,” argued Foxy, tilting her head. “But I hear you. Since so many people see you as the leader of the rebellion, it does some damage to you to be seen infighting. Even though they started it.”

With that, she snapped her fingers, and the other Amazons stood up even as she slid off her chair. “You’re a good kid, Chilton. If you need your older sisters, we’ll be there.”

“Well—thanks,” he said, still slightly flushed. “I haven’t had sisters before.”

“You did,” she said, flicking her hair as she turned her back. “You just hadn’t found them yet. Girls.”

With that, they left, the bell above Jacob’s door chiming cheerfully after them. They walked straight to their bikes and started them up to leave as the Burners thought, for a minute in silence.

“They shouldn’t get away with it,” Dutch said quietly.

“Texas will gladly kick their shiny butts.”

“Maybe not,” Mike agreed. “I don’t like it either. I guess… I’m realizing now how mean a move that was, now that I see how much it upset everyone else. But…” As he hesitated on his next sentence, his arm went around Chuck’s shoulders. “To be honest, it wouldn’t make me feel any better to beat them down about it. It certainly doesn’t solve our real problem, which is Chuck having a bounty on his head.”

“…That’s what we should focus on,” Dutch reluctantly folded, his head knocking back. “Damn, it feels like shit, though.”

“It doesn’t feel great,” Mike agreed.

“It’s fine,” said Chuck quietly.

Mike whispered, “Chuckles.”

“It’s fine,” he repeated, looking down at Mike’s shoes. “The last thing I want is for you to blow up the goodwill you build with the other gangs because of me, man. I just want it to all blow over. I don’t love the fact that Kane knows my name now, but, you know…”

“Know what?” Mike asked, looking clear-eyed and flushed, holding Chuck’s back.

Chuck took in a breath, then giggled, quick and pneumatically compressed. “I keep imagining his face when he sees some nerd making out with Mike fucking Chilton.”

Dutch and Julie both snorted in the same moment. Chuck tried to keep the pressure on his laugh, but it came out in a wheeze of compressed air. Mike, still wrapped around his back, was trying to stay offended by how Chuck was talking about himself, but it was hard to keep stern though the giggling.

“Fucking—public enemy number one—and this guy who LARPs,” said Chuck, and then wheezed.

Julie suddenly broke out laughing and the rest of them weren’t far behind. Texas gladly leapt on the opportunity to make fun of Chuck for being a twiggy little man, and Jacob, guffawing, took his exit to the kitchen—though not before leaving with a parting line.

“She’s right about something else though,” he said through chuckles. “Can’t believe that little girl knows about that kind of stuff. I went to the last parade with some friends, just to support them, before the cops—but never mind all that ancient history,” he sighed, and walked off.

Mike waved him off as he went, but he was collapsing in giggles as well. Somehow, he hadn’t thought of Kane seeing…

Seeing Chuck Haynes, original Burner; and hopefully realizing how powerful and wonderful and amazing he was, even if Kane could only understand that power as a danger and only feel the wonder as fear.

—

It wasn’t just people who had known Chuck in Motorcity who were talking about him. In a backroom in a movie theater, in the shadow of a supply closet, two men spoke to each other in hushed voices.

“Didn’t you see what was around them?”

“Look…”

“Because that’s what I saw. A room full of friends. Family. Even an elder. All laughing and smiling and having a good time. Everyone laid back, having a drink, joking around, not a care in the world, even while in the same room as them, two men…”

“…I know.”

“Didn’t you see that? Don’t you want that?”

The other man wavered, saying nothing.

“If that’s what they have down here,” pressed his partner, “if that’s what we could have, isn’t it worth trying?”

The response did not come quickly. Dozens of couples had nearly the same conversation across Deluxe that evening. They did not all come to the same conclusion, but some brewed bold plans in the night.

—

It became clear the day after that choosing to keep Chuck in the hideout was the right idea. Even in their own neighborhood, the streets commonly accepted to belong to the Burners, Dutch and Texas saw cars going slowly down the road, cars they didn’t recognize, as they walked around town on errands.

“Followed me for almost eight blocks,” Dutch huffed as soon as he walked into the cafe, “and I swear it was a Skylark car. I can’t believe the nerve of them, after all we’ve done for them.”

“Texas saw the Mama’s Boys wandering around, but he expected them. And he wiped them off the earth with a single—”

Texas went on. Julie tapped her fingers rapidly against the counter. “I’m going to have to get to Deluxe tomorrow at the latest before my absence becomes suspicious. Unfortunately, I’ve built a reputation as a gossip since I need information so often. It’s weird that I’m not around for something this big. I had Claire tell everyone that I’m sick today, but still.”

“Can’t risk your job, Jules,” said Mike. “If you have to take another car—”

“Nine Lives is still the safest car for me to take. It kills the battery, but I can have her cloaked the whole way up for a few days. But now I can’t stop thinking of someone sneaking up on her where I park her and just—stealing all my files, even though it’s never happened before.”

“And this is why we should teach those Zero Day creeps a lesson,” inserted Dutch.

“No,” Mike sighed.

“They’re more likely to show up here to take advantage of this than anyone else,” Julie grumbled. “We’re likely to run into them eventually.”

“And we will not be fighting them.”

“Frankly,” said Texas, “That’s unrealistic, Tiny.”

“Who taught Texas ‘frankly?’” asked Chuck, and things briefly devolved into arguing.

It was loud enough that they missed the knock on the door the first time, and the second. Suddenly, Julie shushed the whole group; like a nervous classroom, they all fell silent immediately at the raising of her hand.

They heard the next slow, sharp knock on the door.

Texas and Mike both put an arm in front of Chuck. He huffed, and grumbled, “Fuck this, I’m going to my room.”

“Go for it, buddy,” Mike said under his breath.

Chuck retired; Jacob appeared through another door. After a few moments, Mike slowly walked forward to answer the knock.

On the other side stood a man in sunglasses and a suit, short but svelte. When he saw Mike, he nodded at him, then smartly took a hat off his head and put it before his torso. “Mr. Chilton.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I’m here on Rayon’s behalf,” said the man. “May I come in?”

Mike looked like he was seriously considering answering in the negative, but he backed away from the door. “Be my guest.”

“Much obliged,” the Skylark responded, and less entered and more turned into the hideout. Unlike Foxy, he didn’t welcome himself to a chair. In fact, he barely entered the garage at all. He closed the door quietly behind him. “I hope I’ve found you well, despite the circumstances.”

“Well enough, thank you,” responded Mike, cross-armed but still responding politely to politeness. “How can I help you?”

“I’m not going to waste your time or insult you by being oblique,” the man responded crisply. “Your number two has a price on his head.”

“No one is my number two,” Mike responded. “We’re all Burners equally.”

“Mr. Haynes,” the Skylark corrected himself, “has a price on his head. That has you in a predicament. I’m sure you know already that some bad actors are staking out your establishment, wondering if they can’t catch you unawares.”

“Funny you should mention that,” responded Mike, “one of my guys saw a Skylark ride sneaking up behind him today.”

“That was me. I apologize for startling you, I was trying to make my approach clear.”

Mike held his breath for a moment, then let it out slowly. “Alright. We read you wrong. What have you got for us?”

 The man nodded in polite acknowledgement again. “Thank you. You see the situation around you; there are a lot of desperate people here in Detroit. People willing to do a lot for that much money, or just for a leg up, or to ingratiate themselves to Kane. You’re not going to wait this out. That much money can change a person’s life, and there are people starving down here. You’ll only see people get more desperate the longer that money is hanging over your head.”

“What’s your point?” asked Mike icily.

“Rayon wants to fix this for you,” he continued cooly. “Let us capture Mr. Haynes and turn him over to Kane. We’ll split the money and then assist in his rescue. With our combined efforts we can hash out a rescue plan that has him back out of Deluxe efficiently. The Skylarks will use our half of the money to rebuild apartment blocks in our area that are still struggling after the fight. You’ll help a lot of families this way. The money goes to a good cause, the bounty disappears, and then we get Mr. Haynes back good as new. Mr. Christobal—”

“Tex, don’t,” sighed Mike, because, as the Skylark had noticed, Texas had been walking up behind the Skylark with a coffeepot raised above his head.

“No, man, he’s got to go,” Texas argued evenly. “This guy wants to sell Chuck out to Kane. We’re not doing that.”

“I second Texas,” said Mike. “The—the statement, not the coffeepot; put it down, Tex. I appreciate you coming in good faith, but I can’t do that. We’re not sending Chuck to Kane even with a plan to get him back. I saw what happened to him while we lived up there, and I’m not going to let that happen to him again. It’ll be even worse now that Kane knows he’s a Burner. Even if he’s only up there a week, it’s a week too long.”

The Skylark listened politely and nodded sharply. “I hear the conviction in your voice. You won’t change your mind about this.”

“We won’t.”

“You could have two captured at once as a gambit, and plan their escape together.”

“That’s still unacceptable,” Mike replied. “Two in Kane’s clutches is no better than one.”

“Even if we send him up with one of our guys.”

“I wouldn’t do this to your guys either.”

“I would hate to see you rebuff our fair offer, Mr. Chilton, and then for someone with no such charitable impulses to be the ones to get their hands on him. The money can go to rebuilding Motorcity, with us working together, or it can go to whatever bounty hunter will use it for their comfort alone.”

“I would hate that too,” said Mike, “but it’s not happening. Chuck is staying where he belongs. In Motorcity.”

“I hope so, for your sake. I’ll bring your answer to Rayon. We like you, Mr. Chilton, you and the Burners. You’re fighting for Motorcity. The Skylarks will fight with you; though you may not like our tactics.”

“I can assure you that you’re not my least favorites,” Mike responded.

As he reached for the handle of the front door again, a grin curled briefly onto the Skylark’s face. “That would be the gilded old has-been,” he said, and then he saw himself out.

Standing in the vacated doorway, watching him leave, after a few beats, Mike said, “Yeah, that’s… yeah. That’s the one.”

The Skylark laughed once, and then was in his car and on his way.

—

Julie went back to Deluxe, Texas visited home, Dutch went all around the city as he usually did, keeping his ears open, and Mike watched Chuck withdraw, further and further, and then into his room to stay there.

“Should I…” asked Mike, leaning on the counter as Jacob fiddled with his food processor, tapping his fingers polyrhythmically on the steel edge of the counter.

“Should you what?” asked Jacob, scraping at the rim of a stuck ring of incredibly sharp blades with a butter knife.

“I don’t know, should I… this is going to sound dumb.”

“It’s a day that ends with ‘y’, kid,” Jacob grunted.

Mike laughed, and genuinely. To the embarrassment of their mutual friends, he loved Jacob’s vintage jokes. “Well, should I… should I be going out there and evening the score? At least talking to the guys that outed Chuck like that? You know, defending his honor?”

Jacob snorted, but took the question seriously. “Not that there’s any personal score to settle, of course not. Does he want that?”

“That’s a no,” Mike admitted. “He wants all of this to blow over as soon as possible and for no one to talk about him ever again.”

“Too late for that. The minute Kane actually had an inkling of how good your guy actually was, he was going to start coming after him. But Motorcity will cool down if we give it enough time.”

“Yeah. Only I just feel like I’m not doing enough. I feel like I have to stop this bounty somehow.” Mike shot out his hand at his side the second he heard a noise, and when the ring of blades Jacob was trying to unstick from its fixture suddenly popped out and sprang into the air, it landed perfectly in Mike’s palm.

‘“Nice.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s nothing you can do down here to solve that problem,” Jacob continued, examining the newly exposed insides of his machine. “The person responsible is Kane, as always. Don’t let this be the thing that turns you against the other people fighting the good fight.”

“It won’t be. Though I’m not going to be good friends with anyone who actually tries to capitalize on it.”

“You don’t have to be, as long as you don’t let this make you into enemies. That’s what he wants; he would send down his goons himself if all he wanted was a hostage. Half the goal is to have us fighting each other and don’t you forget it. Divide and conquer.”

“He’s great at that,” Mike admitted, handing the blades back to Jacob. “Nah, I’m focused on Chuck. Or I would be, if he wanted to see me,” he added, somewhat under his breath, looking down at the basement in which Chuck resided.

“He’s not trying to avoid you, he’s trying to avoid everyone.“

“I know—”

“Defend him with your actions. Go out and get promises from the other gangs they won’t pick Kane over you, keep watch over the garage, get things done for him so he doesn’t have to worry about it. When he comes around, he’ll see what you’ve been doing.”

“But—”

“Whatever you’re thinking about doing, it won’t help him if it involves not leaving him alone when he wants to be alone. You know this kid better than this.”

“...You’re right,” said Mike. He was still looking down, for a second, low-voiced. But in the next he shook it off and pinned Jacob with a mischievous smile. “Who knew you had such good relationship advice?”

“Well, you know.”

“Where does that come from?”

“The state of Michigan, that’s where, where I grew up, and you might as well say you grew up in Pangea now. If you think your relationship issues are too hard for me to understand just because you’ve got a guyfriend instead of a girlfriend, you are mistaken.” Jacob got to work untwisting the parts of his food processor from each other and dropping them all in the sink individually. “You’ve even got the oldest problem in the book: you’re clingy. Let him breathe.”

Mike put up his hands as he laughed at himself. “Alright, alright. I’ll go… bother the Weekend Warriors, I haven’t seen them yet and I’d rather talk to as many people as I can before they get ideas in their own heads. Keep an eye on Chuck for me while I’m out?”

“I’ll try,” said Jacob, rolling up his sleeves, “but he’s real good at hiding.”

—

Original Note:

I maybe could have been more thorough with the scenes of Deluxe people talking, but I didn’t want to make a ton of OCs for this, so I ended up writing them more like a chorus. The show treats them as extras, so hopefully it doesn’t feel too odd.

—

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Partner

Julie stopped dead in the hallway and curled her nails into her fists.

A pair of security officers crossed her by, laughing. “And he was just some kind of fucking faggot all along,” said one. “So much for ‘public enemy one.’”

Julie breathed.

They walked away, still laughing.

Julie made herself walk forward.

Most people weren’t phrasing it so… poorly, but Security especially had found recent news pretty funny. She hadn’t seen Chuck’s former colleagues in R&D, and rarely did, as they tended to be rather isolated, but Mike’s former colleagues were everywhere and they could say whatever they liked about nearly whoever they liked and face no consequences.

It was their general sense that Chilton’s shameful present now cast his defection in an even worse light. It had been assumed he was volatile and crazy before; now they were wondering if he was just soft. A girl, essentially, leaning on a man, making emotional decisions, unable to cope with the demands of Security, the requirements of keeping a city in line with violence.

Julie struggled to dismiss all of that as merely ignorant and uninformed, something that would be rectified with education and a second chance. It would make her feel better if she could. She had, in her life, watched some people make the choices and do the hard work necessary to change their minds for the better. She had seen many, many more people not lift a single lazy finger to inch out of their simple, hateful assumptions, because it kept them comfortable, because it was easy, because they could ingratiate themselves to power and succeed the simple way by singing the same old song for the same old listeners. She knew, because she had been born with the offer of the easiest, most comfortable life possible, and she just hadn’t been willing to be hateful enough to keep it.

She judged those who made the opposite choice and did not feel bad about doing so. Maybe the sneering cadets who called Mike names to stabilize themselves were ignorant. They were hateful too.

As she walked up stairs and down hallways to the top of Kane Co. Tower, her anger at allowing those words to go unanswered slowly morphed into a discontent that murmured and gnawed under the rest of them, like something in the basement. It brought her back at the thing that had been eating her for days: she hadn’t apologized to Chuck yet.

She had tried a few times and just hadn’t gotten the words out. There had been too many people around, and she wasn’t really sure what to say, and she was so persnickety and cautious that she hardly ever messed up like this, and with more and more people deciding to test at the Burners’ boundaries, time had grown too short to take Chuck aside properly before she had to go back up top. She had gotten more hesitant after the time when—if she understood it right—Mike gently stopped her from starting her apology.

At first she hadn’t really realized that that was what happened, and then she thought she must have misunderstood, but the longer she mulled on it, the more certain she became. Mike had tried to stop her from apologizing to Chuck. He had turned Chuck and himself away and spoken over her. It was subtle, gentle, likely reluctant, but that was what he had done. The only question, then, was what had motivated Mike to do that.

She knew Mike. He was a caring man. Compassionate, egalitarian, and full of hope. He saw the best in people and was routinely disappointed by their mediocre; no matter how many times he was disappointed, it never broke that hope. He was jealous or suspicious or in other ways mediocre like the rest of them on occasion, but it was much more likely he had a good reason for what he had done, and, as he wasn’t exactly a genius, it was likely a simple reason, too. When Julie added the fact that Mike knew Chuck better than anyone, and that he had had a long stretch of private time to talk things over with Chuck after they were outed by Julie’s video, the truth became clear to her. 

Mike had stopped her from apologizing to Chuck because he knew, though she didn’t, that Chuck wasn’t ready to accept her apology. He had told Mike he was angry and sore and not ready to listen. Mike had been telling Julie to wait.

That was fine. She would apologize one way or another.

After running over the facts again, certain they were in place, with the cruel insults she heard in the hallways echoing in the back of her head, Julie knocked firmly on Kane’s office door.

“Mr. Kane?” she asked, just in case someone was in there with him.

“What is it?” he asked, muffled from behind the door, but strong, harsh. He hadn’t recognized her voice.

“It’s Julie Kapulsky, Sir,” she continued, undaunted. “I—”

The door immediately opened. Her father stood up from behind a desk. “Julie!” he said brightly, tone completely changed. “Come in!”

Despite herself, Julie smiled as she walked in the door and it closed behind her. To see him completely changed from the stern CEO to her father in an instant was still—it gave her fleeting, toxic hope, which smoldered in her, burned low whenever she considered giving up on him completely.

She knew who he was. She also knew who he could be, if he wanted to.

He was alone in the room. Usually a vast, empty space populated only by screens, he could make it into a comfortable office space whenever he liked by summoning blocky furniture and fake potted plants out of the doors and walls. He didn’t, usually, preferring to make his guests stand in the void, but perhaps he had been tired that morning. He kept the little office space up and summoned another square chair out of the ground for Julie.

“I know I tell you not to ask for me too often at work,” he started, slightly chastising, “But I must admit you’re a sight for sore eyes right now.”

Julie felt herself smile. “I try not to,” she agreed, “I know it puts me at risk.” Her father was wrong about a lot of things but right that keeping her identity a secret kept her safe and that going to see him privately jeopardized that safety. “I figured an early morning meeting with an intern wouldn’t look too odd.”

“Ha! I’ll make sure you walk out with a whole stack of paperwork so they think I’m just working you to the bone. But it’ll just be old documents, you can run them through a shredder and be done.”

“Why do you even have so many paper documents?” she asked, genuinely curious, as Kane summoned a white filing cabinet out of the wall with the press of a digital button.

“Anything kept on a server can be hacked into by someone with enough time and skill, no matter how good your cybersecurity is,” Kane told her, standing up to start opening drawers, “and even if you have the best cybersecurity in the world. We have to keep ten thousand doors shut, which takes thousands of people watching and working, and a determined hacker has plenty of time to find and chip at the most vulnerable one. Even though it's inconvenient, I keep some things on paper because there’s no way to get at them except with my own hands. Here,” he finally concluded, picking out a door and lifting a few hefty folders full of papers from it, “when we’re done talking, you can leave with these and shred them all. Or incinerate them, if you like.”

Julie eyed the unlabeled folder curiously. “If it’s important enough to keep on paper, why would you want to destroy it all?”

“Good questions, Julie,” he responded, his eyes narrowing slightly as he smiled. “You’re getting sharper.”

“Well—”

“No, no. That’s good. I see you really becoming more curious about how things work around here. You’re getting knowledge you’ll need to have in the future, and the instinct and drive to find that information and figure out how systems work is much more important than just having the facts memorized. Knowing is good, but knowing how to find out is better. Keep exercising that brain of yours. But to answer your question, this is just a lot of information about an old rat that I’ve now been informed I don’t need to keep around.”

Hesitating for a moment, but giving in to curiosity, Julie reached forward to lift the cover of the folder and look inside. She saw a pile of bound, stapled reports and a name in every corner. ‘Jacob Power’, over and over, as her thumb flipped the corner of the papers.

Julie said nothing.

Her father asked, “Have you seen the little video that has all of the gossip bits in a buzz, Julie Bear?”

“I have,” she admitted, putting a little bit of guilt in her voice. “I was trying to ignore it at first, because I thought it was just some drama. But I got curious…”

“Do you know who was in that video, Julie?”

“Um,” she said, “Well, Mike Chilton.”

“And?”

“I guess some guy named Charlie Haynes. I’ve been seeing his face everywhere, now, so, I know his name now, too.”

“Who else?”

After a moment, Julie replied, “Well… there were other people in the video, but I didn’t really think about any of them.”

Her heart beat hard in her chest. Her father was acting nearly normal, but not fully. Surely she would know, by now, if he had recognized her laugh, those two last seconds of the video where she chuckled at the look on Chuck’s face. If he were working up to that, to tell her that he knew who the other person in the video was, the person behind the camera, would he really be smiling like this?

“And with that, you have noticed what everyone else noticed in that video too,” Kane continued, voice now quiet, intimidating, a fist creeping closer to her on the surface of the desk, “The big, loud, obvious thing that anyone would notice, the disgusting display front and center. But there were other people in that video. Little Motorcity rats scurrying around. And one big rat.”

Julie gripped one hand around the edge of the table when Kane flicked his hand and pulled up a personal copy of her video, the little video she took of her normally reticent friend showing open affection in a place where he felt safe and respected, which she had taken to keep for herself, snatching his sense of safety out of the air and shattering it for some stupid selfish reason. Kane quickly clipped the video to the exact moment he wanted: Jacob standing behind the couch, smiling down at his young apprentices.

Jacob Power.

A new awareness rushed into Julie. She had been so focused on Chuck. Jacob hadn’t even mentioned that this meant his face was now everywhere in Deluxe too.

Except it wasn’t. Kane was right. Everyone had focused on the big, tantalizing scandal; next to no one had noticed the dusty old man behind the couch.

“Do you know who this is?” Kane asked.

“No. I never noticed him. I didn’t… you know, I think I skipped by this part of the video, because I was told the good part was at the end,” she said, tilting her head as smiled bashfully.

Kane laughed. “Julie! But I know what you mean. Yes, I think a lot of people did that. In fact, I had to go looking for this full version. Most people are just sharing a clip of the… ‘good part’, so to speak. The ‘extra details’ are all cut out. And that, Julie, is a dangerous instinct you will need to curb next time: skipping to the good part is missing the work, and doing the work is indispensable for a leader. A strong leader, anyway. If you leave it all to your underlings, you will slowly find yourself in a place where you don’t actually understand what they’re doing, because they do it all for you. And then things will start happening right under your nose.”

“I see,” she said. Staring at the still image of the hideout floating above her father’s desk made her back prickle. It occurred to her that this was likely the first time he had seen the inside of the building; better than having a look at the outside facade, at least. “Everyone ignored the parts they thought were unimportant, and completely missed something that was. But who is he?”

“You’ve seen pictures of him before,” Kane said, uncomfortably tight-eyed on the frozen image of Jacob, “But from many years ago. I’m not surprised you don’t recognize him. Jacob helped me build this company before abandoning it years before you were even born. I had wondered where he went after he fled. Down below, it turns out; I would have suspected him of running far, far away first. He was always a runner. Learning that he—that old rat—is the person who built and supplied the Burners all along makes so much sense.”

Kane leaned back in his office chair, pleased. “Chilton had initiative, he had guts, but I was never sure how he had developed an underground powerbase so fast—or where he got all those machines. Or the software on those machines. Learning that Jacob is supplying him just puts the whole picture into place. Jacob still has a chip on his shoulder about my success relative to his abject failure, and Chilton’s youth and drive has given him an opportunity for revenge. Chilton must have been vulnerable and moldable when he showed up in the sewers, and I’m not surprised Jacob would be willing to take advantage.”

He was wrong, not just in his character judgments but with regards to the basic facts, but Julie would have to keep that to herself. Jacob hadn’t even told the Burners about his history with Kane until after the gang was officially formed, and by the way Jacob told it, he made it sound like he wasn’t nearly as important as a co-founder. It was funny, then, that they both downplayed how important Jacob had once been in the birth of the company then called Power and Kane. Jacob was humble, Kane was disparaging and minimizing; the truth slowly diminished until, as far as most people knew, there was no co-founder.

“So why put a bounty out for that other guy, instead of for Jacob Power?” she asked. “It sounds like he’s more important.”

Kane finally let the screen dissipate, invisible nanobots scurrying back into a hidden holder. “Oh, he certainly is,” he said, not looking off and afar. “But remember how I said I never knew how they were getting the machines or the software? As you may have already heard, Haynes was Kane Co. R&D, for a short while, before he flunked out of the division and the city at once. I had a feeling about it, so I pulled all of his records up as well. A clear picture of the man emerged quickly: a brilliant mind in an, unfortunately, faulty person. His test scores were always phenomenal, but his work performance was barely passable. I found reports of emotional instability and constant professional reprimands. Doctor’s notices about rages and panics. He’s a dangerously unstable individual. I’m sure he’s much happier in Motorcity; comfortable enough in a rat’s nest that works for him to put his brilliant brain to use.”

He is, Julie thought intensely, He’s comfortable, and happy, and brilliant, and he feels safe with us, for once, safe enough to just do what he loves to do without feeling like he has to hide his work every time someone twitches. And he is going to stay in the Motorcity he loves and that loves him back if I can do anything about it.

And now, to apologize to him; for him, and as much as she could. “I think… for all of those reasons, I would probably just leave Charlie Haynes alone, if I were in your position.”

“Oh?” His eyebrows rose. “I don’t follow your logic.”

“The bounty is a firm indication that you take the Burners’ terrorism seriously, and that’s good,” she made herself say, “And you couldn’t ignore the video of Chilton going around, either. But for one thing, I would certainly focus on Power; he appears to be the real brains of the operation.”

“I also believe he is, which is one reason I want people to continue to forget about Jacob,” her father corrected. “Jacob has some charisma. Clearly he still does, if he’s building up militias underground. It’s not just these boys he could win over, and with his knowledge of his founding of this company and how he can spin a story, too much of a spotlight on him would be dangerous. I’ll unravel his operation and get him defenseless before I go for him. But continue.”

After gathering her thoughts, she did. “Based on what you told me… about Haynes being unstable, and flunking out of his program… I wonder if he’s actually a victim, and if he isn’t, whether it wouldn’t be wise to frame it that way. When people see that video, you know… a couple minutes of people looking… comfortable and happy…” She hesitated. “I would worry about making that relationship look too strong. If you frame it as two people working together, even to such a terrible goal, well, it looks like…”

“Like what?”

“Like love,” she said, heart beating hard. “And it looks like you trying to break it up. It’s a pretty bad look. If you frame Haynes, or even all of the Burners, as Chilton’s victims—”

“And turn it into a rescue situation instead of a criminal bounty, I look charitable instead of uncompromising. I follow your logic, Julie.” But at the tone of his voice, Julie’s stomach sank. He understood, but did not agree, and was not changing his position. “That might work if the Burners hadn’t committed so many crimes without their leader present. We don’t know most of their names, but we see their cars; it’s not just Chilton blasting through cubes and destroying property.

“And the thing is… Sweetie, sometimes, you do have to look bad when you’re in charge,” he said, now dropping his voice to a quiet, sympathetic tone, hunching his shoulders to speak on Julie’s level. “Sometimes, you have to forgo optics for results when the results are important enough. Because you do have to look tough; you have to stay looking tough, or else the people who claim to be on your side but jockey for power start thinking about taking yours. There was no way to not react to the identity of one of the Burners being suddenly confirmed. The thought of a ‘rescue’ framing crossed my mind, too, but realistically…”

He leaned forward. He put a copy of Chuck’s wanted poster onto the desk, holographically superimposed across the surface, and tapped not his face but the tattoo on his wrist of the Bruners’ tag. “This is not a victim. This is not a captive or an unwilling participant. That is a partner. When we apprehend him, he is not going to act like he’s been rescued. He’s going to fight for his life, and I don’t know exactly what he’s capable of, considering how well he knows Kane Co. tech. If I don’t frame him as a partner, as a competent criminal prepared to spread seditious lies, then once we have him up here, people won’t be prepared to close their ears to his lies.”

Of all times for someone to take Chuck seriously, after the constant mocking and disrespect. Her father was completely right. All of it. Chuck would not go down without a fight. He would be sobbing through it, he would be screaming and panicking and fighting random shots, but he would go down fighting for Motorcity. 

Julie apologized, despondently, in her head to Chuck for not even being able to lessen his sentence.

“…I see,” she said. “There’s no way for him to go along with the framed story.”

“Not unless we get really, really messy.”

“Could you…” she struggled to think of something that would actually help Chuck and that wouldn’t make her father suspicious of her intentions. “Just… send in troops, instead of releasing a bounty? It seems indirect.”

“If I knew where to find him, I would, but after all this time I still don’t know where the Burners are hiding down there. I’m relying on someone else down there who does know where he is to get him, and money will motivate them.”

“Don’t you… have contacts down there too?”

Kane laughed. “Of course I do! They think I don’t know anything about their ‘city’, and I’ll let them keep thinking that to keep their guard down. It’s enough money to be of interest to one of the many little petty crime rings down there, but not so much that it’ll cause trouble for the people who I’m already in business with. I’m not trying to entice the best of the best here because I don’t want to jeopardize the positions of my moles. No, the amount is targeted towards the less fortunate rabble of Motorcity. It’s enough for someone who doesn’t have too much already.”

Julie could not let that comment go, even though it was stupid to question it. “Who do you have connections with down there?”

“Oh, don’t you worry about that yet.” His eyes crinkled in a smile. “We’ll get there, Julie Bear; but that’s a rough crowd. I don’t want you dealing with them yet.”

Julie had undoubtedly dealt with whoever it was—and she had her guesses already—many times before. But pushing any further would start making him wonder, so she pivoted to at least getting some information now that she had failed at helping Chuck in any real way several times. “What’s the plan for when you do get Haynes up here?”

“Isn’t that obvious?” asked Kane, voice light, head tilting to the side.

“…He’s bait to get Chilton.”

“Of course he is. And bait that I think he’ll take, for once. Julie,”  he sighed, and replacing the poster with the video, rewound it just a few seconds until Mike and Chuck are front and center again, “I have no doubt that some will see what you see here and see love, and that they’ll see me as harsh or heartless for breaking it up. But sometimes, to be the good guy, you have to do something that looks bad. Sometimes, you face the fact that a criminal is a person too, and there are times he looks good. And you have to choose what is good for everyone over mercy, and what is good for everyone here is to end the Burners’ terrorism once and for all. The future is long, and will be full of better days, where you can look good all you like.”

Julie looked at her father and asked herself whether he intended to kill Mike and Chuck when he had them in his hands. Or did he have a fate worse than death in mind? Imprisonment, brainwashing, enslavement? The Burners had escaped from his hands too many times for him to be comfortable letting them go.

He will kill them, she told herself, and it just didn’t, couldn’t feel real. Even though she knew. He ordered for people to disappear all the time.

When they’re found, I have to be found with them, she realized. It was the only way. The only possible way he might be convinced to spare them.

To make it undeniable, Julie resolved to get a tattoo to match Chuck’s, in yellow instead of blue. On her shoulder blade, maybe, or her thigh; somewhere she could easily hide for now but reveal once the time came. So that he would see, and know he couldn’t kill the Burners.

That was going to be a very bad day.

“…I see,” she said, and made a final effort to soften his decision. “Dad, I have to admit, I’m still just… not very comfortable with it.”

Kane softened, too, though in sympathy, not understanding. “You have your mother’s heart, Julie. This sort of thing bothered her too. And every time I let her talk me out of it, the mercy I showed came back to me exponentially as a price I had to pay. The Burners will not quit. They won’t stop destroying this city. Sometimes, you have to be cruel to be kind.”

For once, they saw eye to eye. Looking right at him, she said, “I understand.”

“…But to your point,” Kane continued, now leaning back and putting a hand under his chin, “Maybe a simple bounty isn’t the way to go. And maybe the price is a little bit extreme. I thought the amount would inspire the rats down in Motorcity, but it’s been a few days without any results. Perhaps that much money is just a little too good for them.”

“Dad?...” Julie asked nervously.

“I’ve got an idea,” he said, and smiled a smile that made her feel like she didn’t know him.

—

The serious attempts to kidnap Chuck began while Julie was stuck up in Deluxe. The first, quickly aborted attempt was a bump in the night; someone tried to break into the garage and fled when Jacob intercepted them and turned them away. It was hard for them to sleep after that, just Jacob and Chuck and Mike in the hideout, checking and double-checking their locks and alarms.

Next came an utterly insulting raid from the Mama’s Boys; they grabbed Texas off the road and tried to bargain him for Chuck. The thing was, though, that everyone knew they wouldn’t dare hurt Texas, so the Burners launched a counter-offense and won. Texas, while he was captive, made himself up a warrant poster that stated he was good for a million even—until he spontaneously added a few more zeroes to become the Billion Dollar Man.

“Looks great, Tex,” said Mike, beaming, and handing Jacob the hand-drawn wanted poster to hang up.

“Chyeah. Way better than Skinny’s. Especially since he don’t cost as much now.”

“What?” said Mike.

“Yeah, Kane put him on sale.”

It took some digging to figure out what he meant by that. Chuck’s bounty had gone down that day from $800,000 to $750,000. And it took a call up to Julie, who looked blearily, barely awake, to figure out why.

“Kane said he’s not getting results fast enough,” she whispered into her comm, likely hiding from her coworkers in a bathroom or closet or something similar. “I thought he wasn’t serious at first—when I heard a rumor he was considering changing the price—but he is, and I can tell you why, too. He’s planning to lower the bounty on Chuck’s head a little bit at a time until he gets him. That means that anyone who was considering doing it will now realize that they’ll lose money sitting around—”

“—Meaning that now they’ll feel pressured to try it as soon as they can. Shoot,” said Mike, getting up and pacing as he walked. “That’s why we suddenly got two attacks in twelve hours when there hadn’t been anything for days.”

“Everyone who was just thinking before now knows that every days costs them.”

“Damn,” sighed Dutch morosely. “That’s good. Like, that’s smart.”

“Way too smart for Kane,” grumbled Julie into her comm, sounding deeply consternated. “Or for the sycophants who he usually surrounds himself with. If I figure out who gave him that bright idea, I’m going to put them in a trash compactor.”

“It’s not his style,” Dutch agreed, “He’s usually more… straightforward. This has a psychological edge to it that I don’t really like and hope we don’t see any more of. Though the impatience is him all over. Man, how many times would we have been got if he didn’t show his hand just to brag?”

“Too many,” sighed Chuck. “Yeah. That’s. Information. I’m gonna…” he abruptly turned his back and started walking out of the room. “Yeah. Gonna.”

“Hey,” said Mike, spinning on his heel, “You good?”

“Nope,” said Chuck, smartly saluting as he left the room.

Mike sighed. Dutch sighed. Julie, unseen by the other Burners, slapped herself in the forehead and planned herself a date with a trash compactor. “I want to get down there as soon as possible, but it’s… the intel is really, really good up here right now, with everyone talking about the video and what they do or don’t know—”

Julie had to pause, because even she could hear how Chuck suddenly started screaming in his own bedroom, a floor down and across the hideout.

“…Yeah,” she finished lamely. “I’m… getting a lot of good information, so it’s hard to pass that up, but I’m still going to get back down there when I can.”

“If you could pull off a few nights, Julie, that would be great,” Mike sighed. “I think we’re going to get a few more night raids.”

“I’m going to sleep in the hideout for a while too,” Dutch said.

“You don’t have to do that, dude.”

“I like my own space, but I can pull a little extra when things are rough.”

Mike smiled. “Thanks, Dutch.” He went in for a fist bump and Dutch happily met him there.

“Texas don’t like to leave his mama alone,” said Texas, “and if the boys are going to come for Texas, he don’t trust them to not go for his nanay either.”

“You stay with your family, Tex,” Mike agreed. The Burners didn’t include him in their ranks and his family home in their streets by coincidence—repaying the Cristobals for housing Chuck when he first appeared in Motorcity had been one of their stated motivations when starting a gang. “You’re right, I don’t trust some of these guys to not try to mess with them either as another way to get at us. We don’t have to worry about the Cablers or any other gangs on our side, they can handle themselves. The rest of us will stay here as much as possible, until…”

Until when? Kane’s newest move was going to be genius for ratcheting up the tension. Could they be so sure that this would just blow over, now?

“Until we’ve got a solid plan for dealing with this,” Mike finished.

“Can he just fake his own death again?” Dutch suggested. “We can find him another corpse to torch, I bet.”

“…Let’s consider that a plan B,” said Mike. “He didn’t love that the first time.”

“And we’d have to act like he’s dead,” said Texas, “which would suck.”

“Right. Not a long-term solution. You keep your ears open, Julie, but get down here when you can; we’ll start brainstorming a real solution for this one. Maybe hacking and replacing the wanted posters with something else, I’m not sure.”

“You work on it. We’re right behind you, Cowboy.”

“And I’m right with you,” he responded, and with a smile, Julie ended the call.

—

The appearance of stubborn strength Chuck had been wearing, already thin before, crumbled quickly after that. Mike kept himself distracted in the afternoon, helping Jacob with a long-needed and much put-off deep clean of the kitchen that kept him in the base but occupied. He repotted plants, futzed with the indoor sprinkler system for Jacob’s produce, tinkered with the laundry machine until it could run twice as fast; he knew Chuck wanted the time alone, but keeping himself away was agonizing.

It was late in the day, once Jacob was resting and Dutch and Julie were deeply absorbed in a discussion over comm about how Deluxe’s advertising and announcements systems actually worked and how they might be hacked or adjusted, that Mike came to his natural limit of how long he could ignore his best friend suffering in the other room. He excused himself and went to find Chuck.

Though they did spend most of their time together in Mike’s room, it wasn’t as if Mike never took the flight of stairs down to the basement that Chuck shared with Jacob’s bunker-like supply of pickled vegetables and dried goods. They had built an indoor wall, in fact, once it was decided that both Mike and Chuck were staying with Jacob, to give Chuck his own very private and incredibly safe room below.

After Mike knocked on the door, Chuck made some muffled noises and remotely unlocked it for him. It swung open, revealing the same dark, untidy, stale room that made Mike smile despite himself.

Chuck did not have much of a personal sense of aesthetics. What had turned the concrete bunker into a bedroom had been sheer clutter. His screens, machines, and projects were hooked up all around the walls, with papers taped up around them holding Chuck’s coded notes in his tight handwriting; blankets and clothing and dusty textbooks removed from emptied stores and libraries around Motorcity crowded the floor. Old posters of sword and sorcery movies or foreign TV fantasies aged and crumbled on the walls; half-finished prop weapons and shields grew dusty in plastic crates. Chuck washed his bedding and laundry when Jacob made him, and that hadn’t happened in a while. He was a mess; he always had been one. Because of the disarray and clutter, much of the room was in shadow, the machines and boxes blocking out the meagre low light of the rows of blue LEDs that he favored for lighting.

Here or there, Mike could see the things Chuck had always had, the few little things he carried with him from the home he had been born in and through the work-housing program and finally shoved into the duffle bag that he had taken with him after he faked his death and started his new life in Motorcity. A quilted blanket, now thoroughly worn; a few of the little ceramic animals his mother collected on a small wooden shelf, bolted above the mess; the picture-book from the same home; favorite tools he had carried from place to place.

“It’s just me,” said Mike.

Chuck grumbled miserably from his bed. He was sitting up, wrist-deep in a prospective project on the wall. Mike couldn’t remember what it was he was testing; some jointed metal shivered around his hands as he messed with buried parts in its glowing blue insides.

Chuck was a software engineer, but the interfaces of software and hardware could grow quite close in the insular but rapidly advancing technology of Motorcity. Mike stood in the doorway for a minute, watching as Chuck curled a finger inside the machine and drew it around a curve, flicking a switch that made it shudder and curl up, slowly dimming before slowly shutting down.

“Sorry about that,” said Chuck, voice flat. “I was doing something a little… mean there.”

“You gotta stop being mean to the machines, Chuck.”

He sighed. “No. It was a mean idea. Vengeful, I guess.”

“I can’t blame you for feeling that way.”

Chuck rolled his head forward and down, and sighed. Mike stepped into the room and pressed the pad on the wall to close but not lock the door behind him. Of course, Chuck would get antsy if most people came into his room and shut themselves in with him, but he didn’t think anything of Mike doing it. He had a different psychological reaction to being in a private space specifically with Mike, now, which he expressed in shuffling to the side, his bedding firmly cocooned around his shoulders, so that Mike could get into bed with him.

All Mike did was sit on the other side of it, facing the door, so Chuck looked over at his profile, soft in the dim blue light of his room.

“I’m not going to do it,” said Chuck.

Mike startled. He had started relaxing into comfortable thought the moment he sat on Chuck’s body-warm bed. “Do what?”

“The thing I was just coding. I guess it could be a nothing-to-lose sort of thing.”

“What’s it supposed to do?”

“Take down the whole building and everyone in it in a sudden and complete incineration. You know, if someone gets this far chasing me.”

Mike pulled in a breath, then nodded. “We… definitely don’t want to do that.”

“Kane doesn’t come down here himself anyway.”

After a moment of thought, Mike said, “You’d kill Kane if you could.”

“You wouldn’t,” Chuck sighed. “I’m going to be honest, that makes you the weird one, Mikey.”

“Then I’ll be the weird one, because I’m not comfortable with it,” he replied, though without heat. “I know people say it’s because I was close to him, once. But that’s not it. I’m not comfortable killing anyone. Kane is a person, too. If I don’t keep the perspective that everyone we are talking about is a person, or else I start thinking things… being someone I don’t want to be.”

“I know he’s a person,” replied Chuck, “I just think there are some people the rest of us are better off without.”

Mike didn’t respond. Chuck continued, “Not many. But there are a few people making things worse for everything else. If I… If someone made the choice of getting rid of Kane for the rest of us…”

“…I hear what you’re saying,” Mike said, “but I also don’t think it needs to be you.”

Chuck was silent.

“There are some people who could do something like that and feel nothing about it,” said Mike, “But you’re not that way. You would feel awful, for a very long time, if you did something like that. Maybe for the rest of your life.”

“And you want to protect me from that,” sighed Chuck. “But you’d feel worse, you know, if you did it yourself.”

“Hey,” said Mike, because Chuck had leaned into his a little while speaking, and now Mike could see the redness of his eyes and his nose, and the dull shine of his cheeks.

“Yeah, I’ve been crying in here,” said Chuck bitterly. “What did you think I was doing? I was lying in bed and sobbing.”

“I knew you were. I wanted to give you some time alone.”

Chuck’s shoulders lowered as he sighed. “Thanks.”

“I didn’t think you’d get around to making Mutually Assured Destruction devices while I gave you some time to yourself,” Mike admitted, turning his shoulder to look at the now-dark machine on the wall behind him.

“Well—I was—uh—”

“Come here,” said Mike, softly. Because he knew what Chuck meant. He was feeling so horrible that he could only think about death.

He had figured out how to externalize it, now, and think about killing someone other than himself, but whether that was better was impossible to say.

Chuck sat still for a moment, then two, then shuffled, and leaned forward into Mike, who curled his arms around his shoulders and pulled him in.

Mike hadn’t been there for Chuck’s only serious attempt at suicide. He hadn’t known it had happened until much later.

After the ‘accident’ of gross professional neglect that had orphaned both of them, they and six other children had been put into a program run by the company to raise and school them and then put them officially into career tracks when they were fourteen years old (thirteen for the girls, was Kane Co, believed they matured faster). Reflecting their natural interests and talents, roughhousing Mike was put into Security, and intelligent but anxious Chuck into Research and Development. Their request to keep living with each other after that point was, after an interim, denied. They were never told why, just shuffled off into different cubes with different roommates where they would live until they were individually married and raising families.

When they were moved apart from each other, they had sworn to remain best friends, and they had kept that promise. There was never a point when either of them would have called someone else his ‘best friend’. But the time came, after a few years of work and struggling to fit in and life, that they both found themselves saying that they wished they saw their best friend more often.

The distance had been manufactured; in retrospect, this was obvious. R&D was a rat’s nest that at this point operated nearly as a cult, constantly refining a poisonous combination of inhumane working hours and fierce loyalty, demanding utter secrecy from the men slaving over weapons and spyware and drones and manufactured monsters in locked rooms together. After a few years in the warrens of R&D most of them had no real life outside of work at all, caught entirely in the secrecy and intensity of their work, witnessing things they knew the average person could not know, not just seeing but fine-tuning the dark underbelly of Kane Co.’s existence. It soon transpired that Chuck had almost no time to see Mike outside of work and spent much of that time alone in his bed, unable to move, wondering what was wrong with him.

Mike, meanwhile, absorbed into the ranks of Kane’s private army, had become quickly invested with his social life and connections there, filling up his schedule with eager extra work and nights out. He had seen some of the brutal tendencies of his colleagues early on but kept convincing himself he found a bad apple, and then another one, and then another one, and worked to pull those bad apples off the branch. He, too, started running out of free time, and both he and Chuck found themselves with less and less to say to each other as they kept more and more secrets from each other. Out of individual nightmares they woke, and spent single nights together locked almost in a place outside of time, on the still riverbank of existence, watching foreign movies without subtitles and talking about nothing, pretending everything was like it used to be.

Then Chuck tried to kill himself, and failed. In a moment of intense clarity, watching shadows and reflections ripple in his own blood, he decided to run away to Motorcity. After that, planning to steal a corpse requisitioned for medical testing, dressing it up with his clothes and hair, and burning it in the office incinerator before running away just didn’t feel too hard. He hadn’t thought much about anything he had left behind, including Mike, until there was no turning back.

Chuck had slept on the street for a few nights after running away, constantly moving, terrified of being found and dragged back to his job. He had eventually been found, as so many vagrants are, trying to attend to basic hygiene in the bathroom of the public library; after some reassurances, some calls, some handovers, he then found himself hosted in one of the several houses owned by the Christobal family, who were friends of the library—one of their girls was dating one of the librarians—and so spend a few weeks sleeping dazed and disbelieving in their basement, fed and clothed and bothered immensely by the energetic eldest son of the family, who had a nice normal name and chose to call himself “Texas” instead.

When Mike found him, standing silently on the streetcorner and thinking, shining like an angel in its golden light, he thought that maybe he had died. Finding Chuck again in the underworld, seeing the scars and the fear and the pain, he knew he was seeing his friend again, who he really was, what he had really endured, with all the lies stripped away, and he knew he wouldn’t trade it for anything.

They stayed a night together in the Cristobals’ house where the proprietress wisely offered Mike some new clothing, gifting him the jacket that he treasured forever after, the first thing he received in Motorcity. But now that there were two of them, and Chuck had resurfaced somewhat from his dissociative haze, they didn’t feel comfortable imposing on the gracious but struggling family much longer and set out on their own.

After a few misadventures, that led them to a car, then to a garage, and then, eventually, to a home. The Burners were still just a concept when Mike kissed Chuck for the first time.

He had always loved Chuck. He couldn’t remember not having him in his life. They had been friends from the start and only came to like each other more as time went on. But the painful separation, the distance that grew between them as the respective cruelties of their lives in Kane Co. drove them apart from each other, carried a gift inside it.

Mike really hadn’t seen Chuck that much in his last year in Deluxe. When he was running away from his old life and down into the streets of Motorcity, he remembered a boy. When he saw him standing under a golden light, dazed, looking into the sky, dressed in a borrowed black overcoat, he saw a man.

For a few months, the dissonance between the boy who had been his friend and the man who loved him now was dizzying. Mike’s throat went dry when Chuck hugged him or held his hand. He suddenly laid awake when he laid down next to him at night, something they used to do every night as children, his heart beating. He saw the thin hairs on his arms or the nape of his neck, golden in the yellow light of Motorcity, and forgot what he had been saying. When Chuck told him what had been happening to him in R&D, when Mike saw his scars for the first time, he felt a cold and dark anger that left him shaking. What he wanted to do in response scared him.

And then after they set up their own separate bedrooms in Jacob’s place for the first time, a month after he officially employed both of them to help him out in the garage, Mike stood in front of his finished bedroom with Chuck and looked at him, and caught his eyes, and kissed him.

Chuck melted right into it. In retrospect, it had been awfully presumptuous of Mike to have not even considered the possibility of Chuck rejecting him, but Mike had already known, though he hadn’t been ready to face the thought, that the thing that had been growing between them was mutual.

Chuck, as it turned out, had been in very questionable ‘relationships’ with both men and women while still in Deluxe. Mike had never been able to think about a relationship with a man—he had always struggled to think outside of the cube. But men held hands with men in Motorcity; women kissed their girlfriends. When the possibility opened itself up to him, Mike knew he would never forgive himself if he didn’t take it.

He had never regretted it, either. Their relationship was odd (when Chuck had a crush on a girl, Mike’s instinct had just been to share, leading to strange waters they had to navigate without a map), but it was a strange thing Mike treasured above any of the normal, nice, common treasures he could have been offered in Deluxe. When he moved forward to press a kiss onto Chuck’s lips under the arms of the doomsday device he had been building in his bed, he still felt absolutely no regrets.

Chuck moved a shaking arm up Mike’s back and pressed into the kiss. Then he moved his face to the side and tucked it into the corner of Mike’s neck and shoulder. They held each other, for a while.

Finally, Chuck disengaged, leaning back against the wall with a sigh. “This sucks so much.”

Mike rolled his shoulders back to settle in beside him. “I’m sure not having much fun right now.”

“This is still about you, you know,” Chuck told him, a bit of an edge under his voice. “This is still about Kane’s obsession with you.”

“I know. It’s driving me up the wall. All of this, playing with so many people’s lives, when he could just keep it between him and me.” He sighed, then turned to look at Chuck. “Really, though, they should want you just on your own merits.”

“Come on, Mikey.”

“I’m serious. I didn’t become Deluxe’s most wanted on my own.”

“Ugh.”

“If they knew the amount of respective work we had put into messing with them, it would be you that’s Deluxe’s most wanted! Kane just… has a chip on his shoulder about me.”

That was true. It was personal. They all knew that. “Well, dude, I was pretty comfortable being an unknown entity before now. Now I know… that everyone up there is talking about me. All the dickwads who used to push me around at work. The old roommates. My cousins. The company store clerk that would see me every Tuesday. Just… knowing that everyone is talking about me… would be enough of a problem if everyone wasn’t also hunting me down here!”

“Not everyone,” Mike reminded him. “A few of the hard hitters showed up to support you, remember? If… if we consider what the Skylarks offered as support… I think they saw it that way, anyway.”

“I’m expecting the Duke or Kaia or I don’t know someone to bust through the wall every moment of every day, and you can’t tell me it’s paranoia, because they’re trying!”

“Yeah, they… sure are,” Mike winced. “Julie and Dutch are working hard on infiltration to try to shut it down on Kane’s side. I still think we can wait it out to the point where it's not really worth it for anyone to try to grab you anymore. And Texas and I are visiting the other groups and talking to them. You know. Reminding them of how it all works when we work together.”

“Good luck,” Chuck sighed. “You can talk to everyone you want to, but it just takes one guy who doesn’t care about the consequences to blow it all up. Just one vulnerability in the system.”

“It’s not as bad as all that,” Mike disagreed. “We always have tons of vulnerabilities. You can’t live without taking some risks. Going outside. Trusting someone. Pushing yourself to improve. We take risks without getting hurt all the time. This one’s a harder scrape, but we’ll get through it. I hate that you’re cooped up here in the meanwhile.”

“I don’t. I love being alone in my room.”

“I—I know.”

“I like it better when I’m not having—sobbing baby fits every other hour—”

Chuck’s voice broke on him when he tried to finish the sentence. Mike put a hand on his shoulder and waited.

“I wouldn’t want to be outside anyway,” Chuck continued, now morose. “I would just be crying and panicking outside too. Everyone is already calling me a coward and a girl and now a faggot too. Maybe you’re stronger than this, maybe you’re better than this, but I don’t want to face…”

“…Some people are,” said Mike, eventually, his voice now low too. Motorcity was better, but there was nowhere a person could go where it was easy to just… be a man and be who he was at once. “But the people who loved you then love you now.”

“And the other people think I’m dirt.”

“Chuck,” said Mike, “I promise that right now, the majority of those people now think you are a terrifying criminal genius and are living in fear of seeing your face on their screens.”

“Shut up.”

“Really. Today Jules told me about a new ransomware virus going around Deluxe that uses a vocoder of your voice. It has people terrified.”

Chuck looked up at him. “No way.”

“I’m serious! Someone’s impersonating you to scare people. And it works.”

“People are—” Chuck began, and broke into sudden laughter like a vase shattering on the floor.

“They are!” Mike continued, now smiling. “She told me that it has a little AI picture of you and it demands money and files are people are just giving in. They’re terrified of you.”

Chuck wiped tears from his eyes. “Why does that make me feel better?” he asked between giggles. “That should not make me feel better.”

“If there’s one thing I know about you, doomsday device underground terrorist, its that you like some pretty weird stuff.”

Chuck shoved gently at Mike’s shoulder through his laughter. “A little vocoder,” he said, his voice wobbling. “What the hell, they don’t have the sound file library for that. It must sound like shit.”

“I don’t know,” Mike admitted, also chuckling. “But you don’t have to worry about people thinking you’re a coward. The average Deluxian is afraid of whatever Kane says is scary. They think you’re…”

“What?”

“Bad,” Mike finished, glancing over at Chuck, “I guess.”

“Total villain,” Chuck sighed, running his hands down his face, sighing in the wake of his crying. “Oh, man.”

Mike hummed. They were both quiet, for a second, sitting next to each other.

“Mikey?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m not going to be good… for a while.”

“I know.”

“It feels like my nerves are exposed. I can’t stop thinking about all of this. I can’t sleep.”

“I know. I don’t blame you.”

“And I don’t know when it’ll be over.”

Mike didn’t respond, because he didn’t know either. Their life already had Chuck anxious and afraid all of the time. To have a special target on his back, and to not know if things would ever go back to normal again…

“…Hey,” said Mike, and Chuck dropped his hands from his face and looked at him.

“…Hey?” he responded, low, because he recognized that tone of his voice.

Mike put a hand back onto Chuck’s shoulder, but not the same tight, warm, friendly grip he had had earlier; it went behind his shoulder, to his back, light fingertips. “Do you wanna…”

“Yeah?...”

“…Feel a little better for a while?”

Chuck could see a flush on Mike’s dark cheeks. He thought back—and actually—he thought it had been there since he said that some people thought that Chuck was… bad.

Mike was a confident man, but he could get a little lost in areas less familiar to him. While Chuck had been having short and somewhat dangerous sexual relationships, Mike had been cheerfully informing anyone who asked that he was really waiting for the right girl, and then going home alone. That he got a little uncertain, suddenly, a little shy and fumbling, was more attractive to Chuck than by any rights it should be.

He had a few bad character traits, in his own opinion. One of them acted up when he leaned into Mike’s flushed face. “You sure, man? I hear I’m bad.”

Chuck could see Mike swallow. “I dunno, you seem alright to me.”

“You sure about that?”

“Maybe you’re just someone who gets a little worked up when you’re overwhelmed.”

“You wanna help me with that?”

Mike’s flush reached his ears. “If—you want me to.”

Objectively, he was sure plenty of people would have told him that this was the wrong time to make a pass at someone, that he was too emotional, or the mood was wrong, or Chuck was too scrambled to make a cognizant choice. But Mike knew Chuck’s moods changed, sometimes quickly, sometimes dramatically; and he knew pretty well now that sometimes, a sudden shock to his system got him out of the loop. It was why he kept jumping in Mutt, Mike thought, and rushed to every mission despite claiming to be terrified and unwilling—because he always felt better after the adrenaline rush, the screaming, the running, the fighting, getting it out, and deep down Chuck knew that, and he leapt into the terror and passion of violence as medicine; to seep out, drop by drop, the anger and hatred that had festered inside himself.

Ramming a car into a dangerous criminal’s limousine wasn’t the only kind of shock to the system there was out there. Mike felt a strike of quick, sweet fear in his heart that woke all his body up when Chuck reached suddenly forward and grabbed his hand and wrist on the bedspread.

“What do you want?” asked Chuck.

“What do you want?”

“You started it.”

“This one’s for you,” said Mike, having to fight a bit of nervous hesitation that told him, despite all this time opening himself up, coming to terms with who he was, to not talk about something like this. “I want to help you. So… I’m going to do… whatever you tell me to do.”

Chuck brushed his hair back, behind his ears, to keep it out of his face when he leaned forward, and then put out both hands to guide Mike down onto his back.

—

Original Note:

You can tell I’m a Certified Childless Career Woman because when I asked myself ‘what is most likely to have caused Chuck to fake his death and escape Deluxe even before Mike did?’ my thought was ‘A terminally toxic work environment, duh.’ Shout out to my homies in retail.

—

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Said a Spider to a Fly

There were brief moments of victory in the next two days. When Texas and Dutch visited the Duke to suss out his position, they got the sniffing response that the Duke wouldn’t shake hands with Kane for a mere $750,000, which was an unexpectedly principled response. (It didn’t demonstrate any traditional principles, per se, but the bar was very low.) Texas’ mom and sisters showed up at the garage with an astounding amount of rice and adobo and flan for a family meal together. The Cablers made it very clear that they would defend the Burners against Kane—they didn’t get involved in gang wars, but they would always throw a wrench in Kane’s plans. Chuck’s friends from the LARP group came to visit him, though they didn’t stay too long; Chuck informed them that this was far above their heads quickly, and a little unkindly.

He was trying to protect them. He was also trying to scare people away, since it was the best way he knew to keep people out of danger.

Those bright spots glowed in a dim continuum. They were, overall, a rough forty-eight hours. No one got much sleep. Working during the day and watching overnight, Julie really didn’t get any. In that time, the hideout was attacked five times; only once by a gang, an outskirts gang that specialized in focused destruction and nearly tore down a wall trying to get to Chuck. The rest, as the Skylarks predicted, were independent, desperate individuals, hungry, after the money for food, rent, medicine.

Some of those attacks were focused and took some work to defuse, some were panicked and undecided, chased off with a single growl from Mutt’s engine. Still, there was no way to relax in the slow hours in-between, having no clue when the next crisis would come. In-between the attacks on the base came Kane’s regular assaults on Motorcity, so the Burners had to decide how to split their attention between protecting Chuck and protecting everyone else. Other gangs who saw things their way pitched in; one attack on the north side was taken care of entirely by the Amazons, and Jacob told them to come over when they were done for some nosh. They ate together, the Burners thanked the Amazons, but the quiet, exhausted meal certainly wasn’t a celebration.

Kane knew he was causing trouble in the city below and was exacerbating it on purpose. His bot attacks were purposefully weak, only handfuls of machines at a time, all easy to disable or disrupt, but they came frequently and at all corners of the map, dividing their attention and destroying their ability to rest.

The Burners were the most vulnerable they had been yet the morning after those forty-eight hours in an hour when Dutch and Texas were already defending Motorcity against a bot attack in the south near the lake, Julie was stuck in Deluxe, cornered by a pushy superior at work, and Mike was, after nearly three days awake, making slightly stupid choices.

The choice he was making right now was being outside the base and arguing with the Duke, which had to happen on occasion, and especially now as he randomly ransacked an outlying neighborhood for some machines he wanted, though it left Jacob and Chuck alone in the base. Yet it as understandable that he thought (in his exhausted-addled mind) that his brief absence wouldn’t cause any further problems—since the Burners were spread thin in all directions, and had left to go different places at all different times, the only way someone would know that they were spread uniquely thin at that moment would be if that someone had been watching the hideout all along; watching Julie leave for Deluxe the night before, watching Mike leave before dawn to intercept the Duke, watching Dutch and Texas leave to fight bots, and finally, watching Jacob, too worn from days awake, collapse into bed.

Then all Red really had to do was open the front door, and he had made a key a long time ago.

—

His attempt to sleep through the lonely morning behind a locked door having failed, Chuck was acutely aware that he was alone at the hideout with only Jacob, who he could hear snoring through the walls But while he wasn’t exactly a combat specialist, he considered himself at least a harder hitter than Jacob—he would defend himself rather than wake him up if it came to it. That was what he had a shape-changing lethal weapon in his arm for.

Standing just outside of his bedroom, looking down the hall, he first resisted the urge to booby trap the house. With lasers, and buzzsaws, like a movie supervillain. It wouldn’t catch anyone except the other Burners, though, and it would take way too long to set up before they got back.

He would write up some plans for doing that in the future, though. Just for fun.

Abandoning his impulse to cartoon villainy for the moment, he ambled around the hideout, checking the cybersecurity wards and alarms that were already set up to tell him the moment someone tried to get into the building. A person would have to have the keycode for the alarms and the physical key for the front door to get in without him knowing—and even that amount of security just managed to trip up Jacob more often than it was useful. Chuck knew that, and yet, standing at the door, looking at it from the inside, that level of security suddenly felt incredibly flimsy.

Two keys, and you’re in. Chuck felt, for a moment, absolutely certain there was someone else on the wrong side of the door, just waiting to get in; he knew it was paranoia, but he stood there imagining their frame behind the steel threshold, hand braced on the doorknob.

Shaking off a chill between his shoulders, Chuck turned around and retreated further inside the hideout. He would only get more paranoid standing there.

Not that he felt cool and collected once he walked away. Wearing a quilt around his shoulders, he slouched unhappily through the cafe and into the kitchen, a clean steel space that was largely Jacob’s domain. He opened the fridge and stared at its contents; he wandered away without touching anything.

Then, almost as if he had walked there in his sleep, he suddenly found himself standing outside Mike’s room, turning the handle, and stepping inside.

Without Mike, the room was empty. Mike had always been orderly, even persnickety, but the main reason his room was so clean and neat was because he spent as little time as possible in it. It was a bed to sleep in and sparsely populated drawers for his things. Mike wanted to be around people, all the time; he got up before Jacob did in the morning, showered, cleaned messes left over from the guys last night, then helped the old scientist tend to his gardens and projects, and then whoever showed up at the hideout first, Burner or friend or even foe, got Mike for as long as they would have him and with whatever they asked for. If no one showed up before Mike started going restless, he got in the car for a drive, or went out to check on neighbors and run little errands, or—sometimes Chuck woke up and pulled him back in. Whenever he woke up early enough to intercept him, whenever he woke up in Mike’s bed.

Chuck stood and looked at the walls decorated with scrounged posters and road signs, the full wall mural Mike had had Dutch paint in his room of Motorcity with the sun shining above, a glittering silver Lake Erie in the distance; the dresser and desk literally gathering dust. The only thing that looked like it had been used in the last year was the bed.

But he wasn’t looking at the bed; he was looking at a shelf. One of the only packed shelves, full of things Mike had largely forgotten but hadn’t been unwilling to give up. Chuck knew exactly in which drawer Mike kept the collection of boosters they had kept just in case.

Just in case Dutch could turn them into something. Just in case they could use it later, for some yet-unforeseen purpose, to get out of some unpredictable pinch. Just in case Kane made an even worse version and they then had to reverse engineer them to figure out how to disable them.

But they had a few, and they worked. Chuck stared at the drawer and imagined opening it, fishing them out, plugging all three into his left arm and pounding them.

He sighed, then turned on his heel to collapse into Mike’s bed.

He stared at the ceiling for a while, a buzz in his ears from all the alarms and wards and machines running in the building, even with almost everyone gone. When he closed his eyes, he imagined how it would feel to have the booster slide under his skin and pour its golden comfort through his arm and then all around his body.

He let himself imagine it for a minute, being completely fearless and ruthlessly unstoppable when whoever it was he was convinced was about to break into the house and attack him finally came. He could throw them down the hall, listen to their bones snap.

Fortunately, his stomach twisted at the thought of hearing bones snap, assailant or not. He wouldn’t feel that way about if he had a booster in him.

It was better this way and he knew it.

If he put on the booster and nothing happened, no one attacked, he very well could do the same thing to the other Burners once they came back. He had tried to do it to Mike the first time. (The only time. The only time he tried the booster and felt utterly complete.) Mike had had dark, ugly bruises for days. Every time Chuck saw one of the bruises on Mike’s skin that he had put there, slamming him against the steel of the Cablers’ tower…

He opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. Lying on the bed, he was facing the open door to Mike’s room and the little bit of dim orange light in the hallway. Jacob had cramped them into the rather full cafe-greenhouse-hideout-house wherever he could, which meant a little basement room for Chuck and a little back-of-the-house former storage room for Mike. Incidentally, they were in around about the same part of the house, but two floors apart; they joked about making an elevator down, but it would have made the wall too structurally unsound.

He started to feel anxious again, which was no surprise. The noises of all the machines in the building ebbed and crested, now with a little clatter that rose and fell with the rest of the noise. The HVAC? The alarm? The laundry? Might be anything. He closed his eyes and felt the wave of anxiety rising again, as well as the parallel, hungry urge to put on a booster and just get rid of it. He didn’t feel any of that, any of that anxiety and hesitation and low dark hatred, when he had the booster in him.

The desire came in with his breaths, the disgust poured out with them. Just as quickly his heart turned between wanting to feel as calm as the booster made him feel and not wanting to be a man who hit his boyfriend.

When he opened his eyes again, he turned his head and saw Mike’s pillow at the other edge of the bed. Following an urge, feeling some emptiness in his stomach and not much else, Chuck rolled over, leaned forward, and grabbed the pillow. He buried his face in it for a minute, smelling Mike’s hair and sweat, closing off his sight of everything around him.

He heard something metallic and looked up.

There was a man in Mike’s room. He wore red. He had a dartgun aimed at him.

“Heya, Chuckles,” said Red.

Caught in a moment of especially embarrassing weakness, shot from his despondency into sheer panic in a single second, Chuck choked on his own voice as he scrambled to his feet. He raised an arm immediately to ready his slingshot.

Before he could even lift his arm all the way, Red nailed him in the neck with a dart. A single shot, in deep. Chuck’s voice shut off like someone had pressed a power button on his neck and his arm went limp.

Red laughed as he fell to the floor like a doll. “Checked your room first, once you finally got away from the door,” he told him, his voice ground up and digitized by something in his helmet. “Then I heard you walking around up here. Had to inch in, step by step, whenever your old generator rattled. Oh, I had a key to that door made weeks ago—it wasn’t hard at all to find your nest once I put my mind to it.”

Red holstered the gun he had used to shoot Chuck at a new brace on his thigh. “Christ, look at you,” he grumbled, low, simmering. “Is that what you like, Chilton?”

Chuck made a noise in his throat.

“So you’ve noticed,” Red responded cheerfully. “It’s sort of like being tranquilized, except you don’t get to sleep. Or move. Or speak. You just get to watch and listen to everything that happens around you without being able to do a thing about it. I know, it would probably be nicer to just let you black out. I’m not a nice guy.”

Red walked past where Chuck had fallen on the floor, and looked to the ruffled bed. “Gross,” he said, and he didn’t have to say anything else about it. Having murdered that topic, he moved on to the next without a glance back.

“The thing was, it kills me that I won’t be able to see Chilton’s face when I run off with you,” Red sighed. “I’m not going to be able to have that, but I can at least make sure that he knows that it was me. And then I can imagine his face,” he sighed, and pulled something out of the bag at his back.

Unable to turn his head, but able to hear, Chuck quickly realized it was a can of spray paint. Chuck laid paralyzed as Red painted something directly onto the sheets of Mike’s bed.

“There,” he said when he was done, cheerfully spinning the spraypaint back into his bag. “You know, it’s meant to be an hourglass. ‘Time is running out’. But for once, the black widow look will do for me.”

Red turned and looked down at Chuck on the floor. He shuddered and made a noise in his throat. “Feels wrong to use that term for you, though. I would hate to do a favor for Chilton, but I can’t imagine he won’t thank me for this eventually.”

Chuck couldn’t do a thing. He could barely feel Red pull him off the floor and sling him over the shoulder. When he did, he could finally see the red hourglass painted roughly across the bed. Then he watched the halls of the hideout flow by him, the bar, the front door, and then he was being loaded into Red’s car without as much as a gasp.

—

Based on past observance, Chuck would vehemently disagree with anyone who said Red was smart. He was clever; he had a hunter's intelligence, he understood his prey and how to stay ahead of them, but Chuck knew a lot of smart people. He knew a lot of stupid people too. Red had the spite of bone-deep stupidity, the blind hatred of someone too dumb to look around or inside any deeper than the surface. The smartest people Chuck knew—like Jacob, or like Dutch, or Julie—they just weren’t this mean. They reflected. They worried. They got to know their enemies and became slowly reluctant to hurt them, even if they knew they must.

That was why he was so disappointed that Red was smart enough today to shove him into the back of the car, cuff him with anti-electrical cuffs that shut off his comms, and attach those cuffs magnetically to a bar in the back instead of just tossing him unbound into the passenger seat like a less clever person might have. By the time the morning light of Deluxe was filtering through the windows of the car into Chuck’s eyes and he was able to feel just enough of his face to feel the tears on his cheeks, he already knew he was not getting himself out of that car on his own power. Not even if he could feel his arms, and he couldn’t.

Frustrated, unaware he could move his throat until he did, Chuck sobbed. Red glanced in his rearview.

“Good morning, Chuckles.”

Chuck decided to try his voice. Like a coffee grinder, he rattled out “Ffffuckk you.”

Red laughed at him. “Not very comfortable, is it? But it’s a short drive. Which you know. You come back up here all the time.”

In the passenger seat of Mutt, which Red knew. Had known, and hadn’t done a thing about until now—If he had been watching the hideout long enough to get a key made, Red could have given Kane IDs of every Burner and proof positive of those IDs months ago. But he didn’t want to help Kane. He wanted to hurt Mike.

“You’re. A. Dick,” Chuck painstakingly responded.

“Guess what. I know that too,” Red responded, alighting fully into Deluxe and taking a slow, lazy way around the outskirts of the city.

Deluxe wasn’t small. It was much smaller than the older, sprawling city below it, but Kane liked his wide, empty spaces. Red had no fear of being stopped up here and was happy to take his sweet time driving through the white wasteland, under and out of the shadow of drifting white monuments. “Sometimes a man has to be a dick for the sake of the greater good. You have to think the same way, being a terrorist and all. Can’t imagine how else you excuse what you do to yourself.”

Chuck didn’t feel like arguing he wasn’t a terrorist at the moment. The arguments really split hairs and it was a waste of his time right now. Instead, “Takes one to know one.”

Red laughed; surprised, not happy. “I didn’t expect you to have this much fire based on what I’ve seen out of you before, Chuckles! Didn’t really think much about you at all, really. But I’m not going to humor your old ‘we’re the same deep down’ argument. I know who I am. And I know what you are.”

Chuck tried to curl up in on himself but found he couldn’t do that yet. He coughed instead of speaking.

“Nothing you can do back there, huh?” Red noticed. “Good. And there’s nothing your boyfriend can do for you, either. He can’t help you now.”

“Not the same,” Chuck wheezed, doing his best with the amount of air he could get. “Wouldn’t do that to you.”

He saw Red grip his steering wheel tighter. “What was that?”

“He wouldn’t—do the same to you.”

“Chilton destroyed my life and he’d do it again in a heartbeat. He hasn’t changed. He’d have me dead in a moment just because I touched his things.”

“Mike—Mike isn’t the man you think he is,” Chuck told him bluntly, feeling his lungs slowly soften as he forced them through the sentences. “You've been watching, but you haven’t been seeing. Fff. Mike wouldn’t do that. He doesn’t want to hurt you. But if I could get to you—I’d pulp your forehead on the wheel.”

Chuck coughed and felt his abdomen twitch. He was forced to hack through the phlegm and tears still gathering in his throat; one of the reasons his voice was shaking was because, it turned out, he was still crying.

Wavering, he finished, “You got the right guy for once.”

After a moment, voice even, Red said, “I think you mean that.”

“Every word,” said Chuck, who could see it as clear as he could see the white sun above Deluxe. If he had put on that booster, Red would be red inside and out by now.

Chuck saw what he would do to people pretty often, now. He hadn’t really talked to Mike about it. He knew he was too scared to actually do those things, so everything was fine.

“Well,” Red replied, voice low. “I think you love him. Too bad for you. I thought you were just his underling before. If you’re his partner, for real, we’re real enemies now.”

“Glad you caught up with me,” Chuck agreed through a rattling cough.

Ever since he did put the booster in, he sometimes felt the way the booster made him feel if he drank, or he was tired, or he was hit by something chemical or psychological (or metal, if it hit him in the head and hit hard enough). He dimly recognized the same feeling now as he watched Red’s fist consider a sharp turn on the wheel. That feeling was replaced with cold, familiar fear as he realized Red was now debating whether he wanted to still deliver him to Kane as he planned or drive somewhere else and take care of Chuck himself instead.

Forced to ask himself whether he’d rather face Red or Kane alone, Chuck realized that the answer, against all odds, was Kane. He knew what Kane would do to him. He’d had it done before. But the evil unknown came with unique terror.

“Once I give you to Kane,” said Red, low and intimidating, “Mike’s going to come right to me.”

Chuck recalled him spraypainting his widow-maker mark on the bed. A bit dizzy, he thought; ‘Will you walk into my parlor?’ / Said a spider to a fly.’

“And he’s going to dust you,” Chuck responded, “like he did every other time.”

“Not if he knows he’s fighting for your life,” Red responded. “Everyone knows that what you are is a bargaining chip to get Chilton. No one’s going to finish you until we get him, whether it’s me or Kane or Kaia or anyone else. I think you know that too.”

“Way better than you do, buddy,” Chuck replied immediately. “You don’t live next to Mike Chilton your own life without getting pretty aware of what a failure you are.”

“If you’re as smart as they say you are, you could do much better.”

“Listen, I know you think that I shacked up with some kind of evil maniac,” Chuck told him, watching with mixed relief as the car curved slowly into the center of the city. “But I will tell you right now that we don’t see him the same way and you will not convince me to change my mind about this.”

“Suit yourself,” Red growled. “Die with him if you want. That day will probably come soon, considering the mood Kane’s in. He’ll almost definitely wait until he has Chilton in cuffs and then have you shot like a dog in front of him so he can watch.”

“You’re going to let Kane get him?” Chuck asked, endeavoring to sound sarcastic through his tears.

Red laughed. “You got me. No. I’ll be right there waiting for him. If I time it right, Kane will never see Mike Chilton again. And neither will you.”

Chuck could see now that he was being taken to the back of Kane Co. tower, to the loading dock usually used for deliveries. He was going to be tossed from Red to some security grunt like an object, and he couldn’t even call that inappropriate right now.

He was a bargaining chip. Not even someone but something they could use to get at Mike.

He struggled pointlessly to get the rest of his body out of paralysis and reach the cuffs, but there was no way. His arms were starting to tingle, and he could twitch his fingers, but that wasn’t enough.

“It’s been a while since you’ve been in here, hasn’t it?” said Red mockingly.

The fact that Red might actually know what he was talking about caused Chuck to bite on a sob again. His past before his supposed ‘death’ was a matter of public record. Red could well have found some reports about the things that happened to him in this building when he still worked for Kane. And as they pulled into the yawning mouth of that garage, he saw not the trucks and the cubes and the doors but the toilets, the pencils, the lighters, the pins and the nails and the boxcutters clicking open.

“I spent a few years of my life thinking I would die here anyway,” Chuck started to say, but as they drove under the ceiling of the garage he could see Security officers and Elites lined up, and his voice failed him.

Red eased his car to a stop and popped his front door. The Kane Co. soldiers startled visibly enough that Chuck realized that they had not, in fact, been waiting for him; this was just how many people Kane had guarding the back door these days.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Red said, his voice thick with pleasure.

One of the Elites started boot-stepping up to Red, who paid him no mind. He took a few steps back, opened the back door, uncuffed Chuck, tossed the cuffs back into the back seat, and then lifted him out of the back seat by his neck.

Chuck couldn’t even fight it. He still didn’t have the feeling back in his legs. He hung, gasping, as Red cheerfully said, “Chuck Haynes, positive ID by his own admission. Have fun with him.”

Chuck couldn’t see who said ‘Holy shit, it is him.’ Affirmative noises and gasps of shock followed. Chuck wondered if any of these meatheads had been bragging about knowing him, once.

The approaching Elite got halfway through demanding Red identify himself before he had to pivot to catching Chuck as he was thrown at him.

Red laughed at his flailing and then turned his back to get right back into his car.

“Wait—” said another Elite.

Red waved a hand at him. “Oh, you can tell Abe to keep his change. I don’t want his bounty. Just tell him to call me himself the next time he wants a Burner. If he asks nicely, I might tell him where to find them.”

The Elite had nothing to say to that. Red got into his car and turned sharply around, gone as soon as he came.

Stunned, the Elite holding Chuck looked down at him. He watched Chuck cry for a few seconds before asking, “Are you really a Burner?”

Decided that he didn’t owe this motherfucker anything better, Chuck elbowed him as hard as he could. Sloppily, through the tingling numbness, but the Elite still shouted and dropped him to the ground. Chuck couldn’t use his legs to run away yet and so to his lack of surprise he was grabbed by two more Elites, hoisted up, punched in the face, and then carried into the building limp and dazed.

—

Original Note:

Red works fast.

He’s an odd character. His stated motivation just doesn’t make sense no matter how you try to square it with both his backstory and the broader story around it. It becomes even more muddied and confused once he’s willing to work with Kane, when 1. Kane is his real enemy and he should know that by now and 2. He initially said he would not work with him. To me, Red’s backstory is so illogical and so incongruous with his actual character that I find myself just unable to work with it. I have to treat him like a character with no backstory. Sheer vengeance and sheer hatred, given a killer character design and shoved into the script. He’s the guy who hates Mike and that’s what matters.

I know this is a lot of words for me to say that I just think he was written badly, and that his character doesn’t make sense, but I find myself also drawn to that sort of thing, characters that don’t make internal sense, whose existence feels like the result of a behind-the-scenes struggle that never really resolved. Watching Red’s episodes makes me feel like I’m being lied to, but there’s no lie. The truth is just unbelievable, an uncanny valley of storytelling, a place where things just aren’t right, just don’t add up. It all has an eeriness to it that I emphasized with him bringing in some quick, raw brutality here, a tone that will keep ringing in future chapters.

Other topic! Chuck’s ongoing fight with what is basically a one-use immediate-onset addiction to the boosters entered this fic in a moment of inspiration as I was writing and then became incredibly useful. My poor boy, he was allowed to try an SSRI once, just once, but the only SSRI in his world is the SSRI That Makes You An Evil Psychopath so now he just gets to long for the feeling of not hating himself but knows that not hating himself makes him an Evil Psychopath. I LOVE it.

Oh, and the particular piece of Regency poetry that came to Chuck’s mind as the spider was weaving his web is not a perfect parallel to our story, but I couldn’t quite resist.

—

Return to Navigation

Bang

They hadn’t noticed that Chuck had been handcuffed in the back of Red’s car, and they didn’t replace the cuffs.

When they realized that he couldn’t walk, they initially tried smacking him around some times to fix that. When that didn’t work, someone used their eyes and saw he had a hole in his neck surrounded by a swollen red ring where he had been tranquilized. He was then dragged to the medical science ward, which had always served as the place where physical mistakes were quickly corrected, and slammed onto a table to be fixed.

The terrified med cadets had no idea what Chuck had been tranquilized with—Red’s supplies were Motorcity-made, and in retrospect, it was possible he had been hit with something courtesy Kaia, now that Red claimed to know her too—and lacking better ideas or actual understanding they rammed him full of enough stimulants to outdo any sedative.

Chuck spasmed, then immediately jumped off of the table and onto his feet. The Elites rushed to grab him nearly as quickly and then he was seized in place by two brawny assholes wearing boosters (he could see them glowing on their wrists) the moment he was up, but he had his legs under him again.

And speaking of boosters, once he was standing and could feel his heart thudding in his chest and his blood running to his fingers and his face, Chuck felt that the chemicals that had just been shoved into his bicep were familiar. The air around him looked so clear; he could feel every breath in his lungs.

The skin of his face knew that there were tears on his cheeks, but he didn’t feel scared.

He didn’t fight the soldiers holding him strictly because feeling good was so disorienting. Nothing hurt, nothing felt real—when the Elites shoved him around, marching him down a hall and to an elevator, in his chest there was a slight tightness and some annoyance but his head was like a windy cliffside, quick, so close to falling off. He could see what the face of the grunt to his left would look like if he smashed him into the wall, he could see that elbow snapping. He kept crying, he couldn’t stop crying, but when one of them pulled up a comm and called his superior, who then sent him straight to Kane, Chuck listened to every word they said with pure, crystal-clear intent. And no fear.

As he was loaded into an elevator, two men on either side of him holding him still despite the fact that he was not  fighting/struggling, Chuck felt his fingers, his chest breathing; flexed the muscles in his legs to feel them. He was in control of himself again.

And they hadn’t put any blockers on him to power off his implants..

They hadn’t put any blockers on him? Chuck didn’t remember them replacing Red’s anti-electrical cuffs with anything of their own, but it couldn’t be true that they didn’t block his embedded technology somehow. Didn’t they know that he had a comm? Moments of glass in the rising elevator let him see the skyline of Deluxe lowering steadily beneath him, the bright sun searing on the roofs of the houses and towers. He saw people walking down the roads, or riding in slow communal movers. The same movers that had once taken him from his cube to work and back every day, on days he didn’t just sleep in the R&D labs. For a moment he could intensely feel the nausea and exhaustion he had felt every day when riding those movers again, the fear for his life and the desire to end it, and for a minute he was in both places at once, then as a powerless underling, now as a Burner.

They passed the floor that held those labs which once held him like a prisoner without stopping and the feeling shattered. Chuck stared at the floor number rising. He had undergone years of borderline torture on floor fourteen; floor fourteen was already gone.

He turned to look outside again and saw that they had climbed high enough that in the distance, he could just barely see a place that was green, not white.

Then Chuck saw hundreds of screens suddenly materialize around the city, each taken up with Kane’s beaming face.

“Good morning, Detroit!” he called, his voice reverberating from every tower, down to every street. Chuck knew that it was echoing below as well, broadcast to Motorcity at the same time as Deluxe; why else would he have called it all Detroit? Everyone below would hear whatever sugared words he offered to Deluxe but know what was beneath that saccharine coating.

“And it is a very good morning today,” he said, “because we are all about to meet someone we have been looking for for a long time.

“As you all know,” he said, leaning the camera that was streaming his wide smile to the world as everyone there knew it, “Just last week we finally identified the man who sits at the right hand of the despicable terrorist Mike Chilton.”

Then the screen split and beside Kane’s grinning face was an image of Chuck in the passenger seat of Mutt, grainy, but the bright colors of Chuck’s face and hair learning out the window glowed in the fuzzy darkness of Motorcity behind him, and his eyes made a bright blue star of four scattered pixels in the center. It too halved itself, and below it arose the now immortal image of Chuck’s own face, looking into the camera at Julie, right before he yelped and asked her why she was filming him. (And she had responded, ‘Just because you two look so cute like that.’)

“Yes, through the detective work of Kane Co. Security, we finally learned that Chilton’s partner in crime is Charlie Haynes, a defector from our own city who brought the knowledge and education Kane Co. gave him to the criminal underworld to use to betray the ones who had raised and mentored him. Though it saddened me to learn that there are two men that Kane Co. once trusted who have chosen to use our proprietary data to ruin the lives of others, we now know exactly who was programming such dangerous technology for the Burners—and we know that he never will again.

“That’s right! After only a week of looking, our brave Kane Co. Security Officers have found Haynes! They’re bringing him to me right now. We’ll all get to ask him a couple questions once he gets here.”

Kane had his timing down. It was just then that they reached the floor that contained his office, five floors above the level Chuck had ever been allowed to venture before. He was walked out of the elevator and into a long, dark hall.

After watching Kane spin his lies, he was surprised to find in his gut only a sense of dull distaste, like he had seen someone puking into a trash can on the street.

He was still crying. He didn’t feel it. His body felt warm and sweet, like honey; he felt like he could flow out of captivity like a river. He checked his hands again, twitched his palms, and while he felt his own skin pulling and relaxing, that seemed distant from the moment, from his mind. When he sent a quick query signal between a nerve in his arm and a wire of the technological imbeds inside of it, it pinged in response. On. Ready.

Down the hall, he could hear Kane’s voice echoing, but it was muffled, blurred. It slowly became clear again, step by step, and Chuck realized he was approaching the door that stood between him and the man himself.

He hadn’t seen Kane in the flesh often.

There was only a single door between them now.

Just when they reached the door, he was stopped. (Standing still had his swimming, backwards and forwards at once.) Someone’s fist was in his hair. “Sir,” said an Elite nearby, “Yessir.” Chuck was spun around by that hand. He found himself looking into one of those empty black comm screens standing in the air that meant he was the one being filmed.

He blinked at it.

The man on the other side of the screen said, “Tell us who you are.”

Chuck thought, they want me to incriminate myself. Then he thought, I’m going to.

He breathed in and felt his throat choked and swollen. His voice would be high, and snotty, and broken; he spoke anyway. “I’m Chuck Haynes,” he said, sounding exactly like the pathetic crybaby he knew he would sound like, “And I’m a fucking Burner.”

“How long have you been a Burner?” asked someone at his side.

He glared at him, and had to hack through some phlegm to speak. “Um, since the start? I’m a founding member.”

This was getting streamed live to all of Detroit, and his voice was so high-pitched. Yet he could not feel ashamed. The door was shut on those feelings. A beautiful golden mist, like the sun in spray, filled up his head and hands. He found himself wondering if he could figure out what chemical he had been shot up with and get some more when another person asked “What do you do for the Burners?”

“I’m their programmer and software engineer,” he told whoever the hell that was.

“Did you make the weapons the Burners use to target innocent civilians?”

“Do you know what a programmer is?” Chuck asked the air around him, as he had no idea which of them had asked that stupid question.  “The hardware guy does the weapons. But if you ever had your bot shut down, or your comm hacked, or your base invaded, that was me saying hello.”

The screen disappeared abruptly when one of the Elites reached for him, and the public missed the chance to see Chuck get punched in the face by a security guard. It stung, but not as much as it should have; voices lapped around him like waves, he could not discern their origin any longer.

Then his head turned to a sharp, slick noise. The door was open.

Chuck’s arms were pulled back and his shoulders braced so that he was staring straight into a wide, empty room. He recognized it. This was where Kane stood in the videos he broadcast to the city. The room he stood in when he sent rants and threats down to Motorcity. His office. And he stood in the middle of it, dressed in white, his hands clasped behind his back, smiling.

Chuck was pushed into the office. He walked with the guards; six men escorting Chuck Haynes, known for his crying and screaming. He had spent so many years terrified in this building. He went floating on, and there he was, the man himself, in the flesh; Abraham Kane, the man who had taken the sky away from Motorcity. The man who had his mother killed and who dumped toxic waste in the water and sent killer robots down to murder them and tried to gas them all and tried to burn them all and tried to crush them all and tried to choke them all to death.

The black screens glittered into life around him, showing the world every possible angle of Chuck being slowly walked up to Kane.

“Welcome back, Mr. Haynes,” Kane began, his laugh ringing in his voice. “I bet—”

(When that short shot of digital video was watched and rewatched in the future, shared, stored, examined, dissected, passed around, viewed guilty in breakrooms and bedrooms, it was often said, with a shudder or with morbid delight, that you could pinpoint the exact moment when Haynes decided to do it. His jaw tightened, his chin lifted; the camera caught one blue eye appearing behind his disturbed hair, wide and bright.)

Between one syllable and another, Kane’s head wrenched back on the hinge of his neck like a door being slammed open. Through that door rushed a vibrant arc of blood. Chuck stood across the floor, with an arm raised straight ahead of him, wrenched easily out of the loose, shifting guard around him, two fingers pointed out and thumb standing up.

A blue glow danced around his fingers.

Future viewers could and did slow every twitch of his nose or cheek down to microseconds as he let out a choking, furious shout and lunged forward a moment later. His second shot went wide; he could not fire again before he was being hauled back by a half-dozen screaming men.

The comms in Kane’s office belonged to him. He had started them up himself and his firewall was airtight. Somewhere in the tower, his staff were trying frantically to end the livestream, but they couldn’t. The shoot rolled on and on as Chuck, firing wildly, was drug back, knocked out, and eventually hauled out of the room, then as nurses rushed in, then doctors, and finally, as a single frantic clerk hacked a hole into the machine that was running the livestream with a wrench and finally shut it down.

—

Original Note:

Now that the smoke's gone / And the air is all clear
Those who were right there / Got a new kind of fear
You'd fight and you were right / But they were just too strong
They'd stick it in your face / And let you smell what they consider wrong
That's why I say hey man, nice shot

Filter / Hey Man Nice Shot

I thought to myself… what if changing hand shape or some other signal changed exactly what kind of plasma weapon Chuck had embedded in his hand? I get why they gave him the slingshot, but what if it could be gun if he really, really meant it?

As a little meta-note, I really struggled to title this fic. I had no solid ideas, then I had the unformed idea to name it after some wordplay around ‘shoot/fire’, since the two defining moments of the fic are two shots: Julie’s ‘shot’ with her camera and Chuck shooting Abraham Kane in the fucking head on live TV. I spent an evening tossing around different title ideas but nothing really sounded right (or else the pun was too cheesy). I went to bed and woke up the next morning with hey man nice shot stuck in my head, like a gift from a grunge angel.

It’s a song with a heavy history, but I would argue that I am not using it inappropriately. Chuck’s history with suicidal ideation and checkered, canon history with interpersonal violence have both been woven into this narrative already and will both keep being factors.

—

Return to Navigation

Man in the Box

There were about three minutes of video footage in which it was unclear whether Abraham Kane was alive or dead.

The immediate results of the uncertainty would have been the same no matter how it ultimately ended. Since the livestream could not be shut off, every agonizing second of scrambling after the assassination was beamed down on Motorcity like an eclipse to premodern man and all of them took to the streets.

Some ran on their feet, some to their cars. Enough of them thought that the time had come to topple Deluxe that they suddenly burst forth on the world above, while Kane still laid prone on the screens in the sky, and tore up buildings and pods and streets.

—

The people of Deluxe were people as well and they didn’t act too differently. Some rushed to help, some locked their doors, but some could not contain their hope.

Chuck Haynes, who had been immediately and thoroughly concussed by a soldier, didn’t see or hear any of that. White halls streamed by him like he was immersed in a river; stairs and rooms and clear walls and the blue sky all around him and then finally he was in a dark little room with glass-like walls and a bigger dark room around it.

They had figured out that they needed to handcuff him. They didn’t put anything else in him to paralyze or sedate him, but the concussion was doing what a concussion did best. He didn’t feel like moving much.

Pressing his face to the cold floor, and hearing the shouting ringing around him, he thought, It is me. And what he meant by that is that a lot of people had told him That isn’t you, Chuck. This isn’t like you. When he said he was afraid he would hurt someone again they said You wouldn’t do that. You’re better than that. That’s not you.

It is me, he told himself. He could see his personal and permanent view of Kane’s head rocking back like his neck had been snapped playing in his mind, starting to swirl as his head throbbed. He remembered Mike telling him that the guy with the booster in his arm, the guy that wanted to kill the coward inside and take his life, wasn’t really him.

Who ‘he’ was, the real Chuck, who had only been known in quiet basement rooms by the handful of people who sat and waited for him; he, me, was now immortal on film, blasting Kane’s fucking head off. The other guy, the guy everyone had thought they had known, had not and would not outlive the guy with the gun.

Someone banged on the clear polycarbonate walls of his cell. He didn’t look up. He thought he would puke if he opened his eyes. 

For a few minutes he was convinced that the other Chuck was dead. The coward. The freak. He had finally killed him with that shot of bright blue plasma. The raw body that only felt its own pain and dizziness was the man inside, dug out, nerves bare. The shouting continued outside of the cell, and the occasional sound of fists ringing on it. His arms were clasped behind his back. When he tried to open his eyes, everything spun.

His head slowly cleared, though it did not stop pounding with pain, and the situation around him only got worse. His cell was an observation chamber in a large dark room with two levels for people to stand and stare at him, floor and balcony, like a theatre. Hundreds of people flowed in and out, pushing, crowding, staring, shouting.

He had been on the other side of those polycarbonate cell walls before. He was in a testing room in R&D, and he was in the place that the experimental bots and weapons usually were. The walls around him were impervious. The controls were on the other side. He had been properly bound with something that shut off his biotech now; it didn’t so much as spark when he tried to send a signal.

Chuck’s first afternoon imprisoned was a nightmare incomparable to anything he had made up himself in his panic attacks. It ended when a doctor—and he thought he recognized him—was let in to sedate him and fix his concussion.

Then he was asleep, as alone as a man in a raft on the sea.

—

He was lying in bed, dizzy. Mike’s bed. He was dreaming—or he had been dreaming, and the ceiling turned around above him. His back was cold, and wet, like he was lying on the ground, and when he spread his fingers across the sheets to steady himself he felt something damp.

He lifted it up to his face and saw red. His wrist was red, with a booster, except it was paint. He had put a booster in; he felt a pang of disappointment in his stomach. His palm was covered with red paint.

He struggled to sit up, which felt incredibly hard. He looked at the bed behind him and saw the outline of his body on the bed, framed by an hourglass sigil in red paint. Condemned. The widow-maker’s mark. Time is running out.

He realized there was a man in the doorway. Fear drove down into his guts (if he had a booster in, how was he so afraid?) but it was Mike. Mike came into the room, his face oddly still.

“What happened?” he asked.

Chuck put his stained hand out to stop Mike from getting too close. “Stop. Wait.”

“Let me help you.”

“You’ll get it all over you,” said Chuck, curling his hand back. He meant the paint, which he now saw was all over his body.

“Let me help you.”

“I think this is a trap,” Chuck told him. “They don’t want me. They want you.”

“I think you just changed that, buddy,” said Mike, who was now standing on the other side of the transparent wall outside of Chuck’s cell.

Chuck struggled to sit up in the pool of blood, with his arms bound behind his back. “I’m not the one they should want. You’re incredible.”

“You’re dangerous,” Mike responded, flatly, likely speaking his mind for the first time. “But no one knew that but me, for a while. We never told anyone you attacked me when you put the booster on. There are a lot of things I never told anyone about you.”

Chuck saw the rings of staring people around him and knew Mike was in danger. “You have to get out of here.”

“I don't want to leave you,” said Mike, and right before he woke up, Chuck couldn’t suppress a terribly uncomfortable feeling that that statement just wasn’t right. 

—

There were fewer people standing around him and staring at his hunched form when he woke up again, but not none.

His head still hurt but he could string together a full sentence in his head. He didn’t think he had killed himself inside himself anymore because now that he was horrifically watched he felt small and singular. His arms were numb, his legs shook when he tried to move them, but he could move them. He was hungry and nauseous at once, and he was surrounded by his former colleagues in the Kane Co. Research and Development Department. 

In retrospect, someone had harshly whispered ‘he’s awake’ a minute ago and they were all staring and buzzing now.

Chuck opened his stinging eyes in slits and took in face after face. Some of them he knew immediately, some he could not quite recall clearly, some were new. He didn’t see many fourteen-year-old interns—maybe he and Mike had convinced Kane Co. that raising child soldiers didn’t work very well, actually.

The golden chemicals from last—from when he was awake last had drained out of his system and left him with nearly nothing. Immediately, panic overtook him.

“No, that’s him,” said a low voice he recognized, though dimly, once he started hyperventilating. There was scattered laughter, nervous. “He hasn’t changed,” said someone else, “But somehow, that makes it worse.”

“Didn’t,” mumbled Chuck, but his throat was too tight to speak. Didn’t know what you were dealing with, huh?

Someone shushed; someone else started walking around the rail ten feet away and boldly toward the class. “Bad look, Haynes,” said a voice he identified as a petty bully; not even a ringleader, but someone dumb enough to try to suck up to them. “Political assassination, that is.”

It was really a personal assassination, he thought, but he didn’t even try his throat. He felt the tears in his eyes and struggled to get his legs under him, so he was at least sitting up.

“Dude, don’t mess with him,” hissed someone from the balcony.

“He can’t get out,” the bully scoffed.

Chuck knew he was right. He had seen experimental killer bots blast repeatedly at the reinforced walls around him while rapidly malfunctioning and get nowhere. It was a little funny, for a moment, that he had now had panic attacks on both sides of this room.

Even so, he screeched in his throat when the man on the other side suddenly kicked the thick polycarbonate, causing nothing but a dull noise. “Hope you’re proud of what you did to the department, freak,” he snarled. “Do you know what we’ve been going through since the truth about you surfaced?”

Chuck choked, and then, despite himself, felt a clutch of giggles fall from his mouth. Though his eyesight was still blurry, he could see the stupid, petty bully lurch back away. “The department?” he squeezed out between the high-pitched breaths and the laughter. Do you think I care about that? Why do you care about that? he thought, but couldn’t get anything else out.

He could remember why the idiot on the other side of the containment cube cared so much about his department. He lived there, and essentially wasn’t allowed a life outside of it. He remembered. Chuck could feel it, for a moment, with everyone looking down on him, but he was still laughing.

“He’s crazy,” said a voice around him, in hushed awe.

“You didn’t catch that from the broadcast?” someone asked.

“I told you to leave this guy alone, jackass.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m just saying, maybe he wouldn’t have been so crazy if you hadn’t waterboarded him in the bathroom sink.”

“Well, I didn’t do what Jason did to him.”

“If you assholes piss him off it’s your fault.”

“This is not my fault.”

Chuck giggled again, trying to hide his face in his shoulder because he couldn’t use his hands. He didn’t even know why he was laughing. He was terrified. There was nothing he could do if these assholes decided it was time to get revenge.

“All of you, just—” Chuck heard another voice he knew he recognized. His head snapped up, and he saw her walking toward him from a hall on the opposite side of the room; the middle-aged, no-nonsense secretary who had been filing for the department for about as long as he had been alive. He tensed, but only because she was approaching. Marlene had always been firm, but… fair.

“Marlene—” said someone.

“Hush up,” she said, leaning down to a console near the containment cube’s base. Chuck watched her warily.

“You can’t—”

“I can, and I will, since the rest of you won’t do it. Chuck is going to be perfectly polite to me if he wants breakfast and his cuffs off, isn’t he?” she said, snapping her sharp gaze up to his face.

“That’s no way— no way you’re allowed to take my cuffs off,” he responded, choking halfway through the sentence.

“So fastidious. I’m going to detach them from each other so you can eat. The cuffs and their tech flatteners are staying right where they are.” With a flick of her nails, she opened a doorway that seemed to appear out of the air in the cube. Everyone but her scattered.

She shook her head and walked inside, even closing the door behind her with a tap of her wrist. “I don’t think Lee Harvey Oswald here has his sights set on secretaries,” she admonished them, walking right up to Chuck. She dropped to her knees to get to his level, placing a horribly unappetizing cube of prison goo down next to him. “Do you, kid?”

“No.”

“If you’re going to do something like that,” she grumbled under her breath, “For God’s sake, don’t miss.”

“He’s alive,” said Chuck, “Isn’t he?”

“He sure is. Missing a chuck of his prefrontal cortex, strangling nurses that get near him, but alive.”

“Shit.” Chuck flinched when Marlene reached behind him to disable the device that kept his cuff magnetically attached to each other, then whimpered when his numb arms fell apart with a cascade of tingles and shocks.

“What was your plan there, kid?” she asked, sounding sad.

“Didnt have a plan,” he said, feeling a tear materialize on the side of his nose. “Got captured. Got shot up with s—something. Realized I had a chance.”

“People are shooting up the streets,” she told him, voice flat. “There’s bots everywhere and the hospital’s full. If you’re going to do something like that, do it right.”

“I— Uh—” Chuck floundered. Marlene stood up, turned her back, and shut him back inside.

He dimly realized that he perhaps should have tried to escape, but he also knew it was impossible from his position. His arms were free but he couldn’t use the biotech inside them. He couldn’t call for backup or fight for himself. He was one man, and he was back to himself, now; the coward who couldn’t even imagine how he’d start getting out of this room, let alone this city. The thought made him whimper and shudder.

He realized that he did have to just wait to be rescued. Just like Red wanted. Just like Kane wanted. Mike would come for him, and Mike wouldn’t make it to him. Not here, in the winding depths of the labs, surrounded by enemies and the powered-down corpses of Kane’s worst machines.

This was it. The day had come. And the fuck of it all was that everything he had been afraid of had happened and he was still scared.

—

Day bled into day. Former colleagues, roommates, associates came in to sneer at him. He jumped and startled every time; the room flowed around him in all four directions and there was no way to watch every angle of approach. They got what they wanted: he cried. He jumped when they slammed the polycarbonate. He snapped and shouted at them when they called him names and insulted his boyfriend. He was incapable of sleep and did not have a moment alone. His body felt like a live wire and he gave everyone who came to see him exactly what they wanted every time.

If anyone was sympathetic to his case, they couldn’t possibly show it; he was always surrounded by guards watching him. Anyone who didn’t want to hurt him just wouldn’t come. He wasn’t let to rot, but much more couldn’t be said.

What was funny, in its own way, was that he was one of the handful of people who already knew what Kane Co. was capable of by seeing it from the other side, hating it, and fleeing. He was not surprised by a single thing that happened to him, but there was no hiding, not for a moment, from how horrible it was.

He eventually got a decent reckoning of time passing by tracking how often he was fed and dropped into the dark room below the cell (but still guarded by the same walls) for other biological necessities. As such he knew he was in the cell for at least three or four days before Abraham Kane visited him.

Chuck knew he was coming several minutes before he did. Several people looked at their comms and rushed out of the room; others straightened themselves up and stood at a corner. A few minutes later, a row of guards came in and stationed themselves around all four walls. Chuck was already standing and facing the right direction by the time a pair of Elites opened the doors to let Kane through.

Chuck’s heart dropped to his feet the moment he saw him.

Kane was walking with a cane; the cane transparently doubled as a heavy, blunt force weapon. His hair was gone from his head and plastic patches surrounded a white and blue mask that covered much of his forehead and the left side of his face, framing a bright, bloodshot eye. His gait wasn’t quite right, but he walked on his own. It was perhaps a side effect of whatever heavy medication he was surely on for the pain of his brain being partially sublimated that had his mouth half-open in a toothy, skull-like sneer as he lurched through the threshold and into the chamber.

What did Marlene say? Chuck asked himself dizzily. Prefrontal cortex, right? Management of attention, focus, decision-making, working memory, goal-setting… self-control…

Kane’s arm shot up suddenly, and without a word, a little steel tool he was holding suddenly shot a burst of light directly from his hand and toward Chuck. It shook the box and left a scorch on the glass-like wall. Chuck screamed and jumped backward; Kane opened his mouth and barked with laughter.

“Turnabout is fair play, young man!” he shouted, approaching the cell with an uneven walk, his Elites marching in wings behind him. “Oh, look at you. Haynes, I’ve been told you’re a coward.”

As Chuck was trembling against the opposite wall, that would be a hard claim to debate.

“Which makes me wonder,” Kane continued, “Where the hell you got the guts.”

Kane slashed at the polyfiber wall with the load-bearing weapon in his hand, and it scratched the surface. Chuck had watched faulty Hounds scrabble at the walls for hours without scratching it. He desperately clung to the wall on the opposite side.

Kane laughed at him and it did not sound right. He wasn’t really smiling, either. The forceful cackles burst out of his open mouth. “But I solved that riddle. The staff who fed you steroids before your ill-fated interview have been sacked, rest assured of that. I was assured that you would be nothing but a whining, beat-down dog without them, and I’m pleased to see that that is definitively true. Still, how the hell did a sniveling nancy like you manage to get as far as you did?”

Chuck was breathing like a computer that had every program open and malware running too. Still, so help him God, he was going to talk back to Kane.. “If you— you—”

“Speak up.”

“If you hate someone enough, that’s enough.”

Kane stood like a statue after Chuck’s shout stopped echoing. He nearly fell to his knees but managed to brace himself against the wall. 

Just the same as loving someone enough, thought Chuck, though it was a thought he figured Kane didn’t deserve. If you love someone enough, you find it in yourself to do whatever you need to do.

His body was growing cold. Heat was seeping out of his shaking fingers. Kane leaned forward to get a good look at him and Chuck could see that the eye inside of the mask rolled more slowly than the other one, and had a larger pupil.

His heart quickened pace when it really sank into him that he did not know what he was dealing with anymore. Kane then and Kane now were different men with different brains. He did not know what was coming next.

“And why would you hate me,” Kane asked, “young man?”

When Chuck didn’t speak for a moment, he specified, “You, specifically. I don’t want to hear about the vague, assumed grievances of ‘the people’ or ‘Motorcity’. Why do you hate me enough to kill me?”

Chuck stood silently. There were so many answers, and he couldn’t work his throat.

“Well?”

Chuck screamed in his throat, and turned the ragged sound into “Turnabout is f—fair play, f—fucker. You’ve tried to kill me a hundred times!”

Kane started laughing again, uneven, unstable. “You’ve hurt everyone I ever loved!” Chuck continued, suddenly free to speak. “You or your fucking goons! You got my mom killed with a stupid dangerous scrap project, you hurt every one of my friends, you’ve do everything you can think of to ruin Mike’s life, and I would have been a fucking comfortable senior programmer by now in any fucking company except your code violation CESSPOOL!!”

Kane barked with laughter. “Is that the real reason! Well, Chuck, there is no company other than mine.”

“Bullshit, I am the Burners’ incredibly comfortable senior—”

Chuck broke off with a shriek again when Kane pounded the plastic and exacerbated the slash mark. “Uncomfortable!” he admitted in a squeak, as in truth, he usually was uncomfortable at his job, Burners’ senior programmer or not.

“Nothing has changed!” Kane roared, and in his shaking vision Chuck saw even the Elites around him back away. “You haven’t changed a thing with your failed attempt on my life! By all rights I should have you killed, but you know what you’re here for, and that hasn’t changed.”

Not in any way that mattered. Chuck had tried to kill him, and he was still just bait for Mike. “I’m going—I’m—I’m—”

“You’re going to what, you snivelling wreck?” Kane sneered at him.

“I’m going to—t—tell you—Oh God,” Chuck stammered like a pressure valve bubbled to force himself forward, “I’m going to tell you the same thing I told your hound, which is that you’ve got the wrong guy. Mike wouldn’t do this to you. You think you know him but you don’t. You’re looking at the real enemy right now.”

He was crying again by the time he was done with his short and shaky speech. Kane, with his skull-like, unclosing mouth, looked down at him.

“How sweet,” he started, voice now low. “You’re trying to protect him. You’re wasting your breath. I know Chilton better than you ever will, if that’s what you think about him. If he’s such a hero, you can ask him the next time you see him why he’s left you here to rot.”

Chuck didn’t say anything out loud, because he again figured Kane didn’t deserve the truth, but that wouldn’t make him doubt Mike for a minute. If Mike never came, Chuck would know that he had died trying. He wished that he wouldn’t, but he would.

“You can ask him the same,” Chuck said instead, not believing himself, “Because he left you to rot long ago.”

He realized his mistake immediately, and then realized it was a fatal mistake when Kane wordlessly punched the console that would allow him access into the observation chamber.

The door opened. Kane stood still behind it, twenty feet from Chuck and nothing between them.

Chuck could barely breathe.

“Go on,” Kane said.

The only noises that came from Chuck’s throats were wordless wheezing.

Kane lightly, calmly, pressed the button that closed the door again, sealing the observation chamber shut.

“Good choice,” Kane said. “I’m a reasonable man. I give what I get. You’re getting what you’ve earned right now. You’re not getting out of here, Haynes. You could die trying, if you like.

“And I assure you,” he continued, now beginning his stalk out of the room, “There are those that will.”

In the ensuing silence, which gradually grew into buzzing concern once Kane left the room, Chuck slowly slid down the wall to the floor and reflected on a few facts.

First: he had known that Kane was a monster already, and those who had the misfortune to work closely with him did, but quite a few people here had not known that before now. Kane used to control his temper in mixed company. He didn’t do that anymore, not now that he didn’t have a prefrontal cortex.

Second: Now that Chuck wasn’t high, he hadn’t even tried to hurt Kane, not with the door open and nothing between them. His plasma canon was dead, yes, but he could have tried something, and it hadn’t even occurred to him to do so. The coward lived.

Third: Kane didn’t have Mike yet. He had slipped up in his bragging. No one had come for Chuck yet, and that meant no one had fallen for the trap yet. He would have bragged if he had captured any of them, he would have dragged them in with him to gloat.

“Good job, guys,” Chuck wheezed into his folded arms, heavy with the cuffs on his wrists. “Keep it up.”

—

Things grew better, in a way, and worse. Chuck had been in there a few days, so the number of people wanting to gawk at him slowly decreased. The interactions he did have, however, were worse. Since Kane was willing to threaten his life and call him a freak in front of everyone, they assumed it didn’t matter how they treated him.

They weren’t wrong, in the sense that they could get away with it. Still not sleeping, except when he shut down, without a moment alone, Chuck continued to react to provocation incredibly poorly.

He thought it was a dream, at first, when several days later, a blank yellow box appeared in front of him. Glowing—a screen—but nothing on it. Like a little floating pixel star or fairy.

“Thunder,” it said. “Blond Thunder. Respond.”

Chuck only knew he was really hearing this when the scattered handful of people in the room—was it late at night?—also looked up.

The voice coming from the screen was scrambled. It was a person masking their voice. It could be anyone—

Anyone who knew him well enough to codename him Blond Thunder. “I—present—who are—”

“Nine Lives reporting,” said Julie, her voice beyond recognition, and yet there was a little catty smile somewhere in it.

Chuck, in a moment of disorientation, tried to reach to the glowing screen, to hold it. “Nine—Nine—”

“I can’t stay with you,” she said, and Chuck bet she couldn’t. How was she even doing this? His comm was dead; she was casting this from somewhere, which meant first that she had to be nearby and second that she had figured out exactly where he was and exactly where she needed to generate a screen so that it would appear inches from his face. He would have had to spend hours calculating the exact angles to pull off the same magic trick—but knowing Julie, she hadn’t done any math at all. She had aimed. She had figured out where Chuck was and thrown the line to him from across the tower. Bullseye.

“Nine Lives,” he said again, overwhelmed.

“I’m going to get you out of there, Thunder. It won’t be today. I can’t tell you when. I hear those guards getting closer to you. Don’t do a thing. Don’t provoke him. Keep your mouth shut. And don’t move.”

“Uh—got no choice, Niner,” Chuck sobbed, just as the scrambling guards were approaching the containment chamber.

“I’ll be there. I promise. Goodbye,” said Julie, and just as someone burst into the room, the screen flickered out of existence.

Chuck let out a low, heavy sigh. The guard picked him up and shouted, knocked him around, but for the first time in days he felt a perilous relief.

He had known that the Burners would try to rescue him. He had been terrified of hearing Mike’s voice, knowing Mike was on his way to get himself killed. But somehow—and he figured she must have cuffed him to some basement wall herself to accomplish it—somehow Julie had convinced Mike to let her rescue Chuck.

And maybe she could. Chuck did not want to let himself hope, but if it was Julie, acting alone, acting cool, taking her time, letting him suffer as she waited for the perfect moment to pounce, maybe she could.

—

Of course they questioned him about who had contacted him. Of course they demanded names.

Chuck knew damn well he wasn’t going to stand up under questioning, let alone whatever they did when questioning failed. He chose the name of an R&D coworker he had hated and spat it out. When they came back a day later, he picked another one.

He had ruined those men’s lives. He knew it. He wasn’t going to ruin Julie’s.

He wasn’t sure how long that would work for, but it was working for now, and hopefully, for as long as Julie needed.

—

He was lying on the road. The old tar was hard against his back and so cold that the chill seeped through his clothes.

No one used this road, which was why Chuck wasn’t too concerned about lying on it. It was at the very southern edge of the dome, so close to that edge that his righthand horizon was a dark, unlit line, perpetual night. Motorcity glowed orange on their left side, hidden partly by Mutt’s guarding shadow. At his feet, and in his eyes when he opened them, was the long, dark shore of the lake.

Like everyone had warned him, Kane partially enclosing Lake Erie under a steel dome had killed it. Not all of it, but this sunless stretch was like a dead limb on the now-hobbled ecosystem of the Great Lakes. It was silent, black water that Chuck’s half-liddled eyes looked tiredly over, driven only by winds and tides far, far away, reflecting the rainbow glistening lights of the underground city. The high blue line cast by the Cablers shone and shivered like the beacon of a lighthouse, the uneven patches of moonlight from gaps in the dome sprang from the dark surface like islands of light. Between them, Motorcity’s brief, uneven starlight glows, constellations of violet, blue, and green, appeared and disappeared on the black waters.

This far south, and so close to the lake, a person could hear some life in the gloom. Insects chirped and rustled, having wandered in from the light or adapted to the darkness, and the owls who preyed on rats and snakes called to each other above his head.

Chuck laid on the cold road and closed his eyes, heedless of a car that might drive up, of owls or rats or snakes, because Mike was asleep with his head on his chest, and that was all he wanted right now.

He wanted the comfort and trust of Mike resting on him with a nervous fierceness that made his stomach hurt when he tried to examine it. He knew that he wanted to remain lying with Mike on the cold road badly; he did not want to open his eyes.

He could feel Mike breathing and the body heat pouring into him through his chest. The idiot was always telling him that it was okay to be close or even clingy in public, but Chuck had to say that he couldn’t imagine Mike lying on him like this if anyone else could see. He wasn’t sure if Mike was aware that he was being a little hypocritical, that he always teased Chuck for trying to look tough in public when he did the same thing himself, but he didn’t really care to point it out to him, either.

It kept moments like his special, private, removed from everyone but him. He’d keep it that way if he could.

He had thought Mike was asleep, but then was surprised by his voice coming from his chest. “Chuck.”

Chuck swallowed, nervous, not sure why. “What is it?”

“Are you mad at me?”

Mike sounded for a moment like the boy he once knew; he still was the boy he once knew, though he was bigger, stronger, full of a natural-seeming confidence that belied the skittish, abandoned kid he once had been long ago.

“No. Why would I be mad at you?”

“Because I haven’t come for you yet.”

In his gut, without words, Chuck knew exactly what Mike meant, and responded to the feeling without remembering why he had it. “No. I’m glad you’re not putting yourself in danger.”

“You’re not mad at all?”

“A little bit, but it isn’t fair.”

“I knew you would be.”

“I’m more scared than angry,” Chuck told him, because that was always true. “I wish I would wake up to see you standing there with your hand reaching out to me. But I’m more afraid that they’ll get you too than I am angry that you won’t come get me.”

Chuck knew what he was talking about. He was trapped in a prison cell right now. He was also lying on the hard asphalt shore of Lake Erie, the cold waters breathing fog around him, cut through with glowing blue. Mike curled up on his chest, huddling close, like a cat, and Chuck wrapped an arm around his back.

“I’m holding you back,” Chuck said.

“No, you’re not.”

“I am,” Chuck disagreed. “I’m your ghost. The pale ghost of Deluxe, clinging to your wrist. You want to be free, but you have to drag me around everywhere, pinning you to the past. Now I’m going to pull you back upstairs; you’re going to come for me, lured up into the attic, and then they’ll keep you here forever.”

Mike asked, “Do you still want to be up there?”

Chuck hesitated before responding “I sure don’t want to be where I am right now.”

“But you would have stayed in Deluxe if you could have.”

Chuck laughed briefly and felt Mike’s head rise and fall on his chest. What would he have done if he could have had this in the warm sunlight of Deluxe? “You notice I still wear blue.”

“It looks good on you.”

Chuck felt a cold chill, and thought he saw a white light. He shut his eyes more tightly. “Stay with me.”

“Always. If I can.”

“You should at least have the option to leave me if you want to.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere.”

Chuck heard a buzz as a door opened and he knew someone else was coming to look at him in his cell. He opened his eyes and his cell was on the shore of lake Erie, and all the spooks he used to work with were standing in the black waters of the lake, watching him and Mike lie in the silver road.

He stared back at them.

“Would you still live in Deluxe if you could?” Chuck asked Mike.

“No,” said Mike. “I thought I loved it, but only until I got a chance to try something else. Then I realized it wasn’t what I really wanted. I just thought it was my only option.”

Chuck gripped Mike’s shoulder. It was cold.

“You should have the option to leave if you want to,” Chuck repeated, his throat feeling dry, staring at the scientists watching him, the swells of dead black water around their legs.

After a moment, he heard Mike say on his chest, “Do you want to leave?”

Chuck thought, maybe, he was waking up.

He also thought that there was no way he would be where he was if he had a choice.

“I want to be in that place on your wall,” he said.

“What place?” asked Mike. He struggled to sit up, bracing his hands on either side of Chuck’s chest.

“On your wall in your bedroom,” Chuck repeated, squeezing his eyes closely shut, pretending he couldn’t hear voices buzzing, machines humming. “There’s that place Dutch painted that’s like Motorcity, but the sun is shining over it, and nothing is broken, and there isn’t any Kane or any dome. And the lake is blue.”

Mike said, “Stay with me.”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Try a little harder. Keep your eyes closed,” he said. “I don’t want you to be hurt. Just stay with me here.”

“I don’t think I can,” Chuck said again, and then he was awake, and he was in his cell, and all those people were staring at him.

—

Original Note:

That’s the second title of some kind I’ve pulled from an Alice in Chains song for a fic in two years, and that isn’t a lot, but it is two nickels.

‘Marlene’ is not supposed to be anyone in-setting. I named her after a woman who was a mentor to me when I was starting out in my job. Serious and straightforward, kind but not effusive. She was from West Virginia, so you can imagine some unamused country twang here if you like.

—

Return to Navigation

In Twain

“Damn what we have to say, anything other than a public execution is a mercy,” snarled the Director of Finance, smacking the palm of his hand on the glowing white table. “I know there are plans and I know he has his uses but we can’t lose sight of the fact that even being kept alive is better than that little terrorist deserves. Oh, please, Julie.”

Intern Julie Kapulsky wordlessly tilted his white mug toward her so that she could pour a thin stream of coffee inside. Steam billowed from the cup; she spooned in some sugar from a silver jar as well and stirred it for him, eyes down.

“Me next, Julie?” asked the Director of Human Resources before returning to the conversation. “Look, John, you’re not wrong. People get dumped outside with cuffs on for a tenth of what this guy has done. But that’s exactly the thing. Once you’re not a petty criminal anymore, not even a career criminal, but a name, someone the average person knows, you’re a celebrity. Kane knows he’s working with more than just a disturbance to the peace. He’s got an asset on his hands and he’s using it.”

Julie poured him his coffee as well, but he didn’t thank her.

“Asset, my ass,” said the Director of Finance, and smiled like he was smart. “That’s a danger. And every day we leave him alive, we send a message that we can excuse crimes like his as long as we can use him. At least that we don’t care to punish him for it.”

“He’s being punished. He’s in a goddamn testing cube,” sighed the Director of Research and Development. “No, no more for me, Julie.”

“Of course, Sir.”

“Sure, right, to get ahold of Chilton and the rest of the Burners. But it's been two weeks! What's the plan if Chilton never bites? Maybe he’s done with his little ‘friend’ now that he’s gotten himself caught.”

Julie turned around and returned to the serving station to put the half-full carafe of coffee back into the warmer.

“I wouldn’t blame him if he were. From Chilton’s position, he does have a reputation to uphold, even if it’s a grim one. ‘Kisses boys’ can’t be the image a criminal mastermind wants to project.”

They all laughed. Julie pulled up her work comm, standing in the corner, to make sure it was still taking automatic notes, though she used an app that looked just like the company messaging server to do it. The Director of Security had asked her to take autologged notes even on private meetings without telling the others. Two other Directors asked for the same thing, so making sure four separate, slightly different recordings kept running continuously without feedback and without being obvious took a good amount of RAM.

Four, of course, because the last one was for her.

“Come on, John, use your head,” sighed the Director of Human Resources, crossing his legs on a floating white ottoman. “Even if we don’t get the whole gang from this, he’s a goldmine of information. He knows the names of the rest of them and where they live and that’s just for starters. He’s got information on the whole interconnected gang network if we can just get it from him. Killing that is like wiping out a whole research database.”

“I heard he’s not talking.”

“He is,” the Director of R&D inserted smoothly, “He’s lying. That doesn’t surprise me, because I knew that he was a liar and a sneak from the start. He’s been giving us fake names seemingly at random and obviously faulty information mixed with plausible information. If we can’t get Chilton out of him, eventually, he’s going to be transferred to the labs, where we can get him full of truth serum and get him to talk.”

“Why aren’t we doing that already?”

“Because truth serum isn’t real, you idiot. We’re wearing him down to a point that he’ll believe it does work and just be relieved to be off the hook for snitching once we do pump him full of colored saline. By that time he should be happy to talk. Don’t just watch the gossip bits; I know Haynes and he’s a coward. He’s going to break eventually, and then we’ll get reliable information out of him. But he’s not at that point yet. He still thinks his friends are coming for him. We’re waiting until he realizes that’s not happening.”

From the corner came a voice which hadn’t yet spoken up: the Director of Communications, who was the only other woman in the room. “And what if he doesn’t break?”

The Director of R&D looked up witheringly at her.

“Julie,” she asked, “Some tea, please?”

“Right away,” Julie said, and turned to the server to start making a cup of tea.

(The Executive Board got real tea. Real coffee. Real pastries on ceramic plates. All imported from other cities, cities that did still exist, despite what Kane told the masses. Transport was run by only one branch of the company under strict secrecy and only by untraceable, analog, expensive means. It cost a fortune that Motorcity paid for every time she put a cube of sugar in a cup of coffee, a slice of lemon in a cup of tea, a cruller on a plate.)

“I said, what if he doesn’t break?” the Director of Communications repeated herself. “What if he just lapses delusional instead? Or what if his Burners do come for him and he knows there’s hope? What if you go all the way through with torturing the skinny little boy and you still don’t get any information worth having? What’s the point?”

“The point, madam, is the punishment of a serial offender.”

“You’d have shot him and washed your hands already if punishment was the point,” she responded, “Certainly if defending social order was the point. All I’m saying is, what if you do all that and get no information or bad information and all you’ve done is spend months torturing a boy before he dies?”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” snapped the flustered Director of Research and Development.

“There’s nothing else we can do, anyway,” inserted the Director of Human Resources. “If you haven’t seen the boss lately, you don’t want to.”

“I’ve seen him,” the Director of Communications replied. Julie slid a slice of lemon onto her cup of tea and then began walking it toward her. “And I know that since this is the boss’s pet project right now, we aren’t doing anything the boss doesn’t want us to do and getting away with it. But it beggars belief—thank you, Julie, and with lemon, just how I like it, you remembered—”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Julie, though she was spoken over, “I always remember.”

“—It beggars belief that none of you have noticed that the boss doesn’t always remember what he asks for right now.”

A short silence followed that remark. Julie lowered her head and walked back to her station.

“If you wait two days and ask him for the opposite of what he asked for yesterday,” the Director of Communications continued, “He’ll play like he remembers that conversation, but he might not. And you might get what you ask for. There’s no way none of you have noticed this.”

“...What are you saying, Alice?” asked the Director of Security, his tone low and dangerous.

“I’m saying that any of you in charge of that project could ask Kane to stop torturing that boy, or put him in a private cell, or just kill him in a showy public execution instead and hang his head up for other criminals to behold and beware if that’s what you wanted to do.” She paused to sip at her too-hot tea, barely disturbing the surface. “And every day you don’t do that, you could be doing that.”

“...It won’t work,” said the Director of Human Resources. “No, not with this one. Maybe you’re playing him while he’s scrambled to increase your budget or get an air-headed staffer out of a fix, but he’s going to do what he wants to do with the Burner and we can’t convince him otherwise.”

“And what does he want to do?” she asked, almost innocently. “Has he told any of you?”

“Keep him as bait, of course,” said the Director of Security impatiently. 

“Oh? I heard something else.”

“What?”

“You have the best information, John,” she said evenly. “Whatever I heard must have been a rumor.”

“But what was it?”

“I find it irresponsible to spread unsubstantiated information around,” she replied, eyes down.

“Come on, Alice.”

“No, no. I must have heard wrong.”

But Julie agreed. Of course Chuck was bait to get at Mike; her father’s obsession with the commander who left him had always been… intense. But he would not give up on what he wanted out of Chuck either. If Mike didn’t show, and Julie should have set things up so that Mike would not show, he wouldn’t just give up and hand him over for execution or exile. He would find another way to get what he wanted, somehow. She had heard rumors of Kane considering other options for getting Chuck to talk or enticing Mike to come rescue him, wild theories about altering his memories or personality or even humanity, and though Kane was holding whatever he was planning to his chest for now, the man Julie knew would grow impatient and change the game eventually.

The man she had known would do that. But, he had been… different, after the accident.

—

When her father appeared in all the screens across the sky and announced he had Chuck in custody, Julie dropped everything she was holding and ran.

She ran right out of a meeting, which was stupid. Normally, she wouldn’t have dared to do anything like that. Her cover had to be unassailable for her to keep up her work at the Burners’ spy. Realistically, she was absent enough, prying enough, knowledgeable enough that if someone really went digging, they would find something. All she could do to keep up the balancing act was try to be below suspicion as much as possible.

She knew that. She dropped everything and ran, no subterfuge, no sidetracks, no disguise, to Nine Lives.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t been especially close to where Nine Lives was parked. She tore through the streets of Deluxe, in her uniform, over roofs, past crowds of people gathering, and almost fell on her face scrambling to run faster when all those screens were replaced with Chuck’s beaten face.

“I’m Chuck Haynes,” he said, high-pitched, wobbling, and furious, though you had to know him to know that, “and I’m a fucking Burner,” and Julie ran with her lungs bursting to the tunnel where Nine Lives was hidden away, witnessed probably by a hundred eyes overhead. 

“Um, since the start??” he continued, clearly affronted, his voice glitching somehow, maybe through the screen, but maybe through something happening to his body, “I’m a founding member.” Tears came to Julie’s eyes when she heard the glimmer of pride in his voice and as she finally disappeared into the darkness.

“I’m their programmer and software engineer,” she heard his echoing voice state as she slammed into the side of her own car and made it lurch. Her whole chest ached with pain as she punched the driver’s side door with her right fist, where she had a chip key that could unlock her doors implanted subdermally. She fell into Nine Lives, gathered herself up, and slammed the door shut, thinking, knowing, that if she couldn’t get to him now, it was too late.

“Do you know what a programmer is??” Chuck asked the world at large as Nine Lives burst back into the daylight of Deluxe and headed in a straight line to Kane Co. Tower and damn what was in her way. 

“The hardware guy does the weapons,” he explained sarcastically, being the little prick he was as the people of Deluxe lurched screaming away from the car that suddenly yowled on the roads.

Julie had already mapped out a way a car could conceivably drive up the large, gaudy stairways lining the center of the tower with enough momentum and enough horsepower, but fuck that. She was going the Chilton way, and that meant up the goddamn side.

“But if you ever had your bot shut down, or your comm hacked, or your base invaded, that was me saying hello,” said Chuck, and then he flinched, and then he vanished, and Julie was gaining on the tower.

Her father’s office replaced Chuck’s face in the sky, a wide angle that let her see Kane standing there, pleased, arms behind his back, and Chuck being dragged up to him. She could see the tower in her window; she could see the people on the road in front of it. Rapidly recalculating, she hit an angle, bounced, kept driving, jumped, and just managed to land on a bridge above the crowd, which could take her into the third story if she aimed her approach correctly, and then up the side, and then—

Chuck shot her father in the face.

Not a word. Drew, aimed, fired.

She watched him collapse like a bot turned off.

Nine Lives stopped in front of Kane Co. Tower. She didn’t remember stepping on the brake. She watched the Elites drag Chuck away and the doctors flood into the room.

For a minute, Julie Kapulsky and Julie Kane had one hand each on the steering wheel of Nine Lives. Neither of them moved an inch.

Her hand was forced when she saw security officers running up to her. No matter what, she had to move; she couldn’t risk being seen in Nine Lives, undisguised, in her uniform, no matter what. She peeled away, unthinking. She ran a wide circle around Deluxe like a hawk hunting, found a place to hide, and stepped out of the car again.

Standing in the shadow of a tall white building, she could hear the city rioting behind her, people shouting, motors roaring. In front of her was a yellow horizon, the distant, endless, wavering wilderness of the prairies. After everything, and now that there were no trees left in their way, the grasslands that had once covered up so much of the continent had slowly, with time, so expanded their roots and overgrown the ruins that they stood practically at the threshold of Kane’s great white dome.

She heard the calling of crows in that golden void, and saw a few darting and diving, black specks whose calls rang like bells from the wilderness to the city.

She grimly accepted that her first order of business was to make sure the reckless tracks she had just made were covered up. No one could know.

She rejected all calls as she ran back to Kane Co. Tower, making sure she was seen in the office, easing suspicions about her flight and disappearance—she had long ago convinced everyone that she had been the victim of a close-thing Burner attack that had left her terrified of the violent fiends, which was why she sometimes ran away at the mere mention of their name—learning that Kane had survived, but was being operated on, hearing a hundred disparate rumors about how severe the damage was, and that the Burner had been put in a holding cell—

Her father was alive. Chuck was alive. They were both alive.

She finally stopped herself dead in a hallway. She looked out a window, and she was so high up in the tower that she could see that golden shimmer of the prairies in the distance again, and she knew her second order of business was to stop Mike Chilton immediately. She went to her favorite quiet room—a private executive suite for reprimanding higher-ups that had no recording devices because only Kane (and her) could get in, as he would not suffer himself to be scrutinized like everyone else—and called Mike.

“Julie,” he said, “Am I glad to see you. Are you okay?”

“Go back down,” she responded, looking at the floor.

“Julie—I’m on my way right now—”

“No you’re not. Go back down to Motorcity. Stay there.”

“Why? Jules? What’s—have you—got Chuck?”

Julie considered telling him Chuck was already dead. It might keep him down there. But they were likely to brag about Chuck’s capture and show off his humiliation to Motorcity, so the lie would only serve her for a little while and infuriate Mike when it was revealed.

“I have to save him.”

“And I have to help.”

“No,” she told him firmly. “You can’t help him. You’ll only hurt him if you try.”

“Julie—”

“Listen to me, Mikhail Chilton,” she said, finally glaring into the screen at Mike’s wide-open face, looking back at her from the front seat of his car, the lights of Motorcity like comets behind him, “And listen to me well, because I’m only going to say this once. I know where he’s being kept. You cannot get him out of there. It is impossible. He is locked inside an invulnerable observation cell in the test labs made to keep malfunctioning Hounds in place. He is surrounded by guards and he is in the middle of Kane Co. Tower. You cannot get in there. You cannot get a car in there. 

“The only one who can get in there is me and the only hope we have is waiting until they let their guard down. I have to socially hack my way in, manually disable his holding cell, and get him out myself. It is the only way. This is a trap meant to catch you. If you come up here, what you will do is break his heart by getting killed. Stay. Down. There.”

 “Julie. It’s a riot up there. People are on the streets. People from both cities. When Kane was shot, they started coming upstairs—fighting—”

“Well, I’m in the tower, and they’re sure not in here!” she snapped. “This entire city is a trap meant to catch you right now and you are about to spring it. If you can’t trust me to do this, you will get both you and Chuck killed.”

The line was only static for a minute. “It can’t be the only way.”

“It is.”

“But Chuck—”

“I know,” she responded, “But he’s stronger than he thinks. And stronger than you let him be.”

Mike said, “I didn’t want him to be a killer.”

“He isn’t. He failed. Kane’s alive.”

She heard him finally hit Mutt’s breaks.

“Kane’s alive and wants one thing. You. I can get Chuck out of there, but only if you let me do this myself.”

Mike said, “It was Red who took him.”

“What?”

“He painted his calling card on my bed. The… condemned sign. While all of us were gone, he walked right in and took him.”

“Shit,” she responded. “Then Red’s up here too. He has to be. He’s sitting in Kane’s trap like a ferret in a snake’s den; he won’t let Kane get you. He’s ready to spring himself.”

“No,” said Mike. “I’ve got to get him. I’ve got to help him. This is my fault.”

“The only way to help him is to trust me,” she said. “And is your head on straight? Mike. Red knows where we live.”

“I know—”

“You’ve got to get everyone out there now!”

“If he’s waiting up there for me, what danger is the base in?”

“Mike! He could have given that information to Kane! He doesn’t care what happens to the rest of us! His plan is almost definitely to come down for the rest of the Burners once he gets you or finishes you off! And if he tipped off Kane, his plan is to definitely send bots down while you’re distracted and grab Dutch and Texas and Jacob while they’re vulnerable! If you don’t get back down there right now to warn them, they’re done for!”

Mike’s hand gripped the wheel. She could see him grimacing in strain. “Chuck–”

“Is the only one of us safe and accounted for right now.” 

“He is not safe! He’s—”

“A trap meant to catch you, and the only thing that keeps him safe is you not springing the trap.”

Mike fought with himself so hard she heard it, minute, awful sounds of strain. “Julie.”

 “Mike.”

“Do you promise. Do you promise you’ll save him.”

I love him so much, she thought, angry and annoyed and devastated. “I promise.”

Mike had to look away from her. He reached to turn his comm off, but stopped himself, and said, “Please be careful. Please.”

“I will.”

“I can’t lose you too.”

“...Goodbye,” she said, and cut the line herself.

—

She was able to visit Chuck in his tank before she was able to sit at her father’s bedside, sneaking in after the surgery and while no one else was in the room. For both events, she just stared. Chuck, in an observation cell, arms cuffed behind his bent back; her father, asleep from anesthesia, his whole face covered with a machine.

—

For the next few days, nothing was right. Deluxians emboldened by the chaos defected down to Motorcity and caused trouble there; Motorcitizens emboldened by the chaos continued the unplanned, uncontrollable raids in Deluxe, taking cars up to rampage and shoot at the tower. Some of them were taken hostage, too, and the tower suffered very little damage. People got hit and killed in the streets.

The Burners fled the garage, or so she learned in her short calls down to them (mostly with Dutch), to move through a number of safe houses. Julie, to her dismay, had been right; the base had been crawling with bots when Mike returned. But they had to keep going back despite the location being compromised, because to Julie’s dismay again, Chuck had built a self-destruct switch in the basement that would destroy the entire hideout and had only told Mike about it, and on the very first raid an idiot Elite had almost triggered it, so now Dutch was trying to take it apart without starting it but they kept having to run away from riots and raids before he could finish the job. Chuck’s firewall kept foiling him.

Kane Co. Tower was in chaos, because her father was alive but in a medical coma, meaning orders were whatever people thought orders were. Employees with agendas stole or destroyed documents, grabbed money and ran. Captured Motorcitizens just disappeared. As for Chuck, she only saw him in mere, painful glimpses; she didn’t dare linger too long in his room, because if he saw her face in the crowd, as addled, as exhausted, as miserable as he was, he might stare at her; he might shout her name. She heard from those who watched him that he was clearly and obviously cracked, a dangerous maniac who shouted nonsense and tried to attack people through the clear walls of his cage.

That was possible.

Fear of him certainly permeated the halls at first, hurried whispers about the assassin, about what it could have meant, what could have happened, if he had succeeded in what he had meant to do. That fear lessened as it became clear that he was contained and as the riots started slowly decreasing in frequency.

Of course, that happened after her father woke up.

—

The first time she saw her father after he returned from his coma, she cried in his arms.

He told her everything was going to be okay.

—

The second time she saw him…

He was on the job. He had gone back to work mere hours after coming to his senses and was back in his office two days later.

At first, she thought he was… maybe he was being watched, or recorded, because he was acting like she was just another intern. She decided to cut the meeting short and come back later, when he could act more freely.

But when she said something just a little joking, making her excuse to leave, he turned on her. He whirled around and snapped, “I don’t want your smart comments, I want results, cadet!”

Julie stopped in her tracks. She said, “Sir.” Her father did not look at her like he knew her. The reddened eye in his new mask, the white plastic fused to his bone and keeping the rest of his brain in his skull, glared like the eye of a rat.

He turned his head and started speaking, in a low, growling tone she knew from when he addressed his troops; about his city, about respect, about safety. He didn't use her name. He looked at her, then again, after looking at her three times, his speech halted for a moment.

“...That’s… why this is so important,” he said, “Julie.”

He turned away again and kept talking. Quickly. His sentences stopped going anywhere in specific.

Julie was excused a few minutes later. She left, and she walked, down the hall, down five flights of stairs, into a bathroom, single-stall, empty. She locked the door and stood, staring down into the sink.

Chuck killed him, she thought. He killed my father.

She tried to unwind that thought, to soften it. He wasn't dead. He had recognized her eventually. He hadn’t meant to yell at her. He had clearly been embarrassed by his mistake, though he hadn’t admitted to making it.

She saw in her mind the video of Chuck lifting his arm, aiming, firing. Not a word. No hesitation. How his blue eyes glittered with rage when he saw he hadn’t finished the job.

She gripped the sink and began to resolutely, painstakingly plan how she was going to rescue Chuck.

—

For the next few weeks, she served coffee, recorded meetings, watched her father choke people who defied him in the hallway—in meetings, on camera, everything he did before but only in private, only with gravitas and cool and a sense of dignity—and she planned Chuck’s rescue.

It took a week just to cast him that message. When she heard his voice, she missed him terribly.

She had literally crawled inside a wall to get the right angle to throw that cast comm at Chuck, hiding in a duct, and much closer to him than he realized. She had to stay in that duct, holding her breath, creeping slowly around, for hours afterwards as security guards and the Elites tore around hunting for her. Every movement was a risk, each completely necessary; someone would figure out how she had sent the message eventually and start pinpointing the sending location. She crept, and crept, making no noise, hearing footsteps ricochet above and below her, squeezing through steel walls in a driving suit and helmet.

Three separate times, as she stood in the wall, she heard her father’s voice booming past her as he ran himself.

The first time, mere minutes after the call, she heard him above her head, echoing from floors above with the thunder in his voice. “FIND HIM!” he roared. “FIND THAT STINKING FUCKING WEASEL!”

Later, when she had barely moved a corner, maybe five or ten minutes, she heard her father stop in what she could swear was the office room right in front of her, just on the other side of the wall. 

“How have you not found him yet?” he snarled. Julie could hear someone gasp in pain. “It’s one man and he sent a clear signal through my building. We know what technology he’s using, they stole mine. Find this Burner and bring him to me or I’ll have your entire team fired and dumped in the pits outside.”

Then, when she was close to squeezing out of the wall again, once the hunt had largely died down but not the voices shouting in panic and fear, she heard him once more, from a further distance away, shouting, “No, that’s what a useless dog gets when he can’t do the one thing I trained him for.”

Not long after that, she was free. She put her suit and helmet into a dry-cleaning bag and locked it into her locker. When another intern found her crying in the bathroom, she didn’t even ask Julie any questions. Bethany just sunk down, sighed, “Me too, honestly,” and sat with her until she stopped crying.

—

Julie got away with much more than she used to. Everyone was scattered, distracted, worried about their own skin. She destroyed all footage of her running to her car and back. She hacked into tower security and left herself backdoors. She shot untraceable reassignment messages at guards sent to watch Chuck’s cell. The rescue plan she came up with, the only viable plan she could think of, was verifiably insane. But it had a chance of working, and she had promised Mike she would try.

It took over two weeks to get her plan into place, but time was on her side. People became more afraid to act as Kane continued being off. Fewer and fewer people were keeping an eye on Chuck.

But, on the other hand, time was not on her side. Kane was growing impatient with having the bait dangling but not being taken. She knew that Red, too, was out there sharpening his blades. Calls from the other Burners had slowly dwindled, and the ones that went through were short and terse; Dutch said it was chaos down there. They were all fine, he claimed, but they were incredibly busy, on the move, sleeping in their cars. When she went to check in on Chuck, by camera or sometimes, in fleeting, bold moments, in person, lingering on the balcony where he could not see her but she could see his bent, bruised form on the cold floor, each day he was surrounded with fewer guards and gawkers. But every day surely brought the hour that Kane or Red lost their patience with the stalemate closer.

—

She also had to sleep at nights.

She tried to sleep at nights. Realistically, she ended up taking power naps in the office break room, like a good intern.

In her dreams she ran frantically through white ways; white hallways, white roads. There was always a danger. Who he was changed. Chuck shot her, once. Her father threw her off a roof and she landed on the ground and kept running. Red found her and locked her in the trunk of his car. Sometimes she had no idea who he was, only that she wasn’t getting away from him.

That part was real. She wasn’t going to get away from all of this. Not now.

Just about the only decent night of sleep she found was the night she stayed over with Claire, dead of exhaustion and avoiding her now-unpredictable father, who had told her to come see him after work and then mercifully forgotten he had done so. There she fell asleep on Claire's bed after they ate dinner together, before the sun set, and suddenly awoke around midnight, feeling certain she had heard something awful, something shattering, and jolted up.

Claire, who had been watching something on a screen in front of her, hurried to shut it down. She sent her entire screen away rather than just pausing the video and so the light vanished from the cube and Julie could see nothing.

“Sorry!” Claire squeaked. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

Julie breathed through the rapid heartbeat in her throat. “Is—I heard something break.”

Claire curled in on herself a little on the other side of the bed. “No, that was just… my show. I’m sorry. I should have turned the sound off.”

There weren’t really any shows actually filmed in Deluxe, other than stunningly bad corporate propaganda films. Most actual shows were brought in illegally from outside and passed around furtively on physical chips, and that wasn’t usually Claire’s speed.

Julie didn’t really feel like questioning it, though. She swallowed against her panic. “My fault. I’ve been really jumpy.”

“I bet,” said Claire, somewhat subdued. They had had this conversation, after all, several versions of it, each a tired capitulation to how hard it was right now.

It still felt nice to be alone with Claire, with someone she knew she could trust, enjoying her tenacity, her stubbornness, her refusal to ever let the bleakness of the situation have the last word in how she felt about it.

And true to form, after a huff, the next thing Claire said was “I would be sleeping all day after the week you just pulled and I wouldn’t let Kane himself get me out of bed. How many hours did you work? Eighty? Ninety?”

“I wasn’t working every hour I was in the tower,” Julie sighed, collapsing back onto a pillow. Claire’s piles of fluffy, purple pillows all smelled like her rose and argan oil hair products, a scent that made Julie’s shoulders relax as it billowed around her.

She had always been safe with Claire. Even her father would leave and come back later if he saw she was spending time with her best friend. She was like a human lucky charm, a cloak.

“Yeah… you were also busy seeing that boy, too,” Claire sighed.

Claire was also safe to be around because her cube was relatively private. She and Julie had not become best friends accidentally; Claire’s parents were close with Kane and important in the company. Everyone approved of them being friends, which was why it was lucky they really did come to like each other so much. Because of who Claire’s parents were, her room wasn’t covered in recording devices. The regular Kane Co. spyware listened for alarming key words, which could be easily avoided with some finesse, but that was all. There were few safer places to talk and to be honest in Deluxe than Claire’s bedroom. It was in this room that Julie had first told someone she was a Burner, and Claire was the person she had told.

The little digital clock above Claire’s bed chirped midnight like a nightingale.

“Sure was.”

“He's still doing… bad, I assume.”

Julie had seen his face only once since it had been captured, and it was half-black with abuse. She had flinched and ran away, still frightened of Chuck recognizing her. “Pretty bad,” Julie agreed, eyes closed.

“Julie…”

“Yeah?”

Claire let out a heavy sigh. “I hope you make it up with him,” by which she meant, I hope you do rescue him, “but I never want to see him again.”

Julie only nodded. “I know.”

“Like, I’m serious. I always found him kind of creepy, and now I think I’d crawl up the wall to get away if he looked at me. I never want to see him in the same room as me again.”

“You won’t,” she said. “If we hang out downstairs again, it’ll just be the two of us. None of my other friends.”

“Ugh!” Clair pulled up a blank screen again and started a now-muted entertainment feed just to flip through it. Baby blue and pink flickered like fairy lights on her face in the dark. “See, but I think your other friends are cool! I just don’t want to see… him.”

“I know.”

“Julie—”

“We can hang out with the girls instead,” by which she meant, of course, the Amazons. Julie had been ambivalent to icy Foxy and her mean girls at first, but her opinion of them had increased exponentially after they really went all-in on defense of both the Burners and Motorcity after Chuck was first threatened.

“Sure, and that would be great, I’ll do that any time, but Julie,” Claire continued, speaking over another half-hearted attempt to cut her off, “Are you even sure you want to keep seeing this guy?”

Julie waited, for a few moments, with her eyes shut.

“After he… after what he did?”

Julie started speaking once and was surprised by a choking noise coming out of her throat. A hand flew up to her face; her own. In another moment, Claire’s lavender-scented, hard-tipped fingers curled around it.

“Julie.”

“I can’t leave him where he is,” Julie finally said.

“Yeah,” Claire whispered, half-certain. Then, after a sigh, “Yeah. It’s just not right.”

“I know why… he did it.”

“Yeah, I know too,” Claire responded, “you would have to be stupid to not see where he’s coming from. But personally, I never want to see his creepy face again. And if I were you, I’d be steamed at him. I’d be ready to claw his stupid eyes out. He still did what he did, even if he had some good reasons.”

“He doesn’t know…”

“I know he doesn’t know, I know he doesn’t know why what he did would hurt you, but that doesn’t change the fact that he did it! You have every right in the world to be mad at him.”

Julie was quiet. She felt Claire’s hand tucking her unruly, bed-tossed hair behind her ear.

“I am,” she said.

“That’s right you are,” Claire said, but softly. “I know you have to get him out of there, but… you don’t have to be happy with him. And… I love you like a sister, Julie, you’ve been my best friend for as long as I remember, and what I don’t want is for you to be lying to yourself. You can play cool with him and pretend you’re not bothered if you want, you can keep him in the dark and pretend you’re not mad, but don’t tell yourself that you’re not mad at him when, like, you are. You’re super mad at him.”

Julie watched Chuck shoot her father in her head a few times.

“I still have to get him out of there.”

“Uh, yeah,” scoffed Claire.

“And I…” Julie started, and faltered. She watched Chuck cry in his cell in her head, next. She watched the bots pour through the gates into Motorcity to burn homes, crush people flat under their feet.

Deep down, she knew that what she felt was wrong. There were so many people who would be alive if he had been killed years ago. Like Chuck’s mother. She had heard Chuck telling Kane that his stupid dome had killed his mother, and he was right. She did not know if it was right to mourn her father. She weighed his life on a scale against the things he had done, the lives he had ended, and the scale tipped, and tipped.

Her resolve to free Chuck strengthened in her because it felt like the only thing that was right to do, undoubtedly right. He was being hurt. She could stop it. Beyond the darkness of his cell and past the moment they exited the white wide doors of the Kane Co. Tower, however, was a wilderness; who was he, the man who might have killed her father, who had been her friend? Could she feel the same affection she had for him before? Would she be able to look at him without seeing him shooting her father? Was there any path forward but increased resentment and a widening gap inside of her, the two halves of her life like her two ribcages as the people at both ends pulled them further and further apart?

What would she say to Mike next after she watched him fully enfold and forgive Chuck again? If she watched, somehow, Chuck’s crime flowing onto Mike and sticking to him the next time she saw them together, suddenly tainting him once he refused to condemn Chuck for what he has done, how could she handle it?

All this time, she realized, Mike had been, to her, the only person who was better than this. He never stooped to the level of the enemy, he never lowered his standard to get the job done, and he pulled up everyone around him with him. He thought better of you, and that belief spurred and prodded everyone around him into being better, slowly. And she suddenly felt afraid, though she knew all of this was happening in her head, that this would be the thing that Mike’s goodness and perseverance could not drag up from below. He would not get out of this without making a concession or turning a blind eye for the sake of love, just like the rest of them.

She wasn’t sure she fully understood all these connections, and couldn’t see the whole picture in her mind, but her nervousness, her fear that Mike, who had always found a way to do it right, would not be able to navigate his best friend becoming a killer, made her very afraid she could no longer keep up loving her father as well as all the people he had hurt.

“What?” asked Claire.

Julie opened her eyes to the dark ceiling of the cube above her, felt Claire’s fingernails resting on the side of her head. “I may be the only person who can stop him from doing it again,” she whispered.

“...That shouldn’t be your job,” said Claire quietly.

“I know,” said Julie, because in occasional moments she suddenly felt how goddamn unfair all of this was and felt so overwhelmed she thought she would puke, and then she cleaned Nine Lives or found something important to shred at the office, depending on where she was, “but I’m going to do what I can anyway.”

“Girl,” sighed Claire, “I know. I’ve known you since we were, like, babies. I was there when you told me you were going to go downstairs yourself to see if the rumors about how people are treated down there were true. I was there the day you declared you were going to do something about it. I was there the day you told me about your new friends, and I couldn't sit still for a month trying to keep that in my chest for you. I was literally there every time you made the same choice, again, to do something instead of sitting back and getting comfortable. I know. It’s something I like about you. But if you let it get you killed, I’m going to be so mad at you.”

Julie felt a flush on her cheeks and a pain in her chest at Claire’s words. She wanted to believe she was driven by doing the right thing so badly. It was what had driven her on like a Hound was behind her since she was barely more than a girl. She could not sit back comfortably while people were being hurt. It was all her father and his officers and the entire machine wanted from her, and it was too much to ask. She could not. She would not. She got up every time, from her comfortable chair, out of the door, and onto the street.

She would not say to Claire that she had done the math, the same calculations that had her father slowly slipping off the scale, and had already decided that she did not matter as much as Motorcity.

“I’m not going to get killed,” she said. “I’ve got nine lives.”

“Oooh, I am about to hate you right now,” said Claire, and Julie laughed as Claire snatched her nails together in the air and drew herself up to chew her out.

—

Original Note:

Initially I had this chapter and the next one together as one big chapter, but decided to cut off the ending scene and make it its own chapter when this one expanded in editing. This build-up chapter only became its own entity like an hour before I posted it, and I strongly considered titling it 'The Only Person Having A Worse Time Than Chuck', though tbh their bad times are incredibly distinct and hard to compare.

—

Return to Navigation

The Cat Came Back

In the end, it was three button presses.

The first one suddenly dropped the little ‘private’ space under Chuck’s cell down three floors. The second one disintegrated the walls. The third opened Nine Lives’ passenger door.

Dazed, bleeding from where his teeth had just split his lip, limp as a fallen scarecrow on the ground, Chuck said, “Holy shit.”

This was an understandable reaction. It had taken weeks of work to build the backdoor pathways that would allow her to hack into and break his containment cell in the push of a button. But if there were consoles that allowed a person to do it, there were codes that allowed a person to do it themselves. Now it was as though someone had waved a magic wand and turned his chains into soap bubbles, leaving him blinking on the floor of an office building.

It was also a slow reaction. “Three seconds,” Julie responded, the warper in her helmet altering the sound of her voice beyond recognition.

Chuck scrambled to get in. Alarms blared into sudden life around them as he threw himself past the passenger side door. Julie jammed a crude but effective DDOS module into the cuff on Chuck’s nearest wrist and it sprang off, clattering onto the floor of her car like a spider sprayed directly with insecticide.

“Yes, yes, aaaaaAAAAAAAAAUGH,” screamed Chuck, because three seconds were up and Julie had floored the gas pedal.

Her route out of the middle of Kane Co. Tower had also been planned down to the moment for the least stupid path through the building. That meticulous, exact race against time, which gave her at best a coin flip chance at getting them both out alive, began now.

She cloaked Nine Lives the moment after the punched the gas, making it invisible to the human eye. Some bots would still be able to see her and everyone she passed would certainly hear her, but it would reduce the amount of fire she was worried about enough to be worth the drain on the battery. Then she accelerated to speeds definitely dangerous for driving inside a corporate office and wiggled the wheel to start confusing her pursuers about her exact location immediately.

Chuck screamed and Julie shoved a muffin in his face. He needed the calories, she needed him to not distract her with ear-splitting screeching. (And the noise he made when he realized that after a month of prison slop he had a blueberry jalapeno muffin shoved upon him by the hand of fate was in itself a reward.)

The first rev up was easy. She had dropped him three stories down to an open ballroom floor only used for social events; the quick turn down the wide ballroom stairs was easy, too. It got harder from there.

She was too high up to slam right out of the chic glass wall overlooking the ballroom. Mike would have tried it, and maybe made it, but Nine Lives wasn’t built for the same stunts Mutt was. Holding her breath she barrelled toward the wall, wrenched the wheel right at the last possible second and hit a support pillar she had identified as her best target weeks ago.

It crumpled, then buckled, then tilted, and then slammed onto the ground. Julie smashed the button that manually turned the airbags off right before Nine Lives fell through the floor.

Julie stepped on the gas before she even hit the ground and started roaring through the next floor in the opposite direction. This floor had people in it and none of them had a clue what was going on. Julie blasted through panoptic workspaces and water coolers as shouts and bursts of light flashed around them until she finally hit a partition wall she knew was structurally unsound and appeared again in a lobby that had stairs running down to the floor below.

Chuck started screaming obscenities as she popped a metal rail off of its support and coasted down the stairs in a shower of sparks. Julie popped open her glovebox and pulled out another muffin for him.

Once she had torn down those stairs, swerved left, and smashed open the glass doors around a large enough elevator to fit a car (her father favored lots of wide, flat movers that could accommodate a large crowd at once), she rolled down her window and calmly hit the button beside marked ‘Floor One.’ 

The door closed without letting anybody else in. Unfortunately, about a half-dozen Elites had already been in there.

Rolling down the window had dropped the cloak on her car. With a sigh, Julie popped open the driver’s side door and grabbed her boomerang.

Fully clad in a yellow cycling suit and her face covered in the mirrored visor of the voice-changing, cat-eared helmet, Julie wasn’t afraid of being recognized. She was afraid of being captured, then exposed, then recognized, so she was going to have to make this both quick and thorough.

“HOLY FUCKING SHIT,” said a man readying his plasma gun in a completely warrented responce to one of the Burners’ cars smashing into an elevator in Kane Co. headquarters (despite them otherwise using said elevator as intended). Julie leapt out of the diver’s seat door and slammed bodily into him to knock him down and then slashed her boomerang at the face of the man behind him.

She had to surge forward with the momentum and slam into the glass wall on the other end of the elevator, pinning the Elite’s throat between the wall and her weapon. Shots rang; she ducked. Glass shards rained down on her neck. She grabbed the Elite above her and threw him to the side. Not far, she wasn’t that strong, but enough that she could spring over him and jump at the next one, slamming the sparking end of her boomerang into his chest. He jolted as electricity surged into him.

One of them grabbed her other arm behind her but she kept falling forward. She whirled around and shocked him. He collapsed but the one behind her grabbed at her neck, his polyfiber gauntlet squeaking on her leather suit. Then she heard shots again, felt the sizzle of plasma in her throat, and suddenly she was free.

She still hit the ground. She gasped, forced herself through the dizziness and pain of being choked, then leapt forward, low, aiming the sharp steel cat eats on her helmet at the nearest pair of legs she saw. He hadn’t been expecting her down there and she easily knocked him over, wrenching around from under his flailing legs to slam the boomering into his back. Like the last one, he jolted, then went still.

The shock wouldn’t kill them—unless one of them had a heart condition she couldn’t possibly know about, which would be awful, but threw off her calculations too badly if she took it seriously—she had to have at least three on the ground now, but that was only half of them. She reached up, grasped the shirt of one that was facing the opposite way, and pulled him to the ground to ram her boomerang in his face.

She jumped up again and found herself face to face with another Elite; one she had already hit, judging from the burns on his armor, but not disabled properly. She raised her arm to strike but he was so close he was going to get to her first no matter what—and then he glowed blue, and then he dropped.

She stared at his fallen body. She heard Chuck gasping.

She looked to him and, to her immense, irrational relief, saw that he was holding his slingshot in his hand. Tears were streaming down his face. All of the Elites were on the floor, unmoving.

Looking down again, it actually looked like they had shared the task of knocking out the Elites evenly. Julie sighed, stepped over the fallen bodies, eased herself into the driver side, and clicked the door shut.

“Ow,” she said.

“Ooohhhhhhhh my god JU—”

“Shut up, Thunder,” she barked.

Chuck recoiled, covering his face.

“You nerd,” she told him, the helmet turning her voice into a baritone growl. She reached forward, not really thinking, and touched his shoulder, lightly.

He shuddered, it seemed, and covered his face. “Sorry—Nine Lives.”

“Get a muffin,” she said.

The elevator doors cheerfully chimed and a recorded voice said, “Floor five!”

“Five?” she snapped at it, but unfortunately, it made sense. There had already been people in the elevator. They had already chosen a floor before Julie came in and chose the first floor.

She had not planned for the fifth floor.

“I can hack into—”

“You do not have time,” Julie informed him. The doors started opening. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Five. What’s floor five?”

“POOL,” screamed Chuck, reminding her in that moment that the Company had a fucking private pool and spa.

“You are kidding me,” snapped Julie as the elevator doors opened onto the heavenly white glow of a private resort, pouring steam and calming music into the carnage of the elevator.

Several aged executives sitting in a hot tub turned and stared.

Julie floored it.

She realized as she crunched through a little bit of wall and then swerved onto the very wet tile around the pool that she had forgotten, in her panic, to turn the cloaking device back on. Nine Lives skidded and slid through the pool like a giant had thrown it, completely visible, emitting screams every moment of its swerving rampage. Swimmers scrambled out of the way and she rammed through drywall into a private spa and just completely destroyed it.

Nine Lives was taking hits she had not planned on by pushing through the cute little built-ins that separated spas and changing rooms from each other on the pool floor, but there was absolutely nothing else she could do but go forward. Jumping from five floors was manageable; from this direction, she would be exiting from the south side of the building, and that meant if she got her angle right, she could land on a three story building outside and jump from there.

It was possible. She just had to get through the wall. But she hadn’t planned on being on floor five. She had no idea if the outer wall she was about to run into was a tangle of wires that would fry them immediately, solid steel, or a little slip of glass she would burst through like a soap bubble.

“BUCKLE,” she screamed at Chuck as she demolished the men’s showers in bursts of tiles. “BUCKLE UP RIGHT—”

Then she hit the wall, and she didn’t know why did she didn’t think of this, but it was mostly pipes.

If those pipes had been the old, sturdy, reliable copper pipers of Motorcity, that would have been it for both of them. But Deluxe used PVC pipes. They shattered like a tower of tinker toys smashed by a jealous older cousin and then a battered but yowling Nine Lives was soaring in the air over Deluxe.

Chuck screamed in her ear. Julie could see her own helmet-covered face reflected in the cameras in the sky. She punched her cloaking device and every single one of those cameras went as clear as glass, and the beautiful, blue sky above shone all around her, completely free.

She landed on that three-story building beautifully, dead square in the middle of the roof, drove off of it, hit a cube, drove off of that, and touched the road in ten seconds flat. Nine Lives’ engine roared in delight and she ran.

Bots poured out of the smoking building behind them, but she was invisible and moving fast. In the time it took them to shift to seeing infrared or electrical pulses, she was off of main and coasting south. They tried to pursue, but she revved Nine Lives to speeds that usually even Mutt didn’t do. She knew that none of those bots could keep up for long.

Kane’s dome was massive—the entire city and outlying area, including a huge chunk of the lake, had been covered up. Traversing it seemed to take mere minutes as she forced Nine Lives to tear over the slippery steel at maximum speed and shouted at Chuck to roll down the passenger window and snipe the bots. He did, and with phenomenal accuracy, one hand going white in its grip on the plush seat as he caused eruptions in their wake. Julie had her hands full with the wheel as they soared and sometimes skidded down the dome to the golden void that now drew closer and closer.

They bounced into the air, rattled, and landed again when they finally ran over the edge. Steel turned into grass. Real grass, gold and green and tall, headed with white puffs of grain or green burrs, speckled all around with blue and yellow and red and violet wildflowers.

Julie was forced to step on the brakes and reduce her speed significantly as the untamed grasses pulled at her wheels. There were very few real roads heading into or out of Deluxe anymore, and none in the direction she was going. She tore southbound, off road, and disappeared into the rolling wilderness, the calls of amused crows and grackles rising around her. They billowed into the air in their clouds, teasing and laughing as the car hurried by.

“Oh my god,” said Chuck weakly, twisted around in his seat and looking out of the window. “Finally. They stopped.”

“They won’t follow us,” Julie told him. “None of his bots work outside of the city, so they’re programmed to stop at the edge of the dome. We can easily outpace them even if he does send them out to run out their battery in the prairie, and good riddance if they do.”

“Julie, oh my God,” said Chuck, shaking as he turned around in his seat, covering his face with his hands. “Oh my God. Oh my God. You saved my life.”

“You’re okay.”

“I’m free.”

“Reach over,” Julie said, “And undo the clasp on my neck. It’s hot out here, I want this fricking helmet off.”

Chuck fumbled it a few times—his arms were shaking, noticeably thinner than they had been, and his wrists were red and scarred from the cuffs. But after a few tries he popped the latch, then pulled the helmet off her head for her, and as he was doing that Julie hit the buttons to roll back the roof of the car and so when her head was free the warm and hay-scented wind of the prairie poured over her and set her hair streaming behind her.

Chuck laughed when he felt the wind gust into the car; he laughed and cried at the same time. Julie glanced at his face, also revealed by the wind that pushed back his hair, covered in bruises and cuts from being struck repeatedly while he waited in his cell for her rescue, and she remembered, with a stab in her heart, how much she loved him. Why she had fought for him. Why he had even been in that cell in the first place; because he was willing to risk his life and dirty his own hands for what he was sure was right.

She came to a tremendous conclusion instantly, and decided in the next instant that she was completely correct about it and wasn’t changing her mind.

It was the only way forward. After everything that happened, it was the only thing she could do.

“Chuck,” she said, “Rest. Roll the seat back. Close your eyes. I'm taking us to Indy.”

“The underway,” he realized. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s probably the best way back.”

“There’s nowhere we can enter the dome safely after that,” she said. “We’ll take our time, let things cool off a little, and take the underground road directly into Motorcity tomorrow. I’m going to get us to the Brickyard so we can fill up the tank and sleep it off. But we’ve got a bit of a drive before we reach a real road and I have to take it slow before then so I don’t burst a tire out here.”

“Julie,” he said. “Julie. I… I owe you my life. I can’t… I can’t thank you enough.”

Julie took a breath in and breathed out slowly.

“Chuck,” she said, and hesitated again, then thought about—thought about her life if she didn’t do this. If she had to go back to pretending, balancing two lives, watching what she said every moment of every day, and now with her father raging, and Chuck—

—Willing to die trying again.

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

—

Original Note:

Now, old Mr. Johnson had troubles of his own /
He had a yellow cat that wouldn't leave his home!

I think a lot about what the rest of the continent looks like in the world of Motorcity. How many other metropolises or even towns still stand? What do they look like? Kane’s dystopia is localized, but it really seems like a larger federal government isn’t a problem for him, or else it’s so corrupt that they don’t care about what he’s doing. It always felt to me like there is no more big imperial nation left and no real supply chain and everything is regional or local instead.

These two will be going back with some help from outside; I wanted to set that outside stop mentioned above at the Canadian border, and then I was considering Chicago, but considering we’re going underground, the amount of water in both places made it feel unpleasantly unrealistic. Then I thought, how about Indianapolis, I guess? And then I thought, this is a show about fucking car racing, of course Indy is the place I should have them go, why did I not think this from the start.

Prairie grass does not CURRENTLY grow all the way up to Michigan; give enough post-apolocalypse and consider how huge the dome is, and I think them driving right into a beautiful post-american field of tallgrass and flowers is more or less as unrealistic as the rest of Motorcity.

Lots of A/Ns this chapter, but, to anyone wondering, the answer to the question 'how did Julie get Nine Lives into the building to begin with?’ The answer is ‘she made it invisible, took it into the delivery garage in the back, and up the same elevator once the coast was clear.’ She wasn’t lying when she told Mike she thought it was impossible for him. She figured only Nine Lives could do it. The answer to the question ‘realistically, should this have worked?’ is ‘Fortunately, this is a Motorcity fanfiction.’

—

Return to Navigation

When I Dream about the Moonlight on the Wabash

“This is—not the right time,” said Julie to herself, putting a hand on her forehead and feeling a bead of sweat, brought by the warm air of the prairie that now ran past them, disperse on the pad of her finger.

Tangled grasses behind them sprang right back up from Nine Live’s tread like water is disturbed by a boat passing but rapidly returns to placidity; to Chuck she said “I know this is not the right time, but—”

Chuck, who had only been free for minutes after being imprisoned for a month, curled into the plush passenger seat. His bony, intense face was exposed as the wind blew his cornsilk hair around. Through heavy breaths rocked by the adrenaline of the escape, he replied, “Just tell me.”

“Chuck—”

“Is someone dead? Just tell me who’s dead.”

“No one’s dead.”

“Okay. Oh thank God. Good.”

Julie smiled joylessly as she gripped the wheel. A pair of confused mayflies were swept into Nine Lives, turned around their heads, and hurried back out again to where the wind took them. Clouds wandered in flocks overhead.

“What is it, Julie?” asked Chuck, rubbing his raw, red wrists, just released from heavy cuffs. His face and wrists seemed to have endured the most abuse; Julie had no doubt she wouldn’t like the look of his back or torso, though, where she knew he had been repeatedly hit, kicked, and stomped on.

“Chuck,” she said, her voice barely escaping her throat, “I’m really, really mad at you.”

“Oh,” he responded. He accepted that immediately. He assumed it was fair. She knew he would. A month of being exposed to public abuse in prison, but he took her anger without question. “Why?”

“Because you tried to kill my dad.”

Julie’s lips started buzzing after she said that. Her face felt a little numb, but in her stomach, there was an incredible stillness. It was like all of the butterflies had just flown out.

“What?” asked Chuck.

She breathed out a heavy, warm breath. “Julie Kapulsky is a code name,” she said. “I used it at work and then used it in Motorcity as well. My legal name is Julia Maria Kane. Kane is my father.

“He wanted my legal identity to be secret. He thought it would put me in danger if people knew I was his daughter. He was right about that, at least. Even if I had stayed in Deluxe like he wanted, there are enough people who would try to use me to get to him, either to get into his good graces or to hurt him. And since I took a very different direction with my life it felt even more important to keep it a secret.

“But I don’t know if it’s going to help me to keep it secret much longer.” Julie looked straight forward through Chuck’s listening silence. “I don’t know if I can keep it secret much longer. Going back and forth every day is hard. Making sure I never slip up and say too much is hard. Using a fake name is hard. Coming up with new excuses is hard. It’s hard to… do both. And with my father acting how he is now… sometimes… sometimes he doesn’t realize he’s talking to me. Sometimes he’s not sure what’s going on. I think he’s going to slip up soon and call me by my name in front of other people. Or he’s going to notice something I’m hiding. Or he’s going to mention me on a broadcast because he’s forgotten that he shouldn’t. I don’t know if keeping my own secrets is going to be my choice much longer.

“I think I have to tell the Burners,” she said, “because I don’t know how else… because this is going to get worse. He’s… worse. He’s doing things in public that he never did in public before. In meetings. With the cameras on. He’s going to hurt people. It’s going to cause more violence. Someone is going to try to kill him again. And I can’t explain to you all… why this is so hard for me if I don’t just… tell you the truth. It’s hard for me because I know him. Because I need—I want some way to end this without him dying. I don’t know what that way is. Especially not now, that he’s… changed.

“You did that,” she said, feeling a stab in her gut as she said so. “You tried to kill him, and now he’s different. And I’m really mad at you.

“Even though you’re right. That’s probably… what we have to do. He hurts someone every day. He’s killed so many people. You’re right. We probably have to kill my dad. But I’m still just… really mad at you.”

Julie knew she hadn’t said what she really needed to say, but she didn’t know how. There was no way to explain how hard this was. That he was her father. He was her enemy. She knew they were better off without him. She wanted him stopped at all costs. She was so angry. He wasn't the same and she was mourning him already.

And she didn’t hate Chuck. He was her friend and she loved him.

The grass of the prairies grew tall and the stalks of wildflowers and wild grains wove around each other; Nine Lives had to roll slowly to work through the weeds. Butterflies, little white butterflies, flew around them in drifting clouds.

Here and there, the ruins of the places that used to exist stood abandoned, looted long ago. On the horizon, Julie saw some deer.

“I’m so sorry,” said Chuck.

Julie sighed.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I knew.”

“But you were right,” she responded. “That’s what we have to do. I can’t believe it, but… it’s the only way. He won’t stop.”

“No,” said Chuck. “No. We’re going to find some other way. We’ve got to find some other way.”

“He has tried to kill us all,” Julie said, voice dead, “several times. He has tried to gas and poison and crush the entire city beneath him. A hundred thousand people. There’s no way.”

“Well, we’re going to find a way,” Chuck repeated, slightly frantic. “I don’t—I can't believe this. Julie. This is why your intel is so good.”

“This is why my intel is so good.”

“I can see it.”

Julie glanced rapidly at him. “What?”

“Your—” Chuck swallowed, then visibly lost his nerve. “You—uh—” His thin, jittery hands rapidly framed his face and flitted away. “You—”

“You think I look like him.”

“I’ve seen him up close and personal a lot recently and I haven’t slept much.”

“I think so too,” she sighed. “At first, I couldn’t believe no one saw it on me. I guess because I’m a girl.”

“Do you—I—Julie.”

The sadness in Chuck’s tone made her heart clench. “What?”

“Oh jeeze—and you snap like him—”

“Chuck,” she said, and closed her eyes for a moment, feeling the uneven bumps and rolls of the prairie under her wheels. “Yeah. I’m never more like him than when I’m angry.”

Chuck was silent again, for a while. She wondered if he was accepting all of this as true. She wondered if he couldn’t quite believe it. She wondered if he was angry at her, too, for keeping a secret like that.

“...We’re going to find a way,” Chuck finally said, softly. “We have to. I can’t do that to you.”

“I don’t know if there is a way.”

“There has got to be some way. There has got to be some way to fix this without… without becoming… without doing things that way. Mike will know. He’ll somehow find some way to fix all of this without anyone dying. I don’t—I can’t think that way. I think about dying every day. I didn’t think too much about killing someone because I just think about death all the time. I rigged up the hideout so that I would be able to take it down in a suicide blast if I had to. Or wanted to. But I want to find some way out of being that guy.

“I wish I hadn’t done it. Even if you think I was right. Because I can’t… even with everything he’s done, I can’t hurt you like that. We have to find some way to do this without hurting each other and if only Mike is a… a good enough person to figure it out, then we just have to… he’ll figure it out and I’ll just do what he says.”

Julie swallowed. Her eyes had started stinging, not just at Chuck’s constant oblique reminders that he was his own worst enemy, that no one had gotten closer to ending Charlie Haynes’ life than Charlie Haynes had, but at how deeply, sincerely he just wanted for everything to be okay. And somehow, despite the fact that all he wanted was to be safe and comfortable and happy, here he was.

 All that, and he wasn’t even mad at her in return. He sat curled up on himself in the corner of her seat, a crooked bundle of limbs around a sopping wet mass of regrets.

“I was so worried about you,” she said, holding back a tremor in her voice.

“I’m sorry.”

“I was so mad about you and I was so worried about you. I felt like my heart was split in two.”

“I’m sorry, Julie.”

Julie sniffed, put a hand on her face, and fought back the tears.

“I’m sorry, too,” she whispered. “I could have told you.”

“You had to—”

“And I’m sorry for taking that stupid fucking video,” she said, her voice now starting to break. “That video of you and Mike.”

“Do you think I care about that anymore?”

“I still shouldn't have done it,” she said. “Chuck, I get—scared—I know how many times you almost died. I know you tried to kill yourself. I’m sorry. I think about losing you guys at night. I take the videos… just in case. Just in case I do lose you, then I can go back and see you happy. You and Mike looked so happy. That was why I took that video. You looked so happy and I wanted to keep that.”

Chuck didn’t respond for a while. When she looked over, she saw him looking out over the waves of grass, the wind showing her both of his reddened eyes, his flushed cheeks.

“...I’m sorry,” Julie said again. “This was the wrong time.”

“No,” said Chuck, unusually calm. “It’s a month late. You should have been able to sock me right after it happened.”

Julie felt a smile twitch on one half of her face. “I hated seeing it in the sky.”

“Yeah I—yeah, that was broadcast live. What did you do?”

“Ran to Nine Lives to try to rescue you,” she said. “I was too late. I think the only reason no one caught me was that everything just blew up after. I’m just not going to get away with it forever. The evidence is there, now, if someone smart enough and with good enough clearance goes hunting for it.”

“Then… it probably is time to tell everyone,” Chuck said, “The Burners, I mean. If you think…”

“Yes,” she said. “It is now. I won’t make you try to keep that a secret from Mike. That’s not fair. I kind of… I’ve wondered before if Mike already knows. But it’s time to tell everyone.” She felt a smile on her face. “That was part of the reason I told you, so that I couldn’t chicken out later.”

“You got yourself good, Julie.”

“And so that I could explain why I’m so mad at you.”

“I don’t blame you! Fuck, your dad. I don’t even have a dad, I can’t imagine.”

Julie laughed, then stopped herself. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“I’m serious, Julie,” Chuck interrupted, voice low. “We’ll find another way. We have to. I know it seems impossible, but we have to try. There has got to be a way to save Motorcity without ruining your life.”

Julie looked out to the distance, torn between two things to say. Because she did believe, as she watched yellow clouds rolling over the unbounded horizon, that some people’s lives were going to be ruined by them improving the world no matter what, and if it was her life, she was just going to have to suck it up and deal with it. But the allure of hope was for a moment so strong she couldn’t fully accept that firm voice of self-denial in her heart, as easy as it would have been to surrender, and she thought it was because it was Chuck who was saying it.

If even Chuck thought they could make it…

Nine Lives interrupted her hesitation by mewling unhappily. Julie looked down and saw there was an alert on her gas gauge.

“I… don’t think we’re making it to Indy, Jules.”

“We’ll be fine,” she replied, slowly pushing down on the brake. “I didn’t plan on getting there on one tank, not after all the revving and swerving I had to do to get out of Deluxe. I have some canisters in the back. We’ll take a breath, get her filled up, and then get back on the way.”

“We should be pretty close to the highway,” Chuck said, leaning forward as the car slowly ground to a stop, “Not that I… can tell the difference between one patch of grass and the next.”

“If it still stands, yeah, we’re not far.” Only a few roads actually went into Deluxe any more, all controlled by Kane’s bots for miles out. The highway that once led to Indy had been blasted up outside of the city, but if you drove far enough, you found it eventually. “We’re going the right way, and I’ve been watching the signs that still stand as we go. We’ll make it.”

“I trust you.”

“Even if my angle is a little off, we’ll hit the Wabash no matter what and we’ll be able to recalculate from there,” she sighed, popping her door open and pulling the keys out of Nine Lives. “Okay, stretch out for a bit.”

“Oh, I will be so happy to stretch out for a bit,” agreed Chuck, and then pulled his gangly limbs out of the rather small passenger side door much like a tarantula shimmying out of its old skin.

Julie grabbed her boomerang and set the electricity to run along the inside edge, then used it like a machete to cut her way through the thick, entwined prairie grasses. A dozen kinds of glass-winged flies and shining beetles and spotted butterflies rose up around her as she moved. “Oh, yeah; I have a change of clothes for you in the trunk, too.”

“Ohhhhh I love you so much Julie,” Chuck responded in a rush. She snorted. “Seriously, I guess at some point while I was pumped full of drugs, an event which happened several times, I decided I was going to just rot in my real clothes instead of changing into some Deluxe shit but at this point I am majorly regretting it. How do you have some of my clothes?”

“Jacob’s,” she admitted, “Some of Jacob’s old stuff. But it’ll fit you, it’s oversize. It doesn’t smell like sauerkraut, I washed it.”

“Why do you have Jacob’s clothes, then?”

“He saw me punching the back of my car one time because I thought I had tampons in the back but I had run out and didn’t have time to go get some more,” she sighed. “Since then he’s just been giving me supplies. The back of Nine Lives is like a soup kitchen right now. He got me clothes that fit me, too, I guess the thought for the old flannels was winter wear, or something.”

“Well, I’ll take it, even if it does smell like sauerkraut.”

It did look like a soup kitchen in the back of Nine Lives; completely full, well-organized, prepped to provide for a family of four for one week comfortably or two in a survival situation. Most of the tools and rations were stuffed in the tire compartment (along with a spare tire, obviously). Jugs of water and cans of preserved food were neatly organized in the back, and the stacks of nicely folded clothing laid in a thin wire rack near the front.

Chuck picked out the biggest shirt and jeans he could find as Julie got the spare canisters of gas out. (He sniffed them, said, “hot sauce”, then, “I can deal with hot sauce” as he went back in for socks.) She went to one side to fill up the tank, and he went to the other to change.

Julie popped the tank open, which caused a reflexive chirrup from a chip embedded nearby—purely to make a little noise in just this situation, as the rest of the car was powered down. As she worked, Chuck said, “What should I do with the old stuff?”

Julie wrinkled her nose. “Bury it. It'll stink up my car.”

“I’ll stink up your car, if I don’t get to bathe.”

“We’ll bargain for a full night at the Brickyard before heading out. You can hit a shower there.”

“What are you going to pay them with?”

Julie resisted the urge to pop her head up and glare at him, as he might be naked. “Did you just see the back of my car?”

“Dude, the Brickyard is a whole civilization. They don’t need rations.”

“What they don’t have is the plastic or polyfiber materials that make the packages that hold those rations. They don’t really have… industry. It’ll be fine, Chuck.”

Chuck sighed. Julie popped the fuel door shut again and gathered the empty canisters up to put them back into the back. “You changed?”

“Yeah, I’m decent,” he sighed, somewhat sarcastically. Julie replaced the empty canisters and pulled out water, a first aid kit, and a change of clothes for herself and went to join him.

The worn flannel top and old gray jeans weren’t a perfect fit, but Chuck didn’t look awful. As she turned the corner Julie watched him find one of Jacob’s hairbinders in a pocket of the flannel shirt, whisper “score,” and start tying back his straggly, greasy hair.

“Were you bathing?”

“Not really,” he sighed, “the compartment had a shit chemical shower that kept me from actively growing mold, but that’s about it. I would have if I could have.”

“You hurt anywhere?”

“Bruised, but that’s about it, I think,” he said, apparently not counting his raw wrists and recently-broken nose. “And I just onced myself over while changing and flicked off some hopeful ticks, so you don’t have to pester me with the first aid kit about it.”

“I’m going to pester you to bandage me,” she told him. “You were being a passenger princess while I bodily wrestled down a half-dozen Elites.”

“Oh, shit,” Chuck startled, and turned to her. “Sorry, Julie.”

“It’s okay. Listen, I don’t think anyone got me too bad, but I feel like I was run over. I am going to get the suit off and have you check—”

“That’s fine, I can do that.”

Julie felt a moment of hesitation, because all of her friends, while overall good people, had flaws, and one of Chuck’s flaws was an embedded, well-intentioned, never fully uprooted conviction that women weren’t quite the same type of humans as men. He was usually normal around girls, but then, out of the blue, he said something that just dropped her jaw. She was not particularly worried about him seeing her undressed, but she had assumed he would overact about the suggestion. “Alright,” she said, and acted cool as she began unzipping the cycling suit.

She waited with only lightly tingling nerves as Chuck anxiously applied pain-relieving gel to her back and applied a patch to a slash she didn’t remember getting—it must have been cut with something hot, because it came sutured, like a slash of skin taken away from her. They both discovered little cuts and scrapes from glass or masonry as they patched themselves up. After fifteen minutes of that, they were sitting down, changed into new clothes, leaning against Nine Lives, watching the grasses move.

“You almost wish you could stay,” said Chuck.

Julie watched a flock of geese pass by overhead before saying anything. “It’s nice.”

“It’s… peaceful. It’s almost eerie to see the world like this. None of…”

“It reminds you that it doesn’t have to be this way,” Julie said quietly.

“Yeah. No war. No people to cause the war. No violence.”

“There are plenty of people here,” she corrected. “There are, like, five native nations just outside of Deluxe. We’re in the middle of the Miami Nation right now. They’re here. They're fine. They’re just not… killing each other in cyber hellscapes.”

Chuck breathed out. “Yeah,” he said, and then, “Yeah. It just doesn’t… have to be this way.”

“I would say it reminds you what you’re fighting for,” Julise said, struggling with the feeling as she tried to express it, “but that’s not quite it, right?”

“Not exactly,” Chuck agreed.

“It’s more like… it makes the fight feel ridiculous,” she said, and then they were both silent for quite a long time, watching the prairie wave in the wind, and birds in migratory patterns above, followed by a pair of dancing, closely circling hawks.

—

They reached the Brickyard, formerly the home of the Indianapolis 500 and now home to the Indianapolis 5000, a marathon where warriors contended for the rule of the accompanying feudal state (currently, the title of Grand Cobra was held by Marcellus Andretti IV), when evening had turned the sky above the prairie into a slow, saffron, burning explosion, bands of crimson and salmon and gold reaching from the setting sun on one side to the pale moon on the other. 

There were a couple disconnected towns in what used to be Indianapolis. They were usually icy and often hostile to each other, sometimes at all-out war. The Brickyard was the main one that Motorcity had any track with; the other fractured city-states traded with Deluxe.

The Pit Snakes, who were something of a gang and something of the communal voice of the Brickyard, were good on their word when they gave it but rowdy and sometimes dangerous if they wouldn't. They also tended to be a touch traditional in their social values, ostensibly owed to their heritage as a gentleman’s sport. It wasn’t a great idea to stay there overnight as a single woman, so the second they pulled up Chuck and Julie started acting like a couple without saying a word about it. Chuck held an arm loosely around Julie’s waist, Julie looked up at Chuck before she said anything as she bartered for a garage for Nine Loves, a pass to use the tunnel back, and a bed and showers for them—the barbeque was communal, so there were no worries about food.

Of course, getting a few of those communal plates of venison sausage, heirloom potatoes, and very big pork cutlet sandwiches meant that the Snakes were going to harass them friendly-like for news from Detroit, which was what they all called Motorcity (they called Deluxe ‘Deluxe’ or ‘De-yucks,’ depending). That meant that Chuck and Julie really only got so far into dinner before they got inevitably to the fact that Chuck had shot Kane in the head.

The general reaction to this from the Snakes was ‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’ Julie’s bartered goods were given back to her and they could not stop being given little things all evening long. A cooler of beers was unburied and Chuck received increasingly violent toasts for an hour. By the time the pit fires were burning low and the stars were glittering above Chuck had gotten the many-times-repeated story down to two terse sentences and Julie’s cheeks and fingers hurt from clutching the crook of his elbow and smiling in a friendly and feminine way.

Stuffed full and exhausted from talking, they finally rolled themselves into showers, changed, and then locked themselves firmly into the trailer they had been loaned for the night, one of a thousand cluttered into the Pit Snakes’ power base. Julie collapsed onto her back on the bed, finally and happily resting into an expression of blank annoyance, as Chuck nervously went around testing the manual locks on all the windows.

“I think that’s as good as it gets, Chuck,” she sighed.

“Sorry. I just hate having to do it all analog.”

“They don’t have anything digital at all. The Snakes don’t use any technology that can’t be powered by diesel or coal. There’s no bots and nothing to hack the… the windows with because there’s nothing to hack.”

“I know. I know,” he grumbled, still standing cross-armed at the window. When he finally turned to look at her, slouched, he paused for a moment, then said, “Geeze, could they give us a smaller bed?”

She snorted. “It squeaks, too.”

“Gross.”

“As far as they know, we’re glad to just cuddle up.”

“Ugh. Sorry for looming behind you all night.”

“It was the smartest thing to do,” Julie admitted. “Even with you looming, some of those mullet guys were giving me looks I really didn’t like.”

“It’s creepy,” said Chuck. “They act so… nice and welcoming and friendly, and I knew I was perfectly safe for me, but for you and half of anyone who could come here it isn’t. It’s weird.”

Julie bit her tongue on Like you’re one to talk, because she knew his heart was in the right place, and because she was too tired to go into it. Some old, traditional chauvinism lived on in Deluxe too, and Chuck was one of the worst examples she knew (out of people she liked) for treating women like aliens once he found them attractive. He didn’t know when to quit, either. And he didn’t exactly do that to his actual boyfriend.

She had wondered but never asked if Chuck’s pursuits were just a display, a nervous smokescreen around his real relationship with Mike. But that seemed… tactical in a way she couldn’t see from either of them. Mike didn’t do the same thing. Mike acted cordial and platonic with everyone, as far as she had ever seen. Even with Chuck, really. He kept his private matters to private rooms, sometimes to his own detriment.

“Mike was going crazy waiting on me to get you,” she said quietly, her eyes closed as exhaustion swept over her. God, she had started this morning at dawn in Deluxe, and here she was hundreds of miles away and covered in contusions. “But you know what’s funny?”

“What?”

“I knew he was going crazy about you, but he hardly ever spoke about you. I knew because of how he dodged the subject, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Chuck, a smile in his voice. “He does that.”

“He would ask, ‘how are you getting on, Jules?’ ‘You okay, Jules?’ ‘We miss you down here.’ Thirty second conversations, and then he would hang up. He couldn’t ask about you, so he just… shoved that all into worrying about me.”

“I’m sure he really was worried about you.”

“Oh,” Julie said, opening her eyes, seeing Chuck still standing across the small room, looking down at her. “Yeah, I didn’t think that was fake, or something. I just find it cute how he has to run around his own feelings like that. I snapped at him at the time, but whenever I ended the call, I…”

She felt warm about it, in her chest. The echo of his voice went with her, softening and dimming the hard light of the halls in Deluxe for a while. “...I was glad for it.”

“Hey,” said Chuck, almost in a whisper, picking at his shirt with one hand, “Do you… do you like Mike?”

In Julie’s stomach, for a moment, she felt the comfortable, warm, cozy feeling that spending time with Mike always made her feel. A feeling like a warm bath, a quiet room, the soft glow of a television.

Julie sat up on the bed. “Um,” she said.

Chuck looked at her, for a second, then turned to the side. In the dim light, with shadows cast on his face, all the leftover bruises from a month of being handled by Kane. Co. security were sharp and dark on his face. His broken nose cast a crooked shadow. “I kind of thought you might,” he said, “for a while.”

Julie suddenly couldn’t sort her thoughts in her head. “I,” she stumbled. “Um. I like him a lot. Obviously. He’s my… one of my best friends. But…”

“...You can tell me the truth,” Chuck said quietly. “I’m not going to… whatever you think I’m going to do.”

Julie paused, then pitched her head forward into her hand and sighed. She gathered herself as she pulled her fingers down her face. “I don’t know,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I really don’t know,” she admitted, feeling an embarrassing burn on her cheeks. “I’ve… wondered that before, but I don’t know how I’d know. I’ve never really liked anyone before. Like that. I don’t think about that thing much. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to feel like. And I don’t know if what I do feel around Mike is… that.”

“What do you feel around him?”

Julie felt that lovely and comfortable feeling again, and knew that it wasn’t something meant for words. “Safe,” she said. “I can be myself with him. And fun. A little reckless. I know that doesn’t make sense. I just said ‘safe’. But I feel… free. Like when he’s around, everything’s going to be okay.”

Chuck was still for a moment, and then let out a long, low sigh. He turned fully away from her, to look out the window at the smouldering pit-fires under the stars.

“I really don’t…” Julie started. The truth was, she avoided thinking about this. She knew it was a complication she didn’t need and she shoved it away from her whenever it approached. “And I wouldn’t do… something like that to you. Either of you.”

“If you did like him,” said Chuck, looking away, “I wouldn't stop you.”

The thought of breaking the two of them up caused a jolt of fear and pain in Julie’s stomach, similar to the jolts that kept her from thinking about this at all. “You can’t do that for me.”

“...I’m kind of a jealous guy,” Chuck admitted, leaning forward on his elbows on the slightly rotten windowsill, which creaked. “And it’s really unfair. Mike just encourages me to go for it when I have feelings for someone else, but I get mad when I think someone is even looking at him. I’m not willing to give him up. I’m also selfish enough to mess around with other people while keeping him. And he doesn’t even see a thing wrong with it. He says, ‘we do things differently. That doesn’t mean we do them wrong.’

“Well, he’s not doing anything wrong,” Chuck continued, speaking to the night. “But I am. It’s not right for me to do this to him when he doesn’t do the same to me. It bothers me. I always knew it wasn’t right but I just couldn’t… I couldn’t be okay with it if someone was getting too close to him. It sticks in my stomach. I couldn’t get rid of it.

“But I wouldn’t mind it at all if you and him were together. I look for that sick feeling in my stomach when I think about it, and I don’t find it. I want you to be happy. And I want Mike to be happy. And I think I’ll be totally fine if you’re happy together.”

“I wouldn’t ever…”

“See, you wouldn’t,” Chuck replied, “I think you’d just accept it as a loss and never say anything.”

Julie felt—to her surprise—a moment of defiant anger after Chuck said that, sharp but strong, as if she had just been taunted.

Well, she had been. Chuck thought that she would go down without a fight.

“I really don’t know if I just want to be friends with Mike or if I want something else,” she continued cautiously. “I don’t think about that sort of thing much.”

“Well,” he said, turning back around, pulling the curtain over the window so it was dark inside, “If you do think about it, and you do come to another conclusion… I’m fine with it.”

Julie waited for her eyes to adjust, so she could see the outline of Chuck’s body in the darkness. “Me being Kane’s daughter doesn’t change a thing to you,” she said softly, “does it?”

“Oh, it changes plenty,” he protested. “But it doesn’t… change you. I know you. You wouldn’t hurt him. It doesn’t change that I trust you.”

“It should,” she said, “and to someone as paranoid as you, I thought it would.”

“...Even a paranoid guy has got to trust someone. I’m pretty sure about you.”

“...I don’t know,” she finally responded. “I’m not sure I’d be willing to go for it. You just said you’re a jealous guy. I’ve seen you mad, and I’m not sure I want to see jealous.”

“Oh, come on,” Chuck sighed. “No, it would be fine—”

“Like, what does your possessive look like? Because I don’t think I’m impervious to headshots.”

“Julie!” Chuck whirled back around to face her, shoulders tight.

She laughed at him. “Listen, it’s… don’t worry about it, alright? We’re too busy for that sort of thing, anyway. It’s really sweet of you. It really is.”

“I’m not trying to be sweet,” Chuck complained. “I’m trying to be… good, I guess. A good boyfriend. A good person. Less of a selfish and territorial bastard.”

“So you’d let… you’d let Mike date someone else, along with you.”

“There’s not really a ‘let’ about it,” Chuck sighed, “I can’t exactly stop him from doing anything.”

“You can so,” Julie disagreed. “You just look upset and he recalculates.”

“Not true.”

“So true!

“No way.”

“Yes way. He’s headstrong, but he cares more about you than about getting his way. He cares about us all like that. He won’t do it if he thinks it’ll upset you.”

Chuck flushed. “He… cares too much.”

“About everyone.”

“I know he deserves better,” he mumbled.

“He deserves a better life,” Julie counter-argued. “And whether or not you think so, you obviously make things better for him. You don’t see what he’s like without you.” 

“First off, I’m not convinced I do make things better for him,” Chuck grumbled, crossing his arms tightly, “Especially considering what I’ve put him through in the last month literally by existing. Second off… I know he’s not invulnerable as he looks. I know he’s scared, sometimes. I know he needs help. I know he needs more support than I can give him. I’ve been trying to make up my deficits for him the whole time. Always riding with him. Being brave for him. Doing the things he doesn’t want to do, when his back is turned, if I know they need to be done. If I can’t make it all the way up to him…. Then I’ll accept someone else picking up the slack.”

What Julie didn’t want to be was a way for Chuck to punish himself. If she was getting an opportunity because of his insecurities, she didn’t want it. “I don’t have to be someone’s girlfriend to do that. I’m going to keep being Mike’s friend, no matter what.”

“Well, me, too,” said Chuck. “I just want you to know that…. I don’t want to be what stops you two, if there’s something real between you.”

Julie sighed, and Chuck sighed, and in the silence that rose up after, she heard that outside, a bloom of cicadas had started; rising again into a different world than the one they had fallen asleep in.

“I’m… getting kind of tired,” Julie admitted. “I’m not sure I can… think of anything else to say. I’m just going to be repeating myself.”

“Okay, you’re right,” he sighed, “I’m exhausted. I can feel half of my brain already asleep.”

“I know you have Mike’s best interest in mind, I trust you too, let’s just go to sleep.”

“Even though I shot your dad?” Chuck asked, as she could now hear his footsteps on the creaking floor, walking to the other side of the bed.

“I kind of trust you because you did that,” she said, “or, because you do things like that, though I wish you hadn’t this time. You’re not a hypocrite, Chuck. You’re a man of your word. You stand up for what you say. And you stand up for your friends.”

“I’ll try to do that less lethally from now on,” he said, and then he climbed into the other side of the bed.

It was small—his weight folding the covers caused Julie to roll toward him before she could balance herself. It was almost too dark to see each other, but Julie could see the deeper darkness of his body looming above her, and Chuck could see Julie in the center of the warm bedsheets, and both of them froze for a moment, because in the same instant it really sunk into them that they had just been talking about starting a relationship with each other.

Not in the same way most people would have meant that, but a relationship with each other nonetheless. And maybe it wouldn’t be the same as a direct connection between them, but there was something, or there could be something, and that something grew thick in the space between them, the idea, however vague, however hard to understand, of becoming something more, but not knowing what that something was. It wasn’t specifically about the two of them; nonetheless it was between them, and tugged on both.

Chuck swallowed. Julie gently eased herself backward. Chuck pretended to cough, fumbled, and subtly retreated to the very edge of the bed.

“I… just want to get back safe to Mike,” Julie said, “To everyone. Anything else, I think I’ve gotta wait on.”

“Yeah. Uh. Right.”

“As much as…” looking up at the black ceiling of the trailer, feeling the air its fan whisked around, the warm air of the rolling waves of grain outside, “You’re right. As much as you just wish you could stay here. Right?”

“Yeah,” Chuck said quietly. “Out where all of… where Kane can’t get to us.”

“But I’d never forgive myself for just abandoning the rest of them.”

“Me either.”

“It’s almost… It feels like… at least for me, that I have no right to shirk my responsibilities,” she whispered. “I was born where I was, and who I was, so…”

“It’s not like you chose that,” grumbled Chuck. It was a small bed; even though he laid as far from her as he could, his voice was close, almost like an angel on her shoulder.

…Chuck would not be a great angel. He looked like one, or at least how they looked in the old Christmas cards Jacob had collected in a storage box, but a conscience that could be easily bullied sounded like a bad idea to Julie. But Mike didn’t need much of a conscience anyway; he was good on his own. “I didn’t,” she agreed, “but I still wouldn’t want to just… sit comfortably in my white tower. I guess I could. But that’s not who I want to be.”

“...You’re a really good person, Julie.”

“So are you.”

“I’m really not,” Chuck replied softly.

Julie was falling asleep so quickly that she couldn’t pull up the words to respond to that. She grumbled in consternation and heard Chuck laugh under his breath. She felt the bed shifting under her; she felt the air blowing gently on her face. A remembered image, pressed on the inside of her eyelids, of her father’s head rocking backwards tried to bother her; she imagined the grasses rolling on the prairie until it went away.

—

Original Note:

While I was writing this I turned to my husband, who has not seen Motorcity, but who did grow up in the state of Indiana, and I asked him, “What do you think the Indy Brickyard would look like in a theoretical post-apocalypse anarchal state?” and he immediately and confidently replied “exactly the same.” And I admit that’s 1. Really funny and 2. Likely prescient but I did decide to go with More instead.

Similar to how I gave Chuck and Jacob last names, I spontaneously gave Julie a middle name here, too, and I want to make it clear that was me, I don’t have access to secret canon character names no one else does. ‘Julia Maria’ was the name of a woman I was briefly but devastatingly in love with during a semester abroad. You know how it is!

—

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All the Roads I've Crossed

Chuck woke up straight from a nightmare about an hour before dawn and woke Julie up as well by rolling the covers off of her. He apologized profusely once he had calmed down. Julie admitted she had been having a nightmare as well, though not as bad as his, and she was honestly glad to be woken up.

They decided to just get ready to go back. There was no point in stalling and it would be better to get back early in case they came back to any one of the poor situations that returning to Motorcity after a significant absence could provide for them. Both the tank in Nine Lives and the spare canisters were full of gas, they had breakfast waiting in the car, and a slightly chilly, wakening breeze nipped at them when they stepped out of the front door of the trailer. The pre-dawn sky was eggshell blue and soft champagne yellow just on the edge of one horizon, like a great hand had lifted up the corner of a black sheet between two pinched fingers.

“Perfect for a drive,” sighed Chuck.

“You wanna do it?” asked Julie.

“Do what?” he asked, pausing halfway through rolling up the second sleeve of his hand-me-down old man flannel.

Julie spun Nine Live’s keys around her finger.

“What,” said Chuck, his voice jumping up an octave, “drive your car?”

Julie laughed brightly and so suddenly that some crows sitting in a nearby maple sprang up. “If you’re so eager for a good drive! Besides, I’m still all kinds of sore from yesterday. I wouldn’t mind being the passenger princess today.”

“I’m a passenger prince,” Chuck complained, injured, and then carried on through Julie’s laughter. “I can't drive your car, Julie.”

“You can if I say you can.”

“It’s a bad idea.”

“It’s fine.”

“I’ve never driven… on… grass.”

“It’s highway for hours, and almost no one uses the old highway anymore. Do it as a favor, Chuck; let me look out the window while you do the work. I’ll take over once we have no more road left.”

Chuck made a quiet, whining noise, like an anxious dog. “I’m not… that good at driving.”

Julie tossed him the keys and he took them on instinct. “I know you’re not a trick driver like Dutch or Mike. It’s alright. You’re taking me on the flattest, straightest road in the midwest. It’ll be fine.”

“...It is pretty straight,” Chuck admitted, and reached out to fit Nine Lives’ key into its lock with a nervousness typically seen in people feeding captive snakes. With a bit of fumbling and quick bursts of muttering, he popped the door open, got himself inside, released the passenger side lock for Julie, and woke the engine up.

The yowling noise of Nine Lives starting up made him jump again. Julie covered her mouth.

“She knows I’m not you, dude,” Chuck said nervously.

“She always sounds like that. Just put her in gear, Chuck.”

Julie settled comfortably into the plush passenger seat of the car as Chuck nervously, painstakingly, and accurately pulled Nine Lives onto the road. He did one shimmy over a curb that made him yelp apologies, but with blinkers on in the utterly silent morning of the plains, with the now-bright light of the sun illuminating all of the waving grains around them in gold, he began to ferry them both north.

He did go slowly, rather slowly considering the near-lack of other cars on the road, but Julie didn’t mind and didn’t point it out. After getting up so early after such a day yesterday, she found herself dozing off again. The rolling, unchanging prairie outside the windows was hypnotic; the sky slowly brightening into a warm, white day.

After about half an hour, Chuck looked over to check something he thought he saw outside of the window and realized that Julie was fast asleep.

He had seen something outside the window—a herd of buffalo, not particularly close, but they didn’t seem to mind him and kept grazing as Nine Lives hurried by.

Chuck couldn’t really imagine sleeping peacefully behind the guy who tried to kill his father, not that he had one. But whoever that guy was, it wasn’t Kane.

Julie’s confession, another shock in a nerve-wrecking day, started sinking into him. Kane was her father. The man who was trying to kill them and everyone around them, people who lived at his mercy and who should have at least received humanity from him, every single day. Chuck knew, in his head, that Julie wasn’t responsible for what her father chose to do, but he knew that if he were her… he would not be able to shake the feeling of responsibility anyway. The guilt of having been raised by that monster, the guilt of still loving him, would press on him like a vice.

Chuck wondered if he understood so well because he understood. Sometimes, when he was exhausted, or afraid, he admitted to himself that he really wished that he still lived in Deluxe, that Deluxe had been a place he would be able to live in. If Deluxe had been—not even evil but just kind of bad, he doubted he would have ever left it. He liked it better there. He liked things being clean, controlled, orderly; he liked being able to just fit into the machine and work. If it hadn’t been so fucking evil—if they hadn’t hated him that much—if they had been cruel to others but not him and his friends—he would have just dealt with it. He knew he would have.

Then he found himself aware again of the golden horizon around him, broken with gray-green trees, loud with the sighing of the wind and the whirring of insects, and once again, the whole question felt absurd, like he had woken up and realized the terrible question posed to him had been posed in a dream, and his answer wouldn’t have changed anything in the real world.

Was there no way to just… leave Detroit?

Not if he wanted to stay with Mike. That was one thing he wasn’t willing to give up, no matter what. If he asked Mike to leave Detroit, Mike would tell him that if Chuck needed to go, he could go, but Mike would stay and fight for Motorcity.

Chuck sighed to himself. He drove on, expecting for the anxiety in his stomach to grow and grow, to become more and more reluctant to return to the dark underground world of violence, decay, uncertainty; but actually, he became more and more impatient to see Mike, to feel his shoulders or his waist under his arms, to rest his head on his shoulder. He thought about the warmth of holding him and being able to lie down in bed with him again tonight and, to his utter shock, when he looked down at Nine Lives’ dash it said he was driving at a hundred and fifty miles an hour, faster than he’d ever gone before.

—

Julie dreamed that she was looking at her comm, flicking quickly through glowing videos in a room that was otherwise dark. At first she had some awareness she was in a dream, a fact she kept forgetting and discarding. She might have sat down, actually, and started shuffling through her data to prove whether she was in a dream or not.

Between her two hands the video was playing. The video that had put them all in danger. She watched it again, knowing, certain it wasn’t right. It was moving too fast, then too slow, and Dutch was there even though he shouldn’t have been. She couldn’t remember the name of Texas’ one sister—the video certainly wasn’t this long, because now it had gone back and forth and back three times, to Texas, to Jacob, to herself in the opposite corner, huddled all the way in the back of the room, looking out of a window in the back into what just looked like a black room.

The kiss was at the end. Mike had Chuck’s face in his hands; Chuck’s face, uncovered from its veil of hair. She could see his smile, interrupted by the side of Mike’s face covering him up, like the moon half-waned, then how Chuck’s fingers came to tangle in Mike’s thick hair. She felt so much relief that they were back together and knew that this was what she wanted; this was the most important thing. The most important thing, maybe, was the opposite of the worst thing. But maybe, to the contrary, she thought, as she sat in the back of the dark room and looked in, the best thing was not the safe opposite of bad but the precious sharpness of the strange, the rare, the thing poorly disposed to the environment it lives in, only able to flourish when painstakingly nurtured.

In the video screen, Mike pulls away from the kiss. He turns his head and notices her filming. “Hey,” he says, gentle, soft.

“Hey, Mike.”

Mike stays anchored to Chuck with one side of his body, arm wrapped around his waist. He reaches out with his other hand and puts it on Julie’s cheek. Julie finds herself suddenly quiet and still with prescience, knowing what will happen, but holding her breath and quivering like a note about to resolve, lovely in the tension.

She then gasps a higher note when Mike kisses her on the cheek. Warm, brief. She turns to face him and kisses him herself.

She closes her eyes but it doesn’t go all dark. It goes dark except for Mike, who she can see behind her eyelids, like a heat signature. He curves a hand around her jaw, under her ear, and presses to her.

She cannot see it, but she knows what it is that she feels then on her other cheek, a ghost-like touch. She turns her head, opens her eyes, and sees Chuck on her other side, flushed. He had kissed her too, cold and comforting, friendly and firm.

Chuck sat on the floor of her dark room. That’s where they all were now. “I love you,” he said.

“Oh,” she responds. “I love you too.”

“It’s not the same.”

“I know it’s not the same.”

“I’m not sure what it is,” says Chuck, “but I know I don’t want to kill it.”

“No one will understand it,” says Mike, near her ear, and somehow she understands this as an incredible compliment and a wonderful promise. No one will understand it, they will never grasp it, they can never have it.

Mike shushes her laughing with a crooked smile on his own face. “Be quiet. Listen. There’s an even bigger mystery ahead.”

“What is it?” Julie asks. Mike looks away. She follows his glance and sees that she is still sitting there, on the other side of the room, in the corner. Julie stands to go get herself and then she wakes up as her car slowly rumbles to a stop with a contented purr and Chuck puts a hand on her shoulder to rouse her.

—

They changed places in Fort Wayne, where a bend in the Wabash shielded one of the last remaining entrances to the underground highways. Built in the late American Empire by a typically corrupt technocrat, the private highways for private vehicles were now largely but not fully collapsed. They were actually most maintained around Motorcity, since underground roads had a unique benefit to the dome-covered city. They were the best ways in and out if you were strictly avoiding Deluxe.

The Pit Snakes did not run this entrance, the Miami Nation did. A pass from the Pit Snakes, however, could get you into the tunnel without further taxes charged by the Nation, as it represented a fee already paid. The laid-back guard, a woman in leather who was also embroidering as she watched the gate, surrounded by giggling, playing children, accepted the pass and offered them a top-off before they got on their way.

“You headed for Detroit?” she asked.

“Yeah,” replied Julie. 

“You from there?”

“We are.”

“What are you going back there for?”

After a pause, Julie decided that the answer was “Family.”

They accepted the gracious offer to fill up the tank, Chuck handed Julie the keys, and Nine Lives descended into the tunnel that would lead them home.

—

The underground road had almost reached the entrance to the dome when Chuck blurted out a question.

“Hey Julie?”

“Yeah?” she asked, reluctantly pressing on the brakes as she reached what she knew was a still stop in front of a gang-guarded gate.

“Can you do something for me when we get back?”

“What is it?”

Chuck took in a deep breath and held it for a second. “In Mike’s room, in his dresser, there are a couple of boosters in a box in a drawer,” he blurted out. “I need you to find them and put them somewhere else. Somewhere I can’t find them. And don’t tell me where you put them.”

Julie was silent for a few moments. She could just see the gate coming into view as she slowed. “Okay.”

“Okay—okay. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

But then they were at the gate, and though it was shut, they quickly realized that there was a group of cars outside, and people standing around the cars, and outside of the clutch of colorful motorcycles and the one slow, slick Skylark car, the rest were immediately recognizable as the whole gang, waiting for them.

“What!” Julie shouted, slamming Nine Lives to a stop and hurrying to unbuckle her seatbelt and jump up. “Chuck, did you call them?”

“No!” Chuck struggled significantly more to get out of the car. The gates were already sliding open as he flailed with the passenger door. “I—I don’t know how—they—Mike—”

Which he said because the very first person they saw behind the gates, standing in the green glow of the city behind him, was Mike Chilton. For just a moment he stood like a statue at the gates, but then the way was wide enough for him to jump through with a shout.

Julie was out of the car and Mike saw her first, so he slammed into her like a wreck and swooped her off of the ground. Julie screamed in shock and delight as Mike held her in both arms and tossed her in a full circle in the air. “Julie!”

“Mike!” she shouted, her stomach soaring, both dizzy with the height and about to cry with happiness. “How did you—”

“You did it! Jules!” Mike nearly cracked her with a hug before setting her unsteadily on the ground. “I can’t believe—you’re amazing. You’re incredible. Chuck—” he broke off, and now Julie was tottering on her heels in the road as Mike put a hand on Nine Lives’ hood and lunged over the entire car.

Chuck did not scream. He had just barely stood up straight on the road and could only wheeze out Mike’s name before Mike vaulted over the car, down, and into his arms. There was no way Chuck could break the motion of his fall, so he turned on his heel and they spun, wheeling around.

At that point the gate to Motorcity was finally all the way open (and it was not exactly slow to open). Tottering, unsteady, Chuck wrapped both his arms around Mike’s back and expressed the impulse to bury into his chest by folding his head over his shoulder.

“Mike.”

“Chuck,” Mike sighed, suddenly as quiet now as he had been vibrant a moment before. Chuck felt tears in the corner of his eyes, hearing his voice, smelling the scent of engine oil that drifted off of him.

“I missed you so much,” said Chuck.

“I,” said Mike, and Chuck felt the fingers of one hand dig into his back. He felt Mike swallow, fail to speak. Chuck tightened around him, too, in sympathetic response; when he felt Mike’s breath rasp in his chest, he pulled back, just a little, to look at him.

He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing in his eyes. He had never seen him wear that naked pain so openly before, not outside the shadows of a dark and private room. Chuck could see that the rest of the gang was coming in through the gate, rushing for Julie, and he knew from the fact that Mike was even looking at him like this right now, silent, teary-eyed, that they had seen things from him they never had before.

That knowledge was externalized when Mike did something else he had never done in public before, which was to lean in and kiss him. The warmth stung Chuck’s eyes and made the tears that had been gathering fall.

Julie only saw a half-second of Mike leaning in to kiss his boyfriend, in front of everyone and damn what they think, before she was being practically tossed six feet in the air by Dutch, who was calling her the fucking slickest badass he knew. “I rewatched that shot ten times a day!” he crowed, punching Julie in the shoulder with effusive affection. “Smashing your car through Kane Co. Tower like it was made out of cardboard! Are you serious? How’d you even get that—your car in the Kane Co. Tower? You insane genius!”

“With an elevator. They’re really big. Oh my God, Dutch, I missed you,” she squeaked, pressing into his chest.

He, just like Mike, held her off of the ground for a second when he hugged her back. Her spine popped gently.

“Dutch!” she laughed.

“We were going insane worrying about you, but you had it on lock the whole time,” he enthused.

Then Dutch had to brace her with his weight, because Texas suddenly enfolded Julie’s other side and Texas was heavy. “Always knew you could do it, Kennedy,” he said, and Julie could hear he was fighting back tears as he said it.

“I did it for you, Tex,” she told him, and because she realized how much she had missed his goofy ass when she could smell the grease and sweat on his back, she wrapped an arm around his shoulders. He started crying and she squeezed him.

Chuck, meanwhile, backed away from Mike with a warm breath. The warmth and the closeness of that kiss shivered between them.

When he looked at Mike, a half-head below him when he stood, he realized that he looked awful. There were dark bruises around his eyes and on his forearms, and strain all around him. His right shoulder had a brace on it. (He had used the left to vault himself over Nine Lives.)

“I’m so sorry,” Mike said. “For not rescuing you.”

“I’m not,” said Chuck. “I’m not sorry. And it would have been insane. It was a trap for you.”

“I know. I know and I hate that. You’re not any less—”

“Thank you for having Julie do this,” Chuck told him, and seeing the words fall off Mike’s face without reaching his brain, he pinned him with a look and said it again. “Thank you for having Julie do this. It was the right call. They were expecting you. They were not expecting her.”

“It was Julie’s call,” Mike told him.

“I know. I know, man. There was no way in hell that was your choice. You would have done it yourself. I know you would have done it if you could have.”

Mike hesitated, and Chuck repeated, “I know you would have.”

“I should have anyway,” said Mike, low, suddenly quiet. “I should have gone up there anyway.”

“You would have just gotten caught.”

“He was bragging about it the whole time,” said Mike. “Filling up the sky with pictures of you in a cell. There are things… you can’t… I could only think that this is not what a partner does. I don’t wait out you being tortured.”

“Mike…”

“Could you?” Mike asked, his eyes darting up to look Chuck in the face.

Chuck, despite what he had just said, did not hesitate long before saying “No.”

“I couldn’t look anyone in the face,” said Mike, “knowing I was just… letting that happen to you. That I did let that happen to you. That I wasn’t there when Russ broke into the house to grab you. I kind of lied to Julie,” he admitted, as Julie was being squeezed flat by Dutch and Texas, “I really only intended to let her plan for a while before I came up there and planned with her. I was going to… just come up and find her cube and hide out there until—”

“Mike,” Chuck gasped, now fully aware of how terrible that move would have been. “Mike, you would have blown her cover.”

“No, no, I know, but I—”

“No buts! You can’t do that!”

“I couldn’t just stay down here!” he said, a hand on each of Chuck’s shoulder. “I couldn’t—the only reason I didn’t is because Russ blew up the hideout around me!”

“What??” said Chuck. “Who?? What??”

Mike flinched back and flushed slightly. “Oh... Uh…”

Chuck felt another, gentle finger tap on his shoulder, and he whirled around to see a sedately but warmly smiling Foxy. “Let me butt in before you get into all that,” she said, “I can’t spend my whole day watching your tender reunion, sweet as it is.”

“Sorry, Foxy,” said Mike.

Foxy, who looked a little grimy and worn herself, waved off Mike’s apology. “Don’t even worry about it. Good to see you back, Chuck.”

“Uh,” he said. “You… too.”

“Mike wasn’t the only one rankled by how Kane was treating you,” she continued, collected and calm. “The girls and I went up a few times when we thought there was a chance of tearing the tower down, but once it was clear that Kane was up and way on his guard, the offense fizzled. We’re waiting. We’re not done. His guard will go back down eventually. Once you guys are back up to full strength and settled down somewhere again, we’ll talk strategy.”

“I can’t thank you enough for hosting us, Foxy,” Mike sighed.

Foxy held out her fist, and Mike bumped it, grinning lopsided and wide. “You boys have a lot of work to do, so I’ll leave you to it. See you around, little brother.”

Chuck felt his neck flush again at Foxy’s affectionate appellation. He felt a jab of fear in his stomach whenever she acknowledged the similarities between them, but that fluttering fear, he was able to recognize, was so uncomfortable because of the restless hope it carried. Bones deep, he did not want to be like her. He just wanted to be normal and unremarkable and beneath anyone’s notice. But that was never happening, and he couldn’t stand it when someone noticed how queer he was and pointed it out, but yet even he could tell that when someone noticed and liked it the squirming in his guts was not quite the same as when they hated him. They both made him angry. The anger of being accepted was different. Harder to take, even, but there was something in it that almost hurt good, like scratching at a wound. He could get used to it, which frightened him in another way.

“Maybe—you know, maybe I could be an older brother, you ever think of that?” he shot back lamely.

Foxy laughed, low, but open-mouthed, as she swung up her helmet form under her arm and replaced it on her head. “You’re not,” she said, with sisterly fondness, and then she turned on her heel to walk to her bike.

Chuck glowered at her walk away, but he couldn’t expend that much mental energy on it, either, especially as it was just about then that Dutch finally put Julie down and started a quick, meaningful walk toward the two of them.

“Alright, alright, quit hogging the Chuck,” Dutch said, literally putting an arm between them and pushing Mike away. “You think I don’t like this guy too?”

Mike laughed and went with Dutch’s arm, putting both of his up in playful surrender. “All yours!”

“You can be besties all you want but it’s not like I didn’t miss this guy every goddamn day he was gone, come here you absolute champion,” said Dutch, giving Chuck a nearly aggressive fist bump before clasping his hand and then pulling him to a hug. “You hero! You goddamn psychopath! You shot Kane in the fucking head!”

Chuck choked, then sputtered with laughter. Anxious, high-pitched, perhaps slightly unhinged laughter, nearly squeezed out by Dutch’s embrace. “Oh man has that been an unpopular move. It’s—”

“Maybe where you were!” Dutch pulled back but still gripped Chuck’s arms. (Chuck could see that, unlike Mike, Dutch did not look like he had been beaten black and blue recently. Dutch looked fine. Stressed, but fine.) “You’re a hero here, man! They did a toast to you in every bar in Motorcity! I was asked to make a mural of you in the act of headshotting Kane! There were vigils! I couldn’t go anywhere in the city without people asking about you! And everywhere I went, I got to say, ‘yeah, that’s my friend!’ God, I’m so proud of you, you maniac. You're going to be the life of the town!”

“I don’t want to be the life of the town,” Chuck said. “I am really glad to see you, though.”

“Son of a mother,” sighed Dutch, and then went in again to give Chuck one more quick hug. “I was going crazy,” he sighed. “I missed you so bad. Mike wasn’t the only guy who nearly just went the fuck up there, but unlike him, I knew it was a suicide mission." He shot the last half of his sentence into Mike’s face.

“Hey—”

“Don’t ‘hey’ me, I was relieved when that edgy whackjob trapped you underground for a week.”

“What?” said Chuck again, lightly gripping Dutch’s arm to steady himself as he turned to Mike. “Again, what the fuck does that mean?”

“Yeah, um,” said Julie, who was now walking over to their side of the car, Texas on one arm and Jacob ruffling her hair behind her—it had  taken him a little longer than the rest to get out of Sasquatch and up to Julie to welcome her back— “What the fuck, actually? Because I don’t know what you’re talking about either, and I feel like I should know about whatever you’re talking about. It’s not like you couldn’t get a message across to me.”

Jacob winced. “Yeah, we… made the call to not tell you about that one. I’m sorry, Julie!” he added, as she turned to shoot him a look. “We didn’t want to divide your focus and we had it under control! I mean, it was rough for a bit, but—”

“Underground??” Chuck replied, high-pitched and furious, gripping Dutch with one hand and Mike with the other. “For a week??”

“You were the dude in a cell for a month, so,” said Dutch, who was interrupted by Mike quickly defending that “It wasn’t a week,” though he was quickly outspoken by Texas, who laughed and said “Yeah, it was sick, I had to use Stronghorn to smash up the rubble—” 

After a few of them spoke over each other for a few sentences, Jacob held up his hands and made buzzer noises until the rest finally piped down. “You’re all as bad as each other! Chuck and Julie deserve a real explanation. If one of you can do that, go ahead, but if you can’t let each other speak I’ll do it myself.”

Mike took in a breath, but Julie, still at Jacob’s side, took the floor. “How about you do?” she said. “I know the guys are so eager to tell us, but I don’t know if any of them will stick to the facts.”

“And you think Jacob will?” Dutch protested, but Mike laughed.

“If it’s something this important, I will! I don’t have to go off on a tangent, I just like to.”

Chuck crossed his arms. “Alright, so what happened while I was in jail? Apparently everyone knew exactly what happened to me exactly when it happened, but I wasn’t scrolling through tabloids while I was in an experimental holding cell.”

“I’ll tell you what happened before Texas can make it sound worse than it was or Mike can make it sound better than it was,” said Jacob, and continue to speak over a little more good-natured but unserious protesting. “I’ll tell you first off that I was tearing my hair out for a week after I learned you got grabbed in the hideout while I was sleeping in the next room, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am. No, no, this isn’t my pity party, I’m not going to dwell on it. We burned the bedsheets and put our heads together on a plan to get you back.

“Well, Julie took that over rightly quickly, and it turned out to be good sense to leave it to her, because we had bots at our door the very same day you were captured and only a few hours after Julie made Mike promise to let her handle it. We learned much later that Red had turned over our location to Kane because he wanted to make sure no one tried to sit pretty down here. He had expected Mike to come roaring after you immediately and got antsy when a couple hours went by without seeing you, especially considering how chaotic everything was while we thought Kane might be dead.

“It was crazy. Everyone was out in the streets.” Jacob, who was getting more excited as he spoke, staring waving his arms up and down, narrating the movement of people with his sweeps. “People going up to Deluxe to try to take down the Tower, people fleeing down here while they knew they could make it down, the Terrans showed up and took a mob of Deluxe prisoners—they’re still tied up in some harebrained hostage negotiation—and us and the Skylarks and the Library have been trying to house nearly a thousand people who came down here to stay just in those first few days. We haven’t had people move back and forth so much since the days they were finishing the dome and people were having to make final choices.

“Anyway, Red gave Kane our address to smoke us out, hoping to nab Mike once he finally fled. We all got out, we fought our way to the south side and went into hiding, and we had almost settled on abandoning the Garage and focus on getting you back instead when your damn fool boyfriend told us what your damn fool head had done.”

Jacob had directed that last sentence to Chuck with a mighty glare. Shrinking back into Mike’s side, Chuck responded, “Would that the, uh, self-destruction bomb—”

“IT WOULD BE THE SELF-DESTRUCTION BOMB YOU RIGGED INTO MY HOUSE WITHOUT TELLING ME,” Jacob responded. “The house we had just surrendered to Red and Kane’s mooks! I knew those idiots would have no idea what you’d done and one of those fools was going to blow it all sky high! Instead we rallied with Foxy’s girls and a few other gangs to get the Hideout back; it wasn’t a hard sell, since there was information about the other gangs in there, too, if any of them was smart enough to look. We had our own hideout under siege for three days, back and forth, in and out, flushing out Kane’s boys one by one and passing them over to Rayon, who has half the Motel done up like holding cells right now; not a wink of sleep those whole three days. I made everyone keep it hushed to Julie—and I’m sorry about it, Julie, but we knew we had to keep them from blowing up the hideout and the whole neighborhood with it for all we knew. We had our own base under siege, and we had to just—leave Chuck to you.”

“...I don’t love it,” said Julie, “but I understand. It’s exactly what I told Mike would happen and why I told him to stay down there.”

Jacob continued, “Land’s sake, it hurt to know that we had to just leave Chuck up there, but they could’ve flattened Motorcity just with the stuff they found in the base… and Red is a host unto himself. Right. Red. After three blessed days of that mess, Red was still squatting inside and wouldn’t leave until we sent Mike in.

“Well, we weren’t going to do that. No way, no how. We all agreed we weren’t going to do that, and then Mike snuck in once everyone was exhausted.”

Mike smiled a beautiful smile with his whole face.

“Boy Blunder here went right in to talk to Red. Red coaxed him downstairs. Red hit ‘doomsday’ on your suicide bomb once he had both of them in the basement.”

Chuck seized Mike’s arm in his grasp. His heart plummeted down his spine. Mike was standing right by him—Red was not. “Did…”

Jacob leaned back and crossed his arms. “I know you’ve been through hell, and I’m not going to take some time to rag on you, but I hope you’ve just reconsidered stocking weapons as a coping mechanism. Based on what I was able to sort out later, once we cleared out the rubble a few days later, I don’t think you were quite done with that machine, were you?”

“Not quite,” Chuck admitted. “It was… I meant…”

“It had a good kick all the same.”

“It was supposed to be able to take the whole place down with me.”

“It did,” Jacob told him. “Oh, it did. But I’ll tell you another thing, Chuck. When you came to this town and Texas’ mama told me you needed a place to stay where you felt safe, real safe, because you were someone who had never felt safe in your entire life, I gave you the safest room in the house. I built that basement myself, young man. It has a hardwood frame, hardwood and steel, old-fashioned joinery. The floor is cement and anchored into the ground; the frame above could take a seven on the Richter scale. You took the house down, but only God could have taken down my basement. It was covered in rubble, it took us days to get in, but when we got there, Mike was cradled in the storage room I built for my preserves and which had held like a tank around him. Bruised a bit, shaken, but the only scratches on him were from him trying to dig Red out of the rubble. He wasn't even hungry; he was in a room with several thousand cans of preserved vegetables and a whole underwater tank! Your offensive power came against my defensive power, kid, and my defensive power won.”

Chuck looked at Jacob for a moment, then put his face in his hand. “Shit,” he said, weakly.

Jacob crossed his arms. “Well, don’t look too happy!”

“No, I—Jacob—I’m so sorry. The base…”

“I’m not going to say I’m happy with you, but it’s not the time. I guess take this as a lesson that… you know, that you’ve got people around you. You’ve got defenses. If it kills me to keep them up.”

“It could have taken all of you… it’s a miracle it only killed one person, but—”

“Russ isn’t dead,” said Mike.

Chuck turned to look at him. Mike’s bruised face had an expression of simple, unthinking innocence on it.

“...Is that his name,” said Chuck, flat.

“Yes. That’s his name.”

“Why do you know his name?”

Mike slowly smiled, both sheepish and incredibly pleased with himself. “I mean, I didn’t have anyone else to talk to while we were down there.”

Chuck pulled in a breath. As he let it out, low, heavy, he wheezed, “You’re kidding me.”

“I wish we were kidding you,” Dutch sighed. “I wish we were kidding you. Mike was trapped for almost a week with a man who had been trying to murder him for a year and he fed him and drug hardwood beams off of him and talked to him nonstop until he cracked. Mike knows everything about him now.”

“I think he’s a good guy, deep down,” said Mike Chilton, who meant what he just said.

Chuck saw Dutch put his face in his hands out of the corner of his eye. Julie closed her eyes. Chuck said, “I don’t think he is.”

Chuck heard Texas and Jacob both start laughing at once. Chuck continued, “He broke into the house and kidnapped me. He cuffed me into the back of his car and turned me over to Kane. He told me we’re enemies. Why do I even have enemies??”

But when Mike looked at Chuck, he didn’t look ashamed of what he said, or even flustered. “I don’t think he’s a very good person right now,” he said. “To be honest, I still don’t really like him, and I don’t think I ever will. Not after everything he’s done to you, and the rest of my friends. But I spent… a really long time with him. He told me a lot. I just know there’s a normal person in him now. He hasn’t made good choices for a while now, but I know that he can.”

He didn’t sound particularly happy with that knowledge. He certainly didn’t sound proud or judgemental, like he thought his compassion made him better than the rest of them. He sounded like he had learned something ugly in ugly circumstances and had to live with it now.

Chuck said, “I don’t want to go home and see that prick there.”

Mike sighed. “Home is Texas’ house right now. Rayon is hosting Russ, and he feels much more like you do about the situation. He’s not free to leave. Not that he can, with the state he’s in. When your room fell in, he was on your bed. The wall on that side caved in… he can’t get around right now. He probably would’ve died if he hadn’t been in armor. What happens to him now is out of my hands.”

“For what it’s worth, I think the jerk is where I’d like him to be right now,” Jacob said, “In cuffs and behind bars. And healing from his injuries, I’m not a monster.”

“Rayon thinks he can make something out of him,” Mike sighed. “I’d love to see it. I can’t ever see being really comfortable around him, so it would be awkward, but I’d love to see him… doing better. I mean…”

Chuck could see the struggle in his face. He tried to reject it, but he felt his resistance failing. Mike had been trapped with the bastard; Mike wanted to like people, was disappointed and dejected when they acted so badly that he just couldn’t like them, and now, Chuck could see the fact that Mike could not forgive Red, not after he kidnapped Chuck and turned him in—and that right before he finally had a chance to talk to him and understand him—disappointing himself by killing the desire to emphasize with him every time it rose in his irrepressible heart again.

“...You’re too good, man,” sighed Chuck.

Mike startled, a little, at that.

Chuck sighed, and pushed his bangs back. “You’re just too good for me.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I don’t ever want to hear you talk down to yourself, shorty,” said Texas, who had been standing back with his arms crossed through the explanation of the actually startlingly stressful month he had just lived, “And I really don’t want to hear it right now. You were having a real bad time up at Kane’s place, on account of he’s a real bad host. Texas doesn’t want to hear any self-deprecation.”

“Me,” said Jacob before anyone could say anything. “I taught Texas ‘self-deprecation.’”

“Thanks,” Chuck sighed, “And I’ll work on it, but I’m talking about something real right now, not some… paranoia. You spent all that time feeding and doctoring a man who was trying to kill you. I shot someone in the head before he could speak to me. Listen, I know that you want the guy I am when I’m mad to not be the real me, but he is. I am that guy. All the time. I’m doing everything I can to not let him get his way, but he’s still me all the same. And you just… you just wouldn’t have done what I did. I know you wouldn’t have.”

“Chuck…” said Julie, but Mike shook his head.

“I’m not going to tell you I know you better than you do,” he said to Chuck, “Though I know you pretty well. You’re right that I wouldn’t have done the same thing. I would have made a different choice. I wouldn’t have made the choice to just end this war, no matter what it takes. Everything I do, balancing sides, making compromises, trying to get everyone out of the burning building… I know it keeps the fire burning. You’re willing to take the building down if it puts out the fire. I’ve been wondering while you were gone if that isn’t the choice the good guy makes.”

“...not if you want a place to live in once it’s all over,” responded Chuck, “I don’t think.”

Mike sighed, lifted an arm, but it was Jacob who suddenly put a hand on Chuck’s back. “You’re going through a lot right now, kid,” he said, “more than you should be. Being angry about it doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you normal.”

Chuck turned his head, spoke at no one. “I might be if I stayed mad at the right people.”

Sounding like he was a thousand years old, Jacob told him, “It’s going to work out, Chuck. I know. I know it doesn’t feel like it’ll ever get better. But it’s going to work out okay.”

Chuck sighed.

“We can talk about it more later if you want to,” said Mike, stepping forward to his front, “but I’m not giving up the chance to celebrate you getting back! I figure you don’t want to go out much right now, but… what if we go back to Texas’ place and just… have lunch with the family.”

Chuck breathed out heavily. He could feel a relief creeping up on him with the memory of that comfortable family home, the sunlight above the ferns and monsteras, the adobo, the flan, the family all gathered around the table. The Burners crashed back in folding chairs, throwing cards and straws at each other. It hadn’t been the endless fight or the cavernous city he had been so desperate to return to.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. That sounds great.”

Mike smiled, a warm, mixed smile, touching but not smudging out the exhaustion under his eyes. “Then your seat in Mutt is ready for you, partner.”

Chuck had only just glanced back, had just taken a half-step forward, when he said “Wait, how the heck did you know when and where we would come back?”

“What?” said Mike. “Oh, I knew. Since Julie took you out, we all figured that she’d take you somewhere else—probably Indy?—and come back up the underground way the next day. I just knew what you’d do.”

Julie laughed. “You guessed?”

Mike shrugged with a lopsided smile. “I guess I guessed right.”

“...You just know us that well,” muttered Chuck, a little low.

“So maybe you can trust that he does know you,” Julie responded to him, “Well enough to decide for himself what kind of person you are.”

Then Julie and Chuck looked at each other for a few moments, without saying anything, and it was a way they could not have looked at each other before this month, or not quite. It conveyed things they would not say out loud; things they didn’t know before now. There were reasons Chuck didn’t trust Mike’s high opinion of him despite trusting Mike; there were reasons Julie wanted to push him to think better of himself. There were reasons she wanted all of this focused on Chuck, not her.

The oddest thing about it all, and they both knew it, was that they had completely swapped their opinions. Julie was convinced now that Kane had to die. That it was a sacrifice she had to make for the many who deserved better, over the one who couldn’t have everything. But Chuck was going to do whatever he could to keep the old tyrant alive. Get him deposed, but keep him alive. For her.

“Nah, I don’t care if you developed ESP, I don’t care if there’s some new twist in the plot, I don’t care if you have some kind of crazy secret you need to keep from us, I do not care,” interrupted Dutch, making them both jump, “I heard adobo and we’re going to get adobo.”

“C’mon!” agreed Texas, lightly slapping the hood of Mutt.

Julie huffed, but with a smile on her face. She pulled Nine Lives’ keys back out of her pocket and spun them around her finger. “Alright,” she said, “Texas’ place it is. You’d better get on your throne, passenger prince,” she added, cheekily, to Chuck.

“That’s more like it,” he agreed, but was interrupted by Mike, throwing open his passenger side door, who disagreed.

“I know you’ve watched a LARP sesh at least once, Julie,” he grinned. “Chuck’s a king.”

—

Rebuilding was going to take time. It always does.

It wasn’t necessary, for a while. Everyone was happy to host the Burners because everyone loved Chuck. The debate of whether they would rebuild the same hideout or move to a new one was postponed for a liminal week; the fact that it was gone did not yet seem real.

They spent that week going from house to house and celebration to celebration, disrespectful of day and night, to cafes, to bars, to living rooms, to basements, to war-rooms, and to cheers everywhere they went. And after the week was through, Julie told them all about her real relationship to Kane.

At two in the morning, the same night as her confession, Julie sat braced against Mike’s side, where she had been for a while. Neither of them had spoken for about half an hour.

They were being hosted by the Cablers that evening. As far as Julie knew, everyone else was asleep. The darkness of the city beneath them was almost total, a garden of shadows under the dim blue light of the Cablers’ Tower. The air was chill. A breeze from above sometimes found its way through the cracks in the dome and to their faces to touch their troubled brows. Julie had rested her head on Mike’s shoulder; she could feel him breathing, slow and steady.

Pressed to his side, she felt it was nonsense that she had ever depended on him to be moral, to have some way to navigate the winding roads they found themselves on. Instead he was solid and sitting beside her and quiet. He did not have a map; he was willing to take the next turn, confident enough to choose which way he would go, ready to make the right decision for the moment. She still couldn’t quite phrase it, but it was as if the right way to go just could not be planned. The master planners she knew were also the architects of death. Mike didn’t have a plan, he never did; he looked at the person in front of him and considered them.

At the moment, her next move was to not take advantage of his kindness. She felt him sigh through the movement of his arm. She closed her eyes.

They had been sitting that way ever since he said that he couldn’t think of anything she could be that would make him not love her. There were things, she figured, that she could do; she would try to not do any of those things. She had been a little surprised when Mike insisted that he had had no suspicions about her secret before, but more surprised when he said that it made him a little happy.

No one likes to hear me say it, he had said, but I knew there was good in Kane. It’s in you. Maybe he gave it to you. If he can see it there, there’s just a little in him.

So the calls of dome-dwelling owls and crickets echoed around them; so the night-dark waters of the lake lapped on the shores below, sometimes lit in beams of silver moonlight when the slowly traveling moon above found a way through. Julie spent enough night above that she could see it, as if the shield that blocked the sky from her view was as transient, as shifting as a veil of clouds, as if they sat in the wildflowers of the prairie instead. What walls of steel insisted was not real and could not be was so clear in her heart it was nearly in her eyes. She could see the horizon unbarred. She could see moonlight on Lake Erie. She could see the grasses growing. She could see the dawn rising, in just a few hours, on the roofs of Motorcity.

She realized she had been drowsing when the sound of a door opening woke her up again. “What are you doing?” asked Chuck’s slurred, slightly frustrated voice.

Then, “Oh.”

“Sorry, buddy,” Mike replied, a soft smile in his voice. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“It’s fine.”

“You don’t have to go,” said Julie.

“I’m not—I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t even start going anywhere.”

Julie smiled.

“You weren’t even looking,” Chuck continued.

Mike laughed silently. It made his shoulder shake. “You don’t have to go anywhere,” he agreed. “By the looks of it, you weren’t sleeping so good either.”

Chuck sighed. “The Cablers’ place is loud as hell,” he complained, which was true; every part of it whirred and hummed and beeped, some louder than others. Julie heard his footsteps coming closer on the corrugated steel beneath them. “Every time I dozed off I heard something that sounded like a camera or a laser or something.”

Julie hummed in sympathy. The walkway under them rattled when Chuck sat down on Mike’s other side.

“We’ll go somewhere else tomorrow,” Mike said. “Leave Dutch here for a bit. Check in with Rayon, talk about buying some land from him.”

“I’m serious about wanting to build the new place ourselves,” Chuck said. “Now that I’ve lived in a place Jacob built once, I’m not going back to some twenty-first century prefab.”

“Well, he’s not building anything with his back how it is, but we can let him direct.”

“I’ll have to spend tomorrow in Deluxe,” said Julie, leaning forward so that she could see Chuck on Mike’s other side. He was hunched forward over himself, looking down at the world below like a gargoyle on a roof. “I’ve been faking sick for a while now, but that’s not going to work much longer.”

“We don’t want to make a choice without—”

“I trust you to make a good choice,” she cut Mike off. “Choose the place. I’ll pitch in when I can.”

“...I worry about you going up there, now.”

“It’s the same it’s always been for me, Cowboy,” she replied softly.

“Yeah. But now I know what that’s like.”

“I can handle it,” she smiled. “In fact, it’ll be a lot easier to handle it now that I know… that I have you all in my corner.”

Mike put a hand on her shoulder. “Always did,” he said.

Now he was holding her into his side; she didn’t expect it, but her heart rose inside her. She looked at the lake below and her stomach fluttered like she was diving into it.

She caught Chuck’s eyes from across Mike. His head was in his arms, turned toward her; he had his hair tied back to sleep. His tired, shadowed eyes, for a moment unreadable, crinkled up with a smile that was hidden by his arm.

She smiled back.

“...I just want to keep you both safe,” said Mike. “But I know the reason you’re not safe is because you both believe in changing the world too. In fighting for the future. And fighting for the future just is dangerous. It always is. But I can’t hold either of you back from doing that. I won’t. Because you both deserve better, and the only way you’ll get that is if we fight for it.”

Julie squeezed into Mike’s side. She felt Chuck press into him as well, from the other side, close enough to jostle all of them together.

“We’re fighting for the same thing,” she replied.

“Won’t be right without you, man,” said Chuck, “so don’t try to do it all yourself.”

“Okay,” said Mike, and showed the bravery he showed every day and another kind altogether when he reached down to take both of their hands at once. “Okay.”

Chuck put an arm around his back. Julie turned her face into his shoulder. Mike Chilton closed his eyes, and breathed out, slow, steady, and felt, despite the fact that he was a dozen stories up in the air, like his feet were finally on the ground again.

—

Original Note:

I've been many places / I've travelled 'round the world
Always on the search for something new
But what does it matter / When all the roads I've crossed
Always seem to lead back to you?

Home Again / Blackmore’s Night

That's a wrap! This show has been so special to me, for so long, but I never found a story inside that I had to write about it. It was a very pleasant surprise to find that story in 2025, but, in retrospect, and as I realized as I edited, not that much of a surprise.

Writing about resisting tyranny doesn’t feel the same as it once did. I can’t write anymore about a resistance made up of good people making good choices. Now I have to write about the resistance as human people making calculated, often compromised choices. But I do write knowing about the kinds of people that it takes. Radicals, idealists, compromisers, calculators, fighters, lovers, helpers, dreamers, and dirty dealers working against tyranny in a dozen different ways, taking so many separate slashes at its ankles that it eventually collapses. We just cannot condemn each other as we work to the same goal, though some of us do it in a radical way and some do it in a moderate way. If 500 radicals fight tyranny and 500 moderates fight tyranny, that’s an army of 1,000, but only if they don’t fight each other.

Sorry for attaching a moral to the story. I hate that sort of thing, personally. My relationship with Motorcity is so totally changed now; what I could take lightheardedly in 2012 I have to think seriously about now. I could not fully keep my current situation out of the story, and didn’t try to, though I insisted on focusing on the actual characters and setting of the show. But the more I wrote, the longer and longer it got, because I found it more and more necessary to put love into it at every opportunity. So that's what I did.

Here’s to you, Burners; I know you guys won, even though we never got to see it.

—

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