Chapter 1: Edge of the Forest

Carraos had been inside for over two hours now. Doann’s heavy brass watch ticked the seconds away with maddening regularity. The junkyard king wouldn’t be coming back out. But, even though Doann and I both knew that, we stayed there, waiting. We watched the jagged lines of the mechanical jungle imprint rust trails against the heavy clouds.

The jungle was mecha territory and breathed death.

Beside me in the car, Doann sat deeper in his seat. Plastic creaked. He had his eyes on the horizon and his cheek pressed against his watch. He couldn’t hear the horrid thing: he was deaf. But that didn’t matter. He liked feeling the ticking. He hated being deaf.

I’d been drumming my fingers against the dashboard for a while before I realised how annoying it was. My hand dropped to my side and started braiding the fringes trailing my jacket. My eyes were glued to the narrow gate of the mecha jungle, as if Carraos would pop back out at any second.

The jungle looked like thousands of abandoned bomb shells reaching into the sky. People said it used to be a city that had been turned into a massive graveyard after a pandemic. It looked as if our ancestors had wanted to shoot down heaven with corpse-filled bullets.

They had failed.

And the shells had returned.

Thick titanium walls stood erect round the jungle: further wrapped in deadly steel thorns the size of my fists. The barbs were electrified. They gave an eerie glow to the whitened bones scattered on the ground round the jungle.

“He was wrong,” Doann said. “The mechas got him. Bloodless bastards.”

He wasn’t looking at me, so he didn’t want an answer. Except now I couldn’t get rid of the image of Carraos getting his body snapped by metal skeletons. Somehow, the picture was pleasing. I hated Carraos more than Doann hated being deaf.

Doann opened the car door. The greasy aroma of our lunch escaped into the metallic scented air. I wanted to reach out to pull the comforting fatty fog back in, but kept my arms close, hugging myself. The jungle was barely 30 metres away.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

But Doann didn’t hear me. He shut the door behind him and walked round the car. On the way, he pulled the dangling windscreen wiper off. It had annoyed me the whole way driving here. Only then did he open my door.

“What are we going to do?” I repeated.

Doann didn’t like sign language. It made him feel deaf. He preferred missing half of what people told him.

“Where’s your wheels, princess?” he asked, ignoring my question.

“In the trunk.”

Doann returned to attach the wheels to my chair with a little screwdriver. He rolled me out smoothly, nothing like Carraos ever did. The dirt was packed firm and flat. I smoothed my jacket down: stopping a little above my waist, where the metal block took over from my flesh. The lower part of me was gone: in what Carraos called “the accident”.

“Comfy?” Doann asked from behind me.

I flashed a thumbs up so he could see, and I knew that made him smile. I wanted to tell him he could let go, I wasn’t going to run away, but he wouldn’t have heard.

The last few metres were rough. Bits and pieces of torn fence mixed with metal scraps and bones. Doann was slower now, hesitating. What the hell were we doing here? We weren’t equipped. We weren’t Carraos.

The gate was open: an invitation perhaps.

“When d’you think they’re gonna throw the body out?” Doann asked, still behind me.

“Once they pick the bones clean,” I said, for no one but me. For Doann, I added a shrug.

Doann veered me round, and, after moving me away, passed his head through the gate. I expected a siren to howl our eardrums out. But nothing happened. Doann took a step backwards. Goose-bumps dotted his arms, but he didn’t look ready to turn round.

“Carraos took the car keys with him – the bastard,” Doann said.

He dropped to his knees so we’d be face to face. He didn’t even jump backwards when his kneecap crushed a rodent’s ribcage. His hand under my chin brought my face up to look at him. His eyes were the softest blue-grey. His black hair was too long and brushed his shoulders.

“What the bloody hell do we do now, princess?”

“What do you do when the devil dies before keeping his side of the bargain?” I asked.

“Wish I knew,” he said. His skin was deathly white under the glow of the electrified barbs.

“I’ll make the deal,” I said.

Doann blanched some more and passed his hand through his hair: recently tattooed knuckles peeking through the strands. Without Carraos, we didn’t stand a chance, but I had no choice. We were too close to back out now.

“He failed, princess. And he had the stash. We’ve nothing left.”

“I have something better to give them than Carraos ever did. He should have known mechas don’t care about spare parts.”

For the last two years, Carraos had me sorting through all the junk he got his hands on in the scrap yard. With Doann, they brought back piles of mecha parts that had been intended for the compactors. All of it came from the bad robots that got shot up during raids on humans. I had got the memory boards out and strung all the recollections up like live threads of wool. Carraos thought mechas wanted that knowledge. He’d been wrong.

But he’d given me an idea.

When I’d first heard about Carraos’s project, whispered under the noses of my guards, I had almost refused. But there were only two ways out of jail: death, or the slave market. He’d picked me, he said, because there weren’t that many high level scientists in the pit.

That was his first mistake.

I hadn’t known what I was. When he realised freedom wasn’t going to cut it, he’d upped the ante. He’d promised to get my memory back as soon as the money hit the table and kept coming. So I’d said yes.

And now he was gone. I’d been locked in the dark for two years, pretending I didn’t exist so the neighbours wouldn’t freak out. Doann, Carraos’s only employee, had kept me sane. Thanks to him I had someone to remind me how to string words together.

With Carraos dead, it was either a return trip to jail or a new master. I couldn’t go back. So I pushed my wheels forwards, rolling over the human bones and through the gate.

Part 2 - Meeting the fairy godmothers

The floor was slick and the wheels lost grip. They veered. The left side of my chair lifted off the ground.

Why does time always go so slowly when the floor rushes towards your face?

I closed my eyes, whipping my head away ... and bumped into Doann’s leather vest. Once again, he took possession of the handles at my back.

“If I die, I just want you to know that I’ll freakin’ miss your stubborn little head, princess ... no matter how much crap it gets us into.”

I wished I could remember my name, just to hear it from Doann’s mouth. But it was gone, along with two thirds of my body, my pride and the rest of my memory. The broken body I’d done to myself, according to Carraos, but my memory had been wiped by the police when I got locked up.

It didn’t matter, Doann trusted me.

I wished there was another way.

“I’ll miss you too, Doann, when I’m dead.”

I’d never felt more alone as he continued to push me through the spotless stretch of copper between the bomb shells. Somewhere, something metallic was thumping the ground, like a heartbeat.

“Where d’you think we should go?” Doann said, breaking the rhythm of the thumps.

His voice echoed round the slick surfaces and sent goose-bumps along my arms. I pointed up front, towards the largest set of bomb shells. We still hadn’t come across any mechas, and that couldn’t be a coincidence.

An opening was visible in one of the large shells: a hungry mouth of tin foil.

“You do the talking,” Doann said. “I do the running when things go bad.”

All settled, we crossed the threshold: moving from the eerie glow of electrified barbs to the clean white of neon lights. It sent pain stabbing through my eyeballs. There was only one big machine in the middle of the room, which was surrounded by six staircases in a perfect geometrical design.

“Bloody hell. Where d’you think we are?” Doann whispered, his eyes on the centrepiece.

The contraption resembled a block of Goliath-sized knives attached to thick cables. A line of metal teeth dropped down from the ceiling and closed over a circular jaw planted in the ground. The car would have fitted inside the circle it formed.

Slowly, we got closer. The teeth gleamed like new. We didn’t often get to see untarnished metal: all clean and reflecting broken pictures of our faces. I ran my hand along the foot of the machine, fascinated. Red and blue wires bulged under my touch, like arteries.

“What do you think it does?” Doann asked, looking at my face this time.

“I don’t know,” I said.

My reflection was barely distorted this close to the chrome. It showed little lines growing from the corners of my eyes. My hair was wild. I suddenly felt all too aware of Doann’s gaze lingering on my face. Involuntarily, I lifted my arm to brush my hair back.

“Ow!” I exclaimed.

In my rush, I’d caught the tip of a finger on one of the sharp blades. Blood gushed. Doann’s face fell. It took me a second to realise I wasn’t responsible for the look of horror on his face.

Six mechas had appeared in the mirror surface of the machine. I turned round to see one at the top of each staircase. They descended in perfect synchrony.

All six left feet touched the ground at the same time. They were tall and plated in colourful metals: each of them a different shade of the rainbow. They were so perfect that they sparkled.

“I’ve got a deal to make!” I said quickly.

The closest mecha, a bright teal blue, blinked at me. Its eyes turned red. A scanning net shot from them, running over my face. Two mechas down, Doann was getting the same treatment. But that’s where the similarity ended. A powerful sunshine-yellow mecha grabbed Doann by his leather vest and threw him out. He bounced on impact.

“Hey!” I exclaimed, pushing my chair towards the door.

The wheels refused to catch on the smooth surface. The door of the shell took life and started sliding into place. Doann struggled to his knees, relearning how to breathe in large coughing fits.

“Doann!” I screamed. I was too slow.

He threw me a frightened glance, failing to make his legs work. The slick metal door clicked into place without leaving a handle to grab. I turned to the roomful of mechas. Their expressionless faces looked back.

“I just said I had a deal to make!”

“Yes. He did not,” one of the mechas answered. There was no way to know which one.

“How do you know? You didn’t give him time to talk!”

“Nothing a yard assistant could have would interest us.”

A scan and they already knew us. And I’d hoped I was smarter than Carraos. At least I was interesting enough to stay in the room.

“What are you offering, human?”

“I want my memory back. And for that I give you the knowledge of all the projects I worked on, my thoughts, my theories and anything else that you can find in my brain.”

The world froze. They did not have to talk, breathe or twitch to make a collective decision. This was my gamble. Had I ever done anything worthwhile? I assumed if I’d ended up in jail, I must have done something of interest. They, on the other hand, already knew.

“I also want the man on the other side of the door to leave safely and for his hearing to be fixed.”

That was pushing it, but I had nothing to lose. The atmosphere grew static: half my hair flew about, the other half stuck to my face and little jolts played over my synthetic, fringed jacket.

“We accept,” the lime-green mecha said.

I wanted to run. Instead, I licked my suddenly dry lips. Two mechas lifted me from my support, cutting the wires linking what I had left of my digestive system to my plastic kidneys and bowels.

“Stop!” I yelled, panic gripping me. “I’ll die if you do that!”

“All flesh is dying,” the red mecha answered.

Its face was right above mine. It almost hid the mechas opening the jaw machine behind it.

“No. You don’t understand. I’ll die in under an hour ... I...”

“It won’t take that long for you to remember,” the red mecha said. “The scrapyard manager told us you would come. We left the door open for you. We are glad.”

The sunshine-yellow mecha untangled a mess of red material from the inner teeth of the machine. It was like a slashed bag, and was oozing crimson liquid. My brain refused to recognise the stiff white sticks inside the red sack. But when car keys tumbled out, the world wavered. Horror muzzled me.

Part 3 - The gift of grace

I was lifted into the great machine’s mouth. Mechas formed a circle round my body. A force field held me in suspension. I couldn’t move. The red mecha’s fingers turned into needles. I couldn’t look away from them, even as the articulated arms moved too close. The needles plunged into my skull.

The world turned crimson for a second, and faded away.

I stared down at the shoes. My feet were tiny in the adult pumps. The soles felt hard. The plastic was stiff and hurt my little toes. I’d walked all day, and, now, whatever I slipped my feet into hurt. That’s why Mummy had given me her shoes, so I could play with the others outside. I turned at the sound of the door banging shut.

“Come on! It’s flying away!” screamed my cousin.

Her enthusiasm and gap-toothed smile got me laughing. Jenny was the best! I ran after her, losing a shoe.

“Hey! Don’t go running in the dirt barefoot! Don’t hurt the butterfly!” Mummy called out.

“Butterfly!” I screamed shrilly, with all the excitement and wonder of a five-year-old.

It was so big! Powdered cherry hues dropped from its wings, dusting our heads. It was a dancing fairy. It looked nothing like the disgusting cockroaches we accidently walked on, and which left gunky trails under our shoes. They flew too, but they weren’t pretty.

“Grace,” the red mecha whispered in my head, as if it was living the memory with me. That’s what I’m giving you: grace ... and drive.

I beat my tiny arms under the dance of the butterfly, twirling.