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“And you’re a rust-licking, slag-sucking, grease-guzzling—”
Scrapper didn’t get a chance to finish telling the enforcer on his left exactly what he was before they both lifted him up and threw him face first into a cell. Stars popped behind his optics. “Rrm. Frag.” He turned his head to pull off his mask and visor with one hand. The mask was dented and the visor was cracked. He wondered if that was from landing on his head, or from the enforcer with the claws that had punched him on his way in. He muttered another curse, and let his head flop down onto the ground.
He heard a hydraulic hiss as his cell bars slid shut. Primus fraggin’ Mortilus, he hadn’t even gotten locked up in a good precinct, had he? Didn’t even have a laser forcefield for the cell. Cheap slag. “Behave yourself a couple days in there and maybe we won’t press charges.”
“You ain’t got any charges to press!”
“This time.”
“I’m talkin’ about this time!” Scrapper sat up and squinted blearily through the bars, vision blurry and faintly greenish without his visor plugged in.
“Just keep your act clean, ditchdigger.” The enforcers turned away, leaving Scrapper there. He took advantage of a rare opportunity with his mouth exposed to stick his tongue out at the enforcers, before he looked down and squinted, trying to bend the edge of his mask back into place.
A small shifting sound behind him was the first time he realized there was someone else in the cell. Scrapper turned around and saw a big orange blur. “Oh! Hey! Roommate!” Scrapper separated his mask from his visor, looked straight forward to plug his visor back into his optics, and looked back at his cellmate. As the static cleared from his booting-up visor, Scrapper saw a mech with faded orange paint, black and yellow safety stripes, and a large gray drum mixer on his back. He was sitting in the corner, knees pulled up to his chest, and when Scrapper looked at him he looked away. Okay, so skittish, huh?
That was fine. Maybe the bot wasn’t used to being in lock up. He’d probably heard some horror stories about bots getting beaten up by other cellmates. … Which were, admittedly, true, but Scrapper wasn’t that kind of cellmate.
Scrapper took the other corner away from the cell bars and sat, legs open and knees bent out, grinning at his new cellmate. “Hey.” He gestured at the mixing drum. “Another constructibot? Nice. Name’s Scrapper, of Helex.” He waited for the other bot to introduce himself.
He didn’t.
Scrapper tried again: “What’re you in for?”
The mixer flinched, like receiving a question was painful, but he didn’t answer.
Okay. Quiet bot. Maybe Scrapper should leave him alone. But, even though the mixer wasn’t looking at Scrapper—he was staring at the floor—his head had turned to follow Scrapper as he moved from the middle of the floor to the corner.
Would talking at him bother him, too, or just asking questions? Maybe if he left out the questions it’d be okay. “I’m in for—I dunno what charges they’re pretending I’m bein’ accused of, actually,” Scrapper said. “Causin’ a public disturbance, maybe. Or loiterin’. Me and my friend—well, he ain’t a friend, exactly,” Scrapper lowered his voice to a hush, you couldn’t be too public about this sort of stuff in Kaon, “but there ain’t a good word for it unless you make it all legally official, y'know?”
The quiet bot wasn’t reacting. Well, he wasn’t flinching, so Scrapper took that as a sign that he could safely go on. “Anyway—me and my friend were waitin’ in front of the Functionist office. He’s gonna be a doctor.” He looked back down at his mask, and resumed bending it back into shape. “He’s a truck crane, but he’s got better hands than any doctor you’ve ever seen—he patches bots on our worksites up when they get injured, and most of the time they get better—so we’ve gotta let the Functionists know he’s gonna switch functions. ‘Cept, if you’re a constructibot, they like to tell you that there’s a line in front of you and leave you sittin’ in the waitin’ room until they close.” He grinned. “But they can’t tell you there’s a line if you show up two hours before they open.”
There, good enough. He fixed his mask back in place. “So there we were waitin’, when Enforcers Slagger and Fragger come along 'n’ ask us what we’re doin’, accuse us of loiterin'—we say we ain’t, we’re just waitin’, and they leave—but we see them comin’ back a few minutes later with Enforcer Screwball hulkin’ behind them, so I tell Hook—he’s my friend—I tell Hook to walk the other way, I’ll stay behind and take it, cuz…” He pointed at his face and the crack in his visor. “I mean, imagine if they heard he’s a doctor and did this to his hands instead of my face. Imagine if they arrested him and took his hands off. And unless he can switch castes, it’s only a matter of time before somebody goes after him. Even after he switches, he’s gonna stay a target long as he’s got that crane on his back. I’ve gotta stay between him and anyone comin’ for him as long as possible.”
He’d meant to just tell the stranger in his cell how he’d got here. He didn’t mean to say all this. But, it was…
He and Hook couldn’t talk to each other about how much Hook was risking by fighting to become a doctor instead of just keeping his head down. They couldn’t talk to each other about how much Scrapper was risking by sticking by his side and helping him fight for this. Scrapper had dreams of his own—Scrapper wanted to be an architect—dreams that were way closer to their current position than Hook’s were. They couldn’t talk to each other about how, without discussing it, they had put Hook’s dreams first and Scrapper’s second.
He hadn’t realized until he’d started talking about it how much he’d needed to.
“… Yeah, sorry 'bout all that,” Scrapper said. “Anyway, that's—what I’m doin’ here. More or less.”
He sighed and looked toward the door, resigning himself to silence.
“… He’s-he’s-he’s got medical tr-training?”
Scrapper looked over at the other bot. Whoa. Some vocal glitch. No wonder he didn’t like to talk much.
He sure as hell wasn’t gonna comment on it, though; the quiet bot already looked nervous enough to be speaking out loud. “Nah, not yet. He’s gotta switch castes first and then get trainin’. But he’s got—” he lowered his voice again, “he’s got some medical texts we pirated us. He’s read 'em top to bottom. Ya wouldn’t believe the stuff he can rattle off now, he’s a fraggin’ genius.”
The other bot nodded, fidgeted, and then said, “Mix-Mix-Mixmaster. Of-of-of Kaon.”
Scrapper was going to assume that was just supposed to be one “mix.” “Nice to meet—”
“A-and-and-and I wanna b-be a chemist.”
Scrapper’s visor flickered in surprise. Hook would love that—one of his books was on metallurgical medicine, he’d probably love getting connected to a bot on their level who actually knew how to mix the chemical compounds in the book. “Yeah? That what you in here for?”
Mixmaster nodded enthusastically. “I-I-I’ve been stealing ph-pharmaceutical supplies for experiments, a-and I was caught with them.” He dropped his voice. “The-the-the-the place I get them from has m-medical supplies, too. I-I-I can get you the place if you can get me s-some chemistry books.”
This was why Scrapper was nice to his cellmates. You never knew what kind of connections you were gonna make. “Got yourself a deal, Mixmaster.”