When Scrap opened his eyes, she was staring back at him.
Dandelion Brightside. The only face he ever wanted to—
No, not Dandelion.
It was Paige.
Dandelion’s daughter was kneeling over him, head bowed and shoulders shaking. Tears streamed down her face and dripped on to Scrap’s case, mingling with his coat of rust.
“Paaaiij…?” he slurred. He had expected to awaken in his once and former case as the King of the Robots. He expected to feel powerful … restored … complete. Instead, he just felt terrible. “Whuuts -zk- haappeniin’…?” he groaned. As Paige lurched backwards in shock, he spotted the apparatus in her hand. “Isss -zk- that a -zk- shift-widget? Like, from -zk- the -zk- old days…?”
Paige leaned forwards and inserted the shift-widget into a port to the left of his chest panel. She turned it with a clack-clack and the panel whirred shut, sealing his core inside his torso. What he saw when he gazed down was horrifyingly familiar.
He was still Scrap. Still a junk case.
“What -zk- happened? Where’s my -zk- case?” he added, before casting his eyes around the expanse of rejected cases. “Where -zk- are we?”
Paige opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. Instead she leaped at Scrap, wrapped her arms around him and squeezed him so tightly that she heard his chest creak.
“Paige…?” he muttered, dread creeping into every servo. “What’s -zk- goin’ on? Where’s Gnat?”
“It was all a trick…” she said between gasping sobs. She caught her breath but did not let Scrap go. “Highshine took Gnat … she had another case. She had a case that looked like Mum.”
“What…?” Scrap blurted. “She looked like -zk- Dandelion?”
“Gnat thought it was her, but I knew … I knew it couldn’t be her,” Paige said as she wept. She let Scrap go and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “I’m all Gnat has, but – but she’s all I have too. And the last thing I said – I told her that Mum … I told Gnat Mum was…”
Scrap pulled away and took Paige by the shoulders. Finally he saw the long scar running down her face, her left eye blinded. But more than that, he saw the truth that she had kept from him – the truth she had kept from her sister.
His voice was almost a whisper. “Dandelion’s dead?”
Paige didn’t say anything for a while – long enough for Scrap to kick himself for saying the words aloud. Then: “Dad got sick first … I mainly just remember him not being there. It was years before Mum got it, but then she got so weak, so quick. The medicine and the generators ran out at about the same time. The air got thin … Mum wasn’t even strong enough to move. She said go and I said Gnat wouldn’t go without her, and so Mum told her we’d come back for her with the ship, and so … well, and so everything else.”
“Paige,” said Scrap. “I’m -zk- sorry.”
“Mum said, find the King of the Robots,” Paige continued. “He’ll take you to the Pink-Footed Goose, she said. You can trust him. He’s family.”
A moment later, Scrap and Paige were holding each other tightly.
“…Cog’s -zk- sake, I’m so sorry,” Scrap whimpered as the realization dawned upon him. Dandelion Brightside had known she was dying when she sent her children to find him. She had no choice but to send them out into the world and hope that they tracked him down. Even though he was a junk case, she had chosen to entrust Paige and Gnat to his care.
And now they were the last two humans left on Somewhere 513. Scrap felt a sudden, strange moment of calm. In that moment, he realized he could no more escape his own fate than their mother could escape hers. He was forever tied to these humans.
They were his family.
“We’re goin’ to rescue her,” Scrap said. “We’re goin’ to save Gnat.”
“How?” Paige asked, pulling away. “How are we even going to get off the Piles?”
“I – don’t -zk- know,” Scrap confessed. “But I promise. I promise we’ll get her back. Whatever it takes, we’ll get her—”
Scrap froze.
That sound – that terrible sound again.
The hunter’s flight-cycle. It soared high over the Pile, banking erratically, lurching left then right as it sped towards them.
“Paige, run!” Scrap cried, clumsily dragging himself to his feet. But Paige did not run. She put herself between Scrap and the flight-cycle as it descended upon them. The cycle did not so much land as almost-crash. It ploughed into a stack of cases, then another and two more, slowing it down enough that it ground to an awkward halt just a few paces from where Scrap and Paige stood.
Scrap peered through plumes of dust and smoke as the flight-cycle’s pilot checked that he was still in one piece.
“Morten will not do that again,” he declared shakily. “Morten will stick to shovelling.”
“…Morten?” Scrap cried.
“Scrap!” Morten gasped, all but tumbling from the flight-cycle before landing on his back, on a mound of cases. His wheels spun helplessly as he tried in vain to right himself. “Scrap, Morten found you!”
Scrap and Paige hurried over to the upturned robot and, with a collective heave, flipped him on to his wheels.
“What are you happy about, you lyin’, doublecrossin’, case thief?” Scrap snarled. “I should -zk- junk you where you stand! What are you -zk- doin’ here?”
“My fr— Harmony had you dumped here,” he said. “Morten came to find you. Perhaps Morten is not doing the right thing … but Morten does not want to do the wrong thing again.”
“That ship has -zk- sailed, you gub,” Scrap replied. “You expect us to believe you want to help us, all of a sudden? How’d you even -zk- find us?”
Morten pointed to his shovel’s collar. Wrapped around it was an orange core tracer.
“My core tracer?” Paige blurted.
“My core tracer – Morten swapped it…” Morten said. Scrap let out a growl. “But you can have it back,” Morten quickly added.
“Thanks,” Paige said. As she took the core tracer and slipped it on her arm, Morten added, “Also, I shovelled up your other things. Here…”
Two pincered arms extended from behind his shovel and reached into a debris container on his back. After a moment, he held the arms out in front of him. In one pincer was Gnat’s toy bear and in the other Paige’s grenade.
“Be careful with the things,” he said and carefully placed both into Paige’s open palms.
“We’re takin’ the flight-cycle too,” huffed Scrap as Paige returned the bear and grenade to her satchel.
“The flight-cycle is a thing that Morten does not want,” noted Morten. “Morten prefers to travel at the speed of shovelling.”
Scrap began limping over to the flight-cycle, before stopping in his tracks.
“Wait … how do we know we can -zk- trust you?” he hissed. “Every ’bot on this sorry rock has -zk- betrayed us.”
“You have no reason to trust Morten,” the shovel-bot replied. “Morten trusted Harmony because Harmony said everything was ‘all part of the Plan’ … but Morten does not understand the Plan any more. So, in answer to your question, you can trust Morten because Morten no longer wants to be part of the Plan … and because…” Morten trailed off. A moment later, he pointed his shovel towards the horizon. “And because you are here,” he added, “and your human, Gnat, is over there, in New Hull.”
“Where is she?” Paige blurted. “Where did Highshine take her?”
“She said she was going to her Ivory Tower,” Morten replied.
“Then that’s -zk- where we’re goin’,” said Scrap.
“But you cannot just walk in,” explained Morten with a hopeless shrug of his shovel. “None may enter the Ivory Tower. What makes you think you can?”
Scrap turned to Paige, his neck-joints scraping with rust.
“Because I’m King of the -zk- Robots.”