“You’re making a habit of dying.”
Scrap opened his eyes. A robot stared back at him. She was triangular, with a single eye and more probes than she knew what to do with. It took Scrap a moment to rack his memory.
“Dr -zk- Buckle?” he muttered, and sat up.
“Well, almost dying,” the doctor added. “That really is quite the core…”
Scrap looked around. He was on the same gurney in the same dull medical ward he’d found himself after he was first taken from the Pile. “Is this -zk- Bad Knees? What am I doin’ here?”
“You’re also making a habit of being brought in by those kind-cored friends of yours,” added the doctor, pointing to the window into the waiting room. “At least, I think it’s them. They seem to have upgraded, but between you and me I’m not sure it’s an improvement…”
Scrap glanced at the window. Though they were wearing different robot heads to disguise themselves, Scrap recognized Paige and Gnat immediately.
They were alive.
“Yeah,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief. “That’s -zk- them, all right.”
Scrap barely had time to breathe a long sigh of relief before Gnat raced into the room.
“Scrap!” she shouted as she threw her arms around him. Then she waved her toy bear in front of his face. “Paige founded Mr Steven Kirby too, but I’m just as happy you’re back.”
“Glad to see you, uh, ’bots in one piece,” said Scrap as Paige followed her sister into the room. She wasted no time in hugging them both tightly.
“What -zk- happened?” Scrap asked.
“The train crashed not far from here,” Paige explained. She tapped the core tracer on her wrist. “It took a while to find you among the cases, but we got there in the end. You’ve been shut down for two days. How are you feeling?”
“Two days…?” Scrap repeated. “But what happened to—?”
“We couldn’t find her,” Paige interrupted. “I don’t know if she’s gone, but there wasn’t much left of the train. To be honest, there wasn’t much left of you either.”
“You were in a sorry state when they brought you in, that’s for sure,” the doctor confirmed. “That splendid core of yours saved you again.”
“Less than dead…” Scrap said, and silently thanked his maker.
“And then me and Paige bringed you here,” added Gnat proudly. “So you could get back on your feet.”
“Thanks,” said Scrap. “I owe you—”
“No…” Gnat tutted, gesturing pointedly at Scrap’s legs. “So you could get back on your feet.”
“My -zk- feet?” Scrap repeated, and looked down. Sure enough, he had a pair of new spindly copper legs and, for the first time in ten years, two feet. In delight, he reached for them and realized he also had not one but two arms – one blue and slightly skeletal, with a small but useful-looking hand, while the other was tubular and yellow, and ended in a two-fingered pincer. The dents in his torso had been hammered out from inside, with a rust-red plate to seal the blast hole that Highshine had left.
“I said we should just use one of the old cases from the train wreck,” said Paige as Scrap climbed down from the gurney. “But Gnat said we had to fix you.”
“Because those cases aren’t Scrap – that is,” Gnat said, pointing to Scrap as if it was the hundredth time she’d had to explain it. “He’s bits and pieces, like he should be. I think he looks cool as cooclumbers.”
“Yeah … so do -zk- I,” Scrap said, and let out a wheezy laugh as he stepped gingerly down from the gurney. He, Paige and Gnat were almost out of the room when the doctor spoke up.
“I have to ask…” the doctor said in a whisper. “Are you really him? Are you K1-NG?”
Scrap didn’t answer. He just walked on two feet out of the surgery, and made his way into the street.