WHERE THERE ARE CITIES, THESE DISSOLVE TOO

BY S. QIOUYI LU
La Puente

Inhale. Strap on your helmet. Exhale, one long stream between pursed lips. Gloves on, goggles adjusted. Seat belt strapped tight. The chomper rattles and groans as it creaks, accordion-like, into a standing position. By now, the jostling throwing you from wall to wall on imperfect suspension is a comfort in itself.

Your chomper is Gundam-like, individual plates laser-etched with golden filigree that gleams against the chomper’s deep-red paint job. With your chomper at full height, taloned feet gripping the packed dirt beneath you, layers of still-unexcavated garbage underneath, you rise to a height of nearly twenty feet. From here, you can see how the path to the arena carves through the landfill, a poorly lit, narrow road that branches off the main thoroughfare. Tangled string lights daisy-chained into a fire hazard pull electricity from an off-grid generator, illuminating the makeshift arena with humming, flickering bulbs.

Everything stays off the grid. Chomper battles are an underground sport, born in the heart of the San Gabriel Valley, in Los Angeles’s biggest landfill, hidden in plain sight and known only to a few like you. You are Winnie Su, better known by your chomper’s name, Lady Danger. But the spectators have a different nickname for you. In the Spanglish patois that arises around the arena, you are La China Cochina. It’s a badge of pride, to be known for your ruthless battle style: Double tap. Show no mercy. Don’t celebrate until the match has officially been declared over.

Your opponent today is more formidable than the rookie you slaughtered last week. Figuratively slaughtered, but some of the matches still come dangerously close. There are paramedics on site and an ambulance on call, but injuries can still be nasty.

You know that firsthand.

Even though your opponent doesn’t look too intimidating, you can’t let down your guard. You’ve seen tricked-out chompers get taken down by modest-looking scrap heaps.

The chomper opposite you is named Quetzalli. It’s well-designed, more symmetrical than the average chomper, as if some thought had gone into envisioning its assembly, rather than being an ad hoc collection of parts and modifications. Not the challenger’s first chomper—a mark of experience, collective in this case. Las Basureras run an auto repair shop off of Valley in City of Industry, and the way Quetzalli bounces from leg to leg, hydraulics pumping, shows off their mastery in lowrider hop contests. The rooster-like chomper’s body is similarly sleek as classic muscle cars, art deco–influenced lines and chrome hiding gnashing teeth and bladed wings. The body clanks against the chassis as the chomper springs from leg to leg, frame gleaming, banners streaming from the crest of her head. Shadows dance through the arena. Any other sport would have floodlights to bring the whole space into sharp relief, but floodlights here would be visible from nearby freeways, exposing the match to their steady hum.

The overwhelming stench of the place filters through to your tiny space. Diesel. Garbage. Methane. Roasting meat. Spilled beer. Piss. Sweat. Smoke. Fire. Each breath feels like swallowing poison, though you have no choice but to inhale—carrying oxygen would only serve to make Lady Danger that much more flammable.

The audience crowds in. Several spectators are eating foil-wrapped burritos or paper trays of tacos, meat freshly grilled, cilantro and onions fresh and crisp. The vendors are out toward the dump’s parking lot, a herd of food trucks with neon lights flashing red and green, proclaiming in scrolling text, TACOS AL PASTOR CARNITAS CARNE ASADA CERVEZA AGUA FRESCA HORCHATA … Another truck has signs in English and Chinese with twenty types of boba and several tea-marinated snacks and bowls. Beside it is a banh mi truck, then a Korean-Peruvian fusion truck. The whole parking lot smells like garlic and onions, the scent thick enough to penetrate through the dump’s constant smell of rotting garbage, making the dilapidated surroundings seem almost hospitable. On the makeshift benches, cobbled together from sheets of ungalvanized metal and wobbly patio furniture, several people have coolers open with sweating glass bottles of beer. Others are tailgating and laughing raucously as they knock back oysters with twists of lime and dashes of Tapatío. To one side, a chain-smoking group of Mandarin speakers gathers around a mahjong table, betting pool growing as they keep one eye on the chomper ring.

The rules are simple: Three rounds, five minutes per round, one minute rest period in between. One perimeter. Win by knocking an opponent out of bounds. Or win by utterly disabling your opponent at any point in any match. No repairs or adjustments allowed between rounds.

There’s money exchanging hands, masked by clouds of cigarette and marijuana smoke. The odds are decent tonight. If you take down Quetzalli, you’ll get a hefty cut of betting profits. Makes it well worth it to participate.

But, as the announcements come on and the referee counts down to match start, you know that money was never your motivation here. You pull a lever to your right, swinging Lady Danger’s left arm around in a hook. Lady Danger is a collection of limbs and prosthetics with an uneven, loping gait like a three-legged rabbit. Yet, despite her imperfections, Lady Danger embodies grace in your hands, with you as the maestro in her cradle. There is no exhilaration that can come even close to the power of conquest, the mad glee of destruction, the soul-feeding satisfaction of complete annihilation. It sickens you sometimes to see how much you get off on tearing people’s prize machines asunder. But the pleasure destruction brings you, the brute recklessness that you can’t get anywhere else, provides a catharsis for your id, an outlet that far supersedes any concerns for your own soul.

You plow a claw through Quetzalli’s left wing, ripping off several panels to expose frame and wiring. The move unbalances Quetzalli, but isn’t enough to disable her. You swing back around, swaying and quick. Quetzalli bounces from one foot to the other before hopping high into the air, clearing Lady Danger easily. She knocks you off balance when she crash-lands into you. A flurry of blows between the two machines leaves dents in both, scuffing up Quetzalli’s beautiful paint job, smearing streaks of red from Lady Danger into the gouges on Quetzalli’s frame. Quetzalli is the first to retreat as two of Las Basureras bow their heads together from the side and talk last-minute strategy to their teammate in the cockpit. Quetzalli’s windshield is tinted, preventing you from seeing what the operator looks like. In a way, that’s better. Easier to rip a chomper apart when its operator is anonymous.

You take the retreat as an opportunity. You’ve been stomping on this battleground for a while now, and you know its quirks. The ugly stink of cow farts has gotten more intense. There’s a PVC pipe creaking a few paces to one side, its joints swelling and settling, shuddering and rattling. You stride over and spark a pilot light, launching yourself off a perfectly timed burst of methane piping out of decaying refuse. The blast is a spectacle, bright and sudden, launching you straight toward Quetzalli while the crowd whoops and cheers.

You tear a devastating gash through Quetzalli, setting her aflame with the last of the fire propelling you.

It’s a humiliating loss for Las Basureras, whose prize fighter is now a pile of sparking and smoldering scrap, the operator hauling herself out of the wreck, coughing as she limps through the smoke. But a chomper is as ephemeral as the trash it’s made from: useful only for a moment, its final home a heap of garbage hidden in Los Angeles’s suburbs.

Lady Danger shudders as she lowers back to the ground. You disembark from the chomper. People congratulate you as you stride by, offering high fives, fist bumps, and bro-hugs. The vast majority of spectators are men. You’ve learned their body language to reciprocate their appreciation and thump people back just as heartily, even if you’re half their size.

You make your way past ahjussis wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke and over to the bookie. He nods at you, shouts over his shoulder, then goes back to distributing wads of well-thumbed cash to a mostly drunk crowd. There’s a makeshift shanty behind him, all rusting tin roof, cinder block, tarp, and pallets. Someone steps out from it, counting under her breath as she flips through bills.

“The legendary Lady Danger,” she says, looking you up and down. Round-framed glasses sit on her nose. She wears a mustard-colored beanie over her hair, which is braided into two pigtails, sleek and raven dark over her shoulders. She has the kind of rosy skin that reminds you of a white peach, its flesh pale and luminescent, hiding a secret core of red, a flash of brightness as rich as sex. The lights have her partly backlit, limning her flyaway baby hairs and the fuzz otherwise invisible on her cheeks.

“You know, I’ve been wanting to meet you for a while,” she says.

“Is that so?”

She’s stepped closer to you, her bubble of personal space brushing up against yours. Your heart beats a racing tattoo against your solar plexus as you inhale, exhale. She hands you your cut of the pool. When your fingers brush against hers, you could swear a shock of electricity turns your nails into claws that dimple her succulent skin, leaving crescent moons in their wake.

It’s a momentary illusion, one that leaves you breathless with want.

“You’re quite the name around these parts. The boss may handle most of the cash, but I keep the accounts. Nothing digital or online—all paper and abacus calculations that we destroy after each match.”

She grins, her teeth slightly crooked and turned in—the rabbit teeth so coveted in Asia.

“I see how much you’re pulling in. Every figure.”

You imagine her fingers dancing over the abacus, beads clacking like stilettos on hardwood, her fingers feather-light. How keen her eyes are as she murmurs numbers like incantations.

“I’m Agnes,” she says, blurs of orange light reflecting off her glasses.

“Winnie.”

You hook your thumb into your belt, if only to quell its thrumming.

“Winnie,” Agnes repeats, making your skin break out in a ripple of goose bumps. “Fitting.” She shifts her weight to her other leg, her stance casual, hip cocked to one side, hand resting on top. “I’m not going to waste your time, Winnie. Keeping the books here—I get a decent cut for helping out and all, but you and I both know we’re not here for the money.”

She smiles at you again. It’s charming, the way her full lips hold high the apples of her cheeks. But under the twinkle in her eyes lies something fierce: a reservoir of wickedness, one that draws you in like a lighthouse in a storm.

“I want to operate a chomper. I’ve got some designs drafted, but I need someone to help me make the chomper a reality, and someone to coach me through matches. Who better than the incredible Lady Danger?” Her face shines with fervor, full moon plating the world in silver. Agnes comes close, her pigtails brushing against your shoulder as she murmurs into your ear, “I’ll make it worth your while.”

You have no anchor to throw overboard, nothing left to pull you back as you agree. Nothing left to ground you as you crash into the waves, welcoming how her presence drowns you.

The mornings after matches always feel unreal. You return to the same landfill for your day job processing waste, but the sunbathed crags of garbage are an alien landscape compared to the landfill’s evening counterpart.

You didn’t exactly aspire to this occupation. Your father had wanted you to be an engineer, so you’d complied, having never given much thought to your future. But, by some fluke of Asian parenting, you ended up enjoying engineering after all. Mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, fluid mechanics—you’re adept at them all.

But what you like the most is creating. Envisioning a thing that doesn’t exist in this world and then making it exist, as if you straddle a portal between dimensions, importing visions.

You get a position at a lab in Caltech and expect to stay there for the rest of your life, researching automation and manufacturing techniques.

Then, amid escalating anti-immigrant sentiment, the Chinese Exclusion Act is renewed and a complete trade embargo placed on China.

The head of the lab, a Chinese professor, is falsely charged with spying for the Chinese government. A good two-thirds of the grad students there are on student visas. They are all promptly deported, and the lab disbanded.

So you go into industry, intending to work on automating waste processing to minimize municipal landfill usage. However, with the nation no longer able to ship hazardous electronic waste to China for processing, nor able to purchase raw material or cheaper recycled imports, you are flung into the new world of waste mining.

Bulldozers break through layers of earth at the previously full Puente Hills landfill to get to the rotting piles of garbage underneath. You help develop the first chompers—machines built to take in trash and digest it, extracting useful materials like metals, rare elements, plastics, anything that can be repurposed to meet domestic demand.

By day, you are quiet and mild-mannered as you oversee blueprint development and the latest figures while people drive chompers through the decay and muck, digging trenches into the archeology of humanity’s excess. Others clear and reset methane piping in their wake, ensuring careful venting of the disturbed burial mounds.

You envy those who can work so closely to the heart of the dump. It is a living thing to you: breathing out methane, gurgling and shifting, quaking with the earth, pulsing with its own ecosystems. It is the teeming id of Los Angeles, dismantled to bring new opportunity.

Certainly, you are one of the few with the knowledge and training to work in research and development in this area. You cannot leave your post. But the longing to be swallowed by abyssal waste is there still, powerful as magnetism, all-present as gravity.

So you return to the dump at night, to the craters and cliffs carved into the hills, to teetering pallets and tarps dripping garbage juice, to the choking hiss of methane as sharp as laughter.

And there, you come alive.

Agnes invites you to a cafeteria-style spot called Kang Kang Shau May, where everyone minds their own business as the two of you share beef rolls, buns, and pickled cucumbers. Agnes places her tablet on the table and shows you her sketches.

“This is Kill Switch,” she says.

You chuckle. “Hang out in the import scene much?”

Agnes looks over the underbody lighting scheme, turning mechanisms, and decals as she grins. “How could you tell?”

You pan through the notes, nodding to yourself as you take in the plans. They’re feasible and only need some small adjustments. “So, we’ll go for both speed and agility. Good for feinting and quick recoveries. Maybe a couple tricks up the sleeve.”

You get to work building the actual chomper at a salvage yard owned by a friend of yours, who gives you free rein to use the place for a modest fee. Agnes welds a prototype of the chomper’s frame, sparks magnesium-bright as they fall. You haven’t needed to buy new parts. Not even more solder. It amazes you, what kinds of things end up at the landfill. You’d expect scarcity, when the truth is that entire towns could live off the dump’s intake.

Agnes learns quickly. Her hands are slender, the lines of her wrists elegant, but you know she has hidden strength. Her grip on the torch is steady. Even though the mask conceals her face, you can imagine how intense her gaze is with its scrutiny.

Then, Agnes puts down the torch and lifts her mask. Her smile is disarming. You want to believe that she’s genuinely excited to see you, and maybe Agnes senses that. In two steps, she’s come right up to you and draped her arms over your shoulders. She’s so close that you can feel the heat radiating off her.

“Winnie …” she says, as if savoring your name. Your breath catches in your throat.

You want to hear your name on her tongue again, and again, and again. So when Agnes presses her lips to yours, you welcome her.

You have never been known to have restraint. You and Agnes burn like a wildfire, brilliant and all-consuming, as terrifying as it is awe-inspiring. You are the Santa Ana wind stoking her, urging her on, pulling her to your breast, wreaking a trail of havoc through her.

The two of you do, of course, continue to work on the chomper. It’s beginning to come together, and its progress becomes a blur of days: Agnes, in steel-toed boots and Daisy Dukes tinkering with the engine, her thighs smeared with grease; Agnes, on her knees, her half-lidded eyes asking you for more as she submits to you; Agnes, hopping into the body of the chomper for the first time to test the controls, sinful delight written in every line of her body; Agnes, her back arched as perfectly as the golden spiral as she gasps, opening for you, more than she ever thought she could, her heartbeat thrumming through your fist, as if you hold in your palm the very core of her; Agnes, lit by strings of lights, pearlescent with sweat as she takes on her first matches with your voice murmuring directions into her ear, her trust in you as powerful as surrender; Agnes, blood trickling from cuts red as danger, breathing sounds of pleasure at your care and silent attention as you patch her up.

You wonder if this love, too, is dangerous. Whether the swelling in your chest as Agnes leans against your shoulder, asleep, is just an illusion.

There’s a part of you that loves to see Agnes lit with the adrenaline of the win. How she teeters on the cusp of brutality like the most elegant of ballerinas en pointe, primal catharsis in her every delighted laugh.

But when Agnes takes a hard blow during a tense match and cracks her head against the dash, knocking her unconscious, you can’t help but feel responsible. After all, you are the one who challenges Agnes with increasingly difficult battles, the one egging her on, placing her in riskier and riskier situations to see how she reacts.

You are at Agnes’s bedside when she wakes up in the hospital. You’re shocked by the relief you feel when she meets your gaze and smiles, a sunrise slanting through redwoods, her ferocity momentarily tamed. You reach out for her hand. She wraps her fingers around yours.

“Thanks for being here,” she says.

You bark out a laugh.

“Of course. I’m the one who landed you here.”

Agnes waves you off as she makes a face. “I may be younger than you, but I’m not a child. I can make my own decisions.” She raises a finger, silencing you before you can protest. “I’m not delicate,” she says, serious, before grinning slyly. “You of all people should know how much I can take.”

She has you laughing, dispelling any argument left in you. You lean in for a kiss. Even now, in a sterile hospital room smelling of rubbing alcohol and the unnameable scent of something deeply human, even under fluorescent lights that wash the color out of everything, even while alarms go off around you and nurses run to and fro tending to emergencies, Agnes can still take your breath away.

“Win,” she murmurs. You blush when she calls you that; she’s the only person you’d allow to use this nickname. “I’m okay. Really.”

Agnes is discharged an hour later, her head wound requiring only a few stitches and her concussion mild. You pull her in extra close that night, sucking bruising kisses into her breasts, pushing her to the brink, to just shy of both your safeword limits, as if to prove to yourself that she’s still here, that she’s more powerful than you think. That maybe, as your hands leave fingerprints on her skin, she needs you too.

You dream of pomegranates, seeds glistening and full as clitorises, bursting wine-red between teeth, tart and sweet. You dream of your skin pulling back to reveal rivers, deltas, highways. You dream of climbing a peak and brushing your fingertips against the moon.

You dream of Samson.

He comes to you sometimes like a premonition, or perhaps an omen. “Don’t get attached,” he says, his voice warm like hypothermia, undressing you with its paradoxes.

But you do. Even as you tell yourself that your intimacy is rented, that he only wants you around for what you can provide to him, you get attached. It’s a mistake, but you open yourself to him anyway. You allow him to infiltrate you, to leave his impressions on your synapses like a ghost in a machine.

“Don’t get attached,” he says, cupping your cheek, kissing your fingertips, as he slams skin-to-skin against you, tearing cries from your throat until you come undone against him, trembling as he buries your face in the sheets.

You drift on a sea of desire, a river of stars splitting you in two. Samson slips through your fingers like grains of sand, each counting down to absence. You tell yourself to stay cool and collected, an astronaut untethered in the zero-gravity of space.

But you have never loved lightly, even as you brace yourself for inevitable separation.

Your dreams take you further back sometimes, to the landscape of a country you know only through brief trysts, as if she were a mistress to keep hidden from your main allegiance. You remember flocks of bicycles a hundred people thick; you recall a city dense with blocky buildings and diesel, bursting with people: in alleys, in corner stores, at bus stops, on steps and balconies.

You remember an apartment, claustrophobic with its compactness. Firm, bead-filled pillows, beds stiff as planks. A television set on the floor playing cartoons. A figure whose face you can no longer picture, but whose very silhouette imbues you with a sense of safety.

When you were a year old, you were sent back to China to be raised by relatives. A satellite child, not unlike other Chinese-American children, set adrift between two coasts before settling on one. A year later, you were returned to your parents in the US. Your mother tells you sometimes that you were crying for your uncle as you returned, inconsolable.

She tells the story as if it were amusing. But you find more and more traces of separation as you grow older: hollows, absences where safety should be, where fear replaces love. Where attachment is to be guarded, hoarded, so that it becomes unreal if you ever do find yourself moored.

Don’t get attached.

Samson crosses the border between the dream world and your waking life. You see him in the corner of a coffee shop one day, his nose in a book. Shocked, your head going light, your hands going clammy, you duck and pivot on your heel, walking away as briskly as you can while not drawing attention to yourself.

You see him in the crowd, eyes dark and watching, at your next chomper battle.

He’d told you that he was moving away. You figured you were simply something too short-term and casual to justify the energy of keeping in touch over distance. But whatever took Samson away appears to have brought him back. He returns several times a month to watch matches.

You have no idea if he’s still battling. But you know that, despite everything, your heart still remembers your limerence, betraying your shaking body.

Agnes notices the tension you’re carrying before you do. She manhandles you onto the bed and kneads your shoulders, drawing long groans of pleasure from you.

“You’ve been quiet lately,” she says as she straddles your waist and works her way down your back. “Other than now, that is.”

All you can manage is a soft mmph in response.

“Really, though,” Agnes says, her hands slowing to rub circles on your skin. “What’s wrong?”

You turn your face away from the pillow and look up at her with one eye. She’s trying to play it cool, but there’s a hint of genuine concern in her eyes, so tender it could make you weep.

But you don’t.

“My ex is back in town,” you say after a moment. Funny, how your relationship with Samson had been so multilayered, so all-consuming, and yet it’s now so easily glossed over with the single syllable ex.

“Didn’t part on good terms, then?” Agnes says.

The laugh escapes you before you can contain it. “He left me bleeding and bruised in a wrecked chomper,” you say, your stomach turning at the memory. “Lucky there was an EMT at the match who could help out before the ambulance arrived.”

Agnes goes still. You close your eyes, but when you feel Agnes shaking against you, you open them to look up at her again.

You call them flashbulb memories, the way a fraction of a second, a single sight, can imprint on you so strongly that it shines clear over a murky haze of memory. Agnes impresses on you like that now, her hands balled into fists, her face a lightning bolt of fury.

“I’m fine,” you say. Agnes’s brief ha doesn’t break her expression. “Really.”

“Sure,” she says, then lets out a long breath and runs a hand through her hair. “Okay. I’ll believe you.”

Some part of you wants to spring up, to hurl her off of you, to let yourself become feral and wild as you snap at her. For what, you’re not sure: for her condescension, you’d say; her insolence and her assumptions. But there’s a deeper part of you, still bruised, wounds reopening, that’s furious because she’s right.

Of course you’re not okay. You woke up to strangers around your bed, asking you question after question and taking whatever samples they needed, while you asked for Samson again and again, only for him to never appear. The recovery afterward, lonely and aching—gathering the nerve to call him for some kind of closure, only to find that he’d disconnected his number.

The ghost of absence inhabits your very marrow. Despite it all, you still love battling, even find solace in the thrumming womb of a chomper. But seeing Samson once more, unchanged, unrepentant, chokes you with waves of unparsable emotion.

Samson’s face superimposes itself on others’ faces, sometimes even on Agnes’s face, so that you have to blink and recompose yourself, remind yourself of where you are, when you are. PTSD is a perpetual engine that powers you across space and time at the cost of splitting your being in two, astral-projecting one half while anchoring the other to a touchstone of trauma.

Don’t get attached.

You coach Agnes less and less as she grows into herself as a fighter. These days, you make only the occasional comment, and usually only on technical details.

“I want to do a solo match,” she says. She stirs the boba at the bottom of her cup with her straw before sucking up several of them, the two of you walking down Alhambra’s main street, Agnes sipping on Hokkaido milk tea, and you on Tieguanyin oolong milk tea.

You’ve discussed this with her before, having her battle without your voice in her ear guiding her. Last time, she wasn’t quite there yet, but now, you have confidence in her ability to react on her own.

Still, something stabs at you when you imagine watching her from the sidelines without a channel open to communicate with her. But it’s no use holding her back with your fondness for her. The greatest mentors know when to let their students go.

On the night of Agnes’s solo match, you walk down the winding path through garbage, finding solace in the sensory overload. Stink clings to your skin. You pass cathode-ray televisions, your skin crawling as you notice that the glass in the tubes is, thankfully, unbroken. You make a note to come back during the day to properly dispose of and recycle the leaded tubes. Closer to the arena, the dump’s excavation is less orderly, a relic of the experiments you undertook with prototypes.

Your legs go weak when you round the final cascades of garbage into the arena and see a familiar sight, one that throws you straight from your body into a stratosphere of dread befitting the chomper’s name.

You should have expected this long before you stepped into the arena. Should have realized the instant Samson appeared in your life again that there was no way he’d ever find another outlet for his aggressions.

Dreadnought.

You hope there’s a mistake. That maybe Kill Switch isn’t up against that monster. But when you take the final steps into the arena, Agnes catches your eye and waves.

You don’t get a chance to wave back. Samson’s across the arena, solid as a mountain face and just as unscalable. Even though he’s wearing a button-down flannel shirt, you know that tattooed on his left shoulder is the Rising Sun.

You remember being stunned by it when you first got into bed with him. You run your fingers over it, your heart thudding not with arousal, but with a surge of fear.

“What does your tattoo mean?” you ask, deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He turns his head from the pillow just as you’d done with Agnes and says, “It’s a Japanese symbol. For my mom’s side.”

You don’t know how to respond to that. Why the Rising Sun, of all symbols, to represent Japan? You tell yourself that maybe he doesn’t know its meaning. How seeing it is like having a hand around your throat, squeezing, constricting, collapsing your larynx, plunging you into silence, reminding you of a broader history you’re from, even if you only have secondhand memories of it.

Seeing Samson here now is like the shock of that discovery, striking quick as a punch to the chin and just as disabling.

Agnes follows your gaze. You don’t know what you look like now, whether fear shows in your features, or whether you’ve thrown on the mask again, seeing through the world around you to a point beyond the horizon.

Thunderclouds of rage gather over Agnes’s face. She’s always been smart. She puts two and two together. The moment she does, she clenches her fists until her knuckles are white as dolomite.

“I …” you begin, then catch yourself breathing too shallowly as your throat thickens. “I can’t let you go solo against him. I can’t let you go against him at all.”

But that only seems to encourage Agnes. She stands up straighter and meets Samson’s gaze from across the arena, her eyes narrowing into a glare. “No way. I’m taking him down.”

Tectonic plates strike against each other as the violence of impact slams into you again. The sounds around you muffle as you stare at the single word Dreadnought.

There’s so much you want to say to Agnes. So much in your heart that you’ve never told anyone: the sting of being snipped away like an inconvenience. Detachment that spreads through your whole consciousness until it manifests in your veins, your arteries, your retinas, until the very sight of yourself in the mirror is foreign, an uninhabited land. How you weave absence into a cocoon and use it to tell yourself that your very core is unknowable to anyone.

But some metamorphosis has occurred in you, with Agnes as the catalyst. She fits into you like water, opening your heart to hers. You have osmosed into her, membrane to membrane, and she into you, traded in heated kisses that fog up her glasses, your qi and hers as one. She knows you in a way no one else does, even though it hasn’t even been a full year since your relationship began.

But you don’t know how to vocalize that, or to say how much she means to you, how your spirit soars when you’re with her. How you dare to imagine a future with her: possibility is, to you, far more terrifying than oblivion.

Agnes’s expression softens. She touches your shoulder. “Hey,” she says, turning you to face her. She cups her hand against the base of your skull and touches your forehead to hers.

Warmth suffuses you, grounds you. You feel steady against her. Rooted.

“Breathe with me,” she says, voice loud enough for only you to hear.

You want to panic. But Agnes breathes in for eight measured counts, holds for a moment, then lets out a steady exhale, her breath hot against your cheeks, pulling you back from a racing spiral of thoughts.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Hold. Exhale. After a few rounds, you’ve returned to the present, your thumb rubbing circles into Agnes’s other hand.

“Thank you,” you murmur, your voice going hoarse.

“I’ll be okay,” she says. “Trust me.”

You do. You trust that she can get through the match, even as you send her off with your eyes into Kill Switch, knives digging into every pulsing chamber of your heart.

Samson doesn’t bother to speak to you before the match. He keeps himself at a distance, looking at Agnes with the same predatory gaze you’ve seen dozens of times.

Agnes and Samson step up to each other in the center of the ring. Their mouths are moving, but you can’t hear the words being exchanged.

Samson climbs into Dreadnought and Agnes into Kill Switch. Unlike others who take a more Transformers approach to turning chompers into fighting machines, Agnes preserves the chomper’s original form: the treads, the claw, the epiglottis, the various chambers into which raw materials are sorted. But she’s added her own touches to the design. Blue LEDs outline the treads, creating an otherworldly underbody glow. The machine is far more compact than the typical chomper. Agnes’s streamlined design has even inspired you to make the next generation of chompers more energy-efficient and compact without sacrificing power. Kill Switch’s lightness and multitread system allow her to turn quickly and pivot corners faster than most chompers you’ve seen, even ambulating ones. And instead of storing materials in the gut chambers, Kill Switch is filled with extra battery cells for boosts of power and speed. Kill Switch is a clean machine, one that fills you with pride, even as Dreadnought roars with anticipation.

Dreadnought is more juggernaut than machine, capable of crumpling flimsy chompers on impact. Without Agnes grounding you, you’re floating again, two visions overlaying your sight: one of the present, and one of the past. Dreadnought, shrugging off your blows and charging you, Samson’s leering grin visible through the windshield; Dreadnought, shaking debris down from towers of garbage with its might, even as spectators shout and shield themselves from brittle showers of sun-bleached plastic, unidentifiable sludge, old packaging, and bits of metal; Dreadnought, jumping up to close the distance between you and Samson, crushing Lady Danger into twists of metal; you, hysterical with adrenaline, shaken, the roof of the body caved in to an inch above your head, airbags punching bruises into you, realizing only when blood trickles into your eyes that you have gashes all over from where you collided into Lady Danger’s frame; Samson, declared winner, flashing you a sharp-toothed grin as he walks away to collect his winnings.

You’re the one who’d helped him develop a propulsion system powerful enough to give Dreadnought the lift to execute its devastating moves. You’d even prioritized developing Dreadnought over Lady Danger, because Samson would lavish you with the praise, attention, and validation you never gave yourself. He was the one who brought up facing off against each other: proof of concept for both machines. You agreed, thinking of the match as an exercise.

But Samson never pulls his punches.

The buzzer sounds, starting the timer for the first round. Agnes stays nimble, dodging Dreadnought’s blows with a wide margin while trying to punch through Dreadnought’s armor.

But if Dreadnought had been armored when you faced Samson, she’s even more so now. Blows that would have torn through others as if their hulls were made of tissue paper leave only shallow gouges in Dreadnought’s steel plates. You wonder if Agnes will have the mental fortitude to persist through Dreadnought’s defenses—the game is as much about being levelheaded and sure of yourself as it is about brute force.

You don’t sense Agnes’s energy flagging, though, even as Kill Switch and Dreadnought end the first round in a stalemate. But you can tell that Samson’s getting aggravated—that he’d intended to take down Kill Switch viciously and quickly during the first round. Dreadnought has an agitated energy about her, and, when the second buzzer sounds, Samson comes at Agnes with even more force, barreling at her with such energy that the ground trembles. Agnes leaves less and less of a margin when Kill Switch dodges Dreadnought.

It pains you that you’re only able to watch from the sidelines—that you can’t hear Agnes’s panting, or the moments when she takes a deep breath to center herself. You can’t whisper encouragements to her, or hear her curse when things don’t go as she expects. But maybe that’s for the best—you can’t trust your voice to not shake as you speak to her, or trust that you can keep yourself collected as you hear Agnes’s cries, knowing that Samson is responsible for them. He puts up such a front of impenetrability that you can’t afford to introduce anything that would compromise Agnes mentally or emotionally.

The crowd winces together when Dreadnought sideswipes Kill Switch, knocking her off-balance. Kill Switch’s gyroscopes engage stabilizers that extend from her body to keep her upright, yet as Agnes steadies Kill Switch, Samson comes in for another blow, one that Agnes doesn’t have time to dodge. Kill Switch crashes hard enough to rattle the trucks parked around the arena, empty glass bottles of beer clinking together as the ground quakes. Kill Switch’s stabilizer hydraulics pump madly as her arms scrabble for leverage to rock upright.

Dreadnought retreats several feet. Someone less familiar with the machine and her operator would think that perhaps Dreadnought is giving Kill Switch the room to get back up. But your heart plunges like a stone from your throat to your stomach.

You know what Samson is about to do.

“Agnes!”

The roar of Dreadnought’s engine drowns out your cry, her jet boosters filling the arena with the tang of ozone and exhaust. Dreadnought pulls from her reserve energy to propel herself into the air, clearing enough height that, when she lands on Kill Switch, folding her lighter frame like an accordion with a massive quake, the bookie’s shanty collapses and several strings of lights come tumbling down from their posts, sparking a fire on the edge of the ring.

You don’t hear the ref calling the match. You’ve already darted down from the makeshift bleachers, past people trying to contain the fire, and broken into a sprint toward Kill Switch. Samson climbs out of Dreadnought’s cab like an astronaut stepping out of a vessel after a successful space mission.

It takes everything in you to face Samson. To hold his gaze and not back down, even as he triggers a cascade of images and memory so thick that you almost lose sight of the present in the deluge.

You’ve never allowed yourself to imagine what you’d say to Samson if you ever saw him again, because you never wanted to see him again.

So you don’t say anything.

Samson smiles as if he hasn’t just crushed a machine and possibly a person, as if the sport were no different than a game of tennis.

“Winnie,” he says. The sound of him saying your name sickens you, curls your lips back into a snarl.

“Get out of my way,” you hiss, trying to push past him to get to Kill Switch. Agnes still hasn’t appeared.

But Samson grabs your arm, his fingertips digging into your flesh. “You know her?” he asks, nodding at Kill Switch. “She seems sweet.”

With Samson holding you back from Agnes, something snaps. Anger replaces shame, replaces hurt, replaces fear. You yank your arm away from him so hard he’s thrown off-balance. Then you swing your fist around, landing a punch square against his jaw, making him stagger back and collapse against Dreadnought’s frame.

“If you show your face around here again, I will fucking destroy you,” you say as Samson’s eyes swim in and out of focus. “That’s a promise.”

You leave him as he left you. You don’t have the time for vindication or satisfaction. Knuckles throbbing, you dash over to one of Kill Switch’s doors. It no longer fits flush to the frame, both the door and the body creased like balled-up paper. A mere tug won’t do. You find a position where you can leverage your weight against the door. Even as your muscles burn, as pain floods your whole body, and you feel like your head could burst with the strain of it all, you will yourself to keep pulling.

Finally, you work a gap large enough that you can reach inside. Agnes looks hazy, blood trickling down her neck, staining her clothing, which is already damp with adrenaline-laden sweat. You fumble around until you can unbuckle her seat belt and pull her from the wreck. Her breaths are shallow, but at least she’s breathing.

The whiplash of emotions makes you feel manic, as if you’re about to break out into wild laughter. But when Agnes opens her eyes again to meet yours, when she smiles at you, firelight dancing in her eyes, you find tears falling before you can stop them from spilling over.

“Win,” Agnes breathes.

You sob with relief as you hold her close.

You live in a palimpsest, people and places double-exposed in a spatiotemporal pocket where layers and planes merge. Time is distorted here, long stretches compressing into incomplete montages, micromoments blooming into eternities, whole years hauled to the surface of your mind in an instant.

Dragging Agnes out of Kill Switch becomes another shadow impressed over the negative of your memory, exposing panic in your bones. Even when she recovers with little more to show from the incident than whitening scars, you find exposure after exposure layering on her aura, making you fall silent as she asks you what’s wrong.

“I told you,” Agnes says, the two of you under the covers, your hands twitching with want for her even as your mind stops you from acting, “I’m not delicate.”

You allow yourself to cup her cheek. It’s true—she’s been resilient and strong, keeping both of you afloat.

“I know,” you murmur, then pull her close and say into her neck, “but maybe I am.”

Your face is wet with tears that soak into Agnes’s shoulder as you clutch her closer, willing her not to leave.

“I’m okay,” she says.

“I’m not,” you whisper in reply.

“I know.”

Agnes pulls back enough to look into your eyes.

“I love you, Win.”

The words shoot through you like a star you could make a wish on, like something you could pin a hope on. You entwine your fingers with hers.

“I love you too,” you say.

Agnes touches her forehead to yours. She is a safe harbor in the sea of possibilities that the two of you are drifting on, anchored to each other with a red thread.

Come what may. As you look into her dark eyes, you see Agnes, and only Agnes.