Silvy came to and moaned. First in pain, then in confusion. It took her half a minute to realize she was staring at Iris’s armored ass, upside down. She had been tossed over Iris’ shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “What the? This is no way to carry a lady!”

“Shut up if you don’t want to be shot,” she hissed back.

“But, Iris, what happened to you? Why are you bare?”

Beyond naked, Iris was in nothing but her sub-dermal plates. The little layer of humanity on the outside had been discarded, leaving just the alloys and graphene that constituted her HAB unit. “That’s where the bug was, right? I ripped it all off. It doesn’t impact my performance, and now is not the time to be worrying about how I look.”

“There are limits to not caring how you look though.”

“Yeah, well, you almost died, you idiot,” Iris said, and finally tossed Silvy into a corner garden. Once there had been asphalt covering the ground, a patio of some sort. The locals had smashed it out with hammers to get at the dirt. Somehow, they had managed to kill potato plants trying to eek out some calories. Just putting her down made Silvy hiss and whimper in pain. She had bone fractures all over, and her limbs were starting to swell in her flight suit. “Just stay quiet, I’ll be right back. I need to get a gun.”

Silvy bit her lip and nodded, looking away from the blood splattered skull of steel that housed Iris’ brain. The look in her face hurt more than the missile strike had, but Iris buried that. She prowled out, hunched over and sprinting. Xi’s voice was getting echoed throughout the slums by means of aerial drones. Most of it was cut and looped repeats of his earlier speech. There was also a promise of a bounty now. Anyone who brought Iris’ head to him would get one billion yuan as compensation. The number made people drool, but those she made eye contact with shrank away. The impoverished no longer had the spirit to risk themselves, no matter how much money was offered.

The Brothers of Steel were another matter. She found the first trio of them in a road clogged with abandoned shipping trucks. The cargo cabs had been converted into something akin to a mobile home. What mattered was how tight line of sight was. She dropped in the middle of them, grabbing the nearest gun by the barrel. At the same time, she smashed her hand into the arm of the second gunman, snapping it. The third spun and got her foot stuffed into his gut so hard he flew back and dented the wall of the cargo hauler.

The man with the broken arm howled in pain as she ripped the gun free of the first man. She smashed the stock into that gunman’s nose and dropped him, rolling on the ground, his face a mess of blood and tears. Armed up, she sprinted out, circling round from where she had left Silvy. More squads were coming. Jumping up from cars to balconies and to shallow rooftops only bought so much stealth. One of them spotted her. She spun and pumped half her magazine at them, cutting holes through their guts and taking only a few scratches herself.

“Shit.” She hadn’t grabbed more magazines. The next squad that showed up came running towards the sound of gunfire. She dropped in front of them. She could have tried to disable them, to shoot their knees out or scare them off. That would have increased the risk for Silvy though, so she killed each of them.

After grabbing their ammo, she finally found what she needed: a ride. Someone had an electric motorcycle hidden under a weather tarp. The chain through the front wheel was thick, but rusted. She pried a link open and broke it, yanking it free as the owner stepped out to look at her. Old, scarred, missing an arm and not even replaced with a prosthesis. “That’s my bike,” he said, not in Sprawl dialect, but English. No need for translation software.

She pointed the gun at him. It didn’t even make his eyes flicker. There was nothing there to flicker, no spark of life. He just stared back at her and drank his can of beer. “Sorry, I need it.”

“It doesn’t take as much charge as it used to, but I replaced the tires just a few months ago. Try not to get it shot. I wouldn’t trust the battery with a bullet wound.” Iris lowered the gun and hesitated. The man shrugged. “Ain’t my first time seeing a HAB unit, girl.”

“There’s a bounty on my head.”

“And? How am I supposed to get that? I’m a one-armed cripple and you could feed me my own asshole, if you felt like it. And it was Chang’s policies that left me ineligible for a new arm. I don’t suppose you’d leave me my bike if I asked nicely?”

She shook her head. “I gotta get out of here.”

“Must be nice to have somewhere to go. Something to do. A justification to rob an old man.”

Iris opened her mouth, but stopped herself. She couldn’t think of a justification beyond the fact that she needed it, and it was handy. She wondered if by taking the bike, she was killing the man as surely as the Brothers of Steel she had shot. A soldier abandoned after the war, left with nothing but resentment and alcohol to dull the pain. “Sorry,” she repeated, and hopped on the bike. The computer yielded to her digital probing, and started for her.

“You don’t need to be sorry. You’ll have all the time in your life to be sorry when you finally give up fighting.”

She gunned it and blasted down the gravel street. Rocks shot out behind her, pelting windows and cars, and making people stick their heads out to scream at her. It would bring the gunmen faster, but she didn’t have time to worry about that. Iris peeled around the final corner and grinded to a stop beside the garden.

Silvy wasn’t there.

“Here,” the girl said, weakly hobbling over and holding up a jacket for her.

“Really?” Iris couldn’t even guess where Silvy had stolen it from.

“You need it, you look ridiculous.” Silvy forced the coat into Iris’ hands. “Oh this is going to hurt so much.”

“Sorry,” Iris said, and threw on the jacket. It was a puffy thing of faux leather, and so long it almost seemed more indecent to be dressed in just it. The important thing, was it gave Silvy something to grab onto as she pulled herself onto the back of the bike and hugged Iris.

The two of them took off, weaving through the unmapped mess of slums, seeking out the bigger roads until she hit the island’s main highway. From there, it became a race the Brothers of Steel couldn’t win, not on the ground. They shot a few times, missing completely. They had armored vehicles, but they didn’t have the acceleration that the electric motorcycle had. She hit three hundred kilometers an hour before they had even broken clear of local traffic.

Weaving between cars like they were stationary, Iris found herself thinking about the man she had robbed. A soldier, deprived of his purpose in life. Unable to fight anymore, and without anything else to fall back on. It wasn’t even his fault, he was in a society that had more people than it had useful jobs. She wondered if she would have ended up like that, if she hadn’t qualified for a HAB unit, but perhaps that had just delayed the inevitable.

At some point she’d be like him, and with a lot less body than he had.

“Iris,” Mendel said, his voice crackling through jamming static. “Looks like you got rid of your bug.”

“The manual way, yeah.”

“I don’t even want to know what that means. Right now, we’re sailing east, headed for Okinawa. We won’t be able to pick you up, but don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry? You expect us to hide here or something? Have you gone insane?”

“You need to hold out until the Artic Cutters arrive, about twelve hours.”

“I don’t even have a proper gun. Silvy needs a hospital too.”

“I hear you, I hear you. We all saw the Archjet go down. I’ve sent in backup. Sending coordinates now.”

Iris wanted to scream, but also didn’t want to worry Silvy. The coordinates came through, along with a path to follow. She figured it would be a few more minutes before Chang got hover-jets in the air, but soon they’d have the airspace crawling with gunships. The bike was running out of charge fast too. The only thing she could do was go to the coordinates and hope for the best.

The path lead to a beach, a crummy thing filled with trash washed up from who-knew-what river. She nearly had to coast in as the battery screamed for more charge, but it got her to the beach. Silvy was trembling by then, her breathing uneven. Iris could only imagine the pain from every crack and bump in the road.

Hope manifested in the form of a black speedboat skimming over the pacific chop. It crashed full speed into the beach, scraping up the sand and crashing into the high tide levy as the occupant jumped out. It was an RW-33 with a high powered transmission receiver strapped to the back, along with a pack of goodies. The canine chrome boy spotted them and trotted over. “Well, don’t you look like shit,” it said.

Iris gaped back at it. Had she any synth skin left, she would have been burning. “Roselyn? You’re one to talk!”