Taking the left fork, I rode top-speed, keeping my head down, throwing up a viz scrambler, just in case Rambo was right about junkbunnies creeping around; now I'd just look like colorful fuzz on a bike to any sightseers. I glanced at my handlebar chronometer―twelve past the hour. Yep, now I was late for sure. The meet up time was now, what, an hour ago? Why was Rambo so late, too?

I double-timed it, really putting my muscles into the pedaling. It was too risky to run engines in proximity to all this random junk―you just never knew when some heavy-ass gadget would become inductively attracted to the ion drive and come slamming into your head. The Velvet Paw was only 5 klicks from here, if I remembered right; I couldn’t always keep up with how often Betts switched up our meeting place to keep the ‘bunnies and the rival gangs from snooping into our business. Fortunately, there was way more junk on Beta Fornax II than there were ‘bunnies, so the odds of running into them was low. On the roads, in the vast junk plains, and in the city centers, it was riskiest, but I felt most at home in the cozy tangles of stuff in the vast junkscrapers.

The Velvet Paw was fronted by a refreshment station, nothing more than a glorified vending machine with mercher attendants. I liked merchers; they just wanted to trade with anyone, they didn’t look down their noses at others like the Academics did. But the Academies needed them for all the essential services they provided, just like everyone else, so they were more polite with the merchers than they were with us. But the merchers were polite to everyone, because it was good for business, and life was harsh enough without being being snubbed by rude nerds, so the merchers, although a little hilfiger in their style, were generally deck cronkites and tassels.

Today the outside of the Paw was swarming with newbie junkbunnies digging in scrap piles all along the street; junkbunnies were only a threat if they caught us scavenging and could ID us well enough and quick enough to call in a nerd Administrator. As long as they were in our turf, far from any town center, and alone, we could keep them in line.

None of them took notice as I secured my bike to a rusty iron piling jutting out from a wall of twisted automotive debris. I stepped lightly, mumbling a password to the attendant, and he gave me a wink. The owners of the Velvet Paw and all the other speakeasies offered respectable fronts to many of our establishments, and that was usually enough to keep the Academics looking the other way. The attendant disappeared, and a crack in the wall opened next to me; I slipped in as it shut behind me. I was guided down a pitch-black corridor by the firm hand of the attendant on my shoulder. He shoved me into a room and slammed the door behind me, no doubt anxious to get back to his official duties: behind closed doors, they were happy to work with hipsters, but publicly acknowledging that would've made their dealings with the nerds more tense.

Inside, it was all friggin' shoes. No joke. Suede, velvet, fuzzy shoes of too many colors all at once, stuck to the walls and ceiling. My great-grandpa used to say it was a room designed by "Elvis's bleeding cobbler." I squinted as a totally unnecessary floodlight came on.

"Juno," a silky, liquid, voice said. I couldn't see with the blinding flood, but that was definitely Betts. I tensed, ready for her to lay into me. The light dimmed to a mellow glow. It was, for shiz, Betts, purple bangs pinned back, giving me a full view of her trademarked irritated look. She had her hands on her hips which were layered in her electric blue velvet dress under which she wore patterned tights. The tights had some frayed seams, but that dress must have had some expensive self-repairing threads, because it looked way too undamaged for a junkrun dress, and I'd seen her wear it a bunch before. My lip curled thinking about her using gang funds for her own friggin' stuff. I took a deep breath thinking maybe it was a re-cooled find that she also sold on the 'Net. It was a struggle to give her any benefit of the doubt, though.

"You're late," she spat.

Absently, I felt my neck tat. I thought about what Rambo had said. Betts had come from Oasis, a former allied gang, now defunct. My deck boy PickupStix would have been our leader, but he declined the offer for...reasons I didn’t want to think about. Betts had the skills―she was a trixie, a gearhead, and a jinxie―most runners had only earned one or maybe two specialty tags. But she was never good with people. Sure, she cleaned up nice―she could swagger those elemental hips of hers like nobody, and read your friggin' mind with her neon green eyes, but she'd never have enough heat to maintain strong loyalties.

"Sorry, but that aerogel shaft drive suggested by Hipstamatic just wasn't―"

"Excuses, again, Juno?"

"―and that ridic trip to BF-IV so I could butter some nancies for you took more time than I―"

She glared at me. "I can look up weather sat readings, Juno. The solar storm fizzled out before you even left BF-IV."

Almost automatically, I began to protest, but I finally gave up and sighed. I knew she was right, and it was my own fault because my heart wasn't in it. I tried real hard not to let down my buds―not Betts, but the rest of the gang―because it wasn't their fault that I wanted out.

"Alright, Betts," I said, resolved. "It won't happen again." At least as long as I'm around.

"Well, whatevs, we've got a run to do." That silky liquid voice of hers almost made me miss the utter contempt that it conveyed.

She eyed me warily. "And where's Rambo? He's been late to the last few runs. If this keeps up, we'll have to boot him. I warned him already. Our rep has been sinking, in no small part because of his acting like a bleeker."

I shrugged. He wasn't my problem. I looked around the shoe room. "Uh, Betts? Where's Calvin? And Tomahawk and Lise? And everyone?" It was just me and Betts.

"I sent them ahead to get started," she oozed. "It didn't make sense to waste time waiting for you guys. C'mon, I'll take you to the first site."

The Velvet Paw had a secret exit I hadn't remembered, which Betts led me through that took us into a deserted section of the neighborhood. Narrow alleyways were steeped in shadow between teetering towers of furniture and mag-rail cars, leaving only a few narrow slits open to the sun's hazy red light. Betts led me through the pitch black corridor, her head lamp glowing just enough so I could follow. I sweated, feeling the walls close in on me, trying not to think about the junkscraper avalanche I got caught under in West Bodacious when I was just a 7-year-old snipe. Usually, Betts let me focus on the junk fields that were more wide open but we had to be less picky these days, what with our low leaderboard rankings. Even so, I was getting real tired of this. Sure, I was good at it, when I wasn't being lazy. So what else was I going to do, even if I found some way to get out of the life? I supposed I could have found a mercher to apprentice for; I was a passable gearhead, so could probs be useful to them. But although the merchers weren't bad folk, they were purely transactional and didn't grok the True Culture.

After a meandering route through more crazy narrow passages, some of which blocked the light of Beta Fornax altogether, we finally popped out into the interior of a junkscraper―an area four by four fixies long, with ceiling struts held up by junk-festooned steel columns. Bits of sunlight were streaming in through the cracks between the stuff crammed between the scaffolding. I had to squint again, since the space was lit up by another of Betts’s awful flood lights. My fellow 'Snatchers were there scouring through junk looking for re-coolable loot. I exhaled and got to work. My buds were already covering most of the easy spots, so I looked for a way to a different room and noticed a Juno-sized gap between a couple of stacks. At least this one I didn't have to edge sideways through, but my stomach nearly emptied itself when I came to the end...that is, the end of the damn storey―there was a fifty-meter sheer drop down to the street below at the end of the passageway I was in. Somehow with all that wandering through the dark, we'd ended up on the―I counted joists―fifth story of a junkscraper!

I shrugged it off and poked around, peeling open the tops of plastic crates, using my keychain laser torch when necessary to get through particularly heavy-duty lids. Peeking inside, I had a knack for knowing if it was worth pulling and digging through, just from the surface layer of shapes and colors. One particularly weathered crate was actually made of wood and smoldered when I lasered through the top; the smell reminded me of some tasty varmint barbecue I'd had at a speakeasy on BF-IV. Some very old laser-driven music discs sat in clear plastic cases inside. I noted the era printed on the cases. What was the re-cooled era for music right now? I pulled the crate, stepping back to make room to pull it down to the floor, but it got caught on something and then suddenly came free, almost knocking me over, but I shimmied to the right and it landed with a thud on the floor, clanging against the aluminum planks. Dust billowed around me, making my nose itch.

I peered over my shoulder, making sure nobody was within range to see me. I slid Tilly out of my pocket and ran her over the box top―an easy way to check for valuable goods. If I ever got caught carrying her, they'd for sure take her away and Relocate me for awhile; the Committee was very clear on their feelings about the Hipstamatic distributed supercomputer and the scanners that talked to it. I didn't use it often, because Betts usually briefed us on the stuff to look for, but sometimes when I didn't want to grovel at her for intel, I'd just find a corner in the junk stacks and use the scanner so I didn't have to talk to her bitchy ass.

Hardly anyone had a direct-link scanner like Tilly. I got used to her random buzzing against my skin whenever she picked up a new find from Hipstamatic so often that I just ignored it unless I was on a junkrun. Mostly, she kept me company, since even though the 'Snatchers were the best buds I had in the world, I didn't spend much time with the few of us who were left. Beyond being my companion, Tilly was special to me. I'd inherited her from mom, so I didn't care how dangerous it was to have her, I wasn't ever letting her go. Also, if I really did find myself starving, I could sell her for a whole lot of meals. I shivered at the thought; I hoped it never came to that. Nah, most runners had a contact who knew a contact who got regular updates from a guy who had a scanner. And for sure sometimes we'd get duped by someone handing out fake updates. They got weeded out real quick, though, since hipster commerce was massive and depended on good data. The gangs didn't tolerate bad feeds. Feed was what we called folks who were willing to risk dealings with the gangs if they could turn a profit. How big a profit we could get was figured by how high up it was on the leaderboard: the higher it was, the more we could charge for it on the StarNet after we scanned it in and published the synther recipe for it.

The scanner flashed green at me as I waved it over the contents of the crate. Sure enough, I saw some Oasis albums and even a couple of Stone Temple Pilots. I better learn what these were and brag about them, if I wanted to be treated like a king at the local bars. I dug in my corner, keeping a keen eye on the sheer drop to the street below. I dropped my newly found stuff in one of the collection satchels. As I walked back out of the corridor to report my finds to Betts, I carefully tucked Tilly back into my cargoes.

"Not bad, Juno, not bad," Betts dripped. Even her compliments were brimming with contempt. I nodded, attempting to return her contempt, but I just didn't have it in me. Me? I could be snarky, sarcastic, even conceited. But contempt for my own peeps? No, not deck. She flipped through my satchel. "We'll get some decent rep if we throw these on the 'net."

I grinned. "How much food and power cells you think we'll get for these?"

She shrugged. "A good couple months worth. So keep looking, it’d be nice to get set up for longer."

I fumed. She made it sound like that was no friggin' big deal, but most of the time we found stuff that would net us food for a couple days. My hand brushed my cargoes where Tilly was. It's not like it was all my mad skills, she helped a lot. Still, I was one of the few keeping us afloat, even when I was being lazy, and Betts barely ever copped to that.

She looked around, and finding every nook and cranny of this storey being torn apart by the rest of Bandersnatch, she smirked. "Well, I think you can go ahead down to the first floor and do some more looking there. We have intel that says it should have hella sweet stuff. Be careful, though; there's no cover from the street. Damn junkbunnies'll be just crawling out of their holes, now."

I followed Betts through precariously balanced stacks to a recess in the wall behind where Gallagher was crouched, pawing through some ancient jewelry box. At 93, Gallagher was Bandersnatch's oldest living member, and it showed from his shiny pate, but he was no punk to mess with; my great-grandmother held the record for staying a runner until she was 154, and only then settling down into her life as a punk. Even as a punk, she picked up 'net modding like nobody else―most punks had already learned some modding skills when they'd been runners―and got her mastery as a bithead at 163, only a few years before finally expiring. But she expired with a legacy nobody else had matched: her finds alone kept us in the leaderboard top five. I was only a tween―just graduating from snipe to runner―when she kicked it. I grimaced at that; she was one of the last 'Snatchers I could remember that died of old age.

"There's a shaft here, just slide down and it'll put you in the sector that my feed claims has some deck vintage finds,” Betts said, winking at me with those synth-grown extra long lashes. I shrugged and squeezed between the stacks to the hole in the floor. I was still thinking about great-granny and wasn't paying much mind to the slide, so when I dropped through the hole and smacked my head against the edge going down, I swore far louder than I should have, and looked up. Betts was glaring silently down at me, her purple bangs and scowl framed by the pipe that just bit me.

I shot her a faux-contrite look and moved on quickly, not wanting to see anymore of Betts.

The first floor of the junkscraper had no stacks, just the support beams at the corners with a wide field of junk piled only as high as my knees. Betts was right; it was visible to anyone on the street. This wasn't a busy area this early in the morning, though, even for junkbunnies. The Velvet Paw access to this area was the only way back here, and the nearest pub or comm station was at least a couple klicks away.

I felt most at home among the low-stacked junk. Using the system my folks had taught me, I let my gaze scan across the piles, making my eyes go fuzzy and just waiting until something tugged at my vision. There. I stepped carefully between the piles, drawing near to the glint of blue and silver. It was a diner seat from Old Earth. Well, not really an original, but a retroed copy and it was the sort of thing great-grandma got us big points for. I picked it up and couldn't help but grin. But it wasn't really on the list for today. It wasn't re-cooled enough right now.

Putting it down gently, I stood up and let my eyes wander once again. I kept finding more stuff and getting lost in memories. None of it was on the list. A lime-green bumper caught my eye. I walked over to it - yes, the body of a Pinto, an automobile so notorious that it had been re-cooled at least five hundred times since the gen-ones left Old Earth. Of course, the newer models developed by runners were powered by mini-hyperdrives and had none of the defects of the original, but wow. I remember this was one of Uncle Alec's favorites. It was this kind of loot that got him his own friggin' gang. He left Bandersnatch and ran with a gang he named Moby, which became one of our main rivals. It was a thorn in Betts's side, but I loved the old coot, even so. I smirked remembering the friendly rivalry he and mom had, even long after Moby had jacked ahead of us on the leaderboard by ten spots. Mom had always said that blood was thicker than cycle grease. I frowned. Of course, she was wrong, because now we were sucking gravel and scrounging for frigging food.

Mom would never have let us sink this low. And shiz, if mom and dad hadn't run afoul of whitecoats on the most epic junkrun in our history, then they also wouldn't have been forced to retreat smack into Oldskool's territory, and get smoked by Frankie So-Co. I was only sixteen when it happened. The sharp lines of the Pinto grew blurry as I stared at it. I blinked my eyes dry and it came into focus again.

What the hell. I pulled at the handle, but it didn't open. It had no window glass, so I slid in through the driver's side. It was all gen-six synthed leather interior; indistinguishable from the dried animal skin of yore without a tunneling 'scope. Sure enough, the console was modern; this must have been tossed maybe a couple decades ago in the teens, just as it trended back up on Hipstamatic (and was too trendy to bother keeping). Gangs used to try to hold onto frequently re-cooled stuff as a hedge for when it downtrended, but then we realized Hipstamatic somehow accounted for that, and nobody got rich trying to game it.

I ran my hand across it slowly and purred. My hand caught on the ignition card. Whoever'd tossed this left it in. I poked at the controls, pressing my thumb against the bio-reader power switch. A holo display flashed on. It had just enough juice to show me it's vitals. The display got all fritzy and―what the frig. A vid of Uncle Alec started playing.

"Hey kiddo," his crackly image said, smiling at me through the static. His hair was bright white and his wrinkly old face told me he must have recorded this right before he disappeared. "I hope you find this before it's too late. Bet you didn't expect to find a message from me here. I'm counting on you being alone, but I figure if this was on the list, you'd never get your fingers this close to the bio-reader; Betts would have you hauling it off for re-cooling before you could so much as sniff the leather,” he said, grimacing.

The sound was really low and fizzy. "Some crazy stuff is happening that you're gonna need to know about. Remember when I tried to recruit you to the Paisley Order? You were too stubborn, and I got caught up in...complications. But you should find a time when you can take this beauty for a spin and get away from Bandersnatch."

My hand was shaking as I reached for the card. Before I could grab it, Uncle Alec's voice came back. "Oh yeah, before you go, don't forget: the leaderboard matters for survival, but we're here to keep history alive. Commerce of re-cooled goods on the StarNet is just a means to that end. As long as the folk remember culture, remember where we come from, no bland, stark, single-minded nerds can keep the True Culture from shining on. It's always a fight to keep that going, though. Things will get rough. And when they get rough, talk to Gallagher. The old fart knows the score. I've got a lot to tell you, so if you're in a safe place, settle in for a long story. This will be the initiation I never got to―"

The sounds of clanking and clattering interrupted the vid, and so I snatched the ignition card back as quick as I could, shoving it in the inner pocket of my cargoes. I turned instinctively to look out the window and there was Betts sauntering toward me with a big ol' frown.

"Juno, what are you doing?" Betts hissed, voice bereft of its silky mask. She walked up and stood right there, leaning on the door frame. "This junk isn't on the list. How long you been digging up useless stuff?"

"I, uh, I dunno..."

"I'll tell you―I left you here two hours ago―and if I remember right, your shift is coming up in―" She looked at her lapel chronometer. "Fifteen minutes. Don't make Fred wait for you at the comm desk. Now get outta here.”

Betts snorted sharply and this time I flushed at her contempt instead of snarking. She was right. I'd fallen down on the job. Frigging job. Why do I even still do this? I used to do it for my fam. And for 'Stix, and Carrion Carrie, but they're all gone, now. "Yeah, uh, thanks for the reminder, sorry for getting distracted. I’ll head over.” Apologizing to Betts always stung, especially when she was right.

As she walked away, I paused to notice my shoulder tat reflecting off the windshield glass and blinked a few times. I slid through the window and ran off as quick as I could to the path back to the Velvet Paw. I risked a glance back at Betts. Her eyes shifted, glancing away and at the ground, then shyly back at me, like she was—embarrassed or something? Or felt…bad?

"Well, I guess, uh, you found some good stuff up there, so don't worry about it for now. Just get to your shift, ok?" she said with a gentleness I could not remember ever hearing from her before.

I avoided eye contact and kept moving, stepping on stuff without paying attention to what it was. Understanding and compassion weren't like Betts, so I must have imagined it, right?