[cont. from the previous chapter due to character limit]

He ran into Tzarif at the end of the alley and together they headed north-west towards the part of the town called the Drown. Half a century ago it was one of the newest city blocks, some kind of architectural project that many of the mines invested in together. A modern refinery surrounded by a residential area: you never needed to leave it for anything, all the jobs and recreational facilities were in the walking distance from homes and parks and government buildings. A perfect city of the future.

Anyways, the refinery blew up one day, and the surrounding buildings sank into the shifted sands. Robert had no idea how many people died in the aftermath, probably a lot. Enough to dissuade any entrepreneurs from attempting to rebuild the refinery or fill the surviving buildings with new tenants. Now, the Drown stood empty and was slowly being reclaimed by the desert.

Robert’s workshop was several blocks deep into the Drown, far enough that random stragglers wouldn’t stumble into it but also close enough so that the ground was not sinking under the foundation. It sat in what used to be a row of garages for personal vehicles; now, only the concrete carcass and thick metal doors remained. Tracks from the crawler led to one of the doors, which could be pried up with an old bar enough for a person or a small vehicle to pass through.

Once inside, Tzarif went to dust off the solar panels on the roof and turn on the lights. Meanwhile, Robert walked over to the crawler and pulled the tarp off. Enough sunlight seeped through the holes in concrete to make the white shell of a plane visible. It looked surprisingly pristine, only several scrapes on the sides and, well, broken off wings and tail and a missing seat, but other than that? It could have been new. Maybe, it was. Maybe some rich manager bought a plane, immediately got bored of it and threw it into trash; then, during transport, a piece of heavy machinery was strong enough to strip it from the protruding parts. But nobody disassembled it properly, that’s why his sensor caught the signal a week ago. The brains of this plane were still inside and possibly operational.

“What is that?” Tzarif asked when he returned and the projector, hanging in the centre of the room in a jumble of wires, illuminated everything in the workshop: old tables, assorted rusting cabinets and shelves, and piles of yet to be repurposed scrap. “An evacuation pod?”

Robert rolled his eyes. Tzarif knew nothing about the world other than what he saw on the streets or in the video games. 

“It’s a plane, dumbass.”

“It doesn’t have wings.”

“That’s why it was in a landfill, duh.”

“Whatever.” Tzarif pouted and reached out to rap his knuckles on the smooth surface. “What will you turn it into?”

“A working plane.” Robert smirked in response to the heavy glare. “What? You think I can’t fix this thing?”

“I would like to repeat – it doesn’t have wings.”

“I have a welding machine.”

Tzarif stared at the plane a little longer then turned to give Rob a very sceptical look. “I don’t know, man. It’s one thing when you attach wheels to a cart and roll it downhill. If you do something wrong here and it falls apart in the air, you’ll totally die in a crash.”

“Just gonna do everything right then.” Robert grumbled and climbed inside the cockpit. He didn’t care about the doubts of a kid who knew nothing about planes or engineering in general. To be honest, Robert also didn’t know much about planes outside the basic physics behind how they worked. But he was sure he could figure it out or find schematics on the outnet and go from there. It was just a plane, not even a spaceship. How complicated could that be?

Tzarif didn’t stay for long and soon Rob was alone in the workshop. He lost track of time as he slowly opened the dashboard and pulled the components out one by one. Most of them he could recognise or at least guess the purpose of. The rest he tried not to disconnect to ensure he wouldn’t forget how to put them back. Everything looked so new, undamaged. It had to be fully operational. With just a little care (and new wings and tail), this plane could fly.

He was startled from his work by a loud scraping noise. Somebody inserted the metal bar in the gap between the door and the ground and pushed it up. A moment later, Pep and Ace climbed through, followed by Gatien.

Robert wasn’t sure he was that happy to see any of them. “How did you know I am here?”

“When you don’t have a signal, you are either dumpster diving or assembling something new.” Gatien replied with a smirk. “Also, Tzarif told us.”

Pep made a circle around the plane, faking interest just to be polite, and then joined Ace in the corner where a salvaged gaming console was connected to the stationary interface. (It was last year’s model, which meant crazy new for Mesa; the whole gang chipped in to trade it from a guy on a flea market, who fished it out of private trash. It had a faulty memory chip, but other than that worked fine so Robert fixed it in two days and Gatien downloaded some licence-stripped games to run on it. It could be used by up to four people, but was mostly Pep and Ace’s thing now.)

Gatien, on the other hand, immediately zeroed-in on the most interesting thing and walked over to carefully pick up one of the components still connected to the dashboard. “Dude, this is like…pristine! It has to be able to fly again, right?”

“Well, it doesn’t have wings.” Robert grumbled. He was still angry with Gatien, right? For not coming with him and all. But Gatien was the only other member of the gang who understood tech (and not just as a container for software).

“Yeah, but you have a welding machine.” Gatien smirked and looked up at him.

Something in Robert’s insides melted.

“Yeah! I was thinking of maybe repurposing floaters we found last year. Not like there’s much to float them on, but they are light and sturdy.”

“Or we could sell some useless scrap for recycling and buy an actual sheet of composite.”

Robert rolled his eyes, annoyed again. “You and your fucking obsession with buying stuff.”

“I’m just saying, it would be better to use actual plane-grade materials for building a plane. And this thing is so small that one standard sheet would be enough for both wings and the tail surfaces, right?”

It was a good point. Robert didn’t say so out loud but he stopped arguing. He started showing Gatien other components he already pulled out and explaining what they were. Soon, they were disassembling the plane together.

Next time he heard the scraping sound of the door being propped up, Robert looked over to see, to his horror, Ehud squeezing in. He didn’t have enough strength to make a wide gap but he was bony so managed to fit into a narrower space. He got to his feet and slapped some dust away from his old t-shirt. A nasty little smirk was permanently plastered to his face.

“Oh, fuck off, Ehud,” Gatien grimaced.

Ace gasped from the gaming corner and turned away from the interface. “Oh, shit. Yeah! Fuck off, Ehud! Go kiss your momma!”

Ehud bared his teeth in a grin. “I’ve just finished kissing yours, asslicker, and it sucked. Should’ve gone for Gatty-boy’s here.”

Pep held Ace back, muttering something about not starting a fight. He tried his hardest not to look at Ehud. Gatien gritted his teeth but also made sure to roll his eyes to show that he didn’t care for the insult.

Robert wasn’t looking at them and instead stared at the gap under the door and waited. But nobody followed.

“You weren’t invited here,” Gatien said coldly and straightened up where he was sitting on the floor next to the crawler.

“Last time I checked, this was not private territory.”

“Rob found this place and all the stuff in here was brought here by him or us. Tell him, Rob.”

“Where’s Kolya?” Robert asked instead.

Ehud snorted. “You were the one who forbade him from coming, fatass.”

“Uh-huh, and it was specifically so that he wouldn’t bring you over, halfling.”

“Well, he didn’t, did he?”

“Is he waiting outside?” Robert jumped down from the crawler and started walking towards Ehud, an unpleasant tension rising in his temples.

Ehud laughed, a nasty, petty sound. “Why would he? You forbade him and he wouldn’t fucking enter the Drown because of that. He is brain-fucked, in case you have forgotten.”

Robert’s hands started shaking in anger. “And you left him alone, brain-fucked as he is, and dragged your ass over here just to annoy us?”

“Last time I checked, I wasn’t responsible for him. Who was? I think that’s supposed to be you.”

Kolya was left to his own devices somewhere in the city. Maybe Ehud dumped him near his house and that wasn’t a problem. But what if not? What if Ehud dragged him all the way to this part of the city to the edge of the Drown? What if Kolya had to navigate his way back to their block through the hot streets of Port, unable to ask passers-by for directions and not having a personal interface to load a map. And maybe he would be found by an enforcer, which would be reported to the administrators, and his mom would get in trouble again. Or maybe, instead of enforcers, he would be found by someone in search of free manpower or willing to take a life for a pair of new shoes.

And all of this, all of these possibilities were Ehud’s fault. That Kolya thought of him as a better friend than Robert; that Kolya considered him a better company; that Kolya chose to go see the moron instead of staying with Robert and fixing the plane together. Ehud’s fault and no one else’s.

Channelling all this anger into it, Robert punched Ehud in the face.

Where Ehud lacked strength or mobility, he made up with total disregard for fairness. He clawed and scratched and bit and aimed his kicks to the crotch and stomach. By the time Robert managed to knock him out, all the barely healed scratches on his arms reopened. He sat on top of the awkwardly splayed body, trying to steady his breath and remember where he was. He must’ve hit Ehud’s head against the floor more than one time. He didn’t even remember getting to the floor. There was blood on his hands and he couldn’t tell whose it was.

In a horrified whisper, Pep, who somehow got to this part of the workshop, asked: “Did you…kill him?”