Chapter Text
It was a bright and stormy night. Electricity arced, with a crackle that seared Ratchet’s wiring, between closely-spaced warehouse walls.
Lower Iacon, beneath the gilded spires, was a warren. Even after vorns scuttling in the dark, his memory of the back alleys failed him. Ratchet brought up the coordinates, his wrist’s projector almost guttering out in the feverish light.
Soundwave’s tip-offs never failed. Often it seemed Soundwave was nothing but tip-offs: ten thousand scurrilous whispers and a hundred thousand secrets poured into a cold shell.
But he’d ( it’d ) been right. This was the clinic.
A steady hand had seared AUTARCHS SLAG OFF into the back door. Ratchet knocked twice, as he’d been told, feeling increasingly foolish.
“I’m here for your house call,” he tried after a cycle.
The door opened into darkness, punctuated by the glare of headlights. “You the health inspector?” A deep, booming chuckle.
Ratchet held his ground. The charge-storm flashed, ball lightning floating weightless through the shabby abandoned lot. Around them the air smelled of burnt chlorine. “A little deployer told me you need a doctor. I’m here to help.”
The monstrous warframe sized him up. “Soundwave sic you on us?”
There was grudging fear in it.
“Let’s pass on that question,” said Ratchet, sounding insincere in his own audials. “As one grumpy old medic to another—”
The warframe’s burnished faceplate twisted; he let out a startled laugh. “ Funny little doctor.” His optics blazed golden, reflecting the night. “Run back to Soundwave. I see your shiny face around here again, you’ll need your empurator pals to give you a new head.”
Countless Iaconian summers before Ratchet met the street-mechanics, Breakdown met a mech with a dizzying smile.
It seemed a charmed summer. They snuck into tatty second-run theaters, smuggling in Engex-flasks. Knock Out picked fights; Breakdown finished them. At each other’s weak jokes they laughed uproariously.
“My partner in crime,” said Knock Out as they watched the bright storms creep across the horizon. “Or at least a few misdemeanors.”
Breakdown slipped an arm around him. The charge in the air leapt between their bodies, fizzing and spitting; with Knock Out at his side, the world seemed brighter. A sharp focus he’d never known.
Knock Out was vapid; Knock Out was cruel. Knock Out was too self-absorbed to know he was lonely. Breakdown forgave him that. They were Conjugated in high summer, shabby and sweltering. They’d known each other six quartexes. A wildfire romance.
Life came easily to garnet-eyed Knock Out, as quick and beautiful and sharp as the lightning. At times he seemed too perfect to be real, as if he’d evaporate at any second, a trick of the light—
“If those dimsparks can get through medical school,” groused Knock Out as they limped from a back-alley clinic, their fresh welds aching in the humidity, “how hard can it be?”
And that, Breakdown would reflect later, was the snapping point. As if some catch in the world had finally come loose.
“Can’t say I didn’t try,” said Ratchet. He spoke too loudly around Soundwave, to fill the humming air.
The darkness bent strangely around Soundwave, light condensing on his dull armor like dew. He gestured slowly. Meaninglessly, perhaps.
They sat in a dead canteen, two joors before opening. Soundwave squatted like a pigeonoid on the back of the dusty booth. Unrecognizable symbols flickered, too fast for Ratchet’s optics to capture, across his faceplate.
He’d been a Councilor once, rumor had it; but Ratchet wrote off gossip, as a rule.
“They don’t trust me. Why should they?” Ratchet’s bearings ached. He’d worked 32 joors without recharge; now he felt simultaneously insubstantial, as if hollowed out by exhaustion, and leaden. “Every physician in town’s a tool of the Primacy.”
Soundwave pointed to Ratchet’s chest. In Megatronus’s harsh voice he rattled, “Physicians are the keepers of the weak and the wounded—”
He’d been flattered, for a nanocycle, when he’d heard it from Megatronus’s vocoder; now it felt hollow and cheap.
“None of that nonsense,” said Ratchet, unmollified. “Physicians are a pack of comfortable old mechs who can’t see past their own faceplates. Myself included.”
The sun was rising. Through the canteen’s scummy windows, indistinct figures thronged the streets; Iacon never slept.
In the first rays of daylight, Soundwave looked all the more uncanny. He sat perfectly still; in his hunched posture, in the oily smell of his mini-servos, Ratchet recognized the telltale signs of surgery.
“Sooner or later we’re all going to get our faces scraped,” said Ratchet into the silence. “Good riddance to us.”
The lime-green LED glow of the Docks guttered, night falling fast.
Ratchet locked the clinic door. The Docks were a low-rent district, adjoining the industrial warrens; skivs and siphoners and empuratees drifted regularly through the steam tunnels. (The least—or most—fortunate died there.) It paid to be careful.
As he turned to leave, a weak clatter drifted from the dark. A faceless femme stumbled up the curb.
“By the Allspark,” murmured Ratchet, “you made me jump.”
She groped with her peg-hands, feeling for the clinic sign set into iron walls. Her single optic glowed in a scraped-clean faceplate; greenish corrosion encrusted exposed wiring. She smelled of rust.
She seemed liable to blow at any nanocycle.
With a sigh that did little to still his rattling fans, Ratchet unlocked the door again.
The effluvium of Lower Iacon washed up at his clinic door, sans optics and hands and T-cogs. The botched patients. Ratchet cared for them, one and all. Ratchet cared too often and too much, he sometimes thought.
In the warm silence he poured her a glass of cloudy Energon, guiding it to the narrow valve serving as an intake. She gulped it down, her exposed fuel lines spasming.
In the quartexes after empurata , survivors often starved. With lead in his belly and ice in his Spark chamber he remembered the statistics: 80% after surgery; 50% after six quartexes; 10% survival after a metacycle.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, as casually as he could, “you have a caretaker. That would be too easy.”
She shook her head vehemently, blinking: twice for no.
One could learn to drink quite well with two pegs for hands, if one were of sound mind and body. A tall order for most empuratees.
Her vocoder had rusted in her chest. Infection. A well-known side effect of sloppy face-scraping, so common it had a sardonic name ( icepick’s mutism ). Someone had extracted it roughly—her breastplate had crumpled under the force, the fault-lines white and painful-looking—and welded the wound.
Ironic, thought Ratchet as he peeled the corrosion from her mangled faceplate. It’d taken millennia of training to mutilate her; then some oaf of a street-mechanic had saved her life.
“If you were my patient, madam—”
—though of course she was—
“—I’d have some very stern words with your surgeon.” It sounded pathetic, like shouting into a void. His voice echoed in the dead air. His pick squeaked, catching on an exposed groove in the alloy.
She sucked air, a long and hopeless sound. The empty space in her breastplate whistled.
“The mandibular plate’s connected to the—” Breakdown squinted at the datapad. “Uh.”
Knock Out lounged in hip-deep oil, sipping cheap moonshine. They’d salvaged the shallow washtub from the scrapyard. Through the warehouse’s crumbling roof, shafts of moonlight puddled in the oil.
One day, Knock Out had promised him, they’d have hot running oil; they’d drink Betelgeusian brandy; they’d live in Translucentica Heights, and Breakdown would rub broad shoulders with the High Council and their hangers-on—
And Breakdown supposed that didn’t sound so bad.
They were reviewing for Knock Out’s anatomy exams, more or less. The night was sweltering. Breakdown wiped oily condensation from the datapad, tilting the hologram left and right. “Mandibular plate’s hooked up to the servo trigeminalis. Whatever that is.”
“Pops off like—” Knock Out reached back, finding his jaw with a damp fingertip. He swiped along Breakdown’s chin. “— that . Nice little click.”
Breakdown rolled his optics, wiping the warm oil away with the back of one hand. “You already know all this stuff?”
“It’s P-nuts. Monkey-wrench work, between you and me.” Knock Out set his drink down beside the tub. “Any old mechanic can take a face off. You could do it.”
Breakdown stared at his own blunt fingers, silently. The oil gleamed in the moonlight, on a blacksmith’s scarred hands.
“The lingo’s just to sucker the customer. Makes it sound real technical. And technical means— zzzt !” Knock Out yawned delicately, miming a credit transfer. “Now, building a face—that’s the tricky business.”
Again Breakdown felt lost. The black oil gleamed, and though only two meters deep, it sucked at the gaze. “That why the empurators make the big Shanix?”
Knock Out’s laugh was startled. Breakdown loved that: the spontaneity of it, the quick cruelty. “The empurators build faces on an assembly-line. No art to it. You could do that, easy.” He paused. In the hazy moonlight he was beautiful enough to quench Sparks. “But they are rolling in it.”
They were poor, and they were grimy. Knock Out had talked of nothing but the glamorous life for quartexes.
“How’s it feel to be a trophy conjunx, Breakdown?” Knock Out’s optics half-shuttered. His smile was transported, almost dreamy. “When I’m done with residency, you’ll never work another solar cycle. Never take some foreman’s scrap again. You’ll be a kept bot—”
Knock Out passed his exams with flying colors, as Breakdown had known he would. There seemed nothing Knock Out could not do—
—save self-examination.
Weight-loss surgery paid just as well as empurata. “Lifestyle specialty,” Knock Out said carelessly, his head a grounding weight in Breakdown's lap. “Can’t beat the hours or the clientele. And the Autarchs—” A political jab (though Knock Out loathed politics, as a rule). “—leave us alone.”
“Wouldn’t know,” said Breakdown, massaging warm wax into Knock Out’s faceplate. Delicate work: he distrusted buffers, but he trusted his hands. “Not my crowd.”
“Now you’re talking. You’re out of their league.” The wax squeaked. “Never seen those waxjobs gut a skydart. Or find the stuck wires in my back.”
A skyship passed over their habsuite with a rumble like distant thunder; through the cracked roof its lights illuminated Knock Out’s faceplate. Knock Out looked for a cycle unearthly. Too beautiful to be real—
—and the light passed, and Breakdown was dabbing away smudges on his faceplate. In his encrypted processor banks, Breakdown liked the smudges: they made Knock Out seem a living thing. Imperfect.
“Breakdown,” said Knock Out, almost pleadingly, “we deserve this.”
He believed it implicitly; Knock Out, who insisted so often that he believed in nothing, clung to it like holy writ. We deserve this.
Breakdown reached for the chamois. “Well, deserve it or not, I guess we’re gonna get it. Rich and famous. Gonna take a lot of wax to make me into arm candy.”
Some half-compiled scrap of code drifted at the edges of his processor, the ghost of a thought. In the pulse of his Spark, Breakdown felt a flicker of dread.
“You were thinking about empurata, huh?”
“No guarantees on the placement interviews,” said Knock Out, examining his claws. “Might’ve been my second choice.”
“It’s barbaric.” Ratchet thumped his fist on the table. “An outrage.”
Orion Pax sipped his Energon, looking grave. The sun was setting over Upper Iacon, the spires gleaming a brilliant gold; through the veil of smog no money could clear, the world seemed far away. Unreal. “Is the death rate really—”
“Well, I don’t know what the death rate is.” Ratchet cut him off, the air around them popping with his indignation. “Undoubtedly a great deal higher than anyone reports.”
Orion’s brow-ridges drew together.
He was kind, reflected Ratchet, and—shut away in his archives—he was at times disarmingly naive. Perhaps the two went hand-in-hand. Orion believed in justice.
“I have seen the reports,” said Orion in a low voice, a small voice. “The crackdowns on the support groups.”
Ratchet raised a finger, willing himself not to snap. “Your average empuratee is hardly going to support groups . They’re lucky if they can fuel themselves.”
At times Orion seemed to be goading him, with that troubled innocent look. At times Ratchet suspected Orion knew far more than he let on.
Orion was decent . Some things could not coexist with decency.
The moons were rising in the rose-gold sky. They sat in Orion’s habsuite, watching dusk creep over Iacon: the city’s lower levels, the Docks and the steel-district and the vast insatiable smelters, were invisible from such heights. Easy to forget.
“Is anyone keeping track of empuratees?” Orion set down his cube. The steam painted the window, trickling down in rivulets. “Beyond Soundwave, I mean.”
Ratchet snorted. Sometimes Orion said the obvious. “Soundwave has probes up all of our exhaust ports, you mark my words.” But it was a good question. “Some of them were poor fools in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hardly anyone cares if they’re online or not.”
His own Energon was cooling, untouched. Orion pushed it across the table, his irises contracting.
Sometimes Orion believed most in things written down. An archivist’s mindset.
Ratchet sighed, shaking his head. “The records are terrible. Intentionally, I fear. All I know—all anyone knows—is that the Science Academy graduates more empurators every year, and the Council keeps funding new residencies for this—disgrace.” His lip curled. “They’re getting worse at it, or they’re running out of good surgeons. I see hackjob after hackjob in my clinic.”
“Your clinic.” Orion seemed to grab the thought like a chain thrown to a drowning mech. “Can you afford to keep it open?”
Ratchet funded his charity work out of his own accounts.
“Barely.”
Orion’s lips thinned. “Soundwave will find the money,” he said, with such conviction Ratchet’s Spark dimmed for an instant. “Megatronus has barely said a word about this—”
“Not just Megatronus.” The sun had half-vanished behind a steel horizon. Ratchet felt a swell of indignation, a wave of despair. “ No one ’s said a word. No one who matters. Until they start scraping Councilors or actors—or doctors—”
He leaned forward.
“Between you and me, Orion, a surgeon disappeared last metacycle. Vain little thing, or so the rumor goes. Too stupid to be dangerous.”