vN The First Machine Dynasty(5)

"Uh, you might wanna roll those up."



"Excuse me?"



"Your pants. Roll them up."

Amy bent down. The ends were dragging, a little. She started folding.



"At the waist, I mean. Start rolling at the waist. So they don't fall off."



"Oh! OK." Amy started rolling. It took a couple of folds, but the pants did fit better. Javier threw a nubby old grandpa sweater at her, too, saying something about it being cold outside, as he shuffled off toward another store. Amy followed, rolling up her new woolly sleeves. Javier crowed, and ran across the parking lot to the store on the opposite side – a used electronics shop. Amy jogged behind him. He ran around the side of the building and started rubbing his hands together at the sight of a row of three dumpsters.



"Awesome." He tossed a chunk of asphalt at the nearest one. When it fell back to ground, he began opening its massive creaking lid.



"What are you doing?"



"Grocery shopping. Didn't I say I was hungry?" Javier leapt in. A moment later, out flew a positively ancient keyboard that clattered to the concrete and promptly lost a few dirty keys. "Plastics! In the trash! It's like they're just throwing money away!"



Amy tiptoed to the side of the dumpster. She stood on her toes to peer inside. It seemed mostly empty, aside from a few stray accessories. Rationally, she knew that other vN, the unlucky ones out there on their own, had to eat garbage sometimes or sell it to buy food. They didn't have to worry about diet plans like Rory's pinging their kitchens every time they opened the cupboards, because they were just scraping to get by. She'd just never seen or met one of them, before. Not until her granny.



"You take the other one," Javier said. "This one's mine."

Amy frowned. She hadn't asked to share his loot, but she moved on to the next dumpster anyway. Slipping her fingers under the lid, she pushed it up until it rested against a wall, and tried hopping in as Javier had done. He evidently had a lot more experience, though, because he had made it look easy, and she ended up slinging one leg over before teetering on the dumpster's lip and falling down inside. Like the other dumpster, this one was mostly empty aside from a few loose loops of frayed cable and discarded dongles, yellow and blocky like old organic teeth. She listened for rats, but doubted they would have much use for an electronics store dumpster; after all, there was nothing inside that they would want to eat.



Emptiness aside, Amy liked the dumpster just fine. It was surprisingly clean, and its faint rusty smell gave her only a little twinge of hunger. If she were still in a child-sized body, it would have made the perfect spot to play Scorched Earth. She had designed her own tanks in games, of course, and had bounced and careened over their perfectly rendered deserts blowing the middles out of everything from Nazis to djinns, but she had never really played that kind of game outside, with things she could actually touch. She wasn't allowed to visit playgrounds during the day when human children might be there, so when her parents took her to the nearest place with swings and slides and cargo netting and a crow's-nest, it was always after dark and the other kids were always gone. She would sit up there alone, or maybe next to her dad on the swings (her mom's arms were so much stronger that she always pushed them both), but inevitably they left before too long.



If they'd had a backyard, maybe she could have played those games there. But they weren't rich, so they didn't have one, so she didn't. She built her tanks and forts in-game instead, and her dollhouse's walls and chimneys had gone gluey and flexible with having been recycled and reprinted so many times. She wondered about the dollhouse, now. The week before graduation, she'd programmed some new designs – based on having looked up the word "caliphate" a while back. Maybe the panels were still there waiting for her in their tray; pale and thin like the bone cups she had seen in a museum once. When she got home, she could put all the pieces together.



"What's taking you so long?" Javier asked.



Amy looked up. Javier stood over the dumpster, clutching the old keyboard to his chest.



Amy looked around the dumpster. "This place would make a great fort."



Javier frowned deeply. "Were you tased as an infant? Quit daydreaming and get out of there." He moved on to the third dumpster. Amy heaved herself out of hers, and watched him cautiously put down his bounty before propping open the lid. Looking inside, he laughed and patted his belly. "We're eating good tonight, that's for sure," he said, and jumped in.



The dumpster promptly closed around him. Amy watched the massive lid slam down on Javier's head. Locks sprang up, threading through bails that pinned the whole structure together. She heard nothing. Maybe he was too muffled in there. She took a hesitant step forward to listen, and startled as a sudden thud sounded against the walls of the dumpster. "Hey! Get me out of here!"