They Don't Die In This One

The glass of the terraforming dome outlined the sky. Color seemed to swirl on it, the half-sphere resembling a bubble catching the light. Tones of pink and orange dropped into it like oil. The structures climbed skyward, nearly touching the dome’s ceiling. Though dark outside, the city kept breathing, light reflecting off glass and gleaming in the artificial rain’s remnants on the ground. Everything was white and sharp, the windows catching the image of the girl like a mirror. Her dark, curled hair. Black tattoos of long-extinct Terran flowers covered her dark skin, along with a thin film of dirt, the clothes of a factory worker with a hoodie tossed over the top. 

She followed the curve of the terraforming dome, seeing nothing but the rusty red planet beyond. It looked more like a deep brown in the night. Even with the glare of screens against the glass, she could see the night sky beyond, an entire sky filled with stars. Darkness in the distance, revealing the branching pathways of the subway system, the other domes in the distance like planets, and so many stars in the sky that it almost blinded the lights of the city.

The moments between midnight and dawn on Mars were her favorite time of day. Even though everyone was asleep, the world was still so bright. She was in her own little bubble, where, just for this moment, she was entirely immortal. She was arrogant, maybe, for being able to do anything that she wanted. Everything just felt so still, an inhalation being held.

She ran her fingers along the glass of the dome, her fingers sticking and sputtering against the glass, leaving a smear across it. She followed the concrete path along the edges of the concrete jungle as the buildings slowly petered out, like leaving the warmth and safety of a house and entering an ever-darkening field.

It was alright; the stars were there to light her way.

Mountains of scrap started to pop up in her vision, the height of each rising like slow waves. Silver and rust, gears and gold, each mountain growing taller and taller. Walking away from the concrete jungle into the forest of junk.

But one man’s trash was this girl’s treasure.

She was looking between the stacks, like a person at a grocery store looking for the best pieces of fruit. She saw some beautiful things, including a spindly robotic hand. Its fingers appeared needle-like, and she moved closer while a dirt-covered hand grazed the knuckles. It jingled like a windchime, the fingers clicking against one another. She noticed some parts were rusted, but she could replace or repair them. Underneath the stars, the possibilities for this were endless, beyond melting down the metal into something else. She questioned if it would hold as a support beam or if she could program its fingers to flex. She always liked sorting machines even though they were very rudimentary. She liked watching them.

It occurred to her at that moment that she had very odd hobbies.

“HEY! GWEN!!” The girl jumped, and she swiveled around, looking up at one of the mountains of discarded machines. The other girl was already perched on top, as though it was a personal throne. Gwen-- Guinevere-- could see better here, the stars winking all around them. The other girl’s bright blue hair seemed to glow like a halo underneath the stars, and she stood, taking a step forward like she was stepping off a building to throw herself into freefall, and sliding down the path of scrap. Some of it clattered and fell to the path in front of them like an avalanche.

She stumbled a few feet, the sound of her feet banging against the ground creating this awful echoing noise against the piles.

Guinevere studies the other girl-- Serafina. The blue hair had not been brushed, so it looked like a stringy and thin mess that looked like spun sugar. She wore loose clothes and looked almost boxy in appearance, and her skin was pale; she lived on the space station satellite outside of Mars for most of her life, and so she was thin and lanky, almost like a moving skeleton, a blue-haired ghost. It was in stark contrast to Gwen, who had lived on Mars her whole life and was much curvier.

“You promised me a date,” Guinevere said; the tone was plain, but her voice was squeaky, as though it had been in disuse. She hadn’t spoken to anyone all day; she worked at a factory, and her coworkers liked to mingle with each other, but Gwen preferred her silence.

“That I did!” Sera exclaimed, reaching forward to tug on Gwen’s hands. For a moment, Gwen was a rock tied to a string, almost futile to drag her, but she willed herself forward, Sera rubbing her thumb over Gwen’s tattooed skin. They wove behind the hills, the metal trees, light only coming through occasionally, dappled between holes in the metal.

There was a table set up in the middle of the scrapyard, an old wooden thing that looked like it was starting to rot-- though it was probably the nicest thing that Sera could find, so Gwen didn’t hold it against her-- with a misshapen chunk of metal put in the center. It looked as though it had been hammered together, dents in the silver. It was in the vague shape of a bird, but if a bird had a rectangle for feet and was clambered together. Two buttons had been glued into the eyes. Sera also had odd hobbies.

“Your table, madame.” Serafina offered a dramatic bow, rolling her wrist a few times as the blue hair fell forward, creating a nest around her hair. “Our finest seat in the scrapyard!” She grabs Gwen's hair again.

“Where are the chairs?” Gwen asked, glancing around the surrounding piles. It was here that the early hours were most concentrated. They were surrounded by dim light and walls of metal, their own little alcove where the only thing that could see them was the eyes of stars.

“I would make a suitable chair.” Sera offers. “Or we can sit on the table. Oooor we could lay--”

“Not if it doesn’t collapse under our weight.” Gwen interrupts blankly. Gwen was often seen as being very blunted; almost unenthused in most things, even if she was actually extremely excited. She still found the flirtatious behavior cute, even if it was very normal for Sera.

“Then there’s always the ground,” Sera says, very quickly.

Guinevere hums in acknowledgement.

There’s a lingering warmth between Gwen’s fingers, and Sera starts to peel herself away, an almost-touch between their skin. Gwen stares at the scarred area around Sera’s nails, the white lines in her palm, and Sera slips away, leaving cold as though there was nothing there at all. She’s moving around the table, admiring her work on the bird, before reaching forward to straighten it out.

Gwen follows her, her feet slipping on the dust, off of concrete and onto the dirt floor. The light wasn’t better here, but they were standing still for long enough that Gwen could get a better look at Sera. For all her peppiness, she looked exhausted, with slight bags underneath her eyes. There was a scratch on the bridge of her nose, not deep enough to scar, but still ever present.

Gwen leans forward and kisses the scratch, and Sera turns just so that their lips are right next to each other, their shared breath tingling. Sera straightens a little, almost preens like a cat, rolling her shoulders, her bones popping. Gwen could see the insides of Sera’s eyes, the bright pale blue rimmed with darkness, like an evening sky on Mars, accented with specks of violet.

A pause.

A forever.

A moment of immortality, the liminal space between dawn and dusk.

Guinevere reached forward, clutching the girl’s clothes with her fists, and they kissed.

Calloused hands ran up under her shirt, brushing against her sides in a feather-light gentleness. She felt her entire body shiver, warmth being rubbed against her in winter. Serafina’s hands started to creep up, the shirt stretching around her arm, inching up the sides of her body until it was rubbing against the side of her bra.

She tasted like chocolate, sweetness exploding onto Gwen’s tongue, and Sera leaned further into her, pressing Gwen against the table slightly. Gwen’s feet rocked slightly, trying to keep her weight off of the fragile wood, maneuvering her feet so that they didn’t bump into Sera’s when--

There’s a sound, a loud clattering bang, ricocheting off of the sides of their sanctuary in an echo. Something falling, landing on the ground. One of the piles from the direction they came slid down, a plume of dust exploding into the air. Both girls jumped, Sera’s nails digging into Gwen’s flesh.

Gwen squinted in that direction, noticing something glowing and blinking in one of the scrap piles. It looked like a star, a bright, blinding white light. It sputtered, and then died.

“Did you fuck with something on the way in?” she asks Sera, still holding her girlfriend.

Sera looks up at her innocently: “No. That’s our number one rule: you never pull from the bottom of the piles; it could be load-bearing.”

The two girls peel away from each other, the electricity in the air numbing down to static, and they both, awkwardly, lower themselves to the ground, next to the table.

“I promised you a date,” Sera echoes.

“Maybe we should investigate that,” Gwen says, starting to get up again.

But Sera grabs her and nudges her back down, her hand sliding down her arm and rubbing her thumb over the back of her bare palm, twisting around the shape of the carnation tattoo.

“Sometimes the piles do just fall,” Sera points out. “Like drywall and a shelf, sometimes it just can’t hold the weight anymore, and everything collapses underneath it.” A long pause. “I forgot to ask, but how was your day today?”

Gwen nearly laughed at the abrupt shift to small talk, how banal it seemed compared to what just happened. Her heart was racing, throwing itself against her ribs and… ‘How was your day today?’

“Fine,” Gwen said, smiling just a little. “You’ll never believe what Greg did today.”

“Did he talk about how his ex-wife is terrible and horrible and stole his kids from him again? The fact that he has no friends and no one likes him is an indicator of something.”

Almost in unison, they both lay down, the dirt mingling in their hair, staring up at the stars.

“Oh, no, he was talking about how he found a new girlfriend. Met her online. She goes to another dome, apparently.”

Sera giggles. “Poor girl, do you think he was using one of those twenty-first clanker machines to make himself look less bald? Not sure how any girl could be attracted to an egghead, though he doesn’t have the facial structure for hair.”

“You don’t see it because you’re a lesbian,” Gwen points out, “I’m sure some women find that to be some sort of mating-”

She’s cut off by the jingling of metal; it sounded like her mother flicking through her keys when she was coming home. Both girls glance at each other, Gwen catching Sera’s grey-rimmed eyes; Sera’s eyes narrow with determination.

“Alright,” Sera agrees, “let’s investigate.”

“I think I saw something blinking in one of the piles; let’s start there.” They both scramble up off the ground, Sera brushing dust off of her clothes, although it didn’t do much.

The mound looked the same as it had before, which didn’t say much because all the piles looked the same. Gwen traced her eyes over it, as though she could find some discrepancy. It was a spot in the difference picture: green or yellow shoes, rust or silver. She leaned forward, running her fingers over where she saw the glowing light, maybe considering pulling something out. Sera found a flat piece of concrete and used it to start crawling up the mound, looking around to see where the jingling could have been coming from.

You can’t really discount it as wind, when wind doesn’t really exist in a dome.

Systematically, they start going from mound to mound, finding nothing. They just stood there, suspended. Sera grabbed Gwen’s hand, dug two fingers into her wrist in a vice grip. Gwen’s pulse thrummed underneath her fingers. She felt wired like she had chugged a coffee, pain laced across her back from the tension.

Sera’s eyes moved, then went wide, and she whispered. “Look.”

The last piece of their spot-the-difference puzzle.

A machine.

It definitely wasn’t there before. There was rust underneath its fingers, brown and dried, looking like cracked blood. Its head looked like that of a screwed-on baby doll, complete with the painted lips and long eyelashes. One of its eyes was… missing, leaving just a black, gaping hole with multicolored wires spitting out of it.

Almost anticlimactically, the robot fell forward, collapsing onto the ground like a dropped doll. It lay there for a moment, and both girls stood frozen, staring at it.

Its voice was a glitching record scratch: “Y-you humans. State your purpose.”

“We’re just looking around,” Gwen says.

“Unauthorized access to this facility is prohibited.”

“Facility?” Sera sounds dubious. “This is a fucking dome scrapyard. It’s where all the big corps come and dump their shit.”

“Incorrect,” the robot says, a spindly hand reaching forward so that it can crawl towards them, sounding like the scraping of a shovel on concrete, sending shivers through the girls like nails on a chalkboard. “This is a restricted production zone. Production personnel have failed to report for 8,421 days.”

Gwen blinks. “Do either of us know what was here before?”

“What were you… producing?” Sera leans forward on her knees, as though addressing a child that was shorter than her.

“Leather coats.” The robot says, finally pulling itself out of the pile fully. “We are out of material. I need to collect the material. It is my job. I collect the leather.” It was almost childlike in the simplicity of it, the curt, cut-off sentences.

The eyelids blink, slow. It sounds like the shutter of a camera.

“I have not finished my quota of two-zero-zero pieces of leather.”

It rises, its chest swiveling around on its hips, its head spinning into place, its arms whipping around.

“You are a suitable piece of leather.”

The robot lunges for Sera, needle-like fingers grabbing her by the neck and slamming her down on the table. The wooden table snapped in half with the force of it, but Sera was still floating there, being held in the air by her throat. On instinct, her fingers fly up to meet his, and she starts scratching at the metal, trying to peel it away from her neck, leaving only red markings on her pale skin instead.

Gwen’s entire brain stalls for a moment. It’s as though the floor had been completely swept out from underneath her. For all of her bluntness and impartiality, she didn’t know what to do with this; her stomach just churned and felt like lead, as though she were to bend over and vomit.

The robot took a needle-like finger and pressed it into Sera’s forehead. “Now I will cut the leather.”

Sera shrieks.

“Please do not scream.” The robot says.

Gwen fumbled for the wrench at her belt and threw it at the robot’s arm, the side that was rusted near the joints. The metal clangs together, and then the arm falls off, and the robot, startled, presumably, stumbles back a few feet, leaving Sera to throw herself backwards over the rubble of the table. She was scrambling, moving up one of the piles of scrap, nimble like a spider. Sera looked down, her hair in her face. The fear was plain to read; her bottom lip was trembling, and her eyes were wide.

The robot turns to Gwen and grabs her by the throat instead. She smacks it with the wrench a few solid times before it lets go of her.

Guinevere scrambles backwards like a crab, the dirt covering her hands and running up her elbows. The robot was standing over her, servos and fans whirring. Its body was making a clicking noise as it stepped towards her, dominoes tumbling into place. She crawls a few more inches, and it pins her arm down with its foot. She felt something in her hand crack, and she bit her tongue, copper exploding into her mouth and spilling out onto her cracked lips. She choked, trying to bring in air. She throws out the other hand, clutching the metal bird that had fallen off the table. It was heavy, pure metal, and the base was steady. It felt as though rocks were being tied to her arm, and an icy hot burn sensation ran through her body.

But she swung the bird above her head and smacked the robot’s hips with it.

Its foot stumbled off of her.

She grabbed it better with both hands, and arched the bird above her head, slamming it down on the rusty metal head. The head and the hips both swiveled, making it land in a pile of metal bones, like a marionette whose strings had been snapped. It tried to rise again, its body clicking back into place as the upper half twisted around to align with the lower, and she swung the bird again, hitting it in the head with a loud metal CLANG.

She swung again.

CLANG.

She dropped the bird, and it landed with a quiet thud, the beak piercing the dirt underneath her feet, a black button eye staring up at her with mischief.

Sera slides down from the stack she’s balanced on.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Gwen says.

They both run.