The dry, dusty air of Scrapworld was a welcome relief from the cockpit’s bloody humidity. Giza took a deep breath, coughed a few times to clear her lungs, and then gave Rush a hand as he climbed out of the cockpit as well. A handful of Junkers were already hard at work peeling away armor and salvaging the scrap of the mecha. She had been expecting to see even more, in fact. Hopefully that would delay the discovery of the pilot by a bit.

  “Come on, we should find my dad,” Giza said. “Get ahead of things.”

  Giza started climbing down first, but Rushmore still beat her to the ground. She hopped down and took the lead as the two tracked down Hartwell. A short distance away, near the crater left behind from the railgun shot, half the clan had gathered in a loose mob. Giza figured that was a good place to start the search for her dad. She had almost made it to the edge of the crowd when Jack and Eiffel intercepted her.

  “We should find something else to do,” Jack said, a little too insistently for Giza’s liking.

  “I need to talk to my dad,” Giza said. “It’s about the mech pilot.”

  “Whatever it is, it can wait. He’s, uh, busy,” Eiffel said.

  “It’s important.”

  Jack and Eiffel shared a quick look, and then gave up on their shared scheme.

  “Somebody got hit by the shrapnel, Giza,” Jack said. “They were on the edge of the blast when the hauler got hit, and…”

  Giza took a few steps back, and put a hand on her neck for reasons Rush did not understand. After biting her tongue to restrain her worst impulses, Giza took a breath and tried to continue the conversation.

  “Okay, so dad’s handling it. He’s handling it, right? How is he handling it?”

  “He’s...handling it the way Hartwell handles things.”

  “He thinks if we turn around right now-”

  Giza put her hands on her temples and let out a loud scream of frustration that caught Rush off guard. He stepped aside to avoid getting caught up in her sudden charge forward. Giza pushed into the crowd and disappeared, and Rush went to follow until Jack and Eiffel held him back.

  “You probably don’t want to get involved in this one, Rush.”

  “I want to know what’s going on.”

  “‘What’s going on’ is a family thing,” Jack said.

  A “family thing” that apparently involved shouting, based on the echoes of distant but very loud voices. Rush took his helmet off to hear better, but could not make out any clear words.

  “Let this one stay between Giza and her dad, alright?”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “If you say so.”

  What curiosity Rush had was easily overcome by his desire not to upset his friends. He shuffled back to the mech and put his powersaw to work disassembling the armor, giving the other Junkers easy access to the valuable components below. He finished stripping the forearm, and a work crew led by Jen filled in the gap and started prying out circuitry.

  “Curiosity sure went out of you quick,” Jen said. “Not the least bit curious what those two are yelling about?”

  “That should stay between Giza and her dad,” Rush said, repeating Jack’s words almost verbatim.

  “Yeah, it should. Problem is you’re between them too,” Jen said. Rush was, of course, blissfully oblivious to the ongoing ideological conflict surrounding the Scrapper suit. “You should know what you’re getting in to. Understand what daddy and daughter want from you.”

  “If you think so.”

  “I do think so,” Jen said. “So, in all the time you’ve been spending with Giza, she ever mentioned her mom?”

  “Not often,” Rush said. Giza occasionally referenced her mother, but only in passing. Most of what he knew Rush had surmised from context clues and assumptions. “I know she was killed by a bandit a few years ago.”

  “Not just any bandit. Marcus.”

  The name sounded like a curse coming from Jen, and Rush could not help but feel there was a reason for that. Whatever bitterness she held in her heart, Jen moved past for the sake of the story.

  “Giza’s mother was a woman named Aya. I didn’t know her well. Only joined a few weeks before the attack. But she was good people,” Jen said. “Hartwell’s better half, in every way. She was kind, caring, like him, but braver. Knew when to put people in their place, hard. Wasn’t afraid to smack a head when she had to.”

  Jen seemed to look back on the memories fondly. Rush was surprised to see any fondness in the usually cold woman, but the warmth faded back into her usual icy demeanor as Jen followed the thread to its grim conclusion.

  “When Marcus hit- she wasn’t in the center of the blast, like Jack’s parents were. She was on the outskirts,” Jen said. “Shrapnel hit her harder than anything. She had shards of metal stuck in her back, right into the bone, in her spine, in her head. The kind of thing people don’t survive even with good medicine.”

  The mere memory of the injuries shook Jen. She had been dealing with her own pain at the time, and Aya’s condition still stuck in her mind, haunting her.

  “Sensible thing to do would’ve been to just bash her head in. Put her out of her misery. End the suffering,” Jen said. “But Hartwell refused. Said there was a chance. Dragged her halfway across the disk, bleeding and barely conscious, for three days. Three fucking days, Rush.”

  Rush tilted his head in a barely-noticeable nod of acknowledgment. Jen shook her head and continued.

  “Giza was there the whole time,” Jen said. “Watching her mom die. Watching her suffer. For three days.”

  Ever mindful of the demands of Scrapworld, Jen worked as she talked, and ripped a handful of wires out of the inactive mecha. Tearing mechs to pieces was always cathartic. She hoped one day she’d get to rip Marcus’s mech to shreds.

  “That’s what you need to know about Giza,” Jen said. “Girl’s still carrying that with her. Thinking about the mom she lost. Carrying all those regrets she has and all that revenge she wants.”

  The vendetta had been obvious from their first few conversations about mechs, but Rush was glad to have more context. The intensity of Giza’s hatred for bandits made sense now.

  “And what is this supposed to say about Hartwell?”

  “Nothing good,” Jen scoffed. “You don’t let someone suffer like that because you love them. You let them suffer because you’re scared to let go. Hartwell’s a good man, Scrapper. He’s right more often than he’s wrong. But deep down, at the core?”

  Jen tore out another handful of components and tossed them on the ground.

  “Hartwell’s a fucking coward.”

  With that final insult spat out, Jen absorbed herself fully in her work, leaving Rush to return to his own labor and think about what she’d told him. Far behind him, a debate repeated itself. Just as before, Hartwell stood his ground, and fought for the importance of preserving life -until someone else pointed out that in the time he’d spent arguing with his daughter, the wounded Junker had already died.