Rush carried the hoverbike out of the garage on his shoulders, and drew a crowd almost instantly. The mass of people parted as he sat the vehicle down outside. It was inactive, so the plates that usually kept it floating above the ground settled in the dust.

  “Oh, my lower back feels better already,” Jen said. Even rarer than haulers, intact hoverbikes were some of the most useful pieces of old world tech. They could move hundreds of pounds at once, and were both faster and more maneuverable than haulers, making them great for loading and unloading scrap from the much larger vehicles. Even the one bike could save the clan dozens of hours and a lot of back-breaking effort moving material.

  “Don’t get excited,” Giza sighed, as she followed Rush out the door. “It’s missing a Cell.”

  She popped open one of the hoverbike’s side panels and revealed the empty socket where a Kell Cell was supposed to rest. The crowd dissipated immediately, groaning and muttering with disappointment. As useful as hoverbikes were, usable Kell Cells were more valuable. All but one of their haulers had their Kell Cells overgrown with Kellcite, making them still functional but unable to be moved and reinstalled anyway. The last one spurred monthly debates on whether or not to yank it out and sell it as scrap. Nobody was willing to sacrifice one more Kell Cell for the sake of a hoverbike, especially not while Rush was around to do most of the heavy lifting anyway.

  The crowd had vanished entirely by the time Rush had retrieved his tools and started poking around inside the bike’s components. Giza sat by the side, polished some dust off of one of the rear-view mirrors, and looked at her own reflection in it.

  “My mom used to own a hoverbike, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I know, that’s why I’m telling you,” Giza said, as she leaned on the bike. This ancient model was obviously very different from the one her mother had owned, but the core concept was the same. “She loved it. My dad hated it, though. Rode it with her once and never again.”

  Rush continued pulling at wires and picking at components in silence. He examined a few cables and then went digging around in his toolbox again.

  “She was a bit of a speed demon, I guess,” Giza said. “Scared the hell out of him.”

  “That sounds like Hartwell.”

  “Yeah,” Giza said. She let out a sigh and looked up at the endless blue sky. “I kind of wanted to try riding a hoverbike too.”

  “Excuse me.”

  Rush walked around to the other side of the hoverbike and kept prying at the pieces, and Giza scooted over to give him room.

  “Are you listening, Rush?”

  “All the time, yeah,” Rush said. Giza didn’t doubt it. She could accuse Rush of a lot of things, but he was always paying attention, often to things she wasn’t even aware of.

  “Right. Sorry,” Giza said. “Just thinking about the past and being moody, I guess.”

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

  Rush shrugged off any offense and started coiling some wires around his hand.

  “So what are you pulling out of the hoverbike anyway? Anything valuable?”

  “I’m not taking anything out of it,” Rush said.

  “Then what are you doing?”

  Rush straddled the hoverbike, grabbed some of the cables he’d been manipulating, and plugged them into his own armor. With a roaring electric buzz, the hover panels on the bike surged to life, and the bike lifted off the ground.

  “I was doing that,” Rush said. The bike needed a Kell Cell, and his armor had a Kell Cell. The mech-grade power supply was more than enough to run the suit and the bike at the same time.

  With a delighted shriek, Giza hopped on the back of the hoverbike and grabbed on to Rush’s armor.

  “Drive!”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t care,” Giza said. The crowd that had lost interest was reassembling already. “Just go!”

  Though Rush was not entirely sure how to drive, he did as Giza commanded. He pushed his way through a gap in the crowd before it totally closed around him, and buzzed away from the garage. He got the hang of steering fast, dodging and weaving through the rubble of the collapsing city around them.

  “As soon as we get back on the wastes, make it go as fast as you can,” Giza demanded.

  “I don’t know how fast that is,” Rush said.

  “Well how else are we going to find out?”

  The hoverbike coasted over a patch of rubble and broke the bounds of the city. Rush examined the accelerator, shrugged his shoulders, and pushed it to the max.

  Four seconds later, Giza realized she was probably still alive. The sudden acceleration felt like it had flattened all her organs, and the air was roaring past her face so fast she couldn’t breathe. The whine of the engine and the buzz of the hover engine were the only things she could hear. She was glad she’d gotten a tight grip on Rush, at least, or she might be rolling through the dirt ten miles away.

  “Rush! Slow down! Slow down!”

  It took a few more tries, but eventually Giza managed to scream loud enough that Rush heard her. He decelerated into a stop and let Giza hop off and enjoy the feeling of solid ground beneath her feet.

  “We probably shouldn’t have gone that fast right away,” Rush said. He hadn’t been bothered, thanks to the armor and his natural inability to be bothered, but seeing the state Giza was in made it clear the speed had been a bit much.

  “Yeah, no shit,” Giza said. She still felt like her stomach was wrapped around her spine. “I think I agree with my dad on that one. Speed bad.”

  Once her legs stopped shaking, Giza stood up and examined where they were. It took her a second to realize the skyscrapers they had been nestled among seconds ago were now a few lumps on the horizon.

  “Holy hell,” Giza said. “I didn’t know things could move that fast.”

  “Most things probably don’t,” Rush said. “I think this hoverbike is special.”

  “You’ve ridden a hoverbike before?”

  “No. I just saw this while I was working on it.”

  Rush grabbed one of the panels on the hoverbike and pulled it loose with ease, then turned it around to show the interior to Giza. The thin metal plate had the initials “KK” welded into them. Giza stared at them and recalled some of the stories Rush had learned from Elvis.

  “KK...Kal Kellarin?”

  “Maybe,” Rush said. “Elvis pulled data from some kind of navigational system on the bike. He says the before it got parked in that garage, the bike made frequent visits to the capital, where the Hub is now.”

  What had once been the pinnacle of the Sol Imperium’s civilization had been reduced to rubble long before the Junker’s had arrived, and anything left of it had long since been disassembled. There were occasional rumors of secret basements filled with treasure, but no one had uncovered any remnants of the old capital in decades.

  “During the last few days of travel the bike was moving erratically,” Rush said, passing along whatever Elvis told him. “No way to tell why.”

  “Considering the state of this place, he might have been running from something,” Giza said. She turned to look back at the collapsing towers, and was reminded just how far away they had gone. “Come on, we can share ghost stories later. My dad’s probably worried sick.”

  “Do you want to walk?”

  “Rush, that’d take hours,” Giza said. “Just, uh, ease into the speed and I’ll tell you when to stop.”

  They boarded the hoverbike once again, and Giza signaled Rush when she’d hit her limit. Rush checked the bike’s readouts, and saw they were traveling about ten percent of top speed. He chose not to point that out.