They lived in a hollow at the bottom of the slope, protected from the shifting junk by a large outcropping of rock. The sun set behind the serpent wall as they descended, sky first turning red then black. It took longer than it should have to return, and after that quake, Asmundre knew Lillian would be worried. More than one junker had gone out into the metal and never returned. Worse, they had nothing for their troubles today - but oh well. Maybe tomorrow they could go looking for that thing that had crashed, rather than picking through the wall’s discarded machines.

Light shone on the top of the rock, twinkling like a star, the shadow of a slight figure spreading across the top. His sister really was worried, if she’d come out to look for them. The light and the shadow vanished, and as they came down the path around the rock, she waited for them in the doorway instead. Her expression changed from relief to anger in an instant. She would be twelve this year, and had inherited every bit of their mother’s fiery temper, and it would be their fault that a blood mech had crashed down and they had almost died.

Their father parked his suit next to the door and undid the straps then stepped out of the exoskeleton. Their home was a small structure built of scrap, like everything else up in the shadow. Bits of sheet metal assembled into rooms, patched and replaced over the years, backed up a great giant stone that some giant must have rolled into place. The building was more rust than iron but somehow still held together, and lately father had been using his mech to drill into the rock itself. Soon they would have a sturdy stone house, he claimed. Stairs circled the rock, spiraling away from the door of their home which faced the valley, to the path up into the junk at the back.

Asmundre sat on the last step, next to Lillian’s tomato plants.

“I was worried,” she said.

“It was nothing,” their father said, sweeping her into a hug. “Just a junk quake.”

“It was bigger than usual. Something fell in the workshop.”

Their father sighed and untangled himself. “I better check on that. Azzie, you can take care of dinner for your sister, yah?”

After father went off around the rock to the workshop, Asmundre followed his sister inside. He had to duck under the doorway. The interior was cramped and crowded, the counters of their kitchen overflowing with odds and ends recovered from the junk. Some appliances still worked and Asmundre even knew what they did, but most were busted things that Father insisted he could fix. If he just had the time and could find the parts. The icebox chugged away, a constant hum. The lines etched around it’s based glowed a dull crimson, a sure sign that it was running down and wouldn’t last much longer. Maybe the next piece of valuable scrap would have to go toward a blood battery instead of food.

That thought was enough to set Asmundre’s stomach rumbling. It was easy to forget hunger when you were slogging through the junk pile, much more difficult standing in his own kitchen.

Lillian went to the sink and ran some rust colored water into the pitcher. That had been getting worse as well, the filters running down like everything else. The whole world seemed to slowly decaying around him.

“Any of those tomatoes ready?” he asked.

“Not unless you like them green,” she said, placing the pitcher on the table, pushing some papers out of the way to make room first. “But I kept the worms out of them so far.”

“They’re looking pretty good.”

She scowled at him. “You’re just saying that. They’re tiny.”

“Maybe that will make them sweeter?” He opened the icebox and selected a slab of ground meat. Not much in way of flavor, and he was never sure what animal it came from, but at least it was cheap. He combined a bit of oatmeal from the cupboard with water from the tap and put it and the meat into the hotbox above the sink. “Did you make any progress on that stitching today?”

“No,” Lillian said. Her attention was on the papers on the table. Besides fixing the holes in their clothes, she was supposed to be practicing her letters. All the things that mother had used to do had fallen onto them when she died the year before. It hardly seemed fair to Asmundre - it must be a thousand times worse for Lillian. After all, he was sixteen, and expected to step up and take on more responsibility. How would he have coped if mother had died when he was eleven?

“Some men came by the house,” she said.

The oatmeal spun in circles inside the hotbox. “Did you talk to them?”

“No, I hid inside until they left. They poked around. Looked in the windows.”

That couldn’t be good. Anyone from the village would know they lived there and expect Lillian to be home - they would have called out to her if they came for any honest reason. The hotbox dinged. “You didn’t recognize them?”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“No, never saw them before.” Lillian got bowls from the cupboard and put them on the table. “They had uniforms. Blue like the midgard.”

What were midgard doing out here? He had to tell father. Right after they ate. Setting aside some for father, he split the rest of the oatmeal and meat into their bowls. The hotbox turned everything he put into it into a gray mess - he couldn’t yet figure out how their mother had made everything look so good. It always tasted a bit gray, too. They sat in silence for a moment, Lillian dragging her spoon through the oatmeal without eating any of it. Midgard coming by could be good, it could be bad. Maybe it was related to that blood mech that had crashed. If they were looking for it, a junker would be the right person to ask. Or maybe it was about father. A year previously, after their mother died, there had been an incident in the village that left a midgard pilot dead, and Asmundre hadn’t seen one visit the shadow since.

“Do you think they were looking for father?” Lillian asked, echoing his own thoughts back at him.

If they were, Asmundre didn’t know what he could do about it. “I don’t know,” he said.

Lillian stared at her bowl. She hadn’t taken a bite yet.

“You should eat.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You haven’t tried it.”

“It’s goo. I know what goo tastes like. It tastes like it’s already been eaten once. It’s just used up junk like everything else here.”

He couldn’t fault her. It did taste awful. “There’s not likely to be anything else. You should eat it, unless you like being a stick.”

Lillian scowled, but didn’t lift her spoon. Just as Asmundre prepared to scold her again, a crash from the workshop cut him off. A clang of something large toppling, and the assorted jangle of bits and pieces scattering across the floor. Asmundre sprang to his feet.

“Was that father?”

“Stay here,” Asmundre said as he pushed past his sister and darted out the door. Outside, the cold had risen, and the metal planes of their house shone with frost. Asmundre jogged up the path that wound around their rock. He should have grabbed his coat. He wrapped his arms around himself and ran for the workshop, bursting through the door. Just as cold on the inside. Father hadn’t lit the forge. Built behind the rock, the workshop was a low building with corrugated walls, filled with bruised and dented tables and old bits of machinery. None of it worked. Anything that did father sold, and what was left here were the left over bits and pieces that still promised they might someday be useful again.

Fractured bowls and bottles and gears lay scattered across the floor, whether tossed there by the junk quake or the crash Asmundre had just heard he couldn’t say. His father lay across the room, back across a broken table, machine parts piled around him. Asmundre ran to him, kicking debris out of his way.

“Pa!” He knelt beside his father, who grimaced. “Are you okay? What happened?”

“Get me up,” his father groaned.

“Did you fall?” He took his father’s hand. It was cold, the fingers tinged blue.

“Yeah I fell. It’s nothing, just tired. I’ll be fine.”

His father’s lips were blue as well, and as Asmundre pulled him to his feet, gauntlet groaning, his father’s sleeve pulled back to expose a long track up his father’s arm. “How much did you give it?”

Father’s grimace turned into a hard line. “No more than normal.”

“You’re blue.”

“It’s none of your damn business how much I gave it.” His father ripped himself free of Asmundre’s grasp, steadying himself against the broken table instead.

His father’s mech, while barely larger than the man himself, was still a blood mech. Like Asmundre’s gauntlet, it ran on blood. The mech could accomplish amazing feats of strength - for example, holding the door of that cab shut while they tumbled through the junk - but it had a cost.

“You know you can’t give it so much,” Asmundre said. “It’s dangerous. You could have died.”

“Now look, I won’t be lectured by my own son! Besides - Besides -” He put his hands on Asmundre’s shoulders and leaned upon him. He shook a little, his feet barely able to hold him up. “Besides, what else was I supposed to do? Come on then, help me inside. Nothing out here can’t wait until morning.”

Asmundre guided his father through the debris then down the path. “You need plasma.”

“Aye, maybe. Have we got any?”

“I don’t know.”

Once inside, Asmundre lowered his father into the big chair in their small living room while Lillian fetched blankets. He built up the fire until he could barely stand to be near it, and still his father shivered. They kept the plasma in the cabinet in the hall, but when Asmundre drew out the bags and laid them on the table, each was empty. He sat and stared at them. Lillian appeared in the doorway.

The color had vanished from her face. For the moment, she wasn’t the fierce little brat she had become, but the scared little girl he remembered.

“Lil,” he said, “I have to go down to the village and get some more.”

“But it’s freezing out there.”

Asmundre rose and got his coat.

“Is he going to - ?”

Asmundre looked into his sister’s eyes, then took her shoulders. She looked exactly like she had a year ago, near the end of mother’s wasting sickness. He wondered if Lillian had eaten a single whole meal since that day. “No,” he said, trying to make himself sound more sure than he felt. “But he needs plasma. I have to go and get it. You can keep the fire going, right? Without burning the house down?”

The moment vanished. The fierceness roared back. “I’m not going to -”

Asmundre cut her off by hugging her. Then he ducked out the door and into the cold night, gauntlet holding his coat shut tight, never mind that they hadn’t a single coin between the three of them.