“So you can upgrade that thing, then?”

As soon as they’d woken up, Giza had gone right back to pressing Rush for information about his suit. She had shared what she’d learned with Eiffel and Jack, who were far more skeptical of the claims being made.

“Yes,” Rush shouted. He was currently helping to disassemble one of the fallen mechs with his suit’s built-in power saw, necessitating a very loud conversation.

“How do you do that?”

“Elvis does it for me.”

“And who is Elvis?”

“The computer that lives in my suit,” Rush said. He paused briefly and then looked up from his sawing. “He says hello.”

“Can we say hi to Elvis ourselves?” Jack asked. Rush paused thoughtfully and looked up before answering.

“He’s linked directly to my nervous system,” Rush said. “He hears whatever I hear.”

“I’m sure,” Eiffel said. He turned to Giza and lowered his voice so Rush could not hear. “This dude’s a lunatic, Giz.”

“He’s not- he’s a little weird, but not in a bad way,” Giza said. She could not honestly claim that Rush was “normal” by any definition of the word. “I think he’s telling the truth, guys. I’m not even sure he knows how to lie, really.”

“Doesn’t matter to me either way,” Eiffel said.

“What are you three standing around for?”

Hartwell rounded the fallen mecha’s head and immediately went into scolding mode. Being the boss’s daughter never got Giza or any of her friends a free pass from his managerial wrath.

“Don’t worry, Harts-”

“Hartwell.”

“-we’re already ahead of schedule,” Eiffel concluded.

“Look, he’s almost done,” Jack said, pointing to Rush. “Watch this.”

With a final quick push on his power saw, Rush sliced through one more corner of the armored plating. He latched on to the segment of armor, activated the suit’s magnetic grips, and hefted the thick armor plate above his head. Hartwell suddenly found himself standing in shade as Rush lifted a piece of armor big enough to block out the sun. He casually strolled away, holding a sheet of thick armor that would’ve usually taken fifteen men and a hauler to move.

“See what we mean?”

Rush deposited the armor plating a few yards away, making the ground shake as he dropped it. Hartwell vibrated a little and crossed his arms disapprovingly.

“One person working hard—even unreasonably hard—isn’t an excuse for the rest of you to slack off,” Hartwell said. “More work means more material, and more debt paid off. Get to it.”

Hartwell smacked Jack on the shoulder and directed him to a now-exposed piece of circuitry. He got moving towards the electronics while Giza and Eiffel fell in behind him.

“So, you guys agree he’s useful, right?” Giza said. She started disassembling the mech’s interior as she spoke.

“Not in the way you want him to be useful,” Jack said.

“We’re standing on proof he could pull it off,” Giza said. She gestured down to the ruined mech they were taking apart.

“He got lucky,” Eiffel protested. “And he’s coming back, so quiet down.”

Rush walked back onto the arm and locked around. His eyes locked on Jack, who found it increasingly hard to concentrate. Even behind the featureless helmet Rush wore, Jack could feel the eyes staring him down.

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“Can I help you?”

“I don’t need help,” Rush said.

“Then why are you watching me?”

“To see what you’re doing.”

“You could try asking me,” Jack suggested.

“What are you doing?”

“Disconnecting power from the shoulder joints internal gyros so I can disconnect the computers,” Jack said.

“Oh. Why don’t you sever the main power coupling from the torso?”

“The what?”

Rush walked across the mech’s shoulder and down towards the connection between the arm and torso. Jack watched as he vanished into the mech’s interior, and then hear the sound of shifting metal and one loud yank. Seconds later, every power system in the arm went dark. Rush poked his head out of the mech’s interior while Jack poked at the now-inert power systems.

“That should work.”

“It did,” Jack admitted.

“And he knows his tech too,” Giza said. “How useful.”

Jack glared at Giza for a second and pressed on.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?”

“I figured it would work, I tried it, and it worked,” Rush said.

“That could’ve gotten you killed,” Jack said. Working with power systems was always dangerous, even when you knew what you were doing. “Trying it” was a good way to get dead.

“It didn’t, though,” Rush said.

“You are a very strange man, Rushmore,” Jack noted.

“Don’t be an asshole, Jack,” Giza said.

“It’s fine,” Rush said. “I am very odd. People tell me that all the time.”

So many people had called Rush some variation of strange, he had to assume they were right. He was no longer offended. What really bothered him was that no one ever told him how to stop being strange. Problems existed to be solved, and if his behavior was a problem, the least people could do was help him solve it.

“You’re not weird, Rush,” Giza said. “You’re just different.”

“That’s what people say to me when they think I am weird but want to be nice,” Rush said.

“I- I don’t-”

“You’re fighting a losing battle, Giza, give it up,” Eiffel advised.

“He is a freak, and by all appearances, a very useful and intelligent one,” Jack said. He cracked open a panel in the mech’s interior and withdrew a few components. “This would’ve taken me the better part of an hour without his help.”

“And you would’ve complained about it the entire time,” Eiffel said.

“I’d complain less if you helped more,” Jack snapped back.

“You were just talking about how dangerous that is,” Eiffel said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“If you’d listened to me when I explained it the first dozen times-”

“Boys,” Giza interjected. “If you two are done flirting, Rush looks like he has a question.”

He’d been staring at something, at least, which Giza had figured was a sign he was curious. Whenever Rush saw someone or something new or interesting, he just stared at it for a while. At least he was wearing the helmet, so his eyes were covered. His unblinking stare tended to unnerve people.

“Can I have that?”

Rush pointed at a pile of discarded components Jack had set aside. When disassembling, Jack always sorted his hauls from most to least valuable, on criteria like the value to weight ratio. Rush was pointing at something in the middle of the rankings, a brick of heavy metal he didn’t really understand the purpose of. Most Junkers assumed it was some kind of weight to make sure everything was properly balanced.

“The brick?”

“Yeah, that.”

Jack picked it up and handed over the piece of junk. Rush held it in the palm of his armored gauntlet for a second and stared at it. Jack immediately lost interest and went back to work, until he heard Eiffel gasp with shock.

A wave of silver had washed out of the Scrapper suit, seemingly from nowhere, and engulfed the metal brick. The metallic wave moved up Rush’s arm and onto his back, carrying the brick with it, and then settled into a spiraling twist right next to the power core on the armor’s back. With a sharp click, the brick sank into place, and the silver wave receded back into the armor. A second later, a quick pulse of blue light surged through the entire armored suit. Rush got a popup on his helmet.

New Battery Online

Power Systems: 1/2 Charge Capacity

“Hmm.”

“Rush, what the hell was that?”

“A battery, apparently,” Rush said. “I always wondered what those did.”

“I meant that...liquid metal,” Giza said. “What was that?”

“Oh. That was Elvis,” Rush said. “He does that whenever he upgrades my suit.”

“That’s...interesting,” Jack said. As the resident electronics expert, he knew more about Old World tech than most, but he’d never even heard rumors of such a thing.

“Where does it go?”

“The battery? I think it’s in my backplate now,” Rush said. He tried to reach between his shoulderblades and touch the battery, but the armor limited his motion too much for that.

“I meant the goo,” Eiffel clarified. “All the silver stuff. Where does it go?”

“Into the armor, I assume,” Rush said. “Hold on. Elvis, where do you go?”

Rush stared upwards for a second, listening to a voice none of them could hear. Then he tilted his head downwards to look at them all again.

“He says he lives in my blood.”

“In your...blood?”

“Mostly, yes,” Rush said. According to Elvis, it was part of their biological link. He’d made himself at home inside Rush’s body, and apparently even cleaned out some latent heavy metal toxicity in Rush’s bloodstream while he was at it.

“The computer goo that talks directly into your brain lives in your blood,” Jack said.

“Yes.”

“You really are weird.”

This time, Giza didn’t tell him off.