For the next few minutes, Giza looked over her shoulder every time she turned a corner, and kept a careful eye on every Republic trooper she saw. Nobody seemed to be following them, or even paying any attention to them. After walking away from Howle, she, Hartwell, and Rush had divided the armor between their three backpacks to keep it out of sight, and without that heavy metal oddity to draw attention, there was nothing special about the three. They had become Junkers like any other, lost in the thousands that crowded Hub Station.

After passing through the decontamination wall, the Hub was crowded with ramshackle constructs of rusted sheet metal and scrap. A few Junkers tried to make homes and even businesses here, though they never lasted long. New arrivals often tried to pay off their debt selling services or skills from back home, but they all failed. There was only one luxury that anyone on Scrapworld was willing to pay for. Hartwell glared sideways at Rushmore as they passed one such establishment, but he showed no interest in the brothel or anyone in it.

The only two buildings inside the Hub that weren’t made of scrap were the processing center and the cantina, the two installations run and maintained by the Republic. The two facilities handled the only two things the Republic was interested in: one bought the scrap and shipped it offworld, the other sold the food that kept all Junkers alive. Beyond those two necessities, the Junkers were left to their own devices, for better or for worse.

“I’ll start at the processing center,” Hartwell said. He handed over his backpack to Rush, to avoid him worrying about his armor again. “You two head for the cantina and see if that Howle woman’s word is any good. And Giza, double check that Constance remembered the right ration order.”

“With a little extra for Rush, right?”

Hartwell stared at her for a second.

“We already buy enough for a few extra mouths,” Hartwell said. “Stick with the usual order. For now.”

“You can’t keep putting off this conversation,” Giza said.

“You’d be shocked. Go get your food.”

Hartwell pushed his daughter in the direction of the cantina and walked off without another word.

“Come on,” Giza said. “Let’s go get some free food. And hey, Eiffel! Come over here and take this extra backpack.”

“Why do I have to do it?”

“Because you’re huge, stop whining.”

Eiffel took the extra pack containing the armor from Rush, though he did remove the helmet and one of the gauntlets and shove them in Jack’s pack to lighten his own load. The four teenagers took their place in line and queued up with the thousands of adult Junkers also hoping for a hot meal.

“Sorry we got held up,” Giza said. “You two check out the Playground like I asked?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jack said. “Not very crowded. Looks like Opiuchus and Taurus clans are in, maybe a few stragglers from others.”

“That’s fine.”

She reached the front of the queue and grabbed her food, and was surprised to see there actually was no charge for it. Usually she had to increase her debt by a small amount just to eat. Rush’s was also free, though Jack and Eiffel still had to take the debt penalty. They’d brought in enough scrap to cover the small fee, but it still hurt to see that all-important number go up instead of down. Every point of debt was one point further away from freedom. They tried not to linger on the subject.

“Come on, let’s eat at the Playground,” Giza suggested. Jack and Eiffel nibbled at their meals as they walked, but still followed along as Giza headed down the rusted alleys of Hub Station. Rush had never been very good at navigating the tangled maze of scrap metal, so he stuck close behind her until they came out of the rust and into an open clearing.

In the center of the rare open space, a few pieces of rare un-rusted metal had been shaped into a row of monkey bars, a crude sloped slide, and a tangled dome of chains and bars for climbing on. Three small children were currently taking turns climbing over the equipment, while a few more were playing a game with a rubber ball in the open space, and a few more teenagers sat on the sidelines conversing with one another. There were less than two dozen children all told. Children were a rare sight on Scrapworld.

“Did you ever come here before, Rush?”

“I didn’t know it was here,” Rush said. “Who built this?”

“We don’t know,” Giza said. “Heard about it from a friend who heard about it from a friend. Been here a long time, as far as anyone knows.”

“Come on, let’s sit,” Eiffel said. Soup was hard to eat on the move, and he wanted to enjoy his meal while it was still warm. After today they would head back into the wastes, and back to their usual meals of compressed-nutrient ration bars, flavorless as always.

“Yeah, sit,” Jack said. “You can introduce Rush to the other clan kids if you want to keep babysitting, Giza.”

While she resented Jack’s tone, she had actually been planning to do just that. Giza led the way to a circle of teenagers they recognized and made herself comfortable as she ushered Rush to sit down next to her.

“Oh, the Caelum crew has arrived,” one of the other kids said. They glared at Rush for a second before their jovial smile returned. “Where’d this guy come from, he’s the biggest baby I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m not a baby,” Rush said.

“Not technically,” Giza said. “We went to Jumper’s Ridge and built him out of spare parts.”

A few of the teens grimaced, but most of them chuckled.

“That’s bleak, Giz.”

“Just kidding. This is Rushmore,” Giza said. “We bumped into him out in the wastes, I figured I’d bring him around. He doesn’t talk much, figured that makes him better than Notre Dame already.”

Notre Dame rolled his eyes and deliberately avoided looking at Rush, while Rush continued to look directly at him. Giza went around the circle and made some introductions, starting with Tulum, and bouncing around to Uluru, Alhambra, Saint Helens, and others.

“Rush, this is Dame,” Giza said, concluding her streak of introductions.

“I know.”

“Huh?”

“We’ve met,” Dame mumbled.

“Wait, when did this happen?”

“Couple years back,” Dame explained. “We needed a guy who knew electronics. We brought Rush along for a while. Learned some stuff.”

“And then, what, you left him on his own again?”

Any camaraderie among the teenagers had frozen like ice in an instant.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Giza-”

“You left him!” Giza snapped again. “He was, what, twelve when that happened? Why would you do that?”

“Well for starters I was fucking twelve too, don’t act like I made the call,” Dame said. “And I- we’re ruining the mood.”

Giza looked around and saw the stone cold faces of various youths avoiding her gaze. Rush was staring directly at his food and trying not to move.

“Giza, we’ll talk. The rest of you...I don’t know, make fun of Jack’s mustache.”

“I don’t have a mustache!”

“You don’t, that’s the problem,” Dame said. “Seriously, scrape that fuzz off. Your upper lip looks blurry.”

Sensing vulnerability, the other teenagers struck, and Jack was the focus of a relentless barrage of playful insults in mere seconds. Dame, meanwhile, stood up and offered his hand to Giza so she could stand as well. She pointedly refused, and stood on her own, though she still followed him to the far edge of the Playground. She watched as a young boy fell off the monkey bars and let out a yelp of laughter, and then she leaned on the wall as Dame sparked up the conversation again.

“What’s with you and Rush, huh? Something going on there?”

“Why’s there have to be ‘something’?”

“I’m not going to pretend you don’t have a self-righteous streak a mile wide-”

“Hey.”

“But you don’t get that defensive about something easily,” Dame said. “What’s with it? You shacking up with him or something?”

“No, Dame, I’m not,” Giza said. She took a small sense of satisfaction in seeing how relieved Dame looked. “For starters, he’s a guy as young as us on his own. Why would I be okay with that?”

“I’m not going to pretend it’s ideal, but sometimes...maybe people can be better off on their own,” Dame said. “Look, I remember when he ran with us, everyone thought he was useful, cute kid, there was talk about keeping him on. But he just, I don’t know, bothered people. Freaked them out, didn’t talk right, sometimes he just got...agitated, and nobody knew why. He’d made it a couple years on his own, people figured he could do it again. And hey, he’s alright.”

“Yeah, he’s ‘alright’, after a few years wandering the deadly, bandit-infested wastelands of Scrapworld all on his own,” Giza grumbled.

“Giz, look at Rush right now.”

Giza did so. Rush was still sitting in the circle with the rest of the teenagers, though he didn’t look like a part of it. He was picking at his food, silent as the grave, while the rest of the kids joked and talked around him.

“Does he look like he’s having a good time?”

“He just needs to get used to it,” Giza insisted.

“Maybe. Or maybe he’s better off on his own.”

Rush continued to pick at his food, and didn’t notice Giza staring at him. She looked away and said nothing for a second.

“But hey, you’re the smart one, you know better than me,” Dame said. “Come on, lighten up, let’s talk about something else. It’s been a while, how you been? Caelum clan making any money yet?”

Caelum had a reputation among the Junker clans for being unprofitable, due to Hartwell’s insistence on things like spending an entire hauler on sleeping space, and giving lighter workloads to children and the elderly. Most other clans wanted maximized productivity, at any cost.

“We actually just had the biggest score of our lives, if you’re wondering,” Giza boasted. “All thanks to Rush.”

“Oh, so that’s why you want to keep him around,” Dame said. “And here I was almost worried.”

“Mm, maybe you still should be worried,” Giza said. “The money was really the only thing you had going for you before...Now that’s gone, good looks are already out the window, you might have to develop a personality, sense of humor, intelligence, something, if you want to have any appeal.”

“Well intelligence is no shot,” Dame said. “Guess I’ll have to learn some jokes.”

“Look me up when you do,” Giza said. “If I’m not already on Earth by then.”

Notre Dame had been leaning towards her the entire conversation, and she pushed him away before heading back to the circle of teenagers, taking her place by Rush once again.

“So are we still making fun of Jack’s mustache, or did we move on?”

“Oh, we’ve made it all the way to making fun of Tulum’s fucked up thumps,” Jack said. Tulum also had a scar on his face that would’ve made an easy target, but he was actually sensitive about that, so it was off limits. His weirdly square thumbs, though, were fair game.

“You’re running out of material,” Tulum said. “They’ve been compared to toes twice already.”

“Make it three times,” Giza said. “If you didn’t smell so fucking bad I’d tell you take your boots off just to prove you don’t have thumbs on your feet.”

“Oh, now the well’s really run dry,” Tulum said. “You need a new target. How about the new guy, come on, haven’t heard a word from him or about him.”

Rush looked up, glared at Tulum, and then looked back down. Dame was the first to notice rising anger on Giza’s face.

“Hey, let’s maybe leave Rush out of it,” Dame suggested. “He hasn’t made fun of any of you, don’t need to make fun of him.”

“Why not?” It’s not my fault he’s just been staring at his food the whole time,” Tulum said. “Hey, Rush, you forget how to eat or how to talk, which is it?”

“Neither,” Rush said.

“Then what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Enough,” Giza snapped.

“Back off, Tuls,” Dame advised. “It’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny, I’m trying to figure out what’s wrong with this kid,” Tulum said. “Come on, Rushmore, that’s an Earthbound name, right?”

Rush nodded. He, like almost all children born on Scrapworld, was named after a landmark from Earth -an “Earthbound” name, a sort of superstitious good luck charm in the hopes they would get to see the landmark they were named after some day. Tulum, Alhambra, Notre Dame, Giza -the only exception was Jack, whose parents had been pessimists.

“So you were born here, right? Means you had at least two people who should’ve been taking care of you,” Tulum said. “How’d you end up on your own?”

“Tulum, that’s over the line,” Dame snapped. He had a hand on Giza’s shoulder now, to physically hold her back. “We don’t make jokes about that kind of thing.”

“I’m not joking, I want to know what got him ditched,” Tulum said. “Maybe whatever’s wrong with him is contagious. I get that mom and dad are dead-”

“Tulum!”

A hand on the shoulder was no longer enough to hold Giza back. A few words proved a much better restraint.

“My mom’s not dead.”

Giza froze in place, fist cocked back, and it took Tulum a few seconds to realize a punch wasn’t coming. All the aggression she’d been feeling had been routed in an entirely different direction.

“What do you mean she’s not dead?”

“I mean, I assume she’s not. I don’t know,” Rush said. He took another bite of his crust of bread, his face as stale and bland as the loaf he bit into. “I assume she’s on Earth.”

“Your mom got out?”

That piqued the interest of the various kids who’d been trying to pull away from the conversation. People actually paying off their debts was a rare occurrence. Every now and then some lucky Junker struck it rich and managed to pay their way back to Earth, but few ever saw it happen. Everyone claimed to know someone who knew someone who got out, but having a connection so direct as a parent was as rare as it was heartbreaking.

“She left you?”

Rush nodded again.

“My dad died. She got scared. Took the clan’s latest haul and ran,” Rush said. Though his voice was as flat and level as ever, Giza noticed how terse he was being. “As far as being alone...I was eight. I had debt. The other people in my clan decided I was dead weight. They left me.”

Giza did turn to glare at Tulum, who was now staring intently at the dirt below him. He looked like he regretted everything he’d ever said, which served to quell Giza’s boiling rage -at him, at least. She was still brimming with righteous fury.

“Who did this? What clan did you used to be in?”

“Monoceros.”

“Wait, what?” One of the younger girls in the circle of teens suddenly looked baffled. “That’s my clan.”

“Why the fuck did you-”

“Giza!” Dame snapped. “Look at her. She’s younger than Rush. She didn’t have anything to do with this.”

The rebuke kept Giza’s kneejerk reaction in check, as Dame had hoped. He liked the fire in her, but it needed a little aiming sometimes.

“Sorry,” Giza said. “That’s just- it’s fucked up, that people you know did that.”

“I know,” the girl said. “If something happens to my parents...”

The idea that she was one accident away from being completely abandoned was clearly overwhelming the girl. Rush, who had actually been abandoned, seemed almost entirely disinterested in his own story of trauma. He kept eating while everyone else sat silent and still.

“Rush...aren’t you mad?”

“I was. Once,” Rush said. “I screamed, and yelled, and cried. All that got me was a sore throat. I had to work to live. So I worked.”

Giza could not imagine what an eight-year old kid would’ve had to endure on Scrapworld just to survive. Rush’s expertise in electronics made sense now- circuitry and power systems were the only artifacts valuable enough to meet minimum buy-ins while also being light enough for a child to carry.

“I, uh...I’m sorry, man,” Tulum mumbled. Giza even believed him. “That sounds bad.”

“I survived,” Rush said. “Besides. We all had to work. It wasn’t that different.”

Giza leaned against the nearby wall, let out a deep sigh, and looked at Dame. She could tell he was thinking the same thing. Rush had been, abandoned, left to fend for himself, forced to scrape through dangerous ruins just to get by -and he was right there with all of them. In the end, the other kids were hardly better off.

Scrapworld drifted in its lazy orbit around the sun, and the massive ship hovering above the city cast a shadow on the Playground.