“That was close,” I coughed, covered in dust. “Are you all right?”

“Take a guess,” whined my sapiens, slowly pulling out pieces of glass from her bloody forearms.

When we finally fully emerged from the rubble, the machine gun was still smoking. At its side, the pirate was playing on a station of Whac-A-Mole without paying any attention to us. Her mind was as volatile as helium.

“You see the drone?” Ali whispered.

“I hear it but you’re not going to like it.”

The flying hornet was positioned at the heart of the highest rollercoaster’s biggest loop just behind the wiped-out Ice Palace. Unfortunately, the attraction was surrounded by sharpened fences and deep ditches. We had to find an alternative and my human had the idea to reach the most eccentric rails by jumping from the Ferris wheel that passed by.

The first part of the climbing wasn’t a piece of cake, but our hunt was on hold until Lucille Blaine overcame her attention disorder. Alas it couldn’t last.

“Ali! I think the wheel is moving under your weight,” I cried, feeling vibrations shaking the steel branches beneath us.

“Are you calling me fat?”

“No! Someone has restored the power. Look!” One by one, the rides all round us were starting their ignition. The multicolored still-functioning light bulbs flashed while the heady music resonated across the dilapidated park. The atrocious carnival awoke from its torpor for the highlight of the show: the Kitty crew’s death knell. “Let’s go to the nearest gondola and wait for it to pass by the tracks!” I said to Ali.

But the latter stopped just below the cupcake-shaped basket. Suspended in the void, my human then asked me in a half-voice: “You see what’s hanging?”

I did. Lulu Long Drop didn’t only deserve her nickname for the scar she proudly displayed on her neck. In front of us, corpses hanged by cables swayed to the rhythm of the carousel and the rotational force producing gravity. Some of them were Marines, merchants or even colonists; but some civilians among the dead wore the asylum’s barcode tattoos on their wrist.

“This bitch ain’t no pirate. She’s worse than the fucking Bebhionn Strangler,” Ali uttered. “Lee? I promise to listen to you. Starting tomorrow!”

“What about today, dear?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Nah. Today, we’re probably gonna die.”

The ricochet of bullets in the metal structure concluded our banter. As soon as we were in the rickety basket, we had to jump on the rollercoaster tracks. Weakened by time and its sinister load, our platform collapsed into the void when Ali’s feet left it.

I heard another shot and my partner got hit on the leg. She had to let me go to catch up, from her fingertips, the set of beams that held the tracks while I fell towards the second level of the aerial walk. Fortunately, the felines always land on their feet.

“Climb the loop!” I shouted after not landing on my feet. “Then use a power cable to rappel down to the drone!”

“Smart move… not! Let’s become a swinging target!” angrily cried my partner, holding her injured thigh.

“If you have a better plan, I’ll be all ears!”

At the foot of the rollercoaster, a crowd of animatronics started dancing. Their twisted limbs and empty eyes gesticulated to the rhythm of the new music spat by the speakers. They were mimicking a parade from a terrifying carnival. But it was not the time to be rocked by the quaking sound of the Beach Boys because the first train had left its launch lane. The cars were slowly moving towards me, squeaking the support elements. I found out how to quickly reach Ali.

As my partner limped towards the top, my leading trolley shaped like an American rocket was gaining potential energy along the lift hill that preceded the loop. With support elements not adapted to my size, I had to hope the bars’ foam was strong enough to hold my claws.

Halfway, I froze with horror when I saw the pirate on the slope of a spin supporting the vertical loop. The exoskeleton had abandoned its body armor function and had expanded from Lulu’s spinal cord to form long metal spider’s legs. Clamped to the rolling areas, she was teasing Ali with deliberately missed shots. While reloading, the psychopath uttered a wild laugh that turned into a hissing sound. She then sang nonsense, covering the music and false shouts of the crowd.

Hurt and dazed, Ali gained the loop’s top when I reached the end of the acceleration slope; below was still flying the drone. I saw my partner stare at Lulu with her arms wide open, daring the pirate to strike her final blow to the heart.

“You will never dare to jump! You are not crazy enough,” Lucille Blaine exclaimed.

“You know nothing about me, Long Drop,” my copilot yelled, short of breath. “Nothing!”

Lucille Blaine aimed, but unexpectedly dropped her gun “Don’t I, Koviràn?”

“Koviràn? Our name isn’t—how does she know?” I meowed. But I couldn’t hear the following conversation as the train slipped. The same moment, Lucille Blaine pointed again and Ali jumped. I hurried through the rollercoaster, the ears flattened by the velocity as the normally straight readjusted trajectory of my partner swerved. She had just been hit again, and the deceiving drone flew out of her reach.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

It all happened at full speed, but by the grace of God Darwin, my associate fell into the caboose—and by ‘fell’, I mean of course ‘smacked the bumper head-on before being violently thrown into the seat while fracturing half her sugar-coated bones’. I then held back the pastries threatening to escape from my stomach at the first inversion, and closed my eyes before the train entered the bowtie where Lulu still stood. “Farewell, Long Drop!” When the pirate brutally stamped the leading car, I knew the fight was over. The train continued its course through several barrel rolls and left the tracks before we finally crashed into the singing animatronics.

“Ali? Are you alive?” I asked, the hair disheveled and the claws deeply anchored in the old protections.

A bloody thumb emerged from the tail car before falling softly. In addition to a few shot holes in the shoulder and a bullet in the leg, Ali said she only suffered a broken wrist and wet pants.

Preserved by her exoskeleton and providence, the pirate was miraculously unharmed. But stuck beneath the train’s nose and a section of tubular structure that had followed us, she was entirely at our mercy. “Y—your partner went troppo…” stammered Lucille Blaine. She paused to release her neck from an animatronic’s arm. “She’s crazy but almost indestructible, like every Niku-doll.”

I raised an eyebrow. For a pirate, Long Drop seemed to be too much aware of Ali’s past. “What do you know about the meat-dolls?”

Lucille Blaine spat blood alongside a couple of teeth. “About everything, mozzie. Your partner and I are made of the same wood—or rather the same stem cell pool.”

“I see.” So, Lulu Long Drop also appeared to be a Lunar tank-grown clone—like my copilot. And her history seemed quite intertwined with ours.

“He abandoned us, you know—he let us burn and die!” She spat blood again as her tank-assembled body had reached its limits. “Can I blame him, though? There were dozens of us on this Lunar vessel…”

“You’re referring to Félix Koviràn, I presume. Ali’s father.”

“The one and only despicable man who came aboard the same pink-colored UN ship of yours—this exact same fucking ship that makes my blood boil!” Lucille looked straight at me, struggling to focus to avoid losing consciousness. Talking seemed to keep her alive despite her body being severely crushed under the rail wheels. “It was called ‘Operation Damocles’, y’know?” She laughed between two coughs. “Rogue elements of the Metal Rain and Belter hunters of the Cabal trying to take down the Arch-Empress Hera’s ship. What for? Pretty obvious. On whose orders? Nobody truly knows—even today.”

“If you say so…” I coldly answered, as Félix never wanted to talk much about the ambush which was a ‘no-survivors’ policy.

“Turns out young Koviràn managed to escape—and brought back with him a little souvenir. I understood who your girlfriend was the moment I noticed her blue eyes—blue eyes that had seen the worst the universe could offer before even reaching her sixth birthday. There, I pictured Barbie and I were the same… That and the ship.”

Ali dragged herself to me and pulled me out of the foam protection like Stan Smiths Velcro. Letting me go, she aimed the 12 gauge at Lulu, who had begun lifting the wagon thanks to her powered armor. “You and I aren’t the same, bitch…” my partner panted.

Lucille Blaine scoffed. “You—you and I were assembled in the very heart of the belt—to serve the God House of the Omega, Ali.” The pirate started to free herself but, beneath the bended beams, her legs were nothing more than a reddish mash. As her face turned white, articulating began harder as she fought to remain conscious.

“The House Omega, you said?” That, however, Félix mentioned it.

“Indeed. I was assembled by a Monsutā from raw genetic material compatible with the Arch-Countess Demeter’s deenay… but you, Barbie… you were—”

“Oh my god! Who gives a shit? Quit monologuing!” Ali cut her off, pushing down the wagon by sitting on the edge to crush Lucille again. “My father couldn’t save everyone—too bad—he tried. Nobody’s to blame but the Omegas, and they’re fucking gone now. Félix slayed them all and blew their damned ship up—this is over. It belongs to the past. Move on.”

Lulu exploded, vomiting blood: “Move on? You ramble! They ain’t all dead! Some of them weren’t even on the vessel. Besides, there are other families… even more twisted and vile: the Awen, the Inukshuk—don’t you seek revenge over them?”

“What are you trying to do here, Blaine?” I intervened. “Didn’t you try to kill us three minutes ago?”

Ali laughed. “She wants to team up now, Lee. What for, though? We have better things to do but to join a legless pirate and hunt down Lunar ships and Monsutā computers—didn’t know they were for dolls too. That just looks like another lame excuse to zero people without consequences, don’t you think?”

“Indeed, partner. And we already have a government-approved badge for that!”

“Vengeful crusades are lame tropes,” Ali added while adding weight on Lucille by bending the knee. “Plus, we can’t take on the Moon. It’s impossible.”

The pirate gasped for air. “Your father did...” she managed to groan.

Ali first responded by standing up on the train’s edge, right on top of Lucille, making her wince in pain. “Didn’t end very well.”

Our foe coughed. Her lips had turned blue. “So… what’s the plan, you cowards? You—you’re gonna a—arrest me? Me—your sister?”

“Sister? Stop striking sensitive nerves…” my partner scoffed while cocking the pirate’s rifle. “You ain’t no sister. You’re just a C$400,000 contract.” And she emptied the round magazine without even blinking.

Lucille’s crew freed, the Kitty took off a day later and I couldn’t wait to leave this sad horror park behind. However, something kept tickling my mind. Lucille Blaine, an Omega’s Niku, was shaped by an atrocious tale and became a monster. It made me think that things could have ended up very badly for Ali too without Félix around.

A pink bubble popped beside me. “Why the long face?” asked my partner as we were resting in our bunk.

I smiled before turning to her as she unwrapped another Bazooka gum. “Nothing. By the way, we received a message right after landing on this ominous station…”

My sapiens chewed loudly while reading the little comic strip that came with her candy. “From?”

“Zéphyr,” I answered. “It’s been some time. She’s around Uranus now!”

I was thrilled but, somehow, Ali didn’t share the same excitement. “I don’t know. I’d like to stop by Saturn first.”

That was understandable. That whole story with Lucille Blaine brought back its share of sorrowful memories. “Whatever you wish. But… are you sure?”

My partner rolled on the chips-covered bunk and looked away to the silent dark skies beyond the airlock’s porthole. “Yeah… I want to see my dad.”

Back to business…