First, there was the scrib, which had been easy to fix. Just a few pins bent back into place. Owl said she didn’t have enough power to talk to Jane through the scrib, but she could activate a signal that would tell Jane which direction to walk in if she needed to get back to the shuttle. Jane was glad of that. She’d had enough of running around lost.
Next, the water wagon. It wasn’t much – just a cargo dolly with two big empty food crates bolted to it. The water tanks on the shuttle would need a bunch of crates’ worth of water to get full, but the wheels would make the task easier than lugging around bottles or something. She just had to find water first.
The last thing she’d built was scary, and she didn’t want to ever use it. It was a tool for making dogs go away. It started with a long plex rod with a length of stripped cable running through it. The cable plugged into a small generator (which had been part of an exosuit, whatever that was). The generator had two fabric straps – also cut out of the exosuit – stapled to it, so Jane could wear it on her back. At one end of the rod, Jane had wrapped a whole bunch of fabric, to make it comfy (another good new word), and another smaller strip that she could tie around her wrist, so the rod wouldn’t fall down if she needed to do stuff with her hands. The other end of the rod held a bunch of metal forks – a tool for eating solid meals, Owl said – spread out like fingers, each connected to the cable with a smaller wire. Jane could switch the generator power on and off with a manual switch she’d inserted right above where her thumb rested on the grip. When the power was on, the forks got all full of electricity. Owl had told her to spit on the forks the night before, to test it out. The spit made the forks pop and hiss real loud. It’d hurt the dogs a lot, Owl said. She called this tool a weapon. Jane thought that was a good-sounding word. She didn’t want to get close to the dogs again, but she knew they’d try to get close to her, so having a weapon was a good thing.
She’d found some other good things, too – an empty cloth bag called a satchel, some work gloves that were way too big for her hands but might be okay, and a real good cutting tool called a pocket knife. She put the last two things into the satchel, along with three empty canteens to bring back any water she found (Owl wanted to do tests before Jane did the hard work of filling up the water wagon). She also packed two ration bars, four pouches of water, and the scrib. She put the satchel over her shoulder and the weapon generator onto her back, slipping her hand into the grip.
‘You look like a girl who knows what she’s doing,’ Owl said. ‘You look very brave.’
Jane swallowed. Owl had explained brave the day before. She did not feel brave. ‘Do you think I’ll have to go far?’
‘I don’t know, sweetie. Hopefully not. If you get too tired, or if you don’t feel good, you can come back home, even if you haven’t found water.’
‘What’s home?’
‘Home is here. Home’s where I am, and where you can rest.’ Owl paused. Her face was some kind of sad, and it made Jane feel all weird in her chest – kind of tight, and wishing she had a blanket to curl up in. ‘Please be safe out there.’
Owl opened the inner door that led to the airlock, then opened the outer hatch. Jane tightened her grip around the weapon, and stepped outside.
She was glad Owl had taught her some new words, because everything outside the shuttle needed them. The sky was big, and the sun was bright, and the air was hot. She wasn’t sure she understood wind, but she didn’t think there was any. She could already feel herself starting to sweat. It was good that there was water in her satchel.
The metal siding on the outside of the shuttle had scratch marks on it. She spread out her fingers, running them along the scratches. Dogs. She gripped her weapon tight.
She put her palm flat above her eyes to block out the sun, and looked around. So much scrap. Scrap everywhere. Piles and piles and piles, on and on. How could anyone use this much stuff? And why would they get rid of it, if most of it just needed some fixing to be good?
She thought of Jane 64, bent over her workstation. She thought of how 64 was real good at untangling cables, better than most of the girls. Something sharp jumped into Jane’s stomach. She wanted to go back inside. She wanted to go home. She wanted to go back to bed and turn out all the lights. She had done that on the second day in the shuttle. Being in bed had not helped and was not relaxing, but everything else was too hard and Jane 64 wouldn’t leave her head, so Jane had just stayed in bed and cried until she ran to the bathroom and threw up in the sink, and then she slept because it was the only thing she could do. Owl had been good to her. She stayed on the screen by the bed all day, and she taught Jane about something called music, which was a weird bunch of sounds that had no point but made things feel a little better.