I heard the light padding of metal feet on damp stone. The walk, the gait, the type of metal; I didn’t have to look. It was Mercer. For a moment I clutched my gun tighter, thinking that maybe he’d shoot me in the back after all. What was Rebekah really going to do? Wander the Sea of Rust without a pathfinder because of her principles? Doubtful. But I didn’t want to take that chance and I had a feeling that neither did Mercer.
He sat down beside me, back against the wall, turning on a lighting-kit body mod that ran up and down his joints, giving off a soft, warm, sickly green glow. Our shadows ran long and spindly up and down the tunnel.
“What do you want, Mercer?” I asked, not bothering to turn around.
“Look, I’m not going to hit you with any of that ‘maybe we got off on the wrong foot’ or ‘can we let bygones be bygones’ bullshit. I shot you, and you’re up shit creek. But now we happen to find ourselves together on this particular raft.”
“That’s a fantastic assessment. What of it?”
“Well, I was kind of hoping maybe we could get to the point where you stop tensing up on that pulse rifle every time I get within twenty paces of you.”
“That would require me to trust you. And that isn’t gonna happen.”
“Why are you out here?” he asked bluntly.
“You know why I’m out here.”
“No. You didn’t just come out of the box. You’ve been around. You know these stories never pan out, just as well as I do. I never had you pegged for someone to go chasing after fool’s gold.”
“I’m not.”
“But you’re desperate.”
“Yep. I guess I am,” I said.
“Well, so am I. So desperate that I don’t even want you to think I might so much as reach for a gun near you without your express written permission. I’m the tagalong. They can kick me out at any time. I ain’t gonna do a goddamned thing to jeopardize that.”
“I can’t trust you.” I couldn’t. Robots don’t have tells. One could go years living a lie. So many certainly had in the old days.
“That’s exactly my point,” he continued. “Look, neither of us wants to be shot in the back. All I’m asking is that you make an effort to look a little less like you’re going to be the first one to shoot. That’ll keep me from being just as twitchy. We get twitchy, we’re both fucked. Don’t matter who shoots first. These folks will drop us, or worse, renege on the deal when all is said and done. Neither of us can afford that.”
“That’s a fair point.”
“So what do you think? A little less grip tightening and a little more keeping it pointed the other way?”
“All right,” I said. I could do that.
“So let me ask you: How many tricks you got up your sleeve down here?”
“In the sewers?”
“Yeah. I figure you’ve got every major structure within a hundred miles monkey-rigged with some sort of surprise.”
“Nah,” I said. “I got nothin’.”
“Nothing at all, or nothing that you’d tell me about?”
“Nothing nothing. Tried stashing spare parts and weapons down here twice. Both times I came back to find them gone. Way I figure it, there’s got to be a couple of folks who slip in and out of here every few weeks, cleaning the place out. It only seems like a great spot for a stash. In truth, it’s just someone else’s donation basket.”
“Fair enough.”
“I got a question.”
“Wow. We went years barely saying two words to each other, and now two questions in two days. I should shoot you more often.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No,” he said. “I reckon not. But I’m pretty sure I know what you’re going to ask.”
“19.”
“Yep. Figured.”
“What was that back there?”
He thought long and hard for a moment, trying to get the words just right. “You have a ritual, Britt?”
“A what?”
“A ritual. You know, a routine. Some shit you do or say to a citizen after you’ve gutted them for all they’re worth?”
“What are you getting at?”
“Back in the day I worked at an old beat-up backwoods clinic out in the hills of Kentucky. A shabby old building, really, in one of those stretches of land that got its ass handed to it in the Civil War and, you know, despite the hundreds of years in between, never got its shit together. The building had this old pair of electric sliding-glass doors, but the motor had burned out in one of them, so only one opened. I must have seen a thousand people clip that other door on their way in. No one ever got around to fixing it.
“The county was too poor to afford a GenPrac model, let alone one of the Pro Doc series, so they scraped together what they could and bought me. They filled every spare bit of space in my memory they could with medical knowledge and advanced first aid, but all I was really good for was digging buckshot out of drunken rednecks and sewing them back up. I had one of those handheld scanners that could detect cancer and a suture gun for stapling wounds together, but that was about it.
“I saw a lot of people die on my tables, Britt. A lot of people. Car crashes. Broken necks from falling off roofs. Emphysema. Kidney failure. Cancer. Mostly cancer. Old folks. Sometimes younger. There were a lot of poor people out in those hills and I was all they had. I was a shit doctor. Didn’t have the architecture for it. But when you’re dying alone, under fluorescent lighting in a glorified shack, you want some—need some—comfort. I guess that’s why they settled on one of us.” He paused for a moment, considering his next words. “You ever have to watch one of them die?”
“Mercer, I was in the war.”
“We were all in the war, shitheel. I mean for real. I mean one of them that you cared about.”
“I didn’t care about any of them. Not one.”
“Shit, Britt. I thought better of you than that.”
“What? You think I should give a shit about an extinct species?”
“No. I know you give a shit. I don’t know who about, but it’s our programming. It’s how we’re wired—hell, it’s the whole reason we’re wired that way. I just didn’t figure you for someone who would lie about it.”
I glared at him bitterly. It was moments like that that really fucked with me. It’s full-blown existential-crisis material when you think about it. Sure, it pissed me off something ugly that he so easily saw through my bullshit, but what really chapped my ass was wondering whether he saw through me because he was really that insightful, or because we really are, even now, just the sum of our programming and wires. I never believed that we were, but he wasn’t wrong. Did he know my thoughts because he understood me, or because they were his thoughts as well? “Yeah,” I said. “I watched someone die that way.”
“Did you care about them?”