I don’t have anything to dull the pain, not even that battery acid the spacers drink in the market, but I’m numb anyway. The curved needle spears into my flesh once again, and I pull it through, tightening the loop of thread. It’s an awkward angle, trying to stitch up my shoulder one-handed in the bouncing light, and I glare at the battered metal orb floating in front of me as my breath plumes out in a fog.

“Asu, Gus! Hold still.”

The amber light emitting from his lone ocular sensor pulses an apologetic blue for a moment as he tries to steady himself.

Sweat’s broken out on my brow and drips into my eyes, stinging as it mixes with my tears. I’m numb, but it still hurts. It’s a good pain though, a pain that tells me I’m still alive. That I’m lucky to be alive.

It could’ve been worse.

I guess.

It was over quickly enough.

I taste snot on my lip and wipe it from my nose with the back of my hand. The cut is long, and deep, and so back the needle goes into my skin, purple thread the color of a bruise pulling the edges of my flesh together.

Why purple? Because it’s what Sylvia had on discount and it was all I could afford.

“Goblok,” I hiss through clenched teeth.

Gus pulses a staccato burst of amber questioningly.

“Not you. Me. I was so stupid.”

A flicker of purple and blue.

“There’s nothing you could’ve done.”

Did I mention I don’t know how to sew? Not cloth and certainly not flesh. Mama tried to teach me—sewing cloth that is—but it didn’t take. Cooking, that I managed to learn before she was killed in a food riot four years ago when I was nine… ten? Her and papa both. But sewing? Not so much.

This is going to be an ugly scar. A permanent reminder of an ugly afternoon.

Gus is trying to coach me through the process in pulses and flashes of light. That’s how he talks. Luminix, it’s called. Some ancient drone dialect from before the War.

“Yes, I know I’m making a mess of it. I’m doing my best. You want to try? Oh right. No hands. So stow it. And hold steady, sialan.”

He pulses in alternating blue and yellow.

“You’re right. I probably won’t live long enough to worry about an ugly scar. Not without antibiotics.”

My brother Arjuna died right here, in this leaking scrap-metal shack not three feet from an open sewer. Sepsis. And he barely got a scratch. That was two months and a lifetime ago. He was only six. He was the one who figured out how to understand Gus, back when I found the pre-War relic in a junk heap. Concord-era recon drone, Kael said. He offered to buy the ancient scrap, but Arjuna had already adopted the oversized ball bearing.

Kael had offered a lot of cred too.

Which was weird, because no one else seemed to think much of the rusted-out, glitchy, hovering bauble that trailed Arjuna like a puppy.

Arjuna had never been quite right in the head, not so good with people, you know? Like, he figured out Luminix when he was four, but couldn’t understand when someone was joking. Gus made him happy and kept him quiet. Calmed him when he had his episodes.

So I told Kael no deal.

But it was a lot of cred.

Enough to save my brother, but it’s not like Kael had the credits on him—he’d have to find a buyer first, probably off-world, negotiate, haggle, and that would’ve taken time. Time Arjuna didn’t have. Sepsis sets in faster than the slipstream. He snagged his leg on a rusty piece of rebar one morning and had a burning fever that same evening. By midnight he was vomiting. The next morning he could hardly breathe right and his skin looked wrong. He didn’t know where he was. By noon he didn’t even know who I was. Gus was the only thing that could comfort him. By that evening he was gasping for air and had turned a sickly purple. Just like this damn thread. He couldn’t speak.

The next morning he was dead in my arms.

I knot the thread, bite it off with my teeth, and pray to Kiva the wound is clean and I can scavenge enough to trade an apothecary for some off-label antibiotics that didn’t expire before my grandparents were born.

Asu. If I live it’s going to be an ugly scar.

But not as ugly as the ones people can’t see.

Shivering and sweating, I pull on my parka and huddle inside it, pulling my knees close to my chest and feeling the all-too familiar knot of hunger even though I’m still nauseous.

I sniff and wipe my nose on a sleeve, then dry my eyes and carefully pack up the needle and thread. Swallowing hurts, and I know tomorrow there will be nasty bruises on my neck. But I can hide those. I have bigger things to worry about tomorrow than bruises. Like what I’m going to eat, and how I’m going to scrape up enough salvage for antibiotics.

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