Cyberpunk

thought, la chica is all full of herself. All the same, he admired the way her hair spilled from her hat, the cocky angle of her stance. He’d follow her to harvest when they all set out. Tag along quietly. Follow his late best friend’s older sister, as he always had. He stood fifteen paces away so as not to draw her notice.
    Pico took out the shard of whetstone he kept in his pocket and worked at the tip of his tharpoon. Marzo’s sweetwine gave him a happy boldness, a desire to knock someone off their feet, though he usually ended at the bottom of such a scuffle. He looked at the pepenadores around him. Some were old, buried beneath layers of clothes, little mole people who owned what they could wear. Some were young, kids his age. Most ignored him, sweat lines cutting the dirt on their faces. All of them were tense and focused, watching the trucks on the horizon of trash.
    Waiting was hard, and Pico had the hiccups. He leaned heavily on his tharpoon and stared at his mismatched boots. They waited another ten minutes for the main dump to clear of nackers, then they trickled into its expanse.
    Mouse headed for the great wall and he followed at a distance. He wasn’t sure what she’d find there, so far out. Crazy chica always did stuff her own way, he said to himself, trying it out dismissively, but his throat ached with longing. She probably knew he was following along, but he kept hidden all the same. She’d probably shoo him off.
    They were maybe a couple kilometers out when a nacker picked up Mouse’s trail. It skittered along behind her, stalking her, waiting for her to make some find. Pico swore. This nacker looked different from the others. Some kind of new model with carbon or plastic joints that didn’t make noise. Why was it so far from the trucks? Pico crouched low and ran behind as quietly as he could, taking cover in the uneven trash heaps.
    Mouse stopped and dug at a swell with her tharpoon. She took her cowboy hat off and worked at the mound and he could tell it was something good by the way she dug. Loosed by one of the recent earthquakes maybe. She had the luck. The nacker paused at a distance to see what she would find, and he paused too. When the nacker sat on its haunches, it was hard to distinguish from the trash around it. The way she dug was something to watch, a perfect sort of movement. If only he hadn’t messed it all up between them. He would have liked to watch for a while but he had no time.
    Pico crouched down out of sight and breathed hard in fear. Maybe her find was crap and the nacker would move on. He’d kamikaze the pinche waste bot, he would! He psyched himself up and began to shiver uncontrollably.
    After a few minutes, Mouse pulled up a full-on car door from the ground, worth plenty at the market with its metal and embedded electronics. The nacker would want it. Pico gripped his tharpoon and ran toward them. The smog heat was getting to him and he sweated, the sweetwine buzz now a disorienting spin. The nacker was too far ahead of him and much faster. Its six legs traversed the dump obstacles, the tentacle gripper raised in front, assisting when it needed to, poised to strike.
    It got her at 10 meters—a charged electric bolt that knocked her flat out. She only just saw it, and the look on her face before it got her crushed him. Pico stopped where he was. He couldn’t see where Mouse had fallen, she was downed behind trash.
    For a moment, breathing ragged and hot like some ancient machine, he considered what to do. He wanted to run away but he couldn’t leave her. Rumor was nackers lifted organs off fallen pepenadores . An indignant rage filled him and he pounded his thigh with his fist. Why was a nacker out here and not at the trucks anyway? Why did pinche nacker trouble always find him. If it weren’t for them, Suto might be alive. And Mouse might—no it was too much to hope for.
    This nacker had better range than the last model.
    He inspected his tool belt for something that would help. He plugged his GPS jammer into the battery pack at his belt—28 percent charge. It was janky, but it should keep the thing from tattling its location. Among the other tools: a light, a few circuit boards he carried hoping to find parts to make something whole, a mirror. There wasn’t much else.
    He ran in a crouch, maneuvered along the ground with his hands and feet like one of them, his ratty cloth gloves tearing on the ground. The bot was in the process of laser-sawing the