The truck was unlocked. Keys behind the sun visor. This was definitely someone’s restoration baby that they’d left here, possibly because it was too irradiated to take home.

“This isn’t good,” Dimes said, looking in the front. “The model is over one hundred years old, its lidar requires manual hookup. In fact I don’t think the lidar is functional. I don’t know how to drive one of these otherwise.”

“That’s fine, I do,” I said, scooting into the driver’s seat.

Dimes lifted her ears. “But I thought you didn’t have a license.”

I tapped the button on the side of the fob and the key popped out. “I don’t. Been about eleven years since I’ve driven anything, never got it reissued. Get in the back.”

I stabbed the key into the ignition. Lily, Eo and The all climbed into the passenger seat, with Eo and The ducking down near the floor. They’d all left their helmets behind, but even so with the bulky rad suits on, they took up all the space on that side of the floor. Lily quickly snapped the seatbelt on herself.

“So you do remember the last time I drove!” I said to Lily as I turned over the engine. It sputtered, but came to life with a roar. “Whoa, damn, a gasoline engine? This thing’s a dinosaur!”

“Uh-huh,” Lily said. “Are there air bags or foam catchers in this vehicle?”

“Probably not.” I yanked the wheel around, not bothering to back out of the driveway, because right behind me, the police cars lit up their lights.

Dimes hopped into the bed of the truck, righting her stance as I peeled off, running over and down the hump of the inclined terrain. The truck jumped as it hit the old road, and the tired screeched as they clung to the pavement. I remembered just in time to switch on my lights, and barely dodged an all-dark car sitting in the middle of the street. The right side of the truck threw up sparks.

“Mira, watch out!” Lily yelped, throwing her mitted hands over her eyes

“I am, the road’s clear now!”

The police cars swerved around the stalled delivery vehicle, and they started blasting the standard hail. “Stop the vehicle at once! Compliance is mandatory!”

“Ow, ow!” The yelped, covering her ears with her hands as she tried to bury herself deeper under the glove box.

“They’re hitting us with disabling EMPs at us!” Lily’s eyes and ears twitched as she covered her own head under the collar of her suit.

“Let ‘em try,” I said. “About all that's going to do to this old tank is make it pollute more than it already does!”

I tapped the button to roll the window down, stuck my arm out the window, and threw a finger back at them.

“Mira!” Lily whined, clutching her seatbelt. “Arms in the vehicle!”

I was going to laugh, but one of them shot rubber pellets in my direction. Even with the suit on and driving away at forty-five and climbing, smack, right into the back of my hand. “Ow, god!” Could have nearly ripped a hole in the suit if it didn’t hit straight-on, and I was sure right then that I’d have bruising there if nothing else.

“See! What did I tell you!”

“Stop backseat driving me, Lily.”

“Excuse you, I am in the front seat, and you programmed me to!”

“And this is why I stopped driving in the first place!”

One of the cars sped up and rammed the bumper. I swerved, but the strike wasn’t enough to knock me out. A second car sped up; I was approaching sixty, but the police cars to either side were already approaching eighty miles per hour. The car behind me veered around my right.

WHAM. The one to my left collided with my side, WHAM, the other responded like I was a ping-pong ball. I quickly sickened of the whole thing, so I slammed on the brakes, throwing everyone to the front of the vehicle, including Dimes in the back, who stumbled and crashed against the rear window.

The police car on the left blasted ahead of me, already moving in to ram me, but finding nothing, slammed right into the other car, and both of them ended up in the ditch.

“The hell!” Lily exclaimed, gesturing at the two. “Mira! Where did you learn to do that.

“Uh, I saw it in a movie once,” I said. I probably had.

“That’s not fair!” Lily grumped. “I thought I was special in lateral thinking…”

“Mira,” Dimes said, struggling to pull herself upright. “Keep driving, there’s five more closing in.”

The lights appeared in my rear view. “Damn. I don’t think I have another stunt like that in me.”

“I got it!” Dimes said, standing up. “Just drive!”

I hit the gas. Standing without buckling this time, Dimes fumbled with her hands,but eventually grabbed her suit by the collar and tore the entire top half off, pulling her arms out of the sleeves. Dimes had long black markings on her arms, which were themselves hard metal, which peeled away. From her right arm emerged the flechette cannon, and from the left, a long steel whip, cracking with electricity.

She fired on the wheels of the cars weaving around the left. It took at least twenty rounds, as the police tires were well-reinforced, but soon they collapsed, and the two cars around the left veered off as they lost speed. At the very same time, the grizzly officer right behind us attempted the same on our truck, leaning out the window with his own flechette cannon loosed, but Dimes threw her whip right around the bear’s arm. With a single pull, Dimes wrenched the bear’s arm from the elbow, bits of metal and wire flickering behind. The car behind us also swerved at the sudden loss of balance.

Dimes then lifted her gun and fired multiple rounds into the windshields of the police cars pulling up to take their place. Crack, crack, the windshields shattered into spiderweb cracks, but held firm. They weren’t looking out of the windshields anyway, I suspected Dimes was stalling, trying to identify where on the vehicles they pointed their exterior cameras.

But the next car had centered itself, and the gator officer in the passenger seat was trying the same tactic as before, to before, only from out of range of Dimes’s whip. Dime’s ears popped up in surprise and concern. Just to their left, on my right, the single-occupant police car was popping down its driver-side window to do the same.

Just as the gator’s arm opened up to the flechette cannon, Dimes jumped out of the rest of her suit onto the tailgate of the truck, and from there, leapt into the air. The vehicle attempted to slow down to stymie her approach, but wasn’t quick enough. Dimes landed on the hood of the vehicle with a loud crash, denting the thing. She jabbed her hand into the cracked safety glass, which allowed her to punch a hole through, and grabbed the wheel of the vehicle.

Before the driver could override the wheel, Dimes had yanked them just far enough off-course to smash them into the side of the other police car. The Gator’s first three shots missed their mark entirely. In the other police car, the blue lioness had just let her arm out of the window. Dimes snapped her whip around the arm at the elbow and ripped it off, and with the momentum, pulled it directly into the gator’s face, sending her next two shots veering wildly. The second police car skidded and fell off into the ditch on the side of the road.

The gator officer, at this point, had enough, and thrust her arm through the windshield of the vehicle, grabbing hold on Dimes’s throat. But having her whip back, Dimes wrapped it around the Gator’s elbow.

I’m not exactly sure what happened next. I’m not really sure if my recollection of events was entirely accurate, as I’d seen it all in the twenty seconds it occurred in a dim reflection of a rearview mirror, combined with the parts Lily managed to witness in the side view. But there was a flash. And then the police car’s battery exploded.

After realizing that we were no longer being followed, I suddenly twisted the wheel and brought the truck to a halt, leaving a long path of skid marks behind us. I’d stopped far too late, as the fire in the distance was almost half a mile behind, but I popped open the door and stood up anyway.

“Dimes!” I yelled into the dark. I wrenched my helmet off and yelled again. “Dimes! Are you still there? Dimes!”

There wasn’t any answer. I turned back to look at Lily, and she shook her head. “I don’t hear her.”

I looked back one more time, hoping that maybe she’d just lost too much power for her wireless. But all I could see in the distance behind the fire were police lights still struggling to catch up again. I swallowed, popped my helmet back on, and snapped the door closed.

It was only thirty more seconds before the road split into a T-junction, at which I took the third option and kept driving into the grass beyond, ignoring the various bumps and divots under the grass. The light behind us stopped following.

But we eventually waded into a thin clearing, and immediately in front of us, a twenty-foot high chain link fence topped with razor wire. Trees were cleared forty feet on either side, so it was impossible to use them to climb over. The sign immediately in front of us announced in no uncertain terms: RADIATION HAZARD ZONE. DO NOT APPROACH. REPORT TO WINDY STATION BEFORE CROSSING.

I looked down to Lily, The, and Eo.

“We’re here,” I said. “I just… figured Dimes would be with us.”

“Keep going,” Eo said. “She wanted us to keep going.”

The seemed very contemplative. Lily put a hand on my arm.

“We’ll see Dimes again,” she said. “She knew what she was doing. She isn’t going down that easily.”

I sure hoped she was right.

I backed the truck up to a running start, and hit the gas, aiming for a spot between the poles. The wire pulled away and taut, and stopped us in our tracks, throwing everyone to the front of the car. Undeterred, I righted myself, backed up the truck even further, threw the thing into four-wheel drive, and slammed on the accelerator.

Wires snapped. We punched a hole right through the fence, into a field that was much like the one we left.

About one hundred yards later, we rejoined the old highway—torn, broken, and dusty. Carefully navigating the pot holes, we drove right into Chicago.

—

Not long after, every building darkened to brick and steel skeletons. A gentle curve took us under antique steel beams, still barely holding up the elevated rail.

Although we still didn’t know where in Chicago to look, it only made sense to start in the epicenter. We pulled alongside the shore of Crater Bay, underneath where the elevated rail abruptly stopped, its precipice reaching in the air as though half-finished, globules of frozen steel dropping down like hardened sap. Buildings still stood slowly crumbling in the shore of the water where the land had eroded; many submerged up to a story deep though none stood deeper any farther out.

Slowly the world reclaimed its land, the edges of a concrete jungle consumed by shallow greenery. Time and natural forces shattered ancient slabs of cement into smaller and smaller rocks. Decades pulled unmaintained towers to the ground, and every year that passed set the old city’s average height a little lower.

It was five in the morning by the time we arrived. The sky behind the bay lit up as the sun approached, not yet sunrise but almost there.

We stopped, got out of the car and started walking the bay. While the morning sun flickered its light between the shadows of each building, the space between the road and the beach had all been upturned sand. Empty lots of dirt and dry grass lined the remaining road up to sixty meters out, though many buildings remained. A hotel, a convention center, an elementary school, a gas station, a restaurant, an office.

“I think I remember this place,” Eo said, casting her eyes this way and that. “It’s hard to tell, there’s just nothing of note here… I didn’t think I’d need to remember a place that was so dead.”

“My Geiger counter’s ticking like crazy,” Lily said. “I think we’re here, but I don’t see…”

Eo gasped suddenly. She pointed out to the shoreline. There, standing with no suit, an Opera-class skunk stood, looking out over the rough water.

“Eo, wait!” I called out, but she was already running in that direction.

“Choice!” She called out, “Choice! It’s me, Eo! Choice!”

“Eo, that’s not her!” The yelled.

Eo, coming to her senses, slowed her sprint a walk, and then to a stop. She turned to look as us. “What do you mean?”

Choice turned her head, the rings in her eyes shining bright yellow. She suddenly rushed and grabbed Eo around her chest and shoulders.

“Wh—hey!” Eo yelped as Choice dragged her away. “What are you—sis! Please!” Choice snapped a hand shut over Eo’s mouth.

I sprinted forward to stop them—I was pretty sure I could overpower an Opera-class, even if Million had rebuilt her. But then Million stepped out from behind a collapsed wall, and pointed a gun up at me. I wisely decided to stop in my tracks.

“The fuck are you wearing?” Million said, turning to gun to thee who’d sprinted up beside me. She also stopped. Lily hurried forward and stood in front of me with her chest out, but she wasn’t going to block anything.

“Million!” The snapped. “You left us behind!”

“You were slowing me down,” Million said. “Look, all of you… I couldn’t give less of a shit what the hell any of you want with Mother, but I was tired of playing road trip with a bunch of tin can bots. I’m just surprised you managed to get here so fast.”

“But even leaving us behind, you still haven’t gotten to Mother,” Lily said.

“No, I didn’t. I was hoping that Choice being here would be enough to open up the gate. But it seems as though her original OS was beyond repair and lacked its takeover properties. Her new slave OS doesn’t seem to be adequate for the task either—at best it got me to this beach from her remaining visual record.”

“Mother is here?” The asked.

“Yeah. She’s just below the water line.” Million gestured in that direction. “At least, there’s definitely some kind of structure down there. The entrance might only be traversable underwater, so I was considering how I’d get a submersible out here when you showed up. Eo? Is the entrance underwater?”

Choice removed her hand from Eo’s mouth. Eo stammered. “I-I don’t really remember,” she said. “I think maybe it was. I remember walking through the water at some point, and coming up on shore…”

“Does Mother have another way in?” Million said. “A submarine? An extending platform? She can’t rely on everything coming to her being waterproof.”

“Maybe?” Eo said. “But I don’t have any way to contact her, or I would have already! Even if she would open up for any of us!”

“But Choice here has a distress beacon,” Million said. “Unfortunately, it stopped after I rebuilt her, and I don’t know any other way to access it. But my point is, there’s no point to a distress beacon unless you hope for rescue. Query: are you built the same as your sister?”

I hadn’t considered that. I picked up Eo long before anyone could tell that she was emitting a radio distress signal. I was pretty certain she had no radio! But if she was built similar to Choice, and did have one inside her head…

“I can’t access it!” Eo said. “That’s not something I have control over.”

“Okay,” Million said. “One more chance. Can you call Mother from here?”

“I don’t know!”

“Fine.”

Million raised the pistol and fired. The bullet sliced through Eo’s neck.

“Eo!” I cried out. Lily and The immediately rushed forward, but Million turned the gun and shot The right through the chest. Lilly skidded to a halt, jumping and catching The before she hit the ground.

Eo slumped in Choice’s arms, her eyes dimming.

“The hell, Million!” I shouted at her. “You don’t need to do any of this!”

“Yes, I do,” Million said, aiming the gun right for me again. “Because I am not letting any of you get ahead of me.”

“You could have just asked,” I cried. “If you want to meet Mother first, you could always do that. None of us were stopping you!”

“You’d want to do things the slow way,” Million said. As she spoke, the ground under our feet rumbled. My heart leapt up into my throat. Lily clutched onto The as though something was going to fall on top of us, but the rumbling slowed soon after, and a long, tendrilous pipe emerged from the water, at least six feet in diameter. It slid lazily on shore, twenty feet behind Million.

“You’d have wanted to try and activate the distress beacon again without destroying Eo,” Million said. “But I don’t have that kind of time. I have never had that kind of time.”

“You don’t even know if Mother has the solution to Koenig’s health problems!” I snapped.

Million suddenly stiffened. “Shut up!” She shouted. “Do not presume you know what you’re talking about. We’ve researched a way out of his collapsing body for years. We’re almost there. We’ve been almost there. It’s ready. All we need is a little more efficiency, and I can’t wait another day. If anybody has what I need, it’s Mother.”

“So, what, you’re going to go up to her at gunpoint and demand it from her?”

“I have my ways,” Million said. “But you are not going to get ahead of me. Stay where you are for five minutes. After that, do what you will. Choice, take the body and follow me.”

Choice hefted her sister up onto her shoulder—she was likely much stronger than she’d ever been. And they turned, heading for the entrance that’d appeared. Million snapped her eyes in my direction one more time, and vanished into the passage.

“Lily, give me The,” I said, kneeling down and picking her up. “And let’s hurry.”

“She said five minutes,” Lily said.

“Screw whatever she said. She’s not our goddamn boss and I’m not risking them closing the gate behind.”

“But she is our boss—”

“You know what I mean!”