The Dead Nubie
Scrim saw that Mapmaker had the little flag up at his house for Scrim to come over for a yarn. Good, because Scrim had a sheet of paper for Mapmaker and a couple of tallows. Already a routine, when Scrim got there, he and Mapmaker first did their trading business.

“And I would like anything colored you can find,” Mapmaker said. “Stones, bones, plastic, glass, anything. I grind it all up, and mix it with pigeon-eggyolk to make paint. Greaves left you these rabbits.”

Scrim hung the smoked rabbits by the door for on his way out then joined Mapmaker at his indoor stove fire for dinner.

“People come to me to with their things for me to paint them. I talk with them, ask them where they got this or that interesting thing. Lately, it’s always something they traded with Andover.
I ask them, Who is Andover? They tell me That kid, you know, that skinny freckle with dry-grass-colored dreads? And then they say He says, You want to trade? And-over same time, they say.”

Scrim chuckled to hear his trading described so. “I like trading. I look all over for things what people want. Glass for Grievous. What people call him behind his back.”

“Who? Why Grievous?” Mapmaker said. “I’m interested. Everything helps me.”

“He wears one arm hidden in his coat. Like he pretends that arm is gone,” Scrim said looking careful at Mapmaker. Did Mapmaker already know that? “I saw him picking up a thing from the street and forgetting to bend the arm in his coat with the rest of him. His street name is Greaves.”

Mapmaker looked disbelieving. “Greaves is a friend. You’ve heard me mention him. He gave me the rabbits for you to trade.”

“Why so kind to me? Something he wants, I bet. You’ve known him for a long time with only one arm? I feel bad that he’s pretending to you.”

Mapmaker frowned.

Scrim changed the subject. He trusted Mapmaker to ask around about the why of Grievous. “I find paper for you. Pots with holes and good dirt for Wobby and them growing gardens. All these streets are my patch for finding stuff.” He spread his arms big to show Mapmaker everywhere he went. “There’s a lot of stuff hidden in broke places where only young ones—skinny like me—can get into.”

“When you call me Mapmaker it’s like me calling you Andover. It’s a street name,” Mapmaker said. “For friends like you, I am Wal.”

“I never heard anyone call you by your friend name.”

“Friend names have to be secret. We’re always looking for ways to break the hold the medi-techs have on the numbers.”

Now Mapmaker—Wal—frowned fierce. Like he had searched his mind for knowledge he might’ve let slide into a corner. Like he found it and studied at it properly, and didn’t like what he saw.
— — — —
Grievous lived in a hide in a garbage hill with a stinking fire in the entrance making hazy smoke all day. His trade was smoked short-eared rabbits though Scrim only saw friendly fat rats playing in the mountain when he spied on Grievous from the row-houses across the street.

Next time he met Wal, Scrim told Wal his suspicioning. “Grievous is making like he got an arm took by the medi-techs like you got your under-legs took? Why?”

“I’m a number,” Wal said. “My legs are on a customer who wore out his own. Greaves is no number. All week I asked every other who ran at the same time Greaves said he ran. No one saw him.”

“Running the maze, every number too busy being scared to remember anyone,” Scrim said.

“They said that. But even while being brought by the raiders no one met Greaves. Still, smoked rabbits from Grievous for glass from Scrim is a good trade. Because now we know and can find out what he’s up to by keeping our eyes on him.”
— — — — 
All Scrim’s salvaging times were in the daytime before the hooter went for the new transies to jump out of their barrack to haunt the streets. That exact time too the anubots ticked back to their gate.   

The nubies were shiver-some. After the hooter one day, a transy quicked out alone, ahead of his mates. The nubie was a slow egg unfolding like he stiff after sitting all day watching opposite Tom’s stall. So they met, nubie and transy.

The transy wanted to melt into the roadway when he knew his shadow. The nubie slitzed his knife hands and the transy was pieces in a puddle of blood, too quick for Scrim’s eyes to shut. Only good thing was no more transies in that street for a few nights.

“What’s anubots?” he asked Wal next time they met.

“The way they look. Robots like ancient old anubis-gods. Some medi-tech’s idea of a joke. Or maybe management already had that pattern and made it do for a new project. I’d like to know their use.”

“Why they’re made, you mean?”

“Yes, I bet it’s more than just killing transomatics.”

“Why do they?”

“I don’t know. Nubies look peacefully at my cat and my flyers. But I watch out I don’t cross their shadows because we don’t get to know each other. Keeping them contained could be another reason for the city to be closed.” 

The right-side gate off the walled square at the end of the maze led to the labs where the medi-techs did their deeds, Wal said. Transies went in and out of a gate at the top of the square. Left-side was the gate the nubies came out of every morning once the transies were home.

Where Scrim hid, he could only see nubies striding through their gate. Today five of them returned. Yesterday only four. Day before seven. Wal promised by talking with all his comers to find out how many nubies all told.

Because nubies being the mystery he was studying, Scrim also swung left but along the outside of the wall. He followed a good road, straight and with abandoned row-houses both sides. Yards at their backs. He searched for a high-up to camp the night and from where he’d see how it looked on the other side of the wall. But none of the ruins here were tall enough and he left hiding almost too late.

Transomatic voices cursed and complained around a side street corner. Like they seen him earlier and curved round to catch him. Scrim dived into the nearest wall-side house thanking luck for its shadowed doorway.

The transies arguing along didn’t see him.

He breathed again. Hesitated stepping back out. If he continued out on the road to return home to his high-up, he’d be scared all the time to meet a gang of transies. He might as well stay the night. In houses he often found scraps of paper Wal was always happy to see.

Before settling, he tasted the darkness, mouth open, breathing gently through his nose, ready for any stray smell. Only the moldy old of the house. Cat pee and rat piss. The dank earth below the floor. And last, a foul sweet rot of some ammal—man, woman or beast—recently dead.

All night there was no noise except for roof iron creaking to the cold and rats playing. When he woke there was a beam of sun laid over everything in its path—torn walls, stuff, dirt floor—to the few planks where he lay. In its journey to him the sun temptingly twinkled over a glass in the dirt under where the floor once was.

Though he should see the death stink first. But probly just a cat or rat, falled over of hunger. Anyway on the dirt the death smell was much less. Only the old dank smell there and the glass looked a biggie.

Curved shards of green and brown were both common. This one green. He was hopeful for a bottle because the curve went round deeper and deeper. He pushed through the dirt with a stick.

A different kind of prize appeared. Once a bottle but now a glass with its top ground smooth. He poked the stick down into it to clear dirt from inside. In the rubble he would’ve used old grass to cushion it in his pack. What here? Look around outside? He stood the glass steady in a corner to save it from an accidental.

In the yard the death smell was strong. There lay a nubie. Big steels, rounded muscled panels, toes for tickin on the road, a fist of knives flung scattered, almost at Scrim’s frightened feet.

He stood like a stone but the anubot did not move. With his stick Scrim did the unthinkable, touching stick tip to knife tip. The nubie finger fell back un-alive with a skitzing of steel over steel.

From beyond the wall came skitzy whistles and scratching like a knife edge working on true stone. A anubot-sized dark eclipsed the light showing through a gaping crack in the wall.

Then Scrim was too scared to stay and too scared to run. What if a hand of knives grasped the top of the wall and a nubie vaulted over? But only sunshards came burning holes in his eyesight from skittering on steel whenever the nubie at the wall-crack moved.

A story came to him of the events. The wall so tall, but saggy because it too heavy to straddle the slumped ground under it. In the kinnie home-cave the same thing happened. Min liked every one of her kinnies to remember because of the baby what got killed when the wall closing out the weather slumped. That wall once-upon-a-time built by kinnies themselves.

Here the wall was seriously broke, with a large piece lower than its mates. One side of this house’s yard was a stepped crack to the top, like a little set of stair, the other side a gape big enough for a nubie to see through. 

This dead one climbed the broke wall to escape? Why would he, kinnie? When they can go in and out at the regular gate? So this one made a bad mistake. Climbed the wall and killed himself dead?

Smelling of death-rot now meant it was alive before. That’s a puzzle. The smell thickest and most foul here by the head … which was of closed steel, with no mouth or lips on its muzzle. With his stick Scrim pushed the nubie muzzle skywards.

Ichor trickled from a mass of maggots under a lid thing that fell off the neck. The lid thick and silver with tech-tronics all over. The eye-window was stained with boiled brains. Scrim heaved emptily. Breakfast would’ve been wasted.

Inside the body were struts of steel and wire and technics but the poor head was flesh. And should be buried, he thought in Min’s voice. He looked around for ideas. The ground near the wall was loose and rubbley, easy to dig. He used a leg steel as scoop and got a good hole.

Because of not wanting to touch it, he shoved the head along the ground between the stick and the leg steel, and slid it into the hole so the ears stood proud out of the ground. To show that the nubie was once alive, Scrim fetched the glass to put in a feather out of his hair. Because the nubies liked the flyers.