The reek hit Gurta first. As it always did. Even with the enviro-mask latched to her face and a thick line of sea salt paste drawn under her nose, the smell clawed its way into her. The Praetorian Corps would’ve said it smelled like another righteous victory or some bollocks like that. The Nouveaux Jacobins – or the ‘Jacs’ as most called them – would’ve said it smelled like the promise of freedom. Gurta just smelled it for what it was: a bloody pile of carnage. Her hover-car finished its parking sequence and groaned melody as it entered standby mode. Gurta had already undone her seatbelt and wrenched the sliding door halfway open. She stole a final glance at the family picture pinned on her dashboard. For them  – for Corey and Linda. Without the breathing apparatus up her nose, Linda looked more like Gurta than Corey – except with a warmer smile. We’ll get you what you need to live. One way or another. Gurta clenched her jaw and hopped down into the fray.

The rubble caught her landing hard with a sharp jolt to the knees. What remained of the underground shopping mall greeted her with a cloud of dust. Last came the five Praetorians offering nothing but curt nods from beneath their fully helmed heads. Gurta would’ve bet a month’s worth of credits that they didn’t have to smell anything bad with that kind of gear on. The bastards.
“You the bleacher?” the one in front said. The others had already gone back to loading their armoured hover-truck. Gurta only offered a grunt in reply and held out the arm of her hazmat suit. The Praetorian touched a button on his helmet, causing a red light to flicker to life. The scanner hit the ID badge set into Gurta’s arm, and then the man nodded.

“We’ll send a drone to confirm the job’s done. You’ve got five hours.” And that’s all that was said to her before she began to work.

It took nearly ten minutes for the tornado of dust to clear following the departure of the Praetorians’ hover-truck. Gurta spent it preparing her equipment and fantasizing about all the ways she could’ve sabotaged the fully-helmed pricks – or at least thrown them an insult or two. If she joined up with the Jacs she could’ve done so much more, and even be a hero to Linda. But instead I’ll just keep my head down and clean up after the heroes. Bitterness was almost as constant a companion as grime in her line of work. But the work was what kept a roof over her family’s head and gave them morsels to eat.

The underground mall was three levels deep, with the bottom layer large enough to have housed several hundred shoppers before the fight. Near every wall now either had a chunk bitten out of it or the scars of gunfire on their faces. The glass roof had been smashed good and proper, but at least it’d made getting inside easier than navigating the street-tunnels. 

And then there were the bodies. 

The first one lay just a few metres from her: a middling man who’d had half his face blown off. Looking at him was enough to make the stink come flooding back. She squinted through the dimness and spotted another two…three…four…five. All of them Jacs. All of them dead.

Gurta gritted her teeth. It was her third job like this in a week. The Jacs would pull a stunt in some public place, the Praetorians arrived en masse, and the Jacs get massacred. The Praetorians were given public funerals and had their names plastered on every news site this side of Earth III, while the Jacs were given over to bleachers like Gurta and erased from memory. 

Another wave of stink hit her and she coughed from behind the enviro-mask. Let’s get to it, ya foolish devils. As much as the Praetorians were brutal, the Jacs were as equally unorganized and unfocused. Overthrow the Senate, and then what exactly? Their promises of democracy sounded grand, but she wondered how easily they’d be washed away when it came to ruling an entire planet.

She sent out a camera drone to find other corpses while she gathered the ones nearby. The first two were heavy and had to be dragged by their rat-bitten boots. The third was lighter – women always were – and fit over her shoulder. The fourth had been severed in two by what she reckoned must’ve been a Praetorian greatsword. The fifth was the hardest by far: a teenage girl with hot pink hair and piercings on her lips and brow. 

She looked to be about the same age as Linda. The bullet wound in her hip didn’t look that bad to Gurta, but the back of her head was bloody and mushed like mashed potato. Gurta put her beside the others and stared into her lifeless eyes. Could I have done what she did? Maybe if a middle-aged crone like her joined the rebellion it’d mean less young folk would have to sacrifice themselves. But then she’d risk leaving Corey and Linda for good. Something ugly clawed at her insides. You’re a coward, Gurta.

The drone came back a few minutes later and reported another four dead. It took Gurta half an hour to trudge up and down the bones of the escalator with those in tow. She managed to keep down the bile in her throat until the last one and had to tear off her enviro-mask to sputter on the floor. Least you’re a bleacher, she thought grimly. She could easily clear up her own messes at least.

The aftermath of this fight had left her a whole cocktail of burnt flesh, plasma discharge, intestinal fluid, and excrement. By the time she had all the bodies lined up, her hazmat suit was half covered in muck and the seasalt paste beneath her nose felt like it was doing fuck-all. The Praetorians had left her two cans of compressed gasoline – the only good thing they’d done that day – so she was at least able to douse the corpses quick and unhampered. She got out her remote lighter, triggered off the safety, then paused. Something metallic winked at her from the pocket of the pink-haired girl.

 Frowning, Gurta shuffled forward and bent down. The Praetorians would’ve already stripped the bodies of any weapons or valuables, but sometimes they missed stuff. Her thumb and forefinger snapped around the corner of the item and eased it out. The flashlight mounted atop her enviro-mask revealed what looked like was a small rectangular box, thick as her thumb, and grubby. Gurta opened the case and inside was an almost identical rectangular box, but with some strange indents drawn across its face. Two small holes were set into it, the insides of which were cog-like. 

“What the hell?” Gurta squinted and brought the object closer to her face. A keycard? Some kind of data bank? But surely the Praetorians would’ve taken such a thing. She flipped it over and saw that the bottom had tape running through it, but it looked too flimsy to be of any use. She almost threw it back to the girl, but a small curiosity niggled her. Could take it to Manjit. Her cyber-tracker had an almost unhealthy obsession with odd trinkets and loose ends – he’d probably buy it off her for a decent sum. Gurta closed the item’s case, pocketed it, then aimed her remote lighter again. The laser painted a dot on one of the corpse’s eyebrows, then a click later the Nouveaux Jacobins were ablaze. The flames caught fast and Gurta watched as the girl’s pink strands curled black, the stink of cheap dye mingling with burning flesh.

Even after a few jobs like this Gurta didn’t know what the right words were to say to the dead. Thanks, was all she could think, and sorry. The Praetorians hadn’t given her any details about why this particular skirmish had happened, who these people were, and why they’d given their lives to the revolution. They never did – it wasn’t her job to question whether these people deserved to have their bodies cleaned off of this world or not. After her job was done the ‘reporters’ would be allowed in and they’d publish the ‘full story’ and tell people what to think instead. The whole undercity would then spit and gossip about what had actually happened. And then it would all blur into another sad story of freedom.

The flames had already gulped down the compressed gasoline and turned the bodies into a small bonfire, the light warm and feverish. Earth III had billboards that could be seen from space, and everyone had the means to paint and light practically any item they wanted with any colour. And yet Gurta still found the simple, natural flicker of fire the most appealing thing. Wild. Unpredictable. Uncontrollable. 

She caught herself imagining what a grand fire the burning of the Senate would be at the hands of the Jacs. 

And I could be one of the lucky ones to start it. 

The thought came unbidden, hot and reckless like the bonfire, but Gurta lingered on it a minute longer. 

I could do it. 

The thrill of it lit her up in a way bleaching never had – before the doubt slithered back in. Doubt was always a conniving gnat that popped up when she was thinking about such things. Killing Praetorians and burning shit was just a fantasy. What would the Jacs want her to do in their new world if all she could do was kill and burn? She thought of Linda, and how having a mother who was a lowly bleacher was bad enough. But a fighter – someone who killed? That could be worse. Always an excuse, always a reason to step back… It was easier to tell herself she was protecting her daughter’s opinion than admit she was protecting herself.

Too damn complicated. She grunted to herself and went back to work.

Gurta modded two drones to begin the misting process: all it took was a large sprinkler attachment filled with several gallons of hyper-bleach and then a quick spot of programming to set a path. The drones whirred above her and started to fill the mall with a milky white mist. That along with the fire would go a long way towards disinfecting the place for the rebuilding crew. While the reek of rotting corpses were slowly replaced with the reek of bleach, Gurta set up her power washer. It was a heavy duty piece of kit usually reserved for scrubbing the exterior shells of ships, but Gurta had been a bleacher long enough to find its uses in pretty much every job she’d had. It required two arms with a pauldron of muscle on each to wield, and let out liquid with such force that she could rock cars with it if she wanted. A thick tube connected the instrument to a water tank that rolled clunkily behind her and just about had enough programming in it to avoid obstacles. carried by a small walker droid, who she’d programmed to follow close behind her. 

She squeezed the trigger and felt the force rush into her arms before a deluge of water exploded from the nozzle. A bloody splatter was scraped out of existence from a nearby pillar. The milkiness from the drones’s misting seeped down the stones and soon faded from it as well. Gurta allowed herself a grunt of satisfaction, then walked to the escalator to reach the upper floors. Her first quarry was several large streaks of plasma that decorated a mural of Senator Treviglio – the result of a grenade, she reckoned. If it hadn’t killed two of the Jacs she’d just burnt she’d have thought it funny that the grenade had taken off the Senator’s head. She rinsed him of the plasma burns, then gave his crotch a disparaging spray.

Outside a neon drugstore she dealt with the pool of blood that had formed from someone’s blown off legs. They’d bled enough to fill a bucket. Gurta cleansed the floor tiles with her power washer, the hint of satisfaction that could’ve come fully squashed by the brutality of it all. 

Could I have gone through that in the name of freedom? The bleach turned the blood into a sickly pink foam that ran over the edge of the balcony. If helping the Jacs meant we’d get better medicine for Linda…would dying like this be worth? The thought itched at her, ridiculous and dangerous, and she shoved it down where it belonged. Picking a side in this so-called revolution was a quick way to end up like the bodies she’d lined up. She kept her eyes on the work – a chunk of flesh stubbornly stuck to the glass barrier, making Gurta have to go in close and focus on it. It eventually peeled off and fell to the ground below with a pathetic wet plop.

Fiddling with the pressure settings next to the trigger, Gurta rounded a corner where a pair of picnic benches had been peppered with bullets, and was forced to pause in her washing to clear up the casings. She whipped out her magnet staff, held one of the bullets against it as an identifier, then pointed it around the area. Dozens of dead bullets flew at her and stuck to the staff, clinking as they were added to the pile. She held down the button for a few more seconds, then released them all into a nearby bin. The staff played a discordant tune and flashed red. 

HARMFUL ELECTRONIC COMPOSITION DETECTED, her wrist-console read.

Gurta stopped and peered into the bin. Then jumped back with a yelp.
“Holy shit!” Some idiot had thrown a cobbled together plasma grenade but hadn’t pulled the pin all the way out. The Praetorians had obviously missed it when doing their clean up. Her heart grew twice its normal size, the beat of it filling her ears. Gurta backed up all the way to her power washer. Senate-issued plasma grenades had a radius of around twenty feet, and while the Jacs had done a pretty good job of making their own blackmarket ones, their blast radius was much more variable. 

Maybe I just leave it, a dark voice said inside her. And hope the Praetorian propagandarists set it off. It’s what the Jacs would do. But wouldn’t that make me no worse than the Praetorians? 

She spat. At the very least she couldn’t allow some random person to come across it and blow themselves up. She was going to need to set up an EMP field to clear this problem, and for that she’d have to reprogram her spare car battery. 

 She put down her power washer and made her way back to the escalator on light feet. The fire still burned, but her drones had completed the misting process and returned to their charging stations, making the mall dreary once more. 

I’m done with this. A knot twisted in her belly. Cleanin’ up shit, dealin’ with grenades, bein’ under the Senate’s boot. The Jacs might be losing in their little uprising, but at this point it’s better to die with a gun in hand rather than a mop. 

Gurta clambered into the back of her car and rummaged through the jumble of tools, cleaning supplies, and parts. The spare battery was hiding under a pile of wires and it took a few sharp tugs to set it free. She dragged it to the edge of the trunk, then spun herself around to climb out – straight into the barrel of a gun.

“Fuck!” Gurta jumped and banged her head on the car’s roof. The flames spun in her vision and she felt her legs crumple.

“Don’t move!” A man’s voice, though his voice was high and unsure of itself. Gurta rubbed her head and blinked her eyes back into focus. He was of the same height as her, but bony like a crowbar. Beneath the dirt and smog, he wore the threadbare jumpsuit and hardhat of someone in the Engineering Corps but the emblem that usually rested on the left breast had been ripped off. 

Gurta raised her hands.

“I said don’t move.” The pistol in his hand trembled but stayed pointed at Gurta’s face. He was scrawny, but even someone scrawny could make her heart chug something sickly when they had a gun on her.

“All right, all right.” She grimaced. “What’s goin’ on? What you doin’ here?”  She had a taser in the glovebox, and a wrench that could do mean work to someone, but she’d have to wait until his guard went down to grab either of them. “Ya know this is a restricted area, right? Ya can’t be here.”

“Didn’t see any Praetorians on my way in.” He was breathing hard. “But I know they’ll be sending their news crew in soon. How long?” Gurta paused, trying to reckon whether it was worth telling the truth. “How long?”

“A couple of hours.” She was a shit liar anyway. His eyes zipped from her car to his peripherals, before relaxing an inch.

“All right, bleacher, put out that fire – and do it quick.”

“What?” Gurta reckoned she must’ve misheard.

“Put out. The fire.” He thrust the gun further into her face.

“I can’t do that right now.” She tried to swallow but her throat was too damn tight. “My washer’s on the middle-level and bein’ held hostage by a faulty grenade.” She nodded in its direction. “You gimme ten to safely disarm it, and then I can-”

“No time.” The engineer gnawed on the inside of his cheek and stepped away from her. “There’s just…j-j-just one we need to save.” The corners of his mouth quivered downward. “Hurry.”

Heart still racing, Gurta got off the lip of her trunk and shuffled towards the blaze. The fire had been going good and proper for nearly an hour now so she had no idea what this man hoped to achieve, but since he had the gun she couldn’t even think about arguing.

“Did you happen to notice at all…” One of the engineer’s eyes leaked. “Was one of them a girl in their late teens? Pink hair, piercings on her eyebrow?”

Gurta sniffed and nodded. “Yeah.” She walked to the place where she reckoned she’d laid the girl out and pointed. The engineer let out an agonized howl.

“We have to save her! We must save her!” He scrambled forward.

“Woah, woah.” Gurta threw out an arm. “Look i’m sorry but she’s gone. Nothin’ we can do.” He ignored her. “You ain’t got any protection and she’s already good and-”

“She’s my daughter.”

Gurta stopped, suddenly struck dumb. She watched helplessly as he shoved past her and dove towards the edge of the flames. She knew she should’ve just let the idiot burn. She knew he’d been threatening her life for the past few minutes and was just another crazed addict. But damn it all he was a father who’d just lost his daughter and that tugged at her insides worse than anything else had that evening. 

The engineer plunged in, elbow deep into the flames. Do I stand back and let him burn? He jerked from the heat, crying out as he clutched his arm. A thin line of flames flickered on his jumpsuit. But even through the pain, he went at it again trying to retrieve the girl. He pulled back again, the heat biting into him as a flame leapt up his arm.

Damn it all.

Gurta rushed forward. In just a few steps she was crouched and beating down the fire on him as hard as she could. Her hazmat suit could deal with pretty high temperatures, but open flames were not something she’d ever tested with it. He writhed beneath her, his words a babbling stream. 

“Stay…still.” Gurta slapped at the flames and glimpsed the ruddy skin beneath them. She struck one of the larger flames and felt its bite beneath her glove. Snarling, she gave it a heartier pat and it finally disappeared. After a few more slaps the other blades of orange vanished and she sat back, panting.

“I’ve lost it, i’ve lost it, i’ve lost it.” He’d curled himself into a ball. “And I’ve lost her.”

“Get away from the fire, you idiot.” Gurta coughed. “That’s compressed gasoline on there, there ain’t no way we’re recoverin’ your daughter. I’m sorry.” Traces of the smoke scratched her eyes, but she leaned forward and pulled his wiry frame towards her. The gun fell from his tool belt and she flinched. It hit the floor and didn’t go off, so she went for it. He was too distracted to put up any fight. Gurta grabbed the gun and didn’t even bother to check whether it was loaded. She threw it into the fire and let the stupid thing burn. It was at least one good thing she’d cleaned up today. 

“Where is it, where is it, where is it?” Gurta looked back at him and recoiled. The burns on his arm and hand were already starting to welt. “Oh Eunji, I’m so so sorry.” Something slid into place.

“You lookin’ for this?” Gurta got out the small rectangular object that she’d found earlier. His eyes bulged, the pain he was in momentarily forgotten.

“Yes! Yes, that’s it!” He went to grab it, but she shuffled out of his reach.

“You still got family?” she asked.

“Y-yes, another daughter, but please just give me-”
It was her turn to interrupt him.

“You can have it if ya come back to my car, lemme patch you up, and do as ya told – and quickly, yeah?”

He nodded so hard she thought his head would fall off.

#####

Together they stumbled back to her truck. Gurta shoved him down in the passenger seat and set to work as fast as she could. Not only were his burns making his arms weep, but she still had that faulty grenade to deal with above. If a random idiot like him could get into the mall, she suspected others could too. She stripped his sleeve, gave him water and her strongest painkillers, fetched him a wet cloth to put on his forehead, then unscrewed the hip-flask she kept in the glove-box.

“This is the shittest whiskey you’ll ever drink,” she told him before taking a sip. “But you’re gonna need it while I dress those burns.” Gurta handed the flask over to him and he had his own trembling gulp of it. She sprayed his burns with disinfectant and he whimpered. 

“You one of them?” she said to him. “The Jacs?”

The engineer spluttered a bitter chuckle. “Absolutely not.” He flinched at the next spray. “You really think I’d want to be one of them?”

Gurta blinked. Wait, is this idiot a Senate sympathizer?

“If they weren’t trying to do their ‘glorious’ revolution…my Eunji wouldn’t have died. She joined up with them only a week ago…I begged her not to, but…but…” His face broke into another sob.
Gurta hesitated, watching him. She opened her mouth, searching for something worth saying, but ended up just setting her jaw and applying more freezing balm to his arm.

“The thing is…the Senate, they don’t treat us working folk good.” She did her best to keep the contempt from her voice. “Make us work on this hellhole so that the rich bastards on the other Earth can sip on their martinis. And the mountains of paperwork they shove between us and them so that they can get away with helpin’ us as little as possible.” She spat. “So many people would be alive if they just gave us a bit more.”

All Linda needs is a lung transplant. She’d read that the first Earth transplant had been successful more than two hundred years ago – and with archaic tech too.
“Yeah but this?” The engineer waved his uninjured hand out of the window and to the spilt guts of the mall. The flames danced in his eyes and for the first time that evening their light didn’t seem all that bright to Gurta. 

Would I still be able to tell Corey and Linda apart after a fight like this? She rubbed another lot of the balm on his arm and she felt him relax beneath her.

“I-I’m sorry about your daughter.” Just saying that word cut her. “Here, lemme bandage you up, then I really really gotta deal with that busted grenade upstairs before it takes my power-washer.”

She ended up using all the bandages from her first aid kit. The engineer twitched and shuddered with every wrap around but when she was done some of the colour had returned to his face – the painkillers and whiskey were finally doing their job.
“The tape.” He sniffed. “You said you’d give me the tape after patching me up.”

“Guess you’ve been good enough.” Gurta reached into her pocket and pulled out the strange rectangular object. 

“Th-thank you.” He took it, fingered its edge, then opened it. “Thank you.” She was almost ready to leave and get to the grenade, but curiosity struck her again.

“What is it?” Didn’t look like any tape she’d ever seen. 

It took him a few moments to answer.

“A cassette tape.”

“A what?” Gurta frowned.

“An invention from the first Earth – one of the earliest forms of portable audio storage.”  For the first time that evening the hint of a smile played on his lips. “Eunji always wanted to be a music producer. I made this cassette for her sixteenth birthday, we recorded a few tracks on it together.” His shoulders shook again. “I just wanted…wanted to hear her voice again.” He cried again and Gurta sat with him, not sure what the hell to say. She couldn’t imagine losing Linda. And she couldn’t imagine Linda losing her. Her eyes stung with a sudden wetness. The bleaching mist and smoke were finally getting to her.

“I dunno about ‘cassettes’,” she said eventually. “But it looks like that case did a good job of protectin’ it at least.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The engineer wiped his eyes on his sleeve. “It’s a stupid thing really. They can only hold thirty minutes of audio but I didn’t have the parts or credits to get anything else.”
“Sounds like you were a good Dad. Reckon she appreciated what you did for her.”
“Thanks.” He audibly swallowed. “Though now I’m done for. Praetorians already came knocking now that they think I radicalized my daughter.” A bitter laugh escaped his lips. “And now I’ve threatened a bleacher at gunpoint and the Praetorians are probably on their way anyway.” He tipped his head back and stared up at the roof. “Least my other girl’s at her Mom’s.”

“It’s fine, I haven’t called the Praetorians.” Gurta let out a small snort. “And ya not the first bastard who’s shoved a gun in my face so don’t worry.”
“Really?” He blinked disbelievingly before rubbing his eyes. “Thank you.” 

He held out an awkward hand. 

“Taemu.”

She shook it “Gurta.”

There was a pause and again the only sounds in the mall were the crackling fire and the hum from Gurta’s car. The bodies were well and truly disintegrated now, but the smell of death still lingered despite her earlier efforts. For them – for Corey and Linda. But what the hell that meant now she didn’t know. Would creating a bloody mess instead of cleaning up after one really help them? More and more the flames looked less appealing.

“What’s the solution then?” 

“What?” Taemu’s voice was an even weaker whisper than hers.

“How do we make things better without risin’ up like the Jacs? It’s been years since the Praetorians took over. You either fight, or you bow your head and take a beating.”

Taemu chewed the inside of his cheek.

“Whenever there’s a problem in a mechanical system you don’t destroy the whole thing and then try to rebuild it using the same scraps.” He hugged his knees. “It’s like an old cassette – you don’t burn it, you just need to record over it. The hiss and scraps of the old track might still be there under the new, but you can make something worth hearing. It just takes time.” 

Her lips twitched – almost a smile, almost a sneer.

“Slow doesn’t work for everyone,” she said, and he heard the bite in her voice.

“Slow means you survive to see the end,” Taemu shot back. “No. There are never just two sides to a war. There’s always a third.” He lifted his bandaged arm. “There’s the side with the people who just need help surviving.” He nodded toward the fire. “The side with the people who need remembering. The side that cleans up the mess afterward.”

Gurta stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Before all this mess started, I used to hear every kind of music.” The engineer bowed his head and spoke softly. “Jazz. Folk. Punk. Opera. Sometimes all on the same day. You’d walk down a tunnel and every shopfront had its own sound, right? But now?” He shook his head. “The Senate can only be bothered to distribute music that they want us to hear: always the same rigid beat, the same ordered words. And the Jacs? They push their own heavy anthems – nothing you’d ever mistake for the old songs. God forbid you’d ever listen to the ‘corrupt’ past. Both choke the life out of the music in their own way.

He let out a small hmph and tapped the cassette. “Guess they’re just two sides of the same cassette at the end of the day.”

“Violence leaves you with ashes. Compliance leaves you with rot. But… if you sing your truth and let others sing theirs, people will start to remember that there’s more than two tunes in the world. But that’s only if there are people still alive to hear them.”

Gurta was quiet. She’d seen his look before – the look of someone measuring the weight of an idea against the itch in their bones to do something. 

“But it’s got to be done with care.” Taemu looked at her and nodded. “It’s got to be done with care.” 

Gurta didn’t know she’d been battling tears until they won, the wetness breaching her eyes and streaking down her cheeks.

Taemu touched her arm. 

“You have family too, don’t you?” His eyes flickered to the picture on her dashboard. Something sharp caught Gurta’s throat.

“Yeah. Husband. And a daughter – but she’s sick and the Senate haven’t granted her the machine she needs, and-”

“And she needs her Mom more than anything.” The corners of Taemu’s mouth quivered. “You take care of them, all right? Whatever it takes for you to be there for them – for you to come home to them – do it.” The grip on her arm tightened. “And in the meantime…you can be brave by helping those who the Senate and the Jacs don’t think about. People like us.”

His words washed over her more thoroughly than any Senate propaganda or Jac crier ever had. Her eyes watered. Gurta hated the Senate’s shitty bureaucracy, but if she joined the Jacs she reckoned she’d just become a bleacher’s next job – or worse. For them, for Corey and Linda. And the others who just need to survive. Helping Taemu get out of that fire and patching him up had made her feel braver than she’d ever felt before. 

Gurta coughed and opened the truck door.

“Time’s runnin’ out and I reckon you owe me, Mister Engineer.”

“Yes, I most certainly do. And I could do with a…distraction at least.” He winced as he shuffled to the edge of his seat. “That grenade…Senate standard issue?”

Gurta grunted. “No, some Jac whack-job.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m guessing you were going to make an EMP for it?” She nodded. “I think it’s better just to short circuit it, show me your car battery and I can walk you through it.”

“A’ight,” she went to leave but found his bandaged arm touching hers again.

“Wait.” Taemu held up the cassette once more. “Before we start…can I listen to it.” The swallow he made was pained. “Just a minute or so?”

Gurta nodded and almost carried on getting out, but then stopped. “Can I listen to it too?”

Taemu smiled, and she reckoned it was the truest one he’d given her all evening. “I’d like that. I just need to link it to my personal console…” From his pocket he pulled out a beaten up looking console and unlocked the screen with a quick pattern.

“You’re gonna come home with me, Mister Engineer.”

He paused in his tapping. “What?”

“You said the Praetorians are already after ya. You can hole up at my place, till things die down a bit.” She sniffed and found that the reek of the mall wasn’t so bad now.

“That would be…that would be very kind, thank you.” Taemu looked as if he was about to cry.

“And then…,” Gurta started. “Let’s make sure as many people live to sing their song as possible. And whoever wins this stupid war, we’ll clean up all their mess afterward, yeah?” 

And be the bravest bastards while doing it. 

Taemu tapped the final few buttons on his console and a media player popped up on his screen. A white light came into existence on the corner of the cassette – small but defiantly there.

“All right. We’ll try.” He gave her a final smile, then pressed Play.

A crackle of static, then a young girl’s voice spilled out, young and laughing. Gurta felt Taemu’s breath catch beside her. It was amazing how just a few sounds could spark such a clear picture: the joy of being sixteen, her hand tugging his toward the mic, and the smile they shared as they sang off-key. 

She closed her eyes, trembling, and let it all wash over her. Gurta didn’t know much about music but the untamed melody had a rawness to it that was more alive than any Senate march or chant of the Jacs. Utterly fearless, it was nothing she’d ever heard before and yet she found it was everything she’d been waiting to hear. 

Within a world of carnage to clean up there could be music, and in it the faintest notes of something better.