Looking up, she saw Abenayo. Or at least, her bodyshell. All the subtle lights that usually glowed to indicate life within the machine were dead. The police-issued bodyshell that belonged to her partner and mentor lay dormant. Empty.
There was some movement off to the side that drew Tera’s gaze. The man who had pleaded with them mere moments ago to let them stay in the ruins approached her.
“Ah, she’s awake,” he said. Once he was within arm’s reach he knelt down so he could stare into her synthetic face. “If that’s what you call it, that is.”
“What the hell happened?” Tera asked. Her tone was seeped with venom. “What did you do to Abenayo?”
“We deleted her,” the man replied, a smirk on his lips. “The E.M.P. was supposed to erase you as well, but I guess you were just out of fatal range. Still, it was powerful enough to shut your systems down for a little bit. Might work out for the better, in the end.”
“Why?” Tera asked. “Why did you do this?”
The man scoffed a little. “You were about to kick us out of the only shelter we had, and you want to know why we attacked you?” He looked around at some of the other humans in his group and laughed.
“You had the E.M.P. from the beginning,” Tera observed. “This was your plan all along.”
“Ha, you got me,” the man replied. “You’re right — we were always going to blow you up.”
“You aren’t exiles,” Tera said matter-of-factly.
The man nodded. “You’re pretty bright for a Council hound, you know?” he said. “Truck sent us himself. Wanted to send Shell City his best regards.”
“By killing two cops?”
“Nah,” the man replied. “That’s just the first phase of the plan. Gotta lay foundations, you know?”
Tera looked around as much as her restraints would allow her. They had pulled her into one of the abandoned structures that made up the ruins. At one point, it might have been a parking center, but Tera couldn’t be sure. While the man had been talking with his prisoner, another man started picking at the remains of Abenayo’s bodyshell. He plugged some sort of tablet-looking device into her empty head, gazing at the information through a pair of green-lensed goggles. Behind him, a pair of bodyshells were watching his work.
Tera’s face must have conveyed her confusion because the man talking to her turned and followed her eyes.
“You’re surprised to see I.I.s with us?” he asked.
“I thought you hated us,” Tera said.
“Not the I.I.s,” the man explained. “Just the Council. I.I.s are just like us — there’re good folks and bad folks. We’ve got some of the good folks with us here, and we welcome them. As long as they hate those fascists ruling things from their ivory Pavilion, we consider them friends. Some are even old urbanites, you know. Defectors, your bosses would call them.”
The man working on Abenayo’s corpse made a disappointed grunt. The big man turned to lock eyes with him.
“I don’t think any of this is gonna be usable, boss,” the man with the goggles said. “If there were any static charge left in her, it would have dissipated by now. Everything here is dead.”
The big man sighed. “Damn,” he said. Then he looked back into Tera’s face. “At least we have her.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Tera said. “The Council will be coming for you now.”
“That’s what we’re counting on, actually,” the man in charge replied. “It would have been nice if one of our I.I. boys could use some decent police hardware, but we’ll get some when they send people after you.”
“Abenayo will be coming, too,” Tera said. “In a different bodyshell.”
“You’re wrong there, officer,” the man sneered. “The frequency we used in the E.M.P. bomb deleted your friend, wherever she may be stored.”
“That’s impossible,” Tera said.
“Not at all. A bit of code gets injected into her hardware, which is transmitted to every instance of her brain. A virus. There’s no coming back from that. You’re on equal ground with us now.”
Tera refused to believe him. She tried to turn away, to turn her ocular receptors away from the man and his grinning face. Then, something caught her attention. A little alert in the corner of her vision she hadn’t noticed until now.
Her distress beacon had been activated. They must have accessed it while she was out cold. The Council would be coming out here, and there was no way for her to tell them it was a trap.
Calvary
A whole day passed since the group of Truck’s Raiders deleted Abenayo and took Tera captive. The bandits kept her tied up the whole time, ignoring her for the most part. There was nothing for her to do — they cut off any kind of network access she normally had access to.
The only form of entertainment available to her was to watch the bandits prepare for the ambush on whatever Council troops would be responding. Where she thought they only had huts and tents set up, they actually had stored weapon caches. They unloaded what seemed like hundreds of magna-rifles and so many boxes of E.M.P. bullets that they could have erected a little fort for the children to play in with them. Some of the I.I.s in the group used bodyshells with built-in weapons, but most did not. Most were the old civilian models, the same kind one might see in Slumside.
They converted some of the tents and fake housing to make cover and pockets that bandits could conceal themselves. The part of the ruins they chose for this ambush was perfect — a nice clearing surrounded on all edges by tall, ruined buildings. There were a few people on each roof — if the building had a roof, that is — and several in the interior.
More and more, she started to doubt if the Council would win the
