Siddy didn't need an alarm to wake up because he was already awake, and he was awake because he was hungry.
His paw felt above his head in the compressed dark. The stale air was warm. His elbow pushed past his belongings, all in a single bag. When his paw found the lever to open the hatch, he took a deep breath and heaved it as hard as he could, which was hard to do lying down. The door swung upward, helped by large springs, and the light from the hostel's corridor came in, cold and white. Along with the damp cold.
His eyes blinked. His face scrunched. His tail curled around him, along with his arms, and he started shivering. He grabbed his coat which served as a blanket, and swung it around himself.
It was a coat meant for moles. Polyester fleece. Thik-Tex shell. Larger and bulkier than his own little mouse body. Because of his thinness, the coat seemed to wrap around him one and a half times.
He shivered in his coat until he felt marginally warmer, then dropped down from his pod and landed on the floor. The display outside of his pod suddenly lit up with a tired chime. He blinked at it and tried to read it. He could see the numbers; a pair of Zeros on one side and a red number with a dash on the other side.
He tried to ignore it. He stood on tiptoe and reached into the pod for his bag.
"Unfortunately," the display suddenly said with a friendly tone, "due to unpaid balance, we will not be renewing your rental terms for another night. Please pay the full due balance of—63.338—credits—to reserve this pod for your use."
Siddy felt his face go warm with embarrassment. Then cold with fear. "I'm collecting today—I should have enough," he stammered. He stretched out as far as he could, feeling around the pod with his paws until he grabbed his bag.
"Please pay the full due balance before 8 PM tonight," the AI said coolly. "Or we will close out your reservation and refer the past due balance to a collections agency."
"Okay. Yes. I will!" Siddy whispered. "Thank you."
He pulled a pair of over-sized gloves onto his shaking paws. He checked his bag.
Brush. Scraper. Prybar.
Water bottle. Pick set. A hook made out of scrap steel.
The pocket that normally carried a square of Malto was empty.
He shook his head, tried to ignore the sudden grumbling in his stomach, and shouldered his bag. The AI's screen was replaced by a grainy advertisement. A rabbit wearing a seahare's uniform and shouldering a rifle stood at the bow of a battleship.
ADVENTURE AND EXPERIENCE.
5,000 CR BONUS. ROOM+FOOD FREE
NORTH STAR SECURITY.
His eyes snapped to the number. To the words after it.
His stomach growled.
But it'd make no sense to try and sign up. Even for that money. For one, everyone, even him, knew that signing up for a 'Security' job these days meant they'd send you anywhere and make you do anything.
His stomach growled again. He looked at the number.
Then to the gun in the seahare's hand.
What kind of sailor or security animal could he be, really? He could hardly read and never fought. With a weapon at least.
He glanced into the pod. His pillow, the one he owned, was the only thing left. After a final thought, that if he wasn't able to make enough today that the hostel would take his pillow and send it right to the dump where he'd be desperately scrapping anyway, he plucked it from inside and stuffed it down into his bag. He pulled out his water, drank as much as he could, and then filled it from a spigot hanging just off the wall. The water tasted like chlorine and was so cold that it made his head and stomach hurt.
He walked to the hostel's door, waited for the AI to unlock it, and then stepped outside, into an ugly, murky, undercity morning.
The morning was cold, especially in this quarter of Nuu, where the scaffolding rose for hundreds of floors, and the natural light at high noon only made it down in sparkles and glimmers. In the darkness of the morning, however, this part of the city of Nuu was pitch black. His bare footpaws tripped over something warm—another mouse swiped at him from underfoot and mumbled to watch for tails. He fished into his bag, and pulled out a poplight that he unfolded into a lantern. The light spread thin over trash and hollow aluminum poles and the prickly, thorny mess of scaffold connections. The mouse under him shifted beneath a tarp and curled out of sight.
He rose through dozens of levels, and could feel the temperature rise by infantesimal degrees with each floor. Light started to drip through the distant ceiling.
He emerged from the undercity through an exit that opened into an alley behind a towering, cubic medical center. The air was cool and crisp, and there were pink lights filtering through the rising city around him. The walls of Nuu rose high, leaving half the city dark in shadow and the other half in a mellow pink and blue. He went straight toward the main avenue that led to the Eastern exit of the city. The sun was rising somewhere outside of Nuu itself. Its rays started to cook the hotcrete and stone and glass all over Nuu's top layers.
The walking made him warm. He rolled his jacket up and stuffed it away. He hoped his bag wouldn't rupture and his pillow stick out like a puff of popcorn.
When he made it to the Eastern Entrance, the traffic for both paw and vehicle became a melee. There were several modes of transport, fighting to get in and out across entire fronts over several rising levels at once. He took a walkway that shrunk and curled off of a pedestrian level and extended, like a long fibrous peel, into the rocky, dusty outside. The walkway was entirely open on one side. No protection. No windguards. An animal could slip right off and fall to its death, but then again, that was technically the fastest way to the dump.
Once he made it far enough down the path, the natural morning breeze suddenly turned into a gale. It blew him toward the edge of the hotcrete and threatened to spin him around and then to gently tip him over. Even with the dump so far below, the smell was harsh. The dump extended all through the riverbed, creating a half-full trench that ran below Nuu's walls and directly under the East entrance. The garbage, if hauled onto a flat plain, would have formed a mountain. But in the riverbed, it created a river of its own, with slow waves of piles rising and falling over weeks as animals and machines dug through looking for scrap and acrylics.
He stuck to the side of the walkway that had any structure to hold onto. Steel and aluminum reflected the sun off the bridge through dust. He tried not to look down. The drop made him squeak if he looked.
As the walkway curled and steepened, he could see other animals walking off of its base into the refuse. They were the real early animals, Siddy thought jealously and frustratedly to himself. The ones who seemed to leave before the sun could singe them. The ones who continued to sort and collect for weeks when others gave up and left. The ones who had been doing it for generations. They were dressed similarly to him, though, his bag was already full with his belongings while theirs were empty.
He started to wonder how he could even collect anything valuable today.
Eventually, the walkway came to an end across the riverbed. Siddy now could look upward, and see the bridge of the magrail stretching off the top of the walls of Nuu.
The walls rose in cliffs above him and lost its shadows in the day. The dump became a low, suppressed field of heat. Animals in clusters, like working ants, scattered across its prickly and chaotically covered surface. The sun created shimmers. The smell grew worse. He stepped from the last bit of steady hotcrete, onto an alien world made of plastic bags and smelling like poison.
He covered his mouth with a sleeve and tried to breathe.
He looked for a fresh patch, where the garbage had recently been scraped back by an earth mover. More than a dozen animals, mostly mice, filthy and working with their heads bent low, collectively seemed to stiffen as he got close. "Hello," he said, trying to settle in without disturbing them.
"This pile's ours," one of them stood achingly up straight.
She had a scar on her face, where the fur struggled to grow back. Battery acid could do that if one wasn't careful. She had a chisel in her hand that was covered in grime. She stood up as tall as she could and squared off. Siddy could see behind her. There was something big and metal half-buried in the trash.
The scarred mouse noticed him looking. She started toward him.
"I said it was ours! Get out of here!"
The chisel swiped toward Siddy's face. The rest of the mice in her crew started putting their tools down and getting up to face him too. They had lean, thin faces, and their clothes were ruined with grease marks and holes. Siddy could see knives on their belts. A couple mice drew theirs. He knew that one little scratch would put him at the mercy of his hungry, tired immune system, and the thought drew a chill.
"Okay," he said, backing away. "I'm sorry."
The trash sunk under his shoes. He wandered across the sea of plastic and refuse and kicked around, hoping that the sound or feel could clue him into something valuable. After a time, with the hot sun beating down, and his stomach squealing with hunger, there was a clue. Something hard and plasticky, like a tray. Or a box. Most of the time that meant just some piece of garbage long ripped off a droid or something, but large panels clued to large things, and large things sometimes held things inside, like electronics.
He pulled his hook from his bag and started to dig. A layer of plastic shredded back and revealed that the hard tray thing he found was an acrylic panel an entire paw thick. It could have belonged to a droid, it seemed. Heavy, but plastic. He set it to the side. It'd be worth a fraction of a credit if he could haul it all the way to the top…
It was difficult, disgusting work. Time passed slowly. The sun baked overhead. The heat was the worst—it beat down, making him sleepy and sick and slow when he needed to dig faster.
He could hear someone calling close by. He lifted his head from a hole deep enough to fit him halfway, only having found plastic. He saw an elderly squirrel pulling a cart, cobbled together out of plastic panels and a couple of mismatched wheels. He had squares of Malto hanging around his neck, tied together with a plastic string. "Scrap for food," he called, limping. "Metal for Malto, trade up some Malto—"
"Do you take plastic?" Siddy called.
The squirrel grimaced at the tangle of garbage next to Siddy's hole, then limped away toward the site where the dozen-plus animals continued to dig out the machine under them. "Wants to give up a bunch of plastic for this real food, no way, no way. Metal for Malto!" The squirrel hoarsely called. The animals guarding their site waved him over and they began trading.
Hours later, a team of rabbits called from the base of the ramp. He blearily looked up and saw them pulling a sled with a couple of opaque and mismatched barrels of water.
"Trade for water!" One of them shouted out, over and over. "Fresh, clean water! One to one for metal! Five to one for plastic!"
By the time the noon sun was squarely overhead, Siddy was growing dizzy. His arm was tired. His stomach hurt. Everything felt weak. He drank the last of his water. He tried to think. If he could get enough credits tonight for a pod, then there'd be complimentary water too. But if he passed out in the dump, there was no telling whether an earth mover would shove a fresh hill of garbage over him and smother him to death. Or if he'd simply die of heat. It sometimes happened.
Siddy glanced at his pile of mined scrap. It certainly wouldn't fit in his bag. He imagined somehow carrying all of it all the way back up and getting a measly three credits for it. It'd be enough to drink water, but it wouldn't be enough to keep his pod.
When they finished dealing with the group far off, Siddy waved them over. The rabbits pulled the sled with a rope. When they stopped in front of him, one pulled a scale from the top of a pile of metal and plastic parts tucked behind their water barrels. The scale was tossed to the ground, right side up.
"That's all plastic, aye? Five for one. By weight."
Siddy started gathering the plastic in his arms and tried to settle the heavy panel onto the scale.
"Ten for one," another said, scoffing. "We got enough metal. Don't need plastic today, no sirrah." Siddy tried to stay calm. The weight of the panel would make sure there was enough water to fill his bottle, ten to one or not. No use arguing. One never knew if water traders would even be down here later. And ten to one wasn't a bad deal anyway, especially if you were thirsty. They took all his plastic in the end, in exchange for letting him drink as much as he could and then filling his bottle all the way afterward. Then they continued into the dump while Siddy worked the hole and prayed that there'd be something, anything, that would guarantee him a meal.
By the time the sun made it behind the city and the dump was suddenly swallowed up by shadow, Siddy was shaking uncontrollably. He sat at the edge of the hole and tried to rest, despite feeling every panicking impulse in him to get back to work. He'd only found a few copper panels that were once decorations and were now dented and corroded, along with a fistful of wires from a machine that had already had most of its internals removed. And more plastic. It'd barely be enough for a square of Malto, if he was lucky.
The gang of mice finally abandoned their site. Their bags were full, and they tottered off in an unsteady line toward the ramp. After a time, Siddy could see their tiny forms hiking all the way back up toward the city, bent over, bags bursting, covered in rags, but triumphant. And likely to eat well. There was nothing more glorious as a scrapper than to carry a barely managable load of metals all the way back up.
He looked around. If their bags were so full that they were bent town, then there had to be more to scavenge at their site.
Right?
He felt a drop of adrenaline. He grabbed everything and dragged it over. No other animals came by the site, or seemed to notice it being open and available. It was a gaping shadow where they'd dug down to the depth of a mouse and uncovered…
Siddy blinked.
It was a car.
It was a car! Entangled in garbage, hidden for who-knew-how-long. A real, solid, hydrocarbon vehicle, now missing all of its plastic fixtures and electronics on the inside. It had been unburied down from the top of its roof to the windows, which the previous scrappers had knocked out and crawled inside to take everything that could possibly be pried off. He crawled onto all fours and looked inside.
It was scraped clean.
It was as if the car had been dipped in solvent and only the metal that had been cast together remained.
But still. There had to be something left.
He glanced around one more time before activating his poplight. He crawled into the smashed out window. Inside, the roominess of the car allowed him to comfortably stand. This one had to have been made for something large. Larger than rabbits, certainly. Possibly for otters. Or weasels. Or maybe raccoons.
There was nothing left inside. All the electronics were ripped out. Everything plastic was missing. Even with the light, it was clear that nothing had been left un-disturbed.
He waited another moment.
As if he would find something.
He crawled back out slowly.
He heard broken glass tinkling under his gloves.
No food. No shelter.
It was finally dark.
He looked up. It was a long climb up the ramp and back into the city. He could find a corner to bundle up and sleep in, like the mouse he tripped over that morning. Or maybe he could just stay along the dump. There was a ramshackle village on the other side of the depths of the riverbed where most of its inhabitants were scavengers. He could trade this scrap for food there as well. And then… he could live there.
He sniffled. He shut his eyes tight and shook his head. Another moment of silence passed where he thought about the seahare and the gun.
When he opened his eyes, the light from his lantern bounced off of the roof of the car and against the dark mound of garbage behind it.
It was a definite glint.
He tilted his head. His nose twitched. His eyes went wide.
He stepped closer.
He wiped his paw across the flat top of the car. Suspiciously flat. He slid it along the side of the top and realized that there was a large panel on top of the car frame, and while the vehicle's internals had been completely and perfectly and focusedly ripped out, the crew had missed the very top of the car, not realizing that the electronics within had been partially powered by a broad, thick—
"Solar panel," Siddy breathed.
He glanced around quickly and went to work. For a whole hour, he chipped and pried around the panel. It was built tightly into the frame, but peeled upward slowly. Once he heard the sound of some glue layer separating and the whole panel lifted with a gasp, he threw himself onto his crowbar. The sharp lever downward forced the panel upward and bent the frame. Plastic rivets popped in a row. A few more tugs, and the solar panel broke free.
He started giggling. He felt giddy. He could go right up the ramp with it, and if the wind wasn't too strong, he'd stumble alive into a pawn shop and get at least a hundred if it worked and sixty if it didn't. He heaved the panel upward, trying to balance it on his bag. The lantern dangled underneath his arm where it clipped onto a strap.
Lights now danced across the garbage field. It was a black sea covered in dust and, now that the sun stopped baking the garbage, it only smelled like chemicals. He started toward the ramp base, when a collection of lights coming off the ramp suddenly shifted direction and moved quickly closer to him, all at once.
There were about a dozen.
All mouse height.
His heart seized when he realized that the crew from before might be back.
He changed directions, and rushed as fast as he could, but they seemed to notice and were faster. Before he could make it to the ramp, he was surrounded, and the mouse that got close enough to him to shove a lantern in his face was the mouse whose face was scarred by battery acid.
Siddy watched her draw her chisel from her belt.
"What's that you got there, mousey?" She asked. She wiped it on an apron that had once been a shirt. "Is that our panel? From our car? It looks familiar."
Siddy suddenly felt angry. Panicked too, but mostly angry. If there was one thing he was more than angry, it was hungry.
"No!" He yelled. "It's mine!"
The other mouse showed teeth. "Oh, ho, it's not. That was our site. We were coming back."
Siddy stuttered, even as he shouted. "I n—need it! I need to eat!" He fumbled his bag to the ground, and then pulled the hook out from inside. "Stay back!"
"You're not cut out for scrapping, mousey," she taunted, stepping sideways. "Takes more than stealing from others' sites. You get extra hurt doing that." The lights lit up her scars. They were pale. The other mice closed closer to Siddy. He started swinging the hook in fast arcs that made a thin, needly sound through the air. The other mice had their weapons drawn. Scrap knives with an oily sheen. Shivs with chunky plastic handles. They were clutched in tiny paws.
"Give it to us," the scarred leader said, calmly. "We've got some Malto. We'll trade you."
"It's my panel," Siddy said through gritted fangs. He ran the math as a mouse could. He might get overwhelmed by them if they rushed him. He could leave his bag behind, use the solar panel as a shield and charge straight ahead, hope he outran them, and then buy new equipment on the cheap. He could—
There was a fast movement just behind him. His eyes barely picked it up, but his hungry frame, oceanically flooded with adrenaline, solved the whole problem for him by clutching the shield tight from underneath—and charging as fast as he could—straight toward the mouse with the chisel.
"YAAAAAAAAA!" He screamed—the mice collectively cursed and a couple leaped backward, and he found himself running unopposed across the garbage field.
His shoes squeaked on garbage bags and slipped on slimes. He didn't know how fast or how slow he was going. All he had to rely on were the shouts behind him, the fast treading of paws and shoes, too many, too close. Too fast. His lungs hurt, the panel was catching on plastic and he was cracking himself in the face, the ankles with it—
The ramp up to the city became visible, a thin grey line. Then it swelled into a path with lights dotting up and down as animals traversed it, up and down.
How could he possibly make it all the way up to the city without being caught? His body felt trembly and weak and everything was hurting, and they were still chasing him, but when his shoes made contact with the hard roughness of the ramp and the garbage no longer sucked his paws into it, he realized that he might be home free.
"That's our panel!" He heard the leader scream, terrifyingly close behind. "Thief! Thief!!"
The higher he rose, the harder the wind blew. He couldn't see down, it was too dark except for little lights across the dump's surface that clued just how far he'd fall.
Animals and carts and sleds stepped themselves out of the way, and only toward the side of the ramp with support. Siddy ran on the outer edge. He didn't know if his paws would continue hitting hard hotcrete or if he'd find that his next step was just air and he'd find himself falling. He could still hear the animals shouting after him, less close, but also certainly less encumbered. The wind pushed and pulled at the panel. He could see the turn at the very top where the ramp disappeared into the bridge. It glowed with the rapid blink of shadows and the lights of thousands of vehicles, reflecting off of concrete pillars in multicolored blooms.
It was so far. He was hardly a third up the ramp.
A heavy gust gripped the panel like a machine and then ripped it from his paws. The panel flew into the darkness and disappeared immediately.
He was on one paw. Off balance.
His shoe tried to make contact with the ramp.
But it didn't.