Wired Bone: Chapter One (Patreon)

Chapter One

24 Hours Earlier:

Twelve-year-old Lucas DeRose woke up to the ringing of his alarm clock.

With trained motions, he immediately slammed his hand down on the device before he fully woke up, then laid completely still in bed, avoiding any motions that might cause creaking from the old springs under him.

His sleep-addled mind barely managed to process what his ears provided, but he scrounged up enough working neurons to deduct that his mother was still sleeping by the lack of creaking from her own bed and the faintest traces of snoring heard through thin and hollow concrete walls.

Almost without looking, he set his alarm again for five minutes in the future, then started his day.

Slowly, he crawled out of bed then under it, shuffling through a collection of dust he should’ve swept months ago, until he reached a small hole he’d dug into the wall with a hammer.

Reaching inside, he pulled out the radio-scribe. It was a device with a pragmatic design, blocky and unadorned, and it had been the cheapest one Lucas had managed to get his hands on with the pay from his job.

Opening a small compartment on the underside, Lucas found a bit of paper already written on, waiting for him.

In blocky letters, it read “Guard. Bring iron. 2.”

Lucas cut off the scrap of paper and crawled out from under his bed. After brushing off the dust that clung to his clothes and skin, he got back inside the bed, paper held tightly in his hand.

Childish energy kept him from dozing back off, so instead he took one of the pulp magazines from the stack next to his bed.

Minutes ran past while he paged through it. He’d read the issue already, but not enough times that he was tired of the short stories inside. Despite the summer season, cold air leaked in through the cracked and missing glass of Lucas’ window, making him pull up the covers until only the numbed fingers and his head poked out from under them.

Eventually, the sound of a different alarm clock rang through the wall, followed shortly by Lucas’. Slower this time, he reached for the device and turned it off, which still happened a few seconds before his mum managed it.

Lucas set aside the magazine and curled up in bed, giving his mom ample time to start to dress herself and get started on breakfast.

Shortly after the sounds of the kettle boiling and some mild cussing at the dwindling coffee grounds rang out, Lucas saw his door open.

Lucas’ mom, Victoria, was a short woman with long and curly brown hair. She’d had her son young, and was only now starting to hit her late twenties. Her good looks had ensured that Lucas had to put up with an unfortunate amount of comments by the older kids.

(Which had led to an unfortunate amount of fights with older, bigger and stronger kids.)

She was currently wearing a robe tied loosely around her sleeping clothes, plus a pair of mismatched flip flops. Her hair was tied back in a messy bun and she had her thick plastic-rimmed glasses, through which she squinted at a world that refused to not exist until she had her breakfast.

Still, she smiled kindly at Lucas when she saw him tucked into a blanket burrito.

“¿Mucho frio, pichón?”

“Bastante,” Lucas confirmed, voice creaky with sleep.

Victoria smirked and approached to sit at the edge of Lucas’ bed. She ran her fingers through his black hair, which had yet to be brushed even a single time. Despite her best efforts at hiding scissors and keeping a close eye on him, her only son kept sneaking off to cut his own hair so that she wouldn’t be forced to “waste” money on haircuts for him, which meant that what occupied Lucas’ head was a ridiculous mass of uneven, knotted and messy hair. Some of it appeared to defy gravity.

Because of this, the act of running her fingers through his hair wound up being more like pulling on it, but Lucas didn’t complain.

He did, however, noticed the bags under his mother’s eyes were slightly darker.

“Did you sleep alright?” he asked.

Victoria frowned disapprovingly at his use of English inside the house, but clearly lacked the energy to argue as she shrugged. “Slept late. Had to grade papers.”

Victoria’s Argentinean accent was heavier than Lucas’, despite the latter’s effort. He knew his mom got embarrassed by the way she pronounced her vowels, especially when her students made fun of her behind her back, so he’d made a conscious and active effort to sound just like her.

Despite that, living since he was three years old outside of Argentina and since he was four in Third York had played hell on his accent. Now, at the mighty age of twelve, there were some days he realized he sounded just like a gringo, to his distress.

Upon noticing Lucas’ frown, Victoria smiled at him and squeezed his shoulder. “Tranqui, pichón. Vení a desayunar.”

0 * + * 0

After Victoria left, Lucas took the dishes over to the sink and opened the faucet to wash them. When water failed to come through the pipes, he sighed with annoyance and walked over to the pipes that connected to the raincatcher tank on the roof, a few levels above their apartment.

Cold water came out of the rain tap and gathered on a small tin box, which had a dial on one side and a few thin metal pipes on the bottom. Once it was one inch from full, Lucas closed the faucet and carefully dragged the tin container over by the sink, only spilling a lot of the water on the way.

He turned the dial a bit, making the pipes start conducting energy from the fuel battery, heating up the water. The device, nicknamed “El Quemadedos” by Victoria, had been put together by her, Lucas and John over a weekend in the middle of a drought, using instructions from one of Diego’s magazines.

It was easy to get the parts, since Third York catered to its Hypercognitive population, meaning that most hardware stores had everything you could need to build anything up to a small radio-controlled drone. After that, trying to build more dangerous or complex devices required elements that you could request, as long as you didn’t mind attention from law enforcement.

El Quemadedos was a capricious piece of tech, prone to shorting out, overheating, electrocuting you and making a strange growling noise that sounded vaguely like prayer to an eldritch god. But it was also the best way to get hot water when even getting cold water was a challenge.

(Lucas and his mom had actually been discussing the possibility of building a purifier from a different article for quite a while now, but they’d been procrastinating on that front. Money had been tight recently and it was a bit difficult to scrounge up the money by going without simple pleasures for a while.)

Eventually the water was steaming, so Lucas turned the damnable machine off and tossed in some detergent, soaking the sponge to wash the dishes and occasionally hissing when arcs of residual electricity bounced against his skin and left small burn marks.

Once the dishes were clean and placed on the drying rack, he grimaced as he threw the soapy water down the train and put El Quemadedos aside. It always stung to toss aside water when he thought of having to go weeks without washing clothes.

Another reason for building the purifier.

The piping system for the raincatcher measured how much water each apartment used, the cost of which was then added to their rent for “use of communal goods”, so everyone living in Gibson Heights used as little as they could of rainwater, the parking area below the buildings, legally afforded electricity and such.

Most people found their own workarounds, such as El Quemadedos for the DeRose family, generators and purifiers for others, etcetera.

Others simply didn’t clean their clothes, heat their homes own vehicles or light their rooms.

It was amazing what you discovered about your own endurance and ingenuity when you had no other choice.

Once the dishes were clean and Lucas had quickly cleaned up the spilt water (which had combined with the existing filth of the kitchen floor to make mud) he got ready to go out.

Fashion in Third York tended towards the utilitarian, due to the high amount of jobs that revolved around putting together machinery, even among the upper echelons of society. Most outfits either had short sleeves for pants and shirts, or could be rolled up easily. In cold weather, coats that could be quickly removed were the norm. All clothes were designed with large amounts of endurance and storage space in mind, so even skirts had pockets that would fit a two-liter bottle.

This is why Lucas, aged twelve, laced up a pair of steel-toed work boots, filled the pockets of his cargo pants with his keys, wallet, radio and switchblade, threw on an oversized black hoodie over a white tanktop, and strode out the door, looking like someone had shrunken and shaved a factory worker.

(His constant serious expression did nothing to help the situation.)