Verdad, that summer was the hottest on record, but by 2014 every summer was worse than the last. And we were just finding out what the Greenhouse meant, when fruit was cheap but real bread was hard to find, when the Forcers resorted to sleepgas to stop the Obsoletes from trashing the cities, and la Migra's camps started cropping up all over like ugly sarcomas. When combatics was still called ro-bashing, and I was in the thick of it, an eighteen-year-old Mex-Am girl working (illegally) as an apprentice myo-electrician for Pandemonium Crew. That's when I got the proverbial Big Break and became La Demoña of the circuit....

The day hadn't started well, with nothing much for breakfast and no dinero left in the account. We'd blown it all on new carbon-weave flywheels for the basher's gyros, natch, and spent the previous day preparing for tonight's gig. While the Chief was tied up all morning on the phone, handling some minor crisis or other, Dee challenged me to a sim-fight, and then she got depressed when I beat the pants off her, crushed her basher into a smoking heap of simulated metal. She yanked off her video headset and input gloves, grumbled under her breath, and stalked away, across the garage. "Caray," I said, "Only a glorified videogame, 'ey. No reason to get upset...." Of course, Dee was still irritable from withdrawal, since she had curtailed her usual diet of pills only a few weeks ago. She'd been into dreamers, noxoline derivatives.

A wave of heat flooded in with the morning sunlight, as Echo raised the big doors and started yelling. "What the fuck are you nil-brains doing? Shitting around, playing sims. Lupe, get your fat ass in gear and help Dee load the truck." True to her netname, her voice battered around in the hollow concrete space. "Where's that useless Faun? Better not be--"

"I'm up, I'm up, just gimme a minute," Faun called from the "bedrooms". Khat leapt up, almost catlike, at the sound of Faun's voice, stopped recharging from a wall socket, and skittered off behind the partitions, going skrrizz-rizz-rizz.

"Lupe, where're the puppetsuits?"

"Green sports bag, Echo, in the office."

Still half asleep, Faun stumbled out, ruffling her blonde, scarecrow-cut hair. Khat padded behind her, tripping over and getting up again, clicking. The cat had been jerry-built from two not-entirely-compatible kits. The yellow-orange countershaded fur--that part was real.

We got busy, hoisting the teloperation booth into the back of the truck.

The garage was Pandemonium HQ; our office, our workshop, our home. We slept on futons thrown along the south wall, behind curtains of translucent plastic hung from wires and ropes. A few derelict cars rusted in the corners, old gasoline jobs, skeletal now that we'd scavenged everything useful from them. Sacrificed to serve the hulking, parts-hungry monster, the basher that stood in the shadows by the six-wheeler. Pandemolator, he's called. The fifth of his line. Muy seismic and terminal, as any ro-bashin' fan will tell you.

Until a few days ago, I'd been spending nights in the "office," with our Crew Chief, Stagger Andersen. I didn't know why he'd gone cold on me all of a sudden, and he wasn't saying. It hurt, but I had to let it slide for now, knowing that he was hard to talk to at the best of times. I got the impression I'd done something wrong, broken some obscure, unwritten rule that I was too inexperienced to understand. It had happened before. I'd only been with the Crew for just under a year....

At seventeen, I'd left my hated familia behind in Erie, and took off with Jaime, a boyfriend. We crossed the border in his ranfla, over to Canada so that he wouldn't get called up. Then he told me the carro actually belonged to his Tia Julia. We argued and I told him what a culo he was, then I jumped ship at a Voyageur station on the 401, just outside of London, Ontario. Stagger found me there in the restaurant, stranded and crying, all sentida.

Nobody had even heard of him, back then, except for an underground of loco robotics hackers who were into this new thing called ro-bashing. I was one of those kids, and I couldn't believe my eyes. Ootah, here was this huge, bald, bearded guy in a Zoetec tee-shirt-- Stagger Andersen, the top-rated teloper pilot on the regional circuit. This guy had run the big military RPV's in the War Zones for the US army. Mexico, that's where he'd lost both his arms. His new arms were these baroque bioelectronic prosthetics; he'd deliberately removed most of the polythylene skin, to reveal the substructure of carbon composites, plated with imitation gold.

I'd spent the last two years skipping escuela and fooling around with ro-pets, domestic drones, and myonics. So I asked the Chief a lot of informed, technical questions, and he was impressed, glad that I wasn't just another of those ditzy limpets. (The limpets worshipped him and his kind, the way groupies worship hammerfolk singers. And so did I, of course.)

At the time, only Stagger's Crew hired women as techs, so I figured he was okay. Like, progressive. And later that year, when he called me his squire, I thought that was ziggy, too.

But now, something was wrong. I must've fucked up somewhere, I figured.

So we loaded everything into the six-wheeler and drove across town. I sweltered in the back, savouring the tense pre-show anticipation.

That night, we were going up against Rex Penthera and his King Terror Crew, up-and-coming hombres from Detroit. The organizers (Suffer Machine Productions), had only just settled on a site for the gig, announcing the location at the last minute, to throw off the cops and their drones. The Forcers had been making things difficult because bashing wasn't quite legit and was considered dangerous. No insurance of any kind, no corporate sponsors, no big stadium gigs. Just a scattering of obsessed mecanicos, kluging their pet monstrosities together out of scavenged parts, making up the rules as they went along.

Stagger drove us through a gate in a long chainlink fence crowned with razorwire, then pulled up to the rear loading dock of a vacant factory. Echo was the first out of the truck. She was a tall and skinny Afro-Asian with long, slightly kinked hair, which she tossed back with a flick of her head.

"I dunno, Chief. Looks pretty pessimal to me."

Dee jumped down, frizzy-haired, muscular, and rather hefty. She squinted through gobs of black eyeshadow and became even paler than usual. "Hex this shit. Stagger, whose brain-damaged idea was this?"

I followed her onto the buckling, weedgrown tarmac. There was the empty factory, a few high-tension towers, a half-buried heap of oil drums nearby, and some kind of dark, granulated glass all over the place. Paint had been shedding from the wooden signs for a decade at least. Palatine Electroplating, and Toxic Hazard, and Absolutely No Trespassing. Ai, the whole vecino reminded me depressingly of similar places from my childhood; forgotten industrial suburbs on the outskirts of Akron, and Erie....

Dee was nervously scratching the new tattoo on her upper arm (spanner entwined with lightning bolt). She confronted Stagger as he stepped out of the cab. "This is the Grotto, dufus. A no-go area. They fenced off half the subdivision when I was a kid. Jesus fuckin' H. I grew up just a block from here." She waved her arm toward a row of collapsing, boarded-up tract homes.

Stagger was unfazed, tugging on his beard with one golden hand, and smiling. "Don't sweat it, sisters. The city vitrified all the contaminated soil -- ran a current through it with these big electrodes, fused it into glass, right? Safe 'nuff."

Dee wasn't reassured, and now she was shouting. Some people in this 'hood had died of brain tumors, she said. Echo had wandered off, into the factory, and Faun (typically) didn't seem to know what was going on. I was scared to pieces, but I trusted Stagger's judgment.

"Hey, Onassis," he said (using Dee's last name, which she hated), "we're not moving in, okay? We're here for few hours, that's all. Then we go home. End of discussion." Then he followed Echo.

Inside, there was a decent spread of food and beer, compliments of the Suffer Machine folks (nice to know somebody was making money in this biz), and that ended the argument for sure.