SCRAP: The Good, the Bad and the Rusty (eBook)

“You can’t keep it.”

Gnat looked up at her sister, and then down at the tiny, hairy, petrol-blue thing staring back at her through four black bead eyes.

“Paaaige, it’s not an ‘it’,” Gnat replied huffily, dragging out her sister’s name as the blue thing climbed into her cupped hands. “She’s my best friend.”

“It is a wild animal, and you’ve known it for all of ten minutes,” Paige sighed, tapping her foot impatiently on the ground. To herself she whispered, “Where is he…?”

“He’s fine,” Gnat asserted confidently. “Scrap’s always fine.”

Paige let out a less-than-confident grunt and cast her eye around. The Elsewhere was a strange maze of shallow valleys divided by curved sweeping rock formations. The landscape stretched in every direction, an almost lurid combination of oranges and yellows, its outcroppings striped with even brighter dashes of turquoise, purple and silver. To Paige, it felt formidably vast – and a place you should not stay still for long.

“I’m going to call her Tomato Ketchup,” said Gnat.

“Who?”

“My best friend. Cos she’s blue.”

“Tomato ketchup is not blue.”

“What colour is it, then?”

“It’s, uh – that’s not the point. Put that thing back where you found it.”

“I didn’t found her, she founded me, when I did a wee over there,” replied Gnat. She pointed between two rocks, where jagged vines jutted adventurously from the hard ground and reached into the sky. “Founding each other is what best friends do.”

The thing emitted a throaty tock-tock as Gnat fed it a cracker.

Paige rolled her eye and prodded the worse-for-wear stuffed teddy bear strapped to Gnat’s waist. “I thought he was your best friend.”

“That’s different,” said Gnat, nodding sagely at the bear. “Mr Steven Kirby is imaminate.”

“Inanimate,” Paige corrected her.

“…So I need a proper one,” Gnat concluded. “Like you do.”

“I do what?”

“Have a best friend.”

“Who?”

“Scrap.”

“Scrap? Scrap is not my best friend,” scoffed Paige, even as she scanned the horizon, impatient for the little robot’s return. She glanced back at their ‘gofer’, parked on the edge of a long, wide canyon. The stout, sphere-wheeled dune buggy was piled with equipment and random detritus they’d found, scavenged or stolen. It had been three weeks since they’d ‘borrowed’ the gofer from a charging outpost on the outskirts of the robot city of New Hull and set off west into the Elsewhere, from which they were assured no one could return.

“Scrap is one hundred per cent your best friend,” said Gnat, oblivious to Paige’s unease as she cradled the four-eyed thing. “Everyone knows he is. Even Tomato Ketchup.”

“Shut up, you gub,” Paige snapped. “Y’know, if that thing bites you and you catch something and you die, it’s your fault and we’re leaving you in the Elsewhere to rot.”

Gnat took a small notepad from one of the many pockets on her sleeveless jacket and waved it. “I’m a science explorer,” she said matter-of-factly. “So I have to documend all the things we find in my science book.”

“Document,” Paige corrected her sister again, making sure all of their belongings were firmly strapped to the gofer should they need to make a quick escape. “And since when have you been a ‘science explorer’? I thought you were a Badlands outlaw.”

“I can be two things,” replied Gnat. She opened the notepad, and the blue thing patted the pages with a curious paw and a guttural tock. “I’ve already documended forty-three Elsewhere things. Forty-four when I documend Tomato Ketchup. What do you think she is? I think she’s called an uncommon ticker. How do you spell ‘uncommon’?”

“Put it back, I said,” tutted Paige. “We’re not here to make friends with the locals. We’re here to find—”

“I knoooooow,” Gnat interrupted. “We’re here to find the Pink-Footed Goose. You don’t have to tell me one million times a minute. You don’t have to go ‘Find the Pink-Footed Goose!’ All. The. Time.”

“I don’t do that…” Paige mumbled.

“You do too do that. You say ‘We’ll find it tomorrow, we’ll find it tomorrow’ but then tomorrow’s today, and Mum said we shouldn’t worry about tomorrow, we should live in these moments.”

“Live in the moment.”

“There’s loads of moments.” Gnat counted them on her fingers. “This is a moment, this a moment, this is a moment…”

Paige grunted impatiently and glanced up at the horizon, craggy and full of shadows. Under the sound of whistling wind, she muttered, “Where is he?”

“Do you miss your best friend?” Gnat said, giving her new best friend a wink.

“He’s not— Shut up!” Paige threw her hands in the air and walked away, but nor far. “I just don’t know what’s keeping him, that’s all.”

“See? Best friends,” Gnat whispered to the creature she’d named Tomato Ketchup. Paige huffed and pulled the grubby poncho off her arm to reveal a rust-red armguard. She stared at it, hoping to see the flashing light of Scrap’s unique core. She tapped it frustratedly and held it up to her ear.

“Nothing.” She sighed. “The core tracer is deader than a dinosaur.”

“What’s a dinosaur?” Gnat asked.

“It’s … I dunno, dead.” Paige stared out across a nearby ridge. “I hope he didn’t get eaten again. What do you think was following us? Did you get a look at it?”

Gnat shrugged. Paige banged the core tracer one more time on the side of the gofer, but its screen flickered uselessly.

“Gofer, can you take us back to Scrap?” Paige whispered, keen not to show too much concern. “Back to where we left him?”

“It sounds like you want to Retrace Your Steps,” the gofer replied, its tone too jolly for Paige’s liking. “Is that right?”

“Yeah,” said Paige. The gofer said nothing for a few seconds, so Paige snappily added, “Yes!”

“I can help with that,” the gofer said. “Where would you like to go?”

“Three weeks of this…” Paige grumbled. She pointed to a nearby ridge, scouring the ground for the gofer’s tracks. “I just want to go back the way we came.”

The gofer fell silent.

“Gofer?” Paige prompted.

“I can help with that,” the gofer said at last. “Where would you like to go?”

Paige’s frustrated growl echoed across the Elsewhere. She looked up. The one and a half suns were high in the sky. She imagined the worst, but said, “I’m not even sure something was following us. I didn’t see anything.”

“Well, you’ve only got one eye,” said Gnat. “If something was following you, you’d only know cos you’d be eaten.”

With a tut, Paige rolled her right eye and adjusted the eyepatch covering her left.

“Next time something tries to eat you,” she said, “I’ll let it.”

“Maybe I want to get eaten,” Gnat replied happily.

“Ugh!” Paige grunted. “You are such a pain in … the…”

Paige trailed off as the distant clank-ka-lank of metal feet against rock echoed across the Elsewhere. She narrowed her eye and peered at the horizon as Gnat’s new best friend let out a loud tock-a-tock-tock.

“…Scrap?” Paige whispered.

Over the ridge, she saw the small, spindly-looking robot appear. He was only slightly taller than her sister, with limbs mismatched in both colour and design, giving him a cobbled-together look and an awkward, uneven stride. As he raced towards Paige and Gnat, his arms and legs flailed as if he was still trying to fathom how...