The disorderly quiet of the workshop of Mira Solen was in marked contrast to the angry din of the Gutter Circuit. Kai was seated on a stool which seemed dangerously overloaded with spares, and he was watching Mira as she walked, with an economy of movement which was not only a good one but was a little terrifying. She had a beautiful mess of a workspace--a cathedral of broken things. Shelves creaked with the pressure of dismantled Relics, the inner organs of which were visible, like the bones of a clock-work. Little tools were scattered in the strictly random, but closely patterned, on several benches, and the air was filled with the leftover charge of a hundred slumbering toys.
Rusty Rex was lying in the harsh gaze of a magnifying-lamp, its new accessory--the bent spring--still part of it.
You spent your last half a hundred credits to get into that... place? Mira, without looking up her work, said, No. Her fingers, with their fine conductive gloves, followed the line where the spring was attaching to the plastic forearm of Rex.
The prize of the victor, Kai explained, was two hundred--and it was feeble, too, in his own ears. "I can eat now."
The answer to this, she said, in a tone that would have dried the pond, was a sound financial strategy. Permanent Relic, disintegrate one week to get one week of instant noodles. She used her stylus on her chin. The spring is not simply attached. It's not even welded. It has been absorbed by your Relic.
Kai blinked. "What does that mean?"
It means, she said, and then raised her cobalt eyes to him, that on a resonant level it has perceived the spring as a constituent part of herself. The form of the plastic molecule has rearranged itself to attach with the metal. It's not a repair. It's an upgrade." She pointed to a massive screen on the wall, on which a glittering rotating hologram of Rusty Rex could be seen. And part of its arm was burnished with a complicated, interwoven design. "See this? There is a changed resonance signature forever. It has combined the tensile strength of the spring and the recoil potential with its own energy matrix.
She sat straight back, her hands together. "Tell me, Kaito. Will youingly did you will it do it? Did you execute a certain command of resonance of Metallic Integration?
No, I said, I reply, I am in a lecture that I never attended in a subject I never studied. I simply saw the spring and said to Rex to take it. He was simply attempting to prevent the other thing from smashing us up.
"Fascinating." Mira took a fine probe. Many Relics have fixed ability set. A gimmick. My Glasswing Seraph is a mirror. The Spinblade Phantom of Juno works with momentum. They do their best in their parameters. But this..." She pointed the probe at Rex. There appear to be no parameters to this. Its gimmick is that it is gimmicked... whatever it must be gimmicked. Not merely learning by doing but actually developing through environment sensibility and your own, which appears to be quite anarchic, prescriptions.
She gazed at him, there was a new and disturbing intensity in her eyes. That, do you see, is unprecedented. How... it is theoretically impossible?
A gradual smile spread over the face of Kai. The technical lingo outside of his comprehension, but the essence of the meaning was clear. "So... it's not broken. It's special."
Mira sighed in a frustrated way. "It is both. It is special in that it is fractured in a manner that gets beyond conventional resonance theory. It is a beautiful, erratic a-mash. She pointed to the work room. "I fix things. I will get the shattered fragment and fit it back, restoring the system to the desired position. Your Relic... it gets a broken part and a new organ out of it.
In one of the minimalist apartments which overlooked the glittering Skyline District scattered around the city Juno Kaze was frowning.
He was sitting cross legged on a low platform with a holographic recording of a fight in the Gutter Circuit of Kai, playing in the air in front of him. He played it backwards with a flick of his finger, and again saw the trash-compactor Relic bursting forward. He saw the panicked spring of the Scrap Kid, the shrilly shouted call, the awkward flight to the spring.
He paused it. Zoomed in.
It was unsightly. It lacked rhythm, no choreography. It was the opposite of what he thought a Toybound battle ought to have been--a performance, a masterpiece of controlled movement. This was just... survival. A animalistic scramble.
It got used to it, the voice of Mira, the spectator of the match, was ringing in his ears.
He let the recording play. The spring had caught in the joint. The compressor clutched and dropped. Juno's frown deepened. It was a fluke. An accident in the mud. But... he had seen it seventeen times.
It was this primitive, unrefined efficiency, which his perfect style never attained. The conflicts of Juno were planned. He came up with the formulae of trajectories, the formulae of manipulating momentum, and he painted his wins in a stroke, a graceful stroke. The Scrap Kid did not count; he responded. And his Relic returned to him, and transformed the canvas itself at the heart of the picture.
It was infuriating. It was illogical. It was... intriguing.
He rose and walked back and forth across the room, his long coat swishing behind him. That junk toy, Rusty Rex. It ought not to have been in a position to do so. Its sound was poor, broken. However, at this point of collision, it had not broken any more. It had reconstituted. It was as though I was looking through a broken mirror not only bouncing light back, but also moulding it into a different form.
Respecting the art, he does not respect the art, Juno said to himself, and there in his hand was his Spinblade Phantom, spinning silently, a soothing thing to do. "He has no style, no grace."
But a little, disloyal voice in the rear of his mind answered: Does that make any difference, when he wins?
He ceased pacing, and gazed at the frozen photograph of Kai, standing triumphant in the dingy arena, with his permanently changed toy in his hand. The sight was abhorred by Juno. But his strategic intelligence, the element of him that aspired to perfection in all fighting, had been captured, reluctantly, undoubtedly, captured.
This wasn't over. The Scrap Kid was quite an eyesore. He was a variable. An anomaly.
And Juno Kaze had decided, with an irritation that was mingled with fascination, that he must have something to find out to what extent this anomaly might extend.