He dragged himself over to the iSoldier, wincing as the concrete scraping his raw knees. “Shut up,” he gritted out. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” He banged on its armour. “You need to be quiet! They’ll hear you!”

“Oh, God,” said the iSoldier. “Fuck, fuck, my legs, where are my legs?” It made choked gulping sounds, forcing air back into its failing lungs.

“Will you shut up?”

It said, “I can’t,” and, “Sorry,” and, “Hurts.” Tracey clawed at the back of its neck, holding his probe between his teeth as he tried to find the right spot to—yes—open it up, exposing the cluster of wires at the top of its spine. “What are you doing?”

The wires were half-fused, a tangled mess of still-cooling slag. There was only one thing to do.

“I’m sorry.” He jammed in his probe, right up against the first joint of its spine. “This’ll only hurt a lot.” He thumbed the button.

It screamed, a jagged wail of electronics, arms flexing madly. Somewhere in the mass of trailing cables below its waist something sparked.

And it was done, and the iSoldier was gasping, harsh mechanical sobs falling from its lips. Heat pulsed off its shell. “Oh, God. What did you do to me?”

“I’m sorry,” said Tracey lamely. “I needed you to be quiet.”

“I can’t—it doesn’t hurt any more. What did you do?” It flexed its fingers. “I can’t feel anything.”

“I fried your nervous system,” said Tracey. “Needed you to shut up. You were going to get us caught.”

The iSoldier’s eyes rolled to look at him. “You look familiar.”

“One of those faces.”

It blinked, sucking in air noisily.

Tracey looked up at the tattered shell of the building, hoping that it would die now and let him be.

“Where are my legs?”

It was such a silly question, where are my legs, like he’d just forgotten where he’d put them, and Tracey nearly laughed. “I don’t know. They were outside, but that Beast probably crushed them.”

It digested that. “What happened to me?”

“I don’t know. You were in bits when I arrived.”

“No, before that.”

Tracey shuffled his feet in the dust and grime that coated the floor. He swallowed. His throat was dry. “How much do you remember?”

It wheezed. “I don’t know. I was in this—place, I don’t know where—they told me I’d been picked out for an experimental treatment, and then I was in a waiting room or—I don’t know. It’s all in bits. What did they do to me?”

The soft tissues went first. You scooped them out like pumpkins on Hallowe’en. Then the bones. Keep the arm bones and the ribcage and the skull and the spine, but the hip bones and the thigh bones went on the scrap pile, and then—“Oh, God. My legs.”

Tracey steeled himself. He avoided its eyes. They were the only part of it that looked alive. “If it makes you feel any better, they weren’t your original legs.”

“Was that supposed to be funny?”

“Not really.”

“What happened to my real legs?”

“They weren’t used for the procedure. Leg bones—aren’t. They don’t—I’m sorry.”

It was looking at its hands. It mouthed procedure.

“This wasn’t an experiment, was it? I saw—others. How many people did you –”

“I don’t know!” said Tracey. “A lot. Thousands. More, maybe. I’m just a field tech, alright? I don’t know. They don’t tell us anything. They barely even train us.”

“They told you more than they told me.”

“Shut up,” Tracey snapped. “I should have left you out there. I don’t know why I bothered saving you.”

The iSoldier’s eyes blazed . “Oh, you bastard,” he said, “You sick, selfish, fuck –”

“You are dead!”

It went quiet.

“In case you hadn’t noticed—you’re already dead. Your spine’s severed and your entire programming’s gotten wiped somehow which means you’re undergoing critical neural failure, so I give it maybe two or three hours before your brain disintegrates completely, except you don’t have two hours. You’re overheating. You’ve got maybe half an hour before what’s left of your internal organs cook.” He took deep breaths. “So yeah. You’re basically dead and I’m basically not and if I’d just left you there I might actually have gotten out of this.”

Staggering, he sank down on the concrete.

“You could call for help.”

“No point. They won’t come. They might’ve if there was enough left of you to save, but there’s not, so they won’t. They won’t come for me. I’m expendable.”

The iSoldier wheezed . “You said they didn’t train you.”

“What?”

“You said they didn’t train you. Didn’t sound like it just now.”

“I was a junior medtech. I got demoted. Happy now?”

There were regulations about executing non-combatants. But there were jobs that needed doing, jobs too dangerous to risk an AI. Field techs, on average, lasted 3.8 missions before their sticky end. It was tidy. It worked, on average.

This was Tracey’s fifth mission.

“I woke up on a battlefield without any legs, so no, I’m not happy.” A choking sound that was either a laugh or a sob. “What did you do to get demoted?”

“What’s it to you? Nothing. I didn’t do anything. Piss off.” Tracey didn’t want to look at it. He didn’t want it looking at him, not with those dancing, living eyes.

“You must have done something.”

“Well, I didn’t. It wasn’t something I did, it was something I was supposed to do that I didn’t. So I didn’t do anything.”