"Light fixes the broken."
The blizzard was doing what it usually did before the sun came up on the Izkalian dumps. It was biting, blowing hard without respite and as far as the eye could see, the entire vista was covered in snow. Izkali was actually a vast tundra, stretching for miles and miles around without any respite from the monotony. If one didn't count the heaps of garbage and metal that was everywhere.
Without the help of the sun, one watching the vast panorama would be hardpressed to see the moving specks of life against the vast black and white of the heap dump sites. But they were there, Izkali's inhabitants already awake and searching for the precious metals and parts that kept them alive and the hunger away.
At least almost all of them were. For the little boy asleep in a little corner of an old ship hull, the day hadn't started at all. Hell, everything in his little being screamed for him to not go outside until the suns were blazing high in the sky. For him, he had to wait a while before joining in the scavenging.
It wasn't a strange sight for a little boy to join them, but Tristan was shunned for several reasons that had nothing to do with his age. As far as he could tell, he'd been here for about four to five seasons now. While he did look his age, his mind was vastly different. One of the things that set him apart.
But it was his appearance that made him keep to himself. Forced him to, or he would be waking up in the regular shelter where the other children slept in and lived in the commune-like shelters that was their home. In a world of extraordinary scientific advancements, alliances and space treaties with alien races and minor advancements in time travel, cyborgs and cyberkinetic limbs and enhancements were not new. They were the run of the mill and even in Izkali where the lwors
t of the worst lived, where the broken were left to die and managedd to crawl and claw their way to survival, there were remnants of the cybernetic engineers holed up in the most obscure and hidden reaches of the dump city.
So it wasn't that human and machine parts merged together in living tissue was an oddity. There were even children in the heaps with prosthetic limbs and eyeballs.
Tristan was different. His metal parts, the ones that covered everything about him except his face were not attached after his birth. Unlike others around, his machinery was a part of him. The boy was born with them.
While the wind blew harshly against the battered Challenger Airship he'd been spending the last fortnight sleeping in, he shivered as his body fought to keep his two cores heated. Tristan frowned, knowing what was wrong. He hadn't come across any good working parts with electricity in a while. And his stores were running out.
His breath came out in faint plumes, misting in front of his face before vanishing into the cold air. The rest of his body might as well have been metal scrap left in the blizzard, stiff and unprotected, but the skin on his face still prickled and twitched with life.
The heen—that was what his brain whispered to him in that quiet, instinctive way it sometimes did—was still new, still growing. He didn't understand it, not really. He never could understand how his body worked.
It wasn't skin, not the way other children had, but it felt alive, like tiny threads were crawling beneath it every time the cold bit too deeply. The rest of his body was bare metal and jointed plating, but the heen on his face seemed to know when to tighten, to thicken, to trap what little heat he still carried. And he knew instinctively that in time, it would come to look and feel just like skin. He just knew.
It was the only part of him that acted that way. The rest of his frame was fighting the cold the only way it could—by burning through what power he had left, shunting it back and forth between his two cores, keeping them just warm enough so the cold didn't creep in and freeze the delicate wiring inside his chest.
The heen would spread someday. He felt it in the same way he felt his heart beating, as if his body already had the instructions and was simply waiting for the right time. But not yet. Not now.
His brain sent quiet warnings when he thought about going outside before the suns rose—sharp, quick pulses down his spine, almost like someone pulling him back by the neck. He didn't question it anymore.
So he stayed curled in the hull, teeth clenched, listening to the hum of his cores and the soft twitching under his skin where the heen slowly, carefully, learned to keep him alive.
It was probably for the best that he was onfined here, like every other morning since the snows came. While he had a vast memory, all Tristan knew was the harshness of Izkali. So he had kept to himself, especially after he saw the looks from the other boys. And the men, the clans deeper into the dump site city. There was not much he could do by way of fighting off anyone who saw treasure in him, what his body looked like, but he could at least, and that was what he was doing here.