Best friends Jamison and June were linked by that most enduring of bonds: there was a secret passageway between their houses. The passageway maybe wasn’t so secret, and maybe was just a partially covered weighbridge that spanned a creek of reeking, toxic water, but to a pair of otherwise lonely twelve-year-olds it was more than enough. As a back-up fastening, they shared possession of an odor they’d both absorbed in-utero, a rot-sweet stink of chemically treated refuse that  clearly signaled to peers that these were kids from the part of town opposite the school. There, two knotted streets dead-ended up against the now-defunct landfill, all shadowed into a perpetual evening by the sharp jut of the wooded hill to the east. Beyond their living situation, and despite similar clothing budgets, the two struck a broad contrast as they stumbled through the bare patches of the dump, Jamie always ten steps ahead. June, despite her extra heft, cast a ghostly silhouette in her trailing skirt, her regal march more suited to a tragic heroine stalking the moors than a chubby pre-teen with only one bra to her name. Jamie was nymph to June’s wraith: he flitted from side to side as he walked, turning over bits of trash with his toe, yapping in an utterly unpredictable rhythm. Though his clothes were in the same state of second-hand disrepair, he was less elegant in his Laserlook logo tee with the ripped pits, which he flashed each time he raised his arms in gesticulation.
	“So look for a car with the catalytic converter still intact. It’ll hafta be an older car.” He walked heel-to-toe the span of a discarded pipe, arms out. “It’s kind of a cylinder thingy on the underside. Most cars’d probly already have ‘em removed—they’re worth a little somethin’. Not much.”
	June nodded. “I’m looking for a red thing. Red or blue. I guess.” She had to shout into the wind for the sound to reach ahead.
	“Got it.” Jamie continued his discussion with himself, limning out the merits of various techniques for his current project. Eventually, his conversation returned to its inevitable point. “…which should result in something not completely unlike Silverhand’s hand. I mean it won’t compare to a natural power, but if I combine it with the Laserlook helmet once I finish it, it’ll be about on par with, like, Lord Deus? Maybe? I mean I’d be able to be a pretty decent hindrance at least.”
	“Right. You’ll be an eighty-pound kid with a half-ton of machinery strapped to you. I can roll you off a roof and smush him.”
	“Well I’ll have the grav field working by then, of course. First I just have to find a battery for the mini-grav field, so that I can actually lift up the grav field itself. There should be a hatch on the underside where I can—hey would purple work?” Jamie stabbed his finger toward the top of a nearby trash dune, where a torn aubergine kiddie pool flapped in the breeze.
	“Hm. Do you think that could pass as a polyp-scarred vena cava?”
	Jamie, who knew much more about recycling machinery than human anatomy, shrugged, “I mean, yeah, totally.”
	June steeled herself with a firm nod. She pulled up the hem of her skirt fist over fist, tucking it into the secret bike shorts that squished her scarred hips. “Go on ahead. I’m gonna drag it back to base.” Even with her pants stuffed, ascending the trash pile on her hands and knees, she had a certain dignity to her posture. Jamie admired her climbing technique for a moment before trotting on ahead.