The whole world seemed strewn with it, as far as her grey eyes could see. She was told they looked unnatural, off somehow. That echoed the way she felt most of the time, excepting the small moments like those with Jido. His easy, quick way with words felt familiar to her, like a memory she couldn't quite place. If she had memories, that is; try as she might, she couldn't recall a single thing before waking up on Altier.
She trudged along the gaudy, junk-strewn landscape, a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes and people all fit together in a mismatched fashion. Plasticine containers crunched under her boots, discards of a meal once enjoyed by a being far from Altier. Perhaps it had been a side of Steak Frites from a Pizza Hutt, or a Kowakian crumb cake with warm spices and a berry swirl on top. She had never tasted any of it, though her mind offered enough suggestions to make her mouth salivate and her stomach grumble in the rising heat of the morning sun.
If she was going to eat today, she was going to need credits. Jido thought her boots might earn plenty from the fasteners alone. If she was lucky, they were made of something prized like Zeyd-cloth or Dewback leather, and she could buy some serviceable footwear alongside lunch. Her boot scuffed on a piece of junk, sending it skittering along the craggy ground. She was never that lucky. Others were lucky. Lin Bibblo had found a whole pile containing the scraps of some decommissioned Alliance starfighter, which he sold to a used ship dealer Nether-bent on reassembling it. And Amina spent a whole day showing off the bronzium statue she'd carefully extracted from the remains of a twisted, duracrete-and-durasteel structure that had taken her a week to break apart.
The only luck she had so far was meeting Jido. The youngling had something special about him, a presence that others seemed to respect, even those several times his age. Jido seemed younger even than her, though she didn't know how old she was. Some guessed she was fourteen, others thought seventeen or eighteen. Jido spent a day trying to justify declaring her to be exactly twenty-two, by way of comparing her to spots of rust and squeaky connections on his droid, and perpetual project, Mara. Fixable, he claimed, but clearly showing her age.
Jido kept her alive during her first days on Altier, so for that she was lucky.
Few lasted so easily in the junkworld's merciless landscape. Not without falling under the thumb of one of the gangs, that is, or joining their ranks instead. Gangs, like the Kyber Khans, controlled everything around here, and what wasn't Khans was another gang's turf. Ahead, she could spot the rising, dark clouds from the Khan-run scrap factory billowing from behind the mounds still hiding the squat building from view, yet the reminder still sent a cold shiver down her spine. She looked down instead, focusing on the piles and junk around her, the discomfort of hunger overriding apprehension to drive her closer to the factory's poisoned grounds.
By the time she was close, her arms were full of scrap to trade, none of it the duralumin on special today. A strip of durafab she'd managed to roll enough to tuck under her arm, with a few bars of durasteel coated in plastex. They were easy, clean finds, with thousands like them dropped from the garbage haulers every day, nothing special. Which meant that she'd only get a few credits for them, if anything at all. She set her jaw as she marched toward the factory gates, it was better than selling her boots.
"Hey, it's Scrap Cat!" One of the factory guards recognized her, stepping close to the line of customers to grab a bin for her items. She grinned at him, offering a pleasant face when he held it out to her.
"Thanks Nek," she told him, dutifully placing her items in the bin. His hand brushed hers as she took hold of the bin herself, and she could feel her cheeks grow warm. Her grip on the bin tightened, hoisting it up with a knee to rest more comfortably against her body before she looked at Nek again. He returned her gaze with a broad smile, ushering her ahead of the line and ignoring the vocal complaints that followed them.
Nek might not have been much older than her, or could have been a decade more. Details like those didn't make much sense to keep track of to her. Physical characteristics, her own or that of other beings, felt as much as a mystery to her as her name. Jido called her Blondie, for the flaxen hair she had stuffed, matted and unwashed, underneath her helmet. The factory guards called her Scrap Cat after she had been spotted prowling around, and questioned for hours, only to judge her as harmless as a cat. She had never seen a cat and wouldn't identify with one, but the name had stuck around the factory grounds regardless.
"What was the big noise?" She asked, ignoring her grumbling stomach to turn back to Nek, the Yagai falling behind her with the rest. Ahead, the blue sackcloth tarps of the factory doorway loomed high, and next to them she felt smaller than Jido. Nek stepped in front of one, chuckling at her as he pulled back the jury-rigged doorway that was a common fixture on Altier buildings.
Heat and noise roared out at her, catching her unprepared. She choked back a cough, her stinging eyes ready with moisture that would only cake mud onto her dusty cheeks. Nek laughed louder at her misery, setting a firm hand on her back to guide her forward. "You get used to it. As for today's noise, well let's just say someone found a junk pile to call home outside the factory."
Inside the factory was enormous, far bigger than she had ever imagined from the outside. Rows upon rows of workers stood at worktables, some cordoned into sections, others flitting across half the factory floor to drop off parts or pick some up. She spied some older —and she was sure this time— workers, a few sitting down with an intense focus on their tasks, with the rest of them far younger. She was surprised to find that most were younglings, and all at once she realized why she never saw many in the tented camps hosting junk sorters like herself.
"The good news is..." Nek started, and took hold of the bin in her hands. Startled, she let him take it from her hands, marveling how he was able to keep a grip on it with just one of his strong arms. It distracted her for a moment until he nudged her. "What would you think about filling that opening?"
Her stomach was suddenly quiet, her apprehension from before back with a vengeance. It swirled up from the pit where it dwelled in her stomach, and her insides suddenly felt hard as the ground she slept upon. It was hard not to let her pale, grey eyes show the horror reflected inside of her as she nodded her reply. Slowly at first, then with the grinning eagerness he'd come to know from the scrap cat.
Nek patted her on the back as they walked toward the only open worktable on the floor, its pile of junk grown larger than all the other tables around it. Half the pile glinted with specks of a dried substance that still glistened with moisture from the larger pool underneath the table. She swallowed as the knowledge hit her with another roar, consuming the last of her hunger along with it. Nek left her there without another glance back, and when she looked to her neighbors for guidance they quickly tipped their small heads down to their work.
She picked out one of the scraps cautiously, uncertain of what she was supposed to do with it, all the while mindful of what had befallen the last worker who stood here with this same pile.
Discarded, just like junk.
