"Trash Bandit! Would you be willing to answer a few questions on the rumours circulating about your reckless endangerment of animals?"

  "..."

  "The public want to- Hey! Give that back!"

  "Eeee! EE eeee EE ee e EEE eeeee!"

  --Chip 'the raccoon' Roberton, stealing a broadcaster's microphone (and beanie) to spread his truth.

  By the fifth rubbish pit, I’m really wishing I had a bigger army.

  My claws tear through yet another Four, rending it in two as I spin on my heels to face a writhing ball of small, bladed limbs.

  The Nine leaps towards its dying ally, missing me by a hair as I step to the side and drive my hand into its back.

  “These things are boring,” I whine at Cyon, dropping the corpse and glancing at the dead plants scattered around me. “They’re so spread out it’s not even fun.”

  You have reached over a thousand points again. If you want an army that bad, start spending for it.

  “Right,” I mutter, glancing at the point counter reading a little over one thousand one hundred points. “Can I buy cloning stuff from here?”

  You are still just within range of the lab.

  “Okay, take four hundred and fifty to speed up the current batch of raccoons please.”

  Done!

  My points tick down, so I rip off a Four’s tentacle to snack on and set off deeper into the dump again. I mindlessly follow my nose, ripping apart all the plants I find as faint explosions ring through the walls from a nearby pit.

  After a few minutes, an alert through our network lets me know that the symbiotes for our three newest additions are done. I have to backtrack a little bit to get back into range of the lab, but I drop some more points into accelerated clones, their culture, and a few sets of spare augs to install on the newbies while chatting with Cyon about a very important and relevant problem.

  ‘Chonk?’

  Just why?

  ‘Well, she’s small now, but she’ll get chonky eventually, right?’

  Cyon’s avatar flickers in the corner of my vision, shaking her head in disapproval and drawing my focus to a five lumbering up to the lip of the pit above me. I reactivate the invisibility I turned off to travel through an already cleared-out pit, and leap to the side the moment I spot the xeno, narrowly avoiding a barrage of jagged spines.

  [{Five above me,}] I squeak into our network before dashing between scrap piles, moving from the plant’s targeting area without it even realising.

  ‘What about Pin?’

  It seems a little odd for your usual naming scheme. Weren’t they named after their markings?

  ‘Chip wasn’t. Besides, it’s linked still! She’s a clone of Stripe, right?’

  The Five overlooking me explodes in a burst of green gore as I reach the channel dug through to the next pit. I glance up and see Chip peeking over the lip with his thumb up and his symbiote covering his fur.

  They look so funny in defence mode.

  Oh, I see. Pinstripe.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “Exactly!” I giggle, pulling a throwing knife from a pouch at my thigh, wiping it across my tail to pick up a dose of DogEater, and flicking it into the Four fixed to the roof trying to get the jump on me ahead.

  That fits. What about the other two then?

  “That’s harder.”

  I scratch my head in thought, throwing out two more knives to clear the roof.

  These squishy fishies must really like being upside down.

  It takes cleaning out the entire pit and meeting my siblings at the tunnel to the next for me to decide on two new names.

  “Bengal and Chevron,” I state firmly, ignoring Cyon shaking her head in disappointment.

  It’s not my fault she can’t see the wonder of matching thematic names!

  Well, you’ll be happy to know that now you’ve settled on those names, there’s only a few minutes left till the next litter is done.

  “Damn it!”

  ***

  With another trio of unnamed clones, this time without adorable defects, helping us, it doesn’t take long to arrive at the pit tucked away in the back of the dump that we call home.

  Me and my siblings cull the nearby plants before slipping through alleys of rubbish to arrive at a dilapidated work truck. The entire vehicle is old and battered, with its cargo compartment completely buried in a large pile of junk behind it and its front doors rusted shut.

  “Welcome to our den,” I say to Cyon as I follow my siblings in squeezing through the glassless windows into the main cab.

  I push back a sheet of corrugated metal behind the passenger seat, revealing a small gap that my siblings shimmy into with ease. Their little paws peek around the metal sheet to hold it back for me as I jam myself through the tight entrance after them.

  Inside opens up into a small room, only tall enough for me to stand at half-height, but wide enough for three or four of me lying down. The space is dark, with only a few small cracks in the rubbish walls to let in light, but even before my mutations, I could navigate it with ease.

  It’s… cleaner than I expected.

  I choose to ignore her very rude comment as I drink in the space I’ve called home for as long as I can remember. I barely spare my crumpled bed-pile a glance, the old sheets and cushions no longer seeming as tempting now that I know the Squish is waiting for me in the lab, but my gaze lingers on the very clean and organised pile of shiny objects in the corner.

  I reach into my pockets and pull out the cutlery I permanently borrowed from Hands what feels like days ago, tossing the additions into the pile for likely the last time. Spot and Stripe dive into the pile after the cutlery, digging through it to pick out their favourites as Chip moves to his own collection in the far corner.

  I can’t help but giggle when he dives into the glorious pile of hat buckles, surrounded by other unique headwear that he’s collected, and starts trying to cram the silver keepsakes into his symbiote.

  {You can take a few, but not too many.}

  He visibly deflates, letting out a sad, keening whine, but I don’t back down.

  {You can take all the hats if you want, but you don’t need that many duplicates.}

  {But… my shinies…}

  I give him head pats, looking away from his watering kit eyes because they’re totally unfair.

  {Fine, but you’re carrying them to the lab yourself.}

  His tears vanish in an instant as he turns and dives back into his collecting.

  Y-

  “Not a word.”

  Ignoring Cyon’s teasing giggling in the back of my mind, I finally look up at the two clean, white skulls placed on a metal shelf jutting from the wall above my bed-pile. I reach out and gently pick them up, cradling them in my arms and checking for any new damage.

  Luckily, they’re untouched by the alien invasion just like the rest of our hidden den, and there isn’t a single new scratch on them.

  “These are my parents,” I tell Cyon, leaning back against the entrance with my legs crossed as Spot and Stripe wiggle out of the shiny pile and approach me.

  “This is Mum,” I say, holding up the slightly smaller skull on the left and running my thumb over the small piece missing from her eye socket. “She got this when they first found me.”

  Cyon doesn’t say anything, but her avatar forms sitting on my shoulder, looking down as Spot and Stripe curl up in my lap, brushing their noses affectionately against Dad.

  “I was trying to steal a pot of these cheap, synthetic noodles from a ganger – can’t even remember which gang – but I wasn’t exactly stealthy. I snatched them and ran. They caught up to me after like two streets and started beating me.”

  I can feel tears building in my eyes, but I sniff them back, grinning as I continue.

  “Then out of nowhere, while I’m on the floor getting the shit kicked out of me by like three grown men, one of them started screaming. Mum had jumped on his face!” I giggle, closing my eyes and picturing the memory again. “She ripped the fucker’s eyes out before his friend hit her off. Dad attacked the one who hurt her, and at that point they stopped paying attention to me, making it pretty easy the bash their heads in with a nearby pipe. Mum lost her eye because of that fight, but they still shared the noodles with me.”

  I open my watering eyes again as I gently set Mum back down on my siblings with Dad.

  “Can I have something to keep them safe please?”

  Of course.

  Cyon spawns a small brown sack that looks similar to my siblings’ grenade bags in front of me. My points tick down by five and I pick up the bag, opening the drawstrings to put my parents away.

  That bag is formed from a padded, reinforced synthetic fibre, like Kevlar. They’ll be safe in there. They sound like they were wonderful parents.

  I wordlessly nod in response, closing the bag around them as tears stream down my cheeks.