The Bandalore - Pitch & Sickle Book One (Paperback)

Kira raised her metal fist and sang her booze-soaked heart out to the ceiling. The music blaring in the pub downstairs made the whole room vibrate. She hit the high note. God damn nailed it.
‘Christ almighty.’ The guy beside her rolled his generous package away, and grunted out of bed. ‘You could kill small animals with that voice, K.’
‘I don’t pay you to talk, Liam.’ Kira tossed a pillow at his smirking, pudgy face, and the room spun. ‘Be gone. I’m done with your dimpled ass.’
She was up for a lot of things, but her rent-a-hump seeing her puke wasn’t one of them, and any second now a bolt to the bathroom would be compulsory.
Liam pulled on his pants, gave her the finger, and launched that smile. Honey on warm toast. He may have a gut you could eat breakfast off, but damn, that grin. It made his grey eyes gleam, and wrenched ridiculously high tips from her blacker-than-black credit card.
‘Till next time.’ He stepped into the hall, the blast of music deafening before he pulled the door closed.
Kira sighed. She arched her back, sending her boobs skyward, but even that small movement made her gut twist. She jerked upright, swallowing hard.
‘Shit. Stay down. Sangria and whisky you need to be better friends.’ She reached for her underwear, slivers of sapphire-red material lying on the timber floor. Carefully, super carefully, she pulled the delicate g-string up over her thighs. Satin bra next. She’d learned a lesson early on about the metal prosthetic she called a right arm. It didn’t think much of Victoria’s Secrets. The ‘armadillo’—what Kira called the intricate folds of hard metal that moved with the smoothness of oil on skin— existed on a diet of lace and satin, always managing to catch threads between its layers and refusing to let go. The bastard thing had cost her a fortune in the beginning, but three years on Kira had it under control. Even at times like now, when her vision was blurry, and the room tilted and lurched like a motherfucker.
She stood up, defying gravity. Jeans on, zip done. A god-damn dressing genius. Shirt proved an issue. Whose idea had it been to buy something with more holes than material? It took three tries to find the armholes; two of those attempts ending up with her flat on her back. Sangria and whisky held hands, waiting patiently at the base of her throat.
‘Jesus. Perry’s going to kill me.’
Nothing new there. It was pretty much his permanent state. And yet the crazy son of a bitch had agreed to partner with her in the Wheel and Barrow. She was supposed to be downstairs right now, behind the bar. She’d promised Perry she’d cover the midnight-till-three shift, but her promises were as empty as the fishtank in their musty back office. Thankfully, the guy was practically some kind of Sri Lankan saint. Never bitched at her when she ditched the whole damn town of Pryden on a whim and flew off to Greece, or somewhere equally stupidly beautiful, just because she was Kira Beckworth and she could. And his lips remained sealed on nights like this. When she drank too much of the stock and decided small talk with drunk-ass customers was overrated, and she had better people to do.
Liam didn’t cost top dollar for nothing; but damn, sex made the room stink. She sniffed her armpits. Sweet Jesus, the room wasn’t the only thing. Kira focused on the door like a magnifying glass on an ant and found her way out into the hall, up the short flight of stairs to the fire exit, and out onto the rooftop. The night sky was velvet black, dotted with hundreds of diamonds, and the breeze coming in off the desert pushed goosebumps to attention across every centimetre of her skin.
Kira raised her arms to the view. ‘Hell yes.’
The town of Pryden was a small blob of light in the wide expanse of curving, undulating sand hills that spread out forever around it. Somewhere off to the east, and hidden in the crux of a mountain range, was the Facility. And in that sterile, high-tech, boring-as-bat-shit place sat Kira’s sister, Blake.
The great and wondrous Blake Beckworth. The goddess of bioengineering. The reason anyone paid Kira two seconds of attention. The gossip mags had fallen in love with the idea that nothing about Kira was real. That her grief-stricken genius sister Blake had created a masterpiece in her biotech nirvana after the accident: building an android version of her dead sis to dull the pain of her loss.
Yeah, right. The sisters both knew Kira wasn’t the one Blake would have recreated if that had been an option. Nope. Their father would have won that competition, hands down. But he was dead. Entirely and completely. Kira had been close to it, so fucking close the demons in hell were probably putting up the welcome signs, but then the aliens said yes to handing over some of their precious, funky metal and Blake had brought Kira back from the brink, like a shiny new toy.
Still, the world preferred to believe Kira had stepped over that brink. And apparently it was a thing now, trying to get into her pants to see if she had a robo-muff. Kira flashed her lady garden on a regular basis to prove she didn’t. She was a real girl, god-damn it. But her plan had backfired. The press loved a crazy rich bitch. Especially one whose rarely-sighted, brainiac sister was holed up in a place whose security and secrecy were whispered about on a regular basis. No one gave a shit about Area 51 anymore; it was all about the Facility.
‘And sometimes conspiracy theory nutcases are right,’ Kira told the night sky.
She tilted her prosthetic arm back and forth. Overhead, the moon was a giant half-ball of silver light, but the armadillo didn’t give a fuck. When light hit the metal it kind of soaked it in, dulling down the brightness to something insipid and barely there at all. Like a five-fingered black hole. Her heart was made of the same stuff. The chunk of metal in her chest didn’t beat, didn’t flutter, didn’t race. Brilliant as they all may be—Blake, and her little extra-terrestrial friends—they were also assholes. The aliens had the technology to wing their way from one distant universe to another, yet they couldn’t come up with a way to make her heart beat? It did its job silently, keeping her blood flowing with the quietness of a tomb.
And what was with the no fingernails on the armadillo? Smooth nubs. Just bloody creepy. Sure, Blake had put fingernails into the faux skin she wanted Kira to wear over the prosthetic, but there was as much chance of Kira wearing that fucking awful sheath as there was of Blake actually calling to see how the hell her sister was.
Kira fixed her eyes on the stars overhead. One in particular, a bright little splat directly above them. The rest of the universe rotated around it in a slow, torturous circle. She braced against the back of a faded chaise lounge, determined to keep looking. Something about the wide-open space, the endlessness overhead, never failed to give her the feels. If she could, she’d jump into that nothingness and let it take her. Let it swamp her, suck her down into the black hole that was already a part of her. The one she should have stayed in after that fucking car crash.