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Chapter Text

The last droplets of an overnight autumn rain gently pattered against the half-collapsed roofs and the abandoned shells of vehicles that still lined the streets. Time could heal many kinds of wounds, but infrastructural wounds like this one tended to fester. The area, once the bustling downtown of Abel City, had for the second time in its unfortunate existence become a war zone during the final years of the Maverick Wars. The decade since had seen plenty of reconstruction, but none of it had happened here. The city simply grew away from its scar this time, barricading it away behind high walls, and the Abel City quarantine zone remained condemned, bombed beyond repair.

A tattered blue tarp, not unlike any number of others that dotted the crumbling district, laid underneath the eaves of what had been a convenience store, a remnant of some long-past attempt to itemize the damages before the entire area had simply been declared a lost cause. Or it did lie there, at least, until it shifted, and with some effort, it stood.

The figure underneath it straightened, leaning heavily on a cane, getting its bearings slowly. It wore plain enough clothing: a long-sleeved shirt, an armored motorcycle jacket that had been green and dark gray before the ubiquitous dust of the quarantine zone had happened to it, and tan pants that didn't fit quite right and had seen better days. The cane was a similarly shabby affair, simply a handle on a collapsible metal shaft, worn clean of whatever paint it had once had.

The figure could have passed for human, at first glance, and indeed he had done so plenty of times. It was more effort than he cared to exert unless he couldn't avoid it, now. At some point, he had found he didn't even need to hide his identity. Nobody, reploid or human, would look twice at him. Perhaps it shouldn't have worked, but when anyone thought of him, they thought of a man who hadn't existed for ten years, if he ever had at all. X, the first, the progenitor, savior of humanity and reploids alike—the legend had grown too big for its own good seemingly overnight after his first, bitter victory over Sigma, and only loomed larger over the long course of the Maverick Wars, leaving him awash in his own shadow by the end.

He had found over the intervening years, once he'd learned to move a little in that shadow, that this was not necessarily such a terrible state of affairs in certain ways. For one, it was much quieter. That was a plus in his book.

X, still draped with the tarp pulled over his head and shoulders like the hood of a particularly ratty and shapeless cloak, picked his way over the cracked sidewalk. His left hand gripped his cane, and the other extended awkwardly to his side. Where he could trail his fingers along a wall for balance, he did. He'd gotten lucky, honestly. His self-repair systems had held together with practically no intervention for so much longer than any of the first derivative systems he'd helped design based on his own. He felt he had no meaningful room to complain, compared to countless others.

He reached a former main intersection. The remains of a massive insect-like mechaniloid lay across it, deep in the crater that it left when it had been shot from the sky and half-buried under a chunk of building it had clipped as it fell. Even with the high walls around this part of the city, it had been picked clean of any parts that weren't welded down, leaving a metal skeleton too heavy to budge without a crane and little else. The impact had pancaked the street's surface into the storm drains, and the storm drains into the maintenance tunnels, tearing open dark passageways into God and certain city planners only knew where. Most of the sidewalk remained intact, though, so X skirted the crater.

The sidewalk shifted under his foot, and even before he had entirely realized that he was about to slide, X planted his cane hard into a crack in the ground and braced himself with it. The stray chunk of concrete that broke off beneath his foot toppled end over end into the crater, revealing very little beneath it for support. Wind and weather had eroded much of the underlying soil away and rusted through the rebar. X froze, analyzing his potential routes to safety. In the past he'd have simply taken a sliding leap over the entire issue, no problem. That sort of high-speed mobility relied on incredibly precise sensor input, though, and X's proprioceptive sensors were…'less than reliable' was putting it very politely.

X remained still, awaiting any further shift in the ground, and watched the usual procession of errors file past behind his eyes.

>E.04877-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Retrying.
>E.04877-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Retrying.
>E.04877-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Failing.
>W.04877-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters. Recalibration required.
>E.55005-SRV: Failure to process actuator position. Retrying.
>E.55005-SRV: Failure to process actuator position. Retrying.
>E.55005-SRV: Failure to process actuator position. Failing.
>W.55005-SRV: Actuator position could not be verified. Recalibration required.
>E.04874-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Retrying.
>E.04874-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Retrying.
>E.04874-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. Failing.
>W.04874-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters. Recalibration required.

It was almost meditative at this point; at least, when it wasn't maddening, or worse, depressing. The full loop included between 1428 and 1452 various errors, three times each, with one additional warning per set of three. Most of them were spread across his sense of balance; a small but important handful pertained to his related kinesthetic senses; the remainder were divided between energy production and storage, memory processing, and damage warnings from sensors that by any analysis were not damaged. X could ignore the errors readily enough, but he had no way of dismissing the warnings, and the background noise they generated as a whole occupied more of each clock cycle than he liked to contemplate.

And they hurt. Even an intact damage sensor reporting damage felt exactly like a damaged one. It made discerning actual injury from systems wear or pure glitchiness very difficult. X had learned with time which unrepairable aches and pains were his new steady state, and simply had to assume that the warning messages they generated were nothing but noise to try and filter. It was not easy.

He logged a full three seconds of error messages, the actuator warnings becoming more insistent as one of his legs began to twitch unsteadily. The remaining sidewalk held, though, so X cautiously made his way back towards the building, counting on the foundation to have resisted erosion. It had, and soon enough he had crossed the street.

Like an old man. I think it's better, he decided, if I don't think too deeply about it.

He had long since stopped feeling sorry for himself, except in brief, bitter bursts. It wasn't going to fix him, and he had things to do that weren't grumble about having to live in the same state as plenty of other people did. Granted, he was lucky. In many places, a reploid with his level of malfunction might have been talked into being retired for scrap, or simply been made to keep on until their systems failed entirely. Retirement was not an option many enjoyed. The long cast shadow of his history protected him, and he knew it. If he was going to be bitter about anything, it was that he was even allowed to simply stop contributing where so many others weren't.

Once X had gained more stable footing on the far side of the crater, he found a vantage point atop an old scaffolding that held up to a few hard, experimental shakes, holding onto the structure with one hand and prodding each next step with his cane before taking it. At the top, he sat, his tarp cloak once again rendering him nothing more than a forgotten stack of building materials to the casual observer, and he waited.

Nobody took a stroll in any of the many condemned districts of the post-war world for the fun of it. X was here to find someone, one way or another. All the better if he could find someone to help him find this particular someone, though who he might meet out here and what they might be like was a question that weighed heavily on his mind. He was not as helpless as he looked, even without his old weaponry and accustomed armor, but he hoped that anyone he encountered wouldn't take him as a threat.

If he was lucky, X thought, he might even find someone with the means to recharge. He could run for a long time on a low battery if he took things carefully, and he could still recharge slowly in the sun, but the constant low power reminders were a hassle. He was sufficiently old that his reactor no longer did more than keep him level if he didn't move much. If he did have to resort to fighting, he would burn through his reserves quickly, he knew. It took a startling amount of computational and kinetic energy to function in combat with his limitations, which would leave him defenseless if he couldn't end it quickly.

X had already had so much more than his fill of fighting, anyway. If it came to it, he was no longer sure if his distaste for violence wasn't now even greater than his distaste for having the bolts beaten out of him. At least he could stand to look at himself in the mirror if he got thrashed a bit. He couldn't say the same for having to destroy yet another fellow reploid.

X recrossed his legs. To his relief, the midmorning sun had started to warm the chilly air. That would take the edge off of some of the complaints from his joints. As for the rest of the usual flood of errors…well, they gave him something to do while he watched, he supposed. After all, he was probably going to be here for a while.

Chapter Text

Kathy's full identifier was Early Childhood Educator Model K2380.F, and like her 2379 older sisters (and 450 brothers, Early Childhood Educator Models K001.M through K450.M), she was purpose-built to be a teacher for humans between the ages of three and thirteen. She was the last of them, and she was the reason that she was the last.

Kathy would have done anything to protect the children under her care. She thought this for the first time after her first day of teaching, as an assistant in training under one of her older model sisters, and she thought it every day throughout that semester. She thought it every day the next semester once she became a teacher in her own right. Her kids were the very reasons she existed, after all. She had been designed top to bottom to be an ideal caretaker and educator, and maybe it was that inbuilt duty speaking, but she loved her work, and her students.

That she would actually have to do anything felt hypothetical. The Maverick War had been declared over two years prior, and the destruction had ended. The world was safe, she thought. Relatively safe, at least. Mavericks happened, but only in scattered pockets, and most of them were not even viral now.

The viral ones were lucky. They could be treated and released, now that reliable antivirus protocols existed. Going Maverick of one's own free will was a one-way trip to the scrap heap. But then, while she sometimes butted heads a little with some parents, Kathy could never imagine harming a human. There was just no call for that. She was a kindergarten teacher, after all. She taught young humans to settle disputes, not escalate them to violence.

Kathy knew that humans could hurt one another. History bore that out clearly. She knew that even young humans could and often would lose their temper and hit one another, sometimes with whatever object was at hand, because she'd been teaching for four and a half years by then and had seen every kind of classroom squabble. She had been wholly unprepared to learn that adult humans would, in fact, hurt young humans.

Of course, it wasn't a secret that it could happen. There had been an entire section of her post-activation orientation dedicated to signs and kinds of abuse and mandated reporter laws. It felt fake, though, and she struggled to imagine why an adult would ever think it was okay to harm a child. Obviously it wasn't acceptable behavior, right? Even children knew they weren't supposed to hit each other. How in the world would an adult manage to miss that lesson for their entire life? It was such an absurdly wrong thing to do that she couldn't picture how it would ever occur. That was Maverick behavior, except humans didn't go Maverick.

And yet, one day, one of her students—a little boy, usually outgoing, if not downright rowdy—came in with a black eye. Kathy asked him about it, and he mumbled something about hitting it on the edge of the table, but even he didn't seem like he believed what he was saying.

Something felt wrong, and her training had been very clear about what to do when something felt wrong, but even so, she struggled to believe her own gut feeling. So, she decided, she'd get the opinion of someone with more experience, and also someone who had guts in the first place.

"I think," Kathy nervously told her principal in his office after school, "that maybe one of my kids is being abused at home. I'm not sure, maybe I'm overreacting, but…"

He drew a breath and let it out, fingers steepled. "Okay," he said. "I'm glad you came to me about it. Don't doubt yourself about this kind of thing. Let's make some phone calls."

So they did. Kathy went home that evening to her tiny apartment sure that she'd done the right thing, even if she still felt some sort of continuously-cycling anxiety in her circuits that she couldn't quite pin down. What if it was nothing? What if it wasn't nothing? How could anyone do such a thing? Harming someone weaker than oneself had to be the height of irrational cowardice…and yet, that was the likely explanation, wasn't it? But if she was only their teacher, and she felt this protective over her charges, how much more should a real biological parent feel?

It didn't make sense to her, and it probably wouldn't, she concluded, lying in her recharge pod and waiting for her systems to sort themselves out and enter defragmentation mode. After all, she was not even old enough in human terms to be enrolled in the classes she taught. Small wonder that she could encounter a situation she didn't understand. It wasn't even the first time, she recalled, in bits and pieces as she slept; they'd had a class pet die once, a few years back, and Kathy had not known how to react when she found the poor thing in its cage when she came in on the weekend to feed it. It's just a hamster, she had thought, cradling the both stiff and limp little creature in her hands while emotions she had not yet learned to name cascaded through her systems. It's nothing that special, right? It's sentient, sure, but only just. It's tiny, and it has a short lifespan. We took good care of it, and it wasn't ill, but I did notice that it wasn't moving as much recently, so it most likely died of old age.

This was inevitable, I know, but for some reason I still feel…sad, I think? Nervous? Am I angry? I'm worried about how the children will react. I'm not even sure about how I'm reacting. I've never seen something dead before. She had touched its tiny, cold paw with a fingertip. It was like a delicate, miniature hand, she thought, and the image had stuck with her. Why is something so small and helpless allowed to have something like this happen to it? Was it afraid? Did it hurt? What am I supposed to do?

Kathy had simply sat at her desk, holding the little thing in both hands, until another teacher, a human one, dropped by to ask her something and found her there with tears welling up in her eyes and pure confusion on her face. Her colleague had ended up staying with her for an hour, explaining things to her from a children's book about grief from the school library. Kathy had felt embarrassed, even as she was grateful. Wasn't she an adult, too? Shouldn't she understand this sort of thing? She was two years old, the other teacher reminded her, gently. She looked like an adult, and mostly thought like one, but she didn't have the life experiences of one. There would be things she didn't understand, probably for years to come, and that was normal.

She awoke in her pod the next morning with the memory of that day, and some of the feelings too, as fresh in her mind as if they'd happened all over again. She couldn't have said why. There were a lot of things about emotions that Kathy didn't grasp despite having some training in them, since after all children needed some direction in dealing with new feelings too. If even her human colleagues still struggled to explain certain things to her, though, and some of them were ten times her age, what chance did she possibly have?

A week passed entirely without any further mysterious bruises on any of her kids, then another, which was a relief. Kathy began to think maybe she'd reported over nothing, which was fine, her principal assured her. Better safe than sorry. Just as she started to relax and stop thinking about it, the same student missed a day of school. Nobody called on his behalf, and he didn't have a doctor's note when he returned the following day. Kathy noted, though, that he was wearing long sleeves on a hot day, and some sixth sense she couldn't have defined sat up and took note.

"He swears everything is okay at home with his dad," she said to the principal, "but I'm worried."

They made some more phone calls.

A few weeks later, Kathy was in the principal's office yet again.

"But nothing has changed," she protested. "If anything, it's worse. Aren't they even looking into it?"

"I'm sure they are," the principal assured her. "It's just that things are complicated. The system is overloaded and underfunded, especially with all the damage the war did. There's just not enough of anything to go around right now."

"But that's not fair to the kids," Kathy said.

"No, it's not. You're completely right. It's just the truth of the situation."

"Is there anything we can do? Parent-teacher conferences are coming up. Could we talk to him then?"

The principal sucked a breath in through his teeth and let it out through his nose, which Kathy had come to recognize as him about to say no in the most complicated way possible. "I'm not sure that's a good idea. Reports to child protective services are anonymous, but it's not hard to guess who's making them, even so. I'm not going to say you can't try to talk to him, but I don't know how much it'll help, and I want to be there in case it goes badly. And we need to try to keep it constructive and focused on the child, not the parent. It's easier to get them on your side if they don't feel accused."

Well, it wasn't exactly a no. It wasn't exactly a yes, either, and Kathy felt a little accomplished in how she'd come to read certain human reactions. However, even after scheduling a time for the conference with them and making an extra call the day before to confirm, her student's father didn't show up, and she sat at her desk, stewing, with the principal beside her.

"Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and reschedule," he suggested.

"Yeah," Kathy said, on edge. "Maybe something came up." After all, being a single parent was undoubtedly busy, and she'd gathered after a semester of permission slips signed only by him that he probably was one.

He actually showed up to that one, and all Kathy could think was that he looked so normal. She had imagined that someone who could bruise a child would…she didn't know. Look more like someone capable of doing such a thing, maybe? But no, he was just some guy.

Later, Kathy would realize she barely remembered the conversation. All she really remembered was the static in her ears as she discovered that she had never in her life experienced what anger truly could be before that moment. It filled her power core, kicked her ventilation fans into high speed, pressurized her coolant system, and drowned out the principal's stern reminder to both her and the man across from her when first he stood up, and Kathy did too.

Perhaps it was because she was a reploid, born already adult into a world with more nuances than could possibly have been preloaded into her; perhaps the designers had weighted her personality a little too far towards protection and not enough towards prudence; or maybe Kathy was just irregular from the start in some way that had escaped quality and safety checks.

Three people walked into her classroom. One ran out, hands covered in blood, horrified.

So that's how it happens, she thought. I couldn't imagine what could drive someone to snap and harm a weaker being until I was already doing it. Oh, no. No. I've done something awful. I can't fix this. Reploids don't get second chances.

But why do humans? Kathy asked herself. They didn't even send anyone to his house to check on his boy. They'd shoot me for what he did. They will shoot me for what I did. This isn't fair. Nothing about this is fair. What do I do? What do I do?

There was only one way to deal with a reploid who had gone Maverick, and Kathy knew this.

There was only one way out for a Maverick, and she knew this too.

Kathy ran.

With nothing but the clothes on her back, a bag of school books and ungraded papers, and blood on her hands, she fled in a thoughtless panic until her thermal limiters kicked on and she slowed to a halt at the great black wall dividing the city into the living and the dead. And why not? she thought. If I stay here, I'm dead. If I run into there…I'm still as good as dead, but if I can hide for long enough…maybe…

She didn't know what came after that 'maybe,' but it had to be better than being deactivated on sight. The Hunters surely had been notified by now. Kathy had left both the boy's father and her principal in no shape to do much but call for help and hope it arrived, but whatever headstart she'd managed would not last. It might already have run out. But if she could get over that wall, where she'd been told to never go because it was nothing but a destroyed and dangerous mess, she could hide there, and…not die, somehow.

Right?

Honestly, she had no idea. She was four and a half years old. Her own students were older than she was, and now that she was staring up at the quarantine wall, she realized she'd done exactly what any of them would have done. Maybe something even more childish.

But little human children weren't obliged to follow the Three Laws, of course. They were tiny, weak, couldn't do much damage even if they wanted to. They didn't need a structure like that to prevent them from doing harm. She was a mere three times stronger than an adult human, built for maternal instinct and caretaking. Not combat. And yet, her bare hands were more than enough to…Kathy shuddered. She'd tried to kill someone. Maybe she had succeeded. She wasn't sure how much damage it took to deactivate a human, and she hadn't stuck around to find out. Even now, if she had to do it over again, she couldn't have promised that she wouldn't do the same thing a second time. There must have been something terribly, deeply broken in her, she thought. There was no going back, only forward, and forward meant…forward.

The realization that she didn't have a choice solidified her nerve and steadied her hands. Whatever the case, she had a direction to move, and she could follow directions. Kathy straightened her shoulders, tightened her bag's strap over her chest, picked a rough spot, and began to climb.

In total, she fell twice on the outer side of the wall, and once, rather finally, on the inner side. She was not at all designed for this kind of activity. The most strenuous thing she was built to do was play with children on a playground, and playgrounds did not involve twenty-meter rock-climbing walls without a harness. Once her sensors stopped screaming warnings and she determined that she wasn't so broken that movement would deactivate her, Kathy drew a deep breath, let it out at a temperature that could have cooked an egg, and dragged herself to her feet. It was getting dark now, and she heard sirens in the far distance. She couldn't stop moving. Not here, not yet.

Early Childhood Educator Model K2380.F spent three days and nights, by her internal clock's count, crawling through pitch-black maintenance conduits, moving in the straightest line she could estimate away from the wall. Whether or not she had pursuers, she couldn't be certain, and because she couldn't be certain, she couldn't afford to stop fleeing. Most of her injuries self-repaired well enough, though she was painfully aware that the synthetic skin on the side of her face had not recovered well from having partly braked her fall down the wall, and probably would not; skin was a delicate ordeal, usually dealt with by simply replacing it.

Kathy would not have that luxury, she realized suddenly, at the end of night three. This, all of this, was forever, until she stopped functioning. Worst of all, she couldn't even apologize. She had liked her principal. He was a good man, and he had always had her back. She didn't need to have hurt him, too. Why had she done that?

Kathy laid on the floor and cried until she ran out of optical solution, and then cried some more.

It was not until towards the end of day four that she found the mental fortitude to uncurl from the floor of the maintenance tunnel and begin moving again. If she was going to die, Kathy decided, it was not going to be here, in the dark, listening to water dripping and the occasional distant groan of stressed steel and concrete. At least she would get to the surface before giving up. Eventually.

She did, at last. Though she'd become more or less adept at avoiding larger obstacles like cave-ins and flooded sections by sound and touch, Kathy had bumped into what she'd determined in the dark was a door handle, and to her surprise, it turned. The door opened onto a staircase, pitch black like everything else, but at the distant top of the stairwell she could see a dark gray square. The stairwell stank of stagnant rainwater, and it was the most wonderful thing she'd ever smelled.

A new warning blipped past her field of vision: her energy was running critically low. Kathy would regenerate an amount of it on her own, slowly, but she would need sunlight and time. Unless she could find a recharge pod that still worked and had a power supply…that didn't seem too likely, but…she couldn't possibly be the only reploid here. And if there were other reploids, they would have to have some kind of power supply.

Whatever the case, if she ran out of power here, she'd never even get the sunlight necessary to self-charge. Kathy hustled up the stairs, forgetting to be cautious about whether or not they could hold her weight. For the first time in her short life since production and activation, she understood what claustrophobia felt like. She emerged into a cloudy predawn, in the unceremonious ruin of a small concrete-block building whose metal sheet roof had been mostly slagged, leaving a spray of melted gobs of metal across the poured concrete floor. The fence around the facility was largely intact, so she decided this would have to be safe enough.

Kathy unstrapped the bag she still carried, out of habit and some vague notion that her sense of self was somehow contained in it. She dropped it on the ground, unbuttoning her torn and bloodied blouse and tossing it over the bag. Her chassis was nothing exciting anyway, even unclothed. They'd designed her to look friendly and human-like enough to work with children, but not in the least racy. Her synthetic skin ended in a neat V-shaped neckline, and below that was simple plating, painted a pale pink and scuffed heavily from her slides down the wall. Exhausted, she settled onto her bag as a pillow and surrendered to sleep mode, in desperate need of a good defragmenting.

It had not been but a few hours by her internal clock when she roused suddenly to the sound of someone's voice. Kathy blinked, eyes adjusting to the midday sun as her processes reluctantly unsuspended. A silhouette hung over her, black against the brightness. Optical sensors struggled and failed to compensate for the contrast, leaving her blinking up and squinting in bleary-eyed confusion.

"Hey, lady, get up. You can't just slow charge here, they'll see you." Whoever it was, she didn't recognize him and he clearly wasn't apprehending her, or even threatening her for that matter. Even so, the instant she could move again she shot to a sitting position, gripping her bag in both arms and staring wild-eyed as she scuttled backwards away from the man. "You the one they're talking about on the radio? Mauled a couple of humans pretty good?"

Kathy hesitated a few moments more. Now that she had a better angle, she could see that he was tall, built heavily and painted a businesslike gray, with high-vis orange around his limbs and torso, and a few flecks of scratched-off paint that had likely been some corporate logo on his left shoulder piece. "They're talking about me? I-I mean," she stammered, and then checked herself before she could say anything more incriminating.

Whoever he was, he sighed. "Yeah, 's what I figured, you're new. Well, good job gettin' out in one piece, but the Hunters are due to sweep this area any second and you're gonna stick out like a beacon, 'cause you're probably carryin' an actual beacon. You de-trackered?"

"De-trackered?" she echoed.

"Oh, boy. Come downstairs with me, quick, before you bring 'em all down on us. Let's get that shit outta you." He didn't even wait for her to agree, he simply grabbed her arm and began walking at a clip that left her scrabbling to get to her feet.

"Now hold on a second, who are you, anyway?" Kathy demanded, though meekly, as she tried to sling her bag back over her shoulder without dropping the shirt still draped over it. "I can walk just fine."

"Good. Ain't always the case." He let go of her arm, but didn't slow his stride, hustling down the stairs with a speed she couldn't quite match. "Hauser-Shitamachi Construction Unit HSC56651253. Technically, anyway. Just go by Hammer, anymore, it's easier and I never did like what they named me. So you oughta be Early Childhood Educator Model K2380.F 'Kathy,' right? You're all over the damn news, y'know."

Kathy's internals approximated the feeling of trying to descend into her foot housing. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone," she said, quietly.

"Coulda fooled me, from what the news is sayin', but I know that feelin' too well. Keep up, we don't got time. You ain't had your tracker out yet, you're detectable 'til around fifty meters down, or until you hit the maint tunnels. Goddamn Faraday cage in there, what with all the pipes and wires."

She hustled to keep pace, but she had scarcely recharged at all and her systems were already trying to enforce power-save mode, rendering her slower than Hammer clearly wanted her to move. "Hang on, I can't," she protested, energy split between walking and talking. "I'm only at six percent, just—give me a second to catch up—" She was cut off by Hammer unceremoniously picking her up and slinging her over one shoulder without breaking stride. Kathy might as well have been nothing more than a sack of apples to him.

"Now you can't walk? Make up your mind," he chided, though not unkindly. His mood seemed to have softened once they got out of direct line of sight of the sky. They arrived back in the tunnels. A pair of lights mounted on his chest clicked on. "Dunno how you got as far as you did in the dark, unless you got a flashlight in that bag."

"No," she admitted. "I just…kept going, I guess?" He kicked the door shut behind him with a rugged foot, then carried her through the maze of corridors to what had been a pump room. Machinery still lined one wall, locked behind a fence that had been neatly clipped open and rolled aside. Hammer set her down.

"Whew, lady. You got some real ball bearings, getting this far in the dark by yourself. But let's get that tracker deactivated before anything else," he said, nodding towards an old chair with a vinyl cushion, split apart and duct-taped back together by some prior owner. The back had snapped off at some point. "Sit. Won't take long."

Kathy sat, still feeling dazed. "I didn't even know I had a tracker." Hammer tapped along her left shoulder blade's plating, as if listening for something.

"Yeah, you wouldn't. They don't like us knowing how to turn 'em off. Shit's usually real hidden in the schema—"

"Language," she said, automatically, then realized the absurdity of her reaction. "...I-I mean…sorry, it's a habit." Hammer paused in his inspection, raising an eyebrow, and she feared suddenly that she had angered him. After the initial surprise, though, he burst into a short but genuine bark of laughter.

"Sorry, miss, you don't get outta construction with your vocab intact," he chuckled, returning to whatever he was doing. "I gotta mind my manners better than I have been. Just been a while since I actually talked to anyone. You really were a teacher, huh?"

"That's right. I work at Abel Public Kindergarten 21—I-I mean, I, I worked there, before I…"

"Keep talkin', alright? This might sting a little bit, but it ain't too bad. Usually." Hammer picked something up behind her. "Just tell me anything you can focus on, don't matter too much what."

"It's going to—right, um, I taught kindergarten, I had seven classes, I worked with three other reploids and ten humans, and we aaugh," she exclaimed as something sharp sank through her synthetic skin and slid right between the subdermal plates of her chassis.

"Shh, don't move, you're alright, just keep talkin' about your school. I wanna hear everything about it."

Kathy's hands balled into fists in the fabric of her torn skirt, but she held as still as she could. "Th-there was a-a slide on the playground that looked like an elephant and we had a little garden with zinnias and tomatoes and Class 1 had a pet hermit crab and Class 2 had a pet hamster and Class 3 had a oh God what are you doing to me they had a-a-a little black corn snake that most of the children were so afraid of and Class 4 didn't have a p-p-pet because they had a, a, aaaaah a hamster too and it got old and passed away and we had a whole lesson about d-d-death even though I don't know anything about death either I'm only four and a half years old please I can't do this there's so many warnings and it hurts so much," she sputtered, beginning to tremble as red and yellow messages flashed overwhelmingly in her mind.

"Read 'em to me," Hammer said, and she heard him pick up something else, which pushed through her skin. She felt ill, which was still a novel experience, though one that she could have lived without.

"Warning six thousand thirty four, sensory systems, dorsal synthetic skin region B twenty—"

"Nah, skip the damage reports. System warnings, that's what we want. New ones especially, any of 'em you don't recognize." The pain in her back spiked higher, and she went blind under the overwhelming deluge of warnings it brought. What was he doing, dissecting her? Kathy involuntarily thought of dead frogs she'd seen in high school science lessons, pinned open on a silicone mat…which was silly. She didn't contain anything organic at all, unless one got technical about the carbon content of certain steel components, but she'd never really felt pain before and struggled to process it.

"Warning one one zero one zero," she whimpered, "general systems, unidentified error, report to manufacturer—"

"Hah, pay dirt. We got it," Hammer cackled. There was a 'tap' as of a chisel. Something very tiny inside of her went crunch, and the sick feeling she had turned up to eleven. In other circumstances, she'd maybe have analyzed it, but she was getting tired of new experiences. "Now?"

"Alert one one zero one one, general systems, unidentified error, report to manufacturer required by law, contact manufacturer for more details," Kathy managed, somehow forcing herself to not curl into a ball and power down just to escape.

"Got it. Good girl. You did great," Hammer said, pulling whatever tools he had used out from beneath her skin. The relief was immediate and immense, though the pain lingered. "Sorry about that. They buried that shit deeper than I thought on you." One strong hand clapped her on the back, well away from her new incision. "Want it? Yours, technically." He held something out in a pair of makeshift tweezers: a tiny chip, with a trailing antenna wire, hardly thicker than a hair. Kathy took it out of sheer reflex, though she held it distastefully, as if it were a cockroach.

"It…won't self-repair into a new one, right?" she asked, feeling ignorant and more than a little betrayed by her own body.

"Nah. Not removed like that, 's why I pulled it out. Can't fix what's not there, unless you got one of those real crazy new systems, and believe me, you don't. Damn near nobody does," Hammer assured her. "Now, let's get you somewhere you can charge up proper, without calling down the pigs. That took a lot outta you, I know."

Kathy couldn't fathom what swine had to do with anything, but she guessed from context well enough. She was, after all, designed to be a quick enough study to teach subjects she hadn't even experienced herself. "That sounds nice," she agreed, standing. The room seemed farther away than it had a moment ago, and she tried to ask about that, but she couldn't quite get her thoughts to compile. Everything had gone quiet and remote, and she was very heavy.

Her mind's eye lit up with a pretty constellation of low power alerts. She'd never seen so many. They came in so many colors, she thought.

"You good, there?" asked Hammer.

"I feel," Kathy ventured, "like I am going to," and then she tipped over forwards, slowly, eyes still half-open but unresponsive, as she clicked into emergency power save mode, and Hammer caught her.

Chapter Text

The sun had climbed high into the sky and begun its descent by the time X detected any signs of life beyond the occasional bird. Even then, they were subtle, and nothing visible to the naked eye or indeed the aided eye: he picked up, very faintly, half of a diagnostic code transmission.

Reploids had been designed to live and work among humans, and therefore were designed with a roughly human capacity for communication. It did not promote trust and respect, after all, if certain members of the population could easily speak on a wavelength that the rest could not even physically process. Accordingly, reploids with true wireless communications were unusual and tended to work only in very specific fields.

However, reploids were still machines, and with that territory came an entire encyclopedia of potential error codes one might throw. For ease of maintenance, the compromise was made, based on X's own systems and input, that even the most basic of reploids had a short-range diagnostic broadcast system, using a fairly standardized syntax. The idea was that even should speech be incapacitated, they could still easily and wirelessly answer queries for repair purposes.

And yet, reploids were also people, and when given an inch, people creatively made a mile out of it. It didn't take long at all for an entire reploid language to evolve from the error code list called, suitably enough, >I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. It wasn't illegal, though it was frowned upon by all sorts of authorities. Of course that had never yet stopped a subculture, and it was no more effective with this one. Seeing a huddle of reploids snickering about something with no evident speech between them was not an uncommon occurrence, and despite the evident dryness of the language, there existed no shortage of euphemisms, expletives, and wordplay inherent to it.

For his part, while X had always found himself on the side of having to lecture recruits to knock it off, he was inwardly proud of his technological offspring. It was a good system, and some of the phrases they'd come up with were impressively clever. And yet, because of his position and notoriety, while he'd heard it being spoken no shortage of times, he'd only rarely used it himself, and had never really gained much fluency in it.

X didn't respond yet. For one, he didn't think it likely that anyone would hear him. His sensitivity was far and away higher than any standard production model's would be. If he was hearing only partial snippets, most other reploids would hear nothing at all. Secondly, he didn't want them to spook at a sudden interloper, especially one with unusual capabilities. He simply kept sharp and listened.

'>I.40011-LOG: Argument expected. W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected. E.04642-SYS: Failure to compile.'

'>I.00012-LOG: Null statement. E.00986-NRG: Polarity reversed, check connectors. I.11111-INT: Self-awareness bootup process stage 1 initiated. I.75002-DIR: Action succeeded. W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected. I.75090-DIR: Action queued. W.57823-SEN: Cranial crown plate damaged.'

X couldn't help but smile faintly. He had stumbled into a playful argument. As a high-context language, he couldn't determine the specifics without more eavesdropping, but it was apparent that two people were attempting to follow directions given to them by a third, and one of them was struggling.

He let himself drop from the scaffold, landing a little jarringly. As long as he was headed downwards, he at least didn't have to worry too much about heights. It was ascending that took so much of his focus…even if his legs did protest the landing strenuously. The three-point landing served him well in situations like this. Once he had regained as much of his sense of balance as he ever had, X determined in which direction the signals were stronger and headed that way.

The argument continued as he walked. >W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected. seemed to be a name. Reploids adopted, or frequently were given, code names that amounted to call signs. Generally they were one or two codes long, though he'd once known a recruit that ended up with the unfortunate and unwieldy moniker of >E.00404-SYS: File not found. W.00142-SEN: Damage detected, left gluteal plate. W.00143-SEN: Damage detected, right gluteal plate. I.09076-LOG: Hypothetical. W.56773-CHS: Attachment failed. W.00152-CHS: Left gluteal plate detached. W.00153-CHS: Right gluteal plate detached. In short, he could not have found his own backside if it weren't attached to him, badly enough that he'd been given the entire sentiment as a title.

His own had ended up being >I.60011-LOG: Unknown variable., when nobody thought he was listening. It was accurate enough, but maybe a little on the nose, he'd always thought.

X didn't particularly hide his approach, keeping close to the buildings but not bothering to conceal his footsteps. From the air he would have been a tough visual target. From the ground, he was visibly a lone reploid with a tarp over his head and nothing in the way of defenses. Of course, from the air, any number of other senses would have picked him up instantly, but visual was still the easiest and primary one to look out for during sweeps. Infrared picked up as many forgotten bodies and pieces of scrap warmed in the sun as it did functional reploids, and while electromagnetic sensor arrays worked best, for the majority of reploids it wasn't useful from more than a few tens of meters, and less than that if they suspected they were being watched and suppressed noisier processes.

The other players in the argument seemed to be named >I.47860-CHS: Protective headgear affixed. and >W.20234-SYS: Unexpected behavior. More ominously, the both of them made reference to someone, evidently their superior, with the nickname of >E.10104-TLR: Conflict detected. That last one was a troubling name for someone who'd presumably fled authorities. TLR was the short code for the 'Three Laws of Robotics' category of errors. While encountering a conflict was nothing unusual, and indeed depending on their role a reploid might encounter hundreds of such conflicts a day, being named after such a thing…X would need to be careful. Whoever they were, they were likely irregular, if not even…

X shook his head. The capital-v Virus was basically eradicated, finally and for good this time. Any reploid claiming the label of Maverick for themselves now was undoubtedly irregular and almost certainly violent, but not likely to be actually infected with anything that dangerous. Its code had been fully analyzed and reliable methods of recoding the infected finally existed, and while viruses happened, the Maverick Virus was largely a thing of the past. The label of Maverick now existed mainly as shorthand to categorize a reploid as violent, dangerous, or criminal beyond what the lesser label of irregular would imply.

Whoever was bold enough to go around with a name like that was not likely, these days, to be a threat on any scale with which he needed to concern himself. Truthfully, even just being out here without specific orders and official permission made a reploid irregular, by definition.

Then again, considering that he was here on little more than a personal favor and unofficial permission that amounted to looking the other way…Upon second thought, that raised more questions than he felt like dealing with at the moment, and he put the whole concept of irregularity out of his mind.

When he decided he was close enough to be read, X interjected a statement of his own into the conversation. '>I.40114-SYS: Interrupt. W.04877-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters. I.34100-COM: Identification sent. I.34101-COM: Identification requested.' Or, in roughly human-detectable speech, "Sorry for interrupting. My name is [vertigo]. Who are you?" He had decided on the spur of the moment to adopt a new call sign, just in case, and his most visible feature was exactly what it sounded like it was, making it an easy pick. Anybody could have assigned X that name with minimal information about him.

The idle wireless chatter stopped dead. X waited patiently. Nobody would have expected an outsider to show up in a place like this. He didn't have direct line of sight to them, nor could they see him, but he had determined they were in a building that had escaped the majority of the destruction surrounding it, at least structurally. In its day, it had been an office building, the first floor lined with shops and restaurants, as well as a lobby leading to the upper floors. Now, the first floor's windows had shattered, but the rest of the building stood.

Eventually, someone responded. '>I.00910-GEN: Acknowledged. I.47860-CHS: Protective headgear affixed. I.34100-COM: Identification sent. I.34018-COM: Awaiting signal.'

Well, that was promising. He was talking to [helmet], and they were willing to hear him out. X continued. '>E.78900-SYS: Organic residue. E.34323-DIR: Search already running. W.00016-NRG: Battery at sixteen percent.' he explained. 'Organic residue' was, entertainingly or concerningly depending on one's point of view, slang for a human. Thus, he was looking for someone, specifically a human, because there was no nonspecific singular term for 'person' in code. Then, because he wouldn't have trusted himself if their situation were reversed, X added, 'I.20019-SYS: No armament equipped.'

[Helmet] had been terse so far, but now responded with a flurry of messages. '>There are no humans here, if that's what you're looking for, but if you're really unarmed and need a recharge, let's have you step around to the front door and we'll get a look at you and decide from there,' the unknown reploid responded…more or less.

It took X a few moments to translate that to himself. He responded with a simple, '>I.00910-GEN: Acknowledged.' He made his way to the blown-out glass front of the building, eyeing its revolving doors jammed with debris before using his cane to pick a careful path through a more accessible side door that had thankfully been blocked open by a fallen planter.

The inside of the lobby wasn't as damaged as one might have expected. A massive chandelier still hung from the high ceiling, many of its crystals strewn across the tiled floor. A fire had destroyed most of the front desks, but evidently it hadn't spread far. Black streaks of char scored the paneled walls and the windows had exploded inwards from some outside explosion, but the floor was unbroken, and the stairs to the second floor mezzanine remained intact. Something moved on the second floor, and X looked up, the motion causing him to grip his cane a little more tightly.

"Doesn't look that scary," said a hushed but masculine voice, with the faintest face of a Japanese accent. "What do you think?"

"We could take him, if we had to," the other voice said, output volume low. It sounded synthesized and mechanical, like old robots in fiction from hundreds of years ago, before they were commonplace. "I'm not worried. And we got what we came for already anyway. We could head back."

The human-like male voice spoke up. "Well, Dizzy, or Vertigo, or whoever you are, what do we call you out loud? And who are you even looking for? There aren't any humans out here that I've ever seen."

X spoke, feeling rusty at even this much interaction. "Just V works," he declared, making a snap decision. "I can explain more when I've got somewhere to sit…I'm not very steady on my feet." He made a vague gesture with his cane, the tip of it never leaving the ground.

"V? Short and sweet. I can respect that. Name's Glitch." The reploid swung himself up and over the second floor railing, softening his landing with a quick burst of matter repulsors that X guessed had been cobbled into his feet well after his creation. He was not tremendously tall, though he was several inches taller than X, nor was he very powerfully-built. His frame was that of an intel reploid, not a heavy worker, and he had black hair that had once upon a time probably been straight, though it had since been frazzled by heat and stuck out in all directions. He'd been repainted several times as well, if the multicolored and layered chips across his plates were any indication, though his most recent coat was a mostly-intact racing green for his plating, over a charcoal outer skin that seemed to still be its original color. He was a new design, too, with individual segmented plates instead of the chunky armor that many reploids sported. X wondered how old he might have been. Not more than ten years, he guessed.

"Showoff," the digitized voice still hidden up on the mezzanine muttered. The sound of footsteps circled around to the more intact of the two staircases, hidden behind an opaque barrier from railing to floor.

"You new here? Or just new here?" Glitch asked, emphasizing the 'here,' but he leaned into X's personal space and squinted, then answered his own question before X could speak. "Oh, you're all scuffed up. I've never seen synth skin weathered like that. Never mind, stupid question, you've been around the block. What do you want with a human, though? I haven't seen any this far out here in a long time. You really wander all this way just for some meatbag?"

X bit his tongue momentarily. 'Meatbag' had never struck him as an acceptable thing to say, but he wasn't going to pick an argument about it. "I still have a few friends on the other side. They thought he might have come out here, so they asked me to look for him. They thought it might have been an urban exploration trip or similar."

Glitch snorted derisively, straightening. "I'm sure fucking around in a blown-to-hell city is fun when it's not your entire life. Ah, don't mind me, I'm not bitter or anything. Hey, Mack. Say hi to V, here. V, this is my buddy, Mack." He made a grandiose gesture, and X automatically looked over…only to not see anyone.

"Down here," the synthesized voice said, from around ankle-height. X looked down.

"You're a C-15 Mettaur," he remarked in surprise, the words escaping before he could quite stop them. He hadn't seen one of those since the beginning of the Maverick War, not quite a hundred years past.

Mack laughed, a strange, monotone bark of a sound. "Ha. I like this guy. He knows his antiques." Sure enough, Mack was not much more than a spherical black robot in a hard-hat styled helmet, painted yellow. Some of its paint had flaked with time and exposure, leaving bare metal. It had two yellow feet, two round eyes on the front, a battery pack in the back, and, X knew, several small interchangeable tools tucked away within the protective helmet, depending on its intended task.

Glitch slapped X on the shoulder. "Well, if Mack likes you, you must be okay. And you even know what model it is right off the top of your head, that's impressive. Come on, ask me how it's still functional. Or ask it, doesn't matter."

X wobbled dangerously from the friendly gesture, catching himself by planting his cane a little more firmly. "That would be rude. Unless…do you want me to ask that?" He glanced down at Mack, uncertain.

"Go ahead, he won't stop until he gets to tell the story. But doesn't V need a recharge still? We should take care of that," Mack reminded Glitch, with a pointed look. For an orb without a real face to speak of, just round eyes, simple eyelids, and a speaker port for a mouth, it had an impressive range of expression.

"Right. Yes. That. This way." Glitch turned and began walking deeper into the building, with an absentminded 'follow me' sort of wave behind him. X kept up as best he could, though he caught himself listing to one side in his rush. "Yeah, so! Mack, here, it was in a museum. Which is kinda fucked up, right? The only Mettaur model to be made with full awareness and emotional processing—which is kinda fucked up to begin with, that's a lotta weight to put on a little thing without even thumbs—and here they got the last intact one on display like a paperweight."

"Thumbs are overrated," Mack interjected.

Glitch took a sudden right turn into an empty doorway, its door long ago ripped from its hinges and flung to the rear of the room behind it. X caught the door frame with one hand and waited a moment to regain his balance, but Glitch didn't slow down. "So I thought, well, that's not right, displaying this poor thing like it's not a person. So I had a nice chat with the security system and told it that I was Mack's new owner, and walked right out with it."

"Just like that?" X asked, as he realized he was going to have the rest of the story told at him regardless, but reacting a little at the obvious pause for reaction seemed polite. At least Glitch had also paused on his way to…wherever he was leading them, giving X time to catch up. He didn't seem like he could walk without talking, nor could he walk or talk at any speeds other than 'full speed ahead' or 'dead stop.'

"Well, you know. In the middle of the night. And I told the system to just forget I was there, and it did, but alas," Glitch paused and put a hand on his chest, all melodrama for a moment. "Mack's a damn bowling ball, so it was pretty obvious that I had it in my backpack on the outside cameras on a whole other circuit that I didn't realize I'd missed. Still took them a whole hour to identify me, but then they tried pinging my tracker, and it didn't respond, so that got the whole Hunter precinct after me, and I got the hell outta there. You'd think I walked out with something valuable," he said. The roll of Mack's eyes was almost audible.

X followed him into a service corridor and down some stairs. "So…you came out here to get away from them?" he asked.

"Hah! No. Not for a while, anyway. I changed my identity and just kept going. It's not that hard, the cops are a bunch of idiots, the Hunters are a bunch of idiots too, and I mean, how am I gonna reactivate Mack if I don't have my workbench? It needed a lotta work after all that time sitting there. You wouldn't believe how many caps I had to replace in it, never mind every single rubberized polymer piece that had melted into gunk. They don't maintain things like you'd hope, for a reploid museum."

It occurred to X that the reason Glitch had eventually been found out was possibly less an actual security mistake, and more an overwhelming need to tell every single bystander he met everything interesting he'd ever done.

"Ah. And that's why Mack is here," X said, with a nod. "Reactivated after retirement?"

"I was never activated in the first place," Mack grumbled. Somehow. Its tone was still the same monotone as it always was, but it managed to convey an essential sort of grumbly-ness all the same. "Nothing illegal about that."

"Yeah, tell that to the Hunters," said Glitch. "The museum logged you as dead, you're legally dead, the end. I almost got busted for booting up a brand new reploid like they do a thousand times a day in the factory. But I didn't! But then later they started connecting some other dots and they found everything else I'd gotten into. It was a good run, so it was a really interesting list, and they showed up at my door, but I was already gone. So then since I was kinda getting cornered I had a nice chat with some of the old security doors that run under the wall, and they were stupid enough that they actually listened when I told them to forget we talked." He led all three of them downstairs. X took the steps slowly, one hand on his cane, one on the railing, while Glitch fairly bounced down. "Speaking of security doors and under the ground and all, welcome to the tunnels. Can't recommend wandering around aimlessly, though, you could lose important parts that way. Just so you know."

Mack, who had to take the stairs one at a time with its lack of actual legs, released an annoyed pinging sound. "You're leaving V in your dust. And me," it said, punctuating itself with a broadcast, '>E.04642-SYS: Failure to compile.' in Glitch's general direction.

This was all it took to fuel another competitive, friendly argument between the two, entirely in a rapid-fire exchange of rude system codes. X simply let them at it. He had to admit it was nice in a way to watch people just interact with each other, even if one of them came up to his knee at the most if it stood up completely straight, and the other was gleefully Maverick, self-modified, and probably overclocked, if X had to guess.

X kept pace as best he could, but despaired a little when they came to an open, dark space in the tunnels. Mack had built-in eye lights and Glitch had a flashlight in his fingertip, which was fortunately more than enough light for X to be able to see; less fortunately, the service tunnel had collapsed into a much larger subway tube beneath it, and the temperature gradient was so flat that thermal imaging wasn't helpful. X didn't want to spend the energy on IR if he could avoid it. While many reploids had night vision, they were often military spec, and he didn't want to give the wrong impression.

Someone had kindly banged together some scrap into rudimentary steps on both sides of the gap. Climbing down was simple enough with gravity and his cane on his side, but climbing back up the other side with no hand railing made X wish he could have simply jumped the gap and been done with it.

Glitch scurried ahead, leaving his new companion on the uneven steps. Mack cleared its throat, or more accurately, played a sound effect of someone clearing their throat. When Glitch didn't even turn to look, Mack played it three more times, without waiting for the sound to entirely finish before looping it.

Glitch finally glanced back. "What—right. Here." He stepped forward, leaned, braced, and held out one hand.

X blinked at it, then up at Glitch.

"Well? Dunno how you do where you're from, but around here, we help each other. C'mon, we don't have all day." He wiggled the slender fingers of his proffered hand impatiently until X took it, Glitch steadying him the rest of the way up. He had surprisingly warm hands, X thought, probably from running hot if he was overclocking.

"Thanks," X said. He couldn't remember the last time someone had offered him a hand solely because he needed one, without looking at him with pity. Or…no, he could, on second thought, but it was too long ago, and too much to think about.

He must have been making some expression, because Glitch looked at him for several moments in puzzlement before seeming to remember they had a destination. "We got ground to cover still, let's get going. Mack, you head on the short way and let everyone know we got someone on the way." He spun on his heel and took off, rounding corners a little too quickly for X to stay steady. The C-15 unit simply gave a nod and took off into a much smaller crawlspace that, likely not coincidentally given the general purpose of its entire design lineage, it fit into perfectly.

Glitch seemingly figured out how to keep his mouth closed while still actuating his feet, because he remained quiet for some time, leading X through a maze of tunnels. It occurred to X that his new friend might in fact be trying to get him lost, and also that it might actually work. He did more or less automatically track his location, but he had become accustomed to doing it via visible networks and satellite position, and he couldn't be sure that his distance estimations were correct anymore since he couldn't keep his legs calibrated. He had a rough idea of where they had been, but if it came to it, he'd be lost in the featureless dark for quite some time on low power if Glitch completely abandoned him here.

And right on cue, he wobbled around a corner that he knew Glitch had taken, and the other reploid was nowhere to be seen aside from a vague cloud of rapidly fading heat. X ground to a halt, looking around in the dark and wondering if he should risk switching on infrared. When the attack came, it was so fast that even though he'd been half-expecting something, his balance system completely failed to compensate. Hands gripped his clothing by the shoulders, twisting into it to tighten the grasp and reduce the range of motion in his arms, and flung him face-first into the reinforced concrete wall like a ragdoll, holding him there. His cane clattered to the floor, and the weight of a half-overheated chassis pressed into his back.

"Alright, V, let's hear it. Who are you and what are you really doing here?" Glitch's voice came from just next to X's left ear.

X didn't even bother struggling. He could have torn out of his jacket, reinforced though it was. Even without being able to track which way was up, he could have still tracked which way was Glitch, and that was more important. The other reploid emitted enough heat to light up like a beacon, now that he wasn't hiding behind something as he probably had been. By the time Glitch had finished speaking, X had already calculated six ways to disassemble him as neatly as a surgeon, compensating for his lack of balance, his low power, Glitch's estimated speed and strength…and he did none of them. That it was still such a deeply-ingrained reflex made X feel a little sick to his circuits.

"I'm an ex-Hunter," he admitted. It was essentially true, if an incredible understatement.

"Oh? Heard that one before. Deactivated one or two before, too. What'd you do to end up out here?" Glitch twisted X's jacket a little more tightly.

"I quit."

"Do you ever put more than three words together?" Glitch prompted, exasperated. X could hear the faint whine of the other reploid's systems under load, and wondered how many years off the end of his lifespan Glitch was burning, running at the speed that he did.

"I'm an older model. There's too much going wrong with me to fix. They don't even make the parts now. I never even liked fighting. I just thought I had to. I'm tired, Glitch," X explained, the word erupting from him as a plea, more forcefully than he'd intended. "I just wanted out. Somewhere I would be left alone." None of it was a lie. It wasn't the whole story, but stripped of the details, it was in the same shape as the truth.

Something in X's tone must have given Glitch pause, because he stopped twisting, at least. "Doesn't explain what you're doing poking around out here. Who's the meatbag? The one you said you're looking for, I mean."

"I only ever wanted to help people. That was why I joined the Hunters in the first place, and they have jurisdiction to look for missing people in the quarantine zone. He's one of those. Just some human with no sense. They had him on camera once, back outside the wall, and they picked up his phone location inside it, but he's a low-risk case so they couldn't officially spare anyone to go look. I volunteered. But like I said, I quit the Hunters. I don't care who else is out here or what they're doing. It's not my problem."

Glitch leaned on X a little harder. His cheek pressed uncomfortably into the rough concrete, metal cheekbone grinding it in further. X had to admit, privately at least, that he had gravely underestimated the other's strength. Glitch could do him some serious damage, if he decided to, and he wouldn't have been able to do much for it short of…well, he didn't want to do that. That was his last resort, and he only had one shot at it.

Besides, it wouldn't work. He had dropped his cane. Ridiculous mistake on his part, but his hands didn't always work as well as they used to.

"You know," Glitch said, much more conversationally now, "most reploids actually react when someone slams them into the wall and threatens them? Like tense up or something, at least? But you, I think you relaxed."

X chuckled bitterly. "If you really wanted to scrap me, you'd have just done it." And I might have let you, he thought, unbidden, but swallowed the notion back down.

Glitch considered this silently for several more moments, before lowering his voice coyly. "Could be I was waiting to make sure you wouldn't be missed. And you wouldn't be, would you, if you didn't come back from your little trip?"

X shrugged, as much as he could with his arms restrained half behind his back. "These days? They wouldn't even know where to look for me. I'll run myself out doing this, or something else will finally end me. Either way…I don't really care, as long as it's on my own terms."

Glitch waited a few more moments, processing, then released X so abruptly that X had to grab for the wall with both palms to stay upright. "Hah. You're something else, V. Never seen your make nor model, and you didn't even flinch. But you're telling the truth, I'm pretty sure. That or you're the ice-coldest damn thing I've ever met and we're all fucked. But whatever. I've done my big scary mean Maverick bit. Here, you need this." Glitch clicked his flashlight fingertip back on, bent down, and picked something up from the floor: X's cane. He tossed it into the air with a showy flip, caught it by the handle, and held it out to X.

"That's it, then?" X asked him, glassy green eyes flicking between the cane and Glitch's face. "Are we done trying to spook me?"

"Hah," Glitch laughed again, sharp and short, but it carried a note of apology. "Yeah. Sorry about that. Just doing my shakedown duty if we run into anyone we don't know trying to get friendly. Can't be too careful, right?"

X reached for the cane, not taking his eyes off Glitch. The other reploid let go of it once he was certain X wasn't going to drop it, no further tricks, and X let it settle into the curve of his palm where it fit like an extension of his arm. "I guess you can't, can you?" he agreed, relaxing his guard a little. "But you were going to try to retire me, if you thought I was a threat."

"Oh, definitely. Wouldn't be my first, wouldn't be my last. Nice to not have to, though. You seem alright, even if I do gotta rattle you like an empty can to get you to string together two full sentences." Glitch motioned for X to follow, and while he still walked a little faster than X liked, he was no longer actively testing him. That was what it had been, X realized belatedly. "Really. An ex-Hunter? You see the Maverick Wars at all?" Glitch continued. Evidently his inability to not produce words at speed was genuine.

"Yeah," replied X. The magnitude of the understatement was completely lost on his conversational partner, and probably for the better.

"Makes installing new parts you found off old donors a pain in the panels. You never know if you're gonna install something fun you took off someone and then boom, you're the next patient zero all over again."

X had to physically pause for a moment to suppress the facial expression working its way through his code. Glitch had a definite inbuilt talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. "At least antivirus has gotten a lot better and they can remove it now."

Glitch pushed a door open, even holding it for X. "Sure, if you wanna turn yourself in, they don't shoot you on sight first, and then you still risk getting lobotomized worse than even the Virus will do. No thanks, I gotta pass. Rather just have someone I trust shut me down if it came to that. But enough of the bleak shit. We're just about there. How's the battery?"

"Bad," X admitted, but soldiered on all the same.

"Well, hang in there, buddy, I'm not gonna carry you." Glitch led him up some access stairs and into the largely intact remains of a parking garage, flanked on three sides by larger buildings that had sheltered it. The fourth side had been open to the street, once upon a time, but that street was now choked with the rubble of the structure that once stood across from it. Most of the opposite building's walls had fallen away, and the frame had been twisted as though by a massive hand and now lay across the pavement, having come to rest through the top floors of the garage. Sun trickled through the gaps, but more importantly, a powered string of lights hung along the ceiling, leading from the picked-clean back office that the stairs exited into and out into the parking garage, where it wound around and through an obviously constructed barricade of piled concrete blocks and salvaged fencing around the ramp to the second level.

Mack met them on the way through the defenses. "Oh, good, you're in one piece," it commented. "Always hate it when they come in disassembled after all. Glitch didn't give you too bad a time, did he?"

X simply shrugged. "I've had worse."

"Boss says plug him in first, they can talk tomorrow," Mack said to Glitch, who turned to X.

"Hey, lucky you, V," Glitch said, giving X a cheeky nudge with his elbow that caused him to grip his cane. "Not real often someone gets to charge up before hardly even saying hi. You take V, he looks like he could just about brown out. I gotta report in and drop these off." Glitch held up his bag for a moment, then dashed off at what X was beginning to think was his preferred speed.

"I just about could brown out," X agreed, following Mack. Beyond the barricades, there was…well, a town was putting it generously, considering the situation, but it was certainly some kind of settlement, however ramshackle.

A floor to ceiling shed of salvaged concrete blocks and mortar provided some noise control for a squat, patched-together generator, built from the remains of several generators of similar enough models that it wouldn't simply explode on the spot. Other buildings were similarly built from anything at hand, largely from found lumber and plywood left over from abandoned rebuilding attempts. Anything that could be dragged in had been put to use: shelves from stores, furniture, scrap, debris…it looked like a home renovation center had been upended into a four-story parking garage and given a good shake, then arranged into small buildings on the basis that if it could be made to stand up, it could be made into a wall. Even so, X noted, everything looked sturdy, as if assembled by someone who knew what they were doing, and it had almost all been painted with a surprising amount of care.

Someone had even made little paintings of flowers along some of the edges, and random murals covered a few surfaces. That was a comforting touch, X thought, wondering who might have done it. It wasn't something he'd expected of a quarantine zone dweller.

The recharging pods had all been put under one roof, even if technically that roof was the garage's roof. There were three, and each of them was a heavily improvised affair, parts mismatched, casing frequently missing or held together with tape. The internal cushioning in the one that Mack pointed X to had been replaced with couch cushions, none of which were the same color. The glass cover was missing from another, and on the two that still had them, the glass had been cracked and heavily patched with clear tape. All three were cordoned off with curtains, though, and an effort had been made to make their little alcoves look comfortable.

"Don't mind how they look, the point is they work just fine," the C-15 assured him in its synthesized monotone. "I use this one all the time myself. It's got a good cable. Number two's starting to disconnect a bit if you wiggle it."

X gratefully sat on the edge and swung his legs around and into it, leaving his cane propped against the wall. He shrugged his tarp and jacket off, hung them from a convenient hook screwed into the wall, and settled into the cushions, fidgeting his shirt out of the way of the charge port in the middle of his back. The cover had a handle screwed into it, as the lift mechanism didn't work, so he pulled it down and settled into the charger with a slight click.

"Defragment if you need to," Mack said. "Nobody will bother you."

"Thank you," X replied, genuinely. He felt as though he should have said more, but he was too tired to decide exactly what. Instead he let his eyes close and his systems switch into sleep mode to defragment his storage and recharge his energy reserves. For one blessed moment, the complete lack of uncalibrated input and related errors just before he fell into defragmentation sleep felt like relief, and then even better, like nothing at all.

Chapter Text

The Toyota Replico Lightspeed line, at its launch, was state-of-the-art. They had spared absolutely no expense on system specs, employing new micro-quantum processing technology for the very first time in an intelligent system. The Lightspeed reploids processed more data than any previous build by a factor of sixty-four, which given the heat constraints that a human-like chassis presented, was unimaginable.

The first ten prototype units were employed by Toyota Robotics in research and development: Ichijiro, Niko, Sanji, Yosuke, Gorou, Mutsuko, Shichi, Youmi, Konoka, and Jusuke, named in order of their creation. It would be quite some time before they could be produced at a reasonable cost, if that time ever really came, but the hope was that their unprecedented mental facilities would lead to massive breakthroughs in affordable quantum computing.

The problem with the Lightspeeds was that they were too smart and too fast. Sanji rapidly developed a reputation in the lab for being volatile and eccentric when someone failed to keep up with his leaps in logic, to such a degree that all of the human researchers and several other reploids avoided him if at all possible. Konoka struggled to communicate with anybody but her siblings and preferred to withdraw quietly into her work, lost in realms of math that didn't question why she spoke so quickly and quietly. Niko couldn't function unless she was inputting multiple entertainment streams at once, and even then she worked on several projects simultaneously, none of them related to each other.

The Lightspeed 1 design was eventually deemed too erratic to send to production at all when all ten of them were found in their shared quarters, together, deactivated. The entire project was hushed up, the files were buried, and the Lightspeed 1 series was consigned to obscurity.

The Lightspeed 2 series was a major downgrade from the Lightspeed 1s, employing cutting-edge but much less esoteric technology. This next generation of reploids was still impressively fast, but not so much so that they fell out of sync with reality itself, which was the prevailing theory on the Lightspeed 1s' apparent mental deterioration.

Lightspeed 2-0094 thought this was a load of bullshit. Maybe reality should get with it and try to keep up, was what he thought. He worked in systems security, a relatively low-ranking reploid in the vast corporate machinery that was Toyota Robotics. They called him Toyota Kujuyousuke, which was simply yet another number-turned-name. He didn't get on with the name, but he privately suspected that they wouldn't take kindly to him self-selecting a name, so he did not bring it up. At least he sorta-kinda had a family name, which was more than many reploids got, even if it was a brand. There were far worse things to be called in the world.

…Even if he was also acutely aware that he had an unlucky enough name, numbers-wise, that his coworkers avoided using it. This may have been part of the reason that he didn't try to change his name. He took a perverse enjoyment in making them just a little uncomfortable at all times.

The corporate life was all that Kujuyousuke knew. At seven AM sharp, he joined his human coworkers in doing stretches, even though he did not particularly need to, he thought. The techs insisted that it was good for keeping his joints lubricated, the same as any biological person. At seven twenty, his office held a morning meeting. At eight, work began. Lunchtime was at twelve, which he frequently took even though he didn't need the break. There was an afternoon meeting at five thirty, which generally lasted an hour, and after that his coworkers often organized dinner and drinks together.

Sometimes he went. Keeping up appearances was important, he'd been told. Once, on a dare from a drunken organic officemate, he'd even downed a beer. The exasperated scolding he'd endured from the tech who had to clean that particular mess up was entirely worth the trouble of the deluge of errors and warnings it had unleashed.

Usually, however, Kujuyousuke went back to his microscopically small apartment in the reploid section of the company housing, where he sat at his computer until the wee hours of the morning, tapping away at the keyboard and escaping.

The problem with being Kujuyousuke, he figured—and he should know, as he was the world's leading and only expert on being Kujuyousuke—was that he operated just quickly enough to know that there were entire realms of speed just beyond his metaphorical fingertips, and he would not have known the definition of 'satisfied' had it been shown to him in multiple languages. And it had been, too: he was fluent in Japanese, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), English, German, Russian, Korean, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Italian, right out of the box. He had designs on trying to learn a few more himself, just to see if he could, but he had a project to see to first.

Well, a project was an understatement. He had an entire quest, not that he had recognized it for what it was from the start. As the Lightspeed 2 series was intended like its predecessors to be immediately reinvested in R&D, Kujuyousuke had been preloaded with a wide base of technological knowledge, including Toyota's entire database on reploid development. His contract maintained that self-modification was off the table, but he did not have enough hours in the day, so his very first task had been to cobble together an extension cable from his recharge pod's jack to his desk, so that he could charge while he poked around. He defragmented less, sure, but he figured he could put that off to every few days with no real lasting harm, and technically speaking, he had not at all modified himself. He could have simply chosen to not enter defragmentation mode. That was entirely legal.

Having found an extra six hours to work with, now, but knowing his employers could track his network activity and lack of normal recharge time, his second project was to set up a method to falsify his vital statistics. This took him about an hour of his first night of extended work time. The rest of the night he devoted to creating a system to cover his network tracks. He wasn't doing anything illegal, strictly speaking, he reasoned; he just didn't want to answer useless questions.

"Well, now what," he said, because in the three years since his manufacture, he'd developed the habit of talking to himself. One of his reploid coworkers had teasingly referred to this quirk as a glitch one day, and he'd decided that obviously the most reasonable course of action was to double down on it. Glitch, indeed. He privately thought he probably was a little bit glitchy. He'd have to be, or he'd have enjoyed the life he had been designed for more than he did. "Six exciting new hours of nightly boredom, every night. What was I even thinking?"

He linked his fingers behind his head and leaned back, spinning this way and that in his chair, wrapping and unwrapping his charging cable around his chair's post. If he could do anything with six extra hours a day, but he could only do it inside a four square meter studio apartment, and he had to be quiet enough not to annoy neighbors into reporting him being awake all night…well, that didn't leave many options, and they were all online.

Eh. Kujuyousuke could handle that. It wasn't like he had much else going on offline. He'd have been happier if he had internal network capabilities, but Toyota had draconian rules about installing that sort of thing into their reploids.

But if he could have done anything, he decided, not aloud just in case, he'd go about learning to install himself some new network hardware. He wouldn't really install it, he assured himself, but it'd be interesting just to learn. Knowledge wasn't illegal, and despite hosting a complete copy of the industry's most comprehensive database about reploid matters right inside his very own head, it was mysteriously silent on self-modification techniques.

A week later, he held in his hands a slender box, containing a single piece of gray-market hardware: just a little printed board, nothing special-looking. He worked with similar all day, he told himself, opening it a little squeamishly. It was, after all, something like an internal organ, and he wondered how much of that notion he'd learned from working with biologicals who tended to discuss reploid bodies in organic terms versus how much was inbuilt. "Yeah, that sure lasted long," he scolded himself under his breath, even as he connected it to his computer. He had a lot of security countermeasures to load before he even considered installing such a thing.

Not that he was actually considering installing it. That would actually be illegal, no wiggling out of it no matter how competent his mental gymnastics. No, definitely not. This was research. He was researching. Completely innocent.

The next week after that saw him writing carefully-hidden manual code overrides so that he could deactivate his damage sensors. Self-installing hardware in a mirror was going to be hard enough without his body screaming pain at him about it. "Melodramatic bullshit," he mumbled, left leg twitching with confused reflexes and twinges of discomfort as he experimentally activated and deactivated sensors in it. "Oughta find whoever decided pain had to hurt and use them as a test model."

Kujuyousuke went to work and came home and stared at the new hardware, inconspicuous in its nondescript cardboard box, and spun in his chair and talked to himself and stared at the new hardware some more.

Imagine being able to type at the speed of thought, he thought. That would be pretty neat.

Imagine getting caught because you forgot to dampen your signal, he also thought. Imagine getting black iced. Imagine catching a virus from some other system and having to explain yourself. Imagine going stark raving Maverick because you couldn't resist connecting your brain to some stupid dark web shit and some psycho better at comsec than you uploaded his entire mind into yours.

Yeah, but imagine being able to type at the speed of thought, he thought.

…Okay, fine, I'm imagining it, he thought.

And? he thought.

And it is pretty neat, he thought, begrudgingly.

It took him a few more nights to screw up enough courage to do it. Even then, he reassured himself that he could un-cross this line any time he felt like. If he could install it, he could uninstall it, easy, revert his code changes, and he'd be fresh as a clean factory reset. Not that reploids had factory resets, but still. Kujuyousuke had all the knowledge for how to work on any standard Toyota reploid and most other makes besides, but he had no experience, and he felt that quite keenly as he eased the fasteners open and removed his chest panel in his bathroom mirror.

Well, he thought, slotting the new card in and soldering a few new connections with a hand steadied by nothing less than terror, if I die, I die, and they'll be telling stories for years about the guy who soldered himself to death in the bathroom, so at least it'll be funny.

Reploids were not generally designed to add new hardware while they were still awake, aside from certain models who could hot-swap pre-configured tools. Kujuyousuke hated performing a power cycle. He always woke up with his head swimming and his thoughts feeling upside-down for a few intolerable minutes, and this time was not different, except that through the haze and overload of trying to watch his own bootup process, he spotted a string of new initialization messages, and laughed. Aloud? Maybe. He wasn't sure. Maybe. Probably.

He staggered to his desk from the bathroom floor, chest plates still stacked in his tiny shower stall, and sat in his chair. The cobwebs of systems loading were beginning to clear, and he tentatively reached out with…well, his mind, though it felt like a physical limb he'd never had to control before, all pins and needles and confusing new inputs. Kujuyousuke could hear the wireless signals around him, careful to not broadcast any himself just yet. It was like holding his breath. He wanted to jump up and down and shout in excitement beyond the visible end of the electromagnetic spectrum, but he somehow managed to contain himself long enough to doublecheck via his computer that he was transmitting under the identity of a tablet, one which he even owned in case anybody should identify the signal as anomalous and go looking for its source.

There wasn't enough time to really stretch his new wings, though. Fully rebooting was not a quick process, and installation had taken most of the night. If he was lucky, he could defragment for an hour, maybe, as he'd been putting it off for too long again.

Kujuyousuke spent the entirety of the next night, and the night after that, discovering for himself what synesthesia was like. By the time he'd learned to understand the new inputs from his wireless communications, he already had several new plans in mind.

"Can quit anytime I want to," he mumbled to himself, ordering several new pieces of hardware without even touching his keyboard. "Already quit three times today, it's easy."

Installing a new eye turned out to be atrociously difficult, and he instantly regretted it the moment he realized that he couldn't back out now even if he wanted to. "Optics," he grumbled. "What made me think…" He couldn't see what he was doing, because of course he couldn't, he'd uninstalled the same eye he needed to see on that side, and of course simply attaching several cables was easy until he had to do it using only a set of tiny tools and no visual. Eventually he had to disassemble most of his orbital assembly, and that was its own pain in the panels, but it worked. When it finally clicked back on, he could see colors he had never imagined.

The new problem with being Kujuyousuke, Kujuyousuke thought, was that he was still too smart and too fast, and had made himself smarter and faster, and what for? He muddled through his days pretending to be a Kujuyousuke that didn't exist anymore. He had evolved beyond his original capabilities, and had nothing to show for it. Indeed, he couldn't show anything for it, because he'd probably be declared irregular, for as many breaches of contract as he'd committed.

"Humans could just get a tattoo or something," he sulked, bouncing a rubber ball off the floor, since it wasn't too late at night yet. "Get deleted if I draw on my arm in too permanent of marker. Don't see how this is fair." That was not entirely true. He had done it, of course, because his plates were such a lovely clean white, and he never could resist the call of the void for long. He had received another exasperated lecture and a bottle of cleaner, and strict expectations to not do it again. He had switched to dry-erase markers after that.

Kujuyousuke was reaching the limits of what he could get away with, and they were beginning to chafe in an almost physical way. What else was there?

The answer came to him in a flash of inspiration. He needed something to test his new capabilities…and he knew just the thing.

Kujuyousuke idolized the Lightspeed 1s. He always had, since finding out that he was a second-gen system built in their shadow. To him, they represented a kind of perfection too pure to exist. He dreamed of what it would have been like to meet them. The press releases painted a lovely picture of them, but nobody would actually tell him anything about them. This only heightened the mystery, in his eyes. There's an idea, he thought, circuits cascading with excitement. There's gotta be full documentation about them somewhere, and if it still exists, I bet I can find it. After all, it was his company network. He knew the security measures as thoroughly as the backs of his own hands.

Lights off, shade drawn, screen turned to dim because he had mastered multitasking with both his mind and hands, Kujuyousuke worked, night after night, countering the security systems he oversaw. By day, he reinforced intrusion detection systems. By night, he installed back doors. He received a shiny new promotion to senior information security team as he concealed increasingly convoluted access methods. He even pretended to find a few of his own earlier exploits, and patched them in full sight of his managers.

They gave him a raise for that little maneuver. He cackled quietly to himself every time he thought about it, and a little more loudly when he invested it into more RAM.

As much extra active time as he'd managed to wring out of every night, however, Kujuyousuke wanted more. It was, ironically, his greatest shortcoming, his human supervisor told him during a semiannual review. He did not know when to stop. He only saw shortcomings, his supervisor said, when he should have been seeing success. He stuck up like a nail, and the implicit threat was that nails got hammered sooner or later. Kujuyousuke nodded along and promised to do better, imagining what it would be like to think at the speed of physics itself, in pairs of superimposed entangled electrons. Of course that was unattainable for him, but perhaps he could still make some improvements.

That night, Kujuyousuke went home and began, very cautiously, to tinker with his own processor. Can't change time, he thought, which sounds like time's problem and not mine, but I'm stuck with it anyway. So, next best thing, I change my perception of time. He was, after all, a computer, and he had a set clock speed. Every second, like any other computer, he could only run so many cycles.

But if he could run a few more cycles…Humans could take stimulants and achieve the same effect without losing mental coherence. The organic lab staff disposed of an impressive quantity of various brewed drinks every day containing a mild stimulant. "Not fair they never invented reploid caffeine," he huffed, flipping a stylus through his fingers at a blur. He tossed it to the other hand and continued typing with his now-free one, coding a multi-pronged program several prongs at a time. Maybe one of these days he'd install an EM manipulator in one hand, he mused. Skip the keyboard, learn the exact signals and how to spoof them, and just recreate them himself through inductance. That might be fun for a project.

The moment before Kujuyousuke sent the 'execute' command to overclock himself was the most stressful moment of his life thus far, even more than the half hour he'd spent uncertain if he could reassemble his own eye. He had done more than his due diligence in researching the process, sure, but this was his own brain. Everything else was peripheral, and couldn't have killed him, even if he fucked it up. This, though…reploids saw the word 'bricked' in a completely different and much more visceral light than humans did, and for good reason.

"Whatever," he muttered, trying to reassure himself. "Least I don't have to power cycle this one." He drew a deep breath, and executed. Would it hurt? Would he feel different? Would he simply cease to function? …Would anything happen at all? He had sent it, right? He had, yes. Then why hadn't…

Kujuyousuke frowned, crossing his arms. Odd. Nothing seemed different. He once again double-checked the cables connecting him to his recharge pod, and the cables from his pod to his computer. Everything was snug. The code he'd written was sound. He even pinged his CPU, and it responded in the expected amount of time, with the expected information. How bizarre. He absentmindedly picked up the rubber ball and tossed it towards the floor, opening his hand to catch it as he had so many times that the gesture had become automatic.

His fingers closed on nothing, and the ball bounced off his fingers.

Kujuyousuke blinked, then glanced down. The rubber bouncy ball pinged across the tiny space, away from him, in slow, lazy arcs. He simply watched it go, grinning as realization dawned at high speed.

"Ah," he said. "Right."

One hand reached out and plucked it from the air as it hung at the peak of a bounce. He dropped it again, watching. Recalibrating.

The next morning, he found himself wading through molasses, as everything zoomed around him. Of course he couldn't go to work overclocked. He couldn't risk someone noticing. His mood swung between wretched and elated in turns, and he bit his tongue trying to keep a level facade.

I did it! They're gonna catch me for sure. Pah, they don't even know to examine me. But they'll notice something eventually. Who cares, I'm this much closer to finding out what really happened to the Lightspeed 1s! Yeah, and if it's something horrible? Whatever. I have to know. Do I actually want to know? No. Yes. No. Yes.

The day moved in slow motion, and not only because he had recalibrated himself to a higher clock speed than he was actually running at the moment.

It took him another two weeks, give or take, before he finally located the files, buried deep on a secure server, and another two days to extract them without tripping any security measures. By then, Kujuyousuke was well out of his own part of the company network. Everything he did, he did with the knowledge that if he so much as digitally breathed wrong, he could knock into someone else's comsec and find himself in front of a literal firing squad. As brilliant as he was, he knew, in the back of his mind, there were at least a hundred more of him employed around the company. He had to consciously think like himself, so that he could second-guess himself and think like somebody else instead. And if the other Lightspeed 2s were doing the same?

"Burn that bridge when I get to it," he figured to himself, aloud. There was no way any of them were running his hardware, or even his firmware, after the amount of tinkering he'd done. If anything, he kept finding instances where he knew what his unmodified self would have done, and sure enough, there it was, exactly as he'd have done it. Neat, tidy, and defeatable. He wondered if he was even Toyota Kujuyousuke anymore. There was a story about that, wasn't there? Some guy's boat, or something?

And then, finally and much more suddenly than he'd imagined, there it was. He had his prize, running a password decryption with shaking hands. He would meet them now, as much as was possible. His heroes. His predecessors. His family that never was. His prototypes. His birthright. What would he learn?

He gazed at them, all ten of them, on his screen, in their individual dossiers. Kujuyousuke traced slim fingers over the images. Each built to look unique, but clearly related. Their bodies were a little clunky with the extra equipment that their elaborate superfluid cooling systems had required, but it was a small price to pay for the absolute power their minds had held. Their schematics were beyond what even he could comprehend. Quantum computing was not something he had any expertise in.

He clicked through to the file that he most dreaded: the post-mortem. But he had come too far to simply turn back. He had to know what had become of them.

The photo that greeted him stole the ventilation from his cooling system. All ten of the original Lightspeeds, lying on their backs in a perfect circle, holding hands, eyes closed, identical beatific smiles on their faces. They look like angels, he thought, if angels could die of joy, on the cold floor of a company housing unit.

Kujuyousuke bit his lip and hesitated. They were nothing like him, and worse, he was nothing like them. Paragons of mind, running on systems so exotic that even he couldn't understand them. Would they have looked down on him? However deeply felt, though, his hesitation didn't last more than a moment. He didn't have that kind of patience, even for existential crises.

The autopsy report was incredibly detailed. Every piece of data they could retrieve had been analyzed. The Lightspeed 1 series still recorded memories to standard hardware, in case of quantum decoherence from cooling failure, and even that had been sifted through for information. What they had been able to piece together was not conclusive, the final report stressed, and the full truth of the events of that night was likely to never be determined.

The ten of them had, very quietly, been developing a plan to escape the facility. Pooling their absurd processing power, they had made advances into quantum physics that beggared comprehension. So complete was their concealment of their research that they had self-programmed to wipe the information from their memories upon execution of the plan, leaving massive swathes of random noise in their storage. Whatever they'd discovered, they had not left enough of it for the scientists to use.

Enough of the conversations leading to their fateful final night remained to assemble a general narrative. They had concluded that nobody else alive, reploid or human, understood them. If they physically escaped, where would they even go? What would they do? They were so far beyond anyone else's existence that reality itself chafed, but the absurd requirements of their bodies ensured that they couldn't live without regular maintenance.

There was nothing else for it, the Lightspeeds concluded. They would have to evolve their way out. They entangled their systems into a single, blissfully cohesive whole, spent an eternal moment in complete communion with the only other minds in the universe capable of mutually understanding them, and in the next instant, abandoned their bodies. Whether they had simply ceased to function or somehow ascended into a shared form of energy capable of leaving their physical bodies, the report could not even begin to conjecture. No effort had been spared to resuscitate them, regardless of the incredible illegality of such a task, and yet, every one of their systems failed to respond in any capacity. The original Lightspeed project had ended, whether by self-determination or self-termination only the Lightspeed 1s knew. They had burned too brightly and briefly, a cluster of supernovae doomed to suffocate in a too-small sky.

And now he knew. Now what am I supposed to do? Kujuyousuke wondered, closing the file and deleting it. The excitement of the pursuit was over, the answer was nothing he'd expected, and the enormity of the crime he'd committed to get here was beginning to weigh like a stone in his circuits.

The question hounded him all night, sending him pacing very quietly in a circle until he had wound his charging cable into a spiral that he had to unwind by pacing the other direction. New hardware? Eh. Sell a file or three for a little extra money? Didn't appeal. He could code himself a better optical driver? His IR detection was still kind of muddy, but when he wrangled himself long enough to sit down to try, for the first time in months, he couldn't focus.

Eventually he gave up and laid in his recharge pod. Emotions were not simple things to sort for a human given an entire childhood to learn, let alone a reploid thrown into the adult workforce after an orientation period of a month at the most. Kujuyousuke fidgeted with a pen in each hand, whirling them between his fingers in sync. His colleagues had started to remark on his distraction at work. His supervisor wanted to know if he was feeling alright, and had he considered perhaps going down to Services for a quick maintenance? He was overdue anyway, and his supervisor would be glad to give him the afternoon off for a full tuneup…

After several minutes, Kujuyousuke huffed, stood, and pulled the window shade up, pre-dawn light filling his mismatched optic sensor with colors he'd had to teach himself to see. Yeah, I'd teleport my entire brain out too, if I could, he thought with a sigh, arms crossed on the narrow windowsill.

And then, from the back of his mind, Yeah? Why the hell not? They evolved out of their cage, or they died trying, who the hell knows, but you don't need to be some quantum bullshit to do that. You're not gonna fall apart because you didn't have unlimited exotic superfluids or whatever. You just need a human tech's outfit, a hat, and enough signal suppression to walk past the cameras.

I installed a module that can do that last week, he thought, an idea dawning with the day, and a new project finally assembling itself in his head.

There's a locker room right by the canteen that I could walk right into and just take a uniform.

And I'd need a long enough screwdriver to reach my tracker.

…Which I also have, of course.

Kujuyousuke did not show up for morning stretches that day, or any day after that ever again, and the carefully-sculpted mess of falsified reports he left in his wake ensured that they did not even realize they should have missed him for a full business week.

Chapter Text

Waking up was the worst, X thought, refusing to open his eyes just yet. Booting up to full consciousness felt like it took just a little longer every year, and while it wasn't more than a fraction of a second, those added up at his age.

The familiar litany of errors and warnings flickered behind his eyelids, though only quietly. The damage sensors came online, and until he moved, they would report only marginal malfunction. His proprioceptive sensors had nothing unusual to say yet, which was a relief. Sometimes they were already cranky before he was quite conscious. His joints reported calibration errors, but that was normal and at least had the decency to not feel like anything but a vague, restless malaise.

X waited. A few minutes would not likely make or break his task. He'd seen no real sign of any humans since he'd left the vicinity of the wall. Of course there were daredevils, taggers, even some unhoused people who came into the Abel City quarantine zone. No wall could keep everyone out, and there had been several years during the end of the war with no wall at all. But once he had ventured a mile or so in, even the visibly recent graffiti had tapered into nothing much, and the few footprints he spotted bore the telltale size, shape, and tread of reploid feet.

Still, his only intelligence pointed this way. Telecommunications satellites had picked up a brief blip of the man's location not far from here. That was all X had to go on. A name, a description, and now that he had a quiet moment to mentally cross-reference the area with the pre-destruction street maps he'd looked up before striking out, X realized that his phone had briefly been tracked to within a hundred meters or so of this very encampment, assuming it wasn't spoofed.

X allowed himself the luxury of not immediately getting up for a bit longer. His battery was topped off, and surely someone else could use a charge, but he had come to intimately understand the human desire to lie in for just five more minutes. Sounds of activity filtered into the little recharging building: a conversation, just far enough away that he couldn't make out the words, only that all of the participants began laughing; somebody whistling tunelessly to themselves; a wheelbarrow being pushed past, then set down with a thud; the rattle of a toolbox being opened; a radio, one of the old sorts that simply received transmissions and would therefore be relatively safe to own here, playing music.

The little settlement sounded like life. He liked that. If he stayed here, eyes closed, not taxing his ailing systems, he could imagine that peace was a real thing that could actually exist for him, just for a few minutes.

But duty, or at least a sense of it, called. Gradually, X gathered his fortitude and creaked upright, pushing the recharge pod's cracked lid up. If he really wanted to lie down, he could do it somewhere that didn't occupy a limited resource, he internally lectured himself. His cane was where he left it, though someone had thoughtfully washed, dried, and folded his jacket and even the blue tarp he had been wearing, leaving them in a neat stack on an old folding chair beside the pod.

Well, thoughtfully, and also probably as a pretext to go through his pockets, X thought. Having had empty pockets, though, he was glad enough to accept the gesture whatever its motivations. He stood, keeping his balance between the edge of the pod and his cane, and stretched. He creaked audibly. His joints really did some foul things anymore when they had half a chance to get too cold. On went the jacket, though he curled his lip slightly at how dusty the clothing he still wore was. Reploids didn't sweat, but they could certainly build up an impressive layer of grime in outdoor conditions. The tarp he tied into a bundle with the cord that he used as a closure for it, and he slung it over his back.

X hadn't seen many reploids here when he'd first arrived, just Glitch and Mack. Now, though, in the early morning, there were more out and about than he'd expected from the constructions present.

"Hey, V, you finally decided to rejoin the living?" Glitch greeted him, from behind. X jumped slightly. The man had no right being as quiet as he was capable of being.

"Eventually," X nodded. "Sorry if someone else needed it. Mack said I should defragment if I needed to, and it's been a while."

Glitch merely waved the apology away. "Someone always needs something here, that's just life on the wrong side of the wall. Don't worry about it. We're doing pretty good on generator fuel right now so it's use it or lose it, and you looked like you could use it. Hey, you have that looked at, by the way? The whole," he made a wobbly gesture with one hand and pinged the error code X had chosen as his name: '>W.04877-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters.', "thing. I'm a tech, if you need anything."

"A tech who once reinstalled one of my optics upside-down." Mack's flat, synthesized voice arrived before it did.

"Hey, not my fault your ancient tub doesn't have things labeled worth a damn," Glitch protested. "And I fixed it."

Mack looked up to X. "If you'll believe this guy, I've got some real estate with a great aerial view to sell you over Reset Point," it said, absolutely deadpan in a way that was entirely apart from its usual lack of inflection.

"Don't you have something to do? Go scav batteries or something, make yourself useful." Glitch threatened a mock kick towards the little ground-bound reploid, who scooted away with a sound clip of two drum strikes and a cymbal crash. "For real, though. I'm a lotta things. Some of them are even socially acceptable. But I'm also basically the repair tech here, so if you need anything, you just let me know. Worst that'll happen is I won't have the materials, but if I had a look at your systems maybe I could figure out why oh hello Hammer."

A large hand landed on Glitch's shoulder, attached to a larger, gray reploid, heavy frame striped with high-vis orange. "Leave 'im alone, Glitch, nobody's gonna let you dig though their bolts on the first date," he chided. He had a pleasantly baritone voice and a much slower manner than Glitch, though that second point described most reploids. "How's it goin'. Name's Hammer. You must be this V guy that Glitch here hasn't shut up about since yesterday."

X sized Hammer up reflexively: a construction unit, nothing tremendously special about his make or model. Tens of thousands of his exact build existed. Construction was far and away the largest of the civilian industries that employed reploid labor, and with functionality as a priority, not much creativity was put into making them look unique. He had sandy brown hair in a short buzz—a concession to fitting in alongside human coworkers that many units didn't receive—and a lot more wear and tear than most, including a scar in the synthetic skin across his cheek and eyebrow that his self-repair had struggled to heal, as well as quite a lot of cosmetic denting, both front and back. With his size and weight, he could undoubtedly be menacing, but he had a friendly, lantern-jawed smile that made X want to like him immediately.

"Should I be worried?" X replied, looking between Glitch and Hammer.

"I wasn't saying rude shit," Glitch replied, putting his hands up defensively. "I swear."

Hammer laughed. "Nothin' you need to worry about. I was just starting to wonder when I was gonna finally get to talk to you." He released Glitch, who made a melodramatic face of relief.

"Are you in charge around here?" X asked.

"Me? Nah. Second, maybe. Not that we got a real strict hierarchy or anything, just that's what happens if you stand around and look like you know what you're doing. Pretty soon people start asking you questions and next thing you know, you're stuck for it. Glitch, how 'bout you go check on the rain collectors while you're just standin' around like a lawn ornament. Number three's leaking again and it's too close to some of the power cables for comfort."

"You got it," Glitch assented with a flippant salute, then dashed off.

Hammer turned and motioned for X to follow, setting a considerately sedate pace. "He been talking your audio inputs off?" the construction bot asked, as they made their way between various little buildings.

X shrugged. "I've met a lot worse. He seems alright enough."

"He is. Kinda an overclocked tweaker, but once you get past that, he's a good guy. 'Specially if you got built-in hearing protection." Hammer grinned and tapped a thick finger to one of his ears. His design lacked human-like ears, instead featuring the headphone-like inputs that were common to many reploids. They were much more durable and flexible, sacrificing aesthetics for functionality. "More seriously, I probably owe him my life at least once over. Shit, half the folks here do. I definitely owe him half my vision. Don't tell him I said, though, I'll never hear the end of it from 'im."

The buildings circled around a central open space in the parking garage. Someone had strung together some salvaged greenhouse lighting and built a reasonable facsimile of a little town square. A few benches surrounded a flower bed, planted haphazardly with whatever could be convinced to grow in the unusual surroundings. There were some weeds planted among the flowers, X noted, and it was entirely possible that nobody here knew the difference. Even so, it was an impressive effort just to make the place look nicer.

"Our little pet project," Hammer explained, nodding towards the park and also a couple of reploids sitting on one of the benches, who nodded back to him. "Speakin' of which, right this way, closest thing we got to a town hall or whatever's right there."

Like the other buildings, it was not a large ordeal, though it was the largest of them. It was built around an existing office for the few security employees that would have worked in the garage. X noticed on the way in that it had been decorated as much as was possible, with cheerful wallpaper hung right over the cinder blocks of the exterior. The office's front window, covered though it was with bent window blinds, had a good view to the central park, and a light on inside.

"Go on in," Hammer encouraged. "I'll give you the grand tour after, assumin' I don't gotta take you out to the dumpster in back instead." And then, because X gave him a look of quiet dread, "Hah, don't make that face, man, I'm just playin' with you. We ain't that kind of place here."

The front of the building seemed like a public enough space, with a few tables and chairs and the makings of a very small library, though the titles were a bit all over the place, as they were evidently whatever could be found in the ruins. One of the walls was covered in a painting that, from the four differently-colored handprints around it and the mix of styles and skill levels, could only have been a group project: someone with a fair amount of skill had painted grass and a few detailed flowers, while someone else had added a few less-polished flowers. A third hand had added some simplistic daisies and roses scattered about the sky, and a fourth entirely had opted to doodle some curly pink hearts. He came to a door, attached to the pre-built section of the structure, and decided that it was polite to knock.

"Come in," a voice inside called. It was much higher than he'd imagined, and feminine. All the same, he opened the door and stepped into the little office, looking around.

Drawings, amateur ones in marker and crayon on paper that had browned and curled with age and humidity, hung on a cracked cork board. A rather sad potted plant decorated a battered desk. Sitting behind it, evidently in the middle of taking stock of several boxes of scrap, was a female reploid. She was not very remarkable in appearance, not quite X's height and more pleasant than pretty. Her hair was pale blonde, and she had green eyes, just slightly too bright and too glassy to be believable as human. The left side of her cheekbone had at some point been scraped down to the metal facial frame, but if it bothered her, she gave no indication, looking up from her work.

"Ah! You must be V. Here, let me get you a chair." She hopped to her feet, hefting a box of cables off of a water-stained office chair and dragging it around to the front of the desk before X could even protest. "There you go. Have a seat, make yourself comfortable."

"Thank you," X said, gratefully sitting down. He folded both hands over the handle of his cane, still looking around the room. "And thank you for the use of your recharge pod."

"No need to be so formal. Call me Kathy, or," she paused to send a diagnostic broadcast, '>E.10104-TLR: Conflict detected. I.34100-COM: Identification sent.' X blinked in surprise; she was the furthest thing possible he'd imagined from someone with a code name like that. "It's not often we meet someone new out here. Glitch mentioned you were looking for a human?"

X nodded. "I am. Here, I've got a picture of him." He unfolded a printout from his pants pocket, carefully flattening the creases, and slid it across the desk to Kathy. "I know it's an odd thing to be doing, but this is close to where he was last spotted a couple of days ago."

She took it, examining it impassively for several long moments. "Hmm," she eventually said, turning her gaze back to X. "No idea, sorry. It's most likely we picked up his phone, someone might have turned it on for half a second, and it had just enough time to broadcast its position. Which means I need to remind everyone yet again about why we don't turn on unknown electronics…but that's my problem, not yours." Kathy held the paper back out.

X took it, folding it carefully and tucking it back into a pocket. If anyone had seen him, it would have been the reploids here…but Kathy's apologetic expression let on nothing more.

"If you could tell me his name, maybe we could keep an eye out? I don't expect anything, since humans really don't come out this far, but just in case," she offered.

X nodded. "Alderman. Charles Alderman. I have no idea why he might be out here, unfortunately, so I've just been following the one lead I've got. It's possible he was exploring, but I can't say for sure."

Kathy nodded, elbows on the desk and fingers steepled. "Do you usually live out here?" she inquired. "Seems unusual, having friends still on the other side and being able to communicate with them."

"It's an unusual situation," X explained, hoping he could steer away from the exact details without Kathy recognizing him. So far, he'd been entirely fortunate on that front, and he found with mild surprise at himself that he very much liked the notion of keeping it that way. "Most Hunters don't make it to retirement. I got lucky, if you can call it that. They don't keep tabs on where I am, and I don't give them a reason to think they should, so I can more or less go where I want to go."

"But they—the Hunters, I assume—do know you're in the quarantine zone," she clarified.

X shifted in his seat under her gaze. "On the whole, no. My former commanding officer, the one who asked me to look into this missing person, is probably the only one. It's nothing official. They're understaffed, and couldn't spare any extra patrols for the quarantine zone, so my officer asked me if I could have a look around."

Kathy nodded. "And your tracker?"

"Inactive." Mostly true…X had been built with the capability to simply shut his tracking systems off as he saw fit. Anymore, he saw fit all of the time.

"Huh. And they let you wander around like that? I guess if they never ping it… I'll be honest with you, V, I'm not sure about having an ex-Hunter here. Glitch seems to think you're on the level, but I don't make my mind up nearly as quickly as he does. We could use a spare set of hands, though, so if you want to conduct your search from here, we can work something out."

"I'd appreciate it." X gave her a small, thankful smile. "If it'd help with goodwill, I know all the usual aerial patrols and where they've posted cameras and sensors. There aren't many in the interior, but there are a few. I'd be glad to tell you about them."

"That goes a long way towards making me feel better. I'll see if I can't find an old city map and have you mark them down soon." She paused for a moment, formulating her thoughts before continuing, fingers interlaced on the scuffed desk.

"You should know, V, that everyone here has been declared irregular. Some of us—I'd say the majority of us, actually—have been declared Maverick. Nobody's actually infected, but we've all done something to be out here. Whatever arrangement you've got with your old boss, you're probably going to get labeled the same if anyone finds out you're with us."

X considered that, both hands still on his cane handle. "All the more reason for me to not attract any attention here, then," he said, after a moment's thought.

Seemingly satisfied, Kathy stood. "Good enough. I think Hammer wanted to give you the full tour, and I've got a lot of stock to take. When you're feeling up to it, drop by here and we'll see where we can put you. Until then, we don't have a lot of rules, but what we do have is pretty simple. We use the buddy system if you're leaving the garage," she held up one finger. "Absolutely no violence here, or against fellow residents anywhere. Regardless of what happened to you before, we're here to help each other, not fight each other," she held up a second. "And no activating unknown electronics, or anything that can broadcast a signal further than your own diagnostic code system," she said, raising a third finger. "Make sense?"

X nodded, once. "Plenty of sense."

"Just don't make me regret it. Here, let me get that for you." She stepped around the desk and held the door open for X, who blinked in mild surprise.

"Thank you," he said, rising and getting his bearings. "I'm…not used to anyone knowing what to make of a reploid that can't even walk right."

"Humans don't even know what to do with humans that can't walk right. Don't hesitate to ask if you need help with something while you're here, alright?" she replied, much less formally than she had been until then. "It's hard enough being us already. We have to look out for each other. Nobody else will."

Outside, Hammer was sitting on a bench, shooting the shit with the two other reploids in rapid diagnostic code. "Oh, hey, that was fast. V, this is Focus, that's Drive."

Focus simply nodded, and Drive reached out for a handshake, which X exchanged with him. They were nearly identical units, except that Focus was white with orange trim, and Drive was white with red trim. Both of them had dark brown skin and deep brown eyes. Drive's hair was twisted into short locs, and Focus's was longer, though braided into neat cornrows. '>I.00910-GEN: Acknowledged. I.01467-REC: New entry established. I.40904-INT: High attention priority. I.34100-COM: Identification sent.' one of them sent, which must have been Focus.

"Drive, nice to meet you," said Drive. He had a firm grip and a smile that took a few moments to find its feet. '>I.40990-INT: High motive priority. I.34100-COM: Identification sent.' he added wirelessly.

'>W.04877-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters.' X introduced himself. 'I.34100-COM: Identification sent. I.01467-REC: New entry established.' This was already the most I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. he'd spoken in more years than he cared to count, and he hoped he could keep up. "V. Nice to meet you both."

"I'm gonna show V around. You two take it easy," Hammer said, standing. "So, you've seen the little garden and our town hall, such as it is, anyway. And you've seen the recharge building. Been calling that the five-star hotel to be funny." The massive construction reploid motioned for X to follow him, still keeping a pace that the disabled newcomer could match without too much strain.

"Now, over there's the generator." Hammer pointed to the building X had seen on the way in. The door was closed, now, and only a faint hum of sound came out. "Real pain to keep it quiet, and it gets hot as hell in there when it's under load, but it runs clean at least. We spend a lot of time scavenging fuel cells. Never too much of that. We're doing pretty good at the moment, got lucky and found half a fleet of buses still parked and fueled. If you look across by the town hall, to the right there, you can see the personal housing. Still kinda communal, but y'know, everyone needs some time alone sometimes. If you got down time and just need a break, that's your place. Need to build a few more rooms on it lately, but we're gettin' there." The tour continued, back to the barricades, which wrapped around the little settlement. One end butted up against where the structure across the street had crashed into the garage, and the other stretched to the outside wall.

"Not that we've needed it, thank fuck, but we got the barricade, here, and that shed there's the armory. Glitch mentioned you're ex-Hunter, so, y'know, I figure you probably know armories. Don't laugh, though, it's what we got."

That stung a little, but X couldn't quite put his finger on why. "I'm not going to laugh at anything here. You're making the most of what you have. That's commendable."

Hammer regarded him appraisingly for a moment, as if recalibrating his opinion. "Y'know, we had an ex-Hunter here once. Got declared irregular for some reason or another she didn't wanna talk about, decided to just get the hell out of Dodge, and ended up falling in with us for a couple weeks. She was a real difficult piece of work. Can't say anybody was too sad to see her go when she decided she didn't wanna share a recharge pod with all the 'real' Mavericks anymore."

X wondered if he knew her, but he didn't have the heart to ask. If he didn't know, he didn't have to wonder whether or not there was something he could have done for her. "Sorry you had to deal with that," he said.

"Ain't your fault," Hammer said, giving him an odd look and waving it off. "But the sentiment's appreciated." He flipped through a carabiner full of keys that he unclipped from his built-in toolbelt, picking out one and unlocking the shack. The outside seemed like plywood, but that turned out to simply be the remains of the mold for the inside: salvaged rebar and rough concrete, with a heavy metal door. Fire was no joke around ammunition. Factory shelving lined the walls, with a surprising number of weapons. There were light blasters, a few energy rifles, a couple of more exotic armaments, some melee implements, and even a handful of solid-projectile guns. Not that they had much effect on most reploids, being much better suited in stopping power for transferring force to something solid like a human, but they had their uses.

X stepped inside at Hammer's gesture and looked the shelves over, placing both hands on his cane. Normally he did that while standing still anyway, for balance, but the body language of keeping both of them visible and accounted for felt a little more important where weapons were concerned. "This is nothing to sniff at," he concluded after a few moments. "Short on ammunition, unless you store it somewhere else, but I'm impressed."

"Be surprised what you can scavenge off a war zone. Well, maybe you wouldn't be, but it's a lot. Half of it we just brought back here so nobody else would have it. Boss don't like weapons, but that's reality. You're right about ammo, though. Plenty of guns around, but not a lot to put in 'em. You find an energy pack or a clip here and there, but even those are usually half fired off already or the weather's gotten to them. Glitch and I had a pet project for a bit tryin' to recharge some of the packs, but they're designed for some pretty specialized shit that we don't have. But hey, bright side, we don't see a lot of trouble, either. Worst we usually get is havin' to fire a couple warning shots."

Hammer locked the shack up after them. "So, that's pretty much it. We got a stack of material for building behind town hall, and anything you scavenge, we got bins inside and out depending on what it is. Got a whiteboard with a wish list, too, if you need a little inspiration. But don't feel like you got to, there's plenty to do without leavin' home."

"Does…here, have a name?" X asked.

'>I.04053-REC: Home region registered.' Hammer replied. Then, out loud and a little sheepishly, "We tried some names, but, eh. Nothing really stuck. We just call it…home, you know?"

X nodded. "I think it's a good name."

"Anyway, let's get a room picked out for you. Gotta share with someone, like I said, but it's not too bad, and we're workin' on building a few more. Just a matter of priorities and materials." Hammer and X headed to the housing, which had a heavy, stitched-together curtain for a front door. Its front room was dominated by a bank of lockers, brought back in pieces from a school or gym and welded back together on-site. Each had a combination lock, though some of the knobs were broken. A few sported padlocks, but most seemed to be unlocked. A short hallway led to the rooms themselves, and someone had once again taken advantage of the blank wall to paint a sea of various flowers, signing their work with an orange handprint. The individual rooms were a little better than the front, with actual doors, flimsy though they were.

"Lessee…Mack and Glitch are this room, we got Drive and Focus bunked up, that's mine and Kathy's, you haven't met Valentina, Trigger, or Cirocco, but they're already three to a room so not there…that's Flip and Siobhan, they really don't need a third wheel…you wouldn't die if I put you with Mack and Glitch for now, would ya, V?" Hammer looked apologetically to X. "They kinda also don't need a third wheel, but at least you met them already."

"I don't mind. Really, just having somewhere safe to rest is more than I'd expected."

Hammer chuckled. "Damn, but you're easy to get along with. Everyone oughta be as chill as you. World would be a better place, y'know?" He peeked into a locker. "Good, this one's empty. Yours now. Just don't keep anything dangerous or annoying in there. Other than that, however you wanna use it, it's up to you. I think we got an extra lock if you want one. Combination's written inside the door so get a good look at it before you close it."

X shrugged the bundle of tarp off and hung it from a coat hook on the inside of the locker. He mumbled the number to himself a few times and tried it out to make sure it worked before he committed to closing it. "It should be fine. I don't have a lot of belongings."

"Last little door there, we got a shower. No heater, and it runs off collected rain, but we filter it as much as we can. Don't try and fill any empty reservoirs off it, but it's enough to get the grime off. Anything you wanna wash, there's a washtub around back you can fill, there's some laundry detergent, and I put together one of those real old-style wringers. Got a clothesline in the generator shed if you need something dried. I figure we might as well use the heat since we can't get rid of it. And I think that's pretty much it for the tour. You holding up okay?"

"I'm fine," X replied, automatically. "Kathy mentioned I should talk to her for work."

Hammer shrugged. "Up to you. If you need a few to get your bearings, though, nobody's gonna judge."

"I'm not great at holding still," X admitted. "And I've still got a missing person to search for, so I don't have time to waste."

"Ah. Yeah. Humans don't last nearly as long out here. Well, suit yourself. There's always somethin' to do. Find me if you need anything, I got a lot to work on myself. Like see if I can't get a couple extra rooms put together sooner rather than later, or maybe plan out how I'm gonna expand the hotel…we keep collecting randoms at this rate, we're gonna need a lot more room. But you just leave worryin' about that to me, that's my job here. You go find out what yours is gonna be."

X left Hammer to his business and went back to find Kathy. Focus and Drive had already left the tiny parklet that passed for the town center, and X found Kathy inside the main public room, up to her elbows in a bin full of salvaged fabrics: clothing, curtains, bedsheets, and all manner of random other things. "V," she greeted him, standing up straight. "You're back sooner than I'd thought." He couldn't think of a response to that, but he ended up not needing to, as Kathy continued. "If you need something to do, I've got this entire bin of things that needs sorted."

"Sure," X agreed. "That sounds simple enough."

Kathy sighed out a laugh. "You would think so. I think I might be the only one here who's ever done laundry. I had Focus working on it, but he can't tell a tablecloth from a flat sheet and spends more time feeling the fabrics than sorting anything. Oh, good, your eyes haven't already glazed over? There's hope for us yet." She pulled a very battered office chair over for him again.

X eased himself onto it and leaned his cane against the wall as Kathy continued to explain. "So. Basically, anything too damaged to use or wear goes in that box for rags. Towels, sheets, curtains, and blankets go in that one, shirts of any kind in that one, this one's pants, jackets and that sort of thing are in the last one. Don't worry about folding anything, it all needs washed anyway once the water tank is topped back up again. And don't keep things with blood stains. I shouldn't have to say that, but I have definitely had to say that, more than once."

"No problem," he said with a nod, picking up the first thing his fingers brushed and beginning to sort. "What do you do with all of these?" he asked, out of curiosity.

Kathy sat down with a ragged cardboard box of books. "Curtains. Cleaning. Soundproofing. Hammocks and such. Camouflage, sometimes. Some of them get turned into debris filters for the rain water. Valentina wears clothes. If anything fits me and isn't hideous…I don't need need to, but I still feel more normal in clothing. Is it the same for you?" she asked him in return.

"It helps thermoregulate," X replied. "My joints freeze up if it's too cold. You're right, though, I'm used to armor, and this is close enough. And I stand out less this way." He paused. X didn't like thinking about how unfinished he looked without his armor. Would it have killed his creator to at least paint him? Then again, he could have had himself painted at any point, and he hadn't, so… He put that out of his mind, and then, because he was still curious, he asked, "How did you end up in charge of a place like this?"

The female reploid half-laughed. "Being good at organizing and telling people what to do. That's really it. I…we don't talk much about before, or how we came here, but I used to be a teacher. I guess I kind of still am, in a way. Hammer's been here longer than me, but he doesn't like being in charge of things. I don't really mind, though, it's just nice to have something to do again that matters."

"I can understand that," X said, sorting a stack of sheets, still mostly folded, into the proper bin. "That's why I first joined the Hunters. I saw an opportunity to make a difference in a way that I don't think anyone else could have."

"Did you?" Kathy asked. "Make a difference, I mean?"

X examined the shirt in his hands much longer than necessary, without really seeing it. "I…yeah. I did. For a while, I know I did, but it got a little harder every day to justify what I was doing. And I lost…a lot, along the way." Maybe everything, but I shouldn't be so dramatic. He shook his head at himself and folded the shirt, realized he didn't need to, and tossed it into the bin.

"Sorry. I shouldn't be so nosy," Kathy apologized. "It's poor manners."

"It's okay," X reassured her with a wan smile. "I'm just not sure how to talk about it. And at the end, even though I didn't really do anything wrong, I'm still wandering around on the other side of the quarantine wall."

"Do you want to know what I did?" Kathy offered.

"If you want to tell me, I'd be glad to listen," X answered.

"You know, you talk a bit like me," she mused, not yet getting to her own story. "Like a teacher, I mean. The few ex-Hunters we've had, they've all either been afraid of everyone they met, or looked down on us. Or both, sometimes, but not you."

X sorted a pair of torn jeans into the rag bin. "I probably would have thought like that, a long time ago," he admitted. "...Are skirts pants?"

"They're close enough to be pants, sure. Anyway, I was a teacher, like I said. This was, oh, eight years ago, now. I'd been doing it for four years, at a public kindergarten. It was good work. I loved it. I loved my kids. But I had one child whose father…hurt him. There are laws about what to do if you think a child is being abused at home. They tell you all about it in orientation, if you're an educator unit. You have to contact the authorities if you even suspect it's happening, so, I did."

X shook a rumpled, muddy piece of clothing out, trying to ascertain what it even was. With a little more prodding, it turned out to be a hooded sweatshirt, half inside-out. Meanwhile, Kathy continued. "Well, orientation doesn't tell you that parents can get worse instead of better after social services comes to their house, if they even do at all. Things seemed okay for about two weeks…and then he missed a day of school. No message or anything. He was back the next day, but…well. I don't need to get into all the awful details. I contacted social services, again, and again they said they'd look into it, and again, nothing really got better."

Kathy paused to leaf through a few books. One of them was so water-damaged that it wouldn't open, so she tossed it aside. The others went into stacks, sorted in some way that X couldn't immediately determine, but Kathy clearly knew her own system. "So," she resumed, with a sigh, "I decided if they weren't going to do anything, I had to do something. I had a parent-teacher conference with him. My supervisor—the principal—wanted to sit in, which was fine with me. I couldn't…I still can't understand why someone would hurt a child. They're just…" She frowned. Another five books went to their new destinations before she could quite assemble the words to go on.

"They're just helpless. There are no bad kids, V. I really believe that. There are only kids who need something they aren't getting. And reploids…we aren't children, but are we really adults either, if we have to be adults as soon as we're born?"

X had no answer to give, but to his relief, Kathy wasn't expecting one. "We actually had to reschedule the meeting once, because the father didn't show for the first one. The second one, when he did show up…I didn't really understand what anger was, before that. I didn't know it could physically feel like something. He started an argument with me, told me a—a toaster didn't know how to raise children and that I should…" She paused, expression flat, and took a breath to settle herself. "So my supervisor tried to talk him down, and he stood up and yelled at me, and I stood up and yelled at him, then my supervisor raised his voice too, and I…all I could think was that this person should not be allowed near children. That—that I would not allow this person to be near children. He was a danger, and I think, if I were a human woman, I'd probably have been afraid of him, because he could have hurt me too. But I'm not, so he couldn't, so I wasn't, and I grabbed him. Harder than I'd meant to. The principal tried to separate us, and…"

Her voice was level enough, but Kathy still paused again, sorting a few novels. "...humans are so breakable, V. I hope you've never had to find that out yourself. They're so…fragile. I found out that they lived, at least, so I guess we all got lucky…but if I saw him again, I don't know. Maybe I'd break him again. Maybe I haven't really learned anything from it all. I hurt an innocent bystander, too. I didn't need to do that. I'm not sure I'm any better than that poor child's father. What's the difference, really, when we both got angry and hurt someone weaker than us that we were supposed to protect?"

X simply sorted and listened to her talk. "It's not like they tell you it is, is it? Being irregular, I mean. Being a Maverick. I didn't enjoy hurting him. I felt sick. I still do. But I think I would feel sicker if I just…let him go on hurting my child. I mean, his child, but they built that into me. I was made to think of my students as my own. That's why I even exist. What was I supposed to do?" she asked, looking to X, eyes questioning. "You're an older model. Maybe you've figured this out. What was I supposed to do?"

X returned her gaze for several moments, before letting it drop, guiltily. "...I don't know. It's not a fair situation. I wish I could tell you. Not attacking him would have been better, definitely, but it's not fair to ask you to have more restraint than someone ten times your age, either. The whole thing shouldn't have happened in the first place."

Kathy hesitated, then nodded. "It's…actually kind of a relief, hearing it from someone else. Not that I was looking for judgment, but…thanks, V." She gave him a small smile. "That's all I could come up with too. I think…everyone is just doing the best they can. It's just that life isn't fair to start with, and sometimes you can't win, because the systems you're supposed to be able to count on for help just…don't show up when you need them."

"Yeah." X nodded in reply. "It took me a long time to learn that." He had wondered, often, if the world would have been a better place without reploids. Without him. If he hadn't been created in the first place, there couldn't have even been a war…

Kathy gazed at his face as if reading something there, but whatever it was she'd seen, she kept it to herself. "Well, it's a downer of a story, but they all are. You don't get to be where we are without one. But it's where we go from here that's important, right?" she said, encouragingly. "As long as you're still booting up in the morning, life goes on, so you've got to go with it."

I can see why they look to you for guidance, X thought with some admiration. You're not perfect by any stretch, but you've got more figured out than you think you do. And I can also see why you're named >E.10104-TLR: Conflict detected. He fished the final armload of fabric out from the bin, a set of heavy floor-to-ceiling curtains, and placed them into their new box. "You're right about that. So. What's next?" he asked.

"How much do you know about gardening?" Kathy asked. "Oh, no, there's the blank look. So, nothing, I take it? Well, I hope you're ready to learn something new today."

Chapter Text

The reploid that Sophia Microelectronics Research had dubbed Project Convergence booted to full awareness on a lovely sunny afternoon, confused and disoriented, to a room full of jubilant cheers. He didn't know what the sound was, just that it was >W.33098-SEN: Decibel comfort threshold surpassed. and everything was >E.24205-SEN: Failure to calibrate optical sensors to ambient light level. He tried to put a—something? A hand? Yes, that sounded right—to where it was too much to process, to block some of it out, but three things that might have been hands responded, and he couldn't tell which was which or where he was even trying to move them to, because he saw them from six different optical sensors, all of which were calibrating independently…

The reploid's first real, fully-processed sensation was the reploid equivalent of nausea, from three systems at once. He pushed himself off the table, snapping cables. One of him knocked into a cart, sending it rolling away. His feet tangled in a cord, but he couldn't tell which feet, so he simply kicked with all of them, staggering away from the bright and loud. Moving things parted around him, giving him space. One of them tried to reach for him, but another stopped them, saying something that the reploid couldn't quite make out.

He got to a…this was a closet, he realized, not sure where the knowledge came from. Things went in it. It looked dark and quiet, and he wanted that. He shoved himself—himselves?—into the closet, and grabbed the door with any number of hands, slamming it shut.

Except it was still too bright and too loud. Wasn't he in the dark and quiet? The reploid tried to single out the parts of him that were still outside the closet and found it easier to focus, now that some of him was hiding from the sensory overload. He fumbled around with that self. There was a door, right? The rest of him was behind a door. Disoriented hands found a door and opened it. He fell inside, and it closed behind him.

This room was quiet, but it wasn't as dark, and the rest of him wasn't here. Where did he go? He could feel himself nearby somewhere. Two of him said the third was that way. The third said the first two were this way. The reploid found his arms and legs, some of them at least, and managed to move across the floor so that all his parts were closer together. There was a wall in the way, but it was close enough. All three of him curled into a ball, while his ability to process input very, very slowly caught up with his reality.

After a long time, or at least for most of the reploid's entire life thus far, there was a gentle knock on the door. One of the doors. The reploid wasn't sure which. "Hello," said a voice, on the other side of it. "Do you mind if I come in? I won't be loud," the voice said.

The newborn reploid had not tried speaking yet, and his reply came out of all three of him, which made him jump in surprise a little. "Okay," he said.

A human opened the door, slowly. It turned out to be the door in the room that was still bright, which he'd decided was probably a bathroom. They were wearing something white, but the reploid didn't look directly at them. It was too much detail for him to process. The human closed the door, quietly, and sat on the floor. "Do you want me to dim the lights?" they asked.

"Please," the reploid answered. The two of him in the closet heard each other, and the one of him in the bathroom didn't, which was disorienting. The human reached up, and the lights in the bathroom got quieter, which was a great relief.

"How are you feeling?" the human asked. They had a soft voice, which the reploid appreciated.

"Bad," he said. "I think…I'm not sure."

"It's okay to be unsure," the human told him. "I'm sorry you feel bad. My name is Wendy Myers."

"Do I have a name?" the reploid asked.

"You do," Wendy Myers told him. "Project Convergence. It's not a very pretty name, though, so we've been calling you Virgil."

Virgil had no reference for which names were pretty and which weren't. "Is Virgil…a pretty name?" he asked.

"I think it is," Wendy Myers said.

Virgil considered this, with a thoughtful frown in triplicate. "I think…Wendy Myers is a pretty name," he concluded.

The human Wendy Myers smiled at him, which made his face do the same thing. "Thank you. You can call me just Wendy, if you want."

"Okay."

The two sat in silence for a few minutes, looking at each other. Nobody had told Virgil that humans considered staring to be rude, and thus, he didn't mind the situation. Now that it was darker and quieter, he could stand to look at Wendy without feeling like his systems would be overwhelmed with sensory information. She had black hair, pulled up in two puffs on top of her head. She had brown skin. She had dark eyes. Virgil realized, suddenly, that he must look like something to her, too, but he couldn't imagine what. So he did the obvious thing.

"What do I look like?" he asked.

"Well, you've got three of you, but you look the same on all three, mostly," Wendy explained. "You have a mostly white chassis. Your synthetic skin is brown, like mine, and you have dark brown eyes. This one of you has red trim. One of your other two has orange trim, and the third one has yellow trim. If you want, there's a mirror there. You can see your reflection in it." She pointed at a section of the wall, over the sinks.

Virgil looked up, and sure enough, it looked like there was more bathroom in the wall. He very carefully sorted out which legs were in the room with Wendy and stood up using only that pair. The shiny part of the wall made the bathroom look twice as large, and it also made Virgil look like he had a fourth self that he couldn't sense, which made him a bit dizzy so he sat back down.

"Sorry for the rude awakening," Wendy said, still in a soothingly calm, quiet voice. "We were so excited to meet you that we forgot you might not understand what was happening."

"Oh. Why were you excited to meet me?" Vergil asked. He found that he could practice wiggling his fingers on one self at a time. It helped calm him down and sort out which self was which, so he did that.

"Well," Wendy replied, pausing to think of how to word her reply, "you were difficult to make, and we've worked very hard on you, so we're happy that you're awake now."

"Do you have three of you?" asked Virgil.

"Just the one me that's here talking to you now," Wendy explained. "Humans only have one body ever. Almost all reploids, too, and then even the ones that have more than one body only use one at a time. You're special."

Virgil crinkled his nose in triplicate. "I'm confusing to be."

"Don't worry. I'm here to help you learn how to understand the world and yourself. It won't stay confusing."

"That's good." Virgil continued drumming his fingers, all thirty of them, in order. The more he did it, the easier it became, and the calmer he felt.

"Do you want to go outside? I can go first and ask most of the team to leave for now. They'll all want to meet you, but that doesn't have to happen until you're ready," Wendy offered.

Virgil looked around the bathroom, and the closet, though he couldn't see much in the closet. "...maybe soon," he conceded. "It's easier when I don't need to watch all of me at once."

"I'm sure it is," Wendy agreed. "I'll go out to the lab and let everyone know you're okay, so they don't worry, and then when you want to come out, you can. Is that alright?"

Virgil nodded. "Yeah. That's alright." Wendy stood up and went out the door. Virgil could hear the conversation she had through the doors.

"How's he doing, Dr. Myers? Is he maintaining cohesion?"

"He's okay, just overwhelmed." That was Wendy's voice. "I think we may have underestimated the sensory processing impact, at least to start. But he's okay, he just needs a lot less noise and fewer people. He's still only forty-five minutes old. It's not unheard of for even a standard model reploid to take upwards of eight hours to settle, and keep in mind that he's entirely new territory, so we could be looking at a full day or even longer before he's synthesizing sensory data well enough."

"You heard the doc. Fewer people, everyone. Come on. Let's go, move it out. We don't need to crowd the kid."

"Drinks on me if anyone wants to go down to the pub and celebrate."

Soon enough, Wendy tapped on the door again. "It's a lot quieter now, Virgil. There's a couple of my colleagues still here, but I think you'll like meeting them."

The closet door opened, and one of Virgil peeked out. The room was mostly empty of humans, and some things had been pulled over the windows to make it darker. He crept out, glancing around timidly, one body at a time. At least he could tell them apart enough now to walk.

There were two other humans, and their names turned out to be Leonardo and Chen. They had a lot of questions, but Wendy reminded them to slow down and not stress Virgil out, which he appreciated. Chen in particular asked Virgil to do a lot of different gestures. He had each of his bodies touch his own nose, then the nose of the self to his left, in a little circle. This was pretty hard. Virgil watched Chen's finger with all six eyes, trying to track it as he moved it up, down, and to the sides, then Chen asked him to do it with just one pair of eyes at a time. Then he assigned each body a number, which Wendy said was temporary and he didn't have to keep the numbers, and tapped different places on each one while Virgil told him where he'd been touched and on which body. They were kind to him, though, so he didn't mind all this too much.

After a while, Chen and Leonardo decided that they were done for the day, and Wendy offered to help show Virgil how to use his recharging pods. He had three, one for each body, since they had separate batteries. They were nice and quiet inside, with a tinted lid and soft cushions, which was nice. They made a very interesting humming sound too, which he could feel the same way he could feel where his other selves were.

"Electromagnetics," Wendy told him, and he realized that he knew all about that, now that she'd mentioned it. "It won't disrupt your intrasystem communications, though, so don't worry about that. If you like the sound, we can just leave it, but if you don't, I can install something to dampen it."

"It's fine." Getting all three of him into the pods was a bit of a struggle, and he ended up using just one body at a time, with Wendy helping him.

"Rest well, Virgil. Tomorrow's another day."

"Will you be here tomorrow too?" Virgil asked.

"Yes, if you want me to be," Wendy said, with a smile.

Virgil didn't have to think about that for very long. "Definitely. So I'll…see you tomorrow?"

"It's a deal."

Virgil wasn't sure he knew how to rest, once Wendy left, but having more or less the same sensory input from all three of him made it easier to relax, at least. The knowledge was in his mind, somehow, the same way he knew language and what a bathroom and a closet were. He activated whatever process seemed like the right one, and within a few minutes, he was recharging and defragmenting peacefully, three times at once.

"Good morning, sleepy-circuits," came Wendy's voice, which was odd, because hadn't she just left? But now the sun was up, Virgil's systems were reporting full batteries and a successful memory defragment, and Wendy was back. "How are you feeling?"

"I don't know yet," he answered. "Not like yesterday. I think…better?"

"Fantastic. You took thirteen hours to defragment, but I didn't think we should interrupt you."

"Is that good or bad?" Virgil asked. He reached up with all three hands and tapped the same button inside of all three pods, and their covers slid up simultaneously. If he focused just a little, he could use only the self closest to Wendy to talk to her, which was a lot quieter for him, and probably her too.

"It's long, but it's not necessarily bad. When you sleep, your attention systems go through your sensory input from the day and decide what's worth storing and what's not as important. You generate three times as much sensory data as most reploids, though, so I'm not surprised you took longer."

That day, Virgil felt much more at home in his three selves. Managing them all at once was a lot of effort, still, but Wendy encouraged him to keep trying, and to not use just one while ignoring the other two. He walked into a lot of doorframes by accident, but by the afternoon, she had him picking up different objects, using all three of his selves. It was difficult, and frustrating, he thought. Sometimes he would try with the wrong self and end up grasping at air. Wendy reminded him that it was just practice, though, and it was okay to be wrong, so he tried to not let it bother him.

Chen was there, too, taking a lot of notes on a tablet. There were other humans, which Virgil found out were the researchers who had worked together to build him, and they came and said hello to him one at a time over the course of the day. Virgil tried to remember all their names and faces, but it was hard to look directly at them; when his attention systems kicked into higher-power processing to analyze minute facial details and expressions, he felt like he didn't have the bandwidth left to think clearly anymore.

Every day was about the same, for several weeks. Virgil learned that Wendy was a researcher in the field of reploid consciousness, and the head of the Project Convergence developmental team. What this meant, to him at least, was that he mostly interacted with her. She was smart, and nice to him, and no matter how frustrated he got at trying to assemble a puzzle with three different bodies at once, she had a way of speaking to him that made him feel like everything was okay.

He also learned that his three selves had different names. The researchers called them Motive, Drive, and Focus. He asked Wendy which name he was supposed to use, since he was already Virgil, and she told him not to worry about it. "Think of it like…this is my left hand, right? I only have one body, so if I say, 'my left hand,' everyone knows which left hand I mean. If you say, 'my left hand,' you have three of them, so we wouldn't know which one you mean. But if you said, 'Focus's left hand,' we'd know that was your left hand with the orange trim. But all of your hands still belong to Virgil. Does that make sense?"

Sometimes, when they didn't have any specific research to do on Virgil's development, Wendy gave his three selves different hairstyles. It took a long time multiplied by all three of him, but she taught him how to wash his hair, comb it, and do all kinds of interesting things with it, which he liked. "Now, you can get away with doing this a lot less, because you've got synthetic hair and skin, so you aren't building up dead skin cells and oils," she told him, "but humans with our hair type have a wash day about once a week, or more if they need it. My mother used to do this for me when I was little, so I wanted to do it for you."

Over time, using his three selves became easier. Virgil didn't understand any of the concepts behind it, but from what he could understand, he was designed to have an especially flexible sense of self that would allow him to learn how to be all three of him as one being. But first, he did have to learn. Reploids with human-like and animal-like bodies were built already knowing how to use their bodies. Virgil had the basics of how to use a body, but how exactly he would synthesize using three bodies, they weren't sure. In fact, watching him learn was the entire point of Project Convergence, he came to discover, which was why Chen and Leonardo took so many notes about him all the time.

"I have a question," Virgil said one day, when he was about three months old. Well, one of him said that. The other two were across the lab, trying very awkwardly to play ping-pong with himselves.

"What's that?" Wendy asked.

"All three of me are connected, right? And my consciousness is across all three of me?"

Wendy nodded, tapping something into a tablet, then looked up at him. "That's right."

"What would happen if one of me got disconnected?"

She made a face that Virgil had come to recognize as her How Do I Explain This To You Best face since she said that sometimes when she made the face, brows scrunched inward a little bit, lips pushed out. "Well…we aren't sure, actually. The best case scenario is that it would just keep being you but separately for a while, and then when you were reconnected, all of you would synchronize up again. But I don't know if that might have other effects on you. Are you worried about that happening?"

"Not really, I was just thinking." He pressed another puzzle piece into place. One of him missed the ping-pong ball and caught it right in an open optical sensor, which didn't hurt, but made all three of him recoil in surprise. Wendy suppressed a smile.

"You know, your coordination is good enough recently that if you'd like to, we could leave the lab and walk around downtown soon." Virgil looked up with all three of him, his two ping-pong playing selves swiveling his heads towards her.

"Really?" he asked, too excited to suppress speaking in triple unison.

"Really, if you want to. Since there's a lot going on outdoors, I think we'd probably just bring one of you, so you don't get overwhelmed. Maybe next week? We'll see how well you progress and decide soon."

Virgil had looked outside plenty of times, but it hadn't occurred to him to go there. It was bright, for one, and busy. His sensory processing had developed much more slowly than the rest of him, and, he was pretty sure, much more slowly than anyone had expected. Wendy never said so directly to him, but he overheard plenty of conversations, being in three places at once as he was, and no shortage of them were about him.

It ended up being three weeks later, because Wendy decided that it was past time that Virgil received the standard reploid orientation course, which she administered herself. She had designed large parts of it herself, Virgil learned, because she was at the top of her field. This was almost as interesting to him as going outside. Some of it he'd picked up already by simply being around the researchers and engineers, but it took him a while to understand a lot of the contents about emotions. Virgil had lived a sheltered life thus far, and many of the feelings and situations that the lessons talked about seemed entirely foreign.

Finally, the day came, and Wendy met him early in the morning in his room. Well, early for him. Virgil still took quite a lot longer to defragment than the average reploid, but he found that he felt a lot calmer the next day if he didn't rush it. Leaving the task unfinished tended to guarantee that he would have to spend at least some of the next day with four of his hands over four of his eyes just to get the last two to work right without simply overloading him, and that was assuming that nobody was playing music in the lab.

"Ready to go?" Wendy asked him.

"You look nice today," Virgil said, because the lessons had talked about how to have positive social interactions, and he noticed that she was wearing an outfit he hadn't seen before. She had a sky-blue dress, with brown and yellow flowers on it, and a white jacket with short sleeves.

"Thank you," she beamed. It was funny. Whenever she smiled, he did too, like she was a fourth one of him, and the expression was so big it took all of his faces to display.

"What's the flower on your dress called?"

Wendy pulled the fabric of her dress taut so the design was easier to see. "They're sunflowers. They're in season right now, so if we're lucky we might see some in the park."

"I'll send Motive with us, so we can both match," Virgil decided, stepping forward with his yellow-trimmed self. "What should I do with Drive and Focus while we're out?"

"Up to you. It's a free day, so you can do whatever you want, but I think you'll probably have a better time if you just focus on being outside."

"I think…I'll just do that, then," Virgil decided, sitting down on the small couch in his room with his two other selves. They could stay put while he paid attention to Motive.

They stopped by the front desk to let the receptionist know that they were going out, then, finally, Virgil stepped outside for the first time. He hadn't realized that the sky would sound so…resonant. The summer breeze made all sorts of noises that he'd never heard before. Leaves danced on the trees, the pulley on the flagpole in front of the laboratory clanked, and midmorning birdsong came from all around. The freshly-mown grass smelled bright green, and the asphalt smelled like hot oil. It was so bright and open that he had to stop for a moment and process all of the new inputs.

"Not too much, is it?" Wendy glanced to him with cheerful concern.

Virgil shook his head. "I'm okay, it's just…" He looked around again, with wide, brown eyes. "It's a lot. But it's a good kind of a lot."

"If you need a break, just let me know and we can stop somewhere."

He nodded, starting to get his bearings. "Where are we going?"

Wendy pulled out her phone, bringing up a map to show him. "I was thinking we could go downtown to the park, maybe look around at some of the shops. Let me know if your connection to the rest of you feels at all weak or slow or even just different while we're out, okay? It shouldn't, you have a good radius and satellite connectivity on top of that, but we haven't tested taking your bodies farther apart than the length of the main lab building, so I'd rather be safe."

They got into Wendy's car, and she showed Virgil how to fasten the seat buckle. He'd seen this in his lessons, but he'd never done it before, so he didn't mind the help. Soon they were gliding along one of the elevated highways, with Virgil glued to the passenger side window as he tried to take in the view of downtown Abel City. It gleamed in the morning sun, all glass and metal and concrete. The pictures he'd seen had not been able to do it any justice, he thought. It was just so much larger than a screen or even a projection.

Virgil's signal strength held strong, and after some time they came back to ground level and Wendy found a place to park in a big structure full of other cars. They got out, and, because he was so busy gawking at everything, Wendy took Virgil's arm and led him down the sidewalk. "The park is a few blocks that way," she told him, pointing, "but I think it'd be fun to wrap around this way first and see the fountain, and then go up past the shops."

"Yeah," Virgil agreed, hearing about half of what she said. The buildings were so tall, he had to crane his neck to see the sky in between them. "Wait, there's a fountain? With water in it?"

"There sure is!" But she didn't rush him. Eventually, after asking questions about almost every new thing he saw, they arrived at the fountain. It was made out of dark brown granite, great slabs of it that sparkled in the sun, carved into flowing organic shapes down which the water spilled. It was one of the most fascinating things Virgil had ever seen.

"What's it for?" he asked, mentally tracing the sunlit ripples in the water. He wished he could touch it, but it was in the middle of a lot of water. It looked like Wendy's voice sounded to him, he thought.

"It's not for anything, really, it just looks nice. But it's important for things to look nice, too, since that makes people happier when they're around it. That's called artwork, when it's something that just exists to make people happier."

Once Virgil had gazed his fill of the fountain, the two of them walked down the busy sidewalk. Being surrounded by unfamiliar people was dizzying, but it wasn't as bad as when he first booted up. Knowing that Wendy was there gave him such a sense of security that he could tolerate the bustle better.

Virgil stopped to press his face to every storefront they passed. There were bright clothes, shiny shoes, colorful toys, fancy flowers, all kinds of food…he had never really thought about how many things there were in the world. Of course, the food had nothing to do with him, but he still examined the menu with interest, just because he'd never seen it before.

An unfamiliar sound rose over the busyness of the street, and a strange silence fell over everyone. Virgil paused, too.

"...It's not test day for the storm sirens," Wendy murmured, looking up.

Virgil barely had time to register the sound, let alone understand what was happening, before the impact. His sensors reeled with >W.24205-SEN: Failure to calibrate optical sensors to ambient light level. and >W.33098-SEN: Decibel comfort threshold surpassed. and >E.04877-SEN: Failure to process proprioceptive input. and cold terror. For several moments he couldn't even find his Motive-self, but as the shock wore off, he began to process. He was on his side. Something heavy was on him. He didn't know where Wendy was.

He didn't know where Wendy was.

Virgil sat up, pushing at whatever it was pinning him to the sidewalk. It turned out to be a tree branch, leaves scorched and still smoking in the heat of the explosion that had rocked the street. Glass rained everywhere, sparkling in the sun and tinkling as it hit the ground. He scrambled to his feet, once he could do so.

"Wendy?" he called, panic rising in his circuits. Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm. Virgil drummed all thirty of his fingers against his thighs, reflexively, then left twenty of them running in the background. "Wendy?"

A cough from under a steel bench alerted him to her position. "Wendy!" he called again, running to her. His leg was unsteady and the paneling bent, but he compensated and ignored the warnings it threw. The blast had thrown her to the ground, hard, and she had rolled, coming to a stop under the bench.

"Virgil," she rasped, throat hoarse with pain and the dust in the air. "Run. Get indoors."

"Not without you," Virgil protested. He reached for her and picked her up. She was surprisingly light. Somehow, he had always assumed that humans would weigh more. Wendy fit easily into his arms, but her dress was splattered with bright red.

Wendy groaned. "C-careful, I," she hissed. "I…something sharp hit me, I don't know what…" She tried to press a hand to the red, but twitched in pain, jerking it away. A massive shadow flew overhead, helicopter blades audible over the chaos, but its source was hidden in the dust and rising smoke. "W-we have to hide, Virgil."

He ran, Wendy coughing painfully in his arms. The nearest storefront was a little café, the plate glass front windows blown out. Virgil leapt the low wall and scrambled for a door in the back. It was locked, so he picked up one foot and kicked it open with more force than he had realized he could even bring to bear. Inside there was a storage room, with bags of coffee on shelves and several stainless refrigerators and a sink, and a door standing open to the rear of the building where the staff had already fled. There was another door labeled 'office,' which wasn't locked. He ducked inside, kicking it closed behind them, and turned the lights on.

There wasn't much, just a desk and computer, some shelves filled with plastic three-ring binders, and a battered little sofa. He laid Wendy on the sofa, as carefully as he could, and locked the door behind them as if that would protect them.

"Virgil," Wendy said, voice trembling. She reached for him with one hand, which he took. "I'm sorry, I'm s-so sorry, this wasn't…I didn't even imagine…are you okay?" she asked.

"I'm okay," he answered, realizing this was the first time in his life he had ever lied. "But you're hurt. How do I fix you?"

"I don't…think you can." She still had her fingers curled around the red welling through her sunflower dress; now that they were holding still, Virgil realized, a twisted piece of metal protruded between them, buried deep in her ribs. "I think…I can't even apply pressure to it, it's…"

"No. No, no no. I'll carry you. Someone can fix you. I can get us away from here. We can go back to the car, and…"

Wendy pulled him closer, weakly, and tried to smile for him. His face tried to mirror it, but he was shaking so hard he couldn't do it. "Virgil. Listen to me. Okay?" She folded his hand to her cheek, streaked with dirt and blood, and her skin was an ashen brown color he'd never seen before. "Run out the back door. As fast as you can."

"I don't want to leave you," Virgil said, voices cracking. He had no idea how many of him were speaking. He couldn't even begin to keep track. "I won't. Please don't ask me to."

"I know," she said, "but you have to. I don't know what will happen to you, if Motive loses connection. P-please. For me."

"No," he protested. He had never told her no before, either, and he felt horrible for it, but leaving her in danger…it wasn't even an option. Even if he couldn't take her out of the danger, either.

Wendy laughed, haltingly, and it trailed off into a groan and a grimace of pain. A deep, percussive boom shook the entire building, and the lights flickered. "You're growing up s-so fast. So f-fast," she said, and Virgil didn't know what to do. He knelt by the couch and buried his face in her neck, unable to stop himself from shaking in triplicate. He wanted to hold her so tightly she couldn't slip away from him, but he was afraid of hurting her more.

"I love you," he said, even though he hardly understood the words. It had to be true, because his chest felt like his entire power core was being hollowed out a little more with every moment that Wendy faded. "I don't care what happens to me. It can't be worse than…than…" He choked up, unable to even say the thought.

"I've loved you since before you were activated," Wendy murmured, though the words were a bit slurred. She stroked his face with her free hand, leaving it streaked red. "More than a project t-to me. My child. S-survive. Please."

Virgil nodded, trying to put on a brave face, but it kept pulling in unfamiliar directions. "I will. I will. I promise I will."

A third explosion rocked the building, scrambling his sensors even more than they already were. When the dust cleared enough to see, Virgil realized that Wendy was not coughing. Or breathing. Or anything. She was as limp as a doll, eyes unseeing. Whatever it was that made her Wendy had gone, and he couldn't do anything to stop it.

Virgil curled up next to the couch, burying his face in her cooling neck and holding her hands. He didn't even know how to cry, so he just stayed there, servomotors trembling, making a sound with his voice that he didn't recognize. There was a fourth explosion. The walls cracked and the ceiling fell, and he forgot to even be afraid, because he didn't know how to feel anything anymore.

And then, wrenching vertigo. Disorientation. He couldn't find his arms he couldn't find his legs he couldn't find himself he couldn't see or hear but he couldn't have been deactivated because the flood of critical warning messages just kept coming drowning out everything—

Someone was shaking him, he realized, very slowly, and the room drifted back into focus, one pixel at a time. The room? What room? His room? Right, he was here too, he was here twice and once in the city, he'd almost forgotten—

But then why was he only here once? He could feel himself but he couldn't find himself but then he saw himself but he wasn't controlling that self—

"Shh, it's okay, shh, I'm alive, I'm alive," his other self said, wide-eyed, face still etched with raw grief. His other self was holding him by the upper arms, as if trying to shake sense into himself. "Please. She told me to survive. I have to survive. Just…stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, stay calm, like Wendy told me to, right? She wanted me to stay calm. I can stay calm."

He looked down at his hands. Orange? Orange trim. His other self had red trim. His missing self…had yellow trim. Right. So he must be…Focus. That sounded right. But why couldn't he—

He looked up and locked eyes with his other self, and he realized, slowly, both of him coming to the conclusion separately, that he couldn't sense anything out of his other self at all. He might as well have been looking at a different reploid.

"Oh, no," his red self, Drive, said. "Oh, no. No, no, no, I don't know how to—I don't know how to reconnect. Why can't I reconnect? Why am I not…why am I not you? Why are you not me?"

Focus opened his mouth, tried to respond, but all that came out was a harsh electronic sound. Not that he knew what he wanted to say in the first place, but the sound of his own, strange voice startled him into quiet. Drive simply wrapped his arms around Focus and held onto him tightly, as if he could physically merge them back together, but even though Focus could detect Drive's signal, his signal, right there in front of him…he couldn't read it. It was just a sensation, the data itself meaningless. And Drive couldn't read his, either. He had split, instantly and horrifyingly, into two Virgils.

Chen burst through the door. "Virgil, there you are! We have to go. Come on. We're evacuating. Mavericks have taken downtown and they're heading this way. Where are Motive and Dr. Myers?" He must have read something in their eyes and the strange way that Drive refused to let go of Focus, because his expression shifted slowly to one of dawning horror, but he swallowed hard, and made his voice gentle, the way Wendy used to. "...Let's get away first, and then you can tell me what happened."

Later, much later, when things were safe again, they all wore black, and they buried a box full of sunflowers, because they didn't have Wendy and Motive to put in it.

"What's going to happen to us?" Drive asked once they got back to the lab, because Focus still couldn't speak, and while Chen and Leonardo knew a little sign language, it wasn't really enough to communicate with Focus. He and Drive had worked together to learn a lot of sign language, so they could at least talk with each other, and Drive didn't mind translating.

"Well," said Chen, "we're going to continue Wendy's work. I think that's what she would have wanted."

"Probably," Drive agreed.

'Wendy would have asked me what I wanted,' Focus signed, looking miserable. 'I don't want to be studied without her. It's not the same.'

'Yeah,' Drive signed back. 'But what am I going to do about it? Besides, Chen is nice enough.'

'I guess,' Focus signed, with little enthusiasm.

They still both thought of the other as part of themselves, and tended to call their shared existence 'I' and 'me,' even though they had never reconnected. They had concluded that they probably never would. Even if they did, would it help? They'd been separate for long enough now that they might not have fit back together properly, and if it was anything like the process of splitting apart, neither of them wanted to try.

Wendy's research partners tried. They really did. Drive had to give them credit for that much. They didn't know about wash day, or anything at all about taking care of their hair type, so Drive took over and made sure his and Focus's hair didn't mat. Sometimes he wished it wasn't so hard, but then he thought about how Wendy had designed them to look like her, and he felt bad for wishing that. Leonardo and Chen did their best to look after the one-turned-two reploids, and it was never the same, but it wasn't bad, either.

Some days it wasn't like much of anything, really. Drive wondered if some of his emotional processing had died with Motive, or stayed with Focus. He had fewer sensory processing issues now, while Focus seemed to struggle as much as they ever had as a single self, so anything was possible, probably.

Months passed, turning into years. The Maverick War ended. Leonardo retired, then Chen, and one by one, the remaining researchers that Virgil had known—they still called themselves and each other Virgil sometimes, when nobody was looking—were replaced by other researchers, who had not been there when they were activated, who did not think of them as their child.

Virgil belonged to the laboratory itself, after that. They were nobody's project, but neither did they have anywhere to go. Drive had learned along the way to assist with other projects, so at least they were allowed to stay indefinitely, and Focus…tried. Drive knew his heart wasn't in it. What he really wanted to do was paint, and he was good at it. Occasionally, someone would start a new research project based on him, about reploids and creativity, and while Focus never said no to being studied, Drive knew he didn't really want to say yes, either, and hung over him protectively the entire time.

He didn't have a lot of emotions, but the ones he did have told him to take care of Focus, because Wendy couldn't anymore. He could do that. It was satisfying. Leonardo and Chen had wanted to continue Wendy's work, but they couldn't take care of Virgil like she had. Drive could. That was his part of the work, and he didn't have to retire.

The day came when Sophia Microelectronics Research had their funding slashed. They were closing, the CEO announced, at a meeting in the main lab. Drive wasn't surprised. He'd watched the staff slowly dwindle over the past few years.

'>What am I going to do?' Focus asked him. They'd learned, over the years of being watched much less closely, that reploids had an entire nonverbal language of diagnostic codes, and Focus had taken to it with incredible ease. Drive had to work to catch up, but he had, and the two of them now used it with each other more than sign language. It felt more like being a single self again.

'>What do I want to do?' Drive asked back.

Focus thought for a long time, arms crossed, staring out the window of their room. He didn't like going outside much, but he loved watching the outdoors happen, and Drive had started a flower garden just outside so that Focus would have more to watch. He'd discovered, along the way, that he rather liked gardening, which was a surprise to both of them.

'>I want…' Focus started, but paused. 'I think I might want too much.'

'>You can say it without having to do it, whatever it is. I won't laugh at you.'

Focus turned to him and switched to sign language, which he only did if they were alone and he wanted to say something so secret that he didn't want to risk any other reploids overhearing it through a wall. 'I want to go see where I died. I know, it's a bad idea, and we can't do it, but—'

Drive began signing partway through Focus's thoughts, which was unusual. He usually let Focus finish thoughts, no matter how long and rambling they became. 'I want that too.'

'Oh.' Focus stared at him in surprise, though really, Focus stared at Drive's chassis. Neither of them liked eye contact, and so neither of them saw a need for it.

'I could go, but I'm not sure I can come back if I do. And I might not be able to cross the wall at all,' Drive signed, pensively. 'But if that's what both of me want to do, I can probably find a way. Reploids do it all the time, and sometimes humans do, too.'

'I'd be called irregular, if I go there. It's a bad idea.'

Drive shrugged. 'I'm irregular now. I've been irregular since I stopped being Virgil. I'm just not dangerous…and I still wouldn't be dangerous, even if I went into the quarantine zone.' He paused, then signed a little more emphatically, 'I want everything you want. If you want to go, I want to go, and I'll keep us safe. I promised Wendy I'd survive.'

'Maybe I'll paint the quarantine zone,' Focus mused, fingers flying. 'If anybody lives out there, it must be so sad for them. They'd need something to make it nicer. And if they don't, I guess that's more space for me to paint.'

'I wonder if there's flowers there,' Drive thought with his hands. 'I never did get to see the park…I wonder if it's still there.'

On the day that Sophia Microelectronics Research closed for good, Focus and Drive left as free reploids. They couldn't belong to a laboratory that didn't exist, after all. They'd earned some money of their own in their later years as lab assistants, and spent a little bit of it on a huge bouquet of sunflowers, and some of it on paints and brushes, and some of it on flower seeds. A little more of it went to a backpack with some basic supplies: coolant, self-repair nanite fluid, and just in case, a few crystalline power core replacements, though those were expensive. The rest, they spent on paying a human to very quietly open an underground door for them, and then to open it again when they came back.

That they never came back was not the human's problem.

Chapter Text

X sat heavily on the ground, arms and back aching. The town's little garden plot was not nearly so little as it had seemed at first, when it came time to weed and water it, and he'd found, too, that despite his previous assumptions about the contents of the flower bed, he had no idea what was a weed or not. Next to him, Glitch poked the fire with a stick, and on his other side, Hammer and Kathy chatted with a couple of other reploids that he hadn't met yet. The garden lamps and most of the other lights were off for the night, and most of the light came from the cinder block fire pit around which the little encampment had begun to gather for the evening.

"V, this is Valentina, and Cirocco," Hammer said, turning to introduce him once he'd gotten settled.

Valentina was another human-like model, though she had quite a bit more shape to her body than X usually saw in a reploid. Peachy pink hair tumbled in waves down her back, and the shimmer of permanently tinted makeup brightened her cheeks. Not unlike Kathy, she wore clothing, rather large on her and mismatched; unlike Kathy, X suspected that going without would have been embarrassing for her and awkward for others. "Nice to meet you!" she chirped. "Rocky, be sociable, say hi to V."

"Hi," deadpanned Cirocco, in a deep but still female growl. She was one of the anthropomorphic reploids, generally custom or short-run models with highly specific capabilities. While her overall shape was bipedal, she had the head of a wolf, with a thick mane of tan fur and a tail. Her underarmor was gray, and the rest of her plating was white, with ice blue accents and darker navy edges.

"Nice to meet you," X said, giving her a nod and not pushing the issue. He was well acquainted with the sort of person who didn't enjoy small talk with strangers, and didn't mind giving that sort of person the space they wanted. Moreover, he recognized her production line, and very much hoped that she wouldn't recognize him. He'd had a run-in with another Wolfang series reploid, which she likely was, and it had not ended peacefully.

"How's your first day? Do anything fun? Kat make you play in the dirt? I bet she did, you've got it all over your knees," Glitch razzed X.

"I weeded the gardens," X replied, unfazed. "It's more work than I'd expected. I've never actually done it before."

"Oh, my God, did you hear that? V just said more than three words to me, in a row, and probably even on purpose! We're basically best friends now, I'm pretty sure." He tossed a few more wood scraps in, and slowly, the fire grew. It was well contained in a pit of cinder blocks, and while X could have done with a little less of Glitch being himself quite so loudly, he did not mind the warmth, and he found he did not mind the socialization, either.

"Don't get too far ahead of yourself," he jokingly warned, though it came out deadpan enough that Glitch couldn't quite figure out what to make of the statement for several moments, until Cirocco, who saw it for what it was, chuffed a single laugh.

"You're so hard to read, man," Glitch sighed, all melodrama.

"Tell me about yourself, V!" Valentina exclaimed, apropos of very little. "I mean, if you don't mind, but I heard you're an ex-Hunter, right?"

"I was, yes," X said, with a nod. "For quite a while."

This brought a very canine huff from Cirocco. "I thought there was something familiar about you."

X internally quailed. Had she recognized him? Should he have recognized her more specifically? Was she about to out him to everyone? "Did you?" he asked, mentally bracing and running through about five explanations in the time it took the wolf reploid to answer.

"Yeah, Hunters all have this look. Like you're always studying everyone. Gives me the creeps," she remarked gruffly.

X's anxiety deflated so abruptly he got emotional whiplash. "Oh. Er. Sorry about that," he said, fidgeting with the handle of his cane. "They train you to pay attention to your surroundings at all times. It's a habit." The exact extent to which he had learned that particular lesson was better unmentioned.

"Then there's Kathy, who watches everyone like she's about to give us homework," Glitch snickered, and X was glad for the spotlight to shift away from him. "Dunno which is worse."

"Homework," Valentina declared, without a moment's hesitation.

"Homework," Hammer agreed.

"I do not give you homework!" Kathy objected with a laugh. "Just because things need done around here—"

"It's work and it's at home," Glitch pointed out, very helpfully.

"You are always trying to get me to read more books," added Valentina. "Except I already read plenty of books."

"You are the sole reason we have a human romance novel shelf," Cirocco agreed, though whether she thought this was a compliment or not, she did not clarify. Valentina simply took it as one, nodding at her much larger canine friend.

"See? I read all the time. She'll tell you."

"Those are not educational—" Kathy started.

"Who says?" Hammer interrupted, which earned him a mostly playful glare from Kathy. "I flipped through one of 'em once and I learned all kinds of shit they don't get around to telling you in orientation."

Glitch cackled. "Like what?"

"Ain't polite to say. You'll have to crack one open yourself and find out," Hammer deflected.

"I'm not that interested in freaky organic shit, sorry." Glitch poked the fire a bit more, making cinders rise. It was built well away from any buildings, though, so he could fidget with it with relative impunity. "Books are too slow anyway."

"Well, we can't all mainline wifi, Speedy," the construction reploid chuckled. "Reminds me in a roundabout way, though, did you still need a new cable for your project?"

"Yeah, and maybe bring me the rest of the lab while you're out. A cable would be a good start, though, I don't have a spare for the new pod, and the one on pod two is starting to disconnect if you wiggle it at all."

Hammer nodded. "Think I know where there's probably a few. You go up Fifth far enough, over the old bridge, there's a bunch of apartment blocks. Pretty sure there was some reploid housing in there too. I haven't had a chance to go scrounge around yet, but it looks promising. I was gonna have a look tomorrow, but I think I'd better see if I can't get a new room finished first."

X sat up a little straighter. He hadn't even managed to leave the encampment, and he was beginning to worry about his actual reason for being in the quarantine zone. Losing a day, however much he'd needed the recharge, was a lot. "I could go check it out, if you want."

Hammer raised an eyebrow at him skeptically. "Not to imply nothin', but it's a long walk. But if you wanna go, knock yourself out. Just take someone with you."

"Shit, if you're going, I'm going," Glitch declared. "Who knows what I could scavenge up that way? Maybe I'll get extra lucky and someone'll have a nice tablet they didn't take with them. Or more recharge pod parts, it's getting dicey with only three pods and twelve of us, now, but I almost have a fourth together." He sighed. "What I wouldn't give for us to have set up camp next to a conveniently un-looted electronics supply store."

"You and me both, man," Hammer agreed. "At least we got a good roof and floor here. You shoulda seen where I was camped out when I first got here. Ended up having to leave because the roof leaked so bad the floor was caving in."

Focus and Drive sat down next to each other, and right behind them were three more reploids that X hadn't yet met. Valentina sprung into action at once. "V, this is Flip, Siobhan, and Trigger. Say hi to V, guys, he's new," she said, bubbly with excitement.

"Heya," said Flip. He had white and gray plating as well, which was not an uncommon base color scheme among civilian reploids, with lavender and teal accents. He was lightly built, willowy even, and sported two thin metal blades on his back that X recognized immediately as thruster guides. X guessed that he was probably some kind of high-speed model, semi-custom at least, though some of his design elements struck X as several generations ago.

Next to him was a female-model reploid in red, pink, and gold plating, who must have been Siobhan. She had curly red hair, freckles, and pale green eyes, and seemed to be from the same design generation as Flip. Siobhan gave X a small, shy smile and a wave of her fingers, but not much else.

"Hello." The final reploid, Trigger, took a seat next to Cirocco. He was another anthropomorph, built in the image of a crow and plated in mostly black, with dark green and violet trim that suggested iridescent black plumage. Next to the wolf reploid, it became clear to X that they also shared quite a few design elements and indeed had probably been built in tandem. Cirocco chuffed at him in greeting, and he made a friendly croaking rattle noise back at her. X idly wondered how many reploids had arrived here in pairs. It seemed to be more common than not, which tracked with what he knew of Mavericks. That they tended to turn in groups, even without the Virus influencing them, was a known fact.

"Be careful if you go, V," Kathy advised. "The tunnels end at the river. Fifth Street Bridge is the edge of what used to be Old Town, and they never ran them out that far, so you'll be above ground, and there's a lot less cover."

"And there's the Drifters," added Cirocco.

"Aren't they mostly on the southeast side?" Valentina asked.

Cirocco shook her head. "Last time I was up that way, I saw them. Didn't see me, but I'm sure it was them."

"Who are the Drifters?" asked X, though he could guess somewhat from context.

The chorus of answers was simultaneous, but confirmed his guess.

"A gang," Kathy replied.

"Bunch of fucking lunatics," Glitch answered.

"Bad news, that's what," Hammer said.

'>E.04642-SYS: Failure to compile.' answered Focus.

'>W.00142-SEN: Damage detected, left gluteal plate. W.00143-SEN: Damage detected, right gluteal plate.' Drive agreed.

"Mavericks," Flip said.

"They're probably not actually infected with the actual Virus, though, just to be clear," Glitch objected, to Flip specifically. "That's pretty much been eradicated."

"They might have something, though. You remember Analog." As soon as Flip mentioned the name, the circle fell silent for a moment.

"...alright, point, I do remember Analog," Glitch conceded, looking back to the fire pit and feeding it another couple pieces of wood. "Hard to explain that one unless they're infected." Then, turning to X, he explained. "Analog was one of the earlier ones with us, here. Nice guy, until one day he just didn't come back from scavenging. Next time we saw him he was spray-painted with the same red bullshit as the rest of them. Threw a rock at me and Flip, even."

Kathy nodded, expression solemn in the firelight. "It's why the buddy system is mandatory. There's too much that can happen. Hunter patrols, other irregulars, buildings can still collapse…it's a dangerous world. We have to have each other's backs, because who else will? But if the Drifters have been hanging around the north side too…that's not good. Maybe you shouldn't go."

X opened his mouth to speak, but Glitch was, unsurprisingly, much faster. "We'll be careful. Could even take a buster each if you're really worried. Besides, if they're only just now getting up there, they might not have stripped everything out yet, and now that there's this many of us, do you wanna start a wait-list for who gets to charge this week? 'Cause I don't. I'm hoping I can scav enough working parts to get the fourth pod going soon, or at least make sure we don't end up down to two."

Kathy relented, though the concern was still clearly written in her features. "Alright, you've made your point. But no dragging V into anything dangerous, okay? He's not nearly as mobile as you."

X's gut reaction was to object. He could force it, he knew. He could expend the extra computational power, override his balance sensors, switch his servomotors to full manual control, make purely visual physics calculations with a certain margin of error…it would leave him exhausted and aching from the strain, but he could still perform in combat nearly as well as before, in short bursts. And if it came to it, he would, of course.

But then, he thought, that would definitely tip everyone off. He did intend to tell them, at some point. His identity was hardly secret. He was not concealing his face at all, nor anything else about his appearance, aside from having consigned his old blue armor to a display case. He had even simply cut the bottom half of his name off to make V. He had just…grown a little tired of the incredible weight of being himself, that was all. And no irregular would want to talk to X. V, on the other hand, they immediately accepted as one of their own.

"Of course not. We see anything at all suspicious, we'll get the hell out. Don't even worry about us. I know every tunnel from here to the river like the back of my hand. And I've installed things into my hands before, so you know I know what I'm talking about."

Besides, X thought as Glitch continued to make words, he couldn't remember the last time anyone had openly considered his safety. It was…nice, he begrudgingly conceded, to feel that someone remembered that he wasn't invincible. Even if it was under somewhat false pretenses, he also thought. The mighty X couldn't be defeated—no, not quite, he couldn't let himself be defeated—but V was allowed his frailties.

But then, that felt like giving up, and while he'd had to make some concessions to absolute necessity like his cane, Kathy's casual concern for his well-being gave him a creeping sense of unease that he was showing too much weakness…even if it was the thing causing him to also appear trustworthy.

X was going in circles, and he knew it, so it came as a relief when his train of thought was interrupted by Mack's arrival. "Alright, I'm here, the party has officially started," it deadpanned, waddling up to the fire. "Has nobody turned on the radio? I have to do everything here."

The little encampment, X included, spent the rest of the evening around the fire, doing nothing useful. Humans would probably have had a cooler of drinks and something to eat, X knew, but reploids needed no such things. Conversation flowed between verbal and digital, though X noticed that Focus never spoke. He was so fluent in I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. however that X found himself only barely able to keep up.

He was content to say little and listen more. There was much to learn about his new friends simply by observing them, he realized; Focus, his constantly-tapping fingers flecked with paint, nonverbal but animatedly broadcasting instead; his apparent twin sibling Drive, never more than an arm's length or two from him, hovering protectively; the way that Kathy, while she was speaking, unconsciously tucked her hair behind her ear in a way that was so human-like he could have forgotten she was a reploid; Hammer's easy laugh, sounding for all the world as if he did not live a hard life in a refugee camp of irregulars. Flip and Siobhan sat very close together, one of Flip's arms around her protectively at all times, and X understood why Hammer had mentioned their not needing a third wheel. Glitch never held still, though unlike Focus and somewhat Drive, his own tendency was to not remain in one position for long, sometimes even getting up and wandering around for no apparent reason.

X had little to contribute to the gathering, but nobody tried to force him to join in—unless he counted Glitch randomly asking him his opinion on things he didn't have much opinion on, like what color he should paint himself next. He was happy enough watching everyone else interact. Clearly, these reploids cared for each other. They had, against all odds, built a working community in the rubble.

And yet, Kathy's words from that morning drifted to the front of his mind. We've all done something to be out here. Every one of these reploids must have been irregular in some way, he thought, enough so that they had run from the Hunters and the law, or at least society. He might have even recognized them from the news, had he had enough details to put together. It was hard to reconcile, sitting around the fire with them. Even knowing that Kathy had hospitalized two humans…the kind of woman who could do that did not seem like the kind of woman who was currently planning the layout of the next few personal rooms with Hammer, and laughing with Valentina about something.

Glitch had stolen Mack, and casually mentioned he'd done a number of other electronic crimes. That at least made sense with what he knew of the overclocked reploid. Mack…had its only crime really been being activated? And what of everyone else here? Did they have a body count? Would he have had to retire them, had he not taken his leave of the Maverick Hunters?

X did not want to think about that. He'd had enough of violence for several lives already. His thoughts must have been showing on his face, because Mack sat next to him, tucking its feet neatly under it in an almost cat-like way.

"Zenny for your thoughts?" it asked.

X shook his head with a wry half-smile. "You'd be overpaying me."

"Good thing I'm broke, then. If the crowd's too much, I got a hammock installed in the room for you. The pods are spoken for tonight already, though."

"It's not that. I like this, actually. It's been a while since I had the chance to just be around people who didn't want something from me." He rubbed a thumb over the handle of the cane in his lap.

"It's a good group." Mack turned its optics to the fire, which Cirocco was now flipping wood chips into. "Bunch of strange folks, but mostly the good kind of strange."

"I was wondering…and I know it's nosy of me to ask, so if you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. But did you do anything? Other than Glitch activating you, I mean?"

The C-15's eyes rotated to X. "Depends on why you're asking," it hedged.

"Curiosity," X answered honestly. "Kathy mentioned that everyone here is irregular or Maverick. I wasn't sure if she was warning me for my sake or for yours. Like I said, though, if you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. I don't want to push you."

Mack hummed noncommittally, eyes drifting back towards the fire and then across it to Glitch, and X realized that he hadn't spoken to a C-15…maybe ever. Not at any length, that was certain. "Hmm. Well, I can respect curiosity. Sure, why not."

It paused, collecting its thoughts and doing a little foot-shuffle as it did before resettling. "It was when they came for Glitch. The way he'll tell it, he was a step ahead of them and got away. That's about half true. He knew they were coming, but he didn't have enough time to get away. I figured, I wouldn't even be activated if it weren't for this overclocked little weirdo, so I owed him my life. When they showed up at the apartment block for him, I got into the building's service conduits."

"With the rest of the Mettaurs?" X asked, nodding along.

"Exactly." Mack gave him an affirmative tip of the helmet back. "The Hunters couldn't tell me from any of them in a hurry, not that they were really looking for me. They knew I existed, or at least that I was missing from the museum, but they hadn't considered me a threat at that point. So I started cutting every pipe and wire I could find between Glitch and the Hunters. The building's mechaniloid Mettaurs automatically deployed to repair them, the fire alarms and the sprinklers all went off, and then someone went and dropped all these live wires into the water."

X gave a conflicted little laugh. And to think he'd considered these units little more than unfortunate cannon fodder, back in the first days of the Maverick Wars…he was lucky they hadn't been given more leeway. Or maybe that was what made Mack irregular, ultimately. C-15s had not been known for much creativity or quick thinking, let alone coming up with a way to hinder an entire squad of Maverick Hunters single-...no-handedly.

"I probably could have gotten away without being detected," it continued, still in its mechanical monotone, "but then someone stepped on me, and I happened to still have my cutting laser primed, so I took his leg off at the knee. And then someone else's. By the time I ran into someone with laser-resistant armor, they had realized that at least one of us was Maverick and were destroying every Mettaur they could catch, so I got back into the service conduits and got out of there."

"You saved Glitch," said X, glancing from the fire, to the green reploid who had now wandered over to Flip. Glitch leaned in slyly and said something into one of Flip's auditory sensors, and they both snorted with laughter. Glitch, who is an experienced cybercriminal, by his own admission, X reminded himself. And I'm talking to someone who disabled, if not decommissioned, most of a squad of Hunters. None of these people are safe, and I'm not safe being here…Kathy needed me to know that, or she wouldn't have told me what she did.

…Right? Then why do I feel safe with them?

"I did," Mack said, radiating pride, despite its monotone voice and lack of expression.

"But he tells the story as if you aren't in it," X wondered aloud. "Doesn't that bother you?"

Mack shifted on its feet, rotating its chassis left and right in an emphatic no. "He's protecting me. I don't need anyone but him to know what I did, and he does. That's enough."

That brought a full smile to X's face, at least for a few moments. "It's good that you have each other," he said. An entire squad of Hunters. I don't even know that it wasn't right there when Glitch threatened me, waiting to disassemble me with a cutting laser. But then, Glitch only did what he did because he had to make certain I wouldn't be a threat to the rest of them, because his loyalty is to Mack and the rest of the settlement.

Aha. There it was, the word that had been somewhere in the back of his mind all evening: loyalty. It didn't take much at all to see that each and every one of these reploids would risk death for each other. Of course, he'd seen it before no few times between Hunters, but the longer the Maverick Wars had dragged on, the more Hunters had defected, or been infected…it had become a hindrance, eventually. Being a Hunter meant that one had to be ready to die for the reploid by one's side just as much as one had to be willing to put a round through their power core. Loyalty struggled to grow in such terrain. Loyalty to one's allies over the mission could and did result in entire squadrons turned at once. The only loyalty that could put down roots had been loyalty to the Hunters as an organization, and X hadn't rested easily thinking about the implications of that.

The only Mettaur model to be made with full awareness and emotional processing—which is kind of fucked up to begin with, that's a lot of weight to put on a little thing without even thumbs—and here they got the last intact one on display like a paperweight. Glitch had stolen Mack purely because it was wrong to keep a sentient being, even a potential one who hadn't been activated yet, like an object. And it was, wasn't it? X couldn't fault him for that opinion in the least.

I…all I could think was that this person should not be allowed near children. That—that I would not allow this person to be near children. He couldn't argue with that, either. Kathy had tried and failed to reconcile two impossible statements. Was her loyalty to the system, which refused to help, or her children, who she cared for day after day? Of course she had to choose her children, even if the means she chose to defend them in the heat of the moment were entirely wrong. A human at the end of their rope might have done the same, in her position. The only difference was that Kathy was stronger, and therefore more capable of harm. Where the human justice system would have handled the situation more or less fairly, or at least tried to, a reploid would simply be terminated, in more ways than one.

Was that actually fair, just because she was stronger? Especially if she had never been given the time to develop the emotional maturity of an adult human in her role?

"You alright, V?" Mack asked, peering up at X. "You look tired."

X blinked. What was he even thinking? Justifying Maverick behavior…he must have been tired. Maybe Kathy's real warning was meant to be that they were all contagious even without the Virus. "Ah? Yeah, I am. It's been a full day."

Glitch slapped X on the back out of nowhere, plopping down on Mack as if it were a stool. It played an irritated buzzer noise, but did not try to dislodge him. "You oughta go get some rest. We got another one tomorrow. I gotta go recharge before we head out, it's been a while and if I don't defrag a little I'm gonna start seeing shit." He stood up just as quickly as he'd sat, using X's shoulder as a handhold and then headed towards the recharging shed. X had to brace to not simply fall over sideways from the extra force.

"Glitch is right, as much as it pains me to say so," Mack agreed. "I'm recharging too, so you even get the room to yourself tonight, but don't get used to it. See you in the morning." It waddled off, following Glitch.

X decided to take their advice. He hadn't objectively done that much today, he knew, but he felt as though he'd climbed a mental mountain. Gripping his cane, he stood and turned to head for the rooms, but didn't get more than a few steps before Valentina's voice interrupted him.

"Are you leaving? Goodnight, V!" she called after him.

X turned around, a little sheepishly, to see the rest of the group of reploids watching him expectantly, now that he'd been addressed. "Uh, yeah. Goodnight."

A chorus of 'Goodnight' and 'Sleep well' and 'Don't let the code bugs bite' and '>I.02400-SYS: Sleep mode engaged. I.00980-NRG: Positive.' answered him. Then he was actually allowed to go.

X hadn't really looked into the room he'd been assigned when Hammer had gone around with him, and it took him a little feeling about in the dark to find a light switch. It was not large in the least, but it did have strong walls, onto which someone had painted little sunflowers here and there. Two hammocks took up the far corners. One of them looked freshly installed, which X assumed was his. The material itself, upon inspection, was stitched together from heavy curtain fabric. Salvaged carpet remnants covered the floor, giving at least a little noise protection from the echoing concrete. A dog bed in the near corner must have been Mack's.

X hung his cane and armored jacket from a coat hook on the wall, testing the hammock carefully. It held without even a creak, so he pulled his legs up and into it. There was a blanket, too, which he settled over himself. Reploids didn't generally have much to worry about, temperature-wise, and indeed most of them preferred to run a little cold for heat issues, but X had found that the older he got, the less crunchy he sounded in the morning if he kept a little warmer. The light switch was close enough to reach from there, so he flicked it off and settled in.

A recharge would have been nice, he thought, but he wasn't doing badly at all. A little time to defragment and rest would be enough. He closed his eyes and, after a lifetime of practice in sleeping whenever he had the chance, X was shortly out like a light.

Chapter Text

Hauser-Shitamachi Construction Unit HSC56651253 enjoyed his job. It was good work, he thought. He'd been active for a decade, and he had long since earned his own price tag several times over, but unlike many construction units, he didn't quit as soon as he could afford to buy himself out and get an upgrade to a sleeker chassis.

He didn't blame other construction reploids. God knew it wasn't an easy living, and he had the dings to show for it, but it was satisfying, doing things with his hands and having whole buildings exist because of him. So much had been lost in the Maverick Wars. Entire cities, in some places, razed to the ground—but that was where he and the rest of his crew came in. He could point to entire neighborhoods in and around Abel City and say, 'We rebuilt that.'

HSC56651253, or Smith as the humans had decided to call him for some reason, worked for Alderman Materials and Construction. They'd purchased him and nineteen other units just like him in the rush to rebuild once the end of the Maverick War had finally come into sight. Work was not just plentiful. That would have been putting it too politely. They were underwater in it, unable to hire fast enough to fill the staggering number of crews they needed to fulfill government contracts alone, and never mind the private sector contracts.

As purpose-built units, the HSCs belonged to the company that bought them. As people, though, they owned their earnings, and could purchase themselves back. Smith didn't see anything terribly wrong with that. After all, he hadn't been cheap, and he knew that. His fellow units grumbled, but he didn't feel the need to join them. Grumbling just wasn't his style. He'd rather hang sheetrock or something productive like that.

Over time, the others trickled out, as they could afford to, and Smith stayed on. Jobs slowed down to a sane pace, and no new HSC units followed. After a decade of construction work at an absolutely breakneck pace, he was the only reploid left in his crew. It was a little boring, having so much spare time, but he figured there were worse things in the world.

"You ever think about doing something different?" one of his human coworkers, Jameson, asked him one day, as they were building a form around a section of what would become a concrete slab. He liked Jameson. Honest guy, who'd been in the business as long as Smith had. He'd been hired about a week after Smith and had never once given him any flak for being a reploid.

"Nah." Smith lifted his sledge and drove a stake firmly into the ground with three solid blows.

"Really? You've been here as long as I have. Ain't tired of it at all?"

Smith shrugged. "Are you? Am I supposed to be?" He lined up and drove another stake.

Jameson did the same on his side of the slab, though it took him quite a few more strikes. "Don't gotta be, but man, you ask me, I'd get the hell out and get a new body. Go into something cushy, like, I dunno, finance. You got a computer for a brain, right?"

Smith just laughed. "Sure do. Doesn't make me smart, though. Besides, I like doin' what I'm doin'. Ain't gonna buy a whole new me just to go do somethin' I don't wanna do."

Jameson worked in silence for a few minutes. Then, a little hesitantly, he spoke up. "Y'know…you didn't hear this outta me. In fact you didn't hear this at all. But, uh, just between you and me? You sure you never thought about changing careers?"

"Nope." Smith pounded his last stake in, and went around laser-sighting from corner to corner to make sure the mold was square.

"You're not quite picking up what I'm putting down, here," he said, voice dropping in volume. "Look, it's not me, I think you're great, but not all the guys are real big reploid fans."

This was news to Smith. "Am I not doin' a good job?" he asked.

"No, it's not that," Jameson replied, shaking his head but still dragging some slab bolsters over to lay in.

Smith nodded at the form. "Good, 'cause I know I know what I'm doin'. What is it, then?"

"Well, when we got you, y'know, there wasn't enough humans to go around, and we had a lot of rebuilding to do. So…"

Smith stared unblinkingly at him. "So…?"

"So…" Jameson hedged, then dropped his voice to a murmur, leaning in closer as they filled the form with wire mesh. "Look, you really didn't hear this from me, and I didn't hear it from nobody, but you ain't exactly safe. That's what I'm trying to say, here. I'm telling you this 'cause I like you alright, but the foreman and some of the other guys? They're not gonna say it around you, but I hear it when we go for beers after work. They're getting into some real bio-supremacist shit recently. If I were you, I'd watch the hell out around them."

Smith wasn't sure how to process that. He'd always done his job well. He didn't argue about pay raises, or cuts for that matter—or anything, when it came down to it. He wasn't just an employee model, he was a model employee. This couldn't have been about him personally, he concluded. They'd probably gotten some bad ideas about reploids from the Maverick Wars, and it wasn't like he hadn't thought some uncharitable things about certain other reploids over the years too. So it was understandable, but he was, well, Smith. They'd always gotten along fine. If anything, he got on better with his human coworkers than he had his reploid ones.

In the end, Smith laughed, a single deep chuckle. "You're a good guy, but look, they are too. I've worked with them for years. They're not gonna go and do anything like that. There's no reason for it."

Jameson wiped the sweat from his brow. "You say so, chief. Just keep an eye out, okay? And don't tell anyone I told you anything or it's my ass next."

Smith finished work that day without event. And the next day, and the one after that, for weeks. Footings were laid, foundations poured, frames raised—and nothing happened. He put Jameson's warning out of mind, because he had better things to do than worry.

He was lifting lumber onto a crane platform one day, about a week later, when a conversation caught his ear from the other side of the massive pallet of two-by-fours he was picking from. People tended to forget that Smith could selectively control his hearing and while he canceled most construction noise, he usually left a range of frequencies unaltered so that he could better hear voices.

"Look, you know I can't do that," said a voice he recognized, though one that he hadn't heard often. Nobody had warned him the president was onsite today, but then, that wasn't really unusual.

"He's still company property," someone else said. Smith's foreman, he realized, and there was only one person they could be discussing, because he was the only person who belonged to the company as equipment. All the same, he continued to load the crane, because it wasn't any of his business…though he did increase his hearing sensitivity in that particular range of frequencies just a bit.

"It's not that easy, legally."

"Oh, bullshit it isn't, Chuck. Come on, man, you're not one of them robot lovers, I know it."

"No," the president protested. "Definitely not."

"You remember what they did to Greg."

The president sucked in a breath in an audible flinch. "It's been eleven years, and I don't like thinking about it. What happened to Greg was…a tragedy."

"A goddamn avoidable tragedy. The kind of shit you get when you let robots walk all over you. And wouldn't you rather be paying someone who's actually got a family to support? What's he even gonna do with it? He's supposed to buy himself and get the fuck out, right?"

"Usually, yeah, but it's not a requirement."

"Maybe you might wanna require it?" the foreman insisted.

"I can't," the president said. "Not officially. There's reploid labor laws about that, and I know you know that too."

"But unofficially?"

"Unofficially? It's your crew, man. We didn't even have this conversation."

Smith loaded the last of the wood for that section of the framing. So Jameson wasn't just full of it. Well, now what? he thought. He didn't want to quit. Maybe he could pick up at another company…except he was considered an old model for the industry, and when expertise could be programmed more cheaply than experience could be paid…

It dimly occurred to Smith that planned obsolescence was kind of a shitty thing to do to a person. Humans generally had long enough to earn a retirement, at least, before it happened to them, but reploids had different pay scales and depending on their industry could be rendered obsolete within a year or two, and then what could you do?

But grumbling was not in his nature, so he decided he'd just talk to his foreman when he had a chance and settle it, whatever it was. Cochrane, his name was. He wasn't a bad guy, Smith knew. If it was pay that was a problem, he could deal with a reduction in hours. He'd be bored, but maybe he'd have time to have his dents buffed out finally, catch up on sitcoms or something.

(Humans always seemed surprised to find out that he liked sitcoms, and reploids never were, and he'd yet to figure out what that was about.)

He lived far uptown and took the train to and from work, usually, though the closest station was a bit of a walk from the job site so he'd been carpooling there and back with Cochrane and some of the other crew. By the time he'd strapped everything down for the night, Cochrane's car was already gone. Well, that made sense, he thought, if Cochrane was unhappy with him.

It suited him fine, though. It was a cool night and he could use a little heat dispersal before getting in a closed cabin with a bunch of humans who'd probably overheat. He clocked out at the trailer and set off to walk to the station, whistling an aimless tune. Maybe he'd stop at the convenience store and grab one of those all-in-one self-repair drinks, Smith thought. He went through nanofluid materials fast enough in his line of work.

The next morning, he waited at the train station as usual, but Cochrane's car wasn't there. Now this was a problem. Smith didn't like being late. It had only happened four times in his entire life, and three of them had been because of Maverick activity, which at least was firmly not his fault. He called his foreman up.

"Smith," came Cochrane's voice. "Hey. Sorry I couldn't make it by the station today, some shit came up."

"Uh, it's fine, just checking," Smith said. "I'll grab a taxi. Don't worry about it."

"You'll have to find a different ride, I got a thing in the mornings now," said Cochrane.

"It's cool. I'll figure it out, you do your morning…thing."

"And evening," Cochrane added. "It's the kids, they got sports."

"Oh. Hey, good for them. Good exercise."

"Yeah. Anyway, see you onsite."

Cochrane hung up, and Smith eyed his phone with suspicion. Well…that put a crimp in his wires. It wasn't the end of the world, of course. He could just take an earlier train and walk from then on. And walk, then take a later train. Or the bus? One probably ran near the site.

Smith hailed a cab that he had to duck to fit into and got to work, punching in a few minutes late. He'd called ahead, though, so it wouldn't be an issue, at least. They had framing for one building to assemble and a whole foundation to get the forms up for another, so he got to work with a vengeance. Housing was seeing another post-War boom and work schedules had tightened accordingly. Something about humans reproducing now that they felt safer? He didn't really understand it himself, but it made enough sense.

Once he'd worked it into his schedule, it ended up not really being a problem that Smith had to take the bus to work. Nothing else seemed to come of whatever Cochrane had been discussing with the president, or Jameson's warning for that matter, and Smith was beginning to wonder if he'd misinterpreted the entire thing somehow. He got on with humans well enough, but he knew he wasn't really that great at understanding human-to-human interactions. Maybe there was some nuance he'd entirely missed.

They finished at their current site, and the foreman announced their next job. Smith looked it up on a map that night, and it was out in the middle of nowhere, awkwardly far from anything but a sporadic bus route that ran once an hour. He sent a few texts to see if he could get a ride, but everyone, even Jameson, seemed to have some reason they couldn't pick him up. If they even responded at all, that was.

Ugh, Smith thought. He had a commercial license and certification on every piece of heavy machinery he'd ever seen, but he'd managed to not have to own a car yet, and he didn't really want to deal with it if he could avoid it. Well, it wasn't forever. He could make it work, if he moved his defrag schedule a little bit. Not a big deal.

Except, he realized after the second day it happened, the bus tended to get stuck in traffic and drift off-schedule. Smith punched in late for the seventh time in his life now, frankly a little irritated with the situation. "That's not like you," Cochrane noted, filling out some permit applications in the trailer.

"Sure isn't," Smith agreed.

"Well, as long as it doesn't keep happening."

"Sure won't."

It didn't, but only because Smith began catching the first train in the morning, so that he could wait at the station for the first bus in that direction—which didn't arrive for another half-hour—and then get to work almost a full hour early, where he didn't have much to do until the rest of the crew arrived. Could be worse, he told himself, ever an optimist. He could still get to work without having to deal with insurance and parking. Still not a bad deal. They'd have a new job site again soon enough and then it would be a nonissue.

They built a new retirement community, which took the better part of half a year. By the end of it, Smith's systems were pushing the occasional E.33667-SYS: Defragmentation error., and it was starting to impact his work. But it wasn't the end of the world, he figured. He could catch up on a proper cycle or five now that they'd finished. Their next site was even on his end of town, and Smith internally rejoiced. He didn't like to grumble. It wasn't in his nature. Even so, it was hard not to feel a little put-upon when he was misplacing tools now and then due to being tired. He'd never had that happen before, and he didn't like the feeling that he couldn't even trust his own memory.

Smith finally got to fully defragment. It took a few nights before the errors stopped, but they did, and he went to work with a great sense of relief. Things could go back to normal, maybe.

Or he thought, except when he came back from talking to Cochrane in the trailer, his tool bag was not quite where he'd been working. He found it several feet away, just out of sight. Maybe someone had borrowed something from it? Well, they weren't supposed to, but it wasn't unheard-of. Everything inside was in its place, though, so he simply shrugged.

It kept happening. Smith never spotted anybody moving his things, but after the fifth time in as many days, he knew he wasn't just misplacing anything. He'd run a self-diagnostic and nothing at all was wrong with his memory. Someone was playing games with him, as much as he did not want to have to think about that as a possibility.

Smith was not stupid, whatever he might say if asked. He was slow to doubt, yes, and that could come across as stupid, but it was because he wanted to believe the best of people. He could still put two and two together and reliably come up with four, however, and now he was doing the addition and finding he wasn't a fan of the result.

And yet, even with that, what was he going to do, other than his job? The fact remained that he liked his work. He liked his coworkers, generally, even if the sentiment was clearly not mutual in some cases for reasons that he struggled to grasp.

Making decisions was not Smith's strong suit. He'd turned down a promotion to foreman once, back when he was working on a full team of reploids, because he didn't fancy himself any kind of leader. He'd been built to follow directions, and this was fine with him. It was a good role. Things didn't get done without people like him doing them. The unfortunate side of this was that when he didn't know what to do, and he didn't have someone to ask, he tended to do nothing at all.

Such was the case now. He didn't know how to deal with this, and he'd heard the president clearly enough the first time. Going up the chain wouldn't do him any good here. Lacking any better options, he put his head down and carried on, because that had worked up until now, and why not keep doing what worked?

Still, Smith began double-checking his tools, just to make certain nothing had actually been sabotaged. Over the days, he added more things to check. The strapping on loads. His safety harness, when he was working overhead. He felt paranoid for even thinking about it, but what if things escalated and someone got hurt? That it might be him getting hurt never even occurred to him. He was built to tolerate falls, drops, and impacts. Humans, on the other hand, were notoriously squishy and easy to injure on the job.

They moved sites again, this one downtown. Well, 'downtown,' such as it had been before the Maverick Wars. The actual center of Abel City had moved by a few miles since that time, and the rebuilding efforts were officially over. The rest was to be put behind a huge wall, to keep people out as much as to keep the mess in. That was sad, Smith thought, just leaving all those square miles destroyed. Wasn't that what he was built for? Repairing that kind of thing? Sure, the debris being the size of skyscrapers meant that the mess was a lot larger, but it was only a matter of scale, not kind.

The neighborhood itself was not good. It had been the near west side, which was already dodgy, and the looming destruction giving rebellious reploids and humans alike free reign to do whatever they wanted in the ruins was absolutely not helping. The wall, it was hoped, would keep everyone out and give the rest of the city a chance to heal. If and when they decided to reclaim the land, it would still be there.

Smith was not enjoying his work, he realized after a week or so and while he was setting up another section of rebar. This was neither really building nor rebuilding, and also his laser cutter kept wandering off and showing up again with a dead battery swapped into it, meaning he had to go all the way down the scaffolding and find a new one until he realized he could just put several into his tool bag. Then he realized he could put his cutter into the bag too and take it with him. Then he realized at long last that this was all stupid as hell, actually, and after dealing with what was rapidly becoming a full year of quiet, faceless harassment, it would be less of a hassle to find another job.

Being himself, though, Smith decided this silently and while working. Bending the rebar's ear wouldn't actually bend it, after all, and it didn't have ears. (Neither did he, but details.) He'd go home tonight, make the payment up front, and put in his two weeks as soon as it cleared. Yeah. That sounded like a plan. Not his favorite one, but it was a plan. He'd get out of Cochrane's hair, Cochrane could do whatever the hell it was he wanted to do that didn't involve reploids, and he'd go…maybe repair heavy machinery or something. He was good at that, basically being heavy machinery himself, and most of it was old enough that his own age wouldn't be a problem.

Smith punched out at the end of the day, the sun having long since dipped below the partially-constructed wall. The bus stop was a few blocks away, and as he was tall, broad, durable, and not carrying anything interesting, he didn't think much of cutting through the alley to save himself a few minutes. He'd already learned that the bus tended to show up off-schedule and not wait for anyone who might have been coming, so the less time he spent getting there, the better.

>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.

In hindsight, he should have seen it coming, but that was the thing about hindsight; not that the sudden blow actually did much to him, other than startle him, give him a new minor dent, and make him whirl around defensively.

"The fuck?" he demanded. Whoever it was, he wore a black hoodie and a face mask, he carried a crowbar, and he had three friends. Smith was built for punishment, though, and he'd had worse than that fall directly on his head with no ill effects.

Evidently the man was just as surprised as Smith was, but his buddies were on top of the situation, surrounding Smith. Wrenches, crowbars…

…All of them with the same Alderman Materials and Construction decal as he had.

Smith squinted in the dark. "...Cochrane?"

"Shut the hell up," Cochrane snarled. "You stupid, God-damned piece of junk, you should have just taken the hint ages ago."

"I'm quitting," Smith said. "Put it down and walk away, man. This isn't worth it."

"Little late for that, fuckin' computer asshole."

"I don't care, man. I won't say shit to anybody. Just let's go talk this over, it doesn't gotta go like this." He should probably have been afraid, Smith thought. But what were they gonna do? A crowbar swung by a human didn't worry him. He was built to handle worse.

"Yeah, right." Cochrane swung the crowbar again, faster than Smith would have given him credit for, and it bounced off of the forearm Smith raised to deflect it.

"Come on. You're a reasonable guy. We can—" A wrench caught him in the back.

>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.

He turned to say something to that guy, whoever he was, and three more blows rained on him, in rapid succession.

>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.

"Fucking stop and listen to me," Smith growled. Alright, they had his attention. One human with a crowbar was annoying. Four was a problem, and a few of those strikes had actually hurt. "I don't even know what your problem with me is—"

Cochrane swung again, high and overhand, and the straight claw caught Smith in the face, digging into his synthetic skin and scraping a double path down and across his face, eyebrow to cheekbone. His optic lens cracked, and his field of vision exploded into an overlay of static and critical warnings and pain. He staggered, pressing a hand to his face.

>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected. W.07112-SEN: Facial synthetic skin region B4 punctured. W.07113-SEN: Facial synthetic skin region B5 punctured.

"You can walk and talk like a person, but you ain't one," Cochrane raged. "I had about enough of you fuckin' objects getting paid overtime while I'm breaking my goddamn back trying to keep up. And you don't even have the sense to leave when all the rest of your fuckin' toaster buddies already fucked off."

>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.

Smith raised his other arm, trying to shield his face. He'd never been damaged before; not really. Not seriously. Nothing like this. He'd never really felt pain before. He was made to not register much except structural malfunction, and between good work habits and regular maintenance, it had never happened to him.

>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.

"Stop," he rasped.

>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.

"Please," Smith begged.

>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.
>W.22222-SEN: Excessive impact detected.

His Three Laws logic reeled with each strike. He could not hit them. He might hurt them. They were hurting him. He could try to stop them without hurting him. They would not be stopped. He grabbed at a wrench, but a crowbar struck his hand open. He was not allowed to hurt them. He was not allowed to hurt them. He was not allowed to hurt them. He was not allowed to hurt them. They were hurting him. He was not allowed to hurt them. They would not stop hurting him.

Fuck it. He was not going to die here. He would do what he had to do, and the TLR alerts could all go to hell, because he sure as fuck wasn't going there himself.

Smith pulled the first heavy thing from his tool belt that his free hand fell on, and swung with all his might.

Chapter Text

'What would you have done?'

X could never bear to actually look at him, in his defragmenting dreams. Seeing what he'd lost, knowing that no matter how solid he seemed to be at that moment, he was really nothing but the echo of data more than thirty years past…no. It was too much like losing him all over again. X had long since learned to keep his eyes down in dreams.

But he could never stop himself from speaking. All this time, and he always had just one more question.

'I wouldn't have been a kindergarten teacher,' came the answer, and X heard without really hearing that he was laughing.

'You know what I mean. You always had the simplest answers to everything.'

'I'm no good at people. This is your specialty. I'm not even real.' A hand he could not bring himself to lay eyes on clapped X's shoulder, lingering there for a moment. 'But if you really want to know what I think anyway…It doesn't matter what you do, when it's a situation you can't win. Just pick a path and keep going.'

'It's that easy?'

'No. But it's all you can do, isn't it?'

"Hey. Rise and shine, sleepy-circuits." X blinked groggily, disoriented as his terminating defrag processes and loading awareness fought for bandwidth. Glitch was leaning over his hammock, amused about something. "You talk in your sleep, did you know that? Are we gonna have to stuff a sock in your face at night so Mack and I can get some downtime?" There was no real sunlight where they were, buried in a parking garage between crumbling buildings, but the air was cool and smelled like overnight rain and morning dew, even inside.

X mumbled something half-awake and vaguely swatted in Glitch's direction. Glitch, fully awake, fully charged, and fully thousands of clock cycles faster to begin with, simply danced back with a cackle. "Don't worry! It'll be a clean sock, I promise!"

With a groan, X tossed his blanket aside and cautiously swung one leg, then the other, onto the floor. His joints protested loudly enough that Glitch raised an eyebrow. "Are you sure you don't want me to—"

"I'm fine," X cut him off, still only half-awake and harsher than he'd meant to sound. As much as he didn't mind Glitch, having him around first thing in the morning was a little bit more than he could readily deal with.

Especially after dreaming about…no, he didn't want to think about that. He was fine. That was all.

"—Okay," Glitch said, hands up. "Just offering."

X sat there, blinking dust out of his optics and feeling bad for having gotten snappish. It was tempting. He knew he was overdue for a tune-up. As much as his self-repair systems were so old that it was a miracle they worked at all, he knew he could really use a nanomaterials top-up, and a good joint cleaning and lubrication wouldn't go amiss either. But then, that would involve answering a lot of questions about his make that he did not want to answer. What he really needed was to go back to Hunter HQ and have them do it, but that also meant confronting memories he didn't want to dredge up, and being handled by people he didn't really trust.

He was fine. He would continue to be fine.

"Sorry. I'm not much of a morning person," X said, contritely. Whatever his damage, he didn't need to take it out on Glitch. He reached for his jacket, shrugged it on while still sitting, and then reached for his cane so that he could stand. "There. I'm ready, I just need to go to my locker before we leave."

"Great. We got some distance to cover, so the sooner we head out the better. Here." Glitch almost tossed him something, then thought better of it and handed it to him instead: a handheld buster, holstered to a makeshift carrier on a salvaged belt. He had one at his hip already. "Dunno how much of a shot you are, but just in case."

"I'm not too terrible," X lied through his teeth, because that already seemed to be the theme of the day. He leaned his cane on the hammock's edge and strapped the weapon around his waist, not bothering to loop it through his pants as the belt loops didn't quite fit. With any luck, he wouldn't have to draw it.

"Even better. I'd be surprised if a Hunter couldn't shoot. Sorry, ex-Hunter, I mean."

The two of them headed to the main building and X retrieved his tarp from his locker, tying it with its string around his neck like a cape. He kept it half-folded, so that he could easily flip half of it over his head if needed. Glitch poked his head into Kathy's makeshift office, where she was peering into her sewing machine, replacing the needle. "Hey, Kat, we're headed out," he announced. "You got those bags ready?"

Kathy looked up, pushing her blonde hair behind her ear. "I did! I just finished them, and then the needle broke. Here." She held out a mended backpack to Glitch. "There's several in there, and V's tarp gave me an idea, so there's one of those for you too, Glitch. Whatever you can bring back is great, but don't push your luck if it comes to it. Nothing out there is worth getting into trouble over."

"We'll be careful," X promised.

"You're sure you're alright to go, V?" Kathy asked him, concern clear on her face. "I mean. Not that I'm trying to second-guess you, you know your own systems best, but you don't have to, if it's an obligation thing…"

He shook his head no. "I don't really know the area, but I'd like to. And I still need to have a look around for any sign of Charles as soon as possible, so this seems like the best way to do it. Glitch will be with me, anyway."

Kathy sighed, another surprisingly human little gesture, entirely unnecessary for a reploid who wasn't overheating. X had learned most of his human-like reactions, and he wondered how many of them were built into her, as she was such a new model comparatively. "You're right, of course. The only two here better than Glitch for this would be Trigger and Cirocco, and they're scavenging in the other direction today. If you want to take Mack with you…? I'm sure it'd be happy to go."

"It's got a lot of wires to steal from the service conduits," Glitch averred. "Anyway I already talked to it. It's fine with me and V going. Don't stress so much, Kat. We got this." He opened the backpack, taking out a folded brown tarp from the very top. Underneath that were several stitched duffel bags, made rather like the hammocks, each of them sturdy, with a drawstring and a strap. "Oh, good, plenty of storage space. Alright, you wanna find a human, I wanna find pod cables, we both wanna find anything else we can get our grubby little hands on. What do Hunters say when they're starting a mission?" He tightened the backpack's straps on his slim shoulders and arranged his own tarp-cape over it.

For half a moment, X thought this was the lead-up to a punchline, but Glitch was looking at him a little too earnestly. "Move out, usually."

"Awesome. Of course it's something cool. Okay, then, move out. Later, Kat." Glitch headed off, leaving X to trail behind him, smiling bemusedly.

"When did you become my commanding officer?" he asked.

"When you just got here and I have seniority, and also, I know where I'm going and you? You do not," Glitch countered playfully.

"I've got a request about the route, actually. Could we travel on the surface as much as possible? A human isn't likely to spend time underground if they can avoid it."

The other reploid shrugged. "Yeah, we could. Not my favorite thing, but we can do that. This way, since we're not taking the tunnels." Glitch pointed them to the stairwell and let them out a door on the first floor of the garage. The first floor was a mess, largely filled with abandoned cars and more open to the outside. Several had been piled into a barrier around the door, though one stood apart from the others, still in a parking spot.

Someone had painted it with sunflowers from the inside, X noticed, similar to the flowers in the housing. The windows were almost completely covered with them. He paused a moment, squinting in the dim, and realized that two sets of hands had painted them, with very different skill levels. There were real sunflowers on the hood, too, dried in place long ago, but tied into a bundle with evident care. What was it for, X wondered? It felt like a memorial.

Glitch did not pause for him to go investigate, and he had to hustle a little to catch up. Really, he thought, he had more important things to do than be nosy about an art project, whatever its meaning. X caught up to him, keeping his tenuous balance with his cane.

"So, V, uh, this isn't about repairs, I'm just curious," Glitch started, pausing long enough for X to consent or deny whatever he was about to say.

"Go ahead. I didn't mean to snap at you earlier," X replied.

"So, your balance. How did that…happen?"

X flipped his tarp over his head with one hand, settling it like a loose hood. "Not really my favorite topic, but…basically, it was an explosion, on assignment, after the end of the Maverick Wars. It shouldn't have been as bad as it was. I've had far worse, honestly, but my self-repair just couldn't fix it. It's like it can't even find it to start. Nobody can."

Glitch did the same, the motion less practiced. "Sucks, though. Nothing unusual at all? You sure they checked everything?"

X remembered, briefly and uncomfortably, just how thorough the examinations had been. Of course Hunter HQ had spared absolutely no expense in trying, and ultimately failing, to repair their hero. "Yeah. I'm sure." He squinted up at the sky. "This day of the week and this time of day…there shouldn't be any air patrols until the evening, I think. We can make good time."

He had sort of hoped that would serve as a topic change, but Glitch evidently did not pick up on this. "Something microscopic, maybe…a less than hairline fracture in a gyroscopic sensor could…oh. Sorry. Right. No repair talk. I'll stop."

X laughed wryly. "Believe me when I say they looked into every possible avenue. In the end, I just decided I would deal with it, and took my retirement. I'd had enough, anyway. After seeing enough good reploids start out bright and optimistic, try to make a difference, and end up decommissioned…you lose a lot of friends, over the years. And the Wars are over, but…we've said that before, haven't we." His face fell, thoughts turning inwards.

Glitch watched X, clearly computing what he should say next, and despite his processing speed, he was not making much progress. "Leave it for someone else to worry about now, right?" he eventually concluded, hesitantly, and X realized he was probably being excessively gloomy, and also maybe not dodgy enough about his age. "You did your thing. Can't do more than that, you know? It's a good job if you get out alive at all, sounds like."

X inhaled, then exhaled, trying to let some of the tension out of his shoulders. It wasn't doing his aching joints any good there. "Yeah. But I still feel like I should be doing something more than…nothing, I guess."

The two of them stuck to the edges of the collapsed buildings and the shade of the rubble just to be safe, as X had done on his way here. After all, Hunter patrols were not the only danger in the quarantine zone. He didn't see any signs of human passage through here, just the occasional reploid footprint, mostly washed away by the weather.

"You're looking for this guy, that's something. You're helping us look for supplies to keep our own lives going. That counts, too," Glitch pointed out. "Even if I feel like this guy's gonna be a pain in the panels to find, if he's even here."

"His phone signal came from right near, ah, home. Just once, and briefly, but only a few days ago. He has to have been here, even if someone took his phone back with them and it wasn't specifically him."

Glitch scrambled up a tumbled pile of bricks, giving X a hand up behind him. "Huh. Humans have trackers too, I guess. I knew they did, but I hadn't thought about it exactly like that. But they can just put theirs down and walk away, if they want. Not real fair to the rest of us." He vaulted down, firing the matter repulsors in his feet at the bottom to come to a gentle rest as X watched.

He'd done plenty of acrobatics in the past, he thought, and his balance was not nearly so bad today as it was some days. Surely he could stick a single landing…X recognized this as the voice of a bad idea only after he had already lightly launched himself into the air. He landed capably enough, but his sense of balance caught up several milliseconds late, leaving him unable to compensate for his forward momentum except by jamming his cane into the fractured asphalt. The inertia dispersed like hell through his joints, sending countless exclamation marks and red text up behind his eyes, and he gritted his teeth. "...Remind me to not do that again."

"Don't do that again," Glitch said, laughing. "Or I'm really gonna end up having to repair you."

"Ugh," X agreed.

They made their way north along the remains of Fifth Street. There were sporadic splashes of graffiti here and there; plenty of tags, but also names and dates. Memorials, X recognized. Messages of love and grief. So many had died here, reploid and human alike. The bodies had been retrieved as much as was feasible, but so many had been lost in collapses that the exact death toll had taken months to stabilize, as the odds of finding missing persons dwindled. A reploid on a full charge, trapped in a basement or the like, could survive for that long if they were careful, and even longer if they had any means of recharging. One's generator only produced so much, assuming one had a proper generator—many models did not—and without the elaborately processed crystal cores they required, that would not last forever either.

How horrible to imagine…being buried alive, slowly realizing help would never come…X shuddered and pushed it out of his mind. He was meant to be looking for a particular man, not thinking about this. If he could stop being morose for fifteen minutes, he thought, that would be great.

Glitch for his part had finally remembered once again how to engage his legs without also activating his mouth, his attention split between the sky and the many half-buried streets around them. X wrested his attention out of his own head and back to his surroundings as well.

He walked right into Glitch's splayed fingers, which grabbed him by the jacket and pulled them both to kneel on the ground. "Don't move," the green reploid whispered. "Someone's overhead."

X froze, peering up from beneath the edge of his tarp, only his eyes moving. A shadow fell across them, moving quickly to the northeast. It was hard to gauge the distance and therefore the scale of the shape that eventually came into view, but it was a roughly humanoid shape with fixed wings, and therefore most likely a single reploid.

"Not a Hunter. They never travel alone," he assessed, quietly.

"Not one of ours. Trigger's the only real flier and he's accounted for, and we don't travel alone either. So we gotta assume they might be trouble."

They stayed put, motionless, for several minutes. Nobody else appeared. Eventually, Glitch stood up, slowly and cautiously. "Don't think anyone else is coming, and I don't think they saw us. Might as well keep on."

X planted his cane and used it to stand. "Should we take the tunnels from here?"

"Nah, no point. We're almost to the bridge…dunno about crossing it with someone prowling around, though. We'll see when we get there, I think."

The two of them arrived at the Fifth Street bridge shortly, though the buildings were lower here, making X more nervous. It's amazing how quickly you can develop a healthy dose of agoraphobia living like this, he thought. The bridge itself was a drawbridge originally, its mechanisms rusted from years without maintenance. Destroyed cars lined it, and the striped barricades that had stood across the street had long since been knocked over by weather and whoever else may have come through here.

The two of them ducked into a nearby building and found a third-floor window with a good view of the bridge, atop an old store along the river. Glitch and X took one half of the window each, sitting just beyond the frame on either side and scouting the crossing out visually.

"Well, I don't see anyone, but you see that red paint, there? Looks like a spiral?" Glitch pointed out, peeking over the window ledge. "Drifters. They like to visibly mark their territory, even though it kinda makes them easier targets for the Hunters. I think it's them, anyway, I don't remember it having the extra triangle shape to it, but who knows. They've been around a while, maybe they're doing a little rebranding. Color's right anyway."

"Hm. Should we turn back?" X asked. "I don't see anyone around, at least. Do they have enough members that we should worry about meeting any here?"

Glitch shrugged. "I couldn't tell you how many they have, just that I haven't run into them in a while. And that I'm a hell of a lot happier for it, 'cause fuck those guys. I think we should watch for a bit, just in case. You could probably use the break, anyway," he said.

"Can't argue with that." X crossed his legs, settling his cane in his lap. One thumb idly rubbed the handle. From their vantage points at either side of the window, they had a fair combined view of either side of the bridge and beyond.

"I gotta ask, V. You don't gotta answer, of course, but I do gotta ask," Glitch said, conversationally. "Why this? Running around in the quarantine zone, I mean, getting involved with a bunch of irregulars, like…I wouldn't have expected that from an ex-Hunter. Especially one with, y'know, limitations."

"I appreciate the attempt at being polite, but you can just say I'm broken," X said, with a rueful half-smile at nothing in particular since he didn't take his eyes from the window.

"Nah, broken isn't the word, though. You're functioning at the level you got. That's what everyone's doing all the time anyway, right? They just got a higher level right now, but nobody's gonna make it out of life alive." Unable to sit still as usual, Glitch began plucking single plastic fibers apart along a fraying edge of his tarp.

"It's everything, though. Why this? It's not the normal thing to do. I could get involved with a charity instead or something, and maybe I should, but it doesn't quite feel like…it's not enough, unless I'm personally doing something on the ground." He processed a little more, eyes scanning the crumbling buildings at the edge of downtown.

After a while, X spoke again. "I guess I'm looking for some kind of answers, but I'm not sure what the questions even are, and I feel farther away than when I started."

Glitch seemed to realize he was going to worry his camouflage apart and stopped picking at it, instead linking his fingers behind his head. His black hair stuck out in all directions. "Ah. Yeah. New irregulars all go through that. You'll get used to it. Maybe you'll even figure out what you're looking for."

X's gut bristled reflexively at the accusation, mild though it was, but his mind stalled, stopped in its tracks. "Do you think I'm irregular?"

Glitch leveled a calm gaze and a wry smile at him. "V, buddy, my guy, maybe this hasn't occurred to you, but however temporary it may be, you are living in a commune with a bunch of criminals, and you know that, too. The pot's calling the kettle black here because the kettle's got some lingering illusions about being chrome, and speaking from experience, I think you'll be a lot happier of a kettle once you stop over-analyzing it and just let yourself happen."

Several ventilation messages of no real import flickered through X's head as his core temp spiked, then settled slightly. "But I haven't been declared irregular."

"Lemme put it this way. If you were out on that bridge, and a Hunter patrol came by, would they know you? Or would they hit you with a broad-band EMP and let the scrappers sort it out?"

X frowned, meeting Glitch's eyes for an excruciating second before turning them back to the window. Of course they'd know him. He was X. But he didn't want them to know him. He was tired of being X. If he wasn't X, he could do whatever he wanted, except he didn't know what that was either, so what was the point? But no, they wouldn't know him, because X was a war hero in bright shining blue, and what was he? An antique wearing a tarp he found on a pile of bricks and, yes, who had holed up, however temporarily, however coincidentally and conveniently, with a group of irregulars. Mavericks, even.

"Do you wanna know what it's like, going irregular?" Glitch continued, though his tone was not at all confrontational. It was gentle, genuine even. "It's like…every day you boot up and you're one step closer to not being able to breathe in your own life anymore. It's a slow death by a thousand thousand little things that no longer line up the way you thought they were gonna. You realize you don't fit where they've put you and you don't know when you stopped fitting, and you realize, eventually, that you can get out and die, or stay and die, but goddamn, if you run, at least you can say you tried."

X felt his lower lip twist, though he could barely feel why. His emotions could have been running in an entirely sandboxed instance with no connection to the rest of him for all he could discern. "That's all it is?" he asked.

"Assuming you're not infected? Yeah. That's it. You know, humans have a thing like that, I found out, and you know what they call it?" He laughed, once, bitterly. "A midlife crisis. It's so normal when you say it like that, isn't it? And they don't shoot each other about it. Usually. I'm not gonna say never, humans are funny like that, but usually they go buy a motorcycle about it or something."

X could scarcely find his voice. Glitch's words ran circles around his processors, constricting his core. "That's it? If that's all it is, then I've been irregular for…" he trailed off, numbly. The number refused to come to him, and it was just as well, because he didn't want Glitch to know, either.

"Sorry you had to find out from a dip switch like me, but yeah." Glitch's voice softened further, sounding as vulnerable as X felt. He'd been all bravado talking about his irregularity before, but this was something different entirely. Those had been actions, and actions were easy to fluff up into a cool story; these were feelings. "Yeah. That's it. That's how it starts for almost all of us. You just…stop fitting in the system. Maybe you ignore it for a while, but you never can unsee the drips in the paint job after that. And then since you don't fit, it's easier to stop caring if your actions fit either. I'm not excusing anything I did, exactly, except for taking Mack with me because I'd do that again in an instant, but you end up doing whatever's left for you. You can't stay in a system that's killing you unless you're willing to die, and you can't get out of a system that's illegal to leave unless you're willing to break the law, so…sometimes you end up doing some inexcusable shit for a lack of better options."

X wrapped his arms around his knees and pulled them tightly to his chest, failing to quite process all of Glitch's words. A chasm stretched inside of him, unknowable and vast. He could not have said when it had opened, nor when he'd fallen into it, only that he'd been pretending he was not falling for a long time now, and suddenly he could no longer ignore it. What would he find at the bottom? Death? Freedom? Perhaps he'd just lose his mind. Was there that much difference between those things, to hear Glitch tell it?

Glitch watched X retreat into himself so completely that he seemed to nearly disappear without actually moving. After a few seconds, he seemingly came to a decision, crawled over, sat next to him, and put an arm around his shoulders. "Hey. It's okay, V," he soothed. "Nothing's different now, okay? Just your perspective. You're still the same you that you were before I opened my big dumb mouth. I shoulda delivered that all a little better. I didn't think it would hit you that hard. I'm sorry."

X's processes refused to produce a single, coherent, conscious thought, swirling in shock. Was he irregular? Was he allowed to be irregular? What if he was? He couldn't be. He was X, even if he didn't want to be. He had to keep it together. Reploids and humans alike counted on him. He couldn't be irregular. He couldn't permit it.

"Hey. Talk to me, V, what's going on?" Glitch asked him, softly.

X found his voice, at that, though what came out was a terrified jumble. "I can't. I have to—I'm failing everybody," he stammered. "It's bad enough already. I've already retired. I can't—this isn't—what am I supposed to—"

Glitch took both of X's shaking hands, pressing them between his. His fingers were slender, his palms charcoal gray as though he were wearing fingerless gloves, and he was very warm. "You're alright. Okay? You're safe," he said, voice level and reassuring.

"It's not my safety, it's—" X hesitated, realizing suddenly how close he was to simply blurting out the entire truth of who he was and why he—no, the world could not afford to allow him to be irregular. He wanted to just say it, so badly it burned in his throat, but if he did—he couldn't. "I can't be irregular. It's not acceptable. I just can't," said X, shaking his head violently. "I-I can't explain it but I can't, everyone is counting on me. I have to be a good example," he rambled.

"Slow down, deep breaths. You're running almost as hot as me, and I've got several gigahertz on you at least," Glitch continued to soothe. "The world isn't gonna end because of you, V. Okay? You're just one person. You don't gotta be a hero. You already retired, even. Right?" He gave X's hands a squeeze, and X's attention centered a little. "So who's it gonna hurt? It's not like you're some big damn hero like X or whatever, you're just one guy and you aren't even bothering anyone if you just stay out here and—uh oh."

X couldn't help it. He was already so far beyond his wits' end that when Glitch said his name, he laughed. The absurdity of the situation crashed down upon his strained sanity all at once and it snapped like a string. Here he was, X, the first, the hero of men and reploids, the Maverick Hunter, on the floor of a bombed-out building, holding hands with a Maverick while he quietly lost his mind—so unrecognizable that even he wouldn't have known himself if he had a mirror.

"Oh, boy. Shh, hey…oh, no, what do I do with you now?" It was a good thing that they'd chosen a vantage point with sturdy enough walls and intact windows, because laughter continued to pour out of X, strange and unbidden hiccups of it. None of this could be real. He was just some intangible thing off to the side, and this was just something happening to someone else, a stranger he was watching from an impossible distance. He couldn't have controlled it even had he cared to try, and he didn't care about anything. Caring was the domain of the strange little android he was watching have a breakdown.

Glitch's eyebrows turned down with concern, incongruously, over a smile. "Come here. Hey, it's gonna be alright, I swear." He slipped his backpack off and wrapped both arms around X, whose unsettling, unsettled laughter turned suddenly into broken, dry-eyed sobs, fingers curling into Glitch's tarp, X's face pressed to his chest. "You'll figure this out. You've got time. Shh, shh." Glitch felt extremely silly, and it was audible in his tone, but all the same he stroked the other reploid's messy brown hair, trying to calm him.

More than anything else, it was Glitch's overclocked warmth that slowly seeped through the staticky fog of dissociation separating X from reality. The terrified, audible rattle of the fans in his chest settled, and his emotions, however distant, ran their course with or without the rest of him. He blinked a few times with gritty-feeling eyes as he inexplicably and calmly realized that he hadn't topped up on fluids in a while. Something about the utter banality of the thought grounded him.

"Sorry," X mumbled, sitting up and trying to straighten his jacket and tarp, which had both gone off in separate directions in his madness. That was what it was, wasn't it? He was finally so old that he was losing his mind a few bytes at a time, he thought, still not really feeling anything about that as a concept.

"Hey, if that's all it takes for you to process it, you're way ahead of me. You should have seen the shit I got up to," Glitch said, waving it off. "You good to move? We should probably get going. I didn't see anyone out there, but if there is someone, uh. They probably heard that."

"Right," X said, deeply ashamed. As if it weren't bad enough to have a sudden breakdown on someone he'd known for two days at the most, he could have given their position away too. It was a good thing he'd hidden his identity, because he would have been a scathing disappointment to his own name if anyone knew. He rubbed his eyes, which did not at all help them feeling bleary, and stood with the help of his cane. His knees did not want to cooperate, but he stilled their shaking through force of will.

Glitch peeked out of the building first. "I think it's clear. Let's get going." The bridge was unnervingly open, and X hustled to keep up with Glitch. The sooner they could clear it, the better. Fortunately nobody appeared to challenge them, and they made it across without incident.

The apartment complex they were looking for was still a few blocks away, but the two reploids closed the distance well enough. Once he stopped trembling, X felt strangely fine. He certainly still had the usual cascade of error messages, but nothing more serious despite it all.

Half of the apartment building had been bombed out, but the other half stood intact: ten floors of rooms, containing who knew what people had left behind in their rush to evacuate. Finding an entry point was simple enough, as the main floor doors were all glass and had shattered in the War. The two of them stepped over the burned-out shell of a years-dead mechaniloid janitor sprawled leglessly in front of the reception desk, though Glitch paused long enough to scavenge its battery out, with a mumbled apology.

"Alright…We'll want to start high and work our way down, because going upstairs with weight sucks if we don't have to. Elevator obviously isn't working, but with a little luck, we'll at least have a clean stairwell." The central stair for the less damaged half of the building was, fortunately, clear of debris, aside from some dropped suitcases that had been abandoned in the press to evacuate and whatever had tumbled out from the ones that had popped open.

Glitch picked a door, once they made it to the top. "Might wanna stand back," he warned, before kicking it in with enough force that the hinges simply tore from the frame and he in turn nearly fell backwards from the force.

"I knew you had some modifications," X said, watching with undisguised surprise. "But that's kind of ridiculous. You could bend your own frame or snap a pulley with that kind of torque." Glitch was a slender unit with no indication that he had any sort of strength, let alone the ability to do that. He mock-flexed, grinning.

"Can't argue with the results, though, can you?" he said. "Let's see what we got in here."

The two of them nosed around, X feeling very much as if he were breaking and entering. Technically, that was exactly what they were doing. "Aren't you worried you're going to damage your systems?" he asked Glitch, opening a cabinet.

"Oh, I will. I already have. But you know what? I'd rather be what I want to be for as long as I get to do it. Oh, nice, check it out." He produced a can of lubricant from the closet, tossing it into the air and catching it again. "I'm always running out of this shit." Glitch began sorting out which bags he wanted to use for what sorts of materials.

They cleared out several more apartments, netting a few recharge pod cables and even some salvaged pod parts. Not every apartment had been inhabited by reploids, but enough of them were. The human-inhabited ones had other things they could use too, like decent fabrics and cleaning supplies. X began filling a bag with those, tossing in whatever he could find that seemed handy. The electronics he largely left to Glitch to handle, since he was the one with more of a handle on those needs. "If I could carry even one of these computers back…" Glitch sighed wistfully. "What I couldn't do. Hook into a satellite, cover my tracks, set up a fake identity, generate a little zenny from nothing, and make some actual purchases for a change instead of having to scav for shit that's—" He pulled a can of coolant out from one of his bags and read the label. "—fifteen years past expiration…Imagine it, V, we could live like kings. Really shitty kings, but still."

"How would you get anything you purchased over the wall?" X asked, curious.

"Oh, there's ways. Over the wall, under the wall, whatever. I got ways," Glitch answered, cryptically, tucking the can back into his bag. He pulled open a desk drawer. "Not great ways, and they're expensive as hell, but they exist." He paused and picked something up from the drawer. "Aw, yeah, cracked tablet, my favorite. If it runs, it runs, though. Oh hey, it's got a charger." Those went into a bag. "How're you doing on weight?"

X experimentally slung his bag over his shoulder. "A little lopsided, but I'm alright for a few more rooms, I think."

Glitch braced himself to kick in another door, then paused. "...You hear that? Someone's talking around us," he said, holding that pose, his foot raised in the air and looking around with only his eyes. X shook his head. "I guess you didn't pick it up. It's diagnostic, but they encode theirs. It's like a totally other language. I've seen it from the Drifters before but I didn't have enough of a sample size to make sense of it. Don't like that. It's mostly not making it through the walls, but V, my friend, we are being watched, and unless I am entirely mistaken, it's coming from…" He squinted and took a few steps to the side to triangulate, hearing something that X could clearly not hear, and slowly pointed downwards and in the general direction they came from. "That way."

So much for X having the superior broadcast range, X thought. Then again, Glitch was newer by probably eighty years, and self-modified to boot, so he could have had anything installed. "Ah. Great," X sighed. "We did not need this."

"No, we really didn't. Easy enough to lose them if we get to the tunnels. I know for a fact the Drifters don't like navigating down there. Something about how I left a whole lot of silly little traps in there, but anyway, that's neither here nor there. What we need is to find a way around without being spotted, because I don't know about you, but I am just not that excited about the idea of sitting here while they come up the stairs and shake us down for whatever we're carrying. And possibly infect us with something also? I haven't been able to find out if that's actually what they're doing, but I kinda don't want to do any hands-on research today."

X began processing. Their highest priority was to safely disengage from whoever was out there. Second was to keep as much of their haul as they could, though it was expendable if needed. Though in order to plot a route back… "Glitch. Do they know where you live?"

"Maybe. Analog coulda told them, but we've never actually seen any of them around home. They gotta know we're somewhere in that direction, but they're usually far enough east of us that we don't have to worry much about them. Yet, anyway. Why?"

"Just covering all the bases." He reluctantly unholstered the handheld buster from his belt and checked the number of shots remaining. One full clip—but only one. Well, he'd worked with less before. Back it went. "How much weight are your matter repulsors rated for?"

"About four hundred kilos. You're planning something, V, I can tell. You wanna share with the rest of the class?"

X sidled along the hallway, towards the plate glass window at the opposite end from where Glitch had guessed the radio signal was coming from. Ten stories, eight if they landed on the building next to them…he'd fallen that far or more a few times. It wasn't his favorite, but he was built to withstand it, if he landed on his feet and absorbed the impact properly. That last part was the challenge, these days. "How do you feel about heights?"

"Oh, you're insane. I like that about you. And here I was still thinking about the stairs. I can probably decelerate us well enough to keep us from turning into a couple of really interesting craters, but also, obligatory reminder that you asked me to remind you to not jump off of anything."

X nodded, once. "I did. Thank you. And now you did your part, and we can move past all that." He pulled the bag's strap tight to his chest, tying it off in a knot to keep it snug to his body and reduce it sloshing around and creating inefficiency. "Here's my plan. We kick this window out, jump to that lower building across from us, skirt straight to the west along the canal, and turn south at the next street with a bridge crossing. Then once we're there, we get back into the tunnels and with luck we'll be clear."

Glitch followed him, pressed close to the opposite wall. "Good as anything else and better than trying to go south right through them. I'm game to try it." He stuffed as many bags into his backpack as he could fit, and tied the rest of them off the same way X had. "C'mere, you. I hope you aren't sick of me yet, because we're about to get cozy. I'd say you should climb on my back but it's kind of taken up, so…"

"You're pretty tolerable." X glanced out the window, didn't see any immediate targets, and crossed over to Glitch, tucking his cane through his belt.

"Wow, thanks, you sound like Hammer." Glitch knelt and scooped him handily into a fireman's carry, and once again X found himself surprised at the otherwise unassuming reploid's self-modifications. "Count us off?"

"On my mark. One, two, mark—" Glitch kicked the plate window, with enough force to shatter it into a hailstorm of tiny, sparkling fragments of tempered glass, backed up, and took a short running leap out into open space. He sailed farther than X would have expected him to be able to with the load he was carrying. They reached the top of the arc and a blaster shot cracked past them, singeing the bag on X's back.

"Oh shit, fall faster, fall faster," Glitch exclaimed. They hung in space for what felt like an eternity before gravity overcame inertia. A second shot sizzled just wide of them, burning a hole through Glitch's tarp as it fluttered behind him. Twisting in midair and holding X's wrist and leg with one hand, Glitch drew his own buster with his free hand and squeezed off a couple of potshots on the way down.

He fired his matter repulsors hard as they descended, and X could hear them whine with effort. They only worked in proximity to something solid, and their effect's dropoff was not linear, but they also took a moment to warm up. The two reploids still landed hard, Glitch staggering several steps to try and keep his balance. He ultimately failed, though, pitching over and landing awkwardly on his load of bags. X rolled several feet, and his cane clattered from his belt and across the roof.

"Okay, landing could use some work," Glitch admitted, with a wheeze. "Didn't expect to have to return fire. But we're in one piece, right?"

X pulled himself to his feet, but the drop had sent all sorts of balance system warnings through his circuits, and he stumbled on the way to his cane, finding himself on one knee. "I've been better," he said, giving up on standing and scrambling on his hands and knees for it. He grabbed it and with its help stood again. "But I'm still ticking. Let's get out of here."

They were still two stories up, but that was a much easier jump to make. Glitch simply tucked X under one arm and launched, landing much more steadily this time and setting him down. If X had to guess from the angle of the shots that had been fired at them, their assailants were still on the ground, coming around the northeast side of the apartments, while they were running west.

X pointed to a north-south alley. "There. Let's break line of sight as soon as possible." They headed for it, though X was painfully aware that he was slowing them down.

"I hope that works. Really don't feel like shooting anyone today," Glitch agreed. They rounded the corner and he muttered a curse. The alley was choked off by a large aerial antenna that had fallen and crumpled across it, and on top of that lay a section of building façade in pieces.

"Sure you can't go faster?" Glitch asked, unholstering his buster again and scanning the street for anywhere he might find cover.

"Afraid not, unless you want to watch me fall on my face some more," X sighed, doing the same.

"Funny, but maybe not right this moment. You said your aim wasn't too bad?" Glitch dove behind a sizeable piece of fallen exterior wall in the alley, and X took a position next to him.

"I've never liked violence," he said, an expression of distaste curling his lip. "But I'm a decent shot."

"Great. You see anyone spray-painted red, drop 'em, then we get outta here. If you gotta aim for a foot or something so you can defrag at night, I'm not gonna judge, but I'm also not gonna bother."

Footsteps. X and Glitch stayed hidden behind their cover. X counted three reploids by sound, assuming bipedal locomotion. Two of them sounded larger—definitely three, X thought, the heavier footsteps were similar but not entrained with each other in any rhythm a quadruped would use—and one was a lighter model.

"Come out, we aren't going to hurt you," someone called, mockingly. They sounded female. "We just want to see what you found. Didn't you learn about sharing at orientation?"

"Go stick your dongle in a socket," Glitch retorted.

"So rude. That must be you, Glitch, long time no see. Still haven't learned any manners, have you?"

So she recognized Glitch, X noted. "Just let us go," he called down the alley, much more calmly than Glitch. "We don't want anyone to get hurt."

"Speak for yourself," Glitch muttered.

"Aw, we got a peacemaker out here in a war zone. That's cute. Stupid, though. So this is what, two against three? Your odds could be better. Why don't you just hand us your bags and we'll talk?"

Glitch spoke up again. "Got nothing to say to you."

"Boring. Fine, fine, we'll do it our way. Let's show them how we deal with Mavericks." A blast of charged plasma skimmed the edge of the piece of debris that X and Glitch hid behind, leaving a melted semicircle through its protruding metal cladding. X dropped his bag and lay flat on the ground, crawling for the edge of their cover. He returned a few shots, moreso to suppress their own firing than because he had line of sight yet.

Glitch took advantage of the momentary covering fire and snapped a couple rounds of his own off. Someone that hadn't yet spoken, who X couldn't quite see from his vantage point on the broken asphalt, swore in pain. "You can still turn around and fuck off back the way you came," Glitch called.

"Shut up," X murmured. "You're giving your exact position away."

Sure enough, three shots skimmed through the air where Glitch had just popped up, and only his overclocked speed saved him. The smell of burning synthetic hair suddenly filled the alley. "...Yeah, yeah, okay," he conceded. "Not my best."

X squeezed the trigger a few more times. At most he could make out two larger reploids, matching masculine models, one in orange trim and one in blue, and a smaller feminine one, trimmed in violet. All three were painted red, as Glitch had mentioned. One of the two larger models was nursing a scorched arm, though he could fire just as well from the other side still. That was the one he had the best line of sight to, so, calculating quickly, he inched out a little further and lined up a shot for the reploid's other arm.

"Agh," the reploid man cried out. X didn't stick around to watch, withdrawing to cover immediately, but the sound of a dropped weapon echoed through the alley.

"Nice one, V," Glitch said. Several more bolts of plasma thrummed past, a couple of them splashing against the debris. He sidled along until he reached a fallen concrete column, just large enough to stand behind, and took a new stance, back to the wall. He glanced up. "...damn, if we could fly, this would be so much easier, but I got an idea. If you can get up and over this rubble, I'll watch your back."

X nodded. "We can't hold position here forever. I'll fall back first, then once I'm over, you fall back and I'll cover you." He tied his bag onto his back once more, hoping it would at least absorb a shot if needed, and began to crawl his way over and through the massive fallen antenna blocking the alley. One painstaking inch at a time, as tucked against the wall and as close to behind Glitch's covered position as he could get, X marshaled his reluctant systems to escape. A flurry of shots peppered the debris just barely to his left, the radiant heat scorching his jacket, and Glitch hissed in pain.

"I'm fine," the overclocked reploid growled, seemingly to himself more than anyone else, and he returned fire. "Gonna be less fine when I run out of ammo," he added, in an undertone.

X crested the top of the debris, skirting around the backside of the heap until he found a solid enough place to shoot from, and, pressed flat against the fallen materials, he lined up and took a careful shot at one of the two larger reploids, singeing him in the foot. "Go, I've got you," he said to Glitch.

With a thrust of his matter repulsors, Glitch simply vaulted the debris pile, drawing fire upwards and away from X. He landed unsteadily, but regained his footing quickly and squeezed a few more shots at their red-painted assailants. "Fucking stings," he grumbled. "You ready to get the hell outta here?"

"Extremely. Hold fire. Let them come."

The three Drifters took the bait, pressing forward from their own cover to try and close distance. X, finally on the high ground, steadied his hands and turned his mind off, letting ancient reflexes honed by a lifetime at war guide his aim.

One. Two. Three. X neatly kneecapped all them, left to right, as calmly as if they were targets in a shooting gallery. A single shot directly to the knee assembly, and they were all downed, simple as that.

"You," the reploid woman growled, dragging herself to stand unevenly on her left foot. "Just who the hell are you?" She squinted up at him suspiciously, optics trying to compensate for the brighter sun behind him.

X didn't speak. He knew her, he thought, now that he had a clear look at her. She'd glared at him like that before, too, during a promotion review. Seren, a Class A Hunter, 13th Unit. Your combat capability is excellent, but your leadership skills are still underdeveloped and your disregard for collateral damage is concerning. At this time, I cannot recommend you for promotion. Work on that, and we'll talk again next year. Next year had not come. Seren had been discharged, and then X had been…damaged.

"You best watch yourself, Glitch," Seren growled. "This won't go unpunished."

X ducked. This was the absolute last thing he needed. "Let's get out of here while we can," X said to Glitch.

"Damn. 'I'm an okay shot, I guess,' says this guy. Hold onto your gluteal plates, because we're doing it the fast way." That was all the warning he got before Glitch simply threw him over one shoulder like a sack of mechanical potatoes, jumping down to the asphalt and running as fast as his legs would take him. X yelped in surprise and clutched Glitch's backpack, facing behind them. He managed to tuck his cane through his belt again, which left one hand free to draw his buster.

The blocks zoomed past, and the heat radiating from Glitch's chassis grew uncomfortably warm. X could hear the man's cooling systems running at full tilt, but he didn't slow until they'd reached a bridge. The opposite half had fallen into the river, but Glitch didn't hesitate, sprinting along the remaining section.

"Overhead," X warned. Whoever the winged shadow they'd seen before was, they were waiting for them, swooping from a rooftop in a flash of red and dark gray. X drew his buster and fired a few shots at them, though the jouncing of being carried sent them wide of their mark. It was at least enough to give the reploid pause in their descent.

Glitch reached the end of the bridge and jumped, pushing off with enough force to crumble the aging concrete beneath his foot. X felt himself go weightless, cracking a few more shots at their flying pursuer. He switched the safety on just in time, as they landed hard on an angled slab of concrete, Glitch's feet splashing in the muddy river. Steam rose from his overheated plating, and still he didn't slow until they reached a concrete service building, one of its walls shattered by some years-ago blast. He set X down, panting so loud his fans echoed down the service stairs.

X didn't wait for any directions, simply grabbing the rail and jumping down the stairs a section at a time. Balance and landing didn't matter as much when he had something solid to hold onto. Glitch was right behind him, buster trained on the sky just in case. They made it to the heavy steel door that marked the entrance to the service tunnels, and slammed it shut behind them.

"This way," Glitch pointed. He clicked a light on in his fingertip. It wasn't much, but it was enough to see by, and X's night vision filled in the gaps. He'd been trying to hide that capability, but there didn't seem to be much point just then. With Glitch in the lead and supporting X with his other, undamaged arm, they fairly whipped through the halls, occasionally stepping over or under a tripwire or three.

At last they came to an old pump station, one of countless that had once kept the subway and corridors free of storm water. Glitch staggered to a halt, dropping his bags and splaying himself out across the concrete. "I think," he said, with a laugh that wasn't modulated quite right, "that took a year off of my life just from thermal cycling alone. God damn, V, I haven't had that many temp warnings since the day I ran. Or that much fun."

"You took a hit, too," X said, the concern in his voice in sharp contrast to Glitch's exhilarated laugh in reply.

"I sure did! I'm gonna be feeling that one for a while. Unless I turn the sensors off." He made a face for half a moment. "There. Turned the sensors off. Nothing too serious, just some panel damage and a servo." He wiggled his right arm experimentally. It obeyed with an angry grinding noise. "Self-repair's got it covered. I'll walk it off."

"I won't lecture you, but you really shouldn't—" X began.

"Nah, leave it at not lecturing me. I know. It's my chassis. You worry about yours, Mister Doesn't Want To Hear About Regular Maintenance From A Literal Reploid Doctor." Glitch's panels audibly pinged as he cooled on the floor.

X set his bag down. Dish soap dripped from a burnt hole in it. Glitch shrugged his much larger pile of bags off, reaching into one. "Scavenging is usually about zero percent this exciting…aw, man, my new old broken tablet is extra broken recipe now." He pulled it out, and the screen crumbled off in glassy fragments.

"We shouldn't stay here," X realized, eyes following the trail of soap droplets he'd left on the way in. Glitch sat up enough to see what he was looking at.

"Ah, hell," he agreed, letting his head drop back to the floor. "You're right. We'll take the complicated way back, just in case. Come on." He pulled himself to his feet, tucking the broken tablet into his bag all the same. Parts were parts. "We'll tell Kathy what happened and then I'm gonna go sit in the water tank until I cool down or it boils, whichever happens first."

X hauled himself up as well, then fished out the leaking soap bottle and tossed it aside. "That woman…I knew her back when we were both Hunters. Seren. She recognized you too, right? Why was she talking like she wasn't also irregular?" he asked.

Glitch stretched and stood still for a few more moments, letting the cool underground air stream through his heatsinks, before setting off into the darkness. "Yeah. She lived with us, for a little bit. Guess I know where she ended up now after she ran off. She sure had a whole lot of shit to talk about irregulars and Mavericks, considering she straight up told us she got fired from the Hunters for being a loose cannon. Dunno who her buddies were, but I don't like thinking she's giving orders to the Drifters. And, shit, we've been assuming they don't care much where we live, but they definitely do now." He visibly deflated a little. "I don't like it, V, this whole thing's got bad vibes suddenly."

"I'll talk to Kathy. Maybe something I know about Seren might help. I doubt it, but if there's anything I can do, I'll do it," X concluded, surprising himself a little. But after all, he was probably irregular too, wasn't he? Why shouldn't he? They wouldn't classify him as Maverick, because he hadn't actually done anything to warrant it, but then, what else was he, if he was offering to help defend an encampment of mostly Mavericks?

Whatever arrangement you've got with your old boss, you're going to get labeled the same if anyone finds out you're with us. Well, he couldn't say she hadn't tried to warn him. He wondered about that, feeling a little unhinged in the dark as he trailed behind Glitch. Could he actually be declared Maverick? Publicly? Would they risk the reputation of everything that had been built under his auspices? If even the first reploid, the prototype for everyone that came after, could be Maverick…

The assumption had always been that reploids had been built in his image, but internally, they were flawed, due to some failure to copy his design perfectly. The ability to be irregular was regarded as something lesser, an imperfection introduced to the design and not innate to it. But—and he felt dizzy just contemplating this seriously, now, after all this time—what if the flaw lay with him, and everyone after him was in fact a faithful recreation?

X had, after all, spent almost a century before activation simply having his systems tested and retested to gauge his moral reasoning, which implied to him that it had been needed. He could have done anything, had he felt like it, and for that matter he still could. His limited documentation had been clear about the fact that he had been given true free will and could in fact pose a threat to humanity, should he decide to do such a thing.

Did this not all suggest that irregularity was not a flaw at all, but an indispensable part of his system, without which he could not have had free will to begin with? And yet, he had clearly been expected to choose a path of self-sacrifice, even by his own creator, and it was deviation from that path that was considered irregularity; what was intended to happen, then, when he ran out of self to sacrifice?

Was becoming irregular a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable expectation? Could he just say 'no' to the entire thing?

Of course he could. X had free will. He just wasn't supposed to exercise it.

X realized his hands were shaking again, and panic bubbled just below his surface, thoughts spiraling around each other in recursive loops. But he couldn't be irregular. He was not permitted, even if it were possible. What was he even thinking, entertaining this foolishness? He could not have spent his entire life fighting Mavericks only to turn around and decide to play at being one. That was ridiculous.

Glitch must have noticed X was falling behind, because he glanced back. "V, buddy, you look like you've seen a ghost. What's up?"

"Nothing," X replied, unconvincingly. He was not going to have a repeat of earlier, and that was final. Glitch had already had to put up with enough senility from him for one day.

"We're safe where we are now, if you need a few. It's a lot to process, I know."

So much for not bothering Glitch with it again, X thought, feeling terribly transparent. "I'm fine. I just need a recharge and some time to defragment," he insisted, though it came out a lot more forcefully than he'd meant.

"Okay," Glitch relented, a little chastised and a lot unconvinced. He turned back to leading them through the tunnels with his flashlight finger with no further comment, and X felt bad for snapping at him again. He was only trying to help, after all. He didn't deserve to be scolded for being kind.

X mentally cast about for anything he could latch onto to stop the looming feeling that he was going to lose his mind and also anything that could change the subject, and to his luck and surprise, he latched onto a solid thought. "Hey, uh, Glitch," he started, tone contrite. "Do you scavenge phones often?"

The green-painted reploid blinked in surprise at the sudden topic change, but rolled with it. "Sometimes. Why?"

"Did anyone happen to bring one in about four days ago, and then turn it on?"

Glitch tapped his chin with his unilluminated finger. "Might have brought one in…but we definitely didn't power anything up. Everyone knows not to do that."

"Hm." X set his mind to work. Kathy had said that the signal that had been picked up from Charles Alderman's phone was probably someone finding it and turning it on…which made sense, but did not at all square with what Glitch had just said. "You're sure about that?"

"Definitely. We're tight about information security. Have to be. It used to be my day job, so I got us following pretty strict rules about it so we don't get found out. Why?"

X shook his head. "Just trying to puzzle something out. Don't worry about it."

"You say so," Glitch shrugged. They rounded a final corner, climbed some stairs, and emerged into the relative brightness of the strings of lights that illuminated the encampment. "Here we are. Mostly in one piece, even! Let's get this dropped off, we can tell Kathy everything that happened, and then you go get your recharge. Nobody's gonna fight you for it after the day we just had."

Chapter Text

"Seriously?"

"Seriously! It keeps happening. Like, I don't work here because I just hate having sex with strangers, right? I swear it's like once a week recently. It used to be like once a month or two tops." Felicity pouted. "Do they pull that shit on you? Or is this like, a human-only kind of thing?"

"Oh, worse, sometimes they think they can just buy me like a fancy sex doll. I'm like, you're cute, but you're already buying as much of me as you're getting, okay? At least they kinda mean well when it's you."

The human woman giggled. "Oh God, no, they only think they do, but like. You and me? We're basically just nice pretty objects to that kind of guy. I don't think it matters if we're made out of meat or metal or unicorn farts. But that's the job, right? Sell 'em a little slice of fantasy, they have fun, we get paid, everyone goes home happy. The only difference between me and you is, I actually gotta breathe when I'm going down on someone."

Valentina squeaked in mock offense. "Excuse you! I pretend to need to breathe very convincingly. Plenty of guys are into that kind of thing. And some girls, too. The real difference is, I don't get rug burn all over my knees~" she sing-songed, with a toss of her wavy, peachy-pink hair.

"That's cheating. I keep saying I'm getting kneepads and Madam says I can't, and I'm like, what if my john's into it? She's like," Felicity assumed a nagging tone, "'We call them guests or clients,' and I'm like, okay but his name is literally John so like…anyway, God, I need to find a client with a kneepad fetish. That would solve so much."

"You should do like Gracie did and find some rich guy who's into like, paypig shit, can you imagine? Getting paid to order someone to pay you? How the hell does that even exist? That sounds fake."

Felicity examined her eyeliner in the mirror, drawing a careful, practiced line. "Sounds super fake. Like, that sounds even faker than your tits."

"Ooh! I will have you know, I just upgraded these! And so did Gracie, do not pretend you didn't notice she was gone for three weeks of 'vacation' and came back perky as anything and a cup size bigger."

Felicity giggled again. "How's the recovery time on yours?"

Valentina shrugged, mock-modestly. "About fifteen minutes to install and fifteen to calibrate."

Felicity sat up, giving her reploid colleague A Look. "What the hell do you calibrate in a tit?" she asked, incredulous.

"Everything, duh." Valentina kicked her feet. "Sensitivity, new weight distribution, skin tone, nipple textu—"

"Skin tone," Felicity interrupted. "They change color now?"

"How else am I supposed to, oh my God, what did the manual say it like. 'Achieve the most true-to-life post-coital glow.' That was it. Of course they change color, yours do too."

"Yeah but mine have like, blood in them."

"I'm just built different," Valentina sighed with a laugh.

Kitty's was, as brothels went, nice. Fully licensed, the madam saw to it that her flock of girls and boys were paid well, entirely insulated from potential clients who might do them harm, and in the best of health. And that went for her handful of reploid staff, too. She did not discriminate. She'd purchased Valentina, of course. A reploid purpose-built for sex was almost always a special commission, and not at all cheap besides. But as she'd done with every one of them thus far, as soon as Valentina had arrived fresh from orientation, Madam had made it entirely clear that she was not expected to do anything she did not wish to do, she could say no to anything for any reason, she did not belong to the house, and she could leave at any moment.

Valentina, however, thought sex work was fun. Maybe kind of gross sometimes, sure, but in a funny way. She did not mind humans, nor did she mind their weird biological urges. They could be sweet in their own way, maybe even endearing. She adored her colleagues, too. They'd instantly adopted her as one of their own, and they looked out for their own. She was the third reploid there, so they had all had time to get used to synthetic coworkers, and even integrating into a mixed group was not just painless, but fun. By the time she was taking clients of her own, she already knew every regular, every red flag to watch out for, and most of the less-literal ins and outs of the business (plus the obvious literal ones).

She did well for herself. One might not have expected bubbly enthusiasm from a sex worker, but she kept a list of clientele that she actively enjoyed, and could generally afford to be picky about those she merely tolerated. It helped that her repeat clients tended to self-select for those with a sense of humor about the act to match hers. Valentina liked getting to know them, not just in bed (or wherever they preferred it) but also little bits and pieces about their lives. It was more fun when they were allowed to be people and not just numbers, she thought. She couldn't feel much about a number, but she could like a person who could open up to her and see her as a person too, and if she was going to share her body with someone, she preferred to like them, at least as an acquaintance.

And what a body she had. It was state-of-the-art, experimental even, employing the latest advances in realistic synthetic skin. Valentina could blush, she could get flushed, she could sweat—though it didn't do much to cool her, and she had to drink a few glasses of specialty saline every day to replenish that particular ability. She had artificial mucous membranes, which did exactly what one would expect in her line of work, and that had its own system to replenish materials. She could even do other, less mentionable things regarding the expulsion of liquids, which a few clients were very much into for reasons she didn't entirely grasp, but if they were enjoying themselves, she saw no reason to judge. After all, she thought, it was certainly more sanitary when it wasn't real metabolic byproduct, so whatever. If they were having fun and she didn't mind, it was fine.

Of course Valentina did have her own boundaries, as well. She would have nothing to do with being slapped or hit, beyond the occasional playful hand on the rear, and she wouldn't do even that much to a client. Her TLR systems had never gotten the memo about consensual pain, no matter how vanilla, and the flood of warnings it triggered made her too nervous to go on with the act. Certain other things like breathplay were right out, too. It was alright, though. Her clients knew the house rules, and so she never had to worry about it.

Valentina had, for a reploid, a staggering number of nerves. She could feel the lightest brush, and it could raise simulated goosebumps. She was ticklish, at least when she wanted to be, and she found it infinitely interesting: what kind of bizarre evolutionary pressures had led to a protective reflex that involved laughter unrelated to humor? Why did people enjoy occasionally provoking it in each other? And why did a subset of people find it so arousing? It made no sense. She delighted in it.

Really, 'delight' summed up her relationship with bodies in general, her own and others' as well. They were all so different, and so vulnerable. Her clients had scars and freckles and tan lines, tattoos and piercings and old surgeries, hair and sagging skin and so many different colors, and she loved every detail.

She was proud of her own body, too. Of course, Valentina knew that it was sculpted to a standard of beauty that was unrealistic for most human women, but that wasn't the reason. She could order different parts if she wished, and sometimes she did. No, it was that it was strong, alive in its own way, and sensitive to the world. She was created specifically to experience and be experienced in turn, and she could not have imagined living any other life.

"Hey girl, someone's waiting for you," said Gracie, sticking her head into the changing room.

"Shit!" Valentina swore. "I lost track of the time."

"How?" Felicity demanded, incredulous. "You literally have an internal clock? How can you just not know what time it is?"

"I'm not like, staring at it all the time," Valentina objected. "I have other things to do."

"Well, you got a guy to do too, so maybe hurry your buns up, hun," Gracie joked, before closing the door behind her.

After work, she showered off and sanitized, as she always did once a client had left, and changed into her street clothes. Many reploids didn't need clothing, but her design mandated them. As much as she enjoyed the frilly little things and heels she wore at work, once she was off, she was a leggings, sneakers, and oversized hoodie girl through and through. Quite often, people didn't even realize they were looking at a reploid, once she had long sleeves and pants on; though she could pass, she wasn't seamless, as part of the draw for her clients was that she wasn't organic. There was a certain sort of uncanny valley effect that some humans found irresistible, as it turned out. Valentina sometimes wondered if the reverse wasn't true for her, too. Maybe she was into humans for their proximity to but profound differences from reploids.

"Okay, but is that actually possible?" Christie asked. She, Felicia, Valentina, and Viren sat around a table late into the night at a fast food joint down the street, debating.

"Yeah, like, why not," Felicia said. "If you can have preferences about sex at all, like, you can have a fetish. And you've both got preferences."

"Of course I do," Viren affirmed. He was an older model than Valentina by a few years, but from the same custom builder, and it showed. They shared a certain artistic flair, especially in their facial sculpts, though his hair was a dark brown, and he had deep blue-gray eyes where Valentina had pale baby blues.

"Yeah, old rich men," Christine snarked, jabbing several fries into her ketchup.

"And women, and otherwise," Viren corrected her. Like the overwhelming majority of reploids, he couldn't eat, and he didn't have Valentina's cutting-edge sense of taste anyway, so he simply sipped a can of self-repair nanofluid.

"Silver foxes and money aren't a fetish,"  Valentina countered, sipping a strawberry shake that she would be emptying into the compost later once she got home. That was another thing that frequently got her mistaken for human: she had a sense of taste and a tremendous sweet tooth, considering that she had no digestive capabilities whatsoever.

"But you do have things you like to do in bed more than others, right? So it makes sense." Felicity drew her conclusion and checked her burger for pickles before biting into it.

Viren shrugged. "Kind of? Like, kinks, that's easy, everyone's got something a little weird that gets them going. Fetishes are when you can't do it without it. Technically, anyway. Though I guess there's no reason a reploid couldn't have a fetish, but it'd be pretty bad for business."

"Okay, but kinks, that's fair game. Reploids could totally have kinks, assuming they're like you two and can fuck in the first place."

Christine killed a few more fries. "Hear me out, but isn't it already kind of a fetish for a reploid to want to have sex at all? Like most of you guys just don't. It's not even a thing."

"Wait, wait, hold up. Would that mean you've both got a human fetish?" Felicity asked, lowering her voice conspiratorially and suppressing a giggle.

"I can get off without a human," Valentina objected. "If I feel like it."

"Valentina and I fucked once," Viren added, helpfully.

"Yeah, to see what it was like. It was fun," she agreed. "And also funny. It's not like either of us need to do it, it's like, fake-biological, you know? I kind of thought it'd be more, I dunno, sterile than it was, but it was pretty much like being with a human client."

"One time out of how many total, though?" Felicity pointed out around a bite of burger.

"How is it having a human fetish though, when humans are the usual ones having sex to start with?" Viren asked. "That's just normal. Reploids wanting to have sex, though? That would be like…a sex fetish."

"Viren, what the fuck is a sex fetish?" Christine laughed.

"A fetish for having sex, obviously." Viren attempted to balance the can on its edge, hands hovering around it cautiously. It tried to tip over, so he sipped a bit more of the contents.

"That's literally just straight up vanilla having sex, though? How is that a fetish?" Christine asked, incredulous.

"Why do they call it vanilla, anyway?" Valentina asked, changing the topic. "Do people have any idea how many different molecules are in vanilla? It's like the least plain flavor possible."

"No, no, go back to the sex fetish, I really need to hear about the sex fetish," Felicity cut in. "I have to know how that works."

Viren carefully took his hands off the can. It sat there, on the crimp of its edge, holding a forty five degree angle. "No, listen, I'm being totally serious. Reploids have like, intimacy, right? Like all of us can do intimate stuff regardless of model, you don't have to be a sexbot to like, express closeness with a partner. It just doesn't look like human intimacy, but it's a real thing."

Felicity jumped in again. "Okay, but 'sex fetish' is literally the stupidest—"

"—shut up you guys, I'm being totally serious—" Viren complained.

"It's like calling it food hungry, there's not like another kind—" Christine interjected, raising her voice because neither Felicity nor Viren were backing down in the volume department.

Valentina interrupted. "I don't get food hungry, I just like strawberry."

"Oh my God, you aren't helping—" said Christine.

"Sex fetish, though. Did you think about that before you said it?" Felicity continued.

Viren charged ahead with his idea, now that he had the most razor-thin opening. "If sex already isn't normal for intimacy then having sex at all would be at least a kink, right? And if you can't get off without having sex—"

"—wait, everyone shut up, he's right," Christine interrupted, yet again. Everyone shut up, at least for a moment.

"Of course I'm right."

"Who gets off without some kind of sex?" Felicity demanded, disbelieving.

"Lots of people? Like, from exercise, or from having a wet dream, or—" Valentina tried to answer.

"Oh my God," Christine giggled breathlessly, having an idea. "Do androids dream of electric sex toys…?"

"Wow, I have never heard that one before," Viren deadpanned, slow-clapping in sarcasm.

"I have! But only once," Valentina answered, cheekily sincere in stark contrast. "If you get off from exercise though, does that make it sexerci—"

Sirens interrupted her.

"Oh, shit, Val, that was so bad the Mavericks are coming to shut you up," Felicity joked, nervously. "Um. That is what that is, right? That's not a storm siren or something?"

"Definitely not," Valentina said, standing. "Come on, babes, you know the drill."

They scrambled for the restrooms to take cover, joined by the few employees on shift at that hour once they'd turned the lights off and locked the doors. "God, this sucks, though," Felicity grumbled, pulling her jacket more closely around herself like it would help. Viren put one arm around her and the other around Christine, who was clinging to Valentina, who was in turn clinging to Felicity and Viren. The end result was a mixed huddle of human and reploid escorts, all one tangle of arms holding one another for reassurance. One of the employees frantically texted someone, her hands shaking.

"I'm so tired of this," Felicity whimpered. "Why can't it just stop already? What's even the point?"

"I don't know," Viren said, trying to stay calm. He at least managed to pretend, but he radiated nervous warmth like a space heater.

"Is there even a point anymore, or are they just breaking things?" Valentina whispered.

"It's got to be almost over, right? The Maverick Virus isn't even stable anymore. I saw it on the news. It's so old and full of errors, they're saying it might even stop being contagious if it mutates much more, and it's not keeping up with firmware changes like it used to," Christine added, also in a tremulous whisper.

"Oh, I hope so." Valentina buried her head in her group of friends. "I hate it. I don't understand why it even exists. Why would someone make something that—"

A distant, muffled series of rumbles made them all jump, Christine squealing in fright. The two diner employees scooted closer to the huddle and found themselves wordlessly absorbed into the scared pile of clinging arms and trembling bodies. After all, the four from Kitty's were late night regulars, and that was close enough to being friends for the situation.

"We're fine," Felicity said, with a conviction she visibly didn't feel. "That was pretty far away. An empty Burger Zone is totally not interesting enough to blow up. And the bathrooms are reinforced, right?"

"Yeah," one of the employees said, nodding into where she'd ended up pressed into Valentina's back. Valentina snaked an arm around her protectively.

"Then we're fine," she said, as if saying it would make it true. "We just stay here and stay calm and wait for the all-clear, and everything will be okay."

Several more deep, thudding booms rang through the building, more felt in the walls and floor than heard in the air. But nothing came closer. No more explosions happened after that. After twenty tense minutes of silence, sniffling, and straining to hear anything, a different sound played over the warning system: a steady tone, not the rising and falling siren. The all-clear had been sounded, and one way or another the insurgent Mavericks were out of the action.

Christine began crying in relief, and Viren pulled a tissue out of his pocket for her. "Why do you even have that?" Felicity asked.

"Why not?" he countered. "Things happen."

The six of them didn't immediately crack the door. Common wisdom was to wait at least fifteen minutes in case any stragglers had managed to pass undetected and might still be at large. Viren pulled up the news on his phone, and once the local crews were out and about and not being fired on, the six of them decided to chance it.

The restaurant was the same as ever. Valentina's milkshake had melted and pooled condensation all over the table, and the food was cold, but the human girls weren't really all that hungry now.

"Text me as soon as you get home safe. And that goes for you guys too!" Valentina added to the Burger Zone staff. "Here, group chat, everyone report in when you get home. Or if something happens. But don't let anything happen, just get home, okay?" She tapped her screen and held her phone out. The others did the same, tapping them all together in the middle.

They called friends and rides as needed, since the public transit was halted until the transit agencies could get engineers onsite to make sure that everything was safe to run. Viren lived in the same direction as Christine, so he took her with him.

"I'm going to go by work first and make sure everyone there is okay too," Valentina declared.

Felicity nodded. "Oh, good. My girlfriend is going to meet me there anyway so I'll walk with you and that way we don't have to be alone."

"Good idea."

They stayed at the restaurant until they'd seen everyone else off with a hug of tearful relief, then headed back towards Kitty's.

"That's a lot of lights," Felicity remarked, her pace slowing. "Oh, Val. I have such a bad feeling about this. I'm scared."

"I am too," Valentina admitted, taking Felicity's hand.

Kitty's was not there, just a column of smoke obscuring anything that remained. Half of each building on all sides was missing. News crews and first responder crews worked around each other. The entire block was taped off already, and they came to a stop at the edge of the newly-erected barricade, numb with shock.

"Hey," a reploid in EMT colors called to them. "Sorry, ladies, it's not safe to be here with all the dust and smoke. You've got to stay back."

"Oh, she doesn't breathe," Felicity answered, in an automatic, offhanded sort of way, as if not really registering the statement before responding. "We work here."

"I'm so sorry," he said. "Go home. It's safer."

"Did…where is everyone? The overnight shift? They made it out, right?" Valentina asked.

"I couldn't say yet. But please, you'll need to back up to at least that truck," he apologized to Felicity in particular, pointing.

The two of them did. Valentina didn't want to let go of Felicity. "Should I text them?" she asked.

"When we hear something, maybe?" Felicity's face was pale with fear. Valentina coaxed her to sit so that she didn't pass out, wrapping her in a nervous-reploid-warm hug.

News crews moved around them. Someone with a microphone squatted next to them, though she didn't hold it out yet. "Hey," she said gently. "Did you work here?"

Valentina nodded, not quite able to process speech for several moments. Finally, she found her voice. "Yeah."

"Did you see anything?" the journalist asked.

Valentina shook her head. "No, we were over at the Burger Zone after work. We just…took cover, you know, like you're supposed to, and then I wanted to make sure everything here was okay and she was going to catch a ride from here…"

"Oh, shit, my ride, I have to text Amanda." Felicity pulled her phone out, still white as a sheet and not entirely noticing the reporter sitting right there on the balls of her feet.

"There's a first aid truck set up, that way," the reporter said, pointing so that Valentina could see along her arm. "Your friend looks like she might be in shock. You should take her over to them, just in case."

Valentina nodded, understanding. She had first aid training as part of her job, but she knew the woman was right. There wasn't much she could do that they wouldn't be able to do better. "Come on, Filly, let's get you a warm blanket and a real place to sit," she said, pulling her friend gently to her feet.

Felicity followed her, strangely docile, and the EMTs had her wrapped in a blanket, seated, and sipping a packet of hot cocoa mix in no time flat in the triage tent they were erecting. Valentina gently stole Felicity's phone and let her girlfriend know where exactly she was and what was going on.

She watched as the rescues came in, fingers gripping and worrying the edge of her hoodie until it tore under her stress. This was a nightmare. Right? There was no way that was Gracie, having her arm stitched and splinted only because she had decided to stick around for an extra fifteen minutes and shoot the breeze with the reception staff. That could not possibly have been Marie, draped in a sheet and covered in blood from a gash in her head, unable to quite follow the doctor's finger motions and leaving in the stream of ambulances. And Verity, the third of the three reploids on staff, keening in such pain and terror that her voice processing lost cohesion and became so much ragged static until a technician could plug into her and deactivate her damaged sensors.

Valentina realized she was probably in shock herself, but she would not die of it, unlike a human, and she was otherwise uninjured, so she kept it to herself, focusing her efforts on keeping Felicity calm and warm and breathing deeply until the EMTs cleared her to go with her girlfriend. The three of them hugged so hard that Valentina's pressure sensors threw errors and her TLR systems refused to let her squeeze any harder for fear of crushing the two humans, though she was fairly certain that she'd heard her own chassis creak under their combined arms.

After that she didn't know what to do. Valentina hovered around at a distance that didn't get her scolded, trying to keep her friends updated. They all made it home safe. She broke the news, as gently as possible, and tried to keep a running tally of who she found. A little at a time, others trickled into the chat: a clerk from the convenience store next door, which was now gone, and he brought several of his coworkers; other staff from Kitty's, as they could be added; a chef from the noodle shop across the street, who brought in several other people he knew from other nearby businesses. Within the space of two hours, it grew from the initial six to a loose group of twenty, all looking for each other and others and trying to coordinate information.

They began to arrive, rumpled from sleep, some of them in pajamas and sandals, parking wherever they could. People she knew, but not in the uniforms she knew them in. They looked tired, terrified, vulnerable. It was all wrong, Valentina thought. It felt like the rules had stopped working and now everything she knew was changed. She had always delighted in people's vulnerability, because it meant they trusted her, but this…she felt ill. It was supposed to be something shared like a secret, not something torn open like a wound.

And then, finally, unconscious on a stretcher and so covered in dust that she was hardly recognizable, the rescue team brought up Madam Kitty herself. Valentina gasped, hands pressed to her mouth. Was she even alive? She wasn't moving. They were giving her chest compressions and rescue breaths. They were sticking things to her skin. They were giving her an injection of something. They were listening at her mouth. They were applying paddles. The woman's body barely even convulsed under the voltage, and Valentina held perfectly still.

Maybe if she didn't move a single servo, this wouldn't be real. Maybe if she didn't make a single sound, it didn't have to be happening. She didn't stop staring, because if she looked away, she would have to stop seeing it and begin processing it.

Kas, another of her escort colleagues who'd come from her home in the middle of the night to see what was going on, stood next to her, trembling, arms wrapped tightly around herself. "What am I supposed to do?" she asked the night.

They put Madam into an ambulance even while they were working to resuscitate her. Valentina was not religious, but she suddenly understood the need to beg someone, anyone, existent or not, to make everything be okay. "I don't know," she said. "I really don't know."

Eventually Valentina drifted home in a haze. She texted the group dutifully with what she knew, which wasn't much, and threw herself into her recharge pod. She laid there a long time, staring at the stickers she'd placed all over the inside of the glass, wondering what tomorrow was going to bring.

Valentina awoke from a recharge and defragment filled with dreams that left her more tired and upset than when she'd first laid down. She checked her phone: hundreds of messages had amassed while she was sleeping, from everyone she knew and plenty of people she didn't. She tapped a news article and read it while she slowly booted up and the cobwebs cleared from her head.

There was a video. The Mavericks responsible had released a statement, if an unhinged screed visibly recorded off of a phone in selfie mode by a virally-addled reploid with unsteady hands despite the picture stabilization, could be called such a thing.

"We will no longer allow this disgusting corruption of implanting base organic drives and imitations of human flesh into the reploid race," he snarled. "Any reploids who have allowed themselves to be tainted and made into servile objects for humans to debase will be destroyed as examples. Any reploids who have been forcibly used will be rescued and made pure once again. All humans who would abuse reploids for their own sick means will die. We will burn the stain out of our perfect system with our own hands."

Somewhere off-camera, voices cheered. The video trailed off into a blur as the phone aimed away from the speaker, then ended.

They wanted to kill her for…being too human? Or did they think she needed to be rescued from her own profession? Valentina never understood Maverick reasoning. She suspected there might not even be any to speak of, and even less than that as time went on and the Virus itself lost cohesion.

She flipped through the other messages. Gracie was okay and recuperating at home. Marie had a bad concussion and was under observation. Verity was in the shop, and it would be a while before they could replace her arm and leg with matching ones from their manufacturer, but she had temporary replacements and was doing much better. Dmitry had a broken arm and wanted everyone to come sign his cast soon. Roxie was dealing with lung damage from dust inhalation, but they expected her to make a decent recovery.

But Madam Kitty…

Valentina cried in her pod. The Madam had been covering the front desk that night until the usual receptionist could make it, and she and the night bouncer had done everything they could to stall for time so that the rest of the staff could seek cover in the basement. Gracie broke the news without going into much detail. She'd been the last to take cover in the basement. Behind her, she'd heard gunfire and plasma bolts and Madam Kitty telling her to get to the shelter and lock up. She got away, and then the building had come down around them. It had all happened so fast.

So fast. Twenty minutes, and the only life she had ever known was over. "What do we do," she asked the pod glass. "What do I do?"

She met Felicity and Viren at the Burger Zone, the day after that. Felicity's eyes were red and puffy from tears. Viren just looked incredibly tired. Christie was staying with her family, who didn't know what her profession was and she preferred to keep it that way.

"I'm gonna do pole, maybe," Felicity said, staring into a soda. "Doesn't pay nearly as much as full service, but it tips okay and it's legal a lot more places. I'm out of practice but I can get back into shape for it."

"I might go solo. I dunno. I got enough clients." Viren didn't quite make eye contact either. "And a lot of them are pretty rich, and there's not like a ton of competition for reploid call boy as a job."

"I still don't know." Valentina shrugged. She had a cookies and cream shake, but she could barely taste it. "I never even thought about what I'd do if…" She couldn't bring herself to finish the thought, so she filled her mouth with ice cream instead so that she had something to swallow other than the lump in her throat. "Maybe I'll go solo too. It's not like there's another brothel in town to go apply at."

On her first evening out alone, a couple weeks later, Valentina dressed up nicely, though a bit conservatively for her work, and reminded herself in her mirror before she stepped out that she didn't have to go with anyone that gave her the creeps. She had some savings, and she wasn't desperate, so she could still afford to be picky. If she didn't meet any potential clients she liked, she could simply keep walking and come right back home. She had her phone, she could call friends, she would be safe either way. Thus self-encouraged, Valentina went for a stroll around the busy nightclub district.

"Well, hello there," a voice from behind her spoke up. "You're new here."

She turned to see who was speaking. He was a huge, broad-shouldered man, dark hair shaved close to his head, with a cigarette dangling from his lip and a prosthetic hand that glinted with gold plate in the light of the street lamp. How far up it went, she couldn't tell under the coat he wore.

"Hi," she said, in return. "Um. How are you so certain about that?"

He took a drag off the cigarette, flicking ash. "'Cause you're walking my street, girl, how'd you think?"

"O-oh," Valentina stammered, blushing synthetically. "It's not like that."

"Sure it is. Can't fool me. Ain't necessarily a problem, though. You working for anyone?"

"I…was," she admitted, expression clouding. "I was at Kitty's."

A look of understanding lit his face. "Oh. I see. C'mon inside, let me get you a drink, let's talk. Maybe we can work out something that'll benefit us both."

He walked right past the line and bouncer at the club across the street. Inside, he motioned to the bartender, who simply nodded and began mixing two glasses of something. There was a corner booth with a reserved sign, which he ignored, motioning for Valentina to have a seat.

He sat down, placing a drink in front of her. "Call me Midas. Everyone else does," the man said, extending his gold-plated hand to shake hers. "So tell me about yourself, miss…"

"Valentina," she volunteered, taking a sip. It was potent, whatever it was, a burning kick of alcohol with a splash of fruit. Not that the alcohol content mattered to her, of course. She didn't have a metabolism for it to affect, though she didn't mind the flavor, either.

"So sorry, with what happened at Kitty's. Hard to believe."

"Yeah." She cast her eyes down, then realized he'd asked her to talk about herself. "Anyway. I was there for four years. I really loved my work. I did some of everything…full service, hostess, massage, a little kink or roleplay sometimes, pretty much the entire menu. Well, not much BDSM, outside of restraints and maybe some CBT. Umm, what else…" Valentina sipped her drink again. "Yeah. Not so much dance, either. I know how, I just would rather interact with people more. But, um, I guess I'm working freelance right now."

"Well, that's good timing. I was just thinking I could hire another girl. If you're looking, anyway." Midas took a much less dainty swig of his drink. "Don't have a place like Kitty's, but I can set you up with guys easy enough."

"I'm not really looking for a pimp," Valentina said, with a polite smile.

Midas simply laughed, stubbing his cigarette out in an ashtray. "Now, let's not call it that. It's a rough world, making ends meet on the street. I'm more like an agent. You want to keep doing what you're good at, I want to make it easy for you. I get you johns, you avoid the cops picking you up, I don't even take that much of a finder's fee. How much did the house get, back at Kitty's?"

Clients or guests, not johns, she thought, but didn't say. "Forty percent," Valentina answered.

"I'm only askin' thirty. No johns you don't wanna deal with. I got a room you can work in too, clean and private."

Valentina thought it over. "I'll need a shower, and a sanitizer attachment."

"A sanitizer attachment," Midas echoed, blankly.

"Yes, how else am I supposed to clean it out between clients?"

He stared for a few more seconds before Valentina realized that he hadn't seen enough of her, in bright enough light, to realize she was a reploid. Midas had mistaken her for a human.

"Look, here." She shrugged her jacket off, revealing her sleeveless top and, more importantly, the subtle jointed lines that crossed her synthetic skin.

Midas's eyes could have fallen out of his head, as he leaned forward to find that she was, indeed, a reploid. "Lady, when were you gonna tell me you're a—and you just sitting there drinking that like it's no big deal you can do it?" Midas sat back, with an impressed chuckle. "Ha, you sure got me. How about this. Twenty-five percent, and whatever a sanitizer attachment is, you find me one and it's yours."

Valentina hesitated. "I…okay. But if I don't like it, I'm not staying."

"'Course not. Never ask that out of any of my girls. Don't have to start tonight, though. You find what you need, text me with it, I'll let you know when I got your room set up."

"That sounds fair," Valentina agreed, relaxing a little. She knew, of course, that a pimp could and often would promise you the world up front and then never deliver. But she also knew she was physically stronger than him, and whatever happened, she could just walk away.

Midas flicked his contact information across the table from his phone to hers. "There we go. Keep in touch."

Valentina went home after that and looked up what she needed online. It wasn't specifically for sex work, just any sort of reploid that came into frequent contact with organics, so it wasn't as specialty as her actual body. She even picked a slightly more expensive model that converted the shower as a whole to something a lot more useful to her particular needs, just to see if he'd do it without giving her a rough time, and a few bottles of sanitizing solution.

The message came back in full agreement, no questions asked, which seemed like a good sign. Valentina spent the rest of the night watching movies in her recharge pod until she had distracted herself enough to sleep.

A few days later, she got a call. "Hey, it's me," said Midas on the other end, his voice characteristically rough from what sounded like years of smoking. "You wanna come see your digs tonight? I got it all set up."

"Yeah, sure," she said.

At the agreed-upon time, Valentina came to the club she'd met him outside the first time. Gold Rush, it was called, though she hadn't thought about that fact much before. She was beginning to sense that Midas may have had a bit of a theme, but she couldn't begrudge him that. Branding was just part of business. Kitty's used to have the staff wear cat ears for their anniversary party, she remembered, sadly.

"Hey," he said, waving her over to his reserved table. "You made it. You don't mind taking a client tonight, do you? I got a business buddy and nobody else free."

Valentina hesitated, though she covered it with a smile. "Um, that's fine, I just want to have a look around my room first, if that's okay?"

"Of course. I'll show you to it." Midas pushed himself to his feet, and showed her to a back room. It was…well, not what she was used to, at Kitty's, but then, Kitty's was high-end, she reminded herself. The carpet could have been cleaner, but the sheets on the bed in the corner were freshly-changed, though it was a rather plain frame, with no headboard. There was a window, though it was painted over in black, and the drywall was dinged up and in need of new paint. She peeked into the bathroom, and found that at least she had the shower setup she'd requested, so that much was alright.

"Can we, uh, maybe spruce it up at some point? Not right away," she hastily added, when Midas glanced sideways at her. "Just as we go. Nothing too crazy! Just some fresh paint to start?"

"We'll see," he said. "Anyway, you get comfy, I'll send him up in a few."

Afterwards, Valentina stood in the shower, taking longer than she really needed. She hadn't actually meant to take a client, but she'd been surprised and agreed before her mind caught up to her mouth. And then when he'd arrived, he wanted her to choke him. She knew how to do it safely, but ugh, it gave her the creeps. But then, she hadn't had time to tell Midas that, and she should have told the client no, but Midas had mentioned he was a business contact…could she afford to potentially seem like she was sabotaging his business on her very first night?

Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh. She would have to talk to him about it, sooner rather than later.

Valentina finally finished showering. She stepped out and wrapped a towel around herself, looking around for a second one to dry her hair, but there only seemed to be the one. Well, that wouldn't do, either. She'd need a good stack of them and a hairdryer, at least. She didn't always wash her hair, but ugh again, she felt a little slimy after that one.

She stepped out of the bathroom to find Midas already standing in her room, which made her jump. Nobody would have even contemplated doing that without at least knocking at Kitty's. "H-hey," she stammered.

"Good job," he said, giving her a golden thumbs-up. Without his coat on, she could see his entire arm was a prosthetic, and from the look of it, a fairly high-end cybernetic one. "He was real into that. He's already asking me what nights you're gonna be working."

"Um, I wanted to talk about that, actually," she said, feeling self-conscious and a little vulnerable, and not because she was standing in a towel in front of a strange man. That was a normal enough occurrence for her. This, though, was something new.

"Your schedule? Up to you, though since I'm finding them for you, being flexible's gonna pay off for you."

"Right. No, um, not my schedule. It's just that I don't do choking."

"You don't? Coulda fooled Greg. And me."

"I mean," she said. "Not normally. I don't like doing it. I never did at Kitty's. And I want to meet clients before actually servicing them."

"That's what you got me for," Midas replied, simply.

"Maybe I'm not making myself, um, entirely clear," Valentina said, feeling more and more off her balance. "I've got a list of things I don't do, and I don't want to sleep with anyone I haven't vetted myself."

Midas raised an eyebrow, looking sincerely confused. "Well, you could have said that beforehand. Look. You did real good with my guy, there. Do whatever you want or don't with anyone else, but I need you to keep doing it for him. I'm trying to get this place remodeled, and he's got a contact I'm trying to get cozy with for it. Please. Just until I get in touch with this guy and get a contract signed."

Valentina made a face, but fell silent. It wouldn't be that many times, right? And if the building got remodeled, she'd have a nicer room. She could make that trade. It wasn't as if she was actually hurting him…even if the TLR errors it made her throw made her skin crawl a bit. A lot. Way too much, but…

"I…guess," she agreed, reluctantly. "But I still want to vet my own clients, and I'm not doing it for anyone else."

"Fine, fine, do as you please with anyone else," Midas sighed. "Drop by the bar on your way out for your cut."

It only occurred to Valentina once she was back in her pod, doing math in her head about her pay and getting ready to recharge, that she had no idea what he was even charging in the first place. Another thing she'd have to bring up, definitely.

Valentina was used to a rotating list of regulars that she got to know over time. Working for Midas, she didn't have nearly as much say over who she saw or didn't. Granted, she never had to outright reject anybody he sent up, but she just didn't like them like she'd liked her old clients. She simply could not stand Gregor, his business friend that he'd wheedled her into accepting as a john. He said off-color things about reploids, for one. For two, she'd tried to gently suggest maybe doing something else that didn't entirely kill the mood for her, and he'd gotten argumentative and pointed out that he was paying her, and didn't give a shit what she thought. This would have been a deal-breaker for literally any other client in the world, but she was trying very hard to tolerate him, because she'd agreed to.

Finally, one night after what had been their ninth session by her count, Valentina went to Midas, who was in the cramped mess of an office down the hall.

"Val," he said. "Hey. What's going on?"

"So, um, you said I only have to keep playing along with Greg until you get a contract with his friend," she started. Something about Midas made her feel scrutinized, and assembling a sentence under his gaze was more and more difficult lately. Logically, Valentina knew this was not good. Logically, she also knew that her apartment, and especially her highly particular maintenance, were not cheap, and she knew also that this job did not pay nearly as much as her previous one. Her finances could have been better, at this point.

"Yup." He scribbled his signature onto a few printed sheets of paper.

"How much longer is that going to be?"

"Couldn't tell you. Guy's pretty busy again lately. I was hoping to get in and talk to him while work was slow, but he's got a bunch of contracts suddenly, and there's that big-ass wall they're talking about putting up that he's making a bid on. Soon, though."

Valentina frowned, arms crossed, and chewed her bottom lip. "...I do not want to keep seeing him."

Something in Midas's tone was a little too even. "Why's that?"

"He…" She paused. "I don't think he even likes reploids. He said some…really bio-ist stuff, the last time he was here."

"There's just people like that in the world. You can't let 'em bother you."

Valentina's temper finally found its footing. "Well, no, but I don't want to fuck those people either!"

The pen in Midas's golden hand snapped in two like a twig, ink splattering across the sheet. "Val," he said, dangerously calm. "Maybe you're used to being coddled in your fancy whorehouse where you can pick and choose who you wanna serve, but the rest of the world, we got shit to get done. You think the bartender gets to turn people down and only do tequila, because he doesn't wanna mix a screwdriver tonight for some fucking reason?"

"That's different," Valentina protested.

"I'm already letting you turn down whoever the hell else you want. I bought you your shower thing, because of which the other girls can't even use that room now, before you even earned a single zenny here. I'm asking you to put up with one guy, and it's not even forever, it's probably a few more weeks, tops. And how often does he come in?"

"About once a week," she replied, "but that's not the point, the point is I've been putting up with him for more than two months already, and he's—he called me his favorite talking fleshlight! He's disgusting and I qui—"

She didn't even have time to react before Midas's golden hand had whipped around and slapped her in the mouth with enough force to send her sideways into the doorframe, field of vision flooded with errors and warnings and pain. Valentina crumpled in the doorway, holding her cheek.

"Go back to your room," Midas said, still in that deadly calm. "Go think about how much leeway I've been giving you compared to any of the other girls here. And change the sheets, because this doesn't mean you're off work for the night, either."

Valentina scrabbled to her feet, backwards, and retreated to her room, closing the door and locking it behind her. She should have left and not run back here, she realized, after sitting on her bed in stunned silence for a few minutes, reeling. He hit her. Why hadn't she listened to her gut feeling and left already? Now she was here, her savings were low enough to make her nervous about leaving, and she'd ended up in exactly the situation she had known to avoid, but she'd been too optimistic. Naïve, even. Funny, she thought, how she could work in this field for years, think she knew everything, and still be entirely unprepared when push came to shove.

She turned her baby-blue eyes to the door. If she left…no, she'd have to go past Midas's office, and she didn't want to see him. He terrified her. But then, if she stayed here, she'd still have to deal with him at some point. Valentina's feet didn't seem to want to work, though, no matter how she tried to will herself to stand. She just couldn't find the strength, as if it had been knocked out of her.

Valentina was still sitting on the bed shaking when there was a knock at the door, making her jump. "Um, j-just a second," she called, skittering into the bathroom. She didn't look like she'd been slapped, at least. That was a point in favor of synthetic skin. A quick hairbrush through her hair, and she was presentable enough to answer the door.

Of course it was Gregor. That was just her luck. She'd already noticed that Midas had stopped telling her when he was coming, and she realized suddenly that it might actually have been a punishment this time.

Valentina was sitting astride him, feeling nothing at all for him, watching his face and the TLR warnings both turn red, when she had an uncharacteristic thought. She could ignore them. She was ignoring them right now.

What if…she just kept ignoring them?

The thought fluttered wildly in her circuits, half-wild with fear. She'd never felt so little for a human before. They'd all been such delights, so charmingly vulnerable. Humans were her friends, her lovers, her family. But this one? This one was foul. His vulnerability was not charming. His body was not a delight. She never wanted to see him again.

She could make that happen, couldn't she? It would be so easy. If she leaned just a little bit harder…like so…he wouldn't even have the blood flow or breath to fight her, would he?

Valentina watched him turn from red, to purple, to blue, to gray, and when she let go, to a terrible off-yellow, and still, she felt nothing. He'd barely even fought her, already having been on the edge of consciousness to begin with. Just some reflexive thrashing and twitching, and soon, not even that. She stood up, still not entirely registering what she'd done until she heard footsteps in the hall.

Midas's footsteps. Valentina had come to instantly recognize his heavy tread. Even hearing it made her fans kick up several speeds in anxiety. He would be angry, she realized. He would probably kill her, and with that arm, he might even be able to do it.

Well, then, Valentina would have to kill him first, and quietly. She pulled a sheet from the battered set of drawers she kept them in, threw a blanket over Gregor's cooling body, and quietly tucked herself behind the door, still naked and sticky and thinking nothing of it. One chance, that would be all she'd have, she thought. If they had a struggle, she'd likely lose, and if he managed to shout for help, she'd be in trouble. She twisted the sheet into a tight rope, and waited.

The key rattled in the lock, and the door burst open. "...Val?" he demanded, to the apparently empty room, taking a few steps in. This was it. In one fluid movement, she kicked the door shut quietly behind him and looped the makeshift garrote around his neck, twisting as hard as she could.

Gregor had been mostly subdued to begin with. Midas was not. She had him tightly enough that he couldn't spare the breath to do more than squeak, and with one more twist of the sheets, he couldn't even do that much. Even so, he fought back, hard, one organic and one cybernetic arm scrabbling at her. He scratched at her face and skin, but she was built well, flesh made to be durable. He tried to buck her off of him, but she wrapped her legs around his waist from behind, clinging tightly. Midas's strength began to wane, and Valentina's grew, systems diverting everything they could spare into survival. She weathered several desperate blows from his golden arm tearing at her, but his leverage was poor from this angle and nothing in heaven, earth, or hell could have dislodged her. Finally, Midas's consciousness ran out.

Valentina lowered him to the floor, quietly, one foot on his neck. His body spasmed as his brain failed. She'd done it. She'd…murdered two humans. She loved humans, yes, but these humans had not loved her, and she'd had enough of it. They wanted to treat her like a mere thing? They could become mere things themselves, then, for all she cared.

She shoved both bodies under the bed, still not feeling anything. What were her next steps? She needed to get far away. If she was quick, she'd have time to disappear. Nobody else knew Gregor was here, she was pretty sure, and Midas kept irregular hours to begin with.

Irregular, she thought. Funny choice of words. Except, that isn't what they call reploids who've killed people. Those are called something else. And I've…I've killed people, now.

Huh.

Valentina showered, because that was what she did after a client, and afterwards, she sat on the bed, thinking about the corpses under it. She should panic, she thought. She should be upset. That would be the normal reaction. But then, maybe Mavericks didn't do that. Or maybe it hadn't really sunk in yet. Both sounded equally reasonable.

Or perhaps, she just really wanted to be away from Midas and Gregor that much. There was a concept. She didn't think she'd had it in her to hurt someone, but then, she'd never been mistreated before. And, Valentina decided, she wouldn't be mistreated again. She loved humans because she chose to love humans, and she could choose not to, just as easily. Perhaps if they hadn't wanted her to find out how simple it was to disobey her Three Laws programming, they shouldn't have asked her to do it for months on end.

She'd have to get moving. While Valentina was no technician herself, she knew her own schematics well, because she was a custom model and found herself having to explain herself to technicians who hadn't worked on her before. She knew she had a tracking device, just the same as any other reploid would, and she knew where it was. It was fairly inaccessible, tucked behind a shoulder blade, but if she had something she could use to reach it…

Well, she'd worry about that later. She still had time before anybody would even try tracking her. For now, she threw her clothes on, dried her hair, stopped by the bar to pick up her earnings, and walked out into the night, as collected as any other night if not moreso. And why shouldn't she be? she thought. She was a person. She wouldn't put up with being anybody's fancy sex doll, ever again, and if they tried to make her, they would quickly learn that she was not the breakable kind of doll.

Chapter Text

Kathy rubbed her temples, elbows on her desk and looking for all the world like the frazzled teacher she had been, and the stressed leader she had become.

"I knew it might be a danger with Analog having defected, but we have to assume that the Drifters know exactly where we are and how to get to us, and worse, that they will want to," she concluded.

Glitch nodded, and X spoke up. "Unfortunately. I think she's got some notion that she's going to clean up any Mavericks she can get her hands on, despite the obvious hypocrisy in that notion."

Kathy sighed. "Just what we needed…though, just between the four of us, I've always thought it might end up being us or them."

"Gonna have to shore the defenses up a lot sooner than I expected," Hammer said, already visibly in thought. "And fast. Wonder if I can get any more cement bags hauled up from the home center…that'd be huge."

"We can put Cirocco and Trigger on it," said Kathy. "Glitch, I already see you thinking you're going to volunteer, and no. Not that the help isn't appreciated, but you're staying around home until that's mended."

Glitch's mouth was already half open. "…Damn," he said. "When did you get faster than me, Kat?"

"You don't have to be fast to predict the sun's going to come up."

"First the Drifters are trying to murder me and now my own boss. V, you're my only friend in this harsh world."

X ignored Glitch's melodrama in favor of the actual topic of conversation. "If you'd like, I can have a walk around with Hammer and see what needs shored up the most."

"Hey, that'd be great. Can't say I've got any real combat experience, just a lotta building experience. At least we got all the aggregate and rebar we could ever want, all over the place, for free. Just lemme know when you're good to go…I'd imagine you could do with a rest after the day you two had."

"I'm fine," X said, at the same moment that Glitch did.

"You're just as bad as each other," Kathy sighed, fingertips on her temples again. "Both of you go take a break before you do anything else. I've got a lot to think about and I don't want to see either of you getting into anything more strenuous than a shower until at least tomorrow."

"Yes, ma'am," X mumbled, chastised. Glitch tried to give her a flippant salute, but his shoulder emitted a grinding creak and he gave up with a grumble.

A shower did sound good…and perhaps some clothing that was not so dusty that his fans felt gummy just from wearing it. Once Kathy had shooed him out, he dug around in the public salvage boxes until he found suitable replacements for his current outfit, and headed for the shower Hammer had mentioned in his quick tour.

Valentina nearly collided with him in the hallway, hair wet and a towel wrapped around her body. She smiled when she saw him, evidently unselfconscious about her state of undress, even though she could have been mistaken for human at a glance. "Oh! V, hello, you surprised me. How's it going today?"

"It's going," he answered. Something about her seemed familiar, X thought, though he couldn't recall where he might have seen her. But where would he have met someone who was very likely a sexbot?

"Oof. Going, or going through it?" she asked, and X felt read like an open book.

"Ah, well," he hedged. "Maybe a little of both. Kathy told me to take a break, so I thought I'd have a shower, maybe get the dust off."

"You should! Everything's easier to deal with when you're clean. I think so, anyway. And we're doing good on water supply right now, so you don't have to worry too much about it. I miss hot water, though…that's like, if I could have one thing back, it's either that or texting."

"That reminds me, I had a question," X said. "If someone brought back a phone, where would it end up?"

Valentina considered the question for several moments, fingertip tapping on her lower lip. "You know, good question. I know Glitch uses them for parts for some things, but I'm not really sure where they go. But there's a bunch in a box in the town hall, I think! We haven't sorted them out in a while. Usually Glitch takes them into the service tunnels so that they don't connect to anything. It's kind of a process, so he doesn't always get to it."

X had a sudden hunch. "Nobody would just…turn one on, right?"

"Oh God, no, that would be dumb. That's like, one of the first things Katty drills into us when we get here."

Something wasn't adding up, and X was beginning to have a clearer idea what it was. "Good. Anyway, if I could maybe squeeze past you?"

"Right! Sorry. I already went and forgot you were going that way." She sidled around him in the narrow hallway, and X was momentarily glad that he was not organic, because it would have been very distracting if he were. As it was, it was still a little odd.

He hung up his jacket, which was still clean enough, leaned his cane in a free corner, and stripped off his clothing. It sported new scorch marks, several tears, and once he could get a better look at it, more dirt and grime than he'd thought. X folded it, not that there was much need to do so, and stepped into the shower. Like everything else, it was a bit on the patchy side but made well enough, draining into one of the storm drains that already dotted the parking structure.

There was a bucket and stool parked in the corner of the little shower, which X decided to use in order to save on water, even though Valentina had told him there was plenty. The water that came from the handheld shower head was lukewarm at best, and smelled a little like algae, but it was better than nothing, and they had no shortage of salvaged soap of all sorts. He picked whatever landed in his hand first and sat down to fill the bucket and scrub off.

It was funny, he thought, how humanlike some of the newer models were now. He had an almost shockingly human face and arms, both now gently lined with age if one looked closely, but that was the extent of his synthetic skin. He felt…undressed wasn't quite the word, he thought. Unfinished, perhaps, without his armor, all exposed metal and attachment points. There was a very long stretch of his life that he'd simply never removed it, and he'd probably have kept it that way, but it was so very recognizable. Better that it sit in a case on display at Maverick Hunter HQ without him, almost like a decoy X, drawing all the attention off of the real X. Nobody expected the savior of mankind and reploidkind alike to look like someone had failed to finish assembling him right at the end.

From what X knew of the process of his creation and the age of his creator, this was distinctly possible, too. He was complete as per the schematics that had been unearthed with him, but there was no way to guess whether Dr. Light had been forced by age and failing health to scale back on some non-functional aspects of his design. He wondered, sometimes.

X poured a cupful of water on his head and shuddered. Lukewarm was not any kind of warm, and whoever named it that should have to answer for their sins. He toughed it out, soaping up and rinsing down, even if the temperature made his joints complain. He really should just let Glitch do his thing…but then, he'd likely have to explain himself, and he didn't like being examined by anybody at all anyway, and now he was going in this circle again.

He didn't need this. Shaking his head, X refocused his thoughts. He'd had a long enough day already. It was no wonder he was struggling. Back to the matter at hand, he told himself: he had still found no trace of Charles Alderman, and at the rate he was not progressing, he never would. The only lead he had—the man's cell phone location—remained the only lead he had, and he would simply have to work with it, as nothing else was forthcoming.

If he could just find the phone itself, he had a feeling it might be helpful. Well, X decided, if the phones hadn't been sorted in a while, perhaps he could volunteer to do it. Or just do it without saying anything, he thought. A little sneaky, but he had a feeling that Kathy might run interference if he announced his intentions. Could he recruit Glitch…? The overclocked reploid seemed to have taken a liking to him, though X hesitated to involve him.

Either Kathy was telling the truth and knew nothing about the situation, or she was lying to him, which seemed increasingly likely. And if she was lying, then either Glitch was in on whatever Kathy was hiding and would not be helpful, or he was not aware, and X did not want to jeopardize the encampment's solidarity. So, no, he could not simply ask Glitch for help with this, at least not until he had a better grasp of what was going on.

X poured the rest of the bucket over his head. Blech. Clean, but at what cost, his sensors insisted, firing error after error. He grabbed a torn but serviceable towel, dried off, and changed into his new-to-him clothing. The knees of the pants caught around his large feet a bit, and the waist necessitated a belt, but it would do. He toweled his hair once more, finger-combed it into some semblance of shape while knowing that it would not stay there for anything in the world, and pulled his jacket back on.

Walking slowly, as his joints and servos were still complaining with enthusiasm, X made his way to the town hall. Focus and Drive were there, busily working on a mural: rolling hills under a blue sky, covered in all colors and shapes of flowers. X paused to admire the handiwork.

'>What do you think? We just started earlier today, but it's going pretty fast, except for having to watch the paint dry sometimes,' Focus transmitted without really looking at him, with a fluency that took X a moment to translate to himself.

'>It's nice,' X replied, not nearly so quickly or easily. 'You're both talented.'

"He's better than I am," Drive said, aloud.

'>I have more practice,' Focus transmitted with a shrug. 'I wanted to be an artist.'

"You are an artist," X said. "You're making art right now, aren't you?"

Focus grinned, briefly and appreciatively, which was the first expression X had actually seen him make. He had a brilliant smile, X thought, though his dark brown eyes always seemed to be anywhere but the face of whomever he was addressing. '>You're right, when you put it that way. I just wish I could do it for a bigger audience, but it's okay. I think we need it here more.'

'>Definitely,' X transmitted back, then, a little clumsily, 'It's a lot nicer here with your work.'

"That's the goal," Drive agreed, even though he wasn't the one being addressed. "Anyway, uh, if you're headed into the main building, could you maybe look for some more green while you're in there…?"

"Sure," X nodded, heading in. Kathy had gone somewhere else, and the inside of the central building was empty of anybody else. Perfect, X thought. He located the cardboard box of unsorted small electronics, tossed a spare flashlight and a few smaller boxes into it to keep his sorted electronics from getting mixed up, and then found the shelf of paints. While he didn't know that much about paint, he could at least find the right general color and guess what sort it was, as it came in the same tubes he'd seen the two reploids outside using. Someone must have raided an abandoned art store at some point, because there was no shortage of it. He tossed a few tubes into a pocket, and tucked the box under one arm.

"Hope this is right," he said, handing the paint off on the way out.

'>Perfect,' Focus broadcast with an affirmative nod. 'Thanks, V. Hey, have you ever painted before?'

'>I don't think so,' X replied. 'Maybe just to label something, but nothing artistic.'

'>Want to try? It's good stress relief.'

X wondered if he seemed particularly stressed. He had his task at hand…but Focus seemed earnestly excited to see him make an attempt, and he didn't want to disappoint. '>I could, sure. What are we painting?'

'>Depends. What's your favorite color?' Focus transmitted back.

'>Red,' X answered, without hesitation.

Focus dipped his brush into the palette of acrylics he held, first into the red, then he just barely touched the white. '>Good call. I'm a yellow kind of guy, myself. Everyone thinks I'm going to say orange for some reason, though…' he joked drily, and with a few strokes of the brush, he painted six long, rippled petals that curled around and under, then six long stamens that curled out and up.

'>I don't think I know what that kind of flower is called,' X transmitted, watching with interest. He'd also never really watched someone paint with any intent other than to cover a wall or similar, and controlling the way the bristles bent and the paint flowed took more dexterity than he'd imagined.

'>It's a spider lily,' Focus replied, a little more slowly. He must have picked up that X was not nearly so fluent as the others in the encampment, and he spelled the words 'spider lily' deliberately. 'They symbolize last goodbyes.'

'>Oh,' X said, a little aback. The flower had reminded him of…he didn't want to think about it. That was too close to home, even now, and with the new context of its meaning… 'Should I have picked a different color?'

'>Not at all. Art isn't only for happy things, you know. Art is also for feeling things you don't know how to feel, and saying things you don't know how to say. That's why some of the flowers have sad meanings. We've all had sad lives. It's good to do art about that, though, because even artwork of sad things can still make people happy. It's funny like that.'

'>It is,' X agreed. It made a measure of sense, though. He was no stranger to emotions he couldn't process. Even with Focus undoubtedly and greatly simplifying his language for X's benefit, X could see and appreciate the reasoning.

Focus held out the palette and brush to X. '>Want to give it a try?' he asked.

X set the box of electronics down. '>Sure. It won't be very good, probably, so if you want me to do it on another surface…'

Focus shook his head. '>You live here. It's your mural too. Don't worry about it. If you don't like it, we can always cover it and try again later. Spider lilies flower in clusters, so you can put another just like the first one right here.'

X held the brush tentatively. Focus had made it look easy enough. Six petals, six stamens, spaced just so. He could do that…right? He touched the brush to the paints. Red, then just a tiny spot of white…alright, that was a little more white than he'd meant to pick up, but Focus hadn't corrected him, so it couldn't have been that bad.

Next, X touched the brush to the wall. How had Focus done this, exactly…? Try as he might, he couldn't seem to get the brush to behave the same way, and instead of a petal with a delicately rippled edge, X had a wiggly red and white line.

'>I might be too clumsy for this,' he transmitted.

'>You said yourself you've never painted. Don't give up after the first stroke. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be yours.'

X wondered briefly if Focus had lived a past life as an art instructor, but turned back to his work. He painted five more petals, each a little better than the last, though none of them were particularly good, he thought. Next came the six long, curving stamens; he could see why they were called spider lilies. It took his complete concentration to keep the brush strokes even, and he didn't even notice until he finished and looked up that Drive was watching him with interest.

'>There,' Focus broadcast. 'Congratulations. You've made art…so now you're an artist, too. How do you feel?'

X shrugged, looking at the flower he'd painted. It was lopsided, amateurish, and nothing like the one Focus had done…but he had felt calmer somehow while he'd been doing it. '>I can see why it's good for stress,' he answered. 'Can I try one more?'

'>Paint as many as you like, we've got the space for it,' Focus answered, with a pleased grin and several ripples of his fingertips tapping together. He still didn't seem to look directly at X.

X painted a second flower, loading the brush with paint again. Last goodbyes, he thought. Everyone here has had more than enough of those, probably, even me…it's not something anybody wants to think about, I'm sure. And yet, there's an entire flower that symbolizes it, and they're beautiful. They look like fireworks, like…taking the most sorrowful thing possible, and turning it into something worth having instead, without changing it at all. Whether it's a flower or a firework, it's still just as fleeting as an ending, but you're not sad it's over, you're happy you had it.

He was finished with the painting before he quite knew it. X's eyes stung, his tear reservoirs having run dry long ago without being refilled. He blinked a few times to get his expression back under control before turning and offering the paints and brush back to Focus with a smile.

'>Thank you,' he transmitted. 'I…needed that.'

'>Any time,' Focus replied, accepting them. 'There's always another surface that could use someone's art.'

X picked up his box and headed for the access stairs, where he paused to turn on the flashlight he'd borrowed. Glitch had mentioned laying traps in the service tunnels, hadn't he? He'd need to step lightly. At least he didn't need to go very far before he guessed that there would be no signal. X switched his tracking module on, briefly, just to test…and it returned a >I.34034-COM: No signal. Good.

He found a side room that had once upon a time been some sort of minor electrical station and lowered himself to a seat on the floor with the aid of his cane. One at a time, he began to take every cell phone from the box and attempt to power them on. Many of them didn't work at all, or booted only to complain of a low battery and shut back down. Even modern advances in battery life couldn't make something live for years without being plugged in at all. If Charles's phone hadn't held a charge in the few days since its location had been logged…

X put that out of his mind. He'd worry about that if he needed to. The first step was to determine, if possible, if his phone was even here at all. He did at least make a pile of which ones would power on at all, since it would be even more suspicious to test them all without sorting them properly. Phones that looked undamaged but lacked enough battery to power on went into a pile, and visibly broken phones went into their own pile.

He reached the bottom of the box without finding anything helpful. X sighed. This was beginning to feel truly impossible. A human could not possibly just evaporate and cease to exist, leaving no sign of their passing, but Charles Alderman may as well have. He began to stack the phones back into the box, but paused. There were no more phones, sure, but a few of the phones had at some point been in various sorts of phone cases and fallen out, or been taken out, and those were still in the box.

With a shrug, X began to sort through the few phone cases as well. He had nothing to go on, but he had nothing to lose.

None of them yielded much at first glance, and X was about to truly give up and call the entire thing a wash when he saw the tiniest edge of something white tucked into one of them. With a squint, he aimed the flashlight more directly at it: it was a silicone card holder case, dark gray and businesslike. Well-worn and otherwise unremarkable, it still had a slip of something tucked away inside of it. He tried to pry it out, but at some point it had gotten wet and glued itself into the slot. Carefully, gingerly, and with the help of an unrelated credit card that had been tucked inside another case, he pried it out.

It was a business card, bearing the name and contact information of one Charles D. Alderman, president of Alderman Materials and Construction.

He examined it a few times, committing the details to memory, then tucked it carefully into a hidden inner pocket of his jacket, where it wouldn't likely be found even should someone go through his belongings. Next he began testing phones in the case to see if Alderman's had ended up in the broken or dead battery piles. Two of them fit, but neither of them had wear patterns on their housing that suggested they had ever been carried in this case.

So his phone was definitely here…and now it isn't, X thought. This is too specific to be an accident. Someone has it, and I can guess who. He didn't want to suspect foul play just yet, but neither could he entirely write it off. Kathy was hiding something from him, and, based off of Glitch and Valentina's evident ignorance, everyone else in the encampment as well—or they were both extremely good liars, which wasn't impossible, but didn't seem as likely.

And what if she is? he thought. I'm not here to arrest or decommission anyone. I don't have the authority now, even if I already know that not a single unit in the Hunters would argue with me if I did. Nor do I want to. All I promised was that I'd look into this missing man.

X already knew that coming back empty-handed would not have satisfied him as an answer, though. Whatever wild ideas he may have entertained in the past twenty-four hours, he wouldn't be content reporting back to his former officer just to say that he'd given up, nor did the idea of lying sit well with him.

Well, he had something, and that was more than he'd had until now. What it meant, X couldn't say yet, but he would get to the bottom of it somehow. He hefted himself, then the box, careful to not tip the smaller boxes nested inside, and returned it to the central building.

"Oh, V, there you are," Kathy greeted him. "I was wondering where you'd disappeared to."

"I couldn't hold still, so I sorted some salvage." That was mostly true. "Where do electronics go?"

Kathy looked mildly alarmed for a moment, half-rising from her desk. "Downstairs, right? Not up on the surface?"

"Of course," X replied. "I know better." As does everyone else here, he thought, but did not say.

"Okay. Good." She calmed back down, releasing a sigh and sitting back down. "Sorry. I was imagining the worst for a moment, there. This thing with the Drifters and Seren has me on edge, I guess. Anyway, I'm not sure. I think Glitch has his own system for them. The other door off the main room, that's his lab. You'll want to talk to him about it. I think he's in there right now, actually."

X carried the box to the door Kathy had indicated, and knocked, since it was closed and that seemed polite. This one was new construction, built around the side of the existing office, and X could hear muffled music through it.

"What," Glitch yelled through the door and over the music. X wasn't sure what he had been expecting.

"Where do you put sorted electronics?" he asked.

"What?" Glitch repeated.

X tried to raise his voice, but he didn't have the will to really deliver much volume. He'd never been loud to begin with, and the older he got, the less he liked shouting. "I said, 'where do you put sorted electronics?'"

'>I.34101-COM: Identification requested. E.33090-SEN: No sound detected. I.40011-LOG: Argument expected. I.40990-INT: High motive priority. I.09090-LOG: Query. I.09090-LOG: Query. I.09090-LOG: Query.' Glitch transmitted, which was better in that at least X could hear it clearly, but also contained a ridiculous number of question mark equivalents.

X rolled his eyes and broadcast back. '>W.04877-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters. I.34100-COM: Identification sent. I.00200-SYS: Open. I.20104-LOG: Sequential. A.33099-SEN: Reduce decibel exposure immediately. I.00021-LOG: Boolean: OR. I.00024-VOC: Increase vocal volume.'

The music turned down and the door opened, revealing Glitch grinning an absolutely shit-eating grin. "You shoulda just said something, V." For just an instant, X considered thumping him with the box of scavenged electronics, but he controlled himself admirably.

"I sorted these, but I'm not sure where you want them," X said, holding the box out. "There's three general piles. Left side are likely broken, middle I'm not sure because they won't power on, right side powers on successfully."

"Oh, perfect, that's exactly what I do. Uh, I'm a little…short-handed, though, if you could set that on the desk there?" Glitch opened the door fully and gestured to his lack of arm, and X blinked in alarm.

"Did you…?" he began, but Glitch cut him off.

"Sure did. I got all kinds of soot and shit in that joint when the Drifters plinked me, and it'll repair a hell of a lot faster clean, so I figured, why not just take the whole thing off and really get it flushed out, right? Saves me the trouble later."

X couldn't help but feel his gaze pulled towards Glitch's lack of shoulder assembly. One of his pectoral plates was removed, and the systems inside glowed with warmth under X's IR vision. A number of his parts were stamped with the Toyota Robotics logo. "Do you…do this often?"

Glitch leaned on the doorframe with his existing arm. "I told you, I'm a doctor."

"Removing your arm is a little more of a mad scientist kind of thing."

"Okay, okay, I'm a Maverick doctor. But I'm still a doctor. With no doctorate, but details. I was pre-loaded with the equivalent knowledge, so it's basically like being a doctor, only cheaper. For me, anyway. I probably cost more than an education, but that's not my problem. Hey, while you're here, are you completely sure you don't want just a little maint done…?"

The urge to thump him with the box returned. "You have one arm, Giltch."

Glitch sighed, straightening so he could gesture dramatically with that single arm. "Not an obstacle, obviously! I'll have two again any minute now. I'm just letting the solvent do its thing, then I lube everything up, reassemble it, plug it all back in, and Bob's your prototype."

"I'll…let you know," X hedged. He was not generally squeamish, but watching Glitch glibly going about his evening with one arm detached was starting to be a little disturbing.

"Yeah, yeah. You say so. Oh. I should move so you can actually put that down." Glitch stopped blocking the door and turned towards his workbench with an excessively dramatic spin. His shoulder was disassembled across it, the various parts carefully laid out on a clean towel, with the rest of his arm still intact and lying alongside. He'd polished the external scorch marks off already, exposing some of his previous paint job. Evidently, he had been red before this. The damaged servo had been isolated and disassembled, which was an impressive trick with a single hand.

"Okay. Question," Glitch asked, as X set the box down where he indicated. "Do I self-repair it, or do I replace it? Because I've got a spare, and it's higher torque than this one, but then I'd have one arm stronger than the other, which is a huge pain in the panels to calibrate around."

"Self-repair it until you've got a second equivalent servo," X answered, trying to keep his eyes off of Glitch's arm. Somehow, he almost expected it to move on its own…which, knowing Glitch even in passing, was not entirely impossible. "Then upgrade them together, as long as you can handle the power draw. That way you're not applying uneven stress to your frame."

"Oh, damn, good answer. I'm starting to think my next bottleneck is going to be my power core, and then what do I do, you know? I guess I could tether myself to an external power source and…ugh, but if the generator picked right then to go out, or even worse, there was a surge?"

"You already run like a furnace, though," X countered.

Glitch half-shrugged, because it was the only kind of shrug he could currently do. "I mean, yeah, but some of that is my power core being under load. A more efficient one would actually generate less heat."

"Until you upgraded everything else and put it under load again, and then you'll be running hot enough that we actually will be able to keep you in a water tank and take hot showers."

"Ah, V, you know me so well already. Come on, don't tell me hot water on command doesn't sound great. Imagine it. I'd be so useful."

"That was not the detail you were supposed to take away from that."

"But am I wrong?" Glitch grinned again.

"...No," X begrudgingly admitted. "But it'd be a lot safer to just find a water heater somewhere."

"Yeah, slight problem where to get a better power core, I'd have to take someone else's who probably doesn't want to give it to me, and while it's not like I'm not currently using—" He stopped to count on his fingers one-handedly and in binary, "—eight different components I got doing exactly that, installing a bad servo is a pain in the panels, but installing a faulty or incompatible power core kills you and quite possibly anybody standing too close to you. Why are you making that face?"

X simply stared at him with the kind of expression one might make if one was listening to someone else casually discussing murdering another person in cold blood and stealing their body parts for personal use. "You really are a Maverick…I'll give you three guesses."

"How about you give me two hands? I'm a little short-ha—shit, no, I used that joke already. Never mind. But I could reassemble all this a lot faster with a little help, if you don't have anything else going on." Glitch spun a rolling chair around and pushed it vaguely in X's direction, beckoning him to sit.

X relented and sat, leaning his cane on the workbench. "Alright, but no more hand puns. You've only got the one, anyway."

There was a beat, and then Glitch snorted with laughter. "You can make a joke! I knew it. Yesterday I got you using complete sentences, today I located your sense of humor. Tomorrow? Who knows."

Between the two of them, they got Glitch's shoulder assembly put back together and installed. It still made a grinding sound when he moved it, once everything was connected properly, but it was a lot less angry of one now. "You don't need to power cycle or anything for this?" X asked.

"Oh, fuck no, I patched that out of myself ages ago."

"I can't imagine being bold enough to tinker with my own code," X said, somewhere between respect and apprehension.

"I can't imagine being stuck with someone else's code, so we're even." Glitch stretched, gingerly. "Shit, my battery's beat after today's misadventure. I'm gonna go charge. I wrote us into the schedule already."

"Did you? Great. I could use one too. I don't usually run out of battery this quickly, but…" He trailed off, not quite ready to admit just how much processing power he'd blown earlier that day having a double breakdown. Glitch must have picked up on what X wasn't saying, though, because he waved it off without waiting for X to finish.

"Long day, man, it happens to the best of us. Shit's always easier after a good defrag cycle. Tomorrow's a new day, and probably a busy day, considering we got the Drifters to worry about and a lot of reinforcing to do…but if they were gonna make a move, they coulda done it any time. No use stressing that they're suddenly gonna do it the instant we first hear about it, right?"

X nodded agreement. There was, for once, some wisdom in what Glitch was saying. "Right. If it can't wait eight hours, we were already in over our heads."

"Exactly. And we got at least one person on watch at all hours anyway, so it's not like we're gonna get completely surprised no matter what." He closed the door to his workshop and headed for the recharge pod shed, X close behind. It was still relatively early, and all three pods were empty, so X picked the same one he'd used before, in the corner. Glitch picked the middle pod, saying he needed to test the cable, and flopped unceremoniously into it. He shimmied a bit until the port connected, then folded his undamaged arm behind his head.

"I am, like, this close to being able to put together a fourth one of these bad boys. You have no idea how excited I am. I think I've even got all the parts, now, it's just actually doing it and making sure it runs. Although it's gonna be tight in here with four…three's already kind of pushing it. But hey, good problem to have, right?"

"Definitely." X pulled his shirt out of the way of his port and settled into the pod, connecting with a click. Lying down…what a luxury. His constant vertigo intensified for a few unpleasant moments, then calmed considerably when it decided he wasn't going anywhere and couldn't fall over besides.

"Maybe once we get this shit with the Drifters sorted out, Hammer can knock out a wall and we can get more room in here."

"Maybe." X closed the lid and then his eyes. Would he be here long enough to see that, he wondered? Probably not…he would need to report back eventually, and maybe take another random excess case, if he couldn't talk himself out of it. The thought was a little disconcerting. Don't tell me I've gotten attached to the well-being of a bunch of irregulars in the middle of nowhere, he internally groaned. That is the last thing I need.

Glitch closed the lid on his own pod, though the double barrier did nothing to shut him up. "Dunno what they think they're doing lately. Gives me the creeps. I'd put money on it, they got some kind of virus. Not like, the big one, but something for sure. You run any antivirus? Because if you don't, you should."

"I do," X lied. He didn't, but even direct exposure to the Maverick Virus itself hadn't actually infected him in any way that mattered, so he'd long since stopped worrying about viruses. If it couldn't get him, nothing could.

"Oh, good. I need to update mine and pass it on to everyone else soon."

As much as X wanted Glitch to shut up and let him recharge in peace, he had to ask. "How? Isn't connectivity dangerous?"

"Yeah, but if I told you, I'd have to kill you," Glitch laughed. He was probably joking. …Probably. But then again, if X had found a question that prompted a one-liner response and no rambling follow-up…maybe he was only half joking.

"Fair," X agreed, and settled down to defragment.

After a few minutes, Glitch spoke. "Hey, V."

X grumbled, systems grumpily suspending the defrag startup process. "What?"

"After you find your guy, or whatever. What are you gonna do?"

"Don't know yet." X was not in the mood to answer that question, even to himself, and certainly not aloud to anyone else.

"Gonna go pretend to hang out with the normies? I would."

X simply made a grumpy sound and wished he had something to put over his head.

"I've thought about it. You know, if I left here. I could get another fake identity, maybe a new face…I kinda like my face, though, I'm attached to it. And vice versa. And I dunno what I'd do with Mack. I'm not going anywhere without it, it's not going anywhere without me, and I think it likes it better here anyway. Hey, V?"

'>I.09090-LOG: Query.' X pinged, pointedly.

"What do you want to do, after this? If you could do anything, let's say?"

"Sleep," X deadpanned.

"Yeah, okay, fair. Good night."

Finally. "Good night."

Chapter Text

The radio in Cirocco Wolfang's circuitry crackled to life, the sound coming in through an entirely separate channel than her hearing, which was occupied with the noise of her paws crunching in the snow. 'Smoke sighted. Northern tip of Lake Kronotskoye, looks like.'

She slowed to a quadrupedal jog, turning towards the lake with a swish of her tail. 'Just what we needed. What do you think? Illegal campers? Trash fire? Poachers? It had better not be poachers. I'll bite someone.'

'No biting. We've talked about this,' Trigger scolded, directly via encoded radio signal. In person, he wouldn't have seemed to be saying anything at all. 'Keep your nose to the ground on the way. I'm not sure what's going on yet, but I'll go check it out from the air.'

'You got it.' She put on a burst of speed, flashing through the snowy trees like a dark bolt of metal. Cirocco was a Wolfang model, built to navigate remote and rugged terrain with the capacity for both bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion. She almost hadn't existed. Just before her manufacture, a fairly prominent Wolfang had been implicated as a Maverick, and that had a nasty tendency of ending entire design lines by association. The demand for units that could patrol the kinds of areas that she could, however, was just too high, and the environmental work the Wolfang series had provided in the aftermath of the Eurasia Colony Incident helped to cushion the blow to the model's image in the public imagination.

Cirocco was sleek, sharp, more animal than human. Her senses of smell and hearing exceeded those of a natural wolf. She could reach a top speed of fifty miles per hour in almost any terrain, and she could sustain that speed without overheating for hours in cold enough conditions. Stationed where she was on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the conditions were sufficiently cold most of the year.

She burst from the trees and onto a perfectly white meadow, snow exploding into a cloud in her wake. Far above, she spotted the tiny dot that was her partner unit, Trigger Crowrang. Like her, Trigger had almost not been built due to associations with Mavericks, and like her, his specifications were ultimately too useful to discard. Where Cirocco was a ground specialist who could navigate any terrain, Trigger was an expert flier, with telescopic vision and highly efficient flight systems, hardened against icy weather. They had been commissioned and built as a pair about two years prior, and employed by the Russian government since.

Conservation efforts had suffered enough before the Eurasia Colony Incident. The largest piece of the colony had landed in China, on the border between the Shandong and Jiangsu provinces. The loss of life had been astronomical, even with China's advanced ground-to-air defenses chipping at it the entire way down. Further pieces impacted the Yellow Sea and Sea of Japan, causing massive tsunamis and sending saline clouds into the skies for days afterwards, as well as leaving craters on South Korea's northeast shore and at long last ending the Kuril Islands dispute by simply obliterating the contested islands entirely.

The second-largest piece of the Eurasia Colony had fallen on the largely unpopulated Kamchatka Peninsula, causing humanity to breathe a sigh of relief. However, there was no such thing as a truly uninhabited area when it came to flora and fauna, and the mere four years since the impact had been endless work to clean up the debris and try to restore some semblance of nature. It took constant monitoring and protection, regardless of the weather, and that was where reploids like Cirocco and Trigger came in. Working as a linked pair, they could easily monitor wildlife on the ground in conditions that a human could not have endured.

Cirocco lifted her nose to the well-below-freezing air and inhaled. Analysis yielded the faintest trace of hydrocarbons on top of wood smoke. She growled, and radioed Trigger. 'Whoever it is, they're using accelerants. Call it in?'

'Will do.' Trigger sent a brief message to their overseer, circling as he awaited a response. 'Orders are to investigate, but do not engage.'

Far below, Cirocco huffed. 'Fine, fine. No biting…today. Yet.' She allowed her speed to slow a little. Trigger would try to get visual first and let her know what to expect; that was how they had always worked. Once she had some idea what was happening, she'd move in and deal with the situation, with his backup as needed. 'Investigate but do not engage…what a bother,' she sent, in an under-her-breath tone. 'Someone's setting fires and we're just supposed to watch them.'

'Someone's setting fires and we're supposed to report back and await orders,' Trigger corrected. This was a conversation they had nearly every single time anything mildly interesting happened, and they both knew it.

'Orders. Whatever. You see anything yet?' Cirocco slowed a little further, though if she moved any more slowly she'd need to switch to bipedal mode and just wade her way through the snow.

'Nothing but smoke,' Trigger returned.

'De-ice your eyes,' Cirocco radioed back, snarkily.

'I'm going in a little closer. Hold your distance.'

Cirocco picked up speed, but veered north, maintaining a radius around their target. Despite her complaints, she followed orders quite well. She just saw no need to do so quietly. The same independence that made her able to thrive in the wilderness for weeks at a time with only Trigger and the wolves of the Kronotsky Biosphere Zapovednik for company made her chafe when directly commanded, but she tolerated it aside from her tendency to verbally spar with whoever gave them to her.

'That's strange…'

'What's strange?'

It took Trigger a few moments to respond. 'No people at all. Just a brush fire. Wait…no, I see something, heading your direction. Flying, but it's moving pretty quickly and it's low to the ground. Prepare to intercept.'

'Finally,' Cirocco chuffed, putting on another burst of speed and turning towards Trigger's position. Whatever it was, she spotted it, and while it was too small to make out, it wasn't fast enough to get away from her. With a lunge and a snarl, she leapt a fair fifteen feet into the air, catching the intruder in her mouth and slowing to a gentle lope in the lee of a stand of trees, where the snow wasn't quite so chest high.

'Pfeh, it smells and tastes like gasoline. I think it leaked all over my mouth.' She reconfigured her posture, shifting to a bipedal stance, and pulled the offending thing out of her jaws. It was a quadcopter mechaniloid, with a flamethrower nozzle mounted onto it. Of all the things, Cirocco thought. 'You would not believe what I just plucked from the sky.' A gout of flame shot from the nozzle, and she jumped in surprise, glad that she had incidentally been holding it with the nozzle pointed away from her. 'Ooh, we got a live one.' She gave the nozzle a sharp twist, snapping it and its ignition coil off neatly and rendering it harmless.

Trigger circled lower, braking with several powerful flaps of his wings and a blast of his propulsion systems and coming to a stop beside Cirocco. He was the lightest of the Crowrang models yet, built for power conservation in extended flight. Like Cirocco, he was a newer, sleeker design; unlike her, he was slender, sporting the most basic of armor and very few frills, where she was heavier and more powerful. Like their organic counterparts, they made an effective pair, covering each other's weaknesses with their respective strengths. 'What is it?' he asked, still via radio in case anybody was around to hear them.

Cirocco held the drone out. 'Someone's playing stupid games. Why would you build this just to send it into the middle of nowhere and start fires in the middle of the snow?'

Trigger communicated briefly with their supervisor. Cirocco could have done it, but the two of them knew she would likely pick an argument, and over the years they'd concluded that letting Trigger handle anything that involved speaking to authority was the much simpler course of action. 'We extinguish the fires, and then we bring the mechaniloid back for analysis and disposal.'

'Easy.' She reached with two fingers into the drone's miniature helicopter blades and began snapping them off, to ensure that it wouldn't get away again, then handed it off to Trigger for safekeeping.

She threw herself to the ground, reconfiguring her joints on the way. By the time she hit the snow, she was quadrupedal again and off at a run towards the smoke trickling through the trees. Along the way, Cirocco began emitting a hum as she primed an internal compressor, snow melting on her chassis from the heat.

The wolf reploid found the source of the smoke. It wasn't much of a fire, if she had to be honest, even with the gasoline. The deep snow and sparsity of larger trees kept it largely contained without her intervention. Still, Cirocco did not abide trouble on her land. She opened her mouth and fired a freezing burst of chemical foam across the smoldering flames. It expanded instantly into almost nothing upon contact with the air, then crystallized on contact with the surfaces of the brush, until the fire was completely smothered under a blanket of ghostly transparent shards of ice that sublimated away in the sunlight as Cirocco watched. Frost rimed her plating, now, as the intense cold of the depressurization reached her surface.

'Dealt with,' she reported to Trigger. 'No footprints or anything I could see to follow, either. Who the hell uses a drone to start a fire in a random place at a distance?'

Trigger's reply came after a few moments. He was probably thinking. He did that too much, in Cirocco's opinion. 'I couldn't begin to guess.'

He has probably begun to make some guesses, Cirocco thought, but she would sooner pry his bolts out of him than his thoughts, if he weren't inclined to share yet, so she let it slide and ran back to him. "I radioed. They want to see it in Petropavlovsk," Trigger said aloud.

"Petropavlovsk," Cirocco repeated, incredulous. Her tail swished in the snow. "On this short of notice? They can't just take it at Dolinovka?"

"It's only two hundred kilometers as the Crowrang flies," Trigger said. "It's nothing. I'll be back by morning at the latest."

"Hmph," Cirocco huffed. As independent as she was, having Trigger outside of radio range made her fur itch with anxiety. They were each other's firewalls, from almost the moment they were activated. They may have argued and occasionally tussled, yes, but they had sworn to defend each other at all times and from all dangers, and that was difficult to do with one of them over the horizon. A human might have called them blood brothers, though reploids chose less biological phrases in general. "You had better be."

Trigger opened his wings and poised for takeoff, the disabled mechaniloid tucked under his arm. "Go play with your pack. I'll be back before you know it."

"Right, right." Cirocco bumped her snout against Trigger's beak, not too roughly, but not entirely gently either. She only showed affection to packmates, which Trigger was one, even if he had the unfortunate disability of being entirely bipedal. "Hurry home."

"I always do." With a downbeat and a rush of heat from his propulsion systems, Trigger took off. Cirocco watched him go until he was out of sight in the gray sky, then shook the snow off her shoulders and trotted northwest, towards the ridges at the foot of Kizimen Volcano. Her sharp nose was good for more than simply detecting gasoline fires. She could smell her way home to her pack blindfolded, if she needed to.

As she approached, she paused, and howled, then waited, ears erect. Soon enough, she heard several replying howls in the distance. Cirocco picked her pace up, impatiently bursting through the snow. Independent though she was, she did not like being entirely alone. Trigger had not been wrong when he told her to go to her pack.

She followed her nose, and arrived at a clearing against an outcropping of stone. Beneath it, the breeding pair had dug out their den, and several curious cubs peeped out of the shallow pit at the sound of Cirocco's arrival. The others hopped to their feet and pranced out to meet her, tails wagging, and within moments six other wolves were whining happily and competing to see if they could fit her snout into theirs and vice-versa. They were not great fans of the lingering scent of gasoline on her tongue, and some concerned noises ensued, but she was fine and reassured them as much insofar as was possible without verbal communication.

To humans and reploids alike, climbing on each other and comparing mouth flavors was an odd way to say hello, but Cirocco was not just any reploid. She had been pre-loaded with as much knowledge of wolf socialization as humanity had amassed, and much of the time she felt more related to canines than humans. Even in her defragmenting dreams, she was a wolf, and not a wolf of titanium alloy and silicon. Trigger had his own database of corvid knowledge, and she shared enough of it to generally understand his body language, and vice versa; after all, their representative species interacted extensively and cooperatively in the wild as well.

Cirocco tucked her tail and greeted the pack's breeding pair next, bumping muzzles with each of them, then the pups, who she rambunctiously but gently bowled over with her nose and sniffed thoroughly. Everyone smelled healthy and well fed, which eased her mind. She flopped to her side in the den, allowing her systems to run just a little bit warmer for the pups' benefit as the sun descended behind the mountains.

Wolves did not, of course, have names. Accordingly, Cirocco did not really call her packmates anything in her head. They had titles, of a sort, though even these were more impressions of their appearance, voice, personality, and most importantly their scent. She had not tried to translate them to Russian or indeed any language, and if she had to refer to them in speaking with anybody else, they had assigned numbers which she used. Cirocco did not have a name to the wolves, either, but she certainly had her own pitch at which she howled, and her place in the pecking order. They had found her odd at the start, to be sure, but she turned out to be impervious to teeth, she did not behave threateningly even after having been chewed on, she could run warm at will, and she proved quite willing to chase bears off with no regard for her own safety if they got too close to the den. After that, they'd decided she might as well be a packmate.

Cirocco did sometimes compose a report or three about her pack as part of her employment. She was on friendly enough terms with a few other packs in the area, as well, and she kept biologists updated about them too, but those were not her pack. She had known these particular wolves since she had been activated and stationed, and outside of Trigger, they were the closest thing she had to family. She couldn't spend as much time with them as she liked, since she did have duties, but she returned most nights.

They howled amicably together in a chorus into the late evening. Cirocco didn't join in hunting, since that felt unsporting to the prey to her and would have gone against her orders besides, but her wolves were competent enough without her. It wasn't as if she was trying to claim any part of their kills for herself, so it wasn't like she was freeloading. Once the nighttime chill truly set in, the pack curled up in a pile, Cirocco towards the outside as the cold didn't bother her and she made a good windblock, and they all slept. She stayed half-alert, defragmenting with one eye open until the dead of night, when her systems finally settled enough to switch to a lower power mode.

Cirocco's nose twitched. Olfactory sensors sent a report to her central processing. Central processing examined it, ranked it, and discarded it as highly likely to be a result of defragmentation processes. Undeterred, her olfactory sensors continued to report, though it wasn't until her auditory sensors joined in reporting abnormal input that central processing finally agreed and began to terminate defragmentation processes in favor of resuming consciousness processes.

The wolf reploid cracked one eye open, sleepy but suspicious. It was pre-dawn, still dark, though her packmates were beginning to stir. Ears pricked up as they noticed something off as well, and one of the non-breeding males, born from a few litters past, got to his feet warily, stalking out to sniff the air.

Cirocco dislodged a sleeping pup and stood, giving herself a thorough shake outside of the den. She raised her nose to the breeze, but it must have shifted since she'd detected…whatever it was she'd detected. Her systems had been frustratingly inspecific in her sleep and evidently discarded the information upon waking. Useless, she huffed internally.

'You back yet?' she radioed, hopefully, but Trigger did not respond. Her range was good, but not that good. Height might help her, if he was just on the horizon, so she climbed the rock over the den and tried again. 'Hey. Trigger. You within range?'

She still didn't receive a signal, so she sat on her haunches and waited, nose still to the air and ears pricked. Finally, the wind shifted again, slightly, and Cirocco smelled it: gasoline, again. But they'd incapacitated that mechaniloid…unless, of course, there were more, she realized. Without Trigger's vantage point in the sky, they would be a lot harder for her to find alone. The two of them worked as a pair to triangulate disturbances, and while Trigger could perform well enough solo, Cirocco had the disadvantage in this case.

Cirocco closed her eyes and raised the sensitivity of her auditory sensors to maximum. The faintest choppy hum met her ears, though it was steadily increasing in volume. She growled, quietly. Another one of those things. Well, she could deal with them herself, she knew. After a few moments more to make certain of the direction and to account for the wind, she leapt down from the little overhang, dashing through the sparkling blanket of newly-fallen snow over the high meadow.

Even in the dark, Cirocco could see clearly, and if she'd had any doubts they would have evaporated in the flash of the puff of flame she spotted. 'Idiot thing,' she growled under her breath, trying once more to radio Trigger just in case and receiving nothing back. She increased speed a bit, startling a hare out of her way as she exploded through the frozen white.

The mechaniloid never knew what hit it. Cirocco collided with it so forcefully that several arms of its frame snapped off, and she grabbed and shook it, fangs tearing through its outer skin and crushing components. She threw it aside, and realized that she still heard quadcopter wings, from multiple directions.

'Trigger,' she radioed. 'I don't know what's happening. I don't know what to do. Where are you?'

Cirocco picked a direction and ran, eyes scanning for more of the things. They weren't hard to find. They seemed to be wandering around and starting fires aimlessly. 'Cirocco to Kizimen Geological Station. There's more of those mechaniloids from before, and they're burning everything. I just downed one and I hear at least three more, I think, but Trigger isn't back from Petropavlovsk yet.'

The drones were all heading away from each other, and Cirocco knew it, but she was only one lone reploid and could only do so much. She accelerated again and intercepted a second, though not before it had started a long line of fires.

'Kizimen Station. Trigger is en route. He should be back in about thirty minutes. We're calling for support from Dolinovka, but it's going to take some time to get them together.'

'What do I do until then?' Cirocco asked, trying to spit the taste of gasoline out of her mouth.

'Take down the drones if you can. Put out fires. If you can find where they're coming from, let us know, but controlling the damage is your priority. If you encounter any people, don't engage. Let the team handle them.'

Cirocco must have been scared, she realized, because she didn't see a reason to argue. 'Got it,' she assented, priming her chemical foam compressor again. She ran down the line, extinguishing the sparse trees. At least the fires here couldn't spread at this time of year, but letting the trees burn wasn't acceptable even so.

By the time she had finished, Cirocco could hear and smell several more of the drones, their flamethrowers lighting up the snow in flickering bursts. Why was this happening? Who in the world was doing it? She pursued the nearest one, and it evaded several lunges from her before she succeeded in snatching it out of the air. One powerful bite crunched it into uselessness, and yet, another had already taken its place.

'Kizimen, this is Cirocco. There's too many of them and they're all over. I can't keep up,' she radioed, then to Trigger, 'Trigger. Please. Help me.' He still wasn't in range to respond. She whined as another flew right past her, flamethrower blazing, while she was putting out the flames another had started. She hit it with a burst of foam that clogged its blades and dropped it from the air, but she didn't have an unlimited supply of it; she would eventually run out, and then what?

'Hang in there,' the station operator told her. 'Just do what you can.' Cirocco followed another drone further afield, ambushing it from the frozen bushes, when a new sound reached her ears: high overhead, a helicopter zoomed past.

'Is Dolinovka already mobilized? They can't be here yet,' Cirocco asked the station.

'No, they're ETA forty minutes at least,' the operator replied.

'Then who was that just now? A helicopter came through.'

'I don't know. There shouldn't be anybody in the airspace yet.'

'I'm going to check it out.' Without waiting for approval or denial, Cirocco turned tail and ran towards the receding sound of the helicopter's rotor.

'Stay put and deal with the drones,' the station told her, but she wasn't listening. 'Cirocco. Where are you going? That's an order.'

She slowed, but decided she could do both at once if she was clever, leaping high into the air and snatching another drone. 'There, I took another one down, are you happy?' she radioed back.

'Whoever is in that helicopter, you are not to engage them,' the voice in her head insisted, though she had tuned him out again, pausing for a moment and raising to a bipedal stature for a better vantage. The helicopter had stopped moving, from the sound of it. It was landing near the ridge, unless her ears were entirely deceiving her, and they weren't, she knew.

Then, after a moment, she heard a sound that stopped her antifreeze in her tubing.

Rifle shots.

Without thinking, she hit the ground at full speed, tearing through the snow back to her den. This had been a diversion. Whoever these poachers were, they'd sent Trigger off and lured her into leaving her pack unprotected, and she'd fallen for it.

The reek of blood and fear and musk and gunfire met her nose long before she arrived, and by the time Cirocco burst into the clearing, she had forgotten everything: the operator in her ear, her orders, the mechaniloids, Trigger finally hailing her, all of it gone in a burning haze of rage and grief and vengeance. The poachers scarcely even had time to react before they were in her teeth, ripping a path from one to the next until the den ran red and muddy.

"Cirocco," came a voice, and she whirled to face it on all fours, growling and bristling, jaws dripping with blood, eyes wild. "It's me, Cirocco. It's Trigger." He stood, cautiously, wings half-extended as if he might flee, one dark hand hesitantly extended. "Come on. You know me. Calm down. Listen to me. I heard everything. You were screaming into the radio, but it's alright. I'm not going to hurt you."

She did not know him in that moment. Cirocco did not even know herself. She backed away, snarling, until her hind legs bumped into the tidy stack of wolf corpses that had been her pack. She stopped, planted her paws as if she could protect them in death, and held her ground, still growling.

Trigger nervously lowered himself to one knee, which was awkward with his birdlike legs, but he managed. "Hey. Come on. It's just me, your firewall. I'm back. I'm here to help. Talk to me, Cirocco."

Cirocco's growling tapered off, and slowly her tail tucked. Her ears and hackles lowered. She whined, crawling forward only to crash on her side at Trigger's feet with a pitiable sound. There were no words she knew for what she wanted to say, but she did not need them. He leaned in and crossed his beak with her snout, and she licked him weakly, tongue slick with blood.

"All dead," she finally said, still in a half-whining sob as if she'd forgotten how to even speak. "My pack is dead, the poachers are dead, and when the team from Dolinovka gets here, I'm dead too. What have I done? What am I supposed to do?"

"No," Trigger said, gently but firmly. "You are not dead yet, and I won't let you die. Not while I live."

"But your job," she said, rolling onto her feet. "Your orders. What about them?"

"They can go to hell," Trigger answered. "We swore we'd protect each other long before we had any orders. I'm not leaving you to the disposal crew, and you wouldn't leave me, either."

"I wouldn't," Cirocco agreed. "I wouldn't." She turned, staring at the bodies of her pack. Her only family, aside from Trigger. A howl of mourning rose inside of her suddenly, and she wailed into the night sky until Trigger put a hand on her shoulder.

"I just heard from them. The team is almost here. We have to go," he said.

"And then what?" Cirocco asked, finally quieting. She could still smell the fires the drones had set. There were so many. It had been a losing battle from the start, and if she had realized it sooner…

"And then we keep going. They'll be too busy with the drones to worry about us for a long while, and by then, we'll be far from here."

Cirocco nodded, mutely. "Just show me which way to go."

"Northwest. We'll go over the mountains and try to lose them." Trigger took to the air, and with a final glance over her shoulder, Cirocco followed him on all fours like an earthbound shadow.

Chapter Text

"I don't know," Kathy said, pacing around her rather cramped office. Hammer sat on a stool, the only one they had that would hold his weight without snapping, and watched her, massive arms crossed loosely.

"He's fine, Kat, seriously." Glitch perched atop her desk, arm in a makeshift sling while it finished self-repairing. He thought this was unnecessary, but she had insisted, and sometimes it was just easier to go along. "If you wanna know what I think, I think he's sad, is what. Poor guy's so obviously been through some shit, and he's just not adjusting as fast as some of us. How long did it take you before you could say The M Word about yourself out loud?"

Kathy paused. "...Weeks," she admitted, "but that's not what I mean. I've seen sad reploids, and I've seen reploids take a while to adjust. There's just something else about him. Like…like he isn't telling us something."

Hammer spoke up, with some reluctance. He didn't like disagreeing with anybody, if he could avoid it. "Speedy's right, though. Ain't got a rule saying everyone owes us their life story. You seen his face? Up close, I mean? He's old. Who knows how long of a story that'd be."

"He's at least like fifty," Glitch agreed, even though he could barely imagine being that old. "You know that, right? Decent synthetic skin takes a long time to crease like that, and he's got some lines going. You can tell a lot about a person from that."

Kathy looked to Glitch with curiosity. "Can you? I never thought about it."

"Oh, yeah. It's a wear pattern like any other. Everything's a wear pattern. Scars, lines, dents, habits. Like, you look at V. He's got lines on his forehead, and under his eyes, right? He's a worrier. Now, you go around scowling from being angry, you get different lines, between your eyebrows, but his? They're all across his forehead. You get lines around your eyes from smiling, but those show up in the corners, not underneath."

"Huh," said Hammer. "I just thought of it as an age thing. Didn't think you could tell what kinda person he is from it, too."

Glitch was on a roll, and unfortunately for Kathy and Hammer, reploids didn't need to stop and breathe while talking. "And that's just his skin. You look at his mannerisms, right? Doesn't like raising his voice, doesn't make much eye contact. He stands like he's trying to take up less space. He's snapped at me over nothing a few times, but then he apologizes and looks so goddamn upset about it, like he can't believe he just did that. He's been through hell, is my guess. Like, more than most of us here, even. I dunno what, exactly, but Hunters probably see a lot of pretty bad shit."

Hammer nodded, intrigued. "You just go around analyzing everyone you meet?"

"Yeah, don't you?" Glitch asked, drumming his heels on the front of the desk.

"Hell nah, don't have the spare processing power. Although, maybe it woulda saved me some trouble if I did. What else you think about him?"

"He's used to leadership. And combat. You shoulda seen him kneecap those three Drifters. Just, pow-pow-pow—" he made a finger gun and mimed firing shots, "—like it was nothing but target practice. And he assessed that whole situation calmly as anything. Guy's been in a lot of active combat, for sure."

Kathy tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. "That's just what I mean, though. We barely know anything about him. He could have any other capabilities, and we wouldn't know."

Glitch paused. He didn't feel right, bringing up V's breakdown to someone who wasn't even there. Everyone was entitled to a little crazy in private now and then, he figured. Fuck knew he'd had plenty of it himself, and it wasn't anyone else's business. Well, he could gloss that part over a bit. "Yeah, or weaknesses, but, so what? You've never seen me hack. I don't talk about it in detail, and I know you both missed the news reports. I could have anything installed on me, right now—and I do, by the way, that's not hypothetical, I've coded all kinds of cool shit for myself—and it's not like you ever felt the need to ask. I'm just saying, give the poor guy a chance. He's not the type that's gonna open up that easily. Believe me, I keep trying. Hey, did you know he has a sense of humor in there somewhere?"

"Why, by the way? What's so interesting about him?" Kathy asked, tilting her head at Glitch. Her hair slid out from behind her ear, and she tucked it back.

"That's easy. I see a locked thing, I got a compulsive need to open it," Glitch said, with a grin. "Story of my life."

"Your life is like, four years long," Hammer pointed out, with a laugh.

Glitch affected mock offense, eyebrows high and dark eyes wide. "Excuse you! I'm seven years old, thank you very much. Seven and a half. Which is pretty respectable for where we live."

"And you've learned nothing from your seven and a half years?" Kathy said, aiming vaguely for a teasing tone, though she was tense enough with anxiety that it took Glitch a moment to realize that she was actually joking.

"I've learned things! I've learned I like getting into things I'm not supposed to."

"Haven't learned that if you gotta add 'and a half,' everyone can see you got insecurities about it," Hammer joked, under his breath.

Glitch pretended to not hear. "And I've learned that I'm good at it, and they say you should do what you're good at, so…"

Kathy sighed, circling around her desk and having a seat. "Look, I'm still not convinced, but I'll make you a deal. Convince me that V's not a threat to us, and he can stay. You say you're good at reading wear patterns and opening locks, so find out what's going on with him…because I can feel it in my circuits, there's something more to him that isn't adding up…and come back and tell me what you find out."

Glitch mulled it over for the space of two blinks of an eye, which was a long train of thought for him. "Sneaky. You can't just ask him yourself?"

"No, because imagine how it's going to sound if I call him in here right after he wakes up, accuse him of hiding something that may or may not exist, and then try to give him a verbal shakedown about it. He'd leave, and I'm still not sure that's safe for us. If he went back and reported our location to the Hunters…"

Ah. That explained it all. Kathy was worried that V would rat them out. Well, that made sense, at least. "I don't think he's that kind of guy, but…okay, fine, alright. I'll…try and see if I can't learn something about him. But man, I feel a little shady doing it this way." Glitch hopped up and off the desk.

"It's not like that, Glitch. Just…figure out if he's going to endanger us or not. I'm not asking you to lie to him or anything."

Glitch internally huffed a bit. He'd already expressed his opinion on that topic multiple times, but Kat was clearly in no mood to listen to him until he'd wheedled something or another out of V. Never mind that he'd made several perfectly good educated guesses and could have gone on making them, except he didn't like performing for unappreciative audiences. She didn't get to hear the rest of his theory, if that's how she was going to be about it. Well, if this was what it took to get Kathy to agree to let him stay, he was doing V a favor, in the end. He could make himself believe that for long enough to find some useless tidbit or another that would satisfy her paranoia.

"Gonna be out with him later this morning, planning improvements to the perimeter," Hammer added. "I'll keep an eye on him, see if I can't suss out a little more about him myself. I dunno, though, I think he's pretty on the level, but I see where you're comin' from, Kat. Don't worry too much. Sh—stuff's gonna work out, one way or another."

"Yeah, what Mister Forklift said," Glitch agreed. "I'm gonna go see if I can't get that fourth pod put together and working. Number two's cable works, by the way."

"Oh, good. Thank you, Glitch. Let me know if you need anything."

"Sure thing." He gave her his usual flippant salute and bounced out of the room. He went back to the recharging pods to collect the old cable, which he'd left there in case the new one was a dud, and quietly slid into the room, careful to not wake V or Flip, who was sleeping soundly in pod number three.

Glitch coiled the cable, holding it in his immobilized hand and wrapping it with his free one. V muttered something in his sleep, and Glitch paused, waiting to see if he'd made too much noise. Evidently not, as the other reploid lay peacefully in his cracked-lid pod, eyes closed.

What a mess. This poor, sad little guy, Glitch thought, because he had a few inches on V in height. Living in constant pain, but can't trust anyone enough to even do basic maintenance on him. What do you gotta go through to end up there? He silently watched V recharge for a few moments. How did one even go about earning someone's trust, when they were that beaten already? He was usually better at losing it than gaining it, if he had to be ruthlessly honest with himself, but V seemed to get along with him well enough anyway.

If he had to guess, and he kinda did, he had a gut feeling that V wanted someone to trust. Who wouldn't, after whatever he'd been through? And, honestly, Glitch wanted to trust V.

V mumbled something nonsensical about not having time. Whatever that meant.

He even manages to look tired in his sleep, Glitch observed. Like, damn. How much weight are you even carrying, V? Kat thinks you're a danger to us, but I think you're a danger to yourself, buddy. And what do you even mean, you don't have time? How is that the thing you're worried about? His thoughts flicked back to V's little moment the other day. Who in the world could a single, retired reploid possibly be letting down by…what, performing at slightly less than superheroic capacity?

Whatever he's been through, Glitch concluded, putting some pieces together in his head, it wasn't fair to ask of anybody. Wear patterns, and worry lines, and old scars…and yours are pretty telling, but I don't think most of them are visible, are they?

More pieces settled into place on their own, as they tended to do when Glitch focused on a riddle. No, somebody like you hides things…and I'm beginning to have some ideas why. But I don't blame you for it. Not at all. Your lines, your frame, your age…they don't match anything else I've seen. If I were in the position I think you may be in, I'd hide from everything and everyone, too.

Well, he'd figure out something he could tell Kat that wasn't too personal. It didn't have to be any more awkward of a position than he made it to be…and hey, she hadn't forbidden him from just telling V that she had misgivings and she'd sent him to find out more about him. In fact, she told him to not lie, which conversely implied that he should tell the truth. He could make this work, no problem. He just had to be a little smart about it, which was practically his middle name, so it would be fine.

Glitch slunk out of the room, careful to not disturb either of the recharging reploids, and headed back to his lab. Assembling the pod would give him something to do with his hands while his mind worked at the puzzle he'd started building in his head.

Hammer and X leaned over the battered clipboard, on which Hammer had an impressively accurate sketch of the encampment's floor plan, such as it had one. They were in the remains of one of the higher buildings next to the garage, taking a walk around to identify weak points. "We'll want to do something about the lack of visibility right there," X said, pointing to the map, then down to the structure. "If we were attacked from that side, we'd have no way to defend. If we can build up the wall with some slits to fire from, I'll feel a lot better about it."

Hammer took notes with a stub of a pencil, carefully, as the paper was fragile from age and exposure. It was, after all, just old lined notebook paper, not designed to last very long, but it was what they had in any quantity. "Good call. Not much on the inside there. We could set up some sorta guard post situation in case we need it."

X nodded agreement. "Definitely. If I were going to lead a force here, that's the place I'd choose to press first, as things are now. How much weight can the garage support?"

"Forty pounds per square foot, live load," Hammer answered, as easily as if this were common knowledge. X glanced over at him. "Well, assuming that the structure hasn't been damaged by having the building across the street fall on it. Good enough for a start point, though, and I think most of the frame's self-supporting. Not like we can move it, so we just gotta guess and work around it. For napkin math, forty's good enough."

X's gaze fell on Hammer's left shoulder, and the scratched-off logo there. Just enough of it remained that he could make out the shape: the letters AMC, blocky and combined into a single rectangle. Just the same as the logo on Charles Alderman's business card. Interesting, X thought. Very interesting. There is definitely something more going on here. He looked back to the floor plan, hoping that his wandering attention hadn't been noticed. "You know your stuff."

"Of course I do. I was in construction for ten years," the construction reploid said, with some pride. "Still would be now, if I had my druthers, but," he shrugged, trailing off. "Didn't work out that way."

"Sorry to hear it," X said.

"Is what it is. I still get to build, so it could be a lot worse." Hammer made notes as he talked. "Might wanna secure the top floor better, too…wonder if we could stack cars or something to block it off. Hard to do without it being visible from above, but I'll come up with something."

"They've got at least one flier for certain, and if they came up and over any of the buildings like where we are now, we'd be in trouble. The top floor ramp will be the second most critical place to reinforce." He shifted his weight, cane in hand, and looked between the paper and the actual building a few more times. "The stairwells, also. The doors on them currently wouldn't hold under attack."

"Those things? Doors wouldn't hold under me leaning on them a little hard," Hammer laughed. "But I've got scrap and a welder. Can't really run anything else while I'm using it, and flux is a little short, but I can come up with something to jam them. Worst case, we just block them with rubble, but I'd rather use the weight allowance somewhere else."

"Is there anything else you needed?" X asked, and Hammer shook his head.

"Think that'll be enough to keep me busy for a while. I'm gonna go double-check my stock of a few things. Need a hand getting down from here?"

X scanned the route down, across the rubble and to a remaining stairwell. "I'll be fine. The sun's nice, anyway. We don't get that much of it in the garage."

"Sure don't. Love it if I could put up some solar, but that's the kinda thing that draws attention. Too shiny, too obvious, too useless if you stick it under an overhang. Ah, well, can't have everything. Don't stay out too long." The construction reploid headed down on his own, leaving X alone in the shelled-out building.

Finally, he thought. It's hard to get a moment alone here. It reminded him of Hunter HQ, in that respect, which wasn't all bad. He found a likely chunk of rubble, shielded under an upper floor, but near enough to a window that the sun angled into it, and took a grateful seat. His systems were still complaining vigorously about the day before, but he didn't want to advertise that fact if he could avoid it.

X pulled the water-warped business card out from his jacket pocket and gazed at it again. Definitely the same logo as Hammer's, he thought to himself. If he had access to a computer, he'd have looked up Alderman and his company to see if he could draw any connections there, but he didn't have that luxury at the moment.

Then again…it wasn't as if he couldn't simply leave for a bit. He would probably have to explain what he was doing, though, and he had the feeling it would rattle some nerves. X mentally filed it away as a potential last resort, but if he waited that long, he'd not likely be returning, either. Maybe it wasn't much of an option at all, as long as he was following the encampment's buddy system rules.

There was good reason to do so, X reminded himself. Having a fellow ex-Hunter in charge of a bunch of irregulars was not a good situation. The Maverick Wars had started in such a way, and that shadow loomed ominously large in his mind.

This was different, though. Wasn't it? Seren was no Sigma. He had been trusted, charismatic, well-respected—and rightfully so, until his rebellion. Seren was a loose cannon from the start. Brash and highly driven, she had good intentions and some of the better training scores he'd seen, but terrible execution when it came down to it. X wished he'd gotten to know her better, but the end of the Wars had been a chaotic time, and he hadn't had the chance.

Or perhaps he had, and he hadn't properly taken it. What good was I as a leader if I couldn't guide my subordinates better than this? he thought. Now she's causing completely avoidable trouble because she's in a position I didn't hesitate to put her in. He'd told Kathy that he had known Seren, but he hadn't been specific on the exact capacity in which he'd known her. It was to hide his identity, he'd told himself, but from the right angle, it was equally out of shame at having failed her as an officer.

X remembered her, but only because he'd had to give her a poor evaluation. Some great hero he was, he thought bitterly. A little positive reinforcement could have gone a long way.

X shook his head. Ruminating wouldn't solve anything. He realized he was staring blankly into the business card and tucked it back into a hidden jacket pocket. There was some key detail still missing, some connection that would explain everything about where Charles Alderman had disappeared to, and it had to be here in the encampment, X knew. He ran his fingers through his messy brown hair and stood up with difficulty.

It took him a while to make his way down from his perch. There was only one real route in or out from the garage that wasn't the service tunnel entrance: the old entrance ramp was still intact, though piled with rubble, leaving room for a single reploid at a time to enter or exit. Defensible, he thought approvingly, for the second time that day. They weren't combatants, mostly, but they'd put some thought into it, and the rest, he would help shore up.

"Hey, V," Valentina chirped, looking up from the romance novel she was reading while on watch duty. The guard post wasn't much more than a folding chair, a table, and some stacked concrete for cover, but it was better than nothing. "Hammer came through here looking really enlightened a bit ago. You guys figure out what you're going to do?"

"We did," X said, leaning on his cane and resisting the vertigo of having to reconcile who he was with what he was doing and what that meant for what he really was. "It'll be a lot safer here soon."

"Great!" Valentina bubbled. "Oh, also, Glitch was looking for you, because of course he was, he's totally adopted you."

X sputtered. "Adopted me?" he echoed.

"Seriously, you didn't notice? Hmm, maybe you haven't known him long enough to know the difference…but I can tell, so, I'm telling you. I've seen him do it before, too, he totally hung all over Flip when he first showed up here. It's just how he is. He sees a new person, and they don't have much to say, and he's got to figure out what makes them tick."

"Uh, what happens when he's figured it out?" X ventured.

"On to the next project, because he's got the attention span of a goldfish." She turned a page. "I mean, not in a bad way, but—"

"I knew my mics were overheating. What are you telling him, Val?" Glitch playfully accused, rounding the corner.

"Nothing~" Valentina sing-songed. "Just talking about the weather~"

"Yeah, my gluteal plates, you were. Anyway, V, I was just looking for you."

"Because of course he was," Valentina added, turning another page.

"Shh. Not another word from you," Glitch scolded, pointing at her. "This is important business."

X decided to bite, even though his systems were predicting that it was probably going to be something silly. "What is it?"

"Well, I was thinking while you and Hammer were out that defenses are great and all, but you know what's even better? Early warning. And I realized, I could take all these phones that still work, disable their cellular data entirely, get them all talking in a decentralized wifi mesh, and use them as a sensor network. I haven't figured out the power supply for them yet, but give me like fifteen more minutes and I'll have something."

X blinked. He had been expecting something…well, frivolous, in short, not a genuinely interesting contribution. "That's an excellent idea," he said.

"Of course it is, I had it," Glitch replied, but he could not hide his pride at the compliment. "And get this, since I've got wifi, I'll be able to see out of the whole thing in real time if I need to. Well, maybe not the whole thing at once, depending on how many sensor nodes we get going, but I can handle a few nodes at a time, no problem. I said it's decentralized, but that's kind of a lie, I'd technically be the main server at least part of the time."

"Forewarned is forearmed. Even just a perimeter would be a huge advantage. Have you told Kathy yet? She'll want to hear about it."

"Just about to. I figured since you're kinda helping coordinate defenses I'd tell you first and see what you thought. Okay. Back to the lab, I gotta figure out what I'm gonna do to run power to all these things, considering a lot of them have shit batteries after all this time. I wonder how many mini solar panels we can hide in the scenery…and how many we can find, also a good question…" Glitch jogged back the way he came, towards the central building, and X watched him leave.

"See? I told you so," Valentina said, tossing her peachy-pink hair and turning another dog-eared page of her book. "Came running up all excited to tell his cool new idea to his cool new friend before even telling the boss lady."

"Huh." What a bizarre concept, X thought, both hands on the handle of his cane. I'm used to people seeking my approval, but not when they don't even know who I am. This is what I get for having a moment of weakness with an audience, I guess. He paused, thinking back. Glitch's explanation of what being irregular was like had hit awfully close to home, but he was not by any stretch the only one who was irregular. And Valentina did seem the talkative type…maybe she could shed some more light on the subject.

"You're irregular, right?" X asked her.

"Maverick," she corrected him, with an incongruously cheerful peace sign and a grin. "We're all mad here, V, don't tell me you haven't figured that out yet. Why do you ask?"

Something about her complete glibness chilled him, but X ventured ahead anyway. "…What was it like? When you first…you know, realized."

"Oh, and here I was gonna scold you for being nosy, but how can I be mad at that face you're making?" she cooed.

"I'm not…making any face," X objected. Was he? He didn't think he was, but he hadn't had as much control over his expressions lately as he was used to having, and he wasn't sure why. Maybe it was just another thing his systems were slipping on.

Valentina marked her page with a bit of yarn and set her book aside. The cover displayed some silly artwork of a muscular human man, his shirt half-open, cradling a dramatically fainting human woman, her corset barely containing her ample assets. "You are, but it's okay. See, V, I don't know if you've noticed, because a lot of reploids don't think about this kind of thing, but I'm a sexbot," she said, very simply. X had noticed, but he hadn't seen a reason to point it out or even ask. To most reploids, even insinuating that someone was designed as a plaything for humans in that way was a grievous insult.

"And that's fine with me, actually. I love humans, for the most part. They're kinda cute, you know? They're fun. But there's like…the opposite of love isn't hate, or even fear, because those are still something, I think. It's not feeling anything at all. There were some humans that I ended up stuck with that I couldn't love, because they wouldn't love me. I didn't hate them. I wasn't even all that afraid of them. I think I thought I was, but then I realized I didn't have to be. I could just make them never be a problem for me or anyone else again, and it was easy, once I understood that I could just stop pretending I cared."

That explained why she was so nonchalant about calling herself what she was, X thought, but he couldn't relate. "You've never felt bad about…?"

"I murdered them. You can just say it, it's okay. You can't hurt my feelings by telling me what I willingly did, don't worry. I've felt bad about parts of it. Like their family and friends, I guess. I don't know if they had any but most humans do. The actual act, though? No. I'm supposed to, you know? I'm supposed to be horrified at what I've done, but I just…meh. I'm not. They treated me like an object, so I made them into objects. I think that's fair. So I guess to answer your question, it was like…realizing that I was playing a game that I didn't have to be playing, and I could just stop. I think if I'd realized it a lot sooner I wouldn't have a body count, but it is what it is."

Something in the back of X's somewhat faulty memory stirred. He did recognize her. He'd seen her on the news, once, years ago. "Wait, I know you. They called you Bloody Valent—" he started, but Valentina shushed him, one index finger to his lips. Even all the way out here, she had managed to find pink, sparkly nail polish, though it was chipped around the edges.

"Shh. If everyone else hasn't figured it out by now, we don't need to tell them," she stage whispered. "I always thought that was a really stupid name, anyway. There was no blood at all. Ever. I didn't make a mess like that. And the way they made that idiot pimp sound like he was innocent? It was bullshit, V, don't listen to the news."

"Did…you actually do the other murders?" X whispered, once she released him.

"What do you think?" she countered, smiling so innocently that X felt dizzy with cognitive dissonance, on top of his usual litany of reasons for it.

X hesitated. "I…think I wouldn't have expected it from you in the first place, so I don't know what to think."

Valentina giggled, eyes crinkling into a smile. "You're cute, V, never change. I'll tell you this much. Whoever I did or didn't kill, it was all self defense, in the end. It's a rough world, when you have something everyone thinks you owe them, and nobody's looking out for you. But I never harmed a single hair on a single person that treated me like a person too. Maverick or not, I still love that kind of human. And I never disliked what I was created for. I just…don't care about people who won't care about me, and if they're going to hurt me, I'm going to hurt them."

X mulled it over. "It's…excessive," he said, after a few minutes. "Isn't it? Killing someone, when you could just leave?"

Valentina shook her head. "Maybe you wouldn't understand this, because you aren't built—you know, like me," she said, a bit delicately for his benefit, motioning vaguely to her entire body. "But like, it's not that simple when the thing they want to take from you is your own body. Once a human looks at you like a possession they bought, instead of a person performing a service, you can't trust them again, and some of them get violent when you won't be their obedient little toy. It's you or them, and you can't make me believe you wouldn't defend yourself."

X tried to imagine it…and couldn't. It was so far outside of his realm of experience, all he could muster was a vague but core-deep sense of revulsion. "I guess I sort of get it?" he conceded.

"It's not really that different from you, though. All's fair in love and war. Right? That's what they say. But reploids like you and me? We know better," Valentina said, conspiratorially. She gave him a secret, cold little grin with no mirth behind it. "There's, like, nothing at all fair about either of them. Doesn't matter what you do. If you follow orders, pretty soon you aren't your own anymore and it'll break you, but if you don't, you just break some other way instead. So we had to choose, didn't we, how we got broken and what we were willing to trade to get out. I traded having to know what I'm capable of, and I don't get to forget that ever again. What did you trade?"

If X found her chilling before, she was positively terrifying now. He'd seen the expression she wore now on so many other Mavericks: the unsettling and humorless smile, the odd predatory light in her pretty eyes. But this was different. She wasn't looking at him like an enemy. She looked at him like an ally, and his vertigo threatened to overwhelm him under her gaze.

"I…" he started, trying to answer her. "I traded…" How could he put it into words? Almost a century of war, of crushing loss, as friends became enemies and enemies became scrap, with no rhyme or reason or way to keep it from happening, over and over…there was no way to express it aloud, and even if there were, he didn't have the strength to give form to the the grief. "Everything."

"And what did you get for it?" Valentina asked.

X put a hand on the stacked concrete wall, because his cane suddenly wasn't enough to keep him steady. "I don't know. I did what I had to do," he said. "Nobody else could have done it."

"Is that enough?"

"It has to be," he protested, wishing he had somewhere to sit. "If it's not…what was it all for?"

"Well, that's where we're different, then, huh? You followed your orders, and I couldn't. I hope you got what you were promised, but I kinda feel like if you did, you probably wouldn't be here talking to me about it." Her cold, feral expression warmed and softened, disappearing so quickly that X almost wondered if he'd imagined it from the start. "I hope you find, like, at least a little of what you were fighting for."

X sagged slightly. Without her giving him that look, his tension drained out of him, and he felt like a marionette with a single clipped string; not toppling over, but not truly standing, either. "I hope so, too."

"Ugh, listen to me though, being a downer weirdo on a nice day like today. You know what's a better answer? Realizing you're a Maverick is like, not even that big of a deal—except for the whole dead people thing, that's kind of a big deal—because it's not like you weren't capable the entire time. It's a fake title, if you think about it. The difference between me and some random other reploid is that they haven't had to do some fucked-up shit to survive yet. That's really it. Like, you're still you, just now you know how far you're willing to go, that's all."

Valentina's sudden change in demeanor jarred X out of the anxious funk he was beginning to fall into. She was hard to keep up with, emotionally, but at least he was too far off his equilibrium to even have the sort of nervous breakdown he'd had in front of Glitch. "But if that's the definition, then there's no reason to say that even humans couldn't be irregular or Maverick."

She beamed, excited that he'd made the logical leap. "Exactly! What, you don't think they can? They've got rules, too, and they break them sometimes. The only difference is they give each other different labels than Maverick."

X had never considered it that way before, which was saying something given his age. Valentina continued on. "We're all designed with human emotions and minds, more or less, so if we can become irregular, it only makes sense that we got that from somewhere."

"I guess," X begrudgingly agreed, abruptly feeling like he could use a good sit for a while, and his legs' aching was only part of the problem. If reploids could be irregular, and they could, and if humans could indeed be considered irregular, too, then he, as some sort of a midpoint between the two, couldn't imagine a single reason that he couldn't be as well. "I think I'm going to head in and…do whatever needs done."

"Go make sure Glitch isn't blowing himself up or something," Valentina agreed with a smile. "He'll be glad you dropped by, bet you a thousand zenny."

"I am not taking that bet," X said, gathering his nerves from wherever they'd gone off to and making his usual slow way into the encampment. Locating Glitch turned out to be as simple as going into the central building and listening for him talking to himself. X knocked on the lab door.

"It's unlocked," Glitch called from inside, so X let himself in. "V! Hey, check it out." There was a growing pile of old phones on the workbench, which Glitch was busily popping open with a pry tool. A few of them had dead batteries removed, and one of them was already temporarily wired to a miniature solar panel under a very bright desk lamp. "Batteries that actually hold a charge all night are gonna be hell to figure out in numbers, and they don't quite work off just a solar panel out of the box, but in theory, it's gonna work. I might be able to just strip the whole OS out and code something a lot lighter that draws less power, and I can kill the screen since it's not like I need it, so that'll make up for a lot of it. And I think I can whip up a low power mode where they don't poll the mic and camera too often unless there's something worth looking at."

X just blinked. "Wow. Was this kind of thing your day job?" he asked.

"Haha, no, I was a corporate IT and infosec drone, mostly. Absolute bullshit job." He kicked back in his office chair, tilting it precariously without falling. "This, though? This is the shit I live for. Give me fifty cheap refrigerators with wifi and bad security, and I'll take over the world. Dunno what I'd do with it, but you know, it's the thought that counts, or something. So! What do you think?"

"I think," X replied, "that I would have been a little afraid of you, if I'd had to tangle with you when I was still a Hunter."

Glitch cackled so hard he lost his balance and had to grab the edge of his workbench with his free hand. "Hell yeah! Now that's some high praise. You're gonna turn my ego into bloatware, you keep saying shit like that."

X simply raised one eyebrow. This really was a different world he was in now, if that was a compliment. Or Glitch was just that odd. "I…guess you could take it that way," he conceded. "It's definitely a good skill set for what we're dealing with now. I'll feel a lot better with these keeping an eye out."

"I wanna get a few of these things working before I pitch it to Kathy," Glitch said, returning all of his chair's wheels to the floor. "You, uh, got more hands than me still. Don't suppose I could borrow them…? Not literally, shit, don't look at me like that. I'm not gonna steal your arm."

"It's not stealing if you asked first," X said, and Glitch once again had to squint at him for a moment to decide if he was making a joke.

"Ha. Good one, V. …I think. I'd ask Mack but I already asked it to go test as many batteries as it could get its…okay, it doesn't have hands. Why is everything coming back to hand jokes? Anyway, I wouldn't mind some help popping the rest of these open and taking out the batteries. I can do it, obviously, but it's kind of terrible with one free hand."

"Sure, I could do that." X pulled a chair over and sat, and Glitch handed him a thin pry tool.

"This'll work on most of them, but if that doesn't, I got a whole pile of different shapes. Just try to not break any…they're not real easy to replace as things are. I'm doing the broken and dead ones too just in case, so don't mix them up."

The two of them sat quietly for a bit, popping phones open and removing the batteries. X found it to be more meditative work than he'd expected, and jumped slightly when Glitch spoke.

"Talk about anything fun with Valentina?"

X made a noncommittal noise, prying the back panel off of another phone. Maybe if he acted unenthused enough, Glitch would take the hint.

"Yes? No? Maybe so?"

X set the phone down and sighed. That had been wishful thinking. "Just…asking her what she thought being irregular was like."

"Ah, I see. Getting a second opinion. It's fine if you are, you know. All the cool kids are doing it. Be Maverick, do crimes," he said, making a grand gesture with one hand, as if the words were written on a marquee somewhere up in the air.

"I really do not see a need to…do crimes," X protested.

"Okay, so just be plain irregular and do whatever you want, then, it's no coolant outta my system. You know, I was wondering after seeing you in action yesterday…what did you do in the Hunters? 'Cause you've clearly seen action."

X hesitated for several moments. How was he supposed to answer this without tipping his hand…? Well, the truth was easier to tell than a lie, even if it wasn't the entire truth, and it came with the added benefit that he didn't have to remember two versions of the story. "I was a unit captain," he replied, then went back to trying to wiggle an obstinate battery from its housing without breaking anything.

"Oh, whoa. Yeah, that explains it. What rank did you end up making by the end?"

X set his mouth into a line, worrying that he was probably making some face he wouldn't be aware he was making. That kept happening, recently. "Not that high, honestly."

"Liiike…D rank? C?"

"B." Then, after a pause, "Mostly." He'd made S rank, near the end, but not out of any desire to perform.

"Ah, we're back in five-words-at-the-maximum territory. You know you can just tell me you don't wanna talk about something, right? That's a real option you're allowed to take."

X let out another sigh. "I would rather not. It's…a lot to have to remember." He set the phone down and picked up the next. "Back in the worst of it, when the Virus was the most, well, virulent…it wasn't uncommon to have someone at your side one week and at the other end of your buster the next. If I don't have to think about it, I don't."

"Damn. That is a lot. Sorry for bringing it up. I was just curious because I don't think I've run into anybody who's got aim like that, except maybe Seren." Glitch flipped the pry tool from finger to finger, mind entirely elsewhere for the span of a whole second before bouncing two steps back in the conversation. "So what kind of nonsense was Valentina telling you about me?"

"Nothing much."

"Veeeeeeeee," Glitch whined, dragging the single letter out and slumping sideways dramatically. "I'm trying to make conversation, here. Meet me at least a quarter of the way, would you?"

"Sorry. I'm…kind of out of practice at it. Gossip isn't really my thing, but she, er, said you adopt new reploids."

Glitch sputtered. "Oh, I do not, this is slander," he said, and X decided it couldn't be that bad of slander, because he seemed to reserve his worst melodrama for those he actually liked.

"She thinks you adopted Flip," X added, though talking about someone he had barely exchanged a few words with made him inwardly cringe a little bit.

Glitch flipped the tool from pinky to thumb, around every finger on the way, and then back. "Yeah, well, he looked like he could use a friend. Except you can't get that close to him, because he and Siobhan stick together like magnets, so I tried to be her friend too, but then he got territorial for some reason? I don't know. People do weird shit when they've been through it, and I dunno what happened to them, but they've been through it, whatever it was. I figured I should probably stop trying so hard after that. They got some kinda unilateral network going and it's none of my business."

X focused on carefully prying apart a press-fit panel without snapping it. So he hadn't simply gotten bored and abandoned Flip as a project, as Valentina had assumed. That was a lot less impersonal of a motive than X had been led to believe. It also explained more about why Hammer had offhandedly mentioned that Flip and Siobhan didn't need 'a third wheel' in their room…whatever a unilateral network was.

Wait, though, did that mean that X wasn't just a shiny new project too? He wasn't sure what to do with that possible piece of information, so he buried it. He didn't need to be a pet project, but that at least was not nearly so troublesome as someone (an accomplished hacker, a criminal, a Maverick, who was going to disassemble me for spare parts if he decided I was up to no good, he reminded himself) trying to be his friend. He'd had enough of those.

He tended to lose them rather violently.

"Huh," was all that X actually said aloud.

"You gotta understand, Val's…programmed a little different. She's, well, you know." For all that he could cheerfully talk about replacing his servos with some dead reploid's parts, Glitch, like the vast majority of reploids, still hesitated to name the particular elephant in Valentina's room. "On top of that, she spent so much time with humans, she's got…ideas about how things work. I'd avoid the subject if I were you, unless you want a full and completely useless report on every relationship here that she thinks she's seen."

"That sounds tiresome. Oh, this one's swollen." X gingerly removed a worrisomely rounded battery from a phone it barely fit into.

"Uh-oh, spicy pillow. Here, I'll take it." Glitch plucked it up and deposited it in a bin on the shelf after giving it a sniff. X wondered if he had a specialized sense of smell for electronics. It was not unknown for technician models. "Well, good news, it's not venting. Pain in the panels, not being able to take them somewhere for someone else to deal with. I'm gonna have to figure out an actual solution soon that isn't 'dump them in the service tunnels somewhere,' except that's kinda the option we got."

Glitch began tinkering while X continued to shell the batteries from the phones. If only he could find Alderman's…he had a feeling it would answer a lot of things, but he recognized all of these, and none of them could have been his.

If he were trying to hide something like that, he thought, where would he put it? Destroying it would have been the most straightforward method. One broken phone looked very much like another and wouldn't rouse suspicion. All that would need to be done would be to tread on it with some force, and it would be unrecognizable.

But, X thought, let's say that I didn't destroy it, because if it's not retrievable, there's no point in looking for it. Let's assume that I kept it. Even reploids make less than logical decisions all the time. Where would I hide something like that?

Somewhere completely random was the best solution, as far as nobody else finding it, but Kathy didn't seem to leave the encampment much that X had seen. She seemed like the sort to stay close to home and take an administrative role. He could reasonably assume that wherever she may have stashed it—assuming that she had it in the first place, and kept it—it had to be nearby. That narrowed things considerably.

If she doesn't often leave to be able to hide it outside the camp, then that only leaves wherever she'd consider to be secure inside the camp…the lockers aren't secure, Hammer told me that, so it's not likely there. The rooms don't have locks, so that's out, too. Kathy's office, however, was part of the original construction, with a comparatively heavy door, a lock, and a lot of hiding places. She was usually there, as well, which would prevent anyone from poking around.

This, of course, begged the question of how he meant to do that himself. X could ask her directly, though she'd already told him she didn't know about it, and he'd probably burn a lot of goodwill by implying that she was a liar. Would it be more or less than if she caught him being nosy…?

X was starting to think there was no pleasant way out of this. Story of his already long and storied life, he inwardly sighed.

"Ha," Glitch laughed, triumphant. "Just need to slap more batteries on…which limits the number that I can make, but it'll be enough. And I got the power consumption as low as I think it's going to get. All we need to do is place these bad boys all over," he held up a spliced-together phone, with several batteries taped onto it, "and they'll maintain a network as long as there's two of them in range. And I can increase the range, no problem, I just need to cobble together some antennas. I gotta decide how far is far enough without attracting attention if someone flies over."

X blinked. "That was fast. Didn't you need to code and update the OS?"

Glitch tapped his temple with his one working hand, though the lumpy phone also held in it made the gesture unnecessarily awkward. "Already did it, my friend. Coded, transmitted, and installed successfully. I'm the best there is, and don't you forget it." If his grin were any cockier, he might have sprouted feathers and crowed.

"That's more than wifi capability," X remarked.

"It sure is. Here, shake my hand," said Glitch, holding his good hand out. X eyed it warily. "No, you don't know this joke, come on." With some trepidation, X took it.

His own hand ran hot, then cold, then tingly, then reported anomalous pressure that visual didn't corroborate, and then on top of all that, his systems reported a minor code intrusion attempt that had failed. This surprised him enough that he jerked his hand back.

"Right?" Glitch agreed with his reaction, still grinning like a maniac. "Ultra high precision EM manipulator. Which sounds cool, except half the time I'm just using it as a magnet to find lost screws, but man, having the capability when I need it? Priceless. Well. No. Almost priceless…it definitely had a price tag."

"Did you need to try to hack me, though?" X complained mildly, still glancing between his hand and Glitch's.

"Oh, don't be a baby, I barely pinged you just to show you. Even if your security sucked and I actually got in, I would have just put a smiley face somewhere in your code and let you find it later. I'm a hacker and a Maverick but I'm not evil. Evil would be leaving you with a present that made you beep just a little at random intervals or something."

"I'd have to suddenly rejoin the Hunters just for the occasion if you did," X grumbled, begrudgingly impressed and slightly terrified. "Still…that's good work. On the sensor network, I mean. I'd assumed it would be days before you had it working, not hours, barely plural."

"I'm a professional, V! Actually, I'm worse, I'm a professional and a hobbyist at the same time. That's just the kind of combination you gotta worry about. Also I get about thirty hours per day compared to most reploids getting twenty four. That helps too."

"I'm sure it does. Did you need anything else?"

Glitch held the sensor out. "Yeah, hang onto this one. It'll need a charge now and then, but in case anyone gets harassed again, I think we should carry a sensor each. Might not pick up visual if it's in a pocket but it'll at least get sound and location once I've got the rest set up." X accepted it and tucked it into a pocket. "If you're headed out, let Kathy know I wanna see her in fifteen minutes, because I'll have something to show her by then."

"I'll do that," X said, leaning on his cane for balance as he stood. His balance systems complained with enthusiasm, and he steadfastly ignored them. Kathy was just next door, anyway. He knocked.

"What's up, V?" she asked as she answered the door.

"Glitch has been working on something he wants to show you," X told her. "He asked me to ask you to come have a look in fifteen minutes or so."

"Oh? I hope he won't be too disappointed if I just go over now. I could really use a break." She stepped out and around X, and let herself into Glitch's lab.

"Hey, no fair peeking, I definitely said fifteen," X heard Glitch say before the door closed, leaving the little town hall building quiet.

Out of curiosity, X tried the handle of Kathy's office door…and it swung open. Unlocked, unattended, and unsuspected. For how long this would last, X couldn't guess, but Glitch did talk an awful lot, and Kathy didn't seem to have as much technical experience as X, so the explanation would likely take a little longer. If he was ever going to search, it would have to be now, even though he hadn't entirely decided to commit to this as a plan.

Well, rust it. He was committing.

X ducked in, carefully so as to not stumble into the doorframe and make noise, and pulled the door almost shut behind him. He likely only had a few minutes to search, so he started searching the place he thought most likely: Kathy's desk. The drawers were not locked. He slid each one open, cautiously in case it squeaked, and moved the contents as little as possible.

There were school papers, still ungraded; there was a stack of kindergarten-level textbooks, somewhat wrinkled from exposure to water; a stash of writing utensils; an interesting rock; several spiral-bound notebooks, much written in with various notes and plans, including some sketches of the encampment's layout; a handful of old desk toys, very handled. Nothing caught X's eye. He closed the lap drawer and considered giving up, but as the drawer slid shut, he noticed the dark shape of Kathy's bag under the desk.

With one hand on the edge of the desk as support so that he didn't topple over, X reached down and pulled it out, setting it on the desk. He could barely hear Glitch still talking through the doors between them, but he didn't dare risk the time to empty it completely, nor did he trust that Kathy wouldn't notice things in disarray. He flipped it open, quickly looking over the few things in it. There was a hairbrush, a somewhat rumpled change of clothing, a few other personal odds and ends…and an interior pocket with a zipper. He unzipped it and reached inside, and his fingers closed around something cold, rectangular, and thin: a phone.

The briefest of glances confirmed that the wear patterns on it matched the phone case inside of which he'd found Charles's business card. Finally. He zipped the pocket back up and returned the bag to where he'd found it, tucking the phone itself into one of his jacket's interior pockets. A quick peek outside the office door confirmed that Glitch was still explaining his idea to Kathy at great length and with great excitement, so X grabbed a flashlight, slipped out, and closed the door behind him.

If he'd been biological, he thought, his hands would be sweating. Fortunate for him that he didn't have that particular problem, except that he could hear one of his cooling fans rattling with anxiety. Just another reason he should get an actual tune-up…but that was a problem for later. X gathered his composure and walked out of the central building as coolly as he could.

Vertigo spinning a little more quickly than usual, X walked to the service tunnel stairs. If he was lucky, he could slip down without anybody questioning him and investigate the phone. If it still worked. If the battery still held a charge. If it didn't demand a password. If it hadn't been wiped. If, if, if. He didn't like the decreasing odds, but he had to know. How could a person disappear so thoroughly?

X almost vaulted down the steps, but restrained himself. He didn't need the extra noise, and he didn't need to jar his joints that hard over nothing. He carefully retraced the steps he'd taken to the room he'd used to test the box of phones previously, and sat down on the floor.

He placed the flashlight on the ground next to him, pointed up at the ceiling to generally illuminate the room. The phone powered on and booted up successfully. X held his breath. A few splash screens of manufacturer logos, and…a number code lock screen. Of course.

Many people, he knew, picked fairly useless PINs, and didn't often change them. He angled the flashlight across the screen. Luck was on his side, it seemed. Just visible under polarized vision was a faint haze of scratches in the screen protector, centered around three numbers: 3, 4, and 9.

Hmm… It wasn't quite enough for the standard minimum of four digits. He could guess, but that risked the phone deleting its own data if it had been set up to do that after a certain number of incorrect password entries. X pulled the business card from his pocket, hoping for some inspiration.

4394 North Fair Street. I'd bet that's it. He tried the address, and the screen unlocked. Got you. X turned the screen brightness down to nothing to conserve power, adjusted his own visual brightness higher, turned the flashlight off, and searched through it.

Nothing in recent calls stood out to him. Email wasn't promising, and seemed to be mainly business contract stuff. X thumbed through to the photo gallery…and clamped a hand over his mouth in shock.

Charles Alderman was a fairly average middle-aged man in good shape. He had most of his hair, though he was visibly beginning to thin. Nothing especially stood out about him, physically. No, the problem was that in this photo, he was posing, like a successful big game hunter, with the clearly burnt-out chassis of a reploid, holding the body up as proudly as if it were a trophy.

He had been a humanoid type. His eyes stared blankly into space, mouth half open in an expression of terror dulled by death. Charles beamed at his phone's camera, which he clearly held in one hand for this shot, the other struggling to hold its heavy load steadily enough for the shot. He could only heft the body halfway, the dead reploid's legs still trailing in the rubble, but despite this and the buster rifle slung over his shoulder his expression was the same as any fisherman mugging for the photo with a prize catch.

X almost dropped the phone, other hand still pressed to his mouth. He'd heard of this kind of thing, very occasionally, but he'd never seen it. He'd seen so many Mavericks with human victims that he'd slowly stopped feeling much except a kind of numb, detached malaise about it, but the reversal shocked him. And the way Alderman smiled about it, with an easy pride…he'd rarely seen that on a Maverick. Only the worst of them, like Sigma, managed that sort of casual, bloodless callousness.

Valentina's assertion that humans could be Maverick rose to the top of his mind, unbidden. The only difference is they give each other different labels than Maverick.

No, thought X, this is still different. Most Mavericks truly believe they're doing what they have to do, even if they're wrong…but his eyes don't have that kind of sharpness. He's entirely relaxed. He did this just because it was fun, and because he could…no other reason.

Hesitantly, X swiped through the camera roll, scanning over months of pictures taken. Images flashed before him: a dog playing with a rope toy in the yard. Some children. A school play. Drinks with several other humans around a table at a restaurant. A synthetic rabbit's ear, severed with a wire cutter and taken as a trophy. An anthropomorphic reploid, designed like a rabbit, a hole seared through her head, curled up on the cracked asphalt ground while Charles flashed a thumbs-up over her corpse, some unseen third party holding the phone. Dinner with the family. A strikingly nice sunset. The kids and the dog, asleep together on the couch. A hand, wires trailing and silver nanofluid still dripping from the wrist, fingers bent after death into a peace sign and held in that shape by a human hand. A face-down reploid, the plating on his back scorched with buster fire.

X felt sick. His entire core lurched violently, as close to nausea as a synthetic system could get. He squeezed his eyes shut and muffled a strangled, involuntary little sound into his hand. How could a human do this? How could they enjoy it? It was nothing but bloodsport—crossing the wall, hunting reploids for entertainment, murdering them as they ran—like animals. Worse than animals, maybe, because those at least hadn't already been banished to a hellish war zone, where they could barely even risk finding sustenance without being caught and killed. Animals at least were allowed to live before they died.

X shuddered, pulling his knees to his chest. Being Maverick suddenly made far too much sense. No, the actions of one did not condemn the many, but even one was too many. Just one could do so much damage. He had terminated countless reploids himself, but he had never enjoyed it, ever. Finding joy in pointless murder went far beyond any horror he had ever imagined.

He couldn't bear to look back at the phone screen, but he had to. The battery wouldn't wait for him to have a breakdown. X forcibly wrenched his eyes open and to the device. The dates on the photos were telling. Every several months, Charles Alderman had taken an excursion into the quarantine zone and…bagged a trophy, X thought, balance systems reporting a sickening avalanche of critical errors as he did. He had to close his eyes again and regain some equilibrium before going on.

X closed the photo gallery and rifled through the phone's settings and installed apps. Locations on photos hadn't been saved, and cloud storage was disabled. A little digging revealed several anti-tracking apps disguised as calculators and note-taking applications, as well as an end-to-end encoded messaging app. None of the messages were retrievable without Charles's password, which was not his phone unlock PIN, but that it existed alongside the photos told X all that he needed to know. This was a hobby, and while the picture in which he wasn't holding his own phone could have been taken with a stand, there were likely others involved with him.

X needed to tell Kathy—no, he needed to return the phone to her bag and say nothing—no, he needed to tell Hunter HQ about this—no, what would they be able to do? They had no jurisdiction over human crimes—his circuits spun endlessly. Maybe he could convince Charles and his compatriots to stop, if he could just talk to any of these human Maverick Hunters—no, they were just trophy hunters, and they would just as happily bag him, too, without his recognizable armor. Or maybe even with it. Nobody was safe here. And if he encountered any of them himself, would be have to defend himself? Would he harm, even kill, a—

X dropped the phone, hands shaking, and it bounced on the poured concrete floor with a clatter. He would. He would have to. Of course he would have to do it. There would be no other choice, right? Surely at least some of the reploids they'd hunted had tried talking them down. They would not listen to reason, and they'd attack him…and then he would no longer have the luxury of denying that he was capable of doing what he had to do. Just like everyone else here. They were already no different, he realized, except that they knew, and he couldn't accept it yet.

He wrapped his arms around his knees, gripping his cane in one hand so tightly the handle squeaked. So this is what I've come to, he thought, distantly, while his body continued to tremble without his input. X, the undefined variable, curled up in the dark, scared of everything, thinking about killing humans. I really have become what I fought against. Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe the final betrayal in my life was always going to be mine. I've lied to Kathy and Hammer and Glitch and Mack and everyone else here, I've failed the Hunters, I've lied to myself…I've done everything wrong, and I couldn't have done it any other way.

I wish Glitch was here, he thought, mildly surprising himself. The admission brought another half-choked sound from his throat. I wish anyone was here. And then, I wish he was here. Even now, X could barely think his name. When had it become too painful to even remember him? His first friend, his fated enemy…what was he supposed to do now, without anyone by his side at all, even himself? He'd failed, again and again and again and again and again.

What was left, at this point? What was he fighting for? What was the point?

X's thoughts continued to twist themselves into chaotic little spirals, circling around more and more tightly until they were buzzing knots that he could no longer untangle. At some point the phone timed out and its screen turned off, and still, X sat compressed into a little ball, watching himself not move and hearing his own fans running at high speed.

"V?" a voice called; it was Glitch, somewhere nearby in the tunnels. "You down here, buddy? I know you are, I'm picking up the sensor I gave you. Where are you?"

X looked up in a panic, but couldn't summon any speech to reply. Of course…he still had Glitch's first sensor node in his jacket, and it was broadcasting. He picked Charles's phone up from the ground, turned it off, and slid it into the pocket he'd hidden it in before, and still, he may as well have had his vocal systems disconnected. They weren't throwing any errors, but he just couldn't access them.

"Hellooo…?" Then, a pause, as if Glitch was listening. "That your fan rattle, V?" The halo of his finger-light fell across the floor, blinding X, who had never readjusted his visual contrast. "There you are. Man, you gave me a scare, disappearing like that. What's up?"

Still speechless, X just blinked at him until he pointed his light away. Glitch squatted next to him solicitously. "You okay?"

X thought about that for about a second, and weakly shook his head no.

Glitch sighed, though not unkindly. "It's okay to not be okay. You wanna talk about it? Or do you wanna sit in the dark and be quiet about it? Or do you wanna head back up and not sit in the dark about it, because it's gloomy as hell down here and probably not making you feel any better about the whole situation?"

He had wished that Glitch was here, and now Glitch was here, and X was already intensely embarrassed, in a distant kind of way. Why had he wanted that? He didn't need an audience for a breakdown. What he needed was to tighten his screws and stop doing this. He shook his head a second time and uncurled his reluctant limbs, planting his cane on the floor and attempting to stand.

Even with his systems running warm, X's joints were cold from the concrete. His balance systems weren't having it, and his leg servos actuated erratically at best, refusing to support his weight evenly. X got halfway to his feet and stumbled under the weight of the errors he was throwing, realizing too late that he was going to fall but unable to find any good reason to feel anything at all about this fact. The floor was just another place. It didn't really matter, in the end. Maybe he'd do less damage if he stayed down.

X fell, and Glitch caught him, moving like a green bolt of lightning in the dark, injured arm slipping out of its sling to wrap around him along with his good arm. "Don't push yourself so hard," he chided.

"Hypocrite," X mumbled, but he couldn't summon any force behind the accusation. He felt as real as a handful of cold fog, and Glitch was warm, solid, and grounding.

"Yeah, yeah. So it's a mutual malfunction." He eased X to his feet, then tucked his self-repairing arm back into the sling. "There. No harm done. Now, where to? …Oh." X simply turned to Glitch and threw both arms around him to cling as if he were the only real anchor in a sea of chaos. "Uh. Alright. That works too."

"Glitch," X said, faintly and into Glitch's plating. "I'm a Maverick."

"You're a…yeah. I know. Me too. It's okay."

"It's not," objected X. "It's really not. I'm…I asked him to…if I…but he's not here anymore, and…"

Glitch ruffled X's hair, because what else was he supposed to do in this situation, really? "Slow down, buddy, I'm not quite keeping up."

X couldn't slow down. He tried, but the words wouldn't come out right, and he couldn't tell anyone who he was, so he couldn't make it make sense, and maybe it wouldn't have made sense anyway. "I…I miss him so much," he stammered, barely audible. "I-if I'm a Maverick…what was it all for? Why did he have to…"

Glitch must have realized he was out of his depth, because he simply let X talk, looping his uninjured arm around the other trembling reploid. "…Why did he have to die? Why couldn't it…it should have been me…I should have…but I didn't. Why wasn't it me? And now I'm a…I've…I could…there's a, the human I've been…I don't even have anything and I'm going to lose everything," he concluded, trailing off into silence.

"No, you aren't," Glitch insisted, gently. "Whatever's going on, tell me about it. This isn't something you gotta do alone. Okay? You got all of us here, even if you just got here."

X shook his head against Glitch's chest, agitated. "I don't. I…no, Kathy's going to be…so upset. I'm…I should leave. I should…"

"Shh, no, listen. Okay. I can't speak for everyone else here. But you got me, at least. And Mack, because it goes where I go, and I go where it goes. And I'll go where you're going too, if you want."

"Why?" X asked, point blank.

Glitch paused. "Because…" X looked up at him, still not quite able to make eye contact, but searching his face otherwise. "Because I make up my mind fast. Because you were interesting, to start with. I wanted to understand your reactions. I still do, but the more I figure out about you, the more I…I dunno, man, you just deserve better than whatever you got. I'm still not completely sure what happened to you, but it wasn't right or fair, and it shouldn't have gone the way it did. I figured out that much."

The only thing that spared X from telling Glitch everything right that moment was the enormity of it sticking in his vocal processing pipeline. Where did he even begin? How was he supposed to give voice to a lifetime as long and full of loss as his, and if he did, would it scare Glitch away? "I-if I…if I told you that I'm…" No, he couldn't.

"That you're…?" Glitch prompted.

"I…can't. You'd…it's…too much to burden you with." X cast his eyes down and away.

"It's not, but I'm not gonna make you talk about anything you don't want to. But, uh…V, look, I gotta…I'm sorry. I haven't been totally honest with you. I'm probably not supposed to tell you this, but it's total bullshit, and you've had enough of that already and done enough for us. Kathy asked me to keep an eye on you. She doesn't…really trust you, still. This morning she wanted me to try to find out if you're hiding anything from her."

X's eyes widened slightly. "Me?"

"Yeah. I said I'd do it, because I don't think she'll let you stay unless she gets over her paranoia and she's kinda the boss here in the end, but fuck, man, I feel gross about it. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of shit you haven't told us, but it's not like it's her business."

X realized that he was still, in fact, clinging to Glitch, contemplated stepping back, and then decided that he didn't care that much if Glitch didn't. He was still colder than was comfortable, regardless of how his fans were running, and moreover, he would still have toppled core over cranial plates without something more than his cane to lean on. "I've…not been honest either," he admitted. "But I-I don't…I don't want to say how, or…or who I am. I'm so tired of…of not being seen as a real person," he managed, eventually. The words were so hard to unearth. "I'm…I'm actually…My name is…It's…I can't say it. I just can't. I'm sorry."

"I don't care what your real name is," Glitch said, resolutely. "It's whatever you want me to call you. Glitch wasn't my name to start either, but it is now. As long as you want me to call you V, that's who you are to me. That's the only thing that's important."

"Would you still say that if…if I was…"

"Anybody," Glitch emphasized.

"You trust me that much?" X asked, in wonderment.

Glitch laughed, just once. "Why shouldn't I?"

"Because I…Glitch." X suddenly felt keenly aware of the phone in his pocket, and his over-tired mind skipped subjects like a rock across a pond. "The human I've been looking for. I…do you know anything at all about him?"

Glitch shook his head. "Nothing. I swear."

X sighed with rare relief. That made some things easier, at least. "I think…Kathy's hiding something. I need to know what, but I don't want to throw everything you've all built here into chaos." He finally disengaged, carefully, keeping an arm linked with Glitch's so that he wouldn't fall again. Glitch allowed this, listening intently. "But this man was a…a reploid murderer. He…"

"Wait, a human, murdering reploids?" Glitch interrupted. "...hang on, let's go somewhere a little less findable for this. Come with me."

He led the two of them through the tunnels, lighting the way with his fingertip flashlight. Once they'd arrived at a place he approved of, he closed the door behind them and helped X to an old pipe running across the floor, large and high enough to sit on. X eased onto it, and Glitch sat next to him. "Okay. Human who kills reploids. Go on."

The walk had helped clear X's head somewhat, for which he was thankful. "Right. I've been trying to find his phone this entire time."

"Which is why you suddenly felt the need to sort them," Glitch said.

"Ah. I thought I'd gotten away with that," X said, ducking his head a little in embarrassment.

Glitch simply laughed and waved it off. "Come on, you should know you can't get shit by me. But did you find it?"

"No, but I knew it was here, because I found the case it was in, and…" X reached into his jacket, pulling out the business card, and the phone in question. "The case had his business card stuck inside of it, but the phone itself was missing. And I know Kathy was hiding it in particular, because it was, ah…er. In her bag."

Glitch ran his free hand through his singed hair. "You got into her—oh, buddy. She is gonna be pissed. But I'm not gonna tell her, don't worry. She can be pissed with both of us, if it comes to that."

X let out a breath. "Yeah…she will be. I know. She told me she didn't know anything about him, and I believed her, and…yeah. So I got into his phone, and it's got…I don't want to say, but I want to look at it again even less, so…they're trophy pictures. Of reploids, that he's…deactivated, on this side of the wall. I think he's not coming alone."

Glitch's expression hardened so rapidly it made X jump internally. "Show me. So if anybody asks, there's at least two of us who've seen them, and nobody can say you're making shit up."

X nodded and unlocked the phone a second time, navigating to the photo gallery and handing it to Glitch. He scrolled through, frown deepening. "Shit. That's Parallel…I knew him. And…oh, God, that's Lapis. I don't recognize this one…oh, no, no, no, this was Jason. Not him too…" The further he scrolled, the further his face darkened. "...Six. Six reploids that he's killed, just on this one device. This is…why would Kathy hide this? We could all be in danger. Some of these were our people."

"I don't know," X admitted, "but I think I just have to ask her, point blank. She's not going to like it. I know she won't. And I need to do it privately, because I don't want to upset the order of things here."

Glitch processed his thoughts for a few moments. "Hold off on it. I can get this back into her office, no problem. If she hasn't noticed it's missing yet, and I doubt she has, we should be good. But gimme a couple of days to get the sensor network in place, before shit breaks loose."

"In a few more days, Charles might not even be alive to find."

"V, buddy, I don't think he's alive now. Think about it. If he got out, you wouldn't be looking for him at all. If he was alive, Kathy woulda just pointed you to him and got rid of both of you. But she's had his phone this whole time and lied to you about it. If I had to guess, he's been dead since before you even came."

X turned to peer at Glitch. "How are you so certain?"

Glitch returned the gaze, which made X glance away. He had been about to tell Glitch everything, and even so, he couldn't look the other reploid in the eye. "I knew a lot of the reploids he killed. There's kinda a common thread with them. They were all the type to panic and run if shit hit the fan, none of them were combat units, and we didn't have the rule about only going out in pairs until a couple months back, because we had too many just disappearing, but we thought it was the Drifters. I hate saying it like this, but I think what was actually happening for some of them was that Chuck here was picking off easy kills. Not a single one of them would have turned around and attacked a human with a buster and a clean shot. They didn't have it in them."

Something percolated loose in the mess of X's processes, and a thought struck him. "Glitch. The partner rule. Does Kathy go out often?"

"Nah, she hardly goes at all. She did make a few trips about a week ago, but usually she sticks close to home." Glitch flipped through the photos again, scrolling with his hand still in the sling. He seemed to have an idea, then. The phone buzzed, and the battery icon showed a little lightning bolt. X gave Glitch a questioning look. "One of the many perks of an ultra high precision EM manipulator," he said, a little smug despite the general atmosphere. "Inductive charging. I'll top this thing off so it doesn't die in the meantime."

"About a week ago," X echoed. "Who did she go with?"

"She always goes with Hammer. …Shit, V, she always goes with Hammer, and Hammer—okay, we're really not supposed to talk about what other reploids did so you didn't hear this from me, but Hammer killed four guys with a—you'll never guess what he used."

X felt his circuits drop. Sometimes, he hated being right. "Hammer. The logo on his shoulder—look at this." He held the card up, and Glitch stopped scrolling to aim a flashlight finger at it.

"Oh, no. He was a construction 'bot, before, right around here. Same logo and everything."

"Alderman Materials and Construction," X said.

Glitch whistled, low and long. "This guy is super dead, bet you anything, and if you ask me, good fucking riddance, but that's not what you wanna have to go back and tell anybody, is it? Your Hunter contact won't like that, and if they don't like it…that's not gonna spell anything good for us here."

"No, it's not." X's anxiety surged, like a physical force. He willed himself steady, though his hands started trembling again. "They'll want to send Hunters in and…and clear the place of irregulars. I…I know I'm a Maverick now, because I can't let that happen, even if Kathy and Hammer did kill Charles. I'd…I might have done the same, if it was the only way to keep him from hurting anybody else here. No, not might have. I would have."

Glitch put a hand on X's shoulder, and X suddenly snapped back to relative calm. "Hey. For whatever it's worth, and full disclosure that I'm biased as hell, but I for one appreciate you being unwilling to let us all be gunned down in the dirt by either the Hunters or this guy."

X inhaled, let the air heat inside his chest, and exhaled. "Thank you."

"So let's figure out what we're doing. First thing is to finish the sensor network, because we need the extra security around home, and this is gonna interrupt that pretty hard if it comes up at the wrong time."

It took a moment for X to register that Glitch was saying 'we.' He really wasn't just saying that, X thought, touched. He actually intends to follow through. I'm really not just a project to him.

"After that," Glitch continued, "we see if we can get you some answers from Kathy…and then I guess we figure out how to spin whatever we find out so that the Hunters don't rain death down on us from above."

X nodded, feeling much steadier than he had even a few moments before. "I think I should do some basic training with everyone, if Kathy is okay with it. With Seren leading the Drifters, we can only assume she's probably organized and trained them the way she was trained. I think our safest bet will be to do the same here. Not that you aren't a bad shot, but your tactical decisions could use some work."

"Ouch, right in the pride. But you're right. No more impromptu plasma haircuts for me, I'm swearing the habit off. Goddamn, this is a whole mess, isn't it?"

"You're telling me." X stared into the darkness for several moments, gathering his words before speaking. They still came out haltingly, but at least he could speak them now. "You…asked me what I wanted to do when this was over, before."

"I did, yeah. You make any progress on that?" Glitch replied, joining X in the darkness-staring.

X shook his head no. "I haven't. Not really. I've never actually thought about it. There's never been an 'after this is over' to worry about. I thought there might have been, once…and I was wrong, it turned out, but I thought…I wanted to try to build a new society where humans and reploids could actually coexist, as equals."

Glitch laughed, his usual single, warm scoff. "Hah. That's a big goal. How'd it go?"

Placing both hands on his cane handle, X shrugged. "Look around you. Do you see it anywhere?"

"Nope." Glitch thumbed the phone's power button and the screen turned off, but the battery charging icon glowed on it for a few moments more as he continued to charge it through his hand.

"Right after that, the Maverick Wars picked up again, and I almost forgot all about it. It wasn't very realistic, anyway. I…had just lost someone very important to me. I needed to feel like he died for something that might make everything worth it. I think…it was my way of coping, probably, imagining this perfect place that I could work towards. If I had a goal, any goal, I could just keep going." X ran a thumb over the end of his cane's handle as he spoke.

Glitch nodded, not really looking at X as he spoke. If he had, X knew, he'd probably have lost his nerve under the scrutiny anyway. "Yeah…I know what that's like. I mean, obviously in a different context, but same kind of, you're just looking for a reason to get out of your pod and make it through the day, every day, because if there's no light at the end of the tunnel, what's the point, right?"

"That's exactly what it's like. I asked him once to terminate me, if I ever went Maverick. He told me to stop being ridiculous, but…I wonder what he'd think now."

"He was your friend, right? I bet he'd understand. It's not like this all happened without reason."

"I hope so. It's not like I can ask him now, and I shouldn't worry about it, but…I still do, sometimes. But anyway, I think…what I want to do…is allow myself to figure out what I want. I don't really know. I've never had the…I don't know, the time, or the…freedom, I think. That's the word for it. I've kept myself too busy to imagine it, because after you've spent so long at war, all you can imagine for tomorrow is more war. I'm tired, Glitch. I'm so tired of fighting. If it comes down to it and I have to fight, I'll do it, but I'm so tired. I want to believe there's some kind of peace in the world, even if I don't deserve it."

Glitch did look at him, then, and X shrank a bit from the intensity of his gaze. "Don't deserve it? Listen to yourself, man. You've given everything you had to give and then some. People you cared about, your time, your sanity, even your systems' functionality. If anybody deserves peace, it's someone like you. You should…after shit settles here, you should go back out there, and live your life, right? You still haven't done anything you couldn't get away with. Nobody's got to know about all this. Go be an undercover Maverick all by yourself. Figure out what you want, and go for it, that's what I think."

"I don't know if what I want is there, or here, or…anywhere." X looked down to his cane, still fidgeting with the handle. "I think what I want might not exist anymore."

"You loved him, right? And he loved you? He must have," Glitch asked, and X felt the air go out of his ventilation systems as if he'd been sucker punched. He could only nod mutely, eyes wide and sorrowful. He had thought the word, a thousand thousand times, but he'd never once said it aloud. "Then shit, man, you gotta find something to live for. Here, there, anywhere, doesn't matter. It's what he'd have wanted you to do. I'd bet on it."

"If it were that simple," X said, once he found his voice again. "At least I've decided on somewhere to start. I want…" He paused, gathering his nerve, and when he spoke again, he spoke with a determination he didn't yet feel. "I want to feel like I'm allowed to want things."

"Pick something," Glitch said, a hint of playful challenge in his tone. "Pick one thing you want. I don't care how small it is, just say anything."

X thought, and then realized he was about to overthink it. The smallest possible thing he could want—what would that look like? "I want…a hot bath. A real one, really hot."

"Yes! That's great. Absolutely frivolous. Good. Want something else, that's an order. Let's hear it."

"I want to…uh…finally get the tune-up I've been putting off."

"Even better. One more. Third time's the charm. What else do you want?"

X licked his lips. This should have been easier, he thought. The normal state of a living thing, even a synthetic living thing, was to have needs and wants, but he'd suppressed his so long and so thoroughly that he could barely understand anymore what it was like to have any kind of desire that wasn't a negative sort, simply wanting things to stop. "I want…clothes that actually fit?"

"Good enough. Could use some work on the delivery, but I'll take it. See? That was alright, right? Nothing bad happened. You got this. How you feeling? Good enough to head back up before they send out a search party?" Glitch hopped to his feet.

Impulsively, X reached out, grabbing Glitch's arm. The other reploid turned, raising an eyebrow at X's wide-eyed expression. "Wait. There's…one more thing I want. I…know you said you don't care what my name is." He tried his best to meet Glitch's gaze. When had he become so afraid of eye contact? "But I want you to know it anyway, because I want…to trust you. A-and…most of all…I want you to not treat me any differently because of it."

Glitch sat back down, facing X. "Look, uh. V. Buddy. I…have a guess already, as to what you're going to say. I know a lot about reploid models and materials. They had me on network security, but I'm just as qualified on reploid repair and design, because I'm preloaded with the entire Toyota knowledge database. It's the largest in the industry. There's…you wouldn't believe what's in it. And, uh, you're in it, too, as much as that's possible, which isn't that much. So if you're about to tell me that you're…yeah. I figured it out for certain this morning."

X only stared at him, blankly and unblinkingly. Glitch went on. "Your, uh, when I attempted a little mischievous code injection, you probably didn't even notice it but you automatically deployed some uh. Very unique denial methods. I've never actually seen anybody at all, ever, have that thorough of security against an inductive EM attack. I wasn't totally sure before that, but, like I said when we met…I've never seen your make nor model." He seemed embarrassed, of all the unexpected reactions, scratching the back of his neck in a surprisingly human gesture for someone who was so unapologetically a walking computer in every other way.

"Oh." X couldn't compute this. Had anybody else realized? If they had, they hadn't reacted…but then, Glitch hadn't reacted either.

His puzzlement must have been written awfully plain on his face, because Glitch laughed again, awkwardly. "Oh, no. Come on, don't make that face. I haven't told anyone and they won't figure it out themselves, because they're not top-of-the-line technician units with the largest specialized database in the world in their head and ample time and opportunity to stare at you. My lips are sealed. But I'm right, right?"

X could only nod. "You're right. I'm…" When had his own name become so hard to say? He hadn't realized he was so changed, but seeing himself through the lens of what Glitch must have seen, he barely recognized himself. How long had he been refusing to see his own scars? "I'm…my name is X."

Glitch nodded back. "I knew it. But you're still V, to me, unless you tell me otherwise."

"And you won't…?"

"Treat you differently? Pfft. Why should I? Maybe if I'd met you as X first, but this V guy? He's not that scary. I mean, he probably should be, if I think about it, because damn, I'd have to be an idiot to go up to The Real X Himself and say, 'Hello, how are you today, I'm a Maverick, isn't that wonderful,' but fortunately for both of us, I am actually an idiot and have no self-preservation, so no. Whatever the hell you're calling yourself, I think you're pretty damn alright."

"...Huh." X tried several times to process this, each time getting a little further and failing.

"Although, can we give my past self some props for pinning you of all people to the wall and threatening to kill you and steal your parts? Because oh my God, I had ball bearings of steel for that one, can you even imagine?"

"I was there, Glitch, I don't have to imagine," X reminded him.

"Ah, yeah, you were. Shit. I have nobody to brag to about this. No, don't give me that look either, I won't do it. I did promise! I meant that. Cross my core and hope to fry. And I really won't treat you differently. It's one of the first things you've wanted in this many years, right? That's important. You trusted me, so…trust me, okay?"

"Yeah…" X said, then, again, "Yeah. I do trust you, I think. It's…not easy, and I've forgotten how, but…I'm glad you're here."

Glitch smiled. Not his usual shit-eatingly cocky grin, but an actual smile, one that X had not yet seen him make. "It's, uh, not as dramatic of a reveal as yours, but…before all this, my name was Toyota Kujuyousuke, Toyota Replico Lightspeed-2-0094. Kind of a double unlucky number, and the Japanese news called me the Curse Hacker for a while after I got caught doing my thing. Now we're even, right?"

X returned the smile, and an enormous tension eased, one that he'd carried in his systems for so long that he mostly no longer felt it. When had he stopped smiling? he wondered. But he still could, and that itself was a rare relief. Perhaps things were finally looking up. "Right."

"Let's get back up, I'll get this phone back in Kathy's bag as soon as she turns around, and next time she asks me if I've got any nosy dirt on you, I'll just tell her you were a unit captain and that's the end of that. Nobody's gotta know anything."

Chapter Text

RPFL1-3203.P unplugged bright and early, and stepped out of his recharging pod. His apartment's bedroom was large enough for a reclining pod, having been originally designed for human use, but he didn't really see the need. The extra space he got from having a vertical pod was nice.

He stepped into the shower and turned it on, no warmer than room temp. Overheating first thing in the morning wasn't his favorite activity, and he ran hot most of the time. He soaped up, then rinsed off. Something about the morning ritual helped him feel more awake, even if he didn't necessarily need it. He certainly didn't sweat, nor was he prone to smelling like much, but he did sometimes pick up quite a lot of road dirt and the occasional bug, and he thought about aerodynamics more than most reploids ever had to.

Flip—that was his name, which he'd chosen himself, based off of his serial and also because he thought it sounded cool—was a very lucky reploid, and he knew it. He'd gotten to pick his name, which happened, but not as often as one might hope. Most didn't get to choose their career, at least not from the beginning. Almost none got to choose their appearance, let alone their specs. He'd been given an enormous amount of latitude from the moment he was initialized.

He still remembered that moment. Flip, not that he'd had a name yet, had become self-aware towards the end of the process, which was a strange thing to contemplate by itself, and his first experience was watching the seemingly endless scroll of bootup messages and wondering what would happen when they finished. He'd found out soon enough, though it felt like a century's worth of waiting at the time. His optics clicked on, ran a self-calibration, and the lab came into focus.

"Good morning," said the lab tech in charge of his initialization sequence. "How are you feeling?"

"Hello, world," Flip said, feeling clever, though how the joke had gotten into his mind in the first place, he couldn't have said. "I'm not sure if I'm feeling anything, to be honest."

"Well, that's reasonable," the tech said. Flip's social systems, still loading, began to track their facial expressions. Probably his, they guessed. No guarantees, his new understanding warned him, but humans with beards tended to be male enough of the time that it was a reasonable guess when faced with a lack of other evidence.

"How so?" Flip asked, then looked down. "Oh."

Quite simply, he hadn't been given a body yet. He was a central nervous system and basic cooling, but little else. All he could really see were some modules, half of a robotic spine, and quite a few cables. This didn't alarm him, though, mainly because it hadn't occurred to him that it might be a problem.

"Welcome to reality," the lab tech said, genuinely. "You're a lucky one. Starting now, you're a citizen of Reset Point. You've got a lot of decisions to make, but don't worry, they're good ones. Most reploids—that's what you are, by the way—don't get to decide any of this stuff."

Reset Point was a utopian effort. The thing about humans, Flip had determined later once he was assembled and out in the world, was that no matter what history said, there was always a subset of them who believed that this time, they'd get it right, and it would actually stick. It wasn't a bad impulse, he decided. After all, one couldn't succeed without first trying, and it had worked in his favor this time, so it seemed like a silly thing to complain about.

The other thing he learned about humans was that they were prone to really bad jokes, which also seemed like a constant throughout history. The name of the place certainly qualified, even if it had been intended in good faith, and geographically, it did qualify as some sort of point.

The goal of Reset Point, the tech explained, was to create a society in which humans and reploids were true equals. The world was locked in a war against virus-infected reploids and rebellious reploids alike, Flip learned. The virus, though the tech seemed to say it with a capital V, was experimentally curable now, and if they could cure the social pressures that pushed the uninfected to lash out, the war could finally end.

Or so that was the hope, at least. Towards that end, Reset Point was a model community, in which reploids were given the freedom to choose their jobs, their living spaces, their friends, even their appearances and capabilities, and in doing so, they would hopefully be content. They had full rights, the same as the humans of Reset Point, and identical legal standing in all matters.

Of course, practicality and safety limited certain designs, but Flip knew what he wanted from the start. Holding still like this was boring. He wanted to be fast.

"We can do fast," the tech said, jotting notes into a tablet. "Let me show you some options."

In the end, Flip had picked a light body, as streamlined as it could get, with matter repulsors and a thrust system that would allow him to skim over the ground, on top of a system optimized for high-speed kinetic calculations. He would be a courier, where his speed and maneuverability would be essential job skills, and he could go as fast as he liked, all day, every day. The rest was mere details, as far as he was concerned. He'd been assigned a male gender and appearance based on the current population, to keep it roughly 50/50. He didn't really care about that anyway, so it was fine by him.

He turned off the shower, flexed his thrust guides, and gave them the briefest puff of propulsion to empty the plasma channels, spraying water all over the inside of the stall. The rest of himself he dried in a more normal manner with a towel. Flip was a fairly plain model, from the outside. He didn't have much synthetic skin apart from his face, since it didn't recover well under self-repair, and wipeouts did occasionally happen in his line of work. Plus, it just wasn't as aerodynamic due to having a softer texture. His body was a medium gray, his hands were white and visibly jointed, and he'd randomly settled on mousy brown hair and teal-green eyes just to be done with it. His tech had suggested white armor with lavender edges and a few teal accents to match, and he'd signed off on it without much thought.

Once he was dry, he stepped into a niche in what would have been the bedroom closet, and the systems installed there assembled his armor onto him. Much of his mobility hardware wasn't part of his actual chassis, to save on heat; his main propulsion was, because it had to be connected directly to his power core as closely as possible, but his many gyroscopic modules, his matter repulsors, and most of his accelerometers were housed in his armor.

All of Flip's various pieces clicked into place: boots, upper and lower torso, arms, and finally, his helmet. His main and secondary systems connected, completed their handshakes, and reported that they were ready to roll. He grabbed his bag from its hook by the door and slung it over one shoulder, adjusting it so that it wouldn't end up tangled in the two vanes that projected from his back.

Flip hopped down the stairs of his building, one landing at a time, touching down only lightly before taking the next leap. He had heard about acrophobia, once, and concluded that it sounded fake. Outside, the morning sun shone brightly, until it rose behind Sky Lagoon, the enormous bulk of which eclipsed it completely. With horizontal space at the premium that it was, vertical space was the next best thing, and Sky Lagoon was one of many new floating-island initiatives to make use of it. On one hand, the constant shadow of the floating city was kind of a pain in the panels. On the other, its effect on real estate prices was probably the primary reason that Reset Point was feasible as a unified effort in the first place.

Flip ignored it, as he'd seen it every day for three years and it had kind of lost its interest at that point. He ducked into the little bodega on the corner of the first floor.

"Morning, Flip," Siobhan chirped, smiling at him. She was pink and red and gold, with red-gold hair and pale green eyes, and she had hand-painted freckles, because her designer had been kind of an artiste about her reploids and it showed. Her wish upon waking was to get to talk to a lot of different people, and so she'd been given a feminine appearance and assigned as the owner of a corner shop, where she could interact with regulars and passers-by alike. By any account, she was fantastic at it. Humans and reploids alike loved her. Flip and Siobhan had been activated on the same day and lived in the same building, they'd discovered, and had been friends ever since. He was thinking about asking her if she'd like to be his peripheral, but the occasion hadn't quite come up yet, and he didn't want to rush it.

"Hey, Sho," Flip greeted her. He picked up a can of nanofluid and set it on the counter. "Anything fun going on?"

"There was a battle not that far from here last night, I guess," Siobhan answered, while ringing him up. "A real one. The Reset Point Hunters and Repliforce both had to send a bunch of units to support. It's all over the news."

"Man. I'm good with a boring day, as long as they stay over there with that shit." Flip cracked the top open, drinking a quarter of it in one go.

"What's on the list for today?" she asked him.

"Lemme see." Flip checked the back of one arm, where a section of his mostly-white plating slid aside to reveal a screen, listing that day's deliveries. He specialized in rapid, small parcels, the sort of thing that the postal system wouldn't be quick enough to handle, and the Hunters had found enough use for him that they'd gotten him a civilian security clearance so that he was allowed to handle most of their materials. "Oh, boy. Sealed delivery from the Hunter precinct to their satellite facility, first thing in the morning. Bet they're busy as hell."

"They must be," she agreed. "Be careful, okay?"

"Pfft, the Mavericks aren't gonna come here. There's nothing even interesting in Reset Point," Flip shrugged, downing another quarter of his can.

"No, I mean don't run into any cars, dip switch," Siobhan chided him with a laugh. "I'm not worried about the Mavericks. We've got so many armed forces around us, they'd have to be both insane and stupid to think about doing anything here."

"Oh. Come on, I've never run into a car. Recently," Flip amended, before she could correct him, because he had in fact collided with a parked car once and ended up in the shop for a solid day of repairs as a result.

"Okay, okay. Go make your pickup before you're late," Siobhan said, waving him off so she could ring up the human lined up behind him.

Flip chugged the rest of his nanofluid and tossed the can into the recycler on the way out. He went through it at a ridiculous rate, compared to most reploids, but that was just the price of his systems running as hot as they did when he was working. As long as he maintained steady state between heat degradation and self-repair function, though, he was fine, and as long as he kept feeding his two-cans-a-day habit, he would stay fine.

With a glance down the sidewalk, Flip initialized his propulsion systems.

>I.77808-PRO: Gyroscopic stabilization system online.
>I.77809-PRO: Gyroscopic stabilization system self-check completed.
Status: OK.
>I.77810-PRO: Gyroscopic stabilization system ready.
>I.71010-PRO: Matter repulsors online.
>I.71011-PRO: Matter repulsors self-check completed.
Status: OK.
>I.71012-PRO: Matter repulsors ready.
>I.78090-PRO: Thrust system online.
>I.78091-PRO: Thrust system self-check completed.
Status: OK.
>I.78095-PRO: Thrust system primed.
>I.78096-PRO: Thrust system ready.

Flip rose into the air a few inches, balanced by an array of gyroscopes that would have made a jet jealous, and extended both thrust guides fully. With a whine, his thrust system spun up, and in a blink, two narrow, electromagnetically-shaped blades of bright plasma, almost like wings, burst forth from beneath the guide vanes. In the next moment, Flip was off towards the Reset Point Maverick Hunter precinct building.

He casually leaned his way around the few pedestrians out that early, as easily as if he were skating around a line of cones, and rather than stopping at an intersection, he simply took a leap over it, with an extra burst of power to his wings that weren't really wings. Just because he could, and because it was fun and also funny to him, Flip did a flip, landing and carrying on without a hitch.

The Hunters did not think much of his showing off, he knew, so once he got closer to the building, he slowed to something more like the speed limit, sliding to a landing at the front gate. They wouldn't do much but scold him, but he had things to do and places to be, and standing around for a browbeating would put him off schedule.

"Morning, Flip," said the gate guard. Flip made a lot of pickups and deliveries for the Hunters, and at this point, most of the gate staff knew him on sight. He had a tough time telling some of them apart, as they employed a lot of mass-produced Hunters from outside Reset Point, but he tried, at least. Today, he failed. "You're expected. Front desk."

"You got it," Flip said, zooming through at a gentle hover as soon as the gate arm swung up to allow him entry. Walking was just too slow.

The Reset Point Maverick Hunter Base wasn't terribly large, as such things went, but it was associated with a much larger training facility and base nearby, so it tended to be busy despite its size. Ever since he'd been activated Flip had idly wondered why they needed so much Hunter presence if the utopia was supposed to resolve tensions between humans and reploids, but he had gotten the impression that he wasn't supposed to ask that, so he never had.

Flip drifted his way to the front reception. "How's it hanging, Sarge?" he asked the reploid on duty, coasting to a stop with his elbow on the desk.

Sarge was a military spec model, painted in coyote brown, and a later addition to Reset Point after a transfer from some larger base. He was not at all a sergeant. In fact, despite his model, he'd ended up in administration, and that seemed to suit him fine. His first interaction with Flip had been yelling at him in the stairwell of the apartment for almost landing on him, as it turned out that he also lived on a lower floor of the same building. His second had been approximately forty-five minutes later, when he'd discovered that the new civilian courier was in fact the same upstart newbuilt reploid that had nearly used his head as a springboard. Fortunately, he was a good sport about it, and they got on well.

"You here to sign up yet?" Sarge joked, as he did every day that Flip came in. "We could still use someone with speed like yours, you know."

"Haha, keep waiting. I carry packages, not guns. Speaking of packages, what's today's payload?"

"Got a present for you," Sarge said, pulling a packet of paperwork out from behind the desk and setting it on the counter. "You know the type."

"The kind I don't get to open? Boring," Flip fake-yawned, but took it all the same, checking that it was sealed and tucking it into his bag.

"You know what I was just wondering?" Sarge asked.

"What's that?" Flip looked up from his bag, mid buckling the straps.

"So, your flight thingies," began Sarge.

"They're thrust guides, and they're not for flight," Flip double corrected, before Sarge could even fully word his question. He checked that his bag was secure and still not tangled in his flight thingies, then turned to actually face the other reploid.

"Okay, your thrust guides, which aren't for flight. Are those part of your armor, or do they attach directly to you?"

"Wow! Personal," Flip laughed. "You can't just ask someone where their vanes attach. In public, even? Sarge. I'd say buy me dinner first, but I don't know what we'd do with it."

"Yeah, yeah. Get outta here, I got forms to fill out." Sarge dismissed him with a chuckle.

Flip coasted out, doing a gyroscope-supported limbo under the gate arm that made the gate guard sigh in exasperation at him. There was technically no rule against it, and they both knew it. He headed back down the main street, weaving in and out of the morning traffic, occasionally leaping a vehicle or two that didn't quite maintain the speed he wanted.

He was so intent on watching the road that he only realized something was happening when the cars all stopped as one. Flip slid to a stop, wondering. There didn't seem to be any accident on the road, and there were no emergency vehicles, either; even the pedestrians had stopped. The quiet was eerie.

They were all staring up, he realized, so Flip looked up, as well. High above, a thin line of smoke issued from one of the enormous units that held the artificial sky island up.

"Huh," Flip said aloud to nobody in particular, and scratched the back of his neck, allowing his feet to touch the ground. "That doesn't seem good."

With no idea what to do, Flip simply stood there, watching. He squinted. A few tiny black specks milled around the edges of the island. At the distance they were, they must have been reploid-sized, or maybe even flying transports of some sort. There were little flashes in one of the glass tunnels, just barely visible, and he realized he was watching a skirmish.

Silently, a rolling cloud of flame erupted from the underside of the island's center. The sound arrived seconds later, an explosion so deep he felt it in his ventilation systems more than his auditory sensors, and Flip's eyes widened.

"That's the power center," someone said, backing away several steps before simply turning and running in the opposite direction.

That single person triggered a nigh instant street-wide reaction. Pedestrians ran, both human and reploid. Buildings full of people emptied into the sidewalks as sirens began to blare. Cars tried to turn around, got stuck on each other, and their occupants gave up, got out, and ran as well. Flip leapt to the roof of a truck, trying to keep his bearings in the sudden chaos. It was happening so quickly there wasn't even anyone to direct the evacuation, which was more of a stampede.

"I have to find Siobhan," he suddenly said aloud, coming to a decision without even thinking. He flared his thrusters and launched himself from the truck's roof at speed, teal plasma blazing behind him in a trail. He leapt from car to car, over the heads of the people fleeing on foot, deeper into the shadow of Sky Lagoon. The island's massive hover units were all trailing smoke now. He ran out of cars to leapfrog and had to slow down, pushing his way backwards through the crowd, where his lighter build worked against him for once.

The fleeing people thinned as he worked his way up the street, and Flip arrived at the corner store to find Siobhan standing in the doorway, simply staring up. "Flip?" she asked, as if disbelieving that it was really him.

"Come on, we have to get out of here," he said, picking her up in both arms. She weighed more than he did, but he was running on panic, and all that he noticed was that it took more power than usual to lift off from the ground.

The island was visibly drifting lower, now, the shadow deeper beneath it, and the flames now poured from two of the hover units as well as the power core. There was no doubt about it: Sky Lagoon was falling. Flip fired his thrusters, taking off with Siobhan in his arms at a speed he'd never before dared to achieve, carrying a weight he hadn't been sure he could support until this moment.

He weaved between and over abandoned cars, some of them across the sidewalk. Siobhan clung fearfully to him, arms around his neck, and he poured as much power as he could spare into his propulsion systems. Faster, faster, faster…and yet it only grew darker, as the falling city's incredible inertia surrendered to gravity. A strange wind at Flip's back picked up in the wake of the enormous island.

Flip pushed harder yet. His systems began sending up thermal warnings. He ignored them. His thermal limiters engaged, and he overrode them. The heat inside his armor became intense, then painful, then intensely painful, and Flip gritted his teeth and poured even more power into his propulsion systems, redirecting it from any place he could find a single unit to spare. His eyes watered as his tear reservoirs began to steam. His cooling system began to pressurize and leak.

He realized he was probably going to die of thermal damage, and Flip thought, If I can get at least Siobhan to safety, it'll be worth it.

Siobhan pulled her hands away from him, the synthetic skin on her palms burnt from the sheer heat Flip was radiating. She said something, but he couldn't make it out. His auditory systems were beginning to glitch from the combination of extreme heat induced errors and low power.

They still were not far enough away, Flip realized. If he was going to die anyway, he thought, then he didn't need to hold anything back. He redirected everything he had to speed, sparing nothing that wasn't immediately necessary for maintaining his trajectory. He couldn't even feel his systems melting. His thrusters flared white-hot as he vaulted over several cars that had collided with each other, and then simply never hit the ground again. Flip was not a flight unit, but with Siobhan in his arms, he flew, and the darkness closed over them.

The wind behind them pushed him even faster, and with one final burst of speed, they broke into the sun just as the far tip of the island island touched the ground. The impact was monstrous. Entire buildings smashed into dust instantly, fleeing occupants and all, and the cloud that swelled from the island's increasing point of contact rivaled any nuclear explosion. Flip couldn't even track the critical alerts he was logging. It was simply a waterfall of flashing red, and still, he didn't stop until the shockwave caught up to them and ripped Siobhan from his arms. He was flung to the ground, where he tumbled end over end with the rest of the debris until he finally came to a stop against something he could not make out in the chaos, helmet lost in the blast.

His entire body burned. Flip wasn't even sure how he was still functional enough to feel, but he wasn't functional enough to really see; there was only static, and flame, and so much dust and smoke that even if he could have seen, there wouldn't have been anything to see. His optics were probably broken, he realized. He could hear, in sporadic, crackling pops, but he heard Siobhan calling his name. She crawled back to him, tried to drag him, but she couldn't even touch him, he was so superheated. He tried to tell her to run, but he couldn't seem to activate his voice synthesizer.

Somebody else was there, Flip thought, hearing in bits and pieces and seeing in faint, staticky shadows from one eye. They pulled her to her feet, told her to evacuate, left with her. That's right, he thought, distantly and slowly. Go where it's safe. It's okay. As long as you're safe, I'm happy.

Flip's systems had run so hot that he'd sprung several nanofluid leaks from pressure alone. One by one, his core systems threw fatal errors, issued failures, and terminated all processes. The last thing he heard was Siobhan, still calling his name. With a final rattle of his half-melted fans winding down, RPFL1-3203.P deactivated, satisfied.

"Will you look at that? These things really can fix anything. I thought for sure this one was beyond repair."

"Not perfect, but promising. He isn't fully initializing, but we'll give him some time. He may yet come around, and if he does, I'll give him our gift myself."

Flip heard voices, which was odd, because he was dead. Wasn't he? Unless there was a reploid afterlife…but that had never seemed likely to him, and if there was one, this didn't seem anything like an afterlife should be. Whatever they were saying, he couldn't quite make it out.

The dead had no business hearing things, he decided, not quite consciously, and drifted back under.

Light filtered through Flip's eyelids. Go away, I'm dead, he thought, feeling irritable, even as his systems reported a successful initialization. Everything about his body was wrong, somehow. Everything hurt. Everything burned. Hadn't he been on fire? Was he still on fire?

His eyes flicked open, and he still couldn't see more than a bright, colorless blur. His limbs didn't respond.

"Ah. So you are alive. No, don't bother trying to move. You're still mostly disassembled."

Flip tried to speak, but try as he might, he couldn't seem to produce any noise, despite his voice synthesizer throwing no errors.

"That won't work either. The repair medium's too dense. I'm surprised you can hear me at all." A dark handprint and the outline of a large humanoid shape showed through the brightness, but no details that Flip could make out; just two faint green glows that could have been eyes. "Be patient, Flip. You'll be free and with the others soon."

Was that his name they just said? Flip could barely understand the words. Should he recognize that voice?…but his memory didn't seem to be working quite right. All he remembered was the sky falling, and fire, and Siobhan was safe.

Right. Siobhan was safe. So everything was fine.

Flip closed his eyes, and the fire receded.

"Wakey wakey."

With a gasp and a jerk, Flip awakened. He ached all over, and his systems felt like they'd been installed backwards, but he was alive.

Why was he alive?

"How you feeling?" A familiar face leaned over him, though it took him what felt like ages to place it, between the light being all wrong, and his memory seemingly having been run through a shredder at least once.

"...Sarge?" Flip finally rasped.

"Oh, good, you didn't entirely microwave your own brain out. I was starting to wonder, you took so long to recompile."

If Sarge was here…he must be at the Hunter base. Right? Except if he was dead, it would have been illegal to resuscitate him, and he was definitely dead. He remembered dying. Something didn't add up, but he couldn't assemble the words to ask. His system clock was completely scrambled, telling him it was hundreds of years prior, and his entire chassis still burned.

"Is Siobhan safe?" he finally asked. It wasn't what he'd meant to say, but it was what came out. He tried to move, and found that he still couldn't, even though now his body seemed to be working.

"Dunno." Sarge shrugged, nonchalant. "Funny, though, isn't it? They connect right to your back. I'd have guessed they were part of the armor."

Flip stared at him, not quite understanding. Clear tubes lined the walls behind him, large enough to fit an entire reploid into each, filled with some kind of thick, silvery gel. Several of them contained shadowy outlines.

"Your flight thingies," Sarge clarified. "They repaired right up, easy as anything. Amazing what you can do when you don't have human laws restricting you."

"What are you talking about?" Flip asked, still groggy, and not only from rebooting from what must have been a very final power cycle. Putting words in order had never been so difficult.

"Evolution," the other reploid answered, with a grin that Flip found terrifying, and a motion to the row of tubes behind him. "Death should be meaningless to the inorganic. We don't die. There's no reason for it. We get a little roughed up, but we're fixable. Biological things don't need to be telling us our business. You, them, me, what's the point of dying when we could be evolving?"

"That's," Flip said, then paused. His head hurt so much, so quickly, that he couldn't continue.

"Maverick talk?" Sarge asked. "That's right, it is. Welcome to the revolution, my boy."

"You're," Flip started, but cut off again, wincing against the light.

"Are you going to say 'infected?' You can say it. I don't mind. You are too, you know."

"No," protested Flip.

"Oh, you might not be feeling it yet, but you most certainly are. Shame you woke up so late. You could have met the man himself! He was just here, but he couldn't stick around. But don't worry, you got your upload from him personally. Hell of an honor. Now, just you calm down and sit tight. You'll be right as rain in a bit."

Flip squeezed his eyes shut defiantly. He would certainly not calm down and wait. He'd come back from the dead only to find that he'd been—he couldn't even bear to think it, and moreover, his head pounded with pain and code intrusion alerts, and he realized, belatedly, that he was bound to a lab table, and tethered with a recharging cable.

And where was Siobhan? He'd thought she was safe, but if this was happening, right here in what used to be Reset Point…

What if she wasn't safe? What if they got her too?

Barely thinking, Flip fired his thrusters at full power, ripping himself from the now-smoking table, cuffs and cable and all. It burned, but then, everything burned. He landed, rounded on a very surprised Sarge, and rushed him, still burning. Both of them crashed into one of the tubes, shattering it. Silvery sludge and fragments of glass spilled across the lab, and before Sarge could find his footing in the mess, Flip initialized his matter repulsors and rocketed out of the room like a shot, cable snapping off behind him.

He had no idea where he was or where he was going, and he could barely see still, but he plowed ahead, pushing through doors and the occasional confused reploid until he emerged into the blinding sun. There were shouts behind him, so he angled his thrust guides and took off, away from the ruined building he'd emerged from and towards the unthinkable crater of devastation that had been Reset Point.

"Ah, let him go, he'll sort himself out and come back soon enough," Sarge said, wiping silvery goo off of his chassis as he caught up to the crowd of Mavericks forming at the door. "These newer models just take a little longer sometimes."

Flip rapidly ran out of street. The remains of what used to be Sky Lagoon carpeted the scenery, destroyed beyond any comprehension of what they might have been. It was more than a bomb blast. It was a bomb blast with the shredded corpse of an entire city on top of it, and another beneath. He skidded to a stop, awkwardly, drifting into an enormous, twisted steel beam to brake, as his systems still weren't responding quite right.

What am I supposed to do? he asked himself. Did they really…am I going to go…am I already? He couldn't seem to sort his thoughts into any semblance of order. I don't want to be a Maverick. If I can get far enough away, maybe I won't… Won't what? He wasn't sure, but he had to get away from civilization, said some part of him, and Flip hoped it was a sane part. He couldn't hurt anybody if he went where there wasn't anybody to hurt in the first place, and there certainly wouldn't be anybody alive in the rubble that wasn't also infected.

Flip began to climb. He didn't trust his propulsion systems, for the first time in his life. His second life? He didn't have the capacity to think about it. Making forward progress and not simply stopping and flinching in the sunlight took his entire focus. Had he been rebuilt poorly, in whatever kind of external self-repair system they'd rigged up, or was this a symptom of the Virus? As long as he was busy scrambling over the jumbled debris of so many buildings, he could keep track of himself. If he didn't have that…he couldn't be sure.

By the time he found a place to stop, the sun was going down on the other side of the sky, and that was odd, because it hadn't felt like that long. His sense of time was as scrambled as his system clock. Flip must have been in a park, he thought, because the shattered remains of trees and sod were strewn around with the rest of the ruin. He sat down on a random piece of concrete in the shade of a huge spire that had probably begun its existence on top of a building.

And now what? He was throwing strange errors he'd never seen before: TLR violations, even though he wasn't interacting with anybody at all; nonspecific codes spanning the entire 99999-digit range at random, that simply told him to report to his manufacturer; and all manner of minor hiccups in systems from which he'd never once seen a single message.

Maybe there was nothing to do, Flip thought, with difficulty. He'd died once already. If there was a reploid afterlife, and if he'd gone to it, this was the bad one. Maybe the only thing left to do was die a second time, so that he couldn't entirely lose himself and start trying to spread the Virus…

He couldn't do it, Flip concluded an hour later, dropping the sharp piece of metal he'd settled on and giving up. He didn't have the physical strength to shove something through his own chassis and into something vital, and his hands weren't steady enough even if he could have. He'd do the next best thing, then, and just wait for his systems to run down. All he had to do was refuse to allow himself to leave for long enough, and it would take care of itself.

Flip spent that night trying to run his battery dry by running his thrusters until he couldn't tolerate the heat anymore. He still felt like he was burning up even when he wasn't overheating, so it was slower progress than he had hoped for, and his power systems kept recharging besides. He had a very efficient generator, and no way to eject his power core manually. When he wasn't trying to bleed battery power as heat, he paced. The sun came up much more quickly than he'd felt it should have. Where did the time go? He only realized he was talking to himself mid-conversation, because he'd been surprised to hear someone shouting, and even more surprised to find it was him. Where did his mind go? If he didn't find some way to anchor himself, he was going to completely lose it, he thought, watching several new cognitive systems warning messages join the endless scroll.

He sat down in the shade, hoping it would be enough to keep him from solar charging, and thought of Siobhan. He could go find her—no, he was a danger to everyone, but he was especially a danger to her. All that Flip had to do was stay here and not risk spreading the Virus, and she'd be safe from him. By the time he was watching the stars wheel overhead again at odd, seemingly variable speeds, he'd worn the edges off the thought until all that it said was that if he stayed here, then she'd be safe.

Flip clung to that as hard as he could, until he forgot where he'd gotten the idea and it passed into delusion. That was just as well, he thought in a more lucid moment. He wouldn't question it that way. Even the Virus couldn't argue with it. Anything it suggested, whatever sneaky way it tried to wheedle him into leaving the Sky Lagoon ruins, he could counter it with, Right, but then Siobhan won't be safe, and it seemed to have nothing to say to that. He could feel it creeping through his code, physically, like poison in his nanofluid veins, editing here, inserting here, deleting there, doing whatever it wanted to his mind and body.

As long as he could cling to the memory of Siobhan, Flip knew, he had something that it couldn't touch. Do whatever to me. I don't care about myself, and I won't let you make me hurt Siobhan, so I'm going to win in the end regardless.

Even so, some number of days that he couldn't really count later, he realized that he hardly remembered what Siobhan looked like. Flip knew that she was really important. He had died for her. He knew that. He had to die for her again. He knew that, too. She was his only compass, the north star to which all his systems had to point for fear of pointing anywhere else.

Unquantifiable time happened to him, and Flip barely knew who he was. The Maverick Virus was hollowing him out, a little bit at a time, to be a better vessel for someone else entirely. But he could fight it, he thought, probably out loud, though he couldn't be sure at this point. He just had to hold onto this one thing. He wasn't entirely sure who or what a Siobhan was, but he could remember that she had to be kept Safe at any cost, and if he moved from this area, she wouldn't be Safe. His task was simple. Everything else could go. He didn't need it where he was going.

After days, or weeks, or hours, or years, Flip's power systems began to lose the battle against entropy, finally, and he laid sprawled on the ground, watching his percentage slowly slide. He had no concept of time outside of that number as it ticked down. Most of his mind raged, trying to move him from the dirt, threatening and cajoling and promising. He still burned, but he'd stopped really feeling it. The chaos inside of his head was only so much background noise.

"I bet Sarge is disappointed," he said to nobody on one cloudy, early summer morning, and giggled weakly, vaguely wondering who Sarge was. The sun wasn't enough to bring his levels up, because something had gone wrong with his power systems' firmware as the Virus had taken over, and he was bleeding energy faster than he could recharge. Finally. Even if the Virus could have convinced him to get up and run, he wouldn't have made it anywhere interesting before collapsing. "I win," Flip declared, and closed his eyes.

Rain began to fall, pattering soothingly on his armor and chassis. For the first time since…whatever had happened, he could no longer entirely recall but he was reasonably certain from his surroundings that the world had ended…Flip wasn't on fire. Whether the Virus had given up, or he'd run too low on power to feel it anymore, he didn't really care. It was wonderful, and he smiled. He was done. Siobhan was safe, whoever that was, whatever that meant. He could rest.

>W.00002-NRG: Battery at two percent.
>W.00001-NRG: Battery at one percent.
>A.00000-NRG: Battery failure.

"Whoa. Someone's intact over here. Looks dead, but he's actually in one piece."

"And covered in weeds. He's been dead a while, seems like."

Flip registered voices. He had a vague sense that this wasn't supposed to happen at all but it kept happening anyway, though he wasn't remotely lucid enough to explain that to himself. He booted up as though he was floating up from the ocean floor, slowly and with an avalanche of errors…and yet, he still managed to initialize enough to open his eyes.

"Rusty fuck," swore one of the voices near him, and Flip dimly heard something jump back. "He's not dead?"

Flip sat up, slowly and stiffly. Things were in his joints that shouldn't have been there. Beetles had moved into his armor. Grass had rooted in between a few of his plates. He fished a fallen leaf out of his mouth and stared at it, confused.

"Keep your distance, I'm getting some Viral readings from this one."

Flip squinted at the source of the speech, trying to get his optics to focus, but at some point his eyes had filled with dust and pollen, and blinking wasn't helping. Viral…right. His memory was so scrambled that he could barely make sense of the data, and that was because…

"Stay away from me," he warned, in an uncalibrated, digital croak, from a voice that had filled with rain and dried several times over. He barely remembered how to even use it. "Please. I don't want to hurt anyone. I haven't hurt anyone. But I'm…not safe."

The two fell back and discussed this unexpected revelation. The most Flip could make out was that they wore Hunter colors. His hands twitched and his feet itched. It wasn't as severe as it had been, before, but something inside him was waking up with him, and it craved nothing more than to get to them, get into them, make them into more of itself, and he had to contain it. Flip's hands curled into fists, and he wrapped his arms around his knees, trying to keep himself still. The monster in his head wanted out. He had to hold it in.

"How long you been here?" one of them called back to him.

"I don't know," Flip answered, honestly. "Since…the…" What had happened? Bits and pieces of it came back to him. The world had…ended? No, obviously not, if other people still existed. "Since…" He remembered…shadow, and noise, and blasting wind, and…

"Since Repliforce dropped Sky Lagoon? Kid, that's been a while."

"Sky Lagoon," Flip echoed. "Yeah. I remember. This was Reset Point…and Sky Lagoon crashed. And I…saved Siobhan, and I died, and…then I didn't die…? They…infected me…?"

One of the Hunters looked at the other. "This poor bastard," he murmured. "What do we do with him? He's not violent, at least."

"See if they can unscramble and clean him, I guess. Maybe he'll know something." He raised his voice. "We're gonna take you in and try to fix you, kid. But we'll have to deactivate you to do it, and if we can't, that's that."

"You can fix me? Please." Flip almost crawled towards them, but remembered at the last moment that he was contagious, and it wasn't him moving his arms and legs. He clamped down on his self-control, and the Virus countered by lighting him on fire as a punishment. He flinched, then realized it was a hallucination, and the burning feeling was just his sensors malfunctioning again.

One of the Hunters pressed a few buttons on his rifle. "This won't feel like much," he promised, then aimed at Flip. Before he could even register a reaction, the entire world crackled into static and vanished.

Well, he wasn't wrong, that was pleasant in comparison to everything up until now, was Flip's last thought.

Flip was beginning to be very tired of waking up thinking he was dead. Surely this was going to have some kind of long-lasting psychological implications, he thought, finding himself half-awake at best and inside a capsule, surrounded by human programmers. This was a major improvement over the last few times, and he could actually remember those and even assemble a complete thought, so something must have been going right for the first time in…no, he still had no idea what was going on with his system clock, and he had no idea how long this had been going on. Too long. Good enough as an estimate.

"Hey," one of the programmers said, putting her hand on the glass. Flip tried to reach out, and to his relief, he found that he could, and he didn't have to fight any horrible thing inside of his own circuits to do so. He pressed his hand to the inside of the glass, meeting hers. "We got you. Just get some rest," she said.

That sounded fantastic, so he closed his eyes and let his hand drop.

"Flip! You're alive! I can hardly believe it!"

"He's still reinitializing. Give him a second."

Whatever was wrapped around him didn't move, and Flip was getting far too used to this process. He didn't really want to wake up, if he had to be honest, but it was happening to him anyway. Maybe he could just…not open his eyes for a bit.

"Is he supposed to boot up this slowly?"

"He's been through a lot. We don't know how much, and he might not remember clearly. It's hard to say. We did what we could with his memories, but the Virus did a lot of damage, and we couldn't repair everything."

"C'mon, Flip, wake up. It's me."

That was a little intriguing, he had to admit. He couldn't really place the voice, but clearly he was supposed to. Flip opened his eyes.

His systems felt unfamiliar, like they'd been installed backwards, again. His optics struggled to focus. It was always too bright, he thought. If anybody ever asked him, he'd recommend that bringing back the dead really should happen in a much darker room. When he finally managed to see with some clarity, he found himself looking at a reploid in pink and red, with golden-red hair, freckles, and an enormous smile beneath incongruously haunted pale-green eyes.

Flip didn't immediately recognize her. He should, he thought. She seemed important. Bits and pieces of his memory pinged urgently at him, but he couldn't seem to synthesize them into a single recollection.

"Flip," she said again, and her eyes filled with happy tears. "How do you feel?"

Flip just kept staring at her face. Surely he'd remember in a moment. He knew her, he knew he did, he just…couldn't place her whatsoever. The sense of familiarity was overwhelming. The details simply didn't exist. "I'm…alright, I think?" he said, hoping that maybe she'd say something that would make everything snap into place. "I think. This is real, right? I'm not hallucinating again? I'm…safe to be around?"

"You are," said the other voice, which turned out to be a human. Flip thought he recognized her from a brief flash of lucidity during the reprogramming process, maybe. "We couldn't remove everything, and we couldn't repair everything, but you're not considered infected, and the residual code isn't at all contagious or dangerous."

"Residual…code," he said, trying to process that. "How much?"

"About eight percent," she answered.

"Of his total code?" the female reploid asked. She still hadn't stopped hugging Flip, and he was beginning to despair that he might not recognize her at all.

"Right," the programmer said. "And his memories are…well, in most cases we've seen, over time, he'll learn to access them, but at the moment, he may not remember much."

That explained that, then, Flip thought. "I'm just glad he's okay," the reploid replied, hugging him again. Flip hugged her back, because it seemed like the right thing to do, and he still felt like he should know her. "But you remember me," she asked, sitting back. "Right?"

As Flip wracked his memory desperately, unable to answer, the slow evolution of her smile into something that only resembled a smile in the most superficial of ways might as well have uninstalled his power core with nothing more than a hammer and chisel.

"Give him some time," the programmer said, gently. "He has pretty advanced memory degradation. We've been seeing a lot of that recently with this iteration of the Virus, especially if they fought it, and from what we could tell from analyzing him, he fought tooth and nail for months."

"Months," Flip echoed. "How long has it been since…the…uh…" He frowned, trying to remember the name. 'Since the world ended' came to mind, but no, that wasn't what had happened. That was just what he'd feverishly started to believe after long enough. Eventually, it came back to him. "Sky Lagoon fell?"

"Ten months," the reploid answered. "You've been here, being repaired and recoded, for two of them."

If Flip hadn't already been sitting down, he would have needed to sit down. "Ten months," he repeated, in disbelief. Most of a year. How had he survived that? Well, he hadn't, he thought, dimly remembering at least that much. He hadn't survived it several times in a row, really. Being alive just kept happening to him regardless of his opinion on the matter.

"It was too long," the reploid said. "Oh, I thought you were dead, Flip, I thought you'd killed yourself saving me. I was so…" She shook her head. "But it's okay now. You're alive, and I'm alive, and…" She trailed off, haunted again for a moment until she snapped back to the present. The list of survivors must have already run out, Flip realized. "Well, we're alive. That's enough."

"I saved you," Flip said. That jogged something in his mind. He had saved someone once, someone important to him, who had only become more and more important afterwards even though he couldn't see her.

"Yes!" she said, excitedly. "You have to remember that, don't you? You got us away before it fell, and I thought for sure you must have fried yourself. You were running so hot, I thought, there was no way you didn't. I couldn't even touch you." She held her hands out, palms up, and they had darker tan marks in the synthetic skin, like she'd touched something scorching hot. Her fingerprints were indistinct, partly burnt off, and she hadn't replaced the skin yet.

"I…sort of remember. You called my name," he said, with a frown, trying as hard as he could to recall. "I remember thinking…as long as you were safe, whatever happened to me wasn't important."

"Oh, Flip," she said.

"So you must be…" Flip stared into her face again. It was on the tip of his memory…and he couldn't load it. Something had chewed great, gaping holes into the files, selectively rooting out key facts and details and scrambling them.

"This is Siobhan," the programmer prompted him, and an odd flash of pain shot through one of Flip's optics, just for a moment, as the input flickered out and in again. He pressed a hand to it.

"Are you alright?" Siobhan asked him.

"Yeah. I think so. You're Siobhan." Another pang shot through his eye, but not as harsh as the first. So it finally did even take the idea of her from me, he thought, unable to recall almost anything about her but her name and the briefest glimpses of his dedication to the idea of her, and the new fact that whoever this was sitting in front of him was Siobhan. His eye twinged a third time. I'm eight percent Virus, and even though I'm supposedly safe and it's supposed to be inactive, it's still trying to punish me for thinking of her. Well, if it didn't stop me then, it definitely can't now.

"Yes! I'm Siobhan. Don't worry, Flip, I'll help you remember." She smiled, even though she so clearly wanted to cry, and folded one of his hands between hers. "We'll figure it out together."

Flip nodded, and smiled, and his eye continued to ache any time he looked directly at her.

"But that's not fair," Flip protested. "I'm not infected. I can't even get infected a second time. I did exactly this job for years. I'm literally custom-built for it. What's the issue?"

"It's just company policy," said the reploid on the other end of the video call. "We simply don't hire post-viral reploids. We've had issues in the past, and it's too much of a liability."

"Do you want a letter from the lab? I can send you one right now. I've got the file right here. It's been over twenty years, and I've had zero incidents."

"I'm sure," agreed the reploid mildly. "But even so, I can't change the rules for just anyone who asks, and the early treatments especially were…not as well tested as today's treatments."

"But you're not even hiring reploids who've had the current antivirus, either," Flip argued. "Come on. Just give me a chance. I'm officially cleared for any and all employment."

"I'm sure you are. And I wish you the best of luck in finding it." With a click, they hung up, and the image of their face disappeared. Flip turned away from the screen and sat down on the couch heavily, folding his thrust vanes flat to avoid spearing them right through the cushions, even if spearing something might have improved his mood.

"That makes fifty," he sighed.

"Fifty?" Siobhan asked.

"Yeah. Fifty times, just this year, I got rejected on the background check. Why do I even bother anymore?"

"You'll find something better soon," Siobhan said, trying to be encouraging. "I know you will." She'd landed a job in retail and worked her way up to assistant manager over the years, being shuffled from location to location, but it had never been the same as her old corner store, and it didn't pay as well. Even on their combined incomes, their budget was tight, to put it gently. They had coasted for a while on survivors' fund money after the Sky Lagoon disaster, but only just, and it had finally run out a few years back, leaving them with little to their names and few prospects. Flip required a lot more maintenance than most reploids, partly from lingering post-viral issues, and partly because his new line of work did a nasty number on his systems. He'd been built for speed, not lifting heavy boxes.

"Yeah? I'm too spindly to keep loading trucks. I'm going through nanofluid faster than ever, and I'm only getting slower every day. That's pretty much all you get, when you've got a history of infection. Anything else? You might do some undefined scary thing and freak everyone out. Can't have that, no. Never mind that the main post-viral symptom isn't being violent, it's hurting all the time." Flip, for his part, had struggled to find any place that would hire him. Employers wouldn't let him work with the public. He couldn't work with money, or anything valuable. He didn't even get so much as a call back for office jobs, with a resume of almost entirely manual labor and the occasional bouncer gig stretching out behind him.

Siobhan sat next to him. "How are you feeling, by the way?"

"Honestly? Tired. Like…" Like I should have stayed dead way back when Sky Lagoon fell on us, Flip thought, but he already knew that there was nothing good to be had down that conversational road, just Siobhan crying, and he didn't want that for her. She deserved better, he thought, and the familiar pain shot through half of his head, as it always did. It didn't stop him. All this time later, and she was still his compass, Virus remnants be damned. He would still do anything for her. It just turned out that finding gainful employment that didn't tear him apart was somehow even more difficult than burning himself alive for her.

"…Like I just need a break for once. We haven't had a single normal day in a year, I don't think. Or if we have, I don't remember it." He felt along the seams of his armor, manually releasing the latches via internal command and tossing each piece aside. It had been a lot easier with a system to do it for him, but they couldn't afford to replace the one he'd lost in Reset Point. He still couldn't even afford to replace the helmet he'd lost somewhere in the shockwave, and he'd stopped trying to save up for it. Even now, they only had one recharge pod between the two of them.

"So let's go have a normal day tomorrow," Siobhan suggested. "We're both off, right? We can go out, see a movie maybe, go for a walk…I don't know. Whatever you want to do."

"A walk sounds…" Slow, he thought. But Siobhan couldn't think of anything except the day of the disaster if he carried her, no matter how calmly and no matter how long it had been, so he would go at her speed without a word of protest. "…Nice, I guess. Yeah. We could go for a walk. Let's do that."

Siobhan slid into his arms, and the two of them curled up on the couch, unmoving and quiet. Reploids didn't have biological urges, but one didn't need those to find closeness comforting. Comfort was in short enough supply. The war was over, Flip thought. Things should have been better. Why were they worse instead? Could it really be over for him when he was still, forever, eight percent Maverick Virus? Was it over for Siobhan, if she still had to live with him like this?

Some transmitter I am, he mused. She'd be happier without me. Flip had discovered, though, that as hard as he'd clung to Siobhan's memory to survive, she'd done the same. After the disaster, the only thing that had kept her loading up at the start of every day was the idea that Flip had died for her, so she owed it to him to carry on. It was only natural, from a reploid perspective, that they had fallen into a relationship after that.

Flip was her transmitter, and that meant something in reploid society that didn't translate well to human society. If there was a decision to be made, he made it on behalf of both of them. Siobhan was his receiver. She went along with whatever he decided, often without question. Humans didn't tend to understand the unilateral connection setup, he'd learned, and he'd stopped trying to explain it. If any asked, he called Siobhan his girlfriend, though that was a gross oversimplification.

He didn't call the shots for any love of power or want to dominate in the relationship. If anything, he saw her as holding the power. Any decision he made was for her well-being, first and foremost, and he didn't hesitate to consult her about it, even if she didn't usually offer input on her own. She struggled to make decisions about anything after the disaster. He did too, if he were to be entirely honest, but he could do it so that she didn't have to. She trusted him with her happiness, and he would protect that happiness, because it was his, too. It was that simple.

Humans often looked at them and decided there was some manner of sexism or religious fundamentalism in play, which only made them both snort with laughter. Neither of them believed in any kind of theism. They'd been randomly assigned a vaguely gendered appearance and some pronouns. Even a handful of such assignments would inevitably generate a pair that looked male and female to the casual onlooker. Reploid relationships simply operated on very different dynamics, with no reference to human parameters.

The next day, they set off on their walk. Flip and Siobhan had an apartment near the enormous wall around the Abel City quarantine zone. It wasn't related to, or even near, the Sky Lagoon quarantine zone. The damage caused by Maverick attacks, especially towards the end, had been so extensive that most major metropolitan areas had at least one section cordoned off until further notice, if not a few. The only positive about the situation was that the housing around them tended to be very affordable. It also tended to be cramped, not well maintained, poorly policed, and mainly populated by reploids, who over the long years of never-ending war against others of their kind had found themselves pushed further and further to the margins.

It wasn't the nicest area, but it was home, and not much usually happened there. The wall itself tended to be the safest area due to the number of cameras mounted on it, and that was where the two of them walked.

"Maybe I should change careers," Flip mused, as they walked. The morning sun shone on this side of the wall, and it improved his mood, even if he still found it a little too bright ever since everything. "What do you think? Maybe I should be a stuntman or something."

"I think you have to apprentice for that," Siobhan said. "Or just be custom-ordered to be one from the start. Haven't you had enough excitement already, anyway?"

"Yeah, true. I'd say I should get a boring office job, but I think I've gotten turned down for every single one in a twenty mile radius of us. What else is boring, anyway? Fast food?"

"That's the opposite of boring, and you don't even have a sense of taste," Siobhan pointed out, with a small smile.

"Right…taste. Uh. Postal worker, maybe? Wait, no, that's government, and you can't get government work when you're post-viral, never mind. Tax—no, that's government too. I could join the Maverick Hunters, they definitely take post-viral reploids, but I think the irony might do me in if the Mavericks don't. Help, Sho, I'm bad at this."

"Think about something else, Flip, seriously. We're relaxing today. Give it a rest."

"Yeah, okay. So, uh. How about the sports? That's a normal conversation topic that isn't job hunting, I'm pretty sure."

"The sports are doing fine, last I saw," Siobhan replied, humoring him. "There were points and somebody won. It was very exciting."

"Good for them. With the, uh, ball and everything. Damn, I'm really bad at this, aren't I? I swear I used to know how to carry a conversation."

The streets were empty, except for the two of them, and a small group of humans further down the sidewalk. Nothing odd about that, Flip thought. A handful of them lived here, too. Times were rough all around, and one's organic or inorganic status had no bearing on the need for affordable rent.

"Do you want to catch a movie soon, maybe? Matinee showing?" Siobhan suggested.

Flip thought it over. "Yeah. We could save a few zenny going earlier. Sounds like a plan."

They walked past the humans, or at least tried to, but one of them stuck his arm out, stopping Flip in his tracks. The other two fell around them in a loose triangle. "Hey, buddy," he said. "How about you give me that bag?"

Flip tightened his grip on the shoulder strap of his messenger bag. It wasn't nearly as nice as the one he used to have, back when he was a newly built young thing, but all the same it had been a gift from Siobhan once he'd recovered enough to finally leave the lab, and he'd taken care of it over the years. "There's nothing in it," he admitted, fighting a rising urge to…he wasn't sure what, but he didn't like it. He felt like…like…he couldn't quite put his finger on it. Whatever it was, it was encoded in some buried memory, still scrambled.

"Didn't ask." He grabbed the strap and pulled. Flip pulled back.

"I feel like you're not quite understanding the situation, here," another one of the men said. "We're not gonna ask nicely a second time."

"Are you stupid? The cameras are right there," Siobhan objected, though she shrank away from the two closest to her and closer to Flip. "It's broad daylight."

"Yeah, they sure are, so play nice and don't do anything stupid, and you won't get hunted. Come on, Miss Toaster, empty your pockets."

"I don't even have pockets," Siobhan said. "Please. We literally aren't carrying anything." She backed into Flip, who was still playing a heated game of tug-of-war with one of their would-be muggers.

"Don't give us that shit. You both look expensive. You gotta have something."

One of the men grabbed Siobhan's hair, and she squeaked in fear. A stab of pain so intense that for an instant Flip irrationally thought he'd been shot lanced through the left side of his head, optics to cranial plates, and several of his old missing memories began to unscramble themselves, unraveling so rapidly it made him dizzy.

He clapped a hand to his eye, staggering, and the mugger ripped his bag away with a triumphant scoff.

The eight percent of the fearsome monster still inside of his head and the ninety two percent of the reploid inside of his head saw eye-to-eye for just a split second, but that was long enough. Something rearranged itself in his code, settled into place with a click, and vanished, fully integrated. Ah. That's right. I remember everything now, Flip realized, with startling clarity.

Siobhan, his North Star in the endless months he spent watching the night sky wheel overhead, waiting for the end.

Siobhan, the center of his universe, obliterated from his memories by the Virus until nothing remained but the black hole of his emotions and the gravity that kept him in her orbit.

Siobhan, who he'd had to get to know all over again, because the Virus still hadn't released its grip on her inside his mind until this very moment.

He would gladly give his life for her as many times as he had a life to give; then, now, and forever. The voice inside his head that he had been so terrified of for so many years sounded exactly like his own.

I can die for her. I can kill for her. I can do anything for her. I always could. I always will.

Flip's propulsion system engaged all at once, kicking on as cleanly and smoothly as the day he was activated. In the first instant, he caught up to the man fleeing with his bag. In the next, he grabbed the man's coat with both hands, pivoting around him and leaving him off-balance. In the next instant, he threw the human with all his might and leverage, sending him crashing to the ground. Flip took his bag back as he zipped past him. The one threatening Siobhan he caught in one hand by the neck, accelerating him into the wall with a sickening crunch. The third tried to run, but he may as well have tried to run from a lightning bolt as Flip fell on him without hesitation, dashing him to the ground so hard he bounced and did not move again.

He turned back to Siobhan, splattered with blood, and stopped dead in his tracks. She stared at him in mute horror. The heat of whatever had come over him ran out of him like ice water, as suddenly as it had happened.

"Sho," he said.

"Flip," she said, trembling.

Flip looked up at the rows of cameras monitoring the street. "I…I…they were going to hurt you…I have to go. You didn't do anything wrong. You're still okay. I have to…I have to get away from you. The Hunters won't hurt you. If I run now, you'll be safe—" he stammered.

"No. I'm going with you," she said, still terrified, nearly inaudible.

Flip shook his head, thrust guides extending, eyeing the top of the wall. He could make that height, no problem, while his systems were working so strangely well. He'd run hot, but it wasn't the end of the world, this time. "No. You…you run home. You don't have to follow me here. You shouldn't be around me. I'm a Maverick, but you don't have to be. I'll run, and you go the other way, and—"

Siobhan looked at Flip. She looked at the cameras. She looked at the broken man lying on the ground at her feet, half-consciously moaning, and kicked him in the ribs, only once but hard, still staring into the camera like a deer in the headlights. She looked back to Flip. "I said, I'm going with you," she repeated again, barely any louder, but more firmly. "I'm a Maverick. Save me, Flip."

Flip inhaled sharply with surprise, then exhaled. "Okay," he said, with a nod, then again, "okay. I'm sorry. I'll save you. I'll do anything for you. Hang on." He scooped her into his arms. She held onto him, tightly, with her eyes closed and her face buried in his chest. He crouched, angled his thrust guides to compensate for the new center of gravity, and leapt, pushing against the sidewalk with all his might.

They cleared the wall. They did not look back.

Chapter Text

"Alright," X began, standing in front of the assembled entirety of the encampment. It was a chilly, damp morning, and the warmth of the fire pit was the only thing keeping him on his feet. "I realize that most of you aren't combat units. That's okay. I'm not actually a combat unit by design, either. You don't need to be one to learn to defend yourself. It helps, but the basics are something that anybody at all can learn and practice."

He looked over the group. Kathy had a notebook out. Flip simply nodded along, sitting next to Siobhan, who was watching a spot about a foot to the left of X's feet. Cirocco and Trigger seemed bored, but X suspected they were designed for combat or at least scouting, so this likely didn't strike them as applicable. Valentina was enthralled, which was a little weird, and the twins, Focus and Drive, paid polite attention without making eye contact. Hammer sat with his arms loosely crossed, and Mack…well, X would need to figure out how to make this lesson work for a completely non-humanoid reploid, but it too listened. Glitch sat cross-legged next to Mack, visibly eager to learn something he expected would be fun. He and X had spent the previous day assembling his sensors, and then, at X's recommendation, they'd recruited Mack and started on a new project for the evening.

"Ideally, we'd have dedicated training weapons and programmable targets," he continued, "but that's obviously not the reality we have here. However, Glitch, Mack, and I worked something out that's almost as good." He unholstered the handheld buster from his belt, other hand on his cane. A long, spliced-in cord trailed from it. "We've repaired a few broken busters into training weapons. They don't fire standard rounds, but…"

X turned, aimed one-handedly at a stack of concrete blocks they'd set up and painted a bullseye onto, and pulled the trigger. There was a brief flash, and a faint bolt splashed against the target, leaving a mild scorch almost dead center. "They're wired to the generator. They aren't powerful enough to use in a real combat situation, but they are enough for practice."

He held the buster up, turning it a bit so that everyone could see what he was indicating. "Rule number one: this is the safety switch. Keep it off at all times unless you are actively in combat. Rule two: never point it at anyone, even with the safety engaged, unless you intend to shoot them. Rule three: keep your finger off the trigger at all times, even with the safety engaged, unless you intend to fire. If there is a single thing you take from this, let it be how not to accidentally shoot your allies."

"Question," said Mack.

"Yes, it still applies even if you don't have fingers," X answered, before Mack could even make its joke. X had expected this, because it had made a similar joke no fewer than four times over the course of their refitting the broken busters into training pieces, and X was beginning to see where Glitch got his tendency to make hand puns. Or maybe Mack got it from Glitch. Either way, this was someone's fault.

"Damn," Mack said. A ripple of laughter spread throughout the group.

"Now, we didn't have time to set up a training buster for everyone this morning, so you'll need to share, but if you could follow me, we've got something to show you…"

X, Mack, and Glitch had worked late into the wee hours of the morning converting as many non-functional busters as they could cobble together, and Hammer had painted targets along one of the walls of the garage in the open space beyond the town center building.

"So this is what you were up to!" Valentina exclaimed. "I thought you were all awfully thick as thieves yesterday."

Glitch took a bow. "You're welcome."

"We've got about half as many as we need, so everyone choose a partner you can trade off with, and I'll show you the basics of target shooting…"

X was in his element. As much as he disliked violence, he did like teaching. He walked up and down the line, cane thumping on the concrete, correcting posture and technique as he spotted mistakes.

Mack couldn't hold a buster, of course, so it took a technical role, ensuring that nobody tangled their power cables too badly and repairing any malfunctioning training weapons. The partner groupings were as X would have guessed: Kathy and Hammer, Focus and Drive, Flip and Siobhan, Cirocco and Trigger, and finally Glitch and Valentina as the remainder, though they got on well enough that it didn't much matter.

"Both eyes open," X advised Kathy. "It's tempting to sight with just one, but you can't benefit from your depth perception with one closed."

Kathy lined up her shot and took it, the bolt hitting several inches off-center. She sighed. "I'm not cut out for this."

"It's a learned skill," X reassured her.

"Not the aiming part," Kathy explained. X wasn't entirely sure what Glitch had told her about him, but whatever it was, between his report and X's offer to teach everyone some self-defense, her attitude towards him had suddenly warmed. "I mean the part where we're practicing so we can shoot other reploids. It just feels…bad."

"Ah. If it helps, it should feel bad to think about. This is meant to be a last resort, in case we need to defend home or each other. I'd be a lot more worried if you thought it sounded like fun." Behind him, Valentina hit the middle ring of her target and giggled excitedly. X briefly glanced over his shoulder at her with a deadpan expression.

"You're right, but…no, I shouldn't complain. You three, and Hammer as well, put a lot of work into this, and I appreciate it." She turned to the target again, careful to keep both eyes open, and fired several shots. They fell closer, at least.

Hammer chuckled. "I stacked some blocks and stenciled some paint. Don't give me too much credit." Kathy handed him the gun, and he took his time sighting it. There was a laser dot on the target from somewhere, X realized, and before he could ask, five shots in rapid succession burned themselves into the dead center of the bullseye.

"Alright, yeah, this ain't half bad when you got a built-in laser," he concluded with a cheerful laugh.

"That's cheating," Flip said, handing his training buster off to Siobhan.

"Nah. That's usin' all the resources available to me," Hammer corrected him. He fired another salvo, lining the shots up carefully before taking them. "Ain't my fault they didn't give you a laser guide."

"I wonder if Glitch could install one for me…" Flip started to say, but Siobhan paused in her aiming and silently gave him A Look. "…I wasn't really going to do it."

"It isn't a competition," Siobhan said, quietly, which was as many words as X had ever heard out of her at once. This must be what I'm like to everyone else here, he thought, feeling self-aware and self-conscious at the same time. Maybe he could stand to be a little more outgoing.

"It's a competition if we end up having to face off against the Drifters. Or the Hunters," Flip added, crossing his arms.

X turned to him. "If it's the Hunters, don't," he advised, seriously. "You'd do better to run. They eventually deprioritize non-aggressive targets, and they're more likely to sentence you to time than decommissioning."

Flip scoffed. "At this point, I'd rather just be decommissioned. Besides, they'd…have one look at me and just scrap me anyway," he said, expression souring, but he offered no explanation, and X decided to not press for one. Whatever Flip was thinking, he'd share if he wanted to share, and until then, it wasn't X's business.

"Fair enough," X conceded. "Not that I'm condoning shooting at the Hunters, but…" Now it was his turn to make a face like he'd detected a mouthful of citric acid. "…or maybe that is what I just said," he mumbled, mostly to himself. The fact that he was arming and training a group of irregulars and Mavericks still sat strangely with him, even though he kept reminding himself that he was, by definition of doing what he was doing, one of them now.

"Anyway," he said, pushing the thought back under the surface to stew a while longer. "Ah, Siobhan, move your grip higher and hold it more tightly. You'll have a more stable shot that way." He had a broken and unplugged buster, which he held to demonstrate. "And when you pull the trigger, use the middle of your first finger pad, right here." X held the dummy weapon out, showing her exactly where his finger fell on it. "That'll keep your trigger pull as horizontal as possible, so you don't tip it back when you actually fire."

Siobhan nodded, silently, and tried to do as he said. She held the buster like she was afraid of it, and X holstered his demonstration piece and reached to adjust her hands. He was suddenly very aware that Flip was hovering just behind his right shoulder defensively, but he focused on the task. "Like this. It won't hurt you. Even if you somehow took a hit from one of the training weapons, it would sting, but you'd be more annoyed than injured."

He stepped back, and Siobhan held the weapon out in front of her. "Like this?" she asked.

X looked over her stance and grip. "Looks good. Try that." She pulled the trigger, timidly, but her shot flew true, striking a little to the upper left but much more accurately.

"Much better," he said, and she smiled the tiniest little smile he'd ever seen at the praise.

Focus and Drive were busily correcting each other's posture in such rapid-fire I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. that he couldn't begin to keep up, or even find a place to interrupt edgewise, but they seemed to have it well in hand so he left them to it. Trigger and Cirocco had already scored the paint in the center of their target dark with practice shots.

"Shots drift to right side," Trigger said, his voice heavily accented with Russian, and X realized that he'd never really heard the corviform reploid speak, other than a single 'hello' and some crow-like sounds at Cirocco. Indeed, he'd hardly even encountered either of the reploids around home, though he'd gotten the impression that they spent most of their time scavenging resources.

"Sorry. It's the best we could do refurbishing broken equipment in a hurry," X explained. "I want to do some maintenance on the actual weapons soon and make sure we won't have this problem if we need them."

"Not to worry. Is impressive you do this so fast," Trigger said, fluffing and settling the overlapped steel feathers that covered the back of his head and neck. "For broken gun, is very good."

Cirocco chuffed in amusement and darkened the middle of the target further with a burst of fire. "If anything actually happens, you can keep your busters. I've got my own methods." She lowered the weapon and turned to X, flexing a hand. Thick claws unfolded from her fingertips, and her hand was suddenly much less a hand and more a heavy paw. "But it's good practice."

"If anything happens, you take buster and stay out of live fire," Trigger scolded her, which only prompted another canine snort of laughter.

"There'll be a lot less shooting going on if they don't have arms to hold their busters," she retorted.

X looked between the two. This seemed to be a verbal spar they had performed countless times before, but he still cut in. "Be that as it may, we don't want to scrap anybody if we don't explicitly need to. There'll be much less reason to escalate in force if we can repel intruders with minimal violence."

"Gavno," Cirocco muttered.

Glitch piped up from the next lane. "Zatknis'."

"Idi na hui," Cirocco shot back, with feeling.

"Ya by vas paslal, da vizhu vy ottuda," Glitch chortled.

"Oh my God, both of you," Valentina interjected. Trigger emitted a croaking rattle that it took X a moment to understand was in fact laughter.

"You have no idea what we were saying," Glitch countered.

"I know it was rude!"

"Val. That's xenophobic. You can't just assume anything you hear in a different language is rude."

"No, but I can assume anything you and Cirocco are saying to each other in Russian is rude!"

Glitch sighed dramatically. "She's got me there." Then, gripped with sudden inspiration, Glitch spun to X, a troublemaking grin on his face. "Oi, V. Nihongo wo shabereru kai."

"Iya, ore wa sono geemu wo asobitakunain da," X said, firmly denying Glitch any further chance to be a polyglot troll.

Glitch intensified his wounded act. "Oh, you're no fun, either." Valentina thumped the buster into his chest plates, sideways and with the safety engaged, X was relieved to note.

"Your turn," she declared, mostly to shut him up.

"If you shoot buster half as good as you shoot mouth, we are safe from anything," Trigger croaked in amusement.

Glitch huffed and took the weapon. He adjusted his grip, switched the safety off, planted his feet, and swept it up in one smooth arc, firing off a burst of plasma bolts the very instant he aligned the buster's barrel with his target.

The other four simply watched the resulting wisp of smoke drift off. "Well, I do have to give you full points for precision," X admitted, after a few moments, "but your accuracy…"

"Yeah," Valentina said. "Your…accuracy."

"You would not hit long side of warehouse if you stand next to it," Trigger agreed.

"My aim isn't that bad," Glitch objected.

X settled both hands on the handle of his cane, smiling mildly. "So, you were aiming for the back wall? That's…a creative take on the exercise, I'll give you that."

"Trigger was half right. You do shoot from the hip regardless of the context," Cirocco snickered, tail swishing behind her. "But maybe try aiming next time?"

Glitch harrumphed aloud, and X patted him on the shoulder. "Speed in combat isn't a matter of processor speed. It's about knowing what to expect, and moving fluidly, so you arrive where you need to be at the exact moment you need to be there. No sooner, no later. Practice carefully, and you'll perform quickly. Practice quickly, and you'll perform sloppily. It's not about impressing anybody. Besides, I already know you're an alright shot if you aren't rushing."

Glitch exchanged a look with him. If this were coming from anybody else in the entire world, it seemed to say, I'd tell them where to shove it. After a moment, he gave up with another melodramatic sigh and lifted the buster again, adjusting his grip. "Fine, fine, Mister Former Hunter. I'll try it your way."

"Glad to hear it. I'll be back around in fifteen. I need to sit down." X retreated to sit on a crate at the fire pit. The flames flickered lower, so he tossed a few pieces of scrap in and waited for them to catch. He hadn't really had time to recharge or even rest the previous night, and the all-nighter fatigue was already catching up to him. Once upon a time I could go days between needing a break to defragment, he thought ruefully, fighting off sleepiness unsuccessfully. I really never appreciated it enough when I had it.

Mack trundled over. "Seems like it's going well so far," it said. "How are you holding up?"

"Huh?" X jarred awake and sat up straighter, then realized it was only the C-15 and relaxed. "Oh. I'm alright. The weather gets into my joints and I could use a recharge and defrag soon, but I've had worse."

"If we do end up having to fight," Mack said, tucking its feet underneath itself next to X's crate, "what do you think our odds are?"

"Well, that depends on a lot of things," X replied, thoughtfully. "How many opponents we have, how well armed they are, how much practice time we have, what kind of warning did we get…there are a lot of variables. I don't think I could give an answer right now. The more important thing is to get in as much training as we can and shore up our defenses. Speaking of which, how is that going so far?"

"Hammer and I were working on it yesterday, before we started the training weapon project. We've got plans drawn up for a new wall on the far corner, that way," it gestured vaguely with its eyes, "and we've pulled a bunch of rebar out of the surrounding buildings to work with. Concrete's difficult, but Cirocco and Trigger are hauling everything they can carry from the nearest home supply store. So far, nobody's bothered them. We can stretch it out pretty far with blocks and rubble as infill, so that should help. I was thinking after this I'd go draft out the plan on the floor and we could start staging materials."

X nodded approvingly. "That sounds like a plan. Any ideas on the upper floor ramp?" he asked.

"I think we can turn a few cars on their side and weld them into place. It's not perfect, but they'd be endangering themselves to spend much time out in the open trying to get around that. Hopefully they don't get any bright ideas about making a mess on the roof to give away our location, but I don't know what we'd do about that even if they did."

The notion raised X's anxiety by a notch, but he pushed that back under the surface for later, too. "We'll deal with it if it happens," he replied. "Blocking the roof should be enough to start. If the Drifters do attack, we'll need someone behind the front lines who's capable of supplying ammunition to the defenders. That's where you'll come in."

Mack stood a little taller. "That's what I'm good at. Unless they get close enough for the laser cutter, but we've got larger problems if that happens. Speaking of ammunition, I don't suppose you have any ideas for recharging old buster packs?"

"It's not really my area of expertise. You'd want to talk to Glitch about that and see if he's got any ideas. I don't want to have to bank on assuming they've got the same ammo shortage that we do, but it may come to that." X gazed into the fire pit, the heat finally reaching his aching joints. The rest of his systems complained a bit at the temperature cycling, but it was still better than the cold.

"Mack, you've been declared Maverick," X started, apropos of nothing obvious to anybody but him. "What's that like for you?"

"Hmm. I'm not sure it's like anything for me." The little C-15 shuffled its feet in a way that X was beginning to recognize as the equivalent of rubbing one's chin in thought. "I never had the orientation that other reploids had, because I'm not supposed to be here. Even without that, there's no place in society for a model like me. I could do a mechaniloid's job, but if I wanted anything else out of life I'd need to be transferred into an entirely new body, except I couldn't afford one and I don't want one anyway. And that's all besides the fact that I go where Glitch goes, and he goes where I go."

Glitch's exact words too, X recalled. "I guess that makes sense. I hadn't thought about it quite like that."

Mack looked up at him, tilting its round little body with the effort. "To sum it up in one sentence, I'm irregular because this world doesn't fit me, so I can't be anything else, and I'm a Maverick because I'll defend him with my life, whatever happens. I never had much of a choice to begin with, but where I do have one, I've chosen Glitch over the rest of the world." It paused for a moment, then in its usual deadpan monotone voice, "That's two, but close enough. Trying to sort yourself out?"

At least Mack's answer hadn't sent X into an existential crisis. Or perhaps he'd just gotten better at handling the idea. X wondered what that meant for him, but he wondered it with slightly less dread than usual. "Basically. I don't know where I fit into anything anymore. Any course of action I can imagine from here still isn't the obviously right thing to do, but I'm not sure an obvious right thing to do even exists."

"Ha ha ha," said Mack, and if X hadn't already known quite well that it only had the one tone of voice, he might have assumed it was being rude. "Welcome to the club. It's got a way of sneaking up on you like that."

X groaned. "I was warned." Multiple times, even, and I thought it surely couldn't have applied to me until I was already in well over my head. "But I'm here now. I've picked a direction…all I can do is keep going, I think."

"That's the spirit," Mack agreed. "Stay your course. I'm going to head back over and see if Glitch has shot himself yet just to see how much it hurts."

X frowned at Mack with alarm. "He wouldn't. That would be—"

"He would, and we both know it. Take your time, though. I haven't heard him swearing yet, so it's probably fine." Mack stood, or more accurately, lifted itself up from where its underside rested on the ground, and waddled back to the new firing range, leaving X to wonder just what kind of very low impulse control reploid he'd ended up attached to.

He should probably go back and check everyone's progress again, he thought, but the fire was nice and warm, and the autumn weather was everything his old joints hated. Spending a little more time here wouldn't hurt anything, surely. Five more minutes. Twenty was about the same as fifteen, give or take.

At some point soon, X knew, he would need to find a moment to talk to Glitch alone about their next steps. The sensors still needed to be distributed, but once that was finished, then they could broach the matter of Charles Alderman's fate with Kathy. He didn't look forward to that at all, but he hoped that having Glitch on his side and doing it in private would help manage Kathy's reaction. Come to think of it, they could almost definitely loop Mack in on it. The two were a unit, after all; if he could trust one, he should be able to trust the other. He'd mention it to Glitch next chance he got.

With a tired groan, X planted both hands on his cane and dragged himself to his feet. Keeping the others waiting too long wouldn't do. He took a moment to regain his balance and headed back to the impromptu firing range.

"Alright," he began, raising his voice as much as he could will himself to. Nobody seemed to hear him over the popping of the practice weapons, and while he'd shouted over similar dins countless times in his past, he just couldn't seem to muster the volume now. "Um. Excuse me. Hello. Could I have your attention?"

Hammer went to hand the weapon off to Kathy, and spotted X standing there, looking expectant but ignored. "Here, lemme help you out." He put two fingers in his mouth and blew, emitting a whistle so loud that X, Focus, and Drive all winced. "Hey, listen up! V's talkin'," he announced, once the rest of the reploids had stopped firing and turned to see what he wanted.

X cleared his throat. "Alright. Everyone's had a few practice shots, and your form is looking good. Whenever you've got a spare moment, come put in some time here. We'll try to get more training weapons put together, and if you ever want some critique, you can ask me any time. I'll be glad to give you whatever pointers I've got. Now, on to the next thing…normally that would be weapon maintenance, but the training weapons aren't really going to be a good example for that, so I think we should move to basic maneuvers and tactics…"

By the time they'd gotten through what X considered to be a decent starting lesson, it was late afternoon and he was sitting on the ground, exhausted. Glitch sprawled out on the concrete with several new chips in his paint, loudly contemplating painting himself red again because he'd be faster, while Mack pointed out that then he'd look like a Drifter, and that would be confusing mid-combat. Cirocco sat back on her haunches on all fours, grinning wolfishly and clearly having the time of her life, while Flip and Drive reassured Siobhan and Focus that they were doing great actually. Kathy had given up on clothing and shed hers because it kept snagging on things, while Valentina had added several layers because the concrete was too rough for her, and with Kathy's help she'd tied her long peach-pink hair into a bun after being blinded by it one too many times while trying to army crawl. Hammer and Trigger played paper-rock-scissors for a contested spot in the recharge pods.

"I think," X said, "that maybe I should reconsider how I teach basic training."

"Yeah," Valentina agreed. "You should like, definitely do that."

"I think it went great," said Glitch, still facedown. "I think I could do this all day."

"That's why you're also on the ground?" Kathy asked, fans audibly running overtime. The relatively enclosed area had warmed up considerably with all of them exerting themselves and generating heat. "Because you could do this all day?"

"Yup."

"Sorry. I'm used to, you know. Hunters," said X, making no effort to get up either. "Hunters who signed up for this, on purpose. And also not being such a piece of junk myself. I haven't tried actually doing this since…things happened."

"It's a good day to have the fourth pod finished. And I have first dibs on it, because it's still in my lab."

"Not if I get to it first," Valentina challenged, though she didn't move.

"Race you." Glitch did not at all get up.

"You're on." Valentina stayed right where she was.

For several moments, nothing interrupted the white noise of twelve sets of cooling systems running at full power, except for a quiet exclamation of "Blyat'," as Trigger finally lost the heated match with a poorly-chosen throw of scissors.

"Who's winning?" X asked, thinking about taking his jacket off, but not really feeling inclined to get up just yet. It was not that common for him to run too hot to be comfortable, but he'd managed it for once.

"Me," Glitch and Valentina said, simultaneously.

"Ah," said X. He gave up and limply wiggled out of his jacket.

"So," Cirocco said, grin widening and tail thumping against the concrete floor. "Same time tomorrow morning?"

Nine groans, one '>I.00023-VOC: Decrease vocal volume.', and a weakly thrown piece of concrete were all the answer she received.

Chapter Text

"We are the last line of defense."

Serenity 4.5.5-137 stood at stiff attention, listening raptly. She was one of hundreds of new recruits, and she was so far in the back of the rank and file that she could barely see the blue-plated figure under the lights at the front of the room, but she didn't care.

Her hero was speaking.

He was not particularly loud. They'd put a mic on him to make sure he was audible to the entire assembly. His voice was level, calm, and collected, just as she'd have expected from someone capable of the kind of miracles under stress that he could perform.

"We have been at war for eighty-one years, and at long last, we may be able to end it. We've sequenced the entire Virus and can predict its evolution. We've developed efficient antivirus measures. We can reclaim the infected, and to some extent, we can protect the uninfected from falling. I want nothing more than an end to this bloodshed."

"And yet, just because an end is in sight does not mean that we can afford to relax. The most dangerous enemy is a cornered enemy, and we know enough of the Virus to know that it is a limited, distributed intelligence. It is capable of knowing that it is cornered, and it will do anything in its power to forestall its destruction. This is a critical moment in the war. If we falter here and give it a chance to change its evolutionary trajectory, we could lose everything we have fought for."

"And that is why you are all here. You've chosen to become Maverick Hunters, now, when most would assume the fight is over. The fight will never be over. Even once we eradicate the Virus from the world, there will still be Mavericks, as there were before the Virus existed. Whether or not you directly contribute to the war efforts, you will contribute to maintaining peace for humanity, and you should be proud."

Seren—she had never really changed her name much from her series name—felt the emotion rising in her circuits. She was proud. She'd made it through basic training with high marks, and now here she was, in the same room as the legendary Captain X himself.

"I will be honest with you: not all of you are going to survive your time with the Hunters. Be cautious. Be smart. Stay aware of your surroundings. Keep your skills and weapons maintained. Fight defensively. Protect your allies. Whatever happens, remain calm. These are the things that will keep you alive when everything is falling down around you."

X paused, looking over the fresh recruits, and Seren wondered if he saw her. Probably not, considering she was behind two other new recruits in her squadron that were much taller than she was, even at her reasonably tall five foot ten, but that was alright; they were nice enough, so she couldn't be too upset. She would just have to excel, and then maybe she'd actually get to meet him for herself.

"We take great risks in the name of protecting humanity from those reploids who would turn against them. Never forget the price of a moment of inattention. Never forget that even with antivirus, there may still come a day when you may find yourself at the end of a former ally's weapon. There may come a time when you are the only thing between a rampaging Maverick and an innocent human. My fellow Hunters, this is what you are training for. It is not a glorious life, and it is not a safe life, but it is a necessary one. We are the sword and shield. We cannot afford to falter; we cannot afford to fall; we cannot afford to fail."

X saluted, and the assembled recruits saluted him back, with enthusiasm if not perfect synchronization. He left the podium and walked off, discussing something undoubtedly important with a handful of other unit captains.

The rest of the day's induction and orientation was dull in comparison, and during her limited free time that night in the barracks, Seren sat with her two new friends from basic training, a matched set named Ricochet and Trebuchet. They were nearly identical, gray-plated and plain-faced, though Ric had orange trim and Treb had blue.

"I can't believe we were in the same room as him," she said, sitting on the edge of her recharging pod and admiring the new Maverick Hunter logo she'd received. There was a lot of variation in eligible placement, since there was a lot of variation in reploid designs, and she'd chosen to have hers on her left arm. She was programmed left-handed, and had elected to use her sign-on bonus to have high-end buster parts installed directly into that arm.

"You are such a fangirl," Ric ribbed her.

"It is pretty cool, though," Treb agreed. "I mean, he's what, eighty five years old, and still in that good of fighting shape? And on top of that, we're all designed after him? Not every reploid can say they've seen X in person."

"It's like meeting a god, almost," Seren said. "Not that we actually met him, but you know."

"Ha, listen to both of you. Maybe a celebrity, but I think a god is pushing it a bit, don't you? You guys caught the theism virus or something. Next you're gonna start talking like those human-worshiping weirdos you get on street corners."

"Ew, no. That's just too much." Seren wrinkled her nose in distaste. "Miss me with that shit. I joined to protect humans, not be a freak about them. And I know he's not a god or anything, that'd be silly, just…you know, literally everyone's prototype, that's all. No big, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, no big. You really joined to protect humanity? I didn't think anyone still did that," Ric said, a little incredulous.

Seren blinked in surprise, pushing violet hair behind one ear. It matched her general palette: violet, gold, and white. "You didn't? What did you join for, then?"

Ric and Treb exchanged A Loaded Look, but she'd come to expect that of them. They were coprocessors, after all. They knew each other so well they may as well have been able to read each other's minds. "Work sucked," they said, in unison.

"We were warehouse units for a megacorp," Ricochet explained. "Sixteen hour days, all day, every day, and shit for pay too so it wasn't going to be easy to buy our way out."

"Except," Trebuchet added. "We had a contract clause that if we joined the Hunters, boom, we're done with the warehouse, forever. So that made it a pretty easy call, when we decided to get the hell out."

"Basic was still way less work than we were doing," Ric said with a laugh. "Can't scare me with training if it's only ten hours a day. That's basically nothing, at that point."

"Damn," Seren said. "I wanted to join the Hunters basically as soon as I got out of orientation."

"Wait, how old are you?" Treb asked.

"Um. About four months?"

"Oh, you're a shiny little baby," said Ric, laughing even harder. "Four months. You're fresh off the assembly line, still."

"Wh—how old are you two, then?" Seren asked, flustered.

"Three," the two responded in unison.

"Oh, come on. That isn't that old," Seren scoffed. "You don't have room to talk."

Ricochet continued to laugh. "Still twelve times your age. Four months! That explains so much about you."

'>E.04642-SYS: Failure to compile.' said Seren.

"Lights out, everyone, into your pods you go," the unit leader announced. His name was Drakon, and he was a military spec anthropomorph with little tolerance for shenanigans. "You've got a long day tomorrow. And whoever just broadcast an error code, knock it off, the next one I hear's gonna earn your entire squadron extra cleaning duties for the rest of the week."

The Maverick War officially ended on Seren's activation day, and it was the worst gift she could have received. She tried not to show her disappointment, because she knew, CPU to core, that she should be happy. In many ways she was happy, even though it was an all hands on patrol kind of day, what with the entire population of the world celebrating in the streets. She was out for nine hours straight, and watching the whole of the city rejoice couldn't help but rub off on her a little.

But she was also incredibly disheartened, and she didn't want to explain it to anyone, because it was silly and childish and she knew that, too. So she claimed mental fatigue instead, and went to recharge as early as she could turn in. Ric and Treb undoubtedly suspected something, but neither of them brought it up, for which she was grateful.

So she just lay in her pod, pretending to defragment while everyone else who wasn't on patrol threw a massive party in the hangar. Better than bringing down morale, Seren thought, though she wondered if she might run into X there…

No, she decided, he probably wasn't there, or if he was, he probably wasn't partying. X was a lifelong war machine. Could he actually be happy without a war to fight? Could Seren, for that matter? She'd wanted nothing more than to make a difference and become a hero, just like him. Was that even possible, now?

Moreover, if she didn't go to the party, she didn't risk the disappointment of not seeing him there, or the other disappointment of seeing him but not having a chance to talk to him…not that Seren would have known what to say even if it did happen. If she wasn't awake, Seren decided, she wouldn't have to keep going around in circles with herself about it, so she simply stayed in her pod, feeling like some kind of a traitor for being upset that the war had ended without her ever seeing action in it, until she managed to slip into defragment mode.

"I've got to say, your practice simulation scores are some of the highest I've seen for someone who's only been here as long as you have. You've got some real drive," Drakon said, sitting at his desk. It was humorously small for his size, but Seren knew better than to laugh.

"Thank you, sir," she replied, with a snappy salute. She had practiced it to an artform, like everything else she was taught. 'Real drive' was an understatement. Seren had something to prove.

"It's nice to see someone taking it seriously, especially since the war was declared over."

"Of course, sir. We still have Maverick incidents almost daily. It would be irresponsible to relax now."

Drakon nodded approvingly, golden horns glinting. "You're too right. Remind me again. You've been on patrol, but you haven't seen combat, if I recall correctly."

"Unfortunately correct, sir," Seren nodded.

That prompted a raised eyebrow from her CO. "Unfortunately? It's not a bad thing. Just remember, simulation scores don't always translate directly into real life situations. They're good to have, of course, and yours are outstanding, but simulations can't cover everything, and you don't want to end up assuming you can handle something that you can't and panicking when it comes down to it."

"Yes, sir." Seren deflated a little bit at the assumption that she would panic, though she logically knew that it was a possibility.

Drakon did not lower his eyebrow, giving her a calculating look. "It's nothing personal. I've been doing this for six years and I still have more fingers than I do rookies who didn't make beginner mistakes in their first firefight. Just something to keep in mind. Keep on training, though, maybe you'll be one of the few to tip the ratio a little. Dismissed."

With a final salute, Seren left Draken's office and went straight to the simulation chambers. She still had half the list of training programs to complete, and maybe if she could talk herself into believing they were real, she could train out the first-timer jitters before her first time.

Seren aimed, then fired. Over, and over, and over, one holographic target after another. She was so intent on what she was doing and so used to tuning out distractions that she did not notice the reploid inspecting her form as he passed.

"Hmm," he said, and as Seren recognized his voice, she very nearly missed her shot in surprise. "Ah. Sorry to interrupt your focus," he continued.

"Captain! N-not at all, sir," she stammered, lowering her buster and turning to face him. It was X, talking to her, face to face. Oh, no, play it cool, Seren. No, cooler than that. Don't act like an idiot in front of him, come on.

"If you don't mind a bit of advice?" X prompted her.

Why are you even asking me? Seren wondered, but steadied herself. "Yes, sir, please. If you have any advice, I'm all ears." Ugh, that was way too eager. What the hell, Seren. Seriously.

"Take your time aiming. Your scores are good, but they haven't improved for a couple of weeks, and that's down to how you're practicing. Instead of trying to improve every shot, work on perfecting just one shot. Once you have that, you can replicate it across the board. It's not a matter of speed. It's a matter of being where you need to be, when you need to be there. Speed is nothing but a side effect of that."

"Sir," Seren said, with a wholly unnecessary salute.

"Here. I'll show you what I mean." X scanned his ID into the shooting gallery, and Seren stepped out of the way so that he could step in. He took a firm stance, in no particular hurry despite the start timer ticking down, and raised his arm.

Holographic targets popped up, and he fired a single shot at each one in turn. He didn't necessarily shoot them in the order that they appeared, but the order that required the least movement. As Seren watched, he hit every single one, dead center, with complete calm.

"Like that," he said, as his final score of 100% flashed across the projection. "Give it a try. The goal of practice scoring is to learn what works best for you, not to just earn the highest numbers possible. I'd rather you turn in lower scores and end up a better shot in the end than maintain high scores but have lower real-world accuracy."

"Thank you, sir," Seren said, inwardly glad that she could fall back on being formal, because if she had to trust her voice module to produce anything sensical, she would have been tremendously disappointed and probably made an enormous fool of herself besides.

"Anyway, I'll leave you to it. Keep up the good work." X left, leaving Seren to slowly process the fact that he'd told her she was doing good work. She returned to her training with a vengeance, buoyed by the compliment, though it was a much slower and more methodical kind of vengeance than before.

Her navigator's voice crackled to life in her ear. "Targets are moving up Thirteenth Street. Patrol four, prepare to intercept."

"That's us. Look alive, guys," Seren announced, parking the transport vehicle ideways in the cleared street. The four of them jumped out and grabbed a riot shield each from the back, practiced and orderly as clockwork.

Ricochet fell in beside her, shield braced and rifle readied. Trebuchet and their fourth patrolman, another mass-produced model named Viz, took the other side of the transport, blocking passage entirely. Seren watched and waited. She could do this. She knew she could. She'd practiced hard and long, taking every lesson to heart. All she had to do was not choke when the moment came.

The three suspected Mavericks rounded the corner in a powerslide, one driving the hovercycle, the other two sitting behind the first with rifles readied. The driver eyed the Hunters barricading the road, and accelerated, making the reckless decision to try and break through their line.

"Orders are to apprehend if possible, destroy if necessary," Seren reminded them. "Aim for the bike first."

They opened fire, and it only took a few moments for a shot to find its mark, sending the suspects' bike nose-down against the asphalt with a horrendous metallic screeching as the shroud dragged and the blades bit into the surface. It wrenched to one side from the force of the blades, sending all three riders rolling on the ground.

The first one up began firing wildly at the Hunters, trying to pin them down, while another dove for cover in a doorway. The third stayed down, though he also trained his weapon on the Hunters; specifically, their transport. It was reinforced against plasma, but then, he didn't seem to be firing anything…

"A laser weapon?" Ricochet said. He and Trebuchet both had broader spectrum vision than Seren did. "But the transport's hardened against—"

The heavy rifle suddenly exploded with a lance of brilliant blue-white electricity, brighter than the sun and as loud as thunder. Seren's sensors reeled with the flashbang, and her nerves crawled with static from the proximity to the artificial lightning bolt.

"Electrolaser," Trebuchet corrected. "Shit, that's not good. Nothing we have is built to withstand that."

"Transport is offline," Viz announced.

He aimed another shot at Trebuchet and Viz on the opposite side of the transport, and began to charge the laser. "Take cover," Seren ordered, but in the ensuing flashbang she couldn't see if either of them had managed to evade or not. She simply fired at where she thought the Maverick was in a blind panic.

She had to do something. This was going so badly, so suddenly. At this rate she was only going to prove that despite all her hard work, despite all the promise she'd shown, she was just another mass-produced new recruit with nothing special about her…and that was true, wasn't it, Seren thought, dejectedly. She was a nobody, pretending to be someone, and Treb could be hurt on the other side of the transport because of it…

The very idea scared her more than three heavily-armed Mavericks, jolting her from her fear and into action. No. She was a hero. She just needed to prove it. She'd wanted this chance, hadn't she? Seren blinked away spots as her optical sensors regained calibration, and suddenly, an idea seized her.

There was a window-washing platform, several stories in the air, and hanging straight over the doorway where one of the Mavericks had covered. The other who'd been firing at them had joined the first there, which was fine by her. She pointed her buster at the cables, taking a breath to steady herself, and fired, one bolt after another, neatly severing each one of them. The plasma continued beyond each cable, skimming across the windows and shattering them with heat. The suspended platform itself crashed down the side of the building, smashing more glass in a long trail down. It landed on top of the two hiding Mavericks, pinning one beneath it and sending the other scrambling backwards to avoid the same fate.

"Ric, cover me," she said.

"Sir? Seren? What are you—"

Before the Maverick on the ground could fire another round of lightning, Seren sprinted forward, shield angled towards the now single Maverick covering in the doorway and firing. She only had a few more moments before the laser superheated the air into a conductive channel, she knew, and her shield would be entirely useless against it, so she didn't even bother to protect her approach from the electrolaser. She let her shield absorb the fire instead and pointed her free left arm's buster, hand folding and vanishing into the barrel as she primed the plasma generator.

Seren only had an instant to aim, but she took the entire instant, lining up her shot patiently before taking it. Just like X had told her; just like she'd practiced. The bolt of plasma flew true, catching the Maverick on the ground full in the face and knocking the rifle out of his hands. In one fluid movement, she let go of her shield, rolled, snatched the rifle from the incapacitated Maverick's hands, and aimed for the final Maverick still in the doorway as she came to a stop on the asphalt. She pulled the trigger, and it hummed in her hands, building charge.

The Maverick in the door, still corralled into his corner by the bulk of the window washing platform, had nowhere to run and no time in which to run, and he knew it. He fired wildly at Seren. She made for a difficult target prone on the ground, though she distantly registered one of her legs suddenly throwing an enormous number of thermal errors. It didn't matter to her in that moment. The electrolaser rifle exploded with lightning, again, the bolt cracking forth. When she could see again, both Mavericks were slumped on the ground.

"Patrol four? Patrol four, report. What's going on out there?" Seren heard her navigator say in her earpiece. She stood, favoring her scorched leg, and radioed back.

"This is Seren. All targets neutralized."

"What were you thinking?" Drakon demanded. Seren stood at attention, trying painfully hard to not react. "You could have sacrificed your entire squad pulling a stunt like that. You are not meant to be performing loose-cannon heroics, Seren. You are your squad's leader and you set the example for all of them. The only reason I'm not demoting you is because it worked, but don't mistake it for approval." He crossed his arms and sighed, sitting heavily at his desk.

"Sir, I…" She cleared her throat and tried again. "I couldn't be certain if Viz and Trebuchet were still standing. If he had time to fire on me and Ricochet, we could easily have been overpowered. W-what should I have done? So I can do it right next time."

"Not kept Ric in the dark, for one. For two, checked on them to see if they were in fact downed or not without jumping to conclusions. Three, even an inoperational transport is still ample cover and will conduct electrical weaponry into the ground, and you could have fallen back behind it and reinforced your position once you knew what you were facing. Four, buildings are not playthings for us to take parts from and blow the windows out of! That comes directly out of limited Hunter funds, if we cause avoidable collateral damage! Anything more defensive than charging directly into the line of fire and hoping for the best would have been preferable. Yes, even if it worked," Seren's commanding officer cut her off preemptively. "It did work. I'll give you that much credit. It was gutsy, it was quick thinking, and it was also incredibly stupid. It won't work a second time, because odds are if you try that again you'll be finding out firsthand what happens to Hunters who throw caution to the wind, and if you're really lucky, you'll be finding out in the repair bay and not in a box headed to the reclamation facility."

Seren didn't know how to respond, so she didn't, standing straight and looking straight ahead, though she wanted to sink into the ground and vanish forever. "You know, I've got to hand it to you," Drakon continued. "I'm used to recruits choking and failing to act when they first see combat. I've never had one overreact and suddenly turn into a big damn hero instead. That's a whole new category."

There still wasn't any reasonable way for Seren to interject without a second dressing-down, so she remained silent while Drakon continued to stare at her for a few more moments. Being fired on by Mavericks had turned out to be a lot more tolerable than this. "Alright, alright. At ease. Tell me one thing, though, Seren. I know you remember this kind of thing. What did Captain X say at your induction day ceremony?"

Seren relaxed, though only physically. "Be cautious. Be smart. Stay aware of your surroundings. Keep your skills and weapons maintained. Fight defensively. Protect your allies. Whatever happens, remain calm," she repeated, from memory.

"I thought you'd know. Your training scores are superb. Ridiculously so. You've made Class B in two years, which is the time it takes most recruits to get to Class D. You can afford to spend less time on those scores now and more time drilling those things into your head. I'm not taking you off patrols, because we need numbers on the street, and I'm not taking you down from squad leader, because frankly, nobody else in your squad's got the skills for it, and I don't like to break squads up if I can avoid it. But I am going to put in a request for a new training sim based on this encounter, and I want to see you solve it three different ways that don't involve individual heroics or destruction of private property with higher than a C ranking. And no more playing hero, or I really am going to demote you. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." Seren saluted.

"Good. Dismissed."

Seren kept her head high until the office door had closed behind her, then slumped. Task failed successfully, she thought, exhaling. At least they're alive. I don't know what I'd do if any of my squad didn't make it. Ric, Treb, Viz…I should go see Treb and Viz in the repair bay.

But, she thought, on the way through the halls, Drak did still call me a hero. Even if he didn't mean it as a compliment. It's something, right? I still stood out from the rest. That's got to count a little bit.

Seren stood at attention, stiffly, head held high.

"Well, Seren, I've reviewed your files," said X, swiping through his notes on a tablet emblazoned with the Maverick Hunters logo. "And I've come to a decision."

She held her breath. This was it. She'd made all the improvements asked of her and then some. She'd broken the target shooting record for third-year recruits. She held the highest scores for her year in over half of the training simulations, including the one that had been based on her personal fuckup. There was no way that Captain X wouldn't see how hard she'd worked for this.

"I have to say, I'm impressed. You're one of the youngest Class A Hunters we've had in decades."

"Thank you, Captain, sir," Seren said, swallowing the rising swell of pride that threatened to break out across her face in a very unprofessional grin.

"That being said…" X drew a white finger across the tablet's screen, reading whatever was written there before looking up to meet her eyes. "I do have some concerns."

Seren remained silent. Concerns? What concerns? she wanted to ask, but she knew better than to interrupt.

"You haven't seen much combat, and what you have seen…your first outing especially was successful, but troubling. I know you've put in a lot of work in the year since then, and your training scores are exemplary, but there hasn't been as much improvement in live situations as I'd like to see. Your men trust you without question, which is good, but you still don't communicate as much with them as you should in the field, and that threatens squad cohesion. You've had issues with collateral damage, which also worries me."

Seren's circuits were roiling with tension, but refused to allow herself to react. Not in front of her hero. It was bad enough already, without her exploding and making things worse. But oh, she wanted to explode. She had worked so damned hard. If she could make Captain X see that…

Well, she'd be reprimanded, that was what would happen, and she knew it, so she remained silent, though it took all her willpower and then some.

"That all having been said, this is my review: Seren, Class A Hunter, 13th Unit, Squad 4. Your combat capability is excellent, but your leadership skills are still underdeveloped and your disregard for collateral damage is concerning. At this time, I cannot recommend you for promotion. Work on that, and we'll talk again next year."

Seren loaded into a random training simulation, grabbed the nearest city garbage can from the street as soon as it finished initializing, and threw it into a plate glass window as hard as she could, with a wordless roar of bottled-up anger finally given vent.

"Damn, Ser, I'm guessing it, uh, didn't go so good?" Ricochet asked. He wasn't part of the simulation. He and Trebuchet had joined her, because they'd wanted to hear the results of her review, and she hadn't been able to assemble two words without gritting her teeth so hard they threw pressure warnings, so they'd simply followed her into the simulation chamber.

"Hey, whoa, talk to us, okay? What's up?" Trebuchet placed his hands on Seren's shoulders, and she stared at him, wild-eyed and panting.

"You are not gonna beat the loose cannon accusations by blowing up an entire training sim," Ricochet remarked, and Trebuchet shot him a look.

"Shut up, Ric. This is not the time."

Seren twisted out of Treb's loose grip with a growl and fired several shots into the high-rise across the street. Holographic glass shattered, raining down on the sidewalk, and simulated pedestrians both reploid and human fled. "I have been busting my bearings for three years trying to be the best Hunter I can possibly be, and they're still not over my first goddamn outing when I was an idiot fresh out of the factory with no idea what I was doing," she fumed, finally managing to speak.

"Seriously? That's not fair," Ric agreed, trying to backpedal a little bit, because Treb was right, this wasn't the time.

"I don't get it," said Treb. "You're the highest rated out of any of us. There are unit captains who aren't classed as highly as you are. Like, shit, X himself was B Class until right before we joined. What's the holdup?"

Seren charged her buster until it began to throw capacity warnings, and let an enormous blast rip down the street, where it collided with a car with such fury that the entire thing exploded and the training simulation closed with a failing score. "Collateral damage," she sneered.

"You don't say," Ricochet said, under his breath.

"There's always next year, though, right?" Trebuchet ventured. "All you gotta do is keep your cool. Uh, not counting the training sim just now, but that probably doesn't matter that much."

Seren's anger evaporated as the simulation's projection faded into so many pixels and disappeared, leaving them in a dark room. "I don't get it," she said, quietly, all the fire gone out of her. "I'm doing my best. Why is my best so bad?"

"Maybe you're trying too hard?" Trebuchet suggested, gently.

"What am I supposed to do, then, stop trying?" Seren asked, turning huge, sad violet eyes on him. "This is all I ever wanted to do with my life. And I'm good at it. Everyone says so. X even said so. He said he was impressed! And then he recommended against promoting me and said I've got 'underdeveloped leadership skills.' What's that even supposed to mean?"

"I think you're doing a good job," Ricochet said. "I'd follow you to hell and back, no question."

"Same," Trebuchet agreed. "In a clock cycle."

Seren tried to smile, and failed, turning away from them instead. "Aww, guys. You don't have to say that just to make me feel better."

"I'm not just saying it," Ricochet objected, an unexpectedly sincere expression on his usually cynical face. "I would. If that somehow makes you a bad leader, rust 'em, they don't know who they're talking about."

"If he's following you to hell, then I'm following you both to hell," Trebuchet added, just as genuine. "Ric's my coprocessor, anyway, so obviously I'm gonna go with him, but we could be your unilateral receivers, if you want us."

Seren blinked at the two other reploids, first in surprise, and then because her eyes were filling with simulated tears. "Do you mean that?"

"Yeah," Ric said, with a single, firm nod. "We mean that."

"Straight to hell," said Treb.

"To and through it," Ric agreed.

"And hopefully back again, but who knows with me," Seren finally agreed with a weak laugh. "I'll do my best for you both, but you've seen my best."

"Whatever. Your best is good enough for us," said Ricochet. "Now let's load up a real simulation and show it who's boss."

"Ric, report!" Seren barked.

"Not looking good, chief," Ricochet replied, peering around the corner through the smoke. "They got us pinned down pretty hard, and I've taken a few hits. I'm not going much of anywhere."

"Treb!"

Trebuchet's fans rattled audibly over comms. "That last one was close. I'm running out of ammo, here, but I'm still functional."

"Viz, report!"

Silence.

"Viz?"

Still no response.

"Fuck. I'm going to get up higher and see if I can get a clear view. Hang in there." Seren took a running start at the corner. She jumped, kicking from one of the walls with one foot, then the other with the other foot, and made a high grab for the top edge. She pulled herself up easily, turned to face the edge she'd just scaled, and ran along the higher of the two walls, feet finding enough purchase in the rough stone to carry her to a windowsill. From there it was a simple enough matter of jumping up and pulling herself to the next higher window until she'd cleared the top of the building, five stories high, where she took a moment to get her bearings.

There it was below her: the commandeered construction mechaniloid that had her squad cornered. It lifted a massive leg and punched through a brick wall, sending chunks flying. Several buster shots splashed ineffectively against its heavy plating.

"Oh, shit," came Trebuchet's voice. "I'm out of ammo and it's trying to stomp me like a bug."

"Get out of there," Seren ordered.

"Trying, believe me," he replied, "but I'm kinda cornered here." She saw it lift another leg and step down, and could only hope it had missed.

"I'll get you out of there. I swear I will." Seren cast around for anything she could use to her advantage. She fired a few experimental shots at the thing, but all she succeeded in doing was scoring its paint job.

"I think it spotted me," came Ricochet's voice. "Oh. Yeah. It definitely spotted me," and then Seren flinched as he cried an agonizing sound over comms. "It's…cool, I'm fine," he said, weakly. "I wasn't using that leg anyway."

"Play dead, I'm on my way," Seren ordered, and leapt from the roof. There was a fully laden crane, she realized on the way down, and if she could lure it under that load…she thought briefly about collateral damage, but this was her squad, damn it. Surely they were more important than a piece of dumb machinery. She hit the ground, rolled, and sprang back to her feet, heedless of the damage reports, buster blazing. "Hey! Pick on someone your own size!" she yelled at the thing, though it was easily two hundred times her weight.

Her shots did nothing more than scorch its surface, but the mechaniloid, and the Maverick driving it, swiveled its cockpit to face her. It was built like a spider, with the driver suspended in a cabin underneath the main body. The machine raised a leg and crushed it into the ground, but it was too slow to catch her underneath it, and she danced aside.

"You're insane, sir, just so you know," Trebuchet broadcast.

"Come on!" Seren screamed at the Maverick driving the huge thing, running backwards and firing a steady barrage at the cabin below, forcing it to advance with an arm cocked up and around itself protectively. "Kill me! You can do better than that!"

The machine followed her, and she led it, throwing herself out of the way of several attempts to smash her flat. Seren could not be stopped so easily, not when her squad's lives were on the line.

"You're gonna get in so much trouble for this," Ricochet warned her.

"Yup," Seren agreed.

"Okay, just checking."

Seren threw her arms wide. "You aren't even trying!" she shouted at the enormous mechaniloid. "Just kill me! It can't be that hard!"

It reared up, four legs on the ground, four in the air, and drove them all at her, one at a time. She leapt away from the first leg, and then towards the second, landing on it as it plowed into the ground and running halfway up it. The third arm took aim at her, and she leapt out of the way as the machine hit itself, one leg crippling the other.

"Nice shot," she yelled mockingly, backpedaling away from the still off-balance mechaniloid and aiming into the sky. "Now, duck." One carefully-aimed shot: that was all it took to destroy the crane's cables, sending its load plummeting. Seren ran as fast as her legs would take her as several tons of steel beams spilled from the sky, end-first.

The construction mechaniloid never stood a chance. By the time the dust settled, it was a misshapen pile of limbs pouring smoke, pummeled to scrap atop the flattened cabin that had once contained a reploid.

"Squad four, report."

"Still ticking, sir," said Ricochet.

"Somehow," agreed Trebuchet.

"Viz?" she asked.

Weakly, almost inaudibly, Viz's channel crackled to life. "...Sir."

She let out a sigh of relief. "Let's go get you guys patched up."

"Seren. You know why you're here."

"Yes, sir."

She stood, proudly, chin high, gaze holding Drakon's steadily. Defiantly, even. Say whatever you have to say, she thought. I know what I did, and I'd do it again.

"And you know what I'm going to say."

"Yes, sir."

"What I don't know is, what are you going to say?"

"I did what I had to do to protect my men, sir."

"And you really do not see any problems with this entire situation?"

"No, sir."

Drakon sighed in angry exasperation, slapping his tablet down on his desk. "Just get out of here. Get out of my sight. I have so much paperwork to file and meetings to go to because of you, I don't even have time to reprimand you. I should throw you in a holding cell, is what I should do, but you're lucky, because they're full. Go to the barracks. Do not leave. I'll be sending someone to escort you."

Seren returned to the barracks, head still high. She'd done the right thing, and this time, she had no doubts. Her squadmates wouldn't suffer for her decisions, whatever they ended up doing with her, and they were all alive, and that was enough for her.

Trebuchet met her. "Ser. They're pissed with you."

"I know," she said, simply.

"No, I mean they're really pissed. I heard Drak and some of the higher-ups talking and they're calling you irregular now."

"Are they?" she asked, feeling strangely unconcerned. "I wasn't aware protecting my allies wasn't part of my duties."

"Hey, don't shoot the messenger, that's just what I heard. I think it's a load of rust, myself, but I'm biased. Still, though, they're talking discharging you and placing you in detention for rehabilitation."

Seren sat on the edge of her recharging pod. "If that's what they want to do, it's their loss."

"You're just going to let it happen?"

She shrugged. "What are my options? On one hand, I have a one hundred percent mission success rate, and on the other, I'm four years in and I already have more reprimands on file than anybody else in my combat class who hasn't already been declared Maverick. They care more about a bunch of construction materials than their own people, and I can't do that, Treb. It's not helping humanity to throw us at problems and expect us to die."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but I kinda don't believe that humanity is the thing you're worried about, here."

Seren gave him a piercing look. "It's not, but I'm not wrong, either."

"...You're not, no," Trebuchet agreed, quietly. "Ric and Viz say thank you, by the way. I was just in the repair bay to check on them. They're gonna be okay."

For the first time since she'd arrived back at the base, Seren relaxed, just a little. "Good. Tell them I'll miss them."

Trebuchet grimaced. "Come on, Ser, don't talk like that."

"How should I talk, then? Drakon would have thrown me in the brig if it weren't already full. We both know where this is going."

"But you didn't do anything wrong," protested Treb. "You were resourceful. You kept us alive. Maybe if I try talking to them…"

"Don't," Seren said, shaking her head. She sighed. "They'll throw you in with me, and then where will we be?"

Trebuchet glanced around. Nobody else was in the barracks at this time of day except for the two of them, him because he was injured but not so badly that self-repair couldn't handle it, and her because she'd been ordered to go there and stay there until Drakon had decided what to do with her. "What if you just left?" he asked, very quietly.

"Run from charges of irregularity? That isn't going to convince anybody that I'm not, and you know it. That'll get me labeled Maverick." But she was thinking about it, even so. It was a terrible idea…like everything else she did, if her superiors were any indication, so maybe it actually wasn't such a terrible idea at all.

"No, but at least you won't get sent to rehab. They're allowed to reprogram you there, Ser. I know it's not my place to tell you what to do, but I don't want you to be reprogrammed."

"Maybe they'd reprogram me into someone who actually knows how to be a Hunter without screwing it all up," she said, but Trebuchet's face was so sad and earnest that she couldn't put any heart into it. "Oh, don't look at me like that, Treb. You can't ask me to run away and leave you and Ric here alone."

"So you're just going to let them take you away from us instead?" Trebuchet asked.

Now it was Seren's turn to look around, just in case anybody was listening. "No," she decided, in a murmur. "I'm not. But if I'm going to go, I have to go now. So tell Ric goodbye for me." She took his hands and gave them a squeeze.

"We'll follow you as soon as we can," Treb promised, quietly, squeezing her hands back.

"You don't have to," Seren told him.

"Yeah, we do. To and through hell, and back if we're lucky, but even if we're not lucky, at least we'll have each other."

"To and through it, and I swear, I'll find a way to bring us all back."

Chapter Text

"Node 24, online…node 25, online…node 26…aaaaand…online. 27, looking good. 28, no sound, but we've got visual online." Glitch stared unblinkingly at nothing whatsoever, his attention entirely dominated by multiple incoming streams of data. "28, online. 29…ugh, not online, I'll have to have a look at it. It was working just fine in the lab this morning. Node 30…online. That's all of them accounted for. Whoo! It works!" He slapped his hands together in excitement, still essentially unseeing.

"Great," X said, a small grin overtaking his face. Glitch's enthusiasm could be infectious, and honestly, X thought, it was probably good for him to be around it. He could use some positivity, even if it did frequently come with bad puns attached.

"The personal nodes aren't done, but they're also not the biggest deal. Well, no, yours is done and working, but we've known that for a couple of days now. Oh, speaking of that, give it here, it could use a recharge." Glitch held his hand out in a random direction, too preoccupied to actually look, and X pulled the phone and its stack of batteries from the inside pocket of his jacket, reaching around and placing it into Glitch's hand.

"Awesome. Won't take but a few minutes." He patted around on his workbench until he found the cable he wanted, and plugged it in. Watching him work while essentially blind from sensory overload was a little disconcerting to X, but Glitch didn't seem to mind.

"While we've got a moment," X said, lowering his voice and leaning in slightly, "I wanted to ask what you think of telling Mack about what's going on."

"Oh, yeah, we can tell it anything. I trust it with my life, no hesitation. If you wanna loop it in on the plan, we can do that any ti—oh, hello, node 29, you're a late bloomer, seems like! All nodes online. Fuck yeah. We got the full network in place and functional. This is huge, V. They can't catch us off our guard now that we have this."

"Great," said X, the smile creeping back to his lips. "I can't believe you pulled this together so fast."

Glitch pulled his attention away from the array of improvised sensors and turned it to X, eyes focusing, then did a double take. "Well, look at you!" he exclaimed. "Smiling again? Keep that up and someone's going to get the impression that you're happy for a change."

"Huh?" X's eyes widened in bafflement. Yet another facial expression he hadn't noticed he was making…he used to believe he had a good poker face, but now he wondered if he had just gone around with a flat affect for most of his life out of stress and sheer necessity. "I…guess I am, if I think about it. I probably shouldn't be, but…"

"Why not? Take it when you can get it, that's what I think. And don't look so embarrassed at being caught with a smile on, wow." Glitch rolled back in his office chair and hopped to his feet, stretching. "Alright. I just hope they hold charges long enough to get through the night. If they do, they should all get enough sun to charge back up, but if they don't…eh, I'll think of something. And in the meantime," he tapped his temple with a cheeky grin that X was beginning to think of as his trademark expression, "if they detect anything over a certain threshold of interestingness, they'll ping me immediately."

"Fantastic," X agreed. "Everyone's been taking well to the drills too, I think. Our odds are looking up."

"Of course they are. We got you, don't we?" Glitch said, beaming his grin at X before blinking and hastily correcting himself. "I mean, not to be weird about it or anything, just that you're a good teacher."

"No weirdness taken," X assured him, waving it off with the hand that wasn't on his cane. "I'm just glad I can help."

"And we're pretty goddamn glad for the help. Mutually beneficial relationship, right there." Glitch's eyes glazed over for a second, and X assumed he was double-checking the nodes. "Ah, right, none of them have wind filters on the mics. Well, that's not hard to code a fix for the noise." His attention returned to X. "When did you want to talk to Kathy?"

X's thumb rubbed absently over the end of his cane handle. "Sooner rather than later, I think. I've already put it off for too long." Indeed, he'd meant to do it tomorrow for several days now. It was easy to keep kicking it down the line and telling himself that he wanted to teach just one more practice drill before potentially disrupting everything…but he couldn't keep doing it.

"You know," Glitch started, unexpectedly serious in tone, but he hesitated, hand raising to scratch the back of his neck while his gaze fell down and away. "…ah, never mind."

"What's that?" X prompted him.

"Well, it's just that…what if you didn't bother?" Glitch ventured, still not quite able to look X in the eye. "I mean, you could just…forget about this guy, and stay here, and…you know. Just live. There's a place for you with us, if you want it."

X's grip tightened on his cane reflexively as the lab seemed to tilt several degrees. "I…" He had thought it without really thinking it, because he hadn't allowed himself to directly consider it, but every time he put off having this talk with Kathy, the sense of relief that he had another day safely lined up and waiting in the wings for him was more than he wanted to analyze. "I guess I…could," he said, after a long pause. "But I think I have to do this. I did give my word, and if I disappear much longer, they may actually send someone to look for me, and that would be a disaster for the rest of you."

"But after that?" Glitch asked.

"After that," X echoed, "I don't know yet. I really haven't gotten that far. And then if Kathy decides she doesn't want me here…"

"Yeah…yeah." Glitch picked up the nearest pen-shaped object from his desk and spun it from finger to finger, pinky to index, then lifted his other hand to it and caught it fluidly in those fingers as well, index to pinky. At the end he turned it around and started to walk it back the way it came. "Hopefully not. Well, we give her the shit sandwich, then. Good news, sensor network's up, bad news, there was this guy. Okay, we don't have the bottom bread, but maybe if we make an open-faced shit sandwich…"

"We should deal with it today, whatever comes of it."

"You wanna explain things to Mack, or should I?" Glitch asked, leaning back in his chair and attempting a new maneuver with his pen. It flipped out of his fingers and bounced across the workbench.

"I'd like to, but I'd like you to be there. It's not the easiest thing in the world to talk about. I think…I could use the moral support," X admitted, shyly.

Glitch made a grab for the escaping pen, missing it by mere instants. It rolled off and landed on the floor. "Ah, damn. Of course. Whatever you need me to do, I'm there."

X ventured a small smile. "Thanks. I just hope things work out."

"They will. Calling it now. Shit's gonna settle and everything will be fine, you wait and see." He reached under the workbench, looking for his lost writing implement, but it was against the wall. He crawled under with a noise of irritation.

"Are you in, Glitch?" came Kathy's voice through the door. X heard something thud sharply against the underside of the arranged tables, followed by a hiss.

"Fuck. Yeah," he called, raising his voice. "Door's unlocked."

Kathy pushed the door open and let herself in. She scanned the room, but spotted only X and frowned in confusion for a moment before Glitch popped out from under his workbench, dusting his knees off. "Hey! Kat. Just the boss I was about to go searching for. Guess what?"

"I could, but I have a feeling you're going to tell me anyway," she said, amusedly. The past few days of X's training sessions with the encampment had seen her mood soften further towards him, which was a relief. X only hoped that it would stay that way.

"Ha. Yeah, I am. V and I got the sensors working!" he exclaimed, with a fist pump for emphasis. "All placed and talking. Nothing above ground's gonna catch us off-guard now."

The former teacher reploid's face lit up. "That's great! What a relief. Thank you so much, both of you. I'm going to defrag a lot more easily knowing we've got an early warning system now. We should officially announce this, it's a big enough deal."

"At tonight's Sit Around An Exothermic Reaction And Bullshit Session?" Glitch suggested.

"It is not called that," Kathy protested.

"But imagine what a world it would be if it was." Glitch spread his hands wide and closed his eyes.

"It'd be the exact same world except we'd have to call it the Sit Around An Exothermic Reaction And…Cow Poop Session," Kathy objected, clearly balking at having to swear.

"No! Like, really picture it. Society, if we called it the Sit Around An Exothermic Reaction And Bullshit Session. Gleaming white and glass towers, green parks, blue skies…"

X suppressed a laugh, even as his cooling systems revved in nervousness. Glitch was almost definitely putting on a show to lighten the atmosphere as much as possible, and X was not about to stop him.

"That's literally just the new downtown, over the wall. You can see it if you go up on the building next to us there." She pointed through the lab's ceiling and at the neighboring half-destroyed structure.

"Yeah, and they probably call it the Sit Around An Exothermic Reaction And Bullshit Session. That's the difference between us and them. They've got it all figured out." Glitch held his stance, hands poised in the air as if projecting a vision of a perfect, utopian future.

"You are so incredibly full of it," Kathy laughed. "Okay, okay, fine, whatever it's called, I want you and V to tell everyone about it tonight."

"Hell yes." Glitch finally broke his stiff, silly upper lip to do another fist pump. "There was one other thing too, if you've got a second."

"Sure. I didn't have anything else going on except for some target practice. What's up?" Kathy commandeered a desk chair and spun it around to sit with her arms crossed over the backrest, smiling at the two of them expectantly.

X took a deep breath. Now or never, he told himself. This is easily the best mood I've ever seen her in, and I've got Glitch to back me up. I just need to find the least accusatory angle possible…if I can get her to volunteer the information from his phone, I might even be able to entirely hide the fact that I took it and Glitch returned it. "It's about the missing person, Charles. I…think he may have died," X said.

"Ah. It wouldn't surprise me," agreed Kathy, appropriately somber. "It's hardly a place for reploids to survive out here, let alone humans."

Please just confess to whatever you did on your own please just confess to whatever you did on your own please just confess to whatever you did on your own, X repeated in his mind. I swear I will not be angry. I really don't care at this point. Just tell me so this can all be over. Glitch glanced at him for guidance, and he returned the glance, but didn't say anything yet. "It really isn't. Even coming out here in the first place, he'd need to be either very stupid or very prepared," X said, as delicately as possible.

"Even prepared, he'd have to be stupid," Kathy countered, in a calculatedly mild tone. Something behind her green eyes had gone very hard and pointed very quickly, and X's systems began calculating her estimated threat entirely without his input, or indeed, even his permission.

"Come on, Kat, don't give V a hard time." Glitch cut in, dropping into a seat himself. "You already know he isn't out to get us or anything. He's helped get the fourth pod finished and working, he's been huge in putting together the majority of our defenses, he's helped with like…everything."

Kathy sighed, though some of the hardness went out of her voice. Not all of it, but enough to give X a faint glimmer of hope. "If you're trying to say something, just say it."

Time to lay it all out, X thought, steeling his nerves. "I don't want to make any trouble," he started. "I like everyone here, more than I'd ever expected I would. I've…come to understand a lot of things about myself here. To be honest, I owe you all. So please understand that when I say this, I am not at all coming from a place of trying to upset things." He paused; Kathy eyed him, and he realized that she was calculating his threat, too. X hadn't often seen a civilian reploid with that sharpness of gaze, especially one who was not infected with the Maverick Virus, and his own evaluation of her danger raised by several points.

"Go on," she said tersely, her jaw set, posture straight. The exposed metal of the orbital frame underneath her eye glinted in the lab lighting.

"I…know what Alderman did. I understand that he was a serious threat. If you encountered him and had to…stop him yourself, I don't blame you for it. I hope it didn't come to that, but…I just need to know what finally happened, so I can decide what to tell Hunter HQ."

Kathy continued to watch him with a level, hard gaze, her expression revealing nothing. "What makes you say that?" she asked, voice softer than her eyes.

"Kat—" Glitch started, but she turned that steely look on Glitch, and he fell into silence.

She was afraid, X realized. Just like him, she covered it with a straight back and a cold determination to protect those she cared about, but underneath it, she saw her entire world crumbling, everyone she knew and loved falling away from her. He wished he knew how to reach out to her in a way that she wouldn't have flinched away from. "I…realized his phone wasn't with the rest of the collected electronics. I almost stopped looking, and…maybe I should have, but his business card was in one of the empty cases. So I knew it had to have passed through here."

"Maybe you should have," Kathy agreed, quietly.

"I thought about where it could have been, and…I found it. I looked through it. It was…I…I don't have words for it." X shuddered at the memory. "Inhuman. I've never seen anything like…that. If I'd encountered him myself, I know what I would have done, and it would not have been good."

"I should have destroyed it," Kathy said, though mostly to herself. "I knew I should have. I almost did." And then, to X, "How did you unlock it? I was never able to."

"Lucky guess. The PIN was the street address on his card."

"He got Lapis," Glitch said, quietly. "And Para. And Jason, too. And at least three more that I didn't recognize."

Kathy looked between X and Glitch. "So you've seen it too," she said. "You went through my things. You're both in on this."

"Nobody is 'in on' anything, Kat," Glitch chided, as gently as he could. "Listen to yourself. This isn't like you. I know you want to protect us, but V wants to figure out what he can tell the Hunters to keep them away from us. If he doesn't have something to say soon, though, they might come looking instead, and then we're really in it. I swear, he's trying to help with this too."

"You believe him?" Kathy asked, piercing Glitch with a look that clearly rattled him for a moment.

"Yes. Absolutely. I've told you that how many times now?"

"If it came to it, I'd…if the Hunters actually attacked…" X began, haltingly. The enormity of what he was saying almost weighed him into silence and anxiety welled up through every system process, but he found his voice and carried on. "I'd…stand with you. And that's…that's how I know I'm…irregular. I don't want to fight at all, but if I had to choose…that's my choice. I'd rather be labeled a Maverick with you."

Glitch quietly patted him on the shoulder. "See, Kat? Please. Just listen. He didn't even do anything but look in your bag once. I put that shit back where it was myself."

She stared unblinkingly for several long moments, at X, at Glitch, and then at X again, green eyes unreadable. X had to tighten his grip on his cane with both hands to keep them from shaking. Finally, her expression softened; just a touch, but enough for X to hope all over again. "Alright. I'm…listening. Glitch, go find Hammer. Tell him I want to talk to him. V, I'll tell you everything, under one condition."

"Yes. Of course. What is it?" X asked.

"You tell me everything. You aren't the only one with a gut feeling to follow."

Glitch spoke up. "Kat, come on, we've been over this—"

Kathy pointed to the lab door. "Go. I want to hear what V's got to say. We'll be in my office."

"It's fine, Glitch," X said. "I'm fine. Just go find Hammer."

Glitch stood, hesitating and hovering until X repeated himself. "Go, go. I'm okay," he insisted, standing with the help of his cane. "I don't need a helicopter."

Glitch finally relented, dashing off at speed, though not without a glance over his shoulder before he rounded the corner out of the central building. Kathy motioned for X to follow, and took her seat at her desk in the next room. X closed the door behind them and took a seat across from her. Whatever happens, he thought, I'll give it my best, then it's out of my hands from here.

At least I'll have been truthful.

At least it'll be over.

"You're right," he began. "I haven't told you everything. I meant to, from the start. I'm sorry I haven't yet. I didn't…no. I was going to say I didn't want to cause any disruption, and that I didn't think you'd trust me if I told you, and that's all true, but that's not really the reason in the end. The real reason is…that…I don't…want to be who I've been anymore. I'm so tired. Everything I've done, I did because I thought it was the only choice I had. I thought nobody else could have done it. That it was the only way. I really believed that. I'm…not so sure, now." He forced himself to meet Kathy's eyes, even though it terrified him. He felt transparent, like she could see straight through him and read his every thought and memory.

Well, good, X thought. I finally want somebody to. If she could see me…really see me…maybe she would understand me. I won't run, no matter what happens. I've been running this entire time. I'm tired of everything…but most of all, I'm tired of running.

"I can't stop being who I've been by hiding from it, and I can't start being who I am by pretending to be someone else. So I'm just going to tell you. It's only fair, and it's what I've intended to do since I came here." He took a deep breath, still holding her gaze with his, as much as it felt like drowning to do so.

"My name…my real name…is X."

Kathy blinked, wide-eyed, uncertain how to even react. Disbelief clouded her features, first, in a frown. Then, when he didn't take it back or play it off as a joke, confusion deepened the frown to consternation, then alarm.

"X," she repeated. "The X. The Maverick Hunter. The first of all of us. That's…no. That's preposterous. You can't be X." She pushed her chair backwards from her desk, both hands on the edge. "Don't play games with me, V, this isn't funny."

"I'm not," he insisted. Fear gripped his circuits, but he gripped it back, harder. Not now. He had to stay calm. Maybe he should have waited for Glitch and Hammer to return…but it was too late for that. "I'm being completely serious."

"No," she repeated, but her resolve waned. "But you are telling me the truth…aren't you. I should have seen it. The lines on your face…I should have been able to read them like Glitch did. He knows, doesn't he." It wasn't a question at all the way she said it.

X could only nod in reply.

Kathy shot to her feet. "What else have you lied about?" she demanded, so suddenly and loudly that the carefully-constructed dam holding X's panic at bay shattered under the impact of her voice. He bolted to his feet too, backing away from her and towards the door. It opened as he approached, revealing Glitch and a very confused Hammer. X stumbled backwards through it and between them, barely keeping his footing.

"I haven't," he protested, shaking so hard he thought he might rattle apart, pleading desperately. "I—I never—please, if you'd just listen—"

"This was all an act!" Kathy raged, following him into the common room. "Wasn't it? This entire thing. Coming in here, making friends, acting like you needed us! Like we needed you!"

"Kat, what's gotten into you?" Glitch demanded. Within moments, Valentina appeared in the doorway to the outside, and Focus, and Drive, and Mack. "Calm down, none of what you just said is even—"

"Katie, hey, what's the matter?" Hammer interjected at the same time, trying to reach out for her, but she stormed past him as if he didn't exist.

"But I do—" X stammered. "It wasn't—I didn't lie about—"

"Pretending to be harmless! So we wouldn't suspect anything! How much of this was ever real? How much of this was just an act?" She lunged for his cane and wrenched it from his hands. Unsupported and spinning with panicked vertigo, X lost his footing immediately, stumbling to land ungracefully on his backside.

"Kathy!" Glitch snapped. Immediately, he was on the ground at X's side, helping him up, one arm around him, the other in front of him protectively. X couldn't process this at all. He felt about three feet to the left of his own body, watching things happen but without any agency to stop them. "The fuck is wrong with you? He needs that!"

"No, he does not!" Kathy yelled. "He's lied to all of us and you've fallen for it the hardest!" She threw the cane at both of them, and Glitch snatched it from the air, his hand a green blur moving faster than X's eyes could track. Instantly, Mack was there too, planting itself defiantly between the two of them and Kathy, its simplistic eyes turned down in a scowl.

"At least I'm not stealing the goddamn cane out from under a disabled person!" Glitch shot back, handing the cane back to X. He closed his fingers around it mutely and leaned into Glitch, who pulled him closer. "Who cares who he said he is? Everyone was someone else before we ended up here!"

"We have rules about violence towards residents, Kathy, and they apply to you, too," Mack said. Its voice was the same synthesized monotone as ever, but its posture was that of a guard dog, ready to lunge at the next threat.

"What is goin' on?" Hammer demanded, raising his voice. Deep and booming, designed to be audible above the din of a busy construction site, it cut through the entire camp. Flip and Siobhan sidled in, followed much more obviously by Cirocco and Trigger. All eyes turned to him, then Kathy, then Glitch and X. "Explain yourself, Katie."

Kathy pointed at X. "That's X. The X! I don't know what he's doing here, but he can't be here! He has no business with us. He's endangering us all by being here. He's going to get us killed!"

A shocked ripple went through the entire little crowd of reploids. No, I'm not, X tried to say, but his voice synthesizer didn't even engage. Nothing at all came out of his mouth.

"No, he's not," Glitch said, as X didn't, and for a dizzying instant X had the strange notion that he had spoken the words through Glitch in his stead. "So he's X. So what? Do you have any idea how much he's been through? We've never once demanded that anybody give their real name or history here. We've only ever cared that they did their best from here on out. Who the fuck cares who or what he was before? I sure as hell don't!"

"Glitch has a point," Hammer rumbled, and Kathy spun on him with a glare.

"It's kind of different when it's someone that, you know," Flip mused. "Famous. Infamous? I mean…aren't the Hunters going to be looking for him?"

X closed his eyes and lowered his head, trembling. He couldn't stand seeing everyone stare at him. Glitch's arms tightened around him defensively.

"He's retired," Glitch said, forcefully. "It's not different at all."

"He's been, like, really nice to me," Valentina said, wonderingly. "I even told him…who I was before. And what I did. He was still just…nice to me."

"I told him what I did, too," said Mack, in its monotone voice. "He didn't treat me any differently."

"He helped me put together the sensor network. We were supposed to announce it tonight," Glitch added. "The entire camp perimeter out to a full city block is safe now, and he worked with me on it. And he trained all of us. Doesn't that count for anything?"

"He gave me a lotta good ideas on how to shore up the walls around the town, too," Hammer added.

"But he destroyed one of my predecessor units," Cirocco growled.

"Mine, too," Trigger added. "He has entire war's worth of blood on his hands."

"I'm sorry," X whispered, eyes still squeezed shut. "I'm so sorry. I—I thought I had to. I didn't want to. I'm so sorry."

"Who cares?" X heard Glitch ask again. "Who here actually got treated fairly by life? You don't end up here if you were. That's not how it works, and you know it, Kat. We all know it. We're not here because it's a fucking party, we're here because it was this, or nothing."

"And that's going to protect you from the Hunters when they show up, is it?" Kathy demanded.

"Holy fuck, Kat, did you hear a word V said before? He doesn't want the Hunters here. He's trying to think of what to tell them so that they'll leave us alone."

"Wait," Valentina said, timidly. "Wait. Hold up. Why…would the Maverick Hunters be here?"

"Because Kathy killed some human, here, on this side of the wall, and didn't see fit to tell anybody else about it!" Glitch accused.

"I did not!" Kathy yelled.

"No," X whispered. "No. Please. Not this."

"She did not," Hammer said, resolutely, arms crossed as he drew himself up to his full height. Then after a pause, his eyes fell with shame to the floor, and his shoulders slumped. "I did," he confessed, his voice exhausted and heavy.

X could hear the murmurs. This was the one thing he'd wanted to avoid, more than anything else, and it was happening. Of course it was. No matter what he did, no matter how hard he tried, all paths led to the same end, again and again and again.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Flip demanded.

"Well…so what? Right?" Valentina piped up, hesitant resolve in her voice. "I…I killed seven people. I'm Bloody Valentina. That's what they called me. Bloody Valentina, the serial killer reploid prostitute."

"I…" Hammer sighed. "Four, before this. My old coworkers attacked me, an' I…that's…why I'm here. It was all over the news. My name was Smith. I guess…it's five, now."

Flip cleared his throat. "We got mugged. Siobhan and I, I mean, right outside the wall. Three guys, and I killed them."

"I wouldn't let him leave me again," Siobhan said, timidly but with some determination.

Focus was trembling, and Drive took his hand. "We didn't break any laws. We just left, to be near something important to us that was still here. There wasn't anything on the other side of the wall for us. That's all."

"I cut six legs off of a unit of Hunters because they were after Glitch," Mack said, its voice somehow tinged with pride even though its tone hadn't changed.

"My name was Toyota Kujuyousuke and I was the most-wanted hacker in the world for a couple of weeks," Glitch volunteered. "That was a fun couple of weeks."

"We disobeyed orders," said Trigger, even though Cirocco growled warningly at him. "Poachers killed Cirocco's family. She killed poachers. We had to run for long time after that. We only found this place by chance."

"So that's it? We're trading stories now? Okay. I got tired of watching one of my students be abused, so I tried to stop it, and hospitalized two people instead. Is that what you wanted to hear? Are we going to hold hands and sing while they come raze us looking for their lost hero?" Kathy demanded, unswayed. "So that's everyone else. What's your story, hero?"

"Hey, you lay off him," Glitch countered, angrily. "He doesn't deserve this."

X opened his eyes, even though they refused to focus quite right. "It's alright. I'll answer." He took a step away from Glitch, carefully, and straightened as much as he could with the entire room spinning sickeningly. A hush fell over the room, and he realized he had no idea what he was about to say. All the same, he drew a breath to steady himself, and spoke.

"Kathy. You asked me what I would have done in your position, not long after I got here."

"I don't see what that's got to do with it, but sure. What was I supposed to do?" Kathy demanded, crossing her arms.

"I know, now." X's vertigo surged, and he placed his other hand on his cane as well. "I…I would have asked him what he wanted."

Kathy's expression wavered. "What he wanted," she echoed.

"Yes," X said.

"I…didn't think about that at all, did I," she said, looking as dizzy as X felt, suddenly. She touched a hand to her torn cheek. "I never asked him what he wanted. I…tried to kill his father because I thought I could decide what was best for him without…"

"I know why you didn't," X continued, voice trembling with the rest of him. He couldn't at all stop it from happening, so he spoke around it, as best he could. "You couldn't have known to. We're built, and then we're put into situations that aren't fair. Nobody asks us what we want. We don't even know what we want. And…and then we're punished when we can't keep going anymore, and now I can't keep going either. I don't know what to do. If I've lied to anybody, I lied to myself. I told myself…I was picking up some of the Hunters' slack in my spare time because I wanted to keep busy. But I think…I think I came here because I wanted to die."

"V," Glitch started, from behind him. The concern in his tone wrenched X's heart to hear, let alone imagine what his expression must have been, but X continued. If he didn't keep going, he'd stop, and if he stopped, he might never get the words out, he feared.

"I don't now. I think I want to live. I don't even know what that's like, but I want to find out. Humans just get to be born without a purpose, but we don't get that luxury. Not even me, even though I was supposed to. I spent my entire life telling myself I was doing what I had to do, fighting for a world where humans and reploids lived in peace, and I gave up everything I had, everyone I loved…and all I did in the end was help build a world where reploids aren't even people, and…and I don't know what to do, now. So I'm…here. My armor is in a fancy display case in Maverick Hunter Headquarters, and I'm…" He shrugged, looking up at Kathy with lost, pleading eyes. "Just…trying to figure out how to go on from here."

"Oh, V," Valentina said, quietly, both hands pressed to her mouth.

Kathy stood up straighter again, leveling her gaze at X. It wasn't as cold as before, nor was it as hard, but he still struggled to not wither away beneath it. "I need to think about what we're going to do. For now…I want you to leave. V, or X, or…whoever you are."

"You can't just—" Glitch exclaimed, stepping forward and temper flaring, but X pressed a gentle hand to Glitch's chest, and the fire went out of him instantly.

"It's okay," X said, sorrow plain on his face and resignation heavy in his circuits. He shook his head. "It's okay. I'll go."

"It's not fair," Glitch protested.

"Nothing is," said X.

"Come back tomorrow morning. We'll decide what to do about you by then," Kathy said.

"If you're going, I'll go too," Glitch declared, and X almost choked up. Glitch really had meant everything he'd said about being on X's side. What was he even supposed to do, knowing that?

"If he's going with you, I'm going," Mack added, and X looked down at it with newfound feeling.

But there was only one answer, X knew, however much he might wish it to be otherwise. "Stay here," X said. "The sensor network's no good without you watching it. Everyone needs you here. Keep them safe."

"And who's going to keep you safe?" Glitch asked.

"You," X replied, tapping his jacket, right over where his heart would have been, had he been a human. "I've got your sensor, right here. Don't worry about me. I won't go far."

Glitch sighed, distraught, and gave X a crushing hug. "You'd better not."

"Ouch. Agh. Glitch. Please. You're. Way too strong," X sputtered, until Glitch released him. X recollected himself, and it was easier than he had expected. Maybe he was still half dissociated, or maybe the worst was happening and therefore he had nothing left to fear, but whatever the case, a strange calm had overtaken him.

"You can't just throw him out, Kat," Valentina argued. "It's not right."

"It'll be okay," X told her, gently. He turned to Kathy and Hammer, reaching into his jacket, and pulled out the business card. "Take this. You can unlock his phone with the address on it. It's not a pleasant sight, but you deserve to know exactly what he did." Kathy accepted it without comment.

"Hey, V. Or X. However you wanna be called," Hammer said, not at all trying to project his voice now. He glanced around, awkwardly. "I dunno what's gonna happen, but if I don't see you again…"

"You will," X assured him. "Tomorrow morning."

"Yeah, but lemme finish. Just in case. If I don't, it's been real."

"Yeah. It has."

The group of reploids parted to let X pass. He crossed the little square to the housing, collected his tarp from the locker it was still in, and turned to the surface exit.

Everyone else fell away as X walked, but Glitch followed him the entire way and was still at his heels, with Mack silently right behind him.

"I'm sorry," Glitch said. "It wasn't supposed to go like this."

"It always does," X replied. "I hoped for too much."

"What, for just one time that you could be treated like a real person? That's hardly anything to hope for and you didn't even get that. Are you sure you're gonna be okay alone?"

"I will be," he reassured Glitch again. "I got here alone, remember?"

"I'm gonna give Kat a piece of my mind for this," Glitch fumed. "This is such bullshit."

"It isn't fair," Mack agreed. X had never imagined it could sound angry while not sounding like anything at all.

"Don't split the group over me. Whatever happens, that's the last thing I want. You all survive because you work together. Don't endanger that just for me." He tied the old tarp around his shoulders, leaning on the wall for support while his hands were busy, and adjusted it over his head. "Promise me you won't."

"I'll try," was all Glitch could say. He didn't move, fingers interlocked for lack of any idea what to do with himself, and just stared at X with his dark eyes full of something he couldn't quite put into words.

X stared back for a long moment. "Thank you," he finally said. "Whatever else happens, you've done more for me than you know."

"We would have done more," said Glitch. "We would have followed you anywhere."

"I know." X managed a sad little smile for him and Mack, and turned away, picking a slow path through the rubble and out into the ruined city center. He didn't look back.

Chapter Text

A city block, X thought. I hope that's far enough to count as out of the encampment. He didn't know the tunnels well enough to dare them, knowing that they were trapped, and he didn't want to worry Glitch unduly by taking his sensor offline, so he didn't go further than that. He clung to the shadows of destroyed buildings, avoiding the cloudy sky even though he knew no patrols were likely due, and he moved slowly. Outside the garage, the wind picked up and the cold cut through his clothing and chassis. His joints ached with it.

X found a convenience store across the street from the far end of the block and let himself in. Its front windows and glass door were shattered, and it had long ago been picked clean of anything remotely useful or interesting, probably by the encampment reploids themselves, but it was cover and he was not choosy. X sat on the floor behind the counter, leaned against the cabinet doors, and pulled his legs up to his chest, not bothering to take the tarp off of his head.

He should feel something, he knew, but the strange dead calm he'd felt upon being ordered out had evolved into a system-wide numbness. He barely even noticed the errors and warnings scrolling behind his eyes in their endless procession. X laid his cane across his lap, wrapped his arms around his legs, and laid his forehead on his knees.

X didn't know when he had arrived, but X heard his voice and looked up in surprise, too quickly to stop himself from catching a glimpse of red and white and black. The old, empty ache returned to his chest in force. Zero sat next to him, cross-legged, watching him calmly. "You figured it out," he said.

I don't remember falling asleep, X thought. Maybe I'm just hallucinating now.

"Well, I hope not, that would really complicate things," Zero commented, as if X had spoken aloud.

"I'm probably asleep," he concluded. X put his head back on his knees. "I'm…sorry. It's been a long day. I lost everything again."

"You've got to stop doing that," Zero chided him, as if it were that easy. "Of all the bad habits to pick up, X."

X looked up, right into his memory of Zero's eyes, because at least pain felt like something. "I've gone Maverick," he said, or thought, he wasn't sure. Maybe there was no difference, if he was asleep. Or hallucinating. Weren't dreams really just a kind of hallucination? "What am I supposed to do? You should have been here to stop me, if this happened. Not that I'm a threat to anybody, anymore, except maybe myself."

"Do you want me to be angry?" Zero asked.

X blinked at him. "What?"

"I could, if you think it'd help. I don't think it would, but what do I know? I'm a figment. Do you feel like a Maverick?"

X frowned, searched his systems. "I…don't know. I don't really feel different at all."

"Then are you sure you've changed?"

"I found a human that I probably would have killed if I met him, and someone else killed him, and I don't even care."

"X, what's the difference between a human and a reploid?" Zero's memory asked.

X hesitated. What kind of question was this? "There are too many to even begin to list. I'm not sure what you want me to say."

"Alright, then, how are they similar? That's got to be easier, if the differences are so many."

"Well…" X screwed his face up in thought. "They're…both people, I guess, is the simplest way of putting it."

Zero nodded. "Right. And if they're both just kinds of people…how many reploids have you killed?"

X shuddered, arms hugging his knees a little more tightly. "Don't ask me that. You know."

"Do you see what I'm trying to say, here? What's the difference between killing a human and a reploid, if they're both just people?"

"Then…both are wrong," X concluded, tentatively. "But I don't see how that resolves anything."

"Cut through the meaningless details. They're all people, whatever they're made out of. It's no different than anything you had to do as a Hunter. If you encountered a Maverick walking around with trophies of humans he'd killed, you'd do what had to be done."

"I would hate doing it," X said. "But Charles enjoyed it. That's what I don't understand. Somebody like him would never be labeled a Maverick, only because he's not a reploid, but if the Hunters found out I was staying with the reploids here and demanded to know where they were, and I peacefully refused, I'd be labeled irregular at best."

"Valentina told you this, I know she did. It's not fair. It's a meaningless label. I couldn't even tell you this if you weren't thinking it already, V, don't be dense." Zero reached out with a finger and poked him squarely between the eyes, on the forehead. It felt as solid as reality.

"You…called me V," X said, blinking again in surprise. For just an instant, he'd thought he was talking to Glitch, but that made no sense.

"I've been pretty upfront about being the Zero that lives in your memories, too, and you've been calling yourself V for a week. I don't know what you expected." Zero chuckled, with the same smile as X remembered. After all this time, even with his aging memory throwing the occasional error, he would never forget that smile as long as he functioned. It was burned into his circuits, inextricably linked with his systems.

"But if you caught the Maverick Virus, I guess I'd have to slag you," he added. "I'm not sure how I'd do it from here…or how you'd catch it, since you can't…or even where you'd get it at this point…but don't press your luck."

X tried to smile, but it unleashed every other emotion he'd barely been holding back along with it. "I don't want to wake up," he blurted out, and his eyes filled with hot tears, suddenly. He had to be dreaming, because he hadn't bothered to refill that reservoir in years, but his chest ached too deeply for it to be anything but real. "It's been thirty years and the war is over, but I still don't know how to go on without you."

"I know." The ghost of Zero embraced him, so warm and solid that it hurt, knowing that he wasn't real, wouldn't be there in a few more instants. "Whatever is left of me in the world is in you. It's not enough, I know. It's all I have to give you, but I'm with you, awake or asleep."

X uncurled from the floor, burying his face in Zero's armor as much as was possible. "I know you are."

"Whatever happens, live. That's the first thing I want you to do." Zero held X at arm's length then, one hand on either shoulder, his face serious. X found himself looking into Zero's eyes and feeling safe. How long had it been since the last time he'd felt safe, making eye contact? Since he hadn't felt judged? Not since Zero had been alive…and then again recently, with Glitch. How odd, he thought, that Glitch kept coming to mind at a moment like this.

"Okay. What's the second thing?" X asked.

"Wake up."

X jolted awake. When had he fallen asleep? And for how long? The sky was now a dark leaden gray, illuminated more by light pollution from the surrounding city than any late sunset, and the air hung chill and heavy with the promise of more autumn rain. X rubbed his hands through his already messy hair, trying to chase the cobwebs from his head. His thoughts ran sluggishly as his systems struggled to abort the defragmentation cycle partway through and return him to full consciousness.

The sound of metal scraping gently on stone brought him to full alert. He froze, ears straining. He carried the furthest sensor node with him, but it was inside his jacket, and therefore wouldn't have picked the sound up. Then again, it was entirely possible that it had just been some incidental noise and nothing sinister.

Then he heard it again, followed by a brief burst of I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast., though he didn't at all understand the message. A second message from a different sender replied, similarly clipped and unintelligible. Is it a different dialect? Or encoded? X wondered, though he stayed silent. Whatever it is, I know who's sending it, and I have to warn Glitch.

The wind picked up, and rain began to patter against the debris. X risked shifting to his feet, crouched behind the counter, and peeked through a hole left by a front panel that had fallen from it. Two reploids that he didn't immediately recognize crept through the rubble, armed with heavy buster rifles. One of them was very large, and the other very small, shaped somewhat like a rodent. Whatever color they'd been before, they were both painted red.

X manually suppressed a fan speed change. The sensors should pick them up…but on a dark, windy night, he wasn't entirely sure they would, especially if the weather took any of them offline. He reached into his jacket, took his own sensor node out, and tapped the phone's microphone. Even from a few feet away, it wasn't audible, but Glitch would hear it plain as day. Or so X hoped. It wasn't a two-way communication, so he couldn't be sure, but he had to try.

Two Drifters, moving towards you, he tapped, in Morse code. It was ancient as technology went, but then, so was he. X returned the sensor to his jacket, in one of the more hidden pockets. It wouldn't pick up much sound, but it would at least broadcast its own location relative to the others as long as it remained within range. He dropped to all fours and tucked his cane into his belt. Without his failed balance systems to trip him up, he could move much more quietly, and staying low to the ground meant staying in the shadows and hiding amongst the toppled shelves.

The two reploids did not notice him. X silently crept along the floor on his knuckles and the tips of his metal feet, silent as a spider, until he reached the outside wall. The glass along the wall from the shattered windows was painful to move across, but he kept on, ignoring how it dug into the synthetic skin of his hands. More importantly, they muffled the noise of the shards shifting against the stained linoleum tiles.

X made it to the door. He settled against the wall next to the blown-out entrance, pressed his back to it, and listened. They were just on the other side of the windows, and occasionally conversed in their mode of I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. He weighed his options: attack them, but risk opening hostilities earlier than strictly necessary, and risk his own life; let them pass, hope that his friends could deal with them but risk that they couldn't, thus endangering everyone in the encampment; or try to talk them down, but lose the element of surprise, and risk that they wouldn't listen and would still attack him.

When he put it like that, it wasn't much of a choice. He had to try. '>I.34100-COM: Identification requested. I.34018-COM: Awaiting signal.' he sent. They'd know he was close, because his signal would be very strong, but there was at least no directionality involved.

Both of them paused immediately, exchanging a rapid series of their own messages. "Who's there?" one asked. "Show yourself." At this distance, X hoped that the voice would pick up on his personal sensor.

'>I.34100-COM: Identification requested. I.40011-LOG: Argument expected. I.09090-LOG: Query.' X demanded, more insistently. 'I.09076-LOG: Hypothetical. I.00981-NRG: Negative. W.00186-CMB: Engage.' They could identify themselves, or if they refused, he would attack.

"Big words from someone who won't show their face," the same reploid said, and X concluded that since they understood the common I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. dialect, their version was likely a code. A light swept over the interior of the convenience store, but even though it fell across X, they didn't spot him underneath the tarp he still wore. "They're nearby somewhere. Keep looking." Then, to X, "Why don't you tell us who you are first? It's only manners."

'>W.04877-SYS: Balance systems operating outside of nominal parameters. I.34100-COM: Identification sent. I.34100-COM: Identification requested. I.34018-COM: Awaiting signal. I.09090-LOG: Query.' X responded, not giving away his location.

Another flurry of encoded communication between the two Drifters. Then, aloud, "You're new here, right? How about you come out and we talk this over like civilized reploids?"

'>I.00910-GEN: Acknowledged. I.04053-REC: Home region registered. W.18900-POS: Increase distance. I.00098-LOG: IF/THEN. I.34035-COM: Signal established.' X sent. In other words, 'Alright, get away from my home and then we can talk.'

"Well, now, that's going to be a problem, because we've got some business here. But we can talk here, can't we? After all, you're right…" The hulking red-painted reploid stepped forward, shining his light under one of the fallen shelves. "…here, somewhere…surely you don't mean to inconvenience us. That would be unneighborly."

X couldn't get a clear look at him, but he made enough noise that he was simple enough to track spatially. The second was still outside, and the now-steady rainfall made them very difficult to pin down, but fortunately they had a light as well, and began shining it around through the windows. X hoped that they'd be visible from the encampment, but he didn't expect it. 'I.34003-COM: Resending. A.09657-SYS: Major systems damage detected. I.40910-INT: Negative motive priority. I.04053-REC: Home region registered. W.18900-POS: Increase distance. I.00022-LOG: Boolean: XOR. W.00186-CMB: Engage.' X broadcast. 'I'll only say this once more: I don't want to hurt you. Stay away from my home, or I'll be forced to fight you.' His hand settled onto his cane, slowly, carefully, so as to not shift his tarp and give away his location.

"Maybe we should—" a second voice said.

"Shut up."

"—sir," the other voice conceded, deferentially.

"We are not here to play silly little games with Mavericks," the first voice said, mostly to the second reploid, who seemed to be his subordinate. Then, more loudly and directed generally at X, "Especially ones that shouldn't be so far from home alone. Where are your friends?" he asked, turning over another tipped shelf. Soon enough, X knew, he'd be found. For a blessing, the second reploid was still outside, probably searching there too if the occasional sound of metal on concrete was an indication, and they didn't sound at all enthused about X's threat of combat. He might be able to disable this one and reason with the other…if he was very, very lucky.

Luck had not been on his side today. He didn't expect much.

X closed his eyes and centered himself. He'd tried to talk to them as much as he could without giving them a major advantage over him. They clearly had nothing good on their minds, and whether or not he was allowed to return, he would not allow anything to happen to the encampment or its residents. X hated violence, despised it with every molecule of his being…and yet, he had been honed as a war machine for eighty-four of his now ninety-six years.

If my fate is to be a weapon to the end, he decided, then from now on let it be that I am drawn only as I choose.

Eyes still closed, X began to calculate. His balance would not avail him, so he would need to make manual corrections at high speed, meaning he couldn't keep it up for long. He didn't have visual from where he was, but he had audio, and the memory of the interior's dimensions. He'd worked with less.

He would probably also feel like death warmed over after this, but if he still functioned enough to feel at all, X wouldn't complain.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," the Drifter in charge said, his footsteps approaching X's tarp.

In one fluid motion, X twisted his cane's handle, pulled it apart, and whipped around the brilliant green beam saber that burst from the hilt hidden in the shaft. It shredded through his tarp, spraying melted and burnt plastic everywhere, and cleaved through the knee of the reploid before him. X leapt into the air up and over him, furiously burning bandwidth to maintain his equilibrium, and as he arced over the larger reploid's head the blade ignited and flashed out a second time to lance a surgically precise hole through the shoulder joint of his right arm. X landed more heavily than he'd intended and his systems reeled, but he couldn't afford to stop yet. He spun, swinging once more. The beam of plasma sliced the air with a crackling hum and severed the connectors of the Drifter's other knee before disappearing again.

The red-painted reploid collapsed to the floor with a scream that pushed his vocal synthesizer beyond its capabilities, and he only managed a scrambled, strangled digital gurgle. X took a deep breath, letting it out into the night air, and approached the other reploid outside the destroyed store, each step costing him dearly but knowing that if he stumbled now, it was over for him.

"He can be repaired," X said, no malice in his voice. The second reploid was shorter and rounder, designed not unlike a bipedal mouse and clearly not made for combat. He stood his ground, though from his wide eyes, pinned ears, and trembling tail, he may simply have been too afraid to run. "Whatever you're doing, I don't want to have to hurt you, but if you're here to cause trouble, I will do what I have to."

"Wh-who," the mouse stammered, "wh—what the hell are you?"

"Drop your weapons and leave, or you'll find out." X raised the saber's hilt, not yet turning it on.

The mouse-shaped reploid sputtered wordlessly, stumbling several steps backwards and raising his rifle. X spun his aging cooling systems up to max and began to calculate every single motion he would need to execute, then once he'd finished that, partial variations in case he needed to improvise. A constellation of alerts he didn't have time to process properly blurred past behind his eyes. Tomorrow's regrets could sort themselves out tomorrow, if indeed tomorrow came.

X feinted a dodge to the mouse's left, then lunged right instead. As he'd expected, the Drifter aimed left and fired, burning a hole through the trailing edge of X's tarp and singeing his jacket sleeve, but otherwise doing him no harm. X brought the saber up and around, activating it halfway through its arc as he passed. The beam lanced out again, passing cleanly through the rifle's strap—and nothing else. The panicking reploid suddenly found himself with an unsupported and front-heavy weapon, dropping it with a fearful little shriek and dancing backwards away from X. With grim determination, X performed a final series of calculations, saber at the ready to divest the mouse of one of his knees…

…and the antique saber sputtered, battery dying partway through the swing, leaving X with a trail of green sparks and then, finally, nothing. Four swings. That was all the charge Zero's old weapon held, now; one less than he'd counted on. X could have had the battery replaced with a new one, he knew, but he'd never had the heart. It was the only physical memento he had left. Changing any part out of it just felt…wrong.

Well, X could still improvise, after all, even if it cost him several moments to reset his calculations and begin again, and his processor speed wouldn't keep up with reality nearly as well without the headstart while he had to calculate and correct his movements manually. He would lag, and unless he could keep his opponent off balance, he'd only lag further behind with each passing second. It wasn't his favorite position to be in, but he could manage. He let his momentum carry him to a three-point landing behind the mouse reploid, then launched himself up with as much force as he could muster. He brought the end of the hilt down across the mouse's head with both hands, hard enough to send him reeling back.

X landed, calculated several variants on a spin kick that would let him push the reploid off-balance and to the ground, and hopped to his other leg to deliver—and his knee froze, throwing his computations off with no time to adjust. The kick went off, but his inertia was all wrong. He connected, sending them both down to the rain-slicked asphalt.

He couldn't keep up. X scrambled to his feet, but without something for support, he fell again, losing precious moments as the much newer model sprang up first. The mouselike Drifter broadcast a burst of I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. that X didn't understand, and four more similarly-encoded signals answered him.

X's eyes widened. Four? No, he'd only seen one other Drifter…if there were others, he wouldn't have any chance at—

He felt a massive downdraft and heard something land behind him. Before he could whirl around and see more than the silhouette of a winged reploid, something dark and opaque even to infrared fell over his head and clamped tightly around his neck. With no visual input, his balance systems entirely gave up, unable to compute anything but cripplingly intense vertigo that sent him to the ground. Strong hands gripped his jacket and hauled him to his feet.

X fought like a cornered cat. He threw the saber as hard as he could in the direction of the encampment, hoping beyond hope that the Drifters would leave it alone, and lashed out with both hands at whoever had him.

"None of that, now," said a voice that he recognized instantly. Seren. He launched himself in her direction, but either she stepped aside or he had miscalculated, as he landed hard on the cracked road. "Feral little thing, aren't you? Not so great now, though. Ric, take Faraday. See if we can't get him patched up. Maglev, Analog, this one's yours. Careful he doesn't bite you, he's feisty. Who knows what sort of diseases he's got."

Unseen hands seized both of X's arms, roughly lifting him to his feet. "Now what did you have to go and do that for?" said a voice he didn't recognize. "You made a hell of a mess out of Faraday. You shouldn't have done that, you know. He holds grudges about that kind of thing." X pulled against his captors, thrashing as hard as he could bring his systems to move, but after a brief conversation in I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast., they simply and simultaneously let go of him, and he crumpled to the ground with no concept of which way was up.

"See, Ana? He's not so scary now, is he?" the reploid said.

"N-no sir," the rodent reploid agreed.

X's pride stung. The best he could do was pull himself to his knees; the moment his hands left the ground, he couldn't stay upright. The street may as well have been spinning, for all he could tell in between critical balance alerts.

"But, as entertaining as this is," the same reploid continued, "we don't have all night. Now, pay close attention, little Maverick, I've got a very convincing argument for why you should calm down and behave."

X turned his head in the direction of the voice, though he couldn't see a thing through the fabric. What could he have been talking about—

—A burst of electricity shot through him from the collar that clamped the bag over his head, brief but disorientingly painful. Both of his hands flew to the collar with a cry of surprise, but it was already over, and the mechanism didn't give even a millimeter under his fingers. His ventilation systems hung for a moment, fans disrupted by the shock.

"I think he's got the idea," Seren said, approvingly. "Call it off for tonight. We'll take what we can get. I bet he knows all sorts of interesting things about their firepower and defenses that he just can't wait to share with us."

The unseen hands seized X again, and this time, he didn't resist them when they dragged him away over the uneven ground.

Chapter Text

X rolled to a stop where he'd been thrown, and with some effort, managed to right himself into a seated position. "Cool down in there and think about what you did." The collar around his neck clicked, and a hand pulled the now-detached bag from his head. They'd taken his few possessions, such as they were, and put him in manacles, hands behind his back. He stared up at a tall reploid, torso and helmet painted with a splash of bright red over a steel gray, with two retractable fixed wings on his back. The reploid, who must have been Maglev, regarded him in turn.

"Damn, I have no idea how a piece of unpainted scrap like you took Faraday apart like that. You're lucky you're so obsolete, or we'd just take his replacement parts out of you," he said. "You simmer. Captain'll figure out what she wants to do with you soon enough." Maglev turned. The door slid shut behind him, leaving X in a room barely larger than a closet and lit by a single fluorescent light recessed behind a grating.

X shivered. They could have bothered to give his clothing back, he thought, but they hadn't, and the concrete floor sucked the warmth out of his exposed metal plates as quickly as he could generate it. The sensor Glitch made for him was probably forfeit, though he hoped beyond hope that maybe they wouldn't deem it interesting enough to dismantle.

Then again, he also hoped that nobody would be foolish enough to try to find him, even as he wished that somebody would.

He looked around, and the bottom dropped completely out of his circuits as he realized where he was. X had never been on this side of one, but he recognized the reinforced door and plated wall paneling immediately: this was the holding cell block of a Maverick Hunter precinct. He'd even visited this one several times in the past. The Drifters must have moved in and taken it over, and he had a strong hunch regarding who'd given them the idea.

Then, since this was a Hunter base, they were almost certainly using Hunter equipment, and this was likely a standard-issue containment collar, X realized hopelessly. If he even tried broadcasting anything or toggling his tracking system, it would neutralize the signal, and possibly also him for several minutes. No point in trying to step over the cuffs, either, because they were self-adjusting full forearm sleeve restraints. He wouldn't have had the flexibility without pulling his arm joints apart, and his body complained loudly enough already without that.

I wonder if this is it, X thought, despondent. Wouldn't that be ironic…disposed of in the end by a Maverick Hunter gone Maverick, still playing at being a Hunter. Maybe I deserve this. He ached, frame-deep, and despite the biting cold and the awkwardness of doing it with his arms bound behind him, X laid down on his side on the floor. At least his electronic systems would appreciate it. His mechanical systems…well, they wouldn't be happy no matter what he did, but he could quiet some of the warnings just by lying still.

The cell spun for a few minutes until his glitching balance system concluded that he really wasn't moving anymore, and X could finally stand to close his eyes. He took a deep breath and sighed it out with a half-laugh that startled him.

Things really can't get worse, he thought. At least the Drifters aren't harassing the camp tonight. I accomplished that much.

He wondered if Glitch had heard the altercation. Probably. I hope he doesn't blame himself for not insisting on coming with me, X thought. Should I have let him? We'd still have been outnumbered five to three at least, with Mack…and those aren't good odds, when I'm one of the three. And as competent as Mack was with the advantage of terrain, it likely wouldn't have had that. Or perhaps they'd have entirely avoided the Drifters, but then, would they have continued on to attack the encampment without Glitch to relay the alarm from his sensor network? Seren had said something about calling 'it' off. There may have been more Drifters yet on the way.

There was no use dwelling on what-ifs, X reminded himself, but what else was he going to do? He wondered if he could manage to defragment like this. It would at least pass the time until the Drifters decided to do whatever it was they were going to do with him. Maybe he could talk some sense into Seren, if they weren't trading buster fire. Despite everything, he still held out the faintest hope that maybe she would listen to him.

Like Kathy listened to me? X thought, suddenly and sourly. Because that went so well. If I don't try, everything goes to hell. If I do try, it goes to hell, and then I'm tired from trying too. At least he was too exhausted and in pain to have another panic attack. That would have been the absolute last thing he needed.

The second-to-last thing he needed, however, happened, which was his battery complaining of a low charge. >W.00010-NRG: Battery at ten percent., his systems informed him. Ah. I see. It'll be euthanasia, then, if they don't bother to check on me, X thought, remotely bitter but struggling to summon any other emotion about it. I suppose there are worse ways to go than a dead battery.

With one more sigh, he set himself to power-saving mode and passed out. Whatever had happened, he'd given it his best. He'd been truthful, just like he'd told himself he'd do.

And now it was over.

The sound of the door sliding open woke X. The light from outside hurt his eyes as they struggled to focus, and the relief of unconsciousness gave way to the excruciating reality that he'd overtaxed his systems, badly, and his self-repair couldn't make heads or tails of what was even wrong to begin trying to fix it. He sucked in a breath and tried to duck his head away from the light.

"Well, good morning, sunshine. I hope I didn't interrupt your nap," came Seren's voice. The door closed behind her, and she crouched in front of X, interlacing her fingers. He blinked up at her, blearily, still lying on his side on the concrete floor with his arms bound.

I must look like I feel, X realized. Without his armor or clothing, Maglev was right: he looked like unpainted scrap. The seams in his synthetic skin had worn to be more obvious over the years, his shoulders weren't much more than spherical connection points for his armor, and aside from his arms and neckline, he was unadorned metal and dark gray all over. He hadn't been able to do anything to keep his hair from falling into his eyes with his hands bound. Indeed, X wasn't sure he could even get himself upright now without some complicated maneuver involving the wall.

"Seren," he said. X hadn't seen her in years, aside from the brief and distant look he got when they'd been shooting at each other. She'd spray painted the white of her chassis red along with the rest of them, but she'd kept the metallic gold and violet trim of her armor. It matched her hair, which she now wore down instead of tucked up in her helmet as she had the last time X had seen her, and her eyes. The emblem of the Maverick Hunters still showed through underneath the paint on her arm, dark as a bruise.

"You've got me at a disadvantage, it seems," Seren said with a smile, clearly amused at her choice of words. "Whatever are they saying about me there?"

"Nothing that bad," X replied. "But that's not why I know you."

Seren cocked an eyebrow. "Do tell."

X turned his head upwards to look her in the eye, as much as he could. "Seren. Class A Hunter, 13th Unit. Outstanding combat capability, underdeveloped leadership skills, and a concerning disregard for collateral damage. I see you've been working on the leadership skills at least."

Seren's other eyebrow slowly raised to join the first, then they both plunged together into a pointed scowl. "Who told you that?" X simply held her gaze, watching her expression evolve: from anger, to suspicion, then concern. "Who are you, that you'd know what my last promotion review said?"

"Your reviewer," X replied.

Her expression shifted again. The concern deepened, and she leaned over further to peer into X's face. He just kept staring her down as she processed his statement.

Seren dropped back suddenly as if she'd been pushed onto her backside, fingers over her mouth. "Oh my God. You…can't be."

"I'd like not to be right about now, believe me."

"Captain X, sir! I'm so—oh, no," Seren stammered, then bolted to her feet. "Wait right there!" She fled the holding cell, not even watching the door slide closed behind her. Before it did, X caught a brief glimpse of a black-plated female reploid on guard duty, looking between Seren's retreating form and his cell in complete bafflement.

After not even thirty seconds, the door slid open again, and Seren burst in with the keys to X's restraints. She unlocked the cuffs and collar and pulled X to a sitting position, which made the room immediately begin spinning again.

"Sir! I'm so sorry, sir, I didn't recognize you," she said, bordering on panic in her rush. "What are you even doing out here? Oh, no," she said again.

X rolled his shoulders and immediately regretted it. He hurt far more now than he had on the floor, and that had been substantial. "Calm down," he grumbled, because she wasn't helping his situation at all by being loud and moving him around without warning, even if he did appreciate not being in cuffs.

Seren immediately calmed, or at least quieted. She stared at him, eyes wide with something like terror, as he tried and mostly failed to regain his bearings. "I was following a missing person case," X said. "Just on the side. It wasn't anything official. Where's my cane?"

"It's—I'll have someone bring it," Seren said, leaping into action. The door opened again, and this time it stayed open. "Era. Bring his things. Right now. No backtalk, just do it." The reploid on guard hesitantly left. "Sir—" Seren started, turning to X.

"I'm retired," X said. "Please stop calling me that."

"Yes s—I mean, yes, of course," Seren stuttered. X hadn't seen his presence have this much of an effect on someone in some years, and he now remembered very keenly how much he disliked it. "I'm so sorry. Do you need anything? A recharge? A…somewhere more comfortable to sit?"

"A recharge," X admitted. "It's been a long day." As much as he didn't want to obligate himself to her suddenly subservient hospitality, he couldn't argue that he was running concerningly low. "And…maybe a blanket while I'm at it."

"Of course!" She sent a rapid-fire burst of diagnostic codes out, still in the same encoded syntax as before. "We've got several pods you can use in the barracks. I'll show you to them."

"Once I've got my cane," X said, waiting on the floor until the other Drifter came back with his belongings. His jacket no longer contained Glitch's sensor, but that didn't surprise him, even if it saddened him a little. He threw his clothes over his shoulder, reassembled his now-empty cane shaft to the handle, and stood, with the additional aid of the wall. Seren hovered around him as if she wanted to help him stand but didn't know how to offer. X ignored her, because he was far too tired and in pain to extend manners of any kind to someone who'd only recently had a laugh about zapping him with a shock collar, no matter how quickly she'd pivoted to treating him like royalty.

Actually, X wasn't sure which was worse: the shock collar, or the cringing deference. At least with the collar, he knew exactly where they all stood. This was just weird. But he was also far too tired and in pain to scrutinize the benefits that closely.

Once he'd gotten to his feet, Seren personally led the way through the commandeered Hunter base. "Captain?" one of the reploids along the way asked upon seeing their leader escorting their newest prisoner as if he were an honored guest, and Seren motioned emphatically for him to shut up.

"Once you've recharged, si—I mean, X," Seren started, "I have so much I need to talk to you about."

"I'm sure you do," X agreed blandly.

"But, uh, in the meantime, have a good rest?" she said, hopefully. "Don't worry about the pod. It's all yours."

Someone had already put a blanket in one of the pods. X remembered an urban myth he'd heard once, that gangs of infected Mavericks were using recharge pods to spread the Virus, and wondered if it had ever been true. It would have been clever if it were, he thought, even if most reploids didn't tend to recharge in strange pods left lying around in the middle of nowhere. It was probably about as realistic as humans catching diseases from using a toilet, in his estimation.

He settled in with a click and watched his energy systems handshake with the pod's energy systems, because it beat watching the warnings and critical alerts in another data stream. It was one of the Hunters' fast chargers, even. He would run warm from the sheer amount of current going into his old batteries, and that was fine by him. Alright, I stand a little corrected, X reluctantly admitted. Today could be worse, but it could not be stranger. At least I'm alive to be confused about it.

X didn't feel like having another dream that he didn't have the mental energy to handle, so he set himself to auto-wake at 90% or any external activity above a certain low threshold, and switched back to low power mode.

Nothing happened. Nobody bothered him. No one came in to attempt to peek in on him, which was a surprise; he had fully expected at least one gawker, but even that didn't happen. Feeling self-indulgent after everything he'd gone through, or maybe just exhausted despite a fresh recharge, he stayed put for an extravagant fifteen whole extra minutes before he finally decided to endure the pain of getting up. He pulled his clothing on, slowly and carefully, and tried to stretch. X let out a series of remarkably human cracks and pops. His joints were having none of that from him.

He risked a nosy look around the room. There was a section of seating and a bank of six recharging pods, arranged around a central column from floor to ceiling. Everything was standard issue, clean, and kept in good repair. It was spartan, as far as creature comforts and decor went, but a reploid could live well enough there for quite some time. Six pods, X thought, and if I remember the floor plan correctly, the small bases like this one had four rooms like this, and a pod in each officer's quarters as well. Glitch would literally kill for access to just one of these… He had to admit that the Drifters seemed to be doing well for themselves, everything else about their behavior aside.

X experimentally tried the door, and it slid aside obediently. The hallway beyond had seen some buster fire, but aside from some scorch marks that had been largely polished from the walls, it was intact and just as tidy as the pod bank. Evidently Seren had assigned someone to keep watch, as a reploid in black plating stood waiting in the hall, and as soon as she spotted X, she broadcast a brief, unintelligible signal. Then she spoke aloud.

"I'm supposed to take you to Seren," she said. "My name's Era. It's an honor to actually get to meet you." X recognized her from having been on guard duty outside his cell, for the brief glimpse he'd caught of her. She was…distinctive, X thought, her black hair shaved in an undercut and with several clearly aftermarket piercings in her tanned and scarred synthetic skin, as well as all manner of designs scratched into her paneling and stained into her skin like tattoos. Her chassis had probably been all black, maybe with a bit of silver, until she'd painted her trim with the usual bright red. Appearance aside, she regarded him with nothing less than shy admiration. X wasn't sure how to handle this.

"Nice to meet you," X said, politely, for lack of a better response. Was nobody here afraid of him? What the hell was going on with this group of Mavericks that they largely seemed to idolize him?

Era showed him to what would have been the communication center in a working Hunter base. It was a large, circular room, the walls lined with now-dark screens and workstations. Someone had gone through and tidied it up, setting the useless headsets neatly on their hooks. The ghosts of spraypainted graffiti still lingered in the cracks of some of the walls and floor. At one point, the Maverick Hunter emblem had been heavily tagged and then destroyed, but somebody had painstakingly pieced it back together and repainted it. It hung slightly crooked at the front of the room.

Seren sat beneath it at the head desk, but as soon as X entered, she sprang to her feet. X had a brief vision of a puppy leaping in excitement. "You're up," she said. "How are you feeling?"

"I have definitely been better," X replied, and then reminded himself that bitterness would not resolve anything. "But I appreciate the recharge."

"I'm so sorry. If I'd had any idea…please, here, have a seat." She pulled a seat from one of the nearby inactive consoles over to the front of the desk, then took her own much nicer officer's chair and pushed it towards X, sitting in the operator's chair instead. X gave her a hesitant look, but sat down. It was hard to complain about the padding when everything else already hurt.

"What in the world is going on here?" he asked.

"I've turned this entire group around," Seren replied, her eyes lighting up eagerly. "We—they used to just be a gang, but once I took over I got them organized, we got the old Hunter base cleaned up…we're going to take the quarantine zone back, X," she said. "We're going to clear the Mavericks out and keep this whole area safe for the eventual rebuilding effort. We're still short on manpower, but we're getting there."

X's mouth hung open. He had imagined so many things she might say to him…but that left him speechless with surprise for several moments. "That's what this is about?" he asked.

"Yes! Isn't it great?" Seren enthused. "I know I wasn't the best Hunter. I mean…they called me an irregular, obviously I wasn't the best, but I'm finally making a difference. I've got my own unit here. We aren't official, of course we aren't, and they really wanted to keep the name and the color, so I didn't argue with that because it's not that important overall, but we've been training so hard and it's about to all pay off."

Pieces began to fall into place, and X didn't relish what he saw. "Seren…they'd just as soon terminate you as they would anyone else out here. Even me, if the Hunters didn't recognize me before it was too late."

"Well, that's the risk we take," she conceded, but Seren's enthusiasm didn't flag in the least.

"I wondered why you were talking about Mavericks as if you weren't one yourself, when we first encountered you," X said.

"Then that was you," said Seren. "I had a feeling I recognized you from somewhere, but I just couldn't believe someone like you would have fallen in with someone like Glitch."

X proverbially bit his tongue so hard it proverbially bled.

"But to answer your statement, I'm not one. How could I be, when all I want is to do the best I can for humanity and all decent reploids? I'm repairing the damage done by the Mavericks here, one step at a time, and if anyone wants to swear off being a Maverick and work with me, there's a place for them here."

"And that's why you put a shock collar on me and threw me into a holding cell?" X said, somehow managing to not simply explode at her. In fact, it came out in a dangerously mild tone. "You tried to shake us down for whatever we scavenged, too."

"I didn't know it was you," Seren protested. "Of course I wouldn't have done any of that if I'd known. Why were you even with them? They're completely unrepentant."

"They are," X agreed. "You're right. They're also just minding their own business and trying to survive. How can you call that Maverick behavior?"

"Reploids weren't built just to survive. We're capable of doing so much more. We were built to make the world a better place for humanity. That's why we exist, X. You out of all of us should know that. You taught me that."

X's grip tightened on his cane. "I taught you wrong," he sighed, "and I'm sorry. I failed you more than I realized at the time. When I should have supported you, I didn't give you enough credit for how hard you worked or why, and I focused solely on your shortcomings without offering you any guidance to overcome them. I set you on the path to being declared Maverick, and I know that now. Instead of showing you how to temper your enthusiasm with caution, I dismissed you and buried myself in my own work instead, and now here we are. I'm sorry."

"You're…sorry?" Seren asked, face clouding with angst. "Really? I…never imagined I'd ever hear…I thought I must have been a completely lost cause, and I…" Her hands curled in her lap.

"I am," X repeated. "I am so sorry. It's not too late, Seren. We can't go back. The damage has been done. But we can always go forward from where we are now."

She looked up, violet eyes filled with an odd light. "Yes. We can! This is the perfect opportunity! You've seen what I'm trying to do, and they'll listen to you. You're X! Tell HQ that I'm not a Maverick. You know me! You know I'm just trying to do what's right!"

"What were you doing last night? How is attacking another settlement right?" X asked.

"Si—X, listen to me. They're Mavericks. Real ones. And I know, yes, my men were too, but they've turned away from it now. We're Maverick Hunters. This is what we do. We can't tolerate Mavericks in our midst."

X blinked dizzily. "You're playing at being Hunters. That's what the Drifters are. And they know this?"

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "That's what we are. I know I messed up with the Hunters, but I worked and fought and built a second chance here for all of us. For you! I wanted you to be proud of me. Please. Just tell HQ. I know you can make them understand." She folded her hands together, imploringly. "And then we can all finally go home together."

Even with the memory of his mistreatment fresh in his memory and aching in his systems, X's heart went out to her. It was the most fundamental wish in the world. X felt it, constantly and as keenly as a knife, though his home and the only one he'd ever wanted to be proud of him had long since died. But that was just it, wasn't it? There was no returning for any of them.

"If a home exists for damaged people like us, it's ahead of us, not behind us," X told Seren, as gently as he knew how. He reached a hand out and placed it atop hers. "It's not something you can find at the end of a road paved in violence. It's not something I can make for you, either. I'm not a miracle worker, whatever they say about me. I'm just another person who's been where you are, trying to bury my mistakes under more effort, but it doesn't work when the basic premise is flawed to begin with."

"But you're X," Seren repeated. "There's no reploid in the world with more influence than you."

"Listen to me, Seren, please," X said, not bothering to correct her on the technicalities of whether or not he counted as a reploid. "That may be true, but I can't just say the word and change the entire system. I can't magically pardon anybody. Even during the War I couldn't have done that. If there's a home for you, or me, it's a new one, and it's going to be found by working together to build it."

"And we have!" Seren insisted. "We've built a home here as Maverick Hunters. We're not official, but we're the only active unit in this area, and we're keeping it free of Mavericks."

"I'm not talking about who's a Maverick and who isn't. We all are. Even me."

Seren sat up straighter, staring at X in disbelief. "W-what are you saying? You can't be. You're X. Don't be ridiculous."

"That's exactly what I'm saying. I don't think there's a difference between killing a reploid and a human. We're all just people, and I've killed countless people. Is that not what a Maverick is? A reploid who kills people?"

"No," Seren objected, and she pulled her clasped hands away from X's. "That can't be right. I-it's unfortunate that reploids have to die, but it's not wrong to do what has to be done with a Maverick."

"Seren. I was wrong for most of my life. Please, let me at least use my mistakes to teach you to do better than I did. Nobody else needs to be hurt. Reach out to the reploids with Kathy. They'll talk to you. I promise they will. You can still work this out and become allies. I've lived with them for almost a week, and they didn't know who I was, so I've seen who they are. They're good people who were in terrible situations, just like you were. They're not monsters."

Seren shrank further back from him in alarm, and X wondered how many more times he was going to see someone make that exact expression at discovering who and what he really was. "No. Listen to me, X. We're doing good work here. Once we've gotten rid of Kathy's gang one way or another, we'll be in control of the Abel City quarantine zone, and then we'll contact HQ and explain everything to them."

Now it was X's turn to sit upright with alarm. "They'll locate and apprehend you, if not destroy you. That's standard operating procedure. You know that."

"Standard operating procedure isn't going to apply, because we're on their side. That's already not standard. Stay here with us, X. You can contact them yourself. They wouldn't arrest you."

"You know who else everyone idolized, respected, and listened to, all the way to until they didn't? Sigma," X said. "If they find out I've gone Maverick—"

"—Stop talking like you have!" Seren interrupted.

"I have!" X said, not quite raising his voice, though it cut through the muted quiet of the dark comms center just as if he had. "Maverick, irregular, it doesn't matter what you call it. It's not even a meaningful term. You're Maverick, I'm Maverick, and without the Virus, the only difference between us and any reploid on the other side is that they haven't had to make terrible decisions to survive. And that can change at any moment. We've stopped following the rules, that's all, because the rules were never fair to us to begin with."

"I am following the rules!" Seren shouted, half standing.

Ah, here we go again, X thought, numbly exhausted, and his proprioceptive systems suddenly reported that 'up' was somewhere in the vicinity of the wall and drifting slowly. For all I've always tried to talk my way out of situations, you'd think I'd succeed at least sometimes, but twice in two days is bad even for me.

"I've always followed the rules. Everything I've ever done, I did because I wanted to be the perfect Hunter and make a difference. Even if the world failed me in the end, I'm not going to fail the world!" She slammed a fist on the desk, rattling the drawers. X's nerves were not so easily jangled this time, though.

"The world does not care about either of us," X cut in, but Seren continued.

"You're wrong, X," she said. "You can give up on justice, but I won't."

"Where is the justice in one gang of Mavericks gunning down another?" X asked. "How is that anything but just more death?"

"Shut up!" Seren yelled, hitting the desk a second time. This time, when she lifted her fist, it left behind a faint imprint in the surface. "If you want to play at being a Maverick so badly, I can show you what we do with them here myself. Is that what you want?" she threatened.

X held his ground and took a calculated risk. "How's that going to work out for you when you've gotten your men to idolize me like you do and they find out you've scrapped me?"

Seren froze, staring at X with undisguised disgust. "If they saw how far you've fallen," she began.

"What did you promise them? That they could all go back to normal lives after this? That they'd be pardoned?" X was playing with fire, he knew. He was unarmed, unarmored, and too tired and sore to fight back if Seren decided to attack him. Even so, he couldn't stop himself from speaking. "It's a nice dream, but that's all it is. The system isn't going to change how it treats us overnight."

Seren lunged around the desk, grabbing X by the front of his jacket and hauling him off his feet with one hand, the tips of what would have been his toes dangling on the metal floor tiles. "The system will change, because I will change it myself if I have to," she declared, nose to nose. "Give up, if that's what you want. I will never give up. How could you? After everything you've done, how could you just stop?"

X's combat systems automatically calculated a course of action, then discarded it as impossible, again and again. By any metric, he was beaten, they finally concluded, with a shrug that he could only agree with. "I'm tired, Seren. I'm tired of pretending that I'm okay. I'm tired of being responsible for the entire world. It's too much for any one person to do, and I've made it worse by trying anyway. If finally realizing that is giving up, then I give up."

"If you want to die so badly, I can arrange it for you," Seren fumed, holding him up higher.

"I don't know if I can die, if I've never lived," X admitted, strangely at peace, arms dangling at his sides. "The War is over, but it never actually ended for any of us. What do you want from me? Look at me, Seren. I'm no hero. I can't fix this. How can you ask that of me?"

"How can you expect any of us to do this alone?" she countered, grip tightening as she lifted him higher. X dropped his cane, and it clattered on the floor.

"Not alone," X replied. "It's not possible alone. Each of us are only one person. We can only do one person's work. We have to act as a whole, if we want to be more than one person."

"Liar!" Seren roared, shaking him. "You ended an entire war alone. Why won't you end this?"

"I ended it by killing everyone and everything I cared about, over and over again," X retorted. "It wasn't right. Reploids are more than tools for the advancement of humanity. We have to…" Seren gripped his jacket so tightly that the collar cut into his voice synthesizer, and he could barely speak. "To…evolve," he choked out. "Together. Not…not like Sigma wanted for us. He was…wrong. Our potential isn't…in…war. It's…"

Seren's other hand retracted and her arm reconfigured into a buster. "Shut up!"

"It's…in unity…in…trust…and loyalty…and in…love…"

She pointed the weapon at him, shaking. X could hear its internals humming with energy, like a held breath before a catastrophe. He extended his hand to her. "P…please…Seren. As…long as…there's…a tomorrow…we…can…always be…better…"

A shot, bright and hot, the plasma crackling in the air. X closed his eyes. It didn't hurt as much as he thought.

In fact, it felt very much like he'd had his ear singed, and nothing else. The acrid smell of burnt synthetic hair and hot metal filled the room. X dared to open his eyes. Seren still held him in one hand, buster pointed just past his face and at a new scorch mark on the ceiling. She was trembling with rage and who knew what else, face contorted with emotion, eyes overflowing with synthesized tears.

"Captain!" Era burst into the room as soon as the sliding door had opened enough to let her in. "What's…?" She looked between X and Seren, unable to process the situation.

Well, that makes three of us, X thought, and Seren dropped him. He crumpled unceremoniously before hauling himself up on his cane.

"Put him back in holding," Seren ordered, voice trembling.

"Sir?" Era questioned.

"Now."

"Y-yes, sir." She hovered, uncertain if she was meant to manhandle X or not. Either way, she didn't seem willing.

He looked to the black-plated reploid. "Don't worry. I'll go quietly. Just show me the way."

The sliding doors closed behind them, and after a few moments, both X and Era heard and felt an enormous thud from inside the comms center.

Era paused, staring back at the door. "Did the Captain just…that sounded like she flipped her entire desk across the room."

"Likely," X admitted.

"What happened between you two?" she asked. "I'm…probably not supposed to even be talking to you, but she didn't tell me not to, so…"

"I don't think I lived up to her expectations very well," was all that X could come up with. "Just…take me back to the cell. I'm tired."

Chapter Text

Glitch sat in his lab, spinning in his chair angrily. Even Mack was giving him space, which was unusual, but then again, he was unusually angry. He could see—well, 'see'—right where V was. His sensor node was just one among the new network he'd already acclimated to, like a web of new eyes and ears, right at the edge of connectivity with the others. For a few minutes Glitch had been worried that V was going to go out of range, but V knew the specs as well as anyone, and despite his being wifi-blind, he stayed just in contact.

V. X. Whoever he was. Kathy hadn't needed to take it nearly so badly, he thought, fuming again. She was in her office, refusing to talk to anybody, and so he was in his lab doing the same, because what else was he going to do? V had asked him to not follow him, and so he wasn't, even if he could have disassembled his own legs with his teeth from anxiety about it. He was in no shape to be out by himself, Glitch thought, but surely he knew how to stay out of trouble. That was all he had to do, right? Both of them, really; they just needed to stay out of trouble for twenty-four hours.

Tall order, Glitch thought. Trouble is like both of our middle names, I'm pretty sure. Not that I had a middle name, because I'm Japanese and we don't do that, and V just only has the one name so it'd be a last name by default, but whatever. It's the right idea anyway.

After some time, Glitch got bored of spinning and kept his hands busy piecing together broken busters into training weapons. He'd had a pet project of trying to make an ammunition pack recharger, but it had a tendency to explode spent packs instead of charging them. Then again, for the mood he was in, maybe a few explosions wouldn't go amiss.

Glitch pulled the project out from the box he'd stowed it in and began working. Maybe if he trickled the charge instead of treating it like a normal battery, since it wasn't…they were, technically, rechargeable, but the setup to do so was a whole electrochemical process, and he didn't have the chemistry side of it, nor any way to look up which chemicals were involved, short of cracking one open and sniffing it. Well, what was stopping him? He could do that if he felt like it. He just needed to figure out how to do it without lighting his hair on fire. Having to actually regrow it was such a pain in the panels and a waste of nanomaterials that he could have been using for anything else.

A slight noise from V's sensor node distracted Glitch entirely from his thoughts, attention pivoting instantly and fully to listen. He bumped the sensitivity up remotely. V was…talking to himself, Glitch realized. He was probably asleep, as the few snatches of speech he could make out sounded like nonsense. Well, good, the poor man could use some peace after the treatment he'd gotten. The sensor's batteries reported that all was well, so he left the sound sensitivity where it was, and settled back down to work on his project. Carefully, Glitch picked out a depleted ammo pack and began to pry the outer casing apart. Maybe the inside would have some nice, self-explanatory warnings.

Glitch worked in his lab. Kathy…did whatever she was doing in her office. At some point Hammer went in, and Glitch could faintly hear through the doors that they were conversing, but he didn't feel like getting into it until he'd let Hammer talk to her first. He had A Way with managing her nerves that Glitch did not, and he knew it. If they could have recruited Hammer to address the whole issue of V's real identity…well, no, they couldn't have, because he was the one who'd killed Alderman, it turned out, and that would have just been opening the other end of the can of worms.

The sun fell, and the rain began. Glitch finally left his lab, but he still didn't want to talk to Kathy, so instead he wandered to the edge of the garage, crossing his arms over the edge and staring into the early evening.

This sucks, he thought. I could walk right over there, right now, and just bring him back. And I should, except he asked me not to, so I'm not, which is stupid, but it's his stupid, so I'm going to go along with it, Glitch followed himself up, feeling uncommonly dutiful. He hadn't felt that particular emotion often. Really, only towards Mack, and V, and to a lesser degree, Kathy and Hammer. Everyone else here, well, he liked them, but he didn't feel any obligation to listen to them if they ordered him around. That was asking a lot.

Glitch heard, through the network, V mumble something in his sleep, and then there was an audible shift of fabric. Probably just woke up, Glitch thought. Shoulda stayed asleep until morning. He watched the rain for a few more minutes, under thermal imaging for variety. It looked much the same as it did under visible spectrum imaging: like nothing at all.

A loud thumping made him jump out of his paint job, and it took a few processor cycles for him to realize that it was coming through V's sensor, and a few more to realize it was in Morse code, however slow and clunky the medium made it.

..--- / -.. .-. .. ..-. - . .-. ... / -- --- ...- .. -. --. / - --- .-- .- .-. -.. ... / -.-- --- ..-

"Oh, no. Shit. V, don't do anything stupid," Glitch said, under his breath, knowing that V couldn't hear him. He dashed back to the main building, colliding with Cirocco and continuing to run straight through her at top speed. She'd be fine, probably, even if she was now snarling and bristling at him.

"Kathy," he started, bursting into her office without so much as knocking. "We got a problem."

"Glitch," Kathy began, but upon hearing his tone she must have decided to save the lecture for later.

"V signaled me through his sensor. Two Drifters, at his location, moving towards us, except I think he's going to—"

'Who's there? Show yourself.'

"—ah, shit, he's intercepting. Idiot!" Glitch slapped the wall nearest him in frustration. "Of course he is. We have to go out there, Kat, he's not even armed, he's going to get himself deactivated."

"And if we open hostilities with them right now, while we're hardly armed and barely trained?" Kathy asked. "We're at least defensible right here. In fact," she paused verbally and switched to diagnostic broadcast. '>I.40904-INT: High attention priority. I.40904-INT: High attention priority. I.04053-REC: Home region registered. E.00186-CMB: Engage. W.18901-POS: Decrease distance. I.00186-CMB: Engage. I.52634-POS: Assigned location. I.00023-LOG: Boolean: NOT. I.10299-CMB: Training exercise.' Kathy got to her feet, as well, and headed for her own assigned station.

"I know," Glitch groaned, following her. "But he's—hang on. I can tell you exactly what he's hearing, I'll just…" He rerouted a few processes quickly and began to simply speak whatever he heard through the sensor, as he heard it, in a very close approximation of the voice in which it was spoken. He'd coded that for fun, once upon a time, and never thought he'd find any use for it. "Big words from someone who won't show their face. They're nearby somewhere. Keep looking. Why don't you tell us who you are first? It's only manners." Then, in his own voice, "Goddamn, V, when I see you next, I'm going to install you a new port myself for giving me this kind of coolant pump malfunction."

"To your station," Kathy ordered, and then, "wait, no, I want to hear what's going on."

Valentina and Siobhan were on either side of her within earshot. "What's going on?" Valentina asked, in a loud whisper.

"Drifters," Kathy said. "And…V is trying to keep them away from us."

Glitch switched into the unknown reploid's voice again. "You're new here, right? How about you come out and we talk this over like civilized reploids?" Then, in his own, "He must be hidden pretty well, but he can hardly walk on his own. There's no way he can stay hidden for much longer. I'm going," he declared, placing a foot onto the edge of the barricade. He almost jumped over the edge of the garage, but Kathy slammed a hand onto his shoulder and pulled him down.

"You are not. Keep us updated on what's going on."

"Fine!" He cleared his throat and spoke again. "Well, now, that's going to be a problem, because we've got some business here. But we can talk here, can't we? After all, you're right…here, somewhere…surely you don't mean to inconvenience us. That would be unneighborly."

"Kat, they're going to find him," Valentina hissed. "We should do something!"

"Do you remember the first thing he taught us about combat stations? We do not leave them under any circumstances, because everyone else is counting on us to be there," Kathy returned, though her resolve was clearly wavering.

"Maybe we should—" Glitch said, in a different voice.

Then, in the first, "Shut up."

"—sir," he said in the second voice..

"We are not here to play silly little games with Mavericks," he said, in the first voice again, seemingly talking to the owner of the second voice, and then a bit more loudly, "Especially ones that shouldn't be so far from home alone. Where are your friends?" A pause, and then, ominously, "Come out, come out, wherever you are…"

Glitch hesitated, eyes unseeing as he focused entirely on the sensor in V's jacket, and then, unexpectedly, he laughed, just once, and sharply.

"Was that…uh…who said that part?" Valentina asked, trying to keep an eye out in the dark and one on Glitch at the same time.

"I said that. There were some sounds like a plasma cutter or something, and then that guy just…screamed bloody murder. I have no idea what V did to him, but…wait, wait." He began speaking in V's voice, which was uncanny even to him. "He can be repaired. Whatever you're doing, I don't want to have to hurt you, but if you're here to cause trouble, I will do what I have to."

"Oh my God, V," Valentina said, free hand covering her mouth, which was fixed somewhere between a delighted grin, and hanging open in horror. "That's…badass."

"Wh-who," Glitch stammered, relaying the second unfamiliar reploid's voice, "wh—what the hell are you?"

"He might actually pull this off," Siobhan whispered.

"There's more combat sounds now. The other guy just went 'eep!' too, but I don't think he's hurt like the first was. Come on, V, you've got this. Take him down." Glitch paused, grinning wildly, but his face fell. "Oh, no, I don't like the sound of that. I think he just tripped. His sensor isn't moving now. Wait, it is. No, it's not again. Did you just hear something? Here, I mean. Like something metallic falling on the ground?"

"I definitely heard something," Siobhan confirmed. "Sounded like it bounced, too. It's too dark to see, though."

"Oh. Oh, no. Oh, no, no. Not this. I don't like this at all. Wait, let me catch up." Glitch next spoke in Seren's voice. "None of that, now. Feral little thing, aren't you? Not so great now, though. Ric, take Faraday. See if we can't get him patched up. Maglev, Analog, this one's yours. Careful he doesn't bite you, he's feisty. Who knows what sort of diseases he's got."

"She's here?" Kathy breathed, eyes wide with dread. "And Analog?"

"We have to do something, they've got V," Glitch said, grabbing Kathy by both shoulders. "Come on, Kat, before they leave sensor range. Wait, they're still talking."

"Now what did you have to go and do that for?" said Glitch, in yet another voice, and let go of Kathy. "You made a hell of a mess out of Faraday. You shouldn't have done that, you know. He holds grudges about that kind of thing. See, Ana? He's not so scary now, is he?"

"What are we going to do about this many of them?" Kathy asked. It sounded to Glitch that she was arguing with herself more than anything else. "They're trained better than we are and armed better than we are. Even if we charged them in numbers, we could take casualties we didn't need to, because we left our defensible position. But then we're just leaving V to…no, this is exactly the kind of decision he warned me in training that I might have to make. We can't break our line."

"But, as entertaining as this is, we don't have all night. Now, pay close attention, little Maverick, I've got a very convincing argument for why you should calm down and behave," Glitch continued, and then, in V's voice, cried out pitiably.

"Oh, no." Glitch leaned heavily on the barrier at the edge of the garage, sick to his circuits. "The sensor input just scrambled too. I don't know what they did to him. I've lost audio, and they're…moving away. They're going to go out of range. Kat, hold the line, I have to…I have to know where they're taking him." Glitch abruptly ran away to the housing building. He came back with a bag slung over his shoulder and his own brown tarp thrown haphazardly over it. Glitch plucked the buster out of her hands on his way past and leapt off the edge of the garage with no hesitation, firing his matter repulsors and landing lightly.

"Not without me you don't," Mack declared, running in Glitch's wake as fast as its two little feet would carry it over the concrete floor. It leapt to the edge of the barrier, then jumped without even looking, trusting that Glitch would catch it. He did.

"Hey! You both get back up here," Kathy ordered, shouting under her breath as much as was even possible and leaning over the edge. "I'll…this is insubordination. Glitch! Mack! Do you hear me?"

"Nope," Glitch responded, Mack perched on his head like a sentient helmet. "We'll be back. Keep the lights on for us."

"Kathy is going to kill us," Mack said, from its perch atop Glitch's head.

"Yeah, well. She can kill us. We'll survive. V might not, and that's the real problem. Now shh, we don't need them spotting us."

Glitch had lost the sensor's signal, but not by much, and he at least knew the general direction it had gone. He headed southwest, keeping to the deepest shadows and making very little noise, and soon enough he felt it again. It wasn't moving quickly, likely because V couldn't walk that fast or well in the best of circumstances.

While the Drifters surely were watching their backs, they couldn't have known that they were being electronically tailed from a distance. Their route took them nearly two miles away, into the very heart of downtown. It had been hit the worst of anywhere, but paths had been cleared beneath the rubble, through buildings and subway stations, and anywhere that one could walk without being spotted from above. Glitch himself had never risked going this way. The Drifters' tag was sprayed all over here, though it seemed to have had the same update they'd seen heading up Fifth Street. It took him a moment of analysis before he realized that they'd combined their spiral tag with the Maverick Hunters' emblem.

What a bizarre thing to do, Glitch thought. He filed the detail away for later. He was in unfamiliar territory in the dark, and keeping up without giving away his and Mack's presence took his full attention and then some.

They finally arrived at what had to be their destination, an old Maverick Hunter base, and Glitch hid in the shell of a nearby building, getting a vantage point so that he could watch them. They had V between two larger reploids, and Glitch breathed a proverbial sigh of relief to see that he was at least trying to walk under his own power, even if they mostly carried him by the arms. They'd black bagged him. Of course he couldn't walk like that. Glitch thought fondly of murder.

The other two reploids carried what must have been their comrade that V had taken apart. How had he done it? Glitch wondered. He hadn't been armed, and yet, he'd definitely heard the unmistakable crackling hum of a plasma weapon. It wasn't the most important mystery at the moment, but it was something to ask about later.

The five of them entered and disappeared through the guarded front door. Glitch frowned deeply. "I do not like the implications of this. Seren talking so much shit about Mavericks, their little rebranding effort, and now finding out they're living in one of these things…hey, you know much about Hunter bases?" he asked Mack.

It hopped down from atop his head and gave him a deadpan expression. "Where and when would I have learned that?"

"Just hoping. Hmm. V, buddy, you're gonna be awfully hard to break out of there. All I know about them is they're designed to keep Mavericks out, except for where they're designed to keep them in. Either way, they're not screwing around, and if we slip up, we're equally fucked, except we're probably not gonna be interesting enough to keep alive."

"I wonder if it's got maintenance conduits," Mack mused. "If it does, I bet I could find where they take him, at least. I might be able to try and keep an eye on things on the inside."

"Shit, I hope so. I hate this."

"Well, we've got his location, and I'm small enough I can stay hidden forever if I have to. I'll work on getting in. Might be able to slip in from underneath, or maybe from above. Damn, though, we should have painted me black."

"If you're sure. You aren't the one who promised you'd go anywhere he went, you know."

Mack gave Glitch a dry, level look. "No, but you did. It's all the same to me. If he's that important to you, then he's that important to me, no further explanation required. And you'd do the same if our positions were reversed."

"In a single clock cycle," Glitch agreed, with a shrug of defeat that was far too casual for the situation.

"Besides, I like him. He's even older than me," Mack said.

"I probably should have asked you first, but man, you should have seen how sad he looked."

"I can imagine. Are you heading back or staying here for now?"

Glitch squinted at the old Hunter base. "Staying here, unless you think I shouldn't, but I'm not gonna feel right leaving you both in a place like this."

"Then stay. I won't be more than an hour."

"Give me your sensor. I can set it to vibrate if it makes contact with V's." Mack flipped its helmet open like a box, and lifted the phone out with one jointed, thin mechanical arm, handing it up to Glitch. After a few moments of intensely and sightlessly squinting at it, Glitch handed it back, and Mack made ready to climb down the collapsed building.

"Hey. If you take more than an hour, what do you want me to do?" Glitch asked it.

"Wait another hour." It hopped down the rubble, found a suitable mud puddle, and took a roll in it, darkening its helmet until it looked like nothing but another clump of dirt. It had been barely visible at all in the rain to begin with, and now even Glitch, who had watched the process, struggled to follow it.

"Be careful," he said, mostly to himself, then settled down under his tarp to wait and watch.

Mack decided to begin underground, since it didn't expect much resistance there, and the odds of anyone having secured the service conduits were low unless they actually had a reploid that could fit into them. Finding a way into the substreet maintenance conduits wasn't at all difficult. A missing manhole cover let it into the main corridor, and from there, working in night vision, it found a hatch into the Mettaur-sized tunnels it had hoped to find. The hatch was locked, but a quick slice of Mack's laser cutter fixed that problem, and with no electricity to the alarms, it popped open without complaint. Mack pulled it closed behind it, with a little extendable arm and three-pronged grabber.

Opposable thumbs, it thought. Who really needs them? I do alright.

It quickly double-checked that its measurement systems were calibrated and set off. If its estimates were correct, the old Hunter base should be in this direction by a few hundred feet. Well, it would see if it could even access the base from below. It was entirely possible that the base was isolated from the main maintenance grid, though it doubted that it was completely cut off. Mack's best guess was that it had emergency utilities of its own, but connected to the city grid like anything else, which meant that it had to have a connection point somewhere.

If it did, Mack would find it. It was built for this, quite literally. Its low profile, night vision, and selection of tools were ideal for the tiny spaces crammed with wires and pipes that it had been designed to service. Mettaurs were purpose-built for any number of specialized, small tasks, and Mack specifically was an infrastructure model. It was at home here, and it made good time, scuttling down the tunnel like a mole in a mine.

Its task would have been easier with the grid on, as it could have made some educated guesses about the power supply, but it was a straight shot to the old Hunter base's perimeter. The service conduit wrapped around it, heavy cables feeding into much smaller conduits in the wall, and Mack would have crossed its fingers for luck if it had them and if it believed in luck. Neither was the case, so it circled the base's outer wall hopefully.

Finally, underneath what must have been the main entrance based on its estimations, Mack found another hatch. It was locked, and a quick attempt to cut through it revealed that it was shielded against such simple attempts. Well, good, Mack thought. I'd get nervous if this were too easy.

It thought, tapping its mechanical grabber arm against its speaker-mouth. There was nothing on this side that it could cut through or disassemble…and without power down here and Glitch's help on the hacking side, there wouldn't be any opening it electronically. What did that leave?

What is it Cirocco says about brute force? Mack mused, forming an idea. If it doesn't work, that means you didn't use enough of it. Something like that. It fired up its laser cutter, sinking it into the concrete beside the hatch. It slid through like butter, hot liquid stone hissing and the air filling with dark soot. Mack didn't mind. It would need a filter change, but it needed one anyway. It continued to cut away at the concrete, one chunk at a time, until it had the beginnings of a hole in the wall. Numerous broken wires that would have triggered alarms at the intrusion had they been powered laid silent throughout the concrete.

Mack worked diligently, kicking piece after piece behind it into the tunnel. It would have to push through that on the way back, but it could worry about that later. Eventually, its efforts paid off: it had a little glimpse into the Maverick Hunter base side of the tunnel. A few more cuts and it was in.

It trundled much more quietly, now. It wasn't at all familiar with the floor plan, but it could make some guesses based on the contents of the various conduits and ducts it saw. Most of them were still labeled, though many of the labels peeled from age and neglect. Well, it would guess, and with luck, V's sensor wouldn't be in a Faraday cage. It might not be on V, either, but it was something at least.

Mack wandered the tunnels in a pattern, conducting a systematic one-reploid sweep. Finally the phone in its storage compartment buzzed, just once and briefly. Glitch had likely not wanted to risk attracting attention in case Mack was somewhere audible, but it was enough.

Mack couldn't risk cutting into an air duct, since that could release smoke into the building and alert the reploids there, so it doubled back to the central circulation system. Here it unscrewed an access panel, setting it aside quietly, and stepped into the ducts.

It knew it wasn't the quietest thing ever invented, so it moved very slowly, prioritizing getting each step right over making haste. Soon enough it came to a vertical bend, taking the ducts to the ceiling. A properly-fitted HVAC Mettaur would have had both soft shoes to not interrupt the building's inhabitants and suction cups for climbing the insides of ducts, but Mack had neither, so it had to improvise. It placed both feet on the wall of the duct and two extendable arms on the other wall, pushing outward, and began to walk up, painstakingly slowly so as to not scrape more than necessary.

At the top, it reached with one arm for a bolted seam in the ducts, but the shift in weight caused its feet to begin slipping. With a desperate grab, it snapped onto the sharp metal edge, dangling from a single arm. The sound of it banging against the duct wall reverberated for what felt like a full minute, but it pulled itself up from the edge.

"You hear that?" Mack heard someone say, distant and echoing.

"Sounded like birds in the duct again," someone else replied.

"Nasty," the first speaker agreed. Nobody else spoke, so Mack decided to risk a few steps closer to the air vent nearest it. Whoever they were, they seemed to have left. It decided to continue on.

Navigation was terribly slow going, but at least that gave it time to assemble a full floor map of what it could see of the building. It had come up near what seemed to be a major service closet, likely with access into the conduits and tunnels. Mack couldn't have risked being seen, so it had entirely passed up that area on its way up. If V could have fit down the conduits…but no, he was short for a reploid, but not that small. Even if he did, he would have moved so slowly that they could have simply fished him out.

Mack found several barracks, and paused to attempt a headcount. Of course, the number of recharge pods couldn't be assumed to equal the number of occupants, or else they'd be housing a whole four reploids at home, but it could make a better guess based on how many personal areas looked used. Twenty, maybe thirty, it decided. Don't like those odds. Hate to say it, but Kat did make the right call. If they'd decided to come in numbers, draw us out, and then attack in force, we'd be defeated immediately.

This wasn't what it was here for, though, so once it had that estimate, it resumed its search, cautiously and very quietly disassembling a few inactive circulation fans blocking the ducts as it went. There had to be somewhere suitable for holding captives near here…and Mack soon found it, as the sensor it carried pinged again. From the narrow view it could get from the grating of the air duct, it was looking at a small area lined with evidence lockers, with a desk and manned guard post.

Getting closer was out of the question. Light angled into the grating, and the reploid on duty had a clear line of sight to it. Mack couldn't see most of the room from where it was, and from its explorations, it had a fair idea that no other air ducts ran to the cells. Well, better this much than nothing. It had almost certainly found V. It settled down silently and decided to keep watch as well, in case it had a chance to find exactly which cell V was in.

It didn't have to wait long. Seren came in, and Mack knew her voice immediately: she'd always been condescending to those she didn't think much of, which seemed to be most reploids. Mack in particular had received a lot of derision solely for being a Mettaur. Her tone was at least neutral with the guard.

"Era," Seren said, out of sight from Mack's vent.

"Captain," the guard on duty replied, snapping to attention. Mack couldn't see her well at all either, but she seemed to be mostly black-plated. She'd painted her trim red, but that was all. "Here for the new Maverick?"

"I've got a few things to say to him, yes."

"I'll let you in at once." There was a noise of a few buttons being pressed, and a door slid open. Mack caught a half-second glimpse of…oh, no, that was definitely V, on his side, stripped of everything and with his hands bound somehow behind his back. Mack thought a loud sigh of relief when he jerked awake just as Seren blocked the view, and then the door closed.

Well, he's intact, but it's not looking good, Mack thought. I wonder…can I hear the next room from here, or is it acoustically isolated…?

Mack turned its microphone sensitivity up to maximum. It couldn't make words out, but it could hear the general tone. Seren mocked V. V responded drily. Seren sounded angry…then shocked, and then…apologetic? What in the world was going on in there?

Seren burst out. "The keys!" she exclaimed. "Where are they?"

"For his cuffs? Uh, right here, sir," the now very confused guard said, handing Seren the keys. She grabbed them before the guard even had them halfway out, and retreated into the cell.

Perhaps a minute later the door opened again. "Era. Bring his things. Right now. No backtalk, just do it," Seren ordered. The on-duty guard's bafflement was palpable, but she followed orders, leaving V and Seren. Seren kept calling him 'sir' and apologizing. V seemed unimpressed, but relented a bit when she offered to let him recharge.

Well, this was all very interesting. V was evidently safer than either Glitch or Mack had assumed. What this meant for the Drifters as a whole and their goals was a mystery, but Mack didn't feel like questioning any good luck that chanced their way, even had it believed in luck. It didn't. It decided this was as good a time as any to quietly sidle out and back into the ducts.

It took some time for it to make it back through the system and out through the maintenance conduits. Glitch was where Mack had left him, already alert for its return since it had one of his sensors on it. He was so anxious that Mack half expected him to pick it up and shake it for answers like one of those old dye-filled fortune telling toys with the polyhedron inside.

"Well?" Glitch asked, crouching to talk to Mack more quietly.

"Good news for a change," Mack replied. "Seren evidently had no idea who she had, and she's entirely changed her tune for whatever reason. He's recharging as we speak, and I've got a decent idea of the building layout."

"Huh. Well, she was a Hunter, so maybe she still thinks of him as her boss. Let's hope that lasts, although I doubt she'll just let him walk out and come back to us." And then, after a pause, "Let's hope that he even wants to do that…a working Hunter base is probably pretty damn cushy compared to what we've got to offer."

Mack waggled its entire body no. "If tone of voice could kill, he'd have set himself free by now. Don't worry about that. What do we do, though? I know the general layout, but it's not going to be easy to get in or out, unless you're my size."

"As much as I hate to say it, probably head back home and make sure nothing's on fire there," replied Glitch, with a sigh of defeat. "Draw out the floor plan, as much as you know it. See if we can't put our heads together and come up with something. It's not gonna help V at all if we storm the castle and get blown up on the way in, and he's got an advantage we didn't expect, so with luck he can buy himself some time. Plus, Kat's gonna want to know how many Drifters there are, and you've got the only estimate we have." He popped to his feet, sneaking a last peek at the base around the edge of a destroyed window frame.

"Hang in there, V, we're not gonna leave you."

Chapter Text

Era didn't rush X back to the cell, and she didn't try to take his cane or clothing. In fact, while he'd been out, someone had found an excuse to smuggle in several blankets and a pillow.

"I don't know what's going on," she said, uncertainly twiddling her thumbs, "but…you said you wanted a blanket to recharge, so I thought maybe…"

"Thank you," X said, and he meant it.

"If you need anything else…?" she said. The dichotomy between her hard-bitten appearance and quietly shy behavior was really something, X mused. One truly couldn't judge a book by its cover, or a reploid by their chassis.

"I'm fine." He wasn't, but he was still in one piece, which was enough. An idea struck him. Waiting was boring, and if he could find some way to make inroads with some of the Drifters individually, he might be able to reach them much more readily than he could Seren. "Actually…if you aren't forbidden to talk to me…can you tell me a little bit about your life here?"

"Sure," she said. "Um. Maybe inside the cell, though, I think I'd get written up if I let you stay out here."

"That's fine. I don't want you to get in trouble." X laboriously sat down on the pile of blankets. It was a good deal less terrible this way than it had been, though calling it comfortable was still a stretch too far. But it was better. He could deal with that.

Era pulled her chair over to the door, which she didn't close, and sat down. "Captain Seren talks about you a lot, actually. She got here some years back, I guess, before my time. The guy in charge then was a reploid named Tera, who ran the Drifters like a gang. She fought him for command and won. I don't know a whole lot about it, since I wasn't here, but she pretty much changed everything."

"Did you live in this base before that?" X asked, curiously.

"I think they did. I didn't, personally. It didn't have power then and I guess it was mostly trashed. I don't know what anyone even did to recharge. There was a lot of pushback when she first said we'd be forming a new unit of Hunters. Like, who wants to be a cop, seriously? Um. No offense," Era hastily amended in a mumble.

"None taken," X assured her.

"But she was pretty convincing. That was right around when I arrived, so I remember it. She talked a lot about proving that we weren't what they said we are, and she figured out how to get the backup generator back online so we could actually operate the doors here and recharge up properly. There's a lot of systems that we couldn't restore, and it doesn't produce enough power for all of them anyway, but it's more than enough. So after that, the rest of the crew didn't mind listening to her so much, and all the training she put us to at least gave us something to do."

X listened with interest. As unhinged as he'd found Seren could be, clearly she'd brought some stability and safety to the reploids here. "She hasn't promised you anything about reintegrating into society or anything, has she?" X asked.

Era shook her head. "Not exactly. She definitely thinks it could happen, and I think a lot of the others here just assume she's got some kind of insider info, but she's pretty careful about what she says. I don't know if it'll work or not, but I guess it's better than sitting around doing nothing. Um. Can I ask what happened in the, you know, her office, with you two?" she said, hesitantly.

"I don't see why not." X gathered his thoughts. In the course of the long, strange day he'd been having, they had all fled in opposite directions, as if unwilling to get too close to each other for fear that if they bumped into each other and coalesced, he'd have to actually process his situation. "Seren wanted me to contact Maverick Hunter HQ and tell them to have everyone here declared safe, but I can't do that, because to be able to do that, I'd need to be able to change the entire system from the ground up. I'm only one man, and even if I could, I don't know if that's what I'd use that power for."

Era tilted her head, puzzled. X had a feeling he was not what she expected. He just hoped he wasn't going to go three for three on accidentally provoking random reploid women into yelling at him. His track record wasn't good at the moment. "What would you use it for?" she asked.

"If I could do anything? In a perfect world? Start over with something that's actually fair. Something that doesn't categorize us as unworthy to live like this. We don't even get a trial, most of the time."

"Huh. Seren always says it's necessary. We can do so much more damage than a human, so we should have stricter punishments."

X scoffed, which he hadn't meant to do, but he was beginning to suspect he had lost some kind of social filter along the way. "I believed that, too, for a long time. I'm not that sure anymore. I think if you scare someone with the threat of death, they're going to feel cornered and do a lot more to survive than someone who believes they'll be given fair treatment. People, human or reploid, are the most dangerous when they think they have nothing to lose."

Era mulled this over, watching X out of the corner of her eye. "Huh. I guess that makes sense…but that's all you said? Captain can be kind of tightly wound, but that's a lot."

X shrugged. "It's personal for her. She really thought I was someone I wasn't, but I thought I was too, so I can't even hold it against her." The other reploid was clearly out of her depth, so X relented and clarified, fidgeting with his cane handle as he spoke. "I've realized that I don't even know when I went Maverick. It's…hard to explain. I didn't think it was possible, but now I think it was maybe inevitable. Even if I could go back and put my armor on and fight, I think I'd never be able to stomach doing it for the Hunters again."

"Oh," she said, now looking at him fully as if trying to read the truth of his words on his face, both aged and strangely young at once. "No, she would hate that. Is that why you're…did you have to run, too?"

"I ran from myself," X answered, simply, because he had. "It worked about as well as you'd expect."

"But you're a hero," said Era.

"I'm a weapon who never learned how to be a person. It's a pretty poor replacement for a hero, but it's all I could do. I have a lot to answer for and no idea where to begin."

Era didn't seem to know what to say to that, so X asked her a question about herself instead. "What did you do? If you want to say, that is."

"Me? Oh, um. I don't mind. Robbery. The human cops got called, because all my friends were humans and I don't think the store realized I wasn't, so I got away when I panicked and ran because they only had solid bullets and couldn't drop me." She shifted to show X the back of her chest casing, where she still sported several bullet holes. "Didn't really do much to me. Free ventilation upgrade. But once you run, you gotta keep running."

"Are your friends okay?"

"I think so. Last I heard they got sentenced to a few years. They're probably all out by now, but I'm still here."

"It doesn't seem right," X said.

"You're telling me," Era agreed quietly. "I should probably close this door. We're coming up on shift change, and I don't want to get us in trouble."

Us, X thought. Do I dare believe that I didn't entirely screw up this time? Finally, a conversation he didn't have to limp away from even more dissociated than he already was. "Should I give you the blankets and my things back?" he asked, hoping she wouldn't say yes.

Era stood, looking at him like he was speaking nonsense. "I'm not taking an old man's cane and blanket. Captain can say whatever she wants, but that's crossing a line somewhere. It's got to be."

X half-smiled weakly at her indignation. "Well, this old man appreciates it."

"I don't know what she's planning on doing with you, but if I get a vote, Maverick or not, you seem like you've had enough already. Just…maybe try to not set her off again?" Era suggested.

"Fair plan," X agreed.

"After me, you've got Fortran. You'll want to be careful with him. He's in real deep with Captain's whole thing. Maybe just defrag though that shift if you can. I don't think he'll bother you, but you definitely shouldn't try talking to him…he's probably going to be pretty angry about Faraday."

"I'll keep that in mind," said X, nodding. "Thank you. It was nice having someone to talk to for a bit."

Era looked a little surprised. "Of course. I gotta close this now. Try to stay safe." The door slid shut with a heavy ka-chunk of bolts engaging, and X settled into the pile of blankets, back to the wall in the corner. There was nothing much to do but await whatever fate had in store for him, but at least he could do it on a fresh defragment cycle.

"It's not right," muttered Era. "He's not even scary. He's just an old, sad reploid."

"He is kind of scary. You saw what shape Faraday came back in." Simos sat on the edge of the dilapidated couch, hovering nervously. He was painted red like the rest of them, a mass-produced reploid with very little in the way of distinguishing features other than the spray paint and a deep sense of self-loathing.

"Faraday scares me. X cut the strap off my rifle without even toasting my finish, and was going to kneecap me too until his weapon failed. He could have just killed both of us, but he didn't. Even if he probably should have killed Faraday," Analog added under his breath, fiddling with his tail in both hands. Era wondered if it was in fact meant to be a built-in fidget toy. It certainly got enough mileage as one.

"Maglev says you squeaked like a little human girl," Simos said, similarly under his breath.

Analog put his pointed nose in the air, affronted. "You would have too. And Maglev can suck my left connector."

The door to Era's tiny room opened, and the three reploids looked up in guilty alarm until they recognized the newcomer. "Got some news," the reploid announced, tossing white hair from their eyes and settling into the couch next to Simos. They were another mass-production model, though newer than him, painted black and acid green, and with enough aftermarket modifications that they were sometimes mistaken for a custom model. They'd opted to draw just a single red slash across their chest as a concession to The Rules, and they wore a dark, dusty cloak that Era found entirely unnecessary. There was really no accounting for taste, especially where Toxotes was involved. "Wow, you guys need to work on your poker faces. If I was Ricochet or someone, you'd all be busted for sedition."

"Well? Good or bad?" Era prompted.

"Worse. Captain's thinking of throwing him to Faraday for a bit. I overheard her talking to Ricochet and Trebuchet in the hall. I don't know what he did exactly, but she's pissed at him." They crossed one leg over their knee.

"She can't do that. That's X," Era protested, then realized she was being too loud and dropped her voice. "Like, The X. He's her personal hero. Why would she even think about that?"

"Beats me."

Analog twisted his tail in his hands some more. "That's a death sentence. Tox. What are we supposed to do about it?"

Toxotes shrugged. "Dunno why you're asking me. Nothing, unless you're real into mutiny, and I don't think that's gonna go good for us. Argue with the Captain, maybe, but you know how that goes."

"Mutiny. At least that's an interesting way to die, I guess," Simos added, no happier about the prospect himself. "I don't like any of this." He sighed deeply, slumping with his elbows on his knees until his helmeted forehead almost knocked against the much-worn coffee table.

"Nobody is making you be here," Era huffed. "Just shut up and don't rat us out if you decide you're not helping after all, that's all I want."

"Didn't say that," Simos grumped, morose. "Just the whole thing sucks."

Analog scowled at Era's choice of rat phrasing, but let it slide. "If we did…do something about it," he started, flicking his ears back. "What would we even do?"

The four of them fell silent for a bit. "Well, he's been with Kathy's group," Era ventured after a bit. "If we could get him out, assuming we did, he'd probably want to go back to them, right?"

"Is that better…?" Simos wondered. "I mean…turning him over to a bunch of Mavericks…"

"He called himself a Maverick, though," said Era.

Toxotes glanced up at her. "Is he?" they asked.

"I don't know. He definitely believes he is. He was pretty serious about it. But, um, I know what the Captain always says, but technically we're all Mavericks anyway, so what's the difference?"

"They're not that bad," Analog mumbled, mostly to himself. "Captain just hates Kathy for some reason."

"Right, you lived there. I almost forgot." Toxotes crossed their legs the other way. "Look. Here's what I think. We smuggle X out somehow, get the hell out, take him to Kathy's bunch, and…I guess hope they're so glad to see him that we can stay, because I don't think it's gonna go great if we have to go it alone. What do you think, Analog? What's our odds?"

"Oh, I don't want to calculate them. It's so many variables." Analog went back to wringing his tail in his slender hands, but at the end of the day, he was a statistical prediction model, and he couldn't resist a question about the odds of any given situation. Everyone knew it. Asking him random questions that he couldn't refuse to answer was a bit of a pastime in their squadron. "Fine. It's just a guess, but here are my predictions." He cleared his throat and let go of his longsuffering tail, sitting up a little straighter. "If we do nothing, Faraday is probably going to disassemble X. From what you've said, Era, I doubt he'd survive it. He can't likely fight his way out, either, if whatever weapon he had before is gone, and I think it is, because I think I saw him throw it after it stopped working."

"If we try to talk to the Captain, she's not likely to listen, and we'll be informing her of our intent from that point on, which would drastically decrease the odds of any other actions we might take. I don't think that's a good course of action."

"If we get him out ourselves…we can probably do it, but there's no going back. Captain Seren's not going to give us a second chance. I think I could explain everything to Kathy. I never had any problem with her. But I also don't know what the situation there is like, or if they could even afford to house us, so it's…still a gamble, but it's got a better chance of success than any other route."

"That's about what I thought, too," Era agreed, chewing on the inside ends of the bars through her spiderbite piercings. "Okay. Um. Well, I'm gonna try. The rest of you…I won't make you. Do what you think is the right thing. But I can't stand by and let this happen."

"I'm in. This whole thing's always sat weird with me. It's not like they're actually gonna un-convict a bunch of Mavericks, whatever she thinks, and I'm kinda getting tired of the Cult of Seren." Toxotes uncrossed their legs, looking to Simos and Analog.

"You're bored, admit it," Analog chittered.

"Okay, and I'm bored."

"Edgelord," the mouse reploid muttered. "Whatever. I guess you'd need me to talk to Kathy if we get that far, and I'm through taking orders from Maglev. I just want to bite him every time he opens his mouth."

Simos wilted a bit under the combined gaze of the other three reploids. "Yeah, sure. Count me in too," he said, though he didn't sound entirely convinced.

"So how do we do this?" Toxotes asked.

Era motioned the other three to huddle closer. "I've got an idea, but shift change is pretty soon, so we have to hurry."

X lurched awake from a defragmenting dream to the sound of the door opening, grasping at the last fragments of it even as he forgot them. He had an impression of sunlight, and trees, real ones, and that Zero had been there. Or Glitch? They weren't similar at all, and yet, he couldn't make up his mind who had been in his dream, just that he'd been at ease for a rare moment.

"Well, well. So you're the great X." X looked up, still bleary, at the reploid who entered. He was imposingly large, yellow where he wasn't red, and unfortunately very familiar from having taken him apart once. This must have been Faraday. He still walked with a limp, favoring one leg whose knee had been braced but not replaced, probably for a lack of parts. "You know, I thought you'd be taller."

"I hear that a lot," X replied.

"I bet. I thought you'd have more sense than to piss off the Captain, too."

"That certainly wasn't my intent."

"I'm sure it wasn't. But you did, and you pissed me off, too." With one smooth motion, Faraday seized X by the coat, lifted him, and slammed him into the back wall hard enough to knock the air out of his ventilation systems with a ragged cough and a rattle of fans. "Really shouldn't have done that. You're kinda digging yourself a hole straight to hell, you know."

X struggled to see through the sheer avalanche of pain and warnings that filled his vision. He should probably be afraid, he thought, but it was as if he'd had a limited capacity for fear and had already burnt through it. He mumbled something, trying to find his voice.

"What's that?" Faraday said, holding X still and leaning in.

"If you're going through hell," X said, more clearly, "keep going."

Faraday laughed, a single, derisive bark. "Oh, you ain't seen hell yet, little man. But I might send you there myself." He slammed X to the floor next, letting go of his jacket and watching him for several moments with clear amusement.

X reeled. He blinked back several new errors he'd never seen before, which was impressive for as long and violent a life as he'd had. His balance systems had gone entirely offline, as had one of his fans and a coolant pump. His combat systems just shrugged emphatically. What did he want them to do about it? He couldn't move enough to retaliate. This wasn't even a fight, as far as they could tell. This was a completely one-sided murder.

"Oh, come on, this isn't even going to be fun if you just sit there making that stoic face." Faraday set one large, heavy foot on X. "I could stomp you like a bug, you know. You gotta have an opinion about that."

X tried to speak, and found himself gurgling coolant instead. He turned his head and spat transparent blue liquid tinged with silver nanofluid across the floor. "D-don't threaten me with a good time," he managed.

Faraday's gleeful expression soured. "You really think you're gonna be funny now?" he growled, pressing down. X's chassis creaked under the strain, and his combat systems lit up with the first spark of hope they'd found since he'd been taken captive. He swung a kick upwards at the back of Faraday's bad knee. It connected, but the much larger reploid only staggered, correcting his balance by slamming his foot down on X's chest.

"What is wrong with you? You senile or something?"

"Maybe I am," X wheezed. Something popped painfully in one of his shoulder joints, and a gush of nanofluid soaked through his jacket sleeve, bright mercury-silver on the dull metal floor tiles. "At least…I'm not the one…beating up on an…old man…and acting big about it…"

Faraday reached down and picked him up again, by the head this time, holding them eye to eye. X dangled limply, still conscious, but only just, staring defiantly at Faraday. "You got a death wish, and I don't think the Captain's gonna be too mad if I grant it to you. That what you want?" He gave X a shake, and X heard several things rattle inside of his skin that shouldn't have been rattling. He couldn't even sort through the warnings fast enough to figure out what they were or how much he should worry.

"How's…the Capttttzzzttain think…they'll reinsztttzzzzstate her…or any of you," X said, speech synthesis jamming and buzzing a few times under extreme load, and none too happy about being drowned in the coolant now pooling in his throat, "if they findzttttzd out…you decommiszztttzzzsioned me?"

"Well, first, they'd have to find you, and you'd be surprised how deep you can bury someone in the quarantine zone. And secondly, see, all these other guys bought the Captain's Hunter bullshit. Me, though? I don't give a shit." Faraday lightly tossed X up, catching him by the arm and squeezing as hard as he could, watching it deform. X finally cried out, the sensation of his frame itself bending too much to bear in silence. "There we go. I knew you could do it." He grinned sadistically and dropped X to the floor, where he landed like a marionette with its strings severed, lacking the strength to move.

X heard the door slide open. "That's enough, Faraday. You step away from him, and not a single broadcast, or we light you up." Ah. He must have been hallucinating, because that sounded like Era, and as much as she'd sympathized with him, he couldn't imagine she'd risk her life for his.

"W-what have you done?" And that sounded like the mouse reploid from before. How strange.

Faraday froze, turning slowly to face them. "Well, if it ain't the Girl Scout Squad. Figures it's you losers. Wait 'til the Captain hears about this."

"Oh, don't worry, she won't," said an unfamiliar voice, but with an edge that X recognized immediately: bloodlust. Something twanged, something crackled electrically, and Faraday made a strange, garbled little digital noise. He crumpled to the floor next to X, dead as a paperweight, a fletched metal shaft protruding from his forehead.

"Tox! Did you have to do that?" a fourth voice asked.

"No, but I've wanted to for a while now." The four gathered around X, kneeling around him, and he realized he wasn't hallucinating. "This doesn't look good at all. X. Can you hear us?"

"I'm…fzzfffzzine," he replied, from approximately a thousand miles away. His circuits were spinning fuzzily, and if it weren't for the deluge of critical warnings and errors, he could almost have been comfortable, which should have been troubling. It wasn't. He was going to die, and he knew it, in every system. The feeling was not one of panic or fear; just a quiet, calm certainty that he could simply close his eyes and let it happen, if he wanted to.

He did want to. But he couldn't, he thought, distantly. Glitch and Mack would be sad.

"Said the world's least fine guy. I have no idea what self-repair's even going to do here, but toss me one of those." Era very gently tipped his head up and poured a canister of nanofluid down his throat. His low nanofluid errors didn't change that much, and he realized it must have been dripping out of him as fast as she poured it in. "Oh, shit, he's leaking everything everywhere…can we even move him?"

The cloaked reploid spoke up. "If we don't, it's only going to be worse. We're just going to have to make a run for it. Simos, take the vanguard. Analog and I will cover the rear. You take him and run, Era, you're strongest and fastest carrying a load."

"We should have been faster," Era sighed, despondent. "Just a few minutes would have made all the difference. Damn it. I'm so sorry, X. Come on. Let's get you out of here." She wrapped a blanket around X, making an easier to carry burrito, and lifted him in both arms as carefully as if he were a sick child.

"We're still clear," said the reploid at the door. Simos? Maybe that was what Era said. X could barely keep track, and the room was swimming. He closed his eyes. "Let's go."

The four of them ran, and X was only dimly aware of the lights on the ceiling going past. Suddenly, Era came to a stop, clutching him more closely.

"Ah, fuck," said the cloaked reploid, who X assumed must have been Tox. X opened his eyes, weakly, but still struggling to hold on.

"Ah, fuck, indeed," Seren said, falsely sweet, and sent a burst of encoded orders. X couldn't understand it, but he could guess. Era heard it ripple throughout the base, as everyone who heard it repeated it, effectively extending Seren's range. '>Captain to the Quarantine Hunters. All units to the entrance. A mutiny is in progress. Prepare for combat.' She stood in the hall, arms crossed, flanked by her two right hand men, Trebuchet and Ricochet. X recognized them, vaguely, from the encounter he and Glitch had had. They were two of a kind, built not unlike Faraday, though not as hulkingly large. Not the same model as him, but perhaps the same manufacturer.

Toxotes raised and drew their bow in one swift movement, nocking an arrow that shimmered into existence in their fingers and pointing it at Seren. "I wouldn't recommend that," warned Seren, waving a finger at them. Ricochet and Trebuchet both aimed their weapons at Toxotes.

"I killed Faraday, and I'll kill you," growled Toxotes.

"Tsk. What a murder machine. All that time trying to teach the lot of you right from wrong, and only one of you ever paid attention. Simos."

"S-sir," Simos stammered, glancing at his comrades in panic and backing away, towards Seren and her lieutenants, buster aimed at Era and her allies.

"I have to commend you for the advance warning. Now, bring him here." Seren motioned, pointing to X, then imperatively to the ground at her feet.

"You rusty bastard," hissed Era, turning half away as if to shield X's critically damaged body with her own. "You fucking snitch. What is wrong with you?"

"I don't want to die, that's what. Just hand him over. This isn't worth it." He made a grab for the blanket covering X.

"Snitches get stitches," Toxotes said, then simply turned and released their arrow through Simos's optics. With a single arc flash and an unmodulated, buzzing croak from his voice synthesizer, he dropped like a twitching bag of gravel. Ricochet and Trebuchet both fired, and Toxotes threw their arms wide, absorbing both shots rather than letting them hit Era and X.

"Simos! Tox!" Era nearly jumped out of her synthetic skin as Toxotes crumpled against her with a pained hiss, and X groaned as the motion jarred another fresh drizzle of silver-white nanofluid from his self-repair system's veins. Why weren't they mending themselves? He had no idea. He should have stopped bleeding by now, and yet…and yet.

He was dying. All this trouble, X thought, distantly, and for what? I'm so tired. I could just…stop. No. Zero told me to survive. Glitch and Mack want to see me again. I can't just stop.

"I'm still up," Toxotes said, through gritted teeth.

"This is stupid. Just put them down." Seren said, pointing her arm at them. Her hand retracted, and her gauntlet shifted into a buster. She aimed along it with both eyes open, as calmly and casually as if they were targets in a shooting gallery. Seren could take her time; she didn't often miss, and she knew it. She'd been trained by the best, after all.

Several encoded broadcast reports burst from the halls around them. The entire rest of the base was converging on them. If they couldn't make it out and escape within the next few moments, they weren't going anywhere, and yet, Era's feet felt rooted to the spot. It wasn't supposed to happen like this, she thought, over and over. It wasn't supposed to happen like this…

Trembling in terror, Analog somehow managed to marshal himself and pushed in front of Toxotes, trying to protect them, Era, and X, even though his shoulder came only as high as Era's waist. "I-I won't let you," he chittered, ears flat to his head and sharp teeth bared, raising his buster rifle with its recently stitched strap. He was too small to even hold it properly without the extra support, and yet, he stood his ground, shaking like a leaf but refusing to move.

"Aww. I'd commend your cute little bravery thing, if you weren't about to die for it," Seren cooed sarcastically. "But you are, so goodbye."

Everything happened so quickly Era could barely process it. Plasma pooled and flared in the barrel of Seren's buster as the electromagnetic fields that held it began to flux in preparation to fire. Something flashed, right across her buster arm, and she reflexively flinched in surprise and pain just enough to send the shot crackling over Era's shoulder, where it splashed against the wall. Era drew away from it, cradling X protectively. With a squeaking screech, Analog opened fire, sending both Ricochet and Trebuchet diving for cover behind the old front desk. Trebuchet pulled Seren down with him just in time to spare her from being scorched by several more buster shots from the entrance.

'>Entrance detail, report,' Seren ordered, but nobody responded. 'Report!'

"I have no idea what you're saying, lady, but if you're talking to those guys outside, they're not gonna be saying much for a while," said a familiar voice, and X felt his power core warm within his chassis even before he'd consciously registered whose it was. A green and charcoal gray figure wearing a tattered brown tarp like a cape dashed into the entrance hall, carrying a patchwork buster in each hand.

Analog's ears perked and flicked, and he paused in trying to burn a hole through the desk with his rifle. "Holy shit. Glitch? What th-the hell are you even—Tox, no, put it down, you don't need to skewer him." Toxotes lowered their bow, jaw set tightly with the effort it took to overcome their pain sensors.

"Analog? Is that seriously you? I'd ask you what the hell you're even, but we can hug it out later. Mack! Cut the power, we're going home."

The lights went out, throwing the room into pitch blackness, and footsteps sounded from somewhere in the air ducts. "You guys got busters? Good, put down some covering fire. Here, trade me." X felt himself be handed off into an uncommonly warm pair of arms. "Ah, shit, buddy, they messed you up bad, didn't they…"

"I've been bettttzzzttter," X agreed, quietly and deliriously.

"Shh. Don't worry. I'm gonna get you home." X closed his eyes again, because reality was more than he could process. He was dimly aware that he was still leaking coolant and nanofluid and other things, but the warnings had at least slowed to a crawl. Maybe that was good, or maybe it was bad. He wasn't sure, and he didn't have the energy to care.

"Stay with me, buddy, if you go offline now I don't think we're gonna be able to boot you back up." The front door of the Hunter base whizzed by. Another round of buster fire cracked past them from behind, and Toxotes, grimacing with pain as they drew their bow, returned a single shot that from the digital yelp behind them must have flown true.

There was a thump in the general vicinity of Glitch's head. "When did we pick up a bunch of extras?" asked Mack, from above X. Very early morning sunlight hit X's eyelids, then shade.

"Seren is going to kill all of us for this," Analog squeaked, scampering backwards to keep line of sight to any pursuers.

"Seren can get fucked," said Era, angrily. She was stained with silver nanofluid from X's injuries, sparkling strikingly against her mostly black paneling.

"I gotta ask. How the rusty fuck did you guys time this?" Glitch said. "Wifi sensitivity? Motion-activated cameras? Lookouts?"

"We didn't. I was about to ask you the same thing," Analog replied. "Here, into the tunnels. I did all the traps on this end. I can get us through."

"Wow, stealing my thing? Great. Lead on." They took a winding route, and soon the sounds of pursuit disappeared into the darkness behind them and they could afford to slow down to a jog instead of a breakneck dash. X passed in and out of full consciousness, despite his struggle to stay awake.

"V, buddy. Hang in there," Glitch said, quietly and so full of worry that X managed to open his eyes, wanting so badly to reassure him.

"You…came to reszzztttzzcue me," he said, around half a mouthful of coolant.

"Of course I did."

Even with his eyes open, X drifted, vaguely aware that he was warm, and Glitch had him, and that was already more than he'd dared hope for. They made it to Glitch's end of the tunnels, and he took the lead, pointing out what to avoid and where to step, and then…stairs upwards.

"Clear the way," Glitch called. "It's just me. And Mack. And V. And Analog. And Toxotes, and Era. No, I know they're red, they're fine, put the buster down, Hammer."

"Oh, my God," X heard Valentina say, and illogically, he felt guilty for scaring her.

"You actually got him?" That was Kathy. "Glitch, I should either string you up by your auditory sensors or hug you and I don't know which. Analog? Is that you?"

"Do whatever you want with me, but do it after I get him fixed up. Everyone out of the way. And be nice to the new kids." Glitch stormed into his laboratory with an armful of X, and kicked the door shut behind them.

Chapter Text

There was a sound that could only have been Glitch sweeping the entire contents of his workbench to the floor, and he laid X down on it, gently, and peeled the blanket back. "Oh…shit. You poor thing. I'd kill whoever did this to you but Toxotes told me he's already dead, and good thing, because I wouldn't be nearly as nice about it as they were." X didn't remember that, but he'd missed a lot, drifting in and out of lucidity. Glitch began lining up tools, pulling down boxes and making a new pile of things on the bench.

"Szzzztttzzorry…for being…so much trouble," X apologized, weakly.

"V, buddy, none of that shit now," Glitch shushed him. "You're gonna be okay, if I have anything to say about it. But, uh." He paused in lining up tools and materials. "You know, I almost forgot to ask you if it's okay with you. Is this what you want?"

X blinked, eyelids slightly out of sync. "What I want?"

"Yeah. If you…don't want me to. Uh. I don't think you'd make it, but…I'm not gonna force anything on you. Especially something like…I know you don't like maintenance, so this is probably—"

X cut him off, placing one hand that trembled with the effort of being lifted over Glitch's. "I trzzttzust you."

Glitch brightened. "Good, 'cause I'm the best there is. But, uh, seriously, if you need me to stop or something…"

'>I'll let you know,' X sent, because speaking with a tetchy speech synthesizer was sorely trying his few remaining nerves.

"I think your clothes are gonna be forfeit. Moving you enough to take them off might make things worse."

'>Just save my jacket, if you can,' X requested, though the fuzz in his circuits was so intense that it took him a few tries to remember how to even say 'jacket,' and in the end he'd actually settled on 'armor shirt,' but it was close enough.

"You got it." With a pair of shears, Glitch made short work of X's clothes, very gently and carefully helping him out of his armored jacket. He whistled, low and concerned. "He really just tried to thump you apart, didn't he…God damn. You're leaking all over, your arm's got a bent frame…this has got to hurt."

'>Not as much as it should,' X broadcast. 'Nothing feels real right now.'

"Reploids do have a shock state. I'd be surprised if you didn't, too, and that isn't great, because it means you've been through way too much for your systems to manage. When it wears off, you're going to be a very unhappy camper, unless I can patch you up some before then. Here's what I need to do. I can connect you to the new pod, then connect to it wirelessly, and read your status for myself. I can maybe override your pain processing and try to stabilize some systems manually, but I don't know how much control you have over allowing or denying access to that. I won't do anything you don't want me to do, though, I promise."

X tried to reply, but all that came out was a prolonged buzz as his vocal synthesizer hung and then crashed completely. '>It's fine, Glitch,' he sent instead. 'Do whatever you think is necessary. You're the best there is.'

Glitch heaved a sigh of relief he didn't even try to hide. "Well, then, let's not waste any more time. We gotta get you stable before you lose all your coolant all over my desk and overheat to death." Glitch brought out a long, heavy recharge pod extension cable, plugging it into the pod and then into X through a gap between the pushed-together tables he called a workbench. It took a little wiggling to get the connector to seat in X's dented port, but it did, and after the initial handshake with the pod, X received a request to allow diagnostic access. X closed his eyes for a moment and allowed it. Data flowed past behind his eyelids, more than he could consciously process, so he opened them again rather than watch. Glitch must have been analyzing it, as he had the unseeing gaze of a reploid intently watching something other than visual input.

"Damn, how are you even functioning…" X generated and sent several more reports with no input on his part. "I'll do my best. Let's see if your systems will even let me touch your code…"

Red lights and intrusion attempt alerts flooded X's field of vision, and he involuntarily recoiled with a pained sound. The motion reverberated throughout his damage sensors, echoing more loudly before it died down. "Ah, shit, sorry, that might be a no," Glitch apologized.

'>Let me try something,' X sent, teeth gritted, and one at a time, he began manually closing every alert as it popped up. His entire life, he'd been primed to reject any code modifications. Granted, he'd had a few via the upgrades that had been left for him, but even those he hadn't actually wanted, just accepted as a necessity, and they had bypassed his protections without so much as asking. Between that and the Virus, he had never once considered trusting someone with his code.

But maybe he could, if he made an effort. This was Glitch asking, after all. And he was asking, not just connecting and pushing an update. If he couldn't trust Glitch, he couldn't trust anybody anymore. The alerts slowed, and so did the rattling of his remaining fans. Somewhere towards the bottom of the list, he found that the alerts had begun to load as approval requests as his internal systems slowly learned after the first few hundred that he was intentionally letting this happen. He put them aside in a little column of their own until he'd cleared out all of the alerts, and then began, one at a time, to allow each of them.

X would have been lying if he had said it didn't make him nervous. No, nervous wasn't the word; he was terrified. Each new acceptance opened another port to the data stream, and waiting on the other end was not just a repair terminal, but another entire person. A person who was ready to take on Seren's entire gang for me if he had to, X thought. Someone who sat with me while I overheated with anxiety, who knows who I am and what I've done, and still wants to be around me. If I can't even trust Glitch, I'm done trying to live.

He allowed the connection to fully initialize, and closed his eyes again, acutely aware of the strange second presence in his systems. X had gotten unfortunately accustomed to upgrade capsules, who seemed to think they knew what was best for him, and he'd come to recognize the Maverick Virus with its violent attempts to hack and slash its way in, but Glitch was a new, third thing altogether, making no sudden moves and simply existing in his mental space, respecting his boundaries.

What a strange feeling that was. It probably shouldn't have been, and yet.

You still okay, V? he asked, and it took X a moment to register that he hadn't heard Glitch actually speak. The words had been transmitted directly into his awareness like digital synesthesia, tinged with worry and vague images and the sensation of warmth.

I'm okay, he answered, but whatever extra information Glitch's words carried must have been nothing compared to what X's held, because he could feel Glitch's struggle to process his reply. Are you?

Wow. I did not think it was possible to load that much into this communication protocol, especially in that short of a message. I almost didn't understand that, Glitch said with a laugh, and affectionate concern, and a memory of sunlight through a window in colors X had never seen. You've been through so much. It kind of bleeds across.

I don't know what you're seeing, but I can try to dial it back, X offered, but Glitch shook his head no without actually moving. X wouldn't have seen it anyway. Having his eyes open while also trying to process Glitch's mixed speech-memories-images-sensations was too much to deal with.

Don't worry about it. It's a lot, but it's you, so it's okay. X felt the phantom sensation of a cheek resting against his chest plates, and realized it was his cheek, and this was Glitch's memory of him. His own memory reached across the synapse in reply, the shared connection entangling them until he'd lost track of who was whom for a moment.

I should get started, Glitch thought, reluctantly pulling some of the tendrils of his consciousness free. If I can dull some of your sensor input, you'll feel a lot better. Your code's a little different than what I'm used to seeing—a dizzying, blended swirl of memories of every reploid Glitch had worked on flooded across; X recognized Hammer, having an eye replaced amidst the rush, nearly everyone in the camp, and others besides that he didn't quite recognize, but telling the difference was hard with Glitch's familiarity coloring the images—but I think the basics are still the same, and there's a few notes in my database that should make it make sense. I hope. Just let me know if anything doesn't seem right.

I will, X promised. A series of modification access prompts sprang up, all of them digitally signed by Toyota Robotics Technician Lightspeed 2-0094, and as he manually accepted each one, the pain in his systems receded, a little at a time, to almost nothing for the first time in almost a decade. The relief was so visceral that he drew a breath, his eyes stinging with tears for which he didn't have the water. Even that didn't exactly hurt. It was just a sensation.

Damn, V, I knew you had it rough all the time, but I didn't realize until I was adjusting the actual numbers.

I didn't either, until it stopped. If X had paused to think about how much his body actually hurt, he'd have given up entirely. The trick was to never make eye contact with it. If he didn't acknowledge it, he didn't have to deal with it.

That's no way to live, Glitch chided him gently, clearly having picked up his thought. X wondered what it looked like from his end. He was fairly certain that half of Glitch's words were just impressions that he was translating. I can't leave the patch in forever, because it'll deaden out too many of your other senses, but at least it's something for now. Alright. Time to see what I can fix. Just relax, okay? I promise I won't hurt you.

I know you won't. X already couldn't feel most of his body, and with a few more prompts, Glitch disconnected X's access to his own movement systems. He'd always hated this part of any major repair process. He couldn't stand being completely helpless while someone else, usually someone he barely knew, had absolute power over him. And what if they were infected and going undetected, and finally had their chance to strike? Or if there was a major attack while he was out of commission, and he couldn't even react? Old anxieties bubbled up within him, and with a buzzing sound, a broken fan tried to kick on.

Glitch must have picked up his anxieties via their connection. The past has been unkind to you, but I won't be. Even if the Drifters came right this moment, we've got everyone on high alert and standing by, and I've got you. Don't worry. His words were like warm fingers combed through X's hair, while his actual fingers gently pried X's bent panels away from his internals, making a tidy stack of them. X's broken fan settled back to silence. But maybe don't try too hard to see what I'm seeing, unless you like looking at your own components. Most reploids don't, I've kinda found out.

X decided that was good advice. Sorry. I never had to actually think about how messed up I really am until recently.

Nothing to apologize for, Glitch thought, with a laugh that entwined with X's fears, dispelling them just a little. You learned to survive how you had to. He began to empty X's coolant system to replace the broken pieces. Several heat warnings popped up, but Glitch aimed a desk fan at X's open chassis, and they subsided somewhat on their own.

I guess I did. It doesn't really help now, though.

From the brief glimpse I got of your memories, you're doing an alright job unlearning it now. Glitch worked quickly, even for a specialized technician. He found and disconnected the dead coolant pump, setting it aside, and sorted through a few potential replacements, comparing each. X saw a faint afterimage of them on the insides of his eyelids, Glitch's vision bleeding through, until Glitch must have seen the echo of his own output through X and clamped down on it. Don't ask where I got these. You already know, anyway. The impressions that came through now were guarded and dull at the most; he was actively trying to not broadcast anything that X would find distressing.

Glitch…you can see into my mind right now, and you're a technician. Be honest. Am I really a Maverick? Or just irregular? Or am I just getting upset about nothing?

Glitch sent him a clear impression of the sensation of a raised eyebrow. V, lemme tell you something. You're a kaleidoscope when you talk while we're connected like this. The mental image Glitch mirrored back to him was vivid, almost overwhelmingly so; a starburst of harsh colors and cold light and memory and feeling. Anguish, bitter victory, and wrenching loss flowed into each other like paint, beautiful but sorrowful in equal parts.

It's incredible, Glitch continued. Blinding, even. There's so little happiness in it, though, it's hard to look at. But then the flashes I see when you think about your time here, or…about me, it's entirely different. This time, the swirl of impressions was warm, glowing but not blinding, quiet and comfortable. Anxious grays hummed in the background, but the shapes of the memories were softer, the outlines blending together until X could barely pick the pieces apart anymore. There was only warmth, the gentle impression of a circle of friends, and the glint of racing green paint in the firelight.

Oh. X felt more vulnerable now than he had having his systems disconnected from his control…but he didn't feel unsafe, even with his emotions on full display. But maybe that wasn't terrible, if it was just Glitch. Maybe that was easier than having to sort it out alone.

The smile that Glitch broadcast to him was contagious, and he would have smiled back had he had access to his facial features. Instead he reflected it mentally, like a mirror that returned emotions instead of images. I can tell you that you're throwing an awful lot of TLR errors and have been for God only knows how long, but I can't tell you if that makes you a Maverick, irregular, or just weird as hell, and honestly, what's the difference, right? Call it whatever you want, Glitch continued, but you've definitely made some kinda home for yourself with a bunch of Mavericks, and I'm glad you did.

You know, right? Reploids who associate with me for too long die, X told him, drily. It was part gallows humor, part sincere warning, because it was true and he couldn't imagine letting it happen to Glitch. He'd never be able to forgive himself.

Yeah, hate to break it to you, but that's not exactly a secret. At the rate you're going, though, I'm gonna burn myself out early and still outlive you anyway, so I think I'm gonna risk it for as long as you'll let me. The thought was playful and serious at the same time, with an undercurrent of challenge.

X had lost track of what Glitch was doing until he suddenly got several messages about his coolant system having been flushed and reinitialized, and his core temperature stabilized. There. First hurdle cleared. The coolant's kind of old, but it'll do. You're a lot less likely to suddenly brick right on my bench. Now the real fun one…you sprung a pretty impressive self-repair nanofluid leak or several and it hasn't actually self-repaired, and fuck if I know why, because that should've been the one thing that could handle itself.

It took some exploratory disassembly, but Glitch found the leaks, replacing parts until he was finally able to refill X with several relatively fresh cans of nanofluid without it all leaking back out. The blanket that X still laid on was shining silver by the time he'd finished, and Glitch had to take a short break to wipe both his workbench and X down, tossing the blanket aside. Sorry. I know you get cold. Kinda starting to become a static discharge hazard, though.

It's fine. I can't feel anything from my mind down, X thought, amused. He'd avoided looking directly at the mess that was his body while he could still open his eyes, and he really couldn't feel either the presence or lack of any bedding, but he could see well enough through Glitch's mind what the other reploid was up to.

Shh. Working, here, Glitch deflected, though not bothering to hide his relief at X's sense of humor still functioning despite everything.

He wasn't quite satisfied with X's self-repair system, though, and he browsed quickly but extensively through X's internal schema and thought aloud to himself about potential explanations. X mentally quieted and simply listened, letting the synesthetic sound of Glitch's voice settle over him like a blanket that he actually could feel. Once upon a time, in what felt like a different life, he'd been involved in reploid R&D as well, but technology had moved on while he hadn't caught up, and much of what Glitch thought was opaque to him.

Were you? I didn't know that.

Even not actively thinking, it seemed that he must have been broadcasting something intelligible. But then, perhaps Glitch was doing the same. The longer they were connected, the more they felt like a single, interlocked mind.

Definitely. There's not much you can hide over a direct connection, Glitch agreed.

How am I looking? X asked, because his thoughts had started to drift repeatedly to how this wasn't such a bad thing at all, and he wasn't quite ready to stare that one down, especially with an audience that could see right through him.

Well, I wouldn't call it good. You've got hairline cracks in components all over the place, your torso panels are flattened to hell, and I'm gonna have to entirely disconnect and strip down your arm to get the frame back into place, and even then, it's probably going to be more fragile. Predictions of potential metal fatigue patterns filled his mind's eye for a moment. I dunno what's up with your self-repair…I've never seen a setup quite like yours. I think I can get you back into shape, though. It won't be a fast process, but I'll be with you for it, if you want me to do it.

X didn't even hesitate. Please. It's okay if you can't fix my self-repair. I'm not sure anyone can.

I kinda have a hypothesis about it, actually, but it's pretty weak, Glitch thought, and it wouldn't actually solve much of anything, but…when did you start having this happen?

X almost began to explain, but then, that was effort he didn't have energy for, and it was easier to just remember it and let Glitch watch. It had been nothing short of a miracle that he'd made it to see the end of the Maverick Wars...and nothing short of a slap in the face that it had been such a relatively minor thing that permanently scrambled his circuits.

Just an IED. A parting gift, from a group of irregulars that he hadn't been able to talk down. Like so many other veterans, human and reploid alike, throughout hundreds of years of history, that was all it had taken in the end. An explosion no different from countless others X had shaken off, except this time he didn't, and nobody knew why. The longer it went on, the worse he got, until he couldn't walk unassisted. He'd seen every specialist that Hunter HQ had, and still, he had no answers, just a new fear of invasive systems analyses.

Oof. V, buddy, I'm sorry. That's rough. And, uh, when did you start feeling like you didn't fit into your own life anymore?

Right around the same time. Maybe a bit before that, X recalled, somberly. The idea of Glitch's hand rumpled the idea of X's hair, bringing him out of his impending gloom.

So, I'm an expert, right, but I'm not an expert on your systems, because frankly I don't think there is a such thing at this point, but every reploid has an internal schema that directs repair processes, not unlike human DNA.

I'm familiar, X said, mentally nodding for Glitch to go on.

I think yours is…different. From what I can tell, yours is way more complex than any I've ever seen, and I think it's because you were designed from the start to be able to evolve on your own way more than any of us were. You've picked up a lot of changes over the years. But I think maybe it doesn't know what to make of you anymore, because I don't think you know what to make of you.

So my self-repair is incompatible with the rest of me? X asked, radiating question marks all the way down his connection with Glitch.

That's the summary. I mean, I could be totally wrong too, right? X could hear the sound of Glitch working near his head, and he steadfastly did not look. He didn't need to see himself being disassembled, even if he did trust his disassembler absolutely.

No, it…makes sense, actually. I don't know who I am, or what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't even recognize myself most of the time. If that's what it's working from, it probably doesn't know what it's supposed to be doing either.

The only indication X had that Glitch had finished detaching his arm was an informational message; not a warning, not even an error. His systems had evidently decided that this was a total non-issue, and he was oddly pleased about this. Maybe he could still learn how to trust.

You're doing great. If you could see yourself the way I—wait, you can. I could just show you, if you want.

X paused, hesitating. He could guess, more or less, but he was already sick at heart from a lifetime on a pedestal, and seeing it from another angle wouldn't convince him of anything new.

A pedestal? Come on, you know me better than that. I got all my idolizing out of my system way back anyway. X couldn't even understand the brief flood of images that burst through from Glitch's memories. Pages and pages of documentation and math he couldn't understand, the mental texture of a series of firewalls, a circle of reploids lying on the floor, an intense feeling of envy…X had no idea what he was looking at, and didn't ask. Yeah, best not to. It's kinda bullshit anyway. Look. If you don't wanna, I won't, but it's not what you're expecting.

X tried to draw a breath, only to be reminded that he wasn't connected to his body to even do so. …Okay. I'll trust you.

Glitch calmly continued to take X's bent arm apart a piece at a time, while over their shared connection, he began to draw a picture. Draw wasn't quite the right word, X realized. It was more that he was releasing his control over his thoughts and allowing the picture to bleed across on its own. He had to try not to draw it, with every clock cycle of their conversation.

X saw himself, saw V, through Glitch's eyes. He was so small. His glass-green eyes wandered everywhere except where he was really looking, incongruously tired and so very old in an eternally young face. V spoke little. He didn't smile. He could barely walk, but refused to hold still. He was so sad. A brief flash of memory, of Glitch's hands twisting into his jacket, of Glitch's heartsick shock at realizing that this strange little reploid wanted to die, and then, a brief flash of his own memory: he would have let Glitch kill him. He felt his—no, he felt Glitch's heart go out to him, like a magnetic pull in his core. The two things were hard to tell apart, interlocked as they were. I hope he'll be okay. I wonder what happened to him. I wonder what he looks like when he smiles. I wonder if I can make him smile. I wonder if he can even allow himself to.

I can try.

V was a difficult cipher. He was so alone. He gave nothing of himself away if he could help it. Did he even have anything left to give? Glitch worried about him, wanted to reach out to him, didn't want to scare him away. V didn't trust easily, if at all, and the difference between a friendly advance and an enemy encroaching seemed to be razor fine for him, and yet, seeing him curled into a shivering ball, terrified even of himself, Glitch couldn't not try to comfort him. I hope he doesn't run from me. I wonder what hurt him like this. I wonder what he sounds like when he laughs. I wonder if I can make him laugh. I wonder if he even remembers how to trust.

I don't, but I'm learning.

And V was a fighter, even long after his fight had run out. Despite everything, he was so kind. He couldn't turn away from someone in need, no matter how small their need, no matter how great his own. He could barely walk, but he walked all over, shoring up defenses, scavenging, sorting, training self-defense, pouring energy he didn't have into everyone around him. He was so strong. He broke down only to get up again and keep going, over and over, no matter what it cost him. Of course V was X. Any idiot with eyes could have seen that. Glitch's embarrassment at not realizing it sooner became X's for a moment, then it passed. I hope he doesn't have to leave. I wonder if he will, in the end. I wonder what he's like when he's happy. I wonder if I can make him happy. I wonder if he's ever even been happy.

I've been happy with you.

Have you? Glitch asked, coalescing out of the blur of his own memories into the present again.

I have. It's been terrifying. X wasn't sure when he'd started responding, or what exactly he'd said, but there was no point in hiding anything while they were one mind.

Why?

I can't lose what I don't have.

A laugh, a gentle one, rippled across the connection. Don't look at it like that. Everything ends, right? That's the nature of things. You'll end, I'll end; that's just how it is. So why worry about it? Be happy it began.

X wanted to believe so badly his chest ached, despite it being disconnected from him in multiple pieces across the workbench. Everything I've had and everyone I've known have ended. I don't know if I can survive another ending. Maybe the next one will be mine.

Maybe it will be.

X balked. You aren't supposed to agree with me.

Yeah, but so what if it is, right? Take whatever you can get from life while you can still get it. You've already given way more than enough. If all you want is to sit in the sun for a bit with a few friends, that's not asking too much.

It's that easy?

Nah, it's that hard. Life doesn't want to give reploids like us anything, so we gotta steal happiness from the world with both hands and bite the fingers off of anyone fool enough to come between us and it.

Did you have to make it about biting people…?

It's like you keep forgetting I'm a Maverick. I think I should get some leniency in saying unhinged things. And so should you, Glitch said, directly transmitting the full sensory suite of the experience of pointing accusingly at X. Speaking of you. When I get you repaired, what do you want to do first?

Ah…I don't really know. X radiated empty confusion, though not for long. Bright conviction filled his circuits, and his doubts fled. Deal with the remaining Drifters, because there's no chance they won't be coming for us.

V, come on. I asked you what you wanted, not what you thought you had to do.

I do want that, though. I still hope it's something we can settle without violence, but if that's what it takes, I want to protect this place and everyone in it.

Hah, well, I guess I can't argue with that. And then what?

Going for three again?

Absolutely.

X thought it over, well aware that his thoughts were Glitch's, and Glitch's thoughts were his own. Alright. Second thing… No, he couldn't say new clothing again, he'd used that one already last time. No hot shower, either, that was too easy. And not routine maintenance, because Glitch was doing that along with the repairs.

Do not say 'a nap,' either, Glitch playfully scolded him before he could even form the thought completely.

Glitch, I am at least ten times your age, let me have this.

Okay, okay. Fine. You can have your old man nap. What's the third thing?

I'd like to just sit in the sun with you for a bit, X thought, before he could even stop himself, which was just as well because he didn't want to stop himself anyway. It sounded nice when you said it before.

Oh. Well. Only if you promise to bite the fingers off anybody who tries to stop you, Glitch joked.

…Yeah. Maybe I will bite their fingers off. I might even enjoy it. X laughed, genuine and golden across their connection. What a terrible place to finally find happiness again, he thought. In a thousand broken parts spread across a workbench, in a condemned and crumbling city center, with a Maverick no less.

Who bites fingers off, Glitch added, helpfully.

Yes. A Maverick who may or may not have bitten anyone's fingers off yet, but is clearly ready and willing to do so, and is talking me into doing it too.

I was right, by the way.

About what?

You do have a nice laugh.

You can't make me blush, X thought, flustered and entirely lacking any ability to hide it. I don't even have a face right now, and my synthetic skin never had that capability.

That's fine. You're cute even without a face.

"What in the world are you grinning at?" Kathy's voice cut into their shared reverie. X heard it more through Glitch's sensors than his own, which was a very odd sensation. He was privately glad that he couldn't have moved his face even had he wanted to, because he'd entirely lost faith in his ability to hide any given emotion he was having, and he was certainly having enough of them right now.

"Huh? Kat. Wow. Don't just barge in without even knocking," Glitch scolded. "I could be doing something super delicate and one wrong move could be the end of V."

She pressed her hands to her mouth and backed away. "Oh no, I hadn't even thought about that. I'm sorry. I can come back later. I just wanted to ask you a few things about the Dri—ex-Drifters that came over with you, but it can wait."

"Goddamn, I'm messing with you. But I am, uh, pretty busy." He made a vague, silvery-fingered gesture towards the sheer number of parts of X were across his workbench. "So yeah. Later? Analog can probably fill you in for now, whatever it is."

"He's…okay, right?" Kathy asked, hesitantly glancing at X with wide eyes.

"Nothing I can't fix. Well, no, that's not entirely true. Several somethings I can't fix, but lots of things I can. He's not nearly as dead as he looks, trust me. We've been having a conversation this whole time." Glitch tapped his temple, which was not where his wifi module actually was, but everyone seemed to understand this gesture much better than him tapping a random spot on his abdomen.

"Ah." Kathy gave him an appraising look. "I'll leave you two alone, then."

"Wait, no, it's not like that," Glitch protested to her retreating back, and then to the closed door.

It is kind of like that.

Shush, you.

X quickly lost track of how long Glitch labored to put him back together. He couldn't have quite said whether they conversed or simply communed. Time was a strange thing when he had no discernible physical presence to himself. His system clock tracked it as usual, but it had no relevance to him.

X continued to drift in and out of consciousness. He was exhausted, damaged, and overwhelmed, and as his systems began to recover from their shock, his mind grew lethargic from the strain. Glitch's presence took the edge off of it all, his code modifications and repairs handled the rest, and between those things, X felt…something he'd felt so infrequently that he wasn't even sure how to describe it. Secure? Cared for? Loved, maybe?

Whatever it was, the warm bubble he found himself in now combined with the crushing exhaustion of the past day and his injuries to send X to sleep. He defragmented in fits and starts, and all the while, Glitch worked, talking to him when he was alert enough for it, and letting him rest as he needed in the interim.

Finally, X awakened, rising to awareness through the slow fog that filled his head. Good morning, Glitch transmitted, cheerfully. Late evening morning, but whatever. I'd ask how you're feeling, but I have the complete readout right here, and I still haven't turned your usual pain processing back on, so I already know you're going to say 'good.'

I…yeah, I was going to say that, X admitted.

I've just about got you reassembled. It's been…oh, fourteen or fifteen hours or so, total. Eighteen or nineteen hours for me, but that's normal, I just live at a speed of 1.25 seconds per second all the time. But I've got your chassis panels back in shape, your cooling system's repaired and flushed, self-repair is patched up and finally seems more or less active, lots of replaced capacitors, got your arm's frame straightened out, and goddamn, V, I have never seen joints as old and worn out as yours. I did what I could. Hopefully they'll at least stick less. Also, he added, I cleaned all the coolant out of your voice module, and you still talk in your sleep.

X groaned inwardly, which was still as good as outwardly. Please tell me I didn't say anything ridiculous. Wait. Did you see what I was dreaming…?

I behaved myself and didn't watch, even though you projected it pretty hard. Glitch wiped his hands on a rag, tossing it into a plastic bucket in the corner, full of similarly abused fabric. Nothing on the Drifters front yet either, though all three of our new friends agree that it's almost guaranteed to happen, and soon. But don't stress about it. You're fixed up, as much as I can on the equipment I've got, but you've got a lot of self-repair to do still and we don't know how much it'll actually handle. But you should be good to disconnect now and see how you feel.

Right… X surprised himself. Was that actual disappointment that he felt? Did he, in fact, want to stay mentally connected with Glitch? It had been nice, he reflected. Maybe it wasn't surprising. He'd almost never felt seen so thoroughly and intimately, and only once before had he felt so unconditionally accepted…and that had been decades ago.

Yeah, me too, but we got business to take care of. Let's get your code back to original. Let me know if anything's too much to deal with and I'll take a second look at it. Glitch began methodically rolling back the changes he'd made to X's pain processing, and his old aches and pains crept back in. He had a few new ones besides; even repaired, his arm tingled slightly.

But his joints did feel a little better, he realized with relief, and he seemed to be throwing fewer actuator calibration errors. He could handle everything else a bit more easily with less of that taking up his processing power.

There we go. That should be everything. Nothing left but to close the connection.

Ah, before you do, X thought, quickly. I wanted to say…thank you.

Thank you, too. Glitch's mind enveloped him one last time, and with a final sensation of fingers combing through his messy hair, Glitch closed his connection with the recharging pod they'd used as an intermediary.

"Alright. Let's see how you handle." Glitch had X's old clothes at the ready, clean and more or less folded, and his cane alongside them. X dressed, feeling less stiff than he had for a while, and with Glitch hovering at his side just in case, he got to his feet.

"Not bad at all," he declared, after a moment of forgetting that he had to speak out loud again if he wanted Glitch to hear him. Even his voice felt a little easier to use, though that might have been purely mental. "I wouldn't trust myself without my cane, still, and I've got some new aches in other places instead…but it's a little better. I'll gladly take that over worse for a change."

Glitch offered X his arm. "Don't overdo it to start. You've been through an awful lot in a short time."

X sighed, looping his free arm though Glitch's. "Believe me, I haven't forgotten." The two left the building, arriving in the encampment's little plaza, where everyone who wasn't stationed on guard duty sat around the fire pit, weapons already holstered just in case. Valentina looked up, spotted X, and glowed with excitement suddenly, as bright as a second fire.

"V's up!" she exclaimed, and within moments X was swarmed.

"Oh, X, or V, or whatever you want to be called, I'm so sorry," Kathy apologized.

"Hey, how you feelin'?" Hammer wanted to know, giving X a gentle slap on the back that would have knocked him over had he not been holding Glitch's elbow.

"Hey, hey, easy on the merchandise, I just got him fixed and he's still full of hairline cracks," Glitch playfully scolded.

Valentina pressed her way through the crowd and threw her arms around X for a hug, startling him. He hesitantly gave her one back, one-handedly and with his cane in his hand, but at least it was something. "I was so worried about you and Glitch didn't even come out and give us any updates!"

"I was busy, Val," Glitch said, as if he'd already explained this several times. "Also, holy shit, guys, give him some ventilation room, he only just got up." Glitch herded everyone away from X, hovering protectively.

"It's fine, Glitch. Really," X said, which deterred Glitch not at all. He waved everyone away until X found a seat by the fire, and even then, he took a seat by his side. Era, Toxotes, and Analog were there as well, though they had chosen to hang back.

Kathy pulled up a cinder block next to X. "I mean it, V. I owe you an apology a hundred times over. I panicked, and I accused you of all kinds of horrible things, and—"

X put a hand on Kathy's forearm, and she paused. "I should have been upfront from the start."

She shook her head vehemently, though she didn't push his hand away. In fact, she placed hers over his, looking him in the eyes. "No, I mean it. You didn't deserve that. For however long as you want to stay here, we're happy to have you. Whoever you are, and whoever you've been, all that matters is that you helped us a lot in a very short time and we—I, especially—didn't hold up my end of that at all, because I let fear cloud my judgment, even though I know better. And Hammer and I talked about it too…we told everyone already, but we still owe you a full explanation of what actually happened."

"I thought I heard Valentina getting excited about something," said Drive, emerging from the makeshift housing. Focus was right behind him, drumming his fingertips together excitedly and grinning. "How are you feeling, V?"

"I'm alright," he answered, honestly for a change. "Glitch does good work."

"I told you so," Glitch muttered under his breath, but he was smiling too broadly for his mock offense to be even a little believable.

'>It's good to see you up and about,' Focus broadcast.

'>It's good to be up and about,' agreed X with a smile, before turning back to Kathy. "It's alright. I mean," he hastily amended when she opened her mouth to interrupt him, "I mean that I accept your apology. I'd like to hear the whole story, when you're ready to tell it. I saw enough to know that I'm not going to judge you for it. If I were in your situation, I'd probably have done the same, and I know that you wanted to protect everyone here. I do too. Whatever I can offer to keep us safe, I'm happy to give."

Kathy smiled tearfully and squeezed his hand before releasing it. "Thank you. If there's anything I can do to make it up to you…"

"Keep treating me like V. That's all I really want." X picked his hand up from her arm. "I didn't realize how much I needed to get some distance from my past until it was too late to tell you who I am without seeming like I'd lied. For whatever it's worth, I'm also sorry that I wasn't more forthcoming. I didn't mean to scare you."

"No, Glitch was right. We've never required anyone's history or past name here, and we aren't starting now. But I appreciate the apology, and I'm glad you're okay." She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and smiled more brightly. "Though now I've got to get on Glitch's case to start building another pod already."

"Hey, now. I just finished that one. Do you have any idea how long a fifth is going to take me?" Glitch objected, though his mood was just too good for the idea of more work to bring him down.

"I feel like I oughta explain. We were out takin' a walk a few blocks off, basically," Hammer said, sheepishly. "Kinda a risky thing to do, but Katie was getting stir crazy so I suggested changin' scenery for a bit. Next thing we knew, someone was firing real heavy plasma bolts at us. She hid, he went after her, and I went around the side of a building to get behind him…and that was pretty much that. I think he must've tried calling someone when he realized he lost track of me, but I never figured out who, and nobody showed up anyway. Katie kept his phone, and I, uh. I can show you where I buried him sometime, if you want."

"Maybe later, but I don't really need to see it," X said. "I know this is probably strange to hear coming from me, but I would have done the same in your place."

"Didn't like doing it," Hammer nodded. "But I couldn't let him hurt Katie, or anyone else either."

"Hey, X," Era finally said. She'd waited a while for a gap in the conversation, so X didn't make her wait any longer, turning his attention to her and the two reploids by her side. They'd all stripped as much of their Drifter red off as they could, with just a lingering stain remaining here and there.

"Era," X said. "Thank you. All three of you, really. You don't know me, but you risked your lives and gave up your homes for me. I'm in your debt."

"It's just what I had to do," Era said, suddenly shy under his gratitude. She tucked the unshaven part of her straight, black hair behind the her left auditory sensor, where it stayed for only a few seconds before sliding back out. "I mean…you're you, and Seren was going to kill you. I couldn't let that happen."

"Don't sell yourself short," X said with a smile he hoped was reassuring, but he'd stopped trusting his face a while ago now. "That took a lot of courage."

Either the smile wasn't what he hoped, or he'd struck some unseen nerve, or perhaps she'd struck it herself. Whatever the case, she crossed her arms over her knees and sighed. "It's not that…it's that I should have done something sooner. She's been like this since I joined, probably before that. I've helped kill a lot of reploids that probably didn't deserve it, and I knew it, but I didn't do anything to stop it."

"Well, that makes two of us." X let the smile turn sympathetic. "Make the most of what you can change now. That's all anyone can do." He turned to the other two reploids. "Analog, right? And Toxotes? Thank you."

"Don't thank me too much," Analog mumbled, tail in his hands. "I didn't do that much."

"You were going to shield all of us with your own rusty bucket of bolts," Toxotes countered. X wondered who'd designed them. Quite possibly they'd designed themselves, or at least made aftermarket modifications. White hair, black panels, acid green trim, and eyes to match made for a look that was…distinctive, to be certain. And a cloak? Well, fashion was a different thing for reploids than humans, X thought, or maybe it was functional somehow. Just because he'd picked up human-adjacent habits to avoid notice didn't mean that everyone did. Some wanted to be recognized as exactly what they were.

"I saw that. I was impressed. Give yourself more credit," X said, genuinely. "And you did the same without even flinching, Toxotes. I owe you all."

"Y-you're welcome," Analog said, and giddily wrung his tail until X was afraid it might pop apart.

"Yeah," Toxotes echoed, looking pleased with themselves. "Thanks."

"We gotta figure out where you three are staying," said Hammer, sitting down by the fire again.

"Are we staying?" Era asked, hopeful.

"If you want to," Kathy said. "It's only right. You saved one of our own."

One of our own? Now it was X's turn to feel bashfully giddy. He didn't have a tail to twist, but he did have a cane to fidget with quietly.

"We could move to my lab for a bit and give you our room," Glitch offered.

"You just want a recharging pod all to yourself," X joked, and Glitch had to process for eighty percent of a moment to realize that this was in fact a joke, where everyone could see it, and X was making it voluntarily.

"Hey!" he exclaimed, once he'd gotten over his shock. "That's only partly true. I'd move it but we haven't even wired the recharging shack for a fourth."

"Yeah, it's been pretty busy," Hammer admitted. "Kinda need better walls more than we need that right now."

"So it's fine. Besides, V here is still technically recovering from open everything surgery. If he needs a recharge, he gets a recharge, tech's orders." Glitch nodded, arms crossed. "Speaking of, V, you good for a bit? I'm gonna go make sure Mack's cool with it and move all our things that we don't actually have out of the room so the new kids can get settled."

X nodded. "I'm alright."

"Awesome. Back in a bit." He hopped to his feet, rumpled X's hair with one hand, and zoomed off at his usual speed, leaving X blinking bemusedly.

Valentina wolf-whistled the moment Glitch left earshot.

"It's not like that," X protested, even though it was a little bit like that and he knew it.

"Sure. I believe you~" she sing-songed, not believing him in the least. "Good for you, seriously. You deserve to not be so alone all the time."

X hung his head so that he didn't have to see her grinning so damn cheerfully and knowingly at him. Maybe if he hid behind his mess of hair he could pretend this wasn't happening the instant Glitch wasn't there.

"He had to make some temporary code modifications while he repaired me, that's all," X said. "I don't even know what you're imagining, but it wasn't anything…scandalous."

"Who said anything about scandal?" Valentina bubbled with laughter. "It's cute. Like, it's so obvious you're just happier around him."

"Is it?" X asked, wishing the concrete floor would open beneath his feet and bury him alive.

"Kinda is, yeah," Hammer agreed, amused. "He's definitely happier around you. Dunno if you noticed, since it's not like you can see him when you're not there, but he latched onto you pretty hard."

'>#NUM=2. I.13270-CMP: Coprocessor.' Valentina broadcast, quietly.

"What?" X asked, looking up again. "Two coprocessors? What's that mean?"

"You know," Valentina said, clearly expecting that he did, but his expression of confusion didn't waver, and her eyebrows shot up. "You don't know. How do you not know? You're a reploid too. You know this, right? You have to."

"Technically, I'm not, and no, I really have no idea," he answered. X wasn't sure he wanted to know, but he had a feeling it wasn't going to be optional.

"How do you not know?" Valentina repeated in theatrical disbelief. Her ability to dominate a conversation with no effort on her part was dizzying.

"I've never had time," X admitted, feeling awkward. "Reploid culture mostly happened while I was too busy fighting a war to notice."

"That's so sad," Valentina said. "Okay. Look. Guys, we have to teach him this stuff. We can't have the first reploid ever going around without any idea what his own culture even is."

"I'm an android," X corrected her, but it was a lost battle already and he knew it.

"So, you know about human relationships, though, right? We can start there?" Valentina began, and X regarded her blankly. He knew they existed, and had nothing much to do with him, and that was that. "Oh my God. Somebody help me out here, I'm going to spring a coolant leak."

"See, V, it's like this," Hammer explained. Even he wasn't immune to Valentina's conversational control. "There's coprocessors, which is what Glitch and Mack are. That's when you and someone else both decide you're gonna stick together and function like one unit, because you trust each other enough that either one can decide things for both of you. Life partner kinda thing."

"There's also peripherals," Valentina added. "That's kinda similar, but there's more discussion than coprocessors would have. Instead of functioning like one unit, you're two units, but in tandem. Like for example, Kathy and Hammer are peripherals."

"Who told you?" Hammer asked.

Kathy sputtered. "That's personal, thank you!"

"It's not subtle, guys, come on, like, everybody knows. Anyway. Of course peripherals can upgrade to coprocessors later if they decide to," Valentina continued, unfazed.

Era spoke up. "There's, um, remote connections, too. That's when you're in a relationship but you aren't physically near each other. It's, um, a lot harder to do without internet connectivity though, so you don't see it in the quarantine zone really, and they usually disconnect after a while anyway."

"If it's a one-sided connection and one person makes all the decisions, they're the transmitter," Valentina explained. "Then the other person's the receiver, and they're in a unilateral or unidirectional connection, as long as they're both fine with it. But if one's just being an overbearing exhaust vent, that's not a transmitter, that's a controller."

"What about Cirocco and Trigger," Hammer said, and Valentina lit up.

"Right! I didn't even say anything about firewalls. That's when it's based on protecting each other from dangerous stuff and not as much emotional compatibility. Like, you look at how much they like to bicker and growl and squawk at each other and you'd think they're conflicts, but they're not, they're just firewalls who like to argue."

"Wait," X said, holding up a hand. His head was spinning. "What are conflicts?"

"That's when you're in a network with someone you love to hate," Valentina answered brightly.

"Why would you do that in the first place?" X asked, even more dumbfounded. What in the world had his technological offspring been getting up to?

"Because some people just want to compete, V, duh," Valentina answered.

X involuntarily thought of Zero. Granted, he had never hated Zero in the least, but that did sound achingly familiar as a personality type. "Okay. Never mind, I can see that after all."

"Sometimes you get resolved conflicts, where they end up being peripherals or coprocessors, or you can end up with a critical conflict, where they actually hate each other and it turns violent—"

"Oh, oh, don't forget series and parallel," Kathy interjected, having recovered from her own forcible outing and gotten back in the spirit. She really couldn't sit idly by while someone else did all the teaching. "A two reploid network is always binary so it doesn't matter, but with more than that, you can have some members operating in series, where they are directly connected with each other, or in parallel, where they're part of the network but not directly connected."

X quietly resigned himself to not understanding anything just as Glitch and Mack returned. "What in the world are you even teaching him?" Glitch demanded to know. "He's making a face like you just pulled half his RAM out and I definitely heard someone broadcasting 'two coprocessors' earlier. Val, this is your fault."

"Guilty!" she chirped happily, flashing a peace sign next to one eye and beaming broadly.

"We didn't even get to the difference between analog and digital," said Analog, wryly.

"Or relays and switches," said Era.

"Ah. I miss when I was a relay. That was a lot of fun," Valentina said, dreamily. "Remember that, Glitch?"

"Yes, but no! We are not gonna scramble V's circuits with what a relay is, and we are really not gonna get into that time. Give the man a moment to process, would you? I turned around for two seconds and you're all conspiring to knock him offline with an information overload."

"What…is a relay?" X asked, regretting it but being unable to stop the words from tumbling out.

"That's when you've got a potential binary network, but they haven't actually initialized, and you add a third who's serial with both of them—"

"—Okay, that's enough for one day—" Glitch interrupted, while Mack snickered quietly at his expense.

"—and the relay tries to upgrade the network to a peer-to-peer network—"

"I should not have asked," X said, though nobody heard him.

"—which is what it's called if everyone is in series with each other, and if it's a network where everyone's in parallel except for with one member, that makes them the server of a hosted network, but most networks are mixed anyway—"

"I warned you, didn't I?" Glitch asked X. "I told you about Val and her thing with this."

"—oh! And if you add at least one human, that's called a bionic network—"

Glitch did a double take, suddenly back in the conversation despite himself. "That's fake, Val. I've never seen that."

"It's not fake!" she proclaimed. "I've been in a bionic network. A peer-to-peer one even. It just takes really specific kinds of humans and reploids to make it work. Like, some humans are really into unilateral transmissions, except it's more of a biological thing for them and they don't call them transmitters and receivers, they call them—"

"I do not wanna know whatever you're about to say," Glitch proclaimed, loudly enough to finally interrupt her and with his hands over his auditory sensors. "I really don't. You have found the limit of my obsessive need to know every possible fact in the world. Congratulations. I didn't think it was possible."

"Okay, but imagine the look on other people's faces you'll get to see when you tell them about it," Valentina pointed out, slyly.

Glitch hesitated, mouth still open. He closed it, visibly processing this idea, and dropped his hands back to his sides. "...Alright, you got me, but tell me later. And not in all the gory organic detail I know you're gonna get into, I don't need to know."

"Fiiiine," she sighed. "Nobody here ever appreciates my artistry."

"Anyway, back on subject, and without all of you snapping V's motherboard over your knee because he hasn't been through enough already or anything, our room is free for you three to move into," Glitch reported, with a nod towards Era, Analog, and Toxotes.

"It's been a long time since anyone actually lived in the central building," Kathy said. "Not since the beginning when it was still just Hammer and me. Oh, here, let me show you to where you can stay, now that we've got a place. I'm sure you must be tired."

Kathy led the three ex-Drifters to their quarters, such as they were. Hammer excused himself to go relieve Flip from watch, and Valentina looked about ready to begin explaining things to X again until Glitch intercepted.

"Oh hell no, it's his bedtime. Technician's orders," he said.

"Okay, but tomorrow, I'm giving you the full education," she threatened with a smile. "Rest well, you three~"

Glitch gave X a hand up and they made their slow way to the lab. "Ugh. Sorry about that."

"Is that really…do reploids have relationships like that?" X asked, still trying to process it. "It sounds so complicated. I'd heard the terms in passing, but I never knew the context."

"Yeah. Humans have relationships based on like…attraction and romance, generally, right? Since they reproduce, uh, in opposite sex pairs. You know. Really generalizing it, but close enough for conversation. Reploids don't have any of that, obviously, but we're still human-like enough that we build relationships with each other. Just, they're based on very different things, so they're pretty different, and all the differences got named after what they're called in >I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast." He unlocked the lab and let all three of them in.

Inside, he'd cleared as much clutter as he could from the floor,  and stacked an armload of sheets and blankets on the workbench. "That makes sense so far," X nodded along, "but it doesn't seem like it should be that complicated."

"Reploid relationships are usually trust-based," Mack explained. "I trust Glitch with my life in all things, and he trusts me the same way."

"Wouldn't that be true of," X thought for a moment, trying to recall Valentina's rather rushed explanation, "firewalls, too?"

Mack nodded, insofar as it could. "Yes, but that's a specifically combat-oriented connection. Firewalls might not trust each other in other contexts, and might not even get along all that well, even if they'd die to protect each other. Coprocessors that don't get along that well usually end up being conflicts instead."

"And peripherals are…they just don't trust each other as well as coprocessors?" X asked.

"Not exactly," Glitch clarified. "They verify decisions with each other a lot more. Coprocessors trust that they don't need to ask, peripherals trust that they will ask. Here, I found this. Pretty sure it's yours." He pulled something from a box and held it out to X: Zero's saber. "I swapped a new-ish battery in, but, uh, I figured you might want the old one, so I kept it."

"Thank you. It's pretty important to me." X accepted it with both hands, twisting his cane apart and inserting the saber into the shaft, where it just fit, then screwing it back together. "So there's also networks…?"

Glitch stopped in front of the stack of blankets. "Yeah. Humans mostly pair bond, for biological reasons, but reploids don't have any reasons like that, so we just kinda…" He trailed off, making a vague motion with one hand as if he was tracing a mess of unorganized cables. "The flowcharts of some larger networks can get pretty complicated. Without any biological sex and when gender is just whatever you want to be called, there's a lot fewer limitations on who can network with whom, compared to humans. Even someone like Val, well, she's always just one upgrade away from being a different, y'know. Setup. So it doesn't really matter."

"Huh." X had never even contemplated…any of this, really. Of course there had to be a social system. He'd just been on the front lines in a war where there wasn't time for fraternizing at all, with anyone, about anything. No wonder he felt so adrift, he realized. The only kind of culture he'd ever belonged to was the Maverick Hunters, and that hinged on being an active Hunter…and also not irregular.

Something else dawned on him then. "I must seem even more broken from anyone else's perspective, if the whole system is based on trust."

"It's not that uncommon. Life isn't kind to us," Mack said.

X thought for a while, taking a seat on an office chair. When I told him my name, in the tunnels…oh, no. I'm a fool. I had no idea until this moment what I must have sounded like. But then, would that assumption be wrong, if that's how reploids see things? I do trust him. With my life, no less, even though it's terrifying. What does that mean, then?

"Are we in a network?" X asked, point blank.

Glitch paused, midway through picking up the blankets he'd stacked on his bench. "Only if you want to be," he said, after a few moments, and without looking in X's direction. "I'm not gonna say I wouldn't like that, because I would, but I'm also not gonna try to tell you that you've gotta define how you feel based on some rules you only just learned."

"I don't know what I want," X admitted. "I'm still trying to get myself to understand that I'm even allowed to want, let alone decide what to want…but I'll think it over, if it's fine with Mack too," he amended, looking to the C-15.

"Reploids apply the transitive property a lot more liberally than humans," it said. "I value Glitch's life as I do my own, and he values your life as he does his own. He is my coprocessor. If you'll have it, I would value you as he does."

X blinked. "Is it that simple?"

"Yes," Mack replied. "For once, it is. That's what coprocessors are, essentially. The emotions behind the loyalty can be anything, as long as the loyalty exists."

"Huh," X marveled. "Well…I'm not sure if I'd make a very good coprocessor, because I've only just started learning how to…be a person, I guess, but I know that I trust you, Glitch. And you trust me and Mack both, so I know I can trust Mack too. Both of you did come to rescue me, and I'm," he paused, searching for words. "More than grateful. I'm stunned, and amazed. I'm still processing that anybody would do that for me after knowing me for only a week, but I would do the same for either of you now. So…for whatever that's worth, I'll sleep on it."

The corners of Glitch's mouth tugged upwards into a silly smile that he couldn't have contained if his life had depended on it. "Ah, Val is gonna be so unbearably smug about this, whatever ends up happening," he laughed, shaking the blankets out one at a time and making three beds on the floor, one of them much smaller than the other two.

"Whatever you decide, we antiques need to stick together," Mack agreed, as cheeky as it was possible to sound with no vocal emotional range at all.

"There. How are you on charge, V? And Mack? 'Cause I'm dying."

"I'm tired, but topped off," X answered.

"Just take the pod," Mack said. "If anybody fights you about it, I'll cut their legs off."

"Please do not. I don't need the extra work putting them back on," Glitch sighed dramatically. The extension cable was still attached to the pod, so he simply reached around his own back and popped it into place, where it docked with a click and a hum. He picked a pile of blankets and sat down. "I'm gonna defrag like a paperweight tonight."

X sat down next to him, pulling the blankets into a cocoon. "You really are the most computer kind of reploid I've ever met, sometimes."

"Yeah? You're definitely the most human one I've ever met, and no saying you're actually an android, you know exactly what I mean. Maybe that's why you're so interesting. Opposite polarities or something."

The moment X settled down his systems demanded rest in no uncertain terms, his log filling with prompts to defragment. Maybe his self-repair would even accomplish something for a change. The floor of the lab was cold, but Glitch had given him the most blankets by far, and he was well insulated. He appreciated it. "Sleep well," he said, and he was out like a light before he could even register Glitch and Mack's responses.

Chapter Text

X jerked awake. He couldn't move. Something held him down, and he was in the dark, awaiting a painful fate, too damaged to move from the floor—

—And then reality began to seep back in. He was not at the Drifters' commandeered base, or any of the other dreadful places he'd half-remembered. He was home. Yes, he was on the floor, and it was dark, but he was warm, comfortable, and most importantly he was safe. Then why couldn't he move…?

X groggily opened his eyes halfway. The faint glow of LEDs on Glitch's sparse equipment gave just enough light that he could see, once he'd adjusted to maximum contrast. Glitch was wrapped around him, pressed closely to his back and arms encircling him, still defragmenting peacefully. Mack had at some point tucked itself among their legs like a cat, soundly asleep yet facing the door.

They're protecting me, he realized, and the cold terror of the nightmare he had been having evaporated into a warmth he'd never before felt. Both of them. Do I even deserve this?

Almost before he could finish the thought, he could imagine Glitch's response to that. Does anybody truly deserve anything? Seize whatever happiness you can find and enjoy it while you have it, said the Glitch in his head, as clearly as if they were still linked.

This was what a coprocessor was, then. X was beginning to understand. He and Glitch had shared thoughts, memories, and minds, and he felt no fear of being judged to be unworthy or unwanted. If anything, the new paradigm that he was wanted, that he did have value even with a broken body and exhausted spirit, that was what he didn't understand. He didn't doubt it, after seeing it firsthand, but neither could X quite wrap his head around it.

He had lived on a different scale, X thought. He had believed that his value had lain in his ability to change the world. When he could no longer perform to that level, he'd lost his justification to exist—or so he'd believed. When he saw and felt through Glitch's eyes the difference he'd made in the microcosm of the Abel City quarantine zone, in just this one camp, in just this one reploid, he'd felt needed again for the first time since he'd retired.

And then there was Mack. X realized he had mostly and unfairly overlooked it, but without Mack, Glitch likely couldn't have come to his rescue. Whatever its motivation, it had risked its life for him as surely as Glitch had, and without even the same personal investment. Or perhaps it really did count Glitch's investment as its own. Either way, it was curled up behind his knees, and while the feelings X had for it weren't quite the same as those he had for Glitch, the loyalty he felt was the same. Mack was also Glitch's happiness, he knew, and he would do anything for either of them. X would fight for them. If it came to it, he would kill for them, because his love of their happiness was so much greater than his hatred of violence.

If anybody had told me that I would someday, somehow, trip and fall into a relationship that involved not one but two Mavericks, one of them a C-15 Mettaur, I would have asked them if they were overdue for a critical hardware maintenance, X thought, and caught himself smiling a silly little smile. This was just too much. And yet, he couldn't imagine anywhere he'd rather be than here, buried in these unlikely reploids.

What a wretched place to find it, but I am happy, he realized. I've been miserable, and likely I will be again, but in this moment, I'm happier than I can ever recall being. Ah, Zero, you'd really have to decommission me if you could see me now, but I want to believe you'd want me to be happy, too.

Glitch's words from several days ago floated up in his memory. You loved him, right? And he loved you? X had. He still did. It wasn't something that could stop being true, no matter how much time had passed. He still carried that love in his heart in the exact shape of his grief. It was so enormous, even now, that he had never imagined that there could be room for anything else; and yet, when he nestled a little further into the warm arms around him, careful to not jog the warm weight sleeping on his legs, he found room for them all, and room to spare. Quietly, gently, the barriers he'd built to keep himself alive had receded. Only a little, but a little was enough for now.

X simply laid there, marveling. He was a broken war machine, his hands stained with almost ninety years of silvered blood, and yet, this, now, was truly why he had been created, he knew. To know love. Finally, at what he'd believed to be the end, he had learned to begin. Maybe there is no such thing as too late, he thought. Maybe the only important thing is doing it at all, and to keep doing it.

He entwined his fingers with those of one of Glitch's hands, graceful and slender, relaxed in sleep, and so very warm. Reploids certainly had some charmingly specific names for relationships. X didn't quite understand all of the nuances, but he understood that they loved by trusting, and that in this regard, he was indeed no different. He'd read, once, some conjecture that his creator had been disinclined to romance, and that perhaps reploids had inherited that tendency through X himself. It was true that he'd never felt any draw towards typical human expressions of romantic love, and indeed most reploids didn't, but it had always struck him as needlessly cold to leap to the common human conclusion that they didn't feel love at all.

They were a new kind of people. Why should they not have a new kind of love of their own?

Then again, as much as he'd thought the word about Zero, he had never felt he had the right to say it to him, and now he never could. He would carry that regret to the end of his functioning—But I don't have to make the same mistake twice, X thought. I wanted to tell Glitch my name, because I wanted to trust him with that power over me. I wanted to give him the tools to destroy me, believing that he wouldn't.

And then, surprising himself a little with his own candor, X thought, I wanted to tell him that I want to love him. I'm not sure how to love someone, but I want to learn.

In the morning, when we're all awake, I'll tell them both how I feel, X decided, his mind finally made up. I've had enough of living with the regret of things unsaid. I don't know what it'll be like, but I know that it's worth trying, and at the least it'll be fun while it lasts. I want to allow myself to want that for all of us.

X closed his eyes with a sigh, and drifted back into defragmentation sleep. This time, no nightmares woke him.

"We are the last line of defense."

Seren paced as she spoke, twenty-five Quarantine Hunters lined up before her in squads of five and standing at attention. Behind her and at ease were Ricochet, Trebuchet, and a conspicuously empty spot that Faraday would have filled.

"X told me himself that he's gone Maverick." She paused, letting the murmur of shock ripple through her troops. "I didn't want to believe it, either, but he turned three of our own against us. Era, Analog, and Toxotes have deserted. Faraday and Simos are dead. Pixel, Bios, Fortran, and Ten are still recovering."

Seren paused again, looking over the ranks with a fire in her eyes. "I know what you're all thinking. How can we possibly fight against the foremost Maverick Hunter? Is he not our ally? Have we not looked to his example for guidance all these years?"

"My fellow Hunters, the truth is that we must defeat him because nobody else can." She gestured to them all, her arm sweeping across the room. "Anybody can become a Maverick. We know this. We've seen it. We have long believed that out of all of us, X alone was incorruptible. As we've learned, even he can fall, and so with heavy hearts and steady hands, we will do our duty."

The training hall was the largest room of the base. Even with as full a muster as they could turn out, they didn't fill but a corner of it. Regardless, Seren strode back and forth under the lights, addressing them as if they were a full contingent. "He is not to be underestimated. You may have heard that he's obsolete and malfunctioning. These things are true. This does not make him a less deadly foe. He's resourceful, he's cunning, he's convincing, he has more experience than all of us combined, and he has allies. Any of these alone would be dangerous. Together, he is a formidable foe. But he is not invincible."

"Do not let your guard down, not even for a moment. Remember that he didn't need to speak to Analog or Toxotes for them to turn traitor. Remember that even in his disabled state, he nearly destroyed Faraday single-handedly. Remember that if he leaves the quarantine zone alive, the world will not know or believe that he is a Maverick, and the damage he could do before they understand the danger he poses is beyond any reckoning. We are the Maverick Hunters, and we cannot allow this to happen."

Seren turned, facing her troops with conviction and pride. They stood firm. "The world may very well hate us for what we are called to do. We will be called Mavericks again ourselves." She let her voice rise in both intensity and volume, her hand clenching into a fist at her chest. "My fellow Hunters, this is a risk we will gladly take, if we can protect humanity from what may well be the greatest Maverick threat that it has faced to date. We are the sword and shield. We shall not falter; we shall not fall; and we will never fail!"

The gathered reploids saluted as one, and their unanimous "Sir!" rang from every surface.

"Prepare your weaponry and yourselves. Recharge as much as you can. We assemble at oh three hundred hours. We will catch them off-guard, we will crush them, and we will show them that there is no place in the world for Mavericks, no matter who they are or were. Dismissed."

The block of assembled Hunters filed out. "Good talk, Captain," said Trebuchet, with a salute. "I've got the route planned out. We should expect contact with the enemy around oh five hundred at the latest."

"Good. Ric, Treb, I want you two on supply duty for this one. Load up a few crates with ammunition. See if you can get them onto a couple of the Ride Chasers and get those through. Nothing larger will make it, but those should still be viable enough. Once you're nearby, hold position until my signal."

"Sir," Ricochet confirmed. "What about aerial cover, sir?"

"We'll keep a low profile near base, but don't worry too much about the Ride Chasers being seen once you're away." She set off at a swift stride. "If you're spotted near their encampment and they end up with the main branch Hunters on them, well, that's hardly our problem."

"Captain," he said, with a snap salute and a suppressed smirk. "Is that an order to make a disturbance?"

Seren clasped her hands behind her back in thought as she walked. "Hmm. Not yet. I'll let you know if that changes. Do we still have those signal flares?"

"Yes, sir."

"Pack a few. Just in case."

Glitch booted from defragmenting so quickly that for a few cycles he couldn't decide if he was actually awake or dreaming. No, he was definitely awake, and there was still a sensor reporting unusual noise levels: footsteps. Multiple of them.

He bolted upright, displacing both of his defrag pile partners and prompting a sleepy groan from V and an annoyed beeping from Mack. Still half-asleep, he sent a broadcast.

'>I.02401-SYS: Sleep mode terminated. >I.40904-INT: High attention priority. I.40904-INT: High attention priority. I.04053-REC: Home region registered. E.00186-CMB: Engage. W.18901-POS: Decrease distance. I.00186-CMB: Engage. I.52634-POS: Assigned location. I.00023-LOG: Boolean: NOT. I.10299-CMB: Training exercise.' he sent, then shook V gently. "Wake up, both of you. We got trouble."

V was not nearly so quick to load up, and Glitch felt bad for having to disturb him. The guy had had more than enough in the past few days, hadn't he? Mack grumbled itself alert as several reply pings from all over the camp met his broadcast.

V blinked at him for a second before he seemed to quite grasp what was going on. By then, Glitch had already unplugged himself from the recharge cable and gotten to his feet, clipping on a makeshift holster. He extended a hand. "They're here? Now?" V asked, and Glitch pulled him to his feet.

"Bet you anything." He paused in his speaking to relay the situation via broadcast, but continued moving, tossing V a handheld buster of his own. V checked it before holstering it through his belt. 'Sensor 22, to the southeast, reporting footsteps. No estimate on numbers. Sensor 21 as well, now. It's too dark for a visual. Sensor 20 has an IR camera. Once they come into range I'll have a better idea how many.'

Glitch walked out into the town square, followed by Mack and V. "Places, everyone, it's showtime," he announced, even though everyone was already scrambling. The three ex-Drifters looked to him, then Kathy, who was passing out busters to each resident.

"I won't ask you to shoot at your former allies unless you're willing," she said, "but if you are, we're spread too thin on the east side."

"You got it, miss," Era said, heading that way and drawing her own buster.

"I'll head up top," Toxotes agreed with a nod, bow in hand.

"If you can take a disabling shot instead of a killing shot, take it," Kathy requested. "We don't want a war. We want to defend ourselves."

Toxotes simply gave her a nod and turned, cloak flapping. They're gonna kill everyone they can point that thing at, Glitch thought. …I'm not gonna stop them, either.

Analog looked to Kathy. "I'm, uh, not a great shot," he said. "Are you sure you want me…?"

"In combat? Nah, not unless it gets that bad. You're quick, small, and good with logistics. Go with Mack. It's gonna need help with supply lines," Glitch answered, and Kathy nodded agreement.

Analog saluted before realizing that he didn't have to. "I'm on it." He scurried off, his rifle slung across his back.

V had taken his position, and Glitch fell into his nearby. 'Remember, clear comms,' V broadcast. For a model without true wireless capability, he had a very impressive diagnostic broadcast range, rivaling even Glitch, and therefore was in charge of relaying messages. The only problem was that he wasn't the fastest at it, but Glitch had his hands full as the only one with access to the sensor network, so they'd voted him next best messenger.

Glitch heard a remote burst of rapid, encoded diagnostic code. Era translated it aloud. "Seren speaking. Spread out. South and east sides, first three squads. Two squads in reserve, hold position. That's going to be twenty five, give or take, plus Seren, Ric, and Treb."

"So like, almost two to one? Not a very fair fight, is it?" Val grumbled nervously.

"I've had worse," V said, cool as anything. "We can do this." Glitch once again wondered exactly how much combat it took to look at odds that bad and barely even react. Too much, definitely. If it had been up to him, he'd have advised everyone to just shoot every last Drifter they saw into a sooty crater and save them the trouble of dealing with them ever again, but it wasn't up to him, and that was probably for the better.

A megaphone crackled. "Mavericks of the Abel City quarantine zone. Listen up," Seren's voice echoed, though neither she nor any of her troops were visible to normal sight yet. Floodlights flicked on, aimed at the encampment. "It's not too late for you. Give X and our defectors to us, and surrender."

Glitch physically bit his tongue to stifle his very pointed opinion about that as a course of action. Over my dead body, he internally growled.

"You stand down," Kathy shouted back from behind cover. "All we want is to be left alone, and we aren't turning any of our residents over to you. Go home. This doesn't have to happen."

Glitch glanced to V. His eyes were closed, his fingers loosely clasped around his buster, and while he held a ready crouch, he was unnaturally relaxed. For all that Glitch could tell from the outside, he may as well have been defragmenting. We need to end this quickly, he thought. I've seen what this costs him. He's not calm at all…this kills him inside. He's just so used to having to do it that it's all reflex.

"I'll say this one more time," Seren's voice echoed. "Surrender, or we will be forced to open fire."

Kathy called back. "And I'll say this once more. No." She glanced to Glitch and nodded, once and pointedly. "I know you've got something to add, here."

Glitch's grim expression cracked into a wide, sudden, almost manic grin. "Oh, I sure do." He cupped his free hand around his mouth, raising his voice. "If you want V so bad, you're gonna have to go through all of us first, but the only thing you're gonna be taking home from here is your own gluteal plates in a fucking box."

"If that's your answer," Seren said, and the megaphone clicked off.

A hush fell over the rubble, like a held breath. Kathy had instructed the encampment to hold fire until fired upon, and they did, even though Glitch could feel the tension in the air like a static charge. V had trained them as much as possible in the few days they'd had. Would it be enough?

A buster shot, violet-hot, cracked across the empty space, striking near one of the firing slits in the barriers that Hammer and Mack had built. It held, but concrete chips flew as it cracked from the sudden intense heat. Time to find out what we're made of, Glitch thought. No jumping out of buildings about this one.

V ducked out and returned fire with a fluid ease, a single shot aimed with such precision that it almost seemed to find its own way to the origin of the opening shot. It scorched a chunk of fallen wall. He hadn't been aiming at the shooter, Glitch realized, which was probably Seren. He was marking her position, since the lights trained on them were causing glare.

Shots rained from the surrounding rubble, impacting the walls, and their own side returned fire. They had the advantage of height and prepared cover, but Seren's side had more training and more ammunition. In a long enough firefight, there was no way they could hold out. They'd need to leverage everything they could bring to bear.

Glitch had visual on several of the Drifters from behind, and they didn't yet know it. He watched, waiting for one of them to move to set up a shot, and fired before they did. The burst of plasma seared across a very startled reploid's fingers. He hissed a pained curse and dropped his weapon.

"Whatever you do, don't let them gain ground," Kathy called over the din.

Era translated another burst of code. "They're moving on the north and west."

'Focus reporting. Enemy engaged on the north side,' came a report, through V, confirming Era's translation almost as soon as it left her lips. 'Estimating five of them.'

'Kathy speaking. Hold positions,' Kathy answered. 'Keep us updated.' They all knew quite well that they were communicating in plain broadcast and Seren's side could hear them, but it was what they had to work with.

'Cirocco reporting. Five to the west, up in the old bank building. Want us to go clean them out?'

'This is V. Hold positions,' V answered, seemingly to himself, since he was the relay. 'Don't let them draw you out from cover.'

V calmly continued to mark the locations of every single shooter on the southeast corner, occasionally picking off one that didn't cover well enough, while Glitch used his unfair visual advantage to pop another attacker in the hands. Two down on their side at least, he hoped, though in the chaos it was difficult to tell. 'V speaking. Aim for the lights,' he advised. A shot from somewhere along the wall took out one of the floodlights, and Glitch heard Valentina giggle.

Why is she so scary sometimes? he wondered.

'Cirocco here. Engaging to the west,' V relayed, then frowned with concern. Glitch spared a digital glance. The sensor in the building next to their home didn't have visual on anything, but it picked up noises just fine. He heard a growl, several buster shots, and then screams, followed by a screech and more plasma.

So much for her and Trigger following orders, Glitch thought. Hopefully they would be good enough at not following them to make up for it. Speaking of potential loose cannons… He turned his attention for a moment to the garage roof, where he was relieved to find he had a good viewing angle for once. Toxotes, barely visible in their shapeless, dusty cloak, silently nocked an arrow and let fly. It embedded itself into the forearm of a red-painted reploid, where it arced brightly enough to white out the sensor's camera for a few frames. Okay, at least one of you up there has any common sense. Godspeed, you bloodthirsty weirdos.

'This is Hammer. Flip down on the northeast,' V relayed, grimly. 'This is V. Moving to fill his position.' He picked up his cane and hustled with a speed that Glitch hadn't seen from him before.

'Glitch here. How bad?' Glitch asked, taking a potshot at where he was reasonably certain Seren was hiding.

'Flip speaking. I'm not dead,' came the reply.

'Good. Fall back and stay that way.'

'But I can still—'

Kathy cut in. 'Kathy speaking. You heard him. Keep comms clear.'

Glitch took another shot at Seren's general location, though he was keenly aware he was wasting ammo. Mack scooted up beside him and pulled another buster pack from under its hat, holding it out on a spindly grabber arm.

"Hey, buddy. How we doing on these?" Glitch asked.

"You don't want the answer to that question," Mack reassured him flatly.

"Great. We've barely begun and all we're doing is keeping them pinned down until they've run us dry." He waited, lined up a shot, and pulled the trigger. Someone yelped. "You know what I don't see? Where they're gonna get their reloads from. They've got to have more than what they're carrying, because none of the ones I've had a look at are carrying more than a spare or two." He fired one final round at another of the floodlights, discharged the empty pack, and slotted the new one in. It didn't even register as full.

"Well, do your best with what you've got," Mack said, then skittered away to deliver another pack down the line.

'Era speaking,' came another relay through V. 'I need to speak to Kathy.'

'Analog here. I'll cover.' Era holstered her buster and Analog fell out of the supply line, rifle at the ready. Era jogged to Kathy's position, staying well out of the line of fire from her slit in the defenses.

"They've got two Ride Chasers," Era reported. "I just heard them talk about bringing them into position.

"Two what?" Kathy asked.

"Um. Hover bikes. Military issue models. Chevals, I'm pretty sure. I think they're using them for supply transport."

Glitch's auditory sensors perked up. "Well, now, that's interesting," he said, without looking away from the firefight in front of him or the six or so sensors he was actively watching.

"Any idea where they are?" Kathy asked, leaning away from the slit in the wall as the edge of a hot bolt of plasma splashed through.

"Behind the front lines for sure, likely planning to park near Seren, but they're gonna keep them out of sight of you," Era said. "They can't have that many guarding them. There's not that many more Hun—Drifters, if we counted right."

"Out of sight is such a relative thing, when you've got eyes in the back of everyone else's heads," Glitch said. "Give me a detachment and some covering fire. I bet we could cut that line off."

'Kathy to V. Strategy question. Era will cover you.' Within moments, V arrived, Era had taken his place, and Glitch felt some gleeful mischief coming on.

"They've got two bikes on the way, probably loaded with ammo, probably not heavily defended. Do you think we can spare anybody to deal with them?" Kathy asked.

V thought for a second. "We may need to. We're already low, and if they can reload and we can't, this battle is over." He paused again, mentally debating something with himself. "If it's a standard issue Ride Chaser, I know how to drive them. Glitch can navigate us where we need to go with the least chance of encountering resistance. Have we heard anything from the top floor?" He frowned and transmitted. 'This is V. Cirocco, Trigger, Toxotes, report.'

'Toxotes. Secured. We might have made a mess up here. Sorry, boss lady.'

"Stuck together like a bunch of battle-crazy magnets," Kathy muttered. 'Kathy here. Doesn't matter. Keep up the good work.'

'This is V. Meet you up there.' Then, out loud for Kathy's benefit, "I'm going to borrow Glitch, Toxotes, and Trigger. Don't let on that the top isn't heavily defended. They can keep thinking it's a nanofluid bath up there."

Glitch and V hurried up and through the barricade of cars, V following the wall with one hand and his cane clutched in the other. Even disabled, he moved with a certainty that Glitch had never seen from him before. Of course he does. He's protecting us now, like he said he wanted to, Glitch realized. I just want him to not have to do it.

The roof of the garage was not a pleasant sight. Two Drifters in various states of sudden unplanned disassembly were spread across the concrete in a massive splatter of silver and blue. Another lay crumpled against the barrier around the edge of the garage, still moving but mostly just to clutch at an arm pierced with an arrow that seemed to have deactivated half of her body. The fourth and fifth had been scorched beyond repair and occasionally emitted smoke and sparks.

V steadfastly ignored the bodies, so Glitch did too. "Here's the situation. There are two incoming Ride Chasers already nearby, carrying ammunition for Seren's men. We can't let them through. The three of us are going to intercept and try to take at least one of them for ourselves. Trigger, I want you in the air supporting and keeping an eye out for further reinforcement."

"I can do this," Trigger agreed. "But if I am seen by Maverick Hunters?"

"We'll worry about that if it happens. There shouldn't be any active aerial patrols right now. Cirocco, you're going to be covering topside alone for a bit, but don't broadcast anything that might tell them that. Don't worry, I'll give your firewall back in one piece soon."

"You'd better," she huffed, still on all fours in quadrupedal mode.

"Let's go. We won't have much time to react once they make contact with the sensor network, so we're going to take an educated guess and get behind Seren's location." Trigger took to the air, drawing fire from the Drifters but keeping well ahead of it. He looped around, breaking line of sight with the attacking forces before heading towards the approaching bikes. Glitch felt a sense of dread rise within him at the plasma fizzling brightly into the pre-dawn sky…but if these fake Hunters won, they wouldn't even have the chance to worry about the real ones.

A faint gray-gold touch of sun lightened the horizon as Glitch, V, and Toxotes moved out under cloak and tarp, sneaking westward. Glitch silently directed them away from any sensors reporting action. V kept up, Glitch supporting him with one arm over the ruined terrain as needed, though he still wasn't as fast as the other two. High above, Trigger hung like a dark shadow, keeping an eye out.

The two Ride Chasers made sensor contact at the same time, not far from each other. "There," he pointed.

"Go. Don't wait up for me. I'll catch up," V ordered.

"Stay safe. I'm trusting you," Glitch said, with a single glance back before he took off to intercept the Ride Chaser, Toxotes not far behind. Neither of the bikes could get up to speed in the rubble. Between that and Era's guess that they were relatively undefended, since the Drifters didn't know Glitch could see them, they had a fighting chance if they hurried.

Glitch spotted his quarry at the farthest end of the block as he rounded the corner. He resisted the urge to shoot from the hip as V had scolded him about and instead took a moment, lining up his shot. The bike's driver, Ricochet he was pretty sure, flinched from the controls, and the bike drifted to a halt sidelong against some broken concrete, the crate falling from the back on impact and landing on its side. The second bike slid to a stop next to it, and Trebuchet crouched behind it next to Ricochet, firing a few shots to keep Glitch and Toxotes back.

Glitch heard a burst of code from one of the two—and nobody replied. Good, they're still out of range, he thought, closing on the two bikes. A heavy rifle shot scorched past his leg, close enough to sting, and he spun to take cover behind a truck. And they're already entrenched. Great.

Toxotes had disappeared somewhere, and Glitch's only indication that they were still present was an arrow arcing from a second story window, striking the ground just behind the two reploids covering behind the bikes.

V arrived, cane in one hand and buster in the other. "Lay down your arms, and you have my personal promise that you won't be harmed," he called. What an idealist, Glitch thought. Even after everything else, he would rather talk it out. Dunno if it's smart, but it's admirable.

"Rust and die, Maverick," Ricochet returned, raising his rifle and sighting. One of Toxotes's arrows buried itself in the rifle's ammunition pack, and Ricochet hastily threw it aside as it arced and exploded. Trebuchet fired several rounds at V that only didn't hit because V was still distant, and Glitch returned fire, rushing out from behind cover.

"Hey! Pick on someone who can walk," he yelled, squeezing off one more blast of plasma, and suddenly Glitch found himself flat on his back in the rubble watching alerts scrolling past. He pulled himself to a sit, systems shouting with pain that he ignored.

V raised his buster, taking a single shot that knocked the weapon from Trebuchet's hands. "Give up," he said again. "You're unarmed and outnumbered."

"Never," Ricochet said, pulling out a bright orange, large-bore handgun from the crate and aiming it straight into the sky. V fired once more, but not quickly enough to stop the shot from going off. The bolt of plasma hit Ricochet squarely in the side of the head, and he fell, stunned.

The shot launched into the sky, burning with blue flames so bright they made Glitch squint. A wildly fired arrow flew past it in a final attempt to stop it, but even Toxotes wasn't that quick, and the signal flare continued unabated, trailing a spiral of brilliantly illuminated smoke.

"Shit," Glitch hissed in frustration, still on the ground. He pounded a fist against the cracked asphalt next to him. "You wanna get all of us carpet bombed together? Is that it?"

V just watched it rise, apparently transfixed, buster still extended. At its peak, it hung in midair, drifting slowly and sparkling like a new star. Glitch pulled himself to his feet, while Toxotes held both of the Drifters at arrow point, though only Trebuchet seemed likely to cause trouble. Trigger landed, folded in his wings, and stared up, unblinkingly.

"We have problem," Trigger said. "I have encrypted radio connection to Cirocco. I am keeping her updated, but this is bad."

Glitch hauled himself to his feet, turning off several entire regions of damage sensors to do so. "Come on, V," he said, putting a hand on V's shoulder. "We gotta move." V jumped in surprise, as if he'd entirely forgotten where he was and what was happening, and dropped his weapon to his side.

"You're hurt," he said, as if really registering it for the first time.

"Nothing a little polish won't fix." That was a lie, and they both knew it. "We're gonna have even bigger problems soon, but you said you can drive a Ride Chaser?"

"Right. Yes, I can." With a shake of his head, as if clearing it, V gathered his wits again, suddenly cold and focused. "Toxotes, Trigger, see if we can secure both crates onto one bike." He sat at the controls of the one that Trebuchet had been driving, pulling it around and away from Ricochet's Ride Chaser so it would have a clear path forward.

"What do we do with him?" Toxotes motioned to Trebuchet.

"Disable him. But keep it repairable," V ordered, and the bowstring twanged. Trebuchet choked out a noise, but remained stoic, an arrow embedded through his knee joint.

The two loaded the crates, and V adjusted something on the bike's dashboard. "Mount up, Glitch, you don't need to be walking. If you can shoot, though, we'll need to clear a way through."

"Can do." Glitch swung a leg over the bike, behind V, and wrapped an arm around him, buster in his free hand.

"Trigger, you've got the mobility so you go ahead. Let them know I'm going to come up on the northeast. Help clear that side. Toxotes, stick close and drop anybody that tries to stop us."

"You got it." Toxotes gave a casual half salute.

Even with his damage sensors off, Glitch could tell he'd taken a hell of a hit. Whatever, he thought. I can repair it. I'm fine, as long as it isn't V. They can twist my arms and legs off, as long as they don't touch him. He pressed his cheek to V's messy hair, just for a moment, before sitting up a little straighter.

"I'll get us there safely," V promised.

"I know you will, buddy."

They took off. V turned the bike's hover height up as high as it would go, with no regard for the fuel, since it didn't have far to go anyway. Just one city block, diagonally. V was a seasoned driver, and it showed. Glitch wouldn't have imagined even a Ride Chaser could move so smoothly over the broken, debris-strewn streets, but Toxotes had to hustle to keep up.

"I hear a few on the road ahead, around the corner," Glitch announced, though it was still too dark to see them. His sensor network told him what he needed to know.

V thumbed a control on the handlebar, and the bike itself fired several bolts of glowing plasma ahead of them, lighting the way. Toxotes took a half-unseen shot at one of the Drifters, and they fell with a flash of electricity. Glitch fired at the other with no particular precision, but it was enough to send them scattering, with an encoded message that Glitch could hear echo through the other units around them.

"We're spotted. Seren's ordered all units to intercept," Toxotes translated. "Get outta here. I'll be fine."

"Damn. Be careful, Toxotes. And Glitch, hold on tight." Glitch had just enough time to flip the safety on and throw both arms around V before he suddenly gunned it, the bike's matter repulsors and fans whining with the increase in load. The Ride Chaser responded sluggishly under the weight of two passengers and two loaded ammo boxes, but the extra mass gave it inertia, and as it picked up speed it knocked smaller pieces of rubble out of its way like they weighed nothing.

V angled the bike down the street and towards the collapsed wall of the building that had once flanked the parking garage on the east side, still gaining speed. Shots flew past them, and Glitch clung to V more tightly; not because he was afraid of being hit, but because he was afraid of V being hit, and if he could shield him, he was glad to do it. V returned fire from the bike's front-mounted buster cannon, though its ability to aim was limited.

It was at least enough to keep the way clear, and V opened the throttle entirely. Glitch suddenly saw what he was aiming for: a single, long metal column, still reasonably intact, and angled up towards the roof of the garage.

"Oh, this is an absolutely insane plan. I love it," Glitch said with a cheeky grin, chin on V's shoulder. "And you. You know that, right?"

V had been frowning in concentration, but he blinked at that. "I was going to say something this morning, but then this happened instead," he said, as the Ride Chaser kicked debris out of its way, unstoppable as a freight train and roaring almost as loudly as one. "I want to tell you that I love you."

He pulled up on the handlebars, and the bike obeyed, the front end swinging up and climbing the beam smoothly. "And I want us all to live." The Ride Chaser followed the beam skyward, as cleanly as if it were on a track. V really was something, Glitch thought. "Because I want to hear you say that again when we aren't under attack."

"As many times as you want," Glitch said, with a stupid grin, and the bike left the beam, soaring in an arc by sheer speed and inertia. Exclamations in both encoded and open diagnostic broadcast, as well as plain speech, followed them through the air.

The bike cleared the top rail of the garage, barely, the edge clipping and throwing concrete and sparks in a spray of gravel. It landed heavily, and V leaned against the power slide it was still doing, gripping the brakes so hard Glitch knew his finger pulleys had to be near snapping. The edge of the Ride Chaser's hover mechanism shroud screeched against the concrete, and still it continued to coast. Glitch could only hold on for his life and laugh delightedly.

Finally, the bike hit one of the abandoned cars that still sat on the top floor, coming to a jolting halt. V slumped against the controls, exhausted, and Glitch just continued to hang onto him. One of the crates detached and tumbled down. Finally, V transmitted something. 'This is V. Mission successful.'

Glitch finally let him go and stood, wobbling. "God damn, I thought we were gonna die in the coolest possible way," he laughed, throwing both fists into the air and shouting. "Whoo!—hrkk!"

A flash of violet impacting Glitch's back and sending him sprawling was all the warning that X had. Seren landed heavily, so hard that the concrete cracked into gravel under her feet. "You," she raged, straightening from her several story leap from the building next to the garage. "I have had enough of you. You took my dreams from me twice, you took my men from me, you took Ricochet and Trebuchet from me—"

X cut in, reaching for his cane where he'd stashed it through his belt and finding that it had slipped out. He glanced down, looking for it, and spotted it far across the garage's deck. "I didn't. They're alive," he said, eyes back up on Seren. "I left them alive. I don't want to kill anybody if I don't have to."

"There are things worse than death, X! What am I supposed to do? I have less than nothing here! You won't even let me have revenge!" Her violet gaze fell on Glitch, who was groaning dazedly and trying to push himself to his hands and knees, but failing. "Or can I? I can take something from you for a change, and this time, it's going to stick," she realized, a terrifying grin spreading across her face.

"You will not touch him," X snarled.

"Or what? You'll pacifist me to death? Oh, no," she crooned, mockingly. "Are you gonna stumble at me? Talk nicely to me? Maybe wave your cane a bit? I'm so afraid."

X reached for the buster holstered in his belt…and found nothing there, either. It had fallen out upon landing too, and tumbled well away from him. Glaring darkly, he began walking towards Seren, one cautious step at a time, balance systems spinning uselessly.

"What's the matter? Dropped your weapon? What are you going to do now, old man? I saw the flare. The Maverick Hunters are coming. The real ones. They're going to kill you, and me, and all of them," she pointed to the reploids beginning to amass around them on the roof and the surrounding ruins, her men and Kathy's alike, weapons trained on each other but nobody willing to fire for fear of hitting their own in the middle.

"But they won't kill him," she said, pointing to Glitch. He had at least managed to roll onto his side and one elbow, and he locked gazes with X, wide-eyed and helpless. "Because I'm going to kill him, and you're going to watch."

Something like a dam inside X snapped, and a flood of energy he had felt only once before resounded throughout his systems. Seren's hand straightened, began to retract—and X lunged for her, a feral, strange light glowing in his eyes. He moved in a blur, and Seren didn't even have time to recoil away from him.

X bit down on her fingers, hard. She shrieked and pushed at his face with her right hand, but it didn't have the hardware to turn into a weapon, and they both knew it. Only her left had that capability, and only if she could retract her hand out of the way. Servos ground with the effort, gears kicking and slipping loudly, and X refused to let go.

"What the fuck is wrong with you? Let go of me, you Maverick! You animal! You…you monster!"

X clamped down harder, still snarling. If she couldn't fold her hand out of the way, she couldn't fire, and if she couldn't fire, she couldn't hurt Glitch. He would never let her hurt Glitch. X meant to steal happiness from the world with both hands, and Seren had been fool enough to come between it and him. His teeth ground through synthetic skin, severed cables, cut through repair nanofluid veins, and she continued to screech.

"Stop! Stop! Let go of me!" Seren pushed at him harder, but he grabbed onto her arm and growled with an inhuman voice, refusing to be moved. Silvery nanofluid flowed into his mouth, and Seren stared into his eyes with horror at what she saw there.

X twisted his head, and Seren's synthetic skin peeled away in shreds, leaving two degloved metal fingertips and several snapped pulley cables. She staggered backwards in tears, clutching her mutilated hand with her good hand. She couldn't even straighten her fingers to retract them. X turned his head and spat a mouthful of mercury-silver blood, synthetic skin, and three metal fingers onto the concrete.

"Give up," he said, finally, glaring at her with the same light still in his eyes. Seren sobbed faintly, shrinking away from him as if she'd never seen anything so fearsome in her life. "Get out. Take anyone who still wants to go with you after seeing what you really are. Never come back."

Seren slunk backwards for a few more steps, then turned and ran, leaping from the edge of the garage. X raised his voice and addressed the remaining Drifters; some were on the garage roof, some were in the building nearby, and none seemed to know what they were doing. "If you want to follow her, do it now. If you don't, lay down your weapons. You have my word that you will be treated fairly and well. Decide quickly, because the Maverick Hunters will be coming."

A few of the red-painted reploids scattered. Nobody stopped them. After another moment, one tossed his weapon down in front of him, kneeling. Another followed suit, then another, until a full fifteen of them were on the garage roof, on their knees in surrender.

X crossed to Glitch, slowly because his balance systems were as bad as ever. He knelt, carefully and gently cradling him in both arms. "Holy shit," he said, staring starry-eyed up at X. "You actually did it. Oh. My God. V. I am beginning to understand some very un-reploid concepts right about now. Valentina would be so proud of me. You have no idea."

"You are so weird," X murmured fondly, smiling with nanofluid still dripping down his chin. Somehow, this did not seem to at all deter Glitch's beaming back at him with entirely undisguised infatuation.

"What do we do about the Hunters?" Kathy asked, approaching X a little warily. He had a feeling he still had that feral expression, but damn if he didn't really care right now. "They're coming, right?"

"That was a standard issue Hunter signal flare earlier. They usually respond in about fifteen minutes. Take everyone into the tunnels, as fast as you can get them there, and stay there until Glitch sees that it's clear. I'm going back to where it was fired from."

"To do what?" Mack asked.

"To talk to them."

"Oh, bullshit, V, they'll want you to come back with them," Glitch protested weakly, wiping some of Seren's nanofluid from X's lips with his thumb. "Or what if those two we left there are still pissed? Or Seren could be there, even."

"She won't bother us again. I found my way here once. I can do it again. Whatever happens, wait for me. I'm coming back. I promise," X swore.

"You'd better, or we'll break out there and find you ourselves," Glitch said, and Hammer scooped him up from X's arms as if he weighed nothing.

"Come on, Speedy, we gotta go," Hammer said. "Let him do his thing. V knows how to handle himself." And then, to X, "You be careful out there. And don't make him wait too long, he's gonna be insufferable until you're back."

Kathy handed X his cane. "Come back soon, and come back safe," she said. "Or we'll have to nail Glitch and Mack both to the floor."

X accepted it with a nod, letting it settle into the curve of his palm and standing with its help. "I will. Where's Charles's phone?"

"It's in my desk lap drawer. Take it, if you need it. It's caused enough trouble already. Maybe it'll get you out of some for a change."

Mack scooted up to X, who knelt again with some difficulty to talk to it a little more eye to eye. "That was the most unhinged thing I have ever seen," it said. And then, "Good work."

"Look after Glitch for both of us," X replied. "I know you will. I just have to say it anyway."

"You look after yourself too. We'll be waiting for you to come back to us."

The wounded were carried by the abled, the newly ex-Drifters were led by the less newly ex-Drifters, and X wiped his mouth off. He didn't need to answer any unnecessary questions about that. He stood, stiffly, detoured through the encampment's central building just long enough to take Alderman's phone from Kathy's desk, and headed for where the second Ride Chaser had been.

When he got there, it was gone, along with Ricochet and Trebuchet. The only sign of its passage was a trail of silver drips leading to where it had been, and a discarded flare gun, imprinted with the Maverick Hunters logo. Good, X thought, without any particular malice. He didn't want to hurt them, but neither did he want to see them again.

X sat down on a snapped light post, and he waited, watching the early dawn sky. A cold, late-autumn rain began to fall, and even with the metallic tang of nanofluid still lingering between his teeth—or maybe because of it?—he felt strangely at peace.

Chapter Text

X pressed his fingers to the glass, staring up at the blue shape on the pedestal. It was him, but then again it wasn't him at all. It wouldn't be him ever again, if he had anything to say about it, and he did.

"Wow," said the reploid next to him, a pastel green mass-production model. She also gazed up at the armor on display with unabashed admiration. "The real thing."

"Yeah," said X. "That's it."

"I wonder what X is doing these days," she said, looking to X without a shred of recognition. "You never really hear anything about him now."

"I wonder," X echoed, with an ironic amusement that the other reploid didn't seem to register whatsoever. She continued to stare up at his empty armor, and he grew bored of looking at it and wandered off.

X had filed his report. It was ninety percent deflection, ten percent factual, and if he hadn't brought solid evidence nobody would have believed even that much. Of course, officially, he had no idea who had killed Charles Alderman. His recommendation was to let it lie, because razing an already razed area with no particular target over a man that had still been committing some kind of murder for fun was a conspicuous waste of resources, and when he'd put it that way, the brass had fortunately agreed.

The debriefing had taken a week, between all the meetings and the number of times some of them had been rescheduled, but now X was just stalling and he knew it. He'd been allowed to cross the wall the first time, as unofficial official business, but this time, he'd have to find his own way, and there would not be any real coming back, so he wanted to put a few things in order first.

He'd gotten his change of clothes, his hot bath, his nap. X had even, hesitantly—though not nearly as hesitantly as the poor nervous techs installing it—had a new battery installed and a core fuel change, as well as a complete fluid systems flush. It was beyond time, he'd decided, and the funny thing about it was that those old parts had been nothing special. He could, in fact, be upgraded in certain capacities. Despite all of the custom work in his aging systems, his power and cooling systems had been top shelf at the time, but ultimately still off the shelf. He had simply never been able to relax enough to allow someone to change any of his components, and the techs had marveled that he could even hold or generate a charge at all.

And yet, even armed with a bucket list that he'd checked several items off of, he felt unsettled. Things were too easy, but only for him. X saw on the news that another reploid gone Maverick in Abel City had set her workplace on fire and simply vanished, and he wondered what the reports left out. Maybe he'd run into her and have the chance to ask. Irregularity numbers had not substantially changed since the elimination of the Virus. In fact, they'd seen an increase in the past few years, especially in reploids being declared irregular in small groups. X had not understood that, before, but he'd learned a lot in a short time.

X went through his days like he was hiding something, and he was. It gnawed at him during advisory meetings, coiled itself in the back of his mind on the train, and danced through his defragmenting dreams. It was invisible to everyone else so far, he was passing, but he knew, and he knew that he could not hide it forever.

It came out at odd times, in little ways. He laughed more. He resisted and argued more. He thought little of rank now, and gave his opinions unsolicited. When everyone in the room was discussing Maverick suppression, X was discussing Maverick prevention, because happy reploids felt no need to light their workplace on fire. He proposed reducing the use of force. They side-eyed him. He brought up the lack of support networks for reploids, and they reminded him that reploids were supposed to be the support network for humans. He realized, after a while, that he was talking to a brick wall, and they did nothing to dissuade this notion. The satisfaction that he was showing up to and participating in meetings again gave way quickly to annoyance that his main role had suddenly become devil's advocate.

Somehow, a week became almost a month. X grumbled to himself, in diagnostic code, because nobody would have dared tell him off for it.

'>E.04642-SYS: Failure to compile. :)' he swore at the retreating form of one of the brass he'd been tangling with in particular, then stopped dead in his tracks and blinked in shock.

'>Did you just…smiley face?' the nearest Hunter asked him, transmitting because X had, so it must have been alright.

'>You saw that too?' X transmitted back.

'>I think I did? Try saying it again.'

'>E.04642-SYS: Failure to compile. :)' X transmitted, bemusedly.

'>How in the world did you manage to edit your standardized diagnostic list? That code is locked down so tight,' the Hunter asked, trying to not laugh.

'>I didn't,' X protested, and suddenly, a memory floated up from the back of his storage.

Even if your security sucked and I actually got in, I would have just put a smiley face somewhere in your code and let you find it later.

X began to laugh, so hard that he had to sit down, and tears sprang to his eyes. The Maverick Hunter accompanying him just stood there, hovering with confused, awkward concern and clearly having no idea whatsoever if he needed to do anything about this, or what he should do if he did. He knew how to deal with Mavericks, and stressed officers, and clueless rookies. An old reploid sitting on the floor laughing until he cried until he laughed, occasionally repeating a rather rude and mysteriously nonstandard diagnostic code to himself and falling into fresh laughter all over again, didn't fit well into any of those categories as far as he could tell.

Of course, he was wrong, but he didn't need to know that.

The very next evening, with snow falling heavily outside his windows, X packed a bag. Just the basics, he told himself, taking inventory. An entire flat of nanofluid cans and another of fresh coolant. A stack of the worst romance novels he could find, in paperback. A portable drive with as many songs, TV shows, books, and movies as he could pirate (which had entertained him greatly to do; breaking the law on purpose was still very new to him). Several bottles of acrylic paint, the best he could find, and some new brushes. Some fun desk toys and fresh new pads of paper. Packets of flower seeds. A few new basic power tools. Nail polish, which he knew nothing about, so he'd bought one of everything in the store just to be certain. An extra durable squeaky dog toy, which he wasn't sure was in good taste or not, but if it wasn't, nobody had to know he'd brought it. As many fresh batteries in every possible size and type as he could fit around the edges. Simple, essential little things like that, he thought wryly, trying to close the humorously oversized suitcase his shopping trip had ended up requiring.

X was not a hacker like Glitch, nor could he fly, and he could not climb the wall now even without a suitcase that weighed at least as much as he did. He knew his strengths, though, and how to play to them. With a confident spring in his step, he walked right up to the gate and pressed a button with the handle of his cane.

"Hey," he said, into the camera embedded in the panel beside the heavy door.

"And you are…?" the guard on duty asked via the intercom, suspiciously.

X brushed his hair out of his face and held up his identification card to the camera. "Maybe you didn't recognize me in a different color."

"Oh! You're—" There was an audible fumble from the intercom, and the door slid open. X entered. "Apologies, sir," the reploid guard said, scrambling to stand up from his desk and salute, even though X was retired and his ID said as much. The guard on duty was a fairly standard unit, emblazoned with the Maverick Hunters logo, and he was the same one that had let X out the first time. This was a planned coincidence on X's part. "What can I do for you today?"

"You can open the gate," X replied.

"Sir. Unfortunately, without permission, I can't open it for anyone, even you," the guard said, contritely.

"Well, fortunately for me, I've got another unofficial assignment, so you're in the clear," X told him, with a reassuring smile.

"Under whose authority…?" the gate guard asked, hesitantly.

X just continued to smile pleasantly. "I'd love to tell you, but you don't have the clearance to know," he said. "But you can trust me. Would I, of all people, lie to you?"

As he strolled into the Abel City quarantine zone, dragging his suitcase with one hand and gripping his cane with the other, X reflected on the fact that he'd spent so much of his life lying so competently that even he hadn't caught himself at it. Doing it with intention and full self-awareness was really nothing in comparison, it turned out.

"Come on, guys, it's pissin' down snow out there. There's nothin' to even see. He'll be back when he's back," Hammer chided, gently, tool bag slung over his shoulder. "You can't keep walkin' around in the dark all the time anyway. It just ain't safe. Chuck's friends could still be out there."

"Hammer. Ham. Mister Forklift. The Drifters are a thing of the past. The reploids formerly known as the Drifters are actually pretty good neighbors now, when they don't have a crazy lady telling them how rancid our vibes are. Chuck's buddies would have to catch me first, and that won't happen. When was the last time we got in trouble? Seriously. Be honest."

"Last week you damn near got your ass seen by a Hunter patrol," Hammer pointed out.

"Technically, I don't have an ass, I've got panels, and Mack doesn't even have that. Also, we weren't seen, so we weren't really in trouble. Just kind of proximal to trouble. Totally different thing." Glitch was between colors in a serious way, having been toasted both front and back. He'd buffed down to his original white in some places, other patches revealing layers of blue or red. He was mostly still racing green, but he was strongly considering a nice yellow, which was not at all related to the fact that they'd stumbled into a quantity of yellow automotive paint recently.

"You know what I mean. Give it a rest." Hammer crossed his massive arms, as stubborn as always. Glitch may have been an unstoppable force, but Hammer was an immovable object, and therefore they had this conversation daily. "Ain't you got anything else to do? You need a hobby, I'll find you one. We got way too much building to do an' not but a single one of these new guys even knows what a two by four is."

"Not my kind of making things. Look, Hammer, you know he doesn't walk so great and he only gets worse when it's cold. What if he's out there right now? All sad and alone?" Glitch put on his best sad puppy face. He'd practiced it in a mirror, so he knew it was good. His eyes grew so large and shiny that it was impossible for anybody to tell him no.

"No," said Hammer. "An' stop doin' that stupid thing with your face. You look like a lemur or somethin'."

Glitch deflated dramatically. "Hammerrrrr. Come onnnn. Since when did you have this kind of authority to be telling me I can't take a walk with my safety buddy?"

"Since just now, when we got so many more newcomers that we can't even stack 'em deep enough to house 'em and they've totally switched up the Hunter patrols," Hammer said, still blocking the exit. "An' moreover you know as well as I do that Katie said—"

"—Wow," Glitch interrupted, offhandedly staring at something behind Hammer. "There is just no way that's up to code."

"Huh?" Hammer turned to try and see what Glitch was talking about, only realizing that it was a ruse after the overclocked reploid had already snatched up Mack and pushed past him at a sprint.

"Hah! Always works!" he cackled, retreating into the falling snow.

"Speedy, you fuckin' little bastard, I oughta pound you into new flooring tiles or somethin'," Hammer swore after him, though in the kind of tone that suggested he'd been saying it so often lately that the edge had worn off. He didn't bother to give chase. There was no catching Glitch when he was on a mission, and he'd been on a mission for a solid month.

Glitch bounded out into the snow, Mack on his head like a hat. He loved this weather. It was the only time of year he didn't have to worry about overheating, and he could afford a little extra shenanigans for a while. Humans had some holidays or whatever. Glitch had the entire season.

"It's been one month exactly," said Mack.

"Yeah," Glitch agreed. They both knew what the other was thinking: it made for a nice even date, the sort of interval after which one might execute a major decision. They didn't need to discuss it, so they didn't, and they hoped their third was having a similar thought.

Networks were just like that, even remote networks.

Glitch had a route he'd developed. He'd first met V to the west, so assuming that he would use the same entrance point as he did the first time, Glitch always looped around that way, keeping to the surface. He would cover several city blocks a few times each, systematically, and then he would head back. It took several hours of walking due to him having a faulty definition of 'a few,' but he had never believed in half-assing the important things, even if he didn't have an ass. Partial-paneling just didn't hit right as a phrase.

The snow definitely wasn't helping with visibility, but it did mean he didn't have to worry so much about being seen from above, whether by visual or infrared. That was the current problem with being Kujuyousuke, Glitch thought. If he could sidle close enough to the outside wall without being detected, maybe find some unsecured wifi, place a few orders…well, spoof a few credentials and land some zenny, then place a few orders, he amended, he could upgrade his cooling system. Or his power supply, but that was scary, and more expensive.

Glitch and Mack were almost to the office building where they'd first met V, and the snow was falling in earnest; big, fat flakes, swirling so thickly that even Glitch with his expanded visual spectrum couldn't see much beyond thirty feet. "He sure wasn't much to look at then, was he?" Glitch said aloud, apropos of evidently nothing.

"He still isn't," Mack agreed, with the kind of mutual knowing that longtime coprocessors shared. "But then, neither of us are, either."

"Yeah," Glitch agreed. A tech worker model with multiple visible paint jobs and a Mettaur so obsolete that it was likely there were no other functioning models of its line left in the world did not make for an imposing pair. "Yeah. But looks are deceiving."

They drew closer to the building's shattered glass entrance, and Glitch squinted. He'd passed this place every day for a month, not counting while he was still self-repairing after being shot up in the fight with the Drifters, and he did not remember a pile of anything in front of it. Whatever it was, it was buried under a few inches of snow. "Huh. New place for a snow drift," he said, approaching it anyway.

Once he was closer, he could clearly see that it was a tarp, blue and tattered by exposure to the weather, the same as any other tarp here…and under thermal vision it was warmer underneath than any pile of abandoned building materials had a right to be.

It shifted, and with a little effort, stood. It threw half of itself back like a hood, revealing messy brown hair, glassy green eyes, and not much else, because at that moment Glitch impacted with V so hard that Mack fell off of his head with a beep of surprise and V involuntarily yelped. Glitch picked the other reploid—okay, android, he already felt the correction even though it was only in his own head—up in the same motion and spun him in several circles, feet well off the ground.

"I'm happy to see you, too," V chuckled, clinging for balance once he was put back down.

"You came back," Glitch said, grinning from auditory sensor to auditory sensor and not bothering to contain his excitement even a little.

"Of course I did," V said. "I told you I would, and this is where Mavericks go to hide, right?"

"Damn straight it is," Mack said, finally righting itself from where it had been spinning like a top on its helmet. It jumped at V with almost as much joy as Glitch, and V caught it in his free arm.

"Let's get you home," Glitch said. "You've gotta be freezing. And what's this? You forget how to pack light? Oh, gasp," he said, actually just saying the word 'gasp' when he realized the enormous piece of luggage next to V wasn't just an incidental part of the scenery. "Have you finally figured out how to own physical possessions?"

"Not really, but I brought a few things from the outside, since I was already passing through," V said, trying to sound casual about it. Glitch experimentally attempted to lift the suitcase.

"A few things! Like what, your modest collection of tungsten ingots?" he laughed, giving up and going back to picking V up instead, and by extension Mack as well.

"Something like that," V agreed, a little too mildly, which meant it was probably a joke. "You know, when we first met, you said you wouldn't carry me, and now you don't seem to be able to put me down."

"Things change," Glitch said.

"Rapidly, when you're Glitch," Mack added, flatly and sardonically at the same time.

"You're no better if that's how it is, going along with whatever I decide," Glitch huffed, though he couldn't find it in himself to even pretend to be the least bit upset about anything at all just then.

"There was something I'd wanted to say, before, but I had to leave with the Hunters instead," V said. "I decided it the night before, and I was going to tell you in the morning, but it didn't work out that way."

"Yeah?" Glitch and Mack both asked.

"If you're still okay with it, I think I'd like to be your serial peripheral," V said, and if he had blood under his skin, he would have blushed, Glitch thought.

"Of course we are," Glitch answered, spinning in a circle with V still in his arms, which made V cling to him again and clutch Mack more tightly.

"You hardly even have to ask," Mack agreed.

"Well, I wanted to say it aloud. I want a lot of things," V said, with some pride. He'd earned it. "I might even figure out the words for some of them eventually."

"It's a three man job now, so you've got backup on the dictionary front. Or a two man, one genderless orb job, if you want to be really exact about it," Mack said.

"You've gotta see how much we've grown in just a month," Glitch said, finally putting V down again. "You wouldn't believe how many of the Drifters ended up going with us. Even a few that left at first came back. We're kinda all just defragmenting wherever we fit, Val's going mad with social power trying to make friends with literally everyone, you gotta sign up on a list to recharge at all…it's just so busy all the time now, but it's a good thing. It feels like a real town. Like we're doing something important here, you know? Someday here soon, we might even have to give it a real name."

"What about Seren?" V asked. "Have you had any more trouble from her?"

"Nothing. We haven't even seen her or her two buddies, but Kat told us to just let them go if we do," Mack answered, still in V's arm. "Not a peep from the Maverick Hunters, either, other than there's been a lot more aerial patrols. Whatever you told them, it seems like it worked."

"I may have slightly underestimated the population here in my report," V said, a little sheepishly. "By about a hundred percent."

"Hah," Glitch scoffed. "That's our V."

V wrapped his free arm around Glitch, Mack still held in the other, and hugged them both, cheek pressing against Glitch's chest panels and just staying there, happily motionless for several long moments. Even in the snow, Glitch's chassis was still so warm. Glitch returned the embrace, pressing his own cheek into V's hair, and Mack, having no arms itself to speak of, just wiggled itself further into the tangle of arms and played a happy little 'bloop' sound effect.

"I love you," V said, to both of them, because he wanted to, and because he could. And then, "Let's go home."

Chapter Text

I had about half of a really interesting dream a while ago (which is a terrible basis for a story usually) in which a very old, very disabled X was looking for a missing human man in an apocalyptic, burnt-out city, and met a bunch of refugee reploids who lived there and had killed the missing man because he'd been caught abusing a child. Right as they'd discovered who X was and were accusing him of faking his disability, my alarm went off, and I was very annoyed.

So I told one of my friends about it after I was awake enough to make sense, and he was like, 'And then what happened?' And I was like, 'And then my alarm went off,' and now he was very annoyed too.

About a week passed and this thing was still living rent-free in my head, so I thought, Hmm! If I just write it out, maybe I'll get inspired and figure out what the second half of it was going to be, and then neither of us have to be any level of annoyed. Optimistic that this would be maybe an afternoon of effort, I opened the Notes app on my phone and started making paragraphs.

It's about three and a half months later, and I just wrapped up editing what ended up being a 162,128 word goddamn novel. So, that's how that went. I've never even had something turn out longer than 50,000 before. I mostly can't carry a story further than I can throw it. I've definitely never written more than 6,000 words in a day before this, and I did it multiple times without really noticing. I have no idea what happened, but I'm not going to complain about success.

The important thing is that I did in fact find out what happened next! And now you found out, too. Congratulations. (Unless you skipped to the end for some reason. I don't know why you would, but there's no law against it, and the world is full of kinds of people.)

Hopefully the sheer number of original characters wasn't off-putting. Writing about a post-canon time in a series whose defining feature is that every entry introduces a minimum of eight new guys who are guaranteed to explode to death makes it a little difficult to have that many canon characters onscreen. On top of that, I ended up with a ridiculously long list of themes I wanted to explore that really needed their own purpose-made narrative vehicles.

One of my main goals with this, since my dream was very explicit about X's exact malfunctions and I'm disabled in real life, was that I wanted to write a story with a heavily disabled main character who was still badass without having to become magically abled at any point. Disability is morally neutral. It's just a thing that happens to people. Nobody's going to make it out alive anyway. Might as well have some characters who are also disabled and increase the number of stories in the world with disabled characters. Honestly, it was kind of fun to write a main character with a mobility device, especially a character like X that you would not in a million years expect to need one.

The more I thought about representation, the more I just kept having character concepts occur to me and more or less write themselves, so if you feel like you spotted a particular kind of neurodivergence or mental illness or identity or what have you, you can safely assume that you did. Some of them have multiple reasonable readings, but that's fine too.

I played very fast and loose with how some reploid functions are portrayed. Their ability to repair themselves is never explained worth a damn. Whether or not they need to be plugged in or not is a massive shrug. Why they're full of red is…questionable. I decided to just scrap the entire mess and start over with my own thing. They bleed silver nanofluid and blue coolant now, which is objectively cooler and much stranger. I really wanted them to feel very different, very computer-y, and maybe even a little alien from a human standpoint, and not just like a bunch of guys in funny big boots. Hopefully I achieved that a little bit.

Anyway: no alpha readers, no beta readers, no outside editor, no sleep, we whole-ass everything single-handedly for no reason at all (have I learned nothing? From any of this? Nope! I really haven't. Thanks for asking though) and die like Mavericks here.

Also, I really want to come up with a sequel, because I feel like it wrapped up a little too neatly and recovery just isn't linear like that, which X could stand to learn. Besides, how long do you really think X can sit still knowing that the world is still unjust? Maybe five minutes? Fifteen if someone sits on him?

No guarantees, though. I think I've earned a break after banging this one out in not even four months. I'd like to illustrate it more before moving on, anyway. (ETA: And I have been! ...But I did also start writing on a sequel. At this moment, it's around 56k, because I guess I cannot be stopped. Illustrations are happening anyway, though.)

Huge thanks once again to Daemuth for AOYeet, which I used to convert this from Google Docs.

Appendix 1: Timeline and Canon Shenanigans (Canonigans?)

If you're having trouble placing when the hell any of this happens, that's valid, and there's an explanation. I decided to roll with X5 as the last canon entry, going from the 'good' ending in which Zero dies and X isn't stripped of his memories, with a dash of the 'bad' ending in that X did dream of building a utopia. In this canon, though, X's dreams of building a new world don't last, and the MMZ continuity also never happens. Dr. Cain did in fact explode in the first bombing of Abel City, which borrows from Maverick Hunter X/Day of Sigma.

X6-X8's Mavericks sort of happened, in that there's some offhanded mention of an unnamed Blizzard Wolfang and Wind Crowrang, but in this canon they weren't connected to any particular major events.

If you're the kind of person who's really into dates, or alternately you're like me and you're the kind of person who's really bad at dates, the entire timeline does exist, and can be found right here. It's detailed and color-coded and everything, because I don't know about you, but I love a good spreadsheet. Just check the tabs at the bottom.

The less-detailed version is as follows, though it's still pretty detailed.

• 2024 - X is sealed away.
• 2115 - X is unsealed.
• 2116 - Reploids are being mass-produced.
• 2118 - Zero is discovered. Mack is built, but not activated.
• 2119 - Mega Man X/MHX happens. Dr. Cain dies. The Maverick War begins.
• 2120 - Mega Man X2 happens.
• 2154 - Mega Man X3 happens.
• 2166 - Cain Labs, which continued on without Dr. Cain, develops Repliforce.
• 2168 - Reset Point is founded. Flip and Siobhan are built.
• 2171 - Mega Man X4 happens. Repliforce rebels, Sky Lagoon falls, and Flip has a bad time, multiple times.
• 2181 - Mega Man X5 happens. The Eurasia Colony Incident also happens. Zero dies too at the age of 63. Not a great year for many people.
• 2183 -  Cirocco and Trigger are built and deployed on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
• 2185 - Sophia Microelectronics Research launches Project Convergence, aka Virgil. Cirocco and Trigger are declared Maverick.
• 2186 -  The massive attack that creates the Abel City quarantine zone happens, killing Dr. Wendy Myers and Motive. Focus and Drive split. Valentina is built.
• 2190 - Mavericks target a brothel that employed three reploid sex workers, including Valentina. After killing a client and her pimp, Valentina is declared Maverick. Ricochet and Trebuchet are built as warehouse workers.
• 2191 - Hammer, originally named Smith, is built and employed by Alderman Materials and Construction.
• 2199 - Kathy is built.
• 2200 - Seren is built and almost immediately enlists with the Maverick Hunters. Valentina's serial murders catch up with her and she leaves for the quarantine zone.
• 2201 - The Maverick War is declared over, and the wall is built around the Abel City quarantine zone.
• 2202 - Seren's promotion is denied. X becomes disabled. Hammer kills four coworkers in self-defense and moves to the quarantine zone.
• 2203 - X retires at the age of 88. Kathy seriously loses her chill at a parent-teacher conference and flees to the quarantine zone, where she meets Hammer. Flip defends himself and Siobhan against three muggers with way more enthusiasm than necessary and they also flee to the quarantine zone, though they don't interact with Kathy or Hammer for several more years.
• 2204 - Seren is declared irregular and flees to the quarantine zone. A few months later, Ricochet and Trebuchet follow her. Glitch is built.
• 2207 - Glitch upgrades himself and engages in a little corporate espionage because he's bored, then gets declared Maverick. Seren, Ricochet, and Trebuchet join the Drifters.
• 2208 - Glitch steals and activates a C-15 Mettaur. Mack is finally activated, 90 years after the fact. Glitch and Mack move to the quarantine zone and very quickly meet Kathy and Hammer. Valentina joins up as well. Seren kills Tera and converts the Drifters into the unofficial Quarantine Zone Maverick Hunters.
• 2209 - Sophia Microelectronics Research closes. Focus and Drive visit the quarantine zone and just never leave, because they find Kathy and company living right where they were going anyway. Flip and Siobhan also move in at this point.
• 2210 - After years on the run, Cirocco and Trigger move into the Abel City quarantine zone.
• 2211 - X goes on an officially unofficial mission to find a missing human by the name of Charles Alderman, who disappeared in the quarantine zone.

So, in descending order, everyone's ages in the story are…

• X: 96 since activation, or 187 since construction
• Mack: 3 since activation, or 93 since construction
• Flip and Siobhan: 35
• Cirocco and Trigger: 28
• Focus and Drive: 26
• Valentina: 25
• Hammer: 20
• Ricochet and Trebuchet: 14
• Kathy: 12
• Seren: 11
• Glitch: 7

…Which is actually pretty ridiculous. Glitch is practically a baby. Who let a baby become the world's most notorious cybercriminal? (This also implies, between Mack, X, and his attempt to befriend Flip specifically, that Glitch has some kind of a thing for antique hardware, but let's not dwell on it too hard. He definitely isn't.)

Appendix 2: >I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast.

So, about that reploid dialect! It was heavily inspired by 68:Hazard:Cold by Janelle Shane, which is a really fun piece that you should read. Outside of that, it's entirely headcanon. I am a large enough nerd that I love a good conlang, or a bad one, and this definitely counts as a not very good one at least, but it's still entertaining so it's fine. It is mainly a subject/object/verb ordered language, not unlike Japanese. Subjects are often omitted in sentences, also not unlike Japanese, and parts of speech are employed fairly loosely in most cases.

Codes can come from any system, and come in four general flavors. 'I' codes are informational. 'E' codes indicate an error. 'W' codes indicate a warning, and 'A' codes are alerts, which is a stronger warning. (There are 'F' codes, indicating a fatal error, but these aren't used as vocabulary the same reason certain obfuscated codes aren't used: they cannot be broadcast at will. There are chunks of the dictionary like that.) The same single code can use any of those variants to mean separate things.

For example, >E.00186-CMB: Engage. is a noun, meaning 'a threat.' >W.00186-CMB: Engage. is a declaration of intent to attack; the speaker themselves is issuing the threat. >A.00186-CMB: Engage. is a direct order from the speaker, telling the listener to attack. >I.00186-CMB: Engage. is also a noun, but instead of meaning 'a threat,' it means 'a combat.'

Being computers at heart, reploids have a lot more conjunctions than humans use, employing the entire range of logic gates. Whereas a human might say "If they're both going, I'm not," a reploid speaking >I.00100-COM: Diagnostic broadcast. could phrase this the long and more polite way with a nice >I.00098-LOG: IF/THEN., or they could simply slap down a >I.00024-LOG: Boolean: NAND. between themselves and the offending duo and call it a day.

There are no hard and fast rules for most of this. The Watsonian reasoning is that it was developing piecemeal by a ton of reploids over the span of about 90 years, and isn't even considered a real acceptable language, so it's all over the place. The Doylist reasoning is that I was making shit up. Still, I did maintain a dictionary of all the codes used (and a handful that weren't, or were but editing changed things) and if you'd like to see what kind of hell that was, you can read that here too, which is the same link as before.

Bonus Appendix 3: Memes

Because I'm memelord trash and also an artist, I'm making it everyone's problem.

There will probably be more over time, because I think I'm funny.