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"Are you afraid of needles, Fran?"

Fran had always vaguely hated hospitals. This must have been a fairly widespread sentiment all over Earth, she imagined. Of course, you go to the hospital because you need to, not because you want to, she told herself.

A shiver went down the jackal's spine.

She couldn't help being afraid of catching something from other patients, then berating herself for it. 'What if they have it much worse than I do?' This time, she was just there for a routine vaccination, or as routine as she could make herself think of it as, in any case. Fran knew enough about vaccines to understand how important that was, mind you. That didn't make it any easier.

"Not really." Even when you were there for a routine procedure, hospitals were still, on some level, these temples to the gods of death and decay, these twisted casinos swimming with the smell of ether where you gamble with your life. "I mean, not much." Like most teenagers, she didn't want to be thought of as weak. "I mean, no." She didn't want to be treated like a child.

"You've had vaccines when you were a kid before, right?" At least the nurse knew enough not to imply the jackal was still a kid then.

"Yeah." 'You don't want disease,' her mind would tell her. 'Disease is bad.'

"Was there anything you used to do to deal with it back then?" 'Keep pointy things out,' her body would reply. 'They're pointy.' Fran rubbed her arm with some trepidation as she spoke.

"It's stupid." She couldn't quite meet the nurse's gaze, but the nurse gave her a look implying she wouldn't, and the jackal saw it. "When I was a kid, I used to imagine that some kind of big, weird bug from outer space was stinging me." The nurse paused to fully process this.

"... And that helped?"

"For some reason, it did," Fran shrugged as the nurse swabbed her arm. "People think lot of stupid things when they're kids, though, right?" Should she have been embarrassed?

"... Does it help if I make a buzzing sound?" The jackal blushed.

There had been no judgment in the nurse's voice. "... Little bit."

"Hey, Fran?" She looked up at the nurse after all.

"What?" She was putting her syringe away.

"It's done." She liked this particular nurse, she decided.

***

"The thing that gets to me is," Orchid started as they walked down the hallway, "why go to the trouble of killing her in such a weird way?"

"That's true." Ghost raised an eyebrow. "Why not just shoot her or set her on fire, right?"

Orchid nodded. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to do exactly what she did to Kacey's body."

"So there had to be a reason for that, but what?" Ghost's antenna tilted along with her head.

"What this tells us is," Orchid went on, "whoever did this had to be someone who knew Kacey, who understood the way she worked."

"Do you really think it was revenge from a Renegade she passed a judgment against?" Between them, they were carrying what was left of the Arbitrator to a Revival chamber.

"Too on the nose?"

Ghost shrugged as well as the situation allowed her to. "I'm just sayin'."

"Have you ever had an Arbitrator pass a judgment against you, Ghost?" A loaded question, if there ever was one.

"Most people who lose trials don't become killers for it, Orchid." What a deft dodge, she couldn't help but think. "Or even Renegades, for that matter."

"I know, but I will say this," Orchid answered, "most killers are definitely Renegades."

Ghost chuckled. "That's one way to stay ahead of us, isn't it?"

"There are others, you think?"

Ghost furrowed her brow. "I didn't think so... until you just said that." She'd spoken in jest, but now she wasn't sure.

"Hah!" Orchid smirked. "Maybe you're right, for all I know."

Ghost grunted. "I have no idea, honestly."

"But there's a chance it's revenge from someone she ruled against, isn't there?" Orchid was getting nervous carrying the green giraffe's body the way they were. Privately, she was very much looking forward to being done with that.

"Oh, definitely," Ghost conceded. "That's our first avenue." There were only so many reasons to kill someone, knowing she'd be brought back anyway. Revenge was easily on that list.

"If worst comes to worse," Orchid said resignedly, "we'll have to wait until they'll have brought her back and ask her ourselves."

"That could take a while without the ants, though," Ghost shook her head. "The sooner we find them, the sooner they'll be able to."

"And she still might not know exactly who killed her," Orchid winced.

"People set traps."

"Wear disguises."

"Hire assassins."

"Or hide in plain sight," Orchid finished, perplexed.

"But your point still stands," Ghost offered. "We can use all the clues we can get."

The two mantis Trackers finally reached a door guarded by a hadrosaur in a business suit with her arms crossed at the end of the hallway.

"Hey, Collider?" Collider turned her head toward Orchid. "Can you do something for me?" The mantises dropped Kacey's body on the ground near the hadrosaur.

"Anything to do with her, by any chance?" Collider indicated the dead Arbitrator with her head without uncrossing her arms.

"Could you tell us where the sensors picked up she died?"

Ghost turned her head toward Orchid. "You don't think she died on the desert planet?"

"We still don't know what she was doing there," Orchid reminded her, "if anything."

"I'll check it when we send people out to scan her brain waves," the hadrosaur replied. "I'll let you know." She uncrossed her arms and turned around, sighing, to unlock the door behind her, realizing the mantises seemed to expect her to drag Kacey's body the rest of the way herself. The Trackers paced back and forth, Ghost mostly, smoking as she paced with her arms behind her back while Orchid meticulously licked her claws and antennae clean to calm her nerves. Being around dead plant people like the giraffe they'd brought back from the desert planet made her decidedly ill at ease. "I'm afraid I've got some bad news." Both mantises stopped what they were doing to look at Collider the second she stepped out to address them.

"Are the sensors not working?" It seemed the likeliest explanation for why something could be wrong, Ghost figured.

"No, they're working," the hadrosaur said understatedly. "We had to run them through some tests to double-check a couple of times, but they are."

"So what's the problem?" Orchid asked.

"You know that, like, if her plant body was a brain, the ants would be like her neurons, right?"

Ghost nodded. "We know it'll take longer to bring her back without them. We've got no intention of sitting on our hands."

Collider's countenance darkened. "I hope not, because it's worse than you seem to think."

Orchid tilted her head. "What do you mean?"

"I'm saying without the ants, we can't bring her back at all. The brain waves are with them. They're too essential to who she is."

Ghost frowned. "But that's crazy. She's died hundreds of times. You could bring her back even if the ants got vaporized along with the whole rest of her, couldn't you?"

"It'd just take a lot longer, wouldn't it?" Orchid couldn't tell where the hadrosaur was going either.

"I'm afraid it's not that simple," Collider answered. "Why do you think we had to double-check the sensors a few times before I came back out here to talk to you?"

"I can't imagine," Ghost had to admit.

"Kacey's alive."

"What!" Orchid's eyes widened.

"The sensors don't detect her as dead anywhere in the System. Wherever her brain waves are, they're still with the ants, which are still alive. We just have no idea where." The mantises couldn't believe their ears.

"Is there any chance the giraffe husk we found was fake, something other than her real body? Could she have been kidnapped?" Ghost was grasping at straws by that point, but she had to grasp at something.

"If it was, whoever did it did a better job of it than we've ever seen before," the hadrosaur informed them. "When we scanned the husk's molecules, they were exactly the same they were last time we revived her."

"When the ants do die, though, the sensors will be able to pick up where it happened, right?" Time was always of the essence in the System, but still, better late than never, Orchid thought.

"Theoretically."

"What if..." Ghost hesitated. How crazy was she prepared to sound? This case was making her uneasy. It was messing with her mind. But still... she had to ask. "What if... theoretically... they didn't die? What would happen then?"

"Oh, we'd never be able to bring her back then," Collider shrugged.

Orchid turned to Ghost. "What made you ask that?"

"I don't know," she sighed. "I've got a bad feeling about this. How do you get away with murder, Orchid?"

"I don't know, Ghost. How do you get an ant through a hole that small...?"

***

She'd definitely bring her knitting needles with her, Jackie decided. Wherever she'd end up, people would probably be wearing clothes, and people always liked it when other people made clothes for them, she figured. They were bound to come in handy. There were only so many things she could bring with her, and her time was running short. The longer the roach put off using the quantum translocator, the likelier she'd be to get found out and stopped before.

She scanned her mind. Were there any last goodbyes she should make before she left? But there was no way of doing this that wouldn't have compromised Jackie's chances of getting away either. Even if there had been, would've there really been anyone she'd have found it worth it to say goodbye to, she asked herself? Wasn't there a reason she was leaving, weren't these the same people that she'd been trying so hard to get away from in the first place? Well... Maybe one or two. Not enough to be worth the risk, in the grand scheme of things. The roach liked to tell herself that, if they'd truly understood her, they'd have understood why she had to leave, and why she couldn't tell them. If they didn't understand her, well, there was no reason to miss people who don't understand you, was there? The wind was getting stronger. She didn't want her new acquisition swept up by a stray tornado.

It was time for Jackie to activate it. It was unlike anything she'd ever worked with before, but Solace had shown her how it worked. If there was anything that having lived in the System for as long as she did had taught the roach, it was to pay close enough attention to be a quick learner when it came to how things worked, unfamiliar though they may have been. The extent to which she was and wasn't grateful to those teachers varied across a wide range.

She gasped when it came on. It took Jackie a moment to realize that the sound she was hearing wasn't yet another strain of the wind's howl but something else, something new and frightening that she'd never heard before, and may never hear again. The light of the shapes that started taking form in front of her was reflected in her eyes as thunder cracked overhead. It wasn't quite like a black hole, although that was the closest comparison that came to mind.

It was unlike anything.

***

Fran looked down at the river's surface below, just over the bridge's railing.

She'd always found the foam formed by the roiling currents so beautiful...