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"Time for bed, sweetie."

_ Fran looked crestfallen. "Can't I just stay up until the next commercial?"_

_ Her mother grinned, endeared yet still reproachful. "You always say that." The days always seemed so short. Whenever they were at an end, all that Fran could think about was everything else that she wished she could've done that day that she could no longer do. There were only so many hours in a day._

_ "That's just because being awake is always so much more fun than being asleep is," she said, tongue-in-cheek._

***

"Where did you come from?" Jackie hadn't been expecting any visitors to drop in unannounced at this point, to say the least.

"Where_am_ I...?" Fran certainly hadn't expected to end up where she did either, yet there she was. The wind howled around them like a thousand wailing souls in torment. She didn't believe in souls, but these figures of speech still came to her mind unbidden. They were on rocky ground, where clear dusk had given way to a cloudy night sky with the occasional lightning bolt and what _could_have been a tornado off in the distance, she wasn't really sure.

"You don't know how you got here?" Did this mean that the jackal didn't know her way around this particular area? The roach certainly hoped so. If Fran didn't know where she was, there were all the fewer chances that she'd be able to lead the Commission to where she was before Jackie would get the chance to step through...

"No, do you?" The last part of the roach that still doubted the veracity of Solace's claims vanished like the ground went out from under her.

"You're..." Jackie couldn't keep her voice steady as she spoke. "You're from over there, aren't you...?" For so long, in her heart, she'd wanted to believe that another world could exist somewhere, far away from everything she'd ever known, where the Commission didn't hold sway. "Which means..." Part of her had always told herself that everyone else in the System had to have been right, intellectually, that if there were anything else, someone else would already know by now. "Which means it worked!" The jackal looked back over her shoulder. "It's true!" The dizzying kaleidoscope of the quantum portal was still deployed behind Fran, daring the roach to step through it. "There are other worlds...!" The implications were staggering.

The jackal gasped. "Oh my God!" She didn't believe in God either. It was just an expression.

Jackie tilted her head at her. "What's a God?" Fran raised her hand to point behind the roach.

"What's_that_?" Jackie had just barely turned her head to look back over her shoulder at what the jackal had been pointing at when it shone its glaring light on both their faces from above.

"Oh, NO!" It was a spaceship. The roach looked almost more surprised to see it than Fran did, even though the jackal was the only one who'd never seen a spaceship before, oddly enough.

"Spaceships are bad?" Fran winced as she asked. Jackie didn't just look surprised. She looked terrified.

"This one is!" The roach looked from side to side frantically, looking for some kind of solution as the ship drew near them. "Not now, not here, not after all this, no, no, no!" The jackal wished she could have helped, but she didn't even fully understand what was going on around her. What could she do?

"Can I help?" Jackie stopped for a second and looked at her, really, really looked at her. There had never been a jackal in the System for as long as she could remember; she didn't even know _what_to call her. The roach wished she'd have had time to ask her so many questions, but time was the one thing she did not have.

"Stay close to me!" Whoever Fran was, _whatever_she was, wherever she was from, and whatever was about to happen to them, Jackie probably shouldn't lose track of her for now, she thought, for either of their sakes. "We need to..." The jackal started running after the roach running back to her ship when Jackie suddenly brought her palm to her forehead. "Wait!" She almost ran into Fran turning around to run back toward the quantum portal. "Let me just..." The jackal ran back after her as the quantum portal closed. There was still a chance the roach could reopen the quantum portal later if she could just reach the quantum translocator in time. "Not again!"

The ship's tractor beam was already pulling them both up into it. It was a much bigger ship than Jackie's, which was more like a shuttle than a freighter, Fran thought. Their kidnappers didn't even see it fit to pick up the smaller ship for scrap, but then they did seem to be in quite the hurry. She supposed theirs was not the line of work you went into if you had to do things at a leisurely pace. She'd often imagined that spaceships would have probably teleported objects and people directly onboard, yet there they were being pulled by a conical beam of light into it, almost as though they were being abducted by a UFO in a cornfield.

Their welcoming committee did not look all that welcoming, the jackal noticed once they were on board. She didn't know where she was - space, obviously, but where in space, she hadn't a clue - how she'd gotten there, or who the roach or their abductors were. If they lived, she was going to have her own share of questions, for sure. Be that as it may, it was still easy enough for Fran to put together the gist of what she needed to know then and there well enough based on context. Regardless of what failings she might find Jackie when all would be said and done for all she knew, what mattered then was survival first and foremost. They were outnumbered, but the roach seemed a lot likelier to treat her decently than their abductors did.

There were five.

A toucan in camo pants grabbed the jackal in a headlock and a parrot aimed a pistol at Jackie. The roach yanked the pistol out of the parrot's hand to aim it at the toucan. A glowworm shot a glue strand from her wrist at the pistol, latching onto it from a distance to yank it right back out of Jackie's hand. Fran elbowed the toucan in the gut, loosening the bird's grip on her. A duck whipped at the roach, who grabbed the whip in her hand on its way. The toucan's hand had been replaced by some sort of ranged weapon, so the jackal grabbed her arm to aim it at a puffin in a puffy shirt. Jackie tried to use her electric antennae to electrocute the duck through the whip, but the duck shrugged it off, made of yellow rubber.

The toucan's arm turned out to be a flamethrower but, before Fran could use it to set the puffin on fire, the puffin had already breathed a cloud of liquid nitrogen at it, neutralizing it. "OW! Watch it!" the toucan yelled at the puffin. The roach abruptly let go of the whip while the duck was pulling back on it, causing the bird to stumble back and fall down. The parrot took over where the toucan had left off, grabbing the jackal in a headlock in turn. The glowworm's wrist shot a glue strand at Jackie that slammed her into the wall, opening into a glue net like a net gun on the wall around her. Fran tried to stomp on the parrot's foot, but had a peg leg, it turned out, thus no foot to stomp on, just a hook hand to bring in front of the jackal's throat.

She had not expected space pirates to be quite so literal. "I'll take that," the duck said, making sure to take the roach's carving knife away from her to hold it against her throat.

"Ever had a bird squawk in your ear so loud your brain came out?" the parrot whispered in Fran's ear.

"Leave her out of this!" Ooh, they were hitting a nerve, it seemed like.

"You're in no position to be making requests," the puffin reminded Jackie, holding her cutlass against the roach's throat to keep her in check while the duck was cutting her out of the glowworm's glue net with Jackie's own knife.

"She's got nothing to do with me, though! She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," the roach explained.

"Oh,Jackie," the glowworm grinned, amused, "you both were, don't you know?" The jackal was surprised to hear that the glowworm knew Jackie from before.

"You'll be powering our ship," the toucan indicated the roach unceremoniously with her head as she spoke. Becoming her own power source had saddled her with quite a resource curse.

"You... We'll find something for you," the puffin looked at Fran with no idea of what to do with the jackal. The toucan growled. She seemed to have some ideas, but nothing good.

***

_ "At first, I wished you'd had a few more years, you know?" Fran had always vaguely hated hospitals. "Then just a few more months, that didn't seem like too much to ask, you know?" She wasn't sure whether or not her mother could still hear her. "Then when that seemed like too much, I thought, at least a few more weeks, right?" The staff had told her that talking to her was supposed to help. "Then, when, when that wasn't going to happen, I thought, well, at least a few more days, why not?" The jackal told herself it couldn't hurt. "And now..." On TV, there was usually this beeping device keeping track of someone's heartbeat. "Now, I still can't help wanting a few more hours with you," she choked back tears. "A few more minutes..."_

_ "I understand, sweetie." Fran's face lit up. She knew her mother was still dying, but still, every word, every minute, at that point, that her mother was still with her felt like a gift. "That's just because being alive is a lot more fun than being dead, isn't it...?" She chuckled through her tears._