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_ "Thank you, Fran." Her best friend and her roommate had been there to welcome her in her hospital room after she'd woken up. It had made her glad to be back._

_ "For what?" She'd tried to sit up in her hospital bed. Harder than it looked._

_ "For still being here with us." She'd technically been dead for a short time. She didn't remember anything from it, but it made an impression on her. "For making it through."_

_ "You're welcome," she smiled weakly. "I was going to do that anyway."_

***

The puffin yelped, dropping her cutlass and pistol as she fell flat on her face. Jackie and Fran glimpsed a puff of smoke behind the puffin before a shroud around her ankles yanked her legs out from under her. The roach and jackal leapt out of the way when the face-down puffin breathed a cloud of liquid nitrogen at them, freezing the glowworm's feet instead. The puffin's assailant dropped a knee on her back, punching the back of her head to knock her out cold.

The mantis in a trenchcoat clucked her tongue disapprovingly. "Should've stayed down."

"Ghost!" So Jackie knew this mantis too. Did everyone in whichever part of the universe this was know each other, Fran asked herself? "Am I glad to see you!"

Ghost shook her head. "What a mess," she lamented, reaching for a cigarette.

"This one's just knocked out, right?" The roach lifted the glowworm's head back up off the ground next to her to look at it, but it didn't seem to lend much credence to her guess.

"Definitely not just knocked out," the mantis indicated the duck with her head as she lit her cigarette.

"That's just a straight shot through, that's an easy fix, right?" The knitting needles were a precision weapon - that was one of the things that Jackie liked about them. 'An easy fix?' the jackal thought frantically. 'What in the world is she talking about? There's no fixing this.'

"And back there?" Ghost tilted her head, blowing smoke in the hangar door's direction.

The roach turned around from facing the mantis to contemplate the significance of what had taken place on the other side of the closed hangar door behind her. Ghost tapped her half-burnt cigarette, dropping ashes on the spaceship's floor.

"Aw,nuts!" She stuck out her tongue. "So much for that."

But with the immediate threat of their own deaths out of the way for the time being, Jackie noticed that Fran had started quietly hyperventilating in her corner. She had seen death - the worst thing in the world. She had seen someone killed in front of her and helped kill someone else. The other two permanent residents of the System seemed to be shrugging off what had happened to the parrot, duck, glowworm and puffin, or at least discussing it only in terms of how they'd have to deal with it casually. Such a level of emotional detachment was beyond her, even though the space pirates had made no bones about killing her and her insectile rescuer themselves. For her, it was something that ran on a deeper level than that.

"Hey...?" The jackal blinked a few times. "Buddy...?" The roach passed her hand in front of Fran's face a few times. "You okay there, buddy?" The jackal followed the movement of Jackie's hand with her eyes. She was at least 'with it' enough to do that. "You hurt?" Fran saw something that looked like concern for her welfare on the roach's face. "Need anything?" The jackal was reassured to see that empathy wasn't completely absent from where she'd ended up, wherever that was. "Glass of water?" Jackie offered Fran her hand to help her stand up in case she needed it. The well-meaning awkwardness of it all. 'You just saw someone die, you just helped kill someone, do you need a glass of water?' The jackal's breathing steadied bit by bit.

"I'm good." She smiled. "Thank you." At the time, the roach wondered why Fran had seemed so affected by what had just happened. Death was annoying and unpleasant, of course, and no one liked it as such, but for some reason the jackal had seemed almost surprised by it, as though everyone hadn't seen people die hundreds, thousands of times before. Much later, when Jackie would finally understand where Fran had been coming from and what her life had been like back when she'd lived there, what surprised her became how quickly the jackal had been able to recover from what had happened to her then at all. They just weren't at that point quite yet.

"So you're still doing this, Ghost?" Ghost scoffed, done with her cigarette altogether by then.

"Looks like it." The mantis had never said anything to the roach about thinking about giving up her work as a Tracker. The question didn't spell it out outright, but Jackie could tell that Ghost had thought about it, and she liked letting the mantis know she could tell.

"You still working with that plant, what was her name again?" The roach furrowed her brow.

"Orchid."

Jackie snapped her fingers. "Orchid! That's right." She pointed at Ghost in recognition. "She here?"

The mantis indicated somewhere behind her with her head. "She stayed back to take care of some toucan back there. Could've been trouble, but her flamethrower got froze," she chuckled.

"Well, how about that?" The roach grinned at Fran, trying to imply that the jackal should be glad to have been able to help.

"Did they say anything about where they were going?" There was a good chance they'd been on their way to meeting other Renegades. Jackie shrugged regretfully. Ghost raised an eyebrow at Fran.

"I didn't hear anything about that either, I'm sorry," the jackal admitted sheepishly.

The mantis tried not to sigh, even though she felt compelled to. "That's all right."

"Hey, did they...?" The roach realized it wasn't easy for her to ask the question without giving too much away, but she still had to. "Did either of you see anything on their ship so far that looked like it could belong to me?" It was an innocuous enough question, ostensibly in any case. Renegades stole, after all.

"Nothing that looked like it didn't belong on their ship in the first place so far." Jackie winced. "You can go through it with us later, if it helps," Ghost offered.

"Could you... Could you take us back to the rock planet, maybe?"

"That where they grabbed you from?" Fran nodded.

"I might have left something back there." If the space pirates hadn't stolen the roach's new quantum translocator from her, there was still a chance they'd just abandoned it without understanding its value.

"Something in particular?" The mantis tilted her head. Jackie had a virtually imperceptible twinge when she asked - but Ghost noticed it.

"Just, anything, really. It all happened so fast," the roach shook her head, frazzled.

The mantis grunted. "We're kind of in the middle of something," she apologized.

"Oh, that's too bad." Jackie tried to hide the full extent of just how disappointed she was by that as well as she could. That would have been telling.

"What kind of something?"

Ghost turned to the jackal. "Do you know what these people who abducted you were up to, Citizen?" She gave Fran kind of a weird look, trying to remember if she'd seen her before.

"They didn't say," the roach answered.

"They'd just broken one of their own out of one of the Revival chambers when she'd been brought back." We thought they might have been on their way to meet other Renegades."

Jackie frowned. "That's been happening more often recently, hasn't it?"

This time the mantis did sigh. "You know, it really has." There was no denying it. "In any case, we still have to bring them back to the Revival chambers that are still intact and assign Enforcers to them."

The roach's antennae drooped. "So you can't take us back to the rock planet?" If the quantum translocator was stolen, all of her work would have been for nothing, and she'd have lost her only hope of ever escaping the System, dead or alive.

"You already owe the Commission for the space pirates you offed, Jackie."

"You're charging her for killing in self-defense?" Ghost turned to Fran again, surprised.

"Have I seen you before?" The jackal gulped. Maybe drawing attention was a bad idea.

"No, I get that," Jackie granted. Was it so different on Fran's world, she asked herself?

"Now, you want to throw us taking you back out of our way to the rock planet on top of that," the mantis gestured emphatically as she talked. "Don't get me wrong, if it was just me, I might do it," Ghost went on, "but it's not. I have to take Orchid into account, I have to do what's best for the Commission. I have to prioritize, you know?"

"You know I'm good for it, Ghost. Look at me. Am I a liar?" The jackal had absolutely no idea whether the roach was a liar or not.

"I don't know. What do you even have _on_you?" Fran had noticed just how important going back to the rock planet had seemed to Jackie, even though the roach had tried to hide it. She could see the dismay that was overtaking Jackie's features even now as the mantis asked her this and she struggled to come up with an answer without being able to. Barely subdued panic.

"... My knitting needles and yarn?" she offered weakly.

"The Commission doesn't need your needles and yarn, Jackie."

"Oh good, because I really do need those, honestly." What the jackal had in mind was her last real link to Earth, at least for now. She might never go back there, for all she knew. Was it worth it to lose it forever in exchange for something in the here and now? But, was it worth it to cling to it even though someone else needed it more than she did, when it was no longer linked to anything she'd have to deal with ever again? She had never left home without it, felt naked when she didn't have it. Fran couldn't measure how important it could be compared to what Jackie needed with the rock planet, whatever it was, but it seemed really important to her. She had to make a call. In the end, it seemed best to adapt to now than to cling to the past.

"This." The jackal reached into her pocket. "If you take us back to the rock planet first, I'll give you this." She pulled out her portable phone.

"I've..." Ghost gave her a puzzled look. "What _is_this, even?" The roach tilted her head at it herself. "I don't think I've ever seen this before." It no longer had an Internet to be connected to, but it still had all of her PDFs, pictures and video from Earth.

Fran looked at the mantis confidently. "That's right, you haven't."

Ghost considered the implications of this. "If _I've_never seen this, it means the _Commission_hasn't." The mantis brought one of her claws to her mandibles pensively. Jackie looked at the jackal wishing she could ask 'Are you sure?' Fran looked at the roach wishing she could answer 'Yes I'm sure.'

"I don't think I've heard of _any_technology the Commission hadn't heard of," Jackie pointed out matter-of-factly.

"Now, if you weigh how valuable that new technology might be against getting your Renegades to the Revival chambers just a little sooner, does that still seem like a good deal to you, Officer?" The jackal didn't know it, but she was already getting the hang of what the System's economy was like. People exchanged goods for work, work for goods, or goods and work for other goods and work, but there was no money. Value was subjective and situational. It was something you bargained for.

"Are the two of you partners?" Ghost bought time to think by asking, moving a pointing finger between the two of them a few times. Fran did not know what 'partners' were. What did this mean? Business partners? Romantic partners? Partners in crime? A little bit of all three? How could she have known? Was there a risk that the mantis wouldn't allow her to make a deal on the roach's behalf if they weren't partners? Should the jackal pretend they were just in case?

"... Yes!" Fran said, wrapping her arm around Jackie's shoulder for good measure and giving Ghost a 'thumbs up' with her other hand as she spoke. The roach's antennae shot up, not expecting this, but hesitantly returned the jackal's gesture, hoping that would make it look normal. "We are like the best partners ever," Fran elaborated. The mantis looked at her raised thumb with a dubious expression on her face, trying to figure out what it could possibly mean.

"What do you even call this thing? It looks like a communicator, but different."

"It's called a phone," the jackal revealed. "A portable phone, more specifically, but I just call it a phone. That's enough." She'd have to get one of those communicators Ghost had talked about, to embrace the fact that she existed in a new time and place when she'd be able to. It would be best to get something she could use to talk to other people here, not somewhere else. That was the same logic that had made her get a phone in the first place, after all.

"I'll talk to Orchid," the mantis relented. "I'll see what we can do about the rock planet, Jackie," she smiled as Fran handed her this 'phone' of hers.

"You just call it 'the rock planet,'" the jackal observed, following Jackie as the roach followed Ghost. "Doesn't it have a name?"

Jackie blinked. "It's a planet and it's made of rock. Why call it anything else?"

***

"We thought we'd throw you a party or something now that you're better. You're back from the dead! That doesn't happen every day, does it?"

_ "Oh, thank you! I'd love that." Her best friend and roommate knew that the jackal wasn't a 'party person' as such but she also knew that, when they said 'party,' they meant just them celebrating with each other. That was enough._

_ "What do you want to do? We can do anything you want," they assured her._

_ She stopped, and thought about it. "Now that I'm a grownup, now that I can stay up as late as I want," she smiled, "I want to stay up all night watching TV with you guys until the crack of dawn."_