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Fran had made it a habit to always make sure that her pets' treats would be kept in a place where her pets couldn't reach them. It'd been a safety precaution, for their own good.

One day, somehow, though, she'd made a mistake and left them somewhere where her pets had been able to find a way to get to and drag them down from. She'd found her pets near the treat bag, ripped open on the ground with their teeth, feasting on their illicitly appropriated morsels like there was no tomorrow. At first, the jackal had worried a lot that they'd get sick from overeating but, fortunately, she'd turned out to have caught them early enough that they hadn't had time to have enough for it to have been bad for their health. Once they'd known for sure her pets would be alright, her roommate and best friend had joked that her pets had become sick of having their resources redistributed by the State, and that they had staged their own revolution.

Of course, intellectually, they all knew that her pets weren't communists, anarchists, anarcho-socialists, capitalists or monarchists. They were animals.

They were hungry.

***

"But I was so careful!" the mosquito protested as they dragged her off.

"Not careful enough," the blue jay dragging her two right arms opined.

"I only took little bits and pieces here and there, where no one would notice!"

"We did," the tyrano dragging the mosquito's two left arms roared in her ear, blowing her antennae to the side.

"I didn't do anything to harm the Commission or other Citizens!"

"All Renegades say that," the blue jay screeched.

"But it's true!" The mosquito knew deep down that she couldn't convince them, but she couldn't help herself.

"It harms the Commission every time anyone does," the tyrano growled.

"I don't need two Enforcers. Look at me." The mosquito did look quite unassuming. "What am I gonna do?"

***

Fran's best friend had hated cooking.

It'd been one of the things she'd hated the most back when she'd lived with her mom. When her mom had cooked, she'd often put a lot of pressure on herself, become stressed out, gotten so fixated on getting everything done perfectly that she'd lost sight of everything else. She'd become so disappointed in her daughter's inability to cook that it would make Fran's best friend wish that cooking did not exist, just so she wouldn't have to feel so guilty. To this day, she'd avoid being around cooking when she could. It'd been more work on top of work she was already throwing her life away doing. She'd liked eating out best. She'd go out to explore from restaurant to restaurant with a sense of adventure to break things up and escape the mundane.

***

"Will you two be Enforcing these pirates?"

"Not if we can help it, Tricorn," Orchid answered.

"Are you sure?"

"We're on a case," Ghost explained.

"Well, someone better keep 'em in line," the triceratops grumbled. "They killed Collider on the way in and Cactus on the way out." Tricorn crossed her arms in front of the recycling symbol etched into her chest.

"Aw, that's too bad," Orchid lamented. She quite liked Cactus, grumpy though she was.

"I couldn't stop them," the triceratops grunted regretfully.

"That's why you're replacing Collider here, isn't it," Ghost inferred.

Tricorn nodded. "We'll have to wait until we're a bit less understaffed again before bringing the pirates back to make sure we can keep them in check when we do."

"We need to get better at figuring out how to stop these breakouts in the first place," Orchid shook her head.

"They think the more they break out their own when they're Revived, the less we'll rely on killing them to get them under control, I'm sure," Ghost clucked her tongue, lighting up.

"They broke one of the Revival chambers to get her out again, you know." It could be fixed, but that would take some time as well.

"Weren't even Renegades a lot more careful not to do that, not so long ago?" Orchid asked.

"Speaking as someone who works here..." The triceratops' expression said the rest.

"You're right, there is something weird about that," Ghost exhaled a cloud of smoke as she spoke.

"Functioning Revival chambers are in everyone's best interest, Renegade or not," Orchid continued.

"Why wouldn't they care about that?" Ghost wondered.

***

Fran's roommate had loved cooking.

It used to be one of her favorite things to do with her mom back when she lived with her. They'd been doing it for such a long time that it had become second nature to them by then. They'd moved around each other in the kitchen in harmony, knowing their place as though the ballet that they'd rehearsed had been as old as time itself. They'd taken pride in the work they'd done. A good meal wasn't meant to nourish just your body but your whole self, a feast for all five senses. It was a gift meant to express how much you cared about the person you made it for in this warm, intimate way. When the jackal's roommate had cooked for them and her best friend, she always tried to recreate a sense of that shared harmony she'd lost and that she missed so.

***

Fran could feel the shiver going down Jackie's spine like a chill through the air. Her shudder almost made her drop her knitting needles and carving knife as it ran all the way through her from head to toe. The blue jay gave the roach a dirty look as the two Enforcers dragged their mosquito captive down the Revival chambers hall past the sitting jackal. She noticed a whistle hanging around the blue jay's neck, like a drill sergeant's or gym teacher's.

"Who was that?" Fran whispered to Jackie well after the Enforcers and their captive were out of earshot.

"That was Siren," the roach muttered, still reeling.

"Do you have any past history with her I should know about?" the jackal asked.

"You must be feeling weak," Jackie evaded. "When's the last time you had something?"

Fran brought a hand to her stomach. "I can't remember." Her stomach growled in protest.

"Catch." A shiver went down the jackal's spine when she realized that her reflexes had just barely allowed her to catch the syringe that the roach had stopped knitting to throw her from her bag in midair without getting stung by its needle in the process.

"What's this?"

***

Fran had always had chronic digestive problems for as long as she'd lived.

It'd been the first thing she'd think about every time she'd woken up and the last thing she'd think about every time she'd tried going to sleep. It'd make it hard for her to get to sleep at night and hard for her to concentrate on anything when she'd be awake. The jackal's body had felt like it'd spent more energy digesting food than it'd get from eating it, but she'd still had to eat to continue to live, there'd been no getting around that. She'd tried various possible solutions to her problem, but none of them had worked. She'd felt as though her body hadn't been made to process solid food at all. Fran had liked ordering in and microwave meals the best, but she'd wished that she could've avoided eating solid foods and fed herself intravenously altogether.

She did have that fear of needles, though.

***

"It's solute. I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of pills. I can totally give you one if you want, though! Where are my manners." Jackie reached into her bag again to pull out a small bottle this time.

"You don't have coffee, do you?" The roach looked at her askance. "Mild stimulant," the jackal sighed resignedly. She'd known people who'd have run screaming back to Earth if they'd heard that, that was for sure.

"One mild stimulant." She'd give this a chance, why not. "Coming up." Jackie put the first bottle of pills she'd taken out back into her bag to pull another one out. "It'll stimulate you mildly!" She threw the bottle at Fran, who opened it. "If you're into that." It opened like a childproof vitamin bottle cap, even though there were no children in the System, for some reason. "It should kick in soon," the roach added as the jackal swallowed it. "Just let it dissolve." Fran didn't ask for a glass of water. "I don't know what it's like on Earth, but pills are usually more expensive than solute here." It didn't take too long for the jackal to feel that kick that Jackie had talked about. Not bad. It wasn't coffee, but it wasn't bad. Her caffeine headache even receded mildly.

"Oh, we don't have things like that often," she explained.

"You have lower energy requirements?" the roach tilted her head.

"We usually eat food."

Jackie stopped knitting and carving outright to look up, her jaw agape. "You... usually eat food?" The roach looked at Fran the way the Spaniards must have looked at Mesoamericans when they had told them that they built whole buildings out of gold like it meant nothing. "You mean, like... all the time?"

The jackal nodded. "Every day." She was nowhere near understanding the full impact of what she'd said.

"I haven't had food in..." Jackie had to stop and think about it. "I wasn't gonna admit to you I'd ever had food, to be honest," she confessed. "I was afraid you'd think less of me for it," she looked down, remembering to resume the knitting and carving that she'd been stunned into stopping.

"Why would I think that?" It seemed so unthinkable.

"You can't have food in the System," the roach answered. "It's not allowed."

"What?" Fran thought she must have heard wrong. "Why?"

"The Commission keeps track of what goes into the pills and solute it makes so they cover everything our bodies need," Jackie elaborated, "just like they keep track of what our bodies are made of so they can put them back together." She'd always taken this for granted, and never thought she'd have to explain it to someone. "They have to be able to keep track of every molecule in the System." It put it into a strange kind of perspective, having to think about it as something that didn't happen everywhere else the way she'd always assumed it did. "If they can't, they might not be able to bring people back anymore. That'd be bad for everyone."

"But you've had it," the jackal observed quietly.

"I used to smuggle food, okay?" The roach felt guilty for not having admitted this before, Fran could tell. "It's not something I'm proud of, but I haven't done it in a long time."

There were so many questions that the jackal wanted to ask. "Did you get caught?" Jackie nodded grimly. "That's why you stopped?" The roach preferred to avoid this topic, but it seemed unavoidable.

"Not right away." It seemed that the best way for Jackie not to feel guilty about not talking about it was for her to talk about it, in any case. "They had to catch me a couple of times before it stuck," she stuck her tongue out.

"You must've really caught hell for it," the jackal sympathized.

"I don't know what that means," the roach apologized, "but it does ring true."

"So, you used to get food not just for you, but for other people too?" Jackie wasn't sure where Fran was going with this, but it had better be somewhere good. "Even though it put you at risk like that?" The roach nodded meekly. "What made you do it?"

Jackie sighed. "It was their faces."

The jackal raised an eyebrow. "The people you brought it to, you mean?"

"Yes," the roach confirmed, solemn. "I'd never seen anyone so happy in my life."

***

Fran had loved feeding her pets.

Feeding time had been their favorite time of day. They'd start running around each other all over the place excitedly, every fiber of their being alive with eagerness and anticipation. When people and animals were depressed or knew they were going to die, they'd often stop eating, the jackal had read, sensing there was no point to it. Every time she'd seen how hungry her pets had been, she'd seen how much they'd wanted to live, how beautiful it'd been. She'd given them food to show them she'd loved them. They'd loved that food and loved her for giving it to them. It had been such a simple, pure thing. It'd made their love of life contagious. Fran's favorite thing to do now and then had been giving them treats with no nutritional value at all.

It'd made them so happy.