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"Darling when the morning comes

And I see the morning sun

I wanna be the one with you..." (Grover Washington Jr, Just The Two Of Us)

"Do you think..."

It'd been hard for them to talk about, but they hadn't had anyone else to talk to.

"Do you think it was on purpose?" On some level, it'd been a legit question to have asked. "Do you think she..." Fran and her roommate had both heard the jackal's best friend talk about things like this for a long time, after all.

"No," Fran had shaken her head. "I don't think so." They'd all been the type of people who'd talked about it, though. "I mean, I know what you're thinking, but..." So why her and not them? "No."

The jackal's roommate had stopped, and thought about it. "You really don't think so."

Fran had just shaken her head again, just like the previous time. "She wouldn't have done that." The jackal had thought back on that time when her best friend had refused to quit the game when she'd run out of potions, even though she'd known she could no longer win as such by that point. "She always wanted to know how far she could get."

***

"You've come a long way to get to me..." Tilly rasped, thawed from cryostasis, "haven't you, Officers?" Ghost nodded.

"Sorry it took us so long," Orchid apologized.

"Oh, you know," the technorganic hedgehog waved off, "I didn't see the time pass, really."

"What's this weapon that was used on you?" Ghost couldn't help asking. "Do you remember who used it on you?"

Tilly gave the mantis a world-weary look. "So they've started using the mind-wipes too," she noted darkly.

"Mind-wipes?" Orchid frowned.

"Who's 'they'?" Ghost followed with.

"They call themselves the Free Radicals," the hedgehog revealed.

"Siren told me about them," Ghost recognized, "but she didn't tell me what they were called."

"So they're, like, a big souped-up group of Renegades that attack Revival chambers and Jamborees and use cryostasis and mind-wipes?" Orchid asked.

"The mind-wipes are still in the development stages," Tilly explained. "Only a few of them use them, and a lot of them don't think they should be using them, but they do exist, for now." The first tests had been on Chime a long time ago, but Robber was a more recent target.

"And the cryostasis?" Ghost went on.

"That had nothing to do with the Free Radicals," the hedgehog assured them. "That was the Commission's work."

"WHAT?" Orchid couldn't believe her ears.

"A long time ago," Tilly continued, "someone in the System wanted to gain an advantage over everyone else, an advantage so disproportionate that no one else could ever level the playing field again. They created a forbidden device called a quantum translocator to bring over an alien from another galaxy. The alien applied her scientific knowledge to the System's technology and created the cryostasis weapon, one that technically maintains life thus fooling Revival chamber scanners that only detect death. There was a power struggle between her and the Citizen who brought her over. The alien killed someone and was sentenced to death and Revival by an Arbitrator Eventually she went rogue and became a serial killer."

"So the Commission has the cryo-weapon, the Free Radicals have the mind-wipes, and the Citizens are caught in-between, basically?" Ghost had a way of summing things up tidily.

"Essentially," the hedgehog nodded, "although it's possible either of them has stolen the other's technology by now for all I know," she admitted grudgingly.

"So we don't know for sure whether Robber got mind-wiped because she ticked off the Free Radicals or the Commission," Orchid regretted.

"Not offhand," Tilly shrugged.

"And you know all this because...?" It seemed fairly obvious by then, but Ghost wanted to see what the hedgehog's response would be.

"As I'm sure you've realized by now," Tilly looked down, "I am a Free Radical, Officers, and I fully expect your arrest." She couldn't quite meet their eyes.

"Maybe we can lessen your sentence if you help us a bit," Orchid thought to ask.

"In what way?" the hedgehog tilted her head.

"You wouldn't happen to know why someone would've used the cryo-weapon on Kacey, would you?" Ghost asked.

"Oh yeah," Tilly nodded, without even thinking about it, "Kacey's a Free Radical too, by the way." So long they'd looked for that answer, and the hedgehog told them so casually. "Why, is that important?"

***

The most important thing on Fran's mind was still getting Jackie back at any cost. Orchid and Ghost had finally gotten confirmation that she hadn't killed Tilly, at least. It just left the question of why she'd vanished open. The roach had existed in the System for a lot longer than the jackal had, there was no getting around that. She knew its ins and outs better than Fran did. If Jackie really had wanted to hide from the jackal, it wouldn't have been that hard for her to do so. Fran still didn't want to believe that the roach would've ever done that, at least not without a good reason and not forever. She wasn't prepared to give up on getting her back just yet.

She did have to exist in the world, as people did. Distraught though she was, the jackal had to force herself to push herself through it long enough to find a place to work still. She found that fewer jobs were available to her now that she could no longer rely on Jackie's know-how and connections to see her through. Eventually, she wound up working in a food processing plant herself, processing real food harvested in the wild to help turn it into pills and solute. Fran hadn't been able to get ahold of Dex since the Jamboree either, but she hadn't mentioned that part to Orchid and Ghost, though.

For a moment, she stopped working, pulled a syringe out of her satchel, and stared at it. She was out of pills by then. It just hadn't been the same since the roach had been gone, the jackal mused. Since the first time Jackie had helped Fran calm down enough to use a solute syringe for nourishment, the jackal had used a syringe on her own a lot of times herself. While the roach had helped her a few more times after that, realistically, Jackie wasn't always going to be able to do that. Fran had understood that well enough she'd overcome her fear of needles enough to have used syringes herself a lot since then. It shouldn't have mattered to her by then.

Yet for some reason, this time, she remembered the first time the roach had held her arm, and made it easier for her to do the hard thing she'd need to do to continue to survive. The jackal's thoughts became lost in that moment, in the beauty of how much it'd meant to her that someone like Jackie would've been there for her in a moment like that. How every other time after that had been a little easier knowing that, ultimately, she'd never have to be alone at the end of the day. For a moment, her arm shook, her hand trembled, and the syringe flailed unsteadily in her grip. Fran would have to learn to overcome her fears on her own, it looked like.

"OW!"

***

Fran's roommate had never fully gotten over how much she'd been affected by the horrible images she'd had to filter out of online spaces that she'd had to be the one to deem unfit for human consumption. The whole reason she'd quit her job to go on assistance was that her mind had no longer been able to withstand what those images had been doing to it to the point that it had made it impossible for her to go on living her life on a day-to-day basis. The worst images that had gotten to her the most near the end had been images of car accidents that people had died in, images she'd still been working on getting out of her mind even after years of having quit her job.

The jackal's best friend had been hit by a car.

***

"WHAT?" Ghost looked like she'd been hit by a truck.

"You're off the case!" Grades waved the mantises off.

"You can't be serious," Orchid shook her head.

"You better believe I'm serious," the tardigrade insisted.

"We've just made our biggest breakthrough yet," Ghost countered.

"We have way bigger problems to deal with," the Arbitrator dismissed.

"The case we're dealing with could affect the safety of the whole System," Orchid saw it fit to mention.

"I'm not taking your word for that," Grades persisted.

"Take the word of the witnesses we've talked to," Ghost offered.

"You've wasted everyone's time and resources and stirred things up enough as it is." The tardigrade's tone was unequivocal.

"The evidence we've found definitely points to something," Orchid asserted. "You can't deny that."

"Enough! If I catch you working on this case again I'll make sure you'll never work as Trackers for the Commission again, and that's if I'm in a good mood!" It looked like Commission support for the Trackers' investigation into Kacey's murder was being withdrawn.

***

It started out feeling like when space pirates abducted Jackie and Fran on the rock planet, when Biting Plants ate the jackal's foot on the forest planet, when a giant centipede attacked the glass blowing plant on the desert planet, when a spaceship came after them, and when the glass plesiosaur attacked the Jamboree on the water planet. At first Fran just mentally categorized it as a Renegade attack like any other. As much as she'd never get used to them as such, she did think of them as less of an exceptional occurrence than she would've when she'd first come into the System all that time ago by then. At first, she figured that she'd be fighting on the side of the Citizens and Trackers against the encroaching Renegades like everyone else.

At first, the jackal hadn't expected to find the roach and Dex among the attackers.

***

She hadn't been dead quite yet, not as such, mind you.

The car had put Fran's best friend in a coma. She'd been stuck on the fence between life and death. It had been possible that, given time, she'd eventually come out of this coma. It had just been a very remote possibility with no timetable attached to it to speak of. It had also been possible that the jackal's best friend would stay in a coma for months, years, maybe even decades, never to come out of it until she'd eventually die anyway. It had been theoretically possible for medicine to advance enough to help her during her lifetime, but it had also been possible for it not to. Medical projections may have hoped for the best, but they couldn't deliver promises in that way. Her will had been clear about what she'd wanted in a situation like that.

She'd wanted to stay.

Fran's best friend hadn't believed in an afterlife as such. She'd been absolutely terrified of disappearing to oblivion, more than anything in the world. So much of her life had already been spent enduring as much pain as she'd had to for the right to still be around. The jackal's best friend hadn't wanted to be made to feel guilty, or ashamed, or like a waste of medical resources for wanting to continue to live. She'd talked about how hard she'd found it to have the courage to let other people go. Fran would come to visit her, hold her hand, and talk to her, even though she'd known there had been a chance that her best friend hadn't been able to hear her at all. She'd talked to her about all the times they'd shared and how much they'd meant to her.

In the face of everything, she'd never wanted to lose the courage to let people stay.

***

"Stay on it." Amber's black hole eyes narrowed to dark, reptilian slits.

"Are you sure?" Ghost tilted her head.

"Definitely," the deinonychus nodded.

"Grades said she'd fire us if we did," Orchid winced.

"I won't tell if you don't," the deinonychus scoffed.

"Do you know something we don't?" Ghost asked.

"I'm hoping you can tell me something I don't," Amber countered, "and you can only do that if you stay on this case." What was the established protocol to follow when two Arbitrators gave you different instructions again?

"Do you think Grades is trying to hide something?" Orchid was ready to get to the point.

"I can't speak to that yet," the deinonychus answered, "but the fact that she tried to get you to stop doesn't look good," she explained. "We can only poke holes through that if she thinks you're gone - and if you're not." It looked like the mantises were about to go under deep cover too.

***

"So this is where you've been for all this time..."

It was Fran's job at the food processing plant that she ended up running away from along with Jackie, Dex, and the other Renegades who'd attacked it after all. To be completely honest she'd always hated that job. She'd only done it because she had to find a way to trade for a few pills and mostly solute while she'd continued trying to figure out a way to get the roach back, and there she'd been anyway. It hadn't been a hard decision for the jackal to make. From the perspective of the other Citizens and Trackers at her job, she supposed it might have looked as though she was being abducted by space pirates all over again. To be perfectly honest she didn't give a shit what any of them could've thought of her or what she did at all by that point.

Fran had just been so happy that Jackie and Dex had taken her back after all this time.

She didn't care what kind of work any of them did or didn't do, at the end of the day. She didn't have a 'face' in the System to worry about maintaining, or a lot of accumulated resources to protect. As long as they had what they needed to get by and did something they could live with doing to get there, the jackal didn't much care about anything else, truth be told. She didn't have a personal loyalty to the Commission or the System the way she imagined that Ghost and Orchid must have. She'd have to think of what to tell them, if anything, next time they'd get in touch with her, but she'd cross that bridge when she'd come to it. If anything, they could always say they were under deep cover for their investigation for the Trackers themselves.

This time had been more like being rescued by space pirates somehow.

"I'm sorry," the roach apologized. "When you showed Dex and I your pets eating at the Jamboree and we talked about everything and stuff, it just really made me think about the old days a lot, and made me fall back into a lot of the same mental patterns I had from back then." Fran nodded. "Do you ever miss Earth?" They were back to running food, thick as thieves.

"No."

Jackie did a double-take. "You don't?" That's not what she'd expected to hear.

"No," the jackal shook her head, "not really." In the face of the roach's puzzled expression, Fran saw it fit to add "I'd just gotten really used to being around you, you know?"

Jackie nodded. "I didn't mean to leave you." She was avoiding the jackal's eyes. "It was just..." Everything the roach had gotten used to about the Fran was coming back to her, hurting everywhere she'd missed her.

"You didn't want to get me in danger," the jackal strained to say, "but you really had to do this," she went on, "it was important." Fran had to get all her strength of will together to say what she had to say next. "I understand." She said it more because she could tell how badly Jackie needed to hear it than because it was true.

"Thank you." The roach could tell, but... she didn't want the jackal to know that either.

***

With Fran's best friend gone, the dynamic between her and her roommate in their apartment had started to change over time. It had been the biggest adjustment period either of them had ever gone through in their lives, and they'd both been making bigger adjustments than had seemed possible for as long as they could remember. Nothing had ever been going to be the same between them now that she'd been gone, there hadn't been any way around that. Even though they'd interacted on a one-on-one basis on countless individual occasions over the course of the years, they'd never had to exist in the same setting as people without her for any substantial length of time, and they'd never developed a real way to do it that'd worked for them.

The jackal had always served as sort of a buffer or go-between between her best friend and roommate. They'd gotten along with each other well enough, but Fran had been the connective tissue that had made interaction between them easier. She'd balanced them out in some ways. One communist, one anarchist, one anarcho-socialist. One ace, one aro, one ace and aro. She'd had just enough in common and just enough that was different from them to be able to relate to everyone as much as she'd needed to. Without the jackal's best friend around, she started digging through her notes to try to finish the novel that she'd been working on, just as she'd promised her that she'd do for her if she died without finishing it all those years ago.

The more she'd gone through her best friend's notes, the more Fran had felt herself veer away from collectivism toward anarchy, and otherwise adopting personality traits that her best friend had displayed when she'd still been with them. Eventually she'd even ended up so worked up about not having enough time to keep writing her best friend's novel that she got into a fight with her roommate over chores herself. Then they'd both remembered the fight that the jackal's roommate had had with her best friend when she'd still been alive, and they'd both started crying. They'd fallen into each other's arms sobbing about how much they'd missed her, and missed everything that she'd brought to their lives for as long as they'd known her.

***

"It was Byte." Orchid had suspected Byte of something ever since the mantis had heard Kiwi talking about her on the forest planet all that time ago, but she hadn't been sure of what. "Byte did it." It hadn't helped that the trilobite would've been so conspicuous when the Tracker had questioned her in her log cabin on the ice planet either, mind you. "She ripped out part of Speaker to put it in Siren." It'd just taken Plesioscope's testimony to finally convict her. "She said that only those loyal to the Commission should have access to tech like that." Byte's downfall had been a long time coming. "That if Revival chambers couldn't be bothered to base that on merit, she'd do it herself." She didn't sound so convinced herself.

"Why were you working with her?" Ghost asked.

The giant glass plesiosaur shook her head. "Not on purpose," she explained. "She found a way to take advantage of my systems' specific blind spots but," she went on, "she was looking for a way to do that with a lot more people than that."

"Is that right?" Orchid tilted her head.

"She wanted to use the neural interface Gizmo used for Glitchhop to figure out how to control most Citizens' physical movements with remote controls," Plesioscope revealed, "even Arbitrators. She was working with at least two other people."

"Do you know who they were?" Ghost would get to the bottom of this if it killed her.

"Corsair's a plant," the glass plesiosaur said. "She mind-wiped Robber to keep her quiet. She's been working with Byte and Siren from the start, but none of the other Renegades she's working with know."

"And the other one?" Orchid was every bit as determined as her partner was.

"I don't know, but Kacey found out," Plesioscope replied. "That's why they killed her."

"Now, this is very important," Ghost struggled to contain her trepidation. "Do you know where Kacey is...?"

The glass plesiosaur looked them both up and down, stopped, thought about it, and, very, very carefully, nodded her head yes.

***

"So... You and Dex are partners now."

One of them was going to have to say it at some point. "Well, we've..." Jackie had gone to such lengths to postpone this conversation.

"No, I mean, you had to..." The roach had still made a conscious decision to take the opportunity to get Fran back, in the heat of the moment.

"It's really dangerous to run food in the System, so like..." Jackie struggled to find the right words to say. "If you want, we can still drop you off and pretend you escaped being kidnapped by space pirates, but..." The jackal wasn't sure how to read that.

"Is... Is that what you'd want me to do?" Fran had spent most of her life unsure that any of her contributions would ever be valuable to people she cared about.

"Well I don't want you to do it because of what you think I want." They were talking about the roach leading the jackal into a life of crime, after all.

"What I mean is..." The jackal didn't want to make any assumptions either way. "Do you think I could help?" It was just so different from anything else they'd ever done. "Do you think I'd be any good?" Fran didn't want them getting caught because they'd felt sorry for her. "I'm not always good at everything." She understood the consequences of failure in these circumstances all too well.

"Honestly..." It felt like so much hung in the air between them during those few seconds. "Yeah." The jackal looked up at her. "I mean, don't get me wrong, there's some numbers work, lot of resource management and people skills you might need to pick up over time but like..." Fran held her gaze, waiting for her to continue. "You know how to fight. There are a lot more situations when you need someone who could fight to just wait somewhere than actual fights, but still. There's a lot of gruntwork and legwork you'd have the endurance for. Lot of piloting. Lot of being willing to take risks for people who might not always be able to help you back right away," Jackie summarized. "Would you see yourself doing that?"

"With you?" The roach nodded. "We'd be working with Dex, right?"

"Yeah," Jackie answered, "if you'd be okay with that, I mean. Dex likes you. She'd like to work with you. We talked about it."

"Are we still partners, Jackie?" Maybe it shouldn't have mattered to the jackal, but she still wanted to know, on some level.

"I, we..." The roach struggled again, then sighed. "When Dex and I escaped after the attack on the Jamboree I didn't even know you'd died. I thought you'd get right back at me and we'd see where we'd go from there. By the time I figured out what really happened, we were already back in so deep that I didn't know what the right thing to do was anymore. Dex and I used to be partners for a long time, and we did fall back into a lot of the same patterns since then, but like... We never said we were partners as such this time around, at least. It's just that in practice we kind of are."

Fran looked down. "Only two people can be partners, right?" Jackie stopped, and thought about it.

"Well... No one says they have to." The jackal looked up at her again. "I mean, we're supposed to only be two partners, but then we're not supposed to be running food either, you know what I mean?" Fran nodded. "Maybe we can be three partners," Jackie surprised herself.

"Has anyone ever done that?" the jackal asked.

"We can be the first!" the roach gestured for emphasis, "if you'd be into that," she added.

"Yes," Fran smiled, more relieved than she'd been in a long time. "I think I'd like that."

***

There had to be a first time for everything.

That night, Fran and her roommate had both spent their first night with someone else since they'd had sleepovers when they'd been kids, with each other. It'd just sort of followed naturally after they'd made up from the fight they'd had about the jackal's best friend. They'd started out hugging in the kitchen then they'd slowly moved toward the bedroom as they'd talked. They'd fallen right into bed - they'd felt so exhausted. They'd gone back and forth between looking away because of their neurodivergence and looking at each other, because it still helped sometimes. They'd just laid next to each other talking for a while but, due to what they'd talked about, some parts still called for a hug, just a bit different because it was in bed.

Fran and her roommate had both woken up crying in the middle of the night. This time they'd hugged each other like a life preserver, this primal longing to hold on to a part of you that you know you'll be missing for the rest of your life. They'd given each other permission to keep letting everything out until they'd just run out of tears. It'd been really intense for a while. What had come to their minds had often been their regrets. There'd been things they'd always wanted to do with her that they'd never get to do. There'd been things they'd done with her that they'd like so much that they'd never do again. Times they'd hurt her, and hadn't apologized the way they'd wished they had. Times she'd been hurt, and they hadn't been able to help her.

They'd started talking about all the times Fran's best friend had helped them out of a jam themselves. Things had progressed to all the little habits they'd picked up from her, that she'd picked up from them, all the little things that, if someone had known all of them separately, would've made it possible for that person to tell that they'd all known each other, and for a long time. Eventually, they'd gone from talking about the big, life-defining moments they'd shared with her to the simpler things, the day-to-day things that they'd shared, the things that they'd always allowed themselves to take for granted, because that'd been what anyone would've done. All that stuff that wasn't supposed to matter always mattered so much.

They'd even chuckled about a few jokes they'd shared with her a couple of times.

They'd started snuggling without really noticing. The jackal had liked being the big spoon. She'd liked being the small spoon. She'd liked spooning, it'd turned out, when it'd been with the right person, for the right reason. On some level Fran's roommate had often wondered what snuggling with that girl she'd broken up with would've been like after all. On some level the jackal had often wished she could've spent the night snuggling with her best friend like she'd promised her during her time of crisis. For some reason, that night, despite the way they'd usually been, the warmth of another person's body had been the most reassuring thing they'd both needed, keeping each other warm against the encroaching cold of the uncaring world.

They'd finally, gently fallen back asleep in each other's arms, then they'd woken up together to watch the sunrise. "Hey, Fran?"

"Yeah...?"

"How do you heal and save in an RPG?"

"... You spend a night with your party."