FSE

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CHAPTER 1: OUT OF SIGHT

"You ever seen anything like it, Ghost?" she asked, chewing on the end of her antenna.

"I don't think so, Orchid," she shook her head.

"She was like that when you found her?" The ibis' eye moved up and down in her cephalic fluid as she nodded.

"You didn't move her, did you?" This time, the ibis' giant eye moved from side to side as she shook her glass head no. "Just making sure." The ibis moved her head back reflexively when Ghost gestured at her with her claw as she asked. The ibis knew the mantises were there to help - it'd been just a reflex, but Ghost saw it fit to reassure her. While the ibis was technically a suspect, the Trackers had a list of suspects and, though Renegades sometimes tried to throw them off by reporting their own crimes, it was far more common for Renegades to try to dissociate themselves from their crimes altogether. Especially murder.

"What a shame," Orchid looked down at the giraffe's body dejectedly. "What do you make of it, Ghost?" she went on, turning her head toward the other mantis.

"As far as I can tell," Ghost started as she pulled a cigarette out of her trenchcoat, "all the ants are gone," she clucked her tongue.

"So we're looking at a husk, basically." The expression of terror frozen on the porous, plantlike mammal's face still reflected the fear that her killer had struck in the ants' hearts in their final moments.

"Poor Kacey," Ghost sighed, bringing her cigarette to her serrated mandibles. The glass-headed ibis tilted her head at what was left of the Arbitrator, as if the ibis was trying to figure out whether she recognized the green giraffe or not.

"Dangerous line of work," Orchid observed, getting to work on her other antenna.

"That'll smart in the morning," Ghost added understatedly, reaching for her lighter.

"Her body as such seems to have been left completely intact," Orchid explained to the ibis.

"Dumb wind," Ghost complained. The sandstorm was relatively weak, but enough to make it hard to light up.

"But without the ants, it's just a great big piece of wood, you get me?" The one-eyed ibis nodded at Orchid again.

"What was she doing on this planet to begin with?" Ghost wondered, finally inhaling.

"Beats me," Orchid shrugged.

"You don't know, do you?" The ibis shook her head so emphatically that her eye almost hit the sides of her head as Ghost exhaled.

"I wouldn't be caught dead here, I can tell you that." Orchid carefully licked her serrated claws.

"I always get sand in my eyes," Ghost agreed, striving to shield her eyes from the storm.

"We'll have to go through her files." Orchid washed her face with her forearm resignedly.

"See who she could've ticked off." Glancing at the ibis, Ghost briefly wished that she also had a thick pane of glass protecting her eyes from the sand.

"If I had some kind of weird problem with ants, Ghost, where would I be?" Orchid asked her pointedly.

"I don't know, but I do know this, Orchid." The sound of the sand hitting the ibis' glass head echoed around Ghost like a hail of bullets. "Whoever did get those ants, we'll find her." The ibis looked from one mantis to the other, privately wondering if they would.

"We'll have Kacey back on her feet in no time." Ghost threw her cigarette down in the sand.

"Yep, yep." And twisted her heel down right on top of it as Orchid walked away.

***

The storm raged on in the night far over Jackie's head. The wind sounded as though it were ripping a hole through the fabric of space-time as it cut a swath across the wasteland. The roach stood her ground as firmly as she could, keeping her center of gravity low and holding up her cloak to shield herself from the biting cold. The nocturnal sky over the rocky horizon almost made it look like she was standing right in the very emptiness of space itself. Jackie repressed a flinch at the cracking thunder, seeing a lightning bolt come down in the distance along with it. A spark rose from the base of her antennae to their tips between them, almost like a counterpoint.

As above, so below.

The roach shook her head and sighed. She was so tired. Even though Jackie could technically generate her own power, it didn't mean that she never ran out of energy. When had been the last time she'd slept?

"So you have it, right?" It was difficult for the roach to strike the right balance between speaking loud enough for the dragonfly to hear her over the wind, yet low enough not to risk drawing undue attention to herself. One of the reasons for which they'd picked the spot they'd picked to meet had been because the wind's howl, darkness and remote location made it that much less likely for them to be discovered in the first place, but one could never be too careful.

"Of course, Jackie." Even if her plan worked, and she never had to hear it again as such, Jackie would probably remember that distinctive, synthetic chuckle for the rest of her life. "Have I ever lied to you?" The roach cleared her throat, biting her tongue as she strove not to give her interlocutor the satisfaction of giving her a dirty look, settling for mildly raising an eyebrow at her instead.

"Solace, please..." The dragonfly always seemed to find everything so funny, funny on a level she imagined others just couldn't get, which made it funnier.

"Come on, I have to, while I still can. Who will I tease when you're gone?" She tilted her head, the light whirring sound of her neck barely audible over the windstorm.

"Thanks for being here on time, at least." Jackie forced a smile, trying to stay on Solace's good side for once. The dragonfly was always fashionably late, when she could get away with it.

"You know me." Solace looked at her nails with a smirk. "I'm like clockwork." This time the roach couldn't resist rolling her eyes at her.

"You weren't followed, right?" The dragonfly clucked her tongue at her.

"Always this worry. Leave all you want, but you can't get away from yourself," Solace philosophized, crossing her arms in front of the plasma sphere embedded in her chest.

"Thanks," Jackie sighed. "I'll remember that." She pointed her finger at the dragonfly as though Solace had just made just the astute observation that the roach had been waiting to hear.

"I can move between dimensions, Jackie." She narrowed her faceted eyes. "Can the Commission do that?" The dragonfly looked at her expectantly. "Can Renegades?" There had been a time when Jackie had found Solace's self-confidence about her abilities charming.

"Rest assured, Solace, I'll remember what you can do for the rest of my life. However long that will be." Had Solace just repressed a shudder?

"So you're really doing this?" It seemed almost unbelievable, when she really stopped and thought about it, yet there they were.

"After everything I did for it, are you kidding? How could you possibly think I wouldn't?" The roach had had to work for several lifetimes to get as far as she had. She wasn't about to back out now.

"I don't know," the dragonfly furrowed her brow. "I kind of thought you were doing this just to prove you could, or maybe to have some sort of leverage for something or other?" Somewhere in the back of her mind, it still hadn't fully sunk in.

"I'm not." Jackie shook her head.

"... Oh, well." Solace shrugged. "That's that." If the roach was looking for someone to talk her out of it, she'd have to look somewhere else, the dragonfly told herself.

"So that's it, right? That covers everything?" It had better, after all that.

"Oh, not even remotely." Solace snickered at Jackie's panicked expression. "Don't worry, you'll get your little trinket, I didn't make you come all the way out here for nothing," the dragonfly wagged her finger smarmily.

"So what do you mean?" The roach was in no mood for games.

"People pitched in." Jackie gave her a disbelieving expression.

"You told people?" Solace frowned.

"Hey, if I hadn't pulled a few strings, you'd still be working on earning this." The roach sighed exasperatedly.

"What happened to keeping this under wraps?" If they were found out, Jackie could lose her window of opportunity forever.

"Look, do you want the quantum translocator, or not?" the dragonfly asked her matter-of-factly.

"But why? Why would anyone else give you their time and effort to help me do a thing like that?" That part was a bit of a head-scratcher.

"I guess more people want you gone than you thought," Solace replied tongue-in-cheek.

"Well, that's certainly not too hard to believe," the roach nodded grimly.

CHAPTER 2: STICKS & STONES

Dex hadn't been to this bar in a while. It was a lot easier to get drink than food, if anything. Those days were behind her, she mused. She wrapped one of her crinoid tendrils around her glass, thinking about how different her life might have been if she'd made different choices. She hadn't talked to Jackie in a while, for one thing. It was strange that she'd pop into Dex's mind, considering how long it'd been, yet there she was for some reason.

Bringing her glass to the lamprey maw between her crinoid tendrils, she idly wondered what the roach had been up to lately. Last time they'd talked, Jackie had still been going on about her crazy plan to leave the System as if that was a thing, but then the roach always did go on about things like that, didn't she? It wasn't like it'd been a new thing, nothing to justify thinking it'd materialize any more than any of the other times she'd tried.

Dex's heat pits sensed trouble. 'Trackers.' She lowered her crinoid tendril putting her glass back down.

It was Trackers.

For a split second, Dex couldn't help asking herself if they could tell what she'd been thinking about. It had just seemed like such a coincidence that she'd have been thinking back on the old days with Jackie at just the same time as they'd shown up. It wasn't like even Trackers could read minds. If they could, their investigations would've been a lot simpler. If someone in the System was working on that, she wasn't talking. She recognized the gravelly cough behind her.

"Officers." She uncrossed her flamingo legs turning around on her barstool, casually, she hoped.

"Citizen," the other Tracker's voice creaked. Dex did the best approximation of a polite nod that her physiology allowed.

"Something wrong?" Such a calm, melodious voice coming from a toothy lamprey maw.

"Depends." The scratchy monotone sounded scratchier than usual by comparison. "On how you mean." The fridge-chested goldfish barkeep eyed them suspiciously while drying glasses from behind the bar.

"Can I help?" With Trackers, it was best to make sure they knew what a cooperative mood you were in.

"You might," Sticks answered, "if you're up for it." Since Stones hadn't given her a straight answer, Dex had directed her attention to the walkingstick, but that wasn't quite a straight answer out of her yet either.

"What can I do?" Sometimes Trackers were purposefully vague in the hopes that the person they were talking to would say too much. Dex hoped this wasn't one of those times, but she chose her words carefully.

"How's work going, Dex?" The termite went around her question altogether.

"Did someone complain about it?" Dex was the best bodyguard in the System. No one had complained about her work in quite some time - no one but those she fought against.

"What my partner means is," Sticks picked up where Stones had left off, "do you like it? Is it everything you want it to be?" It was always so much easier to manipulate people when they were desperate, the walkingstick regretted.

"It's alright." With people like Dex, they had to do things a little differently. "No complaints from me either." Not too emphatic, but enough for them to know she meant it.

"Ever thought of doing something else?" She turned the question over in her mind.

Dex had enough put away by now that she never really had to take on a job she didn't want. There wasn't much that people could do about it if she said no. After all, if they thought they could take her, they wouldn't have wanted to hire her in the first place. Dex was good enough at it that she didn't get killed all that often by this point, and she could afford it when she did. Her reputation preceded her, which helped her with friend and foe alike. Her ship wasn't too shabby, and she was able to go to a lot of Jamborees without having to work at them to afford them. All in all, Dex supposed that no, she hadn't thought of doing something else in quite some time.

"Not really." What reason could the Commission have to be unhappy with her work, though? "Should I?" The termite cleared her throat.

"We have no problem with what you've been doing," Stones hastened to add, "just so you know." That much was a relief, at least.

"Glad to hear it." Dex couldn't smile as such, but you could still hear a smile in her voice.

"The Commission is grateful you've been making its job easier," Sticks went on. Dex didn't know what the flattery was for, but it did have the merit of being true.

"It beats the alternative," she chuckled understatedly. An offhand remark, enough to let them know she wasn't up to no good, but not so much it seemed to be covering anything up. She threw in a gesture with a crinoid tendril for effect, a small one not to startle them.

"We're glad you'd think so," the termite rasped.

"The Commission's been good to me." Dex raised her glass to it, and took another swig. "So I'm good to it, right?" She put her glass back down.

"And how," the walkingstick broached, "good to it would you be prepared to be?"

"Am I in trouble?" Stones coughed at Dex's remark. Was that a chuckle? Dex couldn't tell.

"What my partner means is," the termite clarified, "have you ever thought about working with us?" Until then, most other patrons had made a show of pretending to ignore the conversation they were having, whether they really were or not.

"Wait, as a Tracker, you mean?" That turned a few heads.

"Yes," Sticks creaked, "as one of us." The thought of Dex as a Tracker was definitely enough to give a lot of people pause, Dex not least among them.

"Our equal in every way, shape and form."

"New challenges to test your skill."

"Someone at your back when push comes to shove."

"Full coverage, the works."

"Better weapons."

"A better ship."

"And a way to make a difference," Stones pointed out.

"We know you care," the walkingstick appealed.

"Work with us, Dex," the termite pleaded.

"You'll find we care as well," Sticks promised. Many patrons who were pretending not to eavesdrop on their conversation would've taken that offer without a second thought. It really wasn't such a bad offer, when it all came down to it.

"Is that right?" Dex asked understatedly. They nodded expectantly. She leaned back in her chair against the bar, stretching out her crossed flamingo legs and crossing two crinoid tendrils behind where her head would've been if she'd had a head. "Well, Stones - may I call you Stones, officer?" Our equal in every way, shape and form. Stones nodded, albeit grudgingly. This time it was their turn to pass her test. "Well, Stones... May I ask you something?"

"As you wish, Dex," the walkingstick answered for her partner.

"How often do you think the Commission would tell me to kill, more or less?" Dex had still been addressing the termite, undeterred.

"You have to have killed Renegades as part of your work as a bodyguard, haven't you?" Dex gave the best approximation of a shrug her physiology allowed.

"When I can't avoid it, yeah."

Sticks hoped that would give them a foothold. "So is it the same with us, I assure you."

"The Commission screens its Trackers carefully," Stones explained. "We don't need loose cannons wasting resources, what a bad example that would be, don't you think?"

"I guess so." But Dex's tone belied her words.

"A last resort, when it's the only way to protect other citizens," Sticks offered. 'Or their stuff,' Dex completed mentally - but she didn't say that part out loud.

"And you don't get charged for it," was what she did say, "unlike the rest of us."

"We don't get charged when we get killed, either." The termite thought she was staying one step ahead of Dex, missing her point completely.

"Oh, I don't intend to need to worry about that for a while." A bit of disarming bragging should throw them off, Dex thought.

"Do you have an aversion to killing?" So the walkingstick was a bit more perceptive than her partner, it turned out.

"I don't like to waste the Commission's resources anymore than you do, if that's what you mean." But Sticks could see through her smokescreen.

"But the Commission calculates just how many resources Renegades would waste with the damage they do, and weighs how many it would waste to kill them against it every time. That's the whole reason we're allowed to the way we are. Does it go deeper than that for you, citizen?" Dex was already back on the defensive.

"Let me put it this way." Control the narrative. "See that koala girl at that table over there?"

"The one with the eyepatch?" Stones asked.

"That's the one." The eucalyptus-haired koala didn't look up from her table. The Trackers had to do a double-take to realize that she was doing the equivalent of holding her fingers apart on the table sticking a knife between them from side to side as fast she could, but by shooting lasers between her fingers from her ruby eyeball instead.

"What about her?" the walkingstick asked.

"I had to kill her one time, it must've been, what, a thousand years ago?" Her memory wasn't what it used to be.

"And...?" The termite raised an eyebrow.

"And to this day, she brings it up." Dex took another swig to celebrate regaining control of the narrative. "It's the most obnoxious thing, that's all."

"Most people would be thrilled to be offered work as a Tracker, Dex." Sticks was running out of patience. Dex was wearing her down.

"Then why don't you let me ask you something," Dex retorted. "Do you like your jobs, officers? Are they everything you want them to be?"

"Look," Stones answered, "I know you're being glib, but we'll be honest with you. You're a stand-up citizen, we owe you as much. More and more citizens have been becoming Renegades recently. It's becoming more and more difficult for us Trackers to keep them in check. The more of them there are, the more they know they can get away with, the bolder they get. You act detached, it's a defense mechanism, we sort of get it. Deep down, though, you want to live in a System where people get to live their lives, just as we do. Renegades make that harder for everyone else. We know you care. That part wasn't just a line." It looked like the termite may have been more insightful than Dex had given her due credit for after all.

"Will you help us make everyone's lives in the System easier... please?" The Commission was used to getting its way. Trackers weren't taught to negotiate from anything other than a position of strength. How often did they ever need to? Dex had to give them points for trying.

"... Can I have some time to think about it?" The walkingstick sighed. If only Dex had had any arms for them to twist.

"If you must."

CHAPTER 3: A MAN TO FISH

"Now, fighting isn't just about power."

Jackie was standing straight up in front of her, giving Dex her full attention.

"It's about flow, range, leverage, and direction." Dex was slowly pacing back and forth in front of the roach as she talked, her gently swaying crinoid tendrils emphasizing her points now and then. "Never let your attention waver." Dex didn't have eyes, but she could tell where her opponent was, she didn't doubt that for a second. "We both have six limbs - that should help." Jackie arguably couldn't afford to waste the time she was spending as her apprentice because of her existing debts alone, let alone what Dex's teaching was going to cost her. "There are moves and forms I won't have to reduce to adapt them to four limbs." But Dex had saved the roach from a Renegade attack on her ship. "That would be doable, but not having to does save us some trouble."

"Good." Jackie was grateful to her yet, more than anything, it made her want to learn how to fight back on her own.

"We have different kinds of legs, though, so I'll teach you footwork, but you'll want to learn to move your legs your own way." She might never get good enough to be able to rescue Dex herself, try as she might.

"I'll bear that in mind." But she never wanted to have to depend on being rescued again.

"You can't really grapple the same way I do because your arms have joints, and my tendrils don't." It was an investment, the roach had decided. "But that also means you can use your knees and elbows in ways I can't." She'd make up for it later, whatever it would take. "The same thing can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, depending on how you look at it." What she lacked in skill, she'd make up for with determination. "But you didn't come here for a philosophy lesson." There was no such thing as styles of martial arts in the System. There was only one and it was called Hitting Things. "The real lesson is, everyone in the System has different strengths and weaknesses, so keep an eye out for details like that. They make a difference."

"I'll make sure of that." Her antennae flailed a bit as she nodded.

"There are five lines of attack: up, left, right, down, and through." Dex stopped pacing to show an example of each to Jackie with five limbs as she spoke. "Which means the same about defense, conversely." Jackie tried a punch. "Bend your knees, it grounds you." The roach tried again. "Keep your back straight, don't waste momentum." Again. "Hit with the first knuckles, the others will get hurt." Again. "Your arm should be straight when you hit." Jackie grunted, straining. "Don't tense up the whole time, just when you hit. Don't waste energy." Jackie punched again. "There you go!" Dex sounded happy with her! "You've got it." She was kinda proud of that. "Well done." Dex's patience was refreshing. It was an uncommon trait.

"What next?" This seemed to be a promising start.

"Hmm, let's see... I'm going to want to make you practice attacking and defending in all five directions, with the specifics of what to do and not to do in each case, I mean. It's one thing to see it but you really learn by doing. It's probably a good idea to go through it with each limb. A lot of people tend to favor one side over the other. Just don't leave yourself too open. I'll teach you how to move in and out of range, and how to string things together so you're not working against yourself. That's 'flow.'" The roach frowned.

"I'm not sure what you mean." She was still learning to read Dex's bizarre body language, but this seemed like a sign of approval, whatever it was.

"I'm glad you said something. It's always best to ask." Of course, Dex had more time to spare than she did, but her point still stood. "Maybe it'll be easier if I show you." Dex started showing Jackie the first 'form' of her 'style.' "You see?" She paused. "Each movement flows naturally into the next like that. It's easier that way." The roach tilted her head at her.

"Why are you moving so slow?" In the System, time was literally money. Everyone always did everything as fast as possible. Deadlines crept, interest on debts owed climbed, the clock was ticking, always. Jackie had never seen anyone do anything this slowly on purpose and couldn't understand why anyone would choose to. Didn't Dex want to get it over with, just as she did? Wouldn't everyone?

"It's been my experience that, to really understand a movement or a series of movements completely, it's best to start by doing it slowly a few times until you get it just right. Then, you can worry about trying to do it right as fast as possible. Does that seem to make sense to you?" The roach clucked her tongue.

"I don't know. I don't really have all that much time. Maybe I don't need to understand them completely? Would it really matter?" Dex thought about her question.

"I guess that's up to you!" Jackie had expected her to resist more, but she wasn't complaining.

"What's, like, the last thing we'd do, normally?" May as well skip all the way to the end.

"Normally, I'd wait until you've practiced everything we've talked about so far a few times, then eventually I'd give you a chance to try it out against me, if you feel up for that, so I can get a sense of how far along it got you." Jackie nodded, pointing an index finger at her.

"Then that's what we'll do." Dex turned the roach's request over in her mind a few times.

"... Sure! Why not." She'd have thrown in 'it's your funeral' for good measure, but of course there were no funerals in the System. "Show me what you've got." Jackie's heart raced as Dex sank into a casual fighting stance. Should she really have pushed for this? She couldn't help asking herself as she sank into her own stance. But she'd never be through with it if she didn't get started sometime, the roach told herself.

"Alright!" Dex dodged her first few punches, parried the next few with her crinoid tendrils, got her in an armlock and pushed Jackie behind her, trading places.

"Counters! Remind me to teach you counters, I just remembered." She dodged and parried the roach's next few punches again, then sent a few straight tendrils at her herself. Jackie dodged the first few, parried the next few, then tried the same arm lock that Dex had only to find it was easier to do with tendrils than to tendrils. "You can't quite grapple the way I do, remember," Dex reminded her, disentangling herself from her grip. After dodging a few more straight tendrils she barely ducked under a horizontal one, parrying a downward tendril and a kick before Dex had to duck under a hook of her own. "Very good!" The roach tried again but Dex grabbed her leg while ducking, tripping her. "Watch the legs." Jackie rolled to her feet.

"Starting to get that first part down, at least," she chuckled self-deprecatingly. She tried to get Dex going with a few straight punches again, waiting for her to retaliate with more straight tendrils for her to dodge and parry. When Dex came at her with another horizontal tendril strike, the roach ducked under it to go for her flamingo leg as well. But Dex's balance was unindictable - she did have those flamingo legs and years of practice. Standing on her other leg, she stretched out her targeted leg in front of her, then brought it back to push Jackie away with her foot, more pushing than kicking but still hard enough to almost knock her down. "You're always one step ahead of me," she grinned and shook her head, retaking her stance.

"You're a quick study," Dex complimented her.

'Just not quick enough,' the roach admonished herself. 'Every time I think I'm catching up, she's ready for it.' She slowly walked sideways around Dex on her guard, studying her. 'If I try knees or elbows, she'll probably be ready for that too.' Dex had just brought them up as one of her advantages - of course she'd be going to remember that conversation in-fight as well as Jackie did. 'No, to get to her, I need to step completely outside of what we - I know what I'll do!'

This time, Dex came at her first, to catch her unaware. After dodging a few straight crinoid tendrils, she attacked Dex with four hooks at the same time, forcing her to block and grab all four of her arms rather than ducking under them. All eight of their upper body limbs were now fully occupied, seemingly at a stalemate. Dex's advice about making the most of her advantages was good, no doubt, but she had to do more than simply taking her example of how to apply it at face value. Jackie had to expand on its general principle, to come up with advantages that Dex hadn't thought about. And what else did she have that Dex pointedly did not?

A head.

So she headbutted her.

It'd seemed like a great idea at the time. Dex really hadn't seen it coming - it was the most surprised she'd been in a fight in a long time, honestly. So she just panicked and, more as a reflex than as a conscious response, she backed a smidgen away and leaned forward, Jackie's head landing smack dab in the middle of Dex's lamprey maw atop her flamingo body where her neck would've been if she'd had a neck. She might not have been able to get the timing for it just right if she'd tried, but she'd been reacting in a much more instinctive state than that at this point. Righting herself without thinking, she ended up stuck with the roach hanging upside-down over her body, held aloft by her four crinoid tendrils with her head down Dex's throat.

"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Dex started running back and forth flailing while Jackie's legs flailed over both their heads unable to break free. Finally, Dex slowed down enough to regain her focus and, bending her flamingo legs to lean forward again, released her crinoid tendrils' hold around the roach's four arms, allowing her to fall back out of her lamprey maw on the ground in front of her. Everyone in the System was different, indeed. The two of them spat and spat, Jackie running her arms all over her body trying to clean it from Dex's saliva that had gotten all over her, wincing when she touched her face.

"Jackie... Your face!" She cringed. That was definitely blood on her hands.

"Bleh, that wasn't very smart of me, was it?" The roach shook her head dejectedly.

"No, that... That had the merit of being original. I don't see that every day." Dex had to give credit where credit was due, unexpected results notwithstanding.

"I should probably just give up," Jackie sighed. "I should've known better than to think I could do this." She looked downcast, her train of thought taking her down a depression spiral. "I'm sorry for wasting your time, Dex." She held back tears, feeling stupid for even caring. "Every time I try to improve my life, I just... Ugh, I'm sorry. You don't need to hear that either."

"No, no, don't think like that!" The roach gasped. Dex had hugged her. If this had been a throw, Jackie might have seen it coming and dodged it, but being what it was, it took her completely off-guard. "I mean, you don't have to learn from me, obviously, that's all up to you, it's just..." The roach searched herself for how she should react. "Mistakes are part of learning." Jackie hesitated. "Just because you're not good at something right away, or because you get it wrong a few times, it..." She hugged Dex back. "There's nothing wrong with that. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. It doesn't mean you can't. It just teaches you not to make the same mistake again. It's how we all get good at what we're really good at... isn't it, Jackie?"

The roach tried to imagine Dex a long, long time ago, as someone who didn't know how to fight, as someone who had to learn how to do it, just as she did. It was hard.

"So you... You really think I can do this?" Hard, but not impossible.

"I really do. Like I said, you're a quick study. That wasn't bad for a first try!" Jackie smiled.

"Owch! Thanks." It looked like her face wasn't about to let her forget her mistake so easily.

"C'mon, lemme take you to Beaker so we can get you fixed up." The roach gasped.

"I can't afford that!" Dex wasn't used to thinking in those terms as much as Jackie was.

"It's fine. She'll do it for me, she owes me." The roach tilted her head disbelievingly.

"You'd... You'd do that for me?" In the System, this sort of thing just wasn't done. "After everything you've already done for me?" No one did something without expecting something in return.

"Well, I'm not continuing teaching you with your face looking like that, I can tell you that!" Dex chuckled. "Not when I can afford it."

"Hey, Dex," she started as Dex helped her limp back to her ship, "you know what I'd like you to teach me next?" Had this taught Jackie the virtue of patience after all?

"Forms?"

"Ray guns." Dex laughed.

CHAPTER 4: YET SO FAR AWAY

"I can't believe you did this again."

Aside from the droning hum of her ship's engine, the two of them had been sitting in silence for quite some time before Macha's voice finally broke it.

"You can't believe I did this again?" The pterodactyl was of course sitting at her console piloting her ship back toward the System. "I can't believe you did this again!" Jackie sat in a slump back against the wall behind a force field, arms crossed, an antenna drooping, tilting her head dubiously. "That's my line." It seemed redundant, but while the roach would've gladly spent the whole trip back without saying anything, now that Macha had opened the can of worms she had, Jackie was in no mood to bite her tongue.

"You can't be serious." Even though the pterodactyl was facing away from her, the roach could still tell that she was rolling her eyes at her.

"I can't be serious?" Even though Jackie was behind her, Macha had still known her long enough that it wasn't hard for her to picture the disbelieving expression on the roach's face. "You can't be serious!" If Jackie was going to get dragged back against her will, she was going to do it kicking and screaming every step of the way. How very much like her.

"Stop that." The roach leaned forward from her slump, narrowing her eyes at her.

"No, you stop that." The pterodactyl rewarded her efforts with an exasperated sigh.

"Oh for crying out loud, Jackie!" The infinite beauty of space passed them by on each side, indifferent to their plight. "You could've died." Jackie had never been very good at taking care of herself. "Not just 'died' the way we all die all the time, either." Not if you asked Macha, in any case. "That would've been bad enough." That was putting it mildly. "Really died." They barely had words for this sort of thing. "Died died." They hadn't needed them in so long.

"I know." The roach slumped back against the wall.

"You know!" The pinwheel crest atop the pterodactyl's head span as she shook her head. "That's all you have to say for yourself." The nerve of that girl.

"Well I think you're the one who should be apologizing to me." This time Macha's sigh was one of resignation.

"You still haven't changed." For this, Jackie stood up from her slump on her legs outright.

"That is simply not true!" A spark arced up between her antennae as she frowned only to vanish as it reached their tips, as if to punctuate her words.

"Oh, really?" Part of the pterodactyl was starting to regret having started their conversation herself. "Is that right?" But the wheels were already in motion by then. "Do you forget how well I know you, Jackie?" It was too late to go back. "Everything I've done for you?" Would it have killed her to give Macha credit where credit was due, for a change? "Everything we've been through?" She had tried so hard for so long. "I haven't."

"You don't understand." The roach had sounded more sad than angry that time.

"That's what you always used to say!" the pterodactyl snapped at her. "I never understood this and I never understood that." What a tiring refrain. "In all those years, did it ever occur to you maybe you were the one who never understood me?"

Jackie looked vexed. "You can't just take what I said and throw it back at me like that."

For this, Macha turned from her console to look at the roach behind her outright. "But that's what you do!"

"It's different when I do it," Jackie chuckled, tongue-in-cheek.

The pterodactyl turned back to her console. "You're doing this to punish me because you blame me."

"No, you're doing this to punish me because you blame me," the roach shot back.

"This is just like all the other times."

"That's where you're wrong," Jackie persisted.

"Based on what?"

"I have a plan."

Macha groaned. "Oh, really?" Didn't that just beat all. "What kind of plan did you have when you killed yourself over and over?"

"... I didn't have a plan back then," the roach admitted.

"So the Commission kept having to bring you back, over and over," the pterodactyl scolded her.

"They didn't have to bring me back."

"What did you expect them to do, Jackie?"

Jackie sighed. "'The System is just like a machine or an organism, it can't function without all of its parts'," she parroted cynically.

"There was more to it than that."

"They did it so I'd owe them a debt I can't pay back to this day for something I didn't even want." The roach stuck out her tongue.

"So your solution to that is to go so far they can't bring you back," Macha frowned, "just like all the other times."

"You didn't have to come after me either, you know," Jackie said softly, "any of those times."

"I came after you because I cared about you." The pterodactyl wished she could've knocked some sense into her sometimes. "Why do you think I offered to help you work it off by partnering up with you in the first place?"

The roach looked down. "I was just slowing you down." Macha was surprised that Jackie didn't deny that she'd really cared, as the roach had done so many times before that. "I could never keep up with you." The pterodactyl's ship sped through space faster than it had any right to even as they spoke. "I should've known I couldn't outrun you this time either." Working as a Runner in space, she'd put a lot of work into making sure that her ship would be as fast as it could possibly be. Her living hinged on it.

"You promised you'd stop. I believed you. What kind of plan do you have now, Jackie?"

Jackie's antennae crackled. "I have a self-renewing power source now, Macha," she pointed at them as she spoke, "just like you."

The pinwheel on the pterodactyl's head had worked as a small wind power device, and her wings doubled as solar panels. Once she'd had Beaker put them in, working as a Runner on-world, she'd always recharge her power even as she'd flown over planets like a hang glider. Being able to gain resources while she'd spent time working had ended up playing a significant role in what had made it possible for her to work her own way out of debt before that.

"I'm not going out there to die, not this time," the roach shook her head. "Not anymore."

"What do you think you're doing?" This should be good, Macha thought.

"Since I don't have to worry about running out of power, I can make it all the way to another world somewhere, beyond the System."

"There aren't any worlds beyond the System," the pterodactyl gestured emphatically. "Everyone knows that."

"Well," Jackie quipped resignedly, "we'll never know now, will we?"

"You're lucky I caught up with you," the pterodactyl harrumphed. "You'd have never made it."

"Of course you caught up with me. You always had to be faster than everybody else."

Macha's countenance darkened. "I wasn't always faster than everyone else, you know."

The roach tilted her head. "Oh?"

"Did you ever hear about someone called Bertha?"

Jackie shook her head. "I don't think so, no."

"Bertha and I were partners for a long time, long before you and I met. I was her partner longer than I've ever been with anyone else." Where could the pterodactyl have been going with this? "We ran into an anomaly one day, unlike anything we'd ever seen. I tried to get there before her but she got to it before I did. When Bertha got near it, it ended up destroying her ship."

The roach winced. "Good ships are hard to come by."

"That wasn't the problem, though," Macha clucked her tongue. "Well, it was part of it, but we could always get another ship."

Jackie furrowed her brow. "So what happened?"

"The anomaly scrambled her brain waves in a weird way. It turned out no one ever saw anything like it in the System before or since. When the Commission brought her body back to life, Bertha... wasn't herself anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"She'd lost her mind. She didn't remember me. She didn't remember anything. She couldn't even act like a person. It was like she turned into a force of nature. She went on some sort of destructive rampage and just... never stopped. Every now and then, she dies, and the Commission brings her back, but like... There's no way she can ever pay anything back to anyone anymore. She'll always be a Renegade. She can't even understand what work is."

The roach shuddered. "What a story..."

"So now, I can look at her, but it's like she can't see me. I can talk to her, but she can't understand me. She talks, but what she says doesn't mean anything. She saw something in there, heard something, something must have happened in there to make her this way, but I have no idea what it could be. I can never find out. I've never seen the anomaly since. I don't think her original personality can ever be recovered now. It's gone."

"That's awful..." Jackie had never heard of anything like it happening, to anyone.

"I went up to her to try to save her, time and time again. Over and over, in her blind rage, she killed me, without even thinking of me as a living thing that could die. Eventually I accrued such a debt thinking I could do it if I tried one more time that I was forced to give up for good. I'd still be working it off if it wasn't for my wings and pinwheel. I'll never be able to talk to her again. I've experienced a kind of loss we don't have words for here, Jackie."

"I'm sorry, Macha," was all the roach managed to say.

"When I tell you I can't deal with having to lose you forever, I'm not talking extemporaneously. I'm saying that because I know exactly how that feels. I can't turn to anyone who can relate to what I'm going through. I'm the only person I know who can even say that. So you see, Jackie," she finished bitterly, "I'm not always the fastest, but when I'm not, bad things happen. And maybe you're the one who doesn't understand me."

CHAPTER 5: EYE OF A NEEDLE

"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'd told herself.

A shiver had gone 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'd just been there for a routine vaccination, or as routine as she could make herself think of it as, in any case. Fran had known enough about vaccines to understand how important that had been, mind you. That hadn't made it any easier.

"Not really." Even when you were there for a routine procedure, hospitals had still been, 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 hadn't wanted to be thought of as weak. "I mean, no." She hadn't wanted to be treated like a child.

"You've had vaccines when you were a kid before, right?" At least the nurse had known enough not to imply the jackal had still been 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 had rubbed her arm with some trepidation as she spoke.

"It's stupid." She couldn't quite meet the nurse's gaze, but the nurse had given her a look implying it wasn't, and the jackal had seen 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 had paused to fully process this.

"... And that helped?"

"For some reason, it did," Fran had shrugged as the nurse had 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 had blushed.

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

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

"What?" She'd been putting her syringe away.

"It's done." She'd liked this particular nurse, she'd 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 worse 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 had 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 who had taught her that lesson 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 from its roiling currents so beautiful...

CHAPTER 6: OFF LIMITS

"Time for bed, sweetie."

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

Her mother had grinned, endeared yet still reproachful. "You always say that." The days had always seemed so short. Whenever they'd been at an end, all that Fran could think about was everything else that she'd 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'd 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 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, her body 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 the bird 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 menacingly.

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 as well.

"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 hadn't been 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 had been 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 had 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'd choked back tears. "A few more minutes..."

"I understand, sweetie." Fran's face had lit up. She'd known her mother had still been dying, but still, every word, every minute, at that point, that her mother had still been with her had felt like a gift. "That's just because being awake is always a lot more fun than being asleep, isn't it...?" She'd chuckled through her tears.

CHAPTER 7: MEAN YOU NO HARM

Fran had worked the nightshift at a convenience store. It'd suited her in some ways. After a short, mercifully optimistic period of settling into it, it'd become customary for her to think of herself as hating her job. Most people had hated their jobs - why should she have been any different? When she'd thought about it more, it'd occurred to her that, if there had been a way for her to live her life without having had to have a job at all, she'd have taken it in a heartbeat.

Most other jobs that existed, she could never have imagined having been able to even do, let alone convince someone else she could. So what else could she have done? There had been but a few other jobs available at her entry level, and nothing she could have seen herself doing as such. When she'd been a child, she'd fantasized about working in a museum someday, in some capacity. She'd liked space, Egypt, bugs, and dinosaurs, things that museums were definitely about.

A high school diploma hadn't been going to get her into a museum, it'd been starting to look like. With time, she'd started trying to tell herself that she'd been an adult, that often, adults had to do work that they didn't want to have to do, and that this had just been the way things were. Her job hadn't hurt anyone else, as far as she could tell. The longer she'd worked there, the more a part of her had become used to it, to little things about it here and there. She was nocturnal, and liked solitude.

There'd been nothing she'd needed to know how to do about it that she couldn't do. She hadn't been afraid of being fired. Her coworkers hadn't been her friends, but she'd gotten along with them fine. The manager had been a bit gruff at first, but she'd gotten used to taking it in stride, estimating that they wouldn't go too far if push came to shove, after knowing them long enough. Out of all jobs it'd been possible for her to have, there'd been a fair chance this had still been among the best ones overall.

Fran had begun to realize that she hadn't hated *her* job. She'd hated *work*.

There she'd been, working at a job that she'd known wouldn't have existed without capitalism, perhaps one of its most simplified expressions: you give me money, I give you a product. And yet, she'd had no respect for it at all. For all she'd cared, everyone may just as well have walked right in, taken whatever they'd needed, and walked right out. She'd had to act like she cared, since her job had depended on it, but in her heart, she hadn't. She'd suspected many others had probably felt the same.

Most people don't go out shopping in the middle of the night. When someone had showed up at the convenience store she'd worked at during her shift, there always had to be a story around that, she'd told herself. Either this had been a fellow nocturnal person living as she had or, more often, an unexpected set of circumstances or another had occurred which had led this person to need something they had, right here, right now, to her treasure cave in the night.

Fran's favorite part of her job had been that, every time people had come in in the middle of the night, based on how they'd looked and acted, she'd invented a little story in her mind, trying to imagine how they'd ended up then and there, where they'd been going, and what kind of people they could have been...

***

The space pirates had separated Jackie and Fran from each other. The roach was kept near one of the ship's power outlets so that her antennae could be kept plugged into it to power it, where the parrot kept an eye on her. The jackal was kept in the room next to her while they figured out what to do with her, where the duck kept a weapon trained on her that could only be described as an antique blunderbuss. The hangar door was open between them. For a moment, she couldn't help but wonder about what series of events could have possibly led their captors down this particular road in life. What happened to a person that made them do something like this to someone, she asked herself? It didn't seem like an easy question.

At first, Fran wondered if the sound she'd heard in the next room had been a grenade pin dropping to the ground. The fact that she saw Jackie dive into a side roll under the closing hangar door by a hair's width as the room on the other side of it exploded behind her certainly seemed to corroborate that theory. It was only later that the jackal would understand that what she'd heard had been the sound of the roach's shackles hitting the floor behind her after Jackie had picked their locks with her knitting needles. The room hadn't blown up because of a grenade, but because the roach sabotaged a control panel. Hearing the parrot scream through the hangar door, Fran had no trouble believing that her scream could have killed someone at close range.

The duck's blunderbuss shot went right over Jackie, who came up from her diving side roll into a kneel under it. She threw one of her knitting needles across the room right through the duck's chest. The duck emitted an eerie, squeaky quack as her eyes rolled back into her head. The roach yanked the knitting needle out of the duck's chest at a distance, pulling on a yarn string that she'd attached to the eye of the needle so that it could be retrieved. The duck fell to the ground limply like a puppet whose strings have been cut while Jackie quickly moved to the jackal's side to pick the locks of her shackles with her knitting needles until they also fell to the ground behind her.

Fran fought back the urge to retch. She knew that no one else liked death either, for all she knew, but with her, she still felt that it went further than that somehow. It was a visceral reaction, one that only firmly holding onto the even scarier thought that they would both die if it went unchecked made it possible for the jackal to overcome, or at least to postpone having to process until the fight would be over. It was a sink-or-swim exercise in compartmentalization.

The roach moved to kneel on one side of the room's other door and motioned for Fran to move to do the same on the other side of it. She brought a finger up in front of her mandibles to indicate that the jackal should be as quiet as possible. Somehow both of their civilizations, evolving on completely separate axes, had ended up deciding that this gesture meant the same thing: shush! Jackie threw her yarn ball at Fran for her to grab, holding the knitting needle that she'd used to kill the duck in her own hands to extend a string across the threshold between the needle and yarn ball. The jackal was grateful that she didn't have to hold the needle part of their makeshift tripwire, after what it'd been through. She wasn't sure she was ready for that yet.

The glowworm walked into the room with a glowstick tonfa in each hand only to fall gracelessly on her face the moment she stepped right into the trap that her captives had set. Before she could push herself back up to her feet, she screamed when the roach leapt to kneel at her side to drive a knitting needle through one of the glowworm's hands, nailing it to the floor. Jackie grabbed the back of the glowworm's head to slam it on the floor, knocking her out.

"Drop it."

The roach's other knitting needle clattered to the floor as she raised her hands over her head. The puffin had cut the tripwire yarn string with her cutlass before walking into the room behind them. She was now aiming both her pistol and cutlass at Fran and Jackie, and neither of them could see a way to disarm her from where they were. The jackal wondered whether or not anything they might do could still stop the puffin from killing them or not by that point.

So this was death...

***

One night, of all possible nights, someone strode into the convenience store where Fran worked at night with a definite sense of purpose in their step. Her new customer had answered the usual questions that she'd liked to ask herself about the people who came in before she could ask them to herself, not in so many words, but with their actions. They hadn't been the answers she'd been looking for, but they'd had the merit of being direct.

The jackal hadn't resisted. She'd handed them the money that they'd asked for as fast as she possibly could, without any argument whatsoever. The person she'd been dealing with had clearly cared about the money a lot more than she had, she'd thought. She'd done everything "right." She must've panicked, she must've taken too long, given them a weird look, they may have thought she'd rang an alarm and the cops had been on their way, she hadn't really known. She must've done *something* wrong.

She never knew why they pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER 8: PHONE HOME

"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'd made her glad to have been 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 hadn't remembered anything from it, but it'd made an impression on her. "For making it through."

"You're welcome," she'd 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 on the ground in front of her instead. The puffin's assailant dropped a knee on her back, punching the back of the bird's 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, crud!" She stuck out her tongue. "So much for that."

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'd seen someone get killed right in front of her and she'd 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, music, 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?" 'If I ever die again, I'll make sure to remember my best friend and roommate as reasons to come back from the dead again,' Fran had thought to herself.

"Oh, thank you! I'd love that." They'd known the jackal hadn't been a 'party person' as such but she'd also known that, when they'd said 'party,' they'd meant just them celebrating with each other. That had been enough.

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

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

CHAPTER 9: POWERHOUSE

"See Fran, you put the laundry in first, then you do the dishes while it's in the wash. It's more efficient that way!"

***

"So you also use them to knit."

Jackie had looked for the quantum translocator all over the Renegade ship, double-checking the locations Ghost and Orchid had searched just to be on the safe side. Nothing. Fran and the roach sat on the floor of the Trackers' ship as it towed the Renegade ship with them to the rock planet and Revival chambers with its tractor beam. Jackie was still plugged into the wall.

"Huh?" The roach looked up from her needlework to meet Fran's gaze when she broke the silence. The jackal pointed at Jackie's needles. "Oh, these!" She didn't need to look at her hands. "Yeah, that's what they're mostly for." She'd had to learn to make the best of whatever she had on hand. "Do you?"

"I can sew a little." She liked that their conversation was drifting to lighter topics. "Not knit, though." It helped her remember that people, like needles, largely existed for lighter purposes. "It looks trickier." Jackie had a lot of practice.

"I can teach you if you want." The roach's eyes went back to her needlework, but kept Fran in her field of vision.

"Oh, thanks!" The jackal found knitting intimidating. Nevertheless, it seemed a generous offer. She didn't want to seem ungrateful. "I'll think about it."

Jackie wasn't sure where she'd find time to deliver on her offer if Fran accepted, but it was the right thing to do. If the jackal ended up stuck in the System as a result of the roach's quantum translocator - a place that Jackie spent most of her life trying to escape - she'd owe Fran all the help she could get.

"Have you been knitting for a long time?" The roach looked aside thoughtfully, trying to remember.

"Gosh, I don't know. Fifteen, twenty thousand years maybe? I'm not sure. I can look it up if you want." Jackie reached into her bag absent-mindedly, rummaging for her communicator. The jackal held up her palm with a nervous smile.

"That's alright." It had just seemed like the topic within easiest reach to her at the time. She didn't want to impose. How long did people live around here anyway? It made her head spin. "Thanks, though." It would've been rude to ask the roach about her age, she thought. Fran didn't know everyone in the System was the same age yet. "Where did you get those?"

Jackie didn't pull out her communicator after all, but she didn't bring her third hand back out of her bag, holding her yarn ball in her fourth hand.

"The needles?" The jackal nodded. "I used to work with Tilly on some forest planet farmland way back." So they also had a forest planet. "She'd put the pine in porcupine and the hedge in hedgehog, so to speak." One with plant-people, at that. "These grow on her back. She'd trade them for all kinds of stuff."

"Does she still work there?"

The roach clucked her tongue. "Not since they switched to no-till, she don't." Jackie put the yarn ball down in front of her to hold it between her feet as she sat.

"And the yarn?"

"From the alpaca who used to work at the communal web." Fran could only imagine what a whole communal web of interconnected technorganic knitters must've looked like.

"You worked there too?" The roach nodded. "What was it like?"

"Not the worst, honestly."

"Do you miss it?" Jackie frowned. Fran hadn't meant to put her on the spot.

"Hold on." The roach held up a finger as she pulled her communicator out of her bag after all. "Someone's talking to me." Jackie's upper hands started typing on her communicator while her lower hands knitted under them unwaveringly.

"Something important?" The jackal almost reached for her phone in her pocket herself, used to using it while others did so it wouldn't be awkward. So much for that now.

"Kiwi's got an engineering problem," the roach explained. "She's always had a hard time with this stuff." Fran deduced she was the fruit and the bird. "I can usually talk her through most of it now though."

"You seem like a helpful person."

"... Thanks!" The roach didn't hear that often. "I try," she shrugged.

"Do you need me to stop talking?" It occurred to Fran that all that at once may have been a bit much. "I don't mean to break your concentration." Jackie was struggling to keep up, but she was invested in learning from the jackal, so she wanted it to look effortless.

"I'm good, thanks." It seemed worth it. "You have to get good at multitasking to get by around here." Fran couldn't help staring at her communicator, not wanting to invade Jackie's privacy but wondering how it worked. "We'll have to get you one of these, won't we."

"Oh, sure!" The jackal wondered if people in the System got on your case for using your communicator too much, the way people did with phones on Earth. "When I can afford one," she added. How much could a communicator cost?

"We'll work something out," the roach assured her. "Anything else on you?" Fran wished something grew from her body that people would pay for.

"No, that was pretty much it," the jackal said sheepishly. "There's my wallet, but no money."

Jackie looked at her quizzically. "What's money?"

"Money's..." How did you explain money to someone who'd never heard of it? "Money's... nothing between friends, people say."

The roach turned this over in her head once or twice. "Is it everything between enemies, then?"

Fran almost smiled. "There's something to that."

"Maybe you could trade the wallet for something," Jackie suggested, "whatever it is."

"I don't think anyone will want it around here," the jackal explained.

"I'll take it," the roach offered.

"Really?" Fran looked at her disbelievingly.

"Sure, why not," Jackie shrugged.

"You might not like it."

"Let's have a look at it." The jackal pulled her wallet out of her pocket to show it to the roach. "Neat fabric. Never seen anything like it." Jackie used her communicator one-handed as the jackal handed her the wallet. "I don't have another communicator right now, but I'll get you one first chance I get." The roach looked at the wallet from various angles. "I'd never seen anything like that phone of yours any more than Ghost did either, I can tell you that." The jackal wondered what the mantis would think of her phone, in hindsight.

"Have you known Ghost for a long time, Jackie?"

Jackie shrugged. "Long enough. We... worked together for a bit a while back, you could say." What a loaded statement that was.

"Were you partners? Before Orchid, I mean?"

"Not as such." The roach put her needles and yarn down to reach into her bag.

"Oh, you're done," Fran assumed.

"Not yet." Jackie pulled a piece of wood and her carving knife out of her bag.

"Switching gears for now?"

The roach started whittling away at the wood, also like she'd been doing it all her life. "Kiwi thinks I should do the wood first."

"It's for her?"

"The scarf was for Ghost, this is for Orchid."

"You're doing Orchid's first."

Jackie grinned. "Ghost likes me. She won't mind if the scarf's late."

"She likes scarves?"

"You saw her use that shroud against the puffin?" The jackal nodded. "I made that too. When wear and tear rips it, she'll have this. Good for the ice planet, too."

"Not bad! What are you making Orchid?"

"Wood darts, yarn net, wood-yarn bolas." The roach wasn't sure how to interpret the jackal's surprise. "Trackers like non-metallic weapons, Renegades can't use magnetic junk against them."

"I take it they're not birthday gifts?"

Jackie blinked. "I don't know what that means."

"They're payment, right?"

"That and the power, yeah." Her antennae crackled, as if to punctuate her statement.

"Do you need to charge them soon?"

"They run on a perpetual motion device." Fran hadn't thought that was possible. A small pile of sawdust was forming at the roach's feet.

"Where did you learn to carve wood like that?"

"Sticks taught me. Don't remind me," Jackie stuck her tongue out.

"But Orchid wants yours," the jackal observed.

The roach grinned. "Orchid doesn't want to owe Sticks anything." Fran would have to get to know a lot of people to make barter work. "They used to be partners."

"Sorry I said we were partners without asking," the jackal said meekly. "I panicked."

"You don't know what partners are, do you?" Jackie put down her communicator to look at her.

"I'm not sure," Fran chuckled nervously.

"I figured you might not," the roach waved aside. "Partners have each other's back. Let's say there's things you can do I can't and things I can do you can't. If you repay some of my debts and I repay some of yours, we make each other's lives easier. If we share resources, we can deal with more different situations. I can't be in two places at once. We can."

"It's a serious commitment, isn't it?"

Jackie nodded. "Time and resources are scarce around here. Sharing them is a... personal, intimate thing for us. It's taking a risk, so it's a show of a great deal of trust. You succeed and fail as one."

"I understand."

"You didn't know what it meant when you said that. I'm not expecting it from you."

The jackal blinked. "What could I do for you that you can't?"

"I want to learn everything there is to know about your world."

"What for?"

"I want to move there."

Something clicked. "That's why you wanted to go back to the rock planet so bad."

The roach nodded solemnly. "Unfortunately, if I can't find the quantum translocator I used to open the portal you came through, neither of us will be able to reach your world. So..."

Fran gulped. "What would... partners do in a situation like that?"

"I'd be the one to show you around my world," Jackie explained.

"Hey gang," Ghost startled them walking in inadvertently, "we're here."

***

"[-cuse not to do your chores and homework," the martial arts teacher chortled. "Do them first, then train. We're not teaching you so you-]"

*FLICK!*

"[-nowned for her persistence," Attenborough went on, "much like the dung beetle. Of course, the purpose of the carrot is not to feed the mule, but to-]"

*FLICK!*

"[-are saying that, if they're expecting any kind of retirement, Millennials now need to start saving up for it as early as-]"

"Come help with cooking, Fran!"

"I'm doing my homework."

"No you're not."

*FLICK!*

CHAPTER 10: COCKROACH MOTHERFUCKERS

"There's two kinds of work in the world."

Fran's roommate had been a communist.

"First, there's work-that-stays." She'd also been a writer. "Then, there's work-that-goes-away." The jackal didn't write, herself, but she'd asked about what had made her roommate write. "Writing is work-that-stays." Fran may as well have called her roommate her best friend. They'd been close enough for it to be true. "Cleaning is work-that-goes-away." But their names had been on the lease and her best friend's name hadn't. It'd just been easier that way. "Of course, if I didn't make myself finish cleaning before I start writing, I'd just never stop writing and we'd live in a pigsty," her roommate had chuckled. "The upper classes always make the lower classes do their work-that-goes-away so they get more time to do their work-that-stays, though."

"So in the long run, that makes it look like only the upper classes ever did anything, doesn't it?"

***

It was gone.

It hit her like a ton of bricks when they reached the rock planet, and she'd been hit with a ton of bricks. All that work, all that hope, all for nothing after all. Jackie had been through a lot. It took a lot to faze her by this point.

The quantum translocator was gone.

This was a lot.

"Okay... Okay." This time it was Fran's turn to watch the roach start hyperventilating right in front of her without knowing how to help. "I'll... I'll..." But she couldn't even breathe, let alone form sentences.

"No one took your ship," Ghost observed. "Doesn't look like it got shot at or scavenged from either, at that," she assessed. "That's good, right?" The jackal could tell that the mantis had no idea what Jackie had lost or what it meant to her. Ghost may have 'liked' her, but the roach still couldn't trust the mantis with what she'd told Fran after they'd just met. What was she to make of that?

"Long, deep breaths, okay?" The jackal whispered to Jackie, mindful of her privacy. "Not fast, shallow ones." Fran put her hand on the roach's back and held her hand, the way she imagined a partner would do. "In through your nose, out through your mouth." The jackal remembered these instructions easily from having heard them often herself when she'd have panic attacks while she'd been growing up.

"You're right, Ghost." Jackie spoke louder, so that the mantis would hear this time. "Losing the ship on top of this would've been a real kick in the shin." The roach wasn't lying - it just wasn't the foremost thing on her mind, not by a long shot. Another ship may have been hard to get, but another quantum translocator? There was no reason to think that another one existed at all. This one wasn't even supposed to, not as such.

"So we're not stranded here, at least," Fran added.

"You were looking for something else, I think?" Ghost tilted her head. Just put off the breakdown until she's gone, you're almost there, Jackie told herself.

"Don't worry about it."

"If you say so." The mantis pulled out another cigarette and lit up, ritual gestures since time immemorial. "If we should look out for anything, lemme know."

"Sure thing." The cloud of smoke that Ghost blew at them as the roach spoke made the jackal cough.

***

"There's two kinds of work in the world."

Fran's best friend had been an anarchist.

"First, there's work anyone could do." She'd also been a writer. "Then, there's work only you can do." The jackal was an anarcho-socialist, herself. "Grunt work is work that anyone could do." Fran may as well have called her best friend her roommate, considering how much more time she'd spent in the jackal's apartment than in her own. "Writing is work that only you can do." But her name hadn't been on the lease and theirs had been. It'd just been easier that way. "A story is like... a little bird you nurse from an egg, something that comes to you to beg you to give it life. If you don't use your time to do it, it can't turn to anybody else. When you die, there'll never be another person like you again. So if you take care of it long enough, you get to go like, fly, little story!"

"Fly like the wind," Fran had smiled.

***

"They're towing both ships now?"

When the mantis had left them to themselves, Fran had held Jackie while the roach had cried, and cried, and cried, sobbing until she'd just run out of tears. The jackal felt completely overwhelmed even trying to imagine what terrible weight must have been crushing Jackie's spirit for her to have needed to let all that out, let alone figuring out what to do about it, but she'd held on regardless. Fran hadn't known the right words to say, but the roach hadn't had it in her to say anything anyway. Maybe what had mattered the most had simply been that the jackal had been there at all, then and there, Jackie's only buffer against the uncaring void of space.

"Of course."

Fran still hadn't seen the roach knitting and wood carving at the same time until then, and found it a sight to behold. It looked more dangerous to the jackal than either of them had looked paired with the communicator, for one thing. She did have more experience using a similar device than she did doing either of those things, she had to admit, which may have skewed her perception a bit, but still. Jackie hadn't shown much emotion since she'd started. Fran figured that, in context, if it was giving the roach something else to focus her attention on, it was just as well to assume that she knew what she was doing, and to leave her be.

"I'd have thought you'd have followed them back in your ship, now that we have it back."

"I still owe them power, remember?" Jackie's plugged antennae crackled again for emphasis.

"Oh, right!"

"Since I'm powering their tractor beam, it's cheaper for them, you know?" She was using her knitting needles to drill holes through two small wooden spheres that she'd carved before.

"Makes sense," Fran nodded.

She should probably figure out how to fly one of these things at some point, she thought. If the roach were ever put out of commission, she'd be relying on the jackal to take over the helm, wouldn't she?

"... There's a chance it wasn't destroyed, isn't it?" Jackie's eyes whipped from her work to Fran in a flash. "A chance that someone still has it in working order somewhere, right?" The roach thought that the jackal was clinging to the possibility of it because she wanted to go back to Earth herself. "Whether who stole it keeps it or trades it..." She didn't realize that Fran was already more preoccupied with reassuring Jackie than herself. "... If we can track it down, we could always trade for it again or steal it back, couldn't we?" The roach could tell that the jackal was saying that because of how well she meant and, knowing this, the thought of having to shoot it down pained her.

"We're going to be at the Commission's Revival chambers soon." Fran watched as Jackie pulled a thread of yarn through the holes and tied some knots in it to keep it in place. "This is taking me longer than I thought," she clucked her tongue.

"You can get through this." The roach lifted her eyes back up to her. "I know it seems like you can't right now, but..." It wasn't the first time the jackal had to try to talk to someone like that. "I know you can." She'd had varying levels of success.

"Based on what?" They hadn't known each other for all that long, after all.

"Do you know what they say about roaches on my world?"

The roach raised an eyebrow at her. "What do you mean by 'roaches'?

Fran suddenly worried that she'd accidentally insulted Jackie. "There are other people on Earth who look like you." What if she were called something else altogether? "That's what they're called." How would she know?

"People who look like me?" The roach furrowed her brow.

"I mean people who are the same species as you," the jackal tried to clarify. "I'm a jackal, like my mother before me. No jackals here, I take it?"

Jackie hadn't known what a jackal was. "How can there be more than one of the same person?" She didn't even know what a mother was.

"There's only one of every species here?"

The roach shook her head in disbelief. "There are more than one where you're from?" Fran nodded, agape. "What do they say about roaches where you're from, since you brought it up?" Jackie wasn't sure how much stock she put in it, but she may as well know, she figured.

"They say roaches could survive a nuclear meltdown."

The roach blinked. "What does 'nuclear' mean?"

Jackie couldn't possibly have been serious. "You're telling me you have spaceships, cyborgs, Revival chambers, and teleportation, but you can't split the atom?" That seemed hard for the jackal to swallow.

"You can't split the atom." Yet there it was. "It can't be done." The roach's tone implied this was something everyone knew about, and that there'd be no point in discussing it further. Fran decided it'd be best to drop it for now. "Do you... not have those things, where you're from?" While nothing would change Jackie's determination to move to Earth, she did like the idea of knowing what she'd be getting into.

"We have some spaceships, but nothing like what you have here," the jackal replied. "You could argue we have some cyborgs, but also rudimentary at best, at least for now." The roach would have to get used to being a bit of a novelty on Earth, it seemed. So be it. "We can't teleport at all." So that was why Fran had been so surprised by Ghost's sneak attack, Jackie understood. Other than the normal reasons why someone would be surprised by this, that is.

"Trust me, most of us can't, either," the roach stuck her tongue out. "That junk's expensive."

"Is Ghost rich?" Then the jackal remembered where she was. "Does she have more people owe her work time than she owes them, I mean? Does she have a lot of resources at her disposal?"

"The Commission gives Trackers that kind of stuff for free," Jackie waved off. "It's one of their big draws. They don't part with them easily, either."

"I guess Trackers need all the help they can get to take out Renegades like those motherfuckers we're taking to the Revival chambers, don't they," Fran observed. The roach didn't know what a fucker was, either, but whatever either of those words meant, based on the jackal's tone and context, Jackie could tell this much: you didn't want to be a motherfucker.

"Do you really not have Revival chambers where you're from?" Fran shook her head. "How do you come back when you die, then?"

"We don't."

***

"What about you, Fran?" they'd asked her. "What kinds of work do you think there are, if you had to say?"

"First, there's work you have to do right now," she'd said. "Then, there's work you get to do later."

They'd laughed.

CHAPTER 11: LET THEM EAT CAKE

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 reach to drag them down from it. 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 had 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 trying.

"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, and 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'd made 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 avoided being around cooking whenever she could. It'd been more work on top of work she'd already thrown 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.

"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'd been one of her favorite things to do with her mom back when she'd still lived with her. They'd been doing it for such a long time that it'd 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 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'd always tried to recreate a sense of that shared harmony that she'd lost and that she'd missed so much.

***

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 somehow.

"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'd 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 foreveryone."

"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.

CHAPTER 12: BY A THOUSAND CUTS

"People get them without thinking." Fran and her roommate had been watching her pets chasing each other around their living room. "They get them for their kids."

"That's the thing!" she'd concurred. "They think of animals as lesser lifeforms than people for their kids to 'practice' on for when they have kids of their own."

"Lifeforms that don't 'matter' as much if their kids mess up," the jackal had frowned.

"I guess it's better for people to bring them back than to get rid of them when they realize it's not working out, but still." Her pets had lived in other households that had ended up bringing them back to the rescue rather than keeping them before she'd taken them in. "They get attached, you know?" That's how you got a fear of abandonment. She should know.

"I'm glad they adjusted to living here so well, all things considered," Fran had smiled.

The jackal had promised herself this would be the last place her pets would need to live.

"Just think," her roommate had said. "It's so different for them. For us, they're around for what, one eighth of our lives, if that, right?" She'd nodded. "For them, we're around for their entire lives..."

***

"That was a dinosaur, wasn't it?"

Jackie raised an eyebrow. "What about it?" The roach hadn't stopped knitting and carving for a while.

"I'd never seen one," Fran shook her head.

"Huh!" Jackie never thought of dinosaurs as different from other species in any way. "Why not?"

"They've been gone from Earth for millions of years," the jackal explained.

"Why is that?" The roach tilted her head.

"I dunno," Fran shrugged. "Got careless?"

Jackie furrowed her brow. "Weren't you on Earth?"

"No, I've only been alive for a couple of decades," the jackal reminded her.

"Whoa!" The roach's jaw dropped. "I mean, I know you told me you don't have Revival chambers but, like..." It was one thing to know on an intellectual level, but another to internalize its implications. "I don't know, I guess I just didn't put it together how short your life must've been," she grinned apologetically.

"Is there petroleum here?" Something about Jackie's phrasing had gotten Fran thinking. "In the System, I mean?"

The roach shook her head. "Never heard of it." Of course, the jackal thought. "Why, you need some?" If their dinosaurs were still alive, it meant they'd never turned to oil in the ground.

"Not as such, no." They'd only have had one of each kind of dinosaur in the first place. "Just curious." Fran was getting more of a sense of how much kidnapping a power source like her could've meant to the pirates.

"My first Enforcer was a dinosaur," Jackie mentioned offhandedly.

"Not that one, though?"

"Mine was a stegosaur. She had those red crystals they make lasers with growing out of her back, like the ones they mine on the rock planet." The jackal had never seen the red crystal mines of the rock planet, but she could imagine.

"What was she like?"

"She was just..." The roach sighed. "Very cut-and-dry, you know?" What was a nice way of putting that? "Very by-the-book."

Fran got the idea. "Bit of a stickler, wasn't she?"

"Drill knew every rule by heart," Jackie chuckled dryly. "She could recite them all from beginning to end with the exact same words every time, and did."

"Passionate about her job?"

"I don't know if 'passionate' is the right word," the roach stuck her tongue out. "She didn't seem to hate me, or even love the Commission, for that matter. She seemed emotionless. Drill wouldn't have been able to explain why any of the rules were what they were. She wouldn't have understood the question. She followed rules because they existed. That's what rules were for. For some reason, I kept forgetting what the rules were. She'd remind me as many times as I'd need her to. By the end of it, I'd have given almost anything to see Drill feel something, anything, just to prove she was a person like the rest of us. Still waiting on that."

"She must've driven you nuts."

"You have no idea!" Jackie laughed. "Had her for way too many lifetimes lemme tell you."

"You got that for food smuggling?"

"I wasn't smuggling it at first," the roach explained. "I got that for eating. Smuggling food is worse than that."

"I would think so," Fran acknowledged. "Gateway meal?"

"If that helps you," Jackie granted. "It's like, instead of making me a better person, Drill's repetitive self-righteousness just... ticked me right off, you know?" The jackal nodded. "It was just a taste, but enough to make me understand how much the Commission broke our spirits by denying us food, how much it meant that they did. I started thinking that not just me, but everyone should be able to have food, all the time. It was a mad dream and, well...".

"Rude awakening," Fran euphemized.

"It took them a remarkably long time, in my defense," Jackie remembered. "To this day there are people out there who can't work as Trackers anymore because they couldn't catch me," she smirked.

"Sounds like they had that coming."

"Depends who you ask, I guess," the roach shrugged.

"Was your Enforcer for that a dinosaur?"

"Nah, treehopper."

The jackal was almost sure that was some kind of tree bug. "Forest planet?"

"Caught me with an apple in some treetops," Jackie explained.

"They put you with her longer, huh?"

"Now she was passionate about her job. She didn't hate me, but she loved the Commission. She was a true believer in the role they play for Citizens. Yoke could give you an explanation for every rule the Commission ever came up with the exact way Drill couldn't. She thought the problem with Renegades was they didn't understand why the rules are what they are, that if they understood the reasons for them, they'd no longer choose to break them. She thought they could all 'get better' if she steered them right, that if everyone followed the Commission's rules, everything would be best. Yoke meant better than Drill, I'll give her that."

"She was just wrong," the jackal grasped.

"That's the thing," the roach concurred. "Can't get around that, ultimately. It was like looking at a clock that worked perfectly but that was set to tell the wrong time. She believed so strongly, she tried so much harder to be better than Drill that, even though I knew she was wrong, I couldn't help feeling guilty about 'failing' her by breaking the Commission's rules. She worked that way because she tried to form a rapport that made it personal. Part of me resented Yoke for manipulating me and resented myself for letting her get to me, but I still felt guilty."

"Thorny situation," Fran winced.

"You could say that," Jackie clucked her tongue. "Worked for a while, at that."

"Wow."

"First I just stopped smuggling food. I brought it down to eating bits and pieces of food here and there, hoping no one would notice. After a long enough while of living with it, I felt bad enough that I stopped eating too. Everything started hitting me a lot harder after that. Food had given me this buffer against how much everything hurt that I'd taken for granted by then. I'd forgotten how to live without it, and I was too scared to go back. I couldn't believe I'd been able to get away with it so long. It'd seemed too good to be true, and too good to last," she regretted.

"What did you do?"

"I threw myself into my work, all the way in. I figured it'd be easier to keep my mind off food if I kept busy with something else all the time."

"Makes sense."

"I was working at a dam with a heron with a water wheel in her chest. Work became my escape. People want me to work, so the more I do, the better I deserve to feel, don't I? Mathematically, it seemed airtight. I started working all day then for more and more of the night while Sieve would sleep. Eventually I just worked all the time. At first she loved it. It was practical that I was getting so much done and gave her more time to do other stuff. Sieve didn't have any complaints about that. It seemed like a win-win situation. Who needed to sleep anyway, right?"

"But you can only push yourself so far before you hit that point of diminishing returns, can't you?"

"Where were you when I needed to hear that back then?" the roach stuck her tongue out. "When sleep deprivation caught up with me, I started dropping things, tripping on things, bumping into things. I'd remember numbers wrong or do things in the wrong order, things like that. Sieve became annoyed with me and started questioning whether or not it was still in her interest to be my partner. I wanted to go back to sleeping, but I kept having to stay up to fix the mistakes I'd made during the day, hoping she wouldn't notice."

"Vicious cycle." The roach nodded. "What happened?"

"You know those big turbines they have in dams, they have those on Earth too, don't they?" The jackal shuddered. "Well, one time I was so tired while I was walking near one that I just kinda..."

Fran cringed. "Don't those have, like, handrails around them?"

Jackie looked at her grimly. "They do now."

***

"Darn, I'm dead!" Fran's best friend had exclaimed.

"You are?" They'd been sitting in the jackal's best friend's room as Fran watched her game.

"I may as well be," she'd clucked her tongue, "with the beating I took just now."

"You still have some healing left, right?" The jackal's best friend's character had still been on the move, she'd seen.

"Yeah, but I already had to use too much," Fran's best friend had gritted her teeth, struggling with a resilient enemy as she'd spoken. "It's too early in the game for me to have used this much."

"You can still get more later though, can't you?"

The jackal's best friend had shaken her head. "You can't get back enough by this point to be able to beat the last boss," she'd explained. "Not with how much damage you have to be able to take to beat it."

"But you're still playing, though?" Fran had asked.

"Of course," her best friend had grinned. "I want to see how far I can get."

CHAPTER 13: DIE A THOUSAND DEATHS

'Everyone has secret words that can save them.

Everyone has secret words that can kill them.' (Unknown)

"So they weren't slaves?"

"Not technically," Fran's best friend had answered.

"I'll be gosh-darned," the jackal had shaken her head. "Whenever people mentioned slaves, I'd always picture those people pulling the blocks to build the pyramids, you know?"

"Most of us do!" her best friend had admitted. "They weren't forced to do it as such, though. If they didn't do it, they'd just starve to death.".

"Isn't that just capitalism, though?"

"I knew there was a reason I liked you." Fran had grinned back.

***

"No, the worst time still has to have been the lava," Jackie decided.

"You fell into lava?"

"In my defense, I didn't fall, an albatross pushed me. I had it coming, but still," the roach shrugged.

"Wait, what?"

"It must've been a while back," Jackie furrowed her brow. "That volcano's been dormant long enough they've made a geothermal plant out of it by now. In short, the turbine was fast, at least," she grimaced.

"What happened with Sieve?"

"She was pretty mad at me," Jackie chuckled. "Putting me back together after that turned out to be expensive and, uh, she had to fish me out of there herself." The jackal shuddered. Against the horror of having known how final death would have been back on Earth, she'd never imagined a situation in which your last thoughts while falling to your death would have been 'Someone will be so mad at me!' It was... unsettling.

"That's when she left, isn't it."

"That hit me hard. She's partners with a rainbow trout at the water filtration plant by now I think. Having been able to work the dam with Sieve had been like this thing that proved I could finally fit in in the System, you know?" Fran nodded. "If I could at least have that, maybe not having food wasn't so bad after all."

"So without it..."

"I fell right back into food like a moron," Jackie shook her head. "It was like, why even try, right?"

"It's easy to start thinking like that," the jackal conceded.

"That's how Searchlight caught me with seaweed from the anemone garden."

"You stole it?"

"I went to get it myself in full diving suit." Fran saw Jackie's hands start knitting and wood-carving imperceptibly faster. "It's as inconspicuous as it sounds," she scoffed.

"I bet."

"That's how I ended up with the worst Enforcer I ever had."

"What does an Enforcer do, exactly?" Jackie nearly missed her mark with a needle, barely catching herself.

"You don't have Enforcers on Earth?" She missed her quantum translocator badly enough as it was.

"We have something," the jackal retorted, "they're just not called that. Do Trackers like Ghost take Renegades to space jail?"

"What's jail?"

Fran's jaw fell agape. "You don't have jail?"

"Maybe we do," Jackie replied, "maybe we just don't call it that."

"It's a place where our Renegades get locked up for their crimes," the jackal explained.

"They stay there?" It was the roach's turn to be surprised. "They can't leave?"

"The worse their crimes are, the longer they stay locked up, at least in theory," Fran elaborated. "They can stay for ten, twenty, thirty years, depending on how bad."

"Don't they have work to do?" Jackie asked incredulously.

"Some of them work from jail, but not most, as far as I know."

"That's wild," the roach remarked. "When Speaker, Robber, and Glew get revived, they'll be assigned Enforcers." Those had to be the parrot, duck, and glowworm pirates they'd killed earlier, the jackal gathered. "Most deals are informal, unless you bring in an Arbitrator to mediate, but that's the exception, not the rule. When you Renege on one, you lose the Commission's trust, so they have someone follow you around to make sure you pay them back what they're owed." When you can't go to jail, jail comes to you, Fran couldn't help but think. "The Commission can't afford to have people not working. Work piles up too quick." And it had to be on-site, so the Commission hired people to become jail, jail-that-follows-you-around.

"When you eat or smuggle food, whose deal are you Reneging on?" the jackal asked.

"Your deal with the Commission as a Citizen to let them use food to make shots, pills and, more importantly, to Revive us in the Chambers, as they see it," Jackie answered.

"How do they make you pay them back?"

"Planet maintenance, energy production, Cleaning, stuff like that. Someone has to do it."

"What if someone doesn't want to? What if she can't?" Those were two very different questions, the roach noticed. "What do they do?" The Commission treated them as one.

"Renegades have attacked Enforcers to try to escape. Enforcers make sure they don't try twice."

"Are Enforcers allowed to hurt Renegades to make them work?"

"Not technically. In practice though, if an Enforcer says a Renegade attacked her, says a Renegade tried to escape, that she had to restrain her..." she trailed off.

"What happens to Enforcers if their Renegades do get out of doing the work they're supposed to do?"

"Depends," the roach answered. "Sometimes they can't be an Enforcer anymore. Sometimes they even get stuck with an Enforcer of their own."

"Lot of pressure, isn't it?"

"Tough break." Jackie did not sound especially stricken.

"How does the Commission justify not having Enforcers work so long?"

"By making sure every Enforcer is enough of a deterrent that, in the end, the numbers still add up in their favor."

Fran blinked. "Are your hands moving faster?"

"Siren would say Drill and Yoke were fools," the roach went on. "They thought I couldn't remember rules, that I couldn't understand them, but not her, no, she knew better," she shook her head. "She said all I didn't get was how much breaking rules would hurt," she added, "and she'd make sure I'd remember that."

"What did Siren do?"

"She'd keep making me redo the work I'd done, she'd make me drop work I'd almost finished so it'd keep regaining interest, she'd make me do work she'd owed other people, she'd trick me into working against Renegades I'd worked with. She'd deny having told me to do work she'd told me to do after I'd done it, she'd tell me every mistake I'd made proved everything bad everyone had always known about me, she'd set impossible deadlines with no breaks, she'd insult me, she'd say she'd make me into an example no one would ever forget. Siren told me that I'd never escape from her and that, even if I did, it wouldn't matter, because after how she'd have poisoned the well against me, no one would ever want to be my partner again anyway."

"How did you escape?"

"I killed myself." The jackal was going to say something, but Jackie wasn't done. "Over and over and over."

"I'm sorry," Fran shook her head. "Do you need to stop?"

"People don't kill themselves a lot around here." The roach's hands were definitely moving faster. "Strategic reasons, I mean, sometimes. I used to know this smilodon who got stranded on the ice lake that one time, but like, not as a thing, you know?" The jackal nodded. "They bring you right back, it's expensive, and you remember it every time," Jackie stuck her tongue out.

"Why did you?" Fran asked gently.

"I wanted them to stop bringing me back on the grounds that what Siren was doing to me was ethically unacceptable. They said they couldn't do that because the System couldn't afford to make do without my contribution to it."

"What happened?"

"I tried to escape the System outright. Back then, I just wanted to be able to die far enough away that the Commission couldn't bring me back. They sent Macha after me to drag me back, and offered me a deal."

"What brought this on?" The Commission didn't strike the jackal as easy to deal with.

"Bringing me back over and over was costing them too much. Spacing out my revivals helped at first, but the work I wasn't doing because I spent longer dead caught up with it."

"What kind of deal?"

"My debt was... reassessed a bit after some of Siren's liberties with the truth came to light. I was set free for then. It never stuck to the point where she faced consequences, but the Commission did promise that, if I did Renege again, she'd never be my Enforcer again, for what it's worth. Macha volunteered to be my partner for a few lifetimes to help me reintegrate."

"That sounds nice of her."

"It really was, the more I think about it," the roach sighed, "especially after everything she must have heard people say about me by then." The jackal hadn't meant to touch a nerve. "I wish things had worked out better with her. That's when I had these put in." Jackie's antennae crackled as she knitted and wood-carved. "At first, they were just a way to save power for the ship. After a while, I got to thinking. The Commission may have had another reason for sending Macha after me, right? What if they didn't want me to find out that..." It still sounded crazy to the roach even though she was talking to an alien herself. "... there are other places in the universe than the System and its Commission and their rules, places like your world. Places I could live."

"So you tried to escape again."

"I really thought the antennae would make a difference that time." Nope, still wasn't funny. "Couldn't have made it that far without running out of power before, you know?" Current arced between the roach's knitting needles. "But Macha dragged me back again, she's partners with Ankylowatt now, and the Commission set me up with my very last Enforcer... Ghost."

"Wait, our Ghost?" But how?

"You know, it's funny," Jackie shook her head. "I must've died a thousand times, but of all the things I've been through since then, to this day, some of the things Siren said to me still - AGH!"

She chopped off her finger.

***

"So they didn't even care about the Mongols?" Fran had asked.

"Not at first," her roommate had explained. "They just wanted to keep their intellectual citizens' hands so busy building it they wouldn't have enough time to think. The Mongols were provoked by it."

"What didn't they want their intellectuals to have enough time to think about?"

"Probably about how bogus it was that they were being forced to throw away their lives building some wall," the jackal's roommate had theorized tongue-in-cheek.

CHAPTER 14: TRANSPLANT

"So she never got to finish it," Fran's best friend had told her.

"Halfway through," the jackal had shaken her head.

"They wrote the rest based on her notes," her best friend had gone on. "I hate that."

"You do?" Fran had tilted her head.

"If I died halfway through writing a story, I'd hate for someone else to come along to make it mean something else than what I wanted it to mean, you know?"

***

Light filtered down to the ground through the trees' branches in the grove around them.

"Hold still." You could see well enough to get around from it, but they still kept some more torchlight nearby.

"OW!" They did need good lighting for the kind of precision work for which they were known, after all.

"I said hold still," Glory chided her.

"I can't believe I passed out like that," Jackie grumbled to herself as Beaker reattached her finger. "I've finished jobs after losing an arm before." The doctor's head looked like a plague doctor's mask, but shaped like a dodo's face.

"When was the last time you slept?" Fran asked the roach.

"I don't remember." While she'd been out of commission, Ghost, Orchid, and her Earthling partner had taken her to the forest planet with the Trackers' ship to be healed.

"Most of our clients come here to get parts switched around," the bird of paradise opined, "not to get patched up, these days." Beaker never spoke. "How's the antennae?" That was Glory's job.

"Still cracklin'." The jackal had almost screamed when she'd first seen the trees. Good thing she hadn't. To be fair, a lot of Earthlings would've.

"Good, good." They were organ trees.

"It's good work." Heart trees, lung trees, liver trees, kidney trees, stomach trees, intestine trees, bladder trees, all with organs growing from their branches like so many fruit swaying in the breeze, ripe to be picked whenever the doctor would need some spare parts for one of her operations.

"They're supposed to last for a while, anyway." No brain trees, though. Brains were tricky.

"So this is where you got those," Fran gestured at Jackie's antennae.

"Why, thinking of getting some?" the nurse asked the jackal offhandedly.

"They're very good," the roach eyed Fran meaningfully while the doctor worked on her finger.

"I'm a bit low right now," the jackal explained, "but when I'll want some, I'll know where to look," she assured the bird of paradise.

"Haven't seen you in a while, come to think of it," Glory moved her attention back to Jackie.

"Is that right?" With the puffin and toucan to patch up on top of the roach's finger to reattach, the dodo had more than her fair share of work to get through for the time being, mind you. "I hadn't noticed." The nurse seemed to know when to hand Beaker which tools without a word.

"Staying out of trouble?"

The roach rolled her eyes. "Don't I always?" If it had been up to her, it would've been longer still, but she hadn't had the chance to make that call, what with being unconscious.

"Haven't seen you here with a partner in a while, that's for sure," the bird of paradise chirped.

"Thanks for reminding me," Jackie chuckled.

"You..." Glory looked Fran up and down. "Why you, I don't think I've ever seen here at all, have I?" The dodo picked up some more anesthetic plant matter that grew from her nurse's arm absent-mindedly. "Which doctor do you go to?" Beaker's work was known far and wide.

"I, uh..." the jackal struggled to answer.

"She just waits until they bring her back," the roach came to Fran's rescue. "I keep saying she should but, you know people," Jackie grinned.

"Ah, a lot of people are doing that these days," the bird of paradise acknowledged. "A worker's always more productive with all her limbs attached, wouldn't you say?" How long would the jackal be able to hide being an alien in a part of space where everyone had always been the same and no one looked alike, she asked herself?

"I'll remember that," Fran smiled. "You grow these here yourself?" Hanging organs glistened in the sun around them, the most natural thing in the world.

"They're coming in nice this year, aren't they?" The dodo nodded at Glory as she worked on her patient. "It's funny, isn't it?" The roach tilted her head at the nurse. "People are all so different outwardly, but when it all comes down to it, on a basic level, a lung's a lung, and a heart's a heart, wouldn't you say?" The jackal had never quite thought about it that way before.

"And an antenna's an antenna," Jackie concluded.

"That's the thing," the bird of paradise went on. "You'd think your body would be all like, 'This isn't chitin! What is this?' but, if it's done right, your body can't tell," she shook her head. "It doesn't care."

"Remember way back when there was that big showdown about whether people should have to pay again to keep extra features like that after being brought back or not?" the roach asked.

"How could I forget?" Glory winced. "We almost lost the grove." Beaker shuddered. "That would've been hard to replace, wouldn't it?" Groves didn't grow on trees.

"See, some Arbitrators didn't want the Commission to have to spend the time and resources to put these back together every time." Jackie figured she'd give Fran some context.

"Some Citizens said that, if they couldn't be brought back with them, they'd never get to do any other work, and they wouldn't be worth getting at all," the nurse added.

"Some Citizens said they gave people who could afford them an unfair advantage that they'd never be able to catch up with," the roach went on.

"And some Arbitrators said it'd motivate people to work harder overall if they could get perks they could keep in exchange for it," the bird of paradise finished.

"So what happened?" the jackal asked.

"We're moreefficient with add-ons like this." A lone spark flickered off the end of one of her antennae. "That was the deciding factor, ultimately."

"Now, more people come here to get parts switched around than to get patched up to this day," Glory looped back.

"Except for that panda who used to say we're not supposed to or something," Jackie recalled.

"Whatever her deal was." The dodo rolled her eyes. "Speaking of deals, how do you intend to pay...?" The roach gulped.

***

"We can still go get you another one, sweetie," Fran's mother had tried to comfort her.

"But I don't want another one, mom!" the jackal had cried. "No one can replace her..."

***

The dizzying heights of the Nest's filing cabinets towered around the mantises as they made their way through it to the paper wasp's desk. Kledon was a paper wasp through and through. Ghost and Orchid's faceted eyes could see her joints fold and unfold like origami as she helped them navigate the elaborate paper wasp nest that served as the System's largest organic knowledge repository. Kledon created the paper and tended to her library herself, untouched by electronic tampering. It wasn't owned by the Commission, but it was available to everyone, so some Trackers turned to it for leads, when all else failed.

Somehow, Ghost had been getting the sense that, in this particular mess they were in, all else was going to be failing them a lot.

***

"Can I ask you something?" Fran had turned her head to her roommate. "Even if it's a little weird?" The jackal had nodded. "If I ever die halfway through writing a story... Would it be weird if I asked you to try to use my notes to finish writing the rest of it?" Fran had stopped, and thought about it.

"You're not going to die anytime soon, are you?" The jackal had worried about her friends, after all.

"No, of course not, it'd just... help me not worry as much if someone indulged me?"

"I'm... touched you'd trust me to," Fran had stammered. "I'm not really a writer like you two, you know?" It wasn't really her thing.

"You don't have to if you don't want to," her roommate had reassured her. "It wouldn't have to be perfect, though," she'd smiled. "Just... anything is better than nothing, right?"

***

"I wish you'd left me to finish the job at the Revival chambers," Jackie had muttered.

"What?" Fran blinked.

"Instead of bringing me here." The roach didn't want to be rude but she had to say something. "Just for future reference, that's all," she tried to soften the blow.

"Without your finger?" Jackie nodded without a trace of irony.

"I... need to learn you might not have the same priorities I would." The jackal kept having to process just how different from Earth the System really was.

"Did I have time to finish the scarf, at least?"

Fran indicated Ghost's new scarf in the clearing near them. "You got a little carried away at the end there." It was several meters long.

"You wouldn't happen to need a few extra meters' worth of scarf, would you?" the roach asked the nurse hopefully.

"I would not." The jackal wracked her brains for a solution, for anything that could help Jackie pay for the finger she'd just had reattached.

"I've got it!" Finally it came to her. "I know how to pay you and Beaker back, Glory." It was thinking about just how different the System must have been from Earth that did it.

"I'm listening," the bird of paradise crossed her arms.

"How would you like to get something you've never seen before?" What would a world of Revival chambers where no one had kids fully entail, she'd asked herself?

"I've seen a lot," Glory raised a finger.

"I'm reasonably sure you haven't," Fran responded. "You're just the right customer for it I've been looking for, at that." If the trees around there were any indication, in any case.

"And that's worth Jackie's finger to you?" the nurse raised a leafy eyebrow.

"The finger... plus something else that's very common around here to replace it," the jackal bargained.

"I thought you were all out of everything?" the roach asked Fran.

"I was," the jackal replied. "This is something that's part of my body." Maybe her body really had grown something she could sell after all. "I've been meaning to get rid of it for a while, to tell you the truth."

***

"Do you ever feel like they did replace her, in some way?" Fran's best friend had asked her when they'd been watching her pets play in the living room one day. The jackal had stopped, and thought about it, looked at them, and thought about how she'd really felt about them.

"No, not really," Fran had realized.

"But you're glad you got them, after all?" her best friend had gone on.

"I love them more than anything in the world," the jackal had answered wholeheartedly. "They're just nothing like her at all," she'd clarified. "It's like the difference between loving a parent and a sibling, or between a, a..."

"... between a roommate and a best friend?" Fran had nodded. "Hey Fran, can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"If I ever die halfway through writing a story, would you be okay with trying to finish it based on my notes for me after all...?"

CHAPTER 15: CROSSWINDS

'Housewives should make $115,000 a year.'

"'But there are no pixies!' the housewife protested. 'There's no such thing as pixies!'" Fran's mom had told her this story more times than she could remember when she'd been a child. "'It was meee...!'" The young jackal had laughed. "But the villagers did not believe her," her mother had gone on. "Even after all this, they still thought the ritual had summoned the pixies, who had done all the chores when no one was looking."

It'd been Fran's favorite bedtime story growing up.

***

"You gotta stand up to her," Jackie said into her communicator. "Set some boundaries with her."

'Have you ever tried setting boundaries with Byte, Jackie?' Kiwi shot back.

Fran heard the trilobite yell 'Stop playing with your comm!' at the bird somewhere in the back.

"For well over a hundred years, Kiwi," the roach reminded her.

'I'm not!' Kiwi was speaking to Byte, not to Jackie that time, but the jackal heard that too.

"Kiwi's at Byte's treehouse because she owes Byte furniture," the roach explained to Fran while the trilobite scolded the bird, "but while she's putting it together, Byte's trying to rope her into fixing one of her technical problems, too."

'That's put together just fine, Byte!' Kiwi insisted.

"She's the one you helped with engineering problems earlier, right?" the jackal asked.

'No it's not!' Byte shouted.

"She's messing with you, Kiwi," Jackie frowned. "She's better than she was, but Byte's an expert," the roach turned back to Fran. "She doesn't really need - tell her to do it herself!" Jackie turned back to her communicator.

'She's saying it's not - I already built you a whole treehouse!' the bird rolled her eyes.

"Byte's lying about the quality of work Kiwi's good at to make her do work Kiwi's bad at," the roach stuck out her tongue.

'And a desk!' Kiwi added.

"Why would she do that?" the jackal asked Jackie.

'And a chair!' the bird finished.

"So she can set Kiwi up to fail so she'll owe Byte something else to pay her back for messing up something that's easy for Byte to fix anyway after that," the roach explained.

'How about some shelves, maybe a footrest?' Kiwi offered the trilobite.

"The thing is, Byte can afford to spend the time it takes to bring this in front of an Arbitrator - Kiwi, not so much," Jackie went on.

'I don't need more furniture!' Byte spat.

"I've always sucked at putting together furniture," the jackal admitted.

'I need this fixed!' Fran remembered all those afternoons she'd spent back on Earth struggling to put together Ikea furniture, always ending up with one extra piece that she didn't know what to do with at the end of it.

'I'm a carpenter, not an engineer!' the bird protested.

"I really respect Kiwi for being good at it, actually." To this day, there were still engineering terms that Jackie only remembered because the trilobite's insults about them had been so memorable.

'Thanks, hon!' Fran gasped, not having realized that Kiwi could hear her.

'Your furniture sucks!' the trilobite sneered. To this day, the jackal still felt like that extra remaining piece of Ikea furniture herself, not knowing whether she'd ever figure out where she was supposed to fit in or not.

***

"Just because I'm an anteater doesn't mean I actually eat ants, you know," Dyson narrowed her eyes disdainfully.

"I know that," Orchid assured her.

"It just means I could eat ants," she went on.

"If you wanted to," the mantis completed.

"I don't, though," the anteater replied flatly.

"Let me ask you something," the Tracker raised a clawed finger as she started pacing. "Weren't you involved in research into biofuels a while back?" Orchid tilted her head.

"That was thousands of years ago," she waved off. "They were messy and inefficient."

"So you're no longer involved in this research now." Dyson knew a question disguised as a statement when she heard one.

"Officer... May I say something?" Orchid gestured at her to proceed. "Eating people to turn them into fuel strikes me as a bad idea." May as well get to the heart of the matter right off. "The energy costs associated with doing that and getting away with it..." She sounded highly dubious. "Let's just say that, even if I could get away with it, you wouldn't catch me trying to crunch the numbers for this particular cost/benefit analysis..." the anteater pretended to look at her nails. "... again," she finished under her breath.

"Didn't you have an energy converter put in for it?" The mantis had done her research.

"I had that taken out centuries ago," she countered. "Beaker will confirm it." Glory would, in any case.

"Why is that?"

"Sold it for parts," Dyson answered. "Everything's so expensive these days, you know?"

***

"How did this happen?"

Jackie had just barely had time to finish helping Kiwi fix Byte's technical problem when Glory had sent the roach an urgent message on her communicator. "Sponge wa - AGH!" Jackie had come running all the way back to the organ grove.

"She was watering the Biting Plants for Sponge," the bird of paradise continued for her, "so Sponge could water my organ trees like she owed me instead." The mammoth's trunk sprayed water from her tank-like torso.

"I thought I - FFFUCK!" Beaker blinked at Fran quizzically. "I thought I could do it." Words like 'carnivorous' or 'Venus fly trap' would have been meaningless in the System. "OW!" They were plants that bit. "It s-s-seemed... easy enough." Biting Plants were the size of a person.

"I should've been there," the roach lamented.

"It almost bit her foot clean off," the nurse showed Jackie the extent of the damage as she spoke.

"Sponge is mad at me," the jackal flinched.

"I bet, she takes mad care of those things," the roach shook her head. "Grew 'em from scratch, pretty much."

"She kicked it good," Glory said understatedly.

"It ate my foot!" Fran exclaimed.

"Feet are cheaper than Biting Plants, my friend," the bird of paradise gestured at a nearby foot tree, "speaking as someone who grows both." She gave the jackal more anesthetic.

"I'm sorry, Jackie."

"Sometimes in life you just try your best to help someone, mess up, and end up worse off than when you started, you know?" The dodo nodded sagely. "Speaking as someone who has."

***

Ghost covered her mandibles with the back of her trenchcoat sleeve, clearing her throat as the short hairs on her chitin stood on end. The sawmill was a loud place.

"Sawtooth?"

The mantis' faceted eyes scanned the sawmill for the antlion's silhouette through the floating sawdust that permeated the atmosphere.

"I'm looking for Sawtooth!"

The sound of the Tracker's voice was barely audible over the sawing's din.

"Does an antlion work here?"

She switched to pheromonal communication, hoping to reach another insect, but her antennae flailed as the smell of sawdust also got in her way...

***

"If you look at it from a class perspective," Fran's roommate had said, "animals do a ton of unpaid labor for us." The jackal had nodded. "They got no workman's comp, no union, shit pay, shit conditions."

"And a shit retirement plan," Fran had chimed in.

"It's a shit deal," her roommate had summed up. "I wouldn't take it."

***

"Can you hand me that, Loom?"

The brontosaur, head among the treetops, had to reach all the way back down to hand Jackie her cutter. "Here." The roach measured the scarf twice, and cut once.

"It's the right size, right?" Loom wrapped the longest piece of the scarf around her neck casually, but enough to be able to tell it fit.

"Seems to be." Music to Jackie's ears.

"Can I get one of those branch trimmings you've been cutting off maybe?" The brontosaur made the journey back up and down among the treetops as quickly as she could, careful not to hit her head on the way.

"Done with that?" Loom didn't find scarves her size all that often.

"Here," the roach handed the brontosaur her cutter back. Looks like she'd found a use for those extra meters of scarf she'd knitted after all.

***

"Oh, it's for a pickax!"

Gasmask glanced at the look of dawning understanding on Fran's face as she affixed the handle that Jackie had carved out of Loom's branch to it. "Yup, off to the salt mines with me," the canary answered. "Don't like the salt desert much, but it beats gas mining," she added, testing the handle's resistance.

"Everything good?" the jackal asked.

"Seems to be," Gasmask assessed. "You needed some botworms, right?" Fran nodded. "Good, good." The canary dug around in her satchel for them to hand them to the jackal. How in the world did you tell a good botworm from a bad one?

"Have you used them a lot?" They did seem a lot more structurally complex than a handle.

"They work great here, just not where the earth's salt," Gasmask explained. "I know a thing or two about the importance of oxygen underground, believe me."

***

"Oh, you got it cut!"

Jackie handed Ghost her scarf, now the correct length for her to wear. "Better late than never, right?" The mantis threw it on then and there.

"Not bad." The Tracker lit up.

"Thanks for bringing me here, really," the roach told her. "Sorry about the stress." The smoke dissipated in the steam of the jungle around them.

"Eh," Ghost waved off, "we were coming here anyway." Jackie's hand twitched around her pocket knife.

"That case you've been working on?" The roach could've sworn she'd just seen a vine move.

"That's right," the mantis sighed. "You wouldn't happen to know where Sawtooth was when Kacey was killed, do you?"

"Kacey was killed?"

***

"You'll want to get as much of a random distribution as possible." Scattershot showed Fran the organ tree seeds in her hand. "It's a bit counter-intuitive but I'm sure you can do it." At least the rhipicerid beetle seemed nicer than Byte or Sponge so far. "I like to use these to spread them around while jumping in treetops," she indicated the modified multi-pronged protrusions on her shoulderblades, "but you can just eyeball it."

"Thanks!"

Scattershot looked her right in the eyes. "See these?" The jackal nodded as the rhipicerid beetle pointed at her seeds. "These were all grown in several different areas far away from here." Fran had worried she might end up like an invasive species to the System and its people. "That's good!" Maybe cross-pollination really was a better way to look at it. "You want that." Maybe the jackal would find a way to fit into her new environment after all.

***

"Why do they call it Earth, come to think of it?" Fran had joined Jackie in a clearing that the roach was working on so it could be made into a grove someday. "What is it more like, the rock planet, the forest planet?" Jackie was using a remote to control the botworms that the jackal had gotten from the canary. "What other planets do people live on where you live?"

"Earth is a rock, forest, ice, water, and desert planet, in different places at least," Fran explained. "There's only one of it though."

"Wow," the roach's jaw gaped, "that must be so weird."

"You know, I guess it is," the jackal decided. "What do botworms do, by the way?"

"We use them to aerate the soil underground so trees and plants can grow, you know?" Fran shook her head. "They handle like pollinating drones."

"We don't have those on Earth either," the jackal admitted.

"But who aerates your soil, then?" Jackie asked. "Who pollinates your plants?"

"Animals do that."

The roach furrowed her brow. "What's an animal?"

***

"Pets don't work for us, and we still take care of them," Fran's best friend had pointed out. "We take care of them just because we love them, you know?" The jackal had nodded.

"Why wouldn't people deserve as much, right?" Her best friend had pointed at her pets.

"Look! They're grooming their plush animal," she'd observed. "It's never groomed them, and it's nevergoing to, but they're good to it." She'd petted the animal, and smiled. "Good girl."

CHAPTER 16: SPACED OUT

When Fran had been a kid, she'd often stare out the window aimlessly while her mom would drive. "Come in, Houston." Every new building and landscape would become a new playground in which to let her mind wander. "Houston, we lost you." She probably couldn't have given you directions to and from a lot of the places where her mom would drive them, mind you.

"Huh?" The young jackal had startled out of her daydream. "What?" She'd lost herself in the watery sigils traced by rainfall down her side's car window just then.

"You look like you're off in space, honey," her mom had observed.

"You know," Fran had admitted, "maybe I am."

***

"Now, always pay attention to your radar here," Jackie showed the jackal. "You don't want to run into anything, do you?" Fran shook her head, glancing at the radar before moving her eyes back to the viewscreen. "You'll keep both in your field of vision when you get used to it," the roach hoped out loud. "You can just glance at it every five, ten seconds like this for now, though." Jackie had known how to fly a ship for such a long time that she no longer consciously thought about a lot of it.

"Thanks for taking the time to show me how to do this." The jackal had never piloted anything as such, certainly not a spaceship.

"What are partners for, right?"

The roach was just being folksy, but a twinge of guilt crept into Fran's mind as she spoke. "Maybe next time you're hurt I'll be able to pilot you myself, so you won't owe anyone anything." Jackie nodded.

"When you die I'll make sure to take you to the Revival chambers myself, so no one else can overcharge you for it," the roach offered.

"Uh... Thanks."

Jackie thought she was being reassuring. "That's another thing that makes partners a good idea - and dying a bad one, hold it steady there." The jackal didn't really want to think about dying at all. "I still can't believe you've never piloted a spaceship."

"I've never even been on a spaceship, Jackie."

"That just blows my mind," the roach shook her head. "I guess with everything on one planet, you wouldn't need to as much," she shrugged.

"I guess everyone would be able to pilot a spaceship around here," Fran assumed.

"Well, not everyone," Jackie countered. "I used to pilot this remora I knew places 'cause she couldn't pilot to save her life," she meant quite literally. "A lot of people don't own their own spaceships, but a lot of people who don't can still pilot, though," she explained. "You never know when you're gonna need to, you know?"

"So you sometimes end up piloting spaceships that aren't yours?" the jackal asked.

"Well, one time I did, uh, borrow someone's ship for a while, if that's what you mean," the roach admitted. "That's too fast." They slowed down, incrementally.

"You stole her ship?"

Jackie rolled her eyes. "What happened was, I owed this ichthyosaur some work when she died," she explained, "and her ship was still on." Fran could see where this was going. "Without my own ship, it would've taken me ages to get it done. That's a lot of interest. The ship made it a breeze." The jackal may have very well done the same, if she could've piloted. "I know what you're thinking but I knew how much she owed when she died, like, I actually looked it up to make sure. If she'd been brought back when she'd been supposed to, her ship would've already been back by then. She'd have had no idea I used it."

A spaceship was somewhere between a car and an apartment: most people who owned them lived and worked in them, they might get squatted when no one was using them, and you couldn't find a good one anywhere. Lodgings that kept you on-world were a bad idea for people who had to move worlds often.

"But she did," Fran continued.

"I still don't know what happened," the roach shrugged disbelievingly, "but when she came back to life and her ship wasn't there, she did not like that one bit, let me tell you."

"Did she sue you?" the jackal asked.

"She did drag me in front of an Arbitrator, if that's what you mean." Fran idly wondered how long she'd be able to live in the System before having to see one - and who would be doing the dragging then. "Hands on the stick."

"How did that turn out?" Justice in the System seemed to vary heavily depending on which Arbitrator you got, the jackal thought.

"I did end up having to pay her back for the inconvenience of not having had her ship on hand when she got brought back but," Jackie paused for effect, "that wasn't enough for her." Fran raised an eyebrow. "Speed up a bit." Oh that's right, the piloting, the jackal remembered. "No, she wanted everything I'd have owed her if I hadn't borrowed her ship, interest and all," the roach continued.

"That seems like a bit much," Fran gasped. "What did she do?"

"She tried to kill the Arbitrator." It really was a dangerous occupation.

"Tried to?" the jackal tilted her head.

"Arbitrators are hard to kill," Jackie shrugged. "You don't stay one for long without some unique means of persuasion," she euphemized. "Eyes on the viewscreen."

"What happened to the ichthyosaur after that?"

"She's still a Renegade to this day, as far as I know," the roach added offhandedly. "I think she eats people now."

***

"I hate cars," Fran's roommate would often say. "People can't drive" was a close second. The jackal's roommate used to work for minimum wage as a moderator on a picture-posting forum, to determine what was safe for consumption or not. "I wish there weren't cars." She'd had to see the most horrifying images that the world had to offer day after day until what it had done to her mind had forced her to go on assistance for acute workplace aversion. "I mean, I need a car." She'd needed the car to buy groceries, clothes, medicine, cleaning products. "It'd be better if there weren't any cars at all." After enough close calls with irresponsible drivers where her roommate's preternatural driving skills had been all that had stood between them and certain death, Fran had been inclined to believe her. "We don't need cars, as a whole." She'd been able to fix cars like nobody's business, with her intuitive grasp of complex systems. "We don't need pollution, road rage, and car accidents." She'd also understood the complex system of society enough to picture it without cars. "But why put money in public transit when you can make money from oil, right?"

"But you still need to use the means that are available to you to get what you need, don't you?"

"Exactly," the jackal's roommate had nodded grimly. "We don't need cars, but since we have them, I need one," she'd shaken her head. "See how that works?"

***

*FLICK!*

"Dex, old buddy!" Jackie's face had lit up right along with the channel screen where her old friend's image had just appeared. "It's been ages, hasn't it?" Fran honestly couldn't remember seeing her look this happy since they'd met. "How have you been?"

Dex gestured with her crinoid tendrils as she spoke. "It's been too long, Jackie." The jackal found she could 'read' some of the hybrid's 'expressions' through her body language, even though she had no face. "We should meet up sometime." You couldn't quite see Dex's feet onscreen, but you could still tell she had flamingo legs.

"We totally should." Over time, it had become one of those things that they always meant to do, but never got around to.

"I wanted to give you a heads up." The voice Fran realized came from Dex's lamprey maw sounded concerned.

"What's up?"

"Sticks and Stones came to see me." That got the roach's attention.

"Was it about food?" Her antennae stood straight up.

"No, nothing like that." Jackie's antennae seemed to relax.

"Was it about Kacey's murder?"

"Kacey was killed?" Dex sounded as surprised as the roach had when Ghost had told her. She'd quite liked the giraffe.

"That's a no, then," Jackie deduced matter-of-factly.

"They were on a full-on recruitment drive, if you can believe that" Dex explained.

"They wanted you to join them?" The roach laughed. "They don't know you at all, do they?" Dex may have been less public about her dislike of the Commission than Jackie was, but she didn't dislike them any less.

"There was something about the way they were talking about it, though... They're saying there's like way more Renegades around than there used to be, getting bolder, too. Getting desperate. Something's going down, it looks like. You might wanna lay low and keep your ear to the ground for a bit."

"Did they ask about me?" Without wanting to seem self-involved, it was a fair question.

"No, they're not onto that plan you were telling me about either, if that's what you're worried about," Dex waved off. "How'd that turn out, anyway, you try it yet?"

"Didn't work out," the roach sighed.

"Well, I'm glad you're still around, for what it's worth." The jackal could hear a smile in the hybrid's voice. "Who's piloting?"

"I'm her new partner!" Fran chimed in.

"Hey, I didn't know you had a new partner," Dex said encouragingly. "I'd love to meet her. When's the next Jamboree you're going to?"

"Dex, I can't even remember the last time I went," Jackie chuckled. "It ain't cheap."

"I'll pay your way through sometime," the hybrid 'shrugged'. "How about that?"

"Oh, I couldn't let you do that," the roach hesitated. "It wouldn't be fair to you."

"Fair shmair," the hybrid dismissed. "C'mon, when's the last time your partner's been to a Jamboree, huh?" she playfully insisted.

"Longer than me," Jackie admitted. Never, in fact. "Maybe sometime, sure!" Jamborees were the best thing the System had to offer, so it seemed fair for the roach to take the jackal to one after trapping her in it. "When I'll have time." Dex's physiology did her best approximation of nodding.

"Peace out, friend."

*FLICK!*

***

Fran's mom had been with her when she'd finally gotten her driver's license. The young jackal had passed her first written exam very easily. She'd also passed her second written exam just as easily as the first time the second time she'd failed the actual driving test. It was as if theory had come to her in the exact same way that practice did not. Finally, after months and months of practicing so that she could manage to get parallel parking down just right, with her new driver's license fresh in hand, Fran had driven her mom right out of the driving school's parking lot

into a fire hydrant.

"Hey, mom?"

The young jackal's mom had responded to her as calmly as if nothing had just happened at all. "Yes, dear?"

"I don't want to drive."

"Then don't."

And she never drove again.

***

"Stop the ship."

Fran complied. "Am I doing something wrong?"

Jackie shook her head. "Would you like something?" She gestured at her bag. "Maybe another mild stimulant, or something else?" She walked over to it to start rummaging through it.

"Oh, sure!" the jackal chirped. "Thanks."

The roach clucked her tongue. "I seem to be out of nutrient pills for now," she pulled out a solute syringe. "Will this do?"

Fran's maw gaped. "Um..." She'd never told Jackie about her fear of needles as such. "Uh..." The System may have made it easy enough to survive, but to thrive? "I don't..." The roach was putting two and two together.

"You're scared," she quietly understood. "Are needles bad where you're from?" It seemed like the most logical explanation.

"They're..." It seemed harder to explain than it should've been. "I'm just scared of them. I don't know why, honestly." The jackal seemed ashamed. "It's part of how I'm messed up."

"Hey..." Fran looked up to see Jackie put her hand on her shoulder. "We're all messed up about all sorts of stuff, aren't we?" The jackal nodded. "But you've had to deal with needles before, haven't you?"

"Y-yeah," Fran forced out.

"How'd you deal with it then?" The roach moved to the jackal's side to put her arm around her shoulders.

"Well, when I used to be a kid, I..."

"What's a kid?"

Fran became distracted by the question. "Well, a kid is..."

"I'm sorry, what did you use to do?" The jackal blinked. "When you were a kid, I didn't mean to interrupt."

"I used to fantasize that a giant... space... bug - why are you putting the syringe away?"

Jackie smiled.

"It's done." Fran liked this particular giant space bug. She decided.

***

"It helps to get away from it all every once in a while, doesn't it?" Fran's best friend had loved driving, especially at night. "I mean, don't get me wrong, on some level, driving sucks, I get that." By day, she'd worked at a minimum wage customer service job in a hierarchical, authoritarian office building that had taxed her sanity, or what had been left of it. "Just, on another level, it's still awesome, you know what I mean?" She hadn't driven to work or back from it as such but, after long work days, unable to sleep anyway, she'd taken the jackal out on long drives for hours in the middle of the night, letting out all the tension she'd accumulated during the day. "We mythify driving as freedom in a way that's kind of bullshit, but also kind of not, not completely."

She'd had no idea how to fix a car, she'd just driven.

"When I'd get into fights with people I lived with before, I'd go on these big drives to give them time to calm down." She'd talked with her hands as she'd driven a lot, driving with her knees, with no other cars in sight as if the road had been all hers like in a car commercial. "When my friends lived too far, I'd drive to where they lived so I could finally meet them." She'd take Fran to mountains, parks, rivers, junkyards, and rooftops, reminding them at night of the beauty of the world that they were a part of which they'd forgotten about during their work day. "The Greeks and Romans believed in what they called genius loci. They'd say places had spirits, like people did, and that you could talk to them..."

CHAPTER 17: AUTOPILOT

'If work is so good for you, why don't the rich do more of it?'

"Who said that?"

"Some famous wolf writer I think," Fran's best friend had replied. "The same one who wrote AWOO."

"I think that's AROO in fact," the jackal's roommate had chimed in.

"Whatever," Fran's best friend had waved aside. While Fran wasn't a writer, she'd supposed that, since they low-key wanted her to take over their stories if they couldn't finish them, she should've listened to what they had to say about writing regardless. "Kill the Angel in the Kitchen, Fran!" In the meantime, the jackal had to admit to herself that she hadn't personally minded cleaning as such all that much, for what it was. "It's the only way." Her mind would wander as she'd cleaned, the way it would when she'd worked at her cashier job and when she'd stared out of car windows.

"I think that's the Angel in the House actually," Fran's roommate had offered.

"Whatever," the jackal's best friend had dismissed. "The point is, you can be a writer or you can be someone's maid, but honey, you can't be both."

***

"Mind if I take over for now?" Jackie hadn't taught Fran how to land quite yet.

"Are we going back to the forest planet?" The jackal was already feeling better from the solute injection.

"Not as such," the roach shook her head. "We're actually nearer to the rock planet by now." Fran had been practicing piloting the ship for longer than she'd thought, it turned out.

"Do you owe someone work there?" the jackal asked.

"I owe people work everywhere, kinda," Jackie stuck her tongue out. "I think we should be able to get some more nutrient pills there, though." She didn't really mind solute herself, but Fran clearly did, so the roach figured she may as well do what she could to take that into account. "Enter the course in actually, I'll take over when it'll be time to land."

She still intended to teach the jackal how to land soon enough. "Won't they miss us back on the forest planet?" For then, getting the ship down without having it need to be repaired was more important than that.

"Nah, we don't owe anyone any more work there for now." Nothing urgent at least.

Jackie sat down near a wall not too far from Fran to keep an eye on her piloting as the roach pulled her carving knife and more wood out of her satchel to get to work on some caltrops. "What were we getting for it?"

Caltrops were dirty pool, everyone always said, but Jackie couldn't make them fast enough. It was always different when it was someone else. "Oh, I almost forgot!" The roach brought a third hand to her forehead as she dug into her satchel with a fourth. "Here," she handed the jackal what she owed her for the wallet. "It's your communicator!" she grinned. "I'll show you how to add people later if you want."

***

"Why not animals, though?" Fran's mom had known she'd liked most animals better than most people. "Why a museum?" The young jackal had said so herself. "Why not a zoo?"

"Because the animals are all in cages."

***

"Any luck with Sawtooth?" Lights flickered here and there in the swamp around the Trackers, as if they were trying to lead them astray.

"Nowhere in sight." The flicker of Ghost's lighter briefly joined the other flickering lights around them, almost indistinguishable from them.

"Maybe she had to be somewhere else fast," Orchid euphemized.

"That may be," Ghost conceded. "What about Dyson?"

"Alibi," Orchid shrugged, frustrated. "I checked it, it holds up."

"So much for that," Ghost sighed. "Do you think we should keep looking for Sawtooth or not?" The antlion may have been a natural suspect when a lot of ants turned up missing, but then so had the anteater.

"Do you have something else in mind?" Orchid asked.

"Doornail might know something," Ghost answered.

"You really think it's a fake?" Orchid frowned.

"I'm not sure, but it's worth a shot, isn't it?" Ghost asked.

"Is she still on the ice planet?" The ice planet was not especially designed with plant-people in mind.

"Fraid so," Ghost confirmed.

"Should I come along?" Orchid's offer was sincere, even though she hoped it would be rejected.

"You can look for Sawtooth if you want." They'd cover more ground faster that way, after all. "I'll track Doornail down." Ghost knew her well enough by then.

"Stay warm," Orchid warned her.

"I'm good," Ghost waved off, "I got a new scarf," she added, casually throwing it on around her shoulder as she did.

***

"The thing is that it went both ways," Fran's roommate had asserted. "People didn't just give women that work because they devalued them." Her main contribution to the household had been her work around the house. "If women had done a different kind of work, that work would've become devalued because women did it too, or instead." She'd had strong opinions about this kind of thing. "My granny was a janitor, she put my mom through med school, ain't no shame in that, right?" People honored conquerors and builders, but what was the point of conquering or building something no one would maintain?

"My granny was a housekeeper her whole life," the jackal's best friend had replied. "She could've worked if she'd wanted to but that's what she chose to do, you know?"

"Why is that?" Fran had asked.

"Because work is bullshit," the jackal's best friend had answered.

"That's fair."

***

The cliffside city took Fran's breath away.

The System didn't have cities as such, at least not the way they were understood on Earth. 'Cliffside city' may have been a bit of a misnomer that reflected the jackal's Earthling perspective, but it was the best approximation that her mind came up with offhand.

The canyon was full of holes like a great big piece of cheese, in a nutshell - a comparison that it also occurred to Fran that no one in the System would understand either, for that matter. Together, they formed a complex, three-dimensional network of interconnected tunnels carved into the rock itself.

People in the System tended to integrate the places they lived and worked as part of their natural environment as much as possible. Fully artificial structures were usually set up in space, not on-world. You had to be on-world to do maintenance on the planetary environment, but the idea of moving nature out of the way so that an artificial structure could exist in its place wasn't part of their mentality.

The jackal's time on the forest planet and on the rock planet was the first time in her life she'd ever been on a planet with no pollution. She filled her lungs with the crisp, clean air greedily, as if she was finally reunited with something that she'd been separated from for too long. Fran's blood flowed easier, and her back straightened from her usual slouch a bit, as if a great weight that she thought she'd gotten used to had been lifted from her shoulders. It cleared the jackal's sinuses like nobody's business.

The passages through the rock had been carved with curves and irregularities in them that made them look like naturally occurring rock formations. If the passage of time could've carved them itself, this is what they would've looked like. Fran had lived in Earth cities for so long that, she realized, by then, her eyes had become accustomed to parsing corners and straight lines more than diagonals and curves, but they seemed to welcome it as a refreshing reprieve, jarring though it may have been.

Crystals of every color, shape, and size jutted out of the walls at varying intervals, mined for every conceivable use under the sun. Deep down underground, instruments had been set up to take advantage of the energy generated by the heat from under the planet's crust itself. The wind blew unfettered, gathering momentum in the wide open space by the cliffside before it rushed in and out of tunnels as well, making some of them into wind tunnels.

An odd, plaintive song as the wind caressed the crystals on its way sometimes followed in its wake. Some of the wind tunnels had been mysteriously closed off from outside access, even though the wind could still get in and out of them without issue. Jackie explained to her that wind power generators had been set up in those tunnels to gather energy from the wind coursing through them.

"You don't want the full force of that wind flinging you right into one of those spinning blades at full speed, lemme tell you," she cringed in a way that the jackal was starting to recognize by then.

"Is there any way you haven't died?" That must've been a shorter list.

"I've never been blown up," the roach replied matter-of-factly. "That's pretty good, right?"

***

"It just rips me apart when people abandon them, you know?" Fran, her best friend, and her roommate gathering in their living room to watch her pets play had become sort of a ritual for them. "They live so much longer when people take good care of them."

"I used to know this girl who had a pet fox, but it was like rehabilitated and stuff, you know?" The jackal had gotten her pets from a rescue. "It could live a normal life among people but it wouldn't have survived in the wild, so she was like, don't just get a random pet fox but also don't judge me, right?" Every situation was shaped by its own specific factors, after all. "People would see the fox staring out the window and think, 'that fox wants out,' but they didn't really get foxes, you know?" There was no one-size-fits-all answer. "That fox was making sure no predators out there were getting in."

***

The cliffside tunnels didn't maintain themselves. While some crystals still had to be mined manually, people had also built excavating machines to perform mining for them. Sensors and gauges had been set up underground to keep track of the heat and pressure, making sure that any potential eruption, earthquake or cave-in could be detected well in advance so that plans could be made for containment or evacuation, depending on the situation. Jackie's job was to give these machines and the energy generators the preventive care that they needed to stay in operation and the repairs that they needed when they broke or malfunctioned. It was stressful work running around putting out fires all day like that, but someone had to do it.

The jackal didn't know how to fix any of that, but she knew how to clean. The stone floors had to be swept, vacuumed, and mopped, which seemed done relatively the same way in the System as it had been back on Earth. The very same machines that the roach worked on broke less often when they were kept clean, and they had to be dusted so that they wouldn't overheat. On a windswept rock planet, dirt would get everywhere if you didn't wage a never-ending war against its pervasive encroachment. Debris sometimes had to be cleared out of the tunnels. People came and went to and fro with their ships to fill them back up with power at the source, some of which asked for help with the generators when they did.

By the time that Fran would get to the end of the areas which she had to keep clean as part of her job, it was already time for her to go right back to where she'd started, on a good run. On a bad run, she'd run out of time before reaching the end of the cleaning she'd have to do. She'd have to carry it into the following run and work longer hours to catch up with it. Work that didn't get done now would become work that would need to be done later. No getting around that. Over time, the jackal learned to develop a series of tricks and methods to be as efficient as she could, to save as much time as possible so she'd avoid getting caught in a situation like that.

It was definitely work-that-went-away, not work-that-stayed - or at least work that required her to stay and to keep doing it for it to stay done. The same could have been said for the work that the roach did there as well. Machines in the System weren't built with planned obsolescence in mind because they weren't hampered by the same market-driven principles that plagued them on Earth, but they still broke down all the same. It just took them longer.

The two of them became like parts of the place where they worked, the same way small mechanisms become part of larger machines for them to work. In the end, the cliffside city ran on perpetual motion, just as Jackie's electric antennae did. The functionalism that underlied the circumstances of their predicament did not escape Fran. Their schedule there felt so packed that, had it been a brick wall, you couldn't have slipped a playing card between the bricks.

Neither describing the jackal's work there as easy or hard would've quite done it justice. It was like climbing a thousand stairs - each individual step may have been easy on its own, but they added up to a hard climb. Where the roach's work tested her skill, Fran's work tested her endurance. She tried to tell herself that one of the reasons for which the air of the cliffside city felt so clean to breathe was also partly thanks to the efforts of people like herself. It even helped a little, for what it was worth. It was no one's dream job, but it was still at least marginally better than work back on Earth had been, as far as she was concerned, in any case.

The jackal struggled to teach herself to give herself solute injections on her own, but she still kept chickening out to fall back on their pills after all. Old habits died hard, it turned out. One way or another, her body no longer had to spend as much energy processing solid food as it used to. It was exhausting having to move around making a physical effort all the time the way she kept having to, no doubt about it. Earth jobs that had meant you had to stay sitting down perfectly still breathing stale air all day, Fran had been utterly unable to stand outright. It had made her antsy, cramped, and restless, as though she could feel herself atrophy. Overexertion could be decidedly unpleasant, but her mind felt clearer than when she couldn't digest anything.

When the jackal had been doing it for long enough, it almost became second nature to her. She could almost fall into a trance while going through the motions, and trust her kinetic memory to see her through on its own. It could've become deceptively easy to lose track of time in a situation like that, if she didn't pay close enough attention. When Fran stopped and thought about it, she found that she didn't mind the passage of time doing something repetitive as much as she had on Earth. With a single lifetime, the unfairness of the fact that this would be all that she would ever get to do before she'd die had always hung over her like a Sword of Damocles. Here, she could spend five lifetimes doing the same thing, yet have her whole life ahead of her for anything else.

On some level, there would always be another lifetime. Of course, from Jackie's perspective, what that meant was that if you were trapped at a job you hated, you could spend lifetimes stuck at it knowing that even death could never wrest you from its grasp. Since they had to work at a lot of the same areas, the two of them would go by each other a few times over the course of their respective work days before reconvening at their end.

"Hand me that coil spanner, will you?" The roach was working on repairing one of the cliffside city's machines while the jackal jogged by her on her way from one of the areas that she had to clean to another.

"What, where?" Jackie pointed at it, resting on the ground by a few other tools near her. "This?" Fran grabbed one of the tools, scratching her head.

"No, the coil spanner!" the roach pointed at it more insistently. "That's a flux capacitor," she gestured for emphasis.

"What's a coil spanner?" the jackal had tilted her head.

"How do you not know what a coil spanner is?" Jackie asked, incredulous.

"I've never needed to," Fran explained. "I don't even know what a coil is or why it needs spanning," she admitted. What could happen to a coil that didn't get spanned? Who knew!

"It's next to the hammer," the roach elaborated. "Do you know what a hammer is?"

"Of course I know what a hammer is," the jackal rolled her eyes. "How could I not?"

"I don't know," Jackie shrugged. "Maybe you don't have hammers on Earth, how would I know, you know?" She did have a point.

"I guess so!" Whether something was obvious or not turned out to be more culturally bound than they'd thought. "I can't even tell you we don't have coil spanners, to be honest."

The roach's tone held none of the malice that her words could've been misread to imply. "What were you good at back on Earth?"

"Not much!" Fran admitted.

***

"[-but nobody's really getting in shape for anything-]"

*FLICK!*

"[-if you do it enough times, it should stay-]"

*FLICK!*

The comedy sketch that Fran's best friend and roommate had turned to had two friends talking to each other, a rich one and a poor one, while the poor one had been doing chores in her home as they spoke. The rich one had talked about the gym she went to while the poor one had said that she couldn't go to the gym. She didn't have the money because she was poor and she didn't have time because she had had chores to do, chores that the rich friend had paid someone else to do for her. The punchline was that, as the rich friend had described all of the exercises that she had performed at the gym, her poor friend had been performing exactly the same movements in the course of doing the chores that she had had to do around the house.

*FLICK!*

"[-some of these societies, anything you do mindfully in a distinctive pattern to reach a goal can be considered a form by extension, not just martial arts. For these monks, cleaning the outside - the temple - becomes a way of cleaning the inside, the internal self. It is both part of their training and what their training becomes for, without distinction. To them, if you accept yourself as you are, and do whatever you have to do, that's freedom.]"

"The thing about that is," the jackal's roommate had told her best friend, "it's admirable on an individual level, no doubt about it," she'd continued as the documentary's narrator had kept talking. "But if you build a whole society around the expectation that people will always forget themselves to do anything someone else wants, what kind of society do you have?"

"Hey, Fran," her best friend had turned to her as she'd swept and washed the dishes in the kitchen behind them. "Do you think you could spend your whole life cleaning in a temple like that?" Fran had looked at her best friend and roommate from the kitchen, having a good time watching TV together on the couch as her pets had played at their feet in the living room in front of them while she'd cleaned, and smiled.

"I could if it was a temple to something I believed in."

CHAPTER 18: SET IN STONE

"What does she do, exactly?" Fran's best friend's story had been about a serial killer.

"She never even touches them," the jackal's best friend had started. "She just talks to them. She learns everything about their lives, their weaknesses, their fears, then she says and does everything she can to make them kill themselves."

"She makes them do her dirty work for her," Fran had summarized.

"That's how she gets away with it. People act like words can't hurt you," her best friend had remarked. "I wanted to write a story to emphasize they can."

"Why does she do it?" the jackal had asked.

"She really thinks everyone would be better off dead. She thinks she's doing them a favor."

"What does your protagonist do?"

"Well, she tries to find the killer and stop her but, like... She also tries to get to the killer's victims first, to counteract the killer's reasons to die with her own reasons to live."

"But you've been having a hard time finishing it?"

"Yeah," her best friend had replied, "I've been scared I wouldn't be able to find the right words to make my protagonist win the argument."

***

While a few of Fran's work days on the rock planet did go by without her talking to anyone other than Jackie at their end, on others, people would sometimes talk to her as she'd work or while she'd be on her way from one location to another. When she tried to start conversations with some of her co-workers herself, though, she found that not all of them welcomed the interaction, brushing her off to return to their work. She first appreciated those who talked to her better. When it became difficult for the jackal to pry herself away from some of these conversations long enough to get enough work done in time for what was expected of her, she did begin to empathize with the others as well.

It wasn't always an easy tightrope to walk. Something or someone would pretty much occupy your hands or need your attention at all times. Her pleco fish co-worker, for one, was definitely more interested in cleaning than in talking.

One of the co-workers who would talk to her a lot was a hummingbird with a hamster wheel in her chest. Chime would always seem happy to see her, chirping at her arrival as though they were old friends reuniting after having spent a long time apart. With time, Fran realized that this was a reaction that the hummingbird had developed to deal with her condition. After having talked to Chime more than once or twice, the jackal began to notice that the hummingbird would bring up the same conversation topics that they'd talked about just a few days ago. She'd seem to forget conversations they'd had altogether so much that Fran started out wondering if she'd been imagining them herself.

The truth was that Chime really did forget a lot of what happened to her with the passage of time, even only a short time sometimes. As a response to trauma that had happened to her a long time ago, her mind had started automatically forgetting anything it deemed painful or negative in any way, without conscious control. It did this as a survival mechanism, to protect her from the damage that unpleasant memories would cause her otherwise. It was like a pocket with a hole in it, and memories would fall out. The hummingbird had started always acting as though people she met were old friends so they wouldn't be offended she'd forgotten them if it was true. She hoped they'd go along with it long enough for her to make a new friend if it wasn't.

Some of her partners had felt disappointed by the fact that she didn't seem to be able to keep track of how much work she or her partner would do, and had ended up leaving because they'd assumed she'd been taking advantage of them on purpose. Conversely, some of Chime's partners had realized that she truly couldn't keep track of how much work either of them did, and who had used her condition to their advantage at her expense to make her do more work while getting away with doing less themselves. The roach had given her the idea of taking a rough set of notes about people she knew and worked she owed on her communicator, to have it serve as her portable memory.

The hummingbird was just one of the jackal's talkative co-workers who she'd started out liking a lot, but who she'd ended up also feeling overwhelmed by somewhat. When she figured out how Chime's condition worked, she felt bad for having felt this way. Even though she knew intellectually that, even if she had hurt the hummingbird's feelings, she probably wouldn't have remembered it'd happened in a week, it still felt wrong for her to rely on it like this. Even if Chime didn't remember, Fran would, and that would be bad enough. One day, the hummingbird ran out of the work she owed on the rock planet and, just like that, her ship left for space without saying goodbye.

The jackal weirdly missed her, even though she'd probably not be missed back.

***

"You mean, like, disabled people with prosthetics and stuff?"

"Yeah, but I also mean that, if you extend your perspective wide enough, we've already been cyborgs for a lot longer than that," Fran's best friend had elaborated. "We need glasses, canes, dentures, pacemakers, hearing aids, all the way back to pirates with hook hands, peg legs, glass eyes, powdered wigs, and gold teeth," she'd gone on. "Technology becomes part of our body. If it's missing, it's like part of usis missing, you know?"

"I know I feel naked when I leave the house without my phone," the jackal had observed.

***

A long time before Jackie had met Fran, something had happened to her that she hadn't revealed to practically anyone ever since. When she'd been working in the mushroom forest on the forest planet, she'd sometimes found it especially difficult to resist the idea of biting some of the giant mushrooms when no one was looking. They were so big and some parts of them were so fragile that it seemed that no one would notice that she had just because a few small pieces of them were gone at the time. Still, the roach struggled and resisted for a long time, afraid that she wouldn't be lucky enough to get away with it, that she'd get in trouble with the Commission, that she'd get assigned an Enforcer to follow her around for lifetimes.

Kacey had been working as an Arbitrator on the forest planet at the time. She'd worked atop a great big mushroom skyscraper, its center hollowed out into a full-on tower with stairs carved out of mushroom. Once, after having had a particularly bad day at work, in a moment of weakness, Jackie had finally given in after all. The giraffe had looked up under a tall mushroom to find the roach curled up in its top, looking down with her legs braced against its stem, hidden from view from anywhere except the Arbitrator's exact location.

With a piece of mushroom in her mouth.

Jackie had felt a chill go down her spine when she'd heard Kacey's communicator go off. "Anyone there?" Their eyes met. The roach had stopped breathing altogether as the giraffe had paused before answering.

"I don't see anyone," the Arbitrator had replied, lowering her gaze to move on as if she hadn't seen anyone do anything.

***

"Ice, get the ice!" Fran's roommate had recommended.

"No, fire, get the fire!" the jackal's best friend had advised. Fran was gaming sitting between both of them on their couch, trying to make a decision while dodging monsters' attacks onscreen.

"You anarchists always set things on fire," the jackal's roommate had jested.

"You commies all live where it's freezing," her best friend had joked back.

"You mean like, Cuba?" her roommate retorted tongue-in-cheek.

"Ice is a coward's weapon," Fran's best friend had asserted.

"Why is that?" the jackal had asked.

"You pick ice so you can go slow. They can't hurt you when they're frozen. You can go right past them. Fire means they can hurt you so you better hurry but," Fran's best friend had gone on, "the cumulative burning damage makes them remember what a bad idea it was for them to try to hurt you for a long time."

"I think maybe you scare me a little sometimes."

"Thanks," the jackal's best friend had grinned back wickedly.

***

"OW!"

"Keep up, wimp!" The mosquito wasn't sure whether Siren had just dragged her along so that she'd hit her head on one of the petrified forest's petrified trees on purpose or by accident but, at the end of the day, it didn't matter. "Look where you're going!" If it had been on purpose, the blue jay had plausible deniability but, even if it wasn't, she clearly hadn't tried to avoid it all that much. She had no real incentive to.

"I can walk well or I can walk fast but I can't do both ma'am," the mosquito had weakly protested.

"Then that's what you get," Siren snapped back tersely. She rolled her eyes to the heavens with an exasperated sigh. The problem was that everyone else was too nice, because they were weak. If they'd been as unforgiving as the blue jay was, everyone would do everything better and faster everywhere, all the time. They'd understand what happens when they don't by now, Siren was sure of it.

***

"Byte actually tried to teach Chime engineering one time, if you can believe that," Jackie told her.

"Are you serious?" Fran raised her eyebrows.

"Well, Chime tried to learn engineering from Byte might be a better way of putting it," the roach stuck out her tongue.

"How well did that go?"

Jackie shrugged. "How well could it have gone?" The roach had also learned a lot of the engineering she knew from Byte, it turned out. "Every time Byte tried to teach her something new, she always had to throw in some insult along with it." It had taken Jackie a long time to disentangle the things that the trilobite did because it really was the only way to do something from the mere preferences that she'd enforced. "Of course, since Chime's mind would forget anything unpleasant that happened to her, she'd forget the advice she'd received right along with it every time." Regardless, in terms of raw engineering skill, Byte was one of the very best at what she did, everyone in the System had to recognize.

"And now?"

"Chime's the worst engineer, but she's the happiest person I know."

"What about you?"

The roach would never forget what a coil spanner was. "I'm an amazing engineer." She'd never forget where the trilobite had told her to put hers either.

***

"I swear they do it on purpose," the tardigrade had rolled her eyes.

"You really think so?" the deinonychus had asked.

"They rely on us completely," Grades had insisted. "They don't even try not to die."

Amber's black hole eyes had stared into hers. "Have you ever died, Grades?"

"It can't be that bad," the tardigrade had dismissed.

***

"What I don't like about these games is," Fran's roommate had started, "they pit your civilization against the other ones by default. You don't really get to experience what non-competitively building your civilization without interference, or by collaborating as much."

"What do you like about them?" Complex systemshad always appealed to her.

"I like that you get to experiment with how invention decision trees could've happened completely differently, and still have gotten successful results," the jackal's roommate had acknowledged. "We say 'pre-industrial' societies as if industrial was this natural direction for societies to go, but there's really any other direction a society could go, you know?"

"Wouldn't it be cool if you could speedrun a game like that in a way where it's like, if you hold right here for five seconds, you can clip right from feudalism straight to gay space communism without having to go through capitalism! You save, like, three hours of gameplay," Fran had half-kidded

"I wish someone had done that in the game we're in," the jackal's roommate had replied.

***

"Are there any books on this thing?" Fran was still trying to figure everything out about what made communicators different from phones or not.

"What do you mean?" Maybe this was one of those things that people just called something different in the System than they did on Earth?

"Stories, I mean," the jackal clarified. "History books, fiction books, any real or made-up stories you have, you know?" It may have been a good way to understand people in the System better to see what kind of books they liked to read either way, she figured. "Instruction manuals?" Might have helped her with piloting and engineering.

"What does 'History' mean?"

"It's stories about what happened to a bunch of d..." A bunch of what? Dead people? But what could be History where everyone who'd ever died was still around? "It's what you remember about people you know." When you wanted to know what had happened to someone, you looked them up and asked them. "... You've been giving me History lessons since we met, when I think about it." Suddenly what had appeared to have been idle work gossip seemed like History being passed on. Few in the System could afford to stop working long enough to read or write.

"Oh, good!" Jackie gave her a thumbs up. "Glad I could help." The Commission kept people's criminal records - Citizens kept their own channel logs and transaction logs for themselves. "What did you mean by made-up stories, like, lies people tell about other people and stuff?" the roach asked. "Like rumors?"

"No, no, I meant like, a full fiction narrative with imaginary characters, acting out a series of events that never happened, but that someone came up with." Jackie furrowed her brow. "Like, if someone wrote a story about a roach, but it wasn't you," Fran elaborated.

"But, everyone would know it was me," the roach protested, "I'm the only roach there is." The jackal hadn't thought of that either. "Who else is it going to be?" On Earth, a story about a jackal could've been about any jackal, but here, a story about a jackal would always be a story about her. "At the end of the day, it either happened to me, or it didn't," Jackie shrugged. "Although people who experienced the same events will sometimes have radically different memories of what happened, so it's your call who you trust, I guess." What would Earth have looked like if everyone who'd been shortchanged by History had still been around to give their version of events? "What are instruction manuals?"

"It's a book that tells you how to do something, like piloting or engineering, for example," Fran explained.

"Here, if you want to learn how to do something, you find someone who knows how to do it and ask them." The System had no corporations or money, so mass-published instruction manuals didn't seem to make as much economic sense. It seemed better to bargain with specific individuals in terms of what unique perks you could ask in return for teaching them how to do something. The roach's offers to the jackal to teach her how to knit, wood-carve, pilot, and repair now appeared to her under a different light as well. "We'll go to the Nest sometime. See these?" Jackie showed Fran two tools that went together that the jackal had misplaced before. "These tools are partners, like us. Make sure they stay together, okay?" the roach grinned.

Fran grinned back at her. That'd be easy to remember. The jackal still keeps them together to this day.

***

"I don't know if zoo or museum is the right metaphor for it," Fran's roommate had tried to explain. "I always wanted to be able to have enough money to buy this great big house where all my friends could live, where they'd never have to work again and they'd always be safe, right?" She'd assumed she hadn't been alone in this, but still. "When I write a story, it's like on some level, I'm creating this little world where all these little people who are kind of like the people I care about get to exist and, no matter how much time passes, they'll always continue to. They'll never go away. They'll always be there. Sometimes I just wish I could just hold everyone in the world in my arms at the same time, and tell them all it'll all be okay, you know?"

CHAPTER 19: SPARE PARTS

"Waste not, want not."

[FLICK!]

"[-'told me to be careful so the people who take the recycling out of the bags don't cut their hands on them,' the actress on the talk show had said, 'and it just hit me right then - how many of us even think of the people who have to do that as real people in the first place?']"

[FLICK!]

***

"I may have our ticket off this rock!" Jackie may have been skilled at the repair work she did on the rock planet, but she didn't care all that much for it, truth be told. "There's no time, walk and talk." The roach stopped Fran, already on her way out. "Oh! Grab one of those great big bags."

"New job?" the jackal asked as she complied.

"If you're up for it," Jackie specified. "You might not, I'm not sure." The roach was trying to get across that it'd still be okay if Fran wasn't, but on some level, it was clear that this was something that was important to her.

"What is it?" It seemed like a good idea to ask before agreeing or not.

"It's a Cleaning job," Jackie said ominously.

"I can do that!" the jackal assured her. "I do cleaning jobs all the time." What a curious concern for the roach to have, Fran thought.

"I don't just mean cleaning, I mean Cleaning," Jackie clarified. "Are you sure you're ready for that...?"

***

[FLICK!]

"[-Nations did not take the life of the animal for granted, but showed gratitude to the world for giving it up so that they could live. They hunted in cycles in different regions, giving time to the animals to repopulate their herds. So as not to be wasteful, they would use each and every part of the animal's-]"

[FLICK!]

***

"You have to get it all right, down to every last detail," the possum explained, "otherwise there's no point to it." The bricks in the ceiling and walls of the small dome around them kept it warm even though they were made of tightly packed snow. "One detail wrong, they can tell." The warmth didn't thaw the snow bricks either, the cold wind from outside refreezing them as they melted. "All your beautiful work's ruined, you know?" It had taken some work to get right, but Doornail could be the patient type, if she had to be.

"I guess you'd think of it like that, wouldn't you?" Ghost had not really been sure that her own work had been all that beautiful herself lately.

"Speaking extemporaneously," the possum saw it fit to add. "I haven't done anything like that in quite some time." Doornail had always talked with her hands a lot.

"Collider told us if it was a fake, it was the most exact replica they'd ever seen."

Lounging among her scattered electronics with her hands fluttering about, it could have been hard to tell if the possum had reached for something that could've been used as a weapon somehow, and the mantis' faceted eyes closely followed them. "That's what made you think of me, isn't it," Doornail exhaled sharply.

"We've known each other a long time, haven't we?" It had been quite a trek through the frozen wasteland for the Tracker to reach the possum's workshop. There was never any good spaceship parking nearby. Ghost had to make this count.

"If you were going to turn me in, you should've done it a long time ago." Doornail had known that the mantis had known that the possum had still been doing business with Renegades for a while, even though she was allegedly no longer a Renegade herself.

"Level with me, Doornail," the Tracker went on straightforwardly, "Is something deeper going on with Renegades these days?" Half-open machines with their cords and wires pulled out lying around the snow dome could almost look like bodies with their entrails pulled out, if you looked at them in the wrong light, Ghost couldn't help but think.

"What do you mean?"

The mantis lit up, smoke wafting out of the hole at the top of the snow dome that allowed excess heat to escape. "I feel like I'm only seeing the tip of the iceberg," the Tracker shook her head, "but I can't even guess at what's underneath." She felt like she didn't know enough to know what question she should've been asking. "I can't shake the feeling something big's going down that's connected to this case I'm working on somehow." It was frustrating.

"Look, Ghost... Can I call you Ghost, Officer?" Ghost rolled her faceted eyes. "You're not the worst Tracker I've dealt with. You tend not to mess with us if we don't mess with you. You've let me get away with things other Trackers wouldn't. I don't actually hate you, just don't tell anyone I said so. Point is, if I heard anything about anything like this, and I was gonna tell someone, at all... It probably would be you." High praise from the possum, as it was.

"I'm not going to turn you in, Doornail. I don't even suspect you personally, to be perfectly honest with you. I had to see whether I can rule out it's a fake because, if not, it could mean someone's found a way to stop us from bringing people back at all."

Doornail's eyes went wide, her jaw agape. "That sure has a way of gripping the mind," she euphemized. "I'll bear that in mind. Anything else I can do for now, 'Officer'?"

The mantis held up a clawed finger as she dug something out of her belongings to show it to the possum. "You wouldn't happen to know how to unlock something called a phone, would you?"

"A what?"

***

[FLICK!]

The coyote had chased the roadrunner like their life had depended on it. Every time, it would lead the coyote right off a cliff, where a fall that would've killed any mortal creature awaited. Yet we'd see the very same coyote get up to chase the roadrunner again in the very next scene as though nothing had happened at all.

[FLICK!]

***

"Oh my God...!" The roach still didn't know what that meant. The jackal's mind barely registered the hovering rocks and stones around the site of the fall, which would normally have captured her attention a bit more. Jackie's previous question to her made more sense to her then. It occurred to Fran that she should probably have asked what the difference between cleaning and Cleaning was before having agreed to the latter, but she'd made her bed so she'd lie in it, she told herself.

It had been a bad fall.

Seeing organs in a pristine state growing on Beaker and Glory's organ trees in their grove back on the forest planet had been one thing, but this was something else entirely. When Citizens died, the Commission would put them back together to bring them back to life largely from the same molecules that they'd been made of when they'd been alive. It had to be someone's job to pick up their remains so that they could be revived more conveniently. Typically, this otherwise unenviable line of work was chosen by Citizens who were in desperate economic circumstances, and used its shortcut as a necessary evil to dig themselves out of the hole. If they did this, they wouldn't have to work for pills on the rock planet for a while.

That's what Cleaning was.

The jackal had always been the squeamish type. Losing her mom had hit her hard. Her fear of the deaths of her loved ones and her fear of her own death seemed to go beyond what she observed in others. Fran came to think of them as phobias. She often couldn't help feeling sensitive to other people's suffering, even if they were people she didn't especially like. Having it happen to anyone at all was still too close for comfort to having it happen to her somehow. Intellectually, the jackal knew that things in the System were different, that the dead coyote they were Cleaning would be back on her feet in an amount of time to be determined by how much she owed or not. Her body, her stomach, didn't know the difference, though.

Despite everything, she forced herself to try to help the roach Clean the coyote for as long as she could. Fran made it about a quarter or a third of the way through before she threw up. She almost made it halfway through after that before she collapsed from shock outright.

***

[FLICK!]

"[-cavenging, it was believed that jackals escorted the dead from the Land of the Living to the City of the Dead. They were associated with the use of canopic jars, which were used for the preservation of the mummy's organs. Of course, in the real world, these noctur-]"

[FLICK!]

***

"Did I make it?" Fran asked weakly as she blinked her bleary eyes awake.

"I should've known better," Jackie looked down at the jackal with a look of concern on her face.

"I'm sorry," Fran scolded herself, "I've failed you."

The roach shook her head. "I shouldn't have dragged you along without warning you," she clucked her tongue.

"For you, Cleaning is something that just happens," the jackal understood. "It's just something that people do, that they've always done." When you couldn't do work no one else could do, you had to do work no one else would do - and she couldn't even do that.

"To you, where you're from, when you see someone like that," Jackie went on, "it means you're never going to get to talk to that person again, doesn't it?" Fran paused, and nodded grimly. "I didn't really think about that. I mean, you told me people where you're from don't come back. I understood what that meant intellectually, but, like... I get why you reacted so strongly after we fought the space pirates now, when I really think about it. This is a big deal for you. If I came from Earth, it'd probably be a big deal for me too. People are probably a lot more careful than we are about treating life like something valuable and fragile where you're from, aren't they?"

"You'd think so."

***

[FLICK!]

"[-'Kids these days have no sense of the meaning of life and death anymore,' the old lady on the street had said scornfully. 'It's from playing all them viddy games they play. They think you can just hit the reset button on everything. Now, in my day, when my sister Janet went to join my aunt Clara up in Heaven with-']

[FLICK!]

"How about we play something?" she'd asked, popping their favorite fighting game into the console.

"Thought you'd never ask," Fran had grinned as she'd happily grabbed a controller to play with her instead.

"Prepare to die!" And they'd laughed together in the face of death.

CHAPTER 20: A THOUSAND NEEDLES

"You're as cold as ice..." (Cold As Ice, Foreigner)

"I could give you some of mine, if you want." Fran's best friend had had a bad history with meds messing her up worse than she'd started out as, and she hadn't trusted them or the therapists who'd abused her trust enough to go through that gauntlet again for anything. "Share, share alike, right?" For the jackal's roommate, leaving home without her meds had been like leaving home without a part of her body that gave her back to herself, and having to go for a week without seeing her therapist had been like having to hold her breath for too long.

"Really, you'd do that?" She hadn't been supposed to, but then they hadn't been supposed to do a lot of the things they'd done around there either.

"Sure, why not?" If one of them had had easier access to HRT than the other, why not just level the playing field a bit, after all? "As long as you don't tell anyone." If communists couldn't share, who could?

"Who am I gonna tell?" Fran's roommate had handed her best friend a syringe.

"Hey Fran, you want some?" The jackal, while tempted, had held up her hand timidly. "Oh right, the needle thing."

***

"As it is, we have about three options in front of us right now." Jackie had to figure out what to do with the coyote's research, unclaimed by the coyote's partner, and what to get for the Cleaning work they'd done. "We can give it to Byte to settle the coyote's debt, my debt, even make her owe us a bit for what it is." The coyote had owed a lot to her more fortunate rival Byte, they'd learned. A lot of people did. "We wouldn't have to work for pills for a while so we could go to the water planet, it's more temperate than desert and ice for sure but," she added, "Byte would keep it for good. She's been trying to get her hands on it for a while, it turns out. The coyote would probably never see it again, and there's no telling what Byte would use it for."

There was always a tradeoff. "What else did you have in mind?" Fran asked her.

"Another thing we could do is, we could take her research as payment to keep it ourselves. We could sell it back to the coyote or to another scientist eventually, depending on whether we find another buyer or not. I'd have no idea what to do with it myself, but Byte wouldn't get it. We'd have to go work on the desert planet, not the water planet, and it'd have to be for a bit longer, though. We could get some pills but we'd run out faster. You'd probably have to take at least some solute to make up for the pills that we wouldn't be able to get sooner."

"And our last option?" the jackal tilted her head.

"We could give the coyote back her research right now, and have her owe us something to be determined at a later time, when she'd be able to pay us back. Byte wouldn't get it either, but we'd have to work on the ice planet. We would get no pills at all on the ice planet so you'd have to bite the bullet and go full solute as soon as we'd run out of the pills we have right now." Fran liked being warm better than being cold, and especially liked the idea of pills better than solute. She also liked the coyote a lot better than Byte already, which did go a long way.

"What is her research, anyway?"

"Anti-grav with a neural interface."

"Do you think she'd let us use it later if we gave it back to her now?"

"Maybe after she runs it through a few more tests," the roach said understatedly.

***

"Do you think you need to have done something to know whether you'd like it or not?" Fran's best friend had been aro, but not ace.

"People say don't knock it til you've tried it, but then I don't need to stick my fingers in a car door to know I wouldn't like that either, you know?" The jackal had been ace and aro.

"There is that." It wasn't something they'd have talked about with just anyone.

"So you've never thought about it?" Fran's best friend had asked.

"I don't know," Fran had shrugged. "It just seems like another one of those things I wouldn't be good at, like driving or cooking or machines or furniture. I'd find a way to trip and fall or something," she'd chuckled.

"I never want people I'm with to see me when I'm not at my best," the jackal's best friend had explained. "I can be at my best for maybe a couple of dates a year... not every day."

"You could always... bring people back here to sleep, if you want. We wouldn't mind."

"Oh God no! I mean, thank you! But no." Fran had looked at her askance. "I don't want those people in my house!" She'd gestured at dirty dishes in the sink. "I don't want them to see how I live." The jackal had laughed.

***

The waves came. That much was always for sure. The waves always came. That's what the wave power generators were for.

"Actually, Officer, I haven't had an Enforcer for quite some time now," the ichthyosaur told her. "I haven't been a Renegade for a while." Orchid could've fought well enough in the water, if she'd had to - she was part plant, after all - but still found the wide expanse of water around them vaguely unsettling somehow. The suspect would definitely have been more maneuverable in it - and she did have those jaws. "I learned my lesson," the ichthyosaur chuckled. Her last Enforcer had been particularly unpleasant.

"What lesson was that?" The ichthyosaur gave the mantis a look.

"That trying to kill an Arbitrator is a bad idea," she answered understatedly.

"I'm looking for someone who hasn't learned this lesson quite yet," the Tracker euphemized.

"Someone took down Amber?" Even if the ichthyosaur hadn't been the culprit, something in her tone suggested she wouldn't be mourning the deinonychus anytime soon, if she had been.

"Why would you think that?" Amber had died before, but not often.

"If it's not Amber, why ask me?" When the ichthyosaur had tried to eat the deinonychus with her maw, Amber had eaten her with her eyes. They were black holes.

"I thought you might help me understand her motivation." Or sell her out if you do happen to know who did, but of course Orchid wasn't about to say that. She didn't have to, not really. "Why kill an Arbitrator at all, knowing she'll be brought back?" The mantis wasn't so sure that Kacey would be brought back by that point herself, but still.

"Leverage." The wave-capturing rig under them tilted from side to side as the ichthyosaur spoke.

"Leverage?" The Tracker's antenna drooped as she tilted her head, almost in time with the platform.

"To some Citizens, it seems like Arbitrators have a lot of sway over how we live," the rig swayed on as the ichthyosaur spoke, "while we have none over them at all."

The wind blew Orchid's antenna in front of her faceted eye. "And this fixes that?" She moved her antenna back to where it went.

"People kill Arbitrators because they'll come back, Officer. It's supposed to be a deterrent. They want to create an experience so unpleasant for that Arbitrator that they'll change the whole way they arbitrate just so it'll never happen to them again. They're hoping to use the means they have to make Arbitrators more fair."

"That's what you tried to do, isn't it?" the mantis asked.

"For all the good it did me," the ichthyosaur chuckled. "I tried to rock the boat and saw what it got me. Now I don't make waves anymore, I just..." she gestured at their surroundings, "wait for the waves to come to me," she grinned toothily.

"Do you know anyone who thought Kacey could've used being made more 'fair'?"

"No." No hesitation. "Everyone liked Kacey, as much as it's possible to like an Arbitrator, I mean," she tempered. "She was fair." Interesting.

"Have you seen Sawtooth?"

"Who?"

***

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[-emists associated sublimation with the Libra, the scales of justice that measure our actions. In physics, sublimation is when water molecules get so cold that they evaporate into thin air. For psychologists, sublimation is when we want something but, since we can't get quite the way we want, we end up settling for the next best thing instead. In some religious orders, the practice of celibacy meant to repurpose-]

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"People think I'm cold. You ever get that?"

"All the time. It's the oldest trick in the book, innit? If you want someone to do something they'd rather not, you tell them there's something wrong with them for not wanting to. You don't want something wrong with you, do you?"

"I'm a warm person, aren't I?"

She'd put her hand on her forehead.

"You're about 98 degrees."

***

The ice planet took some getting used to.

Fran's job on the ice planet became to shovel snow around an ozone plant where it turned out that Jackie had died of ozone poisoning a long, long time ago. It wasn't possible for most people to go where they needed to get to without having to go through the obstacle that going outside represented on its surface. They had to be able to come and go from their ships, whether as part of their work or between their shifts, depending on the situation. Furthermore, if the snow and ice had been allowed to accumulate unchecked on the roof, it would have eventually been irreparably damaged by its mass. The snow fell constantly, relentless in its onslaught. The jackal quickly learned never to leave her icepick too far from her shovel either.

Again, it was definitely work-that-went-away, not work-that-stayed. Her first footsteps in the snow from when she'd start shoveling in the morning were already covered with snow by the time she'd be done with her shoveling in the evening, as surely as if she'd never been there at all. If anything, it was not so different from what shoveling her mom's driveway or scraping ice off her best friend's car and her roommate's car during winter had been like back on Earth, just a lot more intensive for much longer than that. For some reason the way that Fran had felt about being out in the cold had done a complete 180 sometime in her late teens or early adulthood.

She'd never been able to figure out if it'd been a metabolic thing, a psychological thing or some admixture of the two, but it'd been a thing she'd had to deal with, that had been a fact. As a child, she'd often chosen to go out in wintertime dressed much more lightly than everyone around her, despite her mother's concerns that so much cold without enough warm clothes might not have been good for her. At worst the young jackal hadn't felt the cold as much as others seemed to and, at best, she'd enjoyed it, the way she'd enjoyed walking in rainfall. She'd had no real sense of death, and the cold had felt like something refreshing that would, at worst, preserve her like a relic from the stone age that could be thawed later like in the movies.

She'd imagined that being frozen must have been like being turned into a great big piece of ice cream.

Death by fire had seemed a lot more final to Fran than dying of cold had seemed. She could have imagined zombies more easily than she could have imagined ghosts. A body that had been buried in the ground had given her that vague impression that it could still rise up somehow, but a body that had been cremated had seemed just gone, irretrievable. In this way, the jackal had perversely understood the motivations of the pharaohs who'd insisted on being mummified so that their bodies would be preserved until they could be resurrected. Though she did not believe it to be true, the psychology behind it made sense to her. Something intact could at least come back in theory. It was always more expensive to come back from being vaporized.

And being remembered the way you were always made you exist for just a little longer.

In her late teens or early adulthood, she'd finally internalized that death by fire or death by cold had still been death, something that people only came back from in the movies but not in real life regardless of the way they died. Around the same time, Fran had, paradoxically, progressively developed a heightened sensitivity to the cold compared to most people around her. She'd wondered if there could've been a psychosomatic element to it, but she'd also known that she'd been in the right age range to have developed Seasonal Affective Disorder. She'd dressed with more and more layers on top of each other each winter, her only armor against the encroaching enemy. Jackals were desert creatures, not tundra dwellers.

The cold did something to your body, like a preview of what rigor mortis must've felt like. It was like the wind becoming a maw for it to bite with, seizing you like a vise. It was like a thousand needles forcing their way through your skin at the same time, injecting their paralysis into you. The body grew cold when you died, so we huddled for warmth, to cling to life.

She'd begun to dread winter's arrival earlier and earlier each year, and she'd spent it looking forward to summer's return more and more as well. When she'd been in her early teens, she'd often used to get up in the middle of the night to start shoveling the snow out of her mom's driveway just because she hadn't been able to sleep anyway, so she'd figured she may as well get something done. Fran had always wanted to stay in bed longer in the morning and to stay up longer in the evening. It had been as though she'd always been out of phase with everyone around her. Delayed sleep phase syndrome was a thing, and night shifts had become easier for her.

While the ice planet did remind the jackal of what she'd imagined that the Arctic and the Antarctic must have been like back on Earth, there were also notable differences between them. For instance, on Earth the poles would have had just one very long day for half the year and one very long night for the other half. She couldn't begin to imagine what it could've been like to try to adapt to something like that. On the ice planet, the day/night cycle was the same as it was on every other planet in the System. It was just as cold all year round, without seasons to speak of.

The roach fell back on her knitting needles and yarn so she could use the clothes she'd make as currency. Headbands, hats, scarves, gloves, socks, and coats were valuable commodities that wore out quick when you had to use them often. When you often had to be careful not to slip on ice and to climb over snowbanks, your whole day could turn into an obstacle course, and the wear and tear could take its toll on them.

She also sewed up a few people's winter clothes that had been damaged but that they didn't want to replace outright. Fran's physical exertion as she shoveled kept her a bit warmer than if she'd stood still for what it was worth, but the prolonged exposure to the cold would also put a strain on her joints. One night, Jackie offered the jackal an option that might help loosen up Fran's stiff articulations.

"A firefly I used to work with showed me the way here one night when I used to work here on the ice planet a long time ago," the roach explained as the two of them sat facing each other in the secret hot springs that she'd taken the jackal to.

"That was nice of her." You'd have thought it'd have been too cold to get undressed at all in the midst of the frozen environment, but the area they were in was shielded enough from the wind by its location that the ambient heat from the bubbling surface around them still predominated.

"You know, I guess it was." An aurora borealis shimmered overhead like a curtain hiding them from the rest of the world. "You want to be careful with this place because we don't get time off to come here, you know?" They had both had to accept to give up a few hours of sleep to be able to indulge in the hot springs. Another tradeoff. "So if you get hooked on coming here too many nights, you end up sleepwalking through your job as surely as I did back at that dam I was telling you about that time, you know?"

Fran had hesitated to get disrobed briefly. "I see what you mean." Even though there were no nudity taboos in the System as such, she'd become used to worrying what people would think of her body, especially before her little trip under Beaker's knife had made it more her own. "It was nice of you to take me here, too." It occurred to her that no one had ever seen anything like what she'd been like before then in the System before she'd shown up, though.

"Don't mention it." As far as Jackie was concerned, every jackal must've looked like what Fran looked like. What other point of reference would she have had?

"Oh man!" The jackal wriggled her toes, stretched out in the water as her muscles released much of the tension they'd accumulated over the past few days. "That's so nice."

"What's a man?" A geyser chose that moment to erupt somewhere nearby, evocatively, one might have said.

"A miserable pile of secrets."

"What?"

***

"What makes something a relationship to you?" Fran's roommate had been ace, but not aro.

"Without the obvious, you mean?"

It had seemed better for the jackal to ask than to assume. "Well, it's probably a bit different for everyone, right?" Where did love end and friendship begin?

"I guess so!" Fran's roommate had granted. "Some of us cuddle but some of us don't. For some of us who live together, it means if one moved away, the other would move with them, but then, some of us are in long distance relationships, though. For some of us it's the one person more important to you than everybody else - but some of us are poly too, though. For some of us it's someone with who 'my money' becomes 'our money', someone whose survival becomes tied to yours. For some of us, it's someone you'd try to help out of anything even if they couldn't help you back."

"And for you?" the jackal asked.

"Someone whose survival is more important to you than yours. Someone you've forgotten how to live without. Someone you'd follow to the ends of the Earth."

***

"Hey, Ghost!" The firefly appeared on Ghost's communicator viewscreen. "Uh, Officer, I mean." People kept forgetting to call her that.

"Dobson! What's up?" the mantis asked.

"You..." The breadth of what she had to say made her pause. "You better get down here." Dobson's words flowed easily, under most circumstances.

"What happened?" The Tracker was on the move.

"There was an avalanche." The firefly's body flickered nervously.

"Did someone die?"

Dobson shook her head. "That's the thing, Ghost." She was too shaken to correct herself that time. "She should be, but she's not. I've never seen anything like it." When she did talk, she talked fast. "I don't know how to even put it, it might be easier to just show you." There was a remote possibility it could've been a trap, but Ghost was trained to deal with that. "You better get down here."

"I'm on my way," the mantis assured her, a cig dangling from her mandibles as she tightened her scarf and trenchcoat around her on her way. The avalanche had unearthed something, it turned out, revealing the way through a snowy mountainside into a secret ice cavern hidden inside of it. The body's silhouette was blurry through the surface of the ice in which it had been frozen solid but, if you knew what you were looking for, it was still unmistakable.

It was Sawtooth.

***

Fran's heart had raced as though it had been trying to escape from her chest.

The bus had been packed to standing only, pressed on every side by strangers as far as the eye could see. Every hair on her body had been standing on end. In her mind she'd known she could breathe in theory, but her body had stopped doing so on its own, forcing her to think about taking every breath she took, as if it could've been her last. The jackal had felt a tension in her chest, like a knot she couldn't untangle, squeezing her heart as surely as her body had been squeezed by the people around her. If anyone in the mass of people everywhere had wanted to rob, grope or hurt her, she hadn't been altogether sure she'd have been in a situation to do anything about it. It'd had a way of gripping the mind.

Her anxiety, claustrophobia, and touch aversion had been spiking through the roof, bouncing around their pressure cooker with no way out. Fran had been torn between wishing people would see how badly she'd been doing so someone would let her sit down, and afraid that someone would notice to take advantage of her moment of weakness. It hadn't been until she'd heard a baby start crying up front that she'd realized she'd gone from holding her breath to hyperventilating without noticing. There had been so many of them against only one of her, hardly a fair fight. The jackal had striven to remember her mother's advice, slow, deep breaths, in through the nose, how did the rest of it go again?

'If only I'd never existed, I wouldn't be getting in the way like this.'

It had been when she'd felt those invisible spikes in her neck, shoulders, face, and chest like so many syringes shooting more adrenalin into her bloodstream than she could handle that she'd known she'd been having a full-on panic attack. She'd lost all sense of time. Fran had always been on this bus. She would always be on this bus. Somehow, she'd finally reached her stop and staggered off the bus to shamble home in shame.

The jackal's pets had rushed to her side the second she'd stepped through the door, running across the room for their emergency rescue. They'd almost run right into her and into each other on their way in their haste to be near her. On the bus she'd been one in a hundred and may as well not have existed. To her pets, she'd been the one that mattered, and it was all the others who may as well not have existed. Fran had almost broken down in tears, not just shaken by what had happened to her, but moved by their devotion. They'd come to her as though it'd been her touch that would save them from something even though, to her, it'd really been their touch which had been saving her.

Her touch aversion had always been worse before she'd gotten pets. The jackal had always felt like someone had been trying to get something from her without anything in return, without being able to do anything about it. With their help, she'd become able to push her way past it sometimes, with people she'd liked, when the situation had called for it. When they'd licked her, rubbed their faces on her, pressed against her, put their paws up on her side or climbed in her lap, her body had felt as though she'd been swimming in a warm bath of endorphins, washing the world clean off from her. It had taken them to teach her that touch could heal, without any ulterior motive, a simple expression of affection.

Here Fran had no longer been a piece of meat on a conveyor belt but felt restored to a truer, nobler purpose. They'd kept her alive as surely as she'd kept them alive. What purer expression of love could there be?

CHAPTER 21: THE MIND KILLER

"Even nothing is something." (Jerry Seinfeld)

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['-ment, 'void,' while it's sometimes compared with the Greeks' 'aether,' is also quite distinct from it in its own way. It connects with the importance of space, silence, everything that shines by its absence, from the black void of outer space to the spaces between words that make them possible to understand. The best defense, it was argued, could be absence, not to be there, to get out of the way. As their fifth element, it was also associated with one of the five directions of attack. When they say that 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form,' what they mean is they-']

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['-never wanted the cockroach to be shown. They hoped the unresolved tension between the literal and metaphorical would give the story more resonance. The important part, the part the reader was supposed to focus on, was that being unemployed made the protagonist feel like noth-']

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['-hing house centipedes and spiders do is harmful as such and they help control the population of bugs that are, it's best to just ignore them and accept that-']

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['-atheists have to do all of their bragging ahead of time-']

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***

Work on the desert planet turned out to be very different from what work on the ice planet had been like in some ways but also very similar to it in some others. Fran found it easier to tolerate than the ice planet had been, in any case, at least at first. For one thing, it wasn't quite as hard to get pills compared to solute on the desert planet, which meant fewer injections and less stress. For another, it was definitely warmer and, even though days were way too hot for anything that could've been called comfort as such, she would still have always taken them over the alternative, if she'd had to choose. She was a jackal through and through. She felt like she could soak up sunlight like a plant at times. It would've been too dry for most plants, though.

Nights could be almost as cold as days could be hot, at that. People mostly thought of the desert as hot as part of how they usually thought of day more than they thought of night, but really, the desert just had a lack of resistance to whatever came at it. It was just like anything else, only moreso. Like a thermos, it could keep cold cold and warm warm - it didn't need to know which was which. It reminded her of the surface of the moon. At night, Fran's dark fur almost seemed to merge into the starry night sky around it sometimes, as though a part of space had been snatched up from above to be brought down to earth as her. It was sure dark enough to draw the sun's heat to it, conversely.

Of course Jackie had died of heat stroke working there a few times. She'd died in quicksand more than once. Heck, she'd even been burned to a crisp by that very same sunlight concentrated through a giant pane of glass - it was a long story. How hadn't the roach died by now? (She knew that of course - she'd never been blown up)

Jackie worked in a glass blowing plant run by a blowfish. In the System, not just the different technology but also the different way the economy worked made it possible for glass blowing to still exist on a wider scale. There was no shortage of sand to turn to glass around, that much was for sure. Glass blowing turned out to have been another one of the many skills that the roach had picked up over her centuries in the System, even though she used it less often. Knitting needles and a wood carving knife were easier to carry around than glass blowing material, for one thing. Demand for it could shift unpredictably. You could trade blown glass with scientists, and large quantities of it would get shipped to the water planet for its undersea bubble cities.

The jackal ended up being assigned to help lay the bricks for what was going to become one of the walls for a building that was being built near where Jackie worked. Like some of Fran's previous jobs, it could seem a lot easier in theory than it was in practice. It was "only" a matter of putting down one brick after another superficially - but it was a lot of bricks, for a long time, under a sun that felt hotter the longer you worked there. It was easy for the jackal to imagine just how much solar power Macha could've stored up in her leathery wings working there before. Again, she caught herself wishing she could've had something like that put in herself. Something that could've formed a connection with her surroundings to her advantage.

It was one-blocking it, just like in gaming. How do you build a pyramid? One block at a time. At least it was finally work-that-stayed.

As she'd worked laying bricks in the hot desert sun, Fran's mind drifted back to the earliest bricklayers who had first built the pyramids ages before she'd ever been born. (Had people in the System ever been born? How... how far back did their memory go?) She knew that, conceptually, the pyramids had always been seen as this symbol of the grandeur of the rich people that they'd been built for. Personally, she thought they said a lot more about the laborers who'd built them themselves. While the jackal knew they'd done so under a form of duress, not as an expression of some creative drive, still, they'd persevered, and they'd made it to the end of the thing. She respected that.

Most Earthlings contemplated the majesty of a bygone era when they'd looked at pyramids today. As someone who'd grown up wanting to work in a museum, she'd thought about this kind of thing extensively sometimes. For a moment, Fran imagined what the pyramids must have looked like to the people who'd looked at them after they'd just finished building them themselves. Certainly some part of them must have resented the pyramids terribly, these structures that they'd sacrificed so much of their lives to build that some of them had not survived. Still, the jackal wondered if she'd have derived some twisted pride from it, looking back defiantly at these things that had tried to kill her but that she'd finally survived building after all.

'Goddammit, I built this!'

***

"I hate it when people say aliens built the pyramids," Fran's roommate had started. "On some level, people say that because they can't imagine anyone but Western civilization being able to build the damn things, don't they?"

"The question is," the jackal's best friend had countered, "would aliens be offended if other aliens told them we built their pyramids?"

"'I used to make Earthlings build all my pyramids but I had to stop,'" Fran had play-acted in a jokey alien voice. "'Earthlings can't build worth shit.'" They'd laughed.

***

"So the scans didn't pick her up at all either," Orchid observed.

"That's just it," Ghost turned over in her head. "It was like she was dead, but not dead, somehow." They'd never seen anything like it.

"We still don't know how Kacey was taken out," Orchid noted.

"It may not have been the same way," Ghost acknowledged. "It may not be the same person for all I know." It was important not to infer too much from too little, after all. "I don't know what I know anymore." She sighed and shook her head, trying to make sense of it all.

"I do know this, Ghost." She looked up at Orchid. "We have worked a lot of cases for a very long time." Ghost nodded. "This doesn't happen for that entire time and now, it happens twice, just like that. That's not a coincidence."

***

"Say it!" The bully had been holding a bug hostage trapped in their hands. "Say you're nothing!" Most kids would've killed bugs as readily as the bully would've.

"Let it go!" They'd known Fran's weakness.

"You have to say it." It was weakness to care about things, the bully had thought.

"I'll say it if you let it go." A weakness that'd had to be used against her.

"I'll kill it!" That'd been how to show you were strong.

"I'm nothing!" The jackal had already believed it anyway.

The bully had killed it anyway. Fran had jumped at them and punched them in the face. They'd gotten into a scuffle and had to be separated by the adults in charge. "That was still the wrong thing to do," they'd told the jackal.

"Then I don't want to be right," she'd spat back.

***

"Now, fighting isn't just about power." Jackie paced back and forth on the desert sand in front of Fran as she spoke. "It's about flow, range, leverage, and..." She stopped then snapped her fingers for a second. "Direction! It's about direction." How many centuries had it been since Dex had taught her how to fight after having rescued her from those space pirates again? "Pay attention." One of her four hands pointed two fingers at the jackal's eyes while another pointed two fingers at her own eyes.

"I have a hard time looking people in the eyes sometimes," Fran admitted.

"Doesn't matter. Look at the center of their body to gauge their movements then. The important thing is don't take your eyes off them." The roach would try to adapt her teaching method to her student, just as Dex had done with her. "You have four limbs, not six." People would've given a lot to be taught by Dex in the System - and did. "That means there's things I can do that you can't, but then you do have those claws and fangs." Everyone had their own advantages and disadvantages, Dex had taught her. "I can still adapt most of those six-limbed forms for four limbs, mind you." This time it had been Jackie who'd been the one to rescue the jackal from space pirates not so long ago at that.

"That's good to know." If they were going to be partners, it made sense to do what they could to make sure they'd have each other's backs, didn't it?

"You seem to have good endurance, you might be able to wear opponents out," the roach noted. "Sand is good because it'll break our falls, especially when I teach you throwing, but you'll want to adapt your footwork to different surfaces as you see fit." At least they had relatively more similar kinds of legs this time. "Footwork's important, it's how you get in and out of range." You could get sand kicked in your eyes, if you weren't careful. "Watch your surroundings, go for openings, keep your guard up, right?" Jackie was trying to incorporate Dex's encouraging teaching method into hers.

"Sounds good to me." It seemed to have helped.

"Now, there are five basic lines of attack: down, up, left, right, and through," the roach demonstrated as she spoke, "which means the same goes for defense, obviously." The specifics of what Dex had taught her had receded to the back of her mind over time as she'd internalized them. "We'll start by having you practice them all one by one on each side." The more of it she had to spell out for Fran, the more of it was coming back to her, though. "Then we'll teach you to string them together in a way that feels right for you." Jackie briefly demonstrated what part of one of her 'forms' looked like.

"Wow, that kinda looks like tai chi," the jackal commented, "what's it called?"

"Hitting Things."

"Ah." The System was a matter-of-fact kind of place. "Who taught it to you?" Fran had never taken a self-defense class before.

"Remember that girl who invited us to a Jamboree while I was showing you how to pilot that one time?"

"Dex taught you?" The roach nodded. "Whoa, that must've been something all right." The jackal should thank Dex for teaching her teacher when they'd meet, she figured.

"You know, it really was." Dex had believed in Jackie when no one else would. "I'd be lucky to do half as well, probably." She'd built the roach up when it'd seemed like so much else had been there to tear her down. "Let's try those five directions now, shall we?" Fran moved to Jackie's side to start doing her best to slowly imitate the roach's attacks and defenses through, up, down, left, and right. "These are like, the basic building blocks of fighting." It was like learning the alphabet before learning how to write. "Everything else we do after this builds on this, is a variation of it somehow."

It occurred to Jackie that, while Dex had encouraged the impatient roach to slow down, the jackal, being more timid, might benefit from being encouraged to move forward instead.

"Wanna try these face to face?" It was one thing to perform these moves on your own against empty air, even against an opponent you visualized, but quite another to do so with another person in front of you.

"S-sure," Fran gingerly agreed.

"Cool!" the roach chirped. "Let's see your defense."

"O-okay." Jackie started out slow enough, making sure to perform her deliberate attacks so the jackal could see her coming and get out of her way in time. She even did them in the same order in which she'd made Fran practice them to make it easier for her to know what to expect. She could always mix things up to work on the jackal's ability to adapt later.

"Not bad!" Fran seemed to be getting the hang of it. "Now come at me." The jackal hesitated. "C'mon, don't worry, you're not gonna hit me," the roach gestured, trying to lighten things up. Fran started by repeating the same five attacks that Jackie had just performed against her at the same speed, in the same order. The roach dodged them all easily enough, some the same way, some a different way. As soon as she'd dodged the last one, Jackie followed up with an unannounced punch right away to make sure the jackal was paying attention. Fran dodged it by reflex, without thinking about what she was doing.

"I, uh..." She wove left and right around the ol' one-two, ducked under the roach's spinning heel, and grabbed the following punch on its way to her at an unnatural angle. Jackie kicked at the jackal's front leg but Fran raised it behind her, leaning forward to shove the roach away as she did so her leg and arm formed a straight line for a second. Jackie staggered back, stunned to actually lose her footing, forced to roll back up into a fighting stance to stand face to face with the jackal again. Fran had moved effortlessly, with the same reflexive grace of her first dodge, without taking her eyes off the roach or changing her facial expression. Now she stood still artlessly, with no fighting stance to speak of.

It'd been like trying to hit a wall. "You know what?"

"What?"

"I think we found something you're good at," Jackie grinned.

***

"They're still on that?" If Amber shared Grades' incredulity, she was doing a good job of hiding it. "How long are they planning to waste on this, exactly?" The deinonychus gave the tardigrade a look. She did have those eyes.

"I know you never liked Kacey but," Amber countered, "if someone's targeting Arbitrators, I'd like to think you'd want to know who as badly as I would." Grades tried to stare back.

"I did want to know in less time than this." The tardigrade didn't quite have the eyes, though.

"They found another victim."

"Was she an Arbitrator?" The deinonychus shook her head. "What's the big deal then?" Her eyes narrowed to slits.

"If people figured out how to cause perma-death, none of us is safe, Grades." Amber allowed a glint of menace to seep into her tone. "None of us."

***

Fran had always avoided killing bugs whenever she could. She'd stayed still and watched a mosquito bite her from beginning to end without interfering rather than killing it. She'd been the sort of person who would literally not hurt a fly. She'd always taken bugs in her house outside rather than killing them. The jackal had even taken drowning bugs out of water when she could. She hadn't bothered them, they hadn't bothered her. It'd worked for everyone involved.

Much later in her life, when she'd lived out on her own, she'd ended up in a situation where bugs had invaded her living space. If they'd reached Fran's pets, they were the type of bugs that could've seriously put their lives in danger, perhaps even killed them. She hadn't even been able to call an exterminator to do her dirty work for her, or the toxic products would have harmed her pets as well. She'd been forced to kill them herself to save her pets' lives.

The jackal's pets had cuddled her ferociously, as if thanking them for what she'd done to save them. Trying not to cry, she couldn't help asking herself how she'd have liked being killed by a bug that much bigger than herself. It couldn't have been all that pleasant, she'd told herself. If only they hadn't gone after her pets. Fran loved them more than life itself...

***

It happened suddenly, without warning. Most Renegade attacks did.

It was nothing like the time they'd been kidnapped by space pirates at all. Was something an 'attack' because of intentions, or because of results? If you defined it by its results, it was definitely an attack. There was widespread destruction, people were hurt, even killed. If it was intentions, though, it was something else. There was no intention behind what happened, not as such. There couldn't have been. It happened right by the brick wall and glass blowing plant where they'd been working. The jackal found herself invested in the wall and plant not being destroyed, even though she still believed people were more important ultimately. They'd put so much of themselves in their work that it almost felt like a part of them by then.

A giant centipede came right out of the sand around them, shrieking its unearthly shriek. It wasn't some predetermined plan of attack. The centipede writhed and thrashed about all over the place heedlessly like a worm on a hook. It didn't seem to be paying attention to which parts of its segmented body were under the sand or over it. It didn't need to, not really. It moved as easily under the sand as over it, as unfettered when its resilient body crashed through brick and glass as when it burrowed through the dunes. Shattered bricks and shards of broken glass soon littered the sand around them as their fellow workers screamed their heads off and ran for their lives as fast as they possibly could, with sand falling through the air everywhere around them.

The centipede was a force of destruction unleashed on the world, with no trace of method to its madness to speak of. If Fran hadn't known better, striving to read a pattern in its seemingly random movements, she'd have said that the centipede almost seemed to be in pain. It was as though something invisible but completely unbearable had taken over its mind, reducing it to its simplest expression as its efforts to break free from whatever it was failed pitifully. For lack of a better plan, in the midst of everything, the jackal actually tried yelling at it to stop. It may have seemed crazy, but the System seemed to know no end of sentient life forms who could understand language, of every shape and size. This didn't seem to be one of them.

The means of defending herself that she'd been practicing suddenly seemed very small.

Without missing a beat, the roach leapt right on top of the wriggling behemoth to run across its length, its thousand limbs her steps and its back her bridge or slide. She reached the centipede's head at the end of her run just as the creature's giant mandibles were about to close around one of its hapless victims. Holding onto the centipede with one hand, she stuck her two knitting needles and her wood carving knife in the behemoth's head. As the centipede threw its head back and shrieked at these pinpricks to its thick hide, the yarn strings that Jackie had tied to the knitting needles and around the wood carving knife's handle slowed her descent as she fell from its back. She yanked them out after landing, modifying its trajectory yet again.

Though it had been slowed, ultimately, the creature continued its rampage undeterred, seeming even more furious that someone would have tried to stop it. It wasn't long before Fran noticed someone else already following into the roach's footsteps across the behemoth's back still. It seemed to be some sort of green mantis who looked like Ghost, but not? The mantis extruded vines from various parts of her body, thorny vines, from what the jackal could tell, if the way they wrapped around the centipede's segmented body were any indication. The mantis left the vines wrapped around the creature as she leapt off, slowing her descent much as Jackie just had, only to retract them back into her body upon landing, scratching the behemoth's hide.

It soon became clear to Fran that the superficial damage caused by the vine thorns hadn't been the primary purpose of the mantis' attack. Rather, the thorns had injected spores right under the centipede's skin and, after having gotten some distance from the creature, the mantis set them off, and watched the results. Pausing as if to wonder what was happening to it, the behemoth trembled and shook, quite unlike the way it had just been thrashing around. Giant purple flowers erupted all over the centipede's body where it stood, their roots killing it as they shot through its body much as it had burrowed under the sand a moment before.

The jackal barely had enough time to see where the last segment of the creature's body was going to come crashing down during the last spasm of its agony. Somehow she made a beeline right for the roach just in time to shove her out of the way so she wouldn't be crushed on the sand by its colossal mass' descent. Fran had hoped they'd both go tumbling down on the other side of where Jackie had been as she'd leapt, but she'd gotten the momentum a little off. The roach's body was thrown clear but, in its previous inertia, it'd stopped the jackal's trajectory short. Fran ended up falling down right where Jackie had been just a moment before her, with no way for the jackal to get out of the behemoth's way herself by then.

So Fran died. Again.

***

"Ghost, I'm gonna tell you something," Collider started, "and I need you to listen and listen good," she went on, "but don't quote me on that to anyone, okay?"

"Are you sure it's safe to tell me?"

"You're joking, but I'm not," the hadrosaur gestured for emphasis. "It's about what happened to Sawtooth." The mantis had brought the frozen antlion to the Commission's Revival chambers, so a number of tests could be conducted to figure out what had happened to it.

"What about it?" The Tracker lit up, giving Collider her full attention as she did.

"We've never seen anything like this, ever, in the entire time we've been doing this." The hadrosaur adjusted her business suit. "There's nothing in our technology so far that looks like it could lead to this, no point A to lead to this point B." This sort of lack of professionalism made her most uncomfortable. "I don't know what this is supposed to be." She prided herself on her professionalism, after all.

"What are you trying to say, Collider?" If anyone was going to lie about this, it wouldn't have seemed in character for Collider to have been the one to do it, in any case. That the look on the hadrosaur's face would've seemed even more serious than usual suggested that she wouldn't have ventured what she did unless she'd been sure the outcome could be worth the risk to her credibility, if anything.

"Ghost, I think the tech used to do this may have been of alien origin."

***

[FLICK!]

['?-me suis trouvée toute seule au désert éternel-?']

"Hey Fran, did you see something?"

The jackal had blinked. "You mean, just now?"

"She means when you died," Fran's roommate had clarified.

"Some people say they saw something," her best friend had shrugged. "A light, a tunnel, anything, you know?"

"Nothing," the jackal had shaken her head. "I got nothing."

['?-out le monde veut aller au ciel, oui, mais personne ne veut mourir, personne ne veut-?']

[FLICK!]

CHAPTER 22: AND I MUST SCREAM

"Sometimes it's more gradual than people talk about," Fran's roommate had tried to explain. "Like, on TV you'll see oh, this person's reacting to this specific crisis, she's up on a ledge, they talk her down, it's over, she made it." It had been the sort of thing that'd had a way of gripping her mind.

"It's not always like that," the jackal had acknowledged.

"Sometimes it's more like, every little bad thing that happens to you throughout the day adds up to bring you just a few steps closer to it, inch by inch, every time." Ultimately it'd amounted to the same.

"And every little good thing that happens to you also adds up to pull you a few steps away from it, doesn't it?" It'd seemed to beg the question.

"It'd have to, wouldn't it," Fran's roommate had grinned. "I have a system for it." Because of course she would've. "They're called Will-To-Lives." Or WTLs for short. "You start at 100%." She'd had a system for everything. "Every time something good or bad happens to you, you win some or lose some."

"What happens to you when you get to 0%?" the jackal had asked.

"You die."

***

"Rise and shine, sleepyhead!" The first thing Fran saw when she came to was a cuckoo bird's face looking down at her, its cheery expression much at odds with her own.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" The first thing the jackal did when she came to was to throw up.

"You're up, you're up!" Cuckoon barely had time to scramble out of Fran's way as the jackal stumbled out of the Revival chamber to vomit on the floor next to it.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" The cuckoo didn't seem to have expected Fran to react the way she did, but she still didn't seem too fazed by it in spite of this, all in all.

"Welcome back, friend!" The jackal had just been through death - the worst thing in the world.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" Regardless of how many people back on Earth shared Fran's death phobia, not many of them would ever fully experience their worst fear as directly as she just had, and be able to look back on it the way she was then. She was in shock.

"You'll be okay!" Cuckoon put her arm around the jackal's shoulder as she finished throwing up on the floor from stress.

"Does this...?" Fran had thought she'd be fine to talk but apparently had to vomit again instead. "BLEEAARRRGH!" The cuckoo patted her on the back a couple of times as the jackal finally finished throwing up for real this time. "Does this usually happen?" Would it happen to her every time she'd be brought back, she asked herself? She sure hoped not.

"Sometimes," Cuckoon shrugged.

"Be more careful." Fran looked up. There was a camel sitting at a control panel nearby.

"Sorry about the mess," the jackal apologized.

"I don't mean that," Cactus dismissed. The same pleco fish that Fran had worked with back on the rock planet showed up with a mop and bucket to clean up, she noticed. "I mean about being killed." The jackal still couldn't fully process what a weird thing to be chided for that was. "We're not made of Revivals, you know." The camel's icy tone contrasted as sharply with the cuckoo's warmth as it was possible for it to. "How many times did you even die this century?"

"I, uh..." Cactus sighed and rolled her eyes, not really giving Fran a chance to answer.

"Just try," the camel pleaded, "try to do better next time." Maybe the jackal should've been looking at the situation differently after all. "That's all I ask." Maybe she was just the first Earthling with her phobia who'd get the chance to get over a fear that no one usually survived experiencing through exposure therapy.

***

"No, I could never do something like that," Corsair told her.

"You couldn't?" Orchid had just caught the puffin in a puffy shirt on her way out of her Revival chamber. "Or wouldn't?" She hadn't even been assigned a proper Enforcer quite yet.

"Neither," the space pirate simply answered.

"Your frost breath sure did a number on Glew and Solder, though," the mantis went on.

"They're not about to let me live that down either," Corsair said bitterly. "Thanks for reminding me." Since the Tracker had to stop by the Revival chambers anyway, she may as well have gotten this part of her investigation done while she'd be there, it'd seemed like.

"Surely you can see how it seemed relevant to ask you, based on that." The glowworm and toucan would've probably agreed with her, she figured.

"My frost breath doesn't work that way, though," the puffin shook her head. "I mean, I can use it as a weapon," she added. "It can kill or paralyze someone, but I could never use it to put someone in suspended animation that could fool sensors for a long time like that," she explained. "You can ask the person who put it in about that too, have it examined if you want." Corsair seemed determined to have the time she'd have to spend with an Enforcer on her hands to be kept as short as possible, whatever that would entail.

"Your associates seem in less of a rush to break you out of here than last time," Orchid noted.

"Yeah, well," the puffin replied tongue-in-cheek, "I kinda ticked 'em off." She was being sent to work in the red desert on the desert planet, where her frost breath was sure to be as useful as the heat would be unpleasant.

"Has Speaker been brought back yet?" The parrot had taken the brunt of the damage from their prisoner's escape, after all.

"I haven't heard," Corsair shrugged. "I don't think so, though."

***

"So, what are you working on?" Fran had asked innocently.

"What?" Her best friend had panicked. "Nothing!" She'd tried to hide what she'd been working on but the jackal had already seen it.

"This looks like a suicide note," Fran had noted grimly.

"Well, you weren't supposed to see it until it was finished."

The jackal had picked it up. "This is over three hundred pages long." She'd skimmed through it, as well as she'd been able to.

"Four hundred, actually."

The first page hadn't been in cursive. "You started writing this when you were in grade school."

Fran's best friend's expression had changed, if imperceptibly. "Did I? I forget." The jackal had put it back down.

"It looks like you put a lot of work into this." Somehow that had seemed like the most constructive thing for her to say at the time.

"Well, you don't get a do-over if you mess it up so you have to make it count," her best friend had shrugged.

"Why not make it into a novel?"

Fran's best friend had winced. "Trans people don't want to read stories about trans people killing themselves. I sure don't! We get enough of that on the news." Fair point.

"What do we want to read about, then?" the jackal had asked.

"We want to read stories about going to space and fighting monsters that have nothing to do with us being trans, same as everybody else."

Fran had tried to smile. "Why not write us something like that instead, then?"

Her best friend had brought her hand to her mouth in thought. "What about the note?"

The jackal had waved it off. "Forget the note."

***

"It was weird working without you waiting for you to get brought back," Jackie admitted. "I mean, I know we haven't been partners for a long time or anything, just..." The roach paused and looked at her hands, looking for the right words to say.

"I know," Fran acknowledged. "It's the most time I'd spent with the same other person since..." The jackal's mind seemed to drift off. "... for a while," she finally finished.

Jackie nodded. "Thanks for saving my life."

The jackal nodded back. "Thanks for saving mine."

The roach furrowed her brow. "What, the space pirates, you mean?"

She did not. "Uh, yeah," Fran cleared her throat, "the space pirates." For a moment, the jackal asked herself how weird it would be for her when Jackie would die. Would Fran have to Clean her? Would she be able to get the ship to the Revival chambers alright?

"Hey, we make pretty good partners, don't we?" The roach gave her a 'thumbs up.'

"You know," the jackal smiled back, "I think we do." She gave a thumbs up back.

***

"Well, it's not like I asked to be sent here," Solder chuckled mirthlessly, gesturing at the ice forest on the ice planet around them. "They wanted my flamethrower arm, which Corsair wrecked and owes me for, by the way." Ghost resisted the part of her that wanted her to tell the toucan in camo pants that she should take it up with an Arbitrator.

"No, I get that." The mantis would've meant it in earnest, but in context, she realized it could only come across as sarcastic.

"You can't get yourself anything without everyone wanting a piece of it these days," Solder shook her head.

"I'm sure Jackie would agree," the Tracker thought out loud, thinking back on how the space pirates had hijacked her as a power source.

"You get it, I'm sure," the toucan gestured at Ghost just as her lighter flicked another cig alight. "Sometimes it's just nice to have some fire on you, innit?"

***

"I mean, on paper, it may as well be right out of a self-help book, wouldn't you say?" Fran's roommate had asked her. "I go up to a nice-looking spot, with a great view, and I think about reasons to continue to live."

"It just happens to be the edge of the roof of your office building after work," the jackal had tried to say casually.

"Nothing wrong with that, we've all done that, right?"

Fran had nodded, too wrapped up in the moment to have the presence of mind to lie. "We anywhere in there on that list of reasons of yours, by any chance?" It hadn't been the foremost question on her mind, but it'd seemed the most harmless under the circumstances.

"You're up there," her roommate had nodded without turning her head. "It must feel freeing for a moment, I imagine, sometimes." She'd meant falling, the jackal could tell. "Completely untethered to anything but air for a bit, you know? But then," she'd gone on, closing a fist next to her, "Earth's gravity reasserts its hold on you, always does, doesn't it?" Fran had put a hand on her shoulder.

"Sometimes we think we want to escape from life," she'd started, "but what we really want to escape from is our life."

This time the jackal's roommate had turned her head around. "I have to work this job, though," she'd shaken her head. "We can afford the place with two of us working, but not one." The images had eaten away at her sanity more and more, day after day.

"What if I got a job so you wouldn't have to?" Fran had offered.

"What would you do?" her roommate had asked her.

"I dunno, I could be a cashier or something," the jackal had shrugged. "Why not?" Her roommate had turned around and stepped away from the edge of the roof.

***

"The thing is," Jackie started, "she didn't start out like that," she explained, "not originally."

Fran tilted her head. "She didn't?"

"No," the roach shook her head, "she used to be partners with someone I've been partners with since then," she went on, "longer than she'd been partners with anybody else at that."

"Huh!" the jackal took in. "How about that?"

"There was a time when, if you'd called out to her the way you did, she'd have actually responded. Of course," Jackie shrugged, "you wouldn't have had to, because she wouldn't have been doing that in the first place, but still." Fran got the gist of it.

"So what happened?"

"There was an anomaly," the roach answered, "out there in space somewhere." Jackie gestured in space's general direction.

"Does that happen a lot?" How much of a piloting hazard was this going to be?

"Anomalies? Define 'a lot'." An anomaly should've been fairly anomalous by definition, she supposed. "This particular one, though?" The jackal nodded. "Not before or since, far as I know," the roach shrugged.

"It made her into this?" What a thing to have happen to you...

"Well, she always looked like this," Jackie clarified, "she used to be a smart giant centipede, you know?" Fran followed. "Now, she's like..." A thought seemed to pass through the roach's mind as she spoke. "My ex-partner actually tried to rescue her a whole bunch of times, have I ever mentioned that?"

"You did not," the jackal shook her head.

"Didn't go so well."

Fran winced. "I figured not." If the way they'd seen her was any indication, in any case.

"She ended up getting killed over and over trying, hoping each time would be the time she'd be able to figure out how to bring her back." However their partnership had ended, Jackie still cared about this ex-partner of hers, the jackal could tell.

"That must've been awful." Fran couldn't help feeling some measure of empathy for the creature herself hearing this, even though it had killed her quite dead.

"I wish you hadn't died saving me..." The jackal hoped she hadn't done something wrong after all. "... but I'm glad you cared enough to do it," the roach smiled.

"It sounds like I'm lucky I only died once doing it." That story had sure put things in perspective. "Who was she?" Fran asked.

"Bertha." Macha's story still felt as fresh in Jackie's mind as when the pterodactyl had first told her about it so many years ago. "Her name was Bertha."

***

"So you had some history with Jackie, didn't you?" The light Glew's body emitted reflected all over the multicolored crystals in one of the rock planet's crystal mines around them.

"That's right," the glowworm answered between pickax swings. "I used to run food with her back in the day." Glew had been assigned Searchlight as an Enforcer. "Until she betrayed us." The Commission wanted to make sure that the glowworm couldn't take advantage of her light to escape in the tunnels.

"That would've been a while before Ghost was assigned to her, wouldn't it?" Orchid seemed to remember that Jackie was supposed to have had one more Enforcer and one partner before her, if memory served.

"Oh yeah," Glew recalled, "you two weren't partners back when that happened, were you?" The glowworm squinted in the light that the flashlight fish who was ignoring their conversation aimed at her.

"Not at the time, no." Glew was trying to put her on the defensive by poking at their time apart, the mantis could tell. "How's the feet?" The Tracker was starting to squint as much from Searchlight's light as from the glowworm's light herself, both reflecting on the crystals around them.

"Tell Corsair she owes me," Glew rubbed her expensive new feet bitterly.

***

"What were you gonna do, exactly?" Fran's best friend had asked incredulously.

"I don't know," the jackal had shaken her head. "I didn't really have a plan or anything." Her best friend had been driving her back after having criss-crossed the city with her car looking for her in the middle of the night. "I just kind of ran out and figured I'd come up with something." Fran had felt driven to suicide and run out into the city at top speed late at night, eventually getting lost and calling home for help in shame after she'd changed her mind. "Maybe I'd just keep walking in a straight line without stopping until I'd starve to death, you know?" she'd shrugged. "I didn't really think this through."

"That was your plan?" Her best friend had almost chuckled, as grim as the situation had been.

"Well, I'm not like my roommate," the jackal had rolled her eyes. "She'd have probably had a plan that looked like a game of Mouse Trap." There would've been no unraveling that.

"Oh, Fran," her best friend had shaken her head. "Never change."

***

"It's great, isn't it?" Cuckoon chirped.

"Huh?" Fran blinked.

"Every time one of us is taken from us, every time they're brought back, I'm here to greet them," the cuckoo went on, "to welcome them back among us." There seemed to be some sort of clock embedded in the bird's torso, the jackal noticed. "I used to make silk, you know?" She also seemed to be part silkworm.

"Really?"

Cuckoon nodded. "I wouldn't trade this for anything though," she shook her head, "not anymore." It sounded like she'd put a lot of thought into this, if anything. "You probably think I'm being foolish." Fran had learned that, when people said that, they were usually sharing something important to them that they were sensitive about.

"No, I sort of get it, on some level." She imagined the roach might have found the cuckoo a bit abrasive by now - but then Jackie had died a lot of times in a row at times, which could make it get to be a lot.

"I know it's silly, but for some reason, every time one of us dies," Cuckoon continued, "it's like there's a part of me that thinks oh no! What if we can't get her back?" She chuckled at her own reaction. "What if she's gone for good?" The cuckoo knew it made no sense for her to think that, on an intellectual level. "So every time someone comes back, I'm like, hooray, she's back!" Cuckoon smiled, gesturing for emphasis. "Everything's okay again."

***

"When did you leave the Revival chambers?" Ghost had finally left the ice planet for the water planet herself.

"I'm not sure, Officer." Robber had been sent to work on it as part of her retribution for her space piracy. "Don't they have that on record?" As a yellow rubber duck, her ability to float could be useful to have on the water planet - especially working around electrical charges.

"As a matter of fact, they don't."

Robber looked disappointed. "That's too bad." They usually did.

"What were you doing on the rock planet?" The kidnapping had happened such a short time after the murder. "Right after that breakout?" What if that hadn't been a coincidence, either?

"I'm not sure either." An exceptionally careless, destructive breakout, at that.

"What do you mean?" The Tracker wasn't sure what to make of the duck's evasiveness. "You're not sure?" She was used to Renegades lying to her. "How can you not be sure?" This wasn't a convincing lie if it was a lie, though.

"Can't you just ask the people I was with?" Robber seemed increasingly annoyed by Ghost's questions, pelting her as the rain pelted the docks around them.

"We are asking them." The more the duck resisted, the more the mantis suspected she might be onto something - but what? "Sometimes different people remember different details about events than other people do, that's all." It'd been meant to be taken as an innocuous statement.

"Well, I don't!" Robber quacked back.

"What do you mean?" The Renegade's answers were as opaque as the fog around them. "What don't you remember, Robber?" By then the duck's frustration had grown to panic.

"Anything!" Lightning struck. "I don't remember anything, Officer!" Robber shook her head in dismay. "Not from before I was revived..." It looked like the Tracker was going to need another cigarette.

***

People would always say 'get help.' So Fran had actually tried to do it. One night, when she'd felt overcome with self-destructive urges she'd stopped trusting herself to be able to manage, she'd check herself into a hospital or a help center or whatever they had. People kept talking about it, that should help, she'd figured, shouldn't it? So the jackal's roommate had driven her to a place where people had been supposed to be able to help her. They'd waited and waited, only to be told that there was nothing this place could do for them. So Fran's roommate had looked up somewhere else they could go on her phone then and there, driving the jackal all the way to it to wait there with her as the night had marched on.

After another extensive waiting period around other patients whose behavior had triggered their anxiety, they'd finally been told that the jackal didn't have the right paperwork to get help from them after all. So her roommate had looked up a third place on her phone that she'd also driven Fran to and where, as night had turned to dawn around them, they'd been told that the jackal's insurance wouldn't cover the treatment she'd need there. There had usually been someone around who could've given them the address of a fourth place they could've gone to, but that person had been home sick with the flu, and they hadn't known when she'd been going to be in at all. 'Get help' was scrawled in crayon on a 'door' that was painted on.

"Fuck it," Fran had finally said.

"Let's just go home and get some pancakes."

CHAPTER 23: TEARS IN RAIN

'If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll spend its whole life believing it's stupid.' (Albert Einstein)

"Ugh, really?"

It'd already taken Fran half an hour to get to the bridge. It'd been raining that day, fittingly, she remembered having thought then. She'd tripped and almost fallen flat on her face on her way. The jackal had instinctively reached down with her arms to stop herself from falling. 'How badly do I want to die?' it'd made her ask herself. 'I don't even want to hit my head on the ground.' She'd dropped her phone and had to go back for it. Even though Fran had wanted to die, it'd been important to have her phone with her, for some reason. When she'd reached the bridge, it'd occurred to her she didn't want to end up paralyzed in a hospital bed. She'd used her phone to look up if anyone had ever jumped from this bridge and how it'd turned out for them.

This had been a shit bridge to kill yourself, if you asked the Internet. It had bad reviews from suicidal people who'd tried to kill themselves on it and lived, only to become confined to a hospital bed for the rest of their lives, just as the jackal had feared. Some idiot had even jumped from it as some sort of stunt with no intention of dying, having gauged it as safe enough to do so. She'd been warned away from bad therapists and bad hospitals before, but never bad bridges. Apparently there was a higher, better bridge to kill yourself from somewhere else, but walking there was like an hour, in the rain at that. She'd stumbled on some pictures of her pets while looking up information about the bridge. Fran had sighed. This just wasn't her day.

"Aw, fuck it," she'd told herself after all. "Too much trouble."

***

"She looked like she'd never seen a botworm in her life," Gasmask recalled, "I can tell you that." Ghost had tracked down the canary to the salt mines in the salt desert on the desert planet. "Good pickax, though."

The desert planet would never be the mantis' favorite, that much was for certain. "I imagine decent tools must make quite a difference, working in a place like this." Not that the Tracker could afford to let things like that affect her own work, mind you.

"Well, for me working here is a step up from where I used to work," Gasmask explained. "The sea slug I replaced here was a lot more desperate to get out of here than I was, no doubt about that!" Ghost shuddered. What an unenviable fate...

***

"Why do people who like Trackers hate Enforcers?" Siren tended to have specific answers in mind to most of the questions she asked.

"I don't know," Tyrant admitted. "Why do you think?" the dinosaur tilted her head.

"Most people have been saved from Renegades by a Tracker or know someone who was," the blue jay started, "but most people have also been assigned an Enforcer or know someone who has as well."

"So it doesn't make sense for people to hate us, does it?" the tyrannosaur asked. "They're the ones fighting each other." Siren nodded emphatically.

"Without Enforcers, what do Citizens even think we'd even do with the Renegades that Trackers catch?"

The tyrannosaur shook her head. "We couldn't do anything."

The blue jay pointed at Tyrant, the way people do when they think they're sharing a great insight with you. "What we do is the only reason what Trackers do means anything," she concluded. "We're the maintainers of people." How could the mosquito they supervised as she worked understand the sacrifices they had to make?

***

"Oh, I pick up all kinds of things from Byte when I'm working for her at her treehouse." Kiwi was raking fallen leaves from under just one such tree as they spoke.

"Is that right?" Orchid knew enough to know that, in the System, gossip wasn't just History - it was intel.

"Oh yeah." After the water planet, desert planet, and rock planet, the mantis was back to investigating on the forest planet again. "She was just talking about something like that the other day, now that you mention it." The Tracker would get around to the ice planet anytime now.

"Like what?" Orchid asked.

"She's been working on some project with Grades she doesn't want anyone to know about." When the bird was around to work, the trilobite treated Kiwi like she was part of the furniture. "She said Jackie messed it all up, though," the bird chuckled merrily. "A shame, really," she chirped.

***

"Not even to go to space, though?" Fran had been doing the dishes in the kitchen while her best friend and roommate had been watching one of those military sci-fi shows that used to be on all the time.

"Not even!" the jackal's best friend had replied. "They're still the military, aren't they?" That wasn't a good thing.

"But you get to go to space!" Space was a big deal.

"Would that really make a difference, though?"

Fran's roommate had turned to her. "Hey Fran, would you rather be doing the dishes in space, or down here?"

The jackal's best friend had turned back toward her as well. "I believe the question was, would doing the dishes in space be better than doing them down here?"

***

Fran was doing the dishes. In space!

A lot of work that needed clean water to turn into unclean water took place near a water filtration plant on the water planet, it turned out. It was more efficient that way. Their new workplace was situated in a cave-like structure behind a waterfall that connected a river to a lake.

She had to alternate between dishwashing and laundry work to make ends meet after getting revived from her giant centipede encounter. Laundry work took place near the water filtration plant for the same reason the dishwashing and drink-making did. People would bring their clothes in, the jackal would wash them for them, and they'd leave. Superficially, it seemed simple enough. One thing was that people in the System came in a wider variety of shapes and sizes than they did on Earth. Another was that, while seasons didn't affect the planets as such, some people had to move between planets more often than seasons would've changed on Earth, needed clothes for any weather on hand all the time. Fabrics had varying requirements.

Fran's mind would wander as she'd do dishes sometimes. When she'd lived on Earth, she'd sometimes imagined that dishes were alive, that they could feel being washed. She had to stop because she'd get too sad when she'd break dishes, rarely though it may have been. It occurred to the jackal that the lake, river, and waterfall were a bit like a bigger version of the faucet and sink she used - or that the faucet and sink she used were a bit like a smaller version of the lake, river, and waterfall, as it were. You could take something - clothes, dishes - that seemed unusable, wash it, and there you go, it'd be usable again. Fran often wished she could wash herself clean of the bad things that had happened to her, of all the mistakes she'd made.

She wouldn't have thought that dishes would have been much of a thing in a System where food was illegal, at least not unless she and Jackie had turned into Renegades when she wasn't looking. Nevertheless, drinks and drinking were definitely legal, and it was easier to get drink than food in the System, even for Citizens. There were bars where people could go to get some, although they were more upscale and less geared toward mass consumption than they were on Earth. Drinks were more expensive to get than pills because you could technically never have one and be just fine. A glass of water could calm your nerves, and a glass of juice was a refreshing treat to reward yourself after a full day of hard work, wasn't it?

Alcohol was around, to be sure, but in a life without food, it's important not to underestimate how sought after anything consumable with flavor on its own could even be. Alcohol didn't really predominate the way it did on Earth. It's true that alcohol shipments were likelier to draw the Commission's attention than other drinks were. Renegades who'd run food would often run alcohol, because it made sense for them to. Be that as it may, most Citizens who ran alcohol didn't run food, and most Trackers knew it. Dex liked bars, the roach told the jackal about. She'd say they tended to lend themselves to a certain degree of tolerance for ambiguity. As a hybrid form of life, she happened to have an appreciation for that.

Jackie mixed drinks at the bar Fran did the dishes at. Where filtration was about separating fluids that, it'd been decided, didn't belong together, mixing drinks was about putting two or more fluids that were usually kept separate together instead. "Do you ever wish you could filter out memories like they filter water?" the jackal asked her. "That you could just keep your good memories of someone, but filter out the bad ones somehow?"

"If I've learned anything in my time working here," the roach answered as she cleaned a glass, "it's some pills go down easier with a drink, partner." Jackie raised a glass to her.

***

"I just don't think it's necessary, that's all," Pangaea said gingerly. "We've mixed crinoid with flamingo, cuckoo with silkworm, ants with giraffe, and for what?" The panda had fought for Citizens not to get their cybernetic enhancements back when they got revived a long time ago. "And at what cost?" It hadn't turned out so well. "Did you ever think of that?" If yes it meant they agreed, if not it meant Pangaea was especially insightful, as she saw it - it was designed so she'd win either way. "Nothing in life is free." The panda's eyes kept wandering to her bamboo staff hungrily as she'd speak, only for her to struggle to pry them away. "What are we losing in exchange for this?" Even without money, people became mired in the logic of loss and gain.

"I guess I hadn't thought of that." Flattery seemed to be what Pangaea was looking for, Orchid figured. More importantly, it didn't commit the mantis to anything the way that agreeing outright would've. "So you haven't seen Tilly, then?" One mention of the needle-backed hedgehog who hadn't been seen in a while had been all it had taken to set the panda off on a rant about the use of cybernetic enhancements in general.

"I have not." It seemed Pangaea's reputation was well earned, the Tracker mused.

"Just checking." Orchid hadn't missed that line about the ants, though.

***

[FLICK!]

["-ish is happy."

"How do you know if it's happy or not? You're not a fish."

"How do you know I'm not a fish? You're not m-"]

[FLICK!]

["-other was holding him by the heel when she dunked him in the River Styx. Even though the River made every other part of him invin-"]

[FLICK!]

***

"Maybe it won't be so bad." Chime was trying to be encouraging.

"You think?" Robber didn't sound convinced.

"It's a fresh start." The hummingbird was definitely drawing from her own experience, the duck had to give her that. "Your life probably wasn't going so well if things turned out for you the way they did, was it?" Chime asked.

"I don't know," Robber admitted. "I don't remember."

***

"Can I ask you something?"

"Yes?" Tricorn tilted her head, awaiting Ghost's question. "What?"

"Remember those space pirates we brought in after the breakout that killed Cactus?"

The triceratops' expression hardened. "All too well." It was clear from her tone that they hadn't exactly made a good impression.

"Orchid tells me she saw Corsair come out of one of the Revival chambers around here."

Tricorn gestured expectantly. "What of it?"

"Could you or Collider take a close look at the Revival chambers to make sure they're working right again?"

The triceratops furrowed her brow. "Didn't we just check them after you brought back Kacey the other day?"

"Yeah, but something weird's happened with one of them recently," the mantis explained, "and you know what else?" What had happened to the duck had messed her up a bit.

"What?" That may not have even been the worst of it.

"I'm almost sure I didn't hit Corsair to kill."

Tricorn's countenance darkened. "We'll look into it."

***

Cuckoon went up on her tiptoes, struggling to get up high enough that she could bend her neck forward to look down into the Revival chamber. From the inside, the cuckoo's face must have looked just the way it had looked to Fran when she'd woken up in one after being killed by Bertha herself. Like someone's face looking down through a manhole on the street expecting to find something other than sewers, something like a cosmic egg about to hatch for all the world to see.

It happened so fast.

There was no way she could've seen it coming. Cuckoon would never have seen it coming regardless of how fast it happened. She was the kind of person who'd always expect the best from people, no matter how many times she'd seen the worst. It was her blessing and her curse.

Just like that, the cuckoo was lying on her back by the Revival chamber, a surprised expression on her face and a hole in her forehead. The force of the shock had knocked her right off her feet on her back, a dash of color splashed around the back of her head on the ground around her for good measure. The culprit was out the door before anyone could see her.

***

"Does it ever bother you?" Fran had accepted herself the way she was, but she'd still cared what her mother had thought, to some extent. It was hard not to. "That I won't have kids, I mean?" The young jackal's mother had been an accepting person in general, but she'd still been brought up in a radically different social context than her daughter had been, Fran had been aware of as much.

"Why would it bother me?" Different social contexts had emphasized different priorities in life sometimes.

"I don't know." Some ace trans women must have experienced maternal instinct, she'd assumed. "Some parents think it's important." This young jackal had not.

"Does it bother you?"

Fran had raised her eyebrows. "Why would it bother me?"

Her mother had shrugged. "Some transfolk think it's important." She just hadn't wanted her daughter to feel like she wasn't really a woman because she couldn't carry life, was all.

"I don't." In fact the idea had always kind of freaked the young jackal out, in a way she'd imagined would've felt much the same whether she'd been trans or not.

"Then don't." She couldn't even picture herself ever adopting a child either, not really.

"Does that make me selfish?" She could barely take care of herself on a good day, let alone a child.

"I know you, Fran," her mother had told her, "and you know what I know about you?" Fran had shaken her head. "Regardless of who they are, you'll find people in life you'll really care about," her mother had assured her, "and you'll take care of them with your whole heart if it kills you."

CHAPTER 24: WHAT SHIPS ARE FOR

"Nobody's gonna show you the way, nobody's gonna hold your hand..." (Zeal & Ardor)

"We can't even imagine what it was like for people on boats back in those days," Fran's roommate had said. "When they'd cross the ocean, it was like, on this humongous timetable we just don't have enough context to understand, you know?"

The jackal had nodded. "Today, it's like, six hour plane trip? That's a long plane trip."

"They'd be on those things for months! They had scurvy!" her roommate had exclaimed.

"They must've fought like families stuck together in cars on road trips," Fran had shaken her head. "I always picture them like those Russian submarine movies where everyone's always fighting." The better ones had aliens sometimes.

"Imagine for a second nothing between you and a hundred sharks or a giant squid but a few pieces of wood like that." The jackal had shuddered.

***

Byte's log cabin kept out the cold about as well as Doornail's snow dome had. "No." Kiwi had built the cabin for the trilobite as well, it turned out. "Absolutely not." Orchid had finally bitten the bullet and gone down to the ice planet after all. "I don't have to answer any of your questions." Burning wood crackled in the fireplace as the snowstorm raged outside.

"I haven't asked." The mantis did not seem to have caught Byte under her best disposition, whatever that may have been. "Why not decide after I've asked?" The trilobite didn't seem convinced.

"Because if I refuse after you ask, you'll think it means you asked the right question," Byte countered. "You must've already decided I must have something to hide as it is." She wasn't wrong. "Why ask me at all?" The smell of burning wood permeated the air around them.

"Because you're one of the best technological experts in the System there is," the Tracker answered. "We're working on a case with some very advanced technology." For a moment, the trilobite looked at Orchid, who was basically a plant, looked at her fireplace, and seemed to ask herself how well the mantis would burn.

***

"It's when the technology fails me, you know?" Fran's best friend had said. "Like, when I used to have to bus places, if my bus showed up late, people would be like, 'Where were you?'"

"But it wasn't you, it was the bus," the jackal had shrugged.

"That's the thing," her best friend had gone on. "Now that I'm the one driving, I know where I was, I can tell them." It could be hard to have to depend on others for things sometimes.

"You don't know where the bus was," Fran had understood. "That's like, your question, isn't it?"

"I think that's the same reason I tend to get pickup, not delivery, these days" her best friend had reflected. "Why have someone bring me something when I can go get it myself, right?"

***

A lot of people in the System needed to have things delivered, it turned out. Fran found this out when, after they'd both worked on the water planet for a bit, she and Jackie started running what she could only describe as some sort of interplanetary delivery service. People on each planet needed things that came from other planets, and made things that people on other planets needed as well. With Citizens' work schedules being as tight as they tended to be, a lot of them couldn't afford to spend the time it would've taken them to go get those things from or to go bring things to other planets themselves. They had to hire other people to do it for them - people like the roach and jackal, as it happened.

It helped her understand how the System's planets worked together, not on their own.

Glass blown on the desert planet was taken to the water planet to build underwater bubble cities. Salt from the salt desert was used for snow and ice on the ice planet. They brought some of the ice from the ice planet to the desert planet and down to the rock planet's volcanic underground to help Citizens cool down as they worked. Water taken from the water planet had to be taken to the forest planet to water the vegetation and to the desert planet to keep workers hydrated. Wood from the forest planet was shipped to the ice planet so it could be used to build and to burn and to the water planet to build floating structures. Metal mined from the rock planet was used to make saws for the forest planet and shovels for the ice planet.

A place for everything, and everything in its place, as it were.

Beyond that, Citizens who worked at the Revival chambers often needed samples of various elements to complete the molecules that they'd be missing from the Citizen they'd be trying to reconstitute. The more intact a body was, the fewer extra molecules they'd need, but the more damaged a body would be, the more extra elements they'd need to compensate. Even though they'd usually exist in different contexts, the elements that formed the five planets were still made from the same molecules that people's bodies were: nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, calcium, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium, zinc, copper, nickel, silicon, lead, tin... Some were easier to get on some planets than others but all of them had sources for some of it.

Nothing was lost and nothing was created; everything was transformed.

***

"Everyone's not always gonna be good at the same things, right?" Fran had seen a lot of trans people joke about how all trans people know how to code. "That's why people do things for other people and have other people do things for them." The jackal had had no idea how to code. "Nothing wrong with that, is there?" For a long time, she'd questioned whether or not she'd been really trans because she hadn't known how to code. "It's part of why we choose to live in a society in general, isn't it?" Perversely, something meant as a lighthearted gesture of inclusion had made her feel excluded, like she wasn't who she said or didn't belong where she was. "No one can do everything, but everyone can do something."

With time, she came to interpret this as meaning that transness was coding, that just by acknowledging their own transness to themselves and to others, trans people were rewriting the source code of society itself.

***

"It was unlike anything I'd ever seen before," the albatross admitted. "I've seen some pretty crazy stuff, you know what I'm saying?" Ghost nodded. "Nothing like this, though," the bird shook her head.

"You were on the surface when it happened?" The mantis had found the bird working in a deep underground cavern, where the sound of bubbling lava, its reddish glow, and the smell of smoke suffused the atmosphere around them.

"That's right," the bird nodded.

"What did it look like?" For a moment, the Tracker asked herself if she could use the lava near them to light one of her cigarettes, but it probably wasn't a good idea to try, she decided.

"I want to say it was almost like a black hole?" The albatross seemed to be struggling to describe it, which made sense, if she'd never seen anything like it. "Like one but not, though, I mean, you could tell it wasn't one at a glance, right?"

It was so hot that Ghost even removed her scarf. "What do you think it was?" There was no harm in asking, was there?

"If I had to say, I'd say it looked like some kind of vortex or... portal somewhere?" The bird scratched her head.

"A portal? Where?"

To an Earthling, the reflection of the lava's light on the albatross' face in the darkness of the cavern around them may have made her seem like she'd been talking of the depths of hell itself.

"I'm not sure, but," she said, "if I went through that, I wouldn't count on coming back if I were you..."

***

Fran had always had the worst sense of direction. She couldn't find her way out of a paper bag with both hands and - actually that last part wasn't quite true. Back on Earth, getting a portable map on her phone had changed her life.

Jackie used the time they spent piloting her ship around from planet to planet to develop navigation systems. One of the things she'd programmed her ship to do as they'd flown was to collect data about where celestial objects were in space, how fast they were going, and which direction they were headed. Since a lot of things in space tended not to be in the same place at the same time, creating a map of space was more complicated than creating a map of a planet's surface. By aggregating the data from travel from each planet to every other planet over a suitable time period, it became possible to extrapolate projections the roach would then assemble into programs that became part of ship computers themselves.

This would in turn become part of how autopilot, the closest space equivalent to cruise control, became possible. The jackal suspected the five planets may have been largely terraformed, and may or may not have depended on where they were in relation to a star for their temperature. One way or another, Fran understood that, without seasons or animals, it was ships like Jackie's ship going from planet to planet that played their role in maintaining the five planets' otherwise isolated ecosystems. If the System had been a field of flowers, Citizens would've been its pollinating bees. If it had been an organism, Citizens would've been its red blood cells, redistributing oxygen wherever it was needed at the time. They were the cogs in the machine that made the System's clockwork turn.

***

"Am I out of time?" Dex tended to be in much less of a hurry than most people in the System tended to seem to be, and didn't always notice the passage of time as sharply as they did.

"What do you mean?" The tree's roots in the mangrove around them reminded Orchid of the way the hybrid's flamingo legs would stand still in the water as well.

"You're following up on Sticks and Stones' offer, aren't you?" So did the stilts that supported Dex's house over the water's surface under them, come to think of it.

"What offer was that?" Even the leaves of the palm trees and ferns around the hybrid's house kind of looked like sets of her crinoid tendrils emerging from the top of her flamingo torso.

"You mean you're not?" Dex had to remind herself it was important not to make it look like you were trying to avoid a Tracker's questions at any point. "They wanted me to become a Tracker, gave me some sort of deadline to decide," she explained. "I assumed it was up." What a force to be reckoned with that would've been for Renegades to contend with, the mantis couldn't help but think.

"I haven't heard anything about that," she shook her head. "You'll have to ask them." The hybrid had no intention of doing that, but decided not to get into that.

"What does bring you to my neck of the woods, then, Officer?" Dex could sound remarkably pleasant with people she was scared of, when the situation called for it.

"I'm here to give you a warning, in fact." The hybrid's heart skipped a beat, almost imperceptibly.

"Am I in trouble?" She'd often worried the Commission would catch up with her someday, after all.

"Could be," Orchid clucked her tongue. "Not from us, mind you," she hastened to add.

"What then?" That was a relief, at least.

"There may or may not be a killer who's targeting hybrids on the loose." The mantis did her best to choose her words as carefully as possible. "She's already gone after Kacey and Cuckoon." That was decidedly less of a relief, Dex thought grimly. "You may be next."

***

"I just don't feel safe, you know?" Fran's best friend had always refused to get on a plane. "I mean, it's one thing to fly short distances yourself if you have wings or something, mind you."

"Really, you'd do that?"

"I'd be in control of that," she'd explained, "not trapped in some big deathtrap flown by a complete stranger. If there were adjustments to make because something came up, I could just make them myself instantly. I could feel what's happening to me," she'd gone on. "I don't like all these layers. I'd rather experience reality directly, not through something or someone else, you know?"

"It's not organic," the jackal had understood.

"I don't like having to rely on people I don't even know for something this important," her best friend had concluded. "What could happen?"

***

It was only a matter of time until they'd get attacked by a Renegade ship. "Who do you think it is?" Intellectually, Fran had thought about it as something that could happen, that had to happen eventually, even. Still, on an emotional level, it surprised the heck out of her when it did all the same.

"I gotta be honest," Jackie had replaced the jackal at the controls, "that could be like a hundred people." The roach had ticked off a lot of people these last few centuries, to say the least. "Maybe just someone who wants to mess up this particular delivery for all I know." They were bringing glass flasks, bottles, and beakers from the glass blowing plant on the desert planet to Beaker and Glory's organ grove on the forest planet. "Doesn't really matter right now I guess," Jackie stuck out her tongue as she flipped various switches around her to change how the controls would respond to her for the situation at hand. "Strap yourself in, it's gonna get ugly."

The jackal was definitely not at this piloting level yet, yet she caught herself observing and trying to remember which commands the roach was inputting into the ship's systems in case she'd ever need to know later. "Not gonna lie," Jackie went on as the other ship kept shooting at them, "we're playing for some higher stakes than usual here a little bit." Fran was still getting used to the concept of living somewhere where higher stakes than your life were even a thing. "I mean, not that getting killed is fun or anything," the roach euphemized veering a hard left, "but getting our ship destroyed?" She shook her head doing a sharp right turn, the Renegade ship still following close behind. "That'd be a real pain to have to deal with, lemme tell you," she stuck out her tongue.

"You've done this before, haven't you?" Jackie zig zagged left, going into a full 360 horizontal loop that, even though they were still being followed, meant that their pursuer's shots were all lost to their centrifugal motion.

"All the time," the roach answered, slanting the ship 90 degrees left to dodge a shot as she did. "Well, maybe not all the time," she shrugged, slanting it 180 degrees right to dodge a second one. "A lot, though," she settled on, deflecting a third shot with a 450 spin left outright.

"You've been here for a while, to be fair," the jackal granted as Jackie took their ship into a clockwise spiral that the other ship stubbornly followed them into.

"It's different when it's near a planet than when it's out in space like this," the roach gestured with one hand, still piloting with her other three. "There you can hide behind structures or trick people into flying into them," she explained, bringing their ship up.

"So can they though, can't they?" Jackie nodded as they went into a nosedive.

"That's the thing yeah," she recognized, bringing the ship all the way up until it was upside down over their pursuer, "it cuts both ways," she finished as she went back down and right side up behind the other ship to start following it instead.

"Can you get her?" The Renegade ship dove down to get upside-down under them before coming back right side up behind them itself.

"Let's find out," the roach grinned, abruptly dropping her ship under its projected trajectory like a bag of dirt as their pursuer sped on ahead of them, suddenly finding nothing where they'd just been. "YES!" Jackie pumped her first as her shot pulverized the unsuspecting ship ahead of them. "This, I like to call the Death Drop." Fran, frightened out of her wits though she'd been, was finding the roach's enthusiasm communicative in spite of herself.

"I'd never heard that before." If they could survive this, she thought, they could survive anything.

***

"I'm baaack!" Cuckoon warbled, poking her head out of her Revival chamber like a prairie dog poking its head out of its hole in the ground. "Well?" She looked left, then right, then left again. "Didn't anyone miss me?" She stepped out of the chamber, vexed, and started taking a bit more of a look around, wandering down the corridor looking for Cactus, Tricorn, Collider, the pleco fish - anyone, really. "Where did everyone go?"

***

"No, I'd never seen her before either, now that you mention it," the blowfish answered Ghost in the mirror desert. "Why do you ask?" The mantis' communicator chose this particular moment to go off, as they were wont to do.

"Ghost here." The Tracker only had time to raise a forefinger at the blowfish in the time-honored gesture that meant 'Sorry, gotta take this' as she picked up.

"Are you alone?" Doornail sounded markedly more conspirational than usual, if that was possible.

"Why, what's going on?" Ghost asked, stepping away from the blowfish to a more private distance.

"Remember that 'phone' you asked me to unlock last time you came to see me?" How could the mantis forget?

"What about it?"

The possum's words when she spoke next hit the Tracker like a bag of hammers. "Ghost, I think this 'phone' may be of alien origin."

***

"They just seem completely out of place, don't they?"

"They're not cars," Fran had agreed.

"They act like they are!" her roommate had shaken her head. "They'll drive right in the middle of the road, stop at traffic lights and stuff, like they can't tell how dangerous that is." The jackal had nodded.

"Bikes are out of place everywhere these days," she'd observed.

"That's the thing," her roommate had acknowledged, "I hate it but I also sort of get it. Did you have a bike when you were a kid, Fran?"

Fran had had to stop, and think about it. "Not really. Maybe. Yeah!" she'd chuckled. "I took forever to learn how to ride it and barely ever used it when I did."

Her roommate had laughed. "I used to bike all the time when I was a kid! I'd take that bike everywhere, or it would take me everywhere, depending on how you look at it," she'd remembered. "There were secret little bike paths all over my hometown, I knew them like the back of my hand."

"Now they can't really be on the sidewalk, they can't really be on the road, there's barely bike paths anywhere, and a lot of them have problems," the jackal had listed off.

"You always see politicians in pictures with their bikes, you know?" her roommate had grinned sardonically. "They're all in the pocket of big oil though," she'd dismissed.

"They'd have to have built everything differently with them in mind for them to really work in the first place, and they didn't," Fran had concluded.

"Bikes were built for a better world."

CHAPTER 25: THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW

"We are spirits in a material world." (The Police, Ghost In The Machine)

"She was hooked up to one of those machines, you know?" Fran had nodded. "Hardest thing I ever had to do," her best friend had shaken her head.

"Well, they're battle conditions," the jackal had assessed. "You do what you have to, don't you?"

"It's what she wanted." The hardest part of being an anarchist had to be letting people make their own choices when you disagreed with them. "She thought she was going to a better place." It had been difficult for Fran's best friend not to wonder if she'd have wanted the same thing had she not, but it hadn't been her place to speak to that. "She said she didn't want to keep going if there would only be suffering." So many times, both of them had tried to talk other people into keeping going when those people had believed that there would only be suffering ahead all the same.

"Some people say they don't want to take up beds that could be for people who can get better," the jackal had ventured.

"Some people need to make more beds," her best friend had said dryly.

***

"I had a dream last night." Jackie and Fran were unloading cargo from the roach's ship in a hangar bay as they spoke.

"What about?" The jackal had noticed that Jackie's sleep had seemed troubled the night before, as a matter of fact.

"We were on Earth, if you can believe that." Fran wouldn't have asked about it, but she was glad the roach had brought it up.

"What was it like?" The jackal wondered how close to reality the imagination of Jackie's unconscious had proved.

"It was..." The roach struggled for the right words to say. "I don't know. I mean, in most ways, it was just the way you described it," she started. "I think maybe someone from Earth could've glanced at it and not noticed the difference, you know?" Fran nodded. "There were signs, though," Jackie went on, "little things here and there where it's like... If I think about them now, obviously, I can tell they're things that wouldn't have made sense on Earth. I didn't notice at the time though," she explained.

"I get what you mean," the jackal recognized. "A lot of dreams have things in them that do stuff like that sometimes." It had seemed so real.

"It was a good dream," the roach said quietly.

"You sure?" Jackie didn't look so good.

"Yeah," she answered Fran meekly. "It's waking up that's the hard part." The roach had talked in terms of dreams when she'd been talking about rude awakenings before, the jackal remembered. "Now let's unload some more baggage," Jackie gestured at their cargo, tongue-in-cheek.

"Someone's coming."

The roach looked up from her work. "What's up?"

It was Ghost. "Hey, Jackie." Orchid was with her.

"Officer?" Fran was definitely not on a first name basis with Ghost.

"How's that investigation going, you still on that?" Jackie put her cargo down.

"Funny you'd ask," Ghost replied.

"What do you mean?" The jackal didn't like where this was going.

"We've discovered evidence that suggests Kacey was killed using alien technology," Orchid revealed.

"But the Commission denies alien life even exists," the roach furrowed her brow. "Wouldn't saying that get you in trouble?" Jackie wasn't making this easier on Ghost.

"Jackie, we have reason to believe your new partner is an alien." Oh no.

"What?" The phone.

"We're gonna have to ask you some questions."

***

"Everything became about rationing." Fran's roommate had worked as part of a suicide prevention group for a while. "I mean, it all started with me looking for a group like that because I was looking for someone to help me."

"At least it worked." The jackal had been grateful for as much.

"So then, I felt like, it's up to me to do the same for other people now, isn't it? I owe them as much." Fran had nodded. "Since I was out of danger, I had to prioritize their feelings over mine. At first I felt like I was helping, like if what I'd learned from having gotten better was something other people could use to get better, it hadn't been for nothing, right?"

It'd had the merit of making sense.

"I started feeling like I was wasting time whenever I was talking to someone who wasn't suicidal. How could I stop thinking about it when someone could die? On some level I was still thinking about suicide all the time. The reasons people kept giving me why life wasn't worth living wore me down, ate away at me. Some people I tried to help tried to kill themselves anyway, I felt cruelly useless. Some people said that I didn't really care about them, that I only wanted to keep them alive, not happy, and that wasn't enough, that I'd stop caring about them the moment they'd choose to live. Soon I wanted to kill myself all over again... and I couldn't help asking myself if it was just so that my feelings would matter as much as theirs did again."

The jackal had understood activist burnout all too well. "People like to say suicide's a way to get attention, but it shouldn't take that to get attention, should it?"

***

"C'mon, Ghost," the roach gestured at Fran, "you don't really think she's an alien, do you?" The sheer absurdity of it.

"I don't know," Ghost said cautiously. "Ordinarily I'd agree with you, but like," the mantis rummaged for the phone in her trenchcoat, "did you or did you not give me this in exchange for taking you and Jackie back to the rock planet earlier?" There wasn't much the jackal could do to deny it at this point.

"I did," she admitted.

"We had quite a time unlocking that," Orchid observed.

"What does that prove, though?" Jackie asked.

"Did you ever actually look at this thing?"

The roach shook her head. "We'd only been partners for a short time when I gave it to you," Fran tried explaining to Ghost.

"Well, you'd be in for a surprise," Orchid told Jackie.

"What about it?"

A shiver went down the roach's spine. "How well do you know your partner, Jackie?" It made sense that Ghost would try to determine whether Jackie knew the jackal was an alien or not. "What was she doing before you two met?" What a sobering realization that still was.

"Okay, first of all, whether I'm an alien or not," Fran blurted out, "I'm not saying I am, but even if I was," she added, "I've never even met Kacey, I don't even know what she looks like," she emphasized. "What am I killing her for?" Some people hired others to kill for them, to cover their tracks.

"Look," Orchid said matter-of-factly, "we've been questioning a lot of people about this since we got you two out of that Renegade ship." Part of her wondered if that had really been a kidnapping or if they'd been working together, but it seemed too early to bring that up then.

"I don't doubt it," the roach acknowledged.

"The point is," Ghost went on, "we talked to a lot of people who probably didn't do it, but we still had to talk to them," the Tracker explained. "That's what an investigation is, one thing leads to another, you try to put different pieces together, right?" Jackie bit back 'don't patronize me, Ghost,' but the mantis could guess it went through the roach's mind from her expression. They'd known each other just a little too long.

"What kind of pieces?" It occurred to the jackal that the sooner the Trackers caught the real culprit, the sooner they'd be off her back about it.

"No one we talked to has ever seen you before, for one thing," Orchid answered. "You didn't know about basic tech everyone in the System knows about." That one stung.

"That doesn't prove anything," the roach resisted.

"Someone saw something show up on the rock planet's surface that they described as some kind of portal right before the pirates showed up," Ghost brought up.

"That could be anyone's portal," Fran waved off.

"Someone heard you use the word 'fuck'." Orchid had heard it from Glory while asking her about Dyson. "What does that mean?" Beaker had started growing some very unusual trees since then, at that.

"Haha, 'fuck'!" Jackie tried to laugh. "Isn't she priceless?"

Ghost lit up. "What's your species?"

The roach cringed. "Ghost, please..." The mantis blew out a smoke cloud.

"Look, we're not assuming you killed anyone," Orchid assured the jackal. "Maybe someone stole tech from you, maybe they developed tech based on something from that phone," she elaborated. "Maybe it is just a coincidence." Ghost inhaled. "Any number of things could've happened."

"I understand," Fran acquiesced.

"The point is," Ghost exhaled, "if you're up front with us, we can work with you to get who did it and get you off the hook as fast as we can, you feel me?" The jackal didn't trust most authority figures by default, not by a long shot, but something about the way the mantis spoke to her inclined her to believe she meant what she said somehow. At this point it seemed they might get in more trouble for lying than for telling the truth.

"Okay then," Fran relented. "I'm a jackal." There had never been any such thing in the System, ever. "I'm from Earth," she admitted. "I'm an alien."

***

"She just looked at me like I was a goddamn alien," Fran's best friend had remembered.

"Everyone always starts treating you differently when you open up about stuff like that," the jackal had acquiesced, "even if it's their job."

"I would say especially if their job sometimes," Fran's best friend had spat. "It's like they think that if they make you ashamed enough to admit that you have a problem, you'll finally use whatever solution you have but haven't been using for some reason to solve the problem just so you won't have to deal with them," she'd summarized. "It doesn't occur to them that maybe you're there because you don't have a solution like that. They act like they can shame you into getting better somehow," she'd shrugged.

"If that worked I think a lot more of us would be getting better on our own, wouldn't we?"

The jackal's best friend had concurred. "Then she said 'If you're going to bring up that you feel suicidal about anything, we're going to have to call the police.'"

"Are you shitting me?" Fran had gasped.

"No, they really said that!" her best friend had emphasized. "Apparently it was school policy or some shit." Being sent to the school counselor hadn't exactly been her idea.

"What did you do?"

"I just smiled, stood up, didn't say a word, turned around, and walked right out." The jackal had laughed.

***

"This device," Ghost held up the jackal's phone for all to see, "it's about your world, isn't it?" She gestured at it with her claw.

"Yes," Fran replied. "Everything about it." Part of Jackie wished she'd had access to it from the start herself.

"Your world has animals, money, jail, nukes, gods, and kids," Orchid checked.

"Each more fearsome than the last," the jackal confirmed.

"Did you know they have food on Earth?" Ghost asked. "Legal food, at that?"

"Not really, no," the roach shook her head. "Not before she got here and told me I mean," she clarified.

"We don't have pills or solute yet," Fran shrugged. "We have to have something, don't we?"

"No, we get that," Orchid nodded. "The Commission's jurisdiction technically doesn't extend beyond the System," the mantis noted. "Ghost, where are you going with this?"

"Is there any chance you were trying to get food to the System from Earth, Jackie?" It did seem like the sort of thing she might do.

"No, but I wish I'd thought of it," Jackie stuck her tongue out. "Maybe you should be a Renegade." Ghost gave her a withering look.

"Wait, wait, lemme see if I got this straight," the jackal interjected. "The whole reason food's illegal here is the Commission has to be able to make sure they don't run out of molecules to revive people with, isn't it?"

"That's right," Orchid confirmed. "What about it?"

"So if it's food from outside the System, it wouldn't be part of that amount of molecules in the first place, would it?"

"I guess not," Ghost answered Fran.

"Does that mean food from outside the System would still be illegal in the System or not?" the roach wondered.

"Arbitrators would have to get together to make a decision about that," Orchid figured.

"It's never happened before, has it?" the jackal tilted her head.

"It doesn't take anything away from the System, if that's what you mean," Ghost granted.

"It does mean more molecules for the Commission to keep track of, though," Orchid pondered.

"Why does it matter, though?" Jackie scratched her head. "She didn't bring any food with her, did she?"

"Because the same logic can be extended to apply to me." A chill went down Fran's spine. "They're talking about whether I should get to stay in the System or not."

***

"I have like a completely different view of suicide depending on whether I'm thinking about it for me or someone else, does that make sense?"

"I have no idea," Fran had admitted to her roommate. "What do you mean?"

"If I'm thinking of someone else, it's like, it's the most unacceptable thing imaginable! How could they even think of doing something like this? How could they do this to themselves, to people who care about them?"

"It does hit people hard," the jackal had nodded. "Hard enough to spread sometimes," she'd added grimly. "And when it's about you?"

"When I'm thinking of doing it, it's like, God, it's none of anyone's business what I do! Can't they all just leave me alone? I'm done with this shit," she'd smirked grimly.

"There's always gonna be someone who finds you," Fran had thought out loud. "There's always gonna be someone who'll miss you."

The jackal's roommate had stopped, and thought about it. "Really, you really think that?" Fran had nodded.

"On some level, I totally get what you mean," the jackal had started. "I feel the same way you do, but it's just..." She'd looked for the right words. "The idea of losing you is just as unacceptable to me as the idea of losing me is to you." Yes, that had been the best way of putting that, she'd decided.

"Maybe we can be each other's life support machine, then," her roommate had concluded.

***

"Let me ask you something, Ghost."

The mantis dropped a cigarette butt on the ground. "Shoot."

"How did you and Orchid first become partners all that time ago?"

"You already know that story," Orchid answered the roach. "Why ask now?"

"Humor me," Jackie persisted, "for the benefit of our friend here," she gestured at the jackal. "She's never heard it."

Ghost's eyes narrowed. "I suppose not, no." Fran wondered what the roach was getting at.

"A long, long time ago, people didn't have partners," Orchid began. "It wasn't a thing."

"The Commission already expected a lot of work from people," Jackie chipped in. "More than you can expect from one person, that's for sure." She pretended to look at her nails.

"Did you two know each other back then?"

Ghost knew the jackal didn't mean harm by it. "We did not." It did seem to make her uncomfortable, though.

"Ghost wasn't around back then," Orchid revealed.

"I thought everyone in the System had always been around." The System still found ways to surprise Fran after all this time.

"Not Ghost," the roach specified.

"Orchid worked with machines a lot back then," Ghost adjusted her scarf as she spoke. "She was up there with Byte and Gizmo honestly," the Tracker gestured for emphasis.

"You're exaggerating," Orchid rolled her faceted eyes.

"I don't think so," Jackie opined.

"What kind of machines?" the jackal tilted her head.

"All kinds," Orchid replied. "I was looking for ways to make work more efficient, basically." Most machines were like that, Fran figured.

"Were you already a Tracker back then?"

It was weird having to talk about the System to someone who hadn't always lived in it, she found. "I was." It made her ask herself if she should be thinking anything differently about it than she usually did in ways she wasn't used to.

"What kind of machine helps you with Tracking work?" It had been some time since the roach had first told the jackal that no one in the System was the same species as anybody else.

"Me." So how could they both have been mantises, it begged the question? "I do."

Because Orchid had made Ghost in her own image. "You're a machine?" Fran gasped.

"Robot, if you want to get technical about it," Jackie threw in tongue-in-cheek.

"Most people weren't able to tell at first," Orchid pointed out.

"It was good work," Ghost looked herself over, remembering her conversation with Doornail from earlier.

"I couldn't tell," the jackal agreed.

"Lot of cyborgs around here," Orchid waved off. "Most people figured that's all she was."

"Ah, but she was more than that, wasn't there?" the roach insisted.

"Yes," Ghost acknowledged. "I'm the only fully artificial lifeform in the System," she said. "The only one with a fully artificial intelligence." She'd become integrated into the System's workings for so long that sometimes, even she forgot.

"Why hasn't anyone made more since?" If Fran could just make robots like that, she'd have done it all the time, she couldn't help but think.

"Because you can't get something from nothing," Orchid shook her head. "The Commission had to remind me of that." Orchid had complex emotions around what happened that she didn't like talking about in front of Ghost.

"Are robots illegal?" the jackal wondered.

"They weren't yet," Jackie responded.

"The Commission doesn't make rules for things that don't exist, as a general rule," Ghost explained.

"They don't want to give Renegades ideas," Orchid added.

"How could they expect you to follow a rule that didn't even exist yet, though?" Fran furrowed her brow.

"Now you're asking the right questions," the roach smirked.

"I get what you're doing, Jackie," Ghost grumbled.

"Really? Is it working?" Jackie asked. "I'm getting on your nerves a little bit, aren't I?"

"The situation forced their hand," Orchid sighed.

"Obviously they ended up deciding Ghost would be legal, or she wouldn't be here working for them today, would she?"

"Got yourself a smart one there, Jackie," Ghost opined.

"She's got her moments," the roach said understatedly.

"The Commission did not like the idea of having another mouth to feed," Orchid regretted.

"Robots can't have pills or solute, though, can they?" the jackal frowned.

"No," Ghost shook her head, "they need fuel." She lit up.

"Then what do you...?" The mantis inhaled. "Ohhh...!" The Tracker exhaled. "I guess it wouldn't make sense for these to have been what I thought they were," Fran thought out loud. "You don't have petroleum here." They still had all their dinosaurs, after all.

"Why, do you need some?" Orchid raised an eyebrow.

"That's what I said," Jackie quipped.

"Not really." Some things from Earth, she didn't miss at all. "So they have to rebuild you from scratch every time you're destroyed?" The jackal remembered her conversation back in Beaker's grove about arguments people had had over people being brought back with or without cyborg parts well.

"That was where some of their reluctance came from, yes," Ghost acknowledged.

"You don't get killed often, though," Orchid countered.

"She wouldn't," the roach noted. "You programmed her to be the ideal Tracker, didn't you?"

Had something about Ghost always seemed a little too perfect, Fran asked herself? "Can't hurt." Or was the jackal only thinking this just now because she already knew?

"I don't know if there is such a thing as an ideal Tracker but," Ghost spoke carefully, not wanting to brag while wanting to acknowledge her partner's programming skill, "if there is, I'm as close to Orchid's idea of what that means as she could make me at the time." That was what Fran had been trying to put her finger on. Ghost felt more like a fictional cop character come to life than like a real life Earth cop down the street. She felt like the heroes cops were supposed to be, not the villains they actually were. She'd been imagined into existence.

"There was another major difference, though," Orchid asserted. "The materials I used for Ghost were all from the System."

"It still took Arbitrators a long time to come to a decision about it, didn't it?" Jackie reminded her.

"Grades was against it," Ghost coughed.

"Kacey was your fiercest defender..." Orchid trailed off.

"What ended up tipping the scales?" the jackal tilted her head.

"People already knew Ghost by then," the roach told her. "They'd gotten used to having her around, she'd even helped a couple people by then," she added.

"So if I suddenly wasn't there when people expected me to be there..."

"People would've noticed," Orchid finished her partner's thought. "The Commission wasn't prepared to deal with the consequences of undermining public confidence in Revivals back then."

"And now?" Fran asked.

The Trackers gave each other a look. "They'll never be prepared for that," Ghost admitted. "If they were going to be, they would've been then."

"People have already seen her too, though!" Jackie gestured at the jackal.

"There was more to it than that, though," Orchid believed. "The Commission already had a hard time getting Renegades under control. An ideal Tracker, at least in theory, however ideal or not she may have been in practice..."

"They couldn't afford to pass up an offer like that," Fran understood. "You were saying earlier there weren't partners back then?"

"It was everyone for herself," Ghost nodded.

"There was more to the Commission's reluctance than that too," the roach side-eyed Orchid.

"I was getting to that," Orchid rolled her eyes again.

"What about it?" the jackal wondered.

"They were offended," Jackie spat. "They thought the amount of work they gave people to do and the amount of time they expected it to be done in was perfectly reasonable." Her tone said the rest of what she thought of that.

"So when Orchid was so desperate to cut her workload in half that she created me..."

"It made them look bad," Orchid sighed. "Coming from me, it pointed to a problem that couldn't be explained away by a malcontent's bad mood, something that would get worse before it got better if they didn't do anything."

"So now," the roach picked up, "we don't have robots, we have partners. The Commission ruled that two people can work together, that they can work for each other, that the work of one person can be counted as being worth the same as if that work was being done by her partner for someone else." Their whole society had reshaped itself around this new model.

"It must've been revolutionary," Fran shook her head.

"I'd be careful about throwing around that word around here," Ghost warned her, "but, for what it's worth, it sure was."

"It's not just a matter of whether you should get to stay in the System or not as a thing, though," Orchid reminded her. "The world you're from has perma-death, doesn't it?" The jackal nodded. "Well, the technology that was used to kill Kacey can cause perma-death."

"Holy fucking shit!" None of the other three had any idea what any of those words meant.

"How did you get here?" Everyone turned to Ghost.

"What?" Jackie blinked.

"How did you get to the System from Earth?" Ghost asked Fran. "Was it an accident? Was it on purpose? Did you have anything to do with it, Jackie?" Orchid gave Ghost a look. "I'm just saying, it seems like a relevant question, doesn't it?"

"My partner has a point," Orchid agreed. "Anything to do with why you asked us to take you back to the rock planet, by any chance?"

"What makes you say that?" That wasn't a denial as such, but the jackal was curious.

"It's the last piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere else," Ghost said matter-of-factly.

"Ghost, I've been trying to get out of the System my whole life," the roach finally said, "you know that."

"Oh, this should be good," Orchid remarked.

"No but wait, this is important, though," Fran interjected. "You can't hold her accountable for anything I or any other alien may or may not have done if she didn't even know an alien would get through," she persisted. "She just wanted out." Another alien? They hadn't thought of that.

"That's still a crime, but..." Ghost thought out loud, "it's not murder."

"I may be a criminal but I'm no murderer," Jackie assured them.

"We still need to know how you did it," Orchid insisted. "Any high technology that's involved in this case, we need to know about it, it could be important, couldn't it?"

The roach looked down. "I don't have it anymore."

"Then we especially need to know what it is," Ghost told her. "If we find someone who does have it..."

"... that becomes another suspect which proves we didn't necessarily kill Kacey, right?" the jackal completed.

"You do have your moments," Orchid assessed.

"I used a quantum translocator." The Trackers' faceted eyes went wide.

"You brought her through a rip in the space-time continuum?" Ghost couldn't believe it.

"Well, she didn't bring me, I just sort of... came through," Fran said sheepishly.

"We don't want this in Renegade hands." Orchid found the thought all too ominous. "Where'd you get it?"

"You can't track down who I got it from," Jackie shook her head. "She tracks you down."

"Solace!" It made sense to Ghost that someone with the ability to shift through space-time across multiple dimensions would've been responsible for something like a quantum translocator.

"Do you know if she made it herself?" Orchid asked. "Who else even knows about it?"

"She didn't say whether she made it or not, but," the roach furrowed her brow, "she did say someone else 'pitched in' to help me pay her for it," she recalled. "I never found out who that was."

"Is there a chance that person's connected to the space pirates who kidnapped us after you used it?" the jackal wondered.

"The timing for that does seem a little convenient, when you put it like that," Ghost noticed.

"They might have 'helped' you get it from Solace because it would've been harder to steal it from her than to steal it from you," Orchid told Jackie. "Once you'd have it, it'd be a simple matter of setting up an ambush after the tradeoff."

"Robber!" Ghost exclaimed.

"You think she did it?" the roach frowned.

"I don't know that yet," Ghost clarified. "She did say she doesn't remember anything from before last time she died, though."

"Why would she do it then erase her own memory of having done it?" Fran asked.

"Maybe someone else used her to get it, then wiped her mind from it to cover her tracks," Orchid theorized.

"That's terrifying," Jackie shook her head. It was a fate so much worse than death.

"We need to find out if Sawtooth knew anything," it suddenly occurred to Ghost. "Someone could've been trying to keep her quiet too, for all we know."

"I don't know if she's thawed yet."

"Find out." Orchid nodded. "Let me ask you something." Ghost turned to the jackal. "How do you like the System so far? Do you like working here, with people who live here? Do you think your world was better than here? What does our world look like from your perspective?" Part of Fran had always wished she could ask an alien a question like that about Earth herself.

"Honestly..." The roach stared at the jackal as she started answering. "I like it here." Jackie stifled a gasp. "I mean, it's not perfect, but all in all, it's not bad."

"Do you feel like you belong here?" Orchid went on.

"I've lived and worked on every planet in the System. I've talked to and made friends with co-workers on all of them. Hard work, but doable. I've flown a spaceship from planet to planet, better than I ever drove a car. Gorgeous planets by the way. Now that I've adjusted to it, I find barter more intuitive than money. I can focus and learn new things a lot more easily now without chronic digestive pain from having to eat distracting me all the time. I've died, and I've been brought back to life. Now that I'm no longer afraid of dying, I feel more free to take risks. I feel more free to let myself care about people knowing that they won't be taken away from me forever. In short, yes," Fran said, "I do feel like I belong here, more than I ever felt like I belonged on Earth."

"Wow," the roach couldn't help uttering. "You make this place sound pretty good." She'd never felt like she belonged in the System herself.

"The grass is always greener on the other side, I'm sure," the jackal figured.

"Would you die for the System?" Ghost hadn't planned on asking this, but something about the way that Fran had talked about the System had struck her.

"Yes, absolutely," the jackal answered without thinking, "as many times as it takes." Fran surprised even herself with her reply, but it came to her unbidden.

"What a weird question," Jackie blurted out.

"Why'd you ask her that?" Even Orchid had some questions about that.

"It may come to that," Ghost replied ominously. "If we don't find a way to stop the cryonics and mind-wipes and the perma-death they bring along with them, we soon won't have a System to speak of," she shook her head. "It's not designed for stuff like that."

"The System was designed, wasn't it?" the jackal wondered.

"What do you mean?" the roach tilted her head.

"I mean the five planets were all terraformed, weren't they?"

Orchid turned to her. "Why is that important?"

"I'm not sure," Fran admitted, "it just seemed like it could be later. One thing I can tell you is, cryonics couldn't keep people alive forever back on Earth. They could extend life, until a way to solve a health problem for good could be found, but not forever. Most people thought of them as a craze that would ultimately fade. To work the way you're describing, someone would either have to have existed in the System long enough to use the otherwise superior technical knowledge that exists here to improve them, or they'd have to have been plucked from a different time period on Earth than I was, one after the hurdles that stopped cryonics from working in my time would've been overcome somehow," she explained.

"How would you like to help us with this investigation, Citizens?"

Jackie's eyes went wide. "Are you serious, Ghost?"

"Sure, why not," Ghost shrugged. "If I'm right, and Kacey's murder is connected not only to Robber and Sawtooth, but to the attacks on the Revival chambers, to something deeper underneath it all that threatens us all, we need all the help we can get. You each bring something different that we don't have to the process. People don't tell Trackers everything. You, Jackie, you know everyone around here, and you," she turned to the jackal, "well, you don't know anyone around here, do you?"

"Not really," Fran shook her head.

"There are people who won't tell something to a stranger, but they may say it to someone they've known long enough, like Jackie. There are people who wouldn't tell some things to Jackie because she has weird baggage with them, no offense, Jackie -"

"None taken," the roach stuck her tongue out.

"- but who might say those things to someone who can't have weird baggage with them, because she hasn't been here long enough. Ultimately, the Commission chose to allow me to continue to exist because I proved I could be useful to them. Now, I'm not the Commission, but if I were you, and I wanted to convince them to allow me to stay here now..." Ghost trailed off.

"It does have a certain internal logic to it," Orchid conceded.

"What do you think, Jackie? Should we do it?"

Jackie turned the thought around in her mind a few times. "What about you?" the jackal nodded, almost imperceptibly.

"All right," the roach nodded at the mantises more decisively. "We'll do it."

"Then you can stay in the System after all," Ghost gave Fran her phone back, "for now." She dropped and crushed one of her fuel cigarettes on the ground behind her, leaving just a few dissipating wisps of smoke behind as the Trackers made their way out of the two Citizens' lives back into the world of shadows from which they'd emerged.

"Well, partner," Jackie watched them leave with the jackal arm-in-arm, "looks like we'll be taking Dex up on her offer to check out the next Jamboree after all..."

***

"Have you noticed when someone tells you a category of people aren't 'real', it's never a category of people that they belong to?" Fran's best friend had asked her.

"Mighty convenient, isn't it," she'd stuck her tongue out.

"It's always someone else," the jackal's best friend had continued. "I never met an anti-transhumanist who wasn't a transphobe. The idea that other people can own their own bodies and do what they want with them is just unacceptable to people like that," she'd shaken her head.

"So they tell you you're not real."

"They say trans people aren't 'really' trans, prosthetic limbs aren't 'really' limbs, online friends aren't 'real' friends, mental disorders are made up excuses to get away with something. Nothing you do's ever gonna be 'real' enough for them unless it's convenient, unless it confirms they're right and you're wrong. They act like being 'real' matters more than life itself, so they write all these stories where they tell the world it's more virtuous for us to accept death than to fight it, because God said we deserve it or some shit. But fighting for your life with everything you have? That's the most heroic thing anyone can do. If I care about someone, I'd gladly break the laws of Nature, God, and Man just to see them live another minute in a heartbeat."

CHAPTER 26: WATER FLOWING UNDERGROUND

"After everything, it's still you." (Undertale, Genocide Run)

"It was you, wasn't it?" The humanoid ant queen had stared Fran down severely from her earthen throne. "You killed the ants, didn't you?" The queen had brandished a bloodied ant skull in one of her six hands as evidence. "As a child, you played with us in sand and fished us out of pools." She took a bite out of the skull and threw it behind her like a bad apple. "Now you've grown!" The ant started dissolving before the jackal's very eyes. "Now you murder us!"

Fran had woken up gasping, startled awake by her own nightmare. She had sat there in bed just panting, gathering her bearings as cold sweat had trickled down her back...

***

"Guess what?"

Ghost sighed. "I'm not gonna like this, am I?"

"Corsair never showed up for her job on the desert planet," Orchid shook her head.

"We need to question Solder and Glew again, knowing what we know now," Ghost opined. "Did you talk to Speaker or did I?" Ghost forgot.

"Corsair told me she didn't know whether Speaker had even been revived or not," Orchid remembered.

"Hold on a sec," Ghost pulled out her communicator. "Hey Collider, do you know if they revived Speaker yet or not?"

The hadrosaur shrugged. "I was just about to call you!"

Ghost tilted her head. "What about?" Please be good news, the mantis thought.

"You wanted me to get back to you about Sawtooth, right?"

***

The Jamboree proved unlike anything Fran had ever seen in her life.

Jamborees took place on all five planets but at different times for each planet. This one was taking place on the water planet. Wave pools had been set up for Citizens to go in to let the waves wash over them. Bubbling pools warmed by jets peppered the area for those who just wanted to sit down and relax for a while. Spectacular fountain arrangements took the jackal's breath away.

There seemed to be just about as many installations with saltwater as with fresh water to accommodate different Citizens' physiologies. By day, the sand on the beach was every color of the rainbow under the sun. By night, it lit up glowing with bioluminescent plankton under the silvery moonlight as far as the eye could see.

Waterslides of every shape and size led from the highest peaks down to the lowest pools. The System's builders could seem a little bolder than Earth builders in some ways. Their rides weren't designed to kill you as such, but they clearly weren't quite as afraid of the possibility you might die on their rides - and neither were a surprising amount of Citizens at that.

Fran startled, slightly splashed by an otter who'd just performed an elaborate tumbling dive off a nearby springboard into the deep end of a cold swimming pool. It occurred to the jackal as she shook off the water that she'd never seen this many people in one place not work ever since she'd reached the System, she didn't think. She found something tremendously refreshing about it.

More than that, she'd never seen this many structures in the System that hadn't been built to generate power, not for efficiency, but simply for people's enjoyment. While it may have seemed to run counter to the System's logic superficially, Fran had a very good understanding of why it was in fact absolutely essential to the System for it to have been able to continue functioning the way it did. It was supposed to be a time and place for people to get a chance to do everything they may have wanted to do but couldn't the rest of the time, a pressure release valve, a place to put those things that couldn't seem to fit anywhere else.

People worked, to be sure, it just wasn't quite the same. People served drinks, they set things up, they maintained things, took things down when it was over, organized things and, moreover, made sure everyone signed in on their way in. As a matter of fact, a lot of people ended up paying for a good part of what it'd cost them to get in by doing work on location for some of their time there themselves. The event was typically arranged around the expectation that a certain amount of Citizens would pitch in like that.

"Hey, Jackie!" Practical considerations did play their own role giving people a reason to stay, mind you. "How have you been?" Jamborees also worked as swap meets of sorts, as a time and place where a lot of skills and valuables that would normally span a wide range of distribution were all gathered in one place at the same time. "Haven't seen you in a while." Considering the way their barter system worked, how people usually had to fly from planet to planet and how quickly interest on debt could accrue, it could be especially useful to have access to such varied goods and services in such a short time - and access to such a wider market than usual for your own goods and services, as the case may be. "Who's your new partner?" They were getting better at not really answering that.

"Wow!" They'd just run into what it'd just taken Fran a moment to realize could only be a floating sea slug. "Glitchhop!" A floating sea slug Jackie seemed to recognize at that. "Where's Gizmo?" The jackal didn't know what species Gizmo was, but she did recognize the name from when it'd been used alongside Byte's during their interrogation earlier. "You can fly now?" Good, so I'm not seeing things, Fran thought to herself.

"You like it?" Glitchhop did a quick spin in the air, like someone trying on a new dress. "It's new!" The jackal wasn't quite sure where the sea slug's voice came from either but one step at a time. "Gizmo made it for me so she doesn't have to drag me around anymore." You could still hear a smile in Glitchhop's voice, wherever it came from.

"You must be excited about that!" Being able to get around on her own had opened up a whole new world to her. "You and Gizmo are still partners though, right?" The sea slug 'nodded' in the air with her whole body.

"That's right!" The roach wasn't the first person that Glitchhop had run into since her modding who'd only been used to ever seeing them together. "We just get to cover more ground this way," she'd chuckled.

"I bet you would!" Fran wondered just how long the sea slug's partner had been carrying her around until then, but didn't ask. "She been workin' on it long?" Jackie's antennae tilted along with her head.

"You have no idea," Glitchhop emphasized. "We got a hair's width from having the rug cut right out from under us at that, too." The roach furrowed her brow.

"What do you mean?" The jackal wasn't quite sure either.

"Well, last time Gizmo died Byte almost managed to take it from us," the sea slug explained. "I was stuck in the salt mines on the desert planet for a while," Glitchhop winced. "I wasn't much help." The salt desert was no place for sea slugs. "Good thing you Cleaned Gizmo and got it away from Byte!" So this was who the partner of the coyote they'd Cleaned on the rock planet canyon had been! "What were you going to ask from us for giving it back, by the way?" It looked like the neurally activated anti-gravity technology that Gizmo had practiced on those floating rocks had borne fruit after all.

"Haven't decided yet," Jackie shrugged.

"What exactly do you do?" Fran asked.

"I'm a programmer!" Glitchhop turned to her as she spoke. "I do a lot of coding for electronic body parts people have some of their flesh body parts replaced with," she elaborated. "Some energy stuff, some ship stuff, some hacking, mainly cyborg coding, though, yeah." The sea slug seemed like the kind of person who liked talking shop when you got her started. "I mean, I'm useless in a fight, but get me in a computer system, and it's a different story." No one could do everything, but everyone could do something, after all. "Ooh, you know those video games they have at Jamborees now?" Had the jackal heard that right? "I make those." Her heart leapt in her chest.

"You have video games?" After everything Earth had the System didn't have, of all things, Fran had never expected the System to have those. "You can't be serious! What kind?" Glitchhop actually gestured for Fran to follow.

"C'mon!" How could the roach not have mentioned they had video games? "I'll show you." What an incredible oversight. "We'll play!" If the jackal had introduced an alien to Earth and had wanted her to feel at home, video games would've been the first thing she'd have mentioned. "It'll be fun." How dearly she'd missed them, and the people she used to play them with...

***

"I think it's this idea that I'll invest all my emotions in this one person," Fran had tried to explain, "then they'll be taken away from me later, you know?" At least she'd had someone to talk to. "Then they'll just take all my emotions with them." Someone who'd cared.

"It's partly because of what happened with your mom, isn't it?" That wasn't a given.

"There's some of that, yeah," the jackal had nodded. "Not all, but some," she'd acknowledged. "I feel like I'm putting too many eggs in one basket." It was so hard for her to really let herself care about someone.

"So all you have to do to lose all your eggs is lose one basket," she'd summed up. "Big gamble."

"Kinda yeah!" Fran had agreed. "But like... You don't want to have to live your whole life without caring about someone because that's like... It's too sad, you know?" More emotion had crept into the jackal's voice than she meant to. "So you either hold back, without really living, or like... You give someone your heart, and they take it to the grave," she'd lamented.

"Hey Fran?"

Fran had looked up. "What?"

"Listen to me, and listen good," she'd told the jackal. "You can care about me, it's safe," she'd promised somehow. "I will never die."

***

"Can I count on you, Ghost?" Ghost hadn't expected the question.

"What do you mean?" She and Siren didn't talk a lot.

"Well, you know," the blue jay tried to sound casual, "if something happened where Trackers had to have each other's back to take care of a lot of Renegades at once, for example." Ghost and Siren had handled the task of Enforcing Jackie very differently.

"You think anything like that's gonna happen soon?" They'd walked away from it with very different takes on it.

"I don't know," Siren shrugged. "Something's in the air, it feels like." The blue jay was trying to have her cake and eat it too. "They've been coming at the Chambers more, for one thing." She was trying to give herself a layer of plausible deniability.

"Yeah, that didn't used to be a thing as much," the mantis acknowledged. "I think Orchid told me Sticks and Stones have been looking into that." They were still both among the Commission's top people, at the end of the day, weren't they?

"So you'd have my back, right?" Ghost had learned over time that, when people let on they didn't fully trust you, it was often best not to fully trust them either.

"It's my job, isn't it?"

***

"Oh my God."

Of all things that had seemed impossible to Fran when she'd first come into the System, it was something that would've seemed possible to most people back on Earth that had seemed the most impossible.

"Did I just...?"

It only served to compound the irony that it would have been something that had actually happened just then, at that.

"I think I did."

The jackal looked to her left. A rainbowfish was lying in bed next to her on his right side with his left hand on her right shoulder. She looked to her right. A zebrafish was lying in bed on his left side with his right hand on her left shoulder. Both were sleeping peacefully with smiles on their faces. It was clear enough that they'd enjoyed a visit to Beaker's grove and sampled the fruit from her new trees.

"Well shit."

Fran had always thought of herself as ace on some level, even before she'd known what it meant. Did this mean she'd been wrong after all? That was a complicated question. She'd known people who'd been ace way into their mid-thirties, until they weren't. It didn't mean they hadn't been, but it did mean people sometimes changed how they identified over time. She'd known people who'd been ace, but who had made exceptions in certain situations, if the situations had been exceptional enough. Some who'd regretted it, some who hadn't. Did she?

She'd have to find out what kind of memory it turned into with time, she supposed.

The jackal had spent some of the evening at the Jamboree bar drinking and dancing with the rainbowfish and the zebrafish on the dance floor. Partners were common in the System, but the fish had seemed to share a distinctive connection somehow, she couldn't quite put her finger on it. There were no nudity taboos in the System, she'd learned at the hot springs. In every way, Jackie and every other Citizen that Fran had talked to until then had reacted to her as though sex didn't exist and they had no idea what it was.

She'd been so relieved to learn that! She'd felt a lot more at ease living in a society where she hadn't been expected to have sex than in a society in which she felt that pressure on her all the time. Had it paradoxically been finally having had that pressure removed that had made it possible for the jackal to stop resisting the idea for the first time? There probably had to be an element of that in there somewhere. She didn't have to have their kids or get married, but she didn't have to disappear from their lives. She could engage with them however she wished.

Would this be a one-time thing, or something she'd see herself doing again? Time would have to tell. She wasn't sure how much trouble she'd go to for another shot at it, truth be told, in the grand scheme of things. There was a good chance Fran would have more urgent priorities to deal with, likely having to do with Jackie, who'd still be her partner first, after all. But, if the opportunity did present itself again, would she take it? Before her visit to Beaker's grove, she'd never existed in the kind of body that felt right to her. That may have played a role in why she'd been less into it back on Earth too, come to think of it. What a thing for the jackal to have introduced to the System, she almost scolded herself. There was no need to decide right away.

She carefully removed the rainbowfish's arm, then the zebrafish's arm, criss-crossed across her chest like a makeshift harness. She tried to slip out from under and between them without waking them up, with only partial success. They seemed half-awake and half-asleep when they turned to each other to start making out with each other in the bed while Fran looked back at them over her shoulder as she left the room. "Have fun guys!" she smiled and waved at them on her way back out.

***

Fran had tried to pet-proof their apartment completely, but there was no such thing in practice, you had to understand. She'd bought and installed fences and wire panels to try to keep her pets out of places that might be dangerous for them, out of places where they might cause damage without meaning to, but they always found a way. Her pets had been inveterate explorers, like a force of nature that pushed ever outward and couldn't be contained. If they hadn't wanted to be there with the jackal, she couldn't have kept them there long, not really. Somehow she'd end up finding them on top of the shelves, behind the couch, in the trash can, under the bed, on the table, on the counter, on the fridge. Rules were made to be broken.

They went everywhere they could go.

***

"She came right out of nowhere," Sawtooth coughed. "I didn't see her until she was right on top of me," the antlion shook her head weakly.

"Are you warm enough?" There was no reason to be insensitive, Orchid figured. "Are you feeling better?"

"I've been killed a lot of times, Officer," Sawtooth rasped. "More than my fair share, some might say," the antlion threw in, tongue-in-cheek. "I never found anything as unsettling as that."

"What was she like?" Ghost asked.

"She was all covered in white fur, from head to toe." So it hadn't been a jackal. "All claws and fangs. She meant business."

"What were you doing in the ice caves?" Orchid went on.

"I was looking for Tilly, if you must know," Sawtooth replied.

"Why do you think the white creature attacked you?" Ghost wondered.

"Because I found her," the antlion answered.

***

"And they never found out," she chuckled.

"Wow!" Fran gasped. "How about that!" The jackal chuckled along. She'd joined Jackie and Dex in the room that the three of them shared for the Jamboree.

"I know, right?" Dex could spread out on a couch, on a bed or on a floor like nobody's business, it turned out.

"That's really saying something, lemme tell you." The roach seemed more comfortable around the two of them than Fran had seen her in a long time, if ever.

"I would think so!" The jackal was starting to feel more at ease around them than she'd felt around anyone in a long time herself, truth be told.

"I'm impressed you were able to keep what you did from them for as long as you did," Dex gestured with a crinoid tendril for emphasis.

"We kinda had to," she'd shrugged.

"So did we, though, didn't we?" Dex addressed Jackie.

"They can never find out to this day," the roach confirmed.

"That's some dark shit right there," Fran shook her head.

"I don't know what that means," Dex admitted, "but I'm here for it." Her legs were draped across furniture like discarded clothes thrown haphazardly onto it.

"You did so much for me back in the day, Dex," Jackie reflected. "I don't know if I ever told you how much." It tugged at the jackal's heartstrings to hear it.

"It sounds like you two have really been through hell and high water together." They didn't know what that meant either, but it didn't matter.

"It wasn't fair, you know."

The roach winced. "I know, Dex, I know," she tried to reassure her friend. "It wasn't your fault, though," she insisted.

"It wasn't more your fault than my fault, I can tell youthat," Dex added cynically.

"It was no one's fault," Jackie almost snapped. "It was their fault." The scent of incense permeated the room to appease them after a long day.

"You mean the Trackers." The roach nodded. "The ones that were after you for the food smuggling." Jackie and Dex had run food back in the day. The roach got caught. Dex didn't.

"The very same," Dex replied.

"The thing is," Jackie explained, "even if Dex did turn herself in at this point, or if I sold her out or something, we'd both get in trouble for it," she went on, "I knew for all this time, and I didn't tell 'em." The System didn't have drugs the way they existed on Earth, but they made do.

"So they'd stick you with another Enforcer regardless," Fran understood.

"And we're not letting that happen again," Dex emphasized, like only someone who'd heard what Enforcers have put the roach through more than once would. "The point is, I know it might not seem that way to you because you just walked in, but people hide stuff from people in the System all the time." They were passing something back and forth between the three of them that was helping them calm down, mind you.

"There are secrets in the System," Jackie had to agree. "You wouldn't think so, but there are." They were sharing synthesized versions of oxytocin, dopamine, adrenalin, endorphins, and so on and so forth - not drugs that released those chemicals like on Earth, but the chemicals themselves, directly.

"I mean, there are 'secrets' everyone kinda knows but acts like they don't," Dex clarified, "but there are secret secrets though." The jackal felt privileged that the roach and Dex would have shared their secret with her.

"That's so weird." Of course, Dex felt privileged that Jackie and Fran would've shared their secret with her as well. "On Earth, a whole bunch of our sci-fi shit is all about how in a sci-fi setting there'd be surveillance everywhere and the authorities would always know your every move." It wouldn't have been the first thing that had turned out different in space from what she'd been taught to believe that space would be like, mind you.

"I think on some level," the roach started, "they want people to have something to lose when they're assigned an Enforcer. They can only take your privacy away if you have it, right?"

"That's interesting, I hadn't thought of that," Dex observed.

"Earth didn't know shit, I can tell you that," the jackal giggled. She was using words she knew she wasn't supposed to use to hide her identity freely, her guard was so far down around these people.

"Oh! You were going to show us some of your animals, I think," Jackie remembered.

"Oh yeah, that's right!" Fran had been adding names to her list of communicator contacts over time: Beaker, Glory, Kiwi, Chime, Cuckoon, Ghost, Glitchhop, Tandem, Dex... She'd almost forgotten that Ghost had given her back her Earth phone altogether when she pulled it out to, in true Earth tradition, show them cute animal videos. "These were my pets when I lived back on Earth."

They all watched, mesmerized, the jackal's pets run and dance around her, excited she'd be bringing them something to eat, jumping at their plate of food to start eating like there's no tomorrow the second she'd set it down. You could hear them munching wholeheartedly, Fran telling them soothing, encouraging words, petting them as they ate with a smile in her voice. When the jackal and roach caught each other's eyes, they couldn't help noticing they were both crying their hearts out, hoping Dex wouldn't notice. Fran, because they'd been her pets, she'd loved them, and missed them so much to this day - Jackie, because they'd been eating food, it'd made them so happy, and it made her think about all the people she'd brought food to before...

***

"We didn't even do anything, though!" Glew protested.

"Not this time," Solder clarified.

"Well yeah, not since last time, I mean," the glowworm grumbled.

"We're not here because you did anything," Orchid assured them.

"What do you want from us?" the toucan demanded.

"We're headed for an ice cave," Ghost explained.

"That means it's dark, so we'll need some light to see," Orchid started.

"And it means there'll be ice, we'll need fire to melt it," Ghost finished.

"You're not Enforcers," Glew furrowed her brow.

"And if we say no, you increase our sentence?" Solder asked.

"No, we just decrease it if you say yes," Orchid specified the distinction.

"We're asking for your help," Ghost concluded.

***

Fran's best friend and roommate would usually get along. They'd existed together sharing the same space for a long time, and they'd all believed, on some level, that they'd continue to share it for the rest of their lives. Realistically, she'd have had to say that both of them were roughly equally important to her emotionally. She wouldn't have known what to do without either of them. They'd all saved each other's lives so many times that they'd lost track of it by this point. Even though they'd each had their own respective approaches to solving problems their own way, they'd all agreed about what the problems were, and about how badly they'd needed fixing. It'd gone a long way, there'd been no question about that.

It'd been the small things that'd get in the way of the big things sometimes, as they often do.

It'd taken well over a decade for it to become an issue but, when the jackal's roommate and best friend had gotten into a fight over chores, it had hit her really hard. It'd been important to her for them to get along, for her to feel that all three of them had been a cohesive unit that had worked together to achieve their goals. It'd seemed like a stupid thing to care about, superficially, but Fran's best friend and roommate had both been writers. They'd worried about the encroaching approach of death as they'd grown older, and their anxiety that they might die before they'd get a chance to finish their respective stories had grown with the passage of time. Every hour spent doing chores had become an hour they hadn't been able to spend writing.

That was when Fran had started surreptitiously taking on more and more of the chores on herself without asking. She'd hoped to give both her roommate and best friend enough leeway to be able to spend the time they'd needed to get their writing done, get their other work done and, more importantly, so they'd all have time to hang out together bonding in their living room when all would be said and done, which she'd always looked forward to at the end of the day. "Always help people who need your help if you can, Fran," her mom had always told her back when she'd still been alive. "It's the most important thing there is."

CHAPTER 27: IF I CAN'T DANCE

"Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town?

We danced and sang, and the music played..." (The Specials, Ghost Town)

Fran used to love listening to video game music on her computer with her headphones on. It had been one of the things that she'd done to cheer up when she'd been down - to regain Will-To-Lives when she'd been getting low on them, as they'd have said in their household by then. For a time, despite everything, she could block out everything she didn't like about the world around her to escape completely into another world, a world that didn't have anything to do with the jackal and her problems. In that world, she'd had a different name, she'd had a different life, no weird baggage, nothing but a world to save because it'd made her heart sing. It'd invited her to imagine a world that would've been worth saving.

She'd let out all the emotions she'd have to hold in around other people the rest of the time. No obstacle couldn't be overcome if you'd been persistent enough, she'd felt. Fran had closed her eyes to let herself sink all the way into the music. She'd cry and laugh at the same time, letting out all her joy and sorrow without caring where one ended and the other one began.

In that world, she'd been free.

***

"What are you in for?"

Loom turned to Glew as they walked. "Me?" The brontosaur had accompanied Ghost, Orchid, Solder, and the glowworm on their journey to the ice caves. "Nothing, why?" The mantises had been trying to think outside the box by simply asking the toucan and Glew for help directly.

"She means," Solder stepped in, "what'd you do to get assigned here with us?" If you told people what to do, they'd feel used - if you asked them for help, they'd feel useful, the Trackers had reasoned.

"Oh, I'm no Renegade." There had been another reason for the mantises to have brought the glowworm and the toucan along besides just their skills as well, mind you. "I'm just here to help look around in the ice tunnels with my neck." If the Trackers had questioned Glew and Solder directly, they'd have probably been suspicious and resisted revealing anything.

"Are you a Tracker?" If the mantises simply took the glowworm and the toucan along for the ride and gave them an objective to focus on, though, there may have been a chance that one of them would forget herself and accidentally say something useful on the way, they'd figured.

"No, why would you think that?" Loom asked Glew.

Solder gestured at the brontosaur and at Ghost. "You have matching scarves!"

***

"You should try it too!" The Jamboree gave each Citizen a chance to shine when they could afford to go. That was another thing about it.

"You can't be serious." Every Jamboree, a few days in, there would be an open demonstration for any set of skills anyone wanted to show off on a center stage in front of the vast majority of the Jamboree's attendants.

"Maybe you'd like it." In practice, not everyone got to attend as often as they'd like but, in theory, if everyone could've somehow shown up, the series of demonstrations should've been kept open for as long as it would've taken for everyone there to have gotten a chance to take part.

"What if they don't like it?" Dex was trying to talk Fran into signing up for it.

"Who cares what they think?" Stage fright fought for the jackal's soul with a deep, newfound desire to become a part of what she'd always only watched and heard.

"If I don't care what they think, why am I doing it?" Since there were no races, only one member of each species, the System didn't have 'cultures' the way they existed on Earth as such, they had Cultures of One.

"They'll like it, you'll see!" There wasn't a culture that had invented fire dancing, there was one moth who'd invented it and her name was Linda. "You won't like everyone else's performances." Linda's progress was the status of fire dancing. "They're still doing them." Every Jamboree, you could track the progress of every Culture of One that was available at the time.

"Dex has a point," Jackie chipped in.

"Are you doing one?" Fran asked.

"Hell no," the roach laughed.

"What does that mean?" Dex turned to Jackie quizzically.

"Must've picked it up," the roach shrugged. "I've done mine a million times, people are sick of them by now," she waved off.

"I don't know, you haven't done one in a while by now," Dex remarked.

"Don't you start," Jackie warned.

"You've gotten a lot better since last time, at that," Dex went on.

"I'll go if you go," the jackal offered the roach.

"Oh, fine," Jackie sighed. "Deal."

***

"What do they do the rest of the time?" Fran's roommate had just punished a monster in an ancient video game for having committed the ancient video game crime of walking back and forth. "Do you ever think about that?" There hadn't seemed to have been much else for the monster to do when she'd walked in, mind you.

"Oh, yes!" she'd nodded while she'd fought yet another monster. "I have opinions about that, as a matter of fact," the jackal's roommate had added, tongue-in-cheek.

"Like what?" The game's protagonist had just found a way to break through a secret passage somewhere.

"It's taken them a while to finally address a lot of the absurdity of in-game physics like that," Fran's roommate had started off. "These days, you walk into a bandit cave, there's like, one of the bandits is cooking, two of them are arguing, one of them is guarding the place, they're like, a full-on bandit community, you know?" The jackal had nodded. "They were doing something when you showed up. I feel like that also reflects overcoming a failure of imagination on a social and individual level on a wider scale though," Fran's roommate had elaborated.

"What do you mean?" The game's protagonist had gotten a power-up! A short musical theme had cheered her success.

"Well, think about it," the jackal's roommate had continued. "When colonizers showed up everywhere, all they could do was think of the world in terms of it having been built and organized around their needs. Something had to force them to learn to think beyond that."

"That's true."

"You go about your day and you see people in terms of how you're interacting with them then: bus driver, teacher, street performer, co-worker, cashier. You picture the area where you usually see them around them whenever you think of them, like a fighting game character's background. But like... You don't picture them at home, eating, sleeping, needing love like everyone else. It takes a specific mental effort to think of other people in terms of their needs, not just in terms of yours."

***

Part of Ghost was glad she hadn't seen what the creature had been up to before they'd showed up. It's true that it would've been useful for her to see because it could've given her a better idea of how to solve their case. On the other hand, she wasn't sure she'd have wanted to have to spend the rest of her life with those images in her mind.

Ghost, Orchid, Solder, Glew, and Loom all gasped when they walked in. In all their time in the System, it was nothing like anything they'd ever seen. They'd all Cleaned people at some point or other in their lives, but this was on a whole other level.

There were no corpses in the ice cavern they'd discovered as such, but what they found chilled them all to the bone nonetheless (well, only Solder and Loom had bones as such, but still). Something about it might have reminded an Earthling of a wax museum right out of a horror movie, but with ice instead of wax. Not the ones where the wax figures look like they're about to come to life, to be clear.

The ice cavern was full of ice sculptures of Citizens being killed in a variety of grisly methods, each designed to strike the mind with more revulsion than the last. Their corpses themselves had long since been Cleaned. Intellectually, the five ice spelunkers knew that at least most of the Citizens that the ice sculptures represented had probably already been brought back to life and had probably already been back to work for a while. Be that as it may, here laid their tortured memory of death still, frozen in their perpetual state of unrest as if in some way, somehow, the pain that they'd experienced then and there would always continue to exist.

Orchid asked herself who would do such a thing and why. Whoever had done this wanted to be able to remember the pain she'd inflicted on Citizens for a long time. They seemed to be getting closer and closer to Kacey's killer, but what would happen when they found her?

And there, in the center of it all, was a giant ice pillar with Tilly in it, stuck in suspended animation with an expression of abject terror frozen on her face...

***

The attendees' performances left Fran's jaw agape.

An anemone played drums with a clownfish who played wind instruments. Dyson used her tongue as a whip on targets. A cyber-caterpillar played herself like an accordion. She marveled at Crane's weightlifting. Chime's singing brought a smile to her face and tears to her eyes. Dobson put on a light show with her body like a rave. The jackal applauded the swan's figure skating. Sponge's trunk gave a splashy water show. A koala put on an eye-laser sharpshooting demonstration. An albatross gave a poetry reading. A polar bear broke some ice blocks with her hands. A spider played the harp on her own web strands. She cheered the rainbowfish and zebrafish's synchronized swimming. And yes, Linda fire-danced. She was pretty good!

"It's your turn." What a tough act to follow. "Knock 'em dead!"

***

"You can't play games by yourself anymore," Fran's best friend had shaken her head, "It's not allowed." The jackal had raised an eyebrow at her. "I basically stopped playing games for a while in the early aughts when everything became an MMORPG or an FPS," her best friend had gone on. "When I was a kid, games were like this comfort thing I'd do to recover by myself when I'd start feeling overextended around other people, you know?" Fran had nodded. "Being around people meant failure and success mattered, people would judge you if you failed. If I failed at a game by myself, no one had to know. It was freeing. Now you have to be on a team and if you're not a team player people get mad. That's not a game, it's work."

***

"Jackie?"

The roach pulled out her communicator surreptitiously, switching to written communication so she wouldn't disrupt the attendees' performances. 'S'up, Ghost?'

'You at the Jamboree?' the mantis wrote back.

'We're watching the show off as we speak,' Jackie replied. 'What's this about?'

'If anyone there seems a bit too good at ice sculpture, please let us know, kay?'

***

Fran finally stepped onstage in front of everyone, hundreds of Citizens attending the Jamboree all sitting in a big concave circle around her facing her in the center, waiting to see what she was going to do next. While everyone else's demonstrations were often gauged in reference to the last time they'd performed, no one there had ever seen what the jackal could do before, so they had no idea what to expect. All the expectations they'd have in the future would probably be shaped by this first performance. You only get to make one first impression, after all. The roach had helped her set up her recovered phone so that she could play music from Earth over the loudspeakers from it as she'd perform. They were just coming on. It worked!

Fran's heart raced. She'd picked Hail From The Past, her favorite Castlevania song.

She stood up under the spotlight, arms over her head thrown back as the first few notes trickled in like a few grains of sand starting to fall on her head to trail down her skin. They say to dance like no one's watching, but, for once, the jackal wanted to dance like everyone was watching. You wanted that. The sound enveloped her like a cocoon, the stage her playground, the music her sword and shield. For a second, she just let it wash over her, letting anticipation build as her heartbeat slowly synchronized with the notes. The light show created the illusion of a desert around Fran. The temperature onstage had been raised slightly and fans had been turned on to complete the impression of the desert wind, to give her a home field advantage.

She let the first wave of sound push one of her arms down across the other one then switched for the second, arms slithering over her head like snakes on a gorgon's. The jackal's arms fell like theyèd turned to sand at her sides, trying to catch each other only to be foiled by their own dissolution. Her body dropped as if in a pool of quicksand on the ground before she carefully returned to normal, ready for whatever came next. Dancing was shapeshifting. You became whatever the thing you thought about was, and moved to make people see it too. That was how she thought of it. This had always been Fran's dream, she didn't want to blow it. She let the wind catch her arms like windmills, letting them drag her along for the ride.

She turned and turned, letting the wind push and pull at her arms from in front of her and from behind her every which way, caught in an updraft that sank into a dust devil to come back up on a dune. The jackal stopped for a moment then, as if by itself, her foot started tapping the ground to the beat, soon joined by her clapping hands, soon joined by the clapping hands of the audience around her. She smiled. They were getting into it! Fran started moving in expanding counterclockwise circles then seamlessly into contracting clockwise circles as part of the same movement, following the music as it rose and fell. Her arms turned into snakes trying to escape everywhere around her, but she got them under control, confident they'd never try to run again.

The jackal had completely forgotten all about Earth, the System, Trackers, Renegades, food, syringes, barter, the investigation, everything but the movement and the sound, her and the crowd, here and now. She was now the desert that was all that mattered. She became a sandstorm, stumbling forward like a person dying of thirst in the desert only to turn into a scorpion on her hands with a foot dangling overhead. Fran seemed to stumble back, barely catching herself forward before throwing her arms right back over her head into a backflip on her hands, her feet landing behind her almost casually before she stood back up from it like a whole new person. She kept moving to the music, becoming things, taking the crowd with her.

It was glorious. She could live for moments like these, if she had to, she thought.

***

"I can't play games alone anymore," Fran's roommate had shaken her head, "It feels stupid."

The jackal had raised an eyebrow at her.

"I was basically a shut-in when I was a kid," Fran's roommate had gone on. "I'd play games alone, watch TV alone, listen to music alone, read books alone, all in silence. It took me half my life to break out of that. They use talking machines for neurodivergent people like us to talk to just to spare real human beings from having to talk to us, but we deserve a chance to interact with real people. Now I watch TV so I can share jokes over it. I play games so we can give each other advice about it. I listen to music so we can ask each other questions about it. I read books people lend me to discuss them with them. I can't think of media as a way to escape people now, just to connect with them. I never want to envision having to be that person again."

***

"She was in a deep state of suspended animation," Collider explained. "We'll do our best, but like, if I told you we can guarantee we'll break her out faster than Sawtooth, I'd be lying to you, Officer."

"Just let me know as soon as you can get her out of there," the mantis sighed. "Did you learn anything thawing out Sawtooth?"

"We learned our projections about how long it'd take to get her out were way off," the hadrosaur shook her head. "That's what I'm telling you."

"No, I get that," the Tracker nodded. "I just want to waste as little time as necessary," she explained. "I have a feeling Tilly might blow this case wide open."

"There's something you should know," Collider added darkly.

"What's that?" Ghost threw her scarf over her shoulder.

"Whoever did this to her ripped her needles right out of her back," the hadrosaur shuddered.

***

Jackie held up her knitting needles and her carving knife in three of her hands for all the world to see, ready for her turn to come.

It was going to be a juggling act.

It had surprised Fran at first but, when she'd really thought about it, it had ended up making a lot of sense to her. A lot of the roach's life had already been spent trying to keep too many things going in the air at the same time. It was a fitting extension of this that she would've practiced how to do this as well as possible on a physical level, just as she had to be able to do metaphorically. It may have helped her practice a similar set of skills, in its own way.

Jackie took a deep breath, gathered momentum, and - all hell broke loose.

At that point, a lot of things started happening at the same time. A giant plesiosaur made of glass lifted her neck out of the water near the Jamboree. A lot of Renegades came at the Jamboree's installations and attendees in droves. It was like a coordinated attack coming at them from every direction, without warning or explanation. A directed sonic blast started coming out of the giant glass plesiosaur's mouth, cutting a swath of destruction across the entire area.

The roach almost dropped her knitting needles and knife but, good thing she didn't.

The attendees ran everywhere in a panic as shattered construction materials fell down and water leaks sprung up in the water park around them. The air was almost hard to see through, thick with dust and water droplets as it was. The chaos was similar to the chaos that Bertha had caused on the desert planet, come to think of it, but the jackal also noticed the differences right away. These people weren't just lashing out at random the way the giant centipede had been.

These people had a plan.

No one seemed to know exactly what was happening. It all happened so fast. A pack of Renegades fell on Dex, Jackie, and Fran, and the trio had to defend themselves from their attackers.

An armadillo chased the jackal into the kangaroo's reach but, before her hook reached Fran, the jackal side-rolled into the kangaroo's legs knocking her on her face. A ladybug chased the roach into a lemur's uppercut, but Jackie threw her torso back sliding under it between the lemur's legs. Dex did a 'handspin' on her crinoid tendrils, flamingo legs in a side split kicking a pangolin and seahorse on each side. As the armadillo struggled to find a way around the prone kangaroo, the jackal grabbed the kangaroo's heels to swing her around into the armadillo's face. The roach did a wall leap to dodge the lemur's sweep, drop kicking her into the ladybug. Dex went back onto her crinoid tendrils, her legs throwing a tapir's head into a waterbug behind her.

Fran got an idea and pulled her earplugs out of her pocket. Back on Earth, she'd often used to get overwhelmed in noisy areas because of her neurodivergence. She'd started carrying earplugs with her everywhere she'd gone to make her life easier in case she ran into a situation like it. Now, the jackal installed them in her ears, then located and moved a waterslide-like structure so it'd be aimed at a springboard just the way she wanted it. Protected from the worst of the sound, or at least more used to pushing through being overwhelmed by it than most people, she climbed up the ladder, rode down the waterslide at top speed, and bounced on the springboard, launching into a series of flips aimed right at the giant glass plesiosaur's open jaw.

Fran slid down the giant glass plesiosaur's neck like another waterslide, corkscrewing on her way down to land inside the plesiosaur's clear body, her control center, where she was being piloted by someone the jackal recognized from when Jackie had told Fran about her.

It was Siren.

At first it had seemed plausible that random Renegades would also have been attacking a Jamboree. It had certainly come as a surprise. Even the more frequent attacks on the Revival chambers were still something that people were getting adjusted to. No one had ever attacked a Jamboree. In the context of the chamber attacks, they did seem to establish some precedent. The blue jay's loyalty to the Commission had never seemed in question. Either Siren had been an undercover Renegade infiltrating the Commission the whole time somehow, or it was the Commission who'd ordered this attack against the Jamboree, wanting Citizens to blame Renegades. In that moment, these weren't the foremost thoughts in the jackal's mind, mind you.

All she could think about was how, after everything that the blue jay had already done to Fran's partner in the past, as if that hadn't already been bad enough as it was, after Dex and the jackal had struggled to convince the roach to perform despite her reluctance, after Jackie had even pushed past it herself, Siren had to show up, and fuck that up for Jackie too.

Some people who saw what happened from the shore assumed Fran must've physically shattered the glass from the inside, possibly slamming the blue jay's body into it somehow. Much later, the roach got the jackal to admit what really happened was that Fran did something to Siren that hurt her so much that she emitted a note so high that it shattered the entire giant glass plesiosaur around them. What the jackal did to her as such, Jackie never got her to admit.

***

"I think for me a lot of it comes down to I'm good at it," Fran had told her best friend as she'd played. "There's so many things in life I'm not good at, you know?"

Her best friend had looked up. "Really, you think so?" The game's protagonist had leapt expertly, swinging off a vine with perfect timing.

"Oh, yeah!" The jackal's avatar had rolled, spared from the swinging blade by a hair's width. "I can't cook, I can't code, I can't drive, I can't build furniture, but I can sure as shit play video games!" She'd chopped off a monster's head effortlessly, without even fully paying attention. "No one can take that away from me." She'd collected the cloud of coins the monster had burst into before moving on.

"Why'd you stop for so long?" Fran's best friend had tilted her head.

"I don't know," the jackal had shrugged. "Lot of reasons. No reason. Long story. I forget. Maybe I had to forget to come back. Good to play again, though." The game's protagonist had broken down a door with a swift kick through it.

"If a shark doesn't swim it dies, if a rabbit doesn't chew it dies..." Fran's best friend had thought out loud. "If you have wings, but you don't fly too long, maybe they fall off." The jackal's virtual avatar had conquered a series of walls and ledges with some well-practiced wall leaps, unfazed. "You gotta be able to do your thing that says 'me!' to live, don't you?"

CHAPTER 28: DEAD TO ME

"Got a little soul

The world is a cold, cold place to be

Want a little warmth

But who's going to save a little warmth for me...?" (Vampire Weekend, Unbelievers)

"Hey, Fran...?"

Fran's best friend's voice had sounded shaky on the other end of the line, like a flickering image through a watery surface.

"It's me." The jackal had already been worried then.

"I'm... I think I'm down to like, about, I don't know, what? 17%?"

Fran's countenance had darkened. "You mean Will-To-Lives."

The jackal's best friend had nodded on the other end of the line, even though she'd known that Fran couldn't see her.

"The screen around me is flashing red..." Their video game metaphors had taken on a dark edge when shit went sour. "Fran, Fran I think I hear that beeping sound..." It had been a twisted testament to their closeness that it would've just felt natural for them to maintain them even then. "Fran, I don't remember last time I saved..."

***

"When she is back, she'll have a lot of glass to pick out of sand underwater, lemme tell you," Tricorn said understatedly.

"So no one else Cleaned Plesioscope yet?"

The triceratops shook her head. "No, they're leaving that pleasure for Siren, whenever she'll be back," Tricorn rolled her eyes.

"That's too bad, can you let me know when she'll be put back together too?" Ghost lit up.

"What can she tell you Siren can't?"

The mantis inhaled. "I'm not sure." She slowly exhaled. "Might have her own take on it." A cloud of smoke formed between the insect and dinosaur, as if on cue. "See if their stories match." May as well get it straight from the horse's mouth. "People will surprise you sometimes."

***

"BLEEAARRRGH!"

Cuckoon seemed less surprised to see Fran throw up that time. "Up and at 'em, sunshine!" She even got out of the way a little faster, the jackal thought she noticed.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" Coming back from the dead didn't seem to be getting any easier.

"You're alright, you're alright!" The cuckoo bird patted Fran on the back, just like the previous time.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" At least it looked like she was only going to throw up three times this time.

"There you go," Cuckoon smiled. "Good as new." The jackal took the hug the cuckoo bird offered, gratefully.

"Oh, you again," Cactus observed. "I thought I told you to be more careful."

Fran groaned. "You did." The camel didn't sound any warmer this time around either. "Where's Jackie?" the jackal asked.

"Did she die?" Cuckoon furrowed her brow.

"I don't think so," Cactus shook her head. "We don't seem to have her."

"Where... Where is Jackie... then?"

***

"You still want someone to be there for you, on some level, you know?" Fran's roommate may have been ace, but she hadn't been aromantic.

"On any level, yeah." The jackal may have been aromantic herself, but she could still relate to the concept, in a wider sense.

"When I was a kid, I used to think people should always follow their dreams and not care about money a lot." Fran's roommate had changed a lot over the years.

"And you extended that to relationships?"

The jackal's roommate had nodded. "It just seemed idealistic to me at the time," she'd remembered. "I didn't really get how classist it was," she'd shaken her head. "I mean, when you're a kid, you don't really get how of course you have to share costs with someone to exist in the world." There were a lot of things you didn't get when you were a kid. "The question becomes, who are you gonna choose to do that with?" Things life only taught you as it happened to you. "Whose company do you want to share your time and space with for the rest of your life as you both try to survive in the world around us the way it is? You're helping that person to live, on some very basic level. If that's not a strong gesture of emotion, what is...?"

Fran's pets had loved her because she'd brought them the food that had kept them alive. She'd brought them the food that had kept them alive because she'd loved them. And their presence in her life had kept her alive in a wider sense. The gift of life was a powerful thing.

***

"She's been missing since all the others were revived, you know that, right?"

Orchid nodded. "Speaker?" The mantis didn't like this. "Yeah." Robber's memory erased, Corsair faking her death, Speaker vanishing off the face of the world. "What about her?" What it all added up to was that someone was trying very hard to hide something, whatever it was. "You find her?" the Tracker asked.

Collider winced. "Some of her."

***

There was no trace of Jackie anywhere.

Fran had asked herself how weird it'd be for her to be on her own for a while when the roach would die as such. She'd never even considered the possibility that Jackie would simply disappear even though she'd still been alive without giving her an explanation. Based on everything that the jackal had experienced of the roach's personality since they'd first met, it'd never seemed to be the kind of thing that Jackie would've ever been able to do to her, under any set of circumstances at all. She'd talked so much about how much partners mattered, about how important they were, about what partners meant to each other in general and what the two of them owed each other in particular. Surely she'd never have been capable of abandoning her.

Fran may have lived in the System for too long by that point, she couldn't help telling herself, because, in some ways, it was worse to her that the roach be alive than dead by then. The jackal couldn't make sense of Jackie being alive and gone with no timetable for her return. At least, the roach being dead would've made sense, and Fran would've had a ballpark figure of when Jackie would be brought back. The jackal would've known that her partner was being kept away from her by forces beyond her control from which she'd eventually be freed to return. This situation posited the far more unpleasant possibility that the roach had left her on purpose, for unknown reasons, and that she may never come back for her at all, for all Fran knew.

Was it something she'd said...?

***

"She said she'd meet me in this alley in the middle of the night," Fran's best friend had admitted. "Don't judge me right?" The jackal had shaken her head on the other end of the line, even though she'd known that her best friend couldn't see her.

"What'd she do?" It hadn't been the first time Fran's best friend had disappeared for such midnight adventures for a couple of hours, they'd expected it by then. It'd been how she'd lived.

"I don't know, she never showed up!" This hadn't been what any of them had expected though, it'd sounded like.

"She stood you up?" The jackal hadn't needed to have shared her best friend's experiences to have been indignant on her behalf.

"It's not just that," she'd explained. "I got mugged!"

Had Fran heard that right? "WHAT?" It'd sounded like she had.

"I'm waiting around in an alley at night for like an hour!" The jackal's best friend had almost laughed mirthlessly at her own foolishness. "I kept hoping she'd show up." To hide her harmless crime, she'd had to go where the harmful crimes had been. "It's an alley!" She'd shrugged. "I don't know what I expected." How foolish it'd been to believe she'd deserved any joy out of life at all, she'd scolded herself.

"Where are you?" Fran's only concern had been her best friend's well-being at that point. "We'll find you!"

***

"Where's the rest of her?" Ghost had been lucky that her android body had already been built in a way that meant that, not only did she not need to breathe underwater, she could also withstand considerable water pressure without damage to her systems.

"Wouldn't you like to know." Not that the mantis would've thought of the set of circumstances that had led to her being the one to interrogate Siren at that point as lucky as such, mind you.

"This isn't a game, Siren." The Tracker's systems also allowed her to connect directly with the speaking interface in the blue jay's diving suit, allowing them to talk underwater.

"That's my line, tin can." Bubbles slowly rose from the ocean depths to the surface far over their heads as they spoke.

"You stole her sonic beak system?" Large aquatic plants gently wavered in the ebbing current around them, indifferent to their plight. "You ripped it out of her and used it to attack a Jamboree, of all places?" Ghost had been disappointed by Siren's behavior a lot over the millenia, but this really took the cake. "Siren, Tilly's needles were ripped out and stolen by a serial killer." A flashlight fish working as the blue jay's Enforcer kept its light firmly trained on her as she worked. "Do you have any idea how bad this looks for you?" The mantis wouldn't have put it past her, to be honest, but she was still giving Siren one last chance to turn herself in to lessen her sentence, as she saw it.

"You have no idea what you're talking about," the blue jay spouted with a confidence that belied her situation. "Everything I did, I did for the good of the Commission," she persisted. "You'd understand that if you really knew what was going on." The Tracker was running out of patience for this by that point. "You have no idea how deep this goes." She had some idea.

"Why don't you tell me what's going on, Siren?" Siren paused her work.

"Or you'll what?" The blue jay covered her face from Searchlight's beam, which she shone in the bird's eyes. "Fine," she grumbled, resuming her work. "There's a lot more than too many Renegades afoot, Ghost," Siren warned her. "A lot more."

Ghost furrowed her brow. "What do you mean?" Something didn't add up. "What could be worse than Renegades?"

The blue jay frowned. "Ghost, I'm part of a special task force to take down the largest group of Renegades to have ever teamed up in the entire history of the System," she said with the utmost seriousness.

"No you're not." But the bird seemed undeterred.

"They don't call themselves Renegades, they say they're somethingmore than that and," she added darkly, "their very existence is a threat to everything the Commission stands for." This would've been a good time to light up if she hadn't been underwater, the mantis thought.

"What do they call themselves?" Siren pretended not to have heard her. "You know, Tricorn was right." That got the blue jay's attention. "That sure is a lot of glass..." The Tracker clucked her tongue.

***

The System had more than its fair share of fates worse than death.

It occurred to Fran that just because Jackie wasn't dead didn't mean that she'd left intentionally, or even that she was safe. The roach had been kidnapped to be kept alive and exploited literally minutes after the two of them had first met, after all. It had only been through a fluke that they'd gotten out of it, but by definition that wasn't going to happen every time, especially without a partner around to help her out of it this time. There were any number of ways in which Jackie could've been suffering through no fault of her own while she'd been gone but alive, waiting desperately for the jackal to find her and to pull her out of it. The thought of it made Fran just as eager to find the roach as her previous concern had, but she still had no idea where to start.

There was a cold-blooded perma-killer on the loose, and Citizens were vanishing left and right.

If the jackal took too long to figure out where Jackie was, there was a risk it'd be the roach who'd think that Fran had been the one who'd abandoned her, and the thought of it made her heart sink. She was so dismayed at the thought of having lost Jackie for good. Surely the roach would've felt the same way about losing the jackal again herself, just as Jackie had admitted that she'd felt after the last time that Fran had died saving her life...?

She'd find her, somehow.

***

[?Everybody's looking for something,

I traveled the world and the seven seas...?]

"Way back in one of my queer politics classes they made us read about this brothel in the Netherlands." Fran's roommate and she had both been ace. "I don't remember if I told you about it?" The jackal had been pretty sure that she'd have remembered something like that. "They never paid a dime for cleaning, they didn't."

Fran had tilted her head. "How come?" Her roommate had grinned.

"You know how some people have, like, a fetish for cleaning, like, it's a thing they're into, right?" The jackal had caught on.

"They had clients like that come clean for them for free?"

There had been a glint in her roommate's eye, but it hadn't been mockery. "It sounds hilarious, I mean it kinda is, but really, all of society should work like that, shouldn't it?"

Fran had grinned back. "My mom always told me, find a job you love, and you'll never work a day in your life."

***

"So you haven't heard from her either?"

Orchid saw Fran shake her head on her communicator screen. "I was hoping you might've!" The jackal had been going through her list of Citizens she'd met since she'd started living in the System to ask them if they'd seen or heard of Jackie one by one.

"We haven't heard from her since the Jamboree attack." This was not an encouraging prospect.

"That was the last time I saw her too." None of the Citizens that Fran had talked to in the interim had seen or heard of the roach since then either. "I was starting to think she might have been off somewhere investigating for you two, as a matter of fact." If there was a situation in which Jackie could get clues about the investigation for which the mantises had asked for their help in which the jackal would've been a liability, it could've made sense for the roach to leave her behind without being able to explain why at the time, Fran had tried to tell herself.

"Not as far as we know, no," the Tracker shook her head. "Doesn't mean she's not, though," she shrugged. "She could be compartmentalizing it from us too, for all we know." Even after all this time in the System, Jackie still found a way to do things that they'd find completely unpredictable to this day.

"I hope that's all it is," the jackal sighed. She had never existed in the System on her own for any extended period of time before, and she was finding it harder to get used to than she expected she would, especially with the anxiety of not knowing what would happen with the roach weighing on her all the time.

"So do we."

Fran tilted her head. "What do you mean?" Did they know something she didn't?

"Did Jackie ever tell you the story of how she traded something for those knitting needles she got from Tilly that time?"

The jackal scanned her mind for it, but nothing came to mind. "I don't think so, no, why?" What had they wanted to hear?

"Her needles were forcibly ripped out," Orchid answered, "and we think the killer did it."

***

"She told me she feels like a hedgehog one time," Fran had told her roommate.

"Like she's got needles on her back, you mean?"

The jackal had nodded. "Like everyone who gets close to her gets hurt," she'd explained.

"So she's afraid to let people get close." Fran's roommate had been driving them around at night, looking for her best friend after her desperate phone call.

"After we get her, she..." The jackal struggled to even talk about it. "She said she was really hurt and lonely, and she knew I'm ace and didn't want to push me and didn't want more but like..." It'd been hard enough for people to talk about this kind of thing who weren't ace. "She asked if we could snuggle overnight. Just, platonically, she meant. But, like, sharing the bed, maybe sleeping, maybe staying awake talking. She said she'd been in a lot of alleys, and it's nice, it's fun, and she likes it, but like..." Fran's roommate had nodded in understanding, encouraging her to continue. "She said it'd be nice to be able to spend a night with someone, even just like that. She said it'd help her feel... safe? She said she wouldn't be hurt if I said no."

"Have you ever done that?"

"No, you?" The jackal's roommate had shaken her head. "Ever wanted to?"

"I was in a relationship with this other ace girl who wanted to one time," she'd replied. "I panicked and said I didn't feel up to it, and now we're broken up so I feel shitty about it, but we were probably gonna break up anyway," she'd shrugged. "You?"

"Not before," Fran had admitted. "I said yes this time, though."

The jackal's roommate had raised her eyebrows. "Oh, really?" Fran's touch aversion had been a secret to no one.

"Just this once, yeah," she'd nodded. "I was just so scared of losing her, I wanted her to have something to look forward to, something to cling to, you know?" The jackal's roommate had understood all too well.

"Don't worry, we'll find her," she'd assured Fran.

"I told her we'd find her..."

And they did.

CHAPTER 29: THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU

"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 one'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 Ghost and Orchid, 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 that she'd had to filter out of the 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 entire 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 of 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 youreally 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 had enough time to keep writing her best friend's novel that she'd gotten 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 couldfight 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'd 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'd been 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 liked 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 they'd shared, the things they'd always allowed themselves to take for granted, because that'd been what anyone would've done. All that stuff that hadn't been supposed to matter had 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."

CHAPTER 30: THE MASTER'S TOOLS

"Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things." (Terry Pratchett)

"So these robot masters," Fran's roommate had asked her as she'd been playing Mega Man, "they're supposed to have been built to do just this one job, right?" The jackal had nodded as she'd slid under a narrow opening. They'd added the sliding by then.

"That's right, yeah," Fran had nodded, crackling as she'd been hit by an overhead spike. The floor ones killed you, though.

"Then they were like, 'Screw it! I'll get my own job, with blackjack and hookers!', weren't they?" The jackal had had to agree with that as well, when her roommate had put it like that. "I respect that." Fran's eyes had widened as her little blue bomber had finally exploded into several balls of light. "Stick it to The Man, robot masters!"

***

Byte had had so many electronic systems integrated into her metabolism over thousands and thousands of years that, at a glance, you could often no longer tell where her cybernetic enhancements ended and where her body began. The trilobite's lair was even more of a workshop than a laboratory, albeit one where genetic engineering co-mingled with electrical engineering. A wide variety of plugs, ports, cords, buttons, and wires protruded from Byte's body, barely distinguishable from the bells and whistles that naturally covered a trilobite's body for the casual observer. As a shortcut in times of crisis, Byte had made it possible for her to activate various defense mechanisms in her lair using her body itself.

The trilobite's lair was where she kept all of her research, after all. Some of it, it'd taken Byte thousands of years to get to the point it was at and, for some of that, it'd seemed like the payoff for it could've been just around the corner, if only she kept pushing for a little bit longer. What it came down to was that, in the context of existing in the System and its way of life, the trilobite's lair was something that amounted to the work of many of her lifetimes, that she would therefore value a lot more than any individual lifetime. This was the work that having Trackers cracking down on Byte would put at risk, and she'd had no intention of letting them do so.

Which would've been a lot easier to do if the hidden compartment in the trilobite's lair hadn't included what was left of Speaker, to say nothing of the other partially dismantled Citizens and Renegades that also graced her abode. After what had happened with Siren, Byte had expected Ghost to show up at her lair to try to take her down. One of the trilobite's regular traps might have given either of the mantises some trouble but, after her plans with the remote controls for people had been thwarted so utterly, she thought she'd try something different.

Byte set up her systems so they'd be ready to hack into Ghost's systems as soon as the Tracker would come in. She would've taken perverse irony in turning the mantis against her own partner. It would've been a workaround, just as they'd had to use for Plesioscope, but it might have had the merit of serving her immediate purposes in the here and now, at the very least. If Orchid hadn't been the one to go in to arrest Byte using her plant abilities that'd sidestepped the trilobite's expectations and defenses entirely, that is. The trilobite gave up her accomplice fairly easily, at that. Byte even criticized the way the mantis dragged her away just the way she'd criticized Kiwi's carpentry and everything else, but the Tracker didn't care all that much, truth be told.

***

Naming conventions were different in the System than they'd been on Earth.

That was one of the things that Fran had noticed about it when she'd first started living there. Since there were no families as such, there was no need for last names. Some first names were very much like ordinary first names back on Earth, mind you: Kacey, Jackie, Dex, Macha, Linda. A lot of people were named after plants, machines or animals, often in varying forms of combinations with each other as the situation called for. Some were named after concepts that would have meant something different on Earth but who represented what that concept meant in the System by their very existence, like Ghost. A lot of people on Earth had last names that had to do with their ancestors' jobs, but the System took it a step even further than that.

Drill, Yoke, Sieve, Siren, Loom. A lot of people in the System were named after tools.

***

"My mom used to have these weird mood swings around chores," Fran's best friend had told her one day. "She'd ignore them for a really long time then all of a sudden it was like they all had to be done at the same time somehow," she'd gone on. "So she'd tell me to start one, then suddenly tell me to drop it to work on a second one, then she'd get distracted and tell me to work on a third one, then while I'd be working on the third one she'd ask me why the first one wasn't done," she'd stuck out her tongue. "She didn't mean harm by it, but it was a pain in the ass. I used to call it the Cascade Failure or, failing that, the Chore Avalanche."

"You people have a little nickname for everything," the jackal had shaken her head.

"She'd give me that look like I was a broken tool that wasn't doing what it was supposed to."

"Some broken tools can still be fixed, though... can't they?"

***

Grades had always been lucky.

The tardigrade literally had a four-leaf clover growing on top of her head. Grades had been an Arbitrator ever since the System's inception, whenever that had been. This hadn't been the only factor that the tardigrade had been lucky enough to have had work out in her favor in all that time, but it sure hadn't hurt. It had already given Grades a considerable amount of sway over how the vast majority of the System's Citizens lived their daily lives. Conversely, it had also made it virtually impossible for most Citizens in the System to have had any impact on the tardigrade's own life whatsoever. Grades had worked hard to establish the dramatic power asymmetry she enjoyed, the way she'd looked at it, and she had every intention of keeping it.

The only thing that could've still stood in the tardigrade's way had to have been another Arbitrator by that point. All Arbitrators had power, but some had more power than others. Grades had no intention of allowing the rest of them and their unreliable decisions to remain a threat for her forever or, worse, until one of the other Arbitrators would choose to act on it first. Kacey hadn't trusted the tardigrade's judgment for a long time. Over the millenia, Grades had made it a habit of making Citizens' lives as hard as possible, as if reaffirming her hierarchical superiority over the rest of them had been an exercise that she had to keep repeating just to make sure it still worked. The giraffe had made a point of keeping an eye on her actions.

That was how Kacey had finally caught the tardigrade red-handed with the quantum translocator and the movement remote, and had paid for her discovery with her life.

In the end, there was nothing that Grades, even with the tremendous amount of power and influence that she'd painstakingly gathered over the ages, could've done against all other Arbitrators put together. You didn't become an Arbitrator by accident. Most of those who made the laws for Citizens to obey got to treat the laws of physics as suggestions themselves. That was where a lot of the weight behind their judgments came from. While most of them were fine with imposing whatever laws on Citizens they wished, they felt differently about the idea of someone else's will being imposed on them, whether that person was an Arbitrator or not. Thinking about what that meant put them in a unique situation to empathize with Citizens, for a change.

The tardigrade had never died. Grades had no idea what it was like. The tardigrade thought that Citizens allowed themselves to die casually, to inconvenience her, because they didn't understand what a waste of resources it meant for the Commission to have to bring them back every time. The four-leaf clover on Grades' head twitched when the Tracker walked in, ready to deploy her own plant-like powers in response to what she expected to be Orchid. Ghost took advantage of the tardigrade's error of judgment with her cybernetic abilities to give her a reason to empathize with the System's Citizens for a very long time. Being banned from being an Arbitrator for the Commission would be a huge adjustment without many other options.

Grades hadn't exactly made a lot of friends among Renegades over the years...

***

Running food was unlike any other job that Fran had done in the System yet.

Superficially, there were elements of it that appeared similar to running anything else. You had to load cargo onto ships, pilot ships from here to there, and unload cargo off of them, but that was where the similarities ended. First you had to even locate sellers and buyers a lot of the time, which often wasn't easy. All the work that Renegades had to do to hide their identities from Trackers so that they wouldn't get arrested was work that you had to re-do backwards to be able to track them down for the reasons for which they did want you to find them, for which they did want to find you. Whole systems had been built and kept secret to figure out when and where to exchange information safely, without being compromised.

This was where a lot of the connections with people that Jackie had built all over the System over the centuries paid off. Even though the roach hadn't run food in a long time, she still remembered everything that she needed to know to get right back to it after all this time. It'd been like riding a bicycle, it turned out, not that there were any bicycles in the System as such, but still. The jackal had to be on guard duty a lot. The fact that there was only one person of each species in the System could sometimes make getting away with criminal activities especially difficult. This made it proportionately important for Fran to be able to keep an eye out for Trackers so that she could warn her fellow Renegades of it in time so that they wouldn't get in trouble for it.

A long time ago now, the jackal remembered having asked herself what kind of series of events would lead someone to a life of crime, not having been able to imagine how that could happen to someone. It was only now that it'd actually happened to her that she'd understood why she wasn't in a situation in which she could've told her old self about it in a way she could've understood at the time either. Somehow events had unfolded in a way that had proven impossible to disentangle from that.

One run, when shit went sour, Dex, Jackie, and Fran struggled to make their getaway from a crackdown. They realized that the Trackers they were up against were mostly fighting another, larger group of Renegades around them. There were even Tracker ships fighting Renegade ships in the sky over their heads.

Those particular Renegade ships looked unlike any other ships that any member of their trio had ever seen. They were in all sorts of weirdly unsettling shapes with little bells and whistles in all the wrong places, the kind that sent a shiver down your spine. It actually took the jackal a bit of questioning after the fact to make the last few remaining pieces of that puzzle fall into place later on.

Then they were all shot down by two or three Tracker ships, just like that.

***

"You know how she used to say places had 'spirits' to them, the way people and animals did?" Fran and her roommate had talked about things that the jackal's best friend used to say a lot.

"I remember, yeah," Fran had nodded.

"I... Everything around here reminds me of her, Fran," the jackal's roommate had broken down. "The games we used to play, what we used to watch, the books we used to read, the couch where we used to sit, the kitchen where we used to cook, the bed where she used to sleep..." Fran had taken her roommate in her arms as she'd shaken her head, filled with guilt and shame. "I could never want to forget her, but remembering her all the time is just so hard," the jackal's roommate had almost apologized.

"I understand." The apartment had been like this little museum to the life they'd all shared together for so long.

"This place has her spirit now, Fran, and I..." She hadn't known where to go from there. "... And I don't know what to do." For once, she hadn't had a plan for this.

***

Tracking down Kacey proved quite an undertaking even with the help of someone who knew where she was. The Trackers had already asked Loom, Solder, and Glew for help finding Tilly in the ice planet's caves before. It seemed to have gone well enough for them to accept doing so a second time, in any case. Finally arresting Siren, Byte, and Grades had gone over well with a lot of Renegades, it turned out.

This time, Plesioscope remotely guided them all into a secret ice cave that took them through a blood-chilling ice ossuary. In a 3-D maze around them, winding every which way like the inside of an anthill, everything was made of ice carved into the shapes of someone's bones. Stairs made of ice tibias and ice femurs, pillars of ice skulls, ice tusks and ice horns in the floor and walls, ice spines hanging from the ceiling, and doors carved to look like fanged, bony ice maws. Whoever had done this, she'd had some issues to work out.

"Holy fucking shit!" Everyone turned to Ghost askance. "Must've picked it up," the mantis shook her head.

At long last, the Trackers found, frozen solid in another giant pillar of ice at the center of a larger underground area, all the tiny little ants that, when they were all put together in their plant-giraffe 'husk', formed the hive mind of the missing subversive Arbitrator known as Kacey, presumed perma-dead.

***

"BLEEAARRRGH!" Doornail scampered out of the way as Fran stumbled out of her Revival chamber to throw up. "BLEEAARRRGH!" It didn't look like she was going to throw up a third time this time. What an awful thing to get the hang of, she couldn't help but think. "I... Where am I...?" The possum helped the jackal up from her stumble, steadying her on her feet. But where was Cuckoon? "This doesn't look like the Revival chambers." They were in a large underground garden, hidden from prying eyes under the surface of the forest planet, lush with everything that could grow without sunlight, from mushrooms to snake plants to spider plants to bioluminescent moss.

"The Tracker ships killed you," Reclaim explained to them. "We figured you'd rather get brought back without having to have an Enforcer to deal with," the hyena added, tongue-in-cheek. "You're welcome."

"You... made these?" Jackie was incredulous. "You people actually figured out how to make your own Revival chambers?" The Commission guarded the secrets of Revival jealously.

"Well, they're not perfect yet, but," Corsair replied, "they will be." The meaning of what she meant by 'not perfect' hadn't become fully apparent to them yet, but itwould.

"Haven't I seen you somewhere?" Fran frowned.

"No, I don't think so," the puffin waved off.

"Are we your prisoners now?" the roach saw fit to ask.

"No," Grassroots assured them. "You're free to leave, but welcome to stay," the grasshopper clarified. She seemed to be the one in charge, although that may have been relative then and there.

"What are these?" The jackal pointed at the weirdly-shaped ships.

"They're bacteria," Gasmask answered. "You know how the Commission are always saying the System is like a metabolism and we all have to play our parts in it like that?" They played the part of the bacteria.

"What's that smell?" Jackie finally blurted out, turning her attention to a bubbling cauldron that was being tended by a rhipicerid beetle nearby.

"This, our honored guests," Scattershot solemnly sprinkled spices over her cauldron while she stirred just the way she used to throw seeds for trees to grow, "is cooking." The rhipicerid beetle took a deep, long whiff out of her cauldron herself, savoring its scent like the sweetest pheromones. "Hungry?" The roach's mouth watered as one of Scattershot's four arms offered them a steaming ladle...

***

"My mom was chill most of the time," Fran's roommate had told her one day, "but she'd really lose her shit when someone would break something," she'd shaken her head. "It kinda fucked me up how mad she'd get, especially since she usually didn't, does that make sense?" Not that she'd wished her mom had gotten mad more often, mind you, but the jackal understood well enough.

"Objects are still easier to replace than people, though, aren't they?" Fran had opined.

"Say that to my mom," the jackal's roommate had stuck her tongue out. "Sometimes I used to wish I'd been an object, just so she'd have cared as much about breaking me."

***

"They keep breaking the Revival chambers!" Amber exclaimed. "What are they even thinking?" The deinonychus couldn't believe what she'd been hearing. "Don't they realize they depend on those chambers to come back, same as everyone?" Kacey had been a dependable Arbitrator for the Commission since time immemorial, beloved by most, if not all. "The work in the System doesn't do itself!" What could've happened to the giraffe to have made her lose her mind like that?

"The Free Radicals have their own chambers by now, Amber," Kacey replied.

"And they work?" That was a different question altogether, wasn't it?

"The vast majority of the time, yes," Kacey answered cautiously.

"What about the rest of the time?" Amber had to know.

"The memory engrams become corrupted," the giraffe looked down. "The new chambers were partly created by adapting mind-wipe technology, so they're not foolproof yet."

"Kacey, you know as well as I do, as well as all Arbitrators do that, when we created the System the way it is, we couldn't afford any duplicates," the deinonychus reminded her. "When we lose a single person, a whole species goes extinct," Amber shuddered. "Is that what you want?" Kacey looked back at her unwaveringly.

"That's precisely what I don't want," the giraffe retorted. "That's why it's so important I speak to you." So important that someone had put a lot of work into making sure she couldn't. "I have reason to believe those glitches are a feature, not a bug, that someone built them in to get rid of people they don't like no matter what the cost," Kacey explained. "If we find out who did it, I think they can be fixed so they won't have that glitch." It seemed like the best solution to her.

"We don't want them to have functional Revival chambers, they should have to depend on us, don't you get it?" How could the giraffe not put two and two together? "If we don't filter Renegades, we won't be able to assign them Enforcers, and there won't be any law in the System anymore!" It wasn't that complicated, was it?

"I'm trying to tell you they're going to use other Revival chambers whether you want them to or not," Kacey responded, "whether they're functional or risky. The only difference will be how many of their memories make it, so I'd rather they have functional ones, wouldn't you?"

"You should never have given them the benefit of the doubt," the deinonychus scoffed. "You should've talked to us, we should've all taken immediate action to quash this in the bud when we had the chance," Amber spat.

"You don't understand the scope this has already taken," the giraffe shook her head. "It's only ever been individual Renegades before, this is something completely different, this is the first time another group than the Commission has worked together this much in the System's entire existence," Kacey went on. "They're trying to create a whole other kind of society, an alternative to the Commission." She said that like it was a good thing.

"An alternative is a threat to us," the deinonychus frowned.

"It's a threat you should take seriously, that's what I'm telling you," the giraffe nodded. "I don't want a few of us to keep breaking the Commission's Revival chambers either," she clarified, "but I need to be able to convince them you're not a threat to us, to work with me on that," she pleaded.

"When did it become 'us'?" Amber rolled her black hole eyes. "You're an Arbitrator, Kacey!" Had she forgotten about that?

"That's why I'm trying to Arbitrate between the Commission and the Free Radicals, Amber," Kacey replied. "It's the most important job of my career." The ants that worked together to sustain her plant-like body crawled in and out of the pores in her skin as she talked. "The System's whole fate depends on it." The giraffe would become the Free Radicals' ambassador and union representative to the Commission or die trying - again.

"What do they even want?" the deinonychus asked. "What are their demands?" This should be good, she thought.

"They want to be able to get Arbitrated over their communicators, they don't want it to have to be in person, it puts people without ships at a disadvantage in negotiations and it wastes time and energy. They want Enforcers to have oversight and accountability so they can't get away with treating them unfairly. They don't want to be at the whim of whether they get an Arbitrator who personally dislikes them or not. They want to normalize giving help without an expectation of immediate reward. They want to be able to have as many partners as they want. They want to be able to have legal access to real food, they think that can be done sustainably. They want more control over whether they have to work at jobs they hate or not."

Amber sighed. "And why should we give them any of that, Kacey, can you tell me that?"

Kacey's countenance darkened. "I'm not in charge of what happens, so don't shoot the messenger about this, because that's the last thing I want, but you really don't understand how big this is," she strove to get across. "This is like about a quarter to a third of everyone in the System." She let that sink in for a second. "We don't know which way people who aren't aligned would go if they knew the full story, but think about it, Amber," the giraffe persisted, "a lot of people have been sick of the way the Commission does things for a long time. If no one works to mend fences, the System's going to have something it's never had, something that, with cryonics and mind-wipes, with the way it's built, it can't possibly afford to have, not even once."

Time and energy use were always factors in being able to bring people back - factors that could only be overclocked so far. "What's that, Kacey?" the deinonychus tilted her head.

"War."

***

"It was you?" Jackie couldn't believe her eyes.

"That's right," Macha admitted.

"When I got the quantum translocator from Solace," the roach turned to Fran, "she told me someone helped me pay for it, but she never told me who it was," she added. "But why?" The dragonfly had always been hard to read.

"Free Radicals give things without expecting an immediate reward," the pterodactyl dodged uncomfortably.

"Why give this to me in particular, though?" Jackie insisted.

"Look, you had a way out of the System when I brought you back, all that time ago," Macha shook her head. "It was my fault you weren't able to leave then," she looked down. "I should never have stood in your way the way I did." The roach winced.

"You thought you were saving me." It still wasn't easy for Jackie to admit even after so long. "What made you change your mind?" They'd argued about this so much back in the day.

"You're not happy here," the pterodactyl said matter-of-factly. "You've never been happy here, I don't think," she emphasized. "Maybe you'd have been happy somewhere else..."

***

"Hey Fran, we're going out!" Fran's mom had never told her to do anything around the house, left it entirely up to her. "Grab your jacket!" As it happened, the jackal had been piling up more and more clothes overhead in her closet trusting it to hold, no need to sort them out was there?

"Coming, mom!" Fran had screamed when she'd opened the door and all her clothes had come tumbling down on top of her like an avalanche. "AHHHH!" For a split-second, as time had frozen while the jackal had seen her clothes coming down but before they'd reached her, the thought had flashed into her head: this is it, I'm going to die the way I lived, a victim of my own laziness. Her mom had found her and, once she'd reassured herself that her daughter had been fine, she'd laughed and laughed.

"I'm sorry, Fran!" She just couldn't help it. "It's just so funny, it's so... you," Fran's mom had elaborated.

"Not helping, mom," the jackal had grumbled on her back under her pile of clothes. "Hey, mom?" Her mom hadn't made a move to remove any of her clothes from her.

"What, honey?" Fran hadn't moved to remove them either, admitting defeat in the face of a superior foe.

"Why must you let me make my own mistakes like this?" The jackal had tried to shake her head as her clothes had muffled her voice.

"Now you won't make it again," her mom had said matter-of-factly.

CHAPTER 31: THE HAND YOU'RE DEALT

"Being forgotten is worse than death." (Freya Crescent)

Fran had kept having a harder and harder time dealing with her best friend's coma alone, while her roommate had kept having a harder and harder time dealing with living in a graveyard full of dead memories they'd shared with her when she'd been with them. The jackal's roommate had been ace, but not aro. While Fran had struggled to sort out her emotions after they'd snuggled through their grief that one time, her roommate had fallen in love with someone from online and, with time, she'd decided to move out of their apartment altogether. They hadn't made any commitment like that to each other, so she didn't owe the jackal anything as such. Still, Fran had always pictured them growing old together in some form or another.

They'd told each other that they'd stay friends and that they'd keep hanging out and meant it, but they'd just always known each other as roommates. That had been how their dynamic had been established and sustained for over a decade. Having had it suddenly removed had proven weird and painful for the jackal to deal with, but she hadn't wanted to make her ex-roommate feel bad for pursuing something that had made her happy and helped her heal from her loss either. Fran's ex-roommate's girlfriend had already shared her apartment with other people and, being the way she'd been, her ex-roommate had naturally taken on the role of cleaning everything around the house for them all the time.

There had been no big fight that had driven the jackal and her ex-roommate apart. Her ex-roommate had started having to spend more time dealing with her other responsibilities, so they just hadn't talked as often as they'd used to at first, bit by bit. More and more of the time they'd spent talking had started becoming about Fran's ex-roommate talking about problems she'd had to deal with with other people around her house, and less and less about the jackal or the friend they'd used to share. Fran's ex-roommate had developed a heart condition, and the jackal had become even more skittish about bringing up her own problems to her. She'd remembered their conversation about activist burnout well, and hadn't wanted to make it worse herself.

By the time Fran's best friend had actually died in her coma, the jackal and her ex-roommate had already fully stopped talking, and she'd had no one to turn to about it, at all.

***

"You can't be serious!" Jackie and Fran had never had a fight before.

"How can I not?" Sure, they'd had disagreements over how to do this or that now and then, but never afight fight, and never like this.

"But that's crazy!" When the roach had gone her own way after the Jamboree attack, it'd taken the jackal completely by surprise.

"The Commission never asked any of us whether we even wanted them to bring us back or not in the first place." This fight was a new experience for them, and a very unpleasant one, at that.

"I know you're still carrying a lot from that time they kept having to bring you back over and over," Fran acknowledged.

"It's got nothing to do with that!" Jackie insisted. "Why is the onus on us to be better about it than they were?" the roach asked.

"I'm not talking about whether or not it's fair," the jackal answered.

"No one's been talking about what's fair in the System for a long time," Jackie shot back, "for a lot longer than you've been here." That one stung.

"So just because I'm an alien, you think I can't understand what the stakes even are here?" The stakes had never been so high.

"I'm not saying that," the roach rolled her eyes.

"What do you think will happen if a few of us break all the Commission's chambers?"

Jackie was undeterred. "Our chambers work."

"Oh yeah, most of the time!" Fran shrugged.

"Do you really understand what the stakes are here?" The roach had to ask.

"Everyone's not cut out to be a Free Radical, Jackie!" the jackal shook her head. "Just because we can do something doesn't mean everyone can do it." Fran had enjoyed being a Renegade and Free Radical so far, but she did have the personality and skill set for it. "Everyone can't do everything," the jackal persisted, "isn't that what the Commission also doesn't get?" Wouldn't it have been better to give people a choice about where to be brought back?

"The Commission's gotten everything it's gotten since the System's inception through its control over the Revival chambers," Jackie retorted. "If it controls the chambers, it controls the System, it's as simple as that."

Fran still wasn't convinced. "What happens when the Commission finds our chambers, and starts destroying them too?"

The roach frowned. "That's why we should probably destroy theirs first." Jackie was speaking from a place of profound hurt, the jackal got that.

"Jackie, if we don't work out some kind of truce with the Commission somehow, we're going to end up with no chambers at all, and the whole System will die." It did hurt the roach to see Fran so crestfallen, but Jackie just wished the jackal would've understood. "You can't want that." Fran had been looking up to the roach for such a long time by then. "Even now, even with everything you've been through, you can't..." She'd become the jackal's role-model.

"We've been trying to work things out with the Commission peacefully for such a long time." Jackie was just so tired. "What's it gotten us so far, can you tell me that?" She had lived too many lifetimes. "How much longer are we supposed to wait for things to get better?"

Fran sighed. "I'm not telling you to wait for them to get better on their own, but there has to be a better way." Kacey had sure been working overtime trying to find it.

"The mind-wipes don't destroy someone's body," the roach specified, "they don't destroy someone's personality either, you know?" The jackal cringed. "I mean, if you put 'em in the same situation they were in, they'll do the same thing they would've done the first time." Something told Jackie this argument wasn't connecting all that well.

"What about all the times you've done something differently in your life because of someone you've known, something they told you, something that happened to you with them?" People's decisions and personalities were influenced by a myriad different things.

"Sometimes I wish I could start from scratch like that myself, you know," the roach admitted. "Forget everything that ever hurt me." It's not that Fran didn't see the appeal to it.

"What if it happened to someone you cared about, like Dex?" That touched a nerve.

"Oh, so now this is about me and Dex!" the roach snapped.

"Of course it's not about you and Dex, for fuck's sake Jackie!" Blood thundering in her ears.

"I STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS!" Heat rising through her body, taking over.

"OH YEAH? WELL, FUCK YOU!" The jackal flipped her the bird.

"WELL, FUCK YOU TOO, ALIEN!" And they stormed off their own way into the night.

***

Fran had realized that she'd mostly buried her memories of what had happened to her when she'd been mugged and shot working at her convenience store night shift job that one time. With time, they'd been replaced with the more positive memories that she'd made of the night she'd spent awake with her best friend and her roommate to recover from it after it, just watching TV and talking as they'd done. Now that her best friend and roommate had both been gone, it'd been like a patch in a dam had come off, and those memories had started coming back to her, often while she'd been at her job for hours on end with no distractions on hand to speak of.

The jackal had used to make up little stories in her mind around customers who'd come in at night as she'd worked. Now, whenever a customer would come in, she'd flinch inwardly, and wonder if this would be it, if this would be the time when one of them would mug and shoot her again. What if it'd killed her this time? What if Fran had survived physically, but had had no one else to fall back on to help her heal from it emotionally this time around? That would've been almost even worse, she'd been almost embarrassed to admit to herself. Without anyone to turn to, how badly would she have even wanted to go on living if it had? These had been the thoughts going through the jackal's mind when another customer had pulled a knife on her.

So she'd reached behind the cash register, pulled out a baseball bat, and hit the mugger in the face with it.

***

"Ghost!" Jackie looked like she'd seen a ghost, fittingly, one might say. "I..." The roach wanted to say something, but the words caught in her throat. "Why are you here?" It couldn't bode well, could it? "You're not supposed to be here." But then Ghost already knew that. "Are you here to arrest me?" It said something about their dynamic that Jackie asked the question more with simple exasperation in her voice than anything else by that point. Really, arrest her? She was already having such a bad day.

"I'm not here to arrest you." The mantis had always seen herself as way more patient with the roach than she'd had any right to be. "I'm here to warn you." She was just going to have to be patient a little bit longer.

"About what?" Jackie blinked.

"There's someone among you who wants you all to fail." The roach tried to determine whether the Tracker was lying or not. "Corsair sabotaged your Revival chambers. She's been working with Grades from the start." For some reason Jackie, even though she didn't expect she would, did get the impression that Ghost was telling the truth about this for some reason. "If you stop her, you can probably figure out how to make it so they stop messing with people's heads the way they do."

The roach frowned. "Why aren't you arresting me?" It did beg the question. "Isn't that your job?" Jackie raised an eyebrow at the mantis.

"Oh, I'm on vacation," the Tracker shrugged, her trenchcoat fluttering behind her as she walked away.

***

Fran had become completely unable to work at her job after what had happened to her there. Even though she hadn't been hurt physically that time, the psychological damage of having been put in the danger she'd been put in and, especially, of having been forced to do what she'd done to save herself from it had just proven too triggering for her to have been able to deal with anymore. So she'd taken a leave of absence, she'd gone on assistance, and she'd tightened her belt as much as possible, resolving to live as frugally as possible until she'd be able to think of another solution to her problem somehow. The jackal hadn't been sure of how long that would take, but she'd cross that bridge when she'd come to it, she'd told herself.

Well, she'd come to that bridge sooner than she'd expected. When her pets got a medical condition that required a lot of money for medicine and operations to get under control, Fran had been presented with a dilemma. Backed into a corner, she'd started grudgingly selling first her own possessions, then what she'd had left of the possessions that her best friend had left them with, anything that hadn't been absolutely necessary for their immediate survival. She'd had all of those positive memories associated with these objects, with the experiences she'd shared with her best friend around them. It'd been excruciating for the jackal to let them go, just not as excruciating as not saving her pets or going back to work for it would've been.

So she'd picked her poison and, ironically, by the end of it, the apartment probably wouldn't have reminded her ex-roommate of her best friend nearly as much as it'd used to, but it hadn't mattered anymore.

***

"Oh gosh!" Fran had clearly stopped expecting Orchid to check in with her about their investigation by then. "Orchid!" The mantis clearly hadn't forgotten that the jackal had promised to help them on their quest to catch the serial killer who was still on the loose. "I..." Was it too late for Fran to still pretend that she'd just been infiltrating the Free Radicals the whole time? "What's up?" Maybe if she just acted innocent enough the Tracker would simply go away?

"You wouldn't happen to have gone off to join the Free Radicals, would you?"

The jackal panicked."What? No!"

Orchid looked at her matter-of-factly. "I'm kidding, Ghost told me." That was more deadpan than the mantis usually was, to be fair. "You still care about our investigation at all, though, by any chance?" There was no real reason Fran shouldn't, come to think of it.

"Yeah!" Free Radicals didn't want serial killers roaming the System wreaking havoc any more than Trackers did, did they?

"Well, I've got good news and bad news, then," the mantis had continued. "We've finally figured out who the other Earthling on the loose is, right down to where she is, at that."

The jackal furrowed her brow. "But you haven't apprehended her yet, though?"

The Tracker shook her head. "That's the thing," she explained. "What we've learned about her made it clear she's a much more serious threat than we thought, and we..." Orchid was trying to get better at admitting when she needed to ask for help, even though she'd never found it easy to do. "As a fellow Earthling, I guess, we thought you may have thoughts on what her weaknesses could be, on how we might be able to take her down, maybe...?"

"Tell me what you know," Fran responded. "I'll see what I can do."

***

The few rays of sunlight that made it from the peaks to the ground of the bamboo grove ran across Dex's body as she'd walked through it like golden fingers going over her shape. Dex's heat pits didn't see the discrepancy where the shadows on her no longer matched the bamboo peaks as exactly as they just had, but they did tell her where it came from. Before she could say anything, her assailant dropped upside-down in front of her, righting herself as she'd swung her bamboo staff in an arc on her way down hitting right where Dex would've been if she hadn't moved out of the way in time by a hair's width. "What'd I do to earn your displeasure, Pangaea?"

Pangaea looked at her unswervingly. "You shouldn't have killed Corsair." So that's what this was about.

"Corsair shouldn't have killed and mind-wiped Grassroots." Dex would've shaken her head if she'd had a head to shake. "She knew what she was doing."

"Grassroots was talking to an Arbitrator!"

"She was talking to Kacey about fixing our chambers."

"Our chambers don't need fixing, Dex," the panda proclaimed. "The System will never change unless everyone's mind-wiped, unless we all start from scratch."

Dex would've frowned, if she'd had eyes to frown with. "Everyone but you, Corsair, Grades, and whoever else you happen to have cut a deal with provided you all keep your word, isn't it?" It hadn't mattered why Corsair and Grades had wanted the chambers not to work, only that they'd wanted the same thing. "What gives you the right to make this decision for everyone else for them?" The jackal would probably have called that Horseshoe Theory, but she wasn't around.

"I have every right," Pangaea countered. "I was an Arbitrator, did you know that? I was there at the start when the others decided that we wouldn't have one crinoid and one flamingo, that it wasn't efficient enough. If they hadn't overruled me then, you wouldn't even exist."

"Who'd they overrule to have one black bear and one white bear merged into you?" Dex asked matter-of-factly.

"I'll make you eat those words." The panda was still struggling not to take a bite right out of her bamboo staff as she spoke. "I don't care about Grades, Corsair, Kacey, Grassroots, or any of you losers. When your mind's wiped, you'll call me leader, just like everyone else." And if someone was frozen, misplaced, then everyone forgot she'd ever even existed, well, how much would she be missed, how much of an investigation would there be?

"It's still time to..." But Dex's pleas for peace fell on deaf ears.

With Dex's four crinoid tendrils, no head, lamprey maw, heat pits, and two flamingo legs, Dex had a fighting style unlike anything that had ever been seen anywhere else in the System, let alone on Earth. She could sense where her opponent was anywhere around her all the time and move in three dimensions in completely unpredictable ways. A lot of people had hired her to teach them how to fight, but no one had ever learned to fight the way she did. Dex's fighting style had been cobbled together from new stuff she'd had to come up with against all the different opponents she'd had over the course of her many lifetimes. It was a set of desperate improvisations that had somehow worked that one time and been recategorized as a good idea.

If you subscribed to the idea of the culture of one that sometimes came through at Jamborees, Dex's fighting style would've been a national treasure. It was so impressive it'd even begrudgingly impressed the people she'd killed with it themselves. She'd often look like she'd been going to fall down, but her flamingo leg balance would always come through in the end, even if she'd only balance on one toe. She'd used tendrils as legs and legs as tendrils interchangeably, moving upside-down as easily as she'd move rightside-up. Dex's cartwheels, splits, jumps, flips, rolls, sweeps, and hand-spins dodged and attacked seamlessly. Watching her fight felt like glimpsing a deeper truth about existence than you'd ever fully understand.

And she made mistakes.

Not often, mind you. This particular mistake, she hadn't made in well over ten thousand years. Had it been fifteen? Oh, Dex had gotten it good that time. She'd told herself, I'm never making that mistake again. To be fair, it'd taken her a really long time. Why did Dex have to make it then and there, as such? Who knew? She'd always been the sort of person who'd tell people it was okay to make mistakes. You could always learn from them. That had been one of the things that Jackie had liked so much about her. In the System, it'd felt so rare. This time, it was a costly mistake. Dex slipped and fell on her back, and Pangaea followed her bamboo staff sweep at the hybrid's flamingo legs with one final, downward thrust right through Dex's chest.

***

Had it been months, maybe even years? She'd lost all sense of time by then.

"Let's go down to the lobby..."

Fran had been ashamed of it at first but, with time, even with how hard her fear of loss had hit her when it'd materialized so hard, she'd found her own small ways to survive and adapt to what had happened to her until then as well as she'd been able to, buffers against the void.

"Let's go down to the lobby..."

Her pets had become her rock and her light, even more than they'd always been. She'd wondered sometimes if people with kids would ever be able to understand she'd loved them as much as she'd have loved her own kids, if not more. That's what her heart had been wired for.

"Let's go down to the lobby..."

She'd sang to them as she'd brought them food three times a day, sharing their excitement and hunger for life as she'd moved through her apartment like cheerful, well-oiled machinery. They'd eaten each time like it'd been the first time they'd discovered what food was.

"And get ourselves some snacks!"

What nobler purpose could the jackal have served than to have been there for her chosen family when they'd needed her the most, after all? They'd always been there for her.

***

"I should've been there for her," Jackie shook her head. "I should..." Fran could've told the roach 'I told you so' but she just couldn't.

"It wasn't your fault, Jackie." The jackal just held Jackie in her arms as she sobbed.

"See, with a lot of..." The roach kept having to pause because she cried so much she couldn't breathe. "A lot of things you share with people from the Commission, if you try to dig back for it, they have like..." Jackie's mind was scrambled, she kept struggling to come up with the right words. "They keep track of things, they can afford to, it's like, their whole thing, you know?" Fran nodded.

"But you can't afford to write down a whole bunch of things you shared as Renegades like that because they could use it to catch you, couldn't they?" By necessity, the history of Renegades had always been a history of stealth, an oral tradition that they could only afford to keep in their own minds, and nowhere else.

"That's... That's the thing," the roach sniffled. "Stories like we told you at the Jamboree that time." She dissolved into sobs thinking back on what a good time they'd had.

"I remember them." The jackal's mind went back to the first time she'd held Jackie in her arms as she'd cried, when the roach had first found out that she'd lost the quantum translocator all that time ago. "We should... We should tell them to her sometime, maybe, so she'll at least know they happened to her." It wasn't the same thing as remembering having had them happen by herself, but it would still be better than nothing, wouldn't it?

"You were right, okay?" It hurt to admit it, but she had to. "What do you want me to say?" It was clear from Fran's face she took no satisfaction in it. "When I saw Dex looking back at me with a confused look on her face, when I heard her ask me 'Who are you?' like that..." Jackie was falling apart at the seams. "It was the worst thing I've ever experienced, okay!" And she cried and cried and cried and cried. "It was worse than all the thousand ways I've died put together." The jackal missed Dex too. "No one should have to go through that." Even though Fran had only known Dex for a shorter time, she'd also gotten attached to her, not as much as to the roach, but not by much. "It shouldn't have taken this to make me realize that, but it did."

"Orchid finally got back to me about that serial killer from Earth," the jackal said quietly.

"I know who killed and mind-wiped Dex," Jackie nodded, "it's Pangaea." It was an answer even though it wasn't one, Fran got that.

"Hey, Jackie?" Their hug turned into one of mutual support and encouragement.

"Yeah, what?" They pulled back from each other a bit, looked into each other's eyes.

"Be careful."

The roach chuckled. "I'm always careful."

***

It'd looked like it'd been time for Fran to go back into the fray after all.

She'd told herself that she'd never be able to go back to her old job after the baseball bat incident. The effect it'd had on her mental health had left her unable to hold down another job either. But when time had come for her to have to be able to afford yet another operation and medicine for her pets to survive, the jackal had gone right back to her old job after all. She'd have kept her hand on a hot stove element forever for them if that's what it'd taken to save their lives with all they'd meant to her. The cruel irony had been that even the medicine and operation she'd gone back to work to be able to afford hadn't been enough to help them make it in the end. All she'd ultimately been able to do for them had been to be there for them all the way.

Fran had always hated needles.

CHAPTER 32: SCORCHED EARTH

"À la claire fontaine m'en allai promener (I went for a walk to the clear blue fountain today)

J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle que je m'y suis baignée (The water was so pretty I had to take a dip)

Tu as le coeur à rire, moi, je l'ai à pleurer (Your heart feels like laughing but my heart feels like crying)

J'ai perdu mon ami sans l'avoir mérité (I lost my friend even though I didn't deserve it)

Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (I've loved you for so long)

Jamais je ne t'oublierai..." (I'll never forget you...)

(À la claire fontaine)

This time was going to be it, Fran had told herself that time. The morning mists had seemed so thick in front of her as to appear well-nigh impenetrable, yet they'd parted before her like butter, almost welcoming her through. Maybe all obstacles hadn't been as hard to get through as she'd assumed, she'd thought - but not in a good way. This time, the jackal hadn't had her mom, her best friend, her roommate, her pets, or an apartment or a job that hadn't both triggered her constantly from morning to night every day. She'd had nothing holding her back, no buoy holding her afloat for her to cling to. So she'd climbed up on the railing, looked down, and saw the eerie, inviting beauty of the water's surface staring back at her like the Abyss did...

***

To a casual observer, the way Jackie held her knitting needles and carving knife in three of her four hands may have made it look as if they'd been just about to fall right between her fingers. "Well, Pangaea..." From experience, she'd been confident enough that she could secure her grip on them in any split-second she had to that she could afford to sacrifice solidity for flexibility for now. "Looks like you're gonna see me juggle after all." She reflexively defaulted to kind of an in-between stance, just as carefully ready to melt away or harden forward at a moment's notice.

"Aren't you gonna lecture me like your friend did?" Pangaea chuckled, her bamboo staff aimed right at the roach's head like a sniper rifle.

"You shouldn't have killed Dex." Lightning bolts striking down at the wide, open, windswept grasslands around them in the distance seemed to punctuate her words.

"Won't you tell me to fix our chambers?" It was clear from what she did next that she had no intention of doing that. "To make peace with the Commission?" The panda parried Jackie's first three swings in a row. "To let you lead the Free Radicals?" The roach parried Pangaea's following swing with all three weapons that she'd just attacked with. "To give myself up, while I have the chance?" But Jackie seemed somewhat less idealistic than her friend had been so far.

"You." The roach's triple defense unfolded into a triple offense. "Shouldn't." The panda dodged it, but not easily. "Have." Pangaea tried to regain the advantage, but Jackie kept turning every defense into another attack, never giving her the chance to step back and regroup long enough to establish a real pattern of attack. "Killed." The roach really was juggling, throwing one or two of her three weapons in the air as she'd spin around only to catch them again or passing them from one hand to another behind her back, always just in time to intercept or perform yet another attack. "DEX!" The panda tried to block Jackie's axe kick from the ground but, instead, the roach's axe kick actually broke her bamboo staff in half in her hands right over her head.

***

"Nothing with needles, no," Fran's best friend had shaken her head, "never anything like that." The jackal had never been the type to try drugs so far, but she'd been curious about her best friend's experience, in a non-judgmental sort of way. "I mean, to have too much weed, you'd have to have like, more weed than it's possible for a person to have," Fran's best friend had gone on. "Hash is basically the same thing, only moreso." This hadn't been the kind of thing they'd taught in school. "Pills, read up on, know what you're getting into," she'd explained. "Shrooms are a trip, good odds but get a sitter, just in case," she'd added. "Any of that white shit you snort up, any of that needle shit though? Stay away from that shit. That'll fuck you up."

***

The powdery white snow covered the sandy dunes around them like frosting on a cake. "But why, though?" Fran had never seen a snow-covered desert firsthand, but she did remember reading about them back on Earth a long, long time ago. "Why give them the means to destroy themselves like that?" The desert didn't care if it was very hot or very cold, after all, it went through both every day and every night. "What do you get out of it?" It just got out of the way to let the temperature be the hottest or the coldest it could be, regardless of which one it was.

"Because they're contemptible," Meteor scoffed. "You're from Earth." Was it a hot spot on the ice planet, or a cold spot on the desert planet? "You get it, don't you?" Did it matter?

"What's there to get?" The jackal looked the ermine up and down. "What's contemptible about them?" Meteor looked like a white re-rendered version of Fran's black character sprite, like someone tried to save money making an old video game somewhere.

"When I lived on Earth, I worked in cryonics." Something about the way the ermine said that made the jackal wonder how Meteor could've ever liked it enough to have made a career out of it. "My clients were the most contemptible people in the world." The ermine's voice dripped with scorn as she spoke. "They didn't care if the poor died, as long as the rich lived." Meteor had clearly dealt with one of those clients too many. "They didn't care if everyone they knew died, as long as they lived." It'd driven her off the deep end. "They were so used to having everything handed to them, they expected to be handed eternal life. They were so used to the rules not applying to them, they thought death would make an exception for them too," the ermine spat.

"What does that have to do with the System, though?" Fran asked. "Everyone gets brought back here no matter what." It could be so easy to superimpose the values you'd come to from your perspective on contexts they didn't apply to at all. "It's perma-death that's the exception here, why make that exception?" On some level the jackal was genuinely trying to understand.

"No one should get to live forever," Meteor snapped. "No one, don't you see that?"

Fran looked back at her evenly. "Not really, no."

The ermine became even more exasperated. "No one values anything until they lose it."

The jackal stopped, and thought about it. "No, I'm pretty sure I valued most of what I had before I lost it, too." She was really trying Meteor's patience by then.

"It's moral cowardice," the ermine sputtered. "It's just not done." How could anyone from Earth not understand that? "If you're too weak to accept death, you don't deserve to live."

Fran thought about every way in which death had hurt her back on Earth, about how painfully she missed everyone she'd lost over the course of her life. "Actually, no." She carefully asked herself how polite she should try to stay. "Fuck that noise." Meteor looked at her askance. "You don't get to barge in here, shit all over these people's way of life, act superior, and wipe them out of existence because they happen to offend your own particular moral sensibilities," the jackal said with a calm in her voice that belied the directness of her words. "You just don't."

"And why the hell not?" the ermine grinned toothily.

"Because I won't let you." As simple as that.

A look of grim satisfaction appeared on Meteor's face. "I was hoping you'd say that."

Both Earthlings descended into their respective fighting stances, eyeing each other warily. It didn't take long for them to jump right at each other's throat. They exchanged short serieses of punches and parries you could hardly tell apart. They grabbed and threw each other around on the sand and snow, throwing and kicking sand and snow in each other's faces trying to blind each other with them. They fought like animals, clawing and biting each other savagely, without holding anything back. They pulled off acrobatics that would take your breath away and joint locks that would make you cringe. They slammed each other's face in the ground, broke out of each other's grips, and stepped back from each other after some spectacular jump kicks.

With that, Meteor, panting, screamed, and sprouted Tilly's stolen needles all over, not just on her back, but all over her body like a great big urchin. It was like the ermine had known Fran's greatest fear and had ripped the hedgehog's needles out to have them put into her body for that exact purpose. Meteor could extrude and retract them at will and, from the look on her face, whether or not she knew how much of an advantage it gave her, she clearly knew it gave her a significant one, and relished it with everything she had. The jackal paused and, for a moment, the ermine assumed fear held her back. Fran was scared, to be fair, but that wasn't the reason she'd paused. She'd paused while waiting for Meteor's needles to retract on their own.

"WHAT? NO!"

The jackal ran at the ermine, slammed into her, and they both sank into quicksand.

***

"I used to know this girl, used to be a commie, just like me," Fran's roommate had told her one time. "Poor as dirt, poorer than me." That had really been saying something. "I even lived with her for a while, so she wouldn't have to pay rent until she'd get back on her feet," she'd gone on. "Months became years. I still had my job back then, of course."

"What happened to her?" the jackal had asked.

"I don't know, she got rich, she hasn't talked to me in years," her roommate had shrugged. "She's a libertarian now."

***

Without missing a beat, Pangaea switched to wielding both halves of her broken bamboo staff like two individual bamboo swords. Jackie went under a double swing and triple blocked a double arc down, her fourth, live hand getting through to knock the panda back. The roach got right back up to go back on the offensive, taking the fight to Pangaea herself, pecking away at her defenses, relentless. All of Jackie's weapons were shorter range than the panda's, but she did have an extra weapon and an extra arm than Pangaea did, so she made the most of it. The roach swung her carving knife at one of the bamboo swords so hard it got stuck halfway into it, yanking it out of the panda's grip in a way that Jackie hoped looked intentional.

Forced to use her carving knife hand to block a counter-attack faster than she'd meant to, the roach grunted when the bamboo sword, not designed to have half of it take that kind of pressure over a sharp metal fulcrum, broke in her hand like a cheap toy outright. Maneuvering around another one of Pangaea's swings with her remaining bamboo sword, Jackie managed to get ahold of the panda's arms to twist it right out of her grip and break it in half by bringing it down on the roach's knee. Pangaea grabbed Jackie's wrist with one hand as the roach's knitting needle pierced the panda's other arm, throwing Jackie away with one hand then pulling off her own pierced skin with it. The roach gasped.

Pangaea removed all her skin. The flesh suit that had made her look like a panda fell in tatters around her, misshapen and ripped, as Jackie saw a four-armed jellyfish emerge from it like a discarded cocoon. She was the immortal kind of jellyfish, the kind that would have still come back on her own even if everyone in the System had died at the same time - the kind that didn't need to care what happened to any of them, really. Before the roach could react, Pangaea had already grabbed all four halves of her broken bamboo swords in all four of her hands to start wielding them as four shorter bamboo sticks. She sure knew how broken implements could still be put to use after all, you had to give her that.

Fighting someone with four hands and four weapons in them proved considerably more difficult. The roach had to work overtime keeping track of where all of the jellyfish's arms and weapons were at all times just to keep from being overwhelmed. She had to reach deep within herself to deploy the treasures of resourcefulness that it took to make up for the extra arm and extra weapon that she'd just been able to take for granted as her own advantage a moment before it. Pangaea's expression went back from her momentary dismay to her earlier display of confidence, certain now that it was only a matter of time before Jackie's insurrection would be a thing of the past.

With time, all three of the roach's weapons got stuck in three of the jellyfish's bamboo sticks, forcing them both to discard them all leaving Jackie empty-handed and Pangaea with one single bamboo stick to speak of. "Hey, Pangaea!" The jellyfish gave the roach a puzzled expression as Jackie reached into her cloak to pull Fran's wallet out of it. "Catch!" Without thinking, Pangaea dropped her last remaining bamboo stick to catch the jackal's wallet with two of her four hands when the roach threw it at her. She'd never seen anything like it in her life.

"What's that?"

Jackie remembered her training with Dex well. She especially remembered when she'd tried to headbutt Dex, only to end up flailing upside-down over her with her head in Dex's lamprey maw and her feet kicking up in the air. This time, in a smooth, well-practiced motion, the roach leapt so she'd end up upside-down over the jellyfish's head intentionally. Jackie wrapped a yarn string around Pangaea's neck with two hands as she went, supported herself on the jellyfish's shoulders with her other two hands for a second, and stuck both of her electrified antennae on Pangaea's head at the same time, electrocuting her. It was a move that the roach had developed based on that same mistake she'd made with Dex, all that time ago.

Wonderful things happened by mistake sometimes.

***

"Don't get me wrong," Fran's mom had told her, "if I could've been as tech-savvy as you at your age, I would've been," she'd admitted. "But you kids start so young!" She'd chuckled. "Sometimes I swear you came out of the womb with a controller in your hands."

***

"Mo-o-om, I don't wanna get up," Fran protested weakly as Jackie's head popped up, looking down in the Revival chamber at her, "I'm tired." This was new. "I'll get up later, okay?" She did have a lot to be tired about, to be fair.

"Welcome back," the roach smiled. "Good to have you back, partner."

The jackal blinked herself awake. "What?" She poked her head out of the Revival chamber like a prairie dog. "Huh?" She wasn't in her room on Earth and Jackie wasn't her mom.

"So," the roach tilted her head, "how'd you get her, anyway?"

Fran had always been vaguely freaked out at the thought of what it must've been like to carry a child. "I had Beaker put Glitchhop in my belly." A sentient sea slug who played video games wasn't a child, though. "She hacked the killer's needles while I kept her busy." Not that it's the sort of thing she'd have done under ordinary circumstances either, but it'd been for a good cause, at that. "Sawtooth took care of the quicksand pit." If there was anything antlions were good for, it was digging quicksand pits to trap prey. "You know, I don't think Sawtooth liked her very much." Freezing someone solid and leaving them for dead on the ice planet had a way of doing that to people. "We're always stronger together than alone, right?" the jackal smiled.

"You really are getting the hang of this, aren't you?" Jackie smiled back.

"You know, I guess I am." Fran wasn't bragging, but there was no use in denying it.

"That's good," the roach acknowledged. "The Commission was pretty glad I took down Pangaea, for what it's worth." They'd better have been, she couldn't help but think.

"Oh?" the jackal tilted her head.

"They gave me the quantum translocator back." Had she heard that right?

"WHAT?"

Jackie's tone didn't change. "Did you notice anything different this time, by the way?"

Fran furrowed her brow, without addressing the rest of it just yet. "Like what?"

The roach gestured toward the Revival chamber that the jackal had just crawled out of. "You didn't throw up."

***

There had been a twisted sense of freedom in the freefall, at least at first. For the first time, she'd understood what those people who did things like skydiving and bungee jumping had been after on some level - although they'd been planning to live, mind you. She'd never really gotten it before as such. The jackal realized that she'd never have to work at a job she'd hated again. She'd never have to get a panic attack on mass transit again. She'd never have to read the news and hate the world again. Fran would never wake up in the middle of the night crying knowing that she'd never have anyone who cared about her for her to turn to ever again. Like a ghost whose soul would be allowed to move on to the afterlife, she'd finally be able to rest.

It had been about halfway down that she'd started thinking about all the things she'd liked that she'd never get to do again either. The jackal would never play another video game. She'd never make another wisecrack, and feel good about herself when it'd make someone else laugh. She'd never read another book and talk about it with someone who'd read it. Fran would never watch another movie or TV show. She'd never message a picture to a friend on her phone of a cute animal she'd wished she could hold in her arms. She'd never go for another walk in the rain or shovel another driveway or listen to her favorite song or drink another cup of coffee. The jackal had been almost angry at herself.

Had such small things really been what she'd been living for for all this time?

She'd wanted to LIVE! Fran hadn't cared why, she'd just wanted to LIVE! She'd known it already hadn't been possible anymore by that point, she'd remembered how badly she'd wanted to die just a moment ago, but at that point she'd still wanted to go on living with all her heart somehow. The body lived and breathed, sought pleasure and feared pain like every living thing. Just then, she'd seen the colors start shifting in weird ways in the air over the water under her, weird in ways unlike anything else she'd ever seen in her life...

CHAPTER 33: OUT OF MIND

"Where is my mind?

Way out in the water

See it swimmin'..." (The Pixies, Where Is My Mind?)

It'd been one of those mornings on which Fran just hadn't felt like getting up at all. What good could come from it? She hadn't been able to picture getting up to do anything that wouldn't go terribly wrong that day. It'd started out as a thought that she'd known she shouldn't take at face value in the back of her mind but, as morning had marched on, she'd begun to turn it over in her head and to ask herself what would happen if she'd actually done it. Would it have really mattered all that much? Would anyone have missed the jackal if she hadn't gotten up today? What if she hadn't gotten up the next day, or the day after that? Would it have made that much of a difference to anyone if she'd just never gotten up again at all? Then it'd hit her.

Coffee.

The smell of coffee had hit Fran's nose from the kitchen as her best friend and roommate had brewed it in the morning for them, the way they always had, and her features had softened, almost instinctively. It'd smelled so good. Maybe coffee had been worth getting up for that day, she'd shrugged to herself as she'd groggily gotten up after all...

***

"Come with me," Jackie blurted out.

"What?" Everything was over. The roach had finally gotten her quantum translocator back after all this time. She was all set to go back to square one, when she and Fran had first met, when she'd been just about to step through a portal through space-time that would take her to Earth, the jackal's homeworld, just as she'd always wanted to.

"Come back to Earth with me." It hadn't been easy for her to say once, let alone twice, yet Jackie stood her ground. "You'll like it, you'll see!" The portal would only stay open for a short time, and the quantum translocator could only exist on one side of it at a time. "It'll be different with me." There had always been something about the way she'd smiled when she'd said things like that. "You can show me around, just like I showed you around here." They'd talked about that a long time ago too, hadn't they? "I can become... a writer. I'll learn how to write some of those books you like. I'll cook for us. We'll eat food, real food, every day! We'll go on vacations. We can take care of some of those animals like you showed me on your phone..."

"I..." This wasn't going to be easy for Fran to say either. "I was going to try to convince you to stay here, as a matter of fact," the jackal admitted. "Here in the System with me."

"What?" The roach blinked. "But why?"

"I really believe in what we're doing here, Jackie!" Fran had found something to believe in in the System, more than she ever had on Earth. "If we all work hard together, we can turn this place into the kind of place where you always wanted to live, don't you see? Earth... Maybe I didn't talk about it enough, I don't really know. Earth already has a lot of the bad things about this place. It has so many bad things this place doesn't! Here there's no racism because there's no races, no sexism because there's no sexes, there's no cars, there's no death, Jackie, no death! With the changes the Free Radicals are pushing for, with your help, soon this place can have all the good things that Earth has, and a lot of good things Earth doesn't have!"

"I..." Jackie didn't like the direction this conversation was going. "I'm sorry." There seemed to be no helping it. "If I think about staying in the System, all I can see is an infinite amount of work stretching out ahead of me, doing all the same work I've always done for all the same people who already think all the same bad things about me that they've always thought... I don't want to have to imagine a future like that anymore," the roach shook her head. "A future where I'm only alive because I have to be, not because I want to be. Where I can always survive, but never really thrive. It's just not what I want out of life anymore. Earth is unexplored territory for me. It's something completely new, something I'll never experience if I don't go now."

"I can't go back to a world where there's death, Jackie," the jackal looked down. "Even after what happened with Dex, you have no idea what it's like to have everyone you care about disappear forever like that," Fran shook her head. "I can't explain to you what it feels like, but you'll just have to trust me on that as an Earthling who's experienced it. It's the worst feeling in the world. People ask me how I move on from it, and all I can tell them is, I don't. I live with it every day, with the uniquely shaped holes people left in my heart that can never be filled back up by anybody else. The only advice I could ever give someone in your situation would be to do everything you can to avoid being in a situation like that. I can't have to go through that again."

"It's hard," the roach got choked up. "It's the hardest thing, I know."

"I never lost a partner before," the jackal broke down.

"You never had a partner before," Jackie grimly chuckled.

"We made pretty good partners, didn't we?" Fran asked.

"You know," the roach gave the jackal the 'thumbs up', "I think we did." They hugged, and patted each other on the back.

"We were like, the best partners ever." This was going to be a tough one.

"You sure I can't change your mind?" They'd backed away a bit, looked at each other.

"You sure I can't change your mind?" But Jackie's mind was made up. "Well..." What they wanted out of life was just too different. "If you ever end up back here through a rip in space-time by accident somehow, look me up." The roach smiled.

"If you ever end up on Earth, come and find me," Jackie replied. "I'll keep a spot warm for you." The roach turned around, about to step through the portal before it'd close in seconds, and looked back over her shoulder.

"Goodbye, Jackie," Fran waved at her on her way out through it.

"Goodbye..." It just hit her as she waved back. "Your name!" Jackie's heart sank. "I never asked your name!" But the portal closed between them behind the roach before the jackal could answer.

***

"Wait a minute," Fran's mom couldn't help but notice as she'd played, "these are all games about doing chores!" She couldn't believe it. "This one's about cooking, this one's about doing the dishes - look, this one's about mowing the lawn!" She'd laughed. "You're doing chores in games while you're putting off doing the same chores in real life!" Hadn't the young jackal seen the irony of it?

"It's only work if someone makes you do it, mom," Fran had replied, tongue-in-cheek. "Games have better music than real life, too," she'd added.

"Well then!" Her mom had given her a sly look. "Okay then." Then she'd simply walked away without saying anything. The young jackal had kept playing for a minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. Then Fran had gotten up, gone to the kitchen, and she'd started doing the dishes on her own, humming her favorite video game songs to herself as she'd worked with a smile on her face.

She did them without being asked every day after that.

***

"Do you really think we should tell them?" Amber asked Kacey. "Won't they revolt?"

"It's a little late for that," the giraffe answered.

"They're not gonna like it," the deinonychus shook her head.

"Finding out we knew they could've had food sustainably the whole time?" Kacey raised an eyebrow. "No, they probably won't."

"Do you really think it's worth the risk?" Amber wasn't so sure.

"They're gonna find out eventually anyway," the giraffe shrugged. "May as well be from us."

***

"Hey, Ghost." Ghost turned to Orchid, throwing her scarf over her shoulder as she did. "Do you ever think about what it'd be like to do something other than work for the Commission someday?" The mantis stopped, and thought about it.

"We've done criminal investigations for such a long time, though." Orchid may have had her engineering background to fall back on, but Ghost had been made to Track through and through. "What else would we even do?" It wasn't a rhetorical question.

"Well, we wouldn't have to give that up," Orchid went on. "I just meant maybe not for the Commission anymore," she elaborated.

"You mean for just like... regular people?" It just wasn't done. "For Citizens like you and me would be?" Then again, people had been doing a lot of things that just weren't done lately, it seemed.

"Yes," Orchid nodded, "private detectives for the common person, you and me, what do you say?" Ghost lit up and, slowly, inhaled.

"Eh, sure," she shrugged, "why not?" The mantis exhaled. "People haven't called me 'Officer' for a while anyway," she smirked, throwing her cigarette on the ground as a cloud of smoke dissipated around her...

***

It was finally over.

With her mind wiped, the effects of the anomaly no longer affected Bertha's mind the way they had ever since she'd run into it. While she'd still forgotten her specific memories of what she'd shared with Macha before it, by being restored to her 'factory settings', it was now possible for her to start from scratch, without the madness. The pterodactyl and the giant centipede had been given a blank slate, one they could use to rebuild new experiences with each other altogether. The last mind-wipe device had finally been destroyed.

Bertha trilled and churred as Macha scratched her head between the eyes, the pterodactyl sitting on top of the giant centipede's head as they watched the sunset together on the desert planet.

***

"Now, fighting isn't just about power," Fran told Dex as she paced back and forth in front of her. "It's about flow, range, leverage, and direction..." The jackal remembered the instructions the roach had given her well. "Now, you've got six limbs, not four, so we'll have to make some adjustments, but that's okay." Fran had a good memory for things like that. "Everyone's got different strengths and weaknesses, you know?"

***

Jackie fell such a short distance that she didn't get hurt falling in the water as such. She did make quite a splash, though. Spitting out water, she swam to the shore, came out of the water onto dry land, and shook herself off like a wet dog.

"Whoa!" The roach took in her surroundings. "What happened here?" She chuckled. "Has this place always looked like this?" She wasn't sure. "Or is this like...?"

Jackie was talking to herself, wasn't she? It was so silent. All she could hear was a strange, low, intermittent sound, far off in the distance. An Earthling would've recognized it as the dim, faint sound of cars, driving somewhere further than you could possibly see. It was a sound you could hear almost anywhere on Earth, if everything around was quiet enough. Most Earthlings had heard it in the background for long enough that they no longer noticed it but, to the roach, it was a completely new sound. There were no cars in the System. She looked left, then right, thinking about what to do next.

"Oh, well," she shrugged to herself. "Let's go get ourselves something to eat."