AVALON DAYS

abby, 20, she/her, a place for fiction and miscellanea

[windtempos]

Soundcheck

Adya, Leo, and Caelius all loathed the earlier shows in their collaboration when their manager insisted that they backload the set with slow, solemn songs. Career felt like a rather strong word for what was likely only going to be a three-month sprint of covering whatever songs were asked of them and kissing on stage as long as their girlfriends would allow it. Idiot Girl was more of a hobby than anything; they were not going to waste it all on singing acoustic covers of Lorde songs while the audience wept crocodile tears. They fired him shortly thereafter and opted to self-manage, keeping their sad songs memorable and few and far between.

Their real careers lied with science and technology-- though Caelius’s in a more unorthodox, removed way-- and required almost all their attention. The shadow of work loomed over her in a way that Leo and Adya could only begin to understand. She was in the business of making enemies. The statute of limitations had expired and the APBs on her birth name held no convictions, but her bionic body remained government property. Seldom does the American Cybernetics Association forget about their lost toys. Every show was a gamble as to whether they’d be able to keep touring on a whim for three more months, or if the ACA would come looking to take back what they owned. Adya was innocent-- a hero, even-- and could easily claim she had no idea who Caelius used to be. Though not on the best terms, Leo had left her job willingly and committed no crime. Only Caelius’s burden was heavy enough that it required being armed at all times; so when she made the non-negotiable agreement that her performances would be no different, Leo and Adya obliged. A concealed carry permit and a 9-millimeter sat backstage at every Idiot Girl show not just for her safety, but for the entire band.

On a stack of road cases sit two women, dressed not too dissimilarly in high-neck tank tops and shorts of varying lengths. One looks vastly unfamiliar with golden skin and a curly, boyish haircut; the other, covered in telltale signs of bionic enhancements, seems otherwise.

There’s a confused but pleased grin on Adya’s face. She trips over her words when she says, “Sorry, I just-- I don’t know what to say. I had no idea you even knew who we were! I mean, for me, I’m sure it’s a professional type of knowing, but this is… completely different. Guys, have you heard of--”

Adya’s curiosity fades into something more grim when her bandmates don’t share the same sentiment when she turns over. Leo’s confusion takes on a more familiar tone. Adya knows the nimble-bodied one on the left with exposed skin seams and mechanical fingers without as much as a second glance; everybody with a career in cybernetics does. If Adya is state-of-the-art, Nora is a prototype. A skeleton for every bionic body that came after her. An eighties celebrity to many and an abomination to many more. A ghost. But to Leo, her associate is the one that puts a familiar look on her face.

The first exchange between Leo and Emma was a double date, set up by her own girlfriend. Allie held no grudge nor feelings for her ex; Leo felt it only fair to do the same. The pairs were on good enough terms to stay in touch, if only for mostly professional purposes and the occasional evening at a shitty dive bar. Nora would hustle men in pool, Emma would update Allie on the whereabouts of their former colleagues, and Leo would make a sorry attempt to get to know both of them. The agreement ended there. They were friendly, but not quite friends. Emma would not put herself in front of Leo without a good reason.

Her expression pales in comparison to Caelius’s. Her hands lean onto the case against her back, with fingers itching to reach toward the crossbody bag that a certain silver barrel sticks out the open mouth of. 

Leo smacks her in the arm. “Stop,” she mutters. “They’re not armed.”

“That one isn’t,” she says, flicking her chin toward Emma.

Emma furrows her brow. “Ouch.”

“She thought about it,” says Nora. “Concert staff would’ve confiscated it. They should’ve confiscated that one, too.”

“It has a permit.”

“The same kind of permit as the ones you carry around on your bike, too?”

Adya too, now, shares their confusion. Nora is clearly personally familiar with everyone but her-- personal enough, too, to have seen Caelius without a helmet on. Personal enough to tip off the police. “What is this?” she asks slowly.

Nora takes on a softer expression. She stands up and approaches Adya who, despite the sudden alarm, admires the features of her body. From the collarbone-down, she almost looks like a doll. There’s stapled-together skin seams and a slender, black cylinder where Adya has complex joinery to connect her wrists to her forearms.

“I’m a big fan,” she says with a wide smile. “I’m also sorry if we’re freaking you out. I thought about introducing myself earlier, but--” she sucks in air through her teeth--“You’re a little high-profile.”

“And I’m not?” interrupts Caelius.

“Before this?” says Emma, gesturing broadly to the rafters and the road cases. “You definitely weren’t. Wasn’t that the point?”

“What the fuck do you have to do with this? Who are you?”

She turns broadly to her bandmates, slightly amused. “Is she always like this?”

Emma gets a resounding, unified yes from Adya, Leo, and Nora at once. Adya frowns and hears a budding, excited crowd building up around the corner. She shakes her head. “I think you should leave. We have to be ready to go on stage in, like, five minutes, and I don’t think that this is the right time--”

“You have to be ready,” corrects Nora. She turns to Leo and continues. “You, too. Pull your backing guitarist if you need a second one. Adjust your set to be the songs you lead on. Make an excuse about curfew if you run out. She needs to hang back. She needs to leave.”

While Adya and Leo remain out of the loop, the pit in Caelius’s stomach is easily visible on her face. This wasn’t the first show where she’d noticed a few too many eyes on her, both on and backstage. She’d snuck off and claimed every possible emergency more than once during the final song. It was, however, the first one that required a warning. If the most elusive woman in bionics felt the need to get involved, the outcome would be far worse than a few disappointed concertgoers.

Resigned, Caelius asks, “How long? Cops?”

“Not long enough,” Nora answers. “Much worse.”

“I don’t understand,” says Adya. “There’s no probable cause. The prescriptive period is up. The ACA can’t arrest her. There are lawyers I know through the panels I’ve been sitting in on. We call one of them, right?”

Emma stands up and approaches Adya. She shows no kindness, but no contempt, either. The two come toe-to-toe and she says, “I’m grateful for what you do, kid. I am. You’ve changed a lot for everyone who looks like you. But I need you to understand that to them-- the ACA, mercenaries, criminals, killers-- she’s an asset. Parts, money, ransom, power, pleasure. They will take her apart and use her for anything. It doesn’t matter how long it’s been since she ran. It doesn’t matter how much they know or don’t know. What’s about to happen to her is infinitely worse than getting booked by the cops.”

Adya staves off the need to correct Emma and explain the nuances between cops and ACA agents. To somebody on the run, they’re the same. Caelius furrows her brow, grabs the tote bag, and slugs it over her shoulder. The canvas is thick enough to hide the silhouette of the pistol when she begins toward the offstage ramp. She stows her phone and leaves behind her in-ears, giving Adya and Leo every possible deniability that she was ever there. Before Emma joins behind her, she reaches for Leo’s shoulder.

“I always wondered how you met,” she mentions. “Felt too good to be a coincidence.”

“I grew up with her in Vegas. Before I--”

“Died? No shit. I had a feeling about her.”

“I seem to attract a certain kind of person.” A solemn, worried look overtakes Leo’s face. She lowers her tone. Caelius has friends among the ACA. She has people who can clear her name. Everywhere else, she had only made enemies. “Take care of her. Whatever it takes. She’ll kick and bite and hate every second of it, but I need you to.”

Emma nods and starts for the ramp. “I’m sure I can take it.”

“Cae,” calls Leo. She turns around, hiding something deep and aching behind a stony face. “Any requests?”

Still, she huffs out a laugh with a short smile. A slow hum pours out of the speakers on the other side of the stage, followed by roaring cheers and raucous applause. When Nora fixes the collar on her open button-up shirt as she follows Caelius, a Glock peers out from within her waistband. I knew it.

Caelius shrugs. “How about Suicide Blonde?”

[windtempos]

Biting The Hand

“We-- aren’t anything,” says Caelius with a finger pointing back and forth over the table. “We are going to be brief. Do you understand? I don’t care that you 'get it', whatever the fuck it is, I don’t care what you know, and I don’t care what you can offer me. Every minute I’m not down there making money, I’m losing it. Someone with deep pockets and a body count is picking up my buy-in.” “Someone like you?” asks Nora.

Caelius maintains a reputation as one of the best mercenaries in town, but when she's a major piece in a massive exposé for the American Cybernetics Association, she keeps her involvement to herself. But those who know where to look-- know how to look-- have the unique ability to uncover anything and everything. Those like Nora Luan, who has been looking into cybernetics corruption since long before Caelius was even born.

Ashlyn Mercy.

There is something especially poisonous about the way Nora says Caelius’s real name. Something unlike the blackmail of those who came before her. Nora’s reputation leads Caelius to believe that she doesn’t want to hurt her-- she just wants an audience. The habitual shotgun fear subsides. While her captor pours herself a drink in the kitchen, Caelius eyes the exits-- even the one that requires a leap onto the terrace, over the balcony, and a 150-foot plummet to the road below. She could survive it. The servos in her hips and knees would give out and the programmed pain would cause a sixteen-second delay, but only after about four minutes on foot maintaining a pace of seven miles an hour would she would blow the damaged motors in her legs entirely. But again, Nora only wants an audience-- not a mess, and certainly not a police pursuit. If these two women were anything, it was expensive and calculated. 

Neither of them were an unusual sight here. Caelius spent plenty of time on the casino floor, several stories below, but seldom got acquainted enough with anybody to be invited up to a suite. Everyone she played with had one booked. She knew this. If they had a hundred extra dollars in their pocket for the entry fee of a semiprivate game room, then they had an extra thousand for a stocked bar and a top-floor view of Hollywood. It seemed that, unbeknown to her, Nora was one of them. More than that, Nora Luan was alive-- she’d rather start there. 

The poster girl of American science, a celebrity gone silent since 1990, mixing a cocktail thirty-something years later looking no different than she did when she was on the ‘84 cover of Machines Monthly. Her fame was passed off as a broken glass ceiling for every girl who wanted to be a scientist. A feat of modern science and a step forward for feminism. An idol. She played the part like she was born for it, refusing for years to return to the girl she was. The girl living on borrowed time, removed from the modern world by government hands she could not control. Longevity was not the CIA’s goal when they took apart her organic body and rebuilt it with metal and wires during Project Gossamer-- it was simply a test of how far they could push the human body until it would break. So were the Mind Transfer procedures that uploaded human brains to bionic systems. Compared to Caelius’s military-built, top-of-the-line cybernetic body, Nora was an iron lung. There was a silence over the room that suggested both of them knew this.

Where Nora had gotten justice and reparations for the experimental procedures done on her, Charlotte Caelius received nothing but an APB from the American Cybernetics Association, an empty grave, and a past she could never return to. Nothing had changed in the 30 years since Project Gossamer-- the ACA was an extension of it, for many. This, too, they both knew. Nora wouldn’t be here, otherwise. This was something more than the acknowledgement of a truth decades old, though-- each has something the other wants.

“You gonna ask me if I want one, too?” Caelius asks when Nora returns to the coffee table, drink in hand. A Cosmopolitan, by the looks of it. The rim of the glass meets red lips when she raises it up to her face. “You forced me to come with you. It’s the least I’m owed.”

“I didn’t force you to. You came willingly,” she mentions. “You weren’t gonna win, anyway.”

Caelius keeps her sourness to herself. She had never been any good at roulette, or any similar game of chance. Games of skill provided a sense of authority; the outcome on the table belongs to the player, not the other way around. And she, as far as she’d learned, could outplay anyone and outluck no one.

“Didn’t get much of a choice.”

Nora breathes out a half-laugh into her half-empty glass. “We’d know plenty about that, wouldn’t we? You’ll get your money back. I promise.”

“We-- aren’t anything,” says Caelius with a finger pointing back and forth over the table. “We are going to be brief. Do you understand? I don’t care that you get it, whatever the fuck it is, I don’t care what you know, and I don’t care what you can offer me. Every minute I’m not down there making money, I’m losing it. Someone with deep pockets and a body count is picking up my buy-in.”

“Someone like you?”

Caelius twitches and bottles her rage, sitting back in the lounge chair.

“I need that money,” she admits with a bite beneath her tongue.

Another laugh from Nora, but a fuller, realer one this time. “But you don’t. You play because it’s fun. Because you can control it.” When her opponent fails to respond, she opens her placating palm and adds, “I don’t blame you. I did it, too. Pool was my drug of choice. Took me a while to get good at it, but what’s a while for people like us?

“I traveled a lot after-- you know. Played mostly in tap rooms and shitty dives. It was not a good idea, believe me. Drunks don’t like to be hustled. I am unwelcome in a lot of backwater bars under a lot of different names. Of course, you’d probably be a lot quicker on your feet than I was.” She taps her right temple a couple of times. “Automated learning and all. Self-defense, too. I didn’t know how to really throw a punch until I was in my forties.”

Caelius affords a scoff that almost sounds like she’s humored. Age was a far off, foggy idea for both of them, but only one of them had the privilege of cybernetic cosmetics that could make her look older. Project Gossamer drug cocktails meant Nora was frozen in time. Twenty-four, forever. At least she looked old enough to drink.

She downs the final sip of her Cosmo. “I do get it, even if that’s not what you want to hear. I was still living off of government residuals when I left, but that made me feel like I owed them something. A game of pool was the one thing I felt like I could control. I earned that money.” 

“I’m not in the government’s pocket,” Caelius says. 

“Oh, I know you’re not. I’ve seen it. I’m talking about the bounty hunting. That’s better money, anyway, right? Twenty thousand, just for some guy running a Ponzi scheme down in Long Beach? I read about that the other day. Wish I had that when I was your age.”

Caelius curls a fist into her satin dress. There was seldom a bluff she could not call, but there wasn’t one she could even begin looking for. Nora was a mystery, but not a liar. She knew exactly what people like us meant when she said it. A snap judgment, a bullet fired or a punch thrown, would be the easiest way out. Project Gossamer had made her strong, but not lethal. Not compared to Caelius. High-profile bounties take months, and yet, this one fell into her lap. Baby curls and gaudy skin seams and all. Still, she finds it within herself to want an answer before a fight. She regains her composure, even offering a cold smile. “This won’t work on me.”

Nora leans forward, arms folded over her lap. “I don’t need it to. I just needed you to know it could if I wanted it to,” she says. There’s a beautiful, haunting chill latched onto her tongue, with every word off of it perfect. So quiet and matter-of-fact, but poisonous. “We can get started now, if you’d like.”

Finding herself beyond blackmail, she says. “I don’t believe that for a fucking second. I’m just like you. What the CIA did to you, the ACA did to me. You wouldn’t feed me to the same hand you already bit off.”

“Is that right? What happened to ‘we aren’t anything’?”

Nora slips out of her chair and returns her glass to the bar, heels clicking on the oak floors. Despite the decades of history to her name, Caelius cannot figure her out like most clients she spends this much time alone with at the casino. Nothing is out of place. A purple gown with a sweetheart neckline, embroidered with florals and trimmed with tulle at the bottom. A short, boyish head of black hair and a maroon lip. She holds all the cards. Nora belongs; Caelius only believes she does. Pulling a short, clean glass from below the counter with one hand and a tablet with the other, she pours a rum and coke and turns on the device to a screen full of text and schematics. Her two fingers beckon Caelius to the bar.

“You were like me,” corrects Nora. “I came first, and I didn’t deal with my problems like you did.”

“Right. Because you let the press kiss your ass for ten years and then you fucked off and did nothing to help people like me for the next twenty. I could’ve used you! Maybe then, I wouldn’t’ve had anything to deal with!”

Nora rests her palms on the slick surface and leans into Caelius. “What does nothing look like to you, huh? Is it--” she gestures broadly, servos whirring in her arm-- “this? The Project Gossamer Exposé. The Skylight Programs. Mind Transfer law. The ACA Suspension.”

Everything is noise except for the last one. It was a word waiting to be spoken, a tooth waiting to be pulled. Her pupils go in and out of focus. These were rooms that she was in. She watched it happen-- she watches it again, now, in her mind’s eye. It was her employer who needed four nosy insubordinates out of the picture. It was her targets who ran their lips raw convincing Caelius to aid their cause. You, of all people, should know what it means to be wronged by the ACA. To have no control over who you are, one of them said. The taste of agreeing with an agent wasn’t pleasant, but it wasn’t worse than knowing she’d otherwise be sending a girl to the slaughter. She had killed before; it was resting on her to determine whether or not this was going to be something infinitely worse.

The plan to extract files and information disinterested Caelius. But it was, in part or in full at times, her idea to incite a spectacle that the agents across Los Angeles could not avoid. Scattered bees leave behind an empty hive, and all they needed was one opening wide enough for a data transfer. The discussion of the after started early in this process. Whoever they decided to give the files to-- they ultimately decided on a number of publications and a few irreproachable senators-- would move forward with it as they wished, and they had little say in it. The only conclusive thought was that the ACA was spineless. If they’d let killers and megalomaniacs climb through their ranks since its birth after Nora’s experiments, how could anyone possibly expect accountability when they’re faced with an ugly truth? A suspension was an admission of defeat. They would never yield to the findings of a few over the six-figure paychecks of many.

Caelius refuses. “They haven’t even--”

Nora slides the tablet across the counter and says, “They will.”

A brief view of the document is more than sufficient. Two seals, at the top and bottom respectively, dripping in decorum and the typical courtesies that come off of Capitol Hill. Mentions of thorough investigations conducted by unbiased, third-party contractors and incriminating documents uncovered by ACA employees and, effective immediately, a complete suspension of all field operatives and first responders employed beneath an American Cybernetics Association agency are printed in crisp, black ink. The time at the top is five days from the current date.

“This is on the DoD’s desk right now.”

“There’s no signature line.”

“It’s not a request.” Nora leans over the bar, elbows and forearms resting on either side of the tablet. If she were any closer, she could kiss Caelius, who isn’t entirely sure she won’t. Nora softens when she asks, “I didn’t just watch all of this happen.”

Caelius looks up. “And you think I did? I was there when--”

“The whistle blew about Exoware? So was I. Two years earlier. Picking through files that had anything to do with Project Gossamer. People who never moved on. Projects that got picked back up. It was always going to happen.” There’s a complete and utter coolness to her as she lifts her head up slightly. Nora knows Caelius wants an argument. She sees the unhinged jaw in front of her, but refuses to even bare a single tooth.

“So you know about all the fucked up things the ACA and the government doing and you just sat on it? And waited for someone else to fix what’s wrong with the world?”

A laugh slugs itself out of Nora’s throat, coming out as more of a distant, bleak sound. “What does that matter to you? You live in a bubble. Fix what’s wrong with the world? Are you serious? You bust petty crime in LA by committing even pettier crime. You want people to hurt the way you were.” A brief silence warrants raised eyebrows from Nora. “But I know you’re not so sure about that, now.”

Caelius bites her lip. She pushes the tablet over the and onto the floor with feline precision. The chair falls flat beside it when she launches her body out of the seat. Her hands reach across the bar-- one for the back of Nora’s neck, the other for her head. Caelius shoves downward until her nose is inches from the slick surface.

“Go ahead,” whispers Nora. She tilts her chin up against Caelius’s iron grip. “Do this your way. Hit me. Break me. Make it hurt. That’s what you do, right? You get things done. No matter who it’s for. So get me over with.”

Caelius presses her palms down and Nora’s nose pounds against the bar. Certainly not as bad as what a number of angry dive bar drunks have probably wanted to do to her, but enough to hear a hearty grunt of pain and see its aftermath spill down her lips. Caelius has done her research; this wound will heal overnight, just as the last thirty years of Nora’s wounds have. This assault is not a want, but a need. The same defense she has always used against those who know something about her: adrenaline and programming.

Nora swipes the back of her hand across her face. Her body bleeds in a dark shade beyond crimson. Beyond even the maroon on her lips. Beyond human. Caelius grimaces and releases her. “I bit the hand off, but you picked it up and just started doing the work for them,” Nora mutters. She spreads her arms wide and adds, “I bet this is a sting, right? I bet you are in their pocket. When it’s all said and done, anyway.”

“What?”

“No wonder they fucked it up so many times. No wonder they’d loan it out to someone like you. Make it look like a hit for a bounty. God! I’m so fucking stupid! You want me dead?” Nora snakes past the lounge chairs and the coffee table, past the curtains and out onto the terrace where the railing meets the concrete floor at its closest edge. She steps up onto an ottoman and turns around with arms outstretched. “Scrape your reward off the fucking pavement!”

Caelius leaps forward in as few steps as she can manage. Her hands reach out and yank her body back onto the terrace without a second to spare. “I’m not with the fucking feds!”  She screams, grabbing Nora by the straps of her dress. “What the fuck are you talking about? What’s wrong with you? Have they been trying to kill you? How many times? Do they know what you’ve been taking from them?”

But she knows the answer. If Nora knows what she claims to know, the CIA would have no doubt over who is bleeding their information out to people with other ideas on what to do with it. They paid her off to be quiet. This was not quiet. It was revenge, in a way. And second to collecting high-profile information was finding someone who understood that she was right to break her peace. Someone equally motivated by revenge. To the government, the only thing better than a quiet victim is a dead one. Yet another notion they both knew well.

“You’re a cunt. You set me up.”

Vicious as she sounds, she couldn’t hide the admiration if she tried. Nora smiles. Blood still trickles from her nose and down her chin.

“Are you ready to start yet?” she asks, heaving through breaths of adrenaline. 

Caelius admires her work and nods.

[windtempos]

Ground Zero

Emma puts two fingers to the bridge of her nose. “Good God, I fucked this up. I just wanted to tell you I get it. I might be the only one who gets it. I’m sorry. I promise I can make it make sense. I don’t need you to—“

“I believe you.” Reese sits back down in the grass, steadying her inhales. She waits for Emma to follow. “But I want all of it. No cutting corners. No poetics. Start from the beginning.”

After criminals and frauds are revealed in the fold of the American Cybernetics Association, Reese is at the center of the fallout. She knows she’s not the only one, but none of them are like Emma. She carries the same weight, only it goes back decades versus Reese’s meager five years.

Though there were wounds that no amount of time could heal, by the time two and a half months had passed since the American Cybernetics Association put its work on pause, Reese was ready for the interviews. She was ground zero. The epicenter of the ACA’s sudden exposure and suspension. There was nobody in the country who could have taken this more personally than her, hence the eleven-week delay in communicating with the media. It was easier to assume that they wanted to talk to her because of her proximity to Adya. Easier to assume she was important only beside the poster girl of science, not on her own as an individual. That didn’t matter to the people asking the questions, though. Adya told her to just speak honestly, and then where they took that would be out of her hands.

“What do you think the future looks like for you?” The reporter from the LA Times asked. The previous journalist had asked the same thing. And the one before them. “You don’t have to have any sort of clear picture. Just an idea.”

Reese shrugs. The answer comes naturally now. “Get better,” she says. “Decide who I want to be. If I don’t go back to the ACA when everything is—“ she makes a vague, circular gesture with her hands that makes the servos in her wrists whir— “normal again, then I don’t go back to the ACA.”

The man delays his response for a second. He expects a silver lining. Reese doesn’t continue with any addendums. It’s not worth it. She’s begun to recognize which journalists will produce the most candid and successful articles versus whose will hardly make the front page. “Thank you, Miss Franklin,” he says, a hand outstretched to shake. She takes it. As soon as he’s arrived, he’s getting up and leaving the courtyard.

“That’s all,” Adya says from the doorway. “Should I call Nate and ask him to pick you up, or are you gonna stay late with me?”

“I’ll stay,” answers Reese, “As long as it’s okay. I want a few minutes first.”

Adya nods. The doors hiss as they close behind her. Being under house arrest with Goddard for the first week post-suspension gave her plenty of time to scope out the courtyard. It’s circular, connecting the two halves of the L-shaped building. All the dormitories that Goddard keeps vacant for rehabilitants or agents or simply scientists spending long lights in the lab face the space, windows easily opened for fresh air and a look down at the oak tree in the middle. A small wedge on the north side, five stories beneath Adya’s dormitory, was the only place with a blind spot. 

A few warm tears roll down Reese’s face. Just because she’s prepared to make a statement doesn’t make it easy. Not only does it happen all over again when she explains the details, but it never comes out right. It will be printed with words she never said. Ideas that cannot even begin to explain the feelings that they were derived from. It’s not enough. Nothing is, right now.

“Excuse me? Agent Franklin?” A body comes out of the south entrance. “Do you have a couple minutes? I have just a couple questions. I promise I won’t waste your time.”

“You’ll have to come back tomorrow, I’m sorry.” The woman keeps walking, still bathed in shadow from the oak tree standing watch over the courtyard. Reese wipes her tears. “Hello? Tomorrow. I’m done for today.”

The woman that pours out from the shadows looks nothing like the past three journalists. No notebooks or microphones or business-casual attire. A well-worn, brown jacket on her shoulders instead. A rectangular bulge in her left jeans pocket. Marlboros, maybe. Or a taser. She can’t be more than a few years older than Reese.

“I just wanted to make sure it was empty. I do have questions, but I’m not here to interview you.”

“Are you an agent?” asks Reese.

“Yeah, I guess I was, at one point. Is this a blind spot?”

She frowns. “How did you know that?”

“I get the feeling you didn’t want CCTV footage of you crying. I did the same at my job. A lot.” Reese wipes her cheeks again, risking an even redder complexion. “My boss turned everything into a study. A cough, a laugh, a bad day. Everything was a symptom to her. Project first, person second. You know?”

Reese nods. “Did you work somewhere that shut down because of-- well, I mean, they all shut down, but the ACA…”

A kind nod from the woman. “Kind of. Not ACA, but similar. A lot older. My boss had connections with people in the ACA but I--” The girl’s hand catches on a piece of the flowerbed’s metal edging. She sucks in air through clenched teeth. “Oh, shit.”

Reese sits up and cranes her neck. “Are you okay?”

But there’s no pain on the girl’s face, no tension in her shoulders. She offers an outstretched, bleeding hand, magenta rolling down the side of her hand and over to her thumb. No crimson red, no signs of aching at the site of the wound. Reese says nothing. She can’t stop looking.

“The same thing that gave you this—“ she taps below her ear, just behind the jaw, then flexes the fingers of her wounded hand— “gave me this. Scientists who went too far. I guess I just wanted to tell you that I get it.”

Reese runs her metal fingers over her neck. The scarred wound, the skin that once sat beside the bionic chip that held her memory in a vice grip, forms a raised line no longer than a sewing pin. She looks up with a little more trust in her eyes. Nothing is a surprise anymore.

“I’m Emma.”

“You meant to do that.”

“I was getting the feeling you thought I was a cop. Did it work?”

Reese bows her head back down and affords a chuckle. “I was. And it did. Sorry.”

“What happened to me happened a while ago. Different… social climate, I guess.”

“That’s probably for the better.” Reese looks up past the five floors of Goddard and into the sky, painted with dusky blues and a few distant, bright stars. The sun has long since set, leaving them to fluorescent lamplight and whatever additional light pours out from the clear sliding doors. “I kind of wish it was worse. On the public side of things, I mean. Is that bad? That I want people to freak out more. I feel like nobody in the real world has any idea how terrible this really is. I don’t want people to ask me questions, I want them to get angry. I don’t know if that makes sense.”

“Like they got angry in the 80s?”

Reese’s head lolls to the side with a faraway noise of disbelief. “Everyone keeps asking me about that. That’s what they’re not getting. This isn’t the psycho-unregulated-human-experiments that they were doing back then. These are bad people who want power that they can’t ever get normally. That doesn’t mean people should be any less mad.”

Emma furrows her brow. “That’s… also what Project Gossamer was.”

“But not like this! My friend explained it to me. What they did to that girl. This is a small group of lingering people with a lingering agenda. Not some government op. I think people should be more angry. Focused anger at a few people is better than just… being mad at an idea.”

“Adya Prisham is lucky she’s far enough away from everything to think that. She gets a choice that most of us were too experimental to be offered.”

Reese straightens up her shoulders. “What?”

“There were people before her, you know. During the… unregulated-psycho-human-experiments. Every success is a hundred losses. I definitely was. She’s probably a lot more.”

“I didn’t say her name.” A brief silence. Reese shoots to her feet. She reaches for a weapon at her hip that isn’t there. “I didn’t say I was talking about Adya. How did you know I was talking about her?”

Placating hands reach out in surrender. “Easy. It’s okay. Part of my job is science research. Bionics or otherwise.”

Reese extends a stiff finger to Emma’s wounded ones. “The same job that did that to you? What do you want from me?”

“I don’t—“ Emma sighs and buries her head in her hands. Another exhale before she looks back up. “What did Adya explain to you about the girl? From Project Gossamer?”

“Don’t try and test me.”

“Please.”

A tense, bothered sigh from Reese. “They replaced all her body parts with bionics. Most of them. Was that the plan for me?”

“What? No. How would I know that? Keep going back. Before that.”

Reese shrugs. “A drug cocktail? She stopped aging.”

Two hands, forming two slowly pointing fingers, direct themselves at Emma’s chest. Reese’s face goes pale.

“Are you her?” she asks.

“Almost. Same people, different experiments No bionics, drug cocktail only. Diane would kill me if she heard me calling it that.”

“Diane? Patya-Henning? Are you serious?”

“She was friends with your mother.”

“Claudia is not my mom.”

“Right, sorry. It’s better that way. I never liked her.”

Reese heaves in and out in shallow, nervous breaths. “It’s Diane? She’s involved in— in the Gossamer stuff? I thought she was just a scientist. She did that to you? I have to— where’s my phone?— I have to call Adya—“

But as soon as it washes over her, the revelation has already worn off. Of course Dr. Patya-Henning, an old, widowed friend of her foster mother, would be associated with the oldest cybernetics scandals in the nation. Of course there would be victims like Reese-- victims of the same crime-- beyond just bionics. There is little left in the world as shattering as learning her parents never wanted to love her; they only wanted to fix her. Shock has become an old, familiar friend in just a few short months.

Emma’s hand reaches for Reese’s wrist. “Reese,” she says softly. “This is not something for you to worry about, okay? People already know. I’m safe, you’re safe, that’s what matters.” Slowly, Reese pulls her hand from Emma’s grasp. She puts two fingers to the bridge of her nose. “Good God, I fucked this up. I just wanted to tell you I get it. I might be the only one who gets it. I’m sorry. I promise I can make it make sense. I don’t need you to—“

“I believe you.” Reese sits back down in the grass, steadying her inhales. She waits for Emma to follow. “But I want all of it. No cutting corners. No poetics. Start from the beginning.”

VEIL and Project Gossamer. Coincidentally similar program names with uncoincidentally similar goals. Before Diane-Patya Henning there was Dr. Henning-- her husband. Project Gossamer was his operation in its exodus and before his death; VEIL-- for its entire lifespan and beyond-- belonged to his wife.

“You think she killed him?” asks Reese.

Emma takes a drag of her cigarette. “I know she did,” she says. “The technology was hers. He brought it to the CIA. I’d kill someone too if my wife handed my life’s work over to the government.”

Reese raises an eyebrow. “You’re married?”

The smoke huffs out from her lips and she shakes her head. “Just a hypothetical thing.”

“Don’t you feel like it’s a little dangerous to tell me about this? Why not report it?”

“Diane can’t hurt me more than she already has. What would the government do? They’re basically in her pocket. They don’t care what she’s doing, as long as she’s quiet.”

She was more than quiet-- she was a shadow. VEIL operated wordlessly for its entire lifespan. Not even those whose pockets she was in could find her. The same way she had made Emma disappear and turned her into a test subject, she made her own identity disappear. Wiped clean. If the CIA wanted Diane to be quiet and stop fighting them over the death of her husband, then they had no jurisdiction over what she did thereafter.

“Before she disappeared, the press doted on her,” Emma goes on. “Why wouldn’t they? Beautiful. Successful. Powerful. Smart. It didn’t even matter if men didn’t like her. Women in science loved her because she was all they had. They would go to war for her.”

“And that’s what kept you.” Reese knows this all too well, given all the tabloids she’s read about Adya, despite her persistent attempts to keep all of her friends from consuming gossip from anyone except directly from her. Only Adya never chose to be an icon for women in science; Diane made sure she was the only one available in her time.

Emma nods-- a somber, accepting gesture. “I wanted to be respected like that. Diane held that against me until I learned how to do it myself. For fifteen years.”

“How many more?” she asks. “How many more besides you?”

“Not your problem,” answers Emma, putting her cigarette out in the dirt. She brushes off her jeans and rolls her head in a circle. A few soft pops from the back of her neck.

Reese exhales in some sort of half-laughter, interlaced with disbelief. “So that’s it? You come here to tell me your whole story and then you’re gone? What kind of--”

“Do you think I came here to ask you for help? To fix my messes? To help you fix yours?”

Reese sits up further. “I don’t need help.”

“I wasn’t gonna offer mine.”

But there’s no contempt in the way she says it. No sensation that she’s withholding something that Reese needs, nor that she deserves to be alone. From anyone else, rejection; but from Emma, reassurance. I’m not going to coddle you, she’s saying. You don’t need to be fixed. You don’t need help-- you need trust.

“It’s a choice,” she says. “You can’t watch things just happen to you forever.”

“Or what? I’ll end up like you?”

Emma shrugs. “I’m still here, aren’t I? I did something right, eventually. So did you.” Reese frowns. She also gets up and dusts herself off, picking stray pieces of gravel from her metal palms. “Pulling yourself out. Diane had me ball-and-chained for fifteen years. I had myself ball-and-chained. But your friends talked you down one time and you trusted them. You made a plan. You got out. So, what changed? Suddenly it’s the press instead of your fucked up foster dad, and you roll over and let things just happen?” 

Reese sighs. “I didn’t ask to be the poster kid who killed the ACA. I don’t want to be a celebrity like Adya,” she says.

Emma has already begun walking across the courtyard to the same door she came in. It hisses open. “Good!” she shouts. “You can do way better than that.”

Reese stands in the open air for a long while. She doesn’t resent Adya’s celebrity status; she’s good at their game. Both before and after the bionics, she was designed to have conversations and give speeches and be personable. Reese has to choke her way through every audio interview she has in this courtyard, and every diplomatic responsibility her former father put in front of her before he got locked up. It hasn’t gotten any easier. Maybe it doesn’t have to. Adya can keep being the face of cybernetics, and Reese can keep being the fist. But it means something, now. Now, it is a choice.

“Hey, wait!” she yells. “Can I get your--”

But Emma is long gone, beyond the halls of Goddard and out in the open world.

[windtempos]

It Always Comes Back

“They didn’t fawn over her as a pioneer for women in science; there were engineering textbooks with Nora’s name in the index a decade before Adya was even born. They weren’t shocked at the outcomes of any hearings on Capitol Hill; Emma had lived them. Every decision for science and medicine-- and often the cybernetics ones, too-- affected her. Affected what her boss would do with her next.”

Adya Prisham is the poster child of cybernetics; Nora Luan and Emma Pearce are relics of a bygone era. They keep a close eye on the general happenings of science and medicine; but as exiles from scientific programs that are long gone, there isn’t much more they can do.

Adya Prisham’s celebrity was participated in from a variety of angles. Most of the civilians that took an interest in her were bionicists-- people who spent their days in labs, trying to come close to recreating the technology her cybernetic body was designed with for their own private patenting. They had the most interesting questions to ask, as well as the most invasive. It always came from a place of curiosity and never ridicule, though it didn’t make much of a difference. Inability to read the room is natural when the room is empty and almost always bereft of women. They are only social when it benefits their work.

Another demographic was adult women, mostly between twenty-five and forty, who doted on her from a political perspective. To them, she was a hero. A broken glass ceiling. A poster girl. Adya had spoken about how it was a difficult thing to understand. “I didn’t really do anything,” she had said. “I just… something bad happened to me, something good happened to come from it. I think there are smarter and harder working people who deserve that label.”

They knew it was true. There were stronger icons for women in STEM, sure, but Adya painted the prettiest picture. She was STEM, in some regards. She was designed for perfection. The same women who refused to perform their womanhood expected a show and dance from Adya every time she spoke, from the moment she first opened her mouth in her brand new body.

Lifestyle-oriented individuals-- talk show hosts, social media stars, mic’d up individuals at any red carpet event she might’ve been invited to-- were unreadable until the moment the cameras came on. Some treated her like the girl she saw herself as, letting her laugh and play games and talk about her favorite things. Some treated her like a paycheck. Ask the questions that people are too embarrassed to be curious about. Harvest views based on an uncomfortable response. Ask another. Monetize. It was getting harder and harder to pretend like she was used to it.

There were few who observed her from above rather than below. It was mostly executives and politicians, curious about what her place in the world means for cybernetics moving forward. They had the power to do what they wished with her as an employee and used it plentifully. It was very easy to include her attendance at certain speeches, meetings, or other functions as part of her contract. And she would have no choice but to put on the face, smile, and tell her story in the most agreeable way possible.

Still, despite all the boxes Adya had to put people in, some were beyond placement. Nobody observed Adya Prisham in the same way that Nora Luan and Emma Pearce did. Observing from above was an accurate description, sure, but they had no stake in the fight. Adya was not an investment they were expecting returns on. They had no concerns over her anatomy or the functions of her body; they had her schematics. Similar ones, anyway. The military-made evolutions of her build that Americans started receiving shortly after her success. They didn’t fawn over her as a pioneer for women in science; there were engineering textbooks with Nora’s name in the index a decade before Adya was even born. They weren’t shocked at the outcomes of any hearings on Capitol Hill; Emma had lived them. Every decision for science and medicine-- and often the cybernetics ones, too-- affected her. Affected what her boss would do with her next. Though Diane was never one to wait for the government to approve a new toy before she started playing with it. She was no different in the eighties than she was when Emma resigned from her position: cold, obsessive, and horrifyingly driven.

There would not be an Adya without Nora and Emma. The combined, public death of Project Gossamer for Nora and VEIL for Emma led to the birth of the American Cybernetics Association. A body founded on scientific advancement and-- though they would never admit it-- crossing the moral lines of what it means to be human. And in their social and scientific exile, all that Nora and Emma could do was watch.

Emma takes a drag of her cigarette. Her fingers, stained with ink, pull back the third page of the newspaper. A police siren sounds about eight blocks away. It still makes her throat tighten, no matter how far. It had never been her before. She was a loose canon now, though, and there is nothing she would put past Diane. She would probably try and come after her in a more subtle way than by making a fake 911 call, anyway. Emma lets her shoulders relax.

Nora grabs the paper by its wings and pulls it from Emma’s hands. It rustles onto the living room carpet, narrowly missing a long fall out the open window. Emma throws her arms out.

“What the fuck? I was reading that!” she shouts.

“Old news.”

“That was printed this morning!”

“Exactly.” Nora turns her wrist and offers Emma a tablet, screen bright-white and open to a headline. Emma grabs the device with both hands. She squints. With the swipe of a few fingers from Nora, the display dims. “Stop doing that. It makes you look like a fossil.”

“I am a fucking fossil,” says Emma. She takes an even closer look at the news site. The New York Times-- an acceptable change in pace. Their research as of late has been way too many conspiracy journalists, academics, and declassified government documentation. Her eyes focus in on the headline, bold and italicized and impossible to miss. 

FBI Arrests 103 in American Cybernetics Association Scandal; Illegal Weapons And Bionics Development Uncovered

 “The other shoe just dropped,” says Nora. But Emma stands perfectly still, jaw set in place. Her cigarette burns down to her fingertips and she hardly feels it. It is such an evil thing to think anything but condolences at a headline like that. No moral high grounds, no meaningless discourse over who was justified and who wasn’t, but it’s impossible not to. All she and Nora can hear in her heads is I knew it.

I always fucking knew it.

[windtempos]

the operatives: comprehensive 600 word summary

ok im gonna make this as casual and concise as possible so i dont sound insane. all character information available here once youre done with this

their present-day world is more or less the same as ours, only with furthered efforts in bionics and science at large. the operatives are a team of individuals who work with a cybernetics institute to handle particularly dangerous/violent situations in LA. any place where having a high pain tolerance/steady robot hands/mechanically enhanced agility/etc would be both helpful and necessary to make sure people Do Not Die. there are five main operatives in the story— adya, reese, colby, zion, and nate— as well as two mercenaries, caelius and kiana.

adya is the world’s first successfully uploaded human consciousness into a bionic body (aka a mind transfer), giving her some celebrity status in the science world. she is a natural leader and an honest person, but also stubborn and worried about what others think of her.

reese is a combat specialist who, with the help of her friends, is removed from a job that is actively brainwashing her into Doing A Lot Of Crime. adya’s girlfriend. she is focused and curious, but also distrusting.

colby is a sharpshooter with a background in mercenary work, as well as the reason reese was rescued from her job. she is clever and laidback, but also loyal to a fault and unwilling to open up.

zion receives bionic replacements for all four limbs after he loses most of them to cancer. he is incredibly gentle and level-headed, but also naive and often too trusting.

nate is adya’s mentor when she first becomes an operative. he is easy to talk to and a humble leader, but also self-destructive with a savior complex.

caelius is also a mind transfer, only her procedure had terrible complications. naturally, she resents adya for a long time, and jumps at the opportunity to go after her when hired by an anonymous client. she is loyal and fearless, but also A Terrible Bitch.

kiana is caelius’s partner in crime. trading in cage fighting for mercenary work, she is skilled in computer science and bionics programming. she is a good liar and can throw a good punch, but also controlling and combative.

that’s mostly it :] they all have different little details/side stories but this is the general gist of it. more fun facts that are not necessary but i like them ⬇️

adya fucking sucks at video games. it doesnt matter that she has a robot brain. she is terrible at them

caelius’s birth name is ashlyn mercy and she grows up in las vegas. she and her best friend both allegedly die (and then survive) in sudden freak accidents with little conclusive explanation given to the public. if i had a nickel

nate’s old roommate is one of colby’s exes. colby lives in her ex’s old apartment bedroom. very weird thing that would only ever happen to a lesbian

zion and reese both have “house arms” aka a set of very simple, endoskeletal bionic arms that are basically just for picking up utensils and turning on the faucet and stuff. their real arms are complex and combat-built

there is a big industry for black market bionics, since they have to be registered and regulated by the government. caelius’s enhancements and kiana’s bionic arm are both illegal and theyre often involved in deals related to black market bionics

colby and caelius are motorcycle girls. theyre not really friends but they will go to car/bike shows together LOL

they were all created in the form of a really shitty screenplay i wrote when i was 17

ok thanks love you bye

[windtempos]

Dye

Rio throws her backpack onto the kitchen counter, making a beeline for the pantry. “Why didn’t you ask me to move in with you?” she asks, hardly thinking about it before she says it. “Loaded question, I know.”

“I care about you too much to live with you.” There’s a dry smile on her face, but she means it. She knows it’s true.

Ashlyn and Rio, two college students and childhood best friends, spend some time together after Rio’s last-of-the-night lecture. The past has its ways of reaching people again, no matter how distant it may get.

Rio takes the long way down the stairs when she leaves the building. It’s cold and quiet at this point in the day, with few students lingering on campus. On Thursdays and Fridays, most people were spending their time elsewhere. Hence why, when she steps out of the lecture hall, she’s only accompanied by about twenty people. Database Entry Principles wasn’t exactly everyone’s ideal Thursday night. It wasn’t even Rio’s ideal Thursday night. But it got her the perfect schedule, the perfect amount of study time, and the perfect ride home at least every other week.

At the bottom of the stairs, a newly-blonde woman leans against a black motorcycle and drums her fingers on the helmet in her lap. Rio smiles out of habit, but soon furrows her brow. “I thought you were going out with your friends.”

Ashlyn shrugs. “Don’t I usually pick you up on Thursdays?”

She pauses on the last step down from the lecture hall. Her confusion turns to concern. “They didn’t show up, did they?” 

A few seconds of silence, and a mildly resentful look on her face. Finding her footing in college had been the easiest thing Ashlyn has ever done in some areas, and a miserable uphill battle in others. Making plans was the latter; rather, hoping others would stick to her plans.

“Oh, Ash,” she says, hand on her friend’s shoulder, “I’m sorry.”

She shrugs again. “I don’t really wanna think about it. I’m used to it. We should probably go before you start yelling at me about wasting your study time.”

Rio looks at the spare helmet that Ashlyn holds out to her. She always kept one on her when she was expecting a passenger, but bought it specifically for Rio. They picked it out at a bike shop when they were both seventeen. It was the cheapest, most boring option that wouldn’t run the risk of letting her skull crack open in a crash. She loved how quick Ashlyn was to keep her safe. She resented that others were blind to that.

“I don’t have anything to study, actually,” says Rio. The honest list of assignments is short enough that she can lie without feeling too guilty about it. “Where were your friends gonna go?”

“I said I didn’t want to--”

She shoves the helmet over her head and pulls down the visor. “Ash.”

She huffs in defeat. “Some house party a few miles beyond campus. Friend-of-a-friend kind of thing. I don’t really know them.”

Rio flicks her visor back up and says, “Isn’t that the same thing you called it last time?”

“Oh, the one I invited you to the other week? No, no. That was a frat.” 

She gasps and throws her knuckles into Ashlyn’s arm. “Oh, my God! You bitch! I almost went to a frat party with you?”

Ashlyn turns the key in the ignition. Any further expletives spoken by Rio are drowned out in its thrum. She lowers her foot on the gas, taking off and heading up the road a mile a minute.

After arguments at red lights and several indiscernible hand gestures while riding 70 miles an hour down the highway, Ashlyn and Rio fumble up the stairs of Ashlyn’s apartment. It’s a miracle she’s been able to make it look homey. It’s not one of the nice, close-to-campus high rises or a townhouse just down the road. It’s a kitchen, a living room, and one meager bedroom, each space with its own peeling paint and stiff drawer and door handles. It’s sparsely decorated, but looks better than the last time Rio was in it. It still looks a little lonely, despite her efforts. So does Ashlyn, sometimes. She sits in the living room loveseat and watches a group of birds shuffle along a powerline out the window.

Rio throws her backpack onto the kitchen counter, making a beeline for the pantry. “Why didn’t you ask me to move in with you?” she asks, hardly thinking about it before she says it. “Loaded question, I know.”

“I care about you too much to live with you.” There’s a dry smile on her face, but she means it. She knows it’s true. Rio takes the late classes, allegedly scoring the most laid-back peer groups and best professors. Ashlyn takes early morning classes and sleeps away the rest of the day. Rio can’t stand the heat. Ashlyn hardly has her AC on. Rio wants a rabbit. Ashlyn hates the smell. Both of them bake and neither can cook. It’d do more harm than good to share a semi-permanent space. Rio simply smiles and shrugs in agreement.

Ashlyn turns around in the loveseat and huffs out a laugh. Rio has suddenly paused rummaging through the cabinets. “What are you looking at?”

“I’m still not used to the blonde,” she admits.

“I was worried you weren’t gonna like it,” she says.

“What?” Rio frowns and climbs out of the chair. “No, no, no. I like it a lot. Do you remember when I cried because my mom wouldn’t let me dye my hair red?”

“Yes, I do.” Ashlyn sits in silence for a moment before a scheming grin grows across her face. She points at the bathroom, slowly raising her arms into a shrug from there.

“No,” Rio says.

“Then why the fuck did you bring up the red hair thing? Don’t lie to me. You can start with bleach and I can go get red dye tomorrow.”

“It looks good on you! I don’t know if I can fuck up my hair this close to Christmas--”

“Who cares? If your mom hates it, you can spend Christmas with me. Go into my middle dresser drawer and pick any shirt in there and put it on. Start thinking about where you want the color.”

Rio puts up little fight and withdraws to Ashlyn’s bedroom.  She smiles on her way down the hall. Their parents had always managed to snuff out their mischief, but this would be the first vast step away from what they would want. It’s exciting. Thrilling, even. Ashlyn always had a knack for giving her that gift.

From the drawer, Rio pulls from the drawer an old shirt with the words “2010 Regional Robotics Championships” displayed across the front in big, blocky text. It’s not the first time she’s worn this shirt. Her version hangs over the towel bar in her bathroom, used to dry her wet hair. She sets it back down. Ashlyn was likely to go “no, not that one” and make her change again, though she’d never admit to being that sentimental. Rio knows her well enough to choose wisely. Instead, she pulls a plain, blue t-shirt over her soon-to-be-red hair and shuts the drawer.

“Cae.”

Silence. The feeling of someone shaking her shoulder follows. “Caelius.”

Her eyes open. A body hovers over her with raised eyebrows. She only now realizes that she’s still sitting in the loveseat, but this one is cleaner and nicer. This apartment is bigger. Enough for two people. Who’s the other? The body above her is still a haze. The front door is on the other side of the apartment than it used to be. The kitchen is clean. A little empty, almost. Unlike her to not clutter up the sink with dishes and the cabinets with snacks.

“Rio?”

She keeps trying to shake the fog. When she stretches her knuckles, her joints feel stiff. Her body is heavy, like there’s lead in her bones. When her eyes fully open, she must look afraid, because the other person in the room sighs softly and kneels down. A round, dark face meets her eye level. “Caelius,” she says again. “That’s you. You sleepwalked again. I don’t know how long you’ve been out here. Close to an hour, maybe. It’s almost six in the morning”  

The fog recedes. “Kiana,” she mutters.

Kiana nods. “You’re alright.”

A hesitant nod. She looks at Kiana for a long while, expecting fear or disappointment or something to express how tired she is of babysitting a girl with a broken body. The expression never comes.

“I have a little good news,” she says. “I’ve been running some algorithms based on the data you let me pick from your brain. I think we might be able to narrow down what part of it is making you disoriented when you wake up. From there, it’s probably an easy fix.”

She can’t deny the appeal of not waking up in a stranger’s body every other day. It still feels wrong that she’s not the one trying to find that solution. “I shouldn’t have to be your lab rat,” she mutters, slumping back into the chair.

“You’re more of a project car than anything.” (A dry huff, hardly any laughter. “Thanks,” says Caelius.) “Also, I like doing it. Is it so unbelievable that I don’t want you to die over a headache or a bad dream?”

She forfeits the argument and says with a grin, “There’s more than enough people who do already.”

“You don’t do yourself a lot of favors in keeping that number down.” Kiana’s arms lower a cup of coffee down over the back of the loveseat. “Drink.”

Caelius takes the cup and glances at herself in the reflection of the TV. She hasn’t seen herself with brown hair in years. Her original dye job was lousy and destructive, so she’d replaced the synthetic scalp on her head altogether. Maybe it was time to get some new colors. She could finally afford it. She tries to picture her original brown, a soft silver, and even a red.

Her eyes travel down to the cup, warm in her otherwise cold hands. Her body doesn’t need caffeine-- or any sustenance, in general-- but Kiana has made a habit out of fixing coffee for her most days of the week. She makes it outrageously sweet. Caelius complained about it for a while, but grew to like it and can’t stand the taste of anything less.

Though, of course, she’d never admit to being that sentimental.

[pillowthemes]

Corallium (Theme 10): a theme-inspired by 2019′s color of the year, Living Coral.

Static preview | Code | Coding Cabin’s Competition Page

Rules: - Do not steal snippets or all of my codes. - Do not claim theme as yours. - Do not remove the credits.

Features: - Infinite scroll/pagination - Multi-column - 500px post size (can also be 250px post size) - 1290px width of the header and automatic height - 500px x 650px header image size - Five links (but you can manually add more) with link hovers - Permalink page styled for easy viewing (especially for photosets and long descriptions) - Custom font added - Footer (100px x 100px of your blog’s profile photo and social media links)

Please like or reblog if you’re using the theme! Happy New Year, loves! <3

[windtempos]

[windtempos]

Deniability

“Claudia sees someone unlike what most funerals bring out in people. She sees a woman with wonders of what could’ve been, had Dr. Henning been a better man. But there is no regret in her face.”

Claudia Irvine, a combat operative, visits Diane Patya-Henning, an old colleague and scientist who has recently widowed. There is much more than what meets the eye at the funeral, but to Claudia, it could not be more obvious.

Claudia Irvine loathed discussions around death. She couldn’t stand to be in a room of people crying over the loss of a life, no matter how expected or unexpected it was. It didn’t have to be this way. Bionics, medicine, machines, pure skill—  there were things that could extend life before death. In the end, maybe even cheat it altogether, putting mankind as close to perfection as it might ever come. Both she and Diane would do anything to reach that end. They'd make sure nobody in this room ever had to mourn again. Not for their sake, anyway.

But Claudia understood the shadow that Diane often lived in. Her husband wanted fame and money and buildings with his name across the front; Diane only ever wanted to further the pursuit of human biology. She would do anything for that, too. Dr. Henning’s funeral and Diane’s need for knowledge could not be mutually exclusive. Claudia had watched too many people die, both her own and her enemies, to miss that.

Claudia is sitting in the middle of a crowd that stands and walks around, chatting in hushed murmurs and subdued half-laughter. Grief makes an already dry room of scientists even less exciting. Diane hardly even knows the names of most of the guests, and doesn’t care to find out whether they were invited or they invited themselves. She accepts apologies and quiet smiles from the semi-strangers she passes, but her movement across the room isn’t aimless. 

“I was expecting your husband,” she says. “I never took you as one for memorials.”

“He is occupied by his work at the moment,” answers Claudia. “Truthfully, I’m surprised you invited him. He’s much more of a sap than I am. Emotions are the last thing you need right now.”

“That much we agree on.” Diane takes a moment to gaze around the room, moderately occupied, and says, “It was like pulling teeth for me, putting this together. When I’m gone, it’ll be quick. Both the death and the funeral.”

“I’m not sure I’d even have one. Trevor and our daughter don’t need to mourn me. They’re too smart to be preoccupied by it. Waste of time.”

She turns to the side, only briefly considering the implication that this funeral is a waste of time. Diane can’t say she fully disagrees. “Daughter?” she asks.

Claudia nods, and with a glow in her eye, she says, “A girl we’ve been sponsoring at a group home for a long time now. We checked all the boxes and finished the paperwork. She’s ours now. It’s not easy, but we’re on our way to solid ground.”

“Do you ever doubt going down that path? With everything your work asks of you?”

She asks a lot more than she leads on in only two sentences. Claudia thinks for a minute. “Maybe. People are surprised at how much of their lives are not out of their control; you just have to learn how. I want my daughter to learn the same. If I ever do start doubting, I’ll fight it, and I’ll correct the errors. Like I always have. I will teach her to do the same.”

Diane nods, wrapping an arm around her colleague. “I'm happy for you.”

Claudia holds Diane’s gaze when she responds, “you, too.”

The women sit in silence for a long while. Diane should be worried. The Irvines are powerful people. If they know something, saw something, said something, it could be the end— not just for Diane, but for her research. Decades of innovation reduced to nothing. But she’s powerful, too, and Claudia is selfish; she has no interest in tearing down someone outside of her field of work. While they aren’t shy to hand batons off to one another, they are racing on two completely separate tracks. Diane will do what is required to put her over the finish line, and the Irvines will turn their backs and have deniability. She will do the same for them.

When Diane steps up to the podium, she doesn’t let the sorrow of the day get under her skin. Her speech is confident yet somber, thoughtful yet quick, reminiscent yet unromantic of the deceased’s life. Claudia sees someone unlike what most funerals bring out in people. She sees a woman in mourning. A woman who didn’t want things to end this way. A woman with wonders of what could’ve been, had Dr. Henning been a better man. But there is no regret in her face. Whatever choices led her to this moment, standing before an audience of grieving people over a man who did not deserve anyone’s grief, she does not wish she could change them. Second to a scientist, the best thing to happen to Diane is becoming a widow. 

Claudia locks eyes with her one more time from across the crowd. “My husband’s achievements were only the beginning,” Diane continues. “I will continue on with my research in his stead. With any luck, I hope to reach heights he had only dreamed of.”

With a nod, Claudia leaves the room. Diane’s race is only beginning, and Claudia will remain with her back turned, as she always has.

[windtempos]

Empty Graves

“When people enter a cemetery and talk to a headstone, they imagine the person buried beneath it, beautiful as ever. But Leo could not bring herself to picture a casket under Ashlyn’s. Not an occupied one, anyway.”

Ashlyn Mercy and Rio Hideki, childhood friends with mysterious and separate deaths in their teenage years, begin again once the world is sure they’re dead. But the only person they cannot convince is each other.

Three locks on the front door, a Glock tucked away beside the door frame, a camera on the balcony, a motion sensor on both her motorcycle and her helmet. That was always the rule. Caelius was no stranger to throwing herself head-first into the public eye, chasing federal agent radio and creating chaos for a check, but when it came to her and her own personal space, nobody was going to get a look inside. Impulsive and calculated are not mutually exclusive; and if she was good for anything in this cybernetic body, it was rapid calculations. 

Numbers had been her favorite long before her mind uploaded to the body and she became them. She ran her fingers raw solving last-minute robotics equations that had saved their team on multiple occasions. Rio was much the same, though she took charge of strategy and performance. It could’ve just been them two competing for their robotics team, wearing each other’s names and numbers on their jackets, and they still would’ve won. Back then, she was still Ashlyn Mercy. Back then, she would’ve been afraid of disappearing. Of leaving Rio alone.

Numbers were the one thing they’d both excelled at. But no amount of calculations, no amount of mental math and critical analysis can bite bad luck before it bites first.

She remembered when the news broke. She’d moved away almost two years before, but was one of the first to hear about Rio’s accident. They’d found the car, wheels up, empty of bodies. Her parents were satisfied when the investigators concluded she’d tumbled out of the passenger side and into the water-- lost to the rapids-- but Ashlyn wasn’t. It was impossible. She was too good. Too smart. Too careful to end up in a car that would crash like that.

Caelius wonders if, when the feds told the world that Ashlyn Mercy had died on the operating table, someone thought the same of her. Thought she was too smart to die from something she’d studied so closely. The one thing she’d been good at, the one thing she ached to be good at, falling apart at the hands of powers she could not control. 

Getting over it wouldn’t change anything. Whatever good people might’ve seen in her after she’d died, it was surely gone by now. Bad luck bites, so you bite back with sharper teeth. Ashlyn Mercy had learned this. Charlotte Caelius had perfected it.

-

Leo stood at the foot of her own grave for a long time, but remained at Ashlyn’s even longer. This was the closest that Rio Hideki’s casket was ever going to come to being occupied. She wonders if they’ll change it to Leo Konomi when she actually dies, or if they’ll opt for a separate headstone entirely. They were two completely different people, anyway. She wonders when the world will find that out, too.

There weren’t many places in her hometown she’d planned on lingering-- especially a cemetery-- but to see the first two-ish decades of your life reduced to a memory keeps you frozen in time, thinking about everything that led up to it. There will always be the wonder of a what-if. She plays the whole thing out differently, every once in a while. They get more and more elaborate and she lets them.

One. Nobody moves away and both of them survive, graduating high school together. Rio almost drops her diploma in the parking lot, and Ashlyn spills Cherry Coke on her gown in the passenger seat of Rio’s car.

Two. Ashlyn still moves to New York, but she sends a package every month. Stationery, snacks, tacky NYC memorabilia-- items that say “I’m here, but I’ll still always be there”.

Three. Rio’s body is pulled out of the crash. Ashlyn stays with her in the hospital room while her broken leg heals. She brings lavender in a vase and Rio’s geometry homework, insistent on doing the odd problems for her.

Four. They die in the same freak accent, for real this time. It’s quick and painless.

When people enter a cemetery and talk to a headstone, they imagine the person buried beneath it, beautiful as ever. A caricature of everything good about the bones they’re sitting on. A face untouched by whatever killed them. But Leo could not bring herself to picture a casket under Ashlyn’s. Not an occupied one, anyway. She’d read every piece of information, every article around her circumstantial death at the hands of the mind transfer procedure, and it still wasn’t adding up. People had died from this procedure before, but none of them were Ashlyn Mercy. She was far too smart to throw herself into something she had little faith in, and she was too stubborn to die. 

Is that all it was? Bad intuition? Bad faith?

Four years of convincing herself that was the answer. Even here, at the foot of her best friend’s grave, she still doesn’t buy it.

Leo sees a blonde woman, slender and stoic, leaving the west side of the cemetery. Her heels click on the pavement with every step and she doesn’t seem interested in looking at anything but the side of the car in her eyeline. She came and saw what she needed to and she folds herself into the back of a vehicle. 

Now that it’s empty, Leo approaches the west side of the lot, making a beeline for her own headstone. The bouquet placed beneath it smells of lavender.

-

“I missed you before I left for work,” says a voice on the phone. “You were still asleep. “How was the trip?”

“Yeah, my flight got in late and I didn’t want to bug you,” says Leo, dodging bodies on a busy sidewalk in the merchant district. “It was good. Nothing particularly special, but it’s not like I was expecting parades and warm welcomes.”

“Guess that’s a good thing. You were worried about keeping a low profile.”

“Part of me was hoping to get recognized, but it’s probably best that I didn’t.”

“If anything, it’s nice to get away from the smog and bad drivers for a little while. Anywhere is greener than LA. Except, like, New Mexico. Wouldn’t that be crazy? If you were from New Mexico? Then everyone would probably ask why you’re so pale.”

“...Right.” Leo enters a crosswalk, nearly brushing shoulders with two women. One has kinky curls and a glove over her left hand; the other is blonde and glances between all the passersby as if in assessment. Her eyes meet with the latter’s. It takes everything to not let her knees buckle in the middle of the road. She manages to stumble her way to the sidewalk again. There is no possible way this could be a coincidence. No chance for bad intuition.

“Hey, Allie, is it okay if I miss dinner tonight?”

A beat, before Allie goes, “Sure. I wasn’t planning anything in particular. Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, I’m good. Just trying to wrap up all my old-life things in one day, if that makes any sense. I’ll see you tonight.”

Cheery as ever, you can hear Allie’s smile over the phone. “Be safe Leo. I love you!”

“I love you, too.”

Leo whips her head around to get another glance at the pair. They don’t look back, but they lean a little closer to one another before the blonde peels off to speak to a clothing vendor. The two carry very little on their person and are dressed not too dissimilar to Leo herself. Locals, she thinks. They don’t hesitate to nod at the vendors up the road, meaning they can’t live far from the merchant district. They’ll be back later.

This is the only shred of hope she’s had. They have to be back later.

Later that evening, Leo finds herself on the fire escape of a vacant apartment. The night markets of the merchant district open earlier and earlier as the sun begins to set in similar fashion. By now, the last of the day’s light has almost faded beyond the horizon, leaving only a murky glow behind the field of smog. The district hardly needs the aid of streetlamps when light, colorful or warm white, pours out of each booth like it’s drowning in it. This part of LA is a ways from Leo’s own, and she’s not exactly here for leisure, but maybe she could be someday. Allie would love it. Truth be told, there’s few things about this millennia that Allie doesn’t love. Both Leo and her girlfriend were people out of their own eras, in some respects. They had that in common.

Leo perks up when she sees the curly-haired woman talking to a vendor, not quite ten years her elder. No glove on her hand this time, leaving her metal fingers exposed to the elements and in plain sight. Leo looks down at her own ankle, listening to the mechanisms stretch and compress as she flexes her foot. Before long, she’s rounding the corner and heading north. She steps up to the side door of a dingy, four-floor apartment complex, not unlike the one Leo is perched outside. She eases herself down the latticework of the fire escape, brushes off her jeans, and follows at a distance. A light on the third floor goes on, then off after about thirty seconds. Either nobody’s home for the night or they’re just unbelievably early sleepers, she thinks. Neither seems like Ashlyn, but Leo prepares herself for the chance that the woman she finds won’t be the same one she once knew.

She climbs up the fire escape on the side of the complex and tosses her body to the front, narrowly grabbing hold of a railing on the facade. The streetlamps are curiously broken around all the buildings on this side of the road, giving her enough cover to hoist herself onto the balcony. It’s empty, save for a couple wooden stools and a jar of lights set to a timer sitting on top of one. They look like fireflies. Definitely not a coincidence.

With a gentle jostle of the doorframe, it slides open quietly enough for Leo’s liking and she slips inside. With the small amount she can see in the dark, it’s hardly decorated, but somehow painfully lived-in. She grasps for any sign of Ashlyn in the knickknacks under the TV, the papers on the kitchen counter, or frames on the walls. A childhood photo. A toy robot. Anything.

Leo’s body crashes to the floor the moment she’s lined up with the hallway leading out of the living room. She barely has a moment to cradle her aching nose before a cold, metal hand pulls her upright. Fist balled up into her t-shirt, the woman shoves her against the kitchen counter.

“Get the fuck out of my apartment,” she mutters, “before I call someone who will do you worse than a broken nose.”

Leo raises her arms up. The woman has started to inch back, her brow furrowing. The gesture seems effective until Leo feels something warm dripping down her nose. The streak of blood she wipes with the back of her hand is almost black. Shit. Forgot that’s how it happens.

“Disease? Experiment? Both?” she asks, knuckles still wrapped in her shirt, just looser.

“What?” says Leo.

“Whatever it is, get it away from me. Get out.”

She hoists herself up, slowly, to give her aching back a rest from all the jostling around. “I’m not here to hurt you, or steal from you, or any of that,” she says, heaving through her breaths. “I just need to talk.”

“So you came in through the back door? It’s thirty feet high. How did you get up here?”

Leo wipes the last of the blood from her nose and manages to sit on one of the barstools without much trouble. “You could have knocked me out cold with that arm. If you’re so mad, why didn’t you?”

“Because your leg would’ve done me worse. I’m completely right to be so mad that you just broke in.”

“Does Ashlyn live here?”

The woman looks over her shoulder and back, nonplussed. Confused, even. “Who?”

“Ashlyn Mercy? When I knew her, she was brunette and about yay tall. I think she lives here. I swore I saw her with you earlier today. Blonde? Heels?”

There’s almost pity in her voice when she goes, “I don’t know an Ashlyn Mercy. I live alone. Whoever you’re looking for isn’t gonna be here. Sorry.” 

She sounds so real when she says it. So honest. In becoming one, Leo has learned what even the best liars sound like. This woman is no exception. Her hope is hanging on by the edge of a razor. She hears footsteps down the hall, but her mind is in too many places at once to notice. “If you see her, can you please tell her that Rio Hideki is looking for her?”

She’s grasping at a singular straw at this point, but she can’t let go now. If there’s any chance this woman knows something, Leo owes herself a moment of desperation. At this point, she’s pleading with the universe.

“How do you know I’m not gonna take that name to someone who won’t be as kind to it as I’m being right now? You broke into my fucking apartment.”

A body emerges from the hallway. Slender, serious, blonde. Fingers wrapped with an iron grip around a silver pistol.

“Because it’s not her name anymore,” she says, hands dropping to her sides when their eyes meet. “Is it?”

The woman’s metal knuckles unfurl from her shirt, but Leo can’t move. With every blink, she alternates between looking like a stranger and looking so familiar it hurts. You wouldn’t be able to get Ashlyn Mercy from her nose, blue eyes, or curled lip, but her voice is identical. Under all the layers of whatever the ACA turned her body into, she is the girl Leo has always known. 

Leo finds her footing too little too late. Ashlyn throws her arms around her, too awed for words.

“I didn’t believe it,” she mutters after a minute. “Never. Not for a fucking second.”

Leo buries her face in her friend’s shoulder. She should be angry. Both of them should be furious with each other. After losing the closest person they had and learning they’d never made it to the grave at all, they should be hurt that it took years to tell each other the truth. There is no coming back from a lie like that.

But you can’t come back to someone you never really left, can you?

Leo manages a smile. “Neither did I.”

[windtempos]

The Ache

Caelius crosses her arms. “I’m not playing this game. You don’t get to act like you know me.”

Alondra nods. “You’re right, I don’t. I’m a survivor, you’re a fugitive. But I’d like to think we both know a thing or two about being hurt.”

After a mission to retrieve a package goes awry, Caelius finds herself receiving help from an old acquaintance who’s quite possibly the only person who can understand why she makes her choices-- and the only one who won’t lecture her for them.

Even beneath the helmet, Caelius’s breathing pulls in and pushes out in heavy huffs. It’s been years since she felt this winded-- years since she took in a breath at all. A bionic body needs no oxygen. But ever the lab rat, she programmed into her body every human mechanism she could. Sour tastes, headaches, and broken bones were all things that she’d not necessarily endured, but surely experienced. Where some might throw around the word masochist, she prefers self-technician. A robot programs its own flaws for the same reason a man helps a fallen stranger when he’s already late for work: to feel a little closer to our own humanity. Or what’s left of it, anyway.

Of course, getting roped into a firefight right when you’re testing out simulated breathing mechanics is not without complications. If only there were a bodily function that could improve one’s luck.

Caelius dips into a dim alley, peering over the dumpster and watching the shadows pass over the sidewalk. She presses herself against the wall when the bullets start firing back. They wedge themselves into the metal with loud, repetitive thunks like heavy rainfall.

“Kiana?” she mutters. “I know you’re waiting for me to admit I’m out of my depth, but can we please do the I-Told-You-So’s after we’re out of the fight?” Garbled sound, then static. She knocks on the side of her helmet a few times. “Kiana?”

No dice.

“Damn it!” She pulls it from her head and wastes no time in emptying her clip into a tall, burly man’s chest. He fumbles to the pavement. With how relentless these other bounty hunters are, she wishes she brought real bullets instead of just stun rounds.

A knife slashes through Caelius’s right shoulder, cutting clean through her jacket and the synthetic skin it protects. The sensation makes her cry out and stumble as she cradles the metal and wires left exposed. The assault throws her off her feet for long enough to let a taser twist into her back. Electricity courses through her body-- not enough to knock her unconscious, but enough to destroy what little energy she has left. The rise and fall of her chest, the aftershock of the taser, and her lack of escape routes start making the panic rise in her throat. 

Normally, she’d give some sort of clever one-liner to Kiana through her earpiece; but her partner in crime is nowhere to be found, likely on the same end of a different fight. She’s out of options. 

Heavy fire overtakes the alley, but this time, it’s not aimed at Caelius. One by one, the bullets drive the bounty hunters out of the area. Their shadows scatter like smoke beneath the broken lamplight. Only when Caelius sees the short, black hair and the outstretched metal arm of her hero does she let her guard down and collapse against the wall.

“You’re a long way from home, metalhead,” she says.

Caelius grabs her helmet with one hand and reaches for the woman’s arm with the other. Her gaze narrows. “Have we met?” she asks. The answer matters little to her; this woman drove her attackers away and hasn’t immediately turned to fill her full of holes. That’s the important part. She’s still a little too dazed to pick out where she knows her from.

She huffs out a chuckle and stows the gun against her back, supporting Caelius beneath her uninjured arm. “Something like that.”

“Where are we going?”

“Somewhere safe. That arm of yours needs a patch job.”

-

Body temperature is no issue, but the chill of the apartment helps put Caelius’s mind at ease. As much as it can be, anyway. Kiana is still radio silent. But knowing her, she’s probably miles from the fight by now, on her way home. She’s notoriously good at getting out of trouble-- even with how often Caelius drags her into it.

The smell of molten metal and the occasional spark floats out of the hole in Caelius’s shoulder. Straddled over the chair backwards, she rests her chin on her arms and observes the room. Aside from where the two women sit, all that occupies the space is a coffee table, a twin mattress, and a well-worn sofa with cracks in the leather. It’s painfully un-lived in.

“Aren’t you gonna ask me what I’m doing all the way out here in Fresno, Alondra?” asks Caelius.

“I don’t usually ask my guests where they’re going. I just see that they make it there.”

“Guests? Last time we spoke, you said you were retired.”

She chuckles. “Retired from bounty hunting? Yes. But I don’t retire from charity. Why do you think I rented this place?”

Caelius furrows her brow and looks into the kitchen. The only things in the open cabinet are bottles of rubbing alcohol, some dry snacks, and a few canned products that are most definitely expired. “Could’ve made it a little more homey.”

Wanting to fill the silence, she spills the details. A mission to pick up some assets went sour, resulting in a firefight in a city where she and Kiana were far out of their element. “Sounds exciting.”

Caelius groans. “It was so exciting! But these bounty hunters go for the throat. Nobody’s that brutal back home.”

“Nobody but you?” she chuckles and drums a few fingers on her jeans. Caelius declines to answer. “I gave up the gig when I moved away from LA. I try to keep my run-ins with them few and far between. They certainly have teeth.” Alondra presses an adhesive to one side of her open wound and stretches it across to the other. Caelius winces at the strange sensation.

“Where’d you learn to do this? Robot bodies aren’t exactly standard first-aid practice,” she mentions.

Alondra raises her arm into the air; all her fingers retract into her wrist except one. It slims down to reveal a small soldering iron. Caelius holds in her marveling, but her colleague cracks a smile at the ounce of reaction that slips through her eyes. “I meet a lot of people. You aren’t the first body I’ve tended to that was more metal than man.”

“Ew. Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re my… caretaker. I don’t need to be taken care of.”

She doesn’t shrink from Caelius’s hardened, defensive expression. Caelius can’t stand the way that Alondra studies her, nor the way she asks her to say what’s on her mind. Yet, she finds it easy to answer.

While both of them might know their ways around bounty hunting, their worlds are on polar opposite ends of the universe. Alondra pulls strangers out of the line of fire, giving them sanctuary when they have nowhere else to go. Just like her mentor did for her. Sticking her neck out for strangers has never come easily to Caelius-- and truly, she doesn’t need it to. She just needs their necks to break, should they deserve it.

“It sounds worse when I say it out loud,” she admits.

“Maybe. But it’s the truth.” Alondra sets her tools down and leans to the side, within Caelius’s line of sight. Her eyes narrow. “Colby told me about what happened to you. Why you became a mercenary.”

Colby. They hadn’t spoken in months; there was no need for it. Caelius took up the bounty over her head, double-crossed her employer, then called it even. She might’ve even gone as far as to consider Colby a friend if they weren’t playing for opposite teams. Alondra, on the other hand— her first interaction with Caelius was purely out of necessity through the whole situation. Yet, there was this unspoken understanding between them. You don’t have to know someone well to see yourself in their eyes.

“Your girlfriend needs to keep my name out of her mouth,” she mutters.

“Ex-girlfriend.”

“Whatever. I’m not interested in talking about it. I don’t know your story, you don’t get to know the rest of mine.”

The anger starts to boil in Caelius the more that Alondra looks at her, waiting for a change of heart. No matter how human her body is, everything feels like ones and zeroes sometimes. Black and white. People who hurt you deserve to be hurt back. I don’t like to be analyzed. It makes me afraid. I want to hurt people who make me afraid. The tunnel vision keeps going, and soon enough, she finds herself turned around in the chair with a hand lunging at Alondra. It only makes it halfway before metal fingers wrap around her wrist.

“I’m sorry,” Alondra says, lowering their hands. “That made you uncomfortable. I shouldn’t have prodded like that.”

Caelius keeps waiting for Alondra to bark advice about feelings, to stroke her own ego and assert some sort of moral superiority, but it never comes. She pulls her hand away and folds herself up in her chair.

For just a moment, she lets the memories play. The sudden awakening in a foreign body. The uncontrollable aggression it enacted on the people around her. The floating months where it was her alone against a world that wanted her in a cell. Three years feels like three months with how hard it is to forget.

“I wanted to be an EMT more than anything in the world,” Alondra begins. “My coworkers felt otherwise. It was perfect-- an open window, a fake phone call, and the claim that it was just some freak accident. I found my death certificate dated ten minutes before I even fell. People I was supposed to trust with other people’s lives made an attempt on mine.” She chews on the inside of her cheek. Just like Caelius, this isn’t a story she’d like to dwell on. “I could never go back to the field I’d dreamed of being in, all because of the mistakes of a select few.”

Caelius crosses her arms. “I’m not playing this game. You don’t get to act like you know me.”

Alondra nods. “You’re right, I don’t. I’m a survivor, you’re a fugitive. But I’d like to think there’s a little bit of overlap.”

She doesn’t need the reminder. Every day, the APB over her name-- or her old one, that is-- lurks over her like a shadow, dictating where she can and can’t go. Who she can and can’t work with, at the risk of turning her over to the American Cybernetics Association. Looking different, acting different, having a new identity; she'd never admit that the thought crosses her mind, but what if it was all for nothing? What would they do if they got to me?

“I’ll never know what it is to be Charlotte Caelius, but I might know a thing or two about what it’s like.”

Caelius hugs her knees to her chest and turns the conversation away from herself. “The people who tried to kill you deserve to be hurt.”

“And I hope they do. I hope they rot in hell for what they did to me. But I lost months of my life to that feeling and I can’t feel that forever.”

The last word plays on a feedback loop. Until her fuses all blow and her wires short circuit, the ache will never stop. Shootout after car chase after stakeout, over, and over, and over. Anything to fill the space in her chest. It doesn’t matter who’s hurting, they just need to be hurting like her. It makes her wish that instead of almost dying on the operating table three years ago, she would’ve just--

Caelius doesn’t notice the tears on her cheeks until they’re dripping off her chin. One of few bodily features she didn’t program herself. “If I learn to get rid of the feeling, what happens then?” she asks. The voice feels foreign in her throat. “I’m combat built. All I’ve ever been good at since I woke up in this body is hurting.”

Alondra rests her elbows on her knees. “You’ll never get rid of it,” she answers. “I haven’t. I just found something else to fill the space better than the pain can.”

She hands her guest a bottle of water, which Caelius takes a swig of. She has no need to hydrate, but the feeling is comforting. Organic. She runs a hand idly over the adhesives covering her wound, already feeling them begin to dissolve and fill the gap left in her synthetic skin.

“You’re taking breaths,” observes Alondra. “Why is that? You don’t have lungs.”

“An experiment. I was…” She stops and shakes her head, slipping her tank top back over her chest.

“I can guarantee you I’ve heard worse than whatever you’re about to say.”

She keeps her gaze fixed on the far wall. “My roommate, Kiana. When we do stakeouts, I usually wake up with my head on her shoulder. It rises and falls with her breathing and—” she winces— “it’s… nice. Plus, I owed her one, so now we’re even.”

No prodding, no comments, no quips from Alondra when she turns around. Just a genuine smile. Caelius hides her own behind her short, blonde locks and looks at the floor. “Then I suppose that can be your something to fill the space. If you’re not gonna keep hunting bounties to make people hurt, do it for the stakeouts with Kiana.”

She places a few extra adhesives into Caelius’s palm, instructing her on how to reapply them when the current ones lose their stick. Her metal fingers latch onto her forearm in a handshake before she shows her guest to the door.

“Give your roommate my regards,” she says.

“And give your ex-girlfriend mine. Not like she’ll be thrilled to hear from me. I kind of did try to kill her and her friends.”

A harbinger of a storm to come, hot, sticky air curls across the terrace. She inhales the moisture in the atmosphere and looks up at the heavy clouds, barely visible in the moonlight.

“Caelius,” Alondra adds once she’s halfway out into the night. “Revenge is part of the gig. We deserve it. But get revenge in a way that matters, yeah?”

The door latches behind her and she descends the stairs of the complex. Alondra exits not long after her, disappearing across the other side of the parking lot like steam rising up from the earth and dissolving into the midnight air.

Get revenge in a way that matters. At least she won’t have to do it alone.

[windtempos]

Midnight Mission

Adya can’t help but smile. The most advanced bionics money can buy, and the one thing that can take her out is a pretty girl with a melee weapon and metal arms.

Adya runs into some unexpected trouble on a mission, followed by some unexpected help from a very friendly face.

--

Loving one another was never the challenge for Adya and Reese-- acting like they didn’t was.

Neither of them were sure of Goddard's policy for romantic relationships between agents. They weren’t sure if they even wanted to call it one at all. Putting time aside both to a partner and to their jobs would be nearly impossible, especially considering how busy Adya was outside of agent work. Every day, a new interview, board meeting, or diagnostic check seemed to take up any ounce of free time she had. 

But Reese can’t deny that she looks at her colleague and wants everything to do with her. Living with four other agents and being right next door to Adya certainly doesn’t curb the thought, either. Even with the cold, harsh metal beneath her artificial skin, her touch always feels warm. Even when every gesture and expression is the result of 1s and 0s in her computer brain, she finds herself picking up Adya’s idle habits. Even when the world spins too fast for them to get a moment alone, it seems to slow down right when Reese wants it to. Just for a second-- then it’s back to business.

The only alone time that the two get is always under... strenuous circumstances. Luckily, amid the chaos of a fight, there’s one thing that all their teammates can agree upon: Adya and Reese work well under pressure.

Colby’s rifle rests across her lap. The weariness starts to set in; it’s almost two in the morning and she’s been camped out on this fire escape for an hour, waiting for someone who might never come.

“What do you have for me, Colburn?” Adya says from her wrist com.

“Exactly what I had for you two minutes ago,” she answers. “An empty storefront with the lights off. No one coming in or out. The building is big, so I can’t guarantee that they’re not using another exit. What do you have for me, Prisham?”

“Well, I found out there’s a basement. The walls are too thick for me to hear anything; and if I go down any further, I’ll lose your signal.”

“Our mission is reconnaissance only. The people in this building are supposedly picking apart old assembly line machines and reselling the parts.”

Adya keeps her footsteps light and ducks around the corner. The concrete is cold against her back in some spots, warm in others. It might just be the fact that she’s underground in a building that’s decades old, but something tells her that it’s more. “I don’t mind secondhand shopping until it means the difference between a bionic arm and a bomb.”

Colby’s tired eyes wake up when she notices five people look up and down the street before unlocking the front door. “Woah, woah,” she says, peering through the scope of her rifle. When one pulls at the handle, she notices his clawlike, bionic arm. “Adya, you’ve got incoming.”

Static.

“Adya?” she taps her wrist com gently a few times before giving up. The five figures disappear behind the building’s tinted windows.

Willing to take the risk, Adya slips into the stairwell and makes her way to the basement. Idle chatter and footsteps echo two flights above her. Shit, she mutters. The staircase goes down a few more flights, but she takes the first exit she sees. There isn’t enough time to shut it gently; the door swings back and latches with a tremendous thud on both sides. As she dives out of sight around the corner, she holds down the button on her wrist com. If live communication isn’t going through at this depth, all she can do is send out a tracking transmission and hope that no one has to use it.

Both sides of the hallway feature heavy, metal doors and one-way windows. Thermal vision tells her that each room has only a couple people inside; the rest of the space is occupied by machines, she assumes. She peers through one of the doors to see two men in dirty mechanic suits studying an elegant bionic arm propped up on the table. Instead of five fingers, the arm stops at the wrist with a wide opening similar to that of a gun. An arm cannon. We were right about this place.

The weight of Adya’s metal body against the metal door is enough to shove it open, however, and it lets out a creak that resonates down the hallway for everyone to hear. She breaks into a sprint down the hall. Even with the most lightweight bionics money can buy, her steps are heavy and loud against the concrete. She’s met by five pairs of eyes when she whips around the corner.

One of the men steps forward, extending his clawlike hand. “I’m impressed,” he begins. “This is a secure facility. Sneaking in here is pretty bold.”

“Guess I just love the thrill,” Adya responds, a firm hand on the pistol against her thigh.

“No, I think you’re just programmed that way.” He lets out a chuckle that feels almost robotic. Maybe his hand isn’t the only artificial thing about him. “Adya Milana Prisham. First human consciousness in a fully functional, artificial body. Designed for any fight. I’ve read up on you-- marvelous work.”

If she’s programmed for anything, it’s this. Her sense of fear is high enough to keep her safe, but low enough that she doesn’t freeze up in the face of danger. “Technically, I’m not built for combat. They didn’t start building military-grade bodies until after they put me in this one.”

“Hm. How unfortunate for you.” The claw attached to his wrist retracts, replacing itself with a narrow, four-pronged tool that the man presses into Adya’s shoulder. An overwhelming jolt of electricity courses through her system. Her joints lock up and her eyes go wide before abruptly returning to a neutral gaze. The world goes dark as her mind retreats into her limp body.

When Adya comes to, she’s blinded by the white light shining directly into her vision. Her wrists are bound to the wall above her head in tight, metal clamps. The room feels, looks, smells-- sterile. She knows the sensation of a bionics procedure room all too well.

“They say that the best way to learn is by doing,” the man says, noticing that she’s conscious, “and I’m tired of reading articles and analyzing blueprints. Let’s dissect that hunk of metal you call a body, huh?”

A small canister slides under the door and clatters against the concrete the moment that he turns to face Adya. Thick, white smoke fills the room faster than he can kick it away or cover it. He stumbles back into carts and tables, knocking trays of tools to the floor.

The sound of a struggle becomes the only discernible thing among the chaos. Adya notices a second, smaller heat signature has entered the room. When the smoke clears, it’s not the man’s face that she notices first. It’s the long, brunette hair and slim, bionic arms. It’s the brown eyes that could see right through you if they chose to. It’s the casual smile that never fails to be a sight for sore eyes.

“Reese?”

Reese coughs out some of the smoke, making sure that her opponent won’t be getting back up anytime soon. She pulls a key from his coat pocket. In one, swift movement, the staff in her hand retracts and latches back onto her belt. “I see that you turned your recon mission into an assault,” she says. “And I just turned it into a rescue. I got your tracking transmission.”

“At two in the fucking morning?” Adya scoffs, but it comes out as more of a chuckle. She can’t even pretend to be mad. “What are you doing awake?”

“Couldn’t sleep. The apartment feels too empty with you and Colby gone and I was working late anyway.”

Adya stares at Reese for a long while as she wanders over. “You were worried about me.”

Reese rolls her eyes, stretching her metal arms over her head in an attempt to look nonchalant. She wears black skinny jeans and a big, gray jacket over a tank top. While she may look out of her element in civilian clothes, Adya can’t deny that she looks awfully good in them. It’s not often they get to be out and about in anything but their uniforms. This doesn’t exactly qualify as “out and about”, though. “Was not,” Reese says.

“Yes you were! You did this last time I went on a midnight mission. Nate and I didn’t come back until four in the morning and there you were, pulling an all nighter.”

Reese rests a hand on the wall above Adya’s shoulder. She leans in closer with the dumbest, most smug grin anyone’s ever seen. “For the record, I got an hour of sleep that night. But keep talking-- I’ll just leave you here.”

Adya giggles and taps her nose against her colleagues. Too much time around Reese and she starts to short circuit. “The things you do to get me alone, Agent.”

“The things I do? You were here first, tin can. I’m doing you a favor.”

She reaches up with the key and slides it into the lock. Soon enough, Adya’s arms slip out, but now they’re caught in a new grip. Reese holds tight to her hands and locks her lips against Adya’s. For a few seconds, everything disappears-- no bionics, no enemies, no threat of being dissected like a lab project. There is Adya and Reese, nothing more. The earth melts out from under their feet like rocks floating downstream, away from the heavy world.

Static spews out of Adya’s wrist com. “Adya?” Colby says. Great timing.

“I’m here,” she says, still eyeing Reese an inch away from her. “I’m on my way out. We were right-- they’re building black market bionics here.”

“What took you so long?”

“I ran into some unfriendly faces.”

“Followed by a very friendly one,” Reese chimes in. “Hey, Colby.”

Colby’s gasp is so loud that it almost scrambles her transmission. “Reese, the General is gonna be furious that you snuck onto this operation!”

Reese opens the door and follows her colleague out into the hallways. “Which is why we’re not gonna tell her.”

Ever the ambitious member of their team, Reese darts down the corridors, narrowly avoiding eyes and ears with ease. Adya follows close behind, ears still ringing from the kiss earlier. She can’t help but smile. The most advanced bionics money can buy, and the one thing that can take her out is a pretty girl with a melee weapon and metal arms.

[windtempos]

“Some days, I find that I am both the sailor lost at sea and the siren that begs her to jump overboard. Ever the exception to my own rule, I cannot resist wandering or beautiful women.”

[windtempos]

Old Name, New Face

“The ACA’s new poster boy is an army vet with the best bionics money can buy. He can smile and wave and throw a punch, but that’s it. I would not put it past him to be taking orders from someone with an agenda that both you and I won’t like.”

Adya Prisham spent the first eight years of her career as the face of cybernetics; but now that she’s putting field work on the backburner, the American Cybernetics Association brings in a new poster boy. Charlotte Caelius, a mercenary with several bones to pick at any moment, has finally found someone she despises more than Adya.

Waking up would’ve almost been peaceful if Reese didn’t burst through the door and yank Adya’s charging port from her neck. She jolts upright with wide eyes, almost throwing a fist out to the side and punching a hole in the drywall. That’d be a hell of a story to explain to the neighbors upstairs.

Adya lets her body relax and buries her face in her hands. “You are going to be the death of me,” she mutters. “What the fuck was that for?”

“Come downstairs, right now. You have to see this.” Reese responds. Her girlfriend glares at how awake she sounds at eight in the morning. Nevertheless, she stretches her metal joints and stumbles down into the living room. You couldn’t tune out the reporter on the TV if you tried-- Reese has the volume deafeningly loud, but Adya blames it on her ears still adjusting to the abrupt awakening. This better be good, Adya thinks.

A shot of an amphitheatre packed with people fades into a closeup of a young man in an army uniform waving to the crowd. He stands with square posture and even blows a kiss or two to the crowd. Adya looks at her hands, then his. She notices the suggestion of a seam on his skin, much less conspicuous than her own.

“The American Cybernetics Association has introduced their newest diplomat: A young, Texas native with a bright smile and a knack for being on center stage,” the reporter goes on. “Casper Sable qualified for the mind transfer program and had his conscience successfully uploaded to his bionic body seven years ago; since then, he’s served with the US Army on countless successful missions.”

Adya groans. “You woke me up for some military propaganda?” she asks.

“Keep listening,” says Reese.

The screen fades to Casper, now in a sleek uniform with a stiff, white collar, standing at the end of a long row of others dressed the same. He salutes the commander with a hand over his chest and a casual grin.

“It looks like Adya Prisham may have some competition,” the reporter jokes.

“For those of you new to the world of bionics, Adya Milana Prisham became the first human conscience in a bionic body almost a decade ago,” her cohost continues after a light chuckle. “She’s been serving as an agent for the Goddard Institute of Cybernetics in Los Angeles, but recently stepped back from field work. Whether or not it’s a permanent decision remains to be seen. One thing’s for sure, though: the ACA is eager to put a fresh, new face out into the field. And this time, the field isn’t just LA-- it’s the whole world.”

“Corporal Casper Sable is now Agent Casper Sable. With his newly recognized status, the Sovereign Agent Program has recruited him to be a diplomat and a protector for communities all across the world. Truly an honor, isn’t it?”

Adya slumps back against the couch with a furrowed brow. She makes one change to her work, and the ACA has the gall to sideline her. All for a pretty white boy in uniform. It’s almost laughable, but her fists ball in her lap.

“The people need someone new, and putting him on the international stage will put vigor in the world of cybernetics that hasn’t been seen since the days of Adya Prisham.”

“They’re talking about me like I’m dead!” she shouts.

Reese shoots up from the couch and paces to the kitchen, downing what’s left of a cup of coffee on the counter. Her metal hands slap against the granite. “You busted your ass to be here,” she spits. “To come to the US, to become an agent, to be a role model-- not a celebrity, a role model. And the moment you make one personal decision, they decide to throw you out for some… bootlicking country boy with a big ego!”

Adya slips an arm over her girlfriend’s shoulders, insisting that they relax. Only a little bit of the tension subsides.

“You and I have both met sovereign agents,” Reese continues. “They’re recruited to be international peacekeepers not because of what they do, but who they are. He didn’t earn that title; they gave it to him so that their pretty poster boy isn’t just some kid in uniform, driving around in a humvee.”

“Easy, babe,” Adya says with a gentle squeeze around her waist. “You don’t get to be more mad about this than I am. Trust me, I’m not gonna let anyone sideline me. Just because I’m not a field agent anymore doesn’t mean I don’t have a voice in the ACA.”

The front door flies open, crashing into the wall behind it. Reese instinctively dives in front of Adya and raises her fists. They don’t stay up for long when the blonde woman in front of her, motorcycle helmet tucked beneath her arm, meets her eyeline.

“You could’ve fucking knocked, Caelius!”

“Too early for a little breaking and entering? To each their own, I guess.” Caelius shrugs and tosses her keys and her helmet onto the counter. She shoves Reese out of the way and throws a gentle fist into Adya’s chest. “You better not just let this happen, Prisham. This kid is gonna give you and me a bad name, right when things were starting to mellow out for people with bionics. I almost don’t feel like a walking freak when I tell people what I am, but now, I’m just gonna feel like a pretentious asshole.”

“You are a pretentious asshole! You and I could not be more different. I’m not about to have this conversation with the mercenary who tried to kill me all those years ago.”

“I think you are. It’d be rude to throw out a guest, wouldn’t it?”

She turns to Reese, who now stands on top of the stairs. “You invited Caelius over?” Adya asks, a look of bewilderment passing over her face.

“You’re both mind transfers and you both hate this guy. If I know anything about either of you, it’s that you don’t like other people defining who you are. The enemy of your enemy is your friend.” She disappears into the bathroom, leaving Adya and Caelius to their own devices in the kitchen like two bulls in a pen. Adya swats her hand away and retires to the couch, still grimacing at a term like friend being in the same context as Caelius.

“Sable will want to meet you,” Caelius mentions. She reaches for the remote to mute the TV as the reporter continues babbling on about mind transfers. “Now that the news has branded him as your replacement, he’s gonna want to talk about it with you. What it means to be ‘the face of bionics’, or whatever it is he’s trying to do.”

She scoffs. “What, so I can pass him the baton? I’m not even on my victory lap yet. I don’t want anything to do with him.”

“The ACA might not give you a choice.”

Adya rests her chin in her hand and does the mental gymnastics. “This how you saw me five years ago, isn’t it?” she asks. “Just some pretty face, putting the ACA on a pedestal and doing interviews for magazines. Now, I understand.”

Caelius nods. “I was also a wanted fugitive. And a criminal. And absolutely fucking pissed every minute of the day. That definitely amplified it. But I’m not paying you a visit to reflect on my past.”

“Wow. I gave you the opportunity to talk about how much you hated me, and you didn’t take it. You must really hate this guy.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, Agent.” She produces a sly, charming smile that’s gone as fast as it appears. “Meet with this guy and propose that you two team up for a few weeks. Keep him in the US for as long as possible while I get some dirt on him and figure out what he’s up to.”

Adya folds into herself, head hanging between her knees. “Caelius, you are not going to sabotage this man’s career!” she yells.

“I don’t plan on it!” she responds. “I sure would like to, though. Sable is pouring gasoline on a fire that was already out of control. The ACA’s new poster boy is an army vet with the best bionics money can buy and a title he doesn’t deserve. But he has no conviction. No humility. He can smile and wave and throw a punch, but that’s it. I would not put it past him to be taking orders from someone with an agenda that both you and I won’t like.”

She almost sounds… intimidated by him. Just as much as his personality is laughable to her, there’s a sense of ambition to her words. A chill slips down Adya’s spine. Charlotte Caelius, the once ambivalent bounty hunter who wanted to reduce Adya to scrap metal for a quick profit, now worrying about someone’s lack of humility. She doesn’t doubt it for a second after her first impression of Casper Sable, but her eyes narrow. “How do you know that?”

“He was part of a sample group of a hundred volunteers being evaluated for the mind transfer program,” she explains. “Ten passed the test, but only two ended up going through with the procedure.”

“Him and who else?”

Caelius clasps her hands together, elbows leaning against the armchair in front of her.

“Me.”

[windtempos]

Here & Now

word count: 3,025

“Colby’s only ever known fleeting love like roller coaster rides that never stop, operating from dusk to dawn. But she hasn’t had a girlfriend since she split with Alondra. Her days of chasing highs are over.”

Colby reminisces on her days as a bounty hunter, wondering if her and Alondra can rekindle a flame whose embers haven’t quite burned out yet. After almost six years of “just business”, maybe they can make something work.

-----

The panels of Colby’s visor retract into the sides of the helmet. She can’t stand to aim through a scope and a tinted visor, even if it hardly makes a difference. You’d be hard pressed to see her miss a target-- especially on a bounty this valuable.

“Tell me what you see, Lon,” she says, looking around the block from the rooftop.

From around the corner, Alondra heads south down the sidewalk in a jacket so big it almost looks like a poncho. On the other side of the road, two hooded individuals pass by one another and exchange a backpack without as much as a glance.

“Short, Caucasian, blue hoodie, black backpack,” she says, crossing the street during a lull in traffic and ducking into an alley between two shops. She cinches the jacket at her waist and produces a slender, black mask from inside of it. Its two eye holes almost seem to glow in the flickering streetlight. “She’s rounding the corner now.”

Colby watches the woman make it halfway down the block before she passes the backpack to another man in a black jacket and a baseball cap. He secures both straps over his shoulders rather than just one.

The intersection gives way to an abandoned lot left by a flattened building; dozens of cars litter the area, avoiding parking tickets and exorbitant meter fees. When Colby looks through her scope, she has a clean shot at the car that the man makes a beeline for.

“How do you want me to play this?” she asks Alondra. “Shoot out the tires and get the guy on the run, or tag the vehicle and see where he’s going?”

She jogs down the alley, making a beeline for the parking lot. “Get him back on his feet. If I’m fast enough and he’s confused enough, I can get him here and now.”

“‘Here and now’ better get a little more here and a little more now, then.”

Colby pulls the trigger, reloads, and repeats.

The two shots echo across the parking lot and air escapes from the tires. The man stumbles back into the trunk. Gripping onto the backpack straps until his knuckles turn white, he tries to seek out the sniper; but by the time he traces the bullets back to their source, Colby is long gone and Alondra’s just feet away from him.

She propels herself off of the trunk of the car and latches onto his torso, flipping him onto his back and letting him cough up a handful of dirt. From beneath the mask, Alondra’s pitiful laugh stays hidden. She throws a kick in the gut which he seems to take pretty well, for a lanky white guy. Her second kick lands on something stiff when he swings the backpack around to protect his chest.

“I could use another pair of hands!” she mutters, grasping at straws to get him in a headlock. The height difference certainly isn’t helping.

“Three cars are about to turn the corner. He’s stalling you, Lon. Get that backpack and go!”

Alondra manages to snatch the backpack from his hands as he continues to use it as a shield. Its heaviness sends her off balance. The screeching of tires and the flash of headlights gives her just enough time to slip back into the alley, where Colby waits for her. She aims her rifle at the ring of cars that just swung into the lot, but Alondra yanks the back of her collar and forces her into a sprint. Footsteps close in not far behind.

The pair descends deeper into the web of back alleys. Even beneath her helmet, you can hear a few laughs of adrenaline escape from Colby’s lips. She scales a dumpster, lunges over the fence, and rolls onto the ground. Alondra grabs her arm to keep her from stumbling, now fully broken out into laughter. The thrill of an escape is almost addictive.

Alondra unzips the backpack and eyes the shiny, solid bricks that have been pounding against her back for ten minutes. Pure tungsten-titanium. The strongest metal that bionics can buy.

“Holy shit!” Colby says, a grin still plastered to her face. She steps backward and leans against the wall, catching her breath. “That was insane! We can pawn this off for so much.”

Alondra can’t find any words to say. The euphoria keeps her giggling as she shakes the curls from her vision. Colby reaches for Alondra’s waist with her left hand and her own helmet with her right, but finds that her partner has already begun removing it from her face. With the visor still covering her eyes, warm, soft lips place themselves against Colby’s. Both hands wrap around Alondra’s waist-- but it isn’t long until the quiet, uncontrollable laughter takes hold of them again.

Even as the years go by, Colby’s days as a mercenary sit in the forefront of her mind at all times. The thrill of the chase. The catharsis of finally nabbing a bounty. The dopamine rush of cashing in. The quiet, mysterious life that she was lucky enough to spend with a person that she loved more than anyone.

Someone she loves more than anyone.

Their recent interactions have been limited purely to business: Colby sends vulnerable citizens to the sanctuary city Alondra runs, and Alondra tips Colby off about criminals in the area in exchange. Nothing more than the pass of a baton to someone who is better equipped to hold it. For nearly six years, they have been each others’ informants, but the title never sat quite right. It should’ve been more. It should be more.

Colby drums her fingertips on a coffee cup at the kitchen counter, metal clinking with the ceramic without her even noticing. Reese comes over and rests a hand over her fidgeting fingers. She offers her roommate a kind, quiet nod before opening the fridge. “Wanna talk about it?” she asks.

Colby downs the last sip of her coffee and grimaces at the bitterness. “Talk about what?”

“You’ve been tapping on that cup for almost five minutes without taking a drink from it. You’re a lot easier to read than you think.”

“That’s only because you’ve known me for, like, eight years.” She wanders over to the counter and pours another cup, careful to put an adequate amount of cream and sugar in it this time. 

“And yet, you still don’t open up about your feelings to me. Or any of your team, for that matter.” Colby scoffs and tosses the creamer to Reese, which she catches with ease and returns to the shelf in the fridge.

“Tough talk from someone who wouldn’t leave her shell until she had a girlfriend to break her out of it.”

“It’s about Alondra, then, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t--” She slumps back into the barstool at the counter. The slightest suggestion of a nod comes from her head. Her roommate pulls out the chair next to her.

“Let’s start from the beginning. Why did you two decide to go your separate ways?” asks Reese.

“I had always planned to be a bounty hunter only temporarily. It was sort of my one ‘fuck-you’ to being given orders I didn’t believe in, but if I just ran from that responsibility and didn’t try and fix the system, I couldn’t live with myself. I had to go back to being an agent,” Colby explains. “As for Alondra, she wanted to make a bigger impact than just beating up criminals and getting paid for it. She wanted to look after people. The Nest is her baby-- a sanctuary city for people with illegal cybernetics was a pipe dream she always told me about, and now it’s real.”

“And you don’t want to pull her away from that.”

She nods and takes another sip. “Not even, like, as a partner. If I show up in her life again in any capacity beyond ‘business’ or whatever, I’m worried I’ll royally fuck it up.” Her expression melts into one that’s not quite sorrowful, but not quite frustrated-- just lost with herself. She meets Reese’s gaze and asks, “How do you and Adya do it?”

“I love Adya more than anything,” Reese says. “I have never loved anyone the way that I love her, but she’s also my coworker. Six-something years ago, we were too young and dumb to commit to a relationship and a career at the same time. We stepped back, looked at the situation a little more, and decided when we were ready to commit to both. You were twenty-one when you were a merc, running around LA and getting newspaper articles written about you. That’s prime ‘young and dumb’ territory. You and Alondra are much different people now. Adjusting your promises to match your values isn’t the same as breaking them.”

Reese takes a few dishes from the sink and sets them into the dishwasher, wiping her hands on a dish towel thrown on the counter. “Regardless, she’s still your informant. The least you can give her is an update on your life. Call her.”

Her last two words ring with a softness that’s seldom seen from Reese. Her and Adya’s relationship is steady, practical, and unbreakable; Colby’s only ever known fleeting love like roller coaster rides that never stop, operating from dusk to dawn. But she hasn’t had a girlfriend since she split with Alondra. Her days of chasing highs are over. She trusts Reese’s judgment.

After sorting through all the fruits picked from the backyard, Alondra’s finally ready to bring them downstairs to the Nest residents. They’re more than welcome to come upstairs and pick it themselves-- safety isn’t an issue when this acre of land is uninhabited by anyone else-- but most of them prefer to stay inside during the day. She doesn’t blame them for being wary; it’s all that most of them have ever known.

The back door swings shut with a creak and she sets the basket on the kitchen counter. Thick clouds passing over the sun cast shadows through the open windows and wooden floors. It’s a bit lonely, living up here by herself, but most of her time is spent downstairs, anyway.

The landline rings. “Hello?”

“No time like the here and now to say hello,” a familiar voice says. Alondra almost drops the knife in her hand.

“Colby?”

“Am I catching you at a bad time?”

She tucks the phone against her shoulder and returns to the cutting board. “No, no. Good time, actually. Is everything okay?”

“Great, actually. Just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing.”

“I’m… good. Things are good here. I’ve been…” She sets down the knife. “I have a feeling that there’s a bigger reason for this call.”

Colby chuckles. “I’d be disappointed if you didn’t. But really, I just wanted to check in. I promise. What have you been up to?”

Her laughter immediately lets Alondra’s shoulders drop. She can’t help but produce a smile. “I’ve started growing grapefruits in the backyard. Thank God the residents like them, because I don’t know what I’d do with all this damn fruit if I wasn’t looking after almost two dozen people.”

“Reminds me of how you used to cut up fruit and bring it to me for no reason. Like your mom used to do for you.”

The recollection of a memory gives her a bit of an ache beneath the fondness. “Yeah, and I tried to placebo you into liking honeydew.”

“It takes like sweet, wet chalk! How do you even begin to like it?”

Her voice glows, like it’ll form a halo around Alondra’s head if she listens for long enough. It’s nice to talk for more than five minutes and have it not be purely business.

A laugh, followed by a soft sigh from Colby. “I hope it’s okay that I reached out, Lon. I know you’re picky about calls being traced and everything, but I… I wanted to—“ she pauses for a second. “I miss you.”

Alondra fidgets with a fridge magnet and says, “Me too.”

“Reese gave me this whole spiel about promises. About how it’s okay to update them as you grow and how it’s not the same as breaking them. I think that I was a very different person six years ago— I was young and chaotic and I don’t know how you put up with me. But you did, and I’m thankful.”

Her elbows lean against the windowsill, where the sun emerges from beneath a dark cloud and pours rich, honey sunlight into the house again. The warmth envelops her and allows the tension to lift from her spine. She breathes out sharply. “Come to the Nest,” Alondra tells Colby. “Friday evening. I think I want to update some of my promises, too.”

Colby trips over her words when she tries to reach some sort of acknowledgment, but says that she’ll be there. They exchange their goodbyes and she drops the phone back into its slot on the counter. 

The moving train barely slows down enough for Colby to swing her body against its rungs and climb up to the top. Dozens of cargo cars stretch off into the distance; she tries to guess what each one’s transporting based on the color and the branding of the car.

It’s a trip she’s only made a handful of times, but she can’t deny that she loves the thrill of train surfing. Her and Alondra would do it all the time with the transit systems that run through LA, speeding across town to where they were needed most. Trying to catch a moving light rail in a metro area makes jumping onto this cargo train look like child’s play. 

Dusky sunlight bathes her in a comfortable warmth that counteracts the rushing breeze passing by her for thirty minutes straight. The railroad stretches on for miles, curling around hills and disappearing behind the occasional farmhouse that pops up from the earth. There’s comfort in these barren, hilly lands. It’s a far cry from the densely packed city blocks she’s used to.

The train car rounds a corner and begins its ascent up a gradual incline. That’s her queue. Two homes in the distance grow closer and closer until they’re only a block away. Colby tosses her backpack onto the ground and her body follows close behind, rolling out of the jump. Years of experience with being on the run, and she lands without as much as a stumble.

She tries to keep her hands steady as she makes her way up the hill to the house. It’s been years since they saw each other in person, and even more since they’d had a conversation that wasn’t work-related. But at the same time, their year-long tenure as adrenaline junkie bounty hunters feels like only months ago. Picking up where they left off is both the most comforting and terrifying thought. It’s funny, the way that a year of love can stretch itself into six more.

The door of the first house creaks open. Alondra plants her feet firmly on the porch-- not because she wants to, but because she can’t bring herself to carry them down the floor without taking her attention away from the figure at the end of the road. Short, scruffy blonde hair that Colby’s been cutting shorter and shorter in the recent years. Two bionic hands that catch the sun at just the right angle. A blue jacket that Alondra insisted she buy because it looked good on her. 

As the last of the train whirs by, everything around her seems shaded, but she stays in the light. Dusk hues pour out from her body and form a halo around it. The same happens around Alondra from the lamplight coming from the open doorway. The sun dips below the hills.

There is no more anxiety. No more fear of safety. No more tension. The world opens up and it’s all Colby’s and Alondra’s for the taking.

It has always been you.

Alondra tears herself from the porch and stumbles down the steps. Colby tosses her backpack into the yard, breaking out into a sprint. Their bodies collide and the kiss lasts a lifetime. It’s strong enough to grab hold of the last light of day and keep it in the sky for just a little longer. 

Just like that, Colby is twenty-one again, standing in the alley and riding the afterglow of a successful chase. Her lips latch onto Alondra’s with a youthful buzz, but a tender adoration that could spread itself across lifetimes. Living hand-to-mouth feels like having all the money in the world if you spend it with the right person. And there will never be a righter person.

Alondra wipes the tears from Colby’s face, then her own. She chokes out a laugh at the sheer drama of her reaction to seeing her again for the first time in years. Tear-stained and wind-rustled from the journey, and she has never looked more beautiful. Her hands trail over her neck, down her arms and intertwine with Colby’s fingers.

“You cut your hair again,” she says with a smile. She guides Alondra to lace her fingers through the short, blonde locks. Colby leans her head into the touch.

“I wonder who I learned that from.”

Their foreheads tap together for a long while-- longer than they expect. The porch lights turn on, bathing the yard in yellow.

“Do you still have some of those grapefruits?” Colby asks.

“Plenty.” She takes Colby’s hand and pulls her toward the house. “Let me introduce you to the residents, too.”

She comes to a halt on the first step of the porch. “I was actually thinking we could sit out here for a while and just… talk. Update those promises we were talking about. I can meet everyone later.”

Pulling Colby’s bag from her shoulder, Alondra pauses and huffs out a chuckle. “Yeah, I’d like that. Let me put your stuff inside and get you that grapefruit. Don’t go anywhere.”

“I won’t,” says Colby, settling down at the top of the steps.

I never will.