A/N: There is a first aid kit with one or more stimpaks on the wall of a cubicle in the Power Station. I have screenshots. The bit about flutter valves is for real. I heard it in my EMT classes back before I found out I was very bad at navigation in a vehicle.

I've also corrected a reference in the last chapter to Changeling having "four" arms instead of the three I established back at the beginning of the story.

Chapter 37

Xen stayed where she was, legs drawn up to her chest as she looked at Charon. He looked back calmly, but he made no attempt to move. The earlier flare in his temperature had been on her account. The probability of his own death apparently caused him no such anxiety. Xen felt a new agony of guilt with that realization.

"She'll be back soon," she said. "I'm sure she will. People can live for hours with pneumothorax if they don't go into shock. And you're not in shock. I can tell. Your core temperature is fine." She chewed on a knuckle, staring at the charred hole in Charon's chest. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised."

Charon coughed wetly. The voice of sharper diction said,

"Charon's reactions to medical trauma are," he paused to take a labored breath. "Are idiosyncratic."

"He's been shot before?" asked Xen.

"From time to time," said the voice.

"I'm surprised you're talking to me," Xen said, intrigued despite herself. "Last time it was sort of an emergency. And I've never heard from the other one."

Charon lifted his left shoulder briefly. It was in his own voice that he said,

"He only talks to us." There was a thoughtful pause. Charon wheezed, an unexpected and unwelcome sound. "And people I'm going t'kill. Dat is his job."

"Because he's a killer," Xen said. Charon nodded once. "And the other one is a tactician. What does that make you?"

"Just Charon," said the Ghoul.

"I'm sure Bell will be back any minute," Xen said. Her roving gaze fell on the remains of Changeling. "She left a probe out on purpose, didn't she?"

Charon nodded slightly.

"She knew she wasn't going to survive," Xen said. "And she knew you'd need something to hit the button with." She sighed. "You know, everything she ever did was for my own good, and I never liked her."

"You t'ink dat bothered her?" Charon asked.

Xen exhaled softly. "She couldn't even simulate emotion. She'd call it," she took a deep breath. "An inherent biologically-derived reasoning error. Wetware logic malfunction."

I wish Tori and Bunni were here. Inexplicably, she was aware of tears rising to her eyes. She blinked them away quickly. "How are you doing?"

"Fine," said Charon dryly. "'S hard t'breathe." And, while the pain must be excruciating, he showed no signs of incipient loss of consciousness. Stationary, seated and upright was probably about the best position for him, Xen supposed. "How about you?"

His previous ability to show concern had been limited to whether or not she was currently about to die. He was trying to offer her some comfort, she realized with a pang.

That'll just make it worse if he does die. I wonder if he knows.

Xen made herself laugh, though it sounded more bitter than she wished. "I've got five stims in me. I've never been better." She bit her knuckle again. "Where can she possibly - "

"I'm back," said Bell's voice from above them. She vaulted over the railing at the edge of the pit and simply dropped the ten or so feet to the bottom. Her knees flexed slightly on impact, that was all. "I could only find two."

Xen stood up quickly. "Shall I do it?"

"Let me. I've got a good set of aid protocols, and now they know who's calling the shots," Bell said. "This is one of the things I was made for. Anyway, you're too shaky." Her hands were clean. Xen was torn between approval of the sanitary practice and irritation that she'd wasted precious time washing. Bell's already-ragged clothes had suffered from recent events. Now the shirt had a spatter of dark stains and a significant tear across the belly, and the pants were gone below the knee on one side. Her filthy sneakers looked to be coming apart at their stitches.

Bell knelt beside Charon. "You have to hold still, and this is going to hurt," she told him.

"Do it," he said.

Bell jabbed a stimpak as far as it would go into the wound. Charon made a noise that sounded like gllkk, but he didn't move. Bell depressed the plunger and extracted the empty. Xen knelt on Charon's other side and watched anxiously. The wound grew smaller, but the hole did not close. Charon did not regain his lost flesh. Xen saw a white tendon contract and release next to his temple.

"Good," Bell said. "Most people would pass out." She took a roll of tape and a piece of dusty paper out of her pocket.

"Charon isn't most people," Xen said. "What are you doing?"

"Making a flutter valve. I think I closed up the hole in his lung. For it to inflate, there's got to be a way for the air to get out of his chest cavity without getting back in. No point in closing the wound otherwise." As she spoke, Bell laid the paper over the hole and taped it down on three sides. Charon grunted approvingly.

The paper tented upward with a crackle, then sucked down against the hole as the Ghoul exhaled.

"See? It's working," Bell said to Xen. "The paper's dirty, but it's not as if Charon has to worry about infection."

"You mean because Ghouls are natively irradiated," Xen said, remembering something she had read. "Which kills germs." There was enough ambient light in the pit that she could not distinguish Charon's gamma aura from his general heat signature.

"Right," said Bell. She sat back on her heels and watched Charon brightly. Xen shifted into a sitting position. Her knees seemed watery all of a sudden.

"So he'll be all right," she said.

"Sure he will," said Bell. She cocked her head at Charon. "I don't think his contract says he can die."

"Thank you," Xen said. She opened her mouth to say something else and found herself without the words. Instead, she just said it again. "Thank you." To embrace Charon would hurt him, and for Bell would probably be just as bad in a different way. To let herself weep would be inexcusable. She sat in a state of limp blankness and looked at the two of them.

"Hey, take it easy," said Bell. "It's going to be okay. Could be a lot worse, in fact." She turned to look over her shoulder at the dead packbot, face gone suddenly serious. "Oh. I'm sorry."

"She never gave very good advice," Xen said. She looked at Charon, the hiring of whom Changeling had been firmly against. "And I didn't want her AI there in the first place. But she was there when I needed her."

"Well, it's not like I really knew her," said Bell. "But it seemed like she always performed to spec. That's probably about all she wanted out of life."

"I guess it was," Xen said. She stood up as a thought occurred to her. "I've got to see if she ejected her memory. It was close to the bottom of the chassis. It might've survived."

"Can you rebuild her if it did?" Bell asked.

Xen shook her head. "No. It'll just be the data she collected. All of her experiences would've been fried when the plasma hit."

"So she really is dead, then," Bell said.

"I'm afraid so." Xen went and squatted next to the wreckage of the packbot, stepping over the ejected epi pens. She remembered when she'd build the SID into the chassis. It wasn't much bigger than a pack of playing cards, so it might have slid away under something...

She found it in the shadow of a crooked leg joint. Xen pulled it out gingerly and held up the steel box with its connector recesses on each end. It seemed to be undamaged. She tucked it into the pocket of her jeans as she stood up.

"She took my original packbot AI with her when she died, so Camel's dead too," she said, completing an earlier thought. "I've got a backup of that one at home, though."

"Is that where we'll go next?" Bell asked.

Xen blinked. "I... I guess we might as well. I found the xeno rounds I was looking for, and I need the Lab to really study them." She felt the cold weight of guilt once again. "And I don't want to get us into any more trouble." She looked at Bell. "You're welcome to come no matter what, but do you think they'll send another android after you?"

Bell smiled. It was not a humorous expression.

"Remember how much I said it cost to build me?" she asked.

"Yes," said Xen.

"It cost a lot more to build an android who could pass for human. They'd be better off to cut their losses." The smile vanished. "And I'm done glitching. If they send another one, I can kill him."

"Damn straight," said Charon. Bell smiled at him. He looked back without apparent expression, but something seemed to pass between them, red eyes and black.

"So the one who came after us is dead?" Xen asked. She had assumed this, but she wanted to hear it said.

"Very." Bell changed position slightly, kneeling on one knee as she leaned her forearms on it. "I was in bad shape there at the end – I forgot about the emergency button, even, and it's not supposed to be technically possible for me to forget things by accident. I was sure you were both dead. He thought the emotional fallout would paralyze me. Instead, it was all I needed for my positronics to run the subroutines under. I'm in control of my background processing now. But damn, I'm glad you're both okay."

"So am I," Xen said. She looked back at Charon. "How do we know when his lung has reinflated?"

"I can distinguish individual lung sounds if I'm close enough," Bell said. "How you feeling, Charon?"

"Better," Charon said. There was no cough or gurgle to interrupt his speech. He turned to look thoughtfully at the shotgun in its holster, which Xen took to be a very hopeful sign.

"Okay," said Bell. "Stay still for a minute. I think I'll be okay with this."

Charon nodded. Bell laid one hand on his leg as she leaned forward to hold her ear next to his chest. She stayed that way for a moment while he breathed, her black hair not quite brushing his skinless lips. "There it is," she said with some satisfaction, and took out the other stimpak as she scooted back. "Good thing, too. I can manually inflate a lung, but it wouldn't be fun for you or me." Bell pulled the flutter valve off and injected the stimpak with one smooth movement. The hole closed instantly.

Charon took a deep breath as the parchment-dry flesh crept back over his face. Then he reached for the shotgun, strapped it back on as best he could given the state the straps were in, and stood up. Bell stood with him, tossing aside the empty stim.

"I'd better get all the epi pens," Xen said.

"I'll carry them," Bell said. She began collecting up the little white plastic tubes. "I can give you one if you end up needing it. Charon can carry some as a backup." She looked thoughtfully at the cargo net. "How much of that stuff do you need?"

Xen was aware that she was blushing gray again. "Well, all of it, really. Charon and I will still need to eat, and there's the bottled water, and I really do need my tools. And there are the samples from the crash site. They're in the knapsack with my other clothes. I could carry that."

Bell snorted. "Well, the exercise will probably do you good, but those won't add much weight. Make sure you get your blaster, though." Xen scurried to pick up the alien blaster and eject the cylinder. It was about a third empty. The glowing blue fluid inside sloshed to and fro as she held it up.

"Three shots to a load," she said. "That's terrible. And one shot didn't even kill the A3."

"It might kill a man, though," Bell said. "An A3 will pass for human in most medical scans, but they don't exactly have a human nervous system. The synapses are different."

"That's good to know," Xen said.

"You were doing well to hit him in the first place," said Bell.

Xen shrugged. "I wouldn't like to try it again." She took the knapsack from Bell's outstretched hand and tucked the blaster and the cylinder inside it. The .22 still rested in its holster on her hip. She had never even unsnapped the button on the thong that held it there.

"All right," said Bell. She tied the cargo net shut and hoisted it onto her shoulder. Charon tucked away one last epi somewhere in his armor. "Ready?"

"Ready," said Xen. "But I'm stopping to wash up first chance we get." Her clothes were still unpleasantly damp with sweat.

"Fine with me," said Bell. "I think I saw another way out of here. Shall we try that?"

"Charon?" said Xen.

"I will go first," said Charon, and started up the ladder.