"It is common for a character in a novel to take it upon himself to tell the story. When a character can intervene in this way, we the readers are never dealing with bare facts, but only with stories about facts, subject to the prism of a subject - of a particular intelligence, sensibility and memory - and therefore eminently problematic. Everything contained within the story stems from an eyewitness account. True, the course of the account is likely peculiarly well informed and probably sincere, but he is none the less intimately involved in the affair, and therefore cannot claim to determine the truth of the reported events." - Pierre Bayard

Aiken

Over the next two months we each fell into a pattern. In a lot of ways, it was surprisingly easy to just get used to the way things were here. Of course, Frost adapted quickly – eagerly – as he always did to new places and situations. And I was busy training, getting stronger at a pace that I wouldn't have believed was possible before coming here, learning new abilities that I hadn't even imagined existed. Even my Mistress, who never seemed to become completely at ease here, seemed to settle in a bit more; at least, after the first two weeks she gave up her experiments with the clothing and started leaving the house again.

She has begun taking meals with the Saiyajin's family sometimes, when Son Goten or Bulma invited her up to the house. That Goten just makes everyone else uncomfortable, but my Mistress seems to like Bulma. The part-Saiyajin boys – Bulma's grandsons, both – are completely capable of flying themselves up here to Son Goku's mountaintop, but more often than not she flies them up here in one of her planes. On those days, her and my Mistress are apt to spend the afternoons sitting on the porch and drinking coffee, chatting softly while me and the boys sparred.

The boys are Bulma's grandchildren, but Amaguri isn't any direct blood of hers, just the all-human half-sister of Boxer, and she is completely lacking in ability as a fighter. Still, Bulma brings her along with the boys on these trips; she is convinced that the girl is sharp, and seems to be grooming her for some future task, maybe a spot in the financial empire that Bulma's family heads. The girl usually stays near Bulma and my Mistress, sitting in the grass and playing at silly games with her dolls.

Those boys are ideal sparring partners. Boxer didn't look much like a Saiyajin – lanky and purple-haired and tailless as he was – and when he wasn't fighting her was just as soft-hearted as any of these others here. But when he was sparring the kid was a zippy little scrap of viciousness. Once he got going you could see plain as anything what was in his blood, that he was a true Saiyajin and really the grandson of Prince Vegeta. He was a cold, dirty fighter, quick to exploit the slightest opening and mean in a way that he couldn't have learned from anyone here but must've been born knowing.

Tanga was Vegeta's grandson, too, (though he didn't look much more like a Saiyajin than the other one did), but he reminded me more of Son Goku than anyone else. He was too fair for his own good, and too convinced that everyone else would be fair too, despite how many times Boxer and me showed him different. But he was a patient teacher, willing to explain things to me as many times as I needed them explained, and that more than made up for his other shortcomings. Most of what I learned about sensing ki I got from Tanga.

I was always real careful to be out of the adults' sight and hearing when I asked questions about sensing ki, and I don't think either of the boys realized that they were teaching me something that maybe I wasn't supposed to be learning. But even if they had mentioned it to someone, I was pretty sure that their parents and grandparents wouldn't connect my learning that to Uragiru. It's funny, almost, how the Saiyajin's people expect us to listen to them just cause they say so; I mean, most folks listened to my Mistress and her family, yeah, but that was because they always backed up their words with actions. The Saiyajin's people don't seem cut out to do that.

I've gotten a lot stronger from training with those boys, but there still wasn't any thought of me ever sparring with one while he was being a Super Saiyajin. I don't think I'll ever be fit enough to stand up against a Super Saiyajin for long, no matter how much I train; even with all the work I was putting into it, in their normal form those boys were still strong enough to mop the floor with me without even trying.

Sometimes one of those boys would forget how much stronger they were than me; this was especially true of Boxer, who, when he started to get heated up tended to forget – or maybe disregard – the difference between our power levels. Then he'd fetch me a blow that'd damn near about knock my head off. He was always sorry afterward, ashamed with himself for losing control, but I didn't have many complaints. Every time those boys broke me down I healed up stronger, just the same as the Saiyajin did. And another thing was, if I hung around Son Goku's house long enough after an especially tough session, looking like a sad enough case, someone was likely to give me a sensu bean; they're almost all fighters, the Saiyajin's people, but none of them like to see anyone hurting. The sensu beans sped the entire process up considerably.

I'm stronger than my Mistress now.

I know, because I can sense ki pretty well now, but I don't think she's realized it. It's not a bad thing, I don't think – I'm better suited to keep her safe now than I ever was before – but I don't mean to tell her, and I hope that none of the Saiyajin's people are tactless enough to mention it. They almost never seem to intend to do it, but they cause her to lose face in their presence often enough already. It might be that this knowledge would shame her, and I don't mean to do anything that adds to her troubles if I can help it. But I'm uneasy keeping things from her.

This place – these people – diminish her. She's become uncertain about almost everything – she's slow to speak these days, and her words are often tentative, sometimes confused. It would be best for us to get away from here as soon as the matter of Uragiru is resolved. That's why I've been working so hard. I don't have much talent for this ki sensing stuff – I know I haven't picked it up as fast as the boys seem to think I should – but for a chance of getting even with Uragiru for my Mistress I keep working at it all the time.

I would have liked to ask Frost about how to approach some of these problems, but I don't trust him to give me the right advice as much as I used to. Uragiru was always his creature – if he couldn't see what she was up to, then how much can his judgment be trusted? And there's another thing.

He and my Mistress are fighting. Not in the common and shameless way that Son Goku and his wife fight, with Chichi shouting abuses at the Super Saiyajin so loudly that even Frost and my Mistress could hear them through the walls of the little house that Bulma had lent my Mistress, though both of them pretended that they didn't hear because they knew what good manners were. But they were fighting. With short pauses and pointed silences and in carefully chosen, exceedingly tactful words, they were fighting, and with questions that were deliberately obtuse, and with answers that deflected those questions, and with a hundred calculated little actions or failures to act.

It had something to do with Uragiru, too, I think. He still seemed more hurt and confused about what she'd done than he was angry. He kept worrying at the thing, trying to sniff out a motive – to make sense of it. All that was wearing hard on my Mistress.

But it wasn't just Uragiru – it also had to do with him and the Saiyajin's people. Before now, I don't think my Mistress had ever seen with her own eyes what Frost gets like when he's around outsiders who treat him like he's one of theirs – folks who don't understand how far above them he ought to be, or who tend to forget (because he lets them) if they do know. I've seen it happen lots of times – how quickly he adopts their mannerisms and turns of speech, how intent he becomes upon doing a thing in the way that they consider proper and how happy he gets once he's figured it out – but it was a shock to my Mistress, every time she saw him at it.

Another thing that they've been arguing softly about – picking at each other over – and this is one thing that Frost has been more vocal about. It has to do with the long walks that my Mistress has been taking in the wilds surrounding the Saiyajin's mountain.

It's true that it's odd that my Mistress should now wish to spend so much time exploring savage places; in the past, she's rarely even liked to leave her ship. They're keeping this matter to themselves, Frost and my Mistress are, but I've caught a few snatches of Frost's arguments against these walks. "You are being fatalistic," I've heard him say, and several times I've heard the words "unnecessary risk." This is a new and outrageous thing, that Frost should believe that he's entitled to tell my Mistress where she should or should not go, but he doesn't like that he's being ignored. But then, there seems to be plenty of things about Frost that my Mistress doesn't like right now, either.

Time was, I depended on Uragiru and Frost to be the brains of this operation, trusted the pair of them to work matters more complicated than fighting out in such a way that everything came out well (or as close to well as we could get) for my Mistress. I can't do that anymore. Goes without saying that it was a mistake to ever trust Uragiru, but it seems to me that Frost's judgment is just about as suspect as hers at this point. After all, just whose mistake was Uragiru? Frost was the one who brought Uragiru onto my Mistress's ship, and he's the one who made excuses for her every time she acted badly. He trusted her. He knew her better than anyone, and he still didn't see it coming, so what does that say about him? And he still hasn't lifted a finger to help us get Uragiru; he's with the Saiyajin's people almost all the time now. By now he could have conned one of them into telling him where she was, but he hasn't.

Never mind, though. It might have taken me a bit longer working by myself than it would have if Frost had been doing his bit, but I've found Uragiru myself.

And all that's why I'm down in the woods right now, traveling on foot while I follow my Mistress's ki. For the last couple of weeks – ever since I started to get a handle on it – I've been suppressing my ki whenever I'm not actively training. See, I know for a fact that someone – probably that Yamcha – has been training Uragiru about ki, too, though she's been a slower learner than me. So, since I figure she can sense me ki when I'm powered up, I want her to get used to me dropping off her radar, so that when I finally do move on her she won't suspect what's coming.

When I first started learning to sense ki I'd thought that maybe my Mistress might like it if I taught her to do the same sometime, but now I think that was a bad idea. My Mistress would not want to know how exposed her feelings and emotions really are in the eyes of the Saiyajin's people. Another thing that I'm keeping to myself... It's bad to keep secrets from my Mistress, but I can't think of any way to do better. Often times, my Mistress's ki signals a lot of mixed and confusing feelings when she's out here in the wilds – like she's badly scared and eager at the same time, looking for something but hoping she doesn't find it – but right now it feels real calm, like she's almost asleep.

Ancient forest rings the Saiyajin's mountain for several kilometers, with trees so wide that you could have hollowed out one to make a sizable house, so tall that you could almost believe that they brushed the clouds. But once you leave the mountain, the trees start to thin out in favor of rocky, uneven land and high grasses.

Still following my Mistress's ki, I came to a slow-moving river that was so wide that I could barely see to the other side. I was still keeping my ki down, so instead of flying over the river I just jumped, using as little energy as possible. I fell a couple of meters short, landing ankle-deep in the cool water, but I didn't much mind. I'm barefoot – my boots were long ago lost on the field where my Mistress fought the Super Saiyajin – and I could feel the wet mud of the river bottom under the pads of my feet.

On this planet, they do make foot gear for people with feet that are somewhat like my own – Dogs, those folks are called, always with the large D, because small-d dogs are something else completely – but they're specialty items. I'd have had to go to one of the cities to get some, or else a dealer would have had to come out here to take my size. Bulma offered to arrange that for me, but it wasn't worth the trouble. Anyway, my Mistress is worried enough about the debt that she's running up with these people.

The Saiyajin hasn't said anything about repayment – he doesn't seem to have much interest in wealth, and his head for figures seems to be even worse than mine – but that Bulma woman has it in her to cut someone's throat if it means she'll turn a profit, that much is obvious. She didn't get to be the richest woman on this planet in the normal way, after all. No, she isn't on the top because she's strong; she got there because she's good at business, and that's unfamiliar territory for my Mistress. She's very concerned that Bulma might try to press her advantage.

The little things that Bulma and the Saiyajin's family have given us – the little house, food, and even the sensu beans – are simple enough to repay, but who knows what they might want in exchange for two lives brought back from the dead? How can anyone place a value on the impossible made real, and if that can be done, what would that figure look like? The Empire isn't as rich as it used to be, and with the possibility of Son Goku – or even Prince Vegeta – working as her enforcer – Bulma could make a lot of trouble for us if she wanted to. Frost says she'll be more than content with the data he promised her – she's especially hungry for some of the tech schematics and blueprints. He says that as long as we frame these things as gifts given out of gratitude rather than a repayment for services we'll be fine.

I hope he's right about that, but I'm not about to add to the debt by getting new boots that I don't need or want. For the same reason, when my armor finally fell apart – Uragiru had gone a good way toward destroying it when she tried to kill me, and all the sparring that I've been doing since finished the job – I just went to Chichi and asked her if she didn't have any of Son Goku's old gis that I could have. Turned out that she had a ton left over from before Son had been as bulky as he is now – she never throws anything away. They're a little tight across the shoulders and around the hips – I'm wider than Son Goku is in those places – for the time being. Anyway, they'll do until I have a chance to get new, proper armor. And I traded Chichi a wild pig I killed for the gis, so they're mine, free and clear.

Now I yanked the legs of the gi up, so they wouldn't get any wetter than they were already, and wadded the rest of the way across the river. The land on the other side was sandy, covered in high, coarse grasses and scrub-brush. Even if I hadn't been able to see my Mistress's ki, it would have been pretty easy to track her here. She'd been traveling along game trails to keep out of brush, and every now and then I could see the imprint of the palm of her foot in the sandy earth.

I finally caught up with her a couple of kilometers further on, at a mound of clean, sandy-brown stones The sun was coming down warmly from the sky, and she was basking in it, her eyes closed, looking completely and entirely relaxed. She was sitting at the top of the stone, leaning back against the palms of her hands, her face turned up to the sky. Her legs were crossed, one dangling over the edge of the rock, the other jutting outward, bent at the knee at a slight angle.

And I think, that Juunanagou wanted me to give my Mistress up – to turn my back on her. But he doesn't know anything. He doesn't see anything that's worth anything in anyone except himself, and even then he doesn't act as though he values himself as much as he claims, neither.

I hate more than anything to disturb her now. There's a number of small lizards sunning themselves on the stone with my Mistress, but when I approach they scatter, skittering off into the safety of the shadowy hiding places between the cracks in the stones. At the same time, something happened to make my Mistress open her eyes and turn her head to look at me.

"Aiken!" she said, startled.

"I'm ready," I told her.