In which Amy has an appointment, and things don't go according to plan.

(Special thanks to Dusky , RDavidson , and NotTheSmooze for betawork etc)

She didn't remember the details. A cure, a plague, a garden of flesh, a sword of light, a voice at once disappointed and utterly, crushingly unsurprised.

A different voice pressed in at her consciousness, sweet and exasperating and familiar, and she hated hearing those beautiful words, hated the disgusting things she wanted to do to that girl-

Victoria touched her.

Her sister's body exploded into her mind's eye, and Amy Dallon snapped awake, shoving Vicky away almost as hard as she slammed the door shut on her power.

"Fuck!" Victoria swore, recoiling backwards through the air in a passable imitation of Amy's own furious scramble. "Jesus, Ames, calm down!"

"I'm calm!" Amy yelled, distantly aware of how absurd it was as she screamed at her own sister, her heart pounding a mile a minute in her head. "I'm totally calm!"

"You don't sound calm!"

"Neither do you!"

"Girls."

Carol's crisp voice from the hall stopped them both cold. Two girls whirled to face their mother, who was raising an eyebrow in what might have been disapproval.

"Uh. Sorry, Mom?"

"Ah! Sorry!"

Amy immediately glanced away from Carol, already regretting giving her apology. Strangely, she thought she caught the hint of a smile on the woman's face. No, that couldn't be right. She must have just imagined it.

Must have. Carol was all business a second later, after all.

"I need you to get dressed, Amy. The Protectorate sent a message this morning. They're asking if you can examine Riley's work for them, verify its long term safety. The Devils have a base set up in what used to be the Weymouth shopping center, and they've agreed to host you today."

If Carol noticed Amy stiffen, she didn't show it.

"I'm not sure I want to," she tried.

"Come on, Ames!" Victoria called, wrapping an arm around Amy's nightgown-clad waist and squeezing uncomfortably tight. "I saw the pictures, they've got a giant tree there and stuff! It's super neat! It'll be fun!"

"A-ah, but I'd need an escort, I think."

"Mom's already given you permission, let's go on a field trip!"

Ever so carefully, Amy found her grip on Victoria's body and pushed her aside, savoring the moment to think and breathe.

Carol stared at her. Amy could have sworn she wasn't blinking.

"...If I'm going, I want Brandish to accompany me."

She was definitely blinking now. As was her daughter.

"What?" Vicky babbled. "I mean I'm all for mother-daughter bonding but what?"

"I'm unsure as to why you'd want me there, Amy…"

"Too bad. You're coming with."

Amy folded her arms, dared Carol to disagree.

Victoria's mother scowled. "I have business today, Amy. I was hoping Victoria would be able to take care of you."

"What oh so important business is this?"

Carol glanced towards her daughter. "...groceries," she admitted.

"Seriously?"

"FEMA's handing out rations, and we have a right to a share, the same as everyone else. I'd rather take some now than beg for some later."

"Right, because our pantry was totally wiped out by Leviathan," Amy drawled.

"That's not-"

"Fine! If it's really that important, just make Vicky do it! She's an adult! She can carry shit! And she doesn't even need a car!"

Victoria gasped. "You want me to go on a milk run? Not cool, Ames, not cool!"

"That's my condition, okay?" she snapped.

Carol sighed and shook her head. "Fine. Now put your clothes on. Victoria, I'm sure you can take care of this. For the sake of the paperwork, I just need to give you a couple of things…"

A resigned Carol and fuming Victoria turned and left as one, leaving Amy alone with her thoughts.

Why had she asked for that?

It sounded like a horrible idea, of course. Being with Victoria was a struggle at the best of times, but at least Amy didn't actively hate her.

She didn't dare tell either of them the real reason she was hesitant about this idea, beyond the inconvenience or anything else. The fire in that girl's eyes, the determination…

Riley wanted to do something. Something big, something drastic.

Truthfully, Amy was afraid that she'd convince her to help.

And if anyone could stop her from doing something she'd hate herself for, then surely it was Carol.

Glory Girl seemed to think of restraint as something you wore in a car, at best.

Besides, maybe Carol would hate it too. And wouldn't that serve her right for dragging Amy out of bed?

She couldn't remember the last time she'd been here, but she still vaguely recalled what the Weymouth Mall had looked like before. Very nice on the inside, true, but on the outside it was really just a bunch of flat concrete boxes. Sometimes they were nice boxes, she allowed, but they were still basically boxes. They weren't even particularly tall boxes.

The concrete boxes were unfortunately still there, but at least the Devils had done something with the entrance. Where once there was a glass sliding door, there was now an open archway of iron, wide and inviting and elegantly proportioned. Where once there were flat, plain windows, there were now curling, twisting trellises, three layers of metal vines arching back towards the interior of the mall, light shining through in shifting, dazzling patterns.

Amy found her eyes wandering through the floral designs, tracing loops and leaves and flowers. They were windows too, she realized, glass filled in between the ironwork, somehow smoothly curving with the metal instead of forming flat panes-

"Hey! Amy and Carol, right?"

She looked down.

An angel of wings and eyes and light fluttered behind the entrance-way. Venus smiled at them, reaching out a hand and beckoning the pair onward.

Carol nodded in acknowledgement. "Venus. I hope we didn't keep you waiting."

"Not at all, not at all! We've just been working on redecorating. Well, Jupes and Riley and I have. Neptune went off to check on a friend's place," the devil happily rambled.

Carol stepped through the doorway, and Amy followed suit. "Quite a place you've taken for yourselves."

"Not just ourselves. If it was just us, we'd be happy to sleep in a tent somewhere. But if we're going to stay in the city for a while, we figured we might as well make something we can share with the world. Our own little Eden. We'll have apartments and restaurants and libraries and cafes and workshops and-"

"And what happens when the city tries to rebuild here?" Carol interrupted.

That shut Venus up for a moment, the angel closing her eyes as she floated over the tiles.

"...We're building this place with our own hands, our own materials, our own ideas. It doesn't belong to the city, it doesn't belong to the real estate company. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to us. And even then, shouldn't it belong to the people who use it?"

"Speaking as a lawyer, I'm fairly certain that's not any recognized legal doctrine."

"Speaking as a teenager, laws are pretty fucked up sometimes."

Amy watched them bicker. Carol seemed to be pursuing the conversation mostly out of academic curiosity, while real concern and emotions flickered across Venus's eyes as she spoke. As for Amy, she supposed whatever Venus was trying to say was a nice idea, but… Carol was probably right.

"Ve-mom!"

Sound and motion ahead of them stalled the conversation and drew their attention towards the center of the building. A massive tree dominated the space, growing right through the hole in the arched ceiling. Branches hung heavy with strange-colored fruit, roots weaved through twisted, colorful floor panels, and wires wrapped around limbs and ran off into the walls, pulsing with gentle power. Quiet music filled the air, echoing from tinny intercom speakers scattered across the corners.

Venus beamed as she flitted past half-finished mosaics of glass and ironwork and flowers and joined her companions. Riley waved with two hands from her position hunched over a particular root, growing under the remains of one of the old square floor tiles. Jupiter curled around her daughter, the storm of hands carefully grabbing the root and stretching it like clay, sculpting it with fingers and chisels to wind and branch through the gap in the floor.

She looked up from her work with a small smile.

"Hey. We've got food if you want it," Jupiter offered, a green apple rolling across one of her hands. "I know it's a mess, but make yourselves at home!"

"Thank you, but we have a schedule to keep," Carol demurred, glancing back the three of them and the surrounding mall, half-rebuilt to whatever style the Devils were using, all flowers and swoops and glass and metal with the added touch of a living clay-wood centerpiece.

"Um," Amy mumbled, then tried again. "Actually, I wouldn't mind one of those apples? Make sure that they're safe to eat and all that."

Carol glanced at her, but it wasn't a chastising glance, merely curious.

Amy didn't quite meet the look, but fortunately, she didn't have to. Three smiles later, a verdant green fruit dropped into her palms, and she felt it bloom in her mind's eye as Riley excitedly launched into an explanation.

"So it was tricky getting a clay tree to bear fruit that were, y'know, edible, but I think I figured it out! Though it's a little less plentiful than I'd like, just cuz of the limitations of metabolism and carbon intake and stuff? I think it's really cool how they respond to your needs, but actually I put that in the tree so I guess you won't see it there, hmm…"

Venus chuckled, light and airy. "Wasn't it still dropping doubles on you?"

"Okay, so the response needs dialing in. But I'm working on it!"

It was a fruit, Amy supposed. A fruit made of proper organic compounds rather than weird living clay, despite allegedly coming from a clay tree. Though, for all that it looked like an apple on the outside, on the inside it wasn't remotely like any fruit she'd ever seen or heard of. The structures inside were strange, and not just because it was obviously designed to feed people rather than to plant new trees. Had Riley invented the fruit's anatomy out of whole cloth? Was it some side effect of growing the fruit out of her distinctly alien tree?

At least it felt like it'd be a good meal, if a little chewy. Most fruit didn't have nearly this much protein. And it definitely wouldn't turn her into a blueberry or anything silly like that.

"Amy?"

She looked up at Carol. "The fruit's safe. Want to try it?"

"I've already eaten."

Amy shrugged, biting into the apple. More for me.

Hmmm. Tangy, but somehow sweeter than she expected.

She finished off her bite, set the apple to one side. "So, you needed me to examine your work, right?"

Riley nodded vigorously. "I think the tree and me should be enough for now! And the apple, I guess."

"I don't think the PRT needs a detailed report, for what it's worth," Venus added. "Just assurances that the stuff is safe. If they wanted a detailed report, they wouldn't have outsourced it!"

Carol's briefcase clicked ominously at her side. "I have the paperwork to prove otherwise, I'm afraid."

Jupiter and Riley collectively groaned at that. Venus just giggled, the traitor.

Amy shook her head and let out a little sigh. "Fine, fine. This'll go a lot quicker if someone can transcribe my observations."

To her credit, her adoptive mother had a pen ready within seconds. Note-taking was an important skill for a lawyer, after all.

"The roots and the tree are all part of the same organism. I dunno if your power has a limit on size, but if it doesn't, you should be able to just reach down there and feel everything out?"

Amy knelt down and pushed her fingers against a terracotta knot.

She'd never touched a single living thing of this size before. And for all that the substrate was clay, this was alive, in a way that Riley's lab hadn't been. There was respiration going on, sensory organs, a proper metabolism. A shining light circulated through the tree from branches to roots and back again, something her power could just about grasp the outline of, could see it leaking out through the bark in rivulets of glowing, pulsing sap. There were feathers and pools of water and even hands scattered throughout the structure, traces of the Devils seemingly providing the tree with some sort of vital energy.

Of course, like the lab, the vast majority of it was Riley.

She could see where the fruits budded from the branches, filling in her previous picture of how they existed; see how they gathered carbon from the leaves and grew it into fresh, edible apples. She could see the roots spreading down as well as out, growing straight through the mall's foundation and sinking deep into the soil, and how the massive tendrils thinned and multiplied until they spilled into a mat of mycelium, uncountable kilometers of fibers soaking up water and nutrients in the deep earth. She could see the photosynthesis in the leaves, the movement of compounds up and down capillary tunnels, the steady pulse of the tree's heartbeat.

If real trees were even half this beautiful, then Amy had been missing out on so very much.

"I'm pretty sure real trees are more beautiful. I mean they're not my specialty, but I've looked at them before! My moms are a big fan. Did you know that trees exchange carbon through the root systems and symbiotic colonies of fungi? And nutrients, and water, and even hormones! Distress signals! Trees have feelings, intelligence even! Communication! It's super neat and I'm so glad I got a chance to check it out!"

"Wait, it has a heartbeat?"

Amy looked up from the knot. Carol looked up from the paper, her eyebrows raised.

"M-metaphorically," Amy corrected. "I'm pretty sure it doesn't have an actual heart."

"It totally could!" Riley insisted. "Having a heart would let me make it way taller, but I'd need a way bigger heart than I could take out of someone, or I'd need to build a pretty huge artificial heart which I could maybe do but it'd be a pain-"

"Do you take a lot of hearts out of people?" Amy interrupted.

"You didn't hear that!"

"Did too," she deadpanned.

"Okay, fine, so maybe I did some heart transplants," Riley admitted. "But that's besides the point!"

"Don't you have like fifteen hearts?" Venus asked, sounding utterly amused.

"Twenty-one, thank you very much!" the Biotinker huffed. "But those are built for me, they don't count! I'm me, not a tree! Even if the tree is me! Kind of!"

"Twenty-one hearts," Amy repeated.

"Yeah! Well, twenty-two, I added one the other day. Wanna see?"

For a silent moment, Amy just stared in the excitable Tinker's general direction.

Then she let out an utterly exhausted sigh.

"Sure. Why the hell not."

"You're supposed to examine me for bioweapons or whatever anyways, so here you go-"

"Wait, biowhatnow?" Amy started, and then stopped talking because Riley put a little clay hand in hers and holy fuck what had this girl done to herself.

Amy recognized the genetics and the whole biology-on-top-of-clay thing going on, of course. She was almost used to it by now. But Riley's anatomy was a mess from her skin to her skeleton, a hackjob of artificial and natural parts dovetailing together in ways she could barely follow. Some kind of armor mesh under her skin? Plates around all the organs? What was even going on with the organs? Her lungs were her brain and her kidneys were her liver, or something, and she had way too many of them, all scattered around and tied up in a wild, impossibly dense bundle of veins and arteries and nervous tissue. There were wings inside her back, fluttering and glowing even as Amy looked, staring out through her skin into the world. There were CNS cells and neurotransmitters in her hands, emotions rolling through each finger. Her blood seemed to be made of some kind of primordial ooze, and nutrients didn't so much flow as disappear in one part of her body and appear in another part of her body, and Amy was pretty sure there were potentially lethal sedatives in her fingers, and a high-voltage electrical system wired into her muscles, and what was that about bioweapons again?

Carol's voice sounded so distant. "I think I'd like to second my daughter's question, if it isn't too much trouble."

"Ehehe, i-it's nothing, just a precau-"

"Don't lie, Jupes. It isn't nothing."

"... no, you're right, it's not nothing…"

The blond hair.

The age.

A past full of mistakes, of 'making messes'.

A PRT suspicious enough to bring someone like Amy in to check Riley for bioweapons.

A terrible thought, one she'd previously dismissed, rose to Amy's mind.

"You're Bonesaw, aren't you?"