At first, travelling in a group had been kind of fun. Though it was for different reasons, he and 4S were brimming with anticipation for what they might find. That energy relaxed their guardians, and soon they were all chatting away about nothing like neighbors who hadn't had an opportunity to catch up in a while.

Now it was all 9S could do to stare at the sun and silently beg it to overheat him.

When Theta specified that a combat-proficient resistance android had to accompany them, 9S had expected someone more aggressive would be assigned. Instead they got Gladiolus, a reasonable, practical choice with a rifle specialization and a compact but stocky build. Their rocky first meeting was apologized for and forgiven in a brief and awkward exchange and that was it. She had no hostility to spare for him, and she took to 4S with surprising kindness, going so far as to suggest carrying him once they reached the desert.

4S had always been good at endearing people to him, but the extent of her sympathy was a sharp contrast from what he'd gotten accustomed to. 9S had never thought about the kind of reputation he had among resistance androids. The ones who disliked him thought he was dangerous or that he knew something they didn't (he did, but that wasn't the point). He kept to himself, and few of them knew what he wanted or what he might do; and if he brought the Tower down, he could do anything, couldn't he?

There was no mystery like that in 4S. He found out about YoRHa's real purpose even later than the rest of them had, he was utterly defenseless, and his one singular concern in life was evident in everything he did. Maybe more importantly than all those things: he had no reason to be close-lipped with the Bunker gone. He was a bright and open room you could just walk into as you pleased, secure that there would be no unknowns or dangerous surprises hiding in the corner. Without duty or a command chain to reign him in, 4S was comfortable answering pretty much anything he was asked.

And Gladiolus had caught on and started asking.

"So you could bring them all back with just black boxes?"

"We'd need compatible bodies too. I could replace your fusion core with a black box and you'd have power but the neural mapping that your AI uses would make all the other functions pointless."

"It also requires the data on the ark copy to have been preserved in a really specific way," Iota huffed.

"Not specific," 4S corrected. "Complete. Especially the consciousness and personality data. Without consciousness data, memory integration won't happen and the short-term storage area will eventually overflow, which will go on to cause significant slow-down in processing eventually leading to a cessation of function. No personality data and you're basically creating a whole new android. They might have the same appearance, but the parameters for how they digest new memories, their emotional range, psychological baseline—it would be totally randomized."

"Is memory like a whole other thing? Or is it not important?"

"That's the one that's easiest to replace. It's not like we have memories of our own when we roll out for the first time. You guys have false memories to compensate, but R&D phased that out with us. YoRHa had an orientation period instead, typically with a pair of Operators and a few others of their model type."

"I guess that's not much of a price to pay if you get to come back to life when you die."

"It's not like coming back to life," 4S said patiently. "If you reset memory data in a YoRHa android, there's a high probability they'll repeat certain actions because the base personality is always identical, but unique sets of environmental stressors produce unique permutations."

Gladiolus shifted 4S higher onto her back. "Can you say that again, but this time, remember I'm not an information officer?"

"Losing your most recent memories means losing the most recent version of yourself. You'll always get someone similar, but you can never get who you were at that exact moment back."

"…Must've been rough."

4S shrugged, but the animated energy had drained out of his voice and left a subdued husk behind. "Losing hours, or days, or sometimes weeks was something we all just accepted."

With the mood finally dampened beyond what strangers could be expected to push through, the conversation retreated, and the tension that had crept into 9S' back and shoulders sluggishly followed after it. As he'd predicted, 4S stubbornly clung to the possibility of bringing everyone back. He might not know how, but he would talk through it with every android in existence until something clicked if 9S didn't rein him in. Hopefully, an opportunity would arise soon, if only so he didn't have to suffer through any other iterations of that conversation.

He hadn't seen a single sign of V anywhere.

There was no mention of a second android from the victims or from any of the androids who combed the area afterward. Ideally, that meant he'd finished his business with the other android, but it still didn't make sense of his actions. A burst of the kind of electricity Griffon could generate would have been more than enough to put four androids out of commission without exposing himself. Or he could have just flown over them and avoided them altogether. Instead of preventing detection, he'd barged through and prevented pursuit.

All accounts said he was running, though not very fast. But why? None of the reports mentioned anything about him being chased—the next ones to arrive after him were all resistance members responding to the SOS. And why go to a place where he knew there would be androids to begin with?

"You think it's someone we know?"

9S didn't bother trying to smooth the furrows in his brow, but made a note to be more careful about his expression. 4S was also a scanner.

"I'm more worried about the weapon."

"I heard about it. Maybe it's some kind of ferro-fluid. Gravity attacks didn't develop in machines until the war had already been going on a long time. If viral infection was involved, it's possible the machines may have been in the process of evolving a new ability like that before the tower fell."

9S was busy looking out at the sandstorm. If V was still out here somewhere, hopefully he had enough water. "…Viral activity ceased when the network collapsed."

"All that means is infected units like me were cured. Damages sustained didn't repair themselves, so theoretically any attack programs left on a unit might still be intact."

That wouldn't be V, but 9S hadn't forgotten how strange the murder was. How unlike a YoRHa unit the details of the attacker sounded. "If it was a YoRHa that reached a severe infection stage and was damaged but still in a mobile state, that would explain a lot… Not sold on the ferro-fluid idea, though."

"What's your theory?"

"I'm not sure yet. But ferro-fluid in this zone would be such a pain. Atmospheric conditions are terrible for the longevity of an iron-based weapon unless they figured out some kind of anti-oxidizing treatment, which you'd think they would use on their bodies before anything else."

"Machine attitudes about wear and tear have always been negligent though. They rely on quantity. But I guess if they got to the point of magnetic control with the kind of precision presented in that attack; they could probably just dismantle us directly… Alright, how about this: it's a nanomachine complex suspended in some kind of conductive fluid that allows a swarm to be controlled."

Gladiolus leaned over to Iota. "You have any idea what the hell they're saying?"

"…I think if I answer that question it'll make you feel stupid."

"Thanks, that was an even worse answer than just saying 'yes'."

They passed through the opening in the eastern bluffs and walked along the pipeline to avoid the treacherous silkiness of the sand for as long as they could. As they grew closer to their destination, 9S grew quieter.

Mammoth Apartments was insular even among machine kind. Stubby-type machines played in the shade of the tilted buildings, their laughter funneled out by the concrete so that it reached them while they were still far out on the sands. Closer, a group of machines all decorated in approximately female fashions conducted a conversation that seemed to consist solely of complaints. Occasionally their heads would turn, their blank faces somehow full of disapproval, before they went back to complaining even louder. If they were hostile, they were fine with keeping to nasty gossip rather than attacks.

4S slid down from Gladiolus' back and checked his readouts. "There are no exact coordinates, so I guess this is the hard part. Can Pod 053 run a scan?"

"NEGATIVE. REMOTE IDENTIFICATION REQUIRES AN ACTIVE BLACK BOX SIGNAL."

Gladiolus eyed the thousands of shadowed doors and windows above them, winding into the sky like strange beehives. "You mind running a scan for the one that's on the loose?"

Pod did not respond until 9S gave her a permissive shrug. "SCANNING… NO BLACK BOX SIGNALS DETECTED IN LOCAL COMPLEX."

"Thanks. Keep us up on it if that changes." She relaxed with a sigh and a hand on her hip and leveled her gun over her shoulder. "Well that means we're safe, now what?"

"We search." Iota dropped into a squat, regarding the buildings with equal parts interest and annoyance. "Though I'm not feeling very excited at the prospect of wandering around out here all day just trying to find a body."

9S stared off down the row of buildings and let muscle memory take over. The first machine to show some sign of coordination between its thoughts and actions had led him and 2B through this complex. Somewhere deep inside the barren cluster of apartments, there was a hole where Adam and Eve had been born. But those weren't the memories 9S was following.

A resistance member requested a simple retrieval. Confidential chips with confidential intel, snatched by machines. Many chips were common between YoRHa and standard models, but not those. YoRHa only. The Commander even got in direct contact with local ground units about the disappearance of a unit with classified information.

She later specified that said unit had been killed by a machine lifeform, along with a nearby resistance member.

Their bodies weren't far from where 9S had last seen them. Just inside the crumbled corner of an empty apartment, where the sunlight bounced off the sand brightly enough that there were no shadows to hide what remained. The scanner's body was sprawled across the floor. His anti-magnetic skin had deteriorated quickly in the heat and hung off of his exposed plates and cables in shriveled strips. His chest plating had been left open and was barren of all chips, including what should have been the bright silver strip of his OS chip. Lubricant had seeped into the concrete and cooked without the bleaching effect of direct light, staining the dull stones a red so rich that it still looked wet.

Gladiolus entered first. She passed the black-clothed corpse by to kneel down in front of the brown hand reaching over the threshold of the next room. 9S averted his gaze while she pushed back the hood and raised the head. She strangled a noise deep in her chest, and the next thing he heard was a flat, tinny clinking as she yanked the tags from his neck. She sat her gun against the wall, but her hand did not leave it.

"How did you know to come here."

"I met both of them before." The scent of spilled oil roasting in the sun was still strong. It wasn't a cramped room, but it felt far too small to hold everything that had happened, was happening, and might happen inside. "He asked me to get some chips back from some machines for him. Turned out they were classified and he used them to illegally reboot YoRHa Unit 32S."

"Did you kill him?"

"No."

"Could you have warned him?"

He thought back to what he knew at that time. He would have laughed if he didn't think Gladiolus would shoot him on principle. Instead he stepped inside, rolled the scanner body onto its back, and clasped the hands together neatly over the abdomen. "I wasn't privileged to know about Executioners at the time."

Her shoulders bunched and quivered with enough muscle to snap his neck if she really wanted to. But she stayed in place, and she slowly let her hand fall away from her gun. Gladiolus, he decided, was probably a good person. The type who wasn't capable of lashing out at convenient targets, even when her anger was justified.

Better than him, in any case.

"I'm gonna step out with 4S," he said, managing to keep most of the emotion out of his voice. "Just to the playground, if you don't mind."

Gladiolus answered with only a numb nod. It was Iota who gladly shooed them out so she could get to work.

The pair sat on the derelict remains of the swings and watched the machines play in the sand, 4S sitting straight and still and 9S sagging heavily forward with his face in his hands. He was grateful it was 4S with him and not anyone else. The dense silence between them could have stretched on until the sun went out without getting awkward or uncomfortable.

He wished they had that kind of time.

"I wondered if any of you had ever been assigned E units, but I really didn't want confirmation."

"We all suspected something like that was happening."

"I didn't. Not to you guys too."

"There was a version of you once that did."

His certainty struck 9S like a stone. The envy he quietly harbored for 4S, so grounded by the existence of 11S, turned inward. It cannibalized on an unknown past version of himself. One who may have been born with all the same doubts and anxieties, but if 4S' words were anything to go by, had been able to take refuge somewhere. Among models in the same position whose relationship with him wasn't a paradox that was always solved with his death.

It was hard to keep his voice steady. "What do you know about me?"

A sigh answered him. A muffled curse followed, nearly lost in the hiss of the sand shifting against concrete and hollowed out vehicles. "Do you really want me to say?"

"Yes!" he cried, the swing rattling on its chains as he jumped from the seat. "The only alternative is for me to continue to have no idea! When did I first meet 2B? When did I learn to fight? Where did I even get this sword from?!"

The gold and black sword materialized in his hand just in time for him to fling it into the nearest dune. His fists shook, his breaths ragged and black box beeping frantically in his overheated chest.

"The versions of me that have died weren't me," he said thickly. "But I've got all these questions about myself that I can't answer because they're parts of those old lives. I don't need you to tell me accurately, I just need somebody to tell me something."

4S plucked slowly at the back of his head. 9S wasn't sure what he was doing until the visor slipped down and fell in his lap. He gave it a brief, dull stare, tossed it aside into the sand, and set his gaze on his feet.

"You don't remember Guadalcanal anymore," he began. "But you were active before it even happened. You don't remember 24S anymore, but he was at your first orientation."

"My… first," 9S said dazedly.

"You had to have two. I don't think 'your' generation of scanners noticed as much, but me and 1S and 11S? We remembered what you were like when you were rolled out the first time. From the beginning, you were always sort of a weird guy. Things hit you different. Harder than the rest of us, I guess. Maybe it's part of what makes you advanced because it's the one thing that didn't change. You always get emotional and make fast, stupid decisions about things that are important to you, and most of the time it works out because you're just that good.

So, when they told us some bullshit about your base personality being damaged in a hacking attempt during the assault on Tarawa…We took it at face value at the time. It sounded like something you would do, and you were still like that. But you came back different, 9S. And you came back paired up with 2B."

9S tried to swallow but his motor processor didn't respond. His balance gave out instead, and he flopped back onto the swings. They cried out pitifully under his dead weight. He wanted to cry out with them, to find someone he could ask what the very first 9S could possibly have done that was so catastrophic they had to alter his base personality. And what had they altered it with. His vision began to quake and distort. This wasn't the kind of news he needed to hear after finding out he'd merged with A2 and whoever else.

He consoled himself with a quick, dry mental incision. Whoever that first 9S was, he wasn't with 2B. So it didn't matter. (It did, it did matter, what had they done to him)—but that panicking voice in his chest was small, easy to drown out.

"Thank you," he said, though he felt no relief at all.

"You could always look in the Commander's data for your kill orders."

"No. There's someone…I really want to hear that from. Even if it's only on the ark."

The chains squeaked as 4S paused. "…I hope you find her."

9S' chest fluttered, and he shrugged down into his coat. It was strange to feel embarrassment of all things now of all times, but it was a welcome change of pace. It gave him a moment of clarity. 4S had given him enough truth to make a decision about just how deep he wanted to dig into the history of his executions. It was only fair to return the favor.

He took a deep breath and laid out the rest of the truths about Project YoRHa. He'd said they were made to die, but not that the backdoor that destroyed them all was built into the plan from the outset. That their lives were on a timer that not even the Commander had known about. And that was so cruel and so inhumane that androids had create something with no humanity. Black boxes, made with machine cores, and YoRHa to house them.

"I… I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I didn't want to overwhelm you. If you bring everyone back, they have to know all of that, 4S. The whole world does. You can't do that to them."

"Are you kidding?" 4S shifted his jaw. His eyes had turned to steel, but they burned with rebellious fire. "I'll be honest, when you told me the body problem, I settled. I tried to think smaller. Just bring my friends back. But now? I'm bringing back everyone."

"What? No! They shouldn't have to deal with this!"

"They already did!" 4S snapped, with such righteous anger that 9S shrank away. "They died dealing with it without ever knowing it!"

"No one should have to live with this. We hate machines, we're programmed to hate machines. How do you think they're going to react when they find out they have the hearts of machines!"

"I don't know. And neither do you." He rose from the swings, his single fist tight at his side and his head held up high. "I can't live expecting the worst outcome to be the one that's true. For me, a lack of certainty is enough. They deserve a choice, 9S. They deserve to know the truth and decide what they'll do with it. That's what you gave me, and that's what I'm going to give everyone else."

"But the bodies—"

"I don't care. If I live for a thousand years and haven't found a clue, I'll spend the next thousand years continuing to search. Until my last breath."

The words were familiar to 9S, if not necessarily the scorching resolve behind them. 9S hated it. He hated how strong the echo of Beepy was in 4S. It was far too much hope with far too little promise, and he hated how much he wanted to believe in it.

"Don't you want 2B to live just once able to make her own decisions about you?" 4S asked gently.

9S frowned and jabbed 4S in the stomach. He meant well, so he left it at that. "Don't lecture me about 2B. I want to see her again, but…"

4S recovered and flicked his ear with surprising force. "Whatever you're about to say, shut up. You're an android and you're supposedly the best we ever made. Stop getting all worked up just because you can't get results from just hacking them once."

"Why do you keep lecturing me?!"

"Because I'm tired of you always looking like you're running out of time."

9S wisely kept his mouth shut. With 4S on the warpath, there really was nothing he could say that would get him the last word, even though he was running out of time. He barely knew why anymore, only that it was a pervasive and constant dread at the back of his mind the longer he was away from V. It might have only been his protocols finally catching up with him, but it didn't feel that way.

But to have 2B back…

The sky flashed pink. They both looked up. Two thin, red beams shaved away a section of the cliffs that separated the complex from the rest of the desert.

"What the heck was that…?"

"DISTURBANCE IN NORTHEASTERN QUADRANT OF THE DESERT ZONE," said Pod 153. "ABNORMAL SANDSTORM ACTIVITY AND ENERGY SIGNATURES DETECTED."

Dizziness momentarily clouded 9S' mind with static. Only the heavy pit that formed in his stomach kept him in balance. Something was wrong. "Is Pod 042 out there?"

Pod 153 hesitated a moment, swiveling faintly in 4S' direction before turning back to 9S. "AFFIRMATIVE."

9S whirled and gripped 4S. "You need to get out of here."

Another thin beam sheared through the sky above them, this time fully collapsing a section of the mesa near where they'd entered. Gladiolus raced down with Iota, and the four of them watched the cloud of sand and debris rising in the distance from the edge of the complex.

9S pushed 4S into Gladiolus' arms. "Get him back to the camp!"

"Where the hell are you going?!"

"I have to go see where that's coming from!"

"Are you CRAZY?!"

9S hesitated. 4S was looking between him and the destruction in the distance with wide, frightened eyes. He opened a readout and quickly began to work.

"9S what the hell are you—"

He shushed them sharply, and the moment the bar on his screen filled, he materialized the first weapon that came up in his databank and pushed it into 4S' hands. "Here! I dropped my combat routines onto this along with a protocol that'll unlock your NFCS permissions. All you have to do is let your object materialization program run and it should self-activate."

"What the hell are you giving me a weapon for?!"

He grabbed 4S face, forcing them to meet eye to eye. "Because if I don't come back, you and 11S deserve a fighting chance to do what you said."

4S' mouth hung open, but he bobbed his head rapidly and closed his fist around the spear, clutching it tight against his chest.

Gladiolus grabbed 9S by the back of his coat. "Hold on just a-!"

Another beam rattled the cliffs and raised clouds of sand on the other side. 9S shed his coat in a single loose ducking motion and took off. Only distantly did he hear Iota shouting at Gladiolus not to fire on him.

He changed his chipset on the fly, until his speed had maximized and all he could hear was wind whistling in his ears and the rapid-fire stomps of his boots pounding atop the pipeline. Theta floated across his mind, but he was beyond worrying about her, or anything that wasn't getting to the source of those beams. The moment he crested the first dune on the other side of the cliffs he was very nearly sheared in half by them. He skidded out of the way, and followed their arc through the sky back through their wildly spinning source to the north. They cut off, and in their place we watched thousands of gray orbs discharge into the air in a fountain-like spray.

He could hear a loud voice screaming and sobbing—it sounded like Emil and filled 9S' mind fit to burst with a hundred questions that all funneled down the only two of any importance: What the hell was happening and was V safe?

As if answering him, a pop of light flashed from inside the vast and swirling cloud of sand that obscured his destination. Only moments later, a pillar of light erupted from inside, so bright that his visual field momentarily distorted with the intensity. The energy coming off of it must have been incredible. His nerve endings all tingled and a disturbance in his sensors caused his head to fill briefly with the scent of hot, rotted meat.

He stumbled and tripped at the top of a dune, sliding uncontrollably in the sand even as he cursed at himself. He was so close—!

Without warning, the valley he had fallen into sank, leaving his suspended in the middle of a massive slope. Just barely a hundred meters, the ground had out opened up and was swallowing the heads and everything else. 9S was left bracing himself against the wind and sand and calling out into the roar.

"V!" He stumbled, clutching at his shirt for lack of anything better to stabilize himself on. "V!"

He heard a familiar yowl. Shadow! Instantly he was on his feet, rushing toward the source of the sound. Through the bronze haze of the last of the falling sand, he saw red hair whipping in the wind and a familiar black coat around the figure of a woman. She held a broken standard issue YoRHa blade in one hand, and in the other an inky looking globe with a faint blue shine to it. Shadow was howling from somewhere deeper in the haze, guiding her somewhere.

She was staring right at him. She had heard him. Waited for him.

There was no sign of V or Pod 042, but that had to be her. The one who stalked him then kidnapped him and then left him alone in whatever condition made him run through the outpost, causing 9S whole worlds of trouble in the process.

"Where's V?" he called, prowling closer.

"He sent you away," she snarled, her eyes watching his with predatory focus. "So be a good boy and Go. Away."

She turned and ran after Shadow.

9S was immediately on her heels, teeth bared and Cruel Oath in hand. To be dismissed so casually; treated like he was not the one who belonged at V's side, who had cared for him all this time, who was still running himself fucking ragged so V could remain innocent and unknown, and this android who had disturbed the ruins' peace, murdered someone, brought so much attention to YoRHa, caused them to be separated and disturbed 2B's body-!

Cruel Oath struck her broken blade with vicious force and sent it pinwheeling out of her hand. She half-turned, eyes wild and filled with—with hate? She had the audacity to show up and hate him?

"Fucking," she hissed, and skidded around, bringing her knee up and into his chin. "Stop!"

She didn't strike him a second time. She didn't have to. The impact had rattled his systems around. Aberrations chromatic and otherwise turned his visual field into confetti—all colors and patterns that had nothing to do with what the desert actually looked like, and for one awful moment his motor control locked up and he couldn't make his body respond.

He tilted his head up and saw her pick something up from the sand. Another sword?

No. The sword. Humility.

Red alerts appeared in his vision. He knew he was moving, but he couldn't feel it. He wasn't thinking about moving. Only about the rush of boiling oil coursing through his body and rushing in his ears. His vision had compressed down to the coat around her waist and the sword in her hands and how V had told him—commanded him—not to touch it and now it was in the hands of an android who didn't know him. From here to the park, how many kilometers was that? Who cared, even one was too many; she didn't get to touch that, she didn't get to carry that, she didn't get to DO THAT.

For a moment she looked up and wavered in the face of his approach and the bright red rage that fueled it. But she was quick to return it, lifting the sword and swinging in a vast, thrumming arc.

A shot cracked across the air.

Everything on the other android's face was replaced with confusion and pain. Lubricant ran down her side. In a moment of blind panic, the sword slipped from her hands so that she could hold on to the blue orb and shield it from further shots.

The unexpected clumsiness snapped 9S out of his rage. He had been willing to die if she came at him seriously and Humility proved just what a well swung demonic weapon could do. Dying in a stupid accident because she dropped the weapon?

He folded his knees and collapsed onto his back in the sand. Humility sailed over him, ruffling his hair with its close passage. He heard a roar from Shadow, and when he sat up, both of them were gone.

Gladiolus stalked up next to him and offered him her hand. He stared up at her, and she flicked her fingers impatiently. "Your intuition was right, so we're gonna pretend I wasn't ready to shoot you. Come on."

He took her hand and stood, sparing a dour glare for the hole in the earth. If Shadow was there, V was alive at least. But he had no answers for any of what had occurred. Only that V had been here. That most likely, he was right at the bottom of that hole.

Just a jump away, but it might as well have been on Mars.

He stumbled to where Humility had sunk into the sand. He de-materialized it into white sparks and stored it safety among his most protected memory banks. The moment was over and his hyper-processing over, he leaned gratefully into Gladiolus' offered arm and they stumbled together back toward the camp.

He'd have to get his processors looked when they got back. He could still faintly smell rotten meat long after they had wandered out of that part of the desert.