9S waits to hear back if anyone has seen the one small piece of 2B. It is the only thing he wants that the network can offer him. Waiting alone would be his preference, but with 4S tethered to him, he is forced to sit at the focal point of a growing ring of units while 4S speaks to 3S.

9S makes every attempt to let his mind wander away, but there's little place for it to go. Their conversation ebbs and flows on the edge of his hearing and he makes no effort to process any of it, but he doesn't have to. Without excessive stress to muddy the process, sub-routines take care of that for him. He picks at his projected clothes and rubs at his projected gloves and looks among the crowd for any sign that someone is trying to get his attention. There is no one yet. He must sit and endure.

3S is not merely the eldest scanner, he is the first scanner. The Bunker has always needed a server administrator, and it always had one in him from the moment it became operational. He bears unique distinctions from the rest of them as a result. He is one of the only YoRHa to have remained active from the bunker's start to its end and his memory is fully continuous for all of it. Until he fell to the virus, he had never been executed or destroyed in combat.

There is no one who can discuss the logistics of fully transferring the Ark's YoRHa population as well as he can. His points make the issue of the bodies the least of 4S' concerns. YoRHa data is mobile but transferring an entire framework over the signal Jackass modified will not work for everyone. It's a signal that relies on intact scanner hardware to even perceive. Unless 9S is going to sit and act as a physical connector for all of them (he immediately thinks he won't and is glad when 3S points out that the strain would fry his hardware before he made twenty-five transfers ) they will need a vast storage space like the kind H units boast.

"Are there any H units in here?" asks 4S.

"Just two." 3S' hands clasp tight between his knees. "They could fight off the virus best, but because they were always paired with groups of combat units…"

9S clutches the arms of his coat and imagines pulling hard enough to cocoon himself in leather and escape the awkward shuffles that surround him.

There are only 216 YoRHa inside the copy of the Ark. Two thirds their active force, and an even finer fraction when considering all the inactive units only kept in body storage. There is no way so many survived, so there is only the alternative for 9S to consider: They're dead. Not like the scanners around him, but in a final and unrecoverable way. N2 took many things from the Bunker's server, but she did not take base personalities or default versions of any of them. The YoRHa on the Ark copy are all those who fell victim to the virus and were completely consumed by it.

4S' voice drops to a pre-occupied muffle around 9S' head. He mutters like a witch over a cauldron, working out the details of an incantation that might be better left unspoken. Arranging it in steps that he can follow to make his wild dreams come true. Find bodies, bring back an H unit through 9S, have the H unit complete the rest of the transfers. Like it is as simple as following a manual.

It's 1S who speaks up to dampen that delusion. "4S do you have any idea how you're going to do any of this?"

"I'll keep asking around until I get answers," 4S answers confidently. "If Jackass is going to kill the one who made YoRHa anyway, I can work on extracting the data from them."

"You intend to impose on 9S for that long?"

The reproach catches 9S off-guard, but it blindsides 4S. "Impose? He has his own reasons to be in here!"

"Yeah, to find 2B. And once he does? Are you expecting him to stick around while you poke your nose into that kind of danger?"

"I agree," said 3S. "Your methods aren't that inefficient given the circumstance, but they're very loud and you have no leverage. If we're supposed to be dead, there's no reason the creator of YoRHa wouldn't just kill you and 9S too if you tried to confront them personally."

"So am I supposed to just let you all stay dead? For me that's like letting 11S stay broken, I—" His voice hitches and cracks. "I can't do that…!"

The other scanners shift uncomfortably, none more so than 9S. Emotion flows a little freer among them now that there's nothing to prohibit it, but the gap between anger and sorrow is immeasurable. To rage is expected. To cry exposes a rawness that 9S is not ready to see in other YoRHa and that they in kind are not ready to see in each other.

From somewhere among the small crowd, someone calls. "Let him do it, I don't wanna stay in here forever!"

"It's easy to shout that from the back to let someone who isn't important to you do something dangerous, isn't it?" 1S frigid words shame to silence the rising murmur of agreement. With that wall of cold between them, 1S turns his attention back to 4S. "This isn't how 24S taught us, 4S. Don't be careless. We have to act wisely and as a team. Nothing that can be done at all—"

"—Is out of reach if we make use of all our assets," 4S finishes with a modest sniffle.

"Stay calm, stay safe, and know your role." It is the often-exchanged mantra of the Guadalcanal era scanners.

32S raises his hand. 9S finds it hard to look at him after seeing a corpse of him so recently. "Are we...bringing back everyone?"

"Why wouldn't we?"

He makes a complicated face. "Executioners."

The air condenses around them and 9S can feel the ripples moving through it. Anger. Resentment. It is surprisingly 3S who offers pity in the form of a stony reprimand. "Do you think they had the luxury to not do as they were ordered?"

42S breaks the tension in the most obnoxious manner possible. With a sigh many decibels too loud and another one of his horrible nicknames, this time for 3S. "Crowd is right. We don't usually make our own roles, we just rolled with whatever we were told, you know? I don't want the start of my freelance life to be deciding somebody else should get punished for their programming."

"Glad to hear you actually say something sensible for once." 1S climbs to his feet and gestures quickly to the other scanners around him. "I propose ourt goal should be to eliminate any possibility the data we're looking for isn't already inside the network. I'm close with the Operators, so I'll take point interfacing with them. 42S, you do the same with the B and D units. 32S you're familiar with the units who don't stay in the sub-network, so go talk to them, but make sure you take someone with you. Any leads should be directed to speak with 3S."

"Hmm?" 3S looks up dreamily from beneath his curly bird's nest of hair. "Me? Why?"

"You're the server admin. You excel at managing large amounts of data without suffering from information overload. We can all analyze it together once we've lined up some possibilities. Ah, you should be the one to talk to the maintenance and repairs crew, though."

That is a job that should belong to 801S, but 9S doesn't say as much. None of the others have mentioned the youngest scanner. He has no intention of broaching the subject when there is such a conspicuous hole among them. There's no good news to hear there.

"9S?" 1S' uptight aura melts slightly. His smile is formal but filled with genuine gratitude. "Thanks for taking care of 4S and 11S."

"I'm surprised you don't have a job for me too." Small talk. He doesn't want one. Another thing to think about when there are so many would be too much even for him. "That was surprisingly efficient of you."

"The No.1 personality was designed to lead missions." He adds, calm and nonchalant: "And I'm the only one who took the time to become familiar with all of your specializations even before all of this happened. You'd be a great asset, but you weren't very talkative. 2B is the goal in front of you. Tasks done distracted and by half-measures won't help me keep 4S out of trouble."

It stings a little because 1S' blunt way with words always stings a little and because he is wrong. Waiting for word from 2B is simple. There would be a result or there wouldn't, and he would continue to search. It is watching an earnest, organized, and possibly even realistic effort by his fellow scanners to reclaim their lives that weighs on him. He has known all along that YoRHa would be a target. The scars from his time in the coliseum are gone, but the lesson imparted has never left him. But being targeted by someone as powerful as the person who made them is far different than being hated by resistance androids. Even with the report from Theta, 9S doesn't fully understand just how much of a reach they might have.

But if 1S is designed to lead, maybe he will be able to process it. Now that they have taken matters into their own hands, 9S feels he owes them all the information that he has.

"I received a predictive analysis from a command unit in the army of humanity today," he says, pulling 1S closer. "I was worried if I gave it to 4S he would just get more stubborn, but I think it'll be in good hands with you."

The data passes between them as a single white block floating across the ever-present connection of the network. 1S crosses an arm, a hand worrying at his chin as he scans the contents, and finally, he sighs. "That's exactly the kind of attention I was concerned about."

"They don't seem concerned about 4S or 11S," 9S offers as a small comfort. "Only me."

"It may be a good idea for you to consider the attention of Legacy Reclamation a positive. If you find any major artifacts, I'd suggest you hold onto it and use it as an advantage."

V's existence rises like bile through him. It is the greatest advantage he could have, but his life is not worth involving V in this. But it is no longer only his life that has to be placed on the scale. He doesn't want to make or acknowledge the unwritten decision, but the truth is evident. To keep V hidden and safe is to place all 216 of these lives below that of a human—and to have his protocols reward him for it.

He swallows these things back down with care, but they leave a sourness in his heart that does not fade away.

The headache that followed the complicated process of hacking into the network copy had not spared 4S. Connecting to 9S with a physical cable didn't allow him much. He couldn't recognize the frequency or figure out a way to project himself as a physical object in the hacking space, but the moment they disconnected from each other, the pain set in on them both.

Icy conditions meant Jackass' truck wasn't active, so they'd had to slip and skid together all the way to the top of the crater, where 4S clenched his eyes shut.

"What?" asked 9S, squinting against the vicious points of light bouncing off the snow. "You gonna puke or something?"

A quick shh! answered, and 4S rubbed his face with one hand. The other waved like the needle on a dial, eventually pointing off somewhere to his right. "Do you…hear that?"

"I don't hear anything," said Jackass. "You bust your aural processors in there?"

9S held up a hand. He didn't hear it, exactly, but something was showing up on his graphs. With a bit of re-directed processing power, he was able to identify it.

"Someone crying," he guessed, cocking his head. "A machine crying."

Jackass scoffed and kept going. It was no secret she still didn't care much for machines. Didn't go out of her way to attack them ever since the treaty, but what did she care if she heard one crying somewhere?

9S and 4S shared an uncomfortable look, and the latter trotted after Jackass. "I'm gonna go check on 11S..."

"Yeah, yeah. I'll go see what that is."

As he ran off, Jackass' voice called after him. "Remember not to do anything heroic!"

The closer he got the more clearly he could hear it, monotone and heavily modulated. It occurred to him in much the way a brick occurs to a window that Pascal might have new children. That he might be repeating the exact same things, and the children being children were wandering off and getting into the exact same kind of trouble. And here was 9S, again. Running to investigate and help in spite of knowing it had all been done before.

He rounded onto the empty road that led to the desert. The snow had been shuffled around by foot traffic, both machine and android, as well as a winding set of Emil's three-wheeled tire tracks. A small biped type machine was making an embarrassing attempt to push through it. Its low knees couldn't clear the hardened piles and it kept falling with every other step.

9S was relieved. It wasn't wearing any bows or clothes. Maybe it was just frustrated or lost.

Its eyes met his, blank and white and flickering. There was nothing to read on that spherical face, but the three-pronged hands reached out, clamping and opening at a pace that would have been menacing if it were so clearly not an act of panic.

"SCARY! BROKEN! HELP! HELP M—!"

The cry cut off. Oil blackened the snow in a boiling splash.

The thing that stood over the corpse was perfectly articulated in 9S' visual field. He had no problem processing the shape, but steam rose in tendrils then in clouds from his collar as he struggled to process what exactly he was seeing.

It had four limbs like an animal, and something like a tail only it was growing from its back. All five of those parts ended in hands. Android hands, to be specific. Attached to android arms which were attached to a body of scrap and parts from machines with grinning half-broken android head crammed in. The arrangement was vile and inorganic and stirred in 9S an almost bestial feeling of hatred. It wasn't that this thing was a machine—he didn't think they had the imagination to make something so awful.

It was that it was so unforgivably inhuman.

With casual brutality, it yanked the head from the dead biped and carried it as it stomped toward him. A gurgling scream shot from its mouth.

9S moved as though underwater, terror and thoughts of self-defense both struggling against his curiosity and revulsion. When it scuttled close enough for him to see the strange black tongue lolling from the android head and the copious mucous weaving between its shoulders like wet webbing, he yelped, and Pod's laser shot out to push it back.

The snow had not cleared before it charged through, missing a limb and screaming in a voice that made 9S skin feel like it was retracting back from his exoskeleton. He lashed out with Cruel Oath and sent the android head spinning away.

With no pause, it crammed the machine head into the gaping hole, and three more android arms rose from its back. The fingertips glowed like molten metal and snatched for him. He dodged, but the impact cleared the snow in a cloud and left cracks in the ancient roadway.

Pod opened fire at his command. The thing did not flinch back. It leaped at Pod, catching her in its glowing hands before she could maneuver away. 9S switched weapons, and with a frantic howl and a swing of Iron Will, severed the multi-handed growth from the things back.

It lurched away, spilling viscous, oozing oil that 9S immediately knew was as cold as the winter air. It held up its hands and screeched as he followed, but Iron Will crushed them and it.

With a shaky breath, he let himself and the sword drop heavily into the snow. Pod 153 returned to his side as though nothing had happened, and he seized her out of the air and held her tight.

"QUERY: WHAT IS THE REASON FOR THIS DISPLAY?"

"It had you," he said, voice a fragile whisper against her cold casing. "I thought it…"

"…PROPOSAL: INVESTIGATE UNKNOWN ENEMY TYPE. UP-TO-DATE DATA WILL ALLOW FOR RISK MINIMIZATION."

He let her go and satisfied himself that the thing was dead with a few experimental kicks. The mucous and the black tongue had disappeared. All that was left behind were a handful of weird red crystals. He nearly dropped the one he picked up when he realized there was a screaming face carved into it. And there was a stench.

The boar V had killed when they met had quickly rotted down to brown, soupy meat and exposed bones in the constant late summer sun. The reek of it soiled even the freshest breeze for weeks after. On more humid days, passing by it was like swimming through a cloud of rancid fats and decayed proteins.

That was what he smelled now. He had smelled the same thing after that flash of light in the desert.

And when he left with Gladiolus.

It stayed right on the edge of his senses until he'd laid down for his repairs, in fact.

The world dimmed out as he tore back through his memory, scouring through his conversations with V. Then he found what he was looking for and he was up and running without even sparing the breath to swear.

Jackass and 4S weren't back to the camp yet. He snatched them both, and maybe there was panic in his eyes because both immediately made efforts to keep up with him. Only when he was within the bounds of the camp did he stop, his eyes darting wildly for signs. Of what he didn't know—more of the same creature maybe. Anything that didn't look right.

Beside him, Jackass cringed and raised an arm over her face. "The fuck is that smell?"

Oh god. "4S, get 11S and get behind closed doors."

A bewildered stare answered him. "What?"

"Just do it!"

"Is there a problem, Unit 9S?"

Gamma. He grabbed her hands and stared pleadingly into her face as though he could convey by pure telepathy what had happened. What was about to happen again if he was analyzing the situation right. "Something's coming. I don't know what—something came out of the desert with me and Gladiolus. It followed us; can't you smell it?"

"What the fuck did you see out there?" Jackass demanded. "Are the machines fucking eating each other again?"

Again? No, there was no time for that. Whatever horror story that was had to wait until later. "The thing I saw out there was not a machine!"

A shot rang out.

Every head in the camp went up like prey hearing a warning call. 4S broke away from the group, darting toward the scaffolding and the helpless 11S. 9S stayed between Gamma and Jackass, his sensors all strained to their maximum sensitivity. Footsteps behind him. Two pairs. Steady, purposeful. Theta's voice inquired. Anemone's voice barked out.

"Perimeter report!"

It was Wormwood that appeared high in one of the ruined windows, rifle in hand. His mouth opened and one word issued in a distorted, static-filled growl that only long periods of vocal synthesizer neglect could produce.

"YoRHa!"

"NEGATIVE," Pod 153 countered. "NO YORHA BLACK BOX SIGNALS DETECTED."

Another shot rang out. Wormwood vanished back to his post. The diverging information of two units who would not lie in the situation left the camp momentarily suspended while the shots grew in frequency.

The first scream brought them all crashing back to earth.

Another of the same hideous amalgam crashed through one of the barren windows, the concrete crumbling under its weight. 9S charged with Iron Will at the ready, only to be bashed in the face with the full weight of an android's severed head.

For a moment he thought it caught him somehow. The huge hands at his back turned out to be Gamma's, setting him quickly but carefully on the ground. Through pulses of pain, he saw her move at a speed he would not have expected from a unit so big. She tackled it to the ground before it could throw anything else.

His mouth opened and closed with a warning he couldn't formulate. The slickness of oil coated his face and ran over his teeth like a liquid drip of the taste of dirt and ancient, rotted trees. Someone yanked him up and jammed something in his mouth and his senses balanced back out one after the other in quick succession.

"Eyes up!" Theta commanded with surprising force. "Ranged units off the ground, physical combat units on me and Anemone! Unit 9S, provide hacking support!"

The camp moved to the sound of Theta's voice, and 9S found he did as well. Gamma did not appear, but he did not have the opportunity to check that she had not been crushed.

The first YoRHa entered the camp.

Alarm bells went off in 9S' head. This thing wasn't wrong in the inhuman way that the amalgam was, but it wasn't a YoRHa unit. Maybe it had been once, but not anymore. It was still wearing what shreds and pieces of heavy armor had managed to cling to the body since the final descent, but the similarities ended there. It moved in a heavy swaying motion that no YoRHa would, and the weapon in its hands looked like a harvesting scythe that hadn't been used in a thousand years.

There was no light, neither green nor red, in its eyes, and aside from the click-thud of its one-booted steps, it moved without a sound.

He tried to hack it anyway, just on the off chance—

The hacking space is black, there is nothing in here but something is in the dark with me, and it is not a memory, it looks at me with dead eyes and knows I am not human but it comes anyway because my fear is human enough, it will bathe in my screams, in all of our screams

9S snapped back into physical space with a choking gasp.

Theta stood over the freshly decapitated body. In each hand, she held tonfa as white as the blade of Virtuous Contract. They were sizzling faintly. His bleary eyes met hers, and she did not ask what he'd seen.

There was no time.

YoRHa galloped into the camp on broken bodies one after the other, each of them utterly silent and swinging that same crude weapon. One became a dozen became a swarm, the bullets of the ranged units only capable of taking out those whose armor had not survived the long months or the journey from wherever they'd all crawled out from.

Gunsmoke and sparks filled the air, mingling with the scent of rot and a strange heat that made the buildings sweat and drip. Though the bodies were decayed, they were still YoRHa bodies. The already sparse ranks of the resistance were hard-pressed to keep up, and the creatures seemed to be getting wiser with every moment. Learning to use of bodies more powerful than ones they might have been used to.

Theta had little trouble severing parts in quick efficient motions that accompanied the flash of a high-intensity laser from her weapons, but dodging attacks was not her strong suit. Anemone kept to her back to cover her, sword in one hand, gun in the other. Gamma emerged like a titan, her face covered in a mix of red and black oil, the arms from the amalgam pulled free and swung with force that shattered them as well as the units they impacted. Steam vented from her shoulders, and she joined the front of the ranks.

For 9S, the world went gray.

Fighting against the YoRHa bodies that no longer belonged to their owners, coming in seemingly endless numbers, the clear sky in his visual field processed as dull and densely clouded. Explosions registered in his aural processor. Jackass was there, but she didn't exist to him at that moment.

He had to protect her.

A scream. Someone fell to his left. He moved. The bodies dropped. There was no carrying them away. There was nowhere to carry them to. This was the final battlefield. They would live, or they would die.

He had to protect her.

Their speed was growing. Their combat routines weren't fancy, but they don't need to be. There are so many of them. And they are so few. They have always been so, so few.

He had to protect her.

He swore he heard the laughter of the machine network, possessing those who had once been his comrades, and all at once the world crashed down on him. It's was only the two of them and the bodies of the infected were piling on. Their black boxes were all they have. Where was she? Why wasn't she there with him? He has to trust her. If they couldn't use the reaction, they could both self-destruct, and he would meet her back on the Bunker. Please let her just be on the Bunker safe.

"UNIT 9S, AT EASE!"

The domineering shout gripped him by his wiring and clicked him forcibly back into the present.

YoRHa bodies were piled up in the center of the camp. He was kneeling over one, Cruel Oath in hand. His self-destruct timer was fading from his UI.

He dropped the weapon and clapped his hand to his mouth. "I… I didn't…"

Wormwood appeared over him. Tall and thin-faced and dispassionate as 9S had ever seen him, but he was actually looking 9S in the face. Acknowledging that he existed with an extension of his hand.

"They weren't the ones," he croaked in his warped voice. "They didn't laugh."

9S stared up at him and managed to suppress the quiver of his lip as a spark of understanding he did not want passed between them. Just like him, Wormwood had lost someone special to him the day the Bunker fell—to the sound of the machines laughing through YoRHa's mouths.

He took Wormwood's hand but quickly put distance between them. He couldn't handle that right now. "4S…?" he whispered.

"BLACK BOX SIGNAL ONLINE. COMBAT ZONE DID NOT EXTEND TO DESIGNATED REPAIR AREA."

On wobbling legs, he turned back to look at the scent with eyes unclouded by his memories. Pieces of YoRHa bodies coated the ground. Not a drop of lubricant in any of them—it had dried up or spilled out long ago. The sickles were all mysteriously absent, replaced by red crystals the same as 9S had picked up. Resistance members sagged against the weeping concrete, some of them weeping themselves and holding onto one another. The repair bay was already at capacity, and Jackass was busily assisting the usual attendant.

A high-pitched yelp saw them all jump back to the ready. Freesia was pointing at something.

The crystals were melting down into something dark and mercurial and flowing away of their own volition. Even the one in 9S' pocket dripped down his leg with a disgusting warmth and slipped away.

9S followed their flow. Theta came immediately to his side, her eyes studying his for some sign of what the hell they'd all just experienced. He didn't look at her. He followed to where he already knew the blood would go.

Humility hung up by some observation device Pine had crafted. She wasn't there, so he and Theta were the only ones to witness the eerie blue and violet light that issued from the blade as the red flow seeped into its strange symbols.

In the back of 9S' mind, V's words echoed: If the veils are thin, there may be demons.

With the calm of someone dangerously close to the edge, he turned to Theta. "I'm going to go check on V."

She nodded without looking away from Humility and did not try to stop him.

The transporter hissed, and 9S stepped out into the balmy temperatures of the forest, where spring was a little closer at hand than in the ruins. Pod 042's marker was close. Less than a hundred meters.

On the remains of the bridge, the only sounds were of the breeze and the birds and the muffled clanging of Masamune's endless work. It was peaceful. It may have even refreshed him, if he were not on edge with the knowledge that V was so close to the church. He dropped down where the upper bridge broke. Tower debris had cluttered most of the lower courtyard. He didn't think V was down there.

His eyes rose to the other side of the broken lower bridge and he froze.

V was there, sprawled out and sound asleep. For him to be resting at this hour, he'd definitely done something he shouldn't have and was recovering.

The red-haired android was leaned over him, cheek just barely above V's chest, her eyes equal parts watery with guilt and steeled by fury. She'd cut her hair. The air was clear of sand or any other obstruction, and something in 9S' memory responded with a match when she stood.

It was a time when 2B was there. She'd gotten jealous. It was cute. Learning that the resistance member killed her friend had not been cute. Learning that she was YoRHa had been dark and unsettling and he had not understood why 2B responded the way she did at the time.

"You're not supposed to be here," she growled.

Whatever 9S had been holding onto to keep himself together during the past two weeks broke as quietly as a young twig underfoot. An E unit was with V. She was standing between him and V.

9S was very aware that he might lose V to old age or illness or V might actually find his way home. V might even be killed in circumstances beyond his control. But he would not lose V to an E unit. That was really all there was to it.

No executioner would ever take anything from him ever again.