4 Hours Ago

Ground camps didn't have much of a use for holding areas. Infected or otherwise hostile androids were killed, and traitors might meet all sorts of unpleasant fates, but problems were dealt with as immediately as possible. The time, space, and personnel for the jails that humans once used were all precious resources that couldn't be spared. Even if they could; why bother? Rehabilitation was only a reprogramming away, and anywhere could be jail if you turned off an android's motor complex.

For these reasons, I found myself locked in a storage room. No sunlight aside from what came through cracks in the boarded-up windows, only my own internal clock to tell me the time, no contact aside from brief snatches of overheard grumbles from the unfortunate androids who still had to guard the place with me in it, no ability to move, and no idea what was going on.

All in all, I was pretty pleased with the situation.

Being helpless and knowing punishment was coming was a little like being in paradise. If I'd had a dog's tail, it would have wagged like a puppy's when I heard stompy, familiar footsteps and the door clicked open. As it was, I couldn't even smile.

Gamma hauled me to my feet and plugged something into the port at the base of my neck. A few seconds of work on her part and I was able to blink, then work my jaw, then stretch my whole body out.

"I was starting to think you were just going to leave me like that," I said, rubbing at my shoulders. "It's awfully late, too. Am I getting midnight disposal?"

Gamma narrowed her eyes and marched me out into the camp without answering.

The good enforcer didn't like me on principle, but she didn't let that get in the way of following protocol to the letter, even if it meant she seemed to be on my side at times. The whole camp knew I didn't need to be controlled or contained or escorted. In this tooth for a tooth world, I was there offering my jaw—my whole skull if they wanted—to cover all I'd taken. Escape was the furthest thing from my mind. Gamma was the one that managed me because it discouraged the resistance members from doing anything too grisly before the army had finished with me. If they thought they could get away with it, most likely they would've thrown me in the vats to be melted down with the rest of the YoRHa corpses.

I wouldn't have minded. To me, violent mob justice wasn't any less legitimate of a way to die. But the only kind of justice that would be taking my head was the kind bound by bureaucracy. The wait was a little frustrating, but I'd had a long life of dreading the future; I could handle a few days of administrative bullshit in exchange for the privilege of anticipation.

I liked to think Gamma and I were close after our handful of encounters. Since the entire basis of my being there was for me to get punished, she couldn't interrogate me the way she wanted. So we'd meet and she'd spend twenty or thirty minutes asking the same question under four or five disguises, trying to get me to admit things I was already there to confess. I think she wanted there to be more to the story than there was. Even if I'd filled in the bit that Fern was so amped up and trigger happy because V was human, it didn't change what a senseless, almost accidental incident it was. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Gamma kept that hard, menacing look about her all the time, but it clearly infringed on her sense of order that two androids died as a matter of cheap happenstance without any involvement on part of machines.

There were many other tells, but the way she struggled with that loudly announced that she had never been on the ground for a meaningful stretch before all this.

When I saw that the cloth over the command tent had been drawn and closed, my pulse began to race. I would have run there by myself without Gamma to hold me back. If things were different, that meant this day wasn't going to go the way the others had. And in my mind, there was only one thing truly different that could happen. No more questions, just my sentencing. My death.

The ominous privacy within the dingy linen was enough to leave me trembling and almost overheated with excitement. But it did dampen my day a little that I was dropped down into a seat across from Theta.

Gamma only ever asked me questions about the murder. Theta, on the other hand, asked about everything else. Especially 'legion'. What the hell could I tell her aside from what I'd seen? Machine heads with no lights moving by themselves made about as much sense as dead YoRHa attacking the camp. I could've told her straight that they were demons from hell, she wasn't going to assume I was being literal. What got on my nerves was that she also asked about V.

At first, I thought it was strange. She'd had every opportunity to question him during the when he'd come into the camp like a spider king to weave his story for all the army ants. But it quickly became apparent that the questions she asked me about V were the kind he would never have answered. What he did, where he went, why he carried a cane, why he had never shown his face to androids before, how 'organic' he was. She even asked about my relationship with him. What started off dry always progressed to a place too personal to be about disproving him as a weapon.

I couldn't figure out what she wanted, but it didn't matter. V was none of her fucking business.

She busily scribbled on a clipboard resting at an angle against the table and flipped to the next page. "I suppose you'll be uncooperative again today."

"Probably." I smiled sweetly. "Does that mean we can skip the formality?"

"I wouldn't be so interested in V if both you and 9S were not so wrapped up in him. 9S has an unfortunate tendency to obsess over anyone he calls a friend, but you lack that personality flaw. I'm curious how V captivated an executioner unit as…unique as you."

"Couldn't say. I wasn't really in my right mind when I met him."

"And now that you are, the effect remains in place."

I shrugged. "He's compelling."

That dead-fish look that seemed to be her resting expression flashed at me. I liked this part. It wasn't going to last long, but it was refreshing to know the answer to Theta's question and constantly hold it out of her reach.

"He's bizarre," she said curtly, thumbing at the next page of her clipboard before setting it aside with a huff. "But I'll grant you that he does evoke a strong air of authority."

"He's a cold-tempered bastard who is obviously used to obedience from the people around him. But that's probably familiar territory for you."

Theta didn't bat a lash. "Strong command structure relies on the presupposition of obedience. Where 9S took him as a friend, your loyalty suggests you've taken him as some kind of superior."

"Hmm." I averted my eyes, peeking shyly at Theta from my periphery. "Maybe I'm just in love with him?"

Theta's face curdled like I'd slapped her with a handful of boar shit. I could barely handle keeping my voice and expression convincingly modulated for that line in the first place, so I dissolved into spitting laughter on the spot. Some of the best I'd had since V re-acquainted me with my identity. Hell, some of the best I'd had in my life.

"What a terrible personality for an executioner…" she muttered.

"It's because I was a really good executioner that my personality is like this." I sat forward, grinning wide enough for both of us. "You wanna know why I won't tell you anything about V, ma'am? It's because you don't deserve to know him."

"I wonder if 9S feels the same about you."

She tapped at a screen beside her, starting up an audiovisual log that must have come from the kid's Pod. I didn't have to look to know what it was. I could hear 9S crying out for V over the gritty howl of wind and sand. My voice telling him to go away. The clang of weapons and the crack of my knee connecting with his small chin.

"The both of you are very possessive of him." She courteously lifted the screen so I could see the glare of red errors and the way 9S' focus had compressed the moment he saw my hand on V's sword. "See there? He was ready to kill you because you touched the sword. And here you swung it at him full force even though you'd been fighting defensively up until that point. There is so much more than meets the eye to this encounter. I can only imagine how your feed of it looked."

I sank back in my seat and crossed my arms. "I'm pretty sure I destroyed my pod sometime last year, so you'll have to live without audiovisual."

She stopped playback with a touch of her finger. "Yes, that is a reality I've come to accept. But you can be useful in other ways."

The words crawled up my back and turned into pressure between my clenched teeth. I knew their implications the way prey knew a predator well before it showed its fangs.

"YoRHa Unit Number 8, Type E." There it was. That cool official tone that should have had my black box racing with the assurance of my impending death. But I wasn't assured of anything anymore. And I grew less so the more Theta spoke. "As the penalty for the destruction of one ground android and one high-value specialty android, in addition to endangering of the armistice, you will be reset to your default manufacture state and formally taken into the ranks of the Army of Humanity."

I stared blankly at Theta without seeing her. My punishment was supposed to be death. Why weren't they going to kill me? They were supposed to kill me, but this shitty world couldn't even give me the punishment I deserved. Instead, it wanted something so much worse. Why would they reset me? I would still be an executioner when it was all done with. Who could they possibly need me to kill?

Someone joined Theta across from me and the increasing roar of my worries subsided only to be overwhelmed by brand new worries.

I remembered her. I remembered her slim face and thick eyebrows. Her rounded silver eyes with their unusually bright optic lights. Her stature and all the physical details of her face were no different, but this was no more her previous self than Fern was me. Her face was colder than the one in my memory.

Maybe she held a grudge. I had killed her, after all.

I sagged in my chair with a weak laugh. "What... the fuck is this?"

"The 'Rho' model is just a template," Theta explained as though it was the most casual thing in the world. "No different from a scanner, battler, or executioner. The same goes for myself, Gamma, Iota, and the rest of Legacy Reclamation."

Rho seemed to look through me. I could see her optic lights flicking through different modes. Gamma had mentioned she had top-of-the-line visual capabilities that had allowed her to 'see' V's sword the way I could feel it. A shudder rolled through me as I imagined her looking at me in spectrums I couldn't even imagine.

"Three weeks is a really shitty turnaround time for a body replacement."

"The time frame is regrettable," Rho agreed coolly. "We can't achieve the same mobility of consciousness that comes with the use of the black box. Additionally, the algorithms responsible for generating our personalities are extremely prone to deviation. Our 'revival' process is too complex to reconstruct behavioral patterns with any meaningful accuracy."

In short, I was now seated with an android that had the same name and face as someone I'd killed, but she was an entirely new person. Despite not knowing the old Rho, I found it hard to look at her. I'd never thought that anything was 'creepy' before, but the sensation was getting very cozy with me now. "Sounds illegal. I'm gonna call you Rho-2."

She cracked a smile. A real one with an actual sense of humor behind it, unlike Theta's. It lightened some of the pressure that had built in my chest, but not by much.

"Rho will oversee your reset and gather data on you in the aftermath," Theta explained, already busily back at work with her clipboard. "I understand you've tried several times in the past to erase your memories. I can assure you it will be done properly this time."

"Well see, that's just it." I leaned forward with a bit too much energy and rammed the table, but neither woman flinched. "I'm not looking to be erased this time. I killed you. I came here to have the same done to me."

Rho tilted her head, her silver eyes betraying no sarcasm or anything but an honest inquiry. "Being erased isn't tangibly different from dying, is it?"

"You don't get it."

"I do not. It's not my intention to be unaccommodating. Please elaborate."

"They're my memories!" Rho's strange sincerity was a thousand times worse than if she was mocking me. 'Elaborate'? What was there to elaborate on? I was a killer and I deserved to be killed; it wasn't a difficult concept so why did it seem so alien to her? "I don't want some other version of me to exist without them. I came here to get justice for all the people I've killed, and that doesn't mean erasing me so I can just repeat the same song and dance for a new master!"

"You crave destruction because you destroyed others…?" By Rho's face, it looked like I had just described the flight mechanism of an alien mothership in a dead martian language. My emotions that I could barely understand and barely articulate were a novel, unintelligible integer among the data she kept. "You completed the purpose you were designed for. There's no reason to experience any feelings of regret."

It felt wrong when she said it that way, but worse still she said it in such a sensible tone that it filled me with doubt. Like maybe I was being irrational.

"I believe your long tenure may have untethered you from reality," said Theta. "Even compared to us, you're an extremely valuable piece of equipment. Damaging your body when it is in excellent condition and possibly the only functional combat-type YoRHa left would be incredibly wasteful."

I wondered if she knew it wasn't a compliment to be called valuable or equipment. More importantly, I wondered if they knew about the kid and the protocol. I thought all this had something to do with it, but they were talking about me like they wanted to preserve me instead of him. "If you think that, you should really keep a better eye on 9S."

Rho didn't have much of a reaction, but I saw a glint in Theta's eye. A slight tilt of her head as though she was cocking an ear in case I let on any more than that.

"He continues to be our prime consideration," she said, rising to her feet so she could stalk around the table. "You can consider your reset a form on independent research based on observations of him."

"Research…?" A surge that rushed over my shoulders and into my hands as I looked at Rho, and I slipped them down beneath the table to hide the way they clenched until my knuckles stood out like bolts under my skin. "What are you trying to do? What do you want with 9S?"

Theta smiled down at me in her dead, joyless way. "That's classified."

I raised a brow and crossed my arms, leaning back casually in my chair and meeting Theta's eyes with a stubborn jut to my jaw. "Then go ahead and erase me and all the interesting insights into 9S' behavior I could share with you."

Across from us, Rho's eyes glittered with something like greed. She must have been like a scanner—curious to a self-destructive degree. She tapped her fingers in a few complex rhythms atop the table, but Theta was so busy assessing me that she failed to notice her officer's discipline whittling down to nothing.

"How about," I started slowly. "You tell me what my assignment is going to be once you reset me. You're gonna have to tell future me something, so it shouldn't be classified for me to know now, right?"

"You'll be my subordinate," Theta said with a distinct note of amusement. "You'll be assisting with Legacy Reclamation."

"…By executing people?"

"Not primarily."

Oh good, only occasional murder this time around. I could imagine future me finding it an exciting change of pace, and my desire to die tripled out of spite.

"You'll probably only execute machines," Rho offered.

Theta and I both looked at the information officer, me with half-feigned surprise and Theta with a silencing glare. Rho seemed confused as though she'd fully assumed that was a permissible admission that would soothe my resistance to the concept of being recycled as an executioner.

"Woah okay," I said with a laugh. "You raised all this fuss about me endangering the armistice and here you're plotting to kill machines off?"

Rho remained silent. She didn't look particularly apologetic, but she probably wasn't keen on overstepping her boundaries again. Theta sighed. The damage was done and she knew it. I suddenly had a very strong appreciation for the reproducible nature of YoRHa personalities. It must a nightmare be to try and command highly-specialized units who were brand new people every time they died.

"Let me be clear: Our actions and those of the full Army of Humanity are separate matters. Legacy Reclamation's goal remains the same as it has always been: To care for humanity's legacy according to the memories we passed down since the earliest pre-gestalt androids. 98% of the machine population was wiped out when the tower fell, and this is an opportunity we do not intend to squander." She planted a hand one hand on the table and glared down at me with a shine to her eyes that truly made them golden. "Whether they are peaceful or not… Legacy Reclamation cannot and will not allow machines to be the ones who inherit the earth."

I was only half-joking when I'd compared her to V earlier, but she definitely had the intensity. "Ok… I get that. But what's it got to do with 9S?"

Theta stood up straight, adjusted her uniform, and turned her stare on Rho with a barely visible go-ahead.

"I apologize if my earlier statement was unclear," she began. "Our goal isn't to enter a new major conflict with machines. It's to prevent them from colonizing the planet unchecked. Ideally, android kind would begin to develop for its own sake. However, current models of androids have proved extremely susceptible to loss of purpose. Without humanity to push them forward, they'll be quick to cease their own manufacture and fade into obscurity as they began to before the aliens appeared. It was the proposal of the previous Rho to produce a new kind of android that wouldn't have this problem, but there is simply too much variance in the existing personality algorithms to presume it can be done without new research. However, new research is...expensive and time-consuming. It required nearly 6000 years of effort to produce a design evolution as dramatic as the difference between YoRHa and common-model androids, and even you are susceptible to loss of purpose."

"…Except for 9S," I completed, biting my cheek to hide the start of a smile.

Rho didn't seem to notice. "He has proved an extraordinary case. Despite losing literally everything, he continues to cling to life and with the passage of time he shows signs of developing an innate sense of purpose and the ability to self-direct without falling into despair. You too—you erased your own memories and lived under the assumption you were a resistance android in order to circumvent your original purpose and now you are here pursuing 'justice', misguided as it might be. It's useful that you're an executioner, but what we truly want is to isolate that resilience and determination to progress. Tweak your faculties over time until that behavior is reliable and reproducible in a less expensive model. That will be the next generation of androids."

"Which will be…" I gestured faintly at Rho-2's fancy new body. "Templated? Like YoRHa?"

Rho's face scrunched. Her passive curious expression disappeared, and she looked at me like I was lower than dirt. "They'll be androids. It defeats the purpose entirely to create androids who carry the hearts of machines."

I nodded as though it made perfect sense, but I had to fold my hands under my nose to hide how hard I was trying not to laugh.

They thought 9S was a miracle case who had picked himself up and just decided to live on his own. Idiots. He was alive because V was human. He had a purpose because V's existence was purpose enough to raise any YoRHa up from the edge of the grave. If he was continuing to do things and make choices now that V might be gone, it was probably because V had unknowingly given him permission to be dissatisfied with his fate, the same as he had to me. Whatever he'd learned while he was with V was too valuable to die with.

Too valuable to die with...?

Oh. So that was how it was.

I'd erased myself over and over again, and finally, I had something I was proud of and didn't want to forget about. I'd let myself grow close to someone I would never harm. Just once, I'd protected someone. If there was a place where I could see all those faces I'd called friend, comrade, or lover before I took their lives, it was only worth it to die if I could hold onto that memory as I went and say to them that I did one good thing.

I didn't want the kind of person I was as Fern to disappear. And as 8E… I just didn't want to lose the simple memory of being given a choice.

Well, that simplified things nicely.

I didn't care what these stupid army androids did. If they wanted to study 9S from now until the sun went out looking for something that wasn't there, that was their business. Whether machines or androids inherited this tarnished, oil-stained planet was irrelevant to me.

Before, my goal was just to die in whatever way they saw fit, but now? Hearing my body talked about like I was just renting it made me even more determined to destroy it so thoroughly they would never be able to use me for anything. If these vultures wanted to scavenge me, I was going to make them fucking work for it.

"Those are noble causes I guess. But that doesn't have anything to do with me." I stood and courteously pushed my chair back in. "I promise you if you study me you won't find what you're looking for. 9S… Honestly, you probably won't find it there either, but good luck."

Gamma's heavy hand fell on my shoulder and I could feel her trying to press me back into my seat. "Sit down, Unit 8E."

"No thanks!" I chirped. "My memories are too valuable to give up just because you guys want to play god. So I think I'll just go."

Theta made a disappointed 'don't waste my time' face that V would've closely identified with. "We would like to avoid damaging you. Don't make this difficult."

For knowing I was a combat model they really weren't taking me seriously enough.

Fun thing about YoRHa design: Physical black box stability relied on the same materialization sub-routine that allowed YoRHa to alter the matter state of weapons and items. When there was a delicate piece of equipment with a self-destruct routine in oh-so-extremely valuable android's chassis, rattling or jostling of any kind was unacceptable design. Our bodies were built to absorb shock, and our black box more or less floated with almost gyroscopic stability in a special compartment just beneath our motherboards. Knocking them around was pretty much impossible.

Android fusion reactors were comparatively quite sensitive.

I pulled the chair back out and shattered it against Gamma's chest. She was a rock of a unit, but that made her terrible at absorbing carefully directed blunt force. She stuttered from surprise and from the flicker in her power supply. Beside me, Theta reached for her weapon. I skimmed backward, deeper into Gamma's reach until my hips were nestled against hers, grabbed her by one arm and the back of her neck, and hauled.

I had to give it to her—she was probably at least as dense as a YoRHa unit. The crash as she pulverized the table beneath her mass was obnoxious. A cloud of dust and splinters flew into the air, buying me another few seconds. The noise would have caught the camp's attention and they were bound to shoot me on sight.

If only Theta's voice didn't follow me out through the linens. "Hold your fire!"

She was really becoming a pain in my ass.

I ran across the garden and rolled beneath one of the broken-down trucks to get my bearings for a moment. Throwing Gamma was a matter of making use of the expectation that I wasn't hostile. Routine practice really, but typically the surprise attack ended the life of its target. I'd have to get around Gamma if I really wanted to get out of here now. Had I left a weapon in this camp anywhere…?

I shuffled forward until I popped up at the front of the truck. A bunch of boxes that hadn't shifted in months piled against and wall and I gladly ducked behind it to find what I was looking for. Like an idiot, I'd sealed it with a lock that required hacking and here I was with no pod.

The truck was moving. Gamma was physically pulling the damn thing out of the way.

"Fuck it," I grunted, and kicked the mechanism. It gave easily and I took a bit of hacking damage for my trouble, but it wasn't an especially strong defensive system. Bit of chromatic aberration few sparks on my tongue. I'd be fine.

I got my fists into both bracers and whirled with them in time to block a buzzing hit from a glowing tonfa. Theta really was full of surprises.

"Your NFCS is not online." She had a cool tone given her arms were shaking with the effort of pinning me in place. "You can't use those. Stand down."

"NFCS...? Ohhhh, I get it." I bared my teeth in a sharp-edged laugh. "You think I'm the kind of YoRHa who can only do damage if that flashy system is working. Sorry to let you know this now, but killing Lobelia and Rho wasn't that much of a fluke."

It wasn't her fault. Without an operational NFCS, most YoRHa were pretty helpless. A side effect of the heavy specialization. But I was among the executioners tasked specifically with infiltrating resistance camps. And more often than we ever let on, the difference between a very clean or very messy execution was the ability to do things the old-fashioned way.

I could see Theta reconsidering her proximity, but I didn't give her much time to think it through. The Type-4O fists were dangerously bladed. A jab was as good as piecing pierced with a sword. I did not need the boost in force or the showy combat routines. I only needed to connect. She was good with her tonfa, but she was no YoRHa.

Gamma snatched Theta back from my onslaught. She was such a good subordinate; if only she'd broken my shoulder broke the start instead of trying to intimidate me I might not have gotten this far. Ah well. I plunged both fists forward into one of her meaty thighs. To my surprise, she still tried to make a grab for me and I had to fall backward—immobilized or not if she got me in her grip I wasn't going anywhere.

The sensors along my arms prickled and I kicked backward, tearing my bracers from of Gamma's thighs and getting splashed with her oil for it. Rho had fired some kind of EMP weapon at me. She couldn't fire the second round too fast, or she'd have done it already. They were still trying to capture me. Which meant it was a matter of time before someone tried to do to me exactly what I'd done to Gamma, and they had more than enough guns to make it happen. I scrambled back on my feet, hopped across the tops of the parked trucks, and made a run for it.

I had to disappear and fast.

I dove right outside the camp. Think, think. The geography was a mess, and my mental maps weren't lining up. Was there anywhere I'd hidden anything else I could use? Had I left things in places as Fern? As Ivy?

My feet pounded all the faster as I heard someone hit the stream behind me and a bullet zipped past me and kicked up a soggy splatter of mud. The crater loomed in front of me. I could leap into the mass of white blocks and try to hunker down, but the routes of escape were way too unpredictable. I ducked into one of the empty, listing buildings on the crater's edge instead. Not to hide but to obscure my trail by disappearing down to a lower floor where I could reach the window of a different half-destroyed building.

I repeated this several times, ascending and descending through the wreckage until I was inside a clogged runoff drain. There was an elevator inside. I had no idea where it went, but I took it. If Rho really could see in all those different spectrums, the last thing I wanted was to be in an enclosed space where she could easily spot me.

The place at the bottom of the elevator was dark. Without any way to generate light, I wasn't keen to go too far, but I stepped out and let myself breathe the still air. Machines were down here. I could hear the distinct whir-clank of their movement in the stillness. If they heard the elevator activate, they didn't care to investigate, and I didn't care to go poking at them.

What a fucking mess this had all turned into. Where was I supposed to go from here? I couldn't kill myself, and Theta hadn't let the resistance androids kill me. I could get 9S to kill me, but frankly, the idea was enough to boil me in my own oil.

If only V were still here...

Dropping flat in the dirt, I closed my eyes and tried to feel for him the way Fern did. I got a vague sense of him being above me, but not much else. And even that might not mean anything. I knew how he lingered on the air for weeks after he'd moved on. Every day the sensation would grow weaker and fainter and eventually a month from now, it would be as though he'd never been there at all.

I combed through my memory for anything, absolutely anything I could use. Maybe if I could get in contact with Pod 042 I could find out for certain if V was still here…?

Again, that meant I had to turn to 9S.

I scratched at my hair and heaved a short, bitter sigh. "God damn it..."

He couldn't have been in the camp, because he'd definitely have come running at the commotion. V wouldn't have let him go with him to fight the gods—it wasn't the kind of fight an android could participate in. So, he had to be around doing his own thing, right?

Maybe at that machine network copy everyone kept talking about?

I picked myself up and looked at the elevator. My NFCS would need a little longer to boot, but the materialization sub-system was still operational. I knew I had to have some of them, I never let myself run out.

Three small, unassuming rods appeared in my hand. The maniac who taught me how to make E-bombs was long dead, but I thanked them anyway. They would buy me some time if I ran into anyone, and I couldn't hide there forever.

At the top of the elevator, I stared out into the pit. I didn't see anything, but that didn't necessarily mean there wasn't someone who didn't see me. I kept to a low on the right side of the pit where I'd be out of sight to anyone searching for me on the left. Nothing happened. For ten minutes. For twenty. For thirty. By the time I got down into the pit, I was constantly looking over my shoulder. I was used to being chased by other YoRHa and they didn't give up half as easy...but maybe Theta didn't want to take on the risk of a hostile E unit. That was bound to only last until she realized I hadn't put in the effort to kill anyone.

I didn't know what I expected, but it wasn't the enormous chunk of memory alloy stretching into the dark. Something that might've been a pod once was sitting on a long block between 9S and two other scanners, keening at a frequency I could only barely hear.

I crept closer, with my hands held up and whispered. "Pod…?"

The gunmetal colored support unit turned. I didn't move and neither did it. The antenna rose, slowly turned, and lowered, and it drifted slowly toward me. "WHAT DO YOU WANT?"

Was it just me, or did it sound like she had an attitude? "Uhh… Can you tell me if V is still around?"

"…NEGATIVE. THIS POD IS NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE SUPPORT TO YORHA UNITS OTHER THAN UNIT 9S."

She was definitely angry at me, but I wasn't about to take any shit from a moody Pod. "You also can't attack unless you receive direct orders through the FFCS, while I'm at liberty to do whatever I deem necessary. Right now, I would like to do nothing to him. That can change if I don't get an answer."

Her antennae spun in short jerky motions and she turned away from me. "TSK."

"Did…" I squinted. "Did you just—"

"CONNECTING WITH POD 042," she interrupted. "SUBJECT V'S STATUS IS CURRENTLY UNCLEAR."

"The hell does that mean?"

"UNKNOWN. POD 042 REPORTS HE IS 'PHYSICALLY' PRESENT, BUT NON-RESPONSIVE."

My heart sank and jumped at the same time. I rushed out of the mouth of the tunnel to begin my trek. If I got to V, I could...

I could what, exactly?

My momentum drained before it could even begin to build into anything. V wasn't going to kill me just because I asked. V never did anything for me just because I asked—he barely even let me secure food to keep him alive. My processor must have been in bad shape because the image of a merciful god who would end my life going through my mind bore no resemblance to the real deal.

I glanced once more over my shoulder. At 9S, busy in that strange hacking state.

I could do what I wanted. V would do what he had to. But I didn't want to kill the kid. He wasn't mine to execute and more importantly, the other two scanners were innocent bystanders in all this. I didn't hate 9S enough to take them down with him.

V was shrewd when it came to shedding blood. He'd call my bluff if I tried to hold 9S' life over him. Maybe kick my ass for trying, but it wouldn't be enough for him to kill me.

The Type-4O fists sizzled at my hips.

Within their data was a certain protocol. The one I used to wipe my memory over and over again. Forgetting wasn't like death. Despite having pursued it, it might be something far, far worse. I could make the 9S that knew V, the 9S V had come to care for... disappear entirely.

Theta thought me and 9S were possessive, but she had no idea that V was just the same. I remembered the way he looked at Fern when she didn't leave him and 9S alone fast enough. If I held 9S' memories in my hand and threatened to destroy them, there was no way he wouldn't kill me like an animal. The more I imagined it, the more the gloom of the day seemed to recede. As I wiped at the oil dripping sluggishly down my face, a blissful burning sensation filled my chest. That sun-like warmth I associated with V, only turned up until it threatened to leave nothing of me but ashes.

"Fine," I breathed with a scathing smile. "If I can't get this world to produce justice on its own, I'll make it happen myself."