3 November 11946: 58 Days Before New Year's Eve

All around the tiny island, the sea stretched away like cold oil in every direction, reflecting the warmth of a few shining clouds and the dull bronze of the horizon. Twenty or thirty androids watched 9S' flight unit descend. All expressionless mouths and goggle-obscured eyes that reminded him sharply of what it was to be an outsider.

"You're too far north," one with a grim, demeanor told him matter-of-factually before he was even fully landed. "The descent is to the south of here."

9S inspected the local structures. The light seemed even dimmer in Sector H after so much time spent in sun, but when his visual field centered on what he was looking for, he hopped out and pointed to it. "I'm looking for someone who used that access point on 19 October 11946. Tall, male, dark hair would've been traveling with a red-haired female model a little bigger than me. Most likely in the company of a female model affiliated with the HHRMO."

They stared up at his flight unit, arms crossed. "They're not here."

"Where did they go?"

"Away."

"I'd sure love to do the same," 9S hinted with a little annoyance. "If you'd just confirm where they went."

"Nobody out here is running toward Sector H."

Curiosity got the better of him and he glanced south. "How bad is it down there?"

"The horizon was completely on fire for two weeks. Don't know more than that. Don't intend to find out. The group you're looking for took a boat out of here heading west. Iceland outpost, Greenland outpost, night kingdom. Those are your most probable options. This is a neutral jurisdiction landmass, so if you don't have business here…" They made a sweeping gesture that welcomed 9S to go anywhere, as long as it got him off the island.

9S clambered back into his flight unit, more than happy to put the inhospitable isle behind him.

Neutral jurisdiction meant Theta had probably brought them there. The plan had worked. Maybe a little too well if it led to a descent mission, but there wasn't anything he could do about that now. He climbed up to an altitude where he wouldn't have to worry about anti-air defenses and took a glance at the southern horizon. From so high up, it wasn't hard to miss the shoreline of the mainland still smoldering like a burnt-out log on the rusted strip of beach.

Part of him itched to go there. To the stacks, to find out if Hibiscus and the rest of Wisteria's family hadn't been caught up in all of this. But that would only draw attention to them and cause trouble for 1S and the other YoRHa. '49' had been in Sector H. With any luck, there'd be no one to say 'YoRHa Unit 9S' had been anywhere near here before today.

He headed west and put the last of the light behind him.

4 November 11946: 57 Days Before New Year's Eve

Several hours passed with nothing but darkness beneath him. On and on it stretched, an impossible pit that swallowed the horizon and threatened to do the same to the stars, until 9S reached the night kingdom.

It wasn't what he saw that announced his arrival to him. Not the specks of glaciers or the sudden white stretch of a frozen landmass or lights that would signify android presence. It wasn't even the sudden burst of static that clouded his map.

It was the sound.

At first, he mistook it for a siren or wind gusting through funnels made of thin, reverberating metal like tin or aluminum. Then they began to overlap. Dozens of metallic roars that he had no reference point for crowded the soundscape and rendered his aural graph as useless as his map. Even the dinosaur machine did not have vocalizations that sounded anything like this.

The first dragon took him by surprise. It Erupted through the thick cloud cover with jaws split wide enough for 9S to make out rows of glistening chrome teeth. He jerked, and they snapped shut on his exhaust trail—too close for his comfort. More followed, plunging through the clouds at him. One right after the other, then in pairs, then in trios. Their raw pursuit was too slow for the advanced maneuverability and acceleration rate of the flight unit, but their ability to dive from ahead of him and work in a growing pack worried him.

"I thought they were on our side!"

"UNKNOWN."

A torrent of fireballs overwhelmed his dark-adjusted eyes. He lurched, veering in blind, ragged patterns without even the internal visual of enemy signals to rely on. One of the dragon weapons rammed into him from behind, and he grunted as a starburst of aberrations bloomed across his vision.

He choked the barrage triggers. A dozen missiles found their mark at close range, the answering pained roar rattling through 9S' skull. To his horror, he began to lose altitude. The dragon weapon was still latched onto the flight unit and dragging him down, the accelerator squealing to keep them from a meteoric fall under the weight. Eyes darting along the clouds, he extended the close-range laser weapon and sliced in wild, quick motions. They sizzled through skin and silicone and hard metal joints until the body fell away, only its locked-in feet left hanging from the flight unit.

Dozens of red glowing points were converging on him from below and glimmers of more lurked in the cloud cover.

Shit…!

He'd never heard of a dragon weapon in orbit, so he took his chance and throttled straight up into the atmosphere. Fireballs burned through the clouds. Singed his senses with the odor of burning chemicals as he spun and wove. His auxiliary vents hissed ribbons of steam from a body that felt too small to hold the pressure in his chest.

Heat exploded against his back.

"REPORT," said Pod 153's disconcertingly calm voice. "DAMAGE SUSTAINED IN LEFT THRUSTER."

9S gritted his teeth and struggled to course-correct. The clouds blurred together as he entered a dizzying, uncontrolled spiral. "Come on, come on!"

A gray blur appeared at the edge of his blind spot and rammed him off course.

Re-orientation became a battle all its own. Every time he came close, he was sent pinwheeling through the sky out of his own control, bounced between scaly gray bodies and beating wings while the roaring reached a cacophonous crescendo. When he came to a sudden stop, he found himself staring into the sullen red glow of a dragon's eyes. It had bitten into the leg of his flight unit. A fresh set of claws sank in from above, nearly piercing through 9S' shoulder, and the in-flight systems erupted in red warnings that quickly fizzled and shorted.

The dragon weapons pulled in opposite directions.

"Eject!"

The flight unit came apart with a screech and a brilliant burst of flame. 9S shot forward into the open sky. He tumbled over the back of a dragon, slipping between its wings and clawing for purchase. His gloves slipped off and vanished into the sky, leaving his fingernails to scrape at the hard plating as he slid down the dragon's back and toward the end of its tail.

Shadow bulged from beneath his coat to assist with two pairs of enormous black claws. The dragon gave an almost insulted cry of pain as they sank in, whipping and flailing to rid itself of them until a chunk of its flesh came loose and once again left 9S falling.

The other dragons were dispersing. The tiny falling speck of 9S' body did not interest them half as much as the burning remains of the flight unit. Pod couldn't regain control of his velocity at this speed and a fall from this height would leave him in pieces.

Excec_A090!

A dimly shining wire snatched him back toward the dragon that threw them. He only had one sword left. He couldn't risk losing it any more than he could allow himself to die, so he 9S materialized the first spear his system presented to him and plunged it in beneath one of the wing blades.

It screeched. With only one functional wing, it was forced to spiral down as 9S had been forced to spiral up. Its fellow dragons paid it only the faintest curiosity, impassive as 9S and the dragon fell together like a spinning comet and crashed into the snow.

10 November 11946: 51 Days Before New Year's Eve

The familiarity of the boot screen welcomed 9S to pre-consciousness with the comfort of surprisingly green system checks. Full consciousness was colder. All he could see was the faint shine of his optic lights reflecting on the snow, and his body was heavy. So much he couldn't lift himself at all.

"Pod…?" he called shakily, alarmed by the prospect of motor damage.

"GOOD MORNING, 9S. UNIT SHADOW, PLEASE ALLOW 9S TO GET UP."

The weight lifted only to be replaced by a warm tongue scouring at his cheek. He gave a relieved sigh and rubbed at her ears. His body was stiff with disuse and the low temperature, but he could move alright. "I'm fine, I'm fine... Status report."

"FLIGHT UNIT LOST. SIGNIFICANT BUT NON-FATAL IMPACT DAMAGE SUSTAINED. REPAIR AND REBOOT TIME: 133 HOURS. NO FURTHER HOSTILITY FROM DRAGON WEAPONS, DESPITE ON-GOING PROXIMITY."

9S peered up into the sky. It had started to snow, and he couldn't make out any of those telling red glows. "Guess they just don't like anything flying around except them?"

"UNKNOWN."

There'd be a lot of that if he wasted time hypothesizing or voicing all the questions percolating through him. He got to his feet instead. A survey of the terrain yielded the dismaying discovery that he'd landed on an island. Bigger than the one he'd investigated off the coast of Sector H, but still an island with a strait full of forbidding ice formations without even one convenient sandbar or shallow he could cross.

Even if he could cross, how was he supposed to find V on foot in a place as big as the night kingdom? He didn't even have access to his map.

How was he supposed to get back to the city?

To 2B…?

Deep breaths. Deep, cooling breaths until the sharpness of the air stung the roof of his mouth. One problem at a time. "What's wrong with my map?"

"WIDE-RANGE JAMMING SIGNAL IN EFFECT. THIS POD HAS IDENTIFIED NO GAPS IN COVERAGE WITHIN SEVERAL KILOMETERS."

"Any indication where in the night kingdom we are?"

"NORTH AMERICAN CONTINENT, EASTERN COAST. ACCORDING TO ENTRY TRAJECTORY, APPROXIMATE LATITUDE 48°, APPROXIMATE LONGITUDE 57°."

He frowned. The only clue he had was the two sets of coordinates he'd sent to V, but they weren't anywhere near here. The closest was the more northerly one but getting there on foot would take weeks. Even if he dared to approach androids out here—and he wasn't keen on the idea after the hostile welcome from the weapons—there might not be anything they could do for him either.

"What happened to the dragon we crashed with?"

Pod 153 took him to a trail of black oil in the snow. Labored breathing reached them from beneath an overhang in the distance, just barely muffled by the falling snow. He still remembered how it felt trying to cut through the legs of the dead dragon locked onto his flight unit. Animal bone didn't feel like that, but the behavior was decidedly animal-like for it to crawl off alone after sustaining damage.

It sounded like every dying animal 9S had encountered in search of that strange moose machine that took up residence in the forest kingdom.

His spear was still planted in the dragon's back. 9S recognized it instantly—he was in luck. That was the one that had the invasive program that could adjusted enemy behavior tables. If he could cut in just the right place, it should override the enemy recognition programming. That could be a quick ticket to getting off this island, back on the move, and maybe even back to the day kingdom.

His approach was not met peacefully. Red eyes and a rattling hiss warned him that even getting the spear back into his hands would not be the kind of task he could casually complete.

"Shadow," he whispered. "A little help?"

She melted from under his coat and stalked off to the left, growling and spitting and drawing attention to herself with the implication of a more immediate threat. 9S crept the other way, just close enough to still have a running start. The dragon whipped its head around. His foot touched down in time to launch him up over the dragon's snapping jaws. He yanked the spear out, curling as the dragon thrashed with fresh pain.

He caught himself chanting 'sorry, sorry, sorry!' in rushed, wincing whispers as he stabbed along the creature's spine in search of a circuit that went to its processing core. Four tries in, a visual indicator in the shape of a halo popped up in 9S' feed. The dragon still threw him off, but it lay where it fell afterward with no further attempts to bite off his head.

9S flopped back into the snow and let himself savor the small victory for a bit.

The dragon watched him passively, and he took in the shape of it now that he had the luxury. Horns curved up from the jaw and cheeks instead of the head, flaring out around its face in a mane of burnished rose gold tipped in that slow red glow that made him think of the running lights in the Bunker's hangar. The wings had a strange and leathery bonelessness to them. More like manta fins than the wings of a bat or a bird and tipped with another glowing red protrusion. The tail was twice the length of the rest of the body and thick as an ancient column.

As he carefully approached to assess the damage, he saw its back was traced with dark red grooves that reminded him of the pattern on his black box.

Beneath the dragon's skin, sparks and wires greeted him where Shadow's claws had raked and most of all where he'd jammed the weapon into the shoulder. If he wanted flight out of this creature, that would have to be repaired.

He flexed his hands and pushed his sleeves up.

16 November 11946 - 45 Days Before New Year's Eve

Repairing an unfamiliar piece of machinery with nothing but leftover materials he happened to have piled away in his NFCS storage area would not have been 9S' first choice for something stimulating to do. And yet, he found himself fully engrossed as the days became hours.

The dragon fascinated him. He only had that one grainy glimpse of a dragon from the datachip V found to go on, but the weapons seemed to be built with as much respect to the real thing as androids were to humans. Their biosynthetic components weren't anywhere near as sophisticated, but the underlying machinery was so elegant it may as well have been built only a few months ago. The water intake needs seemed much higher—it munched on snow for most of its downtime, like some herd herbivore idly chewing at grass—but considering the size and what it was capable of, it was impressive that it didn't seem to need anything else. He'd expected a much clunkier design given they were first released thousands of years ago, but it was possible they had been undergoing version updates and new development the whole time, he supposed.

Maybe he could dissect one and see exactly how they were constructed beyond the surface level…

That would have to be after he found V and got back home. For now, he needed a ride, and the last thing he wanted was to have to hijack another one, so he kept those destructively inquisitive urges in check.

Once repairs were as complete as he could manage, flight was a simple enough matter. Granted it was nothing like riding a moose or a boar. The need to be out of the way of the wings meant 9S had to perch over the creature's shoulders with his legs draped on either side of the deceptively slender neck. Steering was as simple as guiding it by the horns but faced 9S with the constant sight of how far he had to fall. Which he did his best to not think about during the occasional glances from other dragons as they navigated off the island and further into the continent.

Mostly, he tried to stay focused on the problem of destination. That brought him quickly to odds with the omnipresent jamming frequency.

He was fully capable of constructing and completing the necessary equation to triangulate his approximate coordinates based on the direction of his travel, speed, and starting point. That didn't mean he wanted to. It was a pain, time-consuming, and the potential for error was high because he didn't have anything to proof his inputs against.

A few days into a largely north and western flight path, he spied a row of radio towers stretching off across the vast forest that seemed to stretch on forever and decided to seize the opportunity to create a gap. The dragon chewed up half a dozen of the towers in either direction of one left intact, which 9S perched near the top of and easily hijacked.

He woke Pod. There had been no reason to let her run her power supply out given the absence of sunlight, so he'd been letting her hang off his back in offline mode. But with the other nearby towers out and one left for 9S to override, hopefully, she'd be able to offer him some sense of orientation. "Can you tell where we are now?"

"NEGATIVE. POD REGIONAL NETWORK DOES NOT EXTEND TO THE KINGDOM OF NIGHT."

"I suppose it wouldn't. Hmm… Try submitting a direct request to the Moon Server. Pod 006 should be able to figure something out from there, right?"

"POSSIBLE. CONNECTING…"

It wasn't going to be a quick connection just because a few towers were knocked offline. For his part, he managed to isolate the primary source of the signal, for which the towers were mere relays. The origination points were Satelite Lizhin out somewhere far further west from him, and Satellite Iztac down in South America. As far as he could tell, they covered the entirety of the continental mass between the two of them and a pretty robust boosting system.

What was the purpose of even having such a strong jamming signal? Something to do with the aliens? It couldn't be—the power needed to sustain something like this had to cost a lot of money. They would've cut it off ages ago. Or at least when the war officially ended.

Well, whatever it was, no wonder AWOL androids always tried to come here. It was impossible to find anybody when you couldn't even rely on tracking methods as direct as bio-address or personal-use frequencies.

"Any luck?" he asked.

"STILL CONNECTING. PROPOSAL: ALLOW THIS POD TO CONCENTRATE."

Geez, you don't have to be so touchy…

He kicked his feet while he waited. Shadow sat beside him, staring off into the dark. Part of him had been hoping she might just know where V was. Griffon always seemed to. But maybe she was still out of his range. She seemed every bit as lost as he did as they watched dragon lights and radio towers blink in the dark like fireflies.

There was something odd about the night kingdom. Something he couldn't put his finger on.

Twin glares lit up the night, streaking red smoke across the rising quarter moon. He assumed it was some kind of request for aid to address the towers he'd mangled, but a few moments later, the sky became a star shower of red lights. Dragons for as far as he could see descended from the clouds and vanished beneath the trees. Even the one he'd taken control of released its grip on the side of the radio tower and disappeared beneath the frosted evergreens.

There was a shift in atmospheric pressure. The oppressive gravity he associated with Nightmare being summoned fell crushed him inward on himself where he sat.

The darkness between the stars spread. Blotting them out and replacing them with a seemingly infinite void dotted by glowing flecks of red and gold. It was impossible to tell where it began or ended, but a brilliant, exposed machine core shone from behind the bends of what looked like incomplete ribs as it soared overhead. It bathed him in a strong pinkish light that made him think uncomfortably of flesh. He'd never seen a machine core shine such a color before.

The shape was hard to make out, but it had wings. 9S knew this, because they beat exactly once as it passed, and scattered the few harmless clouds that had ventured across the otherwise clear night. That wind made it as far as the ground, ruffling his hair and causing every tree and radio tower in its path to groan.

In the aftermath, 9S remained paralyzed by an all-consuming hush that seemed to muffle even the pulse of his black box. He didn't move an inch until he could see the stars again, and then he could only manage a dry gulp.

"CONNECTED," Pod 153 announced helpfully. "PATHING BETWEEN PRESENT LOCATION AND DESIRED LOCATION PROVIDED ACCORDING TO ARCHIVED MAP DATA."

"Good, good… Hey, uhm... you saw that, didn't you?"

She turned in the direction the shadow had disappeared in. "...AFFIRMATIVE."

"Was that a machine?"

"UNKNOWN."

Long ago, standing atop the empty hole where Beepy escaped from, he'd hoped there were no machines like Grün that flew.

He really really hoped that wasn't what he'd just seen. "...Let's wait until we see some other dragons start flying around before we take off."

20 November 11946: 41 Days Before New Year's Eve

A storm picked up on the wind, and 9S did not need an operator to tell him how bad it was going to be. Flurries had arrived one moment, and thirty minutes later, visibility was down to a few feet, the temperature was plummeting, and the wind was fighting him for control of the dragon. But they were close, so he pushed them as far as he could.

When he saw spotlights cutting through the dark, he submitted to the need to land. The moment they touched the ground, the dragon scraped through the snow until it found ice and punctured through it to drink. He left it gusting steam from its back, secure that it wouldn't go anywhere without him in this weather.

It was quiet beneath the trees. Easier to see and determine what exactly he was looking for. All that stood out was a massive half-lit plateau suspiciously clean of even a hint of snow. Dragons perched along the upper rim in close crowds against the encroaching blizzard. He strode around the base until he encountered an obvious and suspiciously well-carved path in the cliff face.

Shadow melted from beneath his coat, and he let himself be a little hopeful as he ran after her. She seemed to be in good spirits, her ears perked and attentive and her tail swaying high as she padded up the sloped path.

A tiny scanner beside a massive door greeted them and his spirits dipped right back down. Passcode-protected doors were never not annoying to hack. Getting them to open was more like picking a traditional lock than accessing frameworks and bypassing defense systems. Not complicated, just primitive. It ended up taking him a full hour before he arrived at a viable code, and by then he was rubbing vigorously at his coat to raise his surface temperature.

Shadow bolted inside. She snorted and sniffed along the floors while 9S kept his eyes up and about them. It was warm, but he wasn't going to complain about that. Unnaturally clean. Empty as the bunker without any of its rooms or sections. He caught a glimpse of a brightly lit garden beyond the sole glass door that led into the otherwise blacked-out inner area, but Shadow didn't stop for it, so neither did he.

She took him instead to a side room, where he no longer needed her. There was a scent of salt and sweat among the greases and chemical cleaners. A stray fishbone, and a sort of residue to the air and surfaces he couldn't describe ('human dust' was always what he thought, but it felt like it was in poor taste considering V really could crumble if he ran out of magic). All of it was evidence that V had been there recently.

He smiled, relieved in spite of being too late. V had been here very recently. "You're probably on your way to Roswell now..."

That's where he'd be going next, then. But for now, he had to wait out the storm. That meant occupying himself until the wind stopped threatening to shake the trees right out of the earth.

He unlatched Pod 153 off his back and sat her on a shelf, stretching his shoulders while looking through all the loose components and supplies. There had to be somewhere all of this got used. Why else would they be laying around?

A door on the far wall caught his attention. Another scan-based lock barred his way, but it opened with the same passcode as the front door. The hum of machinery wafted up a long, dimly lit stairwell, and he descended into what he presumed was a server area. If there was a storm rolling in and he had nothing better to do but wait it out anyway, he might as well see just what this place was about.

Bundles of wire did run along the walls at the bottom, but it didn't otherwise resemble any server room he'd ever seen. The arrangement was all off. Branching and branching and branching again, ending in green nodes that strobed slowly. The air seemed to pulsate in slow motion, and he swore he smelled chlorophyll.

Still, he pressed further inside through the jungle of increasingly thick wires.

A long, winding trail down narrowing corridors eventually spat him out at a massive pillar that appeared to be both the source and destination of all the wires, now in a state of such chaotic organization he couldn't see how anyone ever got anything done down there.

There was no terminal in the standard sense, but when he reached out to assess connectivity, it took him a meager 1.02 seconds before he was inside.

xxXXxx

9S stands at the edge of a massive white tree. The horizontal maze structure he is accustomed to is not present. Instead, branches reach toward the sky of a hacking space darker than any he's ever found among machines, YoRHa systems, or the lunar server. The paths forward are sinuous and vertical, stretching up and forming the shape of the tree. The paths behind and around him lead to other trees. They do not shine, but they are as stark as the tower against the gloom.

"Where am I…?"

As if in response, a number lights up inside a pentagon on the side of the tree.

{No. 07}

"Uhm… okay. Where is that?"

A pale map appears in his readout, startling him. It shows what must be several hundred million acres of the eastern central continent covered in white, with a few scattered patches on the western coast, and another vast swath of light coating most of the northern chunk of South America. A black '#07' appears in the high north. Approximately where his physical body is.

Where numbers 01 to 06 and how many more there must be cross his mind. But he refrains from voicing any other questions. No permission was requested or given before his readouts were opened. The concept that this foreign system can access him as freely as he can access it is an unsettling one.

A testing step allows him to walk straight up the vertical path toward the treetops. His body is articulated, but the rules of the space are as alien to him as the space itself. He climbs without need of any actual climbing and wills himself to not impose gravity on his avatar when there is none.

At the top of the tree, he finds that where the leaves should be, there are innumerable threads connected to the seemingly infinite branches. A few leaves do sprout as he watches. In bunches of two or three, splitting and combining with no identifiable pattern. They weave away along those threads no sooner than they are fully formed.

One unfurls near 9S in this manner. He reaches out to touch it before it can be whisked away.

A memory unfolds in his mind.

He's a little boy. No older than eight, he thinks. He plays on an unfamiliar contraption, spinning it faster and faster as he struggles to hold on against increasing centrifugal force. His grip predictably fails, and he is sent skidding through a bed of wood chips that aren't hard enough to cut but still scrape and scuff his hands and knees. His eyes sting. It's strange to 9S—to cry as the first response to such a minor injury. But who he is in this memory has never been calibrated or undergone stress testing. The pain seems great because he has only a few references for pain to begin with.

9S can't remember ever being so inexperienced, but he thinks he recognizes other aspects of the response. The desire for certainty that the pain will pass. The desire to be comforted. To feel anything else.

This small child that he is in the memory receives those things. They are provided by the arms of a blurred but reassuring presence that he understands is meant to be a parent. But that part of the memory is not complete. It fades at the edges, and 9S swallows unsuccessfully at the weight in his throat. It nearly overcomes over him just how much he doesn't want it to go away. It vanishes regardless, and he is left back in the trees, his glimpse of what it is to be a child loved by a parent already a faded vision.

The leaf dissolves in 9S' hand, and he looks up with fresh eyes. A whole forest of these trees stretches out across the empty night, weaving memories together and sending them elsewhere.

"The false memory system…" he whispers. "This has to be it."

After finding the YoRHa manufacturing facility, it almost doesn't surprise him. He prods at one of the threads, but it does not respond. They are likely connections to the production facilities for standard model androids. System hopping away from his body in a place with a heavy-duty signal jammer active would not be wise, so he doesn't prod again.

He looks around for anything that isn't the leaves or the threads and glimpses a familiar sight: a port.

Passing through it takes him back down to the bottom. Past the bottom. Into a roots system stretching down beneath the surface, feeding into a row of black cores that are glaringly obvious as machine-things against the borderline organic nature of this hacking space. Each is encased safely in a protective shell, and as 9S watches, leaves touch against them, unfurl briefly, and dissolve. Over and over with no visible change.

It is hard to tell if it's a simulation being run or a real and active process. Either prospect presents a challenge to his processing.

Why would the false memory system be attempting to install memories directly into machine cores? Is it working? It should be, YoRHa once came with false memories just like other androids once. Is it failing? It might be, 801S had mentioned the black box was necessary for communication with the standard AI interfaces.

He stares up at the roots that lead back to the great interconnected forest complex, and only one carefully unspoken thought fills him.

What are you trying to do?

xxXXxx

Back in his body, 9S squinted down the dimly lit pillar. There didn't seem to be an easy way back up, and he didn't want to go all the way back to grab Pod off the shelf. But he had to know.

He slid down the thick cables.

The bottom was hot. Lit by hundreds of those green nodes and reeking of copper and a strange perfume like long-dead flowers.

He found the cores, laid out no different than what he'd seen in the hacking framework. There were exactly seven of them. And exactly seven half-rebuilt bodies hooked up to them by questionable strings of cable and devices he did not recognize which wove into them like a mock-up vascular system.

Not one was alive. He checked all of them and there was no sign of power traveling between the cores and the bodies. It wasn't as encouraging as he wanted it to be. Most likely, this was a highly classified R&D facility. One where any number of components, YoRHa parts apparently included, were being delivered.

His head thrummed in time with that slow, inaudible pulse.

He took a step back, nearly tripped over a wire, and turned on his heel. His temperature crept up, but breath came short as he climbed back the way he'd come hand over bare hand until his palms ached. Despite the burst of sudden paranoia, nothing accosted him. He got a bit lost in the unpleasant tangles and upsettingly organic layout of same-colored wiring and dull green light, but it didn't close in on him.

At the top of the stairs, he slammed the door shut and stood in the brightly lit, empty halls. His vision blurred. He was still inside—whatever this was.

Partial reconstruction. Memory implantation. YoRHa components—that was what bothered him most. Were the YoRHa parts there to bear the load of working with machine cores? Or was it the other way around?

What the hell was happening down there. What was it doing.

He nearly yelped as a hand settled on his head. Shadow was watching his face attentively, and rather than make use of any tendrils or an uncannily well-timed headbutt, a solid black tether trailed from her back and formed a hand that rested gently on his hair. A human hand. One he recognized probably as well as he did.

"Shadow…" She chuffed and wound around his hips until she was satisfied he'd calmed down.

He wasn't sure he had, but amazement and a hint of embarrassment did a good job of bringing him back down to earth at least. Whatever was going on, it wasn't more important than the reason he'd come here in the first place.

There was no one here. As long as it stayed that way, he'd be safe.

Seeing as there was nowhere else to go but the empty halls, he stopped into the garden. It was normal in there, which was abnormal in itself—a garden growing in the night kingdom with nobody around? He wandered down the amphitheater, picking up little spots where there were broken stems and crushed leaves. His steps crunched unexpectedly at the bottom. It looked like a fountain that kept the place watered had gone dry sometime recently. Upon closer inspection, the plants were starting to yellow and dry up.

A closed steel rose sat on a pedestal in the center of the room. He wondered who had taken the time to make something so intricate. Androids could appreciate art, but or Seaglass was the only one he'd ever met who actually made any.

When he turned, he found a shadow behind him, in vaguely the shape of a girl. He tilted his head. "Who's this supposed to be, Shadow?"

A sneeze answered. From three terraces away. Where Shadow had decided to chew on a wispy-looking plant.

Who's this supposed to be Shadow

9S froze. The words appeared as an aberration in his visual feed. Slowly, he opened his hand, and let his sword materialize.

The thing's body rippled subtly, like disturbed water, and it refused to reflect even a little of the light filtering down from above. It didn't move, but occasionally a part of its body shone in unexpected flickers of gold. Only a memory stopped him from swinging—the one he'd found inside of Beepy.

"Are you…a shade?"

Are you a shade

Shadow trotted down and paced around his legs, making a pitchy, somewhat distressed noise and staring up his face. She didn't see it. He wished he hadn't left Pod on the shelf—maybe she would've been able to verify what he was seeing.

"What the hell…"

What the hell

Whatever it was didn't appear to have any actual self. It was just repeating him. That wasn't how shades worked, was it? If it was a genuine gestalt, it had to have been human once, but after this much time, there was no way a fully functional gestalt would have survived. He supposed there was nothing to say a relapsed one might not have endured in an environment as isolated as this one. A live shade wouldn't be the strangest thing he'd seen since he came to the night kingdom.

"What are you doing in a place like this though…?"

What are you doing in a place like this though

Okay, that was getting annoying. Still, a real shade… He wondered what it was made of. Circling it, it followed him with its eyes but didn't seem inclined to move the rest of its body. He reached out and experimentally prodded—

"Huh...?"

He was alone. Though… he had a strange feeling he hadn't been.

The walls shook. Distantly, he heard wind scouring at the stones. "Oh… right. The blizzard. Must've zoned out there for a bit."

Probably just nerves. A little exhaustion. The night kingdom was too quiet, and his experience in the underbelly of this place had disoriented him in more ways than one. He dropped down among the flowers, flipping through his readouts for something to keep him occupied. If he had to stay in this creepy place, he didn't want to give it too much of his attention by puzzling over what was below him.

"Joy and woe are woven fine," he hummed in clumsy cadence. "A clothing for the soul divine…"

That sounded exactly like something V would recite, but as he flicked through his screens and waited for the howling storm to pass, he couldn't quite remember having ever heard V say those lines before.

23 November 11946: 38 Days Before New Year's Eve

Something changed on the way to Roswell.

He felt it before the dragon jerked beneath him and before Shadow began to writhe beneath his coat. Before amorphous parts of her body slithered toward the front of the dragon, and before she roared into the dark with spines rippling up along her back. He didn't know what sense tipped him off, but a sign in the distance provided all the confirmation he needed.

A crimson light appeared on the southern horizon, as though the sun had decided to rise for the first time in ten thousand years.

26 November 11946: 35 Days Before New Year's Eve

The sky was thick with a scent of rotting meat that left 9S stone still on the dragon's back, carried blindly forward without any attempt to control it. A tear in the sky easily as tall as a skyscraper shed baleful light on a world that made him understand just what it was V had been trying to prevent when he aspired to keep demons out of this world.

Manta rays with skulls on their undersides collided with dragons in the air, the victors determined more by chance than any genuine difference in power. The piled bodies of the defeated stretched across a wide radius gone soft and wet with melt and mud and oil and freely flowing blood.

Armored demons built more viciously than any machine scuttled and scurried and stomped through remains and wreckage. They did not resemble the clumsy, creeping things struggling to get the hang of possessed YoRHa bodies. These demons did not need any bodies other than the ones they already had, and their movement was practiced and precise as they closed in on a semi-circle of androids entrenched where snow still crusted the ground.

Shadow jumped and 9S pulled at the dragon's horns to direct it after her. She cut a black swathe across the icy ground, slicing through the demons on the verge of overtaking the line, and at 9S' command, the dragon's flame burned back the rest. He landed and hopped down, keeping one hand protectively to Shadow's side as he searched desperately for an android who wasn't too occupied to explain.

"Unit 9S?!"

The familiar voice only added to the ice piling up in his veins. "Theta…!"

She threw up a fist in a series of field signals that allowed the small platoon of androids to stay focused on other enemies. "What the hell are you doing here?!"

"I'm—I'm looking for V!"

She laughed, openly and almost hysterically. "Of course you are." Her eyes flicked up, and she grabbed him and yanked him down. "TANK!"

From beneath her grip, 9S watched a hulking, blue-armored monster charge at them with a mechanical screech. A single android skidded out between them and it. She was slightly larger than him but radiated an aura he had never seen an android have. With an axe that looked more like a piece of art than a weapon, she produced a pane of energy that he immediately processed as a match to his barrier programs, and he ducked out from under Theta to back her up.

Excec_A060!

Pod unlatched from his shoulders and a sequence of bright rings appeared just atop the orange-white barrier. They produced a strange resonation, and the tank creature rammed into both, the saw-toothed wheels that adorned its body spinning furiously as they attempted to break through.

A white mace appeared to 9S' left. On the other side of the android holding the axe, a black mace joined it, each held by small androids, one with white hair and one with black. They moved in perfect synchronicity and the light flickered in the tank demon's eyes. It went out, and with no fanfare, its body dissolved into bright red crystals and then into red sparks and then into nothing at all.

9S managed to get as far as 'what' before both the new androids were turned on him.

"Who the hell are you?!"

"How the hell are you riding a dragon?!"

Theta snatched them both back. "This is V's other companion. He has no idea what's going on. He's just here to find him."

"Hell is going on," the white-haired one snapped. "We tried to send your pet construct back home, and we got all this shit and a long repair bill as thanks."

"Send him back home…?" He looked again at the empty space where the tank demon had dissolved. Crumbled. Into magic. "You mean you tried to send him back where his magic comes from."

"That's generally how isolating a magical signature works, yes."

"Are you insane or just stupid," he cried. "Humans aren't made of magic; V is! Of course you couldn't send him back to a human world by using his magic as a guide! It comes from hell in the first place!"

"How the hell are we supposed to know that?!"

"Did you try asking? How did you even open something this big?!"

"The tattoos came off him and touched Rubrum and I don't fucking know, there was a reaction!"

"Rubrum…?" His memory snatched at a piece of data from the lunar server and the red light nearly vanished as his vision tunneled. "Grimoire Rubrum?"

"V is unaffected." said the android who raised the barrier, in a voice that brought the argument to an abrupt but definitive end. She was glowering off toward the fiery wound in the sky. "Focus."

Another wave of demons was approaching.

Theta grabbed 9S' shoulder. "I don't have time to care where you came from or where you've been. We need the kind of backup that comes from orbit. Is the Pod Regional Network functional?"

He shook his head numbly as the change in his situation began to register. "You… You can contact the moon server if you can do something about that signal. We have help there."

Theta asked no questions. She barely spared him a second look as she descended into the ranks, came back with a close-range canceller, and worked on making the connection. Just as she said, she didn't have time to care about anything but getting her message out into the world.

"Attention all android forces, Army, Resistance, or otherwise. This is Commander Theta of Satellite Гримизна! The human identified in Sector H is engaged with unknown enemy forces at 33.3943° N, 104.5230° W! I repeat, we are under attack by an unidentified enemy, and the human identified at Sector H is engaged in combat at the point of invasion! We are requesting emergency response at 33.3943° N, 104.5230° W!"

Over a papery tongue, 9S spoke. "Where's V?"

The four of them gestured toward the breach.

Before he'd made it two steps, Shadow was biting into the back of his coat, the ornate axe blocked his way, and Theta had him by an arm—tight enough to make his plates creak. "V left Scheherazade and I an order, 9S. That no one was to follow his through. I will not see that order disobeyed."

9S remembered how hunted V looked when he found out the camp had been attacked by demons. Overcome with as much indignant temper, yet his grimace was one of remorse. Guilt, maybe. Enough at least to make him apologize on the spot, even though it wasn't his fault. He remembered Fern's horrified panic when V vanished into the falls without a trace. A brief time for V, though he never said how many exactly. If he'd gone inside, there could only be one reason why—and going in after him would be the last thing he wanted.

Is there something I should do if you disappear like that again, a memory of a Fern that no longer existed asked.

Not that I intend to visit again any time soon, answered a memory of V that did not belong to him. But keep waiting. Time is funny in hell.

There was a month left until New Year's Eve.

"He'll be back," he murmured, unsure if he was assuring them, or himself. Iron Will materialized in his hand. It was probably the only sword he had that could stand up to the kind of armor he was seeing among these new demons.

This time, he chose to stay.