The floor resonated beneath V's feet. From a distance, the grinding of stone and metal reached him. The entryway was being opened on the far side of the facility. Seemed he was getting ready right on time.

The room he'd sequestered himself in for a suggestion of privacy was no more than a supply closet. One of two both barren of anything but racks of unrecognizable tools and a second door sealed by a scan-based lock. Briar's maintenance area was beyond it. It had been willing enough to show him, but the underbelly of the node was a tight web of almost organic machinery that reminded him uncomfortably of the qliphoth and had little in common with the sterile walkway and flower-lined amphitheater.

A knock announced Fern's presence with enough time for him to tug his shirt down. She'd intended to say something, but she paused, looking him up and down.

"The sweater," she remarked, with half a smirk and a raised brow. "Really?"

The softened wool settled comfortably over the thinner material of the resistance shirt. Warm and suspiciously well-made, it was a perfect substitute for the bulkier coat in the relative balminess of Briar's garden. It was also absolutely hideous.

Charmed afresh by Hibiscus' willingness to love even such an ugly thing, V gave a light-hearted chuckle. "We do have company to entertain today."

"Well aren't you in a good mood all of the sudden."

So was she. None the wiser to the source of his mood but infected by it, or so suggested the mischief that had crept into her eye to chase out the grim look she'd come in with. He rolled his sleeves back to his elbows. Shadow's markings, empty though they remained, swirled in pale frosted glass trails atop his skin.

He threw his cane over his shoulder. "Let's not keep them waiting."

The experts Briar had called for were not hard to find. Their complaints preceded them as surely as a trail of stomped-loose and shaken-off snow followed in their wake. Both were subtly bent under the weight of black bundles strapped to their backs, like a pair of candles left to stand on their own before the wax was fully set.

Scheherazade met them all beside the door to the auditorium. Her gaze was on the empty space behind the new androids. "Hamelin?"

"Listening to an update from the twins," said one.

A glimmer of suspicion creased the edges of her eyes. "Unusual movement?"

"Everything's unusual these days."

Scheherazade glanced at V, gave a subtle shrug, and accompanied them into the garden.

Theta was already inside with Tau in her company. A lingering tightness around the commander's eyes and a shifting uncertainty from her entourage suggested another unsuccessful request for Briar to utilize whatever sway it had. Ever the professional, Theta neatly bottled her frustrations and set them aside to address the new company.

"Are you the ones?"

They shot her equally glassy stares and ignored her to free themselves from their loads, indifferently introducing themselves as Jorinde and Jorindel. The former had the preemptively severe eyes of a gristly matron who knew a justification for her scowl was inevitable; an impression barely mitigated by the girlish pair of loose black braids sloping over her shoulders. Jorindel had but one white braid that ran down the side of his head and drooped over his chest, in addition to a crooked mouth that set his face in a state of permanent cynicism. Both were swaddled in an abundance of violet wool and damp brown leather. A pair in some sense, but not identical.

Jorinde looked V and Fern both up and down once and turned to the steel flower on its pedestal. "You run any preliminary tests on the anomaly?"

"This node is not equipped for physical interface," answered Briar.

She clicked her teeth.

The way Briar spoke of its other nodes, V assumed they were more populated and more suited toward interaction. Perhaps related to Briar's duties in relation to android memory or to its active experiments. Which left this strangely barren site. While V appreciated the extreme isolation, he did wonder what Briar intended to accomplish in this environment where only observation was possible when there was nothing to observe.

"You would bring him to a troublesome spot like this," said Jorindel, with the sigh of someone who had better things to do. "Best we get to work then. Pardon us."

"Ah ah ah," V tutted, pushing the handle of his cane against Jorindel's forehead. "To know in advance what I am expected to pardon would be welcome."

Jorinde rested a hand on her hip, and in the other held up a light blue book. "Relax, you'll just be holding onto this."

V stared at the small square on the front. The engraving was exceedingly basic and resembled a sleeping face. "A grimoire?"

"A lesser grimoire," said Theta, with something like amusement. "There's no need for concern. Contact shouldn't have any undesirable effects on you."

"A poor re-binding of a lesser grimoire," Jorindel corrected, smacking V's cane aside. "Junk that's only useful as a conduit. Which is precisely what we need in order to start working if you don't mind."

V let the cane fall back to his side and held out his hand. Not so much as a tingle resulted from the book being placed in his grasp. At Jorinde's insistence, he swapped it to his clawed left hand, and they were greeted by a dull glow.

"You're emitting a small amount of magic from that arm," she mumbled. "Is that a conscious effort?"

V shrugged. "It keeps me warm."

Jorindel pulled out a slightly darker blue book with an identical sleepy metal face embedded into the front and placed it in V's right hand. A copy of a copy of equally poor quality, V guessed. "Exert a small amount of magic from this hand."

Above the book, a small manifestation of nightmare formed, dancing in black and violet. The binding shivered and raised, flipping through pages each as blank as the one preceding it.

"Cute," said Jorindel.

"Gross," said Jorinde.

They relieved V of the blank books and circled V a few times before excusing themselves for a sober technical discussion next to their strange, bulky backpacks. There seemed to be computer parts of some kind inside them, protected from the elements by waterproof material.

Though the additional tests that followed were repetitive and not especially impressive, they garnered an audience. Fern and Scheherazade sat to one side of the innermost terrace. Scheherazade may as well have been carved of steel herself, but Fern was braced on her toes, ready to leap forward at a moment's notice. Tau and Theta observed from the opposite side two tiers higher up. Tau was content to sprawl lazily back in the flower, but V caught Theta occasionally glancing over her shoulder. Up at the door.

They were expecting one more, still, and V couldn't help but wonder if Hamelin wasn't just beyond the wide ring of blackened glass.

"Eyes front, please." Jorinde and Jorindel had taken a step back and joined hands. In their spare hands, each carried one of the blue books. "This should be the final test. We'd like you to exert as much magical force as you can. Preferably without summoning any of your… demons."

V stretched his claws experimentally. "Then it doesn't matter which kind of magic."

"If we needed it to be specific, we'd have specified. Just get on with it."

It had been awhile.

He planted his cane in the soft soil, freeing his hands and lowering his eyes to concentrate. "God appears and God is light, to those poor souls who dwell in Night; But does a Human form display to those who dwell in realms of Day."

The tattoos peeled back from his skin, ichor swelling into looming, fluid shapes over his shoulders. They congealed into blue-black feathers at his shoulder and long, curved talons and a carapace of leathery plates smooth as the scales of a snake. A low rush of wind began to swirl around the room. While he couldn't tell precisely what he looked like, Scheherazade's eyes were wide. Fern was licking her lips with a nervous sort of recognition in her eyes that left it difficult to tell if she wanted to have a rematch or run away. but she was otherwise unbothered.

Tau had ceased to laze in the flowers and was actively digging her heels into the dirt to push herself back from him. She looked at him like he was a monster, and Theta was doing only marginally better. Only Jorinde and Jorindel's expressions hadn't changed. The books in their hands were flipping rapidly through their empty pages.

"I think that's good!" one of them called over the noise.

Ah, but this was not the maximum energy he could exert. Like the weight of unseen horns curving up out of his forehead, he felt still greater wells of power to reach into.

"Joy and Woe are woven fine," his triplicate tongues incanted. "A Clothing for the soul divine."

Charcoal scales crept up his right arm, the red light that ran through suffusing to violet and then to a cold but luminous blue. The flowers rustled and wept loose petals and pollen into the churning air, and the water that surrounded Briar's pillar sprayed against V's back where he felt the suggestion of wings struggling to take shape. Up in the highest parts of the room, the windows hummed as they shook in their panes.

Then it was over. Cut off like the flip of a switch. The transformation dissipated and the tattoos snapped back into place on his skin, sharp but painless. It seemed that while the dragon offered him partial transformation at will, it could not fulfill the needs of a complete devil trigger quite so easily as maso.

He ran his tongue along his teeth. The effort had left him… hungry.

Applause rattled through the still-settling air of the room. Hamelin ambled down the terraces on indolent steps that matched her languid clapping. "Quite a show."

V's transformation all but forgotten, Theta turned to provide an intense glare that did not match her meticulously measured tone. "You're late."

Hamelin took that as an indication to squat down between Theta and Tau with a greasy smile that neither was thrilled by. "Someone who wasn't invited doesn't have to worry about being timely, Commander Theta."

"Someone who wasn't invited shouldn't have come," Fern grumbled.

Jorinde and Jorindel smoothed down their clothes and brushed off leaves and plant detritus that had settled onto them. Both looked as though they'd been exposed to a gale, to say nothing of the crumpled, battered look of their grimoires.

"If you're done showing off," Jorinde grouched. "We have results."

"We didn't have high expectations for, but it works out that you're some kind of freak accident gestalt from another world. Due to the odd composition of your body, sending you to another world may not be out of the question."

"After all that, I expected more certainty."

"It would be a lot more suspicious if we said it was certain," said Jorindel. "Nobody's done the expulsion ritual in centuries."

"Expulsion," V repeated slowly. "…You're celebrants."

"Reconstructed ones, but yes," said Jorinde. "It's just a piece of old technology we were installed with even though it's obsolete. Like vestigial organs, if you like."

"What makes you the better choice in celebrant over Scheherazade?"

The two shared a look and exploded into uproarious cackling that V would not have expected from their sour dispositions. "This isn't the 30th century anymore. Scheherazade's had a lot of work done since her celebrant days. You're welcome to try the process with her, but you would probably be reduced to atoms."

"But you've never done any of this before."

"No android has ever walked before their rollout either, but we all come out walking just fine if we're manufactured correctly. I'm sure it must be different for…whatever you are, but for us, experience is installable."

"Our ability to complete shouldn't be what you're worried about. We can do our job just fine, you're the one who comes with all the unprecedented variables that complicate everything."

"There are two."

"There are three." Their conversation lulled for a flicker of malice to pass between them before it was gone. "The first being that your body is comprised an unfamiliar kind of magic. It reads a bit like maso so it should still be manipulable, but we'll have to familiarize ourselves with its properties."

"The second is a matter of destination. Nobody worried about where the maso was going during expulsion back in the day. But you want to end up back where you came from. That might not be easy."

"It's been done," V said. "On three occasions."

"Well, why the hell didn't you go back that way?"

"The entrances were not of sufficient size. And the one time I did pass through, it was because I almost died."

"You got any qualms about almost dying again if we can get this to work?" He shot them a warning glare. "Right, right, why make our lives easier... Whatever, we'll come back to that. The third complication is that arm. If you're not willing to almost die to get home, I imagine you're not amenable to just cutting it off."

"Glad we have an understanding."

"Well, we specialize in magic and artifacts. Dragons aren't our field. If you don't want to employ any physical solutions, it may be difficult to send you back without it."

V cocked his head, eyes gradually narrowing. It was true that he didn't want to take the dragon with him. The dragons might be anathema to the gods, but the two were connected. Where the dragon went, the gods could follow, as Accord told it. Thus, the red dragon's power was another thing he had to part ways with before he left this world. Leaving with it would have defeated the purpose of everything he'd done to eliminate maso from his body.

But at no point had he specified that to any of them.

"You're surrounded by the damn weapons," Fern called. "And you're Briar's assistants. Shouldn't you be at least a little familiar with dragons?"

"There's a difference between studying the weapons and studying a live dragon. Even if that weren't the case, the thing on his arm isn't exactly a live dragon either."

"What happened to the white dragon that you didn't get the opportunity to familiarize yourselves?" asked V.

The two gestured in a show of viciously excessive politeness for the other to go first, and eventually, that came back to Jorindel. "An attempt to preserve it led to an unfortunate loss of the asset." Jorindel sniffed and rubbed at his shoulder. "As well as several of our more valuable re-bound artifacts."

V hummed.

"Can I help?" asked Fern. The researchers stared at her like she was an idiot, but she ignored them. It wasn't an inquiry about her usefulness to them. It was a request for permission from V. "Since I can sense your magic and everything."

"You mean since he got the arm?" asked Jorindel.

"I can sense the arm too, but I was able to feel him out before that became a part of him."

"You're a YoRHa model aren't you?" asked Jorinde. "Why would you have extrasensory components?"

"How the hell should I know? I didn't build myself. But I've always been able to tell where V is at a distance and where he's been and I—" Her eyes flicked to him again, asking how much could be revealed. With a wave of his cane, she kept going. "I also sort of…used V's magic?"

"You what."

"You what?!"

"With or without a medium?!"

Fern shrank back. "Uh, with I guess."

"Where is it?! We need a demonstration!"

She shot V a look begging for help, and he kindly returned a smile that said 'you were the one who volunteered, so you deal with it'. "Before you get carried away, how does this solve the last problem?"

"It doesn't. This helps with the first and second ones. Two problems, two of us. If you want a better solution than cutting it off, let Hamelin examine it."

The temperature in the room seemed to plummet. It wasn't just Fern. Scheherazade and Theta bridled as well, and Briar's petals began to twist.

"V…" Fern rumbled.

"I will be fine." He twitched his cane toward Jorinde and Jorindel. "Commit to your task, so that I may commit to mine."

"You really know how to talk about a lady don't you?" Hamelin laughed.

The moment she started down the terrace, Theta was after her. "I'll be observing."

V shrugged and took a seat among the flowers. Theta sat a polite distance to his right, while Hamelin settled down in a chair of shifting light that looked exactly like the kind pod's fishing program used.

She looked different under the glow of the false sunlight. Slicked back hair and sleek black eyes and a furtive curve to her smile that left V turning his cane in thoughtful circles. Despite being out in the middle of nowhere in close quarters with someone who might bear a grudge over the fact that she'd put a gun to his face, there was no tension, no sense of danger. Nor any sign of remorse. The thought of an obligatory apology to set them back at zero hadn't crossed her mind.

V didn't take it personally. He wouldn't have apologized either if their positions were switched.

"Not going to introduce yourself?" she asked.

"I would think my reputation precedes me by now."

Her smile curled a fraction further, like a leaf dying in real time. "Where's your Pod?"

Pod didn't have anything as useful as an encyclopedia of androids in high-level positions in his archives. There was plenty the support unit did not know about Theta and her cohort, and yet he had known who Hamelin was and what she did on sight. That had lingered with her. Knowing what a different world the night kingdom was, it was curious that Pod had known anything at all, and her open ask suggested it was a matter that went well beyond being caught by surprise.

"Conserving power," he answered.

"I suppose Theta must have talked to you about me, then."

"You're carved with humanity's research, as Theta is carved with the history of its extinction. You are perhaps the only android who could confirm I was not a product of Project Snow White." He sank back, both hands relaxed atop his cane. "And you are here now because you are also the one who designed the dragon weapons."

"A fitting summary." She sat forward. "Indulge me a bit before we start. Why are you looking for more of the red dragon? You have more there than anyone's seen since the body disappeared."

"The rest of the body was my only clue as to a means of returning to my world."

"Ah. Good a reason as any for a human, I suppose."

He couldn't help but crack a smile. "Your companions don't seem to share your classification."

"Jorinde and Jorindel specialize in the old world's magic and have a lot of the old world's attitudes to match. You're incomplete or possibly contaminated, as far as they're concerned."

"And you believe differently."

"Naturally. I specialize in fusion—the synthesis of new world magic, by combining the old with modern technology. Fusion was quite the popular tactic in the old research. Fusing their children with particles of the dragon to create weapons, fusing unsuspecting strangers with tomes, and making them battle to the death to create grimoires… The entire intended process of the gestalt project was separation and a grand re-combination." She traced the ridges of his arm and red leylines running through with lascivious eyes, her smile curling up another fraction. "The willingness to combine your body and soul with the unknown in order to escape death is so human; how could I call you anything else?"

"Hamelin," Briar warned.

She grinned and sang out. "If you didn't want me to think that way, you should have programmed me differently~"

The steel flower closed as if to say it didn't have to stay and endure Hamelin's grating temperament.

"Are you more familiar with living dragons than your associates?" asked V.

"What happened to the white dragon?"

"You heard already. Attempting to extend its life had explosive consequences that cost us several restored artifacts and the entirety of Node #13."

V tapped along the handle of his cane. "It's curious… I've received every indication that it was a violent event, and yet never has it been said that the creature was destroyed."

"Well, yes. That'd be because it wasn't."

"Then what happened," he repeated deliberately. "To the white dragon?"

She rolled her eyes and sagged her cheek into her palm. "Did you know the soul of a magically inclined being doesn't behave like a human's? Surprise, surprise, I know. Even a dog's soul could be subjected to the gestaltification process successfully, but a dragon was a bit too heavy of a load. In attempting to preserve it, we traded a dying dragon for a living monstrosity." She sighed as if it were a trite story she had long since tired of reciting. "As for the body, who knows. It vanished in the chaos. And seeing as the aliens were much more active those days, we didn't have the luxury to track it before the trail went cold."

Beside V, Theta looked mortified. She pressed her fingers to her forehead. "All that work for a blinded mission to transport it Gibraltar and you lost it as soon as it was out of our jurisdiction…"

"Sordid little story isn't it." Her voice came out much like her face—a mask that was only pleasant by the most generous stretch of the imagination. "Are you satisfied?"

"For now," V chirped with a nearly honest smile.

"Then let's get on with it." She flicked her fingers at his scaled hand.

There was something to Hamelin's touch. Something that reminded him a little of the white scale still sitting in his pocket. A sort of low resonation of forces beneath both their skin. His eyes flicked between her fingers and her face, but if she felt it as well, she didn't allow it to distract her.

"No wonder you were able to pass for an experimental weapon. You've combined yourself with it, haven't you?" Not fully accurate, but her mumbling was absent, any questions posed merely rhetorical. "And still so cognizant... Just like No. 7."

"Emil," he corrected automatically.

"Uh-huh. Any changes to your ego? No, I imagine not." She flipped his hand, rubbing her thumb over the brand in his palm. "What did you come in contact with? A tooth? A scale?"

"Bone shards."

"Did that YoRHa unit touch them? Has she had any interactions with this arm? Any responses from the dragon weapons in the area?"

His eyes slid back to Hamelin's face, narrowing as he took in the pure academic interest that siphoned away her greasiness and left behind a semi-excitable, almost personable bearing. "Why would the dragon or the weapons be concerned with a YoRHa?"

She giggled innocently. "You've been invited to the most informationally dense location on the planet and you're still like a clueless little kid, aren't you? I guess that's not your fault. Briar's very old. You can't count on it to know what is and isn't relevant and it wasn't built to have anything you'd recognize as common sense."

"How clearly you love the sound of your own voice… Answer my question."

"Hmm, how can I put it so you will understand…" She sat back a moment, gone into old pathways of her memory with the same slow flicker of optic lights that other old androids were prone to. "Containers have no single inventor at a conceptual level. Humans needed to be able to carry things, so independent of any interaction with other groups of humans, that problem was solved innumerable times by innumerable cultures. Briar and the aliens both saw the white dragon's soul. Both saw it as a potential solution to their own needs. Both worked on recreating it for their own purposes." She leered toward the steel flower. "Briar wasn't as good at it."

"This statement is misleading," Briar contested, its petals flaring open. "I did not have the resources to conduct reconstruction to the standards I would have preferred."

"So it goes. Aliens and machines were never bound by attachment to their forms the way androids are. They'd imitate anything they perceived as more powerful—they did it to No. 7 after he fought them off in the initial invasion. Getting attacked in the day kingdom by a white dragon then terrorized by the shade of one in the night kingdom left a similar impression."

"And they never built dragons of their own…?"

"They wouldn't have had an impetus to," stated Theta. "Aliens took complete control of the continental masses of the night kingdom and began machine production years before we were prepared to commence the First Machine War."

"As the good commander says," Hamelin hummed. "And this was thousands of years ago—machine evolution was significantly slower and more error-prone when the aliens were present. They did roll a few things out that were shaped like dragons, but they were just annoying planes with unusual dimensions in a time before they had large-scale anti-emp or any of the gravity-based abilities they showed in the last two wars. They were lackluster models, so they stopped manufacturing them on their own well before any of our designs were finished development. Cores, on the other hand, became a global commonality in the space of about five hundred years."

V pursed his lips. Whether they were accurate to the true thing or not, machine cores being inspired by a dragon's soul would make the black box something like a third generation of dragon byproducts. Offshoots of imitations made to fit the bodies of androids.

Hamelin prodded further up his forearm, but her eyes were centered slightly to the side of it. She was looking past him. At Fern, demonstrating with Humility.

He was beginning to understand just who he was talking to. "Did Briar also test the cores made by machines?"

"They were far more dangerous to tamper with," said Briar. "I did conduct certain examinations and the results have become more fascinating over time, but ultimately the applications were devoted first to the war."

"Devoted to the Head of Council for the Army of Humanity's Research and Development efforts," V guessed, eyeing Hamelin with a widening smirk. "Who proposed the study of machine cores for military use…which led to the development of YoRHa."

"I see why humans are so charming to most androids. You look so proud to have finally put that together."

"Perhaps I am and perhaps I am not," he said smoothly. "In either case, it does spare me the effort of figuring out why Pod knew who you were."

Hamelin's smile didn't move a centimeter out of position, but the playful mockery left her eyes. She waited, her unmoving expression darkening for every second he did not elaborate. The air condensed around them.

V let the malignant silence rest on him like a crown. The details Hamelin has provided were much like the knowledge of the ports on the back of an android's neck. Not personally useful, but interesting. Fascinating, in fact. 9S might be beyond seeking his makers' heads, but perhaps that knowledge would give Fern something to do in V's absence. Give her somewhere outside of herself to place all of that loathing.

"Your interest in YoRHa seems especially keen," he noted.

"No more or less than Theta's."

"Quite an incriminating answer."

"You're the only one in this room who thinks there's anything wrong with making use of 8E."

"I suppose that leaves me in the position of being the only one in her corner then, doesn't it? Theta wishes to overwrite her, and I'm disinclined to believe your intentions as one of her creators are less distasteful than that."

"What are you so scared of, Mr. Human?" She leered. "Nothing has to happen to her… or to the recovered scanners, or to the ark."

Theta's eyes hardened. "How do you know about that?"

"From my exchange with Rho," Hamelin answered distractedly.

The answer didn't seem to satisfy Theta.

"Nothing has to happen to them on what condition?"V prompted.

"There you are again, worrying for nothing. Nothing has to happen to them. It's a complete sentence."

"Then what use do you have in mind for them?"

She pinched at one of his scales, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to make her point. "That's not the concern of a human who doesn't belong to this world."

That was true. None of this had anything to do with him. Regardless of the details, he'd seen enough to understand that all of this was androids chasing ghosts in the dark, same as the machines in the kingdom of day. Theta was right. He couldn't be here forever. At some point, whether it was sooner or later, he would leave and the companions who saw him safely through this bruised world would have to navigate whatever intentions it had for them on their own.

But while he was here, he didn't mind scorching the earth if it became necessary.

"Zinnia." Hamelin froze and V went on with the confident finality of a checkmate he'd seen several turns ago. "The would-be 'father' of YoRHa. He was your subordinate."

The silence stretched. Jorinde and Jorindel fussed in the background, barking orders at Fern while she barked back a number of colorful profanities about her inexperience level with the sword.

When Hamelin finally opened her mouth, it was to laugh. In long, low, rolling waves.

"That's very funny... All personal records from Lab were destroyed. I should know since I handled it myself. So I wonder." Her grip tightened around his wrist, and the vague tingle that accompanied their contact became a sliver of glass pushing up through his arm. "Why is it that you know that name?"

Scheherazade moved like a ghost. One moment she was standing by and in the next, the blue edge of her axe was pressed against Hamelin's throat.

Hamelin loosened her grip.

"I had no hand in Project YoRHa," she said. Her voice only pretended at the cadence she'd been using up until that point. A lid barely containing a frothing pot. "All I told Zinnia was to make up some bodies that could handle the load of running on a machine core, oversee their calibration, and test their stability. But he went above and beyond. Decided to create a god and manufacture faith. A stupid man, really. One of my best but sheltered and short-sighted like all orbit-only androids."

It didn't escape V that such a jab would naturally include Theta. "I didn't take you for the sentimental type."

"I do have many sentiments when it comes to Zinnia. And if Theta's reports are anything to go by, I believe we share a similar abundance of sentiment where it concerns the subject of YoRHa Unit 9S."

Heat raced along down V's arm, burning Hamelin's glove off her hand and even searing her skin before she snatched it back.

Across the room, Fern's head ticked up. "V?"

"It's fine," he assured.

"Scary, aren't you?" Hamelin flexed her smoking hand and scraped some of the warped skin into a tiny glass cube. "Thank you for the sample."

A violet shimmer crept along V's cane as he leveled it at her. "Care to have another?"

Theta grabbed it and stood between them. "That's enough."

"…I suppose it is," said V. "I believe the examination is complete."

"It is." She smiled and leaned back in her chair as V stood. "I'd be glad to help you look for your red dragon, by the way. If you'd prefer that to chancing it on the celebrants sending you home."

"Somehow I doubt that is your way of expressing loyalty," he said dismissively.

"Of course not. But Briar isn't your boss or mine. There's nothing to say I can't whisk you away in whichever direction you'd like. Finding any dragon would be a net positive for me."

"I prefer a better class of companion."

She hummed and her eye wandered to the backbiting researchers bossing Fern around. "She was there too you know," she said in a murmur like a snake coiling around his shoulder. "Not as she is now—Lab was nothing but prototypes. How do you think she might react knowing the first No. 9 burned the first No. 8 alive?"

The report was long since expunged but V remembered it clearly. Pod 042 had been unusually straightforward with him that the prototype had taken the truth poorly. 9S himself had come to V when the cup of his wrath was freshly emptied onto this world, and still he had more fury to give. Knowing that inclination to brutality was inside of him from the very first, he could only wonder who thought it a good idea to build him a body even better suited to the task of war without dimming the sharpness of his mind.

As for the matter of No. 8, he had no idea what the first must have been like, any more than he knew what 8E had been like before her first kill. But he knew Fern. Quite a bit better than either of them probably desired.

"Tell her about it sometime. I'm sure she could use something the laugh."

A/N: This is dense, so if you're confused about what exactly I'm laying down, here's a little exercise:

Look at the pact scene between Caim and Angelus. Then go look at a fully intact machine core. (Latter half of the Simone fight after her dress burns and she slumps over is a good shot.)

Hold onto that.