A/N: No chapter this weekend. Chipping at some other deadlines and hopefully getting vaccinated.

Celebrants were one part of a process. In the early phase of Project Gestalt, replicants made up the original artificial army. Scavengers who traveled and hunted and gathered without wills of their own, collecting the poison that had killed mankind in bodies with no true lives of their own. A celebrant stood by like a soldier stationed at a central encampment. They waited for maso to be brought to them so it could be cast out, and then the process began again. Over and over for the thousand years it took to cleanse the world. That final step came to be known as a festival.

Damn if I could figure out why, though.

Scheherazade provided the maso for the demonstration. The red book she used for her key hovered a few centimeters above her hand, the pages turning with an odd inflexibility, as if they were weighed down by the words inside. A shimmering cloud of salt gathered like priceless condensation in an arid desert and pooled grain by mesmerizing grain in her open palm. The unyielding attentiveness that made her seem more like a brick than a living android was gone. Replaced by the empty-minded concentration that only came with deeply ingrained thought and motor routines. It still wasn't festive, but the sense of ritual that tingled across my shoulders was more than enough to make up for it.

Jorinde and Jorindel treated it the same as they treated everything else. Like work they were too good to be bothered with. They stood on the other side of the auditorium, each with one hand on one hip while the other performed complicated, synchronized routines with mismatched maces that looked like they had been relics even in human times. When they stopped, the festival ended. The maso gathered in Scheherazade's palm dispersed into a dazzling shower of red that put me in mind of the NFCS materialization program.

The sparks vanished with no more than a faint sizzle across my sensors. Off to become somebody else's problem.

V watched unenthusiastically, his chin resting atop his cane. "And where did it go?"

Jorinde stabbed her mace down into the dirt. "We complete a demonstration for you and that's what you ask? It doesn't matter where it went! That part will only matter when it's your turn."

"Which is a fancy way of saying you haven't figured it out yet," Hamelin taunted, prodding at a still-fading spark. "But you've made a lot of progress. Should we attempt to undo the fusion externally ahead of the real thing?"

"Sure, sure," Jorindel chirped with barely contained cynicism. "We'll just tamper with him a little and enjoy another Kaguya incident. Been dull as hell here since the war ended, an explosion would liven the place right up."

"A comparative analysis of your data and ours should allow us to effectively isolate both forms of magic," said Jorinde. "Precluding the need for any stupid ideas like that. When we conduct his expulsion, we can focus our work on the magic that's actually his. The rest will naturally stay."

"And that's progressing well?"

"Well enough. The build diversification algorithm left some old-world hardware in that YoRHa's design. She's not exactly good at it, but she can directly manipulate magic provided she has a medium, and since she's spent a lot of time with V, she's good at telling the difference between what is and isn't his magic."

I didn't have strong feelings about the mystery of my ability to perceive magic being solved. It was just... funny. To think the reason V had taken in the old Fern to begin with was something so small, so borderline accidental. A stray bit of hardware from a dead era left behind on the same rng that determined which memories went to which androids. If I had been manufactured at a different time, maybe I would have been a celebrant.

Metallic tapping spiked through my aural graph. I didn't pay it too much mind. They'd been a regular occurrence ever since V and Hamelin spoke. A lot of cane tapping and a lot of lapses in his attention and a lot of long silences that fluctuated unpredictably between seeming unbothered and seething with unspoken temper. Whatever they had talked about had him back to his prickly self, which made it typical that he'd declined to explain.

And very atypical that instead of a flat no, he'd answered me with 'not just yet'.

I shifted on my heels. Honestly, I would have preferred the no. Not knowing exactly what to expect but knowing enough to expect it was agony in this kind of environment. Every time I did anything even a little excitable, I caught Hamelin watching me with that same ugly little smile that had raised my red flags in Sector H. The researchers were just an annoyance I mostly ignored or put up with when I had to be in the auditorium with them. But in no time at all, I'd adopted as much of Scheherazade's personality as I could to use when I was anywhere Hamelin could see me. When she was around, I wanted to be as close to being no one as I could.

She was heading to the upper terraces lost in conversation with Jorinde and Jorindel, so I permitted myself a moment to slouch into the flowers. After a few days of having people around, a lot of the plants down in the center had taken a beating.

"I'm surprised you don't mind all this company, Briar," I called, attempting to right a yellow flower only to find the stem had snapped right at the neck. "Garden like this must be hard to cultivate in the night kingdom and we're doing a lot of stomping around."

"That is acceptable," said Briar. "Flowers left to their own devices provide plenty of valuable data, but it is impossible to observe new growth or the recovery process if they are never exposed to stress."

"The flowers are what you're studying out here?"

"There is nothing else to observe."

"I had noticed. I just don't see how flowers help you."

"I am also unclear on this part of the equation. However, I believe this to be a comprehension failure due to being cultivated in a vastly different environment from that of my predecessor. The data provided by studying plants has been useful in every opportunity I have had to apply it, so there is value in their observation even if I do not understand the point of the data during the immediate study."

"They are useful to you either way," said V, in a tone that grew darker with every word. "Nothing has to happen."

"This is an accurate statement."

V climbed to his feet with a stony look in his eye and not a word in his mouth. He jabbed his cane at the door and started walking, and I followed without question.

"Are you running off to feed him again?" Jorinde shouted when we were half-way up the steps. "If we're going to isolate V's magic, we need to continue studying you and Humility."

"So study us when I get back."

"You may have nothing to do with yourself, but our time is valuable. The sooner we're done here, the sooner we can get back to our own work."

"And what work would that be?"

They scoffed. "As if a combat unit would understand it."

I clamped down a spike of ill-defined apprehension, letting it flow into an annoyed sigh. Who cared what this maladjusted couple was up to. They were even less interested in V than Briar was. "I'm not leaving V alone."

"Then leave him with Scheherazade! She's the one who brought him here in the first place, not like she'll let anything happen to him."

V's cane hooked into the back of my shirt and tugged. The next thing I knew, I was being pushed up the terrace by claws radiating heat against my back. "You have mistaken this for a negotiation. She's coming with me."

"That's really not efficient!"

"For you, perhaps not. Do not live so strictly by the clock. If this body can spare an hour, yours will not crumble in the same time. Fern."

Jorinde's impotent indignation followed us out until it was brusquely cut off by the glass door.

I knew V wanted to talk, but I didn't think he'd be so obvious about it after playing things so close to the chest since we arrived. He led us into the room he'd started holing up in and gestured for me to go in first. As soon as the door shut behind him, I slowly sank my hands into my pockets. "You uh…okay?"

"Yes." He looked to the ceiling, scanning the corners and crevices. "I'd hoped to speak to you as privately as possible."

"Why didn't we just go outside?"

"Because the next time we leave these walls, it is my intention that we do not return."

A pit opened in my stomach. I scrubbed a hand over my mouth and fisted the front of his sweater, pulling him within whispering distance. "Talk quiet then. I think Briar can be wherever it needs to be. With or without the flowers."

He brushed my hand away, but without pulling back lowered his voice to a gravelly whisper. "You've seen something?"

"That day in the garden right after we arrived. Two seconds of my audiovisual memory from right before I jumped up were gone. Still are. When I tried to think about it was like a shadow. Standing over us while you were sleeping."

"A shadow… Griffon?"

"I didn't see anything," Griffon answered, partially oozing up from V's collar. "But I'm not exactly tuned for techno ghosts."

"Briar didn't see it either." My eyes narrowed. "Scheherazade said it's possible that it is Briar. Some kind of sub-routine that it may not be aware of—however that's supposed to work. She didn't look certain, but she definitely looked upset about it. I haven't lost any time since then, but I've been keeping an eye on you just in case."

"Me?" His head tilted aside, so close I could see the twitch of his pupils. "You are the one Briar is interested in, Fern."

"Not exactly. Turns out that serving humanity bit is real. Briar's still trying to make the Project Gestalt happen. Or make an updated project with the same goal happen. It's interested in YoRHa parts, but what it's really looking for is a soul to study. Yours would have been nice, but you've uh...got a lot going on in there."

V stared at me strangely. For so long with so few other movements I started to scratch at the fabric of my pants. The cane raised gradually between us, and with my eye naturally drawn to it, he pressed the handle just beneath my collar.

"…No?" A laugh fluttered out of me and it was my turn to brush him away. I put a hand protectively over my chest and ended up gripping my dogtags. "No. That's just a machine core in a nice package. It's not—it's not anything like that."

"It is. It is simply not fashioned after a human soul."

'Not just yet' became 'now' as V recounted what Hamelin had told him while I was busy being badgered by Jorinde and Jorindel. What happened to the white dragon. How both Briar and the aliens tried to perfect their own version of a dragon's soul in the aftermath. How the aliens made the apparently superior product, and by a series of indirectly linked events, that eventually led to the research and development process for the black box. A process headed by Hamelin herself.

The walls of the room were suddenly an indefinite distance away. A hazy middle distance on the edge of my narrowing focus, tunneling down to the fluffy lattice of sweater fibers in front of my unblinking stare. A failsafe routine kicked in, and without meaning to, I began to log the length of the thread. Left to right. Row by row. One meter. Two meters. Three.

Repurposing scavenged parts was a way of life. All the nanomachines in the world wouldn't replace a burnt-out component or restore endoskeletal damage and who better to take replacements from than someone who didn't need them anymore? The YoRHa parts from Sector H were the same thing. There weren't any viable black boxes, so I'd thought there wasn't much could Briar really do with them. But Briar knew the person who developed black boxes in the first place. And even with the war over, there was no shortage of living machines to pry cores from. If it wanted to study souls as close to humanity as possible, it could build new YoRHa by reassembly if it really wanted to.

But that was unnecessary work, wasn't it.

I was here. Already assembled. Fully functional.

"And you want to leave…" The words twisted around me, strangling me in the five hundred meters of wool thread I'd managed to count. "So that I…?"

"I have my own reasons as well." A refreshing interruption. If only it didn't end in another chafing qualifier that managed to make my fidgeting at 'not yet' seem childish. "Accord had to be aware that units like Jorinde and Jorindel were still functional, but she didn't tell me to seek celebrants. She explicitly suggested I seek the red dragon, so I will go to Roswell."

There. That was a real problem to solve. Better than standing there with that straightforward 'as well' circling around my neck. Mechanically, I summoned up a cheeky smirk. "What happened to even a trap door is a door?"

A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. "This one may break more than mere bone."

"Ha." My hands rubbed at my neck. At my shoulders. Down my arms, until I was unconsciously wringing my hands. "You know I have no idea where we are."

"And?"

"And unless you think I should break everybody's legs before we go, I'm not going to be especially helpful in getting you to this place."

"Do not underestimate your utility," he said plainly. "An ally is boon enough."

"Would you be going to Roswell if I was out of the picture?" It took too long for him to answer. He didn't struggle for one, but he was too close for me to not see him weighing whether or not the question should be left rhetorical. "That makes me more a liability than an ally then, doesn't it."

"That does seem to be the way it goes among fools," he said, with self-effacing flippancy that I couldn't stomach. "In spite of knowing better."

"Why are you laying it on so thick today?!"

I'd shouted without meaning to. Far more annoyed—far closer to panic—than I'd meant for him to hear. I couldn't even blame him. In my hasty attempt to draw some kind of boundary between myself and the tangle of interconnected circumstances I suddenly found myself in, I'd only made it more obvious I was on the inside.

There wasn't the least bit of annoyance to be found anywhere about him. His voice was patient. So much it made my chest burn. "Was it not the point that you are here so I may have someone worthy of my trust?"

It was. And now that I had that trust focused solely on me while I was stripped of almost everything I could give back, it sat on my stomach like a rock. Weighing down on whatever switch triggered my threat assessment sub-routines. I coursed with the assaults of a dozen systems designed to increase my longevity warning me that I should retreat. I shifted my weight instead. Avoided his gaze. Focused on the uneven grain of the walls. Employed every means I could think up to run without moving. None of them worked.

When Theta barged in without even knocking I was so relieved to have something else to focus on, I could have kissed her.

She paused when she saw us but didn't hesitate to step inside and shut the door with the exact kind of care that suggested she didn't want anybody to hear it close. The demonstration had taken place in her absence. I doubted she expected to find us in here. I doubted she expected to find anybody in here. So what was she doing strutting into a glorified supply closet?

"Were you not bluffing when you claimed to be in love with him?" she asked matter of factually.

A quick conversation passed between V and me on the rapid channel of facial expression. I might have been ready to apologize if he weren't eyeing me with the sort of smug detachment that just begged for someone to slap him. Just once. "You claimed what?"

"Don't even think it, asshole. I was messing with her while she was trying to interrogate me."

"Your devotion certainly makes greater sense in the context of infatuation. If this isn't an intimate moment—"

"It need not be intimate to be private," V warned, placing his cane across Theta's path. "What do you want?"

"To contact Rho. For which I need Pod 042 and your cooperation." She undid the buttons on her coat and pulled out a small device with a dozen gold rods sticking up from it. "I don't have much time until this device is considered missing."

"Holy shit." I covered my arm with my forearm to keep a laugh in. "Did you steal a canceller?"

"Yes. Now please make your decision quickly."

We held another brief eye conversation, and V fractionally lowered his guard and gestured toward the lonely backpack sitting against the innermost wall. Theta marched by us and got to work with the same brisk efficiency she applied to combat.

Pod awoke without his usual greeting. His antenna spun as he took in Theta and the device and V standing permissively by. "UNDERSTOOD. CONFIGURING..."

Against a scrambler like the night kingdom's, a little canceller like that wasn't going to get Theta audiovisual contact, but it would be more than enough to get a transcribed message through on a private channel.

"So," I prompted. "What's so urgent you'd steal hardware and try to contact Rho without telling anybody?"

"I've come to the conclusion that Briar and Hamelin have been receiving my reports. Possibly as far back as my initial planet side arrival."

"Okay? So command passed the data on, so what?"

Theta managed to glare down at me despite being the only one of us kneeling on the floor. "I wouldn't be here if I had reason to believe it was that simple. It wouldn't surprise me if command shared information with Briar. I could even call it reasonable that Hamelin knows about Unit 9S given the artifacts he turned up before he left the city. But there is no cause for a unit in Hamelin's position to know anything about the status of the other scanners or the contents of the ark."

"…You didn't share that with her," said V.

"She doesn't have the clearance."

I looked between them, suddenly feeling like the odd one out. "What the hell happened during that conversation?"

V ignored the question and Theta closed the subject by shushing us both as subtle clicks began to register from inside Pod's case.

The terse whisper that followed told me everything I needed to know. "Shit…"

"Hamelin lied to you." The sound Theta's jaw made was the sound of her sense of order being destroyed yet again. I couldn't say it brought me any of the usual petty pleasure this time. "…I'd like to make a report."

"I'm not in the mood for your sense of humor, 8E."

"I'm serious." V glanced at me but didn't move to stop me. "Requesting permission to submit a report, Commander Theta."

Theta's brows drew tight. "Why the sudden concern for the chain of command?"

"Because this time I'm the one who wants to request you come with us." I shrugged. "Call it me minding my mission."

She stood up, carelessly tossing the canceller on a shelf. Order had already been compromised, so maybe it didn't matter anymore what chaos it might cause if it came to light she'd stolen from androids under night kingdom jurisdiction. "Make your report."

We weren't to blame this time, and I hoped it counted for something.

The full body of information felt strange coming out of my mouth after I'd only had it come together for me not twenty minutes ago. Theta took it in with only minor reactions. She'd been with V, she already knew what I was made of and if it had any bearing on her intentions, I couldn't tell. I may have had more difficulty saying it than she had hearing it. It was one thing to know that I had a machine's heart inside me. It was another thing entirely to consider that machines had an alien knock-off of a dragon's soul inside them to begin with.

Deep-cutting lines only gathered when she internalized Briar's original intentions for V and how that reflected on its other efforts. She rubbed at her face, from cheeks to temples with fingers that wouldn't settle. "I... see."

"Do you? Cause I'd love to hear it explained back to me. I know I just said it, but I wouldn't say it makes any sense. That's a pretty lofty goal but Briar doesn't seem to care whether I stay or go or end up getting reset by you."

"Because the point is to observe you," V pointed out dourly. "As long as you continue to exist, there is no fail state."

"Observation is the opening phase of all R&D efforts," Theta said measuredly. "As long as you're alive, whenever Briar wants to... attempt the reverse engineering of a human soul, it will have the data and potentially the materials it needs. On the more practical side, you're already in the night kingdom. Briar has 33 active nodes on the North American continent alone. There's no need to chase you. Until Briar is ready to proceed to the experimentation phase, there's nowhere for you to go."

"Precisely why it shouldn't matter if we were to excuse ourselves and head to Roswell."

"Roswell…? Why do you want to go there?" V held up his claws, but it didn't do anything to help Theta understand. "Still? Despite Jorinde and Jorindel's work? This report is interesting, but it doesn't involve you, V. You could go home."

"I could," he admitted, with an edge to his voice that wound another thread around me. "But I have already made it clear what I will do."

"Reasonable choices as always," she huffed. "Agreed. I will accompany."

"And make sure even if something happens to me he gets home," I added, kneeling down to pull V's coat out from under Pod.

"Agreed."

"And you'll do it without Tau." I cut off her mounting objection with a snap of latches around my shoulders. "She's avoided V ever since he transformed. I don't think she's convinced he's human anymore. I can't trust my mission to that reaction combined with that personality. Neither can you."

She weighed my words and let further argument drop with a permissive nod and a smoothing of her coat. "My recommendation is that we focus on maximizing the distance between this node ahead of potential pursuit. If we stick to the safe paths, our trail will inevitably be easy to follow regardless of where we go. Briar might be indifferent to our comings and goings, but that doesn't mean any of the others will necessarily share that outlook.

V nodded. "I would also prefer they had as difficult a time as possible chasing us."

I raised a hand and in a flurry of shining gold flecks, a few EMP bombs materialized between my fingers. "I think we can arrange that."

I thought about flowers while Jorinde, Jorindel, Hamelin, and all of their equipment fizzled with lingering charge in the unbothered garden. Three specialty androids, cost of production known and replaceability uncertain, might have just been seriously damaged. They lay inert under the false sunlight and Briar simply observed.

It didn't speak. It didn't sound any alarms. Most likely, it didn't have any. Why would it, in a place where there weren't any androids to hear it?

I half expected to see that black shadow loom up out of the ground. But nothing happened. It was as eerily peaceful as the day we arrived. As the glass door closed behind me, I hoped I never had to experience the uncomfortable pressure of being in that garden ever again.

V stood in the entryway, sealed up inside his coat with the hood drawn against a strong wind blowing fat clumps of snow through the wide-open gates. Scheherazade lay slumped just inside the threshold beside him, with snow piling up against her back. The red book she used for a key lay beside her, the open square of a mouth in its metal face frozen in dull disbelief.

I dragged her to the closest wall and sat it in her lap. If she wasn't such a close companion of Briar in the first place and beholden to the same cause, it might have been her that I asked for help instead of Theta. But I knew better. Scheherazade had been amenable because she was worried about what Hamelin might do to V. The enemy of my enemy was convenient in a pinch, but that didn't make them my friend. Not in a place like this.

Theta was waiting for us at the bottom of the plateau, head tilted up to face the impenetrable darkness of the cloudy sky.

Grateful for the small grace that our tracks would probably be covered by the time anyone in the garden woke up, we fled into the snow. Backtracking toward the last outpost a few kilometers northwest of the plateau. The bundled bear-like androids weren't warmed to us in the slightest by their ability to recognize us this time around. Theta acquired what she could. The groups here didn't move, so they shared one physical map that only showed the roads as far as the next five outposts and refused to hand it out.

You were expected to commit it to memory. If your recall was shot, there was nothing to be done. Resources were limited.

Theta acquired what little she could. One pair of night-vision goggles, a warning that the snow would stop but the wind would worsen for the next few days, and transport along the only road from there, which went more west than south.

She'd been right. There was nowhere for me to go out here.

The paths through the night kingdom didn't offer a lot of choices. My options would be to accept a string of outpost-to-outpost rides and hope the brusque inhabitants couldn't be bothered to mark my passing or to set off alone into the dark and hope I didn't end up in some snowy sinkhole hidden by the deceptively serene off-road terrain. I didn't want to die out here. I didn't want to die anywhere that Briar Rose could find my remains. The problem being that Briar Rose was a being who'd worked on a problem it barely understood for the entire length of the war without once losing patience. It had none to lose. Time meant something entirely different to it than it for me and it would be just as pleased to scavenge me whether it was ten days from now or another ten thousand years.

Chained tires rattled and the covered truck trundled through the snow like an old, tired, beetle and I thought of flowers and seeds and cores and souls until I couldn't stand it.

"Why do you want to preserve androids so much?"

Theta didn't bat a lash. "You've had that explained to you in significant detail."

"I know your ultimate goal. I'm asking why you take the loss of individual lives so personally. You even avoided killing androids back in Sector H if you could."

"Without humanity, we are back to preserving its structures, writings, any artifacts that proved they lived. All evidence has value. That includes us."

"Us as in standard model androids."

"To power you with a machine core was ultimately a necessary act that separates you from a standard android, but you are as much a piece of the human legacy as I am. You have your place in preserving it and I have mine."

I shook my head and rattled a thin laugh. What had I been expecting? "Glad to know we're all tools as far as you're concerned."

"That is correct. It's why we falter in the absence of purpose. Even the most common android is a replication of a blueprint meant for a restoration of mankind that never came to pass. All of us are tools, 8E. Being made to be used doesn't mean the life of an individual is without value."

"Then why are you so comfortable with erasing me?"

"Why are you so insistent on dying?"

V cleared his throat.

I thought of the bursting, empty garden. Not a worm or an ant or an aphid or the tiniest mite lived there. Flowers bloomed for no one in fake sunlight, caked in pollen that no bees would ever find. Dead petals rotted into soft, sterile dirt. Thriving, but only inside a glorified glass cage under the eye of a computer that didn't care what transpired, only that the flowers were there for it to observe. As they lived. Choked each other. Died. Rotted. Began again. All in an environment as barren as the Bunker.

"Do you think Briar is right?" I asked quietly.

"I don't know. Those cores don't look anything like gestalts did. I'm not sure how much Briar has lowered its acceptability threshold for what a human soul is if it's willing to try and fashion one from a dragon."

"I'm asking if you think Briar is more right than you are Theta." I picked my head up and stared across the dark compartment at the optic lights glittering from the other side. "About what kind of use this tool should be put to."

"You're asking me to weigh android kind against the unlikely but potential generation of a viable human soul." She shook her head. "Those concerns are too different. I would defer to command."

My body. My life. And now my might-be, could-be soul. In the end, none of it was mine to keep. It wasn't any more my decision what happened to any of it than it was my decision to be made.

Steam gusted from the vents from my back.

V called my name, but the roar of Theta's body slamming against the bed of the truck and reverberating inside the heavy covering drowned him out.

"You and Hamelin, and Briar, and Rho—all of you…!" I snatched her off the floor while she was still trying to re-orient herself, hauling her up until we were face to face. "I don't mind being a tool, but I decide who gets to use me. I decide what happens to this life. I decide how and where and why and for whose sake it ends!"

"Fern."

The compartment quieted. Back to rattling chains and crunching gravel and the cough of an engine and my shaking, shallow breaths. I dropped Theta approximately back where she'd been sitting and reclaimed my seat near the end of the truck bed.

A slow shiver spread through me. The gap between lashing out in fear of being used in a way I didn't want to and lashing out in anger was wide. It had come over me too quickly for me to understand the difference and I'd leaped but now I was in free fall and I had no idea where the bottom was. I didn't want what any of those words meant. But I would rather tear out my synthesizer than take them back in front of Theta. My muscles buzzed with the friction generated by that incongruity—by memories of rain and summer; and the weight of my names and the ones who had called me by them; and the way I'd suddenly become a factor in V's choices in a situation where I could not even indirectly discount it as intended to benefit the kid.

My programming and my fears about my programming ran together in vicious cycles until, mercifully, I couldn't think.

With a growing disconnect splitting like a seed pod in my mind, I peeked through a crack and counted the thick flurries that caught the taillights, glimmering like flecks of red magic in our wake.