Yup… I skipped another day. Somehow, I fell asleep and didn't wake up until it was today.

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"I'm going now," called Vash from the living room.

"Ok, have fun!" Anne called back, but didn't move to see him off. Knives didn't say a word, and after a few moments, they could hear Vash sigh and exit the room. They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Anne slid off the counter and left the room. Knives followed a few steps after her.

"Where are you going?"

"I want to take a shower and get dressed. If I'm going to be hosting you guys for any length of time, I'm going to have to go shopping, and I can't do that in my pajamas."

"That's your pajamas?"

She paused at the door to the bedroom and looked over her shoulder at him. "And what's wrong with my pajamas?" she asked archly.

"Uh… nothing. I just expected, well…" he sputtered.

"Lingerie is nice, but it's more of a toy than general sleepwear."

"That wasn't what I was saying!" he protested.

"What were you saying?"

"Just… that… it's…" He paused, searching for words. "It looks very comfortable," he finished up carefully.

She laughed, and walked into the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

He sighed, then looked around the bare living room again. He paced over to the couch and flopped down on it, then looked at the blank wall and wondered what he was doing here. This wasn't going at all like he had thought it would. For one thing, Kiley hadn't thrown herself into his arms in gratitude. He had kind of hoped that would be the case. For another, they were sticking around. He didn't know what impulse had urged him to insist on staying in a city full of humans, but strangely he didn't really regret it.

He ended up staring at the door to the bedroom, thinking about Kiley. She had changed in the past few years. It wasn't just that her hair was longer, or that she had put on a few pounds. It was more… there was a peace around her that hadn't been there when she had been in his ship. A calmness that hadn't been there. It was hard to define, hard to place words around, like many things about her. It wasn't a stillness; she had always seemed very still, very silent until prodded otherwise.

Her story about needing time to rediscover herself made sense. From what of her memories she had shared with him, she had not had an easy time in her past life, and anyone might need a break from those memories, she would. But her reasons for not coming back seemed very specious to him. Any research that she might be performing with those humans at the plant would be much better performed back at his ship.

He could think of many reasons why. For one thing, no number of mere humans could ever hope to rival the intelligence of a plant. That alone was a telling reason in his mind why she should have returned. Waiting for the slow humans to appreciate and comprehend her brilliance must have been tiring. For another, there were more resources for development and testing at his ship. He had removed or altered very few components in the last 150 years; the December ship had been scavenged since its fall.

Had she returned, this project would likely have been finished already, already helping his tortured sisters.

He wondered if she could hear them screaming. While he was in the plant, their voices teased at him, pleaded with him to make the pain stop. How could she bear to work there, listening to their pain day in and day out, or even worse, how could she ignore it?

He shifted on the couch and felt something hard beneath him. He slid a hand between the cushions and pulled out her computer. He set the small box on his lap and powered it up, viewing the start-up procedure on the holographic monitor with disinterest. He pulled up the file with the most recent activity and was rewarded with the schematic that Anne had been pouring over a few days ago.

He snorted as he viewed the power linkages. That would never hold the gain, but would blow within a few hours as the couplings overheated. Narrowing his eyes and shifting his weight forward, he began manipulating the drawing, running variant after variant in search of one that would work.

Vaguely, he was aware of Kiley exiting the bedroom and coming over to sit by him. She smelled wet, her hair smelling something like flowers would smell like, if designed by a man with no sense of smell. She leaned over to look at what he was doing, and he sneezed.

"I tried that one," she said after a moment. "But look at this bit here," she pointed to a few transistors in the upper corner. "They can't handle the load you just routed there, and there's no way we could redesign it to make them large enough to do so."

"Hmm," he responded, then erased his changes. "This is a tricky piece of work."

"I know. It's had me stumped for a couple days. One of the guys at work pulled the board from a servo computer, and if I can get it to work we have plenty of boards for the new app. He thought it would work as is, but luckily someone else caught the problem here," she pointed to the original linkage problem, "and had it routed to me to fix."

"I'm not sure this board is going to be fixable."

"It has to be. It's pretty much our last option where we have any real stock on hand. Here, you look it over and see if you can come up with anything while I go get some groceries and a couple more towels."

He looked up at her as she stood. "By yourself?"

She shrugged. "Public places; I should be fine. These people aren't any quicker to draw attention to the existence of plants than you are."

"Don't expect me to rescue you again," he grumbled as he turned back to the problem.

"I never expect anything from you," she said with a sad smile.