Remarkably, Lu managed to keep her incredulity in check--enough so as not to make a scene before their guests, at least. Instead she pursed her lips, looked at him hard, and finally said "We should get that injury of yours cleaned up."

Taiga smiled, motioning off to one of the doors that lead from the living room. "There's another med pack in the den," he said.

Lu motioned him off, curtly. Taiga turned to Fujin, nodding slightly.

"Anyev, could you stay out here? ...I need to talk to Lu."

Fujin frowned, but nodded. "Yes," she said simply.

Taiga gave her a brilliantly sincere smile, and stepped through the door. Lu followed him, entering a half-lit room. There was a desk, a few bookshelves with even fewer books, an endtable--and leaning against the wall was the second medpack.

Taiga picked it up, laying it on the desk. "You look like you have something you want to ask me," he said.

Lu's jaw worked for a moment as she tried to figure out how to respond to such a biting understatement. "All this time, and it never occurred to you to tell me you had a child?" she finally demanded.

Taiga shrugged, halfheartedly. "Would you have believed me!"

"Of course not!" Lu snapped back. "That's not the point!"

Taiga located a pair of large tweezers in the case, picking at the fragments of armor that had lodged in his skin. "What is?"

"The point is--is--" Lu, apparently, wasn't sure either. After a moment, she gave up, and shook her head. "I don't know, 'borg. When have I ever known anything about you?"

"Since about the time I've known anything about you," Taiga responded, dropping the first of the fragments into a chipped porcelain bowl on the desk. Lu winced.

"...doesn't that hurt?"

Taiga glanced up. "The ICI system delivers nerve blockers to any wounded area," he said. "Nerve-blockers and coagulants. If they could have figured out how to make the armor repair itself, they'd have built that in, too."

Lu was still blanching. "How--" she began.

"I'll bandage it up, and call it good. I wouldn't be able to get it repaired without... y'know. Going back."

Lu looked him over, as if she was re-evaluating him. "What would they do to you if they caught you again?"

"The same thing they'd do to any other cyborg. Recondition me and put me back into the unit."

Lu didn't respond at all to that. After a moment, having extracted another chip of armor, Taiga glanced up.

"...are you all right?"

"That's what makes you so different," Lu said quietly. "Her."

Taiga nodded, voice dropping. "...I'm the only one who had something to return to, out here," he said. "...but I never thought I'd find her. I thought... I thought she might be dead." He shuddered. "I'm glad. I'm glad I found her now. This'd be my last chance."

Lu had opened her mouth to ask a question, but she swallowed it. "Your last--"

"It's not going to happen again. If I get reconditioned now, I won't make it back out."

Lu regarded him for a moment, and made an astute leap of reasoning. "You'll go insane."

Taiga didn't respond.

"But--" Lu bit her lip, growling to herself at some perceived injustice. "Surely they wouldn't just do that without any--any sort of a trial, would they? If all this doesn't constitute some kind of extenuating circumstances, I'll be damned--"

"It doesn't," Taiga said. "There are no extenuating circumstances for a cyborg. There's the programming, and there's malfunctioning."

"You have a daughter, Taiga!"

"It's never come up in the rulebooks, Lu. Cyborgs--"

"--cyborgs can't have children. But if that's the case, then how...."

Taiga chuckled dryly. "I thought you would ask that sooner."

"Every time I think of one question, you interrupt and force me to ask three different ones," Lu shot back.

Taiga shrugged, moving mechanically on with his shattered armor. "Remember when we met? I told you you reminded me of someone?"

Lu thought for a moment. "No."

"Well... you remind me of someone. An Esthar anthrobiologist, Alda Lucreche. She had started her career off as a minor technic in the Cybernetics Corps--she worked on developing benign integration systems for the cybernetic systems. Later, she transferred out and went into medicine and microbio. I met her... after Seiken died."

"What?"

Taiga stared at one of the armor fragments with far more concentration than he really needed to extract it. "It was after Seiken died. I was a mess, wandering around with no idea where to go or why. The ICI--well, the ICI was even more annoying than it is now. I didn't know how to deal with it. That's when I ran into Alda."

Lu stepped forward, taking the tweezers for him. and setting to work on his side. "Go on," she said.

Taiga leaned back, shifting his arm to allow her freer access to his side. "She... she was the most amazingly gentle person I'd ever met. She treated me like a wounded animal--she brought me in, fed me, cleaned me up... Hyne, she was so kind! I'd never run into anyone like that. ...she didn't know I was a deserter at first, but when she found out she didn't change. She understood it. She wanted to help me stay lost."

Lu hmphed. "Doesn't sound too much like me."

"...it's that North Esthar color," Taiga explained. "Your skin, your hair. She had the lightest hair I'd ever seen."

"Alda Lucreche," Lu said, tasting the name. "Hmph. She sounds like a regular angel of love and mercy."

"She was," Taiga responded, no trace of irony or cynicism in his voice. "We--Hyne, I don't know if what happened then was a romance or a divine comedy. Sometimes I think it was God's joke on me. But we fell in love. ...and then I was captured."

"You said you came out here after you were reconditioned once," Lu recalled. "Was that then?"

"As soon as I could, I broke out again," Taiga told her. "I found her, and we ran away together. She left off her assignment in the middle--took her equipment and vanished with me. We came out here, to this house. We--oh, Hyne in his heaven, we were young and stupid and in love and we thought that everything would work, that they would never find us out here. We thought we had the rest of our lives together. We thought--we thought--oh, Hyne!"

Taiga jerked away from her, causing her to tug one of the shards out less cleanly than she would have preferred. Lu froze--not wanting to be recognized as a threat by some odd quirk in the ICI, and not wanting to interrupt him.

"We thought we were safe. Safe enough to start a family, to--to be a family. Alda--she was in cybernetics and microbio, and it's lucky, because it wasn't too hard for her to figure out a workaround... it wasn't perfect, it couldn't be, and that's the reason for--well. She was born early, for one, and she's albino, and some of her senses aren't what they can be, but--but she's perfect, Lu, the only perfect thing in my damned life. People always say that childbirth is a miracle and all that. Well--well--they're wrong. That's nothing compared to this. It's--she did the impossible. She... she proved that we were human."

Lu didn't know how to respond. "...it's incredible," she finally responded.

"This house, here. This house has a lot of history to it, and I remember it all--I remember how she grew up, and how much we loved her and each other and--that fight. They found us. They came over the hill and down here--Alda never had the best of health, and you can't run from cyborgs. We hid her--they wouldn't look for a child, why would they? And they killed Alda, and they took me away, and they reconditioned me, and after so many years it didn't quite take--I had changed so much, and the programming wasn't welcome any more. I knew I had to find her--to find Anyev. I broke away again, and looked for her--but by then I was already cracking. I remember killing--I remember trying to find her, and failing, and killing, and then I'd get caught, and they'd take me back--"

A racking shudder passed through him.

"I stopped trying after a while. It just wasn't worth it, and every time they reconditioned me it got a little bit worse. I just stayed with the unit, tried to forget--but I couldn't. And this time--this time, I don't know what came over me. I was out on a patrol, and... and maybe it was the wind, or the sun, or something reminded me of Seiken and Alda and Anyev and I couldn't just give up, I had to try to get out here one last time--and if I failed, then it was all over." He swallowed, making a bid to regain his composure. "It's the last time, and I tried my hardest, and luck gave me you, and we drove each other this far. And I haven't gone insane. Not yet."

Lu was almost surprised to find herself shaking. "This house--" she began.

"This house was Seiken's idea. He was the joker of the unit--always was. Poet, dreamer, class clown. He stole some money and transferred it over the hardwire to a construction company here. Told them to build a house at the latitude and longitude he told them--degree, minute, and second. And then he told me that we were going to go there and restart our lives." He smiled sadly. "But he never got here. ...I like to think of it as his wedding gift to Alda and me."

Lu looked down. "I'm sorry." ...I'm sorry I made you re-live that.

"...it's not your fault. I'm just--I'm just glad I'm here. Again. With--with Anyev, and--" He swallowed. "...I think I need to sleep."

Lu blinked. "Sleep?"

"What?" Taiga glanced back at her, as evenly as he could. "I need to sleep, too."

Lu crossed her arms. "I don't think I've ever seen you sleep," she said.

"Well, I don't need to sleep as much as you do," Taiga responded. "I go to sleep later and wake up earlier. But... I'm tired. More tired than I think I've ever been--I'm going to so say my goodnights and sleep. I'll--I'll see you in the morning, Lu."

Taiga stepped out of the den, and Lu sat down heavily into one of the chairs. There was an ache in her stomach that she couldn't quite place--it was coming from the dust, from the forgotten air of the house, from the words that were still spinning in the back of her mind.

It was several long minutes before words presented themselves to her, attaching themselves to images--Taiga in the den, Taiga by the fireplace, Taiga weeding the garden.

Human, she realized. And close on that came another.

...home.