Afterparty

It's quiet, mostly.

When it came to security on Nar Shaddaa that usually meant they hadn't bothered to show up- the Hutts and the other cartels' idea of law enforcement insofar as law existed here at all ran heavily to Gamorreans with shotguns and pacification droids, neither of which were any good at keeping quiet- but one could never be too careful. The dressing room door's still closed and the cloaking screen active; Nine hauls the duffel bag into the center of the floor and digs into the storage pocket, pulling out her stealth generator and clipping it, after a moment's consideration, to the neckline of her costume.

"Get everything packed up," she says, and shoves the front panel of the skirt aside to strap her knife holster to her upper thigh with a slicing spike tucked in beside the blade. (Hopefully she won't need either one; all the action was on the roof so the responders should be, too, and she'd bet half the tenants in this place pay prettily to keep their doors closed to outsiders. The last time she relied on hopefully, though, she ended up in carbonite. So weapons it is.) "I'll clear the way."

Theron nods as Kaliyo pushes past him, toolkit in one hand and her makeup box in the other, dropping both into the bag. "You don't want to change clothes?"

"We're wasting time as it is. Keep the cloaking screen up until I come back, but be ready to move in five." Before any of them can respond she hits the button on her generator and flickers out of view.

She presses her ear to the dressing room door, hearing nothing but the echoes of alarms in the hallway beyond, takes a deep breath and opens it and-

Nothing. The corridor's empty in both directions, the dancers already evacuated and the building's lockdown making the presence of the club's own guards a moot point. Turning left down the hall, she makes her way past dressing rooms and keypad-locked storage rooms and rounds the corner toward the emergency exit, the light above it strobing red in the dark. The exit door's solid durasteel, intended as a safety measure but in practice meaning she hasn't a Void-damned clue what's on the other side.

Oh, well. Here goes.

She pulls the door open quickly as her field stutters- if anyone's on the other side she'd rather catch them off-guard than give them time to be ready for her- and then takes a step back, pressing herself flat against the wall. Nothing again, at first. She counts.

One.

Two.

"What the-"

Fuck.

Huttese. Not one of Arcann's lackeys, then, clearly not a droid, and not nearly enough grunting for a Gamorrean. She's still considering her options when the footsteps up the staircase fade and a figure casts a shadow across the doorway: human or close to it, broad-shouldered in heavy armor with a Hutt Cartel blazon on one shoulder. Double fuck. She draws her knife as the man peers down the hallway, lifting his chin to look further along and flashing a stripe of paler skin over the black collar of his armor- something to aim at if it comes down to it but oh, go away, go away-

"Huh. Could have sworn I saw something." The guard turns, seemingly incurious, to walk back to the landing, but as he crosses the threshold he reaches down toward one hip and she can see a little radio dangling there, glinting in the emergency light. He unclips it, finger drifting towards the transmit switch. Triple fuck.

She closes the gap between them in three steps. Reaching up with one hand to catch a handful of hair in her fist, she yanks his head back sharply and before he can cry out her blade bites into his neck; she draws it across in one motion until the smell of blood fills her nose and he chokes and starts to sag backward. Under normal circumstances she'd let him fall- this isn't the time to care about how some kneecap-smashing thug lands when he'll be dead before he hits the ground- but she's got enough to apologize to Sia'hla for without leaving a mess on her hallway carpet. She drives her knee into the small of his back, sending his body through the open door to sprawl face-down on the concrete beyond.

And then she waits.

Nothing. No shouts, no footsteps coming up the stairs. Good.

His radio's on the floor beside her. She crushes it under her heel for good measure and then activates her generator again before she steps over the guard's body onto the landing, scanning the alley below. It's silent, empty, unlike the airspace overhead with a half-dozen patrol cruisers and fire control drones hovering around the roof when she looks up- but she's just a dot on the ground to them. Exhaling, she stoops, wiping her knife on the fabric of his trousers.

"Now what," she mutters- she's got blood on the back of her right hand, and wipes that off too- "do I do with you?"

When she looks more closely over the railing there's a massive refuse bin pushed against the side of the building, near enough that she could jump down and land on it. Or possibly throw something into it, if he didn't look so heavy.

She activates her comm. "The way out's clear. But I need a bucket of water and someone to help me with some lifting."

"You need a-" Theron pauses and then just sighs and she can picture his eyelids closing, the way his forehead wrinkles around his implants when he thinks better of a question he doesn't want to know the answer to. "How many?"

"Only one. It's handled."

(Wait, she hears Jonas say in the background, did she just kill someone, or-)

Theron sighs again. "Be right there."

Two minutes later they're all peering around the corner at her as she leans against the doorframe and she waves them on. Theron's got the duffle bag over one shoulder; when he sees the body he stops, scans it quickly and then sets the bag down.

"Really?" He steps out onto the landing beside her. "We couldn't have snuck around him?"

"He saw the door open and he was about to radio out. Assuming all his friends are his size, we'd have been in trouble." Gesturing back toward the smashed device, she shrugs. "Unless you'd rather have fought them all yourself."

Theron wrinkles his nose. "Point. I'm assuming you have a plan."

A rumbling noise makes them both look to the hall. "Couldn't find a bucket," Kaliyo says, rolling the top half of a water dispenser along the length of the carpet. "This'll work, yeah?"

"Ought to." She turns back to Theron; Balkar's still lingering in the doorway with Tee-Seven just behind him. "If I hop down and open the lid, can the two of you toss him down?"

He peers down over the railing. "Probably. Hey, can you grab my gloves out of the-"

"We're seriously dumping him in the trash?" Jonas folds his arms across his chest. "This guy's not Zakuulan. He wouldn't even be in this sector, let alone dead, if you hadn't-"

She cuts him off. "We. You wanted in on this."

"To get the shield generator down, yeah. I didn't buy in for wetwork." Eyes narrowed, Jonas frowns. "Did I actually have a choice? Or if I'd said no, would that be me getting thrown down there with the garbage?"

"What did you think they were doing up there- playing pazaak? This was never going to be a clean run."

"You didn't answer my question."

Theron's crouched down, pulling his climbing gloves out of the bag; he looks up with a shake of his head and answers before she can. "Don't be an idiot. If you'd said no I'd have stuck a sleep dart in your neck and shoved you in a closet."

Jonas blinks.

She does, too.

(She wouldn't have killed him. Not because she particularly cares about him- he'd been responsible for at least a half-dozen captured or dead agents by her reckoning and five years ago she'd have put a round through him without blinking- but she knows Theron does. That means more than it should, probably, these days.

So she wouldn't have killed him. But she thought Theron would have simply let him walk.

Hm.)

"Well," Jonas says after a moment, "that's a relief. I think."

She looks back and forth between them, then starts to climb over the railing. "We can discuss this later. For now, let's get this tidied up."

Theron opens his mouth to reply, then shuts it again. He pulls his gloves on, moving around the body to lift it by both wrists as she gets over the rail completely- it's awkward, still in her dancing shoes and her skirt catching on the paint flaking off the metal bars. "Tell us when."

She lets herself down, dangling from the lower bar, and falls. It's only a story's drop to the top of the bin and she bends her knees to absorb the shock of the impact but still she wobbles, one heel almost giving way before she steadies herself and jumps the rest of the way down to the ground. The lid's fastened down with a simple electronic lock; she pulls the spike out of her holster and jams it into the key port until it sparks and gives way with a halfhearted beep.

"All right." She pushes up on one corner and the lid raises up. "Heave-ho."

Tomorrow must be garbage day- when the body lands it barely makes a noise.

"Get clear-" by her volume Kaliyo's talking to the rest of them, not to her- "unless you want a bath."

It could have been a waterfall except for all the blood in it; it pours off the side of the platform and runs red along the gutter until it disappears, drop by drop by drop, into the half-clogged drain in the center of the alley. Soon enough the stream clears and, the empty water container tossed down from above, she closes the bin again and unspikes the lock. Until the hauler comes around no one will be the wiser, and when she checks her hands one last time they're clean.

(-and she blinks and looks at them again and the blood drips off her fingertips, streaks sticky up her wrists and beneath her fingernails because all the scrubbing in the world won't ever get them clean and she can hear him laughing, laughing in her head at the very idea of it-)

"Hey." Theron's voice snaps her out of it and she looks up to see him leaning over the rail. "We're coming down."

They split up after that.

She calls the apartment's little car for Tee-Seven, loaded into the driver's seat with the duffel opposite- her housekeeping droid can help unload, and the little astromech would only be a target for theft where they're going.

"Where are we going?" Jonas hangs on behind Theron on the back of one of the speeders. "There's no way out of the sector on these."

"The autotaxis are all on lockdown." She has to shout to be heard over the engines (not the most upscale models, these, borrowed via a bit of clever slicing from one of the public rental stations) as she clings to Kaliyo's waist. "And they had to bring the dropship down fast. We're not leaving the sector yet."

"Then what-"

She shushes him, easing her hold just long enough to raise a finger to her lips. Kaliyo's an even worse driver than she remembers. "Relax. We'll have you home in plenty of time for curfew."

Theron doesn't look at her, focused carefully on their route as they weave through one back alley after another, but his shoulders rinse and fall and she's pretty sure he's laughing.

Even in a dancer's costume she's massively overdressed for this place.

It's been a long time since she had reason to venture down to the lower part of the industrial sector- if the upper levels were halfway civilized, Republic and Imperial companies mixed in with venture capitalists with more money than scruples, the underlevels housed weapons factories and spice labs and the occasional mad scientist. But the danger kept the Hutts away, which made it perfect for their purposes.

She's never been to this particular bar. She's been to a hundred others just like it, though, down to the passed-out Rodian at the far end of the counter and the surly Devaronian bouncer, the going rate for entry apparently a handfulworth of her ass pinched hard enough that she'll probably have fingermarks tomorrow. Her knife's still in place beneath her skirt; for a fleeting moment she ponders stabbing him out of principle.

But they've got a rendezvous to make. She rolls her eyes and lets it go as the bartender gestures toward a back room.

Three knocks on the closed door and Veeroa answers, a quarter-empty brandy bottle in her hand. "'bout time you got here," she mutters, voice already shading into tipsiness. "We started the party without you."

"They've started, at least." When they slip inside, Lana rises from her seat at the table in the center of the room. "Not that I blame them. It didn't-" she sighs. "I see you all made it out relatively unscathed."

Beside her, Sia'hla draws her robe closer around her shoulders with a good-natured grumble. She ought to have grabbed a cover-up herself. She'd be warmer, at least. "Unlike my poor club, which is probably now on fire and also full of Hutts. I'm not sure which is worse."

"You'll be up and running again by midweek. This planet's got a short memory." Nine moves a little further into the room, scanning the rest of the group- somber to a one which isn't a surprise, but straight-backed, chins held high. (Loss isn't new to them, of course. Nar Shaddaa's always been a warzone; the Eternal Empire was just the first thing that everyone could agree to hate.) "And it wasn't even a little bit on fire when we left, though I'd advise against opening your garbage bin."

"What did you- never mind. Better not to know." Lekku curling over one shoulder, Sia'hla gestures to the empty chair beside hers. "At least we gave them quite a show, hm? It almost made me miss being on stage."

"Only almost?"

She winks. "Not enough to make the costume worth it. Come sit, numa. I got your favorite."

"And I see our guest is still with us." They're all staring at Jonas when he steps out from behind Theron but Lana's the one who says it, expression neutral but her tone desert-dry.

Theron's hand is still on the door as he sets the lock behind them. "He helped, Lana. Voluntarily. We couldn't-"

"It was an observation, not a threat." When she rubs her face Lana's hair shifts to one side and there's a spot of blood on her forehead beneath it, just above her left eye. "Hello, Agent Balkar. Would you care for a drink?"

Jonas looks at her first, which she didn't expect- title notwithstanding she's not his Commander, she's only got as much influence over him as he's willing to cede and she doesn't expect any at all- and when she gestures toward another empty chair he turns toward Theron, head tilted to one side. '"That depends," he says carefully. "If this is going to be my last one, I have a special request."

Theron flinches. "You think I'd do that? Seriously?"

"You? No. Them?-" hands shoved deep into his trouser pockets, glance flickering between her and Lana- "maybe. I've heard a lot of stories lately. Even if most of them are bantha shit-" he sighs. "You're really going to let me walk out of here?"

She gestures, again, toward the tables, toward the rest of Lana's team with their heads bent over drinks and just enough chairs to seat them all (but they should have been one short, they should have been one seat short and stars, she can't remember the woman's name, it's hanging just on the tip of her tongue but Nine can't think of it and she deserves more than that. Her name was-)

It was-)

"We should probably get your story straight before you leave," she says, "but yes, I'd planned on it. This isn't the old war. We don't need to be enemies, regardless of whatever lies your director's told you."

"Maybe." By his tone of voice Jonas isn't entirely convinced.

He sits, though. It's something.

(The Zabrak's name was Omi.

They'd left her up there. There was nothing else they could have done.

But she thinks, from the stories the rest of them tell as they move from one round of drinks to the next, that Omi would have wanted it that way.)

By Nar Shaddaa standards it's an early night.

"Five years ago I'd have just have stayed up." She yawns as the door closes behind the last of the resistance members. Whether she'll see them again she isn't sure- only Veeroa asked to come to Odessen; Lana's barbs about needing more training must have sunk in properly after all. "But we've got an Exarch to kill, and before that I could use a nap."

Lana nods. "You've been running on stims- don't think I haven't noticed. And now that we know that they can cloak-"

Kaliyo snorts and stands up, draining her glass. "Never met anybody who could outstealth the boss. Met a lot of people who've tried, though. All dead now."

"That's reassuring. I think." Rubbing her eyes, Lana glances across the room to one of the smaller tables where Theron and Jonas are still talking, occasional snippets drifting across during lulls in their own conversation. "Should we interrupt them, or-?"

"Let me. Theron and I will find our own way back, and you two can use the apartment's car. It should be able to bypass the security blockade by now. I'll send you the code-" she looks down at herself. With no place in the costume to stash her commpad she'd left it behind so she's only got her earpiece on- so much for transmitting data. "Never mind. 'liyo, do you still have it programmed in?"

"I might have borrowed it once or twice over the years."

She sighs.

"What? You weren't using it."

"I suppose I wasn't." Her shoulder twinges again. As she rolls it back and forth it catches a little, stiffer than it was a few hours ago. Perhaps a bath first, then, before her nap; there won't be enough time for kolto to do much good. "Head out when you're ready. We won't be long."

Kaliyo heads for the exit but Lana hangs back a moment, reaches out one hand to rest on her arm. "I saw that. Are you all right?"

"It's nothing- I only slipped. I'll manage."

"As always." Lana half-smiles but her eyes betray her exhaustion. She blinks, then shakes her head. "Can we- I need a little time to decompress, but later on I'd appreciate your insight on what I did wrong. I thought I had it all planned out and then-"

She nods. "First rule of field work: it's never as planned as you think, and wrong's not the right word. But of course we can talk through it- on the way home, maybe?"

"Thank you." Letting her hand drop, Lana turns to the door with one last look across the room toward the little table. "Do you think he'll join us?"

"No."

"So certain?"

She shrugs. "He hasn't stopped casing the room all night. With time, maybe… but we haven't got time. It isn't so bad. We could use someone halfway friendly in the Republic."

"True. Don't stay too late." And with that Lana steps out, the dull roar of the bar outside filtering in through the open door for a moment before it shuts again.

She stays in her seat for a little while longer. She ought to get up. They ought to go. But she's so tired and sitting feels lovely, her weight off her aching feet- how did she used to wear these damned shoes all night? Somehow she keeps expecting the five years she missed to catch up with her at one go, that she'll wake up some morning with new wrinkles and a handful of silver hairs and-

Balkar- Jonas, he isn't her enemy any more and she needs to keep reminding herself of that- laughs out loud and she's been trying to give Theron a little privacy, really she has, but she can't help herself. Angling slightly, she turns to watch their mouths as they keep talking.

"Complicated?" He reaches across to thump one of Theron's shoulder's, still laughing. "Complicated. You are such a fucking liar, you know that?"

Theron rolls his eyes. "What? You asked."

Jonas grins. "'I don't feel the need to fraternize with my contacts, Jonas.' Verbatim. How's that working out for you so far?"

"That was six years ago, for one thing, and it wasn't technically a lie. You said blonde, so-"

She can't hold back a giggle and they both turn their heads, very slowly, to look at her.

"Oh, don't mind me," she says. "Just eavesdropping."

Out of all of them Jonas had the most to drink over the course of the night by a fairly hefty margin- he'd been at Sia'hla's place to party, not to work, and by his reaction time when they'd marched him toward the dressing room he'd been several rounds in already- and he, like Theron, drank too fast when he was thinking (she remembered that from Coruscant). He gulps down the rest of a mostly-full whiskey, then angles his chair toward her with a sharp thump as its legs lift off the floor and touch down again. "So. Cipher."

She shakes her head slightly. "I don't use that title any more."

"Xari's not really your name, I assume, and they've all been calling you Nine all night. I figured it was still a rank thing. Commander seems a little formal."

"As I told Theron a very long time ago, that's the only name I have. You're welcome to use it if you like." When she says it Theron smiles a little. "I'm not much for titles in general, honestly."

Jonas leans forward toward her, elbows resting on his knees. "Nine, then. How'd you do it?"

"Do what?" She folds her arms across her chest. His tone's light enough, but Theron doesn't look happy. "I think I missed part of the question."

"This man-" his chin tilts up in Theron's direction - "has no concept of work-life balance. After hours drinks? No thanks, says Mister I-Don't-Sleep-Where-I-Work. Administrative leave? He withered away from boredom. He was on the fast track to a directorship, and then you-" he snaps his fingers, the sound echoing in the otherwise quiet room. "I mean, it's not like the SIS could ever compete with the Empire's resources, but… come on. Playing someone like me's one thing. You found a weakness, exploited it- I respect that. But you must have promised him something good to get him to defect. What was it?"

Theron sighs. "Jonas, shut up."

"What? It's a fair question."

"He didn't defect," she says, leaning forward, matching his posture. If that was what they were saying in the SIS, no wonder Theron'd been run off-planet when he tried to go home. "Not in the way that you're implying. And you know perfectly well-"

Theron cuts her off. "Let me answer that, Nine. Please."

She sits back, frowning, as he continues, his hands clenched into tight fists in his lap.

"Can you really sit there and- no." He pauses, looks down at the tabletop and then back up. "Let's start with a different question. You know why we're here. Why are you?"

"If your question is did someone put me up to finding you, no way." Jonas pushes his hair back off his face. "This was my first night off in a month and- shit, I was there to see her. Xari-her, I mean. Not Commander-Cipher-her, not that I know what the difference is. And then I sat down and there you were. Three years later-"

This is absurd.

He keeps talking; she raises her hands to her eyes, pushing one eyelid back with a finger and pinching the colored lens from that side and then the other and leaving them crumpled on the tabletop. With all the sweat from earlier and the heat of the mask her wig's come unglued a little in front of her right ear and she can feel the gap there, the lace tickling at her skin. She slides one fingernail beneath it, slowly lifting it free with a wince as the rest of the still-stuck glue pulls at her hairline.

"-and 'around' is all the answer I get and- what are you doing?"

Jonas finally looks at her instead of Theron as she drops the wig unceremoniously onto the table with the lenses and starts unplaiting her hair. "You said you don't know what the difference is," she snaps, "between me and her. This is me."

"I've seen your dossier. I know what you look like. I just-"

She shivers, the air gone cold all of a sudden, and Theron stands up. Pulling off his jacket as he steps away from the smaller table toward her, he drapes it over her shoulders before turning back toward Jonas. His hand brushes her side; she slips one arm through and then the other, reaches for his fingertips with hers half-hidden by the too-long sleeve.

"You were never quite the same," Jonas says quietly, "after you came back from Yavin. After Ziost, especially. I thought it was trauma, but it was her, wasn't it?"

"Only sort of. It was-" Theron sighs again, heavier. "Don't you get tired of it? Us versus them, picking the same fight over and over again because we think if they won this round we'll get the next one and maybe that'll be the one that ends the war?"

"Of course I do. But if we give up, if the Imps win-"

She undoes the last of the braid with her free hand, combing her fingers through the tangled mess of still-damp hair. "Then Arcann sees the Empire as the larger threat, which only means he'll level Dromund Kaas before he gets around to Coruscant."

"So, what? We let you win and hope we survive?" Jonas moves to pour himself another drink and then thinks better of it, maybe, pushing his empty glass further away toward the center of the table. "You'll forgive me for thinking that sounds a little disingenuous coming from you."

Stars, she's tired.

"That isn't what I said." She closes her eyes. "We're all pawns in their games, Agent Balkar. Do you think the Republic really cares what happens to you? The Empire abandoned me. If Lana and Theron hadn't found and freed me, I'd have died of carbonite poisoning and my frozen corpse would still be hanging on Arcann's wall."

(That's hard to say out loud. It's true, but-

When she was young she gave the Empire everything it ever asked of her, not expecting anything in return; patriotism was a lesson drilled into her as thoroughly as arithmetic or grammar. Even later, after Hunter, after Malgus, after Yavin and Ziost when she'd finally learned to separate Vitiate from his Empire, Dromund Kaas was still her home and she'd used her freedom in its service. She found the Emperor. She killed the Emperor.

And the Empire left her there to die.

That hurt.)

( -and still you lie. He flickers in and out of focus on the backs of her eyelids. Killed? An inconvenience, nothing more.

She grits her teeth. GO

AWAY-

-and it is dark again.)

"So keep fighting your useless war, if you like. I'm not a Cipher any more. I won't stop you so long as you don't interfere with what I need to do," she finishes. When she opens her eyes they're both staring at her. "But your house is burning down and you're busy rearranging the furniture."

"But Trant said- he said you-" Jonas stops short of whatever he meant to say. "Theron? Is that what-"

He nods. "I couldn't do it. I couldn't keep going. Knowing what we'd done in the past, working together- thinking about what we could do to fight back against Arcann and his armies-"

"We tried fighting back," Jonas says. "Or have you forgotten Bothawui?"

"Look at what we just did!" Theron takes a step toward him, starts to pull away from where her hand's still touching his. "Look at Hoth. Belsavis. Tatooine. With a few strike teams you could do it on the Core Worlds- you know how to slice their systems now."

"It's not that easy. The brass'll never go for it and I can't just turn rogue."

"Why not?" She was thinking it, too, but Theron's the one to say it.

"You know, I always thought this conversation'd go the other way around." One hand lifted, conciliatory. "I just- I can't. The SIS is stretched to breaking point as it is. If I leave too…" he shakes his head. "I can't. But I think I finally get why you did."

Pushing himself up out of his chair, Jonas smooths down his jacket, brushes a piece of invisible dust from the side of his trousers.

"And I owe you part of an apology, Ciph- Nine. I've heard a lot of things about you over the last few years. I'm starting to realize most of them were lies."

She chuckles. "That's terribly gracious of you. Any in particular?"

"None I'd care to repeat in present company." His gaze flicks toward Theron, then back to her. "I should get going. I'm due to report in a few hours, and I'm sure I'll have to explain how I have no idea whatsoever how the shield bunker on top of the nightclub I happened to be in managed to self-destruct."

"Faulty wiring," she says. "Obviously."

"Heh. Yeah. Maybe."

She gathers up the silver wig and her discarded contacts; she can't simply leave them, but she won't be needing them now. "We ought to go as well- we've got an early morning ahead of us. Let me get rid of these and we'll walk out together."

When they both nod she stands up, crosses the room and opens the door to the tiny 'fresher in the corner. It looks to be an incinerator style, typical for this level of the district- too much money to simply let the waste pile up, not enough to pay for proper sewers. She drops the lenses into the toilet, balls the wig up and tosses it in too. Tucking her hand into the sleeve of Theron's jacket, she pushes down on the handle.

A minute later she can smell burning hair. Good enough.

She presses the handle one more time, just to be safe, before she steps back out into the open.

They're nearer to the entrance now, face to face, talking quietly. Whatever Theron was saying, she misses the end of it as he holds out his hand to Jonas, who starts to shake it and then just pulls him into a hug; Theron stiffens, just for a moment, before relaxing and returning the gesture.

"Call me," Jonas murmurs- it isn't meant for her to hear but she can read the words clearly in the movement of his mouth- "when you can. There's something you need to hear."

"You can say it now," Theron replies, even quieter, barely audible. "I don't keep secrets from her."

Jonas frowns as he pulls back. "It's not that. It's-"

She looks away. Not fast enough.

"Just call me, okay?" he says again, louder. "Next time you're on Coruscant we should get dinner. I know a great place if you like gorak."

"I might take you up on that." The response rolls off Theron's tongue too quickly, too polished, an answer to a question she doesn't understand but he obviously does. He hates gorak, more to the point, and he knows better than to go anywhere near Coruscant given his last venture, and- "Stay safe, Jonas. I mean it."

"You, too." Jonas turns toward her, one last time. She searches his face for any hint of his meaning but he's only smiling, expression good-natured and as much a mask as her own. "Good night, Nine. Take care of him for me."

She nods. "I will."

"And thanks again-" he winks- "for the show."

Author's Note: Not much excuse for our time gap this time, I'm afraid. Depression's a bitch like that sometimes.

Up next: Interlude IV- Til Human Voices Wake Us. A bath, and a conversation.