86th District, Eastern Ward

June 30th, Stellar Year 2146

Shiden was getting real fucking tired of lugging this rocket launcher around.

The ammo was being a bitch too. After the first time she'd used the launcher - to save Shin's ass, which he still hadn't thanked her for, the ungrateful bastard - her past self had made a truly awful decision. See, she didn't just replace the rocket launcher with a new one. She got an upgrade.

The previous model had been a one-and-done type of thing. Shoot it once and throw it away. This one, though, was an RPG-launcher, and it could be reloaded after firing. So when she strapped the thing to the outside of her Juggernaut, she also tossed a canvas quiver of extra rockets in the trunk.

The reason this was such an awful decision?

It was way too goddamn heavy.

Part of her debated what was even the point. Even with the extra rockets, the only thing a launcher would help her against would be a single lightly armored drone, like an Ameise or Grauwolf. A rocket-propelled grenade would do exactly jack and shit against anything bigger. And that kind of situation was never gonna happen in the first place, seeing as the Legion always traveled in enough numbers to drown a small country.

And it wasn't like she was guaranteed to win even if she did run into just a single drone. Ameise had machine-guns. One burst would turn her into swiss-cheese in two seconds flat. And the Grauwolves were so fast that one of them would probably cut her in half before she even got the RPG into her hands.

So with all that in mind, she figured she couldn't be blamed too hard for thinking, every now and then, about leaving her weapons behind. Maybe even her backpack too. Might as well if all the gear wouldn't do her any good to begin with, right? And it would be a lot more comfortable without all the extra weight pulling down her shoulders. Those were stressed enough as it was - she might have been proud of her feminine assets, but they created hell on her upper back during long marches. And the journey had been nothing but long marches ever since she had to abandon her Juggernaut.

But, no. She wouldn't. She had to have some kind of weapon to protect herself. It was a mindset thing if nothing else. Not peace of mind, that wasn't the right word. Security of mind? Something like that. Plus, if she ever did run into a single drone she had no way to sneak past, she'd feel like an even bigger idiot than usual when she went for her launcher and remembered she'd left it on the ground two dozen miles behind her.

So she'd carry the shit no matter how much she hated it. Besides, it wasn't just her own life she had to worry about.

She had to protect Kaie too.

Shiden stood in front of a pharmacy. She eyed the unbroken glass of the front door with suspicion. The windows all around it had been smashed in, shot at, broken apart. But the door was completely intact, and for some stupid reason that creeped her out. She didn't know why, except that it was a little weird for it to have survived this long.

Ignoring the completely broken-open window to the door's right, she shrugged the RPG off her shoulders and swung it like a club against the glass. It spiderwebbed on the first hit. Shattered entirely on the second. It felt good to break things. Cathartic. She unlocked the door and stepped inside.

The shelves were ransacked, of course. That tended to be the case for most stores, after four years of a war mostly fought by desperate kids who didn't get jack and/or shit for supplies. But mostly the looters went after the fun stuff. Bottles of cough syrup that could be chugged down for a weird, oily high. Low-grade opiates that, taken in high enough doses, took the edge off pain and reality both. And of course, there wasn't a lick of booze in sight.

Shiden knew all about these drugs. She had tried most of them at least once. But that wasn't what she was looking for today. Thankfully, what she was after today was something very few 86 would think to take.

"You better not have been talking out your ass, Shana," she murmured to herself as she went to the prescription counter and hopped over it. "I swear if you get Kaie killed because you wanted to sound smart…"

If the over-the-counter shelves were simply ransacked, these ones looked like a localized tornado had ripped its way through every bottle in sight. Her RPG had a flashlight attachment for some idiotic reason. So she turned it on and swept it across the billion bottles scattered across the floor, feeling faintly ridiculous about sorting through pills using a rocket launcher of all things. But she also thought it was a little badass, too. She thought about removing the live warhead from the muzzle. Or maybe just removing the flashlight itself and taking it in hand. She decided not to.

Partially on the off-chance she might need her weapon armed and loaded. Mostly because she was too lazy to bother.

"Let's see. The first one sounded kinda like moxie… and the second one sounded kinda like… clit?" She giggled abruptly, then shook it off, trying to remember as many snatches of that conversation as she could. It had been a long time since she talked to Shana, and most of the memories of their talks had faded by now. This one hadn't for some reason. Not all the way at least, but it was still faint..

"No, not clit. Clin. Clin-something. And moxi-something…" And wasn't there a third? She frowned. She couldn't remember a third, but she felt like there might have been. "Mock-a-see, mock-a-do, I got one, how 'bout you…"

She probably sounded like a crazy person. She also didn't care. Maybe crazy was better. She probably needed to be a little crazy if she was going to get the both of them out this jam intact and breathing.

Kaie was dying.

It was some kind of joke, really. When Shiden saw that Dinosauria stomping down the Greenway, she was sure she was dead. It had taken everything she had just to kill those two Lowes - she'd never even killed one on her own, before that day. And then that big metal bastard appeared on the horizon, and she realized it was all for nothing. Even at full strength, she couldn't even put a dent in a monster like that.

But Shiden hadn't died. The Dinosauria had stopped about half a mile up the road from her. Shiden still didn't know why she believed so strongly that it was Alice. But she had, and still did.

Even from all that distance, the Legion drone was massive. Alice stood next to the corpses of all the other Legion beside her. They looked like toys brushing up against her legs. Alice had stared for a long time at Shiden's Juggernaut. Then the Dinosauria turned its cannon, pointing not at her, but at a pillar of black smoke rising over the left side of the valley, up past the cliff of it, where the ground flattened and the forest took over.

After that the Dinosauria turned and trundled back where it had come. Shiden had just stared at that retreating shape for awhile. Then she shook her head, slapped her palms against her cheeks, and looked to the pillar of smoke. She followed it. And at its base she found Kaie's Juggernaut, Kirschblute, lying at the bottom of a cracked crater in the dirt. Somehow the Feldress was in one piece, despite being scorched and broken.

Kaie had been inside it. Her body was bruised all over. Rills of blood leaked from her ears. Her chest and shoulders were peppered with shrapnel cuts, and she was burned pretty bad in places. But she had been alive, and Shiden had grabbed her, laid her out onto the ground, treated the bleeding wounds as best she could and hauled her into Cyclops' cockpit. Shiden had sat the unconscious girl on her lap like a child as she drove as far from the Greenway as the Juggernaut would take them.

That didn't end up being very far. Forty miles. Maybe even less, before the engine broke down and she had to walk.

So she had. And Kaie still hadn't woken up by then, so Shiden dragged her on a travois made from lashed-together branches and a sea-blue tarp. She dragged her through miles and miles of highway for almost two days straight, sleeping fitfully on the side of the road and hoping the Legion wouldn't take their heads in the night. She had caught rainwater in her canteen and ignored her rumbling stomach. She'd dragged her until the highway hit an exit, and they had made it back to the outskirts of the ruined city, where Shiden set up camp in the living room of a mostly-intact house.

And after all that, Kaie was dying again.

Yeah. Really was some kind of joke.

It was some kind of infection. She hadn't been sure at first, when the only signs were fever and red lines across the skin. There were no 86 with any kind of medical training. At least, there were no 86 still alive that did. So Shiden had clung onto denial while she could, but after another day the truth became obvious enough. By then Kaie's fever had turned as hot as an oven, and the wounds were leaking a yellow-pink pus that smelled like death itself.

That brought Shiden here, to this ransacked pharmacy that smelled like dust and expired chemicals, searching through a mountain of spilled bottles using a flashlight mounted to the business end of a rocket launcher.

"C'mon, Shana… couldn't you have spoken up a little clearer or something? I might actually remember what you were saying if you didn't mumble so much, ya quiet bitch… moxie… moxi-see… a-mock-see… mock-a-do…"

She scanned the faces of about a dozen bottles in a little clump along the ground. None of them seemed promising. And there were so many. She kicked them aside in a fit of sudden pique. She enjoyed the sight of them scattering to all corners.

One bottle rolled all the way to the other end of the room, bounced off the bottom of a garbage can, rolled back, and shone clearly under her light.

It read, in a flat, no-nonsense font, 'amoxicillin.'

"There's the sucker right there," Shiden said triumphantly, and stuck the little bottle in her pocket.

It took her awhile longer to find the other one, which she discovered was called 'clindamycin.' One or both of these would combat Kaie's infection, according to that half-remembered conversation with Shana. But Kaie could also be allergic to one of them, and that would kill her even quicker than the infection. So she had to be careful. Dose her up low and slow, waiting to see if her body reacted badly.

She ignored the fact that she probably wouldn't have that kind of time on her hands.

But there was something else, too, wasn't there? She had to get something else she couldn't remember, another kind of medicine, just in case there was an allergic reaction, and it went badly. Something that could save Kaie's life. But this time she didn't even have a fragment of a name to go off of.

Dammit, why couldn't she remember?

What had they even been talking about? It wasn't like it was normal for their conversations to go all the way into a fucking how-to guide for treating infection. And how had Shana known all that stuff anyway? She was just another 86 kid who had nothing at all, except for the one thing every 86 kid had in abundance: free time.

And wasn't that truer than Truman? Time was literally all they had. Food? One of Shiden's first memories from the camps was of starvation. Clothes? Shiden once had to beat down a boy almost half again as old as she was just so she could keep her shoes. And toys? Only what they could make from mud and sticks.

But time? They had tons of that for sure, since the internment camps didn't have any schools for them to go to, or training, or courses, or anything at all other than pipe beds and bastard guards.

So how had Shana known?

"Think, Shiden, think!" she hissed miserably, hating herself for not being brighter.

She tried to create an image of Shana's face in her mind. There was a horrifying moment where she could not remember it. She knew in words and details - dark skin, black hair, blue eyes - but she could not make an image from them. When she realized she might have forgotten what her face looked like, she felt a pain that was palpably physical, a bitter clenching of the heart inside her chest.

And then she did remember, and let out a breath she didn't realize she was holding.

She saw her in the mind's eye, and the image was clear. Sharp jaw, almond eyes, a slim, pretty nose and cute lips.

"Shana," she murmured. She had closed her eyes without realizing it. Being as exhausted, dehydrated, and hungry as she was, she could almost convince herself she was talking to her again.

"When you told me about those drugs, the antibiotics… what we were talking about? And what was that other thing you mentioned? The one you used if they were allergic?"

In that vision seen behind closed eyelids, Shana stepped toward her. She looked both like and unlike how Shiden remembered her. She did not look like the age at which she'd died - thirteen. She looked much older than that, somehow.

Back when they were still together, Shiden had always thought Shana looked much older than her age. Shana had been the smart one. The calm one. The responsible one. When Shiden thought about what Shana might say or do in any situation, how she might feel about things, they were always the actions of a much wiser person than Shiden ever could be.

And as if to prove those thoughts, this Shana was taller than Shiden was, her features more feminine and mature. This was a version of Shana she had never gotten the chance to see. But she looked perfectly familiar to her all the same.

"You were talking about getting high, remember?" Shana said. Her blue eyes crinkled fondly. She was smiling. It was a sad smile.

Shiden nodded. That sounded about right. She had started on the drugs young, like a lot of 86 kids did. The first time had been with booze brought in by some of the older teens after their scavenging runs. She was eleven, maybe, when she had her first glass of sour-tasting bourbon, and loved it.

"And you brought in this little glass syringe you found at a drug store. You asked me about it, because I knew how to read and you didn't, and you thought I might know if it could get you high."

"Did you know?"

"No. But I found a book that told me. What you had was epinephrine - adrenaline. I told you it might give you a rush, but it wouldn't feel good. I told you it was mostly used to treat bad allergic reactions more than anything else. Like from amoxicillin and clindamycin."

"And then I asked about those too?"

"Yeah. Because you wanted to know about everything that might get you high."

Shiden wrung her hands together. Her face flushed coldly, a slick, sick sweat breaking out despite her dehydration.

"I'm sorry Shana," she said.

Shana's sad smile stayed where it was. It looked eternal, somehow. As eternal as her older-woman's face.

"It's okay Shiden."

Shiden had been high when Shana died.

After that first tall glass of sour bourbon, it hadn't been long before she started to try everything and anything. Alcohol, of course, was the most common, but there were all too many drugstores and pharmacies waiting to be raided. There were even a few head shops here and there among the ruins, stocked with strains of herbs that, when you smoked them, would take your perception, rip it into tatters and stitch it back together in impossible patterns.

So she tried everything. She never really got addicted to any one of the things she smoked, snorted, drank, ate. But she did get addicted to the act itself. Of dosing. Taking. Getting fucked up. Of seeing, feeling, and knowing something that was more than a concrete wall and a pipe-frame bed. Her vice wasn't booze or weed or painkillers, and not uppers or downers or morphine so strong half a hit could put her in a coma.

No, her vice was filling in the endless free time.

It didn't have to be filled with anything fun or good. Just something new. New could mean a whole other kind of hell. A delirious, raving dimension of smoke and twisting patterns, filled with pain, caused by yet another pill she didn't know the name of. And when she came out of it, feeling years older and more battered not just in her mind, but body and soul too, there would be a little moment of regret. Then she'd throw it away. She'd tell herself that anything was better than the camp, sitting sober and painfully aware of what had been done to her there. At least if she was high, she could forget.

Shana tried to get her to stop. It was the only thing they ever really argued about. Shiden did not stop.

Not until after one particular day, when she went into battle high as a kite. 'Makes me sharper,' she had said, with a stupid slack-jaw grin. 'Makes me fight better.'

Shana had screamed at her the night before, and Shiden, stubborn and stupid, had punched the drug even harder in response. She didn't even remember what drug it was. She barely remembered the battle itself. But she remembered how Shana died.

Shana was always watching Shiden's back. It didn't matter that they'd thrown furniture at each other the night before, what little of it that they had. Or that Shiden had shown up high even after Shana threatened to leave her if she ever did that again. Hell, maybe Shana did break up with her that day. It was more than possible, and it wasn't like Shiden could remember one way or the other.

But in the end she was still watching Shiden's back.

And when the Grauwolf got behind her, Shana was there. The drone ran at Shiden like a bat out of hell, ten tons of steel and vibrating blades, and she didn't even see it on the rearview. She had been staring at some smoke billowing off an explosion. She'd been caught in the pattern of it. There had been a line of drool snaking down her open mouth.

And Shana had jumped in with her Juggernaut to take the hit that should have killed her.

"It's not okay, Shana," Shiden said in a husky, grating whine. She could feel her eyebrows tensed and screwed, her mouth set in a hard line. "Look, I… I should have died, not you. I was the idiot. You shouldn't have saved me. You shoulda let me go, and you shoulda lived. You'd have been happy Shana. I know it. You'd have done things right. I… I'm just an idiot, and a bitch, and a dumbass, and you-"

"Shiden," Shana said, and stepped toward her. "Tell me later."

Shana reached out and took Shiden's hands. She couldn't feel it. It was like smoke passing across her skin. But Shiden still curled her hands around Shana's, and she still felt comforted, the way she always had been when she did that.

"You have a life to save. You remember that, don't you?"

Shiden shook her head. "But-"

"No buts. Kaie is dying right now, and you're the only one who can save her. The fever is getting so high it will kill her if you don't act soon. Every second counts. So you have to go, and you have to save her. You remember everything you need now, don't you?"

Shiden nodded. "Amoxicillin. Clindamycin. Epinephrine if she gets a bad allergic reaction."

"There's still a little more. Do you remember how I taught you to read?"

"With those medieval comic books, yeah."

"Do you remember how they would heat up their knives in the fire before they did surgeries?"

"Yeah. It was cool as fuck."

"And I told you it was because a red-hot blade would cauterize and sterilize the wounds-"

"-so the patient wouldn't bleed out, or get infected."

"Right. All of Kaie's wounds are covered in infection. The flesh is already dead, and it won't come back to life no matter what. All it's doing is keeping her sick, so you have to excise it."

"Excise?"

"Cut it out. With a heated knife, just like the comics."

Shiden gulped.

"What if I kill her?"

"She'll die anyway if you don't do anything."

"It should be you, Shana. Doing this. Saving people. I'm not… I wasn't made for this kind of thing."

Shana shook her head. "It has to be you."

It was the last thing she said. Then she vanished in a puff of wispy smoke, and Shiden was left seeing nothing at all but the blackness of closed eyes.

She opened them again, and realized with slow surprise that she was still in the pharmacy. She looked around at the toppled-over shelves, and the dimming light filtering in through shattered windows. She breathed in the stale, bitter smell of expired chemicals. She shook her head, found the last things she needed, and left.

—

Hours later, hands coated in a thick crust of soot but very little blood, trembling and dizzy with exhaustion, Shiden leaned back from Kaie's naked body and hoped she'd done enough. Kaie had always been slender, but now she looked like a damn skeleton. Her skin was as thin as paper, waxy and sallow. It pressed tightly against her gaunt ribs. Her cheeks were sunken in. Her eyes too. They'd lowered in their sockets like recessed ponds at the bottom of a crater.

A peppering of cut-out and cauterized holes crossed across her chest and shoulders where the shrapnel had hit her. Shiden had had to get a big fire going to heat up her knife to the right temperature. She had to reheat it five times before the work was done.

Kaie had reacted poorly to the first drug Shiden tried. The amoxi-whatever. An hour after feeding her the pill, dissolved in a cup of water and fed carefully down her throat, her skin became bright red and inflamed. Her breathing, already struggling, took on a high, croaking sound as her throat squeezed shut.

There had been a moment of horror when Shiden remembered something else Shana had said. That antibiotics could expire. So she'd scrambled to find the pill bottle, hoping she hadn't just done something the adrenaline shot wouldn't fix.

She hadn't. The expiration was still a few months off. And the epinephrine worked fine.

Shiden looked down at her friend, and covered her with a blanket. If the antibiotics did their job - and Shana hadn't been talking out her ass - her fever should be down by the morning. The evening after at the latest. It wouldn't be enough though. Kaie was far too thin. Shiden had just about managed to keep her watered on the two-day journey after Cyclops broke down, but there'd been no way to get food into her mouth. Starvation would kill her if the infection didn't.

Shiden wouldn't let it.

She glanced out the window of the living room. The sunset was amazingly bright. The clouds were on fire. Shiden stared longingly at the couch, and wondered how good it would feel to finally, finally lay down and catch some sleep. She ripped her eyes away. She forced herself to stand, because if she stayed sitting any longer she might never get up again.

Kaie needed food. A specific kind of food that unconscious people could still eat. Concentrates, maybe. Shiden had had those a few times before, when she was lucky enough to find them in outfitter's stores. She wasn't sure if there would be any left by now that hadn't expired, but she had to try.

She would not let Kaie die. That was the one and only thought that ran through her mind as she shrugged the RPG onto one shoulder and the canvas quiver of extra rockets on the other. Kaie was gonna make it. No matter what.

Well, well, well, what do we have here?

We have Shiden, of course! I mean, did any of you really think I would kill her? She's Shiden Iida! God himself couldn't kill her even if he tried. Kaie surviving, on the other hand, was a genuine surprise for me. But some surprises are good.

Also, random note, I know I said that this would probably be the fic's last act... but, like, now that I've written a bit more of it, I can't help but feel like, uh, yeah, no. There's probably going to be a fourth. Maybe THEN it'll be finished, and my slavery will end.

I love writing long projects. I really do. But my god it takes ages!

- Verbosity