The cloister bakes itself into the pink-rocked planet in guilt, as though it know what it is and is ashamed. There is no life, no duty here as it lies dormant and forgotten, but I'm no fool. I take my personal craft in with cloaks on, and kill it far from sight.

Looks can be deceiving. I hope that in this case, they are.

I flashstep close—the front door is obvious, but it's also the only way in. The Jade cloister is built into the mountainside; privacy of the upmost. No one knows what exactly off-world jades do, why they are siphoned off and bundled away like this, but whatever the secret it has kept the centuries. And if that secrecy builds places where remoteness and hostile solar flares keep their charges from escaping? All the better.

I shiver. Its been sweeps but it still pains I to think they took her here—or somewhere like here, but I hope, I hope this time it truly is here—when she was so vibrant. This places kills trolls like her. Takes what Emilly who she was and strips it for parts.

But this time it has to be the right place. It doesn't matter how many empty holes I've tripped over in the sweeps of my search, I will find her again.

The doorway is damp. Not sealed, just a troll-sized hole carved in the stone. Groundwater then; this place may even have supported life, if the jades required it to. I are frozen at the threshold, between the rosy desert behind and the life-giving pit below, wondering how the moisture hasn't instantly dissipate in the thin atmosphere, when another of the jade's marvels come to life.

Namely, an automatic security drone rising from the sand behind I, and knocking gravel from its rifle.

As a wriggler, it was made clear to me that other trolls talked to their lusii, and it should not have been my fault that I took this entirely literally.

Why wouldn't Winston talk to me? He raised me, and it never entered into my mind that such an essential component could be missing from the lives of the tolls I catch glimpses of over the internet. Funnily enough, what actually clues me in to how different I are is my name: Lena. Winston gave me for short, simple letters, and it was the dozenth of maybe a thousandth time someone asked me what it was short for that I began to intuit something was off.

Emilly didn't care though. I was odd, and a little stuttery, and probably cull-bait but I stumbled into a gangling, adolescent matespritship even with all that in the way. When I wrapped that blood-colored scarf around her neck, I knew the two of us could survive anything.

As if belief alone could hold back Ascension. They held me from her screaming as she was escorted onto the waiting ship, and tolerated the agony from my burning throat only so long before the adult gripping my shoulder lost her patience. She broke my jaw, and I fell to the dirt in a spatter of bronze leaking from my mouth.

When the ship was only a prick of light in the sky, I picked up the scarf. It had fluttered to the ground as she was dragged away

(oh how I wished she was dragged away. But she had known, just like I had known, and she went to her fate with her head held high)

and I knelt and clutched it with brown stained hands. Hues, mys and hers, blending together. I promised I'd never stop searching.

After a who-knows-how-long sleep in the dirt, it takes the drone whirring seconds to ka-thunk to life. Precious seconds, without which I would be dead for even a drone as old as this one is going to have pinpoint accuracy. I'm already flashstepping behind it, my duel-pulsekind flipping from my specibus, layering a round into its back. It turns, but too slowly, creaking as it does while cascades of sand leak from its joints. I flashstep again, a little to my left of where I first started.

It lurches when my second round hits it in the side. One more pulse should do it-

But my final step is anticipated. In what may have been an attempt to trip, the drone tilts to the side, extending one of its strutpods to clothesline my own.

I barrel into it at full force. A second later I'm free, rolling gracelessly in the dirt at top speed until I slam into the cloister wall and feel every bone in my flesh prison ache.

The drone doesn't fair much better. When I finally stagger to my feet, it is sparking; interfering with a flashstepping organic generally isn't good for ones health. I wait, pistols poised, every smarting muscled tensed.

Eventually, it falls over dead.

"Woo," I say wiping my sweating brow. Touching my radio I add, "ran into a spot of trouble with the old defenses but I think…"

In the unloving desert of pink sand, it's impossible to miss when two more mounds of dust begin to come to life.

"…I think I'm bloody joking."

"Sorry chica, but I don't play those games," she told me right off the bat.

It hadn't helped.

When Sombra—as I got to know her better I would add an emphatic Sombra? Of all people? to that thought—first agreed to help me, I couldn't believe my luck. More like I didn't know I luck, because even in the Aspirant's greatest hacker had randomly taken in interest in the plight of an Overwatch agent, it didn't come strings free. Mainly the fact that she was a flighty broad who could drive me crazy at the slightest remark.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I'd snarled. Unconvincing, because she'd set me on edge and I was gripping the back of her pilot's chair like my life depended on it.

"This. The pitched tango. The kismesis shimmy. The caliginous can-can. I've got this mad hatred for me, and I know I'm very easy to hate, but I'd rather not lead I on."

"I don't hate I," I said, looking at that smug smile through her layer of makeup and wanting to simply bite.

"Suuuure taradita…if I say it enough everyone will believe it too. Just trying to be upfront is all. I've been working on it you know, coming to terms I just don't pitch the way I should. Middle leaf has been helping me through some therapy and I'm very in touch with my emotions these days."

"Well it doesn't matter, since I don't." My teeth hurt from clenching.

"Great," she said leisurely. "So glad that's settled. Now if you'll let me go? I can't exactly find your pretty little jade when I'm facing this direction."

I released the back of her chair. If only that had been the end, instead of a terribly painful beginning.

An hour later, I limp into the dark and damp below the planet's surface.

Every inch of me hurts; organs I didn't know I had, bits of troll I worry I don't have any longer. I trail handprints along the wall, bleeding, other arm around my middle where the wind has been knocked out of me so thoroughly it hurts to pull it back in. But I'll bounce back. I have to. Because the cloister is empty.

"Pickup," I say into my radio.

"Aw, taradita….the deserted cloister turned out to be deserted?"

As always that voice gives I flashes of a part of myself I didn't even know I had. I tamp it down, give basic instructions where my personal craft can reconnect with Sombra's orbiting space-bound, and marvel how the universe just takes and takes. One girl forever out of my reach, one girl painfully within who smiles as she turns the other cheek.