The next set of hallways passes in a blur. She and Keith are too intent on following their quarry to pay attention to much else, and the whole back half of Pidge's brain feels fizzy and nauseated. Keith's focus is pulled taut to breaking, the pulse in his throat beating like a drum. The whole trip can't take more than a couple of minutes, but it feels like forever.
Finally, the soldiers turn off into a side-door that seems to dead-end on the map and they both hunker down for an anxious wait. Another minute passes, and a different pair of guards exits the room. They watch their progress, holding still until the door at the hallway's end closes behind them, leaving the corridor silent and empty.
"That's it, I guess," she says after a moment. "Do we just-"
Keith's brows knit. "Not much choice. No other way in."
Pidge swallows and tries not to think about how huge the galra are. "Okay."
Keith's eyes skitter over to her. The flow of his thoughts stutters off-course. "You ever been in a fight?"
"…I got detention for biting a kid in first grade?"
He blinks and mutters something that kind of sounds like "me too" under his breath before deliberating a moment. "Just go for the cheap shots and don't let them grab you."
"That's your advice?"
He frowns. "What's wrong with it?"
"You really can't give me anything more that 'hit them where it hurts and don't let them hit you'?"
He shrugs. "Always worked for me."
"Great."
"You'll be fine. You're smart enough to fight dirty." His eyes skate away and he awkwardly bumps her shoulder. "I'll be right there, anyways."
"Reassuring words from a guy whose fight advice is-"
"Yeah, okay. I take it back."
She snorts, but sobers quickly. "Thanks."
After a moment, he nods and shifts on his heels. "You ready?"
She takes a breath, holds it. Lets it out again. "Yeah."
The surprise is probably what saves them from an abrupt, messy end. They crash into the room with no warning. Keith's momentum carries him straight into a swing at the closest soldier's exposed side, Pidge on his heels. The guard jerks back with a warbled hiss and gets his weapon up in time to catch the bayard and wrest it to the side. It does nothing to stop Keith, who hisses back and somehow executes a leap that drives his armored knee solidly into his opponent's gut. He staggers and Pidge whips her bayard into the unprotected gap behind his knee. She hauls with all her might and he topples with a resounding thud. She stumbles backwards as the line goes slack and looks up in time to see Keith scramble to the side, narrowly avoiding a blow from the other soldier's baton. She advances on him steadily and methodically, teeth bared as she tries to crowd him up against the wall. He looks tiny compared to her, and when he brings the bayard up to parry, Pidge feels the phantom shock of the blow through her whole shoulder.
The distraction costs her. The soldier on the ground snarls as his hand closes around her ankle and yanks. Her yelp is cut short as the air is knocked out of her. Her thoughts fill with panicky static and she thrashes blindly. Her heel connects with something and she stomps down on it as hard as she can. The hand on her ankle loosens and she wrenches her leg out of its grip before clenching her fingers on the bayard's trigger. It hums in her hand and there's a sudden, scorched smell. The soldier on the ground makes a choked noise and goes still.
The link flares hot. "Pidge!"
She jerks her head up in time to see the other soldier's boot raised to come down on her hand. She rolls to the side, and Keith darts forward to snap a vicious strike at the outside of the soldier's thigh. She has to retreat to avoid it, slightly off-balance from her aborted stomp. Without thinking about it, Pidge rolls back, jams the electrodes of her bayard into the soldier's ankle, and presses the trigger home.
The guard gives a rattling moan and thumps heavily into the wall. Slowly, she slides downward to slump in a messy, uncoordinated heap of limbs and armor. Pidge and Keith are left staring at each other across the room, both of them breathing hard, the link still jumpy with adrenaline. After what seems like an eternity but is probably only a few seconds, Keith eases out of his crouch and clears his throat. There's a speckle of blood spatter over the knuckles of his left gauntlet, and she realizes that his cut to the guard's leg must have hit.
"You…?"
"Ye-" she coughs, clears her throat. "Yeah. You?"
"Yeah." She takes the hand he offers and hauls herself to her feet. The burnt smell lingers in the air and she tries to swallow it away. The soldier she'd shocked first hasn't moved. Keith meets her eyes over the body and she knows right then that both of them know what happened and neither of them are going to talk about it. Maybe ever. They can't afford to feel weird about this.
"You are not galra."
The interruption snaps them both out of it, and she is suddenly, acutely aware of the row of shadowy cells at the back of the room.
"No," Keith says. "We're, uh…" He flicks a helpless look to Pidge, who shrugs in response. "We're with Voltron."
A low chorus of whispers swells out of the wary silence. Pidge takes a step closer and coughs as she gets a whiff of a sharp, disinfectant smell. Underneath it, the air tastes close and rancid. There's a small crowd peering out at them now, bodies of wildly varying shapes and sizes crammed up against the bare metal doors. She goes tip-toe, straining her eyes to pick out anything that might be a familiar shape, but she can't tell in the dim light. "Is there anyone in there who's human? Like us? From Earth?" She waves at herself and Keith.
An uncertain quiet comes down, and when it holds, she feels herself sag. Keith's thoughts hollow out and curl in on themselves.
There's a rattling thump from one of the cells towards the end of the room and a stooped prisoner with a gnarled crown of horns and a cluster of red eyes like jewels in the center of their face steps forward. "Champion. Champion was like you."
Her breath stops in her chest. Another susurration goes through the prisoners. "'Champion?'" Keith asks tensely.
The red-eyed prisoner blinks several of their eyes at once. "Phoebs ago, now. Champion was brought in with two others like you. One with head-hair like yours." They point to Pidge, and she feels her heart rabbit to life. "The other seemed older, maybe. Slower than the others. Grey head-hair. They took Champion and the younger one for the arena. I don't know what happened to the other."
Keith draws in a rough breath. Her heart kicks as a painful half-hope digs itself in under her ribs. That's them. That has to be them. They really were here. "What-"
"Pidge." She jerks to a halt, something hot and angry on her tongue at the interruption. Keith nods sharply to the door. "We ask them about it later. We've got to move." The inside of his chest is squeezed tight and painful.
The anger turns to ashes. Hunk and Lance are still out there. The Red Lion's still a hot, insistent pull under Keith's breastbone, somewhere toward the ship's bow. "Right."
"Take us with you!" croaks someone further down the line of cells.
She and Keith look at each other, both of them a little wild-eyed. They… maybe haven't planned all of this through. She hadn't really thought about there being other prisoners or what they would do with them. She has no idea how they're going to smuggle a dozen people off the ship. But they can't just leave them here. Keith gives a sharp nod and she returns it.
"Stay here when we let you out," he calls. "And be quiet."
The cell closest to them is the one at the end of the block holding the red-eyed prisoner, who watches them approach silently, their broad frame taking up most of the doorway. They pause at the door, and Pidge wonders vaguely if it's obvious to the prisoners that they don't know what they're doing. It doesn't look any different from any of the other doors they've come across. She can't see any locking mechanism except for the ubiquitous panel at its side. With a shrug, Keith takes a step forward and plants a hand on it. For a second, she thinks she hears a low rattling noise from the prisoner, but it's lost in the quiet, anxious murmur of voices filling the room. To their mutual relief, the door opens.
The red-eyed prisoner shuffles out and comes to a halt in front of them. They stare for a long moment, gaze lingering on Keith until he shifts uncomfortably. Several eyes blink in unison and the layered plates at their neck shift upright before lying flat again. That seems to decide something, and to her surprise, they don't continue towards the door. Instead they step to the side, planting themselves firmly between Pidge and Keith and the rest of the room.
"We are in your debt. You may call me Zaas." The other occupants of the cell trickle out the door behind them. Before Pidge or Keith can say anything, Zaas makes a sharp gesture pointing to the room's entryway. "Go wait over there. Let the paladins work."
Pidge cranes her head around their bulk, trying to get a good look at the other people. In the assortment of unfamiliar bodies, it's hard to tell, but they move slowly and raggedly, and they all seem too thin. She bites her lip, thinking about Matt and her dad and Shiro, cold and tired and starved. "Why are all of you here?"
Zaas' lower set of eyes give a slow, considering blink. "My granddaughter authored a seditious text." They make a dry, rattling sound which her translator stumbles over. "The governor was merciful and chose to assign her family to hard labor out of system."
"'Merciful,'" Keith says warily, eyes narrowed.
"The usual sentence is execution."
Keith lets out a quiet hiss through his teeth, and Pidge feels her gut clench. It's not hard to guess what kind of regime the Galra Empire is, but it's another thing to see it. Somewhere out there, Matt and her dad and Shiro are caught up in its teeth. She bites hard at her lip, watching the last of the cell's occupants exit. Next to her, Keith flexes his fingers open and closed on the hilt of his bayard. When they move on to the next door, Zaas shuffles along with them, their stout body a solid barricade behind them as Keith works the panel.
"Are you truly paladins of Voltron?"
She feels a faint, smug pull from the Green Lion and shakes herself free of her thoughts. "Yeah. I guess we are."
Zaas makes another quiet rattling sound. "I had thought it a legend."
She and Keith exchange an uneasy glance. "Well, it's not," he says bluntly.
They inclines their head, jewel-like eyes glinting. "As you say."
They move swiftly down the row, Zaas keeping pace with them. The small crowd of prisoners clustered at the center of the room is tensely quiet, but each group to exit the cells moves a little quicker than the last. By the time they reach the end, there's a palpable excitement. Even Zaas, who appears to be largely unflappable, rivets all their eyes to the last door panel as Keith puts his hand to it.
Before he can make contact, there's a loud mechanical hiss and a deafening bang from the front of the room. They both startle, hands going to their weapons. Zaas is a stiff wall in front of them, red eyes wide.
"Quiet, all of you," says a cold, low voice. "Stay where you are, or I will dispose of every worthless body in this room."
It cuts through the panicked murmur like a knife, leaving a silence so dense it's hard to breathe. Pidge can't see the doorway past Zaas' bulk, but someone at the front of the room is hyperventilating, rapid, wheezing breaths echoing in the dead air. She's painfully aware of the sweaty slide of her fingers inside the gauntlets and the tension coiling through Keith's neck and shoulders.
"You - clean up this mess. You - contain them."
A heavy, deliberate set of footsteps approaches, coming to a halt behind Zaas. In the room's gloom, the soldiers are nothing but towering silhouettes and a glint of reflective eyes. The one in the lead clamps a hand on the plates at the back of Zaas' neck and drags them to the side, drawing a pained rattle. Next to her, Keith shifts his weight aggressively, hand tight on the hilt of his bayard. Before he can complete the motion, one of the other soldiers deliberately meets his eyes. With casual, brutal efficiency, she whips her baton into Zaas' side. They crumple with a short, high-pitched noise. Pidge sucks in an involuntary breath, and a shock of icy, wordless anger sluices through the connection.
The tall galra behind the other two, the one who seems to be in charge, peels his lips back from his teeth. "Cooperate. Or do you want all these people to pay for your mistakes?" The soldier holding Zaas gives them a rough shake, and the one with the baton thumps it menacingly into her hand, eyes narrowed. Keith meets her stare. The corner of his lip curls, but reluctantly, he takes his hand off the bayard.
The officer makes a satisfied chuff and paces forward. Without Zaas' stout bulk sheltering them from the rest of the room, it leaves Pidge feeling small and exposed. He stares down at them impassively for a few seconds. At this range, she can see the shadowy motion of pupils behind the yellow surface of his eyes as he looks between them. His eyes narrow as he examines Keith, and his gaze flicks back to her for a moment before returning to him. He makes a low, rattling hiss.
"Disgraceful. The Empire offers even barbaric stock like you a position of service and pride. A civilized place in the universe. And instead you worm your way down here, crawling into my ship like vermin to sabotage your betters."
Keith is a jagged, humming presence in the link, so tense he's nearly vibrating in place. Pidge isn't doing any better. Her throat is dry and her heart is racing, but she wants to wipe the superior, oily expression off the officer's face, wants to put the electrodes of her bayard on his leg like she did that soldier before and ask him if what happened to her father and brother was civilized. But Zaas is still sagging in the guard's grip, struggling to breathe. The soldier with the baton extends it toward them in a lazy threat and grins as they flinch back.
She and Keith stay put.
"I imagine you think yourselves clever," the officer says in a deceptively level tone. "Did you really think no one would realize that hatch had been deliberately breached? It's not hard to imagine what you came here for," he says, with a pointed stare at Keith and the red of his armor, "but I have to wonder what you're doing here, specifically. Did you, perhaps, get lost?" His lips pull back a little, exposing the tips of his teeth. "Or are you trying to play heroes?" He leans forward, face twisted into a sneer. "Trying to play paladins?" He waits for a response, and when none is forthcoming, produces a ratcheting series of clicks before straightening, expression once again clinical. He gestures sharply to the soldiers. "Get the small one into isolation. Prep the other for interrogation. And inform the Commander. I expect he will want to supervise personally."
"Yes, sir."
The word interrogation falls on them like a gallon of ice water. Pidge takes a step back as the soldiers advance, heart pounding like a hammer. Keith matches her and they wind up back-to-back. He's just a furious hiss of static in the back of her head, and for a second she thinks he's going to lash out. But the soldier holding Zaas hooks his baton under their chin and pulls up hard. "Remember. All of these people are counting on your good judgment," the officer says lazily.
They're roughly separated, two soldiers for her and two for Keith. The more heavily-built of her pair seizes her hands while the other pulls her bayard off her belt. A bolt of panic goes through her at that and she squirms. The soldier holding her tightens his grip and forces her hands up towards her shoulder blades, one of his hands large enough to crush both her wrists.
"Pidge!" There's a horrified mental lurch from Keith, followed by a wrench and a blinding flash of pain in his shoulder. They shove her out the door before she can tell what's happened.
"Let me go!" she spits, and struggles to slide her hands free.
"Shut up," the soldier grumbles. His companion makes dismissive hissing noise. "Noisy little thing."
"You-"
"I said, shut up." He yanks her hands up high enough that the breath is punched out of her lungs and they hike her into a rapid, stumbling frogmarch. She's too focused on keeping upright to protest further.
The room they bring her to is a tiny, cold box with a single cell on one side and a locker on the other. One of the pyramid-shaped drones hovers in front of the cell's door. The guard holding her bayard unceremoniously yanks off her helmet. Afterward, he stares down at her and says something, but without the translator it comes out as an indistinguishable clutter of trills and rasping clicks. He gives a short, unpleasant sneer at her uncomprehending glare and stuffs both items into the locker. He barks out a command to the drone, which blinks its light and descends to the cell's door panel.
They shove her inside hard enough to hit the back wall. The wind thumps out of her and the heavy-set soldier gives a perfunctory nod before he and his companion exit with a final-sounding click of the door. "Yeah, well, screw you too," she wheezes, and drags herself up to sit against the wall, alone in the cold darkness. For what seems like a long span of time, she can't seem to do anything but try to take in enough breaths to fill in the pit in her stomach. "We really screwed up," she whispers into her knees.
They'd been so close. An actual lead on her dad and Matt and Shiro, and it's probably gone forever. And now Lance and Hunk are going to fight this stupid huge spaceship thinking they're going to be escaping at any moment, and when they don't escape Allura and Coran are going to have to decide whether they stay or not, and Zaas and all the other prisoners are going to go back to their cells to be shipped off to labor camps or whatever the arena is, and the Red Lion will stay right where it is, and she's stuck in this miserable little metal block, and they're taking Keith off to be interrogated.
She takes another couple of deep breaths and reaches out for him. The connection is jagged and staticky with adrenaline, coming in fits and starts like a signal clipping flat at its limits. She catches a lurch of forward motion and the pound of Keith's heart, almost buried under the Red Lion's rumble. There's someone speaking in a low, smug tone close to his face, a blurred glimpse of a drain sunk into the metal floor. The undertow of his thoughts is smudged somewhere between dread and wanting to hit something. She swallows and raps at the link. At first she's not sure he even felt it, but then the connection seems to solidify, and he taps back. She holds onto it, not sure what else to do.
It keeps steady for an anxious second, and then without warning, something pitches all of Keith's senses into high alert. She gets a bare instant of his pulse in his throat, everything bright with adrenaline, before the whole ship seems to hitch in place and she's sent sprawling, forcibly knocked out of the connection. The lights flicker and she's plunged into darkness, the only illumination the faint, eerie glow of the drone's lights. The link abruptly comes back into focus with a shock of momentum and impact from Keith's end that echoes through her wrists and shoulders. There's a confusing twist and shove, his breath rasping in his throat. The lights flare back on and she's thrown out of it again, left blinking and disoriented on the cell floor. Somewhere outside, an alarm punches out a long, wailing five-note descent.
Hunk and Lance, she realizes belatedly. They must not have been able to keep the galra talking any longer. The cruiser has been shot, and is almost certainly shooting back. She and Keith are running out of time.
Keith. What just happened to him?
"Keith?" she says aloud. "Keith!" She reaches for the connection again, manages to snag a thready sense of him. He's moving fast, thoughts streaked out into a blur of motion. His shoulder hurts and there's a ragged, discontinuous edge to his presence, fading in and out. Something jolts and she loses contact again. "Damn it!"
For the first time, she wishes the link were something other than what it is. Wishes she could tell clearly what was happening to him, wishes they could talk to each other.
Finally, he comes back into focus again, and she slumps against the wall. He's lost that sense of movement - it feels like he's somewhere quiet now, and there's something about his attention that's tense and waiting. Waiting for what? She bites at her lip and prods at the connection, gets a distracted tap back from him that doesn't really tell her anything. A few seconds go by, and slowly he relaxes. Whatever he was waiting for has passed. He reaches out again, and a hazy sense of worried inquiry seeps across to her. She does her best to think 'I'm okay' as loudly as she can in his direction. She can't tell if it gets through to him, but the connection quiets. For a minute they both just sit there, exhausted and wrung out.
What are they going to do? She has no idea where he is, no idea if he's safe. No idea how they can get to each other if they get out, no way to ask him and get a clear answer. Traitorously, the thought surfaces again. She wishes they could just talk to each other.
Keith's presence goes still and she realizes that some of that must have made it over. Distantly, she feels the restless churn of his thoughts and realizes he's actually thinking about it. It startles her into more serious consideration, and she hugs her arms around her middle against a queasy flutter of nerves in her stomach.
Could they just… talk to each other? They've never really tried to use the link to communicate purposefully. Mostly, they've been focused on keeping out of each other's heads. If she'd considered it a month ago, the idea wouldn't even have seemed possible. But the link is… different, now. Stable. Comfortable, almost. Keith is always there at some level, and the casual way they tap at each other's attention is so habitual she barely thinks about it. It feels like purposeful communication might be something they could do. If they wanted to. If they both pushed at it.
A shiver goes through her. The idea feels way too close to the kind of breach of privacy they'd been worried about. She can sense the unquiet shift of Keith's thoughts and the prickling at the back of his neck, knows that it bothers him as well. But she finds that it doesn't scare her as badly as it did before. It's not as if the idea of the link changing is new to them. They'd worried about it with the Lions, after all, and it hadn't stopped them then.
They're running out of time. Running out of options. They have to get out of here somehow, and they're not going to be able to do it unless they can communicate with each other.
And… it's Keith. He's not going to trespass. She trusts him.
He stills at that, and something pangs though the link before he jerks it back, the connection muffled in its wake. He gives it another long, narrow moment of consideration. A few heartbeats pass and then all at once, his thoughts shift and settle. Her sense of him pares down to a steady, determined presence, thorny with nerves at the edges. He takes careful hold of the link and waits.
"Are we really going to try this?" It feels terribly immediate, said aloud in the dim room. There's a sudden glimmer of attention from the Green Lion, a long clear note that resonates out to Keith as well. She's not sure if it's an expression of approval or a reassurance or simply a mark of interest, but it quiets a little of the dread. The Lions probably understand the link far better than they do. Keith's attention holds on the connection, steady as a flame. She hesitates a beat, one last chance for both of them to back out. Neither of them take it. "Okay. I guess we are."
Gingerly, she grasps at the link and leans on it, feels an answering weight as Keith does the same. There's a sense of pressure, like she's hit the bottom of a jump on a trampoline, forcefully held at the point just before she'd be flung into the sky. Keith's presence is suddenly loud and close. She can feel the rasp of air in his throat, the pound of the lingering ache at his shoulder, the tight, claustrophobic sense of the space he's in.
For a handful of breaths, they're suspended there, half out of their physical space. And then, with a tiny psychic snap, something clicks into place and she's nearly swept under as the pressure lets go. Her gut lurches in sudden disorientation, overwhelmed with a weird sense of doubled awareness and phantom feeling. She's got two heartbeats and she can't tell if she's breathing too fast or too slow. She feels sized all wrong. Keith sucks in a harsh inhale, and she reflexively does it with him, his brain lit up like a cloud chamber full of particle trails, too fast and too bright. She flails, unbalanced, starting to panic that they've really broken something.
But the Green Lion roots herself in the back of her consciousness, a single, clear note cutting through the confusion. Like a lightning rod, it seems to draw the staticky flyaway edges of thoughts down to ground, and it leaves quiet in its wake between them. Slowly, she regains her bearings. She can still feel the familiar shape of Keith's presence, closer than it's ever been before, but she can tell where the boundary between them lies. It feels settled now. Like they've both come to new resting places.
…Pidge?
She blinks as she feels out that thought. It's not really a word. It's more of a concentrated impression, a collection of all the things Keith has tagged as this is like Pidge boiled down to a singular mental gesture. It comes across with perfect clarity despite that. She can feel the restless background turn of his thoughts like the murmur of conversation in a neighboring room, but that's all it is. They're not standing knee-deep in each other's consciousness just yet.
She lets out a relieved breath. Keith startles a little before he echoes it back. He picks warily at the link's edges, trying to map out its new borders. She can actually feel him doing that now, a faint reverberation like she imagines spiders sense from their webs. This is weird, she thinks toward him. She gets back a ripple of wary, spooked agreement.
She feels Keith shift his shoulders uneasily, and swallows. It is weird. It's weird and kind of uncomfortable and she's not really sure what to do with it yet, but it's done. They have a way to communicate. They can figure out how to deal with it later.
Keith makes another shallow, restless motion, and this time it twinges through his shoulder hard enough that she feels it. She thinks back to that blur of motion and impact on his end when the lights went out. Are you okay? What happened?
He hesitates, and then she's whiplashed back into that moment of confusion. This time it comes with context. A sudden plunge into darkness, somebody shouting over an alarm. The heavy shock of his shoulder ramming into someone's midsection and the ragged clench of his left hand on the hilt of the bayard as he rips it off their belt. A desperate, instinctive twist of thought brings the blade to life, and something catches and drags along its length. He staggers in the sudden absence of the weight on his shoulders. A confused, pounding run followed by a scrabbling leap into some small, cramped space. She feels his thoughts sharpen and focus, and there's a blurred glimpse of the ship map on his armor computer, his dot blinking at a point forward of the prisoner's cells.
She slumps back against the wall as some of the tightness goes out of her chest. He's okay. He's escaped. He's not going to be interrogated. Keith goes still before delivering a warm, faintly prickly nudge that has the same general feeling as one of his stiff shoulder-pats. She snorts and taps back at him, feels it echo along the connection. There's a faint, inquiring pull in response, tense with worry and underlaid with the same thought-shape that makes up Pidge to him.
Yeah, I'm okay. She catalogs the bare room and the locked door and the hovering drone again. For good measure, she pulls up the map on her armor and tries to push the image of her position dot over to him. Locked up in a cell, but I'm okay. Does that come across to him in the same vivid, wordless flow of thought she's getting? Or is that just how Keith thinks? She shoves the question aside for later. They have other things to worry about. We have to get out of here.
He sends her back a grim sense of agreement and urgency. A distant auditory echo comes with it of Lance and Hunk and Allura's voices over the comm, juxtaposed with that flicker before the lights plunged out, and she knows he's also made the connection that the Lions have engaged the cruiser. She feels him concentrate, and the map flickers behind her eyes, the path between his position and hers crystallizing from an unknown into a certainty as he charts a course.
She bites at her lip as she brings up her own map to gauge the distance. He's several sectors forward of her, nearly as far away from her as she is from their entry point. It may take more time than they have for him to reach her.
But what choice do they have? The cell is still an empty metal box, bare of everything except the drone hovering outside the door. The gaps in the door's bars are probably just barely large enough for her to wriggle her hands through, but there's no way she can reach the panel. She pauses as something pulls at her, and finds her eyes involuntarily drawn back to the drone. There's a flicker of interest and query from Keith. She stares at it for another few seconds before she realizes what he's asking and shakes her head. It's not like the movies. I can't just wave my hands and hack a piece of alien hardware with no equipment and no idea what I'm looking at.
She gets back a confusing, compressed smear of impressions. Long days watching her align and re-align the receiver, half-listening to her ramble about bitmasking and packet structure while he keeps his hands busy, the bolt of shock when she'd deciphered the Kerberos transmissions and uncovered the alien messages, watching the progress bar tick up as her script crawled through the Garrison servers. It's all strongly underlaid with that sense of this-is-like-Pidge. Traitorously, the Green Lion smugly underlines his thoughts with a clear chime of her own.
She blinks. "It's not that easy." But they're both lingering expectantly at the edge of her consciousness, and it's not as if she's not curious, so she gets up and goes over to stare at the drone anyway. After a moment's consideration, she braces her back against the doorframe and chimney-climbs her way up until her head is level with it.
Up close, it looks more like a real piece of machinery and less like a movie prop. The metal casing is composed of distinct plates, bent and spot-welded at the seams, and she can see the signs of wear on it. The back side of it is scuffed, like it was scraped along a wall at one point, and one of its bottom corners is slightly crumpled. She tilts her head and squints, trying to get a better look at the damage. It looks as if the drone was slammed bottom corner-first into a hard surface - it's squashed into a flat on that point. The metal above it is deformed, bulging outward, and there's a short split along its seam with the adjacent plate, a gap no wider than the point of a stylus. Inside, she can just barely make out a blue-ish light blinking on and off. Dead center in the upper third of its rear face, she can see a tiny pin-hole depression, the flat surface of a button inside it.
Her eyes drift back to the drone's damaged corner. Something about it snags at her thoughts and she frowns, thinking. Keith waits watchfully, most of his attention on keeping low and out of sight as he traverses whatever crawlspace he's found, making his way towards her. Maybe, she pushes over to him slowly. I've got an idea. His thoughts swing her way, curious.
She braces her back against the doorframe and snaps open the compartment in her vambrace, feels an echo of his surprise as she pulls out the glasses. "They're Matt's," she mumbles aloud. "They don't fit in the helmet, but I didn't want to leave them." It feels less exposed than saying it in her head. Keith's presence hums through the connection, but he stays quiet and gives her her distance. She shakes her thoughts off it and turns her attention back to the drone. She spends another couple of seconds squinting narrowly at the damage to its casing before pulling off one of her gauntlets. Carefully, she digs her nails under the plastic boot on the end of the glasses' earpiece and pulls. For a moment, it resists, but finally it flies free and she hisses, shaking out her hand. It leaves her with a long, thin leg of bare metal to work with. She contemplates it for a second. Don't you dare laugh at this, she tells Keith.
His interest ticks up and a feeling of mild curiosity and puzzlement drifts over to her. She doesn't bother replying. Instead, feeling ridiculous, she braces her feet on the doorframe and rubs the glasses vigorously through her hair over and over again. To his credit, Keith doesn't laugh, but she can feel him raise his eyebrows.
After a few minutes, her hair is crackly with static. Holding her breath, she repositions herself and delicately pushes the earpiece of the glasses into the gap of the drone's armor, carefully avoiding the edges.
For a second, she thinks it's not going to work, but then she feels the end of the earpiece connect with something. There's a blue flash and a bright pop of static discharge, and the drone wobbles in the air.
There's a reflexive surge of alarm from Keith, and she lunges to catch it before it can hit the ground. It thumps heavily into her outstretched hands, jarring her elbows painfully on the door bars. "Ow. Ow, ow, ow…" For a second, she and Keith both wait tensely, but it stays quiescent. The link slowly relaxes. She clambers down to the floor, careful not to drop it. It's too big to fit through the bars of the door, so she has to awkwardly hold it in first one hand, then the other. Once she's on the ground, she gingerly turns it over and jabs the earpiece of Matt's glasses into the little depression on the back, hoping that she's right about it being a reset.
"Please let this work, please let this work…"
She bites her lip as she meets resistance. Something clicks, and it makes a low hum. Hastily, she sets the glasses aside and takes a firm grip on the drone. There's a second or two where nothing seems to happen, and then the lights around its eyepiece come up a dim white. She holds her breath, but they stay that way. She's not sure if that's good or bad. Cautiously, she relaxes her fingers. No alarm sounds. It seems content to rest passively in her hands. Keith's thoughts spark like flashpaper.
She pushes out a breath. Not done yet. "Okay," she says to the drone. "Let's see if they still recognize you."
She squirms around and manages to get an arm far enough through the door to hold the drone in a precarious one-handed grasp angled toward the door panel. At first nothing happens and her heart sinks, but she twists enough to make her shoulder ache and raises it a little higher. At the edge of her vision, she catches a flash of white light as it projects something onto the console. A moment later, she collapses ungracefully to the floor as the door slides open, dislodging her.
She wastes no time in scrambling out of the cell, and winds up sprawled in an ungainly tangle of limbs just outside it, staring at the open door. "Holy crap. I can't believe that worked."
She can feel Keith grinning, somewhere in a crawlspace a tenth of the ship away. It's so clear and close now that she can almost fool herself into thinking he's shoulder-to-shoulder with her. First human to hack alien hardware, she thinks smugly. Zapping some poorly protected electronics and pressing a reset button barely counts as a hack, but she'll take it. She scoops up the drone where it lies on the floor and squeezes it to her chest. "You're coming with me. Let's call you-" for a brief moment, she thinks of poor lonely Bae Bae, waiting at the door for her dad to get home and firmly pushes it down. "-Rover. You're Rover for now."
Keith sends her another congratulatory tap before his attention shifts and realigns itself. The undertone of his thoughts is drifting into focus, fixating on the task at hand like the aperture slowly adjusting on a camera. He brings the map up again, and she can faintly sense the way he follows the routes to her and the hangars and the prisoners, the wordless flow of half-drawn plans. And it's still weird and unsettling to be able to shadow his thoughts that closely, to know that he's probably getting the same from her, but they can deal with the weirdness later.
Right now, they have people to rescue and a Lion to steal.
Notes: Generally speaking, static discharge is more likely to cause subtle damage to electronic components that will cause them to eventually fail due to thermal stress rather than immediate, catastrophic failure, but it is possible to wipe a device's memory if you're especially unlucky. (ask me how I know) We're gonna assume Rover keeps its bootloader in a physically separate region of memory and just has the robot equivalent of amnesia.