Rust-tinged droplets raced across the upper threshold of a doorway that hadn't had a door in decades, pushed along by a racing wind. The rain fell at a steep incline that kept its tidal drumming more to the walls than the roof and every gust moaned and whistled around the mouths of half a dozen disused smokestacks somewhere above our heads. Below, the river drowned the runoff pipes built into the concrete embankment. The current was sucking god-only-knew what out into the water and every now and again, when the wind paused for breath, a strong scent of acrid chemicals settled on the air.

With weather this bad, I was glad I'd insisted on carrying the boat up the stairs to the leaky control room we were sheltering in. It probably would have sailed off without us otherwise.

"And you said there's a defense HQ out there?"

"Used to be," 49 answered from further in. Under the cover of his cloak, he was preoccupied with squinting at his readouts. "It fell behind enemy lines, but there's a reasonable chance of ground transport still being intact. I can give you directions, but it'll probably be faster if I just go with you."

I watched the river rise another fraction. "I'm good alone."

"With no material analysis? No support? It'll take you forever assuming you find it at all!"

"Yeah, I know." I turned, crossing my arms and leaning against the soggy entrance. "But you can't just leave V alone out here. This used to be a high aggression zone and you've seen all the factories we've passed."

"All the more reason we should get a hold of a fast vehicle as fast as we can. V has Pod, Griffon, Shadow, and Nightmare. If he went hand to hand with you, he can handle some machines."

"I went easy on him."

From one of the few dry patches in the room, V eyed me maliciously over the edge of his book. I pretended not to notice, the same way he always pretended he wasn't involved in these discussions.

"Really?" asked 49, in a too-nonchalant voice. "Felt like you had battle fever from where I was."

"Some of us can experience battle fever and still make intelligent decisions. Those of us who were actually designed for combat, for example."

"Yeah, well, I'm designed for intelligence operations that included pathing through hostile zones, identifying resources, and establishing escape vectors. This was the job I was doing when nobody was there to save or salvage me, and I wasn't considered top of the line just because I'm nice to look at."

So he had it too. That narcissism I was accustomed to hearing from imposing and seasoned combat units with specialties even an executioner would hesitate to confront. I'd heard once the B model that shared my number was a monster whose combat processing speed was so good she could run upwards of five weapon routines at once without missing a beat. 49 wasn't that good, but he'd survived pretty much unscathed despite logic virus infection and direct confrontation with the whole machine network, and that was more than any other YoRHa could say. It was probably easy to be proud of.

I'm sure there was probably one of us who stood out as the best or had the top shelf capabilities among E models, but I had never run into another executioner who was quick to make that boast.

"Alright, alright." I laced my fingers behind my neck and sighed. "If you got a plan, sell it to me."

"Well, we're approaching mountain territory and the rivers are starting to break up into smaller and smaller streams. We've crossed intact roads—"

"Intact?" I repeated flatly. "Really?"

"Drivable," he corrected. "And they're exactly where all the old maps say they are, which is more than I can say for the rivers." He shuffled up onto his feet and joined me at the doorway to share his readout. "There's a big lake about a hundred kilometers north that we can reach if we go right at the upcoming fork in the river. See, right here? We'll go with V as far as this spot on the east bank. Pod 042 can take him over here, to this inlet on the southwest side. We'll split off and follow this road around the south bend and work our way up to this area."

"The triangle?"

"Yeah, that's where the HQ site was. And that upper road is the one we'll take if we find ground transport."

I reached over and flicked at his screen. "And the road goes all the way out to Sector F… It'd be nice, I'll give you that. What's our backup plan?"

"Get back in the boat, I guess." He slid his map back into the position he'd had it at with only a little obvious annoyance. "We'll set the rendezvous point right here on this fork on the east side. If we can't find anything, we just meet up with V and keep going until we run out of river." He closed the screen with a flick and a troubled frown. "They're already getting smaller and taking different twists than the intel I have, so I think it'll be a lot sooner than we were estimating."

"And it would be back to walking after that, huh…"

We both looked at V. He didn't pay us any mind, but his fingers started to drum along the length of his cane. Outside, the wind picked up until the rain sounded like gunfire battering the old walls.

It took a day for the rain to let up and another twelve hours for the river to be safe enough to traverse.

I watched the skies as we came to the bend 49 had mentioned and followed the northern fork. I watched them when we arrived at the lake and left V in Pod 042's care. I followed 49 with half my processing power focused on the shape of the clouds at the horizon. Even though I knew I wouldn't be able to do anything about it, I felt better whenever I could see for myself that there were no rain clouds building at the horizon.

The old defense HQ was exactly where 49 said it would be and in exactly the condition I expected it would be. Bombed out windows in a squat, square building made of the same sun-washed concrete most machine-reconstructed buildings were made of. They recreated structures, we drove them out and moved in, they came back and drove us out. Same old, same old. The trouble was that when machines drove us out, they didn't give a shit about structural integrity or geographically advantageous locations. Wherever there were androids, they arrived in swarms or launched barrages of artillery that could flatten mountains.

How anyone ever convinced themselves we were going to win against an enemy whose solutions didn't need to account for efficiency or resource use was beyond me, but what did I know? I wasn't built to command specifications.

"You pickin' anything up?" I asked.

49 gave an indefinite mumble and stalked around the side of the building.

I glanced at the sky. Crossing the lake and coming up the inlet was half the distance we'd run, but our land speed was more than double Pod's boat speed. We had about three hours to make this happen.

"Over here!"

I jogged after the sound of his voice to find him perched atop a half-destroyed wall three meters too tall for a normal android to scale, much less with a pack containing a 40kg pod. Could he have used the rubble to climb up there? Sure. But the way he winced and immediately climbed down when I scowled at him told me he'd hopped it out of habit.

"Strike one."

"Sorry," he muttered. "But look, this must've been where they parked everything. One of them has to be functional right?"

I breezed past him. Five trucks intact, none in particularly bad shape as resistance vehicles went. Even the least battered one was a dirty, half-rusted piece of shit, but if the engine bothered to turn over there was pretty much no stopping them. "Your source say how old this place was when it got run over?"

"No. He was stationed up in Sector C and their defense HQ was wiped out in 11944. From the records, it sounds like there was a period where Sector I was classed as extreme-aggression, and all surrounding ones were classed high because of it. So if I had to guess—"

"This base went down maybe a few months before the one in C," I completed, taking in how few machine parts were laying around. I lifted the nearest hood and examined the battery. Dead for sure, but not destroyed. I retracted my skin, tugged my shirt up, and waited for my plates to depressurize while digging into my pack for my cables.

"What—" He turned around. "What are you doing?"

I lifted my motherboard and bit my glove off so I could feel around for the appropriate nodes. "Checking to see if these batteries will hold a charge."

"With your black box?!"

"Yeah? We're all walking around with pretty sophisticated reactors in our bodies. Lots of ground tech has been altered to take advantage of that."

"That has to be against regulations."

"Sure is," I said with a toothy smirk, and snapped the clamps on the ends of the cables at him. "But the resistance doesn't get fancy flight units or dedicated repair crews. They have to come up with their own solutions to these problems."

A sober look crossed his face like the shadow of a bird passing overhead. He checked out of reality and into his own head—which I'd come to understand was a scanner thing. Some kind of analytics-enhancing state. Which was fine by me for the few minutes it took to dig into the dashboard and try to get the truck's engine to start.

What I got was a muted bang that startled 49 enough for him to reflexively evade away. I wagged a finger at him while the engine coughed and let out a plaintive grinding noise that faded into nothing. "Strike two."

"It sounded like close-range munitions!"

"One and a half," I relented gracefully. The battery was fine, but that engine was no good. I unclamped the cables and closed my paneling back up, rubbing at my chin as I considered the other trucks. "Alright. You're on scavenger duty."

"Sure, we need gas right?"

"For starters." I kicked experimentally at a sad-looking tire. The rubber was cracked and the whole thing sagged against the concrete. "Gas cylinder, rubber tube… spare battery if you can swing it. Resistance hubs usually have a few laying around. Keys preferred, but not necessary so don't get hurt looking for 'em. Meet back here in an hour."

"Only an hour? We've got plenty of time."

"One hour. I don't want you wandering off and getting into trouble."

"First you didn't want to let me come with you and now you don't want to let me out of your sight?" A slow frown crept across his face and he crossed his arms. If he was mad, the bemused tilt of his head sure didn't help him make a point of it. "I was doing my best to leave you alone, but you've been acting weird since we reached the mainland."

I dropped down and slid my upper half under the carriage. There was nothing down there for me to check. Leaks, maybe—and I clicked my teeth as I immediately noted dark, slick patches on the otherwise dusty metal that clearly didn't come from the recent rain. The illusion of being preoccupied with my task was nice given my processing power was funneling exponentially toward ways to not have this conversation.

"I'm just trying to keep you out of harm's way."

"You and everybody else," he said, in an unexpectedly bitter grumble.

"Can you blame me? You are kind of hooked up to the final YoRHa kill switch."

Silence answered. He squatted down on the other side of the truck and when I tilted my head back I could see him all but calling me an asshole with his upside-down glare. A skill I didn't think he actually had. Either V was rubbing off on him or I was. "Fern, you don't care about dying."

I shrugged. "My current assignment is to get V to the night kingdom, and I can't do that if you're dead."

He straightened back up. His boots paced off a bit, like he was going to drop it and get on with his scavenger hunt. That would have been too lucky. The truck shook above me as he dropped down with his back against a tire. "You're avoiding V, too."

"I'm sure he's heartbroken."

"No, I don't think—" His processors caught up; he must not have been used to hearing that kind of sarcasm from other androids. "Why are you avoiding V?"

"What do you mean 'why'? I used you as a hostage a month ago, and V strikes me as the type to hold a grudge."

He surprised me with a mellow laugh. "Yeah... Me too."

There was an implicit, shared framework for us to work together as fellow YoRHa, but every time we went outside of that, he lost me. My personal experience with him was as someone who hated me before I even understood the real reasons why. I was always at a bit of a loss for how to deal with him when he didn't show any animosity.

"Just remember that you can change your mind, okay?" His voice had lowered. I wouldn't have thought he could speak so softly. Not to me. "V can't choose if he does or doesn't trust you if you just avoid him. And he'll need someone he can trust when I leave for the moon."

He did that on purpose. Making it about choice. He did it on purpose and I could've strangled the little bastard because a familiar and shameful burn filled my chest, like corrosive eating at my black box. I was angry. At him, for making me feel that way. At myself, for feeling it at all. Any android would be overjoyed to have purpose bestowed on them as directly as I had. But the old Fern had learned firsthand just how wide the gap was between being needed and being wanted, and even as 8E, I couldn't unlearn that lesson.

Even though I was supposed to be dead, and the dead had no business wanting anything.

Quietly as I could, I vented the heat building in my body and carefully modulated my voice. "Why should I promise you a damn thing?"

"I was being figurative, I think. You don't have to actually promise me anything. It's only a hunch, but I figured..." He climbed back to his feet. "I thought you might be feeling a lot of the same things I did when I first met V."

The one time I wanted him to keep talking and he disappointed me. Without elaborating, his boots scurried off across the lot, rounded a corner, and disappeared.

I hauled myself back into the sunlight and let the task at hand occupy me. Kicked at the rest of the wheels. Wandered around the front end of the nearest truck that hadn't blown out any tires and didn't have any old oil spots hiding in its shadow. It didn't have any paint on it at all—a good sign that it was built rather than restored. Bit rusty from sitting in the elements and the hood screamed like hell when I lifted it, but it was probably going to be our best bet. The inside was squelchy with the recent rain. Ammonia singed my scent receptors when I climbed in. Animal urine, baked in and bound to keep V in the truck bed until bad weather forced him inside.

I crossed my arms over the steering wheel and looked at the clear sky. "Feeling what you felt, hm..."

There was a lot 49 could've meant by that, and he either knew exactly what he was talking about or didn't have a damn clue. Either way, I wouldn't say I doubted those words. What I doubted was the implication that I would eventually arrive at the place he had with V.

That sounded far too much like one of the old Fern's self-soothing stories for me to believe.