"He's been watching her train?" Anz paced the floor.

As she moved back and forth at the edge of his vision, all black hair and twitching tail, Trunks had the impression of a caged panther, ready to dismember an unlucky keeper at the first opportunity.

The Three had returned in new, striking matte armor — its dark color blending with their bodysuits. They had been taking it off and making themselves at home in the cool shade of the cave when Anz had realized that Pan was absent.

Trunks and Marron had been about to eat; he was holding a box of capsules, his stomach rumbling. Marron was beside him, the arms of her dust-covered boiler suit knotted about her waist.

"Sometimes, yes. He trained with us a few times, same way you did."

The Three exchanged alarmed looks.

Trunks was not in the mood to indulge their paranoia. He'd spent the morning engaged in punishing drills, trying to clear his mind and decide whether they should cut their losses and go home. He hadn't come to any conclusions, and now he wanted to eat and then ideally to sleep for the next day and a half. He, Marron and Pan had long ago polished off 18's delectable contributions to their food stores, and he was interested in working his way through Chi-Chi's. He began to inspect the brightly-coloured labels, setting aside those he didn't fancy.

"Where is she now?" Reet asked.

Trunks lifted a capsule with a label almost the same shade of orange as Reet's skin. It was some kind of soup. Not for tonight. He placed it carefully back into the case.

"She's with him, in town." He paused, thinking. Sometimes it was hard to tell how much time had passed on this planet. "Should have been back a while ago."

Marron took a capsule out of his hands and activated it, with an irritated glance at his indecision. Everyone watched the contents expand: a small buffet of sandwiches and bao buns. Not what he'd been looking for. He frowned, but when the fragrant herbs and spices wafted towards him a moment later, he found he didn't mind so much.

"You should have some of this." He sat, but the Three had never looked so disinterested. Zaym's smooth, sea-glass green face was set in a deep scowl.

"Your energy-sensing ability," Reet said. "Do you feel her? Is she still on-world?"

At that, Trunks froze, a bundle of chopsticks in one hand. "What? Why wouldn't she be?" He chuckled, but it was strained, unconvincing.

As he spoke, he lurched energetically in the direction of the port town, grasping for Pan's ki signature. He was sure he'd find her there, swanning around, unconcerned about her lateness. But he found nothing. An absence.

He turned to see Marron's brow furrowing as she did the same and came up empty-handed.

"She could be suppressing her energy," Trunks said quickly.

"She doesn't normally— unless there's a reason." Marron countered, alarm starting in her face.

"Maybe —" he began, but Anz interrupted, emitting a little shout of frustration in Reet's direction.

"Oh, they love to come sniffing around us and find younglings to peel off." She kicked a boulder twice her size as if it were weightless. It whizzed towards the cave's illuminated mouth and disappeared from view.

Reet was grim-faced, her furred white tail gripping her middle.

Trunks's mind was engaged in an energetic tug-o-war. Surely this was pure paranoia, the product of traumatized minds. He reminded himself that these women had not had easy lives and would naturally be on alert for worst case scenarios. His father often imagined the worst whenever uncertainty crept into the picture, and it was rarely as bad as all that, he reassured himself. But — why couldn't he feel Pan? Was she hiding from him and Marron? He supposed she might be after some privacy. He could understand that.

Then, a terrible sensation, like a vice closing slowly inside him. He remembered the insistent tug of the feeling he'd put aside some weeks ago. Pan had responded scornfully to his concerns about Tarlow and he hadn't wanted to treat her like a child. Or so he'd reasoned. But more than that, he hadn't wanted to listen to her complaints or deal with her inevitable teenage strop if he tried to set any limits on her activities. It had been easy to tell himself there was nothing to worry about: she was a grown up, she could hook up with aliens in her free time if she pleased. He'd more or less washed his hands of it and decided it wasn't his problem.

He remembered Pan at Baba's Lake when he had gone to ask her to come with him on this mission: pale, soaked through, entirely unconvinced. Don't make me dredge this old pain up again for nothing , her face had said. And he had persuaded her to do it anyway, insisted it was worth a try if they went together.

"But how would they have known who — or what — we are?" he asked, already mentally compiling his own list of a dozen ways in which everyone and anyone might have known, because they had not been careful in the slightest.

"They have large information-gathering networks." Reet glanced at Anz, and paused before continuing. "They don't tend to stay in these sorts of backwater places for very long unless there's a target: if they were lingering, they were here for someone."

Anz gave a curt nod of agreement.

Unwelcome clarity snaked up his spine, remembering the glow of Pan's cheeks after she'd sparred with Tarlow, how they'd sat around afterwards and he had warned them about people like that, people looking for Saiyans, — had it been an elaborate means of throwing them off the scent? It was strange to think that his halting speech, his hesitation at telling them at all, might have been an act. The air around him seemed to shift. He squinted against the bright light pouring in from the cave's entrance.

"A target? What sort of target?" Marron hugged herself.

Anz was swearing in a language Trunks didn't know, her fists balled.

"Do you know his name? Where we are likely to find them?" Reet asked, calm as Anz was agitated. She was clipping her armor back into place on her shoulders.

"His name is Tarlow. I don't know exactly where we'd find him but I'm sure we could sense him out if we were closer …" Marron said, a waver in her voice that Trunks had never heard before. Fear, he realized. He put a hand on her arm and squeezed lightly.

The hum of background profanity from Anz had stopped, her expression thoughtful.

"You know this one?" Reet said.

"We were in a unit together. He's old PTO — when it still existed." She spoke slowly, turning the information over. "Now he's high up in Planacorp. Clever. Dangerous. A chip on his shoulder when it comes to us."

Us. Trunks had come to understand that when Anz said 'us' she always meant the Saiyan race.

"Oh no."

He turned to see Marron sinking slowly into a chair, hand over her mouth, eyes fixed on the ground in dismay.

He thought he could see the cogs turning, familiar self-reproach starting up in her, just as it was in him. But they didn't have time to kick themselves. They could do that when they had Pan back.

"We need to go to town, now, I'm guessing, and start looking right away?"

"We do." Reet nodded.

Anz resumed her swearing, interspersed with colorful accounts of how she was going to send Tarlow to the afterlife when she got her hands on him. She had already tied her hair up tightly.

With a sandwich in his hand and a last, longing glance at the untouched food, Trunks led the way out of the cave.

He kept trying to sense her as they moved towards the port.

Still nothing, but that didn't tell him much. When Pan wanted to, she could push her energy lower than anyone he knew; at times this made it feel like she'd erupted out of thin air when she went from suppression to instant transmission, the sudden ki surge a firework to the face.

He wondered, not for the first time, how it was that Pan had the ki control for the notoriously tricky instant transmission technique, but not for the super Saiyan transformation. It had never made sense, and no-one really discussed it. Excuses were always made for Pan: there was the sense that she was different. The rest of them — himself, Goten and Bulla — had been pushed as children and teenagers to discover the edges of their power, to become disciplined, to understand what they were capable of. To have control over their abilities. To be able to modulate their strength. It made everyone around them safer.

But, for some reason, there was an unspoken agreement that Pan was exempt from all that. The only person who'd ever gone against this understanding was Vegeta: he had accosted a bewildered Gohan at a family barbecue several years ago and asked him where his Saiyan pride in his daughter was. What Gohan hadn't seemed to understand — as far as Trunks could tell from his mildly exasperated, half amused response — was that Vegeta was levelling a fairly serious accusation at him. Gohan was letting Pan down — was failing her as a father even — in Vegeta's eyes, and it would come back to bite them all before long. He wondered now whether he ought to have stepped in and translated for them, tried to make Gohan understand that Vegeta was worried. He had been too busy hiding from Chi-Chi, who had by that time taken to keeping a small photograph of Goten in her breast pocket so she could pull it out when she saw Trunks, eyes swimming, and say: "You grew so tall. I wonder if he's as tall as you."

He tried to shake off the memory of Chi-Chi's quivering voice as they landed together in the bustling town. The market had burst into life again after its hiatus and seemed a good place to start. People saw a lot here.

Without a word, Anz stalked away to embark on an immediate campaign of interrogation, seizing upon the unfortunate townspeople in her line of sight and demanding to know whether they had seen anyone fitting either Pan or Tarlow's description.

There wasn't much point trying to stop Anz, so Trunks glanced at Reet, who indicated that she was going to head to the far end of the market with Marron. He nodded his agreement, and after a moment of hesitation, began to follow his feet in the direction of the familiar route around the stalls. Zaym appeared to have decided she would walk with Trunks. She weaved through the shoppers to get ahead of him, tilting her head here and there, listening, pausing occasionally and squinting up at the glassless windows of the stone buildings that loomed over the market streets. He didn't know how she could hear anything over the din of alien bargaining and the thump of crates and mechanical parts.

He looked back. Reet and Marron were in discussion with a fruit-seller under a sail-like shade. The vendor was shaking his head. He looked worried. Marron's face suggested she might be about to cry. Reet placed a hand on her shoulder and said something. Marron nodded and with a small bow to the fruit-seller they moved purposefully on to another stall.

Eventually he lost sight of everyone but Zaym, though he could feel their energies zigzagging along: Reet and Marron moving methodically as a pair, Anz's advancing erratically. A spike of alarm jabbed him as he began to wonder whether Pan was already gone from the planet. He hadn't thought to ask the Three where Pan could be, if she wasn't here? He hadn't wanted to go that far in his imaginings. But now he desperately wanted to know what they would try next if they didn't find her here.

Ahead of him, Zaym stopped and looked right.

He hurried towards her, recognising the road to the underground market. She disappeared around the corner. He followed. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the shade of the stone alley after the blazing brightness of the market. Zaym seemed to have no issue with that: she was already hurrying towards something — or someone.

In the doorway, the same one that led down to the peculiar bar — a place he'd taken an immediate dislike to and hoped never to visit again — was a figure. And they were looking at him. Beckoning. This wasn't really the time for a one of those mind-bending drinks, he thought, but perhaps they knew something.

It was the blue-robed woman. Seeing her for the first time in daylight, he saw that her skin was a pale shade of lavender and smooth as polished stone. She was waving quite insistently now. Zaym hung back. It didn't seem to be her style to take the lead. He didn't enjoy it much either, but his mother maintained that a dislike of authority was a great quality in a leader. Grudgingly, he approached the woman.

"You're looking for the girl," she said. A statement, not a question.

She glanced warily at Zaym a few times, as if trying to understand something that didn't quite add up.

"Yes, we're looking for her." Trunks moved closer.

"You won't find her," she muttered, her eyes still on Zaym. "He tried his best to take her, but we managed to get her out."

"Out where?" Zaym met the woman's gaze, her tone soft, a little sinister.

The blue-robed woman drew back slightly, but when she spoke her voice was steady. "This system's main trading station. Its orbit brought it close recently and it opened to merchants. My brothers took her there."

"Is she safe?" Trunks pressed urgently.

The woman tore her eyes from Zaym to look at him and shook her head. "I don't know. More than she would have been with him. But he'll be trying to figure out where she's gone."

Zaym nodded. "We will get to her first."

"You will have to wait," the woman said. "The station does not accept incoming ships at all times. Their next rotation is in approximately 6 clips."

Trunks had no idea how long this was. Zaym seemed to register his confusion.

"About the time it would take to sleep and have the first meal," she supplied.

"Something like 12 Earth hours …" Trunks said.

Zaym shrugged. "If you say so."

He felt a pulling sensation then. The Blue Woman had come closer and was tugging at his sleeve. "He's more dangerous than he seems," she said. "Be careful. Find the girl and go home. Earth is a long way from here. Perhaps he won't follow."

He closed his eyes for a moment. He hadn't even considered that these events might imperil the Earth. When he opened them, he found something sympathetic, perhaps even pitying, in the woman's face. He put his hand on hers and said: "Thank you, for being a friend to her, and to us."

"Tell her I'm sorry," she whispered. "I didn't know how else to help her."

They bought some supplies at the market: a few parts Trunks was worried could wear out and about as much fruit as they could carry. News of Pan's disappearance had spread — some of the vendors offered commiserating discounts while others refused to serve them and promptly shut up shop when they approached.

"They don't know anything," Anz said, arms folded over her chest. "But they know Tarlow, and most of them won't risk helping us if there's any possibility he'll take exception to it."

They flew back to the ship in silence to wait and make preparations. They selected a new location as a precaution against Tarlow showing up to look for Pan, though Anz argued against it — ("let him come, I'll rip his heart out through his navel.")

Trunks found this a more appealing image than he cared to admit, but stood firm on the need to avoid a confrontation at this point. They could easily get wrapped up in fighting Tarlow and lose their limited window to reach Pan. Or lead him right to her if he followed them onto the station. Their main advantage at the moment was that although Tarlow might suspect Pan could be on the station, he didn't know for sure. Reflexively, Trunks reached out to energetically again, extending himself further into space in the direction he thought the station was probably in. No sign.

Zaym had suggested they decamp to an area of forest on the edge of a river and they had moved without delay. It was very hot under the glare of the twin suns, now both high in the sky, and the forest offered some welcome cover. Zaym seemed much happier here in the dappled light than she had in the arid desert, moving around with greater ease and frequently submerging herself in the nearby water, her long, dark hair heavy with water.

The two ships stood side-by-side under the trees, the Three's looking rather spikier and more imposing than the one Bulma had built.

Earlier, Trunks had spent about as much time as he could justify calibrating a fault in the navigation system — eventually calling Marron inside. It would take him days to diagnose the problem, but he suspected she'd do it in minutes. As he showed her the error, he made a mental note to suggest that his mother offer Marron a job at Capsule Corp before a rival company snapped her up. He didn't know if she'd take it — she was still in college — but it was worth a try.

True to form, she sat down at the blinking console and scrolled briefly before saying; "We just have a few conflicts in the version we're running. I updated it a little while ago. I think all it wants is a bit of cleaning up and a restart."

He had quirked a brow at that. She hadn't mentioned an update to him, but he supposed she didn't need to. She knew the ship as well as he did now. Probably better.

He'd been peering over her shoulder at the strings of code, puzzling over the mystery of how she'd arrived at her conclusion, when she'd risen from her seat and surprised him with a quick hug. "We'll find her, okay?"

Now Trunks stood outside the Capsule Corp ship, watching the light bounce on the surface of the river, thinking while he worked. He was balanced against a landing gear leg, cleaning their fixtures to ensure they were space-worthy. No small amount of dust had found its way into the nooks and crannies of the ship during their time on this planet. They'd been here a lot longer than they'd intended. And what had it brought them other than grief?

But that wasn't quite fair, he corrected himself, as Marron made her way into the water to join Zaym, who greeted her with an outstretched hand. Their expressions turned serious, deep in conversation.

Reet and Anz were sparring, their smooth matte armor set aside for now. He watched them with interest, having never seen Reet fight before. She clearly knew Anz's style, finding opportunities to strike when the other woman overextended herself or came on with more power than finesse. He watched her surge forward, her mane of white, cotton-candy hair behind her. She tripped Anz, sending her sprawling.

But it wasn't hard to tell that Anz was the stronger of the two when it came to brute force. They moved back and forth a little monotonously — not really testing one another, he realized, but warming up for what was to come. There was no need to exact any satisfaction from this match when there was a real fight on the horizon.

He was absent-mindedly tightening a bolt, his stream of consciousness oscillating between anger at Pan, self-reproach, and a wish for the comforting presence of a small cat perched upon his shoulder, when he heard a noise in the scrubby bush behind the ship.

He looked around and saw Zaym's head had turned in the same direction. No-one else seemed to have noticed.

"Who's there?" he called.

Zaym was rapidly wading towards him, a frowning Marron in tow.

The vegetation parted. The Blue Woman could not have looked more out of place, abstracted from the underground market and the stone alley, her slight form ghost-like against the greenery. Her clothes were tattered, and her face caked with something dark — blood, he suspected. She stumbled. He caught her easily, hearing the others arriving at his back.

"Oh," Anz's drawl came from behind him, cool and contemptuous. "This bodes well."

Her lack of concern irritated Trunks, but he said nothing, gently lowering the woman to the ground, where she sat like a stunned animal for several minutes before she spoke.

"Can we get you anything?" he asked.

"Some water?" Marron suggested, by his side in a hastily-donned robe that he thought belonged to one of the Three.

The woman nodded.

Zaym appeared at his elbow, so stealthy he almost jumped in surprise. She was holding a metal cup, which she passed to the woman.

"What happened?" Trunks asked. He couldn't help but agree with Anz. This was not a promising development, though he thought it could have bee expressed more sensitively.

"His brother came after me," the Blue Woman said, taking small sips from the cup.

"He threatened you?"

She shook her head, then nodded. "My children, actually."

Reet, who had stood on the sidelines till now, her eyes trained on the forest, seemed to become interested, and stepped forward to listen better.

Anz sliced through the silence. "So he knows where she is, in other words. Because you told him."

The woman drew her knees in and lowered her head, her eyes squeezed shut. "I hoped—" she began. "My oldest two are about her age ..."

Anz continued as if the other woman had not spoken. "He'll head for the station. Probably get in before us, since his connections will let him skip the docking queue. Meanwhile, we must wait our turn in order to avoid scrutiny." She pinned the blue-robed woman with a hard look.

"Yes, he won't have made it on during the last rotation, but he will be waiting to go aboard and look for her at the first opportunity."

She stood, swaying slightly on the spot, her torn clothing catching on the bushes around her. Some kind of noisy bird-like creature was making a discordant hacking sound deep in the trees. There was a silence, during which time Zaym stared first up at the cloudless sky, then sidelong at Anz.

"What?" Anz said, a touch of self-consciousness in her voice that surprised Trunks.

"It is dangerous, helping one of us …" Zaym said, with a small shrug.

Anz pondered this. Her face softened.

"Yes, this danger came from aiding the little one," she said slowly, exchanging a look with Reet, who nodded.

"And — I will be glad of the chance to kill him," Anz added. She had found her silver-lining, apparently.

"We will bring you with us." Reet's white tail was loose and curved at her back, in a gesture Trunks had come to understand as conveying openness.

"No," the woman said.

"You know what we are?" Reet asked.

The woman's mouth went taut. Sensibly, she didn't want to admit to knowing anything and Trunks didn't blame her. He was beginning to think that paranoia was a good baseline around here.

"We will protect you, and your family," Reet said. "You helped one of us. It endangered you. We prefer to make an example of people like you. If someone assists us, we protect them from any consequences that follow. You won't find better guards."

The woman bristled at the words 'make an example'. But, having listened to the rest, she seemed to consider it. Was she actually safer with them, Trunks wondered? That depended on your definition of safe.

"You can't stay here." Reet stared her down.

The Blue Woman looked at the ground, then at Trunks. He offered her a half-smile.

Anz tapped the toe of her boot on the ground. "It's time to go if we're gathering stray progeny on the way."

The woman nodded, reluctant. She seemed almost as afraid of them as she was of the idea of staying here. But, Trunks thought, she was running out of options when it came to wagering on who to trust. They all were.

AN: Sorry this took so long! I've been travelling, so it's been harder to finalise chapters, but I have done a lot of writing so expect slightly more frequent updates from here!

Thank you once again to my beta-reader Vonigner, without whom this fic would simply not exist