"I swear, Holly, it's like somebody doesn't want me to own a slave," the mayor said, taking a seat at his desk. It was his first day back in the office after the attack, and confirmation had come in earlier that morning that Sara had made it into Canada.

"Well, there are folks who don't want anyone to own one," she said as diplomatically as she could.

He harrumphed. "Damn abolitionists. We worked damn hard for the right to own people again."

Holly decided she was better off not commenting on this.

"At least it isn't just folks who look like you now."

That's not much of an improvement, you asshole, she thought.

"Ah, well. What'd I miss?"

"The local branch of the ACLU is formally renewing their request that, now that the war is over, all prior restraint on the media be lifted."

"There's still too much unrest for that. Too many people in the rebel states who think that just because they're part of the US again, they get some say in how things are run here."

Holly nodded; she hadn't expected any other response. "Shatter Day is coming up in about three weeks. 19th anniversary of the attacks. It's on a Saturday this year, so Friday is the day off for most people. The Memorial Society has a candlelight vigil planned for Saturday morning, and then a Unity Parade, which you'll be riding in as usual. The parade ends at the memorial in the park, and you'll give a speech. The Fireside Girls and Wilderness Explorers are running a cookout in the park afterwards, proceeds going to the Memorial Society."

"The usual, then. Make sure I'm not scheduled for anything after 2pm."

Holly made a note in her book. "Same as last year, then?"

"Right, you were here last year. Yes."

"May I ask why? I mean, I know you were involved with the rescue efforts after the bombing here..."

The mayor looked up at her, a sad look on his face. "There's a bit more to it than that. I...sorry. It's a hard time for me. Alex and I always get together for it, and drink to those who didn't survive. He'll be coming in that morning."

Holly smiled at him, more sympathetically than she had for some time. She was reminded that he had been in the military when the attacks had happened, and had been heavily involved in the rescue work after the attack on Danville. "I understand, sir. We've all lost people that mattered to us. I'll make sure you're clear after the cookout. Do you want me to arrange for the general to ride in the parade with you? He was involved in the rescue work as well, as I recall."

"He was, but it's not necessary. Thank you, though." He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. "I'll let you get back to work."

"Why the lung implants next?" Isabella asked. "I figured you'd go for the ears."

Colin, sitting next to her, nodded. They'd put implants in his legs and arms, and then used the knowledge to upgrade Isabella's as well. The nanobots had disassembled her existing implants as raw material for their replacements. She had adjusted to the upgrades quickly, which she had been amused at while Colin had been a bit frustrated. He was, finally, getting the hang of operating with the implants running, though.

"Mostly for Colin," Phineas said. "The limiting factor in his implants right now is oxygen, so the lung implants will give him the necessary boosts."

"And then me?" Isabella asked.

"Yes. That's the other reason. The sooner we get your lung implants replaced, the sooner we can take the Liquidator offline for good."

"Oh." She smiled at the thought. "Okay."

"We have some significant upgrades planned as well," Doc added. "I believe that we can have a short-duration carbon scrubber in place. You would have two or three minutes of recycling the carbon dioxide in your system into oxygen before you would need to breathe."

"Wow. That would be handy," Colin said.

Isabella thought back. If she'd had a couple extra minutes, maybe Sophie could have found a way out... "That's really nice, yeah," she said.

"Okay. We should be ready to do about half of one lung tomorrow, as a test. Sound good, Colin?" Phineas asked.

"Sounds good, yes. Let's do this."

Colin breathed in carefully through the oxygen mask on his face. The lung implant had gone awry, and left him with one lung that was currently non-functional. He sat up in the bed they'd set up for him in the lab area, mindless TV on the screen in front of him, but he wasn't paying attention.

So, maybe this is it. You knew this was a risk when you volunteered. Your lung is toast, and the best you have to look forward to is a medical discharge.

The door to the lab swung open, and Doc came in. "We have figured out what went wrong."

Colin coughed. "And?"

"The nanobots were targeting the wrong areas before fully developing, so they did not get interconnected with the blood vessels appropriately."

"Meaning?"

"It is fixable. Mr. Flynn is working on reprogrammed nanobots right now."

Colin smiled. "Sounds good. They'll replace the current ones?"

"Yes, it is the same sort of system that we use to replace Ms. Garcia-Shapiro's implants." He paused, and said hesitantly, "I am sorry about this."

Colin raised an eyebrow. "I'm flattered, Doc, never heard you say anything like that before."

"Yes, well, apologies are not my strong point because I so rarely need to provide them."

Colin laughed, but it quickly turned into another cough.

"Is Ginger coming?" Katie asked, coming into the room after putting Dave down for the night. She handed glasses of wine to Adyson and Holly, keeping one for herself.

Holly looked at Adyson, who shrugged as if to say, "This one's your problem."

"She's gone. Left for Uruguay yesterday. Buford's going with her, he quit at the mess hall the day before."

Katie sat down, looking at Holly with confusion on her face. "I'm sorry, the hearing aids must have messed up. Did you say Uruguay?"

Holly nodded. "Her sister's there. She's a leader of the anti-America political bloc there, largely because of what happened to Ginger. And with the Supreme Court decision coming up in a few weeks..."

Adyson brightened in understanding. "Oh! That makes sense."

Katie cocked her head to the side. "What Supreme Court decision? Sorry, I spend most of my day around toddlers, and they don't talk politics much."

Holly took a sip of her wine. She was going to need it for this; the mayor had been practically salivating in anticipation of a favorable decision.

"Okay," Holly said. "A few of the companies that were in Dixie and Columbia have sued about the liberation of slaves who had been Central POWs after the surrender."

"Why?" Katie asked. "It was obvious at that point, the POWs had been convicted of treason but clearly they hadn't been treasonous since they were fighting for the side that won."

"Right, but there was never a formal pardon for them, or anything like that," Holly said. "The companies are suing that they lost their property improperly - it's a Fifth Amendment case. Deprived of property without due process of law."

Adyson shook her head in disgust. "General opinion was that it was a stupid suit, but it made it to the Supreme Court. And, well...would you trust your freedom to them?"

"Not if I could help it, no," Katie said. "So what was the decision?"

"Hasn't come down yet, but given how the justices argued it, worst case is a 7-2 decision that they get their slaves back." Holly drank some more wine. "Or that the companies get compensated, but you know the government would rather put collars on people than pay money."

"The same seven justices who decided that slavery wasn't an Eighth Amendment violation, of course," Adyson added.

"Of course," Holly said. "Of course, if the President just pardoned all the POWs, it'd all be over, but..."

"But of course he hasn't, because President Sherman never saw a neck he didn't want a collar on," Katie said.

"Exactly. So, Ginger decided she was not going back to the movie company ever, and left the country while she still could."

"Good for her," Katie said.

"Okay. I think we're set. Are you ready?" Phineas asked, looking at her nervously.

"You're sure the old implants are completely replaced?" Isabella said.

"As far as I can tell, the only bits of your old implants still left in there are the security nodes."

"I agree," Doc said. "I do not detect any pieces of the older implants either."

Isabella took a deep breath. They'd used Colin as a test subject, then gone on and used her as a second test, upgrading and replacing her old implants. The new ones were more effective, used less energy, and - most importantly, from her perspective - did not have any self-destruct mechanism in them. But the idea of removing the security nodes, which were the only things that kept the old implants from melting and suffocating her on their residue, was mildly terrifying.

"We can leave the security nodes in place if you want," Phineas said.

"No, I want them gone, but..." A thought occurred to her. "Can we put something in that will let me know if anyone tries to use them? Just in case?"

Phineas thought for a moment. "Sure, I think we can do that. Doc?"

"I agree, it is possible, although I am not certain why you would want it."

Isabella grinned. "Because if anyone tries to use them on me, I want to know so that I can make them pay for it."

Holly cursed herself as she badged into City Hall. The day had been a clusterfuck from the beginning, and she hadn't helped matters. The parade had been marred by not one but two protests: anti-slavery protestors had blocked the Mayor's car, chanting about freedom until they were dragged out of the way, and free-speech protestors had tried to shout over the Mayor's speech at the memorial in Danville Park.

She'd realized at the last minute that she'd forgotten the Citizenship Award certificates in her desk, and they were being given out that evening at the Memorial Dinner. The Mayor wouldn't be giving them out, due to his private commitment, so the head of the Danville Chamber of Commerce would be presenting them.

Approaching the Mayor's office, she pulled out her phone to let them know she'd be there a bit late, and to leave herself a voice memo, reminding herself to check into any charges against the protestors. Hopefully, she could convince the Mayor to be lenient with them in an attempt to heal the nation's wounds after the war. She reached her desk, noticing that the door to the Mayor's office was ajar and there were voices inside. Puzzled, she stopped to listen for a minute before she recognized the voices as Mayor Abercrombie and General Archer. I figured they'd be hanging out in the Mayor's house. Guess not.

"You'll love this one, Dutch," General Archer said, his words slurring slightly. "Guess who's at Sanford West with me?"

"Not a clue," the mayor said, a bit more drunkenly.

"Erik Fucking Bailey, the backstabber."

The mayor laughed. "The Hero of Santa Fe himself! Pity we can't tell anyone he set the fucking bomb in the first place."

Holly froze. She'd vaguely recognized the name; he was a political leader in the Southwest. He set the bomb? And they know about it? She tapped the voice recorder button on her phone, and it started recording.

"Yeah, well, we can't risk him pointing out that - just as an example - you and I set the Danville bomb," the general said. "Everyone still thinks it was the fucking Liberators."

Holly stood, frozen, not believing what she was hearing, watching the virtual VU meter on her phone twitch back and forth as it recorded every word. Nathan Hale's Liberators was the group that had set off the bombs, including the nuclear blasts in Washington DC that had decapitated the government and caused the country to fracture. Each regional group had claimed the other groups were fronts for the Liberators, which had led to troops being used in attempts to force the other regions to reunite by force. Within months, the smaller groups had coalesced into four large factions, and by that point, each side was using atrocities committed by the others in their arguments that they were the one true successor of the American government.

There was a long pause. "Yeah, I know," the mayor said. "Today's the one day I wonder if it was all worth it. You remember that little girl we found at the end?"

"Jesus, Dutch. How could I forget her? Here we'd blown up half of downtown Danville, and we're the heroes rescuing the survivors...and then that last one."

"Sometimes I can still hear her crying in my sleep, Alex. Even if she'd lived, she never would have walked again. Not even Dewdrop could have helped that."

A slurping sound, and then the sound of a glass being set on a desk. "Pour me another," the general said, and the clink of bottle to glass followed. "Could be worse."

"Oh?"

"You remember Bailey's big photo op? That little Latina he rescued out of the wreck in Santa Fe?"

"Yeah."

"Guess who it was."

"Damned if I know, Alex."

The general chuckled. "Her name was Isabella Garcia-Shapiro. She went to the orphanage in Albuquerque, and that fat bastard Maybourne drafted her for Dewdrop."

"Wait. Isabella? Flynn's Isabella? The hot little Latina slave girl?"

"She was Echo Three. Yes."

"Son of a bitch." There was silence for a moment, then the mayor said, "Fucking Flynn. He never intended to loan her to me at all. Selfish bastard."

"Thinking with the little head as always, Dutch."

"Hey, it's worked well for me," the mayor said. "I mean, you think I would have gotten involved with the Council without the promise of slaves eventually?"

"I didn't even realize that was the goal," Archer said. "You and the Council suckered me into trying to fix the government without ever telling me what the real goal was."

"We did fix the government. Eventually. And, hey, we get to treat subhuman scum like they deserve now, and if they don't do what we say, we get to fuck 'em over."

The general grunted in agreement. "Need to go take a piss," he said.

Holly turned off the recording, grabbed her certificates, and snuck out of the office.

"Catch," Isabella said, drawing back the bow.

Colin ran through the routine to bring all his implants up to full speed - almost second-nature now. The world slowed, and he wondered if he'd ever achieve the same casual reliance on them that Isabella had. She'd had them in place for five years now, and interacting with them seemed like second nature for her.

He'd had the full set in place for less than a week now; the last ones had been the set that increased his reaction speed. Isabella had said they felt like the world slowed down, but she had understated it, he felt. The biggest problem was keeping his body under control, because momentum was still a thing.

He crouched down, wiggling his fingers in anticipation, and nodded to Isabella. She fired the bow, its blunted arrow aimed past him. He reached out for it, but his arms didn't quite move as quickly as he wanted them to, and his hand closed on empty air a few centimeters behind the tail of the arrow. Behind him, he heard it hit the padded target where she had been aiming.

"Almost," Isabella said. "Again?"

He nodded as she notched another arrow, drawing the bow back smoothly. It was a basic recurve bow, fairly lightweight for her, and he suspected she didn't have her full set of implants active in order to keep from breaking it.

"Ready," he said.

She loosed again, and he anticipated it better this time. His arm flashed out as the arrow drifted past, and this time he was closer. His hand hit the arrow just before the fletching, but he couldn't quite grasp it; instead, he knocked it away, and it clattered to the ground.

"Better," she said.

"Thank you." He stood up and stretched before crouching down again.

Isabella stepped to the side to change the angle as she notched another arrow. "Ready?"

"Shoot," he said.

She drew and released in one motion, to his other side. He saw the arrow coming toward him, wobbling slightly in flight, and reached out for it with his off-hand. He grasped it around the middle, his fingers closing around it, and snatched it out of the air.

"Yes!" he shouted, holding it up as he powered down the implants.

"Nicely done!" she said, smiling at him. She set the bow down, and reached into the case on the floor, pulling out a high-power compound bow. With a vicious grin, she said, "This should be about two and a half, maybe three times faster. Ready?"

Colin re-activated the implants and crouched down. "Ready."

Holly sat in another park, looking at her burner phone.

I don't believe I have a recording of two men confessing to setting the Danville bomb.

She'd listened to it several times over the past week, and each time, it was more damning. The mayor had set the bomb to bring back slavery, because he liked the idea of owning people. The general had set it because he wanted to help this Council overthrow the government. But, regardless, they had been involved in the deaths of hundreds of people in Danville alone, and deliberately led the country into a civil war that had killed millions and enslaved far too many more.

But she wasn't sure if she should send it to her contact. She wasn't sure what the effect of this news would be. And, most importantly, she wasn't sure if there was any way it could be used without it being traced back to her.

There had long been rumors of some sort of conspiracy behind the civil war, tied to a group that had been involved with pushing through the slavery laws. They'd always been pooh-poohed as yet another crackpot idea from the tinfoil-hat crowd.

And all she had was a recording of some voices. She could say they were Archer and Abercrombie, but there was no proof. The sound quality was good, but not good enough that their identities could be proven.

She looked at the phone. She'd put the recording on a memory card, and put that in the burner phone. All she had to do was turn on the phone and send it.

She took a deep breath, and turned on the phone. She uploaded the recording to the email provider, and emailed it off with a note.

Recorded this the other day. It's the Mayor and General Archer talking about how they were behind the Santa Fe bombing, on the orders of some group called the Council.

Please be careful with this, it's likely traceable. Don't leak it directly if you can help it.

She paused a moment, in case there was a reply.

You may have just given us the missing link. We'll be careful with it.

With a smile, she turned off the phone and started to walk home.

Archer hung up the secure phone and stared at it a moment before setting it on his desk. His superior in the Council - a Senator known by codename 'Scenic Harvest' - had called to tell him that there had been a leak of some sort, and that he should pass it down to Dutch.

A leak? That's all I need right now. I blew the Dewdrop thing, Sledgehammer is going exactly nowhere so far, and now there may be a leak of the Danville job, and it may even be my fault.

Fuck me sideways. We've kept the Council under wraps for almost twenty years now. If I'm the one who leaks it, I am screwed.

Muttering curses, he picked up the secure phone again. He unlocked it with a thumbprint and PIN, then dialed one of the few numbers it could call. This was intended to be the most secure cell phone possible - all calls were encrypted before bouncing through anonymization servers.

A moment later, the other end of the line picked up. "Jumping Jack," Dutch's voice said.

"Acid Test," Archer said, giving his own code name in response to Dutch's.

"What's up?" Dutch asked.

"Just got word from above. Remember when I was there on Shatter Day and and we talked about Danville and Santa Fe?"

"Vaguely. We were a couple bottles in by then."

"Somebody recorded it and leaked it to the ASF."

A pause and a rustle on the other end. "Fuck. How did we find out about it?"

"Don't know. I don't have need-to-know. They want you to poke around at your end and see if you can find anything. Don't trust anyone."

"I know the drill. This isn't my first rodeo. My office gets swept for bugs regularly, but I don't know if it has in a couple weeks. That'll be fixed."

"Take care of it. I'm available if you need resources."

"Will do. Jumping Jack out."

Phineas looked at the videoconference screen, split two ways. On the left, Vanessa was in her Toronto office. On the right, the DRDC director in charge of the project, Jean Blanchard, stared out from the screen.

"So, both test subjects seem to have acclimated well?" Director Blanchard asked.

"Yes," Phineas said, leaning closer to the microphone. "Ms. Garcia-Shapiro has fully adjusted to her improved implants. Warrant Officer Park is gaining familiarity with them quickly, and is already at approximately half what we estimate his final levels will be."

"So quickly?" Vanessa asked.

"He had a couple advantages," Phineas said. "First, he's male, so there's a bit more muscle mass to work with. Second, he was an extremely fit male in peak condition, so he's starting from an even higher point. He's actually drawing even with her on pure strength issues now. She's faster than he is, still, and that's likely to remain the case, because he has more mass to move."

"Okay. So, where do we go from here?" Director Blanchard asked.

"I'd like a couple more weeks of testing before we move forward with more test subjects," Phineas said, "but it might be a good time to start figuring out who the next test subjects will be."

"I'll see what I can do on that," Director Blanchard said.

"How many subjects in the next round of testing?" Vanessa asked. "So we can have the necessary materials on hand for production."

"I'd say three or four," Phineas said. "No more than half a dozen."

"I'd agree with that." Director Blanchard said.

"Doctor Tjinder will be heading back east in a couple of days," Phineas said. "I think Ferb's going, too, he wanted to sync up with you on deployment, Director."

"Excellent. I look forward to it," Director Blanchard said.

From the soft smile on her face, Phineas suspected that Vanessa was looking forward to it, too.