"So what's it like?" Riah asked Katja, who was laying down on the couch across from her and running a glowing hand across the scar on her neck, the remnant of her resurrection demonstration to Yili.

"How does what feel like?" the woman responded as she withdrew her hand, the scar completely gone. "Being a ghost you mean? Well, it's sort of like… being asleep and being awake at the same time"

"Huh?" Riah responded smartly, "Well, that didn't really answer my question."

"Sorry dear, it's just something that's hard to put into words for someone who is so… limited."

Riah frowned at the woman's words, "What do you mean by that?"

"Nothing offensive dear," the woman replied, projecting her omni-tool's browser into the living room's display emitter and flipping through various videos on an extranet site, "You all don't have Anima, so there's really no way to describe it, it'd be like describing music to a deaf person, colors to a blind man, emotions to a rock. Honesty to an Illuminati spook."

"Mmhhh," Riah hummed, thinking of more questions to ask the woman. "So, all Gaians can do this?"

"No, well… heh, this looks fun," the woman said, finally deciding on that idiotic turian obstacle course show. "There are several other Gaian species that can become ghosts like we can, but only humans can resurrect themselves like we do. After the Golden War when we all got these "special privileges" it's become second nature for humans to die, go ghost, and resurrect ourselves. Hell, they teach elementary kids all about safe resurrection techniques." Riah shuddered at the mental image of several little children cutting their throats and overcoming their fear of ghosts through firsthand experience. "But yeah, we can go ghost whenever we want to."

"Why don't you just do it all the time?" Riah asked, "Wouldn't that be the safest way to hide? No one else in the galaxy would be able to find you."

Katja let out a dry laugh, "It's not that easy. It has risks, too much time as a ghost and we risk turning into one of the nasty ones. Specters, poltergeists, all those other ones." She laughed at something on screen before turning back to Riah. "Bad ghosts. Crazy ones. Staying in the spectral realm for too long can cause people to go insane, latch on to their emotional extremes, lose their sense of self. Usually, you find an Anima well to reconstruct your body and avoid that problem or find your body again and jump back into it after patching it up. That also avoids the problem. Problem is, I haven't seen an Anima well anywhere outside of Gaia, natural or artificial."

Riah understood much of that even if some of the details seemed to elude her. Immediately though, her mind caught on to a comment the woman had made. "Wait, you need these Anima things to not go crazy? You said none of these Anima things exist around here, so doesn't that completely destroy our escape plan? It's no use escaping if you and Santi will just go crazy while we're on the run."

"Awww, is that some concern I hear? Getting a soft spot for my Santi?"

"Oh fuck off-"

Riah briefly saw her mother's open palm before her visor's mouth piece slammed into her lips, stinging terribly. She muffled her cry of pain under her mother's glare.

"Young lady if I tell you once I've told you a thousand times, watch your tongue around our friends! Excuse her Katja, I don't know where I went wrong with her. Here, something to drink."

Katja smiled as she sat up and took the offered drink before waving off Yili's apology. "Don't worry about it Yili. I have a teenager of my own remember? I know they can be a bit much sometimes."

Riah rolled her eyes, cursing the insufferable friendship the two women shared.

"Yes, but your boy isn't rude." Yili countered as she sat down and attached her own drink to her helmet.

"No, but I've caught Santi ghosting and sneaking into strip bars."

"Oh. Well, he is a healthy boy…" Yili replied.

Riah buried her head in her blanket, muffling her scream. This is who we are trusting our lives to?

"Riah does bring up a good point," her mother began, "this escape is worthless if you two will go insane in the process."

"No, we'll only go crazy if we can't find an Anima well or if we can't return to our bodies. So, what we are going to have to do, well… what you two are going to have to do is carry a part of ou-"

Riah put up a hand, interrupting the older woman. "Wait," she demanded, "You're going to tell us to pack your corpses in our luggage aren't you?"

Yili gasped.

"No," Katja responded, "Just pieces of us."

Everyone ate breakfast in silence, Yili and Katja sitting at the table and discussing which belongings to pack and which to leave behind. Luckily neither family had much in the way of possessions, what little they did have is easily replaceable. They'd be traveling light. Riah and Santi were enjoying breakfast while playing a video game together on the couch.

"It's unfair that you get to mutilate me but I can't mutilate you."

Riah didn't respond immediately, instead she focused on destroying Santi's aircar and taking first place. Fourth win in a row. "You're not good at games are you?"

Santi gave a frustrated sigh, before taking a bite of his breakfast. "All the language is in quarian, I can't read most of what's going on!" He grumbled something between more mouthfuls of his breakfast, Riah recoiling in disgust as he did so.

"Chew your food you damn animal. Listen, so are we really going to have to carry your heads around? I'm not really sure I'm looking forward to any of that."

"Doesn't have to be our heads, it's just that brains are harder to recreate for us. But really it could be any part of us. The bigger the better. And it'll just be for a while, long enough for you and your beautiful mom," Santi didn't mind the punch to his arm, "to get aboard a freighter. Then you just find a private place for us to rebuild ourselves and bam! We just ride that freighter to… wherever it's going and…" Santi shrugged, "I dunno, I haven't about what we'll do after that. Start somewhere else maybe." He paused for a second, "Or go back to Gaia."

"I thought you couldn't go back?" Riah said.

Santi glanced backwards at his mother, causing Riah to turn and look. Katja was at the stove, probably cooking more human food while her mother was using her omni-tool. "Well, it's not like… when we left it wasn't because there wasn't anywhere we could run to. We just left because the opportunity suddenly presented itself. After that it was a good few months of evading the bastards that came after us." He glanced back to the kitchen before adding in a whisper. "More than me, I think they want Katja back. She was one of their favorites." Given the look of disgust on his face Riah could take a guess at what he meant. "And with all the shit that is going on here I'm thinking it might just be safer on Gaia, or on any of our colonies. We could turn to the cops and ask them for help, maybe give them some info on the Svalka and help them put the bastards away for good."

"I guess I'd like to visit the Flotilla," Riah answered as she set up another race, "But that might still be a while off. I think the Flotilla accepts quarians born on the outside as long as they still come back with a gift, but I think my mother was kicked out or has been gone so long that they wouldn't accept her back. Or maybe they would if she also brought back another gift to get in their good graces. But that's still far off in the future. Press start you idiot."

Santi suppressed a growl, joining the game and almost immediately falling behind Riah and all the NPC racers. They played in silence for a while, the only sounds around them being those of the game and their mothers' conversation in the kitchen area.

"I've been thinking."

"What a surprise."

"Shut up for a second." Santi shot back, "How do you think we should off ourselves? We need to make it look believable so that the Upper Families don't think it's suspicious."

"Why wouldn't they believe it?" Riah asked, "You guys are going to kill yourselves."

Santi paused their game, leaning in as Riah leaned away from him. "But what I mean is if we all book a passage off of the station before we're dead it'll look suspicious to the Upper Families. They might hold you up and make us all miss our flight."

Riah pushed him away, unpausing their game and taking the lead. "Sure. But wouldn't that mean that we'd have to wait until the last minute to book our passage?"

"Probably. But I'm sure you could convince the captain to let us onboard if you wave around enough money. Now we just need to figure out how to kill ourselves in a way that looks accidental."

Riah grinned.

"I've been thinking about that, and I have just the perfect way."

The four of them sat around the kitchen table as Riah searched the extranet for some old news story she said would help them in their plan. At one point her mother gave her a stern glare while Riah seemed to shrink in fear or shame. Santi stifled a laugh as he guessed at what had happened, presumably Yili saw something in Riah's search history that she didn't approve of. A few awkward moments later and Riah beamed in happiness.

"Here, read thi-I mean look at this," she said as she projected the extranet site onto the living room's display. Despite not being able to read quarian, Santi could piece together the story from the various pictures. Something about some sort of device that blew up a house. "See, gangs have been refining their own rocket propellants for a long time now. They use it for homemade weapons like rocket launchers, explosives, they strap small rockets to their aircars for extra speed in gang races or getaway vehicles."

"Alright," Santi said, remembering some of the ingenious weaponry that people made back home during the Golden War. "But that helps us how?"

Yili answered before her daughter could. "Many of the necessary components can be found in commercially available machinery like generators, batteries, capacitors, cooling systems, heavy machinery and the like. Back on the Flotilla this was done all the time since we couldn't always afford actual propellants. It is incredibly dangerous however; lots of things can go wrong."

"Right, like these turians here," Riah pointed to the screen, "Blew up their house when they made a mistake. Santi we own a lot of pieces of equipment that could be broken down and used in this homebrew propellant business…"

"… so it wouldn't be out of the question for an accident to occur." Santi muttered. "Alright, it could work. So we just make up some bullshit excuse as to why I was trying to refine my own rocket fuel-"

"Like for a new golem weapon," Riah offered.

"-right like that and then," he gestured to the screen, "I blow myself up."

"Us up," Katja interjected, "I have to be there too. I have visited the shop a few times, so it wouldn't be out of the question for me to be there. Riah will step out for whatever reason and that's when we have our little accident."

Riah nodded, "And then I'm so devastated that my friend died that I just have to buy a ticket away from this station."

Santi looked at Riah, before turning to look at Yili and Katja. "Well, it's all believable up to there."

It was decided that they'd enact the plan by the end of the week, giving everyone enough time to prepare. Unfortunately Yili never actually made propellant while on the Flotilla, so she couldn't exactly offer the most help to that particular part of their plan. Instead Riah searched through the depths of the extranet for information about these so-called "rocket scientists" including some of the basic setups people "fueled" with. Much of the chemistry of the entire refining process was beyond her and Santi, but that was mostly irrelevant. They didn't have to know how to refine fuel properly; they had to know how to refine fuel improperly. "Really," Riah told Santi during one of their research sessions, "we just need to know enough to blow up our store." Most of the things they either already owned in their junk pile or could easily buy from some of the nearby hardware stores and the process of setting up the machinery wasn't difficult especially since Santi could just order one of his golems to do any heavy lifting that was beyond them.

Riah found that the hardest part was acting natural. Katja had to remind her and her mother to keep their normal expenses, continue making arrangements for outings with friends. Pretend as if they weren't going to completely disappear in a few weeks.

In spite of all of that, Riah found herself being happier than she'd been in a long time. Threats to her life or no, she was finally going to leave this station and maybe, if she was lucky, go back to her people.

"Alright," Santi said as they finished setting up their equipment, a generator humming with power in a corner of the room,. "Alright!" he clapped his hands together and pointed to Mila, his "youngest" robot and designated lab assistant, who lumbered over and stood beside him.

Riah got comfortable behind the makeshift barrier they had built for her, peering through the reinforced glass they had used to give her a window into Santi's section of the lab. "Are you ready?" she asked, "You better not fuck up and blow yourself up before we're ready!"

Santi shrugged and threw her a nasty look, "Nag nag nag! Just let me concentrate, I'm the one holding the explosives! Fuck."

Riah huffed, sitting back in her chair and finding the sites she would use to walk Santi through the process. "Why don't we start small, that way if you do blow something up it'll be a small controlled explosion. Give us an idea of how dangerous this is."

"Fine."

"Ok, you'll need a screw driver," Santi held up their electric version, "some pliers," he held up those too, "gloves so you don't get skin burns," Riah already knew he was wearing those, "OK, you'll also-"

"We have all the tools Riah. No need to check off every single one."

"Tools check. Safety," she kicked the barrier in front of her, flinching in pain as it proved as sturdy as Santi claimed it was. She looked over at Santi, whose safety didn't really matter. "Check. Ok, now… let's start making some bootleg rocket fuel."

The next few days went about as well as they could; the two of them found that they were enjoying themselves a bit more than they should. Aside from the fear that they would cause a pre-mature explosion and ruin their plan, or kill Riah, it was admittedly fun to play with explosives and Santi did legitimately think he could build some sort of weapon for his golems.

"Rocket fists!" he said during one of their lunch breaks. "It'll make my golems twice as powerful, twice as deadly!"

Their experiments did attract some attention.

A few days away from their planned "Bomb Day" something went wrong and one of their containers suddenly exploded, sending a piece of shrapnel through Santi's arm. Not enough to be serious, but enough to spook the two asari "body guards" the upper Families had posted outside. They tried to get Santi to go to visit an Upper Family doctor, but Santi refused. When the asari asked the two of them what had caused the explosion and learned about the proposed rocket weaponry they suggested sending someone experienced in that field of work to assist Santi in his work, to avoid any future problems. Riah refused, telling Santi that they'd probably try to steal his golemnetry secrets. They both started cussing out the asari, telling them to get out of their store. Santi even threatened to call their boss on them.

Then Bomb Day Came.

"What?"

Riah realized she was staring at Santi and Katja.

"It's just-I guess it just hit me, you guys are going to blow yourselves up in a few minutes."

"So?"

Riah really didn't have an answer to that. Instead she just shrugged. Maybe it wasn't so odd. She'd already seen Santi kill himself a few times. Katja slit her neck when she demonstrated her abilities to her mother. This had been the plan for days. "It's just odd." She replied dumbly, feeling Katja put a hand on her shoulder.

"Do you have some baggies dear?"

"Yeah," Riah answered as she reached into her pocket and pulled out a few pouches. "How much of you do I need?"

"Well, if you can try to get some of our brain matter."

"Brain matter takes a while to rebuild, especially without an Anima well." Santi offered.

"Yes, even just a small handful will do. Ideally the more that is left over means less work for us when we do plan on coming back but even small amounts work. So if you can dear, try to get back in here and find an arm or a leg. Brains or hearts would be best."

"Right," Riah said.

"Well, just don't mess this up." Santi said, pointing a wrench at her that she immediately slapped away. "We're counting on you to get pieces of us and get a way aboard the freighter. We'll still be around of course, but we won't be able to affect much of the real world while we're dead." He crossed his arms and frowned, "And for our own sakes we have to stay near our corpses or risk going mad. So we are going to be stuck haunting your house for a while."

Riah scowled, glancing at Katja. "You'll keep him from spying on me or my mom won't you?"

"Of course dear," the woman smiled.

"Get going." Santi said, gesturing for her to get out of the room.

"Just hold on," Riah stopped as she looked around the room. This would be the last time she'd see the store like this. Normal. She felt a small pang of something in her chest.

Odd.

She looked over at Santi and Katja one last time. "Well, this is it then. Just give me a minute or so to get out to a safe distance and… this is it huh? Good luck."

Katja smiled, before pulling Riah into a hug. "Good luck dear."

Riah glanced at Santi, who just stared blandly before giving her a small smile.

Riah smiled, before putting on her game face. "Alright, I'll get you your damn food!' she began in a shout, walking out of Santi's lab and heading to the store proper and slamming the door behind her, "Fucking humans…."

"GREETINGS RIAH-"

"Yeah, yeah. Shoplifters will not be tolerated, I know."

She put up the closed sign out front, hopefully keeping any poor bastard from trying to enter the place just as Santi planned to blow up several containers of low-grade rocket fuel.

"Hey," one of the two asari called out to her. "Where are you going?"

"What's it matter to you?" Riah replied, still headed towards the fast food place further up the hall.

"It matters to the Upper Families," the blue bitch replied smugly, "Upstairs wants to know where both of you are at all times. So I'll ask again, where are you going?"

Riah didn't have to pretend to hate these people. "Well if you must know, mother," Riah spat out, "your little robot factory is hungry and busy with some tinkering. Since he's so busy I get the privilege of playing the inter who picks up the fast food, so if you don-"

Suddenly Riah was picking herself up off of the floor, a deafening ringing in her ears as she struggled to stand up. When she fell down flat on her face for the second time she gave up on standing, her hands immediately and instinctively went to her visor while another reached into one of her pouches. Planned or not, the blast took her off guard and really shock her up. She groaned in pain and felt blood steam down her face, shards of glass embedded in her forehead.

Shit, shit!

Riah fumbled around in her pockets, finally retrieving her emergency kit and applying a disinfectant directly to her face, a sealant across her visor and injected herself with an emergency cocktail of immune-boosters and antibiotics. The plan is shit if I die due to an infection! Ok, calm down, calm down, calm down. Riah, you're fine, you're fine. I sealed the visor as quick as I could, I've had suit tears that lasted longer. I'll be fine. Keelah!

The store was an inferno, flames and smoke spewing out through the shattered windows.

Riah stood up and steeled herself through the pain. Santi and Katja had done their part.

It was up to her now.