A / n: Thanks L, LadyBender and Forgotsurname for reviewing the last chapter. (Yeah, last chapter was pretty short. And this feels pretty long. How does that work?)

She found the camera on top of a stack of magazines in the kitchen. Leela checked the memory slot and tucked it into her bag with a banana and a packet of peanuts, in case she got hungry later.

Come to think of it, she was hungry now.

The cyclops crossed to the refrigerator and pulled out a can of Slurm. She was trying to kick the habit, but it was proving surprisingly hard to do so. There was something about the thick sweet soda that calmed her down, at least while she was drinking it. Maybe it was a craving.

When she'd finished, she found a pen and a sheet of paper and began to write a note for Lars.

Gone to see Mom and Dad, she wrote.

P.S There's goulash in the freezer. It needs eating up by Friday. You're welcome to have some.

She hesitated, then added : P.P.S You weren't there.

P.P.P.S The goulash needs five minutes on HIGH.

She stuck the note to the microwave, where he was sure to see it.

Lars was still on the couch, where she'd left him last night. He was snoring softly, but there was evidence that suggested he'd been up for a while when she was out. For one thing, he'd cleaned up.

Fry's approach to cleaning had always been to open a window and knock off the surface layers of grime, but Lars had obviously realized, some time during his long absence, that there was more to it than that. Not really understanding what this might be, his approach was kind of slapdash. During their marriage, Leela had put this down to him simply being a male, but now she could see in it all the symptoms of Fry's short attention span and irregular logic. In here, for instance, he'd thrown away all the rubbish but had simply stacked all her magazines and books into a pile on the coffee table, ignoring the perfectly good shelf underneath it and the entire bookshelf standing in the corner. He'd dusted. (Leela knew this because she could see the broken ornaments lying by the fireplace like casualties of war. The glue hadn't dried yet.) He had forgotten to vacuum the carpet, but he had, for some strange reason, washed and ironed the curtains. There was a big red weal on his right hand, where the ironing-board had closed on his fingers.

Leela sat on the one clear edge of the coffee table and stared at him for a moment.

It would be fairer if she could let him go.

It would be fairer if she didn't still love him.

It would be fairer if he wasn't Fry.

She leaned across and kissed him gently on the forehead, so lightly her lips hardly touched him. If he felt it he might wake up, and Leela knew instinctively she didn't want that. It could only be awkward.

She watched him sleep a minute longer, wrestling with her own confusion, then slipped out.

The nearest unobserved manhole cover was a block away. Leela walked quickly, her bag bumping against her hip. Yellowing leaves skittered over the sidewalk, swirling around her shoes.

She glanced left and right, then threw back her head and squinted up at the sky, looking for hovercars. Satisfied no-one was watching, she dropped to the ground and pried up the manhole cover. This in itself was no picnic. Years of doing it without a crowbar had left her short nails chipped and bleeding, and were also the reason she ignored Amy's many hints about manicures. How long would French polish last, on her nails? It was like a bad joke.

She swung down into the gloom, feeling for the rusted rungs of the ladder with her boot-tips. When she was sure they would take her weight she descended a little further, then reached up and pulled the iron cover back over the entrance. Darkness swallowed her in an instant.

The cyclops felt her way down in the dark, one rung at a time, ignoring each ominous creak of the ladder. This entrance was one she didn't use if she could help it – the ladder was a mile long, straight down into empty, sucking blackness. It came out by the crocodile pits. With no light to see by, Leela used the air to guide her. When it became unbearably foul she stopped, pulled the banana out of her bag and dropped it, listening for the splash.

It sounded maybe ten feet below her, followed by the grisly snap of a crocodile's jaws. Leela didn't stop to think. She jumped, ankles together, so that her full weight hit the creature on the nose. It opened its mouth to snap again but Leela had bent her knees instinctively and jumped to the left, where – sure enough – a second croc had closed in to contest the kill. This one reeled too as Leela used its head as a stepping stone to the shore. She sprang, easily clearing the six feet to the edge of the pit. When a third reptile snapped at her ankles, she hit it with a length of rusty pipe.

Sighing, she set off again. Leela hated crocodiles. They were basically just logs with teeth, and their mode of attack never varied. Bite, snap, bite. It was so boring.

She glanced down at her stomach.

"Enjoy the ride," she muttered.

All the magazines said it was perfectly safe for a physically active woman to do everything she'd done before during pregnancy. Okay, so they probably hadn't pictured this, but . . . perfectly safe, they'd said. Leela clung to that defensively. If she had to put up with regurgitating her food several times a day during pregnancy, the baby could stand a few somersaults.

She stopped at a marker on the outskirts of the village. It was just a shapeless block of concrete, painted white, but to those in the know it marked the boundary of home. Once you stepped past it you were in the mutant settlement – safe amongst your own. You had shelter, food if you could stomach it, and you could pretend these markers were the corners of the world. Many mutants did, Leela knew. A lot of the older ones had given up on the whole idea of a surface world. Surface air and open skies were like a dream to them. It scared them when the younger ones talked about the shafts of sunlight that sparkled under drains, or about Lars and Fry, the only surface visitors to the sewer. People with pink skin and the regulation number of limbs were a fairytale to the some of the really old mutants.

Leela felt a pang of guilt. The old people had retreated into their own heads because they felt safe there. If her plan worked, she was going to blow that fantasy world up in their faces.

Still, she had to do it. If the baby was born an obvious mutant, nothing she could say would save it from a life in the sewer. If it could miraculously pass for human, it still wouldn't be safe, not under the current status quo. What if she was found out in the future? A mutant with an apparently human baby? Would the city even believe it was hers? She shivered. No, of course not. That would mean admitting humans and mutants weren't really so different. Most likely, they'd say she'd stolen the baby. They'd take the child away, send it to some awful orphanarium like the one she'd grown up in, and she'd never see it again. And then maybe they'd keep an eye on it, and some time in the future, if they started to worry about it polluting the human gene pool, there would be an operation in the night, quick and efficient, and that would be that. There would never be a grandchild she'd never know.

Leela sat down on the marker, steadying her breath.

It wouldn't happen. She wouldn't let it happen.

She reached into her bag and pulled out the video camera, switching it on with shaking fingers. There was light of a sort here: gas lamps burning in little pockets in the wall. Slime glowed faintly on every surface. She would go into the village and film more later, so that people could see what life was really like for the mutant people. But there was a segment she needed to record first.

She raised the camera to her face and stared into the blinking red light.

"My name is Turanga Leela," she said evenly. "I was born in the state of New New York, where I was left in the care of Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium and declared a ward of the state. I lived there until I was eighteen. I still live in New New York. I'm a spaceship captain at a package delivery company, I'm recently divorced, and I pay my taxes. I'm not that different to anyone else in this city, except for one thing, I suppose." She took a deep breath. "I'm a mutant."

It was getting dark by the time Leela hauled herself out of the sewer. The camera in her bag felt like an unexploded bomb. Leela was hyper-aware of its position, of the way it shifted with every step. The more paranoid part of her brain kept expecting to hear sirens and bullhorns, to find herself bathed in blue light and staring down the barrel of a gun.

It didn't happen, but someone did step out of the mouth of an alleyway opposite Planet Express and grab her arm.

Leela grabbed back, found her center of gravity automatically and flipped her assailant over her head. It was only when Xandri yelped that she realized it wasn't NNYPD and she didn't need to fight.

Not yet.

"Don't hurt me! Don't hurt me!" Xandri cried.

Leela glared at her, then pulled the girl up and pushed her into the shadows, so they couldn't be seen.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed. "How did you know where I work?"

"I got it from some guy on LinkedIn! Zoidberg! Dr Zoidberg! Don't hurt me!"

Leela exhaled forcefully. "Fine," she snapped. "What do you want?"

Xandri swallowed. She was looking better than she had in the morning. She'd tightened up her hair and changed into what was probably her waitressing uniform: a black skintight dress, pantyhose, and black patent pumps. The pound of make-up on her face made her look older, but her body language, away from her husband, made her seem younger. Less sure of herself. It was unexpected.

"I wanted to say sorry," she blurted out. "For this morning. I was stupid and I judged you and you were right . . . it was stupid. So I'm sorry."

Leela looked at her skeptically. "You came all the way to Earth to tell me that? Sure you didn't stop in at NNYPD while you were here?"

"No!"

The anger in the girl's voice was pretty convincing. Leela reluctantly let her go.

Xandri simmered down a little.

"I just felt bad, okay? I got to thinking about Yancy – I mean, Fry – and what he would have thought if he'd seen me talk like that. I don't think he'd have liked it."

"What do you care?"

"I told you, my whole life changed when I met him. I wouldn't have Gomez if it wasn't for him. I wouldn't be happy if it wasn't for him."

Leela blinked. "He does have that effect," she said, more to herself than Xandri.

"I owe him, you know?" Xandri went on. She glanced down at her feet. "Besides, I – I know what it's like to not want someone to find you. My last boyfriend . . . we fought a lot." She swallowed. "He always won. He was a lot bigger than me."

"I'm sorry," Leela said. It was an automatic response, but not a warm one. She was too tightly wound to let go of her suspicions.

Xandri shrugged. "It's history," she said. "And it's not your fault. I just wanted to show you something."

She dug into her purse and pulled out a folded photograph. It was her, but only just. The girl in the picture had shiny brown hair in a sensible ponytail, minimal make-up, and no tattoos. She wore blue denim jeans, a demure green shirt, and a smile that dazzled on her lips but died before it reached her eyes.

"That's the old me," Xandri said. "I was at Mars U, remember? So anyway . . . he had a game one day and I was home alone and I guess I just snapped. I hawked a bunch of his stuff and ran away to Vegas. If he ever found me . . ."

"I think I get it."

Xandri nodded. "So now you've got something on me, and maybe you'll trust me. Enough not to tell on you, anyway."

Leela sighed. In a day or so, keeping her secret wouldn't matter in the slightest, but she couldn't say that.

"I understand. Thank you," she said instead.

Xandri was smart enough to realize this was the best she was going to get. She nodded and started to walk away, but stopped at the mouth of the alley.

"If you ever need a couch to crash on," she said, "come see us. Being your safe house might help make up for us being such huge jerks to you. I know Gomez thinks the same. So . . . any time."

"Sure," Leela muttered, and wondered how badly her life could go from here on out, and what possible set of circumstances could lead to her becoming a fugitive in hiding on another planet.

She watched the slight figure disappear from view, privately convinced she'd never see her again.

Bender was exactly where she'd suspected he would be – sitting in Fry's vacated groove on the Planet Express couch, watching All My Circuits.

Leela switched it off and sat down in front of him, forcing the robot to look at her.

"I need your help."

"You need a lot of things," Bender scoffed. "Happy pills. A makeover. Therapy."

"It's about Fry."

There was a slight, barely-audible whirring as Bender's hard drive shifted into higher gear.

"What about him?"

"Look, Bender, I know you and I don't always see eye-to-eye on this-"

"Ha-"

"But we both want the same thing here."

Bender cracked open a beer. "Hey, only one of us wants to bone Fry, and it sure ain't me."

"I meant we want him to come home." Leela hesitated. "And I think I might have a way to get his attention."

Eventually, she added, in the confines of her own head. Bender could be pretty impatient.

"I'm listenin'."

"Do you still have that spamware installed?"

"I might do."

"How do you feel about adding some charges to your rap sheet?"

Bender perked up. The robot was extremely proud of his arrest record, and never passed up a chance to add to it. "What kinda charges?"

"Uh . . . nuisance activity? Disturbance of the peace? Fraternizing with a mutant? There might be more."

Bender drained his beer, considering. "Well . . . I don't see my debugger 'til the new year," he conceded. "What kind of spam are we talking about?"

Leela pulled the memory chip out of the camera and dropped it into his hand.

"I want you to send out a video. That's all. Just one teensy video."

"That's it?"

"That's it."

Bender looked dubious, but took the chip. "You're the boss, meatbag. Who are you spamming? The pigs? The Central whatever?"

"Yes."

"Huh?"

Leela stood up.

"All of them," she said simply. "Everyone in the state of New New York. Every computer, every cellphone, every comms device."

She slipped the communicator off her own wrist and put it down on the table.

"Send it to everyone."