The ring on her finger was non-standard equipment- it wasn't ever a part of any model T-doll that she could trace her core to. For all intents and purposes, it was an utterly pointless piece of fashion.

And yet, every time UMP-9 moved to remove it, something in her digimind stopped her. What harm was it doing by staying there? It didn't interfere with her range of motion, it didn't lower her efficiency in any way. It was just a small, polygonally cut piece of silver that simply sat beneath her gloves anyways. Yes, there was no harm in it, so on her finger it stayed.

But there were times where she wondered about it. It was always during those quiet times, when the team was laying low in one of their safe houses, when no one had the heart or the patience to talk with each other. Sometimes, 9 found herself laying back and simply staring at it in the flickering lamplight. It was on her fourth finger- the ring finger. A band of silver… according to her database, western traditions stated that it was a symbol of an eternal bond. A promise.

And yet she couldn't figure out where it came from. None of her memories noted it, none of her physical dairy entries mentioned it, either. It was like it had simply… appeared on her. Gently she twisted it against her finger, feeling its tightness tug at her epidermal sensors.

"Nine, we have a job." UMP-45 announced, standing by the doorway to what 9 would consider her "room".

"Coming, sis." She pulled her gloves on faster than usual-

Like she was hiding her hands from her sister. Why, she couldn't say… something in her programming whispered for her to keep it a secret. No matter how many times she tried to defrag, it never went away, so it had to be a process that was vital to her digimind.

It was why she hadn't asked her sister about if she had forgotten something.

"Smash and grab mission." 45 spoke to her trailing sister. They were making for their armory, apparently there was going to be no formal briefing.

"Just the two of us?"

"No need for Eleven and Four-sixteen to deploy if it'll save us some money on supplies." 45 grinned, proud of her frugality.

416 would call it stinginess, but it was all a matter of opinion now, wasn't it?

"Light load, three days rations in case, a spare ruck for the goods." 45 had thrown on her jacket as she spoke, collecting the supplies she would need.

"What are we grabbing?"

45 shrugged, though her voice chimed through the sister's private network. 'Something that Griffin wants but can't have.'

It was a contradiction the piqued the curiosity. Technically 404 were mercenaries… but they rarely went against Griffin. Not only that, but 45 tended to charge more to those who were opposed to Griffin's direct wishes.

Well, direct wishes when Griffin had them. If they never knew that something was missing, then they couldn't miss it, right?

'Right'. 45's voice chimed in 9's head. The younger sister frowned, establishing her administrative privileges and blocking 45 out from monitoring her thought processes. The first few times 45 had done it, it had been funny, if not slightly endearing. Now it was starting to feel like 45 was poking around, searching for something inside of 9's digimind.

45 snickered to herself, giving 9 a warm smile, perhaps as an apology for the intrusion.

'It's a quick and quiet mission.' 45's sisterly facade had melted down into her business mode, 'The target is in SF territory, though it doesn't seem to be any particular Ringleader's turf. Just a quick grab of something left behind, no one needs to know we were there.'

'Got it! With the money we make from this one, can we buy better beds?'

'For which safe house?' 45 mused through the network, 'We've only got ten of them.'

'All of them!'

Even as the sisters bantered back and forth like they always had, something in the back of 9's digimind told her to remain on guard. The trust that she so implicitly placed in her sister had been eroding away, bit by bit, and yet 9 couldn't explain why.

"We're heading out on a patrol. We'll be back." 45 waved dismissively back to 416, who seemed somewhat surprised that the two were leaving alone.

The secrecy of the mission from 416 and 11 seemed suspicious as well. Figuring out 45's schemes though required a great deal more cunning that 9 had the capability for; where she was instinctual and reactive, 45 was calculating and devious.

It was why the sisters worked so well together. It was why… It was why… It was why…

For a split second as the pair ascended the ladder out of the bunker, 9's digimind faltered. It felt like a cold breeze had run through her sensor system, but she shook it from her circuits. The more she thought, the more it happened. Solution: do not think so much.

9's "solution" lasted about as long as it took them to get a few miles from the bunker. The march pace they maintained was made bearable by small talk and sharing what they would do with the cut of the mission profits, but the talk always tickled that little electric itch in her mind.

She had to ask at least one thing.

"Why are we hiding the mission from Four-sixteen?"

Without missing a beat, nor giving even a hint of being startled, 45 shrugged.

"There's no telling how she would react if she knew we were going against Griffin."

It was infuriatingly simplistic of an answer, but one that seemingly satisfied the logical part of 9's programming.

But the increasingly illogical side of her digimind rankled under the dismissive answer.

"Why ask, Nine? You've never questioned our sisterly bonding time before." 45's voice module was pitch perfect in its neutrality… but 9 could feel that there was something else behind the voice of her sister. Inwardly, she checked her permissions; 45 was still locked out-

"I figured she would be more upset being left cooped up in a bunker." 9 spoke in half truths, enough to fool her own empathetic processes. She was not as adept at controlling her own systems, but she certainly had a greater understanding of her emotion module than 45.

Her older sister chortled, much to 9's relief.

"This is a mission that requires tact and restraint, Nine." 45 began to imitate the cold demeanor of their team-mate, riling herself up as a irritated cat would, "I am the perfect weapon, it would be more efficient if we eliminated the surrounding patrols."

9 giggled slightly. It was a logical assessment of 416- her programming favored quick, decisive, and violent action…

"What's our ETA, sis?"

"Current march pace… six hours."

"Let's pick up the pace then!" 9 hopped and skipped her way in front of her sister, warming the motors in her legs in the same way a human might stretch themselves.

"Wait... Nine-"

She took off, pushing through the trail with the speed of a human sprinter yet with the casual grace of a dancer. It was something she needed, even as it stressed her systems slightly, the sudden sprint brought a wave of relief. The farther she got away from 45, the lighter 9 felt. Was this what humans called catharsis?

The questions without answers had begun ticking away in her digimind again but this time, with each bounding leap 9 took, they felt less and less burdensome.

'Nine, slow down!' 45's emotion module had pinged with a sense of nervousness, something that 45 never expressed. 9 giggled over the network.

'Come on sis, I know you can keep up! Shake the rust off!'

9 had barely managed to keep herself together for the last half an hour, and she had six more ahead. Somehow 9 dreaded that more than the mission and, unfortunately, the quicker she got there did not necessarily mean that she could avoid the claws sinking into her digimind. Her pace slowed, letting 45 catch up with that frustrated scowl stamped upon her face.

"Who are you calling rusty?" The the whir of 45's exo-frame stressed to a whine every now and again; a reminder of the tools she needed to keep up performance-wise. The frustration in the older twin's voice was enough to send shivers through 9; she had forgot about 45's self-consciousness for being an older model…

But 45 smiled. A true, honest smile. 9 could tell by the way that the sides of her lips imperfectly moved, just slightly out-of-sync.

"Sorry, sis." 9 smiled back, hiding just that slightest bit of an electric pang in her emotion module. That something chipping away at her came from her emotions, and she knew it was something negative… but if she couldn't figure out what it was, she couldn't partition it, she couldn't delete it. The last thing she wanted to do was question her sister- to even feel anger or hatred for 45. At least… at least what she felt certainly wasn't hate.

That was an emotion that 9 at least had plenty of experience with.

The thing that 9 hated the most about Sangvis units, and she had a lot to hate, was that they always came in packs. While they were less efficient than a well trained human soldier on an individual level, their weaknesses were usually outweighed by their sheer numbers.

It was a double-edged sword, trying to sneak through them. More active units meant greater chance of being picked up by something's sensors, but at the same time, the generic SF units lacked the refined dexterity that a single, well-tuned doll had. They clumsily stomped their way around pre-defined patrol routes, making them easy to detect and predict.

9 slipped through the dark, no louder than a mouse as she crept low through the thicket. A direct route into the objective was the safest- though it ran intersecting through two patrol routes. They would leave a trail through the undergrowth as well, but 9 doubted that the Rippers on patrol had the capacity to detect, let alone extrapolate the intent even if they did find the evidence. Once 9 put eyes on the dilapidated wooden cabin, she matched it against the satellite image provided to them before heading back for 45, though this time she decided on a calculated risk.

The timing of the patrols was machine precise. If she did her computation correctly, she could slip onto one of the patrol's routes in between the pathing units with none being the wiser, dodging back onto a new trail back to her sister.

45 was crouched low, hidden among the brush. 9 silently gestured, indicating the path that they would use for infiltration, pantomiming the instructions rapidly. As 45 had instructed, they had "gone dark", not using a secured neural network; for even a secured signal was still detectable if they didn't have the right mask over it.

Her sister nodded, motioning to move to the next stage of the plan. They could slip in, but there was no backup plan after that. 45 countered that they would need all their options available.

Specifically, they needed a local closed-network signal to mask as, which meant finding and hacking a lone SF unit, or tackling a patrol so that they could gain access. Of the units that 9 had spied, they only had the firepower to take on a Ripper patrol. Luckily for the pair, these Sangvis dolls were not the more modern units.

Still… Rippers moved fast and erratic once they were alerted to an enemy. That was the trick- get most of them before they were alerted. The pair slipped into position alongside one of dirt trails, waiting for the clockwork timing of the patrol. Standard ambush and blackout procedure.

The sisters selected their targets.

The first second was the most valuable- 45 and 9 could get at least two each within the cyclic rate of their weapons and the targeting acquisition of of their imprint. The last one would need to be dropped withing the next two seconds- before it rerouted its alert signal past 45's containment.

Easy enough, if she were operating at full capacity.

9 locked up a moment, her perception of the world stuttering as several programs simultaneously began to run in preparation, straining her processors. Calculations, pattern recognition and prediction, data prep for the targeting network, not to mention she also had to partition off some virtual memory to lend 45 so that she could get the bug programmed… all to be executed within the microsecond when they connected their network.

9 had neither a poetic process, nor had an artistic program in her library... but even in her memory-stressed state, 9 could imagine herself as a bow, tensed to the point of cracking-

The signal impulse of 45 connecting to her- the flood of data from both of them crashing together in a flurry over the neural-network.

The perfectly synchronize snap-shooting belayed the absolute chaos unfolding in their network. The first two Rippers collapsed in the first burst- peak performance. The second bursts out were not as precise- not perfectly clean, but the margin of error was small enough that the damage was still enough to disable the Ripper dummies.

The fifth began evasive maneuvers, moving to break line of sight through the trees. 9 pursued, trying to maintain the firing angle.

Two seconds.

9 squeezed off a sub-optimal shot that struck the Ripper center-mass, but the thing kept moving. She pushed herself at the upper limit of her motorized muscles. Tracking- no she needed to deflection shoot-

Three seconds.

The cyclic rate was fast enough that she could get two… maybe three shots in the fraction that she needed-

It was a mix of her aiming imprint, as well as a predictive process from 45. Two rounds out.

The Ripper's path had not changed. It was making for the shortest possible route to break the line of fire which, ironically, put it in the path of 9's bullets. It tumbled and rolled, thudding against a tree as a dead shell.

She put two more rounds into it- one through where the signal emitter would be and another through the primary processing unit, rendering the thing unrecoverable. By the time she returned to her sister, 45's cleanup was complete as well- they had until the patrol's route had finished and updated before the SF mainframe detected the error and sent out an alert. They dragged the shells off of the trail, trying to cover their tracks as much as possible.

'Forty-seven minutes. Plenty of time.' 45 seemingly relaxed now that they had the local SF signal to disguise their network traffic.

'Easy-peasy!' 9 downplayed the amount of stress she was under, giving her sister a blisteringly confident smile. In actuality, the stress of it nearly caused 9's processors to overheat. Quietly she began to shut off programs she didn't need, not having the time to cool off as they pushed back into the woods.

9 leapt and skipped ahead of her sister, keeping up their previous pace, but a halting command forced her to slow.

'We have time, Nine. Stop pushing yourself.' 45 chided like the overbearing older sister she was. Apparently she was still remotely monitoring 9.

'The sooner we get done the sooner we get home.' Came her natural response, but something with it caused her to glitch.

Home-

Even though she was ending processes left and right, even though she was shunting 45's programs back over to her sister, there was an immense pressure in 9's digimind that was slowing her down.

She couldn't trace where the thought was coming from- which part of her programming was causing her to fixate upon it. Quietly she put herself on auto-pathing to trace her original route to the objective as she turned her attention inward.

A memory fragment was lodged within her primary directives, sparking like a frayed wire. The stress of the last flood on her digimind must have dislodged it. She'd isolate it for defragging later...

Home.

It sent a shiver through her digimind as she placed the partition. Her hand reflexively tightened its grip around her weapon- hyper aware to the ring upon her finger. This fragment… it had something to do with that mysterious silver band.

'What's our ETA at this pace?' 45's ping tore 9's attention away. In a panic she ran the numbers.

'Ten minutes.' Even just the process of running predictions caused that fragment to stand out more and more. She mulled over whether or not to ask 45… but if it was connected to the ring, it was a secret to be squirreled away.

'We should pick up the pace. Have you cooled yourself?'

'Yeah. I think I'm fine.'

45 had sent a permission request to check 9's digimind. Quicker than lightning, 9 covered up the fragment, giving it a redundant name and burying it amongst her other vital programs. 45's presence gently slipped into her digimind.

'You still have a lot concurrently running.'

'I-I can go faster. It's when I have to do silent running mode at three-quarter capacity that I overheat.' 9 pouted, making her sister smile sympathetically; 45 did put a lot of stress upon her, after all.

Her sister's presence slithered away, letting 9 breath once again- metaphorically of course. 45 may be able to get into 9's digimind, but 9 certainly knew ways to manipulate her sister as well- without having to tinker with her programming.

'We might need to pick up the pace then. We don't know how long it will take to ID the objective.'

'We don't know how hard it will be to egress.' 9 countered, pressing upon 45's sudden timidness for hurting her sister, 'Give me one more minute to sort myself in case we need to do that again, then we can speed up. Please?'

45 nodded quietly, the tense rigidity in her movements relaxing somewhat. She was still alert -still suspicious- but 9's argument was perfectly logical. They needed to be ready for anything.

One last time, 9 turned inward. She traced the fragment as best she could. Its neural path was obscured, dipping in and out of the web that was her primary directives. It was entwined- impossible to completely root out. Whatever it originally was had been clipped and hidden… but why? Something related to home-

She shook herself from it, despite the haunting nature of the discovery. A self-diagnostic run later would help, but that was for later. Right now, they had a mission to accomplish.

'Let's go.' 9 picked up her pace to a quiet jog. While she didn't have full capability right now, she still could give the illusion of it until she recovered. As much as she wanted the objective to simple be sitting right out in the open on a table or something, experience had told her nothing they were hired on for was ever simple.

Life was never "simple", even for a fully-functional T-doll.

And 9 was beginning to suspect that she was malfunctioning.