‘Flip’ was a massive understatement when AEGIS saw me hauling Karu’s unconscious form through the threshold. She took one look at the blood and cuts covering my body, the tangle of limbs sprawling over my back, and just screamed.

It really wasn’t what I needed right now. What I needed was to get this weight off my shoulders and rest. And finish my now-cold dinner.

Damn, I’d been so excited for that and now it was ruined. When things were already going to hell, the smallest things feel even more unfair.

I put Karu down momentarily and stripped her of her jetpack, vest, and weaponry as best as I could, before heaving her into my hammock, broken arm facing out so I could have a look at it. She was practically half the weight without all her gear, but was still a big girl and solidly built.

After some thought, I pulled the visor from her face as well. If she weren’t blood-smeared and rocking a fuck-you mohawk, she would be a classically beautiful blonde. I wished her eyes were open so I could see what color they were.

“I-is that…Karu?” AEGIS asked.

“That would have been a much better opener than screaming,” I said with a sardonic smile. I winced as a cut on my face announced that making any kind of facial expressions was a painful prospect at the moment.

“You’re bleeding from your…everywhere,” AEGIS said, sounding completely shocked.

“Yeah. She and I had a bit of a tussle outside. Good news, I won. Bad news, I kind of sort of killed her.” She gasped. “Oh don’t worry, I brought her back.”

“I was going to say. Your lightning-based powers stand a very good chance of fibrillation, which, assuming there is no severe tissue damage–“

“Yeah, AEGIS I got it. I jump-started her heart and now she’s alive again.”

AEGIS paced nervously in front of her terminal, nervously stroking one of her long pigtails. “There’s just…so much blood. You need to–“

“I know, AEGIS. I’ll take care of myself. But none of my wounds are as bad as hers, her arm is definitely broken. Do you know how to set a broken bone?”

“I do. I’ll walk you through it. Is there any bone or jagged protrusion?”

“Not that I see.”

“Does the site of the wound look crooked and swollen?”

“No, it just looks like her upper arm bends in a new place.”

AEGIS was pale and a little frantic but was much better at keeping cool when she had a way to contribute. She and I made a good team before when she was walking me through basic repairs and crafting, and electrical work like hooking the mass-fab up to her box. We’d developed a sort of short-hand lingo, which served us well in setting and splinting Karu’s upper arm.

“Move it a little in, about halfway to you, and pull it taut. Hands up two more. One more, okay mark. And tie the other end of that cord to the mark.”

As much as AEGIS worrying drove me nuts sometimes, I had to admit, she was one of the best people to have around in an emergency. Despite the amnesia, her knowledge of random things was, frankly, encyclopaedic, and her ability to give directions and prioritize were precise and effective.

We finished up and Karu had a very professional-looking splint and sling, which should keep her arm okay until she was able to get out of here and seek more professional help. With her presumably vast fortune of blood money, she could probably afford a regenerator and be back in shape in a few days.

Whereas if my arm broke, I’d stand a very good chance of just being dead, I thought bitterly.

“Okay, she’s set. Now clean yourself up. Your knees are mangled, what did you do out there?”

“That was actually from after the fight. She sorta died and fell and I caught her. She’s pretty heavy.”

“You caught her. And you did THAT to your legs? Was she fricking twenty feet in the air?”

“Closer to thirty, I think.”

AEGIS fumed. I felt a little bad for teasing her, but she was taking this entirely too seriously. It was over, I’d survived.

“When I tell you to take care of yourself out there, what the heck do you think I mean by that? Please, go fight someone who’s literally 50% weapons? Try to kill yourself in order to catch her dead, falling body? Or maybe please, bring the psycho murderess huntress home with you so she knows where you sleep and can come in and off you at night time next time?”

“I wasn’t going to leave her to die.”

“You could have just left her dead.”

“I wasn’t going to do that either.” I pulled up a clean rag and poured some water on it. “Do we have anything I can use to disinfect this?” I asked.

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“If you put some water in the mass-fab, I can make hydrogen peroxide for you. It’ll just slosh around the pan, but I think that’s about all we’ve got.”

I poured a couple of glugs of water in the mass-fab’s cabinet, feeling like this was just asking for it to leak and break everything, but she knew the machine way better than I. A brief lightshow and a couple of minutes later and…there was still what looked like water at the bottom. I dabbed my rag in there and applied it to my knee.

Ouch. Definitely not water.

“I think 4% concentration is ideal? So…still just mostly water. Let me know when you’re done and I can dissimilate the rest for later.”

I went through a few yards of cloth just cleaning off blood and grime, and more disinfecting my wounds. When I was done, I gave Karu a once-over as well, to AEGIS’ disapproval. She wasn’t as banged up as I was, her flightsuit doing its job in protecting her from cuts and abrasions, but she still had some on her hands and face, and burns on her arm.

“Don’t use peroxide on burns, it won’t heal as well. Just rinse it clean with cold water.”

I turned and it looked like AEGIS was busy working, completely oblivious to me. I smiled a little. Even if she disagreed with me, she still had my back. I cleaned up the cuts on Karu’s face and arms, but left the burns alone. Didn’t want to leave her lying in wet clothes…or have AEGIS berate me for turning her shirt wet.

And then, finally, I could sit down and eat. Despite the interruption, the fish tasted great, and I had really worked up an appetite. AEGIS seemed to have calmed down from a state of nagging and barely-contained angst to occasional fretting.

“Hey. You doing all right?” I asked.

“Doing…okay. Been better. Been much better,” she said with a glare.

“Yeah, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. Thanks for your help earlier.”

“NP. But really. What’s going to happen when she wakes up? Aren’t you a little afraid she’s going to get…murdery?”

“No. Well, maybe she’ll try and I’ll have to break her other arm.” I laughed, AEGIS did not. I took the hint. “But seriously, she’s not going to do much in her condition, and I put her guns and stuff on a shelf by the door.”

“I get why you did it, but…I don’t get why you did it.”

I paused and thought for a second. “So I woke up one day and was an Exhuman. People always told me when that happened, you’d be a danger to everyone around you. I learned they were right, but not for the right reasons. I woke up powerful, more powerful than I can imagine. I can kill people with barely a thought if I wanted to, but that doesn’t mean I wanted to. I’m still the same person I was when I was human, just now burdened with this insanely powerful…”

“Curse?”

“Thing. It’s not even inherently evil, my powers. Like yeah, if you try to shoot me, you’ll find out they are very deadly. But so is a loaded gun, and that can be held by a warlord or a police officer.”

“Right. So you saved Karu because you want to be more police than warlord?”

“I mean, I didn’t give it that much thought. Someone was hurt and I could help them so I did. I wasn’t trying to be anything.”

She gave me a big, warm smile. “I think people who do what you did are the best people.”

“Boy I sure hope so. We’re probably the only two people who think an Exhuman can choose to be good.” I paused and frowned. “I think you’re good too, AEGIS.”

“What makes you say that? I never thought my goodness was in question, LOL.”

“Nothing, really. I just…wanted you to know. In case someday you ever wonder.”

“Well that’s weirdly deep of you. Is this a new pick-up tactic?”

“Is it working?”

“Well, you have a girl passed out in your bed, and another ravishing hottie chained up in your personal dungeon. So…yes?”

I laughed. “Yeah, I only go for the weird ones. Can’t stand vanilla girls once you get into…jetpack computer-dungeon death-fighting. I hear it’s the latest craze on the ‘net.”

“Don’t forget the mind-reading. Or the fishing boy.”

“Ew, crossing the line.” AEGIS laughed at my disgusted face.

I paused and asked more seriously. “Hey, so do you think having weird shit attracted to you is part of this gift-curse-Exhuman thing? Because my life has gotten so much weirder since this happened.”

“My guess is the weird stuff is all around constantly. Most people just have a normal life to retreat into when it surfaces. Your normal life got taken away.”

“Well, that sucks.”

“I hear being an Exhuman sucks. Kind of part of the package.” She stuck her tongue out at me and laughed. I laughed with her but suddenly was keenly aware of how tired I was.

“I think I need to sleep, real bad,” I said.

“Yes, I think your body needs more blood inside of it and less on your clothes. We still need to sit down and have you sew up some new ones for yourself,” she nagged.

“Or you could just assimilate me some.”

“Yeah, because I’m just going to derive the polymer chains that compose synthetic weave and figure out how to constitute them, and then then be able to assimilate them in a structure which will actually function as cloth, and then extrapolate that for an entire garment? Because you’re too manly to pick up a sewing needle?”

“You made disinfectant today without a blueprint.”

“The chemical formula for that is literally H2O2.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“It’s water with one more oxygen. How did you pass high school chemistry?”

“I did fine in chemistry. I just didn’t memorize every atom I saw.”

“It’s a molecule, not an atom.” She gave an exaggerated sigh. “IDK, maybe you are right. Maybe I will figure out how to synthesize an enormously complicated chemical structure before you learn how to hold a needle. Certainly seems like the correct distribution of brain activity.”

“Ouch!” I said, feigning getting hit in the chest, and flopping into the nest of rope where I’d be sleeping. “You remind me of my sister, Lia, sometimes. Mostly when you argue with me but are totally right.”

“Lia sounds like a smart girl, if she argued against whatever you were saying.”

“Ouch again.”

“You’ll have to tell me about her sometime, but not tonight. Now you should just rest and recover. Sleep in tomorrow. Drink lots of fluids.”

“Yeah, let me just turn off the damn light,” I said, rolling to my side to get up. AEGIS stopped me with a brisk tsk-tsk and one of her trademark superior smirks.

“Got a surprise for you,” she said, and clapped twice. The room lights went out.

“You broke the lights. Neat.”

She clapped twice and they came on again. “I couldn’t decide if I wanted to hook the lights up to the network so I could control them, or give you a switch you could use from bed, so I compromised and did neither. Instead I read about this crazy thing from ancient history and decided to make one.”

“Very nice. Almost even useful. Glad to see the data crystal wasn’t a total waste of effort.”

“You’re supposed to say thank you, nitwit.”

“Can’t, too busy going to sleep and filling my body up with blood again!” I chimed and rolled over in my nest of blankets. I held two hands out where AEGIS could see them and clapped twice, draping the room in blackness.

“God, you’re insufferable," she said with a smile. And then to herself, after turning off the mic and holo she added, “and for some reason, I love you anyway.”