After the events of a few days ago, I had sworn myself to a life completely free from excitement. Between another fight with AEGIS, another fight of a completely different nature with Karu, and potentially being briefly braindead, I was ready to spend my days quietly fishing and hunting in preparation for winter.

The days were growing shorter and darker yet, and more than once there had been a gripping unnatural chill which felt like winter peeking its head in just to see if the world was still there and all ready for its arrival. I knew I didn’t have too long before the first snows, and after that it would be harder to put food away.

Fortunately, unlike many lost in the wilds, I had a mass-fab, and in the very worst-case scenario, could harvest nearly any biological matter from wood to pine needles, have the mass-fab break it down and reprocess it into something edible. It wouldn’t be good, but it would be survival. I hoped to only lean on this advantage as little as I could, as besides the obvious grossness of eating brown biological sludge, I didn’t know if I could trust the machine staying functional forever. Putting all my food stores in it and having it crap out on me would be a death sentence.

So here I was again, crawling through the underbrush with a bow and arrows. I had my lightning bulbs as a backup, but they tended to make the animal tense, tough, and sort of…instant-fried from the inside. It sounded delicious in theory, but in practice, it led to inedible veins of ashen black surrounded by dry raw meat.

Still, my hunting aptitude wasn’t so great, and I had to lightning down my prey more often than not. If I had better control of my powers, I could just stun them and not fry them, but I wasn’t even sure how I’d manage. The bulbs seemed deadly no matter how large or small I made them, just with differently-sized blast radii and prep times.

I sighed again and nursed my aching lower back, dropping to all fours to give my spine a rest.

I had only crept a few feet like that before I saw the underbrush move in front of me. Something big, larger than a boar. A deer maybe? A bear?

If it was a bear, I’d have to show AEGIS. No idea what was up with her fascination with the things.

I held my breath and shifted my weight onto my knees to free my hands, slowly drawing the bowstring. Blinking seemed like a luxury as the bushes continued shifting. I heard a thump of the animal colliding with something metal and solid, it sounded large.

Still, I wasn’t afraid. I was an Exhuman. The most I had to lose here was a decently-cooked meal. I let the arrow fly and heard it impact with a muffled thump.

The animal, whatever it was, didn’t seem to feel the impact, but I saw one shining eye flash through the leaves and take in the arrow for a moment, and then peer right at me for an instant before bolting. I swore and jumped into a chase.

Whatever it was, it was fast. It bounded through the trees easily, keeping far enough in front of me that I could only see glimpses of it and hear it whining as it ran and the heavy thuds of its footfalls.

Knowing the area from my past months in these woods, I cut left. There was rocky terrain ahead which would slow it down. By going around, I could head it off and force it into the open where hopefully I’d get another shot with my bow before I had to turn to lightning. I heard it still pounding at the ground as it ran, hearing the loose rocks sliding under its feet.

Once I’d drawn parallel, I cut back in so I’d appear in front of and to the left of the beast. I drew back my bow and had only a couple of seconds before it burst through the trees and swerved to evade me.

It was…a robot. A huge one, quadruped like DOG, but much, much bigger and bulkier, and with a different design, and a camera mounted on a long flexible neck like a scorpion’s tail. My first thought was this must be another secret project of AEGIS’, but…why would it run? And more, AEGIS hadn’t been running the mass-fab constantly like she had when making DOG…much less enough to make something even larger. This was definitely not one of hers.

And then I realized. Black Shark, information broker with a lot of resources and trying to hunt me down. She would have the means and the motive to send robots into the exclusion zones to find me…and once she did, I’d never be able to sleep with both eyes closed again. I had to stop the robot.

Thankfully, as any animal would do, it careened away from me to its right and broke into the open. While it was still in range, I blasted it with as much lightning as I could muster, slicing away at it with two swords and just generally exploding the area with electricity. I must have fried some systems because it stumbled, but wasn’t down. It loped away, adjusting quickly to its reduced mobility.

Then came the barrage of bulbs at it. Tons of small ones, as fast as I could throw them. The electrocution, surprisingly, seemed to do little. As I’d expect from an info broker, everything in the unit was probably electrically shielded in preparation for my powers, but still, lightning was searing hot, and I was punching holes in the thing left and right, making it bleed molten metal as pivots and servos welded into place and it slowly became more and more immobile and unresponsive, before finally collapsing into a twisting mechanical mass.

The question was, was it too late? It had looked right at me in the brush, presumably well enough to ID me. If it was satellite-capable, it’d be hooked on the ‘net and my face and location were already hers. If not…I guess I had better shut it down for good and make sure none of the data was retrievable. I advanced on the helpless machine, lightning blades at the ready.

Four swords held in place right through its core caused the body of the unit to melt within a dozen seconds, bubbling and rupturing with a dangerous spray of molten metal. The camera-stinger kept its gaze fixed on me until the last possible moment, when the machine finally collapsed lifeless. Even then, to be safe, I spent another minute reducing the whole thing to a simmering, smoking mess.

I gave myself a moment to breathe in relief before analyzing my situation. There were two possibilities here: Either my face and location were already on the ‘net or they weren’t. Ignoring the former situation over which I had no control, that meant this robot was based somewhere for information and instruction upload and retrieval.

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Which led me to…the huge tracks the machine left everywhere. Even someone like me whose entire experience in tracking something was a brief primer given by Wynn could follow these tracks. Quickly, I followed the thrown grass ruts back to the forest where we’d emerged, and then the craterous footprints back to where I’d first encountered the thing.

Tracking became quite a bit harder after that as it hadn’t been running full-tilt before encountering me, and though it was heavy, it seemed it was very deliberate in placing its feet on rocks or leaves where it could avoid mud and dirt. Probably a measure to save on having to clean the thing, I thought, since any real tracker would have no problem following the trail. How indulgent.

The trail seemed to wind at random, but before long I realized I was going in circles. Smaller and smaller circles, like the thing had started somewhere and gone in a widening spiral from there. It took more than an hour to finish the first circle, but only 45 minutes to close the second. What was it doing, I wondered? Was this its optimal search pattern to make sure it didn’t miss anything?

I skipped ahead and went straight to the center, creeping slowly, expecting to find a command center or truck or even just another bigger robot there. Instead, there was nothing, just a small clearing. Here there were two sets of tracks, one, I confirmed led to the spiral I’d just skipped, and the other led north, crossing the spiral once a lap, but totally missed by my amatuer eyes. I followed that trail, feeling I was really getting somewhere now, and keeping slow and quiet.

It was another uninterrupted hour and a half of prowling, and my legs and back were killing me when I finally peeked around another tree and immediately fell back, my heart racing in my chest.

A concrete building, about the same age and construction as The Bunker, lost deep in the woods to the west of the facility crater. If I had to guess, I’d say it was just a little closer to the epicenter crater than The Bunker, but due west instead of due south. Outside the building was a metal fence, in better condition than most around here, and topped with barbed wire, and within that gate were two more of the behemoth quadruped robots.

This was it, I thought. The actual base of operations. The robots were peering around intently, apparently on guard duty, and also apparently unaware of my presence. I had to be smart, they could have all kinds of crazy optics, and if I moved out from behind this tree, they’d see me for certain.

I had to think carefully. If I went in and they ran, there is no way I could stop both. On the other hand, if Black Shark was in that building, I could capture her and be scott free. But if she was in there, instead of running, they might fight back. I had no idea what weapons, if any, they were carrying, but given her foresight in electrically shielding them, it’s almost certain that whatever they carried would be effective through my shield.

She might even have data from Karu’s fights with me, I realized. Karu wouldn’t tell her, but she would file reports with the Hunters Association, and from there, who knew where the information went.

But that was unlikely. There was almost no chance Black Shark was in there herself. At best, there’d be a hired flunky operating the robots and reporting to Black Shark. No need for her to come personally to gather intel.

I didn’t see a winning move here except to withdraw for now. I could come back with the exosuit and armed with handfuls of explosives and simply wipe them out, or maybe AEGIS had some clever way of doing some hackery stuff. I was about to turn and go when I saw another robot emerging and heading up the path towards the base.

I couldn’t believe it. It was DOG. It didn’t just look like it, it was more than a passing resemblance as the larger robots had, it was DOG itself, whom I’d played with, who’d stayed in my room while I slept.

My mind spun. So AEGIS was working with Black Shark out here? Or was this all hers? How did she managed to make a minimum of three huge robots without me even knowing? And…if they were hers, again, why did it run, and why were they electrically shielded? Was she expecting me to accidentally torch them in the woods like I’d done?

Or was I overthinking this. Maybe electricity was just not as good against robots as media had led me to believe. It still didn’t explain anything else, or what was possibly in that other building.

Defeat and despair welled up in me and I felt the overwhelming urge to flee. I didn’t know what was going on, but I needed to confront AEGIS and find out. I turned and ran, leaving the two robots and DOG behind.

I veered east, into the blast radius, wanting to be in the open so that I could run more easily. The huge crater nearby was a fitting metaphor for what was going on in my mind at the moment, and my heart pounding from running covered up my heart pounding from fear or anger.

I only made it halfway home before I had to stop, panting and out of shape. I stopped against a ruined wall and caught my breath.

Forget the how…why? Living with me for months and probably knowing me better than either of the other two girls, why did she still feel like she had to hide things from me? Why was she so paranoid about people, and Exhumans, and me, constantly? Was it that she didn’t trust me to take care of myself, so she was building her own protectors? Was it just a step up in the DOG program to collect more resources and faster? Or was she establishing her independence so that when I invariably blew myself up or died fighting Karu or whatever, she wouldn’t be stuck, alone and helpless again?

I swallowed hard and tried to get a check on my breathing.

I remembered the first time I’d met her, digging her box out of the ground. She wailed for help and cried just to see another face. Since then, she’d been terrified of abandonment, but more and more, she’d been pushy and paranoid instead of the thankful scared girl I’d first met.

I wondered what changed. Was it me? I didn’t think I’d changed at all since I got here, but that probably wasn’t true. Karu and Saga were oddities to consider, but I never got the impression she thought much of them other than how they threatened me, and by extension, her.

I felt like the solution was staring me in the face, and I didn’t want to accept it because it made me…sad, honestly. Like Saga, I’d done exactly zero to liberate AEGIS from her prison, and she’d started on her own solution out. She’d built up a small army so that if or when I was of no use to her anymore, she had other resources to fall back on, and therefore needed me less and less, and consequently worried about me less and less.

The robots running away, the need to build a new base, the lightning-shielded robots presumably in case I disagreed with her new efforts…they all made sense.

The pieces fit…I just wasn’t sure how I felt about being squeezed out of her life like this. And to find out so…abruptly.

I didn’t want to say she owed me for saving her, but on some level that’s exactly how I felt. It made me seem like a terrible person, and I would never hold it over her…but for her to just cut me out like this? It was…was…

It was fine.

I sighed.

I had to realize that to her, I had been useless. I had made zero progress on getting her free, and hadn’t even asked her about her crystalline data dump in weeks. Looking at it like that, it was totally reasonable for her to want to move on, make progress, be free. Heck, she might look my age, but she might not have Saga’s immortality, meaning that she’d already spent a fifth of her life in that room. Who could blame her for not wanting to spend more?

I sighed again and got to my feet. They were much heavier now, but from my run or my thoughts, I couldn’t tell.

I wouldn’t tell AEGIS about running into her little setup. Her big robot which I scrapped was well out of her range and she wouldn’t be able to tell it was me who’d destroyed it unless she stumbled on the wreckage directly. I’d just keep things quiet for now and let her handle the situation as she chose.

Even if she chose to leave, that was something I would just have to accept.