AEGIS seemed to be counting in her head, because she moved after a couple seconds, and arrived at Saga with another sweeping kick at almost the instant Saga's body reappeared pristine. With a look of cold calm on her face, she just...put her bare foot through the back of Saga's head. It cracked and splattered like a melon, and for a few moments, blood just poured from the lifeless body. Counting again, AEGIS lifted her foot, and stomped again, bring it down on a fresh skull the instant it appeared.

I watched in silent horror at the world's most macabre melon-stomping played out again and again.

"AEGIS stop--" I got out, trying to push her back with gestures. The smell of blood and the sight of AEGIS' bare legs caked in gore, pulpy red-stained brains squishing between her toes, the memory of Lia's kiss was nothing. I doubled over and threw up on the floor where I stood.

"Sorry Athan. I need more explanation than 'stop'," AEGIS said, some pity showing through the calm rage on her face. I recognized it as the face she wore when she thought she had to kill me.

Unlike Karu, and definitely unlike Saga, when people needed to die, AEGIS didn't chat or hold back unless there was a reason for it. Like the murder machine she was designed to be, she acted when she had to and resolved things as efficiently and expediently as possible. It was only because of how conflicted she was in killing me that I got a story out of her before she tried to kill me...and that was only after two completely mute assassination attempts.

Saga died again, and the pool of blood seeped ever wider, AEGIS stomping in it like a child in a puddle. I closed my eyes and forced myself to block out the scene of two of my best friends mid-murder, but I couldn't. It was just...cruel. Brutal. The smell of death, of iron in blood sunk right into my sinuses and stung.

I whipped out a blade and held it as close as I could to my face. The familiar smell of ozone, air burning as sparks flew and electricity crackled. The smell brought me back. My blades, such a part of me now, we'd been through so much, and when I called on them, it was at times when I was acting, when I was in control of something. I needed that now.

"AEGIS, this evening, Lia kissed me, and I asked Saga to take that memory away. She just put it back. That's all. Nobody's fighting."

AEGIS looked down, lifted her foot, and then put it through Saga again with a wet crunch.

"Are you sure nobody's still fighting? I may have started something."

"She'll understand, I think. I'm sorry. Please stop."

"I'm trusting you here, Athan. If she takes this and…" she stopped and casually committed murder again "...and takes it out on you and Lia...well...I'd rather save you than avenge you."

"We'll be fine. Please stop."

AEGIS nodded and took a few steps back, sinking into a chair deliberately to sign the end of her hostilities. A few seconds later, Saga came back again and coughed painfully. I remembered talking to Saga months ago, she said getting stomped was her least-favorite way to die.

[Ow. Fuck.]

"Sorry, Saga," I said. "AEGIS didn't understand what you were doing."

[So I gathered.] Saga pulled herself out of the pool of her own blood and gore with a wet sucking noise and fell back onto the couch. [Well, the deposit for this room is fucked.]

"...uh…" said AEGIS in a small voice. "Sorry. I guess."

Saga gave a small smile. "What's a little murder between friends?" she asked.

"I wasn't aware we were," AEGIS said coldly.

"Eh, well, you and Athan didn't really hit it off until you tried to kill him too, right? Maybe it'll work for me too."

AEGIS glanced back and forth between the two of us hesitantly. Maybe she was lost. Or maybe one of us was soaked in enough blood to fill a fountain and the other was holding a blade of lightning to their nose like a false mustache. Both really valid reasons to have some concern. Finally, she sighed and leaned forward, fixing her yellow piercing stare at Saga.

"Saga, do you even understand the concept of friends?"

"'Course I do."

"So you were just joking, right?"

Saga didn't answer. There was a hint of earnest hope coming off of her somehow, despite everything which had just happened. For as close as we were, I didn't think I understood Saga at all sometimes.

"Okay, let me rephrase that. Saga...do you seriously, actually, non-jokingly...want to be friends with me?" AEGIS asked, serious, but slightly incredulous.

Saga smiled a sad, small smile which faded quickly. In a moment, an impetuous, unassailable smirk appeared instead. "Nah. You know me, alone is the only way I get things done. Can't push an XPCA off a building with bitches like you around nagging me all the time, can I?" She laughed. "Can't believe you'd think that for a second. And I thought you were supposed to be a smart AI."

"Yeah. Guess not. Stupid of me," AEGIS said tenting her fingers thoughtfully.

"Saga, if you want to make friends, just say so," I said.

"I did say so. I said I didn't. What, are you deaf and stupid?"

"Saga, I have an idea,"

"This sounds like a terrible fucking idea."

"You could at least listen to it first."

"No, I know what it is. Boo hoo, Saga's so sad, she's so lonely and misguided, maybe the magical power of friendship will turn her into a good Exhuman and we can all hold hands and sing and everything will be perfect forever. Fuck that and fuck you for thinking it."

"Saga, you don't have to be hated and alone."

[Look, I had a moment of weakness back there, I admit,] she said, slipping back into mind-speak. [Yeah, it sucks feeling like you're trying to be good and nobody gives a shit. Not a lot of encouragement to keep trying. But you know what? Fuck all you bitches, I didn't do it for you to begin with. I did it because I've got something I'm working on that's bigger than all of you, bigger than me. So go ahead and rub my own words in my face. Have fun. Because I don't fucking care.]

I frowned at her. "Saga, I think part of the problem is, nobody has ever seen you care about something before. Karu sees you learning to tone down your powers and sees you becoming more of a devious mastermind. Lia sees you heading off again and sees you running away from her personally again. AEGIS just sees...nothing, basically, but knows you're a danger, and wants to jump in before you hurt anyone she cares about again."

"It's true," AEGIS said, responding to my half of the conversation at least. "Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to live with someone who might be your enemy, but you can't see or hear anything that they do directly? My best plan...and this was the plan, like a legit formulated strategy, was to wait until people were screaming, and then kill Saga."

[(That's a terrible plan.)]

"What did she say?" AEGIS asked.

"She said that was a terrible plan."

"Fuck yes it was. But that's like, literally the best I had."

[And you?] Saga asked me directly. [You see me doing this thing and what do you see?]

"For the most part...I was hopeful, I guess. Sad, that you apparently couldn't trust me, or yourself to stay in touch, but I could understand that. I didn't know what to think, but I've always wanted you to have something in this world bigger than just...existing next to it."

[Yeah. So you were the only one on my side, and then I blew that. To reiterate,] she jabbed a finger at Lia's sleeping form [she asked me to.]

"Saga, if she asked you to kill her and you did, I'd be pissed at you. That's not what this is about. She can make whatever stupid demands she wants and I'll be mad at her for that, but I'm mad at you for doing them."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

[You're still an arrogant asshole who knows best all the time, eh?]

"I did know best, this time."

[Is that really so? Were you inside her head? Did you relive how torn up she is inside about the things she's done? How about how she can't get through the day sometimes with her own thoughts, whenever she's reminded of how she let you down, or made me leave, or fucked with your head. She has to drink her memories away, because she cares too much and the pain of the guilt eats away at her more than she can stand. Did you know that?]

"...I...no. That's bullshit."

[Is it? Let's call on some eyewitness testimony.] "Hey, AEGIS, how bad is Lia's drinking."

"Bad."

"Would you call her...say...completely dependent on alcohol as a coping mechanism for her guilt?"

"Yep. Why are we talking about this?"

"Just trying to prove a smug asshole wrong before he kills anyone else on misguided principles."

"You're not so perfect yourself, princess. Don't think you can just crap all over Athan and Lia--"

"AEGIS, thank you, but that's okay," I cut in. "Is it true? Is Lia really...bad?"

"Yeah. She's pretty bad. I thought you had her memories of her and Saga falling out."

"I do, but I thought she just got drunk and made some bad decisions. Kind of like now at this party. Why don't you guys just cut her off?"

"You think we haven't tried? She's a sixteen year-old billionaire, who's arguably cleverer than everyone else in the house. We'd clean up, and then there would be courier vans delivering booze an hour later. She'd go in the backyard and the neighbor had buried bottles under the fence. Hell, I was never able to prove it, but I had suspicions that she'd had someone go in the sewers and tap into our water so she could just pour it out of the sink."

"What the fuck. Really?"

"And on top of that, nobody...really wanted to stop her. When she was sober, and forcing herself to think about all those things that set her off...we all...uh…"

"What?"

"Well. She was just so...off. Not like your normal level of depression. You'd pop in and say hi and she'd put on a big smile and act all saccharine, but the second you're out the door, keep watching on cam-drones and she's...doing tensile strength research on household rope materials. Doing math on sleeping pills active ingredients. Looking up what parts of the brain control what body functions."

AEGIS frowned. "I mean, usually she was okay, and was as happy as she pretended she always was, but some days, she'd just...I don't know. She'd spend the whole day beating herself up inside, and none of us could distract her from it."

I looked over at her sleeping so peacefully on the couch, above the blood and gore. I remembered when we walked in the party, and she had flat-out panicked about seeing Saga again, and returned only a little later, completely drunk out of her mind. Her kissing me seemed a lot less disturbing and a lot more disturbing now in context.

[So, not to gloat, but...you could see why I had to cave to giving her a little closure on that. She wouldn't accept anything but a full reconciliation, and was going to do anything she had to in order to make that happen.]

"I...get it."

[Yeah.]

"No, your statement before. How I worry too much about what you're putting in our heads. You didn't even need to touch her for her brain to be jacked up, did you?"

[No. Lia's had pretty bad depression her whole life. That's why she always tries so hard. She knows if she didn't, she'd succumb to it.]

"She always seemed so happy."

[Well. You were a pretty bright spot in her life. I think she probably had a pretty good shot at normalcy, though she was inwardly terrified about you leaving for college. But any chance of that being a normal and well-managed depression kind of…]

"Died a horrible death with the end of human Ashton."

[I'm sure the family situation and Brick didn't help, but I think it was your absence more than anything.] Saga frowned. [Sorry...I don't know why we're still discussing this. Not very considerate of her privacy, which I know, is kind of a laugh coming from me.]

I thought back to when she first showed up in Canada. How happy and bubbly she'd been, and as she met my new friends, and her perceived prominence in my life diminished, how she'd seemed to want to just fade away. How was I so blind and stupid?

"Why didn't she tell me?" I said quietly.

[Probably because she's smart enough to realize that's the worst thing she could have done, but stupid enough to believe it.]

"What?"

Saga looked over at my sleeping sister with me. [Remember when you were livid about me putting a compel in that frizzy head that one time?]

"Tonight? Yes."

[Heh. Good times. And then you said it's terrifying anytime someone isn't themselves. Like, you never know if when she does something, if it's her, or if it's the compel inside her forcing her actions against her will and self-interests.]

"Yeah. And that is still super scary."

[And it would make you look at everything she did with a hyper-critical lens. Is this really Lia? Is it the compel at work? Are there ways to tell? Et cetera.]

"Yeah, probably. Or...maybe even try to crack it like Lia did to me."

[Yeah. Now replace 'compel' with 'depression' and all that shit you do to her, she doesn't want you doing, because people worrying about her just makes her feel guiltier and even more depressed--see also, why she tries to fake being happy so hard. And you still wonder why she wouldn't tell you?]

I couldn't speak. I felt like every single interaction I'd ever had with Lia, for the past sixteen years was being re-evaluated, even though I knew the whole point of what Saga was telling me was that that kind of re-evaluation was exactly what Lia didn't want.

"AEGIS," Saga asked.

"What?"

"Should I blast out Athan right now?"

"No. But why are you asking?"

"Well, I just kind of let slip that Lia's always been fighting depression. She never told him, and I think...I might have messed up. He's not going to treat her the same way again, and she's going to be really sad about it."

"No, I will," I said. "I absolutely will. This was really important for me to learn."

"Was it though?" Saga asked.

"Yeah, absolutely."

"And why is that?"

"So...I can help her. So I can get her the help she needs. So she can stop feeling so bad all the time and not need to drink herself stupid and rely on you stitching compels into her brain to make it through the day."

"So that you can treat her differently than usual, is what you're actually saying," Saga sighed.

"I see the problem," AEGIS said.

I had a surreal moment where the two girls looked at me a little worried. Saga, still dripping blood onto the couch, AEGIS with her legs caked in, and a huge pool and splatter everywhere, while Lia and Tem just slept through it all, oblivious but for the wriggling of their noses at the smell of iron in the air.

How did I ever become a person who existed in scenes like this? How many missteps had been in my life, and when? I thought I'd generally done okay, but this wasn't the destination of an okay set of decisions.

"He'd find out sooner or later," AEGIS said. "At least this way, he at least knows to try."

"I guess," Saga agreed. "If you can believe that Athan is capable of ever figuring out something on his own."

"I'll just have to keep an eye on him, I guess," AEGIS sighed.

"You make it sound like such an ordeal, but you were going to anyway."

"True, I guess."

"Athan. Hey. Stop staring off." Saga snapped her fingers in my direction. "Listen, I just died a lot and endured a ton of shit from you personally because of Lia tonight, because despite everything, I want her to do well with the fucked-up life she's got."

"Yeah," I got out, still distracted. Everyone wanted what was best for Lia, it seemed. Karu, AEGIS, me of course, but even Saga all saw her as a friend. In the same way Saga got on everyone's shit list, Lia won hearts.

"So if you fuck this up for her and start being an asshole just because you learned something while she was napping, I will be very irate. I'd like to repeat, because you're dense, but also because I like quoting myself: I died for this. To make her guilt a little less bad. Don't. Fuck. It. Up."

"I'll...try. You guys know I'll do anything I can for her."

"We do," AEGIS said, and walked over to give my hand a squeeze. "But treating her like nothing's changed means doing nothing for her. Can you do that, too?"

"I mean...can't...we get her some help or something?"

"You can't force someone to get better, Athan. You can lock them in an asylum, you can force-feed them meds, you can have your friendly local Code-X do some stuff to their head, but that's just preventing self-harm or changing her. All we can do until she wants help is to be her friends."

"I can try," I said.

Saga smiled briefly and then clapped, in a very distracting way which made me realize she'd infused the clap with some of her mental trickery like she did before. As to why became apparent when Lia and Tem both began to stir.

"Ah, damn my head," Lia said, squinting. "What time is it? Thanks, AEGIS," she took the cup of water AEGIS offered.

"Watch your step," AEGIS said. Lia peered off the couch and saw her shocked reflection in the drying puddle.

"What the...the...meerkats is this? Oh my God, it stinks. Oh my GOD! SAGA! You are...just drenched...oh God, oh God, oh God…"

[We played a little Russian roulette while you slept. I won! Several times. Or lost? I'm not sure how that game actually works.]

"Do we have any towels? Or...a...mop? Or a firehose?"

"Yeah, those floorboards are fucked," AEGIS said. "Sorry, they're um, gonna charge you for it."

"I mean...the money is whatever, but...holy donkeys that's a lot of blood. Are you sure you're okay Saga? It is all Saga's?"

[Yep. Good old immortality. And as you can see, everyone else is fine.]

"It's...all over AEGIS' legs..."

"Yeah, she tried to clean up while I was still making a mess," said Saga, switching to voice to cut off AEGIS' reply. "Silly AI."

"Yeah...silly AI…" AEGIS echoed. She looked at me funnily and squeezed my hand. "Sorry...save my dress...I like...it…"

I didn't really have time to comprehend AEGIS' words before she was tilting forward, her knees crumbling under her as her face went blank and it was all I could do to try to catch her before she fell into the pool of gore.