I checked in on AEGIS and Lia the second we got back from that farce and found them both well enough but not in great spirits. I couldn't really expect otherwise. AEGIS seemed worried, about herself and about Lia, and Lia seemed happy and smiling, but was clinging to AEGIS a little more than usual, implying she was scared too. The moment I got there, Lia glomped onto me instead.

"Sorry for being such a downer during the party," she said. "Thought it was a killer party, too."

"It went pretty well, until I brought Saga in, I think," I apologized right back. "Even so, I think most people had a good time. Did you see Karu and Tower going at it? I'd swear they were old army buddies."

"A real shame Taglock couldn't make it."

"You invited him?"

"Of course. Invited your boss too, but I didn't expect her to come. I should have told Taglock it was part of my retainer on him. I think he needs to loosen up more."

"I think he's loose enough already. Lia, I don't think you should be spending so much time with him, he's pretty shifty…"

"Oh please. I'm his boss. If he's shifty, that's just better for me."

"Yeah, that's exactly the kind of overconfidence that he's going to take advantage of. You have a ton of money and information worth even more than that, and he's obviously only in it for the money. And if he didn't before, as of last op, now he knows both sides of your identity, and that you're a sixteen-year-old girl."

I let the words trail off what I hoped was ominously, but she just stared at me with bored eyes.

"Lia, why is your face asking me if I'm done talking yet?"

"Oh good, you're not completely stupid then, you can still pick up on some things."

"Har. But--"

"Athan, you seriously think I haven't thought of all this yet? No. Floundering. Duh. How stupid do you think I am?"

"I don't think you're stupid! I just...it looks like…"

"What?"

She put her hands on her hips and glared at me. Lia didn't have many buttons to push, but insulting her intelligence was right up there. Somehow my brotherly concern had been misconstrued as her being stupid.

"You just seem a little...taken with him."

She laughed, but not in a happy way. "Excuse me?"

"He's like, three times your age! He's a creepy, sneaky old assassin who only likes money. You should stay away from him."

"Seriously? Seriously!?"

"Yes. Seriously."

Even without pressing that button, I still seemed to have pushed her right between disbelief and anger. She looked very much like she wanted to hit me but couldn't quite believe it.

"Athan. Stupid big brother. Are you seriously giving me relationship advice right now?"

"I mean...not really."

"Oh, I must have misunderstood," she said, but while the words were the same as I'd just heard from Tem, instead of shrinking and apologizing, Lia crossed her arms and somehow seemed to grow. "Please explain to me what, exactly, you're saying then?"

"It's uh...it's...not-relationship advice. Like, you shouldn't have one with him."

"Yeah, okay, ass. As in the donkey. Look here, dude--" she stepped towards me and jabbed a finger painfully into my sternum. "Why don't you fix your own relationship stuff before opening your mouth ever again? You've got my girl AEGIS hanging on a rope, you've got Karu begging for you to take her back, and you've got Saga so badly mangled she can't even admit to herself that she still wants you, you've got Tem clinging to your ankles...hi, Tem, BTW."

"Hi Lia!"

"...and now you've got Moon shooting you funny glances over her book all yesterday, don't think I didn't notice that."

"She was?"

"Oh. My. God. Focus, Athan."

"Sorry."

"And in the middle of that whole vortex of I-have-no-idea, where I have been nothing but supportive and loving and understanding as, I think you'll find, no sister in the world but me would be, you're going to tell me what I should be doing?"

The finger ground harder against my breastbone painfully, and I took a step back, but she just followed.

"Um, I guess when you put it that way--"

"And you can bet your socks I do put it that way."

"Um. He's just...old."

"Well thank you for clearing that up for me. I certainly had never noticed. It's a good thing you've got two functioning eyes, bro, because obviously I have none."

She opened her mouth to continue, but AEGIS said something from the other room. Lia narrowed her eyes at me, gave me one final stab in the chest, and then turned on her heel and stomped over to throw open the door to the other room.

I followed, of course. Just...gave Lia a few seconds to get there before me. Damn she was scary.

"Hey Athan. Sounded like you guys were having fun out there, but I found more corrupted code. Like, another virus. This one was rewriting back changes I had already cleaned up, but I was able to track the changes it was making and also pick up a couple other things it touched and I didn't notice. For starters, they got my operating parameters. Apparently for the last couple days, I've been slowly giving less value to civilian lives, and more to...get this...XPCA."

"What?" Lia asked, and pulled one of the holos towards her, her eyes darting back and forth over the indecipherable walls of code. "Uh, hang on, I can barely read this."

"You don't have to, I checked it three times. Either someone's trying to turn me against you guys by getting this code found...or we found a smoking gun of who's trying to hack me."

"That's impossible," I said, feeling the same mixture of anger and disbelief I'd seen just a minute ago. "They wouldn't do that. They couldn't do that."

"Are you seriously that stupid?" Lia snapped at me. "Wouldn't? This is an organization which was created for and dedicated to systematic genocide, and chose to do it with the wonton sacrifice of human lives and a mess of shadow ops. And couldn't? Hacking works both ways, dude. AEGIS has insider knowledge on how to get into and mess with XPCA systems because she was built to know and manage them, but ultimately, they also built her."

"It's true," AEGIS said frowning. "If I hadn't crashed again, I'm not sure I would have even found this second virus. It was buried way in me where I didn't think a hacker could ever get to. Whether it's the XPCA or otherwise, they obviously know my systems pretty freaking well."

"Are there more?" I asked.

AEGIS shook her head. "No. I mean. Maybe. I don't know. I'm kind of shaken up about all of this, honestly. I've gone over everything now, and it all looks fine, but...I'm like...what if I only think it looks fine, because they already got rid of the parts of me that would have thought it wasn't…?"

She said it so plainly, so calmly, I couldn't understand. When I thought about Saga screwing with people's minds, hacking them, essentially, it unsettled me on a primal level. People shouldn't be overwritten. People should be themselves. It should never be possible to see someone and then a day later, they're someone completely else.

I felt like...after my exile, people were all I had. These two, the handful of others at the party, Wynn and Tate out there somewhere, even Cosette and Taglock, I supposed. I didn't have a home or possessions or money, these people were everything in this world to me, and as dark and shitty as this world was, they were the spots of light which kept me going. The thought that they could ever just...be changed…

A shiver went down my spine.

"Please, please, please, make absolutely sure as best you can," I urged. AEGIS nodded. "If you learn anything else, call my personal mobile. Maybe better to keep things off my holo for now." I stood up.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

"Where are you going?" AEGIS asked.

"Back to HQ. I'm going to ask Cosette about this, and if she can't give me any answers, I'll go to Blackett himself."

"And what happens when, not if, he doesn't tell you anything?" Lia asked.

"Then...I do what Exhumans do best, I guess." I stepped out of the room, and found myself stopped by two different girls holding two of my arms.

"Easy on restraining me," I reminded. Neither of them let up.

"Look, dummy, just because I'm mad at you doesn't mean you have to go off and do something amazingly stupid," Lia said.

"And just because you learn something doesn't mean you have to run off and get yourself blown up," AEGIS agreed.

"Meanwhile, they're doing God-knows-what to your head? Fuck no, AEGIS. If they're behind it, I'll find out, and I'll shut them down. I'll blow up an EMP so big, the whole building and every computer in it fries. It'd be pretty hard for them to keep hacking you after that."

"Athan." AEGIS positioned herself in front of me so I could see her golden eyes blazing. "Sometimes I love you for being amazingly smart, and sometimes I love you for being amazingly stupid, and I won't lie, this is one of those second cases. The fact that you're willing to run over there and declare war on the XPCA for me is fucking hot as hell, but that doesn't mean it also isn't stupid as hell. This is cyber warfare, not guns and swords. We need to be quiet with what we know, and beat them at their own game."

"Or! We beat them at every game. I go in there, and make them stop!"

"That's a suicide mission, dumbass."

"It doesn't matter. I'll make it somehow."

Tem now also chose to materialize, because there weren't enough girls giving me shit right now. She frowned at me. "No dying."

"Then we'll just have Tem erase the whole building."

"Damn it, bro," Lia said, pulling at my arm. "Putting aside the thousands of semi-innocent XPCA lives in there, even if you do succeed, you'll still lose. The US needs the XPCA, and so does the world. That was Blackett's whole point, and it's still valid."

"Yeah, well, that was before they were doing this to AEGIS. This is inexcusable. They can't just expect me to sit here while they are actively fucking with her head." I took a step forward, but AEGIS didn't budge.

"They can expect whatever they want, but we're not letting you do this, Athan," she said. "I will call Karu down here and we will blockade the shit out of you."

"I will use these," Lia said, letting me go long enough only to come back with a handful of shock rocks and a pair of restraints.

"You realize putting those on me will be a lot more likely to kill you than it will be to hold me," I said. I felt like we were getting perilously close to my shield deciding these two were restraining me already, and it was making me nervous as hell, on top of being pissed.

For some reason, Lia just grinned at me like she had come up with a master plan. No. Oh no.

"Okay, if you try to continue fighting us on this, I will use these restraints on you," she said. "And if they kill me, then...I guess that's it for me, then."

"Lia, fuck you."

"No, fuck you, Athan," she shouted, and both of us started at hearing her swear. "If you're so damn committed to killing yourself, then I'm going first. So that's how it's going to be."

"That's completely stupid, Lia. I'm not trying to kill myself, I'm trying to save AEGIS."

"Lia," AEGIS said slowly. "I appreciate this but...really, no. On the off-chance you are not bluffing--"

"And I'm not."

"--then I would have to stop you, too. Neither of you idiot Ashtons are killing themselves over me. If it's going to come to that, I'd rather just wipe my memories of the last month and roll back to my last safe backup."

"It's not about your memories or saving them, AEGIS, it's about them doing this at all. If you roll back, there's nothing stopping them from just doing it to you again. Shutting them down permanently is the only way to be sure."

"Fuck, Athan, you're such a binary idiot. There's a million ways we can stop them. We can make them think they succeeded, we can hack them back and erase everything they have on me, we can take control of their 'net access and scrutinize the shit out of anything which comes out of there...hell, we can do another fucking PR campaign if we have to. Just because your world experience is tackling people and waving around swords doesn't mean other methods don't exist."

"Okay," I said.

I took a deep breath, and then bolted left around the two of them. AEGIS went for it, but Lia remained rooted in front of me, and when I shifted right, she tackled me immediately. "God...damnit, Lia!" I shouted. "Let me save AEGIS!"

"Open your stupid ears, stupid big brother!" she screamed back as the two of us rolled on the floor, her arms stubbornly around my chest, her legs locked around mine.

"I could just break his legs," AEGIS said.

"The...fuck is wrong...with you!" I panted, prying Lia's fingers one-by-one off of my back. She bit me in the shoulder. "Fuck! Goddamn it, Lia!"

"I...don't...know…" Tem said, still standing there. "Chariot...do...I help you? They are hurting you...but they are trying to...protect you..."

I needed help badly, doubly badly if AEGIS engaged me physically, but Tem's 'help' would probably just kill all of us.

"Tem! Make all of us invisible!" I shouted.

This seemed to placate her desire to help without blowing anyone up, and in an instant, there were just clouds of dust and grunts and flying sweat instead of the two of us on the floor.

"Okay, what the hell?" AEGIS said. I heard her move towards us, shuffling blindly. I elbowed Lia hard and realized I caught her in the boob, and she tensed and withdrew slightly.

"Sorry, Lia. Damn it…"

"Ow! You damn...bastard. I hate you...so much...right now!" she panted out.

I kicked her off of me and into AEGIS and in the instant I was free, bolted for the door. It was harder moving while invisible than I thought, and I ran into the door instead of grabbing it, not being able to see where my hands were. I threw it open and waited.

Sure enough, I heard the sounds of the two girls scrambling up, and with about as much difficulty as I had, ran across the room and then out the door. When I was sure they were gone, I slammed the door shut, whipped out a sword, and welded the lock shut.

"Okay Tem, turn me visible now," I said, and I reappeared.

"They left," she said, sounding a little shocked.

"Yes, that was the plan. Come on, there's a fire escape."

It took a minute to get the window open and start climbing out, and when I did, I realized just how many ladders down I'd be climbing, but I didn't care. I remembered all the time I'd been spending with AEGIS recently, her smiles and the relish with which she'd planned and executed our dates, her worry over the virus, the look of mild shock and alarm as she realized something was wrong and she began collapsing to the ground in front of the restaurant.

The date. The party. Times taken from the two of us already by this hacker. Her memories. Times endangered to be stolen. Her compassion, her intelligence, her love, her life and future. Things they threatened even now. I could never let that happen to her, no matter what.

The ladders were covered in snow and burned my hands as I went down. My chest began to feel very tight and my thoughts flashed painfully through my head. I was breathing even harder now as the frost bit at my exposed hands. The feeling of my flesh being frozen, of tearing away at the ice on my hands, only to realize the ice was my hands.

I slid uncontrollably on the ice as it trembled under me, blades of icicle stalagmites erupting from the ground all around me. I screamed and slashed at them with my swords. In the distance, I heard screaming, so familiar but nothing I'd heard before. Something fell on me heavily and I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move, I needed to move, or I would die. I couldn't die, not like this, not in this frozen tomb with my fingers frozen and falling off.

There was warmth on my face and I blinked. My vision was red. Something heavy was on top of me, hot and wet. My swords were still out, and I was on the fire escape still. It took me a second to realize why I was here, and then another second to realize what was on me, and then another second to completely panic.

Tem was laying on top of me, holding in her guts where she'd been slashed across the chest by something which had burned her badly. Her breathing was ragged and pained, and even as she laid on top of me, body cut open, she was looking at me with eyes filled with confusion.

"Tem!" I shouted, and moved out from under her as carefully as I could.

"I...I…" tears filled her eyes. "I'm s-s-s-sorry! I was wrong! P-please...forgive me!" she said back.

"You didn't do anything! Fuck. Tem. Fuck! I'm so...sorry...fucking fuck…"

I put my swords away, they'd done enough damage, and carefully picked her up. She made a pitiful, pained whimper, and looked like she was losing consciousness. I didn't know what to do. Call someone? 911? I had to get her out of here though.

As though in answer to my thoughts, the window just below me exploded, and AEGIS stepped out, glowing arms steaming in the cold.

"Athan, you fucker, you--" she stopped as she caught sight of us. "Oh my god, Tem. What happened? No...tell me later. Athan, give her to me, call 911, now."

She cradled Tem gently and brought her inside and placed her on the bed, and I followed. I called, and the line rang once, seeming to take forever before someone would pick up. I was barraged with a handful of questions which all seemed like a waste of time, and just wanted to scream at the operator that someone was dying, and fucking send an ambulance NOW.

AEGIS shredded a sheet with impossible precision into long, even bandages, working quickly but methodically, and seeing her in action, apparently so in-control, it calmed me a little. I realized that screaming at the operator wouldn't help anyone. I had to be like her and keep my cool. So I answered her questions as quickly as I could while AEGIS bound Tem securely, closing the gash I'd torn in her by wrapping the girl in the makeshift bandages. She grabbed the comforter and loosely draped it over Tem, then applied pressure to the wound and spoke to her in a low, calm voice I couldn't hear over my call.

Eventually I hung up. They were coming, and we just had to wait.

"How is she?" I asked.

"Bad. You cut through a lot of important stuff down there. Nicked the lower intestines and bowels, so we've got a great chance of sepsis on top of all the blood and damage. What the fuck did you do, Athan?"

"I...don't know. I just...I don't...I thought I was back fighting the Exhuman here in DC again. I...it doesn't make any sense, but I swear I was there. I slashed at him, and I heard Tem scream and she fell on me…"

AEGIS frowned and looked at me with pity in her yellow eyes. "That's it? I mean...that's plenty, but...she keeps saying she's sorry. She didn't do anything?"

I shook my head. I was sorry. I should be apologizing over and over, not her.

In an incredibly short amount of time, we heard sirens approach, and I realized I needed to call Cosette and beg access to a regenerator. She hardly asked any questions and let me know the hospital would be informed. Then she asked if I was okay.

"No," I said, shaking my head.

"I would hope not," she replied, and that was all we had to say. Another minute later, and I flagged down two paramedics with a gurney in the hall, Lia showed up eventually, and the three of us couldn't do anything but watch as they carefully loaded Tem onto the metal cart.

"You fucked up, Athan," AEGIS said, turning away from the scene. When I didn't look at her, she grabbed my chin and pulled me to face her. "You fucked up."

"Yeah, I know."

"But everybody fucks up. Don't beat yourself up too much, just try not to let it happen again. If Cosette approved the regenerator, she'll be fine, okay?"

"Yeah."

That's what I said, but wasn't what I was thinking.

Inside, I was wondering just how many times I could hospitalize Tem and still be able to stand living with myself.