It wasn't that I didn't trust Athan. I knew he was a good guy who did what he thought was right no matter what, and his definition of right wasn't bad.

It was more that I also trusted him to get himself into trouble, and looking after him was kind of my self-appointed job, just like he'd appointed himself my caretaker while I dealt with this virus thing.

Similarly, Karu was a decent enough person, who'd grown on me the more I saw her as a real person and less of a crazy killing machine...which I think, ironically, is how she saw me as well...only a literal killing machine. But the fact was, she was just as good as Athan at getting into trouble, just more mature and with more resources to get herself out of it.

And then, possibly most worrying of all was what kind of trouble they'd get into together. I knew it was my idea to send the two of them off together, because in my head, they both seemed to be hurting and in need.

...But still, I'd worked hard to position myself ever-closer to Athan, and as the hours drew on, I found it harder and harder to push the question of what the two of them might be up to at this moment out of my head.

So when my intel indicated that reports were being filed from the administrator of New Eden that one Athan Ashton, handle: Chariot was being written up for a laundry-list of offenses so comprehensive it was as though he was trying to make waves, I broke down just a little and looked into what was going on out there.

An EMP bomb had gone off, knocking out about a quarter of New Eden's security and power grids. The culprits, ostensibly members of the rumored New Eden resistance had used the confusion of the blast to kill a dozen of the New Eden guards. Somehow, Athan had gotten himself wrapped up in this, and from the conflicting reports, was fighting the resistance, the guards, was responsible for the EMP blast himself, and most confusing of all, was apparently involved in an Exhuman gladiatorial ring?

Only half of that made any sense, and none of it in conjunction...that was the nature of rumors and preliminary reports, but I was having trouble finding any data myself to corroborate which claims were true or not. Surveillance in the area had been blown out by the EMP, and neither Athan nor Karu seemed to have working comms. When I called the base itself, I found myself repeating explanations of who I was and who I wanted to speak with to a series of ever-higher level officials until I spoke with the base administrator herself for some reason. She heard me out long enough to hear Athan's name, and then told me never to contact her again and hung up on me.

I thought, maybe any of those things independently, I could deal with. Athan, Karu, the bombing, getting written up, the resistance, gladiator fights, the administrator, sure. Life is strange, things happen, especially to an Exhuman. I was supposed to be trying to trust and believe in Athan more, after all.

But what scared me, what was responsible for me standing awkwardly outside the gates of New Eden with Lia hovering around behind me (refusing to let me go by myself), what had made me contact the rest of the P-Force and let them know that something really dangerous might be afoot was the anonymous 'net message sent to me.

Come or he will die.

That's all it said. Five words. I might not have given them a thought had everything else not been so messed up already, but given the situation, the more I looked at those words, the more they eroded my faith in Athan. In Karu. In myself.

For starters, they were obviously about him, whoever sent them knew we were separated, knew he was somewhere potentially dangerous, and knew I'd be worried about him enough to pay the message any mind.

More alarmingly, the message contained no digital fingerprints of any kind. Even with my finger on the pulse of half the comms relays in the 'net, I found no trace of the message's passage. There was no metadata or anything to be found, and certainly no sender. It was as though the message just appeared on my mobile by magic.

So I was standing outside the gates of New Eden, holding my mobile and staring at those five words, feeling stupid for worrying and coming out here and dragging Lia along, not wanting Athan to know how little I apparently believed in him, but not sure why the hell else I had possibly come out here, and generally feeling just all kinds of moronic.

When I was jolted back to the present by the mobile buzzing in my hand. A number I didn't recognize.

"Hello?" I answered on reflex.

"AEGIS, it's me, how you doing?"

"Athan!" I felt relief surge through me. "Thank God, are you okay?"

"I asked you first," he said. I could hear his smile and felt my own on my face.

"I'm fine. Crashed, uh, yesterday after you left. Lia says hi. What's up?"

"I'm okay too...yeah I know, calm down."

"What?" I said. Had he somehow been able to tell I was stressing out enough to fly halfway across the country just from our brief exchange?

"Sorry. I'm borrowing someone else's mobile and they're yelling at me. Look, I'm calling because I have a fried mobile device and I'd like you to pull any data off it you can. It belonged to Steffie, might have a clue where she went and why."

I chewed my lip. Yeah, it was crazy to jump to the conclusion he'd suddenly turned super insightful. I reminded myself this was Athan we were talking about here. "I'd have to have access to the device, and assuming it was fried by an EMP--"

"You heard about that? I mean, I guess of course you have."

"Yeah. Well. Given that, I don't think you could just hook it up and have me access it remote...I'd have to physically have it on me."

"Uh. I guess I could...have it sent to you," he said. "I'd like it ASAP, but if we have to stay another day or two here...I don't know if that works for Karu, she's in the shower."

For some reason, the thought of Karu showering there, of him volunteering to spend another couple days in that was what pushed me over the ledge into making up my mind about intervening.

"Actually, that won't be necessary," I said, avoiding Lia's eyes. "I uh, am here. At New Eden." And then I added "I thought you might need me for something like this."

"Wow, really? You're incredible, AEGIS. We're in unit 115-D, when can you meet us?"

"I'll be there as soon as I get in the city. Might be a bit...there's a lockdown because of...some reason," I lied. I felt guilty about lying to Athan on top of not trusting him, and wasn't about to blame him for anything at the moment. "But it shouldn't be a problem to get the lockdown lifted. I've got Lia with me too, after all."

"Yeah, you mentioned that."

"Oh. Sorry."

"Okay well, we'll wait here. Come join us when you can."

"Cool, thanks. Sorry."

He hung up and eventually, I did too.

It did take a little bit of good ol' Black Shark/AEGIS duo to get the lockdown lifted, but we managed, and joined Athan and Karu at 115-D, hustling through the concrete structures both out of an urgent need to see Athan again, and to get away from the leering, unpleasant Exhumans who were eyeing the two of us in a way that made me feel like meat.

To my surprise, it was Karu who opened the door. She looked down at me with her burning green eyes and an imperious glare.

"How entirely unexpected that you should happen to be here, by utter circumstance," she intoned.

"Yeah, just uh...figured Athan was useless on his own and came to check on him. You know how he is."

"Do I? And I suppose you assumed I was incapable of managing the situation on my own? Hello, Lia."

"Howdy dudes," said Lia, who pushed past the two of us in the doorway, and began chatting animatedly with her brother somewhere further inside the house.

"I had thought," continued Karu in a lower voice now, "that when you had called me to ask me to assist Ashton in his affair, that indicated a minor turning point in our relationship. An indication of trust, or respect. Am I to assume I was mistaken?"

"No, nothing like that. Don't take it so personally, I'm allowed to miss him, too."

"You get him near-on all day, every day. It seems only reasonable--"

Karu was cut off by Athan's approach, and he ducked under her outstretched arm to embrace me in the doorway, wrapping me up in a welcoming hug.

"Hi AEGIS, thanks for coming out."

"N-not a problem," I said, feeling my cheeks go hot at how intently he was looking at me. "I missed you, heh."

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"I missed you too."

"If you two are quite through, there are now four of us in a small house with only one bathroom, so I would prefer if you not force me to spend my time vomiting in there for the entirety of our stay."

"Right, sorry, Karu," Athan said, and pulled away from me, a little before I was quite ready for it.

Well, whatever. Probably not a good idea to be hugging it out in front of the Exhumans outside either way. Karu reluctantly moved her arm, ineffective a barricade as it had yet served, and we all went inside.

"Here is the mobile in question," Karu said, keeping things strictly business, and handed me a device scorched with black spots. Already I could tell this was going to be a mess. I turned it over in my hands a few times, scrutinizing the damage while pulling up schematics from the 'net for this model.

I started explaining as I looked it over. "EMPs force a ton of current through an electronic device. Most personal electronics like this take relatively low power, and are designed to operate at that level of power. When you smack it with a blast like that, you actually melt the wires and substrate, which aren't graded for that amount of energy flow."

I dug through my hair and found one strand that held a small set of precision tools. Always handy to have on-hand. I selected my weapon and began the operation, carefully disassembling the device according to the assembly instructions.

"The good news for us is that it takes a lot more current to wipe a core, and because it was located inside the casing of the mobile, the casing acts as a crude faraday cage and protects the internals a bit. There's still probably tons of damage, but the possibility that some data can be recovered is there." I cocked an eyebrow at Athan. "But it'd be easier if you didn't go around blowing things up all the time."

"I was protecting myself from another Exhuman," he said defensively. "She's the one who started everything."

"Mmm, she," I said, peeling off the outer casing and inspecting the mess of blackened chips inside. "Just what I needed, another one."

"Another what?"

"Another girl, you nimrod," I said, and threw a piece of casing from the inexplicably smashed holo sitting on the table at him. "It looks like the mobile wasn't directly in the blast, so there's hope. The core is beat to hell, though, and all the chips which are, y'know, supposed to permit reading and writing are all obliterated. I might...if we had another…" I realized I wasn't making sense and trailing off but was looking around for something, anything with a quantum core in it.

The answer was right there, the smashed-up holo. Kinda doubt anyone would miss me salvaging some parts out of that.

"Yeah, might work. Probably going to be...need to code a crosswalk to bridge the protocols and read out right…"

I realized Athan was saying something but I was kind of right in the middle of figuring this out. When he didn't repeat it, I assumed it was unimportant, and didn't let it stop me from pulling parts out of the wrecked holo and arraying yet more tools and bits on the table from my hair.

It didn't take very long at all for me to get a working prototype mocked up, kind of an awful mockery of functional design, as I'd had to sort of bootstrap adapters onto each component to get them talking to each other, but it would probably work. I looked around and realized Karu, Lia, and Athan were nowhere to be seen.

I stood up, stretched, and checked my mobile. Three hours? Christ. It was still bright out, I'd swear it was nothing more than half an hour. No wonder they all wandered off.

"Hey, guys?" I called out. Three voices muttered a response from upstairs, and I realized they'd been talking up there this whole time and felt a little sad and left out. "I just finished, want to be here to turn it on?"

There was relative silence and then 'sure' from Athan. I sighed and tried to remind myself that normal people found this stuff really boring and I shouldn't be annoyed.

Even if it was a brilliant solution, and they should all be applauding me for my creativity in once again doing the impossible.

Once the table had four people around it, I screwed a wire into place on the tiny deulith cell, giving power to the unit, and plugged myself in to the standard port I'd set up as output, and then gave another strand to Lia, who plugged me in to her mobile wordlessly.

My hands and eyes moved as I roved over the data, and anything I found, I exported to Lia's device for them to pore over.

There wasn't much interesting here, unfortunately.

"There isn't much interesting here," Lia said, helpfully.

"Yeah, looks like a normal mobile's contents," I agreed. "I think she used the calendar a lot more before moving to New Eden. She's got some locations and notes in here since coming out...but nothing which is like Meeting with criminal I may never come back from."

"Mayhap she kept a journal?" Karu said.

I gave her a weird look, but Lia beat me to vocalizing it again. "Mayhap?" she laughed.

"Mayhap she had a dictionary app, that you may enlighten yourself to a more dignified vocabulary?" Karu said, making Lia laugh again.

"No journal," I said, flying through the data. "But...hmm...maybe Jack wouldn't approve, but there's a lot of chats and messages between them."

"Oooh, we've gotta read that," Lia said. She grinned at the three of us and I think found us lacking her enthusiasm. "Because...that's...where the clue we need might be."

Athan slowly bonked her on the noggin. "Lia, you're an incorrigible gossip," he said.

"Yeah, yeah, I know, that's what Mom always said."

"Like I'd know what incorrigible meant if she didn't." They were grinning at each other.

"I hear Karu has a dictionary for this kind of thing," she replied.

I heard it all but was kind of focused to come up with any banter myself. It made me feel a little left out again, but somebody had to find this missing woman, I thought. I left much of the 'juicier' tidbits alone...not sending them to Lia...but it did seem the two of them were more involved than I think any of us suspected. There was also a lot of personal stuff in here about Jack's past, her disability, how he felt responsible for it…

"Did you guys know Jack has a bad leg?" I asked.

"Other than the one he's in the infirmary for right now?" Athan seemed as surprised as me, and they were teammates and all that.

Karu was frowning but silent. When Athan prodded her for her thoughts, she had an insightful one.

"I must wonder, if he were lame before his powers, or shortly after, if his ability to move about so effortlessly was a result of his powers compensating his disability during his Ramanathan window."

"You mean…" Lia's intensity of thought flipped to match Karu's. "Jack's actual power is his creepy eyes smiling thing, and the fact he can just sort of be wherever he wants was because he was lame during his window?"

"It is a possibility," Karu said.

"Neat, but not useful," Athan said. "Doesn't help us find Steffie."

"Yeah, working on it," I said, only just able to hear them over the data. "Almost at the end of everything now...she had issues with the locals, I think we all did."

"Any mention of either the XPCA or the resistance?" Athan asked.

"No...which is surprising, given the rumors we've all heard," I said. "It seems she didn't get out much...I guess understandable given the hassle. Went on walks sometimes--"

"Can you call it that?" Lia asked, cocking an eyebrow.

"Hey, her words, not mine. But yeah, otherwise became something of a shut-in. Not out of fear or anything, she was just...kinda pissy all the time it seems. Wanted less and less to do with everyone else...ouch, took it out on Jack a lot. He's a really nice guy, it seems. And...that's it." I frowned and looked down at my fingers tenting and untenting themselves unconsciously. "Maybe...location data? You found it where, exactly?"

"It was underground, below the sewers. An Exhuman combat arena, actually."

So those rumors were true. I'd have to give Athan an earful later about engaging in casual deathmatches with other Exhumans.

"Okay, I can tell which relay she was connected to when, which tells us when she was at home and otherwise...where was this place?"

Piece-by-piece I got salient information from the mobile and from Athan and Karu, and worked out that she'd been to the ring, apparently voluntarily, and apparently a number of times. Just her last time...she never left.

"Just before the phone never moved again, there's just this...little blip. She left here, went to the arena, and then went somewhere else, and then went back to the arena, and then stayed there. Or her mobile did anyway. But where's the other place?"

I pulled up maps of New Eden and overlaid the 'net relays on top if it. She went to the northernmost relay to the arena, and then...east, far enough to get onto the next one over. That gave us a crescent-shaped region between the two where her mobile might have picked the new relay over the old one.

"Somewhere in there, she went on her last day," I said, stretching and cracking my knuckles again. I'd designed them to do that, because they were fun to pop. "I think that's all I'm gonna get out of this sucker."

"You got a lot," Athan said, looking at the map. "Half of this area is outside of New Eden, past the north wall."

"This is the same wall where we battled the Exhuman resistance members," Karu said. "Or, I did, while you assembled a suicide attempt."

"Yeah," Athan said, ignoring half the statement. "Weird. Trish said Steffie was probably either taken by the XPCA or with the resistance. Though I still think Soran's a possibility."

"The resistance might operate around there," Karu said. "They wasted no time in mobilizing in the area after the EMP."

"The wall means the XPCA is there too, though," I added.

"Doesn't make sense for her to go back if she was detained by the XPCA though," Lia said. "Even if it was just her mobile. Makes a lot more sense if she wound up joining the resistance for her to leave behind anything which could be used to track her."

"And her clothes?" Athan asked, incredulously.

"They were wearing all red, as though alike a uniform."

Athan shook his head. "Look, I know New Eden is kind of a shithole, but it's still better than the hiding out and suffering and oppression these guys had to deal with before. Steffie of all people knew that, she was grateful for this second lease on life. I just don't see her falling in with them."

"Well, she's somewhere, Athan," I said and shrugged.

"Yeah. Though I'm starting to get a bad feeling about all of this. I'm worried she's caught up in something. Jack said she was just so irrationally angry all the time at the end...think that pushed her into joining the resistance out of desperation?"

"I don't know," I said, shaking my head. "From what I read, she was certainly massively pissed. Cranky. Hormonal, even, maybe? I want to say women have done worse things for less...but I'm not an expert at being a real woman, biologically."

There was an awkward pause where I think everyone wanted to disagree but nobody really could. Athan was getting smart enough to learn when not to say something stupid sometimes at least.

"Then...I guess...we go after the resistance. Try to get them to talk to us," Athan said. "Seems like our best bet right now."

I inwardly agreed, but thought this was heading straight for disaster. Karu shook her head.

"You realize," she said "this is very nearly exactly the course of behavior Captain Targa warned you against pursuing?"

"Yeah," Athan agreed and let out a slow breath. I wondered what had happened there exactly, from what I'd heard, Athan thought Targa could go suck a truck full of dicks for all he cared about her.

There was another minute of silence as we all thought, before Athan found a cocky grin again. Wordlessly, I inquired what that meant with raised eyebrows.

"All that means," he said "is we have to make sure she doesn't catch us."

"Oh God," Lia complained, but she was smiling too. "There is no way this is going to end well."

"It'll be fine!" he said. "We'll just use our smarts. Whole room of geniuses in here. Not a problem."

I looked at Karu and found her face a mirror of my own defeated concern.

"Yeah, we're doomed," I said, but could hardly help to keep from smiling too.