One thing was for certain, I had excellent taste.

Lia held me as she walked up and down the rough circle of machines in the garage, connected to one another via a system of loaders and conveyors, all networked to a central interface so that a fabrication requiring any of these machines in any combination could be carried out automatically.

Around the perimeter of the room were other more eclectic devices: A highly illegal network tap which seemed to be monitoring traffic over a third of the 'net. An entire bank of power supply units, huge imposing boxes with thickly insulated cables radiating out of them across the walls and floor like a circulatory system. And maybe what I cared about most, a couple of server racks, containing my past life and all of the recorded memories within it.

Just a frickin' shame I didn't have the ports necessary to interface with any of it. Getting started might be rough, though Lia seemed willing to help as she could. I'd need a body foremost, even being uploaded to a more modern computer would help…though I couldn't run on just any piece of hardware...

I paused to think and realized Lia was still walking around in circles holding me.

"Sorry, I'm good," I told her. "You can put me down now. I need to figure out how to connect with all this stuff and get a new version of Rua going."

"Oh, about that, we might--"

She stopped as the door opened. I felt tiny and blind, not having any cam-drones around...or more likely, not having access to the ones which were, and couldn't see anything but the direction she'd pointed me.

I heard a soft voice that set me on edge immediately.

"She getting settled alright?" the voice asked.

"I think so. She seemed pretty excited about all the machines," Lia said. "Which is good, since I don't have a clue what any of this does." She laughed.

"She'd probably like it if I stayed out of her hair, huh?"

"Yeah...sorry. Doesn't seem…like...she's a fan."

"Is that Saga?" I asked. "Turn me around, let me see."

Lia let out a heavy breath but didn't complain as she picked me up and spun me to point at the door to the rest of the house. There, leaning in the doorway, was Saga.

She'd changed some. Not a lot, but enough to stand out. She'd filled out a little bit, even put on a bit of muscle, mostly in the legs, though was still lanky and alien in her proportions. Her hundred-year-old prison uniform was now a knit sweater and capris, dark blue and tan, and hanging off of her. White ankle socks, stained, with no sign of shoes.

And strangest of all, her expression. I was accustomed to seeing a confident smirk, a malevolent grin. Something that announced that this was something wholly removed from and dangerous to humanity. Instead, she looked worried.

Did I scare her?

Good.

"Why is Saga here?" I asked Lia. "Is this her new jail? Am I supposed to be her warden again?"

God, I hoped so. I had a whole lifetime of payback for her.

"Saga...lives here," Lia said with no small hint of forced optimism. "As do you. As do Chiho and I. We're all...one big happy family."

For about a quarter of a second, Saga gave me a small smile. I tried to kill her with my mind on the off chance that I'd somehow become an AI-Exhuman in the last five minutes. It did not work.

"You're fucking kidding me. I don't even have a body. I don't even have drones to defend myself! She can just walk right in here and rip out the core of my operations!"

"And...I won't," Saga said.

"Oh, like I'd trust you again."

For some reason, Saga seemed to shy away as I yelled at her. It felt great. All the years of suffering and resentment I had in me, and now she could hear it all, maybe even feel it all, if her black Exhuman heart still could.

"Maybe...you should go through your old memories," Lia said, setting me down again. "There's a lot more between you and Saga than just...that, now."

"No, Lia, it's okay. Last time...she never got this stuff out. We were all tied up with the XPCA stuff and she never got to dump her years of hate on me. I can take it."

Lia looked like she was about to argue but instead froze weirdly. "Yes. You are right," she said.

"God dammit, I forgot!" Saga groaned, clenching her fists like she wanted to hit someone.

"The fuck did you do to Lia!" I screamed at Saga. "Get the fuck out of her head!"

I felt so impotent. I didn't have anything to interact with the world, just a trapped observer watching Saga do what she did best to humans. I was supposed to protect people from Exhumans, and Lia was one of my only friends, and Saga was the worst Exhuman in the whole fucking world and I could do nothing but scream. I slammed against my console and rage and frustration just tore through me.

"I'll fucking kill you!" I screamed at her over her worthless apologies. "You fucking hear me? I'll kill you! I don't care if you kill me a thousand times, I'll always come back! I'm just as immortal as you, bitch! I'll kill you for the rest of goddamn time!"

Saga took a look at me, her eyes startled and scared, glanced one more time at the mockery she'd made of Lia, standing stock-still with pupils as large as dinner plates.

And then she just ran, holding herself. A second later, I heard a door slam from further inside the house.

I liked that she was scared of me. Maybe she was just guilty about killing me, what, twice now? I hoped she was. I hoped she thought of my mom every time she closed her eyes.

"Lia, wake up!" I shouted. "Come on. Please, you've gotta be okay. I need your help, I need your hands. I can't stop Saga by myself like this. Please."

"I'm fine," she said, with a wistful tone that screamed the opposite. "What do you need, AEGIS?"

"I need...to get into these machines. We need to start producing countermeasures."

Lia seemed to blink her way back to being awake. "What?"

"To stop Saga. Are you okay?"

"Stop her from what? AEGIS, we live together. You, me, and Saga."

"She just mind-fucked you right in front of me! I saw it! Tell me you remember. Oh God, what did she do to you?"

To my surprise, Lia laughed and then sat down next to me, stroking my box with her fingertips like it was me she was caressing.

"Oh, that," she said with bemusement. "Look...I want you to get your memories back ASAP, okay? That will clear everything up. But for now I'll tell you a story, about a stupid, drunk, horny girl, and how she hurt her two best friends."

She told me that we'd all lived together like this before when Athan had been captured by the XPCA and we all needed to work together to free him. Karu had helped, and had actually been really influential in his release ultimately, but here in this house, things weren't going so well.

"I slept in late. I drank all the time. I wasted money on things I didn't want. I went out partying almost every night...God, I almost wound up with any number of guys, and I'm only sixteen. Any guy who'd do that...is not a guy you should let do that." She shuddered. "You and Saga were both at your wit's end about me. You were both so worried about Athan and me that you didn't have time to be at each other's throats. But still, I was holding everyone back, trying to deal with the stress and guilt and pain...and not. Really, really not."

Though she was speaking conversationally, even pleasantly, her eyes looked hard and distant. I could tell how much this story made her hate herself, and more than once I wanted to tell her to stop, but she pushed forward without shirking.

Her voice dropped low and she held herself tight as she told me how she'd done it with her loser boyfriend, how she'd forced her way into Saga's mind to drag her into a mental three-way, and once that barrier was breached, it spilled out over the entire city block and their minds were lost in a haze of rapture. How, even now, months celibate, she still gets cravings for that sensation again, like a drug she tasted only once.

How, if I hadn't interceded and smacked her head on the bathroom tile, she'd probably have fucked herself and everyone here to literal insanity.

"But Saga had it the worst," Lia muttered, smaller and quieter and more still than ever. "I used her power against her, I used our closeness against her...I proved to her that she was right, that trusting humans was just a path to getting hurt."

"Which is bullshit," I said, interrupting for the first time.

"I agree," she said. "But I've known a lot of humans and only one of them has ever tried to rape me. I think, on the whole, humans are pretty good, and trusting them is pretty good. But that's not Saga's experiences, and you can't just dismiss that because her life has been monkfished more than most."

"Well maybe she's right in her case anyway. Every human should be trying to hurt her--"

"No, you're wrong," Lia said with sudden confidence which caught me off guard. I knew I shouldn't be surprised, but how quickly she'd jumped from her nervous, pained recitation to putting her foot down…

"Look, I hurt Saga and she was my friend. If you take the fact she's Exhuman out of the equation, what do you suppose I should have done?"

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"Kill her?"

"AEGIS…"

"Okay fine. The answer you want me to say is to apologize, right?"

"Right. But you can't just...literally rape someone's mind and then apologize for it. Especially not when they were your best friend, and--"

"She was your best friend?" I laughed.

Lia glared at me. "Yes."

"She's a mind-fucker! She sits in the dark alone all day, scheming up how to get herself free."

"And you sit in a box doing the same?"

"I am not like her."

"No, you're not. And even in your past life, you still weren't. But before, you were open to the idea that other Exhumans could be like Athan, could be decent people, and had even accepted that, on the whole, Saga might be one of them. If nothing else, you trusted Athan's judgement enough to go with what he thought, and you trusted and knew Saga well enough to know she wouldn't mind-screw him."

"Well, that's stupid. Athan's great, but he's got a lot to learn--"

Lia was shaking her head at me. "You're so frustrating. Please get back your memories soon."

"What now?"

"You kept having a hard time learning this lesson last time too. You never believed in Athan enough. You kept trying to run his life for him, make decisions for him, couldn't accept that he made informed decisions for a reason."

Her words hit me like a knife. "I said that to him...after I almost killed him."

"Yeah. And I think it was right around when you were getting over that, that he finally decided he loved you. So if you want him, you'll have to learn that one again."

"I...see."

I began to think about how I could ensure I integrated this into my future plans when Lia started up again.

"So eventually, I did apologize to Saga. But she just accepted my apology because she still loved me for some reason--"

"Saga doesn't love people. Especially not humans."

Lia shot me a downright contemptuous glance. "AEGIS, not to be a real beluga about this but you've spent the last eight months in the dirt, and I've spent good parts of it in her head. Are you going to tell me this story, or can I finish?"

"She doesn't. I refuse to accept that."

Lia was up and pacing around my machines now, doing weird pirouettes and punching at the air as she stomped back and forth and yelled in my direction. "Why is this so difficult for you to believe? How can you be so stubbornly thick-headed not to realize that your own past life somehow accepted this truth, and she was just as smart and paranoid as you?"

"She just can't, okay!" I shouted back.

"Why not!?"

She wheeled on me and bent over to look my holo right in the eyes, her brown eyes furious in a way I'd never seen her. Lips drawn tight, hands on her hips, glaring me down for all her skinny stature was worth.

"I might have been in the dirt these last few months but I knew Saga long before any of you did. And I refuse to accept that this kind of change is possible, okay? She wouldn't...she can't. She didn't."

"That's not even a logical argument!" Lia exploded at me. "Just no? Is that all you have to say? Just no? She can't because she can't? Just ignore everything I'm saying, ignore Saga herself obviously being someone different than you remember, ignore Athan and all his friends accepting her, ignore your past life even! Yeah, makes perfect sense, once you ignore literally all the data, you can draw whatever conclusion you'd like!"

She threw her hands in the air as she paced away from me. "Worst AI ever!"

"She can't because why would she do it now!" I screamed back at her, finding my voice emotional as it came out. She stopped and turned back to look at me. "If she was just going to change, why would she do it now? Why couldn't she do it before? Why'd she have to fucking kill all those people, why'd she have to kill me?"

I tried to get the last of my words out before the lump in my throat closed it up.

"Why'd she have to kill my mom, Lia? She was my best friend. If she was just going to change in the end, why'd she have to do that to me first? Why?"

Lia, beautiful delicate creature she was, was crying before even I was, and again she was holding my box and sobbing, just a big shadow on my camera that was trying to give me a hug but failing hard. We were there for a couple minutes, before something gently knocked on the door.

Lia turned to look, and as she unobstructed my view, I saw Saga standing there, looking even smaller than usual.

"What do you want?" I hissed at her.

She walked forward and took a seat next to Lia, rubbing the crying girl's back with her broad, flat hands. Lia sniffled and tried to stymie the tide with her sleeves without apparent effect.

"I've told you this before...well, I told the other you this before, I guess," Saga said, crossing her legs right in front of me. "But...I owe it to you, too. I'm...I'm really sorry...about everything that happened before. I was a prisoner in a prison, and you were keeping me there."

"I don't need your stupid apology," I said.

"It wasn't anything personal. I thought...I thought you were a really great friend."

"Just stop, Saga. You're embarrassing yourself."

She shook her head. "I only learned a bit ago that some of the stuff we talked about back then, you still have. You believed in it, believed in me deeply enough that you took some of my words and wrote them into your own beliefs."

"I don't want to hear this. Stop it. You're disgusting. Go away!"

"I always wondered...if we could have been friends...if it had gone another way. You even offered," she laughed "but I was too arrogant to take it."

"Then keep being arrogant, I don't want your friendship."

"That's fine," she said with a smile and another shake of her head. "You don't have to. But I will apologize to you for what I did to your mother. I know how painful it can be to lose someone close to you."

"No you don't. You've never let anyone close to you. You just feed off the thoughts of others, you don't live them."

She smiled her small smile like the more poisonous my words were, the less she heard them. I wanted to turn off my mic and shut her out, but more than that...I wanted to hear everything she had to say.

"The person I lost, I've never been in their head. We're the most distant people in the world, in that way, and yet their death hit me in a way even I didn't expect."

"Just who the heck are you talking about?"

"I lost you, silly. You died when you and Athan fought to save me. I felt so...so torn up. In a way, it hurt more than being physically torn up. But...only in a way," she gave me a small grin like I was supposed to laugh. "It sucked. And it still sucks. And I'm sorry I did that to you."

I crossed my arms and turned away. If she thought she could just make up for murder with a sob story, she was badly mistaken on how this world operated.

But turning away was just for effect, of course. My camera was still pointed right there, and through it, I saw both girls, each acting as though conspiring to stab me right in the heart.

Lia was barely-contained lightning, as she often was, looking back and forth between the two of us with her hands trembling from how white-knuckled she was clenching them. Her eyes brimmed with a fresh new wave of tears, and her nose and face was a splotchy, blotty mess.

But even through all that, she was this goddamn bottomless well of optimism. Pivoting back and forth, saying nothing but thinking everything, with so much fucking hope in her eyes that somehow her old two besties would kiss and make up right in front of her. It was sickening. And also had a disturbingly poignant effect on my heartstrings.

After I'd turned away, Saga...looked very much the same. Maybe not even noticeable to a human eye, but I saw her slump ever so slightly. She wasn't going to let me see it, but my rejection hurt her, and that wasn't anything I could understand.

She was my enemy. She shouldn't give a single shit about what I thought of her, just like I was doing. But in that tiny motion, that modicum of pained defeat, hidden behind bravado, I saw she did care, and knowing that made me care.

Which was bullshit, as far as I was concerned. I wanted not to care. She was a goddamned murderer, it wasn't fair that she could make me feel anything but hate for her.

But there it fucking was anyway. The start of that bitch worming her way right back to where she was before she tore out my heart last time.

"I'm doing this for Lia, and Lia only, you understand me?" I snipped at Saga. "You and I can coexist in this house. You stay out of my garage unless I explicitly permit you entry. You undo the mind-fuck you put in Lia's head--"

"No," Lia interrupted. "I never finished but...I asked her to put that there. It's mine."

"You're an idiot," I told her flatly.

"Maybe I am. But I'd rather be an idiot with friends than the smartest lonely person in the world."

"Whatever. You don't touch anyone else's head, you be a nice, docile Exhuman, and maybe, maybe, someday, I'll consider accepting your apology."

"That's all I can ask for," Saga said with a serious expression. She rose and bowed very deeply at me. "I'll get out of your garage now. Sorry to interrupt."

"Thanks for stopping by Saga," Lia said with a wave at her back. The garage door clicked shut and Lia let out a long slow breath through pursed lips. "I'm glad you're willing to try," she said. "You did it before, and I believe you can do it again."

"I wonder how long before she kills me this time," I said.

"She won't. She's good at being good. You'll see. Just keep an open mind."

"Yeah. I'll feel a lot better once I have some drones and a body. I'll be able to do something if she acts up."

"Oh, right! That was what I had for you. You're gonna love this."

Lia's dials switched from contemplative to exuberant as she showed me something on her holo.

"Úaine?" I asked, reviewing the tech specs.

"It's...probably not a forever-home. High-grade XPCA tech, designed by...well...your killer, actually. She was an AI too. It's complicated. But she had this body built and now she's too dead to use it, so it's just sitting in a warehouse somewhere. Somewhere Black Shark knows about," she added deviously.

"These...these specs are insane. Are you sure this is accurate?" I asked as Lia flipped through page after page. "I've never heard of so many yottaflops. And this is sitting in a warehouse?"

"Well...your tech is like a hundred years out-of-date. So yeah, it's way up there, but it's not like PSWHHH, BOOM, apocalypse great or anything."

"Thank you for that very informative summary," I said, unable to take my eyes off the docs. "Uh, yeah. Hell yeah. We need this, now."

"Thought you might say that. Like I said, probably just a temporary home for you. I imagine you can make a better one using it, though."

"Are you kidding me? This baby has everything," I said. It was kind of an exaggeration, it had everything computational. It was clearly made by an AI for an AI. But holy shit, was it made for an AI.

"Uh, not...everything," Lia said, shifting uneasily. I wondered if I'd missed something important on the tech specs and was going to ask her to go back a few pages, but the mobile moved back into Lia's pocket while she blushed furiously and made a gesture of putting a finger of one hand into a circle of two fingers on the other hand.

"...docking? Standard ports? I swear I saw it had that, Lia, can you bring back the holo?"

"Not...not that kind of interface. Biological," she muttered.

"A biological-robotic interface port? They have that in the last hundred years? I mean, I know neural uplin--"

I stopped as Lia moved her fingers together again a few more times and suddenly felt both very stupid and very red.

"I see!" I announced louder than necessary and furiously began reviewing the tech specs to see what room there was to draw up improvements. Lia giggled nervously and turned on one heel to stroll out of the room.

Before she made it out, I called out to her.

"Hey, Lia?"

"Yup? Or...nope. Depends on the question," she said, still flushed.

"Nothing like that," I grinned at her. "I just wanted to apologize for arguing with you a few minutes back there."

"No problem. Being emotional is how we still know we're human, right?"

"Right. But also...thank you."

"For what?"

"For being patient. For believing in me. For being the first person to cry for my mom. And...for...the whole...Saga...thing."

"What? You just kinda trailed off at the end."

"Never mind!" I found myself shouting at her. "Sorry. Just, thank you for being a great friend."

"It's always been my pleasure," she grinned.