I woke up disoriented by my surroundings but didn't feel half as confused as maybe I should have been to find myself waking up next to Karu again.

She looked like she'd slept well, kicking off the blankets as the heat of the morning had crept through the window, her tank riding up slightly to show the faint definition of her abs, her fit figure not yet a victim of her troubles like so many other bits of her lifestyle.

Before I got myself in trouble again by ogling, I also extricated myself from the blankets and went to the bathroom. When I came back, I found a pair of green eyes watching me from the bed between yawns and stretches.

"Sleep well?" I asked her.

She scratched her shaved head and looked at me through one bleary eye, like using both of them was twice as much morning as she could stand at the moment.

"Not...particularly," she admitted. "I had the most peculiar dream."

"It's pretty late already. We missed the sun by a few hours. What time is checkout?"

"Eleven," she said, and checked her holo with alarm. "Egads. One would think I would have slept better, given the hours I had done it." She began to move around the room, confining her belongings back in the luggage, finishing in just a few minutes.

"I am driving back to Vegas for my job, which you detest," she said, apparently having awoken enough to regain the ability to deliver a stink-eye, and using said ability judiciously. "Are you headed back as well? Are you operating out of the base here?"

"I'm operating wherever Cosette needs hands, which is everywhere, it seems like. So Vegas is as good a place as any. I can keep an eye on AEGIS up there, too."

Karu laughed a little strangely. "I remember when it was Saga we all kept an eye on. My, how things change." We stepped outside of the room and she locked the door behind us.

"And yet there's always something going wrong. The more things stay the same, right? I'd love a ride if you're offering. We can finish our talk from last night."

"Oh? That one about which fantasies you partake of in the shower?" she asked with dry amusement as she dropped the key in a slot and we headed for the car.

"No," I flushed. "The real conversation. Ass."

She turned her back to me and looked back over her shoulder while giving her butt a squeeze in my direction through the jeans. "This ass?" she asked. "This was the subject of your fantasies? My, but I thought you to be a leg man."

I guess I might be? But that didn't stop me from almost walking into a signpost anyway, while Karu laughed full-bodied at my fluster.

"So what was your dream?" I asked as we sat down in her car, and I felt the need to get on a topic which would not make the entire drive a sexually-awkward hell.

"Oh, right," she said, frowning as she hit the starter. "It was about former-Director Blackett, actually. He came to my restaurant, and I was so shocked I put in his order as a country fried steak instead of a chicken fried steak."

"There's a difference?"

"Of course, or else it would not have mattered that I got the order wrong."

I laughed. "It was a dream. It doesn't have to make sense and doesn't have to matter."

"Well, no matter. At the time the dream may have frightened me as only one in the thrall of dream-logic could be, but thinking of it this morning, I was merely amused to imagine the Director ordering steak and eggs at a diner like he had just come from church."

"So what happened?"

"What?"

"In the dream. After you got his order wrong."

"Nothing of import," she said, frowning as she turned us onto the highway and I grabbed for the strap on the door. "Just dream things, as it were."

"But you remember them?"

"Certainly."

"So what happened?"

She gave me half a glare. "He was so unimpressed with my skills that he told me I did not deserve to be a waitress. He ripped my nametag right off of my uniform and threw me out to the curb, as it were, where I remained trapped under his glare and the brutal sun until I could neither move nor think and simply withered away."

"That seems sort of on-the-nose," I said. "Pretty obvious analogy for feeling guilt about Blackett's death as for why you gave up hunting. But it sounds like you have some uh, serious reservations about the 'curb' you're currently living on."

Karu scoffed. "Ashton, I studied psychology. Dream interpretation is bunk, as it were. A dream is just meaningless brain impulses as the mind sifts through the thoughts of the day while processing long-term memories. They cannot tell you anything that you do not already know."

"Can't they make new connections for you randomly though? Like, Lia had a dream once about melting jelly beans to make new flavors of syrup for snow cones. That's not an idea you'd have without thinking randomly."

"Did it work?" Karu asked, perplexed.

"No, it solidified too fast, and if you did get it liquid, it melted the ice."

"Ah, that would be a dilemma. Perhaps if there were some binding agent which prohibited reconstitution."

"She tried that too. Jelly beans just like being solid too much. Wound up getting an A on a science fair project for it though, so that was cool."

"The point being, Ashton, I do not need a dream identifying my guilt, rationale, or current opinions on my lifestyle. I live the three of them every day, and so it makes sense that my brain would relive them at night as well. I only brought it up because I found the imagery amusing, not to have you psychoanalyze me with your inexperience and the hocus of dream interpretation."

"Sorry," I muttered. "But...I do have good news for you."

"I am reasonably certain I do not wish to hear this."

"What? Why do you say that?" I asked, half-offended.

"Let us call it woman's intuition."

"You have one of those?"

She didn't even take her eyes off the road as she punched me square in the shoulder.

"As I was saying," I said, rubbing my bruise "you don't have to feel bad about Blackett. Nobody knows this but Moon and me, so probably don't spread it around, but he was actually secretly an Exhuman."

She scoffed again. "What a very convenient lie."

"It's true!"

"It is preposterous. Director Blackett was outspoken of his loathing for Exhumans of all stripes consistently. It was his ruthless efficacy in dealing with them which propelled him up the ranks in the first place, as it were, and I believe his recent actions under New Eden make clear the continued contempt he held for them -- even as he already possessed a loyal troupe in the P-Force, he sought to replace you with something he could control more directly."

"But that doesn't make it any less true. Moon and I saw it."

"Saw what, exactly? The leader of the world's most proficient anti-Exhuman force and a proponent of experimental technology...do something apparently mystical? Certainly you have heard the adage that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

"He told me himself," I said, crossing my arms, and then realizing that I needed those to keep Karu's swerving lane changes from throwing me into the wall or driver.

"When?"

"In...his office. Beneath New Eden."

"Which you never once set foot in, instead choosing to have a crisis of devotion and abandoning me so that you could chase down another woman. One whom you did not even manage to save."

I opened my mouth to respond several times, but nothing seemed right to say. I felt just...sort of crushed that Karu would even bring that up, much less phrase it as she had. As much as I felt like I had my reasons for everything I did, I did just run away from Karu, and I did fail to save AEGIS.

The conversation was replaced by the screaming of the engine as she gunned past another car on the highway, only changing lanes at the last minute to avoid driving through another car's backside at her new breakneck pace.

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"Supposing you were right, Ashton," she said over the car's roar. "It would not matter anyway, though I appreciate your misguided attempt to assuage my guilt."

"Why not?"

"Because sin is committed in the heart, not in the hand. If I lurk in an alley with the aim to gun down the first unsuspecting sod who wanders into my trap, it matters not if that man would turn out to be a psychopath or serial murderer, I was prepared to murder an innocent, and so that is the sin I committed."

"That's ignoring reality, though."

"So it can go with faith at times," she confessed. "But faith is built on the foundation of beliefs, and so what one believes one's sins are is more real to that person, and thus their faith, than whatever reality might be."

"But even so," I argued, refusing to let Karu pin this on herself "Blackett was a monster. You know that, so your beliefs should incorporate that knowledge."

"He was. But he might also have saved the world, had his plans come to fruition. Should I also weigh the lives of how many he might have saved in this equation? Even if the man was a monster and deserved death, were those victims all equally deserving?"

"But you can't blame yourself for what he might have done!"

"And yet you would have me absolve myself because of what he had already finished doing?"

I blinked at her. "What?"

"You claim the future actions of that man cannot be used to claim he should have been spared. So how can you use the past to say he deserved to die?"

"Because...the past...happened?"

"And the future will happen."

"I feel like you're just twisting everything up until it makes no sense and then saying 'see, I win'."

She laughed, which seemed weird to me. Here I was trying to help her through her guilt, and it seemed like I was the one really involved in this discussion seriously.

"Ashton, when you kill a man, he is who he is. You may blame it on his past. You may claim to be stopping his future. Yet the past is over, and the future you fear may never come. Tell me, on a battlefield, if there is a soldier who is unarmed and surrendering, is it just to shoot him?"

"No…"

"But why not? In his past, he fought with his army and defied whatever victory your side sought. In the future, he may find his heart and rejoin the battle. In both cases, he would be a valid combatant, but not in the present. So why is it not acceptable to shoot him now?"

"I mean...you can take him prisoner or something, then you get to dictate who he is in the future. Make sure he doesn't do anything bad later."

"You haven't changed the nature of the man, just the world around him. He may still warrant death as a corrupt and foul being."

"But we don't just shoot prisoners."

"But you will shoot your own commander, in his own office?"

"He was a monster, damnit Karu."

"And so might be our hypothetical now-prisoner. He may have killed dozens of your friends. Do you not see your own hypocrisy? Do you not realize why it is important we have rules, and why breaking them can cause me guilt?"

I still didn't agree, but Karu had argued me into such a corner that I didn't know where I could go from here but to repeat myself over and over that Blackett was bad and should have died. I felt like...I knew, rather, that there was more to it than that, and if I could only articulate it properly she'd understand me, but it didn't feel like anything I had to say meant anything to the weird twisting logic she so confidently spouted.

When my thoughts stretched into silence again, Karu filled it by speaking up one more time.

"Make no mistake, Ashton, I do not disagree with you. There is a difference between what needs to be done and what is right or wrong. And you are not alone in being willing to pile guilt upon themselves if it means saving others. As we discussed last night, if it meant saving the world, I would damn myself and end many if it were necessary. So do not presume that you can so easily talk me out of the consequences I have chosen to burden. I am no feeble-minded strumpet to be willed and wooed as is the Code-X."

"She's not."

"And yet you convince her of the truth of your words every occasion you disagree. Not that I am truly better...I shape myself into monstrous things rather than let you shape me, so I suppose the outcome is much the same."

"Let's talk about something else," I said, slumping against the window as the desert tore by under the midday sun. Out here was only an endless four-lane road, so Karu's options for being a terror on the roadway were limited to the point of making her an almost normal driver. I feared for the moment when she decided a shortcut through a cactus patch would be the fastest way to pass a car in front of her, but until then, I could relax some.

"So how was incarceration?" she asked, like a mother inquiring about the first day of school.

"Boring. But also...kind of...useful. I guess."

"Did you fashion the empty time to use in working out?" she smiled.

"No, just for thinking."

"About why you were there, perhaps?"

"About a lot of things but that too, yeah."

"And why were you there, if it is not beyond my privilege to ask?"

"A guy died. Talon. Leader of a group of Exhumans who banded together. The guy at the pizza place you didn't go to. They thought I did it."

"Which of course you did not."

"Of course. But I did go to the crime scene and apparently left behind a lot of evidence which put me there."

She sighed. "Of course you did."

"And since then I've been somewhat embroiled between the XPCA and the Defiant. I sympathize with them, but they're threatening to destroy the world, and that's just messed up."

"They are?" she asked, her brows knit.

"Yeah. That's the whole point of the Defiant. So I've been getting roped into their meetings, they sorta have three new interim leaders, each as batshit crazy as the others...Dork-Hand, whatever kind of name that is, uh...a guy who thinks he's a lot smarter than he is. Mini...Minerva, I think. Feisty, dark skin."

"Your type?"

"Ew, no. She's crazy violent, I think."

"You thought the same of me once."

"She's crazy, violent. Almost threw down with me, fought with Dork-Hand. I don't think Lia would talk in front of her--"

"You dragged Lia into this as well?"

"Well...sorta."

"Oh, Ashton."

"...and then some big guy with a moustache, southern, crass, none-too bright but cocky as hell. Lia got him wrapped around her finger in an instant. I think he hates me too."

"Ashton, honestly, how do you see this unfolding?" Karu asked with obvious trepidation.

I thought about it a minute. Moustache and Rito were both buying the line that we needed time to find Talon's real killer. Mini just seemed to want to go off for no reason at all, and I knew nothing about Dork-Hand except that I loathed him, which was far from useful.

I didn't see new evidence turning up on Talon's killer if he didn't act again, and in that case, we'd eventually lose Rito and Moustache's confidence and he and Mini would lead us to obliteration.

But if something did happen, it would likely be another of the Defiant dying, and they'd be pressed to act. Whoever didn't die would lead us to obliteration.

I told Karu as much and she looked about as happy to hear the news as I was to share it.

"Between the two options, it seems their deaths would be preferable. Fewer of them to inspire obliteration that way."

"I guess if you don't care about killing currently-innocent but potentially-dangerous people, as we just discussed."

"And I assume, faced with 'obliteration', you would fight."

"I would."

"Alongside any others capable among your allies, against the entire might of the Defiant, in a battle which would rend the Earth and shape its destiny."

"I wouldn't put it so dramatically but yeah. Would you be one of those allies, or is the call of waitressing too strong?"

"I am a fan of the uniform," she said, looking like she was giving the matter serious thought, and then smiled at me. "Ashton, you ask a stupid question. If the fate of the world ever hangs in the balance, please call me. Or even your world. I told you earlier that it was your acceptance of me, good and ill, and your refusal to let me leave your circle quietly which resumed my confidence. Well, I would never let you leave quietly either. Or noisily. Or alone. As much as I may turn over a new leaf, as it were, I am not committed to burning down the whole forest."

"Thanks, Karu. I hope it won't come that."

"As you said, it may already have." She shook her head, and then stopped like she had a thought. She opened her mouth and took a breath to start talking and then paused.

"Just say it," I said.

"Curses, I cannot get away with anything in your presence, can I?" she said, sounding only half-disappointed. "Very well. Though...I do...hmm."

"Hey, whatever it is, I'll accept it, remember?"

"Right," she affirmed. "Well in that case...in the center console here…"

She drifted off, shooting me nervous half-glances, and when it became obvious more words were not forthcoming, I opened the console in question up and peeked inside.

Aside from the prerequisite pen, napkins, and tube of lip balm--cherry apparently, surprisingly girly for Karu--was a familiar flowing snake of black fabric.

I looked at Karu and saw her unnaturally still, her eyes fixated on the road with a focus I wish she paid during city driving. But there, plain as the awkward nerves written on her face was the matching black choker on her throat, same as was in my hand.

"Do not...feel...that is to say...there is no...obligation of any sort…" Karu mumbled.

I just smiled and put it back around my neck. It felt heavier somehow, like I'd grown unaccustomed to it in its absence.

She didn't smile but kept her eyes fixed forward. I looked forward too, and sighed at the hours we had ahead of us still.

And then I fell onto the hard dirt in the darkness and looked around to realize that the car was gone. Karu was gone. The desert and sunlight and hours we had were gone, and in their place was a dark unfinished cellar and a group of pissed-off looking Exhumans.

Oh, and Rito. She smiled apologetically at me, and I understood by her presence where I was and how I'd gotten here.

"Hello...Defiant," I said, sitting as comfortably in the dirt as I could manage. "How have you all been?"

"We want to talk to you, boy," Moustache bristled at me, his eyes looking black in the darkness. "Word is, you've been held by the XPCA for quite a few days, then suddenly released. Suspiciously released. Almost like you said or did something."

"We'll get answers faster if we punch it out of him," Mini growled.

"And supplementarily, it seems the XPCA had practicable suspicion that it was your very personage whom dispatched Talon," Dork-Hand added, before leaning in and adjusting the brim of his stupid hat at me. "How convenient for you that would transpire, should the murderer be the individual anointed with the undertaking of discovering the murderer."

"The fuck's he saying?" Mini asked.

"He's saying Athan's killed Talon," Moustache said, glaring right through me, the eyes of all of the Defiant behind him boring into me as well. "And I gotta say, I might just believe it."

As Mini and the others pressed in on me, for the first time ever, I found myself wishing Karu had kept her eyes on me in the car. Then Rito's power wouldn't have worked and I wouldn't be...here.

"Of all the damn times for her to be watching the road," I said to myself.

"Wuzzat? A confession?" Mini asked, slamming a fist into her palm.

Yeah, this was not going to end well. I sighed and steeled myself for yet another interrogation.