“Yeah,” Vale mumbled. “And I’ll be ancient by the end of this conversation, so please, Lee, just tell me what you want.”

Lee finished his beer, guzzling it down and signaling to the waitress for his second to come early.

“Don’t judge me,” he said to Vale. “It’s going to be a long week.”

“Aw, poor baby,” the waitress replied with a wink, putting down another frosty bottle in front of him. Lee grinned hungrily at her as he put the new beer to his lips, watching the woman’s hips as they swayed back and forth away from him.

“Not a chance,” Vale said.

“Oh, obviously,” Lee said. He gestured to his short and slender frame, the slightly misshapen face, the freckles that on others would be considered cute, but that just made him look boyish and dirty.

“She just wants a decent tip,” he continued. “And I’ll give it to her too. I’m an American, I respect the hustle.”

“How patriotic of you,” Vale said drily. “And generous. You must be making a lot of money as a knock-off parole officer, huh?”

Lee’s grin returned to a temperature that was a few degrees cooler than his beer. Don’t push it too much, Vale reminded herself. He might act like the biggest asshole on the station, but he takes his job seriously, and he’s only willing to take so much shit before he bites back.

And this little motherfucker bites hard.

Vale laughed in spite of herself. The two of them, she realized, had a lot more in common with each other than she wanted to admit. Lee, socially aware enough to know that the laughter wasn’t as his expense – not really, at least – eased back into his primary persona.

“What’s up, Giggles?”

Vale snorted, shaking her head. “Nothing. I just had a thought, that if the situation were different, we might actually work pretty well together.”

Lee smacked the table with his hand. “That’s what I’ve always thought too! If only you took the massive stick out of your ass and weren’t so damn mopey all the time...”

Now it was Vale’s turn to hand out the icy grins. “Lee,” she said, very obviously maintaining a forced sense of calm in her voice.

“Yeah, yeah, what do I want,” Lee said, waving her off. “That’s not the question, though, Vale. It’s not what I want. It’s what you want.”

Very slowly, Vale sat back in her seat and crossed her arms. She nodded slowly, putting all the pieces together in her head.

“You’re going to ask me to do a job,” she said. Lee gestured with his hand. “A big job.”

“Ehh, I wouldn’t say that,” he answered her. “Let’s be honest, you’ve been a good girl these past twenty...twenty-two...”

“Twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five years,” Lee continued. “You’ve never given us problems. You’ve never made us regret our decision-“

“Your decision?” Vale barked out a laugh. “Kid, you were still in diapers when the military kicked me out. Hell, your dad probably didn’t even have hair on his balls when I joined up!”

Lee continued onwards, ignoring her. “I know you did some training for us, after your separation and treatment. And I’ve heard...things...that suggest that you did a little more than that once things got a little dicey after Chervana...”

Vale crossed her arms and tightened her lips even further. Interesting, she thought, there’s stuff that even Lee doesn’t know. Or that he’s pretending not to know.

She squinted at him, trying to figure him out. As far as she could tell, he was being genuine. That didn’t mean he was. That didn’t mean that she should treat him like he was. But she had no reason to doubt him.

“You’ve never asked me to do a job before,” she said. “The others did. But not you.”

He shrugged. “I was never told to ask for one,” he said. He picked his beer up, realized it was empty, and stared at it for a minute. He glanced over at the waitress, drying glasses behind the bar, then put the bottle back down on the table without signaling to her.

“Well, my answer is ‘no’,” Vale said. She finished her water, then stood. “We done?”

“Sit,” he said, without looking up at her.

“I’m old, Lee,” Vale said.

“You’re fucking forty-eight,” he said. “And the military pumped enough shit into you to ensure that you’re going to be kicking ass for a hell of a while past forty-eight, Jesus.”

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“I’m tired, then,” Vale said. “I’ve taken a vow of pacifism, I’ve gone Chris-Fash, I’ve gone fucking vat-vegan, pick an excuse and tell your higher-ups I’m unavailable.”

“Vale,” Lee said in a voice she’d never heard from him before. “Sit.”

I wonder how far I can throw him, Vale wondered. It was a little thought experiment she liked to run up every time she had a conversation with the much smaller man, whether in person – last time, three years before – or by vid-call, which was once every couple of months.

But even as she imagined tossing him right over the bar and into the full display of bottles behind it, she found herself sitting back down.

“If it was something big,” he said, “we’d send someone who could handle it. Not some silver-haired bitch with one foot in the nursing home.” He made a stupid face, indicating he was joking, trying to get a laugh out of her.

It didn’t work. He sighed.

“Look, it’s important to us. We don’t think it’s particularly dangerous. But it’s...yeah, it’s gonna be fucking annoying, and it’s going to put you on the other side of The Prism for a bit.”

Vale groaned, running her hand through her hair. “Fuuuuuuck,” she said.

“Yeah, we know how you feel about that,” he said. “Which is why...we’ll owe you. Quite a bit. I mean, don’t be ridiculous about it, but-“

“I know what I want,” Vale replied.

Lee snorted. “Well, gee, I really think you want to sleep on it,” he said. “This could be a pretty good I.O.U. for you to have. I mean, artificial hips have really come down in price over the past fifty years, and gingko biloba pills are manufactured right here on Elysalla, so you don’t want to squander it on something you can easily get on your own.”

“Fuck you,” Vale said. “I know what I want.” She jabbed a finger at him. “I want out.”

Lee, confused, threw his hands up in the air in an exaggerated fasion. The waitress, spotting him, reached for another beer but he waved her off.

“You want out?” he said. “You’re not in anything.”

“Oh the hell I’m not,” she replied. “I’m in observation.”

Lee rolled his eyes. Vale continued.

“No, I am,” she said. “And it’s not benevolent. It’s not for my own good, because it’s not like you’ve invested in that, signed me up for therapy or yoga or dumped me in some Zen monastery or something. And it’s not for public safety. If you wanted to make sure others were safe from me, you would have put a bullet in my head and dumped me a long time ago.”

“I kinda wanna do that right now,” Lee grimaced.

“You’ve got me on ice. And you’ve had me on ice for a while. The earlier stuff...yeah, some of it was just testing me, and some of it was because you literally had nobody else to help when the Christo-Fascists were stacking bodies. But all of that’s done with-“

“I wish,” Lee grumbled.

“But you’ve still been keeping an eye on me. I still have to talk to you every few months. I still have to see you every few years. I know that you’ve got my place bugged, I know you’ve got a tap on my communications, I know that probably two out of every three people I regularly interact with get paid to report on me-“

“Paranoid, much?”

“Sure. Doesn’t mean I’m wrong. So you’ve been keeping me on ice. Watching me. Waiting for...for I don’t know what, but I’m tired of it.”

Lee finally waved the waitress over for his third beer. “Okay, let’s not pretend that you haven’t benefited from this arrangement.

“I never said I haven’t,” Vale continued.

“You caused...a major fucking problem. And we covered for you, even though it fucking hurt. And we didn’t put a bullet in your head. And we made sure you got better.”

Vale barked out a laugh.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re still fucked up, whatever, we all are,” Lee said. “But we’ve made sure that you’ve lived comfortably. Gotten you jobs, housing. Padded your bank account here and there for rainy days. Moved you halfway across the solar system – twice – when you felt like having a change of scenery.”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“We even kept that dumb little addict friend of yours out of trouble more than-“

“I said,” Vale answered between gritted teeth, “that I got it.” She took a deep breath. “I still want out.”

Lee downed his beer like it was water and he was a man on a thousand-year journey through the Sahara. “You want out,” he said, rolling the words around in his mouth. “What would that even mean? Or look like?”

“No more checking in,” she said, ticking points of on her fingers. “No more keeping tabs on me. No more monitoring me. I never want to see or hear from you again.”

“Feeling’s fucking mutual, granny.”

“I want a new identity. And I want you...all of you...” she said, gesturing to Lee as well as the invisible puppeteers pulling his strings, “...to forget I ever existed.”

Vale watched Lee tap his fingers on the tabletop as he (she assumed) pretended to consider her request. It certainly was a longshot.

No, she reminded herself. A long shot actually has a chance of hitting the target. It just wasn’t possible. There was no way to free yourself from the brand of InnGov, the inner, central government that managed somehow to keep all of the planets, space stations, and everything between beneath a primary legal framework. And she’d earned her brand while she was still a child, back before InnGov even existed. True, maybe there was a brief period of time after InnGov was formed and defeated the religio-fascists that she could have escaped, slipped away in the chaos, faked her death, something...but she still bought into her old role, still thought that she could claw her way back into the military, back into the good graces of the men and women that she called brothers and sisters...and if it had been just up to them, maybe she could have. But...

She shook her head, confused. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

Lee held out his hand. “Deal.”

She looked at him, brow furrowed, uncertain as to whether or not he was completely fucking with her, or if this was actually all just a dream.

“New identity. Random pull and repurpose from the citizen database. We stop paying attention to you, we don’t look for you, we stop asking for help and giving it in return, and you never see or hear me again.”

Lee pushed his hand even further forward. Again, Vale had no way of knowing what Lee looked like when he was lying with big stakes on the line...but from his face, if he was anything other than being genuine right now, then he had the best goddamn poker face in the whole of the solar system.

Vale reached out, hesitated, then took Lee’s hand in hers. She shook it hard, once.

“Deal,” she heard herself say. But then, a quieter voice, one inside her head, followed it.

What the fuck did I just get myself into?

----------------------------------------

“Ninety-eight,” Vale huffed, “Ninety-nine. One-hundred.”

She uncurled herself slowly, listening to the resistance cables groan and whine as they fought to spring back into their normal configuration. She reached out and grabbed the towel velcroed to the exercise station and pulled it free.

She was sweating, sure. And her stomach had that hollow ache from a decent core workout. But it just wasn’t the same, doing it under microgravity, using some stupid, too-perfect machine instead of her own body-weight under full gravity.