After a night like that, you’d think I’d be getting the best sleep of my life. I sure as hell would’ve appreciated something along the lines of a catatonic stupor, maybe a short-term coma. Anything to bask in the complete and utter exhaustion and let my body process its many new aches as slowly as it needs. Unfortunately, my mind has other plans.

Four hours after furtively dropping Bishop off at a hospital deep in the Electric Town and only sticking around long enough to ensure Metro Blockhouse personnel came to ferry him back to the arena, I find myself sitting awake in my own bed, in my own apartment, with no explanation in my head as to why I can’t fall asleep. Jolie snores quietly beneath heavy quilts on the other side of the room. Her old-fashioned glasses rest on the bedside table between us atop her dogeared romance novel, now with a new bookmark near the end. A holographic clock briefly illuminates under my touch to relay dire warnings about the temperature outside. Fuzzy circles of dimmed neon drift through our window to move in firefly swirls across the ceiling, not yet banished by the rising sun. I watch them and listen to the rain as I sit.

No nervous sweat stains my sheets. No panicked thoughts chase cobwebs in the corner of my mind. We outwitted Shimano Heavy’s best assassin, stole back a missing pro fighter, and sent the corporation’s shattered enforcers limping back to their bosses in shambles. The stakes are clear now. The corporation can’t threaten us like they thought they could. They can’t stop us from returning to the city. Nothing of the night’s rest has changed that. No mercenary warriors with unscrupulous morals came to smash down my door while I was trying to sleep. I’m safe.

I look to my twin sister. Rusty tendrils of hair flutter away from her nose at regular intervals. She’s safe too. Soon the clouds will turn from black to grey and news of Bishop’s rescue will hit the streams and we’ll meet in the common room to figure out the next step to taking down Vex and Prazen, if one even needs exist.

So why can’t I sleep?

I brush my teeth in silence. Activate a suite of sound-suppressing privacy screens before turning on the fan and sitting under a stream of scalding water while abrasive auto-scrubbers pry the exhaustion from my eyes. I slap at the shower’s holographic display when it squawks at me to pick a soap for the fifth time. Scents of apples and sea salt steam in the air. Only bothering to find boxers and a too-large shirt, I pad into the living room expecting to see the wild animal roosting there draped over my couch like an unruly blanket. Instead, I find her lingering in front of the muted stream screen, bare to the waist and covered in bandaging while she watches a nature program of a faraway Section’s mountainous rainforests with longing, enraptured eyes. Rain falls there, too.

If watching her is like watching a fire spark, then this is the coals that remain when the night burns low. Orange hair winds between her fingers in small, repetitive loops. Sometimes she pauses to wrap white bandaging around a wound. Her old revolver lies empty on the coffee table between forgotten rolls of antibac tape. Only in the quiet do I finally see how much older than her the weapon is. Scars enough for two lives. In the moment, human and licking her wounds, she seems so small and tired beside it. A lone girl holding up a city’s worth of guilty weight.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

Mori’s shoulders jump in a small start when I drop a pillow and ease down onto the floor beside her, groaning from a strain in my hamstrings. A multitude of verdant colors reflect in her eyes from the stream. Her tongue runs along her upper teeth while she thinks of a response.

“There’s so much green,” she finally says, still watching the screen. “I bet they don’t even think about it.”

“I think they do. I don’t take the neon here for granted.”

“You’re really bad about giving people the benefit of the doubt, flyboy.”

“That I am,” I sigh. “My sister tells me it’s going to get me killed someday.”

“Jolie’s a smart girl.”

“She’s also an unrepentant skeptic. I like to believe in the best everyone can be.”

“Some people need that.” Mori’s nails trace an unthinking circle on the floor. “They don’t have anyone else to believe in them.”

“And you?”

She sighs at the rainforest. “I have people who need me.”

Slowly, I reach over and brush a finger past her ear, calling her to turn until we’re looking right at each other. “You have more than that. I believe in you.”

A flash of horrible, horrible hurt flashes through her eyes. “You shouldn’t say stuff like that,” she whispers. Quickly-buried wetness forms as she looks away. Towards her gun. Her knuckles curl against her lips. “You don’t know who I am. The mistakes I’ve made, the things I’ve done.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“They wouldn’t matter anyways. Not to me.”

She sniffs quietly, smiles sadly. “I know. I like that.”

Her gaze drops while her heart searches for the right words, and eventually settles on the first that come to mind. “I’ve been a lot of things in my life,” she murmurs. “A liability to feed. A rat to shoot. A threat. A friend. A mistake. A daughter.” She pauses to collect herself. “You’re the first person in a long time who’s looked at me like I was brand new.” Her eyes drift back up. “Even when AJ and Jolie would have left me in the Vents for being the person I needed to survive, you still believed in me. I know I can sometimes be…”

“…a handful?”

She chuckles. “Yeah. But you put up with it. You stuck with me. I could tell you thought I was better inside than I was out. You were wrong… but it made me wish you weren’t. That I was what you thought I was. And that I don’t have to be what I used to be.” Her voice sobers up. “It sounds stupid, but I want to earn those dumb lovebird looks you give me sometimes. So I’m trying to work on it. That, and a lot of other shit.”

My fingers trail away. “I’m not that obvious about looking.”

Mori’s legs shift as she curls two fingers against my jaw. Slowly, conscious of our bruising from the train, she slips across my lap and straddles me beneath the holographic light of the artificial rainforest. Her bandaged chest presses warm against my shirt. Silky hair makes a hood to cover us as it spills into mine.

“You have a lot of tells,” she whispers, hooking her arms around my neck. “I like that too.”

Her warm lips slide between my own. Her hips push hungrily into mine, fingers raking across my scalp. My hands draw her close and caress her back into an arch while we kiss silhouetted by the slumbering storm, and sleepless neon blinks on outside.

-

Grey dawn rules the skies by the time my sister finally emerges from our bedroom. I’m too tired to even notice her arrival at first. Only the telltale scent of her morning caf and a chin deposited atop my head break me out of my stupor.

I blink free from the JOY screen projected over our living room’s table to see the apartment already transformed by her morning rituals. Warm lights I don’t remember activating illuminate the kitchen. Caf bubbles out of sight, an earthy smell in the air. The stream screen across the room now plays sensationalist news from the pro leagues instead of Mori’s rainforest. Jolie’s getting sneakier.

“You’re just zoned out,” she corrects, leaving me with a scratch on the head before drifting down to a nearby chair. She eyes the half-empty couch. “Did you stay up all night?”

A miniscule twitch of my fingers opens a mirror in the corner of my screen. Dark circles dominate beneath my eyes to a rare degree. My hand curls around the side of my head like a brooding stoic. One tucked-in knee supports my chin. Hard blue light skitters across my face. I look like Jolie does after pulling an all-nighter at her internship. Hunched over a projection in my sleepwear, absorbed in watching replays of my first fight against Prazen. Frame-by-frame, meticulously stitched clips of his most common habits tick through animated loops on the right side of the screen. The largest of the clips oscillates through his footwork patterns like a turnstyle disc.

“Most of it,” I murmur, concealing a yawn with my palm.

Her glasses are unable to hide the familial concern in her eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just studying.”

“You don’t study, Mars. That’s why I’m asking.”

I blink slowly, not even watching the text scrolling slowly by. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Jolie takes a sip of caf and sinks back into her chair. Our silence stretches.

“Where’s Peaches?” she asks.

“Checking on her hideout. She’ll be back soon.”

“Liar.”

“Getting donuts.”

“Better.” Reaching into her pocket, Jolie takes out her JOY and opens a projection of her own, idly swiping through the air. “Heard anything from Ajax? He’s supposed to be here by now.”

“He was supposed to be here thirty minutes ago,” I say. I’m about to shut off JOY and steal some of Jolie’s caf when a high-priority message darts into the top of the screen. A peculiar two-tone note announces its arrival. Jolie’s eyebrows raise at the noise. It’s an emergency contact.

“Who’s it from?” she asks, already up and padding over to investigate.

I turn my screen just enough for her to see the source; the same hospital we deposited Bishop at. The brief glimpse assuages her curiosity enough for me to power down the sphere and shove it into my pocket before she can summon up the entirety of the message. Before she can protest, I snag a windbreaker jacket from the closet and duck into our room to pull on a pair of crimson compression leggings. Inline climate control crawls up my legs in waves as the inline heating activates. My fingers are wrapped around the handle to the balcony a moment later.

“I’m going to check it out,” I tell Jolie, nodding for her to look after the front door. “Keep an eye out here and let me know when Ajax shows. I’ll only be a few minutes away by flight.”

Jolie is my sister, my confidant, and an incredibly smart woman in her own right. She knows I’m lying to her. She just doesn’t know why. I vault the balcony railing and drop into the storm, taking flight over the rainswept Electric Town with a troubled truth I can’t tell her burning a hole in my stomach.

Ajax Lionhart, like my sister, is never late to anything.