After napping for a few hours, Kayla was awoken by a knocking at her door.

When she opened it, she was greeted by a small pale-skinned human in a motorized wheelchair. Buster dutifully stood behind him. Kayla wasn't familiar with humans but this one definitely looked different from the others, his short bowed legs and arms reminded her more of her own limbs than any other human she'd seen.

"Are you Kayla? I'm Petro. Buster told me you needed me to mod your communicator?" he said with more shyness than she expected.

"Yeah. Nice to meet you Petro." she said with the flatness of the recently-awoken.

"Would you like some coffee?" Buster offered, "This won't take long, but Petro will need to show you how to use the new operating system once he's finished. You'll want to be awake for that."

"Actually? Yeah! That sounds great. You don't mind?" Kayla stifled a small yawn.

"Not at all." the panda assured her.

"Sure then. Thanks, Buster."

The panda reached down and gave Petro a pat on the shoulder; affectionate and caring, but not the touch of a lover. Then he turned around and was off.

Petro backed his wheelchair up and turned to the cleared workbench, nudging as close to the edge as he could. "Could you get the cardboard box and the toolkit out of my backpack for me? Buster should have taken it out before he left, he's very enthusiastic."

Kayla followed behind Petro and reached into the unzipped backpack hanging from the push handles of his wheelchair. She pulled the small rectangular packages out from a nest of loose electronic components and wrapped snack cakes. "These?"

"Yeah, if you could set those and your communicator here in front of me I should be able to mod and flash it pretty quickly. Just so you know, depending on your model there is a chance that I could brick it. If that happens you can just have one of mine. I'll back it up so you can keep all your contacts regardless." he explained with the practiced patience of someone who has spent a lifetime asking other people for help.

She did as she was told and watched as he picked up her communicator. He flipped it around, looking it over. "Ooh, this is an Abraxis Sinclaire. This is nicer than I was expecting, I should have no problem modding it. There's even room in the case for a mod chip, like the engineers were throwing a bone to the guys who smuggle their nootropics."

"I don't really know a lot about tech, my parents bought it for me when I was in college. They suck, but they're rich so at least I got some nice toys from them over the years. Wish I hadn't left my tablet on the ship, I'll probably never be able to afford one that nice again." Kayla reflected.

Petro flipped her communicator over on the workbench and used a lightweight powered precision screwdriver to pop out one security screw after another. "If it's from your parents it could have some kind of tracker in it. The Abby's niche is being modular, if they got it for you there's probably a reason why."

Kayla nervously squeezed her leg with her tail. She had never considered that her parents would go to that length. Just like how she never considered that her parents would catch her buying the ticket on their card. Or that they would go so far as to revoke her passport to try and stop her. She was realizing that maybe her parents weren't as stupid as she thought they were. "I hope not, getting away from them has been the one upside to all this."

Petro pulled the back off of her communicator. "Oh yeah, there's a tracker in here. A nice one too, has its own discrete little battery and a cache in case of signal loss. I guess the good news is that if you hadn't found us then eventually someone would have come for you."

"Oh, that isn't good news. My parents are both higher ups in the Nakunan military, and they're already doing weird string-pulling bullshit to stop me from running away. If they know I'm here, anyone they send is going to be from the military. They're going to find this place!" Kayla nervously rapped her claws on the workbench surface.

Petro used a pair of precision pliers to gently pull the tracker out and put it in a small foil bag, wrapping it shut. "Well, your signal isn't going out anymore so to them it's going to look like you vanished in our basement. When whoever they send arrives, they're going to head right here." the human explained.

She pulled at her hair. "How are you so calm about this? I thought this was a secret settlement, isn't Nakuna finding this place a big deal?"

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Petro didn't turn to face her but she could see the unabashed smirk on his face. "You think Nakuna doesn't know about this place? Big Zig couldn't get this big without it getting out somehow, we're just not worth the resources to take out. Orbital missile bombardments are incredibly expensive, and even Nakuna knows better than to try and siege a guerilla settlement when the war has them dancing on a razor's edge. There have been a few times Nakuna tried to send agents in, infiltrators. They didn't report back."

There it was again. She knew that this was a dangerous place with dangerous people, but still. Having them be so frank about it sent shivers down her scales. She didn't belong here, she had a new life with Alia waiting for her.

Petro continued, fishing through his box of mod chips as he talked. "I told Buster to give you a foil bag for you to put your communicator in, in case this happened. He told me that if you tell a scared person to meet a stranger at a strange location and not have their communicator at the ready when they do, then they won't come. So I agreed, on the condition that Buster handle any complications that might arise. I'm sure he'll handle this one, just like all the others."

The small human let out an excited hoot and pulled out a small chip, leaning forward to gingerly position it on the exposed board of the communicator. Kayla leaned in and watched, bored by the technology but fascinated by seeing an expert at ease in their field. There was a satisfying click as he slipped the chip into the bare spot on the board where the tracker once sat, using the fine screwdriver to attach the corners of the mod chip to the supports.

"Do you want me to leave?" she asked, "If they show up and I'm not here then maybe they'll just go."

Petro pulled out a thin cordless soldering iron and unspooled a fine filament. He had to hold it with both hands to steady himself as he gingerly bridged the connections. "That's not how they operate on lawless planets. They don't have to follow procedure, they're here to kick doors and swing dicks. It's like getting to take a vacation from the rules for them, they love it. If you're not here, they'll raise hell until they find you and a lot of people are going to hurt."

The soldering smoke rose around them like incense. Kayla felt a sudden sinking feeling in her stomach. "You're not going to turn me over to them, are you?"

"I'd rather die than help Nakuna." Petro said simply, "If you wanted to turn yourself over, I would try and talk you out of it."

Once again, the tegu felt incredibly grateful for the kindness of the men who were helping her. "Thank you."

The soldering finished, the human pulled out his own communicator and set it on the table next to hers. She had a sleek one with a simple number pad but his was chunky with a large screen and a small physical keyboard. "It's a developer model!" he said proudly as he pulled out a cable and connected first his and then hers together, "The physical keyboard is a lot easier for me, so I use it even when I'm not flashing other peoples' communicators."

He powered up his communicator with a series of keystrokes that left the screen spitting out simple amber text on a black background. Kayla had only seen computers look like this a few times in her life, and always when something had gone seriously wrong. She felt awkward just standing there as his fingers flew over the keys.

"It's really cool you can do that." she finally said in simple appreciation, "I had to take two years of programming language to get into University and it was the hardest class I ever took in high school. I'm so bad at computers that I had to study with physical flash cards; I couldn't even figure out how to program my own."

"I'm lucky that programming is so hard for most people, it's job security!" he said proudly.

There was a key in the lock and Buster returned with a transparent plastic insulated tumbler in his paw, the pink lid latched closed. "Here you go! Hope I didn't miss too much."

"There was a tracker, I was right." Petro said without turning around, lines of text flashing on the screen faster than she could read them, "Remind me to skip trace later to see if I can find anything about who's coming for her."

Kayla didn't even have to say anything, Buster was already explaining. "Skip tracing is kind of like bounty hunting but with information. Petro used to do it to pay the bills when we were drifters, a couple times I even used it to hunt down a bounty myself! It was super cool, I always talked them down and convinced them to surrender. I wouldn't recommend it as a career though, it feels slimy. Like working as a collections agent but for peoples' lives."

The tegu processed his words. "So what exactly did you get up to between the old Zed Steadman shutting down and the new one opening up? Sounds like you went through a lot."

Petro spoke up, "I've already got your communicator flashed and I'm just setting it up now. We'll be done in a few minutes, not enough time for Buster to start one of his stories. Maybe we could talk more over dinner?"

Buster seemed excited. "I made soup! We eat a lot of soup: it's easy to make and Petro doesn't have any of his original teeth anymore."

"My teeth are printed!" Petro joked, "The brittle bones affect teeth so mine have always been awful. Very glad we met that dentist who was willing to yank out the stragglers so I could get dentures like I always wanted."

"I've lost a lot of mine too. Got a couple knocked out in fights over the past decade, but most of them are because I spent my 20s and 30s drinking heavily and not brushing my teeth." said Buster.

Kayla flashed her small pointed teeth at both of them. "I'll keep that in mind."

Petro unplugged the cable from her communicator and held down the power button. The screen flashed to life, not with the usual ornate animation but with simple lines of text before booting to her familiar home screen. He picked it up in one hand and used the other to tilt his wheelchair's control stick, turning to hand it to her.

"Here you go. I was able to keep your settings intact so all your contacts are still there. I need to show you how to do some stuff without the proprietary software that came with your communicator, but it will only take a few minutes. Then you can call Alia while we get dinner ready." he said.