When Kayla came back up to the kitchen later, she was beaming. "Alia's OK! We caught up, she's going to try and raise some money to charter me a flight to her."

Buster's back was to her as he stirred a stock pot on the electric stove. "That's great! I know some pilots around here, I can recommend someone trustworthy. And if she comes up short I can help a little, I don't have a ton of money but I also don't have a ton of expenses."

"Oh, it felt so good to hear her voice again! A day ago I thought I was never going to see her again, I couldn't have done this without your help." she thanked him.

Buster turned to face her. "I'll be honest, at first I was worried that Alia might not be real. Long distance relationships turning out to be scams is something that happens a lot these days. I was worried that maybe that was what had happened to you. Glad that's not the case."

"I had similar worries about you. Glad that wasn't the case either." she acknowledged.

He nodded with a small smile, switching off the stove. "Here, let's get this up to Petro's room. He usually takes his meals alone, only especially cool guests ever get to go upstairs."

There was a pair of large oven mitts hanging on a hook by the stove, and Buster used them to grab them handles of the pot. He lifted it with a soft grunt, beckoning her to follow him as he went up the stairs. She was uneasy watching the large bear lurch up each step and hearing the soup splashing inside. She let him climb all the way up before skittering up behind him.

"Hey Petro, coming in with Kayla and some split pea soup." Buster called out as he pushed the door open with his shoulder.

The small room simply had a bed in the corner with a desk next to it and a set of cubbyhole shelves lining the far wall. Petro was laying on his stomach, propped up on several small pillows and covered with a thin blanket. He was typing onto a laptop computer in front of him while occasionally looking off to a larger monitor on the desk beside him. Around him on his bed were the scatterings of daily living: a pair of pliers, empty snack bar wrappers, transparent water bottles in varying states of fullness, empty urinals hanging from the wall in arm's reach.

Buster set the pot of soup on the desk and then scanned the bed, deftly snatching up the empty wrappers and bottles around Petro and dropping them into a trashcan by the bed. Then he walked over to a small closet in the corner and pulled out two folding chairs, opening one and offering it to her. "That's the thing about people in wheelchairs, they don't really need regular chairs so I have to bring them out for guests. I usually stand when it's just me, probably why I'm in better shape in my 40s than I was in my 20s!" Buster teased.

"It took me all morning to make it here, for a guy who complains about being old you sure do go on a lot of hours-long night walks." Kayla teased back.

"I don't always walk that far, only when I'm looking for someone I've heard about. And I'm feeling it today, there's a reason I'm using a chair instead of standing and looking cool." he admitted.

Kayla took the offered chair and set it down next to Petro's bed. Buster's ears gave a flick and he smacked his forehead, remembering.

"Oh crud, I forgot the bowls. One second, I'll be right back! We have a routine, whenever someone else is around it throws me off." Buster apologized, ducking out of the room.

Kayla felt very awkward, alone with someone in their most personal space.

"Yeah, Buster's definitely getting a little scatterbrained these past few years. He tells me that it's one of the long-term side effects of the stuff he smokes, but I've seen what he's like when he doesn't have it. I can't fault him too much. I'd rather have a forgetful assistant who can take criticism than an uptight assistant who can't." Petro said with disarming frankness.

Kayla decided to go with that frankness. "Does he have a problem? I'm no stranger to drugs but I've also lost a few friendships to them. I know people can be really good at hiding a problem until they don't."

Petro laughed, a short sharp barking Ha!

"Buster definitely has a problem, but it's not the weed. I went to Zed Steadman because I got hooked on painkillers and the kingpin I was working for used them to control me. When Buster runs out of weed he gets grumpy and cries more, when my old boss cut me off I destroyed my life and his empire just to make sure I had somewhere I would survive when my stash ran out. Admittedly I'm an outlier, but I spent a lot of time with other addicts while I was in recovery; the whole reason I liked Buster was because he was different." he explained.

Kayla was still processing Petro's words when Buster loudly pushed the door open with his shoulder. Each of his paws was clutching a water bottle while the three wooden bowls were tucked under his arm. "Got 'em! We needed to let the soup cool anyways, no big deal."

"Did you remember the spoons?" Petro asked.

Buster smacked his forehead with the palm of his paw. Emptying his arms onto the table, he opened a drawer on the desk and pulled out three wooden spoons. "We started keeping these here because I forget them so often." he explained, only a little embarrassed.

He filled Petro's bowl first, steam rising off the smooth green liquid. The panda set it on his keyboard in front of him with a spoon already in the bowl. Then he poured Kayla's, handing her bowl to her. Finally he filled his own, sitting down in his chair beside hers.

She tried it. It was savory, a strong umami flavor, the silky smoothness of the soup carrying soft slivers of vegetable. "I usually put sausage in ours but I figured I'd avoid cross-contamination if possible."

"Thank you, it's very good. Usually when meat eaters try and cook for me it's very bland." she said.

"I'm not a super good cook but Petro likes the same things over and over so I get lots of practice. I can roll him a breakfast burrito in my sleep by now." Buster explained.

"It's great, I don't have to deal with nurses scolding me about food anymore. Even at old Zed Steadman they would try and pressure me to eat stuff I didn't want to, Buster just finds ways to dress up the food I already like." Petro gave a big slurp of his soup after blowing on the spoon.

Kayla had been starving, so even though it hadn't been that long since the burgers she dug in hungrily.

"There's always some left over so help yourself to whatever's in the fridge whenever you like. Just don't mess with the carton behind the ice packs in the freezer." Buster instructed.

"What is it, some kind of lab sample?" she asked between slurps of soup.

Petro answered, "A few years back someone stranded Buster on an uncharted planet with only a birthday cake for food. It was supposed to be ironic, I think? I rescued him after about a day so he's been saving the cake to feed it to the guy as a last meal if he ever meets him again."

Buster exhaled loudly, "Geez dude, it's not that dark. I just thought it would be a really good goof to show up with the cake and be like 'you forgot your slice, I couldn't start the party without you'!"

Kayla snorted.

"Buster's really good at that, getting under peoples' skin. It's why he was such a good bounty hunter: we'd pick the ones that were holed up and Buster would just annoy them into surrendering." Petro wiggled his eyebrows playfully.

"Yeah it was great! Petro would pass all the dangerous ones onto the professionals. But if it was someone with no combat experience who was holed up or fleeing then sometimes I would take a shot at it. I've been there, I get how scary and desperate it can be. They're expecting some assassin type so they're trigger happy and paranoid. When a fat old bounty hunter starts prank calling them they have no idea how to handle it." Buster reminisced.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

"Ooh, tell her about the otter porn bounty, that one was great." Petro suggested.

"Oh man, the otter porn! That was so fucking funny. It needs some setup though, you up for it?" Buster asked Kayla.

"Go for it." she said, licking her spoon clean with her forked pink tongue.

Buster sat his bowl down and excitedly began to tell the story.

"Otters have this longstanding ethnic rivalry between river otters and sea otters. To this day, even under Nakunan rule, their home planet is still bitterly divided by civil war and unrest. There's this sea otter who's a big money laundering guy. He got busted funneling money to anti-river otter hate groups and gets burned for exposing them as a result, so he's on the run. Petro is able to track him down to this vacant beach house through his communicator, so I show up and stand right in front where he can see me and call him."

Buster made a fist and uncurled his thumb and pointer finger, imitating a handgun. He grabbed his wrist with his other paw and began flailing around in playful pantomime of frantically brandishing a gun. "So he's yelling and cussing at me over the communicator: 'you'll never take me alive', 'I will give my life for the sea and her people, "the rivers will run red with the blood of race traitors', stuff like that. I let him wear himself out, try and behave as best I can as he goes through his whole manifesto with citations."

The panda put his paw down and faced Kayla again with a satisfied grin. "Once he finally stops, I just pick up the communicator again real cool-like. I tell him that my skip tracer found a bunch of river otter porn on his tablet and if he doesn't shut up and come out peacefully we're going to send it to everyone in his communicator contacts. 'Surrender and your old friends in prison won't know you're a race traitor', real spicy stuff."

Petro raised his arm. "I feel the need to mention that this was all a bluff on Buster's part. It's technically possible to do a remote data breach like that. I have done it before many times. I could have actually done it if he asked! But Buster just made all this bullshit up on the spot to try and psyche him out."

"Yeah, and it fucking worked!" Buster beamed, "Same way I took down those mechs back in the day: it doesn't matter how powerful something is as a whole, it's made up of smaller components and those components have weaknesses. His weakness just happened to be river otters."

"So it was a lucky guess?" Kayla asked. The most she had ever negotiated for was a passing grade, so this was all very fascinating and new for her.

"Well, not exactly." said Buster, "It's a known thing that whenever you have this kind of deep-seated generational trauma and conflict in a culture it finds its way into their pornography. It's very reductive to say that every bigot secretly likes the thing they hate, but on a population level it does shake out more often than not. So it was an educated guess!"

"Buster's good at association and connections. He'd be a great skip tracer if he could learn some basic code." Petro praised his friend.

"But that's never going to happen, so I'm happy just being the assistant of a great skip tracer." he finished the thought. Not without humor and affection, but it was obvious that this was an answer he had given before.

Kayla wanted to ask why but she was interrupted by an arpeggio of sharp chirps from her communicator. Without thinking, she pulled it out and looked down at the display. The new operating system not only displayed the incoming frequency but helpfully noted that it was a Nakunan Empire military frequency.

She froze. She looked up at Petro and Buster, unsure what to do.

"Crap, I was supposed to go over this with you." Buster exclaimed to himself, nervously raking his claws across his scalp in thought, "Too late. Look, don't let them know about me or Petro. We're going to need the element of surprise, hide as much as you can. Try and get info out of them. Don't feel like you have to be nice." he rattled off advice at a rapid clip, concluding simply "I trust you. I'm right here. You'll do fine."

His eyes met hers. She could see the wrinkles in his eye spots. She trusted him.

Kayla used the claw of her thumb to accept the call.

"Hello, this is Kayla. May I ask who is calling?" she answered in an uncharacteristically polite tone.

When Buster's parents were young, communicators had handheld mouthpieces and detachable earpieces to accommodate the diversity of ears and snouts across the Nakunan Empire. Now the trio were listening to the haggard voice on the speaker as if its owner were in the room with them.

"My name is Buka Nightingale. I work with your parents. They sent me to rescue you." he said in a low masculine voice far back in his throat, sounding powerful and measured while lacking force and presence.

Kayla opened her mouth to respond but stopped herself. Thought over her words for a moment. Kept her jaw locked until she was ready to speak. "I don't need rescuing."

"I don't care." Buka replied with matching disinterest, "I'm about 40 hours out from Redtree, you're going to need to find a place I can land by then."

No. She thought, thankfully stopped by her locked jaw. This was an opportunity.

"Okay. How big a ship are you landing? I need to know how much space you need."

"I'm not landing in a clearing in the woods. Find the spaceport. Have them contact this frequency and I'll pick you up. If I don't hear from anyone by the time I arrive, then I'm parking on my own and I'm taking my walker down to your transmitter's last location. Do you understand?"

She stopped herself from saying yes. She was getting angry at how readily she capitulated without even realizing it. How often had she done this before today and just not caught herself? She pushed the thought away, but the distraction had done its job and now she couldn't think of what to say.

The pause was starting to get noticeably long, and nothing was coming to mind.

"You don't have to do this." she finally said with a simple sincerity.

"I'm glad to have the opportunity." he replied in turn, disconnecting the call.

Processing that Buka had hung up on her, she looked back over to Buster and Petro. The panda was beaming and the human was flashing her a thumbs-up with his bowed arm. She wondered why she was surprised.

"Great job! I'm really sorry I forgot to prep you, thanks for picking up my slack there." he praised her with casual generosity.

"Really? I thought I did a bad job. I didn't get anything out of him and he hung up on me. He gave me homework! I feel like I'm back at university, this sucks." Kayla sighed.

"That's the point. Everyone goes to school, school trains people to act a certain way. If you don't know who you're up against and they're inexperienced, treating them like a disobedient child and hoping their school programming will kick in has a pretty good chance of working." Buster theorized against the staccato tapping of Petro's keyboard, "But it goes both ways: when you treat someone like a child you're not treating them like an equal, so your guard is down. He told us his full name, we have a timeline for his arrival, and he doesn't seem to suspect that you'll resist or fight back. This is perfect!"

"Agreed. Buster, if you could take my bowl. I think I'm going to be busy working on this skiptrace for the rest of the evening. I've eaten enough." Petro said without taking his eyes off of the screen.

Kayla leaned over to look at the monitors. The laptop screen reminded her of the new startup screen on her phone: colored text on a black background, columns and boxes she couldn't begin to parse. The monitor suspended on an arm showed a more detailed display of a graphical search interface for some kind of boring-looking database. It reminded her of the research catalogues at her university library, on the old computers that still used radio filaments stored in resin cartridges.

Buster dutifully scooped up Petro's mostly-empty bowl, idly cradling the bottom with his free paw to keep it from tipping and spilling. "You still eating?" he asked her.

Kayla looked down at her bowl. It was half empty but she wasn't hungry anymore. "Nah, I think I'm good."

The panda gave a knowing smile. "It's probably the epinephrine. I learned that the hard way. I lived a comfortable life for a long time, so when me and Petro went on the lam I was so shaken so often I just didn't eat very much. I used to be almost twice as heavy as I am now! I was very cute but it was really hard to find scrubs that fit."

She didn't say anything, but as he leaned down and scooped up her bowl in his free paw she looked closely. She could see how loosely the skin was hanging off of his arm under his fur, and just under the sleeve of his scrubs she could see the snug dark fabric of a compression shirt.

"I'll be right back up for the soup pot, I know better than to try to carry everything at once again." Buster called out as he left the room and they heard his footfalls descending the stairs.

Petro continued to tap away in silence.

Without Buster's constant rapport distracting her, she was starting to fully comprehend the situation she was in: Someone from the military was coming to get her, whether she wanted to come or not. They had a ship and a walker. They were threatening to harm the people who had helped her if she didn't cooperate.

"I'm not cooperating with them." she thought out loud, provoking a rapid glance from the corner of Petro's eye.

"But what are we going to do?" she thought aloud again.

"That's what we're going to be spending the rest of the evening figuring out. I've already got some positive flags from my brokers, once we know more about who and what we're facing we can figure out what to do." he said, typing.

Kayla wasn't assured by his words. Until now it had only been her at risk, now other people were in danger. During the days she had spent on the streets of Big Zig, she had found herself wondering how far she would go to survive. She had enjoyed the recent reprieve, but now she was contemplating her limits again.

Buster returned, fetched the pot of soup, and returned from the kitchen once again without the conversation picking up. Petro was lost in work, Kayla was lost in guilt.

"Hey, I'm gonna step out for a weed break. You wanna join me?" Buster offered Kayla.

"Sure." she said, eager to have an excuse to think about anything else.