Behind Zed Steadman, it had gotten dark enough for the street lights to switch from the stark supplementary blue light of daytime to the softer yellows of nighttime. The neighbors were closed, but like most stores in Big Zig the proprietors lived above their businesses and there were lights on upstairs. The owners were off living their lives, and Kayla wondered if she was bringing an end to that. It was an awful feeling.

Buster leaned back against the wall with an audible sigh of relief. The panda reached into the shirt pocket of his scrubs. Without looking down he casually pulled out a long, slender vaporizer and pressed the tapered tip to his muzzle. As he inhaled in a slow and practiced draw, she watched the slouched and deflated form of the old man straighten up. He held for a few moments and then cooly exhaled from his muzzle, tripping on a few small coughs at the very end.

"Would you like some? I'm friends with the farmer who grows it, I never have to worry about running out." he offered.

She looked at it. She had had fun with weed before. But she also had a lot of friends who stopped being fun to hang out with because all they wanted to do was smoke weed and watch bad movies. She liked drugs as a treat and a way to expand her horizons, and was thankful that she didn't seem to need them in the way some of her peers did.

"I don't know. I feel like I should be focused on what we're going to do, and getting high will make that harder for me." she explained, feeling defensive for reasons she couldn't explain.

In college, sometimes people took it personally when she didn't want to smoke with them. That was another reason she stopped hanging out with people like that in college. So she was a little relieved when he just gave her a small nod and withdrew his paw.

"Then you probably shouldn't, good call. I wish I was like that, I'm just wound too tight. I wasted too much time trying to live with being uncomfortable in my own skin to feel bad about needing a crutch." he said, and she recognized her own defensiveness in him.

"It's OK." she assured him, joining him in leaning against the wall, "I can't imagine there are many therapists out here, or regular pharmaceutical deliveries for that matter."

"Yeah, when we first left Old Zed Steadman I ran out of medication pretty quickly. I had about a week where I was totally useless and miserable and Petro had to take care of me instead of the other way around. I didn't think he would stay with me, but he did. It's one of the reasons I'm so dedicated to him: he's been just as dedicated to me every step of the way. I just don't live the kind of life where I can take a week off whenever a solar sailer gets intercepted, and regardless of who wins the war I'll always be a fugitive." he explained with regret in his voice.

"You're both lucky to have each other." she said, missing Alia dearly and wondering if she should call her.

"I'm lucky. Petro's smart." he said.

Buster took another long drag on his vaporizer. The thin grey cloud he exhaled smelled sweet and acrid, but nowhere near as strong as the reeking dormitories she had eventually avoided.

"You're gonna make it." he finally said, "Don't feel bad. Someone from Nakuna would have come here one day, this is something we would have had to face eventually. If anything, this might even be good for Big Zig if we play our cards right. It's going to depend on whatever Petro finds, and I know he likes to do his work by himself so I figured I'd give him a break. We can stay out here as long as you like, I know it's a lot to take on the first time."

Kayla unwrapped her tail from her leg and tilted her head up. It was uncanny, seeing the dark of night with no stars. It was like reality ended just outside of them. It reminded her of the vidcons made before she was born, when they could only render a single room or scene and everything surrounding it was void. "I don't like this. Every other time in my life when I had to make a big decision, I would go for a walk at night and look up at the stars. Being reminded that there's a whole universe out there and I'm just a small part of it is something that always helps give me perspective. And I could really use some perspective right now, because I feel like a bunch of people are going to die. All because I messed up."

The big panda gave a knowing grin. "Believe it or not, I can help with that."

He ducked into the building and emerged with two flashlights. One was relatively new, a compact little polymer rectangle. The other was older, a long bulky metal cylinder. "Take your pick, they both shine just as bright."

Kayla grabbed the new one and clipped it to the front of her poncho. Buster took the classic and flipped it on, pointing the light out to the trees. Turning back to her, he reached back with an outstretched arm. "Take my paw and follow me. It's about a three minute walk, but I can show you some stars."

She didn't hesitate. She took his paw and grasped it.

The rough pads felt comforting. His long claws had been filed down into harmless little nubs, and they dimpled the scales on the back of her hand. She hadn't held hands with many men, but she felt safe in his.

He lead her through the stretch of ancient forest behind Zed Steadman with a casual and familiar step. Sometimes he would stop to excitedly point out something of interest: a pile of rocks that looked like a bear, the towering skeletal remains of one of the native land-dwelling mammals who had been driven off by the inaudible sonic pollution of the clean geothermal energy that powered Big Zig, a pretty fiddlehead. He had all the enthusiasm of an overgrown cub scout, as if it were just another lazy evening in the woods and not potentially the penultimate night of their lives.

At last, they found themselves at a clearing. There was a folding chair and an upturned crate sitting there. The panda came here often, but there was no trash anywhere. Buster lifted his flashlight beam, revealing a towering wall of tree trunk behind it. He followed the trunk with the beam, climbing up at an angle; the tree had fallen, but the thick nets of branches formed by the canopy kept it from falling to the ground. It was suspended at an angle, going upwards and outwards far beyond the beams of their flashlights.

"Let's turn our lights off. Look right above where my flashlight is now, OK? Give your eyes a second to adjust." Buster instructed. He waited for an affirmatory nod before switching his flashlight off.

Kayla tapped the button on her light. It got brighter. She tapped it again. It grew brighter still. She tapped it a third time. It started strobing. Frustrated, she tapped it again and finally the light switched off.

They were plunged into total darkness, far beyond the ambient light of the city. She waited for the bright afterimages from the strobe to clear, and as they faded she saw a small patch of pinpricks of light in the darkness. It was so small she could hold up her outstretched arm and blot it out with her thumb, but it was there.

"I like to look at the stars too. I'm glad I found a place where I can see them, even if having that kanopy hiding us from the outside world is worth it." he said, wistful.

She noticed they were still holding hands. He wasn't being romantic, he was comforting his friend. She couldn't see him in the darkness, but she could feel him beside her.

"I know that you're afraid. I remember the first time I was running scared for my life like you are now. It was the worst feeling in the world, and I had to do it all alone. I would never make someone else go through that. As bad as this might seem, I've made it through way worse. I'm going to help you. Petro is going to help you. Our friends are going to help you. Alia is helping you. And I know you can do it, because you wouldn't be on Redtree in the first place if you weren't brave enough to risk everything for a chance at something better. Do you think you can do it?" he asked, punctuating the question with a gentle squeeze of her large hand..

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"I don't know. I've never been in a situation like this before, the closest I can think of is getting my report card and having until I came home from school to think of what I was going to say to my parents. What if I fail? What if people die because of me?" she asked.

Buster didn't say anything for a moment. "Do you want to know what I'm afraid of?" he finally asked.

Kayla nodded. Then she felt silly and said "yes" out loud so he could hear in the darkness.

"We live in a giant forest. Everything we build here is made of wood. There's no regulations or oversight, so things just keep catching fire and burning to the ground. And as the city grows, the buildings and the fires are getting bigger. If something doesn't happen, one day this whole place is going to go up in flames." he began.

"This place is big enough for a private fire department, but it's basically an extortion racket. They stop people from putting out fires if the building isn't a subscriber. They let unsubscribed buildings burn down to teach the owners a lesson, even if it damages the paying customers around them. Awful stuff. Most of the time when a place burns down here, there's a firetruck parked outside with the firefighters watching. Even if people try and pay them while it's burning down, they won't help because 'then nobody would subscribe'. They're some of the worst people, at least they die constantly because they're just as callous towards their own workers. Their training and equipment is garbage, too." he let out a cruel, amused bleat and continued.

"So I figured, I'm good at fixing problems. I have a little more down time now that I'm not homeless. Why not try and put together a volunteer fire department? I'm used to charging into the line of fire, what's charging into a burning house wearing a fireproof cloak? I use Zed Steadman to start putting out feelers, and a lot of people are interested because they fucking hate the private fire department; spite is a powerful motivator. Also there's nowhere to hang out here that doesn't cost money so offering people some kind of free social group was really appealing. We started calling ourselves Buster's Buddies because the one thing everyone had in common was that they were friends with me. Being the mascot for this group of people I thought were really brave and virtuous was a huge honor. It meant so much." he continued, starting to sound sad.

Mascot. She'd never heard that word before, and she struggled to figure it out from context.

"But before we could even start, the private fire department catches wind of us. They know we're a threat to their bottom line, so they start telling people that this outbreak of ratbite fever that had happened a few months ago was my handiwork. I haven't made biologics since I defected and even if I wanted to that's not really something anybody can do in a basement with liquor money. But I'm the person who did the Martenwol Massacre, you can pull up the video of me bragging about lying to the humans on the pseudonet right now. So some people believed them, and it started to cause problems. Some of Buster's Buddies wanted to kick me out and change the name because they thought I was a liability. Most of them wanted to keep me and wouldn't budge on it. It was threatening the whole project so I stepped down despite the protests of my supporters. Then it just fell apart because there was too much bad blood over me leaving and the two feuding sides tried to do things their own way instead of reuniting. Within a month the whole project was dead. I haven't talked to any of those people since then, I'm too ashamed."

All she could see was that small patch of stars off in the distance. There was a dusting of soft purple nebula on the left side she could only just barely see. Hearing Buster's voice floating in the cosmos, he sounded very small.

"I can do amazing things on my own, but whenever I try and do things with a group I tear them apart. It happened at Old Zed Steadman. It happened so many times while we were looking for a home. We finally find a home, and it happens here too. Every day I have to watch this problem grow worse, and know that it's getting worse because I ruined the attempt to fix it just by being a part of it. I can't do anything about it, so I have to cope. And my cope is that when this place does finally burn down, I hope I survive. Because a lot of people are going to need help, and nobody is coming to help us. I don't care about surviving, but I care about the survivors. So I have to survive. We can't stop trying to make things better just because other people are always making things worse. There will always be more, and we have to make our best of it. If this place does burn down, at least the survivors will get to see the stars again."

"You're a survivor, Kayla. You're going to go on to do great things, no matter what you do. You've got an amazing life ahead of you. One day this will all just be a funny story you tell young people to try and convince them that you were cool when you were their age. All that's standing between you and Alia is Buka Nightingale. Are you going to let your parents stop you when you've come this far?" he asked.

"No." she said.

"Come on, you can do better than that." he replied, a teasing lilt creeping into his voice.

Kayla grinned. She recognized what he was doing. He was trying to hype her up, and it was working.

"No!" she shouted, louder.

Buster let out an amused bleat. "I have a genuine question: Have you ever told your parents that you hate them? Like, as an adult? Sincerely and not in a moment of anger?"

Kayla thought. "No. They were paying for my college, I needed to stay on their good side. I didn't like them and we didn't get along and they knew as much, but I still came home for the holidays and played nice with family."

"Do you hate your parents?" he asked.

"No!" she said defensively.

"Why not?" Buster asked, "You told me you hated them earlier. They're the reason you're stranded here. You were starving to death when I met you, and they hadn't even sent anyone to get you. They don't support or believe in you, they won't help you, and they are hurting you. People here could die because of them. They work for Nakuna, so lots of people have died because of them. They are bad people. Why are you defending them?"

"I'm not defending them. I just don't hate them, hate them. They're dumb and annoying and I don't want to deal with them anymore, but they're my parents and they raised me. They've done a lot for me over the years." she defended.

"They didn't do that for you, they did it for themselves. They're very in love with the idea of their daughter, but they don't love you. When you were a kid you weren't fully developed and they could project whatever they wanted onto your potential. Now that you're an adult, you're your own person with your own life, and your parents don't see that. They just see that you aren't acting like the version they spent all that time imagining, and they can't imagine that they were wrong. You have to show them that they're wrong and stand up to them. If you run away they'll just keep chasing that imaginary version forever, even if it destroys the real you in the process."

"I don't want to hurt them." she said simply.

There was silence.

"I learned that the hard way. I tried the same thing you did, brushing off my parents. They wouldn't take the hint, they kept getting more desperate and clingy. Because that's the thing about people who place such importance on familial bonds above all else: if it weren't for familial bonds, they wouldn't have any bonds at all. My parents were the type of people who didn't have any friends because they always drove people away. Instead of fixing that, they just clung even harder to the people they did have. My whole life, they always talked about how family was the most important thing in the universe. Everything they did, they did for us. The rest of the world was full of awful people who would betray you and abandon you, but your parents would always be there for you. And when they grew old, it would be my responsibility to take care of them. That's why one day I would have to have cubs of my own, so they would take care of me in my old age. Societies had crumbled, empires had risen and fallen, but pandas always took care of their own and so they persevered."

"But it never went the other way. Whenever I needed help, it was a failure on my part. Whenever I needed their time or attention, I was being a distraction or a burden. They cared more about me embarrassing them in front of strangers than the fact that I was embarrassing myself. And every step of the way, they told me that they loved me. That I was the most important thing in the world to them, and that we'd always be there for each other."

"So one day I finally just told them what I thought of them. I told my dad that he was a bully who cared more about money than people, and my mom that she was a coward who would rather smother me than fix her own issues. I was very mean about it. And I never heard from either of them again after that. Because the worst thing you can do to a person who lives a comfortable life is make them uncomfortable. My parents were Nakunan military like yours. Your parents live very comfortable lives. At the very least, you could make them uncomfortable while they're trying to end yours."

Kayla didn't have anything to say. But she wasn't afraid anymore. To her this was the end of the world, but to the people here it was just another day fighting to survive. Whatever Buster was, he was someone who lived in this world. He had a pretty good track record, so if he thought they had a chance she would just have to believe him.

"Thank you." she finally said, wrapping her tail around his leg and giving it a comforting squeeze. His paw squeezed her hand in turn.

"Glad to. Come on, let's head back to Zed Steadman. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Alia's waiting for you. Make sure you hold the flashlight button so it turns on low."