Herpity doo da, chapter two

So k yeah same thing as the first one, but I would like to know if Glow's parts are hideously boring? I feel like I'm text-blocking all about his Feelings and I feel like that's stupid or something. So. Lemme know.

GLOW
She made me so damn angry. All the time. Now, anyway. It wasn't always like this. Sil used to make me feel safe. Like it didn't matter that I couldn't talk right, or get a full sentence out without flushing in embarassment or people staring at me or feeling like people were staring at me. We could just work next to each other for hours without saying more than a few words and it felt amazing. With everyone else I somehow felt pressured to say something, or risk them forgetting I was there, or discarding me as That Poor Guy Who Can't Talk. But with Sil it didn't matter. Nothing mattered.
And then things changed. I met her when she was just starting to race for Duke, the top dog masc on our level. Around our level, people still had medeival ideas about gender, and it seemed like the fem/masc movement from higher up couldn't touch it.
Then Duke came, climbing her way up from the levels below by pure ferocity. She was vicious and merciless. She literally shot men just for looking at her wrong--Duke could see it when they didn't respect her, either because she was a woman, a masc, or a woman making a name for herself among gangs. She built a gang out of equally vicious other mascs, and for their initiation Duke instructed them to track down rapists and castrate them. Then one of her mascs was gang-raped and murdered. After that, the rapists chosen for initiations didn't survive.
I'd been scared of Sil at first, of course. By then Duke had been around for a couple years. Everyone knew she hated men, and the only ones allowed near her gang were a few fem groupies. A friend and I were working the ground the local gangs had chosen to race on. People like us showed up for last-minute tweaks and installations. Most people were pretty possessive about their cars, so most of our work came from rookies or cheapskates that hadn't learn to treasure their cars yet or just wanted some extra cash that a race could win them.
A car I'd worked on before the race blew out in mid-air. The driver was ejected and parachuted to safety before it hit the ground, but then he came looking for me. My friend, Fuschia, was nowhere to be found. He pulled out a tazer--one of the few weapons that can do serious damage to cyborgs--and started beating the shit out of me.
Sil stepped in, and the rest was history. We'd been together for six years.
And I'd been trying to get her to leave the gang ever since.
For a while I was just angry at Duke. I didn't blame Sil. Duke was the one who kept pulling her back in. Duke didn't treat her mascs like she did everyone else. Duke's gang was treated like family. When members tried to leave, she didn't threaten them--at first. She offered them things. Money. A new car, or cars. When Sil finally made a serious effort to get out last year, Duke had even met her halfway. Duke wanted a business to run a chop shop through, but she didn't want to trust anyone outside the gang. So she set Sil up with this garage, and every few nights they'd bring a car through down to the basement. But Sil had to run it as a real business, and to make sure she didn't slack off, Duke required "rent". And we also had to pay actual taxes to the government on it. And we also didn't own the place upstairs--Duke hadn't bought that, so we had to pay rent for that too. And we didn't get any percentage of the cars Duke ran through, so all of our funds came from the actual business, which was split between normal people and black market people who didn't, or couldn't, take their cars to real mechanics. And, on top of it all, Duke still wanted Sil to drive for her. Not in races--I'd thrown a fit at Sil taking the deal, I would have walked away completely if she went back to driving those batshit insanely dangerous races. But as a getaway driver, or to steal cars now and then.
It was a shit deal. Sil knew it was a shit deal. I had also told her several times, especially in the past year after I actually found out about it, that it was a shit deal.
But she took it anyway, without even talking to me about it, and I didn't know why. It made me angry, her blatantly ignoring me, like people did when they didn't know what to do with me.
And then she'd stopped talking to me. It wasn't the easygoing air where we just didn't feel like talking, she just outright didn't answer my questions about what she was doing, or her answers were always short and clipped. I started to feel like she was building a wall between us and soon I'd be lost to her, suffocating on the other side under all the silence she piled up between us. It had been hard for me to make people understand me for almost as long as I could remember. And then the one person who did suddenly refused to anymore. It was awful.
Sil was sorry for it. I knew that. She was sorry for all the pain and anger she put me through.
But for all that she was sorry, she didn't change anything. She didn't try talking her way away from Duke again--Duke had already made it clear that from now on, Sil trying to leave would end in threats, not offers. And that was the whole vacking point I wanted her to leave in the first place. I didn't care about myself. Cyborgs are made up of billions of nanos--tiny, molecule-sized machines that form most of our body and keep our inner machinery functioning, and are capable of regenerating almost immediately--so it takes a lot to hurt us. Bullets, knives, anything that pierces our skin get absorbed and rebuilt on a molecular level to repair the damage. We can't age. We can't get sick--either organic disease or virus programs, as the second any nanites sense infection they destroy the contaminated nanites, purge them from the system completely, and rebuild new ones to replace them. Electricity is one of the few things that can hurt, as it causes us pain and will disrupt the communication between nanites if it's powerful enough. That can mean anything from frying their tiny circuits to interrupting construction, which means they'll fall apart and our bodies will temporarily dissolve. But nothing permanent could hurt us. We couldn't die.
In contrast, despite being over six feet tall, packed with muscle, and when faced with danger, the disposition of a rabid yet competent doberman, Sil was downright fragile.
I worried about her, constantly. The first years we'd been together I went through my days never knowing whether she'd come home full of bulletholes, or if she'd even come back at all. Races, where I'd once enjoyed them, became awful and nerve-wracking. When she went out on jobs, I couldn't power myself down to rest and I couldn't work on anything. Whenever she was with the gang there was the possibility of her getting in a fight with Gin, the worst troublemaker out of all of them, who always knew how to push Sil over the edge. Or she could get arrested and this time wouldn't make bail, or Duke would just leave her in there. Fuschia had been right when she told me humans and cyborgs together were a bad idea. After a couple decades, you got used to the idea of being stuck like this forever. Spending every day of your life with the very human woman you loved desperately made you painfully aware of her minutes ticking away, gone forever. It was awful enough knowing Sil was growing older and that I didn't know what to do about it, or how to deal with it when it finally became a problem. Knowing that just her mere, everyday life, her livelihood, could take her away from me with all the effort of a finger twitch--I couldn't live like this. Not forever. Not for however many years we would have together.
I was getting to the point where this awful, nauseating anxiety, and all my recent frustrations with Sil were beginning to pull even with how much I loved her.
I was getting to a place were there wouldn't be any more I'm-sorry's or second chances.
I was reaching a breaking point where I couldn't take it anymore, and I would just have to leave.
I heard the sound of someone hopping our chain link fence out back, and grabbed one of my heavier wrenches off the work bench. I was pretty sure I already knew who it was, but it always pays to be careful. I walked softly around the garage along the wall, edging my way over to the doorless garage opening that lead to the small gravel lot behind our building. As the footsteps neared, I steadied my balance and hefted the wrench.
I saw their shadow cast across the garage floor, followed by a loud knocking on the side of the metal sheet wall.
"It's me, Glow. Don't attack me or anythin'."
I grinned, lowering the wrench and stepping out into view. She towered over me, the two bunches of slim, vivid fuschia glowdreads cascading from either side of her head, contrasting brightly with her drab, tattered brown coveralls and drab plaid undershirt. As usual, she was barefoot. Whenever you weren't sure if a person was a cyborg or a human, you could check their feet. Cyborgs were the only ones in this city who dared walk around without any protection on their feet. Not all of them did it--not all of us did it--but it was common enough.
"Hey, Fuschia," I said, stepping aside to welcome her in. "It's been a while. How's things?"
"I was 'bout to ask you the same thing," she said, stepping in and looking around. "You broken a lot more shit 'n the last time
I was here."
"...Yeah." This morning I had snapped a few tools--by accident--and toppled one of the scrap shelves--on purpose. I was still pretty pissed at Sil, but I'd made myself stop breaking shit.
"You two fight again?"
"When are we not fighting, Fuschia," I sighed, tossing my wrench back on the work table.
"Swear to God, Glowbie, I dunno why you stay with the piece a' shit."
"Don't."
"She's a vackin' asshole, Glow. She's a dick to you and ever'one else, but especially you cause you let her get away with it."
"Fuschia," I snapped. "Stop it. What do you want?"
Fuschia looked at me sideways and I could tell she was sorry for pushing it.
"Skar wants to talk to you," she muttered.
I felt my circuits run cold.

SIL

I sat around outside waiting for Blondie at each club. There were about six. While he was inside, I pulled out our paper books and started working them over.

You didn't see paper in a lot of places these days, and it was damn expensive when you did. Living on the moon in a biodome doesn't really allow for that kind of thing to be as common a resource as it was on Earth. Hell, the only reason I had paper books was because an old friend of mine, Lyre Connors, and her parents were from a biodome that was primarily a nature preserve.Lyre's cousin made a nice living producing paper-based products and selling them to rich people, and she'd managed to get me some notebooks for keeping our finances in. The only trees in the dome were
in the oxygen factories, and average people only ever saw them once, when every school took the kids on a one-day field trip to the factories. You saw a lot of pictures of them everywhere though, promoting donations to the oxygen factories' research scientists and all that. A big percentage of our taxes went into them anyway--since, you know, there's not much point in having money and a government and a city and shit if there's no air and everyone dies--but willing donations got you some nice tax deductions on other stuff.
Too bad we were too vacking poor to even do that much.
I growled and punched the roof of my car. I kept doing the numbers wrong, I knew I was doing them wrong, because I always did them twice to make sure, and I'd gotten different numbers, so I did them again and got another answer, and now for the fourth time I was getting yet another answer. I hated this. I hated numbers. I hated not being able to just pull out a calculator screen from my palmface and let it do all the hard work.
The car door open and Julian slid in, slamming it behind him.
"Hey," I snapped. "It's my car. Only I get to beat it up."
"Oh, oh, God, right, I'm sorry," he mumbled, and then he sniffled.
Warning bells went off in every part of my body and the urge to run surged through me. I always panic when a fem starts crying. I never know what to do with them.

"Oh. Um. Hey, hey, don't--it's okay. Okay? I don't care, I just--don't cry--"
Blondie sniffled again and shook his head.
"No, no, it's not you. I just--I lost something. Something really, really important, and I thought I'd find it at one of the clubs, but that was the last one and I still haven't found it--" his voice peaked at its highest pitch and broke. Blondie covered his face and started whimper-crying into his hands.
I was beginning to regret being so helpful. I'd driven him all over the local five levels because I wasn't ready to go back and face Glow yet. But this--this was so much worse. I hated when fems cried. Manly guys, you just patted them on the shoulder and pretended it wasn't happening. Girly girls, I usually just told them to buck up and get on with it, because seriously, girls cry too much over stupid shit. But fems...I was at a loss. I didn't even know the guy, I couldn't touch him or anything, and I couldn't say anything, and I couldn't fix it or anything, so...shit.
"...Uh," I said after a while. "Is there, uh...anything I can do? To help?"
Blondie sniffled and shook his head.
"No. Thanks. I just...can I just sit here for a while? I can't really go home yet."
I didn't ask why. I just sat there, quiet, looking everywhere but him. He stopped sniffling after a while and just stared at his hands in his lap.
I didn't know what else to do and I still had numbers to work over, so I sort of stealthily went back to scratching at my books again.
After a while I realized Julian was watching me. I kind of ignored it for a bit, but then I realized I didn't want some random kid seeing my finances, so I tilted it away from him.
"That's wrong," he said almost immediately.
I blinked and stared at him, confused. Not wanting a complete stranger to see my personal finances is wrong? Does he really have the guts to say that to me?
"What?" I asked, kind of defensive. He flushed and bit his lip.
"Um. That problem you're working on. It's wrong."
"...I know that. I'm trying to fix it."
"Can I...?"
I glared at him. And went back to scratching at the books.
"What is that, anyway?"
I sighed impatiently. I was getting restless and tired of sitting in my car in a lot and not going anywhere or doing anything.

"What is what?"
"What you're holding. And...writing on? Is it some kind of solid screen?"
Sometimes I forgot most people went their whole lives without seeing this stuff.
"Oh, uh, no. It's...it's paper. It's solid, and it's made from trees. And this is a pen, which gives out ink while I right. It's like of like...tattooing on tree skin." I was hoping that made sense.
Julian gaped at me, open-mouthed.
"Paper?" he exclaimed. "That stuff is paper?"
"Uh, yeah," I said, shrugging. I flipped a few pages past where I was working and handed it over. "Go ahead, check it out."
He stroked it softly, like he thought it might still be alive and would fall apart. I had to admit, paper looked awfully delicate the first time you saw it. Everything in our biodome was made out of metal, plastic, hologram, or a mix of them. Even our clothes were made out of hypersynthetic plastic--actual cloth stuff hadn't been used in mainstream for a couple centuries now. If you wanted to see it, you went to a museum.
"It's not really what I thought it would be like," he finally admitted after a while.
"What did you think it would be like?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Well...it's made from, like, leaves and stuff, right? I remember when we went to the oxygen factory in fifth grade. I thought it would be all, like, veiny, like the leaves. And, you know...green."
I snorted a little and he flushed again.
"Well I didn't know, okay?"
"It's not made out of leaves," I said. "It's made out of trees. The wood."
Julian flipped a few pages further, rubbing the paper between his fingers and touching it some more. I smiled a little at his obvious awe. I remembered the first time I'd touched paper, and I'd reacted a lot like he had. Lyre, my friend, had grown up with the stuff, so she was a lot less understanding and had laughed at me the whole time.
Then, before I could stop him, he'd flipped back to my pages of numbers and was studying them.
"Hey!" I said, immediately irritated. "That's my money, kid, you can't just--"
"I can fix it," he said, cutting me off. I was about to rip him a new one when he looked up at me and his eyes were bright and shiney. Not shiney like full of tears, shiney like...excited. "I can. Just give me the pin."
"Pen."
"Please?"
I narrowed my eyes at him and he held out his hand and then he wrapped his mouth around this cutesy little smile that made me feel funny in the place I had for Glow. It threw me off a little bit. I tossed him the pen just to make him stop smiling like that.
It took him a second to figure out--like which end of the pen goes against the paper, and it was only one end, not double-tipped like most digipens--but then he was scratching away like crazy. There were a couple funny moments when he didn't know yet that you can't erase pen ink, and I laughed and he glared at me and I laughed some more, and then I thought about how it had been a while since I'd laughed.
After a while he handed it over to me. Like I said, there was some mess at the beginning before he saw the pen couldn't be undone, but after that all the numbers were kept in neat, clean columns. I could see all the numbers he'd carried and multiplied and everything. I stared at it so hard I felt like my eyes were gonna fall out of my head.
"It's all right," he said. "I checked everything twice. But I'm good at numbers anyway. I mean, like the simple stuff. Adding and subtracting and multiplying and stuff."
I went over everything he'd done.
He was right. It was all here. It was all right.
"How did you do this?" I asked, shaking my head. Blondie shrugged.
"Like I said. I'm just good with simple numbers. It's just moving them around and stuff."
I was getting an idea. And I was going to say something about it, but then my palmface went off. I started, surprised--I almost never got calls. From anyone.
...Which meant it was probably Glow.
I was already building up inside as I climbed out of the car. I wanted to get away for a half an hour--a vacking half an hour--and I couldn't even do that without him ragging on me, nitpicking the shit out of everything, demanding where I was, what I was doing, why I wasn't back yet. It'd been like this ever since he'd...figured out what my garage was really for. It was like I'd cheated on him. I couldn't take a shit for longer than five minutes without him demanding where I was and what I'd been doing.
"What," I snapped as I clicked in.
"Wh-wh-wh--where are y-you? You've b-been g-gone l-like thr-ree hours."
Holy shit. Three hours? Damn. It had taken a while to track down Julian's clubs, because I didn't know most of them and had gotten lost a couple times and then traffic had been a hell of a bitch.
"I'm still trying to ditch this blonde kid, okay? That's all."
"Y-you--wh-wh-wh-what? Wh-wh-wh--why? Wh-wh-how is it t-t-taking y-you s-so long?"
"Just because it is, Glow, okay? I'm sorry, alright, I'll be home soon."
"S-S-Sil--"
"What." But in my head I was backpedaling, I was realizing how bad his stutter was, that it meant something was wrong.
And then it was already too late. He hung up.
I stood there for a second, bracing myself against my car. I felt sick. I wanted to call him back, ask what was wrong, go home and hold him and say I was sorry, really sorry this time, that I wanted to fix things, that I wanted to stop this broken sick cycle we were stuck in.
And then there was this awful twisting in me and I was angry again. I hadn't done anything wrong. What had happened last night--he'd wanted that. We both had. Glow was a vacking cyborg, for God's sake, his muscles were made out of pure indestructible nanites. He could have stopped me if he wanted. He didn't like showing me up phsyically for the most part, because he knew I didn't like him showing me up physically, but if he'd really hated what was happening he could have stopped me. It wasn't my fault. If it was anyone's fault it was his.
He could sit on his ass and whatever until I damn well decided I wanted to come home.
I climbed back into my car and slammed the door. Julian pressed himself against his door like he'd been all morning. He was scared of me.
Good. People should be scared of me. I was a scary vacker. I deserved their respect.
"Do you want a job?" I asked him.

It was late afternoon by the time I dropped Blondie off at his apartment. It took forever because of the same reason cabs wouldn't go there--Julian lived in an area on one of the levels that had been affected by the big cold-fusion plant blowout a couple decades ago. The area was covered in debris and broken buildings, most of it all fused and twisted in one big web. A lot of it was curled over too, like an ocean of metal frozen mid-wave, a result of the massive blast from the plant's explosion. There was even some shit just floating the vack around--there was an entire block that had been rooted firmly enough in its gravity generators to hold itself together when everything fell apart. Politicals up on higher levels used to talk about fixing it up, and they had fixed up the higher levels--of course. But the project had lost momentum as they got lower and lower, and now they'd just forgotten about us down here. Julian was stuck on probably the worst level of all--ten higher than mine, but that meant they'd been closer to the blast and had more damage, and were still low enough for no one to care.
And of course about a mile above all this was the big, squat, hovering black metal diamond that contained the Facility. There was some big long official term for it, but it ended in "facility" and after the meltdown, people had shortened it while talking about it on the news. It had stuck.
The Facility had been installed because of the contamination. Cold-fusion plants actually put out a lot less radiation than nuclear plants, because they fuzed atoms instead of splitting them to make energy. But to do that they had to achieve something called absolute zero--the ultimate cold, the cold that was so cold that even atoms stopped moving. And the only way to fuse them was to do it while they weren't moving.
The problem with cold is that it's contagious. It infects what it touches, as long as whatever it touches isn't warmer than it is cold--and nothing living is warm enough to balance out absolute zero. So when the plant melted down, the containment cores failed and waves of absolute zero winds had gushed out. Most of the dome had already extended forcefield shielding, as the plant had been in emergency mode and broadcasting warnings for almost two days. The blast had been pretty contained, and by the time it had started, the order was already going out to open the vaccuum tunnels closest to the plant, which was right next to our dome's wall just in case this sort of thing happened. Most of the absolute zero winds were sucked right out into nothingness.
But a lot had already been contaminated. So they'd shut it up in the Facility to keep it from spreading. And they'd put a lot of scientists in there with it, to try and figure out how to reverse it--because the spread hasn't stopped. At least, that's what they tell us. They have to keep using gravity bombs to compress what remains inside there every few months, and then they keep feeding it so they can keep studying the spread of the contamination. They wanted to find a way to stop it, I guess. I don't know why they don't just g-bomb the shit out of everything in there and shoot the last of it out into space. It would be easier for everyone, rather than having this big hovering black diamond thing taking up a fourth of our living space. Population regulation limits rose about 4.6 per cent every year because of it. We were already running out of room before the meltdown, and the Facility made everything worse.
After two nerve-wracking hours of weaving my levehicle through tangled webs of gnarled metal, glass, and of course, other levehicle traffic, I managed to get us both safely to Littleville Apartments, which was the complex he lived in. Though actually, he didn't live in the official complex. Over time the landlady had sort of taken over the few empty buildings next door--one used to be a skyscraper that hosted, going by the scuffed up sign, SOLAR CO., and another was just a multi-tiered warehouse--and even though they were officially condemned by the government as unsafe, Mrs. Pottsworth still rented them to people who couldn't afford better.
I really could have gone the rest of my life without knowing, or even caring, about any of this. But Blondie just wouldn't shut up the entire damn ride. I guess he was happy about me hiring him to keep my books and watch the register or something. Or maybe he thought that made us friends. Or something. I don't know. But I got to hear all about Mrs. Pottsworth, who no one knew whether she was married or divorced or a widow, and there was a rumour she had killed her husband one night with a hyperdense steel kettle because he was abusive or something and he dissed her potroast, so she snapped, but she was perfectly nice to everyone else, just don't mention the Mr. or her potroast, and anyway she collects little porcelain kettle miniatures, whatever the hell porcelain is, so if you're behind on your rent if you get her something for her collection she'll wait a little longer, but you'll still have to pay her eventually and she starts getting really impatient after about three months no matter how many damn little porcelain kettles you get her.
God. Just...God. I did not care. I could not have cared less. I would have told him to shut the hell up, normally, but I didn't want him to start crying again. And when I thought about it--and I had a lot of time to think about it, because I tuned him out after he started talking about his nextdoor neighbor who had to be the noisiest slut in the entire dome, like seriously it's okay if you want to hump every person ever every damn night at every damn hour, but you could at least do it quietly--sitting there and letting his babbling wash over me was a lot better than him crying the whole time.
So yeah, I got us there, without ripping up my car squeezing through painfully tight spaces in the metal debris, and without hitting the eject button on Blondie's seat. I dropped him out on a dangerous-looking slab of concrete that clung to the side of his building like a fat, long, hulking animal. It had cracks all through it, deep ones, and I couldn't believe anyone could stand on that thing without it giving way.
"Thanks for the ride," he said, smiling at me again. "I seriously really appreciate this. And the job. And last night. Seriously. Thank you so much."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever," I muttered warily. He almost looked like he was going to try to hug me or something. "Just be there tomorrow morning at six."
"I will!" he said excitedly, grinning and waving goodbye.
I grunted and and sort of lifted my hand in response before turning and driving off.
That kid. Something about his smile...it didn't make me, like, feel glad too or anything. It just made me feel bad if I didn't do something back.
I was halfway out of the debris when the first explosion rocked the sky.

Post the fucking post

So yep this is the first chapter of Dollface in all its awful unedited glory. I don't really want critique at this point or I will probably shrivel up in humiliation and die.

It was not the time at which exciting things traditionally happen. It was not late night, or very early morning, or even merely early morning. It was, in fact, late afternoon.
Despite this, Sandra Connors was clearly exhausted, and felt she had been awake longer than humanly possible. In actuality, she and her husband had been awake and locked in their laboratory for almost twenty-one hours straight without so much as a nap between them.
Sandra Connors rested her elbows on the counter and pushed her fingers up under her glasses, massaging her closed eyes. Her black hair, usually imprisoned in a flawless, tidy bun, was tangled about her face in a chaotic web. Her white labcoat was disheveled, her collar askew, and she would have gone so far as to kick off her shoes if laboratory safety code did not require them.
"How many are left?" she asked, her voice echoing softly in the high-ceilinged laboratory.
"Twenty-seven," replied the man sitting listlessly in a swivel chair in front of what looked like a large, glass-fronted cabinet. Inside was a large metal cylinder with three extending rings of metal dividing it into thirds. Each ring held two dozen small vials, each containing a slightly different shade of yellow liquid. The cylinder rocked, gently sloshing the liquid inside each vial. Forty-five of them had darkened to a dirty gold colour.
Once they had all finished churning, and each vial had turned the same dirty gold, they would be ready for sampling. Sampling was where the real excitement was, or it would have been if both Mr. and Dr. Connors had any expectation of anything being discovered.
But they both knew better by now. They had signed on to the Event 16 Research Facility and Stabilization Base's experiments with the DNA recovered from the massive cold-fusion meltdown hoping to uncover new ways to combat exposure to nuclear chemicals, or at the least research the affects of absolute-zero temperature on organic tissue. Instead, they had spent the past two years churning the same samples for hours and hours just to get the same results. They were both weary of the endless, pointless cycle.
The goal behind this recent batch was, as usual, testing the DNA for contaminants. The frustrating thing was that despite the massive area that the cold fusion meltdown had affected--an entire fourth of the New California Biodome--each batch of samples Mr.and Dr. Connors received seemed to be curiously devoid, or at least largely lacking, in any actual contamination.
At first they'd been suspicious. Upon inquiry with the head of their department, it had been explained to them that the theory behind this curious phenomenon was that the bodies--animal, human, insect--had been frozen so fast and died off so immediately that no actual contaminant had time to take foot.
When the doctors had pressed for further explanation, they had been stonewalled, slapped on the wrist, and finally, threatened with expulsion from the project.
Mr. and Mrs Connors were the kinds of people that, when told to stop digging or get kicked out, quieted down and did as they were told, and then went on digging in much less noticeable ways.
But their constant experiments had proven nothing. Befriending other departments and subtly inquiring had been fruitless. They had quietly exhausted all methods of investigation available to them.
And now, with their contract due to end the next week, they had decided to get through with it and then go back to their home dome on the west side of the moon, where they could return to their own, much more interesting, personal projects.
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
BEEP
Mr. and Dr. Connors both jerked out of half-dozes and scrambled for consciousness. Dr. Connors fumbled his glasses back on to his face and hurriedly unlocked the cabinet. Together, the Connors carefully transferred the vials into trays, and then loaded the trays into yet another machine that resemble a large, long microwave. Having sealed it shut and typing in the instructions, both doctors settled back for another long wait as a small syringe began its slow journey back and forth across each row of vials, delicately stabbing through each lid and sucking up one drop of liquid from each, which would then be dissected on a molecular level and analyzed.
This time, the doctors did not wait nearly as long.
The machine began beeping a mere five minutes in. Both Connors jerked upright in their seats, stared wildly at each other in astonishment, and dashed over to the machine.
"What is it--"
"It's only identified an unrecognized contaminant, it doesn't know what it is yet--"
"Which sample is it?"
"Thirty-four. Nothing remarkable about the DNA itself, it came from a four-year old lion, a resident of the metropolitan zoo when the wave hit."
"Any anomalies in the genome?"
"None."
"Contaminants?"
"Nothing new. I don't know what could--"
Light exploded from the console projectors behind the machine, unravelling into huge, ten-by-ten foot screens. Line after line of data streamed across the holographic screens, the two doctors staring up in bewildered amazement.
"Is that--"
"What is it?"
"I've never seen anything like this before."
Both doctors went to work in a frenzy, printing out hard copies, dissecting the data, and prepping other samples of the lion's DNA for analysis.
Thirty minutes later, their lab exploded.

SIX HOURS EARLIER

"...always have to vacking do this--"
"You didn't seem too unhappy about it last night!"
"I hate it when you do this, Sil! I hate it! And you know it!"
"Then why didn't you stop me?"
"B-because I--because y-you--you don't listen! You never listen to me, Sil!"
"Oh, I was listening, alright, only the sounds you were making didn't sound very unwilling--"
CRACK
"OW--Sonofa--"
"D-don't you vacking touch me!"
"Glow, come on, wait--"
"Just s-stay aw--w-w--g-get off-f m-me!"
"I didn't mean--I--"
WHAM



Oh God, am I dying?
That's what it felt like. Like I'd been shot in the face. That must have been what happened. Some backsewer genderist with a sawed-off shotgun had seen me on my way home from a hard night's clubbing in my fem attire and gunned me down in an alley. And now I was lying on the concrete floor of some warehouse somewhere, my skull shattered open with my brainspace spilling out, and next door were construction workers operating jackhammers and wrecking balls.
I was absolutely certain of this for about five minutes.
Then my eyes finally insisted on opening(since after five minutes of continuing existence, my brain was arguing that maybe my brainspace wasn't ENTIRELY shattered raw) and saw the the couch pillow my head was resting on. Things beyond that were pretty blurry, but I could just barely make out something that two small white somethings were resting on next to a cup-shaped something. It was right in front of my face, within reach.
What--pills? OhthankGodDRUGS. DRUGS MAKE EVERYTHING BETTER.
I struggled upright, fumbled for the white pills, popped them down my throat, and emptied the cup down after it. Then I collapsed back onto the couch. After an eternity more of jackhammers and wrecking balls, I felt them kick in, and I drifted off into blissful darkness.
This couch pillow is really itchy.


...I don't HAVE a couch.
Oh God, where the hell AM I?

My eyes snapped open and I sat up immediately. This wasn't the first time I'd woken up in a strange apartment, so I wasn't completely panicking. Okay, okay, cover the basics--where am I sore, if I figure out what I did last night it can usually help me remember...
I wasn't sore.
Which was odd.
I mean, I had a couple hickeys, the most suggestive of which was right on the inside of my thigh, right at the top, uncomfortably close to certain tender things, and a little to the left of my Masc/Fem Pride tat. And I had one or two finger-shaped bruises elsewhere. But I wasn't sore, in like, you know...important places.
Which was good, right?
...Why was I sleeping on a couch?
I swung my legs off without realizing how tangled up they were in the blanket slung over me. I did realize how tangled up they were when I tried to stand in the same movement and ended up crumpled on the floor with my face in scratchy carpet.
"Ow."
I kicked my legs free and sat up again, barely avoiding cracking my head on an end-table, and got to my feet. I checked myself over and realized I was dressed in strange clothes, right down to the vacking underwear...which was not mine.
"The...what?" I muttered, plucking at the baggy shirt and shorts, then pulling the hem away from my hips and staring down at a pair of boxers two sizes too big. "...What?" I repeated. I gave up trying to remember the night before for the time being and had a look around.
It was nicer than most places I woke up in. It wasn't, you know, tidy, in the way that a bachelor's home isn't tidy when they aren't expecting to bring anyone home. There were random clothes like shirts and socks tossed over the arm of a sofa and piled in the corner, a few empty pizza boxes were stacked on the coffee table next to a half-empty mug, and what probably used to be a very nice duvet before whatever animal had gotten to it had gotten to it was piled in an armchair...under the animal that had gotten to it. A miniraptor, standard size, lay with its head propped up on an arm rest, large hindlegs gathered under it, the massive scythe claws trimmed down to regulation length, the long, rigid tail resting on the other arm rest. It was a dark red with a lighter mottled red along its spine, with some white patches on its legs.
Velociraptors weren't rich people pets, but you had to have good money to afford one--and by good money I mean you can afford to pay more than five bronze monthly rent and have more than two pieces of furniture in your one-room apartment. I was definitely not in the sort of place I usually woke up in.
"The hell," I muttered, staring at it.
"Oh," someone said behind me. I whirled around, my feet twisting up in the vacking persistent sonofabitch blanket and I fell back--
Hands grabbed me in a firm, broad grip that wrapped around my whole upper arm in a way that told me whoever it belonged to could snap this arm like a toothpick. I swallowed hard.
"Sorry about that," she said, raising an eyebrow at me. "Didn't mean to scare you. Didn't think you'd be up yet."
"Hah," I squeaked, trying to smile disarmingly, because disarmingly was the opposite of armingly(I was guessing) and I definitely didn't want to do anything armingly towards a woman that had three inches of height and probably at least a hundred pounds of muscle on me. Her hair was blonde and cropped close to her head with a few thin bars shaved to the skin right above her ears--gang rank tags in the hair. You saw them around where there where the district had so much experience with gangs that they could to lock you up based solely on what they decoded from the symbols in your ink.
So I was in a nicer apartment than usual...in an even worse part of town than usual.
Nice place in a bad town means whoever owns the nice place does very well in the bad town.
"Hey," she growled, and I almost pissed myself(oh God oh God she saw me staring at them now she's pissed she's going to kill me), "I'm not gonna hurt you. You got a little...uh. Wild, I guess? At a bar last night. Barkeep was gonna throw you out on your ass so you could pass out outside and a couple mascs were hanging around looking like they were gonna do something with it once you had...I just, figured I'd, you know..."
"Have it all to yourself?" I snapped, forgetting how scary she was for a moment and trying to yank my arm away.
"Boy who gets that drunk in that kinda place hangin' with those kinda people knows what's gonna happen to him," she growled. "So don't you get uppity wit' me. I didn't touch you, I got sicked up on by you and still found the goodness in my heart to pull you outta there. Woulda sent you home, but the cab wouldn't take your address."
"Uh, yeah. They usually don't. I'm...um, sorry, I just...I threw up on you?"
"Twice."
I winced. Usually I held my liquor better, so this was embarassing in two different ways.
"Um. Sorry. But thanks. For...you know. Doing what you did. And not doing what you could've done."
She grunted.
"Yeah, well, don't feel too bad for me. You threw up all over yourself too."
"Hence..." I gestured to myself and the strange clothes.
"Yeah, let you borrow some of my stuff."
"Right down to your underwear?"
"Figured it was better than you waking up in no underwear."
"...Depends on your experiences with waking up in other peoples' underwear."
A disbelieving grimace flicked across her face, then she said sternly, "That's clean, what you've got on, and you can take my word for it or take it off till yours is done washing."
"Why'd you have to wash my underwear, too? I mean, it would have been...under..."
"Your pants was halfway off when you lost it."
"...Oh God." Now that was embarassing. I mean, I did some vacked up shit when I went off it like that--and I was more than drunk last night, definitely--but that was in, like, the back rooms of clubs or someone's apartment or something like that, you know, somewhere private, but never stuff like that right out in front of people in a bar.
"Yeah. Hence..."
"The barkeep wanting me gone...God, I'm sorry."
"To me? What for?"
"I just...it's embarassing. You know. I mean, I don't do stuff like that in...places like that..."
My voice trailed off and an awful awkward silence ambushed us.
"Um," I suddenly said. "So. I guess, I mean, should I go? I mean, I should go. I mean, I don't even know you--I mean I'm glad you did what you did, like I really appreciate it, you're a really nice gal and everything, but I don't want to impose--"
"Clothes aren't done washin' yet."
"...Oh yeah." More awkward silence. I squirmed for a moment, then hit upon genius. "...How about breakfast?" I beamed a smile at her, and she squashed it with two words.
"Not hungry."
I realized she seemed distant. I mean, here I was, a pretty hot guy in her gratitude, offering to make her an amazing breakfast(granted, she didn't know it would be amazing, yet) and she was...not even looking at me.
I recalled the slamming door that had woken me up. I'd thought I was imagining it, but maybe it had been someone important storming out.
"I, okay, um. Do you have, like cereal? I mean, I'm just--I'm really hungry and I'd go out and get it but I don't know where to go and I'd give you money if you wanted to maybe get it but I don't want you to have to leave me alone in your apartment since you don't even know me and--"
"In the kitchen, right cupboard next to the fridge. Bowls are on the shelf above, spoons in the drawer below."
"Oh. Great. Great! Thanks." I grinned at her again, and she was still totally out of it, chewing on the corner of her bottom lip. "Right. So. I'll go...do that."
I inched around the couch and her and headed for a kitchen, then turned back.
"Hey, like, what's your name? I'm just curious--"
"Sil. Sil Night."
"Oh. Cool. I'm Julian."
"Uhuh," she mumbled, staring out the window on the opposite wall.
I left her to whatever she was thinking about and went to get some cereal.

I was halfway down the stairs when last night and this morning twisted each other up in knots and just rolled over me in one crushing wave of awful.
Blondie was eating breakfast, so he wouldn't be down any time soon. My knees buckled and I slid down against the stairwell wall.
I felt burning black anger surging inside me, throwing itself against the inside of my ribcage like some furious caged wild thing.
Teeth gritted, fists clenched, I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my back against the bare stone wall. I felt the skin of my palms scream under my fingernails and unbent my hands, digging my fingers into the bare concrete stairs instead.
Tried to hang on to the cold, cold wall, the vacking cold wall that was always burning icy no matter what season the dome was set to imitate. Tried to hang on to the parts of me that weren't angry, the parts that really were sorry and hated the parts that weren't and wanted all of me to just stop being a vacking idiot for once in my life and do something right.
I wanted to rip the wooden railing off the wall and throw it down the stairwell. It was hard not to, just because I knew I could.
Think of the money.
I hated the money. It was a sick, draining thing. It did horrible things to me. It could bring on the black, screaming anger or it could rip a hole in me right when my lungs were bursting with it and drain it away.
Can't afford a new vacking rail, need to pay off the damned interest on the refrigerator...
It was working. I felt that wicked green claw sink its pinpoint right into my gut and all the anger poured out, and then all the things that made me feel strong poured out too. That was the sacrifice for stopping the rage before it could make me do anything.
Now I felt weak and sick with the wave having passed and my head spinning with all the money we didn't have for the things that we needed to have. I shuddered and shifted down a step to more cold wall, the heat of my body having already warmed the first spot. The cold seeped into the back of my hot skull, clearing my head.
Stop thinking about the money. Don't think about it. Don't think about it. If you think about it too much the anger will just come back all over again.
Think of the 3090 Falcon you have to work on, with the brake belts run thin as holograms, it's a death trap, gotta make a note to tell the owner, figure out how to explain why you know the brake belts are worn deadly out when you were just supposed to change the oil...
Think of Glow--
No. Don't. Don't think about--
I wasn't angry again now, I just wanted more than anything not to have to go down there and look at him and see how angry I knew he still was, and have to deal with him ignoring me for the next however many days.
Ignoring me was the most awful thing he could do to me, and he knew it. I hated it more than anything, especially coming from him. It was like I didn't exist. Like nothing I did mattered.
Couldn't face that. Not yet.
I pressed my hands against my eyes and tried to make myself get up and keep going down the stairs.

There was an empty cereal bowl on my kitchen table. I'd been in the staircase longer than I thought.
I threw it in the sink, growling about it. I'd cleaned him up and brought him home and he ate my food. The vacking least he could do was put a vacking bowl in the vacking sink.
Then I heard the very familiar sound of vomiting.
It was coming from the bathroom.
"Damn," I said when I looked in. "Uh...hey, are you alright?"
"I think...those pills..."
"Pills?"
"The...the hangover pills..."
"Oh. Yeah. Yeah?" Forgot I'd left those out for him.
"I thhink...ssomekindof--" he lurched into the toilet bowl again, making noises awful enough to make even me grimace. I'd had my fair share of bad times, back when I had serious trouble with drinking, but this was impressive even by my standards. "--Reaction," he gasped, pulling his head back up. "To th--th' pills..."
"Oh, shit," I said, my eyes wide. "I'm so sorry, I didn't--"
"Not your fault," he mumbled, rubbing his eyes and flushing the toilet. "I just--I don't know why,, I mean, I never have reactions to pills or medications..." Blondie blinked and sat up, his eyes clearing some. "Oh. Oh shit." He patted his hips, then looked down at my clothes he was wearing. "Wait. No. That's right. Um." He squinted up at me. "Did you empty my pockets when you put my clothes in to wash?"
...Uh.
"...Uh."
Blondie gave me this pained look. He was also trying to smile at the same time, trying to act he wasn't really mad at me.
"You didn't."
To be fair, I had been kind of occupied at the time. Occupying Glow, who'd made the mistake of squeezing into our damn tiny washroom with me and we kept brushing against each other--
Don't think about last night, don't think about it, don't think about it...
"I...was kind of distracted--"
"Can you get my shorts out now, please? I'm pretty sure the bottle was water proof, I just want to make sure."
The bottle was water proof, and the pills inside it weren't even too badly broke up. I looked hard at the laser-printed prescription. I was pretty sure he'd told me his name at some point, but I'd been kinda preoccupied with how sore my face was at the time and hadn't been paying attention.
FOREST, JULIAN H.
"Here," I said, handing it to him. He ran his finger on the little words and then slapped a hand to his forehead.
"God, I am so vacking stupid." He shoved it in my face, pointing to it. "See? It says not to take with alcohol. That's why I got sick all over last night. I forgot, and then started drinking..."
"Uhuh. I...can see that." I also don't care, and you can get the bottle out of my face now.
Blondie--uh, Julian--whirled away, mumbling to himself.
"What did I do last night?"
"Other than throw up all over me? I have no idea. Look, good that you're okay now, and I don't mean to get unfriendly, but is there, you know, someone who can pick you up--"
"Oh my god! Tris. Duh. Tris would know."
"Hey, look--Julian? I can't really--I have to go to work, you can't really--I don't know you, see, I'd rather you didn't--"
"Wait a second." He whirled back to squint up at me. "Didn't I have my rings in?"
I stared at him blankly.
"What?"
"My rings! You know, in my ears, and my lip, and--I was wearing my chain last night too, wasn't I--and I'm pretty sure my nose studs?"
Now that I thought back, he had been wearing some piercings. I'd done something with them, taken them out in case he kept throwing up and put them somewhere. I used to have a lip ring back in highschool when I first started drinking heavy. Cleaning it out again the next day usually made me feel like throwing up all over again.
"Oh. Uh. Right. Um..."
To be honest I didn't remember much of last night either. Other than being with Glow. Everything else was hazy. Well, being with Glow was hazy too, but in a good, hot blur sort of way.
I patted my pockets, then looked wildly around the washroom until a glint in the corner caught my eye.
"There," I said, pointing to one of my many junk shelves. Normally Glow didn't allow them in the actual apartment--
"Swear t-to G-God, Sil, you've taken over the ent-t-tire d-damn junk room and the spare parts shelves and the work room and half the garage--"
"They do count as spare parts! They belong on the shelves and in the work room!"
"S-Sil, you have an entire pile for shiney bits of glass."
"Glass can be spare parts."
"My God, I d-don't know w-why I even t-try..."--but I'd sort of snuck it in here during one of those months he wouldn't speak to me, much less set foot in the apartment. "I put them over there. In case you kept getting sick and everything. And your earrings were getting caught up in your hair. Cleaned the lip ring off."
"Oh. Um. Thanks," he said brightly, scooping his piercings off the rack. Then he just stood there and looked hard at them. "Were there...any others?"
I was starting to get annoyed. What did it take to get him the vack out of my apartment?
"No. There wasn't anything. Do you, uh--do you have anyone to drive you home?"
"What?" he said distractedly. "Oh. Yeah, I can call Tris..."
"Good. You should probably do that."
Blondie blinked at me, another kind of fog clearing from his eyes.
"Oh. Oh! Right, right, sorry, I'm kind of overstaying here--"
I raised my eyebrows. "Yeah. Little bit."
"--I'll just go call my friend--"
"You can use our shop tel."
"I have a palmface--"
"We're ten levels below yours. Your palmface won't have that kind of range."
Blondie went a little pale.
"Ten...ten levels?"
"Tell your friend not to play their music very loud, don't drive too fast, keep the windows up, and don't stop between here and your level. Not for anything. You should be fine."
"O-ohhh...kay."
The dryer pinged.
"Your clothes are done. Meet me downstairs when you're dressed and I'll show you where the tel is."
This time I made it down the stairs, but I couldn't face Glow yet. I stayed in front to watch the register and I was glad for the excuse, for all I bitched and moaned about us not having anyone to do it properly.

GLOW

She made me so vacking angry. She was so damn good at it. It was like she'd perfected it as an art vacking form.
I shouldn't have gotten in the car with her. I knew better. I knew better, dammit. We'd gotten to the movie fine and I'd thought we'd get home fine but she started...doing what she always did whenever I was in the car with her.
My wrench slid off the bolt for the fourth time and I slammed it down on the worktable in frustration. Fifty pounds of meta-steel muscle bent the wrench and dented the metal table. I didn't care.
"Dammit. God." I rested my forehead on my hands and bit my lip so hard I could feel the skin break.
I couldn't put a damn carburetor back together like this. I hated it when this happened. I couldn't think straight for days afterwards. Why did I always do this? We'd been doing fine. Great, even. Things had almost been back to normal, and then I'd gone and--
No. I hadn't done anything. This was not my fault. This was Sil's fault. Because she did these things on purpose, and she knew I couldn't stop her. She knew what would happen and she did it anyway because she was so vacking selfish.
I wanted to cry. My throat constricted, the back of my eyes stung, and everything filled up and tried to spill over--and nothing came out.
Cyborgs can't cry.
I had a tiny nuclear generator in my chest instead of a heart and I couldn't cry.
It was then that I looked up and realized that the bolt I'd spent the past five minutes trying to twist back into the carburetor sheath was the wrong size.


JULIAN

"Come on, come on, pick up..."
After the sixth round of ringing, I got Tris's answering machine. Again. I growled in frustration and clapped the tel back into place on its port.
"Hey," my host snapped. She was leaning in the doorway, watching me, like she thought I was going to try to steal the tel right off the kitchen wall. Or even more likely, the fridge it was mounted next to. "Take it easy. Don't break the thing."
"Sorry," I mumbled. "Um. I..."
"He's not pickin' up, is he?"
"No. I don't know what he's doing--he usually always picks it up when it's me."
"Yeah, well, it isn't your number, so."
"Oh. Right. Duh."
We stood there for a long, awkward moment."But yeah, I left him like four messages, so he should get back to me soon--"

"Sil? Sil, I need a Jensen-Twenty knob-head for this carburetor, and I can't find it in the--"
His words twisted off with a squeak and he stopped dead, staring at me.
I stared back.
I'd seen cyborgs before, but never up close. At least, not as far as I knew. You could usually only tell a cyborg from looking at them when they went out of their way to not look human. They would change something obvious--eye colour, actual metal spikes instead of hair, moving tattoos, even extra arms and things like that.
This guy would definitely never be mistaken for human. His skin was grey, which was kind of creepy to me, and covered in tiny darker flecks, which I guessed were freckles. His eyes were unnaturally, vibrantly green, practically glowing, and he had small, shifting neon-green tattoos all over his skin. I picked out a gecko, some vines, and something with a broad body, a ridiculously long snout, and some sort of thin, curling tongue.
His hair was the craziest, though. He had vivid green glowdreads, yet another crazy body mod only available to cyborgs. They were sort of a cross of lava lamps and glowsticks, found in any colour and could be as thick as two inches to as thin as a pencil. As we stared at each other and he shrank away from me, I could have sworn his dreads dimmed.
"Uh," Sil finally said, looking from one of us to the other. "Glow. This is...uh..."
"Julian." I smiled and gave a little friendly wave.
"Julian. Yeah. He slept on the couch last night."
The cyborg's mouth dropped open and his eyes snapped wide. He stared at Sil for a long time, clearly groping for something to say, and settled for grabbing her by the arm and dragging her out of the kitchen.
Unable to help myself, I crept up to the doorway and leaned as close to the doorway as I dared.
"C-can't be s-serious, S-Sil, G-God, God, o-oh m-m-my God, he w-w-was there th-the wh-wh-whole time--"
"Glow. Calm. Down. He was unconscious, okay? Out cold the whole time. He didn't hear--"
Oh. My. God. Ohmygawd, tell me they weren't doing what I think they were doing while I was sleeping on their couch.
"S-Sil, I am n-not going to c-c-calm d-down! H-he w-w-w-w--"
"Was completely unconscious, Glow. God. Would you please just stop."
"I-I am n-not g-going to s-s-s--"
"Glow. Just--you're making your stutter worse, just let it go--"
"SH-SHUT UP!"
It was so sudden and loud I jerked back from the doorway and pressed up against the wall.
"Glow, I'm sorry--"
"I am n-not m-making my own d-damn s-s-stutter w-w-w-worse, dammit, S-Sil! It's y-you! You d-do these v-vacking s-stupid things and--"
"How many times do I have to say I'm sorry?"
"Y-you s-s-say it so damn o-often i-it d-d-doesn't even m-m-mean anyth-thing anym-more!"
"...What does that even mean?"
"I-it means--i-it m-m-means--G-God!"
I heard stomping feet and then a door slammed. In the long, long silence that followed, my Palmface beeped.
My heart leapt. Tris! I didn't give myself time to realize how impossible that was, I just tapped the touch-activated microchip embedded under the surface of my palm and the holoscreen leapt out, a new tap scrolling across it.
HEY BAB WER R U LOST U LAST NITE
Oh, God, it was Brett. Part of last night came trickling back--she'd been the one to pick me up, and then we'd met up with Tris at the bar. And then Tris had gone, I remembered that, but I wasn't sure what happened to Brett.
...Why hadn't Brett been the one to take me home and clean me up? Why had some total stranger been more concerned for me than my sort-of girlfriend?
I had just started tapping a reply when a dark blur appeared on the other side of my holoscreen. I blinked and looked up.
Sil was looming over me.
"...Um--"
"Let's go."
She jerked her hand in a this-way motion and walked out of the kitchen. It took my brain a second to kick into gear, and then I minimized my holoscreen and lurched after her.
"Wait, what? Go? Go where?"
"I'm going to drive you home," she growled without so much as a backwards glance.
Just as we entered the garage there was a massive CRASH. I almost jumped out of my skin. I whirled around to see what had happened but the mechanic grabbed my arm, hard, and yanked me back the other way. We were standing in front of her car.
"What--"
"Nothing," she snapped.
"But--"
"I said it's nothing."
"--might be hurt?"
Sil whirled on me, pinning me with a burning glare.
"He is fine. He's just being a little bitch and breaking shit because I kept interrupting him because sometimes it takes him like ten minutes to say one damn sentence and it's not my fault I get sick of waiting. Now get in the damn car."
I got in the damn car.

I tapped Brett back while Sil drove me to my home address. Brett tried calling me after the first tap, but I didn't pick it up. I didn't want to have any kind of conversations sitting next to Sil in an enclosed space. There wouldn't really be any point in trying to talk, what with her radiating vibes of black anger. It was hugely scary, and I'd just end up mumbling too quietly to be heard.
I didn't like being around angry people. Especially angry people I barely knew. I spent most of the ride indiscreetly pressing myself against the passenger car door as Sil sent the levehicle whipping around turns at ninety miles an hour. She was driving on manual, and if she didn't have me vacking terrified of her already I probably would have asked her to slow down.
She finally started calming down about halfway to my level when we got stuck in traffic on a level merge shaft. There were so many leves packed into the enclosed space that no one could move up or down. For a few minutes I waited for Sil to start getting angry again--she definitely seemed like the type to get roadraging--but instead she just turned the music up, put the windows down, and leaned her seat back, kicking the gear into Hover while we waited for traffic to get moving again. The mega-tense atmosphere started to leak out and I finally unbunched too.
Just in time, because Tris was calling me back.
"Oh my gawd, Tris, where have you been?"
"Julian, sweetie, I am so sorry. I was totally out of it. Are you okay? Where are you?"
"Some really sweet masc hauled my ass out of the club before someone, like, you know," I said.
"Yeah, I bet she was really sweet to your unconscious ass," Tris snorted.
"No, seriously, she didn't do anything. I mean, you know I can tell. Besides, I think she was..." I glanced at Sil, who was looking out her window, and lowered my voice. "Like...Tris, I think she and her fem were humping while I was passed out on their couch."
"Oh my gawd," Tris squealed, his words dissolving into fits of giggles. "Are you serious?"
"Yeah, they were, like, arguing and shit about it this morning."
"Oh my gawd, Julian," he said again, still giggling. "Oh. My. Gawd. That's like, so vacked up and so funny at the same time."
"Yeah, it's vacking hilarious. Look, Tris--"
"Oh my God! I forgot, like, I wanted to ask you, did you ever get your package thingy delivered--"
I immediately felt this awful cold weight drop into my stomach, though I was fuzzy on why.
"Uh...package?"
"Yeah. The thingy you were carrying. You said you had to deliver it to some guys."
"I don't...remember. I don't really remember anything last night."
"God, I don't even doubt you, sweetie. You got so vacked up. Like seriously, babe, you shot up like six different toxis all together. I am not surprised you got sickly."
"No, that wasn't it, I got sick because I had alcohol and I'm taking this prescription--" Steady, Julian. Stay on track. I shook my head to clear it, my large, silver bangles lightly slapping against my cheeks. "Tris. Sweetie. Package, what?"
"Oh. Yeah. Right. Something from your sister's boyfriend?"
I could feel a headache coming on. I sighed and rubbed my temples.
"Tris. I don't have a sister." He's known me for nine years. "What are you--oh God. Oh. Oh God. Tris, do you mean Mom's boyfriend?"
"Oh yeah! Him. The galactic dickwad? Oh, God, what's his name--"
"Louis." The word dropped out of my mouth like a chunk of ice. "God. Oh, God. Tris. Tris, he's going to kill me. He's going to vacking kill me. God. Tris, God, what do I do--"
"Julian, Julian, don't panic. Calm down, okay? Just backtrack through the clubs we went through last night and you'll be fine."
"Clubs? Shit, Tris, I only remember one!"
I felt the car shift gears and realized the traffic above and below us was slowly shifting and picking up speed. I wouldn't be able to hear Tris over the hum of the engine.
"Tris, I gotta go. Tap me the names of the clubs we went to last night, okay?"
"Yeah, sure thing sweetie. Good luck!"
I got the list about a minute later. There were about six clubs. I groaned.
"Problem?" Sil asked, glancing over at me.
"Something like that," I groaned.
"Yeah?"
"Um," I said, raising an eyebrow at her. "I left something at a club."
"Uh-huh?"
"Uh...there's like, six clubs we went to last night, so now I have to check all of them. So I guess I have to grab cab fare when I get home."
Sil was quiet, then sighed.
"Or I guess I could take you there."
"Oh, oh God, no, you don't have to do that," I said quickly. Probably too quickly. Can you blame me? She was being nice and all but that didn't change that she was scary, buff, and in a gang. I didn't want to be stuck in a car with her for any longer than I had too.
"No, really, it's fine," she said, rubbing her temples.
"I don't want you to--"
"I said it's fine."
I clammed up tight and went back to pressing myself against the car door, edging the lock up as surreptitiously as I could. Maybe I'd be able to throw myself out fast enough if she snapped. Maybe.
"Blondie?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm gonna need an address if we're gonna get there."

This is an opening and I feel like it's all around horrible.

I've been using this story as a bit of a thought dump, so it's pretty heavy and all around horribly clumsy. I'm not really looking for critique at the moment, but I would like a little help cutting things out. Basically if you could skim it and pick out anything that seems grossly unnecessary, I'd really appreciate it so I can mark it out now and then go back and clip it out when I'm editing later.


Andon Essaice began life as a simple pigeon shepherd. Though no pigeon shepherd likes to be called a pigeon shepherd, for even the poorest beggar of the city Rhinelark has their pride.
So in Rhinelark, bird herding was called roof dancing. And it really was a kind of dancing, leaping from roof to roof to keep up with the flock, twisting and sidestepping to avoid the holes, precarious ledges, chimneys, loose shingles, and of course the bird refuse.
Andon never had much ambition, mostly because she didn't see anything lacking in her life. Though roofdancers were somewhat looked down upon when they weren't totally disregarded, in Andon's mind she lead an ideal life. When other six year old children of the middle class were sent off to stuffy boarding schools and tight-starched uniforms, she spent her days lazing away on rooftops, basking in mild breezes and gentle sunlight, flicking the longwhip at the occasional wanderer to keep it in line, watching the herder ravens to make sure they didn't get too rough with their wards, brandishing the club at a cat that might grow too bold. And then every other half hour to an hour, a sudden surge of wild energy as the flock decided as one that it was time to move on, brilliant adrenaline-fueled dashing and leaping from roof to roof to keep up with them.
Andon lived this way since the time she could leap a one-foot gap, around three years or so, and looked forward to spending the rest of her life this way. Though magic fueled most of her country, her father's bleeding heart pigeons, so named for the smudge of red on their breast above the heart that uncannily resembled fresh blood, were well favoured for their hardiness among mages for experimentation and message sending, and more recently were becoming popular as pets among upper class. In the mind of six year old Andon, she spent enough time on her future to decide it was secure. Her city would always need her pigeons, and her pigeons would always need her.
And as for magic...well. Other people in the city were glad enough for it. Other people that didn't live in the West Wall district behind the Ketlington University of Magic, other people that weren't taught from early childhood to expect to be horribly mutated into something awful by the time they were middle-aged, other people that could afford to live in normal houses and hang them with charms against bad luck, unwanted pregnancies, sickness, and, of course, harmful magic enjoyed it well enough. But for those who were too poor to leave West Wall, magic was known as the sickness. It was not spoken of, and those of the West Wall district knew little of it. They could not tolerate even the meekest of charms or spellbooks, as the magic that seeped out of the University in invisible tidal waves--waste from spells, experiments, and just the sheer mass of power accumulated by those that dwelled there all twisted and tangled and gnarled together. And together all that mangled, raw power sunk into the dirt and stones and water of the West Wall district and, in time, gradually warped its residents into unpredictable, often horribly wrong shapes.
Andon's mother in particular was beginning to succumb to the more terrible changes.
Andon was not a very curious girl, or adventerous, and didn't even consider herself particularly brave. Leaping rooftops was hardly dangerous in her mind, and she was content with the idea that there was nothing better.
The amphiptere changed that. The amphiptere changed a lot of things.
Andon had her first encounter with true power a few weeks before she turned seven.
A pigeon's scream startled her from a pleasant afternoon half-doze. Andon was immediately alert and on her feet, the club in her hand, the longwhip ready. She snapped a command at a nearby raven to hold the flock on the roof, and it croaked in acknowledgement. The pigeon squealed again and a tremor went through the flock. The raven cawed them into submission as Andon darted around a chimney in pursuit of the cry, club raised to strike.
Instead of a cat or a wild, territorial pigeon or even a gargoyle, Andon found her ward menaced by a winding blue shape with wings on one end and the other end wrapped around the pigeon's leg.
Andon had seen snakes before, but never on roofs and certainly not with wings. With a sharp blow she stunned the body long enough to extract the pigeon, its leg badly mangled.
"Stewpid biddy," she murmured gently, carefully knocking it into unconsciousness. "Po' helpless, useless thingy." Her father would not be willing to spare the money to heal a leg so badly injured, not for one bird in a flock of over two hundred. Andon took out a small shiv and cut the leg off cleanly, as it dangled only by a shred of tendon, then quickly wrapped it and fashioned a sling out of her jacket. With her shiv she snipped the flight feathers on the bird and tied the wings to its body so it would not flail and fall from the sling when it woke. "Silly dumb biddy," she crooned, and turned to kill the strange winged snake.
It stirred as Andon raised the club high over her head. She knew nothing of snakes. Andon decided then that her policy when encountering a threat she didn't know was to make sure she killed it on the first blow.
Vivid orange eyes peeked out from the pearlescent and dark blue feathers, and a bright white tongue flickered briefly. Andon brought the club down.
It slammed into the rooftop with a loud thwack as the serpent's head was suddenly three inches to her right. Andon yanked back before it could strike.
But it didn't.
"Mercy."
Andon froze. She knew nothing of snakes, but she was fairly sure they couldn't talk. She hesitated, staring at the serpent, club gripped tight.
"Mercy," it repeated, its mouth and tongue clearly shaping the word. Andon swallowed nervously, stepping back.
"Ahr yew some so't of...godling?" she asked suspiciously. Godlings tended to make strange things happen. Like talking snakes, or talking animals in general. But Andon hadn't heard of godlings being found anywhere other than Farthacia, another continent to the south.
"No," it replied. "What I am is a bit of broken wing and a good deal of hungry. Give me the bird."
Andon scowled and kicked at it. The snake yanked away, and this time Andon saw its right wing lagging awkwardly.
"Stupid child, I am wounded enough! Lash at me again and I will strike, and you will know my poison."
"Yu'll not get one a' my birds," Andon scowled, backing away from it. "Godling or what, you'll not 'ave a one."
"Wait," it hissed as Andon turned away. "Wait...pleeasse..."
Andon hesitated.
"I will give you a gift," the snake whispered.
"Ah don't wont nothin'," Andon snapped, becoming irritated. The thing unnerved her,
"It is a very special gift. A gift that could help you against what ails you."
Andon's hand reached unbidden to her neck, to brush against the ugly patch of warted, purple skin. Her own changes had begun to take root, though she spent most of her time not thinking about it, or that her younger brother was nearly the same age and showed no signs at all yet.
"It turns against you more quickly than others," the serpent murmured, "because you have potential. You are adept. The magic is drawn to you. My gift could change the tide, though. My gift would give you power over it, the power to drive it back, to undo, to obey you. My gift would save your life."
Andon thought heavily on this, as heavily as any almost-seven-year-old can bend their mind to anything. She stroked the bird pensively, holding it close to her chest. She touched its stump of a leg. She thought of her mother, half-dead already, confined to her bedroom for the past months. She thought of her father, who had always relied on her mother for strength, slowly shrinking into himself, even as he tried desperately to hang on to his family.
Then she looked at the snake's broken wing.
It was a hunter, and not a hunted, but it was still a flying thing, and Andon's father had told her flying things were to be treasured. There were plenty of things over land and under sea, and it was easy enough to hug the ground and sink in the water. But flight was something very special. Something that ought to be protected.
And if the gift could indeed help her undo the sickness that magic brought...
"Ah'll fetch ye' a sparrow," she decided. "And ah'll mend ye wing. But ye'll not have any ov me father's birds."
"Deal," the snake said.
"Ye wait hare, then. I'v nay stewpid enuff to pick ye up wit a bird in me arms."
The snake hissed quietly, and Andon smirked.
She brought the bird back to the flock. It was waking up, dazed and a bit wobbly, but didn't seem to notice it lacked a leg. Pigeons were notorious for their stupidity.
The birds were trained to fly home when they had a parcel on their leg. Andon attached a blank slip of paper to the bird's good leg and tossed the pigeon into the air. Then she sent the flock on to the next roof and went back for the serpent.
Andon was good for her word, catching two sparrows for the snake that it swallowed almost one right after the other in its haste to sate its hunger. Then as it lay limp, drowsy from its plump belly, Andon set to work on its wing.
It was a clean break, infinitely better than a shatter, and would heal well enough as long as the beast didn't break the splint and rested hard for some weeks. Andon explained this to the serpent when it woke and it nodded to show it understood. Then it asked if it could stay with Andon till it was healed.
After some thought, Andon agreed. On the condition that the snake did not go after any of their pigeons.

"You are being idiotic. Do it again, and this time, do it right."
"Stewpid biddy," Andon muttered under her breath in her thick West Wall accent. Obridandis reared upright, flaring her hood wings.
"What was that?" the serpent snapped.
"Nothing. Look, I'm doing it right, see? Alright?" Andon drew the symbols in the air exactly as the book depicted, the vivid red light of her magic sparking and curling out from within her fingertip, the bone and veins underneath faintly visible.
"Better. Not perfect. But not idiotic."
Andon scowled as she completed the spell. A small chorus of tiny trumpets sounded and golden songbirds exploded from the symbols she'd drawn. Simple results from a spell of complicated symbols. That was today's goal, perfecting Andon's spell scribing technique. According to Obridandis, she'd gotten sloppy with confidence in the past few weeks. According to Andon, she was fourteen years old, and shouldn't have to worry that much about such a trivial thing for a long time. Not until the University entrance exam, anyway, which was several years away.
They'd been on the rooftop for three straight hours, and Andon was hungry and cramped from sitting in the same position for so long.
"Lunch?" she suggested hopefully. Obridandus swayed slightly, her tongue flickering thoughtfully. Her hood wings retracted.
"...Fine. Make it quick."
Andon dashed off across the rooftops, leaping easily from one to the next, darting and twisting agilely to avoid dips and holes and slippery shingles. It was week's end, Endsday, when the tamed birds of the city spent the day in their eyrie so the roof dancers could have a rest. Most of the city was in fact having a rest, and was out and about in the market, either to spend any extra earnings on pretty things or just look at pretty things to save extra earnings for. Serious buying, such as food and clothing, would be done the day after, on Essensday.
As Andon neared the market, she paused, steadying herself against a chimney, and cocked her head to listen.
The wind was singing.
The hums, chirps, and whistles of dozens of other roof dancers were lifted high on the pre-noon breeze, joining together in a single, aimless melody. Usually the calls of roofdancers possessed specific meanings, coming together to form almost a whole entire language. Stormy skies, and directions, West-up-North, East-down-South, were just a few of the more common phrases. But today, known words were meant to be taken without meaning, casting definition aside for the pure sound. Down in the market, the tune would be lost in the hustle and bustle of kiosks and shopkeepers hawking their wares, the chatter of tatis and the humming of the lower damos voices. The roof dancers only sang like this every Endsday, the only time the signals were to be taken as meaningless. It was an unspoken rule among them that otherwise the almost-language was to be used only when needed. The only songs that had meaning today were roofdancers' whistle-names.
Andon darted around a particularly large, crumbling chimney, skidded to a halt an inch from a stone gutter, then dropped to grab on to it with her fingers, swung herself forcefully to the right, released, and dropped several feet to grab onto the pipe below.
She easily slid the rest of the way down to the ground and darted out of the alley
and into the bustling marketplace.
A series of low, humming notes reached her ears, and Andon replied with several short trilling high notes. A name for a name, exchanging positions with a fellow roofdancer.
"Andon!" The fourteen year old whirled whirled to see her friend Kaurot waving at her through the crowd. They both wriggled their way through the thronging masses to catch hands so they wouldn't be separated.
"Where to for lunch?" Kaurot asked, his impish face grinning, ruddy and smudged with dirt. Kaurot's face was always smudged with dirt. Andon's was always smudged with slightly more than his.
"Piper's sugar buns," she said, her mouth already watering. "Then some of Donno's fried fish chips, and then Kitto's sweet pips!"
"Sounds like a plan," Kaurot said excitedly. "Race you!"
Andon's hand shot out and she shoved him before he could shove her. She darted off into the crowd, his yells of indignation fading rapidly behind her.
It didn't take Andon long to maneuver the crowd of market day, and she had soon beat Kaurot well and good. She tested her money pouch as she approached the stall, trying to decide whether Piper's sugar buns were worth the halfpence today, or if she would have to steal them instead. She hadn't shown herself to Piper yet, so she had time to decide. The faded patch of scar tissue on her neck itched, like it always did when she was nervous.
Andon was just about to sneak around into the stall's blindspot when she felt a hand settle lightly, but firmly, on her shoulder. Startled, Andon yelped and jerked away, but the hand held fast. She relaxed, though, when the owner of the hand uttered a soft, genteel chuckle.
"Steady on there, young Andon. Planning to nick out of poor Piper's stock again? You know she needs the ha'penny just as much as you."
Andon flushed and looked up into the lovely face of Annonnio, one of the loveliest men Andon had ever known, and was sure she would ever know. His long, sheer blonde hair fell in sleek, trim waves down the front of his torso. Somehow he never tangled it in the intricate folds and embroidery of the expensive kiotos he always wore.
"Reck'n ah need it a b't more'n she do," Andon muttered sulkily. Annonnio laughed, a sound like little bells.
"I won't argue with you. Come on, love, I'll buy you your sweet."
"An' Kaurot too!" Andon said hurriedly.
"Ye damned roight, 'an' Kaurot too!'" Kaurot exclaimed as he shrugged his way free of the tarp of the cart he'd crawled under. Annonnio laughed again. Andon was beginning to notice, more and more in the past year, that Annonnio's laugh sent little shivers through her. "Bloody bollhock'n cheater you are."
"Sugar buns all around," Annonnio said, smiling.
"Sounds like someone had good business all last night," Kaurot muttered to Andon as Annonnio proceeded ahead of them to the stall.
Red hot anger burst through Andon's veins, and she punched Kaurot smack in the face. He fell hard on his arse, and gaped up at her in astonishment. Andon stared down at him, a good deal shocked herself. She'd never hit him so hard before, and not in the face.
"Th' divvil wozzat fo'?" Kaurot demanded, recovering quickly and leaping back to his feet.
"Jus'--jus' dinnae talk about An'io lie' thaht," Andon snapped, clenching her fists again.
"Why oughtn' I? Issa truth, sure an' sure! You know that. We knowed it since that time you said we ought 'o take a look at what An'io does wot dresses him so fine--"
"I dinnae care! Jis--jis dinnae say things like that, or ah thump you round again!" Andon demanded, shoving her face into Kaurot's. They glared hard at each other for a long, stiff moment, until finally Kaurot sulkily lowered his eyes and looked away. His left eye, where Andon's fist had landed, was already swelling up.
"Come now, what are you two little ones bickering about now?" Annonnio asked, returning with their buns. "Andon, I've seen you pop Kaurot one before, but never that hard."
"I'm nay so lit'le anymore, An'io," Andon said hurriedly. "Hailit Eltlen say I'm right hanssome jus' th'other day!" She was telling a good bit of truth. Two years prior she'd only come up to Annonnio's hip. Now her head was nearly level with his chest, and she was still growing like a weed.
"I'm sure he did, Andon," Annonnio said in amusement. "He's taken quite a fancy to you, I hear. All you Rensley kits are growing up so fast, these days. Along with me, now, let's find somewhere we can sit and enjoy these buns in peace."
"'Cor, bollyhocks, and fell-dogs walkin'," Kaurot hissed as they fell in behind Annonnio. "You've gone an' took bloody fancy t' th' town's prettiest whore!"

At the end of the market day, Kaurot went home with a broken nose to compliment his black eye. His mother was furious. Meanwhile, Andon had something else entirely to deal with, and potentially even less pleasant than a furious West Wall matriarch.

^be sure to interject near the beginning with training under Obri that she's making Andon learn proper "dialogue" so she doesn't talk like she comes from a slum. Even though she does.