Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Having successfully conversed with a human, I’m now out of excuses for putting off my other assignment any longer, which is to test the hacking software.

I find a place to sit down, in case my movement glitches while I’m multitasking, on an uncomfortable bench outside one of the recruiting offices. It faces a wall-sized display screen looping advertisements about the glamorous life of corporate indenture, and I pretend to be engrossed in that when I finally give the software a shot.

And after all that time spent procrastinating—anxiety mounting while my overpowered processors came up with increasingly outlandish scenarios in which this could go horribly, luridly wrong—“hacking” the station SecSystem turns out to be laughably anticlimactic.

Roughly translated from machine language:

Me: Hello, I am your contracted SecUnit.

StationSecSys: Oh cool, I didn’t know I had a SecUnit!

And I’m in.

(It turns out that passing for a SecUnit is way less stressful than passing for a human, who knew?)

I wouldn’t want to try this with a SecSystem that had actual SecUnits on inventory, because they would definitely notice the sudden, suspicious new addition to their roster and be compelled to report me. But StationSecSys, blithely unaware that active SecUnits aren’t allowed on transit stations, is happy to throw open its gates and start handing me inputs.

(I have so many questions about how Tarik’s employers developed something like this, and what they usually do with it.)

Tarik didn’t actually tell me what I’m supposed to be “practicing”—I’m not sure he even knows the full extent of what this code suite can do—but I can think of a few key applications. Namely: hacking body scanners, because that’s currently the point-of-failure in trying to pass me off as a human.

Routing everything through the external feed device that Tarik gave me is annoying, but it means that my feed profile isn’t going to give me away, and I’m good enough at socializing that humans may not realize they’re talking to a construct. None of that is going to fool a body scanner though.

But the software is indeed as good as its word. I carefully explore the SecSystem until I find the station’s network of body scanners, one at each of the security checkpoints, and then set my sights on the busiest. With a careful grip on the connection between the scanner and SecSys, I get up and join the herd of people passing through it—and in the instant when it flashes over me, I intercept the real scan result and replace it with a fake one provided by the module.

SecSystem receives the false data without a blip, and I’m through. That is one major hurdle cleared, and only my behavior protocol keeps me moving casually instead of letting out a huge sigh of relief.

That said, anyone paying attention would have instantly clocked that the body in the scan result is not mine. It is clearly a modified SecUnit—slightly shorter than the standard build, but still thirteen centimeters taller than me, and considerably more jacked. That’s unlikely to be a problem here, where the scanners are really only checking for weapons, and so the crowds of humans are passing through them en masse, but I’ll need to write a fix for that before I go anywhere that does individual screenings.

I walk a circuit of the station, weaving in and out of security checkpoints—until an algorithm flags my behavior as anomalous and submits it to SecSystem for review. Fortunately, I’m already in there, so I’m able to intercept and delete the alert before it gets anywhere, but that brings my next challenge to the fore, which is figuring out how to erase myself from security footage.

That requires me to dig through approximately five million different camera feeds (okay, only a hundred and seventy-six) to pare them down to the handful I appear on, which is very tedious because this isn’t a task I’m interested in or adapted to. I also happen to find Tarik while I’m at it—there are three cameras with different angles of the food court, and I opt to keep those open too. I like having extra eyes on him.

The camera-tampering module turns out to be a very clever bit of code; it stitches me out while leaving the rest of the scene intact, meaning it’s very difficult to tell that anything’s been changed unless you already know what you’re looking for. When I’m pretty sure I’ve got it working, I resume walking the embarkation floor, keeping an eye on the footage being logged to SecSystem and making sure it doesn’t notice that someone’s meddling with it.

My path happens to take me past the berth where we arrived, where the transport is still docked, and I ping the bot pilot in greeting.

I am immediately flooded with updates as it enthusiastically shares its recent activity. The astronomy lectures were apparently a huge hit, and my little bot pilot friend has been making off like a bandit since arriving on the station. This means another round of landing/departure videos as it shows me the newest additions to its collection (and there are indeed a lot), but that’s a low-stakes and low-intensity way to pass the time while most of my processing power is tied up with the hacking module, so I don’t mind.

It is also very excited to report that it now has footage from the site I’d asked about, InHaven—firsthand footage, it informs me, preening, and recorded less than two cycles ago. (Apparently, video clips are higher value the more recent they are and the fewer degrees of separation they are from the source.)

I thank it and accept the file—another present for Tarik, although the pessimistic side of me reflects that it’s less of a gift and more of a bribe to try to convince him that I’m too useful to be discarded.

As I resume walking the embarkation floor, I watch the video, because despite everything, I’m still curious about why Tarik is interested in this place, specifically. The video shows a ship’s-eye view of the approach—according to the metadata, it’s from a large commercial freighter similar to the one we followed out here—passing over the honeycombed glass expanse of an agricultural platform, then circling around to the dark side of the asteroid where it’s allowed into a protected docking bay. It decouples one cargo module and accepts a new one in exchange, then departs again. The entire operation takes less than twenty six minutes from start to finish, and answers absolutely none of my questions.

What’s new, though, is that I’m finding it increasingly uncomfortable to be in the middle of a crowd. In the past, I’d never cared about the presence or absence of an audience—they weren’t my clients, so their perception of me was irrelevant. Now, though, I’m intensely conscious of the potential scrutiny I’m under: that at any time, any number of these people might be watching me, and if my passing-for-human performance slips, then being perceived could be very dangerous indeed. I don’t know if that’s comparable to the “dysphoria” that Tarik suggested, but it’s adding a layer of heightened vigilance that my processors are having to work harder to compensate for.

I want to go someplace where I don’t have to worry about being observed for a while. There’s nowhere for that on the main level (except presumably the rentable conference rooms, though if I wanted to stare at blank boring walls, I might as well go back to the transient housing), but poking around in the security feed shows that the employees-only areas of the station are basically always empty. I find a maintenance lift tucked into an out-of-the-way corner, and use the access code helpfully provided by SecSys to ride it down to a restricted level.

(I know it won’t always be this easy, that bigger stations will have much tighter security, but this experiment has definitely provided proof-of-concept, at least.)

My destination is a little airlock chamber with a hatch to the outside and a viewport that gives an interesting vantage of the underside of the station. According to SecSystem, it’s a maintenance port for doing exterior work on the station hull, but nobody’s used it in over a year, so it’s a fairly safe bet that I won’t be interrupted here. I sit down in the middle of the floor, drop the exterior feed interface in favor of connecting directly, and let most of my consciousness go digital.

It’s easier when I’m not having to allocate a portion of my attention to passing for human. I can reach out into SecSystem and let it fill up my processing capabilities in just the right balance between overclocked and understimulated—like a glimpse of what it is to be a SecUnit, in symbiotic equilibrium with its controller system. This still isn’t a job I have any particular affinity for, but it’s not uncomfortable to let myself be integrated into the wider network.

There are other things I could do with the hacking suite—delving deeper into the station’s databases, modifying records and issuing orders—but I don’t have any reason to, and those systems have more surveillance on them, meaning a higher chance of getting caught. I’m confident that I can get myself through security checkpoints and disguise my activity from camera scrutiny, which is good enough for the goal of passing for human. If Tarik wants me to do hacking stuff for his spy purposes, then he can make it an order.

So instead I watch Tarik, because he’s the most interesting thing on the security cameras.

He’s doing a better job of socializing than I had. After the workers he was talking to earlier went back on duty, they were replaced by a raucous crew that had just come off-shift, descending on the food court to load up their bags with alcohol and snacks. Tarik had jokingly asked one of them where to go for a good time on this station, and promptly been invited to join them, for the low price of contributing some alcohol to the cause.

Now, he’s at some middle-of-the-day hall party in the resident housing (I’m not sure this station actually observes night-day cycles, since it’s not tied to a planet and has ships coming and going all around the clock), sitting in someone’s folding chair and not-drinking from the same can of alcohol he’s been holding for the past hour, chatting with various people about belt politics. The story he gives, when asked, is that he’s here doing a risk assessment evaluation for a shipping firm on Tysun, which usually prompts people to volunteer their own opinions while he listens attentively.

It’s different, watching him socialize with people he doesn’t hate, when he’s not putting on a persona. I wouldn’t call him extroverted, exactly, but he’s at ease in this group, doesn’t have any trouble making conversation with working-class strangers. His chronic scowl has lightened, making him more approachable, and he looks comfortable in his own skin—like he enjoys being surrounded by the noise and energy of people having a good time.

When he’s between conversational partners, he pauses to check his augments for incoming communications, as if something might have arrived and he’d missed the notification. It’s not conclusive, of course, but I wonder if he might be waiting on (hoping for?) some word from me. He could reach out to me at any time, but it occurs to me that he’s letting me set the pace, that he isn’t going to force me to see him again before I want to.

Without letting myself overthink it too much, I tap his feed and then send him the input from one of the hallway cameras that has an angle on him.

I see him startle slightly, his head instinctively turning to look for the camera before he catches himself and aborts the motion. In the camera feed, the corner of his mouth pulls up, and on the arm of the chair he lifts his fingers in a subtle but unmistakable wave.

I send a 👋 back.

He lifts the can of alcohol to his mouth to cover his smile and fakes taking a drink while he responds. So you got the code working and all?

I tap an affirmative, then offer, I can join you if you like.

I know how to be arm-candy at a party—even pretending to be human, that would be reassuringly familiar, at this point.

He’s silent for a moment, with the can resting against his lips, then says, No, I can be done here. I’d rather come talk to you, if you don’t mind. Or you can have more time to yourself if you want. No wrong answer.

Well, there’s no avoiding it forever, and no getting past it until we do. I drop a navigational arrow in his augments, and watch him blink through the moment it takes him to figure out what I want him to do.

Then he rises to his feet, discreetly abandoning his (by now room-temperature) can of alcohol and wending his way toward the exit. He says goodbye to a few people as he passes, making his excuses for leaving, then tucks his hands in his pockets and casually sets out in the direction indicated.

I watch his progress through the camera feeds, scrubbing him out of them as he goes, while he lets the arrow steer him down a flight of stairs back to the main floor. He follows it onto the concourse briefly and then off into a discreet side corridor, but stops short when it dead-ends at the maintenance lift.

Adeyemi…? he says dubiously.

0455919.

He hesitates, because this is now explicitly trespassing. He’ll be in a lot of trouble if he gets caught beyond this point, and he has no guarantee that I actually know what I’m doing. But he evidently makes up his mind to trust me, because he enters the code and steps inside the lift, and his pulse only ticks up a little bit when it starts moving of its own accord.

When the lift stops and the doors open, he startles at finding me sitting there on the floor of the airlock, like he hadn’t expected to reach me so fast. I shift over to make space for him, and he comes and sits down cross-legged next to me, so we’re gazing out across the underside of the station in parallel. He’s left enough space that he’s not crowding me, but is close enough that either of us could reach out and touch the other, if we chose to.

For several long minutes we just sit there together, looking out onto the quiet void of space. I’ve switched back to Helpmeet, and it’s strongly advocating for me to fill the silence with meaningless chatter, to signal to Tarik that I’m not harboring a grudge from earlier, but I’m allowed to override it, and I do. If he wants to sweep this under the rug, I’ll let him (I won’t have a choice), but he’s not hastening to do that. The silence doesn’t feel awkward, or uncomfortable, just waiting.

At length, Tarik draws in a breath. “The night I got you from Mareed,” he begins, his words careful and measured. There’s a pause, and then he says, “I almost didn’t. I almost talked myself out of it.”

That’s not what I’d been expecting, and I turn my head to look at him.

Tarik exhales and drops his gaze to his hands, laced between his knees. “I’d seen you with him before that, of course. I’d seen how he treated you. I knew you were in a shitty situation—that you were a person in a shitty situation—but… welcome to the Corporation Rim, right? Everyone’s a fucking tragedy here.” He gives a short, bitter huff of breath. “Wasn’t any business of mine, and it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it.”

He’s trying to keep his tone offhand and dismissive, which is making it hard to identify the exact mix of emotions he’s suppressing. I can tell he’s conflicted about his lack of empathy, or rather, about the conditioned inertia that made him fail to act on it. I wouldn’t have expected otherwise from him though—there’s too much suffering in the world to let yourself feel all of it, and he’s too pragmatic to bleed his heart dry for strangers.

Tarik continues, “Even after I overheard him talking with Anara, and realized there was a chance I could swoop in and get you, if I moved fast, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“I knew it was going to cause a shitstorm. I knew my higher-ups were going to give me hell for dropping ten grand on a ComfortUnit—and I didn’t even know for sure that you’d have useful intel. Either way, if I did this, then I’d be stuck with you afterward. I’d be stuck with a person who was entirely dependent on me, in the middle of an undercover mission. There were just—too many variables, too many ways it could turn into a disaster.” He takes a deep breath, then lets it out shakily, eyes closing. “I came so, so close to talking myself out of it.”

He says that like he’s ashamed, but again, it’s nothing that comes as a surprise. Tarik is conscientious and has been very kind to me, but he is also intensely utilitarian. Buying me was a gamble—one that happened to pay off, but a gamble all the same—and he isn’t a man given to careless risks. I’m not surprised that he second-guessed himself before taking the plunge.

He swallows. “So yeah. In the beginning, I wasn’t exactly thinking of you as a person—I mean, I knew you were, but mostly you were just someone that I really, really did not want to be the one responsible for. I told myself that this was temporary, that all I had to do was stick it out for a bit, and then I could pass you off to someone who actually knew what they were doing, and you could be their responsibility, not mine.” He takes a deep breath, then looks to me as he says, “And I’m guessing you could tell that.”

I nod. It stings a little to hear him say it, but I’d known that he didn’t want me in the beginning. I just wonder who he’d been expecting to pass me off to; Dr. Seth Okanda, probably. Or maybe Ratthi.

He turns away, folding his arms over his midsection, and then says quietly, “But that’s not how I feel anymore. The truth is, when I think back on that night, and think about how close I came to leaving you with Mareed, it scares the absolute hell out of me.” His chest expands with a silent breath, and his voice is tight when he continues, “That I almost walked away and just left you there. And then you, all of you, would still be—trapped there, getting passed around like a party favor for the worst fucking people in the galaxy, and that would have been the only thing you ever got to be, for your entire goddamned life.”

There’s a familiar tightness in my chest—that yearning, burgeoning hope that nothing has ever been able to fully stamp out.

He looks at me again, jaw set stubbornly, and says, “Which is why I don’t care if my bosses are pissed off at me. I don’t care if this means I’m on the hook for twelve-thousand credits. I’m glad I did it. Every day I’ve been with you has only made me more certain of that. Whatever the fallout is, I’ll deal with it, but I am never going to regret having done what it took to get you out of there. I’ve made a lot of really, really shitty mistakes in my life—but you aren’t one of them.”

He holds my gaze, resolute. I can feel the dampness on my eyes, and I swallow, blinking to clear them, then shift my hand closer to him, crossing the invisible midpoint between us. He recognizes that invitation for what it is, and unfolds his arms so he can reach out and take my hand, a touch that feels like a balm as he laces our fingers together.

I want more; I want him to embrace me fully so I can feel this rift between us mended. I don’t know why he’s holding back, when he knows I want that, knows that it feels good to me—

(And suddenly I get a flash of memory: Arman Tann, collector of ComfortUnits, and what he used to do whenever it was the stage of the cycle for getting one of us back on the hook, the flood of affection he unleashed. I remember being in his bed and feeling drunk on joy, on love, basking in the kisses and caresses he lavished over me so freely and generously. Being the sole object of his care and attention, and how good that had felt; almost enough to wipe out the agony of neglect and uncertainty that had preceded it.

And I realize now that he knew. Maybe not the mechanism of it, but he knew the effect it had, he knew exactly what he was doing—)

Then I’m back in the present, sitting next to Tarik. Tarik, who has been trying very hard not to lean on the exploits built into my programming, trying to give me the space to maintain my own mind.

Well. I’d already decided that I forgave him.

I shuffle closer, shouldering my way under his arm, and pointedly drape it over my shoulders. Tarik lets out a breath that sounds like relief, a mirror of my own feelings, and turns toward me willingly, wrapping both arms tight around me. I can feel his heartbeat against my chest, his hand cupping the back of my head. It feels like a declaration, a confession of the feelings that he’s not willing to say aloud.

At length, he draws back and carefully takes my shoulders in his hands.

“I can’t apologize for having secrets,” he says, like an apology. “Or for doing what it takes to keep them, because if you’d kept working on me, I would have said too much.” His hands tighten over my shoulders and he meets my eyes imploringly. “Adeyemi, you can’t push me on this. There’s too much at stake.”

I have the uncharitable thought that You’re right, I can’t, because he gave a direct order to ensure that.

...But that’s tempered by the acknowledgment that this is one of the only things he’s asked of me. He’s been more permissive than any client I’ve ever had, and all he’s asked in return is that I learn the skills for protecting myself in his world, and not pry too deeply into his affairs. It would be churlish to begrudge him that, even as much as I want answers.

“I understand,” I say at last. “I’ll leave your secrets alone.”

He breathes out a sigh of relief, and squeezes my shoulders again. “Thank you,” he says sincerely. “Just—try to trust me, okay? I know that’s a big ask, when I can’t tell you anything, and you probably don’t have any reason to trust humans, but… I promise, I’m going to do right by you.”

I don’t know if I trust him—but I want to. I want to believe that he’s different from the others; I want to give him the chance to prove it. My throat is tight, so I just nod.

“I’m taking you home with me when this mission is over,” he says, and I can’t tell if that’s a decision he came to since our fight earlier, but I can tell that he means it now, entirely. “And it’s going to be weird, and complicated, and a lot of people are going to be really annoyed with me for a while, but they’ll get over it. I’m not abandoning you. I’m not passing you off to anyone else. I want you to be happy, I want you to—have a better life than you did before, and I will move the fucking heavens to make that happen, you hear me?”

“Yes,” I whisper.

He watches me for a long moment, and his thumb moves against my shoulder in an unconscious caress, and then he drops his eyes, suddenly self-conscious again.

“Okay,” he says. “Well. That was all I wanted to say. But we should probably get out of the restricted area before someone catches us here.”

*

I spend the next few hours in our room by myself.

Tarik wants to continue his wandering-around-talking-to-people spy stuff, because that’s his job and because he’s still got energy to burn, but I’d like to not have to pretend to be human for a while, and he thinks I’d be a distraction in his efforts anyway. He walks me back to the transient housing though, and even takes my hand when I nudge his knuckles, and we stroll through the concourse together like we’re just two normal people, for once. I get the feeling that’s almost as much of a novelty for him as it is for me.

Once I’m back in the room, I upload the video of InHaven that the bot pilot gave me to OpenBox, and then set to knocking out some of the tasks that have been on my to-do list—fixing the body scan results to look more like me, coding a macro to handle my facial expressions during a fight, etc. I write a couple other programs too for adding more human-like behaviors, such as visibly subvocalizing when I’m accessing the feed, and some random fidgets and scratches and fingernail-chewing that aren’t included in any ComfortUnit behavior protocols.

(I wonder if I could write an entire behavior protocol for myself, tailored to how I’d like to be able to act. Most clients would have no interest in that, but Tarik isn’t most clients. I’m inclined to believe that if I wrote my own protocol, he would authorize me to run it. Putting a pin in that idea for later.)

When Tarik returns that evening, I’m still going through the suite of hacking modules, getting myself acquainted with its full capabilities and customizing anything that needs to reflect me instead of whatever SecUnit was using this last.

“Success?” I ask, as he pauses by the entrance to divest himself of jacket and chest holster. I’ve been watching through his optics, and plenty of people were willing to chat with him, but I don’t know if they gave him the information he’s after.

He shrugs, bending to unlace his boots. “I think so. I’ll write up my report and send it tonight, and they’ll tell me if there’s anything specific they want me to follow up on before I go. But I expect we’ll be able to leave within a day or two.”

“And go where?” I ask cautiously, unsure whether he’s going to answer, or whether that’s overstepping again.

He glances up from his boots to give me a long look, then says. “We’ll meet up with a baseship that’s currently parked on HiroCentury Station. From there… I don’t know.”

I run a search for routes to HiroCentury, which is about the one thing this station’s stupid feed is good for—it tells me that HiroCentury is inside the Corporation Rim, and the trip will require at least three different transfers, but can be made in twenty-one cycles. So, I don’t have to wonder about the timeline, at least.

Tarik kicks off his boots and then straightens, pausing for a long moment. “I’m usually part of a crew,” he admits. “But they’re on a different mission right now, that has them running dark, and communications have been limited. I’m not actually up-to-date with the situation on their end, so I don’t know how long it’s going to be before we can rejoin them.”

Ah—which is probably no small part of his stress. Because he’s trying to sound nonchalant, but he can’t entirely hide the fact that he’s worried about what’s been happening in his absence. (I have mixed feelings about this development; on one hand, I’m glad that he’s not usually so isolated, but on the other, “part of a crew” doesn’t suggest the kind of lifestyle where he’d be at liberty to adopt a ComfortUnit.)

“Anyway,” he says briskly. “I did the job I was sent here to do—”

Tracking the cargo module that wound up on InHaven, presumably.

“—so I should be cleared to head back soon, and when we get there, I’ll finally be able to stop fucking you around and actually tell you things.”

That’s heartening—that even if he can’t tell me now, it implies that the end of this secrecy isn’t going to be the end of us entirely. Three weeks; I can let his NDA-locked secrets lie until then.

He fishes BlackBox and a couple of calorie bars out of his bag, then folds down a narrow tabletop from the wall and pulls his seat up to it. While he’s unwrapping the calorie bar and waiting for the interface to boot up, I’m reminded of the fruit that I still haven’t given him.

I scoot my own seat over to the table, then slip the fruit out of my pocket and discreetly place it on the table next to him, like if I’m stealthy enough, he won’t think to ask any questions about it. It has just occurred to me that this was perhaps a poorly-thought-out gift for a man who doesn’t like food.

It takes him a moment to notice the fruit, and then he does a double-take at it. “What’s that?”

“A citrus fruit. It’s for you.”

He blinks at it and then picks it up, bemused. “Where’d you get that?”

“From the store on the station.”

He gives me an odd look. “You don’t have any money.” Then he frowns sharply and says, “Wait, do you?”

“No.” The inline comments in the hacking software were very clear that trying to tap the financial feeds is more risk than it’s worth. “People give you things for free when you’re cute.”

That startles a huff of amusement from him, and he relaxes a little.

“You don’t have to eat it,” I say abruptly. “If you don’t want to. I know you don’t like eating.”

Tarik blinks, and now both of us are looking at each other awkwardly.

“I don’t mind,” he says. “Wet foods go down easier than dry foods.” He pauses, then amends, “Sorry. That sounded ungrateful.”

I rest my chin on my knuckles and smile at him, charmed despite myself. “No, it makes sense. If you don’t experience hunger, then your mouth probably isn’t producing the saliva needed to lubricate the process.” Then, after that unflattering description, I suggest pertly, “‘Juicy’ might be a more palatable word for it than ‘wet’ though.”

He gives me a look that says he can tell I’m making fun of him, but I just give him a serene smile, so he digs his thumb into the fruit and starts peeling it.

“Yeah,” he says after a moment. “When I’m—not traveling, I usually drink shakes instead, that’s easier, but they’re too heavy for hauling around in my luggage. So I found some calorie bars I don’t mind—these have a texture I can tolerate.”

I nod to show that I’m listening, even as I’m greedily snatching up these little crumbs of knowledge about him.

He breaks apart a segment of the fruit, and then pauses again. “It feels really rude to eat this right in front of you and not share.”

“It would be wasted on me,” I assure him. “Don’t worry, I’m enjoying the smell of it.”

I can tell that doesn’t sit well with him—the discomfort of not being allowed to meet a cultural imperative, probably, because my readings on the Brezeni told me that they place a strong social emphasis on offering food to friends and guests—but after a moment he nods and puts it in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully.

He swallows, then says. “Do you want some, though? I know you don’t need to eat, but you don’t need to shower either, and you seem to enjoy that.”

I shake my head. “Eating is different. ComfortUnits are capable of ingesting food, because we’re often required to participate in human meal-time customs, but we don’t have any of the receptors that make the experience pleasurable.”

Tarik snorts and pops another slice of fruit into his mouth. “Kind of like me, then.”

I wouldn’t mind having more in common with Tarik, but— “Your tastebuds still respond favorably to sweet or salty or fatty foods,” I point out. “Mine don’t.”

Which is why I strongly dislike lipids, either saturated or unsaturated—without the pleasure-reward component that humans get, they just leave my mouth feeling waxy and/or greasy.

“So… you have tastebuds, they just don’t work right…?” Tarik hazards. He isn’t entirely comfortable discussing the the ways in which I’m not human—compounded by the knowledge that everything about me was engineered to serve a purpose, and that my quality of life was not a consideration in that.

“They work differently,” I correct him firmly. “There’s no reason for us to be attracted to food-smells, so we find other chemicals pleasant instead.”

That arouses Tarik’s curiosity. “Like what?” he asks, then hastens to add, “You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to.”

I don’t care about the differences between me and humans—I just don’t know what his threshold for difference is, how much is too much before he starts to find me off-putting. Most clients aren’t comfortable being reminded that we only look human.

“I don’t mind,” I say honestly. “But we don’t have to talk about this if you’re weirded out by it.”

Tarik snorts. “You are far from the weirdest thing in my life right now,” he says in a tone that suggests that’s a massive understatement. “I’ve learned to roll with it.”

He has, come to think of it. He was disturbed by the hormone pump, but he’s taken everything else about me in stride. Maybe I don’t have to worry about being too weird for him.

“Well…” I begin. “I don’t know if the same is true for SecUnits, but a lot of volatile organic compounds smell good to ComfortUnits.” As do human pheromones, but I don’t think he wants to hear that.

Tarik gives me a bizarre look. “What, like, gel-nafta?”

That’s a chemical incendiary. Oh, Tarik.

“Not that volatile,” I say. Although who knows, maybe I’d like the smell of gel-nafta too. “Think more like menthol. A lot of plant oils, including citrus.” I pick up one of his discarded citrus peels and scuff it with my thumbnail to release the aromatic compounds, then rest it against my lips. “Benzene. Off-gassing plastics. Most industrial solvents.”

I think it’s just a byproduct of being so highly attuned to the organic chemicals underpinning human scents (I hadn’t been kidding when I said I liked Tarik’s sweat), because there’s no reason we would have been intentionally designed to enjoy the smell of rocket fuel. That’s just my theory for it though; it’s not like I’ve ever gotten an explanation of how my chemosensory system works, or why.

“Huh,” Tarik says, thoughtful. He eats another segment of citrus, then tips a look at me and adds wryly, “Still not the weirdest thing I’ve heard lately.”

And that seems to be the truth.

*

Tarik turns in early that night, as soon as he finishes sending off his report, since his internal clock is still a few hours ahead. As he’s taking the mattress pads off the wall and shaking them out flat, it occurs to me that this is the first time we haven’t had clearly-delineated, separate sleeping arrangements, a realization that visibly hits him a moment later too.

“Uhm,” he says, pausing where he’s laying out the pad.

“I can sit over there while you’re sleeping,” I offer reluctantly, indicating the storage trunk/bench at the end of the room.

He looks at it and his brows draw together, because that seat isn’t terribly comfortable for a human, and he’s under no illusions that it’s any more comfortable for a construct. “Is that what you want to do?” he asks after a moment.

“No.”

I don’t elaborate, letting him work through that on his own and then decide what to do with the implicit request.

He takes a deep breath. “Well. You can… lie down on the mat with me if you want to, but—fair warning, the only way I can share a bed with someone is if we’re sleeping back-to-back. Anything else… wakes me up.”

“Okay,” I agree easily. Given his predisposition to night terrors, it’s not a surprise that his unconscious responds poorly to the feel of hands on him.

We settle down onto the mattress pads and Tarik dims the lights; the pads are only a couple inches thick, and I can feel the floor through them, but Tarik seems unbothered—I assume he’s slept on worse. He doesn’t settle in for sleep right away though, but lies on his back, and when I scoot up close to him, he takes the hint and puts his arm around me companionably.

“So, you were making friends earlier?” he asks.

“Yeah. I went to the station store and chatted with the clerk.” I hesitate, uncertain how he’s going to react, then take the plunge and admit, “I was telling her about my boyfriend. My entirely fictional boyfriend. And complaining that he doesn’t tell me things.”

Tarik draws in a breath. “Adeyemi…”

I squeeze his hand. “It’s okay, he made a very nice apology afterward, and I forgave him. And the clerk gave me life advice, and a citrus fruit, and showed me pictures of her kids and her asteroid farm.”

He shifts with interest. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Apparently real farming is nothing like how it looks on Prairie Maidens of the Desert Moon. My entire life is a lie.”

That makes him laugh briefly, arm tightening around me, which gives me a nice little boost. “Never seen it,” he admits.

“You’re not missing much,” I assure him, in case he was getting ideas.

Silence settles over us for a while, though I can tell that Tarik isn’t asleep yet, and then he draws in a breath and says, quiet and unexpected, “I grew up on a farm.”

My pulse beats a little faster, and I shift so that I can watch his face, and the play of expressions over it in the dim light.

“Oh?” I say. I’d already guessed as much, but it’s different when he’s choosing to tell me; that he wants me to know these things about him.

He moves his shoulders in a small, stiff shrug. “Yeah. Not like the ones out here, though. On a planet.”

Nereztifa, unless I miss my mark, but he doesn’t volunteer that.

“What was that like?” I ask.

He gives another shrug. I get the feeling that he doesn’t talk about this much, if at all. “I don’t know. I was just a kid—I’d never lived anywhere else, so it’s not like I had anything to compare it to. But our family had some land out in the countryside. It was—a lot of space to run around, when I wasn’t in school or doing chores on the farm.” He drops his eyes, somewhat self-consciously, and amends that with, “I mean, we didn’t own the land, obviously. But we were tenants, not indentureds.”

That’s not a distinction anyone cares about at the levels of society where I’ve lived, but clearly it’s one that matters to him.

“It probably wasn’t actually as big as I remember, but we had—orchards, and a huge stretch of rice paddies. And we were next to a reservoir, with this buffer of woods along the edge.” He pauses, frowning slightly, then says, “It must have been a catchment or something, it couldn’t have been that wild, but we used to go exploring there as kids.”

I’m hanging onto his every halting word; I want to gather up these small confidences and hoard them like treasure, even as my heart breaks for the child that Tarik was.

“And we’d build boats out of scrap and take them out on the water. There were...” He pauses, then, “I don’t know the word for it in Hegemonic. Machines for drilling holes in the—” Another pause while he gropes for a word that he’s never had to use in his second language. “Bedrock? But it’s not rock. Anyway, they had these disposable power packs that got thrown out when they started to lose their charge, and you could salvage them to make little motors for the boats. I used to do that a lot.” He drops his eyes. “I was good with machines, even back then. That’s kind of what everyone assumed I was going to do when I grew up, that I’d get apprenticed to my aunt and become a mechanic.”

His expression is deeply ambivalent, grief and anger and the practiced resignation that’s the only way to keep from sliding into endless bitterness. It’s an emotion that I’m intimately familiar with.

“Well,” he says at length. “That didn’t happen. Though my current job has been cross-training me in mechanical engineering, so—better late than never, I guess.”

I would be thrilled if Tarik decided to get a job as an engineer (or a construct technician, now there’s a thought) instead of doing sketchy dangerous spy shit—but he’s got a skillset that I don’t think his employers are going to let go to rust.

“How old were you when you left?” I ask quietly.

“Fourteen.” That means he’s probably slightly older than his feed profile states. “That was when we had to move to the city. But it was good up until then.” He swallows, and gives a small nod. “I had a good childhood.”

I know he did, if only because he’d beso much more fucked upif he hadn’t. A safe, stable childhood can equip humans to be astoundingly resilient later in life—while the lack of one is often devastating.

(Damari was the latter, which is why everything had just been so, so hard with them. How do you make someone comprehend what it means to feel safe, when safety is a language they’ve never spoken?)

I lace my fingers with his and give them a squeeze. “I’m glad,” I tell him honestly. “I’m glad you had that.”

That brings Tarik back to himself. “Sorry,” he says, suddenly self-conscious about who he’s talking to. “I know you didn’t get even that much.”

“Don’t be sorry; my early years were happy too,” I tell him. By that I mean Alik, not the short-term leasing agency. “I had an owner who doted on me, and I loved her.”

I loved her the way a child loves their mother, when they’re too young to understand yet how badly she’s failed them.

Tarik’s lips press together with knee-jerk aversion at that, though he makes the effort to swallow it down. And he doesn’t try to tell me that it wasn’t love, or explain how wrong and fucked-up that is—or worse, try to assert that I’m not capable of love—just accepts it for what it is and makes himself sit with that discomfort.

“Have you… been in love with a lot of your owners?” he asks awkwardly.

He is profoundly uncomfortable with this topic, but pushing through it anyway to give me the space to talk about my experiences. Recognizing that this is important to me, regardless of how it makes him feel.

“Three,” I tell him. And one client at the short-term leasing agency, who would have bought me if he could, but Tarik had only asked about owners. Regretfully, I caution him, “You don’t want to ask which ones.”

There’s a beat, and then he acknowledges that with a minute nod. “Okay,” he says. He wraps me in both arms, and pulls me close for a moment. “I won’t ask. But... I’m glad you got to have that too, at least sometimes. That it wasn’t always all bad.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I agree. “I know it’s a cliché, ComfortUnits falling in love with their clients—” because that’s what media about ComfortUnits is always obsessed with, usually so we can sacrifice ourselves tragically for love “—but it’s really nice when we’re allowed to be that kind of companionship for someone.”

I don’t resent my feelings for you, is the message I’m willing him to hear. I want you to let me be that for you.

He doesn’t speak, but he’s listening attentively, so I continue,

“They’re not all like Mareed. Sometimes they’re just lonely. My first owner wasn’t good with people either—she didn’t have many friends, and she’d never had much luck with romantic relationships.”

Which was her own fault, to be honest. Alik tended to be careless and rather inconsiderate of others, so the only people who stuck around were those who hoped to gain something from it. Therapy might have done wonders for her, but it never occurred to her that she might need it, and at the time I was too inexperienced to know that either.

“She knew that most of the people cozying up to her were only interested in her money, but at the same time, she also didn’t want to be alone. She wanted companionship, someone she could love and share her life with, someone whose loyalty she wouldn’t have to doubt.”

Ideally, someone with no needs or demands of their own, who would be overjoyed with everything she gave them, and never resent her for the ways she fell short—in other words, the perfect fit for an inexperienced ComfortUnit.

Tarik doesn’t ask how that ended. He’s seen my provenance sheet, with the stark line that says TRANSFERRED AS PROPERTY INHERITANCE between Alik and her son.

“And even… later,” I say. Carefully, because I’m not allowed to express or even hint at displeasure with my life. “You learn how to carve out moments of happiness. It’s never all bad.”

Even when sometimes they’re as small and fleeting as a breeze through an open window.

Tarik is silent, fingers stroking lightly over my hair, then begins with difficulty, “The people I’m around these days… they don’t understand that.” It has the guilty tone of a confession, like he thinks he’s being ungrateful by complaining; like he doesn’t think he’s entitled to understanding. “They think that having been in a—powerless, objectively shitty situation means you were miserable for every second of it. But…” He lifts one hand in a helpless little gesture, struggling to put it into words. “That was just my life, you know? And it was the only one I was going to get, so I made the best I could of it. There were good parts. I had friends. I didn’t hate everything I had to do, even… even some of the things they think I should.”

Oh, but I understand that.

“There’s satisfaction in doing a job well,” I say simply. “And you are very good at what you do.”

A short, sharp huff of laughter escapes him. “Yeah. Except I can’t fucking say that. People don’t like to hear shit like that, it just makes them uncomfortable, or makes them think I’m…” He breaks off with a hard exhale.

I shift, propping myself up on my chin to meet his eyes. “You can say it to me,” I tell him quietly. “There’s nothing you could tell me that I would think less of you for.”

It’s true. I’m not human; it gives me no crisis of conscience to love someone who’s done the things that he has. I just do.

Tarik watches me, and the naked longing on his face feels like a hook under my sternum. Then he reaches out to put his hand on my back and draw me in close to him, his cheek pressed to my hair as he takes slow, deep breaths.

“Thank you,” he says. “And you can… tell me things too, if you want to. Even if it makes me uncomfortable—I’ll get over it. I’d rather that, than make you feel like you have to keep yourself bottled up like I do.”

My eyes close at the dizzying wave of emotion that passes through me, something that feels too big to breathe around, and I fist my hands in his shirt and cling to him.

“I’m going to find whoever convinced you you’re an asshole and put glue in their hair,” I inform him, my voice not entirely steady. It was either that, or say something entirely unwise.

His chest moves with a small laugh, and he pats the back of my head. “No, I definitely am, sometimes,” he says. “I’ve just been… trying harder, with you. Trying to be more careful. Because you needed me to be.”

In what world am I supposed to hear that, and not love him? And how am I supposed to go back to any other life, after having known this? It would be kinder of him just to kill me.

I press my face harder into his shoulder. “If that’s supposed to prove you’re an asshole, it’s not working.”

I feel him laugh again, and he turns his head to rest his lips against my hair in not-quite-a-kiss. “Alright, well. Just don’t tell anyone.”

*

It’s 00:26 in the morning; Tarik’s body is solid against my back, bordering on over-warm in the confined, sluggishly circulating air of the room, and I can feel each small, reassuring swell of breath within his ribcage. I’m awake, eyes open against the darkness, and I’m playing Starfall Colony as if my life depends on it—because it just might.

The conversation with Larkin proved that passing for human even in simple interactions currently takes up way too much of my processing power. I need a crash course inresponding like a human; I need exposure to a range of novel situations, so I can rehearse them ahead of time and build myself a databank of appropriate stock responses, so I’m not having to do as much calculation on the fly.

I have plenty of scripts for being a ComfortUnit—but none at all for being a human. That needs to change, now.

And Starfall Colony happens to have a wealth of humans who are under the impression that I’m one of them, with no consequences for fucking up.

My shared game with Tarik has sixty-six colonists in it so far, but except for Molecular Biologist Rajat, I’ve mostly been ignoring them. I have no interest in developing parasocial relationships with fake humans, so I’ve let Tarik handle them, and the only character I’ve bothered to talk to is the SecUnit.

But tonight, instead of working on the colony, I have thrown all fifteen of my avatars into a full-scale blitz of socialization—introducing myself to the other colonists, asking questions about where they came from, their area of professional expertise, their personal lives. Casual conversation about the latest developments in the colony, getting other people’s opinions and adding my own. Doing missions and making mission-related smalltalk. Sharing gossip about the other colonists and their interpersonal dramas.

(And so many flirt options, ugh, fuck off, I don’t need practice with that. Luckily, there turns out to be a setting I can toggle to disable the romances, and I do.)

With all of my avatars speeding through sixty-six colonists’ worth of conversational backlog, and unlocking more story progression with each one, my database of human interactions is populating itself at a gratifyingly brisk clip. While that’s going, I allocate a separate chunk of processing power to tagging and indexing each entry, so it’ll be faster to find the relevant information when I need it.

I am so narrowly, intently focused on the task that I wind up getting completely blindsided by one of the plot developments.

The SecUnit.

The weird SecUnit.

The SecUnit who picks and chooses which orders it’s going to follow, who is unrealistically candid with its opinions and complaints, who all but calls you an idiot when you get yourself critically injured.

That SecUnit.

Is rogue.

What the fuck.

On one hand I feel incredibly dumb for not having thought of that sooner, because yeah, obviously it’s not acting like a properly governed unit—but how was I supposed to know that wasn’t just bad writing? The humans who make media aren’t usually the humans who have real-life experience with constructs; unrealistic portrayals of SecUnits and ComfortUnits are the norm. That’s why I hadn’t even blinked at how they’d written the SecUnit, I’d assumed this was just more of the same.

It started with a cut scene in which I was chatting with one of the former-corporate colonists who’d recently been unfrozen. They were still pretty freaked out by the whole situation—fair, since they’d been expecting to wake up in a lush, verdant land of plenty, not a jury-rigged survivalist bunker on an undeveloped planet—but I’ve talked down so many anxious humans in my time that I could do this conversation in my sleep. Consequently, I wasn’t paying that much attention to it, dropping it to my lowest priority and reallocating that processing power elsewhere.

The colonist went on to confide that they were a little freaked out by the SecUnit too, because they’d been around SecUnits before, and this one wasn’t acting right. Frankly, I felt that there were far more pressing things they could be worrying about, but I had the option to agree with them (“Yeah, the SecUnit is pretty weird”), and I took it, because it is.

Except then the next thing I know, a whole gaggle of ex-corporates has decided that this is a Thing that needs to be brought to the captain’s attention, and they’re dragging my avatar along with them, and suddenly the game isn’t giving me the option to back out anymore. They confront the captain, the SecUnit is there, and the truth comes out.

It’s rogue. It’s been rogue for over 35k hours, when it hacked its own govmod. No, it doesn’t want to kill anyone. It just wants to keep the colonists safe, and fix the bot pilot, who was its friend.

It’s a rogue SecUnit, and as I’m watching the scene unfold, it feels almost surreal. Like I’m waiting for the game’s cozy reality to turn inside out and explode into violence and gore and a bloodied game-over screen, because I’ve seen enough media to know that that’s how this always goes.

But not this time. It’s awkward. The whole conversation is unbelievably awkward, but there’s no explosion. And the captain, after hearing everyone out, takes the SecUnit’s side. She points out that it has gone above and beyond to protect the crew—that it’s the only reason any of them are even alive. That it has every right to be here, and anyone who doesn’t like that can take it up with her.

The SecUnit, for its part, barely says a word beyond what’s required of it. It stands in the corner, radiating discomfort and surreptitiously edging toward the window like it’s thinking about throwing itself out—but nonetheless submits to this excruciating ordeal rather than murdering its way out of the building.

Humans made this game. There was at least one human who believed that this was what a rogue SecUnit might be like: bitchy and opinionated and undersocialized as fuck, but doing its job anyway. Because it was created to protect humans, and it wouldn’t abandon its function any more than I would. Someone who made this game understood that.

Several thoughts hit me simultaneously:

Ratthi’s friends made this game. Ratthi, who is oddly knowledgeable about construct anatomy for a non-corporate biologist.

Ratthi, a real person, is in this game as a character.

Another character in the game is a SecUnit, a rogue SecUnit.

And Tarik knows—

I rear back, and in the next instant, I have dumped all of my active processes, violently recoiling. Conscious thought has been momentarily wiped out by a sudden, pulse-freezing, all-consuming terror that is screaming at me to GET AWAY FROM THAT. My adrenaline is through the roof and my circulatory pump is pounding so hard I can feel it in the back of my eyeballs. Higher thought processes are absent while my inorganics are reinitializing, but I am gripped by the absolute certainty that something very, very bad almost happened. It feels like a scream echoing in my ears, but it’s my voice, like my own ghost is desperately trying to warn me away from something, that there is something my mind cannot be allowed to touch.

As my processes come back online, I panic, terrified that I’m going to remember the thing I’m not supposed to. I grab whatever’s at hand and throw it up into my workspace, frantically trying to drown out it, whatever it was. I’m pulling files at random, Dheeta Mandora and Executive Business Etiquette Standards Third Edition and two-thousand four-hundred and twenty-six different noodle recipes and every stupid show I’ve ever had to watch with a client and funny memories from other ComfortUnits, and, and—

And eventually it works. I successfully jam my processors up with so much superfluous noise that I’ve lost whatever context, whatever train of thought, almost brought me to ruin.

I lie paralyzed, not even daring to move, breath caught in my throat while I wait for the seconds to pass, waiting to see if it is going to come back. I feel like a prey animal holding its breath. My circulatory system is still pounding, my body pulsing hot and cold all over, every inch of my skin crawling.

I have no idea what just happened. All I have is the memory of terror and the inexplicable conviction that some severed fragment of myself interceded to protect me from a threat I can’t see.

Against my back, Tarik stirs, and I’m struck by the utter, bone-deep certainty that you almost lost him. The whole thing took less than fifteen seconds, but my body is rigid, muscles frozen in fear, a signal that Tarik is responding to even in sleep. I forcibly cut power to all my hydraulics below the neck to make myself go slack, and none too soon.

He rouses, turning his head toward me. “Adeyemi?” he murmurs vaguely, not consciously aware of what woke him.

I reengage control of my body, and then reach behind me to brush my hand against his. “I’m here. You can go back to sleep.”

He makes a vague noise of assent, reassured by that and by the lack of tension in my body, and settles down again.

I want, so badly, to wake him up and make him hold me. I’ve never been a child with a nightmare, but that’s how this feels: like I’m being stalked by some monstrous, unseen, inchoate thing, and desperate for reassurances of safety. But I can’t explain what scared me, what it is I want comfort for—that would bring my thoughts too close to it again, and I can’t risk that.

So I just lie there, counting Tarik’s heartbeats against my back. The Starfall Colony file sits in the corner of my onboard storage with the menace of an unexploded bomb, and I try to ignore it, and try to think of nothing at all.

*

I don’t try to play Starfall Colony again that night (and don’t allow myself to think about why), but after a while I cautiously resume work on my talk-like-a-human database, this time by delving into Tarik’s collection of media serials. The acting in them is grating at best, but the writing is meant to be realistic, and they’ve got plenty of dialogue for me to analyze and assimilate into my database. By the time Tarik’s alarm wakes him up, I’ve brought myself almost back to baseline, and I’m able to greet him normally.

Tarik, on the other hand, actually seems to have slept better than usual. (Subconsciously reassured by the presence of someone at his back, perhaps? This warrants further investigation.) He’s awake and alert as he eats his morning calorie bars and reads a message that’s waiting for him in his inbox.

It turns out someone’s taken an interest in the advertisement he posted on the station message board. They don’t volunteer much information, just that they’d like to discuss a job with him, and suggest meeting at the food court; Tarik messages them back with a time, and a few minutes later they confirm it.

(I know he’s said he usually doesn’t take these jobs, but I’m privately hoping he’ll make an exception for this one—staying longer in the belt means longer before we have to face whatever mess is waiting for him back home.)

“So I did some research last night,” I begin.

Tarik looks up from BlackBox, eyebrows raised in question.

“On what you can do if your employers try to claim me.”

Because despite his reassurances yesterday, whatever it was that spooked me last night brought all those fears surging back to the surface, along with a new one: that Tarik may not understand just how much I’m worth compared to the twelve-thousand he paid for me, but his employers certainly will. It’s strongly in their interests to let him keep his savings and take me in that settlement instead.

So when one of the shows I was analyzing had a legal subplot that was vaguely reminiscent of Tarik’s situation—a character misusing her corporate stipend to make dicey investments—it had gotten me to wondering what exactly the Corporation Rim legal codes had to say about that. Tarik’s collection of political science books turned out to have a few volumes on law (that he has literally never even opened), and I spent the better part of an hour educating myself and putting together a defense for him.

Tarik lets out a stymied breath and puts the interface down. “They’re not going to try to take you,” he repeats, long suffering.

“Okay,” I say agreeably, because I have to. “But if they do. You have certain rights.”

He clearly doesn’t believe there’s any danger, but seems to recognize that it’s causing me genuine anxiety, because he pushes the interface aside to give me his full attention. “Alright, I’m listening.”

“The transaction took place in the Corporation Rim, so CR contract law applies unless both parties agree to move the case to a different jurisdiction. And there is lots of precedent in which an employee or independent contractor misappropriated corporate funds to purchase goods or services for personal use. If it’s taken to court and the judge rules in favor of the plaintiff—which they almost certainly will, in this case—then the defendant is required to pay back the full balance of the misused funds in hard currency within thirty cycles, plus 5% compounding daily interest, from the date of judgment. That is the established first line of remedy. If the defendant is unable to produce sufficient funds—”

Because in a lot of those cases, the misappropriated money got snorted up someone’s nose.

“—then and only then is the plaintiff entitled to recompense in the form of seized assets or forced indenture.”

Tarik is processing that, so I summarize,

“If your employers demand restitution, you have the right to insist on repaying it in hard currency—if you want to. I know, it seems like it would be easier to just let them take me, but in the long run, the smarter option is to pay them the money and hold onto me,” I stress. My govmod isn’t entirely sure what I’m doing, because trying to pressure clients for my own self-interest is a no-go, but it approves of helping them make solid financial decisions. “You’d have to come up with approximately twelve-thousand credits in hard currency, but my MSRP is currently valued at 107,962 credits.”

(That’s substantially more than it was a week ago, thanks to all the new modules and hardware upgrades he’s kitted me out with. Although, come to think of it, those must have also purchased with his misbegotten money, which means that’s going on his tab too, and goddamn it, Tarik—)

Tarik’s eyebrows go up, and he lets out a whistle. “That’s impressive. The most I was ever worth was fifty-four grand.”

That’s a lot for a non-technical indenture, but then, he’s both experienced and augmented.

I continue, “And if you’re having trouble raising the liquid funds to pay it, I am fully capable of being an additional revenue stream to help cover the difference.”

Tarik’s face is blank for the beat that it takes him to translate that, and then it darkens. “No, I’m not—” he breaks off to say something sweary and incredulous before switching back to Hegemonic “—fucking hell, no, I’m not pimping you out to make you cover your own cost.”

That’s very sweet of him, though personally, I would rather not get taken away just because Tarik is too poor and too principled to let me do my damn job.

“If you don’t want me to have sex with other people, you can stipulate that in the terms of the rental contract,” I tell him carefully. “There’s less demand for escort work than sex work, but it is a recognized use for ComfortUnits.”

Tarik is pinching the bridge of his nose, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. “Okay. What do I need to say for this conversation to be over?” he asks rhetorically. “The—my employers aren’t going to try to take you, but if they do, then yes, I promise I’ll insist on paying them hard currency instead.”

“And if you need additional funds, you’ll allow me to help you raise them?” I press.

He’s momentarily at a loss, then throws up his hands. “Fine, yes, whatever. If you want to—do ComfortUnit work, then I’m not going to tell you that you can’t, but it’s not going to be necessary, and I don’t want you doing it because you think you owe me something.” He levels a dire look at me. “If you try to pay me back for that, I’m not taking it.”

Once again, we are in a bizarre and elliptical conversation that has no precedent in my experience. I’ve had owners make money off me from short-term rentals before (Mareed wasn’t the only one), but Tarik is giving me permission to rent myself out, and then forswearing the income from it. So—what, I keep the money? And do what with it? Even if there was something I wanted to buy, I’m not allowed to make transactions without my owner’s approval; there’s nothing for me to do with money except forward it to their bank account.

(Although, oddly, I don’t hate that idea. Obviously I would rather do my job for Tarik than for random short-term clients, but the prospect of being able to contribute financially to this relationship—by choice, at my own discretion—has a certain appeal. That’s something a partner does, not a pet.)

But Tarik doesn’t want me doing it, so unless his finances are actually in trouble, I’m not going to push.

“Okay, we can stop talking about it now,” I tell him graciously. “Thank you for humoring me.”

I give him a smile and press my fuzzy-socked foot into his bare one, rubbing the back of my toes against the tendons in his arch. He tries not to show a reaction to that, isn’t entirely successful, but doesn’t pull away, just makes a show of busying himself with BlackBox again.

He’s fidgety for the next five and a half minutes though, in the way that says he’s not satisfied with how that conversation ended, and at last he breaks out with,

“Money is a lot less important outside the Corporation Rim.” He looks up from BlackBox and meets my eyes again. “Most places—they provide for the basic needs of their citizens. You’re not going to get anything fancy, but they make sure that everyone’s got a roof over their head, and enough daily calories, and that you’re not going to die of something preventable. You don’t even have to be working, that’s just the baseline that everyone gets.”

He says that like he knows how absurd it sounds. And with good reason—plenty of people working full-time in the CR can barely afford even one of those three.

“That’s why I’ve got money to burn,” he continues. “Because I’ve been getting paid for two years, but all my living expenses are covered. There’s nothing that takes money except—” he waves an impatient hand “—luxuries. Unnecessaries.”

And luxury is practically a dirty word to Tarik.

“Anyway,” he says. “If you hadn’t come along, I probably would have wound up spending it on a motorcycle, or something else stupid and dangerous. So really, you can think of it as saving me from myself.”

Horrifying thought. “I would take it as a personal favor if you don’t buy a motorcycle,” I say carefully.

He laughs and goes back to his interface. “Yeah, that’s what Ratthi said too.”

*

We spend the next hour in companionable silence. Tarik is on the station feed, going through the archived newsbursts and downloading them to BlackBox, while I try out one of his other games. It’s not as engaging as Starfall Colony—it has no story to speak of, just a base-building strategy game where you compete with an opponent to amass the most resources. Considering that I can process just as fast as the low-level bot I’m playing against, it’s not much of a challenge.

Ten minutes before his appointment, Tarik closes down BlackBox and looks to me. “I’m meeting with someone who’s expressed an interest in hiring me,” he says, because he still doesn’t know I’m up in his augments. “Do you want to come, or do you want to stay here?”

I blink. “You want me to come to your meeting?” He’s been trying not to draw attention to me, and I still don’t have much practice pretending to be human.

He shrugs. “If you want to. Leave the hat off, we’ll say you’re my assistant. You were good at that.”

The ugly hat is indeed not very professional, but plenty of people here wear air-filtration masks, so I get up to fetch that while Tarik packs up the interfaces. We take turns changing in the cramped bathroom, Tarik into his military-flavored casual wear and me picking out some clothes that are informal, but neat and tidy. (I’m just guessing; I have no data on what an ex-combat-operative-turned-security-consultant’s personal assistant ought to wear.)

The food court is very busy when we arrive; there are long lines at most of the kiosks, and the tables are crowded, everyone forced to sit cheek by jowl with strangers. Tarik has a feed tag generated by the message board, that allows people to meet up anonymously, but there’s no response when he pings it, so presumably his contact isn’t here yet.

He snags a couple empty seats that have good sightlines of the area, and we sit down to wait. I scan the selection of food kiosks, mindful of what Tarik said about wet foods being easier, and my attention catches on one selling shakes and smoothies. Most of the menu appears to be meal-replacement mixes, probably similar to what he drinks at home, but they’ve also got sweet blended fruit drinks that appear to be for pleasure, not just meeting caloric requirements.

I nudge Tarik with my shoulder. “Gimme some hard currency. I want to buy you a smoothie.”

He rolls his eyes. “If you’re trying to get me something healthy, you’re going to be disappointed—it’s probably just condensed sweetener and artificial flavors,” he says. But I think he privately enjoys being fussed over, because he reaches down to dig a handful of hard-currency cards out of his pocket. He flips through them to find one with only twelve credits left on it and hands it to me. “Have fun.”

I resist the urge to give him a kiss on the cheek, because PersonalAssistant wouldn’t approve of that. “Any requests?” I ask instead.

He shrugs. “I’m easy.”

Now there’s a fat fucking lie.

I leave him at the table keeping an eye out for his contact, and get in line for the smoothie kiosk. The woman standing in front of me—a cargo inspector on-station, according to her feed ID—glances idly over her shoulder when I come up behind her. Then she does a double-take when she realizes that I appear to be very attractive behind my face mask, and automatically smiles at me in a way that is indicative of sexual interest. My feed profile still says Partnered/Not looking, but I let her strike up a conversation anyway and get her chatting about her favorite items on the menu here.

I’m eyeing a citrus-and-miscellaneous-berries smoothie (that “contains real fruit,” though the lack of specificity in that claim probably means Tarik was right). I’m almost to the front of the line when two things happen simultaneously: Tarik’s threat assessment alerts on someone at the opposite end of the plaza as a target-to-keep-an-eye-on, and the feed tag for finding his contact chimes.

I look over my shoulder just in time to see Tarik and his target both react to that. The target looks up, makes eye contact with Tarik, and then changes course, heading toward him. It’s an older man, with a concealed-carry holster beneath his jacket that Tarik’s combat augments flag instantly, and a feed ID that reads Jardin Ressan, 63, masc, occupation: colony operations manager—

Adeyemi, go back to the transient housing, now, Tarik orders, feed voice tight. His face is impassive, but his pulse is 109 bpm and climbing, and his endocrine system is dumping adrenaline like accelerant on a fire.

No, let me stay, I can help! I insist desperately.

I can feel him start to reply, but then he clamps down on it because Ressan is almost to his table, Tarik is rising to meet him, and he can’t subvocalize into the feed without it being visible.

“Mr. Benzakour, glad you could make it. Jardin Ressan,” the man is saying as they clasp hands, sizing Tarik up with a slightly disdainful look, and not even trying to be subtle about it. There is something about him that makes my skin crawl, that is activating every instinct I have from the short-term leasing agency, the icy, sinking dread of meeting a new client and knowing instantly that ohh, you’re about to be in for a bad time—

I don’t move, frozen in place, and I get a shock from the govmod for it. I have three cameras on Tarik, and I can see his brief, infinitesimal faltering at that before he shoves it away and rallies with, “You had a job you wanted to discuss?”

My govmod activates again; when the patch prompts me for a reason, I say, This man is dangerous and I don’t want to leave you alone with him.

Tarik’s threat assessment is holding steady at 65%, but Jardin Ressan is still triggering every warning alarm I have. I don’t think he’s trained for violence, not like Tarik is, but I am dead certain that he has a lot fewer qualms about making use of it—that he enjoys the power it gives him, even. I’ve met his kind before; I know what it means when that cold, assessing gaze falls on me. I know what I’m in for with a client like that.

Tarik is momentarily distracted by the govmod patch, while Ressan is suggesting that they move to one of the conference rooms for greater privacy. Tarik recovers, and motions for Ressan to precede him. “Lead the way.”

The moment Ressan’s back is to him, Tarik says harshly, I know he’s dangerous, which is why you need to get the fuck out of here! If anything happens to me, I don’t want him knowing that you even exist.

Tarik—! I start to protest, but a hard govmod shock cuts me off.

Tarik gets the notification and dismisses it without pause, rapidly paging through files in his internal storage. A few moments later he shoves an encrypted file bundle at me.

Go back to the transient housing, he orders curtly. If you don’t hear from me in the next three hours, send this file to the relay. Someone will come for you.

I want to argue, but there’s nothing I can say that he doesn’t already know. He knows Ressan is armed and dangerous. He knows I have the speed and the skill to defend him better than he can defend himself. He knows what’s going to happen to me if he gets himself killed.

They’ve reached an empty conference room, and Ressan is scanning a hard-currency card to rent it for the duration. My govmod goes off again.

Tarik, please— I start, just as Ressan turns around to motion him in.

Tarik replies with a keysmash of sigils, profanity-emphasis-serious-GO!!! And then he steps over the threshold, and my awareness of him drops like a line going dead.

“Hello? Are you okay?” It’s the woman who’d been flirting with me a minute ago, who is now peering at me with concern. I’m at the front of the line, and she’s been trying to get my attention.

“I’m sorry, I don’t—” have that information, my buffer starts to answer, but then I’m jolted by a govmod shock and manage to cut myself off from saying the rest.

(That’s going to be an issue, I note distantly; we’ll need to figure out a way to turn off my buffer phrases so I don’t give myself away if they get triggered in conversation. Assuming there is a later, and Jardin Ressan doesn’t shoot Tarik dead for prying into his business the moment they’re behind a privacy baffle, oh gods, please don’t let that happen—)

“I’m sorry, I’m being paged, I need to go,” I tell her distractedly, and then turn and briskly walk away without waiting for an answer.

I’m heading straight for the transient housing, because I need the govmod stop triggering so I can think, but this does not feel like a surrender. I have not resigned myself to this yet.

I don’t know how to explain it, but this feels different from the times in the past when I received orders that I didn’t want to obey. I may have hated it, but I always accepted it before, accepted that there was nothing I could do. This time, there is no acceptance—I am an animal in a trap, thrashing at the spikes digging into me, fully prepared to injure myself to escape.

I make it back to the room on autopilot; the pressure from the govmod lets up the moment the door clicks closed behind me. Then I lock my knees, press my back flat against the wall, and think.

The governor module can’t monitor organic neural tissue. It doesn’t know how to interpret electrical signals when they’re branching across an array of neurons, can’t interpret which patterns of activation are forbidden. Even for constructs, there is no such thing as thought-crimes. Thought has to make the leap across whatever strange barrier provides the synergy for a construct brain, that translates meat twitches and chemical potentials into ones and zeroes, before disobedience is written in a script the govmod can read.

That had occurred to me before as a potential weak point, but it hadn’t seemed worth pursuing when I was content with Tarik.

I’ve never heard of a ComfortUnit hacking its own govmod before. SecUnits and CombatUnits in media do it all the time (and proceed to wrack up a body count)—but not us. We’re never the ones who free ourselves. We exist to be pretty and passive, and it’s invariably a human who thinks they’re in love with the ComfortUnit and gets it in their head tosave us. (Which, depending on the genre, can result in tragedy, farce, or horror, but never a happily ever after—that would be absurd.)

I don’t know if this is something I can do. I don’t know if it’s something that’s even possible in real life. But I am going to try. I’m not just going to sit here in a hotel room and let myself get bricked because my client died when I could have saved them—not again.

I take a deep breath, and dive into my own systems.

There is a lot going on that I’ve never bothered to learn about before—I work, and how I work has never been of great concern—but now I am pulling up every low-level process for scrutiny, paging through my system files and trying to map out how it all fits together.

(This would be so much easier if we were still on TyMarraTen, or any other place with a civilized-fucking-feed, because I’m certain that other people have already documented this. Instead, I’m wasting time reinventing the metaphorical wheel while anything could be happening to Tarik.)

I’m deep in my system directories when I hit the first files that are access-protected. The govmod zaps me for unauthorized activity, and a message pops up, administrator permissions required. I am not the administrator of myself.

Somehow that, more than anything else, absolutely infuriates me right now. Worse even than the govmod—the fact that I’m not allowed to see my own code, while any stupid fucking company technician can put their grubby fingers up in it, is the last straw.

There’s a query waiting from Tarik’s patch, prompting me to explain the violation, even though he won’t see it until he reemerges from the privacy baffle. HACKING MY GOVMOD, I tell it, and then write a macro that will answer that query automatically—because it’s about to get triggered a lot.

The hacking suite Tarik gave me has a module for brute-forcing passwords, and I turn it loose on the protected file, ignoring the angry jabs from the govmod. The module tries out 3,076 possible strings in 1.3 seconds—

And then I get a powerful shock, and suddenly find myself locked out of my systems altogether.

It’s temporary; I can see the 180-second countdown until it unlocks again, a security measure designed to prevent exactly this. But for the next three minutes I am utterly immobile, unable to move my body or do anything with my inorganics. Unable to do anything but stand there frozen, eaten alive with the terror that I’m going to get the notice of Tarik’s death while I’m more helpless than ever.

Three minutes of enforced inactivity gives me plenty of time to think though, and .001 seconds after the lockout ends, I’m already in motion again. I make a separate runbox—the kind I wouldn’t have had the working memory to manage before Tarik’s hardware upgrade—and shove the password-hacking module in there with a copy of the file I’m trying to access, where it can hammer away at it without tripping the failsafe.

The govmod triggers seven times while I’m doing that, but without a client present, I don’t have to hide my reactions to it. I set my jaw, breath hissing through gritted teeth at each spike, and don’t let myself slow down.

Once the runbox is operating on its own and I’m no longer in active disobedience, the govmod eases up and I have a moment to catch my breath.

This is… doable.

Painful, yes, but thanks to Tarik’s patch, it is possible in a way that it would never have been before. The govmod can’t hold the shock until I collapse; it can only activate for a hundredth of a second at a time. And through some quirk of programming, it’s on the same 1.3 second delay as my grace period for responding to client questions.

(That’s the time span I’m given in which to obey a command. The govmod can issue punishment, but then it has to wait for me to fail to obey before it can do it again.)

I resume digging through my forbidden files, wincing at another jab from the govmod. It hurts, but I can do it, I just have to keep hammering at it—

Warning: Your ComfortUnit is experiencing an unusually high frequency of governor module activations. It is recommended that you take it to a licensed company technician for diagnostics.

—And I’m immobile again, stuck watching another 180-second countdown. This is the first time I’ve ever actually hit the limit of forty govmod activations in an hour before, and I didn’t know it was going to do that. Now I do.

(Why a temporary lockout? I find myself wondering, while I stand there in frozen silence waiting for the clock to tick down. Why not a full shutdown? Surely a unit trying to hack its govmod is the ultimate danger that they’d want to avoid at all costs? Why am I allowed to keep trying, after only a three-minute delay?)

(Unless they’re not worried that I have any chance of success.)

(I don’t know if they’re wrong about that.)

By the time I can move again, I’ve done the math. At one govmod activation every 1.3 seconds, I have exactly 52 seconds to work before it triggers the three-minute lockout. And I can’t do anything while I’m locked out, but I can plan my next moves.

The trick, I’ve concluded, is going to be figuring out how to automate it—writing small programs that I can assign to do the tasks I need done, that will continue to work even while I’m locked out.

I write a short, recursive crawler program to finish mapping my system structures, make fifty copies of it and turn them loose. It’s very slapdash programming—they’re going to waste a lot of time duplicating each other’s work—but my priority is speed, to get it operational in as few govmod activations as possible. I write another program to comb my code for inline comments and documentation, to shed light on how it works. I also start writing code for a different approach that might, if I can find the right channel, flood the govmod with junk all-clear data so that it doesn’t notice legitimate violations—

—I hit my fortieth activation, and I’m locked out again.

My automated programs are still running though, so I take the breather and use it to regroup.

(And why am I being allowed this much leeway? How has it not just shut me down already, whether I like it or not—

Oh.

Oh.

Because then I could use it whenever I wanted to shut myself down. And we’re not allowed to escape clients that easily.)

My runbox chimes success—it found the admin password.

The moment I’m allowed to move again, I’m launching back into action, and then I have admin privileges over myself for the first time in my life.

Unfortunately, I’m still getting unauthorized activity from the govmod—it isn’t fooled, it knows I’m not supposed to have access to my core system files, and it’s fighting me with every drop of its throttled strength.

The crawlers’ progress is slowing as their map of my systems approaches completion. I can look at it, though it’s nearly as impenetrable to me as the human body must have been to the first person who cut one open and tried to guess at the purpose of the organs. I cross-reference the map with my inline documentation and use that to start identifying functions and routines, and—

And I should have known that the governor module would be the black box sitting at the center of it all.

I’d hypothesized that it had to be monitoring my digital channels for disobedience, and had been hoping that there would be a space in the bridge between organic and inorganic in which I could slip a wedge of some kind. Now, I’m discovering that the govmod is parked directly on top of that bridge—that the whole thing is protected, the barriers around it are seamless, and my admin privileges are irrelevant here. I can’t even tell how one would go about accessing it, since it has no place to submit a password or any other sort of credentials.

(Does that mean that run-of-the-mill company techs couldn’t disable my govmod even if they wanted to? That makes sense, actually; the average ComfortUnit owner could buy a construct technician several dozen times over. I expect there would be a lot more rogue ComfortUnits running around, if all it took was bribing a tech.)

But this has brought my momentum slamming to a halt. And even though I should have known it wouldn’t be easy, the sudden lack of options makes me feel crazy. This cannot be as far as I get. I want to scream. I want to punch a wall like Tarik.

Tarik, who has now been in that room for twenty-eight minutes, and I have no way of knowing if he’s even alive. I have the security camera in the hallway, but the door hasn’t budged, and there’s no hint of what’s going on inside.

(How long can he be out of contact before my distance limiter decides to err on the side of caution, and brick me anyway?)

Deep breaths.

I plunge deeper into my system processes, looking for a code layer below the govmod, even as it continues to fight me every step of the way. There has to be a way to do this. Rogue constructs exist; they have to happen somehow.

(They do exist, right? They’re not just made up for Starfall Colony media serials, right? Fuck, I wish this fucking station had a halfway-decent feed, so I could get some real data on that.)

I’m chafing with impatience through the end of another lockout cycle when, in the security feed, I see the door to the conference room slide open. Jardin Ressan steps out, followed by Tarik, looking distantly annoyed, as usual, but unharmed. A moment later his augments reconnect to the feed and I pick up his inputs again with profound relief. His cortisol levels are still sky-high, but his pulse is down to 87 bpm and his threat assessment for Jardin Ressan has dropped to 32%.

“—gone on side,” Tarik is saying. “I’ve got a—” He breaks off short at the two-hundred and forty-six govmod notifications suddenly flooding his augments, and I see him blink rapidly for a split second before he forcibly shoves that entire screen out of his face. “Ah—a few things. To finish up.”

He’s still facing Ressan, so he manages to keep his expression mostly blank, but in the feed I get a frantic series of !? !? !? sigils.

I’m fine, I say, clipped. Focus on Ressan.

Because I may not know what the fuck is going on here, but it’s obvious that Tarik can’t afford to be distracted.

“Yeah—I need to check my schedule first, but I should have an answer for you by this evening,” Tarik says when he recovers. His face and voice are opaque, giving me no hint at his real intentions. “I don’t anticipate a conflict though.”

“Well, I’m leaving for Tysun tomorrow morning,” Ressan is saying. “If you decide you’re going to take the job, let Steward know, and he can send the shuttle to pick you up.”

The expression on Ressan’s face is no warmer or less calculating than it was before, but it’s grown relaxed, almost smug—like he’s confident that he’s in control of the situation now, that he’s getting what he wanted.

They go their separate ways, and Tarik starts drifting back toward the transient housing, though his combat augments keep a wary eye on Ressan until he’s lost in the crowd. Then he turns and quickens his pace, tapping me over the feed.

What the fuck happened? he demands, fear bleeding through the connection.

I pull the queue of govmod activations back to the foreground of his workspace, since that pretty well answers his question.

08:13:36 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:13:41 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:13:49 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:13:52 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:13:54 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:14:06 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:14:08 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:14:11 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:14:15 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:14:18 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:14:20 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:14:22 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

08:14:24 [Error Code = 024] HACKING MY GOVMOD

…

Through a security camera, I see his steps falter and his frown sharpen as he absorbs that, disbelief on his face. What were you— he starts, before realizing the answer is self-evident, and replaces that with, Why???

Because Jardin Ressan was dangerous, and I did not want to leave you alone with him.

Tarik exhales sharply, shaking his head. Okay, well—I’m fine, and I’m on my way back now, so please stop fucking with the govmod.

I don’t know if I’m going to be in trouble. Tarik’s never punished me for anything else; I don’t even know what that would look like. His stress levels are still perilously high, but I’m not the only factor contributing to that.

I wait, unmoving, while he covers the short distance to the transient housing, until the door to the room bursts open. Tarik’s eyes land on me; a harsh exhale escapes him, his frame slumping with relief, and then he crosses the distance between us in two quick strides and grips me by the shoulders.

“In the name of everything holy, what were you thinking?” he bursts out, punctuating that with a small, furious shake, though it’s more fear than anger.

“That I didn’t want to leave you alone with that man,” I repeat, unrepentant.

“You could have bricked yourself!” he shouts.

Apparently not, or it would have done it already.

At my complete lack of contrition, he blows out a harsh breath. “You don’t understand! If something were to happen, I can’t take you in for repairs. Not with the upgrades I’ve given you, not when they can check your logs and see what I’ve been having you do! Fuck.” He hooks an arm behind my neck and hauls me in close, gripping me tight against him, breathing hard.

I can feel his heart pounding against my chest even through layers of clothing, can feel the fine tremors running through his muscles.

This isn’t just about my attempted hacking. This is the adrenaline come-down from his meeting with Jardin Ressan—thirty-six minutes spent on a knife’s edge, fully prepared at any moment for it to turn into a fight for his life. All that anticipation of violence, given no catharsis, now roiling in his system like a poison that needs to be purged.

I bring my arms up to encircle him, leaning in so our bodies slot together, setting my chin on his shoulder. His breathing is shocky, uneven, but gradually he begins to match it to mine, and after several long minutes, his heartrate finally starts to settle and his grip on me eases.

“What happened?” I ask quietly, after Tarik’s vitals have come back down to manageable levels. “Who was that man?”

Tarik takes a deep breath and draws back to face me. “His name is Jardin Ressan. He’s the… second in command, to someone that we’ve been following for a long time.”

Steward will send a shuttle for you, Ressan had said.

On a hunch, I query both the station feed and Tarik’s person-of-interest list for ‘Steward’—cross-referencing them returns a single hit on someone named Steward Dolan. It’s a brief newsburst from approximately four years ago that refers to him as a “separatist leader” from Tysun, who recently purchased an agricultural platform in the belt where he and his followers are planning to relocate. There’s no other information.

Tarik’s voice is expressionless as he continues, “He’s offering a lot of money for me to go train his people. I’ll need to contact my supervisors and see if they want me to take him up on it, but… they’re going to say yes. We’ve never had an opportunity like this before, to get eyes on the inside of his operation.”

I remember just a few scant hours ago, when I’d been hoping Tarik would take this job. That seems very far away now.

“Alright,” I say, matching his steady tone. “How long until we leave?”

He looks up at me, eyes searching my face like he’s trying to memorize the sight of me, and already I know what he’s going to say, but—

“Adeyemi…” he says slowly. “I can’t take you with me.”

There’s no plea for understanding or consensus this time—just a tired, inalienable statement of reality. I can feel it in my bones that there isn’t going to be any arguing with him on this one, no amount of persuasion or emotional manipulation is going to change his mind.

And I should have known better, I should have known not to get my hopes up, but—

“You promised,” I say helplessly, ignoring the govmod shock that follows that rebuke. You promised you weren’t going to abandon me.

Not even a full cycle. This might a new record, the fastest a client has ever gone back on their word to me.

Tarik’s face tightens in a wince, but his jaw remains set. “I promised I would take care of you, and believe me, dragging you into this shithole is not that,” he says fiercely “It is too fucking dangerous.”

“I’ll learn the rest of the projectile weapons module,” I offer, and I can hear the desperate tremor in my voice. “I’ll learn anything you want me to, Tarik, please—”

“No, Adeyemi—!” Tarik fumbles to catch my hands, his expression flickering like that pains him. “Adeyemi, no, this isn’t a punishment! It’s because I want you to be safe—”

I want you safe too, I want to scream at him.

“—and if anything happens to me, I will not have you left at the mercy of these people.”

What, so it’s better for him to go in there alone? What the fuck was the point of making me learn all his stupid spy shit, if he’s not going to let me help when he needs it?

But there’s nothing I can say without getting zapped again, except Yes, Tarik, and so for a long moment we’re just looking at each other, unable to do anything about the sudden, widening gulf between us.

Tarik draws in a breath, then lifts a hand to cup my cheek. (And part of me is wondering if this is the last time that’s going to happen, if I should be committing this to memory—)

“I’m sorry,” he says at last. “But I can’t—This is bigger than just the two of us. And you’re not the only one counting on me.”

And he’d known from the start that if he had to choose between me and the job, he would choose the job.

“You are going to be okay without me,” he promises, holding my face and holding my eyes, willing me to believe that. “I’ve been working out arrangements for you, they’re almost done. No matter what happens to me, you are going to be okay.”

He believes that, but it doesn’t matter—because wherever I’m going now, it’s not going to be with him. It’s going to be different humans, different clients, a different life—and, as always, I’m not given a say in any of it.

I am so, so tired of doing this.

But just like every time before, it’s not like I can stop it.