#lbv index

“You should be resting,” Dol says, her voice serene and cool and utterly disapproving. Your arm has decided to throb, your back has decided to throb in off-rhythm counterpoint just to be a fuckin’ bulge about it, and the only reason you’re standing up straight is that you’re strapped into your armour. You’re pretty sure that the armour is bad for the wound, but given that it’s the only reason you’re upright and shouldering - with your good arm, at least, you’re not insane - through the crowd, you’re inclined to keep it. “You’ll collapse, if you keep this up.”

“Dol,” you say, glaring so hard at an oncoming blueblood that they cross to the other side of the street, “I ain’t entirely certain why you suddenly decided to take me under your wing, but you are invadin’ the territory of my last fuckin’ nerve with it.” You should have never decided to go through town. Still, you want to at least have a medictator eyeball you, an’ the military docks aren’t so far if you’re already cutting through.

It takes a while to find the place that you’re looking for, and longer to get there with a minimum of witnesses, since you and Dol are hardly inconspicuous. The receptionist at the medictator’s dingy office goes white when he sees you, and it takes less than five minutes for you to be ushered through - with nobody passing you, which means that either, bad, this sawbones ain’t got much in the way of patronage, or good, there’s a more discreet exit.

Said sawbones is utterly unimpressed when you nearly pass out on her table, but Dol helps you ease your chestpiece off, and her look fades into something nearly respectful. “Would have thought you could get patched up at a place where they wash the tools between patients, Orphaner,” she says, already snapping on a pair of gloves. “I don’t think I can match this stitching.”

“I wanted somethin’ a little more off the books,” you tell her, ignoring Dol’s satisfied look. “An’ don’t fuckin’ touch the stitchin’.” Ten minutes later, your back is blissfully numb, you’ve got a collection of syringes, and your credit account has had quite a burden taken off it.

Walking the rest of the way is a lot easier, and Dol keeps her mouth shut after being proven wrong on her suppositions of you possessing a modicum of foresight, which is a blessing given that the anaesthetic does nothing for headaches. She trails you through security, makes her guest pass disappear, and only digs in her heels when you get to your ship, which has crew scrambling all over as it finishes loading up. You only gave them an hour, which is pushing it even for the military.

Dol freezes at the bottom of the gangplank, and it’s only after you’ve walked halfway up it without her that you realise she’s no longer a step behind you. Even with the distance between you, you can see her pupils have narrowed into terrified, angry slits, and the tremble in her hands.

Fuck. The ship’s got a psionic assist. You should have thought of that.

“Get on the ship, Dol,” you tell her, keeping your voice as flat and neutral as you can when you’re standing around with your back torn to pieces.

One of her hands goes to her hip as she jerks her head up at the sound of your voice. Lucky for you, she doesn’t walk around armed, although you don’t think she really needs to. “How dare you?” she hisses, but makes no move towards the gangplank.

“You got obligations to attend to,” you say, taking a couple of heavy steps towards her. “If you want my protection, you stay with me or confined to the hive. Pick one.”

Dol eyeballs you warily and shifts her weight, putting herself in a better position should she need to go for your throat again. You stop far enough away that it’d be a real hardship for her to do so. “So you brought me to a psionic ship.”

“I hadn’t fuckin’ considered it, all right?” you snap, and move forward to grab her wrist while she’s confused. Your symbol still hangs there, and you twine your fingers under it. “Look. You get on the ship, or you go back to the hive. I ain’t got the time to escort you there, an’ we both know you’ll run once you think of it, so you can either get on the fuckin’ ship with me or start runnin’.” You place some pressure on the bracelet. It’s not a particularly strong latch, because strength isn’t the point. While she wears it, she’s under your protection, provided she’s got reason to be wherever whoever checks finds her. You don’t want to leave her with it should she run. It’s far too valuable, and far too damning. “Just make your fuckin’ choice so I can get on already.”

She looks at you, some of the terror dying from her eyes, replaced by resignation. “You’re chasing Spinneret, aren’t you?” Without waiting for your answer, she jerks her wrist free. “You’ve never had to face up to the toll your pretty life takes on other people,” she says, her voice level. “The son of mine you killed was imprisoned in a psionic training camp, when he was a child. He fled into certain death rather than stay for the retrofitting that makes them able to power your ships. He had day terrors about it for three sweeps after we found him baking in the desert.”

You attempt to look attentive and interested and not like you’re trying to hide the fact that he had day terrors about it a lot longer than that. Nothing like a troll screaming in his sleep to tell you things you never wanted to know.

“He was lucky,” Dol says, soft, looking inwards. You relax a little. “If you or any of your crew dare show any disrespect to your Helmsman, day terrors will be the least of their concerns.”

She certainly has a way with conversation. You could have bought yourself a nice tealblood, but no, you had to have the Dolorosa, didn’t you? “You can fuckin’ pail the Helmsman if it’ll assuage your worries,” you tell her, and go back up the gangplank as brusquely as possible.

You’ve never really bothered to think about Helmsmen before. They’re a quiet bunch, usually, and the sailing master has more to do with them than anyone else does, excepting sometimes whatever sorry excuse for a surgeon you’ve got on board. The technology’s nowhere near what Condesce’s nerds cooked up - not as extensive, to put it politely, but enough that they can give the ship some extra oomph to make up for how they weigh it down with antibiotics.

You had to help cut an infected port out of a Helmsman’s arm, once. She didn’t flinch, didn’t squeak, even though your anaesthetics had run out a week ago and the site was so inflamed that when the sawbones prodded it with a scalpel, it oozed. She ended up killing herself three nights later by trying to navigate you out of a tight corner without all her proper conduits in place - and the thing was, it wasn’t loyalty to the ship or that she had a quadrant in the crew to protect or some big, dramatic reason like it should have been. You’d just... told her to get the ship out of there, and she did.

The lot of you buried her at sea the next night, to general mutters of ‘fucking crazy helmsmen’, and you’d requisitioned a new Helmsman once you’d limped back to port. He didn’t come to a good end either, now that you’re thinking on it, but, well, nobody in the military does - except maybe the paper-pushers.

In any case, you have more to worry about than Dol getting torn up over a Helmsman. It's probably a good thing she never went in and looked at her son, if she thinks that the current helming procedures are bad already. Dealing with Spin gone haring off and Dol in a mood at the same time is something you're less than inclined to do. You need to focus on Spin, since you have less than a clue of what she's up to now. Dol might insurrect your crew out from under you, but it's likely better than anything your kismesis has planned for you.

--

Spinneret Mindfang is smart. You like to think that you're not stupid, but at this point in your life, you're more a wadded-up ball of instinct than you are anything else. Instinct rarely leads you wrong, however, which means that you’ve been bugging Spin since the moment you met her. She destroys them, of course, either because she finds them or because she can’t hold onto something for longer than a few nights without it exploding in her face, but your latest is still active. She’s had a night’s head start on you, and knowing her she’s probably stolen a psionic as well, but you know where she is.

The fact that it appears to be the middle of fucking nowhere is a concern. Luckily for you, it’s your sailing master’s concern.

The sailing master in question is someone you’ve worked with before, an indigo with neat, folded-back horns who usually looks like she’s about to fall asleep. A small amount of the time, comparatively, she looks like she’s just ripped someone’s heart out of their chest and chewed on it a little, but that was a stressful time and she’d certainly managed to keep the crew in line without running to you over every little thing afterwards. Ignoring military conventions, because the hierarchy has its perks, you sling your arm over her shoulders and drag her into your cabin. If she notices how much weight you’re leaning on her, she doesn’t say.

“Tawret!” you say, her name finally coming to you as Dol shuts the door. That done, you collapse into a chair and try to make it look deliberate. You’re not feeling much in the way of pain, but that doesn’t mean you’re in the condition to be walking everywhere.

“Orphaner,” she replies, sounding on the edge of a yawn as usual, taking about as much notice of Dol as she does of the furniture. Without further ado, she taps your table until the screen in it lights up. “Our destination?”

You check your palmtop, then put in the co-ordinates. They’re still idly ticking away, but it’s almost like Spin’s taking a pleasure cruise, not making her escape. She might not even realise you’re alive - you did lose a lot of blood, but you don’t think Spin’s ever had cause to see exactly how hardy you are before. Most seadwellers can take a beating, but you’ve spent your life taking them professionally.

Tawret - no title, which is strange, although Pumprend is what people who have never met her call her - leans in and frowns, then swipes to change the map to show predicted currents. “There’s a lot in the way, Orphaner,” she says, as the table plays through a sped-up loop of the next few hours. “We’re nearing the equinox and tide’s falling. The water’s gonna be doing its best to shove us onto the sandbars to the east. We’ll be fighting to stay on course, afterwards.”

It’s not questioning your orders, exactly, but you have never been less in the mood for people not saluting and going forth. Some of that must come through in your face, because after a moment’s silence, she salutes and wipes the map before walking out at a faster clip than you’ve seen her use before, other than the pump-rending incident.

Dol leans over the table once Tawret’s closed the door and calls the map back up. Either she’s used the program before - unlikely - or you should be even more terrified of her smarts than you are. You’ll work on that once you’re not about to keel over in front of your subordinates. “Shouldn’t you be striding about the deck and telling people to climb rigging?” she asks, prodding at the map controls.

You snort. “Tawret an’ whoever’s first mate work that out between ‘em. I’m just the Empress’ will walkin’ around on two legs, to the ship.” It’s different on your own ship, with crew you’ve hand-picked; they all know you to put in the long hours of being an Orphaner, tracking down lusii and using your ship as an extension of yourself. They jump to your orders because you know you waters, and they’d have died messy deaths a thousand times over without you. Likely you’ll take a more active role as you close in on Spin, but with your back as it is, you’re happy to sit back and let those who don’t listen to your title think of you as one of the more useless Court members.

Dol seems unlikely to offer you a hand, ungrateful slave that she is, so you stand up using as few of your core muscles as possible - fuck, this is an inconvenient spawn of an unwashed bucket - and then begin the arduous task of pulling off your clothes. You should probably be out making an impression on the crew, but the built-in cupe in the corner of the room is singing your name very seductively, and the thought of getting sopor on your back would make you cry, if your tear ducts weren’t as dried-out as Dol’s sense of humour.

Your armour’s the easy part, which isn’t saying much. The clasps are fiddly and trying to twist back to reach them better makes your vision white out a little, but you get it off. The mechanics of getting your shirt off, however, are what defeat you. You’d just go fall in the sopor anyway, but you really want the shirt off so the sopor can do its thing with the wound, which is beginning to throb again. Hopefully you didn’t pop anything.

You try again, just in case, except this time the pain nearly knocks you off your feet and you end up with your hands locked around the back of your chair, swearing through ragged breaths.

“The muscle was hurt, Dualscar,” Dol snaps, finally looking up from the table she might as well be handfasted to. “You shouldn’t even be able to lift your arm. What are you trying to do?”

You give her the same look you gave Tawret.

She gives you an impassive look in return.

This is a cheap fight. Except you’re wobbling on your feet, your vision is swimming so hard it might make it to Spin before you do, and you’re probably about to collapse whether you like it or not. And Dol, well, Dol is an expert in giving absolutely no fucks, and will probably just stare at you until you do actually collapse, and that will be embarrassing for everyone involved.

“Can’t get the shirt off,” you say, averting your eyes and doing your best to not let your fins pin themselves back. This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever worried about - she is, in a quite literal sense, your own damn slave. Helping you get your clothes off is well within the line of duty, although you’ve never wanted that much intrusion into your personal life.

Instead of helping, like you expected - she’s been perfectly courteous all night, why would she change now? - Dol freezes, her hand jerking on the table and zooming in on an irrelevant patch of open sea. “I-” she says, then the words seem to dry up in her throat. Her other hand rests at her waist, and if she’s looking to start another fight, you might as well just hand yourself to the drones for a mercy cull now. The Orphaner Dualscar, done in by a jadeblood. History is not going to be kind to you.

You’re mentally preparing yourself to throw the chair, because going down without some sort of fight would be more shame than you can take, when she says in a whisper so dry that the words barely get out, “You tripped my submission reflex.”

The silence that falls between the two of you has a weight to it, stifling.

“I had to,” you say, uncertain. “With- Spin an’ all, it was a mite fuckin’ urgent, Dol.”

She shakes her head and looks down at the table. “I don’t care for you, Dualscar,” she says, quiet but firm. “I’ve done what I have because I want to be the kind of person my son would be proud of, because he shamed me with how easily kindness came to him, not for any feelings I have towards you. And…” Still without looking at you, she sits heavily in a chair, her face blank and serious. “There are two paths I see that led to your actions, and I like neither. Either I am not entirely real to you, in that way that the enemy is never quite real, and thus doing as you please has no real consequences - or I am real, and you don’t care.” She looks at you then, and for all that she used to set off alarms for something eerie and dangerous in your head, now she is just sad and so, so serious. “You’re terrifyingly desensitised to the consequences your actions have, in any case.”

“What was I supposed to do?” you snap, nearly throwing your hands in the air before you remember how bad an idea that would be. “Let you keep flippin’ out until Spin declared you a loss and culled us both? Had us found by security, so Spin an’ I were executed an’ you were slated to have that oliveblood of yours tortured in front a’ you for the next sweep? Isle keep it in mind, next time I get fuckin’ dismembered comin’ after you!”

“You were saving yourself,” Dol says, a chill finally colouring her voice. “I was nothing more than collateral.”

You pry yourself away from your chair, barely keeping a growl under wraps as you stalk over to the cupe and slide the lid back. The sopor’s fresh, at least, although a bit cool to the touch. At this point, you couldn’t care less. You’re going to climb in, clothes and all, and when you get back out the world might be a tad more sane. “You don’t care for me,” you finally say, once you can do it without spitting it out between your teeth. “I ain’t sure where you got the impression I cared for you, but I ain’t got a fuckin’ clue why you’d expect me to.”

A hand rests on your back, and you nearly leap out of your skin. It would be good for your continued health if your slave wasn’t a fuckin’ assassin. “Don’t be an idiot,” Dol says, finally, and you can hear the sigh in her voice. “I’ll have to cut the shirt off.”

“I like-” you say, in weak defense of your shirt, then pull the letter opener out of your boot and hand it to her. “You are sendin’ some very mixed signals, Dol.”

She pulls your shirt away from your back - oh, sticking, you definitely managed to pop a few stitches - and sets the knife to it. “Of course you like this shirt,” she mutters, a glimmer of personality coming through. “I care about people, Dualscar. I’m being incredibly charitable and believing you felt you took the best course of action. I still don’t care for you, and if you do it again under any circumstances I will make you eat your own horns, but I’m not going to make you stew in blood-soaked clothes until you feel like asking for help.” She gently bends your arm to get at the sleeve, and you nearly bite through your tongue. “As for you caring… You did attempt to bring me back.”

“You’re my responsibility,” you grumble, when she’s silent long enough for you to realise she expects a reply. “It was in the contract.”

She does sigh then, handing the letter opener back to you, not even attempting to keep it despite the way she always reverts to looking for a weapon when she panics. “I realise that the Alternian Empire is built upon it not caring about its subjects,” she says, keeping a delicate hold on the blade when you try to take it, “but being your responsibility means that I am under your care. You frame it as obligations, and you’re not wrong, but have you never simply - cared about the people working under you? Leaving aside any romantic feelings. You knew Tawret, remembered her. Somehow, she crossed that threshold from stranger to comrade.”

You repress the awful urge to laugh at the fact that Dol clearly has no idea how Tawret made an impression on you. Something in your face must look off, because she nods and lets go of the blade. “We saw it in the cooler end of the haemospectrum a lot. Trolls who thought my son was building a very nice world for other people, but they were too violent, too unable to connect to be part of it. They’d bought the Empire line that the only way to care for others is through the quadrants, and anything else is gross perversion.”

“I’m the right hand of the Empress,” you tell her, in case she’s forgotten. You’re too exhausted and slightly dizzy from blood loss for this.

“You’re allowed to do things because you care about people,” she says, and shrugs a little. “For you, it’s probably been through a framework of obligation and responsibility. You care about your crew, I’m guessing, and anyone who owes you or you owe a debt. Disciple is better at this sort of reframing than I am.”

You shake your head, letting the words wash past you. “Dol, as nice as it is havin’ your insurrection of my ship start with me, I’m takin’ off my pants an’ gettin’ in the fuckin’ sopor. Go preach to Tawret, if you want an argument.”

“-up!”

Your face hurts.

No, your everything hurts. Your face just hurts especially because Dol is slapping you, and not in the gentle hey-get-up kind of way. She draws her arm back for another go, so you cough the dry feeling out of your mouth and say, “Awake!”

She drops her hand and stares at you, then wipes her face. “Sit up,” she says, her voice hoarse. When you just stare at her, she carefully puts her hands under your shoulders and lifts.

There is a squelch, and your vision whites out, and if you scream you don’t hear it. When you come back, you have your hands dug into Dol’s shoulders, and your breath is coming in the shallowest pants possible, but you are sitting up.

“Spin,” you mumble, and pat the ground beside you, looking for Ahab’s. The ground is sticky, and your hand comes away purple.

Dolorosa takes the shawl from her shoulders and passes it behind your back. “Dualscar, for once in your life, listen to someone else. Breathe out.”

You shut up and exhale through your nose, only to sharply inhale and squeeze Dol’s shoulders even harder when she winds her shawl around you and pulls tight. “How long?” you ask, while she somehow knots it back into itself, your brain picking up pieces all the while.

She shakes her head. “Can you stand up?”

“I ain’t stabbed in the legs,” you retort. Getting your legs under you is simple enough, but standing up makes your head spin, and once you’re up you have to lean on the wall. “Just a fuckin’ cut,” you mutter, and wipe sweat off your face with a clean bit of shirt. “Had worse.”

“I’ve seen worse,” Dol agrees, and levers herself under one of your arms. Pale green remnants of tears are streaked down her cheeks, and her eyes are still glittering with more, but right now her mouth is a thin line, for all the rest of her is shaking. “Walk with me or we’ll both fall over.”

You drag your feet one laborious step. “You go in?”

She shakes her head again, stiffly.

You stop in your tracks, nearly spending the both of you sprawling. “Are you fuckin’ kidding?” At her look of incomprehension, you shuffle carefully back to the door. “Spin’s already fucked everythin’ up,” you say, and slap your hand down on the reader. It makes your shoulder ache. “Which means I’m already slated for somethin’ nasty. Might as fuckin’ well get somethin’ out a’ it.”

She looks out at the barely visible curves of the Battleship Condescension, her lips slightly parted. At first you think it’s awe, but her trembling under your arm gets more violent, and you realise that she is bone-deep afraid. “You can’t make that walk,” she says, finally.

You pry your arm off her and lean heavily on the wall. “Off you go.”

She turns away from the door and slowly shakes her head. “You’re bleeding too much.”

“I’ve bled more,” you say, defensively, and readjust your leaning arm. You’re going to sit down and fall asleep again as soon as she goes, and if you bleed out, well, it has to be better than a traitor’s punishment. “It’ll clot anyway,” you add. “Go do what you fuckin’ came here to do, Dol. You ain’t gonna get another chance.”

“I don’t know what I came here to do,” she says, and closes her eyes. After a long moment, she opens them, then places a hand over yours on the reader. “You said Psiionic was dead, Dualscar. How dead?”

You sigh and slump, giving up on looking as healthy as possible. “I don’t know much about that side a’ it, Dol, but by the end he was completely non-responsive. The science geeks called him a battery, okay?” You look away from her wince. “So pretty fuckin’ dead.”

“He would hate me for this,” Dol says, after a long moment of looking out over the Battleship Condescension. She puts her shoulders back under your good arm and steers you towards the stairs. “He may even be right to.”

“Dol,” you protest, looking up at the stairs. You really do not want to climb those. You cannot put into words how much you don’t want to climb them. “You got obligations-”

“Yes,” she says, and grimly drags you along as she climbs the stairs, going slower than a frozen turtle on your account. “I am obliged to put my money where my mouth is. I cannot have preached kindness as the right thing all this time and let you bleed to death now, Dualscar. It would be a worse betrayal of my children than leaving them to their fates.”

“But you were just prepared to end everythin’,” you say, slumping heavily on her. Every step pulls at your back, and you’re getting real dizzy again real fast. "An' you've krilled people who got in your way."

“You may not have noticed-” Dol grunts as she shifts your arm and takes more of your weight, “-but I am not doing well in the sanity department, these days. Keep going.”

You climb another step, then another, and another, your feet lead blocks on the ends of your legs and your vision narrowing to the path in front of you. You almost take the both of you down when you reach the top, trying to step onto a step that isn’t there, and only Dol hauling on you saves you from eating concrete.

“What now?” you say, and find the nearest wall to lean on again. “I don’t know about you, but I ain’t up for swimmin’ home.” You rub your face and try to focus. “Can’t go to medical here. Leave a trace.”

“Wait,” Dol says, looking down the road that divides the fake lab buildings along the length of the underground abyss. You’re more than happy to close your eyes and sag against the wall, although Dol pinches you when you try to lie down.

A short time later, she pinches you again and hisses, “There! Put on your seadweller face.”

“’S the only one I got,” you say, and open your eyes. There are two figures off in the distance, ambling closer, and you straighten yourself up and attempt to look less like you’re about to collapse regardless of how much support the wall is giving you.

As they draw closer, you recognise the uniform of the internal security staff for the compound. You don’t know these two by sight, but it’s a big compound. All of them have been approved by someone much better at investigating backgrounds than you, in any case. You have no idea what their response to seeing you casually leaning on a wall and dripping blood will be, and you’re not exactly eager to find out, but at least Dol seems to have a plan.

They’re casually amicable to each other as they get within eyeshot, but then one of them smacks the other in the shoulder and jerks his head at you and all your blood, and then suddenly you and Dol are the target of two guns and a spear. You’re about to shout at them to stand down, but before you can, Dol steps on your foot and moves serenely forward.

“The Orphaner Dualscar requires your assistance,” she says, hands carefully folded in front of her, an expectant look on her face.

“Yeah, we can see that,” the shorter of the two – a brownblood, you think, although the sign on her sleeve is hard to make out. The taller, a blueblood by the looks of him, holds his guns steady and eyes you carefully, letting the brownblood take the risk. “Weapons on the ground.”

You can barely see Dol’s face, with the angle she’s at, but you see her eyebrows lift just a fraction. “I don’t have any, and he’s hardly going to listen to you telling him what to do. If you doubt his identity, there’s plenty of proof of it on the wall.” She waits a moment, then says, “We require a boat.”

The brownblood thrusts the point of her spear under Dol’s chin. “The Orphaner Dualscar has full requisition rights. You can-”

“Rahave,” the blueblood says, suddenly. “We will escort them to the docks.”

“Bullshit!” Rahave says, narrowing her eyes. “We need to verify their identities and figure out-”

“Rahave!” The blueblood plucks Rahave’s spear out of her hands. “That is Dualscar, and I hardly want his death on my hands. If you must report the incident, then go, but I believe you will find that you run into a wall of classification beyond your pay grade.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Rahave snaps, clearly outranked. “If you think you’re safe with a mysterious jadeblood and a bleeding-out seadweller, fine! I’m going to go tell Calwen and make sure that we don’t all get culled.”

“You do that,” the blueblood says. Rahave retreats a few paces backwards, watching the three of you suspiciously, then turns and starts jogging. You can’t remember where the nearest security hub is, but it should only take a few minutes for her to reach it. The blueblood watches to make sure that his partner is gone, then turns to Dol and raises his hands to his chest, doing something that you cannot see, because you unfortunately haven’t developed x-ray vision and Dol is blocking your view.

“Oh,” Dol says, in genuine surprise. “Well.”

“Am I allowed to fuckin’ talk now?” you inquire.

“No,” Dol says, absently. “You – your name?”

“Telvin,” the blueblood supplies, dropping his hands again.

“Telvin,” Dol says. “Help me haul him to the docks.”

“Oh,” Telvin says, and walks over to you nervously. “I thought that that was an excuse. Your arm, please?”

Dol takes your other arm, the wounded one, and between them they manage to take enough of your weight that you can actually help out by putting one foot in front of the other. “I thought about it,” she says, leaving you out of a conversation about your own imminent demise. “But, well. You know.”

“Yes,” Telvin says, subdued. “I know.”

--

You make it to the docks unassailed by any further security, the speed at which you manage to make it through the compound entirely due to Telvin and his height propping you up the perfect amount to stumble along without overly compressing or stretching your giant, gaping wound. The blood seems to have slowed down, at least. You’re going to have to buy Dol a new shawl.

They have to almost juggle you to get you into the boat, a dinky thing with a motor that – well, it’ll get you where you’re going, but you’re not going to be having any fun with it. You curl up in the bow nonetheless, shifting angrily to try to find a position that doesn’t jar your back.

“Here,” Telvin says, holding out his coat to Dol. She takes it and makes you lean forward like the cruel harpy she is, spreading it along the wood of the seat that keeps digging into your side. You lean back cautiously when she lets you go and it’s better enough that your eyes drift shut. You’re ready for sleep, sopor or no.

Dol pinches you. “Say thank you.”

“Not my fuckin’ lusus,” you grumble without opening your eyes. Before she can pinch your fin again, you wave a hand at the dock, where Telvin was before sleep became imperative. “Good work on not murderin’ me, that was really well done,” you say, and then bury your head in a fold of his coat.

“Don’t sleep,” Dol says, and knocks your leg with a foot as she sits down by the motor. You groan as loudly and piteously as you can, only to remain ignored. “Thank you, Telvin.”

“Good luck,” he says in farewell, even if it is in a dubious tone.

Dol starts the motor and you’re pushed into motion, the boat slapping against the rise and fall of the water. She’s not particularly good at navigating it, but as long as you’re headed in the right direction, you no longer care.

“How did he know you?” you ask, after a few minutes of silence. Dol doesn’t answer, and on reflection, you realise that you don’t particularly want to know the answer anyway.

--

You have to go in through the wreck part of your shipwreck and climb your way up. You’ve done it before, but your feet want to slip out from under you despite Dol anchoring you, and if you never have to crawl up another nearly-vertical, half-rotten staircase again in your life, you’ll accede to the subjugglators that miracles are possible.

“On the table,” Dol says, once you get up to the main deck. She’s already dragging over a lamp, leaving you to slump exhaustedly against the back of a chair.

“We eat there,” you object, and pull yourself up with agonising slowness. “It’s fine, Dol. Night in the cupe an’ the sopor’ll do the trick.”

“Do not presume that you can lie to me.” She looks at you sharply a moment before kneeling to fetch the first aid kit from one of the cupboards. “I don’t know why you’ve suddenly developed a deathwish, but you can indulge it in your own time. For now, you can lie down on the table and cry when I take scissors to your shirt.”

It’s easier, in the end, to just lie down on the fucking table and let her cut your shirt - and her shawl - off, so that’s what you do. She looks at your arm first, washing the wound with care but not tenderness, then carefully prods and pulls at it to get a better view of your innards. Without saying anything to you, she lays out a couple of curved needles and opens some sterilised packets of stitching thread, then twists your arm into better light and starts sewing you up.

“Ow,” you protest.

“This is what happens when you get stabbed.” To her credit, she finishes quickly despite - you think, you didn’t really want to have a look, or think too long about it - having to stitch some muscle together, too. Then, while that’s twinging, she gets a fresh cloth and fresh boiled water and starts cleaning off the mess you’ve made of your back. The water running over your gills makes them flare automatically, and the only thing that stops you from scrambling off the table is Dol putting a hand firmly on the uninjured side of your back and pushing down until you stop swearing. Her arm is an iron bar with you in this condition, which is embarrassing.

“I’m fine,” you say, and settle back against the unforgiving surface of the table. At least you’re not at risk of falling asleep, now. “Don’t do that again.”

“I need to clean it,” she says, patiently.

“It can fuckin’ rot off,” you sulk, but wrap your fingers around the edge of the table so you have something to squeeze. “Do it fast, then.” She rinses the cloth and wrings it out, but just before she can torture you some more, you say, “An’ talk to me,” resolutely not looking at her.

“Very well. Hold your breath.” She runs water over the gill that Spin fouled, and holding your breath does help with the reflexes, a little. Your knuckles still go white from tension. “Why the deathwish?” she asks, and picks up a little more water, continuing in absent, distracted tones. “No, don’t talk, you’ll just fall off the table. I recall you saying that you were for a traitor’s end, but I find it hard to believe that you’ve gone from risking your life to stop Spinneret to glumly accepting your fate.”

You wait a moment, but it seems that she’s done with the rinsing. “I ain’t givin’ up,” you say, offended. “I wronged the entire fuckin’ Empire by not stoppin’ the both a’ you.” Your eyes half-close, until everything is eyelashes and blur. “I had one job.”

“This is going to hurt rather a lot,” Dol says, using a light touch to figure out how badly Spin messed you up. You grit your teeth and resettle yourself against the table, which is starting to become distinctly uncomfortable. “I’m going to have to stitch up the opercula, at least.”

“Look at the expert on seadweller anatomy,” you grumble, more to divert Dol’s attention from her line of inquiry than anything else. “Where’d you learn to surgeon us?”

“I was under the impression that you weren’t supposed to be stupid, as high in the hierarchy as you are.” She sets needle to flesh, and your fingers nearly meet through the fucking table. You’d forgotten how much a gill wound hurt, but Dol is kindly reminding you.

“Well,” you grind out, attempting to not flinch with every stab. She could kill you - could have killed you at any moment, you come to realise - but you think she’s getting more satisfaction from not killing you, at this point. Very deliberately not killing you, as the case may be. “You shoald’a seen the guy before me.”

“You murdered him,” Dol says, tying off the last stitch on your gill. “One presumes you have ambition, from that action.” A snip of scissors, a pause, and she starts in on your back, which at least doesn’t feel like much after the gill. You think you’re too tired to feel much of anything. “And yet, you don’t reside in the palace. Your hive is a wreck, and you had no servants before me. Your kismesis is a wanted criminal, and quite possibly a traitor herself. You would be an awful caretaker of the throne.”

“Don’t want the fuckin’ throne,” you mumble, letting your eyes shut again. It’s nothing you’ve not heard before, or told yourself, for that matter, but you had no intention on slotting neatly into Court life when you shot down old Acalephe. You just want someone in charge who knows what they’re doing, someone worthy of your admiration, and you’ve since shot more trolls than you can remember to keep it that way.

Your predecessors were a power-hungry, grasping lot. So are you, but at least you’ve figured out what seat in the Empire’s worth aspiring to. And it’s yours, so now all you have to do is defend it.

“How long you gonna take?” you ask Dol, changing the subject yet again.

“As long as it takes.” She lets the silence spin out, punctuated only by your hisses as she sews. “Perhaps fifteen minutes.”

You grunt. “Get my palmtop, then. I ain’t got time to waste.”

You’re surprised, when she actually does as you order; you figured what with her actually deigning to talk to you, she was done with the whole slavery thing. Still, she drops your palmtop in front of you and washes her hands while you lever your good arm in front of you to pick it up. It doesn’t feel like you’re pulling on the stitches, so you fumble one-handed with it until you can check in on your security while Dol finishes up.

Spin never came back. You hadn’t expected her to. She’s burning every bridge between you, though, which means that she expected you to die - and you would have, had Dol not come to your aid. Whatever she’d done with Ulixes wouldn’t have been discovered until your body had, and she would have had the time to turn into a ghost.

Now, well, there’s the opportunity to save things.

You know that there aren’t any security cameras in the whole Ulixes base, since the Condesce doesn’t want word of her biggest experiment leaking out across the internet somehow. There’ll be an incident report from that guard that ran off, but you can explain that away. And if you find out what Spin did, you can fix it. She won’t be eager to tell you, but, well. You think the relationship’s run its course, anyway.

You should be filing an incident report of your own. You should be offering up your neck on a platter to the Empress. But you’ve fought too hard to get where you are, to be Her right hand, to let go of it easily.

The next few nights are miserable. Dol is a seething mess who ghosts through the ship and stares daggers at you every time you run into her around a corner. Spin is her usual self, and the only thing that manages to redeem the situation is that at least Dol’s seething keeps her out of Spin’s reach. Well, that, and that things are getting cleaned again. Apparently Dol likes to fix things when she gets mad, and you aren’t complaining.

You’ve never been good at the pressures of waiting, though. Having Spin in the hive, one of her plans weaving together around you, is making you grind your teeth. She won’t drop Ulixes unless it benefits her, and you don’t know what she’s hoping to get out of interrupting things in the first place, which means that foiling her is going to be near-impossible. If you can just hold her off until everything is irrevocably in place, you can at least get by without killing her, but Ulixes is too important for her to fuck up. You’re going to have to kill your kismesis to preserve the Empire’s future if things don’t clear up, and you’re just about ready to punch through a wall with frustration.

She’s just waiting for the last piece to click into place. You hope it never does.

Hope, of course, betrays you. Somehow, in between Dol stalking the ship with a vengeance and Spin being out and about scamming people and setting fire to things, the two of them end up in the same room.  And, of course, neither of them does you a favour and murders the other. They sit together, Dol straight-backed with her arms wrapped around her legs and Spin sprawled out, and you do your best to overhear what they’re saying from the door, and what you hear makes your paranoia seem reasonable. Spin’s obviously getting at Ulixes.

“-psionic training camp,” Dol says, her voice low enough that you can barely catch the words.  “He never talked about it. To me, in any case.” There’s a long silence that makes you wonder if they know you’re there and are messing with you, but then she says, in a choked voice, “He’s been enslaved to the Empire since he was hatched.”

“You’d know what that’s like,” Spin says, and her tone is blithe enough to border on the insensitive.

“I suppose,” Dol says, and wraps her arms tighter around her knees. Neither of them have noticed you’re peering around the door, and your knuckles are white with how tightly you’re gripping the doorjamb. Any moment, they’re going to turn and see you, but if you move before then you’ll be a step behind Spin. “I always had the option of leaving the caverns.”

“You’re the Dolorosa,” Spin says, and to your surprise her voice is scornful. “Why are you convinced you don’t have options now?” You dart out of sight of the door when she turns to get into Dol’s personal space, but the good thing about Spin is that she doesn’t understand the concept of talking quietly. “You can always walk another path.”

“What do you want from me?” Dol says, suspicious to her bones. You almost want to cheer.

“From you?” Spin says, a perfect blend of outrage and surprise in her voice. “I want to-”

“I may be enslaved and occasionally insane, but I am not stupid.” You long to look around the door again and see the expression on Spin’s face, but you have to reluctantly admit that it wouldn’t be worth it. “If you’re proposing a joint venture, you want something from me. Make your offer.”

“I can take you to him,” Spin says, and everything goes dead silent. You have to press a hand over your mouth to keep from yelling, ‘WHAT,’ at the top of your lungs, and you suspect Dol’s not far behind. How does she know where Ulixes is being kept? If she knows, why hasn’t she gone already?

“Disciple,” Dol says, hoarse with the effort of not crying. “What about-”

“Her too,” Spin says, flippant as if she hasn’t just dropped a bombshell. “But I suspect that that isn’t what you’d prefer.”

“Why?” Dol asks, enough of a whisper that you only just catch it.

Spin doesn’t answer. After a long time of neither of them talking, you sneak back down to your room, before either of them can catch you at eavesdropping.

--

You’re on tenterhooks after that, to the point that maintaining a facade of unknowingness is all but impossible. You could go for the obvious method of ending the plot and kill Spin, but if there’s a way out of this that keeps your idiotic, glory-chasing kismesis alive, you want to follow it. And you’ve come to realise that she’ll chase Dol down through land and sea, because Dol is the linchpin she’s waiting on. So you cook, and pin Spin against walls, and exchange cool conversation with Dol, and every atom of you vibrates with the effort of being ready for anything.

Spin goes out, one night, and you relax then. Your base security, which you haven’t been able to change since it’d alert the two of them, tracks Dol as a matter of course, and keeps her in unless she has permission to go out. There’s still the chance that Spin might bomb your hive or something equally ridiculous, but you’re pretty sure Dol won’t be escaping on her own.

You cook, and eat with her in silence. She cleans up the lounge area, which Spin decimated. You catch up on your communications, which are half, ‘Snooty Upstart has Cordially Invited you to His Gathering,” and half your temporary replacement whining about how you’ve picked your territory clean. You reply to your replacement first and suggest that he tries actually hunting, then prepare to delete the rest.

Dol comes into the room you use as your office, when you can be bothered, and places down two mugs of hot chocolate before sitting neatly in the chair across from you. Her hands are folded together in her lap, but she doesn’t look nervous, or blank like she used to. Instead, she looks resigned, and that worries you more than the others would have.

“Need me for somefin?” you ask, when she doesn’t say anything.

She meets your eyes, and unbeknown to her, starts rubbing her thumbs together. Given that she’d shown absolutely no compunctions about beating you half to death, you’re worried about whatever it is that she’s worried about dumping on you - probably that she’s decided to start stepping out with Spin, you think, and take a gulp of the chocolate to try to cope with the idea. Her slave bracelet falls down her wrist and she pushes it back up before drawing a breath.

“I’m leaving,” she says.

You stare at her. You hadn’t expected her to actually come out and tell you, but then again, you don’t think she realises what you’d do to keep Ulixes safe.

“You are self-obsessed, entitled and dismissive,” she says, uneasily twisting the bracelet around her wrist now, “but, somehow, you have also been kind. I am not who I was when I came here, and I am glad of that.”

“An’ if I don’t want you to leave?” you ask, somehow keeping your voice light. Self-obsessed? Dismissive?

Oddly enough, this calms her. Her hands settle and she looks at her lap, a small smile on her lips. It’s not mocking, perhaps the first real smile you’ve seen out of her, and all you can think of is how tired she looks. “I am going to find my son’s body and bury it, Dualscar. I assume that afterwards, I’ll be burying myself. You certainly don’t want me coming back.”

“I could stop you from goin’,” you point out. Your stomach is twisting itself in knots. You’re going to have to stop her, and stop Spin. You thought you’d have more time before Spin changed Dol’s mind. You thought Dol would have more sense. You had even hoped, vainly, Spin would have more sense. “Dol, you know how much a’ the Empire’s future is riding on him.”

She looks at you and says nothing. Your fin throbs, despite the fact that it closed up a week ago.

“Everyone,” you try, gamely. “We’re goin’ to need space colonisation in the next couple hundred a’ sweeps, or everyone’s goin’ to have to start gettin’ reel friendly.”

She continues to say nothing. Sweat drips down the back of your neck. Her saying nothing was almost less creepy when she was locked in her own head. Now, her silence is aimed, and it is making you itch.

“What about the other one - your daughter?” you hastily amend. “She’ll get killed for you wantin’ to go out with a bang. You were just sayin’ to me that you didn’t want revenge, that it’d cause more trouble than it’s worth for you an’ yours.”

“You’re right,” Dol says, and you shift in your seat. Dol agreeing with you is a bad sign. “I don’t want revenge. I want to finish this, and then I want to rest.” She wraps her arms around herself, under the gauze of her shawl, and her gaze turns inwards, distant. “Disciple would be supporting me with every step, if she were here. If death is the only reprieve left to Psiionic, now, death it will be.”

Using the only avenue left to you, you reach over and place a hand on her shoulder, hoping that the time you’ve spent coaxing her back to herself has bought you some goodwill. “Let him go, Dol. It’s already fuckin’ over, just let it go,” you say, and then shut up before you can talk your last hope into the dirt.

She follows the line of your arm with her eyes, through to looking you full in the face, and you know you’ve already lost. “And what did he say?” she asks. You flinch at the razor edge to her words. “Just how closely were you involved with Project Ulixes, Orphaner?”

Your words dry up in your mouth. A repeat of your brawl is hardly something you’re hoping to incite, especially with Spin around. With your luck, she’d take it as an opportunity to drown you in blackmail and skip off arm-in-arm with Dol to ruin the Empire.

“I thought so,” Dol says softly, and reaches up to place her hand over yours. You flinch again, expecting broken fingers, the skin of your palm still tender, but all she does is squeeze your hand lightly before letting go. “I don’t know what lies you’ve been told to make you able to think of us as tools,” she says, standing up, “but my son has served as the Empire’s hammer enough.”

You stand, too, and wipe the sweat off your forehead. You’re not going to want your vision impaired if this comes down to another fight, given that you’re starting at a disadvantage. A pity you can’t pull Ahab’s without warning. “I can’t let you go, Dol.”

“I know,” she says, and tucks her shawl closer around her shoulders. “You may want to sit down.”

“What?” you rasp out, before your vision goes funny and your knees buckle under you, tripping you into the desk on your way down. If you hadn’t already done so, you’d want to smack yourself again anyway. “Choc’late.”

The next thing you know, her hand is pressed against your head, two fingers holding one of your eyes open, and you can’t remember the intervening moments. Gravity drags at you, pulling you down into the black, and the last thing you hear is, “You’ll wake up again.”

Despite everything, you think she’s telling the truth.

--

The first thing you do when you wake up is shove yourself up on your knees and make yourself sick up. From how quickly it knocked you out, you’re guessing whatever Dol put in your drink - idiot, you don’t know how the troll that likely wants you dead more than any other managed to get past your perfectly reasonable paranoia - would have all gotten into your system already, but better safe than sorry. That done, you wobble your way to the kitchen and rinse your mouth out before fumbling at your pocket for your palmtop.

It’s only been three hours.

You let your arm drop to your side and attempt to pull your thoughts together. Item One: It’s been a while since that went down, enough that Spin managed to get Dol out of the hive and they’ve long since absconded. Item Two: Your neck is on the line if Project Ulixes is sabotaged. Item Three: They’re going to sabotage the shit out of Project Ulixes. Conclusion: You’re fucked.

Well. You know where Ulixes is in the maze that is Empire R&D, and you have access, which is more than Spin can say. Maybe you’ll be lucky and they won’t have gotten in yet, or they got caught. Either way, you’re still fucked, just maybe not as fucked.

You splash water on your face and stumble on your way. You still have one chance, if you’re fast.

--

Empire Research and Development is more like a suburb than a series of labs, easily accessible by land and water alike, since a significant percentage of the enlisted scienterrorists have fins - not always ones they started out having, either. You splap your way up one of the access ramps and wring yourself out instead of heading through one of the dryers. For all that people here work all hours, you’re not going to give away any signs of your presence, and dripping all over the place is still more innocuous than a giant, whirring fan going off.

You cut through to the building the entrance to Ulixes’ domain is housed in, a nondescript warehouse repurposed with labs that have never, to your knowledge, been used. The whole thing is a front for what takes place underground, and while you were working, there were hundreds of trolls whose only job was ‘occasionally walk into the warehouse, pick something up, and take it to another warehouse.’ All grunts, and all probably dead now so they can’t betray the strangeness of what’s been going on under their noses. And somehow Spin has still managed to follow a trail here.

Not wanting to ruin all your hard work in getting here hopefully unnoticed, you take the stairs instead of the elevator, walking as quietly as you know how. The security on the door to Ulixes’ hangar is the best any of Her Condescension’s stable of techs could come up with, which means that even if Spin does know where Ulixes is, which is a long shot in the first place, she’ll still be outside. You still hope against hope that she and Dol are still wandering around the R&D grounds; their punishment is going to be a lot kinder if they aren’t near the most secret of the Empire’s secrets.

Of course, you have no such luck.

The stairs lead straight into the hallway, the better to be herded should something go wrong. It means you can’t hide on the approach, but neither can Spin and Dol at the end of the hall, down by the doors. Spin’s slouching against the wall, fiddling with something you can’t see, and Dol is facing the door, one hand placed on the metal. It looks vast, surrounding her. Or she looks small, surrounded.

Two on one is shitty odds, especially when one of them can snap you in half without breaking a sweat and the other is Spinneret Mindfang, but you have no intention of getting into a fistfight again. This is duty, culling, and you know how to carry it out. Ahab’s is set on a thin, low-power beam – you don’t want it destroying the facilities, after all – and it materialises in your hands with a weight to it that seems heavier than normal. You bring it to your shoulder regardless. At this distance, you don’t have to sight down the barrel, but you do so anyway as you carefully advance down the hall.

At the first sound of a footfall, Spin looks up. Dol doesn’t.

“You can still walk away, Spin,” you say, stopping far enough away that she can’t lunge at you, close enough that you barely have to raise your voice. You don’t include Dol in the conversation, because it seems pretty obvious that she’s not listening. “Leave, an’ we ain’t gotta do this.”

Spin raises her hands and at first you think you’ve succeeded, but then you see the spots of blue held between her fingers. Your finger is around the trigger so fast that you almost sprain it. You and Spin aren’t well-matched in a fight – you’re a long-range kind of guy, while she’s an all-rounder strong on the up close and personal – and to win, you’re going to have to end things before she can play to her strengths.

You pull the trigger. In the aftermath of the roaring light, you hear dice clattering on the concrete floor.

Mindfang is a shadow in your vision, still screaming and distorted at the light of Ahab’s, and she whips around the scorchmark you left in the wall, something blue in her hands that you can’t make out. Working on instinct, not daring to blink, you wrap your hand in part of your still-damp cape and grab Ahab’s barrel with it, angling the rifle across your body in a quarterstaff block, and shove.

Thanks to your good instincts, her sword bites into Ahab’s instead of into you. Hopefully it’s not deep enough to actually damage anything, but since nothing’s exploded, you take the opportunity to twist the gun while she’s still off balance, yanking the sword out of her hands. Before she can snatch it back, you skip backwards and level Ahab’s at her again, flicking the beam scatter up a bit. Your next shot won’t miss - can’t miss.

“Stop,” Dol says, turning from the door for the first time.

You hesitate a moment, but Mindfang doesn’t, and that’s all it takes. She kicks one of her dice into a re-roll and the sword stuck in Ahab’s glows white before clattering to the ground as two daggers. You whip Ahab’s down, but Mindfang’s already dived for the daggers, and she rolls as she picks them up to sweep your legs out from under you. You go down hard, Ahab’s bouncing out of your hands, and then Mindfang plants a dagger in the meaty part of your arm before you can push yourself away.

“Stop!” Dol yells, and this time Mindfang freezes, her hand still around the hilt of the dagger. You try to not move too much. Luckily, you’ve got enough adrenaline running through you that you didn’t scream embarrassingly at the stab, but you’re starting to feel it now. One day, you’re going to find out why women keep stabbing you, so that it doesn’t fucking happen again.

“We’re kind of in the middle of something here,” Spin says, and gestures with the other dagger.

Dol folds her hands together. “Dualscar, open the door.”

You let your head fall back on the concrete, whacking your horns in the process. “You gotta be fuckin’ kiddin’ me.”

She walks over and crouches down by your head, waving Spin away. It’d almost be worth seeing the indignant look on Spin’s face, if you weren’t in the situation you’re all in. This isn’t going to end well. Right now, it looks like it’s not going to end well for you, although that could be true of any outcome that isn’t convincing them to agree with you and then going out for ice cream and stitches.

“I want to believe in you.” She sweeps your damp hair away from your eyes and you blink up at her, confused. “My son believed that everyone had something about them that was good. Something small, in some cases. Something hidden. But always, the potential.”

“Dol,” you say.

“My other son is behind those doors.” She has to stop and press her lips together for a moment. “What’s left of him is behind those doors. How much did he scream and beg, as you took his life from him inches at a time?”

You look away, weary. This is not going to end well for you, specifically. “He’d been sentenced to treason, Dol. It’s a death sentence, an’ at least this way he’s actually doin’ some good. It’s as right as it can be.”

“You don’t believe that.” She resettles herself, from crouching to kneeling, as if she trusts you to not attack her. You still could, even with your arm stabbed through. “You know my sentence, and you’ve still shown me kindnesses that you never had to.”

“You’re not going to convince him,” Spin says, something like pity in her voice. You resist the urge to roll your eyes. “Psiionic is only a job to him. Not a troll, and certainly not someone deserving of mercy.”

“I’m so sick of this,” Dol says, in a whisper that you think only you can hear. She closes her eyes and bows her head over you. “I’m so sick of having to look over my shoulder, and hurt.”

“You wanna go, I’ll let you,” you say, before you quite feel the words forming. One last, desperate attempt to avert this. “Just not this, Dol.”

“I can’t,” she says in less than a whisper, and wraps her arms around herself. At the blank look in her eyes, you push yourself up on your good elbow, but it’s too late.

“You don’t gotta do anything,” you say, firmly as you can. “Dol?”

“What?” Spin says, from across the hall. When Dol doesn’t answer, she stalks towards the two of you, saying, “Look, I can only do so much about the guard patrols,” and puts her hand on Dol’s shoulder.

Dol howls. It’s the only word for the pained battlecry that comes out of her as she throws herself at Spin. You use the distraction and haul yourself backwards with your good arm, not wanting to stand in case it draws their attention. You’re somewhat better prepared for this, having seen her flip out twice before. Spin never thinks that pushing too hard can snap, and that broken edges are the sharpest.

Dol actually fighting Spin might have worked out well for you – they’re fairly closely matched, you think; you certainly wouldn’t want to bet on the outcome – but of course, you’re not that lucky. Dol swipes enough at Spin that she backs away, then goes straight to the door and presses her back into it. When Spin tries to follow, she snarls and lashes out, making it impossible for anyone to get within arm’s reach. Like she’s guarding it, like she tried to guard her other son.

“But I’m on your side,” Spin says, more affronted than anything. All she gets back is intense focus, and Dol shifting into a better position to lunge if she needs to.

You climb to your feet, nursing your arm. “Give it up, Spin,” you say, cautiously stepping closer. “You ain’t gonna logic someone in battle-shock.”

“I wouldn’t have to if you’d just done what she asked.” Spin flicks her hair over her shoulder in annoyance, and you take the opportunity to edge closer. “I get that you’re all rah-rah-for-the-Empire, but does this one thing really matter in the long run?”

“Are you kiddin’ me?” you ask, temporarily distracted from your mission of getting close enough that you might be able to punch at least one of them in the face, probably Spin. “This is fuckin’ pivotal for the advancement a’ the Empire – it’s space colonisation, Spin!”

“Pivotal,” she says, and looks away. “Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Right,” you say, and then modulate your tone a little as you turn to Dol. “Dol? I know Spin’s a raging bitch, but I need you to come back to me. We’re goin’ to get out a’ here.” She faces you a little, and you edge forward a little more. This close, you can see the sweat beading on her forehead. “Come on,” you say, gentling your tone a little more. This could still work out for you, if you can just convince Dol to leave Spin in the dust. “You know I ain’t keen to get in a fight with you again.”

“She’s not a barkbeast, Dualscar,” Spin says, stepping closer and crowding everyone in. You raise your good arm to bar her path and stop her from crowding too much, since you’ve actually brought people back from this particular edge, and apparently Spin ditches someone the instant they’re not useful to her. “She-”

“Shut the fuck up,” you say to her softly. “You lost.” Raising your voice just a little, you turn your attention back to Dol. “We can leave, Dol. You ain’t gotta do anything, you had enough a’ death, I get that. You just gotta leave with me. We’ll go somewhere safe.”

“I can’t,” she whispers, and then licks her lips. You take it as a good sign, considering that getting words out of her is harder than getting blood from stone. She still doesn’t look at you, though. She does wrap her arms around herself, squeezing her biceps until her knuckles go white. It’s not a very defensible position, so you think that maybe, on some level, she can tell you don’t mean her harm. You’d think she was repaying the favour, except that she’s shaking so hard she probably needs her hands to keep herself together.

“I’m not makin’ you,” you insist, acutely aware that every second that passes makes that more and more likely to be a lie. You can only explain away so much, when you’re stuck at the door to a top-secret project with two civilians - one of whom needs to see the inside of a cell, and the other barely avoiding going back. You stretch out a hand in the hope of speeding the process up a bit, carefully not touching her because you don’t want to get your face clawed off.  “Dol, I need you to talk to me. You know where you are, yeah?”

She looks up with a sharp jerk of her chin, meeting your eyes, and only then do you see the tension in her jaw, the way one of her fangs is digging into her bottom lip painfully. You reach a little closer without thinking and she slaps your hand away with a smack that rings down the corridor. “Watching highbloods march my son to death again,” she hisses. “I- I won’t- I can’t-”

“It’s alright,” you soothe her. “It ain’t gonna happen, you just gotta-” Before she can knock you away again, you quickly reach up with both hands, the stab wound in your arm screaming, and bury them in her hair. She shrieks and grabs at your arms, but it’s the work of a moment to find her hornbeds and apply pressure, with the kind of ease that practice on ferals shortly to be sans lusus gives you. “Shoosh,” you tell her, and watch her eyes go half-lidded, the panic in them dying. “It’ll be-”

Spin slices you down your back.

It takes a moment, and then pain spirals out from the cut, setting off the wound in your shoulder. You try to turn, to confront Spin, but what actually happens is that you fall to your knees and distantly regret your decision that your armour was too heavy to swim long-distance with.

“Finally,” Spin says, and grabs your arm. You try to pull away, but between your shoulder and the fact that you’re leaking blood like you’re at a subjugglator party, you’re so much meat. When she hauls on your arm, dragging you over to the door, you manage to scream. You can feel the two sides of the cut gaping open, and it is deeper than you are entirely happy with. Worse, you think it’s gone through one of your gills.

“Spin,” you manage to gasp out, between breaths that are coming ragged for no good reason. Dol has flattened herself against the door, her eyes wide and mouth parted in shock, and you can’t imagine that you getting shredded in front of her did much good for that. Rescue is unlikely to be forthcoming from that quarter.

She slaps your hand over the palm scanner beside the door, which opens with a near-silent hydraulic whirr. Dol stumbles to her knees beside you, looking out at what you know is one of the most intimidating sights you’ve ever seen.

All you can see is the catwalk, but beyond it is the largest chasm you’ve ever seen, natural underwater formations included. It doesn’t look like much, until you realise that it’s fifty kilometres long, twenty tall, and full of the first and foremost weapon of the Alternian Empire made for deep space.

The Battleship Condescension isn’t functional, yet. Right now, your blood leaking out of you and leaving you too dizzy to save it from Spin, you can sympathise with it.

“Spin,” you croak out before she can cross through, entirely unconcerned by the fact that your lips are going numb.

She stops and rests a hand on your head. “I am sorry, Dualscar.”

“Why?” you manage.

She actually pauses. You wish you could see the expression on her face more clearly, but given that you left a smear of blood as she dragged you, you don’t think that’s going to happen. “For the future, like you.” she says, after a long period you assume she is using to decide on which version of the truth she owes you based on blood lost. “I’m just better at it.”

“Why Dol?” You fist the hand that she’s not holding against the reader in her coat, sending a fresh wave of pain across your back. It’s that that convinces you you’re beaten - you couldn’t hold Ahab’s if you tried, and you’re pretty sure that grabbing Spin’s coat won’t work as a deterrent forever. Dol’s still not doing anything, kneeling as she tries to comprehend the Battleship Condescension, so you’re probably going to die of not being able to stitch up your own back and slowly leaking out blood; you figure you deserve to know Spin’s plans before you cark it.

She bends down and pries your fingers off, one by one. Under the mask of her hair, a barrier isolating the two of you. “Because it was fun,” she says, and wraps her hand around your fingers, squeezing. The pain is nothing, compared to everything else, but it still hurts. “Because I have a long, long life to prepare for and I’ll use anything I have at hand to make it easier. And because I know what I have to do to win, while you’ve always tried to win with what you have.” She presses her lips to your forehead. “It was a fun game, Dualscar. Don’t be a sore loser.”

You let your hand drop. “Fuck off, then, Spin. For all the fuckin’ good it’ll do you.”

She straightens, still holding your hand in place over the reader. It’s going to time out and send an alert in a moment, and you don’t even know if you want it to or not, now. If Spin’s going to get away with her plan, you’d rather it not be discovered until after you’re dead.

“Are you coming?” she asks Dol. When she doesn’t get an answer, she shakes her head and steps over the threshold of the doorway, then finally drops your hand.

“Why

ain’t

you running off?” you ask her, across the table. With all the blood washed off and everything bandaged, you’re more weary than hurting, although your fin still throbs like a bitch. You can’t exactly bandage it, and you couldn’t bring yourself to stitch the tear together after giving the rest of you a run-down, so you’re stuck with keeping half your face incredibly still until it heals. As such, you are currently shoveling as much food as you can hold into your stomach, in the hope that replenishing your resources means you’ll mend faster.

Dol nurses a cup of coffee, her food untouched. She lets your question hang just long enough for it to get awkward, then says, “Where would I go?” and resettles her fingers around her mug.

“You had a cult,” you point out. “I ain’t happy about how all a’ you managed to evade every piece a’ security we got, but it should mean that they got places to hide you, if you went.”

It’s something else, sitting with her like this. Watching her think, instead of watching your words slide off her like she’s glass. If you’d known that taking a beating was all you needed to get Dol to talk to you, you’d have done it weeks ago.

“Spinneret,” she says, the word awkward in her mouth. “You love her.”

You freeze with your fork halfway to your mouth, then nod.

“If we had captured her and determined that she was a spy,” she starts, and her mouth crooks up a little in one corner. “If we executed her, and you knew there was no hope that you would ever love again. Would you care where you went, after that?”

You set down your fork. “I’d want revenge,” you say, slowly, wondering if this is the danger to the Empire that Spin’s set in motion. “I wouldn’t fuckin’ lie down and wait to die.”

“I would,” she says, her voice light and unreadable, and takes a sip of her coffee. “Apparently.”

“Just sayin’,” you mutter, fin aching, and pick up your fork again so that you don’t have to look at her. “Fuckin’ shell, Dol, did you beat me half to death because you wanted to get culled? There are easier ways a’ toppin’ yourself!”

You can tell you’ve made a mistake as soon as the words leave your mouth from the sour expression that she gets, although you wish you knew what that mistake was. She drains the rest of her coffee in a single gulp and sets it down with a click that echoes through the kitchen, before pushing back her chair and standing up.

“Dol!” you snap, and nod back to her chair.

Instead of sitting down again, she simply leans on the chair, her knuckles going white from how tightly her hands clench down on it. “My son,” she says, and you don’t think she’s talking about the one you’ve met, “taught me many things; chief amongst them was kindness at all costs, which I often regret.” She pauses to collect herself and relaxes her hands, inch by fractious inch. “I wish you would cull me. I will happily hit you until you feel you have reason enough, and then perhaps I could finally find some peace. But if you damage my credibility as an example of the Empire’s vicious cruelty to those who oppose it, her Condescension will destroy you in my stead.”

You gape at her.

“My other son was taken,” her lips twist wryly into something that should look like a smile, but doesn’t, “for the good of the Empire. My daughter managed an escape, and the less I know about that, the better. As long as I live, this punishment falls on my shoulders, not theirs, and it is perhaps the last thing I can do for them.”

Your appetite gone, you push your plate away. All the work you’ve done, becoming an asset of the Empire and of Her Imperious Condescension herself, and you almost threw it all away. “I ain’t goin’ to cull you,” you say, your mouth so dry the words barely come out.

Dol sighs and straightens her shoulders, her burden resettled. “You’ll forgive me for not thanking you.”

“Fuck,” you say, and stare unseeing at your hands. “Dol, you ain’t meant to know even as much as you do, on Project Ulixes.”

“Whip me,” she says, her voice a sneer better than any jumped-up blueblood’s.

Your patience snaps and you stand up to go eye-to-eye with her, your chair scraping an ugly sound in the silence. “Maybe I should,” you hiss, for all that you know it wouldn’t do any good - might even make her more sympathetic to Spin and Spin’s digging, the next time Spin comes around. “You got knowledge you weren’t meant to, I can’t have you gettin’ all kinds of initiative-”

She picks up one of your plates - one of your good plates, they were handmade for the Court and the maker died before Dol was even hatched, you’re sure - holds it for a moment, and then throws it to the ground, where it shatters into irrecoverable shards. For a moment - and oh, you are watching - her eyes go wide as if she’s taken in as much disbelief as you at what she did, but then her mouth goes into a tight line and she dusts off her hands in deliberate satisfaction. “I will exercise as much initiative as I have left to me,” she says, and finally meets your eyes. “You’re welcome to try to stop me, of course.”

Your ribs hurt, your fin hurts, your ego hurts, and you have been so thoroughly trounced that your entire line should be ashamed of you. Fuck you for ever thinking that Spin was a danger to you.

--

“Look,” you say, leaning on Dol’s door. You’ve calmed down some, pacing your cabin until you can almost see the rut in the floorboards. Now you’re back to your usual charming self, or close enough to count, and at the very least you can hold a civil fuckin’ conversation. “There ain’t any reason we can’t be-” the word friendly curdles on your tongue, because when it comes down to it, she’s a landdweller and you’re a seadweller and ne’er the twain shall meet, “-courteous, about this.”

“Courteous,” she says, dryly.

You refuse to take the bait, since getting into a sarcasm duel with her is all you need to round off your beating, at the moment. “So maybe I said it badly before,” you say, and shrug. You don’t think you did, but you obviously set her off somehow. “Dol, you’re probably one a’ three people alive that knows anyfin about Project Ulixes now, an’ it needs to stay that way.”

She crosses to the lone porthole of her room, putting her back to you in a flagrant display of disregard. “What do you want, Dualscar?” Without being able to see her face, you’re devoid of all the clues you’ve worked so hard to get, and it feels like you’re about to miss a step. “Courteously, if you must.”

“Stay as my slave,” you say. When she doesn’t respond, you add, “Yeah, I get it, your kids - but I ain’t keen to send you away now, and I got appearances to keep. Stay on an’ act like a coddamn slave when you’re meant to, an’ you’ll have as much freedom as I can give.”

“And?” she asks, her voice barely inflected enough to make it a question.

“And - what?” you demand. “What else can I do for you? You’ve got Orphaner fuckin’ Dualscar twisted around your fuckin’ fingers, so if you want something-”

She turns then, in a whirl of skirts, and you flinch back before catching yourself. On her face is the same grief as when you taunted her with the judgement of her children, but sharpened into a rage, and at that look you realise it’s a wonder you still have intestines. “If I want something?” she says, and stalks across the intervening space between you. You think that perhaps you might have fucked up again. “I want this entire world to understand the disservices it has done itself in destroying the last vestiges of selfless compassion it had.” At your blank, uncomprehending look, she leans further in and says in hard, intent tones, barely loud enough to make it between the two of you, “I want the world to know that they will never have any better, and that they can only blame themselves. I want Condesce to realise that she has the blood of a kinder future on her hands, and I want her to weep, Dualscar. Do you think you can give me that?”

“Shit,” you breathe out, the word leaving your lips without consulting your brain. You can see why the philosophy would have appealed to followers of an off-spectrum mutant; wrong in some way themselves, or simply low enough to not be worth putting extra resources into over the thirty sweeps they might be alive, the idea of someone coming along and being weak-hearted enough to haul them out of their misery would be a compelling fantasy indeed. “Dol, you can’t fuckin’ blame everyone, it’s just reality-”

“Reality is that my son threatened the Alternian Empire enough to cause the largest public backlash since the limeblood executions,” she hisses. “With nothing more than an outstretched hand. With nothing more than kindness. But feel free to explain how unreasonable I’m being, Dualscar, and how there was no motive other than the furtherance of the status quo; I’ve certainly never heard it before.” She stares at you for a second, unbreakable and cold, and then her shoulders sag and she steps away, turning back to the porthole. “What could you possibly offer me now?”

You breathe again, the broken moment hitting you like a sledgehammer. Leaving Dolorosa alive was almost certainly a mistake, but it’s on the orders of the one person in the entire Empire you can’t countermand, cannot even question. Finally, you manage to push out, “You said you didn’t want revenge.”

“I don’t,” she says, still not looking at you. “I want vengeance. I want justice. It doesn’t- it shouldn’t come from me.”

“Where from, then?” you ask, and fold your arms, only to regret it when your own hand jabs you in a bruise or two. “An’ how? You want us all to die, or what?”

“If I wanted you dead, you would be dead,” she says, a simple statement of fact that you can’t disagree with. Sure, she’d then be executed in some strange and exciting way, given your blood and even being an example of the Empire doesn’t grant you a pardon for that murder, but it wouldn’t make you any less dead. “It comes from everyone. From anyone who heard his words and remembers them, and passes them on, and anyone who hears them in ten sweeps or twenty. Anyone who can look at the world and see that it isn’t working.” She taps her nails on the rim of the porthole before facing you again. “Why do you want me to stay?”

“The world’s workin’,” you insist, dodging the question. “Everyone gets fed an’ a roof, an’ if they want more they have to make themshellves useful to someone.”

“It’s strange,” she says, her voice perfectly level, her face absolute calm, “that you think society taking its members, killing them, and strapping their remains into engines is society working. Why do you want me to stay?”

“I already said,” you say, throwing your hands up in despair. Now all you can do is try to throw her off-course, feed her false information to give to Spin. You need to know what Spin wants before you can counter her, and for that you need time. “I need someone lookin’ after everythin’! An’ you’re already here, an’ you don’t seem intent on krillin’ me, an’ watchin’ Spin runnin’ into a brick wall with you is entertainin’.”

One of her eyebrows rises in a perfect arch. “Did you ever contemplate the possibility that I have no desire to be your entertainment?”

You watch her a moment, shake your head, wince when it jars your fin, and leave. Whoever it was that said jades are all fuckin’ insane was right.

--

When Spin comes back, she looks at your fading bruises and the tear in your fin that Dol condescended to stitch up, looks at your hive, which has returned to a state of lived in that suggests nobody is cleaning it fanatically any longer, looks at perfect Dol with not a hair out of place, and starts laughing so hard she actually cries.

You push her off the ship and go inside, leaving her to fish herself out.

When she makes her way back up and through to your room, she’s wrapped in a monstrosity of a green towel from armpit to knee, her hair loosely twisted together and pulled over one shoulder. She uses the interim in which your eyebrows are rising - she has her own towels - to lean over your shoulder and look at the screen of your husktop.

“Hopin’ I’m trollin’ someone you haven’t tried for access to Ulixes yet?” you ask, suddenly bone-sick of the charade, and push her away so she stops dripping on you.

“Are you?” she asks, and shoves you over until she can sit beside you on your seat.

“Yeah, I do all a’ my top-seacret conversin’ from home,” you say, and slide an arm around her waist. If she tries to shove you off the chair as revenge for her dousing, she’ll be coming too. “What are you doin’ back?”

“Irons, fires,” she says, dismissively. “Maybe I missed you.”

“Fuckin’ ha,” you grouse. “Any chance a’ you just droppin’ whatever you’re doin’ with Ulixes, Spin?” When she doesn’t reply, you add, tentatively, “I don’t fancy havin’ to haul you in, an’ this is bigger than your usual knock-over-an’-run jobs. I don’t fin you get how much bigger.”

She leans on her elbows and looks at your husktop, her eyes half-lidded and all of her usual bravado gone. She doesn’t look like Marquise Spinneret Mindfang without it; just a scarred-up, tired blueblood who’s been fighting as long as you know her. “One chance,” she says, and slowly folds until she’s resting her head on her arms, looking up at you. Her hair unwinds and falls over her shoulders, masking her mouth, and your hand itches to smooth it away. She’d probably bite you if you tried. “But between you and me, I don’t think I’m going to fail.”

You should ask why this matters to her so much. You should ask what she wants. You should do that, and offer it to her wrapped up with a bow, and you won’t, because she would never accept it. Not from you, and, you think, not from anyone. Whatever drives her is furious, and single-minded, and has written her path out in stone long before she ever met you.

You give in, then, and reach out to tuck her hair back behind her ear. To your astonishment, she closes her eyes and lets you.

--

Dolorosa is rattling around the kitchen when you crawl out from under Spin’s mass of slime-ridden hair in the evening. You look askance at the food she’s eating when you sit across from her and say, “Tryin’ to poison me?”

“Only if you intend to eat my corpse,” she says, not looking at you as she neatly dissects her meal. “You made it very clear that you cook for yourself, so I didn’t bother.”

“Good,” you say, and sadly wish to yourself that someone would make you a meal once in a while. You need a proper matesprit, not just flings that inevitably end in their moirail deciding that someone quadranted to the Empire can’t possibly work long-term. “Very effishent. Look, Dol, about you leavin’...”

She sighs and sets down her cutlery. “I’m still here, am I not? As long as I am here, my daughter remains free in exile. If I leave, my punishment falls on her head. I will endure more than your inept insults to not let that happen, I assure you.”

“Yeah, an’ your asshoreance is worth a lot, ain’t it,” you say, leaning back in your chair. “Fact is, Dol, I can’t be shore you ain’t gonna cut my throat in my sleep, so you leavin’ might be an idea after all.” Her leaving, and with her, any chance Spin has of worming more information on Ulixes out of you. It looks like Spin’s set on her course of action, and you want it as far from you as possible. “We both know you would, so don’t bother denyin’ it.”

Her hands tremble, just a little. You would have missed it, were you not paying attention. “When I thought Psiionic might have been rescued, perhaps. Now...” She looks down at her hands and balls them into fists, startled at their shaking. “I would rather that we came to some arrangement.”

You lean on one hand and look at her, considering. It seems to fit with what you’ve figured out of her, of her calculated viciousness and her overarching credo of doing best by her children. You have no doubt that she can lie, but she seems to prefer being blunt. And if you can win her loyalty, you’ll have a powerful tool. “Alright,” you say, slowly. “Convince me.”

“Convince you?” she hisses. You nearly roll your eyes - she’s angry, again, real convincing - but then you notice that her hands are shaking despite being in white-knuckle fists, her teeth tightly closed before she spits out, “I was in a cell barely tall enough to stand in, barely wide enough to lie in, and all through the evening at random intervals someone would play my son’s screams, or flood the cell with smoke and let me beat my hands bloody on the walls for hours.” With an effort, she unbends her hands and lays them flat on the table, pressing down as if to try to force them through the wood. “I have endured worse than waiting on some spoiled, clueless highblood to protect those I care for, and I would do it again. Does that convince you?”

You think of the flat, emotionless woman that you first met and reach for her hand. “Dol...”

“Don’t!” she snaps, but freezes before she can draw her hand back. As her eyes dart up to look over your shoulder, your hand brushes hers, and you helplessly note how warm her fingers are before pulling away.

“Am I interrupting?” Mindfang asks, and you can just hear the smug grin.

“Fuck off,” you bite, as Dol folds her hands under her arms and gets a slightly distant look to her eyes. Everything has been fucked up forever, as far as you can tell. “Quit poachin’ my crew, Spin.”

 “Oh, Dualscar,” she says, trailing her fingers along the back of your neck as she walks around you to take a seat. “I might just have to steal this one from you.”

Spin leaves not long after getting fed, and given that she brings disaster on her heels, you take the last downtime you’re likely to have for a while and use it to give Dolorosa the Mindfang Talk. It’s a talk you’ve refined over the sweeps, as Spin’s fucked you over in new and exciting ways, but this is the first time you’ve found yourself worrying about it in a long time.

“Dol,” you say, when she picks up her plate and goes to stand. She sinks back into her chair, and you twine your fingers together as you wonder how to start. “You may have noticed that Spin has an interest in you.”

She nods, and you sigh. You had hoped that you were past the cold shoulder, after getting yourself all cut up defending her.

“I ain’t goin’ to forbid you from doin’ your own thing,” you say, bluntly. If you’ve learned anything  about giving orders, it’s to not give one that isn’t going to be obeyed. You don’t think that it’s going to be an issue with Dolorosa, given her complete lack of interest in almost everything, but old habits die hard. “But if you’re thinkin’ of takin’ Spin up on her offer, you should know that in all the sweeps I’ve known her, she’s only ever used people for her own gain, and she doesn’t like leavin’ anyone to say otherwise.”

She looks at you, then - or looks straight through you, rather. You feel unexpectedly like ice has cracked out from under you and have to force yourself to stay still and meet her gaze. “Dualscar,” she says, the first time she has said your name, and you had almost hoped it wouldn’t have been laced with so much contempt. “If that were the case, why is she associating with you?”

Your jaw drops. You didn’t think that actually happened in real life, but real life has a way of proving you wrong, it seems. Not only has Dolorosa strung together an actual sentence, she has strung together a sentence that is as perfectly vicious as anything Spin’s ever managed to dredge up. You manage to close your mouth once you’re done processing, and if you’re a little cold with what you say next, well, you have reason to be. “She lies,” you snap, and settle back into your chair. “An’ my reasons for stayin’ by her nonetheless are my own. Take it as a friendly fuckin’ warning, Dol.”

She stands, graceful and unreadable, and just like that the conversation is over and she’s gone. You almost wish that she was deriding you again, just so you didn’t have a ghost in your hive.

--

Dolorosa avoids you for the next few nights, and you ignore her in turn by dedicating yourself to watching the swathe Spin cuts through the local persons of importance. You count yourself flattered that she came to you first, since she isn’t one for sentimentality, until you realise that the dance she’s dancing brings her right to the hands of idiots who almost have your level of clearance.

Almost. You know Spin isn’t below tangoing with some scientists to get what she wants, but all the ones who had clearance for Ulixes by necessity are dead, and you’re the only one left. It’s as good an indicator as any that she’ll be coming back sooner rather than later.

She does come back, a couple weeks later; just long enough to let your natural suspicion die down so you’d be glad for her return, in most cases. You’re still glad for her return, but Project Ulixes isn’t your secret to give away, and Spin has a thing for secrets. You lock down your husktop and palmtop and wait to see how long it takes until she tries to contrive some method of manipulating you into giving her the password.

It doesn’t happen.

You know Spin. You know Spin, and you know she loathes you, and you know that that doesn’t preclude her from fucking you over to advance her own cause. You’ve lasted this long by knowing that, and by being damn hard to kill, but now you can’t even see the steps she’s taking. She’s always been a bit eerie when it comes to knowing her path, but this is beyond anything you’ve seen before.

Dolorosa had asked why Spin would associate with you. You’re beginning to wonder that your own self.

The atmosphere in your hive, with Spin chasing after Dolorosa and Dolorosa being painfully, pointedly cold in return and you stuck in the middle, is uncomfortable, to say the least. More than once, you contemplate shoving Spin over the side as a hint that her welcome is well-worn and getting threadbare, but you enjoy not having to hunt for a new kismesis too much to actually do so.

“I’m leaving in the evening,” she says late into one morning, sitting on the edge of your cupe, and you barely manage to stop yourself from showing any obvious signs of relief as she slides in. This doesn’t stop her from adding, “No need to look so distraught,” in a peevish tone.

“Where are you goin’?” you ask, instead of taking the bait.

She waves a hand vaguely and says, “Away,” meaning that she’ll be going out on matters pertaining to breaking the law and is sliding neatly around the subject, as the two of you always do. You could get her a pardon. You could pardon her yourself and bring her under your aegis, instate her at rank and send her out to raze the Empire’s enemies to the ground. She’d be a credit to the Empire, then, not a petty criminal, and she spat in your face the last time you suggested it.

“You fuck up, you’re on your own,” you say, and lift an arm so that she can crawl under it. She manages to jab an elbow into your gills in the process, and you wish you didn’t care for her half as much as you do.

You’re woken up by her absence when the light of day has barely faded, leaving everything strange and desaturated. She never says goodbye when she leaves, but you rarely miss her going. She’s probably barely halfway to shore yet, so you rinse off and climb to the main deck by way of the kitchen, snagging the dregs of coffee that she deigned to leave you on the way.

You figured she’d be rowing herself. You’ve never had a slave to do it before.

You can’t make them out too well, no matter how far you lean over the railing, and no matter how well water carries sound, it ain’t carrying their conversation to you. The best you can do is watch, and watch you do. Spin clasps her hands around Dolorosa’s and says something with her serious and heartfelt face on, and it’s almost satisfying when Dolorosa jerks her hands out of Spin’s grasp. You’re going to have to find some way to kick Spin if she doesn’t stop her flushed games with your slave, but Dolorosa seems to have made the point quite nicely.

--

Three nights later, you find Dolorosa sitting at your husktop, lightly drumming her nails on your keyboard, her lips pursed. The look of concentration on her face transforms her into someone else, and you almost forget to be angry.

“Lookin’ for something?” you ask, pleasant as you can manage, before sitting in the seat across from your desk.

She looks at you, not with guilt or remorse, merely acknowledging your presence. At first, you think that means that this might be a good night, where she might actually say something to you, but then the tapping of her nails stops and silence spreads and she doesn’t blink or look away. A couple sweeps ago, you were sent down into the southern polar region to flush out ferals and their lusii, and the sea was littered with glass-green icebergs that liked to appear out of nowhere. The fact that she’s giving you the same otherworldly crawling-down-your-spine feelings as those silent monoliths is not, you realise, a good sign of what’s to come.

“Yes,” she says, and you nearly jump out of your chair.

“Anythin’ I can help with?” you ask, maintaining the veneer of civility the two of you have got going. You don’t even particularly want to be upset, given that this is a new and exciting development, but having her show some distress at getting caught would be nice.

Wordlessly, she spins your husktop around to face you. She must know that there’s no point in prevaricating since you caught her red-handed, but it still comes as an annoyance to discover that she’s gotten through the first level of the encryption program you had Condesce’s technogeeks come up with.

“You could be whipped for this,” you say, and make no move to touch the husktop.

“Could I?” she asks. Her knuckles tighten on the edge of your desk, but not in surprise. She is in perfect control of herself, and it is the scariest thing you have ever seen. Self-control like that doesn’t last long before snapping.

“Whipped,” you insist. “Or decommissioned, or even fuckin’ culled, if you’d made it any further.” You shut the husktop with a definite click and decide to drag it all out while Dolorosa’s still talking. “What’d Spin tell you?”

She presses her lips together and looks away, and it takes you a long moment to realise that she’s actually upset. “My...” she says, and then presses a hand to her mouth at the hitch that comes through in her words, green rising angrily across her cheeks. She doesn’t want you to see her upset, and that actually hooks into your heart a little, breaking down your anger and leaving awkward embarrassment in its place. “My other son.”

“How many did you fuckin’ have?” you blurt out, and immediately regret it. Shit. She is going to hate you so much when she realises that you were in charge of Project Ulixes, not to mention exactly what Project Ulixes is. You just had to give Spin the perfect fucking opening to mess with you.

“What do you know?” she asks, hoarsely, and you know they’re Spin’s words coming out of her mouth - you don’t know how Spin managed to connect Ulixes and the Dolorosa, seeing as you didn’t know the connection your own self until after you bought her contract - but it’s harder to refuse someone near-crying in loss than it is to refuse Spin’s worming around.

You link your hands in thought and and wonder how much you can lie, and whether Spin will believe what Dolorosa tells her. “This doesn’t leave this room,” you warn her, and are rewarded with the whole intensity of her focus, with her full presence like you have never seen before. “Go to Spin and you will be culled. This is a seacret of the Empire, got it?”

“I’ve never kept a secret before,” she says, arch, her eyes still glossy from potential tears that she can’t blink away, and you laugh despite yourself.

“Right,” you say, and are suddenly at a loss for words. For all that you’re waiting for the announcement of Ulixes, you’ve never given much thought as to how it’ll be announced, what you have to work around. Finally you settle on, “He was powerful.”

Her expression tightens painfully. “Was?”

“He...” You cut yourself off before you can spill any secrets of his retrofitting, and shrug helplessly. You’re pretty sure that telling her that you ripped her son open and turned him into a machine isn’t going to go over well.

“Dualscar, is he alive?” Dol asks, her voice tightly controlled.

“Whale,” you hedge, and then see the light in her eyes, and decide. “No.”

Watching her face crumple is the most painful thing you have ever done, and you can’t stand the fact that she’s going to think that he was thrown away. “He... He’s doin’ a lot a’ good, Dol. Servin’ the Empire.”

You only realise that you have made a mistake when you find yourself on the floor a mere second later, your face burning and your eyes full of green. You’re still not entirely sure what happened in the intervening moments, but when you cough up something trickling down your throat, a tooth goes with it, and your mind puts it all together.

She leapt over the fuckin’ desk and socked you in the jaw.

Finally, sluggishly, you raise an arm to shove her off, but she knees you viciously in the stomach before picking your head up and slamming it back into the hardwood floor, cracking your horns hard enough that your vision whites out. Then she gets her hands around your throat, and it sinks in that she is actually going to kill you.

“Serving the Empire?” she hisses, and digs in her thumbs. You can’t see too well, but you think her sclera might be wholly red, and it triggers a survival reflex you haven’t had to bother with in a long time. It takes more effort than it should to call up your strife deck, and Ahab’s doesn’t come. “Is he dead or alive?” You make another attempt at Ahab’s - to hell with blowing your place up, you are rather more fond of keeping breath in your body - and she slaps you with all the weight of her shoulders and hips behind it, her claws scoring marks across your face. “Dead or alive, Dualscar?”

“Yes,” you gasp out, and laugh in wheezes. Her hands slacken around your throat just a little, just enough, and you take the opportunity to get your arm up against her throat and roll. For a brief moment you’re on top, but then she manages to get some leverage with a leg and flips you back over again, the two of you crashing into your desk. Without hesitating, she scrabbles at the top of your desk and then drives something through your fin, pinning you to the floor.

Your next laugh comes out as a shriek. You think whatever she stabbed you with missed the spines of your fin, at least, but the membrane is sensitive and you’re not too willing to tear it even further if you don’t have to. You’re not going to be able to overcome her, with your teeth knocked loose and your fin fucked up and her controlling the high ground, so if you want to get out of this no less intact than you already are, you’re going to have to play dirty.

You spit out even more blood and let it drool down your chin, the very picture of defeat. Then you lift your eyes to meet hers - and stop. Apart from a thin trickle of blood coming from one nostril, she’s fine. Her hair is barely even mussed. You don’t think her nose is even broken, and it hits you then how very outclassed you are. You’re not a hand-to-hand kind of guy, but Dol obviously is.

“Explain,” she orders, and reaches up to your desk, presumably for something else to stab you with should you not comply. She is all single-minded focus, her vacancy driven away by the hope you represent, and having her this way is dangerous.

You gather all the composure you have and smile a thin, nasty smile through your bloody teeth, preparing to take the riskiest gamble of your life. “Look at you,” you say, with all the spite you can muster; being you, you’ve managed to scare new recruits overboard with it before. “If only your children could see you now.”

Her arm drops and her face goes slack for just a moment, and that moment is all you need. She didn’t bother to restrain your arms, so you yank out the thing keeping you pinned and toss her off you in one movement, then use the momentum to haul yourself upright and stagger the four steps it takes to get out the door. You see her moving in your peripheral vision just as you slam the door, and that done, you sink down in front of it and brace your feet against the opposite wall of the hallway. You’re still bigger and heavier than she is, and you can at least keep a door closed, even if you just got utterly destroyed.

You take a breath and finally look at the thing she stabbed you with. It’s a fuckin’ letter opener. You only get letters on Imperial business and you’re keeping this shit around to get stabbed by. This is what happens when you get sentimental.

“Dol!” you call through the door, and wince when your side twinges. You don’t think you’ve broken a rib, but you’re sure as shit going to feel like it for the next few nights. Carefully, a sleeve at a time, you pull off your shirt. A massive bruise is already darkening where she kneed you, and after contemplating your options, you spit more blood into your shirt before wadding it up and patting at your fin carefully. You’re pretty sure you didn’t bleed this much the last time you got the shit beaten out of you. “Dol!” you try again. “You over your sudden burst a’ fuckin’ crazy?”

Your only answer is silence, and it gives you the creeping feeling that she’s found another letter opener and is preparing to stick it through the door. Once you've assaulted royalty, you might as well go all the way; it's a death sentence in any case.

You sigh and find a clean patch of shirt to wipe the letter opener down with. If you’re going to be sentimental, you may as well do it right. “I wouldn’t call it livin’,” you say, your voice just loud enough to make it through the door. “I was tryin’ to spare you the knowledge, but the Empire decided to research his psionics, and the Empire’s scienterrorists are pretty fuckin’ thorough.”

There’s no response from the other side of the door. This part of the ship was originally meant to be under the waterline, so there’s no way to escape out a window, but you wouldn’t be surprised if Dol has taken the escape back into her own head.

“He ain’t anythin’ but a conduit now,” you say, and bend to stick the letter opener in your boot. “I’m tellin’ you this in case Spin put any ideas of a grand rescue in your head. You wouldn’t be doin’ anythin’ but draggin’ out a corpse, Dol. Let him go.”

There’s a thud on the other side of the door and you nearly jump out of your skin, expecting something at least vaguely fatal. But nothing comes, and she doesn’t even try to force the door open, so you lean back against it stiffly and prod at the gap where your tooth used to be. You’re going to be chewing on the other side until it grows back, from the feel of it. When still nothing comes, you think she’s either tried to block the door on her side or she’s leaning on the door too, scant inches away.

“Dol,” you say, quieter than before. “We’re goin’ to have to have words about this.”

You try to not think about how those words are going to be ‘you assaulted fuckin’ royalty and now you’re goin’ to have to be culled, you utter idiot.’

It gets harder when you hear her sob. You didn’t think you’d have much sympathy for her, given how thoroughly she just beat you half to death, but the sound of it twists up your guts and you find yourself pressing your hand to the door before you’d given any permissions for your body to move. You’ve seen more wrigglers dealing with the death of their lusii than you care to count, and plenty of the reverse, when you and Spin were young and her lusus was alive to need feeding. Despite all your practice at giving the leave-it-be talk, your words are failing you here and now.

How much did she love them, that it still hurts?

“Dol,” you say again, battered and aching. You try to force out some kind of condolences, or some kind of information you can give her on Project Ulixes, which you think she’d appreciate more. Instead, what comes out of your throat, unpracticed and unasked-for but maybe needed nonetheless, is a wobbly, “Shoosh.”

She cries even harder, from what you can make out through the door. You press your forehead to the wood and say, “Shoosh, Dol,” again, the harmonics in your voice finally clicking into place. She’s a mess, and you are not in any way equipped to deal with crying, but if you’re going to get through this, you need her calm.

Spin would be proud of you, if you weren’t standing in her way.

--

“Are you goin’ to go for my throat if I open the door?” you ask some time later, in all caution.

“No,” she says, dull and defeated.

You haul yourself to your feet and carefully crack open the door a little. When no attack comes, you open it fully and hobble around it, mindful of every part of you that hurts. It’s pretty much every part of you.

She sits on the floor with her arms wrapped around her knees, her sclera still rage-remnant red and bloodshot from crying to boot, creating the singular most terrifying visage you have ever laid eyes upon. The blood from her nose is smeared across her face, but her attempt to remove it just made things worse. She’s nursing a wrist, and now that you look, your teeth left some nice dents on her hand.

“Whale, you look horrifyin’,” you inform her, and offer her the hand that aches least. She looks up at you and you almost want to weep in relief. She’s weary and worn, but not gone like she used to be, and when she places her hand in yours and pulls herself up, it’s not on automatic. You didn’t want to cull her as an empty shell. More than that, you didn’t want to have to extract information from an empty shell.

“And you are a sight for sore eyes,” she says, and the Empire be praised, she sounds like a normal troll. Tired, sure. Sarcastic, yeah, but you’re starting to think that might be how Dol is, traumatised or not.

“Go wash up,” you tell her, and clap a hand on her shoulder. She stares at you frostily until you remove it. “We do gotta talk about this,” you add. “If you’re thinkin’ of runnin’ off...”