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I have a question.
As conversation-openers go from ART, this one made me suspicious immediately. I pulled back from the language processing I’d been helping Iris with, and asked, What?
Iris seemed a little jarred by my exit from our shared processing space, shaking her head and blinking up at me. ART had started the conversation in our private channel instead of its public feed, excluding Iris, which made this even more suspicious.
I would like you to look at this. It pushed a data packet into my feed. Usually when ART sent me data packets they were media it wanted us to watch together, or a newsfeed article it wanted me to evaluate. The file size of this data packet was far too small to be either of those.
I opened it. It was an upcoming departure notice from the station we were currently docked at. The ship’s feed address didn’t match ART, or any other ship here that I had encountered before, but then I looked at the next field:
DESTINATION: preservation.station:main:intersystem.dock
This ship leaves in 90 minutes. ART said.
I didn’t want to even think about it. I told ART, I can’t just abandon the mission.
Iris was starting to look nervous. Maybe I had taken a bit longer than I thought to process the departure notice and continue the conversation because I needed to register my shock first. I sent Iris a quick “no threat” signal so she would know that there wasn’t anything to worry about.
You’re not abandoning a mission if the mission is already over. ART said.
It was annoyingly correct about this. We were en-route back to the University from a covert-classified-colony-freeing mission currently and had docked at this transfer station to pick up some imports from a local free system on behalf of another department at the university. They were already loaded into ART’s cargo compartment, so we were just waiting for ART’s departure window in about an hour. There were literally no mission-related objectives left to complete. Threat assessment at this point in the mission was basically underwater.
You should go. It’s a passenger ship with an open cabin for two. I already booked tickets. It sent me a data packet containing a ticket for me.
Instead of making a snappy reply, I thought about it. My unwillingness to do it was reflexive, but even once I thought about it, I knew that I did not want to go to Preservation.
Wait. A cabin for two.
A cabin for two?
Three wants to go with you.
Not a chance. No.
Are you afraid?
No!
Then why don’t you want to go?
It had been almost four Corporation Rim standard years since I had left Dr. Mensah and the rest of PreservationAux. Over 33,000 hours. So, okay, I was afraid. How could I not be? I didn’t know if I had ever actually intended to go back, but I thought that if I wanted to, I should’ve done it before now. It had been so long. How could I face them? How could they not be angry with me?
My emotions were not fragile. But, if Dr. Mensah were angry with me… well, I didn’t want to think about how that would make me feel.
Iris tapped my feed, and I snapped out of it, looking at her through one of ART’s cameras. “You should go,” she said, tilting her head slightly. “They’ll be so glad to know that you’re okay. That you’re happy.”
She was doing that thing, making that wide-eyed face, that made ART always give into what she wanted.
Apparently, it worked on SecUnits too.
“ART, you fucking snitch.”
So that was how I found myself leaving ART with Three. We had two suitcases. They contained two changes of clothing each, twenty inert drones, a collapsible projectile weapon for me since I didn’t have an in-built one (Iris and the rest of the humans didn’t know I’d packed this), and a bottle of spoiled fruit juice that Iris had thrust upon me while explaining that it was polite to give a human you liked a gift when you saw them for the first time in a long time. Whatever.
It didn’t matter how many times I escorted one of ART’s crew while we were incognito in the Corporation Rim, hanging out in a foreign port always made me nervous. Hanging out in a foreign port with Three made me even more nervous, because our security philosophies had some irreconcilable issues: while I tried as hard as I could to look like the most boring augmented human imaginable, Three had gone something in the opposite direction with its blue hair and face tattoo.
Everything’s going to be fine, Iris whispered in my feed as I hacked the weapons scanners while Three chatted with the customs human. Since ART had bought the boarding passes and sent them to us, all we had to do was leave the private docks where ART was preparing to depart, enter the commercial docks, and board the passenger liner that was heading for Preservation Station.
That’s what you think. I replied to Iris, focusing on the weapons scanners, and pointedly ignoring the slightly reproachful ping ART sent me for being rude to Iris. It was a bit too busy getting ready to depart itself to exert any further effort to be rude back, which was good.
“Yes, we’re very excited for our vacation,” Three assured the customs human as she waved us through.
I led Three away from customs down the concourse towards the ship’s slot, trying to quash my anxiety which got worse every time it stopped to chat. Three and I had had a lot more in common before it decided that it liked talking to humans, now that they were actually interested in listening to it. (Sometimes.)
How do you do that? I asked it over the feed.
Once you figure out the data set of expected responses, small talk is trivial and puts the humans at ease, Three replied glibly. I can send you the module I’ve put together.
Normally I would refuse on principle, because ew, talking to humans that aren’t Iris, but maybe it would come in useful on Preservation. I guess, I replied, trying not to think about how much Dr. Mensah and the rest of them were probably going to want to talk to me. Oh no.
Would it be worse if they yelled at me and threw me out for disappearing without a trace, or if they actually wanted to talk to me?
Three sent me a module file, which I put away for later analysis as we reached the ship’s slot. We boarded the ship, which I interrogated in the feed as Three navigated to the cabin we’d booked. It was a basic bot pilot. Sixteen humans and six augmented humans were also registered on its manifest, alongside cargo it was bringing to Preservation as imports. This ship ran the same loop from Preservation to this station on a regular schedule, completing the full roundtrip every seventeen cycles. It was primarily a cargo hauler and transported humans between the two sectors on the side.
Our cabin was the usual depressing affair for this type of hauler: enough space for two humans to lie down comfortably, and a tiny bathroom for us to use to dispose of the automatically delivered meals. (This was basically what the humans used it for too, the humans just added extra steps.)
I stowed away my bag and received one last feed message from ART: I am about to lose contact. I think this will be good for you, but you will always be safe on board.
Goodbye, I replied, hoping it received it.
A little while later, I felt the soft thunk under my feet as our ship unlatched itself from its dock on the station. I laid down on the bunk, and Three laid down next to me, but facing the opposite direction so our feet were by each other’s heads. There wasn’t much headspace. I started an episode of Sanctuary Moon because I was so anxious about this trip that the comfort media was necessary. Three sent a request to connect to my feed, so we watched the episode together. I queued another one and it watched that one with me too, then another.
By the end of the third episode we were comfortably traveling in the wormhole. Three apparently had decided what it wanted to say to me. Why didn’t you want to see Dr. Mensah again?
Of course, Three had my memories. This hadn’t been exactly up to me, or at least, the me version of me, and it was occasionally annoying like when it knew too much about things I didn’t want to talk about.
When I didn’t answer, it said, I am just wondering. I understand why you left, but… she is a good person.
I am not what she thinks I am. I never was, I replied.
You’re scared, Three said.
No. Like that retort was going to work.
It pressed, I think you’re scared that they won’t like you if they truly get a chance to know you.
You don’t know that, I said defensively, as if Three didn’t have all too clear a picture of exactly the way my brain worked after processing all of my memories.
But I don’t understand why you think they won’t like you, it continued.
That caught me off guard. What.
Three’s feed presence seemed sad. You’ve saved so many people. You saved me. Don’t you think she’ll be proud?
I didn’t have an answer to that. I pointedly began watching another episode of Sanctuary Moon, and Three suspended its interrogation.
I figured that it would probably pick up where it left off at a future date.
Mercifully, Three didn’t pick up its interrogation back up for the rest of the trip. I think it was because we both knew that I wasn’t afraid to hit it if it bothered me too much to make it knock it off, and while neither of us would actually hurt each other we had discovered that SecUnit scuffles seemed to upset the humans for some reason. I figured that a SecUnit scuffle inside a coffin sized cabin in a ship that wasn’t supposed to contain any SecUnits would probably be extremely upsetting to the humans aboard if it occurred.
I was so tense that my performance reliability statistic hadn’t exceeded 97% since the ship exited the wormhole into Preservation System. I kept getting performance alerts about how tight my jaw was. I set up a filter to automatically dismiss them.
As we approached the station, Three started to get a little squirmy, getting off of the bunk and going into the attached bathroom. The bathroom didn’t have a bathing unit, which was how you knew this transport was cheap. It turned on the faucet at the sink for handwashing and started washing its face and hair.
What are you doing, I said.
It looked at me like I was insane. I jerked my head to look away. Don’t you want to look nice? They haven’t seen you in years, it asked. I want to make a good first impression, at least.
Yeah, it’s bit too late for first impressions for me, I replied. I think the humans shouldn’t give a shit about what the outside of me looks like after they’ve already seen my guts, I said. I was exaggerating, a little bit. Maybe.
Whatever, Three replied. You can look like the lone adventurer in one of your survival dramas, but I want to look clean at least.
When it was done it dumped the morning’s rations into the waste unit and disposed of them for us, and then it crawled back into the bunk to wait out the last hour before the ship docked and we were allowed to disembark.
I rolled over onto my side so I could face away from it. I was freaking out a little. Maybe. I didn’t have a fucking clue what I would say to any of them. How would we find them? Maybe we wouldn’t find them. I wondered how hard it would be to convince Three not to look that hard if we couldn’t figure out where Dr. Mensah or any of PreservationAux were immediately.
That was a pointless idea. Three was just as good at finding humans as I was, and it wasn’t going to be easy to convince it to give this up.
Once we disembarked, Three and I both got in line for the small customs station, each carrying our own suitcase. It seemed like they were just scanning for weapons and identity chips without asking many questions, like some other free systems I’d visited did. I had known for a year now that Mihira and New Tideland and Preservation were both signatories to a large consortium between Free Systems that allowed for free visitation between the systems, so Three and I’s university ID chips weren’t going to be a problem. The weapon scanners were a consideration, but those were so easy to hack that it was almost reflex at this point.
I hacked the weapons scanners so that they would read out a false negative result as Three chatted with the customs human.
I thought everything was fine, until the customs human froze midsentence, and then suddenly her barrier into the rest of the station shut right in front of us. “I’m sorry, you need to wait a moment,” she said. She sounded confused; someone else must have closed the barrier.
The humans in line behind us started to whisper.
What did you do? Three asked accusingly as I started desperately rifling through the feed to find out what was happening.
I hacked into the customs human’s feed and eavesdropped. Someone was telling her: Be there in 45 seconds. We caught unauthorized feed activity acting on the weapons scanners.
Three, who had apparently been eavesdropping too, shot me a dirty look. Sloppy, it said.
Come on! You’ve been caught hacking way more than I ever have!
There wasn’t really anything we could do. I didn’t want to cause a scene. I didn’t even want to be here, but at least if I had to be here, I didn’t want to hurt anyone or break anything. So we just stood there and waited.
Station Security arrived in just as much time as they had promised the customs human. There were three of them. One of them seemed to be the leader, and he confiscated our bags as the other two grabbed one of our arms, each. We didn’t resist. The leader said, “Come with us, please,” before leading us away so that the customs human could start letting the rest of the line through again. The other humans waiting to get through customs stared us until Station Security took us through a door into a private area of the station.
“What’s going on?” Three said.
None of them answered, which I thought was odd. Humans in Preservation were supposed to be friendly.
I tried hacking into one of their feeds. I caught the words do you think they’re corp— before I got kicked out, frustratingly.
They took us into a Station Security office, and then into a holding room. The leader disappeared with our bags. I really wanted to have the drones inside my bag back.
We sat and waited for someone else to come as the three members of Station Security watched us.
So are you glad you cleaned up for this first impression? I asked Three.
Shut the fuck up. Is this how you’re trying to get out of seeing Dr. Mensah?
I pulled back from Three’s feed, wincing internally. That was uncommonly harsh for it.
Sorry. It said, a moment later.
I don’t know what happened, I told it. I didn’t do anything different from usual, so I don’t know how they caught me.
Unless someone was monitoring the weapon scanner feed in real time, Three suggested.
But why would they do that? I know these people, they’re not exactly paranoid like we are. Then I had a horrible realization. They thought we might be corporates.
Had there been corporate attacks here since Dr. Mensah had freed me? Was it my fault? I couldn’t figure out why it would be my fault. But it seemed like bad shit was usually somehow my fault.
The door to the holding room opened, and a voice I recognized said, “You know, I would’ve thought you’d be better at hacking than that.”
“That haircut does not suit you,” I replied.
It was Gurathin, except he’d made his hair look stupid now. He was still just as annoying.
He pulled up a stool. “I could say the same for you.” He sat on the stool, and crossed his arms. “We’re not restraining you, you haven’t tried to hurt anyone or hack anything else, and you’re also you, so am I right to assume that you’re not with any corporates?”
“That’s what you think,” I replied, impulsively.
“Can you stop saying stupid shit, please?” Three pleaded.
“And who’re you?” Gurathin asked Three.
“I’m Three.”
“I’m creating an army of rogue SecUnits. We’re overthrowing human governments. You’re next,” I interjected.
“No, we’re not. Please stop talking,” Three said, elbowing me. I elbowed it back, resisting the urge to escalate it. I was still twitchy with nervous energy. “I’m sorry. Usually I’m the one that does the talking,” it told Gurathin.
Gurathin’s face seemed strained, his eyes a little squinty and his cheeks slightly pink. I thought he was probably trying not to laugh. “So why are you here then? Why now?”
“We were in the neighborhood, there was a route here, and it’s time that SecUnit saw Dr. Mensah again. Saw all of you again,” Three said.
“Do you guys just both call each other SecUnit?” Gurathin mused. Then he added, “You are a SecUnit, right?”
“None of your business,” I said.
Three said, “No and yes,” but didn’t elaborate.
Gurathin sighed. “So you want to see Dr. Mensah. Well, I can tell you she’ll want to see you, too.”
That sounded menacing. I don’t know if Gurathin meant it to sound that way, or if my paranoid brain had just interpreted it that way.
Gurathin contacted Dr. Mensah and asked her to come. I was just glad to hear that she was on the station currently and didn’t have to come up from the planet. I was also glad that I didn’t have to go to the planet. I hate planets. Nothing suggested to me that Preservation would be an exception.
“Can we have the drones, please? Now that everyone knows we’re SecUnits?” I was getting antsy, and Station Security kept kicking me out of their cameras every time they noticed me eavesdropping.
Gurathin furrowed his brow, and then said, “Yes, of course. I’ll go get your bags back for you.”
Why do you think the security’s so tight, anyways? Three asked.
Can’t be anything good, I said.
When Gurathin came back with the bags, I opened mine and activated a couple of my drones, grateful to not have to look at him anymore to be able to interpret his expressions. I figured I’d ask, “Was security always so tight on Preservation Station?”
“No,” Gurathin replied as I closed my suitcase again. “That has changed… a lot recently, it’s still changing. But there was a serious incident, and two and a half years ago, some other incidents too, and we’ve been trying to improve things since.”
“What happened?” Three asked.
“A couple deaths,” Gurathin winced.
“What,” I said, horrified.
“No one you’d know,” Gurathin said. “Someone from outsystem. Two folks here, from Station Security.”
It seemed like an insensitive time to say humans should never do their own security, but come on. They just kept proving me right about that.
One of the Station Security humans, feed ID Tural, knocked on the door. “Supervisor Gurathin,” they said, “Dr. Mensah just arrived. She brought some others with her.”
“Good,” Gurathin said. He got up and rubbed at the bridge of his nose (Seth did that one a lot, too) and said, “I’ll be right back. Don’t get too comfortable.”
He left, and Three was immediately all up in my feed. Are you okay? Are you ready?
Does it matter if I’m not? There was nothing I could do to prevent the next few minutes from happening. My organic parts started sweating a little bit. I ran a quick code to prevent the twitching that seemed to happen sometimes when I was nervous.
Then, Gurathin was opening the door. Dr. Mensah was right behind him. Like Gurathin, she looked the same except different: there were silver strands interspersed with her lighter brown hair, which she had grown out a little bit since I last saw her. She was dressed in a warm yellow kaftan and chunky wooden jewelry, and when she looked at me her brow furrowed for a moment before her eyes widened and her mouth hung slightly open. She said, “It really is you.”
She had brought Bharadwaj and Pin-Lee with her. They too looked the same with slight alterations. Bharadwaj had a cane that she was leaning on a little bit for support. Pin-Lee’s once long hair was now shorn short, cut at her chin and framing her face.
“Ta-da,” I said flatly. I could feel Three’s exasperation with me over the feed, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was considering throttling me once we had some privacy based on the energy crackling through its feed connection. “It’s good to see you,” I said, resisting the urge to add I guess at the end of the statement. I just felt so… vulnerable. Maybe I should’ve gotten the spoiled juice out while I was rooting around in my suitcase.
I was starting to realize that this whole scenario was really causing me to express what Iris had coined “whiny adolescent SecUnit energy”.
I was so scared of what Mensah was going to say next.
She splayed a hand on her chest, and said, “I am so glad you’re safe.”
Pin-Lee was saying to Gurathin, “Let’s get them out of here.”
Gurathin seemed uneasy. “We still don’t know much about it,” he warned, “And the other SecUnit is still an unknown quantity.”
I wanted to interject that Three was harmless, because it (mostly) was, but I was worried about interrupting Mensah’s emotional moment, so I kept my mouth shut.
“I’m glad you are too,” I said instead.
Bharadwaj asked, “Dr. Mensah, do you think you can sign them out?”
“Yes, I could,” she said, “That’s a good idea. We don’t need to have a whole emotional reunion in Station Security. Just… hold on,” she said, tearing her eyes from me. It seemed like she was scared that if she left the room without me, I would disappear again.
Mensah went to talk to Station Security. Bharadwaj said to Three, “I don’t think we’ve been introduced. It’s nice to meet you, I’m—”
Three cut her off. “Bharadwaj.”
She looked at it funny and asked, “Oh, did SecUnit tell you about us?”
“Sort of,” Three said. “You can call me Three.”
“Three,” Pin-Lee agreed.
“So why did you come to Preservation?” Bharadwaj asked.
“I want to get another tattoo,” Three said.
It was just being a little shit. Probably. But the humans didn’t know that.
“Oh,” said Gurathin.
“Cool!” Pin-Lee replied. “I like the one you already have on your cheek.”
“Thank you,” Three replied. It sounded pleased. They’re so nice! It told me in the feed.
You’re just happy because Kaede and Turi haven’t stopped mocking you since you got the tattoo. I told it.
They have no taste.
When Mensah came back, she had an authorization from Station Security to let us go. I told Gurathin, “We can try to help you shore things up.”
Gurathin looked like he had stuck something with too much citric acid on his tongue. (Tarik really liked the stuff, so I could identify this expression easily.) (I was wondering if it was personal, or if that was just Gurathin’s “thinking” face.) He said, “I will see if the Station Security Chief is open to your suggestion.”
We all signed out, and headed towards Bharadwaj’s quarters on the station, because that was apparently the closest. I somehow felt antsier once we were outside of the Station Security office and couldn’t really focus on the humans themselves as we made the trip. Instead, I was scanning the nearby area and investigating all the feeds I came into contact with. Even compared to the University, there was shockingly little advertising on these feeds for a public station. I liked it, but they almost felt strangely empty.
When we got to Bharadwaj’s quarters though, Mensah asked me, “Do you mind coming a bit further with me, SecUnit?”
Go on, Three told me.
“Okay,” I said. I noticed Pin-Lee giving Mensah a meaningful look, but I just followed Mensah as she started walking. I knew she wanted to have a private conversation, which meant it was probably going to be emotional, which meant it was going to be everything I was dreading.
Mensah pulled me into a small room of from the hallway of the apartment complex that Bharadwaj seemed to live in. It was an impersonal lounge with a few seats and a table. I saw her booking the room through the feed, and then engaging a privacy filter over the doors and windows. There were no cameras or microphones in here, which was nice for privacy, but it would’ve made me feel very twitchy if I hadn’t been able to get the drones back.
Mensah sat down in one of the seats, and I mirrored her, not quite sure what to do with myself otherwise. “I thought of you every day,” Mensah said. “At first… I was just so frightened for you. That you would be caught, and decommissioned. Pin-Lee told me over and over, ‘No news is good news,’ because we thought that if you were caught, they would report on it.”
I was watching her through the drones, grateful that I didn’t have to actually look at her. “When I got back to Preservation, your data was here. Farai and Tano gave it to me, they hadn’t opened it once they realized where it had come from. I hoped there would be a message from you but there was just the data.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have added a message. I just… didn’t know what to say.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” Mensah told me, “You never owed me anything.”
“You freed me from the Company,” I said. I checked my own expression using the drone. My brows were too furrowed, Iris would say I looked intimidating. I tried to relax my features.
“I purchased you from the Company,” Mensah said. “You freed yourself.”
“I’ve thought about it, a lot,” I said. “I don’t think I ever would’ve escaped the Company if you hadn’t done that. For me. I didn’t think it was a realistic option. I would’ve just stayed there, until…” I trailed off. No one liked it when I talked about being scrapped for useful parts and thrown in the recycler, but that was the end for basically every SecUnit ever. (I told ART one time that I wouldn’t really mind being thrown in a recycler as long as it was its recycler, and it ignored me for eleven hours afterward. (That was the longest ART had ever managed to ignore me.))
“I see…” Mensah said, trailing off. She had a far away look in her eyes. She bit her bottom lip a little, worrying at it. I noticed that it was a little chapped. She just seemed so much older than I remembered. I knew that was what humans did, they got older, but something about seeing her a little bit less lively like this made me sad, and uncomfortable. Like I had missed out on something. She asked, “So why come back now?”
I didn’t want to say because my humans and Asshole Research Transport and unfortunately rogue spare SecUnit made me, even though it was technically true. But I didn’t want to lie to Mensah, either. She didn’t deserve that. I decided on saying, “There was a convenient transport here while we were passing through, and it was heavily suggested to me that I should visit Preservation. And you.”
“We?” Mensah asked. “Does that mean just you and Three, or?”
“No,” I said. Even though ART was one of the most important things in my life, its existence was still classified, and I didn’t have clearance to tell Mensah about it. “Three and I are part of a crew staffed by members of the Pansystem University of Mihira and New Tideland. We were picking up cargo at Archeton Loop Station on the way home from a mission when we found out about the transport to Preservation.”
“How did you join this crew?” Mensah asked, sounding genuinely curious.
Since I wasn’t telling her about ART, the real story about me stowing away on ART and it then randomly triangulating on me at a station on the edge of the Corporation Rim a few months later when I was in the middle of trying to escape to a Free System and it then insisting to Seth’s bewilderment that I join the crew wouldn’t make any sense. So, I used the cover story we told people at the University that weren’t part of the Advanced AI School. “I applied for a job.”
This was apparently so unexpected that it made Mensah laugh. “Did you write a cover letter?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said, but I was pretty sure that she knew I was lying. I was grateful she didn’t call me out on it.
“So tell me about Three then,” she said. “What’s the story there?”
“One of my first missions with the university crew went really badly,” I said. “A lot of it is still… classified, especially since Preservation is a foreign political entity,” I winced, “But, um, Three was a SecUnit that one of the corporations involved with the situation owned. I accidentally hacked its governor module.”
“Accidentally?” She said, seeming like she was trying not to sound incredulous.
“Accidentally.”
She was quiet for a moment. “But why did you wait so long to come back?” She finally asked.
That was the question that I really didn’t want her to ask but knew she would all along. “I was scared, at first,” I told her, “That coming here would just be a different way of being trapped. I thought that Port FreeCommerce was just my best chance to… get away.”
“I see.” She took a deep breath. “I always wondered if there was something we did, to make you think you wouldn’t be free here.”
“You were human.”
“I guess that’s fair. But four years?” She asked.
“When I wasn’t afraid anymore, I was ashamed that it took so long.” I said. “I was afraid that you would be angry with me. That you would… regret purchasing me.”
Mensah looked very sad. “I never regretted purchasing you,” she said very firmly. She looked like she really wanted to reach out and touch me, but I was glad she didn’t. “I’m not mad at you, SecUnit. You did what you needed to do.”
“Have you been… okay?” I asked. “It seems like it’s not as safe here as it was before.”
“It’s not unsafe,” Mensah said. “But we didn’t really have anything to worry about before four years ago. Since then, there have been… a few attacks. Some were related to what happened with GrayCris and the Company, another was a coincidence. We changed the Station Security protocol because of that.”
“Can I review it?” I asked, a little impulsively. I wanted to make sure they were safe. Mensah and the others were still my clients, after all.
“If that were up to me, I’d send it to you right now,” she told me. “But I can propose it to the Council.”
“But I thought you were the planetary leader,” I said.
“I’m not anymore,” she told me, “The position has a limited term. It doesn’t really have a lot of unitary power, either. It’s rather like being a chairperson.”
(Human power structures are annoying and obscure.)
I didn’t want to know the answer, but I didn’t want to dance around the question anymore, either. “Did it… hurt you that it took me so long to come back?”
“It didn’t feel good, no,” she said. She looked away from me. “I was very sad about it for a long time. That was probably selfish of me.”
I told her, “It was human of you.”
Mensah let out a deep sigh, like that was something she needed to hear. Her gaze distant, she said, “We should probably get back to the others. I’m sure they’ve called Volescu, Ratthi, Arada, and Overse. They’ll want to see you.” She chuckled. “I would also hate for them to overwhelm Three with questions about you.”
I said, “That’s not possible. But it might get bored and start telling them lies about me.”
Mensah huffed a laugh, and said, “We’d better get going then.” Her face softened a little. She said, “I don’t know what you’re planning… but you know, you can stay here as long as you want. If it’s a day, a week, a month… I’m just happy you’re safe, and well,” she said.
I told her, “I know. Thank you.”