Chapter Text
The morning was still cool when Orphie rounded the track for what felt like the hundredth lap.
Her breathing was steady, boots hitting the gravel in a familiar rhythm, the weight of the weapon at her side a constant presence she had long since stopped noticing — or rather, had long since started to find comfort in.
"You're slowing down," Magus noted from the gun, her tone leaving no room for argument.
"Good morning to you too, Captain," Orphie muttered between breaths, but picked up the pace regardless.
It was their routine. Quiet, grounding, theirs.
That's why when the radio on Orphie's vest crackled to life mid-stride, it felt like something being dropped into still water.
"Orphie, come in. Report to the research wing immediately."
Orphie slowed to a stop, pressing the receiver. "Now? We're in the middle of—"
"Immediately, Orphie."
She looked beside her at Magus. Magus said nothing, but somehow her silence felt louder than usual.
"...Understood." Orphie answered, already turning toward the building.
Ray Yersin was already waiting for them when they arrived at the research wing, her mechanical arm curled behind her back in its resting position, fingers tapping an anxious rhythm against her shoulder blade. On the table beside her sat a small, unremarkable chip sealed inside a transparent case.
"Good, you're here," Ray said, adjusting her glasses. "Sit down."
Orphie took a seat, placing Magus carefully on the table beside her. Ray's eyes lingered on the weapon for a moment before she cleared her throat.
"We recovered this from a recent field operation." She gestured to the chip. "It took us a while to understand what it does. Frankly, we still don't understand it fully." She paused. "But what we do know... is that it can restore a consciousness back into a physical body."
The room went very quiet.
"...Come again?" Magus' voice was low, almost uncharacteristically so.
Ray looked directly at the weapon on the table.
"We can give you your body back, Captain Magus."
Orphie's breath caught in her throat. She looked at Magus, then back at Ray, then at Magus again.
Neither of them said a word.
Ray let the silence sit for only a moment before she continued, folding her hands over the table.
"Follow me."
She led them through a long corridor Orphie had never paid much attention to, past several sealed doors, until they reached a room at the far end of the wing. Ray pressed her hand against the panel and the door slid open with a soft hiss.
The room was dim, save for a pale blue glow emanating from the far wall.
Orphie stepped inside and stopped dead.
There was a tube. Large, floor to ceiling, filled with a softly bubbling liquid of the deepest blue. And inside it—
"Is that..." Orphie's voice came out barely above a whisper.
It was her. Or — someone that looked exactly like her. The same face, the same build, suspended peacefully in the liquid, small bubbles rising slowly around the body like it was breathing.
"A second clone," Ray confirmed, stepping beside her. "When the original procedure was carried out, a backup was made in case the first body failed. It was never used." She glanced between Orphie and the tube. "It was too delicate and far too costly to simply dispose of. So it was kept here."
"All this time," Orphie murmured.
"All this time," Ray echoed quietly.
Magus hadn't said a word.
The preparation took the better part of an hour.
A team of scientists filtered into the room quietly and efficiently, moving around the tube with practiced precision. They spoke in low voices among themselves, checking readings, adjusting equipment, connecting thin cables to a secondary terminal beside the tube. Nobody rushed. Nobody made unnecessary noise. The weight of what was about to happen seemed to press down on everyone in the room equally.
Ray approached Orphie and Magus one final time before they began.
"I want to be transparent with you," she said, her voice measured. "Our understanding of the chip is still limited. We know it works. We know it can transfer a consciousness into a compatible body." She paused, choosing her next words carefully. "But we cannot sustain it indefinitely. Not yet."
Orphie frowned. "What does that mean?"
Ray looked at the weapon on the table.
"It means that Captain Magus would have her body for forty-eight hours. Two days." She let that land before continuing. "After that, her consciousness would return to the weapon automatically. We cannot stop that from happening. Not with our current understanding of the chip."
The silence that followed was a different kind than before. Heavier.
"Two days," Orphie repeated softly. Something in her voice tried very hard not to sound devastated and didn't quite succeed.
"It's not permanent," Ray said gently. "Not yet. But it is real. And it is possible." She looked at the weapon again. "Captain. The decision is yours entirely. We won't proceed without your word."
The room held its breath.
Magus was quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Orphie found herself gripping the edge of the table without realizing it.
"...Do it," Magus finally said. Simple. Decisive. Like an order she was giving herself.
Ray nodded and turned to her team.
"Begin the procedure."
They had Orphie step back toward the far wall to give the scientists room to work. They attached a series of small electrodes to the outer casing of the weapon, each one connected by a thin wire to the terminal beside the tube. The chip was removed from its case with careful gloved hands and slotted into a port at the base of the terminal with a quiet click.
One of the scientists looked up at Ray. Ray looked at Orphie. Orphie looked at Magus.
"Hey," Orphie said quietly, too low for anyone else to hear. "I'll be right here, okay?"
Magus didn't answer. But somehow, that felt okay.
Ray gave the nod.
The scientist pressed the button.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the terminal flickered. The cables running to the weapon trembled slightly. And then — Orphie noticed it before anything else changed.
The ethereal glow in the weapon's frame dimmed. Flickered once, like a candle caught in a draft. Then went dark entirely, leaving the gun looking like nothing more than what it was — cold metal, empty, silent.
Orphie's breath caught in her throat.
But before she could react, the blue liquid inside the tube began to churn, bubbles rising faster, and then — the body inside twitched. Fingers curled. A sharp inhale disturbed the liquid around the face.
Then the eyes opened.
They were the same color as the ethereal glow Orphie had looked into a thousand times from the barrel of the weapon. Sharp. Burning. Unmistakably hers.
Magus blinked slowly inside the tube, the liquid swirling softly around her as she took her first breath in longer than either of them could properly count. Her fingers spread open. Then closed. Then open again, like she was relearning what hands were for. Her chest rose and fell — slowly at first, then steadier, deeper, like her body was remembering a rhythm it had always known.
The liquid began to drain.
By the time it had lowered enough, two scientists were already positioned at the tube's opening, ready. The seal released with a soft hiss and cool air rushed in. Magus stood inside on unsteady legs, blinking against the light of the room, water dripping from her hair and down her face.
One of the scientists stepped forward and carefully draped a robe over her shoulders.
Magus gripped it. Looked down at her own hands gripping it.
She hadn't spoken yet.
Nobody in the room said anything either. They watched her take one step forward out of the tube, then another, finding her footing on the floor with the careful deliberateness of someone learning to trust the ground beneath them. She felt the cold of the tile through her feet. She felt the weight of the robe on her shoulders. She felt the air moving in and out of her lungs.
She felt everything.
Orphie had crossed the room before she'd even made the conscious decision to move.
"Captain?" Her voice came out softer than she intended, barely above a whisper. She stopped just in front of her, close enough to reach out but not quite doing it yet, giving her space. Her eyes were already dangerously wet. "You there?"
Magus lifted her gaze from her hands and looked at Orphie.
For a long moment she just looked at her. Taking her in. Present in a way she hadn't been able to be in so long.
"I'm..." Her voice came out rough at first, unused, before it settled into something unmistakable — that same firm, low, fierce quality that no weapon casing had ever quite managed to fully contain. She swallowed once. "I'm actually back."
Like she still couldn't believe it. Like saying it out loud was the only way to make it real.
Then, from somewhere behind Orphie, one of the scientists straightened. Then another. Then Ray. Then every single person in that room, in perfect unison, came to attention.
"Welcome back, Captain Magus."
It hit her like a wall.
Something cracked open in her chest that she didn't have a name for — something that had been sealed shut for so long she had forgotten it was there. Her legs gave out beneath her before she could stop them and she went down onto her knees on the cold tile floor, one hand pressed against her mouth, shoulders shaking.
Orphie was on the floor with her in an instant.
She didn't say anything grand. She didn't need to. She just put her arms around her and held on, and pressed her forehead gently against the side of Magus' head, and said very quietly —
"This is real. I've got you. This is real."
And for the first time in a very long time, Magus let herself believe it.
They gave her clothes in a side room off the research wing.
Orphie's uniform — the same one she wore every day. Dark grey jacket, yellow shorts with their yellow accents, dark stockings, the thigh strap. One of the scientists set the folded pile on the bench beside Magus without a word and quietly left, pulling the door shut behind them.
Magus sat on the bench for a moment, just holding the fabric in her hands. Feeling the texture of it. The weight of it. The realness of it.
Then she got dressed.
When she stepped back out into the corridor, Orphie was leaning against the wall waiting for her. She looked up and — genuinely did a double take. Her eyes traveled from Magus' face down to the yellow-soled sneakers and back up again, and the smile that spread across her face was immediate and unstoppable.
"We look—"
"Don't," Magus said flatly.
"—really, really similar," Orphie finished anyway, pressing her lips together to keep from laughing outright.
Magus gave her the look. The one that had made junior soldiers forget how to speak. Orphie, predictably, was immune to it.
Magus turned toward the mirror mounted on the corridor wall.
She hadn't meant to stop in front of it. But once she did, she found she couldn't move.
It was strange — deeply, fundamentally strange — in a way she hadn't anticipated. She had spent so long on the outside looking in, watching Orphie move through the world in a body that had once been hers. She knew every detail of it by now. The way the jacket sat on the shoulders. The way the shorts and stockings framed her legs. The way the twin tails caught the light.
But this was different.
Because the face looking back at her wasn't Orphie's. Not really. The jaw was set differently. The posture was different — straight, rigid, military to the bone, nothing like Orphie's easy, loose-limbed way of carrying herself. And the eyes — those sharp, burning eyes, the same color they had always been even when they glowed ethereal from a weapon's frame — held something in them that no clone had ever put there.
Herself. Just herself.
She couldn't stop looking.
"You know," Orphie said lightly from just behind her shoulder, her own reflection appearing in the mirror beside Magus'. "Looking at us right now... I think we look alike."
Magus studied their reflections side by side for a moment. Same face. Same uniform. Same hair, same eyes, same everything — and yet.
"We don't," she said.
Orphie raised an eyebrow. "We literally have the same face—"
"You look like me," Magus said, turning from the mirror to fix her with a calm, level gaze. "There is a difference."
Orphie opened her mouth. Closed it. Then laughed — that bright, unguarded laugh that Magus had heard a thousand times and never quite gotten used to — and Magus held her gaze with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had won an argument without raising their voice.
Then Magus' stomach growled.
Loud. Insistent. Deeply undignified.
Magus looked down at her own midsection as though it had personally offended her. The sensation was disorienting enough that for a half second she simply didn't register it — and then it crashed into her all at once. Hunger. Real, physical, demanding hunger, the kind that came from a body that had been dormant far too long and was now very loudly making up for lost time.
She hadn't felt that in a very, very long time.
Orphie had both hands pressed firmly over her mouth. Her shoulders were shaking.Tryn to not burst out laughing on the spot.
She simply turned on her heel and started walking toward the dining hall, and after a single beat of dignified silence, Magus followed.
The dining hall was empty.
That alone was unusual enough to make Magus pause at the entrance. The long tables that were normally crowded with soldiers at this hour sat vacant, chairs tucked in neatly, the usual background noise of trays and conversation completely absent. Only one table had been set — a single spot, deliberate and carefully arranged.
And on it sat a plate that made Magus stop breathing for a moment.
A steak. Thick cut, still steaming faintly, seared to a perfect char on the outside. Beside it, a bottle of hot sauce — the deep red kind, the kind with the kind of heat that built slow and then hit all at once. The kind she hadn't been able to get at base. The kind she used to make the trip into the city specifically for, back when there had still been a restaurant worth making the trip for.
She hadn't thought about that place in years.
"Did you—" she started.
"It wasn't me," Orphie said quietly from beside her, looking at the table with the same expression Magus felt on her own face. "They remembered."
Magus said nothing. She pulled out the chair and sat down.
For a moment she just looked at the plate. The smell alone was enough to make her jaw ache — rich and smoky and deeply, viscerally familiar in a way that bypassed thought entirely and went straight to something older. Something that remembered this before she consciously did.
She picked up the knife and fork. Cut a piece. Then reached for the hot sauce and doused it — generously, the way she always had, the way that used to make younger soldiers wince just watching her. She remembered that burn. She had missed that burn.
She brought the fork to her mouth hesitantly and took the first bite.
The flavor hit her so hard her eyes watered as she let out a shaky sigh.
It wasn't just the taste — it was the heat blooming across her tongue, the char and the richness and the slow climbing fire of the hot sauce layering over all of it, and her body recognized every single note of it like a song she hadn't heard in years but still knew every word to. She chewed slowly. Swallowed.
Then she cut another piece, doused it again, and ate that one too.
And then she stopped pretending to be measured about it entirely.
She worked through that steak with the focused efficiency of a soldier who had learned long ago not to waste time at meals, pausing only to add more hot sauce — always more hot sauce — chasing that burn again and again, every bite pulling something loose in her chest that she didn't have a word for. By the time she set her fork down the plate was clean and less than five minutes had passed.
She let out a long, slow breath. Sat back in the chair.
Orphie, who had been sitting across from her with her chin resting in her hand, watching with an expression of pure quiet delight, said nothing. Smart.
Then one of the kitchen staff appeared from the back and set something else on the table in front of Magus.
A mug. Frosted cold on the outside, dark amber liquid visible at the rim.
Magus looked at it for a moment. Something tugged at the back of her memory — long evenings, off days, her squad loud and rowdy around a table, Isolde laughing at something someone said, the particular satisfaction of a cold drink after a long week.
She picked up the mug and drank.
The taste landed exactly where she remembered it. Cold and slightly bitter and perfect, and she tipped the mug back and didn't stop until it was empty, setting it back down on the table with a definitive thunk and exhaling slowly through her nose in pure, bone-deep satisfaction.
Then it hit her.
The cold spread through the center of her skull like a blade and she grimaced sharply, pressing two fingers to her temple, and the sound that came out of her was somewhere between a grunt and a groan.
From across the table, Orphie absolutely lost it.
The laugh that burst out of her was immediate and unrestrained, the kind that bent her forward over the table with her hand pressed to her mouth doing absolutely nothing to contain it, shoulders shaking, eyes crinkling shut.
Magus endured this with as much dignity as the situation allowed, which was not very much.
"Brain freeze," Orphie managed between laughs, like she was explaining it to someone who didn't already know exactly what was happening to them.
"I am aware," Magus said flatly, still pressing her fingers to her temple.
Orphie laughed harder.
Magus waited for the sensation to pass, then straightened in her chair and smoothed the front of her jacket with great composure, as though none of that had happened.
"Not a word of this leaves this room," she said.
Orphie wiped a tear from the corner of her eye.
"Of course, Captain," she said, with a smile that said absolutely otherwise.
The walk from the dining hall to the campsite was short.
Short enough that Magus spent most of it in silence, which Orphie had learned long ago to not try and fill. The evening air of the outpost was cool against her skin — and Magus noticed that too, the way she had been noticing everything since she woke up in that tube. The temperature. The texture of the ground beneath her feet. The distant sound of voices carrying from somewhere ahead.
Familiar voices.
Orphie pushed open the door to the campsite and stepped through first.
The conversation stopped.
Trigger looked up first. Took one look at Orphie, then at the person standing directly behind her in the exact same uniform with the exact same face, and visibly short circuited.
"...Why are there two of you," she said slowly.
"There aren't," Orphie said, stepping to the side.
Trigger stared. Soldier 11 had gone very still beside her, Seed just looked confused, eyes moving carefully between Orphie and Magus, studying. The face was the same — identical, down to the last detail. The uniform was the same. The hair was the same.
But something was different and Soldier 11 was already looking for it.
She found it in the eyes.
Orphie's eyes were green and warm and open, the kind that invited you in without meaning to. But the eyes on the other one — sharp, burning, a color that didn't quite sit right in normal light, like something faintly luminous lived behind them even now — those were not Orphie's eyes. Those eyes had looked at her across mission briefings and training grounds and long debriefs for years. Those eyes had never once looked at anything without measuring it first.
Soldier 11's breath caught.
Magus met their stares with the same level, unhurried expression she had always had. Straight backed. Chin up. The posture of someone who had never once in her life waited for permission to take up space.
And then she spoke.
"At ease."
Two words. That voice — firm and low and carrying the particular weight of someone who had given orders for a living — and it landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
The reaction was instantaneous.
"CAPTAIN?!"
They crossed the room before she had time to brace for it. Seed got there first by virtue of being slightly closer and having absolutely no sense of self restraint, Soldier 11 a half step behind her, and Trigger stumbling as she tried to stand up, and suddenly Magus found herself with both of them wrapped around her with a force that would have knocked someone less grounded clean off their feet.
She stood her ground.
Her arms came up after a beat — not immediately, because she was Magus and nothing she did was immediate — and she held them back. Solid and steady, the way she had always been for them. Her jaw was tight. Her eyes were fixed on a point somewhere above their heads.
She did not say anything for a long moment.
"...You're crushing me," she finally said.
"No we're not," Seed said into her shoulder, muffled.
"...No," she agreed quietly. "You're not."
They stayed like that for a while. Orphie watched from the doorway with her arms folded loosely across her chest and a smile she wasn't even trying to hide.
Eventually they pulled back, and Trigger looked at her face with an expression caught somewhere between elation and the specific kind of fragile that people got when they were trying very hard not to show it.
"How," she said simply.
"Ray" Magus said. "The chip from the field operation."
"For how long?" Soldier 11 asked. Her voice was calm but her eyes weren't.
Magus held her gaze.
"Two days. One of which is already burning."
The room shifted. Something quieter moved through all of them at once — a collective dimming, brief but real. Orphie looked at the floor for just a moment.
Then Trigger straightened up, squared her shoulders, and looked at Magus with an expression that had made a full one eighty into something dangerously determined.
"Okay," Seed said. "Then we're not wasting a single second of the one we have left."
Magus looked at her.
"Whatever you're thinking—"Magus said but quickly got cut off by Trigger.
"When is the last time you played cards?"
"Trigger—"
"When is the last time you arm wrestled someone? When is the last time you ran a full lap without being attached to a weapon? When is the last time you—"
"If you finish that sentence I will demote you," Magus said flatly.
Trigger grinned. It was the grin of someone who knew they had already won.
"With respect, Captain," she said, "you have about thirty hours left and I have a list."
Magus looked at her for a long moment. Then at Soldier 11, who had the decency to look at least slightly apologetic while very clearly also being on Trigger's side. Then at Orphie, who had both hands pressed over her mouth again and was doing absolutely nothing to help.
She exhaled slowly through her nose.
"...One condition," she said.
Trigger's grin widened. "Name it."
"I pick the order."
Trigger's list, as it turned out, was not short.
But Magus had said she picked the order, and she was a woman of her word.
The arm wrestling happened first, at Trigger's insistence and Magus' complete lack of surprise. They squared off across one of the campsite tables, Orphie and Soldier 11 watching from the sides, and Trigger lasted exactly four seconds before her arm hit the table with a definitive thud.
She stared at the ceiling for a moment.
"Again," she said.
"No," said Magus.
She lasted three seconds the second time.
The sprint around the track came next, just as the sun was beginning to dip lower in the sky, painting everything in long gold and orange light. Magus stood at the starting line for a moment before she ran — just stood there, feeling the ground beneath her feet, the air moving against her face — and then she ran. Not for time. Not for training. Just to feel her legs carry her, just to feel her lungs work, just to feel the wind and nothing else.
She lapped Orphie twice. She wasn't even trying.
The stargazing was Soldier 11's quiet suggestion, and nobody argued. They found a clear patch of ground away from the outpost lights and lay on their backs in the grass, the four of them side by side, not talking much. The sky above the outpost was wide and dark and full.
Magus stared up at it for a long time without saying anything.
She had seen skies like this before. But not like this — not with a body beneath her pressing into the earth, not with the smell of grass and night air and the distant warmth of the people beside her. Not like this.
Nobody asked her what she was thinking.
They already knew.
After everyone on the squad calling it a night, the washing block was quiet at this hour.
Magus stepped inside and Orphie pointed her toward the bathroom at the far end before disappearing to give her privacy, pulling the door shut behind her with a soft click.
Magus stood in the middle of the bathroom for a moment.
Then she turned on the shower.
The sound of the water hitting the tile was immediate and loud in the small space, and she stood at the edge of it for a second, just feeling the steam beginning to rise, the warmth of it reaching her face. Then she stepped in.
The heat of the water on her skin made her breath catch.
She stood under it and didn't move for a long moment. It ran down her hair, her shoulders, her arms, tracing every surface of a body she was still learning to believe was hers again. She pressed one hand flat against the tile wall and just stood there, breathing, letting it soak into her.
Then her tail knocked over the shampoo.
She looked down at it. The tail looked back at her, or would have if it had eyes, curling slightly at the end with what she could only describe as a complete lack of remorse.
She picked the shampoo back up.
Washing her hair took longer than she remembered. It had always been long, but between the water weight and the tail periodically getting in the way — knocking against her elbow mid-lather, swinging into the stream and flicking water sideways across the curtain, coiling around her ankle at one point for reasons she could not begin to explain — the whole process was significantly more complicated than it had any right to be.
She stood very still for a moment after the ankle incident.
"...This," she said to no one, "is what she deals with every day."
It recontextualized a great many things. Every time she had silently judged Orphie for taking too long in the shower. Every time she had attributed it to lack of discipline or general inefficiency. Every morning she had waited, weapon propped against the wall outside the washing block, wondering what could possibly be taking so long.
The tail flicked water at the mirror.
"I see," Magus said flatly.
She finished washing her hair through sheer stubbornness, rinsed everything twice, and stood under the water for one final long moment before she turned it off.
The quiet that followed was different from the quiet before. Warmer. She reached for the towel and dried off slowly, working through her hair with more patience than she usually gave anything, and then she caught her own reflection in the fogged mirror above the sink.
She wiped a hand across it.
Looked at herself again — damp hair hanging loose around her face, steam still curling in the air around her, eyes sharp and bright and unmistakably hers.
She didn't linger as long this time.
She already knew who was looking back.
Orphie was already in the tent when Magus returned, sitting cross legged on the futon with her tail curled around herself, looking up when the flap opened.
She took one look at Magus — damp hair, straight backed, expression as composed as ever — and smiled.
"Took a while," she said.
"The tail," Magus said simply.” Mine wasn’t this big… and clunky”
Orphie's smile widened. "Yeah," she said. "It does that."
Magus looked at the sleeping arrangements. The futon on the floor, small but adequate. The cot against the far wall, narrow and military grade and exactly what she was used to.
"I'll take the futon," she said.
"No you won't," Orphie said immediately.
Magus looked at her.
Orphie looked back with the particular brand of immovable cheerfulness that Magus had learned, over a long time, was completely impenetrable.
She sighed through her nose.
"...Fine."
She crossed to the cot and sat down on the edge of it. The mattress was thin and firm beneath her, the kind that left no illusions about comfort. Military grade. Practical. Exactly what it needed to be and nothing more.
It was the best thing she had felt all day.
She lay down on her stomach — always her stomach, it had never been anything else — and pressed her face into the pillow. The blanket was rough against her skin. The tent was dark and quiet around her, the distant sounds of the outpost settling into night filtering in from outside.
Her eyes were already closing.
"Hey, Captain," Orphie said softly from the futon.
"Mm," Magus answered, which was all she had left.
"...Goodnight."
Magus didn't answer. She was already gone — pulled under by the kind of deep, total, dreamless sleep that only a body that had waited years for the chance could produce. Heavy and warm and real.
Outside, the outpost settled into silence around them.
Inside the tent, for the first time in longer than either of them could properly measure, Captain Magus slept.
The morning came quietly.
Magus became aware of it gradually — light pressing against her eyelids, the distant sounds of the outpost waking up, and then, all at once, the soreness.
It hit her like a wave the moment she tried to move. Her shoulders, her arms, her legs — every muscle in her body announcing itself simultaneously with the particular indignance of things that had been woken up after a very long sleep. She lay still for a moment, taking inventory.
It hurt.
She was nostalgic about it anyway.
She remembered this. The specific weight of a body that had worked yesterday and intended to remind you of it today. She had felt it after long missions, after hard training, after days that had taken everything she had and then asked for more. She had always considered it proof of something — that she had shown up, that she had pushed, that she was still here.
She tried to sit up.
Her muscles had a great deal to say about that.
A quiet laugh came from somewhere to her left.
"Good morning," Orphie said, already awake, sitting cross legged on the futon with her tail swaying lazily behind her, looking insufferably bright eyed for this hour.
"Don't," Magus said, getting up anyway through sheer stubbornness, jaw set against the protest of every muscle she owned.
"I didn't say anything," Orphie said innocently.
"You were thinking it."
"I would never."
Magus straightened up fully and fixed her with a look.
"I am still your captain," she said.
"Good morning, Captain," Orphie said, smiling so wide it reached her eyes.
They changed in comfortable silence, the small sounds of the outpost morning filtering in through the tent walls. And while Magus laced up her shoes with her back turned, Orphie quietly slipped her comm out and typed a short message — quick fingers, one eye on Magus — before tucking it away again just as Magus turned around.
"Ready?" Orphie asked.
Magus looked at her for a moment. At that face — her face, technically, and yet so entirely not — bright and warm and looking at her like she was something worth looking at.
One day left.
"Yes," she said. "Let's go… But what are we doing today?"
She stepped out of the tent first, into the cool morning air of the outpost, and didn't look back.
On Orphie's cellphone, a message sat delivered and unread, waiting for the right moment to land.
Orphie M. "Come to the outpost. There's someone I want you to meet."