“This is a terrible plan. I hate this. Why am I doing this? Why did I agree to this?” 

“Correction. This was your plan.” 3th3l stares blankly at the blurry shape of Julien Genet, its best friend, scrabbling along beside it. The shape ignores it. 

“How’re we going to get there? It’s the moon! This is heresy. This is a bad idea. It’s not too late to turn back.” Julien moves to turn and 3th3l drops its cane to grab him.

“It is three days. The city is Two-point-oh-five-seven-five miles ahead. You are anxious.” Julien jerks out of its grip and it grabs its cane from the ground. He turns back around and snaps at it.

“Of course I am! I’m packless!”

“You are travelling. You are vinet.” It nods to his earring, second from the bottom on his tattered right ear. It looks like it’s just a glimmer of yellow to 3th3l.

“I’m functionally packless.”

“I exist. Calm down. You will meet people.”

“You’re here, yeah, but- It’s just… you’re not a group. A pack is at least 4. How am I supposed to follow the moons from Tria?”

“I will track them. I can assist in ceremony. Please continue moving towards our goal.” 3th3l prods him gently with its cane, and he slinks forwards, sulking. Ethel starts its jerking march again. 

“I’m going to be the only nomadic Terlun.”

“I will be the only me.” He bristles, turning into a spikey, blurry shape in front of it.

“Ethel, if you do not shut your moons-forsaken mouth for the next twenty minutes, I will tear the rest of the skin off of your face and let your skeleton rust for the next two decades,” he growls. “I feel absolutely awful, we have absolutely no plan to get to Tria, and I am leaving my entire life behind. I am allowed to be anxious, are we clear?”

3 minutes and 47 seconds pass before his fur flattens and his tail smooths. The rest of their walk is in silence. The city seeps into view, houses along the road growing closer and closer together, and 3th3l’s world explodes. Everything for three miles ahead of them sharpens, and 3th3l feels its world snap into place again.

“The city has cameras. You did not say the city had cameras.”

“It does?” He cocks his head to the side, earrings jangling to accentuate the motion. He is still a blurry shape, but he won’t be for much longer.

“Genet, I can see. There is a Marea woman hollowing a clam three hundred feet to the east. There is a store labeled ‘Extraterrestrial Botanicals” two-point-oh-three-two miles to the north. I can see.”

“Oh! Yay! Wait, does that mean you can see me?”

“Do you see any cameras here?” 

“Oh. Uh… no?”

“Soon.”

They walk another half a mile before the city proper shoots up around them. There’s clearly heavy Arbal influence in the architecture; skyscrapers and densely packed public walkways line the skies, layer after layer of city built on top of one another. It’s organic in a way cities should never be, undesigned and living. It’s the modern architecture of the interstellar age, and the old-town, built into the slopes of the cliff like barnacles on a neglected boat, stands out like a sore thumb in the city that shot up around it.

3th3l can see their destination, a spiralling, twisting mass that cut through the heart of downtown. It shot up into the sky on any camera within four miles, a monument to modern technology. It was lightyears behind what 3th3l remembers from its home, but it was the Large Hadron Collider of interplanetary travel on Neve.

It watches their approach, two brown shapes, standing out of the colorful crowd. They were still too far from the city center to have many traders or tourists, so most were Marea, some were Arbal, and all were colorful in skin and hair in a way they could never be. Julien Genet wore more color than the average peacock and he appeared washed out against the crowd.

“Turn to 7 o’clock and look up until you find the camera. I can see you now.”

Julien Genet is small for a human, but above-average for a Terlun, standing 5 feet, 3 inches tall. His long, dark tail wagged back and forth, wildly smacking passersby as he smiled a puppydog grin at the camera from behind his teenaged facial hair. The corners of his mouth pull unnaturally wide, his glasgow smile pulling at his cheeks. His ears are large and bat-like, with earrings covering almost every inch of his left ear. He looks exactly as it expected him to, sunnily disposed and brightly colored to match.

3th3l, in contrast, is no more put together than the average corpse. Missing one of its three eyes, the skin from its mouth to its ear on the left side, and the skin covering its right eye socket, it objectively fails any undercover missions it could possibly need to undertake. It can only hope that there’s someone, somewhere, who is willing to help fix it.

“So, how do I look?” Julien does a spin for the camera, hitting more passersby with his tail as he does so. He gets a few glares, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

“As I presume you always have.”

“Rude! If I had known you’d see me for the first time, I’d have tried a little harder. Taken my hair down, even.” 3th3l releases a crackling burst of radio static at the thought- his hair was never down. His jaw-length dreadlocks were always tied back in a starburst ponytail at the back of his head.

“A stunning display of intimacy.”

“Exactly!” He wags his tail, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet. 

“Move it, mutt!” An older Arbal woman with feathers for hair snaps at Julien as she passes. “Quit your fuckin’ gawking.”

He snaps his head to the floor, the cameras start looping, and 3th3l raises its arm to face the woman. It takes less than a millisecond for the railgun to fully deploy, and less than five for it to be aimed directly at the woman.

“Apologize. Now.” 

Someone in the crowd screams, people scattering in every direction. The woman 3th3l has pointed the gun at is cowering, frozen to the spot, staring down the barrel of a point-blank railgun. She stammers out an apology to her feet. Insufficient. 3th3l prods her in the side with its railgun. 

“Not to me. To him.” It gestures to Julien, who is standing behind it. The acknowledgement breaks him from his stupor, his head snapping up. 

“Oh no, ma’am, that’s not necessary. I’m sure you were just having a long day, please ignore my friend. It’s overprotective, is all. Please just go on with your day.” Julien’s voice is smooth and polite. The woman sprints off at his dismissal, and as he turns to 3th3l, his voice is a cold, quiet snarl, an unfamiliar tone. “3th3l. Stand down. Now.” 

It snaps the railgun back into its arm. 1.9 miles away, police sirens begin to blare. Julien’s ears snap upwards, swiveling wildly. He grabs 3th3l by the shirt collar and starts running, basically dragging it along behind.

“We will talk about that later! Run!” He’s still snarling at it, but it’s more out of lack of time to react than anything else. Ethel loops the cameras along their path, destroying footage wherever possible, stumbling after him. Julien peels into an alleyway on an emptier street and skids to a stop.

“What’s the fastest route to the spaceport?”

 3th3l pulls up a map of the city from cameras and computers, spitting out a series of directions. 

“Okay. So, here’s the plan.”

—

Acting natural was not an easy thing for the two of them to do. Julien knew this when he proposed the plan, and he knew that Ethel knew this when it agreed to the plan. Why it let him, the Terlun-who-is-not-a-military-strategy-robot, come up with the plan, he has no idea, but he’s willing to bet it has something to do with the railgun-sized elephant in the room.

Nevertheless, they were doing their best to act natural, walking calmly to the spaceport. He’d changed his clothing to be as dull as possible, natural greys and blues rather than bright embroidery. Ethel had retracted its third eye and pulled its wiry nest of hair to lay across more of its face. 

He is steadfastly ignoring its every attempt to engage him in conversation, in that he hasn’t responded to a single whirr, static, or chirp on their walk to the space port. The plan is going fairly smoothly- they haven’t been stopped once, and they no longer perfectly match the descriptions most likely given by the eyewitnesses.

Unfortunately, his best plan for getting onto the ship still required Ethel to keep cool, and, most importantly, not threaten anything that got in their way.

This plan, of course, did not survive contact with the ticket booth.

Julien and Ethel, being from a nomadic Terlun pack, have no disposable income to spend on things like space travel or college. Meaning, they were going to just have Ethel add them to the passenger manifest of the soonest transport off-planet. That part went well, but the security measures did not. Nomadic Terlun are rare, Ethel is rarer, and they were getting stares the entire time. Most notably, Ethel nodded to a pair of Marean cops, with carved faceplates and a military neatness to their uniforms. 

The cops watch their every movement as they approach the shuttle. They get nearly all the way there before the cops approach.

“Play nice,” he hisses, slinging his bag off his shoulder, already looking for their IDs. 

“Names and Identification Forms?” The smaller cop speaks with a high-pitched voice. It almost hurts his ears to listen to.

“Of course! My name is Doctor Julien Genet, Fifth Trian of the Eighth pack, and my companion is-” Ethel interrupts before he can introduce it. He produces their actual legal identification forms, on which Ethel is listed as Ethel Greyshadow.

“3th3l GRS. What can we help you with today, officers?”

“Apologies, but if you could follow us, we’d like to have a word with you in private.” The officers are stiff, the smaller cop doing all the talking.

“Of cou-”

“You may speak to us here.” Ethel stares through its singular, non-functional eye at the cops. Julien groans and grabs its arm, directly over the plating that covers its railgun. It statics at him.

“I don’t believe we can, 3th3l. Please, follow us to a private room,” Julien tightens his grip on Ethel’s arm, “I’m certain it will be nothing, but we do need to speak to you both.”

“Separately,” The other cop adds, with a rattly voice.

“I don’t think we can do that, officers.” Ethel moves before Julien can react, ripping its arm out of his grip. There’s a short whirr and a shockwave that knocks him off his feet. When he can think again, the cop is a red smear across the opposite wall. 

Julien’s ears are ringing so loudly he can’t hear the screaming from the rest of the room, leaving him frozen in place. 

Ethel grabs him and throws him towards the open hatch of the ship. He stumbles inside as Ethel shoots the still-living cop, spraying them both with his blood.

The door slams shut behind them. Julien can feel the ship lurching to a forced start, fully under Ethel’s command. He slams himself down into a seat, wiping blood from his eyes. Ethel sinks down next to him; he snaps at it, ignoring the horrified stares of the other passengers. He’ll freak out about this later.

“You have to be the worst strategy robot in the galaxy.”

—

Julien had been ignoring 3th3l the entire trip. It had herded the rest of the passengers into the other compartment of the ship and is pushing the ship as fast as it can, but Julien stares out the window, pretending it doesn’t exist. Every attempt at conversation had been rebuked.

His ears are pinned back, tail thrashing, clearly distressed. 

“We will be landing soon. Not in a main port. On the outskirts of the city. We will have a couple of hours to leave the moon before we get caught.”

“You will have a couple of hours. I’m staying, and I never want to see you again.” He doesn’t look at it, eyes fixed on the moon.

“You will have a couple of hours before the cops find you. I am not leaving you.” Julien spins to face them, snarling.

“I don’t want you to! What don’t you get? You ruined my life!”

“I was trying to save you.”

“I would have been fine, and so would you! But now you have to go on the moons-damned run and I have to go explain to the cops that I don’t know where you are!”

“You would not have been fine.”

“Why? Why, Ethel? Because I’m too young, too stupid? Because I’m just a nomad? Because I used to try to kill myself every time I fucked up? I’m not fifteen anymore.” His ears are pinned back against his head, his tail puffing up behind him.

“You would not have been fine. I saved your life,” It says, words out into the air before it could stop them.

He barks a laugh at that.

“You saved my life? I’ve been trying to die since I was seven! If I could die, I would have found a way by now!” His words are nearly incomprehensible with how much he’s growling.

“You cannot get into the college with any sort of disciplinary infraction. I was saving you,” it lies, to both itself and to Julien.

“Y’know what? Fuck you,” Julien snaps, and turns to face the window again. 3th3l grabs at its hair, trying not to grab him. It screams, full of static, and raises its voice.

“I was trying to save you! I did not want you to get hurt!” 

Julien spins back around. “And you didn’t think that it would hurt me to watch two people die when I could have saved them? I have been stabbed, shot, ripped to shreds, hit by a train. The only thing I have ever fucking cared about is watching other people get hurt. I thought you fucking knew me.”

“I cannot watch you do that.”

“Do what? My job?”

“You hurt yourself! Over and over and over again! Again and again and again I watch you drag yourself to the ends of the earth for other people, killing yourself to keep them alive.” 

Julien stares at 3th3l for 1.2 seconds.

“Ethel, you killed people.”

“I am aware.”

“This isn’t about my self destruction. This isn’t every other argument we’ve ever had. You killed two people over nothing!”

“I could not have talked my way out.”

“I could have talked your way out for you!”

“No.”

Julien growls, grabbing at his hair. “Stop trying to justify murder! Fuck off!”

3th3l fucks off to the other compartment, full of the people it accidentally kidnapped. 

They immediately stop whispering among themselves, staring, terrified at 3th3l. There’s three Marea, two Arbal, and one Cirellan.

“We will be landing in approximately one hour, twelve minutes and 35 seconds. You will all be free to go,” 3th3l says, collapsing into a seat in the corner. They go back to whispering to each other, but 3th3l doesn’t care enough to eavesdrop.

—

The shuttle isn’t really designed to enter the moon’s atmosphere. It’s meant to dock at a space station and have drop shuttles ferry people down at set times. It can land, but that’s intended more as an emergency measure than routine behavior, but Julien supposes this could be classed as an emergency. Exceptional circumstances don’t make Ethel any better of a pilot though.

Fire streams past the windows of the shuttle as it nose-dives into the atmosphere, descending like a bird of prey if birds of prey could break the sound barrier with their dives. He’s strapped in, as the instructions state, and staring out the window to watch the lights of the city growing to meet them, gradually becoming more and more visible. They congeal into houses, apartments, and street lights, whitewater rapids giving way to the rocks below.

He doesn’t fear a crash as the ground looms below him, and when they tumble to a stop, the world hasn’t ended.
Julien unbuckles his seatbelt and makes his way into the other compartment. 

“Hello. I’m really very sorry about all of this, it was never supposed to happen this way,” he says to the room at large. He doesn’t make eye contact with anyone in the room, avoiding Ethel’s stare from the corner. “If any of you are hurt, please let me know. I’m a Healer, I swear on the moons that I will not hurt you. Ethel will be leaving.”

Ethel doesn’t take the hint immediately, and Julien looks at it, gaze and voice full of ice as he says, “Run, 3th3l. Cops will be here any minute.”

When Ethel stands to cross the room, everyone flinches backwards. It seems unaware, crossing over to them to open the airlock. It looks back at him, and he closes his eyes before the doors hiss shut behind it.

They whisper among themselves, before one comes up, shakily extending a twisted and bruised arm. They’re Cirellan, tall and broad, covered in long, dark fur. Their arm looks broken in at least one place, likely due to not securing themself quickly enough.

“Alright, thank you for coming to me. Can I touch your arm?” They nod. Their fur is far too soft to be a full adult, he would guess late adolescent at the oldest. “My name is Julien, what’s yours?”

“Xell.” 

“Xell? That’s pretty. Where are you from?” He smiles at them, trying to keep his canines within his mouth. “This will hurt for  just a second, but then it’ll feel better, I promise.”

  “I’m from Yenchir, it’s-” Their voice is cut off in a yelp as Julien twists their arm back into place. His arm burns as he takes control of their artificial immune system. He floods their bloodstream with endorphins and sets their nanobots to work knitting the bone back into place. Sirens scream in the distance.

“Oh wow, that’s really far! I’m from the area north of Vednalia, it doesn’t have a common name,” he simplifies, “What brings you to Tria? I’m supposed to be here for school.”

“I- have family here. My dad moved up here for work.” 

The pain in Julien’s arm fades, so he lets go of Xell’s, figuring it’s just about healed.

“You should be all good now, is everything back to feeling right?”

“Ye-yeah, thank you.” They scamper back to the group on the other side of the cabin.

“Does anyone else have any injuries?”

One by one, everyone in the ship comes forward, with a couple of minor scrapes and bruises, one with a dislocated shoulder, one with a couple old cracks in their plating that they wanted help with. The sirens abruptly cut off, and Julien smiles at the group.

“I’m going to cross the room now, I promise I won’t try anything. I’m going to open the airlock, and talk to the officers out there for a moment, and then you will all get to go where you need to be.” 

The airlock door slides shut behind him, and he raises his hands above his head before the door slides open on the outside. The ship is surrounded, officers in riot gear hiding behind shields twice his height. It is dead silent, and he starts to open his mouth, but shouts begin to ring out.

“That’s him!”

“Get on the ground, now!”

“Don’t take another step forward, or you will be shot!”

“Hands up!”

“Hands behind your back!”

“Go on! Down on the ground!”

“Away from the ship!”

He kneels, hands above his head, and the shouts quiet down long enough for one person to rush forward. Cold metal digs into his wrists as his arms are forced behind his back, shoulder dislocated. He’s yanked back to his feet and escorted down the stairs. His head hits the roof of the car as he’s shoved inside, and the officer escorting him locks the door, climbing into the front seat. 

—

The car with Julien inside leaves first, speeding away down the gridded streets towards the center of the city. Cameras follow it, and the GPS inside the car pings to 3th3l every few seconds, alerting it as often as it can without arousing suspicion from the monitors. He’s being taken to the city center, the police bureau buried underneath the skyscrapers. 

The lunar colony had given up on secrecy centuries ago, once they realized that living underground, not even a planet away, would do much to keep them from being discovered. It is the nature of sentient species to reach for the stars, and former human colonies manage it faster than most, especially with the tantalizing prospect of aliens.

Everywhere was surveilled beyond any level of reasonability. 3th3l is paranoid, but a society developed by a knowledge cult had it beat. 3th3l could see itself at every angle, from every camera. The cameras were looping, of course, but it had to keep moving, or people would notice that their views weren’t changing. It stayed on each camera for barely a second, wiping their memory and moving on. It stepped into a store, grabbing a box of masks and paying with made-up credits, tricking the register into thinking it was real. It retracts its eye, leaving its body completely blind.

It doesn’t matter, the city is so heavily surveilled that it couldn’t bump into anything if it tried.

Julien is dragged into the police station and photographed, before he is stripped of his clothing and belongings. 3th3l watches the officer bag his items individually, like they were evidence, and shove them into a closet. They’re completely silent as they strip him, and he is quiet as well, until they touch his knee braces.

“Sorry officers, I can’t walk without those.”

“We’ll need to see some documentation of a disability in order to accommodate for it. Take them off, or we will take them off of you.”

“Please-” One of the officers grabs his shoulders, and the other begins to unbuckle his braces.

When they’re removed, he collapses to the ground, knees giving way beneath him.

“I told you, I can’t walk without them. Please- I-” he’s cut off as he bites back a scream as they place him back on his feet. “My knees and ankles dislocate with any pressure placed on them. I cannot walk without the braces. Please.” His ankle is turned almost backwards.

“You don’t need to walk until you’re released, sir. Please remove your earrings.”

“I- No. No, absolutely not. That is my identification, my name, and my status. These indicate my accomplishments in life. They are harmless.”

“You are not allowed any jewelry within the interrogation room, you are under investigation for second degree murder.”

He starts begging, switching from planetary pidgin to the octal dialect, and 3th3l cuts that camera. It hops on a train, faking the ID chip of some person it had passed on the street that sort of looked like it. It was bee-lining for the center of the city, no longer caring about being suspicious. Thousand-years-evolved humans are still humans, eyewitness testimony still isn’t reliable.

It could see Julien, trapped underground, chained to a table. He was completely alone in a brightly lit room, dressed in plain, gray scrubs, fitted poorly around his tail and digitigrade legs, sleeves ending 3 inches above his elbows. His earrings and rings had been removed. He was captured on two cameras and a microphone. 

He scratches at his wrists, running his claws along his scars. It needs to get there, now. It sprints off the train. It takes 3th3l five minutes and thirty four seconds to reach the police station, digging through the files on legal identification in the city of Laret, faking a history for itself as it walks into the station. It is immediately hit with the sheer scale of the computer beneath the department, and pulls up its takeover program.

It is estimated to take at least twenty minutes for full takeover, and 3th3l curses its limited RAM. The lobby pings for its nonexistent ID and it sends it the data packet back, hiding its program within the data. It digs through its voice bank, pulling a softer, feminine voice.

“My name is Marinka Artemila, I am the legal counsel of one Julien Genet,” it says to the computer in the lobby of the police department. The computer pulls up its false name, clears it, and lets it pass. It wipes its face from the outgoing announcements, and ties its hair back. Its exposed skeletal system can pass as augmentation if it fakes medical records. Nobody will call it, humans and their derivatives aren’t that impolite.

It lies its way through every checkpoint, sending updated takeover programs, trying to cut back the time. 

The officers outside Julien’s cell give it a nod, having been alerted to its arrival, and it nods in return. There’s enough power in the computer beneath the office to give 3th3l a high as its processing power suddenly expands with a partial takeover. It blocks the error messages, taking over external communications first, and continuing normal processing behavior.

Julien looks up from the gashes in his wrists as it enters. 

“E-”

“My name is Marinka Artemila, I have volunteered to be your legal counsel for this case. It is good to meet you, Mr. Genet. You have quite the title,” it says, in planetary pidgin. Recognition dawns on him, and he shakes his head the way he always does, the chains of his earrings no longer hitting him in the face.

“It is good to meet you. I would offer a greeting, but…” He trails off, gesturing at the chains on his wrists. They’re mechanical, not electronic, and 3th3l curses internally. It should have guessed.

“It is to my understanding that you’re unfamiliar with the legal systems governing Tria. Have you said anything to the interrogators?”

“No- they just put me in here. I didn’t even know you were coming. I don’t know anything about this, I was just figuring I could talk to them and they’d understand, but they took my braces and I don’t. I can’t-”

“That’s okay. Don’t worry, we’ll get you out of here. Let’s go over your side of what happened,” it says, knowing the cops are watching. Lawyers and clients have no privacy, what he says here will be used against him. It wants him to talk anyway.

“Okay. Okay, okay okay,” He takes a deep breath, “The basics are that my name is Doctor Julien Genet, Fifth Trian of the Eighth Pack, and I’m two full cycles old- thirty solar years. Do you need me to explain my title?” Ethel nods, and he pauses.

“Okay. It means that I’m one of the leaders of my pack, aligned with the largest moon in the sky. As fifth Trian, I am not necessary for most vital pack functions, it is a sort of honor given to those who have performed exceptional service. I maintain my previous gender identity as Nyct, and maintain my duties to the pack in that respect, but I have a say in the way the pack is run and can act when necessary.”

3th3l nods, indicating to continue. The police chief stands behind his desk.

“I was accepted to the Trian University of Medicine for their fast-track path, due to both my previous training as a doctor within the eighth pack, and my abilities as a Healer. I was going to go into research.”

“Okay,” 3th3l nods. The chief approaches the door, a Tria native with glowing violet hair and several menial physical augments.

“My best friend, Ethel, was accompanying me. It threatened someone who had insulted me, and I had called it off. Ethel is-” The door slides open.

“We know what Ethel is.” The chief approaches the table, and 3th3l turns its body to look at him. “My name is Essayas Merdina. I am the chief of this police office. I personally apologize for the rough treatment you faced at the hands of my employees, and would like to offer you these back as a sign of goodwill.” He tosses Julien’s braces over the table, and 3th3l catches them before they can hit him in the stomach. 

Julien snatches them from its hands, knees and ankles relocating with a pop as he slides them into the braces. He sighs in relief and smiles at the chief.

“Thank you. I can’t express enough how grateful I am.”

“What title would you like to be addressed by? Personally, I prefer Chief Merdina, but I’ve heard there are many for nomadic Terlun,” Merdina says, smiling. 3th3l hates him already, and jumps in before Julien can answer.

“Doctor Genet is fine. What would you like to discuss?” 3th3l asks, trying to catch him off guard.

“Well, Doctor, From the security footage of the terminal, and from the testimony of your victims, you seemed to be the lesser of the two evils, and I would like to offer you a deal. I would like as much information about your accomplice as possible, and you will be free to go.”