Roadtrip

Roadtrip

Prologue

Anj stared at the cell phone in his hands.

It wasn't his - he'd had a cell phone, but it had gone missing - been stolen, probably - in the confusion. This was one he'd "borrowed" from Garrett, who - rather obviously - had no way to use it. It was a newer model than his had been, a year or two old with a bunch of fancy features that he didn't understand and had no intention of asking about, since he hadn't exactly asked permission in the first place. The "phone" part worked just fine, though. He'd already kept it open and untouched for long enough that the screen had gone dark to save on power.

Why was he doing this again? He'd already made the Obligatory Call on the evening of that day, the evening after what everyone was calling The Event. Everyone who still knew who their "real" family was had done something similar. Some hadn't called in person - they'd asked someone else to bear the news, or they'd sent a text message or an email. It was hard to do and sometimes painful, but there was that feeling of obligation - that feeling like the least they could do to their old parents, sisters, brothers, spouses, children, friends was to tell them, "I'm alive." Some families who hadn't gotten caught up in the weirdness wouldn't let it rest there. Most would, at least so far. It hadn't even been a week yet.

His Obligatory Call had worked out pretty typically, Anj had concluded. He'd called, getting his sister, and explained that it really was him, staying as level-voiced as he could, and he'd told her what had happened. Just the facts. She'd had some trouble believing that he was - or had been - her older sister. Anj had convinced her, mostly by talking about what was in the sketchbook he'd left back at her place. It had been uncomfortable on both sides.

So why was he even thinking about calling again? He couldn't seem to figure it out. There was this feeling, like he would miss something big. He was supposed to trust in his feelings, even if he wished he didn’t have to.

But it just wouldn't be right to leave it as it was. So what if most people had settled for the one call? He could understand why. So much was different, and the connections between family members were thinner and more tentative. He didn't want to leave it like that. It wasn't right.

I'm going to regret whichever choice I make, Anj told himself, hovering one finger over the first digit of the area code. The only question is, which would I regret more?

Pickup

It was a very nice day. The air seemed fresh and cool; the sun shone as if defensive about the terrible storm yesterday. Anj made it to the rendezvous point, not far out of the evacuated zone, without incident. He waited.

He could wait for hours, if need be, at rest, equally poised to move or hold position. But he wasn’t left standing for too long. From the curb where he stood, there was a very good view of the road. He saw Valerie’s little blue two-seater car and the baseball-shaped antenna-topper well before it got into the empty lot. Recognizing it caused a little lurch in his stomach, and Anj realized that he was feeling anxious.

It was stupid to feel nervous. More than once he’d been called to pitch in when a fight was threatening. Like the rest of Outpost he'd volunteered both times when creatures had escaped from the Twin Hills facility to roam in teams looking, and although he thought his team could have taken the bear, the manticore wasn't nearly as sure a bet. He was a trooper. That meant a certain level of – not fearlessness exactly. There was plenty of fear. It just didn’t show.

Anj wasn’t one of Xanadu’s public relations people – he had the right look, yes, but he tended to garble longer statements, and now and again an Imperial streak showed up that made people nervous. There was also the fact that, as a Red Guard, he had a bit of an aversion to drawing attention to himself. Still, he’d said a few things on camera, both live and for recordings, and he had been delivering oral reports since evening of that day. In fact, he had only just walked out of one. He had no trouble with that sort of thing.

And this wasn’t someone he didn’t know, someone suspicious and more than a little afraid of him. Valerie was the one member of his family that he felt closest to. She’d always thought that he was a little weird, but they’d been sisters. And friends. She’d been a little uneasy over the phone, but she had agreed to come, after all. Someone had to get him. He couldn’t have just chartered a bus to get all the way home. He hadn’t received permission until it was almost too late, until he had started considering ignoring officials and going anyway - but, as long as it had taken, Anj found himself wishing for more time. It was, by far, too late for second thoughts, he knew.

There had been no trouble coordinating this meet, right up until that last call that he’d picked up on the way here, when she estimated that it would take fifteen minutes to arrive. Waiting for her to get here had twisted his stomach a little. He’d felt both as if it was taking much, much longer than it should have, and as if the time was slipping past faster than thought. As she pulled in and parked he checked his new watch, a thick-banded sporty type, waterproof and digital, and not originally his. Despite himself, Anj smiled. “Right on time.”

The door closed and Valerie stepped slowly around to the curb, clearly studying him as if comparing his face to the one in the picture he’d emailed. Anj looked back in turn. She wore blue jeans and a pale blouse with a collar; her chin-length dark brown hair was wavy and tousled. Like the rest of the family, she was round-faced and big-headed, on the short side, and thickset, even stocky, rather than lean and wiry as Anj was. They looked nothing alike now, but when Anj had been Angela the resemblance had been almost uncanny. Her eyes flicked down to the Imperial emblem on his shoulder, then back up.

Oh no. I’d better be reading that the wrong way. He knew that expression, what it meant. It was in the way her mouth was just slightly open, the way she ran her tongue over her teeth. That speculation that he’d seen a time or two before. Damn it…

Anj had met one or two women here and there who had hinted that they found him attractive, but he’d pretended to be blind to it. Neither of them had done more than hint; he’d found himself grateful for that stupid societal custom that preferred the man to make the first move. He wasn’t ready for all that yet. Emperor’s bones, he wasn’t entirely used to being the man yet!

“How was the drive?” Maybe if he was casual enough, banal even, she’d lose interest. He had to hope. Romance made him nervous, but he’d get to it – incest, on the other hand, was to be avoided at all costs. Hopefully he’d misread it. Maybe she was just nervous and afraid of him. He wasn’t all that good at reading people, at least when it came to details more subtle than ‘about to attack’.

Valerie pursed her lips. “Four hours in traffic. I pity the guys who are out trying to fix damage to the roads – we got buzzed by a pair of flyers on the way. It was a mess.” She’d mentioned that during the last call.

Anj said pretty much the same thing that he’d said then. “Yeah. Not much we can do about those two, though. I mean, they’re inclined to cooperate, and generally limit themselves to ‘mischief.’ They don’t understand that they really aren’t harmless, but trying to contain them now, when there are bigger problems about…” He stopped himself and winced. I’m going to have to watch myself – family or not, there are things she’s just better off not knowing.

She stopped a little more than a meter away, shifting her posture a little as if uncertain. “I, um, got you that stuff you asked for – uh…” I can’t believe that I’m hoping that it’s just fear. Anj hated it when women were afraid of him out of uniform. It made him feel like some kind of monster.

“Excellent.” He came around to the back of her car and, glancing at her for permission, popped the trunk. “And hey, I told you, it’s Anj. Remember when we were kids, Val? You couldn’t pronounce ‘Angela’ or even ‘Angie’. It works.” Remind her that we grew up together and both had nicknames. That might work.

Unzipping one of the bags at random and seeing its contents, he saw something he’d tried to forget after middle school. Seized with inspiration, Anj palmed a particular item and turned towards his sister, stretching it out in front of him. One of the best things about having a ridiculously expressive face was the fact that he could now do “quizzical” quite well. “Honestly, Val. Do you really think this still fits?”

Valerie Kincaid looked from his face to the polka-dot dress with the pleated skirt and, just as Anj had hoped, burst out laughing.

“I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t get into this. And if I did, would it make me look fat? I have gained weight, you know.” Anj let his eyebrow drop and smiled as Valerie leaned against the car, shoulders shaking. Hopefully she’d decided to neither fear nor be attracted to him. It would make the trip a lot easier, let alone when they actually got there.

Giving the dress another look, he said, “I know I said everything, and you did ask if I meant ‘everything everything’. I didn't even know I still had this. Um. Well, next time someone gives an oral report they can take these to donate. There’s sort of a communal pile over there at Xanadu. Not a lot of people brought more than a couple changes of clothes, and stuff that doesn’t fit anymore goes to someone else. It works okay. That’s how I got this,” he said, glancing down at his button-up long sleeved business shirt, the cuffs kept undone, and slightly oversized cargo pants, held up by a belt. Not entirely professional, and this outfit got hot quickly, but he was off duty now – and these clothes didn’t really restrict his movements much more than the robes. They were also nearly as good at concealing weaponry. She didn't need to know that. “I’m really lucky one of my new, uh, friends used to wear this exact shoe size.” He didn’t tell her how much time he’d spent trying to get both of them equally worn down. She didn’t need to know that, either.

As he started refolding the dress into a mathematically perfect rectangle, Valerie recovered enough to ask, “Don’t clothes just change if they don’t fit? I heard something about that on the radio yesterday.”

“The ‘Clothing Curse’. It’s a little more complicated than that.” Finishing, Anj slipped the rectangle back into the bag it had come from, zipped it up, and started to rearrange the luggage so that it wouldn’t slide about. “Some people just can’t wear certain kinds of clothes, literally. Sometimes it changes just enough to fit, sometimes it gets pretty outrageous, sometimes it dissolves or falls off or whatever. And some people have it, others don’t.” The main pieces – duffel bags, a backpack, a few rolling luggages, his laptop case – were placed to his satisfaction. Collectively, they contained everything he owned, just about. Much of it was things he no longer saw a need for, but he’d wanted to decide for himself what was worth keeping.

The Red Guard started folding the loose towels and cloths he’d found in the trunk. Valerie kept her car neat, at least in comparison to the filthy horror he’d found in his car. Of course, he hadn’t seen it until after the windows had been broken to let that thing inside…

“Me, I’ve got a little bit,” he continued, a little rueful as he realized that he was explaining things again. He’d found recently that he really enjoyed doing it. Maybe he’d make a good teacher someday. The thought gave him a little, unexpected thrill. “Logos and insignia turn into the Imperial symbol, my unit patch, and my designation; that, or the text turns into Aurebesh. That's happened to a couple of band T-shirts I picked up. There are a couple of other really minor adjustments, but color and style stay the same. And if it doesn’t fit, it continues to not fit.”

Determined not to pay attention to lint or little bits of detritus, Anj closed the trunk firmly and turned again to his sister. “Okay. I’m satisfied. Pretty sure that there weren’t that many bags in the apartment, though. Wasn’t the Hello Kitty schoolbag yours?”

Valerie climbed into the driver’s seat. “It was. You can keep that one. The U of M messenger bag has my stuff, though. And Auntie’s old duffel. I’ll want those two back.”

Anj took shotgun and raised one eyebrow. Another good thing about his face: he could raise either eyebrow independently. And whistle. And do that curling tongue thing that Scott had shown him so many times. “Why did you do that? Couple of black trashbags would have worked fine, and it’s not like there’s any shortage.”

His sister sighed. “Actually, there is. You’d be surprised at what is or isn’t available recently. Some nut bought out or stole all the trashbags within a forty miles of where we - where I live, and it’s a small enough item that getting new ones isn’t a big priority, not when some places have trouble stocking the basics. I’ve been told to pick up some saran wrap and dish soap on the way. Dad thinks it could be years before the economy settles.” Glancing quickly into his eyes and away, Valerie clicked her seatbelt and adjusted the strap. “I don’t want to pretend that nothing’s happened, Ang- Anj.”

“That would be kind of hard to pull off,” Anj said wryly, following suit and then rolling his eyes. “Ugh. I just noticed that if my back is straight my hair brushes the ceiling. Val, your car is too small.”

“It is not. It’s a fuel-efficient economy.” She frowned, losing the teasing note in her voice. “And it’s not just that it’s hard to ignore. Look,” Valerie sighed.

“You know why we’re doing this. You know it’ll probably happen soon. And you know, you know very well, that this won’t be easy at all. She won’t recognize you, and if we can explain and she can understand, I don’t think she’ll take it too well. Maybe if this had happened four or five years ago, but not now.”

They pulled away, the tires of Valerie’s car shrilling on the asphalt as they always had when forced to turn at low speeds. Anj moistened his lips. “Yeah,” he said after a pause. “This is something I have to do. Uncomfortable as it is. If I don’t, I’ll regret it. I need to see her for this.” He felt he had to add, “And I do feel responsible, you know. If I hadn’t been here, at Xanadu, I mean, maybe Auntie wouldn’t have-“

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Valerie said sharply. “You had nothing to do with it. It’s hereditary.” Her voice became very soft, almost inaudible. “It’s possible that Dad and I have it too. We’re both a lot more active than she’s been for years. It could still happen.”

Anj had no idea how to respond to that last part. His genetics had changed completely, and he was no longer heir to any of the family health problems. He decided to act as if he hadn’t heard it, instead adjusting the seatbelt’s shoulder strap. Although he knew that she was right – well, this hadn’t happened until two days after Xanadu.

His sister’s eyes were fixed on the road. “Dad really doesn’t want anything to do with you. I talked to him on the phone about this. He didn’t try to stop me, but he is really uncomfortable.”

He sighed. This, he thought he could answer.

“Dad – well, Dad was a hippie. Don’t look at me like that, Val. You’ve seen the photo album too. Some of that sticks around, long after all the trappings are gone.” Anj turned a wary eye on a damaged truck that was perilously close to tailgating.

“Bellbottoms, tie-dye shirt, long hair, and smoking something that I don’t think was a cigar. I know. But I don’t really see why-“

“Take away all that sludge about drugs and free love, and counterculture is about resisting a culture or a government or whatever that’s become huge and corrupt, and tries to control the lives of the people.” Anj smiled crookedly. He’d had some time to think about this, and some people to talk to about it. “I’m Imperial, Val. I don’t know if you remember what I thought about politics before.”

“I seem to remember something about it making you sick,” Valerie said, a little slowly.

“Heh. I was pretty apathetic, sure. Now - oh, hey!” Half leaning over his sister, he pointed. “There’s a McDonalds up there that’s still open, no line!”

“What? Are you insane?” Still, she obliged, braking hard and turning in at a sharp enough angle to press their bodies into the seatbelts. The truck behind them beeped its horn in passing, easily heard over Valerie’s tires.

“No, seriously. There’s no line at the drive through window. Don’t worry, I picked up a little money. Actual dollars. I couldn’t stay at Base to eat this time, had to get by on some of my energy rations for lunch. That stuff is more dangerous than a blaster.” Catching her blank look, he added, “They just taste weird and have an awful texture. It’s like eating cardboard that was marinated in banana ketchup. I think you could build houses out of them; they keep forever.” The speaker besides the menu crackled and warbled a semicomprehensible question. It seemed to be half-overgrown with vines. Odd, since there were none on the building itself.

“Uh, I’ll have the Big Mac Combo, hold the tomato and the mustard, ma’am,” he said in the requisite extra-articulate stage voice, accidentally slipping an honorific at the end of the request instead of a ‘please’. In a more normal tone, he said, “You want anything? I can cover.”

No Kincaid refused free food. It was practically the family motto. “Get me a fruit and yogurt parfait, please. Small.” Anj fished a few dollars out of a pants pocket and turned them over at the window. While they waited, Valerie frowned. “What did you mean earlier? About counterculture and politics?”

“Right. Well, I’m Imperial.” Anj laid his forearm out on the car’s retracted window, letting his hand hang on the outside. “That means a lot of things, but basically I’m very pro-government. I think that the state should have the power to step in and solve problems without a lot of bureaucratic nonsense, in essence. Power to the state, which is servant to the people, that kind of thing. I haven’t worked it all out yet, but I’m really big on strength, and order, and control.”

Valerie glanced over at him, then back at the steering wheel. “I see. Absolute power corrupts absolutely? Power falling into evil hands?”

Anj realized that he was jigging his leg in place like a restless schoolboy. He made himself stop – he could sit still for a while, surely. “I didn’t say it was perfect. Just that it appeals to me. Power doesn’t cause corruption by itself, it amplifies what’s already there. And ideally, there would be enough checks and balances to prevent major abuse of the system. I could go on… anyway, the point is that Dad, as a former hippie, is uneasy about The Man. And I am, in a sense, an agent of The Man. It’s not exactly a secret that I’m Imperial. It’s that, or he thinks I’m evil. He’ll come around. Eventually,” he added in an undertone.

“Doesn’t it bother you? He’s your father too,” Valerie asked quietly. The fast-food restaurant was not living up to the ‘fast’ part, but that wasn’t unusual, lately – the closer to Xanadu, the more rattled the employees were, he’d heard, and this particular establishment was barely two miles away. Outside of the official evacuated zone, yes, but most people and businesses here had decided on their own that they were too close.

“It does.” Anj admitted, drumming his fingertips against the car’s exterior. “It really does. But, you know what? I’m an adult, Val. I was an adult before this, and I’m a few years younger now, but I’m not a cadet. I can handle disapproval. And fear. He’ll get used to this. It’s not like it’s happened to him,” he said, a little bitterly. He regretted that bitterness, a little bit. These were hard times, and Auntie’s decline was more important.

His sister waited for a moment before, almost under her breath, asking, “What’s it like?” She was quiet enough that he could, possibly, have pretended not to hear. Fortunately that was when the harried employee finally produced the food, and between getting it and pulling back into traffic Anj had a moment to think and try and phrase a reply. Now that he had the chance, he realized that he hadn’t exactly articulated any of it before.

“Complicated,” he started a few moments later. Wind raked at his face, but he didn’t put the window back up. “It’s very complicated. I don’t know what’s due to losing an X chromosome and what’s Imperial. I have – I have all kinds of strong opinions now about politics, and the military, and all these other things, I eat a lot more, it’s now pretty much impossible for me to be a couch potato because it's hard for me to sit still.” He paused, trying to assemble his thoughts.

“It’s harder to refuse a challenge. If my superiors give me an order, I do it, and it pretty much goes from my ears to my muscles with barely any pause in my brain. I love to explain things, and you wouldn’t believe how good it feels to show someone how to do something. I get really paranoid at night, especially if there’s no one to guard my back when I sleep. I’m not alone in any of it, and for that I thank the E- I thank the Light Side.” Hesitating for a moment, Anj added, “And this is as trivial as it gets, but my hands and feet are huge. Seriously, look at these,” he said, holding up his left hand.

It was somewhat larger than his sister’s and had large knuckles and long fingers that were the same width at the base as they were at the tips. It was marked with calluses and tiny, long-healed scars, and was rough and a little hard to the touch. In all respects, though, it was a perfectly normal hand – entirely human and organic. Compared to what had happened to some people, it was essentially nothing, so he’d always felt it was in bad taste to complain. Unprofessional. Valerie barely gave it a glance before returning to the road.

Her mouth twitched. “Well, you know what they say about men with big feet.”

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” Anj said immediately, frowning loftily. Valerie smirked, then laughed and visibly relaxed, and he realized that he hadn’t seen that bit of uneasiness until it was gone.

“Yeah, okay, you’ve convinced me that you’re Angela. Remember? That’s pretty much what you said after you got treated for that yea-“

“How is that forgetting the issue? That’s supposed to never come up again.” Anj lowered his voice. “You know, like how even when you were twelve you still-“

“Hey, hey! Let’s not get personal.” Even as her cheeks reddened, Valerie kept grinning like a loon. “I’m allowed to bring up embarrassing things in private. Little sister’s prerogative.”

“Hmph.” Secretly he was pleased at the ‘little sister’ part. So many other people from Xanadu, in and out of the 501st, had cut themselves off from their families, content with a single phone call at most. Not that he blamed them, and that seemed to be what had happened with Dad and his Auntie. They’d come around, or they wouldn’t. Valerie had identified herself as his sister. For now, that was enough.

A thought dawned on him. “I don’t think you can call yourself the little sib, Val. You’re older than I am now – I’m twenty-one.”

Her eyebrows shot up. “Really? Huh. Okay. My prerogative’s the same. Hey, aren’t you going to eat that? I’m driving, but there’s nothing stopping you.” She made a vague head-jerk towards the brown paper to go bag, lying between them.

“Oh, right. I’ll get on that,” he said, and did. It would be rude and insensitive to enjoy food in the presence of the various people who couldn’t. Everyone associated with the Outpost knew it and tried to be fairly discreet about eating and drinking. That didn’t mean anyone who dared couldn’t openly carry a meal past any one of them – yes, he could be written up for insubordination and two or more of them could probably have him killed with little effort, but they wouldn’t. Half the Outpost was pretty much competing to see how much they could press that unwritten rule. But Anj knew he didn’t want to take the time to eat there.

Neither Valerie nor her brother spoke as they left city limits. There wasn’t much in the way of suburbia on this side of Orlando. The most direct route from here to the place Anj called Outpost was pretty much impassable, and it would be a long time before all the damage could be fixed, but there were plenty of other roads going in the right direction.

“I don’t actually feel all that different,” he said suddenly through a mouthful of fast food. Valerie glanced his way, but didn’t ask what he meant. He swallowed hard, lowered the sandwich, and went on, “Seriously. I mean, okay, there are times when I wake up at night, and the ‘cold shower effect’ was… ‘’completely’’ unexpected. And yeah, if I look closely at my hands or – or anything else, it’s weird. I’m more visually oriented. But mostly I don’t even think much about it.”

“It’s like – well, you know, like when you graduate high school, or turn twenty, or lose your virginity. Or, I don’t know, you try eating pickled beets again, and they’re a lot better than you remember, or when you realize that you don’t mind doing your own laundry anymore. Sure it’s different, but you don’t feel different afterwards. Not really. It seems like a big deal, and I guess it is, but it doesn’t feel that way.”

Valerie tilted her head slightly, not turning from the road. “Did you really do everything in that order?”

“That falls under the category of ‘none of your business’, miss,” he said sternly, to cover the fact that he wasn’t at all sure. Sometimes, what he was now seemed a lot more real than Angela Kincaid. For a moment he wondered if he should have said, again, that he wasn’t going to dignify that with an answer.

“So you really don’t feel different?” Valerie glanced over at him for a second. She was good about watching the road, which he was grateful for. He’d caught rides with several people who weren’t nearly as careful.

“Not really, no. It’s not like I can just compare both ways, anyway.” He didn’t tell her that he could have had himself turned into a woman again, easily. He hadn’t. As far as he’d heard, none of the other former-women in the 501st had taken that option either. It helped that being a Red Guard was… well, to put it lightly, he’d never before had a job that was anything like this. He felt like what he did now had meaning. Not even those eight months at the art gallery could compare.

“It’s like, maybe… Well, you’re not really the same person you were five, ten years ago, right?” Anj was coming up with this as he went, and just hoping it made sense. “You’re very different, I mean you don’t have most of the same friends, you don’t do the same things, um – Well, you’re different. But you don’t feel different.” He didn’t know how to put it into words.

Valerie spoke slowly, staring through the windshield, through the road ahead. “Pretty much every cell you had seven years ago is dead and gone, replaced. That’s about how long it takes. Except for neurons and… and I forget what else, all human cells have a turnover, and divide into their replacements at least once by the time seven years have passed. Not much is left, but you’re still the same.” She blinked. “That might not be the best analogy, actually.”

“Oh, no, I think you got it. The same. And different. It’s all one in the end.” A little irritated by all this philosophy, Anj hung his hand outside of the window again, raising it to feel the moving air push against his palm.

His eyes were watering a bit in the breeze. It was kind of nice, really. Hot out there, yes, and humid, but nice.

Anj saw Valerie’s hand slip off the wheel and into the paper bag. “Hey! That’s mine!” She popped a fry into her mouth and rubbed salty fingers together, smugly ignoring him.

“Thief,” he said. Undeterred, she took another one. “That’s my lunch.”

“You’re not eating them,” she reminded him. “And you said you had something already.”

He rolled his eyes, saying, “Nothing that should be categorized as ‘food’. I’d give you a bite, but then you’d hate me forever. Or have me sued.” Or you wouldn’t hate it, it was on the tip of his tongue, but he shut his mouth. He was supposed to keep quiet about that. “Oh hey, you hooked up your iPod. Do you mind?”

Valerie, currently moving to pass the only other vehicle within a hundred meters, flicked her hand in a ‘go ahead’ gesture. It took Anj a moment to remember how this thing worked. Rather than deal with the bewildering number of half-remembered songs and artists listed in a language he had to slow down to read, he picked Shuffle.

Bonnie Tyler sang with husky intensity about her need for a hero, blaring out of the speakers. It was a bit louder than Anj liked it, and he turned it down. He’d loved that song at one point, but recently... well, heroes, particularly when they were larger-than-life or fresh from the fight, were better when they were either normal people called to do extraordinary things or completely imaginary.

The car passed by a bird-shaped singe mark on the asphalt, and as the stereo repeated the line about a fire in the blood Anj realized, with a guilty lurch, that he’d stopped paying attention to potential threats. It wasn’t because he’d been in conversation. He could talk and visually scan at the same time.

Not a lot of people sharing the road, and the greenery outside was a mix of tall grass, swampy water, and occasional patches of trees. He took in what he could. A couple of fliers were visible as specks in the sky, not close enough for him to determine if they were costumes or simple birds or aircraft. Possibly the most important thing was that he didn’t feel any hint of warning through his developing Force-sense. Still, no sense in lowering his guard.

Valerie glanced at him and away, and Anj realized that he was frowning. Scowling, even. That was the big disadvantage to having an expressive face. With a little effort, he smoothed it and cast about for something to say, turning his hand so that the wind pressed against it.

“You don’t need to stay at the Outpost tonight,” he said, hastily clarifying with, “Not if you don’t want to. There are a few pretty reasonable hotels nearby.” Anj tensed, and something tiny and compact struck the hand outside of the car, hard enough to sting.

He pulled his arm back in and looked at the very dead mosquito that had hit him. It was little more than a few hairy legs and a smear of brilliantly red blood on his skin. Insects usually had clear or yellowish blood, didn’t they? They didn’t have hemoglobin or red blood cells. Had he just accidentally killed someone from Xanadu?

Wait. No. It was a mosquito. Female mosquitoes drank red blood. That was what had happened here. He hadn’t felt that – that sort of gasp that Revan had showed him happening when something who thought and felt died. Still, he’d heard something back at Base about a secondary change that had passed through blood contact. He’d have to mention the possibility of mosquito-borne secondaries to a superior.

Belatedly, Anj realized that his sister had been talking, and he had to review his memory. Thankfully he’d been trained to have a few minutes of excellent recall. She had said, ruefully, that she didn’t have enough money, since she’d set aside most of it for the trip. And even though this car wasn’t a guzzler, gas prices had skyrocketed in the past three weeks.

“Val, I’ve got just under three hundred dollars left in my bank account,” he said. “I’d have more, but, well, I paid six month’s rent before coming here. And also – well, I’d also commissioned a new helmet. They aren’t refunding orders.”

She slowed the car momentarily. “It’s okay. You don’t have a job-“

“A paying job.” If there was anything he didn’t like about being in the 501st…

“-Right. I do. I can make more when I run out. There’s enough to go there and come back, and I don’t want to spend any more than I – than we need. Doesn’t matter whose money.” She’d always been prideful about that, he remembered.

Still… “I just don’t think you should sleep at Outpost, Val.” That hadn’t sounded as firm as he had intended. Ugh! He hadn’t taken care of the mosquito yet! Anj groped with his other hand for one of the cheap brown fast food napkins, wiped the thing off, folded it into a tiny square, and tucked it into a pocket, vowing to wash his hands several times. He could imagine the bug juices staining his skin, working into the tiny folds of his handprint.

“I thought you said it wasn’t dangerous,” she said, sounding a little irritated.

“Oh, it’s not! Outpost is very safe. And very boring, compared to Base, but there haven’t been more than a few heated arguments and one outright fight.” He winced, remembering that. Anj wasn’t worried about her safety. But he wasn’t authorized to tell anyone the real reason – the 501st was trying to keep it quiet, after all.

“Do you have a reason for me or not? You did say that you wanted me to see it.” She hesitated. “You don’t think people will start fighting again? Is that it?”

He was shaking his head before she even stopped speaking. “No, no. We got it taken care of. I seriously doubt anyone will so much as draw a weapon any time soon. If they do, I’ll keep you safe.” Saying that – he found himself looking his sister over, trying to gauge how fast she was, how strong. He would have to protect her, not just at Outpost, but on the way north, and while they were there, and on the way back. As a brother and a Red Guard, he could not allow her to come to any harm.

Entry

“We’re close, right?” Valerie broke him out of another little trance. He shook his head to clear it.

“Wha? Oh. Yeah. Just up here. You can see it – that gray one off by itself. With its own station and gate. Yes, here.” He took this opportunity to finish the hamburger. Getting fries without something to drink had been a mistake. The attendant who had been supposed to ask what drink he wanted hadn’t remembered. This was one of the problems with fast food.

In the guard box nearest the road, a man sat and watched cars pass. In the box with him was a stormtrooper, kitted up all in white armor with blue markings. They looked alert yet relaxed.

As Valerie’s car pulled both of them straightened up. Anj leaned over so his face was in sight, and rolled the window down so they would hear him.

“Thirtynine? My pass for today is ‘the bantha crows at midnight’.” He gave a casual salute, lightly thumping his left shoulder. “It’s just TR-1407 and guest. She’s logged and everything is filed,” he said. “Anything happen while I was gone?”

The stormtrooper returned the salute, thumping and then showing his open palm. The man with him, nondescript enough that he was only noteworthy for his lack of interesting features, scribbled or checked off something on a clipboard. “Barely anything worth reporting, Fourohseven. My lord started over with his wrist joint prototype, Seventyeight caught some local bug and is being quarantined, my lord Revan has started learning Japanese, there’s a nasty stink around the food prep unit, and we had another bunch of kids around the perimeter trying to see inside. You’d better head in. The suits don’t like people clogging the entry.”

“We’ll do our best not to bother the suits, then,” Anj said, noticing the plain man’s utter lack of reaction. The gate came up, and the stormtrooper waved them into the lot and turned back towards the street.

“Park anywhere except next to the one with the skulls,” Anj told Valerie. The parking lot had only a few vehicles. Not many of the people at Outpost still had cars.

“Okay. Do you know him? Why’d he call you that?” Valerie put the car into park and took the keys from the ignition. Neither of them moved to open a door right away, so her iPod kept playing.

“I know him a little. Everyone knows everyone here, there aren’t a lot of us. That’s just a few numbers from my designation. TR-1407. We use those sometimes. There’s another one with numbers ending in oh seven, so I go by Fourohseven when I’m not on a first-name basis.” He shrugged.

“Right.” The current song ended, and something madly upbeat began. He almost missed her voice under it. “They’re not…”

“What’s that?” The car was not parked perfectly straight. None of the cars were aligned properly in their spaces, and there were multi-space gaps between some of them. They were not neat. This still bothered him, a little, but he’d never mentioned it. He’d never live it down.

“They’re not… bad people, right? Nothing bad is going to happen?” She turned serious eyes on him and tried to make light of this sudden fear, twisting her lips into a fake smile. “I’m not going to get shot at or turned into a turkey, am I?”

If he pressed now, he could convince her to stay in a motel. But then, as she’d said before, that would be wasted money. And they would be apart, with no one to watch her.

“No. These are good people here. I’d trust them with my life. I’d trust them with yours. Nothing will happen. But if it does –“ Anj unclipped his seat belt to swivel in the seat, and Valerie twisted around so that they faced one another –“If it does, here or elsewhere, I will protect you. Believe me. You’ll be safe.” He stared intently into her eyes, and she did not look away. “No matter what. My life for yours. My people for you. As I guard the Empire, I will guard you.” He reached out, palms up, and as she extended her own arms he gripped them just above the elbow, as she clasped his forearms. “I will guard you until the term has ended.”

He let go, and both of them pulled back and settled in their seats. Anj put his face in his hand as he realized that he’d just pledged allegiance to his sister, as if she were a planetary governor or official that he’d been assigned to protect. Damn! He could have, would have protected her without that, particularly if he’d managed to start thinking of her as an Imperial citizen. Well, he hadn’t pledged service or obedience, and he’d mentioned a term. Okay. Okay. This wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

She unbuckled her seatbelt, patted vaguely at her hair, grabbed her yogurt, and opened the door, only glancing at him once. He nabbed the bag full of carefully-folded wrappings, got out, and they closed the doors. There was no danger here. Tomorrow, he would start for real, when they left the safety of Outpost to head north. He could relax for now.

“What was that about?”

“I’m going to protect you. It’s a Red Guard thing.” He took it as a good thing that she shrugged, then, and apparently put it out of her mind.

Had he forgotten – no, of course not, it was right in the pocket where he’d left it, wrapped neatly in gauze. For some reason, whenever he was coming back with orders, he tended to have a moment of panic where he thought he’d forgotten them. Letting the searching hand fall back by his side, he started towards the door, sister in tow.

Valerie nudged him with her elbow and muttered, “Who’s that?” She waved a hand in a vague pointing gesture. Fortunately, there was only one person she could have meant.

Anj could look without making it obvious. ‘That’ was a catlike furry woman with a forked tail, huge pointed ears with stiff tufts of hair under them, and lavender fur that had the shine of velvet. She also had a small red stone set into her forehead, liquid black eyes with white pupils or irises, and was wearing overalls and a too-large wrinkled T-shirt that nonetheless clung to her curves like it was sopping wet. Currently she was on a cigarette break, puffing smoke slowly through a petite mouth.

“Her name is Isaac, Isaac Williams. She’s from Xanadu.” Valerie shot him a ‘well, duh’ look, and he went on, “A Pokemon furry, I think… an Espry? Espryeon? Something like that.” One of Isaac’s ears twitched. She might well be able to overhear them. It probably wasn’t something to worry about.

His sister took her lower lip between her teeth and just gripped it for a moment. “Espeon. Espeon is one of the evolutions of Eevee. Second-gen Pokemon.” She looked back at his face and raised her eyebrows. “Hey, don’t look surprised. I was crazy about those games. They’re psychic cat things. But I’m pretty sure that they didn’t look like that."

Still not openly staring, Anj glanced over Isaac’s narrow waist, flaring hips, long neck, and four breasts, each perfectly, unnaturally round. Having gone back to Xanadu several times, he’d seen enough not to stare, but he could see why Valerie might. “Furry, remember? There are some Pokemon furries.” He went on, keeping his voice casual.

”Outpost was a warehouse complex or something before they handed it over to us. We’ve got pest problems. Lots of little animals have gone and crawled into the walls to die, and the roaches were pretty bad. And rats. Don’t get me started on the rats. It was pretty much unlivable.” This wasn’t much of an exaggeration. “Isaac was an exterminator before Xanadu. Still is, really. We’re lucky we found her. Isaac’s been here for over three weeks, and it’s just about civilized now.”

Across the lot, Isaac’s split tail swished. Anj considered mentioning that she had finished the job over a week ago, with the assistance of most of the troopers. Oh, she still sprayed pesticides now and again, and was sometimes seen putting out traps, but everyone knew she was done. Now she made herself useful in a number of other ways, mostly doing the same work troopers assigned to Outpost did – KP, cleaning, laundry, moving heavy items, fetching things for superiors. Off duty, she tended to stay close to them. Isaac hadn’t quite gotten to the point where she would sleep in the barracks and complain with them about this or that, but it was only a matter of time.

Anj kept silent. If he explained all that, Valerie would probably ask why Isaac was staying on, and he didn’t want to have to lie. He’d like to go in. Better to wait for her.

“Soo,” she started after a bit, “’Isaac’, huh? I take it she used to be a guy?” At his nod, she raised her eyebrows. “Don’t people usually change their names when they…?”

“Hmm?”

She scowled. “Don’t play innocent. When they – when you - get genderfucked, don’t you change your name?”

“Genderfucked? Oh – I can say that again?” he asked, distracted. “Frack? Ah. Guess not. Genderfucked. Genderfuck. Why does it work like that? It’s clearly the same word, just with another tacked on the front.” Anj clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth, considering.

“’Genderfucked.’ That’s not a term I’ve heard before. Very colorful. More evocative than ‘genderbent’, but I doubt it’ll get said as much on the air. I’m going to have to bring it up next time I’m at Base.”

Valerie was a little too old to roll her eyes and sigh. Instead, with exaggerated patience, she said, ”If you don’t want to answer the question, just tell me.”

“Sorry. It’s really a matter of preference, I think.” He shrugged. “I was calling myself Anj and TR-1407 long before this. ‘Anj’ is just ‘Ang’ with the spelling changed, you know, and I've gone by that since I was eight. It seemed to fit. I hear that Isaac’s other name was Sunmoth or something, and she might have decided that was too silly.”

They’d been dawdling outside for too long. “Let’s go in. I told you that I’d show you around.”

Inside it was warm, the result of no air conditioning whatsoever, and there was just the faintest smell of armor wax, mostly overwhelmed by a funk from the official kitchen. Someone had decided to try and make sauerkraut, apparently, and although most of the standing fans had been set to dissipate it, the smell was very present. This was the problem with having no set cook. By now, thankfully, only those who could make something edible in decent quantity were assigned to make things.

Meeting them at the door was a sandtrooper with his helmet off. It was TD-0583. They’d made pancakes together that one time, and had been on the same grocery run twice now. You could always tell when he'd had a hand in anything breadish, because he firmly believed that oats improved everything. Good guy, personable, sharp, sweated pretty heavily, preferred a light repeating blaster, great upper-body strength. Anj exchanged a salute with him, then reached into a pocket and pulled out the gauze-wrapped datacard they’d given him back at Base.

More for his sister’s sake than anything else, he told 583, “New orders. Same as the old orders." Sending messengers to give orders and reports was completely unnecessary, what with comm frequencies and email. But who was he to question his superiors? Maybe it was because they only had dial-up here so far. "They’re rotating a patrol’s worth in to recover. And they’re giving us TK-4321.”

“Not him,” the other man said, sighing as he accepted the card. “I volunteered for this post so I wouldn’t have to sleep down the hall from him any more. He sings in the shower, you know. Let me guess, Ken still won’t wear a helmet and finally got hit? He’s damn agile, but you can only dodge for so long.”

“Not that I’ve heard. Scuttlebutt goes that he’s irritated the Mandalorians. You know how touchy they are. If they secede, they take half the clone troopers with them. Officially, 4321’s transferring so that he can, and I quote, ‘benefit from the media presence’. Yeah. I think they’re hoping he gets taken in by the media or the ‘normal’ alts.”

Sighing, the sandtrooper brushed invisible grit from the dusty black pauldron on his shoulder; it and the generally worn state of his armor were all that distinguished him from standard stormtroopers. “I don’t think the alts will want him. They don’t get along all that well. Back at Base, my patrol ran into three of them fighting. We had to stun ‘em to break it up.” He met Valerie’s gaze and smiled. “Whether or not you like Elvis, more than one of him is a nuisance.”

“I’m not the biggest fan, but he’s okay,” she said, eyes a little glazed over. “I’m not sure what you mean, though.”

“Elvis-alts are the biggest prima donnas I have ever seen,” 538 told her. “Save one some time, you’ll see. And of course there are a bunch at Xanadu, and I swear half of them are Strangers, so we’ve got all these copies of the King walking around not sure what year it is. The classics don’t sleep around much and know when to lie low, at least. It’s the others that get into the peccadilloes.” He rolled his eyes.

“’Alts’ are ‘alternates’, alternate versions of the same character,” Anj told her. “Like classic Elvis, in ‘raw fifties’ and ‘kitschy seventies’ flavors; sex god Elvis, don’t laugh, he exists; furry Elvis; woman Elvis; drag queen Elvis, which is completely different; alien Elvis; child Elvis; and of course there’s our TK-4321, the Elvis trooper. I think you took a picture with him one year, when you came with me to Dragon Con.”

She blinked. “He had the cape, right? And the jewels. He was such a ham. Good God, that’s insane.”

“Basically. He and the others will be here tomorrow, after we leave. You get to miss him.”

“Lucky girl.” The sandtrooper frowned, as if really seeing her for the first time. “I haven’t seen you around before. You new?”

“This is my sister, Valerie Kincaid.” This was going to be predictable, but it would mean she’d forget about that “new” comment. He hoped. “I’ve mentioned her before. She’s stopping over for the night and taking me with her tomorrow.”

“Oh, you’ll tell me your sister’s name but not yours, huh?” 538 jibed, tilting his head a little, the better to see her. “Your brother’s a cad.” Smiling, already raising his arms defensively, he added, “He never said that you’re pretty. Ow! I’m just being friendly!”

Anj folded his arms across his chest and couldn’t quite keep from grinning. He’d always wanted to do something like that. “You want my name? It’s Anj. Same last name.”

“Danny, Danny Watanabe. Today’s official midday-block door guardian. What can I do you for?”

“He said he’d show me around,” Valerie said. “But I think I should eat this first, that or find a refrigerator. And he needs to throw away that bag.”

“Right. Yeah. Stay here, okay?”

He came back a few minutes later to find that they'd been joined by Corporal Amy, Outpost's current official unofficial female trooper. Last week they'd had Brooke, too, but she'd rotated back to Base after the side effects of being alive again wore off.

"-so now we don't play bluegrass," Amy was saying. "If my lord doesn't like something, we have to accommodate that. The first note was about vermin disposal. I'm thinking that tomorrow's note will be a ban on boiled cabbage. I don’t know whose idea ‘’that’’ was."

"Unless he's lost his sense of smell," Danny added, wrinkling his nose. "Probably has. Every time something's getting forged..."

Anj stepped in, feeling obligated to defend his SL. "That's probably because he's working alone now, ever since my lord Revan mentioned that the build team kept getting pulled off their usual project."

Amy was nodding. "Yeah, you'd barely notice the smell back when my lord had someone to watch it while it melted. I'll talk to my lord Revan, see if he can't tell my lord to get someone without a real job." She flashed him one of her crooked smiles, probably fully aware of the little flutter it always caused. "I was telling the new girl about the daily datapad."

She had high enough rank to lead a half-patrol, but in Outpost, any rank less significant than gunnery sergeant or lieutenant tended to have little meaning. There was so little that needed doing, and those with higher rank – the SLs, really, and the people back at Base – were inclined to let Outpost run itself. Those few days when they’d hosted the Morale Officer, a Major as well as possessed with an all-too-infectious pride and vigor, had been an exception. As had that six-hour warning period before a certain Grand Admiral had come to inspect, and any time something exciting happened.

"Valerie isn't staying. She's just stopping in to take me home and bring me back," Anj told her, trying to warn her with his eyes. It would get annoying if he had to tell this to everyone they met.

"You don't need to talk over me." She seemed more amused than annoyed. "So your - uh, boss actually goes around when no one's up and leaves notes about what he doesn't want you to do?"

"Sorry, Val. And yeah, basically, though he doesn't have an official rank. Only they're messages on datapads. Think tiny computer and you're not far off. There's a new one every day. He might not actually put it up himself, I haven't asked."

Both of the other troopers reached, Amy into a pocket, Danny into a satchel on his armor, and pulled out datapads to present. Anj pressed his lips together, envious. He'd been consistently too slow to pick one up, and he'd shied away from buying one off another trooper. They were very in demand - like notebooks, day planners, calculators, and sketchpads combined into one and equipped with a touch-sensitive color screen, audio pickups, headphone ports, and power cells. They weighed less than a kilogram and could interface and download off the Internet, if they'd been fiddled with. Though with only dial-up here, that function wasn’t that great.

Danny's looked like the basic model, a hand-sized machine that clamshelled open to reveal a flat screen, a tiny holo-imager, and a number of buttons, the only obvious modification a plug so it could recharge off of the outlets here. Amy's was significantly more complex, with modules connected to every port and trailing wires coming out of its recesses.

"We finished tweaking Tetris today, and it's running fine," she said, like that was an explanation. To interface with just about any Earth tech, they had to be modified. With Amy being on the build team, it wasn't surprising what she'd done.

"We're going to the mess now. See you later, all right?" Anj asked. They nodded, preoccupied by the Tetris thing, as the Kincaids walked away.

Walker

Valerie wanted to meet the famous Garrett, of course. He was something of a celebrity now, or, well, an attraction. Footage and stills from the chase had circulated everywhere in the past month, and tended to pop up, along with that famous image of Eric Winters perched on a podium, in any article about Xanadu. Anderson Cooper from CNN had interviewed him before driving to the Kublai Con itself. A short piece about his current state of affairs had already run on a major news network, he'd had a mention on the Daily Show, and although he’d denied all of them so far, there were rumors about everything from a reality TV show to a documentary.

The walker was kept in the warehouse itself. Everything had been cleared out to make enough space for him to turn around, though he hadn't done so all that often. So far he had gone outside only four times, always with twenty minutes of troopers working to get things disconnected and open the door and make sure that the yard was clear before he took a step. Garrett really didn’t move much – and now that the fuel crisis was over, this was probably because he didn’t like all the attention his outings got from the media. A camera crew had been on the scene each time.

Anj lead his sister into that space. The high ceiling, corrugated metal with some rafters holding it up, was hung with cobwebs, a sight which always made him curl his lip a little. Similarly, although the small, high-set windows had been wiped, the shafts of light that they let though danced with dust motes. And the floor! It might have been cement originally, but after a few days a truckload of gravel had been put in and spread around haphazardly. Garrett’s ‘room’ was impossible to neaten or keep ordered, at least by Anj’s standards. No one else had said a word, though, so he tried not to complain.

They crunched onto the gravel that had spilled under the door and out of the room, and Anj watched her neck craning upwards, heard her breath catch in her throat.

“Suddenly I don’t think this was a good idea,” Valerie said, barely loud enough to be heard. He felt a powerful, heady rush of protectiveness for her, and found himself glancing around, making sure there were no unpleasant surprises in the corners.

“It’s all right,” he told her quietly, and surprised himself by reaching over and putting a bracing hand on her shoulder. “I’ll keep you safe.” He was definitely bodyguarding her. Well, if nothing else, it would be nice to have someone to protect.

“Right…” They walked in. Garrett was waiting, politely pretending that he hadn’t seen them in the entryway.

The walker didn’t look quite the same as he had in those infamous videos. The black score marks and occasional dents were gone, testament to the cleaning, patching, and replacement skills of the crew. Dangling all the way to the ground were massive pipes to his fuel tank and cables and one rope ladder leading to a hatch, seeming minuscule against his bulk. Both forelegs had a complex series of translucent-to-amber cables wrapped around the “ankle” joint. Over the weeks the crew, being bored, inventive, and athletic, had polished his entire external surface until it gleamed dully.

“Hi Valerie. I’m Garrett. Garret Thompson.” The walker’s neck wasn’t flexible enough to look directly down at them, instead tilting in their general direction. Garrett’s voice, oddly soft and almost tentative, came from the car-sized speaker ensemble that squatted besides him. He had finally conquered the monotone, the feedback, the stutter, and the synthetic buzz, but hadn’t yet mastered the reverb or the flanging. It would probably be a year or more before he could control the weird subharmonics, and static still overcame him when he was upset.

That speaker ensemble had a set of thick braided cords that wound all the way up to one of Garrett’s hatches. Having no speakers or microphones built into his exterior, the walker had had a lot of trouble with communication. Essentially, he could neither hear nor speak to anyone who was neither inside of him nor in possession of a comlink on the right Imperial frequency.

The speaker ensemble had been built to get around all that. Anj hadn’t been part of the drawing board or the build team, so he didn’t know how any of that worked or why it had to be so huge, but Garrett could speak and hear out of the thing, and listen to radio stations, and apparently call people too. The more tech-savvy staff here at Outpost worked on it constantly. SL-1984 had been in on it at first, until he’d started working fulltime on arms.

Anj nudged his sister gently. “You’re staring,” he told her, not unkindly. Many people gawked like this, the first time they met Garrett. No matter how prepared anyone thought they were, that was how it went. He always felt a little guilty when he saw this – disbelief was nothing compared to his reaction. Imperial conditioning ran deep. That was not an excuse.

Valerie closed her mouth and visibly swallowed. “Oh. Sorry. …Hi,” she said in a very small voice. “Anj… told me about you.”

“Only good things, I hope.” There was an uncertain pause. Even though Anj was one of the ones who had elected to stay at Outpost since the beginning rather than rotating in and out, they hadn’t had a lot of contact. Garrett probably did not know how very close Anj had come to lobotomizing or killing him back there, when the Red Guard had finally realized that this was more than a runaway walker. Few people had any idea what had happened at that moment in the AT-AT’s cockpit, and Anj preferred to keep it that way.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” Garrett’s speaker said. “I’ve uh – I’ve been working on a sort of a handshake. Would you like to see?”

Anj was gratified to see that the first thing Valerie did was glance at him. He shrugged. This was something he had heard about since the ankle modification, something the crew had complained about, but he’d never seen it himself. Probably because he’d been avoiding Garrett, not that that was hard.

“Sure,” Valerie said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Just grab the closest toe flap when I’m ready, and hold on.” Garrett’s balance visibly shifted, and his near foreleg swung slowly forwards with a droning hum and a lot of clanking. It bent down at the knee, whirring, and then with a high whine the translucent cables encasing the ankle joint flexed, bending it forward so that the footpad was held level, about a meter and a half above the ground, toeflaps reaching as “down” as they could go.

“Okay. You can come over here now.” Odd, that a voice from someone with no lungs, who could presumably control how he sounded, seemed so breathless. Anj found himself frowning.

“Wait,” he said, putting one hand out to stop his sister. The Red Guard tilted his head back and looked squarely up at Garrett’s fuel tank. “I don’t want her getting hurt, do you understand?”

“I’ve done this before,” the walker protested, with much less certainty than Anj would have liked. “I have it down. Look, it’s just –” The toeflaps on the extended footpad all quivered, then swung up and down, like doors half-opening with a sound of metal sliding on metal. The joints had been oiled recently. “This is as fast as they go, and as far as they go. I’ve tried it with all of my crew. Nothing is going to happen.”

Anj stared upwards for a long moment, and relented. “Fine. But if you do make a mistake-“

“I’ll regret it, I know.” The weary, slightly patronizing tone in Garrett’s voice irritated Anj; he had to fight to keep his face blank, and couldn’t quite stop a twitch. The walker wasn’t taking this seriously.

Valerie, a little more nervous now, stage-coughed into her hand. “Please don’t fight.” She glanced at Anj. “I have to take him back home, you know, and I didn’t bring a bodybag.”

“I wouldn’t have killed him. Just mooshed him a little,” said Garret, as Anj protested that he was faster than that. Still, this reminded him. He shouldn’t try to provoke fights at all, particularly with his target here.

With bad grace, he gave the go-ahead, and Valerie stepped up.

“Just hook your arms over the closest toe flap – yeah, like that. Okay. Hold on.”

Very gradually, in a series of shivering twitches, the flaps rose and lowered, rose and lowered. For Garrett, this was a feat of dexterity as delicate as a brain surgeon with a scalpel, or one of those novelty artists painting names on grains of rice, or maybe SL-1984 adjusting a neural link with his newer hand. Anj had talked to some of the crew who’d endured the walker’s early attempts, and clearly he’d made progress since then.

Valerie’s feet left the ground, just barely, on each upswing. After a few of these, she waited for a downswing, let go. and stepped back, almost stumbling. Anj took her by the arm and steadied her.

“You’re all right?” She ran her hand through her hair and flashed a smile at him, then looked back up.

“I’m fine. So that’s a handshake, huh?”

“As close as I’m going to come until Aydeefor’s happy with his stuff, yeah. My crew are all troopers, and Steph’s even smaller than a human. Other than the press and a couple of other guys, I don’t see a lot of other people. They don’t really want to talk to me. Thanks.” Apparently unaware that he’d basically confessed to loneliness, Garrett lowered his footpad back to the gravel, which crunched.

“No problem. Your crew – that’s who’s using the ladder, right?”

“Yeah. They’re up there now, but they’re not spying or anything, promise. No one's even awake in my cockpit just now."

"Awake?"

"Steph says my command chair is the most comfortable spot. He's got different sleeping patterns. Lots of naps, and he's up for half the night."

Bored, Anj fidgeted, then did a bunch of toe-rising exercises while they talked about this and that. Residual guilt aside, he didn't find Garrett very interesting. It might have been different if he was on the walker's crew, which he was qualified for, certainly. Or it might not have.

He'd thought about rotating back and serving at Base, but he'd always opted to stay here. Besides part of the build team and Garrett's crew, he was the only trooper to do that. He only saw Base through going there and heading back with reports and orders, respectively. Because of that, he didn't have much contact with most of his squadron. SL-1984 and a handful of others aside, they never came here. The capes probably wouldn't give them enough Pym Particles to let them last more than a day at most. Nine hours, more often.

Eventually they ran out of things to talk about, and Anj got the chance to get Valerie out of there.

Revan

Later, as he showed her where he and the other troopers slept, and the nearby room where she would spend the night, he found a paper note on his bunk. It was a formal request for his presence at the nearest convenient time, and curiosity about his sister, though couched in a lot more words. There was no name on the note, but he recognized the handwriting, technically neat but tending to slant terribly. After a moment, he shrugged. Why not?

As they got closer to the door, a voice could be clearly heard on the other side. Not rising and falling or pausing like in normal speech, but there was a rhythm to it anyway. He couldn't quite pick up the words. A chant, maybe? Anj didn't think this Revan did things like that, but he could be wrong.

Valerie elbowed him, barely contacting his side, and he leaned down to catch her surprised grin and hear the whispered, "He sounds like George Takei!" After a beat she frowned at him and added, "You know, Star Trek. Doctor Sulu. Oh. Am I not supposed to mention that, or something?"

"No... no, it's okay," he whispered back. "But I've talked to a few Sulus - well, one, but I've heard others talking. He doesn't sound like that, really."

"George Takei is a lot older than he was back then. Maybe that's it."

Shaking his head at her, Anj knocked. "My lord? It's TR-1407, Anj Kincaid. I'm here with Valerie. You wanted to see me?" The chant didn't stop, but became louder as the speaker came closer.

“Ah ee oh aye ooh. Kah kee koj kaye kooh." The door opened. "Many apologies," the man said. "I fear that I lost track of time. Learning a new language is one of my passions."

Revan wasn't more than a few centimeters taller than Anj and powerfully built, though it was hard to tell when he wore layered formal robes, like now. He was bald, either shaved or natural, and had a an odd mustache like a goatee without the chin bit. A "Fu Manchu", maybe. The interesting thing about Revans was that their alts were all different, and most were equally "classic". This was the only one here, which made things a little easier.

"No foul, no report, my lord," Anj said, mostly to cover his sister's very hushed "Kinda... hmm. Well, okay, he's Asian and that's about it." If Revan heard her, he politely ignored it.

"My boy, I dislike being called 'my lord'. I'm not the one in charge here. You should call me Master, please, or if you're feeling bold, Sir." He revealed startlingly white teeth in a smile and turned to Valerie. "And you would be Valerie. Anj thinks of you, often. I would give you one of my false names, but there are too many of those knocking about already. Call me Revan."

No one here called him a Revan or the Revan, like they did with the various others, like the woman with a band of rogue clone troopers back at Xanadu. Nor was he called by his designation, SL-5301, or his Revan-name(It was complicated) Sato, or his pre-Event name, Louise Hansberry. He was just Revan.

"Now, do come in. I won't keep you long." Holding the door open, Revan motioned for them to precede him into his - 'room' really didn't fit, and at any rate he had more than one, being an SL. Words like "lair" and "sanctum" seemed to apply. From the hallway, it seemed very dark.

Valerie hesitated, so Anj went first. He'd have to do this when they left Outpost, to make sure any rooms were secure. He'd been in and out of here pretty regularly, this large room Revan had claimed. All the lights but the one at the desk close to the door were dimmed by yellowing shades, and various faded patterned rugs had been laid on the floor. There were no fans. The overall effect was that the big, dark room was even warmer than the rest of Outpost, and closer.

Bringing up the rear, Revan closed the door with a soft click. Putting his hands together so that they were hidden in his wide sleeves, he regarded them with half-lidded eyes for a long moment.

"You will need to practice faithfully, my boy. Disruptions in training before the basics have been firmly rooted have an unfortunate tendency to make trouble in the future." He smiled again, this time at Valerie. Revan smiled a lot, and it always looked genuine, complete with eye crinkling. "Not that I fear too much for your brother. His diligence is great and, sadly, far surpasses his skill."

"Sir," Anj said, resigned. He wasn't great in the Force. That was fine. But that didn't mean he wanted it brought up.

"Sit, both of you. I won't keep you long," Revan said again. Since there really wasn't any furniture visible except for the desk and the chair at it - it was a wooden chair, too, weirdly enough - they lowered themselves awkwardly to the carpet. Revan glanced to the side, and Valerie twitched as a pillow emerged from a corner. It floated in at walking speed to tuck under his knees as he knelt. It was embroidered and tasseled on each corner, with the same patterns and color as the carpet. No one knew where Revan got his stuff from. He had the best furniture in Outpost.

"So, is he your pupil or something?" Valerie asked. If she felt uneasy, she didn't show it. This was how Valerie was. She seemed comfortable with everyone, and made friends a lot more easily than enemies, mostly because with most people she was a great listener. Even when they'd been little, she'd been the one who knew everyone and was welcome with most of them. It wasn't that simple, no, but that's what it looked like. "He's told me that he's getting training, but I haven't heard much."

Anj protested this, saying, "You didn't sound interested. You wanted me to prove who I am."

"We had plenty of time after that. I've been on the phone more this past month than in most of a normal year, and half of that's been with you."

"Yeah, granted, but we never discussed me and what I'm doing much, except for the manticore thing." He became aware of Revan's gaze, and that default expression of aloof interest, and trailed off. "There were more... important things... Sir? I'm sorry."

Revan settled back on his heels, evidently satisfied with something or other. "Oh, no. I do enjoy tangents. They can lead to such fruitful ends. You should know this, Anj." Benign as could be, he nodded. "Valerie. You asked if he is my pupil. I am teaching several young men and women the ways of the Force, and your brother is among them, yes. But it is a looser, more fluid relationship than that of Master and Padawan. I will not be staying for long, so my plan is to only cover the basics."

This was the first Anj had heard of that. "You're not, sir? You'll go back to Base? Already?"

"No. No, I really must avoid Base. My return would lead to some complications, and it would undo some of that work I have done," Revan said with just a hint of distaste. It vanished in his next sentence. "I have wanderlust, you see. My greatest joy has ever been venturing out, into the unknown, finding new places and people, and... well. For the forseeable future I am confined to a single planet, so I will endeavor to see as much of it as possible." He closed his eyes. "I have mastered this dialect, English, and the variation called Spanish. Today I have begun to learn spoken and written Japanese, which promises to be an interesting study. You overheard me practicing the basic characters." His eyes opened, and there was that smile again. "When I am fluent, I will leave this place, and I will make my way to Japan."

This was more than Revan had ever said about himself before. It took a moment for it to sink in. "When do you think you'll be back?" He would be back. Of course he would.

"Not for quite some time, I'm thinking. I am not really part of your Empire, child. It's been years since I was out on my own with nothing but what I can carry." The older man's eyes unfocused briefly, his voice dropping until Anj had to lean forwards and strain his ears to hear it. "Though I had a ship, then. And a companion. And, together, we were full in the light..."

There was a silence. Anj opened and shut his mouth, trying to figure it out. Finally, he asked, "So you're leaving?" His voice cracked very slightly on that last syllable.

"Yes. I will leave and I have no plans to return," Revan said, very slowly and clearly, as if to a child. His voice softened a bit. "Though I will admit that since my plans so seldom work, I have made very few this time. I doubt I am needed here. You will do fine without me. Your talents are all in Control and Sense anyway, and the others are the same." He leaned forwards, and spoke with a curious emphasis. "You will do fine. There are other teachers."

Anj really wanted to ask if Revan really meant to leave and not come back, but he instead opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, and croaked, "I will do fine. There are other teachers." And... and it was true, really. They could put in a request at Base. Revan wanted to leave? He wasn't really one of them anyway. Anj wasn't the only one unnerved by a teacher who would, without warning, stop his own heart to demonstrate the effect this caused in the Force.

"I might still be here when you return, of course. I did not choose a simple language, and at the moment I am only on the phenomes." Revan shrugged. "I hope that the Force will favor you on your endeavor. That is not something I would choose to do. Your compatriots back at the Base told me names and showed me flat images, but they mean little to me now."

Finally Anj glanced back over at Valerie, who'd been quiet. She was staring ahead into space, eyes glazed, vacant. There was a - no other word for it, a sense from her of blankness.

"Val? You okay?" Nothing. Something cold formed in Anj's gut. He turned very slowly back to Revan. "What did you do?"

"You are not alarmed," Revan said, and somehow as he said it it was true.

"I am not alarmed." He did have a little anxiety, but it was frozen under a sudden dead calm. He repeated the question. "What did you do?"

Revan had a different smile on now, thinner-lipped and smaller. "A trick. She will not remember this conversation, but neither will there be a gap in her memory, or a single second of time she could not account for. She will remember asking questions about you, and my answers. They will be true."

"How do you-"

"Put it down to a gestalt of innate skill, the combined teaching of more Masters than I care to remember, and four decades of practice," he said, leaning back and smirking. "It causes some minor problems if applied for more than an hour or so in a casual situation, psyches being such curious things, and it's such a nuisance altering the perceptions of two or three people at once, but I won't detain you for nearly that long."

That sounded a bit like a dismissal, but Valerie was still sitting there on the rug, barely blinking. ...Well, why not ask? No one really knew. "Sir? Can I ask you a question?"

"You just did. But fine. Ask."

"What happened back at Base that got you sent here?" There were all kinds of rumors, most of them contradictory.

He'd surprised Revan with that. The Master blinked and brought a hand up to stroke his mustache. "Do you know, no one has asked me that before," he said slowly. "Hmm. I haven't thought about it, but... Well. Do understand, what I know is mostly secondhand. I remember very little of it. I was a different person, then. Apparently Sato had his own companions. They mourn him as if he has died, and I believe they are right."

Anj nodded, a little bit hypnotized. It was dark in here, and by moving his head Revan could hide part of his face in shadow. Whether or not he sounded like George Takei, he had an unbelievably compelling voice, quiet enough to require listeners to focus on it and strong enough to force continued focus. Part of the Red Guard realized that this was the same rise-and-fall voice Revan used during lessons.

"They told me, reluctantly, of an occurrence at Base. One of your fellow troopers, a personal friend of Sato's, found a door where there had previously been none, and when he opened it he found a little closet-space with another door, this one leading to another part of Base. The secondary shooting range, if I recall right."

"And at some point, I believe it was in one of the lesser equipment rooms bordering Mandalorian territory, a doorway opened leading into a hallway which had never been seen before. I gather that it was completely dark and featureless, although one of Sato's companions told me that when light was carried in, all surfaces were a uniform ash gray."

"The hallway apparently took five and a half minutes for the men who had discovered it to traverse, and should have led outside. The hallway terminated in an immense room with many doorways of its own, and at that point the men retreated to inform their companions of it - including Sato, as he was the highest-ranked within the group."

"Sato, it seems, remembered well his life from before, from... from when he was called Louise, and was different." Here, oddly enough, Revan's voice lost the rhythm, becoming uncertain for the first time. He recovered though, and was soon in form again. "He listened to them and was shown the doorway, and told them of a fiction he had read. About a book about a book about a film about a house that is a labyrinth, and which in all its permutations drove those in contact with it mad. He told them that their report and what could be seen from the equipment room matched the description of the house, and said that it could not be left in place or covered up."

"Sato convinced his companions that action must be taken immediately, and that he alone, being as strong and skilled in the Force as I am, could stop it. And so he ventured in alone. I remember that it was cold, and dark past the light that he carried, and the only sound was a periodic low growl in the air, but I know nothing more. His companions were reluctant to tell me about any of this. They know only that Sato came out again eleven hours later, wounded, and the hallway closed, and the door vanished, and he told them that it was done before perishing of his injuries."

"In the mean time they had thought to tell another of higher rank, who chastised them for not doing so previously, but was wise enough not to venture after Sato. A perimeter was set, and those on it experienced a creeping paranoia. I spoke to one who had briefly picked up the conviction that something was right behind him, waiting. Another was convinced that during his brief foray in he had been stalked by something so quiet that it could only be heard as silence. Your people are disciplined and trained to trust one another, and less than a day passed, so the effects were limited and temporary."

"On Sato's return and death, they had him revived, but as I understand it the process is inexact. They tried for some days to believe that I was he, and to convince me of that. What I know is mostly what they told me, walking forwards from when they first met him and backwards from the last time they saw him, hoping to jar my memory. But they are strangers to me, and I to them, and I believe my presence disturbs them. I walk as he walked, I look as he looked, I have his skills and power, his voice, some of his mannerisms, and yet I am not Sato."

"I am not bound as he was to stay with them and so, though this world is largely unknown to me, I will travel it." Revan's tone dropped back into the conversational range, breaking the spell. "And that is what I know. I know how you and yours spread stories, and so my hope is that you will tell the right one." He stood, for a moment seeming to levitate out of the kneel. "Safe journey to you."

Anj scrambled to his feet with a good deal less grace, then offered a hand up to Valerie, who took it. "You too, sir."

His sister moved her hand in an abortive wave as they left. "Goodbye Revan. I hope you're right about those contacts."

"Fare you well, Valerie." Revan smiled once more as the door closed.

The Red Guard shuddered. People in the 501st, mostly troopers, died in Xanadu. It happened. When you were an army of trained and equipped humans divided up into eight or nine-men squads going out into that madhouse trying to stop fights and aid the helpless, you lost men. Revivals brought them back, and they were easier and more certain when the body was intact or at least gathered into one space, but it wasn't safe or sure. People who'd been returned to life were usually disoriented and delirious for a while, hence why they tended to get sent here to Outpost, but sometimes they came back different. There were so many stories about that, and a lot of them were true.

Once he was away from Revan, though, Anj had a few doubts about this one. He'd talked to TK-0480, whose officer girlfriend had been involved in it somehow, and the other trooper had made it sound like a bigger deal. Of course, most people either didn't know or didn't want to talk about this. He remembered when Revan and those troopers who thought he was Sato had come here, how down the troopers had seemed when they left, so that part was probably true...

Valerie interrupted his thoughts with a question. "So he's psychic, huh?"

Anj blinked. "Well, you could put it like that, I guess. Force-user is the technical term, but psychic works too." ...Revan had been able to hold an insulated conversation with Anj and Valerie at the same time. What if there'd been someone else? He reviewed his memory of the room. Too shadowed to tell, no incriminating noises or sensations.

"Does that make you psychic, then, since he's teaching you?"

"Ah. Uh, sort of? When he was poking around to see what I could do he told me that I'm mostly Control and Sense, very little Alter skill. That is, if I'm trained some more I can do little things to myself, boost or dampen senses for a while, I can sense danger and things about my environment, but I can't do anything with minds and I'll never be one of the great talents. I can't do much of anything that's clearly visible to someone like you." Probably. Anj wasn't getting his hopes up. He was a Red Guard, not a Sith Lord. There was no shame in this.

"Did you really burn your hand trying to move a candle flame with your mind?"

Next

Placeholder.

1984

Anj stopped outside of the door to the workshop, collected himself, and knocked. The voice inside said, “Enter. I have to finish working on this. Pray do not disturb anything.”

Closing the door silently behind himself, the Red Guard slipped in and watched SL-1984 bending over a workbench. There were several low boxes on it, each one with a gleaming skeletal hand and partial arm rising from it, most of them grasping what were probably tools. In one hand SL-1984 was using what looked like a slim, featureless pen with a blue spark at the end, which might be serving as a welding torch for the tiny brazing rod held in the other hand. He was currently absorbed in using those tools on the thumbtip of one of the arms. The torch hissed softly, the sound all but masked by the man’s steady, amplified breathing.

“Wait another minute. I need to see if this works.” SL-1984 did something to the box with the arm that he’d been adjusting, then lifted and moved it to a new workbench. Fiddling with the box made a number of tiny irregularities on the arm spin very fast, accompanied by a tooth-jarring whine. He daubed clear oil on each one and tested them again. Now they were silent. After that he opened one of the drawers and took a heap of clear elastic strips to dump on the bench’s surface, then slid off one of his long gloves to attach the elastic strips to the irregularities on the disembodied hand, moving quickly enough that it was a strain to follow. Without the glove, the Vader’s own hand looked very like the one on the bench, but more gold than silver, and with a lot more clear ‘muscles’.

Still moving fast, SL-1984 finished the attachments and started testing the new arm, apparently using something set into the box. He didn’t look up, but he did order, “Get me the number one remote connector. It’s oblong on one side, very long, and on that shelf. No, the one with the glass. Just disconnect it. Good.”

Taking it from Anj, fingers clicking on the remote’s casing, he plugged it in to the box and keyed a sequence in. With just a touch of ceremony SL-1984 pressed and held down one of two more prominent buttons and said, “Garrett Thompson, respond.” Releasing that button, he held the other.

Almost immediately Garrett’s voice came through, tinny and false-sounding on the poor speaker built into the box. “Something you need, Aydeefor?”

Click release, click press. “You always know that it’s me.” SL-1984 was in his default mode of being faintly, dryly amused by everything. On bad days it… slipped, and the basic Vader showed, admittedly more in the form of heavy dark sarcasm than anything else. So far.

Click, click. “Must be a gift of mine. That or your voice. Okay, what do you want? The band’s doing some awful eighties power ballad, so I can spare a few minutes.”

Click, click. “I ‘’like’’ eighties. It’s in my designation. I’ve remade formulation Esk with a few minor variations. It’s holding well. I need you to try it.”

Click, click. “Which letter is Esk again? E? Or AE? I don’t think you’ve had that many configurations yet.”

Click, click. “E. AE is Enth. Pay attention. The cable system is a dead end. I want you to come in through the frequency we’ve set up.”

They had some kind of exchange of technical details, and Anj didn’t yawn. Red Guards didn’t yawn or appear unfocused, not when on duty and especially not when in the presence of a superior. He did shift a little, and tried not to look at the workshop. It wasn’t exactly disorganized, or dirty, but he always wanted to check the boxes.

SL-1984 was a Vader, of course, but an odd one. People tended to notice that he was dressed all in white, and that in the very rare occasions when he’d used his lightsaber the blade had been blue. His breathing was softer, and that outfit had a bit less armor and a bit more cloth. He also gently resisted being called a Sith.

In the long ago – two months, was it? – he’d been Michael, notable for being a teenager with an odd combination of lack of temper and a wild love for being in the spotlight. He hadn’t been the first to make the white “Redeemed” Vader suit, which had appeared for literally two panels in a minor comic book, but he’d liked it more than the other guy had. Even seeing pictures of himself Photoshopped into “Hello Kitty Vader” and the resulting mockery hadn’t phased him, not Michael.

Anj listened with half an ear to the technobabble, reflecting that Outpost might well be the only place for SL-1984. When he went on a patrol things tended to get weird, and he made some of the people back at Base uncomfortable. One of the terms Anj had heard was ‘lobotomised’, but that was blatantly untrue. He just didn’t rage and posture. And he could back down without turning the action into something epic. And, okay, fine, he was ‘’very’’ sympathetic to the Rebel Legion, enough so that he’d something to do with the fact that they and the 501st were allies now.

There were rumors that the DEKA Research & Development Corporation, a small Earth company with numerous inventions, was courting him. So was The Open Prosthetics Project; something about transhumeral and biomechatronics. Once the uproar had hushed a little, a lot of companies had looked at Xanadu, remembered that genius had been quite a common trope in fiction, and seen credit symbols. Dollar signs. Whatever.

Click, click. “Ready. Try it at your convenience.” SL-1984 took his hand off the button and laid it flat on the workbench’s surface.

There was no visible change. Garrett’s speaker hiss-popped in his approximation of a sigh. “Would it have killed you to put in an eyecam? The build team makes those now.”

“You don’t need to see for this. Now, you know the specs. Elbow. Good. Wrist. Now swivel. Good. Try moving the fingers. Faster. Good.” Each motion, abrupt and jerky, came with a faint mechanical whir as motors tightened the elastic, working harder to pull the bones around. “Try the thumb-fingertip exercise. Again. Again. Faster. That’s just flailing.”

“Cut me some slack. The only fingers I’ve had for more than half an hour are the three on the build team’s rig. Since October, I mean.”

“I know. They used my Besh-design joints and an amazingly primitive metal structure, hardly any somatics at all. My work is better. Fine grasp test.” As an aside, SL-1984 told Anj, “Bring me something from the box on that desk over there. Good. I have an item here, which I will give you once you are in position to receive it. Good. Shift to a key grasp. You’re getting better at this. I want you to describe it for me.”

“This would be a lot easier with an eyecam. Fine, fine. It’s small. Like, seriously small. Hard. Doesn’t weigh much. It’s got… flat sides? I think it’s a cube.”

“Hold it between two fingers – no, hold them up like this, bent like so, good. Use the thumb on one side. That’s a corner. Try left. Left. Good. What can you tell me about that side?”

“It’s smooth. Most of it. There’s something right in the middle…” Garrett fell silent for a second as he scratched the tip of the arm’s thumb along that side. “It’s a dice?”

“In the singular form, the proper word is ‘die’, but yes. Good. Next time I will have to find something smaller. Give it back.” SL-1984 tossed the die casually in Anj’s direction, and the Red Guard fielded it. Rather than take it back to the box, he slipped it into his pocket with a couple of others he’d taken. There had been complaints about dice going missing.

SL-1984 took rapid notes on a datapad, consulting readings as he went. Garrett, still hooked up to the arm, waited a moment and asked, “So, are you going to branch out into legs?”

“Perhaps.” He paused in his notes. “Later, though. I would like to refine the arms more. Legs aren’t part of the plan, not for some time. There are a lot of more important things to explore.”

“What about that body you were thinking about making?”

“The algorithms for walking on two legs, particularly considering balance issues, are very complex. Wheels and a motor will be enough. In all honesty, shoulder joints are a struggle, I have no interest in facial expressions, and I have some doubts that you would be able to use two arms simultaneously. Your processors are tested with just one.”

“But-“ Garrett not-sighed again. “All right, that’ll do for a start. What about Steph?”

“What about Stephan?”

“Can’t you do something for him?”

SL-1984 stopped taking notes again and considered this. There was a very slight change in his tone, almost undetectable. Anj heard it, and carefully looked away. “Your faith in me is heartening, but consider. A small alien being, covered in fur that regenerates when shaved, with entirely unfamiliar neural circuitry, and who unconsciously siphons from my life support? One or both of us would be worse off for the attempt. I would be happy to give a copy of my notes or a prototype arm to someone who would take that project on. Do tell me if you find one.”

Garrett must not have heard the change in tone. He started to wheedle. “Well – look, it’s just that Steph’s been in a funk for a month, at least. He spends more and more time sleeping. And he’s been sort of shy since, you know, but he won’t even talk to me like he used to. He said he wants some space, but… I know you could do something.”

“Are you done?” the Vader asked, as quietly as his vocabulator would let him, then snapping the datapad closed. On the other side of the workshop, Anj started fervently counting ceiling panels. “Look. For one, I am not a miracle worker. For two, I can read between the lines. Go to anyone else for relationship advice. Anyone. Because if you would just think for the briefest time, you would remember that everyone I have ever cared for is gone. So I’m not exactly a good choice.”

“But-“

“Changing the subject.” The datapad came open again and was set on the workbench again. Okay, Anj thought, that hadn’t been nearly as bad as he’d feared. He’d sounded tired more than anything else, and unless Garrett decided to explore heights of stupidity, it was over. SL-1984 continued, more measured, “You recall my thoughts on the different kinds of somatic receptors?”

“I – uh, I mean, I think so. Different types of sensors in skin, I ‘’thought’’ I had some for heat and cold but it turns out I don’t , I’ve got equivalents for position and touch, you’ve been able to make some.”

“Yes, though they are rudimentary. I believe I have managed another sensory modality, and those have been built into this arm. Raw data isn’t the same as true input. Shall I test them?”

“Sure.”

Out came the little welding torch, again, this time with a yellower spark. “This should be heat or cold, or possibly pain. Brace yourself. It will be on the wrist.”

“When are you-“ Garrett’s voice dissolved into a pulse of static as the arm twitched violently away from the torch. The voice returned, but a little slurred with shock. “Fuck! That hurt! That actually hurt!”

“Ah, so that isn’t a temperature perception node after all. Thank you for your assistance.” Somewhere between amusement and sarcasm, he added, “I couldn’t be sure. The data wasn’t clear.”

“Why the fuck would you put pain receptors in-“

“Didn’t you hear me? It was either pain or temperature. And pain is useful. If there is no pain, you do not know that you are doing something wrong. There are stories I could tell you. Trust me, you’ll need them. I have other business at hand. Expect contact later.”

“I suppose I don’t have a choice,” Garrett muttered.

“There is always a choice. Farewell.” SL-1984 disconnected the remote and set it aside. He held very still for a moment, then turned to Anj.

“I’m sorry you had to wait so long. You know how it goes,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Anj told him. He had to say it. He couldn’t complain about a Dark Lord of the Sith taking too long, even when said lord wasn’t dark or Sith anymore.

There was another pause. SL-1984 loomed, but it wasn’t his fault. He really couldn’t not loom.

“I hope I have not upset him too much. I may have to apologize later. My uncertainty was a lie. I knew that was a pain receptor. It was not stimulated greatly, but he has not felt pain in some time, so I believe it hurt more.” The elastic on that part of the wrist was a little bit darkened and dimpled.

Awkwardly, Anj said, “Just give him a while to cool off. The worst he’ll do is call up a radio station to complain about you, my lo- sir.” Neither of the current two SLs at Outpost really liked being called 'my lord', given a choice.

“Mmm. That’s small comfort.” SL-1984 pulled back a little, managing not to tower over the Red Guard. Very, very slowly he twitched his white cape to the side and settled onto a tall reinforced stool. “So you are leaving us.”

“Only for a few weeks,” Anj said hastily, Revan’s talk about abandoning the 501st fresh in his mind. “Just until it’s over. The hospice people told Valerie – she’s my sister –“

“I remember her. She was the good listener.”

“Yeah, that’s right, you knew her.” He cleared his throat uneasily. SL-1984 knew that Valerie was here now, and Anj knew he knew it. They were not going to meet. Valerie was only meeting one person who'd known her before the Event, and that person was Anj. “The hospice people said that she'd been stable for the first couple months, but she's started the decline. I said my goodbyes back when she could still understand them, back in July. Still, I wouldn’t feel right missing the funeral.”

Unlike Garrett, SL-1984 could produce a real sigh, although it was wildly out of synch with his respirator. “Sit down. Please.”

There were a lot of tall reinforced stools in the workshop, all of them pretty much identical. Anj picked one just far enough away that he didn’t feel disrespectful, and wondered where the Vader had gotten them from. Troopers got furnishings from just about anywhere - appropriated off of curbs, taken from their old homes if they were close enough, bought cheap if necessary. That was why the dining room looked the way it did. He had trouble seeing officers or SLs doing that.

"You must know that you will probably be poorly received," SL-1984 said slowly, leaning forwards and clasping his hands together, gloved one over bare. "You are not who you were. Perhaps you will remember that I, I met your father once, in passing. I believe he will carry on as if he does not know you. Others..."

Carefully, he added, "They will be wary of you. Some will fear you. I know you have seen that before, and you think you are prepared. But these are people you knew, once. It will be... different. And you will be alone in this."

"Understood." Anj frowned vaguely at the tiles on the floor. "But I have to do this. Not going - well, I'd regret it forever. And not going now would make it a lot easier to make an excuse next time," he said. "And there should be a next time."

"I suppose you know what you're getting into. And you are a Red Guard, 1407. You're trained to work well even alone." The mask was immobile, but Anj felt the steadiness of SL-1984's gaze. "My fear is just that something unforeseeable will happen. You must comport yourself with an eye to your situation, and attempt to reflect well on - sorry, I let it get away from me." Some Vaders, slipping the self-control that they mastered as part of being in the 501st, let rage and scorn into their voices. This one spoke formally.

"I mean, remember that you will be out there on your own, and besides the obvious this means that anything you do, you do as the single representative of the 501st. Possibly all of Xanadu."

Anj blinked. "Do you think the trouble magnet will follow me?" The trouble magnet, held to be a trooper's superstition basically since the concept had come up, was just too reliable to be dismissed anymore. Like Murphy's Law, it was entirely speculative in nature. It tended to manifest as things - anything from a purse-snatching to a ritual intended to do something that involved rending the fabric of space and time - happening when there was someone close by who could do something about it. Basically any time a patrol left Base, it walked right into some form of action, no organized enemies needed.

"I have no idea. We can hope that it won't, and overall you will be bored." The Vader's tone lightened slightly; his hands slipped apart and he stopped leaning forwards so intently. "If something does happen, try not to kill anyone. It makes us look bad."

"Understood." The Red Guard smiled. "I'll keep everything on stun setting. Oh, and I might as well say this now - Revan's leaving for good."

"I know. Oh, don't look surprised, I have my sources."

"Does that mean he told you, or someone else?" Anj was a little annoyed, and said so. "I mean, I was away for literally overnight, and I find that he's preparing to go."

"Preparing, yes, in the sense that he has made the initial decision and started to learn a new language. He has been thinking about this for as long as I have known him. And I told you, I have my sources. You're not hearing about this late. Most of Outpost doesn't know yet."

"All right." Anj checked the time and winced. Waiting for SL-1984 to run that test had eaten up a lot of time. "I should get back before they miss me."

"Just a moment more. Don't stand." SL-1984 rose slowly and strode over to loom over Anj, who shifted in place. "Let me see your hand, either one. Hah. Sometimes I wonder what order I'd have to give to make you hesitate." Very slowly and deliberately, SL-1984 examined Anj's hand with one gloved and one bared prosthesis, only letting the tips of his fingers contact the Red Guard's skin. They were cold and a little sharp, like blunted metal claws. After a moment he let go and stepped back. "All right. Sorry, it's been some time since I had a chance to see a real arm. I wanted to be certain that I hadn't forgotten."

"There are four different muscles in the ball of your thumb. At least eight bones move together in your wrist. If you move it at all, you're using a range of muscles that start in your forearm. If you tilt it and move your thumb, that's ten different muscles and at least six bones working there. That's what I'm trying to make. I started off trying to do it one-handed." Making a fist with the bared prosthesis, he released it. "The replacement worked as well as I could have hoped. Unfortunately subsequent efforts have not worked as well. At times it is frustrating. But the work is challenging, and rewarding, and there is a net benefit at the end, so I will continue."

After a pause, Anj said, "Well, you've made a lot of progress, as far as I can tell." He tended to come down to the workshop every few days and had heard most of this before.

"I suppose I should wish you well - oh, there is a favor I wanted to ask you. You remember where I used to live, correct? I would like you to stop there on the way back. Do you have a datapad? You need one." Reaching to one side of his control box, he brought out something roughly the size of a CD case, removed a datacard from one of the slots, and inserted a different one. Starting to push it towards the Red Guard, SL-1984 reconsidered, pulled back, and said, "Hold on, I should update it," before turning, white cape flagging, and heading over to one of the workbenches.

Anj considered refusing the favor for about half a second, knowing he could probably get away with it, but the white Vader was still a friend, even if conversations tended to peter out.

A moment later SL-1984 was back, the datapad he held now featuring a recharge plug.

Morning

Garlic soup. Nutty, sweet flavor.

[the band?]

Early in the morning, Anj went out into the parking lot and joined the other troopers. They stretched together and talked sparsely in the predawn light, waiting for some internal signal. Some were yawning or hazy-eyed, most were alert and sober. They were all dressed the same, in arm-baring sleeveless shirts and running shorts with pale laced-up shoes, though some shirts had come that way, some were T-shirts with the arms sawed off. Amy, Outpost's official unofficial female trooper, wore a black halterneck which had belonged to one of Anj's friends, once. The part of him that always, always checked saw that everyone in sight was armed - a pocketed vibroblade here, a hold-out blaster in a hidden holster there, an entire E-11 along someone's back or hanging from the waist.

Isaac, the furry who'd come as an exterminator, loitered outside of the door, not quite part of the group. A cigarette hung, unlit, in her hand. Last time he'd been here she'd stayed inside, but she'd still been awake for it. She was getting closer, every time she did this. Today she was even wearing something that bared her legs beneath the knee. Everything still clung, of course, but it seemed to cling a little less closely these days, especially compared to when she'd first come here.

Like the others, Anj ignored her. If she wanted to come join them, she could try and keep up. He didn't think that-

There! The ones closest to the gate had started, and it was like a switch had gone off in everyone, and they were all running. Would this be the number four course, or three, or were they trying something new today? The ones at the head of the pack didn't quite choose it, just as they didn't quite decide when to start. At any rate, they tended to stick to the roads.

The troopers kept tight. No more than four to a row, not much gap between rows. Those running at a steady pace stayed on the right, letting those going faster or slowing down pass on the left. There wasn't much of that, though. Most of the people in his vision were running almost in sync. For a moment Anj considered heading on up from his position somewhere in the middle, since he wouldn't be doing this again until he got back. Nah.

The morning run was pretty much a daily essential for troopers at Outpost. Over at Base, they had those daily patrols, walking around Xanadu in small teams looking for trouble, or letting it find them, depending on who you asked. Here there was nothing like that - everyone would respond if something happened, like both escapes from Twin Hills, and in theory if anyone else from Xanadu started causing trouble here they'd be the first on the scene. All in all, though, not a lot happened here. Officially, they were here to keep a guard on an AT-AT who was never expected to be used.

No one was actively working to steal or destroy Garrett. This was a dead-end duty, almost no chances for excitement or advancement. There was nothing to do here. In the Empire, an outpost like this would be staffed by recruits with little promise, political foul-ups shunted to where they could do little harm, men with no leadership skills aging out of their prime, and people who just didn't care. But hardly anyone in the 501st was like that, and without something to do they would probably go quite literally insane. The run helped.

It was a moment of united effort. They never chanted running songs or anything like that. They didn't need to. All they needed was to run.

It was always a jog at first, a more leisurely run, none of them stretching out that far. Very steady. He could keep that pace up for hours. Any of them could, even fully armed and armored. Troopers all had phenomenal endurance. It was part of the job.

Around about this point, Anj always started feeling it. Flow. Pure focus, the elimination of all those extra thoughts and distractions, the feeling that he was one with the group, that they moved as one, and it was all effortless. When they sped up out of the jog and started on the way back to Outpost, no one started picking up the pace. They all stretched out further and ran faster at once.

And time seemed to slow; and the world seemed to narrow to pounding feet and steady deep breaths and loose sweaty fists swinging in arcs to counterbalance legs; and all their heads whipped around as one as the car went past, the man inside turning to stare at them with parted lips with impatience and just a little anxiety; and the building burn that didn't quite hurt, it felt good; and the jogger with the little yapping dog and earbuds who didn't know they were there until they thundered past; and turning at an intersection and being in a more populated place, narrowing the ranks to fit on a sidewalk, getting off the road; and the jarring, leaping, high-impact long term run that only humans could do this well.

And then, on the last leg, there was the sprint. The best part. Plunging from left to right in full swing, fast as they could, gasping, adrenaline kicking in, physically falling out of sync since some of them were just faster than others, mentally still together. They streamed in through the opened gate, the trooper who'd drawn the short straw watching with envy from the guard box, and spilled out over the parking lot, splitting into clumps and walking briskly to cool down.

Still breathing hard, drenched in sweat, stinking of it, Anj felt it dissolve and came back to himself, blinking in the yellow sunlight. Now there was a little conversation, laughs at the surprise they'd seen from the people they'd passed, Anj and a few others ribbing Danny for how his shirt had soaked through and his skin dripped, now they downed the water they had set out beforehand and stretched again. The run was invigorating. He saw easier, broader smiles now, more animation in movements, more appreciative glances and casual contact, most blatant near the official female.

Now they would trickle back in, as some of his fellows had started to do, and shower and breakfast and read today's datacard and face the day. The ones who'd signed to head back to Base today, rotating in the newcomers, would pack up and get ready to go. It wouldn't take long; troopers didn't tend to pick up a lot of things. Someone would be picked to go over their bunks and make sure they were neat and ready, but they usually were. Others, the ones on the build team with technical skills, would work together, probably working on that distance sight/hearing/speech thing some more, but also likely to try something different. No more jetpacks, that was certain. The suits had not liked that. Garrett's crew would go and see him, then some would stay and others would split off. The handful of untrained Force-Sensitives would work out when they saw Revan. The duty roster for the day would be thrashed out and settled.

And everyone not actively on duty, build team members resting their eyes and hands, Garrett's crew with or without Stephen in tow, would find something to do. Gossip was a huge part of it, though not a lot of them called it that. Complaining. Working on the band. Signing up for a shift on one of Outpost's three ancient computers and the buggy laptop. Arguing over who was allowed on what television, and which channel, and the whole mess with video games. Very little sex, oddly enough. Being a trooper apparently meant a suppressed libido.

Today, Anj wouldn't be one of them. He'd wash up and eat, but then he would leave, and he wasn't at all sure when he was coming back. The goodbyes had already been said. He got a few backslaps and well-wishes from some of the friends he'd made, but there was already a bit of distance. Some of them were heading back to Base next week. Others would follow. If this took too long, he'd come back to an Outpost with hardly anyone he knew. And if Revan was a quick enough study, even he might be gone.

But there was nothing he could do about that, so why fret? Besides. It wasn't like he wanted it to be over quickly. That might mean never seeing her that last time.

Roadtrip

The trip took about two days; they started in the morning at around nine hundred hours, stayed overnight at a motel, and arrived at approximately eighteen hundred hours. There were a few unscheduled stops. Once when Anj had demonstrated in an empty parking lot that he could drive a groundcar pretty well, which meant that they could switch off while driving. Once when sitting still got to him and he desperately needed to burn off some energy. Once when they argued about which route to take when it turned out the way they'd taken last time was Under Construction despite this being December. Once for the turtle.

That had been interesting. Valerie had been at the wheel, and they'd been having a meandering conversation.

"Remember when gas was four dollars a gallon?" he'd asked, a while after passing a gas station with uncomfortably high prices. She'd nodded.

"You had an orange sedan, right?”

“Red. Dark red sedan. Grandma sold it to me.” They were on a fairly backwaterish road through farmland somewhere in Georgia. It was paved and they'd already passed through a few clusters of houses and stores too small to be called towns.

“Oh. Right.” He sighed, not telling her that he could barely remember what car he’d had then. If he’d had a car at the time. “Sure is steep. Can you pay for it?”

“’Fuel-efficient economy’, remember? I’m fine.”

"Hard to believe this is happening," Anj said dreamily. There was a pause, and he continued. "I mean, when we were little girls - do you remember that, Val?"

Valerie took her eyes off the road to glance at him, staring pensively out of the passenger-side window. He was five foot nine with his shoes off, shaved his face in the mornings, and had shoulders that, even if they didn't compare to some of the other troopers', certainly were at least as wide as any she'd seen today. "Do you know what that sounds like?"

He laughed easily. "What, you think I should just switch to 'kid'? I was a little girl, Val. Getting genderfucked doesn't change what happened before. Not for me, anyway." Sobering, he said, "Great-Aunt Maria. Auntie Maria. Don't you remember when we were little? She was just the most awesome old lady ever." Anj added, almost under his breath, "Better than Grandma, even."

"Yeah..." Valerie didn't tell him that she'd been the younger one, and she really didn't have that many memories of when Auntie was 'all there', as Dad used to say. Still - "She traveled all over the world and collected those funny wooden dolls from everywhere. I think the museum still has a bunch of them in that exhibit. Didn't we used to hope that if we got that old we'd be like that?"

"Right. And since I was the older one you said that I'd probably end up more like Grandma with her cookies and the cats, and I always said that I just wouldn't get that old," he said.

Valerie couldn't remember Angela ever saying that, really. She'd always just started arguing, or changed the subject. Anj wasn't the same as Angela. She was starting to come to terms with that, to think of her big sister as gone. Maybe a clean break would have been better. Maybe she shouldn't have told him, when he called. Outside, it had started to rain.

Anj flinched visibly when the windshield wipers came on and started working noisily. He shook his head and adjusted the seat. "There was never anyone like her. I remember her arms, they were thicker than normal for old people. Really wrinkly, yeah, but not thin or flabby. I always wondered about that. And she had that way of talking. So blunt. Remember how when we ate out she'd always refuse to split the bill? She wanted to pay for it herself. She wanted to do everything for herself." He sighed.

After a moment, Valerie added, "She never got married, did she?" People didn't usually talk about what Auntie had been like before the decline started. It was something of a taboo topic; so, naturally, it was somewhere between uncomfortable and fascinating.

"Never. She did live with Auntie Esther. And Dad told me once that Auntie Esther wasn't actually, uh, related to us, but he said I should never tell her that. It was a really long time before I understood any of that."

Valerie said nothing. Auntie Esther was an even vaguer memory. She could remember the funeral - well, okay, she remembered that there had been a funeral, and during the divorce they'd gone with Auntie Maria to visit the grave once or twice, because their great-aunt had said Esther 'would have liked the company.' The Kincaids had a family tradition of photographs, lots of them, so she knew what Auntie Esther looked like, at least, as an old woman and as a younger one with long, curly brown hair and a perpetual blush. She honestly couldn't tell from the pictures if Esther and Maria had been - well, if they had, it had been discreet.

"I'm trying to remember as much as I can about her," Anj said vaguely. "You know there's not much time left. I'm actually surprised that she's lived this long. I guess it's good that I called you back when I did. I wouldn't have known otherwise. Can't tell you what it means to me." He sighed.

Feeling guilty - yes, she probably wouldn't have called to tell him, Dad definitely wouldn't have done it, and any excuses sounded paltry - Valerie glanced over and saw that he was hunched a bit, clutching at his bare arms half-consciously. She looked at the temperature reading on the dashboard - thirty-eight degrees - and through the windshield at the rain. They wouldn't be in the right state until they'd been on the highway for another eight or nine hours.

"Did you pack a coat?"

There was a pause. A quiet, fleshy smack drew her eyes back over to where Anj was holding his forehead in his hand. "I am an idiot. Aaagh. Obviously I can't wear my armor, I didn't bring my robes, I donated all the girl clothes and there is no way anything of yours is big enough. How, how could I forget that it is December?! Aaagh! I have like no body fat now, there was a temperature shift even down near Outpost, and we are going north. Emperor's guidance, I'd forget my toes if they weren't connected to my feet!"

Taking pity on him, Valerie smiled and turned on the heater. "We'll take the next off ramp and find a thrift store." Emperor's guidance? she wondered.

There was indeed a Goodwill in the next town, one of the bigger ones with clothes hung and organized by type on racks, not piled together in rummage bins. A few local people had braved the rain to look through the merchandise. They stared at Valerie and Anj.

Anj didn't seem to notice. He stopped a few feet past the door, pulled his arm back slightly so Valerie didn't overtake him, and turned his head slowly, scanning the entire space twice. What she could see of his expression from that angle suggested deep suspicion. Then he relaxed. Now, though, she thought she saw watchfulness. "Looks like coats are on that side. Let's go."

Valerie took him by the arm as they walked and hissed, "What was that about?"

"Ah. Well, I was trying to see where things were so we don't wander around for too long. You know how I hate shopping."

"I don't believe you." She watched him wince and added, "You are a horrible liar, have you figured that out?"

Anj sagged for just a second. He always had excellent posture, she'd noticed that. Even now, barely a moment passed before his spine straightened and his shoulders squared. His expression remained guilty, and he didn't let up watching. "Sorry. It's a Red Guard thing. Uh, scanning for threats, not being a bad liar."

"Threats? Here?" 'Here' was a well-lit Goodwill with maybe half a dozen other people, most of them watching the two strangers surreptitiously. This town had fewer than a million citizens, looked from what she'd seen like the kind of quiet place that kids couldn't wait to move out of, and last but not least was a few hundred miles north of Xanadu and all the people in it. And it was raining, even. Hadn't she read that street crime went down when it rained? ...Okay, admittedly she'd read that in a Discworld novel, and they didn't necessarily reflect the real world. Even so.

Anj crossed his arms over his chest and told her, "Threats can be anywhere. I can't let my guard down." He let both arms fall back to his sides. "It's just a Red Guard thing. I - look, I have to do it. And besides, we might have a low profile but anything could happen. It's complicated. Look, I'll try to explain later."

"I'll take you up on that," Valerie said, and stood aloof as Anj worked through a rack of extra-long coats, most of them trenchcoats or similar. She didn't know why he'd picked this section, honestly. There were heavier ones all over. He probably could have gone with a zip-up sweater. From what she'd heard there had been some snow and below-freezing temperatures, but it hadn't dipped below zero yet, and it wasn't like they were going to be hanging around outside.

Gloves. She could use a set of gloves. The problem with living in Florida - well, a problem; even before Xanadu she'd been troubled by the pests, tornado season, and the occasional fundamentalist - was that the weather was warm to hot, compared to where she'd grown up. You got out of the habit of having winter clothing heavier than long pants, a light jacket, maybe a sweater. Valerie had at least taken her old coat, but she couldn't remember if her gloves were still in the pockets. Usually she visited during the summer.

Coming back, trying to remember if Goodwill had a policy of washing things before putting them up for sale, Valerie heard Anj, dismayed, say, "Uh-oh."

He'd shrugged into one of them, a double-breasted khaki coat that was long enough to reach his knees, and Valerie could clearly see it sliding on him. The hem lengthened to around mid-thigh, the lapel stretching like a timelapse of plants growing, the sleeves opening at the front and widening tremendously, and the whole thing darkened, like dye had been spilled on it and started spreading. The cloth became nearly black, even in the lining, and then a new color spread across it. Red. It seemed subdued at first, but moment by moment brightened into scarlet.

By then the lapel and the sleeves had sort of merged into something like a waist-length cape that draped over his arms, and the cloth had stopped moving. There was a new, smaller lapel at the top of that; apparently the cape and the coat underneath shared a fold.

"I thought that didn't happen to you," she said, a little surprised at how matter-of-fact she sounded. She sounded a lot calmer than he looked, frankly.

"It - this is the first time, honest. Nothing like this has happened before; I thought the fitting might change, but..." Anj stepped closer to the nearest full-length mirror and turned in front of it, craning his neck to look at himself. From behind, Valerie saw that the cape/sleeves were still sleeves in back, but very wide. An incredulous smile spread on his face. "Well! This is an Inverness cape. Or coat. I can never remember the difference."

Valerie noticed that the other Goodwill patrons were nowhere to be seen. Way over at the counters with the cash register, the older man tending it was on the phone, eyes fixed on the Red Guard. She said the first thing that came to mind. "'Inverness' wouldn't have anything to do with 'Innsmouth', would it?"

"That's the Elder God thing? No, not as far as I know. It's the thing Sherlock Holmes wore - not the deerstalker hat, the coat. Only not tweed." He saw her blank expression and shrugged. "I was a Sherlockian a few years before I started playing soldier, remember? Started reading them when I was what, fourteen? Joined a fanclub and got the official pipe and magnifying glass not long after?" Smiling, he added, "I think I went with the conspiracy theory that Holmes was secretly a woman and or involved with Watson. Never liked him with Irene Adler."

He slid his fingers along the collar, and Valerie saw for the first time a sort of close-fitting undershirt in black, flush with the collar of the everyday shirt he wore over it. Its sleeves went as far as his wrists, too, which was odd, since his arms had been bare to the elbow when they'd been in the car.

Anj shrugged out of the coat, and the undershirt was clearly visible on his arms and at his neck. He handed it to Valerie, who was surprised enough to take it, and dug in a pocket, saying, "Here's thirty-five dollars. That was on the pricetag. I don't think I should be the one to take it up." Somehow the undershirt accentuated his muscles rather than hiding them, and she thought she saw a strap and some kind of holster, more obvious now, through his outer shirt.

There was a sensation like Valerie was holding the fabric too loosely and it was being pulled through her fingers; when she looked, the scarlet Inverness thing had turned back into a khaki trenchcoat. That was the Clothing Curse? Harmless though it seemed, she'd been holding it when it changed, and hairs were rising on her arms. That was just weird.

She'd hoped to avoid weird Xanadu stuff once they'd left the state. Which was probably a silly thought, considering that she was bringing with her a strange young man who had probably been her older sister back in October. Still, he hadn't seemed and still didn't seem like the kind of person who'd go around changing things into other things. And he'd been surprised, too. Maybe it was a fluke. She hoped it was a fluke.

"Please? The shopkeeper's afraid of me now," Anj said, breaking through her reverie. "He's called the cops already, and I'm sure he wasn't the only one. They should be here soon. There won't be trouble. I have papers for this." He said that last with the blind confidence of someone who really believed in his authority.

Angela hadn't been like that. She'd generally assumed that the cops weren't out to get anyone, but at the least she would have been braced for a lot of explaining, maybe a stay at the precinct. Memories weren't a person. Valerie took the dollar bills and nodded tightly.

She'd half expected it, but the way the shopkeeper shrank back warily when she approached, not hunkering down or running away but still treating the counter like a barricade, made her uneasy. Anj had stayed far back, his hands in his pockets, undershirt and armaments somehow no longer visible, even close up, unless you knew just where to look, so the shopkeeper took her money and shakily wished her a good day.

By the time they had left, policecars had pulled into the parking lot, lights on and sirens off. No one had drawn a gun, there were no megaphones, but there was a sense of hyperalertness. Anj, smiling sheepishly, hands open at his sides, went out to meet them.

He had brought papers permitting him to travel and carry a concealed weapon; while the former weren't strictly necessary from what she'd heard, they did provide an extremely detailed description of him, a couple of photos, and the number of whoever had approved him. He also looked pretty normal and was willing to explain.

The police were wary; still, everything checked out fine. Valerie, her usual ability to talk to anyone somewhat dampened, handed the coat over so that Anj could show off what it looked like on him and answered some questions, but she wasn't the main focus. She heard the word 'costume' used a few times and wondered about that.

It was over a lot faster than she'd thought, the policemen getting back in their cars and pulling away, one after the other. Anj wrapped up with the last policeman, shaking his hand and watching him leave.

"They have to respond to something like that," he told her as they walked back to her car. "They have to be suspicious. Did you see one of them talking on a phone? He was on the line with someone from Project X, reporting that it was a false alarm. Otherwise we'd probably have capes here already. Superheroes, I mean."

"So, what? Do the police just show up to stall - I heard something about costumes?"

"I'm a costume. So's Garrett, Revan, the Anomaly, Eric Winters... It's the general term for anyone from Xanadu." They reached the car, and he indicated that he wanted to drive. Valerie shrugged and took the passenger seat. She felt tired now. Maybe it was the overcast sky. "'Xanadu victim' is just too long, and for some of us 'victim' is the wrong word entirely. So we're costumes. Some of the capes want to be called ‘uniforms’, but that’s because they’re crazy. And yeah, the police wouldn't be able to handle most costume activity. Project X is trying to handle that."

"Mm," Valerie observed. "We've got what, eight hours to go?"

"Should be there by around eleven, I think. If we don't make another long stop."

"We'll need to get some food. Wake me then, all right? I'm gonna take a nap."