i like to do a lil bit of pixel art but im not v good at it, hope you guys will like it tho! ♡

like idk it just makes SO much sense with the whole losing yourself/your humanity theme from the cinematic?? going from actual human voices to those chopped up radio signal noises like there's no way

also vandal is SOOO pretty in the cinematic omg bungie needs to make a skin for her sooo bad with the human eyes and that cute oversized jersey like HELLO??? shes literally such a girlie pop im obsessed

finally done with part 3, hope you all enjoy and thank you for reading ♡

part 1 & 2 here: https://www.reddit.com/r/okbuddyRunners/s/bmdAN4Kkq2 https://www.reddit.com/r/okbuddyRunners/s/4DFlrrX69F

---

Chapter Three: Outpost, the Dorms (cont.)

Nobody had ever tried to give a Thief shell anything. From the inside, it went like this.

Icon had a system. She had always had a system; it was most of what she was. You entered a room and you assigned values. Every object in it got a number. Exits got ranked. People got a threat weight and a use case, in that order. You held all of it at once and it cost you nothing to hold, because she had been doing it since her first hour awake. It came with the shell, the same as the reach did.

It worked on rooms. It worked on people. It had, all the way up to about a minute ago, worked beautifully on Glitch — because appraisal is a thing you do to something, and as long as she was the one doing it, she was the one with her hand on the lever.

Glitch rolled over, propped herself up on one elbow, and put a hand flat on Icon's chest.

The system produced nothing at all.

Icon's first response was so fast it did not go through anything resembling thought. She caught the hand. Redirected it — up, harmless, to her own shoulder. Turned her head and put her mouth back on Glitch's throat, because that was a move that had ended this conversation twice already and would end it a third time, and it would be easy, and Glitch would let her, because Glitch let her do anything.

"No. Nope." Glitch caught the wrist. Held it. "You're doing a thing."

"Mm."

"You're doing the thing where you make it about me again." She pushed up further, silver hair sticking out at nine angles, blue paint smeared to her ear, entirely undignified and completely serious. "You've done it twice. That's a pattern. I notice patterns, I'm not — okay, I'm not good at noticing patterns, but I noticed this one, which means it's enormous."

Icon looked at her.

For the first time all night, she did not have an answer ready.

"I know," she said.

That was all of it she had.

The trouble was that she could see the whole thing laid out, the way she could see a floor plan. It was embarrassingly simple.

Four hundred and six contracts of taking.

A Thief shell had come off the loom undifferentiated, walked out of a SekGen lab in someone else's hands, and never gone back. That was the origin story, the one in the codex, the one people repeated in every staging hub between here and Mars — and every single line of her architecture had been drawn from it. Acquire. Extract. Leave. She had never in her operational life been on the receiving end of a transaction. She had never been handed anything, because a hand extended toward her was a thing to evaluate, and she had gotten very good at evaluating, and the evaluation always came back the same: take it and go.

But you could not take this. There was no version where she came away holding it. She could not steal it and she could not price it and she could not, she was discovering with something close to alarm, leave.

And the second problem, the smaller one, the one that was somehow worse:

She could not be read.

They had built that into her, and it had never been a cost before. A Thief shell goes dim by design — the lattice damped almost to nothing, the honesty woven out of her at the loom, because a body that lights up when it feels something is a body you can find in the dark. Sekiguchi had sold it as a feature: encrypted neural locks, industry-leading discretion, your life in your new shell remains yours. Nobody had ever asked what it cost to be a woman nobody could read. She had been unreadable from the first minute she opened her eyes and had considered it, correctly, the single greatest asset she owned.

Glitch lit up. Glitch could not help lighting up. Glitch had lain there under her hands broadcasting on every channel, and Icon had known at every moment exactly how close she was and exactly what she wanted and exactly what to do next, and it had been the easiest thing she had ever done.

Nobody was ever going to know that about her. Not this one. Not anyone. She could want something with her entire chassis and the surface would say nothing at all, and she would have to tell somebody, out loud, in words, and she had four hundred and six contracts of evidence that she did not do that.

"Oh," Glitch said quietly. "Oh, you're bad at this."

"Mm."

"You're bad at this. The Icon. Sekiguchi's finest. Four hundred contracts, cracks anything with a lock on it." She was already moving — getting a knee over, getting both hands flat on white and pressing her back into the mattress with the full committed weight of a shell that had died fourteen times and learned nothing from any of them. "You're a whole disaster."

Icon could have stopped her.

That was the part Glitch thought about later, at length, for years. Icon was stronger and faster in every category that mattered on paper. Thirty centimetres of reach. Leverage on every joint. Four hundred contracts of doing exactly this to other people. She could have ended it with one hand without sitting up.

Icon thought about it too. For about a second and a half, which for her was a long deliberation: the whole clean catalogue of exits, ranked, the way she ranked everything. Roll left. Redirect. Say something dry and land it and watch Glitch laugh and lose the thread, because Glitch always lost the thread, because Glitch was the easiest Runner to distract and Icon had known that since the marsh and had never used it.

She put both arms down on the mattress instead. And went still. And let her.

It cost more than the wall had. It cost more than the dinner had. Somewhere in her a process that had been running since her first boot flagged an error, and she declined to look at it.

"Okay," Glitch said, and her voice had gone strange and gentle at the edges. "Okay. I am going to tell you one true thing about myself and then we are never discussing it again. I have never been any good at holding onto anything. But I am the best on Tau Ceti at being handed something. So shut up and let me give you one."

---

So Glitch took her time.

Actual, real, unfamiliar time — every scrap of her chaos pulled into a single point, patience learned earlier tonight from a woman who was now flat on her back underneath her. She hated how slow it was. She did it anyway.

The headgear came off first. That sleek white piece, the one thing Glitch hadn't got to when she took the pins out, sitting there in loose hair with nothing left to frame, and Glitch worked the catches with both hands and set it on the floor beside the pins and did not make a joke about it, which cost her something too.

And then there was nothing left to take off.

Because the body was the thing. It always had been. Everything about Icon that Glitch had spent three contracts wanting was right there and had been the entire time, and there was no ceremony left to hide behind — just her, laid out on a dead colonist's bunk in the teal dark with her hands open at her sides.

Glitch looked at her for a long moment, and made herself do it properly, which was the hardest thing she'd done all night.

Everything about the build was reach. Long collarbones, a long throat, a torso that went on and on, the frame shallow under a surface finished so smooth it barely had texture at all — cool at the skin where Glitch ran hot to the touch, the whole of her drawn in one line where Glitch was drawn in three. The chest set high and shaped close over the frame, with almost nothing spared for it. SekGen had spent the budget elsewhere on this model, and Glitch could see exactly where: on the taper. On that long descending line down to a waist so narrow she could get both hands around it, and did, immediately, just to confirm her guess.

Below that, hips built more like architecture than anatomy, every seam of the articulation showing, lighter and leaner than a Vandal's, made to fold and pivot and hang off a grapple line for an hour without complaining. Long thighs. Long calves. Those bare white feet, which everyone on this planet had seen and nobody had ever been allowed near.

Glitch put her own hand flat against that stomach and looked at the two of them together and made a small helpless noise about it. Warm grey-chrome on cool white. Broad short fingers on a torso that went on for a week. Two builds that had never been meant to end up in the same room.

And no light.

None. Anywhere. A body being touched by someone it wanted and saying absolutely nothing about it.

"That's so unfair," Glitch whispered. "You get to feel everything and nobody can tell. I would give you half my lights if they'd take on you."

Icon said nothing. Icon, whose one advantage in the entire universe was that nobody could tell.

"Okay," Glitch said. "Then I'll find it."

She had one instrument left for this, and she knew exactly whose fault it was that it worked at all, because Icon had taken both audio units off her at the wall and let the second one roll away across the floor.

So she listened.

Without the units there was a whole layer of Icon coming in raw, and the woman turned out to be quiet rather than silent, which is a distinction nobody in four hundred and six contracts had ever been close enough to hear. The chassis ran a low even note under everything and the note was not even at all. It moved. It came up half a step wherever a hand went somewhere new, and settled again when the hand stayed. And underneath it, a long way down, the fans that had idled through every hour Glitch had ever spent near her were spinning up.

That one nobody had put in the codex either.

And she talked. God, she talked — because Icon had asked her to, back when either of them still had clothes on, and it turned out to be the only currency she had that Icon actually wanted.

She narrated the whole search. Out loud, hoarse, running commentary on every centimetre. It started as a bit and stopped being a bit somewhere in the first ninety seconds.

She started at the throat, because Icon had. Mouth on the long white line of it, feeling the pulse-tone running underneath the surface. "There. That's one. Your tone just did a thing, don't think I didn't hear that, I have excellent hearing now, somebody took my headphones—"

She found the wrists — both of them, the strips of bare shell above where the red gloves had been all night — and put her mouth on each in turn while Icon's fingers curled slowly into the mattress. "Two. That's two. You're leaking data everywhere. This is embarrassing for you."

She found the join at the shoulder where the housing met the arm. The soft crease inside the elbow. The hollow low on her side where the frame ran closest to the surface and she could feel the chassis humming through it, and she pressed her palm flat there and stayed a long moment, just feeling it run — the most expensive shell SekGen makes, turning over under her hand.

She found the small high curve of one breast, where the surface ran thinner than anywhere else on her, and closed her mouth over it, and everything in Icon's chest stopped moving for three full seconds.

"Three," Glitch said into her sternum, and her voice wasn't steady anymore. "That was a big one. You went completely offline there. Don't think I'm not counting. I'm counting everything. I have a whole ledger and you are going in it under assets."

And there it was, the thing she had filed badly in a dead mess room on Perimeter and never looked at again. The breathing. The slow sensory intake Icon ran all day so a room would feel like a room. Which made it the one system on her wired to how she felt about where she was.

It stopped. That was the whole tell. Every time Glitch got somewhere that mattered the quiet rhythm of it simply quit, and did not start again until Icon had decided it could.

Glitch lit up magenta from the inside and had no say in it. Icon had this instead, and it was almost nothing, and it would do.

She followed the taper of the waist down with both hands, thumbs on the flat of the stomach, and found that she could span it — that ridiculous engineered narrowness, both hands and room to spare — and said so, at length, in detail, until Icon's jaw tightened.

She rolled her over and found the small of her back, where the grapple mount anchored into the frame and the lattice bundled thick around it, and when she put her mouth there Icon's entire body went rigid from the shoulders down and stayed that way for four full seconds.

"That's four," Glitch breathed. "That's the biggest one yet. Filing it. Building a whole religion around it."

Somewhere out past the wire the last beacon lit and began its approach burn, and put a tone on the crew channel that both of them would have heard if either of them had still been listening to the crew channel.

She found the backs of the knees. She found the long clean line where thigh met hip and traced it with her thumb, slow, both directions, exactly the way it had been done to her earlier and which she had not yet forgiven — close enough that Icon's legs came open for her without anybody asking them to.

And then she got both hands on Icon's sculpted rear, which she had been not quite doing since the puffer came off, and found the one that mattered.

Both palms full of it, and there was more of it there than the puffer had ever once admitted to: high and firm and cleanly curved, sitting right at the top of those long thighs, nothing like the weight of her own and shaped with the same expensive restraint as everything else on her, the fine seams of the articulation running under her thumbs where the assembly pivoted. She had a line ready. She had a whole speech ready, about the budget and where it had conspicuously not gone. Then she squeezed, once, and lifted a hand to move it somewhere better, and the speech went out of her head entirely.

Because she was leaving marks too.

Not light. Heat. Everywhere her hands had rested long enough, the cool went out of the porcelain and did not come straight back, so that when she lifted a palm the shape of it stayed behind on the white for a second or two before the chassis dragged it down to ambient again. Handprints. Hers. Broad and short-fingered and unmistakable, laid over the most expensive shell SekGen makes and fading at about the speed of a breath.

She could see exactly where she had been. She could see how long she had stayed.

"Found it," she said, hoarse. "You're covered in me."

Glitch fitted her palm back onto one of the prints, matching it exactly, and left it there, and Icon made a sound about it that she immediately swallowed.

"Nope," she said. "Say it properly. Tell me where you want my mouth."

Silence.

"You made me say it properly." She did the thing again, slower. "You held me down and made me say please. And I said it, out loud, twice, and now ONI has it, and ONI never loses anything between shells, that's the entire product. So."

Nothing. Not a word.

But Icon's hand had closed in the sheet, and Glitch — who could not read her, who had spent three contracts trying — watched the knuckles go from white to whiter and understood that she was watching a woman fight something.

She softened.

She got a hand under one long white shoulder and turned her back over, carefully, the way you turn something you intend to keep, and Icon let herself be turned.

"Hey." She came back up and put her face very close, and did not touch her at all for a second. "Hey. It's just me. I'm the worst. I got my head taken off by a UESC drone. There is no dignity left in this room, I took it all with me when I came in."

Icon looked up at her.

The thing about a replica face is that it was never designed to do this. Dr. Yoki Samura had been photographed for a corporate reel; her expressions were captured at a board presentation, sampled, smoothed, sold as an aftermarket personality package to Runners who wanted a known face and an unknown name. Nobody at SekGen had ever modelled this. There was no reference footage. Whatever moved across that borrowed face in the next second and a half came from underneath — from somewhere further down than the face went, from a woman in a body she had stolen and never given back.

The angles didn't change. They couldn't. But the mouth did something at one corner, and the eyes went wide and unguarded in a way Glitch would have paid a year of contract fees to photograph, and the cool assembled elegance of her came apart for a moment into something with no market value at all.

"...I don't know how," Icon said.

Four words. Glitch had heard her say maybe nine hundred in three contracts, and none of them had cost anything.

"Yeah," Glitch said softly. "I know. It's okay. That's what I'm for."

"That isn't—"

"Shut up, I'm being romantic, it's very rare, log it."

And then she got both hands under those long white thighs and pushed them open and put her mouth between them, which was where she had been going since a swamp on Dire Marsh, and for the first time in her entire loud manufactured existence she stopped talking without being asked.

Icon's hand came up at last and closed in silver hair. Just holding on, which from her was a scream.

"Say it," Glitch said, once, against her, and did not stop what she was doing to say it.

Icon made a sound that wasn't language and it answered her anyway.

The fans went first.

Glitch heard them go — the low idle climbing, and climbing, and then not being an idle at all — a good few seconds before there was anything on the surface to see. And she thought, with a satisfaction she fully intended to keep to herself: there you are. I can hear you coming.

The dim lattice started to come up.

The rest of it she would think about constantly, forever, in every shell she ever wore. But this was the thing Glitch would keep: the slow ember-rise of light under white, banked and suppressed by design, coming up anyway. In patches. Faint gold blooming along the inside of a thigh, up the flank, across the narrow of her, because there was a limit to what even Sekiguchi could engineer out of a person.

It got brighter. Glitch did not come up for air she had no use for. She had learned that part from an expert.

And inside it, Icon was losing an argument she had been winning since the day they wove her.

The system tried. It kept trying, which was almost funny. It reached for something to do — a value to assign, an exit to rank, a dry line to deploy — and every time it came back empty, and the emptiness was not a failure state, and that was the part she could not get her mind around. The machinery had not broken. There was simply nothing left for it to do. Nobody was taking anything from her. Nobody wanted anything back. There was a woman with her mouth between Icon's legs and one broad warm hand splayed flat on her stomach, who had asked for exactly nothing in return and was going to keep going until she got a sound out of her.

Say it properly, she'd said. As if that were a small thing.

Icon had asked for it first. She understood, distantly, with the last functioning piece of her appraiser's mind, that she had asked for it because she wanted to hear somebody do the thing she couldn't — that Glitch had given it to her twice without hesitating — that this had been a theft — and that it was being repaid now, with interest, on the record.

The light came up her sides.

She thought, with a clarity that arrived far too late to be useful: she is going to know. In about a minute she is going to know everything, and I am not going to be able to stop it, and I am not going to want to.

And Icon did not come apart by degrees, because Icon had never in her life given anything up gradually — a vault does not open a little — she held and held and held, jaw locked, hand tight in silver hair, absolutely silent, right up until the moment she wasn't.

Then she came, all of it at once.

Her back arched off the mattress and the whole long white chassis lit — throat, breasts, the flat of her stomach, the length of both thighs, every damping protocol they had built into her overrun in a second and a half — and the sound she made was low and broken and had no dignity in it anywhere, and it went on, and her hand tightened in silver hair until it hurt, and both long thighs closed around Glitch's head and held her exactly where she was, and her fans came up screaming from idle to full in the space of one long shaking intake.

Icon finally vented. Glitch had not known she could — the relief seams opening down the insides of those long white thighs, coolant coming out of the coldest woman on Tau Ceti hot enough to feel, running slick over her mouth and her chin and down her wrists, the immaculate porcelain surface of her suddenly and comprehensively wet.

And then, ragged, barely a word, in a voice that had never once come out of that borrowed throat:

"— Glitch —"

Glitch stayed with her the whole way down.

---

Afterward Icon lay there shaking, and that was somehow the thing. Not the light. Not the sound. A woman who had been the one who left on every contract she had ever run, lying still on a dead colonist's bunk with her hands open, shaking, and not going anywhere.

Glitch crawled up and gathered her in. Got both arms around her, one hand splayed across the narrow of that back where the light was still guttering out in patches. Put her mouth against dark hair and held on, and for once in her entire loud, fast, stupid existence, said absolutely nothing at all.

Icon let herself be held.

She could have got up. Her loops were as empty as Glitch's had been earlier and a Thief chassis carries less coolant than a Vandal to start with, so she was running hot with her fans at full and every reason to want air and floor and distance — and she had got up out of worse than this four hundred and five times.

It took her about four seconds to figure out how — four seconds of lying rigid in the circle of someone else's arms while every process she had suggested, reasonably, that she get up. Then something in her went out, all at once, like a light in a hallway, and her forehead came down against Glitch's shoulder and stayed there.

It was, Glitch thought, absurd from the outside. It had to be. All that length folded down into a frame a head shorter, knees drawn up, the elegant vertical line of the Icon collapsed into something compact and warm that fit under a chin. Glitch's hips and chest and the soft of her belly closed around all that lean tapered reach. Nothing about them matched, but everything about them fit.

Somewhere behind her eyes the number had been zero for a long time.

Icon looked at it, because there was no other way she knew how to look at anything. One UESC data core, contracted and paid against. Two full kits. Four hundred and six contracts of shell — the same body, unbroken, off the loom, which was the part nobody who ever quoted that number back at her had understood was a number about her. All of it due to come apart into loose material before much longer.

She put that against the weight lying on her arm.

She did not move.

"...You're okay," Glitch said finally, into her hair. Not a question.

A long pause. Then, very quietly, in a register nobody had ever heard out of her on any channel anywhere:

"Yes."

"Yeah," Glitch said. "Yeah, you are."

Another pause.

"That was—" Icon stopped. Started again. It was, Glitch would think later, the only time she ever heard her have to run at a sentence twice. "I didn't know how to ask for that."

"I know."

"For four hundred—"

"I know." Glitch pressed her mouth to the top of her head. "It's fine. You don't have to know how. That's the whole— that's the deal, that's the entire arrangement. You do the elegant unknowable thing, I do the talking, and somewhere in the middle we both get what we—" She stopped. "Okay, that was almost profound and I ruined it. Let me try again in six hours."

Icon made a small sound against her shoulder that was, unmistakably, a laugh.

"Oh," Glitch said, delighted, going very still. "Oh, that's four."

Afterward they lay tangled in the teal dark, one white puffer and one graphic jersey somewhere on the floor with the hairpins and one red glove that would never be found. Glitch draped over her like salvage — the heavy compact frame slung across the long lean one, one thick blue-toned thigh hooked over both of Icon's, tracing idle circles low on white synthsilk — both of them ticking and cooling down out of the red, completely content.

"Hey," Glitch murmured, half-offline, smug beyond mortal measurement. "Icon."

"Mm."

"We're so good at looting."

---

The zone timer, it should be noted, had hit zero some time ago.

The last exfil had come and gone. Somewhere out past the Dormitories a beacon had lit, counted down, and pulled three crews off Outpost without them. Neither of them had noticed. Neither of them, for a truly impressive stretch, noticed that they hadn't noticed.

It was the comm that finally did it.

"...Glitch. Icon." Blackbird's voice, twenty years older than it had been at infil. "You missed final exfil. By FORTY MINUTES."

Glitch shot upright. "Forty—" She looked at her HUD. She looked at the floor, at one red glove and a scatter of hairpins. She looked at Icon: hair loose and thoroughly ruined, red lipstick gone entirely from her mouth, one white shoulder still faintly lit where a hand had been, one long leg still tangled in the sheet, watching her with sleepy, shameless calm.

"Oh no. Oh no no no—"

"Your shells will disintegrate in five minutes. FIVE. MINUTES. What could you POSSIBLY have been doing in the smallest building on the—"

"We got lost!" Glitch said, at a pitch only drones could hear.

A silence with real weight to it.

"...Icon," a fatigued Blackbird said. "Confirm."

A pause.

Icon reached over and pulled Glitch back down against her shoulder — one long arm, no effort at all, the way she'd done everything all night. Then, deliberately, on the open channel, in the exact low register that had started this entire catastrophe:

"Thoroughly."

The channel erupted.

Glitch made a sound like a machine failing safety inspection and buried her face in Icon's neck, glowing magenta to the ears, one leg still tangled in a sheet she had given up on. "You can't SAY that, she's right here, she's in the neural interface, ONI transcribes everything—"

"Let them."

"Five minutes," Glitch mumbled into her. "Five minutes and we lose all of it. The core. The kit. Four hundred and six contracts of your shell. You have never lost one. Not once. That's the whole—" She stopped, because the arm around her had not moved a millimetre. "...You knew. You knew at twenty minutes."

"Mm."

"You appraised it."

"I did." Icon's arms settled around her, and she smiled into silver hair where nobody could log it. "It came back higher."

"...What do we do with five minutes."

"Get lost."

---

ONI post-run assessment: "Runners failed primary extraction. Runners failed to express remorse. Runners requested the same pairing for all future contracts before the debrief question was asked. Approving. Do not make me read another transcript like this one."

part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/okbuddyRunners/s/nHDJrY9p1f

quick recap: they've been circling each other for three contracts and they are supposed to be looting this POI, but...

hope you enjoy, part 3 very soon ♡

Chapter Three: Outpost, the Dormitories

The Dormitories sat on the eastern edge of the map, the first home of every worker New Cascadia shipped out here, and they had one intact bunk room left. Every Runner on Tau Ceti knew the outside of it and almost nobody had a reason to go in. Outside, a UESC scan drone went past on its patrol arc and found nothing worth reporting. Inside, a ceiling strip had been running teal on a dead circuit for a century. The lie lasted exactly as long as it took the door to slide shut.

Then Glitch was being walked backwards.

She was being herded, slow and steady, one white hand laid flat on her sternum over the CTRL graphic, with about as much pressure as you'd use to close a display case. Glitch went, because her whole history of moving fast had never prepared her for being moved slowly.

"Okay so," she said. Her voice came out at the wrong pitch and she hated it. "Just to confirm. This is happening in a room with a corpse shelf in it."

"Mm."

"That's — I want that on record, that's a choice, that's—" Another step. Icon's hand was still there and it was the only thing in the room she could actually process. "You've done this before. In this building. Haven't you. You scouted this—"

"This morning."

"This morning—"

"You were bleeding out in the atrium." Icon took another step. Glitch took another step back. "I had time."

"I was DYING, and you were real-estate shopping—"

Her back met the wall beside a dead colonist's shelf with a soft flat sound, and everything stopped.

And then Icon did not touch her.

That was the part Glitch had not budgeted for. She had been running this forward in her head since the marsh and every version of it had her being grabbed. What she got instead was Icon standing over her at a distance you could not have posted a sheet of paper through, one hand flat on the wall beside her head and the other still down at her side, doing nothing, taking her time about doing nothing.

Close enough that the proximity sensors gave up and logged it as a fault. Near enough to feel the cool coming off her, which was worse, because there is no bracing against a temperature.

Glitch's thermals climbed four degrees with nothing to show for it.

"Are you — okay. Okay, are you waiting—"

"Mm."

"For what—"

"You," Icon said. "To stop being able to stand it."

She lasted six seconds.

Icon's hands settled at her waist like a decision that had been made three contracts ago.

Neither of them moved for a second.

Then Icon's thumbs shifted, once, feeling out the taper where the waist gave way to the flare of the hip beneath it.

And slid down a centimeter, and stopped.

Because the waist did exactly what the spec sheet promised — hard, cut, load-bearing, an argument made in engineering — and then, just below it, quietly stopped promising anything at all. A soft low curve rounding gently out beneath both thumbs, warm through the fabric, going in a little under the pressure and coming easily back. Icon's hands went still on it in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with restraint.

Four hundred-odd contracts. Nobody had ever had cause to check.

"This is a pivot bracket."

"That's my waist."

"It's a pivot bracket." Her hands slid down two centimeters, following the widening curve of it, and settled again with something like satisfaction. "It carries every rotation you make. They cut it in this hard so the top of you can go one way while the bottom of you goes the other. It's load-bearing." A pause. "They just made it pretty on the way past."

Her thumb slid down off it, into the soft below the seam, and stayed there. Moved once, slow, a half-circle. Entirely off-task.

Glitch's whole frame went rigid. "Okay — that's not a bracket."

"No."

"That's nothing, that's a — that's a manufacturing tolerance, that's a rounding error, you can skip that one—"

"It's the only part of you they didn't build for the job." The thumb went round again, taking its time, and Glitch's next word died somewhere below the collar seam. "Everything else on this shell is an answer to a problem. That isn't. Somebody sat down at the end of a long day and put that curve on you so you'd have somewhere soft to be a person in." She timed the pause. "It's the best-made thing on you."

Glitch's head went back against the wall. "You have to stop describing me like a catalogue—"

"Why."

"Because it's working, obviously, look at me, I'm a disaster—"

So Glitch got both hands in the front of the puffer and pulled — hard, because subtlety had never been installed.

And got an armful of almost nothing.

"You're — okay, hang on." She had one hand flat on Icon's side now, under the jacket, and her palm found the frame right there under the surface where she'd expected more body: the shell laid over it thin as a coat of paint, the whole torso going on and on and narrow the entire way down.

"There's nothing to you," Glitch said, which was a lie and both of them knew it. "You're all reach. This is like hugging a very expensive antenna—"

"Mm."

"I love the antenna. I want that on record too." Her hand moved once, up the flat of her side and back down. "Where'd it go? The money. You told me mine went into the legs. Where'd yours go?"

"The hands."

Glitch made a sound. "I knew it. I knew it, I said it in the key room, I said the hands—"

Then her palm slid another inch under the puffer and she stopped talking entirely, because the whole time, under the porcelain and the cool and the nobody-ever-getting-close-enough-to-check —

"You're warm."

Icon didn't answer.

"You're — no, you don't get to 'Mm' this one." Glitch's other hand came up and got under there too, flat against the small of that long back, just to confirm it from a second angle. Warm. Properly warm, running underneath the cool surface like a pipe under a floor. "You've been warm this ENTIRE TIME. Three contracts. You sat across a table from me and let me call you a countertop—"

"You seemed happy."

"I was WRONG—"

"Mm." Icon leaned in, which brought the whole architecture of her down into Glitch's space at last, and set her mouth just under the corner of Glitch's jaw where the paint stopped. "Nobody finds out until they've got their hands on me."

"That is the most — okay, that's the single most unfair sentence anybody has ever—"

"Zone timer says twenty minutes," Glitch breathed, a half second later, grabbing for the last handhold on the cliff.

"Mm." Icon didn't even glance at her HUD. "Then stop counting."

"You literally never stop count—"

Icon opened her mouth. Something was queued up behind it that had no price on it anywhere, and she looked at the thing, and put it back where she found it.

"...Mm."

"What."

"Nothing."

Then she kissed her, and the sentence died a happy death.

It was nothing like she'd imagined, and she'd imagined it in appalling detail.

Icon kissed the way she cracked vaults. Patient. Exact. One smooth white hand rose to the hinge of Glitch's jaw and tilted her precisely where she wanted her, learning the mechanism before she went near the prize. Every movement measured out and spent on purpose. Just slow, deliberate pressure that unspooled Glitch from the spine outward.

And the mouth was cool. That was the thing that undid her — after everything, after the warmth she'd just found under the jacket, the lips themselves came in cool and firm and unbelievably smooth, thin where hers were full, precise where hers were already coming apart. Blue paint smeared between them, transferring itself in pieces onto a mouth that had never on any contract been anything but immaculate, and Icon let it happen at her own speed and kept going.

And she could taste her.

She had not expected that, and it took the legs out from under her. Sekiguchi had built the whole apparatus in — a tongue that worked, and everything behind it, wired all the way up — and there is no contract anywhere on this planet that has ever needed a woman to know what something tastes like. It had been the running joke of that entire stupid dinner. Two operators with a full set of working equipment and nothing on any plate to put it to.

Icon tasted like nothing in the world Glitch had a word for. Clean. Faintly mineral, faintly warm, the way the inside of an expensive instrument case smells. Under that, where her mouth was open, something else that was just her, and had no name, and was going into long-term storage the second Glitch got a spare cycle to file it.

She had been given a mouth that could do this and had spent four hundred contracts using it exclusively to talk.

She pulled back a centimeter. Glitch chased her and got nothing but air.

"—no," Glitch said. "No, come back—"

"Mm." Icon tilted her head the other way instead, and did it again from that angle, slower, like she was checking her work. Then again. Then a fourth time with her thumb pressed under Glitch's chin to hold her exactly where she'd put her, and Glitch made a sound into her mouth that she would be hearing in her own memory for years.

"You're — okay, you're timing this—"

"Yes."

"You can't time a—"

Icon kissed her again and Glitch's hands came up and fisted in the front of the white puffer, and she pulled — hard — and Icon let herself be pulled, and the full weight of her came in against Glitch and pinned her flat to the wall.

Which was when the geometry of the two of them stopped being funny and became the entire situation.

Because Icon came in long and lean and cool, all that height folding down to meet a shell built a head shorter and half again as solid, and landed wrong in every dimension and right in every other one. The give in the smaller body took the taller one so completely that Icon ended up closer than she had planned and did not correct for it. Her breath function audibly rescheduled itself.

And Glitch lit. Not a little. The lattice came up under the matte grey-chrome in patches wherever a hand had recently been — throat, flank, the soft low curve of her belly — the shell reporting on her with the total honesty of a system nobody had ever built an off-switch for.

Icon looked down at that, unlit, unreadable, cool white from crown to bare feet, giving away exactly nothing.

"That's not fair either," Glitch said, wrecked. "You get to be a closed vault and I'm a — I'm a neon sign—"

"Mm," said Icon, and pressed her mouth to the brightest part of her throat.

That was when it stopped being polite.

Because the thing about shells is that they're heavy. Twenty percent denser than a person, all of it engineered, all of it accounted for on a spec sheet somebody signed. Glitch had spent her whole career being the thing that never held still — the thing you could not draw a bead on, a hundred and fifteen kilos of bad decision moving at a speed the universe considered rude.

And now there was ninety kilos of quiet luxury leaning her into a wall with one forearm braced beside her head, and the whole long architecture of it had come down to meet her, and she could not go anywhere.

She found out — immediately, catastrophically, with no warning whatsoever — what her preferences were.

It was the distribution that did it. In four hundred contracts of being thrown around by ordnance it had never occurred to her that weight had a shape. Icon's mass didn't arrive all at once the way a blast did. It arrived in a line. Shoulder, then flank, then hip, each part of that long frame finding its landing a half-second after the one above it, coming down out of all that height by stages, until the whole of her had settled and there was nothing left of the gap between them to file a complaint about.

They fit and they did not fit, both at once, in a way neither of them was going to survive.

The sound Glitch made was not a word.

Icon went still.

This was a different stillness from the vault-cracker's one Glitch had watched from a doorway on three contracts, the one that meant listening. This one had a different quality. This one had gone rigid somewhere around the jaw.

"...There," she said, very quietly. And Glitch could hear the interest in it — the appraiser's note, the small clean click of a discovery being logged. "Again."

"That wasn't — that was a system noise, that was thermal, that was—"

Icon leaned in another two centimeters.

It was nothing. It was a rounding error. It was the difference between a thing resting on you and a thing deciding to. Glitch's shoulder scraped the wall and the corpse shelf beside them shivered on its bracket and she went boneless in a way no diagnostic was going to explain.

"Ohh — okay, no, that's not fair, you can't just — apply yourself—"

"Again."

"You're doing it on purp—" Icon shifted her weight, redistributed it about four degrees, and the sentence came apart in the middle like wet paper. "—okay. Okay. Wow. Okay, so that's a thing about me, apparently. That's new information. I'd like to file a complaint with whoever installed that—"

"MIDA."

"I'd like to file a complaint with MIDA—"

"Mm." Icon's mouth found the hinge of her jaw, just under the ear. Cool lips on warm surface, and Glitch's thermals took the hit and reported it upward. "File it later."

"I've died fourteen times," Glitch said, to the ceiling, with the dazed clarity of a woman reading her own diagnostic report out loud. "Fourteen. I have been shot, dropped, crushed, decapitated by a UESC drone — and the thing that finally kills me is you standing still on me—"

"Leaning."

"— leaning on me. Oh my god. That's worse. That's so much worse—"

Icon laughed.

It was barely anything. A breath with a shape to it, landing right against the side of Glitch's throat, and Glitch felt it go in somewhere structural and stay there, a foreign object lodged in the frame, unretrievable.

"You're — hey. Hey. Did you just—"

"No."

"You laughed—"

"No."

"I'm the only person on this planet who's ever—" Icon leaned in again, slowly, and Glitch's voice broke into pieces and reassembled itself at half volume. "...okay. Okay, I'll stop talking."

"Don't."

The word came out flatter and faster than Icon's words usually did. Both of them noticed. There was a small pause with something real in it, sitting between their mouths, unclaimed.

"...Don't?" Glitch said.

Icon did not answer that. She put her mouth back on Glitch's throat instead, and worked her way up under her ear, and found the little strip of bare shell where the headphone unit clamped down — and got two long fingers under the clamp and worked it loose, one-handed, without stopping. The hands. Of course it was the hands. She'd told her where the money went and then been proving it ever since.

The world came back loud.

And closest, and worst: Icon's mouth moving against the side of her throat.

"Oh," she said, to nobody. "Oh, that's cheating."

"Mm."

"That's — you took my filters, you can't just—"

"You said you'd stop talking." Icon dragged her mouth down to the join of neck and shoulder, where the deltoid housing sat proud and rounded under the surface, and stayed there. "You've said nine hundred words since."

"I'll say nine hundred more. I contain volumes—"

"Mm." A pause. Then, low, right against her, felt more than heard: "Good."

Glitch's thermals jumped four degrees in one tick and she gave up on dignity as a going concern.

---

She got both hands into the front of the white puffer and shoved it off those shoulders, and it took two tries because her fingers had stopped taking instruction, and Icon let her — shrugged out of the sleeves, let it drop behind her without once looking away — and then there was just the long bare white line of her from throat to hip, and Glitch put her palms flat on it and forgot the entire English language.

"You're warm," she said, stupidly. She had said it four minutes ago. She would say it again.

"Yes."

"Nobody tells you that. Nobody ever tells you the Icon runs warm. That should be in the codex. That should be—" Her palms ran the long way down her, the frame close under the surface the whole distance, the torso going on and on and narrow all the way, so much more length under her hands than there was body. "—okay, no, actually. Don't put that in the codex. That's mine."

Icon caught her mouth again, and Glitch stopped narrating for four consecutive seconds, which was a personal best and went into the log as one.

And then Icon's hands started to move, and this was the part no simulation had prepared her for.

Because Icon touched her the way she handled artifacts.

She started at the wrists. Of course she did — she'd started there in the mess room last contract and had clearly filed it under pending. Bare fingertips found the shallow lattice running the inside of each forearm and drew two slow lines up it until Glitch's fingers spasmed open. She worked the first glove off finger by finger, deliberate as a heist, and set it on the shelf like it went in a case with a humidity reading.

She pulled the second off with her teeth, holding eye contact the entire time — an act of villainy Glitch would be recovering from for the rest of her operational lifespan.

Bare hands, then. Warm chrome against cool porcelain.

And Glitch found out what the gloves had been costing her, because they had been dampening everything: every ridge of the fingertip lattice, every microscopic seam, the faint dry drag of one design's texture across another's. She could feel Icon's fingerprints — somebody at SekGen had sat down and woven fingerprints into a body engineered specifically never to leave one, purely so that the woman inside it would look down at her own hands one morning and know them, and Glitch was going to find that person and write them a letter.

"Mm," she said, which meant something.

"Don't you dare appraise the arm—"

Then down.

Icon's palm dragged over all of it once. Slow. Taking inventory. Then she stopped calling it inventory and took one of them in her hand, the heel of her palm underneath and the fingers closing, weighing it the way she weighed anything she intended to leave with, and Glitch's breath function forgot its own timing entirely and had to be restarted from a menu.

Then around, because there was no honest version of taking inventory that skipped it — both hands filling with the whole warm heavy curve of her backside, which gave under the pressure and came back and went on being there long after her palms had run out of room to hold it. Icon, who had never in her career been caught overpaying, took a proper handful of her and held on well past what the appraisal required.

"You're doing the—" Glitch's voice came out in pieces. "The appraisal thing. The— thing."

"Mm."

"You're inventorying me—"

"Yes."

"I'm not — I'm not a lot, structurally, this is going to be a short inventory, you're going to be done in like—"

Icon's hands moved again, spanning her, and Glitch's head went back against the wall with a clunk.

"Four hundred and six contracts," Icon said, conversationally, into her collarbone. "I have never once been done early."

"— oh my god."

"And I know what I'm buying." The hands went down and settled where they had been headed since the door shut. "I've known since the marsh. You walked backwards through a swamp for twenty minutes telling me about my collarbones, and somewhere in the middle of it I decided I was going to get you on your back with your legs open and your mouth going."

Glitch made a high thin squeal she had no cover story for whatsoever.

"You had that the whole time? You had that in your head and you said the pay—"

"I said the pay."

She hooked one finger into the waistband at Glitch's hip and tugged — once, just enough to feel the whole dense shell rock forward into her, all that mass arriving at once and having to be caught — and then let it snap back and went on. Up along her side, mapping every joint with the flat of her thumb. Under the hem. Onto bare shell.

Glitch ran a thermal warning. She dismissed it. It came back with a second stacked underneath it, and she stopped looking at her HUD altogether — the single most reckless thing she had ever done, and she had once tried to melee a Husk.

"This is a lot of touching," she said, narrating her own building collapse with what composure she had left. "This is — you're being so thorough, has anyone ever told you you're—"

"Take your time," Icon said, which made no sense, and made perfect sense.

So she did.

She got both hands up into the dark hair and pulled the pins loose one by one, scattering them across the floor like shell casings, and watched the whole severe architecture of the bun come undone over her bare fingers. The artifact nobody else got to touch. Unlocked. Hers.

Icon let her. Icon watched her do it, eyes half-lidded and utterly still, and the face under it was doing something Glitch had never seen it do. Nothing had moved, exactly. But the mouth had come open a millimetre, and the dark red on it was gone in the middle and smeared blue at the corner, and there was a stillness in the whole assembly that had stopped being control and become the effort of maintaining it.

"There," Glitch whispered, combing it loose, reverent and smug in equal measure. "Ruined you. Look at that. Priceless."

"Mm." Icon caught her wrist. Gentle. Absolute. Pressed her mouth to the bare strip above where the glove's cuff had been, right over the pulse line she'd been reading since Perimeter. "My turn."

---

They found the bunk without ever fully separating — a stumbling, laughing negotiation of gear and gravity, one of them walking backwards, the other refusing to stop kissing her long enough to make it efficient. Two operators with eight hundred-odd contracts between them, both elite at getting from one place to another, unable to cross four metres of empty floor.

Out past the Dormitories the zone timer went through fifteen. Neither of them was in any position to notice.

Somebody's sneaker came off. The mattress had survived decades of colonial collapse and was not remotely prepared for what landed on it.

She pulled Icon into a kiss with none of Icon's patience in it. All heat and blue paint and hands everywhere at once, and then her hips came down and began to move, working herself against the long white thigh underneath her because there was no version of sitting there that involved holding still.

And she felt it happen at last: the crack in the composure.

A low, quiet sound against her mouth. Those exact hands going suddenly imprecise at her waist, gripping hard enough that the servos in Glitch's side logged it as load-bearing, and then sliding down and back and taking two full handfuls of her, hauling her down harder onto the thigh she was already riding, every last pretence of connoisseurship abandoned somewhere three rooms behind them.

Glitch pulled back an inch, delighted, wrecked, her own face doing nine things at once. "That noise. That's mine now. I'm keeping it."

"Mm."

"No, I'm serious, I'm filing a claim. Salvage rights. I found it unattended in a dead colonist's bunk room—"

"Then earn another one."

"—okay yeah, we're doing that."

The jersey went next. Dragged up and off over the spiked silver crown, the whole thing snagging, both of them laughing at the sheer inelegance of it, Icon patiently freeing a strand of hair from a seam before setting the shirt aside — folded, actually folded — which made Glitch make a noise about it that lasted a full ten seconds.

"You folded it—"

"Yes."

"We're doing this and you folded my shirt—"

"It's a good shirt."

"It's a — okay, it IS a good shirt, but that is not the point—"

And then Icon looked at her, and Glitch stopped talking, because there was nothing left between them now and Icon was taking her time about that too.

Underneath the jersey, matte grey-chrome, warm and running warmer, the sensor lattice showing under the surface like circuitry through frosted glass, brightening in patches wherever a hand had recently been.

And the shape of her, which three contracts of oversized fabric had been quietly hiding. The loose fabric had not merely failed to suggest what was under it. It had been lying, outright, for three runs. A pair of full heavy breasts set high on the frame with the long central seam running down between them, and none of it built to any proportion a shirt had ever been cut for.

Then the waist, cut so sharp it read as a decision rather than a proportion. And below it, caught in the low teal light, the soft curve that came out from under and rounded gently down to where the hips took over. Warm. Smooth. Undefended. The one part of her nobody had bothered to armour, because nobody had ever expected to get near it. Some sculptor four thousand years dead put that exact curve on a goddess and got called a genius for it. Sekiguchi did it in matte grey-chrome and filed it under thermal mass.

Everything past that was the part the design actually cared about — the flare over the pivot joints, and behind it the curve that made the whole silhouette finally make sense, high and round and frankly heavy. The teal light found the top of it and stayed there.

A body engineered for one violent, explosive purpose — and shaped, incidentally, catastrophically, into something that stopped a thief mid-sentence.

Icon looked at that for a long moment.

"...Don't," Glitch said, suddenly and uncharacteristically shy, one arm coming up across her chest. "It does that. It's a whole — it's very obvious, it's like the worst possible—"

Icon took her wrist and moved the arm out of the way. No force in it. Just the same certainty she used on locks.

Then she bent her head and put her mouth on the brightest patch, right below the collar seam, and Glitch's entire chassis came up like a hab block reconnecting to the grid.

"Oh—"

"It's the best thing on this planet," Icon said, against her, and went on.

---

Icon turned her and laid her back into the foam, starting at the throat, where the surface ran thinnest and she'd known it since Perimeter — mouth open against the front of it, tongue dragging slow over the swallow-mechanism, which feeds nothing and is wired like a nerve regardless, so that a woman in a new throat can feel her own throat working, and Glitch's chin went up and back and her whole spine arched off the mattress. Icon's hand followed her up. Spread flat across her sternum, palm covering the seam and the soft weight of her breasts either side of it, and pressed her back down.

"Stay."

"That's not — you can't just—"

Icon closed her teeth, very gently, on the tendon line running up to Glitch's jaw, and the sentence turned into a long shaking vowel.

She worked her way down by inches. The hollow at the base of the throat. The collar seam. She took her mouth to Glitch's breasts, open and slow, working the soft outer swell of one and then closing over the nipple, tongue first and then teeth and taking her time about both. The spec sheet called it cosmetic and the spec sheet was lying. Glitch's hands flew up and found nothing and came down on Icon's shoulders instead, sliding on the smooth white, unable to get purchase on a finish designed specifically not to give any.

Lower. Her tongue traced the long central seam down the sternum, the one every Vandal had, the one Sekiguchi had run the deep sensor trunk directly beneath because it was structurally convenient. Glitch had gone her entire life without thinking about it.

She thought about it now. She thought about nothing else. When Icon's mouth closed over the small hard node at the base of that seam — sold as thermal feedback, with the sensor trunk running straight into it, and never touched by anybody who knew what it actually did — Glitch's hips came off the bed entirely and her cannon arm discharged a spark into the wall.

"Ohh — okay — okay that's — that's a diagnostic port, you can't—"

"Mm." Icon did it again. Slower. Tongue flat over it, then the edge of her teeth.

"—Icon—"

"Mm."

"That's — that is a MAINTENANCE feature, that is for technicians—"

"I'm very thorough."

She went lower without being asked, mouth open the whole way down the seam, and Glitch's legs came apart for her a good four seconds before Glitch had consciously decided anything about it.

"You're a — oh my god —"

Both of her hands were in that dark hair, and she could not decide whether she was pulling her closer or trying to get her to stop, and Icon — who had cracked four hundred locks and never once been talked out of one — simply took both wrists in one hand and pinned them to the mattress above the spiked silver crown of her head.

That was the end of Glitch's higher functions and both of them knew it.

She tested it. Once, reflexively, a full-strength pull with everything a Vandal frame had.

Nothing. Not a shift. Not a centimetre. Icon's hand did not even tighten; it simply continued to be where it was, the way a door continues to be a door.

That was the thing about reach. Icon's advantage had never been strength, exactly. It was leverage — thirty centimetres of arm and a low quiet certainty about angles, a body built to hang off a grapple line above a two-hundred-metre drop and not complain. She wasn't holding Glitch down. She was simply arranged in such a way that Glitch could not get up, and had been from the moment they came through the door.

Glitch made a sound like something venting.

"Mm," said Icon, from somewhere around her collarbone, and it had a note in it that was almost a smile. "There it is again."

"I hate you."

"Mm."

"I hate you so much. I have never hated anyone—"

"Say that again."

"I hate—" Icon's thumb moved on the inside of her pinned wrist and the word warped in the middle. "—I. Okay. Revising. Revising the statement."

Icon held her there and mapped her one-handed, which should not have been possible and was, because she had built her whole professional life on precise work with limited access.

"You're — you're doing it on purpose—"

"Yes."

"You're a monster—"

"Mm." Icon kissed the inside of her wrist, still pinned. "Say it properly."

"Say what properly."

"What you want me to do to you." The vault voice, at four centimetres, entirely level. "In words. I want to hear you ask for it."

"That's — you can't just—" Two fingertips moved an inch inward and stopped, and Glitch's whole frame jolted. "Okay — okay, that's — that's coercion, that's a war crime—"

"Ask."

"You ask first."

Silence.

It was a pause with weight in it. And Glitch — pinned, lit up, running four degrees past redline with approximately nine percent of her mind still online — heard the shape of that pause and understood something.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you can't. You can't say it either."

"Mm."

"You've been doing this this whole time and you still can't say a single—"

Icon moved her hand and Glitch's voice broke clean in half.

"Please," she said. Immediately. No negotiation, all of it at once. "Oh my god. Please. Please put your mouth on me, that's me asking, that's me asking properly — I'll do anything, I'll never talk again, I'll — no, wait, I'll talk more, whatever you want, I'll narrate the entire thing, just — please, Icon, please, I need you to—"

"There," Icon said.

"Don't — don't do the appraisal voice about it—"

"You'll talk," Icon said, and let go of her wrists, and moved down.

She put her mouth on the inside of Glitch's thigh first. High. Where the shell was pale and untouched and had spent every contract of her existence under fabric, and she took her time there too — open-mouthed, slow, one hand pushing the leg wider against all that engineered strength, the other splayed low and open across the soft of Glitch's belly, holding her down while she shook.

And then she stopped waiting. She got a hand under one heavy thigh and pushed it up and out until the joint gave her the angle she wanted, and put her mouth on her.

She did it the way she did everything. Total attention, slow as she pleased, one hand splayed flat across Glitch's hips to hold her down and the other opening her up by degrees, two fingers and then more, working in slow and deep while her tongue stayed exactly where it was doing the most damage. Four hundred contracts of learning things by touch, in the dark, one-handed, without ever being able to see the mechanism, and it showed.

The fastest shell on Tau Ceti could not move an inch.

She did not want to.

She talked. Icon had asked her to, and it was the only thing she had left.

The narration went first: commentary, jokes, a running review delivered in the flattest bratty deadpan she could manage while her hands tore stitching out of a dead colonist's mattress. This is — okay, this is a solid four out of — no. No, five. Five out of — I don't know the scale, there's no scale—

Then the deadpan went, because she couldn't hold it.

Then the sentences broke into fragments. Right there — there — oh, right there, don't you dare stop, don't stop, don't— Then the fragments broke into single words, and the words got smaller and simpler until there was only one left.

Then just Icon's name, over and over, in a register she had not known was installed.

Then not even that.

Icon watched it happen for a moment. Chin resting against the inside of one heavy thigh, red-smeared mouth parted, eyes half-lidded and dark and absolutely merciless. Her face had lost something in the last twenty minutes. The stillness had gone out of it, and what was underneath was hungrier and less finished and about a hundred years younger.

"There you are," she said.

And brought her right up to the edge — three times, four — reading every hitch and stutter and thermal spike, feeling the exact moment the pulse-tone flattened and the magenta went solid.

And each time, at the last possible second, stopped.

"Not yet," she said the third time, mouth still against her, not moving away to say it. "You'll know when."

The first time, Glitch actually screamed at her. A full sentence of profanity, most of it grammatical.

The second time she begged, which she would deny under oath, at length, forever, in every debrief she was ever asked to give.

The third time she got a fistful of dark hair and tried to hold her there, and Icon simply raised her head and looked up the length of her — lit and shaking and wrecked, chest heaving with intakes she didn't need, blue paint smeared to the ear, forehead sensor blinking a fault code — and waited until the hand let go.

"You're going to kill me," Glitch said, hoarse, to the ceiling. "You're actually going to kill me. That's fifteen. That's a stupid fifteen. They're going to ask how and I'm going to have to—"

"Beautiful," Icon said.

Glitch's entire lattice flared magenta from hips to hairline.

"...That's not — you can't just say that, that's — that's not a word you get to—"

"Beautiful," Icon said again, and put her mouth back on her, and did not stop again.

It came apart like a system failure.

Heat gathered at the base of her spine and went outward through every branch of the lattice faster than the coolant loops could clear it. Thermals into red. Then past red. Warnings stacking on a HUD she could no longer see — four, then six, then a cascade she would find in her post-run telemetry and stare at with both hands over her face.

Her heels dug into the mattress. One hand found Icon's shoulder and gripped hard enough that the servos in it logged the load. Her thighs closed around Icon's head, all that dense synth-muscle locking down hard enough to crush a UESC Recruit, and Icon did not slow and did not adjust and did not come up for anything, just stayed exactly where she was with one arm locked across those hips and her tongue not letting up for a second.

And the loudest, brightest, most limited-edition thing on Tau Ceti came, hard, rigid and shuddering and bright.

And she vented. The relief seams opened and everything the loops were carrying went out through them at once, warm and slick and faintly sweet, down the inside of both thighs and into a hundred-year-old mattress. The most undignified thing her body had ever done to her, and she was in no condition to have an opinion about it. Icon's mouth was still there. Icon did not move out of the way.

Icon's name came apart in her mouth into something with no consonants left in it, and then into nothing, and then into a small helpless sound she made four more times as it kept going, and going, and rolling back through her in aftershocks that took her by surprise every time.

It took a long while to stop. Shells overclock. Nobody had ever told her that.

And then she was very hot and going nowhere. Vent that hard and the loops come back half empty, and a half-empty loop takes its time pulling the heat off a frame that has just run itself into the red. Her fans held at full. Her thermals came down in slow reluctant increments, and she lay there and let them, and did not spend one second of it thinking about the door.

Then Icon came back up her body slowly, kissing every place she'd already been on the way. The soft inside of the thigh. The hip. The low swell of the belly, where she stopped longer than she intended. Each breast in turn, lingering over both. Throat. Jaw. The corner of the smeared blue mouth.

And Glitch, coming back up out of the white, got her optics working again and saw what had been happening to her the entire time.

Marks. Dark red, everywhere that mouth had been, laid down on warm grey-chrome in the exact order she'd gone: high on the inside of one thigh, twice, and higher than she remembered letting her. The hip. A long smudged one low on the belly where she had stayed. One breast, then the other, a dark ring around each. The hollow of the throat. Four hundred and six contracts of a mouth that had never smudged in a hostile zone, and it had come off on her, all of it, and the woman it belonged to had kept going and hadn't stopped to do anything about it.

Glitch looked down the length of herself and made a small ruined sound.

"You marked me."

"Mm."

"You don't leave marks. That's the whole point. You go in, you take the thing, and nobody can prove afterward that you were ever in the room."

"No," Icon agreed, and did not sound even slightly sorry.

She gathered her in — one arm under the shoulders, the other hand still moving in slow circles low on the soft of her belly where the aftershocks hadn't finished — and murmured something soft and rare into silver hair that no comm ever recorded and neither of them ever mentioned again.

Glitch came back online in pieces.

"...Status report," she mumbled into Icon's neck.

"Critical," Icon said, and Glitch could feel the smile against her temple. "Recovering."

"Cool. Cool cool cool." A long, boneless pause. Her limbs had been reclassified as decorative. Somewhere in the room a fan was still running hard and she was fairly sure it was hers. "Your turn in a minute. Two minutes. When I remember how hands work."

"No rush." Icon's fingers carded through her wrecked hair at the same speed she did everything else, and Glitch discovered that the vault voice also came in a softer setting, apparently reserved for exactly this. "I have everything I came for."

It took eleven minutes to get her hands back. She counted.

Her HUD had been showing her the timer that whole time. Four minutes, then two, then a number it stopped being worth the pixels to display. Then it gave up bothering her about it altogether.

It had felt like an hour in that room. It had been about twenty minutes. Neither of them was ever going to be able to account for the difference in a debrief, and neither of them was ever going to be asked to, because even CyAc doesn't want that data.

if you've ever looked at those two together and thought about it for more than a second...

so glitch's shell lights up whenever she feels anything and there's no off switch. icon's was built so nobody can read her at all, and sekgen sells that as a feature. they get crewed together for 3 contracts and neither copes well

i put chapters 1 and 2 in this post, and chapter 3 is split into two more parts i'll post later! it gets a lot less sfw from part 2 on, so that's why it's nsfw. hope you enjoy! ♡

High-Value Target

> "Second body" experiences designed for naturalistic neural housing and instinctual comfort — of movement, of thought, of emotion. > > — Sekiguchi Genetics

---

Chapter One: Dire Marsh

The contract was simple: pull a UESC data core out of the flooded Bio-Research annex, hand it to Traxus, get paid.

Simple contracts were where Glitch did her best work, if "best work" meant dying picturesquely, and where Icon did her actual best work, which was everything else.

They'd been crewed up by ONI, who knew both of them extensively, in the direct-neural sense, and had done it anyway.

There had been a third of them on the drop, for about forty seconds. Blackbird had taken one look at the two of them standing closer together on the ramp than the ramp required, said "I'll take the east flats, you two enjoy the annex" in the tone of somebody signing a waiver, and walked off into the fog.

Neither of them had argued about it.

"Okay, question," Glitch said, clearing a sunken walkway on the second jump, the microjets kicking her off nothing halfway across, chunky yellowish-green-soled sneakers landing on the far rail. Below her, Icon moved through the mist like a rumor. White biomat gone grey in the fog. The red line down her jacket was the only thing in the whole marsh with an opinion. "You're the Icon. THE Icon. Sekiguchi's crown jewel, elegant heist queen, 'The Finer Things' literally written into your firmware. Why are you slumming it on a Traxus fetch job with me?"

"The pay."

"Liar. You could've picked any squad on the roster." Glitch landed in front of her and walked backwards through the marsh grass, grinning under the greasepaint. Her jersey hung off one shoulder, CTRL printed across the chest in blocky white, the warning-sign motifs on the sleeves already flecked with mud. "You picked the one with the highest death count and the best fashion sense."

Walking backwards meant looking up. Looking up meant getting the whole of her at once, and Glitch's mouth, which had never once waited for clearance, went ahead without her.

"Also — unrelated, completely unrelated — do you know how long you are? Vertically. Laterally. Structurally. I'm doing two steps for every one of yours and you're not even trying, you're just—"

"I'm walking."

"You're strolling. You've got a collarbone situation up there that could hold up a bridge—"

Icon looked at her.

It was the long one. The patient one. The one she usually saved for locked rooms. It started at the spiked silver crown of her hair, tracking down through the dark smear of eyeliner, the little square sensor set into her forehead, the blue cross painted across a mouth that was fuller than the rest of the face had budgeted for, the oversized shirt hanging off the compact set of her shoulders and pulled taut across the round of her chest where the weave curved out under it — and then the hem, and then a long uninterrupted stretch of nothing, because the shirt gave up well short of the knee and the thighs went on anyway. Blue-toned shell catching what light the marsh allowed, heavy through the top and tapering hard down to the joint, dense enough that the walk had a swing to it the marsh grass got out of the way of. The whole assembled crime of the outfit.

The marsh went past them while she did it. Black water, dead reeds, the drowned tops of fence posts marking out a field that had stopped being a field about a century ago. Somewhere ahead of them the annex was sitting in the fog with a data core in it that neither of them was thinking about.

Glitch got a face back, in return, and it was not a fair trade. Icon's was all angle: narrow at the temple, high through the cheekbone, the jaw a single clean line running down to a chin you could have measured with a straightedge. A mouth cut thin and precise and painted a red so dark it read black in fog. Nothing about it moved unless there was a reason.

"—and it's not even a practical coat, that's the thing, that's the part I keep getting stuck on, you're going into a swamp in white—"

"Mm."

"You're not listening to me."

"I'm looking at you."

Which shut Glitch up for four entire steps.

A Vandal shell is engineered to a brief: get somewhere fast, break it, be somewhere else. Everything about the build was compact and coiled, and none of it was small — that was the part the height fooled people into missing. Shoulder housings built heavy enough to hang the jersey wrong.

Icon went to the money first, the way she went to the money in a room, and all of it was below the waist. Hips flared wide over the pivot joints, because that much rotational speed needs somewhere to turn from, and behind them the counterweight the whole design leaned on: a deep full curve set high over the tops of the thighs, ballast for a body meant to be thrown, and shaped anyway, carefully, by somebody who had not had the heart to take back out what Sekiguchi already put there. Then the thighs, thick and solid from the joint down, synth-muscle packed dense around the microjet anchors seated in the bone of her, holding that thickness the whole way to the knee. Low center of mass. Heavy where it counted. MIDA had put the launcher in and rebuilt everything below the waist to carry it.

And then everything MIDA had never touched, which was where the look stopped going anywhere in particular. A chest built full and round and heavy, set high on the frame, pushing the jersey out and letting it fall loose again over a stomach that stayed flat and firm exactly as high as the engineering had a use for and gave the argument up entirely below the navel. There a small warm swell rounded out low under the hem, soft, smooth, the one line on her that no engineer had ever signed off on. It moved a little when she walked. And every centimeter of her built the way they all come off the loom — frame, then synth-muscle over it, then biomat over that, then the synthsilk woven last across the whole of it — except Sekiguchi had finished hers matte, in grey-chrome, and warm. Warm enough to give a little under a thumb, a detail that had never come up.

Glitch's thermals ticked up two degrees. She felt them do it. She would be denying it later.

"The algorithm picked," Icon said.

"The algorithm has taste."

"Mm." Icon stepped around her and kept going. Then, four paces on, without turning her head: "They spent the money on your legs."

Glitch's heel found a hole and most of her went into it.

"They — what?"

"MIDA. On a stock Sekiguchi frame." Icon's voice didn't change at all, which somehow made it worse. "Torso's baseline. Arms are baseline, apart from the cannon somebody put in one of them. Everything above the waist is still the body you were sold. Everything below it got opened up on a bench by people who did not own it. The hips flare for the pivot, the curves behind them do half the arithmetic, and the thighs carry the anchors, and that's where the money went, all of it, down there." She let that sit. "Synth-muscle packed four layers deep around the mounts, top to bottom, as thick at the bottom as it starts. That's not styling. That's a launch platform."

"That's — those are just legs—"

"They're not." She still hadn't turned around. "You can tell by the way the ground behaves near you." Then, later than she needed to: "It shows."

"You can't just — you can't appraise somebody in a swamp—"

"You asked why I picked the squad."

"I asked why you picked the — oh. Oh, that's not — you're not allowed to answer things, that's not how this works, you say 'the pay' and then I talk for six hours—"

The annex rose out of the fog, rusted and half-drowned, its lower floors given over to the water decades ago. Icon's visor swept the walls and lit every box in the building: grey, grey, green, and one of them three rooms deep burning gold. Then the grapple hissed and she was gone. Up and over, a dark elegant line against a grey sky, bare white synthetic feet finding the gantry rail without a sound, because Icon didn't wear boots, because she had never in her life needed traction.

And Glitch, on the ground, got the whole silhouette of her at once, and it was a silhouette worth having: the long arc of the arm holding the line, the throat pulled long as she looked up at her own anchor point, the puffer riding up to show a stretch of white synthsilk where the frame ran shallow and the waist came in — a long gradual narrowing that went on for further than seemed structurally necessary before it turned back out over the hips.

And the hips were the surprise, on a frame that lean — high and cleanly curved and unmistakably there, rotating open as she swung her weight through and closing again on the other side, all of it visible because the synthsilk was white and the light had nowhere else to go.

Where the Vandal frame was built to be thrown, the Thief frame was built to be drawn — every proportion chosen by somebody at SekGen who had cared enormously about how it would look leaving a room, and who had understood that lean and shapeless were not the same word.

"That's not fair," Glitch informed the marsh. The marsh did not take her side.

She stood in the mud and watched her go with her whole heart broadcasting on an open frequency.

"...Right," she told herself. "Professional. Locked in."

She lasted until the locked room.

Icon stood at the door panel with the key already out, hair pinned in that immaculate bun, the white visor framing it like a setting frames a stone. She had her gloves off. She always took the gloves off for a door: the Bio-Research key was a flat little wafer of a thing, single-use, worth more than most of what was behind the door, and she seated it into the handheld the way you handle something you paid for. Long fingers, three-jointed and pale as bone china, synthsilk laid down in segments over each knuckle so cleanly you could count the courses. Glitch had developed an entire personal weather system around the sight of Icon's hands.

She guarded the door with textbook posture for eleven full seconds. Then:

"Has anyone ever told you your hands are the expensive part?"

The handheld worked through its handshake with the panel. "Yes."

"...By who?"

"Me."

"That's — okay, that's cheating, you can't cite yourself—" Glitch's forearm ran hot along the cannon mount and she closed the hand into a fist, for structure. "Your drone's a butterfly with a whip and your trait is called The Finer Things. You know what that makes you, right? A collector. You collect pretty expensive stuff." A pause. "I'm just saying. I'm right here."

"You're not loot," Icon said, not looking up.

"I'm limited edition."

"You're mass-produced." The panel was still thinking about it. "Face and voice, issued as a pair. There were three hundred of you on Mars and the entire point of it was that nobody could work out which one of them had hit the caravan."

"I'm a series and then ninety percent of us died, which is called scarcity, which is called market forces—"

The lock let go with a flat industrial clunk, and the door drew back into the wall.

Icon came back out of the dark a few minutes later with the core cradled in one bare white hand. And as she passed, she paused.

Close. Deliberate. The first time all run she'd spent motion on anything unnecessary. Close enough that Glitch's proximity sensors chirped, close enough to see the small etched cross-marks at her shoulder and the faint seam where the replica face met the jaw — that borrowed face, the dead scientist's face, the one Icon had worn since her first hour off the WEAVEworm loom and had already stopped being anyone else's.

Close enough to see what the fog had been editing out. The cheekbone had a facet to it, an actual edge where the biomat turned, catching light along its length like something woven to a spec rather than grown into one. The mouth was worse. Thin, exact, the lower lip fractionally fuller than the upper and painted right to the corners with no overrun anywhere, four hundred contracts of not one single smudge, and it sat very slightly parted, which on that face was practically a shout.

Close enough, too, that Glitch had to look up, because Icon had a head of height on her and used every centimeter of it.

She looked at Glitch the way she'd looked at the gold three rooms deep.

Then, because she had already spent the motion, she spent a little more: two bare fingers set flat against the top of Glitch's shoulder, where the deltoid housing sat proud and round under the fallen collar of the jersey. Not a grip. A measurement.

"This is over-built."

"That's — that's a shoulder, that's a normal—"

"It's over-built. They gave you the housings off something a head taller and then didn't build the head." The fingers lifted. "It's the best-looking manufacturing error on the roster."

"Discontinued models," she added, softly, already moving, "appreciate in value."

Then she was gone through the door, and Glitch stood alone in a drowned colonial annex on a locked-down planet, cannon arm still humming, absolutely destroyed.

"—okay," she announced to no one, hoarse. "Okay. Extracting. Extracting forever."

Two floors up, Icon stopped on the gantry to re-seat the core in her pack. The core did not need re-seating.

"...Huh," she said, out loud, to the core and the gantry and nobody at all.

She had run four hundred and four contracts in this body and she could not remember the last time she had said a thing out loud for no operational reason. It had cost her nothing. It had cost her the entire walk to the extraction point, as it turned out, because she spent all of it wanting to go back down the stairs and say another one.

She didn't. But she logged the impulse, the way she logged everything worth money, and when the batch memory cycled that night she flagged it to carry, and she did not delete it.

---

Chapter Two: Perimeter

The second contract was Icon's idea, which Glitch found out later, and never let her forget.

Perimeter at dusk was almost beautiful if you squinted. The expansion edge of the colony — ground surveyed for terraforming that never got terraformed, the twin relays' balloons still holding their antennas up into a wide flat sky, the Data Wall with its teal hue splitting the zone in half. North Relay, a derelict transmission station and nothing else, every building in it put up for a shift that ended a century ago. The contract window was eleven minutes out. Runners with eleven minutes usually spent them getting into position.

Icon walked into the little mess room on North Relay's upper floor — six bolted tables, a serving hatch, a bank of dead vending units along one wall — set her rifle against the counter, and pulled out a chair.

Glitch stopped in the doorway. "...What's happening."

"Dinner."

"We can't eat. We're shells. I haven't digested anything since I had a pancreas." She stayed where she was, one hand on the frame. "Also we're eleven minutes off a window. You know what the grace period is. Forty-five minutes past the window and we come apart standing up, wherever we're standing, us and the kit and everything we're carrying, and then poor ONI has to file it, and the reason line says—"

"I can read."

"I know."

Icon sat, taking her time about it, folding down into the chair with the economy of a body that had never had to catch its balance — one long white leg crossing over the other, the puffer settling in around the narrow of her, spine straight without effort because there was no fatigue in the design to make it otherwise. She gestured at the seat across the little dust-covered table like it was the best table on Tau Ceti and she'd reserved it weeks ago. "Sit anyway."

Glitch didn't sit. Glitch stood there with her hand on the doorframe and made a small strangled noise.

"You fold," she said. "That's not sitting. Nobody sits like that. You came down in about four separate moving parts and every single one of them was showing off—"

Icon uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way. Slowly. Holding eye contact.

"— that was ON PURPOSE—"

So they had dinner.

Two empty New Cascadia ration tins for plates. Condensation off a dead cooler line in two cracked cups. A dead candle Icon found in a drawer and set between them purely for the architecture of it. Glitch narrated the entire imaginary menu — "for the lady, the finest nothing on Tau Ceti, paired with a crisp glass of also nothing" — and used the wrong imaginary fork, and told the story of her fourth death, the funny one, doing all the voices, hers and the UESC drone's, the one she'd insulted personally before it took her head off.

The mess chair was wrong for her in about four separate ways and she kept shifting in it. It had been built for something a good deal narrower; her hips took the whole seat and then some, the swell of her rear going soft against a frame that had expected straight lines and got curves instead. And she'd folded her arms on the table to lean in on the good part of the story, which pushed the loose jersey forward and let it hang off the front of her, and made it extremely obvious that the shirt was two sizes oversized for a reason and was losing anyway.

Icon, who had been built to read objects for what they were actually worth, kept her eyes exactly where they were and did not comment. It took a measurable amount of processing. She watched the whole performance for a while before she said anything.

"The chair's wrong for you."

"The chair's wrong for everyone, it's a hundred years old and it's made of sadness—"

"No. It's wrong for you specifically." Icon turned her cup a quarter-rotation. "They built you low and then built you wide across the top. You don't fit furniture. You fit doorways, badly."

"That's — is that a compliment? That felt like a compliment wearing a hazmat suit—"

And Icon sat there in the last orange light with her chin on her laced fingers, actually listening. Occasionally deploying that small rare smile at close range with no warning, casualties be damned.

Halfway through, she reached up and took the visor off.

Just — took it off. Set it on the table beside the unlit candle, and rubbed the bridge of her nose with two fingers like a woman coming off a long shift.

Glitch stopped mid-sentence.

She had seen Icon without the visor perhaps twice, both times in transit, both times at a distance. Up close, the eyes underneath were dark and slightly tired-looking, a design decision Sekiguchi had made a very long time ago, on a face that had belonged to a scientist who was long dead and probably wouldn't have approved of any of this.

"...You took it off," Glitch said.

"It's dinner."

"That's not—" Glitch's vocal processor did something undignified. "You can't just do that. That's your whole face. That's like me taking off—" she gestured vaguely at her own head, at the black headphone units clamped over her ears, at the entire arsenal of her look.

"Take them off, then."

"...What?"

Icon didn't repeat herself. She just waited. She had spent her entire operational life waiting for locks to give.

Glitch reached up and unclipped the audio units.

The mess room got loud. That was the thing nobody warned you about. The units filtered everything, and without them Perimeter came flooding in: the wind moving through the relay outside, ten kilometres of dead antenna, the tick of cooling metal in her own shoulder, the faint whine of Icon's chassis idling three feet away, a sound she had never heard before and would now be hearing for the rest of her lives.

She set the headphones on the table next to the visor. Two pieces of armor, side by side, next to a candle nobody was going to light.

For a while neither of them said anything, which was unprecedented, and was mostly Glitch's fault for having nothing left to hide behind.

"I didn't think you'd take them off," Icon said.

"...I didn't think you'd take yours off."

"No." Icon turned the cup a quarter-rotation and did not look up from it. "Neither did I."

They just looked at each other. Two faces designed a lifetime apart by the same company for entirely different money, propped on their hands across a dead candle in a dead mess room.

Icon's was the fine one and knew it: narrow at the temple, the cheekbones set high and faceted, that straight jaw running down clean to the point of the chin, everything about it drawn with a hard pencil. And the mouth thin and exact under it, dark red, still perfect eighteen minutes into a hostile zone, resting in the flat neutral line it defaulted to — except the corner, which kept threatening to do something and kept not doing it.

Glitch's was the other thing entirely. Wide across the cheek, blunt at the jaw, everything rounded off where Icon's was cut, a face with no line in it that had ever gone where it was told. The eyeliner smudged. The sensor square glowing faintly at the forehead. And the mouth that Icon had already spent an unreasonable share of two contracts noticing: full, wide, soft-looking in a way that no other part of a Vandal was, sitting slightly open the way it always did between sentences, the blue cross running straight down through it like somebody had marked it do not touch and hadn't been thinking the thing through.

"Can I say a thing," she said eventually. "About the face."

"You're going to."

"It's not hers." Glitch had her elbows on the table now, chin down, watching her across the dead candle. "That's the thing. Everybody does the whole ooh, she's wearing a dead woman's face, like it's a costume, like there's somebody underneath going let me out. And I've been looking at it for two contracts now and it's not hers. You've done more with it than she ever did." She waved a hand, vague and completely serious. "Whatever that lady was doing with those eyebrows, it wasn't this. This is a whole different building. Same bricks."

Icon's thumb stopped moving on the cup.

Everyone who had ever looked at that face had been politely, quietly wrong about it, and none of them had ever bothered to say so out loud, because none of them had ever been rude enough.

"...It's yours," Glitch finished, quieter. "That's all. Somebody should've told you."

Something in her moved on it immediately, the way a hand goes to a lock. Not on what Glitch had said. On getting out from under it. Four hundred contracts had taught her that the fastest way to stop being looked at was to look back, harder, at whoever was doing the looking. It always worked. She had gone her whole life without asking why she needed it to.

The wind moved through the relay. Icon put the cup down.

"You paint over a good one," she said.

"I — what?"

"Yours." She tipped her head and looked at a range of about four feet, going slowly, the way it went over locked rooms. Across the wide cheekbones. Down the short stubborn line of the jaw, rounder than her own and set at an angle that had been arguing with somebody since the factory. Onto the mouth, and it stopped there long enough that Glitch felt it land. "You've got a round face and a jaw like a closed door and a mouth that has never stopped moving. It's full. It's the softest thing they put on you and it's the part that does the most damage." A pause. "And you painted a hazard label over it. Cross straight through the lips. Liner like a bruise. Sensor square in the middle of your forehead like a price tag."

"That's the series, that's not even — that's not mine, every Glitch on the roster has this face, they issue it with the voice, that's how it comes—"

"I know what they issued." Icon did not move at all. "I'm telling you what's under it."

Glitch opened her mouth. Closed it.

"...Oh," she said. "Oh, you're doing my thing at me."

"Mm."

"That's — okay, that's not the same, that's not remotely the — yours is one dead woman, one face, one lady. Mine's a uniform. There were hundreds of me on Mars wearing this exact face on purpose so the UESC couldn't tell which one of us hit the caravan. That's not a face, that's a — that's camouflage, that's the opposite of a—"

"And not one of them was you." Icon turned the cup a quarter-rotation the other way. "Same bricks."

"Hey! That's my line."

"It was a good line."

The paint on Glitch's chin couldn't hide the flush — a real one, cerulean coming up under the surface where the biomat ran thin, going faintly warm and blue under the greasepaint, the shell's honest translation of oh no, she's got me. And then she did the thing Icon had not accounted for, which was nothing at all. She didn't argue it down. She didn't turn it into a bit and hand it straight back. She sat there in a dead mess room with her ears going blue and let somebody tell her a true thing about her own face, and took it, and kept it.

It looked like the easiest thing in the world.

Icon filed that too.

"This is the weirdest date I've ever been on," Glitch said finally, softer than she meant to.

"Mm." Icon turned her cup slowly, watching her over it. "It's the only one you've stopped performing halfway through."

"...That's the vault voice," Glitch managed. "You're using the vault voice at dinner."

"It works on valuables."

And then Icon reached across the table and touched her.

Nothing dramatic. Two bare fingertips laid against the back of Glitch's chunky red glove, then sliding back over the knuckles to the strip of bare shell at her wrist. That thin inch where the glove ended and she began, where the sensor lattice ran shallow and close to the surface, because neither Sekiguchi nor MIDA had ever expected anyone to be nice to a Vandal.

She was warm there. Warmer than the finish on her looked like it had any business being, and she gave slightly under pressure — grey-chrome synthsilk laid thin over biomat over woven synth-muscle, softer than it read from across a room, a compromise the spec sheet had never advertised because nobody was ever supposed to get near enough to find it.

Glitch's whole system stuttered. Actually stuttered, a visible hitch in her frame, the kind of thing a diagnostic would have flagged.

Icon's thumb moved once across the seam. Slow. Deliberate. Reading it.

"Your pulse-tone went up," she observed.

"That's — it does that. Randomly. It's a known defect. I've filed about it—"

Icon's thumb moved again, and Glitch's sentence collapsed into something that wasn't a word.

Somewhere in the wreckage of it, Glitch turned her hand over and caught Icon's fingers in her own, mostly to have something to hold onto. And stopped.

Because there was nothing in them to read. Nothing at all. The same four layers Glitch was built out of, in the same order, off the same kind of loom — and where Glitch came out matte and warm and gave a little under a thumb, Icon had been finished white, and glazed, and cold. Porcelain the whole way down. Eight hours on the frame and not one course of the weave out of place.

"You're cold."

"I'm ambient."

"That's worse. That's so much worse." Glitch turned the hand over anyway, looking at the segmented knuckles, the long bones of it, absolutely refusing to let go. "How do you run this cool. I'm sitting here venting like a hab fire and you're — you're room temperature, that's not a person, that's a countertop—"

And then the room went quiet for a second, and she was close enough, and she noticed the other thing.

Icon was breathing.

Not much, and not for oxygen. There were lungs in there — woven ones, like the rest of her, moving air over a set of receptors that told her what room she was standing in and whether anything in it was burning. A pulse-tone under that. A throat that swallowed. Most of the set, none of it doing a job any contract had ever asked for.

Nobody had ever explained to Glitch why a woman hired to shoot people needed a heartbeat. She had a theory that somebody at Sekiguchi had wanted them to feel like people and had put it through the budget under another name.

Icon ran hers slow and even, the same way she folded into chairs and took her gloves off for locks.

Glitch filed it, the way she filed everything, badly and forever.

"Mm," said Icon, and did not let go, and did not speed up, and sat there for the next four minutes with two fingers resting on the inside of Glitch's wrist like a woman keeping her place in a book she intended to finish later.

Outside, the Data Wall still torn open, the balloons overhead went on holding up a long dead transmitter, and somewhere in a dead mess room two mercenaries with nothing at all to eat sat across a candle that wasn't lit, and neither of them would have traded it for a real meal on any real planet.

The final exfil began counting down.

Neither of them moved for another thirty seconds.

i think we all know how those two are together and i can't help myself but bring it to life! i'm almost done i think i'll have it ready in a few days, so here's a snippet while i'm finalizing it! ♡