Bec laid there, recuperating, letting the wolf’s body keep her feeling safe and protected. It was irrational to think it was protecting her but, like a weighted blanket, it comforted her. She’d cracked her skull, and her arms and legs were studded with deep, filthy holes. She just laid there, bored. Her nanites, guided by Al, worked quickly to repair broken veins, bones, nerves, and musculature. She just had to wait and, eventually, she’d be back in business. What business? She didn’t even know at this point. Sure she’d gotten her backpack back after a relentless rainy season, and she was eventually to make her pilgrimage to the City, but part of Bec made her feel like she had done nothing but run, full sprint, from scenario to scenario all of which ended in her lying in a puddle of her own blood. This was… getting old. She needed a day off, badly.

Eventually, Al gave her the okay to walk, and she heaved the shockingly hot body of the wolf off her. The distended belly of the wolf ripped, and a retched scent filled Bec’s nostrils. This didn’t entirely shock Bec, but it would have a year ago. Bec now knew that large bodies of animals like wolves didn’t “go cold” right away, instead, the internal body heat causes rapid bacterial growth and heat that would rapidly spoil the meat in only the few hours that Bec laid there. She sighed and gathered her things as she looked at the field littered with wolf corpses that had revealed themselves as she laid there. It was an ugly scene only made worse by the smell.

The hike back to base was boring. A bad boring. Bec wasn’t asking for more wolf attacks, but she… well, she didn’t know what she wanted, but it wasn’t this. Coated in mud and blood, she opened the large, vault-like entrance to the Mountain’s Border. She hung her holster on a hook in a small room to the side of the entrance area alongside a myriad of other odds and ends. A bag of marbles, a set of binoculars, a wooden stick, and so many other strange things hung there, Bec knowing that they represent highly lethal tools in the hands of Word users. Who had Words? Everyone. Who was a constant threat? Everyone. Her paranoia didn’t stop her from engaging with this association. She’d rather die than live in isolation. She would know, she’d done both.

As she took another deep breath, braced for another day in the Border, she stepped into a nondescript hallway. She started walking and walking and walking. She opened a door. A bathroom. She sighed again. She walked and walked and walked some more until the door she opened was her room.

She slung the bag against the wall and flopped into bed, caked in mud, blood, spit, and probably shit. I really, really hate the forest, she thought as she fell asleep.

Waking up after a long nap, she felt clean. If only the bed refreshed her emotions. An impatient knock came from the door reminding her that everyone seemed to know whenever she would be awake. She rolled out onto the floor, then pulled herself to her feet. She opened the door to meet a man in black. She gritted her teeth. “Robert. Good morning…”

“Wow, you’re in a great mood!” His eyes flashed green.

Bec looked with sunken eyes. “What do you want?”

“You recovered the package?”

“You couldn’t have paid me enough LC to make up for what I just had to do.”

“Sounds to me like you couldn’t negotiate yourself out of a paper bag. 1,000,000 LC is standard fare for an excursion into the wilds.”

“I fought a pack of wolves, Robert.”

“Didn’t you kill a wolf a year ago? Sounds like you deserved it,” he said. He opened his palms out and flapped his fingers in a “gimme, gimme” sort of gesture as he bobbed anxiously.

Bec rummaged through the trashed bag and slapped a small black rectangle into his palm. His eyes fired blue as he all but started to drool at the ancient phone. He promptly pushed Bec out of the way and entered her room. “HEY!”

Robert wasn’t listening, and, instead, he plopped at her desk and laid the phone on the surface. The glossy screen lit up and Robert began typing at insane speeds.

“It’s soaked. The electronics are trashed. The files? Stored in solid-state. Good news for us since this thing seems to have mud in every port.”

“Good news.” Bec crossed her arms and shook her head just slightly. Not an iota of privacy since she found her first human company on this damn planet.

“I—” He tapped a few deliberate strokes. “I—got it! Bec, you are amazing! This is…” Robert’s voice waved. “This is the best birthday gift a sister could give a brother…”

Robert was Bec’s half-brother… probably. She hadn’t squared that yet, but it seemed likely. People say they look similar. How his pasty ass looked anything like Bec confused her endlessly.

Bec walked over to get a better angle at the glossy screen. She didn’t read off of screens at an angle very well, what with the glare. Robert sniffed. He was looking at a picture of Bec’s stepfather, the Silver Star of the Towers, looking like a dweeb with nary a silver strand of hair in sight. Her new stepfather. A colossal piece of shit. Or so she heard.

“Erm, Bec?”

“Yes?” A testy tone filling her response.

“Is your Timelet… beeping?”

Bec suddenly noticed that, yes, her Timelet was beeping and flashing while she was distracted with thoughts of family. She pulled it out, and Robert was suddenly there, peering over her shoulder. The Timelet had a new message scrolling across a splash page. It said:

Congratulations on not dying so much thus far! You are one of four surviving members of our program to usher humanity into the future! As a reward for your continued work for Lauds inc., we have pushed new firmware to your Timelet! From now on, you will now not only back up your thought data and records to the assigned checkpoints, but you will now be able to export up to 5 minutes of video data! Watch the world through the eyes of another you in another time!

Go! Spread humanity to the far reaches of Dust! This is our ultimate imperative!

The moment that Bec had read the scrolling message a new one appeared.

P.S. Whomever killed the fifth user can come and collect their reward in the City. Hurry up already!

Bec looked at Robert. Robert looked back at her.

“Do you think I killed her… or you?” Bec asked.

“It… was a collaborative effort for sure.” Robert said, lips forming a line as his brows furrowed in thought. “What is this ‘reward’ going to be? My gut says it’s a trap.”

“My gut reaction is to doubt any gut reaction these days.”

~~~

Bec chewed on her problems with a bowl of curry in the cafeteria. Her heart raced at the sight of the red sauce slowly soaking deeper into the rice heaped on her plate. She heard the crack of the wolf crushing against her skull as she clacked her spoon against the ceramic.

“What are you doing just staring off into the distance?” A woman dressed in equally bright red clothes abruptly pulled Bec from her trance. Seated across from Bec sat Ms. Scarlet, a woman one should never underestimate in a fight and fear more in a conversation. She read Bec like a book in moments. “That bad, huh?”

“No, no, it wasn’t that bad…” Bec sighed and tilted her head back, while still eyeing Scarlet. People act a little different when you don’t look directly at them. Even Ms. Scarlet, who knows my Word, doesn’t entirely understand how well I see these days. Bec could see most everything around her, feeling the lights and sounds ricocheting off every surface wildly and mostly incoherently… incoherently for anyone but her. She could hear a group of women talking as they walked past the cafeteria.

“—ple is so cool. I heard he took out an entire raiding party this week with line drives before they could even knock on our door! He’s so dre—"

“Not so bad? That sounds bad…” Scarlet returned the sigh and sat down silently.

“Do you usually sneak up on friends?” Bec desperately tried to sidetrack the conversation. Ms. Scarlet was not having it.

“Bec, darling protégé and platonic life partner, I need you to please not make me regret coupling my existence to you. Your mental health… or the lack of it is very important to me.”

Bec looked directly at Scarlet for this. “So, you got it implanted, finally? Congrats on the first day of the rest of eternity, I guess.”

“Starting… now actually!” She made a gesture, and Bec felt her Timelet vibrate as a third stream of data tethered itself to the device.

“Could you not subvert the encryption on the Timelet? You could just ask…”

“Bec. You are very clearly distraught. Please talk to me.”

“I… I don’t think anything will help how I’m feeling right now.”

“Talk to me, please.” Scarlet reached out for Bec’s hand, but Bec pulled her hand back out of reach instantly.

"Don’t. Scarlet, don’t do that to me.”

A shocked face streaked Scarlet before she collected herself. “Bec, I would never use my Word on you like this! The notion is absolutely absurd.”

“You use it all the time, why not now? On me?” Bec shot a look at Scarlet that could have been mistaken for anger or exhaustion but was mostly just a cocktail of apprehension and general malaise.

Scarlet let out a long, drawn-out breath. “I forget sometimes that you’re not from Dust. There are… rules… unspoken rules but rules. Bec, you are a friend. I would never, ever, manipulate you without you being explicitly okay with it.”

Being okay with mental manipulation at all was nutty. Mental manipulation for things like sparring practice and testing Scarlet’s sleep device were just a small, yet significant part of how Bec couldn’t really find comfort anywhere anymore. She wasn’t even comfortable with who she was when she was alone… or with Al, of course. She was never alone anymore. All Bec could say is, “what makes me special?”

“Your Word, silly!”

Bec winced. “Yeah, thanks.”

Scarlet looked puzzled. “Do you need anything more? You’re already practically deathless, you have ridiculously versatile power, you have been training under me for a year!” She rattled off reasons that Bec was lucky, but that isn’t what was bothering her.

“First of all, so are you now. Second, I meant what is special about me to you?”

“Ah, well… nothing right now…”

Bec’s head just lolled weakly left and right as she got the news that she already knew was true. She was a blip on the radar of Scarlet. Of Dust. Of the universe. “What am I even supposed to be doing? Slaughtering wolves? Shouldn’t I do something… important?”

“You can’t expect to save the base every week, can you? Existential destruction only happens every once in a while.”

Bec wrinkled her nose. “I just feel like I’m spinning my wheels. I… want to go to the City.”

“We can get ready to leave tomorrow. I will tell Black that the family reunion is on.”

“What? Just like that?”

“I was waiting until you came back from a mission on the first try.”

First try… Bec didn’t really realize until now that she managed to do something without dying. She was so used to reading about her death that they’ve all started to blend together into a ball of screwedness. Did she really manage not to die a billion times before beating those wolves? It almost felt like a joke that she could pat herself on the back for something like that, but it did make her feel better. The Timelet had updated, yet Bec wanted to never see a video on her Timelet ever.

"Oh and Bec, here take this." Scarlet handed her a data stick. Bec put it into her Timelet and squealed as she saw a series of what looked like public domain books and general city culture getting uploaded to her Slate.

What she really wanted was to see the City and the photos she saw on her Timelet reminded her of that. She was nervous since, what she had researched about the long trek through the Suburbs, she would need to be smarter, faster, overall better than everyone she encountered, or else she would be doomed to fight an impossible battle for an eternity. She needed to have a chance before she could beat the odds. Was she ready? Maybe now, after all this, she might actually be. Bec smiled for the first time in months.