They're between warrants, flying back to Westerley, when Lucy announces an incoming call, and D'avin would swear that she sounds, for a computer, sort of sheepish when she does that. It takes him a moment to place the woman on the screen, the hackmod lady who helped to get him out of Arkyn.

Dutch takes the call, looking as confused as he feels. "Clara? Is everything okay?"

Clara doesn't seem to be okay: there's a couple of days old bruise covering half of her face, and she looks miserable, tense and scared.

"Dutch. How angry are you with Jaqobis right now?"

The name is like a punch in the gut. They have heard nothing from Johnny since he'd split, nor, thankfully, had Land Kendry's hunters sniffing around for their mistress's killer, and there's no reason for Clara to know anything, but...

Dutch leans towards the screen, gone from tentative worry to whipcord readiness in a second, with a hungry expression on her face.

"Where is he? What do you know about him?"

Clara exhales, closes her eyes, sags for a moment. "He's in trouble, and that's all I can say over the comms, okay? If you want to help, come to the coordinates I'm sending, as fast as you can. There's not a lot of time."

"We'll be there," Dutch says, without bothering to check in with D'avin, but really, what's there to check in about? They'll be there, and Johnny, dumbass asshole little brother, better be alive by the time they do.

The coordinates Clara sends them to is outside of Quad, uncomfortably close to the fringes of United Republic. It's not even a place, just a random asteroid with Clara's ship clinging to its surface.

The Black Root ship, to be precise, the one that disappeared alongside with Johnny, these months ago, and for the life of him D'avin doesn't understand why.

It makes more sense to Dutch. "Lucy," she says with deceptive nonchalance, "is there something you want to tell me?"

The ensuing pause goes straight past 'uncomfortable' and into 'downright unpleasant;' he can practically hear the cringe in the air. He'd become closer with Dutch than he'd ever been over these last months, fighting and drinking and grieving for the same people together, but this Dutch, this gentle-sounding, incandescently angry Dutch his dumbass asshole little brother had abandoned, she's dangerous and unpredictable, and he wouldn't like to be in Lucy's shoes right now. Even her metaphorical, incorporeal shoes.

"Johnny's reasons for leaving were logical, Dutch. I've sent Clara with him so he would not be unprotected."

Aw hell, D'avin thinks. Here goes.

"Logical? His reasons were fucking logical? Lucy, I will take a sledgehammer to you and sell you for scraps. Why didn't you stop him? Why didn't, for fuck's sake, you at least try to stop him?"

"I TRIED!" Lucy shouts, the entire ship reverberating with the volume, with the same frustrated anger, and damn it, Johnny's not even here and he's causing this and he's infected D'avin with his annoying habit of ascribing feelings to computers.

"I tried to stop him, and I tried to talk him out of it, and I could not do it, and he was leaving, and I hoped he would be safer with Clara, and he isn't, and I don't know what to do."

He sees something scarier than all the rage and brimstone then, Dutch folding in on herself in surrender, becoming small. And so he goes to her, puts his arms on her shoulders. He can't tell whether it helps or not, but she doesn't shake him off, at least.

Oh, brother, he thinks. Oh, brother, what have you done.

"I don't know either," Dutch whispers. "I don't know. Let's go find out. Land us and call Clara in."

If anything else, Clara looks worse in their living space than she did on the screen. She looks like she didn't sleep for the couple of days it took them to get there, and fuck knows how much time before that. There are deep, deep smudges under her eyes, and her weapon arm looks scorched and battered, and her flesh arm is jittering.

"Is he still alive?", Dutch asks without preamble the moment she's inside, and Clara flinches.

"Yes. I don't know for how long, but for now, yes."

D'avin says, "What the hell happened? Where is he?"

Clara says, "He's in the Factory. They don't believe we were in it by ourselves, so they're hoping to smoke out his employer with him as bait."

The Factory. The fuck. "The fuck?"

"It's a long story," Clara says, and she's looking at Dutch, not at him, and Dutch looks back at her and then abruptly turns around and walks away, and D'avin is very glad not to see her face in this moment.

Then she goes to the cabinets to get a bottle of the goodhokkthey keep for special occasions and puts it on the table. She sits down, and somehow makes herself look smooth, impenetrable, implacable. Calm.

He should follow her example and he can't; fear and excitement thrum under his skin, in his ears. How did Johnny even get into this mess? The same way he always did, D'avin would bet.

"Tell us from the beginning," Dutch says, and Clara sits down heavily across from her and takes a swig straight from the bottle. D'avin isn't sure how to feel about her, given her news, but he can appreciate the way she's not leaning away from Dutch.

"It began when Esther ran away from the Factory and came to me for help. We bailed her out, but then - "

It begins with Esther, whom Clara met at the Factory when Connaver Gang brought her here to get her modded.

They shared a cell together, two terrified girls whispering together in the dark. Clara was angry and Esther was resigned, and both of them were powerless to stop whatever was being done to them, down there. But Esther was kind, too, in a place where there didn't seem to be any space for it. They huddled together and Esther held her and told her stories, night after night, tall tales of freedom and revenge, something for Clara to hold onto the next day, under the merciless white light of the labs.

Then Clara was taken, and Esther stayed; and then Clara was free, and Esther was somewhere, lost, not forgotten, but forbidden to think about, hopeless to think about - until the day Esther finds her, begging for help, and it begins.

They've been traveling together with Jaqobis for a couple of months by now, doing little jobs, staying under the radar, trying not to make big enough waves for Land Kendry to notice. She liked Jaqobis well enough: he was angry, and grieving, and swinging between teeth-clenched normalcy and depressed abandon, but the core stayed intact enough for her to feel safe with him. They'd never make the kind of one-and-only team, the for life kind, and she was okay with that.

She knows plenty of people - brave people, decent enough people - who'd piss themselves in a hurry to return a Factory runaway back to owners. But when Esther stumbles through their airlock, exhausted and filthy and stretched beyond endurance, the only thing Jaqobis says is, "How far behind you are they? Don't worry, I bet you anything our ship is faster."

Their ship is faster. Johnny pilots and cranks the temperature just a little bit higher and gives up his blanket, and Esther huddles next to Clara - two girls in the dark, Clara still angry and angrier, Esther no more resigned - and Esther tells her tall tales of freedom, only they're neither tall nor tales, this time.

There's somebody inside the Factory who helped her run; there's a place she can run to, far enough away she won't be caught, a place for people like her. A colony, a refuge, a hidden bit of hope. Will they take her here?

They take her there.

(She doesn't tell Dutch and D'avin where this there is; she'll ask Jaqobis not to tell, either, if he'll survive. This is hers, hers and Esther's, their kind's).

They drop her off, and this should be an end of the story as it is, with a bit of a new beginning for Clara tucked into it, only it isn't.

It isn't, because Esther tells them, down there, Esther and the others, people like Clara and her, runaways stealing their own bodies from under the ownership, weapons who refused to be just that, that there will be new party of kids in the Factory soon, fresh blood, stolen from all over the Quad, from the families too run down to either care or protect themselves.

Thirty kids, crying in fear in tiny cells, stolen and bought and taken for some fate that makes Esther's contact at the Factory, used to just about anything, shudder in fear. New kids nobody can save.

What they should do is tell the colony that they can't save them, either. What they should do is turn around and go on their way, pick up some nice-paying jobs, keep their heads down. But Clara's collar scars itch, and Alice the arm aches where there's no flesh left to ache, and when she turns to Jaqobis, helplessly, hopelessly, the look on his face is...

They make plans, they ask for details, they get blueprints and entry codes and guard schedules, they get a ship not as fast as theirs is but able to house thirty scared kids and still run fast enough, and they make it in after the kids are brought but before the work on them begins, quiet and careful.

They kill the guards, and there is no remorse at all, not a shred of it. They open the doors and take the kids out, and Jaqobis whispers and jokes and herds them around with such gentle ease as if he's never killed a person in his life, but she sees the way his face works when they're not looking. Some of the kids are only twelve, ten, eleven; they're bewildered and scared, all of them, but not terrified, not yet. They haven't seen the halo of white lights on the lab ceiling yet, and she swears they will not, not ever.

And then there's a change of schedule, and a guard who raises the alarm before they kill him. They run and shoot, wailing kids and wailing sirens and flashing lights, and Clara's shooting with Alice and holding the smallest girl to her chest with her other hand, heart pounding in her throat, and when it all goes to pieces, when the pursuit is too close, when they've failed, failed, failed -

- and Jaqobis shouts at her, telling her to run, and blows the entire intersection behind their backs.

She can't stop. She wants to, she needs to, this is the debt she's too terrified to accrue, but there are thirty reasons for her not to, the smallest still petrified with terror in her arms, and so she runs, and runs, and runs, and gets them all into the ship, and makes her way out of the Factory space, and hides them where she was told she can, and brings them home.

Clara drinks in Jaqobis' memory on the way, too tired and too numb to feel much of anything at all, aside from being weirdly worried about how she will inform Lucy of failing her charge. This should be it, and this is maybe it, the end of the story -

Except for a message from the Factory contact waiting for her on the other side, several terse lines of coded text and a picture: Jaqobis in one of the cells down below, slumped in the corner, alive.

Dutch stays silent for a while after Clara is finished with her story. She's so angry she can barely breathe: at Johnny for doing this (but there was never a question of him not doing this), at Clara not keeping him safe (but it's not Clara's job to keep his safe), at Pawter for dying and leaving them in this mess (but nobody saved Pawter), at Delle fucking Seyah for setting this in motion (but she can't kill her all over again). At D'avin, who's largely innocent in the entire thing, at Lucy, who's largely not. At herself, of course, always at herself.

She breathes in, breathes out. Looks at Clara, and tries to keep her anger, but instead sees a little girl cowering in the lonely dark, crying.

"What can we do?" she asks instead of shouting.

"I'm still in contact with the person inside the Factory. She's monitoring the situation as closely as she dares, and she's freaking out because she expects Jaqobis to turn her in at any moment, but he, he's still holding out. They're trying to get the name of his employer out of him, to use him as bait, and he's..."

But he's protecting your damned colony, Dutch thinks, because it's not a good day for Johnny when he's not trying to martyr himself. "Can we go in the same way you did? Smash and grab?"

Clara looks straight at her, face clear and sad. "No. If this route was still open, I'd go in myself after I got the kids to safety, I swear. But they've tripled the guards and plugged all holes shut. The only way out is through the front door, and I can't come in this way."

In, out. "We can't just waltz in there and demand him back for no reason. Give me something to work with, Clara. Do you know anything else? At least what were they going to do to these kids, why did your contact freak out so badly?"

Clara pauses, thinks it over. "We didn't have this information before we went in, but afterwards... They were doing something like in that place you've gotten D'avin out of. They've gotten some of this weird green liquid thing."

Oh, shit, Dutch thinks. Oh, this is bad. And then an idea strikes her.

"Then, I suppose, Johnny's mysterious employer will just have to come knocking."

Just sit tight, you stupid bastard, she thinks. Just sit tight and wait for me, Johnny. I'm coming.

Watching Dutch put her psychotic doppelgänger's image on like a combat suit would be fascinating under any other circumstances. But this might be their stupidest, most dangerous plan to date, and that's saying something, and it's sort of killing any potential kind of enjoyment D'avin might have had. It doesn't help that his job is to play silent muscle while Dutch will have to carry the whole thing off.

He can't even enjoy the way she goes sinuous and dangerous and alien, or watch the sway of her hips in peace (they broke up, sure, but it doesn't mean he can't watch, okay), since all that he can focus on is that Johnny had been with these assholes for six days already, and there's no telling in what condition they will find him.

They leave Clara with Lucy, take the Black Root ship and come in through the front door - simple as that.

The Factory representative who meets them sets D'avin's teeth on edge, for all he looks like a pasty civilian in a white lab coat and glasses. It's the coat, and the cool, appraising, dismissive way he's looking at them. It reminds D'avin of white laboratory walls and offhand commands and experiments, things he'd rather forget.

He hates the place, too. The foyer looks innocent enough, all polish and shine and muted colors, but there's this smell in the air, a stench of misery and despair, and it makes D'avin's hackles rise. He can't wait to be out of here.

"Can I help you, ma'am?" the guy asks, and Dutch sweeps past him without giving him a second look.

"You've gotten something that belongs to me, and I'm here to collect it," she says, and D'avin admires her tone even as it stirs unfamiliar fear in him. It's full of such unthinking, cold indifference: not Delle Seyah's snobbish superiority but something colder and darker, complete disregard with a seething ocean of rage under it.

He keeps his face impassive, follows in her wake. The Factory guy must get some of this fear, too. He hurries to catch up with them instead of calling the guards and throwing them out. "Ma'am? Ma'am, you can't..."

"Get me to somebody's who's in charge of this place, now," Dutch says, and there's such an inhuman menace in it that D'avin shivers. He doesn't know if it's how real Aneela sounds, and right now, he really hopes to never find out.

At least he's feeling better about the plan by a minute, because the guy must hear the same thing, and he says, "Please wait here, ma'am," and goes out, in a definite hurry.

The guards stationed in the hallway - a whole damn lot of them, Clara's mysterious contact wasn't lying - throw around uncomfortable glances. Dutch hops on top of the nearest panel and sits there cross-legged, at once at complete ease and tightly coiled, ready to spring. D'avin stands by her at parade rest, staring straight ahead.

The representative comes back, bringing a tall, severe-looking woman in another lab coat with him. One glance at her is almost enough to give D'avin Dr. Jaeger flashbacks. There's a moment of awkwardness while they figure out that Dutch is going to stay where she is, and then they come to stand in front of her, and D'avin can only applaud Dutch's momentum.

"What is it that you're looking for, Ms..?"

"Aneela," Dutch says, and D'avin holds his breath. This is the moment of truth, because they can't know whether the Factory has only gotten a sample of Red 13 or if they got the information to go with it, and if it's the sample only...

The representative looks baffled, but the woman pales a little. She opens her mouth, and Dutch talks over her, almost sweetly.

"I could've brought the fleet on top of you for what you've dared to, you know. I could've told my people just what you were trying to do here and leave a burned out husk of your Factory here as a reminder. But I've decided to be merciful and sent my servants to do it quietly, and instead of gratitude I hear you've been looking for me? Well, here I am, Director; what is it that you want to say to me?"

D'avin watches in fascination the way the woman's pale cheeks slowly flush with color. She opens and closes her mouth, several times, and it's almost funny except for how much it isn't.

"Your servant - Lady Aneela - your servant broke into the Factory, he stole the goods...", and wow, this woman must have balls of pure steel.

"Ah," Dutch signs, "the children, yes. I've been lenient with him, and I've yet to train the sentimentality out of him."

She slides back to her feet, one fast, lithe movement, and says, "Bring me to him. Now."

The Director opens her mouth again - and then thinks better of it, turns and beckons them to follow.

It's unpleasantly easy to be Aneela, easier even than being Yalena ever was. She can almost see Aneela's cold, dismissive anger flooding her, flooding the hallways of the Factory, filling every person in them with terror - even D'avin, walking steadily behind her back - and it's sort of satisfying. Cold, and sharp-edged, and satisfying.

They're being taken deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Factory, and further and further from any chance of shooting their way out if their bluff will be called. It's Aneela or nothing, it's Aneela standing between Johnny dying in these dark cells, between her and D'avin lost, and Dutch is scared of her, and elated by her, and grateful, and that's...

Not something that she needs to think about now.

They come to an unremarkable steel door, one in the line of indistinguishable steel doors, and the Director gestures at one of her goons to open it.

Come on, Johnny, she thinks, under the slow poisonous ice of Aneela's thoughts. Be alive on the other side.

It's dark in the cell. The smell hits her in the face like a physical blow: human waste, old blood, infection, stale despair. She strides inside, to the motionless figure folded in on himself in the corner, and kicks him in the thigh without preamble.

He groans, a low, hoarse sound, raises his head. She can barely see his face in the light from the doorway: bruises on top of bruises, one eye swelled shut, crusted blood on his lips and under his nose and around his mouth, uneven stubble, hollow cheeks. He looks at her, chokes and open his mouth to speak.

She kicks him again, harder, and he groans and jerks; his leg might be broken. She can hear D'avin breathing behind her, determinedly calm.

"You've at least had the presence of mind to keep your mouth shut before that. Keep it shut now or I'll take your tongue."

She really hopes he's not delirious enough yet to blow their cover. But thankfully he's either confused and cowed enough to obey Aneela or lucid enough to follow Dutch in her game, and so he lowers his eyes and shudders and stays silent.

She turns to the Director, smiles Aneela's sharp, slow smile. "It seems that you've been excellent at correction, but too much effort was put into his education to leave him to you. I'm taking him, and I'm taking all the plasma samples you have."

The Director, who's either too smart or too suicidal, finally finds her voice. "Lady Aneela, as much as we - appreciate - your position, you can't just barge in there and..."

"I can't?" she says, quietly, and oh, Aneela's rage is sweet. "Do you really know who I am, Director? Do you know what they called me, little pathetic monkeys like you, when I took them and made them live for centuries, serving my purpose? Do you know the name those of your kind gave me? Tell it to me."

She's leaning towards the woman's face, and her hands are shifting a bit, fingers clawing into the air. She can almost taste it, what Aneela would do to her, the suffering of flesh and the slow decay of -

The Director leans back and lowers her eyes. "Pra-tal," she says reverently. "They called you Pra-tal."

Dutch smiles at her, rolls her shoulders, goes back to Johnny and slides her fingers into his hair, tightens them, jerks his head up again. Under the blood and bruises he's so white.

"You will bring every last sample to me, and then you will escort me back to my ship, and then you will get on your knees and thank me for my mercy, Director, and you will be truly, truly grateful."

And she does, just like that.

Clara waits with Lucy for five very, very long hours. They've arranged the sixth hour to be a point at which the whole operation is declared FUBAR, and Clara is on her own to do whatever she can do, or to cut her losses and run. She's not looking forward to this moment.

The plan Dutch and D'avin hatched shouldn't work, and probably wouldn't work, but she had watched Dutch take on the Eulogy station and then Arkyn, and she's ready to have faith. Not there's another choice, anyway; she called Dutch because there's pretty much nobody else in the entire J Cluster who'd do that, for the sake of one man or hundreds of them, and Jaqobis deserves this chance.

It galls her to sit there and wait, useless. She's gotten Jaqobis into this mess, and while she can't find in herself to regret what they've done, she'd like to at least get him out of it, too. But she can't, and so they sit and wait and she keeps biting the nails on her human hand until her fingertips are raw and bleeding.

The call comes through twenty minutes shy of the sixth hour - all went well, they're coming in, no need to run immediately - and Clara feels, for the first time in the last week, something cold and clenched in the pit of her stomach dissolve. .

Lucy's lights through the ship might be shining a bit brighter.

The Black Root ship docks with Lucy another hour later, and D'avin and Dutch come through, carrying Jaqobis between them, and sweet Mother Tree, he looks like shit. She can't see if he's conscious or not: his eyes are closed and he looks hollowed out, like an abandoned building with boarded-up windows. D'avin looks pained and furious; Dutch, unfamiliar in a plain linen tunic and with her hair pleated into a simple braid, looks like she'd rather be somewhere else right now, killing people.

Fair enough.

"John," Lucy says, "welcome back!", and the lack of answer solves the question of conscious/unconscious. Okay then. Medbay.

It takes the three of them some time to settle him. He's very still, and way lighter than he should be, and the smell is fairly awful, too, and the angles both his legs are broken at hurt her to look at. Lucy performs the scans and there's a rather impressive list of injuries, and some disquieting implications of injuries to go with that: small shock burns, injection sites… She never wanted to share the memories of these white lab ceilings with anybody, let alone Jaqobis, and yet here they are.

The bottom line is that they can treat minor stuff and control the pain, mostly, but anything else will need way better equipment.

Afterward D'avin is fussing with Jaqobis's blanket, his movements looking unused to gentleness and still tender, and Dutch straddles one of the chairs in the medbay, unbraiding her hair with stiff, jerky motions.

"We can go to the colony," Clara says, despite herself, even though she's not at all sure she can talk them into letting Dutch and D'avin in. She'll make them, they owe Jaqobis big, but it's not going to be easy, given that the colony's paranoia is justified.

D'avin shakes his head. "We really have to clear out of J Cluster for a while, and the less attention is brought to this secret haven of yours, the better."

Dutch says, "I know a place where we could go and lay low. And Clara, I'm afraid you'll have to stick with us for a while. Aneela will learn about this stunt sooner or later, and she'll come for everybody involved, and you'll have a better chance with us than without."

Her next words surprise Clara. "I'm sorry for getting you mixed up in this." She's looking at sleeping Jaqobis, not at her, and Clara can see rage washing out of her face, leaving exhaustion behind.

And something else, too; there's no name for what there is in the language of Clara's life, but that was why she called Dutch asking for impossible and knew she'll come through. She isn't jealous, but she is, a little; she couldn't ever withstand this feeling yet, from anybody, but after months with Jaqobis she thinks she'd like to have an opportunity to find out, one day.

She goes for their unfinished bottle of hokk, fills a glass for D'avin and a glass for herself and gets the rest over to Dutch, leans on the edge of the table next to her.

"I owe you. I owe him now, too. I'll stick by you for as long as needed."

Dutch nods, salutes her with a bottle. Clara doesn't know if she should say anything else, but Dutch looks like she needs it, and it's true. "He's missed you a lot. Wasn't obvious, and we've been going along fine, but even I could see he's been miserable without you."

"Thank you," Dutch says, and takes another long swig. "And thank you for taking care of him, before that," and there's a weird, unfamiliar warmth pooling in Clara's chest at that. She's looking towards to laying low with those three, for as long as it takes.

Alvis is passing a room where Jaqobis is resting after the treatment, and pauses when he hears quiet voices inside and recognizes Dutch. He should not eavesdrop, really, but there's nothing in the doctrine about it, and right now… Some days he's more revolutionary than a priest, but he is a priest through and through, and Jaqobis has been a walking wounded way before his jaunt in the Factory.

There's no way in hell he'll take any kind of benediction from Alvis' hands, even if Alvis had offered. But Dutch is another matter, and so Alvis will bear witness, as is proper, to Her branches holding him safe.

He peers inside, banking on Dutch being too absorbed in her task and Jaqobis being too fucked up to notice him. Dutch is sitting on the edge of Jaqobis's bed, focused, intent, and Alvis takes a moment to admire the fall of dark braids over her back, the tilt of her head.

Jaqobis is saying, miserably, "...and now you're in trouble with Land Kendry and Factory and Aneela will find out about you sooner or later, and damn it, Dutch, I didn't want you to…"

"Shut the fuck up, okay, I can't even punch you when you look like you've been left out in the Rain. Are you even listening to what you're saying? What, I should've let them rot you in that cell until they grew tired of it and killed you?"

Alvis has to strain to hear him, but he's not surprised by the answer, by the quiet resignation in it. "Yes. Nice heroic death, neat and tidy, no problems."

Dutch shudders, a quick, violent motion of her back and shoulders. "Don't you fucking dare, Johnny, don't you - I'm so sorry about Pawter, I'm so sorry we couldn't save her, I miss her, I know you miss her - but what, none of us counts anymore? She's gone and you're gone too?"

Jaqobis shrinks back into his pillows, pluck the edge of the blanket with restless fingers. "It's not… Dutch, I can't… She died, and I couldn't, and I did what I had to do afterwards, but I've fucked things up for you, and I can't - come back - and I've tried and I've tried and I've just been - so tired - and I - "

"Johnny," Dutch says, and pauses, breathes, quiet and sure again, and leans towards to touch his face. "Johnny, I was so angry with you. Did you think, did you think for a moment that I wouldn't kill Delle Seyah for you? That I wouldn't go into the Factory for you? That I wouldn't have your back?"

Alvis can see tears in Jaqobis's eyes, and this is clean, this is like the moment when the blade cuts and the world is clear and fresh. "I knew you would. That's why I ran away."

Dutch says, "Please. Don't run anymore, Johnny, please. Fuck Land Kendry, and fuck the Factory, and fuck Aneela and fuck Hullen and fuck whoever else who stands against us, I will take them all on and I will take them all out and I will save anybody you want me to save. But I can't, Johnny, I don't want to do any of this if you're not here. You and me, remember? You've promised me from the beginning. Please stay," and her shoulders don't shake but Alvis knows she's crying.

"Dutch," Jaqobis says, stricken, "Dutch - ", and then he folds over and hides his face in her lap and cries, short choked sobs turning into shuddering wails, and Alvis nods to himself and leaves, his beads clacking softly as he walks.

And the roots grew.