1. Homecomer

The first thing Riley noticed upon waking up was the warm body curled up against her back.

She thought she'd outgrown the need for company at night a long time ago – had been forced to, really – but the bliss of a sated craving almost made her purr with contentment. It felt like home. She leaned against the warmth, savoring the moment while it lasted.

The second thing she noticed was the slight distortion in her sense of touch towards anything that wasn't the other person. Even years later, the sensation carried enough familiarity not to feel out of place. It spoke of safety and comfort and soothed nightmares, having lulled her to sleep so many times before.

The third thing she noticed was herself. It would be hard not to, with her power, but she tried nonetheless. She clung to the warmth and invulnerability wrapped snugly around her like a blanket, forcing herself to focus solely on the coziness.

It worked at first, but the part of her brain that couldn't help cataloguing the differences in her body became harder and harder to ignore as the haze of sleep left her.

Riley hadn't been allowed to modify herself since Amy forcibly removed all of her tech from her body. The result had been uncomfortably light and foreign at first, and the vulnerability was terrifying, but she'd grown used to it over the past two years.

The difference was dizzying.

This body was only a bit smaller than the one she'd worn for two and a half years, but it was heavy with the hardware and mods that had been worked into every available space. Her proprioception extended to the weapons and mechanical parts hidden on the inside, and she could reach for them as easily as moving individual fingers. An array of mental switches and controls awaited her input. Her heartbeat pounded in her throat, the sound tracing the outlines of a modified circulatory system. Everywhere, intricate structures brimmed with activity.

Hidden blades rearranged themselves as she flexed one wrist experimentally, and the subdermal mesh shifted seamlessly to follow the movement.

Her attention caught on the stiff, blood-crusted sleeve of her nightgown. Two years of aggressively enforced biosafety measures urged her to clean the mess before someone noticed and docked her privileges, to which her conscious mind raised the rather more pressing issue that she wasn't alone in the bed.

Comfort drained away from the warmth as reality sunk in, leaving only suffocating heat and the rancid aftertaste of bile on the edge of her throat.

She pushed away the questions of how and why. They weren't useful right now. She tried to do the same with the growing knot in her stomach, but it was anchored too deep to budge.

One slow inhalation, followed by an exhalation three times longer, then she opened her eyes.

Morning light peeked through the curtains of the window she was facing, painting the room in shadows. A room twice as large as her quarters with the Wardens, and three times as crowded.

It was clearly intended for a child, and clearly curated by an adult who had made it their mission to sanitize away the slightest trace of personality.

Matching furniture surrounded the bed, all glossy white with clean lines and small button handles. Framed posters with inspirational messages and bright colors adorned the walls. In the corner next to the bedside table, a three tier shelf displayed a pristine arrangement of toys and stuffed animals that seemed to exist to be admired rather than played with. The bookshelf in the other corner wasn't much better, with tasteful ornaments between aesthetically pleasing sections of books.

It must have been an incredibly boring room to live in.

Of course, someone had taken it upon themselves to add some much needed personality.

Dark handprints cut a sharp contrast on the pale walls and white furniture. A few were superimposed to form butterflies or figures; others dragged the fingers into waves and abstract patterns.

Bits and pieces of spider boxes and control frames were piled up at the foot of the bookshelf. Below the window, the desk had been commandeered as a base of operations. Half of the space was covered with an arrangement of organs displayed like a solar system model. They were held in place and linked to the others via thin strips of connective tissue and an artificial circulatory system. A mess of tools and equipment covered the rest of the desk, along with several racks of test tubes.

The desk only had one row of drawers, leaving room underneath for a cooler and a large water reservoir seemingly filled with blood.

Between the desk and the shelf of toys, there was the Mannequin-made backpack used to protect glassware and sensitive equipment while Shatterbird sang. Power tools littered the floor in front of it, plugged into an extension cord to recharge.

On the bedside table, the lamp had been pushed aside to make room for a fish bowl with lumps of grey matter floating around in viscous liquid, with plastic wrap held in place over the top with elastic bands.

Head still on the pillow, Riley cranked her neck to look at the frame above the bedside table. The words "Rise and shine!" were written in elegant gold cursive on a white background, above a stylized golden sun. Blood had been used to finger-paint a face over the sun. Eyes crossed out, tongue lolling from the mouth and a knife stabbing through the forehead. The words "And kill!" had been added next to "shine!", still in blood.

Riley suppressed a groan.

Movement against her back prompted her to turn and look at her companion. Yellow eyes met hers, and a hand moved to brush a lock of hair out of Riley's face. Bonesaw's face.

She was too dazed to remember which muscles to move in order to achieve anything resembling a natural smile, much less the usual carefree grin. She tried, and her failure drew an inquisitive eyebrow from Siberian.

"Had a bad dream," Riley offered as an explanation, voice higher than she'd heard in years.

The hand moved to her shoulder, pulling her closer until her face was buried in the crook of Siberian's neck. Siberian held her tightly enough to blur the edges of invincibility between them, and Riley allowed herself to hold her back just as tight.

The pressure made her skin tingle, but relief surged like she'd just let go after holding her breath for too long. Unease still tied her stomach, but she could ignore it as long as she kept her focus on the embrace.

Riley didn't remember much of her earliest days with the Nine, but one crystallized memory was the relief and gratitude she'd felt when she realized why Siberian constantly hovered around her and found excuses to touch her. Things became a little bit better, once Riley understood. A little bit easier. She learned to stop flinching under the touch, and even started seeking it.

It was so easy to fall back into that mindset.

A cabinet door slammed somewhere downstairs, souring the moment.

Who would that be? Past experiences pointed to Shatterbird as both an early riser and a slammer of doors, but Riley's mind went to Jack first, because he was the one she dreaded to see most.

At least she didn't wake up cuddling with him. Small mercies.

Riley broke the hug and sat up. Her safety blanket vanished, leaving her feeling ten degrees colder, and the distortion stopped as regular physics reclaimed jurisdiction over her body.

Siberian pushed the covers back and rose from the bed before Riley was done untangling her legs from the sheets. The woman made her way to the vanity on her side of the room and expectantly pulled back the stool.

Riley's feet found the bedside rug, and the differences in her body threw her off balance as she took a tentative first step. She stretched, both to cover for her clumsiness and to get a better sense of what she was working with, and leaned heavily on the information her power provided to compensate for the difference as she walked around the bed to join Siberian.

She sat down, eyes cast firmly downward and away from the mirror. Siberian picked up the brush, and a fraction of the tension in Riley's neck washed away under the soothing motions.

Careful, even strokes dug into her scalp in the most pleasant manner, unfurling curls to their full length before they sprung back into shape. Goosebumps rose on the back of her neck with the end of each stroke, in anticipation of the next.

It had been so long since someone else brushed her hair. It felt so good.

It was also useless.

A pretense of normalcy. An artifact from another life. An empty gesture of affection between two people playing pretend.

This hair didn't tangle or get messy. The modified proteins shaped it in permanent, impeccable ringlets no matter what mistreatment it received. Hair maintenance was a pure formality, which was good, because Siberian had no idea how to brush curly hair, and Riley had never dared to correct her.

Because she'd been scared at first. Because it didn't matter when she could correct the hair instead. Because doing it the right way would invite the ghostly memories of someone else's hands into their daily ritual.

The ringlets felt foreign now. Amy's power didn't work on hair, so Riley had undone them herself as a voluntary step away from the image, and she'd let her curls grow wild ever since.

But the brushing was nice. And it bought her time to think.

Riley was grateful for her life since Gold Morning, no matter how much she might dislike the strict surveillance and heavy restrictions and mistrust and loneliness.

It was fair, even if it wasn't easy.

Finding herself in a skin she had outgrown, wearing a mask that didn't fit in front of a family that wasn't hers anymore was not the kind of second chance she'd hoped for.

What now?

Knowing when "now" was would be a good first step.

She could feel her tech, or at least the parts she could move voluntarily, but that didn't translate to instant recognition. There was no time to examine each piece individually. The vast majority was years in the making anyways, with too many gradual improvements to pin down the date based on the current iteration.

She searched for a handful of more memorable additions instead.

The most recent one she could place with certitude was the remote piloting system implemented in January of 2011, when it took four hours to retrieve her body after she was decapitated. Her six year anniversary with the Nine had been eventful, to say the least.

She couldn't narrow down the time any further without more hints, and there were no obvious ones to reach for.

She didn't recognize her surroundings either. The group moved around so often that most places blurred together.

On the run, with heat on their backs, Jack chose hideouts by convenience over comfort, no matter how much Shatterbird might complain about the lack of plumbing or electricity. This wasn't the case. They were laying low rather than running or actively attacking a city, and judging by the state of the room, they'd been here for at least a week.

This meant isolation. Somewhere out of the way, with no traffic and no immediate neighbors. No occupants who would draw attention by going missing, if they were planning to stay here for a while.

Laying low also meant the others would all be there. More eyes to track her movements and notice the differences, and more people to fight in order to break away. Chances were good that the core group would be intact. Jack, Siberian, Crawler, Mannequin and Shatterbird. Those who had been there since the start of her tenure with the Nine.

What could she do?

Staying was out of question, but running without a plan was a terrible idea. She'd seen reluctant members who tried to run away. She'd worked on reluctant members who tried to run away. Jack made it into a hunting game, with Crawler or Siberian usually winning and claiming their prey, then tossing her the leftovers to play with.

Crawler was a sweetheart, but he could outrun speedsters and track a familiar smell from a mile away. Riley could change her smell or cover it, but would need more data on his current biology to determine which chemicals would confuse his senses rather than leave a conspicuous trail of their own. The acids he produced were strong enough to kill her if he swallowed her whole, and might even stop the spread of plagues that would follow her death.

She didn't like thinking about Ned as an opponent. He'd been a friend once, even if that didn't count for much now.

Siberian would never hurt her. Would never hurt Bonesaw, she amended. Which meant that she couldn't appear as anything less than Bonesaw as long as Siberian was in the picture. If things went wrong, Riley's only defense against Siberian would be to locate Manton, and she couldn't do that without conspicuous preparations that would give away the show.

Siberian might not let her out of her sight at all, which brought a whole different set of complications.

Riley's ability to defeat Mannequin was entirely dependent on her understanding of his current arsenal, which she lacked. She didn't even know her own arsenal at the moment. It would take her hours, if not days, to get properly reacquainted with everything.

Shatterbird could be taken out of the equation fairly easily, as well as most of the short-lived members who would be completing the rooster. Not a serious consideration.

And Jack…

Phantom eyes scrutinized her from years away, wordlessly picking apart a veneer held together only by a machine.

Jack would know something was up the second he saw her, but he couldn't do anything about it right away without provoking Siberian. Unless, of course, he turned Siberian against her first.

Or worse, he could convince her to stay. To be Bonesaw again.

Jack was the biggest threat, and her best chance of survival was to take him out before he realized anything was amiss.

Hopefully he wasn't awake yet.

Riley opened her eyes, facing the mirror. The lost expression looked out of place on Bonesaw's face, and conscious effort molded it into something more in character. Siberian squeezed her shoulder before putting the brush down.

At least one person was already up, and Riley couldn't tell for sure that it wasn't him, but the gamble was worth taking. The window of opportunity, if there really was one, was shrinking by the second.

"Bathroom," she told Siberian while rising from her seat. "Wait for me?"

Siberian nodded, and Riley smiled. The smile remained until she closed the door behind her.

Hope surged as the smell of coffee greeted her in the hallway, confirming Shatterbird's presence in the kitchen. She prided herself in her ability to make an excellent coffee, and would savagely tear down anyone else's attempt. Only newbies ever made that mistake, to everyone else's entertainment.

Silent footsteps carried Riley to the nearest room, door slightly ajar. A glance found it empty.

A calming breath quieted her trepidation. There were more rooms in the corridor.

She continued.

Bathroom. Door open, lights out. The days old blood trail on the carpet coming from the stairs wasn't worth investigating.

She continued.

Another bedroom. Door open, curtains drawn. Red clothes crumpled on the floor prompted her to look up, and she found the scorched husk of the smoke detector hanging sadly from the hallway's ceiling, a large patch of blackened paint peeling around it.

Burnscar. Probably in the kitchen with Shatterbird.

There was only one door left before reaching the stairs, closed, and with no light showing under it.

Muffled echoes carried over from downstairs, unintelligible over the blood pounding in her ears. She half-expected the floor to creak or the door hinges to squeak or something to go horribly wrong as she opened the door as quietly as she could, but her sense of impending doom appeared to be off-target.

The good news was that it was Jack's room. The collection of knives spread across the dresser was clue enough.

The bad news was that he wasn't there, which meant he was up already.

She forced herself to breathe, splitting the difference between relief and panic to settle on dread.

The prospect of going back to her room was eclipsed by that of locking herself in the bathroom until she had a half-decent exit strategy.

Her feet refused to move.

Goosebumps surged on the back of her neck, and the dread turned to panic.

"Snooping much?" Jack said.

She froze, air held hostage in her lungs. There was no programming to guide her movements, but the body that turned around to face him felt so alien and disconnected from her mind that there might as well have been.

He stood right behind her, clad in a plush bathrobe that looked ridiculously out of place on him, hair heavy with water and dripping on the towel around his shoulders. Bare feet on the carpet hadn't made enough noise to tip her off as he climbed the stairs.

"Was looking for you," a voice that wasn't hers chirped from a body she wasn't controlling. "Had a bad dream."

He studied her, icy blue eyes piercing her like the knives littering his room. Time stretched enough that she couldn't tell for sure whether the moment should be counted in seconds or minutes or lifetimes.

"Come here," he finally said, raising an arm.

It felt like the opposite of a hug. A hug whose warmth had been cut out with surgical precision, leaving ice cold negative space where the warmth should be. Her lungs closed off to avoid smelling him, and for a second, she couldn't tell whether the heartbeat that pounded against the side of her head was hers or his. A calloused hand settled on the back of her neck, under her hair, exerting just a bit more pressure than necessary.

She remembered his hugs feeling good and warm and comforting, and had to shut down the thought before she broke a tooth from clenching her jaw too hard.

She could fire the poison needle in her index finger at point blank, or flood the hallway with gas, or short out his nervous system with a touch, or do a hundred different things to end this right now.

She didn't.

She couldn't.

This was too long ago. She didn't know what upgrades he had, or what she'd immunized him against. She couldn't use anything without knowing for sure, because it would be worse to take a shot at him and miss than to do nothing at all.

Anything that wasn't effective on the first try would be met with instant retaliation.

He'd declined an offer for retractable razor blades under his fingernails half a lifetime ago, citing the mundane elegance of a well-crafted knife, but her imagination still found the edges of hidden blades around her neck, ready to strike.

He was faster, stronger, more experienced, and she'd just lost the element of surprise.

She should have known she wouldn't do anything from the moment he offered a hug, because it meant he knew she wouldn't do anything. Not that he trusted her, no. He knew something was up. But he trusted his own ability to keep her in line.

And he'd been right. The realization turned to ice in her veins.

He let go of her, and there was a wet spot on the shoulder of her nightgown where water had dripped from his hair. She shivered.

"Better?" he asked.

"Yes," she lied, a smile pasted on her face.

He smiled too, eyes alight.

She'd seen that look countless times before. When people tried to dictate the rules of engagement and change the game. When heroes with strong ideals and exploitable weaknesses came after them. When a candidate was unusually hard to break and finding the right test proved to be a challenge. When Cherish joined with ambitions out of her depth, or when someone attempted a more direct takeover.

When he found out about the end of the world.

She could remember the very first time she saw that look, as she emerged from the hazy fog where her passenger had made contact.

He'd found a new game to sate his boredom.

"Now, go get dressed and come down for breakfast. We have a big day ahead of us."

His eyes burned through her back as she hurried to the safety of her room.