It's strange, how he still thinks in terms of him and them; how, despite fighting alongside them, he's no closer to becoming part of their group.

Belonging to a tribe, he realises, is more than having a demon snarling in his head; more than having an atma brand that burns black on the back of his hand, a mark of a starving beast seared onto his skin. It's more than wearing the colours of the tribe, the orange bright as a weeping wound on his sleeve and twice as dangerous, a signal of his allegiances. It's more than just travelling with them, more than obeying the signalled orders of a silent leader.

(and the truth is that Serph, Serph's twice the leader he was, twice the leader he ever will be.)

Roland feels strange, watching them. For programs, for AIs, they're more human than the people of Karma City.

Theirs is a dangerous existence, but he's long resigned himself to it; he's run enough, away from his responsibilities as the leader of the Lokapala, away from the consequences of killing a man they infected with the virus. He's used to danger, used to sleeping with one eye open, used to waiting for the Karma society to break down the doors at any minute. He supposes the Embryon are the same, in a way; they live for warfare, were programmed for it - there's no escaping their origin.

They sleep in shifts, watch in shifts; they have to remain on guard, especially in the midst of enemy territory. The floor is silent; they've cut a swath through the officers and soldiers. They rest in a room that reeks of blood with the bodies of the slain piled in a corner, catching what snatches of sleep they can before the solar noise peaks again, before the hunger gets too much to ignore and they need to move, to hunt and to subdue their demons.

Part of him wishes, fleetingly, for alcohol; for the familiar ethanol burn at the back of his throat, for the welcome oblivion that eats away at his thoughts as he licks his teeth and throws back cheap whiskey, shot after shot. Another part wishes, wistfully, to be part of the huddle that the others instinctively fall into, when beds aren't available - they sleep close to one another, as wolves do, back-to-back and shoulder-to-shoulder. Perhaps he's envious of their closeness, the way Gale curls against Serph and Cielo's head rests against Argilla's side; perhaps he's jealous because even though he's sworn his loyalty to them, he'll always be different - an outlier, a stranger.

Something glints amongst them and he starts, violently. Argilla. Argilla watches him watching her and narrows her eyes, questioningly. "Is it almost time for the change in shift?" she asks.

"No," he lies. His watch reads fifteen-past three. He shakes his sleeve over the face and averts his eyes from Argilla's. "It's nothing."

She rises, and gently props Cielo against Gale. He shifts a little and says something incoherent, then settles. "You should sleep," she whispers. The plates of her armour clink.

"I'm fine," Roland says. "I was just ..." He pauses and stares back at the others, then at the atma that pulses faintly over his knuckles. "... just thinking," he finishes. Argilla settles beside him and hugs her knees to her chest. Prithvi's mark is calm and silent on her breast. Her shoulder presses against his; they sit elbow-to-elbow, gazing at the pile of slain Karma soldiers in their red-washed uniforms.

He's always struck by the differences between them, the fact that they'll never be the same. They had no choice; he, on the other hand, is a self-made monster. He chose to fill the syringe himself and jab it into his veins; he chose to daub the colours of the Embryon onto his clothes. Even their demon forms are dissimilar, despite the common appellation of asura; theirs are more organic, smoother and naturalistic, crested in bone and keratin, plated in chitin and scales. Indra's as much an outlier as Roland is, composed of metallic edges and unnatural shapes; theirs is a fearful symmetry, terrifying and beautiful. Indra is haphazard, lopsided, unbalanced with the heaviness of his vajra. They're graceful in ways he cannot be - he doesn't have Varna's agility; Prithvi's elegance; Dyaus' languid flight.

Argilla cants her head to the side and surveys him through lowered lashes. "You're one of us, you know," she says and rests her hand on his. Indra reacts to her touch, sends static crackling across his skin. Argilla smiles faintly, unaffected - and why would she be, for Prithvi is a mother of the earth and lightning bows to earth. "Despite what you may think. You're an honourable man," she adds and he has to laugh.

"Gale," he says evenly, "would not agree."

"I'm sure he's revised his judgement of you," she says. There's a laugh somewhere in her voice, amusement mixed in with the weariness. "It takes courage to do what you did."

He wants to believe that. "It's my karma," he says instead and smiles thinly. "After my failures with leading the Lokapala, with killing the man we turned into a demon ... it's all catching up to me now."

"The cycle of karma never ends," Argilla says. She's no longer looking at him; she gazes instead at her comrades. Roland thinks about the missing members of their group, the spaces he's just filling in. "Demons epitomise karma in its simplest form."

"I suppose," he says. Argilla eyes him, sidelong.

"Did you know," she begins and stops. Her mouth curls into a frown. "Your atma, your demon - it's who you really are inside, set free to act on your karma and to accumulate it."

Roland thinks of the old leatherbound books he used to read, the ones on long-dead mythologies and distant pantheons. "For what, so that we can be reborn into better lives?" He snorts and Argilla shrugs. She looks tired, unhappy; but then and again, when have any of them been truly happy? "Do you believe that," he says and she looks at him with her cerise eyes, artificial-bright. "Do you believe in reincarnation?" The moment he says it he thinks, god, it sounds like a terrible pick-up line.

"It's already happened once for us, I think" she says slowly. "We were all people of this world once, weren't we? Just like Varin ... Colonel Beck ... whoever he really was."

"Maybe," he says. "I don't know. The files are corrupted."

"Just like our data, then," she says and there's an edge of bitterness in her voice. "To most of you, we're nothing more than monsters composed of sequences of letters and numbers, machines that gained sentience due to faulty programming."

She falls silent. Roland wishes he could get back to his liquor cabinet, wishes he had a hip-flask, anything on him.

"Sometimes - sometimes, there are glitches. Dreams," Argilla amends as an afterthought, after a moment's careful deliberation. "Sometimes I dream of things, strange things that were never in the Junkyard. I dream about the others, but they're all different. I dream of ... what is it, regret? And fear. Perhaps I did something terrible, something unspeakable in my previous life, and that is why I must collect enough karma to be reborn again." She smiles faintly, sadly, an expression that melds too well to her face.

"And beyond that, perhaps, lies Nirvana," he says. The solar noise whines at the back of his mind; soon it'll be an intolerable wail, a clarion command to rend, to devour, to consume. "Once we have paid back the sins of our past."