Fury drives the rapid stab of my shovel into the dirt. Screw if I only have one functional hand: I trap the handle end under my elbow to lift it and toss the contents aside, balancing it on my dead wrist.

Nolan is studious in his work, quiet. He doesn't bother me, or even really look up at me, even when I growl at the effort of removing the occasional stone. "Do you realize how very little is holding me to this town, now that I'm not employed by it?" I demand, viciously hacking a tree root.

"That's true," Nolan agrees neutrally, performing the same hacking motion on his end of the root with more success.

My exerted huffing ends in a prolonged sigh, which feels like it had been long withheld. It's not that I've never belonged. I have found community a few times in my life, with the most lasting instances being tied to Defiance. With the thought goes the force of my steam, and I stop to wipe my damp brow and pant, casting my eyes to the stars that twinkle. They are timeless: if their faces have ever been terraformed, we would never know. Any traumas and turbulence they hold is hidden by distance. I envy that. "I'm sorry to unload on you," I grumble to Nolan apologetically. "I just... I feel so jekking purposeless." I feel as lonely and adrift as the Gulanee in my dreams, aimless in deep space.

"So leave," suggests Nolan. "Get out of Defiance. Just go until something makes you stop."

I've done that before, I realize. When I found my parents dead in pieces, I ran until Deerik, then Defiance's farm, gave me reason to stop. "I don't want to leave," I murmur. Defiance has come to be familiar to me, and though it has put me at my most vulnerable, I cannot abandon it. "Besides," I continue dryly. "Since I can't make a living with my body, I'm stuck."

"Well, that's not true," drawls the Lawkeeper. "I hear Kenya is always hiring..." He bursts into laughter as I chuck a clod of dirt at him, nailing his shoulder. When he stops grinning and brushing off, he takes on a genuine tone. "You can handle it," Nolan says simply, like declaring the sky blue or Castis white. "You're tough."

To have him, a very new friend, be so confident in my capacity to triumph over hardship brings a tiny warmth to my heart. But my inner pessimist rears her ugly head: why is he being so friendly? It has to be a ruse. I must be annoying him and he's just being polite. I have to sound needy and whiny, and he's trying to think of a way to shut me up. "Why are you being so nice?" I demand.

Nolan blinks at me for a second. "What do you mean?" he asks, brow knitting.

"Nobody listens for this long, and is this patient, without good damn reason,'" I assert grimly. "So what's your end game, Lawkeeper?"

The man leans on his shovel for a long moment, befuddlement written on his face. Then, his shoulders start to shake. He ducks his head, but not before I see a smile. "Geez!" he laughs. "You're a jumpy one, aren't ya?"

I splutter into laughter myself as the tension breaks and drops like a popped bubble. "Dammit!" I bark, doubling over. "Take me seriously!"

"I am," he chuckles. "You've got serious trust issues!"

"Oh, come on!" I gasp, petering out. "You see where I'm coming from right? Compared to what I'm used to, you're shady as three hells."

Nolan worries his shovel handle, looking away with mild embarrassment. "I'm a guy who gut-checks everything. You..." he sighs, like he knows he's about to sound dumb but can't find alternative words. "You check out."

I observe his turned-away face, the worst of my ire and worry fading. He means I'm the kind of person he's safe around. I'm not going to manipulate him because of his position in the town, or use him. He knows I don't have it in me. The irony of someone like him finding me, a person who literally lives a lie safe is almost comical. But then, he knows my truth. In turn, he grants me something very precious, yet innately easy for him to give: his open hand. He does not have reason, I sense, to extend it often. If he wants trustworthiness, and I want a meaningful relationship, then I suppose the mutual exchange is called being friends. So, greedily, we sip from each other while dying of thirst.

He deserves to be let off the hook after all that. "This is a lot of fun," I confide to change the subject, loosening a rock before tossing it. "The anticipation is killer."

With an air that he's grateful not to be called on his bout of emotiveness, Nolan follows my lead. "Ark hunting gets the blood pumping," he agrees with a wistful tone.

"That's what you and Irisa did before coming to Defiance, right?"

"Yep," Nolan replied with a wry laugh. "And it's what brought us here, too."

"Oh?" I query, eager for more tales of glory.

Nolan details how Sukar's Spirit Riders gang had stolen all of his and Irisa's gear and wounded Irisa, and how they had unwittingly brought the ark-core that saved Defiance from the Volge. He mentioned, with some degree of regret, his intention to sell the core to pay for his and Irisa's journey to Alaska.

"Irzu smiles," I say. "If you hadn't brought that core, Defiance wouldn't be standing. None of this - " I gesture around at the quiet fields. "Would be here. Including me!"

"Yeah," sighs the Lawkeeper. "But it was worth a lot of scrip..."

I give him a chastising look, and he corrects, "I mean, it was worth it." He flashes a winning smile.

I laugh, "You are so full of bullshtako." I push my shovel deep into the soil with renewed vigor, and immediately am met with a metal-on-metal clunk. We both lean in to look where my shovel blade impacted, only to look up at each other and realize our faces are very close.

We stare at each other for a long moment, excitement slowly giving way. "So if there's an intact core in this Ark, too," I breathe. "What are you gonna do?"

His breath flits over my face, the same way several quick-fire expressions flit over his. "I guess we'll find out," he replies, softer than before.

We drop to our knees to scrape dirt off the metal corpse, slowly and laboriously exposing the lettering on the hull. There are several characters, and evidently more hidden by deeper soil.

"I can't read Indogene, can you?" I ask.

Nolan makes a noncommittal noise. "Enough to know what something is worth."

"Can you read this?" I ask.

Nolan squints. "That's not the name of the ship. Indogenes don't put anything on their ships to distinguish them."

"Then what is it?" I prompt.

He shakes his head slowly, bewildered. "Damned if I know, sweetheart," he says absently. "But that definitely means it's not an Ark."

The endearment makes my heart stutter-step, even as I frown in mild disappointment. "Have you got anything to write with?"

After Nolan produces the appropriate utensils, I painstakingly carve the symbols into a piece of paper. "Maybe we can find someone to translate it."

We cover our treasure back up thoroughly, to prevent others from finding it until we can deem it safe. If anyone sees the disturbed soil, they will simply think it the leftover damage of the Hellbug. "God knows what's in there, if it's not an Ark," Nolan says. "Could be anything, and 'anything' in Indogene usually translates into dangerous."

I chortle. He could not be more right. "So, Doc's?"

Nolan looks up to eye the height of the moon. "Nah, not this late. She'd never stitch either of us up again."

I wince. "Tomorrow then." I fold the piece of paper and hand it to him.

"What am I gonna do with that, other than lose it?" he asks, waving his hand.

With a shrug, I tuck it into my undergarment. "Suit yourself. I'm beat, let's go home."

Nolan stifles a yawn. "Uh-huh. Let's meet at Doc's right after she closes and go in together."

"Sure," I reply. "Drop me off?"

"Nah, you gotta walk."

"The hells I do!"

"Rides are for winners. You moved half the dirt I did, so you lost."

"I was unaware it was a competition, or I would have smoked your pink ass. With one hand!"

Nolan laughs and chucks our shovels into the trunk. "So have you got another job yet?"

I remember the beakers lined up on my table, and the tables full of Castithans drinking Green Fairy like water. "Yeah, I do. More money than lawkeeping, but less than hooking."

While Nolan chuckles and starts the Charger, my mind drifts back to the last hooker I was in contact with: Delsia, the Hispanic neighbor of Mateo. I wonder if she ate the produce I gave her, and slept well on a full belly. I wonder if her customers commented on her energy. But above all, I wonder if she's eaten since.

When we roll through the rougher side of the Hollows en route to my building, I can't put my thoughts down. "You know what, Nolan, you can drop me here," I remark, unbuckling.

The Lawkeeper looks pointedly around at the stylized Spanish graffiti on nearly every surface. "You sure?" he asks doubtfully.

"Yes, I'm sure. I'll be fine." I shut the car door and lean down to address him through the window. "See you tomorrow evening. I got some business to attend to."

Nolan frowns. "Be careful."

I wave my dead hand floppily. "I'm armed and dangerous, officer."

He pretends to consider. "It would make a decent club."

I smile and push off the car. "Thanks for the ride."

The boroughs welcome me as only they can: offers of sex with every gender or combination of gender I care for, copious amounts of drugs, even knockoff trinkets made to look like Casti gemstones. It might as well not even be night, for all the activity on the streets. Vendors, hagglers, stragglers, and thieves all vie for their place in the world under the light of a smoke-clogged moon.

I sourly ignore Mateo's door as I approach the one with a red tassel hanging from the knob. A polite knock earns me a breathless, distracted, "Ocupado!" from within, so I prop up on the wall and unwrap my sling.

The stitches are itchy, ugly, and sure to scar magnificently. I concentrate hard on moving my fingers individually and together, with zero response. I even try helping them 'remember' how to move by coaxing them with my other hand, but again, my efforts are fruitless. I might as well be bending lifeless wire.

A prolonged groan from behind the door makes me wrinkle my nose, but I restrain my arm again in preparation. No sooner have I tied off the end than does the door swing open. A portly, grungy white man saunters out, tucking his dirty shirt into his equally dirty pants. "See you tomorrow night, perra," he sniggers. Finally catching sight of me, he coughs a smoker's sneering laugh. "Sorry for the sloppy seconds, Scissor Queen."

"Jek off," I snap, embarrassed and angry in milliseconds.

Delsia appears at the door, grabs me by the shirt, and hauls me in before the customer has a chance to reply. She slams the door in his face.

As my eyes adjust to the light, dimmed and pinked by a gauzy red rag tied around the glass flume of a lamp, I notice there is little more to the room than a rumpled bed and a bureau with a mirror on top. No personal possessions, nothing of value. The only visible article of clothing is what Delsia is wearing: a flimsy, short silk robe...

that she is starting to open!

"Whoa, whoa! Hold up!" I cry, covering my eyes with my hand. "Not here for that, Delsia."

With a tiny peek, I can see the young Latina closing her robe with a confused look. "If you no here for love," she says in a heavy accent. "Why you here?"

I drop my hand and sigh in relief. "Thank Irzu, you speak English."

She squints. "You're vegetal señora."

I blink, hoping my rudimentary translation is right. "Yeah, we met the other night. You remember."

"Why you here?" Delsia asks again, impatient in her befuddlement.

I swallow, gathering my nerve. "I, um... listen, Delsia - do you mind if I call you that? I'm Betta. Uh, mi nombre es Betta."

Delsia seems thrown by a proper introduction and doesn't say anything. She does nod to acknowledge my name, though, so I guess I managed not to insult her in her native tongue.

"Listen, um, I want you to hear me out, and if you don't like what I say, I'll leave and never come back, okay?"

I pause to gauge the reaction, and pick suspicion and curiosity out of her closed expression.

With a deep breath, I continue, "Do you want to do this?" I ask, gesturing at the messed up bed.

Delsia's face moves through surprise, then humiliation, then anger, then hopelessness, all in quick succession. "No," she replies simply. "The men - and women - they no nice to me. Bastardos," she spits.

"But you can't find work anywhere else?"

"No want me," she responds bitterly. She looks at the rumpled bed in indication.

My heart pangs a little. Nobody wants damaged, used goods. I can relate to that.

"Do you want another job?"

Delsia's spine goes ramrod stiff. She stares into my eyes like I hold the secrets of the universe for a very long minute.

I prattle on awkwardly. "It's probably not as much money as this, but it's a good job. Could you make deliveries for me? Could you lift things?" I gesture at my bad hand.

Mistrust evicts the flicker of hope on the Latina's face. "How long?" she asks. "When you hand good, what I do?"

I give my own bitter chuckle. "My hand will never work again, Delsia." Even if I did manage to get enough money, miraculously, to buy an Indogene cybernetic implant that would fix my hand, or money for some coin-toss surgery, I estimate Green Fairy will have grown so large I will need Delsia, anyway. The more I've run the numbers, even with conservative figures, the more I realize I'm going to outgrow my capacity.

I need help. For the first time in my life, I can't provide for myself, all by myself. So why not help someone while helping me?

"Let me show you," I plead with Delsia. "Then you can decide."

The Hispanic woman must find the hook of a respectable living too tempting to pass up. She dresses and follows me to my one-room apartment, but keeps the door open behind her as I show her the beakers of Green Fairy. I take a shot and give her one, too, which she downs with an appreciative whistle that makes me laugh.

"If you work for me, you would be delivering this," I motion to the liquid. "Mostly to Castithanos. You wouldn't see any of your bastardos."

The corners of her mouth flicker upwards as she stares into her shot glass. With slow, deliberate movements, she takes the red door tassel she'd stuffed in her pocket out and holds one end over the Bunsen burner, setting it on fire. She then turns to my open window and chucks it to the ground below, where we both watch it smolder out.

Delsia looks at me determinedly. "When I come here? Mañana?"

My grin is huge, and I extend my good hand for a human handshake, which she takes in her lithe fingers. "Tomorrow," I confirm.

Tomorrow, after all, is a new day.

I am careening through the stratosphere in a streaky haze of smoke and flame, surrounded by the groans of the Ark I am in as it rends apart in descent. In panic, I try to break the glass of the pod surrounding me, knowing my fate intimately if I don't do something, but when I lift my hands, they are sheathed in some kind of mechanical suit.

I am staring at them in confusion when the Ark makes impact on the planet's surface.

In any other dream, I would have awoken immediately. No such escape is granted in this vision: I scream silently through every bounce, grind, overturn, and jar. It is easily the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced: the next tumble could crush me under a megaton of alien metal and glass, crumpling my pod like a piece of paper. The next skid could send ragged shrapnel through my small oval prison, killing me instantly.

But somehow, none of these things happen. The Ark loses velocity at the expense of a wide swath of heavy trees, finally shrieking to a halt and leaving only the sound of hissing and tinkling glass.

The pod pops open of its own accord, and I look down to watch my mechanical feet stumble out. I have no control over what my body does: evidently I'm along for the ride as a frustrated observer.

A gaping hole in the side of the Ark, easily the size of town square, beckons me with light and blue sky crosshatched with smoky clouds. My suit easily lifts itself over the edge and drops to the ground, the gears whirring and pneumatics moving.

All around, there are strewn fragments of the ship, starting as far away as a mile where the forest began our deceleration, to mere yards away. The exposed pods in some of the fragments look like lines of teeth in a ripped-apart jaw, some busted open to show the blackened corpses within. Other pods have only a few simple, air-stealing cracks to denote the deathstroke to the being within. Some Votans died with flame and fury... some with hisses and sighs.

And still more pods are bursting open, sending aliens to the grassy floor of their new home planet. The effect of such a rude awakening is evident in chorus of groans, vomiting, and crying.

My mechanical suit does not seem to suffer as they do. Nor do the other suits rising from the debris. When I get a good look at what I assume to be a twin of my own suit, I realize what they are: biosuits! In the glass cranium of each one, floats a glowing white Gulanee.

Time begins to fast forward, just as it had when the Votanis star system had imploded. My perspective wheels through place after place, experience after experience. Aliens rise all around, red and white and furred. Humans in tactical gear assault. A Castithan stands on a fallen tree, hoisting an automatic coldfire cannon in one hand and a severed human head in another. Votans ripped apart and stuck on pikes surrounding a human fortification drip many colors of blood on the thirsty ground.

A grander scale of the vision draws me out, to a third-person viewpoint, and I am no longer in a biosuit. I watch the ant-like armies of soldiers clash on the terraformed terrain, flashes of gunfire and grenades. I see the foreignly decorated offices of what I assume to be human ruling bodies, shouting and pointing and arguing. Another spin later, and the ruling body has been cut down to ten war-wearied humans, meeting in a cave flickering with firelight as they pour over a sand-topped table stuck with different colors of flags.

My heart lifts when the vision changes to something I recognize: Defiance's streets, more broken and dirty, but still familiar and viewed from the destroyed rampart of a human fort. I see the battle rage all around, shots fired from the shadows of cover. There are screams for help from those clearly not soldiers, trapped in the wreckage and by fire as the fortification comes down around them. The soldiers cannot stop fighting long enough to help those trapped, even as the fire reaches some and burns them alive. They must have taken refuge in the heavy walls, thinking themselves safe in the company of the 9th Division, whose uniform arm patches are dulled with soot and blood. The civilians thought wrong. Hell, even some Votan fighters get hurt or snuffed out as the fort falls all around, though they continue their assault grimly.

There is a gaunt look to every one of the soldiers, human and alien alike. The eyes trained down the sights of guns are hollowed with a nausea for the violence. Yet their commanding officers bark in their respective languages to advance, wipe them out, kill kill kill!

The cacophony of screams and shouts and cries and crumbling structures is enough to sicken me. This is what is meant by the chaos of war. But suddenly, a voice I recognize speaks from beside me and cuts through the insanity. "Enough's enough!" it shouts. I turn just in time to catch a glimpse of a grime-coated, younger-looking Nolan. It startles me, to say the least. Upon a closer look I see that it is only his face that is young: his eyes are ancient.

He's talking to what looks like his superior officer, and there are many more declaring similar sentiments. I reel through the sky again to find a very similar situation going on on the Votan side. In fact, they are so close to each other as to be in earshot. Some, from the proper angle, can see each other.

It starts with short steps in hesitant boots. Gold eyes meet blue. Brown eyes meet silver. Cautious, testing, guns pointed to the ground but still grasped. A slow reach of a white hand to a pink one speckled in blood.

And even though commanding officers shout and threaten, weapons begin to hit the ground. Rubble is team lifted, resting on the shoulders of many different uniforms. First aid kits are shared among species; bandages and water canteens and even the scarce ration.

The texture of the air changes. No longer charged with bloodlust and battle, a more tender and righteous scent permeates.

With great reluctance I am ripped away from the Defiant Few making history. I witness word of this tentative truce spread across the planet. As I drift off the face of Earth, I see the last of the terraforming burn itself out, and the final shots of war extinguish.

The world, like newly forged metal, cools and becomes.