For the first time, Adya performs an immediate system shutdown instead of waiting for her body to naturally fall asleep. Peaceful rest isn’t coming-- not for at least another week. It’s an uncomfortable process equivalent to going into shock for five seconds and blacking out, but it’s better than running on fumes the next day.

Morning comes with a hazy sunrise and quiet bird calls coming from the cracked open garage door. The last agents of the night shift peel their uniforms off and stow their gear in the armory with tired eyes. Adya, on the other hand, has never been more awake. She throws a barrage of punches and kicks into a boxing dummy on the far side of the room. She goes through combinations that they’d practiced dozens of times but still catches herself falling into habits that Nate advised against. Slowly, she walks through the motions as if he were standing there, doing it beside her. As if he could stand at all. The sight of his nearly lifeless body keeps crawling back to the front of her mind. His wounds bleeding through the gauze in a matter of seconds. The ends of his long hair, caked in blood. The color draining out of his skin.

Not once during her training did he keel over and give up. Even when Adya was her most stubborn, he stayed patient and hollered across the room when she managed to land a punch or pin her opponent. Now, it’ll be weeks before she sees that side of him again. Months, even.

She sends one final blow into the dummy and it falls over. The catharsis only lasts a few seconds.

Val gave her the rundown of what happened once the dust had settled. He truly, honestly believed this was his final resting place. Just as quick as the building started to crumble, he was willing to accept that he would go down with it. Even through Val’s voice, his words give Adya a chill that crawls up and down her spine. Some things are bigger sacrifices than others. She’s just like everyone, but she’s also like nothing you’ve seen before.

She is a charity case. 

She is a trainee who fell into his lap last minute.

She is all neural networks and phantom limbs, a shot in the dark. A science experiment.

Even when her bionic body has a literal price, Adya still isn’t sure how to determine her own value. Nate has no reason to include her in his dying wishes. Her training is under twenty weeks, if all goes well, and any interactions after that would purely be in passing. It’s a button-sized notch in the string of his lifespan.

“You’re important to the world of bionics,” Elora always told her. “You’re invaluable to science and invaluable to me.”

But what does “the world of bionics” even mean? How am I supposed to take that broad of a statement to heart? Adya asks herself.

She knows that her mother, father, and relatives find her important. Family is everything to her. She knows that she’s important to Elora, who is essentially family at this point. She’s important to her childhood friends back home, who cheered her on when she decided to leave home and start a new life. But to be important to someone you might only briefly cross paths with. Someone who didn’t even ask to be on the same road as you.

When she finishes propping the dummy back up against the wall, a second pair of footsteps click against the concrete. It’s hard to miss visitors when you’re the only one there.

“General Morales told me you’d be in here,” Elora says, her voice carrying across the room. 

“Is that all she told you?” Adya asks.

“Said that I taught you well. Instead of withdrawing into yourself, you’re channelling stress into physical activity. I insisted that I had nothing to do with it.”

She chuckles and pulls her head through the collar of the big, red sweatshirt she’s practically been living in during the cold mornings. Her face stays passive to keep Elora from worrying about how she’s feeling, even if that’s in her job description. 

“He’s awake.”

Adya whips her head around. The hardest part is soon to begin-- Nate coming to terms with his injuries. “Well, ‘conscious’ might be a better word. He’s on a morphine drip and hardly making a lick of sense, but if you’d like to see him, he’s in the infirmary. Take the stairs, then a left, and it’s the first door to your right.”

Without much thought, Adya’s feet follow Elora’s directions. The medical sector of Goddard remains quiet, considering how few patients are admitted on a regular basis. She’s willing to accept that she might have to get used to the sterile smell and white walls of a hospital again. She’s thankful that she’s not the patient this time, but isn’t happy about who is. 

Adya steps through the open door with a gentle knock. He’s still worse for wear, but much less so than yesterday. Nate’s hair, now free of any dirt and blood, has been kindly tied back by one of the nurses. His right shoulder and neck are wrapped in bandages, while gauze and medical tape cover the back of his jaw. It’s clearly a temporary fix. Even in his fugue state, he manages a smile at the sight of his cadet.

“Hey, Agent,” she says, pulling up a chair on his left side. 

“Don’t look at meeee,” Nate says with a gentle toss of his head. “I have to set a good example.”

“I don’t know, I think being selfless and saving someone’s life is setting a pretty good example.”

He scoffs. “Murphy said it was stupid.”

“Maybe it can be both.”

A brief silence as the gears turn in Nate’s narcotics-filled brain. Just as easily as the smile came across his face, it fades. “Are they okay? Murphy and Tristan and Val?”

“Yes, they’re okay. Just shaken up is all.”

“I’m sorry.”

Adya rests her elbows on the edge of the bed. “You have nothing to apologize for, I promise.”

“But I do. Everything was good. Your training was good, missions were good, and now I’m making you all worry about me. Now I have to worry about me.”

“Do you know what’s next for… this?” she asks, gesturing broadly across his torso.

“I can move my arm a little, but I can’t feel anything on my right shoulder. They might give me bionics, but it’ll be a big, ugly scar.” He pauses with his head in the clouds for a second, but slowly, he comes crashing back down to earth with a gasp. “Oh, that was so rude. Bionics aren’t ugly! Why did I say that?”

For a man who “refuses to publicly embarrass himself”, his thoughts sure are unfiltered when he’s trying to piece them together through the painkillers. Some minutes, he stares blankly at the ceiling. Others, he’s going on about something that Adya can’t quite figure out. At least he’s enjoying the high while he can; once the doctors start weaning him off the morphine drip and deciding what’s next for his injuries, odds are that he’ll hit the ground pretty hard.

When he finally goes quiet again, he reaches for Adya and loosely curls his fingers around her forearm. “You didn’t have to come see me, but I appreciate it,” says Nate. “I said some things to Val before I… you know. Almost killed myself. Told her to train you well. Don’t be afraid to get pushy if she’s too hard on you.”

She nods and chews on the inside of her cheek. When she meets her mentor’s gaze, he’s all glossy eyes and empty stares, but he’s still him. Even at his worst. “When I got hurt, I felt the blast and blacked out almost immediately,” she starts. “I didn’t have time to give any final messages to my parents or my friends. But Val told me what you said and… you were ready to die, Nate. Why?”

His chuckle comes out sounding more like a strained breath. “Truthfully? I always am,” he admits, drumming his fingers on the edge of the hospital bed. “I spent two years being filled with lies. ‘Bionics are bad. Going back to tradition is the only way forward. You are nothing without a leader.’ The Brotherhood told me exactly who I should be. And what did I do? I said ‘okay, sure’. Like a big, dumb idiot! I was willing to die on that hill because I was too afraid of what would happen if I didn’t have a hill to die on at all.”

Nate makes this extremely heavy burden sound like a minor inconvenience with the way he’s rambling on about it. “The Brotherhood?” asks Adya.

“Yeah, Brotherhood Nova. That cult I ended up in. What a bunch of fascist assholes.” He starts to slur his words; she’s wondering how much of these are sober thoughts and how much is the morphine talking.

“Cult? Are these the same radicals you told me about way back when?”

“That’s beside the point,” he says with a huff of air to blow a loose strand of hair out of his face. “If I’m gonna die for a cause, I want it to mean something. I’d rather die doing something good than live for a cause that does nothing but hate.”

Adya wanders over to the window, careful not to trip over any cords or plugs. She opens up the curtains just enough to flood the room in a gentle blanket of blues from the morning shade. “You don’t have to sacrifice your life to pay for your mistakes.”

“Better me than someone like you. Someone who’s always been good.”

She opens her mouth but snaps it shut without a word. It’s definitely the drugs talking. Now is not the time for a debate about self-sacrifice.

“I’m telling you my whole life story again, aren’t I?” Adya laughs off the tension and nods. He slumps his left arm over his head and groans, mostly from the pain.

“Here, let me give you some of mine,” she says, settling back into her chair on the other side of the room. “Growing up, my mom taught me how to apply henna and I’d practice on myself. My synthetic skin can’t absorb things the same way that real skin can, so that was no longer an option in this body. The bionicists looking after me made some phone calls to some of their scientist friends, and for my birthday, they gave me three tubes of henna paste that were specially made for my skin. And since it was artificial, it had a longer shelf life. Nothing compares to the way my mom used to do it, but it’s still one of the nicest things someone has ever done for me.”

Even as he starts to nod off, Nate smiles. “That’s wonderful,” he says.

With that, he’s out like a light. Adya slips out into the hall and leaves the door cracked open for whenever Tristan, Murphy, and Val come by to see him.