It took Adon several fights to work through low-level hives and crumbling dog-houses, chock full of Quartet affiliates and informants, then a dozen calls to Harmony (who was no longer working as a P.I. but answered as if he were paying her to investigate), to figure out if Troy and Mykos were working for the Quartet, Gideon, or Ores. He was surprised to learn that, by all accounts, they were considered free agents since Gideon’s lock-up, which meant Lu was probably right about his brother hiring them, though Adon was shocked they’d found enough work to survive independently. They weren’t the smartest of dogs.

Y laughed at him when he pouted into XOX and whined for advice about taking out free agents. He was used to organizing political coups. If he didn’t like one of Arty’s dogs sniffing too close to Mess, he went to Arty and made a trade. People who belonged somewhere were so terrified by un-belonging that he usually only had to threaten it to get them to back off. Ironic, given his current mission to keep his promise: to end the violence and belong to Lu. 

“What, you think the freebies have to be skilled?” Y chuckled, “they’re extra-expendable! What’s the worry?” She led him to their internal security training room and they traded info while moving easily through sparring patterns, oblivious to the startled onlookers as old competitive habits revived between them. 

“I don’t want to do it!” Adon sulked. Would Lu even let him in if his way of giving up violence was murdering everyone who even looked in Lu’s direction? Probably not. He was far more stubborn than people seemed to give him credit for. He might cry against the door while Adon pounded on it and hate himself forever, but he wouldn’t open it. Adon growled to himself, letting his frustrations leak into his jabs.

Y rolled her eyes because if it was her problem, if Adon made it her problem, she was confident she could take both Mykos and Troy out in a night, no sec-off investigation necessary, no bodies found. But then, she wasn’t trying to climb up to the Mids with a clean ID. She batted away his hit, ducked into Adon’s guard, and uppercut him in the gut, then stepped back so he could recover. “If they’re not affiliated, the Quartet moves them around like pawns,” she shrugged, laughing at Adon for being so exhausted he couldn’t put the bigger picture together himself while still avoiding every open opportunity to his left side when his guard was slower than it should be. 

She kicked his elbow lightly into place twice, he was a mess. She huffed at him, swinging harder, “it’s not that Mykos or Troy are special, it’s just that they’re still alive. You don’t choose which bug to kill, you just kill the one you see, and the leftovers of Gideon’s flock are very good at staying in the dark. Mostly because Gideon keeps them there.” 

Adon grunted a swing through empty air, curling his lip at Y dodging with a cackling laugh.

They ended their training with a brutal sparring that had Y’s trainees gawking speechlessly from the corners. Adon would never beat her, she was still able to be cruel where he’d slowly begun redrawing a line in himself. But he could still hold his own against her and, for a dozen minutes, they were a caged flash of illegal locks and throws, elbows and knees moving in endless creativity as they matched attacks to blocks with a speed only experience could teach. Even X stood transfixed in the shadows of the balcony track, until Adon finally double-tapped and they broke apart, laughing through bloody towels held to faces, shaking off sweat. 

Y chuckled fondly at her new bruises, gripping Adon’s slick shoulder proudly and muttering something about not having to worry about any fungus because she made them wash the mats religiously, both of them obsessed with keeping clean after every horror of the Pits. Adon thought of his print-o, wondered if Lu had kept it, and decided not to mention the parasite the length of his arm. He should have asked to see it. He leaned into Y with a half-hearted thanks about the clean mats and they staggered toward the showers as the room cleared, guards returning to abandoned posts and training regimens before Y caught them. 

In the locker room, Y added Adon’s requested three additional tallies with the mini tattoo gun she kept in her locker, totalling thirty-two, then threw a fluffy blue towel at him and ducked into a shower stall. Adon stared at the swollen marks on his skin, chewing his cheek and imagining Lu’s face when he noticed them, the way he would frown like he was angry but his eyes would well with tears and he’d turn Adon over, looking for every crack. It was frustrating how easily Lu saw the breaking. How he could look at Adon, a crumbed statue felled by Gideon, and see something worth keeping. 

Adon peeled his sweaty clothes off, shoved his feet into the foam sandals Y had pulled from a shelf, and ducked into the shower stall beside hers, stumbling back into the cold curtain when the water hit him in the chest, practically boiling. He yelped and rotated the faucet 

Y laughed, “that’s right, we have heat, you heathen! I can’t believe you still turn the water on from in the shower, you don’t have to do that anymore, you psycho—ah!” 

She fumbled her phone and Adon winced at the distinct smack of it falling face-down onto the wet tile, rolling his eyes with a smile because she’d broken at least a dozen phones in the last two years alone. “Oh nooooo,” he crooned sarcastically, “your phone…. Whatever will you do.”

“No, look!” Y stuck a soapy arm into his curtain, holding up her phone.

Adon nearly shrieked, scowling darkly because they’d shared a cage for enough years that yes, she’d seen his tendons and protruding bones and he’d sewn her up more than once himself, but that was enough and he had no desire to ever see or be seen by her in anything but fully-dressed. 

She leaned further in, smacking blindly at the arms he’dd crossed tightly over himself and barked a laugh, shaking her phone and gesturing wildly, “look, look, watch!”

Adon leaned forward, confirming that only her arm stuck through the curtain. He sighed, then looked, then gasped, wide-eyed. Y’s screen was cracked in a messy pattern stemming from the lower right corner, but as he watched, the damage faded, healing itself within the minute. 

“Cool right?” She began to withdraw her arm.

Adon took the phone and turned it over, inspecting the screen from different angles in the bright locker room lights, “...how?”

“Same stuff they used to patch us up with, I guess,” she smacked his shoulder, feeling around for her phone. Adon jumped away from her, dangling the phone in front of her grabby hand with two frowning fingers until she finally snatched it away.

“But those didn’t actually heal us,” he mused, “they just imitated the top layer of skin so we didn’t bleed everywhere. It just flooded us internally. Might as well have been tape.”

“Yeah but close enough, I don’t know. X showed me, Leroy said it was some self-healing thing. I don’t care, it’s cool. Can you believe the tech came first though? We’re so close to being able to fuse skin without that stupid beef-scented cauterizing pen thing, and they spend the research on dumb tech gadgets? Are they stupid?”

“Yes.” Adon grunted. Of course the Midders would invent self-healing technology before the medical applications. Bodies were harder to work with, first of all, but what Midder needed large swaths of skin to heal in a few minutes without something much larger being a problem that sent them to their fancy hospitals with their legal IDs? All of them dropped phones though, he was sure of that. They had fancy mods, sure, watches, bands, sleeves, and headsets, a thousand ways to keep comms out of hands in the grav tunnels or on the rails, without committing to implants, unless medically necessary (another benefit for the Uppers that disabled Grounders could only dream of, because the neuro In-Tech offered on the Ground only came with test controls and mandatory ads). Still, they must drop their stupid expensive phones, and theirs had further to fall… but it still sucked, she was right. He wondered if Lu and Mess had magical phone screens, then realized what she’d said and snorted to himself, “they’re not beef-scented pens, Yas, that’s your flesh cooking.”

She heaved in the stall next to him while Adon laughed and forced his head under the icy shower, letting the thoughts roll off him with the soap.

“Hey,” Y called, “don’t forget—”

Adon yelped, grumbling to himself.

Y  nodded smugly “—your arm.”

Adon glowered at the sensitive lines she’d just tattooed while Y listed all the horrible things they’d survived in the Pits, all the memories he’d tucked far away that she still seemed to revel in, as if remembering the pain of his pinky being lobbed off would make his skin burn less. He didn’t remember what happened to his pinky, and his skin only burned more while the rest of his fingers gripped the shampoo bottle, pretending there were five. It felt like he hadn’t showered in ages. Dunked in buckets, wiped down, washed off, nearly drowned in a water cistern, yeah, but not with cedarwood bar soap and sudsing shampoo and all the other small privileges X offered his staff to keep them from being tempted by the Quartet, which reminded him, “whatever happened to Frank? That guy you hated?”

“Ganked him?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Don't worry about it.” Y struggled to hold her arms up long enough to wash her hair, “man, you gave me a workout.” She rolled her shoulders and pursed her lips, “you heard Arty’s outsourcing through D’Arjon these days?” She rinsed her face, talking through the water, “I don’t have proof… Troy’s been on a bender. But the mustard man is still a pain in my ass, regardless of whose jobs he’s taking.”

Adon smirked to himself, then pursed his lips at the idea of Arty lying to his face about leaving Lu alone, debating whether the barter to remove Gideon from play by the end of the year was legitimate, “you think he would? He promised….”

Y shrugged, “nah, I think he needs the Finder more. I don’t think he’d play you on purpose, but I don’t think he would care if you got caught in a middle. The Conductor might send someone on his own, even though the hit was cancelled.”

“You think he’d Gideon?” Adon scowled, shaking his head and letting the water silence the complicated world, already struggling to hold on to all the different people and motivations and possibilities that had been a second language to him only months ago. He sighed, letting his shoulders fall as the warming water ran down his back, “I don’t think the Conductor will send anyone after Lu or their ARC thing yet. I don’t think he even knows his henchmen supply is low, to be honest. I think little Orestes wants daddy’s attention and Gideon won’t notice until his toys are broken and the Conductor’s asking about the mess.”

Y wrinkled her nose, “oh yeah. I forgot about Gideon. Don’t call him daddy, Adon, that’s disgusting.”

“You always do,” Adon shook his head.

“I do not!” She splashed water over the cinderblock wall between them.

“No,” Adon snorted, “you always forget about him.”

“Oh, well… he’s not really worth remembering.”

“Neither is a sliver until it gets infected.”

Neither of them mentioned it was Gideon who’d shot her. They both knew. 

“You’re infected,” Y mocked.

“With so many things.”

“Actually?”

“Actually.” Adon nodded, turning in slow circles under the steaming water, “I think if Lu-Lu hadn’t brought me to the hospital, I might have died soon. He said I had a parasite longer than his arm.”

“Ew, Doni!” Y cringed, swallowing back her own fears.

“Remember when you found me in the warehouse and dragged me to Nyx and she gave me that dog dose they had leftover?”

“Awww, yeah, because Cosmo died,” Y pouted at the memory of Nyx’s beloved mascot dog.

“Well, apparently it worked, but only a little bit, I had to get more.”

“Ugh,” Y, whose legs were covered in tattoos from her most bored days in the Pits, shivered at the thought of the med-box lance shots the Asylum distributed when districts were under quarantine. “Don’t you need a special DNA plug-in thing for those to work?”

“It’s not a plug-in,” Adon sighed with a nostalgic smile, already tired of their old fights to educate her conspiracy theories and all the ways she somehow ended up being right. He imagined her arguing back after he explained how the vaccines were mutated with the updated viruses to stop people from dying (as opposed to the tablet options that were meant to stop them from getting sick at all… and never worked), and all the ways she would roll her eyes and say yeah, so a plug-in for your DNA. 

He rolled his eyes at the thought and dropped it, “so, next time you’re at the track, get a check up, okay?” Adon urged, “Nika lets you use the Med-Pod for free anyway, so just… just check.” 

“Fine.” She didn’t fight him.

“Really?”

“I said I’ll do it.”

“You said fine.”

“Fine, I’ll do it,” Y cupped her hands full of cold water and threw it over the wall between their stalls, laughing at Adon’s sigh. She turned off her water before it ran brown and began to dry off, rehearsing all the ways she would blackmail Adon into redoing her hair, feigning ignorance out of boredom, and because she wasn’t sure if they were allowed to talk about Lu-Bird yet, “by the way, who’s this Gideon again?”

“Oh, just some guy,” Adon turned off his shower, tired of volleying between Y’s pretend and actual ignorances, “who shot you.”

“Hm,” Y grunted, “I don’t recall.”

☆☆☆