On the Ground, the rain froze into sleet, collecting on ledges and clouding over glass-top corridors, blustering through broken windows, and threatening those who couldn’t afford the self-heated housing along the buckling server pillars. Y jumped out of an old ground-access stilt and crunched over the ground, stubbornly following Adon into the incredible greenhouse he’d compiled over the years. Twelve dogs greeted him at the door, some excitedly, but most with a passive sniff as he poured hard-won food into a trough. One of the dogs skidded around a corner and rushed past Adon, leaping out the door Y was struggling to pull closed against the wind. 

Y paused, eyes wide with dread, “do I… do I have to chase it?”

“Nah, she’ll come back if she wants,” Adon filled water buckets next, waddling them to and from a spigot in the corner, “it’s cold, but they have other places. Bumo takes care of them.”

Y nodded uncertainly, squinted through the cold fog one last time, then pulled the door closed with a resounding clang. No one but her jumped, the dogs moving around Adon in their careful alliance of packs, coming and going as they pleased through a dozen entrances and exits she doubted even Adon could keep track of. She watched a dog jump up, open a door, skitter into the shadows, then kick it closed with a sigh, folding her coat over the railing of the stairs, “I hate your place.”

Adon snorted, busying himself with water drip lines and checking his plant leaves, occasionally shoveling small cups of nutrients into the large pots, checking his heaters, or yelling at bugs he would never be rid of. 

The dogs slowly dispersed from the corner, some nudging Y or Adon for pets, most wandering further into the humid greenhouse to fight over the various beds. A cat revealed itself, weaving between Adon’s legs with a soft greeting before running away from Y and disappearing up the loft and into the rafters. 

Y followed Adon through his chores with a bored sigh, feigning nonchalance as she passed a broom uselessly over the chipped tile floor, “that was him, right?” She leaned the broom against a table and picked up a small dog, following Adon upstairs to the loft with the happy dog in her arms and plopping on his lumpy bed. “That was the till death guy?”

Adon rolled his eyes, but nodded, shivering as he pulled a clean base layer shirt on, discarding the sweaty tank into a laundry pile. He sniffed a line of ratty hoodies, ducking greedily into an oversized sweatshirt X had sewn together herself, then, without even pretending to answer her, he stomped his slippers back downstairs and fed another round of logs to the furnace that was finally kicking on. 

Y rolled to the edge of his bed that looked out over the old manufacturing warehouse, calling down with a teasing smile, “he seemed—”

“I don’t wanna hear it,” Adon warned her, warming his hands over the roaring grate with a sigh. He was trying to get Lu’s face out of his mind, to stuff it back into all the befores it belonged to. 

Adon stomped back up the metal stairs with creaking knees and flopped down on the bed beside her, curling away from the cold. Y flopped on top of him, the dog still in her arms, inhaling more pestering questions, but Adon was already two steps ahead. He nudged her off him and pointed to the box on the table against the shadowy wall, “your knife, your highness.”

“Oh!” Y dumped the dog beside Adon, jumping up to investigate. She bounced on her heels with small giggles, turning to him, holding the knife, impressed, “you really are the Finder, huh.” She smiled proudly and Adon tried not to think of the siblings he’d left behind. He rolled away and pushed himself up from the moldy mattress, rifling through empty cabinets for the alcohol he’d dumped out weeks ago. He pouted back into the warmth of the bed, wondering if he would finally cry, or break, or make more, or get used to the incessant tingling in his right hand. 

The white noise of dog claws ticking over tile, huffing at each other, or play-fighting over the plushies Adon brought them suddenly quieted. Adon craned his head to look over the railing of the loft and found the dogs below frozen, heads perked, ears pinned, tails pointed in several directions. Adon followed the most reliable eyes to the darkest corners, crawling quickly out of the covers and into pants and boots, sliding several weapons into pockets and tucking himself into his coat. 

“Security?” Y frowned, gripping the Pen-Ten knife with a practice spin and slash, excited to test out the custom grip. Technically customized for Adon, but they were basically the same sized human except for his missing pinky. And ear. But she had her own missing parts, and custom for one was custom-enough for the other. He stole her sweatshirts, she stole his knives, and it was fair unless the sweatshirt he took was X’s, then he knew enough to give it back. She slid into her own boots, watching Adon and weighing the threat.

Adon shook his head, listening, “paid ‘em yesterday. That’s why I was at Nika’s.”

“Hm,” Y grunted in a whisper, “but that till death kid was why you punched Phaios?”

“Yes,” Adon nodded, peeking out around window valances and clicking off smuggled sunlamps, “he shouldn’t have brought him there.” Adon muttered a quiet apology to his rows of nuts, squashes, and fruit trees for switching their lighting schedule so drastically, hoping they would interpret it as a sudden storm. Lu hadn’t looked particularly happy, but that only made Adon more miserable, Lu’s face still clearly burned into his memory as he maneuvered the rows of plants.

“Wanna kill Phaios?” Y offered nonchalantly, spinning her knife behind him, watching his face in the growing darkness for all the things he refused to say with words. 

Adon snorted and then shuddered, “and who do you think would kill you first just for saying that?”

“Definitely Nika,” Y danced around the barking dogs, letting them lead her to the problem as they’d once been trained to do, muttering under her breath about how Adon had almost killed Phaios himself just a few weeks ago, all because Phai had stolen his bike as a joke, and now here he was, snapping at her for playing along. She wrinkled her nose at him, eyes still on the dogs. 

“Yeah,” Adon agreed in a whisper, wrapping a belt around a fist and sliding his other into a Pen-Ten brass knuckles Y had outgrown after her last break—her fingers couldn’t fit into the mold anymore. Adon sighed at the shadows moving outside the unblocked windows, then looked back down at his nine-and-a-half crooked fingers, “I’m tired of fighting, Y.”

“Just this one, Doni,” she ruffled his hair as they continued to pace the inside perimeter of the warehouse. There would be more than this one. There was always another fight on the Ground.

Adon stared at the tattoos of his knuckles like they would magically motivate him into enthusiastic participation, dragging his feet behind her until Y’s phone rang and she answered too casually. 

“Yeah boss…. In order, boss.” She gripped Adon’s hand, pulling him closer beside her as they flanked an open storage room, sending her voice in the opposite direction over her shoulder. “What? Yeah, I’m fine. It wasn’t a real race. Of course I—ugh fine. Whatever, I’ll be back soon. Don’t do anything stupid without me…. Yeah, listen to Leroy.” She hung up, rolling her head to Adon, then slugging his shoulder lightly because of his bemused smile that was definitely mocking the way her voice had pitched up at the sound of X on the other end. 

Adon inhaled to tease her, Y inhaled to tell him to fuck off, and the dogs inhaled and surged backwards between them, cutting them both off as the group of Grounders attacked from the storage room. 

☆

Duster, Sweeper, Loser, Keeper—Adon sang the childish rhyme as he kicked, punched, and dodged through the crowd. They thought he was growing drugs, he realized, shoving a woman off his beloved apple tree, the leaves she’d tried to eat stuck between her teeth and fluttering to the floor. They thought he had their tweaker fixes in neat rows of flowerpots, hidden in shrubs and mushroomed walls of damp wood, but Adon had never touched their narcotics, because he’d been too busy growing an apple to prove a point and drowning in moonshine to try anything bolder. The Quartet had only just let him go, he wasn’t interested in challenging them further. 

Adon and Y had removed themselves from the Grounder game board, but growing any of the four drugs would be an open invitation to compete as an organization. He’d been very careful not to compete. He was just a free agent with a green thumb, an annoyance to the Sec-Offs. He was the Finder, growing food for himself and learning all the agricultural secrets he was supposed to have studied by CAPT placement through trial and error with only the guidance of the Old Internet. He was not growing any Sheet Music or substitute sedatives, but that didn’t stop rogue grounders from breaking in and trampling his vegetables.

Adon sighed for what felt like the hundredth time, exhaling his weary frustrations, and letting Y push him back as a line of tweakers stumbled through the narrow door, yelping at dog bites like they couldn’t hear the growling warnings. Though they might not hear the dogs, deafness had been a reported side-effect of the Silvers Family’s Duster. They called it Sheet Music, or Symphony, though no one on the ground knew what that meant. It came in sheets that dissolved on the tongue and was supposed to deliver microdoses of all four drugs, invented originally for the Asylum to aid in rehab and recovery, but like most decent ideas, it had been poorly applied, underfunded, and easily replicated by worse hands. If they weren’t digging holes in his neat rows of pots, he might have sympathy for them. But they came baring diseases he was no longer protected against, and they screamed at his cat, so Adon’s potential understanding dried up before it could leak into his fist and loosen his grip.

Y kicked a man with wild hair, his fingertips frost-bitten, rabies-eyes wild and bloodshot, rimmed in scabs from the itching. He crashed into a long table of wilting tulips nearly toppling Adon’s carefully filtered water barrels that had taken years to build and test and trust. The tweakers scattered and Adon couldn’t fathom how they’d been coherent enough to scheme up a raid in the first place, barely able to hold themselves up, already high or deteriorated past the need for the drug. A woman smashed her own head into a wall, a deranged kid laughed manically at a stick as he stuck it under each fingernail and pried them off like loose nails, and a bundled up man snarled and bit at a confused dog. Another man crawled over on all fours and growled back, then stood and threw the whimpering dog into a heavy planter.

“One more fight, Doni,” Y shouted, tackling the man swinging a bat at Adon and snapping him out of his daze, kicking his locked knees and catching him with a pleading smile, “come on.”

Adon rubbed his eyes, glancing down left forearm, thinking of the tallies tattooed beneath his sleeve in the flashing lights. He thought of Lu smiling at Nika in the stands, but the bitterness didn’t rise like it used to, the urge to rip anything apart at the thought of Lu didn’t fill him, there was no darkness consuming him, no horror to surprise him when he exited his blacked-out rage. In his imagination, Lu had always been happy, but seeing the reality, the hollowness around his eyes, the tension at the corner of his smile, the hesitation in his watchful eyes—it had swept something out of Adon.

He’d dared Lu to try and live happily, and he was sure Lu had succeeded, but Adon had lost any will to survive after seeing Lu’s distant gaze landing on him with a question, a polite smile, a hand held awkwardly at his side, anxious for an introduction he thought was coming. Unrecognizeable. Lu had changed, and Adon looked down at his broken hands and realized that whatever thread had been pulled taut between them, hadn’t snapped, but slackened, and he felt humiliated by his own hope that he might find a way to pull Lu back to him. He’d changed too, hadn’t he? Y pushed him through the warehouse, kicking and punching their way to the shadows as she shook him and yelled for him to fight back, or at least dodge the flailing teeth. But Adon was tired. He was tired of fighting. It had been his challenge, till death were his words, it was his promise to keep or not. 

And Lu-Lu’s keeping it, a smiling voice curled through the back of his mind, Lu’s alive and miserable, so you should be too.

There was a click and sharp snap of plastic ghost-gun pellets, Heranika’s metal-tipped annoying contribution to maintaining Gideon’s empire during his Asylum service. Adon glanced around for the hand holding the gun while one of the larger pack leaders, a retired Sec-Off dog, collapsed with a mewling whine. 

There it was. Adon felt the rage break through his chest, his careful leash snapping. He ducked under Y’s kick and elbowed a deranged man eating his tulips whole, sending him sprawling away from the dogs. Adon made his way across the main floor of the warehouse, not bothering with body shots as the dogs flanked him, aiming at heads and knees and necks, defending their warm refuge with bared teeth.

Y moved through people like sandbags from the otherside, meeting Adon back in the middle of the hall at the far end, away from the storage room they’d breached. 

Adon picked up a discarded plastic gun and swung it wildly, separated from his body, unfeeling of his own dripping side as a Grounder slipped a stiletto switch between his ribs. Adon lunged at them, dropping the gun so he could grip his knuckles and lashing out until the grounder let go of his wrist and stumbled away. Adon kicked the gun then scrambled after it, and if Y hadn’t picked it up, he would have shot the grounder dead instinctually, though they were already unconscious and falling backwards. 

Y shoved the gun at his chest, turned his shoulders to face the pile of dogs in a far corner, and pushed gently, turning her attention to the line of new grounders entering through the storage room. They were obviously D’Arjon’s guys, pretending to be with the others, but their eyes were too clear and their attacks too trained, and Y worked her way through them like it was a training montage, happily dancing in circles between their curses cut off by her heel in their mouths or her new fancy knife flashing behind her. 

☆