《No Second-Guessing》

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Marava's eyes glimmer as they roam over something that isn't, for the first time, Quint. It's a little unbelievable - her mouth agape, her eyes widening to saucer diameter as they canvas the arched ceiling, metallic rails, and the bullet-shaped car with its shattered windows and bucket seats. She wets her lips and reaches out to lay her hands over the name R33. A reverent sigh escapes her lips. Quint tightens his hold on her waist.

She blinks, as though his touch has jostled something loose in her brain. "It's wondrous," she says, peering at the train car. "You can almost smell the history."

Tujo waves a hand in front of his face, frowning. "Smells like piss."

Marava growls. "This is history untouched by the FUA." She's on her tiptoes, stretching her body to its limits, to reach into the car and graze one of the hanging, still-intact leather loops. "This is how our ancestors lived, how they traveled from one place to another."

"You can learn all that on the Network," Lilly says. "We have full access to unaltered history."

Marava snorts as she retracts her hand through the tiny, oblong window frame. "You think that what we see isn't filtered? That our searches aren't logged and monitored? That none of us got flagged for researching a topic the Council deemed 'unhealthy'?"

Marava turns and runs her hands over the ruins of a brick column. A film of dust pales her fingertips. "There's no way for us to know what is the undiluted truth unless we see it for ourselves. This," she arcs her hand over her head. "Is undiluted truth."

"Well," Tujo slumps back against the wall. "The undiluted truth smells worse than the Aviary's sewer system."

"Same," I say ambling past Tujo. I smile at him, but he still refuses to acknowledge me. Whatever betrayal he'd felt from last night, seemed to have lodged itself pretty deep. His resentment toward me could almost - almost - rival Marava's. "I'll take the perfumed half-truths any day."

Della steps past us ogling Liars and motions toward the second car. A line of Titav members, like diligent worker bees, scurry between the two railway lines, huge plastic bins cradled in their arms.

"I thought places like this had been blocked off."

Della smirks and slows her pace so I can catch up. "They have, officially."

I raise my eyebrow, and look at an old sign, hanging askew at the far end of the massive tunnel. Rust has eaten through most of the metal, and the paint's chipped off, but it's a remnant, a centuries-old testimony to the citizens of old New York. "And unofficially?"

"A few maps float around the Net, available for purchase." She places her hands behind her neck and yawns. The sound echoes in the cavernous space.

"And so you bought a map, and scoped out every possible point of entry?"

Della chuckles. "Even if I sent the whole Collective there wouldn't be enough. Luckily, people on the lower sects love some added income and are willing to commit to some seedy transactions."

"How long did it take?"

As we near the train car that's the epicenter of the Collective's hub of activity, I notice one of them, carrying two of the blue bins in between his tree-trunk thick arms, is Sin. He must feel my eyes on him, because he cranes his head over the top of the bin, and gives me a slight tilt of his chin.

Della whispers, "Forks over there stands out a little too much for today's mission. Good pack mule though."

I nod. While the middle and top sectors were known to be ad-less, as the most money was made marketing dreams to the lower sector residents, sometimes causing whole companies to buy a sector and re-brand it with a slew of the company's products, Sin was still a good foot and a half taller than average Aviary height. He'd stand out if you shot him into space. With the amount of Militia stomping around, it was best to keep him on reserve.

"Five years." Della's voice slices through my thoughts and they scatter like rats back into the muck.

"Huh?"

Della shakes her head and pokes me on the sternum. "You asked, so I answered. It took five years to map out the underground terrain and another three to clear the rubble and clean the air."

We stop just outside the door to the train car. Della raises her hand and then balls her fist. "Take ten," she says.

The nearest Titav, one who'd been wiping his face with the bottom of his shirt, turns to the others. "You heard the Commander." One after another, the Titavs set down their bins and head toward the tunnel entrance.

Light from a string of loosely hung bulbs dapples the ground. Decades-worth of mold and musk swamp my nostrils. At least two dozen crates fill the car, while another dozen rest where the dismissed Titavs abandoned them. Five more bins sit in the middle of the train car, a trio of holes poked in their sides, concealed just under the bins' overhanging lids. A hard lump forms in my throat. My mouth goes dry.

Air holes.

The bottom of my stomach drops. "You've got to be kidding me."

Della pats my back, an act that could have been conceived as a kindness had it not pushed me into the car and toward the nearest, soon-to-be filled blue bin. "Your companion asked me a question, so here I am," she slaps the bin lid, "answering that question."

I grab onto one of the car's metal poles. Grease sticks to my fingers. "Why is it we're always being shoved into cramped, dark, uncomfortable spaces?" I can't help myself. I jut my chin and fold my arms over my chest, much the way Tujo had just done to me.

Della shrugs. "You were the one who said cockroaches flourished in the dark." With the toe of her boot, she kicks the lid off the tub. "So flourish, little cockroach."

"I should have fried you when I had the chance."

Della looks down at her wrist, where the DEC had been attached and rubs at the flesh there as if remembering a painful memory. "You probably should have," she says. When she looks at me again, there's a softness present in her eyes, around her mouth. "Never fall prey to anyone's tricks."

"Speaking from experience?" Izzer's face comes vividly to mind.

Della nods solemnly while raising her left arm. She pulls back on her thumb, her face an expressionless mask as the tip of her finger touches her wrist.

"Della!" I reach out to stop her, but she slaps my hand away.

She turns her hand upward, traces a line down the middle of her palm, and presses at the top of her wrist. With a soft sigh, a panel of her flesh lifts away, exposing dozens of wires. Blue neutral signals dance above the wires, speeding so fast I can't make out where one ends and another begins.

If before I'd been gaping, now my mouth would need to be scraped off the floor. "Cybernetic--"

"Hand and arm. At least," she clicks the panel back in place, "Up to the elbow." She unbends her thumb as if nothing had happened. "Lost it in an explosion a few years back." She rubs the veined flesh of her knuckles. "Keran tried to save it. Did all she could," a wistfulness takes residence in her eyes and I take a step back, amazed at this warrior woman's ability to be soft, to appear vulnerable and to me, of all people. "But it wasn't enough."

Suddenly the inner workings of my brain start to turn, piecing fragments of information together, until I blurt, "And that's why you won't let her take care of your wounds anymore."

Della nods. "She'd know in an instant and would blame herself," she takes a step back and sits on one of the car's seat. A mushroom cloud of dust billows around her. She kicks at the remains of a newspaper article, dated sometime in the mid twenty-first century before newspapers became the mouthpiece of the FUA Council. "It's why that DEC bracelet scared me shitless. Not because I could have died," she slings an arm across the seat's back. "In my line of work, you get used to the notion of an early grave." She clenches her robotic hand, and the veins bulge underneath her tan skin. If she'd had never shown me, I wouldn't think for a second it wasn't real. "But Keran was there. If she'd seen anything she'd-"

My hand slips off the pole. "What is she to you?"

Chin angled upward, eyes wide, mouth lax, Della portrays serenity in a way I not thought her possible. "She saved me. Only a kid too, six or seven. Found me shot and bleeding out. Took me back to the little hole she called home. Fixed me up."

I raise my eyebrow. "Shot?"

The smile fades from her lips. "Twice, one in the leg, one in the side, but I didn't get the worst of it." She sighs and I still. Tension blankets us. The overhead light sways. "Parents did. Killed instantly. Put up too much of a fight."

My breath catches in my throat. Cold sweat runs down my back.

Della turns to me and I find that her eyes are similar to someone else's.

"What number would you have been?" The words are little more than whispers I barely feel form on my tongue.

Della quirks her lip and points a finger at me. "I can always count on that one-zero intellect." She rests her hand on her thigh. "Deuce," she says.

I frown. "We've gone through four," I say. "Heart failures some times, others just have problems obeying."

A chuckle breaks free from Della's mouth. "Makes sense," she says. "I'm all kinds of trouble."

"Understatement of the millennium."

Della stands and for a moment, she's still, her eyes searching for something in mine. Heat rises to my cheeks. "When I first saw you, I thought for certain you would be Deuce."

The seriousness of the situation tightens around my throat like a Blackhole bag and suddenly, my breathing becomes an exercise in endurance. Della could have been one of us. Was that why she'd hooked up with Izzer? Was he aware of her past, of the opportunity her family had squandered away? I try to focus on the now; the questions and there were several, could wait until after a successful mission. "We're not exactly, twins," I say, in hope of assuaging this newfound tension between us. I'd much rather have her fist in my gut or connecting with my jaw than have an experience that connects us so irrevocably. There were seven cockroaches, not eight.

Della doesn't break her concentrated stare on me. "Something about your eyes had 'Deuce' written all over them."

I fidget and toss my hands into my jean pockets. "Sorry to disappoint."

The Titav Commander shakes her head. "The only way you'll disappoint me is if you refuse to get in that damned box."

I blink and Della kicks the blue bin. Like that, whatever moment we'd been sharing, goes up in smoke. Della smiles. "Afraid these are solo rides," she nudges me in the shoulder. "And Nol's busy upholding his end of the bargain so there's not going to be any stolen moments between you two."

Della's finger goes to her lips, stopping my protest before I have a chance to think of one. "Blackhole bags come equipped with microphones."

The whole of me might as well burst into flame what with all the heat needling me under the surface.

"Don't worry," she says, leaning over me. "I won't tell the others about it." With one last pat on my back, she makes toward the car's exit. "I'm having Nose bring a change of clothes. Something more appropriate for mid-level Civs. Change and be ready to leave in fifteen."

I nod, glance at the box, and wipe the curls out of my eyes. Today, Della was sealing my fate. Lilly pokes her head through the open door. "What's that?" she says pointing toward the box.

I whip around and plastering the biggest smile on my face say, "Your chariot awaits!"

Tujo's lips break into a smile. "'Your chariot awaits?'" He cocks his head. "Shit, you sound like a Titav." 

Lilly and Quint share a chuckle that seems on the other side of the world. Marava's scowl blurs until I can't make her out from the dingy, beige of the tunnel. 

You sound like a Titav. 

I flinch. Bile rises to my throat as repulsive cold rolls over me in waves. Maybe I was becoming more like a Titav, swapping out the FUA crest for its Collective counterpart - the dove I'd seen that morning etched in intricate lines of plasma ink, the one that had fallen in an arc of flames. Funny thing, I didn't know which was worse.