Tevin’s helmet turned again, and his suit whirred quietly as he brought his hand halfway up to his faceplate before his arm went stiff and whirred back down to his side, nearly crushing my foot in the process. I’d been frozen in place for a moment, watching him as worry and relief warred for first dibs on my reaction, but when his heavy armored arm smashed my foot on its way down I yelped and shifted away.

  “Tevin!” was all I could say as I leaned over his helmet. His mirrored faceplate shifted over to face me, but he did not answer. I looked over to Max, “Is he talking? I can't hear what he’s saying!”

  His voice came through a speaker built into the shoulder of his suit, “Nick…”

  I laughed, and placed a hand on one of his shoulders as Rin joined me in leaning over him. His voice was weak, but it was unmistakably him. “Is… Kaylee alright?”

  I turned away and frowned so hard I could feel the scabs on my face crack and start to leak again. I looked at Max, silently pleading with him to do… something. Rin remained focused.

  “Don’t worry about that right now, Tev. Can you hear us?” he asked.

  “Y-yes. What happened?” He whispered, the volume amplified through the speaker.

  I finally regained some control of myself, shoving the guilt I felt into a tight ball and pushing it towards the frozen core of anger that still simmered somewhere just behind my sternum. “We were attacked, you got hit. Your suit locked you down and… a lot happened. We’re—” I almost said ‘we’re all okay’, but we weren't. Tevin was asking about his traitorous girlfriend, apparently not remembering the ambush that she had led us into. Even if it would be easier to substitute my own version of “we”, I didn’t want to lie to him. Not anymore.

  His helmet swiveled to face me, and his voice sounded a little less shaky. “How bad is it? I can't see anything.”

  “You were hit, and have been out for a couple of days,” Rin said, his voice entirely flat.

  “My eyes…”

  “You’re probably going to lose one eye, but the other is fine. We’ll hook you up with a nice bionic optic, better than the last one.” Max chimed in.

  Tevin’s helmet swiveled forward, and it looked like he was about to sit up before his suit whirred and he gently lowered back down flat on his back. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Max, an ally,” I answered. “There’s a lot to tell, but he generally knows what he’s talking about.”

  “Max…”

  “That’s me! Don’t worry Tevy, we’ll get you up and ambulatory here real soon.”

  Both Rin and I glanced over at the tablet, where Max was now wearing a light blue lab coat with a stethoscope wrapped around his neck and a clipboard in his hands. His backdrop had changed to look like a doctor's office, but something about it felt wrong.

  I shook my head and grimaced before looking back at Tevin. His voice was a little less shaky this time . “Don’t call me… that. Who is this guy?”

  “An idiot, but a useful one,” I answered, smiling in an attempt to comfort both myself and Tevin. “He doesn't even know the difference between scrubs and lab coats, apparently.”

  “Are we in a hospital? It feels like… it feels like we’re moving.”

  “The blue really brings out the gray in my… everything!” Max protested.

  “What’s with that, anyway? Why gray?” Ali asked from where she was looking back between the front seats. I caught eyes with Raschel next to Ali for a moment as she glanced over her shoulder at the conversation. Her eyes were red and tired, but she quickly turned away and slightly swerved back into the middle of the road. We all rocked lightly as the van swayed, but everyone was too focused on Tevin to call her out on her vehicle handling.

  “It's a classic look, this pale azure sets off the cool gray of my skin and charcoal outline.”

  “We’re not talking about color coordination right now!” I barked before turning back to Tevin. “Do you have any pain? Can you move your fingers and toes and such?”

  He grunted, and took a moment to answer. “I’m good, no pain. I think I can move but my armor is acting like it's in triage mode.” He let out a strained exhale and his helmet swiveled back and forth a little before he continued. “I’m locked out of my controls, there should be a ton of alarms and alerts going off.”

  “We have you hooked up to a medkit and locked down so you remain still while you heal. We’ll get you fixed up, it’s good news that you’re talking,” Rin said, his voice just as locked down as Tevin’s suit.

  “We got out of the city?” his voice was less worried, and he spoke in a drifting breathy whisper.

  “We did,” I answered. “We’re leaving, looking for a new place to start over. We got ya buddy, don’t worry.”

  He hesitated for a moment, rattling out a few deep breaths before continuing. “Ali’s on point?”

  “I am, we’re secure and running silent. We’re all on the rack for now, so enjoy it while you can.”

  “Alright… wake me up when… when we...” his voice drifted off, and his helmet stilled again.

  “We will man, we got ya,” I said.

  There was a long pause where his steady breathing came through the speaker, then it cut out and a little chime sounded. Max faked clearing his digital throat to get our attention and we all turned to him, Ali giving an upside down look while looming over top of his screen from her place wedged between the front seats.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Well, that was informative. Someone needs to plug some chem refills into his suit, and another into the medkit. His vitals are all looking good though, and his nervous system pinged properly when he tried to move around. I had to stop him, of course, but I got some good data. He should be ready to pull out of his suit in another couple of days, but he’ll have to do with one eye for a while until we can get into an O.R. of some kind and install a prosthetic. Oh, while we’re on the subject, someone needs to empty his septic system as well.”

  “Is being stuck in his suit for so long going to have any side effects?” I asked, glancing between Ali and Max.

  Ali shrugged, “Probably not, I can get the tank.” She crawled through the rough edged opening in the sheet metal wall that used to divide the cab from the back portion of the van, knocking over Max’s tablet in the process.

  Rin reached over and righted the tablet as Ali climbed on top of Tevin’s chest and began to work at a panel near where the medkit’s cords were plugged into his side nearest me.

  Max pulled his stethoscope off his shoulder and began to swing the end of it around in bored circles. “She’s right. Week-long stints in the suits aren't exactly uncommon in high intensity combat situations. It’s not great for him, but it's much better than popping the seal and letting in all the microscopic nasties that you monkeys live in an absolute ocean of. The suit’s a controlled environment, and staying in it until he’s completely knit back together won’t add to the time he’s going to need to recover from the injuries in the first place.”

  Ali looked like she was struggling to get a panel open near where I was kneeling, so I got out of her way while I replied to Max’s info dump. “If it's anything like being stuck in that stationary porta-link, he’s going to be super sore when he wakes up at the least.”

  Rin gave me a look, but I saw the corner of his mouth twitch upwards. Things might be grim for us, but hearing Tevin’s voice meant that we were all still together. We’d been making do for years. We could do this.

  Ali wrenched at Tevin’s suit, and Rin leaned over to see what she was doing. “Careful with that, we don’t know when we’ll have access to spare parts.”

  “He’s laying on the panel,” she let out a grunt of effort, then gave up and picked up the maul I had grabbed from the pile of junk earlier. Before either Rin or myself could protest, she slammed it into the gap between the floor and Tevin’s back plate, then levered the handle upwards to create a small gap between him and the floor. Tevin partially rolled, but the floor gave way more by denting downwards.

  I moved even farther backwards, surprised at the sudden and violent action. Before anyone could say anything else, she continued. “It’s fucking armor, guys. He’s not going to have to deal with formation or any parade marches. A couple of scratches won't matter, and there's no way this little axe is going to hurt him or compromise the suit.”

  Rin had already opened his mouth and raised a finger as if he were going to push back, but decided against it and began going through one of the supply bags instead. “Fine, but you’re going to be the one refinishing that plate when we find the time. Tev loves that suit more than he loved all of his ex’s combined. I’ll get the chem packs.”

  “We’re about to pass the outpost, by the way,” Max said.

  “Any change on that?” I asked.

  “Uh, I don’t think so. We’ll have visual in a moment.”

  Ali let out a laugh and shook her head, glancing up at me as she reeled a short hose out from the back of Tevin’s suit through the small gap she had created. “Should we wait for this then? We need to open the door to drain this shit out.”

  Max’s face split into a massive toothy grin. “No way, that's a perfect little going away present. The compound is on the other side too, so they won’t be able to look in even if we do open the door.”

  “Just punch a hole through the floor, it's already trashed. There shouldn’t be anything in the way,” Rin said as he laid out a series of metal encased vials next to Tevin’s other open panel.

  Ali looked back over to me, asking permission with her eyes. I looked between the two, and shrugged. I was still just happy that Tevin had woken up and talked to us. It felt like a huge weight had been taken off of my shoulders. The mounting pressure from everything else was still present, but knowing that my friends were all okay and that we stood a good chance at making a clean getaway made everything else bearable. Whatever this buffer zone held, we could deal with it.

  “Do it.”

  Ali grinned and looked around for something to punch a hole through the floor with, while Rin plugged the vials into a compartment on Tevin’s other side. I leaned up against the frame of the link, and watched them work, moving my gaze between the two before settling on Max’s tablet and pushing a mental question at him.

  “What are the people at the outpost saying now that they can see us?”

  “They sent out three guys with flags and flares to try to get us to stop. They’re threatening to get the general involved, formal complaints, and throwing us all in jail, but their internal communication is all about how they just need to cover their collective asses and make sure they’re not pointing any cameras at us when we blow past.”

  I nodded, “If anything changes, don't hesitate to be loud about it.”

  “Permission to be loud? Yessir!”

  I made eye contact with his avatar on the screen of his tablet. “You know what I mean, don’t push it bit-brain.”

  “Uh, excuse me, I don’t use bits, I use qutrits”

  “Oh, excuuuse meee, twit-brain.”

  “Trits, qu-trits!”

  I grinned at him. He vibrated with anger on the screen for a moment, before his look softened and formed into a grin of his own. A second later, Ali snapped me out of the moment by driving a knife she had found somewhere hard down against the floor. The blade glanced off the bare steel and slid to the side with a grating scratching noise. She cursed as it narrowly missed her knee where she was crouched.

  “Damnit,” she looked around the cab, and I saw her shrug slightly before drawing the handgun from her waistband and aiming it at the floor.

  “No!” I yelled, reaching forward and grabbing the slide to stop her from shooting a hole in the floor.

  She looked up at me, but didn’t fight me as I took the gun from her. I smiled and shook my head before handing it right back to her. “Let me try, or get the plasma knife from the dashboard. It should be at least partially charged by now.”

  I picked up the knife and fairly easily drove it through the floor, marveling at the power I could feel in my own arms and hands. The knife punched through the sheet metal like plastic, only offering a little more resistance than thick cardboard used to. I gouged the opening out, then pulled the knife up and handed it back while I looked down at the decaying asphalt that rushed along below us.

  Ali sat back, giving me a wide eyed look as she took the knife. She examined the blade closely, running a thumb over the now rounded edge of the once sharp knife. The van rocked as we went over a series of larger bumps, and she tossed the knife onto the floor before shoving the hose through the hole and returning her attention to the open panel at Tevin’s side.

  “We’re past. The outpost even left the gates open for us.” Max said from his tablet.

  “Just like that?” Rin questioned, now busy loading up a boxy pack into the medkit.

  “Just like that. I told you they weren't going to do anything.”

  I leaned into my lounging position again, going back to watching my little team work. Rin was back to tinkering, working on taking apart a pile of the coffee cups that would eventually become our impex. Ali had started to sharpen the knife that I had dulled against the floor, and Raschel was still quietly driving the van after the big armored vehicle that Max was piloting with his squad of empty power armor suits. Tevin remained laying on the floor, but after hearing his voice and knowing that he could still speak coherently filled me with hope for the future.

  Escape seemed possible. I knew what we were running from, and while what we were running towards was still a nebulous concept, it had to be better. It just had to. The van tilted as we crested the pass, and I felt the van shift from uphill climbing to downhill braking.

  With a refreshed sense of peace and solidarity at Tevin’s recovery and our oppressive home country in the rearview, I spoke to Max out loud. “Alright, we’re free. Now… tell me more about this buffer zone.”

  To pull the curtain back a little bit, this chunk of story covered the first half of my planned outline for book 1... and after looking into the details of publishing and considering if this is viable to do as more than just a hobby, I need to rethink my overall outline. I'm going to shuffle the existing narrative around a little, and cut what I have here into two books for eventual release. I'll likely cut some scenes, drops some minor plot-threads, and re-do my blurb and cover. I've been finishing chapters basically as I've been releasing them for a few months now, and would like to start the next portion of the story with a bit more backlog, maybe even enough of one to be able to start a patreon so I can fund an editor before I release the final draft as an actual novel.

  Finally, I'm gonna get a little sappy here at the end. If that aint your thing, you can bail out here and won't miss anything important.

  -MRD