A trickle of sweat poured down the back of my neck after I peeled the helmet off of my head. When I pried my crusty eyes open, I found Rin and Ali both lounging alongside the still form of Tevin in the back of the van and Max’s tablet propped up against the back of the center console between the two front seats. Ali gave me an almost worried look and Rin gave me a serious downward half nod.

  “Welcome back. I think you handled all of that as best as you could. No serious blunders, diplomatic incidents, and you even secured your next mission,” Rin said.

  I wiped a hand across the back of my head, surprised at how damp my hair was and how sore my joints were. I was used to the high quality ship-based links that let you move around while you were linked up, and this cheap rig’s lack of every feature other than letting me into the damn game would take a lot of getting used to. The van was hot and stuffy too, and tasted faintly of dust and ash despite the cracked front windows that stirred a warm summer breeze through the cab.

  “Where are we?” I croaked, then cleared my throat as I tried to sit forward. One of the shoulder hooks failed to automatically release, and I had to awkwardly reach up and pry it off of me before I could lean forward in the saddle.

  “We’re well into the foothills, sir. Still climbing. Nav says we have another three hours until we enter the pass and have to deal with the border station, sir.”

  I gave Ali a flat look, but wasn’t in the mood for our usual exchange over her constant sirs. “Max, what's the situation with the border station?”

  He answered from the tablet, which was showing the same faux face-cam of Max in his streamer setup. His voice came out a little tinny from the tiny speaker. “I’m confident we’ll be able to bypass it. I sent them orders, and have been ignoring their calls for confirmation and blocking their attempts to question other sources about it. To them, it should look like they got their orders and are getting stonewalled from their normal command structure. The more data I scrape off their servers and records, the more it appears that's the normal procedure for the black-team we’re trying to appear as.”

  I grunted as I stretched out my shoulders, and caught Ali giving me a strange look before she quickly looked away and began taking apart one of the pistols we had looted from the aftermath of the car chase.

  I chose to ignore it, and moved to the next pressing issue. “Can we pull over for a minute? I’ve been strapped in for a whole damn day, I need to go water a tree before I explode.”

  A few minutes later, we were back on the road and I was tearing through a second self-heating meal from our store of supplies we had picked up in Green’s Ash. We had shifted positions, Ali giving up her spot on the floor of the van and moved up to the passenger seat next to a silent Raschel in the front. The atmosphere was subdued, but the food was surprisingly good and kept me occupied as we bumped along the rough road in our stolen van.

  When I finally slowed down and chugged the last half of the powdery drink to wash everything down, I looked over and saw that Rin was just staring at me. He was never an easy man to read, but the set of his eyes made it obvious that something was wrong.

  “What?” I asked.

  He pulled a face and shook his head, then looked around in the nest of torn apart electronics and salvaged boxes of equipment that he was sprawled within. After a moment, he found what he was looking for and handed me a dead mobile comm screen. The body of the thing had been removed and wires dangled down from the shiny black rectangle.

  “You need a hat.”

  I gave him a confused glance, but took the screen and angled it so I could look at myself. My jaw dropped open and I sputtered in surprise at the new look I was sporting.

  I’d never thought of myself as particularly attractive. My features were blunt, my skin was blemished and scarred, and years of strain and hard living had given me premature lines and what I half jokingly referred to as resting-bastard-face. Rin was right though, the fight with the convoy of rebels had not done me any favors.

  I had a couple of fresh scars crossing my cheeks, and was missing a piece of the bridge of my nose, and an entire ear. The worst of it was the aftermath of the bullet that had bounced off my skull, which had scoured my entire forehead and temples of skin and hair. A ridged ring of scar tissue formed a gross looking crater that pulsed with each heartbeat as the skin slowly knit itself together over a patch of scabby bare bone almost two inches wide. I was covered in streaked dried blood where rivulets of sweat had washed some of it away, and looked like I was going bald in the worst way possible.

  “Gah-rah,” I said, borrowing the phrase from the dwarves I’d spent so much time around lately. “That’s gonna grow back, right?” I asked Max, glancing at the tablet as I picked at a line of dried blood.

  “Of course, man. I wouldn’t let you walk around like that for too long,” he replied. “It’ll take a few days though, maybe a week or two at the most.”

  Rin let out a breathy single laugh and shook his head in disbelief. “Hah… two weeks at the most… is this healing thing scaleable?”

  “Uh, unlikely. At least not without considerable infrastructure,” Max answered.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “That’s starting to sound like an excuse. You’ve said that about nearly everything we’ve asked about,” Ali retorted. I saw Max’s eyes widen on the screen, and I swear the little bastard blushed a darker gray before he frowned and waved his arms around in a blurry cartoonish gesture.

  “It’s the truth! I exist as about a half a cubic foot of material all locked inside of your precious boss. Unless you want to cut me out of there and plug me into a factory, that’s just the way it is.” He punctuated the remark by crossing his arms, which caused me to smile. Ali couldn’t even see the gesture from where she sat in the front passenger seat. “I may be advanced, but I have no illusions about the scale of my personal power. Would you prefer I lie and fill your head with pretty promises and sweet soothing nothings?”

  “No,” Ali replied, glancing back between the seats at me with a slight grin. “I’m just trying to gauge the limits of this immense power you claim to have.”

  “We’ll be able to ramp up the scale eventually. We just need to find somewhere that will leave us alone enough to get away with it,” Rin added.

  I smiled and just listened to the conversation as I laid my head down against a bulging duffle bag. The chatter between the three felt comfortable, almost reminiscent of home in the way the three of them went back and forth. The roles were shuffled around, but the dynamic rhymed. Rin was acting much more agreeable and less distracted or on edge than his usual self, almost as if he was stepping into Tevin’s usual role. Ali made a decent stand in for Rin’s usual cynicism, while Max seemed to be playing the role I would normally fill as the dreamer with big plans and over the top comments.

  I continued to listen to them, relishing the feeling of a full stomach and chance to rest. I closed my eyes and only added the occasional mhmm or grunt of agreement when prompted by one of them. After a short while, and despite my uncomfortable bed of a bare metal floor cramped between Tevin’s armor and the built-in shelving unit along the side of the van, I fell face first into a deep sleep.

  I dreamt of home, of burning buildings and friends I chased after but could not catch up to. I crashed cars amongst a hailstorm of bullets and bombs, and watched a broken old man sobbing over the corpse of a child while his skull shattered in slow motion and drenched my world in blood and tears.

  I woke up with a jolt, feeling hollow and tense. My jaw ached, and my teeth felt loose and tasted metallic. Rin was sitting across from me, his eyes hard and focused on my own. He pulled his foot back from my shoulder where he had shaken me awake.

  “That was weird,” Max said through the tablet. “I don’t like it.”

  “It’s normal, especially after what we have been through,” Rin added. “We’re nearly there though, twenty minutes until we get within sight of the outpost.”

  I nodded and sat up, not trusting myself or really wanting to say anything just yet. Nothing much had changed within the van, and we still bumped along the rugged mountain road behind the big armored vehicle we had stolen from the traitorous mercenaries back in Green’s Ash. The thick trees to either side of the road pressed in close, and an occasional branch slapped against the windshield or scraped along the roof of the van.

  “What even happened there? I don’t normally pay attention to whatever babbling stupidity your brain cooks up while you sleep, but I just couldn’t look away that time. It was like watching an incoherent compilation of twenty different bad movies starring you as an awkward teen from six camera angles all at once,” Max asked me internally while speaking through the tablet to the others at the same time in a halfway fuzzed out voice. “If that’s normal for you humans, I’m glad to be running on completely different hardware.”

  I answered him with a thought. “Just a nightmare, like Rin said, it’s normal.” Despite my insistence, I knew it was only half truth. Bad dreams were one thing, but the old man's exploding head stuck with me in a way that was not. I’d seen him somewhere before, but couldn’t place where or when. Instead of dwelling, I changed the subject.

  “What do we know about Sikanti, or Siber? Sikanti sounds familiar, but I have no idea where Siber is.”

  Rin and Ali exchanged a glance, and Max sort of glitched out on screen in his tablet. For a second, it looked like he was muted and speaking quickly while smashing a doll dressed in soldier's clothing in one hand with a little toy car in the other, but as soon as I registered it he flashed back to seriously sitting at his desk like a news reporter.

  “Sikanti is a nation north west of Kiorow,” Rin answered after a moment. “They’re pretty sparsely populated, I think they mostly export zinc and copper?” He glanced over at Ali, as if for confirmation, but she gave him a confused look and shrug in return.

  “Nation is a pretty strong word,” Max added, he straightened a stack of papers on his desk and glanced at them for a second before continuing. “They have three cities that got link ships, and they’re not even that big. According to the information I scraped off the Core’s servers before I left, they have about eighty thousand registered users. They don’t have much of a presence on the internet dirtside though. Most of what I know is through satellite imagery and travel blogs, so not all that useful.”

  I frowned and nodded, sitting up and scratching at some of the dried blood stuck to my neck. “What about Siber?”

  Rin hesitated a moment, waiting to see if Max would answer first. When he didn’t, Rin shrugged and said, “They’re across the western ocean. They’re pretty large and have a lot of people, but are also isolationist and peaceful these days. They used to raid the countries to the south and east a lot, but the last great war stomped that particular cultural pillar out of them.”

  We both turned to Max’s tablet, expecting him to add something. He tossed his stack of papers over his shoulder and frowned before answering. “They aren't connected to the global net either, so all I can tell you is that most of their big cities are along the coast and that they have about half a billion registered users that make a relatively low amount of complaints on the board I used to run.”

  I nodded, trying to think of how that information might be useful when combined with the fact that the dwarves were reaching out to both nations. All I could come up with was that they were fairly close in proximity, with the dwarves being between the two along the broken land bridge that once connected the continents. Maybe the dwarves were just making sure their neighbors remained on good terms with them.

  I looked to Max and was about to ask what he knew about the more current conflicts in the factions version of the area, when his eyes went wide and he stood up from his desk, pointing straight ahead between Rin and myself. “Look! It worked!”

  I blinked at his sudden interruption, looking over at Rin in confusion.

  Rin was looking back in my direction but not at me, and I watched his eyes go wide as well before he scrambled up from his position and pointed. I followed his gesture and watched as Tevin’s armored hand slid up from its resting position at his side and moved to cover his stomach. He clenched a loose fist, and his helmet turned to the side a little.