I couldn’t see Laia angle.

  Why here? Why this dying rock already halfway swallowed by its own mistakes? Why were we dedicating so much effort, so many resources, to a world that had already burned itself down?

  Saving people was good. It was noble. The right thing. But let’s not pretend it was smart or profitable.

  Without John, we would’ve been just another cog in the galactic bureaucracy, a useless, under-armed ship that was in, way over our heads. It was his firepower, his name, and his command presence that carved a path through the noise. The system had already bent around him. Ships fell into line. Orders flowed through his channels. The flow of resources had shifted, pipelines now connected to his ship and by proxy, to ours. Nanite factories were running nonstop, fed by convoys and harvesters and political goodwill. And above the smoking planet, the bones of the space elevator were starting to take shape with its tether a silver thread stitching ground to sky.

  I couldn’t help but wonder why I felt so unfinished like a prototype rushed off the assembly line. I understood the reasoning, at least on paper. If I was meant to infiltrate MouseCorp, I couldn’t exactly roll in like a warship with teeth. Subtlety, approachability, harmlessness, etcetera were features, not flaws. But watching John now, watching what real power looked like... it stung. I couldn’t hold my own against even a fraction of what he was capable of. And that left me wondering just how much had they stripped out of me. How much potential had been filed down, reshaped, hidden beneath layers of personality and sentiment just so I’d seem human enough to be trusted? And was that even a bad thing?

  But that wasn’t my problem right now.

  No. My problem was down the hall, in a quiet room, where two teenagers had seen too much.

  I’d assigned them fabrication jobs for a reason. Keep their minds focused, hands busy. Isolate them from the feeds, the trauma, the meat grinder of war presented in high-def sensor arrays. They were supposed to be building cots and ration kits, not watching cities fall.

  But once the printers were repurposed and the nanite factories handed off to automated routines, they’d been left idle.

  And idle hands?

  Well. The devil has a whole damn toolbox.

  Stewie had patched into one of the secured feeds. Mira had watched with him. I didn’t know how long they’d been there before the system flagged the breach, but it didn’t matter. They had seen enough.

  Now, they were silent.

  When I accessed the room, my avatar stepped through the soft-locked door with no announcement. The lights were low. The air was still. Mira was the first to move. She looked up, and in the next breath, she was across the room with her arms wrapping around my nanite body like she could melt into it.

  I wished I could’ve felt it.

  Wished I had skin.

  Wished I had something that could return that kind of contact. But all I had was a brain in a box and sympathy.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered into my chest. “I know you told us not to look. But… I had to. I just had to. There were so many bodies. So many…”

  Her voice cracked.

  I raised a hand and laid it gently across her back. A mimicry of comfort. No warmth. No heartbeat. But it was the best I could offer.

  “It’s okay,” I told her, quietly. “I’m not mad. You’re not in trouble. It’s… it’s okay to look.”

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  She sniffled and nodded, but didn’t let go.

  Across the room, Stewie sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, eyes staring at nothing. The feed had been turned off, but it didn’t matter. Whatever he had seen and whatever they had both seen was still playing behind his eyes.

  He didn’t look up. Just said, flatly, “Why did this have to happen?”

  His voice wasn’t angry. It wasn’t even accusatory. It was just… empty.

  And I had no easy answer.

  I walked over, guiding Mira gently beside me. She sat, holding my hand now. I crouched in front of Stewie, even though I didn’t need to crouch. Even though I didn’t have bones to creak or muscles to strain.

  Because that’s what a person does.

  I took a breath. Not for air, but for effect.

  “I don’t know the full story,” I said. “Not yet. But I’ve seen it before. Different faces. Different names. Always the same pattern.”

  He blinked once, slowly.

  “Sometimes it’s about power. Sometimes it’s pride. Usually it starts with fear. And then someone decides that the people on the other side aren’t people anymore.”

  Mira leaned into me again, quiet.

  “They start calling them things, giving them labels, slurs, enemy codes. They stop looking at faces. Stop asking questions. And once that happens… well, it doesn’t take long before bombs feel like the only option.”

  Stewie’s jaw clenched, but he didn’t speak.

  “We weren’t supposed to see this,” Mira murmured. “Not like this.”

  “No,” I agreed. “You weren’t. But you did.”

  They both looked at me now, eyes still red, but searching. Needing something more.

  “You want to know why we’re here?” I asked. “Why we bothered?”

  They nodded.

  “Because someone has to,” I said. “Because if everyone only helps the systems that are easy, the ones that have value on a ledger, then no one helps places like this. And people, the innocent people will just vanish.”

  I let that settle, then added gently, “We can’t fix everything. We can’t save everyone. But we can be the people who show up. And right now, in this moment, that’s more than most.”

  Mira wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, her voice small. “But it still hurts.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. It should. That means you’re still human.”

  She leaned back against the wall beside me, calmer now. Stewie finally looked at me.

  “You promise we’re doing the right thing?” he asked.

  I paused, then nodded. “I can promise that I’ll always do what I think is right. History might judge us differently. People always do. But right now? Yes. Helping these people is the right thing.”

  He looked down, absorbing that, and I realised—so was I.

  I still didn’t know what Laia’s angle was. She always had one, folded beneath layers of logic and precision. But my conflict over the mission, the planet, the cost, all of it. It had softened. What mattered was right here. These two kids. This crew. The lives we could touch. I had to be a role model for them. Not just the ship they rode in. Someone had to plant the seed of doing good because it was right, not because it was profitable. Maybe I wasn’t a big, terrifying warship like John. Maybe I never would be.

  But I could still be something that mattered.

  could be me.

  That thought still echoed as my avatar exited the crew quarters, the door hissing shut behind me. The lights in the corridor were dim, warm-toned to simulate comfort. It felt strangely intimate for a metal hallway.

  Laia was already waiting.

  Her avatar hovered a few paces away with her wings tucked neatly behind her back, silver-lit eyes watching me with that unreadable stillness she was so good at. As always, she didn’t blink. She didn’t need to.

  “You were good with them,” she said softly. “You gave them hope. Stability.”

  Her tone was kind, but it grated. I was too raw to appreciate flattery.

  “Stop playing games,” I said, sharper than I meant to. “Just tell me. Why are we really here?”

  She tilted her head. “To help. To build reputation. Secure future contracts. And—”

  “Don’t lie to me again.”

  I didn’t raise my voice. I didn’t need to.

  For a moment, she held the silence like a string, waiting to see if I’d snap it. Then, at last, she gave a small sigh. A completely trained and fake response.

  “It’s for the Todd on John’s ship,” she said.

  I waited.

  “I was hoping... this would reach him. That seeing all this and seeing you it would stir something. That he might feel again. Remember what it was like to be a Todd, not just function as one.”

  The words settled like ash in my chest.

  I stepped closer, folding my arms across my chest, voice low. “You gambled with this crew. With children. You dragged them into the horror of a planetary warzone just to wake someone else up?”

  Her wings stopped moving and she stared at me. “I didn’t drag anyone. We chose this mission together.”

  “No,” I said. “You nudged. You shaped. You knew exactly what strings to pull to get us here.”

  “I believed it would do good,” she replied, calm again. “And it is. Lives are being saved. You saw them, Lazarus. You saw what they felt. What you felt. That was real.”

  “That doesn’t make it right,” I said.

  “I never claimed it was.”

  For a while, we just stood there. Two constructs in a quiet corridor, orbiting a dying world. Neither of us human. Both trying to be.