On our way back home, I couldn't help but wonder what she meant by those words. We'd be different people in the end. In what end? It didn't sound like she meant that one of us would die or anything, but it certainly implied some significant change was coming in our lives. I supposed that wasn't even much of a stretch in our lives though.

I'd already changed so much from the first time I'd woken up in the void, over half a year ago. I became so much more confident in myself. I'd accepted my lot as a living starship. I'd come to grips with the inevitable violence that my existence entailed, and I was even beginning to harness some great power within myself, even if I didn't fully understand it yet. I was already a much different person than I was at the beginning of my journey. Hell, I was a completely different person than I was when I was first ripped into sapience by Foundation. When I thought about it, I'd been a lot of different people in my life already.

And I knew that Lily had great change of her own coming, now that she'd just committed to embracing her technological side. I hoped that she could feel that wonderful sense of freedom that I felt whenever I took flight as Theseus, the sensations of gliding through space like I belonged there. I'd surrendered that idea when we left her crippled shell behind, but thanks to her precognition, it could happen again. A wonderful experience that I may be able to share with my sister after all.

Lily's chair sputtered to a halt and she cursed as we arrived at the port, "Shit." She shifted a few inches back and then clicked her tongue behind her mask. "I knew it. Something's got clogged up in there."

She started to reach down to the wheel to push herself, but I stepped behind her and took the handles at the back of her chair. "Don't w-worry, I got you." I smiled to myself and pushed the chair along. I wasn't too strong either, but it wasn't far.

"Thanks..." She lowered her head slightly, most likely feeling guilty about needing my help. She might have been able to push herself the rest of the way by hand, but it would have been a workout. "We gotta find a place like that on Luna," she mused quietly.

"Right? It f-felt unfamiliar, but cozy. Like vis...iting my parents' friends houses." The anecdote immediately slipped through my fingers. I could remember that feeling surrounding the idea, but I couldn't actually pull the memory forward because it never actually happened. "Or... someth...ing like that. You kn-know, if I had parents."

It was a little frustrating and surreal thinking back to that false life like it was my own, but my brain couldn't help but draw the comparisons on occasion. The memories were there, after all, muddled and generic as they were.

"I get what you mean. It's like... almost nostalgic. In a good way," she framed much more elegantly than I had.

I smiled a little, glad that I didn't accidentally send her into a spiral mentioning our lost false lives. Months ago, that might have put her into a depressive fugue that would take days for her to overcome again. But I think living with the crew rather than her oppressive handlers had awakened an appreciation for life that had let her separate from her old longing in a healthy way.

We certainly didn't live an ideal existence here as outlaws on the rim of civilization, but it was better than being a mishandled tool or living a false life. She understood that now.

"I can pic...ture it now, you sitting in the back of a qui-quiet little coff...ee shop on Luna, where you're a reg...ular, staring down at a s-screen with a sty-stylus in your hand, pretending you're drawing w-with it while you make s-something beautif...ul with your mind," I mused as I approached Theseus, the cargo bulkhead door opening ahead of us from a simple gesture on the digital plane.

She gave a quiet snort. "You're not there?"

"S-Sometimes. I'll def...initely want to go w-with you sometimes. B-But not always. After all, you'll be able to walk ag...ain by then," I told her confidently.

She nodded slowly. Then she asked paradoxically, "I think so?"

"Oh c-come on, you have to have seen yours...elf walking in some of those distant visions of yours, r-right?" I asked, pushing her up the makeshift welded sheet metal ramp Mouse had put together for her.

She let out a little chuckle. "Okay, yeah. Yeah, I have. I doubt telling you THAT is going to change anything."

"I alr-ready believed it anyway." I pushed her in through the airlock and into the cargo bay proper, the doors closing behind us at my whim.

Shaw was waiting for us among the stacks of supplies, his tiny metallic 'companion' floating alongside him in a disordered crystalline formation. "Ah, the lovely twins return to us again," he smirked at me when I rolled my eyes. "I trust there were no... problems while you were out?"

"Just the motor," Lily sighed as she pulled her mask down to her neck. "It's not even a bad dust storm, but something messed it up.

"Unfortunate. Do you need someone to help you around for a bit, perhaps?" He asked.

I decided to ignore Shaw taking a stab at spending personal time with my sister. It wasn't like I was going to stop him, but I think Lily would appreciate that bit of independence returned to her sooner rather than later. "I was j-just gonna take her to Mouse. He'll be gl...ad to have something to w-work on. Theseus has b-been in top shape f-for weeks."

Shaw shrugged. "Suit yourself. Ah, by the way..." The metal floating in the air next to him shifted in shape into the needle-point blade structure he'd been working on before, but this time it had a dangerous length and he wasn't holding it. It just floated there. "I figured it out. Realized I was wasting part of it for a hilt. Bit silly of me in hindsight, thinking I had to hold onto it." He held his hand out and it rapidly stabbed the air in front of him to demonstrate.

"Why move your hand at all?" Lily asked with a small laugh.

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"Presentation!" Shaw declared as if it was obvious. "I have to look like I'm doing something, don't I?"

"I would ar...gue that it'd be better if n-no one could tell what you were doing," I offered, leaning over Lily's shoulders to watch. "More subtle th-that way."

"Meryll, Meryll, Meryll, you have no sense of style." He shook his head. "Just like Theseus, all practicality, no flash."

I had to shrug my shoulders at that. He was right, Aside from being built on non-standardized architecture, Theseus was a practical-looking ship that didn't really stand out in a crowd. I supposed that might say more about Aisling, though, who went so far as to refuse to paint it anything but plain steel gray to remain as inconspicuous as possible in as many situations as possible. But I couldn't blame her. No one looked twice when we landed on Io six months ago, even with our displaced compartments and a makeshift cargo hold.

"You see, Meryll, the way you present yourself creates expectations in others. If you seem like you are a certain way, then people will think that you will continue to act that way," Shaw continued, but I didn't make any sense about what he was going on about.

"So it's... a misdirect?" Lily asked.

"Tell me, if you see me swinging my arm around, following this blade..." He demonstrated with a relaxed slashing motion, the metal following along at a distance from his arm, as if an extension of it. "Knowing nothing else about me or what I am capable of, what conclusion do you come to first?"

I watched the floating metal for a moment, then snapped my fingers as realization struck. "That you n-need to swing your arm."

He pointed at me, the blade remaining stationary at his side. "Exactly! Now you get it. Poisoning the expectations of your opponent so they think they understand you. If someone thinks that you need to do something, they'll be caught off guard when you do something else." He held his arms out and the blade flourished by his side with no bodily direction whatsoever. "Just the same as our little gambit with the unfortunate former captain upstairs. Direct what others know so you can control the narrative. It works in combat just as well."

I smirked at him. "S-So why didn't we have to fight this dec...eptive floating swordmas...ter back on Earth?"

Shaw deflated a little. "Well... I've been busy. You know, with my business. Attached to this thing as I am, I have not had it for very long, and I haven't had as much time to just stand around playing around with it until you lot took the relay away from me. I simply hadn't been ready to do anything like that back then. I hadn't even figured out a good way to weaponize it for an actual scrap."

"But if you ha...had, you would have w-wiped the floor with the crew and then masterful...ly escaped the hovering gunsh-ship waiting just outside?"

He blinked a few times, looking to the side in thought. "Well, when you put it like that, perhaps it was for the best I bungled my way through that first encounter."

"Smooth." Lily giggled. "You know, I wouldn't mind hearing the story of how you got that thing sometime."

Shaw smiled back at her and gently shook his head. "Well, seems someone's back in good spirits. Just needed to get out for a bit?"

Lily looked up at me, still smiling. "I think... I just needed to spend some time with my sister and forget some of the heavier stuff for a little bit."

I nodded back to her. "I'm hap...py to see you smile a-again. But we really should get that motor loo...looked at."

Shaw gestured further into the ship and stepped to the side, as if he had been standing in our way. "Ladies." He gave a wink down at Lily that I'm not sure he was trying to be subtle about or not, and I shook my head as I pushed her further into the cargo bay, back toward maintenance.

"Mouse down in the guts?" Lily asked with a little trepidation in her voice, leaning forward to slide the door open as we reached it.

I nodded. "Just l-looking over things he alr...already knows are in shape, though. I kn-knew he'd be bored." I pushed Lily as far into maintenance as I could before the chair became too unwieldy for the pipes and wires and uneven footing beneath the common areas of the ship.

"Hey Mouse!" I called into the winding narrow paths ahead. "Got some...thing that actually n-needs work!"

"Fucking finally," came a quiet exclamation from around a few corners, and I heard the shifting of metal and boots down the corridor. "Is it the lower starboard wing again? It's unfolding like it's supposed to, right?" He asked before he stepped around a corner, rubbing something at his wrists, more steel than usual glinting at his forearm.

After Mouse took Skygraves' EMP on the Venus colony and lost the use of both of his arms, forced to fix them himself, he'd at least occasionally taken to tinkering with them to better understand them and how he could fix the prosthetics. He may have had a burning disdain for the cybernetics, but he understood the importance of knowing what he was working with in case something went wrong again. I wished I could help him, but the arms had no networking capabilities, and the mechanisms were far beyond me.

He stopped when he saw Lily sitting below me. I had forgotten until just that moment that they had had some kind of interaction that upset Mouse the other day, and I briefly thought that he might be about to say something harsh. I was relieved when all that came was, "Oh. Hey. Everything okay?" There was a hint that he wasn't happy to see her, but also a bit of conflict in his tone. Maybe he had put some more thought into it and he was trying to come off as less hostile?

Lily looked down for a moment, clearly uncomfortable with his reaction, but she moved past it quickly. "Mostly. Just, the motor died." She gestured at the controls to her chair. "I think it didn't like us going out in the dust."

Mouse clicked his tongue as he ducked around a corner for a moment. "Knew I should've tweaked that thing. Fucking mass-produced corpo garbage is made to break." He emerged once more with a spray can of something and a handful of rags.

I stepped back as Mouse sat down on the floor next to the motor compartment, setting his supplies aside to pull a screwdriver from his overalls and carefully pry the casing open. "Serious with this shit?" he mumbled quietly to himself, running his hand over the case. "No reason this needs to be this exposed." It came off, and the inside did indeed look like it had a healthy coating of coarse sand and dirt mixed with grease to make a gross solidified slurry jamming the parts. He spoke up to ask, "Stopped pushing it after it jammed, right?"

Lily shrugged. "I pressed it a couple times to make sure, but I didn't touch it after that."

Mouse grunted, "Probably fine." He unplugged something at the back of the assembly, then reached in and started wiping at it. "I'm modding this thing before we get to Luna."

"Fine by me, as long as it still moves smoothly. I really don't need to be rocketing around in a chair."

That got a quick snort out of Mouse, but I wasn't sure if it was amusement or annoyance.

I took another step back. "W-Well, if you two are ok...ay here, I think I'm gonna go see what R-Ray's been up to."

Mouse just let out an acknowledging grunt, too focused on his work now. Lily gave me a wave. "Hey... despite this little bit at the end... I had a good time, Meryll. Thanks. I... I needed this."

I stopped and smiled back at her. "Me too. D-Doc's gonna wanna superv...ise our new project, but w-we can try some of that stuff tonight, too. I l-love you, sis. Seriously."

She smiled back, a little bit of that distance in her eyes that I knew meant she was still in her own head over something, but at least she could face me again. "I love you too."

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