It was strange, having Collins up and about on the ship. We didn't expect her recovery to be so quick, but a stubborn refusal to stay incapacitated seemed to be a prerequisite trait for pirate starship captains.

It meant that the fairly lax part of our plan for her was over. We needed to keep her from learning certain things while leaving more clues for her to find. Subtle, at first, to seed doubt of the veracity of my nature and eventually becoming harder to ignore. Right now, we just wanted her to become a little doubtful so we don't completely blindside her later. We would eventually want her to find proof of our 'fraud', but that could wait until we were well on our way to Luna.

I continued displaying consistent 'tics' that coincided with evidence of my control of the ship whenever she was in the room. In her presence, I kept my hands in my pockets whenever I used the intercom and showcased obvious mechanical control of Theseus outside of the core module. I wanted to make a habit when I passed near her to occasionally close my eyes and take meaningless actions that could be interpreted as putting on a show for her. I could have easily closed a door behind me by hand, but why not do it electronically just to make it seem just a little bit absurd? Nothing too big for now, but I thought I understood how observant Collins was, so that was all she needed to start asking questions.

The day passed quickly without too many opportunities to mess with her, but we didn't want this to happen too fast, anyway.

I settled into bed with Ray that night, knowing that besides Doc's obligatory check-ins, I probably wouldn't be able to tear myself away from the core module for at least a couple days once we were in space. And even though I idled long into the night in her arms, anxious for the coming day, I was surprised to find the sleep I had managed to be quiet. No nightmares haunted me that night. I woke up gently. That was new.

Ray seemed caught off guard when I started stretching my arms up, shifting her hold on me just slightly. She had expected me to startle awake, gasping and sweating, once again. Did I just need to sleep more often? Was that why I only seemed to have nightmares? Did I just need to acclimate to them? To have someone to comfort me through the night until they stopped?

Regardless, the day for our departure had finally arrived. After breakfast, where I kept catching Collins stealing glances toward me, I wondered if maybe I'd been too obvious. She was paying attention to me already. This would be a fine line I would need to walk, carefully managing her expectations until the right moment. Her interest had been piqued. That was all I wanted her to have for some time, so maybe I needed to space out these 'incidents' more.

The whole crew got very busy after breakfast.

Joel and Shaw had gone into town to complete some last minute errands, getting the last of our supplies prepared and closing out accounts we had with various local businesses and underground contacts. We didn't want to attract undue attention leaving the region with unpaid bills, legal or otherwise.

Doc made a rare trip of his own out to pick up some medicine we were low on, and a case of first aid supplies, mumbling that we would surely need it after what we had planned.

Mouse was making sure my wings, hull plating, engine ports, and exterior weapons were in top form, making dozens of microscopic tuning adjustments to optimize as best he could so that he wouldn't have to spend too long making repairs in an environment suit later.

Aisling was coordinating everything. And I mean everything. She seemed to know exactly what everyone was doing all the time, sending messages between people to direct them to their next destination, sending off communications all over our contacts on Io to make sure we'd settled everything and establishing believable cover that this would be a routine departure, and still managing to already be down in the cargo bay to greet others when they stopped in between their own errands.

And that left Ray, Lily, and I. Ray couldn't leave the ship for obvious reasons, and had already taken care of most of the work taking stock of our supplies the previous day, so she was bored as usual. My own preparations were either already taken care of, automated, or things I could handle in the literal blink of an eye, so I decided to keep her company in the infirmary, out of the way of any incidental visitors delivering goods for us. Lily didn't have much in the way of responsibilities on the ship, so she had decided to join us as well. I wasn't going to say no to hanging out with my two favorite people in the world.

"I forgot to ask yes...terday, did Mouse attach r-rockets or guns t-to your chair or anything?" I asked jokingly, sitting over the edge of one of the infirmary beds.

"Hah! I hope not," she giggled, leaning over to look down at the casing for the chair's motor. "He did do some stuff there to seal the openings around the moving parts better, though. And I swear it's a little more responsive now. Like it's got a little more torque."

"He definitely wouldn't be able to resist tuning it up," Ray smirked, sitting in Doc's chair across the room. I wanted to show her how my vitals monitors worked. For some reason, it felt more intimate when she was watching over my body, where it just felt clinical with Doc in her place. Like me with cooking, she was mostly just humoring me; I don't think she was learning much. "He might like his really big guns, but he's resisted putting them all over Theseus so far, so I don't think you need to be worried."

"Oh right... s-speaking of ships, I wan...ted to ask you, Lily, d-does your ship ha-have a name?" I asked.

That seemed to catch her off guard. "Huh... I... don't know." She looked up at the ceiling and mumbled to herself for a moment, her brow furrowed in concentration.

"You d-don't have to de...decide right now," I reminded her quickly. "I just w-wanted to know if you'd th...thought about it y-yet."

She shook her head, her expression relaxing a little. "I hadn't. It's a good question, though. I bet Foundation never bothered to give it an elegant designation, and it's mine now. I've never had a vision that involves its name, so I guess I can name it whatever I want, huh?"

"Why not make it personal to you?" Ray asked. "You do have a fairly intimate relationship with it, after all. It's your ship alone at the end of the day. Maybe a play off your name? Something to do with flowers?"

She let out a pointed laugh at that. "Ehh... My name is just something that they gave me; it's not that important to me. I was thinking more about my-" her word stopped sharply as she turned her head to the door. The unmistakable sound of the hard rubber tips of crutches clicking rhythmically against a metal floor.

We all shut up and watched the door as they grew closer. A moment later, Collins hobbled into the room. She came to a dead stop and glanced between each of us staring back at her in silence. "Uh... hi?"

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We were acting weird. Lily spoke first. "Don't mind us, today's just surprisingly boring for a few of us, so we're just staying out of the way."

She shrugged, looking around the room for something, but stopped and furrowed her brow when she saw Lily and I next to each other.

Lily had already spent more time with her than most of us, since Doc had simply begun involving Collins in physical therapy alongside her. However, she was looking at both of us.

While Lily and I were from the same clone stock, we did look significantly different. I had poor health habits that left me skinny enough that you could sort of see the outline of my ribs without a shirt on, whereas Lily's build had filled out nicely since she was introduced to home cooking and a low-stress sedentary lifestyle. She had a much more sensible haircut than I did, emphasizing our natural long, straight locks while I was becoming increasingly aware of how badly I'd mangled mine trying to do something different. She also wore much less outrageous clothes than I did, preferring simple skirts and t-shirts to my weird implant-concealing fit. Of course, there was also the obvious of the fact that I currently wasn't trying to hide what I was, and she was bound to a wheelchair.

All that is to say, we look different enough that one's first thought looking at us isn't that we share the exact same genetic sequence. However, one could very easily come to the conclusion that we're sisters. We didn't have a great excuse for that, but we were still prepared for it.

"You know, you two..." She started, but then shook her head. "No, never mind. That's stupid. Where's Doc?" I was a little relieved that she'd dropped it so quickly, because our 'Yeah, we've noticed, it's kind of funny, isn't it?' plan was a bit spotty.

"He had to pick some stuff up in the colony." Lily turned her chair slightly to face her. "Did he tell you we're doing a rest day today?"

"Oh. No, I figured with the whole launch happening, it would be good to take one more swing at it before we have to deal with artificial gravity. I know too well how finicky those systems can be."

"Really?" Lily tilted her head toward me.

I shrugged "I got a wh-whole new syst...em installed since w-we last traveled. I trust M-Mouse knows how to ins-stall it. We haven't d-done a zero atm...atmosph-phere test yet, so I guess we'll s-see in a coup...le hours. It def...definitely feels more... g-grippy? Than the last one did, th-though?"

"They're never as perfect as the real thing." Collins shook her head. "Well, I guess I'll go back to my room if we're not doing anything."

She started turning around, but Ray cleared her throat. She'd stood up from the seat and wheeled it around the console. "Want some company?" She asked, approaching her with the chair.

Collins tilted her head and furrowed her brow with a silent question, but her gaze quickly went to the floor as she was approached by the much larger woman. She was still intimidated by Ray, that much was clear.

"Come on, you're about to spend at least a month along with us, are you going to hide in your room the whole time?" She asked with a smile. "Come on, you don't have anything better to do."

I wanted to question why Ray would invite her to come bond with us, but it made sense for her to offer, and it would give us an opportunity to develop our nuanced personas for her a little more. We'd just have to steer clear of any forbidden topics for now.

Collins shrugged her shoulders and lowered herself roughly into the offered chair, placing her crutches on the floor while Ray leaned up against the side of the same bed I was sitting on. I leaned into her as Collins spoke. "Alright... I guess it is going to be pretty boring to just stare at a screen for weeks on end." She suddenly snapped her eyes to me. "Not that there's... anything wrong with that?"

"Screens are k-kinda annoy...ing." I smirked. It was true. It was such an inelegant interface compared to a direct psychic link. "I use something m-more like... a mental cons...struct of sorts."

"Huh..." Collins was clearly still fascinated with how I worked, but she decided to shift the topic instead, looking to Lily. "You know, you never mentioned before that you had a ship too, does Aisling just collect starship captains?"

That made everyone flinch slightly. What was she talking about? When she saw everyone balking at her, she quickly explained. "Sorry, I overheard a little. Something about a new ship? I didn't mean to eavesdrop, but you're not exactly being quiet in here."

I pursed my lips, uncertainty overpowering me. If she overheard the wrong thing, that could have been devastating. Aisling was going to give us another dressing down about opsec. I resisted the temptation to ask her how much she overheard. If she'd picked up on Lily's nature, that would throw a massive wrench into things. But given how casual she was being, she probably didn't hear or didn't understand anything too bad.

Still, it was a new lie we'd have to build up. Best to keep it simple. I opened my mouth to say that we were talking about Horizon, that Lily had gotten into it recently too, but she was quicker. "Haha, yeah, I guess she must. My ship got 'borrowed' when Foundation showed up on Luna." She rolled her eyes, a sad smile on her face. I didn't think she could act like this. Maybe she had had a vision about this and had something in mind. "That's where I got injured. Just like them to cripple me and steal everything I own." The venom she spoke that with was all too real. "I'm grateful the crew got me out of there when they did."

Ray let out a laugh, picking up on the play she was making and taking a teasing tone. "Not like you were invited. I seem to remember you crawling on board before we closed the cargo bay and left a trail of blood I had to clean up."

Collins let out a snort and looked to Lily with a smile. "I thought I heard you say something about Foundation. You were a stowaway?"

I definitely wouldn't miss a spectacle like that in my own cargo bay, but I chose to ignore that for the sake of brevity. "W-We were in a hu...hurry," I added. "No time to g-get her out be...fore we esc-scaped." One of the few advantages of having a noticeable speech impediment was that no one could tell if you were fumbling your words because you were a nervous wreck or if you were just having a little extra difficulty talking at the moment. They usually assumed the latter.

Ray smirked. "Joel wanted to airlock her." Of course he would. That was his first response to anyone out of place on Theseus. "But Aisling doesn't run things like that."

Collins hummed somberly. "I mean, that would be a sensible response. Less mouths to feed, and you can't trust some random stranger you don't know in a situation like that. She could have been a Foundation spy."

"They kept me locked in a room for a while after Doc patched me up. Not sure why, I'm obviously not going anywhere." She gave a somber laugh. "I don't seem to remember them trying to play like they were cops for me, though. You got special treatment."

We were holding it together, but this lie was becoming too elaborate. I think maybe we were all picking up on it, because the room was suddenly quiet. Nobody wanting to pick up where Lily left off.

Thankfully, Collins found her voice before things got awkward. "Well, I guess I can't say I'm not grateful you have a captain with a soft spot. It definitely would've been the easier solution to put a bullet in me. Or better yet, just leave me in my... sticky liquid tomb." She glanced to the back of the room to the massive metal sphere, the portal to my whole self, the core module. She brought her attention back to me. "Oh yeah... you need to get in there soon, don't you?"

I think we all breathed a silent sigh of relief at the change of subject. "Y-Yeah. I've already got m-most of the pre-flight check eith...er done or running in the backgr-ground now. Takeoff itself's p-pretty hard outside the c-core module, though. I'll h-hop in when Doc gets b-back."

The conversation became much more casual from there. It wasn't hard to avoid the hard subjects once Ray and Collins started exchanging anecdotes of their individual adventures. It wouldn't be long before Ray's natural charisma would start to chip away at Collins' unease.

About an hour later, Collins excused herself, and everyone decompressed. I had to take the opportunity after I was sure Collins was out of earshot to quietly tell my sister, "That was p-pretty quick thin...king and great acting. You sh-should've just told her we were t-talking about a video g-game though. I hope you h-have a plan, cause n-now you're going to have to a-act like you know what it's like to c-cap...tain a starship."

Lily stared at me with a completely lost expression on her face. Maybe she didn't know what she was doing with this after all. She confirmed as much when she let out a muted "Fffuck."

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