ND-E

ND-E spent the puzzle chasing pipe runs through the clutter, distracted half the time by the thought of St. Crow's fingerprints all over this place, then redeemed it by cracking the exploit on Cinderwalker's damage type and landing the killing information the crew needed. In the server room he did what he does best — stabilized a dying system, salvaged what the virus hadn't already eaten, and read St. Crow's name straight off the evidence. Finding out that St. Crow had been hunting for Now's real identity didn't shake him; if anything, it was the first solid trace of his nemesis he's had in longer than he'd like to admit, and he said so, almost pleased.

ND-E found the truth of the yard before anyone swung a weapon: a virus in the control crystal, data being quietly erased, and underneath it all a calling card he knows too well. Saint Crow — the bot who sold Onerous out, took the money, and vanished — is somehow threaded through a recycling center's dying droids. ND-E said it plainly to the group, no flourish, because that's what he does with the truth: hands it over complete and lets everyone else decide what to feel about it. He fought carefully after that, stunning what he could, never once needing to swing wide.

ND-E told them everything, more or less — the awakening; the gnome mercenary named Onerous who found him and moved him into a smaller body nobody can explain; and Saint Crow, who sold Onerous out to the men he owed, killed him, and ran with the money. The drone at his shoulder carries the dead man's name. He laid out the truth about the M13s too: the backdoor nobody asked for, the corporations burying the body count, the millions of them walking around not knowing what they are. When the droids in the Reclamation Center came up, he didn't hesitate about what might need doing down there. Andy doesn't flatter himself that any of this makes him good company. He just doesn't lie about it.

ND-E read Commander Achike as exactly what he presented: a soldier, disciplined, dangerous, and not currently a liability. He laid the three paths out loud for the group in the Slag Pit afterward, cold and clear-eyed about what each would cost — piracy and its baggage, corpo ties and cleaner money, or the grassroots faction's wide net of favors instead of credits. He leaned toward squeezing use out of two sides at once, on the theory that being valuable to both the cartel and H&R is safer than being loyal to either, and said so without flinching, because lying was never an option he had anyway.

ND-E did not start this. A drunk called him a clanker and his friend a toaster, and ND-E answered by putting a pistol in a charging woman's mouth and taking out half her teeth — the plating scratches, but the point lands. He dropped a summoned slab of concrete on an unconscious man afterward and didn't pretend it was an accident when asked. He is a truthful creature and told the truth: he didn't spark joy killing a bigot, but he didn't lose sleep over it either. Onerous, for his part, mocked the man's voice the entire fight.

ND-E spent the walk to Zabetta's shop distracted by scrap and salvage the way another man might window-shop, and when Foxlon offered to dig the microchip out of his own chest, he didn't hesitate. He asked Zabetta, flatly, whether synthetics had any real presence out here, and got a shrug and a headcount instead of an answer. Out on the shuttle he had summoned Onerous for the first time in a long while — a volleyball-sized drone named for an old friend, which went nose to nose with Velveteen and yelled at him like an angry modem. At the workshop he tried the name Saint Crow on Zabetta too, and it meant nothing — one more question that came back with nothing behind it. He can't lie, so every question he asks costs him something if the answer matters; this one didn't, but he'll ask it again somewhere it might.

The coats were the wrong size. That was the whole of it — a doctor's shoulders in a nurse's seams, a nurse's name stitched over a doctor's posture — and the room reorganised itself into something legible. He said I wouldn't, and the woman thought better of the blaster on the floor, and he has been turning that over since, because it was the truest thing he said all day and it was also the thing that worked.

Three names now. Sable off a terminal, Chimera off a door, Lethe off a screen a woman was scrubbing clean. Somebody is going to want all three of them back.

Everyone in this prison is a case he could close if he cared to. He doesn't. He tells the tortle he isn't solving anything, just decommissioning his cousins, and it lands as a joke because the truth usually does. Then a twenty-year-old with a riot-gas button starts crying and ND-E does the only trick he has left: he tells the kid exactly what he is — a cop — and it works. In the guard room something on the far end of the network is erasing itself faster than he can read it. He gets enough. He always gets enough. He is so tired.