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Chapter Text

The Zoldycks were in the business of vert riding. It was commonly referred to by the old practice of Russian roulette where, rather than loading a single bullet into a cylinder and pointing it at his head, Killua would point it at the vert owner and say, “If you die, it’s only at the consequence of a few grand missing from my wallet.”

Killua’s own vert was a masterpiece manufactured by none other than Alluka Zoldyck. In order to properly ride, the Zoldycks equipped themselves with the highest quality cerebral docking that would cause any blue collared person to faint at the cost. A vert dock wasn’t nearly as pricey as the vert itself, though—that was Alluka’s specialty. With the number of bodies the Zoldycks remotely docked into, they had a high price on their heads and therefore, required industrial-level verts. It would take more than a shot to the spinal column to demolish a Zoldyck vert.

It was because of this that the Zoldycks became easily identifiable by the metal plating on the back of their necks to cover the dock. It was slitted like the spine of a toy snake. Not only that, but Killua’s eldest brother sported a set of metal spikes just for the hell of it.

Killua’s was simply flat.

He ran his hand along it, trailing his fingers across the smooth finish at the edges of the armor. He was long past feeling insecure about the plating, but it didn’t make him feel any less gaudy wearing it. If it was up to him, he’d go without it, but then every hitman hired to put a bullet in his dock would have a field day.

“How has freelancing gone for you, Kil?”

Illumi’s voice brought Killua’s consciousness back to the loft where his brain was, simmering in every sensation rippling across him. He felt like a bobber in water, attached to Alluka’s string with Illumi pulling at the hook.

Alluka glanced at them out of the corner of her eye. When she met Killua’s stare, she turned away and pushed her glasses up. They glinted against the fluorescent ring light illuminating the metal stand in front of her. She set back to toying with the vert on the docket, but Killua knew she was entirely tuned in and unsteady with having Illumi at their loft.

Killua cleared his throat and looked up from his hands. “I’m not freelancing anymore. Why don’t you ask Alluka that.”

Illumi leant back in his seat with a sigh. He looked off towards the windowpane, away from Alluka, and said, “I couldn’t care less who they’re selling vertebrae to.”

“The number of my verts Milluki’s broke into says otherwise,” Alluka muttered from the desk. Killua narrowed his eyes at Illumi, who pursed his lips and glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. Alluka turned to them, leaning a hand on the desk as she said, “You’re ruining my business. If everyone who buys a vert from me ends up rotting because Milluki’s got anger issues—”

“I never told Milluki to tamper with your clients,” Illumi hummed. “Rude of you to assume.”

“Tell him to cut it out for me, then,” she said.

“I’m sure we’d be able to provide you better equipment if you’d work for us again. Milluki wouldn’t be able to break them, then,” he said.

Alluka stood up sharply from her chair. Killua tensed, but Illumi didn’t react to the sound of Alluka’s chair hitting the wall behind her. Instead, he simply sighed and said, “Figured as much. As I said before: I don’t care who they sell to. I care about who’s hiring you, Kil.”

Killua ground his teeth together. “As I said before: I don’t freelance.”

“Then I take it you have other means of affording rent,” Illumi said with a broad gesture to the loft.

Killua wished he could punch his brother in the mouth. He clenched his closed fist in his hand and said nothing.

Illumi leant forward, imitating Killua’s position. Killua’s eye twitched as Illumi stared him down before whispering, “I just want what’s best for you, Kil. A crappy apartment and low-grade equipment isn’t it.”

“I don’t care about your bar for ‘quality of life’,” Killua said, “and quite frankly, I don’t agree with it, either. So you can kindly piss off.”

Illumi studied him for a moment.

Killua couldn’t allow himself to falter, not with Illumi so close to him—in his apartment. It wouldn’t have been an issue had they met in a café, and despite all of the care he and Alluka had taken to wipe evidence of themselves from the planet, the serial numbers on the casing of their verts were grade-A Zoldyck equipment. It was the best in the business and the firmware was impossible to crack. Even the most skilled vert riders would be incapable of dropping in unannounced, and if they wanted to cut off the family, they would need to keep the best equipment. A scanner along the way—through a grocery store, at the gym, anywhere—probably picked it up and Milluki was on the other end recording the data of all of the scanners in the area that he and Alluka may have passed.

Illumi reached up. Killua tracked the motion to Illumi’s fingers as they rolled down the collar on his turtleneck. He pushed into the fingerprint scanner on the edge of his spiked docking armor. Killua watched as it unhooked from Illumi’s skin—skin that had been covered until now, skin that Killua only now saw as red, irritated, and blistering. The docking vertebrae would be infinitely worse.

“You don’t have to show me,” Killua said, turning away.

He heard the armor click shut once more. Killua swallowed uncomfortably and asked, “What did you do.”

“I docked with someone who’s a frequent rider,” Illumi said, rolling the collar of his shirt back up. “Classic case of misinformation, but the damage is already done. I’m out of commission for at least another month until the virus leaves. Milluki just barely managed to bring me back. The vic had a hard time letting go of my dock.”

Vic. Killua despised that term for as long as he had been in the Zoldyck business. But it was true, that every vert owner they inhabited had the chance of being a victim. Killua had a strong record, though. Usually the “vics” were subjected to a docking virus, so the fact that Illumi had come down with one was an anomaly on its own. Killua had only managed to kill one vert owner with the virus due to prolonged inhabitation, and that was simply because he was young, stupid, and arrogant. He never made that mistake again and had yet to scramble a vic’s consciousness on the return route.

That was the biggest difference between Killua and the rest of the Zoldycks who practiced vert riding. Unlike him, the rest of them didn’t care to restore the data of the vert owner on their return. Sure, they’d lose a few grand for an additional kill, but their clients offered bigger bucks for the actual assigned hit.

“You want me to finish the job for you,” Killua said.

“The target’s still alive.”

Killua rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and so is the vert owner. You think they’d be stupid enough to let another rider in? They’re probably expecting it.”

Illumi leant in further, and it pushed Killua back in his seat with a wary look. “You know how I play this game. The vic only saw a black room, nothing else. For all he knows, he passed out and came to. He’s just a kid, but he’s as close as we’ll get to the target.”

“‘We’,” Killua repeated with a huff, rolling his eyes. “I’m not helping you with—”

He’s just a kid.

Killua was just a kid—if just under ‘underaged’ was anything to go by. It was odd for seventeen-year-olds to be in this line of business in the first place. Any kid who had experience vert riding was likely involved in illegal operations, and Killua was no exception.

“He’s a kid and he’s trained in riding?” Killua repeated.

“We aren’t interested,” Alluka said, stepping around Illumi’s seat. She gave Killua a sharp look, but it was too late. Illumi saw the fleeting bit of interest in Killua’s expression. “We don’t need or want to help you, Illumi.”

“Then perhaps I could appeal to your nationalism,” he offered.

Killua barked out a laugh. “Oh, right, because I care about the government,” he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. He scoffed and rolled his eyes. “I’ll pass.”

“They want to abolish vert tech,” Illumi said.

Killua rolled his eyes again. “People talk about that all the time. It’s never gonna happen,” he said and, leaning forward, hissed with great emphasis, “So I don’t give a shit.”

“This guy has an entire campaign the size of seven military regiments out on the West Coast,” Illumi said. “None with verts.”

Verts were so common place, it was like saying there was an entire country dedicated to not wearing underwear. It was so absurd that Killua didn’t even laugh—he just stared at Illumi, who stared back, impassive. Sure, there were religious groups who abhorred vert tech simply because the one life they lived was all they believed in. When Killua was connected to the Zoldyck server, with a host of clones of himself, he had died and lived again a dozen times over. When he left, he set them all ablaze and Alluka wiped all of their data from the server. It would have been easy, otherwise, for Milluki to simply make a clone of him with his exact same consciousness.

Not having backups felt hazardous and, for a time, anxiety-inducing. He couldn’t imagine going through life with just one body and one mind.

“You’re lying,” Killua said.

“I’m not.”

“Then how did you find someone close enough with a vert?” he asked.

“That’s confidential.” Unless you accept my terms, went unsaid.

Killua put a hand to his mouth and stared at his brother until at last looking up at Alluka. She stood off to the side, between them, her eyes glancing from Illumi to Killua. When she met Killua’s eyes, they held still.

“An army of people who don’t have verts would be easier to destroy than the Republic military with verts,” Alluka said.

“Verts aren’t foolproof,” Illumi said. He leant back, arms crossed, as Alluka turned to Killua.

Together, they processed this information, and Illumi’s illusion to verts being a built-in self-destruct system. No one had successfully shut down more than ten verts at a time—remote deaths took up more energy than it was worth.

Killua pulled his eyes away from Alluka. “Do they have access to something that could deactivate more than a dozen verts instantaneously?” he asked.

“I’m saying they have something that could deactivate several million at once,” Illumi said. “They could wipe out the entire Republic military in the snap of a finger if they wanted. They aren’t here to liberate the people—they’re here to start humanity over.”

Killua rubbed the back of his neck. He slotted his fingers over the plated metal on his vertebrae dock. It ached just thinking about Illumi’s virus. Killua had worked incessantly before getting Zoldyck-branded firmware just to stop Milluki from dropping into his vert unexpectedly. Ever since the last time Milluki broke in when he was five years old, Killua vowed never to let it happen again.

If this kid could break into Illumi’s vert, he’ll sure as Hell break into mine, Killua thought, shivering a little. He didn’t like the idea of someone else occupying his body—feeling with his fingers, seeing with his eyes, among other things.

“I still don’t like this,” Alluka whispered as she ran her fingers through her fluffy ponytail. It swung against her shoulder blades as she turned to Killua, crossing her arms. “If we have to undock you—”

“Don’t let them undock me,” Killua said.

“I can’t stop them from—”

“I’m serious, Alluka,” Killua insisted. The thought of having his entire mind in Milluki’s hands was unnerving enough. Every undocking pitched Killua into a severe, month-long depression—like he could feel his brother’s grubby hands on his cerebrum, opening the casket of his next clone, and saying, “Wakey, wakey.”

They watched the way Milluki  put his lips to the straw of a soda cup and  eyed them like they were a slab of juicy steak on the dinner table. Killua swallowed hard and turned to Alluka, who visibly shivered. “Do what you can to get my body out of here, all right?”

Alluka gave a hesitant nod, her eyes stuck on Milluki. “Okay.”

The dashboard in front of Milluki powered up. He turned back to it, but Killua could still feel his brother’s lecherous eyes like they were trained solely on Killua. “General calibration, yada-yada-yada, and then we’ll sync you up,” Milluki said. He slid his beady eyes over to Killua, who felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. “You know the gist.”

“Yeah, no need to tell me twice,” Killua said with a huff. He felt out of breath already.

Killua shed his jacket. He passed it to Alluka with a firm, sharp look directed to her wary eyes. She pushed her glasses up and gave him a nod before he turned and headed for the secluded room down the corridor from Milluki’s station.

He passed underneath florescent lights, feeling his skin prickle at the realization that he was doing this. He was doing this again, and he didn’t like the sound of it in the least. He hated that Illumi appealed to his humanity—he supposed that was another difference between Killua and the rest of the Zoldycks (Alluka not included).

At least I have a shred of humanity to appeal to, he thought as the door slid shut behind him.

In that pale, white room, Killua dropped into the chair at the middle of it all. He took a deep, calming breath, but wound up more stressed than before the breathing exercises. He knew by now his vitals were on Milluki’s screen. He wondered if Milluki could tell he was anxious.

I need to calm down, he thought, closing his eyes.

“Don’t undock me if he swaps with me,” Killua said.

“That was never the plan, dipshit,” Milluki’s voice sounded on the speakers.

“Then enlighten me, asshat,” Killua said.

“Be nice,” Alluka said.

“I’ll be what I want, bitch,” Milluki said, and it was promptly followed by an audible smack to the top of Milluki’s head. He cussed and muttered an apology. “I’m interested in interrogating the kid when you two swap. I’ll record the session for you for when you get back. Maybe you could learn a thing or two—God knows you need it.”

Killua scoffed, shifting in his seat. “Yeah, right, tell that to me when you can complete a kill without incapacitating the vert owner.”

“I’m not in this for subtly,” Milluki said, harsh and defensive.

“Can we just get on with it, please? The anticipation’s driving me up the wall,” Alluka said.

“We can start when you aren’t breathing down my fucking neck.”

“Why, do I make you nervous? Because my IQ is superior to yours? Or is it—”

“Shut the fuck up, will you?”

Killua faked a yawn, leaning back in the seat. He crossed his arms and said, “Wake me up when you two are done bickering like a bunch of old hags.”

Some static cut through the speakers. Milluki was cussing, that much was obvious, and after a moment, he huffed clear into the mic like he had his headset stuck in his mouth. Killua rose an eyebrow and waited for the cue.

“Just—don’t fucking move,” Milluki huffed.

Killua took the hint. He put his head back against the rest so the back of his neck was in line with the seat post. He heard the whirr of the scanner passing over his dock armor. He closed his eyes to the sound of a thin needle pressing between the plated metal and into his vertebrae.

For a split second, he worried that Milluki was preparing to download everything and start him over. He worried that he’d wake up after completing the mission and find that Milluki had copied his consciousness back onto the Zoldyck server. That he’d find his old clone bed with all of its empty coffins now filled with fresh, identical Killuas.

If that happens, my first task is to gut Milluki, he thought to himself.

Syncing was just as Killua remembered it. It was like slipping into a dream only to be jarred awake by the sensation of falling. It had been so long, though, that the feeling made him jolt like he was asleep in the safety of his bed.

Meanwhile, in the room where his body resided, his eyes blinked awake to an entirely new room—a room he had been in before, but one with lights and with a visible crevice where the door was.

Alluka watched through Milluki’s screen as Killua stood from the chair.

“He’s moving,” she whispered, clasping a hand over her mouth. “This is unreal. Have you ever met anyone who swapped completely like this?”

“Once,” Milluki said, eyes wide and reflecting the image on screen. Killua’s body had moved to the door. It laid a hand on the crevice, eyes trailing up the length of it before at last moving to the side. The walls were completely bare, and Alluka could see through the warped, fisheye view the wonder in Killua’s eyes. “But I’ve never seen anyone pass through our system so easily.”

Alluka hummed, still studying the computers. “All thanks to me,” she said off-handedly.

Milluki gave her a sour look before turning away again.

Killua’s body had a hand on the panel on the wall—one that required a passcode to access the room controls. The panel itself wasn’t visible unless touched, and Alluka’s heart skipped a beat from how quickly the intruder found it.

“How did he know that was there—” Milluki started, only to stop with a shout when the door to the room started opening. “Fuck—How’d he get through?!”

Milluki scrambled from the desk. In an instant, Killua’s order came to mind and Alluka did the first thing she could think of—she karate-chopped Milluki in the neck.

Milluki flopped onto the desk and rolled off with a curse. The supersized soda spilled over the keyboard screen and splashed onto the monitors as Alluka jumped and shrieked, “Sorry!”

“Why are you apologizing like you didn’t fucking mean to do that?!” Milluki screamed.

Alluka jolted back with a shout. Milluki chucked a book at her. She barely dodged it as she reached for his monitor and yanked it from the stand. Milluki swore at her as she threw it at him and slapped him in the face with it.

Thus was how the intruder in Killua’s body found them after emerging from the corridor.

As Milluki slumped against the wall, panting and sweaty, Alluka dropped the monitor out of horror and the edge of it jammed into Milluki’s knee. “Fuck!” Milluki shouted.

Alluka jumped away, eyes wide and glasses slipping. She pushed them up as she turned to face the intruder, who was staring at her with her brother’s wide eyes. Alluka was certain she had never seen Killua’s eyes so bright and round before—Killua always seemed to be in a state of exhaustion.

“Don’t—Uh, don’t mind him,” Alluka said, kicking Milluki’s foot. Milluki spat a curse at her, nose now swollen and red. “He was going to interrogate you and probably torture you.”

The intruder tipped Killua’s head to the side and said, “Interrogate me about what?”

“I don’t know. Your name, for example.”

“Oh, that’s easy. My name’s Gon,” the intruder said, pointing a finger to Killua’s chest. It was jarring how cheery he made Killua’s voice sound, as if Killua had been nothing but chipper his entire life.

Alluka stared at the kid and thought, Well, that was easy.

Milluki rolled to the side, slapping his hands onto the ground as if to stand. Alluka jumped back into motion, frantic to keep her brother on the ground. She kicked him in the shin with her short-heeled shoes and he crumpled in an instant. She yelped when he tried to grab her ankle.  One leap and she was back to the desk.

“Don’t touch anything—” Milluki said, but Alluka was already wiping down the keyboard and getting to work.

“Gon, come over here, please,” Alluka said. She heard Killua’s boots cross the room before coming to settle beside Alluka. Alluka’s eyes were focused on the screen where Milluki had stored Killua’s recent data. As expected of him, she thought, and set to work deleting it and wiping the cache from the Zoldyck server.

“Fucking—cunt, we needed that!” Milluki bellowed from the ground. Alluka lifted one heeled foot as if to strike, and it was enough to shut him up.

She connected a portable drive to the computer to download the sync data from the riding session. She’d get it all—Gon’s vert data, Killua’s new location, everything—and it was all in the pocket of her skirt in a matter of seconds.

She grasped Gon by Killua’s hand and said, “Okay, I know this is a bit jarring for you, but we need to leave.”

“Why would it be jarring?”

Alluka stared at him before swiftly coming to terms with the fact that she was speaking with a vert rider. To her, jumping from body-to-body would be absolute Hell to acclimate to, but to people like Killua and Gon, they were naturals at it. They had no problem adjusting to height, size, weight, or sight.

“Never mind,” she said with a light smile. She felt out of breath from how hard her heart was pounding in her ribcage. She pulled him along to the cabinet near the exit. “I just hope my brother’s body doesn’t give you any trouble.”

She opened the door and pulled a metal case from it—Zoldyck sync equipment. She and Killua had their own equipment, not that Killua needed it anymore, but it wasn’t the best in the business by any means.

And then, they were gone.

Alluka navigated the facility with the ease of someone who had studied the blueprints a thousand times over. They hurried down the flight of stairs at the far left wing of the building and took the ramp down to the loading docks—far from the entrance and likely one of the few places Milluki would think to look. Though, if she knew anything about him, he was dedicated.

He’s probably sitting at his computer watching us right now, she thought, setting the case down and searching the dock for cameras. When she found one, she smiled discretely to it before slamming her fist on the wall panel to open the garage door.

She picked up the case and tugged Gon along, saying, “Follow me. We’re gonna have to jumpstart one of these cars.”

“Jumpstart?” Gon repeated. “I don’t think—”

“This one,” she said, leaping from the dock platform. Gon followed after her, lingering at her back as she ducked down to the sensor on the door handle. She rifled through her pocket for something—anything—to help break the lock without demolishing the car.

She saw Killua crouch down beside her—no, Gon. Gon, using Killua’s eyes to study the sensor before sticking his thumb on it. Alluka squeaked, panic setting her veins on fire and her eyes wide as the moon. The alarm would go off for sure—she’d have less than a minute to break in and shut it off—

The car chimed and the lock clicked.

Gon dropped his hand and turned to Alluka. She stared back, mouth ajar. It took her a second to recover. “Well, that just does it then,” she said, rising. “I’ll drive.”

“Are you old enough to drive?” he asked.

“No, but that’s never stopped me,” she said, setting the case in the back. As she returned, Gon was rounded the hood of the car and opening the passenger’s side. “Killua taught me to drive, actually. My brother—the… body your vert is in right now.”

Gon hummed as he dropped into the passenger’s seat and shut the door. Alluka started up the car as Gon pulled down the mirror flap and let out an appreciative, “Oh, wow, you’re both cute.”

Alluka bit back a giggle as she peeled out of the parking spot and took off. Gon pulled at the skin under Killua’s eyes and said, “Second try and I’ve hit the jackpot.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is the second time I’ve swapped bodies,” he said.

That would mean… Alluka thought, thinking of what Illumi went through. Illumi, out of commission with a worsening case of a vert virus, was incapacitated by a complete newbie.

It also meant that, despite the dark room, Gon had recognized that he was in a new body and that someone was occupying his.

Classic case of misinformation, huh? she thought bitterly with a note of anxiety. It meant that Killua was likely dealing with the aftermath of Illumi’s reckless swap.

“I should probably be getting back. My dad is probably worried,” Gon said. “Do you need help with anything?”

“Uh, yes, actually,” Alluka said. “Tell me… what Killua is likely dealing with right now.”

“He’s—I take it he’s in my body now, right?” Gon asked, which caused Alluka to hesitate. Did he think he was accidentally vert riding this entire time? she thought. As far as she knew, that was impossible, but the implication amused her nonetheless. When she assented, Gon put a finger to his chin and hummed for a moment. “Well, I was with my dad. Since the first swap he’s been watching me closely.”

Any other target would have offed the vert owner without a second thought. Why would an anti-vert advocate risk keeping Gon around? Unless Illumi never got close to the target, that is, then the target would have no reason to know about the temporary assassin visit.

She cleared her throat and asked, “Your father—who is he, exactly?”

“Chrollo Lucilfer,” he said.

Chapter Text

Killua eyes shot up with a sharp gasp. He quieted it as soon as he could, but it was too late. There were eyes on him, staring intently, until Killua realized that they were waiting for something. As discretely as he could, he took in the room, but it wasn’t a room, was it?

They were in West Coast desert and Killua could feel the heat of it tightening his skin. He felt the sun tingling on his tanned, exposed forearms. There was something off, though, about the way it felt. Like a film over his real skin, and when he raised his hand up, he felt tension in his joints like he was squeezing a hand gripper.

The action felt so alarming that all he could do was stand still and stare up at the familiar face of his target staring back at him, sitting behind the rusted railing of a concrete ramp, his feet hooked over the edge.

He felt his throat like a snake clogging his esophagus the instant he followed his gasp up with another breath of arid oxygen. He choked on it, realizing quickly that something was wrong—something that Illumi didn’t explain more than the obvious: That to everyone near the vert owner, he had simply fainted.

Now I know why, Killua thought, knees buckling. He reached with clawed fingers to his throat as he fell. Even blinking reminded him of the dusting of sand under his knees.

He wasn’t equipped to acclimate to a goddamn machine.

“That’s not Gon,” someone said behind him.

“What—” Killua started, and he felt his voice at the base of his throat, vibrating against the piping in his throat. “What the fuck—” he rasped, head slumping to the gritty concrete.

Alluka, he thought, eyes wide with panic. The rigidity of android anatomy made human functions obsolete, and after seventeen years of blinking, breathing, swallowing, to stop all of that was enough to paralyze Killua. To stop all of that meant a long, uncomfortable adaption period Killua couldn’t afford, not when all of the foreign eyes on him knew what he was.

“Who are you,” the target said.

Killua pushed himself up onto his elbows, fists shaking against the concrete. He met the man’s eyes, quaking with the effort to wrap his mind around the gel membrane sloshing in his skull, or the diminutive buzz of the pivot mechanism behind his eye sockets.

It wasn’t until he met the man’s eyes that Killua realized what he was dealing with. He wasn’t dealing with a target anymore—he was looking through the lens of a computer that could assess every pore, every colored thread of the rebel leader’s irises, every hair on that man’s goddamn head.

The shocking clarity of it was like someone had just turned the sharpness on Killua’s vision on high. If he had an ounce of human in him, he would have fainted without question.

I wonder what the Hell Illumi did at this point, he wondered.

“Hold him down,” the leader ordered, pulling himself up with a hand on the railing.

Killua wanted to say, I couldn’t stand even if I wanted to, but refrained from doing so as the pressure sensitivity on his arms registered a push, and an elbow at his back shoved his cheek into the dirt. He gathered the textures in the rapid processing unit listing off the size of each grain, the structure of each chemical in the sand on his cheek, and the dirt that got in his eye as a pair of boots appeared in front of him, scuffing across the gravel.

The target bent down on one knee and tipped his head to the side. The grey threads in his iris shifted, pupils dilating a mere fraction as Killua felt his eyes like gel marbles inside his skull.

“I take it you know who I am,” the man said.

Killua ground his teeth together, not that it mattered. He could feel the soundbox in his throat vibrating—it didn’t function like vocal cords and therefore spent its time processing every thought and spitting out his target’s name without a second to waste.

“Chrollo Lucilfer,” he said, and his jaw moved on command. He closed his eyes. Shit, this body doesn’t have a filter, he thought, and with it came the startling reality that Killua wasn’t an android. He couldn’t think in binary and therefore couldn’t cut off his thoughts from the voice box without giving himself a self-inflicted concussion.

“Who hired you.”

“I don’t know,” he answered dutifully, hating every second of it. “They hired my brother.”

“The other one,” the female voice said just behind his ear. The sound of it was so crisp that Killua shivered. “What did he tell you.”

“Barely anything considering he forgot to mention that your vert is an android,” Killua said with a grimace, grunting when the woman pushed into his shoulder blades with more intention.

“That vert,” Chrollo said in a calm, low voice, “is my son. I’d prefer not to wreck his body, but I’m willing to do so if you give me no choice.”

“What do you want from me,” Killua hissed through clenched teeth, the words resonating in his chest.

Chrollo reached for Killua’s face. He grabbed at Killua’s chin, twisting it off of the ground. He felt the spine on the android quiver from the strain, and he wondered if it was possible to feel pain. This train of thought sent him spiraling into a pit of questions he was willing to test. He trained for torture—he was certain he could take whatever Chrollo had in store for an android body.

“Bring him back or tell me where he is. The choice is yours.”

Killua tensed the arm the woman pinned into his lower back. He felt her elbow like the sharp edge of a knife against his back, but it just proved one thing: This android had a thick skin and enhanced senses. It would have hurt a human, there was no doubt about that, but with the way the epidermal sensors gathered every fiber of the sand embedded in his cheek, there was no way he could avoid painful pressure.

Killua ripped his arm from the woman’s grip. With it came another powerful discovery—the force he used wasn’t automated. Instead, it was a manual input that he could control. It was incremented for the sake of everything—how slowly the android could pick something up to how fast he could run.

He could see the limit highlighted in a red target on Chrollo’s face. It would take less than a quarter of this android’s strength to crush Chrollo’s skull—his task would be complete.

Killua tipped his shoulder up and in the matter of half a second, flung his foot up for a swift kick to Chrollo’s head. Chrollo ducked as Killua dropped back on his hands, feet skidding across the dusty concrete. A cloud of sand kicked up after him as he poised himself, ready to strike.

Chrollo put a hand up. Killua tracked the motion back to the woman he could only see now, tensed and ready to counter Killua’s next move. Killua looked back at Chrollo, whose eyes had yet to stray.

“Let him try to fight with Gon’s body,” Chrollo said.

“What makes you so sure I’m a man?” Killua countered. He may have had the masculine voice of this teenage android—Gon seemed to be their name—but vert riding wasn’t restricted by gender any more than other facets of life.

Killua calculated his next move. He never gave value to his movements before, and it would take time before Killua could accurately fight with the same speed as he had in human bodies. For now, he had to put the training wheels on this android body.

I can’t imagine what the android who owns this body could do, he wondered as he gradually rose from a couch, eyes drifting between his target and the red-haired woman with him. She had northeast Indian features with bleached hair died red, tied back into a ponytail that was pulled through the back of an old-fashioned baseball cap. The shadows over eyes couldn’t hide the way she tuned into Killua’s every move. She’d be difficult to manage.

Chrollo, on the other hand, seemed content waiting for Killua to strike. Only then would he consider being defensive.

Or perhaps defense isn’t his intention, he thought.

A second later, Chrollo took a step towards him. Instincts chased Killua back, pivoting onto his back foot, arms raised.

A light grin tugged at Chrollo’s otherwise stoic expression. Fuck, Killua thought, steeling his position. If I can’t filter my words, I could at least try to get my act together.

When Chrollo moved next, it was to grab the hand Killua retaliated with. Killua flung his arm back, dragging Chrollo forward for a knee to the gut. Chrollo dug his shoulder into Killua’s abdomen, one arm grabbing him around the thigh, and hoisted his entire body off of the ground in one smooth motion.

Killua was airborne within seconds. His back slammed into the edge of the concrete ramp, his head banging off of the metal bar. He cursed at the shock that went through his system. It would take more than that to break through this android’s skull, though, and Chrollo must have known that.

Chrollo grabbed him by the throat. Habit had Killua gasping for breath, but without lungs to fill it with, he wound up gagging on it as Chrollo lifted him and flung him into the cracked pavement, slamming his head into the dust. Killua thrashed in his grip until the exact moment Chrollo let go and said:

“Tase him.”

Killua’s eyes widened. He moved to escape, his mind screaming with the fact that an android’s skeleton was nothing but metal. He didn’t make it past the first step before something hard slapped into his back and red blared at the corner of his vision, its position absolute on his screen so he could read that something had broke the surface of his epidermal layer.

He twisted, grabbing at the chord that connected him to the woman’s taser gun. Before he could pull, a piercing sensation erupted from his back and shot across his entire body. He’d been electrocuted before, but it was nothing like this.

His body’s motor functions shut down and he dropped like a doll.

“Your hair is very beautiful,” Gon said, and Alluka blushed out of the embarrassment of hearing him say that in her brother’s voice.

“Don’t say things like that,” she muttered, lips pursed as she scanned her keycard over the apartment doorframe. The light blinked red.

As she tried the card again, Gon said, “I can’t help it. I’ve never had a filter before.”

“Is this just a personal observation or a fact?”

“Literal observation,” he said. He gestured to the card. “Is there something wrong with the door?”

“It won’t open,” she said, lifting the card up. She blew on it like one would a vintage game cartridge before tapping it on the frame again. This time, the alarm system started blaring. “Shit. I don’t know why—”

Milluki, she thought, brow furrowing.

Gon yelped at the sound and, in a panic, slapped his hand on the doorframe. The alarm immediately stopped and, a second later, chimed green. He retracted his hand as the lock came undone and Alluka stared at him. First the car door, and now her and Killua’s apartment door.

“What do they feed you on the West Coast?” she said, not expecting an answer.

“Contaminated water and battery acid,” he said.

Alluka stuttered over the threshold and turned to stare back at him. He stared back, wide eyes glazing over before he blinked and said, “Ow. Could you remind me to blink, or do I have to do that myself? I’ve really just been blinking whenever you blink.”

“I never thought the water was safe over there anyway, but I imagine they use a filtering system,” she said. “Unless—have West Coast inhabitants aren’t actually affected by radiation poisoning?”

Gon laughed in a sort of giddy way that made Killua look like a schoolgirl. Gon batted a hand at her and said, “Stop that! No, there’s no radiation poisoning. I run on a hydraulic energy, but I also filter water if need be. I basically drink contaminated water and piss freshwater H2O.”

“If this is a joke, I have to say, you have terrible taste. Either that or terrible execution,” Alluka said with a raised eyebrow. She shook her head and turned back to her computer table where she packed up her portable equipment into the Zoldyck tech case.

“I suppose it could be a joke,” Gon said, tapping a finger to his chin. He stood alongside Alluka’s computer as she packed up the case and snapped it shut.

Gon was fascinated by the girl. There weren’t many kids around his age on the West Coast, and if there were, they were in training, working, or growing into adults. Gon was stuck in the same body with the ever-evolving mind of a teenage AI programmed to have his intelligence snowball little by little. To any other computer, Gon’s mind was infantile in comparison. The training wheels had yet to come off, and Gon wasn’t sure they ever would. There were blocks in his mental capacity that he just couldn’t break.

He scratched at the white hair he had seen in the car mirror. These eyes were fuzzier than his usual ones, and he wanted a better look. After a second, his hand hesitated on his head and he wondered if he was using too much pressure. How was he supposed to know if he was using too much pressure when he had no mode to visualize the amount of newtons to one touch?

With a vague sense of horror, he lifted his hand off of his head and stared at the textured skin of his palm. It was pale—so pale, Gon wondered if his host was ill. No one on the West Coast was this color. The sun was too intense in the desert, and any pale skin was either charred to a golden crisp or covered completely from view.

“Do you have a name?” he asked, turning to face the glasses on the girl’s face where they were slipping from the bridge of her nose.

She pushed them up, eyes wide. Pink colored her cheeks as she stammered, “Oh, right—I guess I never—My name’s Alluka. Alluka Zoldyck.”

“Zoldyck,” Gon repeated.

Alluka nodded and hurried off to the adjacent room. She left the case behind, and something told Gon to protect it. He took it by the handle and carried it with him across the apartment. He stepped gingerly across the tattered rug on the ground and through a narrow corridor. It was reminiscent of old, broom closet apartments in New York City. When Yorknew was founded in its place, a lot of the buildings were either flattened or buried under the many levels of the city skyline.

Because of this, even in the daytime, it seemed the Zoldyck apartment had no natural light of its own. The corridor was illuminated by a constant stream of passing lights from the street outside beyond the slim balcony. Gon stared out at the neon lights across the street before moving on to the restroom.

The light blinked on as he passed the threshold. He wished he could hear as well as before, but humans had limitations he couldn’t even fathom until now. Their vision was softer and hazier than he expected. Everything felt delicate under his fingers—from the psuedo-granite countertop under his fingertips to the glossy surface of the mirror. He ran his thumb over his view of his host’s eyes—Killua. Killua Zoldyck.

The numbers were still churning into his system. He blamed the handicap on his mental capacity for the slow processing, but by the time his thumb finished swiping across the mirror, he had everything he’d ever want to know about the Zoldyck family.

When Alluka left the bedroom with a duffle for each of them, Gon was waiting at the desk once more, equipment case in hand.

“Why do you trust me?” he asked.

Alluka met his gaze. Once again, he reminisced about a time when he could judge a person’s micro expressions without the hassle of these foggy, human eyes. He felt so far away from everything, even as he gripped onto the handle of the case as if its weight was fleeting.

Alluka turned away, but not without sparing another hesitant glance in his direction. “I guess I don’t have a choice. My brother means a lot to me, so I’m depending a lot on hope right now.”

“I thought you had clones,” Gon said, recalling an image taken by an online media journal on the Zoldycks just last year. It had been wiped from the web within two minutes and forty-eight seconds of being posted.

Alluka rose an eyebrow at him as she turned to the door. “We did. When Killua and I left the estate, we incinerated our copies. These are the only bodies we have left now.”

Gon was mildly disappointed to find out that his host’s clones were turned to ash.

“So how old are you, really? If you have so many clones, do you ever age?”

“I’m fifteen and Killua’s almost eighteen. His birthday is in two weeks,” she said.

Birthday. The word triggered something in his chest that he had never felt before. He always loved the premise of birthdays. His father and the other trope members indulged the childish wishes that started as inklings when he was just beginning to understand holidays. He was programed, at first, to think of them as “nice.” Simply “nice.” Nothing absurd, only pleasant. His ability to comprehend want, however, only compounded this initial partiality. Want turned “nice” into “enjoyable,” which quickly turned into what Paku called “love.” He wanted what he enjoyed, and therefore, loved the experience of enjoyable things.

Birthdays were one of the firsts. After that, his father gave him everything he needed to understand how other people showed love. It was an odd premise, one that Gon was still wrapping his head around. Not only could he experience it, but he could show it, and the first time he understood external love was the exact moment Chrollo took Gon’s head in his hands and said, “I will make sure that you will always know love when you’re with us.”

Gon didn’t want Killua to miss his birthday.

“Then I’ll help you get Killua back in time for it,” he promised.

Alluka tucked a strand of hair behind her ear as she nudged the door open for him and said, “Um, thanks, I guess. Do you mind me asking how old you are?”

“Not at all. I’m seventeen. Eighteen if you account for the bug fixes within the first few months of inception,” he answered.

Alluka rolled her eyes. “When my brother said ‘kid’ I was picturing an eight-year-old.”

“Killua?”

“No, my psychotic older brother Illumi.”

“The one you chopped in the neck?” Gon said, gesturing vaguely in the motion of a cross-body karate-chop.

Alluka laughed. “No, that’s my other psychotic brother, Milluki.”

“That’s a significant psychosis ratio. What about Killua?”

“Killua’s normal. I think,” she said, sounding uncertain. “Actually, I’m not sure. He hasn’t gone to a therapist in several years…”

“Is that good or bad?”

“You know, I don’t know,” she decided, looking up at Gon. Gon stared at her until she blinked and, likewise, Gon blinked. Alluka narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re copying me again, aren’t you?”

“Yes. Syncing my breathing to yours takes more effort, though,” he confessed, and had he not said it, Alluka never would have looked close enough to realize that Gon’s chest was rising and falling in tune with her own.

This no longer felt like an elaborate joke to Alluka.

The instant they were at the stolen vehicle again, she dropped into the backseat with the duffles and reached for the case in Gon’s hands. Gon passed it over and stood at the other side of the open door, arms folded over the top of it as he watched Alluka plug in the drive she tucked into her skirt pocket.

She loaded the files onto her tablet and sifted through them with ease. Gon took to studying her face because without his facial recognition embedded in his eyeballs, he felt vaguely uneasy about the way she looked—as if she was a ghost. Not solid or real.

Alluka bent over the tablet with a curse. She put her hand to her bangs and looked back at Gon, eyes wide. He blinked—something he was programmed to do only when surprised and it seemed socially acceptable.

“You’re…” she started, slowly closing her laptop. She swallowed hard and said, “You’re an android. How is it possible for you to…”

“Use a human vert? Swap verts? All of the above?” Gon said. Alluka nodded wordlessly, mouth gone dry. Gon shrugged. “I don’t know. I never had a full conversation with my creator.”

Creator.

Gon had mentioned his father before, but the word choice felt different this time. Alluka considered it before asking, “Who is your creator?” but the answer was already right in front of her, embedded in the metadata on her computer. It was embedded in everything, really, and it made her sick to her stomach thinking about all of the debates on the topic of the world’s largest self-destruct button.

“Ging Freecss,” Gon said.

Holy shit, she thought.

“Y-You were made by Ging?” she croaked, all of the blood in her face plummeting to her gut. She gasped out a horrified, “Fuck. Okay, that changes the game, then. I wish you would have started with that.”

She shoved her computer aside and emerged from the car. Gon straightened, lifting off of the door so Alluka could slam it shut.

Alluka paced the pavement, a hand to her woozy forehead. Ging Freecss, otherwise known as the man responsible for vertebrae tech. It was all because of him, nearly a century ago, that the world looked towards a digital mindscape. It was because of him that over half of the world functioned on vert tech. More than once he had been interviewed about the chance of a world-wide shutdown of vert tech—the main hinderance towards its ultimate takeover—to which he replied: “It would be easier to self-destruct with nuclear weapons than what you’re thinking right now.”

Once again the question of Chrollo’s logic came to mind. Why else would he have Ging’s own tech right by his side? she thought, clutching a hand over her heart. She could feel it pounding in her ribcage, desperate to escape the situation Illumi put them in. It explained Milluki’s insistence to interrogate Gon, to keep Gon contained.

Since the dawn of vert tech, the world transitioned into vert-compatibility. It was like a universal outlet that collaborated with every vert—if their system security was up to code and cleared, that is. It was what denied and accepted entry into certain buildings. It was what car doors read. It was embedded in the very foundation of their apartment structure.

Gon was connected to it all.

I have the key to the worldwide shutdown within spitting distance, Alluka said, fists clenching.

A rattling echo carried across the parking structure. Alluka glanced in the direction of the parking garage ramp and saw headlights glowing on the wall and against the concrete columns. With it, there came the flashing red and blue lights of a police vehicle.

Fucking Illumi and his cop friends, she thought, and again wondered if Illumi had come to this conclusion about Gon sooner than she had.

She turned abruptly to Gon, who stood there in her brother’s body.

“Do you know what you’re capable of?” she asked, chest aching and throat condensing.

Gon shook his head. Alluka let out a shaky breath and said, “Okay, we’re gonna try something and hope that it works. Get in the car.”

Together, they dropped into the front seats of the stolen vehicle. Alluka threw the car into reverse and, with one hand on the back of Gon’s seat, looked over her shoulder to peel out of the parking spot. She slammed on the break and shifted into drive in one smooth motion. They jolted in their seats and stabilized, careening around the corner of the garage as the police siren blared once in warning, popping in their ears like the flashing lights in their eyes.

“I need you to take control of their vehicles,” Alluka said.

“I’ve never driven a car before,” Gon said, and the fact that he didn’t question the “take control” part proved Alluka’s theory.

“We just need to clear a path to get out,” she said.

Gon knew what he had to do—he’d need to filter the license plate through the database of squad car ownership. But fuck it if it wasn’t annoying to have the numbers scrambled in front of him. His android system had the painful habit of turning numbers into smudged lines. It would take more than his seventeen years of existence to decode that ever-changing randomization.

But when he looked at the license plate with Killua’s eyes, the numbers were still, solid, and unchanging. He was so floored by it that, when Alluka came to a sharp stop in front of the squad car, Gon jolted forward unexpectedly and slammed his hand into the dash.

“Shit! Sorry,” she squeaked.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Give me a second.”

He filed the license plate away and cross-referenced it with the YNPD database. He had access to the car’s GPS in a matter of a second, but by then, the police officer was slamming the door to the driver’s side and marching up to them. The passenger door opened, and Alluka and Gon startled at the sight of a gun being pointed at them from over the car door.

Alluka squeaked as the officer walking towards them gestured for them to get out. The man had a hand on his holster.

“Gon—” Alluka started.

“Putting the car in reverse,” Gon said.

It started at a gentle roll. The officer behind the passenger door jumped back, only to be knocked into by the open door when Gon went full throttle. The officer screamed as he tripped over his feet and slammed into the concrete. Alluka’s hand flew to her mouth as driver looked back to the sight of his squad car’s wheels spiraling into full hover mode. There was a reason hover was intended for outdoors only, and in the confined space of the parking garage, the wind buffeted so intensely the standing officer staggered and Alluka’s stollen car rocked on its wheels.

And then, Gon slammed the car against the parking garage ceiling once, twice, and crushed every windowpane in the process.

The eruption of scraping metal and broken glass had Alluka slapping her hands over her ears with a shout. She ducked behind the wheel and didn’t look up until an audible crash! signaled the end of the squad car’s meager life.

Holy cripes, she thought, momentarily paralyzed by the very real reality she was in. She was sitting next to the single most powerful individual in the planet with her brother acting as a host.

Alluka looked at Gon, who looked equally horrified for an entirely different reason.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” he said.

“Never mind that,” she said, breathless as she put the car in reverse once more for a few feet—just enough breathing room to swerve between the officers.

The one on the ground was just getting up, the breath knocked out of him, and he shouted at them. A blast of gunpowder sent Alluka screaming as the bullet nicked her side mirror. She tore up the ramp and all but vaulted into the street. The car bounced onto the pavement, tires squealing as they turned and took off down the street.

“Now what?” Gon asked. He was gripping the center console and the edge of the window like his life depended on it. He glanced at Alluka with those wide, blue eyes, white hair tousled into an absolute mess.

Alluka couldn’t help but laugh. Riding in a car with Ging’s AI was as terrifying as it was exhilarating. She would have a blast and a half just rooting through the data she skimmed off of Milluki’s computer.

“Now,” she said, eyes returning to the road, “I need you to flip these red lights to green.”

Chapter Text

Killua’s body jerked awake. The red had faded from the edges of his vision and left him reeling from a killer migraine. It felt more like his brain was frying than the classic pressure from his usual headaches back in his old body. The system must have fried somewhere between the first tase and the second because Killua was only just now coming to.

To black out in an android body meant startling awake from the frozen image of Chrollo leaning over his paralyzed body on the ground. Now, he was sitting upright in a chair, his wrists braced to the armrests and his legs shackled to the wooden spokes. As his system calibrated to his limbs, he felt his joints twisting and clicking and, out of the corner of his eye, a light blinked on either one of his elbows and trickled across tanned forearms and limp hands. It forked off down each of his fingers until each of his joints registered his urge to seize up and grit his teeth.

He grimaced at the plethora of warnings that signaled at the corner of his eye. He looked down to them as they filtered in, fading out as the list grew and grew—from minor dirt patches on his epidermis to the puncture in his back from the first tase to the second puncture just below his rib.

Killua turned his narrowed eyes up to woman sat, perched on an upturned stack of milk crates. The camera scanned her face and tagged her, but the words were jumbled on his screen. It looked like hieroglyphics.

The woman crossed her legs and dropped her elbow onto her knee, taser poised. Killua sucked in a breath without thinking, as if preparing for the punch of the taser gun into his robotic skeleton. No amount of training could prep him to endure a body so prone to electrical attacks. He could manage the classic shock treatment as a human, but an AI was different. He couldn’t fight this body’s response to one jolt of a taser gun.

“He’s awake,” she said.

“I can tell from that bloodthirsty look on his face,” a gruff voice scoffed from the side. Killua eyed the owner of the voice—a burly man leant back against the half-collapsed archway. Beyond the gap in the dilapidated concrete wall, Killua could see the blue sky through blown-out glass windows. It warped around grimy, deserted skyscrapers and reminded Killua that he was far from the Republic. So far, in fact, that the air didn’t fee like air. It was dense in his mouth like cotton.

When he met the man’s eyes, the man grinned and offered a cheeky wave. “Morning, sleepy-head,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Killua spat without thinking. Damn this AI’s processing unit.

The man barked out a laugh and pointed at him, looking at the woman. “Could you imagine Gon saying that? It sounds cute coming out of Gon’s mouth.”

“That isn’t Gon anymore, Uvo,” the woman hissed, glowering in Killua’s direction.

Light footsteps circled Killua’s attention behind him. With his eyes stuck on the woman, he gathered the proximity and stature of Chrollo standing behind him. He felt the man near him simply from the shift in the air and the breath leaving his lips as he said:

“He’ll be Gon again,” Chrollo said. A hand touched his shoulder, weighing him down. Killua sneered as Chrollo Lucilfer leant in beside him, studying the side of Killua’s face and at last settling at his fiery eyes. “As soon as he answers a few questions.”

“Piss off,” Killua spat.

“I take it you can’t control Gon’s filter,” Chrollo commented, hand poised on the back of Killua’s chair.

“Sure is entertaining, though,” the man named Uvo laughed.

Killua tensed enough to rattle the cuffs on his wrists. Chrollo stepped forward with a small tsk—a gentle warning. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Chrollo said. He snapped his fingers at the woman and said, “Machi.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, and the barrel of the taser gun sparked.

Killua shut his eyes. When the force of the needle in his chest didn’t follow, he opened his eyes and found Chrollo standing before him, arms crossed. He left a gap—just enough space for the woman, Machi, to strike Killua from afar.

“You wouldn’t wreck your son’s body,” Killua argued, but it was futile. This was the terroristic leader of a rebellion.

“It’s true his mind would be difficult to replace, but the rest is simply a matter of scavenging after all of this is over,” Chrollo said.

“What about the hardware,” Killua said, breathless.

“Wetware,” Chrollo corrected.

Wetware was beyond anything Alluka worked with and therefore, anything Killua had a hope of understanding. Hardware he could wrap his mind around, but to wrap biology into it pushed him to his limits. It meant that this android—Gon, as it were—was, on some level, a biological life form. If his gel-membrane wetware was capable of overheating like it had on the second tase…

Killua looked back to the error messages at the corner of his vision. His mind was on the puncture wounds, and the list sifted back to it at once.

The epidermis is alive, he realized. If he had a heart to race, it’d already be a mile ahead of him. The taser burnt the surrounding tissue to a crisp. Something was preventing Gon’s processing unit from feeling more than a raw ache. Something like that should have brought an average man to their knees.

“Who made this android,” Killua asked, dragging his eyes back up to Chrollo.

“He was a gift,” Chrollo said.

“Answer the fucking question,” Killua hissed.

“Yikes,” Uvo laughed, pushing off of the wall. He pocketed his hands in his cutoff shorts and said, “Who would have thought my boy Gon was capable of such venom. I woulda taught him how to swear sooner.”

“You can teach him when this leech is gone,” Machi said, sparking the barrel again. The zap had Killua clenching his fists over the armrests.

Chrollo leveled Killua with flat, grey eyes and said, “I’m not here to tell you the specifics of my custody of Gon. Tell me your name and where you were before you dropped in.”

“Killua Zoldyck. Zoldyck headquarters in Yorknew City,” he said, hating himself more and more for even thinking it. If he ever hoped to bypass Gon’s filtering system, he’d need to simply avoid thinking of the answers.

But to do that, he needed to think of something else.

“Zoldyck,” Chrollo repeated.

“Vert riding assassins,” Machi said. “Who hired you.”

“I don’t know,” Killua said. “I didn’t read the terms and conditions for this express purpose.”

“Yorknew City,” Chrollo repeated, again. A dense silence followed before Chrollo looked past Killua to someone else in the room, someone who had yet to move. Killua couldn’t even feel them breathing, let alone hear them. “Give me the tablet.”

Killua blinked, startled by the fact that there was a tablet on the West Coast. He had thought the West Coast was void of electronics ever since warfare turned the western half of the continent to a dusty wasteland. Not only that, but the rebellion’s morals didn’t seem to coincide with tablets, let alone androids.

Killua saw a hooded man out of the corner of his eye. The camera scanned that man’s face as it had Machi and Uvo, but Killua couldn’t read the language. Does this android run on a different language base? Perhaps the creator coded in something other than binary to ward against shit like this. Was that even possible?

Chrollo turned the blank tablet screen onto Killua and said, “Unlock this.”

He lowered it to where Killua’s wrists were restrained by the cuffs. Killua stared at the screen, at the scanner at the bottom right corner. He turned his hand a fraction, lifting his thumb over the scanner.

The screen stayed blank and, after a moment, the scanner turned red.

Chrollo pulled it away. He passed it to Uvo, who had leant over to watch. “It’s not working,” Chrollo said.

“Fuck,” Uvo said.

“What’s on that tablet,” Killua demanded.

“It doesn’t matter what’s on the tablet,” Chrollo said as he turned back, hand gripping at Killua’s throat. His thumb pushed into the soft flesh under Gon’s jaw as he pushed his chin up. Killua stared down his nose at Chrollo as the man said, voice eerily calm. “You’ll do as I say. Understood?”

Killua blinked. Chrollo gave him a firm shake and, in the distance, he heard the spark of the taser gun. “Understood. Sir,” he bit out, teeth clenched into a sneer.

“Switch back with Gon.”

An hour out of Yorknew and Gon and Alluka were stuck in Yorknew’s never-ending suburbs. The suburban landscape consisted of narrow aisles of apartment complexes interspersed between fueling stations and grocery stores. Outside of one such station, they were forced to fuel up. As the car charged in the dock, Alluka narrowed her eyes at the obvious scanners at the station’s automatic doors. One pass through there and Milluki would be on their trail.

“What’s the problem?” Gon asked from where he leant against the trunk of the vehicle.

Alluka pointed to the station doors and said, “We can’t go in there without having the scanners pick up the serial numbers on our docks.”

“Why is that a problem?” he asked, arms crossed.

Alluka sighed. She went to join Gon against the car and said, “Because Milluki has access to our serial numbers—mine and Killua’s. He’s got us tagged, so if any public scanner picks them up, he can track us. It’s like using a chip, where you’re able to track your purchases.”

“Oh,” Gon hummed. He tapped a finger to his chin and said, “Well… it’s harder for me to translate cloud data, but I could shut off the scanners?”

“Would that trip an alarm?” she asked.

“I could shut down the entire security system, then,” he offered.

Alluka stared at him. Gon stared back and Alluka realized that Gon was now so in sync with her bodily functions that when she blinked, she couldn’t even tell that Gon had mimicked her exact action. The realization made her smile a little and she looked away with a laugh. “No, we aren’t doing that. Do you mind if I ask why cloud data doesn’t work well with you?”

“The easiest way I can explain it to you would be… a form of dyslexia?” Gon said, raising an eyebrow at her. She nodded. She could understand that. He went on to say, “It’s supposed to fade with time. It helps me age more like a human, because without it, I’d never question anything. My father says it’s because Ging wanted me process life more like humans do instead of relying on digital information. I experience rather than absorb, if that makes sense.”

“It does,” Alluka said. “That’s fascinating. I never thought to give androids an impediment aside from, you know, not to take over the world.”

Gon laughed and said, “No worries about that with me.”

Alluka’s attention snapped to him. He was smiling, his eyes raised up to the neon sign over the station overhang. When his smile faded, his soft grin kept Killua’s cheeks rounded out, blue eyes glittering.

He doesn’t know what Chrollo has planned for him, Alluka realized.

“Gon…” she started.

Gon gasped. He pushed off of the door and said, “Never mind. I finished translating our serial numbers—I’m erasing them from the Zoldyck server now.”

Alluka startled as if Gon had just shot off a firework. Gon shut his eyes, hands out as if to steady himself. Alluka straightened, her hands falling to her sides as she watched her brother’s hair buffet in the wind. She smelled dampness in the air—rain—and the gloom of evening in the Yorknew suburbs.

After a minute of silence, Gon opened his eyes and said, “Okay. It’ll take more time to erase them, but I think… I’ve stopped the alerts, but it won’t stop the scanner from picking up our serial numbers.”

“That’s fine,” Alluka said, shaking her head. “That’s perfect, actually. If Milluki thinks he’ll be notified, then he won’t think to check for some time.”

“If you give me two hours, I could erase our serial numbers completely. Would that be better?” Gon asked, and Alluka hesitated at the tension between her brother’s brows, and the serious frown on his lips.

She smiled at him and said, “You don’t have to do that. We’ll get you back as soon as we make it some place safe.”

“I want to help,” Gon said.

Alluka’s chest ached something awful. Her smile felt tight on her lips as she said, “We can discuss this later. For now, let’s just stock up on food and get moving.”

They rooted through the aisles of the fueling station building. Under the florescent lights, Alluka picked bags of snacks from the shelves with Gon at her side, watching in amazement at the bright array of colors. He reached for a shiny blue bag and ran his fingers along the hard, sealed edge of it. He braced his hands on either side as if to open it, but Alluka stopped him in a panic, hissing, “No—we haven’t paid for it yet.”

Gon frowned as Alluka took it from him and added it to the metal basket at her hip. She walked on, heels clicking on the glossy, tiled floors as they circled around back to the cash register. Alluka dropped the basket onto the counter with a sigh, perching a hand on her hip.

“Is this everything?” the cashier said.

“Yes, this is all,” she said. Gon took to staring at all of the posters pasted on the plexiglass frame around the cash register window. None of it moved—he could read the bold type to the fine print without having to waste a second on it. He tugged at a slim tab on one such poster, tearing it a fraction until Alluka stopped his hand and shook her head.

“That comes to 40.62,” the man said.

Alluka put her wrist over the scanner. The machine blared, quite angrily, might Gon add. Gon rose an eyebrow at the cash register as the man shook his head and said, “Do you have another chip?”

Alluka frowned. She dropped her hand to the edge of the counter and said, “Could you try it again?”

“Nope. Says here it’s locked.”

“Locked?” she cried. Gon jumped at the severity of it. She slapped a hand to her glasses and moaned, “Oh, for Chrissake.”

“What’s the problem?” Gon said. He could feel Killua’s heart pulsing in his chest, and the sensation unnerved him. He never expected to have a beating heart and now that he did, he worried about it and everything to do with the frustration knitting Alluka’s brows together.

“I think Milluki blocked my chip. I got a new one last year when Killua and I cut them off. I guess I didn’t expect him to be able to get access to it.”

“So it just needs to be unblocked?” Gon said.

Alluka gave a hesitant nod. She looked up at Gon, who was now staring longly at the blue chip bag in the basket. He’d have to access digital files to unlock Alluka’s chip—not only that, but he’d have to go through a bank firewall.

“Maybe I have money?” Gon suggested.

“Not with Killua’s chip. He’d block that, too.”

“No, I mean my old body,” he said. Alluka rose an eyebrow at him. “I never bothered to check, so I don’t remember it. But I could go and I’d be right back.”

“You could just—Gon, you need equipment for that—We aren’t—” Alluka started, but Gon was already closing his eyes with a set look of determination on his face.

Within seconds, he detached himself from Killua’s vert and sent it back to its origin. There, it was only a matter of exporting Killua’s data from the hardware of Gon’s vert. The android body rebooted in the blink of an eye, the light and color swarming through his sensors. Away from the damp, cold Yorknew air, Gon became bombarded by the weight of the arid, desert heat on his exposed arms down to the clamminess around his wrists and ankles where they were bound to a chair.

The room was mostly empty, all except for Machi, who sat poised with a familiar taser gun in her hand.

Gon yelped and Machi startled.

“I thought you threw that out!” Gon cried. In one swift motion, he jerked his arms up and shattered the cuffs. The ease of it had him staggering—he had grown used to human strength, but this? This was ten-times that. He tripped over his feet as the chair rattled and clanked. Gon shrieked as he fell, the chair toppling over him.

“G-Gon?” Machi stammered, lunging to her feet. “Gon—how did you—?”

“Heck!” Gon cried, thrashing on the ground. He slammed the chair so violently into the ground that the armrest splintered and one of the legs cracked off. He ripped the other chair leg off to free his shackled ankles. Panting, he got to his knees, eyes zeroing in on his wrist.

“I’ll go get your father,” Machi said.

“No time!” Gon said, putting a hand out to stop her. He rose up to one knee before lifting to both feet, pushing at the skin of his wrist. The epidermis was raw from the shackles, and he could see now that Machi’s taser gun had seen some use on his back and ribs.

He passed a scan beneath his epidermis that cast a feathery glow across his skin, illuminating the circuitry grid. It collected light around his joints and over his skeleton, marking small, minuscule details he never bothered to focus on until then. There, he found a block on his inner wrist—subtle, but exactly where Alluka’s was.

“Aha! Okay, this is perfect,” he said, cataloging the chip number. He reached out to grab Machi by the arm and said, “I’ve gotta go. Be nice to Killua while I’m gone.”

“Wha—”

Gon closed his eyes.

Killua lurched awake in that suburban convenience store with a gasp. He panted as if he’d been underwater for hours and coughed when it went in too smoothly. After forcing himself to acclimate to a no-breathing zone, the light, but smog-riddled air of Yorknew was a blessing. He prepared himself for this over the two seconds it took for his data to be imported, at which point he breathed, “Oh, thank God. I knew you’d figure something out.”

Alluka was staring at him and, likewise, the man behind the cash register was as well. Clutching at his chest, Killua looked around the convenience store with a vague look of puzzlement on his face. “What are we… doing?” he asked, turning back to his sister.

“K-Killua?” she whispered.

When he nodded, she flung herself at him. He staggered under the force, blinking his eyes quickly to clear them of the fog. He didn’t feel like he was tearing up, but then again, his eyes felt dustier in comparison to the android’s ridiculous resolution.

Alluka tucked her cheek against Killua’s shoulder, arms squeezed tight around his neck. “Oh my God—I was so worried. Are you okay? How’s your dock, does it hurt?”

“No—No, I’m fine. Really, I don’t think I was scrambled,” he said, rubbing her back. He closed his eyes against her hair. If anything was scrambled, it wasn’t his doing. Considering where they were and how Killua got there, he could only assume that this was the android’s doing rather than Alluka’s.

He swallowed hard. His mouth ran dry, though, and his tongue felt more like sandpaper in his mouth.

“You were with him, then,” Killua whispered. Alluka nodded. “You know what he is.”

“Ging Freecss made him,” Alluka whispered.

As if Killua’s heart wasn’t pounding hard enough. This knowledge sent him reeling, eyes open wide once more. He pulled away from Alluka, grasping her by the shoulders. She swayed a little, glasses slipping. She reached up between them to push them back up, looking at her feet.

“Well,” Killua sighed. “We won’t have to deal with him again. I’ll tell Illumi where he can shove his bullshit.”

“I don’t think that’s up to us,” she confessed. “It sounds like Gon only switched back to get his chip code. I’m fine babysitting Gon, but Killua—I think Chrollo’s planning on using Gon to shut down vert tech.”

He’d deal with Chrollo’s bullshit later. “What do you mean you’re fine,” he all but seethed at her.

“He’s really sweet and just wants to help. Trust me, Killua, I can handle him. Just—be careful, okay?”

“But—” Killua started, and the rest of the sentence dropped off of the cliff of his consciousness.

The switch this time was fluid, swift, and knocked everything sane out of Killua. The instant he slammed into the android’s body on the other side of the continent, he made his decision: He’d be damned if he left a fucking android stop him from getting back to Yorknew.

Killua jolted forward on stiff, robotic legs. The momentum brought him shoulder-to-shoulder with the red-haired chick, who stared at him with more emotion that she’d conveyed during their entire Day One of interaction. Killua registered that his arms and legs were free, and that the chair sat, demolished, on the concrete floor.

“Gon,” the woman started.

Gon, Killua thought, mind reeling. He relaxed the tension in gummy fibers around his joints.

“Yeah, sorry. I couldn’t get through,” he said. He put a hand to his chest and relaxed back on his heels. He’s really sweet, Alluka had said. Killua stretched the android’s lips into a forced smile and hoped it looked genuine. Thankfully, the system seemed to register habits, and so the muscles worked on their own—like when Chrollo first interrogated him and his mouth moved on its own accord.

Machi stared at him, eyes wide.

Killua met her gaze with equally wide eyes and, with his limited resources, said, “Where’s Dad?”

Machi settled back, eyes still tight and lips still drawn into a slim line. She nodded to the dilapidated doorframe, and Killua cursed when he realized that he’d be the one leading the way. She didn’t trust him for shit, and with that taser gun, Killua couldn’t relax for a second.

Killua glanced at the gun as he passed her and headed for the exit. His eyes stilled on the shattered windowpanes across the other room. It appeared to be an abandoned office skyscraper, and as they walked between the rusty, moldy desks, Killua couldn’t stop himself from shuddering. This was a world from a different era—from an era before vert tech.

An era before Ging Freecss.

He knew that this wasn’t what Chrollo was looking to go back to, but it was nerve wracking to imagine it. He pictured Yorknew pitched into limited, cloudless technology.

Just before the last row of desks, Killua heard Machi’s breathing shift to a sharp, low intake of air that held. Something about it triggered a short, cutting flash at the corner of Killua’s eye—something the android had seen before, something it was familiar with. Before Killua could spare a moment to analyze it, he turned and, in one fluid swipe, knocked his wrist against Machi’s raised taser gun.

He flung himself to the side, ducking underneath Machi’s fist as it careened over his head. He swung his leg out and crushed it against her shin. She stumbled with a cry of agony, at which point Killua realized that a metal tibia versus a calcium tibia wasn’t an even fight in the slightest. Killua didn’t care to play fair, though.

Killua vaulted off of the ground and over a nearby desk as Machi turned the gun on him again. He hooked his shoulder under the edge of the table and flung it forward with enough force to send it rocketing in Machi’s direction. He followed it with two steps and a leap that landed his feet on the underside of the upturned table, shoving her to the ground. He stomped his foot on the ledge nearest her exposed wrist. Her hand opened and released the gun.

He kicked it away before heading for the exit. He stomped it into the ground, crunching it beneath the android’s dusty, sand-stained boots.

He sprinted down the hallway and to the open stairwell door. He skidded into the stairwell and flew straight over the railing onto the flight below, spiraling down until his boots crashed into crumbling concrete. A slab of brick loosened with the impact.

He cursed as he tripped down and scrambled for purchase on the edge of the broken stairwell. He swung underneath with a shout that echoed up the stairwell.

There was a single window in view several floors below. Killua crashed into the wall above it and slid down, his fingers catching on the window frame. The wood snapped and splintered.

“Fuck!” he cried, feet screeching across the windowpane. He dropped onto the ledge and swayed, throwing his arms out to balance himself.

He was just barely level with the neighboring building, but he had gone too far. A floor up and he would have been able to vault straight onto the rooftop.

He smashed his foot through the windowpane. The glass shattered on impact, and habit had him clearing out the remnant shards sticking out from the frame. There was something exhilarating about exerting all of his energy and force without consequence. Without a heart in his chest, without adrenaline pumping through his veins, he felt entirely in control of the spring in his leap across the chasm between the two buildings.

His fingers scraped down the brick surface before his feet caught on the edge of a balcony railing. He teetered, cursing under his breath.

At last, he came to a standstill.

“Fucking Hell,” he breathed in relief just a second before the rusty railing snapped under him.

He didn’t know where he was leaping until the force of it sent him slamming into a metal rod sticking out of the brick just several feet below the rooftop. He spun around it, gritty rust flakes scraping between his fingers. He hooked his feet under him and caught on the pole as it wobbled beneath him. By that point, he certainly would have fainted just from the adrenaline rush alone, not to mention the force he hit that bar with.

I could get used to this body, he thought to himself, pleased that he kept his shit in one piece.

He vaulted to the rooftop and used his hand as a spring on the ledge.

An alert gave him a quite literal shock in the back of his ankle. He winced at it, staggering just an instant before something nicked the rotting rooftop next to his feet. Right where he used to be standing.

A cloud of dust shot up with it. “Shit!” he cursed, spinning around. The camera tracked the trajectory in a smooth, transparent line to the floor from which he and Machi squared off. He stared down the barrel of a sniper rifle.

Killua took off sprinting. When the next alert came at the corner of his vision, it was accompanied by a spark at the back of his shoulder. He twisted violently to the side, and the shot cleared him and cracked the ledge of the rooftop in front of him. He took the ledge flying, arms swinging in front of him to brace for impact.

He barrel-rolled into the neighboring complex, glass scrapes marking up his arms and legs, tearing into his clothes. He didn’t feel a thing beyond the initial pinch, but it didn’t help the panic that told him that even without adrenaline, he knew his goddamn life was on the line.

They wouldn’t shoot out Gon’s vert, not after what Alluka told me, he rationalized. The severe lack of coverage on the back of his neck, though, was nerve-wracking enough.

He skidded to his feet and dove over the skeleton of a couch and across an iron-framed coffee table. In seconds, he was across the room and leaning out of the opposite window to the alley down below.

A gust of wind buffeted a cloud of sand over and the dusty brick apartment complex. He covered the back of his hand over his mouth, blinking his eyes against the grit over the camera lens.

The alley below wasn’t so much an alley as it was a chasm. The neighboring building had fallen into shambles and with it, left a gap for Killua to see nothing but orange on the horizon. Beyond the half-buried city remained a landscape of nothing but pure desert and sand dunes.

I am not equipped to deal with this bullshit.

Chapter Text

When Gon came to, he blinked awake to the sensation of Alluka’s arms around him. He relaxed into it after a moment, the warmth of her arms around him sending a giddy, bright sensation through his chest. He hugged people before, but it never felt this great. He gave her shoulders a squeeze and said, “What’re we hugging for?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, jerking away. She ducked under his arms, and her cheeks were flushed pink. She scratched at her ponytail and said, “So, uh, did you get the chip?”

“Yeah, I did,” he said with a smile. He looked up at the cashier, who was staring at them with his hands held limply over his stomach. When he met Gon’s eyes, he startled a little. “Are you able to input a chip code?”

“I—uh—We’ll see. Just one moment,” the man said.

After relaying the numbers to the man and having them punched into the tablet, Gon waited with anticipation humming in his chest. The man stilled for a moment as the machine processed it. A second later, the man gave a firm nod and said, “It worked. Have a nice day.”

They left the station with bags full of food and candy. Gon helped stuff them into the trunk before Alluka gestured for him to get in the backseat. She followed after him, taking the blue chip bag with her along with two glass bottles. Gon settled into the leather seats as she slammed the door shut and dropped the bottles into the cupholders.

“I take it you’ve never eaten before,” she said.

Gon shook his head. “I only drink liquids, but I don’t think it works the same.”

“Well then, have you swallowed at all since you’ve been in Killua’s body?” she asked.

Thinking about it just made him swallow again, but it was difficult. His saliva felt thick in the back of his throat. He gave Alluka an uncertain nod.

“When you take a sip of this, it’s the same method. If you swallow it wrong, you’ll start coughing, but it’s not a big deal,” she said.

“Got it,” Gon said.

Alluka grabbed the bottle by the neck and cranked the cap off. A hiss snapped out of it and Gon startled with a shout. Foam bubbled up—he’d seen it once before, but most of the soda on the West Coast was flat and dark. When Alluka held it out to him, though, his chest started to ache from how hard his heart was pounding. He couldn’t breathe. The foam kept charging up the neck of the bottle before it started pouring over.

“Here—” Alluka said, leaning over. She took it back and lapped up the foam, slurping it down until it at last settled down. She put it back in Gon’s frozen fingers.

“Does soda always do that?” he asked.

“Nah, it must’ve been shaken up,” she said. “It’s fine now. Just take a slow sip for starters.”

He did as she said. He put the rim of the bottle to his lips and tipped it back. The bottle was frosted over and chilled, and the liquid oh-so much colder. It touched his tongue with a bite of acidity that turned his tastebuds numb and his eyes alight with energy. He pulled back and pressed the back of his hand to his lips.

There was something so vivacious about the texture on his tongue. It wasn’t a texture, though, was it? It glittered and culminated to a sharp point that instantaneously dimmed like firelight into an ember. He held it on his tongue as long as he dared until the acidic nature of it faded and brought sensation back to his tingling tongue. He swallowed it as Alluka suggested and came to with a gasp.

He forgot to breathe that entire time.

“Wow,” he gasped. “What was that? It felt like… it felt like a smell, but I’ve never experienced smell like that before.”

“It’s pure unadulterated sugar, my friend,” Alluka said. The plastic bag between her fingers squeaked as she ripped it open. It was the blue chip bag Gon couldn’t keep his eyes off of in the store. She poised one chip up to him, only to hold it back when he reached for it. “This is different. If you swallow this straight up, it’ll hurt like a motherfucker.”

“Okay. Tell me what to do,” he said, hands perched dutifully on his lap.

As Alluka described the process of mastication, of which Gon had seen his comrades perform during mealtime every day since his inception, Gon smelled a tinge of something in the area emanating from the bag. It was sharp in his nose—different from sugar, but equally as potent. When Alluka handed the single chip over, he tested it by touching his tongue to the corner.

He shivered with delight.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Salt, carbs, and death,” she said.

“Death?” he repeated, taking a nibble from the corner.

“Chili powder,” she said. “Killua eats spicy food all the time, so you’ll already be acclimated to it. This isn’t the strong stuff, either.”

Gon finished the chip off in mere seconds. He covered his mouth with his hand as he chewed and said, “Can I have another?”

Alluka rationed his chip consumption by interspersing it with sips of soda. After a while, she rooted around in the bag at her feet for something triangular wrapped in a white, paper cloth. Gon could barely function. He felt like he wanted to eat ten entire bags of chips but he didn’t have enough lung capacity to sustain his lack of breathing. He was panting before long, ravenous and disoriented.

“How do you juggle eating and breathing and blinking all at the same time?” he asked, exasperated.

“Years of practice, buddy. Just be glad that our hearts beat on their own,” she said.

She unwrapped what appeared to be a sandwich. She passed it to him before unwrapping her own slice. He waited for her to take the first bite before mimicking her strategy—both hands, teeth biting into the corner, and tearing the piece off for a satisfying bite of fluffy wheat, crisp lettuce, and juicy tomato.

It was by far the most pleasant experience Gon had yet encountered in his seventeen, eighteen years of existence.

“Good?” she said.

He hummed around a mouthful of food. Alluka giggled before taking her next bite and reaching for her laptop. She pulled it onto the folds of her skirt and clicked away at it, one hand steadying the sandwich and the other tapping across the keyboard.

Alluka was curious. Gon had said he wanted to help bring Killua back, but something changed along the way. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, and she found Killua’s blue eyes on hers, illuminated by the neon sign glowing through the back window.

“Why didn’t you stay on the West Coast?” she asked, leaning back against the seat. She turned to face him completely.

He reached for the soda as he said, “Because I want to help you.”

Alluka determined that there was a problem that Gon saw that she couldn’t. The way her breath stilled in her lungs told her that it had to do with the reason Illumi put them on this mission in the first place. That it had to do with Gon being the key to the Republic—the key to the entire Freecss corporation.

“Help me with what?” she asked, eyes wide and eager. If Gon had another agenda, it might change the game. It might mean that whatever Chrollo was planning wasn’t what they assumed. Maybe Chrollo Lucilfer wasn’t even their target. What if—

“I want to help you get away from the Zoldyck business,” he said.

The level of disappointment Alluka felt was unfathomable. It was so impossibly dense in her chest that she could have easily ripped a hole in the fabric of the spacetime continuum and imploded into a black hole.

She sat back with a scowl, a scoff, and rolled her eyes. “Yeah, get in line, buddy. Killua and I already have that covered.”

“Yeah, but I could take you to my dad,” he said. “We’d help you out, and Killua’s already there so we don’t have to worry about him.”

Alluka’s brow felt heavy over her eyes. She rubbed a hand under her glasses and said, “Gon, you do realize why Killua’s in your vert, don’t you?”

Gon fell quiet. He rubbed Killua’s pale, powdered fingers together as he said, “Yeah, I know.” He licked the seasoning off, but that just made his fingers sticky. Alluka passed him a napkin. “Thanks.”

“I’m under the impression that you don’t know what Chrollo’s plan is,” she confessed.

“To reform the Republic,” he answered, “and to ban vert tech and clones.”

Alluka folded up the wrapper of her sandwich. She studied her lap, her gut twisting into terrible knots. She cleared her throat before saying, “You… realize that people who have verts… it would erase all of their memories. We wouldn’t exist.”

Gon said nothing for a moment. Alluka looked up to find Gon’s eyes staring at the seat in front of him. A car went by and cast a bright glow over his face, glinting against Killua’s white hair. Gon turned to look at Alluka, who waited patiently, trying her best to keep the ache from showing in her face. Gon had Killua’s brows furrowed, lips slimmed to a firm pout. It was as close to Killua’s stoic expression as Alluka had seen since Gon took over.

“You’d… still be alive, right?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “But I won’t remember this, or anything. I won’t remember how to walk, talk, or write. All of those functions are stored in our verts now.”

“But—” Gon started, voice cracking. Alluka frowned at him, wishing she could hold his hand and give it a squeeze as she had with Killua so many times. But she didn’t know Gon, not the way she knew her brother.

And then, hot tears were collecting on Killua’s lashes.

Gon had never felt like this before. He never felt like someone had their fist around his throat, squeezing heat up to the back of his eyes. He blinked, wondering if there was something wrong with his host’s eyes. Gon’s android eyes only ever watered after a sandstorm, just to clear out the dirt. Gon reached up to wipe it away as he said, voice hoarse, “But I don’t want you to forget. What’s happening? Why is there water on my eyes?”

Alluka reached over with a napkin and pressed it beneath his eyes. “You’re just crying. It’s easier if you don’t hold it back.”

Gon wouldn’t know how to hold it back even if he tried. He used Alluka’s napkin to catch the moisture. “Maybe—Maybe there’s another way,” he said. He couldn’t control the way his lips quivered when he spoke, or how his voice wavered. He cleared his throat in an attempt to talk normally, as he had just minutes before. “Maybe we could see Ging and… clear all of this up.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Alluka said. Gon didn’t need his android’s facial analysis to know that Alluka didn’t see any hope in talking to Ging.

“We should try,” he insisted. “I’ll erase the you two from the Zoldyck server and then figure out a way to find him. He’ll know what to do.”

Alluka nodded. Gon relaxed a little into the seat, but he still felt like he was choking. He took in a deep breath and, slowly, exhaled. He looked down at the rest of his sandwich, but something about eating more made his gut churn. He set it aside as Alluka suggested they keep moving.

“Where are we going?” he asked as Alluka pushed open her door to head to the driver’s seat.

A small smile graced her lips as she turned back to him. If he didn’t know any better, he’d assume she had something up her sleeve.

“We’re visiting an old friend,” she said.

Killua skidded down the side of a shallow sand dune, trailing a cloud of dust behind him. It swirled with the wind buffeting shirt close to his body. He dug his feet into the sand and squinted against the sand grains spiraling in the air. With his hand sheltered over his eyes, he charged onwards away from the sunken city silhouetted by the setting sun.

Try as he might, traction in the sand wasn’t great. When he did at last reach solid ground, the grit under the soles of his shoes no longer sliding, he took off at a steady jog which then turned into a sprint. Untethered by the sun and the strain on his limbs, he ran longer and faster than he ever had before. He kept on eastward as if it would only take a night to reach Yorknew. It would take so much more than that, but with this android, he might just make it to another town, another city, another civilization that wasn’t fucked out of their minds.

All that running, though, was drab. Without all of his focus going into his breathing, he was left to his own devices—more specifically, he was left to Ging Freecss and where he fit into all of this.

How did Chrollo get ahold of Gon anyway? he wondered, wishing he could call Alluka so that she could ask for him.

I hope Alluka’s doing okay with that android.

I hope she wasn’t lying about Gon being nice.

I hope she’s okay.

The heat faded from the air and turned instead towards chilly nightfall. He could still feel the heat radiating from the dirt under his feet and the friction in his boots. He had long since dismissed the warnings on his screen that dealt with Machi’s taser gun, which left a screen void of anything beyond the image before him.

Killua decided to filter through the android’s screen preferences. As the deep blue, inky sky filled with starlight, he sifted between infrared to ultraviolet, to night vision, to normal, low exposure. The track before him was so crisp, if not barren. He could pick out the red glow of critters moving across the sand in the distance. He could see the stars overhead, marked in colors he’d never seen with his human eyes before. The longer he focused on one star, the more his system gave him.

There was an error loading worldwide information to his system, but what was stored in the android’s gel membrane, it started to lace together constellations with thin, transparent white lines. The colors over the stars spiraled and detailed the age of the galaxies—all warped into that odd, foreign language Killua couldn’t decipher. It fascinated him nonetheless.

When his eyes returned to earth, the lines traveled with him. They spread across the landscape in a grid that followed up the curve of the dunes and tracked the shape of cacti and brush, rocks and boulders. It spread out beyond all of that, beyond what even he could see, and in the process, his system marked a point of interest several miles ahead.

It isn’t a town, he realized quickly as he mounted the top of the hill and looked out over the landscape. There were no lights at the marked point, nor did there seem to be… anything. Far beyond that, though, were dark silhouettes on the horizon. Mountains.

His system pinged a notification at the corner of his screen. He looked down at it with a frown and read, Refuel Soon.

Shit.

Killua put a hand to his stomach. He looked down at it and lifted up the shirt to watch as the circuitry beneath his epidermis cascaded down his chest and abdomen. It consolidated around the pierce from the taser gun and where the needle and punctured the metal skeleton. With it, cylinders took shape with the transparent, white lines on his camera screen. They were pumping, producing the constant whirr he had drowned out long before. It was quiet enough to do so, and he imagined no average human could hear the sound of the pumps anyway.

He dropped the shirt with a look of vague horror. He recognized the system, and he also recognized the fact that he was in a fucking desert.

Gon runs on water, he thought. He cursed himself for not thinking about it sooner—of fucking course a machine would run on something. Somewhere along the line he must have hoped the body was solar powered, and perhaps part of it was. An android as complex as Gon, however, would take more than a thousand minuscular solar panels embedded in Gon’s epidermis.

Killua went on down the hill, legs and arms pumping. He set his target on the spinning marker on his horizon, hoping to God it was a puddle of water.

When he at last approached the marked location, the notification had evolved into a warning, which then upgraded to a grating sound in his joints as he ran faster to beat the effects. Panic started to set in when the sensors in his skin turned numb to the dust in the air. The resolution in his eyes degraded shortly after that point, and the temperature started to hit him like a brick to the face. It was blisteringly cold, and he realized quickly that the stiffness in his joints was partially due to the water freezing in his system.

I need to keep moving, he told himself, even as he slowed at the cusp of a canyon ledge.

There, in the distance, snaked a river.

He curled his fingers in and stretched them out. Bouncing on the balls of his feet he told himself, “Two more fucking minutes and I can make it.”

The alert on his screen blinked back at him. He looked at it and cursed. It read: One minute until shutdown.

“Make that one minute, then,” he said before taking the leap.

His boots touched down on the edge of the canyon slope. He skidded to a swift run that propelled him forward, cursing as his joints gave out. He rolled to the side and caught his fingers in the dirt, scraping down the remainder of the slope to the far edge of the riverbed. He jogged across it and dropped to his knees in front of the river.

He cupped his hands and scooped up water in his palms. After shoveling the first mouthful down his throat piping, he waited, watching the alert in the corner of his eye. He watched the water content trickle down from the corner of his screen before the alert shifted to a glass icon. His water consumption filled only the bottom of the glass.

This would be a whole lot easier if I had an actual fucking glass, he thought bitterly, downing one handful after the other.

He wondered just how waterproof the android was. To test it, he submerged his hand in the murky, brown desert water as he waited for his recently consumed water to funnel into the system. When no warnings came up, he ran his fingers along the bottom of the riverbed as sensation returned to his fingertips. The water was still warm from the sun and Killua realized that this river likely went on for miles despite the severe drought.

Towns tend to settle around riverbeds, he thought, only to shake his head. I’m not far enough away from the compound. If Illumi’s numbers were correct, I’m still in rebel territory.

He brushed his hands off and moved to stand. When he blinked, however, his screen went black.

In his place, Gon blinked wide awake. Gon adjusted to the bright starlight glistening across the river as he stepped away and turned around. He stilled when it became abundantly clear that he was all alone on what remained of the Colorado River.

“Dad?” he said, struck by the way his voice wavered. He couldn’t seem to stop shaking, even outside of a human body. He put a hand to his throat and then to his rib where the puncture wound wasn’t healing.

He could feel Killua’s consciousness like a cloud above him. He didn’t want Alluka to know that he was here, so it became clear that a full swap wouldn’t work. Besides, she was concentrating on driving—he didn’t want to bother her. Still, he hadn’t expected to wind up completely alone.

He dropped down onto the rocks, his hands resting on the dirt behind him. The weight on his shoulders from having pushed Killua out for nothing brought him back to the realization that he had swapped verts with Killua before they ever even had a conversation.

Now that he had control of his motor functions, and with half of his system processing the Zoldyck firewall, he made room for Killua as if clearing a spot on that riverbed for the both of them to share. Gon realized then that he had a relatively broad portfolio of Killua’s vocal recordings—he couldn’t help himself. He had an obscene amount of data reserved simply for recording his father’s voice, Feitan, Machi—everyone. He even had one small clip from Ging from over seventeen years prior.

“I can replicate your voice if you like,” Gon said aloud, leaning over his knees. He clasped his hands around his ankles as he waited for Killua to respond.

Silence trickled through like the river at Gon’s feet. For a moment, he worried he hadn’t given Killua speaking permissions, but then his vocal box responded. “Are we—? Sharing a vert?”

“Yeah. I split my consciousness between your vert and here,” he confessed. “It takes a significant amount of brain power to break into the Zoldyck server, I have to say.”

“What the hell’re you doing that f-f—” the voice box cut out. Gon pressed a finger to his throat as if to clear it, and an instant later, Killua’s voice crackled through—unrefined, but altogether there. “What the fuck was that? Holy—”

“I just pulled from what I’ve said in your body,” Gon explained. “I’ll have to do vocal testing when I get back.”

“Please don’t do that,” Killua said with a groan.

Gon giggled, which manifested into a full-blown laugh. He kicked his feet out and relaxed back on his hands, saying, “Okay, I won’t. I hope my body isn’t giving you much trouble.”

“You wouldn’t happen to come with a manual?” Killua droned in a dry tone that had Gon giggling again.

“No, not really. But you seem to be doing fine. You’ve refueled recently.”

“More like two seconds before you showed up,” he said.

“You’re in for a treat when you have to piss,” Gon said.

“You piss? What for?”

“I was telling your sister earlier—I filter water. Becomes useful if I’m traveling with humans,” he said and to his surprise, Killua laughed. It sounded ridiculously robotic, though, which only made Gon laugh harder. He fell back against the rocks, clutching at his stomach as he smiled up at the stars.

When they sobered, Killua spoke softly, “I’m sure she’s just thrilled.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Building AIs is, like, her dream. Right now she’s just building verts.”

Gon paused a moment. Alluka’s life revolved around vert tech and he never knew it. He felt suddenly insensitive for even bringing up his father’s goal knowing now what that would do to Alluka.

“Why are you breaking into the Zoldyck server?” he asked.

Gon scratched at his head and sighed. “I just… want to help Alluka. And you, I guess.”

“Gee, thanks,” he droned.

“Why are you at the Colorado River? That’s over fifteen kilometers.”

“Getting sniped at wasn’t exactly in my pay grade,” Killua said.

Gon jolted upright, gasping. “He—? Why did they shoot at you?”

“You tell me—” Killua started. He was interrupted by an alert on the screen. Killua cursed under his breath, and Gon assumed it was an alert he’d seen before.

Gon jerked to his feet. A transparent grid flung out from his boots and coated the landscape, condensing in the direction the alert pointed to. Moving vehicles were headed in their direction, and Gon recognized the drivers even from this far away.

“It’s my dad,” he said. “Six vehicles—thirteen passengers.”

“We need to move—give me control again,” Killua demanded, and Gon was startled by the order.

“R-Really? I could talk to them, and we could—”

“I ran this fucking far—I’m not letting you fuck it up,” Killua said.

Gon shut himself up and figured, if need be, he could take over again. Curiosity, though, was the biggest factor. Killua’s reaction to his family felt off, somehow, and it seemed appropriate to view from afar as he passed the motor controls over to Killua.

In an instant, Killua was running down the river to the nearest boulder. He used it as a springboard to vault over the stream. They could hear the vehicles now, screeching up to the canyon ledge. Killua swept behind an outcropping of boulders and snuck into a cobwebbed crevice. He sunk down with his back to the rocks, at which point Gon overlaid a message on his screen.

I’m going to put my body on low-power mode. We’ll still be able to hear and see for a limited period of time, but otherwise they can see thermal heat from my core.

“Whatever,” Killua huffed.

When his body shut down, they sagged against the rocks and waited in anticipation for something that told them it was too late. That, in the next moment, Machi would come around the corner and drag the android doll out from the cobwebs.

Out on the cliff face, Uvogin hopped out of the lead vehicle. He skidded down the side of the cliff and jumped to the riverbed with a bellowing laugh, hands perched on his hips. Behind him, a short, blonde man followed suit.

The driver’s door propped open and Chrollo stood, leaning out with a hand on the doorframe.

“If he didn’t run out of power by now, he still doesn’t know how to shut the core down,” Chrollo said, feet touching down. He stepped over to the adjacent vehicle where Machi sat in the passenger’s side. She rolled down the window to frown at him. “We’ll find him.”

Down below, Uvogin grabbed a metal sheet from the trash on edge of the water and banged it against a boulder. “Come out, come out wherever you are!” he sang with that bellowing laugh that echoed down the canyon as far as where Gon and Killua sat in still, terrible silence.

Chapter Text

Gon listened to the sound of footsteps approaching. They were hidden enough in the shadows, but if the flashlight beam came anywhere near them, they’d be toast. Gon could feel the same anxiety that was roiling in Killua’s head and he wondered if it was a residual effect from sharing the same vert and body.

Gon held his breath as if he had the lung capacity for it. The orange beam of light glowed on the rock formation several inches in front of them—arcing around the space where they were hidden.

“See anything?” a voice sounded farther down the stream.

Shalnark.

Gon pulled up a memory of Shalnark and stuck it to the screen for Killua to see. It was from the day Shalnark and Uvogin stole Gon away from the camp to go dune sledding—years ago, but still an uncorrupted, intact memory. His facial recognition software was down for the moment, but the focus was on Shalnark’s wide smile just seconds before the sled shook and skidded out from under him. When he resurfaced after face-planting, dusty orange sand was all over his round cheeks and yellow hair.

“Nothing.”

Paku.

An image surfaced, overlaying the footage of Uvo ruffling the sand off of Shalnark’s hair. It was of a woman with distinctly Greek features like that of a sculpture—straight, arced nose and a defined brow. Her blonde hair was trimmed to a bob that curled around her chin. She was holding a hand to their face, her eyes soft.

Shalnark’s footsteps drew nearer. “Yeah, my tracker isn’t picking anything up. You don’t think he’d do a system-wide shutdown?”

“I don’t think he’d know how,” Paku said. “See if there are any outgoing signals in the area. If he’s using GPS, we might be able to intercept—”

They might pick up the data I’ve been feeding back to your vert, Gon wrote on the screen.

Shit, Killua thought, not expected it to go on the screen. Gon responded with a fucking smiley face emoji that would have made Killua roll his eyes.

Before Gon could even start the export process, Shalnark gasped and said, “He’s right—”

Shalnark’s voice cut out with an alarmed cry. Paku cursed, but an audible thud! sent metal cracking against the boulder beside Gon and Killua. A shot fired and dented the slate over their heads. It coincided with an array of bullets firing off, deafening to their sensitive ears. The flashlights were in a disarray before pitching them into the dark once again.

Gon rebooted the system and sent the cylinders pumping in his core again. He shifted just as a flashlight spiraled into their cove. He kicked it aside, away from them so he could peer around the rock and see Paku on the ground, unconscious from blunt force trauma to the temple.

Gon flinched at the sound of gunshots blasting downstream from the boulders. He crouched beside Paku and pressed his hand to the blood on her face. She shifted with a groan, and his hand came back coated in red. Gon shushed her and helped heave her up so that she could sit against the rocks, her head leant back against the slate.

“G-Gon?” she whispered.

“More or less,” he said with a small, relieved smile. “What’s going on?”

“Y-You have to go—” she started, grasping at his arm.

A burst of red sprayed from the side of her neck. It splashed across his face and painted his shoulder dark red. He stared in alarm as the force sent Paku slumping to the side. Gon nearly reached out to catch her, but thick, meaty strips of her head came off on the rock.

Give me control, Killua demanded.

Gon was frozen in place. He had completely forgotten that he had pushed Killua aside to help Paku. That moment of shock was just enough for his grip on the controls to fade. Killua took charge in an instant.

Killua stood to face the attacker. He twisted as if to turn around, but a firm voice hissed, “Move and I’ll put a bullet through your hardware.”

Slowly, Killua raised his hands up over his shoulders. He eased them behind his head, fingers lacing over one another against the android’s black hair. The flashlight Gon had kicked illuminated a shadow that shifted, cast against the rock beside him and over Paku’s corpse. The shape of a slim pistol came into formation, and Killua watched it as his system put a model number to it. Gon translated it for him, along with the meter distance between Killua and the target.

The distance was closing.

“On your knees,” the attacker said.

Killua lowered himself down one knee at a time. He became level with Paku’s one still eye and, after a split second, turned away so Gon wouldn’t have to see. He ground his teeth together as the sensors at the back of his head picked up on the shift in the air—the pistol coming within mere centimeters of his head.

He cracked his hand back against the attacker’s wrist. He pivoted on one knee and swiped with the other, slamming it against the attacker’s ankles. They jumped to avoid the attack, but they couldn’t avoid the fist Killua put into their gut.

Cursing, they nearly dropped. They ducked back when Killua swiped a punch at their jaw. He saw wide, red eyes staring back at him as they parried against every punch he threw. He gathered speed as the ache in his joints from the cold began to heat and build with fluid motion. Killua tipped back on one foot and swung with the other.

The attacker braced two hands over the point of impact. His metal shin slammed into their raised forearm, and the force was enough to send them flying in the direction of the water. They barreled into the river, sending up a splash of water over the rocks.

Killua settled back, feet braced and bouncing on the balls of his boots. He slammed his fist into his open palm and shouted, “Is that all you got?!”

The attacker pushed up to their feet, flicking water off of their hands. It dripped from their blonde bangs and matted down the braid over their shoulder. “I’m just getting started,” they said.

Killua picked up Paku’s pistol where it had been discarded on the ground. He took aim with both hands on the handle and fired.

The first shot missed, but the other two hit home on his opponent’s raised arm. It chinked and sent a white spark off of the surface. On the fourth pull of the trigger, the barrel came up empty. 

They pushed the back of their hand against their mouth, wiping water off and giving Killua a show of the damage he did on their forearm. He expected bruised skin at the very least, but instead, a loose flap of skin pealed off of shining metal. They grabbed it and tore it off without a second thought, letting it slap into the river.

An android, Killua thought.

In an instant, his eyes filled with a flurry of lights scanning the attacker as they emerged onto the pebbles, stepping towards where Killua took an unsteady step back. He knew it was Gon’s doing, as he had no means of understanding a single marker that appeared on his screen. A shudder rolled up his spine as he came to terms with the fact that no amount of punching was going to faze this opponent.

I need an electrical current, he thought.

I can produce a spark, but you’ll have to be touching them. It’ll shut down our system too, though, Gon wrote on the screen.

If I shut down, Chrollo gets both corpses, he reminded Gon, but it only reminded him that he was working with a biased party in crisis.

A column of light illuminated his arms on the screen. He had them raised for the attack as his opponent took another step closer, squaring up Killua in every sense of the word. Killua tried not to focus on whatever Gon was doing, but then, slots opened on his inner forearms. He felt the tension pulling at his epidermis before it released in the shin of metal swiping out from his arms.

Hidden knives.

The pommels jumped into his waiting hands. He grasped hold of them and spun them expertly to poise the blade away from his chest. He crossed them with a renewed sense of determination.

With these, he’d kick android ass.

“I’m guessing you’re here for my vert disk,” Killua said.

Their red eyes narrowed. They dropped their hands at their sides, flicking a metal prong out from their palm the length of their forearm. They cracked it in half and divvied it between their poised hands. “That’s certainly one objective,” they said.

“And the other?”

“The price on your supposed father’s head.”

A dark smile spread across Gon’s face. “That makes two of us,” Killua said, and before his attacker could think too heavily on that, he made his first strike.

Killua pushed in with a swipe of his knives—cutting up from his waist and slicing the thin fabric at the attacker’s shoulder. They ducked back and countered with their metal baton, cracking it against Killua’s forearm and springing an alert onto his system. They immediately cut down with the baton, and Killua felt the shock in his shin even as he jerked it out of the way of the attack.

His knife scraped against the metal baton in a flurry of slashes that pushed his attacker back to the water. Liquid seeped through his boots as he broke in and slammed his heel into his attacker’s gut. Sneering, Killua swiped both blades at the attacker’s face. A tendril of blonde hair came loose and carried away in the sandy wind.

The attacker screamed as they barreled into Killua’s abdomen and slammed them both back into the dirt. Killua flipped a knife around and stabbed it up towards their face. They ducked to the side and, fist raised, cracked the baton across Killua’s face. His cheek hit the rocks with a thud.

Killua caught the baton the second time around. Just as he geared up for a full-throttled knee to the nuts, something came swinging out of the corner of his eye. He grimaced, ducking to the side as it smashed into the side of the attacker’s head and sent them flipping off of Killua. Killua pushed himself onto an elbow and looked up to where Chrollo Lucilfer stood over him with a metal bat.

Chrollo was panting as if he just ran a mile. He braced the bat in a white-knuckled fist, swinging it back for when the attacker moved to stand again. Killua ducked with a hand over his head as the bat whistled over his head and nailed Killua’s opponent in the jaw.

On the third swing, though, the attacker caught the bat and yanked it from Chrollo’s grip like it was nothing more than a lolly pop from a child.

The attacker tossed it in the air and caught it by the handle on the backswing.

“NO!” Gon’s voice ripped from Killua’s throat. It was no longer Killua’s, though, since he was moving before he could stop himself from completely intercepting the killing blow on his own target.

Gon dove into the attacker’s side. They dropped the bat and an electric pulse pitched them both to the dirt. It fizzled across them and caught fire on the frayed edge of the attacker’s shirt. The image of the bat on the ground remained frozen on Killua’s screen long after Gon vanished back to Yorknew.

Gon jerked awake in the back of the car. He gasped and immediately lapsed into a fit of coughing. Wheezing, he grappled for purchase on the edge of the seat and pushed himself up. His eyes were wild, looking from the front of the car to the windows around him showing the early dawn through the glass.

Panting, he pressed a hand to his forehead.

“You okay?” Alluka asked from the driver’s seat.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” Gon said. He shook his head to clear the fuzzy feeling that made his eyelids feel like lead. His head felt like it was filled with liquid, sloshing against the bowl of his skull as he swayed and leant over his knees.

“How’s the whole… break through security going?” she asked, glancing back at him before putting her eyes on the road. He could see her through the rearview mirror, her eyes tired underneath the rim of her glasses.

“Fine. Yeah, it’s just… a matter of running through binomial permutations,” he said. He wasn’t lying about that, but he felt icky leaving it at that. There was more to it—like the fact that it didn’t take his full mental capacity to do the task, far from it, actually. Something told him to keep his visit with Killua to himself, and he couldn’t be sure it was a great thing.

“Well, we’re almost there. Not much longer now,” she said.

Gon scooted over to the nearest window. He put a hand to the chilled glass and looked out at the road. They were on a freeway heading west, and past the concrete ledge of the bridge Gon could see low-sitting housing structures catching the orange glow of the sun on the horizon. It looked like a checkerboard of three dimensional boxes stacked and spread out across the rolling hills. Interspersed among them were high-rises and rooftop trees that dazzled Gon’s curious appetite.

His heart hummed in his chest as Alluka at last took the ramp down from the freeway bridge. They cut onto the road beneath the freeway and air train system, where cars passed between concrete pillars and colored lights streamed underneath the bridge. Gon marveled at it all and the twenty-four hour storefronts alive at the crack of dawn.

Alluka produced a tablet from her duffle that was on the passenger’s seat. She passed it back to Gon and said, “Open my notes, please. I can’t remember the address.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Gon said.

He relayed the address to her and put it up on the center console screen for Alluka to follow. In a matter of minutes, they pulled up outside of an alley way and crossed the sidewalk between the buildings. Through the narrow brick buildings, they emerged behind rows of apartment complexes where parking lots were divided by chain-linked fences and dry, dead hedges.

They emerged from the other side of the alleyway and onto a street that was vacant all except for a semi truck parked on the side of the boulevard. Alluka parked the car behind the semi and pushed open the driver’s door. She reached back to let Gon out, who stumbled out onto the street with shaky, numb legs. His feet tingled like television static, and as he walked, he felt damn near close to falling over.

He followed after Alluka to the sidewalk where they walked around to the side of the truck. At the passenger door, she reached up with a little jump and knocked on the window.

Gon startled when a curtain flew out from behind the seats and someone emerged from the back seat the size of a small child. Instead, he found his eyes meeting a girl no older than Alluka.

Her eyes brightened and she scrambled forward, swinging onto the passenger’s seat, and pushing open the door with a forceful shove.

The girl’s short hair was in a blonde disarray, sticking up at odd angles and matted on the side from sleep. Still, she smiled so wide, her cheeks rounded out and her eyes all but glittered as she said, “Alluka! And Killua! Hey, what brings you out here?”

As Alluka spoke, the girl adjusted the straps on her overalls and listened intently, nodding fast as Alluka explained the situation with Milluki and Illumi.

“So it sounds like y’all need a place to stay, huh?” the girl said.

“That’s the thing,” Alluka said. “Killua’s still out vert riding, but it turned into a swap. This isn’t actually Killua.”

At this, the girl looked up at Gon sharply, jaw dropping. Gon blinked in surprise and offered a weak smile and a small wave. “Hey,” he said, reaching his hand out for her to shake. “I’m Gon.”

“‘GONN’, you say,” she hummed. She gave his hand a firm shake, only to drag him forward with a cheeky smile. “‘GONN’ as in General Operating Neural Network?”

“You picked up on that fast,” Alluka commented, eyes wide behind her glasses.

“If I’m GONN, then who are you?” Gon asked, raising an eyebrow.

At this, the girl braced a hand on the door and the other on the seat and swung out over the steps up to the passenger’s seat. Gon jumped back to make room, only to then have his face smushed between her hands. She tugged at his raised eyebrow, which then became furrowed as she investigated the way he looked worriedly at Alluka.

“Your muscle control is impeccable,” she said. “How many human verts have you rode?”

“Two,” Gon said, voice muffled. “Who are you?”

Off to the side, Alluka sighed and said, “Gon, meet Retz. She’s a machine learning computer scientist. Retz, this is Gon. Ging Freecss created him.”

At this, Retz froze. Her hands dropped from Killua’s face, and Gon reworked the muscles in his jaw as Retz’ eyes scanned his face and then turned abruptly to Alluka. “You’re kidding. Please tell me you’re joking—I might actually faint.”

“I’ve been dealing with this all night. I am far from joking at this point,” she said. “He’s able to sync and ride without equipment.”

“That’s amazing.”

“That isn’t the half of it,” Alluka said, and as if Gon’s eyebrows couldn’t go any higher, Alluka’s voice took on a thrilled tone that completely subverted her exhaustion from before. With sparkling eyes, she said, “Gon’s essentially the master key to everything connected to vert tech. He could control the entire city grid if he wanted.”

Retz stared at Gon with a look of pure fascination. She ran a hand through her short-cropped hair and let out a low whistle. “That is… something else, I’ve got to say.”

“I knew you’d like him,” Alluka said with a smile.

“Does he identify with genders?” Retz whispered to her.

“I’m standing right here,” Gon said.

Retz bit her thumbnail but otherwise didn’t seem fazed by the inquiry. Alluka covered her mouth to hide her smile as Gon felt heat sweep up to his face. He pressed a hand to his cheek and found his fingers infinitely colder.

Retz whispered to Alluka, “He gets embarrassed. That’s so sweet.”

“It makes you think that he’s programmed to care about his—”

“Can we stop talking about me, please?” Gon squeaked, voice cracking embarrassingly. The girls quieted but were hardly done thinking about it as they stared Gon down like one would prey. Gon let out a sigh and said, “Thank you. And to answer your question… There’s a program in my system designed to act like the hindbrain medulla in terms of survival instincts.”

“Survival instincts?” Alluka repeated. “What does that have to do with—”

Retz snapped her fingers. “The human condition otherwise known as the drive for reproduction.”

“No, not really,” Gon said, wincing. “It’s impossible for me to feel a paternal connection. If I did, I’d be more likely to build more AI units similar to myself. That causes an existential problem.”

“Then perhaps the human drive to survive in society? What makes us social creatures, perhaps,” she offered, turning to Alluka. “Without the urge to socialize, we’d have no reason to interact with other humans. And without socializing, we don’t get anywhere in society. We depend on other people to help us evolve and improve our own position in life. In other words: money doesn’t come out of thin air.”

“I wish it did,” Alluka sighed. “So if this program Gon’s talking about—if it’s meant to make him a social creature, then—”

“Of course he’d be embarrassed to ruin a conversation. He doesn’t want to break his connection with people,” Retz answered.

Gon faltered at the comment. It begged the question of whether or not he could break a connection. He put a hand to his head, thinking about the fact that Killua had so easily ran fifteen kilometers away from his father. Killua had met all of them and yet he ran. The only reason Gon had left Milluki like that had been because of Alluka’s insistence and orders.

Am I capable of helping Alluka break that connection with her family if I can’t even do that for myself? he wondered, head spinning.