"She knows Danni doesn't date non-vegans, right?" said Aimee later, when they were out for dinner. "I can't even get her to go on contracts with them sometimes."

  Mia placed her chin on her hands. "I suspect that if I told Marisa that, then she would claim she's too attractive for Danni not to look past that. She's a wonderful friend, but I sometimes think she needs to force how she thinks about herself onto everyone else."

  Aimee wondered if Mia ever spoke of Aimee the same way to others, yet she was already too accustomed to asking Mia for reassurance, and so shunted her stress deeper down into herself. Again the difficulty of trauma was that she would need to suffer worse before she could recover.

  "Doesn't sound like she knows what she wants. I mean, I know the dating pool for hosts is pretty low, but not enough that we have to force ourselves to be with women we don't want. Being open-minded is for straight women with ugly boyfriends."

  Mia laughed, then sighed and reached over to Aimee's hands. "I love you. I'm sorry I've been so moody lately."

  "I love you too. And it's okay. Just means I get to take care of you."

  "Very true." Mia smiled smally. "...I just keep ruminating over him. Over Ryumi. I despise myself for feeling this way, but it... it was so exciting. The persona he adopted, the mystery he conducted. When we fought, I felt heroic and aggressive, aggrieved and enraged. It was as if he had melted me into an ideal that I could construct the mold of myself around, and yet now I find nothing to do with such a body." She noticed of late that she had been withdrawing into her still-teen habits of rumination, as if she could bring these memories more alive in her own emptiness.

  Aimee kissed Mia's hand. "But now you're a Urasaria student - fully. Your own Revenant and one that you'll keep. You can make Ryumi's memory proud, even if she isn't around to witness it."

  "I do feel responsible for it now." muttered Mia. "But I still shouldn't have my identity so... I can't understand why I feel this way, rationally. I've felt a little adrift from reason lately."

  "Life is always an odyssey against rationality."

  Mia smiled, and she leaned over to kiss Aimee. She had felt a greater investment into their relationship lately, deeper than time itself suggested; she desired constantly to be around her girlfriend. They had begun a project together lately; a collage of Revenant photography, little of note artistically; merely that she thought keeping running objectifications of herself would be good, for the passing of years eventually held no meaning to immortal hosts, rather the construction of those years.

  As she kissed Aimee, again and once more, she felt her heart beat rise to 200bpm and winced as she pulled away. "It's happening again."

  "Was hoping that was because of me." Aimee stroked her back. "Feeling okay?"

  "It'll... pass."

  The heart rate of hosts is far faster than civilians, at least at its upper extremes; beats of up to 600 per minute have been reported; but since receiving the final piece of Worldwide, Mia's heart rate had occasionally suddenly doubled before resuming its normal pace. According to Hirogane, it was likely due to the mixture of Ryumi and Mia's bacterial colony epigenetics, although he would always recommend Mia have Xenocyclin used on the colony to wipe Ryumi from it: a recommendation she did not follow, for Magnus had requested otherwise.

  "Will you be okay if I use the bathroom for a minute?"

  Mia nodded. "Hirogane said it isn't harmful." As she watched Aimee leave, she raised her left hand until she was eye-level with its heel, upon which a scarab crawled, then turned to her, its antennae waving. She stroked it with a single finger on her other hand, then pressed it close against her cheek, feeling its pincers pinch her softly.

  As Aimee finished her business in the single-stall restroom and washed her hands, she saw a slice of light curl down to rest unnaturally upon the sink, an odd pastiche of light that sat upon shadow as if it did not exist physically.

  "Mad Dog." it said.

  "That's a new one." she said. "Can't remember any students having this one."

  It laughed. "Just as likely we would not have allowed anyone to remember it if there were. This is an urgent request, so you'll excuse the sudden communication. There is a young girl named Lanara. She lives in Lanacca in California, a little outside of what was once Los Angeles. Her Revenant is scheduled for removal, but her family has fallen into heavy debt, one that has attracted quite a few hosts seeking her Revenant. Go to her and ensure her Revenant is removed."

  "And after?"

  "Your work ends and our's begins. Your colleagues Eclipse and Alchemist have already been notified, as they were in the area for the holidays."

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  "Fine. Anything else I should know about her Revenant? What's the ability?"

  "The ability is irrelevant. She isn't useful in a combat context. The nearest facility for Revenant removal is, regrettably, twelve hours south, after an incident in November."

  "And I'm gonna guess because this is federal government work, there's no extra pay, no travel expenses paid for, all while getting about a quarter of the information I'd be getting if it came from somebody who couldn't force me to take it. That right?"

  "Your preference for private work over government work has already been noted, as is our answer - that government compensation comes in other, non-monetary forms."

  "Yeah, I know the recruitment speech. You guys talk about how it's all moral work hunting kidnappers and terrorists. Might've worked on me too if I hadn't already seen how the type of contracts you guys force us to do change with every election."

  "The work you see as a student is only a fraction of the apparatus. But there is much above that dark that you or even I can hardly grope at, unfettered by political or popular whim, yet essential nonetheless."

  "Or it could just all be political assassinations and state destabilization. Difference between the market and the government is the same as the difference between you and me - I'd rather be forced to be a fool openly than be taken for one without knowing it."

  "If a host is to be a servant regardless, I would rather be a servant of the state than to the market, for the simple fact that morality at least, occasionally, enters the conscience of the state. The market's morality simply fills whatever vessel the state sets."

  "It's not about what's there, it's about choice. I'm not ideologically bound to one or the other, not entirely. I don't even mind half the shit you guys send us on because I'd do it regardless of who it came from. But private work offers choice. You can't choose the state for a career and then extract yourself out partway through."

  "Your desire to avoid the system is admirable, but you remain nonetheless a part of it, regardless of personal whim. To enter a game and lose it is to better than to not even attempt to enter it at all."

  Aimee shrugged. "I'll take my chances with my own agency. Not to mention that you guys move at a glacial pace, anyway."

  "Speed is one reason people mock the government sector in favor of the private, but the private sector has the luxury of failure. We do not. Hundreds of years of regulations and customs, iterated upon themselves, prove far more difficult to reform than a simple change in directorship."

  "On the other hand, everybody knew encouraging students to be pacifists arresting hosts was a shitty idea and you guys didn't realize it until Daigo already nuked LA."

  "Yet look ten years back, and you'll note the policy you call pacifist was responsible for ensuring that there were female rogues left to join Urasaria, rather than a line of graves martyring against it. What was once wise becomes idiotic, and what is now idiotic will one day be seen as wise."

  "Couldn't kill the Lavender Menace, though. She got you to bomb children before you killed any of her's."

  "The Lavender Menace was not the only female host of the 70s and 80s, though one wouldn't know it if they listened only to Urasaria students."

  "Still, rest of them got all of our demands from you anyway. Stupid policy to deny us any rights to begin with."

  "No one expected homosexuality to become a side-effect of hyperhumanity. Again, iteration against revolution. Our emergence proved a rupture that it took decades to fully tame, and yet tamed it largely has been."

  Aimee noted the term hyperhumanity; it was an old term for hosthood, one that had not been in mainstream usage for a few decades. "Anyway, remind me again? Lanara, outside of LA, needs her Revenant removed?"

  "The relevant details will be transmitted to your tablet. Your flight is in three hours."

  The curl of light disappeared.

  Aimee interacted much with the professional half of the government as part of her presidential duties, of course, yet the gulf of difference between them lended some credence to Jeanne's conspiratorial idea that students worked for the good government and others the bad. She knew her own domain of things with such familiarity; student Revenants and what was and was not possible, what was allowed and not; that to even wish to look into that other domain seemed to be akin to willingly stepping outsids the gill of a whale. Occasionally it was easy to believe it did not exist when it had gone long enough without impingements into her work.