CyberGene: Anyone need a Cyberhand?

Chapter 17: Mirage

Personal analysis from Lieutenant Jacob Grazhe of the known Mercenary: Mirage

She appeared as though she’d always existed. But there are virtually no records of her mentioned before the year 2489, it was around that time that Intelligence on Los Diablos’ Little Requiem virtually fell flat without a scrap of return. Mirage delved deep into our Abyss-Net servers, wrapping each thread of information from our database of criminals into a web of lies and misinformation.

As of 2496, not much has changed about what we know of her. She’s the one behind Little Requiem’s shift in management and has personal Emulects that do her bidding. Midnight, Daylight and Twilight. Other than that, she appears to identify as a female according to those who’ve spoken up to the Interrogators.

Where she appears, misfortune follows. I’ve put hundreds of hours into investigating her myself, but she’s as elusive as a ghost. Even that damn Skeleton refuses to speak of her, meaning either he doesn’t know anything or that the girl’s too good for him to give up just like the Dogwhistler. My only known lead is the mercenary who she’s known to affiliate with for more hands-on jobs; Missy.

But she pulls up even more loose threads that refuse to fit together, because why on earth would a NeoCore Inquisitor become a merc?

11:03 AM June 5th

Ripley

Claws, blood, thunder, flesh, steel, bone, rip.

Rip.

RIP.

My eyes snapped open, not a thought in the world running through them. Faintly, I noticed a few notifications running through my Lens Display.

Psyche V.0.08 has updated to V.0.09

Effect: Warp Energy can be used to control the amount of Melatonin produced by the pineal gland.

So I could directly control how sleepy I was now? I’d heard of a few Neuroframe Mods that could do that, but I’d never ever bought one simply because not feeling sleepy didn’t mean you wouldn’t feel the effects of sleepiness — you’d be an inefficient blunder of a human without knowing why. That brought me to the second alert.

Psyche V.0.09 has updated to V.0.10

Effect: Reduced mental dysfunction when under the effects of sleep deprivation.

Now that, that would be helpful and it pushed me to V.0.10… if I was right, the next update would give me a Protocol, an ability to use. I got up off the couch, stretching myself in the surprisingly comfortable nightwear I’d borrowed from Twilight… or would it be Elsa?

“Hey Twilight, thanks for letting me crash.” I said, only to receive no prompt response.

“Twilight?” I panged again.

“She’s not with you anymore.” A voice spoke from above, sitting on one of the balconies I hadn’t even noticed ran around the living room was a woman I could only describe as delicately fierce.

She was short, probably only an inch or two above five feet. I’d not been surprised to see just how much she resembled Twilight, taking all aspects of the ethereal being and bending them into a physical form. Hair divided between black-and-white, framing over an oversized puffy jacket that hung atop an inner layer of black clothing that was sleek and clung tightly to her body.

She had the beauty of Twilight’s digital perfection, and added in the imperfections found in an organic form that were rare among today’s gene-twisted population. Somehow, the light sunken bags under her eyes and irregular freckles over her face only made her more mystifying, and the small piercings of shadowy metal scaffolded her appearance into a sharp and confident form — but not outwardly proud.

No, she seemed almost retracted. Staring blankly with glowing eyes that were most definitely entirely metal, black with several rings of white condensing upon an inner star of violet. Other modifications spilled over her, slight metallic angles bordering around her ears up to her temple that I’d assumed led down into her jackets. My reasoning? Her hands were wicked with sharp claws that were the antithesis of my bulky technician’s Shardware.

“You, um… you Elsa?” The answer was obvious, but I felt it was a good starting point to get some information across. “Thanks for sending Twilight my way, she saved my life.”

“Noted.” The word was crisp and delicate, like a songbird’s whistle.

And nothing else. So I was left completely unsure of how else to understand just who Elsa was. “Did you take Twilight back?”

In response, she only raised up her sleeve where three glowing lines shone into view. The highest was a cloudy blue-white, the second was an irregularly beaming violet, and the final was a frightening black shadow with swirls of red.

I carefully probed my memories to answer. “I take it those are Daylight, Twilight and… Midnight, right? Your Personas? Never seen that sort of development of the Psyche Feature, guess it’s a long story?”

One she very much was not keen on answering, it seemed. She tapped an invisible something in her display before swiping and finally resting the cold rings of white in her glare on me. Her voice trailed quietly, a blank tone revolving out like a wheel in thoughtless motion. “Twilight’s spent too long in your head, she needs to be taken back in momentarily to prevent her from getting too rowdy.”

“How long can they spend apart from you?” I’m sorry, I was just way too curious about how she’d developed Psyche to let it go.

Her vision squinted on me, and I shrunk back a bit. I didn’t know the first thing about Elsa, I barely knew the first thing about Twilight or Mr. Skeleton. Either of them could probably kill me in my sleep, scalp my Implant, and the world would continue ticking without a care.

“You have to call me Mirage.” That bit of her voice had definition to it, an implacable moment of sturdiness I was not willing to go against. Then my thoughts flickered, my scattered memories all redoubling in their twist as I remembered the name Mirage from somewhere.

“Mirage, Mirage, Mirage…” I repeated quickly under a whisper. “I- Oh, you cracked open the Los Diablos NetShield seven years ago! Spilled out their data regarding Little Requiem, loosening their hold over the place. You- how old are you?”

Shit, you are not supposed to ask a woman her age.

Her lip lifted at that, purple lipstick now no longer confined to a straight line. “Technically… Twenty-three years old. And monopolies are bad for business.”

So she was two years older than me, but that still put her at fifteen years old for one of the most notorious hacks to ever happen in the city. “So what’s your business…? You’re clearly a DataDelver from what I get, but you strike clean and quickly before disappearing for months. No clear motives or-“

“And I’d like to keep it that way.” She got off the legs, dropping down from the railing and onto the living room floor and striding over towards me. “I work however I want.”

“So you’re not with Missy’s crew? Twilight seemed to know Diamante quite well.” I twisted my tongue discreetly. “And I doubt you’d just let yourself get hired to oversee a rookie’s initiation into Adapterhood. What are you even supposed to be for me, a guide? A protector?”

“You got me.” She said with a smirk, the first sign of any real emotion I saw on her. “I’m your fairy godmother. Missy helps me get jobs sometimes.”

“Like from… Cinderella?” I remembered what Twilight had said, even if I didn’t know what the hell it was.

“Ah, you a fan of classics?” I noticed a distinct perk in her sharp eyes as she sat on the coffee table opposite me. “20th or 21st Century?”

“Um…” I bit my lip. “21st?”

“Really? Because I noticed you didn’t have a single second of access to any Old World media-streaming port, much less could afford it.” She smirked openly now, catching me in the act.

“Okay fine.” I sighed, hoping to keep this as friendly bantering rather than a deception. “Twilight mentioned the… was it a movie?”

“Medieval fairy tale adapted into a movie.” Mirage smiled lightly, like remembering a fond memory of the past. “But that’s hardly the question you want to really ask, as it stands I know more about you than you do about me. That’s your real issue, isn’t it? Well, here’s the answer- it’s likely to stay that way.”

“Bummer.” I let it slip out of me, keeping on the friendliness despite the alarms running in my head. “Twilight mentioned you were a tough shell to crack, but you’re not even giving me a chance.”

“They will say plenty. Each of my Personas is a real personality, much to my annoyance, they all feel their own ways towards me. Twilight is very much annoyed at me half the time, so don’t let her perception turn your own askew. And besides, if you knew any more about me I’d have killed you.” She said it with a coldness I’d only ever heard Shaun manage, but then a chuckle sent my barely-contained shiver splattering.

“So um… yeah, what is it that I should be doing, exactly? I mean— I know why Missy has agreed to keep me alive with the whole deal we made, but why was I alive in the first place? At 0% Convergence she could have easily taken the Implant out of my head, the only reason she didn’t was because she thought she could gain something out of me.” All of it was a fact.

“Maybe she just didn’t feel like adding more to the vicious cycle of death and greed in the city. I certainly would have slipped your head from your body, but now it’s my job to keep them intact…” She smiled wickedly, and even then I gave her a nervous laugh…

Then I felt a cold, dread-born choke grab my breath. A fresh, searing storm of what seemed to be lava rained through my thoughts, and it took a spark of Gold into my Neuroframe to cool them.

Slipped your head from your body, just like-

Elsa- Mirage paused, my face clenched into a blank stare that flashed a momentary shift in concern over her. “Ripley? Are you- Your Personality Matrix, are you using it to suppress memories right now?”

That poured fuel over the explosive buried in my head, and I squeezed my temples tight. I saw her explode into movement, reaching to my bag without my consent but if I were to take a second off the wildfire burning through my memories then I knew it would consume me whole.

She flicked out what one could easily assume to be a broken piece of a dagger, a barely inch-long cracked piece of metal. A shimmer of artificial light passed through it every now and then, turning it from a simple piece of metal into the world’s most valuable resource. A Shard. An Iron Shard, full of Warp Energy.

A faint flow of light spread through her arms to transmute that power into the logic known as Warpcode, it was a brief haze of yellow wires snuffed by the presence of Silver barbs. Even I caught the wince she gave. A flash of a second passed and she pulled from the Shard, a thin beacon of energy colored a dull-gray squeezed between her fingers before thinning into a string.

I couldn’t ask her what she was doing as she pierced the Iron thread into my NeuroFrame and it felt like a dagger had squeezed through into my brain.

“Don’t fight it! I’m giving you a boost for an update!” She warned as several more Iron Shards were grabbed by her fingers. “Just focus on your Personality Matrix and draw from Psyche, it’ll blend together but you need to give it a directive if you want some control over it. A state or emotion to keep you together. Anything that has value for you. Your Feature’s overloading itself to keep your mind from falling apart, direct the Feature.”

Without a second thought, I submitted my agency to her suggestion and submerged my NeuroFrame with Gold threads of my own. The view of my body’s neural pathways glowed brightly, my own shiny Warp Energy delving into a series of quickly rewired patterns of dull gray.

A directive? My thoughts swarmed like a hive of buzzing wasps, each trying to sting me. Each time I stared at one ember of thought it seemed like they clawed out to me, leaving a scar that would forever haunt me.

My father’s last words to me before everything went to shit — ‘sometimes I wish I never listened to you’.

My mother, her tearful eyes as I stood by her while we lost everything to SynTec’s cover up of their sins. My dad had stayed strong then, but things went wrong so quickly.

Selene, her dead eyes. Dead because I’d performed that surgery on her.

NO!

Blood dripped down my face, I’d taken a life just yesterday? How could I forget that? Chunks of skull, chunks of brain, chunks of a living being. Once breathing, once dreaming, once alive like me.

Each ember was too much like the thousand glares I felt staring into my head when I walked down the streets of Little Requiem. They could see my Implant, they could. Hundreds of hands reached for me, stuffing my head into a chokehold where they could easily expose my neck.

What was it all for? What was I given this power for? Was it a curse, or was it karma for the shitty life I’d lived for so long. Was there some greater meaning behind that box opening there and then? Had someone chosen me?

Or was I just lucky? Maybe unlucky considering the target in my head? My mother was a target too, she could easily be used to take this Implant away from me. Maybe it would be better just to sell it off. Skeleton could arrange it, I’m sure.

“Ripley, a directive!” A voice yelled, Twilight’s voice but in a stranger’s body. Though I’d barely even known Twilight, how could I feel so comfortable with her?

Because I would have been dead without her. The pieces of me glued together with that thought, yes, I’d taken a life. But they would have taken my own. I survived by killing them, I wasn’t attacked by anyone else. They’d seen me, they knew I wasn’t worth the risk. They respected me.

All so that I could persevere. That I could stand in the silence of victory and death. It was my right, if there was one thing the Gold gave me, it was the right to live. The right to prosper.

To go headstrong first, resisting what life throws at you all to succeed. Resisting it in a fool-hardy manner, despite all thrown in my way of success. So yes, if I had to choose a directive it would be-

Preservation

I sucked in a deep breath as my world returned, clear as a crystal to see the worried yet intently focused face of Elsa. Of Mirage, grasping my Neuroframe in delicate black fingers that rewired their inner code. I wasn’t surprised that she had the Dataweaving Feature and I’d had a suspicion she needed Network in order to send off her Personas away from her body which came from Psyche. The presence of Three Features was a hallmark of a Silver, to have access to a fourth of all known powers a BUG could have… and I would have a fourth.

Shardware has been modified:-

Neuroframe: Mazhyr Metronome is now Iron-Grade

Warning: The Hardware components of the Neuroframe are limiting the performance.

Grade: Iron II

Integrity: Iron I

Energy: Iron II

Capacity: Iron I

Neuroframe Mod Installations:-

Personality Matrix (Self-Customized for the Toxin Club systems)

Feature Link has been established…

Neural Matrix [Psyche]: A modified version of the Personality-Editing Matrix to allow further modification of the body’s Nervous System. No longer limited to the Limbic System, it can now intake sensory information directly and adjust the Adapter’s motor and emotional reaction according to their edict.

Psyche V.0.10 has been updated to Psyche V.1.00

Effect: Establishing the Preservation Matrix Protocol. Greatly improves the User’s response pathway to the environment, focusing resources to improve the Adapter’s ability to persevere. Can directly link to any Shardware and their associated Feature Links to further act upon the directive of perseverance.

A Feature Protocol? Already?! This should have taken months, and it was a pretty good one at that, the ability to redirect all of my body’s resources towards survival was pretty damn fantastic considering my situation. Hell, it’d probably become that because of my situation. We were dubbed Adapters after all.

Mirage huffed on my side, not from tiredness considering she barely had a strained muscle on her face, but out of genuine relief. “Ripley, you okay?”

“Yeah…” I whispered. “I uh… I don’t know what happened.”

“How long were you using the Personality Matrix to keep yourself… from feeling grief?” Elsa frowned as she said it, her hand still firmly placed behind my neck.

“I…” My thoughts came slowly, I’d installed one in me as soon as I’d figured out how to rewrite the code to suit the club. Though it was only once I’d reconnected with Selene that I began to use it intermittently for myself. “A few years, I think since I was fifteen? And yeah, recently things have gotten a bit worse so I guess it was probably on for most of the last 24 hours…”

Elsa looked extremely disturbed by that revelation. “You need therapy, you know that right?”

“Easy to say that when you aren’t responsible for your father-“ I stopped myself, no, she already knew too much. Hell, she probably already knew about my father. “Just… It just makes things easy. I can live without being weighed down by— didn’t you sever parts of yourself too? Can’t imagine it came from a place too different from my own.”

I could feel her tense up beside me, a flash of anger that burned away into some other complex mixture of emotions, a clench of her jaw and the quiet retreat as she pulled back from me told me enough. “It’s different. Believe me… you’re not the right person to know why, but just trust me on that.”

“Haven’t got much of any reason to trust you.” I replied flatly, winded down by how quickly my brain had short-circuited.

“I did just keep your brain from exploding under… yeah no, I can’t be trusted.” She gave a self-pitying laugh, one I was too comfortable with hearing come out with my throat. “Don’t you know, the name Mirage tends to convey things that don’t exist.”

“And the name Ripley tends to refer to a guy who can barely keep his shit together, now suddenly gifted with a mansion for a brain.” My own laugh was too similar to hers, and I got the sense that she noticed with how intent her blank stare into the unknown could be.

“Ripley… This life isn’t for you.” She held her body stiffly.

“What life?” I leaned out of the imprint I’d left on the couch.

“You know… the kind you were thinking you’d get when you met Missy and heard of the Gold Implant in your head. The type where you’d imagine yourself suddenly getting kickass powers to cripple the system and bring it down, we don’t do that… we barely even keep our own lives from falling apart. You said you wanted change, and believe me, we all start that way, but- but we don’t stay that way. We do change, we twist until you barely recognize the person in the mirror.”

“Are you talking about mercenaries in general?” I’d finally decided I could let go of what I’d suspected they all were. “Or Psyche Shard-Adapters specifically?”

“Both,” I couldn’t tell if her glare was angry or sad. “Combined and separate. If I were you, I’d take the comfortable way… even though our entire life we’re told to do the opposite. In case it wasn’t clear, I’d wanted you to go to Skeleton so that the route was there for you. You could downgrade to a Silver and spend the rest to get a proper legitimate business running up in a few months.”

“To sell my Implant.” My tongue was heavy. “I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that and… neither does my mother. I’m going to get the money to have her get a Silver of her own… I will. But I also want this, to reach the place I think I could get with my Implant. Because-“

“Because you have perfect compatibility. Never thought I’d see one in my life. Nonetheless it’s two separate Adapters from the same MAL… you know you’ve stumbled onto something big.” Elsa revealed that she did know, so she’d seen Twilight’s memories.

“Take it you know about my glowing nipple too then.” I half-choked, half-chuckled.

Her ears got a little red at that, and I’d been so used to her — Twilight’s — face immediately jumping to tease me about it that I almost felt bad for putting the clearly more timid girl in the situation. “Yeah… I know about everything, even your insight into Dogwhistler.”

That got my attention, like a hook speared through my mouth to open it. “You know anything?”

“Some. But I know that once I share that with you, it goes to Diana Ul- Diana Jones. Her investigation would complicate my own. Dogwhistler is both more powerful and more covert than anyone could ever expect in the city, an enigma that’s proven equally beneficial to the law and the lawless.”

I still couldn’t help but find some measure of this conversation humorous. “Seems more like an urban legend at this rate.”

Elsa looked grim, and it seemed like that expression fell naturally on her face. “You wouldn’t be far off from the truth. Who knows if it’s one person or a group, an AI Emulect or a real person. If you thought my own reach was as hidden as it is far, then you don’t have the slightest clue of the tiny snippet of a name you’ve heard.”

A brief silence cut through the two of us, and I’d wondered if I’d run this talk into the ground. “So… I’m a small man caught up in a big world.”

“Very small man. Very big world.” She said it like it was a warning, but I couldn’t help but find some pleasure in knowing that. That there was so much to explore. Was it naivety? Maybe. “Look, just, get a grasp on your Implant for now, if it develops in a way that you like… keep it. If you think you want something specialized then-“

“I’m keeping it, there’s no two ways about it.” I don’t know where my sudden confidence, my trust, in the device came from but something… profound was telling me to keep it. Something so viscerally raw that it beat right next to my heart through the rest of my body, perhaps my compatibility or even the new Preservation Matrix Feature protocol. “But uh… yeah, I’d like a tip or two. I know my way around the technical aspects of Shardware, used to tune Lucille’s Bronze-Grade eyes not too long ago, but the code always escaped me. Numbers are just too large to crunch without a direct uplink into their greater meaning…”

“That’s because you’re thinking of Warp Energy based data as real code, it’s not the 1s and 0s of Standard Grade stuff.” Elsa remarked, almost offended at the simple description.

Yup, definitely a Dataweaver Adapter. I found an amused grin fall on top of me. “Tell me then, what did you do to my Neuroframe?”

She froze in thought, running her finger along a piercing right below her lip. “Just opened it up to your own mind, gave it a boost of Warpcode. The advent of Warp Energy fell along with the First Swarm, that much you know. Then you must also know about the Old_Data, all collections of mankind’s knowledge pre-collapse now under control of a MALtitan. Information from before the Solar Flare at the end of the 21st century crippled an already post-apocalyptic world.”

“Learned as much from my mother.”

“Then you know that the data was never truly lost, it was fried and scattered around trillions of known datapoints. And when the swarm attacked, they crept into the old world’s knowledge, condensing all of the archives and re-establishing old comms… anything that ran on 1s and 0s or electricity. Except, the introduction of Warp Energy into the code changed it… or more precisely it allowed the code to change everything around it. Warp Energy; a classification of chaos and alteration. Binary code; a rulebook defined by electrical circuits with precise — often stifling — order.”

I nodded, understanding most of what she said.

“Combined, their reaction was odd to say the least. Within organic beings, Warp Energy mutates them to be extraordinary with Mutagen. And when collapsed into physical objects it can tend to bolster their material strength, allowing the creation of so-called Warp Materials. But with code, and in particular with code designed for Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, it accelerates that process infinitely so. The main directives pushed so far that they — true to its name — warp into something else entirely. In a sense, Warpcode is nothing more than digitized thought derived from the Old_Data. The smallest embers of it simply repurposed under new orders to follow a certain set of commands, that, yeah, we copied as old 1s and 0s, but now can exist as… as well 2s, 3s, negatives and imaginary numbers and whatnot. Quantum processing taken off the rails by an energy frankly no one knows shit about.”

I thought I knew where she was going, then I didn’t. “So you’re saying that… what? No one knows what it is?”

“It’s not about what it is. It’s about how you use it, its nature and… tendencies. I view it as a storm that I need to catch with nets I weave, blowing that chaotic mess into bubbles and then into specific shapes and commands.” She cast her glassy gaze off to the side, a darkness laying in those amethyst depths. "I take those bubbles and make shapes out of them, stringing them along threads of code like a necklace or bracelet."

I snorted. “That’s kind of cute.”

She huffed a tight breath, but I noticed the smallest nervous flick from her eyes. “A common one people take is a tapestry, threads of information pieced together inch by inch in different flavors to tell a larger story. Hence the Feature Dataweaving being named from Mazhyr’s interpretation. In short, don’t think of it as a rule book or language, think of it as a material you can shape and alter depending on your control over Aeth- over Warp Energy.”

“I still don’t really get it, but thank you. So you basically just bubbled my Neuroframe with Iron-Grade Warpcode you took... (or made?) from the Shards. I get that… but how did you-“

“I only fed it.” She finished for me. “Everything else you managed subconsciously, focusing a directive upon your eature to link it to your nervous system. Considering you had an active mod on your Frame with the Personality-Editing Matrix, it quickly adapted that with the purpose you defined.”

“Hence the name Feature Link… Damn… You know I think I’m getting it a bit.”

“If you didn’t, you’d be an idiot.” She snarled like a knife had been stabbed through her, an abrupt switch so quick that I physically recoiled like the car I’d been in had come to a sudden stop. I stared, blankly, at her eyes.

Eyes that were once a dull violet. They were now a deep red. She shook her head like a fly was buzzing around it, grabbing a fistful of hair as the red blinked away into a calmer violet. “Shit… sorry. They do that sometimes.”

“Your Personas?”

“That was Midnight.” She didn’t meet my gaze and instead made herself smaller by pulling her knees to her chest, that purple stare drifting off to some unknown piece at the back of her mind.

“Yeah… we’re similar, alright.” I whispered under my breath, before raising my voice. “So um… yeah, I get that you’re supposed to watch over me and keep me from getting myself killed but anything else you can tell me? Like, what exactly am I supposed to do?”

“Whatever you want, once your month is up.” She spoke in a whisper just barely heard on the edge of my ears. “I wish I was in your place.”

“I just don’t get why?” In all my life, I knew that often things were too good to be true. “The Gold in my head is fuck-you worths of money, it fails me to understand then—“

“Because Missy values your life more than the Implant, she might be the only person in this entire city to see you that way.” She had an air of finality to her tone, standing up and heading towards the door which opened with a quick touch of her palm. “I’ll be in contact with you.” She flicked her finger and I received a Sigil-share request, there wasn’t much she would get from mine that she didn’t already know, so I accepted it.

A new Contact has been established: Mirage

I nodded, heaving up my bag after ensuring it’d been zipped tight. It didn’t seem like anything had been taken from me, but most of this would be worthless to her anyway.

Step by step, I reached her door frame and politely dipped my head. “I’ll be seeing you then, Mirage. And once again, thank you.”

The voice that spoke back was undoubtedly a different, more cheery one. In her gaze, violet eyes of a much brighter shade had replaced the duller ones. “And what about me? You don’t want to see me too, or have you already gotten a better taste for my fleshier fourth?”

I pulled back my conflicted confusion, before nodding at the Persona invoked into flesh. “You too Twilight, I’ll be seeing you too.”

She smiled, closing the door. Then I heard a scream. “How many times have I told you girls to beha-!“ Which abruptly paused, becoming a quieter mumble I couldn’t decipher.

There was nothing more for me to do here, so I lifted the bag closer to me and made my way into the elevator, relaxing against the steel wall as it smoothly glided downwards.

“You did amazing! I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone open her up like that!” A voice startled me, pricking me up and jostling the elevator around with how fiercely I rebounded.

There she was, Mirage — or perhaps closer to Twilight since she was holographic — except all the darkness had drained away until she only remained a beacon of light, even her hair was a falling cascade of perfect snowing curls. She wore clothes similar to what Twilight had been wearing, a perfectly trimmed and smooth dress except where Twilight’s had portions of tattered shadows. It draped down elegantly over her curves which were much more confidently shown off by either of them.

“Daylight! A pleasure to make your acquaintance! Ooooh, I've heard so much about you! I can't wait for us to be friends~!” Her voice was a soothing melody, very much Mirage’s, but the stiffness and reservation was now a beaming enthusiasm that shone from sapphire blue eyes. “Wow, you’re really jumpy, but don’t worry! I’m not as mean as the other three are!”

“I, uh-“ God just who had I been paired up with of all people? “Nice to meet you?… Daylight.”

I raised up my hand, unsure as she stared at me with her intense blue eyes that twinkled like jewels. She shook it with hands that phased through mine like a ghost, but instead of the tense cold I’d felt with Twilight, a basking warmth ran up to my shoulder.

“My pleasure, Ripley! Also, I should warn you.”

I perked up. “About what?”

She poked my head. “You dummy, you never called your mother.”