Mina pushes the large airlock door inward. The smell of burnt capacitors hits her nose, and the glow of Josh's orange work lamp lights the sphere of this main room.  She shuts the large metal door behind her, its hinges silent and well-oiled. She pulls the giant boom behind it shut, then removes her blades from her back and hangs them on the wall next to the door.  

She stares at them, her reflection a little marred by the red rust of blood.  Her cheek is red and inflamed, the pink diamond light and sparkling. Like a spike Kakos has embedded into her.  The surrounding lines of the K are horrifying.  "I want to own that piece of you."  Kakos rises in her memory, setting her heart pounding.  The blood rushes to her cheeks and her fresh wound hurts worse.  

She unfocusses from her face, and looks at the grin of her blades.  They are dirty from their kill, and she needs to clean them.  But not yet.

"Glad you're back." Josh walks in from an adjoining pod, ducking his head as he moves.  He is tall and too slim.  His bones could carry a greater frame, if only she had enough food to fill them.  His collar bone in particular juts out from under his loose shirt.  Is it getting worse? His wasting away? 

She rips her gaze from his skeletal appearance and looks to his bright green eyes.  Their mother's eyes. Mina is the odd one out in their family, with some weird mix of her father's brown broken up by lines of maroon.  

Josh sweeps back his shoulder-length blond hair and gestures with a sheepish smile to his workbench. "There's um a...rust roast over there I was hoping you could take care of."

It is a relief.  For all her worry about Rylin, it is nice to be asked to do some mundane task. "What, the big bad baby crab out to get you?"

Josh runs a hand up the back of his neck, "More like eat my capacitors.  Smell that? The thing is practically farting them out."

Mina's shoulders relax. She wanders over to the Josh's workbench.  His tools are spread across it, many mechanized to work with microscopic parts.  His large glass magnifier displays some current work on his bass-spheres which he trades with other humans for clothing and scavenge.  Mina has several loaded down her suit leggings.  They are excellent distractors in a fight.

There is a clank and a scuttle from one corner.  Mina spots the Armis crab, its two front claws pulling at a large bolt and balancing it on to its back, where it carries a mobile home of metallic parts that offer both protection and food when it needs it.  It's long metallic antennae comb over the desk.  Mina reaches a hand forward, tentatively, and then slowly bumps the crab so that it scuttles onto her palm, while keeping its newest treasure affixed to its metallic-shelled home.  Its heavy for its small size, a good twenty pounds in her one hand.

"Aw Josh come see, it's only a baby." 

Josh crosses his arms and leans his tall frame into the curve of the wall. "I can see just fine from here. Honestly, must we keep it around?"

*hungry* The crab's voice nudges.  Its thoughts lack the complexity of the blind serpents.

Mina gently transfers the crab back into its bucket by the door, slipping it a bolt from the nearby tub of scavenge, which it catches and begins to nibble at with its maxillipeds. "You know this one keeps the rest away.  Or did you want to be visited by a larger version and have half our wall eaten for lunch?"

Josh waves his hands, "Ug. Don't remind me." He heads back in behind his desk, pausing as he passes her. He hesitates then reaches a hand up to her face.  His thumb and fingers are smooth, un-callused, gentle.  He turns her damaged cheek towards his gaze and gives a long sigh. "So. Kakos."

Under Josh's empathetic gaze Mina feels the dam inside her threatening to break.  They are the older two siblings, and sometimes the weight of their survival falls between them.  Josh understands. He adds, "There's got to be a better way Mina."

Mina pulls away, "What's one more scar? I got the water didn't I?"

She comes to stand before the shelf where the avatars have deposited the water trophy.  It sits next to the other, nearly empty container. "Where's Dee?"

Josh settles into his desk, "She's been a little down. Rylin hasn't been answering her messages."

Mina's chest constricts.  Her heart falls down a hole in a silent scream. What am I, to have done this?

Josh meets her gaze, reads her face. His face pales."Ash no." Josh looks down the back hallway and then back to Mina. He picks up his tools, hands shaking.  For once he seems out of comforting words, out of reassurances.  

Mina can't move. She feels naked. Ripped. Disconnected. Would it have been better if I'd let Rylin live and myself die in those sands instead?

Dee chooses this moment to emerge from the back area, holding a bucket.  She is a pale tiny thing.  Her hair blond like Josh's, like their mother and her eyes the same matching green.  But while Josh is a tall skeleton waiting to fill out, Dee looks like a crumpled butterfly.  Her pale skin is dotted with blueish-green bruises, especially under her eyes.  Whenever Mina looks at Dee, she thinks of their mother in her last days, sick and dying in bed.  How long does Dee have? I can keep them safe from the monsters of Phebetor, bring them food and water...but what can I do about the poisonous air of Typhon?  We carry faint traces of Poseidon's blood in our veins, and Typhon has to be the antithesis to water.  It killed our mother. And it's killing Dee.

Mina's insides chill as Dee approaches. Dee moves slow.  Mina can tell right away she is sad, but trying to hide it. She glances at Mina's diamond scar then back to Mina. "I thought I'd spoil our symbionts with your trophy, they're overdue for a bath."

Josh fumbles with tools behind, and they clink. "That's nice Dee." He says, his voice a little hoarse.

Mina peers into the bucket.  Three nearly translucent skins are immersed under barely an inch of water.  It is a lot, but what they have agreed upon in the past.  Dee's symbiont zips about under the water, small but active.  Josh's moves more slowly, spinning slow circles.  And Mina's, largest and oldest of them all lies at the bottom of the bucket, still.  Mina wonders if it's dead. No less than I deserve, perhaps.

Dee puts the bucket down at Mina's feet, sitting down next to it.  She slides her hand in and her symbiont eagerly latches onto her wrist, settling about like a bracelet.  Dee smiles, faint, "It hums to me sometimes I think.  Does yours do that Mina?" 

Mina shrugs.  Her throat has closed up.  Josh sniffs over by his desk.  He's a mess over Rylin and trying to cover it up.

Mina reaches into the bucket, all the way to the bottom.  The water is bliss to touch.  They can't have bath's here, have no lakes, no rivers or oceans like Oceanus, where her mother was born, or like Earth, as her father describes it.  She swishes it about, enjoying the feel, something inside of her eases.  Then she reaches down and brushes the back skin of her symbiont.

It moves, barely, sluggish.  It has probably suffered the most out of all three because it is the oldest and largest, and needs more to survive.

"Hard to imagine these will someday grow to be protective suits like mom described.  She said the symbionts are the backbone to a Poseidon warrior's power."  Dee murmurs as she plays with hers, brushing it gently with her fingers.

Mina clears her throat. "I would love to see yours full-grown."

Dee smiles.  Her skin colour improves a little, the symbionts help with that.  "What don't you get yours on Mina? It might help with your..." Dee glances at her stinging cheek.

Mina's symbiont is loathe to leave the water.  But as her hands slide towards it, it moves, slowly, fluttering up her right arm until it has formed a transclucent sleeve from wrist to shoulder.  It settles, its thoughts a muffled mystery.  Mina doubts it has energy enough to speed her healing when it is barely alive itself.  "Thanks Dee."

"Yah." She says, her face falling. "It's been quiet on the message board today." She shares, her head down.

Be brave, Mina. You owe her the truth.

Josh drops a tool under his desk. He bends down, and Mina catches him wiping at his face as he does. 

Dee looks to Josh, "You okay?"

Josh hides his face behind his tools, "Something in my eye."

"I didn't get to the trigonometry Mina.  I just...what's the point? I'm not like you. There's no A to B on the map for me. I'm not going out there leaping over serpents. There's just C.  You know. The outlier. Here forever, right?"

Dee stares at Mina. And Mina stares back. I have done a terrible job at keeping my promise.  Is this what mom would have wanted for Dee? Hopeless? Lost? Trapped? Sick? 

And the only words she has left are stuck in her throat. Can my sister survive knowing?

Mina opens her mouth.  Closes it. Clears her throat.  Looks at Dee.  Dee looks back, suspicious. "What?  That's nothing new. What is it?"

Mina glances to her blades for reassurance.  But then realizes what she's doing and looks back at Dee, opening her mouth again, but again...there are no words for this! 

Dee's brows fly up.  She looks to Josh's blotchy face, then back to Mina. "What could it possibly be to make Josh cry and you a mute?"

Her sister looks again at the blades, then back to Mina. Her eyes light with some terrible understanding. "No."

Mina gets a shiver down her back at Dee's tone.  It is a feral, guttural sound. 

"No you did not." Dee's eyes widen. She stands, bumping the bucket of water and sloshing it about.

Mina finds herself reaching for Dee.  But Dee is pulling back. Her voice is now a strange toneless whisper, "Tell me you did not."

Mina opens her mouth, but she cannot give her sister the answer she wants.  

Dee's face crumples, her emotions crest, crash and tsunami. She launches herself at Mina with a howl:

 "HOW COULD YOU!! HOW COULD YOU! HOW COULD YOU TAKE THE ONE GOOD THING!!!" 

Mina let's Dee scratch and claw at her neck, her arms, her chest armour.  Her sister cocks her right hand back in a punch Mina could well have avoided.  But she lets it land, right in the eye over the cheek Kakos recently burnt.  The pain is a distant ring to watching her sister unravel. 

"Dee!" It is Josh. His hand lands on Dee's shoulder, pulling her off Mina.

Dee wrenches back, tripping over the bucket and falling back into the platform holding their water. Which should be relatively secure, only she hits the supportive latch with her elbow and the shelf collapses.  The water containers falls, the nearly empty one bounces unharmed, but the newest, fullest, heaviest trophy splits right in two and splashes out upon the gridded floor of the bunker, seeping into the aging cracks of metal and vanishing into the desert sand below.

Josh, Mina and Dee all freeze in horror.  Dee leans forward first, reaching for the broken container and trying to save a bit of water caught in the corners.  She splays her hands over the grid, trying to wet them, as if she could collect the drips and slip them back into the broken shell.  "It's okay." She cries. "It's okay.  We'll be okay."

Josh leans down and scoops Dee into his arms.  She buries her face in his shoulder, "I didn't mean, I just..." and she breaks again into quiet broken sobs.

Mina is empty inside. Rylin and the water are gone.  Half her face is a mess, and the day she thought was done is just beginning. She stands, reaching for her blades and slinging them into their sheaths on her back.

"Mina?" Josh calls.  "Mina? What are you doing? There aren't anymore Evisceredge fights until next cycle...Mina?"

Mina shrugs, inside she is a thousand bolts of pain, a thousand failures, a thousand disappointments to Dee, and herself. She brushes a hand to her cheek. "Well, " she grimaces, "it seems I have a connection I can call upon."

Dee's sobs drop off.  "Go to Kakos?" 

Mina's already unlatching the door.  Josh puts a hand to her shoulder and gives it a squeeze.  Mina nods, unable to look back.  She doesn't want to see Dee's face. Because I don't know whether I should apologize, or punch her in the face. 

She steps out into the dark sand.  She hear's Dee's voice behind her, "Murderer."

"I'll do my best." Mina replies, and then pushes forward back towards Phebetor.