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Convalescence

Hey listeners. I know you want to hear about Polity; they are alive and I’ll tell you about them very soon, promise. But before we start, I need to discuss what happened to Lea te Suldan station.

By the time this episode releases, depending on how things go over the next few days, my listeners may be experiencing one of two different outcomes. The first would be a… firestorm of news coverage. Your buffer feeds might be overflowing with rumor articles, arguing pundits, speeches, perhaps even declarations of embargo or war. You might find yourself butting heads in the myriad columns of the buffer. You’ll assuredly see a lot of fear and confusion, but nobody will be in any real danger, I think. No. That’s not true. Few people in Sol will be in danger.. If you live in the colonies… I’m so sorry. Things are going to get harder.

Or the second option--maybe you’ll hear nothing. Maybe business will proceed as usual. No changes to the larger world of politics, security, the market might even be booming. In a few decades you might start seeing new trends coming from Therevatti, which you’ll absolutely call Le Straud. Food and travel and architecture. The romance of an alien paradise that, against cosmic odds, evolved independently to be a wonderful little tourist retreat. People will still complain about the rain, travel advisories will caution against the deep jungle, the odd guerrilla will ransom the odd traveler, but the civil war will be over. I don’t really know what I’ll be doing in this outcome. In a year or two, maybe I’ll return to podcasting, after I finish mourning.

But listeners, you have to understand that, in the time that this episode was written, none of this had happened. All my attention wasn’t focused on the future, it was focused on the small, violently hemorrhaging person I held in my arms. It was spent cursing a lifetime of putting off that EMT training I always wanted to get, at how I considered myself so goddamn smart, yet felt helpless to save a friend. So we pick up a little while after we left off. Me, at the drop-doors of a bicycle shop, pounding meat against metal, forcing air through aching lungs, screaming for help.

Polity may have been shot in the chest by an antique firearm, but it was at close range, and repeatedly. It was why I was half convinced that they were just… dead when I dragged them back to the bicycle shop’s garage. But by then I was all momentum. I felt that if I looked at them too hard, they’d die on the spot.

I didn’t have to wait long. Maybe the owners really were good people, ah, previous attempt at knife murder notwithstanding.

The shutter came up, and behind it towered the broad boned body of Eldest Sister. She froze, shoulders blocking my path, attention locked to the bloody water dripping from Polity’s jacket. Her fingers pressed white against the interior door frame, grease streaking her knuckles and neck.

“Don’t just stare at us,” I urged, “help them! Please!”

I’m Oscar Yasui, formerly a professional food critic, currently an independent food journalist, and you’re listening to Gastronaut.

It was her father that shouldered past, sending Eldest staggering backwards, face still locked in that glower of disaffected strength. A mask worn so long that it had locked to the face beneath.

But where Eldest was helpless stone, her father was rushing water. Thickly accented interrogatives poured my way, some of them in a code I’d only later understand as medical terminology. The trained language of triage, staccato birdsong delivered in the vicinity of those too busy dying to feel afraid.

“They were shot,” I said.

“Ok,” he said, his face engraved with a rigid sort of sympathy, “I’s helping them, uhh… badly way, yes? Gee Ess, double U.”

“GSW,” I repeated, “what is that?”

He waved me away. He said something, a sharp blur of words, a command, to Eldest Sister. She responded in Thetti, the concern and protest evident in her voice. I think she wanted to help her father, to remain at his side. He shook his head, his next words carried considerably more force. She nodded, ran for the door, opened it more with her heavy shoulder than her hands. Her father tore open Polity’s shirt.

It’s a… vivid memory, still. Even months later, it tends to… unmoor me from the present, if that makes any sense.

Their torso was smeared crimson. A gash wept red high on the right side of their chest, with a sibling injury on their interior bicep. A graze right between body and limb, bleeding with a persistent aggression. There was a second hole in their abdomen and it bled a thick stream of almost black blood. On exposure, these injuries filled the room with the iron tang of violence.

But neither wound, awful as they were, could hold a candle to the third. It held center stage, a lion among the rest. So grevious that even with my limited medical knowledge it chilled my blood.

“Oh Saints, no, no, no,” I moaned, “their heart--their heart.”

A puckered hole, inflamed and steaming, rested on the left side of Polity’s chest, right where a hand would touch to find a beat.

The father did not pale, he barely slowed. He took a look at it, and his eyes fluttered for one single instant.

“Fine,” he said, sharply, noticing my face, “they going fine.” His smile was breezy, practiced. But the knit of his eyebrows, the frown in his eyes, told a very different story.

I slumped against the cart, trembling. All the stress, the lack of sleep, the pain from being hurled through a glass door, it finally boiled up, seemingly out of my skeleton. I did my best to just breathe. Of the four of us, Polity stirring on the table, Eldest Sister running up the street, and her father, working through his motions as an EMT, I was the only one who wasn’t moving.

“No, no” the father jerked a finger in the direction of Polity, “up, up, they needing you. Go-go-go.”

I nodded, nearly killed myself trying to use a wheeled cart to help me stand.

I had never treated any injury larger than a severe cut, and never with a tool more complicated than a rag, a skin patch, or a trip to the hospital. I always saw injuries as… a mistake. A binary. A wrong that needed to be set right. But with Polity on that table, with the experience of father at my side, I had a thought.

An injury is a mystery, a void that has opened up in a person. Where, if it remains unsolved, that person will die.

And solving that puzzle, to heap metaphor like mashed potatoes, is a three course meal. Or I suppose… a three course meal is how my trauma lensed our actions that night. The way I learned to understand them.

The first course is an appetizer, it’s meant to tide guests over, and so we started hemorrhage control. Self expanding foam, neon green against pale, blood streaked flesh, antiseptic to the nose. The father had me hold back Polity’s clothing, gently pinning them, as he went to work with a foam gun, spraying controlled bursts into each cavity. Then came winding sheets of bandages, wrapped around and around the arm and the torso. Each roll shot through with glittering optic fibers, self tightening with a gentle sigh of air, keeping blood and foam in place, pulling unnecessary air through a clever network of capillary ventilation.

The second course, the soup course, was all about liquids. The father rummaged in a hidden compartment inside the shelves, withdrawing some wobbling bags of self warming, type-agnostic blood. He had me clutch Polity’s upper arm, pressing until a vein stood out, before he threaded a hooked needle through its wall. Filling their struggling arteries with a fresh infusion of oxygen transporting cells.

Now, the main course was a full check of Polity’s body. A dance of fingers, positions, more unknown phrases in Thetti. There was the chin thrust to open the airway and clean finger sweeps of every inch of their body. I almost protested, somehow still concerned with Polity’s modesty, but fell silent when his fingers came away freshly bloodied. A gash on the back of Polity’s head was turning their hair into a raft of scabs. Secret injuries, necessitating more foam, more bandages.

And finally, a surprise dessert of reflective thermal blankets. I was baffled by the father’s choice to include these, but we cleared away Polity’s soaked clothes and swaddled them until they looked, I’m sorry Polity, like a particularly lanky baked potato.

The father took note of my confusion. “Blood it is warm,” he sighed, “I seen… many die cold,” his eyes remained focused, but I could feel a distant memory playing behind them.

“Thank you,” I said. He grinned weakly in reply.

Polity had been in and out through this process. Moaning in pain. A good sign, despite how awful the noises they made were. In situations as bad as these, my brain became… overwhelmed with bad news. I skipped over the blood and the wailing and started to drill in on any little sign. A stir of fingers. Verbal cries instead of agonized vowel sounds. Flailing swipes of the hand against the father was a sign they were still fighting, right? If they were screaming, their airway was clear, right? I was a gambler, licking my lips, squinting at the roulette, willing a positive pattern to manifest from shapes and noise. Polity almost made it easy. A messy hole sat above their heart, a tunnel to that beating organ, and yet they just… didn’t stop breathing, didn’t stop groaning.

Seemingly, through no choice of their own, Polity refused to die.

Two days passed before I saw Polity again. The backstreets doctors dropped them off at the door of our makeshift hideout. They were rolled up in a carpet, presumably to avoid the suspicion that transporting bodies tends to bring. I had to… I had to unpack them. Had to read a series of care instructions someone had tied around their wrist. Polity was loopy from their injuries, from the drugs. They were alive. The instructions said that this was no guarantee. That they needed antibiotics for the fecal breach, excellent hydration, daily changing of the bandages, and naturally, at least two meals a day. The care instructions made clear the importance of it. They read; “Polity won’t want to eat, they’ll struggle to keep food down. Make ‘em. Otherwise the body will start doing what the body does best and digest itself. That’ll hurt in a way the painkillers won’t stop.”

Our appetite will always get its meal, listeners. It’ll always find an entre. If not something on a plate, then autophagy, self consumption, will do just fine. The most forbidden of forbidden snacks.

We waited out Polity’s condition over in that overturned, overgrown shed near the edge of the jungle. We had some cooking supplies. A half full bag of rice, some garlic powder, some slightly limp green onions. What the bicycle family could spare, shoved into a loudly colored shopping bag and thrust into my arms. I had supplemented with whatever I could purchase with my remaining funds, whatever was left after my death march with Ungerson. A second hand purchase of a portable cooking stove, a Kenneman’s Ranger’s Rest, an assortment of mushrooms, spices, beans, all dried. No matter how I prepared our meals, the end result was typically gruel. Sometimes grain gruel, sometimes vegetable gruel, sometimes broth gruel.

It wasn’t enough.

I often skipped meals. I’d pour both of us bowls of watery soup, bobbing with newly swollen mushrooms and spiral peels of vegetables. I’d make conversation, stirring my bowl, eating once for every three spoonfuls that Polity had. Then when the infection dragged them back down, I’d pour my leftovers back into the pot, add a bit more water, and cover it in preparation for the next day. If Polity knew the difference, they didn’t mention it. They hated all of my soups equally.

And so each dinner was last night’s dinner. Some evenings my stomach would growl, and I’d think of how loudly I’d complained about the Goodenough Kanemori. It was an exploitative rust bucket that forced its passengers to sift garbage, but at least there you could get meal kits.

It still wasn’t enough. Polity wasn’t getting better off this diet, they were getting worse. The bicycle family, Eldest Sister and company, they weren’t coming out to help us. They had drawn too much attention from PriSec and trying to make trips out to help us ran the risk of a visit from some heavy booted thugs. Nobody was going to walk to the door and give us something nutritious for free.

We were on our own.

“Do you regret saving my life?”

It was the second week, another evening of meager soup, its smell more water than spice. Polity was sitting up now, talking about anything but the day they rescued me. At the time, I thought it was a sign they were getting better. I would be proven wrong a few days later when they shivered and shook in their sleep.

They were quiet for a while. They used to be so fast when they answered me. Quick with their words, with their hands.

“…No,” they answered.

“Okay,” I said.

But we were far from okay, obviously. But… a relationship is a hard thing to fix when every waking moment is spent on healthcare. Their wound was red and angry, but the bleeding was gradually going down. Still, each plug of foam, each swathe of bandage was soaked with something: Pus. Yellow and green, fecal and rotten to the nose. A welt was forming on their abdomen. Like a tomato was growing beneath their skin.

The infection consumed our focus. Their consciousness. My sanity. I kept referring back to the notecard that the Meat Wagon had provided, instructions scratched with a red pen.

“If Polity starts hyperventilating, becomes delirious, and sweats at room temperature, give them one of each pill. It’ll hold off the sepsis long enough to say your goodbyes.”

There’s a tragic heroism to a death by heartshot. But we don’t treat a gutshot with the same reverence, and for good reason. The injury, it swelled, engorged into the gap between the two of us. Filled our interactions with reek and pus and blood flecked foam.

And while the wound festered, we festered too.

A few days later, when Polity’s fever had set their teeth to chattering, when the only thing about them that wasn’t pale was their gunshot wound, raised and angry, jagged red streaks around it like the tentacles of some fiery octopus:

Like an idiot, that was when I tried to patch something other than their wounds.

“So, if you could eat anything you wanted,” I said, ladling out another bowl of lumpy, recycled, slop, “what would you eat?”

“Oscar…” Polity said.

“Cmon,” I gave Polity the best smile I could muster. Sweat beaded down their forehead. Their blonde hair looked as if it was painted on. “You can pick anything.”

“I don’t want to eat anything,” they said, clutching their dinner more for warmth than any kind of appetite, “I can barely eat this shit.”

“I haven’t had ice cream in awhile,” I plowed ahead. The rain was flogging the overturned roof of our shed, tearing at the tarps to get in. “How about you?”

Polity didn’t reply. I threw a glance over my shoulder as I fought to keep the tarps from collapsing. They had pushed away their bowl, turned on their side. At first I thought they had fallen asleep, or even passed out.

But no. Polity stared at the opposite wall. Ignoring me.

I thought back to that night in the garage. After we had finished wrapping Polity up, the father brought out a sheet metal tray and a pair of tweezers so he could pluck glass from my open wounds. I asked if Polity was going to make it.

He worked his molars against each other, said something under his breath in Thetti. He had fired up a small electric torch and was running its blue arcs across the tweezers. Sterilizing it I guess.

“More this… ah, they is very sick. Very badly. Bullets they,” he paused, rubbing a hand over his face, another complaint in Thetti, “bullet journey it… wander crooked….” he finished, irritation spiking through his practiced professional mask.

What he was trying to communicate in the hodge podge nightmare language of Sol Standard, better suited to commerce than education, is that bullets are funny little guys. Their path through the air is that gentle arc of ballistic trajectory. That same killing tangent we’ve sent each other's way since… throwing rocks on the plains of Africa I guess. But once a bullet strikes flesh, it’ll take a walk. It’ll meander diagonal, yaw horizontal, turn bones into killing shrapnel, turn organs into jellied tunnels.

In the end, all the similes and metaphors break down under their own weight. It’s a literary coping mechanism, listeners. To save you the trouble of me writing “Ungerson shot Polity” over and over again, for fifteen pages of script.

Eldest Sister returned just as her father finished. At her back was a tight cluster of people, each in patched rainjackets and industrial rebreather masks.For a moment, I thought we were being raided by a gang of Dustpunk cosplayers, but then I focused my tired eyes and saw their backpacks.

Each carried an organized kit, packed tightly into whatever space was available in their canvas bags. Wrapped beneath waterproof plastic, I saw the coil of surgical tubing, the round bodies of IF bags, the glint of rows of small and delicate metal tools.

They looked to the father, to Polity, then finally to me. But then… something else caught their attention.

In my fatigue, my pain, my desperate tunnel vision, I hadn’t noticed the crate of newly produced rifles, each firearm stacked in soldierly rows, each barrel port a blackened tunnel emerging from a tarp the color of olives.

Our new guests were quiet. Some turned their glance to Polity. One casually relaxed her shoulder, and let her arm inconspicuously droop so as to bring her hand closer to her hip, where I was certain a hidden sidearm waited.

Eldest Sister made a face like a teenager whose parents were embarrassing her. With quick strides she crossed between myself and our guests, knelt at the crate, flipped the tarp over the top, and savagely kicked it until it came to a halt beneath a rack of incomplete bicycle frames. Then she rose, flung her hands into the air with an expression of childish exasperation and crossed back across the room to where she began. She grunted something in the rolling musical pops of Thetti, like a songbird’s curse.

I almost didn’t catch the slight nod she gave me. Mouth hard as ever, but a glimmer of respect in her eyes. I silently thanked her. Our guests relaxed, the issue of my status as a stranger resolved. A few came forward to inspect Polity. One fumbled in his jacket, where something muffled and mechanical clicked three times.

The outside door opened again, admitting a couple hundred raindrops and a sixth, bejacketed figure. He stood over me, his dark blue slicker dripped with water, his body smelling strongly of peroxide and wood, which did little to cover the fact that he needed a shower.

“Hey, we’re the Meat Wagon,” he said, with a fatigue that seemed to rival my own. He looked between Polity and I. “You’re injured,” he pointed a surprisingly well manicured nail at me, then shifted it to Polity “they’re even worse.”

“There isn’t any sugarcoating this,” he said, “just looking at the bullet holes you’ve got, I can tell you straight away that Polity’s not going to make it.”

I already knew that in my heart, but it didn’t make his answer less painful to hear. He continued, almost bored, as if he was reading a script.

“Me and mine can help you both. We’ve worked with lots like this, we’ve worked with worse than this, but we have to move fast,” he flicked his eyes to a digital watch he wore on his wrist, as if to prove the point. “And if we help you, then I’m going to have to write your name down, I’m going to write Polity’s name down, and we’re going to pass you on to someone else. Eventually, you’re going to do some work for us. I don’t know how much.”

I worked my tongue around the inside of my mouth, trying to work some spit back into it. The man in blue already knew Polity’s name. I struggled, and failed, to understand what that meant. He observed me, fingers scratching at a patch of five ’o clock shadow that peeked from the swathes of fabric wound round his cheeks. Eldest Sister popped her knuckles, watching the conversation from where she sat against the wall. The father had stepped out, maybe to watch the street.

“Is all that clear?” the man in blue said, “Nod if it is.” I nodded.

“I don’t care if Polity can’t agree for themselves, anybody we treat is a part of this whole thing. You understand? Coming with us is consent. You decide now, or I walk out that door and Polity can roll loaded dice. Other people are bleeding tonight, and they’d take this deal in a heartbeat. Answer.”

It was one hell of an open negotiating position. Assist somebody I’d never met before, possibly related to the cartel or guerillas or whoever else, or take my chances. Take our chances. There was a rustle behind me, a wheeze of breath. Polity, limbs trembling, sea green foam protruding from a hole in their chest, had managed to force themselves to lean up from their impromptu trauma bed.

“Fuck you, Fent,” Polity hissed like a venemous death “fuck you and your fucking Meat Wagon. Gras Au Mao have been waiting for me to slip-” they winced, collapsing against the bed, hand over their heart’s new skylight.

Fent, manager of the Meat Wagon, checked his watch again, “The politics is between them and you, Polity. I just clamp arteries, cut people until they’ve healed. Besides, it’s not like you’ve lived charitably by any measure, so try to forgive my complete lack of sympathy. Thirty-seven seconds.”

“I wouldn’t expect,” Polity grunted around hypovolemia, “any sympathy from a person who waits until someone’s bleeding out to make a bargain with them.”

“I like the word ‘thrifting’ Polity, I’m a surgeon, not the Devil,” Fent’s eyes never left his watch, “28 seconds.”

A few of his supporters adjusted the straps on their backpacks, looked to the door. A young man missing two fingers on his left hand didn’t even wait, he just walked out and stood there, foot tapping in the rain.

Polity looked at me, looked at my broken arm, at my look of open faced fear. I watched their features undergo a change, twisting from spite and terror, to the rage of a cornered animal. But that rage wasn’t directed at Fent and his crew, nor was it directed at Eldest Sister and her father, where they sat lurking at the margins.

The hate in their eyes focused on me. They were pale from blood loss. Their hand was still cold when they pulled away to slump down.

“I guess I don’t have any choice,” Polity said, their eyes keeping contact with mine.

“You’ve got your sale, you vulture. I don’t wanna die,” they leaned back and rested their head against the table, pointedly fixing their focus on the hum of the light fixtures above.

“Works for me,” Fent said, as if Polity had finally settled on a dinner location for the evening. His assistants moved Polity, arms slung under theirs, pulling them off the table and into the night.

They were moving for the door, Fent walking after Polity towards that square of rainy darkness.

“Fent,” I called out from the floor, cradling my arm. “Wait, what about me?”

He turned over his shoulder, gave me an appraising look. When he tilted his head, I saw, for the first time, the scar that traced down the corner of his eye, leaving a trail of mutilation that ended at his earlobe.

“I got what I wanted,” Fent said. His eyes seemed to look through me, boring endlessly to some far somewhere. “Ward’s booked. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care to learn.” he glanced at his watch again, then he returned his gaze to me. The smallest shrug.

“Put some ice on it. Bones usually heal, and if it heals bad try breaking it until it heals right,” he turned and left the building. I barely made out, a curt, “have a good evening,” thrown over his shoulder.

I was in shock, listeners. So much so that when a young, I guess you’d call Fent’s Meat Wagon “guerilla medics” so we’ll go with that. I was in so much shock that I barely noticed a guerilla with fading purple hair slip over to me. She looked down, looked at my arm, and finished some ambiguous assessment. With gloved hands, she pulled a single white pill from one of the countless pockets on her vest, snapped it in two, and gave me half.

“For the pain,” she said. And then followed Fent out.

That half pill didn’t last long, and our supply of food seemed destined to follow. At a certain point you’re not even ladeling gruel: just water haunted by a single mushroom or a few twirling wisps of seaweed. Our stomachs growled after every meal, unsatisfied, no matter how much we ate. Writers far more talented than I have described hunger as a wolf, prowling at the door, stalking through the halls. It is a wolf, listeners. I felt it some evenings, nosing at my stomach, jaws tearing at my gut, leaving me writhing as Polity writhed around the infection blazing in their stomach.

I had to do something. Me. There was no “we” here. Polity was in the thick of it now. If I didn’t find something for them to eat, I’d grow too weak to leave.

So I got out and I begged. I pushed through the mud and the spray, from building to building, remembering each location Polity had taken us to. Their contacts became my contacts, and my hope was that sharing food wouldn’t be as tall of an order as sharing living space.

I was mostly wrong. It seemed Polity was a friend of convenience for people. And besides, they weren’t with me when I went door to door. Plenty in the outskirts didn’t speak Standard, so it was impossible to convey that Polity was hurt and starving. When I knocked, rang, or pleaded, most didn’t even answer their doors.

But some did. The family in the guardhouse put some false-ham sandwiches together for us, because that family apparently is a random pack of paragons. Some restaurants were happy to share leftovers or uneaten food, even offering reusable containers to carry them in. Some evenings were little puzzles, assembling french fries from one location with soup from another, or limp vegetables with barely stale bread.

But don’t think this is a puff piece listeners. Things didn’t all fly true. I learned a lot of Thetti swear words, learned some tricks for getting spit out of my hair. Eventually, I got a feel for when a kick was coming, and I learned how to hop out of the way.

Still, I got what I needed, out there in the rain and the mud. And Polity ate, and I starved just a little bit less.

At this point, Polity was barely conscious most days. Their bedding stained with sweat faster than I could clean it, their lips parched even in the moist Therevatti air. It broke my heart to hear them groaning word salad and shaking in their sheets, balled up around the wretched wound in their gut.

Fent had left care instructions, and they warned about this. Polity’s body was fighting past the point of sense or sanity. Their limbs were withering, musculature giving way to loose skin. The human body is an excellent multitasker, what with walking and chewing gum, doing taxes and being depressed, the usual, but here is where its attention begins to falter. Sickness paradoxically kills appetite, your body diverts everything it has to fighting a war, even as it empties its own war chest. If someone doesn’t want to eat, they’re sick. If someone can’t bring themself to eat, they might be dying. I saw this firsthand at Palladium, writing articles covering the charity foundation Fat and Happy. An organization dedicated to feeding the sick, Fat and Happy would extend press spots and tax credits to any talented chef willing to treat a ward of patients to a high class meal.

Their strategy? If a sick person doesn’t want to eat, the best bet is to incentivize them. Where appetite failed, flavor and novelty would function in a pinch. High calorie meals packed with nutrients. The Singular Devotion’s chef, Yarl Williamsburg apparently grew obsessive during his collaboration with Fat and Happy. Interviewing patients on favorite meals from home, or offering seemingly impossible gastronomical challenges. Hot ice cream. Cake vapor. Reconstructing forgotten recipes based on half-remembered flavor profiles alone.

Yarl became my inspiration. I tried my best to emulate them. I couldn’t be a medical specialist like Fent or the father, and I’m certainly not a culinary genius like Yarl.

But I knew a few Therevatti tricks.

“I’m sorry,” Polity said one evening, turning away from the bowl I’d given them, “I just don’t want to eat, please don’t make me eat.”

“You said that yesterday,” I said. I kept to their side. They had been fighting for months. Their heart wound had sealed over with new skin, and their arm had been looking great for some time, but their gut wound was a bastard. It didn’t seal or scab, the body left it open to the air, gasping to the sky. We now regularly had to use a bottle of debriding fluid. It was light blue, foamed like mouthwash, and when it touched their infected flesh, it made Polity weep, painkillers be damned.

“I meant it yesterday too. I don’t want to eat, I want to sleep…”

“You can sleep after you finish eating,” I said..

“Oh, get lost, Oscar,” Polity snarled, a finger trembling at my chest, “I’m tired of eating your gross fucking food, I’m tired of seeing your face every morning, I’m tired of smelling my own guts.”

They clawed their hands through their hair.

“I’m just so tired,” they said. “I’m so tired.”

“Eat the soup,” I said, “please.”

They didn’t reply.

“It’s chocolate soup,” I said.

“What?” They turned slightly, wincing at where the sheets brushed their abdomen. “Are you stupid? Do you want me to fucking puke out my soul?”

I shook my head, “Just because it’s chocolate soup doesn’t mean I used chocolate.” I motioned to the bowl of red, sour sweet broth I had put in front of them. Some saltine crackers lay off to the side, perfect for dipping.

It was something of a final gambit on my part.

Polity scrunched up their nose, gave a suspicious glance to the bowl. They hadn’t had chocolate in ages. They lifted it to their lips, tilted it back, gave a slow, shuddering sip.

Even through their fatigue, I saw their eyes light up.

“That’s insane,” they said. “It…” they struggled to speak, “how did you do that? I don’t even feel like I’m about to hurl.

“Tomato soup with a Lah-tahp substitution for the wine base,” I grinned like a fool, “a few bitter herbs, some good local tomatoes, and then the Lah-tahp inverts it into faux chocolate.”

“That’s,” their words caught in their throat. I had seen Polity give me many looks over our travels together, but this was the first time I saw naked awe.

“Lah-tahp,” I said.

Polity stared at their bowl.

“Nothing lasts forever,” they replied.

For once, Polity ate everything in front of them.

A week later, I was running down my list of contacts, in the hopes of securing more food. I didn’t like begging at the same place twice. I guess I was like Polity in that way. But unlike Polity, I didn’t have much in the way of skills to offer. Which of course, meant that I was burning through their list a lot faster.

And also…

I had only knocked four times. Four times was a reasonable number, I figured, for getting attention. Four knocks brought someone to the door, usually. If someone didn’t want me around, they just wouldn’t answer. Or they’d chase me off. Unlike Brightsail or the guerrillas, it was very easy to eject me from their property. I liked to imagine it was cathartic for them. It made the kicks sting less.

But the older woman we stayed with so long ago, the one who wanted me to get Polity married off. She didn’t chase me off when I knocked. She didn’t answer the door. In fact, I suspect she must have been fermenting some kind of grudge. Because a few minutes later, as I strolled up the street, eyes fixed on my scuffed up Twinnon Peregrine, I received an unpleasant surprise.

“Brightsail Security! Let me see your hands!” came a shout, then a single word repeated over and over, “Manu, Manu!”

The voice was a digitized shriek, run through an anonymizer, shivering up my spine. Cold white light bounded off of the puddles around me, turned raindrops into brilliant embers. I froze in place, tried to get a look behind me in the reflections of the puddles, but they only revealed light.

“I speak Standard!” I shouted, “I’m not armed!” I could hear the figure behind me adjusting their stance, could hear the soft cicada hum of servomotors compensating against muscle jitters. Servomotors meant a powered frame. That left either a mercenary, or an improbably well equipped mugger.

“Don’t shoot!” I said. Still no response.

“Get on your knees,” he said, “Keep your hands in view.”

I complied, mud welling up against the fabric of my pants, soft and sticky. Without the use of my hands, the rain resumed its constant attempts to blind me.

A short burst of consonants, frayed with digital noise, crackled from his helmet, and he murmured something in reply. A lightshow of bright green wires danced around me, leaving my shadow stark black in contrast, then it cut off. Footsteps advanced, and I was driven against the ground, air flooding from my lungs. The mercenary pulled my knife from my pants pocket, probably having noted it on the scan, and rose with it. A kick to my hip spun me onto my back, hands reaching for where the toe of his sabatons struck me. Hot breath hissed from my teeth, but I kept my head low, terrified that the next kick would find my face.

“What do we fuckin have-” his voice died in his throat, his three eyed helmet pulled back slightly, then leaned forward. I could see the faintest shadow of my own reflection in the lenses, treated as they were to prevent glare. Each adjusted individually, like the eyes of a chameleon.

“Oscar?” the mercenary asked, bewilderment audible over the anonymizer’s screech. “Oscar Yasui?”

I kept one hand up, the other I clutched to my sore hip.

“Y-yeah,” I managed, “that’s me.”

“Holy shit,” he said, “I could have sworn I’ve been seeing you around here, hey, sorry about the nova… you good, man? You look kinda…” he looked me up and down, seeing the dirt on me, the deep circles under my eyes, the water damage to my shoes, “yeah, you look uh… you look good,”

“Yeah,” I choked out, lying, “yeah, I’m doing okay.”

“I thought it was strange when someone I flashed didn’t fuckin chirp,” he laughed, “don’t run into much startalk in these parts. Need a hand up?”

He hauled me back to my feet, used his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding a very expensive looking carbine, to flick some muddy gravel from my shoulders.

“Got a call that someone matching your description was threatening little old ladies with a gun, but uh, I don’t think this is a gun, haha,” he gripped the knife, blade first, and pushed the handle towards me. The edge didn’t even marr the scales of his gloves. I took it. His shoulders jerked constantly, the armor fighting against his musculature.

I looked to a dimple on his chestplate, a small pinprick lens on the chestplate. My heart skipped.

“Are you recording this?” I asked, working to keep the desperation out of my voice.

“Uh, recording? Am I recording this? No, nah, that's just factory spec, everyone splices it.”

“Splices?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, alright?” he spoke quickly, or more quickly at that, “no, really, what are you doing on Le Straud, man?”

I looked the mercenary up and down, searching for a badge, a rank insignia, something I could recognize. All I found was a single stylized eye, green irises, a little blue tear in the corner. He inclined his head in response, following my line of sight.

“Oh uh, Green Eyes, Mr. Yasui, sir,” his free hand raised in a supplicative gesture, “Sorry, I know tags are kind of impersonal but on duty we’re uh…ah, You can just call me Green Eyes.”

“Ok,” I said, sighing, “Green Eyes, glad to meet you.”

He rocked back on his heels, gripping his weapon. Eventually he managed to cough out, “I’m a huge fan, Mr. Yasui. Been following you for a bit now. Since Palladium, actually, but uh… I listen to Gastronaut too.”

I wasn’t sure I understood what I was hearing. I kept getting distracted by my hip and… Saints, under all that adaptive ballistic fluid and gray power ceramic plate, Green Eyes couldn’t be more than twenty. “You do?” I asked,

“Yeah man, it’s pretty cool. You kind of go on tangents a lot and sometimes I find it hard to follow what you’re saying, but it’s great seeing you get out of Sol and see the world. Er, the galaxy, sorry.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came to my mind.

“Do you… have any food?”

“Yup!” Green Eyes rummaged around on the spider’s web of cord lashed to his back, and he produced a small silver package covered in barcodes. “Mealkit?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, equal parts eager and dejected that life conspired to exclusively feed me meal kits.

“Oh yeah, that’s right,” Green Eyes gave a self aware laugh, “Episode 6, right? You’ve probably eaten a whole rack of these. You want one?” He shook it back and forth, in a way that was probably meant to be enticing. “It’s bean burritos!” he sang.

“Burritos are fine,” I said, grabbing it from his armored hands. It was heavier than I expected. The foil had a different tint from the ones on the Goodenough Kanemori. Later, I’d discover that it was a deluxe kit, while the Goodenough exclusively served budget-economy models. Because of course they did.

“Hey man like,” Green Eyes shuffled from foot to foot. He was always scanning rooftops and side paths. I think he was floating on uppers. I wondered what the world looked like from inside his armored beetle helmet. Were little tags of trivia shooting off my body? Did he know my resting heart rate? My electrolyte levels?

“I don’t wanna be a douche about this or anything but… is everything alright? You kind of uh… look like you’ve been really going through it.” He caught himself for a moment, “I mean you’re rocking the look and all but…”

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m doing research for a new book,” I wracked my brain, trying to maintain the practiced distance I used to always have around fans… and trying to choose the right words. Sometimes locals would disappear around mercenary patrols.

I’m researching meals in wartime.”

Green Eyes, bless him, did a small pump of his fist. “Alright, fucking rad, Oscar. That’s right up my lane. Hey, if you want a few more of these-”

“Yes, I cut in, yes I do, that would really help--My research.”

“Yeah, totally! Mess basically throws these things at us, surplus are packaged into our contract. We’re supposed to be using them for hearts and minds, but the [BLEEP] won’t take em for some reason. Probably some cultural hang up, hospitality, or debt or whatever. At least you’d eat the things.”

“Right, that makes sense” I said, reeling from his exuberance and casual use of a slur.

“Well, I patrol here a lot,” Green Eyes continued, “doing a stim shift, so you can find me around plenty. Look me up if you want a new meal kit, alright? We’ve probably got flavors you’ve never tried!”

I was stunned, I felt a familiar twinge.

“Are you sure?” I asked, worried for him, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay if you give me these?”

“Yessir!” Green Eyes said, flashing a radiant thumbs up. “Just happy to help, good to meet someone like me out here for once. And ah, don’t worry about the old lady calling you in like that. I’ll get a friend or two and swing by her place, remind her about protocol, alright?”

And that, listeners, was how I got a steady trickle of meal kits every week. Polity loved the things, especially as their appetite began to return. The time came when they could eat an entire meal kit all on their own, and do so proudly, displaying the interior like a prize.

“Have you started mugging mercenaries now, Oscar?” Polity asked the night I brought one back. I didn’t tell them how I got it.

I told them it fell off the back of a truck.

Later on… this was maybe a few months into begging, almost half a year since Polity was shot, my notes just say:

“I think people care.”

It was all I wrote down about it, or all I had time to write about it, but it doesn’t really do the situation justice. While I was roaming from house to house, working my way through Polity’s list. While I was learning who would ignore you and who would kick you and… who would try to get you shot by PriSec. The community was starting to pay attention to where I walked.

It wasn’t Eldest Sister and her family. Their garage got ransacked shortly after Polity got back. I didn’t see it happen, but I did see all the bikes and tools hurled out into the street. Saw Eldest Sister kneeling, hands balled into fists, shoulders shaking. Her father and brothers trying to gather everything up back into crates. Some of them had nasty bruises. We didn’t want anything to do with each other. They had already helped. Anything more would be… too much.

But I was walking up the street, when a man with a full beard and bushy eyebrows shoved a basket of vegetables against my chest. He leaned in close enough for me to smell the Lah-tahp on his breath, and he pointed to a shock of green leaves.

“They’re good for fever,” he said, in perfect Standard. Then he walked away.

For three days, little wrapped parcels appeared at Polity and I’s jungle shed. There was preserved fruit, fresh baked bread, the occasional synthetic meat. Labeled: “for Polity” or, “thank you Polity” or sometimes, “to Polity’s friend.”

We didn’t eat water soup after this. I mean, the donations weren’t infinite. They petered out, but when a chunk of a community starts collectively throwing food at you. When you’ve spent so long rationing and stretching and saving and skimping.

We made sure the generosity of the outskirts never entirely ran out. Polity and I swam in gifted calories.

“I think people care,” I said in my notes. And they did. They really did.

Polity recovered, eventually. It took… ten months if I’m checking my notes right. No follow-up surgeries like I expected. Apparently even the Meat Wagon and guerilla surgeons can perform a modern abortive counter inflammatory procedure. Eventually, it stopped raining, or… no, it doesn’t really stop raining on Therevatti, a planet that would have been nothing but ocean if the ground wasn’t so thirsty.

We had food, and every few days Polity’s wound would be a little smaller. A little less rancid. Those awful red tendrils and lesions retreated back to their source. Their sweat lessoned, they didn’t have fever dreams, just nightmares. We didn’t talk much. Or as much as we used to, I should say. There were jokes. Or discussions of meals or ingredients.

Fights.

But one day I came back, and they were standing there. Shoulder to the window frame, looking out across the outskirts, up at the dewy light that shone up from the walls of the Blue Zone.

Their arm was shaking under their own weight. As thin as it had gotten… well, like I explained, muscles are the first things to go in a health crisis. With the tarp at the window pushed aside, the smell of rain and leaves had forced out that awful cloying reek of unwashed sheets and rusty bloodstains.

They gave me a little smile, as if I’d caught them in the middle of something. It was just a bit pinched, a bit cool. Like, smiling was an unnatural follow-up to their last expression.

I stood quietly, with my reusable bags. They spoke first.

“Hey,” Polity said, “what’s for dinner?”

I didn’t know what to say. And then, all at once, I did.

“Elephant,” I said, gesturing to my bags. “Got the whole carcass right here, we just need to scrub the barnacles off.”

They coughed out a laugh. It sounded like they had forgotten how. I could only smile.

“They really fucked me up, Oscar,” Polity said, their lips trembling. “They really, really fucked me up.”

I set down my bags. A few sealed containers of soup stock rolled out.

I stepped forward, and wrapped my arms around Polity, pulled their frame, all toothpicks and hatred towards me. They stiffened, but I felt their hands curl into my back and pull me forward.

“I can’t let this go,” they said. I couldn’t see their face, but I could feel my shoulder getting wet.

“I know,” I said, “but that can wait until after dinner, yeah?”

“When we eat that elephant, you mean?” they sniffled.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Yeah,” Polity echoed back. “Okay. Let me help tonight.”

“Okay,” I said, “Everything’s going to be alright.”

For Gastronaut, I’m Oscar Yasui, signing off.