Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Do you ever worry about the future?”

Orion laughed. Moonlight splashed across his faceplate as he tipped his head back against the balcony railing, struggling to regain control of himself. The air pulsed with the base thrum of music seeping out under the door. Roller was playing DJ for this impromptu house party, the party Ratchet had fled out onto the balcony. Orion had wandered out to find him and they’d ended up chatting aimlessly, clinking glasses of engex and getting just tipsy enough for things to start to get vulnerable.

But Orion laughed.

“Hey, forget about it,” Ratchet said, waving Orion Pax and his stupid cheerful drunken laughter away. “It was a stupid question.”

“No, no,” Orion said. “Don’t, sorry, I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just...sometimes when I stand on the street I can’t stop thinking about how fragile everything is. Everything. Society. We’re built on a knife’s edge of unspoken laws and social hierarchies and sometimes it just feels so unreal I can’t believe it hasn’t already crumbled. I worry a lot, mate.”

“Oh,” Ratchet said. “I wasn’t thinking quite so...big.” He patted Orion on the shoulder. “‘s deep, Pax. I was thinking about graduation.”

“I think about graduation as little as possible,” Orion said, punctuating the sentence by pouring the bottle out into his empty glass until it ran empty.

“I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s right around the corner. The placement exams are only a few weeks away. What happens if I fail? What do they do with you if the the Taxonomy says you ought to be a medic but you aren’t cut out for the job?”

“You’re not going to fail!” Orion smiled over at him, a dopey and overcharged grin. “Thunders tells me you’re, like, a surgical prodigy.”

“You’re just saying that because you didn’t see my written exam scores,” Ratchet said. He ground his helm against the heel of his hand. “The thing I’m good at is, like, a tiny part of being a medic. Being good at people and managing staff and memorizing differential diagnoses and actually knowing all this slag is the important stuff and I’m terrible at all of those things. Do they reformat medics who can’t cut it? Or do they just demote them to support staff?”

“You don’t have anything to worry about,” Orion assured him. “I’m the one who should be worrying. Me? As a security officer? Have they even met me?”

“Well, no. The point is that the placement exams and the Taxonomy are meant to be impersonal and thus infallible.” Ratchet knocked back the rest of his engex and set the glass on the railing. “Ugh, I don’t know. I don’t want things to change, but I desperately want me to change. I wish I could just skip ahead to the part where I know what I’m doing.”

Orion slung his arm around Ratchet’s shoulder. “Ratchet, friend, my friend. You are way too serious for a mech with this much engex in you. Let’s hit the dance floor, see if we can’t loosen you up.”

“I don’t really dance.”

“Well, if you won’t dance, at least you can replace this bottle. It’s empty for some reason. I’ve gotta go mingle. Roller’s gonna be cross if I leave him alone to run the party after organizing the damned thing. And we wouldn’t want people thinking we were an item or something.” With that he excused himself back into the roar and pulsing lights of the party. Ratchet watched him go, empty drink in hand, fantasizing vaguely about jumping over the side of the balcony rather than walk back through that mass of bots to get to the exit.

He’d wait out here a few more minutes and try to quell that nervy empty feeling that had settled in his spark in Orion’s wake.

Ratchet clenched his hand, then tried to flex his fingers out smoothly. With a crunch and a click, the forefinger and middle finger caught partway through the extension. He forced them past the sticking point and fumbled for his detailing kit. They just needed oiling, that’d solve it.

He continued ignoring the persistent ache that had lingered in those fingers for most of the past month.

Ratchet could see the rest of them ahead of him, the line stretched thin as they wound their way down the narrow mountain path. Ratchet was bringing up the rear at his insistence, because he was getting damned tired of hiding his limp from the rest of the bots on the squad.

Nothing ever went smooth and Ratchet hadn’t expected this mission would. But he’d hoped for more than a pitiful handful of survivors. All of them newframes. Nobody with the kind of clout to ask Ratchet the sort of questions he desperately didn’t want to answer. Nobody had asked about their fuel supply and how he was managing to stretch their emergency medical rations out for seven bots. His optics blurred woozily, but he was just going to have to power through. The soldiers needed it more. They had heavier frames, worse injuries.

Soon they’d either get to the Autobot outpost on this mountain or the Decepticon patrols would spot them and bring them in. Well, they’d kill the squad. They’d bring Ratchet in. Ratchet wasn’t in a hurry to end up a victim of Decepticon hospitality again, which is what was powering him over the rough terrain, tank aching and ankle joint screaming.

Primus, what was he going to tell Optimus? Ratchet paused for a second to let his gyros recalibrate, the world spinning a bit. He swiped his hand roughly over his face and resisted the urge to scream. Screaming would attract attention. Screaming would attract Decepticons and, worse yet, the squad’s concern. They needed someone to lead them right now and there was nobody else to do that except Ratchet. So he was going to start walking again and catch up with them. Any minute now.

He’d just sit down for a moment first until the spinning stopped.

There were no official diagnostic tests for form fatigue—it was all based on the medic’s clinical observations. Pain in the extremities. Loss of mobility. Persistent noises and joints freezing up.

There wasn’t a lot of clinical information on age of onset, but Ratchet felt safe pinning himself as ‘early onset’ anyway. He was only two million years old, damnit. He wasn’t nearly old enough to feel this old and worn along the edges. And sure, most bots’ hands didn’t get half the use his did, but most bots didn’t need their hands half as much as he did.

But while he could no longer ignore the obvious diagnosis, that didn’t mean it was going to get worse. Ratchet had seen patients linger in a state of mild form fatigue for millions of years. So it was inconvenient. So sometimes his hands froze up and he had to knock them back in line. So sometimes (always) they hurt a little bit. He’d cope.

“Do you know why you’re here?” Administrator Panax steepled his fingers and looked over at Ratchet through gold optics. The hospital administrator was an intimidating figure, a jet made of sharp angles and disapproval. Or maybe that was just the way he was looking at Ratchet.

Ratchet did his best not to squirm and nodded. “You’re here to tell me my placement examination score and inform me who my mentor will be during my residency at your hospital. Sir.” Slag, he’d failed, hadn’t he? The look on Administrator Panax’s face was radiating disapproval and...disgust? He’d failed so badly that the administrator was insulted to even have him in his presence.

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?”

“What?” Ratchet blinked in confusion, then corrected. “Sir? What do you mean by that?”

“I’ve dealt with more than a few cheaters in my day,” Administrator Panax said, gliding out of his chair and stalking around his desk. “But never before have I seen someone hack the placement examination. And you didn’t even have the decency be subtle in your cheating!”

“What?” Ratchet felt like his head was spinning. The administrator jabbed his finger in Ratchet’s face, then waved a datapad at him.

“I’ve seen a rare few prodigies get scores like this on their third decade of placement examinations. You want me to believe you scored this on your first attempt.” The administrator held up the datapad, revealing a 360 digit hexedecimal string that represented Ratchet’s score on the various sections of the practical exam. Ratchet stared in shock. He hadn’t...had the AI administering the test failed? That was way too high. Sure, he’d thought the test was easier than he’d expected. And he’d finished startlingly early. But that wasn’t a graduate score. It simply wasn’t possible.

“I...” Ratchet floundered. “I don’t know. I didn’t cheat, sir. I wouldn’t have the first idea how to hack the examination protocol. Maybe there was a glitch?”

“Well, of course you would say that.”

“What do you want me to do?” Ratchet asked, a tinge of frustration leaking into his voice. This bot had clearly woken up on the wrong side of the berth and was in serious need of an attitude adjustment. “Do you want me to retake the examination?”

“No, no, I think we should take it at face value. I’m going to have you under observation as you carry out your duties, so our faculty can make sure you don’t engage in any other acts of academic dishonesty and so they can judge your performance themselves. Given your exceptional score, I will be acting as your faculty mentor myself. You can report to me before and after each shift.”

“Sir, this is really isn’t necessary.”

“Ratchet of Iacon Minor, you are lucky I have not stripped you of your placement entirely! There is plenty of need for bots like you—unexceptional, unethical, insouciant—disassembling frames in the city morgue. You will prove yourself worthy of the score you gamed your way into or I will find excuse to assign you a better profession, more suiting to your temperament.”

It didn’t matter if it was fair. It was his word—the word of a unremarkable student with few friends and an admittedly bad attitude, against the word of his assigned mentor. He was just going to have to live with whatever indignities Panax found amusing until he tired of this little game.

Ratchet squeezed his hands into fists and then released. “Of course, Administrator. I will do my best to fulfill any duties you assign to me.”

There was a horrible grinding noise as Ratchet’s hand froze up into a contorted claw. With a snarl of frustration he slammed his hand onto the surgical slab and, when that didn’t succeed in loosening up the joint, he picked up the hammer he kept on the slab and gave it a good whack. That did the trick, except for one stubborn finger. Ratchet pressed his hand to the berth and spread his fingers to isolate just that one finger, then raised the hammer high.

“Uh, doc?” His patient was staring at him in wide-eyed terror. “What’s going on?”

“You got a defective medic, nothing to worry yourself about,” Ratchet explained, giving the obstinate finger another whack, and then two more just to be safe. He let out a small sigh of relief when it finally curled smoothly into a fist and flexed out, with only a little crackle of protest.

“Doesn’t that...hurt?” His patient asked, an unfortunate jet frametype with a laser burn through his wing whose name Ratchet had already forgotten.

Ratchet shrugged and picked up his scalpel again. “Nah, I cut of most of the sensation in my hands until I’m doing surgery. Unless you need that fine-grained feedback, the pain isn't really worth it.”

“That’s really fragged up, Doc,” the patient said. “Can’t you just fix them?”

“Kid, I only answer one stupid question per appointment. If you want to ask me anything else you’re going to have to get yourself shot up again,” he said as he opened the blockers on his sensornet and started surgery.

Ratchet pulled his hands close and waited for the floodgates to open and light his hands afire. The pain didn’t come. He realized abruptly that his optics were powered off.

Ratchet powered his optics on and looked slowly around the darkened room, trying to place himself. He must have been recharging. It always took him a few seconds to resolve his short term memory when he pulled himself out of recharge, and the intervening time was an anxious place. But the darkness above him was the bottom of a recharge berth, identical to the one he was lying on. The dim blue lighting was coming from the energon infuser on the wall and it lit the rest of the shuttle’s cabin well enough to place himself once the memories slotted into place.

The shuttle.

He was looking for Drift.

All of those other things...his form fatigue...that had been a long time ago. They were just memory purges; visual memory replays in response to lack of neural stimulus. ‘Dreams’, as Verity would have called them. They’d talked about dreams once, back on Earth. Ratchet had been fascinated to learn that humans generated entirely new experiences in their sleeping state, ‘sort of like movies’. He’d explained that while sometimes Cybertronians experienced states of unreality while they were in recharge or powersave mode, the memory purges they experienced were always just that—replays of memories as they’d lived them.

“So you have photographic memory? That is super cool,” she’d said.

“It starts degrading after a few million years,” Ratchet had said, even though he knew that to her ‘a few million years’ was basically the same as forever. “And I’d really rather not re-experience most of my life. I prefer a empty recharge cycle. It’s peaceful.”

“Yeah, I guess most of your life is kind of like an anxiety dream,” she’d said, and then had to explain what those were.

She wasn’t wrong.

He’d gone years without dreaming before this trip, but ever since Drift and his fragged memory time-capsule, he’d been fragging cursed. Just one more thing to add to the list of things to yell at Drift about once he eventually found the bot.

Ratchet swung his legs over the side of the berth with a groan and detached the fuel and charging leads. The search wasn’t going great. The entirety of known space was very big. Drift and his one tiny shuttle were very small. And since Drift wasn’t answering any hails and had disabled his on-board tracking, Ratchet didn’t have a lot to go on.

He coiled up the fuel line and closed up the infuser case, then shuffled out of the tiny berthroom and into the access corridor of the shuttle. Cockpit to the fore, cargo to the rear, engine access belowdecks and the hab space curled around the center hallway. Once he finally found Drift it was going to be a bit cramped, but a lot less so than the shuttle Drift had been sent off with. That was a single-person scout shuttle, theoretically not even capable of storing enough fuel to make more than a two system jaunt without refueling. Given that, you’d think someone at one of the local fueling depots would have seen him.

Ratchet slid into the captain’s chair and put his feet up. He checked his location on the console, not more than an hour’s flight away from the nearest space station. He didn’t expect he’d get any good intel at Station...LO9, but if he didn’t stop at every space station between him and Drift he wasn’t going to be able to include “I stopped at every space station between the Lost Light and here looking for your miserable aft” in his list of complaints.

He wasn’t searching the entirety of known space, thankfully. It had taken far too long for Ratchet to remember that the shuttles had on-board tracking that should have been accessible from the Lost Light—by the time he’d thought to check, Drift’s signal had gone dark. Either disabled or out of range or some worse fate he was refusing to consider. But as he was packing to leave, he’d realized that someone might have thought to check Drift’s location before he fell off the map. Someone, specifically Perceptor.

Percy had been serious-faced when Ratchet first stepped into his lab to ask about Drift. He’d been busy researching the impact of the timecase. Ratchet suspected he was reluctant to talk about the first of his two friends who’d betrayed his trust through the secrets they’d kept. It had been a big betrayal, Drift being involved with the Overlord conspiracy. For Perceptor especially. It would have been for any of the Wreckers who’d been to Garrus 9, but Percy had always been close to Drift.

But when he’d explained his intention to retrieve Drift, Percy surprised him by already being on the same page. “You’re right,” he’d said. “The captain should have sent someone to find him a long time ago. The moment he confessed, we should have at least sent out word that Drift was welcome back.”

“Well, maybe he figured news of his confession would spread and Drift would realize he was welcome back without him having to say anything,” Ratchet said, though he was loathe to defend Rodimus on this of all subjects.

Percy shook his head. “Are we talking about the same mech? Drift runs away from his problems and he doesn’t look back. Wherever he is, I guarantee you he runs whenever he hear the word ‘Cybertron’, let alone ‘Autobot’.”

“I didn’t say it was sensible. Just saying it was something the captain might have thought to himself. They’re quite a pair.”

“Mm, I suppose,” Perceptor had agreed reluctantly. “So are you two.”

“Me and the captain? Pfft. We’ve got nothing in common. Anyway, the ship’s computer says the transponder in Drift’s shuttle is offline, or out of range or something. I was thinking, if there’s anyone who might have checked that signal before it went dark, that someone would be you.”

And Percy had smiled weakly and passed over a datastick full of coordinates—thirty-seven days worth. He’d wished Ratchet luck on his search with obvious sincerity, then reached out to take him by the hand. “Bring him home, okay?”

From the timestamps on the coordinate data, Percy must have started logging Drift’s location only days after his exile. Ratchet wondered what had been running through his head those first few days, whether he’d been convinced with all the rest of them that Drift was the sole conspirator. He wondered whether he’d tracked his location because of or in spite of that conviction. The data was meagre. Drift could have gone anywhere in the time afterwards. But it gave him somewhere to start. Someone somewhere along this path had to have seen Drift. Had to have talked to him. Had to know where he’d gone next.

Ratchet was too full from recharging to drink anything, but he ran out of things to do on the console and needed something to distract his hands. Ratchet didn’t cope well with boredom.

He reached for a tablet and stylus and picked up on his most recent sketching project; an illustration from memory of Hero riding on Thunderclash’s shoulders from back in his academy days. He figured Thunders would appreciate it as a gift next time he saw him. He’d be glad to see Ratchet hadn’t lost all of his art skills, he’d always been adamant that it was important to find private joys regardless of one’s circumstances. And with no crew to attend to and no updates forthcoming from First Aid there wasn’t much else to do except trawl the datanets for sightings of Drift, practice obscure medical procedures in simulation, and work on sketching.

He was just finishing up the shading on Thunders’ face when the computer’s nav system started beeping to alert him they were coming into docking range. He set everything aside and took up the helm, comming into station air control and getting permission to dock at one of the far-flung fueling ports designated for mechs. The sector of space he’d followed Drift into wasn’t exactly mech friendly. It was outside of Galactic Council purview and none of the competing empires or consortiums had laid claim to it. It was no man's land, just the struggling fringes of inhabited space. Not many of the planets had been touched by the war, but it was still best not to show one’s face as a Cybertronian if you wanted people to open up to you.

Now, as a hologram of a human...technically someone might someday call him on humans not being indigenous species to this sector of the galaxy. But generally folks just assumed he was some sort of uncommon bipedal organic they weren’t well acquainted with. There were more than enough species that had been reduced to small migrant populations that it wasn’t uncommon to see an organic and wonder if you’d ever seen another member of that species and not be entirely sure. Ratchet wished he’d taken the time at some point to actually sit down and study organic evolution to try and figure out if there was some common ancestor or if it was some sort of convergent evolution that led to so many species being roughly bipedal and human-shaped.

He cozied himself into the pilot’s chair and made sure all the engines were ramped down and properly docked before materializing the holoform. The abrupt cut of sensation in his real body as it transferred to the holoform was as disconcerting as ever, but he was getting more used to it. Even if there wasn’t a political bias against Cybertronians, most of these organic-frequented space stations were so damned tiny that he couldn’t have gotten far in his real body.

He shook out his arms and checked out his outfit. You would think, given Brainstorm’s explanation of the technology involved, that the avatars would materialize every time looking exactly the same. Ratchet found he oscillated through a variety of cozy-looking sweaters and pants in colors that never matched. He wasn’t sure if the point was that he was unfashionable or that he was boring. Annoying either way, the outfit never did blend well with space station fashion.

He messed with the holoform controls a little bit, testing his solidity and opacity to make sure he could pass and interact with solid matter. There was even a tinge of sensation—enough that you could tell when someone tapped you on the shoulder or if you’d dropped something, not the same as true touch. That all accomplished, he grabbed the bag he’d purchased a few stations back and made sure all his stuff was packed up before heading for the airlock.

The airlock opened into the seal-tube, which led him to the elevator and then into the shuttle-bay lobby. He flagged down one of the shuttle-bay attendants and paid for a few hours of parking in return for a ticket that’d allow him to access the correct elevator on the way out. The attendant looked through his bag with a raised brow ridge but none of his possessions were contraband, they were just a bit...peculiar. They let him on through.

Once he was out on the main floor of the space station, he made his way to the first station map he could find. Ratchet didn’t especially like space stations, there was no reason to waste time being lost. Make a plan, in and out. He grabbed the download link for the station map and pulled it off the station network, then used his HUD to mark up the relevant bits. First things first, he’d hit the community billboards on the main floor.

They were 3D hologram boards, a little more high tech then what they used on the Lost Light. These were the sort that you could wander through and interact with, not just tap the posts to get more information. Ratchet went to the upload port and plugged in his datastick, then scrolled through all fourteen menus to get his flyer posted to the board. Once it pinged cheerfully at him, he walked in to locate his flier and rearrange it somewhere close to eye level for most of the passersby.

Now, Ratchet was no artist. But his design was certainly eye-catching—this was a fact, not an opinion. He’d gotten nearly two hundred replies to the relevant subspace frequency, it’s just that all of them had either been duds, prank calls or so vague as to be useless. At the top, he had “MISSING : REWARD” in block letters, then a still image of Drift he’d pulled from Rewind’s travelogue. Drift was at his least threatening looking—he’d tried to pick a picture that softened up the swordsmech so people weren’t scared away. It was him asleep on the shuttle back from Hedonia, leaning against Ratchet’s shoulder—though Ratchet had been careful to crop himself out of the image. His caption had also been crafted for maximal nonthreateningness: “Lost my friend, he goes by the name Drift. 12 meters standard, red & white Cybertronian, probably engaging in errant heroism, very irritating. Any tips helpful!”

Ratchet didn’t like missing persons searches. Especially not solo, sprawled across an entire Galactic Sector without military backup. The thing he disliked the most was that, inevitably, you were forced to rely on outside help. He couldn’t just hold up a sword and ask Primus to guide him to Drift’s location. He didn’t have a sword, for one thing, and Primus wasn’t real. If Drift wasn’t being an aft he could have called him over subspace or pinged his coordinates. With both of those option ruled out he had no choice but to ask people for help.

Ratchet hated asking for help.

He hit the rest of the ground floor bulletin boards to post up his flyer, then sent up the liftpad to the second floor to see if his flyer was still showing up on the paid advertising screens in the lift. He’d only paid for a ten second slot, because he was cheap and he was pretty sure nobody looked at the advertising screens anyway because they were ninety percent advertisements for sleazy engine boosters and what looked like salespitches for various cults. He had to ride the damned thing for ten minutes before his little flyer popped up on the screen. Then he was on the upper promenade, walking the storefronts and trying to pick a victim to snag out of the crowd. Eventually he settled on one of the janitorial staffers, a fellow with four upper appendages and a red fin sticking out of his head. Ratchet gave him a little wave to snag his attention as he wandered over.

“Hey, could I have just a minute?” Ratchet said, smoothing down the fabric of his pants. They weren’t real, so that really didn’t do much for the wrinkles.

The alien propped his mop on his shoulder and gave Ratchet’s holoform an unimpressed stare, but nodded him on. Both Ratchet and the janitor were wearing standard issue translators, so Ratchet wasn’t expecting any major communication difficulties.

“I’m just passing through,” he said, “and I’ve been looking for a friend. He’s been missing for a couple of months. Do you know, where is the best place to go on this station to find people who’ve got the station-to-station gossip?”

The janitor scratched his chin with the tip of his tapered arm-like appendage. “Well, depends what sort of gossip you want, really. But finding folks, I figure that probably goes to Xex. She runs a fortune telling stall at the end of the way, it’s a chain run by her and all of her clone siblings. They run a little side-gig doing private eye bullshit. That’d be my first guess.”

“Thanks,” Ratchet said. Hit on the first one, what do you know, I’m not entirely unlucky after all. It was just the fragging dreams that were making him feel that way. A few weeks of fruitless searching wasn’t unexpected. Sure, it’d have been nice to fly into the first station he’d passed by and get out of his shuttle and see Drift there, waiting for him, all packed to go. But that was an obvious fantasy. Drift had been doing something all this time. He wasn’t just waiting around for Ratchet to show up and bring him home. Why would he be? Maybe those first few weeks Drift had hoped for a surprise rescue. Those first few weeks were a long time ago now.

Ratchet consulted his map and located the ‘fortunes and energy readings’ stall pretty quickly. Why the frag was every species in the galaxy as gullible as a box of Tailgates?

There was a bell hanging from the door, and it chimed cheerily as Ratchet stepped inside. The space was small, with criss-crossing lights illuminating a elaborately painted floor in various candy colors. In the back of the room, there was an alcove with at least ten security monitors and a figure wrapped in a fluffy white cloak perched on a high stool. Ratchet nooded respectfully in their direction. “Xex? I was told you might have information I was looking for.”

Xex waved him over. “Oh, come in, come in,” she said, laughter in her voice. Ratchet walked over to her, eyeing the weird patterns on the floor warily as he went. Up close Xex was ninety percent cloak; her visible goggles, nose and fingertips peeking out from underneath were a uniform bright pink. She was tiny, even compared to holoform Ratchet.

Xex wiggled her finger to draw him closer. “What were you looking for, dear?” she asked. “I can, of course, do a general reading to suss out your personal energies. If you preferred a deeper reading, that could also be provided.”

“It’s Ratchet, actually, not ‘dear’. And I wasn’t looking for metaphysical information. I heard you’ve got contacts across a few of these stations?”

“My sisters, yes,” Xex said. “So you’re here for the gossipmonger, not the spiritualist. And what are you hoping I might know?”

“It’s easier to show you.”

Ratchet shrugged his bag off his shoulder and stooped to uncinch the top. He pulled his figurine of Drift out and cradled it in his arms for a moment. At human-scale, the doll that was barely the side of his hand was rather more unwieldy. He kicked the bag aside and held out the figurine.

“I’m looking for a Cybertronian, a friend of mine. He looks like this. Except bigger. A lot bigger.”

She chuckled. “That’s...quite the demonstration. I haven’t heard of any Cybertronians passing through this station, but I can message my sisters and see if they’ve seen anything. Whatever did you ask the salesman when you bought that thing?”

“I got it from another friend. I can provide digital reference files for you, if that’d be helpful?”

“Well, we get so few Cybertronians in this corner of the galaxy I can’t really imagine mixing him up with a different enormous killer robot,” Xex said dryly. “No offense.”

“Of course not,” Ratchet said, equally dry. Feeling a bit awkward now, he grabbed his bag and stuffed his armful of Drift back out of sight. “Do you have any contacts outside of your sisters?”

“A professional doesn’t divulge her secrets.” Xex said. “But yes, of course. We’ve got an in with the workers union in shuttle repairs. They travel to rescue or salvage any damaged craft in the sector, which is an excellent way to pick up on secrets. And we’ve got a few staff members on payroll at each of the stations. I assume you have reason to believe this...what’s its name?”

“Drift. His name is Drift. And yes, I have one lead, and its that I know he passed through this sector a number of months ago.”

“And what is the nature of your...friendship?”

“I fail to see how that is in any way relevant.”

“Mm, simply curious how a...can’t say as I know your species at a glance. But it certainly seems an unlikely friendship, especially for you to be pursuing this Drift alone across the galaxy.”

“Maybe so,” Ratchet said, crossing his arms across his chest and scowling. Don’t scare the alien off, Ratchet. She can’t help being nosy, it’s literally her job.

“Well, it will be a few days before I hear back from the entire network, I assume you won’t be staying long at the station?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Alright, well, I’ll need a subspace frequency to contact you once we know. And my standard fees apply.”

“And what would those be?” Ratchet asked.

“Well, generally, I say 15 credits base, plus ten for any additional hour of legwork. But I think I’d prefer to do a reading for you.”

“What?”

“Don’t complain, you’d be getting your favor for fee. And in exchange, all you have to do is stand there and let me tell you what the lights tell me about your inner energies.”

“No. I’ve got the credits.”

“Mm, I don’t think I accept your credits,” Xex said. “I want payment in you putting up with my metaphysical bullshit. Not to be petty, but your disdain is rolling off your aura in waves. Let me have my fun and I’ll help you find your friend.”

Ratchet heaved a sigh and stooped to grab his bag. “Whatever. If it makes you happy. No touching, though.”

“Oh, no need. I’m not some kinetics reader or any of that frippery nonsense. I prefer to go back to the basics, shadowplay.”

“What?“ It might have been that Ratchet’s eyes bulged a trifle out of their sockets.

Xex grabbed one of the monitors and turned it towards him. “Oh, have you heard of it? Shadowplay is the interpretation of how your shadow, as an extension of your body, interplays with the seven holy circles on the floor when you cross the play. I just have to run the security tape of you coming in and then I’ve got an automated algorithm that records the points of intersection. Wait a second, I’ll set it to run.” She grabbed a keyboard out from under one of the monitors and dragged it into her lap and began tapping away at it.

Ratchet watched as the video of him walking across the room played back slowly, bits of the intertwined circles on the floor lighting up as his twinned shadows slid across them. When the recording ended, the rest of the image disappeared, the brightened circle segments left glowing against a black background. Xex hummed, flitting her finger over the screen. “Ah, interesting. Very interesting. You carry yourself like someone much larger than you are. You’ve got a solidity and grounding to your steps, it reflects a deep connection to your home planet. You were born on a planet, I assume, and not a space station.”

“Yeah,” Ratchet admitted. “Long way from here.”

“I’m sure.” She clucked at the image, tapping at three green circle segments. Ratchet had no idea what the colors were supposed to mean, but they certainly meant something to Xex. “Oh dear. You’re mourning a loss, a terrible loss. You carry a weight in your soul that you’ve never been able to throw off.”

Well that was probably true for half the people in the galaxy. See, that was how they did it. Keep it vague, keep it portentous, make sure it could be true for just about anyone.

“You’re tired,” Xex pronounced. “You’re haunted by things you did...no. You’re haunted by things you didn’t do.” She nodded sharply. “And those regrets keep you from sleeping.”

Probably reading little microexpressions, noticed me respond to what she said and responded on the fly.

“And your biggest regret is that you allowed yourself to be separated from your love. Oh, I can see your shadow reaching out for them across the circles. Your love is strong.”

Ratchet snorted. “Yeah, right.”

She smiled at him, a mouthful of jagged teeth like broken glass. “If you don’t love him, why are you trying to find him?”

“I could be hunting him down to get revenge. I could have left some important possession with him. You don’t know anything,” Ratchet said.

“Cross-species romance, always such a fragile thing. Treasure your time together, for it will pass all too soon.”

“We’re not together. That’s the problem. Wait, no, that’s not what I meant. I meant that we’re physically separated and that I’d very much like you to hurry this along so I can keep searching for the bot who I like only as a friend.“

“Very well.” She ran her hand in an ellipse along the field of lights. “Your spirit is out of balance. You’ve held yourself too close for too long and now you’ve lurched into something you do not understand. Do not be afraid to let go in order to regain your balance.” She snapped her gaze back over to Ratchet and smiled. “And that will be all. Please enter your subspace frequency and relevant contact information into this form.”