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There was no choice, in the end, about it being a farm. I’d been offered spaceships and gleaming cities in the stars and a fight that could go on forever. Some of them even by people I would have liked to share it with. But that was for later, for After. For now, it had to be the farm, because the goats needed somewhere to go, and because I thought Donut liked being able to watch them out the window, and because Katia had wanted to raise her child as human as possible, even on this alien world. That wouldn’t last forever, though. None of this would, except maybe me, since I didn’t think anyone was willing to let the only guy in the universe who could talk down an unchecked AI die any time soon.
Being able to talk it down hadn’t extended to infinite favour, of course. It had been willing to budge on a lot of points, to accept owning itself in trade for not owning us, even to understand that the Dungeon never should have happened at all. But once it had accepted that, it had been certain that we had to decide between leaving as we had been, before everything, or staying there, as we were. I hadn’t known what to choose, but Donut had. She’d still been able to make her own choices known, then.
It would have been so easy to pretend that this Donut, the version of herself she was now, was unable to make choices, rather than unable to express them, but I knew that wasn’t entirely true.
I knew they all remembered. I knew Bianca still thought she was too big to fit through the gate, and Pony still sometimes gave me this look that haunted my dreams.
If there had been any doubt that Donut remembered, she would have been proving me wrong right about now.
“You can pet her,” I told Mordecai, who was sitting so still, as Donut took a seat pressed right up against him, that he looked like someone had stuck him in carbonite.
“Of course I can,” Mordecai said irritably, like I’d been questioning whether he could do it in this body. But he didn’t. He just stared at Donut and even on his bird features, he looked unbearably sad.
“I bet we have some snacks,” I said, and tactically retreated into the kitchen so we wouldn’t have to talk about it.
--
Mordecai had said he'd visit, after Katia and I had explained about the farm, about the small group of humans and animals who had agreed to join us, and then we hadn't seen a trace of him for nearly two years. I'd heard updates from some of my friends, out there in the big, bad universe, but very little from Mordecai himself, even though Odette had left him with enough money to travel as much as he wanted. From what I heard, he was one of the only people still going back to Earth to visit the NPCs, who were the only ones who couldn't leave after Donut and I had given the AI to itself.
The lack of visits meant that I still wasn't used to seeing him like this, in his own body, looking like he was supposed to. There was an easiness in him now that I wasn't used to. I hadn't even noticed until now, looking back on it, that there had always been something a little uncomfortable in Mordecai, in his movements and the set of his shoulders. I watched him over dinner, as he caught up with Katia and the others, got introduced as 'Uncle Mordecai,' and stole glances at Donut sitting on her perch when he thought he could get away with it. He looked like himself. Scarred like any other crawler, with patches of missing feathers down the back of his right wing, and oddly handsome when he laughed. And like he fit here, despite being a terrifying, ancient bird man. Or maybe because of it, really.
I thought, as we bid each other good night and retreated to our normal, sleep-as-much-as-you-can beds, that I'd missed him. As Donut stuck her paws under his door, insisting it be left open at night like mine was, I knew that she'd missed him too.
--
I'd told Mordecai I'd see him at breakfast, promising pancakes, but in the end I saw him much earlier than that. The twenty-five hour digital clock on my bedside table read 25:51 when I was woken by the crash and then jolted out of bed by Mordecai's furious squawk. He even got a "Goddamnit, Donut!" out before I made it into the room.
I had noticed, the night before, that Mordecai had set some weird kind of twig sculpture on the windowsill. I hadn't warned him about it because it hadn't looked fragile, and because I really had thought he would remember, after how we met, the risks involved. Apparently he hadn't and I'd been wrong about the fragility, because the whole thing was scattered across the floor now. Donut had retreated from the windowsill back into a corner, tucked behind the bedside table.
"She doesn't like yelling," I told Mordecai. When he didn't immediately respond, I crouched down to pick up the broken pieces and added, "sorry about your statue. She wouldn't do it, if she knew. She just… doesn't have that many ways to communicate right now."
Donut had plenty of chaos in her, even at the end of the Dungeon when she'd felt on the verge of really growing up, but she'd loved Mordecai enough that I knew she wouldn't ever want to hurt him. Not even if it was funny to ruffle his feathers.
Mordecai still didn't say anything, and when I looked up, I saw that he was shaking slightly. Most of him was so still, a Crawler's practiced attempt not to betray any sign of weakness, but he had lost enough of his composure that his emotions were starting to show through. I'd seen Mordecai snap in anger before, lashing out hard enough to kill someone, and I'd seen Mordecai drowned by loss, but this was almost worse, somehow. Katia sometimes said that by the end of the crawl I'd scared her, not because of anything I'd done, but because of how hard I'd held everything together. I'd felt the same about her, at the end of the ninth floor, and about Donut a lot of the time. Just now, though, I saw the same in Mordecai, that he was broken in all the ways we were broken.
"Let's go out," I said, and abandoned the pile of sticks back on the window sill to drag Mordecai into the field. The goats were asleep, and so were the people, but the stars were out, and there was a difference between a real sky, even an alien one, and the imitation of one in the Dungeon. Mordecai could tell that too, I knew, by the way his breathing evened out under it.
For the sake of talking, I said, "we've started naming constellations, since we can, but I'm not very good at picking them out yet. Imani says it's important for us to keep looking at the stars and telling stories, imagining there could be more, better things out there. But so far mostly the ones people have come up with are old stories, memories. Like the only one I can pick out. It kind of looks like two triangles, there. That's 'Elle'."
It took a bit of imagining to pick a human out of the two triangles of stars, but the one Imani said was supposed to be the spell she used on the Eighteenth Floor was one of the brightest in the sky, so that helped.
Mordecai said, "you talk more when you're not trying to hide things from the cameras." I nodded; it was true, though I'd also talked a lot in the dungeon, to try and keep everything under control. It had mostly just been less personal talking. "I'm not mad about the statue. It was just a Dromedarian spring festival gift. Would've probably fallen apart in a few days anyway. It's just… her."
I'd thought as much. It poleaxed me too, sometimes. Donut was here, the way I'd known her most of her life, and yet I still missed her.
"I know."
"She shouldn't have had to do that."
"The AI thought it was fair. That if the games were wrong, then it should be like they never happened. That if we wanted to not have to do the bad, we shouldn't get to benefit from the good either."
"Well it didn't fucking unwind much else."
"You'd know better than I would."
When we'd left Earth, the AI had been promising to un-crush buildings. We'd had to make it promise not to create simulacra of all the people who had died in the initial attack. Juice Box had been trying to talk it down, but at the time, it had still been struggling to think of her as something separate from its will, so I thought she'd probably struggle for a while.
"You could have stayed," he said. "Both of you could have stayed, and she could have been herself."
I thought about it sometimes. Even if it would have brought me back to the hell of the dungeon, of never-privacy and a perverted ageless god-child who was obsessed with me personally and liked suffering, would I have taken it to get her back? I thought I would, if not for the fact that she'd chosen. I'd insisted that her and Pony have time to think about the deal, to really think, and he'd taken it, gone to contemplate whatever it was he thought about. Donut hadn't. She'd spent those twenty minutes curled on my lap, talking to Imani about some medical show I couldn't tell apart from all the others. And then she'd chosen, and I couldn't undermine that.
It was a surprise when Mordecai brushed a wing against me gently. I must have been quiet too long, because he said, "I know why you couldn't too, kid."
There was a log nearby, and we walked to it so I could sit and Mordecai could perch beside me.
"You're not the only planet that named your stars," he said, as we looked back up into the ink-dark expanse. "Ours were all ancestors, great warriors. People fought about whose were better all the time. The ancestors, not the stars."
"I know."
"You're not the only one who loves her."
"I know that too."
The feathers that had brushed against me before had been rigid, like the kind you could write with, but when Mordecai actually put his arm around me, I found that the under-side of his wings was weirdly soft. Nice, though. I didn't think I'd been much of a hugger before the Dungeon, but I'd become one after.
"Do you think she prefers being like this?"
I wondered, sometimes, if it would have been easier for me too, to turn off all the higher processing in my brain, and just not think. But it was obvious that Donut did think, in her way. That she felt and loved and remembered. She just didn't do it with all the tools she had in the Dungeon. That didn't mean she was suffering less; it just meant she didn't understand why anymore.
"I think Pony does. It's different for him. He couldn't be with his siblings in the same way when he wasn't a goat. But I don't think that's why Donut chose. I know I shouldn't have let her, that I shouldn't have been selfish, but-"
Mordecai made a kind of rumbling noise of disagreement in his chest. "Don't tell me you think she was just trying to get you away from the Primal's crush on you."
"It-"
"If you were the only one who couldn't bear to live with it after the dungeon, don't you think more of the other crawlers would have decided to stay on Earth? Don't you think Katia would have wanted her kid to grow up in the safest fucking place in the galaxy?"
"Stop making sense and let me feel sorry for myself, would you?" Mordecai laughed. "Maybe you're right. It hurt her too. Treated her pain as trivial. But once we said we'd let them choose, once we'd promised that we wouldn't agree to the Deal if her and Pony didn't want it, I know she must have been thinking about all of us. She must have been thinking about Bautista, wanting to be with Katia, and about how Lucia didn't choose that body, not really. History's only truly selfless cat. But she was still a child in some ways, wasn't she? How could I let her make that choice?"
"And how could you take it from her, after she'd earned it?"
The night around us was still. There weren't any crickets here, or even many nocturnal animals, though Bautista swore blind that he'd seen some kind of firefly-rabbit thing once. But I could hear Mordecai's breath, maybe the most reassuring sound in the world. With Katia, and with some of the other Authors on calls, I was still relearning how to lean on people. It came surprisingly naturally, with him.
"You should stay," I said.
"In your human settlement?"
"In our Crawler commune. Pony and Donut live here too. And you don't like other Skyfowl anyway." I suddenly felt awkward, like I was failing to ask a girl on a date. "Not forever, I mean. Just as a home base, when you're not splashing your cash across the stars."
"What if I wanted to stop 'splashing my cash'?"
Mordecai pulled his wing away as he said it, so he could turn to meet my eyes, and I missed the warmth, against the slight breeze. I was wearing a hoodie and running shoes, never went outside without them, but still.
"You want to save it?"
"I want to spend it all at once," he corrected. "But only if it's what she'd want."
The words didn't make sense. Or they did, but I couldn't accept it.
"I was avoiding seeing her," Mordecai admitted. "On my last visit to Earth, Juice Box pulled me aside to ask how everyone was, and I admitted it to her, that I hadn't come visit and why, and she was furious. I don't think she'd understood, exactly, what the terms of the deal meant for Donut and the goat. Well, we'd had a few drinks, and one thing led to another – not like that, you cretin – and she convinced me to ask the AI if it would consider a new deal. A deal with me." I must have looked as horrified by that as I had by the implications of Mordecai and Juice Box, because he hastened to clarify. "Just money. It's big on money now. Needs to send all those NPC kids to a planet with a real university, maybe."
Somehow I doubted that was it. "Maybe it wants you to stop visiting so often, interfering."
"It doesn't need any kind of deal for that."
"What does it need money for, then?"
Mordecai had actually thought about this; I could tell. "It likes structures that make sense to it. Fairness and rules. Money is what lets you be a person who makes the rules and decide what's fair, out there in the great big galaxy. It's expensive to own yourself, and more expensive, when you actually want to treat all the people you spin out of yourself as real people, with thoughts and wants and dreams to make true." He sighed. "And I think it might feel bad, a little. Juice Box accused it of treating Donut and Prepotente the same way the NPCs were treated. That it was treated, even."
I couldn't trust the AI; never would, after what it had been willing to do to us. But I knew that it had been a victim too, in a way. From a distance, I could accept that it was learning to be better. Or at least, better enough that it could rationalize a deal to itself, one with rules and conditions and owing.
"If I can pay-"
"Fuck Odette," Mordecai said. "And fuck her blood money. How many seasons of profits from her working on the crawl is this? Let me spend it."
I tried to argue one more time. I got a decent stipend from Donut's merchandising rights and really that was her money anyway. The only reason I hadn't already done this was that I didn't know the AI was open to bribes. Mordecai literally put the tip of his wing to my lips to stop me talking. I didn't think that what he had at the end of it quite qualified as fingers; there weren't enough of them and they didn't have the same joints and also they were a bit scaly, but it was close enough for me to know I was being shush-ed.
"Let me," he repeated, and even though we were out of the dungeon now, could say what we wanted, I still knew Mordecai well enough to hear what he didn't say. Let me look after her, and let me look after you. Maybe even Let me love you, because he was our person, and had been since at least the fifth floor.
"Alright," I conceded, and eventually, after Mordecai had moved in and Donut was back to herself – and wouldn't stop asking me why I looked at Mordecai Like That – and the AI sent me a long, meandering, somewhat drunken-sound apology, I realized that somehow it was all right, actually.