I opened the door, and Lyra was standing there. She hadn't slept all night — that was the first thing I noticed. Anyone else might have missed it, but I'd known her for years, and that faint frown and those tiny lines around her eyes gave her away.

The second thought raised the question of what exactly she'd been doing all night instead. That thought brought with it a mix of anxiety, anger, and tension that tightened my jaw.

Right after that, I remembered Arven was sitting inside our apartment, in her spot.

Lyra glanced past my shoulder through the half-open door into the room. It only took her a second. Two glasses on the table, leftover dinner, a stranger's coat on the rack. None of it actually proved anything had happened between us.

So I smiled.

"You came at a bit of a bad time," I said. "Arven and I have been working almost all night."

That much was true. One of those rare, pleasant truths a person doesn't even have to twist.

"I wanted to help you with your Loop problem," Lyra answered, turning her eyes back to me. "But I see you probably don't need my help anymore."

"You know how it goes," I began, closing the door a little further. "Corven insisted on a partner. I had to pick someone."

"Arven?" she hissed, taking a step closer, forcing my eyes down to the floor. "After what you did to her back then, she should be bringing you to your knees. What did she promise you for this little favor?"

She had no idea what deal I actually had with Arven, but she knew exactly what kind of person Arven was. She must have seen the footage from the Loop's Gala, same as everyone else. I lifted my head and noticed how her face had changed. She was staring straight at me, lips pressed tight. Every second I didn't answer was eating her alive from the inside.

I took my time answering, and eventually decided to ignore her question entirely.

"Corven gave me two Pulses for you. I figured you'd stop by for them. Or do you have some other source now?"

The chance to live a little longer. That changed minds faster than jealousy, anger, a sleepless night, or anything else. She exhaled, and the muscles in her face relaxed. She gave a brief shake of her head. She needed me, and that warmed something in my chest. This could be our new beginning.

"Well, come on in, then."

I opened the door wide and watched Lyra step back into her own home. Arven stood by the table, looking at something on her tablet from our search. Beneath her, the table was covered with my notes and ideas for the fragment series. Arven didn't even look up at us, but I knew she'd caught every word of my conversation with Lyra.

"Good morning, Lyra," Arven greeted her, and the corners of my mouth shot upward. I'd spent half the night trying to think of a fragment to kick off my new partnership with Arven, and I couldn't come up with anything controversial or outrageous enough to be worthy of it. And yet all it took was waiting until morning.

"The Pulses, Nox," Lyra reminded me, her eyes sweeping across the apartment, from the papers, to the glasses, to the open bar cabinet, all the way to the couch in front of the glass windows. Arven smiled faintly and kept pretending Lyra's presence didn't interest her in the slightest.

"Sure, they're where they always are," I answered, and Lyra headed toward the kitchen. I watched Arven discreetly size her up with every click of her heels against the floor, and I pictured her mentally scoring and comparing. Older face, bigger chest, firmer ass. It had to be burning her up inside, but she gave nothing away.

When they were a step apart, their gazes crossed and locked for a split second. They were like two cats that had unexpectedly run into each other at the edge of their territories. Tense, backs straight, ready to pounce on each other at the first opportunity.

I watched them both like a tomcat with an appetite for either one. Ideally both at once.

With another confident step, Lyra passed Arven and glanced over her shoulder at the tablet's screen. Her reaction surprised everyone in the room.

"That's Vey?" she blurted, stopping in her tracks, head turned toward the tablet.

"You know her?" Arven tilted the tablet toward her and zoomed in on the face.

"Maybe," Lyra said absently, eyes buried in the screen.

"From where?" Arven pressed.

Lyra straightened back up and clenched her jaw. "That's not important."

"It's the only thing," Arven continued, hitting every word, "that's important right now."

She needed sleep. She was starting to get impatient and irritable. That approach didn't work on Lyra, but Arven hadn't figured that out yet. I had no intention of staying out of it.

"So you do have another source of Pulses after all," I said.

Lyra's head snapped toward me.

"I can count, Lyra," I continued. "You needed another dose three days ago. The exact day you left. You've been taking them a long time, so without them you'd only last a few days, and you definitely wouldn't look as good as you do right now."

"Was that supposed to be a compliment?" Lyra sneered at me.

"Take it however you want."

"You never change... Did you know I was running out of time, had two Pulses waiting for me, and still didn't even call?" Lyra gave a slight shake of her head.

"I did call. You didn't pick up." I reminded her, savoring the way her lips pressed together again, searching for the right words to defend herself.

Arven sighed and set the tablet down on the table. "Did she give you those Pulses?"

"So this is your grand plan to save your career? Some girl selling Pulses and another girl who maybe knows something about her?" Lyra ignored Arven's question and headed off again toward the kitchen cabinet hiding the Pulses.

"Yeah," I called after her.

"What are you doing?" Arven hissed at me, nodding toward the kitchen.

I stepped closer and leaned toward her ear. If Lyra walked back in right now, she'd see exactly what I wanted her to see.

"She knows something about her. More than just thirty-year-old rumors everyone keeps denying."

The kitchen cabinet door clicked shut around the corner.

"What do you know about her?" Arven shouted toward the kitchen.

I shot her a look. She couldn't possibly have been any louder if she'd tried. She rolled her eyes.

"I'd bet more than the two of you," came the voice from the kitchen.

"And I'd bet," I said cheerfully, "that those two Pulses you're about to walk off with are suddenly worth one short story."

"You're such a bastard," Lyra answered, walking back around the corner from the kitchen with a plastic case in hand. A soft glow shone through its walls.

"I'm your husband."

Arven smiled faintly.

"Help us," I stepped toward Lyra, looking straight into her face, "and you save your husband, me, and yourself. If his contract gets renewed, you get your regular supply back too."

"And what about Vey?" Lyra objected. "I don't want to hurt her. That girl's spent her whole life just surviving and doesn't even know why. I want to publish this anonymously."

"No one's going to take an anonymous source seriously, we need..." Arven started to object.

"Show her what we have," I cut her off, and she shot me a look full of raised eyebrow. I gave it right back to her, and she unlocked the tablet. Her finger tapped the screen and started our still-unpublished fragment, the one we'd been working on all night. It showed everything relevant about Vey's life so far. And I had to admit, there was frustratingly little of it worth using.

A brown-eyed girl appeared on the screen, dressed in a blue work uniform with the ReFab logo stitched onto the right breast pocket. She grinned into the camera with a carefree smile revealing a gap between her front teeth, the footage recorded in miserable resolution.

"Alright, you're going to be famous, Gloria," Arven's voice came through the tablet's speaker. "Just tell me why Vey left ReFab and where she went after, okay?"

"What's in it for me?" Gloria asked, touching her upper lip with the tip of her tongue and biting it lightly. "The guy before you gave me fifty bucks."

"What was his name?" Arven asked, but Gloria just laughed, shook her head, and jutted out her chin.

The camera shook, and a hand emerged from the bottom right corner holding a wad of bills rolled into a tube. Gloria's brown eyes lit up, her hand strung with string bracelets reaching toward Arven's, and the bills disappeared into the warmth of Gloria's cleavage.

"Corven," she said. "Pretty cute, actually."

She looked off somewhere above the camera and added, in a mock-sad voice:

"But he only cared about Vey."

Lyra stopped watching the tablet for a moment and gave me a thoughtful look.

"You knew about this?"

"Not before the Gala."

It wasn't a complete answer, but technically it was true. I'd suspected Edrin knew about it, but he'd never told me the full truth.

"How did things go with her?" Arven asked in the recording, and both Lyra and I turned back to Gloria.

"Vey... she didn't want to..." Gloria began, her voice wavering for a moment. For a split second, her cocky expression vanished, but it came right back a moment later. She took a breath and started again.

"Girls from the orphanage aren't grateful, you know, for a job, hot food, a locker, four walls, and a bed that creaks under them a couple times a month."

Then she flashed her teeth again, tongue poking through the gap between them. "I told her it's not so bad if you just close your eyes, but she wasn't cut out for it. So after a few months, she bolted."

Gloria hadn't even finished speaking before the opening of a Fragment assembled itself in my head. Young, alone, abused, on the run, sitting on a fortune of Pulses people would kill for. I hated how well it worked.

"Where'd she go?" Arven's mechanical voice came through again, and I looked back at the tablet screen.

"That's the best part," Gloria laughed loudly. "She went to work at the docks. Among sailors. Can you believe it? A girl who didn't want to work at ReFab."

Then the screen flickered, and after a cut, footage from one of the warehouse's security cameras appeared. The exact same warehouse Arven had shown me at the Loop's Gala.

Arven was questioning one of the foremen sitting behind a desk about Vey. He claimed he'd never seen anyone like that. But then a door on the opposite side of the room opened, and Vey walked in. Arven didn't notice a thing, still trying to talk the foreman into cooperating. Vey barely flickered past behind her and walked back out, as if nothing was happening. Arven had only gotten that footage a few days later, after bribing security.

Arven touched the tablet's screen and the video paused. It irritated me that she'd stopped it right there. I could have watched my own fragments for hours, and the closing line, the one launching the investigation, was, in my opinion, one of my best.

"That's enough for now," Arven said before I could object, and turned to Lyra. "Your turn. What do you know about her?"

Lyra lowered her eyes to the case of Pulses in her hands.

"This one's going to be a short story," she began.

I sat down in a chair, threw my feet up on the table among the notes, and watched Lyra walk toward the glass window overlooking the city.

"I needed Pulses, before I could find myself a replacement for Nox here."

"That'll be tough," I remarked, but Lyra didn't even turn around.

"A friend told me about the bar, and about Vey. I went there and bought some. But when I took the Pulse..."

"You saw more of the vision?" Arven cut her off, and I watched Lyra's every movement.

"Yeah," she answered after a moment, gaze fixed on the city below her. "She had a box, and there were thousands of them inside."

"She just showed it to you, like that?" I didn't understand.

"When I took that Pulse, I saw Corven's old house. The one you used to visit when we were starting out," Lyra turned to face me. "Vey's room was covered in pictures of fermenters, resonance detectors, and other things she absolutely shouldn't have seen in real life."

"We need to get to that bar right now," Arven blurted.

"It's not there anymore," Lyra sneered at her. "When I went back the next day, the bartender swore no Vey had ever lived there. The door was broken, and there was shattered glass all over the back alley. I think someone's after her. I waited there for her for three days."

That sounded like a police raid. Something about it didn't sit right with me, though. Lyra didn't need Pulses every single day, so why would she have gone back to see her again? There had to be something else behind it. Something she was hiding.

"Why did you go back to see her again?" I asked.

"Doesn't matter," Lyra answered, running her thumb across her ring finger, the one that, until a few days ago, had worn our wedding ring. She noticed me looking and pulled her hand away immediately.

"It matters," I said.

"If I tell you everything, you won't need me anymore. This is enough for now."

It wasn't enough for me, but Arven cut back in before I could push further. "She must have gone back to somewhere she used to live. That's what I'd do."

"We've already checked every address you have," I objected.

"But she was still living at the bar then," Arven disagreed.

"That's ridiculous," Lyra rolled her eyes, "she'll go to Corven's house."

"For God's sake, why would she go there of all places?" Arven countered. "If she's had these visions for years already, she must have already been there."

"Because I'm the one who just told her it was Corven's house. She's drawn maybe a hundred pictures of that house without ever knowing what it was. She let me get that close to her only because she's obsessed with her own past, the same way you two are obsessed with her. She'll go looking for him, and she'll find him."

"How would she find a house that's thirty years old?" Arven mused, setting the tablet down on the table. "She has to sleep somewhere, eat something. We need to go back through every place she's been before. We have to find her before the Loop does. But no one's going to believe an anonymous story, Lyra. Without her face, Corven will call it another lie, and by tonight there'll be nothing left of us. The same thing he did to me thirty years ago."

"No," Lyra shouted, much louder than she'd meant to, "we need to find her, find out what's behind her fate and why Corven cares about it. But then — and listen to me carefully, Arven — we cut her out of it completely and list her as an anonymous source."

Arven looked at me, waiting to see what I'd do. But I was thinking about Vey. Sooner or later, someone would get to her one way or another. Whether we published her in fragments directly or not, she was going to end up locked away for a very long time. If I was the one to publish her story, it would help at least three people — me, Lyra, and Arven. That was better than helping no one at all. It was a comfortable thought. So I held onto it.

Lyra was staring at me too. I knew that look well. She was waiting for me to take her side. It was the same look she gave me every time she'd already made up her mind and just wanted to hear that I'd arrived at the same conclusion.

"Arven's right about one thing. Without Vey, I have no proof. And without proof, I have nothing," I said, and watched the tension drain out of Lyra's face, taking the last of her trust in me along with it.

"First we go back to the places she used to live," I continued. "Depending on what we find, we call Edrin. That old bastard knows something, he just never says what. More leads might convince him to talk. And I'll find out who led the raid on the bar. I still have a few friends left in the Loop."

"That's exactly what scares me," Lyra said, heading for the front door.

"Come with us, Lyra," burst out of my mouth, and before I could even think about it, I added a quiet "please," which surprised me even more than it seemed to surprise her. She stopped at the open door of our apartment and lowered her head to the floor for a moment. When she turned again, her shoulder-length hair shifting, I caught the glint in her eyes.

"There is no us, Nox. Not while fragments matter more to you than a human life."

Lyra walked through the door, and the moment felt like an eternity to me. Her hair curled around her neck, her hip swaying as she stepped over the threshold with her right foot. Her palm wrapped around the glossy door and left a faint print of human warmth behind, the same warmth that had, until very recently, warmed me too. The woman I loved above everything else was walking out of my life for the second time, and I felt like Prometheus, his liver torn from his body by the eagle only so it could grow back by the next day, giving them the pleasure of tearing it out all over again. Over and over.

For a moment I cursed my entire existence. But what would even be left of me without my fragments? They were the only thing I really knew how to do. Or were they? A flash of my conversation with Corven crossed my mind, along with the falling graph of my viewership. Was Lyra right, maybe? I felt the light touch of Arven's palm on my left shoulder.

"Whiskey, Nox?"

"Make it a double."