They shuffled duties again. That final evening, the girls had ended up together on the Aerowing.

Duke gave in, and had not even made it back to his bunk. He was sleeping on one of Tanya’s workbenches in the hangar, only slightly disturbed by the sound of the Aerowing’s refuel, systems check, and departure. Nosedive had put in his shift, and this time they had collectively pulled him out of the cockpit after nine hours. He was cross about it, but Grin was able to lure him away with the promise of a full meal.

Grin was nice enough to hand the girls a meal to go as well. Grin was the best cook out of all of them, and for whatever reason he did not mind the logistics of making a meal large enough for six active people. Tanya could not remember when or where her last meal had been, which was a fair indication that it was time to eat again. She did feel marginally better, after.

If Mallory was flagging at all, Tanya could not tell. Mallory did not touch her food, even long after it had gone cold, stowed away at her feet. It had been much the same when they had first met; the Resistance had difficulty coming by supplies in the center of the occupied city, and the rations had not been generous. Mallory must have been as hungry and dirty as the rest of them, when Canard had introduced them to each other, but she had not seemed fatigued at all.

The Aerowing was somewhere out over Death Valley in the middle of the night when Drake One finally got a useful ping. For all their circling and searching and planning and logic, it seemed that they needn't have bothered expending the effort. In the end, Tanya had been incredibly correct, and Dragaunus had not managed to take the Raptor far. The damn ship had been on the eastern edge of Los Angeles the entire time.

The Raptor itself was only a short lived blip. It was unique enough that there was no question of what Drake One had seen, and that it had vanished shortly after becoming airborne was only more confirmation.

It was a matter of minutes to dip a wing and return. For a moment, Tanya was certain they had lost an opportunity, and that she would need to find a dissipating exhaust trail—something unique and harder to hide than light spectrum—and that perhaps she and Mallory would have to give chase.

They arrived at the ping coordinates, and it was hard to ignore the smoke rising from the ground below. Dragaunus was a threat, but Wildwing would have never let them hear the end of it if they chose the long shot of chasing an invisible ship over tangibly helping someone. It felt like a betrayal to delay their search, but the Aerowing’s computer could begin to coordinate the task of tracking with Drake One while they investigated the fire. It would not be a total forfeiture of their goal, just a slight detour.

It was far easier to find the fire than it was to find a landing spot that could accommodate the Aerowing’s wingspan. They had to settle on a parking lot.

The thrusters powered down, and Tanya did her best blurry-eyed diligence to the post-flight checklist as Mallory grabbed everything she could have anticipated needing and left for the personnel hatch. Tanya had to wait for its cycle before following, and had barely made it to the pavement below the craft, mentally distracted with planning her next sensor sweep, when she walked into Mallory's unmoving backside.

Everything went from complicated and frustrating to suddenly simple, because Wildwing was right there, waiting for them at the edge of the lot, and Klegghorn was screaming at them about their parking job. More than that, they appeared to have additional ducks in tow. They could have not asked for a more miraculous outcome.

What Tanya felt first was not relief, but a wave of exhaustion, as if right at the moment all the adrenaline keeping her awake took its leave, and all she could do to keep from toppling over was to sit down on the warm pavement. Mallory and her ever present well of stamina instead drew a blaster, just in case, and took off at a sprint. She started scolding Wildwing for having been kidnapped in the first place, and that was a far, far closer reunion to what Tanya had pictured.

Wildwing stopped her with a hand signal well before she was at a conversational distance.

Things got frustrating and complicated again.

They supplied him with a fresh communicator, and he described as best he could how his captivity had unfolded. Klegghorn listened from a vaguely impolite vantage with the girls, an ever-deepening frown creasing his face. Mallory’s stoicism broke and she and Tanya stared at each other, troubled, as Wildwing described concern of a mysterious infection that had killed one of his companions.

“Do you know what that is?” Mallory asked her.

“I-I don’t think so,” Tanya murmured. “Do you?”

“Every camp I saw was vile. The worst I heard in there was feather wasting, but everyone’s vaccinated against that in basic.”

“We weren’t in basic,” Tanya reminded.

“It’s not that,” Wildwing interrupted form the open comm line. They did not argue with him. He would have been the best source to know, as someone who had spent many months inside the camps personally. “This is worse. It split someone open and killed him instantly, from the inside. He went from standing and talking with us to dead in under a minute.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Tanya said, aghast.

“I have,” Klegghorn interjected. The girls both looked at him in surprise, having forgotten he was there. He shook his head, waving away their intrigue. “Bullshit, but seems like your exact line of bullshit.”

“Charming,” Mallory remarked.

“You’re going to be really thrilled with my manners if I have to call the CDC and tell them we need to find Sigourney Weaver.”

Mallory gave a dismissive sigh, and looked to Tanya. “What do we do? We’re not equipped for this.” It had never occurred to any of them that they would need a contamination protocol, yet they could not leave their survivors in the middle of a city center.

“I have an idea,” Tanya said.

The Aerowing line was one of the few modern short range crafts Puckworld had made space-worthy. It had been intended for support duties in-system; a little armed courier that could move small numbers of people between rocks and stations. It was fortunate that Canard had been able to acquire it. Its status as more than a small fighter had come with the secondary benefit of a decontamination cell, courtesy of a failed terraforming project two decades prior, where a previously undiscovered microbe had caused permanent blindness to the ground team that had begun moving rock, and then their support staff, and eventually the first rescue mission that investigated.

Klegghorn was not enthused by their plan, but he knew there was no other choice but to return them to the Pond. No one else could be trusted with their care. He agreed to keep his silence, but swore that they would not be able to ignore him when he demanded updates. Quite a threat indeed, from someone who had spent the last seventy-two hours insisting that he did not want to be involved at all.

The cell was nothing more than a glorified body scan for diagnosis, with none of the actual treatment ability of the medicom, but it was better than nothing. Wildwing came away from the chamber seemingly unscathed from the experience of the past few days, with no markers or flags for concern on the readout. Tanya could not say with absolute certainty that the scan would have found the infection he described in early stages, but of everything they had on hand, it was the one device made specifically to inspect foreign material in a body.

He emerged with an embarrassed smile, suddenly hyper-aware that he had been stripped of all his armor, with the sole exception of his shoes. He had not explained where his armor or the Mask had gone. There was hardly any need to ask. Of course both were gone, and of course they would never see evidence of either again. There was the other issue he left unsaid, as well: Without the Mask, it was hard to verify that it actually was Wildwing they had retrieved.

Mallory deployed the tactic that they had used in the Resistance as a basic safety measure against simple illusions and shapeshifters, prior to Canard’s recovery of the Mask: “I can’t believe you just lost my father’s armor like that.”

“Tanya synthesized it last year, after a giant chicken shattered the original,” he corrected, but tilted his head in acknowledgment. It was not a perfect test, but it was a gauge of identity without better tools. Wildwing would have known something as mundane as the armor’s history, the Saurians would never have thought to ask.

Their attention had to turn to the gaggle of survivors that he had brought along with him. Three of the four set off the chamber’s scan, though it could not identify what exactly it had found. All it could confirm was that it was internal, not airborne.

Mallory was the first to say anything about their fourth, uninfected survivor, and she looked between him and Wildwing accusingly. “You did not mention that.”

“No, I did not,” Wildwing agreed. “But I couldn’t exactly just leave him there.”

Before Mallory could mount full interrogation, Wildwing’s copy crumpled to the ground on his own, depriving her of the honor. One of the other survivors, a duck with white feathers and blond hair, slid down beside the duplicate, and he leaned against her for support. Mallory was incensed that neither was taking her glowering seriously, and Tanya took her arm and suggested they begin the ascent to return home. Mallory reluctantly turned for the pilot seat.

Tanya retrieved a med kit and knelt next to the double, but hesitated. He was not a perfect copy. Wildwing had a surprising amount of muscle mass, and this person was too wiry by comparison. There was also something just a little bit wrong in the angles of the face, though she could not have been able to say exactly what, without the two of them side by side. The resemblance was unmistakable, and would pass at a glance, but she realized that this thing, whatever it was, would not have convinced any of them.

“What happened?” Tanya asked, cautiously. Rather than say anything, he indicated to his left side. She hesitated just a moment too long, and he made a noise of annoyance before grabbing the hem of his shirt and exposing the torso, and sure enough, there appeared to be several patches of feathers missing and bruises covering him. The primary of which was a large, swelling spot over his ribs.

She made a noise of comprehension. “The Saurians did that?”

“No,” he said firmly, and winced, but added nothing else.

The duck giving support appeared to be covered in nothing but a large jacket. Her hair and feathers entirely misaligned, and she seemed so exhausted that she probably offered very little in actual support. She propped herself under his good shoulder, and his hand was on her elbow. They knew each other.

“And you,” Tanya asked her. “Are you okay?”

The companion hesitated, and finally settled on “I don’t know.”

Well, that was fair.

The duplicate winced again as the Aerowing lifted off.

“Has he been coughing at all? Blood or… Blood?” Tanya shuffled through a medical kit.

“No,” the companion responded.

“Well, that’s good,” Tanya mused. “Bones are easy, we can get hat fixed no problem. Itches like nothing else, ha ha, but easy. Punctured lungs are harder. Haven’t done that one myself in a while.” She found a syringe and a bottle of clear liquid and lifted them for the double to see. “I’m going to give you something for the pain.”

“Are you a doctor?” he croaked dubiously.

“Sure!” she smiled. “Theoretical physics. Hold still.”