“How long are we going to have to do this?”

Tanya looked up from the itemized list she had made for herself, caught halfway between two thoughts. “We-we just got here.”

The aisle they stood in was dark and cramped. The shelves on either side were closer together than her wingspan, stacked to the low ceiling, blocking most of the light that should have been filtering down from the florescent tubes above. Emily was standing a normal distance from her, but the two of them seemed to take up the entire space they were allotted. The air was stagnant, unable to move through the store, and had picked up the scent of warm plastic and resin.

“No, not, not what ever this is,” Emily waved dismissively at the shelves around them. “How long are we going to do this hatchsitting thing?”

Tanya turned, looking back to her list and comparing it to the specifications written longhand on the shelf in front of her. “Until Wildwing trusts you, I guess.”

“What if that’s never?” Emily said, urgently.

“Well, then we’re both in trouble,” Tanya snorted. She discarded the resistors in her hand, and moved on to the box above them, and then the one above that. Emily fidgeted by her side, periodically blocking Tanya’s light as she worked through part numbers.

“What are you even after in here?” Emily asked. “This stuff looks…. old.”

Tanya grasped a stool that had been left in the aisle to set it where she had been standing, and then climbed on it to continue higher her search. “Under-underdeveloped,” she corrected as she pawed through the boxes. “It’s the best I’ve got to work with.”

Emily made a low whistle. “We’re in worse shape than I thought.”

“Trust is one of those things that I find hard to quant-quantify,” Tanya said, as she worked. “I think… I think I trust too easily.”

Emily was quiet for a moment, before replying. “That’s not really a bad thing.”

“I...it didn’t used to be, anyway,” Tanya sighed. She finally found the part number she was after, and tossed fifty into the cardboard box in Emily’s arms that had been repurposed as a shopping basket. They worked their way through the stacks like this, in silence, as Tanya scrutinized yellowed labels and compared them to her own list. Emily pretended interest in a shelf as she waited, still swaying and sighing.

 “I did-I did speak on your behalf,” Tanya found herself saying. “To Wildwing.”

Emily blinked, and stilled. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but why?”

Tanya placed more parts in the box, and with her hands free, made a motion that was supposed to resemble squeezing. Emily stared at her, vacant.

“Canard wasn’t crushed,” Tanya said, at last.

Emily winced in response.

“He-crushing, crushing is a specific process. It injures soft tissue, not just bones. Trauma that he didn’t have,” Tanya moved her hands in parallel instead. “His organs were sheared, offset, like they had been cleanly cut.”

Emily’s brow furrowed, “He didn’t have any cuts on the outside, did he?”

“Exactly!” Tanya said, too loud for the heavy topic of discussion, and quieted herself. “The evidence I see suggests you did not do it.”

“Did Wildwing believe you, though?”

Tanya shrugged, awkwardly, trying her best at a reassuring smile.

“Yeah, thought not,” Emily’s gaze lowered, scrutinizing the collection of parts in the box. “Thanks for trying. You didn’t have to.”

Tanya resumed looking through bins, unable to think of anything else to say on the subject.

“You never answered my question,” Emily said.

“What?”

“Why are we in here?” Emily said, shaking her box of parts. “This junk can’t possibly be useful.”

“I’m-I’m trying to improvise,” Tanya said. “I thought-I thought I almost had it, but the superfluous components I pulled from the Aerowing weren’t enough.”

“Superfluous,” Emily repeated.

“It means-”

“It means I know why the air conditioning stopped working.”

They stared at each other, in the dark aisle, with no sound between them beyond the traffic outside, until Tanya looked back into the bin before her, defeated.

It was not that Tanya had been wrong to salvage parts from the Aerowing. The team would understand. They just would not be enthused to hear that pieces of the fighter had been purloined. Someone would also probably mention that the air system was not quite as unnecessary as she was pretending. Without its cooling, waste heat from the engines actually made the interior of the craft quite warm. 

She would fix it. Eventually.

Tanya loaded her last few parts into the box, and ushered Emily to the front to pay. The human that sat behind the counter was the same as he always was: round, aged, with a mostly balding head and wiry white hair around his ears, and heavily calloused fingers that never moved quickly.

He introduced himself to everyone that walked through the door as Lenny. He sat on a stool in front of the only window, with a black mug of coffee and a paper sign that alternatively said OPEN or CLOSED. Lenny was often astonished at Tanya’s questions, in a way that suggested that no one had ever asked anything like them before, but he would always regain his composure and try his best to answer. She had no idea what his qualifications were, and he was always vague about it when asked, but the man had sourced the cathode tube for Drake One’s monitor and never questioned what it could possibly be for. 

He nodded to her and began ringing her up, though as he did so he made cautious glances to Emily. In the dim light, her blue eyes must have been giving him pause.

“Did you….ladies find everything you need?” he asked at last, placing everything carefully back into their box.

Tanya did what was sometimes required, where she had to lie and say yes. The real answer was she needed more computing power in a single processor than he would have believed physically possible. And she needed to find it soon, as well, as the fate of the planet might depend on it. He may not have believed that was possible either.

Emily picked up the box at the conclusion of the transaction, and they left.

They crossed the threshold of the doorway into the light of midday, with the high sun beating down on the pavement. They stood there for a moment as their eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness, and Tanya had a moment to ponder at the limitations of natural sight.

Her communicator began beeping, the helpful chirps of Drake One spotting something interesting and demanding her attention, but not of immediate import. She would look at it later, when they had returned to the Pond and she had a moment to give it.

Both their communicators began beeping more furiously, as Drake One changed its mind, and decided that whatever it had found was more emergent than originally assessed.

There was a sound, something high pitched that grasped the edge of hearing, but was otherwise inscrutable. The whining of working machinery, or maybe the imagined annoyance of tinnitus, without  apparent cause. It came it waves, may have even been visible in a strange thickness of the air as it pulsed, moving through everything before dissipating, leaving them standing in confusion. The humans walking around the strip mall stopped to listen as well. 

Tanya was opening her bill to suggest hasty travel to the Pond, when she was cut off by a car alarm in the nearby parking lot. And then a second one, and then perhaps a dozen more. Then began the true cacophony—the car alarms joined by anything else that made a sound, turning the already noisy city into a circus. Fire alarms, TV sets, radios, anything that made light and noise, did.

Tanya stripped off her omnitool, letting it hit the ground without a second thought. She instructed Emily to do the same with her box of purchased goods.

"What? Wh-"

The components in the box began to quiver, as if they were insects rather than rigid ceramic, silicon, copper, and tin. Emily had a split second in which to be visibly confused, before they began escaping their baggies and crawling up her arms. 

Emily did the most logical and useful thing possible, which was to start screaming, drop the box, and flail about as if she were trying to contain a fire consuming her clothing.

Tanya kicked away the box as its remaining contents squirmed. "Why does no one listen to me?"

"They're in my ears!" was Emily's response. Around them, panicked humans ran by, though Tanya noted they did not run in any specific direction, rather they seemed to have taken to running just to run.

Emily suddenly became still. She fluffed, her feathers standing on end, and she let out a particularly unpleasant shriek. Each of the tiny components menacing her briefly glowed blue and disintegrated into inert black dust that fell in rivulets to the ground. Tanya realized that she had underestimated how destructive Emily could choose to be.

Emily was visibly pleased with herself, smirking at the inert dust, until she glanced up at Tanya and realized that she had just destroyed their purchase.

“Sorry.”

The moment passed. The noise subsided all at once. The alarms went silent, the lights in store displays returned to even glows, and the people around them froze in confusion, as if suddenly they were unconvinced that anything had happened at all.

Emily stood and dusted remains off her clothing. Some of the parts that had escaped her lay on the ground, unmoving, normal. The omnitool, which Tanya had stripped off as it began to sting her arm—most likely the sensors that read her nerve impulses throwing feedback—did not complain as she picked it up.

"Did that seem weird to you?" Tanya asked, clasping the omnitool back on her wrist.

 Emily looked doubtfully at the dust surrounding her, then back to Tanya.

 “Uh, yeah, yeah okay,” Tanya agreed.

Tanya gathered up the mostly emptied box, pondering its remaining content, before remembering the store behind them.

“Lenny!” she exclaimed, nearly dropping the box again, and tore open the heavy glass door to reenter. 

Lenny was now standing on his stool, much the way someone would if they had seen vermin on the floor. His fear may have been well justified, as the entire contents of the store had liberated itself and surrounded him in a full circle of resistors, transistors, capacitors, chips, wires, pins, and cables. Tiny individually, they came together in a dazzling wave of gleaming sharp ends, pointed entirely at him.

“Lenny!” Tanya repeated. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll switch to decaf, I swear to god, I mean it this time,” Lenny said, terrified, refusing to move from his spot.

 Tanya set the box of remaining parts in Emily’s arms. “It’s-it’s okay now, I think.”

 If he heard her, he gave no indication.

Emily looked down at the box with suspicion, giving it a firm shake before deciding to hold it at arms length. "Do we really need this?"

"I should examine them,” Tanya said, before cautiously making her way around the advancing pile and the front counter, so that she could coax Lenny down. "I’ll also need to inventory what you destroyed." It may have come out more accusatory than she intended.

"The ears are off limits,” Emily stated, perhaps more for the pile of liberated components surrounding them to hear than to explain herself.

Tanya’s comm was beeping again. Wildwing was checking in on them.