“So, hey, wild idea here,” Mako said, from his position flopped upside-down on the couch, throwing a ball up and down over his face. Cass had been watching him in growing horror for the last minute, waiting for the point at which he missed the ball and caught it with his face instead of his hands. “Hear me out: What if we got a job that actually, like, paid us? More than the cost of the mission and snacks?”
AuDy didn’t look up from the wall panel where they were running diagnostics on the Kingdom Come. “Just because your snack budget is almost more than everyone else’s food budget some months doesn’t mean we aren’t being paid enough.”
Mako made a wounded noise, twisted around so that he was sideways, and threw the neon ball (it had started out green, was now yellow, and starting to shade into orange; Cass had no idea where Mako even found it) at AuDy, who ignored it with the aplomb of a robot whose pressure sensors might not have even registered the squishy ball now dribbling across the lounge’s floor.
Lounge was a generous word for it, of course: The couches were probably still the pre-war couches the Kingdom Come had first shipped with, the floor was covered by indifferent carpet, and there was a table that Cass had seen AuDy and Mako drag in three weeks after the Chime coalesced. Also, the whole thing was draped in gaudy salvaged throw blankets, throw cushions, and throw-anything-else-soft that people brought in, so named because they would get thrown around at least once a week.
Case in point, the way Mako was somehow squiggling his way across his couch like a weird blue neon-jacketed worm, pillow in hand, presumably so that he could thwack AuDy with a pillow. Across the lounge, Aria sniggered, and Cass desperately tried to make eye contact with her. She spread her arms, eyes wide and innocent, as if she weren’t just as invested in Mako in starting chaos within the Kingdom Come as Cass was in trying to stop him.
AuDy didn’t look up. They just said, “You are welcome to correct me if I am wrong. However, we do need a job. It would help keep my ship from falling apart.” They paused, a few lights flashed on their exterior, and they added, “Again.”
“We can’t get a job without looking for a job,” Cass said, trying to be the adult. They’d had practice, but all the practice in the world in the army meant nothing in the face of the Chime. “Which is something we are notably not doing right now.” Not that there were doing any better: Cass had been staring at a blank screen for the last half an hour, occasionally tapping out a greeting to their family before erasing it and trying again to figure out who they even wanted to send the periodic Hi, I’m not dead but I’m also not coming home yet, bye letter to this time.
“We did get blown up like, last week,” Aria pointed out, thankfully breaking Cass’ depressive spiral. She tapped at her personal holoprojector, and a pixelated blue image of the Megalophile getting shot at started gently twisting in the air. “Also, bad press means shit jobs.”
“I just don’t wanna be a courier. Currier? Curry’s good, but I don’t like, want to cook it or anything.”
“Couriers carry things around town, Mako.” AuDy re-sealed the wall panel they had been working on and turned around, just in time for Mako to solidly thwuff a pillow into the place their face wasn’t. “It has nothing to do with food.” Methodically, AuDy pried the pillow out of Mako’s hands.
“If it did then I might care.”
Or at least, Cass thought that was what he said, because everything after “then” was muffled by the pillow AuDy had shoved back into Mako’s face.
Aria laughed in delight, shut down the hologram, and threw another pillow into the fray. Cass weighed their tactical options, sighed, and shut down their laptop, at once grateful for the excuse to forget about the letter and resigned to not accomplishing anything for another hour. Especially as Aria ran towards AuDy to double-team them with Mako, a synth-pop song Cass only recognised from long association with Aria and Mako’s combined music hipsterism starting to blare over the speakers. She almost succeeded in landing another hit in before getting pillow-punched in the gut.
Slowly, Cass stood up, two pillows in one hand and a blanket in the other, and snuck around behind the escalating pillow war, aided by the loud music and also by how the other members of the Chime were already caught up in the fight. Still, they had to move quickly to ensure that nobody noticed they weren't still moping in the corner of the lounge. Cass edged behind the couch Mako had started on and was currently curled up on again, wildly waving a pillow in front of his face to ineffectively fend off both AuDy and Aria’s betrayal.
Cass threw the blanket over AuDy first, pulling it tight and only succeeding in rocking AuDy off balance for a moment because their friend hadn’t been expecting it. Before AuDy could fully regain their footing, Cass dumped the pillows on top of Aria and Mako, who had started tussling on the couch the moment AuDy was out of the picture. They both froze at the sudden influx of pillows and turned to face Cass with identical expressions of focus.
The glee Cass had felt a moment before at a successful ambush drained away as every single one of their teammates launched at them. All four of them fell into a tangled pile, fortunately cushioned by the garish pillows, and Cass said, “Fuck.”
Or, they tried to say “Fuck,” but their lungs were a bit constrained by the robot on their chest, and their face was a little squished by Mako’s arm, and then there was Aria, who had ended up on top in some miracle, and who was indiscriminately lashing out with the pillow she had acquired from wherever. Mostly it just came out as “ugh.”
AuDy stood up, shedding Mako and Aria into another indecorous heap as they did so, and offered Cass a hand. Slowly, Cass took it, waiting for AuDy to use it to trick them. But instead, AuDy just pulled Cass to their feet and said, voice clashing with the sunny pop music, “That was a dirty trick.”
“It worked.”
AuDy didn’t have eyes that could gleam, but a light on their chest flickered brighter for a moment. “Yes. It did work.”
Cass stepped back, and almost got out of range of AuDy’s retaliation, but AuDy always moved faster than Cass expected. So Cass fell over as AuDy threw the blanket over them and then swept a pillow at their legs. As they thumped to the ground, Cass heard Aria and Mako whispering a count-down, and grinned.
The war—with its gloriously unpredictable alliances—was well and truly on, then.