After only a few minutes of growing terror, the outline of Corax appears, barely visible though the tarp. He digs his beak beneath the edge and forces his head inside.

  “Safe.” He says. “Help Ivy.”

  “Ok, just please be careful.” I beg.

  Corax gives me a serious nod and retracts his head, disappearing once again.

  I grab a poetry book and attempt to smother my mind in it. I don’t want to have to worry about Corax every instant until he’s back. I don’t want to worry about my steadily growing anger and what will happen when I try to release it. I just want to pass the time until everything is better.

  Time ticks by slowly as my mind grapples with metaphors and allusions. The reading doesn’t help anything, but I do think it’s stopping it from getting worse. That’s good enough until Corax gets back and can save me again from my own mind.

  At some point Cassie takes the book from my p and starts idly flipping through it.

  The two of us sit together for an hour, with only the occasional sound drifting out of the car. Or at least occasional for me, I’m sure Cassie can still hear everything that’s happening in there.

  Our rest is interrupted by Cassie giving a solid tap on the door, followed by the side of the tarp being pulled up. I look at Cassie for what to do. She’s not reaching for her weapons, I don’t need to either.

  Corax flies from Ivy’s shoulder to mine the moment the tarp is lifted up, and she pins it back down behind her. Ivy turns around, looking at us properly for the first time and freezes, tilting her head to the side and gncing back towards where she came from a few times.

  “What?” Cassie asks, already annoyed by her.

  “Oh nothing.” Ivy waves a hand dismissively with a smile. “Just trying to figure out if my chances are better with two pissed off girls or the robots.”

  Cassie only rolls her eyes and returns to her book.

  Ok. Safe. Ivy fshes two signs into the car and takes a seat between the two of us.

  “I can guess what Cassie’s problem is, but what about you Blue?” She asks.

  “I learned my mom was right again.”

  “Of course I am.” Kara’s voice echoes in my ears, only to be dismissed by a quick pull of my ear.

  “I learned to bottle up my emotions, but it’s just getting worse and I don’t know how to let it out. I’m afraid if Corax tries to help it’ll just end up overwhelming both of us.” My worries flow from my mouth so quickly I can barely believe Ivy can understand me.

  Corax takes a step closer on my shoulder, pushing his entire body up against my neck and cheek in support. His feathers are so warm from the sun, it helps calm me down a little.

  Ivy gently guides me into ying down and resting my head on her p where she once again begins taking care of my hair.

  “We’ll figure it out.” She reassured me gently. ”Why don’t you tell me where it started?”

  “The uninjured guy wants me dead.” I say. A few tears stain Ivy’s pants. “He was so afraid, so full of anger, when all I was doing was saving his friends.” The anger fres up once again. If I keep talking it’s going to burst free. I can’t be around anyone when that happens.

  I pull my guns out of their holsters and set them in between Cassie and Ivy.

  “Keep them, please.” I beg into the open air.

  Cassie stands up, moves over to my backpack, and pulls out my tablet. She pces it in my hand, along with my cord.

  “You have a journal, use it.” She sits back in her spot. Her advice fshes through my mind. She’s right, I need to get my emotions out of my head and onto the page.

  I look to Corax, silently asking if I can handle it.

  He nods, crouching down further on my shoulder, leaving his beak only inches from my ear.

  I pull up the notes application and begin to type. I pluck a single malformed thought from the endless creature in my mind and copy it in its entirety to my tablet. Once done I can realize just how dumb it is, and safely delete it. Exact copies of the thought in the swirling ball of anger disappear with it. I pull another thought, acknowledge it, rationalize it, and move on.

  I slowly come to the realization that the anger doesn’t want to consume me, it just wants attention. Once I work through an individual thought, it never reforms in the ball.

  Are the rest of my emotions like this? Is all I’ve had to do this whole time is to acknowledge, rationalize, and move on? No, if it was that simple someone would have told me a long time ago.

  “This is helping, thank you.” I don’t even have to take breaks while working through everything. One thought at a time, entirely separate from everything else going on in my mind, is manageable.

  Cassie mutters something I can’t quite catch into her book.

  Even Corax eventually rexes, hopping from my shoulder and digging himself between Ivy’s legs and on the hot sand. I have no idea how he doesn’t overheat, and a little bit of jealousy springs into existence inside my mind.

  Ok, I should try to deal with this. First off, why am I jealous? It’s really easy for me to overheat if I don’t give it constant attention. Especially now, ying in the sand with the anger still churning, even the slowest of thoughts threatens to tip the scales and lead to generating far more heat than I can manage.

  Is it a reasonable feeling? No, it’s just that our bodies and brains have different requirements. He’s purely code, and his whole system wouldn’t have any trouble running nearly hot enough to boil water, while my chip would cook itself. We both have different advantages too, I get more processing power and multiple emotions, while his system is far more stable.

  Acknowledge, rationalize, move on. I sever the thread of thought and let my mind wander unwatched. The jealousy doesn’t even attempt to come back.

  Fuck, it has been this easy the whole time. Three simple words could have solved every problem I’ve ever had. I’m not sure if it’ll work for the hallucinations, but I have a pn, something I can try, something I can fight back with.

  I can’t help but ugh.

  Cassie jerks in surprise, her hand flying to her knife and her eyes watching for a single moment, ready for some non-existent fight. Ivy and Corax, on the other hand, barely react besides a small look of surprise on their faces.

  “Sorry, sorry.” I get my ughter back under control and Cassie rexes a little. “It’s just that apparently emotions have been easy to deal with all along, and nobody ever bothered to tell me.” I guess that would have been Mary’s job, she just sucked at it.

  Corax settles back down in his nest, beaming with pride for me. Ivy doesn’t say anything, she just gives me a warm smile and keeps untangling my hair. I think she’s even creating more tangles for her to work on, just because I like the feeling so much.

  “I’ve never heard you ugh before.” Cassie says quietly, finally letting herself rex.

  “Huh. I think that’s my first time, actually.”

  The four of us sit here for an hour while I slowly work on my feelings. The swirling mass gradually shrinks. New thoughts still generate, but they’re so nonsensical it only takes an instant to dismiss them as such.

  Everything is fine until Cassie breaks the silence.

  “Shh.” She silently stands up, straining her ears for any sound.

  Footsteps. One. She signs to us, and then repeats the signs into the car after waving to get Vince’s attention.

  Fear threatens to grip my mind. It's the robots, they've found us, there’s nothing else it could be. I shove the thoughts into the anger ball, I can deal with it ter.

  Ivy gently helps me sit up, grabs her rifle, and loads a single bullet in. Cassie pulls out both her knife and new, silent pistol, and I unsling the harpoon from my back.

  Hack? I signal to them.

  Maybe. Cassie responds and takes a few silent steps forward, stopping just in front of the edge of the tarp. She crouches down, ready to fling our cover into the air at a moment's notice.

  Something presses on the tarp, their hand sinking deep into the material, trying to reach straight through it.

  “Go!” Ivy whispers only loud enough for the two of us to clearly hear.

  Cassie flings the tarp into the air and takes a step outside. The robot stands in front of us, a mobile collection of scrap. It reacts the instant Cassie reveals herself, but she’s faster.

  She drives her knife into the robot’s shoulder, disabling one of its arms. She thrusts her pistol into the other and pulls the trigger, the only sound it makes is the ripping of metal. In an instant the robot is disarmed, its gun dropped uselessly into the sand.

  The robot tries to turn and run, but a single swipe of Cassie’s leg brings it crashing down roughly into the sand. Ivy pulls out a few cable ties from a pocket, and only a few seconds ter the robot is rendered entirely immobile. We’re lucky it can’t scream.

  “Do we need to worry about a distress signal?” I ask.

  “No.” Vince answers from behind me, stepping out of the car with his rifle in his hands. “It not making it back will act like one though.”

  “How long do we have?” Ivy asks, taking a knee and aiming her rifle down the way we came.

  “No idea, but I’d expect not long.”

  Corax takes off from my shoulder, disappearing high into the sky. He’ll give us an answer.

  I crouch down over the robot and peel back a few of its loosely connected scrap sheets. It doesn’t take long before I find a universal connector hidden in its torso.

  “I can take care of it. I should be able to reprogram it to think it never saw anything.”

  “Careful.” Vince crouches down beside me. “Keep in mind these things were designed to kill AI, they’re not going to be easy to hack.”

  “What other choice do we have?”

  Corax nds on my shoulder from nowhere.

  “Twenty minutes.” He reports.

  “Alright, just stay safe Little Blue.” He rests a firm hand on my shoulder.

  “I will.” I reassure him. “Corax, stay out here and pull me out if I need it, alright?”

  Corax gives me a nod. I trust him to know when I’m in danger.

  I pull a cord out of my backpack and plug it into my wrist. The moment I connect it to the robot, pain fshes through both my arm and mind for just an instant, before being severed. It was such a short period of overwhelming pain that I didn’t even fall to the ground.

  “Ow!” I yell out in pain long after the actual pain has left.

  “Are you ok?” Vince’s entire face is drenched in worry.

  “Yeah.” I unplug myself from the robot and retract the ptes on my forearm. A small fuse in my arm has been burned away to nothing. Something so tiny is the only reason I’m alive. I pick it out and drop it into the sand. “I’m pretty sure it just applied 240 volts directly to my data line.” A quick check reports that nothing else was damaged from the power surge.

  “Well, what now?” Cassie asks after a few moments of silence.

  “Just give me a moment, I’ll think of something.” I have to think of something.

  JanePtinum