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When it ends, she finds that she shakes with the realisation of it.
So many.
They've been working on systems only so long, but she shouldn't have ever forgotten what she can do.
She's not afraid of the bodies. She remembers breaking them, and it didn't feel at all like fear. She's— she's afraid of not coming back from that moment. She's afraid of being caught in that action, the breaking.
Her hands are shaking so badly in Lianhua's grip that she can hear the joints rattle. "I can't," she says, sucking in a heaving breath.
Lianhua's silent and swaying. Her eyes are open.
Before them, the sky burns with Rin's every movement. Pipaji doesn't know how long she stays there, holding Lianhua's hands and staring at the bodies, but when she comes back to herself Rin is standing over them, all her parts drawn back into her shells.
Her eyes are tired. Pipaji doesn't think she knows what guilt is anymore. "Go home to your sister," she says. "Tonight. Don't get caught."
Pipaji catches the bitterness on her tongue and eyes and she tucks them away. Venom only grows within, and it's better used elsewhere.
I can make you into something, Rin had told her. It won't be pretty. You'll never have your life back. But vengeance— I can give you vengeance.
Pipaji said yes, obviously. She'd never be pretty again anyway.
No one really knows what Rin is. They whispered about her back— back on the streets, in the underground. She was vengeance back then, too.
Pipaji's not naïve. She knows that they're tools to her, just that. This is a suicide squad, and the only thing left for them is vengeance.
But Pipaji's the only one with somebody back home, so she digs.
She doesn't know what Rin is, but she's got the shape of it. A dead team, broken down and drifting. Pipaji doesn't know why Rin named them the way she did, except maybe wistfulness, nostalgia. There's no good reason, of course, to call them anything less than what they are. Pipaji's a virus, and Dulin's a tank, and Lianhua's the code holding them together in the web. And Rin's there to burn it all down.
They're not humanising, the names. They're not kind. So she doesn't know why Rin did it.
Pipaji's a virus, nothing less or more. In and out. She's dead at the end of this, even if she has someone to protect. And she knows Rin will be the only one still here after that, which is the funniest part of it all.
Venom, and Tortoise, and Lotus. Phoenix, the last one standing.
Not by any merit of her own. Pipaji doesn't mean it unkindly, but the only reason Rin's still alive is because of her shields on the other side.
It's a little funny.
(That's not fair. Rin's just less human than the rest of them, and so she doesn't break the same ways. She's stronger, and older, and she's the one that'll last. They always knew it. She told them, at the beginning. Pipaji wouldn't have joined her if she couldn't last at least long enough to do what she had to.)
Arlong's the final goal. Soon, Pipaji knows. She's going to die before or in that last push so that Rin can burn it down. No point to embellishment. But her team, she might as well figure out. She's got no chance at all otherwise.
Lianhua's not Enki. That's what she's thinking about.
Rin's first mechanic worked a similar role to Lianhua, sure. Human all the way through, of course, but a buffer all the same.
She doesn't know that much about Rin's team. She has videos, though. Rin hadn't been the one to take them, because she's not sentimental, but she'd kept them, so maybe Pipaji doesn't know anything about her at all.
Every time Enki shows up he's tired, and quiet, same as Lianhua, but Pipaji knows they're not the same. She's seen Enki arguing with Qara, and fusing bone and tendon, and his spine— that steel to him, it's not Lianhua's grit teeth and clenched jaw. That steel's a fine thing, carved out by smiths of yore. Lianhua's all self made.
She's not sure Rin realises. That's what it boils down to. Lianhua took her scars and smoothed them over with chrome and chassis, and Pipaji doesn't think Rin knows what that means. What if means that Lianhua cobbled herself together. Rin didn't know her last team either.
But Rin doesn't have to bring them back home. Lianhua is the one that's going to have to do that. Lianhua is the one that dragged Dulin back the first time he got too close to the electricity and the towers. Lianhua's the one staying back, the one who has to deal with the aftermath.
She's a tool in the strictest sense. And she's willing to serve, to save. Rin can see that.
Pipaji only trusts Lianhua because she can see Lianhua's own cracks. Pipaji is not a well oiled machine either. And for all Rin is broken, she had masters and she had her team.
All they have is her, and each other. So Pipaji trusts Lianhua to make something out of the wreckage. To pick up the pieces that she'll still need.
They're halfway through the veritable armed bomb of a city when he happens. Pipaji's everywhere, a creeping thing, and so she notices a flicker of a moment before the others.
She yanks them with her as she goes. Lianhua's music, a simple looping lullaby, fades out. Pipaji sinks into a crouch.
Whoever sent the shadows crackling at the doors knew what they were doing. They're all human, except when they're not. All closed circuits. Pipaji can't get into them.
It's like a cycle, the way younger people lean harder on the way technology spreads in a veritable net around them. It makes them complacent. Reliant. What they forget is that everyone else in this world is smart, too.
But Pipaji grew up on the streets. Rin picked Dulin straight out of a junkyard, but Pipaji found her. She sees enough. She sees what she has to.
Human— meaning eyes. Dulin cuts the lights at her signal.
It's over too quick. People know better than to touch her, but in the dark, well. The bodies hit the floor like drums.
The lights come back on, and Pipaji pauses midway through acknowledgement to Dulin because—
"Hi," the man— boy says, smiling. His hair falls across his forehead in gentle curls. "You can call me Anchor. I think you know who I am." The projection glows cool blue and grey.
"Yes," Dulin says hoarsely. "You were there the night that— "
"Shh," he says. "Yes. We should talk. You've made it this far."
As for Dulin—
He's seen too much. He doesn't seem like he should be stable, and yet that's the whole point of him. The stability. He's the earth beneath them, stretching steady and strong.
Rin brought him aboveground, and the sun is — to him, apparently, it's everything.
Pipaji catches him sitting with his legs crossed and eyes closed more than once. He's small and fragile and put back together, same as her. Lianhua's a willow, and Rin is ashes, but the two of them, they're crushed.
They don't talk about the things they've seen, but they know. Pipaji can see it in everything they do, the way they do it.
Dulin's a sweet child, and so much stronger than he should be. There's a reason he's the one that forces the door open to make way for Rin.
He could wreck them in instants, and never have to touch anyone. He's a match for Pipaji, and she's not afraid of what he will become.
Hidden strength is hard to twist. If he hurts them, it will be him.
They're fighting about Kitay, and nothing makes Rin quite so angry as any mention of Kitay. "Pipaji," she says, low and warning.
"I know how your team fell apart," Pipaji spits back, heedless. She knows she's being cruel, but Rin named her. She knew what Pipaji was before she took her in. Rin's a furious blaze now, but everything she's done she's brought upon herself. "I read it all. Sent up here for recon while your cousin rotted on the operating table. Deep cover, of course. Couldn't go back, poor you."
They were all hiding, before Rin.
They know what happens to people like them: nothing pretty. But she's supposed to protect them.
"Your Wind," Pipaji says, to Rin's pale fists, creaking metal and joints, "in over his head. Daji didn't ruin him all the way. She didn't even have to! Just drive him insane and turn him back on you, ha. Your Tiger went down with him. A bomb in his chest. They loved each other."
Rin's drawing red from her own palms. Blood in the water. "Shut up," she says hoarsely. Pipaji talks faster.
"Your Night fallen into a trap. Your Eagle gunned down in a coup. Your Ghost ruling all alone. Your River poisoned by your own negligence. The Monkey and the Boar, executed because you looked away."
Rin's crossing the room to her now. Lianhua, behind her, is shocked and silent, breathless.
"The child was nothing more than a distraction in his last moments. The Fox and the surgeon," Pipaji says, cold and final as a blade. "They walked away on their own. But you hurt them bad enough for them to do it first."
Rin's standing just inches before her, expressionless and motionless.
Pipaji releases her breath. She can't stop thinking about the first one: the Wind.
Rin loved them all so much more than she loves this team. She doesn't think Rin has room in her heart anymore, for all the wires.
Softer: "You promised us two things. Power, and the culling."
"I did," Rin agrees. "Is that still enough?"
"I don't know," Pipaji says, barely a whisper. "Can you follow through?"
"What," Rin says, "do you want."
Pipaji doesn't want anything. But she's not a kind death, and not a slow poison. She's deadly. She knew it, back when she had parents. Back in the whorehouse. "Stabbed in the back by three dragons," she says, a risk. Rin's face goes dark. A risk: Rin's anger, uncolored by grief. Mostly. But that's what Pipaji does, a touch that eats. "This is your vengeance, not ours."
This team will not survive the way it's going. Rin is used to an army. But she doesn't know how to lead it. To make it last. She just knows how to break somebody else's back on her buckling knees.
"Have you not had yours?" Rin growls.
"I'm not going to survive this war," Pipaji says, no pain in it. "But if you can't, boss, then the entire point is moot."
Rin stalks off instead of hold her gaze. Pipaji finds that the weight of caring so goddamn much begins to lift with her every step away.
The night before, Pipaji sits with Lianhua and Dulin and they don't talk and they don't touch. She almost trusts them with her life.
Pipaji was human at some point. She has the sister of her blood to show for it. She was hurt for it.
She's less now. More. You have to be, to win this war.
Always fingers, reaching and corrosive.
Arlong is rotten at the roots, and every one of its brothers the same. When they reach the heart of the institution, she is among her peers. And she knows herself better than anyone else. For a moment it's beautiful, the tainted black spreading. This is what she's here to do.
She won't survive the rest of this process, but she wasn't helpless and she wasn't afraid.