Julia had been picked to bring Jamie to the infirmary, leaving behind her own partner to take care of her teammate. And, after dressing her as well as she could with a blanket that the suited Indian woman named Tracker seemed to produce from nowhere, Julia set off with the other girl on the top of her amorphous form.

Carrying someone was actually remarkably easy for Julia, especially since she could just reform her body into a sizable and vaguely rectangular shape. That way, she could effectively keep the person that laid atop her extraordinarily stable as she used little feet to propel her forwards smoothly.

Of course, Julia herself didn’t think much of it, especially not now as she still had the two massive fights in a row to chew on. Julia had taken her teammates to the infirmary enough times to know the gist by now, and it all really just worked off muscle memory at this point. The person with a heal link on duty just gave her teammate a once over and pointed them towards a bed that she was to be placed onto until further notice.

Heal links were rare, exceedingly so. The ability to heal yourself, either through natural regeneration, or some other method was common enough. Julia and Jamie already had some form of it, though Julia’s was far more impressive than Jamie’s. Julia was capable of effectively being over eighty percent destroyed, then eating ravenously for a few weeks and being totally fine.

But healing of others was a rarity, and most times out of ten it was almost a side effect of the link’s capabilities. Ability to turn back time in a specific area? You can use it to heal major wounds or even bring the dead back to life.

But actual healing? Almost no one had access to healers like that. There was one who lived in Canada, as far as anyone could tell. Apparently, they were a hypercognitive of sorts, could basically diagnose anything and treat it with a sort of biological control. They didn’t do anything with their link, and they didn’t have to, as Canada has extremely strict Linked privacy laws and also have government support when identities have been discovered.

Despite being so close to America, apparently Canada was doing a fabulous job at holding their own against Centerpiece and his legion of brainwashed, patriotic Linked. Or, well, not quite brainwashed, not when real brainwashing was a thing that could be done.

As Julia mused on topic after topic that fluttered into her mind, Jamie began to rouse from her unconsciousness, shifting in her bed and making the disposable pillows and bedsheets crinkle. Julia almost sighed and would of if she still had the biological function behind doing so, but she managed to brush her mind of the scattered topics and return to the one that loomed over all others in her mind.

“Hey,” Julia said softly, the crystalline nature of her voice somehow making it even more soothing, “are you feeling okay? Do you want me to grab the doc?” Her words travelled into the ears of the slowly waking Jamie, who groaned senselessly for a moment before squinting severely against the dulled lights of the quiet infirmary.

“Did I get…” Jamie began, her voice bubbly and hoarse, forcing her to swallow against the gunky dryness in her throat and mouth, “Did I get knocked out?”

“Kneed to the face.” Julia said softly, making the other girl wince with a flash of memory of the event, “I’m surprised your nose isn’t broken.” The other girl reached up and gently felt at her nose, wincing yet again as she felt where the knee had impacted, or at least some part of the leg.

“I must’ve, it’s too sore. It would’ve healed by now otherwise.” Jamie let her arm flop down to her side, sighing heavily before groaning and pushing herself up into a sitting position, something that Julia let her do by herself like she’d requested so many times before.

“So, Aaliyah took me out, as easy as that?” She said finally, her eyes downcast even with the heavy squinting that was slowly relieving as she accustomed to the light. Julia wiggled her gelatinous body in an approximation of a shrug.

“I don’t know about easily…” she said softly, regarding the slowly recovering girl in front of her, “It looks like she can lose control and needed some time to cool down after that. If it were a real fight, Ren probably could have taken her out while she tried to recalibrate.”

Jamie scowled for a moment, mostly at herself, then sighed with a drop in her shoulders, “Unless, you know, she could just keep scaling upwards. Then we’re all fucked.” Her doom and gloom tone was one that Julia had gotten used to over the months spent with her teammate. She tended to fall into that pit and need to spend some time in it to really pull herself back out.

“We can’t know that, Jamie.” Julia said, letting a little frustration with the girl’s immediate downer response, “She could explode like a firework instead for all we know. Getting yourself down over losing once really isn’t worth the effort.”

“Once? Julia, she wiped the floor with me, just like Ajax did to Ren.” Jamie growled, amplifying off of the minor frustration in her friend’s voice, “Ajax was already beating Ren a fair amount of the time, but now it’s clear that it’ll only continue to get worse…”

Julia watched her friends face, having been uncovered slightly by the blanket that she’d been wrapped in, as it contorted in a restrained rage that made a small fire light in what would be Julia’s chest.

“Are you kidding me?” Julia said hotly, though the volume of her voice didn’t rise significantly, “You’re already rolling over and giving up after being beaten once.”

Jamie’s face screwed up at the girl who’d quickly become her closest friend since arriving at the AASAU training centre. It wasn’t because of her grating tone, or the emotional response, but instead that it was said as a statement. It was not a question, it was a statement of what Julia could see happening right in front of her, and Jamie quickly realised that she didn’t know how to respond to the other girl’s surety.

“Jamie, you do this every time things get hard! You use every trick you can to squirm out of something or do the least amount of work and face as little challenge as you can.” Julia spoke in that same heated voice, and for Jamie it was like sitting a little too close to a radiator and feeling your eyes and skin dry out, “Haven’t you realised in training that you are the one who has made the least amount of progress?”

Jamie stared into her purple formed friend, a weak scowl on her face, left over from when she felt as if she’d had any ground to stand on. Now, though, she realised that her argument it was being eaten from right underneath her by the gentle tide of entropy. No, she wasn’t so blind that she hadn’t noticed the other three in the team going from almost physically disabled by their newfound links, to being relatively exceptional in Ren’s case, to high picks for genuine powerhouses in June and Julia.

She had been watching it all happen, right in front of her eyes. But she was content with that, that they would inevitably grow stronger than her, and that they would surpass her and fly off into the distance. In fact, she was content in never, ever being trained to her full potential and being left unaware of the heights that she could theoretically reach, despite the AASAU offering their link analysts to the entire team.

No, Jamie wanted to go and work as a test subject in a nice country and live out her life in maximum comfort without the pressures of training or performing on any level. Even training at the AASAU was pushing it for her, but she didn’t have dual citizenship like Ren and June had, so she had no other options for training. Not that Zimbabwean training program was better in any way than the AASAU.

She hated that she could almost see Julia’s disappointed face in the shapeless blob of her form, an effect of the girl confiding in her about how she’d looked pre-goopification. After she’d seen the photo of the bookish, but quietly gorgeous woman, she’d looked back and never been able to unsee a bizarre resemblance between the purple blob and her prior form.

“Your motives are changing.” Jamie said quietly, idly becoming conscious about the fact that her scaled chin was uncovered and pulled the blanket up to cover it. “You used to be the same as me, Julia, even if you did the training. Now you’re going against me all of a sudden. Why?”

She had stumped the girl; Jamie knew that much. They’d never spoken so candidly about their shared apathy for the world at large, or even the city of Melbourne itself, and their uncaring want to just be left alone to live their life. But this sure blew that can of worms wide open. Jamie’s first reaction was to jump to the other girl’s crush on the Greek man in their opposing team, who somehow stood out in her mind as tall despite their own team having someone half a foot taller.

However, if she did that, she’d just be lying to herself that it was so black and white. From what Jamie had surmised, Julia had been hesitant about even directly talking to the man for a while, for no other reason than she was a nervous wreck and she liked him. It was almost a highschool-type crush, and with Julia’s self-confidence being even worse than Jamie’s, it wasn’t as if she was going to summon that courage out of nowhere. Point being, the man couldn’t have talked the idea into her head.

“You know…” The crystalline voice broke the silence that had built, though lacking any heat it’d possessed before, “I started to feel inadequate, in comparison to Walter. We didn’t talk much, only between spars, and we aren’t really friends. But when we did, I always felt like his words were just a bit… surer than mine.”

Julia paused, letting Jamie soak in the words, or maybe even looking for a small sign of confirmation from her friend. And, despite Jamie’s best effort, that was exactly what she got. With a grimace, Jamie recalled the little quips that Aaliyah and she had shared, and the moments of conversation. All of which had made her feel just as Julia had described. Inadequate.

“I–” Julia stammered over her own words, but recuperated and powered on, “I don’t think that they are anything more than us. Maybe in some ways—Walter’s link most of all—but not that much more than us. It was just how they commented on things, like each sentence had a full stop at the end, rather than trailing off with unsurety…”

Jamie had picked up on the unsure ending immediately, finding it to be a perfect consolidation of the other woman’s point. Jamie’s own stance was coming crumbling down already, and it was almost painful to understand that it might just be her that was going against the flow instead of following it’s current.

“The matches.” Jamie said solemnly after a few minutes of contemplative silence between the two friends, “When I had to tell her about the matches they needed to fight on weekends… that’s when I realised that there was something weird about them. She knew nothing–” Jamie paused with a grimace, then continued, “no, she knew a lot, and I was just filling in the jigsaw puzzle for her. But even still, when I talked about it, trying to tell her how utterly fucked their team was, I just couldn’t get through to her.”

Julia didn’t say anything, sitting atop the surface of a guest chair aside Jamie’s bed. She let the other woman slowly come to an understanding as she spewed forth the jumbled contents of her mind, forcing herself to order it so she could even put it into words at all. Julia understood Jamie’s frustration, especially as her face contorted minutely as she thought through her next words.

“I’m starting to get the feeling that it wasn’t just misplaced pride and wilful ignorance now. Did you seriously think that they’d start to catch up and beat any of us in literally less than a week?” Jamie questioned to her friend, though they both knew it was rhetorical, “I thought I would just watch them be crushed come Sunday, or at least struggle, but the way this is going, we’re going to watch some team get slaughtered in seconds ‘cause they thought they’d have easy pickings with the newbies.”

And with that, Jamie had skilfully danced around the point. The real point, anyways. They weren’t just impressive; they had trumped them so thoroughly that they’d distilled months of training into less than a week of combat training and were already moving to swiftly surpass them. All four of them had something about them that was just different, in that same, intangible way that you could just tell when someone you knew in primary school was going to end up doing something cool. Then, next minute, you hear through a friend of a friend that they ended up showcasing their art in a full-on museum display of just their work.

“Do you think…” Julia dragged out the word, trying to determine if her next words would make her seem silly or not, but then committing anyway, “Do you think they might be sponsored by a world-wide corp? Th.inc, Techtron, VantaBlac?”

Jamie chewed on the thought for a moment, trying to tease any of the limited understanding she had out of her mind. But, in the end, she’d come up with nothing. With a sigh, Jamie pushed herself out of bed, determining herself sufficiently recovered, and wrapping the blanket around her as best as she could before giving her friend a parting sentence.

“I have no idea, but there is only one place that we’re going to be able to find out.”

And with that, she started to walk out of the room, leaving Julia to catch up to her suddenly highly active friend, giving the on-duty nurse a thankful wave, before bounding out of the door to chase the woman that was likely going to try and get herself into some trouble.