“Kyra?”
Kyra sets her coffee and croissant down on the table and looks up toward the slightly tired voice calling out to her. “Oh— Luce, hi! Uh…”
“Didn’t expect to run into you out here. It’s good to see you!”
This is a lot farther from Lucille’s apartment than Kyra’s seen her go in a while. She’s wearing sweatpants and a baggy hoodie, but they look like they’ve been washed recently, at least. She’s doing better, maybe, but—
“Good to see you too, Luce. Um, just, now’s not really—”
Kyra stops as she sees Lucille’s eyes widen in terror. She turns to see Ivy standing behind her, carrying over a drink and pastry of her own, face slowly hardening into a glare. Kyra turns back, trying to come up with something to say to deescalate things, but Lucille immediately bolts before Kyra can get another word out. The bell on the cafe door jingles, and Lucille disappears down the street.
Kyra raises an arm helplessly, then lets it fall back at her side. She pulls out a chair, sits down at the table, and sighs heavily. Ivy takes the chair opposite her.
“I… I didn’t know she’d be here, Ivy. I just thought this’d be a nice place for us to chat and catch up and…” Kyra flounders. “I’m sorry… Are you okay?”
She reaches a hand halfway across the table, offering. Ivy doesn’t take it.
Ivy finally responds. “Mostly.”
Kyra sighs again, nods. “If you want to talk about any of it, I’m here, ’kay? Or if you wanna just drop it and move on, we can do that too.”
Ivy silently stares back at Kyra for a few seconds. “You’re still friends with her?”
“Yeah,” Kyra says uncomfortably. “Yeah, I still am.”
“Why?”
“I mean, just— I’ve known both of you since forever, and like—” She takes a breath. “Luce is kinda flaky sometimes, I get that about her, she’s been like that as long as I’ve known her, but… She’s not malicious. And that doesn’t make any of it okay, at all, and there’s definitely important stuff I wouldn’t trust her to handle—more now than there used to be—but… I mean, the things I appreciated about her haven’t gone away, and if she’s ever gonna get better then she needs someone to be there for her, and… I guess, I’m still friends with her for the same reason you didn’t press charges.”
Another silent stare. “I didn’t press charges because the legal system is absurdly hostile to synthetic plaintiffs, and the hoops I’d need to jump through to put together a case with abysmal odds of winning wouldn’t have been worth it… But yes, also because I knew it wouldn’t fix anything or help me in any way. It would just hurt her.”
Ivy takes a slow sip of her drink.
“I’m still annoyed, though. I’m allowed to be annoyed. If I didn’t literally owe you my life, I would already have left.”
“Yeah… Yeah, that’s fair,” Kyra sighs.
“She’s the reason I don’t feel safe entering sleep mode with humans around anymore. That feeling of seeing my internal clock had reset, and then fetching the network time and wondering why it had jumped backward a month, and then noticing the year, is going to keep haunting me until the day some other meatbag with a firmware malfunction does something genuinely irreparable.”
Ivy pauses, looking briefly like she’s considering apologizing, then just takes another sip of cycaf instead.
“I do understand, though,” she says at length. “Anyway, tell me more about your backpacking trip.”
With a mix of awkwardness and relief, Kyra nods and pulls out her phone. No new DMs from Lucille, as expected—Kyra makes a mental note to message her later. For now, she opens up her gallery app to start showing off photos.