"Hey, some of us are going to poke around in an abandoned village near here," Nilo said to me as the campfire embers fizzled into the night sky. "Wanna come?"

"Sure, okay," I replied, looking at him slightly askance. I wanted to stay focused, but I also needed to have social bonds in the group. "Let me go grab my day pack."

I had to admit that I had some genuine curiosity, too. I'd never really spent much time in the Relian outback. People were kind of where my job was at.

My feet were crunching over the brittle sand toward my tent when I felt a chill, as if eyes stared at me intently, which is usually a bad sign in my line of work. I mentally let the hook set and followed it to its source across the camp.

It was the silver-eyed girl.

There she is again, boring holes in my back. What's her deal?

A little shiver went up my spine, thinking about Jens' warning about missing Agents.

Does she have something to do with that? She's awfully interested in me... I need to be careful about that one.

"Whoa!"

My exclamation was unfeigned. There actually was an abandoned town there, though it looked like it had been looted pretty thoroughly.

Skeletons of buildings sat on the packed sand ground, perhaps once constructed from solid adobe, but now missing any sort of roof, windows, or even doors. Debris that might have been tables or toys at one time was strewn about the place. Hardy desert plants had sprung up, and were reclaiming the place for nature, however slowly.

An image haunted my mind, but it was hard to match it to the sight in front of me. I wanted to recall having visited this place when it was still in one piece. I could almost see it, children running in and out of a building and laughing here, laundry on the line there... casual conversations...

"Oh nice," Nilo yelled from a few houses over. "Check this out!"

The rest of us jogged over.

Well... I didn't expect to find skeletons besides the buildings.

A collection of metal bits vaguely forming a human shape laid on the ground near a broken house. Its synthetic skin was all gone, so it was hard even to tell what gender it had been. He'd found the remains of a Carad android.

Judging from the mostly bored reactions of his fellow explorers, they'd already checked for a power core or conscience core, and not found either.

"Come on, guys," I said suddenly, not realizing I was speaking until the words had already left my mouth. "Leave the poor thing in peace. Let's... leave all of this grave in peace."

I can't say I'd been an android rights activist up to then, but the looting still felt ghoulish. I could imagine the villagers of this town looking on sadly, and the whole exercise somehow translated into our mercenary group looting my own memories. I shouldn't have interfered for the sake of my mission, but I'd done so impulsively.

Nilo shook his head.

"Sorry. You're probably right. Well, let's get back to camp?"

I ended up deep in thought, missing most of the trip back.

What exactly is life, anyway? I could shape shift into an android with my BPG. Would that make me less alive?

I felt unexpectedly old and worn, looking at all of these places that once were. No one else remembers them. My many years of memories seemed to blur together on me, like a watercolour painting with too much water.

Heavy thoughts from such a small incident.