Yukari didn't use the ship's scanners at all on the trip home. ADAN scolded her for that, but only once. After the AI complained about a missed scan and finally locked the ship up, Yukari merely dipped into the deeper parts of the ship's OS and overrode most of the automated features.

Sure, that kind of tinkering got into the ship's internal records, but in the long run that didn't matter much. After all, Yukari had been planning on wiping most of the ship's data anyway, to make sure she had her tracks towards the Daedalus covered.

So the memory was mostly bare by the time Yukari landed at Galilei Orbit Station 14, which only made her months-early arrival seem stranger. The station management had a lot of questions for her, obviously. Stuff about how so much of a state-of-the-art memory system could get corrupted, how they were supposed to accept such a low completion percentage of a scouting run, why the pilot hadn't stuck to procedure and contacted Galilei as soon as things went wrong.

And of course Yukari had seen those questions coming. She apologized profusely, then explained that stray debris in the orbit of some planet got into the nav systems and short-circuited them. That meant she accidentally took a wrong turn towards a neutron star, and all the interference there left the BIOS mostly fried. Of course she'd tried to contact Galilei about all that—if they checked the logs, they would find the (forged) records of the outgoing calls—but, wouldn't you know it, the photon field disrupted communications, too.

Yukari wasn't afraid whether they'd buy all that. She'd already convinced the orbit station to let her dock ahead of schedule, and really that was the hardest part of the entire scheme.

Even so, the station managers had a team of engineers fine-comb the scout ship's systems. They couldn't come back with proof Yukari had broken corporate espionage laws, but of course that didn't stop them from taking her to task over how much she'd deviated from procedure. In the end, they told Yukari that her services were no longer required.

Yukari bowed as contritely as she could, saying how she expected to be terminated and was planning on resigning anyhow, although deep down she was grinning to herself about how there was nothing any Galilei suit could do now except get Yukari transport to the surface and remind her of the non-disclosure agreement she'd signed.

Galilei didn't find anything unusual inside the ship's cargo bay, either. Out near Jupiter, Yukari got in contact with some people on a StarCruise liner who owed her a favor and got them to smuggle Ia onboard their return voyage. It wouldn't be any problem, Ia and Yukari were both sure. The trip back was only going to take a couple days, and besides, Ia claimed, by now she had a pretty good handle on how to keep out of sight.

And before that, sometime during the long trip home, Yukari blasted that lonely escape pod out of the cargo hold and crashed it somewhere within an out-of-the-way asteroid belt.

"I'm back."

Yukari groaned, her eyes still clamped shut, and rolled over on the mattress. A pair of hands gently started rubbing her shoulders, and in spite of herself, she let out a soft sigh of contentment.

"Quit it. I'm asleep."

"No, you're not," Ia giggled, snuggling up against her.

"How do you know? Maybe you woke me up just now."

"I only went for some water. There wasn't enough time for you to fully enter a REM cycle."

With a laugh, Yukari rolled over to face Ia.

"Well, maybe my REM cycles just start really quick."

"They don't. Your neural would have let out a signal if you were actually asleep."

"Ugh, don't tell me you're paying attention to me when I'm asleep," Yukari chuckled.

Ia frowned, clearly confused.

"You don't like that?"

"It's a little weird, you know?"

"But I like it," Ia said, trailing a finger along Yukari's side, up to her face. "You're so pretty when you're asleep."

Yukari grinned.

"Only when I'm asleep?"

"Of course not," Ia said, finally laughing herself. "You're pretty all the time."

Yukari landed a quick kiss on Ia's lips.

"Good answer," she said. "I'll forget about the creepiness for that."

Ia snuggled comfortably up against Yukari.

"Sorry. I didn't expect you'd find it strange."

"Most people find that kinda strange," Yukari said. She wrapped her arms around Ia, ran a hand through her hair. "But like I said, I'll forget it. It's not like that was a standard you were raised with or anything."

"Quite the opposite, if anything," Ia said, giggling again.

Yukari gave Ia a little squeeze. Another joke about her own past—that was encouraging. Ever since they'd spent their first night on Earth together, Yukari had always worried, deep down, that the truth of Ia's history would come back to haunt her, would force Ia awake screaming in the middle of the night with nightmares of some repressed bit of memory. The worry over that had kept Yukari awake night after night, keeping an involuntary vigil over her sleeping companion.

The days, though, they started off easier. Yukari had found an out-of-the-way part of Ikebukuro to resettle in, a cramped apartment in a low-rent building with landlord who preferred some extra distance between himself and clients. And Yukari kept a clean profile otherwise; she paid taxes and national insurance fees on time, all based around her officially listed freelance work in firewalling.

Of course, she also made extra money off corporations in some not-so-clean ways, too, but she wasn't worried about that being found out. Considering what she was snatching was just chicken feed, even if Yukari got detected it was easier for the corporations to just collect on insurance than to go all-out on prosecutions and upgraded security.

It was a living. And it wasn't all that stressful, either.

"Will they have the water fixed soon?" Ia asked.

"Why?" Yukari said. "Was it still bad?"

"A bit."

"'A bit'? So it wasn't brown again?"

"No, nothing like that," Ia replied. "I just couldn't make it go cold."

"Oh," Yukari said. She thought a second. "Well, I dunno if the manager'll do anything about that. Kinda low-priority, you know."

Ia snuggled up closer against Yukari, her head on Yukari's chest.

"I suppose it's not all that pressing. It's just it'd be nice not to have to always use the fridge for cold water."

"It would be, yeah," Yukari chuckled.

She stretched out on the mattress, holding Ia close. For a moment she thought back to those rough nights, the ones she spent wide awake worrying over Ia. And not only because of nightmares, really; she'd watch over Ia, restless, terrified that this night would be the last one they were together, that the next day someone would reach out from a dark alley and snatch her away forever.

But eventually, Yukari had found herself resting more easily, just as she was right now. In the end, what she was most worried about soon turned to a non-issue: it was totally safe for Ia to be here, on Earth, out in the daylight. Yukari prowled darknet forums and corporate servers everywhere for any mention of an escaped subject, just to be sure, but nothing ever turned up.

Because after all, Ia was a ghost—no records of her existed anymore, no programs could be set up for corporate cleaners to find her. She was as safe here as anywhere else.

Yukari looked back down at Ia, at the ghost in her arms. Some time ago she was a corporate test subject, a rat running mazes. And now she was on Earth, with a life and a lover. Somehow, it felt as though none of it was meant to happen. As though they'd defied fate itself.

How had she ended up here?

"I've been thinking about dinner tomorrow," Ia said, breaking the silence.

"Yeah?" Yukari responded. "Whatcha been thinking?"

"Mostly that getting curry would be nice."

"Babe, we had curry last week," Yukari laughed out. "You're not sick of it?"

"No. I like it. The hot kind especially."

"Well, I dunno if we can afford it. Rent's due in a bit."

"Maybe I could work," Ia offered. "Just a little job. At a market, maybe."

"You don't have to do that, babe," Yukari said. "We're not that hard up."

"But it'd make things easier, wouldn't it?"

Yukari frowned.

"They'll want your records even for a position like that, Ia. And, well... you know what that would mean."

"You're certain it's not worth risking?" Ia asked, apparently a little puzzled. "Not even to make things easier?"

Smiling again, Yukari leaned in, brushed her lips against Ia's as gently as she could. Slowly, she deepened the kiss, taking in the smooth feeling of those lips and almost buckling at the sensation of Ia pressing back in full.

Yukari pulled back, and looked deep into those sea-blue eyes.

"You're not worth risking," she whispered.

Ia's eyes glimmered with an energy that matched her growing smile. Slowly she rose up from the bed, propping herself up with her arms and shifting herself into a bridge over Yukari, who gazed speculatively up at her.

"You...don't have to be up tomorrow, do you?" Ia asked, her voice a sweet and gentle murmur as she traced a finger along Yukari's face.

Yukari grinned, let her hands run along the smooth skin of Ia's sides.

"I'm all yours, babe," she answered.

A wider, brighter smile, and Ia was upon her, silver hair intermingling with Yukari's, and Yukari herself lost in Ia's warmth and the intoxicating taste of her lips.

Yet even as she yielded to Ia's tender caresses, Yukari found a brief, flickering moment to realize that, as cramped as the room was, there was a wide world outside their windows—a world ripe for exploring, and one that she didn't have to face alone anymore.

A/N: It's finally finished! A big thank you to Genki Collective, as always, for her tireless editing work, and my incalculable gratitude to all of you who've read this piece to the end.