Page 56 of Veiled Vixen

I laugh. Can’t help it. “Jimmy with horns.”

His hands aren’t hands, either. They’re claws. And his face isn’t very human. Though his body—aside from the horns and claws—is.

His partner appears to be…

I squint at it. Hold it up close to my eyes. “Xyla?” I rub some dust off the cover to make sure I’m seeing this right. No. It’s right. Long purple hair. Light synthetic skin. Too-tight t-shirt, stiletto-shaped feet, and shorty-shorts that leave little to the imagination.

“What the fuck?” I ask no one. “Hmm.” This makes no sense. This is an actual picture—drawing?—of Xyla exactly as she looked on that day we walked onto Harem Station for the very first time.

One might ask, How the hell do you remember what Xyla was wearing twenty-one years ago, Valor?

I’ll tell you how. That was the first time I’d been anywhere that wasn’t Wayward Station. That was the closest I’d ever been to a sexbot in my life. And that night, after all the shit was sorted with ALCOR and we delivered our messages, and Crux and Jimmy were off somewhere discussing our situation, Luck and I talked about Xyla. We talked about her like… well, like two fifteen-year-old Akeelian boys would talk about their first meeting with a sexbot.

And this picture right here, on this cover that says Akeelian Adventures: Bot Boy, this is her.

“OK, hold on a second.” I channel Tray for this next part. Because he’s all logical and shit. “Maybe that was just the standard-issue outfit for Xyla’s sexbot model?”

I nod at this. I can accept that. This is just what all the sexbots were wearing that year.

“But purple hair?” I don’t know. Something about this is weird.

I flip the book open to the first page and start reading. The story goes like this:

Bot Boy and his trusty sidekick, Xyla—uh, yeah, it’s her—are on the prowl for spare bot parts and wander into the ancient Sol System where they find a hidden station inside a moon. It’s abandoned—or so they think. And then there’s a whole bunch of panels of battles with eight-legged bots. Eventually Bot Boy and Xyla subdue the creepers, dismantle them and then integrate the bot parts with their own bodies…

Uhhh, what the fuck?

That wasn’t Jimmy’s job. He was a bot liberator. And he sure as hell didn’t dismantle them and become a cyborg.

But then I remember that Veila said the comics were just generic characters before we boys left Harem Station on the jobs ALCOR assigned to us.

Because there’s another one below this one. And this guy is Jimmy. The main title is still Akeelian Adventures but the subtitle reads: Jimmy and Xyla Bag the Bots.

He’s older, the illustrations are more accurate—at least he doesn’t have horns or claws anymore—and Xyla looks more like she does today than she did back when we first saw her. A warrior instead of a sexbot.

In this adventure they aren’t stealing body parts for themselves, thank the sun. But they are enslaving bots on a place called Junkyard Station.

I frown. Close it up. And then look at the last two.

Once again the first, older cover, depicts a more cartoonish version of two violet-eyed boys who look like demons and the title is Akeelian Adventures: Soul Stealers.

I flip through it and find the two boys—who are clearly Luck and me—are also going to ancient stations, only this time, instead of stealing bot parts to make themselves into cyborgs, they steal station parts from still-living stations—thus the title Soul Stealers— and take them back to Junkyard Station, and then give them to the evil AI who runs the place, who is called MIZAR.

“Hmm,” I huff, toss it aside, and then pick up the one that has our real faces on the cover.

I stare at it for a long time. Because Lady is there too. And Beauty.

I miss that life. So much. And even though I know the story inside will be wrong, I open it anyway just so I can picture the four of us out on our adventures again.

Luck and I are no longer demons but we’re still stealing critical components from living stations. Which makes no sense. That would be like someone coming to Harem and taking the Baby’s data cores.

It would never happen. Even if you got in alive you’d never get out alive.

But then I get one page where it’s clear that both Luck and I are killed by some kind of glowing weapon. Maybe a SEAR knife dialed up to sword length.

But luckily our trusty bot, Beauty, puts us inside these tanks and then we are regenerated and wake up stronger than ever, kill everyone on the station, and then take the station’s data cores back to Junkyard for that MIZAR person to use.

I hold the comic book at arm’s length, trying to force it to make sense. What are these stories? Just… a fiction? Some kind of lost mythology and we accidentally become part of it? A premonition?