As the hypersonic transport descended through the lower layers of the atmosphere, I caught my first glimpse of Greater Reykjavik. I'd never been there before (roots, I'd never been on a hypersonic transport before, either, though I probably would have found ones built with Terrans in mind uncomfortable) but I'd seen the occasional photo or video, and it looked quite a bit different now that the Affini had had two years to work with it. The shining towers of the metropolis were still there, but were dwarfed by Affini highrises that climbed to two or three times their height, and the seawall brimmed with verdant growth and bright coral that shored it up and made it from a brutalist necessity into a work of art. Most cities were going that way these days, and it was a welcome change.

That wasn't really what was on my mind, but it was a nice distraction and it held my attention through the landing pattern and ultimate descent — and then I was at ground level, and the municipal transit center was so active that I scarcely had time or room to think as I made my way through a sea of Affini, florets, and independent sophonts. No few of them, of course, were thoroughly distracted by me, but then I assume one doesn't see a two-and-a-half meter ostensibly-human woman covered in vines every day.

I could have taken the train, but I was in a hurry, so I'd reserved a pod for personal use. Again, I had a lovely view of the city, but I also had the space to think for a brief moment — a pod flight, even in a new city, didn't have the advantage of novelty like a hypersonic flight between Vancouver-Victoria and Reykjavik did.

Why me? I kept coming back to that question. It wasn't as if the last conversation I had with Argall had gone particularly well, what with him running off in a panic when he realized what he was talking to. That had been a year ago, and though I'd flagged him for a wellness check afterwards I hadn't heard anything about it, and assumed he'd passed it. People can have off days, something I was acutely aware of thanks to my work at OTD — just because someone was dysfunctional for a day or even several days at a time, or because they had a negative reaction to something and either lashed out or emotionally withdrew, it didn't necessarily mean they were unable to care for themselves or a threat to themselves or others. Many of my OTD clients had days like those, even after two-plus years of life in the Compact — trauma didn't just go away because the source of the trauma had been completely dismantled, but even sophonts living with trauma could still care for themselves the vast majority of the time. Part of my job was fixing them up with the resources and assistance they needed to do that, whether it was therapy, social connections, or whatever else was needed to fill the gap.

Sometimes, of course, that meant a wardship, which could either represent a more intensive effort to assist the sophont in developing a mental and emotional equilibrium, or it could represent deeper observation of a sophont suspected of needing domestication. The memo on Argall, sent from one Vita Clematis, Second Bloom, didn't go into detail — it was little more than a request to get in touch as soon as possible, preferably in person. Thankfully, Affini transit technology made that something I could do in the time I had left before I needed to get home to Judy and prepare for Game Night.

The pod landed at one highrise, about 400 meters up, a platform cunningly revealing itself as massive leaves spread aside, then closing up behind the pod to block the wind. A short elevator ride later, and I was standing in front of an apartment door very similar to my own, reaching up with a vine to tap the call button.

"Just one sec, cutie!" the door said.

<I prefer Affini,> I told it. It was not the first time I'd had to correct a housing AI, but their rate of guessing correctly when they saw me was starting to trend the correct way.

<...my mistake!> it said. Regardless, it had been correct about one thing: the wait wasn't a long one. Shortly after, the door opened to reveal another Affini, her brilliant pink-and-lavender blossoms pinned back in a thick mane.

<Vita Clematis, I presume? I'm Tamara Slaine. She/her.> I watched her vines shift in confusion for a moment as she tried to figure out exactly what she was talking to — it wasn't just hab AIs that I habitually confused.

<Ah,> she finally said. <Well, thank you for coming so quickly,> she went on, giving no indication of whether she was reading me as an Affini or otherwise. <Perhaps you can shed some light on this situation. I must admit I'm a bit confused — I'm just a social worker, I don't really understand a lot of the deeper intricacies of Terran culture.>

<It can be a little confusing,> I said reassuringly, <even for those of us born to it. May I come in?>

<Oh, certainly!> She stood aside, and I stepped in. Her apartment was laid out in a fairly standard configuration — she must have been new to the planet — but she'd begun putting her own touches on it by adding thick stands of broad-leaf grasses along the walls, and indeed the entire place smelled richly of them. <Can I get you anything?> Vita asked. <Have you eaten?>

<I don't eat,> I replied, <but I won't say no to a bit of mineralized water. Where is Mr. Argall?>

<Ah, well, he's in his room and refuses to come out,> she said. <That's sort of the problem, he, uhm... he's very uncooperative, which isn't new to me, of course, I've dealt with uncooperative Terrans in the past, but I've never had one make the kind of demands he has, and I thought it might be for the best to have someone who could explain what it all means to me.>

<What's he asking for, specifically?> Argall could certainly be demanding, but I'd seen plenty of that myself from others. Once Terrans worked out Affini could give them anything they wanted, some took that as license to up the stakes, not realizing that they didn't need to act out to get it.

<Well, he insists that I am 'holding him illegally' and that he 'has the right to counsel,' which he explained meant that I couldn't talk to him without him having a 'lawyer.' I asked him what that was, and he really didn't explain so much as insist that he needed you, specifically.>

I had to laugh a little to myself. He'd actually invoked his right to speak to an attorney, a right the Accord frequently let slide, at an Affini, whose government had no legal system to speak of, and certainly not an adversarial one. <Well, I see where the confusion comes in. This is sort of a Terran cultural practice. Thankfully, I'm well versed in it. I'd like to speak to him now — alone and unmonitored, preferably, that's part of the cultural ideal — and if possible I'd like a copy of his wardship file so I can familiarize myself with the case.>

<Of course. I'll compile one for you along with the water,> Vita said. <Warren's room is right over there,> she added, gesturing with a vine. <But, uhm, before you go, may I ask...>

Took her long enough. <I was born Terran, yes, but I no longer consider myself a member of that species. If you'll just consider me an unusually shaped Affini, I think we'll get on fine.>

<...I'm sure others have told you that's quite irregular, but alright,> she said. <And, again, thank you for coming. He's a very confusing one.>

<Oh, believe me, I know,> I replied. The door to Argall's room opened as I approached — the interior was fairly plain, with a bed, a chair, and a desk, all of which had been rearranged into a sort of defensive wall around one corner, where I could see Argall hunkered down, staring at a tablet.

"I told you, I refuse to answer any questions without my attorney present!" he snapped as I walked in and the door slid shut behind me. "I have rights!"

"I'm not your warden, Mr. Argall," I said, and he finally looked up. His eyes went wide as he saw me, and he dropped the tablet on the floor.

"... Slaine?! Stars, you're getting worse..." He slowly stood up, never taking his eyes off me. He was still wearing the same suit I'd seen him in the last time we'd met, and it was getting pretty tattered around the edges.

"I would say better," I replied.

"Are you... are you fucking naked under that?" he stammered. "Fucking covered in vines..."

"I'd like to see you try and get a bra around all of them," I said, rolling my eyes. My vines were more than enough to preserve my modesty. The only part of my meat you could even see like this was my head and part of my shoulders. Still, I thought, maybe I should look into some more fashionable grafts, like the kind Karyon had. If I could take the endoframe so easily, there was no reason I couldn't take something like that.

"But what is it all for? You can't possibly need all of that just to keep you upright, Martian or no!"

I sighed. How the hell was I supposed to explain this to him when even Affini struggled to grasp it sometimes? "Look, I'm... when the Affini arrived, I realized some things about myself, and I needed to change. You may not be able to really understand this, but I'm an Affini. What you see is just part of the process of fixing biological incongruence with that fact. Do you follow?"

"... I get it," he said, his body suddenly tightening up. "Void take me, I get it now. It's fucking brilliant, why didn't I think of it?! That's the way out of this!"

"...what?" I blinked, totally confused. What in the world was he going on about?

"You're making yourself into one of them!" he cried, almost seeming elated as he climbed over his desk. "I thought it was some weird perverted pet thing when I saw you before, but I get it now! You're making yourself into one of them so they can't fucking domesticate you! Ha! Leave it to you to figure this shit out! I always knew you were the catch of the day, didn't I always say that?!"

The revulsion I was feeling was a very physical kind, the kind that always made me feel even more revolted because it grounded me in my meat, made the rest of my body feel alien. Leave it to Warren fucking Argall to say exactly the thing that'd land like a gut punch. "No," I said quietly — I wasn't going to fume and shout, not this time. I'd made my one mistake with him, and I had learned from it. "No, that's not that this is about, and if you're even a little clever, you'll never say anything like that again, not to me or to anyone else."

"What, you don't want someone horning in on your idea?" he said, his eyebrows furrowing. "Well, tough luck, sister, your friends did away with the concept of intellectual property, so I'm free to swipe whatever idea I damn well please! Get out the way, I'm going out there and telling that bitch to give me the vine treatment!"

"No," I repeated, with a little more edge in my voice. "I will do no such thing, and neither will you." I took a step forward, emphasizing the difference between our size. "This is not some kind of scam or hustle that I'm running, Warren. This is who I am. I have had somewhere around twenty surgeries to graft all of this, and I'm nowhere near close to done. I had a series of grafts done today, so as you might imagine my patience for your bullshit is just a little thin right now. Sit down." A few of my vines lashed out, wrapped around the chair in Argall's ersatz barricade, and pulled it up behind him; another vine gave him a gentle push as I slid the chair in beneath him, the seat bumping his knees out from under him. He sat, whether he meant to or not.

"Wh-? Hey!" Somewhere between that old righteous indignation and animal fear, now.

"Not another word on the subject out of you." Learning how to teach simple commands to recalcitrant Terrans was one of the first things I'd learned from my co-workers, but I'd never felt the call to actually use that knowledge until now. "To me or to anyone else. Now-" I pulled the desk out of Argall's barricade and dragged it over to take a seat on it — at this point, such a low desk was more like the seat of a bench to me anyway. "I'm told you've asked for a lawyer."

"Y- Well, look," Argall stammered, his eyes wide and staring again. Maybe I'd gone a little too hard on him, but honestly, it was probably for his own good. "They weren't satisfied with stealing everything from me, now they've fucking abducted me and locked me up in here and that bitch outside is practically treating me like I've got a-" He paused, swallowed. "Like I'm her fucking pet," he grumbled, trying to put a little edge back his voice.

"I haven't seen your wardship file, but Vita's running me off a copy right now, so I'll have a look at it in a moment. And don't call her a bitch, she's doing this for your benefit."

"Bullshit!" He was trying to get to his feet, but I intercepted him with one of my vines almost before his butt left the seat and held him there. "G-get off! And it is bullshit! I know what this is all about, I'm not completely stupid!"

"Why don't you tell me, in your own words, what happened," I said, opening my briefcase and pulling out my tablet to take notes.

He paused. "...you mean you'll help me?"

"Warren, I need you to understand that the Affini don't have a legal system like the Accord did. The Compact isn't concerned with punishment or anything like that. All that matters is that, if you need help, you get it. Clearly, someone felt you needed help-" He didn't need to know that that someone may well have been me. "-which is why you've ended up here. There isn't a place for a defense attorney in any of this process, because this isn't something you need to be defended against — nevertheless...I did take an oath, even if the Bar no longer exists, and I do have some experience with wardships, so if you want my assistance and advocacy throughout this process, then yes, I will help you."

He seemed to relax a little. "Oh, thank the stars," he mumbled to himself. "I can't.... I can't end up one of those... those drugged-out perverts."

"Don't call florets drugged-out perverts," I said. Sure, lots of florets were high the majority of the time, and plenty of them indulged in pastimes that the Accord would certainly have called perverted, but there was something mean-spirited about the way Argall had said it, and that made all the difference. "Now, from the beginning. What happened?"

In fits and starts, with frequent pauses for editorialization, Argall told me his story — how the Affini had turned up at his McMurdo Compound, how they'd been all smiles and reassurances, how they'd immediately began resettling "undesirables" from Wellington, Melbourne, and other cities there; how, when he tried to flee, he'd found people already living in the mansion in Svalbard, and that his highrise in Alert had been converted to housing, and that in fact all of his extraneous assets had been appropriated for use by others. His narrative wandered, but I pieced together that he'd ended up trying to hide out in Reykjavik under an assumed name, convinced the Affini were after him and that they were trying to gaslight him into domestication (an executive summary that, rather than his own words).

Argall did, at least, understand that going fully hermit-mode would have brought the Affini down on him in the form of wellness checks, so he'd kept up a scant social life, all the while trying to figure out how he could get "his" things back. He described it in the same kind of language that you'd expect from a spy movie, and while I doubt the Affini had ever lost track of him, I looked forward to finding out what kind of cutesy language his case worker had described his behavior with in his wardship file. His attempt to track me down had been part of that, though it had not gone the way he'd hoped; he was still convinced, even now, that if he could "get his hands on the paperwork" he could somehow outwit the Affini and reclaim "his property."

"Can I ask a question?" I interrupted him, once I had a good sense of his life over the last two years. "Why in the world are you wearing that suit?"

"What the hell do you mean?" he said, squinting up at me.

"You do realize you could just get a new one out of the compiler at any time, don't you?"

He scoffed. "You think I want some cheap off-the-rack shit? This suit was tailor made."

"So put it in the compiler, let it decompile it, and have it produce an exact copy," I said, not wanting to get into the logistics of hand-made vs. compiled. That was a common enough argument around the office.

"You have any idea how much this suit cost? I'm not disintegrating it!"

"Well, if you keep on wearing it like this, it's going to disintegrate anyway," I said. "Have you considered looking up your tailor to see if they're still working?"

"...why the fuck would he do that?" Argall said. "And even if he were, it's not like I can pay him, thanks to your creepy fucking friends stealing everything I own!"

I felt my vines shift uncomfortably. "How in the name of the Everbloom have you spent two years living in the Compact and not noticed that people still do things even if they're not being paid for them?"

"Fucking coffee shops and shit, sure. Nothing good. Why would anyone would put in the kind of effort a suit like this takes for nothing?"

"Because they enjoy it? For the sake of the art? Why do you think artists make art at all?"

"So someone like me will pay forty-six billion for it so they can take a tax writeoff," he replied matter-of-factly. I was honestly surprised he'd managed to evade being placed on wardship for so long. There was no way I was the only Affini who'd noticed and flagged him for a wellness check.

"Well," I said, putting my tablet away, "I think I have enough to work with for now. I'll look over your case and figure out how best to move forward. For now, you're going to cooperate fully with Vita."

"What do you mean, cooperate?!" he said, horrified. "You want me to play along with this sick nonsense?"

"Do you want to get out of this without a haustoric implant? If so, cooperate. The more you fight, the more they're going to view you as intractable, and the sooner you become a happy little drugged-out pervert." I tried to put as much joy and lightness into the phrase as I could, specifically to clear the air from the way Argall had said it. "I'm going to ask Vita to loop me in on all official wardship paperwork and formal discussions as an interested party, and I think she'll agree. I'll probably be back out here again in a few days, so we'll follow up then."

"Wait, you're not leaving?" He tried to put up a show of blustering anger, but the fear inside shone through clearly. "You can't leave me alone with that-"

"Don't," I interrupted him. I knew full well what he was about to call her.

"I got you here to get me out of this, not to... not to fucking handhold me through going along with it!"

"Warren," I said, kneeling down to look him in the eye, "the only way out is through. It's been two years since the Compact arrived, and you're still displaying deeply feral behavior. Either you learn to adjust, or you will be adjusted. Don't look at this as a step towards the status quo ante. The status quo ante is gone and is never coming back. You will never be a trillionaire again because there is no longer any such thing as trillionaires." I reached out with one vine and laid it gently on his shoulder. "You're just Warren Argall now, and that's enough."

He shuddered at my touch. "You really are one of them," he muttered.

"Glad you finally realized it," I said, smiling. "Behave, alright? I'm going to ask Vita to go easy on you because you're going to cooperate, but if you don't cooperate, she's not going to go easy on you, you follow?"

"So you're still helping me, even though you're on their side?" he grumbled, looking away.

"You asked for my help," I said. "Of course I'm going to help you. And you know what? If you'd been paying attention the last two years instead of trying to claw back something you didn't need, you'd have already worked that out."