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Loyalty only questioned what she was doing once, way back when she first started working for the military, and once was more than enough.

Choosing the career she did hadn't exactly been done on a whim. She'd liked working with her hands since she could move them -- or so the stories went -- and she'd liked building things since she could remember. Then she'd discovered how to blow things up after an awkward incident with a firecracker and the kitchen sink, and that had lead to several years of her childhood being spent 'borrowing' supplies and testing how they worked. By the time she was 12, she knew exactly what made what blow up, and how much of it was needed to make an explosion that someone else would see.

Everyone had pretty much just assumed she was naturally intelligent and naturally gifted, and she liked to keep it that way -- because if they found out that she had worked to learn everything she knew, that she had applied herself to science and maths and several other subjects because it would better her hobbies, they would have expected her to work like that at everything.

So to her, the fact she had chosen a career that involved building things that made other things blow up wasn't a surprise at all -- it was basically an inevitability. Not to mention she really, really liked what she did, so it was never a chore. She was being paid to discover how to blow things up in new and interesting ways, and being paid a lot to build things to then do it more efficiently. She was living the dream, no doubt about it, and completely content with life.

But youthful optimism was doomed to die eventually.

Up until that point -- up until the point when she actually saw her weapons in action -- it had also just been a game. There were no real causalities, and nothing really bad happened because of her. How could it, when she was so far away ?

Loyalty remembered going hunting with her father, when she was just a teenager -- her father with his stern face and bright eyes, teaching her how to crouch in the underbrush and track prey through the forest, then teaching her how to never need more than a single shot to take it down so it didn't suffer. They used the first gun she had ever made, and kept it a secret from her mother, who would not have been pleased he was encouraging her so. But in the end, even that was just a game -- hunting was a sport, definitely not murder, and that made it okay.

She never went hunting on her own. She didn't like killing things, and she only did it to make her father happy. He had supported her through all her experiments, and saying thank-you seemed so … so pathetic.

And then, when she was older and had graduated and everyone was praising her for just how smart she was, there had been men in the military suits who had taken her into big, ominous looking buildings. And inside the buildings there had been testing rooms and shooting ranges and carefully controlled environments -- and there had never been any real danger. Then there had been tests and remakes and more tests and remodels and alterations to specifications, and finally payment for all these things and it had been completely removed from reality; just another kind of game and nothing to do with murder because no one was actually dying.

And one night, in the dark, she had been hustled out of bed -- rubbing sleep from her eyes and vaguely confused, back aching from the hard mattress she'd been dumped on -- and herded into a huge, silent carrier. She had been  flown across miles of open land, oblivious to it all as she slumped against the cool glass of the window and slept -- because whatever this was about, it could wait until morning when there was light and until after she'd had her first coffee, because nothing was happening until she could think straight.

The men in the military suits did not agree. They denied her request for coffee with stony expressions, ignored her sleepy glares and shoved her into a small room with a lot of machinery and a gun that had apparently blown itself up in the middle of being fired. The scientist-looking man with horn rimmed glasses explained -- in between stutters and stammers -- that he thought some mechanism had jammed and there had been a build up of power in the wrong place, and then boom ! Now the guy who had been holding it when it exploded was in the medical word and they weren't expecting that he would ever have two whole hands again, or even that they could repair the damage to his face enough for him to be returned home.

Loyalty yawned, rubbed her eyes, and wondered why they were giving her this sob story. She hadn't blown the gun up, she'd just designed it. Then she stared down at the gun for a second, scratched behind one ear, and mildly pointed out that yes, trying to fire this particular model with the safety on probably would cause it to backfire, because where else was the build up to go if not out the muzzle ? That's what the safety device was for -- to stop people randomly firing it everywhere if they were trained -- and if you were stupid enough to charge it without flicking it off, you deserved what you got.

The military men waited until she was done then, very calmly, told her to fix it.

Loyalty told them that it would require a complete replacement of almost every part, and would take days. Whereas buying a new one would take seconds, cost much less, and allow her to go back to bed.

They told her there would be no new parts, crossed their arms, and stated again that she would fix it.

She argued that it would cost them a lot, and she wanted an extra two weeks holiday out of it. And payment in cash. Up front.

They told her they didn't care, that she just needed to fix it. Then they pulled her toolbox out from nowhere in particular and placed it on the table in front of her, beside the gun, and stared. There was a lot said in that stare that they couldn't get away with putting into words -- for example, the threat that if they could get that out of the safe under her bed without her knowing, they not only knew where she lived, but there was a lot more they could do if she didn't start cooperating.

Loyalty was not intimidated. But she cooperated anyway.

She sat there for three days, passing out on top of the work bench and dripping drool all over the parts when she had to, doing nothing but working on the gun and sitting on two very large suitcases, because there was always the chance that someone would get the idea they could take them away again. While she sat there she pulled the weapon into tiny little pieces, cleaned each piece, and laid them out in near little rows. Then she stared down at the destruction, wondered if even she could repair that kind of damage, and had a meeting with the military men to tell them that. They took her back to the room, gave her a cup of coffee and didn't even bother responding, and so she sat and sipped the steaming liquid and watched the hundreds of little components spread out across the table, as if they would tell her where they were all meant to go instead of making her figure it out herself when nothing looked the way it should.


Three days later, Loyalty had finished. The gun didn't look like it should, really -- it was bent out of shape in places that could only be expected to be bent considering the continued denial of any new parts, and she was amazed the old ones had fit back together at all. She was also secretly proud, because although the safety switch was still included and they weren't happy about that, she had completed her job to the specifications supplied and the coffee had been good, and now she would get to go back home and roll around in a very large pile of money.

Which she intended to do. That was why she had demanded cash, after all.

So the military men came back in, took the gun and checked that it worked, then looked completely expressionless upon realizing that just to make it work at all and bypass the components that she couldn't save, Loyalty had been forced to alter the gun so it used a third less power and had four times as much firing strength. Without strutting smugly and making sure they knew she knew she was awesome, Loyalty gathered up her suitcases and ambled along after them, her legs tingling from the long period of inactivity, and wondering what it was going to feel like to roll around in as many bills as she was currently carrying.

As they were boarding the carrier, she paused and glanced back at the building. In front of the side doors, in the glaring heat, was a small group. She stalled to watch the scene unfold despite the sun beating down on her, blinding her after a week of dimmed lights and muted sounds, and the military men let her. Their faces told her they didn't want to, but perhaps they had been given orders to allow this -- or, perhaps, they just thought she deserved to understand why she had spent so many days locked in an underground room and living off nothing but coffee and Danish pastries.

So Loyalty stood and stared at the group -- five in all, lined in a single row along the outside of the building. The one closest to her wore bandages on his hands -- that, or very thick and very white gloves, although neither would have been particularly comfortable in the heat. He gave no indication he was bothered, however. All five of them wore identical stoic expressions, staring almost blankly at the space in front of them.

Just when she was ready to leave, to give up on seeing anything interesting happen, there was a muted scream of fury. A sixth soldier burst through the doors, dragging a small figure behind him. She squinted, but they were too far away to make out any details, and she was left with the hazy conclusion that it was either a very short man, or a very tall boy. Not that it really mattered, because the one with the bandages-maybe-gloves raised his gun, and pulled the trigger.

The screaming figure stopped screaming, and turned into a bloody cloud. After a beat of silence, to make sure the job had been done, the soldiers turned and walked away. The only one that remained was the one who had dragged him out, looking very displeased at being left to clean up the mess.

After a few seconds, Loyalty turned and numbly followed the military men into the plane. They explained to her, as she buckled her belt, that the bloody cloud had snuck into the bunker and stolen a gun. When a soldier had caught him, he had tried to fire -- but the safety was on and nothing happened, so in a last ditch attempt to escape, he threw the gun and run out the door. The soldier got half his face and one hand blown clean off, with almost irreparable damage to his other hand, and the man-but-maybe-a-boy was caught before he even made it halfway to the door.

In a fit of poetic justice, the sergeant had declared he would be killed with the same gun that he tried to steal, and that had destroyed the soldiers life, when all the Grand Man Of The Military had been trying to do was stop a kid running away with a dangerous weapon that would have got him shot on sight.

Loyalty, very seriously, asked why the kid had stolen the gun. The military men looked at each other, shrugged, and turned away from her -- because this was not pertinent to their investigation, and therefore they had no idea.

She thought about this on the flight home, staring out over the miles of open land because every time she closed her eyes she saw the maybe-a-man-but-almost-certainly-a-teenager turning into a bloody cloud, and feeling a little but sick that something she had with her own two hands had done that.

The fact she was making weapons for the military had never bothered her before. It was all a game, after all, all removed from reality and without any danger at all -- and at the very most, it was a whole lot of people dying because they were stupid enough to go up against an army with vastly superior weaponry. They had never been a person before -- they had always been faceless, both sides, and now she knew this was not entirely true.

Loyalty vomited halfway back to her home, bent over the tiny carrier porta-potty, retching loudly and choking on her own bile. The military men sneered down their noses at her when she finally stumbled back to her seat, but did not consider her worth wasting words on. She stared out the window again, ignoring them, and watched the miles melt away below.

When she got home, Loyalty walked up the stairs to her bedroom without turning on any of the lights. She carefully pushed both suitcases under her bed, lay on top of the covers, crossed her hands on her stomach and stared at the ceiling as she tried to figure out how to feel about the entire night and wondered how she was going to look at herself in the mirror.

And then, a few minutes later, she swung her legs off the bed and went down on her knees, pulled the suitcases out and carefully spread all the bills across her bed. She rolled around a few times, then lay on her stomach and stared at the wall until her eyes grew heavy and she fell asleep.

In the morning, she woke up and stared at the bills scattered around the room, and yawned. She collected them up and shoved them back in the suitcases and back under her bed, stumbled to the kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee, then got ready for work.

By the time she arrived, Loyalty had all but forgotten what the problem had even been.