LINKDING

<blockquote>While I realize driving that mech likely takes all of your limited resources, please take care not to step on the roses. what Don’t step on the roses. I don’t care if we’re under imminent attack. Your mech is standing so close to them I’m cringing. who is this? I can see you typing and then stopping don’t waste my time coming up with a lie, punk Who I am or how I got your number is irrelevant. no, it’s not and, fyi, we don’t drive them, we pilot gods, you’re probably chung sol trolling me</blockquote> ➤ lol I just realized after reading some fanfic that probably this story is intended to be canonically shipping the two leads; when I first read it I was like "awwww what a wonderful intense platonic friendship!" I am inescapably me, whoops, I never notice romance unless there're anvil-sized indications. anyway this is a really good story!

<blockquote>Iyara taps the military implant behind her ear, and low static greets her. It’s been dead for years—a two-way line with only one connection—but the static is comforting, as if she’s listening to the sound of space itself. Empty with longing. Below her, the dealership is an orange, domed pimple on the otherwise placid blue world. Lights flash through the thin ozone advertising: “Cheap!” “Arturo-433 Models Used and New!” “Xanthian credits accepted!”</blockquote>

<blockquote>Max spent nearly an hour outside the shop, huddled under an awning that barely shielded him from the bitter rain, smoking one cigarette after another down until he nearly burned his fingers. He was desperate, that much was sure, but how desperate? That was harder to say. Desperate enough to walk into Adriaan Visser’s den was desperate indeed, especially since Visser wouldn’t need any of his family’s fancy weaponry or arcane knowledge. Any one of the guns lining the walls for display would be the end of Max in a single mundane trigger pull.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Chaeeunshinji was seventeen, and I was thirteen. Just going by years alone, she was way older than me, but that kind of comparison didn’t really mean much: the planet where Chaeeunshinji was from and the one where I came from each had slightly different rotational and sidereal periods, so that the relative lengths of days and years on those worlds worked out to be just different enough to be confusing. “Well, technically I’m in my late teens, but you’re just a little kid, so officially I’m your big sister.” “But who would go by that? If you count by wake-sleep cycles, I’ve lived longer than you!”</blockquote>