Permissions — Part 5: Battle Buddy

We did not hire a child.

That is the legal sentence.

The true sentence is worse and kinder: a child found the room where the adults were building a door, and she made herself useful before we could decide whether stopping her would be mercy or cruelty.

By that first winter the Zoo had a user who wasn't one of us, and she was good at QA because she did not trust the room.

Adults test the path they expect. Anabelle tested the path she would need if the room lied.

She checked exits first. She tried to sit where the sim said no one would sit. She noticed NPCs ignored small bodies unless the body made a noise first. She asked what happened if a user refused the assigned avatar. She broke onboarding because she would not click I agree until she understood who could see her.

"My sister would hate this menu," she said once.

I was under a desk, elbows deep in a cable mess.

"Why?"

"Too many choices before it lets you leave."

"That is terrifyingly good notes."

"It's annoying notes."

"Most good notes are annoying," I said, and she almost smiled before the sim pulled her back under.

The first time we met Anabelle's parents was over a drawing of Fulldive's older, more ancient cousin.

I insisted on permission. I had learned nothing and everything from the knife. Anabelle looked at me like I had asked her to fly with no wings, but she took us.

Viv did the talking because I looked like military-grade trouble and Nate was too smooth for that room. Their father recognized me as someone doing well in the new economy and hated me on sight. Their mother hovered behind him with a laundry basket against her hip and a face worn into permanent apology.

"Your Anabelle has been indispensable to our project," Viv said.

"Our what?" he said.

"Project," Viv said. "It means she is smarter than both of us in ways we keep finding expensive to replace."

Nate smiled the smile that makes bank managers and nurses feel heard. "You will always know where she is," he said.

That line comforted them.

It comforted us.

I hate that it comforted us.

We made it official-ish. A contract and a wage. A spare key. A standing invitation for all-night hackathons. A chair at the table. A user profile with restrictions nobody liked and everyone pretended were enough. Viv asked what avatar she wanted.

Anabelle crossed her arms. "Has to be cute."

"Of course."

"Something with armor."

"What kind?" Viv asked.

"The kind people believe."

Nate wrote that one on the whiteboard and circled it three times, pointing for emphasis. A cat; something soft and helpful, but all claws if pushed too far.

It stuck.

Ana — she went by Ana, once she opened up, and that mattered more than I told her at the time — caught me after a long session one Thursday. I was in the transition space between the Zoo and the real world, headset in hand, room still deciding which version of itself it wanted to be.

"I made you something," she said.

She was trying to be casual about it. She wasn't quite pulling it off.

She had started from the same sim Nate did — the flight test, the one I had jackknifed out of three months earlier, the one that put flight math in my hindbrain and a K-bar in my hand before my eyes were open. She had kept the physics. She had changed everything else.

"I just slapped a skin on it," she said. Which was the modesty version of what she had actually done.

It was a porch. Somewhere rural and warm. Old wood, potted herbs, a couple of sorry-looking lawn chairs. Afternoon light. The feeder hung from a hook in the corner, bright red plastic, full.

She had built it for rabbit. The sight lines were low, the collision mesh was right, the feeder hook sat exactly at ear height if you sat up on your haunches.

"You have to just wait," she said. She was in a small window at the edge of the sim, the way Viv sometimes appeared when she was monitoring without intruding. "It takes a minute."

I waited.

The hummingbird came in from the left.

Fast. That's always the first thing — the speed of them, the mechanical efficiency, the way they fold and correct and hold position like they're solving a problem nobody else can see. My hind legs tensed. Some part of my nervous system started calculating intercept vectors.

Then the hummingbird was me, and I was looking down at a rabbit minding his own business on the ground.

I panicked at first, but the gentle country winds set wind chimes tingling.

I tilted, and my new body just moved. I leaned forward to the feeder and drank the sweet, sweet nectar. Beak in. Hovering. A small impossible thing doing the work of being alive.

"Whenever you're ready," Ana said. She stood inside a small home and watched through an open window. I flew over. She offered a finger and I obliged.

"It's gorgeous," I said. My wings were a blur I couldn't feel.

"You can fly here for as long as you want," she said. "I'll stay here and watch over you. Vivian said you needed an excuse to fly again, and — no. It's a thank-you. For giving me a chance."

"I know," I said. Then I flew free over the procedural prairie, the wind beneath my wings and the sun in my eyes.

We didn't mean to hire family, but Ana became it in that moment.