Vesta’s life is simple. Secular. Everything fits into neat boxes, crammed little compartments of daily routine. She wakes up. She stretches; keeps herself from rusting out by idly transforming her limbs into blades and saws and guns, spends the day exploring the abandoned pits of the compound, derelict with dried oil glistening in low light. Low, lingering hunger striking in her gut as she walks, useless and redundant. She has more than enough oil. What she needs is the hunt, the adrenaline, the metallic tear of ball joints snapping clean off the body. The clean, curving satisfaction of the kill.

Vesta’s life is simple. Secular. This is the future, whether she likes it or not; mundane absurdity, a killing creature reduced to cycles of routine and habit, hollow and meaningless - exactly the same as her past. Just without the murder. 

Vesta’s life is simple. She doesn’t talk to Pallas. Talking to him trapped her; wrung her between the past and present, strung up and left out to dry. He had changed. The dissonance between what she had thought as constant and what was right in front of her layered on top of one another, overlapped, confused her. Ceres was worse. The past and the future are two distinct entities, meant to be kept far apart, and she keeps her life secular because she has always known this. 

You have been invited to be the best man for our wedding. You are welcome to decline, just confirm it to me before Wednesday.

• CeresandIris

She turns it over in her hands. Once, twice. 3 years and not a word passed between them. And now this. 

A joke, from Ceres, who never had a shred of humour. A taunt, a mocking thing to remind her of her loneliness, obvious in its absurdity. But from who? Pallas didn’t have the teeth to be malicious. Ceres would see it as beneath her, or would say it to her face. And Iris? Of all people?

There were their signatures, signed in black, bold as day. 

She turns it over in her hands again. 3 years. 15 before that.