Chapter Text

Tundratown Border

Maintenance Tunnel 6-B

Two hours into enhanced patrol operations

Wrong place, wrong time.

There was a tiny voice in Nick Wilde's head that got distractingly loud sometimes, and it was always when he was in the middle of something that needed his full focus, like removing this access plate without attracting too much attention. Not that the noise of his tools would carry out of the tunnel into the sheeting rain, or get picked up by any of the sensors in here. The little shim he'd jammed into the network would take care of that, for at least the next few minutes.

So what was the problem, he asked himself. The police out there had bigger fish to fry with their little aug roundup party. None of them had time to worry about the scrappy fox in the tunnel, or the stash of not-verifiably-illegal hardware he was picking up from the dead-drop. This wasn't hurting anyone. Right?

Nick gritted his teeth and pulled the hatch shut behind him. If he didn't know better, he'd say he was developing a conscience.

This part of the tunnel was even dimmer, bathed in the red-orange of emergency lighting. Nick's eyes adjusted, and he started to relax. There were no cameras down here to worry about spiking; if anyone out there caught on to his presence he'd hear them coming in plenty of time thanks to the feed from dispatch going on his headset. It was cramped, too - most of the bruisers out there wouldn't even fit in here.

And the case was right where it was supposed to be, behind the data pipes for this section of the tunnel where only the maintenance bots ever poked around.

Nick tucked it under his arm, checked his map for the new route out, turned to duck under a low-hanging stanchion-

And fifty thousand volts dumped him on his back. Nick yelped.

Blindsided.

And as his vision cleared he groaned. Of course. Of course she wouldn't have just disappeared.

Judy Hopps, anomalous rabbit cop and near-constant pain in Nick's tail, was back from her long, blessed, unexplained absence. She scowled down at him past the flicker of the stun baton in her armor. There was still moisture beading on her clothes.

Nick dropped his head to the chipped concrete. "Hi."

Her jaw worked. Was she suppressing a smile?

"Did you miss me?"

"Three months is a long time," Nick said. "What happened that's keeping you so busy? Your chief put you on sanitation duty or something?"

Judy ignored the question. Her compliance tool deactivated and slid back into the housing on her gauntlet. "Nicholas Wilde, you're under arrest."

"You are so straight-arrow it's actually offensive, Carrots." Oh, it hurt to breathe. She hadn't zapped him in a while.

Her eyes narrowed at the nickname. "And you keep getting into trouble. Your network spikes are a nice touch, but they're getting pretty signature. This is trespassing." She nudged the little armored box Nick had dropped with a grey-furred foot. "And maybe trafficking, too. What's in the case?"

Nick pushed himself up to his elbows. "Well, maybe if I could afford a nice neural implant I wouldn't need data shims."

"The case, Nick."

"I even timed it with your friends out there, so they wouldn't worry about little old me. Doesn't ZPD have actual criminals to catch? Drugs? Cloning?"

Her thumb twitched, near the glove controls for her batons. "Nick."

"I don't know. Seriously."

Judy sighed and - when he made it clear he wasn't going to get up and risk another shock - knelt by the case. He watched her, alarmed despite himself. He never opened the cases, because he figured - rightly - he was better off not knowing what the mammals he occasionally made deliveries for were dealing in. Now he was getting visions of booby traps. Tiny explosives, or poison gas.

"Carrots."

"Shut it." She was staring at the box, and after a moment reached down and flipped the catches. Nick braced himself-

-for a neat row of little silicon squares, packed edge-on in custom foam. Judy plucked one out and studied it. Her eyes widened.

"Nick, what are you wrapped up in?" She replaced the chip and whipped out a set of cuffs, applying them so expertly Nick barely had time to move. "Where did you get these?"

"Listen, I don't even know what they are." He frowned. "How do you?"

She was distressed. More so than any of the... seventeen other times she'd tangled with him before. Not that Nick counted. Judy looked down the hallway, and paced a few steps.

"These are neural chips. For controlling augs. Almost military-spec."

"Like the ones ZPD uses?"

"Stronger." Her eyes flashed. "Civilian augs can be dangerous enough, attached to the right mammal. These chips-" She looked down at the case. "Someone could turn themselves into a weapon. Six someones."

Augmentation was an arms race, no matter how much the corporations wrapped their offerings up in glamorous presentation. It gave mammals edges over other mammals. Prey could get claws. Predators could get sharper claws. Anyone with the cash could get faster and stronger overnight.

ZPD wasn't an exception, Nick knew. Most of the officers Nick passed on the streets these days sported something shiny and upgraded. Cybernetic rhinos. Bears with carbon-composite arms, tearing the doors off crashed vehicles to help trapped passengers. The department had even paraded its pursuit cheetahs around, who could hit a hundred miles an hour on their prosthetic legs now, and hold it.

It was obscene, in his opinion. And ominous. To stay ahead, criminals had to augment themselves, too, and being criminals they had fewer scruples. More sharp edges. It added more tension to the cityscape, and shot a fresh divide down the center of its population: between those who retained their natural abilities, and those who sought to push past them - for better or for worse.

Nick tried not to think too hard about it. For him, for someone who couldn't afford even the most basic of implants, it was just one more aspect to a checkered string of jobs. If mammals wanted augs, and other mammals wanted to deliver aug parts and were willing to pay him to carry the materials, he didn't see how that was his business. He was just getting by. What others did with themselves wasn't his problem.

It was officer Hopps' problem, though, came the grating little voice in his head. She was still pacing.

"Where were you taking these?"

"Dead drop." Why was he cooperating? He didn't owe her anything, not after she kept shocking him. He couldn't even complain about that; the department would just laugh him out of the building again. "How did you find me? I'm working in gaps here."

"I don't use the network for that," Judy said. She frowned. "I don't like relying on it. So I watch where it doesn't cover." She fixed him with a critical look. "Or where it drops out."

Good old-fashioned policing. Nick hid his smile. "No idea what you're talking about."

"You're going to get yourself hurt, doing this."

Spoken as if she hadn't just dosed him with enough electricity to stop an elephant. "You're doing plenty of the hurting for both of us already."

"I mean it, Nick." She shook her head. "You should go back to pawpsicles before you get any deeper. I know you listen in to the police band, watch the traffic. You can see it's getting tense out there. Dangerous."

"You mean the way your colleagues are out there corralling augmented citizens right now?"

"Unlicensed augmentation is a threat to public security," she shot back, and gestured at the chips. "You want to look at this and argue otherwise?"

"You opened the case."

"Stop it. I'm awfully familiar with your record, Nick. You can't afford to get mixed up in organized crime. We've been finding runners, doing the things you're doing now. They're all stock. They've all ended up dead."

"Stock." Nick spat the word. "Please don't tell me you're buying into that, too."

"It's happening, like it or not. We've been taking mammals in for months, and they all have the same message. Without augs, you're a subclass. You won't keep up. You can't compete."

"Obviously you don't believe that. You're still on the force."

Judy looked away. "Where's your dead drop?"

"What, you're going to do my dirty work for me now? How am I supposed to get paid?"

"If someone's giving mammals hardware this advanced, we need to stop it as soon as we can," Judy said. "Before it gets any worse." She shifted. "I can't pay you. But I can not arrest you."

"It's not like you've ever made that stick before," Nick said. "You'll have to do better."

"What do you want, Nick?"

"To survive, same as anyone," Nick said.

"Then get out. Start running information for ZPD. Something. We could set you up tomorrow."

"And paint a target on my own back?" Nick shook his head. "We all do what we have to. And I was doing fine, before you and your stun sticks said hello."

"You didn't know about this."

No, he hadn't. Not by choice, anyway. If he'd looked that closely at it he would have left it alone. She knew he couldn't exactly argue the principle of the thing, either. She was right: he couldn't afford the wrong kind of attention.

Not that she could, either. ZPD's lone rabbit attracted a lot of nasty focus as it was - Nick was plugged far enough into the fringe to notice that, and it made him uneasy in ways he never could quite place. Scale was a pressure point in this city, and predator/prey differences, and now augs. She was on the wrong side of all of them, and she charged ahead regardless. One of these days her luck was going to run out.

"You won't be any safer than I would be."

"I know the risks."

"Not like this, Carrots." Her eyes flashed again, but Nick let it roll off and went on compromising his own deniability for her. "You - you, specifically - don't want to tangle with these mammals. An unaugged rabbit? ZPD or no, you'll be lucky if you don't just vanish."

She watched him. "I have a job to do."

If only stubborn idealism were a tangible substitute for synthetic legs, he thought, or upgraded ears. Not that she'd need those. She heard everything already. Could jump seven feet straight up. She didn't need to be faster.

And yet she was still staring at him, as if she knew even more than usual that he was wrong.

The uneasiness was back, cooling in his chest where she'd hit him. She wouldn't.

But three months was about right. If she hadn't been busy, but recovering-

"What did they do to you?" He asked, and her ears confirmed it. "You don't have the mass for augs."

"No."

Was it neural? His bootleg scanner hadn't picked any other networks up, for what that was worth. A rebreather? She was a decent runner, he'd learned that the hard way-

No, it was worse.

"Your eyes."

She blinked, and now that Nick knew what he was looking for he was sure of it. They almost glowed purple in the gloom. "Tell me you didn't give them your eyes."

"Better than yours, now," Judy murmured, and narrowed them. "Infrared, magnification, network, the full package."

Nick had sat upright. Closer. "And did they tell you what happens when they fail?"

They were better at telegraphing the emotion now, too. She finally looked away. "If."

"When. Retinal prostheses have a forty percent rejection chance, Carrots. And it just keeps climbing with age. You'll go blind."

Judy flinched, and those angry, beautiful, awful eyes nearly pinned him to the wall again. "We all do what we have to."

She loved her job so much. The easy parts, the hard parts, the strange relationship they'd built over the years that swung from friendly antagonism to cooperation to petty vengeance and back again. The fringe fox and the reckless rabbit.

Judy had sacrificed to keep up. To run with the rest of an increasingly dangerous profession, to do the only thing she'd ever wanted or known how to do. It was as much survival as what Nick had become.

He wondered if that was what she saw him doing.

"Where is your dead drop, Nick? I can cut you loose right now."

Nick sighed. "I'll give you the coordinates, as long as you promise you won't go in without backup."

"A dead drop is supposed to be quiet."

"It's supposed to be." Nick agreed. He tilted his ears back up the tunnel. "You just ran me through the risks yourself, though. Why take chances?"

"You know, I think I can hear your conscience from here."

"You, too, huh?"

Judy bent to release the cuffs - fearless as ever, even around his claws - and Nick took out his phone.

"Launder this, yeah?"

"We know what we're doing, Nick. None of this will come back to you." Judy looked him up and down. "You're more useful in one piece anyway."

He let her have the chips, and he was glad they were a small enough package to be inconspicuous.

Judy pointed him up the tunnel. "There's a service access-"

"-at the far end, I know."

They walked together. Judy took to the ladder first. It would be less suspicious if she left before he did, in case either of them were being watched.

She paused four rungs up, at his eye level.

"I'm serious, by the way. If you ever want out. A new chance."

"And so am I, about being careful. I don't think either of us are going to listen to each other."

Judy rolled her eyes. "Remind me to really arrest you next time."

At least that meant there would be a next time. Nick watched her climb the ladder to the surface.

The glint of her purple eyes held his for a long moment before she shut the hatch between them.