Where could my heart go
Where you wouldn't be
Where you wouldn't go to find me?
Far, far from here
Still you are near
Still you are near to me
And I see
Everywhere I go I see your face through the crowd
Everywhere I go I hear your voice clear and loud
Everywhere I go you are the light that I see
Everywhere I go you've found me
(Everywhere I Go – Five Iron Frenzy)

One thing Zim had never grown accustomed to was the earthenoid love for foods carved from the muscles of livestock and cooked with liberal amounts of grease. It wasn’t appetizing, and there was something about the notion of devouring another creature, even one that was not sentient, that made him feel nauseous. He’d seen the animals called “cows” and “pigs” often enough to know that they were to stupid to realize what happened to them. The cruelty of slaughtering innocent, unaware creatures alone made the meat inedible, and the irony of the human assumption that the animals being killed were stupider than those doing the killing was not lost of Zim. He rarely ate human foods anyway, meat or otherwise—he’d stocked his Voot Cruiser with a replicator on purpose.

However, there were occasions when the replicator would malfunction that Zim was forced to eat human food. On these occasions, he generally sent Robot Zim to get it for him. Not venturing too far outside of his apartment and labs made the chances of escaping discovery better.

But Robot Zim was undergoing a data upload on a family that had moved in two floors up (it was always a good idea to keep the robot’s memory up-to- date on the building’s residents), and the real Zim steeled himself to step into daylight for the first time in weeks. /Mongolia,/ he kept reminding himself, /Is half a world away./

The sky had clouded over by the time he’d finished preparing, which was both a good and a bad thing. Good because it kept him out of the harmful Earth sun; bad because, if it began to rain, the layer of paste coating his body could only hold out so long. /That’s okay, though,/ he reminded himself, /I’ll only be gone for a little while./ But he still had to keep himself from flinching when he heard thunder rumble in the distance, and the thought of moisture always had his skin prickle in memory of the burns he’d received the last time he’d been in the rain without paste.

He shuddered at the memory—Dib’s laughter and a lingering pain that could not solely be blamed on the white lightning pinpricks covering his skin. He pushed it out of his mind. That had been when he’d first lost all hope of friendship, or even a truce between the two, and it still pained him to think about it. It was such stuff as nightmares were made of.

The Circle Q was only a few blocks away from his apartment—it seemed far longer. A few miles maybe, but no way a few blocks. He tried to glance around without being obvious about it, but not even superior Irkin eyes could look everywhere at once. Every head of black hair he saw sent his eyes skittering in search of a place to hide; even when thousands of miles separated them, Dib still saw him everywhere.

At least it wasn’t hard to blend in with the crowd, though. He wore uniform black, and he’d traded in his Dib-esque wig for a more disheveled looking one. Goth, he’d heard the look called. It wasn’t the fashion he cared about; he’d discovered quite a large population of these “goths” in Rankle City, and it helped him blend into the crowd. Even so, he felt sorely out of place on the sidewalk.

As he walked quickly across the parking lot of the Circle Q, a small, annoying voice in the back of his mind that pointed out, /A Q is a circle./ He ignored that, walking a little faster. The unexpected growth spurt that had lengthened his legs had also lengthened his stride and had increased the amount of ground he could cover in one step. At 6’3” he stood only a few fractions of an inch shorter than the Irkin Tallest. If Red and Purple still held that position, that was—for all Zim knew, the Massive had been caught in a freak falling cow storm and destroyed. The thought brought a tiny smile to his lips and he pushed open the glass doors of the convenience store, relieved at being inside and out of the way of the impending threat of rain.

Looking to either side, he found that there were only a few other people in the store: the cashier, a tall, gangly man who was missing most of his hair, and a trio of teenagers rummaging through the candy. Zim stepped out of the tall man’s way as he left with his brainfreezy, and disregarded the knife ill-concealed in the man’s trench coat.

He headed back toward the dairy case, intent on the chocolate milk he had set out to buy. Milk, he had found, was one of the few earth beverages that was worth the money it cost, and chocolate milk was the only good use of chocolate the species had come up with. Besides, milk was the only drink at the Circle Q that didn’t contain lethal amounts of water.

As he reached the open-faced freezer, he was met with a number of dilemmas. Which brand? Which of the many flavors? He smiled again at the part of himself that brought the questions up before selecting the cheapest bottle he could find. Outside, it had begun to rain. He grabbed another, larger bottle for good measure.

But when he turned to go to the counter to pay, he discovered someone already there. His smile faltered as he took in the dark hair and black trench coat. /Mongolia./ He stepped forward, but froze when the man turned to look out the glass doors, pointing at one of the gas pumps. Large, round glasses were perched on his face, and a single, scythe-like piece of hair swept back from his forehead. It wasn’t exactly a common hairstyle.

Zim ducked back behind a shelf with a muttered expletive; it was a twenty- hour flight from Mongolia to Rankle City, longer if one added in late arrivals and delays. Dib couldn’t have traveled that far that quickly without Zim knowing it.

/It has been two days since I last checked the satellite, though. He could have been standing outside my door and I wouldn’t have known./

He forced himself to focus on how he was going to get out of this. He could either stay where he was and hope Dib was lactose intolerant, or he could put the milk back and try to sneak past the human. Sneaking, he knew, might draw unwanted attention from the clerk, and consequently from the customer the clerk was dealing with. That would be bad. On the other hand, staying meant that if Dib wanted anything from this end of the store, Zim would be hard-pressed to remain unnoticed. He decided that the lesser of the two evils would be to stay put.

It was a decision he regretted the instant he heard footsteps coming his way.