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Hvergelmir's hand twitched, a little ticklish, where Labyrinthite's gloved fingertips skated across her palm. The skin was scarred there, in a distinctive six-pointed Cosmos star that matched the one scarred on the small of her back, but luckily she hadn't lost much feeling from the inury.

Other people had worse scars. She might have worse scars someday, she knew, and the man who now studied her might well bear the responsibility. But right now, she didn't. Right now, and for however long it might last, she wasn't the target of his trail of violence and murder. If he had something like good graces, she was in them.

She let out a breath. Smiled. "I was reckless and foolish long before I ever met you. And a fugitive long before you were, too. The difference is, I didn't have anyone chasing me for a long time. You always did."

How often had Nephthys paced one dock or another when Tarren was late to arrive, imagining him shackled in heavy, ugly irons, or rotting away in the brig of some Martian starliner? How often had she left warm beds and warm partners, because nightmares of him caught and killed had driven her from sleep? How often had she sifted through the news, gossip and rumors Dionysia had passed along, dreading some bad news about Crims?

Often enough that, even with her fragmented memory of her past life, she could recall it.

She liked to think of Crims, sailing from one star to the next, with the rising star tattooed to his skin: a part of her that was always with him, always watching over him. Labyrinthite was right: such a mark was no small gesture.

"Tarren would've sailed through hell and back, for my sake," she confirmed -- not out of ego, but because they were that close. "And so would I, for his."

It was the ideas that bled through Labyrinthite moreso than the memories, Hvergelmir was coming to realize. He described the memories themselves as being few and scant -- save for his death -- but it seemed he had at least some gift for inference, as his mind had clearly siezed upon what mattered and drawn from it what he could. I was a rebel-made king. And so he had been, in his way.

The answers he lacked, Hvergelmir could supply. Some of them, anyway. The way he said I don't want to say goodbye wrenched at something fragile in her heart -- and she understood it to be some small scene, some fragment of memory that was still lost to her yet, because it brought tears to her eyes without understanding them. It was tied to some thread she couldn't see, couldn't follow, but that was certainly there. Something that belonged to her and was missing.

Nephthys felt nearer and hand and yet farther away than she ever had. She smiled through her tears. "I was clever enough not to get caught until I turned myself in," Hvergelmir promised. "And even then, I escaped."

Not without cost or suffering, and not unscathed -- she'd lived with the huge barcode tattoo down her entire right arm after Angaria, and the name of her crime written forever beneath it: THEFT OF LABOR. But she'd been free.

It took little effort to shift their point of contact, to lace their fingers together. His gloved hand fitted to hers, bare and scarred with the Cosmos star. It took a little more effort to answer Labyrinthite's last question.

Nephthys might have offered a coy reply there. I'm trying to, she might have said with a sly smile, but you aren't making it very easy, you devil.

But Laney was not Nephthys. The relationships she held in her heart were fewer, but no less ardent, no less devoted. They were slower, more careful.

So she said, instead, with her eyes on Labyrinthite's face, "I've changed since then. So have you. But I don't think my heart's ever been fickle."

Nephthys had mourned Tarren for weeks. Hvergelmir didn't remember receiving the news, though she assumed it had likely come from Dionysia, whence so much information about current events across the galaxy flowed. She had no idea where she might've been standing when she was told, or how she'd reacted in the moment. She only remembered after.

The quiet solitude of her temple, away from prying eyes -- only Eikthyrnir's quiet breath occasionally at her shoulder when she went to the garden for vegetables. She had shut herself away with her grief, refusing missions and people alike. Visitors to her island received no hospitality beyond what was available when the knight wasn't in residence: just the pier and the fuel that ran to it. She offered them no beds and no bonfires. She was poor company for any stranger. She'd sat at her loom for days on end and worked a grand tapestry, its colored threads wending together -- though she could no longer recall what the tapestry depicted or what had become of it since.

She remembered only that when she grieved -- when she truly grieved -- she liked to grieve alone.

But for all the misery of that thought she laughed. It was unexpected, and bubbled out of her, and she answered, "That's just what you would've asked." 'Come on, Neph, did you cry for me? Did you wear black and tear at your clothes? Have out with it.' And she might have rolled her eyes and called him a blackguard and ignored the question entirely.

If Crims were here. "I mourned you in my own way," was what she told Labyrinthite. "And longer than most."

But Crims wasn't here, not quite here -- and nothing made that more obvious than the question Labyrinthite asked her, his gaze so focused. Him or me. And it had only one answer.

"There's only one of you," she said, the momentary lightness of her tone already starting to fade away. "And there's only one of me. All that changes is time. We just grow. It's only Metallia's hand on your heart that makes you think otherwise. You're Crims, and always were. No matter what rocks you name yourself after. No matter what hoods you hide behind. No matter how many people you kill. No matter what power she grants you and no matter how much you love it, and no matter how much I despise it. This is the person you've grown into -- and if you took all that away, if you wore a knight's clothes again and the name that was born within you, you still wouldn't be the same as you were a thousand years ago. But he'd still be you."

It was an answer, and it wasn't. The rest was obvious. I will always care about you. But that alone will never be enough.

She studied his eyes, gold like the rising moon at sunset. "Let me ask you something. If you won this war -- if all your enemies were killed or converted, and Metallia held this world in her hands, and the only knight left walking this world was me, and my oath -- what would you do then? Would you let me live?"

He didn't want to believe it -- that he and Crims might be cut from the same cloth more than just technically, that they might be more than two bodies that had shared the same starseed. Maybe he couldn't believe it. Maybe Metallia got in the way.

Or maybe it was just that he hadn't quite imagined it yet -- the idea that he could be Metallia's servant, wearing her livery, and still be someone who'd once found his calling beyond Saturn. He hadn't retraced his footsteps yet, had he? He'd barely seen a few of his nearest footprints in the snow, half-disappeared.

"Find out for yourself, then," she offered. "If I can find more of these vials, and bring them to you -- then see for yourself who Tarren was, and if you really would've been in that much disagreement with him. Learn your own history first-hand."

She'd search her own Wonder, first. After that, perhaps Olympus held answers -- or one of the other knights of Saturn. Perhaps such vials had been made on their planet, or perhaps someone had recorded something about it that they could find and decipher . . . but if one small bottle of liquid existed that had the power to restore lost memories, it had to have come from somewhere. There had to be more, somewhere in the universe.

"As for the other thing . . . " Hvergelmir shivered, her hand tightening in Labyrinthite's as though unconsciously seeking warmth. "I don't want to be Metallia's slave. I don't want to have to kill on someone else's command. I'd be miserable. I don't want to live that way."

Hvergelmir let her hand go slack within his -- it would fall back down to her lap unless Labyrinthite held on to it. They were close enough that she could feel his breath warming her face -- and yet, his words left her chilled beyond measure.

"I wouldn't be yours. I'd belong to that thing you call a queen . . . just another slave at the end of her chain, condemned to bring her endless bodies, endless souls for her grist mill. You have to know that would kill me. I can't . . . I couldn't."

She looked at him imploringly, desperately. "I'd be a corpse at your side. Would you trot me around like a pet? Keep my quotas for me so Metallia didn't slit my throat? Would you be happy, knowing that I hated you?"

This was the dance Hvergelmir and Labyrinthite were always doing: two people always bouncing off of each other, never meeting in the middle, always holding firmly to their points of view. If they were alike in one respect, it was in having a core of incredible stubbornness; even Hvergelmir's most strident pleading had had no effect in getting Labyrinthite to promise not to drag her into the Negaverse against her will. He'd made his decision.

Well, Crims had been profoundly obstinate too. It was one more thing his present incarnation had in common with Tarren as he existed in her memories.

"Maybe," she said, though she had no desire to live on Metallia's sufferance. "Or maybe there's a world where you run away from all of this with me instead -- where we find an old spaceship that's still starworthy and we sail the universe exploring the ruins of all the old planets. Somewhere where Metallia can't ever reach you again. Maybe there's a lifetime where no one owns either of us, and we're just free."

Her gaze drifted up and away to the sky, imagining flying far away from a life of war and anxiety, imagining something different.

"But the truth is, I don't expect to be there for the end of things, either. So I guess we can both imagine whatever ending makes us happiest -- for all the difference it makes."

Hvergelmir conceded the point with a smile. "No, you're right, " she admitted. "There are people here I wouldn't want to leave. And I like what it is I do -- I like helping people. I have to keep going until the work is done. But if you think my desire to stay near people I love means more to me than your freedom, than anyone's freedom -- then you don't really see me for who I am." She looked up at him imploringly, studying his eyes. "Don't you have people who'd make sacrifices for you? People you'd make sacrifices for?"

There were plenty of days where Laney had dreaded another night at her bench where things might go badly, another day trying to push the same stone up the same hill. There were days when she despaired, days when she imagined running away -- sometimes with Orah, sometimes just alone. But she didn't - she couldn't -- and those feelings always passed.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercifully, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

People needed someone to talk to, especially during a war. She couldn't leave that behind. Not for one person she cared about, and not for all of them.

But she wished Labyrinthite could leave his red path behind him instead -- could set aside his brutal calling with as much honor and bravery as Tarren had once set aside his nobler Saturnine calling and follow the road dictated by his own heart.

Crims had been anchorless, wild, a bird in flight. Labyrinthite was a man moored to his own damnation.

It was rare for Hvergelmir to snap at someone. Rarer still, probably, for it to be Labyrinthite, whom she was always so careful with, so delicate -- and whom, he had surmised correctly, she now thought of in her mind as Crims as much as she did Labyrinthite. Rare, when she set such store by her self-control, her decision to choose gentleness again and again.

Rare.

But not impossible.

Even then, snap was perhaps a strong word for it -- but there was an uncommon fire in her eyes when she looked back at him, a furious sense of certainty and implacably hard will that came from a lifetime far beyond this one, something that had driven Nephthys beyond just her own life and still lived within Hvergelmir here in her next incarnation. "It would be different because it would be my choice," she hissed keenly back, looking as indignant and insulted as if she'd just been slapped. "I'm no one's slave, not yours or Metallia's or anyone else's. The shackles I wear, I wear because I chose them -- don't imagine that's anything like being dragged into your cage."

The last time Hvergelmir had spoken so forcefully to a Negaverse agent like this had been . . . Had been years ago, had been Bischofite.

It wasn't like her. This time, Labyrinthite had fired an arrow that had struck true, found a way to get under her skin. Damn him.

She curbed her outburst there. Her distress, she reminded herself, wouldn't help the situation. She shut her eyes for a few long seconds and breathed.

"Maybe you're right," she offered. "Maybe I don't understand enough of your life to really see you for who you are. You don't really talk to me about how you ended up in the Negaverse or whether you're actually happy. I don't even know what happiness looks like, for you. "