Everything was different now. Before, she'd held something back -- some willingness to believe that all of this wasn't just real, it was very much to do with her. It was easier to go through life thinking of the important things as being aspects of someone else's life, events in which Laney was merely a spectator, or at best, a bit player. It made them somehow less her responsibility, or maybe just less her choice, as though she had a part to play but not a say in what that part was.

This -- her new life as a knight -- was something she'd tried to live while still holding it at arms' length, reassuring herself that she'd been thrown into it by powers unknown without being given a choice. It was easier to hate it, to avoid facing it, if she told herself her hands were tied as to what she could and couldn't do. Life was easier when things were just happening to you -- you could resent everything that came your way and feel justified about it. Life had not asked your opinion. It was the best way to live if you were afraid to make a decision.

It was the worst way to live if you were afraid to feel trapped.

And now she wasn't. Now the great cosmic Code of the universe had given her the one thing she wanted and feared: control.

She had to get away.

Laney hadn't been able to think of anywhere to go. She'd wandered from room to room of her house, finding places to sit and stew: the bathtub, for an hour, till she was white and pruny; the back of her parents' walk-in closet, hunched over her laptop, talking to CleverBot again; the basement, with her back against the washing machine as it trundled along. None of them really made her feel better -- they just made her feel like she was trying too had to find solace, hoping for some dramatic epiphany like people had in the movies.

Going out wasn't any better. It was worse, in fact: coffee shops were full of people living normal lives that they seemed to have no difficulty managing. Her therapist couldn't understand anything at all, because Laney couldn't say anything. And the self-defense classes she'd been taking just made her agitated now -- Susan kept accusing her of not concentrating. Walks in the park were aimless, and visits to friends seemed counterproductive. The point was she was supposed to find her own way. The universe wanted her to make something of herself. And people were going to die if she didn't figure it out.

In the end, she ran away to the only place she could think of where the way forward seemed simple. There was one thing the Code had insisted they were supposed to do that didn't seem to have any ambiguity to it, which meant it was an easy job to undertake: she had to restore her wonder to life.

This time, when she traveled there, she came better prepared than last time. She got a face mask, a large pushbroom and a pan, some trash bags, and a string to tie her dress up with. She brought bottled water and Slim Jims and her iPod, packed them all up in her backpack along with a notebook and pencil. And she got to work cleaning.

Her island was even more beautiful once she started to sweep the dust away -- and in worse disrepair. It had obviously been an incredible amount of years since anyone had done any kind of maintenance, and the marble underfoot was badly cracked in places, showing the dirt and black rock beneath. Hvergelmir filled up several black trashbags with centuries-worth of dust, swept even more of it off the edge of the island and watched it float away into space (was that considered littering?), and danced to the Mamma Mia! soundtrack while she stacked debris from the rotted old garden into a pile and began bagging it up.

It was good. The work was tiring and simple, and it made her feel curiously invigorated to do it. It didn't hurt, every so often, to take on tasks that provided a cheap sense of accomplishment, especially if you were the kind of person who rarely went about accomplishing anything.

And no one could reach her here. No one could judge her decisions, or lack thereof. No one could look at her or expect anything of her. She was alone and, for the moment, free.

Laney decided she liked it here. Every so often she caught glimpses of things like ghosts, wisps of memory -- a woman weeding the garden, rearranging the benches, sitting on the lip of the reflecting pool and stirring her hand in the water -- and though none of them meant anything much, though it was strange to realize that they were all her and that they were missing pieces of memory from another lifetime, gradually she started to get used to them. The longer she stayed here, the more its familiarity resolved itself into concrete recollections. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to remember an old life.

Rarely, the memories showed her people other than just herself. Out on the pier, she could remember many people coming and going -- refueling great ships and food stores -- and she caught a few flashes of memory near the reflecting pool, too, where other people appeared, though the details of their faces escaped her.

There were no flashes of memory where she recalled any kind of skirmishes. This place, her wonder, had never been a military stronghold, so far as she knew. It was open, welcoming -- a temple, a place of refuge. This was no soldier's base.

"Why do I have to fight?" she said aloud, over the peppy tinkling of Abba in her ears. "Here I am, and I don't see what this place has to do with fighting. It's nothing like that."

No answer came.

She went back to her cleaning, making a small project out of clearing the dust away from the lip of the well. When she was done, she sat down to rest on the newly cleared ledge, and looked down into the water. Her reflected stared back, warping occasionally with the swells and dips of the gently churning pool.

"This whole conflict is such a mess," she told herself -- or the pool, or the whole wonder, or something. Maybe she just needed to vent where no one could hear who might disagree. Making decisions was hard enough; it was harder if there were people around to gainsay you. Being alone was so much better, sometimes. "I just don't understand why we have to keep going like this. Hundreds of years on, of people fighting and dying over this, and no one understanding. It's just . . . it's crazy. And it's like, well because that's just what we do!, and I just -- I can't. I don't think I can. I'd rather stay here forever than go back to that."

A tempting thought. Of course, she'd run out of food pretty quickly, with the garden dead and rotted, and her iPod battery was really only good for a few hours, and the books inside were probably in weird foreign languages, like all the stuff at Aquarius Outpost . . .

And Tara. There was Tara to think of. Her friend who'd been fighting alone for so long, who was even now trying to find another way, some wisdom hidden away in a book that would prevent all this war and death. Could she really just leave her to that?

But could Laney really kill someone who thought they were doing the right thing? Could she do something like that when she couldn't even turn down somene offering her her least favorite food?

She sighed, slapping the water irritably with her hand, watching it ripple away until the well settled back to its usual, stead movement. Maybe there were no answers here either.

Getting up, she returned to dusting once more -- this time tackling the big marble pedestal that marked what must have been the front of the well. The dust came loose under her hands, sweeping aside. Beneath it she could feel cracks -- or, no, not cracks -- engravings. She swept the dust away, curious to see what lay beneath. Would there be words? Tara had asked her to keep an eye out for any of the interstellar languages she was studying -- maybe there would be something helpful.

When all the dust was cleared, she saw that the pedestal was mostly flat and unmarked. A desk, maybe, to be written upon -- but along the outer edge, at the top and the base, someone had carved words in a language she couldn't read.

I'll have to copy these out for Tara, she decided, wishing her past self had left things for her in the English alphabet. Or maybe I can do a charcoal rubbing with my pencil, Indiana Jones style.

Beneath the words she couldn't read, there was, at least, something she recognized -- a very small, round mark, etched with careful precision into the stone. It was her seal, the star in the well, just like she had seen on . . .

Hvergelmir lifted her hand where she wore the heavy signet ring.

It's about the same size, she thought. It's almost exactly the same size.

Almost exactly, of course. It couldn't be exactly the same size. Surely it was coincidence for them to be so similar -- but then . . .

She curled her hand into a loose fist and turned it downward to press her signet ring into the little etched mark.

"Exactly the same, after all," she marveled -- and was cut off when there was a pale flash of light near her feet, at the base of the pedestal, and the whole, impossibly heavy thing began to shift aside of its own accord.

Beneath the pedestal, stairs ran deep into the ground. A soft glow emanated from far below, promising light somewhere. Could someone be here?, she wondered. Is that possible? But if they'd gotten here, it certainly hadn't been the way Hvergelmir had come; the tracks in the dust would've been all too noticeable before she'd finally gotten around to cleaning.

There was no dust on the steps themselves, though; they'd been sealed tight for all this time that the island had been abandoned. Whatever was down here was well-and-secretly guarded indeed, and evidently not meant for anyone but the knight of Hvergelmir herself. She picked up her skirts and descended.

Beneath the ground at a certain point, the stairs appeared to open onto empty space, like the pier had -- or maybe onto a room whose borders glittered like living starlight. Whatever it was, when she tried it with one foot, there was a floor to hold her -- so she settled herself on the bottom step, observing her surroundings, and was surprised to find that the yawning wide open space didn't cause her any unnerving bouts of vertigo. She was comfortable here.

Before her was a big, glowing ball of light, shifting with irridescent color.

She thought of the Code, as she'd seen it at Olympus -- this seemed much the same, if less potent.

"Are you -- is this -- are you the Code?" she asked, tentatively, in hopes she was right.

If it was, it lacked the power that the Code had wielded on Olympus that had given it the easy ability of speech. This ball of light simply hung in the air, pulsing a few times, and she wondered if that was meant to be an affirmative or just a coincidence.

"I don't know what that means," she said.

The orb changed shape, slightly, took on the form of a scroll like the Code had -- then it rolled out into the space around her, unfurling to an impossible length for a few seconds -- then tore into three pieces, with the two long ends disappearing into thin air, leaving only a small scrap from the middle.

"Oh! A little bit of the Code?" she asked, and it pulsed solidly, which she took for a yes this time.

"Why . . . " She paused. "Why are you here?"

The Code didn't respond immediately. She wondered how sentient it was, how much it had to think about its answers. Eventually, though, it must have decided on something, because it changed its shape again, transforming from a torn bit of parchment into something more substantial: a book.

She didn't really know what that meant, of course -- but eventually it began flapping its cover at her lightly for her attention.

Hvergelmir remembered the Code being insubstantial -- when they'd tried to touch it, or manipulate it, or even stand on it, they'd all phased right through it as though it were so much mist -- but she couldn't think what else it could want from her. So she stood up, taking a few steps forward, and reached out with one hand to open the cover of the book.

As she expected, her fingers slid right through -- but the book responded anyway, its cover snapping open and the pages fluttering past until finally it was open to somewhere in the middle. Then words began to appear.

This time -- mercifully -- the words were written in English. They settled onto the page fairly quickly, all but the last thing that was written there -- and it took her only a moment to read what was written. More unnervingly, it was penned in a script that looked eerily like her own handwriting.

I am a knight of Hvergelmir, it read. I am a being of free will.

I will seek no refuge in convention, but strive always to move forward with honor. I will not rest on my laurels. I will not venerate the past for its own sake. Tradition is the enemy of progress and of free thought. Doctrine is the tool of oppression.

I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.

I will follow no order blindly.

This I swear by my Code of Honor.

The ink beneath it was a blur for a few more seconds, something that kept changing from one thing to the next before she could make it out -- then finally it resolved itself into a single word, a flourishing signature.

Nephthys.

She blinked. "Was that me?" she asked. "Did I take this oath?"

The Code pulsed in reply.

She gestured at the page. "Is that what you want me to do?"

Not much happened, at first -- then the signature reshaped itself, till all that was left was a single black question mark at the end of the page, as though to say: Is that what you want to do?

She didn't know.

"Why are you showing me this?" she asked.

The Code didn't pulse at her this time, or even put words on a page -- this time, it retracted its shape, reforming into the little pale ball of light it had started as.

"Why did you choose me?"

No response.

"Can't you tell me anything else?" she asked, and all of her frustration from the past several days -- no, the past several months -- began to leak through even as the Code stayed cool and silent. "Can't you tell me what to do? Can't you tell me," she begged, her voice rising, "how to make this all better? Can't you just choose someone else?"

The Code remained still, nothing left to offer her.

She stayed there for a while, watching it, but it just hung in the air like it had never done anything else, a decorative little ball of light, so she sat on the steps looking out at the stars and thought about what it had shown her, the words on the page.

I am a knight of Hvergelmir. I am a being of free will.

Was that what it all came to, in the end? Was the worst failure of all not making a choice?

How many people were fighting this war because they let someone else dictate their choices to them? Because they entrusted their judgment to someone else and were wrong?

There was a certain freedom in submitting to someone else’s wishes, she'd always thought so. In giving over your anxieties to someone else and letting them reassure you of what to do. She could understand that temptation, what drove people to join armies and serve causes like the Negaverse espoused. But there was misery in it, too -- living her life for her family's approval had brought her nothing but an agonizing sense of dissatisfaction and discomfort, over time. She'd run from that feeling as often as she'd run towards it, the feeling that what someone wanted from her had nothing to do with her and everything to do with what they wanted. Could you call that freedom, just because it was easy?

I am a being of free will.

When she went up and out, letting the pedestal reseal itself behind her, she still wasn't sure what she'd decided. But she felt -- if only a very little, very tiny bit -- somehow less burdened with it.

She sat down at the pedestal once more, taking her notebook and her pencil out of her bag. Eventually she managed a halfway decent rubbing — but she did her best to take a sloppy cell phone picture of it too, despite the feeble light at her wonder. Then she gathered together her dust bags — deciding the broom and dustpan could stay here for the next time she decided to resume her cleaning — and put her iPod with its dead battery back in her bag, and went home.