They arrived in the waiting room for one of the maintenance labs in the Dämmerung's Third Division sector, and Juli went to check in at the front desk while Ziggy sat down in one of the benches along the perimeter. A few other individuals, mostly Realians, occupied other seats around the room. He noticed a tiny blue-haired figure seated in a chair nearby, her head bowed and her hands bunched in her lap, and she reminded him so much of MOMO--of the way MOMO had looked when he first made contact with her on Pleroma--that he had to turn away. Now he understood more clearly than ever how Juli had felt, years ago, when she lamented seeing copies of her dead daughter stationed all over the galaxy.

He looked over at Juli, wondering if she had noticed the other 100-series Realian yet, but she stood at the desk with her back turned. For the last few days he had dreaded the thought of what might happen to her when she was out of his sight and out of reach, but as much as he wanted to protect her, he couldn't shadow her everywhere. And even if he could, when it came down to it, what good would it do anyway? If Voyager had marked Juli as the next casualty in his war of attrition, no amount of protection would forestall the inevitable. Perhaps he was already holding her for ransom in plain sight, allowing her to remain under the illusion of freedom and safety until he ran out of patience.

He hadn't told Juli a fraction of what he feared, and had let on to her only what he judged necessary for her own protection. Not that he thought she would be able to defend herself any more than he could, but at least she would be more vigilant knowing her life might be in danger. Their only hope now was to confront Voyager before he recovered enough to make another move, and there was no way of knowing how much time they had.

He was frustrated. He had been trying to think of a strategy for days, and for once he had encountered an equation that appeared to have no solution. To hell with numbers and tactics; he needed a miracle.

When she had finished at the desk, Juli strode briskly over and sat beside him, keeping more distance between them than she usually did. He had noticed her withdrawal since last night, and he could tell, by her stiff posture and the tension that surrounded her like a static charge, that she was profoundly angry. He knew it was his fault, but he also knew there wasn't much he could do to console her right now, and if he tried, it would only make the situation worse.

The 100-series Realian had noticed Juli as well, and wandered over to the bench a few minutes after Juli sat down. "Um, excuse me," said the Realian, "but are you MOMO's parents?"

Juli's expression hardened. "We are her legally registered guardians, that's correct." More accurately, MOMO and Ziggy were both registered to Juli, but she rarely ever described their relationship that way.

The 100 series lifted her head slightly, with a timid smile. "I was hoping I'd get to meet you. I'm just here for some minor adjustments to my personality layer, but I heard you would be coming to visit her. All the 100 series have been searching for MOMO on the AMN. We can sense her presence subconsciously, so we know she's still there, but ... we can't seem to reach her or determine where she is."

"It's all right." Juli smiled in return, her voice taking on an unexpected warmth. She rested a hand on the Realian's arm and looked into her eyes. "Thank you for trying. We're trying our hardest too."

"I'm glad," said the Realian. "Please don't worry, Dr. Mizrahi. We all think she'll come back."

Juli lowered her eyes. "I hope so."

One of the Vector employees at the front desk called out a serial number.

"That's my appointment," said the Realian. "It was nice to meet you." Without waiting for a reply, she walked away across the room and followed a Vector-uniformed technician down a hallway at the far end.

Ziggy had witnessed the conversation in silence, his initial concern for Juli turning to astonishment at her reaction. He recalled what she had said the other night, about letting go of her pain over losing Sakura, and he wondered if that had anything to do with her actions just now. Perhaps she was just acting in a manner calculated to trigger the 100 series' programmed response to displays of maternal kindness, but he didn't think she was that cynical anymore--if she ever really had been in the first place.

They were called back to the desk a few minutes later, and another uniformed employee led them down the same hallway to a small unfurnished white room with a second door opposite the one they had entered from. They waited there, alone, still standing a measured distance apart, while the employee went ahead through the second door and returned with MOMO.

Ziggy was used to seeing her in her adult form, and even after meeting her likeness in the waiting room, it startled him to see her like this; she looked much smaller than he remembered, and she wore the dark blue dress she had worn in her cell on Pleroma. She took a few careful steps into the room and stared at the two of them, her expression as flat and unchanging as if it had been painted on.

He couldn't look away this time, as much as a part of him wanted to. If he did, he would be giving up hope that she was still there somewhere--either lost in the imaginary domain or buried inside herself, or both. "MOMO," he said softly, and she glanced in his direction for a moment, but without recognition.

"I'm afraid she probably won't be able to recognize either of you," said the Vector employee, in the tone of someone trying to deliver bad news as gently as possible. "We were experiencing some issues with her artificial personality layer again, so we had to disconnect it."

Juli drew her lips into a tight line. "I see. And how long do you anticipate it will take to resolve those issues?"

"Well, ah ... honestly, at this point, it's hard to say." The employee gave a nervous shrug. "Dr. Mizrahi, with your permission, we'd like to keep her here a while longer. We strongly feel that it would be advisable to run more tests on her central operating system."

Juli nodded. "You have my permission. Please consult me before you proceed any further."

The employee left them alone with MOMO for a few minutes after that, but her lack of response deterred them from trying to interact with her. They didn't get much farther than a few words of small talk that received no reply, a few gestures of affection she didn't return. When they were ready to leave, however, Juli bent down and hugged her tightly, then stood and walked straight out of the room without another glance in her direction. Ziggy started out after Juli, but on a sudden impulse, after he had crossed the threshold into the hallway, he turned and reached toward MOMO again, as he had done years ago during her analysis on Second Miltia.

MOMO didn't look at him and didn't reach back. He stood there with his arm outstretched until the door slid into place again, blocking her from his view.

∞

They didn't speak to each other at all for the rest of the day, not on the ride back through hyperspace from the Dämmerung or on the descent from the orbital station to Fifth Jerusalem's surface, and their silence followed them all the way back to the apartment. He went to his own room at once, but he couldn't sleep. He hadn't slept much since the dive, and when he did his nightmares returned in force.

But he must have drifted off at some point, because he awoke to find that hours had passed since he last checked the time. It was after midnight, and the room was dark except for a single lighted screen on the console near his maintenance box. For the last few days he had remained on constant alert, monitoring for the slightest disturbances in his surroundings even while he slept; the light from the screen must have disrupted his sensors.

He got up and walked over to the console. The control unit for his bed also functioned as a standard desktop model and AMN terminal when it wasn't executing maintenance routines, and when he approached the screen he found his mail procurator waiting to inform him that he had an unread message on the server. The AI that retrieved his mail appeared in the form of a white dog bearing a suspicious resemblance to Alby. He would have chosen a more utilitarian interface, but MOMO had set it up for him before he was familiar with the new AMN protocols, and he had never bothered to change her settings even after he learned how to do so. Now it reminded him of her, and he intercepted a renewed stab of grief before he had a chance to acknowledge it.

The message, a plain-text file with an attachment, came from a concealed address within Scientia. Anonymous correspondence was one of their organizational quirks, a holdover from the days when they were still considered a terrorist organization, but he didn't need a return address to determine the sender; no one else in Scientia had any reason to contact him now. Relief cut through the anxiety that had weighed on his mind for days. He hadn't heard from Doctus since the dive incident, and Juli hadn't been able to reach her at the designated AMN address she used for holographic correspondence, but at least she was feeling well enough to send mail.

Captain,

He stared at the greeting for nearly a minute, reading it over until he finally blinked and pulled his gaze down to the rest of the message. He didn't think he would ever get used to being addressed by that title again.

I had intended to give this to you the next time we met, but my repairs are taking longer than anticipated, and if my suspicions are correct, we may not have time for a proper reunion. In that case, consider this a part of your payment for services rendered to Scientia during your recent mission to Patmos. It's the result of a side project I've been working on for a number of years, and I hope it will prove useful to you now.

This file contains the final report on the Inquiry into the Voyager Incidents by the Commission for Truth Under Scientia, code name INVICTUS. Some of this information may already be familiar to you, given your past involvement in the case. As for the rest, we've been trying to leak as much of it onto the net as possible, because unlike your Federation Government, we believe the world has a right to know the truth. Still, a lot of the data I'm giving you is still highly classified. We broke a few laws to get our hands on it, and needless to say, if anyone found out you had it, or traced it back to Scientia, we'd all be in a lot of trouble. Feel free to share it with Dr. M and anyone else you're absolutely certain you can trust, but be careful.

Oh, and don't bother to thank me for this. All I did was finish the work we started together, and we couldn't have done it without you. Another mutual friend of ours contributed as well, when he contacted me a few years ago. I think he must have known, by then, the choice he was going to have to make, and he wanted me to tell you, in case he didn't have a chance to explain it to you himself. He wanted you to know that he was sorry--for what, he didn't say, but maybe you'll know.

As for me, I'm just sorry I didn't act sooner. If I had, maybe we could have stopped this before it got out of hand. But there's no use dwelling in regrets about the past, as I'm sure you understand all too well. The only thing we can do with the past is learn from it, and with that in mind, I hope you'll use this information wisely. It may not serve any other purpose than to clarify what you already know, but maybe the truth is enough. Don't forget what I told you to remember. As a former associate of mine used to say, Veritas liberabit vos.

There was no signature, only a sideways figure eight, the infinity symbol.

He closed the file, stepped back from the console, rested his head in his hands. Whatever information they had uncovered, he didn't think he could deal with it now. He was about to sit down again and try to get some rest, or at least think things over more carefully, when he detected movement in the hallway outside.

When Juli's signal stopped in the living room, he stepped out into the hall as quietly as he could manage. It was past the time when she should have been asleep, although he knew she hadn't been sleeping well these last few nights either. Many times he had sensed her lying awake in bed or pacing the floor of her study, her vital signs betraying her distress. He hadn't known what to do then, or how to comfort her, and it made him feel helpless; he could detect her signal across the hall, but they might have been on opposite sides of the universe for all he could do to reach her.

At the doorway into the living room he stopped and looked in at her. Cast in the blue-green glow of the holographic display panel above the keyboard, Juli seemed as faint and insubstantial as a hologram herself, her face a luminous reflection in the dark. She had turned down the electronic volume control so that the notes barely sounded when she touched the keys, but his auditory sensors picked them up and amplified them so that he could hear them across the room.

After the first few chords, he recognized one of the pieces MOMO had been practicing earlier. In Juli's hands the song changed shape, became something entirely different from what MOMO had played, even though the notes were the same.

"I didn't know you could play," he said, when she had finished the piece.

"I couldn't sleep," she said, as if that answered his remark. Although she had stopped playing, she kept her head bowed over the keyboard, her gaze withdrawn under lowered eyelids. "My husband wrote that song for Sakura. He used to say that if she learned music, it would be almost as if she could speak to us. I tried to believe that, but really, I just wanted to hear her voice. I wanted to see her eyes light up when she looked at me. Maybe I was just being selfish, but I was desperate for some sign of connection with her. I would have done anything if I thought it would give her the chance to lead a normal life. Do you understand?" She looked up suddenly, straight into his eyes. "I wonder if you really can. I used to believe it was something I could only understand as a mother, having brought a life into the world, a part of my own life--a part of myself. I never thought I'd be able to feel that way about MOMO. But when I saw her today, that's exactly how I felt."

"I guess I wouldn't understand."

"But you do know what it's like to love a child as if they were your own. You're the one who taught me that." She hesitated, and her eyes shone strangely in the light from the display. "Jan. You don't have to hide your pain from me. Don't make me go through this alone. If--if you just shut down on me, I don't know if I can take it. I can't stand the thought of losing anyone else." She turned off the hologram, pushed back the bench as she stood. Stray light from the windows fell on her face and shoulders, tracing the curve of her neck down to the space between the lapels of her sleeping robe. "I know you're not going to live forever, but damn it, at least while you're here, be here. Otherwise you're just wasting the life you have left."

He stepped out from the hallway into the skewed pane of light falling across the floor. Juli walked around to the other side of the piano and stood in front of him, sharp and angry and defiant. He took her shoulders in both hands, more gently with his left hand than with his right. "Let me help you," he said. "Please."

Her breathing still came up short, but her gaze softened, lost some of its edge. "How?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure if I can still protect you. But there must be something ...." Clarity arrived then, his first clear memory of the dive operation surfacing out of the gray haze that had lingered in his mind since he returned. "Juli. Listen. Doctus was trying to tell me something, before .... I think it's important."

"Can it wait?" She moved a step closer.

"How long?"

"Just a little while," she whispered, tucking her face against his shoulder and tracing her fingertips down his back. "Just for now."

He closed his eyes. "It can wait."