To the rest of the world, Juli might as well have vanished into the abyss that had taken her husband seventeen years before. The news media had already begun referring to her in the past tense: Juli Mizrahi had become history overnight.

Ziggy was watching the evening news when he detected her signal approaching from the hallway. For a moment he considered closing the screen before she came in; she had stayed up late to watch the coverage the first few nights after they arrived on the Dämmerung. Perched on the edge of her bed in their private residential suite, her face taut and white in the flicker from the screen, she had seen her own past reinvented and replayed before the eyes of the world, her reputation distorted like an image in a carnival mirror. Ziggy had watched with her--not because he wanted to know, any more than he had wanted to know when she had offered to tell him about her previous marriage at their first meeting, three years ago--and he would have left the room if she had asked to be alone, but she never did. Even after she explained which details had been made up or fabricated by whomever leaked the information to the media, it shocked him to find out how little he knew about her history. He had known a little about her involvement in the URTV project and some of her work during the Miltia Conflict, but nearly everything between that time and the recent past was new to him.

"Well, now we're even," she had said, grimly but with a wry stab of humor. She had known about his past for years, at least the official version of the story; she had reviewed his files before she ever met him in person, and now she had the report from Doctus to fill in the rest. But she had never told him much about her own career; he had never asked. The charges of conspiracy with Ormus were baseless, but it was the supporting evidence against her character--the fallout from a career of minor indiscretions and liaisons across the hazy boundary between politics and private life--that seemed the most painful for her to admit. He had listened without judgment, and without condemnation, and it hadn't made him think any less of her.

"Police are still searching for the missing parties," the newscaster was saying as the door whisked open and Juli walked into the room, "and a full investigation into Mizrahi's records is under way. In the meantime, citizens have been encouraged to report any suspicious activities and are advised to proceed with caution. The suspect was last sighted in the company of a Ziggurat Industries cyborg with enhanced battle capabilities. Although legally registered to Mizrahi, the unit has been deployed in an unauthorized manner and is considered stolen property of the Federation Government, as well as being extremely dangerous ...."

"So now we're guilty of theft as well," said Juli, throwing her coat over the bed. She had started wearing it again since they left Fifth Jerusalem, displaying the Mizrahi symbol in defiance, almost with a kind of pride. No one except the staff of Vector and Scientia knew they were here, and no one on the Dämmerung was about to risk incriminating Vector by revealing their presence; they were safe as long as they never left the colony.

Without turning around he remained standing, only half-watching the screen now, the rest of his attention trained on his own sensory input as he tracked her signal across the room. Glasses clinked in the dining area, and then she walked over to where he stood in front of the screen, balancing a drink in her hand. He eyed the cloudy liquid in the glass.

"You look like you could use one yourself," she said, without waiting for him to ask. "You'd appreciate this; it's called a mind eraser."

Ziggy shook his head. The last time Jr. and the Elsa crew had tried to get him drunk, it had done strange things to his system; that had been two years ago, just before the Elsa departed for Lost Jerusalem, and he hadn't let anyone talk him into it since. Even when he was still human, he had never been able to tolerate alcohol, and he had a vague, embarrassing, but inexplicably wistful memory of passing out after less than one drink with his subordinates, and waking up ....

Juli must have noticed his sudden reaction, but she misinterpreted it. "Relax, I wasn't being serious." Despite the circumstances of the last few days, she seemed undaunted, at least on the surface, if a few degrees more sarcastic than usual. Ziggy knew she had been placing calls to Helmer and to her own allies in Parliament, the only government officials she could still trust, in an attempt to sort out the conspiracy in the DIRE. They were scavenging for any fragments of evidence that would prove Juli's innocence, but Nov-OS had covered its tracks expertly, and Helmer's agents had recovered almost no new information so far.

In the meantime, Juli stopped by Third Division several times a day to check the progress on MOMO's repairs. By a strange turn of irony, the damage to MOMO's neural network had prevented her from being taken into government custody during the investigation. The police had sought a warrant to search MOMO's database for further evidence relating to Juli's crimes, but Realian-rights groups had protested, and the Vector personnel overseeing her repairs had explained that it would be impossible to conduct a complete scan of her data until her neural connections had been restored.

After watching the news for a few minutes, Juli set aside her glass. "Do you mind if I turn this off?"

"I don't mind." The news had given Juli's story a moment of reprieve while another broadcaster narrated an update on the Federation Fleet deployment, reciting a government press release over some footage of military vessels lifting off from a base that looked nearly identical to the one on Fifth Jerusalem.

"It seems one of Helmer's contacts finally managed to retrieve the AMN logs from the time of the chairman's death, and from the deaths of the other nine department members," said Juli, when the drone of the broadcast plunged abruptly into silence. "Just like the Patmos Delegation, there was no sign of any direct intrusion from the AMN. The only evidence of brainjacking came from the autopsy results, from the damage to the bodies themselves. But when we compared it with the corresponding data from the shadow network, we found a perfect correlation. Those patterns were unmistakable."

"So there's no doubt Voyager was behind this," said Ziggy, still staring at the AMN symbol on the blank screen.

She leaned into his side. "I didn't think there was any doubt in the first place. But now I think I understand why he was able to get past the safeguards programmed into the AMN. As long as his victims left dive traces in the shadow network--in other words, if at any point in time they came into direct contact with Voyager's consciousness--he should have been able to hack into their minds the same way he did when he was operating on the UMN."

Ziggy understood what she was getting at. "But if they had never dived into the shadow network, they'd be immune to his attacks. He'd be unable to trace their access records. Unless he could manage to seize control of the AMN somehow, or ...." He stopped. "Do you suppose that means the Patmos Delegation was in on it too?" If the delegates themselves had been Ormus agents as well, they might have been exposed to the shadow network before they staged their own capture, collaborating in the plot without realizing that they were about to be killed along with the refugees.

"It's possible," said Juli, "unless they were forced to dive after they were captured. And I still don't understand the chairman's involvement in all this." She walked back to the bed and sat down, drawing up her knees to her chest. Now she sounded tired and frustrated, the ragged edge of her impatience wearing through. "Helmer thought the chairman might have been trying to manipulate Ormus by pretending to support them--making them more of a threat than they were, just so the government would take action to eradicate them completely. A lot of the hardliners in Parliament said the same thing last year: that we weren't coming down hard enough on the remaining Ormus supporters, so they'd just end up slipping through the cracks."

He crossed the room after her, remembering an old saying he had heard once. "'If you want to get rid of something, you must first allow it to flourish.' Maybe he was trying to solve the problem by magnifying it."

"Well, it didn't work," she said bitterly. She lay back across the bed, then curled onto her side, facing away from him. "I'm going to lie down for a while. I need some time to think things over."

He recognized when she wanted to be left alone, and he walked back to his maintenance unit to get some rest himself. Since they left Fifth Jerusalem, he had been recovering from the damage he had sustained in the escape; he had slept for nearly an entire day after they arrived, but his maintenance results were still showing slightly below normal output. When he had begun to feel better and was awake more frequently, he spent most of his time in their room, reading through the report from Doctus, unless Juli required his presence elsewhere. He had been reading it earlier that evening, and had only switched to the news a few minutes before Juli arrived, to distract himself from the memories it stirred in his mind. He had a few questions he wanted to ask Doctus, but he hadn't heard from her since the night she sent him the file. Although Scientia had made arrangements for their stay on the Dämmerung, Doctus herself had remained off the radar, unreachable at her usual AMN address, and Ziggy had begun to worry about her.

At the moment, though, he was more concerned for Juli. She had hit the ground running when they left her office, and her momentum hadn't slowed yet. It had taken him a while to realize that this was how she dealt with her grief, as he dealt with his own by shutting down, closing off, denying its existence at the source; hers, too, was a kind of denial, but channeled in the opposite direction, into restless activity, anything to distract her from the turmoil below the surface.

Sometimes it caught up with her, and when it did, usually after she returned to their room on nights like this one, she collapsed across the bed and lay there weeping into the mattress--not even crying, as if she had no strength left to give voice to her pain and had to wring it from her lungs in whimpers she thought he couldn't hear--until he came over and sat on the floor and held her hand, and felt helpless again. He could take bullets for her, he could shield her from explosions, but he couldn't protect her from her own suffering, any more than he could protect himself.

Other times, when he was asleep, or half-asleep, running diagnostic scans from his maintenance box, Juli curled into the chair with him, although it must have been uncomfortable for her, and he woke up to find her sleeping there.

"Third Division contacted me this afternoon," she said later that night, after they had both been resting for a few hours.

Roused from his trance, he cleared the maintenance data out of his field of vision and looked down. She had her head against his shoulder, and he had his arms around her; until she spoke, he had thought she was asleep.

"They've finished her repairs," Juli went on, without opening her eyes, "and I gave them permission to go ahead and start her up tomorrow. I'll be sitting in on the operation if you'd like to come along."

He nodded, forgetting that she couldn't see the gesture. "I'll go with you." He had visited MOMO only once since they'd arrived here, and only for a short while; it was too painful to sit with her in the overlit white room, to hold the too-small hand and feel nothing in return, no recognition, no response. If Vector succeeded in repairing the damage her adult body had sustained in the dive, they might be able to bring back her consciousness, but there was no guarantee it would be successful, if they hadn't been able to revive her in her original form. Ziggy had only begun to admit to himself that he might have some idea of where her consciousness was, and of what had happened to her when she disappeared into the network, but the thought was still too terrible for him to comprehend or put into words.

"Jan." Juli shifted her weight against him. She seemed smaller and more fragile than he remembered, curled up into herself like a child. "Do you blame me? For what happened to her."

At first he didn't understand what she meant; he had been so concerned with his own responsibility for the incident that the thought of blaming Juli hadn't even occurred to him.

"If I hadn't disconnected her," said Juli, "then ... maybe she would've ...."

"Do you blame me for losing her?"

She pulled away and looked up at him, startled. "No, why would I--"

"Then you shouldn't blame yourself either."

She lowered her head to his shoulder again and sighed, and after that she seemed to breathe more easily.

The next morning, a Vector-uniformed woman met them in the Third Division waiting room and ushered them down the hallway into a smaller, private waiting room outside the lab. "I'll have to ask you to wait here," said the Vector employee. "For security reasons, only authorized Vector personnel are allowed on the operating floor during the transfer process. We'll notify you at once if there are any problems."

"Understood," said Juli. The employee went ahead into the lab, and Ziggy followed Juli to a bench along the wall and sat down after her. The room was as bright and sterile as the examining room where he had last seen MOMO, and nearly as empty, except for the benches and a small table with a synthetic plant and some holographic information panels. A larger screen in the corner, tuned to a government news channel, played broadcasts from the war in the outer regions, the only subject that had taken precedence over Juli's disappearance for the last few days. Ziggy had already lived through more conflicts than he could recall, had participated in almost as many, and he no longer found it strange how quickly the presence of war became commonplace. After a while, all the footage from all the battlefields in the star cluster began to look the same, all the statistics on human loss and suffering faded into background noise, and there was no way to comprehend it except by tuning it out. People lived surrounded by reminders of death--it clamored at them from every screen and surface, invisible in its omnipresence--and they had no choice but to ignore it.

Instead of watching the news, Ziggy stared at the blank wall in front of him, dimming his optical sensors to block out the stinging light. He didn't look at Juli sitting beside him, but after a few minutes he felt her hand rest on his own.

They both looked up when the door to the lab swished open and the Vector employee stepped out. "There's been an error in the activation sequence," she said before they could ask what was wrong. "You may want to come inside now, in case ...."

She didn't have to finish. In case this is your last chance to see her.

Juli stood first, and Ziggy felt the absence of her hand more sharply than he had noticed its presence. "What's the problem?" she said.

"We're not sure." The employee cast a worried glance back through the doorway, into the noise and commotion of the lab. "We completed the transfer of her operating system, but we still can't get a response. It's as if her consciousness is refusing to awaken inside her body."

Ziggy was on his feet before he was aware of standing up. "Can you prepare a dive unit with the shadow network protocol? I may be able to determine what's causing the error."

Juli grabbed his arm. "What are you doing? You can't--"

"She's in danger, Juli." He turned toward her. "You said you would do anything to help her, right?"

"Yes, but--"

"So would I." Pulling his arm away, he nodded to the Vector employee and followed her through the door.