“We have to leave,” Kyso shouted at him as he started to climb the steps, following the woman’s boot prints in the snow. “They’re are coming!”

Althea Ram was insane – she had to be. He’d known something was wrong with her, from the beginning! Yet he’d done nothing but follow along. He had trusted Kyso, trusted…

No more. No more!

“What are we going to tell the people at Panak?” Traejan shot back. “When we come back? And all the others don’t?”

Not a strecking one of them will deal with us again.

He stumbled in the snow, hitting his shin painfully into the stony surface underneath. The stairs were too damn slippery. He was trying to climb it too quickly, but he needed to confront her. After his third stumble, Kyso caught him, grabbed the fabric of his coat, pulling him around. Traejan tried to shove him off.

“What are you going to do Trae?! They’re already dead! You mustn’t stop her.”

“What the hell do you know?” he shouted back, struggling against the man’s grip. “You let her drag us all down here – encouraged her! You let her kill them. You’ve let her do whatever she wanted, and followed her every step of the way. She’s told us nothing but lies! You think she’s Consortia, but you have no idea who she is – or what she is – do you? Do you?!”

He pushed the old man away. Determined, Traejan continued; crawled up the last few steps.

Up on the plaza the cold of the wind blew around him, buffeting him in gusts. The platform ahead was dark, but for a single circle of light off to the side, and a crouching figure behind it. Althea, it must be her. He forced himself up, fought to stay steady against the gusty winds.

“Althea!” he shouted, began to push his way through the wind to her. She shifted from her crouch, looked back at him.

He felt himself grabbed, held back again, turned to face Kyso angrily.

“Let me go!”

“Traejan,” Kyso insisted. “You can’t interrupt her.”

He turned to him, wondering how Kyso – Consortian, civilized, Legionary – could have possibly accepted what she had done. She had castigated them for being violent, being uncivilized! He tried to pull his arm away, but Kyso stubbornly held on, shouted over the wind.

“She’s doing it to save us! It has to be done!”

“Is that what she told you?” Traejan countered, shoved the old man back onto the snow, looking down at his shocked face. “When you watched her murderGoaand the others? And you are still doing everything she tells you? Is this what you saw in your strecking smoke?”

Kyso stared up at him silently, taking the punishment.

“I want to know why!” Traejan demanded. “Tell me why!”

Getting nothing, he turned away, strode across the platform towards the woman. It was only when he was close that he could see what she was crouching over – a glowing web of a framework. She glanced at him a couple times, but otherwise, she was at work hands adding this twisting that, some organic looking devices attached to the frame, still glistening with bits of grey, streaked with red amongst the fibers and cylinders and micronics.

The wind came up again, whipping her hair around. She stopped her work, looked up, eyes wide, mouth set and determined, then past him, over his shoulder. Traejan turned; saw the old fool jogging up.

“Kyso,” she ordered. “I told you to get him out of here an hour ago. You have to go!”

Traejan turned back, demanded, pointing.

“What the hell is that?”

She stared back at him, up at the sky past him – then back, with burning intensity in her glare.

“It’s a multi-channel, high bandwidth trinary transceiver,” Kyso told him, breathless as he trundled in. “She made it out of the implants.”

Traejan turned to the device, disgusted anew.

“I saw her pull them out!” Kyso told him, no part of his voice sympathetic now, or apologetic.

“All of them… All of them?!”