Archive of Our Own

It had been six days since Professor Faremis had said that he would be back in three. He had waved as he hauled his battered old suitcase down the front steps of the manor, smiling as he clapped a hand on Hojo's shoulder, leaving the project in 'his capable hands' for a few days. One day for him to fly out, one day to look at whatever the Turks had dragged in this time, and one day to fly back. “Not a major issue,” he had said when Hojo had asked, “but you know the old man. Doesn't understand biology, and won't take the word of anyone without 'Professor' in their name.”

But when someone was three days overdue and with no word as to why, that was, by Hojo's definition, a major issue. So when the telephone rang on the cramped little butler's desk he had claimed as his office, he snatched it up with reflexes he hadn't known he'd had. “Hojo.”

“Simon,” came Gast's voice on the other end, low and scraping in a way that wasn't just from the abysmal quality of the line, “are you sitting down?”

There was never a conversation in the history of the Planet that had ended well after beginning with that question. “Yes,” said Hojo, leaning stiff-backed against the chair he had jammed in between the desk and the wall.

Gast hesitated, and Hojo had no choice but to wait. "It was... it was a major issue."

"So I gathered." Hojo drummed his fingers, waiting for the point.

“Simon,” said Gast again, harsher this time, “this is serious.”

“And you've got a better chance of me taking it seriously once you tell me what 'this' is.”

Gast hesitated again, and Hojo could hear his slow, heavy breathing crackling over the line. “We've made a mistake.”

Hojo's eyebrows rose. “A mistake?”

Gast swallowed, like he was stalling for time. “The Turks brought in a Cetra.”

“A live one?” Hojo leaned forwards into the phone, his eyes wide and heedless of the papers his elbows sent to the floor.

“A live one. Apparently they'd been tracing the rumours for years. Found her hiding out in the woods up near Bone Village.”

“And you're sure she's a Cetra?” Hojo composed himself, taking charge of his voice, his breathing, and his dizzy, spiralling hopes. “We've had more than a few delusional head cases.”

“I'm looking at the genetic assay right now.”

So that was what had held him up. “And?”

Gast took an uncomfortably long time in answering. Only when Hojo lightly cleared his throat did he finally find his voice. “It's not human, that much I can tell you. Close, but not quite.” He hesitated again, and Hojo's second cough was less patient. “Maybe seventy per cent parity with Jenova. And that's if you're generous.”

Hojo's hand tightened around the handset. “So what makes you think you've got a Cetra?”

“Her magic killed six Turks before they brought her in. When they searched her, they didn't find a single materium, not even subcutaneously. This woman is raw magic, Simon.”

Hojo had to restart his breathing. They had assayed the Jenova specimen, cross-referenced it with the fragmentary evidence they already had. It had matched. It had matched -

“Simon?”

“I'm here,” Hojo snapped, as though he would have gone anywhere. “But what about the Corel mummy? Or the Midgar bog body? Jenova matched what we pulled from them.”

“She did,” said Gast, “what we pulled from them. You saw the assays, Simon. Even Gillian couldn't get anything close to a full genome from either of them.” Papers rustled at the other end. “Next to Ifalna's – our Cetra's - , Jenova's markers look almost random.”

“We knew that from the beginning,” said Hojo, fighting to keep the strain out of his voice. “That was why we wanted a living specimen.”

“You're not listening to me, Simon. Whatever Jenova is, she - it's not a Cetra.”

“It?”

Now came the longest pause yet, and even Hojo's impatient clucking of his tongue could do nothing to make it end quicker. When Gast did finally speak, it was little over a whisper. “I talked to Ifalna about possible Cetra populations around the Crater. She said... she said nobody had lived that far north since an event she called ishalte.”

“The 'calamity'?” Hojo wrinkled his nose. Many of the surviving Cetra texts mentioned the word, often as a discreet event some two thousand years ago. They had hoped the dig that found Jenova might bear some evidence of it.

“Mm. From what she said, it happened about the time Nylaethis was writing.”

“So there could have been Cetra there in our time frame.”

“There were. That much Ifalna confirmed, and the carbon dates on the bones we found back her up.” Another pause. “But there was... something else there, too.”

“Ishalte?”

“Precisely. To hear Ifalna tell it, when the asteroid that formed the Northern Crater impacted, the wound it tore in the Planet prompted a massive Cetra migration to try and heal it. When they got there, something was waiting for them.”

Hojo's mouth began to dry. Don't you dare, Faremis, he thought as the next pause hung. Don't you dare.

“Apparently every story described it differently, but they all agreed that it looked humanoid – cetroid, I suppose – when it emerged from the rubble.”

Now Hojo hesitated, though Gast didn't push it. He wet his lips as best he could. “And you believe this... cetroid is our specimen?”

“So I fear,” said Gast, heavily like the words left him winded.

He dared. Hojo grimaced, and clawed a hand through his hair. He almost didn't want to ask the next question, no matter how hot it burned in his throat. “So what was it?” He was almost grateful for the next long pause.

“An animavore, I suppose you could call it. It consumed the Lifestream when it rose up to the Crater to try and heal itself. Then when the Cetra arrived, it fed upon them, too.”

“She – “ Hojo stopped to correct himself. “It hunted them?”

“For certain measures of 'hunting', yes. At first it just fed passively on the Lifestream around it, but when the Cetra arrived, it went after their life energy as well.” Gast breathed out hard through his nose, and Hojo just about heard a swishing noise followed by a swallow. “Though if you ask Ifalna, the ones that got eaten were the lucky ones.” He followed by pouring himself another tot, and Hojo could hardly blame him.

“And who were the unlucky ones?” he asked, his mind drifting to the bottle of gin in the bottom cabinet.

“Almighty,” Gast murmured, and he took another sip. “Promise me you'll hear me out, Simon.”

Hojo tried to laugh, but it came out as a snort. “It's not like I've got any other options.”

“This is going to sound insane.”

“More than it already has?”

Gast downed the latest shot. “Jenova is a creature we can't even imagine. It flies through space encased in rock, lands on a planet with a biosphere, and drains it dry. You cannot be holding any preconceptions about this.”

“Try me.”

The time it took Gast to reply told Hojo he very much didn't want to, but he finally forced out the words. “When a living organism was exposed to Jenova's cellular material, it began to change. Exposed Cetra started acting strangely, like they were being drawn to Jenova. Their own wills were suppressed, and they became Jenova secondaries, long-distance sensory organs maybe.”

Hojo's head drooped, until it rested on the folded-out desk in front of him. “Oh, Leviathan...”

Gast made a gentle noise, and poured out a third drink. “I'm so sorry, Simon.”

Hojo grit his teeth. Every other time someone had said that, he had scowled and said she had known what she was doing. That she knew the risks, that she had made an informed decision. Lucy was a scientist. She had done it for the only reason a scientist ever did anything; to enhance their knowledge of the world.

They had called it exhaustion; later, they called it post-partum psychosis. Now, maybe the most generous thing they could call it was self-defence, from something unholy trying to get into her head.

He sat for longer than he cared to guess, long enough for Gast to take his third drink and pour himself a fourth. When Gast spoke again, it was as quiet as a man approaching drunken despair could be. “I wish I could tell you that was the worst of it.”

“So do I.” Hojo forced himself up onto his elbows, leaving his glasses behind on the desk to better rub his face.

Another soft noise, and Hojo knew the expression that went with it. Kind-eyed, a small, sympathetic smile just turning up the corners of his moustache, usually paired with a hand on a shoulder or an encouraging word. “Jenova's psychic effects were on more than just its secondaries. It could... bear with me, this is all folklore, so don't take it as gospel, but... Jenova could read minds. Find the faces of dead Cetra, and – God, I wish I was lying, Simon – it was a shapeshifter. It made itself look like dead Cetra and devoured those who couldn't bear to fight off something that looked like their loved ones.”

Hojo sat still for a moment, forcing down long, almost-controlled breaths. “So that's why something from interstellar space has a Gaian gene sequence.”

“Yes. Between the information it got from the Cetra and its secondaries, it did a pretty decent job of blending in.”

Hojo had to laugh at that. It was an awkward, barking sound, but he laughed. Gast tried to hold it back, but he had no chance against either the drink or just the absurdity of it all. They laughed until tears streamed down Hojo's face, and his throat clamped up in protest. He wiped his face as dry as he could, and he refused to sob. Gast didn't have that kind of self-control.

“I'm so, so sorry, Simon. I'm so -”

“Don't apologise.” Hojo's hand became a fist as he pawed at his stinging eyes. “I'm fine.”

Gast exhaled through his nose, not quite a snort but close.

“So then what?” asked Hojo, pointedly ignoring it, “Supposing Jenova did near-enough wipe out the Cetra, then what? How did it end up a kilometre underground?”

Gast chuckled, like it was obvious. “How would you deal with a super-organism that hurtles through space dormant, encased in rock?” He laughed again, and quietened it with his fourth shot of the conversation. “You encase it in rock.”

Ah. Of course. “And then we dug it up.”

“And then, indeed, we dug it up.”

“And the secondaries?”

Gast made a non-committal noise, and downed his latest drink. “Went dormant. Died off. Absorbed into local monster populations. Who knows?”

Hojo swore quietly, and had to force the next question off his tongue. “The boy?”

“What do you think?” Gast's voice turned sharp, bitter. “A new Jenova secondary. Perhaps even a new primary, now the original is indisposed. He's certainly wilful enough.”

Hojo's stomach coiled up against his diaphragm. “We promised the President a Cetra.”

“Promises are easy, it would seem.”

“And now we're eight million gil in, and all we have to show for it is the bastard offspring of some... celestial world-eating parasite.”

“Worse than that.” Gast made a sound that could have been an attempt at another laugh, but it came out more like a sad wheeze. ”We've got three.”

“Oh, heaven...” Hojo leaned forwards over his desk, scraping his fingernails over his scalp as hard as he could before drawing blood. “What are our options? We can't just euthanise that kind of investment.”

“And we can hardly tell the President he won't be getting the Promised Land he paid for, either.” Gast hiccuped a sob. “How did we not see this, Simon? Damn it all, we should have realised something wasn't right. He never heard anything, never felt anything, we all knew it. He doesn't know anything. Why didn't we see it?”

Hojo swallowed hard. “Self-preservation. Confirmation bias.” He rubbed his nose where the bridge of his glasses had pinched. “Idiot hope.”

“Hope,” said Gast, and Hojo could hear the scowl. “That's how all these things go, isn't it? Gillian knew. She knew something wasn't right. But no, the rest of us, so full of hope, we didn't listen to the goddamn paleogeneticist. Didn't listen to the biophysicist, either...” Tot number five came and went. “And now, and now we've spent millions of gil on three barely human abominations. We're dead men, Simon. We'll be shot for this."

“We can't just pull the plug, Gast. Even if... even if Jenova was misidentified, we've still got an incredible organism.”

“And the president expected dividends. Incredible organisms don't pay for themselves. Even if we could just break even...”

“And how the hell are we going to extract eight million gil from what is now merely a scientific curiosity?”

“I don't know!” Gast bit, and Hojo caught himself flinching. “Sorry,” he mumbled, “sorry. I just... I don't know. I really don't know, Simon.”

Hojo winced. Thoughts tore at his guts, twisted them into agonising geometries. They had made a mistake. He had made a mistake.

He wanted to vomit.

“We've got to make this work...” muttered Gast, but Hojo was damned if he had any idea how.

That silence was the longest yet, each man retreating into his own mind to try and find a way out.

“We could send him to the Turks,” said Hojo, only half joking, “that's what the company usually does with the children it acquires.”

“They'd never take him. Too conspicuous.”

Wasn't that the truth. The hair at least resembled Jenova's, but they never had figured out what was going on with the boy's eyes.

“But...” Gast hummed, and Hojo knew the sound of an idea when he heard it. “He's... he's impressive, for his age, isn't he?”

“You're thinking the army?”

There was a brushing sound at the other end, and Hojo assumed there was now enough alcohol in Gast's system to keep him from noticing that Hojo couldn't see him shaking his head. “No,” he said, maybe when the realisation caught up to him, “no. We can go one better.”

Hojo narrowed his eyes, all despair forgotten.

“You remember the early viability tests? When we tried mako as an uptake catalyst?”

“I remember the eighty per cent failure rate.”

“Well, yes,” said Gast, and it took him a moment to re-rail his train of thought. “But the twenty per cent that lived. They were something else, weren't they, Simon?”

Hojo sighed. Gast wasn't wrong; the surviving mako J-rats had gained muscle and bone mass at a truly impressive rate, and by three weeks of age the team had to build them specially hardened cages just to keep them contained. By four weeks, there were enough bite wounds and mutilated lab equipment to justify euthanising the damn things a month early. “The boy did break Rosten's arm last week.”

“Oh for pity's sake, really?”

“Call it proof of concept.”

“I hope you had words with him, Simon.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Hojo made a dismissive gesture, no matter that Gast couldn't see it. He lowered his voice. “Do you really think we can do this, Gast?”

“At this point,” said Gast, pouring and taking tot number six, “at this point it's weaponise or euthanise.” He sniffed. “I am so sorry.”

Hojo shrugged. “It can't be helped. We'd have probably had to euthanise him as soon as we got the Promised Land out of him anyway.” He had long since resigned himself to that fact – this was almost a reprieve. “At least this way he'll be useful in the long term.”

“I suppose we've got our answer, then. I'll talk to the old man in the morning. Not a word of this to anyone until I've given the all-clear.”

“Of course.”

“And Simon...” Gast wavered.

“Hm?”

“How's Sephiroth?”

“As ever,” said Hojo, his voice falling into its usual routine. “Endless questions, voracious curiosity. Still bites.” He looked down at the dressing on his thumb from when he hadn't given the boy proper warning of where his hands were. Entirely his own stupid fault. “Still vicious when he's feeling obstinate.” They could work with that, he thought. In the child's defence, everyone had thought of breaking Rosten's arm at least once.

“And is he... is he all right?”

“Should he not be?”

“Never mind,” Gast grumbled, “don't mind me. I've had a drop this evening.” He was followed by the sound of 'drop' number seven. “Not a word, understand?"

“Understood.”

“Good,” said Gast, now distinctly slurring. “And may God have mercy on us all.”

The phone clicked at the other end, and Hojo swallowed a breath, then another, like a drowning man. He set his glasses back on his nose and shoved the papers on his desk back into an approximation of where they came from. He pushed himself to his feet, and his body found its way to the access elevator while his brain whirled and writhed under his skull. He pulled aside the grate and let it carry him down.

The basement air smelt of a persistent mildew that even the most determined of industrial cleaners couldn't shift. The handful of people still there now they had moved into Phase II turned their eyes to him, but if they had anything to say then Hojo's clenched jaw and tight-balled fists kept it behind their teeth.

He went from room to room, six years in this dingy mountain hellhole having taught him each key by feel alone. He went through the locks and bolts on the door to the observation room, an improvised gallery looking through bulletproof glass into what had once been a root cellar. On the other side the boy sat at his desk, perfectly engrossed in his reading until he spotted Hojo's movement. He looked right up at him, frozen still, hand hovering just where it had moved to turn a page.

Gast was right, Hojo thought at the sight of those uncanny eyes. The boy wasn't human, and he certainly wasn't Cetra. They had been denying it for years. Every failed test, every agoraphobic panic, every meaningless dream, they had only found new and more creative ways to justify it. And now, they didn't even have denial to save them.

The boy still looked at him, not moving but for breathing. At the very least Hojo didn't shudder at his gaze any more. He walked deliberately slowly to the sally-port door, turned the first key in the lock, then the second, then the third, and did the same for the inside door. The boy watched him the entire time; the slight turn of his head only served to highlight the predatory stillness of the rest of him. Hojo stood by the door. "Come with me."

The boy's eyes flickered for the first time, scanning the rest of the viewing corridor, before slowly, gracefully, getting to his feet. He seemed to flow through each movement, an ethereal elegance that felt so out of place in a four-year-old that they had thought it could only be evidence of his Cetra nature. He stopped a short distance away from Hojo, and waited.

Hojo beckoned him through the first door. The boy hurried through, knowing that he was always to walk in front of the staff, and waited for Hojo to fall in behind him. It was easy, practised a thousand times. The boy could easily walk quickly enough to remain a stride in front of a grown adult.

Hojo guided him through to the examination room, barely having to direct him as the boy periodically checked behind him for cues as to where they were going. Once inside he stood at attention, resuming his perpetual, drilling stare as he waited for an explanation.

Hojo ran him through the usual barrage of developmental tests, and for the first time he could be objective about the data. Twenty-one per cent taller than the global average at fifty-one months, eighteen per cent taller than the predicted average for his human parents, skull-to-body ratio of a child a year older than him, close to sixty per cent greater mechanical strength than an equivalent child of his height, and that without any sort of physical training beyond basic exercise. Or, indeed, mako exposure beyond the local baseline.

They had cited the Book of Mnessos, where the Cetra author referred to humans as 'small, feeble, as to children'. They had explained away the extraordinary healing with reference to the Midgar body's ribcage, which showed several dramatic, but thoroughly healed, fractures. They had justified the rapid development of marrow by the larger-than-average voids inside the Corel mummy's long bones. They rang hollow in his mind now, all their explanations, excuses. He took a skin scrape, a blood sample, and a cheek swab, and escorted the boy back to his cell.

Hojo pulled off his glasses, and sat hunched over the microscope until dawn.

Gast chose heavy, drunken sleep over lying awake that night. The next morning, as he rolled out of bed in a tangle of sheets and memories the alcohol couldn't blur out, only his pounding head regretted it. He staggered to the kitchen, took a hair of the dog that bit him, and forced down a slice of toast before dropping himself into his chair to survey the damage. He lit a cigarette and made his bleary, bloodshot eyes focus on the printouts of Ifalna's genetic assay.

It looked surprisingly human. Maybe human enough to prove – or at least make a damn good case for – Gillian's Homo intercessor sapiens pet theory, that humanity was in fact a Cetra subspecies and not the separate evolutionary branch modern studies classified it as. He laughed through the smoke, as if any of that mattered now. Gillian had been right to jump ship as soon as she could.

He scanned over the printouts, flicking between Ifalna, the mummy, and the bog body. Everything looked similar enough; Ifalna shared just under half the distinct markers they'd pulled from the bog body, and the mummy, long suspected to be a hybrid, now looked more like a simple robust Cetra. The differences were there, of course, but the basic structure looked identical. It looked right.

Without looking, he fished out Jenova's assay from the pile. He had to wince. Again, the structure looked close enough, at least in relation to the partials, but the markers were all over the place. Some were in places that, compared to the uniformity of the other three, made no sense at all, and others were just missing entirely. Without Ifalna's complete genome, the similarities to their two partial sequences were easy enough to assume they were the same species, especially when they were working on the assumption that their more complete partial was a human hybrid. Nothing like enough to cause consternation when they were riding high on the find of the century and a twelve million gil grant.

He cast one last glance over the assembled evidence. There was nothing else for it; he scooped up all the paper ephemera he could into a satchel, slung it over his shoulder, and set out into the hazy morning.

The drive took nearly all of the willpower he had left in him, and the elevator drained the last dregs of it that happened to remain. His stomach turned with every jolting stop, and the press of bodies made him fear to breathe. Gast fretted at his collar and cuffs, trying to diffuse the building sweat, until the sweat on his palms only made it worse. It might have been a year by the time he stepped out onto the penultimate floor of the Shinra headquarters, so what was twenty more minutes spent tapping his foot outside the boardroom? Only when the overrun meeting of financiers, tycoons and moguls filed out did Gast manage to catch William Shinra's eye.

A decade ago, when Gast was first hired on to study mako and head up the burgeoning Science Department, Bill would have clasped his hands and flashed the smile that had won the hearts and minds of countless investors. Now, he just gestured upstairs with a tilt of his head and a turn of his hand. “My office.” Not even an apology for his tardiness, thought Gast's hangover. But then, he supposed, being the richest man who ever lived meant never having to say you were sorry.

The presidential office on the sixtieth floor afforded the most magnificent view of the growing city below, but all Gast could look at was the President's face, trying to get any kind of read to prepare himself for the hurricane ahead.

“I am told,” said Bill, through a freshly-cut cigar, “that my Turks have brought in a live Ancient.” He narrowed his pale blue eyes, once icy, now a little watery. Still, Gast remembered the glare they were capable of even now, and he shuddered. “How true is that?”

Gast swallowed against his thick tongue. “Entirely, as far as I can tell.”

“And how far is that?”

“Beyond reasonable doubt, sir.”

Bill took a long draw on his cigar, savouring it while he thought. “If that's the case, why am I still funding your... hybrid?”

“Because - ” Gast hesitated, even as Bill peered at him through his crown of smoke. “Sephiroth might not be able to give you the Promised Land - ”

Bill's brows cast deep shadows over his eyes, and Gast forced his gut back down his throat. They had already crossed so many lines. What was one more, if it bought the child's life?

“ - but he can give you something better.”

Though still glowering, Bill Shinra leaned in over the table. Gast took that as permission to continue.

“We both know that chronic, low-level mako exposure can cause slight increases in physical strength and endurance,” said Gast, and Bill gave a slight nod. “Well, in organisms derived from our specimen, Jenova, those increases are drastically greater. A hundred and thirty per cent greater, in one case. Not only that, but they display incredibly rapid healing, and reflexes quickened up to seventy per cent.” Gast leaned back through his shoulders, trying to look confident in his words.

Bill finished the proposal for him. “You're offering me a soldier?”

“I'm offering you a prototype,” said Gast, blinking against the expensive smoke stinging his eyes, “if it works, then we can set to mass production.”

“If?”

“There's never a guarantee with mako. But Sephiroth is young, fit, strong. He's shown absolutely no adverse reactions to the environmental mako from Reactor Zero.”

Bill shrugged. “That's wonderful, Gast, but I have no desire to throw good money after bad. I have an Ancient, and your gene-freak is redundant. Expensively redundant. And I am absolutely not funding an army at twelve million gil per soldier.”

Gast forced a chuckle, though it sounded more like a cough against his worn-out throat. “They won't be anywhere near that expensive, sir. We can get Jenova material uptake just by injecting it into healthy adult specimens, and once we calibrate the doses, mako exposure will be largely straightforward.”

Bill snorted, tapped his cigar in his ashtray, and looked at Gast across the table. “I'll admit, it's more interesting than the last fifteen business proposals I've heard this morning, but you are still trying to sell me on an Ancient I have no need of.”

Gast took a long, slow breath, steadied himself, and braced for the hurricane. “He's not an Ancient, sir.”

The cigar stopped halfway back to Bill's mouth, and after a moment spent processing, his face began to tighten. “Faremis, you told me - ”

“I made a mistake,” Gast cut Bill off for the first time in his career, and he took the moment of stunned silence to regain his thoughts. “Jenova isn't an Ancient. She - it - was... what wiped them out.”

Bill's back went ramrod straight, and he looked at Gast with that terrible intensity in his eyes that meant he expected him to choose his next words very, very carefully indeed.

“Please, Bill,” said Gast, “please don't write him off. Sephiroth can be so much more than a living compass, if you just let him.”

Bill looked aside, deliberating for over a minute. “What,” he said, slowly and carefully, “precisely, is your 'Jenova'?”

Gast swallowed to wet his throat, and he shifted his weight as he prepared to answer that question a second time. “It's a predator. A predator on a planetary scale. It came down with the asteroid that formed the Northern Crater, and when the Lifestream concentrated there to heal its wound, Jenova consumed it. When the Cetra arrived to try and help the Planet, it consumed them as well.”

Bill stared, agog but for the cold disbelief in his eyes. “And you mistook this...” He shook his head over the words, "this extraterrestrial monstrosity for an Ancient?"

Gast nodded, and wished he didn't have to. “It was some sort of shapeshifter. The genetic material we recovered looked enough like the fragments we already had to be convincing.”

“Convincing enough for me to grant you twelve million gil to produce an abomination.”

Gast opened his mouth, but he had no argument to make. “Yes,” he said at last, “yes.”

“And you say I can make a return on the eight million you've already spent by repurposing the brat into a soldier?”

Gast nodded again, almost numb now to what he was saying. “It'll pay dividends. He's already exceptionally strong for his age, even without mako exposure. With it, he'll be...” Gast paused to find a word, “incredible.”

Bill took another long, thoughtful puff. He clenched his jaw, leaving Gast to sweat while he pondered. “I've trusted you for a long, long time, Gast. This little - ” He gestured dismissively, “hiccup notwithstanding, you've never given me reason to doubt your judgement. If you think you can give me an army, I'd be a fool not to hear you out. I want a full proposal on my desk by end of day Monday.”

A knock at the door, and the President waved Gast out of his office. As he slipped past Bill's secretary, Gast's hand flexed around the unlooked-at satchel of data. The direct elevator to the ground was a mercy, leaving him with less time to stand listening to his howling mind.

Gast spent the rest of the week writing the document that would buy the child's life, at the expense of any life he might have had.

Ifalna watched the doors of her cell, as she had spent most of her waking moments since the Turks had caught up to her. With nothing in there but the wall-mounted bed and the little alcove for the toilet and washbasin, which, and her requests for reading material having been 'pending' for a week and a half, she found herself with little to do but stare out through the porthole in the door.

The heavy anti-magic cuffs on her wrists and ankles chafed the skin beneath. She could probably burn them out with enough force, but in a Shinra facility, in a Shinra city, all she stood to gain was further bruises and higher-threshold cuffs. As it stood she could still feel a distant murmur, like the buzzing of a fallen-asleep foot, even through the choking silence of Midgar. It would have to be enough.

She listened through the heavy steel door, with its second glass one inside the room as one more precaution in case she tried to run. Ifalna snorted as she thought of where running had brought her. If Shinra's Turks could run her down on her own territory, what chance did she have here? At the very least, the biologists here saw the value in keeping her alive.

They shuffled about outside, apparently purposefully, and she had come to recognise some of them by their footsteps. Crooked-Teeth was passing through the adjacent corridor with Forearm-Dermatitis, Uncontrollable-Bedhead was on the catwalk above one of the nearby pens, and Old-Ankle-Injury was pacing about like he was waiting for something.

Another set of footsteps joined them, these ones belonging to Boot-Brush-Moustache - Director Gast Faremis, he'd introduced himself as. Well, Professor Gast Faremis, but he had laughed when she had asked him what he taught, so Director it was. He approached her cell from the left, as he usually did, exchanged brief words with the Turk on guard duty, and the outer door hissed open, then the inner. He stood there, even more haggard than the previous three times he had visited. She examined him, and waited to hear what he wanted this time.

“Ifalna,” he said, tired and heavy, like he expected her to pity him. Whatever had happened to him was his business, and though of all of the researchers he had been the least demanding, she still had no cause to like the man. “How are you doing?”

“As ever,” she replied, flat, bored, and to the point. “Are your people done arguing over whether I could kill them with a book?”

Gast chuckled, and she realised he thought she was joking. “I'd like to speak with you.”

“So I gathered. Speak.”

He buried his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, and inspected his shoes. Ifalna could wait. “Come with me.”

Now he had her attention. He turned to the inner door, and waited. Ifalna couldn't see the Turk outside, but she could hear his breathing - he had a distinct whistle, like he'd been shot in the chest before. Gast ran through the cell's security rigmarole – keypad, retinal scan, voice-print. The inner door slid aside, and as he stepped into the room between, Ifalna stood. She took a moment before she risked approaching, reaching for the magic in her lungs, but not yet driving it through the cuffs.

She watched through the porthole as Gast repeated the process for the second keypad, and when it too slid open he walked out as casual as Ifalna had ever seen him. Whistle-Breath observed them closely, one hand on the pistol loosely holstered at his hip. “Your escort is en route, Professor.”

Gast's back tightened minutely. “That really won't be necessary. Even outside city limits we'll be well within the Shinra security net.”

Leaving city limits? Ifalna's mind immediately began turning over a plan. If this man really did want to get her outside this smog-choked, soul-burning hellhole, all the better for her.

“Standard procedure, sir. I guarantee nobody will interfere with whatever tests you wish to perform.”

Gast shook his head, quite deliberately. “Dammit, just once I want to hear what she has to say without a gun being pointed at her. Is that so much to ask?”

The Turk whistled out a sigh. “Sir, it's more than my life's worth to allow you to take a high-security specimen outside the building without an escort.”

“Do you dictate Ad-R policies to your own director, Heidel?”

The Turk flinched a little. “No, sir.”

“Then do not dictate Sci-Dep policies to me. We are leaving.” Gast's voice was firm and definite, and for the first time Ifalna saw a spine in his back. Whistle-Breath frowned, but he said nothing more. Gast turned on his heel and beckoned Ifalna to follow. She cast one more glance back, then matched his pace. He led the way through a maze of corridors she vaguely remembered through the thick drug-haze to a pair of elevators. Gast summoned one, and they began their descent.

They emerged into an open hall, not nearly effulgent enough to be the main entrance, and mostly inhabited by the poor, suited, workaday souls who could find no better life than slavery. Many looked at her, with her hospital gown and iron cuffs and bare feet, but such lowly creatures didn't dare question a company director. Ifalna kept Gast's slow, measured pace, careful not to look nervous or flighty in case she sparked off whatever suspicions the wage-slaves clearly harboured.

Across the hall of spectators they turned into yet another corridor, this one lined with a further bank of elevators. Gast chose one, and they waited. On every side elevators opened and closed, transferring more and more people and bringing more and more eyes upon them, but even as she could hear the hushed, cautious whispers, Ifalna held her nerve. Gast's breathing was shallow, his palms flushed, and if she didn't hold her nerve neither would he. Whatever he was planning, she suspected that she stood to gain.

Their elevator arrived at last, spewing out ever more staff with their curious eyes. Nobody risked joining them as they made their way even further down. Good, Ifalna thought as, when the door closed, Gast wiped the back of his hand over his forehead.

Another minute, and the elevator opened out to reveal a colossal underground hive of cars, numbers and letters sprayed white on the sulphur-lit concrete pillars to give drivers some hope in Hades of ever finding their cars again. “Come on,” said Gast, and Ifalna once again fell into step beside him. He picked his way through the labyrinth of parked cars with clear familiarity, never once hesitating or stopping to consider his route. Impressive pathfinding, for a human.

As they approached one more pillar, this one marked L-6, Ifalna halted unbidden. Out among the cars, in the shadow between two floodlights, stood another man in a neat black suit. Perhaps not uncommon, but for the pistol and EMR he thought his jacket and the darkness concealed from her. Gast looked back at her, mouth open as he thought of asking a question, when he saw her dead focus and turned to follow her gaze. “Oh, hell.”

The Turk at the very least had the dignity to accept when he had been spotted, and stepped out into the light. “Good evening, Professor. Ma'am.” He nodded to both of them, which came as something of a surprise after Ifalna had spent the past twelve days being treated like she didn't exist whenever the researchers weren't bombarding her with tests. It would be a shame to kill the only polite Turk in the business, but needs must. Ifalna applied a little pressure to the cuffs, willing her magic out through her chest and down into the quickly heating metal. This would hurt, but not as much as it would hurt him.

Gast cleared his throat, and Ifalna eased off the burn. “Good evening,” Gast replied, loud and echoing against the walls of this human-made cavern, and he too moved into the light of the nearest flood.

The Turk approached and extended his right hand, perhaps in the old way to claim that he was, at least for the moment, not an enemy. “Marten, of the Turks. I'm to be your escort for your studies.”

Gast grumbled, and refused the handshake, though the Turk didn't seem offended. “I thought I made myself clear when I said I didn't want guns pointed at her when she's trying to listen to the Planet.”

“Pardon, sir, but orders are orders. I won't interfere unless I have to.”

Gast heaved a long, shoulderous sigh, and pushed his glasses back up his nose. “I will be having words with your superiors after this.”

“Very good, sir.”

The Turk, Marten, fell into step behind them as Gast and Ifalna covered the last few metres to what was, presumably, Gast's car. Old and grubby, it looked like it hadn't seen much use in years, but though it sank worryingly when the three of them piled in, it started admirably. Gast took the driver's seat, and Ifalna got in behind him before the Turk could object and force her into the front. He didn't look best pleased when he settled in behind the front passenger seat, where he could keep his eye on her. No matter.

The car lurched a little when the mako battery fully kicked in, and soon enough they had emerged out into Sector Zero proper. Cars, trucks and people thronged the roads, and it took no fewer than three checkpoints for them to leave out into the rest of the city. The Turk, at the very least, proved his worth, getting them through the stops far quicker than any of the other vehicles Ifalna had seen.

They left via the Sector Five exit, according to the signage, and elbowed their way through the traffic onto the trunk road through the Sector. Ifalna stared out of her window, putting every single detail away in her mind just in case she ever needed to make this run again. This exit, that junction, every landmark she could make out through the dark and the smoke she burnt into her mind as best she could. If they managed to drag her back, she at least knew one way out.

They passed two more checkpoints with ease, and after a few more turns they slowed outside the Sector Five Helix Station. Gast headed for what was signposted as Vehicle Embarkation, and, after yet another security check and a denied explanation to the gate operator, they joined a long line of waiting cars. The station's overhead announcer informed the assembled traffic that the 19:02 train to the surface will begin embarking in twenty minutes. In front of her, Ifalna could see Gast's hands tense.

Twenty minutes passed slowly, not helped by all three of them clock-watching. The Turk looked back and forth down at his watch, and Gast pulled a little printed booklet from the map pocket beside him.

Something small and cold fell against Ifalna's leg as the booklet came free, and neither she nor Gast said a word as their eyes met in the rear-view mirror. The Turk sighed and craned his head to see if the train crew were doing anything yet, and Ifalna tilted her foot to catch the little key between her toes.

"Sorry," said Gast, thumbing through the booklet, "I could have sworn I checked the timetables."

The Turk shrugged, and at last the overhead speakers announced that embarkation will now begin for the 19:02 train to the surface. The array of cars crept forwards, one by one filing onto the massive, two-storey open-bed carriages and being locked in place by the wheels by hurried attendants.

Another ten minutes of waiting led to what took the expert crew maybe thirty seconds to get their rickety little car up and chocked into the upper bed of the carriage. Ifalna had scaled cliffs far steeper and mountains far higher, but, in that little car, held up three metres by girders and empty space, and preparing to head downhill pulled by a train, her head swam a little.

Four more carriages full of cars were hitched as the train edged forwards to make room for them, and the clock's hands just passed seven. The pre-recorded voice repeated the same safety warnings it had been for half an hour, and the forward-most ground engineer waved, whistled, and got out of the way. The train heaved against its cargo, the connections going taut before the wheels began to screech forwards. Ifalna threw dignity to the wind and clutched the armrest, though neither the Turk nor even Gast seemed unsettled as they descended into the orange-lit tunnel.

It took thirty minutes to complete the spiral. Her mother had made a game of holding their breath while they drove through human tunnels. Now, Ifalna had to force air in and out of her lungs like bellows, consciously planning and executing every breath. She clutched the cuff key in her toes hard enough that she would have marks there, while the Turk just hemmed and checked his watch. Gast, when she could see him illuminated in the rear-view mirror, at least managed to look a little nervous, but probably for reasons entirely different to hers. There was a reason she went by boat whenever she needed to cross water.

At last, at last, the ground levelled out, the train shrieked to a juddering halt, and Ifalna brought herself to unclench her jaw. Yet more orange lights burnt over the lower station, and again the train edged forwards to allow the vehicle carriages to decouple and unload. It took the crew another fifteen minutes before their car was free to carefully roll backwards down the ramp, and Ifalna was sure she didn't breathe throughout the whole operation.

And then their wheels hit solid ground, and she couldn't help but sigh with relief. The Turk looked at her, but, ever the professional, said nothing. “Right then,” said Gast, clearly trying to sound chipper, “off we go.”

And off they went. They were close to the city limits, a tidier part of the slums compared to the photographs she had seen of the interior. It would have to be, she thought, if this was how all and sundry would enter the city from the ground. It wouldn't do to let tourists see the plate's rotting underbelly. Troops were stationed in conspicuous locations, directing traffic and making it abundantly clear to those coming in that they would be perfectly safe in the city of the future.

The next checkpoint went smoothly, and the last one before leaving the city was up ahead. They joined their latest queue, and Ifalna watched the troops patrolling up and down, guard hounds on long leashes sniffing and loping between the cars as they went. They snarled and barked at one car up ahead, and the troops descended upon it, ripping open the doors and dragging out the occupants at gunpoint. The driver and passengers were frog-marched away, and somebody brought down a heavy all-wheeler to tow the offending vehicle aside out of the roadway before people on the ground could pore over every centimetre of it. The cars behind it moved up the queue.

Gast sighed at the sight of it, and at the next three cars which were identified either by the hounds or the facial recognition systems at the gate. One of the hounds stopped and sniffed hard at Ifalna's door, but though he seemed curious, and his handler watched with one hand on her rifle, the fearful bark never came. The hound moved on to the next car, and the next, and Gast moved forwards a little as the latest car went through the checkpoint ahead.

This continued over and over, curious hounds at her door eliciting more and more suspicion from the troops. Eventually one of them tapped on her window, and gestured for her to get out. Ifalna locked her toes around the key - she'd never pick it up again if she let it go, and the risk of the Turk seeing it...

The Turk reached into his wallet and, for the dozenth time today, fished out his ID. “Open your window,” he said, and Ifalna was happy to comply. With stern eyes he passed his card out to the glowering hound handler, and just like that the half of his face that Ifalna could see under his helmet turned from disapproval to almost-concealed terror.

“Oh! I see, my apologies. Beg your pardon, sir, we won't disturb you again. Please don't mind the hounds, they're idiot animals really. Little more than monsters.” He passed back the card, and Ifalna turned up her window again.

Gast rubbed his eyes. “I really need to get onto Urban Dev about fast lanes for company business...”

The Turk tucked away his card, and then his wallet. “You and me both, Professor.”

Several more hounds showed interest in their car before they got to the gate, each one frantically pulled away by their handler. When they at last reached the gate, the guards waved them through without even stopping them. And then they were gone, out from under the shadow of the plate, once more under open sky. For certain definitions of 'open', anyway; even as they put the kilometres between themselves and the city, the sky remained black and choking, barely letting down the rays of the setting sun.

Ifalna watched the sides of the highway for cameras. All she needed was one hand free, somewhere she couldn't be seen. She measured distance from Midgar by the strength of the voice of the Planet, still faint and suffering, but minutely louder with every turn of their wheels. Gast took them off onto a slip road, then they turned off to the west, away from the main weight of the traffic, and onto a quieter, camera-less road. Ifalna carefully turned the key over in her toes to buy her a few extra seconds she could spend unlocking a cuff rather than fumbling with the angle of it. She knew the cuffs well enough by now to make a decent guess how the key would engage.

Again she caught Gast's eye in the mirror, and he shook his head ever so slightly. Not yet. The Turk was watching her, and though the road was quieter, it was by no means silent. People heading home from work in the city, and heading out to take up Midgar's night shift. Ifalna could wait.

Gast made another turn, onto a road quieter still, and then out to the northwest where the verges began to show hints of hardy grasses and alpines. Another look, and, after checking the road for headlights or houses, Gast nodded almost imperceptibly.

Ifalna reached down as though she were scratching her foot. The Turk glared, but in the dark he couldn't see her hand close around the key. She returned his glare, conspicuously folding her hands in her lap as though in a fit of pique. She lifted her magic into her chest, pooling it ready for an immediate, overwhelming strike. They hit a pothole, and all three of them started, but Ifalna recovered the quickest. In a moment she had the key in the lock, and the cuff opened out and fell away with a flick of her wrist. The Turk yelled out and had his hand on his gun almost quick enough, but drawing a weapon on someone who didn't need one was always going to be a losing fight.

She grabbed him by the arm, and loosed her magic. Her lightning burnt wildly through his nervous system, and he tried to scream through the wild, seizing muscles and hair-trigger pain receptors. His throat choked under the uncontrolled, rippling spasms, his body locked into a back-breaking arch by the tight-jammed seatbelt. He lasted less than twenty seconds, longer than some, until he fell limp against the belt, gently smoking. As the adrenaline hurricane in her ears quieted, she could just see Gast's eyes in the mirror, irises ringed completely with white. He panted hard, and though Ifalna could see him shaking he made an admirable job of holding the car steady.

“Are you all right?” Ifalna asked, and Gast laughed like one of them was mad.

“Am I all right?” The laugh faded, and his voice shifted as he came to realise what had just happened. “Are you - ”

“Fine.” Her racing heart might argue otherwise, but it didn't have a say in this conversation.

Gast took a deep, heavy breath. “Good,” he said, slowing the car to a halt on the grassy verge and flicking off the headlights, “good.”

They sat like that for a long while, human, Cetra, and corpse, until Ifalna realised Gast wasn't going to break the silence on his own. “So, what now?”

Gast chuckled again, forced and desperate. “Oh God,” he murmured, “oh, God...”

Ifalna waited, taking the chance to catch her own breath, until both she and Gast flinched at the headlights of a passing car. “We need to get him out of sight,” she said, when she could breathe again. Gast nodded, and, after checking for any more oncoming lights, they forced off the almost arc-welded seatbelt, and took two limbs each to manhandle the still-smoking corpse into the rear of the car.

Gast pushed the hatch closed, and he seemed to loosen a little now the dead man was out of sight. “Is it safe to the north?”

“Depends. Where's the next checkpoint?” Ifalna shrugged the Turk's jacket over her shoulders - a bit big, and certainly not tailored for a woman, but at least now she wasn't visibly a hospital runaway to the casual observer.

“Maybe twenty kilometres, if we rejoin the main road. If we go slower we can avoid them for sixty.”

“Your call. You know these roads. Are there any lakes between here and there?”

Gast thought for a moment. “Couple of out-of-the-way alkali lakes. We can stop by one of them if the suspension holds out. Failing that, there's a spot we can ford the River Havil, and... send him downstream.”

Ifalna considered making a joke about the car getting a much needed wash, but held it in. Instead she made her way to the front passenger seat, and looked back to Gast in the light of another passing car. He jumped, and hurried back to the driver's seat. “What about further north? Getting off the continent?” he asked, his voice still trembling no matter how decisive he tried to make his words.

“I know a guy aboard the Fincairn. Or at least, I do if the Coast Guard haven't shut them down.”

Gast relaxed a little at that, and his breathing came a little more easily. “We still need to get there,” he said, so quiet it might have been to himself, but Ifalna answered anyway.

“One thing at a time.”

Gast made a vague noise, and the moment hung again.

Ifalna let it hang for a while, and no more cars passed as they sat in dark silence. Eventually Gast keyed the engine, and the car's own lights almost startled them both. They slipped back onto the little road, and went several kilometres still in silence. After passing through yet another tiny outskirt village, Ifalna asked the question that had been weighing in her stomach. “Why?”

Gast flinched at the question, but Ifalna kept her gaze on him. He fidgeted a little in his seat. “I made a terrible mistake, Ifalna.”

She waited for him to elaborate.

“Jenova... ishalte... we... I...” He swallowed, and tried again. “We thought it was a Cetra. And we... we thought you were extinct, Ifalna, you've got to understand - ”

Ifalna's shoulders rose as she feared she knew exactly what he was about to say.

“We tried to - well, we did - we spliced the thing's DNA into a human fetus. No - ” He shook his head, looking like he could cry if he didn't have to watch the road, “sixteen human fetuses. Three survived. Three! And one of them... one of them was successful. And oh, God, I wish he wasn't - he doesn't deserve this... he's a good child, Ifalna...” And now he did cry, though he screwed up his face to try and look like he was grimacing instead. Ifalna wished she hadn't been right.

She felt her hands bunch into fists. At first, she wanted to punch him - how could he have been so stupid? What between earth and sky could suggest that such a monstrosity could be a Cetra? But she restrained her fists, and forced herself to think rationally. If the calamity had been able to convince her ancestors it was a Cetra, what hope did humans have? And now it had been remade, as an almost-human child... “And what happens to him now?”

Gast choked, and almost swerved the car. “I can't... I can't go back. I can't go back. I've bought him time. That was all I could do for him.” His hands went ghost-white against the steering wheel. “It was all I could do. I couldn't stay, not even for him. Not like this. Not knowing what I know.”

Ifalna watched his shoulders shake, and as he shifted gear she set one hand upon his.

Sephiroth was not very good at understanding people, but he could feel the pulse of the lab. He had barely been spoken to for the past four sleeps; the technicians had all been running around doing things, and Doctor Hojo had been quieter than usual when he had come in to give him his day's work. Lessons and exercise sessions had all but stopped, and though Sephiroth handed in his assignments every evening, he hadn't received a single grade. And now, eleven sleeps since he went away, Professor Gast still hadn't come back.

Sephiroth didn't recognise Hojo's exact mood as they watched each other through the viewing glass. Tense back usually meant a bad mood, but he couldn't work out the dropped shoulders and stiff expression. He watched for another cue, another point of data, but all Hojo did was open up the doors. He took his time coming through, which maybe meant he didn't want to be here? Sephiroth waited to see if he was going to say something, and, when he didn't, he asked what he had been asking for the past nine mornings. “Where's Professor Gast?”

Hojo looked at him, hard and steady and enough to make him want to shy away behind his desk if he didn't know he would be scolded for it. Sephiroth had to turn his head away as he waited to be told off for repeating himself again. He only risked looking up when it didn't arrive as quickly as he expected.

Hojo's eyes looked red around the sclera, like he did when he stayed up all night working, and Sephiroth briefly wondered if it was tiredness making him slow until he finally spoke. “Professor Faremis is dead, Sephiroth.”

The world stilled around him. The constant gurgle of pipes and buzzing of electrical cables faded into the far distance, and the edges of his vision unfocussed. Professor Faremis was dead. Professor Faremis was dead. Professor Faremis was dead. Sephiroth played the words over and over in his mind, trying to understand them. He knew all the individual words, they all made sense and he could define them if he was asked, but together, in that sentence, in that order, they were meaningless. “I don't understand.”

Hojo sighed, like he did when something had annoyed him. “Professor Faremis is dead,” he repeated. “His heart failed catastrophically, and he couldn't be resuscitated.”

Sephiroth looked down at the tiles in the floor. “He said he would be back in three days.”

“He did. And yet.”

Sephiroth looked up, waiting for Hojo to finish the sentence. And yet - and yet? That wasn't a sentence. It wasn't even a clause. And yet what? But Hojo said nothing more, so he tried to formulate his next question. “Why did his heart fail?”

“I don't know.” Hojo's voice was firm, and the words were unfamiliar in it. Hojo always knew, didn't he? “It was likely a cardiac aneurysm.”

Sephiroth tilted his head. “Will there be an autopsy?”

Hojo looked away again. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because autopsies are only indicated where the cause of death is unknown and where there is a scientific or forensic need. Professor Faremis... died naturally.”

Sephiroth didn't recognise the word 'forensic', and filed it away in his mind to look up in the dictionary Professor Gast had given him. He looked down at his hands, folded neatly on top of his desk where Hojo could see them. “Oh.” He felt a tightening in his chest he didn't recognise, like after he had been on the treadmill.

They watched each other for a few seconds, eyes back and forth as their gazes never held for long. Hojo half-turned and headed back for the doors, and Sephiroth had to blurt out his last question before he went too far. “What about his research?”

Hojo stopped halfway through a step, but didn't turn back to look at him. “It falls to me now.” Then he left, and Sephiroth was alone again.

He looked down at his desk, where yesterday he had neatly tidied away his books. It took him a moment to realise that Hojo hadn't given him any assignments for today, just as the big gallery door swung closed.

Sephiroth sat there for a while, watching to see if anyone would realise the mistake, but nobody did. He could hear movement outside, and rolling and scraping noises like heavy machinery being moved. Gast would have told them off for forgetting his work. But then, Gast wasn't here to be disappointed any more.

The thought sat in his stomach, and neither reviewing yesterday's work in his head or trying to map out the movements outside would make it go away. He closed his eyes, arms folded atop his desk and bare feet flat on the floor, and tried to focus. The wood of the desk, which held heat better than anything else in his cell; the cold tile on his soles, which was always good after running; the light material of his gown, which was new and so hadn't 'broken in', as Gast described it. And then he started paying attention to the inexplicable weight in his chest, and then the thoughts would come back.

So he did what he always did when the thoughts wouldn't be quiet; he read. From the shelf on the inside of his desk he fished out the big dictionary Professor Gast had given him when he had kept asking what words meant. He found 'F' with the ease of familiarity, and skimmed through to the word 'forensic'.

'forensic, adj. Pertaining to, connected with, or used in courts of law; suitable or analogous to pleadings in court.
forensic medicine n. Medicine in its relations to law; medical jurisprudence.'

Sephiroth frowned, and flicked through to 'L'.

'law, n. The body of rules, whether proceeding from formal enactment or from custom, which a particular state or community recognizes as binding on its members or subjects.'

He tilted his head, and checked 'C'.

'community, n. A body of people or things viewed collectively.'

He vaguely recalled the term 'community' in relation to biology, but he couldn't tell what that had to do with physics. He turned to 'S', and skimmed over the irrelevant definitions for 'state'.

'state, n. The body politic as organised for supreme civil rule and government; the political organisation which is the basis of civil government. Hence: the supreme civil power or government of a country or nation; the group of people collectively engaged in exercising or administering this.'

Oh. On to 'P' -

'political, adj. Of, belonging to, or concerned with the form, organisation, and administration of a state, and with the regulation of its relations with other states.'

Sephiroth took a moment to review the information. Gast's death - his throat tightened - Gast's death would not be investigated because deaths were only investigated where there was scientific interest or when a state wanted to know why. He set his jaw. Surely this was a matter of scientific interest? A scientist had – had -

He swallowed against his voice-box. Why didn't the state want to know? If Hojo didn't know, then surely nobody else did. Gast had always said that knowledge was the greatest good in the world, and to never turn down an opportunity to learn. He would definitely have insisted on an autopsy.

Hojo always insisted on answers, too. Why wasn't he demanding an autopsy? Why couldn't Hojo do it himself? Sephiroth had watched his autopsies before; Hojo knew how to do it, even if he wasn't anywhere near Gast's level. They had always autopsied the rats and rabbits if they died unexpectedly. Why didn't that go for Gast, too?

Sephiroth slid to his knees, keeping the old, battered book close. It still smelt dusty, like it had sat on a shelf for a long time (the date of printing, he remembered from the inside cover, was 1972), but it had long since stopped smelling of Gast. In the shelter between chair and desk, he turned back to 'L'.

'Lifestream, n.
1. The course of energy which runs beneath the surface of Gaia, the source of all life on the Planet, and to which life is thought to return upon an organism's death.
2. The afterlife believed to exist within the Lifestream, as a stage in the cycle of reincarnation believed to be the Lifestream's mechanism of recycling life energy.'

'A' -

'afterlife, n. A life after death; spec. (freq. with the) the state or condition of continuing existence after death within the Lifestream until such a time as the individual is reincarnated.'

'R' -

'reincarnation, n.
1. Renewed incarnation; the rebirth of a soul in a new body or form; an instance of this.
2. A fresh embodiment of a person; a person or animal in whom a particular soul is believed to have been reborn.'

Sephiroth flinched, and, with slightly shaking fingers, turned through back to 'S'.

'soul, n. An essential principle or attribute of life, and related senses, believed to be drawn from the Lifestream.
1. The condition or attribute of life in humans or animals; animate existence; this viewed as a possession of which one is deprived by death.
2. The principle of intelligence, thought, or action in a person (or occas. an animal), typically regarded as an entity distinct from the body; the essential, immaterial, or spiritual part of a person or animal, as opposed to the physical.
3. This spiritual or immaterial part regarded as surviving a person's physical death and returning to the Lifestream.'

His fingers closed around the thin yellowed paper, then he wrapped his arms around the entire book, hugging it to his heaving chest. That meant Gast wasn't gone, Sephiroth tried to tell himself. He just... wasn't here.

Sephiroth fell asleep at some point, as his dreams were filled with far-off faces and swirling green.

The helicopter had only been able to take them so far, so the rest of the trip up the godforsaken mountain had to be made by truck. Veld had been on rougher rides, but, as the local driver hurtled uphill without a care for the wailing brake pads or rattling suspension, he thought this had to be in the top three. There was remote, and then there was ridiculous.

Loose rocks clattered down to the valley below, landing long after the desperately roaring truck had kicked them up. The driver, a worn old fellow from the garrison in the foothills, showed no signs of slowing down even as they bunny-hopped over gouges and ridges in the alleged 'road', maybe ten centimetres from the plummeting edge. Veld braced his shoulder against the side of the truck, and tried to keep his weight towards the rock face.

A three hour long near-death experience brought the little village in sight, and the poor, maltreated truck almost seemed thankful when the driver shut off the engine. Veld didn't wait for the man to hop out and open up the back; he reached a hand under the truck cover, untied the retaining straps on the tarpaulin and slipped over the tailgate onto merciful solid ground.

He dusted himself down of the worst of the pebbles and grit that had come up through the truck bed, and took in his surroundings. The village was a maze of small houses, run through by rough-cobbled streets that were more bridleway than motor road. The stocky mountain chocobos paid the truck no mind as their drivers loaded the truck's supply haul onto them and their travoises. Above them all, Reactor Zero watched from the top of the mountain, the pinnacle of human engineering looking down on a little village that seemed to have otherwise determinedly avoided the coming of the modern age.

The villagers looked at him with peery eyes. They knew what dark suits meant, and they kept a wise distance. They were happy enough to keep their attention on the driver, who hefted the power cell out of his truck with the strength of a man half his age. He made for the village watering hole, which, as in so many of these little backwaters, must have been where they kept their mako charger. He chattered loudly to the locals, probably a deliberate distraction from the man he had ferried up here. Good, thought Veld, as through the sparse, dead trees, he could see his own destination.

He felt a twinge in the base of his spine at the sight of the old manor, so clearly shunned by the locals from the barely-travelled path that led to it. Whatever had happened to Vincent, it had happened here, in this old colonial relic of a building. He set the thought aside as he passed through the wrought-iron fence, twisted with long-dead vines and rotting weeds. He knocked once for politeness' sake, then tested the ageing double doors. They gave, and he slipped inside.

Between the boxes and boxes of equipment Veld couldn't even name, let alone fathom, a pair of Project S researchers froze like rabbits. Veld raised a hand casually. "As you were.” He scanned their faces, recognising each from the briefing dossier, both junior techs with as little authority as could be had on a project like this. Perhaps he had looked disappointed, as one of them gestured to an ancient-looking elevator.

"Hojo's downstairs."

Veld nodded, and picked his way through precariously-packed crates that couldn't possibly all fit in the single truck they had. The elevator's grate took more force to open than he thought the old metal could bear, but it managed, and Veld guessed at his destination of 'B1'.

The ride down was almost as shaky as the drive up, but at least it was a damn sight shorter. The elevator's whole superstructure shuddered as they hit bottom, and Veld had to shoulder the grate open to convince it to let him out.

“Lift it slightly, then shove,” came a familiar, nasally voice. Veld turned to face the man, looking no different or worse for wear for six years in the arse-end of nowhere, a failed marriage, a gene-freak son, and what was almost certainly a murder. Hojo nudged his glasses back up his nose. “Veld.”

“Hojo,” Veld replied, and they both knew enough of each other to leave it at that.

“So,” said Hojo, only half paying attention to Veld over the manifest in his hand, “what brings a Turk to a simple specimen transfer?”

“Higher-ups are twitchy. Want security rock-solid.”

Hojo snorted. “What, precisely, do I stand to gain from turning my coat?”

“They're asking that about Faremis, too.”

Hojo bridled, and his voice became curt. “Well, you're early. We'll be a few hours before we're ready to load up. We haven't even put down half of the rats yet.” As if on cue, one of the technicians shuffled past them down the corridor, a tray of dead rats in hand.

“And the kid?” Veld asked. He watched the tech round a corner and, after a clatter of metal, an incinerator roared.

“We'll prep him for the trip when we're ready to leave. No point supporting a sedated patient until we actually need to.”

Not the answer Veld had been asking for, but the one he should really have expected. He caught sight of another tech, this one with an arm in plaster. He'd been briefed about that, too. “And will he be trouble before then?”

“Unlikely. We're keeping him in his cell for now, and he's been quiet these past few days.”

“His cell?”

Hojo looked sidelong at him, the way he always had when you'd said something stupid. “Of course. Multi-million gil specimens need to be held securely.” He followed Veld's eyes across the corridor. “And I see you've already spotted Rosten.”

Veld had to shake his head. “For a four-year-old to break a grown man's arm...”

“Impressive, isn't it?”

“That's one word for it.”

“Then I'll thank you to keep the others to yourself. This child is the future of warfare, Veld. With the right training, that strength will be truly unstoppable.”

Veld stepped out of the way of the first researcher, tray now empty, and took the opportunity to break eye contact with Hojo. “How much does he know?”

“Hm?”

“About you and Lucy.”

The lines around Hojo's nose drew back, and Veld caught a brief flash of teeth. “Precisely nothing,” he said. “Gast fed him some idiot fantasy that his mother was called 'Jenova', and that seems to stopped most of the questions.”

“And you don't think that's gonna bite you in the ass some day?”

Hojo shrugged. “If it does, it does. No matter. He'll know it was me who ferried him to greatness.”

Veld looked aside, and fell into step with Hojo as the shuffling staff made it clear that standing in front of the elevator when they were trying to move equipment was not the most civilised thing to do. “What's his name?” asked Veld as Hojo went over a checklist.

“Sephiroth,” he replied nonchalantly, before calling over one of his dogsbodies to confirm the completion of some task or another.

So that was what Project S stood for. Long, distinctive and pretentious, just as Hojo would want it. Veld would have pitied the boy if he would ever have gone to a real school. Though he couldn't think of any jeering appellations for 'Sephiroth', he had no doubt the average four-year-old could.

Hojo had Veld make himself useful, ferrying about boxes that the researchers deemed 'non-critical', i.e. unlikely to break or set anything on fire if they entrusted it to a Turk. In the end it was mostly case files he carried, though they did leave a lot of the records behind in the library - climate-controlled, Hojo pointed out, so the papers would be fine for years. They could always come back if they needed anything.

The damp-mottled walls of the basement grew barer and barer, until finally, just about everything the researchers were taking had been taken. Now, as all six of them stood ready in front of a heavy, steel-reinforced teak door, only one thing remained.

Hojo pulled across the iron bolts on the top and bottom of the door, then kicked up the drop-bolt in the floor. He fished a ring of keys from his lab coat, found the relevant keys without even looking, and turned open one, two, then three locks. The door swung inwards, and Veld wondered what they planned to do in the event of a fire.

Past the door ran a dead-end corridor, lit mostly through the glass wall to the right. Hojo stepped through, and, with a tiny motion of his shoulder, beckoned Veld to follow. The techs hung back as he stepped over the high wooden door sill, and he saw what the gallery was made to observe.

The boy sat knees-up on the floor of the cell, leaning against the little bed frame that had already been cleared of its mattress. His hair was the first thing Veld noticed, grey and hanging to his chin, almost silver as it caught the light when he tilted his head up to look at them. He tensed, curling tighter around himself, with his eyes firmly upon the pair of them. Veld felt irrationally grateful for the plexiglass between them. His ears buzzed a little, and he caught a metallic tang in his mouth.

The child – Sephiroth, he reminded himself – examined them with a predator's eyes, like that intense focus Veld had seen on both his parents. The three of them regarded each other, and Sephiroth's gaze flickered back and forth between him and Hojo.

“There are two rules for dealing with this child,” said Hojo, turning the keyring over in his hands to find the next set. “The first is to keep your hands where he can see them.”

At that, Veld's hands left his pockets.

“And the second is to never turn your back.”

Veld nodded, and Hojo set to the first set of locks. Sephiroth's attention fell on him completely as he entered the sally-port, and when the second door closed behind Hojo, it was as though Veld wasn't even there. He could only hear muffled speech through the plexiglass, but the rhythm of it was that of two adults talking, not an adult and a four-year-old. The talking stopped, and after a moment of hesitation Sephiroth got to his feet, like a liquid flowing through a predetermined course. With him came a thick hard-cover book clutched to his chest, and, bar a brief flicker at Veld, his eyes kept to the bare stone floor. Tall for his age, thought Veld, maybe a quarter of Felicia's height again despite there only being a year between them. Surely neither of his parents could have been that tall as children.

Sephiroth followed Hojo out through the doors, and then Veld was face-to-face with Hojo's son. Sephiroth kept Hojo between them, but with a familiar lab coat to hide behind he did actually look at him for more than a split-second. Veld caught a glimpse of his eyes, and almost shuddered. No human eye should look like that. God, what had Hojo and Lucrecia made their child?

Hojo strode to the end of the corridor, keys already in hand. Sephiroth hung back, his eyes now darting between him and Veld like he was trying to work out whether to stay put within arm's reach of Veld or follow after Hojo and approach too close to the door. Hojo seemed unconcerned as he turned the keys in the old, stiff locks, so Veld, setting aside the feeling of prickling hairs on the backs of his arms, took the initiative. He squatted down to the child's height, and smiled. “Sephiroth, right?”

Sephiroth flinched and wrapped his arms tighter around the book at his chest, but, after a moment's glance back at Hojo, he nodded.

“I'm Veld.”

Sephiroth's eyes returned to the floor, and, when the final tumblers turned in the locks and Hojo cleared his throat, Veld let it go.

“C'mon,” he said, and he extended a hand. Sephiroth shrank back, and in the half-second it took Veld to realise his mistake Sephiroth had already darted past him to Hojo's heel. The door swung open, and as the pair of them went through Veld hung back to give the child some room.

Two of the techs waited with trays of vials and needles, while a third leaned over a rolling oxygen tank, and Rosten stood well back. Sephiroth hesitated at the sight of them, scuffing his bare heels over the concrete as Hojo inspected the contents of one of the trays. “Are we ready?” asked Hojo, turning over one of the vials in hands that looked so much older than the rest of him.

“The transport's ready and loaded,” said Rosten, “just waiting on your go.”

Hojo nodded, and held out one hand expectantly to Sephiroth, giving Veld a glimpse of a suspiciously curved, purple-red mark on his thumb. Sephiroth bridled and curled inwards around his book. Hojo rolled his eyes. “For pity's sake, child, just put it down. I told you it should have been boxed up with everything else.”

Sephiroth huddled away, and there was a flash of white teeth when Hojo stepped in closer. “Sephiroth,” he said, “stop this.”

Veld moved in, shifting his hip just enough to remind himself of the weight of his EMR. He almost wanted to laugh at himself, nervous of a four-year-old, but his briefing, though short on specifics, had made this child's potential clear enough. If it was true, then Hojo certainly hadn't just been patting himself on the back calling his project 'the future of warfare'.

Still, for now at least, the future of warfare was a bereaved four-year-old child, being whisked away from probably the only place he had ever known. So even as Hojo grumbled, Veld slipped around into Sephiroth's peripheral vision. He was acknowledged with a momentary glance from those strange, inhuman eyes, and he crouched down again. Sephiroth swept backwards, much to Hojo's disgust, but he didn't try to bolt again. That, Veld thought as he slowly, carefully offered his hand one more time, was a start. Sephiroth's back rose, but he held still. Veld softened his voice. “D'you want me to look after it?”

Sephiroth's expression hardened, and though Veld had thought he was already using all the strength in his lean, thin arms already, he somehow found yet more pressure to clutch his beloved book to his chest.

Hojo sighed. “Don't even bother, Veld, he's not going to be reas-”

But Sephiroth sucked in a breath, held it, and let his arms loosen around his treasure. He didn't look up from the floor, but with small, trembling hands, he offered the book to Veld.

Veld almost started at the surprise of it, and it took him a moment to respond. Even Hojo could only stare. The second it took Veld to register was almost enough for Sephiroth to reconsider, but Veld folded his hands around the book just before he could think of pulling away again. Sephiroth looked back up and stared hard, still showing just a hint of his upper teeth, but he let the book go. Veld held the book in his lap, still squatting on the balls of his feet so it was always where the child could see it; those bared teeth, he was certain, were not just for show.

The book was, it turned out, a dictionary. An old, decade-out-of-date dictionary, by the looks of it, worn and yellowed but clearly well-loved. Veld wondered what could possibly be so precious about a dictionary, but then, between his appearance and his parentage, that was hardly the weirdest thing about the child. Sephiroth watched the book the whole time, and Veld took the chance to really look at those eyes. The colour was inexplicable, blue or green depending on how you defined each colour, but the pupils, God, the pupils. They were slit, like a cat's or a lizard's, though they were wide now as he focussed completely on the book in Veld's hands. He barely blinked, maybe twice a minute.

Then Sephiroth's head lashed around to look at Hojo, who had once again held out an expectant hand. His pupils constricted to arrow-slits in a second, and he turned his face away as he offered his right arm in response. “At last,” Hojo murmured as he swabbed the inside of the child's elbow.

Sephiroth didn't look at Hojo as he drew from two of the vials into a syringe. He opened his mouth, but without the bared teeth Veld had expected. Instead he spoke, with a soft, mellifluous voice that was yet another thing so utterly out of place in such a young child. “Is this because Professor Gast died?”

“Yes,” said Hojo, palpating the injection site to find a willing vein. He found his target with the ease of familiarity, and, after tapping the syringe to free it of air bubbles, he slid the needle under the skin.

Sephiroth tensed at the injection, but he didn't cry out. “Oh.”

Hojo set the needle aside, and his other hand came around to steady the child as the drugs began their work. Sephiroth began to sway, pupils growing wide again and lagging now as his eyes roamed rather than flickered. He growled as Hojo's hand caught his shoulder, but the little rolling shrug that was as close to a struggle as the drugs would allow him did nothing to dissuade. His knees weakened and he stumbled, against Hojo's waiting hands. Sephiroth barely shifted when Hojo swung an arm behind his legs and scooped him up into a boneless, sedated heap. The tech on standby with the oxygen clipped a pulse oximeter onto the boy's finger, and Hojo adjusted his weight in his arms.

“Right then,” he said as the machine woke and told them, with slow, well-timed blips, that their precious cargo was indeed still alive, “off we go.”

And off they went. Veld had to grumble a little at the glance Hojo shot him when Rosten lifted the elevator grate with his good arm before sliding it across, and they all filed into the elevator, sedated child, oxygen canisters and all. The drum made an unhappy grinding noise as it tried to pull the cable against their combined weight, but after a moment of back-and-forth glances around the space that couldn't have been designed for more than five, it caught, and they began to rise. Only the death rattle of the mechanism and the pings of the oximeter broke the silence.

The lobby looked an awful lot bigger now it was clear of its maze of crates and equipment. Hojo winced at the sunlight through the propped-open doors, but led the way regardless. They negotiated their equipment down the concrete steps, and out through what must have been a garden once to the waiting truck.

Veld caught a look at the driver in the wing-mirror, conspicuously looking nowhere but right in front of him. Smart man. None of the villagers had come by to stretch their necks either, and he suspected there would be a collective sigh of relief once the team was gone. The researchers manhandled the oxygen unit up into the back of the truck, and Hojo had Veld up there to do the worst of the heavy lifting. A pair of ten-litre oxygen canisters, it turned out, were not as light as twenty litres of oxygen.

And then, just as he reached for where he had set the dictionary down on one of the benches, Hojo called him back. “Mind the cable,” was all he said as he held up the lightly breathing, intermittently blinking dead weight that was his son. Veld froze, his mouth going dry, but the part of his brain that knew how to shut up and take orders kicked in. He lifted the child from Hojo's arms, half-expecting to be bitten for his troubles, and he minded the cable as Hojo pulled himself up into the truck.

Sephiroth looked up at him, though Veld doubted how much he was actually seeing. He was heavier than Felicia, which shouldn't have surprised him as much as it did, and, for obvious reasons, much less wriggly. Veld just about got him into a comfortable position in his arms when Hojo had made it to his feet beside him and brushed off the eternal layer of dirt the truck seemed to generate. Hojo lifted Sephiroth back from his arms without a word, and Veld caught himself glowering a little before he reminded himself whose child the boy was. He picked up the dictionary and settled in beside them at the front end of the bench, bracing the sagging Sephiroth between himself and Hojo.

The rest of the team loaded up, and Hojo knocked hard on the back of the cab through the tarpaulin. Sephiroth raised his head a little when the engine spun up, and the seven of them began their slow, rocky descent down the mountain. Veld watched casually through the plastic windows in the soft-top as they passed through the village, quickly overtaking the line of heavily-laden draft chocobos that explained why there was so little baggage in the truck itself. “This really is a backwater,” he murmured.

“Tell me about it,” said Hojo, one hand sitting ready on the supplementary oxygen mask. “We should have left years ago.”

“Why didn't you?” asked Veld, knowing that he shouldn't.

Hojo looked to the pulse oximeter. “Operational objectives. Things have changed now.”

“Haven't they just,” said Veld, shuffling a little to get Sephiroth's lolling head off the bony point of his shoulder. Hojo made a vague noise, perhaps of assent. The techs held their silence, and as the village passed away behind them, Veld and Hojo fell to silence as well.

Veld leaned his weight back towards the rock face, and sat with the future of Shinra warfare half asleep on his shoulder.

FIN.