This is for L and N, who noticed that there's always a full moon over Meridiana ...

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center.

- Margaret Atwood, "Variation on the Word 'Sleep'"

"Let me help." Rhymes with "I love you," right?

- Lois McMaster Bujold, Barrayar

oOo

Taking the stairs two at a time, Lucas finds himself winded, as usual, midway up the third flight. He staggers onto the fourth-floor landing, hands braced on his knees as he gasps for breath. He needs more regular exercise; the walk from home to school and back isn't enough, not even with the detour that brings him past what till tonight was a darkened window.

When he straightens, he's no longer panting, but his pulse thuds in time to the quick knock he raps on the door of 4-A and continues like an echo in the silence afterward. He knocks again, louder.

And again.

And again.

It's delay enough for doubt to catch up, for reason to suggest this is a fool's errand. Maybe he mistook the window; maybe the gleam was only a reflection; maybe he's giving the building manager the fright of his life ...

"Who's there?" answers a voice at last, muffled to unfamiliarity behind the thick panel.

To hell with reason. "It's me - Lucas."

No reply. "Hark, more knocking!" - or something like that, right? He raises his fist, but the door pulls away; from behind the chain bolt Adrian's face peers out at him wearily, warily. "Hello."

Lucas's relief is too keen for courtesy. "Are you all right?" he demands. "Where've you been? What happened to you?"

His friend flinches. "I'm fine."

"You don't look it," Lucas replies bluntly, taking in the familiar hunch of Adrian's shoulders, the body curling up around the secret of its pain. He braces a foot against the door, leaning into the gap. "What's wrong?"

Adrian's glance darts aside. "I'm sorry, I - look, this isn't a good time." The panel pushes outward, sliding Lucas's sole inexorably back across the threshold. "I'll see you later, okay?"

"No, wait!" He clutches at the jamb and yelps as the door shuts on his fingers. "Wait, will you? Ouch!"

One eye glares at him through the crack above his knuckles. "Let go, you idiot."

"Not," he grunts, "this time ... Cybersix."

She inhales sharply, hissing as if scorched; the pressure on his hand eases. He suppresses a wry chuckle: he's cursed his own blindness daily since she disappeared, so her surprise is no insult. Idiot, yeah. "Can I come in?" he asks.

Within, the reason for her caution is obvious: stretched out on the carpet lies Data-Seven, his chest rising and falling with the wheeze of his breath. The glossy fur of his flanks is marred with singed patches; his near legs are wrapped in bandages. Cybersix kneels beside him and draws his head onto her lap. A faint reek of silvadene hangs in the air.

Lucas squats across from them, not too close. "How is he?" he asks quietly.

"Battered worse than I was," she answers, caressing the panther's ears. His lids droop, but the gleaming crescents of his eyes find her face; she smiles wanly. "He was trying to protect me."

Having thrown himself between Cybersix and danger to similar effect, Lucas winces sympathetically. He wonders what menaced her this time: giant robots? a fire-breathing dragon? the tentacles of the island-sized monster that crawled out of the harbor the day she disappeared? "Can you tell me about it?" he asks.

"I - " She shakes her head, not quite denying him. "I wouldn't know where to begin ... "

"That island, or whatever it was?" he prompts her. "Was it another gift to the city from that little creep José?"

"No." Her voice hardens. "Von Reichter sent it - José's father." She levels her gaze at him, as if taking aim. "And my creator."

"Creator?" He barely feels the hit; strangely, it's less palpable than the recoil, chafing an old wound in her to renewed bitterness. "I don't understand."

"I told you before," she says. "I'm not human."

He's watched her leap from rooftop to rooftop, one step short of flying; kick Fixed Ideas twice her mass across a room; and spring up uninjured after three-story falls. But he's also heard her laugh and made her blush, and he could swear she wept when he kissed her. "I don't care."

She rises, Data-Seven's head slipping from her knee with a mutter of complaint. Lucas, too, pushes himself to his feet, but she draws away, holding him off with a gesture emphatically twinned in the bedside mirror. "He wanted me back," she says. "He was going to destroy Meridiana unless I rejoined him. He said ... he said he would free me from Sustenance." She jams her hands against the wall on either side of the glass. "There was so much Sustenance in that room," she whispers, head bowed, "running down all over the floor. We waded through it ... I could have bathed in it ... "

Her need for Sustenance is almost the first thing Lucas learned about her, all those months ago. Since then, he realizes, she's hidden her dependence upon it so well he's scarcely considered what that need might require - or exact. Gooseflesh crawls up his spine. "But the island turned aside ... "

She wraps her arms around her torso, as if the same chill has settled in her chest. "That was José's doing," she says. "We didn't know it was aimed at us until ... until there was only time to send it into the forest, where it couldn't harm the city."

"Aimed at you?" he repeats, horrified. He can't imagine how they survived. The cape where the island detonated burned so fiercely its western tip crumbled into the sea; inland, the woods are burning yet. His own pursuit of the monster dead-ended several miles farther up the coast, but even there he felt the heat of the blast like a sunburn on the exposed skin of his face and arms. "You weren't ... caught in the explosion?"

Her shoulders flex into that telltale crook. "Von Reichter set his - his beasts on me, but they turned against him - held him off, helped us escape - " She wheels to face him. "I thought I was ready to die - I thought - "

Lucas closes the distance between them. "I'm glad you didn't," he says.

She can cry: tears dampen his shirt where her head rests in the hollow of his shoulder. He strokes her hair, discovering places where it, too, has been burned ragged, and presses his lips to the uneven parting above her ear. Her strong hands have just found their way to the small of his back when Data-Seven reminds them of his presence with a cough.

Lucas is no expert at reading the panther's expressions, but the saturnine curve of Data-Seven's mouth suggests pleasure, or at least amusement. But when Cybersix breaks away to attend to him, his smile remains fixed on Lucas, lips parting to show a gleam of incisors as his wheezing deepens to a near growl. Lucas's eyebrows rise. Well, that's clear enough - as clear as the heavy arm of Camille Beauclerc's father around his neck at fifteen. Do I still look like a horny adolescent? he wonders crossly.

"Data-Seven, what's the matter?" asks Cybersix.

He butts his head against her, mewing piteously, a display that wouldn't have shamed a lost kitten. "You're such a baby," she chides, relieved, with a good-humored asperity that's all Adrian's. Hearing it, Lucas feels less of a dupe. Gruff voice, cropped hair, men's clothes: the impersonation is all but perfect, and it's not a pair of spectacles that's lacking. No wonder he - she - never wanted to relax.

Which reminds him that he's still carrying those unnecessary spectacles in his pocket. "Uh, here," he says, holding them out to her. "I guess you'll want these back."

She blinks. "I gave those to Lori."

"She gave them to me."

"Oh. Of course." She turns the glasses over as if unsure what to do with them; finally she tucks them into her breast pocket. "Can you tell Lori I'm sorry? I don't know when - when I'll be back to school."

And there it is: the caution that keeps a little distance between Adrian and the rest of the world, when it doesn't shut the door in your face outright. Lucas folds his arms. "Don't you think you should tell her yourself?"

"Well, yes, I suppose, but ... " She breaks off with a harassed shrug; outside, a distant siren skirls. "Who knows when everything will get back to normal?"

"You'll be waiting a long time," he replies, "if you're waiting for that."

"Exactly!" she agrees, ignoring the irony. The emergency vehicle's wail draws nearer, unmuted by the thin curtains drawn across the window at her back. "We shouldn't leave her hanging."

Who's "we"? he wants to ask, except that he's the one from whom Lori finally demanded an answer to the riddle of Adrian Seidelman. His kinky girlfriend was wearing his glasses! she exclaimed, waving them in his face while the traffic jam brayed around him and her father weakly expostulated with her to get back in the car. She left them with me and ran off and - who is she, Mr. Amato? And don't say his evil twin or something because I won't believe you! He still expects trouble from her parents for taking her pillion on that rash chase down the coast, close enough to disaster to dodge its flying cinders. But he doubts he owes Lori herself an apology; if anything, she deserves his thanks. "You've left it this long," he says. "Another day won't hurt."

"Another day?" A startled, mirthless snort escapes her. "I can't - "

"Why not?" he presses, because her resistance is beginning to unnerve him. Red shadows flicker in the drapes as the siren passes by below; the windowsill is smudged with footprints. If not for Data-Seven's injuries, would he have found her here at all? "I can ... cat-sit for you."

"No!" she says, cutting off the panther's affronted snarl. "I just can't." She takes a deep breath, turning her face away from them. "Please don't make this harder."

Oh, no. Maybe he's selfish, but he's going to make it as hard as he can. "For mine own good, all causes shall give way" - see, you've got me quoting Shakespeare now. He drops to his knees and seizes her hands, stretching awkwardly over Data-Seven's forelegs. "You don't have to hide from us," he says. "You don't have to run away."

She tenses. He tightens his grasp, knowing that she can break his hold and disappear out that window and he won't be able to do a thing about it, just like before. Just like always.

But she doesn't move. "Let me go," she says.

"I can't," he replies. "Let me help."

The balance trembles, even with his thumb riding the scale. Then Data-Seven lifts a bandaged paw and lays it on her forearm, answering her swift glance with a pleading groan.

She grimaces. "You, too?"

He groans again, a throbbing rumble too deep for a purr and too affectionate for a growl. Her stiff fingers yield at last to Lucas's grip and she smiles ruefully at them both. "All right," she says. "You win."

United in relief, they return her smile with interest: Data-Seven gently bats her arm, while Lucas gives her hands an encouraging shake and lets them go. And for our next trick, we teach you that this isn't a zero-sum game, he thinks, though that precept seems less persuasive when she leans over to rub her forehead against the smug cat's. Just because Aesop specifies a dog in the manger doesn't give you a free pass, buddy! Aloud, he asks, "So, uh, how are you fixed for groceries?"

Her head pops up; she hesitates, then admits, "I can't remember the last time I went to market." Furrowing her brow at the kitchenette, she adds, "But there should be canned soup, and crackers and coffee ... "

Lucas tsk-tsks at her. "That won't do," he says. "Can't have you pulling a Mother Hubbard when there's an invalid in the house."

The invalid yawns prodigiously, as if to show how little he cares for Lucas's opinion, but his expiration constricts into a racking cough. Cybersix bends to support him through the spasm, trading an anxious look with Lucas. "I'll bring you some staples tomorrow," he promises, wondering whether he can stretch that to include a vet's services, if there's a vet in Meridiana they can trust with this secret. We'll figure something out.

She nods. Her arms are still clasped around Data-Seven, but her gaze is as warm as a touch. "Thank you, Lucas," she says.

"Hey," he reminds her, "what are friends for?"