Yumi finished pouring Aelita some tea from her parent's antique set. At this point it was clear Aelita had come over to show her something. The pink-haired young woman seemed to be hiding whatever-it-was behind her slender seated form, but as far as Yumi could see, she wasn't holding anything.

"So." Yumi sat down, one hand supporting her chin. "You seem excited. What's on your mind?"

Aelita leaned forward, smiling. She opened her mouth to speak, then giggled and snapped it shut again. "I can't seem to figure out how to say this." She combed her long, pink hair with the fingers of her left hand.

Yumi noticed it immediately. Her mouth dropped open in a grin. "Aelita, that's a beautiful ring."

She gave a tiny squeal, revolving the silver band with the vibrant green gem around the base of her finger. Her hair swayed as she shrugged her shoulders. "Thanks, Yumi. After all these years, Jérémie finally got up the courage." She laughed. "I almost gave up hope for him. But I bet all this time he was just trying to find the perfect gemstone!"

Yumi hugged her with one arm. "Don't you worry about him. If there's one thing Jérémie has plenty of, it's courage. I'm so happy for you two."

Aelita's mobile buzzed, and she blushed suddenly. "I bet that's him!"

"Well, go on, answer it!" Yumi gave a smirk.

"It is him!" Aelita practically shrieked as she caught sight of the caller ID. Then she regained her composure and answered the call. "Jérémie?"

Her smile faded and she stared grimly into space. "Yes, she is. All right, I understand. Here she is." Aelita held the phone out. "It's for you."

Yumi tilted her head quizzically as she accepted the mobile, her eyebrows furrowed. "Hello?"

"Yumi, it's Ulrich."

Any other day, Yumi's heart would have skipped a beat at the officer's name. Any other day, a minuscule trace of the stupid grin Aelita wore whenever she was with her fiancé would have crept onto her face. But this day, Jérémie's voice was low and serious.

"H-how…what happened?" she managed, blinking.

"He's been shot."

Odd Della-Robbia sat on his bed, leaning against the corner of the wall of his two-room apartment. He'd seen this coming. This morning, while trying to clean up part of the wreckage that was his kitchen, he'd broken three dishes. Then he'd had a terrible stomachache for a good portion of the day. He had known something grim was coming. He'd just hoped it would be something more like a XANA attack. Those had been easier to deal with.

Now he was just nodding as Jérémie explained the disaster. Sissi squinted at him from across the room, sensing his dismay.

Oh, not that Sissi.

Odd had gotten a new dog.

"Hiroki was there," Jérémie was saying, "And Ulrich saw it coming, so he took the bullet. He was wearing a ballistic Kevlar vest, but the assailant was virtually adjacent in proximity, so the projectile punctured the material—"

"English, Einstein," Odd said patiently. "I'm attending an art college! I'm not getting my degree in vocabulary." He felt calm, despite the circumstances.

There was a pause. "Sorry, Odd. …The man who shot Ulrich was right next to him, so the slug punched through Ulrich's bullet-proof vest and hit him in the abdom—gut."

"But he's alive, right?" Odd tried to sound cheerful.

Another moment of silence. "…For now, he is. There were complications. There's nothing they can do for him except make him comfortable."

"Oh, man…" Odd clasped his forehead. Sissi, the Pekingese, padded over and hopped onto the bed next to him with a sympathetic whine. "Are we going to visit him soon?"

"Sort of." Jérémie's voice gained a familiar, commanding edge to it. "I said that there's nothing they can do for him. Can you meet us in front of the hospital at ten o'clock tonight? William's coming, too. He took some time off."

Odd glanced at his digital alarm clock, which registered 8:06 pm. "Sure, what happens then?"

"I want to test out a theory."

"How did you get him out?" Aelita ran up to the gurney. Ulrich was breathing shallowly, and he looked terrible.

William grimaced. "Don't even ask. What we did was seven different shades of 'illegal'. We have to make this quick."

Five people and the stretcher couldn't fit in the old factory elevator, so they went three at a time. Yumi desperately wanted to stay with Ulrich, but every look at his pale, unresponsive face made her lose her nerves, and two of them were needed to lift the heavy gurney across the uneven factory floor.

Naturally, Odd and William kept this job. Yumi saw Odd smile hopefully at William as the door closed on them, but William didn't return it, merely nodding instead. Yumi was glad William had stayed in the area. Maybe he used to be an annoying flirt, but he certainly knew when something was important, and Lord knows Jérémie wouldn't have been able to support the gurney very well.

Jérémie's poor physical strength was a distracting thought, and Yumi clung to it as her two friends guided her down through to the basement of the factory.

"I've already started up the supercomputer," Jérémie told the girls. "I'll start the scanner."

"Come on, Aelita." Yumi tightened the grip she hadn't even realized she had on her friend's hand. "Let's make sure nothing goes wrong when the guys put Ulrich—"

She was unable to continue. Stupid. Of all the words to choke on…

Aelita wasn't trying to keep a lid on her emotions. The tears flowed freely down her cheeks, just like they had when her father had sacrificed his life for her almost seven years ago. Yumi envied her. She didn't know how to do that—how to be so secure in her inner strength that she wouldn't mind people seeing her cry.

Yumi had always seen crying as weakness, but Aelita was not weak. It was possible that because Aelita could cry, that made her stronger than most of them.

William and Odd were unstrapping Ulrich when the girls rushed in. They all helped lift him gently and set him down inside the round scanner. Blood immediately began to drip onto the scanner floor as Yumi made him curl his knees to his chest, an action that was painful but necessary to make him fit in the cylindrical pod. His eyes opened and shot towards her, but they were unfocused. His mouth twitched open.

"It's going to be all right," she whispered to him.

He managed to lift a hand off the floor and angle it towards her, but she was already running back towards the elevator shaft. Both the scanner and elevator doors closed simultaneously.

Ulrich was alert the moment he gained feeling and the use of his eyes on Lyoko. He watched the wireframe of his body being traced and fleshed out, and when the artificial gravity hit him, he landed in a crouch, like an old pro. The bright green floor of the Forest Sector seemed to bend slightly under his feet.

Being virtualized was such a nostalgic feeling. It might have made him get all misty-eyed if Lyoko had a tear simulation program. He smirked for a second, then looked around in sudden confusion.

Why was he here, again?

"Jérémie?" he called. Or had Aelita virtualized him? "Hello?"

"Ulrich!" Jérémie answered. "How are you? Are you in pain?"

"Pain? N—oww…" Ulrich doubled over as a simulated shock of agony ran though his systems. The feeling originated in his torso and spread quickly, then disappeared. "Yeah, Jérémie. What's going on?"

"Sorry, it's just a message to let me know something's wrong with your avatar. I can disable it. Hang on a second." Jérémie sounded distracted. There was a burst of static, like Lyoko's thunder, as someone adjusted the microphone.

"If something's wrong, shouldn't you bring me in?" Ulrich furrowed his brow, trying to remember what the situation was. There came another flash of pain, and Ulrich wrapped his arms around his waist as if to keep himself from falling apart. "Jérémie?"

Aelita's voice reached him. "Ulrich, it's me."

"Aelita, what's going on? Are you coming?"

"No, XANA hasn't shown up. Ulrich..."

Ulrich huffed in impatience. "Yeah, what's up?"

"Hir-Hiroki's fine."

Ulrich paused for a moment. Cadet Hiroki Ishiyama. Mugger Moreau. The alley. Ulrich felt like blood was rushing to his head. He sat down against the roots of a digital tree to counter a wave of dizziness.

"Jérémie disabled the pain simulation. Are you okay, Ulrich?"

"Give me a sec," he said.

Hiroki had his back turned to Moreau, but the criminal had regained consciousness. His fingers curled around his gun.

Stupid mistake, thought Ulrich. I should have kicked it far, far away.

And then, though Moreau was still on the pavement, the gun tipped up, pointing towards Hiroki's shoulder blades.

And the dang kid wasn't wearing a bullet-proof vest. Stupid, stupid mistake.

He stood up again. "...I get it. That crook. But that doesn't explain why I'm here. There's a gap in my memory about a mile wide."

Aelita's voice returned. "You've been shot."

"Yeah, okay, I remember that part."

There had been no time to speak; no time to breathe. The gun was already loaded and Moreau was squeezing the trigger. So Ulrich did the one thing he always suspected he'd end up doing.

He'd leapt between the bullet and its target.

"Ulrich, you idiot," Yumi growled, her eyes squeezed shut.

Aelita's hand fell on her shoulder in a comforting gesture. She was still talking to Ulrich. "Jérémie thinks that if we keep you on Lyoko for a while, you have a chance to..."

"Survive," Ulrich's voice filtered out of the tiny speaker. "Got it."

An error message popped up on the screen, and Jérémie read it grimly. "Something's wrong. His life point count is dropping." He leaned close to Aelita and tilted the mouthpiece towards himself. "Ulrich, can you get to a way tower? We'll come in if you need help."

"Sure thing, Einstein. I'll be fine. The place is deserted."

There was an anxious wait as the little arrow that represented their virtualized friend padded across the map on the screen and shot into the nearest tower. Jérémie's eyes twitched across streams of data and computer code. His head slumped beneath his thin shoulders. "He's still losing life points. It's slow, but eventually he'll be devirtualized. Aelita, please give me the headset."

"Mmhmm." Aelita slipped the piece out of her rosy hair and held it out for him.

"Ulrich, there's one more thing we can try, but you might not like it. You need to be absolutely sure."

"Okay, shoot."

"Well, Aelita is technically thirty-one years old. When we found her, she'd been in the supercomputer for ten years, and she still looked fourteen, rather than twenty-four. Have you ever heard of cryonics?"

"Cryonics, what's that, a rock band?"

"No, it's the theoretical science of preserving a body in ice until contemporary medicine evolves far enough to revive them."

Silence.

Biting his lip, Jérémie continued. "The information for a user can't change if the supercomputer is shut down. So if we turned the computer off, you...wouldn't lose any more...life points. And we could keep you there...as long as we need to."

William listened with interest. Yumi choked, and Odd rushed over to her. Aelita began shaking her head very slowly.

Ulrich remained silent. Jérémie brought up his eye-cam, and the avatar's brown boots came into view.

Jérémie swallowed. "If you just want to come back right now, you'll...you'll be among friends."

"How long do I have to think it over?"

"Take your time," Aelita answered, taking the mic back from her fiancé.

Jérémie pulled his glasses off with one hand, leaning over the keyboard. His fists curled until he looked ready to snap the frames in half. "Darn it!" He yelled. "Why couldn't they have told us? Yumi, at least, had a right to know what happened. If Ulrich's parents had told us what happened right away, I could have launched a Return, but now it's been too long. The computer can't bring him back that far."

Silent, Aelita loosened Jérémie's grip on his battered eye-wear.

Yumi began sobbing gently and Odd bit his lip, hugging her. William walked over to join them.

"It'll be all right, Yumi," he said, though he knew nothing was farther from the truth. They only had two options now, and both were disastrous.

Odd nodded half-heartedly. "Einstein'll figure it all out." He looked up at Jérémie, who sighed deeply, still bent over the monitor.

"Jérémie? I'll do it," Ulrich said finally. "But you guys...you gotta promise to turn me back on."

"I swear!" William shouted without hesitation.

"We promise." Another tear streaked its way down Aelita's cheek.

"Then go for it," Ulrich sighed.

Jérémie straightened with a determined expression. "Okay. Aelita, let's go. We'll shut it down together. Give Yumi the headset."

"Hang on! My turn first!" Odd snatched it and hopped into the computer chair. "See you soon, officer! Don't go and lose your memories of us, okay?"

Ulrich chuckled. "Nahaha, I'll try not to."

William was next. "I really did admire you, Ulrich, I want you to know that. You weren't just a rival or something to me. I should have made more of an effort to be your friend." As he spoke, the elevator door opened, and Jérémie and Aelita vanished inside.

"Thanks, William. Sorry I went and did something stupid. At least it did get us all back together. But I swear, if you make a move on Yumi while I'm gone, I'm gonna punch your face in when I get back," Ulrich answered solemnly.

Yumi stiffened, but William just laughed. "I can't stop loving her, Ulrich. But I don't think she'll ever stop loving you, either." He gave the mic to Yumi. "We'll leave you two alone, now. Come on, Odd, we have to go get rid of the evidence."

With a calm smile, William squeezed Yumi's hand, then yanked Odd out of the raised chair and left in the elevator. Yumi's finger's fumbled as she put the headset on.

"Uhm, Ulrich?" she ventured.

"Hi, Yumi. I'm really sorry."

Her voice was trembling, so she pitched it lower. "Don't be. You saved my little brother's life."

"What are you going to tell him?"

"I don't know. W-we'll think of something."

"Will you come back for me?"

She sat perfectly still. "I swear it on my life."

"Then I'll be okay." The eye-cam showed Ulrich's perspective as he sat down against a tree and wrapped one arm around his knees.

Yumi tried to clear the lump from her throat with little success. "Ulrich—"

"Yeah, Yumi?"

She closed her eyes. Her shoulders and jaw shook as she struggled to communicate. "There's something that I need to say...that I should have said years ago..."

She could almost hear his soft smile. "It's okay, Yumi," he told her. "I know what it is."

"Yeah." She relaxed. "I know you do. We have seconds left. Do you want me to say it?"

"No. When you tell me, I am going to be there, in the flesh. That's my promise."

The screen showed a loading bar. Shutting down. "Okay. Time's up. See you later, Ulrich."

"See you, Yumi."