One might suppose that among the other Cylons, Caprica Six might find peace. That among dozens of copies of herself she could fade into the mass. That is was what a Cylons were supposed to be, one of many numbers. That's was what Caprica was not. When she walked among the other Cylons she was a hero, or a prophet, or a fool. Or all of those things at once, and she wasn't particularly sure she wanted to be any of them at all.

It had been simple once. Her purpose had been clear when she came to Caprica and lived among the humans. She had seen them all as indifferent, self-absorbed, lazy, and undeserving of the place in which God had set them. They did not love His creation. They did not care for each other. They were arrogant fools. And they would die for that arrogance. Those were things that Caprica had known when she first walked among them—as surely as she had known that God loved her and had a place for her among the elect.

She knew all these things as she selected her victim. As she seduced her prey. She knew all these things with every fiber of her being as she used Gaius Baltar to destroy his own people. And the moment that all of that righteousness came down around her head was the same moment that should have been her greatest joy. The destruction of the human race.

It was a cruel twist of fate, or a plan of God's well beyond her simple understanding, that the man who represented the worst of humanity, this weak, arrogant, self-absorbed man, would be the one to teach her what it truly felt like to love. And she only knew this fully as he was cradled in her arms protected from the nuclear holocaust she had brought down around them.

For a while she had believed that there was another like her, an Eight who had come to the same understanding that she had. Together they had done the impossible: they had stopped the war, and brought peace to humanity. But loving a human was not as easy at a distance as it was when you were with them. Their faults were magnified under observation, and Caprica had seen the self-loathing turn to hate in Boomer's eyes. Privately she wondered if the other Cylon did not have the strength to love because she had come to that emotion by programming, and by deception. Nothing built on lies stood very long, or with a foundation that could withstand even the slightest storm.

When Boomer looked at her old friends she saw loss. When Caprica looked at Baltar she saw a miracle. A gift from God she hardly understood, and didn't deserve. And so she could accept his faults, even if she did not like them. She could stroke his beard in bed and see him as what he could be, even if he was not able to see that himself.

This was not to say she was never angry with Gaius. Far from it, her anger with him started deep in her stomach and welled up in her like a terrible volcano. But unlike Boomer, whose resentment festered, hers came to the surface quickly, and passed eventually. After all, who was she to question the gifts that God had given her, and one of those gifts was Gaius Baltar.

This was not something she cared to explain to the others. She had tried once, to explain it to one of the Threes, but found that it was an impossible task. The gulf that had developed between her and the others was deep, and growing deeper. Paradoxically, it was among her kind that she felt most alone. It was in looking at her own face that she saw strangers. And it was among the human population on New Caprica that she felt much of that old purpose. They might hate and fear her. Certainly they did both. But they hated her as a Cylon, a Six, one of many. Anonymously. It was among the humans that she walked when she wished to be alone with her thoughts.

As she walked down the muddy street the humans moved away from her and looked away, as if perhaps they thought that if they did not see her she would not be there. She could probably walk through the entire city like this, undisturbed except for her thoughts.

And for a dirty pyramid ball that had rolled across the ground and stopped at her feet. She frowned and bent down to examine the ball as if it was a foreign object, though she knew them quite well. She had loved to go to pyramid games when she lived on Caprica before the holocaust. She could almost close her eyes now and bring herself to that place again. Well, she could, but she rather preferred the memory to the visualization.

A little boy of perhaps ten came running after the ball, stopping short several feet from her with a look of terror in his eyes. A look his parents probably taught him. After all, you have to be taught fear. Though, she reflected, it probably wasn't an unfounded fear. She smiled at him. "What's your name?"

"Marcus."

"Is this your ball, Marcus?"

He nodded.

"What position do you play?"

He mumbled something that she thought was, "Defenseman. Can… can I have the ball back?"

She thought he might have just run away in terror, except that she knew they didn't have many things like pyramid balls and he would be in trouble for having lost it. She smiled again and held it out for him to take, though not extending her arm all the way so that he had to come to her to get it.

Several adults, including the head of the Union, Tyrol, were watching, and she could sense that he wanted to step between her and the child. He didn't, though, and Marcus came closer and took the ball from her hand. She ruffled his hair before he could sprint off.

The threat abated for now, the city folk went on about their business, though several kept an eye on the Cylon. It was so rare for skinjobs, as she knew they were called, to walk among the population without Centurions.

It didn't speak well for her people, she thought, that their idea of living in harmony with humanity was subjugation and segregation. Someday God would make them pay for their sins, just has as He had made humanity pay for theirs.

The first winter on New Caprica was the coldest time Laura Roslin could remember. Many would probably recall the previous summer as one of the happiest times, when they could forget what it was to live in the steel shells of ships running for their lives. It had been a summer of marriages and even Roslin had wanted to believe the gods were shining down on humanity again. The difference was that while she had wanted peace, she knew in her heart that this was merely an interlude and that one day Cylon raiders would again block out the sun.

But among happy people she was a gloomy prophet to be in turns humored, ridiculed, and pitied. She had hated the pity the most.

That summer she had her own escapes, first with alcohol and then to smoking the river herbs that temporarily allowed her to see the world as others did. But she always sobered, and the high faded, and the world was as she knew it to be again.

It was during that summer when Laura had understood who her friends really were, and who were merely hangers on. She had known that the presidency attracted the leeches of any society as well as the best and the brightest. She had known it during Richard Adar's administration, but it was so clear to her now and if she ever returned to the office Laura would be thankful for the chance to have seen people's true faces.

Some people had surprised her. Across the school tent sat Tory Foster, her former aide, trying to help a young boy with his math work that was giving him so much trouble. If Laura had to choose the person who would still be with her a year out of power, it would not have been this ambitious and self-assured young woman.

Tory had been offered a job by President Baltar's Chief of Staff that would have allowed her to remain close to the seat of power. She had turned him down in favor of following Roslin into exile among the school children. She had once tried to tell Tory that she didn't have to stay, but the young woman had just smiled at Laura and said, "I would follow you into the coldest reaches of hell."

None of them had known hell was so close at hand.

The Cylons had come just in time to save Gaius Baltar from a revolution, and at her most cynical she was sure that there was some relation between those events.

She would have thought that they would have come to her school in the first days, that she would be forced to pay a price for those she had causally ordered tossed out an airlock. At the very least she had thought they would come to burn the books.

Weren't books the first casualty of new social order?

They hadn't come for her or for her books or for her students and for all of those things she was eternally grateful.

However, just as she had known that the summer had been an interlude, she also knew that these early days of occupation were simply the rising chords. There were more dark days ahead.

The night had been better than the day had been. By the time she had gotten back to Colonial One Baltar had sobered up, and had not yet again disappeared into a drunken stupor. The sex had been bad, but it had been bad for weeks, and she couldn't really have said whose fault that was. She suspected both of them, though she didn't dare breath that to Baltar, who had enough sexual difficulties these days without it being pointed out.

The next day was worse. She had gotten into an argument with several of the others over the humans' Temple. They had known for a week or so that they were hiding a cache of weapons there, and though she knew the matter had to be dealt with she was loathe to do it with Centurions. They were like children whose judgment could only be trusted with simple tasks. Go here, kill this, build that. Cylon Centurions made poor policemen and worse peacekeepers.

But she was overruled, as seemed to be common these days, and she had left the compound to get some air and think, but aware of the time so that she was back behind the gates when the raid happened. Humans might have redeeming value in her eyes, but they would still defend their sacred space.

She found herself walking around the part of the city she had met the little boy in the day before, and stopped briefly at the makeshift pyramid court, mildly disappointed that there wasn't another game going on. She missed watching games.

Through a nearby tent flap she heard arguing, and stepped closer to investigate. Perhaps it was nothing, in the stress of life on New Caprica there were a lot of arguments. It was the few snippets she could hear that drew her interest. Temple. Risk.

When she pulled back the tent flap the two stopped talking. A balding older man and a middle aged woman with glasses in a large sweeter. Caprica knew who she was immediately. Laura Roslin had earned her reputation among the Cylons, even if she wasn't in power any longer. Before she could ask the other man his name he pushed past her back out through the doorway and she was left alone with the former President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobel.

"Can I help you?" she asked coldly.

Not exactly wanting to say she had been eavesdropping, Caprica gestured around the tent. "This is a school?"

Roslin put her hand on the back of one of her pupil's empty chairs like she was trying to protect the children that weren't even there. "Yes, this is a school. What do you want?" She repeated it again with a stronger challenged in her voice.

"But you are the President."

She raised an eyebrow. "A little behind the times aren't you? I'm just a private citizen. I'm just a schoolteacher." Roslin began cleaning up the school room as if the act of doing normal chores would distract her from the killing machine standing in this sacred space.

Caprica rather doubted there was anything she could do right now that the older woman wouldn't pick up on immediately. She laughed, but only abortively and with a smile that had little joy in it, and took a few steps closer to her. "I doubt you were ever just a schoolteacher, and you certainly aren't now. Leoben speaks highly of you. At least until you ordered him tossed out an airlock after promising him safety."

"I do not have to justify myself to you."

"Perhaps not now, but someday you'll have to pay for that."

"I'm sure the gods will have much to call me to account for when I die, but that time is not now, and you are no god."

"No. No, I am not a god," the Cylon answered soberly.

"And I am not a saint," Roslin replied back coolly.

"That's good to know, because this is not heaven."

"Hell given form, created by man." If the last part of her statement had surprised Roslin, she didn't show it, and when Caprica tried to look in her eyes all she saw was the flare of the sunlight coming through the open flap, reflected in her glasses.

If there was a personification of evil living among the humans to most Cylons, the name that might come up was Laura Roslin. Adama could be admired. Zarek in his prison cell since the beginning of the occupation could be pitied. Roslin was someone to hate. A ruthless bitch with a stubborn tendency to cling onto life well after it should have been snuffed out of her. Yet, alone now, watching her straighten desks and hang children's drawings on the walls, one could forget those things and see just the woman. Just as away from those that knew her by legend, Caprica could simply be a Six.

Silently she picked up an eraser and began helping the former Colonial leader clean off the blackboard.

… to be continued.