Chapter One: Protector

You're going to be assassinated exactly three days from now.

The words wouldn't leave Hope's mind as he watched Snow's motorcycle wink out of existence.

He'd faced death before, of course. Many times. But then . . . he'd been a l'Cie. With powers. Ways to fight back, to heal, and even bring back mortally wounded friends from the brink.

This was different.

You're going to be assassinated exactly three days from now.

So much had changed in the last hour. Alyssa arrested as a traitor, the revelation that Caius was stalking the timeline and undoing the work Noel and Serah had done, Snow's return on his ridiculous Shiva motorcycle, Serah's leaving. . . . Hope turned to look at Noel, who was staring up at the sky with a thin-lipped expression on his face. "Gone, just like that," he muttered to himself.

"Snow's always been like that," Hope said, trying to fight through the heaviness of fear in his body. It had been a long time, he reflected, since he had felt such oppressive dread.

"Snow?" Noel looked over at Hope. "I meant Serah. I'm supposed to protect her. Now I'm supposed to stop protecting her to save you just on his say-so?" A pause. "Er, no offense, of course. You just always seem like you could protect yourself."

"Usually, yes." You're going to be assassinated—Hope rubbed his arms, which had broken out in sudden goosebumps under his Academy uniform. The sky felt too big suddenly, the buildings that had moments ago been this new and strange home now a threatening warren of steel and mirrors hiding unseen threats.

Hope jumped as racing footsteps echoed off the buildings. "Director!" He whirled, hand unconsciously going to his boomerang. Some days he forgot it on his short ride from his quarters high atop the Academy headquarters to the labs. He didn't think he'd be forgetting it much anymore. A squadron of soldiers pulled up short in front of him, saluting. Hope recognized the captain insignia on the leader's shoulder, if not his face behind the impersonal mask. Too much he couldn't see. "Director. Sir, it's Alyssa . . . you should come right away."

Noel held up his hand. "She's not important. He is. Hope is going to be assassinated in three days unless you keep him under guard at all times."

The Academy captain turned to Hope. "Director, is this true?"

"I'm afraid it is," Hope said, turning away from the open sky and heading for the safety of the Academy headquarters. At least he hoped it was safe. He needed to survive long enough to ensure that the new Cocoon would rise in a hundred years. Snow's other parting words made him glance up at the half-constructed dome looming like a felled crescent moon over the capitol. Without you . . . we might as well forget about having any kind of future. "Come, I'll explain on the way."

"Why did you do it, Alyssa?"

She looked up at him mutely from where she hunched, stripped of her Academy garb and forlorn behind the safety glass. They'd bandaged her neck and chest where she had tried to stab herself. A shock of red bloomed against the white of the gauze, the prison garb, the cell.

"I don't understand. I need to understand, Alyssa. Why did you do this to them? After four hundred years of work, why throw it all away like this?"

Hope had never seen her break down. Not during the long sleepless nights in front of computer terminals, not during the day they decided to step into the gravity well and burn irrevocably forward four hundred years into the future. He had never seen her shudder and gasp so, wiping at her nose and eyes with her sleeves. "You would have done the same thing," she choked out through her sobs. "You did do the same thing."

Hope shook his head, adamant. "No. You're wrong, Alyssa. I would never betray my friends." A young boy, hate bright in his green eyes, knife held high as the one he so hated, the one who had protected him, dangled from a ledge—no. With a sigh, Hope slumped, back against the glass. "Alyssa, talk to me. After all we've been through together . . . please, just talk to me."

Alyssa was calmer now, her sobs even and controlled. She leaned against the glass, close to him. It made him uncomfortable somehow, but he didn't move for fear that she'd lose her tenuous grip on herself again. "If they do what they want to, Hope, I will be no more."

"What? What do you mean?" He turned to face her, pressing his hands to the glass. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"When Cocoon fell, I . . . " Alyssa took a shuddering breath, then started over. "I was in Bodhum during the Purge."

The Purge. Those two words were enough. As she spoke, Hope could see that day looming like the broken shell of Cocoon in his memory. Was it five hundred years ago? For him, it was less than a decade. It still felt like yesterday. He could remember her face so well, though she died half a millennium ago.

"I remember when the soldiers came in. We ran and hid."

—when she took the gun I was too afraid to go with her, I was so soft and coddled, just like everyone else, fat and happy lambs for the slaughter—

"But there was an explosion; I remember being thrown against the wall and seeing the sudden brightness of the sky or searchlights—"

—but she was brave, she had gone to fight and gone to die for me—

"Then something happened. I think . . . I think the wall caved in, or the ceiling, something crushed into me . . . I don't know what it was, but I know . . . "

—and I did nothing—

" . . . I know I—I died."

The silence spun out, long and fragile, interrupted only by Alyssa's quiet sobs. Hope put a hand to his face, roughly wiped at his eyes. "Maybe you're wrong," he said lamely. He knew she wasn't. "Maybe you were knocked out and you came to later on."

"No!" Alyssa pounded on the safety glass. "Hope, listen to me! I died! The second they resolve the paradox, my paradox, I'll be gone, and more than gone—you won't remember me, no one will remember me, and everything I've done, all of this I helped build—it'll go on never knowing me." She turned away from Hope then. "Go."

"What?"

"Go. Just go away. Leave me. I don't care what you do to me. Nothing you can do is worse than what's going to happen anyway. I'll just wait here until . . . until there's no more waiting to do."

"Wait, Alyssa, please—"

"Go!" she was screaming now. "Go go go away!"

Guards burst through the door to the hallway, batons drawn. "Director!"

"No! No, I'm fine." Hope waved them down. Inside the cell, he saw doctors rushing in, injecting Alyssa in the arm with a sedative; she sagged in their arms and Hope shuddered as he realized her helpless descent into unconsciousness was not unlike what she would one day experience when Serah and Snow resolved the paradox that allowed her to live.

The doctors laid Alyssa down on a gurney and strapped her in place. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks tear-streaked. There were no words, nothing left to do. Hope let himself out.