"… Aeek'h'i 'hh 'ie 'nhqh?" she heard as colors slowly began forming from gray. She sensed movement. Her mind snapped to somewhat of an understanding and recognized the language as Romulan.

"Are you awake?" the voice continued.

T'Sei opened her eyes with an effort, sight bleeding into place. Leaning above her was a Romulan man roughly her father's age, she guessed somewhat dizzily. His gaze was intense with something she recognized, akin to a frantic panic, and his face was at once sharp and haggard but lost some of its edge as T'Sei garbled some Romulan response. Her side felt curiously light. She felt along it; her knife was missing.

"I took it," the man said from somewhere behind her. "You may need it later." There was a hard edge of…something…in his voice, and unsurety about her condition, but his words all seemed worn, as if he had been in similar situations before, in her place, not his own. She tried to decipher his meaning, decided she couldn't, and instead tried to stand up. She had been lying on a sort of narrow cot, one that was far from the ground, which swayed a little beneath her until she closed her eyes a moment and mastered her breathing. She did not remember all that had happened; if she thought about it, her mind either panicked or came up against a slight wall, one she did not want to cross until she knew more about where she was. She felt as if she had lost energy in a staggering wave, was slightly shocked she had never felt that way before.

What…

"Blood loss," she heard. T'Sei felt slightly green, and entirely drained.

She realized that as she had stood up, she had turned to face the Romulan. She wondered, for a quick moment, looked at him askance—

His eyes kept giving her some visceral reaction, as if she had seen him as the victim of a crime or in a long-forgotten dream. He held bandages; she realized her hands felt tight and slightly cumbersome and didn't sting as they had—before. Her wounds must have re-opened. For a short second neither of them spoke; he looked weary.

"I couldn't analyze it to find your house name and thus be able to identify you as no longer missing—you've been in a light coma for days." He spread his hands outward apologetically. "I have little medical equipment that advanced. In a way, I am thankful for it; I rarely come across anyone in favor with the current government and would rather not be noticed. It is so easy to die here."

She breathed easier. Somehow, what he said made sense, though she didn't entirely understand it herself. She started to walk forward and notice that the building she was in was small, spare and rough-walled with a low ceiling and a single shelf that held several medical objects vaguely similar to ones she had seen in the basic medical training she had gotten as a cadet. She had nearly gone into Medical, but chose Science instead…Movement distracted her from her exploration of the building. The Romulan man was walking over to a far corner of the room she hadn't noticed before. She stared, frozen, at the form she could see there, then noticed the entirety of the doctor—he must be a doctor—and that his foot and leg dragged slightly when he walked. Her heart went out to him. Why hadn't she noticed his limp before? All her memory just before arriving and upon arrival here was muted or gone, but echoes of it ran sharply across her mind as she saw who lay wounded on the other cot.

The Romulan doctor, if that was what he was, didn't look up as T'Sei walked over and crouched next to him. His face was even more drawn and tense than she had seen before. Clearly the trader's wound was serious. T'Sei pushed back a blanket from over the woman's midsection and saw a bandage wider than her head wrapped that area. They sat for a moment, watching the Romulan woman's labored breathing, until unexpectedly her dark haired head turned, the woman's face much paler than T'Sei had ever seen. She turned her body too, after a slow moment, wincing at what seemed unendurable pain. A meaningful look passed between her and T'Sei for an instant, then the woman's gaze shifted. The doctor shook his head, face tightening in shock, but the trader reached a hand to her side. Near the bandages and no longer green-stained, and now grasped in a shaking fist, was her honor blade. The woman's message was clear: I have survived enough to die now.

T'Sei could only see the pain in the doctor's eyes as he lowered the woman's arm that loosened the blade and let it fall to the floor, and reached instead for something resembling a hypospray. There was a sharp thud, a hiss, and a long silence.

Then T'Sei asked, "Evine?" Pieces of memory stung her mind in shards: green and green again, blood-green, outside a wreckage, and all over a woman fallen in the street…

"Dead," the doctor said, unperturbed by the use of the woman's fourth, personal name. "She was close to dying when you brought her here. But you—"—he looked over at her, slight grief still apparent on his features from the death he had helped, but a strange expression overtaking it—"—were pained by something different."

"You did not know her name before," he continued quietly.

"My memory has been…different," she said tightly. And then, "it hurts…and I cannot understand it. Some of the most recent part of it is beginning to return. The rest is there, and something else I cannot understand."

He nodded and stood swiftly. "I told you you may need your knife," he began. "I wish there was more time for your recovery, but there is little time to spare.

"She spoke to me before she died, while you were in a healing trance…"

So that was why there was so much understanding in his expression, why he did not ask who she was. It did not explain why he looked so familiar.

"I understand perhaps more than she did why you feel compelled to go where you are about to, but not entirely. From what she told me, I know where to find the others she would have taken you to if she was still alive. If they are still alive. But everything depends on your memory returning," he said.

Have I known you? she wondered as another moment passed in silence. He seemed concerned beyond the concern for a patient's recovery, and in a different way than the sharp, intense fear and anticipation she had recognized in him. But she had not seen him in the past…in her past…

He handed her her knife, which she accepted wordlessly, and they walked out of the building in pondering silence. Her minor injuries were at the very back of her mind, seeming now trivial and unimportant. Instead, she struggled to piece together what little the doctor had told her, and let the thoughts overtake her mind. There was confusion at first, memories too fast to follow, and still the memories that weren't hers did not entirely make sense. They, too, receded until they were on the periphery of her thoughts as she followed the Romulan down the sunset-lit alleyways towards the edge of the city.