At this time, Irvine was in fairly medieval chains on a class-C Galbadian prison boat that smelled of sweat and fish and metal and was almost as old as the chains. Galbadia had rolled out the most theatrical equipment they had for him. Galbadian television crews had lovingly filmed his transport from the prison to the boat, the confiscation of his weapons and GFs last night, and even - to go by what Irvine's guards had been discussing - interviewed several prominent Deling City residents about the problem of SeeDs on the streets.

Xu was gonna be pissed.

This worsened his mood, which was already pretty bad. He'd spent a sleepless night being questioned, at that time without the film crews, with Bexley and the Galbadian interrogators threatening a torture they knew perfectly well they couldn't carry out under the current agreement. Irvine had opted to retreat inside his mind - weirdly empty, after they'd taken Siren - and ignore them.

There was the whole Hobbs Worth thing to consider instead. The Hobbs Worth thing became more and more peculiar the more he thought about it.

Obviously, they had to have been set up. They were being set up, and so was Worth, and Caraway was probably in on it, and all to hide a GF from Garden, which made no sense, because what single GF was so powerful that they had to go through all this trouble? Siren was a pretty decent GF: queen of boosting status ailments, capable of silencing any magic-user and making an even playing field a slightly more unfair fight. Irvine felt perfectly comfortable with her and no other GFs, an odd development given that many people tried to stockpile as many GFs as possible, but then he knew the risks.

But even Xu wouldn't have staged a massive fake raid just to keep Siren. Or for that matter even Eden.

Obviously, part of the Galbadians' aim was to discredit Garden. But in certain corners Garden was already discredited. Irvine knew that better than anybody. In Trabia and Balamb and Timber and Dollet, Garden was revered, honored, liked, even, depending on who you were talking to. But in Deling City? Among Caraway's own people? They were trash. You wore your cadet duds around school grounds because otherwise Martine would put the screws in and make you dig desert latrines for the army or something, but you took them off the second decent people might spot you. That you had ended up at Garden proved you were either from somewhere else, not a proper Deling person at all, or else you were the lowest rung of Deling society. Destined for the military, not able to get your education anywhere else, had to sell yourself to Martine's army pipeline to be worth a damn.

And Irvine already had a bad name just in and of himself, not connected to Garden in any way. So his being a sexual menace, or whatever they were selling, was hardly going to come as a surprise to anyone who happened to turn on the Deling City nightly news. Slandering him had to be an added perk. The real issue was that they'd stumbled onto something Caraway didn't want them to see, him and Rinoa and—

It took him a second to recall.

…Selphie? He'd bartered away the memory of Selphie for some reason; Siren had taken that memory. Then, while he wasn't looking, or maybe even at his instruction, Siren had taken his reasons for the bartering too. If Siren remembered doing this (which she probably wouldn't), then Irvine would have Words with her about it when she got back to him. And she would get back to him; his guards' vicious prods to get him below decks had suggested that Xu had demanded the return of both the GF and the Seed – probably the GF first, if he knew Xu – and so Galbadia would reap no concrete rewards that these grunts could see, and they'd resolved to take it out on him.

Which was fine. Doctor K could heal the bruises. It was the memory lapse he was more concerned about. Now that sleep deprivation was making the edges of his brain very sharp, he worried that he'd lost some crucial detail, something necessary for unraveling the whole thing.

But, even more than that, he worried because it was Selphie. What could make him give her up? It made no sense. He'd never given her up. Not ever. Just lots of other people. Most people, really. Apparently at least one ex-girlfriend who had nudes. Why couldn't Siren have taken the moment when he'd figured that out? Parts of that were still burned into his brain. Which was overtired, stressed, and desperately wanted a drink.

A soldier came down into the hold and hard jabbed at his temple to get his attention. This was probably in violation of something.

"We're here," said the soldier. "Get up. They're paying us some nice gil for you, at least."

Irvine gave an internal curse. Xu ran the budget with a fist closed tighter than an old Dolletian chastity belt. She hated the thought of Garden losing money. He was going to get the dressing down of his life. Possibly demoted. No. Definitely demoted. Maybe kicked out of Seed; it wasn't like they needed a sexual menace on the payroll. Which. He was mostly in SeeD to be with his friends, so whatever, he wouldn't much miss SeeD. But if he didn't have SeeD, where would he go? Even the residents of Fisherman's Horizon didn't seem to like him. The last time he'd been there, on their way to Esthar not long ago, he'd been hustled to the now-functioning train station by the hotel attendant and told point blank that he looked like a dangerous killer, please consider leaving.

The lack of sleep was turning his mind in weird directions. He shoved all that away and concentrated on making it up the ladder with the blinding sun beating down on him, his shackles making the trip difficult, the soldier prodding at him to go faster. When he made it to the deck he was hustled down a gangplank none-too-gently and then practically shoved at Xu.

Xu wasted no time. She strode forward to meet the Galbadians, demanded that they take the chains off of Irvine, take their money, give her Siren, and leave at once. Her hurry made more sense to Irvine a few moments later.

His shackles were off, he had an efficient cadet propping him, and they'd rounded the corner of the Balamb Hotel, with orders from Xu to report to Doctor K immediately. And there they were: the White SeeDs. Their ship was docked in the blue waters behind the hotel, tarps pulled low over it. This way the Galbadians wouldn't be able to identify them right away, if at all. This was sensible; the White SeeDs would want to initiate and control all contact with the Galbadians. They were unofficial allies with Timber and Esthar these days, some gambit of Matron's to try and make up for having almost handed world power to Deling City and also for being possessed by the woman who later ordered a Lunar Cry on Laguna's people. Only what were they doing in Balamb, on regular SeeD territory? And why was Quistis, talking to someone he couldn't see, visible on the deck of the ship when he craned his neck?

At first Irvine thought it was sleep deprivation combining with the glaring Balamb sun to play tricks on him. Hadn't Quistis gone to Centra? Had the other team come back with the White SeeDs? And so soon? Why? Irvine steadied himself with the cadet's arm, making her scowl at him, then stood up straighter to get a better look. Quistis wasn't alone. Zell was there, looking somehow defeated.

"'Scuse me," Irvine said, stumbling away from the cadet and changing course to the White SeeD ship.

"Hey! You need to get to the Infirmary!" said the cadet.

"Sure do," Irvine breathed out. He really did, too. He felt like he'd been chewed up and spat out, like he'd been devoured in battle, and that wasn't an offhand metaphor. Thanks to some offhand confuse spells that had been performed on his teammates once, he knew what that felt like for real – it was awful. You needed a curaga and maybe a nice nap in a tent afterwards, at least. But his friends were up there, apparently derailed from their mission just as he'd been derailed from his, and Zell, if possible, looked maybe as bad as Irvine felt. His hair hung limp over his face, his skin was clammy-seeming and pale, and his eyes were strangely flat. Something had happened. They might need help. Irvine wasn't going to ditch them; this wasn't the D-District, and he was a better person now; he didn't leave his friends to rot.

Or at least he thought he didn't. The missing memories of Selphie continued to spark a small riot in his brain. He had to have a good reason for that. Right?

"Yo. You look bad," Zell told him, when Irvine came up to the deck.

"I'd tell you the same," Irvine said, "But if I look any worse than you, I'd better hold it in. I'm gonna have to skate by on my charming personality from now on."

Zell, weirdly enough, didn't puff up and take offense at this. He just gave a tired nod, devoid of cheer, and turned up the corners of his mouth like he wanted to show he knew it was a joke, but he lacked completely the energy to do so. Which, for Zell, meant something had to be wrong. He and Quistis had been deep in discussion over something. Now they broke off and she said, "Irvine, what happened to you?"

"Prison," Irvine said shortly.

"What? Weren't you on a mission with Selphie? She didn't mention you'd been thrown in prison!" said Quistis.

"She didn't?" Irvine said, his heart sinking. Selphie was angry with him. They'd fought. Broken up, maybe. That was why he'd traded away the memory. Oh, Hyne. And it was probably his fault, too.

"Well, I'm not sure I gave her the time to," Quistis admitted sheepishly, after a moment.

"We were taken by Ellone," said Zell. "Me and Squall."

Irvine stared at him, befuddled by this new piece of information. Being taken by Ellone usually didn't leave people looking the way Zell looked. Irvine said this. Quistis said, "I was just thinking that, actually."

"I didn't tell you the whole story," Zell said, actually squirming under her stare. "Just the beginning."

"Well, that was interesting," she began, "But hardly useful. I mean, fine, maybe once he wasn't horrible—"

"Who?" Irvine cut in. "What's the story?"

Surprisingly, both Quistis and Zell sighed, like Irvine didn't know what he was signing up for.

"It's complicated. It doesn't even make sense to us," Quistis muttered. She had a book in her lap and now she rapped her knuckles against it, annoyed.

"It's a Hyne-damned enigma," Zell said. "Wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an ugly grey coat that it thinks is cool."

Irvine blinked at them. Before he could ask for further clarification, Xu came up to the deck, trailed by some angry-looking White SeeDs and the cadet Irvine had abandoned back on Balamb soil. Xu pointed a finger at Zell.

"I'm taking 10,000 gil from your paycheck to cover ship repair," she told him. Zell, who was usually pretty respectful to Xu, just looked at her flatly and didn't say anything to appease her, didn't salute, didn't even complain. He worked his jaw. Xu raised an eyebrow, seemingly noting this, but didn't comment on it. Instead she rounded on Irvine.

"And you," she said, transferring the finger to him, "You need to get to the Infirmary now. In fact, you both look like you could use it!"

She packed them off with the cadet, staying behind herself to talk to Quistis. The trek to Garden was one of the worst Irvine had ever made in his life, and he was counting that time they'd lost their rental car and had to hike across wild monster territory from the Tomb of the Unknown King. Every inch of him hurt, he was tired, and he'd given away memories of his girlfriend and was worrying about it - a constant fearful worry in the back of his head. And he wasn't the only one. The longer Zell walked the more he looked ready to drop. He had to be sick or something. Sick and angry. Something about him was angry for some reason, something around his eyes. Zell was always emotional, so the anger wasn't so strange, but the way he wore it was: muted, taut, somehow drained by whatever was infesting him. Zell was usually both loud and aggressively healthy. But now he seemed pale and bitter and uncharacteristically listless. It fell to their beleaguered cadet escort to defeat most of the attacking caterchipillars on the way.

The overly-helpful cadet also saw them straight to the infirmary even though they tried to dismiss her about nine times. When she was gone, they both collapsed onto the fainting couch behind Kadowaki's desk. Irvine slumped forward and massaged his bruised wrists. Zell leaned back on his hands. Irvine eyed the infirmary bed from here, and snuck a glance at Zell to try and see if it would be rude to snatch it. Zell looked like he needed sleep as badly as Irvine did. But Zell was regarding the bed with a kind of horror, like just the thought of going to sleep was nauseating.

Not all nice dreams from Ellone this time, then.

The swish of the door announced Dr. K. She bustled in, a B-Garden staple, practically its mascot, kind and motherly and yet Garden-efficient for all that. Her kindness meant that Irvine could never really feel comfortable around her. At G-Garden they just threw potions at you and if that didn't fix you they wrote up a discharge letter; they didn't pretend to be your friend. But his level of trust here didn't matter, because he was going to get checked over whether he liked it or not. Dr. K pointed a finger at him.

"You first, Irvine," she said. "Haven't I told you to be more careful on missions?"

Had she? She probably had. He'd pulled a stint in Trabia in the second month after the war, trying to impress Selphie, and had ended up nearly buried under an unstable wall when it had collapsed. Dr. K had been there at around the same time and had to have patched him up, since the Trabian medical staff had mostly been dead at the time. But he couldn't remember more than that.

Dr. K took him behind her curtain, into the next room, giving Zell instructions to lie down and make himself comfortable. She checked Irvine, brusque and firm and perfectly Doctor-ly, not at all fazed to have the world's biggest pervert stripped down to a blue open-backed gown on her medical table. Then she had him dose himself with potions for some ailments, bound him up where the potions were going to discourage proper healing, and ordered him to put his shirt and pants back on. He did so and made to leave. She stopped him.

"Irvine, a minute," she said. "It seems I completely forgot to administer the teamwork questionnaire to you."

Irvine blinked at her. He had no idea what that was.

"It's a simple questionnaire designed to maximize team communication and efficiency," Doctor K. said. "We usually give it to people four months after their SeeD test, and then at intervals after that, but you skipped the test, so I never put you down for it. Silly me. Lie down and we'll get it over with soon enough."

Irvine felt like protesting for Zell's sake – something was clearly wrong with Zell and he might need medical attention right away – but Dr. K shushed him and made him lie down again. Then she took out a clipboard and paper and a pen, and started to ask him about Squall, and how was working with Squall (fine), and Rinoa and how was working with Rinoa (Rinoa wasn't technically Garden personnel so that was a weird question, but fine), and Quistis and how was working with Quistis (fine), and did he think Quistis put too much pressure on herself—

Bizarre. Why did that matter?

"I guess?" Irvine said. "She seems sad a lot."

"Why do you think that, Irvine?"

He really had no idea? It was just a general sense that he got from her. He remembered her as bossy and triumphant in her orphanage days. Now she was mostly regulation-calm, but in such a way that you started thinking maybe she had some issues boiling up underneath the surface. But he wasn't going to say that to Kadowaki. Oh God, was this a snitch test? Was he being asked to snitch on her? This was standard G-Garden procedure, of course, but the way the Balamb kids went on, you'd think Cid's people didn't do this kind of thing.

"None of this counts for purposes of evaluating the other SeeDs, Irvine," said Dr. K, like she could read his mind. "It's just for working out how you're communicating with them on the team. Let's make it a little more general, just to keep you comfortable. How can you tell when someone is sad? What gives you that information?"

"I guess…she just looks the way I feel when I'm sad," Irvine said, which was as vague as he could be while still being truthful.

"Hmm," said Dr. K. "Tell me more about that."

Weirdly, over the next thirty minutes he found himself telling her a lot. Not about Quistis, though. He didn't want to sell her out in case this was a snitch test, and he didn't want to do that to Zell and Selphie and Squall, either. So every time Dr. K got close to them, he hedged until she asked a more general question or prompted him with some of these strange ink-splattered cards she had (free association could tell her a lot, she informed him calmly), and then he just sort of talked about himself. About Galbadia. About Selphie. About Bexley.

"He hit me once," Irvine said, feeling a little miserable to bring it up, but also weirdly relieved. How could you be miserable and relieved at the same time? Didn't matter. He was. That was how he felt.

"Just once?"

"I only remember the once. Guess if it was more than once, I gave the other memories away, but kept the once so I wouldn't forget what he can do."

That seemed like the sort of gambit he might have pulled with a GF. Another one of these little bargains. Weird trades. Giving away the moments he'd hated, the parts of himself he didn't like, the parts of his history he couldn't face. How messed up was that?

And Selphie. He'd given up Selphie. Why? Had they had a fight? Would he give her up if they did? How could he even trust himself with her? Selphie would never give him away, but him? He gave people away all the time.

"Tell me about that, Irvine."

So then he did. His misery and relief deepened as he did it. Misery because he felt like he was really seeing himself clearly for the first time in a long time, seeing how spotty his memory was and how, for him, all those spots were deliberately picked out. Selected. How cowardly was he, that he couldn't face up to his own memories? But then he also felt relief to share that fact with someone else. It was a dirty secret, but he didn't have to carry it alone. His friends looked to him to be the memory-keeper. Faithful Irvine, guardian of the orphanage days. Up until now, only he had known just how faithless he really was.

"They're not," he told Kadowaki. "Not faithless. They're better than that. Like Selphie, Selphie cares about her friends first, and she'd never do what I did. She keeps diaries of us. Every minute. Even the bad stuff she just makes jokes about, turns into good things, so she can remember it all and be happy about it. She's like that."

"You're dating Selphie, correct?"

"It doesn't interfere with her performance as a Seed," Irvine said quickly.

Dr. K said, "Don't worry about Selphie. Selphie has quite a good reputation. How does that make you feel?"

Selphie did have a good reputation. Or at least he hoped she did. He hoped she hadn't been dragged through the news like he had for the whole Deling City fiasco.

"Good," Irvine said. "She deserves a good reputation. She isn't me–"

"Unpack that for me," said Dr. K.

He did. He talked about how he was simultaneously a fashionable rake and a complete moral degenerate by Deling standards; about how lonely it got with not even your own memories to keep you company; about how you couldn't talk about feeling sad, not really, not without being a real pissant of a man, so for that you had to go have sex to talk to somebody; about Rill and how he couldn't remember her, but didn't remember bad things, but that didn't mean he wanted himself all over the papers; about being a sadsack but people never noticed the way they did with Quistis and Squall, because he could cover it up better, only maybe he covered it up too well, and now people thought he never felt anything at all—

"But it's not a big deal," he said, half desperately. "It's not a big deal. I can handle myself."

"Good," Dr. K. said soothingly. "Now, tell me, Irvine. Last question. Do you think anything we've talked about will interfere with the performance of your duties as a SeeD? Anything. Be honest."

"No," Irvine said automatically. Xu was already probably lining up reasons to fire him. No need to give her any more. But then he thought about it for a half-second, thought about how he'd traded away memories of the mission and who knew? Maybe they were crucial memories. Maybe they were what the team would need to figure out Caraway's endgame. And he'd just handed that information off to Siren, who might not even be able to hand it back to him, and then what? Wasn't that the definition of interfering with his work, right there?

He was a piss-poor SeeD and a piss-poor boyfriend in one, probably. He opened his mouth to confess this.

There was a ruckus just beyond the curtain. Rinoa and Xu, calling for Dr. K. Something about Squall. Irvine shot up. Dr. K tucked her clipboard in a drawer and was out in a flash. Irvine followed. In the main room of the infirmary were Rinoa, Selphie (who looked pleased to see Irvine, which left him feeling both relieved and guilty), Xu, Quistis, Zell, a medical intern at Dr. K's desk, and, weirdly, Nida. They were all clustered around the infirmary bed in the other room. Squall was on it. He wasn't moving, but he had his eyes open. He looked. Well. Terrified.

That was a really unnatural look on Squall. Irvine didn't like it.

"What happened?" Irvine demanded.

"He needs medical help," Xu snapped. "Dr. K, get to him. Quistis, in with her. Where's Vandarajan?" The intern's head shot up at her command. "Good. You've got Dincht. Dincht, get in the next room with him. He'll look you over. You three, stay here until I call for you. Someone give Kinneas the couch. He looks like he's gonna die. Nida, let's go. We have to track down Cid. I'll be back in as soon as I can, and then—" Here she leveled them all with an ominous glare. "We debrief fully."

Then she and Nida were gone.

Irvine insisted that he didn't need the couch. He hadn't slept in more than twenty-four hours and felt rubbed raw, now emotionally as well as physically exhausted. But it seemed un-chivalrous to make Rinoa and Selphie stand, especially since he'd been the idiot who'd been captured. And since he felt like he owed Selphie an apology, though he didn't know what for.

Luckily, neither Rinoa nor Selphie bought into his bluster. Although they were each significantly smaller than he was, they manhandled him onto the couch with ease. Then Selphie sat down next to him and put her arms around his head and kissed him and hit his chest a few times and said, her voice heavy with relief, "I'm so glad you're alright!"

Not a fight then. Something else.

"It was a set-up, those creeps!" Selphie said. "No offense, Rinoa, but your dad's a creep."

Rinoa didn't seem to take offense. Rinoa didn't seem to do much of anything. She was staring worriedly at the door of the room where Squall was, fingering a new silver choker she'd somehow acquired, but her gaze was tight with more than worry. Either way, there was no time to think on it. Selphie was spilling everything she'd theorized about Caraway and Tulip Ruta. Irvine added what he knew about Hobbs Worth and the conclusions he'd come to, careful not to let slip that he had given away memories of Selphie for reasons unknown.

"They're covering up this GF thing," Irvine said. "For some reason. But why?"

"Maybe it's the most powerful GF ever!" said Selphie. "Opens its mouth and boom! Apocalypse."

Somehow that seemed unlikely, but it wasn't like they had more to go on.

There was a chuckle from Rinoa. Which was weird. This was a weird time to chuckle, with her boyfriend convulsing in the next room. In her defense, it was kind of a mirthless chuckle. Her face was dead serious: plainly unhappy, tight, and a little furious.

"You wish," Rinoa muttered.

"Noooo," Selphie said, confused. "I don't. Why would I want the Galbadians to have possession of a GF like that?"

Rinoa started, stared at her. "I wasn't talking to you," she said, after a minute.

"Then who were you talking to?" Irvine said.

"Doesn't matter," Rinoa said quickly. Her face went blank. She didn't say anything else.

"I think it does matter," Selphie whispered after a minute, bringing her mouth down to Irvine's ear, a tickly, intimate thing that made Irvine's breath seize up. "She's been…weird. Ever since we left her in the library. Not really here. Almost like she's having a conversation with somebody nobody can see, and then her powers are—"

As if to punctuate this, Rinoa had begun to scowl at no one in particular.

"Fine," Rinoa declared to the open air. "Maybe I should tell them so that they can help me present my side of the story to Xu, since you think Xu's so inherently horrible and mean and likely to get angry with me—"

"She is," Irvine put in. "She will."

"Xu's a freakin' blue dragon in human form, are you kidding?" Selphie said. "Did you not see her chew Nida out?"

Rinoa, who always believed the best of people, opened her mouth as if to chastise them for saying these things about their commanding officer (who Irvine was pretty sure she didn't even like much; it was probably the principle of the thing). Then she closed it without saying anything.

"No need to be smug," she snapped. Then she was quiet for a minute, but began to look increasingly furious.

"We… Weren't…?" Irvine offered. "Being smug, I mean."

"I think that was the guy in your head," Selphie told Rinoa. "Which. Maybe you should be seen by Dr. K. Because you're being a little crazy, and now is not the time, because Squall is out of commission, and Galbadia has this GF—"

"Right," Rinoa said. "No. They don't."

Irvine and Selphie stared at her.

"I do," Rinoa said, in a small voice. "I took him. They don't have him anymore. Which is nice for them, because he's a jerk, and he can shut up now, because guess what? I'm going to tell you everything." Then she rolled her eyes and added, to no one they could see, "No, you don't get a say in whether I tell them. We voted. Angelo voted with me. Yes, Angelo gets a vote. Yeah, fine, sure. Only if they help me present it to Xu. Whatever, as my boyfriend would say.

"Oh, would you shut up about not trusting Xu already?"

So now comes the story of how Rinoa Heartilly, amateur sorceress, found herself junctioned to the worst GF she ever encountered, one who was so impossible to deal with that he effortlessly antagonized her other GFs, and so then she'd had to give those to Selphie, all while trying to keep her cool, arguing with the new GF, learning that her boyfriend was in trouble, and suspecting that her magic was going insane. This story takes place on the day before, October 19th, and begins just as she recklessly left her friends behind in the library. Rinoa would have told it earlier. But she was simply too preoccupied to tell it when the GF was monopolizing all her attention.

Monopolizing people's attention was his entire personality, in a nutshell.

So. Back to October 19th. It occurred to Rinoa, when halfway up the library stairs, that maybe she could have explained the sudden manifestation of her powers a little better. She didn't like explaining her powers.

They were often unfortunate, embarrassing developments, similar to those odd expansions and upheavals her nanny used to call "blossoming into womanhood" and Caraway used to call "for Hyne's sake, woman, surely a training bra can take care of it." But while Rinoa had sauntered into puberty determined not to let it bring her down, it was hard to feel the same way about changes that left the rest of the world convinced you were just waiting for your chance to assassinate a president or two. So upon gaining sorceress powers, for the first time in her life she opted for the Squall Leonhart method. She just kept moot. Better to say nothing than to risk capsizing the legitimacy of the new Timber government, giving a bad name to the SeeDs, and throwing more awful publicity on her friends. Just because they kept company with someone who could sprout wings, levitate heavy books, and sense magic.

That was why she'd gone invisible. She'd sensed magic. The same magic user she'd felt before; she was sure of it. Still in the library.

Her friends, tenacious SeeDs that they were, had been too busy chasing down a lead to hear a proper explanation even if she'd wanted to offer one. So she'd gone invisible. She hadn't thought it through; it had just seemed like a good idea at the time. She'd be able to sneak around the library undetected, tracking down the original source. And they would get to head off the second source, per their orders from Xu. There. Neat and tidy.

This was really a Timber Owls-style plan. That was to say, not the best under the circumstances. Rinoa could see that a few seconds into it. She hadn't been strategizing, as much as reacting to the sudden insistent magical throbbing against her skull, and maybe the equally sudden arrival of Missy Spaiss.

Missy was one of these people who you knew for years and years, but who it always seemed you'd met only yesterday for all the impact she had on you. Nice. Downright weird about the sorceress thing, but in such a kind way that Rinoa couldn't help but feel bad and want to apologize for never once in her life having given Missy more than the most cursory of second thoughts. They'd met at around age three and attended dance lessons and classes together for years, until a death in Missy's family had pulled Missy out of school for months and relegated her to class B on her return. Rinoa had written her a card out of genuine sympathy; she'd lost her mother at around the same time and Missy's pain had seemed very real. Missy had written her a thank you. And then aside from that they hadn't spoken much. Missy had, at least, never grown into one of the cattier, more passive aggressive girls at Gryphon Prep.

Now, Tulip Ruta, on the other hand.

It wasn't that surprising to discover that she might be silly enough to want to be a sorceress. Rinoa wished Irvine and Selphie luck with her, and also wished that maybe someone would knock some sense into the girl before she hurt herself. Though, to be fair, people often thought things like that about Rinoa. So. Maybe she needed to focus on the mission at hand and put Tulip Ruta out of her head. She had to admit that focusing on the Tulip side of things was making her a smidge hypocritical.

So instead she focused on the casting. Someone was casting. Find the caster. A simple SeeD mission for the world's most obvious not-SeeD.

Rinoa didn't want to be a SeeD, not really. People kept accusing her of playing at SeeD like a little girl because she never bothered to sign up and become a cadet, but how could she? In the first place: she was a sorceress. That meant she might someday become a part of SeeD's hazy objectives, might become someone they had to take down. She was a walking conflict of interest. Because who knew what the future held? Aside from Ultimecia and Time Compression.

Anyway, she didn't want to be a SeeD. Not really. She liked most of the SeeDs she'd met, so it was nothing personal. But SeeD ran like, well, a military machine. And Rinoa had opted out of that kind of thing when she'd run away from home and pledged herself to Timber's democracy. She could have continued at Gryphon, dedicated herself to Deling's aims, and taken a position as her father's aide de camp on graduation. She'd be twice as military as most SeeDs then, with four times the power over other people, given how the Galbadian military was run.

But the Galbadian military wasn't a good system. Not a moral one.

Now Garden - Garden hobbled by morally. They were in the clear, unlike Galbadia, but only because they helped more people than they hurt. Late at night, with Squall's breath deep and even and calming at her shoulder, Rinoa often reminded herself of this. SeeD put more good than evil into the world. Definitely. Probably. Sure, they fought for money. Killed people for money. Toppled governments for money. And they did mostly as they were told by their clients, no free choice or honest democracy involved. But then she'd been a client of theirs, so how hypocritical was it to judge them? And how silly and idealistic and judgmental was she, to care if they were good people on top of all this? Of course they were. Squall and Zell and Selphie and Irvine and Quistis were all good people. Probably even Xu was.

But whole Garden enterprise, in and of itself, was not inherently good. It was, in fact, somewhat crooked. Cid Kramer had ended up bilking money from a prominent Shumi and getting him trapped in an endlessly regenerating cocoon, and even if that Shumi hadn't been very nice, that didn't erase the facts. And out in the reaches of Galbadia, under Martine, the organization had made bids that ended up strengthening the Galbadian army. And, day after day, Garden handed memory-sucking GFs to children, which wasn't the worst thing in the world, except that according to Squall informing the children that they could lose their very identities was a recent policy. Eight months old, in fact. Instituted by the Commander. Due to an offhand comment made by his girlfriend about basic ethics, which had never occurred to him before as being at all relevant to how they conducted Garden business. Being, as he was, Garden-raised, and therefore not terribly concerned with ethics.

Now, maybe she was just the Commander's silly girlfriend, the way Julia Heartilly had just been the General's silly wife. But Julia wouldn't have gotten very far when it came to freeing Timberi political prisoners if she'd joined the army to do it, instead of marrying Caraway in order to reform the system. Though Rinoa hadn't sold herself to Squall to reform SeeD – she loved Squall, and ending up with Squall had just sort of happened – but if that was a neat side benefit, then she was going to take advantage of it. But if she became a cadet? Then that perk would evaporate. Because cadets didn't have much say in anything at Garden: less, in fact, than Squall's silly sorceress girlfriend did.

All this was to say that she didn't have to be a SeeD to be useful to them, or at least to the ones she loved. She could be an intrepid sorceress, and that would have to be enough. And who else but an intrepid sorceress could have detected the casting?

She followed her intrepid sorceress instincts. The stairs opened up onto landings that circled and looked out on the entry hall below; on the first landing, nothing pinged her. The GF and its current master were higher up. She moved on to the top floor. She passed the girl's lavatory with its delicate glass statues and marble fountain just outside; nothing there. Nothing in the stacks. Nothing in the individual study rooms. But there—the star ceiling reading room! There.

She was lucky she was invisible. The room had nothing to hide behind. No tall shelves. Only short ones, coming up to mid height, easy to see over; and many ornate round tables; and low, cozy seats patterned in the city colors; and huge floor-to-ceiling windows along one end that offered up a vista of the commercial district, twinkling underneath a pall of ever-present smog to the south.

Missy had said that no one was here. Missy was either misinformed, or a liar. Everyone was here. All of them, minus Missy and minus Tulip, who was apparently off in some nightclub. Alkonet, Baymoss, Hyssop, Capsicalle, Selinum, Ruta (that is, Tulip's brother, Pindar, leaning over a red book on the far table), Betel, and Calaminth. Eight perfect Deling City heirs. Along with Tulip and Missy, the only children Fury Caraway had ever let within a foot of his daughter if he could help it. And was so odd to see them again, as odd as it had been just a few days ago; they were, after all, very changed and yet still so much the same.

Fashions in Deling City were completely different now. No one did highlights or was wearing dusters anymore. Baymoss – that is, Selene, who'd been Leenie and Rinoa's best friend until Leenie had grown old enough to realize that Rinoa was a weirdo – had kept her golden hair long and flowing for all the time Rinoa had known her. She'd been impossibly vain about it. But now it was cropped short and capped by a jeweled headband with intricate detailing, almost sorceress-like in appearance. Devotion Hyssop had grown three inches, putting him above Rinoa, but still making him the shortest boy in the room without the extremely trendy platform boots he was using to stomp across to the men's room. Glory Calaminth, 'Glo' to every girl in the class but Rinoa, who'd never been granted the honor, was now wearing all black – she'd been doing the same last week – as though she were going through a particularly morbid phase, or impersonating an impoverished Dolletian monk or something. Capsicalle and Selinum, necking in the corner, seemed to be wearing variations on the same designer kilt. August Alkonet had shaved off his red curls and now went in for tatty smoking jackets. Bea Betel had pierced her lower lip; as her lips were very thin, the effect was to make it look as though the lower half of her face would soon be melting off.

Everyone a little bit changed.

But of course it was all the same old vaguely bored faces, breaking into mild humor or slight irritation occasionally, but generally sort of fixed in tedium, except when their eyes might take on an impish glow because they'd spotted something they found exciting. Generally drugs. Sometimes an attractive person. Sometimes someone to make fun of. Often all three.

What did these people, silly people who had everything handed to them, want with GFs, with magic? And which one of them had the GF?

Before she could even finish thinking the question, Pindar Ruta straightened up. He was perhaps the most interesting of the group, the one Rinoa had always gotten along with best, leagues nicer than his sister, and incredibly intelligent, erudite, and handsome, always kind to Rinoa. Though still a snob through and through. He was really the first person who'd taught Rinoa that you could have good and bad in you, since his kind nature was at odds with his staunchly pro-Deling politics.

He snapped his fingers. And then watched, with interest, as fire bloomed up. Ruta's sister wasn't involved with the GF. Ruta himself was.

"Neat," was all he said.

"Neat," Alkonet mimicked, making a face at the word.

"Well, it is," said Ruta easily. "I hope you haven't flooded Missy with too many lies."

"Just enough to send Heartilly scarpering back to Daddy," said Selene. Then, to Hyssop, who had trooped back in from the men's room, "After we spotted them chatting down below the landing, we thought it might be best to use her to draw Heartilly off. I swear Heartilly almost sensed something last week."

Poor Missy. They were manipulating her.

"Rinoa can't sense things," Ruta murmured. "She's not a guard hound. She's a nice girl. With some…additions, these days."

"She's Adel two," said Selene. "You won't be laughing when Timber and the Commander conquer us."

Ruta aimed a finger at her and her designer handbag began to smoke. Selene shrieked, trying to put it out.

"Not cool!" she said. "Stop using it! You're supposed to deliver it to the General!"

Oh. Oh, fuck. Rinoa never, ever swore, but. Fuck. Caraway was in on it. Just when she thought Caraway was maybe improving, that maybe the good in him (and it was there, faint and small and pathetic, the one small flicker that had made life with him bearable for Julia) was winning out… He did something like this. Acquired a GF. In pure violation of his agreement with Garden.

Well, come on, Rinoa, she told herself. You didn't expect him to honor that agreement, did you?

"He hasn't asked for it," said Ruta.

"Only because he's biding his time, and if you're caught with it in the meantime it's curtains for you," said Glo Calaminth, rolling her eyes. "You should have just left them to their own devices. Why get in the middle?"

"I was selected," Ruta said sharply, "And it's an honor. The rest of you should try thinking about something more than yourselves, for once." Then he snapped the book closed and stood, holding it close to him. It was a simple red-bound volume, apparently one in a series, to go by the jacket, which, when Rinoa crept closer, declared it an Unpublished Proof by some unknown. The thing seemed to glow with power. Was a book the GF's Manifest? That seemed… unwieldy. There were some GFs that were focused in buttons, and some with strange metallic totems, and some that were simply drawn from small rocks. But pebbles or metals you could fashion into jewelry, and the SeeDs often did this. And a button you could sew onto your clothes with relative ease; Zell had shown her how to do this, way back when they'd first met, with Quetzacoatl's Manifest. At the time, she might have preferred a book. A book you could read; a book was useful. It seemed strange that the SeeDs concentrated so much of their power in little trinkets instead of something useful.

But then how cumbersome would it be to carry a book into battle?

Ruta tucked the book under his arm and strode out of the room, leaving his classmates to roll their eyes at him. Rinoa followed …the men's lavatory.

Her harebrained adventures usually led Rinoa to interesting places. Like, to being ensorcelled by her boyfriend's old Matron, herself ensorcelled at the time. To being junctioned by the evil sorceress Adel. To floating around in the distant horizons of hanging off the side of the garden for fifteen minutes, while Zell ran around panicking, looking for a rope. That kind of thing. But never to, well, a bathroom. That was new. And slightly uncomfortable.

The men's lav at Gryphon was a mirror of the women's, only with elaborately painted urinals (of all things) in place of an elaborately carved powder station. Rinoa focused on the fancy dragon taps and the soft hand towels, and watched Ruta in the mirror, torn between being faithful to the mission, and giving in to her discomfort. She didn't want to watch Ruta pee. This seemed to her the ultimate joke – SeeDs on SeeD missions of course got to do thrilling, if morally questionable, SeeD things. They got to shoot, attempt to prevent missile attacks, escape prison, discover ancient sources of mystical power, plumb the depths of the Deep Sea Research laboratory. Silly non-SeeDs, when left to their own devices, got to follow boys into bathrooms. This wasn't morally concerning, but it did speak volumes about the dubious rewards of living a too-upright life. No wonder so many people went in for being jerks-for-pay instead. Jerkitude was exciting. Natural jerks got to have all the fun. While people who tried to do the right thing all the time had to get their kicks in where they could, because soon enough it would be time to discover that all the parental figures in your life were shady in the extreme and would inevitably disappoint you, and also to follow handsome boys into awkward situations that quickly dulled the glamour of knowing them in the first place.

Ruta went into the stall. Rinoa decided to wait outside. Yes, she was invisible and could have poked her head over the stall walls without him knowing. But. Ew. So much about this situation was disgusting, and not even excitingly disgusting like facing down blobras or chomping on massive moon beasts or suffering from poison status effects and leaking green goo out of your ears. Because all that had been horrible, but Rinoa had done it without complaint and not even minded. She'd been on a mission to save the world from an evil future sorceress and her sort-of-ex. That made all the gross moments kind of extraordinary. She could look on them with placid acceptance.

Whereas this was just embarrassing.

Well. No. No, she told herself. It wasn't. She was doing this for SeeD, or at least to keep Caraway from striking out against her friends. She wasn't particularly committed to SeeD; the issue of which GFs went where was one that had little meaning for her, as long as everyone involved understood the risks and as long as the power of the GFs wasn't used for evil. But that was just it. Caraway could hardly use power for good. She knew him. He was the kind of man who could justify the use of excess force to dampen a rebellion he himself had helped ignite. He'd done it a million times. And GFs were high-profile excessive force now. Ever since Garden had come clean about their group's involvement and heroism during the Ultimecia War (Rinoa might have had a hand in that; she wouldn't lie to the public, not even if secrecy would have made their lives easier), military groups across the world had become very interested in Garden's methods. GFs, forgotten in the wake of the Adel war, considered a passing fad of previous decades, became again premier and cutting edge military technology, became something nearly everyone wanted. Caraway could hardly be an exception, and now he'd tasked Pindar Ruta, of all people, with holding onto a new GF, a new source of power, for him.

Which wasn't a crazy scheme. It was actually fairly clever. Ruta was one of Deling City's untouchable beings. No one would dare apprehend or arrest him, not without making a lot of noise and upsetting a lot of powerful people, so much noise and so many powerful people that was probably not worth the trouble. Gryphon kids like Ruta weren't accountable to anyone, not to the populace, even. They weren't like their parents, power-brokers with a duty to the government. They were hardly adults yet – a weird thought, given that they were the same age as Rinoa's friends, and Rinoa's friends couldn't help but be adults at this point – just coddled, wealthy, lucky, spoilt creatures, children who had yet to decide their paths in life, who would take the reins to the city in time, but not right now. Right now they were simply kids from good families. Wild, but always given leeway. Always accepted. Respected for the sheer breadth of the opportunities they had. Their foibles written off or quietly tucked away. Their lives shrouded from public view.

Well. Clearly Ruta had seen a path forward to adulthood: Caraway. And that path would be a tangled and ugly one, Rinoa was sure, but then it also seemed fitting. Ruta had always liked the romance of a United Galbadia, and that was Caraway's chief banner. And Caraway had always liked Ruta, who he found more sensible than Rinoa's other not-friends.

"So many of those kids you hang out with haven't got the brains Hyne gave a geezard," he would say, irritated, on those nights he managed to be home in time for supper (rare, but never treasured).

"Yes, well, you won't let me hang out with anyone else," Rinoa would say sweetly.

Hyne. She almost missed sparring with the old anacondaur. She felt a spike of pain at the thought. She loved him, in her own way. But more and more she was beginning to realize that the best way to love him would be in the same way he expressed his love for her. By penning him in on every side, limiting his influence. She'd always been grateful that Deling City naming customs tied her to her mother instead of to Caraway, but the truth was, she was half Caraway. She had a streak of old Fury in her too. And it came out when it came time to deal with people she didn't like very much. She had a tendency fight them in large ways and small, cut them short with a smile, pick and pick and pick at them softly, clandestinely, teasingly, but firmly. Until they either changed their ways or admitted defeat. This was the old spy method, the Fury Caraway method. And, for most of her life, Rinoa had been turning that exact method on Fury Caraway. Because she loved him. But she didn't like him.

Behind the stall door, she heard the rustling of pages.

Ruta was reading. On Deling's own bowl. Oh, Hyne. Obnoxiously banal had a new name, and it was 'Rinoa Heartilly's daily life.' Well. She had to get that book, so maybe she should just shut up and put up and do it. It was better than waiting for Ruta to get bored with his bathroom reading. She didn't remember him as especially studious, but he was smart, and waiting around for him to finish could take hours. And hopefully the book would cover any of his bits, right? And it wasn't like she would be peeping for peeping's sake. She was just trying to get the lay of the land, to figure out how to take the GF with her. The magic it gave off was all-consuming, brilliant, bright. If she could junction the thing, she knew, from experience, it would just meld with her own magic and it would stop bothering her. But as long as someone else had it and was casting, it would needle at her constantly, and this was by far the worst GF she'd encountered in this respect. It was giving her a headache just to be near it.

She crossed into the stall next to Ruta's, trying to make as little noise as possible. She quietly pulled down the seat, then stood on it and gingerly peeked over the edge of the partition between his stall and hers, holding her breath. Unnecessary. He wasn't even doing anything. He was completely clothed, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, seated on the top seat with his back against the porcelain tank, his long legs crooked, his feet planted on the stall door. He was lazily rifling through the unpublished proof. He held tightly to one side of it and with his other hand very unconcernedly sparked up a small fire to light his cigarette, which seemed silly until Rinoa realized he'd chosen the stall just below the biggest vent, evidently looking for a quiet place and a smoke.

It wasn't like she could blame him, with the company he'd been keeping. But she still needed that book. How to get it?

Levitation was useless. It would draw far too much attention. So would flying over the stall and just plucking the book out of his hands. She supposed she could speak pre-Ancient Centran at him, but that would have little effect and might just make him think the bathroom was haunted. Would he drop the book and scurry away in fright? Probably not. That was for children's detective stories, not real life. Maybe she could mute him? Without his voice, he wouldn't be able to cast as effectively. He was bound to realize that something was wrong then, though, and maybe he would blame it on the GF and conveniently drop it somewhere in order to investigate, but that seemed a long shot. Probably he would instead realize something was up and bring half the library staff down on her head.

So her sorceress powers were completely useless here. As usual.

What would a SeeD do? Engage him in battle, probably. Only she didn't really want to hurt Ruta, and he was more useful alive as a definitive link to Caraway. And anyway, she didn't know what his GF could do. There was no guarantee it wasn't like Eden and really really powerful; in fact, the strength of his casting suggested that it was a doozy of a GF. So there was no guarantee she'd win the fight, anyway, especially on her own. No. She'd have to think outside the box for this to work.

Ruta took a drag of his cigarette. Then, balancing the book on his knees, he quickly snapped it shut, keeping his hand firmly pressed on the front cover. When he lifted the cover again, Rinoa could see why. He'd been hiding something between the cover and the frontispiece. Silver. A chain. A necklace of some sort. He drew it out and crouched over it, letting the book fall to the floor.

The book wasn't the Manifest. This was.

Only Ruta's head was blocking her view of it. He was talking to it.

"Don't think, for a second, that I trust you," he told it furiously. "What you've done to this city is a disgrace. You'll be serving Deling City from this day forward. It'll give some meaning to your life. Consider yourself lucky."

Ah. She'd totally forgotten how he had this mix of pompous and melodramatic to him. He was a nice person, but the speeches he could produce, simply when offering a rebuttal to her in class, often came off like a combination of Seifer at his craziest and Squall at his most uncharacteristically devoted. In fact, she could probably credit Ruta with immunizing her against boys who had slightly bizarre characters and a lot of hidden passion. He'd had so many quiet yet intense arguments with her that she had come to find that sort of thing a little charming instead of just obnoxious. Good times.

"So not presume to tell me my own orders," Ruta continued stiffly. "In order to keep you safe – which I'm doing for Deling City, not for you - I plan to keep you with me at all times. SeeD seems to be poking about—" he broke off, as though the GF was saying something to him, which it probably was. "Well. That gives us a common aim, then," he said, "Assuming you're being truthful."

Then he sat and held the Manifest in his hand for a moment. Rinoa soundlessly dropped down to the floor, where she peeked under the partition this time, trying to get a view that wasn't blocked by Ruta's head. First she saw the book - The Nature of the Sorceress; well, there was something that would have come in handy last week, if only Ruta hadn't apparently been monopolizing it – and then the tangle of Ruta's long legs, and then…

No.

The Manifest looked very familiar. Too familiar. Rinoa freaked out for a second and shoved her head back into her stall, bumping it on the paper dispenser and muffling a shriek of pain.

Ruta straightened up. "Is someone there?" he asked.

Well. Yes. But it was a public restroom, though not exactly open to Rinoa, so whatever. She was about to duck her head under again to get a second look, cursing her stupidity, when Ruta straightened up and picked up the book. Then she heard the jingle of metal, and he was opening the door of the stall and striding out. She felt him spark up another fire spell – what, had he only ever encountered one draw point in his entire life? – and peered anxiously around the door of her stall to see him.

He was wearing it. The Manifest. The really familiar one, which belonged on an entirely different melodramatic mess of a young man, and which she had – she now realized – sort of assumed she'd never see again. She'd never had any idea it was a Manifest. Or that it had been snatched from its original owner. Or even if she would have wanted to see it again, had it found its way to her around the right throat, in the hands of the right person.

She did know that it made her a little angry to find Ruta wearing it, all of a sudden. It wasn't his. And it wasn't her father's, either. At the very least, it should have gone to SeeD, or to its owner's friends or something. If something had happened to him – and something had to have happened, if he'd had a GF wrenched from his grasp after having kept its existence a secret all throughout the war, which he must have done, if that choker was a Manifest – then… Well. The something that had happened to him ought to have come at the hands of the people who had once meant something to him. That was a very short list, Rinoa knew. Maybe her and maybe Cid and maybe, like, two other people. But the list definitely didn't include Pindar Ruta. Nor Fury Caraway.

She didn't quite know what she was doing, or why; she simply knew that she was very, very angry all of a sudden. And when she'd been a normal girl, strong emotions like anger had usually led her to do harebrained things. Now that she was a sorceress, she didn't need to do harebrained things. Her anger made her very will a reality.

Ruta's book flew out of his grasp. He dropped into a crouch. "Who's there?" he called again, summoning up flame with both hands and looking about wildly.

No point to that. The book was way ahead of him. It flew at his face – Rinoa sent it there – and then, purely because she was pissed off, it smacked him once on each cheek. He stumbled back. She floated the book up and, with alarming speed, dropped it on his head. It was a nice, thick proof, so she only had to do this six or seven more times to knock him out.

His flame sputtered out. Rinoa strode forward and grabbed the book, then yanked the choker off his neck.

"I've got you," she told the GF inside. "I've got you. It's okay. I know this is a long shot, but do you remember what… What's happened to your master?"

She curled her will around it. That was all it took to junction: proximity and will, and the will part had started to come ridiculously easily to her after she'd absorbed Edea's powers. So she felt the GF settle in her head next to the others. It was extremely powerful. Not as faded a presence as Alexander or Leviathan. Almost human in how bright and alive it felt.

But it didn't answer her at first.

"What's your name?" Rinoa said, wanting answers. "Were you junctioned to Seifer Almasy? You were, weren't you?"

Listen, said a very, very familiar voice. Get out of here first. Find some out of the way spot. Not your dad's house, Rinoa. And then… Then we've gotta talk.

Rinoa dropped the book on Ruta's head (again) in shock.