It was like seeing your favourite work of art scribbled over with marker-pen. Like someone had taken something precious and defaced it. He'd had thoughts back when he had been young and stupid, like pretty much everyone else. There hadn't been a single man – and some women – in Balamb that hadn't met her and wondered what their chances would have been with her. He hadn't been as…dedicated…to that cause as the Trepes but he had weighed the odds, he'd admit that. Then he'd grown up, and fought with her and laughed and saved the world together with her, and he'd learned who they really were. Quistis had always been the rock of the group. She'd reigned him in when he'd gone too far and helped keep him centred when he needed a little guidance. In return he'd been there when she had needed a helping hand or a kind word. He'd been just a little immature and she had been a patient older sister. Now he looked at that person and nothing of her stared back at him. The women he'd fought beside, the big sister he'd ran to when Seifer had teased him just a little too much, that person was gone. She had been replaced with something hard and dark and cold, and he had no idea how to act towards it.

"Don't call me that."

He had promised himself he would try if he got the chance, try to get her back. But even as he spoke he knew it wasn't going to work. Even though he'd seen the transmission like the rest of the world he had hoped somewhere in his mind that it would be as simple as talking to her. No luck. Maybe Rinoa could have done it, or Squall. But not him. "Quisty I-"

"My name is Imalia!" she screamed back at him, blue sparks flying as she hissed the words at him. He could feel the energy crackling in the air like static.

He risked a glance at Raijin, whose shrug conveyed the big man's words without any sound needed: Now what do we do?

They'd taken the chance. Time Compression had swept across them like a wave and when they had broken the surface they knew this was the best time they'd ever have, and they had been right. The plan had worked perfectly, but now that the tiger was in the cage they could see how long and sharp those claws were. Fujin had tried to get around his stubborn request but he had insisted on speaking his mind, hoping that mere words could bring her around, and now he realised he didn't know what exactly to do next. He'd had some vague idea of restraining her down here in the dark, maybe trying to break through this fake thing to the Quisty inside. He hadn't expected…this. "We just want to talk."

"You'll get nothing from me, SeeD," Qui- Imalia snarled.

"It's Zell. My name's Zell, Qusity. You remember, right? We met in Garden, you-"

"I remember I woke up one day from a fake life and learned people like you killed everything I care about." She looked at him with some combination of pity and hate. "God, Dincht. What did you think you were going to do down here? You thought a few little lies would turn me back into your tame mage-girl?" Sparks flew through the air and behind him Zell heard a hiss of pain as one of them hit a man's hand and burned.

"No, Quist- no.-" He didn't know how to go on. "I'd never lie to you."

She sneered. "All you've ever done is lie. I could kill you all here, right now. You couldn't possibly stop me." She looked around at the group, the other resistance members. "I guess if you let an infection lie long enough it'll spread." She raised her voice to the others in the room. They had been all he could gather at such short notice and they stared at her with faces ranging from fear to shock to their own hatred. They didn't look at her and see Quistis Trepe, SeeD and saviour of the world. They saw a sorceress leader that ground them into the dirt and acted like they should be thankful. "I don't know what you've been doing with this man, but put down your weapons now and we'll show a little mercy. You all felt it, what we're trying to do. We'll finish this work, count on it." She met their gazes one by one. "When we're in a new world, what do you think happens to people too stuck in the old one to move on?"

Zell heard indrawn breath but didn't want to look around for fear of what he'd see. He heard a whimper from one of the younger ones, and a snarl from an older one a she told him to keep his gun up. She hasn't convinced them. Quisty would never have done it like this, never have tried to make them listen because of fear.

"Drop your weapons now or in the Archangel's name I'll kill you all right here and now," Imalia said, and her eyes were flat blue murder.

"She's gonna do it," Raijin said, and shook his head. Either in regret or fear. He spoke one word. "Fu."

The thing wearing his sister's skin smiled like a shark and took one step forward, before Zell reached behind his back and pulled down the mask dangling there. "I'm sorry Quisty."

"You will be," she replied coolly. "When we-"

Zell watched as the bags suspended from the ceiling burst as Fujin's small charges popped them like balloons, and the heavy mist exploded out of them and blanketed the room. Those too slow to get their masks on fell coughing and scrabbling at their throats as the gas forced its way in. The room was chaos as suddenly the tiger broke loose, and the group of resistance members suddenly found themselves blinded. Hadn't expected this… He caught a shape whirr past him almost faster than he could see as Fujin leapt forward, too slow, as the sparks spun and whirled and Imalia – Quisty! – turned into a blue outline wrapped in the fog. He took a step back as something cool raced past his head, its passage making the dust particles whip around him, and he smelled something burning. It might have been his hair. "Quisty please!"

The blue shape rounded on his voice and Zell flew himself away as he realised she was aiming for his voice in the choking blinding fog. An instant after he did so he heard a scream, as someone slower than him was speared on those blue beams of force. "My name is Imalia! IMALIA!"

He wanted to shout something, to try and break through that shell again and see if truly there was anything of his big sister underneath, but before he could step forward a hand wrapped itself around his neck and Raijin dragged him backwards to the door, and escape.

"Sorry Zell, we gotta go!" Raijin said, as he picked up his comrade and hoisted him away from the conflict.

"I'LL FIND YOU!" a sapphire ghost screeched in the fog, and then Zell felt cool air brush against his cheek as Raijin slammed the escape route shut behind them, and light assaulted his senses. As Raijin threw him off his shoulder and the three started running away from the chaos still happening behind them, Zell's thoughts were occupied with a single memory he couldn't shake. An image from after one fight out of thousands, when she had turned to him and idly picked a stray piece of rubble from his shoulder like cleaning lint from a uniform. It was the clearest memory he had of Quistis in his mind, and he wanted to keep it, in case there wouldn't be another.

Take care of yourself Zell.

"That was intense."

Zell could have punched him. "Goddamnit Raijin! I-"

Fujin stopped him short before he could go on. "No, correct. What were you going to do Zell? Were you going to reason with her while she was tearing you apart? I remember Quistis Trepe. That was not her."

He wanted to slap her just for the words but he knew she was right. "God damnit god damnit! Did we get anything?"

"I wish I could say so. I'm sorry Zell."

Fujin sat down next to him on the back street. They were reasonably safe. Dollet was an old city, honeycombed with alleys and streets that went nowhere and forgotten old buildings. They'd built up their little resistance under the floorboards piece by piece. Not everyone was happy with how things were. There were enough sons that had lost a father to speaking up against the cultists – Zell refused to call them the Faithful – or parents that had lost a child to zealotry to give them eyes across most of the city. They'd been ferrying everything they had to Deling, and from Deling to Esthar. He liked to think it was helping but on dark nights he wondered whether he wasn't just sitting the entire thing out. Today's plan had been their first attempt at real action, and Zell had had to coax Fujin and Nida every step of the way. He wanted to be doing something. The first time he had seen that transmission out of Timber he had known he had to take action or damn himself as a coward. Now he had, and it had been for nothing. "We have to- what's that?"

Raijin looked up, and without saying anything picked Zell back up and threw him into the nearest corner before running into one himself. Fujin was as quick on the uptake. "Inside," she hissed, and took cover just as it arrived.

He couldn't have said exactly what it was. Something light and almost not there seemed to swing across the street where they had been standing. Something in the air became not right for just one moment, and Zell could have swore the space between him and Fujin on the opposite side of the street became thicker somehow. The moment passed, and he risked a glance out from the corner to see something just a little darker than the sky hovering above the city. A web of gray lights, and a small black shape suspended in the middle. He breathed a sigh of relief and a curse at the same time as it moved away.

"We have to go before she looks deeper," Fujin said. Zell nodded back, and the three of them moved off into the under-web of the city like cockroaches trying to evade the exterminator searching for them. She travelled through buildings as they ran, keeping off the air. Sometimes they'd feel something, just little prickes on their heads or the hair of their arms stand up like they were tasting static, but every time they'd pause and hope and the feeling would pass. However good Almas Jordin was she wasn't quite good enough yet, and they made good time through the city back to the bolt-hole they called home.

People looked out for them as they travelled. Some met them on corners and handed over things and moved away quickly. Fujin made them detour several times as they looked in on small enclaves of resistance. Some were there and grateful for the attention, others were burned-out ruins filled with the stench of roasted meat. Zell could feel prickling at the base of his neck and thought about something furious behind them in the maze, trying to catch their scent. If she was hunting them down from the ground he wanted to be elsewhere as fast as possible. Finally one of the nameless men that walked past them dropped something into Fujin's hand that drew her up short. "In here." Without waiting for their acknowledgement she ducked into the first abandoned house they found, and they followed.

"What's wrong?" Zell asked, wondering what the worst could be. When first he and Nida had arrived at Dollet that list had been pretty small. When Fujin and Raijin had arrived and filled the pair in the list had become a little bigger. After Timber it had become a very long list.

Instead she smiled. Just a small one, but to the two men after weeks of nothing but stony-faced resoluteness it was a shock. "A visitor."

"Who?"

She stood and led them back out again. "Almost correct."

It took him a moment, and he almost stopped in his tracks when he realised Fujin's wordplay. "No way."

"Let's go meet her."

She looked like hell. There was really no other way to describe it. The neat and prim person he remembered had been replaced with something tattered and torn. She'd had to grow her hair out and it hung badly on her shoulders, clearly cut with a blade of some kind where it blocked her view and not at all otherwise. The SeeD uniform he knew her in was now some motley collection of cannibalised leather and cloth. he could hear something clinking when she shifted her weight, and wondered what she was hiding underneath the thin cloak. She had liked small edged weapons, he vaguely remembered.

"Hello Zell," Xu said. Her voice almost broken when she said the words, like she had gone a long period of time without speaking.

"Ms Tyynes," Fujin said, sparing him a need to respond. "You've come a long way."

She blinked and her gaze shifted to the other woman. "Yes." She seemed to realise that more was expected of her. The words came out one by one, like they were being teased from her. "I…I came as soon as I could." Even her tone was different. A far cry from the scathing personality he remembered from Balamb.

Fujin seemed to be considering something for a moment, then spoke. "Everyone out please." The room cleared in an instant as those curious at the arrival in their base of the skittish and dishevelled woman went back to their work. Finally the room was empty apart from Fujin, Raijin, Zell, Nida and the new arrival. Fujin walked up to Xu and put a hand on her shoulder. "Xu, are you alright?"

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You need to get some rest."

"I need to find Qu-"

Fujin's voice went from soft to harsh in an instant. "You can't help her when you're a wreck. For Hyne's sake woman what were you doing out there?"

"I-" And she told them. Zell listened with a deepening horror and pity as she told them what she had been doing. She painted a grim picture of a woman transformed by grief and anger into an avenging spirit, wandering across the countryside and doing all the things her rational mind had spent years screaming at her not to do. How eventually the blood-haze had faded and drawn back to reveal bloodstained hands and nobody there to wipe them clean, and a shame so great she didn't know how to turn back. So she had kept going, from one town to the next as one desperate and terrified cultist gave the name of the next one a little higher up the food-chain, until eventually she found herself waking up from emotionless combat to find not scouts and squad-leaders dead at her feet but priests and bishops and commanders. Finally one night she had walked tattered boots into a new town, one of the bigger ones along the plains of Galbadia, and found a bar there with a working screen. She had caught the Faithful's transmission, seen that face looking out at the screen. The woman she loved replaced with something hard and angry and evil. Xu's anger had simply run out, and been replaced with nothing. She had walked - walked! – from that nameless town, all the way to Dollet. Simple deduction, combined with the information she remembered Fujin sending to Galbadia and a hard night's search, had brought her the rest of the way from the city gates to the resistance' doorstep.

Zell's mind wandered halfway between wanting to sit down and feel sick, and tell her she'd done a hell of a job. Xu had carved a path across half the continent, taking down Cultist cells as she went. She might have stopped a dozen or more towns falling to them, purely by walking in and killing everyone involved. She'd walked across half a world hunting them down. The scope of what she told him was staggering.

Fujin had no such problem deciding how she felt. With deliberation and all the time in the world, she reached a hand back and slapped Xu across the face, as hard as she could. She spoke calmly but forcefully. "That was for the post you abandoned, and the lives you stole. I can't forgive what you've done, but I don't have the time or the energy to guard you while we fight a war – the real war you left behind."

Raijin shifted nervously. "Fujin…"

She ignored him. "A SeeD commander can help us, but we don't need a rabid dog. Xu Tyynes has friends here, a random killer doesn't. I don't know if I can forgive you for what you've done, but right now we don't have much of a choice. You need to decide who you are before we let you back in."

"I know who I am," the woman whispered, so quietly Zell almost didn't hear.

"Then get some sleep Tyynes, and we'll see what tomorrow brings us."

"Fujin had a point you know."

They were on the roof, staring out over the city. They'd spend the rest of the day recovering from the failed ambush and mulling over their new recruit. Finally Fujin had declared they would get no work done when everyone was about to crash from their own fatigue poisons, and had sent them to sleep. On a hunch Zell had climbed the stairs to the top floor, and had guessed right. Xu was wrapped in blankets after her old clothing given up as useless rags, and she watched the lit buildings on the mountain with endless patience. He watched in silence as she stared out over the city, in the direction of the palace. "I know."

He wondered what it was like to love someone that much. He had his mom and the rest of his adopted family, but he still wondered. He'd been brought up by that family and by SeeD to know that the right thing to do…was to do right. She'd been brought up that way too, but still she'd thrown it all away. He wondered whether one day he might find something or someone to believe in that much, to turn him into a raging berserker. He couldn't imagine it. Zell wasn't like the other Orphanage Gang, and he knew that somehow it set him apart from the rest. He'd been happy with the family he had. Either his original parents hadn't needed or hadn't been able to keep him, but if it was the first he couldn't work up the energy to be angry at people he would never know and if it was the second he was grateful for them for putting him in the orphanage that had led him to his future. He'd seen Squall and Rinoa and Quistis and the others all wrestle with their own pasts, and simply hadn't known how to help. He'd asked Selphie once and she had had the same answer. We'll try to help if they ask but…I don' think this is something we can help 'em with Zell. He'd known she was right.

"I'm sorry Xu. Me and Nida both."

Her lips twitched in a ghost of a smile. "You've nothing to apologise for Zell. Certainly not to me."

"We made it worse. Let you down." If he could have gone back in time, grabbed the shoulders of his younger self as he rushed out of Balamb with the stolen GF and brought him screeching to a halt he'd have done it. Everything had seemed to obvious back then. A daring rescue mission and a secret weapon, a story he could use to get free drinks for years. Instead he'd let his impulsive childish self drag them further down into the hole. Lost a being of unfathomable power and what's worse he'd dragged Nida with him too.

She shook her head, still staring out at the "I think we both could have done things differently."

"You can say that again." A pause. "We'll find a way to get her back."

"I can't think like that Zell," she said, and the despair in her voice was heartbreaking. She didn't turn up look at him as she spoke, and he didn't want to go up and look at her. There was something obscene about it. Xu was Garden's rock, he didn't want to see it crumble. "All those weeks I wondered, how I was going to do it? They named names one after another and I thought eventually I'd find one big enough to…God I don't know. To bargain with, maybe. But then I saw her on the screen looking and sounding like that and I…all of it was for nothing."

He stood, sat back down next to her and put a hand over his shoulder. "We'll find a way. There has to be one," he said, and tried to put into it all the certainty and maturity he'd spent his life avoiding.

She leaned into his side. When she spoke he could barely hear her over the breeze. "What if we have to kill her? I couldn't take it. She looked so cold. Like ice."

Something rattling around in his skull detached finally, like a tooth that was loose enough to worry him but not loose enough to come out. It dropped into his mind, and into view. Like ice. "Shiva." She didn't say anything, and he wondered whether he dared go on. Finally he decided; what the hell, he had nothing to lose. "Xu, you know about GFs, right?"

She chuckled. "A little." She'd taught the classes.

"When we junction 'em, when we let them into our head. They live in the brain, where we keep memories. They live there and the push out what was there before, that's why we forgot things when we use them." An idea was forming in his mind. He had no idea how dumb it was, or how stupid he might sound. He said it anyway. "They take them away, right? What do they do with them?"

She looked up into his eyes. "Yes, and?" It took a moment, but she got his point and all the sleep fell out of her eyes like she had been dunked in cold water. "You think…"

He brushed her off and stood. "I don't know Xu, I don't know. But it's worth a shot right? Quisty thinks she's someone else, she thinks whatever that bastard Aimsland made her think? Well what if he used Shiva to take all her old memories away first?"

"What if Shiva still has them?"

She blinked as if absorbing the information into whatever computer banks she held in her cavernous mind. When she spoke next it was with her old voice, the voice of command. "Call Fujin."

He obeyed.

Fujin rubbed her eyes and tried to focus on the pair as Zell told them what he thought. "It…it could be." She looked at Xu. "You're the expert. You believe it could be possible?" Zell could see her thoughts: It might be that simple?

He raven-haired woman nodded emphatically. "I do."

That was all the encouragment Zell needed. "We need to get her - get Shiva - back."

"How?" Fujin asked.

He had and Xu had talked about it while the resistance member they'd called had went to wake Fujin up. He'd suggested some things and she had shot most of them down, but a couple of his ideas had stayed standing and she had built and added onto it until there was almost a ghost of a plan there. He told one to Fujin now and hoped it would be good enough.

Fujin just stared at the two for a second. She had aura now, an aura she hadn't had back in Deling. For most of her life Fujin Satomi had played second-fiddle to Seifer, the good underling. Then she had worked for Kiros, Squall, a host of others. Now here she was cut off from the rest of her organisation and she was thriving. She looked like a commander. "It could work," she said. "Maybe."

He breathed a sigh of relief and didn't care how obvious it was. He opened his mouth to speak but Fujin raised a hand, and he shut it again.

Fujin looked between the two. "If we would do this, when would be the best time?"

"Today. Right now." He paused for a second as he saw the bleary stare in Fujin's eyes. He was probably sporting a look much the same. "Alright, tomorrow. That Compression has throw everything off their game, we need to use that." He hadn't been affected by it, and neither had anyone else among the resistance inner circle. It seemed like military training helped combat the distortion and mental stress of the thing. That or Zell's experiences with the previous Sorceress-induced world-crushing magic event had gave him a higher tolerance to it.

Fuji rubbed her eyes and pondered silently, for long enough that Zell couldn't bear the tension. Finally she looked back up, towards the others. "Well?"

Raijin nodded. "Hell yes."

Nida did the same. "It's worth a shot. What else do we have?"

Fujin turned to at Xu and Zell saw the flash of tension there. "Will you be okay?"

Xu stared at the other woman and this time there was no trace of the purposeless thing that had walked into their hideout. "I can do it." She took a breath. "I won't let SeeD down again, I swear it."

Fujin nodded. A quick glance sent a nameless soldier towards her with a rolled-up piece of paper, and she spread it out on the floor between them. It was a map, a map of something Zell recognised well enough. "This is the palace." She looked between Raijin, Zell, Nida and finally Xu. All of them were thinking of the reality of that paper map. What was inside those walls. A counterfeit god and a crazed knight. A mad cultist prophet and his hired knives. It wouldn't be easy. "Sleep tonight. Plan tomorrow," Fujin said

"Then we go in."