"And the Agency never suspected a thing?" Branden asked.

Kardeni shrugged. "If they did, I never heard about it." She tucked some hair behind her ears. "Besides, we took precautions. Mr. Stenman and Mr. Hoyer never used Andrew's name directly — they used mine. Memos for him were memos to me. When they needed to specifically refer to Andrew, and not myself, they put an apostrophe right before my name." She began trembling. "It never occurred to me how much of a liability that was."

Branden flicked his wrist, and one of the memos he found in Lantro's office popped up above his palm. He raised his eyebrows. Glanced at Jenny. "She's right. There's an apostrophe in front of her name at the top, but not at the bottom."

"And Lantro stored it all inside his office," said Jenny. She gestured at the message floating above Branden's palm. "You know, I'm really starting to wonder what Lantro's deal is. Because you're not the fall guy for Stenman and Hoyer — you're the fall-guy for Lantro. And given what I've heard about your relationship, either that makes no sense, or he's a really horrible person."

Kardeni's eyes narrowed. "Andrew would never do anything to hurt...!"

"Oh, because he made you a little toy train?" Branden said, almost mockingly. "Because he ran your errands for you? Or maybe he wasn't running your errands for you. Maybe that was an excuse for him to run off and do the real work inside the Battle TARDIS." Shook his head. "He's not a lovesick puppy, Zeera. He'd turn on you in a heartbeat!"

"But...!"

"If he really wanted to help you," Branden said, gesturing with his hand so the holographic evidence blew into Kardeni's face, "he'd have destroyed all this stuff. Instead, he gathered it together and hid it in his office. So who was he expecting to see it?"

Kardeni swatted at the holographic evidence around her, frantically trying to get it away like it could taint her if it touched her. Jenny, annoyed, shot Branden a look — and with a guilty flick of his wrist, the holograms vanished.

Kardeni shuddered. For a little while, she said nothing.

Then, fidgeting with her crucifix necklace, "It was the religion thing that did it."

Jenny frowned. "Sorry?"

"I knew everything we were doing was illegal, of course," Kardeni said. "I told them, when this company got started, that I'd accept illegal, but I wouldn't do anything immoral." She sighed. "Thing was, it had been so hard for us for so long. Finally I was happy, my family was happy, and, for the first time, I could see a future where everything turned out okay. I didn't want to find anything immoral. So when Andrew and I turned the Battle TARDIS into a temporal vault and the company started enslaving, culling, and manipulating sentient creatures — I found a way to justify it to myself. There was always a rationalization I could make — a line in the sand I could draw. And when we crossed that line — there was always another line I could draw, a few steps away from it."

Jenny and Branden exchanged a look.

"But then the Patasi evolved," said Kardeni. "And the only way to control them was to implant a false religion into their culture." She shuddered. "And I couldn't look past it. I couldn't think about anything else. It was gnawing at me, all the time."

Jenny frowned.

So did Branden. "But even before that, you were already enslaving and even killing...!"

"Yes, but religion is sacred," said Kardeni. "God is sacred. Belief in God is what makes us strive to be better than we are. It's what brings us together as a community, and allows us to care for a stranger as if they were a brother." She shook her head. "The thought of making up some false religion as a way to enslave and brainwash people... it was abhorrent. Obscene! And then, one Sunday, when I was in church, I suddenly realized... I'm going to Hell."

No one said anything.

"And as soon as I thought it," Kardeni continued, "it was just always there. Every time I did anything." She clasped her head in her hands. "I'm going to Hell. Nothing can make up for this. What I've done is so bad... so horrible..." She sucked in a sharp breath. "And that's when the justifications and rationalizations all started to crumble into dust. I started to realize I was in as much moral debt now as I had been in financial debt before. I started to talk it over with Andrew. He always found a way to calm me down and convince me to stay loyal. If I'd still been having those daily discussions with him now, I might never have told either of you anything. If he hadn't..."

She trailed off.

Branden sucked in a sharp breath. "That time you got poisoned — it was Lantro, wasn't it? He did it."

Kardeni didn't answer. She just glanced around herself again.

"He thought you were going to spill the beans," Branden reasoned, "so he poisoned you to make sure you wouldn't talk."

Still, no answer.

"That's why Stenman and Hoyer won't let you near him — they're worried he'll kill you for real, next time!" said Branden. "And you won't go near him yourself because you're terrified of him."

Kardeni just shrugged.

"Or maybe..." Jenny suddenly ran over to the door and spun back around, squinting at the spot that Kardeni had been nervously glancing at since they got here. "Maybe that's not what happened at all. But Stenman and Hoyer came to the same conclusion you did, Branden — and Lantro never negated it."

"No, Branden's right," Kardeni insisted. "That was what happened. Andrew..."

Jenny sprinted over to the little light that Kardeni had been nervously glancing towards. "I wondered why you had been hiding in this corner and hadn't bothered to close the door. You can't see it from the door." She revealed the light to Branden.

The light was labeled 'Vault Retrieval Request.'

"Thing is, Zeera — if you had suddenly realized Lantro was a psychopath who wanted to poison you," said Jenny, "you wouldn't be risking life and limb to retrieve him from the vault the very second you get his signal."

Jenny stepped in front of the light, blocking Kardeni's view — and Kardeni leapt to the side to keep it in sight.

Jenny smiled, her point made.

"I think your ending up in the hospital was an accident," Jenny hypothesized. "You told Lantro something that made him so panicked, he reached for whatever was on-hand — a drug designed for the creatures you evolved on Galia-4, not for humans. But the underlying intent of the drug still worked, and it made you furious at him, and that's why you haven't talked to him for the past two months."

The light began flashing. Kardeni lunged for the controls beside it — but Jenny caught her by the wrist before she could push them.

"The office rumors are true, aren't they?" Jenny said, quietly. "You told him you were pregnant, and were planning to keep the child. So he put something into your coffee, to make the problem 'go away'."