It happened rather suddenly. She had reached a plateau in the last few weeks, where she was neither getting better nor worse. Then suddenly she wouldn't wake up at all. Her temperature shot through the roof, and she started hallucinating. At least, that's what Jules Krace thought they were, hallucinations. He immediately sent word through various channels, telling the Rebels what had happened and asking that the five boys and Mike come over at nightfall. Then came the long hours, sitting by her side at the bed, waiting for night to come and watching his daughter fade away.

A few hours before sunset she woke up, in a way. She'd been muttering to herself for several hours, but suddenly she reached out to him. "Daddy?"

He frowned. He didn't remember the last time she'd called him Daddy, if ever. She must be still hallucinating. "Daddy, please hold me," she murmured, not opening her eyes. He immediately moved to the bed and cradled her in his arms, gently stroking her head. Hands that he'd seen her use to bend steel hung limply at her side. Jules remembered reading somewhere, and tears again sprung to his eyes.

"Daddy, I'm dying, aren't I?" Rina asked, opening her eyes a little. They were glazed from the fever, but he saw a hint of her usual self in them.

He found he couldn't answer, but managed to nod his head. She began to cry a little, sobbing into the cloth of his shirt. "I don't want to die, Daddy. I'm afraid. What if there's nothing else?"

Her voice was changing now, alternating between a little girl afraid of the dark and the woman he knew her to be, the one who was concerned with the afterlife, because she was not God's creation. He didn't understand who the little girl was, though. Rina had never been that little girl.

"Daddy, I'm scared."

"There, there," he soothed her uneasily. He'd never done this before, not with her. "It will all be over soon."

"I'm tired. I know I should stay awake, but I'm so tired. And it hurts," her voice rose in something like a whine.

With a flash of horrible insight, he realized what was happening. Somewhere, hidden deep inside of her, was the little girl that Rina should have been, the girl she would have been if not for the geneticists and their tampering. He'd always wondered what she would have been like if she were a normal girl - now, in the last hours of her life, he was getting a glimpse of that child. It was both amazing and horrible - this was not his Rina, but it could have been. It also showed how far the disease had progressed, how deep the hallucinations went that this little spark of who she might have been came out.

For a long time he hugged that little girl, trying to ease her fears, until she lapsed back into deeper dreaming. He gently set her back down on the bed and stood up. He was trembling, and tears ran down his face.


----------------


"Do you think we can make it?" Arthur asked.

"It depends on Rina, on how long she holds on. Even so, it's going to be a close thing, if he even has anything for us," Heero replied as he parked the shuttle. They vaulted out of the shuttle and ran to the air hatch. On the last visit, Ethen had said that he had something that looked promising, but nothing yet, and told them that he might have something by the time they returned. That had been only three weeks ago, but there wasn't any time to wait now. The news had come this morning that the last phase had set in, and that Rina would probably be dead by morning.

Heero hurriedly bypassed the security, and they were already pulling off their suits as the seal was confirmed. They ran down the path at their top speed and into the house. Ethen was working in his lab. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "It isn't time yet..."

"She's dying," Arthur said, aware that he was completely losing control of his emotions, and not caring. "Right now. Do you have something or don't you?"

"Yes, I do." Ethen rummaged around in his desk and finally produced an IV bag full of a light blue liquid. "Tell them to give this to her. It should completely reverse the effects of the disease, and then kill off the virus when it's done. But I haven't finished testing it - this batch was just in case this happened. There might be side effects that I can't predict - there hasn't been time."

Arthur grabbed the bag, then hesitated. He glanced at Heero.

"There isn't anything to lose," Heero said, and Arthur was surprised to hear a hint of despair in his voice. Arthur wasn't the only one with emotions here. "She's dead without it." He looked at Ethen. "Even if this doesn't work, thank you for what you've done here. When we leave..."

"I know. I'll destroy the blood sample and everything else. Don't worry, there won't be anything left."

"Thanks," Heero said, and they ran back out.


---------------


Jules Krace looked up as the two missing boys, Heero and Arthur, ran into Rina's room. The other three, along with Michael, had been here since sundown. Rina hadn't woken up, and her grip on life was failing. The doctor couldn't tell him why she was still alive as it was - she just refused to let go, although the pain had to be great. "Where were you?!" he demanded angrily. "What were you doing that was more important than..." he trailed off as Arthur rushed to her bed and pulled down the IV bag feeding fluids into her body. He hurriedly replaced it with another bag, this one with a light-blue liquid in it, and connected it to her arm. Jules watched the blue liquid begin to seep into her.

"What is that?" asked another angry voice. Dr. David Marci, the man who'd been tending to Rina through the last weeks of her illness, pushed past the watchers. Rina had selected him, had told him the truth about herself and the disease years ago. He had never so much as whispered a word of any of this to anyone, not even his second wife. His first wife had been a Rebel, and killed by the Alliance. "What are you giving her?" He reached out for the bag as if to pull it down.

Arthur grabbed his hand and forced it away. "It's a chance," he said quietly. "We're giving her a chance."

"What?" Jules asked, hardly daring to breathe.

"We tracked down one of the scientists who created us, who also created the disease that's killing her. He made this up. It may help her, it may not. We have nothing to lose." Arthur stared down at her, a tender expression on his face.

The doctor looked at Jules. "Sir? Do you know these boys?" The doctor didn't, but he wasn't a fool, and Arthur had easily overpowered him to keep him away from the IV. There was clearly something going on here that he didn't know.

"Yes, I know them. Leave it in. You said she'd be dead by morning, anyway. What could it do to her?" Jules stared at the bag, then at his daughter, lying motionless on the bed. In the last few weeks her skin had taken on a grayish tinge. He'd known she would die for so long... Now these boys, these astonishing boys, had brought along a chance. They wouldn't have said so if there wasn't a possibility. Jules refused to allow himself to hope, not yet, but if there was a chance...

He glanced at the clock and realized it was near dawn. "You'd better get out of here," he said, directing his words at the Rebels. "You can't be in the house when the sun comes up."

Arthur started to protest, but his stone-faced companion stopped him. "You'll contact us if there's any change?" he asked Jules.

"Of course."

"He's right, we'd better get back."

"Yes, the Phoenix needs to be back at the base," Mike said quietly, and Heero spun, looking as if he'd been shot.

"I am not the Phoenix," he said sharply.

"Rina left very explicit instructions," Mike responded. "You are the Phoenix."

"The Phoenix is not dead. I have no intention of rising from her ashes, whether it has a sense of rightness or not."

"Phoenix..." Mike started to say, but Heero suddenly walked up to him and slammed his open hand into the wall to the side of Mike's head. The wall shook from the impact, but didn't break, which was entirely due to Heero's control.

"The Phoenix isn't dead. Don't bury her yet," Heero said in a low voice that screamed danger. "Come on," he said to the others, and they all silently followed him out the door. All but Arthur, who paused, then walked back to her bed. He bent on one knee at the edge of her bed, raised one limp hand to his lips, and kissed it. Then, blushing bright red, he followed the others.

Mike stared after them, started to follow, but hesitated for a moment by the door, staring at Rina. "I didn't think she could do it," he confessed to Jules. "I didn't think she could turn them. I didn't think they were human enough to care for anyone. There have been times when I doubted that even she was human. But she is, and she did do it. They really care for her, even Heero, and it's more than what she did for them. They love her. I guess we all do."

He looked at Jules. "You did a wonderful job raising her, sir."

"She mostly raised herself," Jules said uneasily. These people knew Rina so well - they shared a part of her life that he couldn't, because of the demands of his job and his duty to the people of this colony.

"I can believe that. Please take good care of her." He glanced nervously at his watch, then vanished out the door, leaving Krace alone with his daughter, his strange and unique and beautiful daughter, who inspired such loyalty in the people around her and who now lay quietly fighting for her life.


--------------


For the first twenty-four hours after Arthur and Heero brought the serum, there was no change. All six returned to the house the next night and the five boys stood a sort of vigil by her bed, not talking at all, but somehow Jules felt that they were communicating. There was no change, which might be a good sign in itself, the doctor told him cautiously, because she hadn't died yet. They left again at sunrise, and still there had been no change.

Midday the second day after they brought the medicine, word reached them through the devious chain Rina had set up so that she could communicate with the Rebels from her own home without endangering her father. "The fever broke and she woke up for a few minutes." There was no name, no specifics, but that was the way it had to be. It took all of the boys' discipline not to go racing over to the house right away, but that was ridiculous - it was the middle of the day, and her house was the center of a media circus. There was no way they could sneak in. They had work to do, covering for Rina's absence, and they applied themselves to the task. It no longer seemed so onerous now that there was a chance she would be returning, and some of the Rebels wondered why the usually stern-faced young boys wandered around with smiles on their faces.


---------------


That evening the boys and Mike smuggled themselves back into the house. "She's been asking for you," Krace said. He was waiting for them when they arrived. Arthur couldn't wait to see Rina, but he noticed a slight hesitation on Krace's part before he spoke. Was something wrong? "She knows that you got her the medicine, and she wants to thank you. I also wanted to thank you. I couldn't before because I didn't dare to hope, but..."

"I understand," Arthur said with what patience and understanding he could manage to put in his voice, considering how much he wanted to see her. He hurried down the hall, following the others. Rina was still lying in her bed in the darkened room, but now she was talking quietly to the doctor. "...and please record all of the blood work for me to listen to," she said, then turned her head as they walked in the door. "Who is that?"

"It's us," Kan said with a worried frown on his face. The room wasn't that dark.

"Oh, good. All six of you?"

Arthur thought maybe that she couldn't see all of them because they were standing one behind another. "All of us," he said, stepping a little to the side. "How are you feeling?"

"I'm alive! I can't believe it - there's no trace of the disease in my system. David said that Arthur and Heero brought the cure." There was question in her voice, and a broad smile on her face.

"Yes. We found Dr. Ethen and went to him. He has no love for the Alliance, and he managed to fabricate the medicine, just in time," Heero said, slowly walking forward. There was a slightly suspicious edge to his voice as he studied Rina's face.

Arthur was also studying her face, and found his attention drawn to her eyes. Normally they were bright, darting around the room, or fixed on a point in space when she was deep in thought, but now... Now she just stared straight ahead, her eyes not fixing on anything at all. There was no sign of intelligence in them - just nothing. But she sounded all right.

"Hey Rina, what's wrong with your eyes?" Herc asked in his usual flippant manner, but a hint of strain told Arthur that Herc also suspected something.

"They don't seem to be working very well right now," she said slowly, the smile not leaving her face. "Actually, not at all."

Arthur heard a gasp, realized it was himself. "You're blind?" Mike asked softly, begging to be corrected.

Rina nodded. "David thinks it may just be temporary, because of the fever. We'll know in a few weeks."

"Rina," Arthur said, moving closer so that he could touch her hand, the one he had kissed two nights earlier. "I'm sorry."

"For what?" she exclaimed, gripping his hand tightly. She certainly hadn't lost any of her strength. "Arthur, I'm alive! Do you have any idea what that means? I've been waiting to die for almost eight years, half of my life. I never even dreamed that there might be a chance I could survive."

"But, your eyes..." Kan ventured.

"I'm alive!" she repeated. "It may only be temporary, and even if it isn't, people have been going blind for centuries, and they survived. Depending on where the damage is, I can get optics, or I can do without. David is recording the results of my bloodwork on a tape so that I can analyze them. Of course," she added with a slight frown, "that won't work if this is permanent, it's way too slow. I'll have to get something that will speed up the sound, or find another way to read. There's a way to read by touch, I think." She sounded so much like her old self that it made Arthur want to cry, for some reason.

"Braille," Michael spoke up. It was the first thing he'd said since arriving here. "It's called Braille. A system of dots that stands for the letters. I'll find you some information on it and record it."

"Thank you," Rina said, still smiling. Arthur couldn't remember the last time he'd seen her smile this much. "I'll make do, somehow. But I'm alive! I can't believe it!" she exclaimed, and pulled Arthur in for a hug. He stiffened. No one had ever hugged him before, not ever.

Rina felt him stiffen and let go. "What's wrong?" she asked, then said, "Oh! I'm sorry. That was stupid of me. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

"No," Arthur said firmly. "That's all right. You just caught me by surprise."
Very, very carefully, he hugged her back.

"Hey, is Arthur the only one who gets to have some fun?" Herc demanded. Laughing, Rina hugged him too. Kan and Michael (who was the most reserved of the boys) clearly weren't ready for that, yet, but surprisingly, Heero moved closer and gave her a very awkward, stiff hug.

"I can't thank you guys enough," Rina said, and Arthur saw tears in her blank eyes. "I'm alive!"


-----------------


The first few weeks passed without anything changing. Rina, still weak from her long convalescence, did learn how to read Braille, and was soon reading it almost as quickly as she had read normal paper. The only thing that she had to be careful of was not to poke holes through the paper by pushing too hard. She insisted that they start sending her files again, so that she could continue her work even though she wasn't yet well enough to return to base. She got very good at reading, memorizing, and then destroying all of the material they sent her, so that there still was no evidence left. The boys came out almost every night, or at least one of them did, to keep her company and to give her a first-hand account of what was happening among the Rebels. During this time Arthur finally finished making the changes he'd proposed months earlier to the satellites' systems, so that the manual override was nonfunctional. No one in the Alliance noticed.

On his night to visit Rina, Arthur snuck into her house and walked to her room. She kept it dark most of the time, not bothering to turn on the lights because they did nothing for her. Arthur, however, needed the light, so he flicked them on as he entered the room. Rina's head suddenly shot up, and she turned her head back and forth. "Who is that?" she asked, a familiar intensity in her voice.

"It's me," Arthur said, wondering at her actions.

"Did you just turn on the lights?" she asked.

"Yes. How did you..."

"Turn them off again," she ordered, and he did so. "Now turn them on, but don't tell me when you do it."

Arthur waited several seconds, then flicked the lights back on. Rina turned her head back and forth again, blinking furiously. "You just turned them on!" she exclaimed.

"Is your eyesight coming back?" he asked.

"I don't know, all I can see is gray, but I can tell when you turn the lights on and off. It may be a start."

Now Arthur knew how Krace had felt when he said that he couldn't hope, not yet. The disappointment would be too great if this wasn't what they thought it was. But there was a chance...


-------------


Richard Ethen finished making tea and set out the cups on the low table in his garden. Then someone behind him cleared their throat. He spun, almost knocking over the table, and saw a figure in a dark jumpsuit and mask. "Oh, it's you. Don't do that, you'll give me a heart attack." He paused. They hadn't come wearing masks since the first day, and they always came together. "How is the girl? Did she survive?"

"I came to thank you for saving my life," said a soft voice, and the figure pulled off it's mask, revealing a girl's face beneath it, with long white hair done in a braid that tucked away under the mask. The girl was very pretty, beautiful even, with a thin body that hinted at womanhood, now that he looked for it. But the most amazing thing was that he realized that he knew her.

"You're Rina Krace!" he blurted out.

"I am. But I also go by the name Phoenix nowadays. Hiro and Arthur told me that you made the medicine that cured me. I wanted to thank you."

"It's no more than I had to do - it was my fault you were ill in the first place - I designed the virus."

She shook her head. "We're making it a policy of forgiving any deeds done by Alliance members before they joined the Rebels, if they join of their own free will. What you did in the past doesn't matter as much as what you've done now, and now you saved my life. Thank you."

"You're welcome," he replied, flustered. "Would you like something to drink?" He gestured to the waiting cups. "Some tea?"

"Certainly, but I can't stay long. I'm having a sixteenth birthday party in a couple of days, and I have to make sure everything is ready." She seated herself in the second chair, crossing her legs demurely.

"Of course," he said, pouring some tea, and noticing her impeccable manners. It was fascinating, the way she could just switch personalities and go from being a dangerous commando to the host of a brunch in seconds. "I'd love to discuss with you some of your interests, the way you think," he said. "We always thought that the boys would be different from the girls, but then they told us they'd killed you..."

"You and Dr. Smith?" she asked, sipping the tea.

"Yes, Karen and I."

"How did you think the girls would be different? Did you design us differently?"

"No, you were designed exactly the same, but there are things buried deep inside genes that even we can't manipulate. You might call it instinct, but it's a learned behavior, slowly integrated into the genetic structure over thousands of years. For thousands of years, women have been physically weaker than men. In order to compensate, they've learned a variety of tricks involving intrigue, power shifts, all sorts of things. In designing you, we eliminated the factor that had caused the compensation - you are as strong physically as any human, male or female, including the boys we designed - but we didn't, couldn't remove the compensation itself. We weren't sure how it would affect the girls, but we always thought they'd be more devious, more thorough in the researching and follow-up of missions. I doubt, thinking about it now, that the boys would have covered themselves as well as you must have, to survive this long. The ability is in them, but some of the steps you took would never have occurred to them. Am I right?"

"I don't know," she replied. "It could be - I never thought to look for differences between our behavior because of sex. I always assumed any differences were because of the way I was raised."

"It would be hard to tell, in that case," he said, disappointed that he wouldn't find out the answer to his question. "Dr. Yirtz never agreed with our..." he broke off, paling as he remembered something. "Oh, no! You have to get out of here!"

"Why?" she asked, immediately setting down her cup and pulling the mask back over her head.

"Because he's coming here! Today! I completely forgot, he'll be here any minute! You've got to get out of here before he arrives!" Yirtz made it a practice of coming out to the prison every couple of months in order to offer his onetime partner 'companionship' and 'sympathy'. It was Richard's opinion that Yirtz did it just to torment him.

She cast a frightened glance at him, then disappeared into the bushes, running cross-country to cut down the time it would take her to reach the one air-hatch, where she would have to put on the vacuum-suit and get to her shuttle before the second shuttle arrived. He could have killed himself for his mistake, and suddenly realized that was probably what he would do if they caught her because of his stupidity. He didn't think he could live with the fact that he'd caused her even more pain than she'd already suffered.

He waited two minutes, then three. Approximately eight minutes after she disappeared through the bushes, Yirtz came strolling down the path in the presence of two armed guards. "Hello, Rich!" he shouted in greeting, knowing how Richard hated to be called 'Rich'.

"Oh, so the Alliance hasn't killed you yet, have they?" Richard responded as he always did. He clenched his hands together in his lap to keep them from trembling. It looked as if she'd made it away without attracting their notice.

"Of course not! Why on Earth would they kill the successful one?" Yirtz snapped.

"Anything wrong?" he asked innocently as Yirtz seated himself in the chair she had just recently vacated.

"Oh, it's you!" Yirtz exclaimed disgustedly. "Rotting away in this place! It's such a waste, and every time I see you, you just get older and more feeble..." He waved a hand dismissively towards Richard, who struggled against the anger the words provoked in him. "And every time I see you, it's the same. You've got the same two cups set out, I sit down, and you... you endlessly polite failure, you ask me if I'd like some tea, and..." Yirtz suddenly cut himself off, staring at the cups. "You've already been drinking," he said suspiciously. "And there's tea in my cup, too, and it's cold. Whom have you been drinking tea with?"

"Maybe I just got thirsty, waiting for you," Richard said coldly, but his heart was beating so rapidly he thought it would leap out of his chest.

"No! There has been someone here! Didn't you say you caught a blip on the sensors as we pulled up?" Yirtz demanded of one of his guards, who nodded. "Who was it?!" he demanded, an excited smile on his face. Like a shark who's smelled blood, Richard thought, his own blood running cold. It didn't matter what he said now, Yirtz would bring him back to the base to be interrogated, and then the girl's secret would be out.

"I'll go get some more tea," he said stiffly, standing up.

For a moment Yirtz looked outraged, then he sat back and smiled. "Yes, you do that, Rich.," he said sweetly. "But know that when we're done with tea, you're coming back with us, and then I'm going to find out who you were entertaining here."

Richard glared at him furiously, wracking his brain for some way to get out of this. Suddenly something occurred to him. He turned and started walking into his garden. "Let him go," he heard Yirtz say. "There's no where for him to run. He can't escape."

Richard thought, still walking, moving closer and closer to the outside wall. He stumbled once, righted himself, and kept on walking. What was the life of one old man when compared to the Phoenix, when compared to Rina? She was the most beautiful, perhaps the only beautiful thing he'd ever created in his career as a scientist. He couldn't just tamely submit and go with them - that would lead to her destruction.

He'd almost reached the wall when they realized what he was trying to do. A stun bolt hit the ground near his feet. "Freeze! Don't move a centimeter!" one of the guards shouted. Richard tried to run the last few meters to the wall, but he was old and couldn't get much speed. A stun blast hit him from the back, knocking him down less than a meter from the wall. His hand was stretched out in front of him, trying to reach the wall with the bracelet, so that it would explode and take him with it, but he couldn't quite reach.
Then the guards reached him and dragged him back towards the airlock. He struggled, and they shot him with another stun bolt. As he drifted out of consciousness he heard the beating of his own heart, the roaring of blood in his ears. he thought hopelessly, and everything went black.


--------------


{TRANSCRIPT OF DIALOGUE FROM BASE 001
STATUS: SECURITY LEVEL 1
DATE: 20.12.22
TOPIC: IDENTITY OF THE PHOENIX


A: What do you look so pleased about?


B: I have some news that ought to please you and your superiors.


A: Unless your news is that you've managed to eliminate all the Rebels in Alpha, I don't think they'll be interested, and neither am I. I thought that I made it clear in our last communication that I no longer have anything to do with you. You're testing my patience.


B: You made it eminently clear, sir, but this does concern both you and Project Titan.


A: All right, I'm listening. What is it?


B: I have the Phoenix.


A: You've captured the Phoenix?! Impossible.


B: I haven't captured the Phoenix yet, but now I know their identity. And the Phoenix is one of our creations.


A: What? You mean they were operating against the Alliance while they were still working for us?! Was it One?


B: Not at all. All of ours were loyal.


A: But you just said...


B: I said that we created it, not that it was one of ours. It got away from us, and this involves a cover-up at the highest levels. Think your superiors will be interested now?


A: Start talking.}