I sat with my feet on the desk staring absent-mindedly at the Matrix code, reading snippets here and there, watching people. Normal people. Doing normal things.
A little boy playing football in the park. A teenage girl trying to run in high-heels to meet her boyfriend on time. A middle-class couple going into an expensive restaurant for a special meal to celebrate their anniversary.
I made a point of not watching anyone I knew - that would just be weird. I kept wondering what they were doing, carrying on with their lives without us. I wondered if they missed us. I wondered what they'd been told, what explanations the machines had come up with to cover our disappearance. With Tom- I mean, Neo, they'd said he was probably assassinated by the Mafia. That was at least vaguely believable, given his records. But what could they come up with for us?
Trying to distract myself, I went to look and see if there had been any more messages from other ships. There hadn't. There never are during night-watches. For no other reason than I had nothing better to do, I went into the saved messages folder.
Scrolling down the list, I opened messages at random, scanning them with half my concentration while the other half went for a stroll.
Suddenly, something caught my attention. There was a name in the senders list that I didn't recognise. And yet somehow, it looked vaguely familiar. Haroeris…where had I heard that name before? My subconscious memory was saying 'Egypt' to me, but it wasn't helping.
And then it struck me. Of course, Haroeris was an Ancient Egyptian god – I'd seen the name in a pamphlet from the British Museum. But wait a minute…it also sounded very much like-
"Apollo?"
I jumped as Trinity came in.
"Mairde, Trin, don't do that."
She pulled up a chair and grinned.
"Mairde? What is that, French?"
I nodded. "Yeh, we grew up in Paris. Our dad's French."
"Really?"
"Mm-hmm."
"That's weird."
"How so?"
Trinity smiled. "So did I."
"Wow! You still speak French?"
"Nah, not for a long time. We moved to America when I was still small."
"Oh." I looked back at the screen and remembered what I was going to ask her.
"By the way Trin – who's Haroeris?"
Her face instantly darkened. "We don't know. He's the one who says he can help us find Neo. The one who wants us to take you two to him."
"Oh…" I paused. "There is something very weird going on." She looked at me inquisitively. "That day we were talking to you for the first time, we got two messages from these random people called Harsiesis and Re-Harkhti. Do you see where I'm coming from? The three of them…they're all the names of Egyptian gods. They must be related somehow."
Our eyes met as we realised. "A circle maybe…? I don't know." Trinity shook her head. "What do you think they want?"
"I dunno…but what I'm thinking is, if they know each other, then why would they be asking you to bring us to them when they clearly already knew who we were and how to reach us?"
Trinity sat back in her chair, staring hard in front of her as she thought. Finally she said, defeatedly, "Ask Morpheus."
OoOoO
But Morpheus didn't know either. All he could say was 'why hadn't we told him earlier about Harsiesis and Re-Harakhti'.
In fact, we didn't talk about Haroeris properly until the next day, when Hannah, Morpheus and I were in the sparring programme.
Morpheus was explaining about different kinds of traps that might be set and how we should avoid them. He was preparing us for the confrontation, trying to get us ready for this stranger who wanted us in return for our brother.
"We expect Haroeris is a human, and outside the Matrix. This means that he may well have the same knowledge and abilities as you as far as bending rules are concerned. So, you have to be careful."
Without warning, he leapt up into the air and I only realised just in time that he was falling towards me, with his leg out and his foot headed straight for my neck. With a millisecond to spare I spun out the way and blocked the punch he threw at me as he landed.
He straightened his gi and added, "Very careful."
"But he won't actually try to attack us, right? I mean there'll be both of us and you and Trinity, he wouldn't try and take us all on at once would he?" Asked Hannah.
"Who says he'll be alone?"
Hannah was about to say "good point" when something /very/ strange happened. She disappeared.
I jumped back and froze. Morpheus began to laugh.
"Link, re-load her." Nothing happened. "Link, that was a serious request." Still nothing happened. Morpheus looked at me. I was trembling.
"Apollo?"
I slowly looked up at him as a tear fell from my eye. "She's gone," I said, in a very quiet voice.
"What?"
"She's gone."
"What are you talking about? Gone where?"
"I don't know. Far away. I can't feel her."
"Apollo, look at me. What are you talking about?"
"She's my twin, Morpheus, I can sense her when she's close. And sometimes even when she's not. But she's gone. Completely."
Tears began to streak down my face. All Morpheus could do was take us out of the programme and scan Hannah.
As soon as the plug was out of my head I fell down by Hannah's chair, taking hold of her hand. It was going cold.
Morpheus looked at the screen above her head.
"Oh, no…"
"What?" I asked, urgently. "What is it?"
"Her vital signs…they're the same as…as…" His words fell short, and he finished his sentence by looking over at Neo. My heart stopped.
"Oh, no…"
