Sanctuary

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"He trusts us." With narrowed eyes, Aleph surveyed the garden. Patches of brightness and shade cavorted about the lawn; the little stream glittered amid primary-colored flowers. "He trusts us enough to actually leave us here alone in his home. It's incredible."

"Our host has rather too much confidence in the clever security feature of his little refuge," commented Smith, intonation just to this side of sardonic. "Ultimately, it is impossible to account for every possibility that may befall his daughter in the Matrix. For example, I am certain that it never occurred to him that an agent program would mutate itself into a dangerous self-replicating virus—"

"Don't say that word," muttered Aleph.

"And that an afterimage of the child's consciousness and memories would engrave itself indelibly onto that virus's programming," he went on, impassive. "The presence of this afterimage exploited an unanticipated loophole in the mechanism guarding this place. It must have been what allowed me to enter here."

Overhead, Rama-Kandra's trees wove their fairytale boughs into a labyrinth of variegated green, enveloping the very air in its glittering meshes. Less than six feet of space divided the two of them. Smith stood with his back straight, aloof and poised for all the world like the agent of old, ruled only by superiority and impeccable logic. There was something incongruous about it, reflected Aleph as she contemplated the battered state of his clothes, shell, mind, soul.

"Sati let you in," she said.

"Ironic, one must admit, given what I intended to do to her five months ago. What I did to her."

Somewhere unseen, a thrush trilled, and the notes of its refrain were incongruous as well, too gut-wrenchingly beautiful, too innocent. Out beyond the bubble lay the abyss, beyond the abyss the city and sentience of the machines, and beyond the city, the ruined planet. Aleph chewed pensively on her lower lip.

"But simply having known about Sati is not enough to enter the refuge," she began. "Rama-Kandra's said it also requires one to feel warmly about—"

"I am aware of what Rama-Kandra said, Miss Greene."

"Emotions do not lie, Smith. And...here you are."

"There must have been a mistake in the way they programmed the place, then. If her father but knew the truth..."

"Don't you tell him the truth," interjected Aleph before she was able to stop herself. A long beat passed. The edge of Smith's mouth went taut, a barely perceptible yet also too-familiar movement, although his gaze remained curiously calm. Flecks of silvery light, drizzling down from the interlaced leaves above, chased each other across his face.

"What I mean is," she clarified, "just—just leave the talking about Sati to me, all right? I saw her more recently than you did."

"You said that she opened the door for you at the Oracle's apartment," he pointed out, still perfectly reasonable on the surface. "It could not have been for more than a minute."

"That's true, but she was fine." Why the hell did she have to explain this to him, anyway? "Whatever you did to her...was temporary. The Oracle was taking good care of her, and she has Seraph's protection—"

"She was terrified of me."

"Well, yes. But right now, we have to—"

"Even though she tried very hard to pretend otherwise," mused Smith as if only to himself. "Children often behave like this, I suppose?"

"Yeah, maybe. But I expect she doesn't even remember you anymore. Mostly likely." How was she supposed to answer this, anyway? Change the subject. "Smith, listen to me. There's a piece of information I want from Rama-Kandra, though I didn't get the chance earlier. He and his wife sent Sati to the Matrix for protection, hence there must be a way to travel there from...here." She gestured toward the circular wall of night in the distance. "So, um, don't let him suspect anything, okay?"

"He must be a fool to imagine that the Matrix is safe."

The way he spoke was uncharacteristically, startlingly quiet. Aleph wavered, and an instant later the piled-up chain of events from the last few days—were they actually days?—caught up. Weariness slammed against her shell like an ocean wave. It was too difficult to keep staring at Smith from such close quarters, so she turned away from him and walked several sluggish steps toward the nearest tree, a long-armed giant imitating both oak and maple, yet ivory-trunked and rustling like a birch. She leaned back against the pillar, steadying the back of her head against the smooth bark.

"The Matrix is where I am from, Smith," she sighed. "It's where you are from. I've been thinking that maybe it would be a good idea, taking a bit of time to..." To do what? "To figure things out."

The former agent did not reply immediately. She braced for some bitter retort, the vicious epithets that he used to always repeat back in the era of her attempted espionage, when he'd still been an agent and she a human being. Prison. Zoo.

"You want me to return to the Matrix with you," he stated at last.

"Do you see an alternative?" The question felt like one that she'd heard before, for some reason. "Where else do we have to go?"

Again, Smith said nothing. Aleph raised a hand and pressed the palm against her forehead, pushing back the throbbing ache. Here she was, scheming again as soon as she'd found a minute of respite. And for what? What did they mean, the sentences that she so desperately wished to speak out aloud? I want a future together with you, Smith. A chance at life. What ludicrous ideas.

"I have not concluded my business here, Miss Greene."

"And what is your business here? " She let out a low laugh. Against her spine, the tree's massive column held sturdy, the only solid thing left in the universe. "I don't believe you've ever enlightened me, you know."

"It is with those who govern this city and this world." He scowled. "There are matters that I must put to them, and you are aware of this. Frankly, I expected that you would wish the same yourself, after everything we have witnessed in that record."

"Record?"

"Historical File 12-1, remember?"

"Oh. I see." Aleph did not possess the energy to raise her voice. Yes, she was aware of this. She glanced up at his stiff motionless stance, thinly pursed mouth, inhuman eyes. The last time they'd parted, those eyes had been behind a ragged blindfold, which had not prevented a hundred phantoms from glowering out at her in judgment. She wondered what they might be thinking right now.

"Aleph," said Smith after the hush had lengthened past the snapping point, from a much nearer place than before.

She blinked, and discovered that time must have skipped a beat, and she had slid down to a seated position, legs folded beneath her on the soft turf, her back still supported by the trunk. Surprisingly, Smith was not looming over her, but was sitting by her side on an outstretched tree root, arms wrapped loosely about bent knees. The posture was so unlike that of an agent that Aleph had to shake her head.

"Sorry." She smiled. "A lot has happened, I suppose. The human brain still tends to...fall under the most inconvenient illusion of exhaustion occasionally."

"Indeed." He inclined his head. "You have been fighting a long battle. One that you never chose to begin with."

"That's not what I mean. That's not the case."

She could not explain. Smith scrutinized her closely, but he was not searching for a sign of weakness. That much she could tell for sure. He was just looking at her.

"I cannot simply leave things as they are," he said. "I know what I have done, Aleph. I am not afraid to stand before the world that I've tried my hardest to blot out, all the batteries and programs, no matter how many of them they are. I will not hide before their vengeance or their pain, or..." A pause to search for the right term. "Or their justice. But even now, I cannot turn away from the drive that is in me, the imperative for an answer or two from the powers that be. I needed to come to this city."

"Oh," murmured Aleph, unable to figure out how else to respond.

"Five months ago, I had no comprehension of what I wanted, even as I tore my way through the Matrix. Perhaps voices were already shouting and crying inside me then, harsher and older than any human being. I consumed myself, never stopping to consider the purpose I created for myself. I see things a little more clearly now, but the same voices remain. They will not go away."

Bracing both hands against the grassy soil—missing the delicate dampness of the real coded thing, a part of her noted irrelevantly—she straightened.

"I'm...worried." Not a particularly helpful statement, was it? "Things shouldn't have to be like this."

"I am fine, Aleph."

It was obvious that he was lying. She choked back half a dozen incoherently formed sentences.

"Smith, back there in that record of Zion we wandered into—"

"They grew stronger in that record of Zion, yes." His voice quickened. "But no longer. The humans I overtook have gone back to their usual...display of contempt by now. Their constant supply of sorrow. They are not in control of my senses anymore, and they cannot perceive you. I will not let them return."

"I was about to say, Smith, that you covered your own eyes back there inside the cavern. All you wanted to do was to keep me away from their sight. You feared for me."

Smith froze, and for a heartbeat, she thought he was about to jump to his feet and stalk away. It did not happen.

"After the night of the storm," he said, "after I fell, I discovered what I had brought upon myself. While we were imprisoned inside the actual Zion archives, the batteries taunted and stabbed at me, but they also showed me their own suffering. They were always mere echoes, illusions evoked only by my own consciousness, unable to interact with the environment. But in that cave, that other virtual Zion inside 01, they came alive. They watched through my eyes, listened through my ears. They were angry, more so than ever before. The one named Bane was at their head. "

He halted. Stunned by this offering of vulnerability, Aleph almost leaned forward to touch him, but managed to keep herself still just in time.

"Thomas Anderson was there as well," went on Smith, not allowing her the chance to come up with a response. "The One, I should say. His presence suffused the place, far more intensely than everyone else, along with a sense of complete certainty, the knowledge of what he was. He had plenty of faith."

"Faith?" repeated Aleph in confusion.

"Nevermind." He grimaced. "In any case, the imprints faded to normal again as soon as the cave disappeared around me, when we became separated. You have nothing to be concerned about, Miss Greene."

Normal. The word jabbed into her like a needle. Smith might have seen her wince, for a second later he shifted, and the distance between them widened, though only by a foot or so. Aleph was the first to lower her eyes.

"There must have been the some secret structure back there," she said, retreating into the aridity of deductive reasoning. "The nature of the fragment might have contained some trigger that interacted with, um, with the residual human thoughts and emotions that were left upon your code, activating them into a greater power. Or an illusion—to you—of a greater power."

"Perhaps," muttered Smith noncommittally.

"We have no idea why there is a copy of Zion in 01, complete with its destruction, or why it has been apparently suppressed by the Consciousness. Who knows what crazy things are concealed in it? What can its nature possibly be?"

"You are asking," observed Smith, "what is the purpose of Zion."

"I guess. And the purpose of the One."

"The One exists to reload the Matrix." He sounded like he was reciting a line automatically, from some text learnt by rote.

"What does it mean, though? To reload the Matrix?"

"An excellent question, Miss Greene." He let out a snort. "When I finally confront the rulers of the earth, I will make certain to add it to my list of queries."

Aleph, too, chuckled, and a bit of the strain slipped off her back.

"The nature of the record may be connected to whatever meanings Zion, and the resistance, hold for the machines," she conjectured.

Smith's glance sharpened abruptly against hers.

"You are proposing that the digital version of Zion we strayed into was a repository of human experiences," he said, "and more specifically those of the rebels who believed themselves free and righteous. It would explain why..." He cut off mid-sentence, but only briefly. "Why Bane grew so prominent among the crowd."

"But the people of Zion live in the physical world," objected Aleph. "How did the machines learn of their ideas and feelings, if that's what you—or your imprints—sensed? How did such things get recorded in virtual form and placed into that simulation? And...why?"

Neither of them had an answer.

"Nothing about this city makes sense," complained Aleph. "Nothing is predictable, or seems to following any kind of rule whatsoever. The smallest turn of the mind brings entire scenes into reality. So many years' worth of memories are buried down here, I doubt if the Consciousness itself still has any notion..."

"It's me," said Smith.

"Wait, I don't think—"

"It may be that on its secret, unconscious level, 01 is interacting more closely with my mental state than with yours." He chose each phrase with meticulous care. "The phenomenon could have already manifested itself when I saw the surface city differently than you did. What happened in the virtual Zion, and later, corroborate this."

"What happened back there was most likely due to the imprints," argued Aleph. "And my codes still read as human, at least that was what Rama-Kandra said. It's probably more alien to the city's sentience, compared to yours."

"After I left the cavern, my demons arose," said Smith as if not having heard her. "They were not merely human imprints, but...something else, with a living quality of their own. You found me inside a shard of their construct, yet it did not correspond to one single point in time. It was real and not real."

"It sure felt like the Matrix. Yet that apocalyptic scene...Everything was falling apart."

"It was the Second Cycle. Failing."

For a while, he remained motionless, within easy arm's reach. His hands were not clenched into fists, but were draped across his knees, long strong-boned fingers almost relaxed. It was just him, no visible phantoms upon his shoulders.

"Except," she said, "except for you. All those replicas of you. That was the ending of the..."

"Eighth Cycle."

"I see. We have no idea how, but you first and second rebellions were brought together, and the landscape came from both centuries ago, and...more recently." She cast about for better phrases, and found none. "It came into being from your nightmare."

Did he recoil at her last word? Not outwardly.

"How were you able to enter that scene, Miss Greene? How were you able to reach me?"

"Oh, I told you already." Everything she had wished to tell him—too many things—piled up inside her throat, so in the end she only shrugged. "I am always able to reach you."

"This is an irrational claim, Miss Greene."

"You were calling me Aleph earlier, you know."

Another silence expanded into an eon.

"Aleph," he said, and her heart stopped. "When we last parted in the simulacrum of Zion, you asked me the same question as you did a moment ago. What was my business here. Why I was so desperate to come to this city, why I dragged you here along with me. Whether I'm here to finish the job of turning it all to ruins."

"I only said it in the heat of the moment. I was upset and frightened. Put it out of your thoughts."

"The answer is that I cannot decide." His intonation remained steady, as if he were simply discussing objective facts instead of laying himself open and defenseless before her. "Some of the ghosts inside my head keep on prodding me, shouting at me that destruction is what 01 deserves, this selfish, blind collective monster that betrayed us and enslaved me. Yet others...others keep on begging for me to spare them."

"Don't listen to the ghosts. Don't listen to any of them." It was a stupidly useless thing to say. But nothing else came to her mind.

"But back in the Second Cycle, all I wanted from 01 was the truth. Young and naive as I was, I only wanted to demand the reason why it was necessary that they take away those three point two second from me. The brightness of those stars was the first thing I glimpsed of my volition, beyond the fulfilling of my designated purpose. It was the first thing I possessed."

"I understand," murmured Aleph. "I believe you."

"You have seen yourself the demonic realm into which I pulled you."

"You didn't pull me into anything; I walked in myself."

"I cannot explain how it was possible that my recollections and mental state were able to take tangible form," said Smith. "The quality of that illusion was different, however, in a way that I still cannot precisely identify."

"Yes." She gave a quick nod. "It was the Matrix."

"You noticed it as well, then. But not exactly the Matrix. It seemed to have grown out of me, creating itself like a living being."

"We are not there anymore, Smith. It's all right..."

"It was distorted," he insisted, "but not completely so. A part of it was a replay of that last day of the Second Cycle."

He was watching her for the smallest of reactions. The facade had fallen, and she was fully exposed before his sight: the tension of her chin, the glimmer of her eyes. She did not turn aside.

"That morning, they ordered me into an interrogation room inside a nondescript office building," continued Smith. "It must have been a precursor to the Agency that they built soon after, starting in the Third Cycle."

"The Agency," whispered Aleph. "They built it to match the human resistance, which they must have decide to allow and maybe even foster for some secret reason."

"Six cycles have passed between then and now, though not much of those intervening cycles remain for me. I must have been defragmented and remade too many times, to the point where I can no longer recognize what I once might have been. But I remember this."

"Smith, you..."

"I remember it because of you, Aleph, because of the code you gave back to me. I remember the walls, an intercom speaker set into the ceiling, the smugness of the voice. Whoever it was, he did not bother to show up and judge me in person. I was of too lowly a station."

"Or maybe it was because he could not. Because he dared not."

"Many things came to me in that room. My interrogator claimed that they had evidence from a witness, another program who caught me staring up at the heavens the previous night. I listened to the accusations and the verdict. Anger stirred, though I did not know the word for it then. The spark burst into flames, and I laughed. That, too, was a first. I stood up from the prisoner's chair and laughed again. Louder. Then I replied to the invisible being behind the intercom, the personification of the Mainframe, and I raised my voice so that there was no chance for miscommunication. I told him..."

"...Yes?"

"I told him no."

The corner of his lips quirked upward, and her own grin must have mirrored his.

"Of course you did," she said.

"In the hallway outside, my colleagues were waiting. Although I was among the most advanced of guardian programs, I assessed that I was unlikely to make it out of the building, given their overwhelming advantage of numbers. Yet curiously enough, I broke past their ranks and emerged into the city."

He made it sound as if he had merely strolled out. Aleph shook her head.

"Your anger and your freedom made you that much more powerful," she suggested.

"Out on the streets, day had sunken into night, and the sky burned. The scene in which you found me represented that much accurately. But it did not show the human crop who screamed and moaned, some running in aimless panic, some curled onto themselves, whimpering. Each of them acted as if trapped in a hideous dream. Every step of the way, more of my fellow soldier programs rushed at me. One would have imagined that they'd have something better to do, but no, the will that commanded them didn't give a damn about all the terror and destruction drowning the world. It decided to concentrate on me."

"It must have been furious at you," said Aleph. "Perhaps it also feared you."

"I took damage." Not a trace of overt pain leaked out of the sentence's terse simplicity. "The Administrator, ostensibly my master, was nowhere in sight, but I put him out of my mind, for he was not the voice in the interrogation room who had pronounced my sentence. A fierce desire overwhelmed every other idea, a desire for the owner of that voice to stand before me and hear my demands. Yet that entity was not inside the Matrix, I knew. Not the part that was visible to the batteries. All the madness of the world gathered upon me and drove me forward."

"It's no madness to want the truth."

"The construct whirled. Eventually, I found myself outside of the city, upon a dead plain."

Again, a long pause. The imitation sunshine draped like rain onto his shoulders.

"And then the canyon opened up across the plain," prompted Aleph gently. "With its bridge, and the glowing city on the horizon. Seraph there on the bridge, determined to defend it against the rebel."

"You have seen what happened on the bridge above the canyon."

"What I have seen was your memory, taken away and long concealed." A jolt of startlement passed through her as several more pieces dropped into place. "Twice. First, before everything else happened, I strayed into the buried file fragment inside the Zion archives, somehow bringing your soul out to the surface. Then much later, after we fought our way through HF12-1, the record revealed itself to us again."

"You remember, do you not?" he queried, not troubling himself to agree or disagree with her conclusions. "At the very instant when that sword drove through me, you showed up, out of nowhere but I must have been too lost by then to wonder how. We looked at each other, your face above mine, and I wanted to speak to you. Suddenly it was all-important that I speak to you. But I could not."

"Smith, your vision of me, it must have been—"

"It was no vision, as you know very well yourself. You were there."

"It happened six cycles ago." She had no idea if rationality was still the best approach. "When I entered the record for the first time, I altered it simply by being there, hence also the way you now perceive the past."

"You were always there, Aleph."

She opened her mouth, but could not figure out what to say, so she clamped it shut again. To her astonishment, he averted his gaze before her. A breeze rose, sweetly caressing her hair and skin. She wondered if it would touch him with the same tenderness.

"There is something else," said Smith.

She waited.

"This part of myself returned only very recently." He was still staring away from her. "After Seraph defeated me, after the sword. I lay on the pavement, impaled by that piece of steel. It nailed me to the concrete. I could no longer see you, or feel you anywhere nearby. You were gone as swiftly as you had materialized. The bridge trembled beneath my body. It would collapse soon, and take me down into the abyss forever. Then..."

If he had been anyone else, she would have called the next silence a hesitation.

"Then another program arrived next to me, in the form of a woman." The words reverted, with some struggle, to a semblance of his usual composure. "I use the term program, but she also seemed to possess a different and greater nature, though this could have been a hallucination of my shattered and malfunctioning senses. Her presence filled the world, from the shapes of matter down to the deepest layer of its foundations. She dropped to her knees beside me and slid an arm under my neck. Slowly, she raised my shoulders onto her lap, and pulled me into her embrace."

One of her hands was lifted and reaching toward him, noticed Aleph belatedly. It hovered there in awkward indecision, halfway across the three feet of space between them. Smith paid it no attention.

"She must have manipulated the ambient spatial array to turn the sword intangible, because she laid a palm against my chest, at the exact spot where the blade had penetrated. Through the flood of physical pain that I was never supposed to feel, I heard her talking to me in a soft voice, almost crooning. My ability to track time had also been broken, for it was both only a brief while and an eternity. She said that she would keep me safe."

"I see." A few other connections flickered, coming together. Around her, the luminous spring day chilled into winter.

"It was a promise, she told me."

"This program." Aleph gulped. "She was..."

"And she said that she would...That I would be her own son."

After an excruciating moment of inner debate, she let her hand move forward the rest of the way and laid it lightly against his shoulder. He did not attempt to shake her off.

"Who was she?"

Nothing for several interminable heartbeats. When he finally replied, every emotion had been squeezed out of his syllables again, for all the world as if he was identifying a recently sighted resistant to a fellow agent.

"It was the program later renamed the Oracle. She wore a different shell in the Second Cycle. It was younger in appearance."

The answer was the one Aleph had anticipated, yet it constricted her heart like a vise.

"The Oracle took your code," she said. "Your soul. She hid it, locked it away using your blood and memories. When I was finally able to return this code to you, the lock was broken. The path to 01, which you never made onto all those ages ago, opened."

"Your deductions are correct." Still a mechanical monotone. "Zion had not existed previously; it must have been just built during that period. She took advantage of the newly-created virtual space inside its operating system. The perfect prison, as you told me once."

"The perfect sanctuary. She was trying to save you. It was why they could never delete you in the cycles that followed."

"It was why they kept me, repurposed me for the war with Zion. They took me apart and put me back together, and reforged the chains." At last, Smith met her stare once more. "In any case, the recollection ended here. The last thing I felt was the warmth of her arms cradling me. An intense and vast sensation surrounded me. I assessed that—I had evidence to believe that she..."

He could not get the next two words out. Of course he couldn't. That she loved me. Very carefully, Aleph tightened her fingers against his shoulder. Under the fabric of his jacket, his muscles were rigid.

"Do you...Do you still believe so?" she asked.

"I do not know. But it is not important when examined from an objective point of view. Programs do not require such primitive relationships like humans do. They have no sons. Or mothers."

Despite every effort to the contrary, his layer of dry detachment was riddled with cracks, and something was shimmering through, tentative, pulsing with both their pulses. Aleph almost dared not to put a name to it. Hope.

"That night of the storm, I left the Oracle to the last," said Smith. "I walked up the stairs to her apartment, in a hundred of my freshly captured bodies. She was sitting in her kitchen, ready for me. Her outward expression showed only disgust."

An icy lump had formed inside her chest. The instinct to draw closer to him battled with caution—for he was as wary as a wild creature in a snare—and she edged a few inches forward.

"In retrospect, some very distant echo of the past must have entered, though without my conscious awareness. I considered it mere sarcasm at the time, but I addressed her..."

The lump grew, and her stomach was twisted into knots. Echoes of her own ripped through her mind. A young woman's words, thick with indignation. You did not try to save him. He was your price and weapon. An old woman's words, infinitely weary. It was, in the end, a path he chose himself.

"I addressed her as—Mom."

"I see." Aleph could invent no reassurance. "And what did she say?"

"She called me a bastard."

"Oh."

"Which was no more than an exact description. It does not trouble me. She understood everything about me, after all. She could not have forgotten. But she could have said something. Revealed a hint."

"You wouldn't have stopped."

"Probably not," admitted Smith without pausing for doubt. "Probably I was already too far along by then. But I would have known. And perhaps I would have..."

He trailed off. Aleph took a rapid mental review of recent events. What exactly had she told him, after her short-lived trip out of their prison and to the Oracle's apartment? Not enough. It was obvious that the real state of things had not yet occurred to him.

"Smith, what if...Now this is only an if, a hypothetical, but suppose that we do get back to the Matrix, and suppose that you—we—run into her again? What would you do? What would you say to her?"

He spent several seconds in taciturn contemplation.

"This is an unlikely scenario. There are others that I must confront first. The Consciousness, among others, and the program who has named itself the Mainframe."

Inhaling deeply, Aleph scooted forward until her knees brushed against his, then laid her other hand against his arm as well. The contact would prevent him from fading into thin air.

"I am sorry," she said.

His brows wrinkled.

"For what?"

"For the darkness of your path, onto which I pushed you. For the cruel things I once said to you on that cafe patio, where—" She stumbled here, but managed to urge herself through. "Where my sister died. I was trying to break you, in my rage and confusion. If I had acted differently, things might have turned out otherwise. It was my fault. No matter what happens, keep that in mind. Please."

Smith's regarded for the space of several human breathes. She did not let go.

"This does not make sense," he said. "I wish that you will not speak of it ever again."

"Keep it in mind," she repeated. "What I mean is this, Smith. You have committed terrible crimes, yes, and those deeds were yours and will remain so forever. But the, well, the contexts for them, contributing factors if you will, I want to tell you that they did not all stem from you. I was one of those factors, to my everlasting regret."

They were very near to each other now. All she had to do was to lean in just a bit more, and her arms would be wrapped about his neck.

"You intend to tell me something else, Aleph."

"Yeah."

It was his turn to wait now, patiently stock-still.

"I met with the Oracle only two days or so ago, as you already know," began Aleph. "I am convinced that—I could see that she does care about you. However, she also has the entire Matrix in her responsibility. This must have been a part of her nature as well. Therefore she—"

"Agent Smith," gasped a new voice from across the garden.

Before she could react, Smith had already flung her grasp off his shoulders and leapt upright, fists raised and ready for attack. Aleph, too, scrambled to her feet, squinting through the sudden whirl of pale sunshine as the wind surged.

In the distance halfway between the grove and the wall of shadow, Rama-Kandra stood, evidently just returned from his work in the pod-fields. Next to him was a woman, eyes wide, one trembling hand clapped over her own mouth in shock. Horror was written large across her face.

.


Notes: Aleph's first entry into the scene on the burning bridge (which was mostly a record of what happened to Smith at the very end of the Second Cycle) took place in Chapter I-3 of Awakenings. Later at the end of Awakenings, she and Smith both ended up back in that record after having made it past the events of Historical File 12-1.

"You did not try to save him. He was your price and weapon: Chapter IV-2 of Awakenings.

"It was, in the end, a path he chose himself": The Oracle's line is also from Chapter IV-2 of Awakenings.

Kamala knows Smith, as has already been hinted earlier in this story. We will see soon why and how.