"Emergency meeting," Ami said through her communicator. "If you can, meet me at Fruits Parlor at once."

Minako's teacup hit the saucer with a clatter. "Another King?"

"That is my surmise, yes." There. Ami had gotten out the most important part.

"Oh…" Usagi's hands flew to her mouth.

Rei's hands made fists on the table. "Evidence?"

"He heard the bells of Hikawa Shrine at the exact same moment that Nate did, on the other side of the world. That must have broken the seal on their memories. But while Nate's memory returned in a full rush…" She took a deep breath, "Zander's memory is still hazy and incomplete. He thinks of the Silver Millennium as a dream."

"Like Nate did," Makoto said softly.

"And you… put a wire on him, or something," Rei said, "you didn't just leave him there. Right?"

"Until more of his memory returns," Ami's gaze remained fixed on the table, "I think he poses little threat."

"So you're saying… for now," Minako rephrased it.

Ami inclined her head. "For now."

Silence fell. Ami had discharged her duty as the Soldier of Wisdom. So why did she feel cold? And hollow as a celadon vase?

Makoto cleared her throat. "Ami," she began, "you were really looking forward to meeting this guy."

Usagi went "Oh. Ami-chan…" And suddenly, in a flood of warmth, her hand clasped Ami's. "Are you alright?"

Ami swallowed hard. "I am fine," she said. "I'll keep a boundary between me and him. The risk to your life is too high."

"Oh, Ami," Usagi's voice was equal parts petulant and frustrated and kindly. "Look at Nate! He's not evil!"

"Nate," said Rei, "turned out decent," in a tone that made "decent" a scanty virtue indeed.

"I mean, he's Canadian," Minako pointed out, "everyone knows Canadians are the nicest people on the planet. Ami— look at me, honey." When their eyes were locked, Minako asked, "Can you guess which of the Heavenly Kings he was?"

There was no hiding from her gaze, not as the commander, not as the goddess of love. "She's probably guessed already," Ami thought.

"Zoisite," she said.

What had he done?

Yes, Zander had a list of failed relationships as long as your arm (romantic, platonic, familial, pick a card, any card) but what had he done or said to drive Ami away?

He stared at the door. He tapped his fingers on the table, and fiddled with his ponytail. Restlessness overcame him, and he found himself abandoning his tepid coffee. The rain was good and loud by this point, so he ducked into a nearby Family Mart and bought himself a flowered umbrella.

He was just unwrapping the thing when he saw a poster just inside the door: it advertised some bygone festival with an artist's rendition of the Sailor Guardians, all in kick-ass poses.

For no reason, a shiver went down Zander's spine. The Sailor Guardians. Of course he'd heard of them before coming to Tokyo. He respected the work they did, even if the Journal de Genève was skeptical of their "magic." He just hoped never to meet one.

"Where should I go now?" he thought.

"Home," he reasoned, "but the scenic route."

As he walked, Zander found himself thinking of Ami. Rain was her favorite weather, for the music of water and the charming grey tint it added to the world, though she admitted its impractical qualities—damn it, he was thinking of rain in her voice.

Disappointment whined, It isn't fair, why did she leave, what did he do wrong?

Pride sneered, Who needed her? If she couldn't recognize a legit snack when she saw it, that was her problem.

Disappointment countered, saying, But I never get what I want! I want her to admire me!

Logic said, Maybe Usagi really did have an emergency?

His inner Don Quixote asked, Is there any way we can get her back?

Something Else just kept twisting over and over in his heart. And that Something Else was concerned for the look he'd seen in her eyes… The thought of Ami Mizuno out there, upset over something he had said— it obliterated all his perfectly honest self-pity.

And her eyes…

"Maybe," he thought, looking towards the horizon, "maybe I should never have met her in person. Now I've seen her eyes, and I know I'll never forget them."

Ami kept her eyes fixed on the computer screen. She was alone in her apartment, talking on the phone.

"I was ready for this," Ami said. "At least, I thought I was ready for this."

Setsuna hmm'ed in encouragement.

"I have developed strategies in case of several dozen emergencies— Minako joked about a zombie apocalypse and I stayed up all night working— and as regards the Four Heavenly Kings, I've been working on a flowchart to determine our course of action. But today— after meeting with Zoisite— the questions just fell out of my head entirely."

"Well, you were surprised. You aren't a machine, Ami." Setsuna's voice was kind.

"Meeting Zander was supposed to be a break," Ami said, and sighed.

There was something about Setsuna that brought out this side of Ami: Ami would have called herself childish, vulnerable. Setsuna herself brooked no such opinion: she thought very highly of the younger Soldier.

"And now Minako and Rei are ready to fight him, and Usagi and Mako are going to tell Mamoru and Nate, and everyone's emotions are running high and I'm—" Ami took a deep breath, "I have to be the steady one."

"That sounds like a hard role to keep up," Setsuna offered.

"There's a line in a kaiju movie I really love… 'The fixed point. The last man standing,'" she said in a thick British accent. Then Ami added, "Really, our fixed point is Usagi. And she's… always the last one standing." She was very still. "I can't risk any harm coming to her. I can't let her down again."

"Usagi would want you to be happy," Setsuna said.

Ami was silent.

"The princess," Setsuna tried again, "would want you to follow your heart. What does your heart say?"

"My… heart?" Ami considered. "Well… I'm glad I know that Zander is Zoisite. Honestly. It's always better to remember, rather than to forget."

"I agree."

"And—you know, before I met Usagi, I was very lonely. I hated to think of Zoi—of the Four Generals reborn, wandering the world with a hole in their hearts. But it would be so much simpler if the two courts were separate again."

"What do you mean?"

" I would not begrudge them the chance to meet Mamoru… Please don't think that I'm weak…"

"Ami…"

"... But to meet Mamoru, of necessity, brings them close to Usagi. And they are dangerous."

"Ami, I want to make something clear. I don't think you're weak."

"Oh?"

"Your feelings for them come from a place of compassion, rather than fear. I think that's admirable."

"I'm cautious," Ami reminded her.

"Yes. Caution is well due. But Ami, what do you want? Really want?"

Ami blinked. A long time ago, a dancer had asked that very question. His blue scales had twinkled as he ensnared Ami deeper and deeper in a riptide of her loneliness.

"What is your dream?" Fish's Eye had asked. And Ami had replied, with her heart in her mouth, "My dream is to be loved by someone— anyone!"

And Zander… he might have been…

Her heart sped up. Her skin grew hot in patches. The cold, the heat, her cardigan with little rain clouds on it, it was suddenly so lucid—

"What I want doesn't matter," Ami said in a rush. "Anyway, I have to go," Ami said, "I can hear Mom coming home."

"All right. Just remember—"

"Yes?"

"I'm here for you."

"Thank you. Really," and Ami was able to hang up before the itching got really bad.

She spent twenty minutes applying lotion to her inflamed skin. She recited the digits of pi in a steady murmur. So what if her hands trembled? So what if her breathing shuddered? She would not lose control.

In time, the spell passed. Ami checked her phone again and found messages of hearts and daisy emojis from her sister Guardians. She had to be strong for them, she remembered. She mustn't burden anyone with her feelings.

But… she had to take stock somehow. Suddenly, her hand craved to hold a pen. And a certain notebook…

She used a towel to open the cupboard under her bed. She pulled out a battered old notebook of powder blue, with "A" on it. Ami flipped through the pages. This had been a perfectly flat, crisp new diary when she enrolled in a cram school, back in eighth grade. She'd had it with her the first time she transformed into Sailor Mercury, for which her only word had been, "MAGIC."

Ami had kept records with remarkable diligence and clarity for a girl of fourteen. She'd written about her new friends, their spells, their schoolwork, and their enemies, the Dark Kingdom. She'd written about the copper-haired General, Zoisite, and how he was obviously their most dangerous foe yet.

Ami had written a lot about Zoisite.

Until the abrupt day when Sailor V—their apparent Princess—had arrived, and Ami had written "Zoisite—Dead," in a spiky, strained hand. And barely a word about Kunzite, afterwards.

After Kunzite's appearance, Ami had started an entirely new notebook, one with geometric constellations on it, dedicated exclusively to the record of her Silver Millennium memories as they returned, in their thin, sparkling stream. And the powder-blue notebook was abandoned for a time. With the arrival of the Black Moon, Ami had realized that her career as a Sailor Guardian had not ended, rather, it had barely begun.

In these latter, quieter years, the powder-blue notebook received new entries rarely. But these entries were the purest distillation of Ami's heart.

A day like today had certainly earned its place there.

Ami flipped to the last entry, and paused. That entry was from the day that Nate was invested as Mamoru's General. At the entry's end, a note: "Zed got his visa to live in Japan. We celebrated by finishing the flamboyant Gothic abbey we built in Minecraft.

"I hope that when he visits, we can play music together, have a 'jam session.'" Followed by a doodled eighth note.

Three months of silence represented by one blank line.

Ami wrote the day's date. And she wrote down: "Zed = Zander = Zoisite."

Her hand grew steady as she wrote, making a river of blue ink down the page.

Not for the first time, Zander thanked any God that was listening that he didn't have a roommate. Tiny his room might be, but it was private.

He had changed out of his day outfit, then he'd taken out his precious mandolin. He had tuned it, and in tuning it remembered a poem about a man tuning a guitar, and he had to turn on his computer to look that up— had it been in English? Or a Spanish poem? —but in looking it up he had come across Ami—no, MA's—last message to him. He had stared at the screen for a moment, then closed his laptop again, put away the mandolin, and taken out his art supplies.

Sitting down, he turned on one lamp. He sketched a broad horizon, a place he could run to, with an all-graphite pencil. He filled in streetlamps down a boulevard, leading towards… something. A huge Moon floated in the sky. And the lamps poured with light…

Wait.

Zander sat up straighter and looked at what he had drawn. The lamps were pouring with what looked like water. They were tall, thin fountains, not lamps at all.

And in the sky… since when did the Moon have those continents?

"It's Earth," Zander said to himself. "The boulevard is set on the Moon."

He stared at the picture, and picked up his pencil again, but now that he was observing himself, his frenzied energy of earlier was harder to re-capture.

He could try, though. His pencil flew over the paper, filling in the clouds at the edge of the horizon. The clouds turned into a vast dome, flanked by minaret-like towers. The higher clouds developed a pointed shape, turned into a chin, then a smile, then—

Crap, he was drawing her.

He flipped to the other side of the page.

Draw, man, draw for your life. Before long, Zander had simple sketches of four men. Portraits. One of them was drawn with a gentler hand and better detail than the others. He found himself regarding that central portrait, a man with short, dark hair. Zander had gotten the mouth right, but the eyes— they should be warmer. Brighter.

He sketched the beginnings of a uniform, and rather a dapper one if he said so himself, but a chime from his phone interrupted him, and broke his flow.

Abruptly Zander realized the late hour— and how exhausted he was. He showered, then crawled into his bed with the sketched pictures still thick in his mind. The fountains, shaped like roses. The vast dome. The Prince…

The Prince and Zander were walking down a road in a windswept, wintery landscape. Zander was shorter. Or else the Prince was staggeringly tall. Snow poured from a sky the color of cream. Zander recognized a road by the lake, back home in Geneva, but it was like a landscape rendered in imbalanced black and white. Even the Prince was little more than the sketch that Zander had drawn, shaded with crude pencil. But the Prince didn't seem to mind. He sounded cheery as he said to Zander,

"What's olive multiplied by guitar?" asked the Prince.

"I'm sorry, I don't know," said Zander, after giving the question due thought.

"Nice girl you met today," the Prince added. "She seem familiar?"

"Well, I know her, we're pen pals."

"Of course you know her. Hey, which way to the water?" the Prince asked.

Zander was happy to show the way. Something about this Prince brought with him a wave of reassurance. Overhead, Zander's mandolin played itself, plucking a primal melody.

"The dreams are all real, you know," the Prince said conversationally.

"Really?"

"The dreams, the bells, the visions. All very real."

"Oh. Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle."

"You will be."

They reached the shore of Lake Geneva, and there was a little boy, brown-haired and blue-eyed, wrapped in the same white as the landscape. He waded through the snow to them, and gave Zander a suspicious sort of look.

"The other two aren't here yet," said the little boy.

"Oh well," said the Prince. Then he looked up at Zander and said something—some proper name that didn't sink into Zander's mind. "—The rest of the way you'll have to go alone," he said. "I want to find you! I hope to meet you," he added, and then pointed across the vast, desolate plain that was the Lake.

"Bye," said Zander, and set a ginger foot on the lake's icy surface. It held.

Zander got both feet on the ice and started to walk. He turned back after twenty feet to wave to the Prince and his funny little attendant. Then he made a mistake. He looked down.

Under the ice, the lake was glowing blue. Fathoms of blue.

"Freaky," Zander said. He forced his feet to move again. The shore disappeared behind him. He walked… and he walked… and all was white and the blue light from underfoot…

And then he heard it again. A name no sooner spoken than swallowed by the wind. A name that slipped off his mind even as it hooked his heart.

"Zander!"

He looked down again. Through the ice he could see—a man below the ice's surface, pressing up his gloved hands. His face was white as snow, his lips frozen into sapphires. And yet—Zander knew him. The coppery hair afloat in the dark water, the green eyes fixed in a furious gaze.

Zander knelt and touched his hands to the ice's surface. He had been getting along fine in the wintery dream, but when he touched the ice, cold radiated through his fingers and up his arm.

"What do you want?" he asked the man in the ice.

"It's not what I want," said the man, his voice muffled, his tongue clumsy with the cold. "It's what you choose. —ite, do you want to remember? Or forget?""

"Remember what?"

"Everything."

His breath hitched.

"I want to remember," he managed to say. "It's always better to remember, than to for—merde"

The ice broke, and Zander fell through, into a cold so severe that it pierced his skin and sank into his bones. As he began to sink, he heard bells ringing. And finally, finally he could make out the called name, his true name:

Zoisite.