Awareness came back to Judy slowly, and nothing quite seemed to make sense. There was nothing to see but a bland stone ceiling, crumbling a bit with age and lit by a peculiar red glow. She couldn't remember where she was or how she had gotten there, and she blinked as she tried looking around. Her eyes felt oddly heavy and sluggish in her head, as did the rest of her body; Judy had never been more tired in her entire life. There was something warm and familiar under her back, though, and then Judy saw at last something other than a boring ceiling.

Nick.

She spoke his name without even realizing she was about to, a twinge of something fluttering in her chest. Two wildly different sets of memories came back to her at once, of seeing herself from two different perspectives, neither one of which aligned. But as Nick looked back into her eyes, the feeling in her chest resolved itself into a powerful sense of relief. Judy finally felt like herself again.

When she had been split, both halves of her had been aware of what they had lacked, but the fearfulness of lacking courage had almost been better than the cold focus of lacking empathy. But she was whole again, and it was all thanks to Nick. Or at least, to a part of him. A lump built up in her throat, and Judy didn't try fighting it. She could remember exactly what the sliver of Nick who had lived in her head had done, what he had sacrificed, and it seemed monstrously unfair.

Some part of her half-expected to hear a response to the thought in her head—something like, "You won't be rid of me that easily, Carrots," perhaps—but although Judy could conjure up the words and even the tone she knew it was just her imagining them. That spark of life was gone, and she was alone in her head once more.

Nick—she couldn't think of him simply as the real Nick anymore; after what his mental copy had sacrificed it seemed to diminish him to think of him as being anything less than real—was still looking down at her, his expression frozen somewhere between hope and despair. No one else would be able to see it, but Judy could. He was desperately afraid, and it wasn't difficult to guess why. He'd have no idea that she came back whole; for all he knew she was about to try killing him again.

Judy tried speaking again, but the words didn't seem to want to move past the lump in her throat. But from that reaction alone, she could tell, Nick understood. Relief lit up his face and made it handsome in a way that had nothing at all to do with how he looked and everything to do with how he carried himself. The tension seemed to have left him, and he murmured something so quietly that Judy could barely hear it, his lips barely moving.

"Picked a great time to wake up, Carrots," he said, but even with the words as faint as they were she could hear the smile in them.

Judy wanted to wrap her arms around him and hug him tight, but her body still felt extraordinarily heavy and weak. Simply moving her neck to try to get a better look at what was going took so much effort that her head felt like it was going to spin off. What she saw took a moment to understand, simply because of how bizarre it seemed.

The queen and Captain General Bogo were standing next to a number of guardsmammals, while the princess stood near where Nick and Judy were. She seemed to have woken up in the middle of some kind of standoff, and Judy wondered what could have possibly happened between her attempt to subdue Nick and waking up. "Well, maybe not forever," Nick said cheerfully, "But a long time."

Judy had no idea what the context of that was, but she got the feeling that Nick wasn't doing too well. The broad strokes of what was happening seemed suddenly obvious—Cerdo must have gained control of the queen as he had controlled both Bogo and Judy herself, and he had sent them after Nick or the princess—but she had no idea what Nick's plan was.

Or, for that matter, if he even had one. Judy had come to a creeping suspicion that, no matter how meticulously he planned things, Nick relied on improvisation and self-confidence more than he would probably care to admit. She wanted to help him, of course, but she had no idea what to do.

"You lied about what you did to Totchli," Bogo said, his voice low and full of a warning grumble, "Why should we believe you won't hurt the princess?"

"Is the princess part of my plans?" Nick asked, "That's the question you should be asking. And you're not going to know unless you hear me out."

Bogo's scowl deepened. As he and the queen seemed to consider Nick's words, Nick spoke in the same low undertone he had used when Judy first woke up, his lips not moving at all. "Arrest me."

"What?"

Judy couldn't help but blurt the word, and she winced internally. All eyes were suddenly on her, and Judy wildly improvised. "I mean, you can't trust this fox, sir. He's, uh, a liar. Who lies."

It was about the weakest cover for her mistake that Judy could come up with, but it didn't seem to faze Bogo or the queen. Nick, however, seemed to be biting his cheek to keep a perfectly straight face, and Judy got the feeling that if they ever got out of the mess they had found themselves in Nick would tease her more than a little. Which was perfectly fine in her eyes; if they somehow both lived and stopped Cerdo she'd be happy to let Nick say whatever he wanted.

"I know," the queen said gently, "But we don't seem to have much choice."

"That's right," Nick said, nodding his head, "I—"

With a supreme force of effort, Judy reached both of her arms up and seized him around either side of the head. Her energy seemed to be coming back, but her arms still felt twice as heavy as normal. Judy was dimly aware that she had something small and smooth and hard clenched in one fist—something like a stone, maybe—but she didn't have to let it go.

Nearly the instant she made contact with Nick's head, he made a loud yip and flopped forward as though Judy had the strength of two bulls. He somehow managed to tumble neatly until Judy was left straddling his back, his arms pinned beneath her. From the surprised looks on the faces of everyone watching, Judy hoped it had been a convincing performance and that no one thought about what it meant too carefully. Simply being a fox made Nick significantly larger and stronger than Judy could ever hope to be, and she knew she wasn't much of a burden when it came to her weight on his back.

"Commandant Totchli!" Bogo shouted, his voice echoing impressively and painfully across the stone walls, "By the gods, what were you thinking?"

"Ow! Ow, ow, ow!" Nick whimpered piteously, squirming slightly beneath Judy, "You're twisting my arm."

He looked backwards at her and, with a wink that no one else was at the right angle to see, mouthed one word.

Stone.

Judy slipped the object that had been in her paw—which was, she saw, a small philosopher's stone, the light it emitted lost in the glow that came from an elaborate alchemy array behind her—into Nick's as surreptitiously as she could manage. "I knew he had to be bluffing, sir," Judy said.

"I surrender," Nick declared, "Please, I surrender."

Bogo's scowl deepened. "That was very reckless, Commandant," he said.

"I know what he's capable of better than anyone," Judy said, and with considerable effort managed to stand upright, keeping Nick's arms behind his back as he also stood.

Mercifully, he seemed to have gotten a sense of how weary she felt, because he was subtly allowing her to support her own weight against his. With each passing minute, it felt as though more and more of her strength was returning, but however long she had spent lost in her own mind—which could have been days for all she knew—seemed to have drained her.

"I won't argue with the results, Lord Bogo," the queen said, and she nodded at him.

Bogo sighed, pulling a torc from an interior pocket of his uniform. "Let's get this over with," he said, seemingly mostly to himself, before adding in a louder and sterner tone something specifically intended for Nick, "Don't try anything."

Nick bowed his head, which Judy supposed might have given someone else the impression that he was appropriately resigned to his fate. She, however, took the opportunity to whisper something back up to him as Bogo approached slowly with an impressive degree of caution. "That's one of Cerdo's torcs."

Nick nodded subtly. Judy's mind raced, trying to consider the possibilities. "Do you have a plan?" she asked as quietly as she could manage.

His shoulders moved almost imperceptibly in a shrug. Judy thought as hard as she could as Bogo continued his careful approach. Nick had a philosopher's stone, but he also wouldn't want to hurt the queen or the princess or any of the guards. There wasn't much room to maneuver, and if Bogo could put one of Cerdo's torcs around Nick's neck then it was all over for him; it'd allow Bogo to control him. Unless...

An idea struck Judy like a bolt of lightning. "Be ready to break that array and run," she whispered.

Maybe she wasn't thinking things through carefully enough, but she thought she might just have a way to extricate them all from the mess they were in.