By the time it felt like they had a handle on their situation, the world had transformed itself again. The giant light in Pulse's sky had slid down behind a line of distant bluffs, and with no streetlamps around or city lights above, the land was darker than Serah had ever seen. But the space above her was speckled with tiny flickering lights that had appeared as daylight faded, forming a huge, intricate pattern across a field of ghostly dark blue. The contrast of tiny lights above and darkness all around her gave Serah an eerie sense that she was standing outside the world.

Which, in a way, she was.

The refugees had huddled into little groups around the lamps they'd recovered from the train, while the soldiers had made a little fortress out of one of the cars that had landed mostly upright. Teams of soldiers and Purge survivors were walking around, looking out for monsters and shooting wary looks at each other. Nobody seemed to be getting any sleep.

Serah was perched on one of the crystal ridges, looking out at the canyon where the Pulse Vestige now stood. Back in Bodhum, the ghostly orange lines that glowed out from its structure had almost blended into the landscape, but now they were the only lights around. The glow seemed to bleed into the crystal, too, and the waves that she'd seen during the daytime hours now looked more like fire.

"Hey, déjà vu." Snow thumped down onto the ridge next to her, following her gaze out over the landscape. "Let me guess. You making a wish?"

She smiled, remembering the way he'd found her on the night of the festival, and her last moments in a normal life. The moment did feel a little familiar, and she guessed that was a little reassuring.

"There's no fireworks this time," she said. "And so much has happened, I'm not even sure what I'd wish for."

Snow leaned back, stretching his arms behind his head. "Yeah, it's been a rough couple of days, huh?" he asked. "But hey, that just goes to show you how quick things can change!" His tone upbeat again, he jumped down to pound his fists together. "So I'm thinking, tomorrow, we walk over to that Fal'Cie and talk some sense into it. I mean, there's no point in having you be a l'Cie if you're stuck down here on Pulse, right?"

Serah caught herself smiling. The idea of Snow lecturing the Fal'Cie on her behalf did at least make a nice image, and she wished she could believe it would be that simple.

"Even if it works," she said, "That still means we're trapped down here, for the rest of our lives. All these people are."

Snow shook his head. "Hey, no way that'll happen! People aren't going to stand for something like the Purge! There's no way the Sanctum gets away with it!" He sat back down beside her, and pointed up at the hole that Cocoon made in the sky. She could see a pale glow coming from one corner, where the hole had been blasted in its shell. "Besides, I bet your sister's up there right now coming up with a rescue plan. All we've gotta do is make sure you're cured before she finds us. That way, she'll have to give us her blessing!"

Serah giggled. "She probably wouldn't even believe us."

"Hey, I can be pretty convincing when I have to be!" Snow set his hands on his hips. "I talked you into marrying me, didn't I?"

It felt good to laugh, and to forget for a moment how completely her world had been turned inside out. Snow was good at that; she'd never known anyone who could be so reassuring, distracting and entertaining at the same time.

"Snow…." She leaned in to rest her head on his shoulder. "Thanks for being here."

He put an arm around her shoulders, practically enveloping her in his trenchcoat. "Are you kidding? This is what heroes are for."

That made her giggle again. Serah closed her eyes, let out a breath, and let herself relax for the first time in days.

"I promise, Serah." Snow was speaking more quietly now, almost to himself. "Whatever happens…I'll always be your hero."

Lightning woke up with a start, and immediately regretted it. A sharp pain flared at her side that somehow felt worse than when she'd been stabbed, and her head was swimming by the time she'd forced herself upright. It took a pitched battle of will to prevent her from either losing consciousness or slumping back into bed.

Once her vision cleared, it didn't take her long to work out where she was. She'd spent more than enough time in Bodhum Hospital to know the inside of the recovery wing. Judging by the light through the window, she was somewhere on the south side of the hall.

And it looked like Phoenix was already dimming outside. She must have been out all day.

The monitor bracelet on her wrist was flaring light red, which meant it didn't want her moving around just yet. So she got up a little more carefully than usual. Even so, she was already out of breath by the time she had her legs over the side of the bed. It felt like she'd pulled just about every muscle she had, to say nothing of the cuts on her side, her hip, her leg, across her stomach, the bruise on her collarbone, and what felt like several more on her back and arms that she didn't remember getting.

While she took a moment to prepare herself for the ordeal of standing up, she started thinking about where she needed to go. Her Corps station, probably, although there had been talk of disbanding Bodhum's regiment after the Purge. The place could have been taken over by PSICOM, or totally abandoned for all she knew.

And what about the Purge? PSICOM had just rounded up the entire town she'd been sworn to protect and put them on a train straight to Pulse. When was she going to let herself seriously think about that?

Sometime after she stood up, she decided. First, she had to know what had happened to the l'Cie.

"Look who's up!" Lieutenant Amodar's voice echoed over to her before she made her second attempt. He was following Sedric, one of the Corps' medics, into the room, looking like the perfect example of indomitable good cheer. "Could've guessed some l'Cie can't keep you down for long, eh?" he asked, clapping her on the shoulder that wasn't bruised and covered in gauze.

"Sir," Lightning replied, doing her best to look like it hadn't hurt anyway. "What happened after the battle?"

Amodar chuckled. "Yeah, I had a feeling you'd ask." He produced a projector from one of his uniform pockets and handed it to her. "Here's the footage from Dacks' velocycle. Probably easiest if you watch for yourself."

Lightning didn't need more encouragement. The device produced an image that was slightly out of focus and at an angle, so she guessed that Dacks' velocycle had crashed as well. Still, in one corner she could see the Pulse l'Cie, facing off against a hulking creature that looked like a giant suit of armor with giant clawed hands.

"PSICOM probably got a better view from one of their cycles," said Amodar, "but they aren't sharing. Still haven't said a word about the whole business."

There was a flash, and both l'Cie and beast were lost in a blur of energy and motion. One or both of them was out of the frame for most of the action, but the two were clearly going after each other in a fight that made Lightning's own bout with the l'Cie look tame.

From most of what Lightning could see, it looked like the l'Cie was barely hanging on against the thing. But despite being several times larger and apparently made out of metal, the monster couldn't seem to land a finishing blow. The longer it went on, the harder it was for Lightning to ignore that the creature had knocked her out in one hit.

Then, somewhere in the blur and confusion, something changed. The two charged at each other one more time, but didn't break apart. The creature fell to the ground, but not as though it was reeling from an attack—it looked more like it was crouching. Huge wings appeared from its sides, lined with pale, glowing veins. And the next time the l'Cie came into view, she was crouched on top of the thing as it leapt into the air, circling the area once before they soared out of view. That was when the recording ended.

"She's still at large?" Lightning put down the projector with a start. It felt like she'd been stabbed from six different directions, although that probably just meant she was aggravating her wounds.

"Easy, now," said Amodar. "But yeah, that's about the size of it. By the time backup got to the scene, she was long gone from our town. PSICOM chased after her, but…it didn't go well for them. We've got an alert out for her to all the other divisions, but she hasn't turned up yet." He took a big breath. "Tell you the truth, though, they might not tells us if she did. We're not exactly active duty anymore."

"What do you mean?" Lightning didn't like the way these revelations were going.

"Orders came down this afternoon." Amodar shrugged. "Regiment's been disbanded. Guess they figure there's no point keeping so many soldiers to guard a town whose population just got shipped off in the Purge."

Lightning had been doing too good a job of putting that out of mind. She hadn't let herself worry about why the streets outside were still and empty, and why there hadn't been a sound coming from anywhere outside her own room. Or why it was a Corps medic was checking her medical readings, and she hadn't seen any hospital staff.

She'd known about the Purge, of course; the news had been impossible to avoid. But while PSICOM had been rounding up all the people she had been sworn to protect and exiling them to Pulse, she'd been putting the whole thing out of mind to focus on finding Serah and that l'Cie.

And look how that turned out. She'd probably failed more people in the last thirty-six hours than she could make up if she had another lifetime.

"Well, come on now." Amodar had taken on the tone he used when he thought Lightning was getting overly broody. "This has been one crazy day, for sure. And officially I'm not your commander, so I can't tell you what to do now. So just hear me out for a second here."

Lightning guessed he expected her to go charging out the door, pick up her gunblade and another uniform, and pick up where she'd left off. And that had been her original plan, before she'd realized she could barely stand. Now, she listened, though she didn't want to admit she was too worn out to do anything else.

"I know you aren't going to give up on finding your sister," Amodar said. "What I'm asking is, don't think you've got no choice besides running off into the wilderness." He set a bundle of clothes on the bed, and Lightning recognized the tan fabric of her parade uniform. "The Corps' job is to protect the people. We haven't done too great a job of that since that Vestige came to life, but…I think there's still a way to keep faith with that."

There was something behind his words that Lightning couldn't quite work out, a tone that sounded less upbeat and more resigned than he wanted to let on. But he didn't say anything more, and cleared out of the room while she changed. They walked back across the empty town to the guard station, located at the end of the commercial strip near the beach and now the only building with lights on inside.

"What'll happen to the regiment?" she asked.

Amodar shook his head. "Ah, who knows? We got spared the Purge, but it looks like PSICOM doesn't want us near the front lines. Anyway, we haven't got any orders yet. The higher-ups are too busy tripping over each other to work up a plan for all this." They arrived at the door, and he held his keycard up in front of the scanner. "Speaking of which…"

Lightning frowned as the door slid open. A man she'd never seen before was leaning against the wall of the lobby. He wore a Guardian Corps field uniform, but the mess of dark hair that fell to his shoulders didn't even come close to fitting the regulations. What's more, he wore the blue shoulder guards that denoted the Corps' most elite special forces.

"Well, now," the man said, stepping away from the wall with his hands on his hips. "Didn't expect the soldier who took on a Pulse l'Cie to be up and walking it off."

"Farron, this is Captain Rygdea," said Amodar. "Wide Area Response Brigade."

Lightning frowned a little. There was a chill in the Lieutenant's voice that told her he knew something he wasn't saying, and didn't like it. "What's the Calvary doing here, sir?"

"Well, I guess you could say we're playing a little catch-up." Rygdea shrugged. "Politicians wanted PSICOM to run the show, so we got to sit back and read reports. There hasn't been a lot of good news from those lately, but you turned a couple heads with your show out on the island. Folks were starting to worry the l'Cie were plain invincible, but you sure didn't make it look that way."

Lightning was too skeptical to just take the compliment. "I didn't exactly win that fight."

"Still, you went head-to-head with a Pulse l'Cie and you're still here to tell about it." Rygdea put his hands on his hips, giving her an expectant look. "So what did you think of the enemy?"

Soldiers were expected to make a report anytime they engaged the enemy, so Lightning knew she should be able to make a thorough analysis of the battle. She could recall the l'Cie's moves, the force of her blows, and the almost instinctive grace behind her technique. It helped that she'd been reliving the whole fight in her head every couple of minutes, as well.

"I wasn't prepared," she said. "She took a cannon blast like it was nothing, and I've never seen anyone move like her. That went way beyond training."

What she didn't add, as it sounded silly even as the thought formed in her head, was that something else had felt different about this fight. Lightning had fought strong enemies before, but what had really struck her was the intensity behind the l'Cie's technique. It was different from the thoughtless instinct of a monster, or the fight-or-flight desperation of some thug on the street; Lightning didn't think she'd ever faced an enemy who had been so driven.

"Well, I guess they didn't call them demons from hell for nothing," Rygdea was saying. "It's a good sign that you made it out in one piece, though." He got a kind of distant look for a second, but then seemed to shrug it off. "Well, PSICOM finally gave us access to the area around the Vestige—now that they've hauled everything interesting in the Purge, I'll bet, but I'd better get a look at where this all went down."

"You got it, captain," said Amodar, apparently recognizing his cue.

Lightning started as she realized that the conversation was about to end. She wasn't sure if Rygdea really was finished with her, but she couldn't take that chance. "Excuse me, sir, but what happens now? Is there a mission to pursue the l'Cie?"

Rygdea didn't look back, but his pace toward the door slowed to a crawl. "Officially, that's still PSICOM's job. There's been some talk of a joint command operation and that sort of thing." Now he looked back. "But if you're asking will the Cavalry sit on our hands while the bureaucrats talk it out…I wouldn't bet on it."

"I need to be involved in the operation," Lightning said. She probably should have added "Respectfully" or "With your permission" or something that made it sound less like a demand she had no business making to a far superior officer. But being diplomatic wasn't her strong suit on the best days. "Sir, I have direct combat experience with the enemy. If I face her again, I know how to take her down."

No one said anything for a moment, and the silence that had fallen over the town pressed in on her again. Rygdea and Amodar exchanged a look, with what seemed like a knowing expression. "This about your sister?" Rygdea asked. "The report said she went missing in the first attack."

"She's not missing, sir. They took her." Lightning kept her voice level, though she knew she couldn't pretend this wasn't personal. "I don't know why, or where she is now. But I'll do whatever it takes to get her back."

After regarding her for another second, Rygdea nodded, and a smile tugged at the edge of his mouth. "I guess there's someone you oughtta meet."