Riku gave Sora the bed, since after the encounter with Kadaj he was too restless to sleep. Something was pulling on his mind, something in what Kadaj had said to them in the hangar. The more he thought about it, the more it started to make sense. Why were they even here meddling in the first place? He'd felt the poison in this world himself, the way it burned his throat as he breathed, as he'd seen the barren brown hills around the city that supported only tenacious weeds. It was so unpleasant that Aerith, Cid, and Yuffie hadn't even wanted to return home, once there was a home to return to. A few contrary thoughts drifted up to jostle against these, especially what Aerith had said to him about Jenova's malevolence, but they were delicate things that popped like soap bubbles when he tried to catch hold of them. This place was a lost cause. It deserved whatever it got. He liked Aerith, and trusted her, but she didn't know everything. How could she?

Finally tired of tossing and turning on the threadbare rug, he kicked off the sheets and headed downstairs. Sora kept right on snoring and didn't hear him leave. He found a glass behind the bar and filled it from the tap, then went to stand by the shadows near the stairs and think. "Couldn't sleep either, huh?" Kairi said as she tiptoed down the stairs and spotted Riku leaning against the wall. She filled a glass of water for herself and padded quietly over to stand next to him. "Bleh…I think I'm allergic to this whole planet. My eyes won't stop itching."

"Huh," he said.

"Okaaaaaaay…Riku, is something bothering you? You've been acting weird almost since we got here."

"I have not. You're imagining things. I was just thinking about all these people…I mean, are they even worth saving from the Heartless? Look what they've done to this place. It's awful. Maybe Kadaj is right and it would be better to wipe the planet clean of them."

Kairi looked over at him, utterly disgusted. "If that was some kind of joke, Riku, it wasn't anywhere near funny."

A nasty chuckle bubbled up from his throat despite Kairi's reproach, and he took a step closer to her to lean his left arm against the wall over her head. She suddenly felt conscious of how much bigger than her he was. Before it had always made her feel safe and protected, to know that he would be willing to put his broad shoulders between her and any danger she couldn't handle herself, but now…why did she feel a cold trickle of fear in her belly? She gazed up into his face, as if searching for the reason, and in a heartbeat that trickle became a raging flood.

"Riku," she whispered. "What's wrong with your eyes?"

In a flash his right hand closed around her throat, smashing her so high up against the wall that the toes barely scraped the floor. She tried to scream but couldn't manage more than a strangled gasp. "I've said this before and I'll say it again," he began, in a disturbingly conversational tone. "There's nothing wrong with me, so if there's a problem, it must be with you. You've seemed like such a pest lately, always hovering and fussing. Sora too. I wonder why." His mouth curled into a terrifying, predatory smile, and for a long time he only stared at her, languorously moistening his lips with his tongue. Impossibly, his right arm wasn't even trembling as he pressed her even higher against the wall. Kairi was a slender girl, but there was no way he should have been able to hold even her slight weight up for so long with only one hand.

Her lungs burned with the craving to breathe, and black tendrils were beginning to creep around the periphery of her vision. "Sorry about this, Riku," she thought, and let her arms slacken and her eyelids flutter closed as if she were about to pass out (which wasn't more than ten seconds from the truth). His grip loosened slightly, which she took as her signal to snap her leg up and knee him in the gut as hard as she could. He grunted as the air was forced violently out of his lungs and dropped her. She tried to stumble away from him on shaky legs, screaming as loud as she could for Sora.

"You bitch!" he snarled once he got his breath back, grabbing her arm and whirling her around. With his other hand he grabbed her savagely beneath her jaw and slammed her head into the railing of the bar with a sharp crack.

"Kairi! Hold on, I'm coming!" he heard Sora yell from the bedroom upstairs. Riku left her where she fell and turned to the door. It was time to join his brothers.

-----

Sora charged down the stairs wearing nothing but his boxers and the Keyblade, but he was too late. Kairi's body lay motionless next to the bar, a dark smear spreading slowly down her forehead. He cried out wordlessly and ran over, half kneeling and half falling down next to her. Tenderly, he turned her on her back and almost shrieked with joy when he saw her chest was rising and falling in steady rhythm. At this point Tifa reached the ground floor and smacked on the light, with Barret and Tasha close behind.

"What the hell is going on here? She's not…" said Tifa, her voice thick with dread.

Sora shook his head. "No, but it looks like she's hurt bad. Get Aerith down here now. I don't have much magic left to help her." Tasha ran back upstairs to the phone while Sora slipped his arm beneath Kairi's shoulder and pulled her up close, until her head rested in the hollow under his collarbone. He was exhausted from the late night and fight with Kadaj's minions earlier that day, but even then could still dredge up enough magical energy for this. He mouthed the simple incantation, and a tiny circle of buttery light appeared in the palm of his hand as he held it up to her temple. It grew outward, rippling through white and green and back to yellow before folding back into itself and quickly disappearing.

Kairi stirred and moaned softly. "Sora?" she whispered hoarsely, then started to cough.

"Yeah. Right here," he said, and brushed a lock of damp hair out of her face. "Who did this? Why isn't Riku here?"

"It was Riku. He lost it. I think he went to join Kadaj."

Sora felt as if the floorboards had dropped out from under him. "He did what? No…no way. You must not have heard him right."

Kairi stifled a little sob. "Sora, I thought he was going to kill me."

"You mean Cloud was right all along? About Riku, about Jenova, about the Reunion, about everything? There was no way I could believe it then, but…" Sora bit down hard on his lip to keep himself from crying in front of Tifa and Barret. "No, that's not true," he said, straining to keep his voice even. "He's wrong about one thing. Riku isn't a problem to be dealt with. He's our friend. If he can fight off Xehanort he can fight off Jenova. He just needs some help, that's all. As soon as you're healed up we've gotta go find him."

Tasha came down the stairs holding two sleepy, frightened children in her hands. "Aerith should be here any second, Kairi, don't worry."

Marlene pulled free of Tasha's light grip and ran over to Barret, who scooped her up in his undamaged arm without missing a beat. "What's wrong with your friend, Daddy?" Marlene mumbled into his shoulder. "Is she sick?"

"And why was there screaming?" added Denzel, rubbing his eyes.

"You don't have to worry about it, honey, it's over now," Tasha said, stroking his brown curls as much for her reassurance as for his.

Aerith came sprinting to their open door soon after, in her suede boots and a pink nightgown. Without a word to anyone else she knelt down next to Kairi, who was hovering precipitously on the edge of unconsciousness. She placed one hand on Kairi's head and one on her bruised throat and set to work. After a few moments she sat back on her heels and gave Barret and Tifa a thumbs up. Kairi lifted herself off Sora's chest and shook her head to clear it, and they both got to their feet. Tasha took that as the signal to shoo the children back upstairs, despite vocal protests that they were now awake and should be allowed to know what was going on.

"Do you know where Kadaj is staying, Barret?" asked Tifa.

"No, but Vincent might. He went off to do some recon after we cleared out most of the Heartless in Sector 6. That freak don't ever sleep."

"That little shit just stole my bike!" yelled Cloud as vaulted up the front stairs. "Why in the…Kairi?" He stopped in midsentence as he noticed the rusty stains splattered on her shirt.

"All this…was Riku," said Sora, still in a state of shock. "I think he's possessed…or something. I don't know. I…"

Cloud jabbed his finger hard into Sora's chest. "I told you he was dangerous. You wouldn't listen, and he almost killed one of us. Next time it won't be almost. He has to be stopped."

Sora's eyes narrow and he grabbed Cloud's wrist to shove it away. "I'm not giving up on him, not now and not ever. You have no idea what he's been through, and he can fight this, I know he can. If you're thinking of hurting him, you'll have to go through me." Cloud actually drew back slightly in the face of Sora's iron fury, a side of the younger boy he had never seen and under the carefree and bubbly exterior never would have expected.

"Stop, both of you!" Kairi said. "I don't know how we're going to break Jenova's hold on Riku, but right now we another problem. He was with us at Shinra Headquarters, remember? He knows where they're keeping the Jenova specimen, and if he knows, Kadaj is going to know soon too."

"Get everyone up and over here as of five minutes ago, and find Vincent," said Cloud.

-----

He didn't know where he was or where he was going, but he knew what lay at the end of the road…his brothers and his freedom. It was an almost physical hunger, this desire to be reunited with a family he had never met. This is what had been pulling at him every since he saw the plastic prison on the table at Shinra's headquarters. To know that this yearning would soon be sated—it felt good.

But not good enough to smother the thin plume of gut-twisting horror that wafted through him like smoke when he the events of the last two hours flashed unbidden in front of his eyes. Kairi…was she dead? Did he kill her? The tiny sliver of his true self was in agony, but it was all he could do to keep a hold his own sanity, never mind wrest control of his arms and legs back from this thing that had awakened inside him after a long sleep a shade above death. It has risen so subtly, so skillfully, that at first he assumed its thoughts were born from his own mind and hadn't thought to call for help until it was too late. Yes, he had fought off possession before, and it was the hardest thing he'd ever done. But compared to Jenova, Xehanort was a tabby kitten to a battle-hardened tiger. She was so old, her malice as wide and black as a starless night, that he had no hope of defeating her, none at all. He could only hold on and pray that he wasn't drowned, and let this him-who-wasn't him have its way with his memories and his body.

The scenery sped by as the motorcycle chewed up the miles under its tires. The rocky hills gave way to shrublands, then meadows, then uncanny forest. The phosphorescent white trees lining the road were covered in a writhing, twisting swarm of lantern-eyed Heartless chittering mindlessly to themselves. The vicious doglike ones he'd seen in the hangar loped along beside him, pacing the bike, but made no move to stop him. Other shapes, much, much larger ones, shuffled through the forest, snapping fallen branches as they went.

Before him the forest broke apart around a small pool lined with decrepit white buildings constructed along vaguely aquatic lines. Their roofs spiraled into perfect points, and the bulbous bodies sprouted blunt spikes, an alien echo of the mermaid's comb shells he used to find as a child on the island beaches. They were nothing like the gleaming skyscrapers or corrugated iron shanties he'd seen in Midgar; they were like nothing constructed by human hands. He parked the bike on the shore and surveyed the area.

No one but the Heartless were there to greet him. He grabbed one by its wiggling antennae and addressed it with impatience. "Where are your masters?" he asked. It bared its teeth and hissed at him, then twisted up and tried to kick him in the face. He shook it hard and asked again. This time it pressed its lipless mouth into a toothy mockery of a smile and sniggered quietly, then pointed over his left shoulder. Before he could turn, he heard a mechanical click and two points of agony jammed into his lower back. The electricity at their tips sent his muscles into uncontrollable spasms as his nerves sparked and sputtered under the onslaught, and his legs and his grasp on consciousness buckled together.

-----

When he came to he was on his belly in the dirt, his wrists bound behind his back. There were two black leather boots next to his face; he couldn't yet raise his head to see whom they belonged to, but he had a very good idea. "He's a Shinra spy. We should kill him now," the voice above him said.

"He's also awake," said another, harsher voice, and a hand grabbed him roughly under the shoulder and dragged him to his feet, steadying him without any gentleness when his legs threatened to collapse again. He spat the grit out of his mouth with a thick tongue and raised his head.

"We're not going to do anything before he's introduced himself, Yazoo, that would be rude," said Kadaj, who was draped over an outcropping of mossy rock. He rose with a creaking of skintight leather and walked over to face Riku, reaching up to place two fingers lightly on his face and trace the outline of his jaw from one side to the other as he looked him over. "You were with the Keyblade Master, and for that alone I would have killed you already, but there's certain…something about you I think I like. It's quite odd, really. Now what are you? A messenger? A spy? A diversion?"

"My name is Riku. I'm here for the same reason the rest of you are here: to recover Jenova."

Kadaj placed one finger against his teeth and smiled up at Riku as if imaging the prospect of something delicious on his tongue. "I think you're lying. People who lie to me are punished, and I'm very good at it."

"It's true. She showed me the way here. She guided me."

"But myself and my brothers are the only true children of Jenova left. If you are one of us, why didn't you hear Mother's call sooner?"

"I was too far away. But I hear it now," said Riku.

"Wrong answer." Kadaj's fingers slid down Riku's neck and jabbed into the nerve beside his windpipe. "Nowhere on this world is too far away."

Riku tried to recoil from the pain but Loz held him fast. "Aaahnnngh…I never said I was on this world. I came on the ship."

"The Heartless did report a breach in their blockade. Clever. Still not convinced," he said, and dug even deeper

"Rufus has Her with him, at the Shinra Headquarters!" he gasped.

That was finally enough to make Kadaj withdraw, and with that unspoken signal Loz released him. "Do they know you've come to me?"

"Yes. The girl found me out before I could leave," Riku replied.

"Then we'll have to move quickly. They'll also be reluctant to attack you. We can use that. Human sentimentality is a powerful weapon. Tell me—the one who killed Sephiroth, if we attacked Shinra, would he come to their aid? Or the weak-blooded Cetra woman who travels with him?" asked Kadaj.

"Not to help Shinra, but to stop us, yes," he said.

"Perfect."