Outside of the school tent, Maya had been watching for trouble for the last two hours. She, Tory, and a few of the children's mothers had volunteered to stand watch after the Cylon attack on the Temple. It was not so much that they expected to stop a squad of Centurions if they decided to rampage through the schoolhouse, at least not on an intellectual level. But if a fire fight broke out in the street outside, a little warning would allow them to get the children under the desks and hopefully out of the way of stray bullets.

So it was Maya whose voice Laura heard call out, "Skinjob. The Blonde."

The Blonde. D'Anna. Leoben. Cavil. Some of the humanoid Cylon models were referred to by names of ones they had known within the Fleet. The Blond was one of the exceptions, because aside from the Pegasus crew they hadn't really seen her much as a person. It made her easier to hate, and at least on New Caprica they had had particular reasons. She tended to be the coldest. The most vicious. The most fanatical. It had been one of the reasons Roslin's encounter with one of them a few days before had been so out of place.

There wasn't really much to be done at her approach. The children couldn't run away from every Cylon because there were Cylons everywhere, and Roslin didn't change her lesson plan. They didn't teach the children anything in the school house that the Cylons would find objectionable. Mostly because they knew that twenty children couldn't possibly keep a secret, and there were children of members of the New Caprica Police in the room whose parents couldn't be trusted not to step on their fellow human beings for an extra ration of rice or alcohol.

So Roslin was teaching when Six came in. She always thought of this one as Baltar's Whore… even though this wasn't likely the one she had seen on Caprica before the attack. It felt nice to keep some of those things clear in her mind. That Baltar was a traitor, and she had to help save humanity from him.

The children looked up from their work as the Cylon passed their desks, looking down at each of their papers to see what they were working on. Laura thought she had a weird little smirk on her face, but it was more the children she was watching. Some of them looked terrified, but some of them had the same bitter hatred their parents had developed. "School's over for the day, everyone line up, the younger kids with Maya and the older ones with Ms. Foster please. Fifteen-year-olds, remember you have homework tonight."

Maya and Ms. Foster. That basically described her relationship with the two women as much as what the children called them. Maya was the sweet older sibling, Tory was an adult not to be addressed familiarly by any but those she chose to give that permission too. The effect was to make Tory seem older, even though the two women were of an age with each other.

Tory gave the Cylon a look and then glanced at Laura, and she could tell that her aide didn't want to leave her alone with the machine, but Laura wasn't moving and one look from her made Tory realize that this was not a point to argue. So as the children filed out of the tent quickly and quietly, the two women were left alone, Roslin at one end of the school tent and Six at the other.

"The children don't normally go home at this time," the Cylon observed.

"They weren't going to learn anything with you lurking over them. What do you want?"

There was that mirthless laugh that made Roslin think that the Cylons could imitate every detail of humanity except for humor. Laughter was a window into the soul, and machines were vacant things. "It's still hard to picture you as a school teacher, Roslin."

"It's hard for a lot of people to think of me as anything else. I ask again, what do you want with my school?" Ice slipped into Laura's tone and she knew she was walking a dangerous line, but then again, eventually they would come for her if she resisted them or not, so she had little to lose.

"You don't like me being here."

"A school is a sacred place of learning."

"Like a Temple? You didn't seem to have much trouble violating your own sacred space." She gestured to Roslin, and she rather supposed that was a personal you and not a collective one.

"I'm not involved with the Resistance."

"Of course you are. You are their focal point. Their noble and suffering leader. Much more dangerous now than you ever were as president, because the people now see you suffering among them. Do you think Adama knows that, wherever he is?"

"Admiral Adama has other things on his mind. Like rescuing us. And if you had proof I was involved with the Resistance I'd be under arrest."

Six had been walking towards her and had reached out and took one of Laura's wrists, holding it up between the two of them with a thumb on her pulse point. The Cylon's grip was strong and Laura thought if she tried to break away from the touch she would probably break her hand. But it was also gentle and sexual as well. It reminded her that this woman/thing was probably programmed to seduce everything she touched.

"You seem so sure you understand us, and that we do not understand what is going on in front of us. Adama is gone. He's gone on to find earth, and now you've taken his place as the heart of these people. The pulse of their hopes flows through you. You resist just by breathing."

The Cylon was now close enough that Laura could feel the other woman's breath as she spoke. See it in the cold air between them. Laura wondered if this was threat or seduction. Or if this woman was capable of not being seductive. Still, she broke her hand away from the Cylon's grip and to her relief the other woman let go. "I don't understand you at all. I never have. But I'm equally sure you don't understand us."

Roslin walked away from Six and busied herself straightening chairs again, just as she had the first time they had met.

"I don't understand you." The admission made Laura stop and look up, but she didn't say anything, and the Cylon continued, "The more you lose, the more you fight. When you run out of space ships you build them out of scraps and chewing gum. When you run out of guns you fight with knives. When you run out of knives I'm sure you will attack us with your bare hands. You were ready to abandon this place before we came. You never wanted to settle here in the first place. Yet, you resent us being here."

"Of course we won't stop fighting. We resent you being here because we didn't ask for you to come and save us. You can't destroy everything—kill everything—and then expect to walk into this settlement like liberators showered with flowers." It was Roslin's turn to advance on Six, looking at the other woman over her glasses like she would a pupil who had misbehaved in her class. "We brought you on ourselves. We created you in hubris. We never asked ourselves what we have done to deserve survival as a species. I know the answer to that question now. We survive because we fight. Humanity wins as long as there is one human left standing. When the gods look down on us in judgment, you and I, whose soul do you think they will find lacking? Me for the three Cylons I have ordered killed? Or you for the billions of innocents you have slaughtered? Is that why you come to my schoolhouse? To find more innocent blood to spill for your God? What kind of God would be pleased with what you have done?"

The question hung in the air and Laura thought she had hit home. Six stood in silence watching her. "God is merciful and is pleased by love and mercy. That is why we are here. To show you His mercy."

It was Laura's turn to laugh without humor now. "This is mercy? This isn't peace. This isn't life. This is slow death. We resist because we have answered the question. We deserve to survive and with every human you kill… the whole grows stronger in it's will to survive you."

Six looked like she wanted to say something, but when she looked into Laura's eyes, she just looked away.

Caprica always seemed to walk away from encounters with Laura Roslin feeling like she knew less than before them. She thought she understood the look behind the human woman's eyes. Hate was an emotion she understood well enough. She had known it for a long time when she lived on Caprica both before and after the holocaust. She had first hated the humans she lived among, and then she had hated her fellow Cylons as they walked around the ruins of colonial civilization as if God would reveal Himself if they just continued a surreal imitation of human life.

It was what she had hated most, watching Fives and Eights and Threes and even other Sixes walking around in groups drinking coffee and reading newspapers. It had been a self-loathing hatred. She had seen God in the eyes of people in the streets of Caprica City. She had seen Him in the eyes of the humans, and she saw nothing in the eyes of her fellow Cylons.

The war had made her empty, and it was only among the enemy that she saw what she wanted most. The love of God. It wasn't an easy love, a simple love, it was one they fought with. It was what made her fascinated by humanity and angry with it. She wanted to touch them tenderly and rip them asunder at the same time. And it had become personified for her in Laura Roslin, a woman she hated and liked at the same time. A woman she wanted to protect, and destroy at once. Just as she loved Gaius and loathed him at the same time, though she rather doubted either Roslin or Baltar would much like the comparison.

She didn't know where she was walking until she saw D'Anna sitting on the ground playing with a scruffy dog who looked like everything else on New Caprica. Hungry. It was an incongruous image, because to her mind the Threes were the most cold blooded among them. She leaned against a light post and watched until the other Cylon looked up and a little self-consciously smiled.

"I think I'm the only one who feeds him, every time I come by here his bowl is overturned." She stood up and offered her hand. "I don't think we've met. You're Caprica Six."

"Last time I checked." She hated being recognized. It just reminded her that she wasn't one of them anymore. One of twelve. "You're the one they call D'Anna?"

"Yeah, I haven't really gotten out of the habit. Too much time among the humans I guess." Too much time among the humans meant a lot of things. All the individuals, the Cylons that found themselves separate from the collective, had spent too much time among the humans in the eyes of the rest. It was a contaminant, not a mark of pride. Something to be washed off, forgotten, erased. And never went away. D'Anna tilted her head to the side, "You look like you are somewhere else."

Caprica smiled a little sheepishly, "Thinking about a conversation I just had with Laura Roslin."

Something about the name made D'Anna laugh. "Don't think too much about her, that's a puzzle that will break your brain. I know, I've tried." At a raised eyebrow from Six she elaborated, "I was in the Colonial press corps and I remember sitting in the back of press briefings trying to figure out what was going through her head. Humans are so easy to read, but I never could figure out her. It was like watching a musical composer slipping a little melody under three other themes. One person would see one theme and think she was talking directly to him, and the man next to him would hear something completely different, and his neighbor something else entirely. You could catch tiny shreds of her thought process, but as soon as you pulled on them to unravel it they would snap."

"We will need to co-opt her or else she will be dangerous to us."

"She is dangerous to us, and she won't be co-opted. She's not Gaius Baltar. She has faith in her mission. Eventually, sooner rather than later I suspect, she will be exterminated."

… to be continued…