10.

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit

"Miri!" The shouted command finally penetrated the darkness.

"Just pick her up, Roland. You're not that goddamn old." Niobe's voice was strident. "I want options. We hit the EMP, we could lose all of these ships. We have no idea…"

"We don't have time for other options." Sace snapped back from her ship. "Prepping EMP in 60 seconds."

"I'm too far." Niobe looked between the ships and the wardens between them. "There's no way I can stop her in time." Wardens clittered and chitted to themselves as they advanced, leg over leg, wary mechanical eyes seeing humans for the first time in centuries of sleep. Their bug-eyed attention taking forever to process the images into faintly remembered commandments.

"Miri." Roland slapped her cheek.

She shoved his touch away, felt the smooth ground underneath her shoulder blades vibrate with movement and it all felt raw. Felt like the Matrix had stripped away her nerve endings and left her to process the sensory data all over again, like the first weeks of life when every motion was a cascade of overstimulation that she fled from, searching for solace. Her eyes hurt to open, but she opened them to see Seraph's statue still standing above her.

"I'm here." The words were painful.

"What did you do? Can you stop it? The wardens? Is Seraph here?" Roland's questions tumbled over themselves as he leaned over her body. His homespun linen shirt looked like it could use a good mending session but wasn't something he considered necessary when other tasks presented themselves.

"Your shirt." Her focus drifted. "Is real."

"Shell-shocked." Niobe's flat intonation was furious.

"Come on, kiddo." He touched her, levered his hands underneath her back and lifted her up into his arms. "EMP won't take out all of them, we're going to have to run for the ships."

"Tell me what happened to you in the Matrix." Miri reached out to the air around her and felt the tracings that she'd seen in the memory. "Tell me about the other woman."

Niobe's face twisted in horror. "We don't have time for this."

"I need to know."

The wardens shivered suddenly in their tracks and slowed. Roland lifted her and then eased her feet to the ground so that she could stand supported as they faced the glittering metal that held them apart from the salvation of the ships. The jacks in her arms glistened with static as the wardens froze into place, and then began to turn as one massive entity to face them.

"What's going on?" Sace's voice shrilled.

"Hold the EMP." Roland urged her and gave into the sensation of holding a woman tight against him. The warmth of her heartbeat, as thunderous as it had been on the rooftop, the memory of her laugh at the most unexpected moment. The thing he'd promised himself was no his for the taking. There had been other women, other loves, but none since Mallory that he turned to like a man drowning and had no wish of surfacing again. He knew nothing about her and yet it didn't matter.

"What did you see?"

The wardens condensed their vision onto the three humans at the back of the cave.

"How is she doing that?" Niobe's whisper didn't penetrate Miri's focus and as Roland caught sight of her eyes he could understand why. The pupils were huge and fixed. He wasn't sure that she could see him or the world around them. He could feel the literal electricity of her skin but the thought of what it meant eluded him as much from fear as from incomprehension.

"Miri, what are you doing?"

"I was a reporter." Her weight pulled on his. "Find the truth, that's always what we told ourselves was important, but the truth is sometimes worse than what you want to believe. I don't know how I'm doing this, but I know the answer to it is here, and that the machines will do anything to stop us from learning it."

"We have a truce."

"It is broken." Gasps from the comm.

"How?"

She looked up at him, catching and holding his gaze in her own. He could feel the urge to shake her loose from the fugue that captured her but then he could sense the warden horde trembling like they were caught in some sort of logic loop that they would find a path out of as soon as she faltered. Roland no longer knew what he was supposed to do.

"How what?"

Miri tried to smile as she took more of her own weight and stood straighter. "How did she die?"

Roland felt the Oracle's reminder as strong as it had been in the room when he'd faced her again after so many years. His failure. His mistake.

"That was years ago."

"Please. I need to know why you were there for me. On the rooftop."

He tensed and she could feel his muscles bind tightly. "I made a mistake. I recruited a woman I knew. Mallory was a brilliant mathematician and she always had an odd way about her, like she could imagine another life. But I tipped my hand in some way. The Agents knew I was trying to free her and they bugged her two hours before we had planned her extraction." The story cracked in the telling.

"She knew something was wrong and I told her that everything would be okay. But the bug was faster than our tracer. And she could feel it… liquid pain… horrible... it ate her skin off. I tried to hold her, to give the ship time to find her, but she hurt so badly. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't save her. And she knew it."

A breath. "What did she do?"

"The Oracle told me that I could make a choice that would save her. I could take the bug myself and she would live."

"What did she do, Roland?"

"I made the wrong choice. I thought we could beat it without either of us dying. I was wrong."

"What…"

"She shot herself before the bug could get her. She died."

Miri clung to his forearm as she took the last step away from him and stood straight and swaying on the walkway. Agartha rose up around her and the ships and the men and women from Zion who were caught in unarmed terror as they waited for the flood to descend. The wardens trembled faster and faster, their casings beginning to hum again with increasing energy.

"Choices lead to endings. The chance to encounter them again leads to faith." She tightened her grip, almost painfully as the static crackled along her jacks and then into his and leaping across the gap in space to Niobe's skin.

"The truth frightens me." She said simply and the electricity crescendoed around them. The wardens keened, Miri screamed as she reached out into the space that Neo had shown her and touched the fabric of the world around them. There was a single gong-like intonation as Miri connected to the city's network and the wardens collapsed. The men and women collapsed on board the ships and walkways, tumbling to the ground as flesh marionettes even as the wardens were their metal opposites. The tone echoed once and then twice more. When it finished rolling back into the silence of the deep, there was not a single soul standing in Agartha, no movement, no signs of life.

Latin translation: Perhaps even these things will be good to remember one day