Aura sat in her car in the detention center parking lot long after visiting hours passed. Metis had barely spoken, but her eyes and the puffy skin around them held immeasurable sorrow. While that would have broken Aura's heart even if she hadn't been in mourning, the kicker was knowing that this was her fault. Fiercely her mind blamed Simon for acting rashly (on his own, after promising not to leave her alone, a promise she shouldn't have believed but did), but in the end she could only curse herself for getting him involved.

From what Aura could tell, Simon waited in Metis's place with the intention of facing his phantom. The fool—did he really think one too many samurai movies would be enough to give him an edge against a killer?

Aura laid her head on the steering wheel. She'd now seen three too many corpses of her loved ones. To force the images and the stench from her mind, she thought through the logistics. The killer had probably escaped through the window or another route; the extra explosion may have been to divert the attention of the officers outside. When Metis entered, the phantom must have slipped back in through the corridor and locked the door to make a scapegoat.

Well, it wouldn't work, Aura thought. Metis wouldn't confess, and they didn't have a shred of evidence against her.

When she met the next day with the lawyer, however, her optimism wavered. The scumbag was useless, barely listening to Aura's advice. She wouldn't have been surprised if they'd been bought off by the state, given how eager the government was to cover up the sabotage. Her rage at the system renewed itself, making her seriously consider revolting, but resetting the timeline had undone her progress on the giant robots she'd need, and in jail she wouldn't be able to reset it again.

In the end, the court determined that Metis's fingerprints on the weapon and the locked room were evidence enough to convict her. It was a farce—of course her prints were on her own possession, and the investigators should have found evidence of the phantom's escape route—but Aura couldn't do anything to stop it.

Metis pleaded not guilty. When the officers took her away, she resisted. Aura knew Metis fought death row for the same reason Simon had welcomed it.

At first, Aura visited Metis every possible minute. Before long, however, Metis's grief spurred Aura to rebuild the machine with obsessive fervor, leaving her without a sense of the passage of time. She only ate and slept as much as necessary to not shut down. A layer of gauze separated her from her surroundings. What was the point in investing anything in a world where Metis suffered in captivity while Aura's brother's corpse deteriorated when it could be erased? What was the point in being courteous to her coworkers, in keeping up with the news, in changing her clothes before falling into a lonely bed?

After that first night, Athena stayed in her own room, speaking to nobody but the robots, who were their own mess of tears and confusion. The government would take her soon, Aura knew. Given that, she only kept Athena fed, not comforted, as causing Athena to develop an attachment to her now would only hurt them both.

After a few days of volatile emotions, she ran out of them, working for hours without connection. Deep down she wondered if the condition was permanent, if she'd never be able to turn the switch back on to engage in the world. The phantom's psychological profile came to mind—the subject doesn't experience emotions like normal people…

So she'd finally created a robot of herself. Though it was a hollow sound, the thought made her laugh.

Still, the comparison to Metis's killer unsettled her enough that she put her work aside to visit Metis. Though Metis clearly tried to mask her anguish, she couldn't hide her swollen eyes.

"What of Athena? I've hardly seen her," Metis said after Aura asked about Metis's wellbeing, to dismissive responses.

"Simon was her godfather, and I don't have legal…they're still contacting relatives overseas. If that fails, they picked out an orphanage."

"An orphanage…?!" Metis's cuffs clinked as she covered her mouth, her eyes wide with uncontained horror. "They can't…! She's not an orphan! They can't take her!"

Aura pressed a hand against the glass, cursing her own helplessness. Even if it wasn't there, she'd be unable to comfort Metis, as she couldn't tell Metis how she knew that relatives took Athena in. They wouldn't even have embraced with the guard watching, an idea that seemed ridiculous to Aura now. How could she have brought Metis back to life, only to not be with her in any sense? The longing seemed selfish in light of Metis's suffering, but Aura had spent so long alone, so long without Metis by her side and in her arms.

"I promise I've been working on something to save you. Just wait a little longer," Aura said, her thumb rubbing the glass.

Metis's chin dropped. "I don't care what happens to me. Just please, help Athena. It should have been me and not Simon, anyway."

The irony might have made Aura howl if seeing Metis this defeated wasn't breaking her. After all I did to save you, you can't just say that. "I'm sure he wouldn't have wanted that."

"I hardly knew Athena's smile until he joined us. I've never been able…Oh, Aura, why?"

It was a question Aura could answer, but not to Metis, and not in broader terms—why has any of this happened to us—so she left with nothing gained except a new hole in her numbness, which began to close as soon as she left the prison and stepped out into the December air.

xxxxxxx

Athena was sent off to Europe. Aura didn't know whether she'd be happy there; she doubted it, but she'd never bothered to learn. Metis wasted away in jail, looking more like a skeleton with each month. With nobody to protect and no front to keep up, she retreated into herself, a ghost of a presence that contained little color behind white and dark purple.

The tear tracks down her cheeks mimicked Simon's. Her hair grew until its split tips brushed the floor, at which point she chopped off the whole lot.

Aura finished the machine in a year. She wasted no time in booting it up.

xxxxxxx

Seeing Metis again was almost more surreal now than the times when she died. Even while still blinking the sleep from her eyes she glowed with a vitality she hadn't had in a year, her face unblemished and her hair long and soft to the touch. The sight hurt Aura, who closed her eyes and pulled Metis close, absorbing her warmth and her breath.

Aura didn't realize she was shaking until Metis began stroking her back. "Nightmare?" Metis murmured with a yawn.

Guilt gnawed at Aura. That Metis didn't know didn't mean Aura didn't remember what she'd put her through. She'd rather have Metis yell at her than be in her arms and yet so removed from her. The urge to tell Metis everything crashed over Aura in a wave that almost washed the words from her mouth. She remembered how cathartic telling Simon was—how much better would it feel with Metis? What if it was the key to truly being with her?

Aura bit her lip, almost breaking the skin. Sharing information with Metis wouldn't change how little of Aura's life they'd shared. She could rewind time for the rest of the world, but she couldn't get her own back.

Not only that, but though she'd lost Simon as an ally, he was not only blissfully unaware but also alive. If Aura dragged Metis into her tragedy…

Aura pulled away from Metis's hold, forcing a smile. "Yeah," she said. "Just a bad dream."

xxxxxxx

Seeing Simon again gave Aura a pang. By now he was about half her age and would probably outlive his sister by a couple of decades, more if trauma aged her. She would make sure he lived long enough for that, at least; when he tried to approach her in the hall, she evaded him.

She tried to avoid the princess…Athena, too, which wasn't hard, as they were both reclusive and—Aura wasn't proud to acknowledge—Athena was used to being ignored. However, when Metis asked Aura to deliver medicine to Athena, Aura found herself outside Athena's room, pressing the button for the lighting system Metis had had her install in place of knocks on the door.

Aura had hardly been in the room since the day she'd told Athena her secret, a period of her life that she didn't want to think about. Still, she knew the décor hadn't changed throughout the years and leaps, as if the bed shaped to carry Athena to the moon, the many blankets Athena wrapped around her ears, and the side table that Metis had carved her love into functioned as their own time capsule. When she entered now, Athena sat at her desk with a pile of homework she was clearly ignoring in favor of trying to take apart her alarm. Aura set the medicine on her desk.

"Math?" she said, picking up the top worksheet. Athena shrugged. With all her absences, it probably meant as little to her as the work Aura had come back to after resetting.

Athena pushed her lips out, apparently hearing Aura's mood from that one word. "You sound…" Aura still remembered the list from before—angry, guilty, lonely—and knew it would still apply.

"Try unscrewing the back first," Aura said with a nod at the tool in Athena's hand and a wink. She left before Athena could respond.

xxxxxxx

When it came to saving Metis, Aura's options for subtlety were running low. No problem, she thought as she adjusted the voltage on her ray gun. She'd never liked subtlety, anyway.

This time, she wouldn't bother with the launch. She had no plan to stop the sabotage, and it wasn't her concern. Getting leave from it didn't take much—a robotics scientist wasn't necessary, not that she'd have gone if they ordered her.

Now that she knew that what the phantom wanted was in the robotics lab, she planned to keep Metis away from it and lie in wait to intercept them. The phantom—Aura spent the last year muttering the term, relieved to have something to direct her hate at that deserved it. She checked her ray gun again and raised the voltage higher.

Of course, it would do no good if Metis got caught in the crossfire. She tried to convince Metis to be elsewhere that day—asking her to run errands or to watch the launch in Aura's place—to no avail.

"I'm nearing a breakthrough on sadness and the frequency of sound waves," Metis said without looking up from her work. "I can't afford to spend a moment away from the lab until it's done."

Aura bit her lip, trying to hold back the voice blaming Athena for this obstacle. "Can I work on it in your place? It'd just be a couple of hours."

"Unfortunately, it's very psychology-specific. Why are you so fixated on that specific date? And don't pretend you're not."

Yet again Aura thought about how much easier this would be if she weren't surrounded by psychologists. "It's the launch," she lied. "The atmosphere's tense, isn't it?"

"You aren't usually in tune to that sort of thing."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Aura's feigned offense didn't faze Metis. Groaning, Aura brushed her bang off her forehead. "Just trust me, all right? Stay out of the lab that day—no, just that morning. Please? Spend the time with Athena, if you really want to help her. She's been lonely."

It'd been over a decade since Aura saw more than a couple days into the recent past, but it was a safe bet. By the sorrow on Metis's face, she thought so, too.

"All right. I don't know what's going on, but I trust you. Now, how do I spend a couple of hours with Athena? It's pitiful that I have to ask, isn't it?"

Metis sighed. Aura's mind wasn't on it; the word trust struck her worse than anything sharp could. Not only had she left Metis to rot in jail, but there was no doubt in her mind that if Metis had refused, she would have detained her by any means necessary.

Well, it hadn't come to that. No use fretting. "All the more reason to try, right? Why don't you draw with her?"

Metis ran a hand through her hair. "I'm more skilled with crafting, but…I'll try."

"That's the spirit." Aura slung an arm around Metis, causing Metis to tense. She was in tune to Aura's own tension, Aura knew. She only stayed that way for a moment, her focus absorbed by warmth and heartbeats and the back of a hand brushing her shoulder before she stepped back.

The last Aura saw of Metis before setting out to the lab the morning of the launch, she was kneeling next to Athena, silently watching her paint a patient Ponco.

xxxxxxx

Aura sat in the lab, adjusting the protective measures she'd taken. She wasn't the sort to just sit around, but she knew how much robotics could absorb her attention and didn't dare work when the phantom could arrive any moment. While she waited, she located the phantom's psychological profile and flipped through it. A person with almost no emotional fluctuation. Somebody who couldn't feel guilt about the agony they'd caused her family, no doubt. Though her blood boiled, she felt reassured that her worries about becoming like them were unfounded.

Presumably this ghost of a human couldn't fear death, either. She was well aware she could be waiting for her demise without anybody to reset time. Perhaps she should have left instructions with the robots, but though her heart thumped, she found she couldn't care. She'd reset thrice already and lived three lives of heartache. She was done. She would win, or she wouldn't.

It was a quiet hour, as Metis followed up on her promise to stay away—of course she did, Simon got his code of honor from somewhere, and it wasn't the Blackquills—and being tied up in the launch, no employees came by. At the thought of the employees, something niggled at Aura. To infiltrate such a high-security building, the phantom had to be stationed there. Not only that, they must have used the confusion with the HAT-1 to slip into what they probably hoped was an unoccupied lab.

Somebody who wasn't near the launch…

Had Aura not been facing the door, she would have missed it opening. The face that appeared meant little to her, but she recognized the person immediately. They were the employee that had helped her open the locked door, the one that was first after her on the scene when she'd found Metis.

Aura stood, one hand gripping the trigger of her ray gun behind her back as she faced the monster who'd killed her family. The file flapped when she held it up, demonstrating the flimsiness of the bait that brought a murderer to her home.

"Looking for this?"

The newcomer froze, staring at the file before pulling their cap over their brow in a gesture that tugged on Aura's memory.

"So it was you," she said. "You slaughtered them."

The cap slid lower. "I don't know what you're talking about, Ma'am. I'm just here to pick up a prescription. Launch anxiety, you know. If the doc's not in…" The employee began to slip away. Aura pursed her lips.

"Don't think I'm letting you escape, phantom."

They froze again, their hand adjusting its grip on the knob before they entered and shut the door behind them with a click. Sweat formed on Aura's brow as she forced a smirk.

"How?" the phantom asked. "No—it doesn't matter."

Their eyes slid over Aura's shoulder, undoubtedly toward the katana, but she didn't pull out the ray gun. As it stood, she had no case for justifiable self-defense, and she didn't plan on keeping her family off death row only to enter it herself.

When the phantom reached into their pocket, Aura was on her guard. But when they pulled out a lighter, she was thrown off.

"You're going to burn down a metal room? I'm not impressed," she said. The lighter clicked, and before she could register the lack of a flame, two shots knocked her flat on her back, where she lay with a searing pain in her abdomen.

Foolish, she thought. Foolish, foolish! Dizziness hit her when she lifted her head, and the pain spread up her torso.

Vaguely she registered that the plate of scrap metal she'd attached to the inside of the breast of her lab coat saved her, but that did no good if she couldn't counterattack. She forced her arm up at the approaching figure, trying to aim despite her pulsing vision. It was no good. She couldn't steady her arm, couldn't see. She was going to die.

At least it will be me. Her years of grief didn't make the thought soothing. She'd wanted to share them with her loved ones, but not like this.

Metis's words after Simon's death came back to her. It should have been me. Aura never told her how wrong that was, how losing Metis was like the sky losing the sun. She always thought she'd get a chance, later, in this time or another.

Footsteps clacked on the tile. A shape moved toward her, fuzzy enough to be a ghost. She placed her finger on the trigger, her neck straining in discomfort nowhere near as sharp as her wound, which was leaving a stain on her lab coat. She couldn't tell if she was about to shoot at the phantom or the ceiling, but that was no reason not to shoot at all.

Before she could, she heard a bang at the door and the click of a lock. No, she thought. Don't come. Don't save me. I'm going to save…

The door swung open. "Halt!"

Horror filled Aura as she recognized Metis's voice.

The phantom stopped advancing. Squinting, Aura made out yellow and black blobs. Both of them. No.

The phantom turned and raised their lighter. Clenching her jaw, Aura aimed her ray gun at what she hoped was their back and fired.

Electricity shot at them, causing them to hit the ground with a thud and a gasp. Aura couldn't recall a more satisfying moment. She intended to continue, thinking of paralyzing them, of watching them writhe and fall limp, of causing them a fraction of the pain they'd caused her in a way even they could feel…but before she could test how far she'd push it, someone she could only assume was Simon leapt on the phantom and pinned them down. Trust her brother to be helpful at the wrong moment.

Two shapes wrestled with each other, but Aura couldn't shoot again as long as Simon would be caught in the blast. Her arm fell, her elbow resting on the tile as she panted, her free hand reaching for her abdomen and finding slickness.

Footsteps hurried toward her—Metis, Metis—but rather than kneel by Aura, she ran past. The katana, no doubt. Pride welled.

Through the blood pounding in her ears she heard Metis call for backup. Metis returned to Aura's side, standing with the phone in one hand and her katana at the ready in the other. Even to her blurred vision it was one of the most striking sights Aura had ever seen.

Mid-sentence, Metis dropped the phone. "Not my pupil," she growled as she lunged, and Aura realized Simon was losing his battle. Lowering the voltage on her ray gun, she heaved her aching arm back into position.

It wasn't necessary. Metis's katana found the phantom's neck, forcing their chin up. "Surrender honorably," she ordered. Something nobody could honestly expect a spy to do, but it awed Aura.

The police arrived shortly after, wasting little time in taking the phantom away. Aura regretted not getting a more sadistic revenge, but letting them waste away on death row was as fitting an end as any.

With her adrenaline and anxiety gone, physical pain took over, making her groan. Metis and Simon knelt on either side of her, supporting her with strong arms.

"What the hell are you two doing here?"

"That's all you have to say to us?" Simon asked. One of his eyes sported a nasty bruise that in Aura's haze resembled the bags he'd never develop.

"Simon checked in on Athena and I and confided about the threat. He was worried the phantom might know the profile was here—especially when I said you asked me to stay away," Metis said.

"Mother hen," Aura muttered. She grunted in pain. Metis's grip tightened on her arm, making Aura realize Metis was trembling.

"I called the paramedics," Metis said, her voice not betraying her worry. "They should be here any second."

"I was trying to protect all of you. You weren't supposed to rescue me," Aura grumbled.

"We would have been shot down in an instant if not for you," Metis replied, stroking Aura's hair. Aura leaned into the touch, surprised at its open tenderness, surprised something so soft could live.

"You don't have to do everything yourself, you know," Simon said.

"Funny, coming from you," Aura grumbled despite his lack of context. Still, the words resonated. She'd acted in isolation for years, but those years were gone.

"Who was it who lay there bleeding—"

"How are you feeling?" Metis cut in. Aura tried to smile.

"I've had worse," she said. We all have, she thought, but she didn't say it. This time, they would never have to know. The phantom would never haunt her family again.