Light mako, dark mako; how were they different? Both came from the Lifestream, or so the scientists said. Max had written a term paper on the research of Doctors Grimoire Valentine and Lucrecia Crescent. She'd worked with both dark and light mako in the WRO lab, analyzing and testing, comparing and contrasting; rather than opposites, they seemed to be more complementary.

Between the myths and rituals of a forgotten age, and the exploitation of mako by the old Shinra Electric Company, Max had found hints of real-world, practical applications that didn't depend on draining the world dry of every last drop.

She'd been puzzling over how to expand on this, how to explore it, and put it to use. And damned if she hadn't stumbled onto a source of dark mako, as well as a new and intriguing friend.

Her supervisor at the lab had accepted the mug of dark mako with a bemused expression.

"Where on gaia did you…?"

"A Turk obtained it for me," said Max, which was almost true. Nero was almost a Turk. And bringing Turks into anything tended to discourage awkward questions. As she'd hoped, the supervisor hesitated, and Max pounced.

"I've got a really great idea for a trial," she said, pulling hastily-scribbled notes out of her backpack. "See, this subject was treated with dark mako in utero."

"He what now?"

After explaining a bit about Nero's physiology, the supervisor approved Max's proposal. She'd have to work on the gel in her free time, which was limited; and anything she produced in the lab became property of the WRO, but that was fine. Reeve wouldn't deny a medical necessity to Nero.

That meant, of course, recruiting Nero as a test subject - if the Turks would allow him to do it. He'd have to get medical clearance, and sign a waiver promising to hold the WRO blameless if the gel gave him any adverse reactions - which was unlikely, seeing as he'd been steeped in dark mako since the womb, and a SOLDIER's constitution could beat hell out of any irritant or allergen on Gaia.

Minor details. They could be managed.

Max kept the other idea she'd come up with to herself for now. It involved both dark mako and prosthetics, as well as materia and the new polymers the lab was creating.

For this, she needed more mako. She'd have to go back to the cave.

Like all cadets- WRO, Turk, even the new science department interns- Nero didn't have a lot of free time. Between reintegration- or in his case, just plain "integration"- classes and Turk training, Max was amazed he even had time to sleep. He had a PHS, but she stupidly hadn't thought to ask for his number. Still, he was easy enough to spot in the public areas of the WRO. She caught him in the coffee shop, staring down the menu, but not actually in line.

"Thinking of branching out?" she asked, coming up to him.

Nero started, blinked, and smiled behind his mask. "Oh. Hi, Max."

"What looks good?"

Nero contemplated the board. "I have no idea. I'm not even sure where to start."

On a whim, Max reached and snagged one of the folded menu brochures from the counter. "Why not try everything?" she suggested. "You can mark off what you've tried, and what you liked, and what you didn't."

"Good idea," he agreed, as if she'd just solved all the problems of the world. Max couldn't help but grin.

The barista jumped slightly as Nero came up to the counter and ordered.

"C'mon," Nero told her, motioning toward the end of the counter.

"Let me order first," she told him.

"I already did," Nero explained. "You like plain black coffee, right?"

"Well, yeah, but recruits don't get paid much."

Nero grinned behind his mask. "More money than I've ever made in my life. Besides, you bought last time."

She got the distinct impression the remark was supposed to be funny, but she didn't feel like laughing. Max managed a smile as Nero collected their coffee and led her over to a table.

"So how's training?" Max asked him. "I am tartan with envy. I always wanted to be a Turk; might still try to pass the entrance exams once I'm done with school."

Nero shrugged. "It's okay. I've done a lot of it before. I'm not very good at the subtle stuff, though."

"Really?" she tilted her head to one side. "I'd have thought you'd be really good at sneaking around."

"Sneaking, yes," he agreed. "I'm not so good at telling people what they want to hear, or making them feel comfortable."

"You'll get there," Max assured him. Even if he couldn't change his physical appearance, she felt confident he could learn the social nuances.

"What about you?" he asked. "What are you working on?

"Remember the mako gel I told you about? They agreed to let me whip something up. Oh, that reminds me."

She pushed her coffee to one side and hauled her backpack onto the table. Digging in one of the outside pockets, she pulled out a few forms and laid them out flat for Nero to see.

"This is a permission form, sort of." She pointed to the paragraph at the top. "Read this. If you're okay with testing the gel on your skin, you sign here and here…" She indicated the signature lines. "...And you check this box to waive any damages that might occur."

She stopped and looked at Nero. "Oh. Sorry. I didn't really ask you if you wanted to be involved with this, did I?"

Nero was eyeing the forms with a vaguely distrustful look. "This is for the skin cream you were talking about?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

He relaxed visibly. "That's okay then." A pause. "Why do I need to sign papers? I mean, you asked. No one's ever asked before. I was just told to show up."

Max blinked. "We need your permission to test anything on you. It's your body. You're a free citizen, Nero. You can even say 'no' if you don't want to do this. I just….when I saw the damage the sun was doing to your skin, I thought, we should be able to fix that. But it's really up to you."

She shuffled the papers around. "I'm sorry. I'm kinda pushy, I know. I just wanted to help."

"You really don't have to go to any special trouble," Nero insisted, "but if you want to…" He trailed off awkwardly, studied the table a moment, and pulled out a pen. Before Max could protest, he'd hastily scrawled 'Nero Sable' on each dotted line. His handwriting was every bit as bad as Vincent's. Weird.

"Read it through, okay?" Max said. "I want you to know what you're getting into. It's not gonna be needles or surgery, nothing invasive. Just topical application of the gel."

She wasn't really sure what had happened in Deepground, but the fact of Nero's existence made it plain they hadn't followed accepted scientific standards.

"The forms are just basically covering the WRO's butt. If anything were to go wrong, they don't want you to sue them. But the labs here are fanatic about safety regulations. You can back out of this at any time."

"Okay," Nero nodded, a slightly perplexed expression lingering in his eyes. "I trust you. I just think it's weird that you're asking. I mean, I'm Shinra property. Although Vincent did mention there's no Shinra anymore. I'm not sure if that makes me WRO property or not. Either way, it's fine. Don't worry about it."

"Nero." Max put out a hand, wanting to touch his hand, but he usually flinched when she did that. "You're not anybody's property. You can walk away from any of this, any time you want to. Nobody's gonna stop you."

He still looked as though he didn't quite believe her. Okay, maybe that was a discussion for another time. "Never mind."

"You're just trying to help," he said, perhaps intending to placate her. A pause. "Do you need more dark mako for your project?"

"Yeah. That mug we got the other day will do for a start, but I have another project in mind. I'm going to need a few gallons, I think. If that's not too much trouble? You did say there's a lot down there."

"There is," he confirmed. "That one pool is deep. I've never made it to the bottom, and there are tons of side tunnels. Just let me know when you want to go back. I can take you, no problem."

"Great!" Max finished her coffee. "Can we go now? I can grab a couple of buckets from the lab on the way out. Unless you've gotta be somewhere soon?"

"Nope!" There was a grin behind his mask, she was sure of it. "I don't have anything else scheduled for today. I think Vincent wanted me to report at some point, but that's not until close of business. I'm ready when you are."

Max slung her backpack over her shoulder. "Come on, we'll go by the back stairs and duck into the lab for a minute."

She led him to a rear corridor and up a dimly-lit set of stairs for two flights. Opening the door at the top let them into what was clearly a laboratory, filled with gleaming steel counters, computers, cabinets, all of the usual equipment; no one was in the room at the moment. Max opened a cabinet under the counter and pulled out two large plastic buckets.

"All set! Let's go."

Nero surveyed the lab, which was too brightly-lit to be of any use to him. Trying the knob on one of the storage closets, he found it unlocked and suitably dark.

"This'll work," he decided, and extended a hand. Max closed her fingers around his and followed him into the darkness.

The transition was less jarring this time, but no less creepy. Just as she was beginning to feel suffocated, the blackness lightened, illuminated by soft indigo light. Faint ripples in the pool reflected dimly off the stalagmites and outcroppings of stone. Nero appeared to have left his blue suit in the tunnel of shadow. All he had on now was the skin-tight gray suit she'd seen him wear in the training simulator. Taking one of the buckets from her, he scooped it through the mako and lifted it, brimfull, onto the gravelly cavern floor.

Max copied this with the second bucket, setting hers down beside his. That would do for a start. She'd better get that proposal printed and handed in to the lab supervisor.

"Okay, thanks." She looked around the cavern, squinting a bit as she tried to make out shapes in the darkness beyond the glow of the pool. Nearby, she could just make out the shapes of Nero's few personal belongings. He'd said he spent time here, in this hole beneath the world, alone. How sad.

"What do you do down here? I know you said you explored some of the tunnels." She peered down into the murky depths of the mako pool. "What's down there, anyway?"

Nero shrugged. "Not much. I'd sneak down here if I didn't want to be bothered. Mostly I'd sleep, or just hang out." He eyed the plastic food containers and the folded blanket as if ashamed of them. "There's some stuff down there, but it's mostly statues, bits of stairs, things like that. No animals or anything. It's not like a regular cave pool."

"So it's not just a hole filled with mako?" Max had studied what research existed on dark mako, and had only begun working with it in the labs recently. She'd certainly never gone swimming in it. It had never occurred to her that anything might be hidden in the deeps.

"I'd love to see it. Can you show me?"

"Sure!"

Max had an idea of what was coming this time, but it still took her briefly by surprise. The wash of shadows, and then Nero's long body all too visible in the darkness before he dove in. It occurred to her that she really ought to have brought a bathing suit. Note to self for next time. Although Nero didn't seem too fussed about his own lack of clothing, she wasn't sure she was ready to bare all herself.

She settled for stripping down to her underwear. Sitting on the edge of the pool, she slipped into the mako. Without knowing where all of the rocks were, it seemed a lot safer than diving in as Nero had.

"Lead the way!"

Nero floated just under the surface, mask dangling around his neck. Turning, he dove deeper. There was a bit of a ledge a few feet below the surface, but it dropped off sharply into an abyss of deep purple-blue. It should have been dark, should have been black as Nero's shadows, the way water was at great depths, but the mako shone with a light all its own. The only hindrance to visual details was distance.

Max felt somewhat less than elegant as she awkwardly paddled after Nero's undulating strokes. It was a running joke that SOLDIERs- because of their incredibly dense muscle mass- tended to do all their swimming six inches below the water line. Perhaps Nero was just used to this; had done it so often that he'd become a good swimmer. It was just as hard to keep up with him swimming as it was walking. He must have realized he'd left her behind for he paused and turned. Max did her best to keep her eyes on his face.

"Sorry," he apologized, and Max noted that sound carried well, and without the usual bubbly distortion of water. "You'll like this."

He led her over to a lower shelf that glittered in the dim light. At first she thought it might be mineral deposits, or a bed of growing materia crystals. However, upon closer inspection, beneath a thick crust of solid purple materia were hundreds and hundreds of pieces of jewelry. Rings, earrings, brooches, bracelets, pendants, and several objects she couldn't identify. Each and every one had been broken in some way. She recognized a few pieces as similar to photographs in her history books. This was all Ancient Cetran jewelry intentionally damaged as votive offerings.

"There's more farther down, but most of it is right here. I guess not too many people bothered to lob anything out to the center of the pool," Nero said by way of explanation.

"This is amazing," Max said, running her fingers over the smooth crust of materia. "Do you know how old this stuff is? Offerings to the gods," she added in a hushed tone. "Just imagine. All of this once belonged to people who lived thousands of year ago. And now, people are walking around on the surface right over this, and they don't even know it's here."

"You think?" Nero asked, eyeing the fragments of gold and silver as if seeing them for the first time. "I figured they were old with all the materia built up over them, but I never thought this stuff went that far back. I've never found an outlet for this cave. If there was an entrance, it must have gotten blocked."

"It took a really long time for the materia to form over it," said Max. "I think this is all Cetran stuff. I've seen photos. So that was at least a couple of thousand years ago. I bet historians would love this place."

Nero did not reply to that right away. "I always just thought of it as my room," he mused. "I didn't think any of this stuff was valuable in any way. You wonder why they tossed it in here to begin with. What are the gods going to do with a lot of broken jewelry?"

Max thought back to her old history textbooks. "Well, the idea was that things in the afterlife were the opposite of the way they are here. We're alive, people in the afterlife are dead. So in this world a thing is broken, but in the next world, it's whole. Although why anybody in the next world needs jewelry at all, I dunno...I'd think you'd be done with all that material stuff."

She peered closely at some of the golden objects. Gems glittered under the coat of materia, like Yule lights under ice. "These are really pretty. I hope the gods appreciated the effort these people made."

"Well, they're clearly not using any of it," Nero observed. Reaching, he scooped his hand through the solid materia as if it were liquid like the rest of the well. Turning, he extended his hand to her and opened his fist, presenting her with a broken ring. The band had been wrenched apart in the middle, but setting was undamaged. Thick and primitive, it was made of heavy gold and enclosed a deep blue stone; quite possibly a Command materia.

"Now it belongs to you."

Max blinked. Nero had passed his hand right through the stone. Traveling via shadows was amazing, yes, but this was nothing short of miraculous. Veld had been right, Nero was way more powerful than he appeared at first glance.

It wasn't scary, though. It was fascinating.

"How…" she began, still awe-struck. "How did you do that?"

"Like this," Nero said, swiping his hand through the solid materia again. This time he held out a pair of earrings- green stones set in gold. Max took the jewelry from him, speechless, turning the ring to examine the rough carving along the band. Light glowed deep inside the stone, a blue flame against a midnight sky.

She turned back to Nero. "That's really sweet of you." Leaning forward, she kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Thanks!"

He started and shied back as if she'd struck him. For a moment he hung frozen in the liquid mako, shock etched clear on his bare face. When she made no move to touch him again, he seemed to come to himself and shook off his surprise.

"What the hell?" he asked, bewildered.

"Sorry," said Max, a little uncertain. That was the first time a guy had ever reacted like that to her kissing him. "Um, haven't you ever been kissed before?"

"No," he stammered. Without his mask, he had nothing to hide behind, so his fearful expression was all too evident. "Sorry. I just… I just wasn't expecting it is, all."

"Okay, well, I'll warn you next time." She smiled, hoping to put him more at ease.

Nero rubbed at his cheek with one hand. "Why'd you do that?" he asked. "What even was that?"

"Oh." For a moment, words escaped her. He had to be her age, or close to it. How could he not know…?

"It's a kiss," she said. "A gesture of affection, or friendship, or even just to thank someone. It was an impulse, I just...did it. I hope I didn't offend you or anything."

"No!" Nero exclaimed. "No, I…" He floundered for a moment, lips moving but producing no sound. Max was again reminded rather forcibly of Vincent. "No I um... not a lot of that went on in Deepground. Sometimes it's hard to remember that the Restrictors are gone." He gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile. There was more there. Though his face was smiling, there were dark secrets hiding in his eyes.

She was almost afraid to ask- but only almost. "What's a Restrictor? Something that controlled what you did?" Images of shock collars flitted through her mind, but surely they hadn't done anything like that to people in Deepground, had they?

"Kind of," Nero replied, turning to face the cavern wall. Raising one hand, a sharp-edged silhouette detached itself from the shadows: a tall figure- as tall as Nero- draped in a long robe and crested with a broken helmet. "The microchips kept us in line, but the Restrictors ran the place. There were four of them: Doc, Professor, Warden, and Sarge. We never called them that to their faces, of course."

Three other shadows had joined the original, each subtly different in shape, stance, and dress.

"We dealt with Sarge the most," Nero explained, the figure with the damaged helm looming larger than the others. "He was in charge of troops and drill. Doc oversaw the medical staff, so I saw him here and there. I didn't have as many chances to piss him off as I did with Sarge. Professor and Warden I never saw much of, since they dealt with the mongrels and fresh meat respectively. Can't say I'm too broken up about it.

"None of them had any patience for anyone who couldn't meet standard or follow regulations. If you didn't obey, they'd come after you. I saw two recruits touching faces- kissing- only they held it longer. Maybe they thought the Restrictors wouldn't see them, maybe they were too raw to realize they couldn't do that. Sarge just walked up to them, and…" he raised one arm, two fingers extended and thumb in the air. He touched his fingers to Max's forehead and then lightly jerked his arm up.

"Bang. Both of them, right through. One bullet."

Max shivered. "That's horrible. Just for kissing? Why? Were they unequal in rank or something?"

"No," Nero said, confusion tinting his expression. "They were kissing. That's against the rules."

Max almost asked 'why' again, like a child questioning a parent over and over, but the honest bewilderment in Nero's face stopped her. Nero was telling his truth, his reality. It was unfair to push and pry, to insinuate that everything he knew was wrong. She'd promised Veld she wouldn't judge Nero's past, and she meant to keep that promise.

"Okay," she said. "We just do things differently. No one's going to kill you just for kissing. It might be against the rules sometimes, but it's not a capital crime."

"You could get punished for stuff like that," Nero insisted. "You saw it pretty often with the new recruits who either didn't know any better, or who forgot. If they were lucky they'd get shot. Otherwise, they'd be punished." His hands had crept up to clutch his shoulders, attention drawn inward. Max drifted silently, waiting for him to return to the present.

"Everyone saw," he went on, toneless. "The Restrictors would make an example of them, so no one else would do that. I saw. Everyone saw, but no one helped them. They were all too scared."

"What happened?" Max asked, her voice hushed. "Did they kill them?"

Nero shook his head. "No. They got punished. They put the JANE in the stocks, and strung the JOE up opposite her. Anybody in the stocks is fair game. He had to watch while other JOEs took a turn with her. He screamed a lot at first, but after a while he went quiet. The JANE cried the first hour or so, but then she went quiet too. By light's out, she couldn't stand up anymore."

Max had gone cold from the inside out. She wanted to back away, wanted to double over and vomit, but fouling the mako would only make things worse. She swallowed hard, and made herself breathe slowly, until her voice came out calm and quiet.

"But you didn't...take part in that. Right?"

He shook his head again, not looking at her or anything else. "No. They wouldn't have let me even if I'd wanted to- and I didn't want to. I watched them do the same thing to Rosso a couple of years earlier. They caught Azul doing what you did. Kissing her cheek."

Nero shifted, glanced up at her briefly. "Azul's from the surface, and he forgets sometimes that you can't do things like that. Next thing I know they're dragging me and Weiss to the punishment pole. Sarge held her down himself 'cause they hadn't built the stocks yet."

Perversely, he smiled. "Rosso screamed and cussed through the whole thing." He turned, finally meeting Max's eyes. "She can't feel pain, so I don't think it bothered her all that much. Mostly she was just angry that she couldn't fight back. The microchips keep you from attacking the Restrictors. You get a shock if you get too close to them, so it's hard to act on whatever you might be thinking. Azul...he didn't take it so well. He got hurt way more than she did."

"Rosso must be a hell of a badass, then," said Max. "And those creeps...Restrictors, whatever they were...I hope they died in pieces and in as much pain as they caused everyone else!"

The same shadow that she'd seen pass over Vincent's face so many times flickered across Nero's. She knew Vincent had been young when he'd suffered whatever trauma had made him the way he was, but it struck her in a sensitive place to see it on Nero. Unexpectedly, Nero shuddered, and swiped his arm through the mako, the shadows vanishing into tattered wisps of darkness.

"Anyway, they were the only thing scarier down there than us."

Max usually had an answer for everything. This time, she kept her mouth shut and thought about what she'd just seen and heard. This sweet, shy, hesitant young man was so much more than he seemed. Shadows weren't just his mode of travel; he shaped them, calling them into being and dismissing them, controlling them as he saw fit. In his hands, they had substance, energy … power.

He'd grown up with that power, learned to use it in what she now realized had been a brutal environment. No wonder Veld had warned her that Nero was something new and different. Vincent often said that Veld knew everything, that Veld was always right. She usually laughed, but not this time. Maybe she ought to be at least a little afraid- but Nero hadn't harmed her, hadn't even threatened her, despite all the horror he'd seen in Deepground. She knew he could fight like a demon, but with her, he'd been nothing but gentle.

"I'm glad the Restrictors are gone," she said. "I'm glad you're up top with us now...at least when you're not down here in the cave."

The smile he gave her was brittle and a little forced. "Thanks. If it hadn't been for the Restrictors, it would have been pretty awesome. Most of the time it wasn't so bad. It only sucked if you got caught doing something they didn't like, and I'm not sure they liked anything."

He shook himself, visibly returning to the present. "Anyway, you don't want to hear any more about that."

"Not if you don't want to talk about it," she said, still a little shaky inside. "Can we look around a little more? I don't have anywhere I have to be today, and this is really cool."

"Sure!" Nero agreed. "There's some other stuff down here that's kind of neat."

He did an elegant sort of backflip and dove deeper. Max blinked, tucked the jewelry into her bra, and did a less dignified nosedive of her own, following him down. Stalagmites loomed in the distance, sticking up like enormous, skinny, skyscrapers. Upon closer examination, the spires were lumpy and oddly-shaped. One vaguely reminded her of a snowman. Squinting, she thought she could see stone beneath the thick layer of crystallized materia. Were there statues under there? Nero drifted a few yards away, waiting for her, and paddled over.

The stalagmites rose up from the center of the pool. Nero had gone over to one side of the well. There were odd, ridge-like projections sticking out of the wall. It took her a moment to realize the outcroppings were a broken set of stairs. There were a few other architectural elements as well. The wall was riddled with holes; some natural, some man-made. Several had what appeared to be carvings around them, though the heavy materia deposits made it hard to tell. Most gaped emptily, their narrow tunnels leading down and into a more profound darkness. Quite a few, however, remained covered with what reminded Max of ceremonial shields. Were these graves?

Nero was waiting near one of the larger, uncovered tunnels. This one was elegantly carved around its mouth, and elliptical in shape, and more than tall enough for Nero to stand up inside it comfortably. A shallow channel ran through the middle of the floor leading back into the blackness. The passage twisted and turned until at last it widened into a large, circular room. It would have been dark as the reverse side of Max's eyelids, except for the massive pile of crystal that sat in the center of the room, emitting a soft indigo light. Beneath the obligatory layer of materia, Max could just make out what looked like primitive carvings, or paintings on the walls. The figures looked human, but between the low light and the materia shell, she could distinguish few details.

"Pretty cool, huh?" Nero asked. The crystal formation was bigger than he was, and that was saying something.

"It's beautiful!" Max circled the crystal formation, enchanted by the soft play of light in its heart.

She ran tentative fingers over one facet, the glassy surface smooth and warm to the touch.

"It must have been down here for ages to get this big," Nero commented, absently resting one hand on a spear of crystal. The materia blinked, indigo fire briefly sparkling to life and then dying just as quickly. Nero started back and then drifted forward to poke it lightly with one finger. Again, light flickered somewhere deep within the many facets, but only for the space of a heartbeat.

"Maybe we better not touch it," he said, eyeing it warily.

"It didn't do anything when I touched it," said Max. "Maybe it's reacting to your shadows?"

"I have no idea. It's never done that before." A pause. "Are you getting a mako headache yet? It can get shouty if you stay under too long."

Max shook her head. "Nope." She tilted her head, as if listening to something in the distance. "There's a sort of whispery hum, but it comes and goes. Should I be hearing actual voices?"

"You will if you stay down too long. I don't mind it. Some of them tell cool stories, but it's supposed to be dangerous for non-SOLDIERs," Nero explained.

"I'm fine, but I guess for once I should take the expert's advice. If you think we should head back, I'm ready."

"Okay."

He didn't swim as quickly this time, checking himself so that she could easily keep up. The return to the surface seemed to take longer. It was hard to tell exactly how far down they were, but it was apparently much deeper than Max had originally thought. In the distance, the shelf of votive offerings glimmered in the half-light.

Breaking the surface felt strange, the air hot and too-sharp in her lungs for the first few breaths. Nero climbed out first, shadows wrapping him in his mako suit again, before he turned and offered a hand to help her out. She really needed to remember to pack a swimsuit next time. And a towel.

She used her sweatshirt to wipe down a bit before putting it on, remembering to pull out the ring Nero had given her and slip it into her skirt pocket. She hesitated over the emerald earrings.

"These would look great on you," she said. "I'll hang onto 'em, and when we get a chance, if you want, I can pierce your ears for you."

"Oh, um, okay," Nero replied.

The two buckets full of mako sat waiting where'd she'd left them. "Guess we'd better get these back to the lab."

"I'll take you back," Nero offered, picking up the other bucket with one hand, and holding out the other to her. Max took the second bucket and his hand, and let him pull her through the darkness back into the soft fluorescence of the lab. Maybe her eyes had gotten to used to the dim, violet light of the mako cavern. Everything seemed too bright, too clean, and Nero looked painfully out of place.

Nero set the bucket on the floor and released her hand. She would have liked to stay with him, to apologize, although she wasn't sure what she would apologize for. However, Nero seemed to have exceeded his social limit for the day.

"Is this okay?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's fine," Max told him, giving him a smile. "This'll be a big help."

"See you later?"

Her smile broadened at the hopefulness in his voice. "Yeah."

She couldn't see his smile, but that didn't mean it wasn't there. Max stooped to lift the second bucket of mako with her free hand. When she straightened, Nero had gone.