There was a headache building behind Leela's eye. The bell had started it off, and now, hours later, stress kept it throbbing away.

"There are a thousand people down here," she said. "And probably ten thousand eyes. How does a child just disappear into thin air? Here? How can that be what you're telling me?"

She stared at the assembled crowd of mutants. Raoul's arm was still in traction, although Brynda had managed to move him home. He was sitting uncomfortably on the couch, his arm suspended at an angle above his head.

Twenty mutants were crammed into his front room. There was Fly Mutant, at his shoulder; and Brynda, busy securing the traction apparatus; and Raoul's younger daughter, whose name Leela had forgotten. There was her own father, and Vyolet, and Raoul's son Estevez. Leg Mutant was somewhere in the throng, she knew, though she couldn't see him.

Each of them had been put in charge of a search party. And each of them had come back empty-handed.

They stared at her, mute and miserable in the face of her questions.

It was her father who tried to answer.

"She wasn't in the Hall when the kill-bots came," he said. "Your mother swears it, Leela. And she wasn't in the hospital either."

"We looked everywhere," Leg Mutant piped up from behind the couch. He hopped into view, bouncing nervously. "We asked everyone. We can't find anyone who saw her after you did."

Vyolet nodded. She'd been chain-smoking cigarettes for an hour, sucking down the smoke like she needed it to breathe.

"None of our fighting squads saw her when the robots attacked," she confirmed. "But it was dark, and it happened fast. Maybe one of them did get her." Her cigarette crumbled into ash, and she fumbled for another one. "Maybe it knocked her out. Knocked her into the lake."

"But she can breathe underwater," Morris pointed out. "She's got gills. And she can swim, right?"

"She can swim," Brynda said heavily. "But she has to be in motion for her gills to work. Or she has to be awake to open them. If she sank . . . if she was unconscious . . . "

She stopped.

The rest of the mutants turned, nervously, to look at Lars.

He was sitting in the only other chair in the room, staring into space. The ice-pack on his neck had melted. It was hanging limply across one shoulder, dripping water down the collar of his shirt, but he didn't seem able to feel it. Leela was only half convinced he could hear the conversation surrounding him.

She lowered her voice for her next question, even so.

"Can we search the lake?"

Raoul shook his head.

"It's never been done. It would take years, Leela. We don't even know how deep it is."

Leela nodded. It had been a hopeless question, anyway. The mutants submerged their dead in the lake. There were currents, the further down you went, that sucked you deeper. And the surface layers had their dangers too. If the fishermen brought harpoons and knives when they took their boats out to trawl, they did so with good reason. There were things in Lake Mutagenic that made crocodiles seem like kittens.

"What about the manholes?" she tried next. "What if she tried to leave the sewer? Could she have done that?"

Estevez stared at her.

"Leave the sewer?" he said blankly. "What, like . . . go up there and go . . . out?"

Fly Mutant shuddered, eyes flickering in agitation. Morris chewed the inside of his cheek. Raoul's hand spasmed, and he stilled it with an effort. Nervous tics, Leela realized. She'd forgotten who she was talking to. Who she was talking about. Skreem wouldn't leave the sewer. No mutant would. They'd been conditioned to fear the surface - from birth, almost. Her own parents were the only mutants who had ever broken that conditioning, and even then, they'd only run from the storm drain to the orphanarium steps. To give Leela a better life. Love of her was the only thing that could have motivated them to leave, and in the end even that love had only gone so far. The idea that they could have stayed with her – that they could have taken her and run further than New New York, further than Earth – had never even occurred to them.

Mutants belonged in the sewer. The only mutant who would ever believe otherwise was one who had been raised away from it. Leela was well aware that most of the mutants were fighting with her to defend the sewer, not to leave it. They wanted better conditions, or to be left in peace. The world outside was a terrifying blank, to most of them, and freedom only meant somewhere safe to hide.

Lars, she knew, was the only reason Skreem had any interest in living on the surface. Without him by her side, Leela couldn't imagine the mutant girl would ever feel brave enough to leave.

"All the main pipeways are guarded," Vyolet told her. "And the smaller ones are inaccessible. We got your robot friend to bend the metal, for the lockdown, remember? We didn't want the pigs sneaking in that way. So unless you think little Skreem can bend a hundred pound iron girder . . ."

Leela shook her head. Skreem was a sweet kid, but she wasn't strong. And she'd been skinny even before the siege. There was no way she could unbend anything Bender had set his hand to.

"There must be something," she said. "There must be something we haven't considered."

She could hear the edge of desperation in her own voice.

"There is something." Raoul sounded weary. He looked around at his fellow mutants, then uneasily at Lars. "Might we have the room?"

There was some dissatisfied murmuring among the mutants, but Raoul was still Supreme Mutant, and eventually the crowd trickled out. Morris squeezed Leela's shoulder as he passed. Vyolet blew a draft of smoke in her face.

To Leela's surprise, Fly Mutant and Brynda didn't leave with the others. They stayed, watching Raoul. Brynda's eyes were narrowed, and Fly Mutant looked uncomfortable. Raoul noted their presence, but didn't ask them to leave.

"You can't tell her," Fly Mutant said, flustered. "Raoul, she won't understand."

"He's right," Brynda warned. "She won't. And what good would it do? Dredging up the past -"

"Won't dredge up the girl," Raoul finished. "I know that. But if we hadn't been so afraid of the past, we might not be here now."

Leela frowned.

"What are you talking about?"

Raoul sighed.

"It must have occurred to you. You saw the girl last, Leela. By the lake, you said. You said she was unhappy."

Leela froze.

"No. No. That's not . . . "

"The lake was where we found her," Brynda said dully.

Leela swallowed. She knew this story. Skreem had been fished out of the lake as a baby, and no-one had ever come forward to claim her. It was something Leela tried to avoid thinking about. In trying to understand it, her imagination had taken her to some dark places. And in the end it had still failed her, because she couldn't understand how any mother could hold a child in her arms and . . . let it go. Into the cold, and the dark. Alone.

Her mind rebelled against the concept. Her body rebelled against it, hands going instinctively to her stomach to keep her own child safe.

But she couldn't shake the image of Skreem, standing with her skinny arm wrapped around the end post. Halfway out over the water.

She'd been crying.

"No." Leela shook her head, trying to push the image away. "No, that's not right." She took a deep breath and tried to marshal her thoughts. "She was upset. That's true. But it was the siege. It was . . . wanting to be a normal teenager. It was a lot of things. Everything, maybe. But we talked about it. She was feeling better when I left. Calmer. More . . ."

"Resolved?"

Leela opened her mouth. No, she wanted to say. No, that's not it at all. But the word 'yes' was on the tip of her tongue too. Yes, that's exactly how she seemed. And that small, serious face was stuck, frozen in Leela's inner eye.

Was it possible? Had she got it so horribly wrong? Could she really have missed something so, so . . .

She sat down heavily, on the arm of Lars's chair.

"I don't know," she murmured. "I don't know. I thought I was helping. I thought she seemed better. I was so sure. I thought . . ."

She was lapsing into incoherency, she knew. But there were no words to make sense of this. Replaying the conversation in her memory didn't make it any clearer. There was no sudden burst of clarity, no moment where it all fit together and one explanation seemed to make more sense than another.

Skreem hadn't been about to jump when Leela left her. She was sure of that. But . . .

How well did Leela know her, really? How well could you ever know another person?

How sure was she, in the face of the evidence?

"She wouldn't do that."

Lars had raised his head at last. He was gray-faced and rigid with grief. The words sounded like they were being dragged from him under heavy sedation.

"She wouldn't do that," he repeated. "She was happy. Not all the time. No-one's happy all the time. And she hated seeing people hurt. She hated that." He stopped. "But she was happy," he managed. "Most of the time. She wouldn't do what you're saying." He shook his head. "You didn't know her. None of you. You didn't pay attention to her, you didn't care. None of you did."

He was finding his way back to an emotion, Leela realized. And it was anger.

"Lars . . ." she said carefully.

"Not you." He shook his head. "You tried. She liked you. But you?" He rounded on Raoul and Brynda, and the luckless Fly Mutant. "You left her alone. All of you. She needed someone, and you -"

"I put food in her mouth," Brynda interrupted. "A roof over her head. I was never unkind to her. Anything she wanted to learn, I let her. What more was I supposed to do? She wasn't my child! I never asked for her!"

"Then why did you take her?" Lars exploded.

"I didn't!" The midwife threw her hands up in the air. "She went into the hospital a sick child, and when she got better there was no parent to take her away again! No-one wanted her! She screamed night and day for a month, she never stopped! We used to call her The Screamer! And even if you could stomach the noise, there was the oozing. Rapid-onset mutation isn't pretty, and if you want the truth – the brutal truth – well, we all thought she'd die. No-one expected her to live, do you understand? I had too many patients and not enough time, and no-one ever asked me if I wanted to play mommy to a dying child. So I didn't. But no-one else stepped up either, so I don't see why the blame for it all should fall on me!"

Lars had turned white with suppressed rage. He made as if to lurch out of his seat; Leela put a hand on his shoulder and, with effort, forced him down again.

There were some things Lars didn't understand. Some things he never had. Fry believed that fate threw people into your path for a reason; he had lived his whole life by that belief. If the universe dropped a dog or a child - or a robot, or a narwhal, or a lonely cryogenics counselor - in front of him, Fry just . . . opened up and took them in, as if he'd had a space waiting inside for them all along. As if anyone would do the same. As if it was nothing special.

He had no idea how rare that truly was.

He didn't understand how easy it was for the rest of the world to turn away from someone who didn't look right, who was too abrasive, too boring, too criminal, too clumsy . . . who didn't, in some way, measure up.

But Leela understood it all too well.

Her entire childhood had been spent watching potential parents assess her flaws and disregard her. In the orphanarium, love was something you performed in the hope of winning, but were rarely deemed worthy of. Eventually, when you'd outgrown your cute phase (or accepted you'd never had one to begin with) you stopped trying, and tried to convince yourself love was something you had never needed anyway. You walled yourself off from anyone who might have the power to give you love and then take it away, you became hard and cynical, and lurched through relationships feeling like love was some shameful addiction you couldn't look directly at or name. If you were lucky you might unlearn this tendency in adult life, but it wasn't easy, and it never really went away.

The world was an uncaring place, and it was full of uncared-for people.

Lars didn't understand that. Fry had never understood that. Every time Leela had ever tried to show it to him, she had ended up retreating. Fry's vision of the world was like him. Better, brighter than reality; even if it was founded in complete naivety. To dent it - even a little - had always felt wrong.

Lars was still mute with rage. Leela squeezed his hand – the only comfort she felt qualified to offer, anymore – and held up her other hand to halt the debate.

Part of her was still absorbing Brynda's outburst. Specifically, the wrong notes in it.

Rapid-onset mutation. We all thought she'd die.

"Why did you expect Skreem to die?" she asked quietly. "As a baby? Why did you think she'd die?"

There was a protracted silence, as the mutants glared at each other in a silent battle of wills. At last, Raoul sighed.

"Because," he said ruefully. "She's not a mutant, Leela."

"What?"

Lars had found his voice again.

"Of course she's a mutant," he said. "You've seen her! She's all scaly. She's got . . ." He flapped a hand by the side of his neck, indicating gills. "And she had her feet in the lake one day. I saw her. She's a mutant."

He stopped. Leela could feel him watching her, as the realization dawned on her face.

Oh, she thought. Oh, please, no.

It started falling into place.

The strange, awkward way some of the mutants were around Skreem - as if in some subtle way she didn't belong. As if they were actively trying to forget her – or forget something about her. Suddenly it made sense.

Leela thought of the mutated NNYPD officer - the casualty of their first battle with the surface - who spent his days cordoned off in a corner of the hospital ward, with the curtains drawn around his bed, sleeping through a painkiller-induced haze. The mutants didn't know what to do with him. They were palpably uncomfortable in his presence and seemed happier, on the whole, pretending he didn't exist.

"Yes," she murmured. "Skreem's a mutant. Now."

"I don't get it," Lars insisted.

But Leela was still watching Raoul.

He nodded sadly.

Leela groaned. The pain in her head was still determined to be felt. And the baby was awake now too, turning fretfully, as if it had picked up on all the tension.

She was tired. So, so tired.

"Just . . . tell me what happened."

Raoul swallowed.

"It was a different time," he tried to explain. "Fourteen years ago, it was . . . it was before you appeared here, Leela."

Fly Mutant nodded.

"Most of us had never spoken to a human who wasn't trying to taser us," he agreed. "Our worlds didn't mix."

"We were terrified of humans," Raoul went on. "And we had orders. We were to scare away any explorers by threatening to mutate them, then let them escape at the last minute. It had always worked before! It should have worked with the girl, when she found her way down here. But there was no talking to her. She had no rational thought, she -"

"She was high. A crack addict, or something worse." Brynda huffed out a breath, still glaring at him. "If you're telling the story, don't pretty it up for her, Raoul." She turned to Leela. "The girl was cracked out of her mind. I'm guessing crack, though to be honest, she didn't look choosy and I hear the surface has narcotics options you wouldn't believe. She didn't know where she was, she didn't know who she was. I don't think she even knew she was pregnant. She screamed blue murder when she saw the baby, I do know that."

"I found her," Fly Mutant confessed. "She was having the baby, by the lake." He stared at his shoes. "I couldn't stop her. Brynda's right – I don't think she knew what was happening to her. I don't think we helped. It must have seemed like a nightmare. Our faces, this place. I don't believe she thought it was real." He shut all his eyes at once, reliving the horror. "It was still attached to her," he shuddered.

"She cut the cord with her teeth," Brynda said roughly. "Bit it like an animal. She was probably too high to feel it, but there was blood everywhere. It must have pushed her tripping over the edge, because she . . . well. That part of the story was always true. She threw the baby in the lake." She stopped, apparently too disgusted to go on. When she recovered she said: "We didn't think there'd be anything to save, by the time I got there. Fly Mutant dived into the lake, but we had bigger problems. The mother was bleeding out and I couldn't save her."

"A human," Raoul explained. "Dead, without any witnesses, in our sewer?"

"But you didn't kill her," Leela argued. "You could have explained -"

"Do you think the humans would have believed us?" Raoul shook his head. "We're monsters to them, Leela. They would have decimated us, every man, woman, and child, if they thought we'd killed one of their own." He twitched nervously. "I was Supreme Mutant at the time. The decision rested on my shoulders. And yes - with the benefit of hindsight, and these years of experience, with your own example to follow . . . I can say I might have done things differently. I can see I perhaps should have done things differently. But the man I am now is not the man I was then. I made what I thought was the best decision."

"You covered it up." Leela felt sick.

"Yes." Raoul sighed. "We submerged the body in the lake, and when the NNYPD came to investigate, we lied. What else could we have done?"

"By then," Brynda said heavily, "the child had been recovered alive. But mutated. We didn't expect her to survive, and we couldn't give her to the humans without telling them the truth, so the Supreme Mutant, in his wisdom" - she shot Raoul a disgusted look - "put her in my hospital and waited for her to die."

"But she didn't die."

"No."

Brynda looked at Lars.

"You think I'm cruel," she said. "Because I couldn't love the girl. And you could be right." She rubbed her knuckles, tracing an old scar. "But I did care for her, so help me. Maybe too well. I got her through the post-mutation phase, and the cold turkey from whatever surface nightmare fuel she'd been born craving. I didn't let her die. I fed her, dressed her, listened to her screams. Maybe I couldn't get too attached to her, knowing what she was, knowing she might die anyway - knowing I had a sewer full of people with their own problems and needs eating into eighteen hours of my every day, and there's only so much caring a person can do if they want to hold onto their sanity." She paused, breathing hard. "Maybe she needed more. But I didn't have more to give, and that's the truth."

Silence followed her words.

That was the worst part, Leela thought.

No-one – not one of them – had meant to be cruel to Skreem. Each of them had tried to do the right thing, in their own way. Fly Mutant had called for help, and saved her from the lake. Brynda had kept her alive. And Raoul had done what the Supreme Mutant was supposed to do – protect his people, whatever the cost.

But she hadn't been their child, and they'd been the wrong people to care for her. Lars was right. Children needed more than food, clothes and shelter. Leela herself had experienced that chilly semblance of care, and she knew the truth of it. It wasn't enough. It wasn't love. And even if no cruelty was meant, it was cruel thing to do to a child.

Raoul seemed to read her thoughts in her face.

"We failed her," he said. "I see that now. But we never meant to."

Lars convulsed, his fingers clenching into fists.

"That doesn't make it better," he snarled.

Raoul held up his two good hands, in a desperate pacifying gesture.

"I know. I know." He paused. "Whatever happened to Skreem – whether she ran afoul of the kill-bots or . . . or something else . . . one thing is clear. We failed her. I failed her. I am Supreme Mutant, and that means the buck washes up here." He was quiet. "I think it best I resign my post."

Leela stared at him.

"What?"

"I resign," Raoul repeated.

Fly Mutant moved as if he meant to argue - but when Leela stayed silent, he shut his mouth again. Brynda was staring at her hands again, lost in some memory.

Raoul absorbed their silence, and nodded sadly.

"Please don't worry," he said. "A temporary replacement will be found, as an interim measure, until we can hold an election." He hesitated. "If you refuse the position, Leela, then you should know your father is likely to be offered it."

"My father," Leela echoed.

"He is well-respected in the community. And . . ." Raoul hesitated again. "If it comforts you at all . . . He didn't know. Neither of your parents did."

"Good," Leela said numbly.

Her father as Supreme Mutant. Would he take the position? Would he even want it? Maybe not. But Leela felt instinctively that the position wasn't hers to take. She could fight for her people, but she couldn't govern them. This wasn't her home. It wasn't her life, outside of the siege. She was a mutant, but not in the way they were.

"I'll tell him," she murmured.

Beside her, Lars was shaking. It was almost imperceptible, but Leela was close enough to feel it.

In a minute, he was either going to go off the deep end again or break down in tears.

"We'll go now," she decided.

She helped him up, and led him, like a blind man, into the street. He slumped onto a crate as soon as they were out of sight, and Leela gave up any pretense of leading him further.

She stood in front of him instead, her hand on his shoulder.

"They . . . they just -" Lars said numbly.

"I know."

"She had no-one," he croaked.

Leela squeezed his shoulder, at a loss for words.

"She had you."

She felt his hands find her waist and pull her in, felt the baby move flutter-light under his palm. He choked on a breath, burying his head in her chest. Anchoring himself in her.

Leela swallowed.

"I'm sorry," she murmured.

There was nothing else to say – nothing she felt more – but it wasn't enough. It couldn't help.

But as futile as it was, it was her husband's final straw. Lars shuddered against her and Leela felt him break, as if it was something happening in her.

"I'm sorry," she murmured, as the sobs wracked his body. "I'm so sorry, Lars . . ."

I love you, she thought. Do you know how I love you?

It wouldn't help. It wouldn't bring back Skreem, or soften the blow of her death. But it was all Leela had, and so she held him through the wave of grief and waited, uselessly, for it to pass.

Eventually Lars seemed to run aground. He subsided into exhausted, ragged breathing, and then into complete stillness.

He was numb, Leela realized. He still clung to her on instinct, but his eyes were glazed and unseeing. When she pulled back to take a look at him, he shook his head and tightened his hold reflexively.

Leela stilled.

"I'm here." She touched a hand to his cheek.

Come back to me.

Lars didn't blink, but his gaze seemed to pull back, as if she was coming into focus for him again.

"Leela," he croaked.

"I know," Leela murmured. "I'm here. I'm here."

She was repeating herself, she knew. Telling him anything, in the hope her voice might guide him out of the fog.

The truth was that she was out of her depth. Leela had never experienced grief. Oh, there had been near misses – almost losses, like the time she lost Nibbler (before she learned he was more than capable of looking after himself), or the time Lars had thrown himself at Nudar and nearly died. Sitting by his hospital bed, waiting to find out whether or not he'd live, had been a special kind of hell. But she'd had something to cling to then, a kind of desperate denial that had been second nature to her then. Lars would live, she remembered thinking, as long as she sat by his side. As long as she held his hand, as long as she watched him breathe. As long as she was there.

Years before that, in her coma, she had drawn on something similar to survive. In her dream world - when everyone around her insisted Fry was dead - Leela had refused to believe it, clinging instead to the insane belief that he was alive. To her relief, that had turned out to be true. But to this day, she couldn't say if her madness in the dream had been the result of the coma – of her damaged brain attempting to process events – or if, more worryingly, madness was her response to grief.

She certainly hadn't stayed in the dream long enough to learn any healthy coping mechanisms for it. All she remembered, of her grief then, was wanting to escape it. All she had wanted, in the dream, was for Fry to come back to her.

Lars was coming back to himself, his movements heavy as the feeling returned to his limbs. His hold on her loosened, though his arm stayed wrapped around her waist.

He touched her hand on his cheek and blinked, as if surprised to find it there. As if surprised she was real.

"Leela," he said again.

This time, her name sounded like a sigh.

They were too close, Leela realized. They were much too close.

But by the time she'd thought it, it was too late. Lars had buried his fingers in her hair, gently pulled her down . . .

And kissed her full on the mouth.