'Do you want to stop here, for tonight?' Cheiron asked Konstantine.

'No. We need to go on,' Konstantine gasped, as though he was struggling to breathe. His hands reached up to massage his scalp.

'Are you hurting?' Cheiron asked.

'No. I don't get the headaches now, I just – remember that they should be there. It feels wrong, not to get them any more.'

'It's not a matter of "should", said Cheiron gently. 'But it's emotionally painful, thinking about what happened in the war, isn't it? And that can be just as bad as physical pain. So if you want to stop, that's fine.'

'No. If we stop tonight – I won't be able to make myself start watching them again. General Skywalker deserves to know what happened.'

'If you're sure. But tell me if you want to stop at any point, okay? If you don't feel up to speaking, raise your hand.'

Konstantine nodded. Cheiron poured the silvery wisps from the next phial into the stone dish.

This memory felt more like a proper holovid than all the rest – or rather, Anakin admitted to himself, it looked like the sort of holovids that he would have liked to have watched as a Padawan if he had been allowed time for anything so frivolous, rather than the romantic ones he had watched with Padme as a young man. Cordelia – it was easier to think of characters by their first names again, now that he was back to watching memories from Cordelia's viewpoint – was in a ship – some kind of freighter, he thought – in a war. The only reminder that it wasn't really a holovid was that it didn't alternate between close-ups of the characters' faces and wide-screen shots of ships shooting each other to pieces. The only way he could see the battle going on was when Cordelia was watching a simulation of it on the computer screen. He grasped what was going on: the Betan forces were sending decoy ships – holographic simulations – to lure the Barrayaran ships away from the wormhole opening that they were supposed to be guarding, to give actual freighters a chance to get through.

Cordelia's ship ran out of power, and she and her crew evacuated to the lifeboat, blowing the ship up after they left. Then the lifeboat was captured. A male Barrayaran voice exclaimed at hearing a female captain over the radio: 'Another damned woman! You people are slow learners.'

Cordelia's pilot turned to her: 'We wanted to let you know, Captain – that if you think, uh, blowing up the lifeboat might be the best thing for all concerned, we're with you. Nobody else is looking forward to being taken prisoner, either.'

'It's all right,' Cordelia reassured him. 'Their reputation is way overblown. Quite decent fellows, some of them. Anyway, I've got things to live for.'

'Somebody back home? Or out there?'

'Uh, yeah. Out there somewhere.'

Well, it didn't stop being a romantic holodrama just because it had space battles in it, after all. It had been difficult enough for him and Padme, but at least they hadn't been fighting on opposite sides. Or not until he murdered her, anyway.

Marched on board a Barrayaran ship, separated from her crew, stripped naked, and inspected by Admiral Vorrutyer – 'A little old, but she'll do. I'll send for her later,' – Cordelia was still doing everything she could not to show fear, taunting Vorrutyer and the guards that Vorrutyer's cabin 'Looks like a whore's boudoir. One with very unusual customers.' She was no teenager, the way the protagonists in holoromances usually were, but her deliberate insolence reminded him sharply of Princess Leia. What would Leia be like in ten years' time? Probably married to that smuggler boyfriend of hers, probably with a brood of Jedi toddlers to keep under control.

In the vid, the guards shackled Cordelia to Vorrutyer's bed, one whispering, 'Sorry.' Cordelia whispered back, 'It's all right.' Anakin found himself hoping she didn't have to shoot that one when escaping, and was shocked at himself for thinking anything so soppy. Even as a child, long before massacring the Tusken village, he had known that you must never let your enemies survive.

Vorrutyer was sitting beside the bed, sipping a glass of wine, taunting his intended victim. 'Do you know, I think I shall enjoy having an older woman for a change. I can tell already, you're going to be great sport. A very great fall requires a very great height, to fall from, not so?'

This had happened to real people, people a friend of his actually knew, Anakin reminded himself. He could even hear Cordelia's thoughts, trying to convince herself that 'only' being raped couldn't be all that bad, or at least not much worse than sex with her previous boyfriend had been. And yet, at the same time – it wasn't just that it felt like a scene from a holodrama. Vorrutyer was playing himself as the villain in a holodrama. He had been taught from childhood that men mustn't fall in love with other men, just as Anakin had been taught that Jedi mustn't fall in love with anyone at all, and so he had decided that if everyone was going to see him as a villain anyway, he might as well enjoy being a villain, and enjoy hurting anyone he could get his hands on, men and women alike.

Hands or, preferably, a knife. He accidentally-on-purpose sliced into Cordelia's leg, disappointed when she was seemingly stoical enough not to react (he couldn't know, of course, that he had conveniently happened to cut at a scarred area where she had no sensation). Anakin felt the Dark Side rising in excitement, both at the blood and at Vorrutyer's cruel, twisted mind. Beside him, he could feel Konstantine feeling sexually aroused by the scene, and hating himself for feeling that way. Even Severus was torn between his human mind, which had no wish to fight except in self-defence, and being in cat form, with a cat's instincts to play with its prey. In fact, Severus forgot himself so much that he flexed his claws, jabbing them into Konstantine's thigh, which fortunately startled him enough to make him snap out of his blood-crazed trance, twitch slightly at remembering where he was, and mutter, 'I'm sorry.'

'Master Yoda used to say that when we started down the Dark Path, forever it would dominate our destiny,' said Anakin. 'Which didn't give any incentive to anyone who thought they might have started down it to try to turn back. But another Jedi saying is that hate leads to the Dark Side. That includes hating ourselves.'

'Exactly,' said Cheiron. 'I think watching this memory isn't helping anyone, right now. Shall we stop here?'

'No!' chorused Anakin, Konstantine, and, to Anakin's surprise, Wonder. The droid- sorry, the poid – had been so still and quiet that Anakin had assumed they were in energy-saving mode, but they had clearly been watching what was going on with interest. 'And stop talking over it!' Wonder continued. 'This is the best Evil Gloat I've heard in a long while – and I work with Erik!'

'I am able to command a diseased servant, though his disease is mental rather than physical. A real, bona fide, paranoid schizophrenic – ah, come in, Sergeant. I was just talking about you.'

Anakin was now experiencing almost a triple vision of the scene: the view on-stage, Konstantine's emotions at watching as his younger self entered, and Konstantine's emotions at his own memory of this scene. He was relieved that he was seeing this memory through Cordelia's version of it, so that the focus flicked between Cordelia's face as she reacted to events, and her view of Vorrutyer and Konstantine. The view from where Konstantine was standing in the doorway, peering up between Cordelia's legs, would have been a lot more embarrassing.

He could hear Cordelia's emotions: her fear, but at the same time, her sympathy for Konstantine, indignation at the way Vorrutyer was exploiting him, and incredulity that Vorrutyer was stupid enough to expect to be able to keep him under control. Did memory-recordings show emotions and internal monologue only for Force-sensitive viewers, or was Konstantine aware of them too? He – the Konstantine sitting on the sofa – was leaning forward now, neither lust-crazed nor wrapped in self-loathing, but intense, anxious and worshipful. He might have grown out of hero-worshipping Aral, Anakin thought, but only because he had transferred his obsessive, idolatrous adoration to Cordelia instead. Anakin remembered the first time he had met Padme, exclaiming, 'Are you an angel?'

The Konstantine in the memory had no such high-minded fine feelings. Brainwashed or drugged or both, he plodded forward like an automaton, unfastening his trousers, at his master's command to 'Rape me this woman.' He knelt on the bed, which creaked under his weight.

Cordelia spoke, trying to console him. 'I believe that the tormented are very close to God. I'm sorry, Sergeant.'

The Konstantine sitting beside Anakin held his breath, as if he wasn't sure what would happen next, and was mentally preparing for the worst. The Konstantine in the memory stared into Cordelia's eyes, his face so close to hers that she was trying not to recoil at the smell of his breath, until eventually he climbed off the bed and zipped up his trousers.

'No, sir,' he said.

Then Anakin felt the other presence that had been watching this scene. The scream of the mind of another ugly, love-starved maniac who had at last decided to hold back from doing evil. Someone who had the technical know-how to watch the memory remotely.

All he meant to do was switch Wonder off telekinetically before they could transmit any more. He hadn't meant to Force-choke the poid into a crumpled heap of metal, and hadn't even noticed that he had done so until Cheiron asked, 'What did you do to my nephew's assistant?'

'A slight malfunction,' he replied. 'Your nephew should have built a more robust model.'

'That's not funny,' said Cheiron. 'Wonder is here to help you. What did they do to deserve being scrunched up like a sweet-wrapper?'

'Something I would rather not discuss in front of everyone else,' said Anakin.

He tried to focus on the dialogue in the memory. Konstantine: 'She's Commodore Vorkosigan's prisoner. Sir.'

Vorrutyer: 'So you're Vorkosigan's Betan! I've got that stiff-necked puritan son-of-a-bitch by the balls now. This could be even better than the day I told him about his wife. Eighteen years were not too long to wait for so ideal a revenge. My perfect warrior, my dear hypocrite, Aral. I somehow feel quite certain he hasn't mentioned me to you.'

Cordelia: 'I believe the term he used was "scum of the service."'

Vorrutyer: 'I wouldn't recommend name-calling to a woman in your position.'

'You embrace the category, then?'

'I've embraced a number of things in my time. Not least of which was your puritan lover. He was quite a merry widower, before he gave himself over so irritatingly to these random outbreaks of righteousness.'

And so on, and on and on. Wonder had been right about this winning the award for most over-the-top Evil Gloat ever, Vorrutyer discussing all the things he planned to do to torture Cordelia in order to punish Aral for breaking up with him. And, of course, like all gloaters, he had forgotten that there was anyone in the room except himself and his audience, right up until the moment when Konstantine cut his throat with the same jewelled knife that Vorrutyer had been amusing himself carving Cordelia with earlier and had absent-mindedly dropped.

In the memory, Konstantine just about managed to unfasten Cordelia's shackles before collapsing, delirious with shock at having murdered his commanding officer, muttering feverishly to himself while Cordelia tried to find some clothes to put on, and the door opened, to reveal Aral Vorkosigan, standing with a weapon in his hand. But at that moment, as the memory ended, there was a knocking on Cheiron's door as well.