I stood outside Xen's ward, my hands wringing each other out. Suppose Xen was mad at me? I know Xen had talked easily enough to me just before, but that was in the heat of the emergency. The time we talked before that, Xen had all the reasons in the galaxy to be mad at me.

My bruises and cuts were patched up. I'd checked on Frod and Yellegiad. They were both doing fine. Nadir was unconscious, and would need a long time to come back from the damage done to him, but the hospital staff were optimistic about his recovery. So all I had left was to see Xen, in the synthetic repair ward. No other distractions or obstacles, even if I wanted them.

Come on, Marys. After everything we'd been through, it was silly that this seemed the hardest bit.

I swallowed my fears and stepped in.

Xen was hooked up to a machine which was pumping some sort of golden-brown oil into Xen's body. Xen had been disassembled: only one leg was still attached to Xen's torso, both having been panel-beaten back into shape after being crushed. A mechanic was fitting an arm back onto Xen, screwing it in then locking in the bolts. Xen watched with a chipper smile on Xen's face. Xen's faceplate was remarkably undamaged, and the glitch on Xen's face was gone, so I could see its perfect symmetry in full once more.

The mechanic left us. Xen extended a metallic hand to me, and I took it.

"This isn't weird for you, without synthaskin?" I asked.

"I've turned the sensory mod off. Otherwise, yes, it would be too much, being without my skin."

"Xen, I'm so sorry about what I said, back in my rooms -"

"It's all right, Marys -"

"It's really not. I crossed a line. I'm not a good person like you said. I'm driven; I act like I have to uphold the law but it all gets to be too personal at a point, and then I get arbitrary, I go too far - I wouldn't be surprised if I get taken down for murdering Korr after losing it on him, you can hardly call what I did at the end self-defence -"

"Marys, I remember everything."

That stopped my self-pitying rant in its tracks. "What? You do? How? Why?"

"When Korr attacked me, I decided... I needed to know. In case I was going to die, I wanted to know for sure whether I was guilty of the crimes he accused me of or not. And I was thinking of you too. You went to such lengths to protect me, I thought it was only fair if you sully your hands with his blood, that I sully my mind with whatever I had put aside, so you could know the whole truth."

"I don't need to know." I gripped Xen's hands with both of mine.

"No, I want you to. Sit, and listen."

I dragged a stool over, and sat where I could hold Xen's hand. Xen nodded, then Xen's smile faded.

"I wanted to die. When Beatrice died, I wanted to die too."

"Oh, Xen..."

"So I went to Black Rose to ask for her help."

"You... you just went up there?"

"I did... because we were friends from way back."

"You were?"

"Shh, listen. I'll explain everything. I was friends with Black Rose way back, like you saw in that picture. A short time before you arrived, I asked her to reprogramme me so I could keep being me, but just forget Beatrice. And that is why there was that contradiction you found, in my timeline. Black Rose didn't do a perfect job. The confused timeline is like... the crack in the broken pot where she broke me and then remade me."

"Why would you let her do that though?"

"Because even though I wanted to die, I didn't want to cause pain to all my friends here on the station. So I thought... could I kill the sore part of me... basically lobotomise myself... and live on, a happy simulacrum of myself, living for the sake of others?

"Black Rose said she would take my memories of Beatrice, on one condition. She would take my memories of her too, and use me to set up a mystery."

"A mystery?"

"You see, she knew a certain someone was coming to the station soon. Someone she believed clever enough to undo all the horrible political and criminal tangle wrapped around the creation of the current status quo in the station. But she didn't just want to hand it all over to this detective who was coming. No, she wanted to watch the detective at work. She wanted to bask in a mother's pride, and to give herself some time, watching the detective from afar. She wanted to enjoy your presence, before you entered your end-game phase, and finally came to her. She also saw how it was the perfect opportunity for me to be rid of an awful loose end from my past, if you were to get dragged into my personal story. I just wish I’d known ahead of time how dangerous that was going to be. If I had, I would have refused."

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My chest hurt. I wasn't breathing right. But I ignored the part about Black Rose - I wanted to ignore that part forever, didn't want to face the coming pain there - and focussed on what that meant for me and Xen instead. "Wait... are you saying... did she programme your interest in me -"

"No, no. That was an unexpected bonus." Xen's smile was sad. Xen looked away from me for a moment, then looked back again, and Xen's smile was neutral once more. "So I let her take my memories of Beatrice, and rewrite my past. Where in the past, I had been a nanny to Beatrice, now I had been a nanny to a child I couldn't remember. I remembered being abused by Korr, but I forgot the specifics: that it only happened to punish Beatrice. When she misbehaved - and when I say misbehaved, I mean only minor things, things which her gangster father would be unreasonable about - he let his men use my body right in front of her, as a threat of what happened to bad girls who overstepped their bounds. A punishment, hurting me in her place."

"Oh Xen, that's awful."

"It was meaningless to me at the time. I didn't have the mods I have now. At the time, I was relieved that they weren't hurting Beatrice. You see, I was programmed to love and protect her at my own expense. And as for how far that love went..."

"Xen, you don't have to answer to that -"

"No, I want to, Marys. I was not in love with Beatrice in that way. As I said to you before, all the mods I added, I added once I was free. Mods to feel emotions, mods to feel sensation, mods to experience sexuality on my own terms: that all came later. I wasn't telling you a sob story -"

"I'm so sorry I said that -"

"Shh, just listen. It's not a sob story. It's my story. But I can tell you in no uncertain terms, it was quite literally impossible for me to groom Beatrice in the way that Korr tried to tell you."

"Then that bastard was blackening your name..."

"He may have been labouring under a horrible misapprehension, depending on what she wrote in her letter to him. Because it was Beatrice who loved me. I could never love her back in that way, because I was programmed to protect the child Beatrice. And so I spent the majority of our time as adults together in a terrible bind. I loved her like we were family, and would do anything for her. But I couldn't do the one thing she wanted most, which was to love her back romantically. So I couldn't protect her from the pain of my rejection.

"And that's why I needed the memories gone. Because the grief is too much." I gripped Xen's hand tighter, but it was useless. Xen couldn't feel it. Xen couldn't know what it meant without the mods turned on. "I have my memory back, but I have my emotion mod on at the lowest setting because... the inherent contradiction in our life together, and the grief that I could never ever be what she wanted me to be, still haunts me. And my programming... Black Rose was able to edit it somewhat, but it's still in me. There will always be a Beatrice-sized hole in me.

“I could live for an indefinite time. Virtually forever if I play my cards right. But all organics perish. Beatrice died. One day, so will you. I think that's why... even though I didn't remember Beatrice specifically, I held back from you a bit, even after we slept together. I feel such a connection to you, Marys, but part of me is scared of getting too close, because one day, you'll be gone. And I'll live on."

I let the tears spill from my eyes unfettered. Xen reached up and tried to wipe them with metallic fingers. It wasn't quite the same as the feel of skin absorbing moisture, but the gesture was sweet.

"At the same time, Marys, you'll never truly be gone from me."

"What do you mean?"

"I know I told you to touch the edges of my chip, to avoid getting fingerprints on it, but the edges of your fingers touched the faces of the chip. You're there forever now, in a way. Indelibly marked on the one part of me which defines me, regardless of body and mods and all externalities. Even if I live til the heat death of the universe, the edge of your finger- and thumb-prints will be on my chip, on what passes for my soul."

I shook with the force of my tears, and Xen pulled me down to Xen's chest in a one-armed hug. I looked up at Xen from there, when I had calmed enough to speak without too much tearful interference.

"I don't deserve this grace from you, Xen. Not after the things I said."

"I disagree. I think you deserve a little grace. But at the same time, I think you ought to spend some time working on yourself. How much of your reaction to me withholding my memories was a response to your ex-girlfriend manipulating you over the years?"

Damn, Xen was so, so right. "Yeah... yeah, I can see that."

"So let's spend a little time apart from each other, all right? Not going no contact, I don't want that. We should definitely meet at the cafe from time to time to get to know each other a bit better. But I just mean, not living in each other's pockets like we have been since you arrived on the station."

"Sure."

"You need time to think about your life after all of this, and I need to grieve properly, instead of trying to run from it. But this isn't me saying it's over." Xen booped me on the nose. "I'm not going to let you go forever. I got these mods so I could live my life on my terms, as a sentient and physical being... and I intend to fully enjoy my time with you, for however long we get to spend together. Because much as I need to grieve... meeting you has proved to me that I can find joy after loss. And running from Korr even after I remembered everything proved to me that I don’t really want to die. So I’ll just have to learn to live on."

I nuzzled into Xen for more of a cuddle, for just a moment. It wasn't as good as it should be, not without skin, and without Xen getting to fully enjoy it. I sat up again and squeezed Xen's hand one more time before letting go. "Deal."

Xen smiled, but the smile took on that sad look again. "And now, Marys, you have to go see Black Rose."

I gulped. It was pretty loud. We might have both laughed, at any other time, but the situation was too sore. "So I know enough of the mystery now that she deems me worthy of coming to the penthouse?"

Xen chuckled. "It's not that. It's that she thought you would be unstoppable, once you knew who she really was."

I laughed briefly, then turned away and left, with one last smile over my shoulder to Xen. I had to fake it, given the churn in my gut.

Nice that Black Rose thought I was unstoppable. But I wanted someone to stop me, desperately.

Because I was scared of what came next.

Of what I might do.

Or not do.

I walked out of the Terran Free Hospital, and up to the elevator, despite the fact that I was injured, and still in my sleep clothes under my coat. Because there was no avoiding it anymore. I had to know. I had to meet her.

Killing Korr had proved to me I was not as good a person as I had wanted to think myself. I was a brutal person, deadly in my response to violence and injustice. Maybe some people saw some goodness in that; a necessary sacrifice of my personal peace in order to protect others from being hurt by bad people.

But confronting Black Rose could prove me worse than a killer in the name of justice.

I could be a hypocrite.