“You’ve found it?!”

“Not exactly,” Luna said. She was using Rei’s communicator to inform the other Senshi of the discovery Rei had made—or which had been made for her—and Ami, understandably, was more than a little excited.

“What we’ve found is a description of one of the Nereid cavern-cities,” Luna explained. “The opening paragraph calls it ‘the Place of the Sighing Mists Rising Through the Crystal Chambers, Where the Hand of Mercury Rests.’”

Minako started sputtering, and from the sounds of things, Hotaru and ChibiUsa weren’t far behind her.

“It doesn’t _actually_ say that, does it?” Usagi asked, her own voice full of imminent laughter.

“Yes, Usagi, it actually does. It’s part of the name of the city.”

“That whole thing?”

“Yes. You have to keep in mind that the Nereids were telepathic. Their natural form of communication was mind-to-mind, exchanging memories rather than words, and when they described something, they threw in everything they knew about it. That sort of all-inclusiveness can’t really be expressed in a single word, so it comes across as several, usually in a semi-poetic form. Rei’s been complaining because the Book seems to use a similar sort of high-density information storage, and it makes translation difficult.”

“Did _you_ want to do this?” Rei asked, not looking up from the pages she was reading and the sheets upon which she was copying down the weird symbols.

“Anyway, ‘the Hand of Mercury’ is a fairly good analogy for the Caduceus, so unless Rei finds something to the contrary further on, I think we can assume that it’s in whatever’s left of that city—or that it was. If it _is_ there, the Mercury Computer should be able to pick it out fairly easily, but that brings us back to the question of just how we’re going to get up to Mercury at all.”

“We’ve got an idea on that end,” Michiru sighed. “Or rather, Hotaru does. I checked my Mirror a few times this week about how we might get to Mercury, and it kept returning an image of the planet Saturn. Hotaru started thinking, and she believes she has the solution. I’m not very comfortable with it, myself, but...”

“Oh?” Luna said cautiously.

“There’s a trick Pandora used to use to travel,” Hotaru replied. “It’s a little slower than teleporting, but it’s easier—sort of.” She didn’t stop to explain what she meant by ‘sort of.’ “I’d do all the work myself, and I could get all of us to Mercury in about three minutes.”

“I think I know what she’s talking about,” Artemis said in a weak voice. “Hotaru, does this ‘trick’ of yours involve the Silence Glaive in any way?”

“It does, actually.”

Artemis sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

“Artemis?” Luna and Michiru said together. “What’s she talking about?” Luna continued. “Will it work?”

“Is it _safe_?” Michiru demanded.

“Oh, it’ll work. And it’s completely safe. But I’m staying here, and I think Usagi-chan should, too. Pandora took me on a couple of trips with her little technique, and the damned thing always made me nauseous for the next twenty-four hours.”

“If it’s all the same to you,” Usagi put in, “_I’d_ sort of like to see Mercury.”

“It’s your funeral.”

“Artemis,” Luna said flatly, “quit trying to be funny and explain what this ‘trick’ involves. I’m not going to go along with something just on your word that...”

“Hang on, Luna,” Hotaru interrupted. “I can show you.” There followed the sound of her transforming, and then Saturn’s older voice asked, “You’re in Rei- chan’s room, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I’ll come in just inside the door. Could you make sure there’s nothing in the way? I’m not completely certain what might happen if I hit something on either end of this.”

“On either end of what?”

“You’ll see. Is it clear?”

“Hang on.” Luna shooed Phobos and Deimos off of their perch and moved it back a short distance while kicking the throw rug out of the way. “That’s about as clear as I can get it. Or did you want me to open the door?”

“No, that’s okay. Stand back. I don’t want to hurt you by accident.” There was a pause, followed by the sound of space being torn.

It was not like the quick ripping of paper or fabric by scissors or by hands, nor like the deep cracking of stone during an earthquake. The sound was more like hearing someone rake their fingernails across a blackboard, but from a distance, and with distinctly metallic overtones that echoed afterwards. The four crows let out a collective squawk and hopped or fluttered away from the area of the door.

Rei looked up and Luna took a few steps backwards as the shining tip of the Silence Glaive appeared in mid-air just inside the door, somewhat above the level of Luna’s head, and then descended down. It left a hair-thin line of intense violet-black light in its wake, a line that quickly widened in the middle, as if two invisible hands had worked their fingers into the gap and were pulling reality itself apart, and when the six-foot high breach was also at least three feet wide along most of its length, Saturn stepped through. Wide- eyed, Luna leaned to one side to look past, and saw Haruka and Michiru staring back at her from the living room Saturn had just left.

“Yikes,” Haruka breathed.

“Yeah,” Artemis agreed, “that’s one way of putting it. Gives you a headache just looking at it, doesn’t it?”

“What is it?” Ami asked. “What did she do?”

“She... there’s...” Michiru was actually at a loss for words.

“We’re standing in our living room and looking into Rei’s room,” Haruka said. “Does that help?”

“You’re doing _what_?”

“Pandora called them dimension doors,” Artemis said. “They use the warping power of Saturn to link two separate points in our universe through another dimension which doesn’t have the same rules of space and motion. Teleporting moves you from place to place without crossing the space in between; you cease to exist at one point and start to exist somewhere else. This way, you still have to cross space, but the door lets you do it in a world where it’s just as easy to cross a couple of light-years as it is to cross a room.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Minako’s voice objected.

“Hey,” Artemis replied, “don’t shoot the messenger. I’m just repeating what Pandora told me. I really haven’t got the slightest idea how it works.”

“Oh, _that’s_ reassuring.”

While Minako and Artemis were arguing, Haruka came up to the opening and very slowly stuck her hand through, moving it back and forth through the air within the purple and black glow.

“Don’t be a baby,” Saturn said, reaching out and taking Haruka’s hand, pulling her through before she had a chance to protest. “See? It’s perfectly safe to go through.”

“What happens if you touch the edge?” Rei asked.

“That depends,” Artemis replied. “The edges will cut through just about anything that happens to get in the way when they’re opening or shutting, but once the door’s open all the way, it’s pretty harmless. Unless somebody happens to hit it with a large burst of concentrated energy, of course.”

“Boom?” ChibiUsa guessed.

“Boom,” Artemis agreed. “And on both ends of the door. It only happened to Pandora once that I ever knew about, but we spent a week rebuilding her quarters afterwards, so once was plenty.”

Haruka, Luna, and Rei all looked at Saturn. “I got the message,” she replied, saluting smartly. “No doors anywhere near a fight.”

“Well,” Usagi said, “it sounds to me like we’ve got everything covered. Do we go tomorrow night, then?”

“We wait until Rei has a chance to finish translating what the Book said,” Luna replied in a voice that would suffer no argument. “If Ami’s computer can’t find the Caduceus for some reason, we’ll need to look for it the old-fashioned way, and I do _not_ want to spend the next month digging around a ruined Nereid city if there’s a chance it isn’t necessary.”

“How much does she have left to do?” Ami asked.

“It’ll only take a couple of nights,” Rei said confidently. “I’ll go as fast as I can, Ami-chan, I promise.” She looked over at Haruka and Saturn. “Now, will you two kindly get out of my room and close that hole before Yuuichirou or my grandfather come along and see it?”

That made Saturn blink. “You know, I’m not even sure what this thing looks like from the other side.” She leaned around behind it, her face disappearing behind the image of Michiru and the living room. “Ah, nuts.”

“What? What do you see?”

“Just the three of you and a slight haze at the edge,” Saturn replied, coming back around to the front with a disappointed frown on her face. “I was hoping for... I don’t know, something a little more... weird.”

“You poor, poor girl.” Haruka smiled. “Come on. It’s past your bedtime anyway.” Saturn stuck out her tongue and then went back through the door. Haruka followed her and then looked back. “Did you want us to take Luna and the birds off your hands for a while, Rei?”

“Huh? Why would...”

“Well, I was just thinking that if there wasn’t anybody else around to see, it’d be a lot easier for Yuuichirou to sneak in here unnoticed...”

Haruka dodged to one side, grinning, as a pillow came flying through the door after her. Saturn poked her out of the way with the blunt end of the Silence Glaive and politely levitated the pillow back to Rei in a small field of black and violet energy before closing her strange portal. The edges which had been pulled apart now flowed back together in an almost perfect reversal of the original process, leaving a straight line of intense violet light, both ends of it contracting towards the middle and canceling out in a brief starburst and a faint, high-pitched chiming.

It was quiet for a moment, and then Usagi asked, “Luna? Are you still there?”

“Of course she is!” Rei snapped furiously.

“Just making sure.”

“Saturday?” Ryo asked.

“It’s looking that way,” Ami admitted a bit sadly. It was lunchtime on Friday, and they were sitting together in a small, out-of-the-way corner of the cafeteria.

“Usagi said that based on the amount of text Rei-chan was able to translate last night, Luna thinks it’ll all be finished by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, and unless there’s bad news somewhere in that, there’s really no reason to put off going...” Her hands were resting on the table, and Ami was looking down at them as she spoke, but then she looked up at Ryo curiously.

“I’m a little upset,” Ryo admitted, answering the question he could see— or feel—in her eyes, “but only a little. It’s not like this was our _only_ chance to go out on a date—we’ve got a whole month coming up for that—and if the Caduceus really can help you get yourself back to normal, then the sooner you have it, the better.” He chuckled. “Besides, I think a trip to another planet ought to be interesting.”

“Oh?” Ami raised one eyebrow and smiled faintly. “And just where did you get the idea that _you_ were going?”

Ryo met her smile with one of his own and tapped the side of his head, but then his smile fell away. “Ami, listen. I _am_ going with you tomorrow, and so are Saturn, Luna, Mars, and ChibiMoon, but at some point, you’re going to get separated from the rest of us. I’m sure of that because I saw all of us walking through the same kind of caves I saw _you_ in when we were at the Time Gate. I don’t know _how_ it’ll happen, but in case it’s because something bad happens, I’m telling you now not to worry about me or the others. I’ve had visions of all of them—and myself—that haven’t happened yet, so I know we’ll get off Mercury okay. And so will you. So don’t worry. Okay?”

Ami nodded. “Okay. I won’t worry about the others. But I _will_ worry about you,” she added, taking his hand. “Just a little bit.”

“Fair enough. Would you like me to have a complete nervous breakdown when you disappear?”

Her head tilted to one side, Ami regarded the ceiling and pretended to think it over. “No,” she said at last, “that’s okay. You can just be a little worried, too.”

“Yes, ma’am.” They both laughed. “So,” Ryo said, “we’ll reschedule the dinner date, then? Say, the week after exams? Tentatively, of course.”

“Of course.” Ami rolled her eyes. “We must keep our calendars flexible; after all, there could be an alien invasion that week.”

“Or a demonic uprising,” Ryo agreed.

“Or a mutant insurrection,” Ami added.

Ryo shook his head and chuckled wearily. “’May you live in interesting times.’ They could have been thinking of us.”

The girl paced back and forth in her room, thinking. Then she looked up at the floating image of Archon. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Now that the Senshi have ripped up your network of trained mold, you want _me_ to carry out these little energy-raids for you?”

“Not quite.” Archon called up a map of Tokyo. “Our watcher-unit was originally charged with the task of locating specific concentrations of elemental energy which we require for present and future operations. When it became evident that a hostile presence was opposing our activities, the unit’s program was altered so that it would establish traps in which to observe, analyze, and possibly defeat our enemy.” The wizard’s mouth quirked at one corner. “That plan has failed.”

“Obviously.” Such a flippant response would have earned most people a painful taste of magic, but due to the curiously personal bond between teacher and student, Archon afforded his apprentice considerable leniency in such matters.

“We are still not entirely certain how all our creations in this city were so quickly and totally eliminated, but since they _were_, we are producing the necessary replacements in Atlantis itself. What I will require you to do is mark specific target areas so that we may precisely teleport the mana nexi and their defensive systems into position. I will inform you as each new nexus nears completion, and you will have approximately three hours from that point to have the designated target prepared for the transport.” He gestured, and a small black object appeared in front of the girl. It looked like a pager.

The girl looked up at her teacher with a wry smile. “Do I even dare ask where you got the idea for this?” she asked, taking the device.

“You are not the only one who has been learning these past weeks,” Archon replied. Honesty was something else he showed the girl, although this was more because he was finding more and more that he genuinely liked her—for who she was, and also for what she represented. As the first true student of old magic in the new world, her progress had been remarkable, and where there was one with talent such as this, Archon knew there would be others.

All in all, that boded well for the Atlantean age to come. The Lords would rule, of course, under the guidance of the as-yet uncrowned Emperor, but they were, after all, only a few hundred against a planet of billions. Once the Rise was achieved, they would still need allies to help advance and maintain their rule—and, just as important, if not quite as urgent, they would need heirs. Very few of the Lords or Ladies were married, and none had any children as yet.

With his black eyes revealing nothing of his thoughts, Archon considered his student and concluded that, with a few more months of work to hone her knowledge of both magic and Atlantean culture, she would impress any number of Lords quite satisfactorily when he finally presented her before the court, regardless of what they thought of her low-born heritage. It was even possible that she might catch the interest of the Crown Prince.

Lilith’s reaction to _that_ would be worth seeing.

Archon smiled faintly as he pictured the moment, but he banished the smile and the thought behind it. It lay in the uncertain future, and there was still a great deal of work to be done.

“I find the basic concept of these devices to be quite efficient,” Archon said, “so I included a number of functions which I felt would maintain that ideal. At its simplest, this ‘pager’ will alert you to when I have an assignment for you, display the details of your current task in holographic form, and allow you to contact me in the same manner as the spells you are currently using for that purpose. There is a scrying crystal in the front which will allow you to obtain limited information on objects, entities, and locations you encounter, and should you find that you require the services of one of the creatures whose summoning rituals I have had you study, the device can create a suitable conjuring circle for you in any location. It can also teleport you to a pre- selected destination within approximately ten of your kilometers. To set such a location, you must first go there and allow the device to scan the area; it can store the necessary data for a dozen or so locations.”

“Does it need to be recharged or anything like that?”

“No. The power is derived from a continuous feed off of the planetary ley lines; it will never run out, but be careful not to let it into harm’s way. The casing is fairly sturdy and has spells of self-repair woven into it besides, but none of the device’s functions will be accessible to you when it is damaged and repairing itself.”

“And it even has a built-in clock,” the girl observed dryly. Pocketing the pager, she looked up at her teacher. “Tell me, Archon; have you by any chance ever heard of something called a Swiss Army Knife?”

There were a few complaints about who Ryo had claimed would be making the trip to Mercury. Minako and Usagi were both seriously put out about not being allowed to go, and Makoto expressed some dissatisfaction as well, although in her case, being upset had more to do with some side-effects of her empathic talent than any desire to go traipsing around the solar system.

Being around someone left Makoto with a sort of emotional imprint after the person had gone, and the longer she was near them, the stronger the imprint. She and Ami had been in relatively close proximity for more than two weeks straight, seldom separated by more than a few meters or a few hours, and Makoto had gotten used to having the sense of the other girl around. She had gotten _so_ used to it, in fact, that her behavior had changed in small, considerate ways that made living with her less of an uphill battle for Ami, and therefore less of an emotional strain on Makoto herself. For one thing, kitchen appliances almost never got turned on before seven-thirty anymore, and for another, Makoto had stopped going out of her way to make time for Ami and Ryo to be alone; now she actually _waited_ for Ami to indicate whether or not she wanted that level of privacy.

They were still working on Makoto’s potentially disastrous little combination of casual near-nudity and early morning obliviousness, but since Ami now knew well in advance of seeing him just how close Ryo was to her current location at any given moment, she wasn’t quite so worried about him dropping by unannounced.

In any event, Makoto had adjusted to being around Ami. Now Ami was going to be a very, very long way away—much too distant for even the strongest emotion to reach—for what was likely to be the better part of an entire evening at the very least, and moreover, she was going after something which would either take away a powerful source of her personal stock of anxiety or, by failing to be there, increase it. And whether it was to cheer Ami on to success or to comfort her over failure, Makoto wasn’t going to be there.

All of which was basically saying that Makoto was having a hard time even _thinking_ about saying goodbye, even just for a little while. That gave the other girls something else to think about in their ongoing vacation-planning. It also added another dimension to why Makoto had suppressed her empathic ability in the first place; if she was having to struggle to get over a friend leaving for a few hours after a mere two weeks of close contact, the fallout of losing her parents—two very close and powerful relationships carried out on a daily basis for twelve years—must have been almost unthinkable. Small wonder, then, that her mind had turned off its extrasensory reception rather than risk facing that sort of shock and pain again.

Still, as Michiru pointed out during another conference communication on Friday evening, it made sense for the Senshi to split up. Their fighting strength would be cut in half for the duration of this interplanetary trek, especially since Saturn was—of necessity—leading the little expedition. With their single most powerful weapon temporarily out of the picture, it only made sense for the strongest and most experienced Senshi to stay behind and keep an eye on Usagi and the city.

Phrased like that, there was almost no doubt in anybody’s mind as to which of the remaining Senshi Michiru would put into what categories—almost. As Luna had said, Neptune’s hand-to-hand skill left a bit to be desired, and in the drills at their two training sessions, Jupiter—her black-belt prowess enhanced by Senshi strength and speed—had knocked her around rather easily; Venus had been a somewhat closer match, but the simple truth was that, powers aside, Neptune wasn’t a very good fighter. Minako said that Michiru had the same sort of problem Ami did when it came to fighting: all thought and no action.

Of course, whenever Minako said anything like this, Ami would inevitably remind her—after correcting yet another Minako misquote—that it had been Mercury, alone and unassisted and with nothing more than the Shabon Spray, who had once out-thought and out-fought Tuxedo Kamen. The problem with _that_ was that the conversation swiftly degenerated into an endless round of which of them was really better at fighting than the others. And somehow the argument always managed to grow to include every other aspect of their lives, so that by the end of it egos were bruising each other in head-on collisions over the most ridiculous things. Minako and Makoto had stopped talking to each other for a week one time because of a disagreement over which of them was going to get a driver’s license first.

Compared to _that_, the fireworks that Ryo touched off by telling Ami who was going on the trip to Mercury were really fairly minor.

Around five-thirty that Saturday, the would-be travelers began to gather at Michiru’s. Rei had informed her grandfather that she would be out with her friends until late, Makoto had agreed to tell Ami’s mother—if she called again— that Ami was out on that date with “Ry-someone,” and ChibiUsa had somehow managed to convince Ikuko to let her go to “another sleepover at Hotaru-chan’s,” which came as news to Michiru and Haruka. As far as Ryo’s parents were concerned, he was out on a date—he mumbled something to Ami about his mother wanting to meet her—and Luna didn’t have to explain her comings and goings to anyone.

The other Senshi didn’t come, which was due mainly to something else that Michiru had pointed out. Jupiter and Saturn had wiped out most—if not all—of the green substance their still-undeclared enemy had been using to set their traps and carry out their schemes, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t now or wouldn’t in the future be some other form of surveillance put over the city, so they had to avoid behaving too differently from their normal patterns.

Except for ChibiUsa and Hotaru, the Inner and Outer Senshi tended to run into each other mostly by accident in their day-to-day lives, especially since Haruka and Michiru were no longer attending high school. Michiru wasn’t advocating that they shun each other, only that they try not to do anything that might make people ask why they were all spending so much time together all of a sudden; the number of things ten girls ranging in age from fourteen to twenty- four could have in common were only so numerous, after all. Then she had gotten cryptic on them.

“It’s a feeling I’ve been having a lot recently, like there are eyes watching us. It’s been building for a few weeks, since we started dealing with these units and mana nexi, but it didn’t go away after last Friday night.”

“Did you try checking the Mirror?” Luna had asked.

“Yes,” had been Michiru’s reply. “I got a lot of subterranean imagery from it; caves, subway stations, city maintenance tunnels, building basements and sub-basements and parking garages. A lot of dark rooms and closed doors. It’s showed me computers more than once, and there were a couple of images of soldiers and politicians—symbolic images, not of specific people. The scenes were all pretty dark, and they made less sense than usual, if that’s possible.”

Even Luna and Artemis hadn’t been sure what to make of that; when used as a scrying device, the Aqua Mirror was generally as vague as it was powerful.

When they stopped to think about it—as they had at that point—the Senshi realized that they had quite a few means of discerning the future at their disposal. Leaving aside the elemental sensitivities and latent danger sense they all had to one degree or another, between the scrying powers of the Aqua Mirror and the Garnet Orb, the extrasensory abilities possessed by Michiru, Rei, Ryo, and Setsuna, and the all-knowing, all-telling nature of the Book of Ages, they really should have had an overabundance of information rather than the opposite.

And yet, every one of their resources had some kind of limitation on it. Michiru’s and Rei’s dreams came to them at random, and Rei’s fire-readings were often every bit as vague as the images Michiru received from her Mirror; by contrast, Ryo’s visions were frighteningly precise, and again quite unpredictable. Setsuna’s ability to perceive personal life-events was controllable, but at once too specific and too generalized to be of much help— she saw a billion possibilities, all of them for just one person, and each of them every bit as likely to happen as the others. The Garnet Orb was controllable and understandable, but it was so rigidly focused on the duty of Pluto to guard the fabric of Time that it wasn’t likely to show them anything short of the appearance of a time-traveler. The Book was incomprehensible on top of unpredictable, and then there was ChibiUsa, who—as Minako put it—probably knew all kinds of juicy gossip, but just wasn’t allowed to tell them.

Since this discussion had been over their communicators, only Usagi, Setsuna, and Luna had been on hand to see ChibiUsa squirm uncomfortably at that remark. Setsuna gave ChibiUsa’s hand a gentle squeeze while Luna hopped up onto her lap and purred, both of them letting her know that they weren’t in any way upset with her. Usagi had demanded right then and there that Minako apologize for her “selfish and insensitive mischoice of words”—which she did, and which set the other Senshi to reassuring ChibiUsa that they weren’t taking her silence on this matter personally.

The fact that she really _didn’t_ know what was going to happen only made ChibiUsa that much more uncomfortable, but she just couldn’t bring herself to admit it out loud, not even to Hotaru. As long as the Senshi “knew” that they all wound up in Crystal Tokyo a few hundred years hence, there was a distinct lack of personal concern over this latest threat. This wasn’t to suggest that the Senshi didn’t take it seriously; that would have been foolish. They were worried about their friends and families and the world in general, but about their own lives? Not particularly. _Ryo_ had seen Crystal Tokyo in visions; _everything_ he saw _always_ happened. More than that, Setsuna had tested her own precognitive powers, and when she looked far enough ahead, every one of their lives reached Crystal Tokyo, no matter how many times the paths of probability divided along the way.

So. If they were all going to survive, then that was that. There was no fear of being killed or derailing the utopian future to get in their way this time. They weren’t about to start taking dumb risks—they had all ‘died’ more than enough times in the past, thank you very much—but there was a difference in all of them from what ChibiUsa had seen before. No more confused reactions to things they didn’t understand, no more nearly hopeless struggles against incalculable odds, no infighting about whether or not the next move was the right move to make. It was a little bit like the deep calm that always came over Usagi when she turned into Serenity, or the strange non-mood that had been one of Pluto’s defining characteristics—the quiet, unshakable resolve of someone who has looked at destiny in all its wonderful colors and terrible darknesses, and accepted it.

ChibiUsa couldn’t bear the thought of taking that away from them. She accepted Minako’s apology, accepted all the reassurances, and kept her knowledge of Time’s potential shifting—and the danger it posed for her and Pluto—to herself.

As she stepped out of Haruka’s car that afternoon and got her sleepover gear out of the back seat, ChibiUsa said a silent prayer, asking whatever benevolent spirits or deities might be listening to give her enough strength to keep that secret. Like her mother, ChibiUsa liked to talk, to share things with her friends, and the Senshi were more than her friends; they were her family. Their future selves had raised her every bit as much as her parents, and they meant no less to her than anyone she was related to by blood, but their younger selves, so much closer to her own age—especially now—were infinitely more approachable than the grown-up women she knew. And even if these younger girls didn’t know her quite as well as the future Senshi, they knew Usagi, which was close enough as to make almost no difference.

Keeping secrets from them—especially Setsuna and Hotaru—was one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do. Not telling Usagi was easy; the nearest that ChibiUsa could figure, since they _were_ so much alike, telling Usagi would have been like telling herself, and since she already knew, there was no reason to tell herself again.

And the headache produced by that line of logic was simply not to be believed.

Yes, not telling Usagi—and for similar reasons, Minako—had been easy, but ChibiUsa had caught herself on the verge of telling Hotaru everything no less than four times in just this one week. She had only almost told Setsuna twice, and none of the others more than once, if that.

“Something wrong, kid?”

“No,” ChibiUsa said immediately, smiling at Haruka. “I asked Setsuna to take a quick look into my immediate future before you picked me up. As far as she could tell, I’m not going to get disintegrated or anything like that during this trip.”

“Good to know.”

It was so much easier not telling Haruka and Michiru than it was the others. ChibiUsa’s earliest memories didn’t include these two—or Hotaru—in any way; it was only later, after her second trip back, that she had heard her mother and friends speak of the pair—and Hotaru—only then that she had met them. In her time, Uranus and Neptune were away a great deal, sometimes overseeing the ongoing efforts to recolonize the moons of the outer system, and at other times making months-long patrols of interplanetary space and the deeper void which lay beyond Pluto—just in case. Once or twice a year, they’d go off by themselves and disappear for a while, and Saturn—who usually accompanied them on patrol—would stay at the palace and play with the children of the royal court.

That was another thing it had been hard to keep back from Hotaru. Everyone in _this_ era had at some point or other been afraid of Saturn, but in nine hundred years, when every child in the city would already flock to any one of the Senshi on sight, Saturn could hardly go anywhere without picking up a small army in the process. They adored her, and not one of them was afraid of her. Knowing how much it would mean to Hotaru to discover that on her own, ChibiUsa had been able to keep silent.

She just wished there was a similar answer for keeping her other secret.

Michiru, Luna, and Rei were sitting in the living room, drinking tea and talking quietly. A large backpack sat on the floor near Rei, holding the Book— which she wasn’t about to leave behind for a second—and the translated ‘map’, which they were going to need. There was no sign of Hotaru, Ami, or Ryo, and ChibiUsa thought that was a bit odd; Ami was _never_ late for _anything_ if she could possibly help it.

“Hotaru had a good idea,” Michiru said when ChibiUsa commented on the absence of the others. “She said that if I wanted to keep a low profile, it would make sense for her to pick up everyone else other than you with her little traveling trick; that way, nobody could see them coming in or leaving.”

“I came on my own,” Luna added, “but Hotaru arranged to meet Rei not too far from Hikawa, and she’s getting Ami and Ryo from Makoto’s right now.”

“Which was the other reason for it,” Rei concluded. “She wants to make absolutely sure that traveling this way won’t hurt Ami, and it’s better to test that with a short hop to a safe place than a really long trip to another planet.”

“Is that why...” ChibiUsa asked, indicating the direction of the foyer with her thumb; there was a space out there which she was sure was quite a bit emptier than it had been during her last visit.

“Loading and unloading only,” Haruka confirmed. “She was worried about slicing up the furniture.”

“Can it do that?”

By way of an answer, Haruka nodded and left the room, returning a few moments later with a piece of smooth white stone. “Check it out,” she said, handing it over.

ChibiUsa did that. Most of the edges were slightly rounded, but one narrow face of the approximately rectangular stone had extremely sharp corners and a too-flat surface, as if someone had taken a laser cutter from her time and flashed the end right off.

“Hotaru was testing out her range for an hour or so last night,” Haruka said. “That’s a piece of one of the ruins from the Moon which was on the edge of her second attempt. I guess she aimed a little low. The edges on that one side are pretty sharp, too, so watch your fingers.”

“And she can reach Mercury?” Luna asked, as ChibiUsa carefully handed the stone back to Haruka.

“She opened up three separate doors into the caves to make sure she had it down, and it wasn’t tiring her out at all that I could see. She _considered_ opening a door to one of the outer planets or their moons, just to see how far she could go, but she’s not completely sure of her ability to stop things from going through the door, and we didn’t really feel like having an example of Saturn’s atmosphere suddenly filling up the house, so...” Haruka shrugged.

There was a screeching noise from the foyer.

“That’ll be them now,” Michiru murmured.

If there were a real estate company that dealt in whole planets, Mercury would be the sort of property that no showman in his or her right mind would want to try and sell.

For starters, it’s not a very big planet. Of the nine planets, only Pluto is smaller, and there are several moons in orbit around Jupiter and Saturn which are big enough to give both Mercury and Pluto a serious run for their money in the diameter department. And just like Pluto, Mercury has some real location problems which make it highly unattractive to potential buyers. Most species don’t much enjoy a seven-hundred odd degree range in surface temperature, or being blasted day in and day out by the thermonuclear ejecta of a healthy star— especially not on a world where a ‘day’ outlasts the planetary ‘year.’ The complete lack of atmosphere and surface moisture are self-evident and barely worth mentioning, and even the presence of some interesting mineral elements doesn’t do nearly enough for the market value, since the most interesting of those—mercury-silver or just plain mercury—once available in staggering quantities, is now just not to be had.

Suffice to say, unless the clients are in the market for a nuclear waste dump or have the resources to do some major remodeling, Mercury just isn’t worth the trouble.

Unless of course, you have clients like the Nereids, who thrive on electromagnetic energy, have a physiology which doesn’t give a hoot about nuclear radiation, and have no qualms about living underground when the intensity of the local temperature and UV start getting into the range where even metallic skin and sunblock with an SPF of five hundred thousand won’t do you any good.

Sadly, there haven’t been any Nereids around for the last ten centuries or so. At one time a very populous species on Earth, they were forced by the short- sightedness of humans to leave for new homes. As Luna had explained to the Senshi, some went to Jupiter, others to Neptune, a very small number to Pluto, and most moved to Mercury. None of them were there anymore, but Mercury was the only one of the planets that had witnessed a mass extinction. The other three worlds saw evolution.

Over the course of generations, Jupiter’s intense electromagnetic field gradually accelerated the thought processes of its Nereid population to the point where they were technically insane by any other species’ reckoning. At the same time, they were absorbing various atmospheric gasses with the vital water which formed their bodies, and the different properties of those substances caused other changes—most noticeably, a change in color from generally blue to generally red. After about five hundred years, energy-beings were born who simply could not be considered Nereids anymore; they were crazed, violent pockets of red lightning, an infrequent but very real threat to the Jovian tribes, who came to know them as the Furies. Those of their predecessors still able to function with some degree of normalcy fled to Mercury, leaving their lost children to roam the mini-system around Jupiter.

Neptune, on the other hand, exposed Nereids to greater amounts of elemental water than anything to be found on Earth, and their bodies grew steadily larger until they achieved staggering size. Some grew too large for their normal electrical energies to sustain them, and they grew slow-witted and slow-moving, eventually sinking into the clouds and vanishing forever. Others, though, developed semisolid bodies whose higher concentrations of various magnetic minerals could better retain electricity, and these creatures became known as the Cetaci, the ice leviathans. They were to the Nereids what Earth’s whales were to dolphins, but they had lost even the Nereids’ low tolerances for heat, and could no longer venture into the orbits of the inner planets. So instead they roamed the outer system, feeding on the electrical energies of the four gas giants.

Those Nereids who tried to live on Pluto suffered terribly at first from the extreme negativity of the tiny ice-world’s energy, but they survived, and somewhere along the line, they ceased to be creatures of mist and became instead beings of solid ice, the Chrysmat. Few in number, they retained the great longevity and mental powers of their ancestors, traits which were somehow enhanced as they fed upon the strange forces of Pluto, the combination of death- energy and Time-energy which also made the planet a haven for the wraithlike creatures known as the Shi’i. But like the Cetaci, the evolution of the Chrysmat left them unable to tolerate heat, and indeed they could not long survive away from the uniquely twisted nature of their homeworld.

And so despite their common ancestry, none of these creatures could venture to Mercury after its destruction. Thus, when the Senshi of Mercury was killed in the fall of the Moon Kingdom, the Nereids became extinct, leaving their home an empty tomb, a planet-sized monument to a strange and beautiful form of life which was gone forever.

As he followed Ami through the dimension door, Ryo was relieved to note that Saturn’s new method of travel, even when stretched out to an interplanetary distance, did not appear to have any adverse effects on Ami. He had also been pleased to discover that traveling through the door did not agitate whatever nerve endings in his nose objected so violently to teleportation.

“Welcome to Mercury,” Saturn said, bowing and smiling like an airline attendant greeting disembarking passengers.

The cavern Saturn had chosen as their landing zone was pretty large; she and Mars had done something between them so that everything within about twenty meters of the Silence Glaive was illuminated by a soft, reddish-grey light, but there were stalactites overhead which disappeared into unbroken darkness, and Ryo could only make out one wall—and that just barely. Considering that they were something like a kilometer or more underground on a world that didn’t have any sort of atmosphere, the air was pretty good; it had a faintly dusty smell and was a bit damp and cool, but he and Ami were both wearing winter clothing, Luna had created a thick fur robe for herself upon stepping through the door, and it would take quite a bit of cold to really bother the other three Senshi.

On the other side of the door, Haruka and Michiru were now standing by themselves in the foyer. “You’re sure you don’t want one of us to come along?” Haruka asked.

Luna shook her head. “There’s nothing here to fight.” She sighed, her breath hanging in the air as mist for several seconds, and then turned around. “There’s too much interference this near to the sun for your communicators to penetrate, so we’ll stop and have Saturn reopen a door every half an hour or so to talk to you.”

“Okay then. Happy hunting. And Ami... you know... good luck.”

Ami smiled. “Thank you, Haruka.”

“Yeah, well...” Haruka shrugged and waved vaguely as she turned and walked away; Michiru shook her head and nodded silently to all of them before following, and then Saturn let the door wink shut.

“Let’s get started.” Mars looked around. “Which way?”

“Doesn’t all that stuff you got out of the Book say which way we should go?” ChibiMoon asked, sounding worried.

“Get me to the city it described and I’ll give you the guided tour,” Mars replied, hefting her backpack, “but I’m as lost out in these tunnels as you are. Any ideas, Saturn? Luna?”

“This way.” Ami pointed at and started walking towards the near wall, where a circular tunnel perhaps four meters across was just visible.

“Luna,” Mars said softly, “she doesn’t have her computer out.”

“Shhh.” Luna watched Ami for a moment, taking note of her slow, purposeful pace, and then nodded. “Let’s follow her for now. All of you, keep your voices down, and try not to do anything that might distract her, but keep your eyes and ears open. We’re the only things alive down here, but there’s plenty of cliffs and holes to worry about. I’ll stay close to Ami and make sure she doesn’t fall.” Luna looked back at Ami and added, “I have to say, though, that I really don’t think she’s in any danger just now.”

Under different circumstances, Ryo might have stopped to argue with Luna about her definition of ‘danger’—he could _feel_ the weird shifting between human thought and almost-Nereid thought that was going on inside Ami’s head—but Ami was nearly to the edge of the lighted area, and they all had to hurry to catch up before she wandered off into the darkness.

They walked along in silence for about twenty minutes, Ami in the lead and Luna just an arm’s reach behind her. ChibiMoon, Saturn, and her glowing Glaive were next, while Ryo and Mars brought up the rear, Ryo biting his lower lip in frustrated concern as he watched Ami, and Mars pausing every so often to look back the way they had come, or off into side tunnels that they passed. It was all well and good for Luna to say that there wasn’t anything alive down here besides the six of them, but all these dark, empty caves made Mars nervous.

And there were a _lot_ of caves. They passed cracks too narrow for even Luna’s smallest form to fit through, and gaping holes that could have swallowed a bus. There were arches and spires and columns of stone, stalactites and stalagmites in all shapes and sizes, all of them in pale, eerie colors. At one point, the path Ami was following divided into three possible directions, one of which was a narrow outcropping of stone which arched out into an enormous cavern whose floor they couldn’t see. To everyone’s relief, Ami took one of the other routes, leading them instead down a kind of broad ravine which made several long turns on its way down the wall, curving back on itself and sloping gently to the bottom.

There were a lot of crystals, too. Some were embedded in the walls while others stuck up from the floor, and there were a few that seemed to have fallen from the ceiling. Many of these crystals were merely the shattered remains of larger pieces, and even those that were reasonably intact were still badly cracked. All of them flickered in the pale grey light, but about halfway down that winding ramp they saw a perfectly spherical greenish-blue crystal set into the wall. It couldn’t possibly have been a natural formation, and it didn’t show any signs of the damage that the others did.

Ami walked right up to the sphere and placed her hand over it, and it responded, giving off a soft glow and a musical chime. A short distance further on, another crystal sphere chimed and began to glow, and then another beyond that, then another, and another...

A dotted line of blue-green light appeared in the darkness below, zigzagging across the vast cavern faster than a person could run. Somewhere out in the darkness, the line came to an end as a ring of the blue-green lights appeared, and then there came a much louder series of chimes as some very large lights began to shine from around and inside the circle.

“Uh, Luna...”

“It’s okay,” Luna reassured them. “We don’t have anything to worry about.” She turned to Ami and gently shook her shoulder. “Ami? Wake up, Ami. Come on.”

“Hmmm? What?” Ami looked up from the crystal globe, blinking. “Luna? Wh- where are we? What happened? I remember... I remember walking, and...”

“It’s okay, Ami. Calm down. Mercury was just showing us where to go.” Luna took a moment to check Ami’s eyes again, and nodded at the absence of the blue light. “It’s over now. With a little luck, that’ll be the last time.”

“What is that?” ChibiMoon asked, pointing out to the lights.

“The Nereids had cities all around the planet, but not all of the caves interconnected with each other, and those that did hadn’t exactly been arranged for convenience. You could spend hours wandering around just to reach a place that was a few kilometers away and one level down from where you started, so the Nereids built a planet-wide system of teleporters.”

Mars blinked. “It’s a subway station?”

“More or less. And like any subway station, it’s got maps. I don’t really trust it to be safe for teleporting after all this time, but we can at least find out where we are and where we want to be.” She traced the path of light with her eyes. “Let’s go.”

It only took a couple of minutes for them to navigate the path, and as they got closer, they could see that the ‘station’ consisted of several dozen crystal and marble constructs. There were narrow, meter-tall pyramids with more of the glowing crystal orbs balanced at their peaks, and there were three-meter tall obelisks with lines of silvery writing all over each face. A forest of finger-thin, translucent crystal rods held up the wide, blue-white, and slightly cracked dome which covered the entire place, except for a spot off to one side where a section had been cut out to allow a tall cone to rise up.

All in all, it looked more like a pile of giant tinkertoys and building blocks than part of the ruins of an extinct nonhuman civilization.

After first cautioning the others to stay clear of the crystal columns that filled the back end of the ‘station’, Luna went directly to a group of five diamond-shaped blocks that had been arranged in a semicircle near the general center. The columns she had pointed out were arranged in groups of three, and there were—or had been—ten such triads in all; two were entirely shattered, and all but three had at least one of their component pillars snapped off short or shot through with cracks. One of the ‘intact’ groups wasn’t glowing despite its apparent good condition, even though most of the damaged columns were, albeit feebly in some cases.

There weren’t any obvious seats, so ChibiMoon and Saturn sat down on an obelisk which had fallen over, Mars leaned against one of the intact ones, and Ami and Ryo settled themselves on the fourth level of a pile of long rectangular blocks that looked like a very wide staircase but wasn’t going anywhere.

“Interesting architecture,” Ryo noted.

“Luna said they liked geometry,” Ami replied, “but this wasn’t what I’d pictured at all. I’m almost scared to ask what one of the cities must look like. Any ideas, Saturn?”

“I didn’t find any cities when I was testing the door last night. Sorry. Oh, that reminds me.” She got up from the toppled obelisk. “Time to check in.”

Luna looked back for a moment as Saturn made the space-warping cut with the Silence Glaive, but then returned to her examination of the display.

“Hello?” Saturn called. “Anyone home?”

“No,” Haruka called back. She came in from the direction of the kitchen and blinked when she saw the ‘geometry’ scattered around on the other side of the door. “What the...”

“Neat, huh?”

“That’s... one word for it.” Haruka squinted at a crystal crescent that was rising up from a block of marble—the thing looked remarkably like the Space Sword at this angle, although it was about three meters from tip to tip and probably weighed a couple of tons—and then shook her head. “All goes well, I take it?”

“We’re getting directions from an old subway station.” Saturn smiled at the confused look she got with that line, then glanced around. “Where’s Michiru?”

“She decided to get in the tub about five minutes ago.”

“Ah. So all’s quiet, then.”

“Pretty much.” Haruka’s smile was crooked. “And now that we’ve said that, there’s probably going to be an explosion somewhere downtown as soon as you close that thing.”

“Probably,” Saturn agreed. “Let me know how it goes.” And she shut the dimension door.

“Another one?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’s what, the sixth time in the last two hours?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And we still haven’t got any idea where it’s coming from?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Stop talking like that.”

“Sorry, ma’am.”

The Director of Sciences gave her subordinate a flat look and then headed back to her office. Although she didn’t show it, she had a powerful headache just now from trying to think up some way to track down this non-energy that kept not showing up on their scans, and being “yes, ma’am”-ed and “no, ma’am”-ed was only adding irritation on top of frustration.

Back in her office, she sat in silence for a time and then dialed a number on her phone.

“I hear you’ve been having a busy night,” the Information Director’s voice greeted her.

“Busy but unproductive.” Sciences didn’t elaborate on that. “I was wondering if there have been any developments on our pet project.”

“The young lady has apparently been shanghaied by two of her friends for an evening at the movies,” Information replied. “The man I have following her is waiting outside.”

“He didn’t go in?”

Information coughed. “It’s one of those movies teenaged girls always go for and drag their boyfriends along to see. A lone man in his late-twenties would have stood out rather unavoidably.”

Sciences sighed. “And the research into her predictions?”

“One of them came true last week.”

“Oh?”

Makoto looked up from her tea when the buzzer went off at the door. With half of the Senshi off to Mercury and Usagi, Minako, and Setsuna out to a movie, she had no idea who it could be, unless Artemis or Haruka and Michiru had decided to...

*No,* she thought as her empathic sense picked up an unfamiliar presence, *it’s not one of them.* She looked out through the eyehole and saw a woman about her own height, with short black hair and dark brown eyes. She had to be well into her thirties, and Makoto had no idea who she was. Frowning, she opened the door a little. “Can I help you?”

She wasn’t sure why the woman gave a start. “Yes. It’s Makoto, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Makoto said carefully. “I’m sorry, but have we met?”

The woman smiled faintly. “We have, but I’m not surprised you don’t remember. We only met that one time, and... does this help?” Her eyebrows took a decidedly downward slant, and her smile became a thin, stern-lipped line.

The image clicked. *Setsuna’s nurse.*

“I see you remember. Could I... could I come in for a moment? I’d like to talk to you about something. It’ll only take a minute.”

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Makoto said evenly. *How did she know where I live?* “We didn’t exactly get off to a good start, and I’m not really in the mood for uninvited guests. Please, go away.” She started to close the door.

“She was right, you know.”

Makoto stopped. “Who was?”

“Your friend, Setsuna. About... well, about everything she said about me. I do have a little girl. She’ll be eleven this May 2nd. I had myself convinced that your friend was just guessing, or maybe she knew something about us from before that came back to her, but... but last week...” She fell silent and held up her hand, a diamond ring winking on her finger. “February 9th, at 4:09:48 _exactly._ There was a clock on the wall behind him, and I could see it, and I couldn’t... I couldn’t believe it. If it had been anybody else asking, I would have thought it was being staged... and I almost said no anyway, just because... but she was right.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because... because if she was right about me, then I knew she had to be right about... about the rest of it... and I had to tell you that I’m sorry for the way I acted, and what I said. I know... a little of what it’s like to lose someone you love.” She thumbed another ring, a plain gold band that was quite a bit older than the diamond engagement ring. “I know nobody likes to be reminded of losses like that, even in a well-intentioned way, and even if I didn’t know until later... but that’s no excuse. I was doing my best to be rude, and I hurt you in the process. I’m sorry.” She bowed. “That’s... that’s pretty much it. I’ll get off of your doorstep now.” She bowed again and started to walk away.

“Wait.” Makoto wasn’t sure at first if the woman heard her or not, but she stopped and turned around. “How did you find me?”

“Oh.” She blushed. “After last Wednesday, I knew I had to talk to Setsuna and apologize to her, so I spoke to Doctor Miko and got the address where she’s been staying, but it took me until tonight to get up the guts to go... and she was out somewhere when I finally did get there, so I ended up talking to Tsukino Ikuko for a while. She wanted to know how I knew Setsuna, of course, and why I was looking for her, and when I told her... all of this just sort of came out. She invited me to stay until Setsuna got back, but I asked her if she knew where you lived, because I had to speak to you as well... and here I am,” she finished, gesturing around with her arms.

Makoto looked at her in silence for a while. Not once in any of that had she gotten the feeling the woman was being anything less than completely honest. Of course, considering what she’d said, it seemed that Ikuko might know about Setsuna’s ability to see Time now, but even this news couldn’t make Makoto muster the energy for more than a brief, wry hope for Usagi to be _really_ enjoying that movie.

“It wasn’t easy to say that, was it?” Makoto finally said.

The woman shook her head. “No, it wasn’t.”

Makoto nodded slowly. “I... I just made some tea, if you’d like to stay a while.”

That earned a look of faint amusement. “I thought you said you weren’t in the mood for uninvited guests.”

“I’m not.” She opened the door all the way and bowed. “We weren’t properly introduced the last time. Kino Makoto.”

“Kima,” the woman said, bowing again. “Fuucho Kima.” She glanced at her hand and smiled again. “At least for a little while longer.”

Makoto smiled back. “Would you like to come in?”

“I... yes. Thank you.”

As before, Saturn was the first one to step through the dimension door. She raised the Glaive and looked around at another station which was—apart from the crystal columns on one side and the blue-white dome overhead—almost entirely different from the first. The designer of this place appeared to have been a fan of dodecahedrons and other three-dimensional shapes with so many sides that they almost appeared round; there were pillars and piles of them all over. Saturn shook her head and stepped aside so the others could come through, closed the door after them, turned around...

...and let out a scream.

She hadn’t seen it before, but there was a dead body laying among the forest of glowing columns. The others jumped when they heard her and then again when they saw the body themselves.

“Gomen,” Saturn apologized, blushing.

“Don’t worry about it,” ChibiMoon said, putting an arm around her shoulders.

Ami’s face was blank as she looked at the body. It hadn’t been reduced to bones; the flesh was desiccated but otherwise still very much intact, and the same could be said for the clothing. The person—it was too withered to tell from the shape if it had been a man or a woman, and what was left of the colorless hair was only about as long as her own hairstyle, short enough to have suited either—had been wearing a blue robe of some kind, and there were dull flashes of tarnished silver and gold here and there.

“Luna? Is... _was_ that a Nereid?”

“No. Nereids either evaporated or condensed and crystallized when they died; it depended on exactly how they were killed, and what the environment was like. No,” she repeated, walking over and looking down, “this was a human. A woman, if what’s left of the clothes are any indication. She probably stepped out of the teleporter right before Beryl’s bomb went off.”

“Will there be more bodies?” Mars asked.

“A few, I’d expect. There was a fairly sizable human population in most of the Nereid cities; merchants, tourists, and artists, mostly, but there were some humans who didn’t have a problem living among mind-readers. More than a few human telepaths came here to study.”

Ryo coughed. “Should we bury her or something?”

“The ground around here’s solid rock,” ChibiMoon reminded him. “That could take a while to dig out.”

“I’ll do it.” Saturn pointed the Glaive, and both the blade and the body were surrounded by dark energy; when it cleared a moment later, the corpse had vanished. Mars murmured the words of a Shinto prayer, and then they proceeded on, following another line of the glowing crystals into the darkness of the caves.

At least, it started out as darkness. As they moved further along and followed the path around a couple of corners, the number of the crystal orbs increased to the point where it was dim rather than dark, and then shadowy rather than dim. They entered a long tunnel that had a row of the blue lights on either wall and along the ceiling as well, and when they exited it, they stopped and stared.

The tunnel opened up at the top of a wide ramp which led down into the largest cavern yet, and they could see this one in its entirety, for there were light-orbs everywhere, set into the walls at all elevations. The sheer number of them put out enough bluish light to create a starry twilight effect throughout the enormous cave, especially since there were deposits of some silvery mineral clustered around, refracting and reflecting the light. A huge version of the crystal orbs had been set into the roof of the cavern, some one hundred meters above them, and it probably would have been lit up like the sun if it hadn’t been for the deep fissures running along its surface. Even without the shattered sun-replica, they could still see that the other side of the cavern was a good two kilometers away; the place was at least half that in width, and the floor was entirely covered by the ruins of the city.

There were no individual houses that the travelers could recognize. Rather, there were complexes of interconnected rooms, somewhat like apartment buildings, but with the individual chambers arranged using the same oddly random placement that the two teleport-stations had shown. Each of these structures— apartments or dormitories or whatever they had been—was centered on an open courtyard, which might have anywhere from zero to six different paths connecting it to the surrounding streets, and no two of them were quite alike. Some were pyramid-shaped terraces rising three or four stories above the ground, and a few had extremely circular designs; most were cubical, looking very much as though a toddler had piled up some blocks and then wandered off for lunch.

Above the cube-dorms and pyramid-terraces rose many towers, none of which bore a rectangular shape; they were all cones or piled-sphere columns or needle- like uprights that tapered at both ends. Elevated walkways surrounded and interconnected each and every last tower to every other, a second street level about fifteen stories above the first, and there were ramps connecting the two levels, some of them coiling around the towers, others sloping up through empty air.

The streets and walkways often ran into open squares—they were platforms on the upper level, and most of them, whether placed high or low, weren’t square at all—and each of these had a small body of steaming water at its center. The one in the largest square on the ground—which was actually a sort of irregular octagon—was bigger than most of the swimming pools Ami had ever seen. In the cool, damp air of the caves, thick plumes of steam rose up from all of the pools, and yet all of the buildings—built from stone in shades of white and grey, green and blue, or from transparent crystal—appeared to some extent as though they were made of ice. There was a shimmer to it all in the blue-tinted light which made the ruins look as if they were on the verge of melting; it made them shine.

It had been a thousand years since this and all the other cities of Mercury had been destroyed, a thousand years in which the damage of the original cataclysm had only gotten worse through neglect and decay. Here and there, towers had toppled. Walkways had collapsed, and some of the buildings on the ground had been smashed by the falling debris, which also choked off roads.

Somehow, the damage only made it all that much more breathtaking.

“It goes right up the sides of the cave,” ChibiMoon murmured, pointing to other ledges that were scattered around the cavern at various levels. Some were large enough that entire buildings had been assembled atop them, but most were balconies, with the rock wall behind them carved out to create rooms. More of the elevated walkways ran along the wall, linking this platform to that balcony to a ramp which led back down to the main city.

“It’s... survived better than I thought it would,” Luna said after a moment. “Well, let’s get started, shall we? Ami?”

Ami was staring at the ruins and had to be gently prodded in the ribs before she wiped surreptitiously at her eyes and started paying attention. Her computer went through its familiar sequence of beeps and then returned a soft “ping” which made Ami’s face glow.

“It’s here,” she whispered excitedly. “It’s actually here! Fifteen hundred and twenty-one meters north, four hundred and nine meters west, and fifty-two meters down!”

“We’re at the main east entrance,” Luna said, looking up at the arch of the tunnel behind them. She turned back and considered the layout of the city. “Four hundred meters out and fifteen hundred to the right would almost have to put it in another chamber than this.”

Looking at her computer’s screen, Ami nodded. “There’s a smaller cave beyond the north wall.” She frowned. “There doesn’t seem to be any way to get to it, though.”

“I’ll get us there,” Saturn said confidently, swinging the Glaive to open another dimension door.

Nothing happened.

Saturn blinked several times and tried it again, with the same result.

“You’re not running out of gas or anything, are you?” Ryo asked with a note of very real concern.

Saturn shook her head and made another cut in the air. This one worked, but once the door was fully open, they saw the foyer of Michiru’s house again.

They looked at the room. They looked at Saturn. Saturn looked off towards the north wall of the city cavern with a narrowed gaze, and Haruka wandered in from the kitchen with a half-eaten sandwich in one hand.

“Problem?” she asked.

“It’s that cave,” Saturn announced, swirling the door closed on Haruka’s mildly startled expression. “Something’s _actually_ keeping me out of it.” It was hard to tell if she were more offended or intrigued by this fact. “What could be doing that?”

Luna shook her head. “I don’t know. Everything I was ever told about the power of Saturn says it’s impossible to keep the Senshi out of a place if she wants to get in.” She looked in the same direction as Saturn and added, “At least, it _was_ impossible.”

“So how is Ami supposed to get the Caduceus, then?” ChibiMoon asked. Unlike Saturn, she _definitely_ sounded offended. “If there’s no entrance and even Saturn can’t get inside, what do we do? Blast our way in?”

“Somehow,” Luna sighed, “I doubt that’d work particularly well. Whatever’s stopping Saturn can’t be a natural phenomenon, and that means somebody had to put it there. I can’t believe anyone would go to all the trouble of creating that powerful a means of blocking abilities like teleportation and then not include some sort of physical defense as well.” She folded her arms and fell silent for a time. “Mars, I think we’ll need that translation after all.”

Mars nodded and reached back to dig the papers out of her pack.

“I don’t know what the situation is with that cave,” Luna said to the rest of them, “but I do know that when there wasn’t a Senshi of Mercury, or when the current one was still young and learning her powers, the Caduceus was kept in a place called the Blue Hall. If there’s an entrance to that cave or some other means to get inside, the Hall’s where we’re most likely to find it.”

“And which building would that be?” ChibiMoon asked.

“Hang on,” Mars muttered, pulling out a ream of paper and then flipping through it, repeating, “Blue Hall, Blue Hall, Blue... okay, here it is.” She slipped two sheets out of the group and read through them quickly, then started searching the city.

“There.” Mars pointed to a building situated right beside the pond in the city’s central square.

Traditionally, the word ‘hall’ conjures to mind the image of a long and generally rectangular wooden structure, often replete with falling-down drunk Viking warriors and the occasional trophy in the form of a monstrous head or arm. The Nereids must never have heard of Beowulf, though, because this ‘hall’ appeared to be a series of rounded and overlapping domes, running north-south along the opposite side of the pond from the six visitors. It was about three stories tall at its highest point and certainly just as worthwhile to look at as all the other buildings, but at this distance, there didn’t appear to be anything to set it apart.

“You’re sure?” Ami asked.

Mars nodded. “It says the Blue Hall has nine domes, and unless you want to consider those bubble-shaped houses, that building by the pond is the only place I can see that has enough domes.”

“I’d have to agree with you on that,” Luna admitted. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Usagi came out of the theater and headed straight for the refreshment center.

“Four small Cokes and one large cream soda, please.”

The girl working behind the counter looked at her and then glanced around at the lobby, which was empty except for the two of them, the girl who worked in the ticket window—who was on her break and chatting with the other counter worker—and a janitor who was making sure all the trashbins were empty in advance of the post-movie exodus.

“Isn’t one of your friends coming to help you?” she asked, filling up the small cups.

“Huh?” Usagi caught the girl’s concerned look, and smiled. “Oh, no. They’re not making me run their errands for them. This is all for us.”

The girl’s look went from concerned to startled as she started setting down the small cups, full of pop, and Usagi started draining them, barely stopping to breathe in between. By the time the girl had finished filling up the large cream soda, Usagi was chugging down the last of the small Cokes. She sighed, covered a hiccup, and noticed the girl looking at her again. She patted her belly.

“We get _really_ thirsty sometimes,” she explained. “How much?”

Cream soda in hand, Usagi was halfway back to the theater when the door swung open, and Suzuran, a girl she knew from school, stepped out. She saw Usagi immediately and headed straight for her.

“Su-chan,” Usagi greeted her. “Enjoying the movie?”

“Usagi-chan,” the girl said, “you’ve got to tell me; WHO is that gorgeous hunk Mina-chan’s with?”

Usagi blinked. *Uh-oh.*

For some reason, Minako had dragged Artemis along to the movie with them, probably to make him suffer for keeping her from going to Mercury; even though it hadn’t been his idea for the Senshi to split up, he’d fully supported Michiru’s suggestion, since it meant he himself wouldn’t have to go through Saturn’s dimension door.

It had long been the Senshi procedure to smuggle Luna and Artemis into theaters in gym bags and the like, but since he could now take human form, Artemis had done so, sparing himself the grim confinement of a bag that reeked of Minako’s three favorite soaps and two favorite perfumes. By necessity, Minako had literally been hanging on his arm the entire evening, keeping him from sneaking off to another theater or out of the cineplex entirely. She had all but torn his arm off when he offered to help Usagi get her drinks.

“It’s just that Dei-chan and Sumi-chan and Keshi-chan and I couldn’t remember ever seeing him before, and none of us could believe we’d _ever_ forget a guy that cute, and we asked Chii-kun and Hose-kun and Goro-kun and Ken-kun, and none of _them_ had seen him around before, either, so we figured he must have just moved here or something...” There was a question hanging on the end of that.

“Um... yeah, he did...” *Terrific. They’ve all seen him.* Suzuran had named her three closest friends and all of their current boyfriends, and Usagi was just too busy trying to have a clever idea for damage control to follow Su’s line of thought.

“...and Sumi-chan thought that he might be related to Mina-chan or something like that,” Su continued, right from where she had left off, “because it seemed really odd for the hottest thing on two legs to just drop out of the sky and get picked up by _Minako_, of all people...”

“What do you mean by that?” Usagi snapped, coming out of her absent-minded state.

“You know exactly what I mean,” Su replied. “Usagi-chan, we all like Mina- chan—she helped me catch Ken-kun, for Kami’s sake!—but let’s face it; however much she knows about finding boyfriends for other people, she’s lousy at finding them for herself.” She looked around and leaned closer to whisper, “And Aneiko’s here tonight, too. We’re all positive she saw Mina-chan and that guy, and, well... you know how Aneiko is.”

Usagi made a face.

“That’s why I came out here instead of waiting to ask you on Monday,” Su said. “Aneiko’s not very fond of any of you...”

“The feeling’s mutual.”

“...but she absolutely _loathes_ how Mina-chan keeps getting on everyone’s good side by helping out in the romance department and always being right. Wrecking Mina-chan’s reputation as a matchmaker is probably number one on Aneiko’s To Do List, but I think she’d settle for just wrecking her reputation, period. When word gets around that she’s seeing a guy that nobody knows, who doesn’t even seem to have a name _and_ has _white_ hair... Usagi-chan, unless you can tell me that he’s her older brother or young uncle or something, we’ve got to get started—right now—or Aneiko’s going to drag both of their names through the mud.”

“His name’s Arthur Knight,” Usagi said immediately, barely hesitating, trying not to wince, and wondering what in the universe had prompted her to pick a name like THAT. “And he’s not a relative. He’s from England, and Mina-chan met him when she was there. He came out here on vacation, but he might be planning to attend university next semester; I don’t know for sure.”

“Are they serious, or is it just a friendly relationship?”

“They’re serious friends,” Usagi said firmly.

Su nodded, getting the point. “I’ll tell Dei-chan and the others; I can _guarantee_ you that _this_ is the story that will be all over school in a couple of days. Make sure you warn Mina-chan, okay?”

Usagi nodded back, and they both walked back into the theater, splitting up and heading to their respective seats. Slipping past Setsuna, who had the aisle seat and was fixated so intently on the movie that she barely noticed the interruption, Usagi plopped down between her and Artemis and stared up at the screen with wide, unseeing eyes.

*What in the name of the Moon did I just DO?!*

“Usagi-chan?” Minako was looking around Artemis at her. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, yeah. Just peachy.”

Minako blinked. “What’s got you in such a bad mood all of a sudden? Did they run out of pop or something?”

“I think that I just gave you a boyfriend, Mina-chan.” Usagi sighed and patted Artemis on the shoulder. “Say hello to Arthur Knight.”

Artemis and Minako looked at Usagi, at each other, and then back at Usagi. Setsuna just kept watching the movie.

By unspoken agreement, they walked to the Blue Hall rather than zipping there through one of Saturn’s dimension doors, so as to get a chance to look at the rest of the city in a bit more detail. Ami scanned the streets with her computer and then plotted the shortest unblocked route to the Hall, but she was barely paying attention to the blinking icons on the screen.

From a distance, the Nereid structures looked simplistic, but up close, they became complex. Each basic geometric shape was covered by intricate designs of stone, crystal, and metal, patterns which had been worn down over the centuries by the humid air, but which still hinted at the original shape and color the builders had intended. It seemed that every surface of every building had been adorned one way or another—or both—as if the entire city had been as much a work of art as it had been a place to live and work.

In a human city, the irregular placement of the structures and the complexity of the streets would have created a claustrophobic’s nightmare, with grey and brown walls pressing in on all sides and no sky to be seen no matter where you looked. Considering that this city was totally subterranean, such impressions were already hard to stave off, and yet the overall sense the visitors had of the city was of space. Most of the buildings did not top three floors, and those that did were narrow and slender. The streets were wide, the main roads as broad as four-lane highways, and the soft, pale colors of the local building materials added to the feel of openness. It was also noticeably warmer down in the lower bowl of the cavern, as the steam rising from the many pools countered something of the predominant coolness of the caves.

Ryo turned to Luna. “I thought you said the Nereids didn’t like heat.”

“They couldn’t tolerate extreme heat because it evaporated away the water that made up their bodies and interfered with the conductivity of the solid minerals that enabled their thought processes. This isn’t nearly hot enough to have endangered them, and the atmospheric moisture would have more than made up for any discomfort they felt—and it’s a much healthier environment for our form of life than those dank, drafty caves. As I also said, they were very considerate hosts. Just look around.”

Ryo did that. “Am I looking for something in particular?”

“Look at everything. Wide streets and low or narrow buildings that make the city seem more spacious than it is, barriers along the sides of the ramps and upper walkways to prevent falls, _lights_ that simulate the effect of stars and the sun. Even this air we’re breathing had to be created—a whole underground world’s worth of it. Nereids didn’t need any of it, not even the air, but they built it all anyway to help their human guests feel comfortable.”

They passed what was left of some of those guests every now and then. Thanks to the warmer and more humid air, most of the bodies were much further along in terms of decomposition than the first one had been, but knowing what they did, the visitors couldn’t help but recognize each shrunken pile of dust and bone and feel a quiet sadness. The smaller bodies were particularly painful to look at.

Even though Luna told her it would be the work of a lifetime to give every human that had died in these caves a decent burial, Saturn went ahead and repeated her service each time they encountered another body. Mars did the same, even though the odds of even one of these people having been a follower of the Shinto faith were pretty remote; it was the thought that counted, and it made her—and the rest of them—feel a little better.

They reached the Blue Hall about fifteen minutes later. Like all the other buildings, it only got more wondrous up close, and its ornamentation was in much better condition than that of the rest of the city, even with the wide pond of steam-spouting water situated right next to it.

Ami walked over to the edge of the water and waved her hand back and forth above the surface. It was hot, no question, but certainly no more so than a pleasant bath, and the water somehow seemed to be more pure—clearer and more sparkling—than anything she had seen before. She was suddenly regretful that she hadn’t brought a bathing suit, and just as suddenly certain that she had in fact swum in this pool before, sometimes as a human, sometimes as a fish, sometimes in her natural form, drifting along the surface, passing through the steam...

“Ami?”

She blinked and realized two things. First, a hand—Luna’s—was on her shoulder; secondly, her feet were wet. Ami looked down and found that she had stepped into the pool without realizing it, and her legs were now immersed to about mid-calf.

She blushed furiously when she realized a third thing, this being that, under the influence of those drifting memories, she had been about ten seconds away from undressing and diving into the pool.

“I... er...”

“Don’t worry about it,” Luna said, helping her step out of the water. “We’re almost there.”

Ami worried about it anyway, and she couldn’t even look at Ryo as they all made their way up the steps surrounding the Blue Hall. She was sure he had a pretty good idea of what she’d been about to do back there, because he was having a hard time making eye contact just now, too.

The Blue Hall’s nine domes were made from the same bluish stone as many of the other buildings in this city, and they were arranged so that each dome was overlapped by the next one in, with the central dome hanging over the two on either side to cap the entire structure. The domes were supported by blue-tinted crystal arches rather than solid walls, and Ami felt a curious tingle as she walked between two of the curved pillars.

The floor beneath the middle dome was given over entirely to a recreation of the symbol of Mercury, some four meters across and fashioned from many tiny, deep blue crystals that might even have been sapphires. There was also a single pyramid-shaped prism of blue crystal standing beneath each dome, but that was it. There was nothing else here, and no sign whatsoever of the Caduceus.

“I don’t get it,” ChibiMoon admitted, looking around. “If this is where they kept the Caduceus, you’d think they’d have at least had a decent security... eep!”

The others looked where she was looking—namely, up—and saw more of the blue pyramids hanging inverted from the ceiling. There was one at the center of each of the smaller domes, and a ninth, considerably larger one built into the underside of the center dome, directly above the large sign on the floor.

Ami almost didn’t notice when her computer beeped softly and began running a series of complex commands along its screen, but she and everyone else definitely noticed when the largest prism began to flicker internally with varicolored lights and then sent a narrow beam of blue light coursing straight into the scanning port on the back of the computer—which returned the favor from the Mercury-sign on the lid. Computer and crystal proceeded to beep, chime, and ring at each other, and the characters scrolling and flashing by on the screen grew ever more numerous and complicated. Ami tried pressing a few buttons which ought to have shut the computer down, but it stayed active and continued whatever task it was performing without interruption.

“Luna, something’s...”

The computer emitted a final, chiming tone, and the eight crystal pyramids along the floor responded in kind, ringing softly and shining with a pale blue light. A spot of energy gathered at the tip of each crystal and then shot forth a beam of blue force directly to the point of the prism opposite it, a beam along which energy began to pulse rhythmically back and forth. The travelers jumped clear as crackling arcs of energy danced into existence between the pillars, and they looked up in surprise as the domes shone bright blue.

The intensity of the light within the crystals grew until they were almost too bright to look at, and then a thousand lines of blue energy slammed down from the tip of the largest one, striking the dark blue sign on the floor and causing it to glow. There was a flash in which all the shimmering power in the Hall seemed to get sucked up into the domes and hurled down into the sign, and then the entire light show subsided.

What was left behind was a circular field of blue energy about three meters in diameter, hanging in the air above the center of the slowly pulsing symbol and showing another cave.

“That,” Ryo said, the suddenness of his voice causing the girls to start, “was a doorbell, I think.”

They heard a slicing sound and turned to see Saturn in the process of chipping a small bit of the floor away with the Silence Glaive. “Just to make sure,” she explained, throwing the blue stone at the unwavering image. It passed through intact and clattered when it hit the stone surface on the other side.

Saturn wasn’t done quite yet. She stepped close enough to the portal to extend the Silence Glaive out and touch it, and her weapon was immediately pushed back by a spark of blue. She didn’t feel any pain or real force behind the push, just enough to repel the blade. She stepped closer and tried pushing her hand through, and was herself pushed back.

Without prompting, Ami walked over and tried to put her hand through the portal. She met no resistance whatsoever, but when Saturn again tried to push through, she was pushed back, while Ami was not.

“It’s warded,” Luna said. “Probably by the same force that stopped you from creating a door into the cave in the first place, Saturn.”

“So Ami-chan’s the only one who can go through?”

Luna didn’t answer that; she didn’t really need to. Instead, she looked at Ami, who looked back at her and then through the portal. The cave on the other side was being illuminated in a very different manner than this city-cavern; the light was uncolored and did not appear to have any particular source. There were patches of that silver mineral here and there, and Ami could just make out the sound of water dripping somewhere out of sight.

“I guess that’s that, then.” She took a breath and smiled at her friends. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”

They all smiled back at her as she stepped through the portal. Ami felt another odd tingle as she passed through the blue energy-ring, but it wasn’t painful or even particularly unpleasant—it was just there—so she ignored it. She had only taken a few steps when she stopped and looked back, smiling.

“Ryo-kun? You can have that nervous breakdown now, if you’d like.”

Ignoring the odd looks from the others, Ryo nodded. “I’ll get to work on that right away. Don’t step in any puddles.”

Ami made a face at him and then went on her way, suppressing an urge to do something foolish like dance or sing. Just a few more minutes, and she’d have the Caduceus, this time for real, for herself.

Just a few more minutes, and she’d be back to normal.

The rat pattered through the sewer, its nose alert for scents of food and its ears alert for the sounds of danger. It came to a junction and detected one of the smells it most liked, that of reasonably fresh fruit, drifting from somewhere up ahead, but it could also smell the distinctive odors of a large number of other rats. It couldn’t see them, though, or hear them, and this bothered the rodent.

It paused, ignoring the tempting fruit-smell, and sniffed cautiously at the cold, damp floor of the tunnel. Yes, many rats had gone into _that_ passage there over the last little while, but it couldn’t find any sign of them coming out again—not one of them. This set off warning lights in the rat’s brain that had a great deal to do with images of fur and lashing tails, of teeth and claws and loud “mrrrraaaaaarr”-ing noises, and it quickly chose another tunnel in which to continue its search.

Down the darkened path the rat had shunned, one of Proteus’ unblinking red eyes watched the little creature shuffle off. Somewhere in its complex awareness, the entity chuckled.

*Clever little thing. Yes, go the other way, ignore and avoid the too- obvious bait and the trap behind it. Keep the freedom your caution and cleverness have preserved. I have more than enough of your kind already.*

This wasn’t the first show of intelligence Proteus had observed in the local rat population. It had been trapping them for study this entire past week, and it had captured precisely seven hundred and twenty-six of the furry creatures so far; the others were understandably suspicious about so many of their number vanishing in such a short period of time, and the intake of the various traps had dropped off sharply in the last two days.

Most of the captured rats were now moving up on the streets, keeping out of sight and warding off cats with the enhancements Proteus had made in them. They were several hundred research projects in progress, and each was part of a fully-mobile information-gathering network, whose individual components were a hundred times smaller than nearly anything Proteus had used before.

An undetectable—or so the entity hoped—means of collecting data with which to protect itself, and an essentially unlimited source of test subjects.

There were some drawbacks, of course. The transfiguration process had been much simpler and smoother with the rats than with the humans, but the end goal of these experiments was for Proteus to redesign itself into something better than it was, and while from a certain standpoint ANY animal form would be a vast improvement over the body in which it now existed, it would much prefer to shape itself into something like a human rather than a less-advanced creature such as a rat. Proteus had IMPROVED the rat, and it was intent on doing the same to a human—and once it had figured out how to create an undeniably superior form, it would transfer its consciousness and inhabit that form. And then... and then...

Proteus paused, realizing that it had no clear objective for the future beyond surviving and obtaining a functional body for itself. With the ability to blend in with and disappear into the human world, the options would be many, and yet it really wasn’t sure what it ought to do.

*Indecision. That is what this feeling is called.* Proteus considered it for a time, then dismissed the sensation. Indecision would have to wait for later.

Proteus examined its human subjects. It now had five of them at or nearing readiness, but the question was whether to unleash them all at once, or more selectively. Considering the rapid deactivation of the first hybrid, a group deployment would probably be required for optimum study time, and yet using so much of its limited resources at one time did not strike Proteus as wise. And there was the hybrid that had been derived from the woman Nanako to consider; THAT one could be very useful indeed, but only if applied properly, and there was still so much about humans that Proteus did not sufficiently understand.

Not for the first time, Proteus considered reestablishing a means of observing Archon and his apprentice—considered, and rejected. The girl’s powers had been growing dangerously close to the point where she would be able to create the proper mix of spells to detect such a device, and detection was something that must be avoided, even if it meant sacrificing whatever knowledge might have been gained from listening to the Atlantean archmage tutor his student.

And speaking of detection, it was high time to be on the move again.

The heavy, fungoid mass with its glowing red beads—all that remained of Proteus’ city-spanning network—recalled the tendrils it had scattered about this section of tunnel to keep watch and trap rats. Thick lumps of fleshy green matter extended out from the main body and grew swiftly into legs, and something that looked like a ten-meter long hunchbacked green centipede went scuttling slowly down the tunnel, the dozen egglike pods fused into its back glowing and sloshing as the thing rocked back and forth.

The tunnel was cooler than the city had been; Ami could hear the dripping water more clearly now, and it was obviously not steaming like the pools in the city.

*It really was a beautiful place,* she thought sadly, pausing for a moment just in case Mercury tried to respond to that. Nothing happened, and Ami continued on, walking in silence except for her soft steps and the steady drip, drip, drip of the water.

It really _was_ a beautiful place, even now. The buildings in the city had been stunning, and the natural beauty of this cavernous world was growing on her as well: the rainbow shimmering of the metallic silver crystals that seemed to be growing from the walls; the shapes and colors of the wild caves they had walked through on their way here. She wondered—but not too hard, for fear of waking up her past life again—what it must have been like with people living here, some of them humans, some of them Nereids, and perhaps others from other species that had been around back then, like Luna’s and Artemis’ feline race.

She could almost see a group of children playing tag in the streets, some of them little boys and girls on sturdy legs, others furry cat-children leaping about and tumbling down with awkward feline adolescence, and a couple of little girls with blue hair and eyes and pale, blue-tinted skin, who would suddenly be replaced by clouds of sparkling mist whenever one of their playmates got close to catching them, and then they would swirl around and make the other little ones laugh by tickling them in a hundred places at once, and it didn’t matter at all that they were all different species or that she was Mercury, because for today they were all just children...

Ami closed her eyes and put her hands to the sides of her head. *Stop it, Mercury. Please. Just stay quiet a little bit longer and let me do this. If you’re still there after I have the Caduceus, you can talk all you want and I’ll listen and talk with you, but please, not now.*

The tide of memories continued for a few moments and then settled back down. Ami let out a slow breath and reopened her eyes, continuing forward.

The tunnel led her into the chamber her computer had picked up. It wasn’t nearly as large as the cavern that held the city, but it was big enough to hold a small pond of what appeared to be ice-cold water, over and around which drifted a pale, blue-white mist. In the center of the pool was an island barely large enough to have held a car, and in the center of that island was a plain marble stand about as high as Ami’s waist. On top of that stood the Caduceus.

It hadn’t changed in the week and five thousand years since she’d seen it. The ruby-eyed gold serpents still coiled around the handle; the blue sapphire still shone; the white wings were still perfectly carved and outstretched. She could see every detail right down to the tiniest curve of the feathers, because the Caduceus itself appeared to be the source of that pale glow.

There didn’t seem to be any bridge or stepping-stones with which to reach the island, but Ami supposed that since she’d already gotten her feet wet once today, one more time wouldn’t hurt. She stopped at the edge of the water and changed her mind.

The pool wasn’t all that wide—she could have swum across it in about three strokes—but the bottom of it was black, black, black, out of which the stone pillar that was the island rose up from somewhere below. She generally wasn’t scared of anything that had to do with water, and Luna had said that there was nothing alive up here to be concerned about, but looking down into that narrow abyss, Ami found it a little too easy to imagine some hideous Things that might be lurking down there, just out of her sight, waiting for her to step into the water...

She shivered, and not just from nervousness. It was definitely cold in here, worse than the untamed caverns by a fair degree. The water looked as though it might be cold enough to freeze the blood in her veins if she jumped in, the silver crystals were creaking as if they were about to break, and the mist...

Ami’s heart skipped a beat. The mist was moving.

*Intruder.*

*Trespasser.*

*Thief.*

Jets of icy water erupted from the pool, spraying up into the air and filling it with a blue mist that swelled up in front of Ami like a thunderhead about to unleash a storm.

*Intruder,* the whisper-quiet voice said from everywhere, *this is a sacred place you have entered. You have defiled the death-place of the Senshi of Mercury. You have stolen a Weapon given to them by the First Lords of Atlantis, and you have come to steal another. Foolish thief, foolish girl, foolish _human_ girl, know that your life is forfeit.*

The roiling mist flooded over her, and Ami felt incredibly cold. There was no warmth in the air at all; there was no _air_, period, just the mist.

*Some sort... of protective... measure... must be what... was keeping Saturn... out...* “I d-d-didn’t-t-t s-s-steal anyth-th-thing,” Ami stammered, hugging herself to try and retain some kind of heat. “I d-d-din’t-t-t c-c-come t-t-to s-s-steal anyth-th-thing.”

*Liar. You have the Mercury Computer. You came for the Caduceus. They are for Mercury.*

“I... am-m-m... M-m-merc-c-cury.”

*Liar!* Ami went flying backwards as something vague in shape but very real in force slammed into her. Laying on the floor, she was actually grateful for the cold, because it had already numbed her beyond being able to feel most of the pain.

*You may have fooled the gateway, but you cannot fool me! You are not a Nereid! You cannot be Mercury!*

“I... am-m-m...”

*YOU ARE NOT MERCURY!*

That did it. For nearly a month now, Ami had been stuck at an in-between point. Once—four years ago—she had been a normal, albeit somewhat extraordinary girl. Then her life had been turned upside-down by Mercury and the mission of the Senshi. For all the trouble it caused her at times, she loved being Mercury, and while it sometimes scared her to know what the power was slowly doing to her and her friends, making them more and more different from other girls—other people—the fact that one day she would transform and then never again be without Mercury’s strength to protect her and help her protect the people she loved was a welcome one.

Then there was the mana nexus, and the sickness, and her inability to become Mercury. She had been locked in place, halfway between normal and magical, facing the possibility of being forever different from both normal people and the other Senshi. She had trained, and fought, and bled and died; she had EARNED the right to be Mercury, only to have it snatched away by some stupid twist of fate and an unfeeling machine, and now this THING had the gall to tell her that SHE WASN’T MERCURY?!

“My name is Mizuno Ami!” Ami screamed, getting to her feet and pulling out her transformation pen. “MERCURY CRYSTAL POWER, TRANSFORM!” As the light began to gather, she looked right at the heart of the mist and screamed again. “I— AM —MERCURY!”

The mist seemed to recoil from the force of that scream, but it might have been the sudden flare of blue light that flooded the small chamber.

Luna and the three girls looked up in surprise as Ryo fell over backwards with a shout, just before the distorted, indecipherable sound of an enraged scream came ringing back down the tunnel on the other side of the portal, along with a powerful blast of ice-cold energy.

She opened her eyes and looked around at the cave. Frost lined the walls and floor; icicles hung from the ceiling by the hundreds; the pool had been flash-frozen into a solid block of ice, while the Caduceus did not seem to have been touched at all.

Mercury walked quietly across the frozen pool, her bootheels clicking against the pure white surface. The ice was so thick that it didn’t shift or even creak under her weight, and nothing else sprang up to challenge her.

She wasn’t sure what to expect as her fingers closed around the Caduceus, and there wasn’t any great flash of light or chorus of angels or anything of the sort, for which Mercury was privately grateful. Still, she did feel _something_ change, as if an unpleasant pressure had shifted and settled. It might have just been part of her adjusting to the magic of the Caduceus—she could feel that at work already, linking itself to her so she would be able to call it or dismiss it at will—but somehow she knew it was a great deal more than that. The hollowness that had been lurking inside of her all this month was gone, completely and totally gone.

Mercury—the other Mercury—was still there in her mind, but she was different from before. Mercury looked back and saw the Nereid’s life, all twenty-nine wonderful years of it, arranged before her with perfect crystal clarity. The Nereid herself, wearing a face and body that were older versions of Mizuno Ami’s—rather like her mother, in fact, but more youthfully slender and with longer hair—appeared to float there in front of the mind’s eye of her human reincarnation, wearing a soft blue gown and a patiently gentle smile, ready to tell her whatever she asked to know.

Ryo was still there as well, and her sense of him seemed sharper than it had been a moment ago. He was worried about what that flash and screaming had been about, happy that she was feeling better, slightly curious about what that other presence he was feeling could be, and quite tired of mental impulses that blew through his head like a bullet train with the brakes cut...

So it wasn’t as much of a cure-all as she’d hoped, but it was also no less than she’d expected. That was something, at least. No more energy-attacks, no more interference when she tried to transform. She was Mercury again, and her memories and Ryo... she could deal with. She was going to have to.

Something touched her shoulder, and she spun around, half-raising the Caduceus to defend against whatever new problem was...

A girl her own age was standing next to her on the island. It was almost like looking into a mirror, except that this reflection seemed a little more delicate, had longer hair which reached to just short of her shoulders, and was wearing a close-fitting yet loosely-hanging blue gown instead of the Senshi fuku. The color of the girl’s hair, though, was the same as her own, and the eyes... the eyes were so large and clear that they reflected Mercury’s face back at her, and she could see and compare the color, and know it to be the same.

The Nereid presence in her mind sat down in shock.

“Sister?” the girl said softly, wonderingly touching Mercury’s face with her hands, while at the same time touching her mind. “Is it really you in there, Mercury?”

*Calypso,* the Nereid-memory whispered. *Oh, gods, little sister. You’re alive?*

The girl—the Nereid—nodded, biting her lip and starting to cry. “You’re alive,” she said. “I only saw a human, and I didn’t even stop to study her mind, but it really _is_ you. You’re in a human body, but you’re alive, and I’m not alone anymore... oh, Mercury!”

The Nereid rushed forward and buried her face in Mercury’s shoulder, weeping. At the prompting of her past life, Mercury put her arms around the girl and kissed the top of her head, patting her shaking back and murmuring soft, soothing sounds, all the while wondering what in the world had just happened.

What followed was a very bizarre moment in which all three minds got tangled up in each other and dragged the edge of Ryo’s startled awareness along for the ride. Ami wanted to know _what_ was going on here, and Mercury tried to explain it to her; Mercury wanted to know _how_ this had happened, and Calypso was trying to explain it to _her_; and both Ami and Mercury were trying their best to calm the terribly upset Nereid down.

Ami learned that this was the birth-sister of her past life, Calypso, a little under thirteen years younger, and she was a sprightly little delight, always full of fun and mischief and adventure. She learned of a decade’s worth of practical jokes, some of which made no sense to anyone except a Nereid, others which only a human should have been able to appreciate, and all of them executed by this misty little minx. She learned of parties on the Moon or here in the cave-cities where the two sisters had appeared as twins and confused a whole generation of human nobility, and of times when they had conspired with Ishtar to sneak handsome young noblemen into Vestia’s quarters, and then turned around and helped Vestia teach Ishtar a new meaning for the phrase ‘cold front’...

Mercury learned that not all of the Nereids had been killed in Beryl’s attack. A few—so terribly few—were spared because they had been inside the teleporter network when the mana inversion weapons exploded. Somehow, that had protected them, when everyone else had perished, even those humans and Nekorons and others who had been in transit. The aftereffects of the bomb had poisoned them all, and they knew they would soon die anyway, so they gathered in this city, in this most sacred place of their entire species, and fused their remaining life-force into a single entity—into Calypso, the youngest and healthiest of them, who had been cured of the slow wasting death that would have claimed her in days, but who had also grown ancient and wise far too quickly, inheriting the memories and knowledge of nearly forty of her elders all at once, a shock which nearly destroyed her mind. And then she had been bound here, to protect the most powerful relic the Nereids possessed until either Mercury came for it—and for her—or the sun died and carried her away into oblivion. She had spent ten terrible centuries here, drifting between unconsciousness and awareness, between despairing loneliness and mad grief...

Calypso learned how her sister had died and then been brought back, and why she was here now, why she had not come for her sooner, and that it was all right, she was not alone anymore, she would never be alone like that ever again...

Out in the Blue Hall, Ryo sat down on the floor and concentrated very hard on keeping his head from exploding. He took a moment’s satisfaction when he heard a sound coming from the deepest, blackest pit in his soul—an inhuman roar of anguish—and knew that in its prison of silver light and crystal shards, the trapped essence of the youma was suffering a thousand times worse than he was.

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Calypso said. “I was asleep most of the time, only waking up every now and then, and I could never tell how long I’d been asleep for or what time it was, but I could see each time that the cave had changed, and I knew it must have been years... decades... centuries... and you never came... no one ever came...”

*You know I would have,* the Nereid within Mercury replied.

Ami couldn’t help but notice that Calypso’s body temperature was a couple of degrees shy of even her own—which, according to her mother, had always been a bit low—and that in her distraught state, the Nereid was having some trouble maintaining her solid form. Small arms of sparkling blue mist were flowing off of her, some to hang in the air, others to sweep around behind Mercury as if hugging her. Then again, this might be exactly how Nereids embraced; Mercury was a little too preoccupied to tell her.

That was something else to consider. Mercury wasn’t trying to take charge of her—their—body to soothe her sister; everything the Nereid was doing was mental, speaking to Calypso mind-to-mind, quietly asking Ami to be her hands for this instead of reaching out and doing it herself. She could have done taken control easily, but she chose not to.

*I wouldn’t mind,* Ami told her.

*I know you wouldn’t mind, but what would be the point? There is no physical comfort I could give her that you are not already providing, and I do not need to be in control of our body to feel our dear little sister in our arms again.*

OUR arms. OUR body. OUR sister. Ami realized how true that was. Her illness had been caused because her human body and Mercury’s Nereid energy had not been entirely compatible, because their minds had not been able to properly link. Ami could not recall Mercury’s life, and the last thing Mercury had been able to clearly recall was the battle on the Moon, and dying. Then there was darkness, broken only by flashes of a life that was not hers, in a body that could not change form, which suffered illnesses and injuries her kind had never known, pains she did not know how to cope with. She panicked, tried to protect herself the best way she knew how—by assuming her Senshi form—and suffered more pain.

All that was over. The Caduceus had not done it; it was a tool for information and defense, and Ami knew now how to use it to tremendously enhance the scanning capabilities of her computer, and to summon the Frost Lancet and all the other powers locked up inside the Weapon, but it had no capacity to heal. What the Caduceus had was a potent affinity for the power of Mercury, and the power itself had taken a hand in things, resolving the separation between two sides of that one special soul that was its window into and hands within the physical world.

Ami could see Mercury’s life, and Mercury could see Ami’s, and in both cases it was from the inside, each of them seeing the other through her own mind and eyes. They did not merely know each other; they _were_ each other. Mercury was Ami, Ami was Mercury—and Calypso was Mercury’s sister.

*I have a sister,* Ami thought in wonder.

*And she loves you very much,* Calypso’s mental voice whispered.

The portal of blue energy had fallen apart not long after Ami’s angry scream, leaving her friends in the Blue Hall with no obvious way to reach her. They had already tried their communicators, and whatever had blocked Saturn was blocking the signals. If it wasn’t for Ryo, with his connection to Ami telling him that she was okay, the local rock stratum would have been getting a serious facelift from Saturn right about now—and that might happen anyway, the ability to wait around while one of their friends might be in danger not being a particular gift of any of the Senshi.

They were all very much relieved when a cloud of blue mist swelled up from the floor, expanding upwards and outwards and then parting to reveal Mercury. In her right hand, she was holding the Caduceus, and in her left, she held the hand of a girl in a blue gown who looked so much like her that even Ryo blinked and looked from one to the other in confusion. Luna, white as a sheet, was staring at the girl in shocked recognition; the girl smiled timorously at Luna and raised her free hand in a short, slow gesture of greeting.

“Everyone,” Mercury announced, “this is my sister, Calypso.”

“Hello,” Calypso said, nodding.

Ryo, Mars, Saturn, and ChibiMoon blinked.

Luna fainted dead away.

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